Sixteen (or so) Candles

Since this blog will publish on my birthday, I decided to make some wishes with it. Yes, I am aware that wishes made public supposedly won't come true. And yet, wishes kept captive in the inner-recesses of my addled mind go nowhere anyway, so I feel safe in putting a few out there. And yes, I am also aware that making my wish list public might be taken as a tad self-serving. That's because it is. And I'm ok with that.

Wish #1  This year, my 38th if you must know, I really hope to be found by a story that makes me feel so inferior I am compelled to write it. This is not because I have an inflated opinion of myself and my abilities. Rather, I want desperately to be stunned into the process of telling an amazing story that, for some reason or other, has not been told. I am convinced that it is not an artistic duty that drives story as much as it is the incumbent need to bear witness to the invisible.

Wish #2 Re: Wish #1 - Because so many stories worth telling get ignored for ones we've heard too many times before, my second wish is that anyone who ends up reading this blog will also be confronted with a story they must tell. If it happens, I'm hoping the candle I blew out with your name on it compels you to find the keyboard rather than think "Someone should really write about that."

Wish #3 Re: Wish #1&2 - Because the desire to write a story is the response we SHOULD automatically heed, my third wish is that all of us who commit these stories to prose actually seek their publication so we are not the only ones who get the opportunity to experience them. Instead, I wish for all of these stories to eventually be submitted to various publications (and no, this is not me shoe-horning in two wishes, Jafar). If you're not sure where to send the story you write, spend some time here.

Wish #4 And for my final wish, a little selfishness on my part (as if taking one more wish than the customary three is not selfish enough). I wish that all our stories find homes, bear witness, and inspire others to stand in the path of stories that will force them, in turn, to be witnesses themselves. 

So don't let me down people. It is my birthday and all.

Michael Dean Clark is the fiction editor at Relief and an assistant professor of writing at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, California. When he's not writing or parenting via shame and sarcasm, Clark is waiting (im)patiently for the return of Psych, and you know that’s right.

CA Redemption Value

Some thoughts on trash:

A homeless man in his fifties pulls aluminum cans from the trash barrel in front of the Ralphs Supermarket where I shop. He’s clearly no amateur. What catches my attention this morning is not the act itself. He’s not the only person I've seen scavenging to get by today. This is Ocean Beach after all.

What arrests my general distraction is the way he cleans as he pulls the cans out of the refuse, taking time to pick the cigarette butts out of the ash tray on the top of the stone-speckled trash barrel, dropping them one by one into the bag as if to earn the recycling fees others didn't bother taking the time to redeem.

-#-

When I was a reporter in Los Angeles, I worked for a newspaper that covered the Puente Hills Landfill in a strip of unincorporated county land that was once most likely a dairy farm. Now, it’s America’s largest trash heap at 150 meters tall and covering more than 700 acres. I once covered a meeting where officials discussed the rate at which the massive trash mountain was summiting the space allotted to it. At one point in the meeting, a plan to ship the region’s trash by rail into the Nevada desert was discussed, though not seriously. Apparently, the same objection came up every time the concept was mentioned. It’s less expensive (and thus, more profitable) to continue with the current business model until it is no longer viable.

No word on how viable the people of Nevada find the alternative.

-#-

I love family stories, especially the ones from before I was born. Apparently, there was a DIY trend in the early 70s where particularly resourceful interior design types would piece together area rugs from a number of smaller pieces of (hopefully) corresponding color, though I did mention this was the 70s, right? In my mind’s eye, it’s like a shag quilt. All one needed were the remainders of other pieces of plush pile or low nap and the desire to turn said scraps into one Franken-rug.

My parents apparently harbored said desire, which is why, on more than one occasion, you could find my older brother in the dumpster behind a carpet store. I’m told the results were lovely, though no pictures exist as confirmation.

-#-

I may be over-simplifying, but as I relive these scenes I can’t help but see the writing in them all.

Michael Dean Clark is the fiction editor at Relief, as well as an author of fiction and nonfiction and an Assistant Professor of Writing at Point Loma Nazarene University. He lives in San Diego with his wife and three children.

Touching Scars

Taking a break from my thoughts on place, I wanted to write about doubt. Or English muffins.

Or, really, about Thomas.

As one prone to pressing fingers into my own scars, I've always felt a bit connected to the Missouri of disciples. I think it was because he was supposed to be the one we all looked down on (other  than Judas, but I think that goes without saying even as I finish saying it).

But Thomas, he was the one who didn't believe. He had to be shown. Personally, I think he was just the one who put words to what the other disciples who hadn't been there to see the vacant tomb were thinking.

Recently, I started thinking about Thomas as an author (not about him working as an author, but as an author thinking about Thomas as a symbol…got that?)

I think my initial misconceptions about the most famous doubter in the Bible (though not the biggest or most egregious) have led me to seeing him in a new way. He’s what all artists who claim a faith should aspire to.

Thomas wasn't satisfied with intellectual knowledge that Christ was risen. He wanted to press his fingertips into physical evidence of the miracle that still makes people choose love over what their own eyes tell them. He wanted to feel life in the hands he’d seen lifeless. He wanted to get messy to know, definitively, that we can now be clean.

And that’s what our art should be – a reckless engagement with the scars of living so that they can begin to heal.

There’s No Crying in Starbucks!

 

 

This is the fifth in a series of thoughts on how place shapes and is shaped by the stories we tell. The first four can be found here, here, here, and here.

This is a love song about the place where I write, not the places I'm writing about.

I have a bad habit, but it’s a habit nonetheless. I write at Starbucks.

Really, most of my friends think I write there so I’ll “have” to buy some coffee. And while I admit that I may have a (borderline) issue with my love for the Seattle bean, that’s not the main reason I work in the House of the Mermaid. It may, however, be the main reason I have a job that provides a paycheck that allows for said coffee ingestion.

But I actually started writing in the Green Room because I discovered that I compose better when there are people around me and natural ambient noise (that I, of course, drown out by putting my headphones on).

