On the tidal flats, July 2019

The reason I went to Provincetown for the first time, in the summer of 2006, was to take a class from Pam Houston. I owe her for the rest of my life for that alone. Over that winter she read the novel I was working on, my first novel. In 2007, I went back to take her class again. That summer, she introduced me to the breakwater, which I had somehow missed during my first summer. As we walked on the giant boulders, I began shedding things. Later that same year, I joined the writing group she led, and over the years, we’ve become the best of friends.

Here’s how she fictionalized that real time on the breakwater in Contents May Have Shifted.

Last year, on that same long walk across the breakwater, Willow left behind first her sweatshirt, then her shoes and eventually even her giant purse, which contained six hundred dollars cash and her brand-new Vaio computer, which is the exact effect P-town is designed to have on anybody who is willing to let it.

But really, the story starts years before that, back when I was a reader without the first thought of writing.

The kids were little, and in those days, after they went to sleep, I stayed upstairs and read in bed.  Early in January of 1992, late one night, when Cal arrived home from a business trip, he came into the bedroom holding a scrap of paper. “You have to get this book,” he said, handing me the paper. “I heard her on NPR.”

On the paper, of course, Cowboys Are My Weakness, Pam Houston.

I adore Pam’s sentences. Look at these two from Contents May Have Shifted:

Henry is the only man I’ve ever known in my life that I knew how to love well, and as luck would have it, we were never lovers (6).

See how she repeats love in the noun form of lovers. And notice the rhythm of the sentence. Now, take a look at this one.

We were each locked inside our individual sorrows, didn’t know each other well enough to share, but we agreed, out loud, that like moose, pelicans were surely put on earth to act as suicide preventers, agreed we’d never kill ourselves within the sight of one (8).

Notice the multiple could-have-been-single sentences contained in one sentence and how the compression creates such a lovely rhythm.

Some of you know that Tidal Flats is actually the fourth novel I’ve written–all of them about marriage. Here’s what Pam has to say about that, from her essay collection, A Little More About Me.

There is only one story of our lives and we tell it over and over again, in a thousand different disguises, whether we know it or not.

Currently, Pam is on tour for her memoir, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country, which was published in January.

Here are some of the lines from Deep Creek that I love most.

It’s hard for anybody to put their finger on the moment when life changes from being something that is nearly all in front of you to something that happened while your attention was elsewhere.

This passage means so much to me because I had a moment like this–when I finally lifted my head as my last child left for college. Here’s another one.

You have to be a certain age, I think, to understand longing as scarcely distinguishable from pleasure, and my love affair with the ranch is defined by a thousand leavings and a thousand returns. It’s the only place I always miss, no matter how fabulous my temporary circumstance. When the road turns to gravel and bends with the river into Antelope Park, every single part of me takes a deep breath.

All I need to do is substitute Provincetown for the ranch, the ocean for the river, and the Pilgrim Monument for Antelope Park…

Here’s one more. Pay attention to the symmetry and the juxtapositions and the rhythm.

Sometime in the last twenty-five years, the ranch changed from being the thing I always had to figure out how to pay for, to the place I have spent my life.

Her sentences, I’m telling you. And I’m still on the first essay. Actually, I’m only on page 10. I won’t spoil the end of this essay, but I will tell you I underlined the last two paragraphs.

I don’t know where in the world I’d be without Pam. She has shaped me as a writer and as a human being. Her writing and wisdom have set the bar high, high, high. I’m grateful for her and her writing and for her support of mine.

Andre Dubus III and Kwame Dawes                                      photo credit: Pam Houston

Just a few weeks ago I was driving out of San Francisco across the Golden Gate Bridge while debating with Andre Dubus III and Kwame Dawes the pros and cons of this age of connectivity in which we live. What a great way to kick off this year’s Writing by Writers Tomales Bay Workshop.

