Reading this collection cover to cover, we watch as Boyle imitates, reacts to, and interacts with major literary and philosophical movements, mastering the written word along the way. Boyle doesn’t just read the great works, he incorporates them into his own stories, often updating the characters and situations with some post-modern twist. Whether he’s commenting on the beat writers (“Beat”), the Cold War politicians (“Ike and Nina”), the Dadaists (“Dada”), Gogol (“The Overcoat II”), or Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (“Mexico”), Boyle isn’t afraid to topple heroes from their pedestals, imagining them as regular old folk: proud, inconsistent, often hypocritical … but also vulnerable, tender and (usually) likeable.

From the first story, “Modern Love” (a courting couple is so frightened of becoming infected with some virus or bacterium that their dates involve a battery of blood tests, finally the awkward protection of a full-body condom), to the last, “Filthy With Things” (a pair of compulsive hoarders seek intervention from a diabolic lifestyle coach, hoping to end their addiction to shopping), Boyle’s stories are drunk on language, with a refreshingly experimental approach to style, theme and point of view. This stylistic and thematic variation notwithstanding, many of Boyle’s stories are concerned with the raw power of nature. Boyle’s characters are always seeking either thrills or shelter from the creeping, crawling, oozing, implacable forces of nature – in doomed relationships, in downed airplanes, upon isolated mountaintop watchtowers, or behind the walls of concrete bunkers designed to withstand societal collapse.

But nature always seems to triumph in the end, mostly due to our all-too-human vanity, which lets us feel separate from the environment, somehow above it all. Here’s an excerpt from the hilarious “Descent of Man”, where a man competes for his girlfriend’s attentions with an unusually evolved primate:

And later, when our hero’s girlfriend brings this same chimpanzee home for dinner:

In perhaps the most absurd and touching of these stories, the high-concept “Sinking House”, an aging widow allows her faucets, garden hoses, and sprinkler system to run non-stop for weeks. The woman’s next-door neighbor – a young housewife addicted to Pilates – begins to notice water seeping up through her own foundation, and discovers the sinking house next door. The neighbor confronts the seemingly oblivious widow (“Water?” she said. “What water?”), and we begin to understand that this woman has survived fifty years of domestic abuse. The police are summoned, and the widow is institutionalized. It is only after she is gone that the young housewife ventures next door, recognizing the similarities between her own fate and the widow’s:

“All my humor is based on destruction and despair,” the comedian Lenny Bruce once said. “If the whole world were tranquil, without disease and violence, I’d be standing on the breadline.” T.C. Boyle is mining the same vein as Lenny, conjuring worlds that defy categorization: at once absurd, dangerous, scary, gross, farcical and – above all – funny. Like the woman in “Sinking House”, Boyle writes in order to empathize with his neighbors. He tries on styles, explores absurd situations, toys with literary conventions … all “just to see what it felt like”. This trial and error approach delivers the reader, in the end, to a more perfect understanding of the universe and our place within it.

“We’re all gonna die!” Bruce is rumored to have wailed into the microphone.

To which Boyle replies: Might as well die laughing.

(This review was originally published at Zouch Magazine)

This review is one in a series for what I’m calling the The DIY MFA in Creative Writing.

Click here for the comprehensive listing of titles, and check back often for updates on other selections from the list.

Cheever’s genius is in his ability to create rich and (mostly) sympathetic characters, show us how circumstances or social norms have built around each one a kind of psychological solitary confinement, and then explore how they might try to escape from, rise above or (more often) simply endure this private, existential prison. In the early stories, Cheever is writing as a realist, inviting us along to posh summer vacations by the sea, where upper crust families entertain themselves with passive-aggressive mind games fueled by gin and familial discontent. Readers of F. Scott Fitzgerald will recognize in Cheever’s characters the yearning that arises in those who rub shoulders with the wealthy – dreamy losers trying (and often failing) to gain access to the glamour just beyond their grasp.