But I tried the monastic-writer-thing. The computer-in-the-closet-thing (hat tip to R. Kelly for teaching us all why it’s bad to end up trapped in a closet). The typewriter-instead-of-computer-thing so I could “feel” the story as an extension of my keystrokes.  I even tried the low-rent-Hemingway-stand-and-deliver-thing, but my knee sucks too much to let me grow that manly a beard.

As a side note, I draw the line at the handwriting-in-the-Moleskine-thing. No yuppie journals for this guy (if for no other reason than my handwriting is so awful – thank you journalism years – that the cost-to-benefit analysis just won’t let me be that much of an affluent nerdy hipster).

Nope, for me, the place to write is Starbucks, with their endless supply of Pike’s Roast, horrible cover versions of songs I used to like, and meetings between wedding photographers and their clients. I have, to date, written two complete novel length manuscripts and am a few hundred pages into the first version of a third, and I would conservatively estimate that in the more than 1200 pages of text in those three projects alone, at least 1,000 were written in this, my other office.

Which brings me to yesterday when I was working on changing a scene in one of my books…it’s an important scene. I killed a kid (in the book, not in the store). It’s a child I worked on creating for more than a few years. And I killed her.

Now, I’m not an overtly emotional guy. But I was a little moved when the final words began migrating from my fingers to the screen. Maybe even a little teary-eyed (though I blame that on the eerie confluence of that scene syncing up with my friend’s cover version of Muse’s “Unintended” – thanks for being such a sweet-voiced beast J. Lynn).

 This is the first time I've ever wondered if writing in public, in Starbucks of all places, is a good idea. I mean, I never know when a scene like that is going to present itself and I sure don’t want to get the whole Coffeehouse Weeper rep. That’s just not the guy I want my kids to have to deny is their father. I give them plenty of other reasons for said denials.

On the other hand, what better market research is there for a writer than resting secure in the knowledge that a scene they created brought them to tears in a coffee shop full of strangers? Unless that author is Glenn Beck, it seems like that says pretty good things about the emotional resonance of the moment.  

Michael Dean Clark is the fiction editor at Relief, as well as an author of fiction and nonfiction and an Assistant Professor of Writing at Point Loma Nazarene University. He lives in San Diego with his wife and three children.

Sunrise, Sunset

This is the third in a series of thoughts on how place shapes and is shaped by the stories we tell. The first two can be found here and here.

According to George Washington Carver, “nothing is more beautiful than the loveliness of the woods before sunrise.”

As much as I love peanut butter, I have to disagree. Not completely. In an earlier blog, I concluded that sunrise is most beautiful in the mountains, but sunset is more beautiful over the ocean. Being back in San Diego, however, has reminded me of one of life’s true-isms: in a wrestling match, sunset on the Pacific beats sunrise anywhere over the head with a steel chair every time.

Don’t agree? Here are three reasons you should.

1. You don’t have to get early up to see it.

This isn’t a morning person/night person binary. It’s just common sense. I mean, seriously, early risers get everything – the worm, a quiet house, the best waves, an unfounded reputation for being go-getters. They also get a sense of ownership over the beauty of the moment, that self-serving pride that says “I deserve to see this because I set my alarm clock and didn’t ignore it when it went off.”

Slackers need a prize, and that prize is the most beautiful part of the day. We know we don’t deserve it. We know we’re unable to lay claim to having a hand in the experience. Maybe we just have a better understanding of grace because we have a much harder time convincing ourselves we should be given any based on our actions.

2. The death of color is always more vibrant than its birth.

Apologies to Robert Frost (and Pony Boy), but nature’s first green isn’t gold. (Irony alert: Microsoft Word’s grammar check identifies this version of his famous line as grammatically problematic. Guess humans are still better than machines at a few things even if one of those things is not winning Jeopardy). No, nature’s last gold is gold. Just before they die, greens give way to the deepest, richest colors. And so it goes with the sunset. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve watched the light of the sun coming up and thought “those colors are amazing.” I can count the same number of times I’ve uttered those words as the Big Orange dropped into the ocean in the last ten days.

3. The Green Flash.

If you don’t know what that is, it’s probably because you either haven’t spent much time in Southern California or you’ve followed the age old of wisdom of not looking directly into the sun. But out here, we do it anytime the day is clear and the water is calm on the off chance we’ll get to see fingers of green light splay out across the water just as the sun dips below the horizon. It’s a rare event, but when it happens, you know you’ve been given a gift (unless you were also up to see the sunrise that same morning, in which case you assume you’ve earned a bonus for working overtime).

I’m sure some of you disagree. Please do, in the comments section below. While you do, I’ll be outside watching the sunset.

Michael Dean Clark is the fiction editor at Relief, as well as an author of fiction and nonfiction and an Assistant Professor of Writing at Point Loma Nazarene University. He lives in San Diego with his wife and three children.

I’ve Been Here, Right?

 

This is the second in a series of thoughts on how place shapes and is shaped by the stories we tell. The first can be found here.

I spent a year writing a novel about my hometown because I was pretty convinced I’d never get back there again (other than on vacations). Then I moved onto another novel and another class to take and then another and then a degree. I applied to some schools wondering not where I would end up, but if I’d even get a callback.

And then I got a job offer in San Diego, a short drive south on the Coast Highway from where my novel/childhood took place. Not surprisingly, from the time I accepted the job (which happened on a day when Milwaukee’s high temperature was 32 degrees) to the moment I pulled into Ocean Beach, my mental slideshow of home was strangely blank.

Now that I’m back, however, I keep ending up in my book. I swing past the Self-Realization center at the Swami’s surf beach and I’m walking the reflection path with my character Shandy. I buy a Big Gulp at the D Street 7-Eleven and keep waiting for Marley Bob to walk in wearing his diaper and Birkenstocks. I go out of my way to wind up the hill past the park where Tommy Mac and Troy-boy meet before heading to the beach.

This doubling of life and writing only gets weird every time it happens. The field full of greenhouses in my mind and history is now empty awaiting tracts of homes that died off when the recession hit. Moonlight Beach now has an enormous plastic playground for little kids and paved footpaths down the sandstone hill from the parking lot. The bars on the 101 have updated their facades. There is a ridiculous statue of a “surfer” that wasn’t there before.

