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Eyes Like Mine
By Jackie Lewis

They say the sense of hearing is the last thing you lose before you die.  Touch fades away, taking with it the gentleness of kiss upon forehead, grasp upon hand.  I slept there, perhaps not really asleep at all, while they waited by the bed.  The room was painted a cold shade of gray—or perhaps the walls were really white, the gray little more than sorrow floating like a dutiful cloud in the room that would be my last.

Image courtesy of Giant Gingko (flickr.com)

The hearing had not left me, and neither had the sight.  But the touch was gone.  Their hands were wrapped around mine, their eyes asking questions that I could not answer.  What was it that they wanted from me?  They didn’t say.  In fact, they did not speak at all.

I noticed her right away when she came into the room, her blonde hair shimmering down like angel’s wings.  Like the others around my bed, she did not speak.  I did not feel her touch upon my hand, but her very presence made the muscles in my shoulders tense. She was young, perhaps fourteen, and the blue in her eyes seemed heavy—as if the color had been forged from molten metal.  She placed a guitar case beside a wooden chair, then sat quietly and began to fumble through the pages of a small notebook.  I watched for a moment, waiting for her to speak, but instead I heard a note that seemed afraid to travel up and down the scales.  It was not music, though it had both tone and tempo.  And I knew that it somehow belonged to me:

Beep.     Beep.     Beep.

The sound rang out, slowly at first.  Then faster and faster it came, surrounding me in the room and speeding up as if somehow it knew that I was listening.

Beep.   Beep.   Beep.  Beep.  Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.Beep.Beep.Beep.

My eyelids parted as if they were shutters being opened after a long, angry storm, but there was no calm in the gray cloud that had settled about the room.  It felt as though the heaviness in the air surrounding us had been formed from our unspoken questions.  “Who are you?” we seemed to ask one another, though neither of us spoke the words aloud.

I knew that something was there between the girl and I—a kinship, perhaps?  Were we two souls destined to meet in this moment?  Or had we met sometime before, sometime long ago when we were different people?   I could sense that we were both searching for someone, though I could not remember whom.  Did she know why we were here?  And would she share her secret?

All at once, her eyes began to dart around the room.  Her stare caught and held other eyes of steel, and then I noticed their heads nodding.  The girl rocked slowly in her chair, forward and back again, and her eyebrows arched as if she had yet another silent question to ask.  There were suddenly deep breaths surrounding me.  I felt as if I were a stalled aircraft floating on silver clouds, and all at once her eyes began to melt.  Our tears fell together, as if somehow we were both a part of something much larger than the room.  And for a brief instant, I almost knew her.

“Daddy, what should we sing to him?” she asked the man beside my bed.

His eyes were a brilliant blue; his soft, blonde hair curled slightly at the nape of his neck.  “I don’t know, Tiffany,” said the man.  He raised his hands to his face, covering his eyes.  And in the second before fingertips hid emotion, I saw the steel within.  His eyes were blue like… mine.  Mine.  My eyes are blue.  Blue eyes like hers—blue like his.

The sound of his voice startled me as I tried to connect the pieces that had all but disappeared.  My mind stuttered and stammered, as if it were an old tractor’s engine being brought back to life after too long a winter.  I looked down onto the bed below me, careful to move only my eyes until at last I saw my own hands.  They were the hands of a giant.  The skin hung loosely as if it had been stretched and draped over muscle and tendon; age spots numbered the years that had somehow escaped from my grasp.

“Should we sing ‘I’ll fly away’?” the girl asked.  There was strength in her words, softness in her voice.

“I can’t,” said the man with eyes like mine.  Through clenched lips he forced a smile, and as he reached toward me, I noticed the calluses and oil stains.  These hands were accustomed to labor.  They were thick and muscular—the type of hands that could rebuild a tractor’s engine, or work the land from dawn till dusk.  His hands were like his eyes: strong, intense, and never idle. His features seemed tense until he shook his head slightly.  I concentrated on his face for a moment, and noticed that it was rounded despite the strong, sharp line of his jaw.  His leathery skin flushed with a deep redness that traveled down his neck, where it disappeared behind the collar of his flannel shirt.  His cheekbones were high, and his forehead was broad.  His top lip was thin and almost disappeared before it reached the corners of his mouth.

“Dad, do you want us to sing to you?” the man asked.  He bent at his waist and leaned in closer.  His breath smelled of peppermint; his voice was gritty and coarse.  I shifted in my bed, the gray of the room closing in on me as if it had been waiting the whole time to swallow me up.  I looked down the bed as if somehow it could save me.  My arms were long and unfamiliar—as if they, too, knew of tractor and of field.

“Grandpa, we’re here,” said the girl with angel’s wings.  The man with eyes like mine began to sob softly, as if he had never cried before and was suddenly learning how.  I looked at the girl again, and noticed the eyes once more.  She wore a dress of pink satin, the hem cutting off sharply just above her knee.  Her skin was pale, and her lips were a shade of red that was much too dark, and as she smiled, I saw a flash of metal in her mouth.  It covered her teeth, blocking out the whiteness of a smile from long ago, and suddenly I wondered if she was really human at all.

Image courtesy of Subnet 24 (flickr.com)

She slid her arms along polished wood, until at last her fingers came to rest upon the long, metal strings.  Slowly her fingers moved, and something that could be heard, but not seen, began to drift around the room.  Her red lips shifted, then parted, and at last she began to sing.  The sound of her voice twirled itself around the bedposts and spilled out of the room through the open door.

Some glad morning, when this life is o’er, I’ll fly away.
To a hand on God’s celestial shore, I’ll fly away.

She stopped singing, and a voice that sounded as if it had been formed from honey and embers whispered in my ear.  “We’re here to sing you out, Grandpa.  It’s okay to go to the other side.  Don’t be afraid.  We love you.”

The voices joined together again, and this time there were so many that I looked around the room.

I will meet you in the morning.
Just inside the Eastern Gate.

The eyes were blue, and blue, and brown, and black; their hair came in delicate shades of gold and copper, and silky gray.  The music came to me during that moment, flooding my soul with warmth as her delicate, soprano voice eased into the chorus.  Cupping the neck of the guitar, she slid her thin fingers across metal strings that came alive beneath her hands.  And as they sang, their voices seemed to pour my memories onto the gray cloud until, at last, the sorrow lifted for a moment and I was allowed to see what it was once like to be me.  The harmonies were still there, hidden away deep inside as if they had been waiting for this moment to return to me.  I had lost the images and sounds of my childhood, then lost the memory of my own flesh and blood.  The grandchildren had disappeared one by one, and then the great-grandchildren slipped away from my memory as if they were lightening bugs being released from glass jars.

What a glad thought, some wonderful morning.
I shall hear Gabriel’s trumpet sound.
When I wake up!  To sleep no more…

I did not recognize the loss of those memories when they fled from me, and upon my unfamiliar deathbed I did not know the faces, nor the people.  But I almost knew the eyes like mine.  And I did, indeed, know the voices.

I’ve got a mansion.  Just over the hilltop.
In that bright land where, we’ll never grow old.

They sang the songs of my youth, the music I had long ago taught to young children who had grown more than distant in my memory.  The girl with eyes like mine sat at my bedside, her hands cradling the guitar.  But she cried no more from that moment forward.  Instead, she settled into the music as if she were stretching out in bed after a long day of work.  And as her lips parted, my eyes turned toward the ceiling.

It was then that I called her name, a name I had long forgotten.  My eyes were opened wide.  My lips curled up slightly at the corners; my shoulders lifted as if they had grown weightless.  The sound of memories floated around the room, and quiet voices gathered at my feet.  The songs, of love, and hope, and joy, seemed to warm the air and lift me ever upward.  And at last, I called her name before the remainder of my senses faded.

“Momma,” I said, my eyes fastened to the ceiling.  The gray of the room seemed to drift away, and in place of the gray there was a certain fabric upon the air.  It was made not from cotton, or even material at all; it folded and creased, as if the threads had been formed from light.

The girl’s voice waivered slightly at my bedside, and then returned again.  She sang in harmony with the others, until I called my mother’s name once more.  And then, with eyes like mine that dared not cry, the girl at my bedside disappeared.  All at once, I knew the girl, the blonde hair, the room.  My sight and hearing failed me then, but not before I understood the eyes of molten metal, the young woman at my bedside.  For hers were eyes like mine.

They say the sense of hearing is the last thing you lose before you die.  Touch fades away, taking with it the gentleness of kiss upon forehead, grasp upon hand.  I wonder if one day the girl at my bedside will sleep like me, in a bed that she no longer knows.  And I wonder if she will know them, the young ones in her midst— the people who have sprung from her womb, the eyes of steel, the voices of honey and embers, the harmonies that call out to her memories.

Image courtesy of Denis Todorut (flickr.com)

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound.
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now I’m found.

With eyes like mine, I see.

(Q&A to follow, beneath Jackie’s bio.)

Jacquelyn Lewis is the Regional Editor and Publisher of The Minute Magazine, a Louisiana publication that focuses on living life to the fullest.  Her articles have won many awards, including “Best Investigative Reporting” and “Best Community Service” through the Louisiana Press Association.  She is a US Air Force Veteran, a graduate of Southern Arkansas University, and is on the Board of Directors of Cultural Crossroads, a 501(C)-3 dedicated to preserving and encouraging the arts and the culture of Webster Parish, Louisiana.

During her years in the US Air Force, Jackie joined the elite Little Rock Air Force Base Honor Guard, a team dedicated to performing military rights at funerals in the state of Arkansas and in the city of Memphis, Tennessee. The experience of being face to face with grieving families on an almost daily basis profoundly affected Jackie, and she began writing to find her own sense of comfort. Consequently, her first article was published in Little Rock Air Force Base’s publication, The Drop Zone, and thus began her lifelong love affair with writing.

Jackie lives in Minden, Louisiana, in a historic home with her husband Shaun and two sons, Miles and Preston.  In 2007, she was appointed to the City of Minden’s Residential Historic Preservation Study Committee, and she is a strong advocate for historic preservation.  Jackie (and her husband Shaun) are currently restoring a late 1880’s Louisiana Dogtrot home in rural northern Louisiana, and she documents the restoration of The House at Sugar Creek on her blog at www.jackie-lewis.blogspot.com.

Q&A with Jackie Lewis and YARN’s Editor Kerri Majors:

YARN: This is such an “anonymous” essay, with no proper names and the like.  Can you tell us a little about the important people in the essay, and their relationship to you?

JL: Sure!  While writing the essay, I had to close my eyes and remember the day that my Grandfather died. In writing “Eyes Like Mine,” I had to travel through time.  The fourteen-year-old girl with blonde hair shimmering down like angel’s wings is now a twenty-six-year-old woman.  My baby sister has changed quite a bit since the day we sat by our grandfather’s bed and “sang him out,” as we call it in my family.  I really had to reach back into my memories to pull out details such as the braces on my sister’s teeth.

There are certain snapshots in my mind that I hope to remember forever, and I tried to recreate those snapshots within this essay.  It was my father’s hands that hid the tears from my view as my grandfather was dying beside him.  Our family knew that it was time for Papaw to go. But when someone that you love is dying, it’s difficult to give them permission to leave.  We knew that Papaw was far from comfortable in his hospital bed.  But comforting him in that moment wasn’t as simple as fluffing a pillow or adding another blanket to the pile.  Papaw was terrified of something, whether that something be death, or the unfamiliarity of the room, or the teary eyes of the people surrounding him.  As my sister and I sang, he relaxed.  And I guess in a way, we did, too.

YARN: One of the things we discussed when judging the contest was whether or not this qualified at creative *non-fiction*.  Obviously, we decided it did , but we were wondering how and why you decided to write the essay from the dying man’s perspective, and how you reasoned that it was still non-fiction, still an essay and not a short story.

JL: I know exactly what you’re talking about, because I felt the presence of this question as I wrote the essay.  But in the end, I really felt that “Eyes Like Mine” was a very creative non-fiction piece.  In actuality, the narrator’s perspective is my own.  I sat at my grandfather’s bedside and wondered what he was thinking, what he was feeling, and worried that my life would pass by so quickly that I, too, would soon be lying in a bed surrounded by a family that I no longer recognized.  So do I feel that “Eyes Like Mine” is creative non-fiction, as opposed to fiction?   Absolutely.  I can only imagine that other people have been in my shoes, at their loved one’s deathbed, wondering if Alzheimer’s Disease had stolen every last memory and left only worry behind.  Without memories, there can only be a series of instinctual emotions.  I watched Papaw’s non-verbal communication and saw fear, worry, horror, and surprise.  But I also saw something else, in the moment that he called out for his mother.  I saw happiness.  It was such a surprise to see and feel his happiness in a moment of my own profound grief.  As he crossed over, I remember being consumed by so many different emotions that I couldn’t express a single one through tears.

I chose to write “Eyes Like Mine” using my grandfather’s perspective because I wanted to verbalize my feelings and emotions.  I am an invisible character in the story, in that his thoughts are really my thoughts.  His confusion is my greatest fear.  And his eyes are my eyes, too.  But I also chose to write this essay from Papaw’s perspective because I wanted to make readers understand that we’ve got to find a cure for this horrible disease. It is my hope that this essay reaches our future scientists and doctors and to make young adults understand that their future jobs are very important.  Maybe “Eyes Like Mine” will encourage adults to push a little bit harder, too.  Though one of the main characters in “Eyes Like Mine” is a fourteen year old girl, I feel that this piece can really help those people working in the field of Alzheimer’s research feel the importance of their jobs a little more than they did before. We’ve got to end the cycle of Alzheimer’s and save future generations from enduring the torture that my family knows all too well.  Hopefully this will inspire young adults to enter into medical research.  Without the advancement of medicine, Alzheimer’s will continue to steal away our memories. And without our memories, we lose everything.

