Tomorrow morning, I go back to work. I have a 9:00am meeting and (from the sound of it) a pile of projects eagerly awaiting my return. Honestly, I’m looking forward to a change of pace. It has been nice to have so much time to write strange stories about Homer, Williams College, and middle-aged men who love Laura Ingalls Wilder, but the other side of my brain is ready to dig back in. At least this is what I tell myself.
To celebrate my final days of freedom, I drove across the bridge to spend Saturday with Christian, Emily, and Iris (Emily not pictured for reasons of being at Crate and Barrel when this photo was taken).
It hasn’t been that long since I saw Iris, but she has turned into a person suddenly. She expresses opinions now, climbs up and down the stairs with ease, and (much to her father’s delight), triumphantly says “Goaaaaaaal,” whenever a ball finds the back of the net in the World Cup. I got to witness this phenomenon several times during the high-scoring Germany/Uruguay match. (Iris was an equal opportunity fan; cheering with full enthusiasm for goals scored by each side.)
After the soccer, we decided to grill. Steak, of course–full-pound, inch-thick ribeyes. It is appropriate to celebrate grandly on the final weekend of one’s sabbatical.
Also there were grilled sweet potatoes.
And grilled tomatoes.
One of the tomatoes appeared to be having genetic difficulties…
…which in no way interfered with its being delicious.
The coup was brown-sugar-soaked figs wrapped in prosciutto and then lightly grilled.
It is the kind of treat that would send Robbi into a state of pure glee. But I must admit to initial skepticism. The concoction seemed to violate my long-held conviction that sweet and salt should never be mixed.
But it, like the rest of the meal, was delicious. And the company couldn’t have been better. I had to fight back tears when Iris hugged me goodbye. She has already cultivated a wonderful embrace. When Alden returns, I will see if I can arrange some lessons.
Still no new words from Robbi and the kids, though I did hear from Robbi’s brother’s wife (who just got back from the tundra), that the fishing has continued to be slow. And apparently, Kato has embraced solid foods with nothing short of lustful glee. It’s difficult to feed him, so enthusiastic is he to grab the spoon with both hands and shove it into his mouth. I can’t wait to see it. He hadn’t quite figured out the delicate act of swallowing when they left.
Moving forward now. It’s time for a change of gears. More pushups await. I mention them again because clearly some of you are interested. I’ve gotten more emails about 100 Pushups than I have about any other topic in recent weeks. Alas, 100 Pushups has higher aspirations for my pectoral development than I am able to meet. I am now consistently demoralized by the workouts, which I can’t even come close to completing as outlined. But I am undaunted. My goal is that I won’t be able to fit into any of my shirts by the time Robbi gets home.
Here’s my little painter (Robbi thinks Alden is actually going to be a writer).
And here’s my little dude, enjoying the simple pleasures back when eating solid foods was still nothing but an idle daydream.
Here’s a sneak peak at some key components of a book in the works.
You attentive parents might recognize these cheerful figurines as members of the Fisher Price Loving Family line. Though I’m hoping Alden will not take an interest in this plastic family, they will be the central characters of an upcoming drama about the state of family life in contemporary America. Rather than drawing, Robbi will photograph these figures in self-made dioramas. Perhaps it won’t work, but we’re going to try.
One of the things we’ve come to love about our book project is that we get to reinvent our style and approach with every volume. Most illustrators are advised to cultivate a recognizable style and stick to it, creating characters or an aesthetic that are consistent from project to project, so that art directors can begin to recognize one’s work and have it in mind so that when the right project comes along, they say, “This would be perfect for Robbi Behr!”
Only, so far, Robbi hasn’t subscribed to this strategy. Although there are definite through-lines in her approach to depicting humanity (the oft-cited gnarly fingers and pointy boobs, for example), in the course of illustrating our subscriber books, she has been largely free to choose a media, aesthetic, and approach that works best with whatever text I have advanced. In 3+ years of Idiots’Books, she has worked in pen and ink and watercolor, gouache, vector art, and, sumi ink. She has drawn on cardboard boxes, ticket stubs, hot-press paper, stretchedc canvasses, construction paper, sketchbooks, and rice paper. She has used clip art, collage, and digitally manipulated images. She has gotten to make saddle-stitched, wire-o, and perfect bound books. She has gotten to make posters, card sets, CD-jackets, and original letterpress prints. Stylistically, has ventured from the surreal to the abstract to the representational. She has gotten to do it all, never veering from her aesthetic core, but showing the full range of its application. And each new project affords an opportunity to try something new. Cops, as the new book is called, will provide a chance to try her hand at photography. I can’t wait to see what she comes up with.
