The Reading Queue Revisited

1. My mom: secret novelist
Last fall, when I was home visiting my parents in Marin County, California, I ducked downstairs to check my email on my mother’s computer. When I typed the address of my email server into her browser, the history bar popped up with a list of oddly familiar websites: www.tinhouse.com is one I remember; www.glimmertrain.com is another. I can recall my mother writing a few short stories when I was a kid back in the 1970s, and once more recently she’d mentioned to me that, “just for fun,” she was writing a series of fictional journal entries in the voice of 17th century American poet Anne Bradstreet, whom she was studying for a master’s degree she was pursuing late in life. But Tin House? Glimmer Train? What kind of secret life was my 72-year-old mother leading?

The mystery was resolved a few weeks ago when Mom revealed, with a touch of sheepish pride, that she had published her first short story, “Drawing Lily,” in the Nebraska-based online literary quarterly, Forge. The story, which went live earlier this month, turns out to be the tip of a submerged iceberg of a mostly secret, but also quietly serious and ambitious, literary life my mother has been leading since she retired as a partner in a San Francisco law firm in the early 2000s.

My mother has not only written an entire novel about Bradstreet, called The Poet and the Outcast, but worked on it with a writing teacher, and sent it out to agents and publishing houses. She has also built up a fair-sized stack of short stories, has been taking writing courses for years, and has applied to several writing conferences this summer. But aside from my father and a tiny handful of her closest friends, no one knows about any of this. “The minute you tell somebody you’re a writer,” she explained to me, “they immediately ask ‘Where have you published?’” Thus, until she had a story of hers published, she resolved to keep her literary ambitions a secret from the world.

2. Those scribblin’ Bournes
My mother, Nancy Bourne, is a kind of one-woman Women’s Movement. Born in 1939 in the blue-collar Southern cotton mill town of Danville, Virginia, she learned in Sunday School that girls could grow up to do one of two things: be a wife and mother, or become a Christian missionary. Thus began my mother’s short-lived dream to become a Christian missionary. Things didn’t work out that way, and after college, she taught high school English while my father finished medical school. Once I was born, she quit teaching to raise me and my brother Randy and sister Molly. In the early 1970s, when we were old enough to go to school, she took up ceramics and founded a pottery studio and school in our garage that continues to this day. A few years later, while still running the pottery studio, she began to cast about for a more fulfilling second career that might carry her through the years after the three of us kids left home. She taught school again for a year, which didn’t go well, and took a fiction-writing class in the U.C. Berkeley Extension program, nursing a closely held ambition to become a writer.

The literary landscape looked much different in the late 1970s than it does today. For one thing, there wasn’t an MFA program at virtually every university in the country. For another, the personal computer was still a hobbyist’s plaything, and you typed out your stories on typewriters and mailed them in big brown envelopes to literary magazines – there weren’t nearly as many of them then, either – one at a time. My mother estimates she spent three years laboriously sending out stories, getting rejection slips, slipping the copy of the story in another envelope, and sending it on to the next editor, before she quit writing to go to law school. “At the time I thought if I could get just one story published, I wouldn’t go to law school,” she told me, adding with a laugh: “Thank God I didn’t get anything published!”

She’s not kidding. She passed the bar the same year I finished high school, and her law career not only paid for the college educations of her three children, but also made it possible for all three of us to finish graduate school without going into debt. The law also offered her a high-powered career that ended with her dream job as a partner in a law firm, now known as Dannis Wolliver Kelly, that represents school boards across California. But as she entered her sixties, she cut back her hours at the law firm and decided to pursue a master’s degree in literature at San Francisco State University, which, in its roundabout way, led back to where she had begun with her secret life as an aspiring author.

This is less strange than it might at first appear. We Bournes are a writerly bunch. There’s me, of course, who has been writing seriously and steadily, albeit with only the most modest worldly success, since I learned to touch-type at age thirteen. My father, too, in the four years since his retirement as a molecular biologist at U.C. San Francisco, has written not one, but two books: the first a self-published memoir of his career in science called Ambition and Delight, the second an institutional history of UCSF called Paths to Innovation, published by the University of California Medical Humanities Consortium. My sister, Molly, a doctor, has written at least one collection of stories and a novel that I know of – never published, never seen by me, and never once so much as mentioned by her in my presence. (My brother Randy, also a physician and the family’s only non-writer, said to me when I told him Mom had published a story in a literary magazine: “Man, I better get cracking.”)