YARN: How many drafts did you write before posting to Figment?  What does your drafting process consist of?

JL: My process is a far cry from a formal checklist with bullet points.  To prepare to write my essay, I basically sat down and asked myself the question, “What is the normal, gut instinct for most people when they hear the words family gathering?  What will everyone else write about?”  I wrote my answers down on a piece of paper and then challenged myself to stay away from those topics.  I wanted to write something different, something meaningful to both me and to my family.  I went for a walk and asked myself the question, “What makes my family different from other families that I know?”  The answer came immediately.  I thought of my family’s ability to use music in both life and death.  Then I challenged myself again and asked, “Okay.  What now?  How much of yourself are you really willing to give away?”  The answer surprised me.

I wrote the essay rather quickly and edited it twice.  The first draft was based on emotion.  I allowed the prose to flow easily, and didn’t censor myself.  Then I abandoned the manuscript for a few days.  I waited until the emotions were gone, and edited for typos and grammar.  I returned to the second draft a day later and prepared to feel the emotions again.  On my final edit pre-submission, I allowed myself to look for hidden meaning and experiment with meter.  I read the essay aloud and allowed myself to tweak the tempo, pace, and timing of the sentences and paragraphs.  When I was satisfied with the final product, I forced a few friends and family members to listen to the essay.  I knew that it was special because their reactions were all somewhere between devastated and relieved.  I wanted the overwhelming theme of the essay to be the presence of two major emotions: sorrow and joy.  People rarely have the chance to experience both emotions at the same time.  But those are the moments that we never forget—unless something like Alzheimer’s takes the memory from us.  Once I saw my friends’ reactions, I knew that it was time to submit.

YARN: And we went through two rounds of edits between the original draft and this published final version.  The first required quite a bit of cutting and some moving around (a very painful process to some writers!!), and I was so impressed by your willingness to take a step back and see that it would improve your piece.  Can you give writers any advice on how and why you were willing to do that? (Also, interested readers can see the original version of the essay on Figment.)

JL: You were a wonderful editor from the start.  You established credibility right away when I received your suggested edits.  I realized that you weren’t just editing for typos, but also looking for symbolism, and even character and setting flaws.  It’s easy for me to picture the room where “Eyes Like Mine” takes place, because it’s there in my memory.  But as an editor, you questioned aspects of the setting that were inside of my head and not necessarily written down on paper.

The second round of edits were much more difficult than the first.  I have certain words in this essay that are virtually stapled and glued to the paper.  In my mind, they are unmovable, like heavy pieces of furniture that can never be rearranged.  But the words that really mattered to me, such as STEEL, COBALT, and ANGEL’S WINGS, were never really on the chopping block.  I didn’t feel like you were trying to steal away pieces of my writing.  I felt as though you really wanted the best for both me and my essay.

It probably helps that I’m not the type of writer that allows herself to get bent out of shape over the deletion of a comma or an apostrophe. As a journalist and magazine editor, I know full well that typos happen.  Words are fickle creatures, and sometimes they need to be guided a bit.  To be perfectly honest, I’m relieved to have a second set of eyes scanning my work, just so long as the edited essay is accomplishing the goal that I set before I began writing.  The point of writing, in my opinion, is emotional in nature.  If rearranging sentences, expounding on certain settings or characteristics, or removing redundant phrases makes the EMOTION of the essay easier to tap into, then it’s well worth the trouble.   Believe it or not, I actually enjoy criticism as long as it’s done from an honest, helpful perspective.  As a writer, it’s almost impossible to know what other people feel and think when they read your work.  A good editor, however, can easily point out high points and low points in the manuscript they’re editing, and take away any fear the writer has of being misinterpreted.

YARN: How was writing this piece different—and/or similar—to anything else you write?  What are you working on now?  Has writing and revising this essay changed anything about the way you are writing now?

JL: I’m a journalist by trade.  And believe me, there is an enormous difference between investigative journalism and creative non-fiction.  For me, it’s literally the difference between night and day.  By day, I write articles and conduct interviews.  But at night, after the children are in bed and hubby’s asleep, my alter-ego comes out of hiding.  When the moon rises, so does my inner author.  I love to abandon reality and escape to my imaginary world, where people have character arcs and society begs to be challenged.

I definitely learned a lot about myself through the process of editing “Eyes Like Mine” with you, Kerri.  In fact, it was much easier than I thought it would be.  I actually gained a lot of confidence during the edits, because I realized that the editing process didn’t affect me in the way I thought it would.  Before we began the revisions, I assumed that I might feel a bit self-conscious.  It’s one thing to have an article edited by a coworker before heading to newsprint, but it’s another thing to hand over an essay that’s so emotionally charged.  I thought that I would be more resistant to change, but in actuality I found that I welcomed the suggestions.  I didn’t take the revisions personally at all.  In fact, I kinda liked the process.

So what am I working on right now?  Oh, where to begin.  I’m a journalist by trade, so I’m always working on an article.  But I’m also working on the oh-so-dreaded-yet-necessary side of writing that drives my inner author up the wall: the all important query letter.  I’ve finished writing a Literary Fiction / Women’s Fiction manuscript, and I’m completing a third read-through and the all important last-minute tweaks before sending said query letter to literary agents.  And while I wait for responses from my queries, I’ll spend my time raising my boys, working on the 1880’s Louisiana Dog-trot home that my husband and I are restoring, and gathering additional research for a work of non-fiction that I will begin this spring.

YARN: Thanks once again for submitting your wonderful, highly creative essay to the contest, Jackie.  It’s been such a pleasure working with you on it!

Thanks again to Susan Beth Pfeffer for helping us judge the contest, and to all the awesome folks at Figment for making this contest a reality!

Image courtesy of Boston Bill (flickr.com)

In case you missed our contest, below are the original details. Thank you to everyone who participated!  Thank you to Susan Beth Pfeffer for helping us judge!!

We want you to use your family (to create an engrossing story). They’re there to help you (with their unbelievable idiosyncrasies). They love you (enough to forgive you for immortalizing their more unattractive habits and tendencies). And, of course, the holidays are a time for family to gather (so you can observe every member at once). Take the opportunity to write an essay about your crazy, funny, awkward, nonsensical, loving family and submit it to YARN via Figment!

Figment is a free online community where teens and young adults create, discover, and share new reading and writing. Founded in December 2010 by New Yorker writer Dana Goodyear and former managing editor Jacob Lewis, Figment has in less than a year built a community of more than 80,000 users have created a library of 185,000 pieces of original, unfiltered writing. In addition to creating and sharing their own books, stories, poems, and essays, Figment’s users come together to discuss all things literary—from offering book suggestions to discussing their favorite fictional villains.  With its unique platform and community, Figment is also an innovative, exciting teaching tool, used in classrooms, libraries, and other educational settings around the country.

YARN’s premiere essay contest was on “Family Gatherings,” and it produced two fantastic winners: teen Helen Hasbun and adult Susan Young. Now, it’s your time to sparkle in the spotlight. Enter the Family Gatherings Contest, and you could be published in their online journal! Start practicing signing your name, “Mr. Firstname Lastname, published author.” Alternatively, you can swap out “published author” for “bigshot”.

What do you have to do? Get cracking! Write a nonfiction essay in 2000 words or fewer about a memorable family gathering. Could be a holiday, a wedding, a party, but it MUST include a teen or young adult. Essays are due by 11:59 p.m. EST on December 12. Voting will run until 11:59 p.m. EST on December 19 at which point the ten most-hearted stories will be judged by the YARN editorial staff along with special guest Susan Beth Pfeffer, New York Times best-selling author of Life as We Knew It and Blood Wounds. The winner will be announced on January 3, 2012, and the essay will be workshopped and published on YARN in January! (The winner will also receive a Writers Bundle chock full of swag, including a copy of “Blood Wounds” and Stephen King’s “On Writing”).

Teachers! All of us here at YARN are educators in one way or another, so we hope you’ll use the lesson plan we’ve created especially for this contest!

HOW TO ENTER:
1. Read the full rules
2. Create an account on Figment
3. Start a new writing
4. Tag that writing with YARNessaycontest on the Details tab
5. Press “Publish Now.”
6. You should receive a pop-up confirmation of your entry, and in about two hours or so, your piece should appear among the submissions.

Image Courtesy of smussyolay (flickr.com)

I saw Catcher’s parents at Taco Bell last night. I shouldn’t have been surprised to see them there, because in my town, every Baptist goes to Taco Bell after Wednesday night church. My family and Catcher’s family were no exception.  Only this time it felt different, because I didn’t know what to say to Catcher’s parents, because for the first time, Catcher wasn’t there.  What was I supposed to say, “I’m sorry your son died. Enjoy your tacos?”

So I didn’t say anything, and I felt like jerk.  Instead, I studied their faces, searching for anything that would mean things were all right.  But they were actually chewing their tacos sadly. You can chew food sadly, like the food tastes like melancholy.  I know because I’ve done it a lot since I got the news three days ago. It’s forced and sometimes you can’t even swallow before you start to cry. But the difference between my chewing and their chewing was that Catcher’s presence had made an impression on my life, whereas Catcher was their life. They couldn’t be expected to get over a loss like that in three days.

Plain and simple: Their son was gone and things were not going to be okay.

There was no one to blame for what happened to Catcher. He got sick with a brain tumor just before we finished high school, and for the past two and a half years he’d told everyone he was getting better.  Then one day last week he had a bad headache and few hours later he was in a coma. The next morning he was gone. No car crashes, no broken beer bottles, no water-filled lungs—other ways teenagers usually go. Instead there was an overwhelming sense of over-ness. Like when you don’t realize you’ve reached the end of a book, and you turn the page only to find there’s nothing but blankness.

You know the way people talk about how they would have done things differently with a person if they had known he was going to die? I wish I could say I would have treated Catcher differently. But I know things couldn’t have been different, because I know me. I couldn’t even talk to his parents at the damn Taco Bell.

Because Catcher and I graduated a couple of years ago and we both headed to different colleges, most of my memories of Catcher before he died are from middle and high school. Ever since I got the news, I can’t stop thinking about my first memory of Catcher. Actually, it’s everyone else’s first memory of me and Catcher, which I discovered when I was talking to a friend of mine, Kelly Matthews.

In high school, she said to me, “Of course you aren’t going to invite Catcher to your party. You hate him. I know you can’t stand him.”

I was genuinely shocked by this evaluation. “What? What are you talking about?” I asked.

Dora Mayhew piped in, “Come on. Christen? Don’t tell me you don’t remember the time you screamed your head off at him on the seventh grade bus trip?”

I remember standing there in awe as Dora recounted a story that was so hazy in my memory I doubted it could be real, but when she described it in such detail I felt it had to be true: “Yeah, I’ve never seen you yell at someone like that when Catcher stole that Happy Meal key chain from you.”

Image Courtesy of Eric E. Johnson (flickr.com)

“The whole bus was terrified,” Kelly added.

Everyone remembered the seventh grade bus trip, but I didn’t. I just couldn’t help wondering if Catcher remembered it too.

Now that Catcher is gone I’d much rather remember the 10^th grade bus trip to Ashville, North Carolina. It was early in the morning and everyone was tired and hungry. From his seat in the first row e, Catcher reached into the front of the bus, grabbed a huge bag of SunChips and started chowing down. I looked at him from the third row seat like he was crazy and he looked  back at me like I was crazy. After a long, silent stare down, he said, “What? It’s whole grain,”  and explained that cereal was also whole grain, so SunChips were therefore the same thing, only salty . He moved to the second row bench, offered me some chips, and we sat there across from each other, both of us leaning over the back of the seat, our arms almost touching, as we shared the bag of chips. Ever since that day, I can’t eat SunChips without thinking about Catcher. Later on that same trip, someone had put in the Phantom of the Opera soundtrack. When my favorite song came on, I belted out the words, “Say you’ll share with me one love, one lifetime…” When the song was over I told the bus that I wanted it sung at my wedding and Catcher grabbed my shoulder, “No,” he said, his mouth twitching mischievously, “I’m having it sung at my wedding.”

“NO. I’M HAVING IT SUNG AT MY WEDDING.” I argued.

“I suppose we’re just going to have to get married, then,” Catcher smiled deviously with his charmingly crooked smile.

Right there my heart skipped a beat. I remember it so clearly, because I shrugged it off quickly, because I didn’t want to become one of those ridiculous girls who were infatuated with Catcher. But you need to know that marrying Catcher wouldn’t have been so bad; with a Snyder’s pretzel engagement ring, I would have married him right then and there. The sad part is that everyone thought I hated him. I never did, I just didn’t want to be another face among the masses, another unread fan letter.  So I chose to be the one who was openly “not –in- love” with Catcher.

It wasn’t until Catcher was first diagnosed with cancer and underwent an operation to remove the cancer tissue that I knew I had to do something, something to let him know that I cared, something to say I was sorry I had screamed at him over a stupid Happy Meal key ring on the seventh grade bus trip.

Typical, you must be thinking. “Friends” always come out of the woodwork when someone gets sick. If I hadn’t been myself, I would have called myself a hypocrite.

Oh, he has cancer now and suddenly you care.