It has been a difficult day in the barn. It seems two weeks of this is enough. I’ve gotten so much done, but there’s no one here to share it with. I’ve been working all day on a story about Homer (the epic poet, not the lovable consumer of Duff beer). I ran, I went to yoga, I did my pushups. But I’m operating in a vacuum. I need a hug from my Robbi, a kiss from my baby, a petulant episode from my two-year-old. The days are slipping past, but not fast enough for my tastes. On Saturday, I’ll head to Baltimore to spend a day with my good friends Christian and Emily. On Sunday, I’ll attend a dinner party with some friends in Chestertown.
That leaves tomorrow as the last official day of this sabbatical. I’ll review all I’ve written, making changes and improvements. It has been a good two weeks. I’m sure I’ll look back and think I could have done more. But I guess I’ll have to be content knowing I did as much as I could.
The title of this post is a bit of a misnomer. If an errant comet hits the barn tonight, destroying me and reducing my home to cinders, the letters I have written will not find their mark. They are stacked on my table, addressed and return addressed and stamped and ready to go out into the world. All except for the letter requested by Scott of the UK, whose letter is waiting to have the proper postage affixed.
This was fun. Thanks to those of you who reached out. Several of you wrote expressing interest in the project but claiming that you, “did not need letters.” What am I to make of this? Are you being too polite? Or maybe it’s that you’d rather I not know where you live.
In some ways, I am grateful that I posted this offer over a holiday weekend, because had more people asked for letters, those of you who will be getting them would have gotten less. I wrote each of you a full page, with the exception of the lone stranger among you, who got two pages. It’s too small a sample to draw conclusions from, but I think it might be telling that the one person I did not know at all got the longest letter. Did I have more to say, for some reason? Did the act of writing to a stranger require greater preamble? I wish that more strangers had reached out, that I could know the answer to this question.
The words I write in my daily exercises are free to be empty. They have no audience. With the letters I have sent to some of you, the words required purpose, care, and meaning. It’s a different challenge, to be sure. I’m glad to have had the opportunity to meet it.
If you are inspired, please tell me what you think when your letter arrives. Words cast into the void have some value for the potential they represent, but words responded to are greater by far. They represent a conversation. And no matter how much of a misanthropist any of us must be, we need exchange as we go about our lives. We long to be heard, responded to.
In other news, I got an email from Robbi today, who must have ingratiated herself to the owner of a local cannery with a wireless connection. The message was short, the news brief. It sounds like the fish aren’t hitting this year, but that my babies are well. My babies…what do they even look like? Oh, I remember now.
Seventeen days and I’ll see them again. Wasn’t the whole world made in just one?
I got home from a Fourth of July crab feast around 11:00 tonight, sat down at my computer, and wrote the eleven letters that have been requested by the readership. Lindsay, Clare, Abby, Cathy, Brandy, Veronica, Don, Holly, Jessica, Alex (and Megan), and Brandi can expect a letter in their mailbox by the end of next week. As for Aubrey, I have not started writing your masters thesis. It’s 2:00am, and I’m feeling unequal to the challenge of unpacking the subtle mysteries of Stoppard’s prose at the moment. But that’s what tomorrow is for.
Thanks to those of you who participated in this experiment. It was great fun writing to you all. I’d like to be the type of person who writes a letter every day, but I know how daunting a challenge it would be. Just past the midpoint of the year, I have succeeded in my New Year’s goal to write at least 1,000 words a day, though what I come up with is a mixed bag. Sometimes nonsense, sometimes solid prose, the product of my daily writing, is, at least, writing. Raw production aimed at nothing more than keeping my fingers in shape and my mind involved. Even a bad run is good for the legs, the heart, the soul.
