As one does, I did a lot of moronic pretending when I was in grad school. I lied about what I knew (because if you pretend to read Heidegger, then you always have to pretend to have read Heidegger), and I lied about what I liked (e.g. whiskey, cats, and Bob Dylan’s Christmas album). When it was easy or self-serving, I sometimes told the truth, including once at a dinner party when I said that my favorite novel was The Great Gatsby.

The host — a lovely intellectual titan who kept a framed letter from Heidegger — was semi-listening, and I was desperate to be not-stupid. I made a quick calculation, figuring that my honest answer was innocuous and transcendent enough to escape any prodding. I responded, clearing one conversational hurdle and preparing my brain-legs for the next. Someone quipped about goony high school teachers ruining Gatsby and the discussion lurched elsewhere before I could try to explain why I loved the book. Equally grateful and slighted, I sipped some whiskey (barf) to celebrate the preservation of my 22-year-old intellectual persona.

Fast forward four years later, and I’m the goony high school teacher ruining The Great Gatsby for my juniors. I think that they’ve been lapping up Fitzgerald’s airy descriptions and delighting in Nick’s creepy-ish search for significance, and in my estimation, they’re about to fall to their cool denim knees upon reading the startlingly perfect last page with the classroom lights off and the windows open. As soon as my favorite student finishes reading aloud to us, she huffs, “Man, everyone in this book was such an asshole.” My face must look somewhat punched, because she backpedals with swift sincerity: “Sorry, Ms. D. I know you love this book, but…”

Again, with a new group of students, the space doesn’t open up for me to tease out my Gatsby love, because now we’re arguing about whether characters should be likeable if the reader's going to learn from them, and the way my students lean forward makes me realize that I don’t have to answer for the book yet — as long as I can help make this kind of discussion happen. After all, reading asks you to juggle what’s going on inside of you with what’s out there in the world, especially as you grow old and visit beautiful countries and do crazy stuff like become someone’s mom.

As I write this, I’m finishing my sixth year of teaching. I don’t teach Gatsby these days —too busy writing “persuasive” commercials for raw onions with 8th graders — but I’m still learning from it. Now, it meets me in a place where the green light switches from gorgeously abstract to kind of terrifying. Over and over, Gatsby demands that I stay alive to how time passes over my changing self, and I think that such aliveness is the very best thing I can ask of myself and my students: all of us future liars, generous juniors, and onion salespeople alike.

Prose is a supportive, inspiring community for emerging writers, and it has been good to me.

I'll confess that I laughed the first time I spotted the phrase "emerging writers" on a publication's submissions page: what a pleasant euphemism for us unpublished nobodies! I thought. That italicized thought reflects the view I once held of my writing, more closely than I care to admit. It's an aggressive form of self-deprecation, a defense mechanism of equal parts arrogance, shame, and denied vulnerability. If I say I am not a real writer and declare that I suck, the unexamined reasoning went, then rejection will hurt less. Writers face more than their share of rejection.

But not on Prose. We're all here to do what we do for the love of words, stories, poems. Prose is a place where we can read and be read - I know I'm not the only one here who never had a real audience until Prose. This is a place where one need not apologize for writing, where we can cast aside the self-deprecation and share our writing without fear of a condescending and skeptical "oh, how nice." Writing feels solitary, but in truth we're all packed into a very large boat, and Prose gives us the chance to paddle together awhile.

The company is good; some marvelous writers post here. I've read chapbooks by a couple of stellar young poets who have said Prose helped a lot as they started out. Connecting with them and other writers whose work I admire, with whom I can commiserate about rejections, and who have encouraged me made a world of difference to my writing. For the first time in my life, I kept at it. I've gotten better. The support of Prosers fortified me sufficiently to go out and get rejected - and eventually accepted... two stories and two poems now. I'm especially proud of the one I posted the link to last week: "River Walk, Upstate Town." I'm used to rereading old pieces and seeing the flaws, but when I read that one, it's actually still kinda pretty.

I'm still sending pieces out. I'm still getting rejected. I'm also still writing on Prose. If I haven't told you this recently, or if you're newish here, I really appreciate your reading my work. I'll try to read yours, too, as a good Proser should. It's a pleasure to emerge with you.