No, I had always cared. I just had never known how to say it in an original way, because I didn’t want to be like Kelly Matthews or Dora Mayhew who had been in love with him since time began or fifth grade, who quit being friends because Kelly beat Dora in asking Catcher to prom.

You see, around the time that everyone was falling in love with Catcher and fighting over who would take him to prom, I was struggling with the idea of originality. My feelings weren’t valid, my likes and dislikes weren’t good enough unless they were too obscure to be popular. Catcher = popular. I loathed myself for loving him.

Image Courtesy of Lee McCoy (flickr.com)

So I did what any self- respecting self- loather would do. I spent all my allowance and painstakingly baked homemade brownies. We’re talking I melted the butter and Ghirardelli 65% cacao five dollar bar of chocolate over the stove and everything. I folded in the eggs. This was no Betty Crocker cop out. I was channeling Martha effing Stewart.

I didn’t stop there; I even cut out letters to a message reading “Feel Better Catcher” and attached each letter to a brownie with a toothpick.

When I showed up at Catcher’s house with the brownies, his parents were sitting on the couch watching TV. It was embarrassing how shocked they were to see me. As they led me to an armchair in the family room, I knew they were wondering if I actually thought brownies were going to make their son feel better. I sat down and they politely told me that they weren’t sure if Catcher was feeling well enough to come say hi.  But after a short wait, Catcher came out to say hi. He even managed a snarky comment, but I can’t remember what it was. I don’t remember what I said either, but I’ll never forget that there wasn’t much to say.

A few days later, Kelly Matthews told me that Catcher had talked about my brownies, “He said they were the best brownies he had ever eaten.”  I didn’t tell Kelly, but I wished I had labeled the Tupperware with 100%realbrowniesnoneofthosecheapocrockerbagmixesthatyougetatwalmarttheseweremadewithbloodandsweatandarealmarthastewartrecipebeacausei’minlovewithyou.

I wanted the brownies to mean more to Catcher than a friendly gesture or a feat of culinary genius. After eating the brownies he was supposed to chase me down the driveway, take me in his arms, dip me, and whisper in my ear what I’d been too afraid to say, you mean more to me than you realize. I wanted him to explain that there had been a huge misunderstanding—his heart was mine and now we could make delicious baked goods together.  You see, the brownies meant something big to me, though they didn’t successfully communicate the depth of my feelings, nor did they achieve the outcome I had hoped. I think they made an impression at least.

Most of my memories of Catcher  are from bus trips. I don’t know why, I suppose my school took a lot of fieldtrips. On another bus trip, Catcher proposed again.

Kelly Matthews, Catcher, and I were sharing the front row while discussing our love for Liam Neeson, when I announced to the bus, “I’m going to name my son Liam.”

“No you’re not, that’s what I’m going to name my son.” Catcher replied sternly, as Kelly Matthews seethed with jealousy in the seat next to us.

Catcher looked at me, then said decidedly, “I guess we’ll have to get married then,” and turned his attention to the highway ahead of us.

Of course I never told Catcher how I really felt and I suppose no one ever expected me to. Maybe it will be freeing in the long run. No one will pat me consolingly on the shoulder. No one will pray for me when they pray for all the ones who lost Catcher. Heck, no one will expect me to attend the funeral tomorrow.

The thing about Catcher is that he wasn’t all that attractive; he was a bit pudgy before he got sick and his face was scarred by acne. His personality made up for everything.  After the brownies and throughout the rest of high school, I saw Catcher here and there at social events. His hair was gone, replaced with a “there’s a story”/“I’m secretly an X-man” sort of scar extending from the top of his head to below his left ear. He had become tired and skeletal, not at all like he had been at Kelly Matthew’s 16^th birthday two years before, when he had looked truly dapper, when he was completely fabulous in a black suit and fedora.

Kelly’s birthday party was the first time I felt pretty. In honor of the formal event, I put on real makeup for the first time and donned a padded bra to hold up my strapless blue evening gown. I knew I was pretty because I felt pretty that night. Maybe I was exuding magic or something, but all the boys I had ever wanted to notice me, noticed me when we started posing for pictures.

Camera flashes went off in all directions as I smiled my self-conscious closed lipped smile to cover by braces, when suddenly I was enveloped from behind. It was Catcher. Flushed as I was, I went with it, continuing to pose and smile. Catcher feigned a serious male model expression, but I could do nothing but smile, showing the world all my orthodontic works in progress. I didn’t care because I was in Catcher’s arms for the first and last time.

Dora Mayhew showed me the picture later, and to this day, I’m convinced that it’s the most genuine smile ever captured, the most real smile I’ve ever smiled.

About a week ago, I got a message from Catcher asking how I was. We talked for a while. It was nice, but it was so unexpected that it was random, like my brownie delivery must have felt years before.  During our brief conversation, he accused me of “violating the friendship rules,” claiming that he hadn’t seen me in years. This was gross hyperbole, but it felt true. We talked about what was going on in our lives. I confessed that I had become a school-a-holic, diving into my studies with almost obsessive devotion. He on other hand had his mind on family and relationships and was looking forward to going on a road trip with friends. I judged him then, but I would later discover that Catcher had majored in the things that would matter so much more if he died. It didn’t occur to me at the time of our conversation, but I think Catcher was tying up his loose ends. I was a tiny insignificant detail in the scheme of his full life and somehow I still mattered.

Image Courtesy of Drew Evans (flickr.com)

A couple days later I got a text from Kelly, Catcher’s gone.

In the moment it took for me to open that text message, all my last chances were spent. As I read the details surrounding Catcher’s death, I knew that Catcher and I would never catch up; we would never become pals like I wanted us to be. Instead we were reduced to random acts of friendship, bus trips and birthday snapshots.

Maybe I’ve written everything down– years later—for some kind of closure, because I never went to the funeral; I couldn’t bear to watch people like Kelly Matthews and Dora Mayhew who had played such large roles in Catcher’s life, who would have a lifetime of memories that would keep them awake at night with damp eyes for years to come. And what role had I played? Bus Friend #2?

I’m still trying to understand why he had to go away before I got the chance to tell him how I really felt. I don’t know where Catcher and I fit into the grand scheme of things. But I do know this: Catcher showed me that even the smallest fragments of a life matter—that he mattered.  Then again, how do you make sense of a short life like Catcher’s?  A life I had so little to do with, but still changed everything.

Christen Gresham was born in Clovis, New Mexico, and never stopped moving.  Since then, she has lived near Bitburg, Germany; Macon, Georgia; and most recently, Savannah, Georgia, where she studied Dramatic Writing at Savannah College of Art and Design.  Having grown up with a passion for creating stories, Christen primarily writes fiction, plays, and screenplays.  Now that she is a grown up, Christen still prefers young adult novels over grown up books and will probably write a novel for young adults one day.  “How I Lost Catcher” is her first time writing in the nonfiction genre.

YARN: We are honored to present a piece written exclusively for YARN by Catherine Gilbert Murdock, “Fairly Tales; or, One Author’s Adventures with Enhancing an Ebook.”  Timed perfectly to give you insight into her new book, “Wisdom’s Kiss” — released September 13! — this genre-crossing essay reveals Ms. Murdock’s process of embracing and advancing book technology (something we also aspire to at YARN) with an entertaining, enlightening frankness.  All this and more: an original fairy tale, confessions about her edits, and a bit of literary history thrown in for good measure.

By Catherine Gilbert Murdock

First, the fairy tale:

“The Dolorous Draper,” from “Gory Dragons Galore: A Treasury of Educative and Cautionary Tales for Unformed Youngsters and Others Yet Morally Deficient”

Once upon a time a dragon lived in the mountains of Sottocenere. He lived with his mother, in a cave overlooking a tiny valley, where people tended their cows and made their cheese and had sense enough to keep away from dragons.

All day long the dragon would lie on a boulder outside his cave, watching the villagers far below (he was a young dragon, and so had excellent eyesight), and when night fell, he would watch them still. Sometimes when the evenings were warm and the villagers felt safe, they left their shutters open, and the dragon could observe them eating dinner. He particularly liked to watch the burgomaster. How glorious that dinner looked! The table set with china plates and candles, the plates spread upon a pristine white tablecloth.

Oh, the dragon yearned for a tablecloth. The candles were lovely, and the china, yes, but most of all he wanted that snowy white cloth. The food looked far more delicious — so much better than the cattle and stringy mountain sheep he and his mother ate off the floor of their cave, surrounded by bones and the few scraps of treasure they’d salvaged or stolen from other, wealthier dragons.

His mother, when he worked up the courage to voice this dream, scoffed at him. “A dragon doesn’t need tablecloths!” she’d sneered. “A cloth doesn’t change the taste at all. Besides, cloth isn’t treasure. It isn’t valuable — not like gold.”

“Not even silk?” he’d asked, tentatively. “Not even damask?”

“Nothing like gold,” she’d sniffed. And that was the end of that.

So the dragon returned to his boulder, still dreaming of banquets spread on damask. And there he might have remained, full of unfilled longing, were it not for the arrival in the village of a cloth merchant, or as they used to call them, a draper.

The man appeared pushing a heavy cart laden with the most beautiful fabrics: silks and woolens, fine linens and sheer voiles, cotton grown in far-off lands and damasks woven in intricate detail, some colored with borders of fruit or ornaments, and others snowy white.

Intently the dragon witnessed the man’s approach, and at once the beast flew down to the village entrance, transforming himself into a fat matron with a purse of coins. “Have you a tablecloth?” he asked the draper, affecting disinterest and hoping the man could not hear the pounding of his black dragon heart.

“But of course,” the man answered, displaying several so lovely that the dragon nearly swooned. Yet he was still a dragon through and through, and so haggled for some time over a price for the loveliest one (so the dragon felt, anyway), and with feigned reluctance handed the man his dragon gold before hurrying off with his treasure.

Woe for the draper, for he was not from Sottocenere and so had no experience with the dangers of dragons, and the widespread belief that dragon gold is cursed. Instead, he promptly visited the local brewer’s and purchased an enormous bucket of beer. (The brewer wasn’t so bright either, accepting that dragon gold, but there’s never been much to say for Sottocenere brewers.) The draper then settled himself beneath a shady tree, and drank so much of the beer that he fell into a deep, deep slumber.

Photo courtesy of Giampaolo Macorig (flickr.com).

The dragon by this point had returned to his cave, where he could not resist showing the tablecloth to his mother. She did not share his delight, however, and slapped him and called him names (dragon insults such as “Ice Lung” and “Pappy Tooth”), and told him to return the fabric to the draper and get their gold back. In fact, he should take all the man’s earnings, and anything else of value the man might have. “Which does not include cloth,” she added, with a final blow across the young dragon’s snout.

And so, heartbroken, the dragon flapped slowly back to the valley. He landed beside the draper, curling his nose at the stench of beer. But no matter how the beast shook him, the man would not waken. The dragon sat back on his haunches and stared sadly at his lovely tablecloth, and then at the cloth merchant, who was rather plump, even with all that cart-pushing.

At once an idea came to the dragon, and quick as a flame he wrapped the draper in the cloth, and flew back to his mother. “Look,” he cried, slithering into the cave. “Look at this!” And with a great flourish he pushed aside the litter of bones and treasure and spread out the tablecloth, the draper centered upon it.

His mother pursed her dragon lips. “Hmmm,” she mused, smoke curling from her nose. “Is that what you’ve been talking about all this time?”

“Yes!” cried the dragon. “Tablecloths make everything look better!”

“Well, son, I stand corrected,” she said at last — for while dragons may be greedy, selfish, envious, and altogether cruel, they are not above admitting their mistakes, at least sometimes. “You have an excellent point, and, I must add, you have made an incomparable presentation. Shall we?”

With that, the two dragons lunged at the draper and gobbled him up, pausing only to squabble over the juiciest bits, and to set aside the man’s purse. Afterward, their bellies bursting, they happily flossed their teeth with the shredded remnants of the tablecloth, the mother dragon praising her son for his excellent choice of fabric.

The End

For the past two years I’ve been writing “Wisdom’s Kiss,” a tale about a princess en route to her wedding who discovers she’s a pawn in a malevolent plot for imperial control. In order to save her kingdom, Wisdom (the princess) joins forces with a gifted orphan maid and a handsome young soldier. Sword fights, magic and romance commence. The maid and the princess disagree violently, not least about the handsome young soldier, and their tensions are compounded by a thoroughly malevolent duchess and a vain little swordsman complete with goatee and huge plumed hat. The story, of course, ends happily ever after, but not before heartbreak and a treacherous, breathless escape.

I absolutely adore this story, which contains every element I’ve always wanted in a book (a book either to write or to read), including a large smug black cat. (As I pen this, I’m looking at *our* large smug black cat, who though passed-out on the window sill is still quite delighted in my attention.) My summary of “Wisdom’s Kiss” requires one more very important detail: the story is related from the various perspectives of each of these characters (except the cat; the feline mind is beyond me). Thus, instead of one narrator,”Wisdom’s Kiss” has eight, including the soldier’s letters, the princess’s diary, the autobiography of the maid, the swordsman’s preening memoir, a play (terribly campy), encyclopedia entries . . .

I chose such a multifaceted format not for its complexity (though doubtless some readers will grumble; some readers already have), but because I couldn’t figure out another way to share the plot, to withhold and reveal critical information in the most timely and dramatic manner. Such a format also, I discovered to my great satisfaction, saves an enormous amount of space and time. Instead of contriving an illogical three-page dialogue on the laws of royal succession, the encyclopedia presents it in half a paragraph, allowing readers — snip snip! — to return, quickly educated, to the story and the characters we truly care about. Given that the voices are so often contradictory, “Wisdom’s Kiss” in effect becomes a mystery: who is telling the truth? Are all these people who they claim to be? Who can be trusted?