The women in this collection typically fall into one of two categories – there is the bitter, acid-tongued harpy who abandons her family to pursue another passion (like an education, say, or a job); and the virginal baroness or princess, perfect in every way, impossible for the mere mortal to obtain, way up there on her gilded pedestal. Marriage is not just a prison sentence, it is a murderous evolution of the mind-games played by the sea … a fight to the death between the sexes, where fathers and mothers “put the burden of order onto their children and filled their days with specious rites and ceremonies.” Here is a Cheever character in “The Ocean,” wondering if he should eat what might be a poisonous dinner, cooked for him by his wife:

Cheever’s characters are often at war with themselves, wondering how to reconcile their natural impulses with the requirements of social convention, not wanting to “offend the order of things”. When the author lets his imagination off the leash, abandoning realism for a kind of Kafkaesque commentary on suburban life and its discontents, the stories become magical, almost mythical, in their effect. In “The Death of Justina,” for example, a man has to battle an absurd zoning restriction after his mother-in-law dies, an entirely natural condition which has apparently been outlawed by the zoning committee:

In what might be the most famous Cheever story (“The Swimmer”), Neddy Merrill awakens one summer’s day from an alcoholic stupor beside a friend’s pool. In a flash of insight Neddy realizes “that by taking a dogleg to the southwest he could reach his home by water”, and decides to leap the fences of his neighbors and swim home via a succession of backyard pools. Along the way, Neddy interrupts quiet Sunday afternoon barbecues and cocktail parties, apologizing to his open-mouthed neighbors as he invades their privacy and dives into their waters. Time and memory seem to contract as Neddy swims his way home. Entire seasons pass – summer changes into fall and finally into winter. Neddy grows tired, but persists in his absurd journey homeward, even after sensing that a tragic epiphany awaits him there. Returning home after an absence of what has seemed like years, Neddy finds a crumbling house, long since abandoned. “He had done what he wanted, he had swum the county, but he was so stupefied with exhaustion that his triumph seemed vague.”

“The Swimmer” shows us a protagonist at sea, trying desperately to maintain his public composure while feeling wholly divorced from the society in which he moves. In Cheever’s works, water represents a whole host of things – at times memory, baptism, opportunity, life, sex, and death. Water, rivers, the sea – these are chaotic, ever-changing elements. Cheever’s characters turn to them in order to sustain themselves, to find the courage required to endure yet another day in the prisons around them. The sad and beautiful thing about “The Swimmer” is the sense that, unless we address the larger problem of the prison and the way it makes us feel, the restorative swim in the water eventually loses its power to heal. Self-knowledge is required to break down those walls, and since so few of Cheever’s characters attain enlightenment, few of them come away from their dip in the chaotic, turbulent sea feeling truly refreshed.

“Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos (no less) and we can accomplish this only by the most vigilant exercise of choice, but in a world that changes more swiftly than we can perceive there is always the danger that our powers of selection will be mistaken and that the vision we serve will come to nothing,” Cheever writes. “Our knowledge of ourselves and of one another, in a historical moment of mercurial change, is groping. To hedge our observation, curiosity, and reflection with indifference would be sheer recklessness.”

Or, to put it more simply, from his story “Artemis, The Honest Well Digger”:

(This review was originally published at Zouch Magazine)

This review is one in a series for what I’m calling the The DIY MFA in Creative Writing.

Click here for the comprehensive listing of titles, and check back often for updates on other selections from the list.

Johnson’s protagonist, known only as FH (shorthand for the more obscene nickname given to him by one of his stoner friends), fumbles his way through eleven linked vignettes that, taken together, sketch a more poignant, modern, and truly felt portrait of addiction than Malcolm Lowry’s infernal Under the Volcano. FH lives in a self-constructed sort of alternate reality, his conscious perceptions sprinkled with the dreamlike afterimages bubbling up from the ether of his daydreams and nightmares.