You can hear the rumble if you stand on the tracks between the abandoned station and the abandoned animal feed factory.  It’s a tractor trailer on Route 17, but you can imagine otherwise, imagine freight that was made here, loaded here, galloping along these rails.  Passengers, even.  But the feed factory didn’t sell at auction last year, and they tore down the rotting station.  Still, my mind’s sitting inside it, watching a woman with a flowered hat and lacey green dress step into a caboose. It’s a dress I saw in the Salvation Army before it closed, too.

I stand up because my daughter scampers down the slope with dandelions and violets in her fist...

full text of story published at https://bluelakereview.weebly.com/river-walk-upstate-town.html

Yes, I feel cheesy pulling a bait-and-switch and linking out to another site, but I wanted to share with my Prose friends and this seemed as good a way as any. Feel free to complain or offer alternative sharing approaches in the comments :)

Listen:

When I was a younger man—ten years ago, a full head of hair ago, four hundred books ago…

When I was a much younger man, I visited a Books-a-Million in the mall for a book by Kurt Vonnegut.

It could have been any of his books.

I asked the young cashier for a recommendation.

She led me to a shelf and pointed at a sky-blue book with a vacant birdcage on the cover beside the title: Cat’s Cradle.

The book is an apocalyptic tale narrated by a man who told us to call him Jonah. Written as a flashback, Cat’s Cradle follows Jonah’s quest to write a book about what famous Americans were doing the day that the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. The book also introduces an absurd religion (aren’t they all?) called Bokononism, led by its creator, Bokonon.

Reading Cat’s Cradle for the first of many times felt like finding a map to navigate the rest of my life despite never realizing such a map ever existed or lacked in my life in the first place. The string game of Cat’s Cradle reflects the way the book explores truth and how people choose to accept certain small lies, or foma, to make themselves feel better about the world.

Busy, busy, busy.

I always wanted to be a writer. As it happened—As it was meant to happen, Bokonon would say—discovering Cat’s Cradle and consuming it in the days thereafter challenged everything I knew about what a book could be. This would be compounded by Vonnegut’s other books, which are rife with trips to outer space, doodles inked by the author, as well as visits from Vonnegut himself. Humans are only confined by the abstract limits we set for ourselves. No limits existed for Vonnegut.

I’d like to think the cashier who suggested the book is a member of my karass, teams that do God’s Will without discovering what they’re doing. I never saw her after that transaction, and she likely forgot me by the end of her shift. But the book she sold me changed my life.

Since reading Cat’s Cradle, my thirst for books has become insatiable. I’m passionate about collecting, reading, and learning from them. They teach me empathy and expand my understanding of the world and the disparate people who inhabit it. That book guided me to an English degree, fiction workshops, and a writing career. I am me because of Cat’s Cradle.

As I navigate the world, dodging the periodic pool-pah and avoiding granfalloons, I occasionally tell myself foma to trick myself into thinking I have a decent understanding of the world and what’s to come.

And whenever I worry about life and its grand meaning, I return to my favorite Calypso from The Books of Bokonon:

“Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;

Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?'

Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;

Man got to tell himself he understand.”

A man approaches the reference desk looking guilty, like maybe he stabbed someone in the parking lot.

“Butts?” I ask. There was never a face straighter than mine.

“Yes, ma’am.” David comes into my library and shyly requests this oversized photography book called Butts: A Coffee Table Compendium every few months. We don’t own it, but we can get it via Interlibrary Loan from somewhere in Oklahoma. He smiles – relieved, maybe, by my casual agnosticism – and walks towards the stacks, where he’ll find enough steamy, butt-centric romance paperbacks to hold him over.

As a librarian, I’ve witnessed the private reading habits of thousands of people. And while librarianship is probably not what you think (there are more bodily fluids and Marvel movies), it is a romantic profession. Yes, there is poop on the floor outside the men’s room and yes, there are hours-long conversations with lonely widowers about Ronald Reagan and yes, there is Butts: A Coffee Table Compendium, but beneath the mundanity there is that magic kernel of truth: you’re dealing in stories, and stories change lives.