“Wisdom’s Kiss” was an absolute blast to write, as much fun as I’ve ever had with the creative process. Putting it together, I felt as though I were assembling a mobile, adding one element here, its counterweight there, doing my best to keep the whole edifice aloft . . . And yet even as I was writing, I couldn’t help but wonder how these voices would work if they were read not all mixed together but in separate chunks. What would that campy play sound like if read independently from beginning to end? Or the maid’s autobiography? This notion immediately raises the question of how one would go about accomplishing such a task. A traditional book, being a hard-copy construction of paper and ink, doesn’t allow for random, reader-prompted reorganization . . . But an electronic ebook does. Or at least an ebook offers the potential of random reader-prompted reorganization.

Photo courtesy of Sean Kelly (flickr.com).

So, very early in my writing process, I began pondering an ebook version of “Wisdom’s Kiss,” including all the marvelous improvements and additions that such an ebook might potentially incorporate. The actual ebook technology was — and, I must confess, remains — rather vague to me, which, oddly enough, may have encouraged the creative process: I didn’t know what couldn’t be done. Thus, I’d say things like “Just add one of those button things,” however frequently and patiently the tech folks at Houghton Mifflin responded, “Um, what you want hasn’t been invented yet.” But they came up with fantabulous solutions, and gave me remarkably free reign. So now we have an extra-special deluxe electronic edition of “Wisdom’s Kiss.” Want to know how the character of Trudy emerged, or why Felis’s memoir title is so long, or the significance of castles, or the origins of the Elemental Spells, or the truth about the Drachensbett Cloud Wars? You can, simply by clicking a (proverbial) button. The enhanced ebook contains the entire first act of “Queen of All the Heavens” in all its campy glory; sound clips from the audiobook; recipes; deleted scenes; author commentary on the text, the characters and all sorts of other stuff; a gazetteer of place names complete with pronunciation guide . . . and two original fairy tales.

Which brings us to “The Dolorous Draper.” “The Dolorous Draper” emerged from a section of “Wisdom’s Kiss”in which the main characters battle a dragon. The section included the proverbial fight scene — quite dramatic, conducted by moonlight from a hot-air balloon — as well as an encyclopedia entry describing the mythic country of Sottocenere and the dragons that inhabit its mountains. Placing cherry firmly atop sundae, I even cooked up two fictitious titles of fairy-tale compilations describing said dragons, “Gory Dragons Galore” and “Terrifying Tales from the Mountains of Gloom.”

Well. How could titles as ghastly as that just sit there, unused? So I decided to write a story from “Gory Dragons Galore” as a exercise for my own enjoyment and also as potential enhancement to the ebook, an example of original prose that might be woven into the bonus text and linked to from the book’s “official” prose.

As it happens, I was, if not uniquely suited, at least unusually suited to composing fairy tales. In my one experience teaching creative writing, I gave several lectures on the subject. If you want to learn something, assign yourself a one-hour public presentation — you’ll get proficient real fast. Fairy tales, so I learned and so I taught, have several defining characteristics. They’re timeless and placeless, for example, versus “set in London in December of 1734.” They’re also non-religious, which is particularly surprising given that the stories so often have morals, either written or implied: the innocent, kindly hero(ine) prospers; greedy and selfish villains fail. (Inferior fairy tales tend toward ham-fisted and overbearing moralism, as may be witnessed in the “Gory Dragons Galore” subtitle: “A Treasury of Educative and Cautionary Tales for Unformed Youngsters and Others Yet Morally Deficient.” Gack.) Fairy tales frequently — although not invariably — have talking animals or other magical devices that are accepted without question within the story, and just as commonly archetypes such as a youngest son, or numbers such as three, seven or twelve. They also involve the breaking of prohibitions: Don’t open that door . . . follow that troll . . . attend that ball! But it happens anyway. The list goes on from there, but what I found most fascinating is that fairy tales, from at least the 1600s onward, have been overtly self-conscious. The authors of new fairy tales were well familiar with the old versions and set out intentionally to build on, to revise and quite often to tweak them, in the process both updating and strengthening the fairy-tale tradition. William Steig’s 1990 picture book Shrek, for example, describes a hideous ogre who woos an equally hideous princess: a grotesque inversion of the “handsome prince and princess” narrative, but the two nevertheless end up Happily Ever After.

I go into all this detail (sorry if it sounds like a college lecture; it kinda started life that way) to show the origins of “The Dolorous Draper.” I very self-consciously set out to craft a story that both acknowledged and tweaked the history of dragon tales. Dragons — so my lifelong reading indicates — are either wicked and expendable à la “St. George and the Dragon” and “The Hobbit,” or noble and wise à la David Wiesner’s “The Three Pigs” and pretty much everything else written in the last thirty years. I love and cherish both these traditions, but they’re . . . they’re established. These are the two approaches everyone expects. So why not go in a completely different direction and create a dragon character that, instead of being initially horrifying but ultimately sympathetic, is the other way around? And, may I add, horrifying on multiple leves. Not only does this monster cheat and murder an innocent merchant, but he even trashes the tablecloth — and flosses his teeth with it! His disregard for basic decency is positively inhuman. It’s like he’s a dragon or something . . . Oh wait, he is.

I don’t harbor such prejudice toward dragons personally, you know; dragon-wise, I’m more in the noble and wise bloc. But “Gory Dragons Galore,” the fictitious anthology for which I composed “The Dolorous Draper,” was a book intended to demonstrate the viciousness of Sottocenere’s mythic dragons. This Duchy of Sottocenere is not a country through which to stroll late at night — or, apparently, in broad daylight.

Photo courtesy of lapidim (flickr.com).

If we compare “The Dolorous Draper” to the classic characteristics of fairy tales, we see that the story fulfills the genre on some levels but fails on others. Self-consciousness, check; magic and the breaking of prohibitions, check; timelessness, check. It is most definitely not placeless, however (though to be sure “Sottocenere” is a bit more fanciful than “1734 London”), and the moral is subversive at best: use a tablecloth? Practice dental hygiene? Don’t trade with dragons? I suppose one could describe the moral as “follow your dreams,” but do we really want to follow that particular dream? None for me, thanks.

To my mind, the most subversive element of “The Dolorous Draper” is the presence of a mother. An abusive, critical, domineering mother. Mothers are almost never in fairy tales. Fathers, stepmothers, grandmothers and siblings ooze from every page, but not dear old Ma. Indeed, living mothers tend to be absent from children’s literature generally, a point I’ve addressed elsewhere (see my discussion in the March 2009 Horn Book). “Jack and the Beanstalk” is the only fairy-tale exception I can think of, and even his mother is absent for the bulk of the story, and for all of the adventure.

There’s an excellent reason for this motherlessness. A story — any story — requires conflict; conflict is the engine that drives the plot forward. “Two children sat at home doing nothing” is not a story. “Two children were turned out by their stepmother to seek their fortunes” is the foundation of any number of excellent stories. The poor dears have been abandoned! They might starve! In other words: conflict. Yet, readers do not like the notion of a mother who spawns conflict. (We’re totally okay with stepmothers, however; “evil stepmother” is practically redundant.) Given the choice between a mother who initiates conflict — heck, a mother who even tolerates it — and a mother who’s missing or dead, readers almost every time choose Door #2.

The mother in “The Dolorous Draper,” however, doesn’t just initiate the conflict; she promotes and intensifies it. Instead of an adventure about how the hero will return safely home, it’s more a saga about how the hero will survive his home. That said, it’s worth repeating that this dragon mother is, well, a dragon, a classic Western baleful dragon. I’m quite comfortable holding her to a lower maternal standard than, say, our next-door human neighbors. It may very well be that “The Dolorous Draper” even strengthens our esteem for human mothers, who at least don’t call their children “pappy tooth” and force them to haggle over dragon gold.

As I mentioned above, I wrote “The Dolorous Draper” as a supplement to “Wisdom’s Kiss,” bonus prose that in an ebook reader would be linked to the “official” text. Unfortunately, “The Dolorous Draper” became tangled in a massive revision to the book’s second draft. The dragon scene, so my very wise editor pointed out, had pretty much nothing to do with the main story, and in fact muddled the main story: why in heaven’s name introduce dragons and then drop them? Dragons aren’t incidental, you know; they’re essential. As far as fiction goes, it’s either all dragons or all something else.

So, with a sad but appreciative sigh, I took the battle scene and its related encyclopedia entry and demoted — erm, shifted — them to the enhancements. I am probably not the first to realize that ebook enhancements are a wonderful way both to savor good-but-incongruous prose and to encourage well-needed editing: “I’m not discarding what I’ve worked so hard on! I’m just storing it elsewhere!” Much of this prose should — and in my sake often does — end up in the trash regardless, but drawing out the excision makes it surprisingly less painful.

Thus the Duchy of Sottocenere, once so integral to our heroes’ escape, shrank to a parenthetical aside, a brief mention as flyover territory. (The more gluttonous may also recognize sottocenere as an Italian truffle-flavored cheese; such was my inspiration for the place name.) “The Dolorous Draper” became an enhancement to an enhancement, another facet in the evermore serpentine enhanced ebook. And, believe me, “serpentine” is not hyperbole: the 50,000 words of enhancements are as long as the original book, and contain over seventy stand-alone entries.

Is such a wealth of enhancements necessary to fully understand “Wisdom’s Kiss”? Heavens, no — no more than knowledge of fairy-tale theory is necessary to understand “Cinderella.” In each case, the story stands alone. We can, of course, choose to learn more and to value that knowledge, but such learning shouldn’t be a requirement for appreciation. In both cases, the story either works or it doesn’t; if the author needs to explain the ending, or a scholar the psychological significance of glass shoes, then the fiction is inherently unsound.

That said, deeper understanding can be a wonderful thing, whether it’s the history of Sottocenere, the contents of “Gory Dragons Galore,” or the potential differences between dragon and human mothers. Reading is its own reward . . . and so is learning. Perhaps in the end that’s the true meaning of enhancement, even an enhancement as fizzy as “The Dolorous Draper”: it is something that improves the quality, however slightly, of “Wisdom’s Kiss,” of fairy tales, of life.

Catherine Gilbert Murdock burst onto the young adult book scene with her debut novel “Dairy Queen” (2006), winner of the Borders Original Voices Award, the 2007 Midwest Booksellers Choice Award, the 2007 Great Lakes Booksellers Children’s Literature Award, and the Pennsylvania Young Reader’s Choice Award. Five years and two sequels—”The Off Season” (2007) and”Front and Center” (2009)—later, Murdock’s popularity and success continue to grow exponentially. Ms. Murdock is also the author of “Princess Ben” (2008), a fantasy novel much like her newest book, “Wisdom’s Kiss.”  Ms. Murdock and her sister, author Elizabeth Gilbert,  grew up in Connecticut on a small family Christmas tree farm.

Ms. Murdock now lives outside of Philadelphia with her husband and two children, plus a black cat who inspired the character of Escoffier and another cat who didn’t.  Visit catherinemurdock.com to learn more about her books for young adults and to find an extremely delicious recipe for Cuthbert en croûte.

Shannon and I loved Lili’s essay right away.  It’s a raw, honest self-examination that begins with the surprising admission that she was “some suburban snob.”  Throughout, the prose is dense and atmospheric, and we can really see and feel what Lili does in that subway car.   In a rather short essay, Lili takes us on a surprising journey in her mind, and where reader and writer end is much different from where they began.

Another example of the kind of essay we’d love to see more of here at YARN!  Happy reading

By Lili Rosenkranz

It was only a few months ago when I boarded the subway looking like some suburban snob. I was wearing stockings in July because they made me feel pretty and my face was painted with bronzer and blush, ballerina pink. I remember feeling, put-together, poised, purposeful. That morning in the mirror I slid my fingers down my figure, tucking in the ivory blouse, inching the stockings up my calf and then my thigh until they perfectly rested on my hip. I brushed my hair, a side-part to the right. I wore lipstick with a funny name, “Turning Heads Red.” According to Vogue I couldn’t pull off red with my chocolate hair and pasty skin, but I did it anyways like Audrey Hepburn, or Liz Taylor, or Spanish tango dancers with crimson mouths.

The station smelled of empty Corona bottles and sidewalk street food. A man sat with his head against the stucco wall, holding a Marlboro between two bony fingers. Another man carried a empty orange juice carton, “Just a dime, a nickel,” he pleaded. “Help my family.” He extended a jagged arm, rocking the cup, grinding his cigarette-blackened teeth to the turning of pocket change. I did not look at him because he was dirty, ratty, poor, and his nails were cracked and my father is European and I live in a big white house with a garden. He lives on concrete and eats out of wrappers. I did not look at him.

You see, I really did not want to take the subway that morning. Waking up from a weekend of city nights, with my nose in the air, superior, above the sultry atmosphere where everyone looked so strange: limping, sauntering, straggling, begging. I was dreaming of ivory arches, Providence, the man in a suit, the one who would ask me lots of questions. Because I am the type of girl who wears bows in her hair. I enunciate; I study; I sigh. I play the piano to please. I’ve got it all figured out.