That’s what I tell myself, at least. Good night, everyone. Here’s hoping you got to see some fireworks.
Here’s a photo of the family, an outtake from the recent Baltimore Magazine shoot.
Just a short post this morning. I didn’t rise until nearly noon today after staying up half the night watching the first four episodes of Veronica Mars, a show for teens that features a surly high-school detective and her misadventures with a pack of rich kids and a local biker gang. I was looking for something to stream on Netflix before going to bed, and was reminded of a positive review for Veronica Mars on NPR from a few years back. It’s nicely done. Good storytelling, and the lead actress, Kristen Bell (also of Heroes fame), is incredibly appealing. Once I started watching, I couldn’t stop. My present vulnerable emotional state makes me more prone to admit things that I might otherwise keep to myself.
I guess my brain needed a break from yesterday’s record writing haul. I finally caught my stride, making major contributions to four new stories, finishing working drafts of two, and revising my Alaska essay into something approaching final shape. If I had been this productive from the first day of my sabbatical, I would have written the great American novel by now. Or at least the good American novel. Or at least a novel written in America.
I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s day of letter writing. I’ll repeat my offer. If you comment on this post and write me an email with your mailing address, I will write you a letter tomorrow. And I’ll send it to you in the mail. It’s ok if we don’t know each other. In many ways, I consider the prospects of writing to a stranger a more intriguing challenge. But perhaps you’re too busy eating hot dogs and waving sparklers to check in this weekend.
For those of you in my current queue, I wonder what I’ll have to say to you tomorrow. Be prepared for lengthy observations on the monkish life. I have little else to offer these days.
In case you are hoping for a photo (I know I need one right about now), here you go.
The Fourth is always a day of major celebration on the tundra. If the fishing schedule allows, people from all along the beach gather for a massive pot-luck featuring everything from casseroles to Akutaq (pronounced a-GOO-duk), or Eskimo “ice cream” made from seal oil and berries.
After the pot luck, people gather along the bluff to watch Pyro Dave (who works as a demolitions expert in the off season) dramatically explode drums of fuel or boxes of black powder. It’s one of the highlights of the season (to give you a sense of the lack of other entertainment to be found in Coffee Point).
Here’s a video from a few years back, if you care to partake.
This afternoon, I’m heading off with friends to a crab feast and fireworks of the more traditional kind. But it’s nice to be able picture what my family is up to today.
Chestertown is getting hot again. I got up early to take a run while the world was still cool. Now I am sitting in the artificially chilly confines of the studio, working on a story about bad-looking high school freshmen. It is only vaguely autobiographical. I am only drawing slightly from my own memories of the high school years. Ok, just about every painful episode is basically a word-for-word transcription of my adolescent pain. There is a famous photo of me taken in the eighth grade when I was swindled by the teachers into being on the “Principal’s Council.” It was basically a distinction given to the dorkiest kids so that they could be easily identified by the other, meaner kids and publicly mocked. I was still in my fat years at the time, and I still parted my hair in the middle. I still had large plastic glasses. My father still dressed me. In the photo, I am featured, fat and unlovable, in my Keystone Mountain t-shirt. One of my sleeves is longer than the other. I look sloppy and imbalanced. I’m sure that everyone who looked at the photo wanted to stuff me in a locker. To complete the image, the words that were printed on the shirt were (in reference to skiing, of course) “My Life is Going Downhill.” The wonderful thing is that I had no consciousness of the irony at the time. I was a mostly happy kid in spite of the social blight I represented. Rehearsing my early teenage pain through writing has been a pleasant way to spend this lazy afternoon. And I’ll never run out of material.
In other news, I finally heard from Robbi last night. The fishing has been slow so far, but the Department of Fish and Game has decreed that they fish during the day, so it has been difficult to travel over to Egegik to use the pay phone in the cannery. Yesterday they were switched to the night tide (which probably means Robbi got up at some ungodly hour this morning to stuff herself into a full rubber suit and head down to the beach), so she was able to make the trek across the water to call me. Apparently Alden spent the first two days being a total pill, still sick and completely exhausted from the travels. But she’s back now to her spunky self, though she can’t seem to understand that the “beach” here is different from the one she loves at home. No parent in his right mind would let a child swim in the water here, which is dirty and cold and teeming with underwater life.
