There was a weekday this July when all the banks in Utah were closed. I was born and grew up in Utah and lived there for years, growing up among the Mormons which was a valuable feature of a writer’s youth. I have been away from that dear place a long time and live in a beach town in California now, but on this particular day I greeted people with “Happy Holiday.” It was also my brother’s birthday and as kids we were thrilled that he got a big parade every July 24, Pioneer Day. I was in the actual parade once in high school when my buddy George Pearson and I walked the route through downtown Salt Lake City as Roman Soldiers. I have no idea why. I think the costumes were available, always a good guide for character development. A girl I had a crush on rode a unicycle along with us.

So I wake up nostalgic in the dead center of the summer and the marine layer off the coast has dissipated and the sun is that thing, promising, here’s another day, buddy, and I step out the back door of my cottage and across my little patio to the room in which I write. Years ago the French translator of one of my stories wrote to me and said: what is this thing, patio? Is it like a terrace? I grew up in a small house on the west side of Salt Lake, and my father poured a cement pad between the house and the wooden garage. He was a welder and made an arched arbor at one end with a steel frame onto which plants volunteered. We barbequed on that patio many a summer night in the late fifties. If you’d said the word terrace, my mother, who loved words more than any person I’ve ever met, would have said, veranda, adding an h to the end of the word, her little joke. We had a patio–and now a million years later I have one again and I walk ten steps across to my writing room. So, it’s Pioneer Day 2014.

Overhead a dirty yellow Cessna flies over my little house every eighteen minutes dragging a banner urging those of us below to drink a new beer which is actually an old beer in a new bottle. He’s there many days, circling back from the beachfront, sounding like a lawn mower really, sounding like he could use a tune up. Every day he has more readers than many of us ever get.

My writing room is a writing room, some people would say writing studio and that’s a bit like saying veranda. It has the great everlasting writing devices: a big table and a door. On the wall the old charming artwork for the cover of my first novel Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald and two thrift store paintings my sons have edited for me and which I absolutely love. In one of the paintings the mounted cowboy on the mountain pass can’t see the asteroid approaching in the moonlight, in the other several pink pigs await their cappuccinos.

Today, even in the morning light I know that I’m stuck. I’ve written as far as I can in my chapters and I have to make some mapping decisions about larger issues in this fiction I am constructing. I’ve said elsewhere that I make all my decisions as I write the scenes before me, and that has been a valuable guide for a story writer, but with a novel you need a map and there is a time when you must decide to bring the five strings you’ve started together in a nifty bow or it’s metaphoric equivalent or if you are going simply to lay each thread down where it is and tiptoe toward the door. Of course, you’re terrified of being melodramatic fusing those five storylines. Best is to make the decision and do not second guess it, but write it with all of your heart as closely as you can. What I need to do is read these three hundred pages, which means I have to print them at last, which means I am going to put page numbers on each page using this new computer. This is the kind of thing that takes twenty seconds for any other human.

Today I am numbering the pages, while my old beach town fills up with holiday seekers who do not know what holiday it is. When I get the page numbers right, which I am assured because I have my son’s phone number right here, I’ll print up my problem and, yes, leave the room. I’ll walk to the coast and come back to read.

And for years whenever I have spoken of writing dialogue, of course, I’ve addressed the bodies, the dance, the actions the characters are doing as they try to talk, and forever I’ve used the example of having someone on his or her knees with a trowel finishing the cement work on a driveway or a patio when the other person arrives with bad, good or other news, and I know that springs from the day sixty years ago when I watched my father and his friends do that wondrous work. What can you do as a writer to make me believe these people occupy space, do something, so they might actually talk.

Now, when trying to urge a student away from the disembodied voices in their scene of dialogue, a more manageable example is to have one person on the living room floor with all of the pieces of an Ikea bookcase laid out before them while the other person, drinking coffee, tries to angle her questions so as to find out where the money is hidden. The things we call work have changed in the years I’ve been writing. No one I know works cement. And I finally ceased using the “changing a tire” exercise because all of my students have Triple A and cellphones.   So few of them have changed a tire.

~

Ron with Karen Nelson in the back of my (rented) convertible at Tomales Bay October 2013 Photo credit: Pam Houston

AND THOSE SAME 3 QUESTIONS…

1. What is the best book you’ve read in the last few months and how did you choose it?

• I’ve been reading Bob Shacochis’ masterpiece The Woman Who Lost Her Soul the best book I’ve read in ten years.

2. Would you give us one little piece of writing advice?

• Every morning separate the writer and the editor; send the writer into the room and let the editor know he/she can come back after three.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

• Stop the day’s writing mid-sentence, and if possible mid-word. Find every way you can to be a friend to yourself; you’ll be back in the room tomorrow. How can you help that person and not leave them vexed at a space break.

x

By Ron Carlson

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—Other Writers in the Series—

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I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.

On the first of each month, a guest writer shares how he or she spends the day.

August 1, 2014: Ron Carlson 

It seems wrong, somehow, that I first met Ron Carlson in Italy, as if he should never be separated from the western United States where his writing takes place—the skies over a construction project in the Rocky Mountains in Five Skies; the mountains of Wyoming during a hiking trip in The Signal; and in Return to Oakpine, a small Wyoming town.