I waited for the train as men coughed into their hands with fingers nails caked in dirt and hands strained workday soreness. I thought about college, about that interview I was going to, how I had to carefully package my life into a conversation that would only last one hour. And that man on the other side of the table had a family, a home, bills. He had seen thousands of girls like me and I was just another bright-eyed dreamer, another polished pick, another name: Lili. Looking around, I concluded the motley mix of characters passing by didn’t seem like the “college type.” There were the punk teenagers with cartilage and nose-piercings, those kids from abusive fathers perhaps, and alcohol, and greasy hair, and drugs.

“Hey, pretty girl,” said a boy with black hair sprinkled with dandruff. He did not wear a tie, or Sperrys, or Armani cologne. He smelled like a dollar burger and he spoke with a lisp and I was too pretty for him. I nodded, smirked, and walked on.

But there were more like him. There were the construction workers. There was a man in a Starbucks apron. Minimum wage. Why wouldn’t I judge a man who spends his life filling cups?

A girl waddled in wearing a cherry red dress with big white polka dots. She looked like a waitress at some crappy diner off route 95: hair in a bun that sagged at her neck, long white striped socks that ascended her calf, a fatigue that created wrinkles at the edge of her lips giving her that bulldog pout. Her eyes were calf-brown. Her cheeks were round, bulbous. She looked vulnerable. Of course that was because she was pregnant and I just kept on staring at her stomach, the way it swayed with each step, the way it bounced with each breath. This girl was indeed only a girl. Her legs were still slender. She had the frame of an adolescent and her bulging stomach looked awkward, unwanted. She was some  character on Lifetime or a statistic you learn about in Sex Ed. Did she know where she was going, where they were going? I imagined her walking into my college interview with that balloon belly, a knocked up teen with rich, plum hickies sprinkled across her neck. I sort of snickered and then started to feel bad. The mother was suffering so many eyes, stuck somewhere between motherhood and adolescence, insanity and normalcy, just trying to walk on that thin, ragged margin, as if it were a tightrope and she was hoisted hundreds of feet in the air. But she could barely walk; she waddled.

The mother looked around, holding a bare hand with fingers cupping the bump and the other hand holding a broken back, trying to support the weak knees, the nausea, the fear. I was watching from a bench, with my ankles crossed, and my arms crossed, and I thought about people disappearing, reappearing, walking toward me, walking past me. They were all lives that I would never know because I never wanted to know them. I was judging because it is easier to be knowing and powerful than to be ignorant. It is easier to judge. The mom walked toward the bench that was full with stragglers. I saw her eyes, not just the stomach this time, and I got up. She  looked up at me and I let her sit down and I know she appreciated it because the small glance became a smile.

She eventually boarded the train, the one going north. (I was going south.) She pressed a hand to the cool metal as the cart began to trundle down the tracks. I knew what she was thinking: Where are we going? Do we have a place to stay? Away, away, away echoed in the rhythm of the train.

But I saw her there differently. I saw her for what she was., Not a slut. At that moment I saw myself in her: scared, unsure, just trying to pull it together. And the truth is I don’t have it all planned out, although I try so hard to. Sometimes the red lipstick fades and my chapped lips appear. Sometimes the shirt wrinkles, the stockings rip, I don’t feel so beautiful anymore. Providence is only a distant hope; I have become just another girl that life puts on a tightrope, watching to see if I fall. And I do; I fall so hard outside the margins that I’m not even straddling the line. Perfection perishes. I stop judging the outliers in the station: the man smoking, the beggar, the girl nursing a baby. I’m just one of them, hoping to get on the right tracks, hoping to go in the right direction.

My name is Lili Rosenkranz and I am 17 years old. I am going into my senior year at GreenwichAcademy in CT. I have always loved writing. I attended the UVA summer writing workshop last summer and am currently teaching poetry to young children through an art therapy program called CARING at Columbia medical school. I have beenpublished in “Connecticut Student Writers,” “Blue Pencil,” “Apprentice Writer,” and have been recognized at a regional level with a gold key from the Scholastic Awards and placed third in the Lynn Decareo Connectice State writing contest.

Last summer, I received an email from Tomas Mournian asking if YARN would cover his new novel “hidden.”  Being the scrupulous editor that I am, I did a little checking up on Mr. Mournian, and discovered that not only was he a hot-s–t journalist in LA, and “hidden” his first buzz-worthy novel, he’d also graduated from Berkeley, just like moi!  So we exchanged a few emails about Cal, and generally got to know each other as we e-chatted about what he might offer YARN so we could help plug his novel.  I asked for an essay, and boy did he deliver!

“Meeting My Muse: Francesca Lia Block,” is exactly the kind of personal essay we want to see more of here at YARN (so yeah, if you’re a writer wanting to get published, pay attention!!).  It’s funny and moving with an absorbing narrative and insightful reflection and exposition.  Not that every essay has to be funny….I think you get my drift.  “Meeting My Muse” shows that essays can be as exciting and revelatory as fiction.  Enjoy, and get writing!

By Tomas Mournian

My interest in seeking out Francesca Lia Block happened the same week I moved to Los Angeles. I sat on the floor of an empty studio apartment above Hollywood Boulevard & Vine, reading “Weetzie Bat” by the outside neon light. Immediately, I knew two things: “I love this book” and “I need to meet my muse.” Later, I would never felt that way about Robert Pattinson, Matt Damon, or Taylor Lautner. (Okay, I felt it a little bit about James Franco, but who doesn’t want to meet him, with or without his left arm?)

It took me a long time to learn that meeting heroes and heroines in Hollywood is a dicey proposition. Almost two years after I made my wish, I had been schooled in the problems with meeting one’s muses.

During the seven years I worked in Hollywood as a reporter (for “In Style,” “US,” “E! Online” and “Los Angeles Magazine,” among others), I successfully avoided the I’m-star-struck sand trap that tended to come with interviewing actors. I viewed Hollywood celebrities as the means to an end (specifically, making money so that I could fund my other work, investigating safe houses). Unlike other celebrity journalists who tried cozying up to famous people, there was no risk of my wanting to befriend Natalie Portman, Kristen Stewart, or Blake Lively. The only danger I risked from being near to a movie star or television actress was the crows feet that came from squinting in the face of their brightly glowing super humanosity close up.

Meeting Francesca Lia Block, however, was a different matter. She possessed a luminosity that was different (and more intense) than media celebrities. Or rather, I experienced her fabulousness differently that I did others. Seated at the World Famous Formosa Cafe across from the author of “Weetzie Bat” triggered all my wanna-be author aspirations. I didn’t just want to interview her, I wanted to be her—or  my version of her—a  published novelist.

Five years into my season of dancing with the stars, I had enough clout to summon pretty much anyone I wanted to meet. This wasn’t because I’d become a wonderful person living and working in Hollywood; in fact, I was a lot less nice than when I’d sat in that Hollywood Boulevard studio apartment. But I’d become an insider who could offer celebrities the sort of coverage that’s the coin of the realm in Los Angeles. Few refused, and I can’t remember anyone actually saying no.

“Los Angeles Magazine” was what I’d offered Francesca. And, like everyone else in LA, she was eager for press and agreed to meet for an interview over Shirley Temples and Diet Coke. Sitting in the red vinyl booth I walked the line between fan and dispassionate observer. Muting my bouncing-in-the-red vinyl admiration for her was difficult: Francesca’s writing had never let go of my heart. In fact, her writing—and now her, in person—reminded me of all my faded or forgotten Hollywood Dreams.

Block’s exquisitely written novels were elusive, neat, and poetic. Unlike other writers (Libba Bray, Jonathan Franzen, and Stephanie Meyer come to mind) who write long books that give the reader a sense of accomplishment (and relief—“I finished it!”), Block’s novels are marvels of economy and inspiration.

Because they are deceptively slim, some might read Block’s books as short stories or novellas. Except they aren’t short stories or novellas. Francesca creates unique worlds that are deftly composed yet fully realized works, novelistic in scope.

I’ve reread Block’s novels dozens of times, yet I’m always amazed by the works’ subtle seduction. Francesca works colorful language within the confines of precise form. And though the stories feature characters who feel like best friends and are intensely appealing to straight girls and young women, they are, in fact, cast with a range of characters who make them more broadly relatable. To queer boys, for example.

For me, “Baby Be-Bop,” about Dirk McDonald and his future boyfriend Pup exemplifies Francesca’s ability to write a story that’s both specific, yet general. Block taps into the most glorious—and precarious—moment of a young man’s life, when everything is dusted with angst and insecurity and power. When I read “Baby Be-Bop,” I recognized this male naiveté, but—more so—the feeling young men, gay or straight, have: the world is theirs to explore. In fact, everyone – male or female – must, to some extent, leave home and explore it if they’re ever to step into their own hero’s journey.

Yet, reading “Baby Be-Bop,” I never thought about the author’s gender. Francesca Lia Block had transcended gender because she so perfectly observes and tells a boy’s own story—my story. And this isn’t genre writing either. All of Block’s work resists categorization. “Baby Be-Bop” could be fantasy, a utopia/dystopia, or romantic love story. Francesca glossed “Baby Be-Bop” with the painful truth of being young and queer (the latter being different from “gay,” more Addams Family strange) in America. Francesca so perfectly captured that specific truth –my truth—with all its possibility and pain, that after I finish reading “Baby Be-Bop,” all I could do was lay on the sofa, and sob.

After our interview at the Formosa Cafe, my path crossed with Francesca’s several times.  Over the next five years, I’d either see her from a distance, or speak to her in passing.
photo © 2009 Steven Damron | more info (via: Wylio)

In 2008, Francesca presented the PEN/USA award for Best YA novel. She stood on stage at UCLA’s Royce Hall dressed in a miniskirt, one long leg cocked off to the side, and read the nominees in an impatient voice that barely registered interest. She radiated the aura of an outsider who had, with only great reluctance, agreed to step into view. I read her stance as both defense, and posture. The “I’m too cool for this” attitude was belied by the fact that she stood on stage, in front of a large audience. I loved it.

The next year, we met at the “Los Angeles Times” Festival of Books. She stepped out from the shaded Manic D press tent, dressed in a white head-to-toe outfit, noon sunlight turning her into a chimera part Easter Bunny and part yoga sylph. Two years ago, I wandered into Book Soup for a reading-in-progress (“Damage Control,” a collection of essays about women writing about beauty, an evergreen topic that resonates with particular intensity in Los Angeles). I stood in the back, near the home design and celebrity entertaining books. I sensed her presence, but before I saw Francesca, I saw her purse. Enormous, its soft, gold material shone under the fluorescent lights. I looked up at its owner, and that’s when I saw her, standing by the French post cards and Hollywood movie/screenplay/biography section. For a moment, we eyed one another, our mutual wariness giving way to, “Oh, I know you.” We swapped silent smiles and then she stepped forward, and read her essay, the longest, and best written in the collection.

During the past decade, I bought Francesca Lia Block’s books by the dozen and gifted them to initiates. I gave away hundreds of those small individual books: “Weetzie Bat,” “Witch Baby,” “Cherokee Bat and the Goat Guys.” When the stories were collected as “Dangerous Angels,” I started gifting the five “Weetzie Bat” stories bound in a single volume with an ethereal fairy figure on the cover.

Some part of me—the part that couldn’t really be friends with, or ever really know Francesca except as a fan—read her work and gave it away because I needed, even in an unconscious way, to stay in touch with the inspiration she radiated.

Partly, her writing was an excellent model of craft, but also of possibility. If Francesca could do it (become a published novelist), I knew I could, too. We had both attended UC Berkeley, after all, and read the same magical realist and Modernist writers (Gabriel Marquez, H.D., Gertrude Stein). I just needed to get on with it.

Problem was, I had an addiction to quell, and that was easier said than done. While I imagined myself as the perennial outsider, the truth was, I had been co-opted by Hollywood’s promise of proximity to fame, beauty, and money. I couldn’t stop writing interviews with and gossip about Hollywood celebrities. Perez Hilton and I both needed celebrity journalist rehab, quick.

Yet somehow, even as my heart turned black from dishing scoops and bloopers, I wrote a first novel. The first chapter featured a boy, asleep, who dreams about being visited in the pre-dawn hours by a fairy boy figure who hovers over the sleeping boy’s consciousness until sunlight breaks. Then, dawn hits the fairy, and he explodes into a billion colored fragments. This fracture defined the book’s core problem, and my inability to fix it. Despite endless revisions, the story never gelled.

Eventually, I wrote another novel, “hidden,” and it was published last week. Told in short chapters with near staccato language somewhat like Francesca’s economic yet poetic style, once I finished “hidden,” I stopped compulsively buying/reading/gifting “Dangerous Angels.” This isn’t to say that I stopped following Francesca Lia Block’s writing or stopped buying her work. If anything, through the alchemical process of becoming a novelist, I returned to Francesca’s books with the same pleasure, and love, I felt the first time I sat in that empty studio apartment overlooking Hollywood Boulevard and read by blinking neon light.

When I wrote “hidden,” my Francesca muse sat on my shoulder, offering if not exactly spoken encouragement, then an ever-present reminder that love, however remote seeming was still a subject worth my attention. For, world weary as I’d become in my Hollywood life and style, an original copy of “Baby Be-Bop” always sat nearby. Its tattered pages served to remind me of what I’d loved—and maybe lost (or just misplaced)–and might possibly, someday, regain, if only through the gesture of writing fiction.

Copyright Tomas Mournian, 2011

Tomas Mournian is the author of “hidden,” out last week.  “Publisher’s Weekly” dubbed “hidden” an “exquisitely written and impossibly sad fiction debut,” about fifteen year old Ahmed who escapes from a “rehab” center for gay teens.   In San Francisco, he meets others like him with similarly heartbreaking stories, but he soon learns that the safe house is “never entirely safe.”  A unique YA story and an intimate look at a world few of us knew existed before–a must-read for 2011!