Mind you, I didn’t expect North County San Diego to remain unchanged while I was gone. But somehow, that first attempt to write this place cemented images in my mind that I’m now having a hard time letting go of those pictures. I guess I like the warm glow of nostalgia a bit more than I thought.

Michael Dean Clark is an author of fiction and nonfiction and an Assistant Professor of Writing at Point Loma Nazarene University. He lives in San Diego with his wife and 2.9 children.

Cold Comfort

This is the first in a series of thoughts on how place shapes and is shaped by the stories we tell.

In 1993, I left  Encinitas, California – a suburb of San Diego roughly 25 miles north of the city – for what I thought would be a quick four years of college in L.A. Then four years became 17 and I accepted the fact that my hometown would be merely a conversation point for the rest of my life.

In the process, I devised a way to keep San Diego present in my life - by writing about it. The concept came to me in the middle of my first Midwestern winter (which looked a little like the one they’re having now). I can almost pinpoint the moment I decided to make the Southern of Southern California my geographical muse.

It happened on a day when they cancelled school in Milwaukee. Because it was cold. Not a snow day. A cold day.

Coming from a place where I never once had to shovel the sunshine off my driveway, this was frightening to me. They actually shut down school because there was a strong possibility of children getting frostbite while waiting for the bus.

I’d never felt homesickness as actual nausea before. Actually, it was more like creative morning sickness (at least, it seemed to feel like my wife’s descriptions of the actual, baby-induced morning sickness she was having at the time). I found myself thinking about the beach, random snapshots of winter mornings with no clouds or snow, wearing shorts when I went Christmas caroling.

At first, these memories were anti-nostalgia. They mocked me with their warm breezes and complete disconnection from my reality. A quick visit to the coast during the Christmas break only made the feelings worse when I settled into the next three months of outdoor icebox conditions.

The memories continued with the cold and it wasn’t until a friend of mine inadvertently suggested a solution that I found productive use for them. Craig and I were in a writing workshop together and I told him a story about a guy who wore nothing but an adult diaper and Birkenstocks while sitting next to the convenience shop I frequented as a kid. Craig asked why I hadn’t written a story about him and, with no good answer, I set out to do so.

But to tell diaper guy’s story I had to tell a dozen others. And with each, the winter grew a bit shorter and the reason for my being there a bit clearer. By April, the snow had melted and left behind the shape of what would become my first book-length manuscript.

It seemed odd to me at the time that a story contained in a five-mile stretch of the Coast Highway in San Diego was the product of a Wisconsin winter. Now that I’ve moved back to the West Coast (something that seems more dreamlike than less the longer I am here), it feels only natural.

I left San Diego to find it; to discover how deeply ingrained this place is in me and how strongly I feel about sharing it with others. Living here again with that new perspective only makes that more apparent.  I don’t know if I’ll ever sell that first book, but maybe that wasn’t the point.     

Michael Dean Clark is an author of fiction and nonfiction and an Assistant Professor of Writing at Point Loma Nazarene University. He lives in San Diego with his wife and 2.8 children. 

Friday I’m in Love

Happy Day after Thanksgiving. Hopefully you’re rested; that the Tryptophan has induced a good night (or half day and then full night) of sleep; that this Friday morning finds you anywhere but shopping at Target or Best Buy.

Don’t get me wrong: there are gifts to find. I’m just hoping you’ll find them outside the crowded box stores and teeming masses of mothers who will cut you for whatever toy is supposed to be worth its weight in violence this year.

This is no anti-capitalist statement. I’m not looking to end up on Glenn Beck’s socialist conspiracy chalkboard (though I’d wear that as a badge of honor and really be touched if he cried when he mentioned my name. I have attended churches that actively seek social justice, so I’m probably a candidate for his list, along with Olbermann’s Worst Person Ever distinction).

Actually, I’m more interested in encouraging people to go find something beautiful. Walk hand-in-hand with a spouse or partner they haven’t seen in awhile. Take their kids to the most beautiful part of the place they call home and actually stay still long enough to enjoy it. Be thankful in the ability we have, as fleeting as it may be, to spend a moment just spending a moment.

Recently, I attended a dinner with John Polkinghorne, a quantum physicist and Anglican priest (and no, those are not mutually exclusive endeavors, but I digress…). Mostly, I spent the evening trying not to prove the academic stereotypes about creative writers true. But I was particularly intrigued by one of Polkinghorne’s assertions.

He said, to be a great scientist or clergyperson – and I read this as a great (fill in the blank) – one must “engage the aesthetic experience.”

In other words, really living means tasting the beautiful rather than gorging ourselves on material things that so rarely provide anything beyond the want of more material joy than they will ever provide. As a writer, these ideas are second nature. I’m just not used to hearing them from a guy who was talking about quarks in the next breath.

Which is why, I think, I’m writing this. Crass consumerism has got nothing on a sunset over the Pacific or snowfall on Lake Michigan. And while Money Never Sleeps (I’m told), it’s no substitute for the time we lose chasing and spending it.

Michael Dean Clark is an author of fiction and nonfiction and an Assistant Professor of Writing at Point Loma Nazarene University. He lives in San Diego with his wife and 2.7 children.   

Some Notes on Editing Fiction

This is the first in a series of entries on working to get the content ready for the next edition of Relief to go to press. Check back on Mondays for further installments.

Serving as the guest fiction editor for the coming edition of Relief reminded me of something.

Editing other people’s work is hard. Not difficult, hard.

At times, the decisions feel like chiseling off pieces of an already formed statue. In its initial form, the sculpture is complete and what the author wanted it to be when he or she put down their own hammer.

Being more of a writer than an editor made my work even less intuitive. Every sentence I suggested they cut or word I asked to be altered made me think of the sentences I’ve lost and words I’ve parsed for someone else in my own work. It’s never pleasant, even when I see how it is improving the story.