3. Anne Bradstreet, the gateway drug
My mother’s wayward path back to fiction began with her master’s thesis project on Anne Bradstreet, one of the original Puritan settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and New England’s first published poet. As she researched Bradstreet’s life and career, my mother learned that while Bradstreet, whose husband and father both served as governors of the new colony, lived a life beyond reproach, her sister, Sarah Keanye, was excommunicated by the church for, among other things, “gross immorality.” Partly as a way to further her research and partly as a writing exercise, Mom began writing journal entries in the voice of her research subject. “I was imagining what it would have been like to have been a woman in the 17th century with eight children, and writing poetry,” she told me. “It was just a fun thing to do.”

But as the project grew, my mother added a competing fictional journal written by Bradstreet’s disgraced sister explaining her behavior, and even fictional letters between the two sisters. Before she knew it, she had a book, an epistolary novel of sorts, with the sisters’ dueling memoirs, along with letters and snatches of invented letters between the two, creating a portrait of life in 17th century Puritan New England. Mom gave the manuscript to Bay Area writer and teacher, Tom Parker, who found the book “profound and powerful and interesting” and gave my mother the name of a literary agent he thought might help her get it published. That didn’t pan out, but Parker remains high on both the book and my mother’s talent as a writer. “A lot of good, smart people come through these portals, and your mother is in the top ten percent of the people I work with,” he told me.

4. The activity that dare not speak its name
Looking back on it, I think what most surprised me when I saw those familiar literary magazine titles on my mother’s browser wasn’t that my mother was writing short stories, but that I didn’t know. After all, I talk about my own writing all the time. I’ve been writing fiction since I could type sentences, and in the decades since I left home, a fair portion of my biweekly phone call with the folks has been taken up with descriptions of my latest writing project and blow-by-blow accounts of my interactions with agents and editors. Sitting there looking at those web addresses on my mother’s desktop, I realized that at least for the last few years my mother had been sailing the same perilous waters as me, and not saying a word.

Part of the explanation for this lies in the dynamics of our family. As anyone who has ever sat at our dinner table can attest, we Bournes are anything but shy and retiring, but we don’t discuss money and we don’t brag, not openly. Nothing is tackier, or more hilarious, in our household than a Christmas card that trumpets the accomplishments of one’s self or one’s children. Growing up, I learned that the key in life wasn’t to be successful – that, it seemed, was all but a given – but to make it look easy. Effortless. “Just for fun.” My father worked his ass off for almost forty years at the cutting edge of the DNA revolution at one of the top medical research institutions in this country, and I had to read his books to figure out what the hell he’d done all day all those years.

But just because we don’t talk about our accomplishments doesn’t mean they don’t matter. They’re everything. But in the family narrative, success is supposed to appear out of nowhere as a fait accompli, a nifty little treasure found by happenstance by the roadside, preferably brought to the family’s attention by others. All of which encourages a certain amount of privacy about things that don’t turn out so well, and even about things that haven’t turned out well yet. For her thirteenth birthday my sister asked for a filing cabinet, with a key. God only knows what was in that locked filing cabinet, but I am going to guess that its present contents include at least a story collection and a novel.

Still, I don’t think my family is really such an outlier. Anyone who has read the slush pile at a literary magazine or small publishing house knows there are thousands of people out there writing books and stories, most of them moms and lawyers and teachers and cubicle wretches writing at night and on weekends without telling anyone but their spouses. Some of these writers, no doubt, are hobbyists for whom writing stories is what bird-watching or fantasy football is to other folks. But many more, I suspect, are quite serious, enrolling in university extension classes, attending writing retreats and conferences, sending out story after story despite the steady drumbeat of failure.