“hidden” is based on an article Mournian wrote for the “San Francisco Bay Guardian” about an underground network of safehouses for gay teens.  Titled “Hiding Out,” it won Peninsula Press Club, East Bay Press Club and GLAAD Media Awards and was nominated for a Pulitzer.

Mournian’s journalism career began when he  worked for Lance Loud interviewing musicians, singers and other personalities for a “Details” piece about Max’s Kansas City. This lead to working for Kevin Koffler (then “OUT”’s West Coast Editor).  Working as a freelance journalist, he has been published in a wide range of consumer titles: “Marie Claire,” “Los Angeles,” “YM,” “US,” and “In Style,” among others.  In 2009, he held the Eli Cantor Chair at Yaddo.  For more of Tomas Mournian, visit his blog.

Photo courtesy of Michael Cutmore (flickr.com).

I was minding my own business the day the wolves barged into my apartment, demanding that I write about them.  I was thinking about dogs, and how amazing it is that we have such a close relationship with them. I had recently read “The Botany of Desire,” in which Michael Pollan discusses plant evolution and its effect on human evolution.  That’s when a little voice in my head said, “I want to write about how the wolf evolved into the dog from the wolf’s point of view.”

I wrote about ten pages, and realized that I knew almost nothing about wolves and even less about ancient times.  I began to resist the story.  I hated research.  It  was boring and I was no good at it.  I’d find something else to write.

How Research Hooked Me

Resistance was futile; the wolves wanted their story told. I found myself in the Natural Sciences section of a bookstore  holding a book called “The Wolf Almanac” by Robert Busch. A few minutes later “People of the Earth: An Introduction to Prehistory” by Brian Fagan leapt into my hands.   The next thing I knew, I was curled up at home, trying to read both books at once.  As I read “The Wolf Almanac,” I learned that much of what I’d assumed about wolves was wrong. I’d thought they were violent, vicious creatures that fought all the time. I learned that they were really social animals that lived in family groups. As I read about prehistory, I came to understand that wolf packs and an ancient human tribes were quite similar.  Kaala, the wolf narrator of my book, TaLi, her human soul mate, and their respective families began to take shape.  I found Barry Lopez’s “Of Wolves and Men,” and learned that the relationship between wolves and humans was long and complex.  The fourth book I found, “The Truth About Dogs” by Stephen Budiansky introduced me to the idea of wolf-human co-evolution, the idea that wolves, and later dogs, may have shaped our evolution. Everything began to come together.  The research I had feared and resisted had led me to the heart of my story. “Promise of the Wolves” was born.

Research, which I had thought would be an obstacle to writing my book,  turned out not only to give the book shape, it also became a central part of the creative process at the heart of the life altering journey that writing a novel can become. In the course of my research, I chased huskies through the French Alps, braved -40 degree weather in Yellowstone, watched wolves feeding a few hundred yards away from me, and walked through caves where someone else had stood 14,000 years ago painting bison and horses on the stone wall.  I spoke to fascinating people from all over the world and made friends I never otherwise would have met.

How Research Shaped “The Wolf Chronicles”

Research continued to play an important role in shaping The Wolf Chronicles in both large ways and small. On my second trip to Yellowstone I stayed at the Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel, and the lawn and parking lot were absolutely covered with elk who were bellowing through the night. They became the elkryn in key scenes in “Promise.”  Because I’d read about ravens and wolves playing together, I decided to add just one scene with some ravens in it to add some authenticity to the book.  One of those ravens turned out to be Tlitoo, and he became a major character and driving force of the book.  One of the  biggest changes came when I was watching a documentary on wild dogs in which the pack was traveling to a new location, and one of the pups got left behind.  That became the scene in “Promise” in which Ázzuen and Kaala struggle to cross the Great Plain, but it was what happened next that really influenced the story. The researchers making the film weren’t supposed to interfere with the animals, but they couldn’t stand to watch the pup die. They saved it. That started me wondering:  what is it about us humans that makes us unable to resist the urge to save a creature’s life in one instance, while at other times we kill indiscriminately? I began to think about how our connection to and love for other creatures could be the one thing that could save us from our more destructive tendencies, and that if we can tap into this better part of ourselves, we might be able to save ourselves as a species.  That became the central theme of what was to become The Wolf Chronicles. The research had expanded the story in ways I would never have imagined possible.

The Practical Stuff:

So how do you actually do it? Researching a book can seem like a daunting task, but it’s really just a series of small steps.  The first thing you need to know is where to look for information. Every author will have different needs and different resources, and finding the right tools may involve some trial and error. Don’t give up or despair if some of these aren’t right for you. Keep trying.

Books: I’ve always been a book person, so this was the first place I turned.  I identified the areas I needed to learn about—wolves, dogs, evolution, ancient life—and found good books to curl up with.

Online sources: The web, of course, is an incredibly valuable research tool. The challenge is vetting the huge amount of information you’ll find online.  Don’t assume something you read online is true unless you’ve verified the source and found other sources that confirm it.  I often use the web as a first step. I’ll find a few pieces of information and use them to direct me in my search.  I may continue on the web, go to a book, or talk to someone knowledgeable.  GoogleScholar is a great resource for finding good, solid information.  The new Google Books also promises to be a great resource.

Libraries: Libraries are an author’s best friend.  Not only do they have books, they often offer access to professional resources like online journal articles that would cost you thousands of dollars to get on your own. This allows you to get the most recent, peer-reviewed research on a topic.  Libraries also have librarians, who always seem to know more than other human beings.  Often, library resources can be accessed online if you can’t get to a library in person.

Documentaries and Films: The amazing wolf documentaries I watched made it much easier for me to describe wolf life.  Like the web, the information in films and documentaries can be useful but should be checked for accuracy.

Talking to people:  One of the best things you can do is to talk to really, really knowledgeable people, either in writing or over the phone/in person.  I had the good fortune to talk to wolf experts, dog researchers, anthropologists,archaeologists, climatologists, and others.  I found that most people were happy to discuss their work, but there are a few important things to keep in  mind when you ask people for help.

• Be very polite.  The people you’re getting in touch with are busy.  Be professional and polite in your communications with them. Email them (or if necessary, snailmail them) in advance to ask if they would mind answering some questions. If they don’t have time to talk to you, don’t take it personally or get angry. If someone says they can’t help you, thank them for their time. If they don’t answer you, don’t take it personally.  Move on to someone else.  You might get a lot of “no’s” before you get a yes.
• Be prepared. Before you approach an expert in the field, know her or his work, and do as much research on the topic as you can ahead of time. They will appreciate the effort you have made.
• When you are finished talking/emailing with your expert, always ask if there is anyone else you should talk to.
• Don’t forget to say thank you! Send a thank you note.  Thank them in your acknowledgments and send them your book when it’s published.

photo © 2009 Markus | more info (via: Wylio)

Some Nitty Gritty Advice

Once you have identified your research tools, you have to roll up your sleeves and get to it. I think of research as having two main forms: specific research that you do in order to make sure your facts are correct, and research you do in order to absorb the world your book is set in.

Specific research

As much as possible, you need to get your facts right.  Here are some practical tips to help you do so:

• Take notes.  Make sure to take notes as you read. Otherwise you’ll have to look the same information up over and over again. Trust me on this—I learned it the hard way.
• Keep track of your sources.  I’m not the best note-taker in the world, and can’t always read my own handwriting or make sense of what I typed.  The one thing I always do is make a note of where I found a particular piece of information.  That way if I find something that looks like “Ravens don’t uitowrc but snrlogey,” (Mind of the Raven, page 147), I can go back and figure out what I meant.
• If you’re stuck on a bit of research, tell everyone you meet what you’re looking for.  You never know who knows what.  I was trying to figure out what plants would be in Kaala’s Wide Valley, and was having a terrible time finding information for that time period. Nothing in my toolkit was working for me.  Then, I was at a party and mentioned the book to a fellow guest.  “I have to find someone who really knows paleoecology!”  I wailed. “I’m a paleoecologist,” she said,  and I was on my way.
• Use more than one source.  Unless you are absolutely certain that your source is reliable, double-check the information you find.  Not everyone who claims to be an expert is.  If you find conflicting info, find another sources, too.
• If no one knows the answer, you get to make it up.  If you keep getting conflicting information, or if the data is incomplete, or conclusions debatable (as is often the case when you’re writing about the past) you get to choose what truth to use, as long as it doesn’t contradict known facts and as long as it is logically based on what is known.  It’s one of the best parts about writing a novel.

Immersion research

The other kind of research is what I think of as immersion research, and it’s about absorbing everything you can about your characters and their world in order to make your book as real and engaging as possible. Immersion research gives your book the colors and shadings that will make your readers’ experience rich and rewarding. Some tips:

• Be omnivorous: I read everything I could get my paws on about wolves, dogs, birds, evolution, ancient times, shamanism, philosophy—anything that might possibly have anything to do with what I was writing.  I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, but such reading helped create Kaala’s world and helped me build my own understanding of what was important to me and what I wanted to communicate as an author. Much of the reading you do might not show up as specific facts in your book, but it will create a richness and authenticity in your work.
• Allow your research to guide you.  If you’re reading a topic and it leads you to another, don’t resist it; see if there is something good there. You don’t always know what you’re looking for.
• Be open to the world.  Being a novelist is about exploring your world, about taking things in, interpreting them, and sharing them again with the world.  Writers spend a lot of time alone with their computers.  Make sure you take in the world as well.

How Much Research Is Enough? Knowing When to Research and When to Write.

How do you know when the research you’re doing is necessary and when it’s procrastination?  How do you know when to stop to find facts and when to keep writing?  The first part of this question is about procrastination.  You know when you’re procrastinating! If you’re trying to write a difficult scene and decide instead to go look up something that you might or might not need to know, that’s procrastination.  Don’t let research be a reason not to write.  A good way to deal with this is to place time limits on research.  Give yourself  30 minutes or 60 minutes to research and then cut yourself off.  Or make yourself write 30 or 60 minutes before doing any research. Have a friend or writing partner help you on this if necessary.

The other part of this question is more complex and is, again, a matter of trial and error.  Be guided by your instinct on this one (as long as your instinct isn’t to procrastinate!) If you’re on a roll writing a chapter and find a fact that needs to be verified, leave it blank. When I was struggling to figure out the plants in Kaala’s world I would write sentences that said “We ran until we reached a PLANT and hid under the TREE.”  That way I marked where I needed to research something  but I didn’t need to stop writing.  I then set aside time to go back and fill in the blanks.  There will also be times when you need to find a fact before you can go on because it affects the storyline.  That’s when you stop to do the research. The decision whether to keep writing or stop to look something up can also depend on how long the research will take. If it’s a quick online check go for it. If it’ll take longer do it later. I’m revising “Secrets of the Wolves” now and I just had an instance where I did both.  I was rewriting some dialogue and needed to know what a weasel might eat.  I went online and quickly found several things that weasels eat, and decided I wanted the weasel to be eating a gopher. But I wasn’t sure that there were gophers in Europe 14,000 years ago. When I couldn’t find the answer quickly, I put in a place marker and will go back to it later.

The key thing to remember is that the research serves your story. Its purpose is to make your book accurate, engaging, authentic and evocative.  It is yours to use as you will.

Dorothy Hearst is the author of “The Wolf Chronicles” trilogy including “Promise of the Wolves” published in 2009 and “Secrets of the Wolves” due out in Summer, 2011. Prior to writing about the wolves, Dorothy was an acquisitions editor at Jossey-Bass, where she published books for nonprofit, public, and social change leaders.

"Darkness Visible" by Catherine Price Slayden

By Catherine Price Slayden

She is wasting away, they tell her, but she can’t afford to hear them. She is on to something, something amazing that will make her everything she’s always wanted to be. They don’t understand. They don’t look in the mirror and see what she does.

When she was little it was one thing. She was all long hair and thin limbs, running wild and smiling in the sun. But when her center of gravity moved it was like the whole world shifted. All her angles turned round, but not just curvy. Soft.

Soft and mushy and pale and round. Like dough.

Her wardrobe of skirts and dresses in bright colors and lace was traded for a few drawers of bulky tops and bottoms, designed to hide every inch of her body. Each day was spent in the same uniform: big sweatshirt, baggy jeans, tight ponytail.

And even though time has passed and the pudgy dough of her flesh has smoothed into gentle curves, the memory of the years of elastic waist pants and oversized sweatshirts hangs heavy in her mind, like wet blankets on a line. And every time she looks in the mirror she sees the reflected image of herself at eleven, and it makes her sick.

It also makes her strong, makes her a machine.

Each pounding step of her feet on the track reinforces her new mantra. I am a machine, I am a machine, I am a machine. She doesn’t need a break, doesn’t need a day off, doesn’t need anything but her water bottle, her tennis shoes, and the firm rubber of the track, pounding back against her, pushing her forward.

And she needs her rules.

Every day is the same – a strict routine designed for optimal weight loss. There is the water bottle she carries with her everywhere, constantly draining and refilling it. One bottle must be drunk each hour from 9:00 to 4:00. This is easy during class periods. She simply takes a swig anytime her fellow students say something irrelevant or stupid. Some days the water bottle is empty before class is half over, and she has to clench the muscles in her stomach and legs to divert attention from her aching bladder.