To come to terms with the work that needed to be done, I finally came to the following resolution: Venus De Milo would be far less beautiful with arms I didn’t have to imagine.

Sometimes you edit a part of a story to make it stronger. Sometimes you alter an element that works against the purpose of the piece. But most of the edits I found myself making were not about change. Rather, they were addition by subtraction.

Increasingly as I worked with these stories, I found myself excising lines and sections that got in the way of the author’s best work; the places where their voice was audible; the moments where their prose was at its most unselfconscious; the scenes where the world they brought me into ceased to exist through mere ink and paper.

The more I edited the more I saw myself cutting away background noise so that the silence left behind would cast the rest of the sound in clearer tones.

I found myself clearing paths so that the quiet moments of loss and strength like the passage below could more definitively mark Zach Czaia’s character Gladys in “The Wonderful Thing about Forgiveness.”

“Jorge said other things, made apologies, touched her arm briefly. These gestures she waited out. It could have been five, ten, a whole half-hour of minutes Gladys waited before finally hearing him rise from the chair, shuffle heavily out of the kitchen, open and close the door to the front porch.  Only then, after she was sure he had gone, did she lift her face from the table and bring it back into the light.”

In Michael Cocchiarale’s “God She Could Tolerate,” I worked to help clarify the utter disconnect that has grown up between Maddy and her husband John; a disconnect that rings in Maddy’s thoughts after he comments on how beautiful the afternoon is.

“At least he didn’t say ‘Lord.’  He didn’t say the Lord had anything to do with it, and for that reason Maddy decided she could tentatively accept the proposition, even if it reeked a bit of sentimentality.  To be charitable, she was even going to say “indeed”; but then, the silly fool, he kept on going.  ‘Forty years,’ he said, turning to her with moist, dung-like eyes.  ‘I don’t think I have ever taken the time . . .’”

Even in Margot Patterson’s “Catholics,” a story I mostly tried to avoid getting in the way of with the changes I asked for, I found myself pruning away lines and scenes so readers will run head first into passages like the following: 

“Now as I wait for Edward to call me, the cold of that day whistles through me, a draught that blows its cold breath on my hands and my heart. Before me, the long fall towards nothing. Within, a crazy, inextinguishable hope I’ll discover wings on the side of my body.” 

In a way, all of this feels a bit like the first and most vital tenet of the Hippocratic Oath, which is a pledge doctors make to help others using their skills and knowledge without harming them. Seems like a good way of looking at someone else’s writing as well.

Michael Dean Clark is an author of fiction and nonfiction and an Assistant Professor of Writing at Point Loma Nazarene University. He lives in San Diego with his wife and 2.7 children.   

Of Phones, Motherhood, and Miracles

In his book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond comes to one of those inverse conclusions that seem so interesting given the degree of change that happens in such a small linguistic alteration. After looking at the development of various cultures in history, he writes that the old adage “necessity is the mother of invention” is actually more correct when reversed. Technological advancement happens because invention creates the sensation (reality?) of necessity.

A crude analog: give up your cell phone.

When the cramps that idea creates in your stomach subside, think about it. About a year ago, my then six-year-old daughter heard me mention a wall-mounted phone and asked what exactly that was. We’ve never had a home phone in her lifetime, so I gave her the best description I could, feeling more and more that this is exactly how sci-fi writers create new technology from old. Her response sounded a lot more like when I give my college freshmen history lessons about the 90s.

“So, wait,” she said, her face twisted in a thinking frown. “You called a place and the other person had to be there? What happened if they were gone?”

“You called back later,” I said.

“Did you at least leave a voicemail?”

“For a long time, none of my friends had that. And the ones who did had what was called an answering machine separate from the phone that taped what the person calling said.”

“That…is so…weird,” she said, then whistled, then turned and looked silently out the window. Later, she told me that she needed “time to fit the whole phone thing into my head.”

In this, Diamond’s idea seems pretty spot on. I got along just fine before the phone moved from the kitchen counter to my pocket. Sure, it was a pain to miss the call I was waiting for, or to get a busy signal when I finally worked up the courage to call some girl (who most likely left the phone off the hook for just that purpose), or when I stroked in a six rather than a seven on the rotary dial and had to start over.

But now that I have a cell phone, the idea of not being able to call other people on their corresponding always present, always on wireless seems absurd. In fact, if I hadn’t been in grad school the last four years, I’d be writing about how foreign the idea of living without an iPhone is. And this, as most things do, got me thinking about writing.

There are many aspects of my writing process that remain (thankfully) hidden from me. One of them is what exactly drives an idea from invention to necessity. After I’m done, I can see the evidence in the sum total of the story I’ve wrangled. But in the moment, it’s never that apparent.

Some say I shouldn’t worry about trying to understand that; that the analysis will ruin the magic. In some ways, I agree. There are so few miracles left (we’re told anyway) that we should protect the ones we still have. But miracles are miraculous because they are rare, and that’s why I can’t quite leave the one most common to me as a writer to sit uncelebrated.

I can’t chalk up the times when meaning happens rather than is created to the firing of neurons intersecting with the various and sundry contexts and conditions shaping my experience. The science of the intellect does a lot of things well – inspiration is not one of them.

In a sense, the moment of the creative breakthrough is the realization that I’ve become attached to my cell phone. All along, the mechanism of the story (and telling it) has carried its own logic. I learn and internalize the rules of the world I’m expressing to the point that I carry them around with me like the Motorola in my pocket. Only later do I see where something beyond any abilities I possess intervened to make something less than usual out of it all.

Michael Dean Clark is an author of fiction and nonfiction, as well as a professor of writing at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, California. His wife and two children are currently preparing for a different type of deadline – the birth of a new brother and son in February.     

Ultrasonic Creativity

I wish there was an ultrasound for the creative impulse.

As I write that, I disagree with myself. Allow me to play devil’s advocate for my own idea.

Point: Recently, I was sitting in the doctor’s office with my wife and two external children looking at their half-done brother on a screen and it occurred to me that it would be really helpful if every once in awhile I could hook my imagination to a sensor and get a look at what’s going on in there.