It’s this last point that I think helps explain the secrecy of writing. Most people can’t carry a tune, and fewer still could paint a passable portrait in oil, but just about anybody can write a sentence and tell a story. It seems so easy. And yet as my mother, or I, or any practicing writer can tell you it’s devilishly hard. The problem isn’t merely that a magazine like Tin House receives thousands of stories a year and publishes perhaps twenty. The problem is that even among those twenty, half are crap. Half the stories I read in The New Yorker, the top forum for contemporary fiction in the country, bore me to tears. This isn’t because the editors of these magazines have no taste, or because something is horribly awry in our literary culture, but because it is unspeakably hard to write a piece of fiction that someone who isn’t related to you by blood or marriage will actually want to read.

And yet, here we all are, my mother, me, and probably you, too, writing on the subway, in stolen minutes at work, on sunny Saturday afternoons when anybody with any sense is watching a ballgame or going to the beach. My mother and I aren’t likely to create lasting literature. One of you might, but frankly, the odds are against you. But that’s not the point. The point is sitting down and doing it, taking it seriously, caring about excellence, being willing to risk constant failure and rejection. The cost of caring about something you know you will most likely fail at is that you will look a little ridiculous in the eyes of the people you love. So you dissemble. You tell people at a dinner party that you’re a teacher, a lawyer, a mom – anything but a writer. You hide the copies of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and the latest Writer’s Market. You tell yourself you’re doing it “just for fun.” But you do it. And that’s what counts.

If you have read this far you will not be surprised to hear that my mother resisted having attention called to her first publication. In her reply to my emails suggesting an interview, she said I’d “outed” her and wanted to talk to me about my “angle” on the piece. After we finished, she confessed that her biggest fear was that this essay would make her sound like a loser for having taken this long to get a story published. (I should have told her, but didn’t, that most people never get anything published.) She did talk to me, though. But as we were finishing up, she returned to the business of me seeing those literary magazine web pages on her browser, and I spent the last two minutes of our conversation walking her through the steps of how to erase the browsing history from her desktop.

That won’t happen again.