With these stories, Johnson pulls off an impressive feat – he adds to the literature of addiction without relying on its well-established tropes: the exhilarating “first taste”, promising a glimpse at an alternate means of perception, the voyeuristic descent to “rock bottom”, the inevitable brush with crime, the twelve-step road back to recovery. Instead, FH drifts through the “great pity” of his life seemingly untouched, bouncing between scenes of mayhem, violence, and loss with the thoughtless grace of a child: “As nearly as I could tell, I’d wandered into some sort of dream.” FH truly doesn’t understand who he is, where he is going, or why he is on this planet, other than to wonder that he might be “the victim of a joke.”

And these stories are funny. In 1999 Jack Black and Billy Crudup starred in a film adaptation (view the Jesus’ Son movie trailer here), which pretty effectively captures the quirky, fun, and yet heartbreaking nature of Johnson’s collection. Rather than dwell on the fear and loathing that a sober mind might encounter in the big, wide, scary world beyond our eyelids, FH runs from it all. He avoids any responsibility for his actions and his fate by escaping into a kind of eternal, stoned, present – the world measured in hazy micro-moments, free from his guilty past or the anxiety that his future might contain.

And some of those micro-moments are beautiful (if you can’t find this collection in the fiction stacks at the library, be sure to check the poetry shelves, too). “I knew every raindrop by its name,” FH says. “I sensed everything before it happened.”

But numbed-out on narcotics and driving drunk from “the bombed-out squalor” of one dive bar to the next, FH can merely watch, witness, and transcribe his adventures … without really investing himself in the outcome. Insulated from the inner joy or sorrow that his misadventures might entail, FH is free to transcribe horrifying events with humorous, often insightful glee. The great tragedy is that for the majority of these stories, FH is looking for (but unable to experience) true emotional connection with the world around him.

Johnson leaves it up to us, as his readers, to summon the feelings FH might be going through … and the experience can sometimes feel strangely voyeuristic, as if we shouldn’t be privy to such private, shameful, and intimate thoughts. FH, too, is a voyeur, spying on “normal” life in an attempt to remember what it might have been like. In a story called Beverly Home, FH crouches in the bushes to watch a Mennonite couple in their bedroom. He “wanted to watch them fucking”, but instead witnesses an argument. The Mennonite wife, crying, walks to the window and draws back the curtains:

The husband ends the argument by eating his angry words and washing his wife’s feet in a basin. This scene seems to imply that self-reflection is something FH covets. It will mean taking a closer look at himself, but it might also mean abandoning his special powers of perception … he will be blinded to the micro-moments of grace sometimes offered by his drugs. Exhilarated by the depth of the feelings he has glimpsed, FH eventually does make it back from the wasteland of addiction, learns to live sober, and deals with the confusing aftermath of his half-remembered actions.

This review is one in a series for what I’m calling the The DIY MFA in Creative Writing.

Click here for the comprehensive listing of titles, and check back often for updates on other selections from the list.

Rabbit has all the trappings of adulthood: a son, a job, an apartment, a pregnant wife, a car. But he moves through life like a child, always wanting more from others, never giving back to them, and unaware of the effect his actions might have upon those around him. He can switch from a low-grade amiability to an almost blind cruelty in the blink of an eye. In the first fifty or so pages of the novel, we see Rabbit abandon his pregnant wife and infant son, flee his home town, return, shack up with a prostitute, refuse to let the prostitute use birth control, and knock her up too.

Updike has an amazing power to insert the reader into the skin of his characters. His primary strength as a writer, if I had to pick just one, would be empathy. And Updike understands that young men like Rabbit are thinking, every second of every day, about one thing: sex. He’s nailed the psyche of a certain class of white, adolescent males (sorry, I couldn’t pass that one up). Rabbit is always on the hunt for tail. Whenever he sees a woman, he weighs her sexual assets and liabilities, imagines how she might perform in bed, and passes judgment on her desirability as a sex object … all within the first few seconds.