I’d even put that nasty gel on my forehead to do it.

Counter: The point of art is the discovery. Knowing what is at present unknowable completely destroys the mystery that causes humans to seek. To hope. To wonder.

Hooking up to a machine to juice that system would only make a medium that can struggle with predictability even less impacting. What if the question inside my head that I can’t answer is supposed to be presented as just that: a question worth wrestling with an angel?

Point: Now, I’m not advocating a wholesale push to scan my way into ruining the beauty of the revelatory experience. I like finding out what’s going to happen as the story unfolds in my own work as much as I do in others.

I’m also not convinced that prolonged contact with whatever electrical signals are being sent out by a machine that could see into a part of a person’s psyche would be medically advisable, not to mention the increased use of said nasty goop.

But there are times when I can’t wrestle out something I know is there. I write it as many ways as I can think to and the character won’t take shape. The dialogue won’t stop sounding like a beer commercial. The conflict won’t stop sounding like it came from a Lifetime movie.  

In these instances, I think a mental ultrasound would work like Metamucil.

Counter: Really? A laxative for your head? There are just so many ways that metaphor hurts my feelings. I’m thinking that writing through the issue would work more like Actvia with Bifidus Regularis (you’re welcome Jamie Lee Curtis). Over time and with consistent use, the writing process will either fix the issue or provide the context that the author’s perspective on the idea they cannot articulate is what needs fixing.

Point: Here’s the thing: before we went to see the doctor for the scan, my wife was worried. She couldn’t tell if she was feeling the baby move or imagining it, a fear made worse because we hadn’t seen a doctor for a couple months courtesy of switching jobs, states, and insurances. She worried that there might be something wrong with him.

And then the ultrasound tech poked Judah with the scanner a bit harder than he liked. Soccer-ready, our boy kicked back. Later, Heather told me being able to feel the kick and see his foot moving on the screen made all the times she’d doubted whether or not he was actually moving disappear into certainty.

I imagine a similar certainty about the detail that eludes us in a story might clear a lot more of the paths we want to walk than just that particular piece of the puzzle.

Counter: Or, certainty robs the expecting parent of their faith during the waiting and the author of what makes their work even remotely original. And, how incredibly invasive would that scan be? I’d wager the experience would be more embarrassing than those full-body scanners that show you naked under your clothes to the groping eyes of TSA.

Either way, just imagine the types of things we’d see in images of our imaginations…Or don’t.

Michael Dean Clark is an author of fiction and nonfiction who appreciates a good laxitive metaphor as much as the next guy (and probably more than the next girl). He teaches at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, California where he lives with his wife and 2.5 chidren.

(Un)Suited

A week ago, I wore a suit to work. And a tie. And a vest.

This is not cause for alarm, except for some of my new students who felt compelled ask why I’d done it. Backing up a bit, there are three cultural assumptions at work here.

First: Writers don’t look like “writers” unless their outfit was picked up off the bedroom floor, shaken out, and put on quickly enough that one of the buttons in the shirt is in the wrong hole (if the shirt has all of its buttons to begin with).

Second: People who just completed a Ph.D. don’t have enough money to own a suit that makes them look like they could be a teller at the local Bank of America branch.

Third: Being that my new university sits right on the Pacific Ocean, I should apparently deliver my lectures in shorts, sandals, and with a liberal use of the term “dude.”

The intersection of all these ideas is exactly why I wear the suit. Call it a fashionable object lesson.

The more I write and the more I work with other writers, the more convinced I am that the greatest obstacle standing in the way of originality is not our practice of making cultural assumptions and then extending those assumptions into stereotypes. Rather, the problem lies in our inability to identify those assumptive forces within ourselves. In writing, this is deadly.

I know, this isn’t rocket science. Then again, the rocket scientists I’ve known more often than not suffer from the same blindness.

We can’t see within ourselves the systems that guide our opinions and actions when we decide what is and is not acceptable, desirable, and worth pursuing. And when we can’t see them, we can’t challenge them.

In critical theory, folks like Foucault would point to our blind spot for the control of systems outside of us as the culprits for this blindness. We are enmeshed in overlapping, intertwined mechanisms that create the internal latticework of opinions and attitudes that “guide” us.

I tend to see humans as more autonomous than that, but I’m not as smart as Michel was. And yet, I’m pretty sure his ability to theorize about those systems (and my subsequent assumption that they are there) means I can’t lay back and blame everything outside of me for my internal blind spots.

If I’m going to be a writer, I must identify and own the places where I lack sight. Not only that, I need to wallow in them and then make them public. This is the mirror artists hold up to culture. And a mirror is only effective if it reflects clearly (unless you want to avoid your blemishes, in which case I’d suggest taking stock in why you are so afraid of yourself).

So sometimes I wear a suit. That way, when people’s stereotypes are challenged, I can talk about it with them. Hopefully those conversations will lead me and others to a more refined understanding of the forces at work within us and a broader vocabulary with which to talk about them.

Michael Dean Clark is a writer, teacher, and former Southern California ex-patriot in the Midwest. Currently, he is at work on…nothing. His new job as a professor of writing at Point Loma Nazarene University has left no time for stories of his own. He hopes that is not the case for much longer, otherwise people may begin to question his qualifications for said new job.

Becoming (anti)Matter

A recent conversation has me pondering. This is usually cause for the people nearest me to flee the room or at the very least duck. But since this is in (virtual) print, you can decide now whether or not this post is a danger to you.

Really, I just lied to you. It wasn’t the whole conversation that set me thinking about this idea. It was more a statement within the conversation. Or, more specifically, it was a part of a comment within a particularly important part of the conversation. But here I am, the next day, still turning it over in my mind.

So, in lieu of therapy that would cost a lot more and require an appointment with a counselor, I’ll work through this here: Are we all destined to matter?

As you can see, I like small issues easily settled in less than a thousand words.

The knee-jerker in me leaps to yes. Or leaped. Leapt?