Kato is sleeping happily in a cardboard box. Other helpers are more than making up for my missing contributions. It was a good report. Mostly, it was just good to hear Robbi’s voice. I did not get to talk to Alden. She was sleeping when Robbi left for Egegik, and rousing her would have violated Robbi’s and my most sacred rule: never wake a sleeping baby.
I got my first letter from Robbi today, full of news about her trip, mundane details that were delightful to me but which would bore you stiff, and so I’ll keep them to myself. But letters are on my mind right now as I contemplate my Monday of writing them. I think I have a list of ten eager recipients so far, including the young lady who has asked me to write her Masters Thesis. I’m going to do it. I may post it here for all of you to enjoy. We’ll see how it goes.
Be sure to let me know if you want a letter and haven’t asked for one yet. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, read the next post.
It’s Friday in Chestertown. The gods of summer have granted one more day of reprieve from the heat. I’ve even turned off the AC, giving the unit a chance to rest from its nearly constant activity of late. I’m working on my Alaska essay today, trying to figure out how best to tell the story of that wonderful, complicated place. I won’t bore you with the details of the current mess, but I hope that it will be an interesting read when I’m done.
I’ve been thinking about letters lately. I haven’t really written them in years, given how busy I am and that Robbi, the person I’d be most likely to write, is usually no more than 15 feet away. I write dozens of emails each day, but as I do, I notice there’s a difference between writing an email and writing a letter. In general, emails are about communicating information—the who, what, when, and where of things. Transactional discourse, at best.
Letters, on the other hand, are about spending time with someone, luxuriating in shared thoughts and observations. Because they live on paper and require and envelope and stamp, they represent a greater commitment. You don’t off-handedly write a letter to someone. There is significance in the medium itself. They contain information, to be sure, but tend to trend more toward poetry, tend to be more focused on the pleasures of langauge. One puts something of himself in a letter, whereas emails tend to be so devoid of character that there’s danger in trying to communicate with any subtlety. My trademark dry humor tends to fall flat in emails, the readers of which are accustomed to straightforward communication and are less prepared for humor. I sometimes have to write back and explain myself when a joke has failed. I know that emoticons have been developed to help with this disconnect, but homie don’t use emoticons.
While Robbi has been gone, I’ve been writing her a letter a day, and in so doing, am remembering the pleasure of it. I used to write Robbi a lot of letters. We corresponded for a year before the official start of our “relationship.” We wrote several times each day, exchanging stories, thoughts, ideas, and observations. But what we were really doing was spending time together, carving out space in every day to commune as best we could across the miles between Williamstown, where I lived, and Philadelphia, where she was a gallery assistant.
Writing letters is the only way I can spend time with her these days, putting my thoughts to paper and sending them off into the void. I know her well enough by now to predict when she would smile, what phrases would delight her, how she might react to an observation about my day.
And that is enough to make me feel connected. In fact, I doubt she’s getting my letters. They are probably sitting in a PO Box across the Bay from where she’s fishing. It’s the height of the fishing season now, so there probably isn’t time to get in the skiff and go to Egegik to check the mail. But the act of writing is an end it itself. She’ll read my words at some point. For now, just writing them gives me a chance to sit with her a while each day.
But given that the letter-writing bug is alive in me, I thought I’d try an experiment. I have a proposition for you readers. If you are interested in getting a letter from me, leave a comment to this post and email me with your address, and I will write you a letter. I aim to spend an entire day writing letters. I’ll do it on Monday while others are off frolicking at the beach and baking in the sun. Anyone who asks for one between now and then will get a letter from me. I cannot vouch for what I might send you, but I guarantee that it will contain words.
The analytics suggest that thousands of people read this blog, so I may be getting in over my head, but here is my promise: if you comment, I will send you a letter. Monday could be a very long day.
So let me know. People say they lament not getting letters any more. But I like writing them. And Idiots’Books is about paper, envelopes, and the mail. I’m game if you are.