Back to join Pam Houston for another year were Antonya Nelson and Dorothy Allison, and also teaching classes this year were Andre, Kwame, and Robert Boswell.

Wednesday night, I introduced our guest speaker–the very young Josh Weil, who had to dash out Thursday morning when his wife went into labor.

Faculty readings, fellowship readings, student readings, and panels. Afternoon band/dance party with Kwame singing “Stir It Up” and “No Woman No Cry” with Greg Glazner’s band. And oysters!

Enjoy the slideshow with some of my favorite moments, and lines, from the workshop.

Writing by Writers Tomales Bay 2015: October 21-25. Join us for a fall literary infusion next year!

Today, please welcome writer Fenton Johnson.

On the porch of Thomas Merton’s hermitage at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky in December 2013

Cynthia’s blog charged me with describing my day, but then I read Cynthia’s touching introduction with its mention of Fenton the Canine, and I found myself writing an obituary, and grateful to Cynthia for inspiring me to do what needed to be done. Ain’t that the way of life–some kind word or thoughtful comment, a bit of praise from a fellow traveler and suddenly we see what’s been begging to be seen all along.

And so here is how I spent my day: composing a tribute to my namesake.

Fenton Johnson on Fenton Johnson

I was walking with Pam Houston, the human, and I had been complaining. Non-Southerners do not realize that south of the Ohio objecting to the nature of reality is just a conversational mode–a way of making a particular kind of mouth music that is not intended to carry any larger implications about the speaker’s temperament or frame of mind. Many of the most light-hearted Southerners I know are the most eloquent complainers. Some of them find their ways to becoming writers.

Anyway, I had been complaining about my sixteen nieces and nephews and my friends, none of whom had chosen to name any of their children after me. I would go to my grave without issue or marker, I said. Not long afterward, being the kind of friend she is, Pam announced that she was naming her next Irish wolfhound Fenton Johnson.

I admit I was taken aback. I understood this to be a compliment of the highest order, and Fenton / Fintan, a name with deep Irish roots, was singularly appropriate. The first of the two Saint Fintans is revered as “Father of the Irish Monks,” and both ruled over monasteries in the glory days of Irish Christianity, well before the Roman Church suppressed its so-called pagan elements–nature rituals and goddess worship. All the same. A dog is a dog, when evidently I had set my perverse heart on an eponym and namesake attached to some creature of the two-legged variety, despite the overwhelming evidence of the moral superiority of canines.

Wolfhounds, most particularly Irish wolfhounds, are a noble and enduring breed–when you see them in paintings and tapestries in the company of medieval kings and queens, the impression is of the royalty escorting the dogs rather than the reverse. But they have suffered the ravages of inbreeding, and as an emotional investment they are as risky as–well, as the men Pam writes about in her books. Some can be–let’s be generous here–learning challenged, and many develop bone diseases and arthritis early in their short lives. To keep company with Irish wolfhounds is an ongoing reminder that indeed our lives are as grass on the roof–an ongoing lesson in the symbiotic relationship between love and loss, life and death.

But when the gene pool coalesces they are the noblest of hounds, and I know that I will get no argument from Pam when I write that in Fenton the Canine, the gene pool seriously coalesced. For starters, at almost eleven years old he was the longest-lived of Pam’s several wolfhounds, beating out even the remarkable Dante on this score. To watch him in his youth–or even in his old age–hit his long loping stride chasing sea birds on Limantour Beach was a q.e.d. moment, when the illusion of separation and the burdens of being a sapient homo slipped away and everything, sea, sand, birds, surf, dolphins, sky, humans, dog and the long perfect arc of Point Reyes curving toward sunset was one and whole and completely and fully integrated. No duality. We are all one in Christ Jesus. Like Pam, Fenton the Canine was a teacher, and like her, he taught through the simple fact of being who he is, who he was.

What we have to be is what we are–thank you, Thomas Merton.