And women like Rabbit: as a former all-star basketballer in high school, he’s tall, athletic, good-looking, and confident. There’s more action in this novel than in Hugh Hefner’s mansion on Saturday night. But the star of Rabbit’s glory days is fading, and the afterglow isn’t living up to his expectations of it. Trapped in a disappointing suburb in Pennsylvania, in a disappointing job, married to a disappointing wife, with disappointing parents who always seem disappointed in his performance as a son … Harry’s life seems, well, disappointing.

Halfway through this novel, I too was ready to write Updike off as a disappointing writer. I just didn’t like Rabbit. He was coasting through life on his laurels, expecting the world to be handed to him on a platter, believing that his actions were free from all consequences. And Updike’s frequent forays into pages of what one of my college writing professors would call “verbal masturbation” – long, beautiful, expository, seemingly unnecessary, run-on sentences about everything from the way a phone rings to the way a Chinese dinner is assembled on a dining table – began to make my eyes glaze with boredom.

But then Updike introduces a guiding force in Rabbit’s life, an Episcopalian priest named Jack Eccles, who brings an interesting dynamic to the story. Eccles likes Rabbit, and spends months golfing with him, trying to convince Rabbit to return home. Rabbit is reluctant – now shacked up with June, his prostitute girlfriend (who, unbeknownst to Rabbit, is also pregnant), he’s free from all responsibility. Why should he return to his mildly alcoholic, somewhat unintelligent wife? Eccles slowly works with Rabbit; Rabbit repays the priest’s kindness by trying to bang his wife. Finally, when Janice gives birth to their new daughter, Rabbit returns home.

I don’t want to spoil any more of this novel than I already have, so I’ll just say that the results are disastrous. We see that Harry’s actions, in the final analysis, DO have consequences – major, heartbreaking consequences.

But rather than a sudden, transformative salvation, Rabbit continues to run from responsibility. By the end of this novel, you begin to understand that Rabbit cannot be counted on. Or, rather, that he can only be counted on to screw up (or just to screw): Rabbit will say the wrong thing, think the wrong thing, do the wrong thing, hit on the wrong woman. But it all feels “right”, or true, to Rabbit’s character. He’s not malicious … he’s just young, and unaware, and wants more than he thinks a boring life in the suburbs is going to provide.

There are several sequels to this book (I haven’t read any of them yet). I expect that Rabbit sees even more heartache in those future novels, and that he eventually does begin to grow into an adult. Updike cares so much about his characters that, by the end of Rabbit, Run, you can’t help but care a little bit about what kind of man Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom will turn into. Like Eccles, Updike seems to believe that Rabbit can be redeemed. But it will be up to Rabbit to take that first step towards salvation, and stop running away from difficult choices.

Just grow up, dude.

This review is one in a series for what I’m calling the The DIY MFA in Creative Writing.

Click here for the comprehensive listing of titles, and check back often for updates on other selections from the list.

James Ellroy’s American Tabloid presents the reader with an alternative history of America … one with personality in spades. This ultra-violent, seedy, hyper-paranoid slice of Americana culminates in the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November of 1963. Covering the five years leading up to the fateful day in Dallas, the novel follows three anti-heroes working sometimes together (but just as often at cross purposes) as they moonlight variously for the Mafia, FBI, CIA, Howard Hughes, Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department, exiled Cuban refugees plotting revenge on Fidel Castro, and themselves.

At first, it’s tough to resist Ellroy’s stylized prose. His sentences are pared down to the bare essentials, with paragraphs so sparse they resemble bone-white skeletons picked clean. Ellroy can go from Miami to Mexico to Guatemala in less than a page, and leave you feeling like he hasn’t rushed the pacing one bit.