Photo courtesy the author

This guest post comes to us from Anne Yoder. Anne is the former books editor of KGB Bar Lit. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, BlackBook, PopMatters, and elsewhere. She moonlights as a pharmacist in the West Village.In Bomb magazine’s interview with Aleksandar Hemon following the publication of his book of short stories The Question of Bruno (2000), Hemon speaks at length about the similarities between the novel and the history book – “both provide models to organize the practice of human life… the only question being what details are chosen” – as well as the tendency to read his fiction autobiographically, since he often crafts fictional yarns that include details from his remarkable life. This interview precedes the notable memoir scandals of recent years, where authors had the opposite problem: their “true” stories veered too far into invented territory, and many of the significant details they chose to include never really happened at all. A recent occurrence, this time involving the entirely fictionalized memoir Love and Consequences by Margaret B. Jones (aka Margaret Seltzer), caused Patrick Lane of the Missouri Review to speak against the furor, pointing out that “the cries of outrage at a memoirist’s ‘lies’ bespeak a general distrust of or even disdain for fiction.”Vladimir Brik, the narrator of Hemon’s recent novel, The Lazarus Project, would likely agree with Lane’s assertion. Brik, who like Hemon was born in Sarajevo and now calls Chicago home, takes note of the high regard Americans hold for stories that contain facts and concrete details. In Sarajevo, the function of story-telling was far different: amusement and pleasure outweighed veracity; a boring tale would be judged more harshly than one that takes great liberty with the truth. Vladimir grows nostalgic for Sarajevo where, “If someone told you he had flown in a cockpit or had been a teenage gigolo in Sweden or had eaten mamba kebabs, it was easy to choose to believe him; you could choose to trust his stories because they were good.”In Chicago, Vladimir disappoints his wife with his missteps in American-style storytelling. Whereas their friends give mundane accounts of the ways they fell in love, he fails to provide the details of their own romance. Instead, he attempts to inject levity by telling a tale of lust-filled rabbits separated by the Berlin Wall, who would fall in love with the scent of rabbits on the other side, and how during mating season they would congregate at the wall’s base, issuing “pining rabbit sound[s]” and making the guards on both sides “very trigger happy.”Playful exaggeration like this rubs up against the dour insistence on the real time and time again. Telling stories in America requires a certain propriety of not straying too far from expectations. And so, it seems that Hemon attempts to respond to these expectations in the novel’s two narratives, both of which find a basis in real-life stories. The first concerns the death of Lazarus Averbuch, a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe, who was killed by the Chicago chief of police in 1908. Lazarus shows up at Chief Shippy’s house with nothing but an empty envelope, but Shippy believes Lazarus is an anarchist who intends to do him harm and shoots out of fear. The murder is covered up by the police, who introduce fictional details to corrupt the investigation.The second thread mirrors Hemon’s life, as Vladimir researches the life and death of Lazarus Averbuch in order to write a book. The story follows Vladimir’s grant-funded journey through Eastern Europe with his good friend Rora, a photographer, ostensibly to learn more about Lazarus. Hemon doesn’t attempt to mask the many ways that Vladimir is a stand-in for for himself and Rora for his childhood friend Velibor Božović. Like Vladimir and Rora, Hemon and Božović traveled through Eastern Europe funded by a fellowship in order to research this book. And Božović’s photos from this trip are interspersed between Hemon’s chapters. In essence, Hemon embraces the real in order to exaggerate and manipulate it, irretrievably blurring the distinction between real and invented, autobiography and fiction.John Edgar Wideman’s latest novel, Fanon, is close kin to The Lazarus Project. It too deals with a novelist who researches the past – in this case the Martinique-born psychiatrist, activist, and revolutionary Frantz Fanon (1925-61) – in order to write a book about Fanon’s life, an undertaking he uncannily refers to as “the Fanon project.” The narrator is a novelist by the name of John Edgar Wideman, with Wideman’s mother and his incarcerated brother, Robby, playing lead roles. Despite the invented circumstances, one gets the feeling that these characters remain true to the identities of their real-world doppelgangers. The Fanon narrative, which reads more like a reflection on his life, acts to anchor the sprawling, sometimes-surreal encounters that include a conversation between Wideman and Jean-Luc Godard. With little in the way of transition, the scenes skip from the narrator’s walks along New York’s East River, to Wideman’s mother gazing over the streets from her balcony, to visits with his imprisoned brother, and to the hospital where Wideman’s mother finds Fanon on his deathbed. Wideman muses on the hierarchy of fact versus fiction more openly than Hemon, and speaks directly of his desire to defy categorization. He sets fiction against nonfiction in a struggle for dominance: “Stipulating differences that matter between fact and fiction–between black and white, male and female, good and evil–imposes order in a society. Keeps people on the same page. Reading from the same script. In the society I know best, mine, fact and fiction are absolutely divided, one set above the other to rule and pillage, or, worse, fact and fiction blend into a tangled, hypermediated mess, grounding being in a no-exit maze of consuming: people a consuming medium, people consumed by the medium.”What does it mean when, in the same year, two of our country’s gifted fiction writers publish novels preoccupied with reality? Is this a triumph of the dominant form, evidence of a weakened imagination, or a response to our culture’s hyperawareness of the division between fact and fiction, reflected in the outrage at memoirs outed as fictitious and the obsession with reading “true” stories. I suspect it’s a combination of all three, even though both authors, I imagine, would defend their novelistic ideals. The very fact that our fiction writers consciously confront the real is evidence of nonfiction’s influence; we can no longer ignore the gray sea between. Or perhaps the answer lies in admitting that this sea exists.In Fanon, Wideman writes about his frustration with categories – “fiction or nonfiction, novel or memoir, science fiction or romance, hello or goodbye… those categories one might say, are what I’ve been writing about, or trying to write my way out of, not only the last few years, but since the beginning.” In Fanon and The Lazarus Project, both Wideman and Hemon realign the boundaries of fact and fiction, and in the end make them more elastic. With book reading on the wane, one wonders if the tizzy made about such distinctions isn’t just an anxious distraction from the greater underlying issue of who will read these books, regardless of the content, as Wideman’s brother, Robby, states: “I don’t know why you keep beating yourself up trying to write intelligent shit. Even if you write something deep, you think anybody wants to hear it. Everybody out there just likes the guys in here. Everybody just wants out. Out the goddamn slam. Quick. Why they gonna waste time reading a book… So when I think about it, big bro, I give you credit for being an intelligent guy, but, you know, I got to wonder if writing an intelligent book’s an intelligent idea.”