Permit me to indulge in self-aggrandizement by writing that Fenton the Canine and I shared some deep genetic bond. Not long before his transition from hither to yon, Pam wrote that “he was always kind of stand-offish–you could hug and pet him and he would like it well enough but after a little bit he would wander over to the corner as if to say, ‘that’s enough now, I’d rather sit over here in the corner and watch.’” And I thought, of course and helplessly, “Yes, I know another Fenton like that.”

“Life is the little that is left over from dying,” wrote Walt Whitman, our national prophet and saint. In the losses lie the lessons, I know that to be true, too. Put those statements together and you see that if we would embrace death as another aspect of life–if we would let the animals teach us how to live and how to die–we just might treat each other and our animals better than we do.

A tribute to Fenton the Canine is of necessity a tribute to Pam, who brought him into my life, and who has the bigness of heart to admire and love and care for these beautiful bright short-lived creatures.

It is hard to accept that, ojalla, the next time I walk on Limantour Beach, I will have to conjure Fenton the Canine in my imagination. And yet in the end I am glad to know and to write that glorious, useless art has a greater hold on me than practical fact, and that to live in the imagination is another way of living in what the saints and prophets call eternal life.

~

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?

• The best book I’ve read recently is a tough question, because I read peripatetically, keeping multiple books at hand and browsing through them. (Evan Connell: “I don’t read for pleasure, I read for what I can steal.”) These are the books on my coffee table, right now, as I’m typing: The Oxford Annotated translation of the Bible (I recommend Genesis, Exodus, the opening and closing passages of Isaiah, the Psalms, and the Gospels). Maurice Manning’s The Common Man and The Gone and the Going Away. Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna. Emily Dickinson’s complete poems. The American Library edition of the complete Zora Neale Hurston–I’m reading her memoir, Dust Tracks on a Road.
  

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

• In Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find, the Misfit says of the Grandmother, “She would have been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” This, of course, is true of all of us, every single day, true of you, true of me. How we spend our days is how we spend our lives. So here is a prompt, a daily exercise, for you, for me: Next time we sit to the blank page or the keyboard, let us ask: How can we really see the gun pointed daily at the heart? Assume the loping stride of Fenton the Canine on Limantour Beach. Go looking for that place. Then write.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

• I’ll start with a definition of terms: I’ll assume the question to mean, “my strangest habit that I’m willing to post on the web.” I assume “habit” to mean “something I do regularly,” and “strange” to mean “something few other people do.” So, with those qualifiers in mind: I get down on my knees every night before I climb into bed and do my best to remember to say, “grateful, grateful.” Sometimes I forget the “grateful,” but the getting down on the knees has become ingrained.x

~

In the meadow in front of Thomas Merton’s hermitage, December, 2013. L to R: Dave Harrity, poet; Paul Quenon, poet, monk, teacher; Silas House, novelist and hell raiser; Fenton Johnson, wordsmith and proximate cause; Maurice Manning, poet. Photo credit: Jason Howard, writer and editor.

By Fenton Johnson

.

.

—Other Writers in the Series—

.

I’m on the board of Writing by Writers and was volunteering at the conference. My first duty was to collect Ron Carlson from the airport and deliver him safely to Tomales Bay. I lucked into a convertible (Hertz’ answer to a tiny problem) and so Ron and I could actually hear crickets and notice drops in the temperature as we made our way, directed by Siri (who deserted us five miles out). But with only one wrong turn we made it.

During workshop time I worked on my novel, except for Saturday morning when I went for a walk at Limantour Beach, recently featured in the NYT Travel Section. On Saturday afternoon, I had the pleasure of introducing Ron, who has a wonderful new novel, Return to Oakpine—more on the novel coming soon.

