Life long library goer remains connected.

I received a Tweet that my book, Ahead of the Flaming Front: A Life on Fire was Book of the Day at the Ketchum Community Library last week. The first time I had a book in a library it was the McCall Public Library when I fought fire with the Krassel Heli-rappellers on the Payette National Forest. In conjunction with the local bookstore, the library hosted a reading for me. The book at the time was my collection of poems The Journal West. As fate would have it, the order for my books was delayed and not present at the reading. I ended up taking the names of people and sending them copies later and donated one to the library It is a great thing. For as long as I can remember I have been going to libraries. In the third grade I appeared in a newspaper photograph for an exhibit on reading books about cowboys. There I was my little reader self. Over the years my father took us to some isolated areas in the American West because of work. I always found my way to the library or wherever the bookmobile would pull up and sometimes it was quite a hike. It is a fine testament to the vision of Benjamin Franklin and the building of community that in those remote outposts I was able to read for free about any subject I wanted. Not only that, but the belief that we can contribute to the society to make it better and not worse. People can check out books for free, read them and turn them back in so others can read them. Almost sounds like a 20th Century Socialist idea and not a 18th Century notion of spreading knowledge for the common good. No matter. As a working class kid off in remote areas, the library was my portal through which I traveled to learn how others lived and had lived whether they be cowboys, firefighters or Founding Mothers. Now my book is in a great library in a region loved by other famous writers, notably Earnest Hemingway. I too love the fall. But importantly, even in the age of connectivity, someone who is unconnected can stroll in and take my book off the shelf and read it. Hey stranger, this is what happened to me. Why even this week I checked out books on China and the American Gold Rush, researching a project no amount of internet connectivity can give me. Books go deep while the internet skims as it were and besides, I cannot afford to buy those books. The library, giving a connectivity not dreamed of or possible in your own privatized internet. There I am. The life long connection I've had with libraries expands and turns and now I am both borrower and contributor, but still yet the curious kid.

Reading: Author Jerry D. Mathes II

Getting Tweaked And Finding Your Category

Who me?

Not but three days ago I didn’t know how to check Amazon’s rating system and then Social Media Advisor Christy Hovey alerted me that my memoir, Ahead of the Flaming Front: A Life on Fire was listed at #97 in like books. I was excited as all get out to be in the top 100. Christy had been retained by my publisher Caxton Press as a social media consultant to help me tweak my web presence and advise me how to increase book sales and increase my self-esteem.

So she asked me a battery of questions, and I gave her a battery of answers and only managed to say one awkward thing when I said, “I’d love for you to tweak me…I mean… ah…my sites.. tweak my sites I mean!” My daughter Sophia close by face-palmed and let out a long sigh signifying the word Dad. So cut to a morning not a couple of days later (yeah, this morning) I was excited to find:

#10 in Books > Professional & Technical > Civil Service > Firefighting & Prevention
#27 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Specific Groups > Adventurers & Explorers
#28 in Books > Science & Math > Nature & Ecology > Conservation

#10! Wow. I was shocked And top 30 in two other categories that were close to my heart.

Process and being lost in the desert

So I’m writing on this new project and I am cranking out pages and words like you wouldn’t believe. I mean this thing has been inside me for thirty years waiting to get out, while I’ve been keeping it tamped down and smoldering like a star with excessive gravity. Scene after scene falls by the way. Thousands of words a day sometimes. I sit down to write 250 and before I know it eight-hundo has clattered by. Bite me writer’s block. I have an overarching story, a frame, a time, an era, a point of view, tense, a cast of characters, a voice and something I never have, a theme (subject to change I’m sure). So what’s the big deal you ask? Well, I’ll tell you.

Structure. (Structure block?) How are all these scenes and stuff that are important, vital even, going to fit together to create a seamless narrative? I mean, I am writing word after word like footsteps of a lost hiker in the desert and no idea if I’m going to get out alive. The desert, you ask, and not something infinitely more losable to be in like a forest or a jungle? Well, I’ll tell you. In the desert you can be real fucking lost and see no way out even though you can see for hundreds of miles. “The mountains are right over there!” And that’s where I am with writing on this book. I can see everything for fucking miles except the trail out. No worries.

Kim Barnes once told a whole class of us to trust the process. Keep writing, be uncomfortable in the unknown and stick it out. Much like being lost in the desert. Trust the process. Trust what you know and forge ahead.

Yep, I know how to find water and keep warm and navigate by sun, stars and landmarks and even set snares (aka write words, sentences, paragraphs, scenes, blah blah basic writer survival skills) and I know without a doubt that process will get me to where I need to be.

Writing what I don't know

My greatest misconception about being a writer when I was growing up was that writers needed to go out and have experiences. I was captivated by Joseph Conrad having been a sailor, Melville having been a whaler, Twain a miner and riverboat pilot, plus Hemingway, and London to name a few. I went out to have experiences and had lot of them. I got so busy having experiences that I wasn’t writing about any of them. Plus the old adage, Write what you know seemed like particularly sage advice. Well. I’ve done a bunch of stuff and I know a bunch of stuff. Of course what was missing was how to think about what I knew and experienced. How to make sense of it.

I can see why teachers would tell a student, “write what you know” in the sense that doing all the research can hinder the learning of telling a good story. Just keep the subject simple and work on the art and craft of writing. Scaffolding the learning as it were. Not that writing about your life doesn’t require a little research, because it does. One other aspect is to question what you do know or think you know. Turn it upside down and inside out. Re-envision your experiences. From what other lens can you see the same experience? As William Blake observed, the same world to one man is a heaven and to another a hell.

I started to think about “writing what you know” from a different angle. Instead of what you know as in life experiences to what you can know through research. Doing research led to what does it mean and in coming to terms with the fact that sometimes there is no pat answer or “moral of the story” I freed myself in a different way. I would hasten to add, there is sea of difference between an answer and a revelation.

This of course led to escape the idea of the physical story altogether and consider the emotional story, that emotional quest the protagonist embarks upon and what questions it raises.