Books don’t have power over everyone. If you hand a Judy Blume novel to one hundred 11-year-olds, only seven will dog-ear their copy, and only one will decide they are a writer, too. The magic of the written word is kinetic – a certain kind of person is required to activate it. Many people live their entire lives without discovering a sacred personal text.

The handful of readers whose lives change course the moment they meet Blume (or whoever) crave something, and they find that thing in books. I’ve met people whose only friends are the sexy were-leopards in Christine Feehan’s fantasy novels, unhoused people who devour Kurt Vonnegut while wearing gloves so they don’t smudge the pages, miserable teenagers transcending public school offerings and finding their own teachers in Marge Piercy and Mervyn Peake. (Miserable Teenager, you’re going to be SO COOL one day. Please hold on.)

It doesn’t matter which book captures you, it only matters that you are captured.

All these people, regardless of what kind of story resonates with them, or why, are connected to each other by a unique quality that only capital-R Readers have, something that causes them to see the world through a certain imaginative lens, and it is my theory that this added richness supports one through difficult times the way a robust group of friends or a functional, loving family might.

My personal holy book? It’s a tie between Roald Dahl’s Matilda and a surreal picture book called “The Nightgown of the Sullen Moon.” These aren’t the most profound titles I’ve read, but they both suggest that magic is real – a foundational belief I’ve been unable to shake in the intervening decades, and which led me to become a writer and a librarian.

When someone asks for help finding a book, I find equal pleasure in connecting them to Butts as I do Bulgakov. Magic is magic, after all.

In my mind, the book still sits on a shelf in the tiny library of Oakridge Elementary School in Salt Lake City, Utah, about as far away from the Ozarks as a child could be. With my parents’ permission, I used my allowance and bought a hardback copy of Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls and donated it to the library so that other young readers at the school could experience what I just had. That was over fifty years ago. It’s doubtful whether the book survived, though if decimated by eager grimy hands or even stolen in order to become someone’s salvation, so be it. The donation served its purpose. It wasn’t just a book, after all, but a totem. For the first time ever, I understood this wasn’t just a story about a boy and his dogs. It wasn’t even about “Billy”, with whom I shared a name, the protagonist. It was the first time I could remember a book being about something other than just ‘what happens’. Like a clarion call, the author’s work taught me how a story could render hope, fear, regret, wonder, nature, love and even God. One who, all my life, has kept me guessing and takes from me just as often as He gives, with purpose, just like in the book. My whole life, I’ve had dogs that loved me unconditionally only to slip their chain one last time for the Great Beyond. When Little Ann crawls atop Little Dan’s grave and dies, I was being taught how one soul could bond with another, regardless of how many legs it has, and grieve. It’s a profound lesson at any age but as a young boy, I knew to look out for opportunities to fall in love on as deep a level as these souls and welcome not only the potential for that highest level of happiness but for complete and total annhilation that comes with it. There’s a sort of irony there and I’ve been on the lookout for it ever since, in literature, but mostly in life. I constantly seek the majestic or the divine though I wouldn’t say that I’m a religious man and, compared to certain others I happen to know, I wouldn’t consider myself all that well-read though I collect books and they are my most treasured possessions. My appetite for all of life’s joys and sorrows, hopes and fears, and what some people call God can be found on the pages, in text, and when it reveals itself, the truth is transformative, like the love Billy enjoyed from his dogs, a love I have been questing for my entire life, a love to be shared, discovered, and cherished. A love that appears in movies, in art, music, or inside a book on a shelf in a tiny school library, waiting to be read.

Carefully stepping into overgrown grass gone to seed, I lifted the leg of my pants. Royalty always elevates a skirt before moving through the thicket by foot. Regardless of whether this act may result in a tidy hemline. It is expected. Navigating around burdock, the car keys shifted in my pocket. I grasped my thigh and pressed the metal into my leg. Hard. I’ve sworn an oath to maintain the safety of these keys. The only ones known to open a portal to another world.