As a writer, I found myself looking for tricks in Ellroy’s style which I might be able to emulate. Ellroy’s prose is all about forward motion, the steady layering-on of suspense, the threat of impending violence (imagined or, more often than not, real). He gives us just enough detail to imagine a scene, and not much else. The result is an endless series of deeply memorable visual and stylistic images; memorable because you’ve filled in the details yourself, forced to connect the dots between Ellroy’s scant details and your own imagining of the context surrounding them:

There’s not much there … and yet these brief sentences summon the personality of the place Ellroy is describing with such attitude that I feel like I’m cruising Cuba in a rented Cadillac drop-top.

Ellroy adheres to the “show … don’t tell” school of creative writing. We never get a glimpse into the interior lives of our characters, but have to infer what they’re feeling from their actions. After a particularly brutal set piece where a still relatively uncorrupted FBI agent named Ward Littell witnesses rapes and beatings from afar, then doles out a savage, drunken beating of his own on one of the perpetrators in order to force his cooperation in a shakedown, Ellroy tells us that “Littell walked back to his car. He started sobbing just over the border.”

And that’s about as touchy-feely as Ellroy is going to get. The actions described in the 600 or so pages of this novel would give the even the most hardened of criminals nightmares – the reader is assaulted with murders, chainsaw-assisted beheadings, torture, sodomy, drug addiction, rape and more … all of it unfolding in a cold, clinical style that sounds as if it was spooled off by a sociopath. The detachment here is chilling.

And this is ultimately why I began to pull away from the novel. Don’t get me wrong – Ellroy is a master of style, plot, and suspense. But when every character is, on some level, an emotionless sociopath driven by an insatiable hunger for money, power, or both … it’s hard for me to relate to the reversals of fortune which force the story along. I simply didn’t care whether the characters lived or died, whether they succeeded in their next hit or shakedown, whether they were going to kick the sauce and take down the Mob, or whether they were going to succumb to their baser instincts and become embroiled in a Presidential assassination attempt.

Of course we all know how the novel ends – Kennedy will be killed in Dallas. And Ellroy’s characters – in all of their shallow, filthy, ignorant, emotionally barren glory – will be there to help pull the trigger.

This review is one in a series for what I’m calling the The DIY MFA in Creative Writing.

Click here for the comprehensive listing of titles, and check back often for updates on other selections from the list.

So I’ve resolved to complete a “DIY MFA in Creative Writing,” utilizing free (or near-free) resources, including: the local library, local Dallas-Ft. Worth writing critique groups, a small network of alpha and beta readers, selective use of freelance editors, and the web. I’ll be trying to complete the first draft of my novel over the course of two years, taking occasional breaks to finish a collection of short stories (6 or 7 of which are complete).

The reading list for this stay-at-home-dad’s MFA is listed below, and reflects my tastes more than anything else. These are the stories I enjoy reading, and will hopefully influence the novel I eventually produce. I’ve read a few of these already, but most will be new. I’ve also sprinkled in some “just for fun” books such as Susanna Clarke’s “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell”.

And so here, in no particular order, is my reading list for the next two years. I’ll get started in early June, and will update you infrequently on my progress and thoughts about each novel:

1. Rabbit, Run (John Updike)
2. The Right Stuff (Tom Wolfe)
3. Underworld (Don DeLillo)
4. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Annie Dillard)
5. 2666 (Roberto Bolaño)
6. Oryx & Crake (Margaret Atwood)
7. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle (David Wroblewski)
8. Jesus’ Son (Denis Johnson)
9. Suttree (Cormac McCarthy)
10. The Brothers K (David James Duncan)
11. Collected Stories (Raymond Carver)
12. American Tabloid (James Ellroy)
13. The Cold Six Thousand (James Ellroy)
14. Matterhorn (Karl Marlantes)
15. Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison)
16. Under the Volcano (Malcolm Lowry)
17. Drop City (TC Boyle)
18. The Sweet Hereafter (Russell Banks)
19. Middlemarch (George Eliot)
20. Libra (Don DeLillo)
21. Stories (TC Boyle)
22. The Stories of John Cheever (John Cheever)
23. Collected Stories (Amy Hempel)
24. The Sportswriter (Richard Ford)
25. Independence Day (Richard Ford)
26. The Intuitionist (Colson Whitehead)
27. American Pastoral (Philip Roth)
28. Shadow Country (Peter Matthiessen)
29. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
30. Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)
31. Gilead (Marilynne Robinson)
32. Disgrace (JM Coetzee)
33. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (Susanna Clarke)
34. Tree of Smoke (Denis Johnson)
35. Chronic City (Jonathan Lethem)
36. The Unconsoled (Kazuo Ishiguro)
37. The Sheltering Sky (Paul Bowles)
38. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (Michael Chabon)
39. The Art of Racing in The Rain (Garth Stein)
40. Await Your Reply (Dan Chaon)
41. Geronimo Rex (Barry Hannah)
42. Airships (Barry Hannah)
43. Best American Short Stories 2005 (edited by Michael Chabon)
44. Slaughterhouse Five (Kurt Vonnegut)
45. The Things They Carried (Tim O’Brien)
46. Empire Falls (Richard Russo)
47. Escapes (Joy Williams)
48. The Complete Stories (Flannery O’Connor)
49. Too Much Happiness (Alice Munro)
50. Our Story Begins (Tobias Wolff)
51. The Elegance of the Hedgehog (Muriel Barbery)
52. Gravity’s Rainbow (Thomas Pynchon)

I’ve been writing long enough now to feel confident adding in a few of my own tips:

1. Go With Your Gut
   • If it feels “wrong” on any level, axe it. You’ll know when you’ve nailed your story or concept.
2. You’re The Boss
   • The best writers will seek out help – in the form of critique groups, freelance editors, alpha and beta readers, or other sources of constructive criticism which should help the work “be all that it can be.” But you’re ultimately the author, and it’s your responsibility to own the final product.
   • Neil Gaiman sums this up best in the article above, when he says: “Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.”
3. Get Lost
   • And I don’t mean the TV show (though it’s an excellent time-waster if you need one). Take your dog for a walk, get away from your normal routine, get outside of your comfort zone. And pay attention to what’s happening around you – and inside your head – when it happens.
4. Just Do It
   • Talking about writing … isn’t writing. Wanting to be an author … won’t make you one. Sometimes you have to just sit down in the chair and put words on paper. Stick to a routine. Sometimes it will be difficult to write a single sentence, other times the paragraphs will flow easily for hours on end. But eventually, day-after-day, you’ll build momentum. And the story will have written itself to “done.”

The thing I found interesting about this article is the diversity of tips that these authors have included. Everybody finds inspiration in different ways, and gets excited about their work (and the work of others) through different vehicles. Next time you sit down to write, see if you can come up with a few pointers for yourself. Then write them down … it might help.

]]> http://daviderictomlinson.com/2010/02/made-to-be-broken/feed/ 0 http://daviderictomlinson.com/2010/01/peeling-back-the-onion/ http://daviderictomlinson.com/2010/01/peeling-back-the-onion/#comments Thu, 14 Jan 2010 00:05:39 +0000 David Eric Tomlinson http://daviderictomlinson.com/?p=327 I was feeling pretty good about myself going into the holidays, good enough to take several weeks off from writing and just be for a little while. As my wife and I packed for our visit to the coast, I even considered leaving behind my trusty laptop: all I was going to be doing for several weeks straight was reading anyway.

On the plane flight to San Francisco I finished Let The Great World Spin, by Colum McCann, as well as the most recent issue of Glimmertrain Stories. Then I dove into The Best American Short Stories, 2009. Boy was that a mistake.

Don’t get me wrong: the stories are fan-tas-tic. I especially enjoyed Ethan Rutherford’s The Peripatetic Coffin, even going so far as to email the author after Googling him and stumbling upon his web site.

After all of the reading done over the holiday break, I realized that in the last year or so, I’ve taken the first few steps in what will undoubtedly be a marathon of writing, rewriting, editing, hair-pulling, rewriting, throwing away, and writing even more. The rejection slips are piling up, tangible evidence that I can stick to a routine, draft stories that are engaging to at least one reader (namely … me), and not get too discouraged.