The (apparently) easy answer is, of course, we all matter despite ourselves. That’s the Sunday school message and, if your theology or social understanding is western and affluent, it makes sense to you. We are the one lost sheep important enough for the other 99 to be left behind in order to find us. Ergo, we matter.

But the crack in that logic rides a fine line with what makes it true. We assume our worth is intrinsic so that every decision we choose to make has meaning, and yet, even in the safest, most affluent and “important” country in the world, so many of us struggle with a deep sense of just how utterly unchanged the world would be without us. That nothing we do makes a difference. Simply, that we don’t matter.

And that’s here. What about the billion and a half people in the world so poor they are virtually invisible to those of us affluent enough to have the time to ruminate on our relative worth? The children who die of hunger rather than struggle with childhood obesity? Those defined as elderly when they reach their late forties? Those who die of diseases almost non-existent in places where vaccines are stockpiled?

Before I slip into a treatise on economic inequality, let me return to the original question: does everyone matter?

Not if they’re never shown they do. And to help people see their value, those of us who were born into “mattering” need to recalibrate our understanding of success. Success is never a grand gesture. It’s never a lottery ticket. It’s never going to leave us saying “I love it when a plan comes together.”

In fact, success is almost never something we can claim credit for. And if it’s really success, we won’t want to. It won’t make us feel worth more. It will more likely underscore just how little we matter. It will leave us discontent rather than fulfilled because it will feel small.

Success can’t pay or it becomes gain. And gain is something even in these economically challenging times we need less of. Especially in these economically challenging times. Success is giving and loss and dirty and quite likely painful in the process of achieving.

But if one wants to matter – and in this way everyone absolutely can matter – success must be measured in what’s given up, not what is acquired. 

Michael Dean Clark is on vacation. When vacation ends, he will not be on it anymore. He will most likely be saddened by that. But his new job is near the beach, so he probably won’t remain sad. Currently, he is reading submissions for Relief 4.2 and prepping for the damage he is about to inflict on his students in the fall.

Random Reflections at 12,100 Feet

 

(The third in a series on my attempt to hike to the top of the tallest peak in the continental United States. You can find the first two here and here.)

The following is a collection of thoughts that ran through my head while camped at 12,100 feet above sea level and dealing with a case of altitude sickness.

Using the space-age technology of the WAG bag for packing out human waste is one of the more awkward experiences in life, but not as awkward as carrying said bag past the 40 other backpackers camped between your outdoor toilet and tent.

In a related vein: marmots are creepers.

The term glissade sounds way more pretentious when pronounced “gliss-ahd.”

Sunrise is more beautiful than sunset in the mountains. Sunset is more beautiful over the ocean.

Jon Bon Jovi is a more important ambassador of New Jersey than Bruce Springsteen. The two should collaborate on a project that erases the Jersey Shore cast from the public consciousness.

“Self-arresting” is more exciting than any episode of Cops except the one where the sheriff’s deputy with a prosthetic leg chases down a suspect on foot and then mocks the man for not being able to outrun him. 

A good sleeping bag allows one to avoid the awkward morning-after conversation that comes from spooning with your friend to stay alive.

Marmots are way less industrious than beavers.

The Lakers really can’t win a championship unless I am actively watching their finals games.

Things I should have invented because they are brilliant, yet so ridiculously simple I could have: bear canisters, tent stakes, snow cones, a less awkward term for ice spikes than “crampons.”

People fall into two distinct categories: ascenders and descenders. They’re like the Sharks and the Jets of the hiking community.

In retrospect, John Denver was really overrated.

In a pinch, Marmots would make a savory stew but not very good jerky.

An ice-axe is really more of an ice-pick with a serrated edge.

And finally, a 270-pound man you don’t know stripping down to his underwear, winking at you, and grunting “I’m a beast” before jumping into a frigid lake is both funny and disturbing.

Michael Dean Clark holds a PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and is an assistant professor of writing at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, California. He is a firm believer in oceans’ superiority to lakes (including lakes named Superior or designated as “Great”).

Trading Failures for Successes?

 

(The second in a series on my attempt to hike to the top of the tallest peak in the continental United States. You can find the first here.)

“Everything I have I count as loss/Everything I have is stripped away/Before It started building I counted up these costs/Ain’t nothing left for you to take away.” Hello Hurricane – Switchfoot

At present, I find myself deeply influenced by pretty much all of the music of Jon Foreman. Most know him from his group Switchfoot, some from his side project Fiction Family with Nickel Creek’s Sean Watkins, still others from his solo seasons EPs.

In my case, I listen to pretty much anything he chooses to put to record, including Switchfoot’s vastly underrated cover of Beyonce Knowles’ “Crazy in Love.” If I had to rank current song writers, Foreman’s in the top three.

So, given my musical and lyrical man crush on his work, it’s really no surprise “Hello Hurricane” came to mind as I trudged down Mount Whitney without finishing what I came to do. But it was an odd convergence.

I think at first I wanted to hear these lyrics as encouragement. You know, I may have failed, but really in the big picture I’m way more blessed than cursed or something like that. And, at another moment, that would have been a valid, potentially comforting interpretation. But with a little distance, I think it was something else.

A short digression to get to where we’re going. Consider it a switchback in the trail of this piece. One of the guys in my hiking party, Dave, is the originator of a process called the 100 Things Challenge. If you want specifics on this process, see here and then buy Dave’s forthcoming book. Generally, it’s about looking at the clutter of things you have and how they’re standing in your way of living simply content.

This concept is never more apparent than when one is backpacking. You carry only what you need, plan very specifically so you’re prepared for contingencies, and truly enjoy all you have (dehydrated sweet and sour pork from a plastic pouch is only truly edible at the end of a long hike).

So here’s the intersection. You’re never as aware of what you need as when you put a limitation on what you can have (as in the case of carrying what you will need to survive a mountain or trying to maintain only 100 personal possessions). What you have, then, is at once much more critical, and, strangely, much more easily defined as temporal.