At noon she allows herself her first meal: half a low fat bagel with three quick sprays from the Parkay bottle. The lack of fat makes the bagel tough and hard to chew, so she warms it for fifteen seconds in the mini-microwave she shares with her roommate. She takes slow, tiny bites of the thick bread and chews it until it has dissolved into nothing on her tongue.

She likes this feeling of complete consumption, of simple destruction. One moment the bagel is there in her hand, the next it has disappeared. It has served its purpose. It will fuel her through the afternoon’s classes, social time, and workout.

At 4:00 she will return from the gym and eat the other half, which until then will wait in the cellophane wrapper, torn from its mate, jagged edges beckoning for her to put it out of its misery.

Photo courtesy of Darryl H. (flickr.com).

After lunch until 2:30 she follows her schedule, drinking a bottle of water an hour as she attends classes, reads her assignments, works on her papers. She is always at least a week ahead on her reading and homework. She likes to know what is coming, likes the feeling that if she wanted to she could take a full week and do nothing as far as school is concerned.

Not that she ever would. The idea of that much free time fills her empty belly with a sour feeling.

At 2:30 she changes into her gym clothes. Until recently she couldn’t wear the cute, form-fitting workout wear that the perfect gym bunnies could. But that last ten pounds marked the change from average to skinny, and she is now proud of the tight black pants that cup the join where her legs meet her buttocks. She wears a fitted shirt now, too, and leaves her hair down while she exercises, even though the sweaty strands sometimes get caught in her mouth or on the dampness of her cheeks. She has never mastered the messy bun, and refuses to put her hair in another tight ponytail as long as she lives. Besides, she likes the way her hair bounces on her shoulders when she climbs the stair-stepper, how it flows out behind her as she runs the track, exposing her sticky neck to her own self-created breeze.

She works out hard for an hour: running, climbing, cycling, rowing in a repetitive circuit of machines until the hands of the clock point to 3:30. Then she hauls her aching limbs to the pool and swims in long, fluid strokes.

She pulls her weight behind her through the water, no longer ashamed to see herself in a bathing suit.

At 4:00 she pulls her body out of the pool, relishing the drag of the water that slides off of her hips and chest as she climbs the shaky metal ladder. Each drop reminds her of a pound she used to carry, and she imagines the doughy flesh of her youth overheating, melting off.

In the dressing room she rinses off, sucking her stomach in tight just in case someone walks in. No matter what she does, the flesh of her belly remains soft and round. She yearns for the ridges of muscle the other girls have, but after thousands of crunches she has accepted as reality that her future consists of sucking her belly in, not showing it off.

After her workout it is time for a snack, and the other half of the bagel rests where she left it – lonely and ragged in her dorm’s mini-fridge.

Somehow the second half of the bagel is never as satisfying as the first. Maybe because it is the bottom half, the side with the flattened base. Or perhaps it is because the cold air of the fridge has seeped through its torn edges into the chewy flesh – something that couldn’t happen when both sides were joined, protecting each other.

She heats it in the microwave for twenty seconds this time, and gives it four sprays from the Parkay bottle. She gags it down as fast as she can, and this time she doesn’t enjoy the act of eating, the way the bread melts on her tongue. For now she is tired – both physically and mentally – of waiting for food, and something as plain as this bagel is far from what her stomach cries for.

As soon as the bagel is gone she regrets it.

Regrets having eaten it, because it wasn’t good anyway, and instead she could have had a mini chocolate bar or something equally tasty, if not as filling.

And she regrets not having enjoyed it more, because after all it was food, and food has always been the way she rewarded herself.

But she will put it out of her mind for the next few hours. If the gnawing at her belly starts again she can always down another bottle of water or chew a stick of sugar free gum. The water will fill her stomach and the chewing will fool her into thinking she’s actually eating. She will flip through magazines or read a book or watch something on TV to take her mind off the constant hunger, the unceasing dissatisfaction.

At 8:00 he arrives – the boyfriend – and they drive away from campus in his car.

Photo courtesy of Felix le Chat (flickr.com).

His car is his life, or at least so it seems. He washes and waxes it religiously, even in the winter when temperatures are so cold the locks freeze. He dusts the dashboard and wipes the windows, polishes the leather seats and the glass that covers the gauges.

He can control this machine, he tells her, and she knows he is right. Knows the comfort of having something to control.

They drive to the grocery store, as they do every night, to pick out their dinner. This is another ritual – the hunting and gathering of previous generations distilled down the years into this mindless perusal of packages and cans, freezer bags and cartons.

Although their funds are limited and her diet strict, the couple enjoys their slow walk up and down each aisle. The colorful products lining the shelves stretch out like bright ribbons of light, and the girl can’t help but reach her hand out to touch every once in a while.

A bottle, a can, a package of beans.

Touching, smelling, seeing this paradise of food almost makes up for the lack of tasting, and for a few minutes she entertains the idea of buying whatever she wants, of piling it into the cart and taking it home to make and eat until she is full to bursting. But as always that is just a dream, and she manages to control her cravings and select one of two options: a can of light soup or a frozen diet meal.

The boyfriend, meanwhile, chooses an array of cheap but mouth-watering snacks. Ho-Hos, pretzels, M & Ms, a twelve pack of Cherry Coke. He doesn’t eat real food, unless it’s from a restaurant. But despite his gorging on artificial flavors and monosodium glutamate he remains slender – wiry, really – with shaded outlines of muscle punctuating his flesh.

On the way back to his house he sings along with the radio – some angry alternative song – and she studies him.

His face, like his body, is lean and sculpted. He is handsome, although it is a young beauty. Not for the first time she wonders how his face and body will change over the years. And how hers will, too.

This boyfriend is so different from the other men she has loved, and sometimes she can’t remember why they are together. But there is something between them, a magnetic force that pulls them together despite their differences.

They both need the safety of control.

At home in his kitchen he wraps his arms around her while they watch her dinner go round and round in the microwave. The faint light from the appliance gives a romantic cast to the darkened kitchen, and the hum of its motor combines with the sound of the news on the television in the next room.

The girl feels safe here, almost happy.

The faint smell of noodle soup emanates from the microwave and fills her nostrils. Her stomach aches and she cuddles closer to her boyfriend.

“You look hot today, Babe,” he tells her, nuzzling her neck with his chin.

She smiles at his compliment, and for a moment the chasm in her belly is forgotten.

The microwave timer buzzes and they step apart, leaving a small gap of air between their thin bodies. A moment passes and the microwave light switches off, leaving them in darkness. He reaches his hands out to her waist and squeezes.

“I can fit your waist in my hands now, you know?” he says, his voice soft with pride. “Just don’t get too much smaller.”

Her mouth curls into a smile and she stands up straighter, sucking her stomach in tight. “Don’t worry; I don’t want to slip through your fingers.”

Catherine Price Slayden is a free-lance writer living in Saint Paul, Minnesota. She is also an up-and-coming visual artist, specializing in black and white portraiture. Catherine received her BA in Forensic Science and Psychology in 2003, and her MFA in Writing in 2010.

I like writing about bad girls. A murderous countess. An adulterous queen. I don’t know what they’ve taught you in school, but here’s the truth: history is full of bad girls.

Meeting the Countess

When I was in high school, I got a book about vampires out of the public library. It was an anthology of short stories and excerpts from novels, and among them was a story about Countess Erzebet Bathory. It told the legend (in gory detail) of a countess so obsessed with preserving her youth and beauty that she murdered her young female servants and bathed in their blood, believing that it would make her immortally young. The story was riveting to me. It was also deeply repulsive and terrifying. When I finished reading it, I didn’t want to be anywhere near that book.

Maybe because it scared me, it stuck with me. Often the things that make an impact on us during our childhood or teen years—whether favorable or otherwise—leave a mark that still exists years later. When I started studying writing in college, I found myself returning to the story of the countess. I was fascinated by her obsession, her madness, her desperate grasp at some untenable perfection: eternal youth and beauty. We would all grow up and grow old, eventually. I was keenly aware of this fact. Assuming that she wasn’t born evil, what happened to her when she was a child that caused this transformation?

The teen years are a dramatically charged time of life. This is one reason why I write about teenagers, for teenagers. There are so many things that can influence a developing sense of self. There is so much at stake. Who are you going to be? How are you going to change? What does the future hold? It’s that urgency that makes reading and writing young adult fiction so invigorating; not only is there action surrounding the character, but the inner self is mutating in ways the character hadn’t imagined or intended.

So what’s the internal struggle of a young murderess? I kept wishing I could ask the countess “Why did you do it? What were you thinking?” This question nagged at me. Clearly, she must have been crazy—but in fiction, that’s not a satisfying answer. Perhaps she feared growing up, growing older, losing her beauty. Why couldn’t things remain just as they were, safe and contained in her castle in the mountains? I had wished for that kind of comforting consistency myself, especially when I was a young teenager and filled with dread of the unknowable that awaited me in the years ahead.

Sharing my fear with the countess offered me a way to connect with her, to empathize. As I started writing her story—which would eventually become my first novel, “The Blood Confession”—I began to see her madness drive her to do terrible, cruel, repulsive things. If I wanted to tell the story in her point of view I had to expose the weaknesses that lead her down that path. For all of her vanity and pride, the countess was ruled by fear and insecurity. It would be a dark book, certainly not for every reader, but even in those early drafts I had envisioned it as a young adult novel, as it grappled with many of the same issues that I had felt as a teenager. Those questions about why she did what she did fascinated me, not because I knew the answer, but because I wanted to know. I wanted to create a logic (if entirely mad and illogical) for the countess to follow, that led to bleeding her servants, to bathing in blood, and finally to murder.

Aside from her fears of growing older, Erzebet’s close friendship with Marianna is at the core of her story. Marianna’s acceptance of Erzebet relieves some of the loneliness of the young countess’s existence. But Marianna does not harbor the same fears of the future; she is eager to become a young woman, a wife, and a mother. When Marianna falls in love and marries, Erzebet feels abandoned by her closest friend.

We often grow apart from our childhood friends—I have, and I think most people I’ve met have had similar experiences. It’s a natural, painful part of growing up. This gave me another way to empathize with Erzebet. I remembered feeling neglected and powerless as a certain old friend pulled away. And if there was one thing I knew Erzebet would react poorly to, it was that feeling of powerlessness. I knew she would react strongly, and—when it became clear that she couldn’t control Marianna’s actions—she would take drastic measures to convince herself that she was all-powerful. Time may have changed Marianna, but it would not change her: her search for eternal youth was energized, and remorseless. Bleeding her servants was only the beginning. She would murder young girls. She would act as God in her tower room, choosing life or death for the minions held captive before her. What could be more powerful than deciding a person’s fate according to your own whim, choosing whether they live or die?

Admittedly, Erzebet’s behavior is irrational, insane. But she enjoyed playing out her own power games, and I enjoyed writing them. Fiction is liberating. You can be bad in fiction, without fear of consequences. You can slip into someone else’s skin and play their role, even if you know they are horrible, vindictive, mad as a hatter. What might draw you to read a terrifying story is the same thing that draws me to write one—we want to visit that dark part of ourselves in a safe way, a way that won’t hurt anyone. It won’t even hurt ourselves. It’s frightening and it may make an impact on us, but then we put the book down and we can walk out into the sunlight again.

A Different Breed of Bad Girl

After finishing “The Blood Confession” I tried to settle my attentions on other ideas, but they just didn’t hold up. I had spent years writing about a girl who murdered for blood, for youth, for fun. She was dramatic, malevolent. How would I follow that up? How would I find someone else bad enough to inspire me?

And then one day I was surfing the internet, and I came across the story of Catherine Howard.

Catherine Howard was a teenager when she became the fifth wife of the notoriously unpredictable King Henry VIII. He had divorced his first wife, beheaded his second, lost his third in childbirth, and then hastily divorced his fourth (she wasn’t as pretty as he had hoped, after all) in order to marry Catherine. Not a great track record, but he was king so he could get away with these things.

Image courtesy of Ann Marie Brasacchio.

So what did she do, this Tudor-era Cinderella, propped upon the throne beside her all-powerful husband? First, she lied about being a virgin upon marrying the king. The king didn’t like liars, to say the very least. And according to most historians, Catherine engaged in a secret affair with one of the king’s most trusted servants during their marriage.

Knowing what she did about her royal husband, why would Catherine have acted so rashly? Henry’s second queen, Anne Boleyn, had been executed on similar charges of adultery—and Anne was Catherine’s cousin. Further, historians tend to agree that it is doubtful that Anne had actually committed the crimes she was accused of, while Catherine’s affair may well have been real. Either way, they both met the same grim end: execution by beheading at the Tower of London.

Here I was meeting another bad girl, whose actions inspired a similar confusion and interest. I found myself wanting to ask her the same questions: “What were you thinking? Why did you do it?” How would she explain?

Catherine was much different than the countess, of course. The countess murdered people in brutal ways, without remorse. But Catherine’s actions were absurdly reckless: she was risking her own life, and the life of the young man whom she claimed to love. Did she really imagine that she was safe, seated beside this great king? Did she really believe that Henry’s love (which had already proven itself fickle, and was quite dependent on her ability to produce an heir to his throne) would protect her? I read some amazing historical accounts about Catherine’s rise to the throne, all of which offered a broad array of potential reasons for her actions, but I wanted to get inside Catherine’s head. I wanted to hear her story, from her point of view. These thoughts would lead to my second novel, “The King’s Rose.”

