The Point and Other Stories

By Charles D’Ambrosio
Back Bay Books
1995 (paperback edition)
Condition: Excellent; annotated text; signed by author; additional inscription reads: “Madison, WI Nov. 3, 2004.”

Why I keep it: intellectual, personal ^[*]

In 2004, during my first semester as a graduate student in the Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, writer Charles D’Ambrosio served as the fiction writer-in-residence. This consisted of a four-day campus visit in which he spent some time with us, the eager young fiction darlings of the department and in which he came into our fiction workshop, taught by his friend and our professor, Lorrie Moore, and expounded on writing short stories.

Some of my classmates were familiar with D’Ambrosio’s work, but somehow I had managed to make it to age 34 without reading a single one of his stories. I’m certain had I read one of them in The New Yorker or Story Magazine, I would have remembered because D’Ambrosio’s stories are nothing if not memorable.

Moore assigned “The Point and Other Stories.” We were to read the collection and come to class with questions for the author. Around mid-September, I bustled over to the University Bookstore and purchased my copy, and then I let it sit. And sit. And sit some more on my messy desk in the graduate student office. I let that sucker sit until the week before D’Ambrosio was to arrive, and then I cracked it open and read it in one long afternoon.
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Rock Springs

By Richard Ford
Vintage Books
1988 (paperback edition)
Condition: Used; wear on front cover; pages dog-eared.

Why I keep it: intellectual, emotional ^[*]

I’m not sure if I own a short story collection that surpasses the importance or the teachability of Richard Ford’s “Rock Springs.” Some would argue my point, but I’ll stand by Ford’s collection as it has stood by me.

A reader who calls himself Grouch writes in an online review:

And when I first read “Rock Springs,” a collection of 10 short stories by Richard Ford nearly 15 years ago, I was standing in the Public Library of Livingston, Montana. I’d come to the library that night not knowing what I’d walk out with, but I knew I wanted to read a great piece of literature–one that would make my heart pound, my palms sweat and the little hairs on the backs of my hands stand up. At the time, I was married, the father of two, a reporter for the town newspaper and living paycheck-to-paycheck. Our budget was so lean, Jack Sprat looked like a glutton. To conserve gas, I walked to work, head down and collar up as the harsh winds of south-central Montana scoured the streets. We were so broke, my wife and I thought of co-authoring a cookbook: “101 Things To Do With Macaroni-and-Cheese.” Of course, buying books was out of the question. That’s why I was at the public library that night, looking for a piece of writing that would take me out of my struggling, lower-middle-class life.

Little did I know I was a character straight out of Ford’s stories.^[1]

I had a similar moment, the first time I read the collection in its entirety. I thought, Ford knows my people. Somehow, he knows the men and women I grew up with in my working class family–the dreamers, the down-on-their-luck schemers, the work-hardened people who said they’d given up on hope for good (but who kept a little wellspring of it on tap for emergencies), the smoke-roughened women, the leathery-palmed men. I may not have grown up in Montana or Wyoming, but it doesn’t matter because Ford understands the archetypal working class, even as he extends his characters and his stories beyond the stereotypes and one-dimensionality of the archetype.

Ford’s style is sometimes called “dirty realism^[2],” a term that better describes the state of the characters in his stories than the writing style itself. His concern, in this collection, does not revolve around the wealthy or the privileged. His vision sharpens around inequities and slights. He understands how desperation can lead to the worst choices. He does for the American short story what Woody Guthrie did for folk songs.

Thus, when I assign a Ford story to a classroom of students, I know the working class students will fall in love, as I did, and the wealthier students will be forced to face their own preconceptions. Most importantly, Ford’s work allows me to start a conversation about the necessity of fiction in our day-to-day lives.

I say, “How many of you know people like these people?”

Usually one or two kids raise their hands. They are still ashamed of their people. (I want to tell them this impulse will pass, but they won’t believe me. Not now. It’s too soon.) For now, Ford has broken down their barriers, put them at ease.

Then I say, “For those of you who don’t know people like this, what do you think of these characters?”

Usually a pretty female student will raise her hand, wrinkle her nose and say, “They are losers (or some variation thereof).”

Or the kid, who cornered me on the first day of class and informed me with some aggression that he’s a Republican and that he hopes my class won’t be one of those where I try to shove my liberal ideas down his throat, says he thinks these people had better pull themselves up by their bootstraps and get some work and become productive members of society, dammit, because that’s what’s wrong with America.