But Ron is not just place; he’s also language. The Signal, a brilliant example of story arising out of character, with the main character’s choices driving the plot forward, is full of sentences like this one:

This was his life, riding out two hours from a ranch that itself was an hour from town and still knowing there were unknown hours ahead.

Return to Oakpine, Ron’s most recent novel published in July of last year, is a story about a friendship that began in high school between Jimmy, Frank, Craig, and Mason, but it’s also about the choices we make. And it’s about facing who we were, or thought we were or thought we wanted to be, as we finished high school and left, or did not leave, and who we are thirty years later. “All these years had passed, but it seemed simply impossible,” Ron writes.

“Last week,” Jimmy said. “That must be what thirty years is.”

In Ron’s novels, the men and women are equal but the men are, after all, the men. And against the will of these strong men who don’t talk, the bull’s heart leaks out, a heart you could crack “with a whisper.” Frank’s ex-wife says:

The modern woman wants exactly what the modern man wants. She wants to put out the fire and rescue everybody, and then when it’s safe, she wants to go back in and wait to be rescued.

In her New York Times review of Return to Oakpine, Deb Olin Unferth quotes a passage in the book where Craig’s wife, counting up all the good things in her life, thinks to herself, “It was so close to being enough.”

Unferth, speaking about the new novel, describes what I love about Ron’s writing:

The men and their tender, disgruntled families get almost enough to sustain them, but not quite enough to calm the inner cry. These characters will stay with you because this is how we are too… What we do with the inevitable residual longing—is our story.

Ron was born, and grew up, in Utah, and he’s currently the director of the writing program at the University of California at Irvine. He’s an award-winning writer whose work has been published for over thirty years—five novels, five collections of stories, one YA novel, one book of craft (excellent if you don’t know it: Ron Carlson Writes a Story), and Room Service, a book of “poems, meditations, outcries & remarks.”

“Thirty years,” Mason said. “What is that?”
“Minutes,” Jimmy said.

Come back on AUGUST 1st to read how RON CARLSON spends his days.

One of the amazing things about Sirenland is that it includes spouses in the dinners, the readings, everything except the workshops. So my husband was with me in Italy. He and I left Positano Saturday morning around 8:30. We took the train from Naples to Rome. After a pasta lunch with friends near the Piazza del Popolo, followed by a walk to the Pantheon, the Trevi Fountain, and the Spanish Steps, then a glass of wine in the courtyard of our hotel, I began to feel sick. I went up to the room to lie down for a minute. Then I started throwing up. Which went on for hours. From my bed, between trips to the bathroom, I could see Cal on the balcony looking out at Rome. I could also see a couple across the way. Cal told me later that they were pointing at me on the bed and him on the balcony and laughing.

Anyway, even though I stopped throwing up sometime around midnight, I was dehydrated. My body felt all achy and feverish and so weird that I could not make myself get out of my clothes. Also, I could not stop myself from worrying about having to be on a plane in a few hours.

Sunday morning, I washed my face and brushed my teeth but did not have the strength to dig into my suitcase to change clothes. I told myself if I could just make it to the plane, I could curl up and go to sleep and by the time I got home, I would feel better. I would not breathe on anyone, and I would keep my anti-bacterial gel in my pocket.

At the Rome airport, I accepted the boarding pass the agent handed me, and I checked my second carry-on because I could barely lift my purse. An hour later, as Cal was about to leave to get on his plane (we fly separately), he noticed that my boarding pass had me going to Boston instead of Chicago.

The agent in the Alitalia Lounge helped me untangle the boarding pass mess and tried to reroute my suitcase but no luck there.

I finally got on the plane, took my shoes off, put on my face mask and got under the covers…only to hear moments later that we had to get off the plane for mechanical difficulties. When I walked back into the lounge, the agent who had helped me with the boarding pass was still there and I told her I was on the plane to Chicago, and with her lovely Italian accent, she said, “Madame, this is not your day.” No kidding.

Delayed one hour, then two more. Then they sent us to the airport Hilton to await instructions. I threw off my shoes and collapsed on the bed to sleep for 3 hours. Woke up, washed my underwear and socks in the sink, aired my other clothes, wrapped up in my raincoat, and watched movies on TV. Oh yeah, and the air conditioning was not working in the hotel. When our instructions came in, we learned that we would not be leaving until the next morning at 8, and that we should be at the airport at 6.

Back at the airport on the way to my gate, I got trapped in the train along with two other women. They had to come manually open the doors. Then the plane was delayed 30 minutes–fueling and catering…

By the time I got home–Positano to Naples to Rome to Chicago to Atlanta to Columbus–I had been in the same clothes for 3 days.

So sometimes, although I hate to admit it, I don’t love traveling. There. I said it.

Coming soon: more pictures from Italy, stories from Sirenland, and lots from my workshop with Ron Carlson. Also, on the first, a new guest post in the How We Spend Our Days series!

Saturday afternoon filled with colorful sidewalks

big Pantheon circles

small doorway circles

colorful rectangles, big and small,

then this morning, airplane difficulties and another last night in Rome...