Though the action took place hundreds of years ago, in a culture much removed from our own, Catherine was recognizable: a teenage girl, full of flaws and desperate for love and attention. Her faults and weaknesses made her palpably human to me. I empathized with her plight. I imagined that being chosen by the king was a heady experience. In spite of her triumph, she didn’t know enough about court life to know how a queen should behave. She didn’t understand how to deal with King Henry and his dangerous mood swings. And then she risked all to indulge in a night of love (or lust?) with a young man from her past.

I’m a lifelong fan of fairy tales, and I was enthralled by how Catherine Howard’s story resembled both a princess fantasy come true, and the terrifying Bluebeard murdering bride after bride. Haven’t we all wanted to be the princess? The chosen one? I did, and I think it’s a pretty universal fantasy. I spoke to my editor about this before starting my revisions of “The King’s Rose,” how the whole story could be seen as a loose parallel to modern life: every girl wants to be chosen by the Prom King, even though he’s kind of a jerk. The point is that he’s powerful, everyone respects him, and he’s the most popular kid in school. And when you are chosen, that attention and respect and elevated status is fun for a while. But then you start to think of the nice guy that you really like, who maybe isn’t so popular but was a whole lot nicer to you and maybe really cared about you. But then it’s too late, you’re stuck dating a monster, who is enabled by the social structure of high school to be as jerky as he wants and get away with it—for reasons as infinitely complicated and illogical as any royal family tree.

When I was a teenager, writing rhyming vampire poetry and dreaming (quietly, from a distance) about boys in my class, I kept my dreams to myself. While I vigilantly protected my heart, Catherine let passion rule her. She followed it and fell blindly from grace, indulging in sin and ignoring the consequences. Though her actions are foolish, there is something powerful in her story. We all teeter on the brink of disaster at one point or another during our teen years—do we give ourselves to passion, to a potentially bad decision, or do we back away? Catherine never backed away, which is what makes her story so dangerous, and so delicious.

Wicked Fiction

I find that people—especially people who know me—often look for who I am in my novels, or what may be based on truth. This is the beauty of fiction. My life is, thankfully, very different from the lives of glamour and danger lead by my characters. Though we are very different, I can still connect with them through our inner fears, our awkwardness—something that all of humanity shares, regardless of the century in which we’re born. It’s through these very human stories that I connect most deeply with history, with those who came before me, and imagine the stories their ghosts might tell us if they could.

Reading and writing are the safest and most effective modes of metamorphosis that I have found. It can be liberating to shed your own preoccupations and obsessions and try on someone else’s for a while. To take your own pain and anger and fears and dreams and transform them into a story—someone else’s story—this is part of the magic of writing, for me. The act of creation can be liberating. It’s empowering to let your old demons dance across the page, and tell a story that is dark, and human, and true.

Alisa M. Libby has been writing stories since she first learned how to properly grip a crayon. Growing up in Natick, Massachusetts, she dabbled in other potential careers in her formative years (trumpet player, actress, astronomer, unicorn) but ended up going to Emerson College for a degree in creative writing, with a focus on fiction. While at Emerson she began writing numerous short stories about the “blood countess” of Hungarian legend, which years later evolved into “The Blood Confession,” her first novel. She lives in Brockton, Massachusetts, with her husband Thomas, and their basset hound, Roxanne.

She also writes a blog we here at YARN highly recommend!

Why couldn’t my relatives have a place at the beach? I’d be able to stroll off, thoughts whooshing around in my head like the crashing waves, and, most importantly, I’d have a high probability of scoping golden lifeguards with six-pack abs. Instead, our Chevy Astro heaved up a gravel driveway leading to an old house in Waynesville, North Carolina, a small mountain town. My attempt to read Seventeen along miles of winding roads had made me too nauseous to enjoy even the magazine’s folded perfume samples, usually my favorite freebie.  The postcard view of the lush highlands was totally lost on me—their peaks verified that there was no escape from this family gathering.

We’d driven three hours to devote our Memorial Day weekend to the Phillips Family Reunion, never mind the fact that I’d never known we had any affiliation with this last name.  When my dad set the parking brake, I had no choice but to drag my butt out of the car.  Clutching their Beanie Babies, my two younger sisters bounded out the minivan, high on Skittles and Dr. Pepper. I slid out of the car and scanned the scene.  About twenty of my relatives were scattered among several picnic tables on the craggy incline.

Photo Courtesy of protoflux (flickr.com).

“I’m so glad you wore those ratty shorts for the occasion,” my Mom said.

I’d had these strategically deconstructed J.Crew cut-offs for a couple of years; Mom was just waiting for her chance to sneak them into the trash.

“What, like I was supposed get all fancy for this?”  I said under my breath, loud enough for her to hear.

She sighed.  I made a face and pulled at one of the threads along my thigh.  Neither of us wanted to get into it in front of everyone.

“Are we having fun yet?”  my Dad asked.

He adjusted his visor and squinted his eyes, which ping-ponged between Mom and me.  Earlier, I’d mumbled “Yeah” and “I know” in response to his pep talk about how it was just one afternoon, and I should try to relax and get to know some of my relatives.  Little did my parents know there were actually supposed to be parties back home that weekend.  I hadn’t told them this because I sensed that they’d get a secret thrill out of ruining my social life.

My Great Aunt Kate, sort of the matriarch of The Phillips Family Reunion, lived in an old white house at the top of the hill. Everyone called her “Aunt Kate.”  I’d only met her once before this particular family event.  My Great Aunt Rooney and Uncle Robert, whom I’d also met once before, lived at the bottom of the hill in a ranch-style brick house that was right across the street from a Lowes.

I said hello to my relatives of the close-extended variety: the ones who sent me birthday cards with a crisp twenty sandwiched inside.   I vaguely recognized some of the other faces from fuzzy old photographs. I prayed no one had gotten tee-shirts made for the occasion.

Although Aunt Kate was well into her eighties, she wore semi-cool tennis shoes and carried herself like a lanky gym teacher. In a hopeful voice, Dad told me that Aunt Kate had won several medals in the Senior Olympics for running. I’d been on my high school cross-country team for a year, but I’d won nothing besides a Varsity letter that was now tacked to my cork bulletin board—I had zero desire to sport the jacket.   My passion for the activity was mainly due to its calorie-burning benefits and the fact that I hated it less than other sports. On a trail, you could just be in your head, sans blaring scoreboards and teammates screaming at you for dropping the ball.  When Aunt Kate led a few of us through her old house and pointed to her display case of ribbons and medals, I mentioned that I ran too.  Out of the corner of my eye, I caught my mom looking pleased.  Ugh.

“Do you like it?”  Aunt Kate asked.

“Um, well,” I took a deep breath.  Her house had a woody, apple cider scent.  “Probably not as much as you, y’know?  I’m not very fast, but I do like to exercise.”

“Good for you,” she said.

I wished I had more to say.

“Cool.  Where’s the bathroom?”

Photo courtesy of Jason Marshall.

In the bathroom, my Aunt Kate’s “Evening in Paris” perfume and powder set caught my eye.   The midnight blue bottles with elegant calligraphy looked like it had existed in the days of bootlegging and flappers, and the fancy set almost seemed out of place in the rustic house.  Though I wasn’t sure what kind of prospects could be found in these hills, I tried to picture a young Aunt Kate primping for a hot date: her hair in a French twist, a spritz on every pulse point so that her “Evening in Waynesville” could be as magical as the designs on those starry bottles.

Back out in the yard, my family lounged in lawn chairs around the picnic tables.  I was amazed at how many of the grown-ups wore the same gross, pleated khaki shorts.  From the words “Whitewater” and “son of a…” I knew that they were discussing their favorite boring adult topic—politics.  So much for jumping in on that conversation–not that any of them would listen to me anyhow.

I did have plenty of cousins, some of whom I was seeing for the first time that day.  The family-tree-forces had conspired against me though, so most of them were still dependent on someone else to fasten the metal clasp of their Osh Kosh straps.  While my little sisters were no ankle biters, they hadn’t yet hit the MTV phase of life.  Besides, three hours in the car with them had sucked out every ounce of my “helpful, understanding big sister” persona.  I grabbed my Discman out of the Astro, and plopped down on a metal folding chair.  I hit play on the device and covered my ears.

My tunes, the green mountains, and the crisp air, almost swept me into a Zen-like mindset.  Almost.  Then I found myself as the unintentional Monkey-in-the-Middle in a game of catch between my sister Sarah and our cousin David.  A dog-slobber-matted tennis ball whizzed my face. The last thing I needed was to get slammed in the face by this nasty ball—my zits were already enough trouble to spackle. I was forced to relocate. Radiohead’s lyrics fit my mood: “What the hell am I doin’ here?  I don’t belong here.”

In an authentic fifties convertible, a “local” relative, Tim, arrived with metallic tubs full of fried chicken with a myriad of country “fixin’s,” from some restaurant.  Everyone formed a line for the food then dug in.  I fought the urge to ask how many fat grams were in a drumstick.

Later that afternoon, I took a walk down to my Aunt Rooney and Uncle Robert’s house.   I’d said hello to them when we’d first arrived at the picnic, and I wasn’t sure if they were in Aunt Kate’s house now or what. Taking a walk would  get me away from everyone for a minute and counteract the greasy fried chicken and blackberry pie I’d inhaled that afternoon.  I didn’t tell anyone where I was going because the house was just down the stupid hill.  Like there was any trouble to get into. I dropped my Discman off in the car, and carefully walked down the slope.  Too bad we hadn’t come in the winter–sledding might actually have made things more fun.  On my way down, Aunt Kate was walking up, a smile on her face.  She waved at me without missing a beat, almost charging up the incline.  I felt lazy.

Once I reached the house, I saw that the screen door was open, so I poked my head in.

“Hello?”

Aunt Rooney came to the door.

“Um, hi,” I said.  “Can I use the bathroom?”

I was such a dazzling conversationalist.

“Of course,” she said.

I kind of hoped there’d be another “Evening in Paris” discovery in their bathroom, but it was just a standard old people bathroom: a hand-knit cover shielded the extra toilet paper roll from looking like toilet paper.

When I came out Rooney was in the kitchen, filling a tall glass with ice.

“You want a soda, honey?”  she asked.

She eagerly held open the refrigerator.  If I was a decent human being, I had no choice but to sit down and have a soda.

“Sure.”

She handed me the Coke she’d poured, and I followed her through a hallway into the living room. We walked by a framed 1950s school photograph of a smiling, brunette teenage girl.  I wondered which of the middle-aged people at the picnic that cute girl had turned into.

We reached the living room, where my uncle sat in a leather recliner.  The dark wood panels and musty couches made me feel like I’d stepped into some early 1970s sitcom.  The scene on the television really clinched the time warp— an announcer in a polyester leisure suit introduced a group of women who looked like Dairy Maids, who burst into a corny tune.

I’d never seen such cheese that didn’t seem to realize it was cheese.

“What show is this?” I asked.

“The Lawrence Welk Show,” my uncle replied.

“Mmm.”

While he hummed along with the swinging, singing women, Rooney asked me questions about school and my family.  I must’ve even mustered up some questions for her because she told me, “I don’t know why people call me Rooney.  My name is Mary Katherine.”

I was getting a kick out of Lawrence Welk in a “so bad it’s good” kind of way.  I also liked being around fewer people.   It was easy to be polite to these sweet old relatives whom I didn’t really know.  They’d never seen me slam doors and sulk.

I’d almost finished my Coke when someone tapped at the screen door.  Rooney got up, while I watched the beginning of another equally wretched song-and-dance.

I heard my Dad asking about me, so I got up.

“Just seeing if you were down here,” he said.  “You didn’t tell anyone where you were going.”

“Oh, sorry,” I said.

I would’ve said, “Whatever, like anything was going to happen to me in this Podunk town,” but I didn’t want to subject my elderly relatives to my snottiness. After Dad and Rooney chatted for a minute, he and I said our goodbyes and hoofed it back up the hill.  The sun had almost set and the temperature had dropped.  I wished I’d brought pants.

“How long did you talk to them for?”  Dad asked.

“I dunno, a little while I guess.”

“Did they tell you anything about their daughter?”

“Um, Rooney might’ve mentioned something.  Hey, did you know her name’s not really Rooney?”

He nodded.

“Their daughter died of Scarlett Fever when she was seventeen.”

The wholesome face from the hallway picture flashed in my mind.

“Oh.”

Chilly bumps covered my legs, and I pulled at my shorts.

“They’ve always been fond of teenage girls,” Dad said.

I was so, so grateful that I’d acted nice in front of them.

We said our good-byes to the rest of the family.  My dad steered the Astro back down the mountain while I thought about how I’d survived the Memorial Day family reunion—it wasn’t so bad after all.  I realized that maybe my relatives hadn’t always been the kind of people who donned Christmas sweaters without a smidge of irony: they’d been young once.  Not that I believed they’d all been born over-the-hill, but I’d just never considered how much life they’d lived—all the loves and deaths they’d already experienced before I made the scene. I felt lucky to be related to an eighty-year-old who could trek up mountains with a smile on her face. She probably still carried her memories of magical “Evening in Paris” scented nights with her.

About Susan: Though I have lived in Atlanta, GA since 2006, I spent my college years and early twenties in Asheville, NC, which is about thirty minutes from the town where this memoir takes place.  I have just completed my MFA in Children’s and YA Lit. through Hollins University, and I currently work at a private high school, teaching Writing and Yearbook, as well as tutoring students.  When taking breaks from writing, I can be found adding new music to my Itunes, searching for online sales, and going to concerts.

Congratulations to Susan!

For her $25 prize, Susan chose the children and YA bookstore Little Shop of Stories in Decatur, GA