In our acquisitive culture (that culture being more generally human than merely Western and capitalistic), we expect the inverse of this relationship, only to find that the more we get, the more we have to have to convince ourselves we are secure. Our possessions fail to bring joy or peace. Instead, they breed a fear of going without so strong we fail to see how rich we are.

I can hear your thoughts at this point. “But, did I really read this whole blog for a shopworn message on the evils of consumerism?”

Ha. To quote Lane Hall, you’ve been “Trojan-horsed.”

Where Jon Foreman and Mt. Whitney merge for me is in the way we treat successes like possessions, desperately piling up easy wins to ward off the sensation that we are all failures. However, the more cheap “triumphs” we collect, the more we suspect our lack.

Only the reality of an earned failure can shift our view and move us embrace the message of Foreman’s chorus.

“Hello hurricane, you’re not enough/Hello hurricane, you can’t silence my love/I’ve got doors and windows boarded up/All your dead-end fury is not enough/You can silence my love.”

Michael Dean Clark holds a PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and is an assistant professor of writing at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, California. Currently, he is somewhere between Milwaukee and San Diego.

Peak(ed)

 

(The first in a series on my attempt to hike to the top of the tallest peak in the continental United States.)

On top of Mt. Whitney is a stone hut erected in 1909 to protect hikers from the elements should they be stranded on the peak. This is the highest building in America, something I only know because I’ve seen pictures of it. But that was supposed to change when I joined six friends with the express purpose of hiking to the top of Whitney, striking a pose next to the hut, and fulfilling a life-long goal.

I failed. It sucks.

I’m tempted to justify that statement, maybe deflect a bit. I did make it to 12,100 feet above sea level, which is 700 feet higher than I’ve ever hiked. I wasn’t quite in the shape I wanted to be for very legit reasons. I came down with a decent case of altitude sickness. The night before we hit the trail, snow dumped on what was already the most difficult and dangerous section of the hike. I am extremely afraid of heights and falling from them. I’m getting older.

All of these factors were in play and impacted my trip. But it’s simply more accurate to say I failed.

I think right now I’m supposed to add, “but it was a good failure.” I’m not going to. This isn’t one of those lessons learned deals, unless that lesson is that failure blows and disappointment lingers. I assume most of us don’t need to be reminded of that, let alone think about it while they watch three guys from their group reach the summit without them.

I should note that I am really happy my friends made it, and not in that Miss America Runner-up way. In fact, I think I’m happier for them than I would have been had I made it myself. The sting of imagining how great it was up there – something my fiction-generating mind does quite vividly – makes me appreciate their accomplishment even more.

It’s lame but true. It’s also true that my trip to the foot of Whitney was an amazingly good time. I spent time with two of my closest friends, guys I definitely don’t see often enough. We talked deeply and joked shallowly and hiked the hill together. And when the thin air made my head hurt so bad I thought I was going to vomit every time I moved, they skipped the summit and hiked down with me to make sure I didn’t fall off the mountain.

I guess this is the spot where I should write “so, without my failure I wouldn’t have…” fill in the appropriate friendship platitude. But I won’t do that either.

It sucks that, in a way, my failure cost them the chance to finish what they started. But my guilt is what allows me to feel the grace they extended me on the mountain. It’s what enables me to hear and believe them when they say the time spent with me was worth their own disappointment in not summiting.

Maybe I can trust them because we all share the same failure together.

I find it no coincidence that while I sat reading in the airport on the way home, Flannery O’Connor’s words spoke directly to my failure and its necessity.

“(The writer) begins to see in the depths of himself, and it seems to me that his position there rests on what must certainly be the bedrock of all human experience – the experience of limitation or, if you will, poverty.”

And, in case I started feeling the urge to make a moral out of the mountain, she said this.

“The writer’s business is to contemplate experience, not to be merged in it….you can’t make an inadequate dramatic action complete by putting a statement of meaning on the end of it...”

Michael Dean Clark holds a PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and is an assistant professor of writing at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, California. His latest authorial activity is going through his pile of rejection letters and rating them on a scale of painfulness and sarcasm.

Literary Confessional (Part Deux)

In an effort to balance the scales after I encouraged you to come clean about the books you haven’t read, how about exploring ones that you have?

Now, there are two ways to go about this and I leave the choice up to you (unlike that Frost guy, who, true to his ingrained sense of white, male superiority forced me to take the road less traveled by).

You can, of course, choose to talk about books that were truly meaningful experiences. These are the books you want people to know you’ve read because they make you look smart, thoughtful, or at least literate. There’s nothing wrong with this desire and I actually like hearing stories about these types of reading experiences.

For example, when I read Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays, I wanted to stop being a writer. That book is a clinic in how to write a novel. Nothing extra. Real people. Every chapter ends the way a great book should, and then another one starts. Sure, it’s a depressing account of the loss of meaning in 1960s Hollywood, but it’s so depressing you forgive it.

Or I could talk about Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey. I’d never heard of the 109-page novella about freewill and bridge collapses until I read it. And then, I wanted there to be six more like it so I could teach an entire class titled “See, this is what novels about faith are supposed to look like.” Of course, I’d shorten that title, but whatever.

So feel free to drop down to the comments if option one is the way you’d like to respond. However, if you are feeling more daring, choose option two. Tell me about the books you’ve read that you wouldn’t normally bring up in conversation. Here, let me help.

 I’ve read the novelization of the Mel Brooks' movie Spaceballs at least six times. It’s still funny. Ditto the novelization of John Hughes’ Some Kind of Wonderful. Only read that book if you want to a) feel good and b) revel in nostalgia (the good kind of nostalgia, not that kind that rewrites the history of, say, Native Americans to the point where they were happy to find the reservation).

There are of course other books I could list, but I’d rather you did. So pony up people and let’s hear about the books that moved you (or moved you to silence).

Michael Dean Clark holds a PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and is an assistant professor of writing at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, California. Currently, he is taking a break from writing to hike Mt. Whitney and watch the NBA finals.