Someone else will speak up and defend these imaginary people, say that it’s kind of hard not to be a loser when there’s no work and no future and no way out. And our conversation, in which we discuss how important fiction is in a democracy, in our daily lives, in the press and fold of a nation’s progress, will unfold.

I tell my students they are not required to love these stories or even to like them, but they are required to read them deeply and with an honest heart. I tell them that’s the least they can do since that was how these stories were written. But I secretly hope, every time, that they will love these stories as much as I do, that they will treasure Ford’s rhythms and his eccentricities. I hope they will recognize the thread that binds all of these pieces together, the thread of our common humanity.

I like to end that class by reading aloud portions of my favorite story, “Communist.” It has been anthologized often but not as often as the title story “Rock Springs” or “Great Falls.” The title, “Communist,” a term they’ve been taught to hate, throws them off, of course, but the opening which is rather mundane quiets them: “My mother once had a boyfriend named Glen Baxter. This was in 1961.”

I read key lines aloud to them, and we discuss point of view and point of telling. We talk about how narrators can look back or forward in time and what those choices mean. When they are fully contemplative, I read aloud the entire last movement of the story which begins with the lines:

A light can go out in the heart. All of this happened years ago, but I still can feel now how sad and remote the world was to me.

Perhaps its because a little of the light in my heart has gone out as life’s many disappointments have piled up or perhaps its because I know what time will do to the hearts of my students…I don’t know.

What I do know is that I find it increasingly difficult, as the seasons pass, to read those lines aloud to my students without my voice cracking under the weight of their enormity.

Tomorrow: “The Point and Other Stories” by Charles D’Ambrosio

Further reading:

The Stubborn Truth: If we’ve learned anything, it’s that we should never elect a rich guy who says he hates government but can’t wait to ‘fix’ it. (The Guardian, Jan. 17, 2009)

Richard Ford On The Work Of Writing. (CBS News, July 6, 2008)

California Literary Review interview

Salon.com interview (September 2008)

Powell’s Books interview

¹ A Short Story Masterpiece. http://www.epinions.com/review/Rock_Springs_by_Richard_Ford/book-review-1FEE-107CB128-383510D8-bd1 Accessed Feb. 28, 2010.

² Dirty realism has been described as “the fiction of a new generation of American authors. They write about the belly-side of contemporary life – a deserted husband, an unwed mother, a car thief, a pickpocket, a drug addict – but they write about it with a disturbing detachment, at times verging on comedy. Understated, ironic, sometimes savage, but insistently compassionate, these stories constitute a new voice in fiction…‘These writers,’ Tobias Wolff has observed, ‘while not necessarily a school, nevertheless form a new voice. They are able to speak to us about the things that matter.” Granta 8: Dirty Realism. (Summer 1983) http://www.granta.com/Magazine/8 Accessed Feb. 28, 2010.

Eva Moves the Furniture: A Novel

By Margot Livesey
Henry Holt and Company
2001 (advanced reader’s edition)
Condition: Good; some scratches on front cover.

Why I keep it: intellectual ^[*]

Margot Livesey, a Scottish-born author, who has enjoyed a good career as a writer of literary fiction wrote one of my all-time favorite ghost stories. “Eva Moves the Furniture” explores grief and longing, particularly as it’s experienced by children.

Eva McEwan’s mother delivers her daughter in 1920 under the inauspicious omen of six magpies in the tree outside the birthing room window, and she stays “only long enough to bring me into the world.” As Eva grows up, under the care of her father and her aunt, two other mysterious strangers, a woman and a girl, begin visiting the household.

The catch is, only Eva can see them. At first, their presence seems benign. They teach her to gather eggs and encourage her to explore her world, but as Eva’s desire for freedom expands, the companions’ visitations takes on a slightly more ominous feel.

Eva grows up and becomes a nurse in WWII Glasgow, but she never outgrows her ghostly companions. Livesey builds a sense of dread throughout the novel, and she delivers an ending that shocked and surprised me.

Livesey’s prose stands as a fine example of crisp, clean writing that is at once lyrical and straightforward in its delivery. (I know, I know, how is that possible? But I swear there’s no other way to describe it.) Livesey has said that her goal is to write readable novels:
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Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table

By Ruth Reichl
Broadway Books
1999 (paperback edition)
Condition: Very good; owner’s name inscribed; additional inscription reads: “10/99 Seattle.”