But the sheer volume of short stories I read over the holidays has shown me that there are so many more ways to think about moving through something: an action, an emotion, a series of events, a premonition. I need to stretch myself even further than I’ve been doing.

The story I’ve been working on lately is about a United States Marine recruiter, and by the time I’m finished with it I will have spent more than twice the amount of time I typically spend on a story. One evening in particular, I spent three hours furiously rewriting what I’d already drafted, then wrote one more paragraph to move things along before calling it quits. My word count had actually decreased after three hours of writing.

Writing is like peeling back the layers of an onion: there’s always another layer to explore, always something new to learn. Sometimes, it can be so frustrating you just want to cry. And I’m okay with that – another layer of the onion peeled, digested, assimilated into the daily grind of it all.

This year, I’ve resolved to read more than last year, and to spend just as much time writing as last year. And to slow down, savor the words a little more, and dig deeper into each sentence, paragraph, and story.

]]> http://daviderictomlinson.com/2010/01/peeling-back-the-onion/feed/ 2 http://daviderictomlinson.com/2009/12/local-hero/ http://daviderictomlinson.com/2009/12/local-hero/#comments Fri, 18 Dec 2009 16:17:55 +0000 David Eric Tomlinson http://daviderictomlinson.com/?p=277 I’ve been asked by a friend of mine, who also happens to teach 8th grade English here in Dallas, to come speak to her class about writing. She’s read several of my stories, and her class will be discussing “The Hero’s Journey” in January, so I’m now on the hook to put together a somewhat coherent lesson on the short story and how it relates to the Monomyth concepts described here.

There are a few things that jump out as I begin thinking about what to say.

1. One of them is the concept of Community: the hero leaves home, is engaged in an incredibly exciting adventure, gains magical powers or insight … and is then expected to return to the hum-drum routines of everyday life in order to share his magical powers with the local Community.
   • Joseph Campbell, the author of Hero With A Thousand Faces and the incredibly sharp guy who documented this mythological construct after reading and comparing thousands of texts, believes that a hero who refuses to share his mystical knowledge with the Community (a responsibility which can come at great personal expense to the hero), has failed to complete his heroic journey.
   • After all, what kind of a hero helps … himself? Imagine a Superman who only cared about winning the heart of Lois Lane. Or a Michael Clayton who took the bribe rather than expose the corruption in U-North.
2. The second concept also has to do with refusal: Refusal of the Call. The hero simply says “why bother?” and continues playing Guitar Hero while the world falls apart out his window.
   • Campbell writes: “Refusal of the summons converts the adventure into its negative. Walled in boredom, hard work, or ‘culture,’ the subject loses the power of significant affirmative action and becomes a victim to be saved. His flowering world becomes a wasteland of dry stones and his life feels meaningless – even though, like King Minos, he may through titanic effort succeed in building an empire or renown. Whatever house he builds, it will be a house of death: a labyrinth of cyclopean walls to hide from him his minotaur. All he can do is create new problems for himself and await the gradual approach of his disintegration.”
   • That’s a pretty dire prognosis. Refusal of the call results in the “future” hero never realizing his full potential, doomed to a life of failure and regret.

Campbell’s system tells us that the home is the center of the hero’s world: it’s where he spent his formative years, it’s why he fights and strives against supernatural forces, and it’s the place he desperately needs to return to complete the story. A healthy, fulfilling home life has more power over our hero – whether it be Superman, Michael Clayton, or Bilbo Baggins – than the evil forces against which he strives.

The kids in this 8th grade class attend a well-respected Dallas private school focusing on an international perspective to education. Every one of them can speak three languages or more (French, English and Spanish), and each will have more opportunities than many of their peers in the Dallas public school system. But only if they decide to accept a highly personal and challenging call to adventure, work hard to achieve it, and give something back to their friends, family or local community.