Being on vacation sure can be exhausting. I’ve funneled some of my newfound energy into a physical regimen of the type my body has not seen since I ran competitively my freshman year of high school. I’ve run every day this week, have had three yoga classes, and have continued to work at developing the well-sculpted pecs of my dreams using my favorite new iPhone app, 100 Pushups. I’ve always imagined that it would be a good idea to do pushups, a free, easy, self-contained workout that develops your arms, chest, and back, with residual benefit for your core. But every time before, I’d harness a new spurt of pushup motivation by doing as many as I could, aching considerably for the next few days, and then forgetting to do them again once the pain faded. This app involves an initial test: Do as many good-form pushups as you can and then follow a program outlined by the app. For example, I did 25 pushups in my first test, and the next day was told to do sets of 10, 12, 7, 7, and 10 pushups with 90 seconds rest between each. The app counts down the rest time for you, removing any mystery. After completing a workout, you rest for a few days until you feel up to it again and then do the next workout, invariably doing more than the time before. Today, only my sixth workout, I did 16, 17, 14, 14, and 20 pushups, for a total of 81, though I was struggling to finish the final set. The progress is quick and gratifying. I’m already seeing the results. I think it cost a dollar to download. Consider this my official endorsement.
But the upshot of all this exercise is that my body is tired even though my mind feels quick. I had terrible form in yoga today, completely botching all of the positions requiring core balance. Yet the exercise is spiritually energizing and replenishing, keeping my mind off of how much I’m missing my family today. Chestertown has given us the gift of cooler days this week. The high temperature has been in the low 80s, and it was only 65 when I woke up today. I am enlivened by cooler temperatures and completely depleted by the typical Chestertown summer day. I’d be happy if it never got about 72. Apparently, I should move to Sweden.
While I’m doing product placement, I would like to put an enthusiastic word in for my friend and yoga teacher Helén Sears, who teaches Vinyasa Flow Yoga out of her home, just off Cannon and Cross Streets in the Historic District. Helén is patient, kind, and a wonderful teacher. She has a way of helping you improve without making you feel like a clod, which every beginning yoga student invariably is. I’m taking my fourth and fifth classes with Helén right now, and it’s exciting to see how much better I’ve gotten in only a few months’ time. I’ve noticed that the yoga practice has helped me improve body control, balance, strength, and, dare I say, grace. I’m slightly less of a lurcher than usually am. I’m moving through the world with slightly more purpose these days, and I know it’s all because of Helén. In addition to her Flow classes, which are rigorous without being demoralizing, she teaches Bliss (a weekly movement through the Chakras, each class devoted to “opening” a different one), and Restorative (a relaxing class that moves students through a series of positions meant to improve flexibility and focus). She also offers Beginner’s Yoga classes for the interested novice. I’ve taken all of her classes, and am extremely impressed. If you live anywhere near Chestertown and have ever been curious about yoga but have never found the right situation, give Helén a try. Consider this my official endorsement.
Enough about exercise. It’s the eve of the holiday weekend, and I’m preparing for a blissful convalescence with my keyboard. This evening I’ve been working on a project I mentioned in my last post: a meditation on the time I’ve spent in Alaska as a fishing helper. It’s an interesting dynamic working with one’s spouse. Robbi and I certainly know about working together, we do it every minute of every day. But when working on books, we’re on equal footing, each one an expert, each one contributing leadership and vision. But when fishing, I am invariably in the position of novice. Robbi has been fishing for three decades. She’s a pro. She has said that it is the only context in life in which she feels that she knows exactly what she’s doing. I, on the other hand, after seven seasons, still have much to learn. On one hand, what we do is simple. On the other, we confront constantly shifting conditions: time of day, speed of tide, weather, mode of setting the nets. Decisions have to be made quickly, and with no ambiguity. Directions have to be followed for the sake of safety. For the first few years I went up to help, I had a hard time dealing with the fact that I was the amateur. I’m used to being good at everything I do. I’m used to being quickly thrust into leadership positions in whatever context I encounter. But with fishing, I have to defer, listen, and follow instructions. Coming to terms with an uneven power dynamic was one of the most difficult things I had to deal with in the early years of my relationship with Robbi. But I’ve come to find a comfort in the position of follower, supporter, cog in a complex machine beyond my ability to fully comprehend.