I eyed my destination. The entire frame of the old grey barn shifted more each year. The structure leaned alarmingly to one side. Decades had passed since the last of the dairy cows were sold off and farm equipment auctioned. I pretended to use one of the car keys to open a side door. They clinked softly as I returned them to my pants pocket. I forced the wooden barn door closed behind me. The stillness was sublime. The air thick with the rich sweet scent of hay. I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply.

Where are you, my siblings? I must be released from this prison of an existence. I must find the door to Narnia.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis provided escape from the world I inhabited. The youngest of four children, I did my best to avoid my parent’s proximity and drug fueled violence. I’d roam the rural land for hours searching for the door. Entire days hidden in the woods of the Adirondacks, dense with trees, the ground obscured by plant growth. Miles of shale riverbed hiked and explored. As the season’s heat waned, I’d open milkweed pods and pile downy seeded strands at my feet. Eventually releasing them to the wind.

I would grieve the loss of summer until she returned.

Harsh winters forced almost all time to be spent indoors. Relying on books for strength, I turned to them more. Borrowed from friends and school libraries. Hidden under pillows. I devoured them during long nights locked in my childhood bedroom. Praying for moonlight sufficient to read by, I hoped to continue hours after the house fell silent.

I recognized characters. The insurmountable obstacles they faced. Beloved protagonists would misstep and at times intentionally hurt others. Individuals capable of selfless and cruel behavior. Motivated by fear and pain. Worthy of forgiveness.

My books gave me a means to briefly elude my reality. To access desperately needed respite. To discover characters resembling those I’d been hurt by. Like those I hurt. To find myself in the pages and grant her grace.

Now with three young children myself, I relish their request, “Tell us a tale Mommy! One we haven’t heard before!”

Completely immersed in story, losing sense of time and place, my boys intently focus on my words. I am filled with gratitude. I lead them to the secret door to another world. Together, we go through.

She feels the pulse between the words. In a crowded dining room, Mrs. Ramsay absorbs the intentions and experiences of every person, lives deeply in every detail she observes.

To the Lighthouse is written how I try to live.

The dinner party begins awkwardly, with rivalry and reluctance preoccupying the characters in attendance. Mrs. Ramsay binds them together partially through social graces, but more through empathy. She possesses the ability to feel, exactly, the mind of the person beside her, whether content or anxious or in love. She is the party’s center because others cannot help but connect their threads to her, offerings for her tapestry. Then, the candles are lit. Mrs. Ramsay knows everyone is “brought nearer by the candlelight, and composed, as they had not been in the twilight, into a party round a table, for the night was now shut off by panes of glass.” She recognizes how the candlelight “ripples” the world outside “so strangely that here, inside the room, seemed to be order and dry land; there, outside, a reflection in which things wavered and vanished, waterily.” She has made a refuge in that room. The others enjoy it without thought. Mrs. Ramsay alone feels how the world beyond the glass might swirl and eddy, but the persons at the table are together in that moment, whole.

I try to inhabit moments. I try to watch my beagle’s paws trot on the sidewalk, feel pride at that word my daughter mastered, taste my coffee. Sensations like these are the stuff of memories, but the memory is the attenuated form. The moment itself is the thing. Among petty concerns and distractions, it’s impossible to experience every moment in a life fully, but Mrs. Ramsay succeeds in it that evening, and Virginia Woolf in writing it. She relegates the doings of the dinner to parentheticals. The feelings are the matter, and Mrs. Ramsay prizes them. The guests discuss and eat and jest; among them, Mrs. Ramsay becomes aware of something “immune from change” that “shines out… in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby.”

The novel sweeps forward a decade, during which the seaside home of the dinner party lies vacant, battered by wind and time. The news comes in another parenthetical, midsentence: “...Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before…” Having breathed life into her matriarch with lyrical precision, Woolf quietly snuffs it out.

The characters miss her. Poets, philosophers and artists had sat round her in that candlelit room, but the vision was all hers. Mrs. Ramsay had the gift of attending to the moment. She could break it like bread and share it.

I reread the dinner party this afternoon, in quarantine: a student to whom I was exposed tested positive for the coronavirus. I’m healthy, probably. I sat on my porch. Even in an upstate January, the air can feel crisp without biting, and wind reveal patches of color in the sky.