Then on Sunday morning I did something I’ve never done before. To make a flight at SFO, I left at 6:30 a.m. in the dark, trying not to wake my roommate (Practical Karen). I drove for twenty minutes, debating whether I had enough time to stop at Point Reyes for coffee but decided to risk it, and made the turn off my route hoping the coffee place was open. When I reached for my purse–no purse. I had no choice (ID) but to drive all the way back…where I parked, woke Karen (who, being practical, had advised me to start 3o minutes earlier than I had planned), and grabbed my thin black purse, which still sat by the door, invisible in the dark, then back into the car–no stopping for coffee this time. I did make my flight, going around the city because of the marathon and crossing over on the San Mateo Bridge.

Enjoy the photos!

Writing By Writers Tomales Bay

Follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, and join us at our next workshop–with Pam Houston, Ben Percy, and BK Loren, March 14-16, 2014, in Boulder at The Colorado Chautauqua!

The Literary Death Match was hilarious–Adrian Todd Zuniga as host. Roxana Robinson read against Rigoberto Gonzales , while Pam Houston read against Christopher Castellani. And it was the women, with the help of squirrels, who advanced to the final round–which turned out to be a spelling bee, not of words but of authors’ last names. Pam phoned a friend–me (ha)–for help with the spelling of Achebe. But she lost points on Ondaatje and Solzhenitsyn. Roxana won on Eugenides. Steve Yarbrough judged on literary merit , Carmelita Tropicana (in snakeskin) on performance, and Tom Bodett (in a fedora) on Intangibles (or as he put it, on Je ne sais quoi). I haven’t laughed that much in a long time. Already looking forward to next year.

Our panel on Building Communities of Readers and Writers, with Jodi Paloni as moderator, was lots of fun. David Abrams talked about his blog, The Quivering Pen, and World Book Night. Erika Anderson, who teaches at Sackett Street Writers Workshop in NYC, talked about how she uses Twitter, and I talked about Catching Days, sprinkling in a quote from Apollo 13: “You never know what events are to transpire to get you home.” Figure that one out : ) Questions from the audience led to a discussion about MFA programs and their pre-made communities.

Readings took place all day Saturday and Sunday–Christine Schutt, Chris Bohjalian, Alexis Smith, Kris Jansma, Sophie Cabot Black, Howard Norman–with books flying off the tables and writers being stopped on the streets for signatures. Matthew Limpede, editor in chief of Carve Magazine, and Leah Miller, an editor at Random House’s Crown Publishing Group, held an informal talk on the editing process. The rain only seemed to make the weekend cozier and the leaves more colorful.

The Author Dinner Saturday night took place at The Gleanery in Putney, where the food was freshly grown just down the way. I wish I had taken some photos. Still tasting the delicious beet salad and the squash.

What Books (be honest) Are On Your Nightstand/Bedside Table, Dede Cummings’ Facebook Book Group, created a series of fantastic posters that decorated the walls of the Gibson River Garden.

Many thanks to Sandy Rouse, the director of the BLF, who, due to a last minute injury, missed it all! Thanks also to the many volunteers, including Jodi Paloni, Cynthia Larsen, and Suzanne Kingsbury. It’s not too late to donate. And be sure to mark your calendar for next year–October 3-5, 2014!

Some of my favorite writers will be teaching workshops this coming October at Tomales Bay–Pam Houston, Ron Carlson, Antonya Nelson, Cheryl Strayed, Fenton Johnson, and Carl Phillips.

Writing By Writers is hosting six workshops October 16-20, 2013 at the Marconi Conference Center in Marshall, California, which is just north of San Francisco in Marin County.

Some of these writers are leading traditional workshops where work is submitted and critiqued, and Antonya and Cheryl are doing generative workshops.

I’ve been in workshops with Pam (Fine Arts Work Center, plus my writing group) and with Ron (Sirenland)–both wonderful. And I love the writing of all of these writers. I’ve been to Tomales Bay, which is gorgeous, and eaten oysters at Tony’s.

I will be there in October and just noticed that if you apply by April 1, you qualify for an early writer discount. So how about a literary vacation?