This acceptance of “helper” status is one of the central themes of the essay that’s emerging. But more than a psychological exploration, the piece also tells the story of how we fish, and why. There are so many eccentric characters, stories, and complex explanations of process that I’m sure I’ll have to work at economy lest the piece become an epic beyond its ability to engage the reader. That’s my present task.
Writing about Alaska as I sit here in Maryland helps me feel closer to my distant family. I looked at a map today and shuddered at how far away they are. They’re practically in Russia, as the echo of Sarah Palin reminds me. I still haven’t heard Robbi’s voice since they left. It’s hard. I miss Kato’s fuzzy head, Alden’s stern reminder that her name is “Alden” when I call her any one of the dozens of pet names that I can’t help but call her.
And so I’ll return to my writing and thus commune with my family in the only way I can right now. Evidence of their absence lies strewn about the barn. A tiny pair of shoes, a bib, an empty sippy cup. I don’t have the heart to clean up the mess. I summon their ghosts through artifacts, which are everywhere.
In conclusion, join me in sculpting sick pecs by downloading 100 Pushups. Sign up for yoga classes with Helén. And kiss your children if you can. Grab them and hug them and never let them go. They’ll be gone soon enough, whether to Alaska or college. I now know what it feels like to do without. Here are the obligatory photos.
What rascals. What knaves. Is it possible I played some role in their becoming?
Now that we have joined forces with a literary agent, Robbi and I have been thinking hard about how to make books that might be more readily marketable than is our standard Idiots’Books fare, about which there is not much that can be described as “standard,” I suppose. For the most parts, our books lack such traditional literary elements as plot, character development, description, place setting, and narrative arc, which proves problematic to some, if not most, readers. In general we’re interested in ideas, contradictions, and human folly and explore these themes with provocative, incomplete, and unexpected language and visceral, messy, and highly editorial illustration. Our books aren’t stories as much as they are studies, musings, examinations.
But generally this sort of thing doesn’t fly off the shelves at Barnes and Noble.
So the trick is coming up with a way to come up with writing and illustration that is both pleasing to us and appealing to a wider audience. So we decided to point our noses in a different direction.
For the past few months, I have been spending long hours imagining the lives and adventures of an 8-year-old witch named Gramangela and her friend Collins, a 184 lb monkey with golden bones. The book is about 150 pages long, has 21 chapters, and is, as far as I understand it, a “middle grades” book, meaning a step beyond picture books but not quite “young adult” literature.
I find the things I enjoy about writing–surprise, strangeness, and non-sequitur–work fairly well in the realm of children’s literature. Instead of feeling like we’re “selling out” or “compromising our principles,” we’re having a ball applying our styles and sensibilities to an entirely new realm. I haven’t had this much fun writing something in a long time. And last night, around 1:00 in the morning, I finished my first complete draft.
Robbi and I have already spent a lot of time talking about how the illustrations might work in this book, and she has done a handful of studies to see what the characters might look like, but now it’s time for her to dig down and explore my text and how she wants to interpret it. In imagining Collins, she found that she was having trouble figuring out what he was supposed to look like, and so she took out her sculpey and made a model. Here is Collins:
As is so often the case when Robbi sits down to create, the character she came up with looked exactly how I thought it should when writing the text. She has an eerie knack for completing my thought in visual form. It’s why we work well together, I think. She’s the other half of the circuit begun in my brain when I make something up. It’s why my work is always incomplete without her. It’s why we so enjoy living together in this barn of ours, and why I hope we get to keep making books together for a long, long time.
Story Builder
Play with our recombinable, death-defying, story-making watchamajig!
2010 Small Press Expo - One of the top alternative press events on the east coast, with over 450 exhibitors. Come see! On 09/11/2010, which is in 2 days and 05:49 hours.
AWP 2011 - The Association of Writers & Writing Programs is holding its conference in DC this year. We'll be there too. On 02/02/2011, which is in 146 days and 05:49 hours.
