As Close To A Manifesto As You will Get From Me

 I wrote this for Adina Talve-Goodman Fellowship:

You ask for a statement of my commitment to writing, and I see no answer without referencing my biography. When I was younger, much younger, I had ambitions of becoming a writer. Ambition and a need for income led me into practicing law. Plans on writing fell by the wayside. Over time, I succumbed to depression, and then I ran into legal problems of my own, I went to prison. One of my oldest friends suggested this was the time for me to return to writing. Searching for a way to deal with my depression as well as a need to do since my suicide attempts had failed rather melodramatically, I followed up on his suggestion. That was when I was fifty. I am now 62 years old, a former lawyer, and now a felon. Prison impressed on me to use my time creatively, and I found writing to be the best use of my time. I am still writing, as well as trying to the boxes of materials I wrote the past 13 years in a digital format. So far, I have only one published story, “Passerby”, through Thin Air Magazine. That story was the first I wrote since arriving back in Indiana.

I have at the present time, a collection of short stories, and a novella in the final stages of editing. Both were created while in prison. I have a novel that is about half done; that is typed up. That novel, tentatively titled “Love Stinks”, has presented a problem as I found portions missing when I returned to Indiana, about 80 pages throughout the whole, and then a typist hired disappeared with about 40 pages. I filled in the holes in the opening section, then turned to the novella and the short stories. There was a time, about 40 years ago, when I would have not attempted to recreate what had gone missing (another point for outlines, they do make recreation a bit easier). When my depression was in full bloom, I would have taken this as a sign it was not to be and walk away from the entire project. Right now, I do not know what better characterizes my commitment to my writing.

I think it might be relevant to use this paragraph to explain a bit about what the works mentioned above. When younger, I was much enthralled by William Faulkner, and I wanted my fiction to be centered on my area of Indiana. There were two problems with this plan. First, I was not William Faulkner. Secondly, I did not see what there was to tell. Prison gave me an insight into what I might tell. People in the East seemed to find life out here in the boondocks to be interesting, surprising where I saw it was just how things are. I found I did not have the Civil War, but I did have the deconstruction of the industrial Midwest. Several stories in my collection have autobiographical antecedents, most chart the decline and slight return of a small Indiana factory town. In execution, the idea was to have each story told in a different manner, from different perspectives, and over time. If I may name-drop, it was more influenced by A Spooner River Anthology than Winesburg, Ohio. It has slipped from that goal, a bit. I have been submitting the stories since my release, and as they have not met with any success, I have made some changes in form without changing their themes. Other changes came about because they were nine to ten years ago, and I could not resist revisions. The novella, “Road Tripping”, is part of a larger planned work; my published story “Passerby” is another part of that work. This was also started in prison, the year before my release while we were under the Covid-19 lockdown. Again, its characters live in the same Indiana factory town, but it is more expansive, even more experimental. Its principal character is a person returning to life after prison; it’s chief supporting characters are Captain Ahab, Edgar Allan Poe, and Omar Khayyam. The underlying theory is that the realist novel does not include the reality of what we carry in our imaginations and our cultural baggage. I have chosen to embody the cultural baggage with actual characters. “Love Stinks” represents a work done before “Road Tripping”. It is meant to be a comedy, a study of what we know and do not know about history, which in this case is embodied in a marriage. As far as execution goes, it is also an experiment since I thought to import some techniques from film, such as montage and flashback and jump cuts. It is also the one thing I wrote that I can attribute a direct influence, that being Milan Kundera’s “Art of the Novel.”

It is not that I want to write just any stories. Nor do I want to write Jame Patterson entertainments. I have attempted to pay witness to the lives that I have seen lived in my area, and I hope that I have given the dignity of fair representation. In trying to reach these goals, I have tried to write in a manner rising to the importance of the subject—matter. Such is my commitment to writing.

What I hope to accomplish with your grant is to hone my skills further.

I thought to send along with this letter “Passerby”. Instead, I am sending a story I intend for the collected short stories, “Irretrievable Breakdown”. It is a bit more of an experiment while also a story of a divorce.

I thank you for your time and patience.

 I did not win, but I made the effort. That is all any of us can do; it is far more than what I did when I was young.

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