Literary Confessional

I don’t usually solicit comments on my blogs, but I’m going to this time. Shamelessly. Mostly, I’m asking for response because if I’m the only one who does what I suggest, I’m going to look like a tool. But, no pressure…

What I propose is a little confession. Writers are readers. It’s what we do. It’s where we steal borrow take learn our best techniques. And, well, we enjoy it. If not, we wouldn’t dream of telling other readers about how we wrote the book they love so much. (What, you don’t do that?)

But here’s the rub: we tend to lie about books we’re supposed to have read. Seriously lie, and not just by omission or that nod we give when people ask, “So, have you read (title of unread book goes here)?”

It’s a weird impulse. All these completely unrelated inadequacies jump up your throat when you’re standing with two or three other readers and they’ve all (apparently) read something you haven’t. They know something you don’t. They’re more literarily hip than you. They might not invite you to the next spontaneous book circle because you’re not cool enough. They might stuff you in the next available locker or mock your hair.

Now try that feeling in a Ph.D. program where people throw out books you’ve never heard of and EVERYONE has read them SIX TIMES. So you lie. You nod, dredge up some part of the Sparknotes summary you remember or, failing that, drop some random non-sequitur line from a Mel Brooks movie. Hopefully the conversation moves on and you put the book on your list of books you have to read before promptly forgetting about it until you’re shamed again.

So, I’m going to try and get out in front of this for once (and I think you should too). I figure, if I admit to some of the books on my list of “shouldas” it will hold me accountable to move them over to being “dids.” The following are books I may or may not have led people to believe I read:

100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Seriously, I’ve read the first ten pages of this book twelve times and, true to my undiagnosed culturally-induced ADD, I drop it for the latest Chuck Klosterman offering. But, I’m told, if you’re going to read magical realism not penned by Borges, this is where you start.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

While this is really a lit-nerd’s pick (no offense to my friends who are lit nerds), this book is on so many contemporary top ten lists that I sometimes feel like avoiding the New York Times books section as much as the novel itself. I hear it’s quite funny and I am a sucker for footnotes.

Underworld by Don Delillo

While most people I know prefer Delillo’s White Noise (a great book I can attest to directly), I need to read this one if for no other reason than it really suffered for coming out at about the same time as Candace Bushnell’s terrible Sex in the City (a book that is actually worse than the horrible show is spawned). So I need to get over the weird temporal association I’ve made linking the two.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

I actually went to hear Diaz read from his novel a year ago and thought it sounded great. And then I got buried reading for my comprehensive examinations and writing my own book and never got back to it (not that my colleagues who I’ve spoken with about the book would have been able to tell).

Those are some of mine. What are some of yours? The confessional booth of the comments section awaits you below.

Michael Dean Clark holds a PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and is an assistant professor of writing at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, California. While he has not read the books listed above, he has read many others. He has also (proudly) seen every episode of Walker Texas Ranger.

Palabras, Parabolas, and the Perception of Flaws

This is the fourth and final installment in a series on “being” a writer. You can find the first three here, here, and here.

I suck at math. Just thought I’d start with that. I was alright until people started adding letters to numbers and then the unknowns won. Kicked my butt is more like it. My geometry teacher rounded up my 69.45 percent to a 70 so she wouldn’t have to oversee my repeating the class. Lucky her, she got me two years later in my second trip through Algebra II (a trip that ended in a gift B-). Tutors didn’t help. Calculators were useless.

The one thing that made sense to me was parabolas. I loved drawing parabolas. Still do. There’s just something spiritual about an infinite curve that meets at the base of its own horseshoe and while simultaneously angling up and away from itself forever. It was, for some reason, a more attainable idea than any Pythagoras ever came up with.

I’ve often wondered why I have this love affair with a diagram, as I’m sure you’re wondering why I feel the need to share my sickness with you. And yes, I do remember this is a column about writing. So let me attempt to make a little sense. When I was in college, I saw a 3-D rendering of a parabola in space. It was a simple computer image, basically turned to provide the depth lacking in the 2-D versions of my high school textbooks. I wanted to hug it. Now, I know why. That’s how stories should be.

In grad school we talk a lot about our “aesthetic.” When I talk to normal people, I call it “what matters to me when I tell a story.” Now I’ll tell both groups this – good stories operate in that three dimensional parabolic space.

First, I want my stories to operate along a vertical plane in which my characters do what I do – wrestle with a God who can be difficult to pin down or even feel at times. This does not mean all of my characters are Christian or even spiritual.But they are all confronted with divinity and respond in the variety of ways people do everyday. Without that vertical component, I see no point in telling stories.

But, just as the lines of a parabola move away from each other, so do many of the horizontal relationships of my characters. Life is hard. Love is harder. And people fall away from each other. Inherent in all of this are pain and hope and trauma and grace. But what I’m most concerned with is the continued presence of that point of connection, the joining of lives that would otherwise continue on, one moving gradually east while the other goes west. And that bond only really happens in the scope of a vertical and horizontal space.

And then there’s the third dimension – what I’ll call depth. For the first few years I flirted with the parabola, she was just a flat, u-shaped thing. But that slight shift of the picture opened up a possibility of growth and change that I want my characters to possess. Our culture trains us to judge people visually and immediately. We size up and reject or accept as soon as we can take in their hair, features, and clothes. Sometimes we make that choice sooner. But sometimes, if we wait, we experience something else about that person. And the experience opens us up to the possibility that our perceptions are flawed; that we are flawed. As a writer, I am possessed by the desire to communicate that our flaws are neither permanent, nor outside the healing influence of change.

So being a writer is about the depth of our flaws, the space between ourselves and the people around us, and the heights to which we are willing to climb or depths we will fall to find what is outside of ourselves. In other words, I’m still drawing parabolas, just without the numbers that might mistakenly make people think my fiction assumes certainty in and of itself.

***

Michael Dean Clark is an author of fiction and nonfiction and now an Assistant Professor of Writing at Point Loma Nazarene University. He is also mere inches from earning a Ph.D. in Creative Writing at the University of Milwaukee-Wisconsin. His work is set primarily in his hometown of San Diego and has been known to include pimps in diapers, heroin-addicted pastors who suffer from OCD, and possibly the chupacabra.