]]> http://daviderictomlinson.com/2009/12/local-hero/feed/ 0 http://daviderictomlinson.com/2009/11/conflicted/ http://daviderictomlinson.com/2009/11/conflicted/#comments Wed, 04 Nov 2009 01:30:17 +0000 David Eric Tomlinson http://daviderictomlinson.com/?p=132 I spent this past Halloween weekend sating myself on saccharine and chocolate, my wife and I trudging around in the perfect October weather behind our children – who were dressed as Hermione Granger and Hannah Montana, respectively. On Sunday we had some friends over and ate chocolate chip pancakes, drank too much coffee, then grilled bratwurst on the back porch while the kids all played soccer in the yard. It was a completely relaxing couple of days filled with family, fun, friends, and food … and not a drop of conflict.

One of our guests this weekend mentioned that she is becoming disillusioned with reading short stories, because so many of them are depressing, dark, and brooding; the characters either do damage to their loved ones or themselves; the endings usually leave everything up in the air. What’s going to happen? Will things get worse, or better? Is this a happy ending or a depressing one?

I was trying to explain that conflict is so essential to drive narrative forward, and that a short story has so little time to establish the world in which the protagonist must act that conflict is often relied upon as the engine driving the reader forward. Nobody wants to read a short story about a weekend filled with chocolate chip pancakes and shiny, happy, well-adjusted people looking after their kids. But zombie Rottweiler dogs chasing a teenage vampire killer through a post-apocalyptic cityscape? Now that’s a page-turner.

In grade school most of us learned about the typical forms conflict can take: Man vs. Man, Man vs. Nature, Man vs. Himself. When I hear the term, I think of men and women striving against dark, external forces … the kind of thing you see in action movies. Whether it’s psychological or physical, set against a historical backdrop or all in the protagonist’s head, the tension created when a character is up against forces seemingly greater than their own pulls the reader in and propels the story into the next sentence, paragraph, scene, chapter. Or sequel if you’re lucky.

One of my challenges as an author is trying to find the psychological or emotional tension in normal, everyday situations – like watching a basketball game, or sitting in church listening to a sermon – and extrapolating that tension into a kind of conflict that’s real, and yet interesting at the same time. I don’t write about zombie Rottweiler dogs, or vampires – and yet my fiction must have the same sense of urgency and importance if it’s going to work (for me … and for my readers).

Today was my birthday, and I ended up having to stay home from work to look after my oldest daughter, who was running a low-grade fever. At the pediatrician’s office, when we learned that she would need to be tested for both strep throat and the flu, my daughter burst into tears and came over to sit in my lap during the tests. As the nurse worked to shove several extra-long Q-tips into my daughter’s nose and throat, I had to restrain her hands to keep them away from her face. She was blubbering and crying, absolutely miserable.

I don’t know how most parents react to hearing their children cry, but to me it’s like listening to fingernails scrape down a chalk board: an almost unbearable sound that lets me know something in the universe is not as it should be, and that it’s likely all my fault, and why can’t I just fix it so that the crying stops? My stomach was churning … I would have given anything at that moment to be outside of that pediatrician’s office, with a healthy little girl, eating ice cream or watching TV. What the hell was this woman doing, manhandling my daughter? Did she even go to school for this … where were her credentials? Was it a one year certificate class or a four year degree? At that moment, the distinction seemed important. I thought of asking her to be more gentle, then held my tongue.

Almost before the nurse had started swabbing my daughter’s nose and throat she was done, exiting the room quickly and leaving the two of us huddled on the tiny plastic chair beside the examination table, two sobbing and miserable human beings. We were up against the common cold, maybe strep throat, possibly a global H1N1 pandemic. It was an important moment: filled with drama, emotion, fear … and conflict. We’d ventured together into the cold, not-so-sterile badlands of the healthcare industry in the hopes of finding a cure, and had now passed the first test successfully.

On to the next one.

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