Why I keep it: intellectual, emotional ^[*]

I can’t remember why I purchased Ruth Reichl’s memoir “Tender at the Bone” (Did someone recommend it? Had I read a review?), but what I do remember is reading it on the plane and in the hotel and during every available moment (because it was so incredibly good and full of wit and wisdom that felt so incredibly important at that moment) during a long weekend trip to Seattle in October 1999. I was attending the wedding of my former coworker and good friend Tracy Cutchlow, and “Tender at the Bone” kept me good company during the down time between wedding-related activities.

To me, this memoir sets the bar by which all modern food memoirs ought be compared. It’s funny. It’s heartbreaking. It’s insightful. It includes really great recipes. Plus in this era of you-just-can’t-believe-it’s-true memoirs, Reichl opens with the observation that:

everything here is true, but it may not be entirely factual…I learned early that the most important thing in life is a good story.

And a good story she provides, opening with my favorite chapter “The Queen of Mold.” Reichl describes how her mother fed her father “the worst thing he had ever had in his mouth…so terrible that he leaned over and spit it into the sink and then grabbed the coffeepot, put the spout into his mouth, and tried to eradicate the flavor.” In explanation, Reichl writes that her mother was “taste-blind and unafraid of rot.”
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A Desert in Bohemia

By Jill Paton Walsh
St. Martin’s Press
2000 (first edition)
Condition: Very good; owner’s name inscribed; additional inscription reads: “Door County, Feb. 2001.”

Why I keep it: intellectual, emotional ^[*]

British author Jill Paton Walsh may be best known for her work as a children’s author and for her mysteries featuring sleuth Imogen Quy. She also completed Dorothy L. Sayers’ final unfinished novel “Thrones, Dominations.” Less well known in the United States are her adult novels, including “Knowledge of Angels” (shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize) and “A Desert in Bohemia.”

I picked up “A Desert in Bohemia” while on vacation in Door County, Wis. in February 2001 when Jesse and I were shopping at the lovely independent Passtimes Books in Sister Bay. I’ll admit that I was first drawn to the novel because of its evocative cover (a scratched sepia-toned photo of an angel statue with the title in cursive script), but a cover alone isn’t enough to make me buy a book.

The opening paragraph electrified me:

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Middlesex

By Jeffrey Eugenides
Farrar, Strauss, Giroux
2002 (first edition)
Condition: Pristine; signed by author with a personalized inscription that reads “To Heather L. S. all best and thanks for reading slowly.”

Why I keep it: intellectual, personal ^[*]

Somewhere on my overstuffed books shelves, I have a copy of “The Virgin Suicides,” Jeffrey Eugenides‘ first novel; and while I think his debut is worth reading, I treasure his expansive, generational novel “Middlesex.” (I had no trouble putting my hands on it when I decided to write this post.)

From the title, which plays with one of the novel’s main themes (intersexuality) to the twisting, delicious narrative, I had a feeling from the first moment it arrived on my desk that this book would be an important American novel.

In the opening lines of my Oct. 25, 2002 review, I wrote “In many ways, author Jeffrey Eugenides’ new novel “Middlesex” can be described as the ultimate American story. While ostensibly telling the painful coming-of-age tale of a young hermaphrodite, Eugenides takes time to explore the promise of the American dream — that heady mix of life, liberty, the chance to make buckets of money and ultimately, the ability to reinvent oneself.”

I was high on this book, but I also felt that Farrar, Strauss, Giroux was having some trouble marketing the novel to a more general readership. Whereas “The Virgin Suicides” was an easy sell (boys meet girls, girls kill selves, boys obsess about meaning of these suicides), “Middlesex,” like the fictional lives it contained, was messy, intricate and confounding. Was it a novel about intersexuality? Or a family history? Was it a story about being the other, in all of that word’s meaning? Or about the ultimate redemption of family? (Yes. Yes. Yes. And yes.)
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The Dirty Cowboy

By Amy Timberlake, Pictures by Adam Rex
Farrar Straus Giroux
2003 (first edition)
Condition: Excellent.

Why I keep it: intellectual ^[*]

Rarely have I been more delighted by a children’s picture book than when I read (and re-read and re-read yet again) Timberlake’s debut book, “The Dirty Cowboy.” The best picture books provide a perfect marriage between story and illustrator, and the publisher Farrar Straus Giroux made a wonderful decision when it paired Timberlake’s dryly humorous text with illlustrator Adam Rex’s outstandingly funny and richly detailed pictures.

There’s a wonderful history to this book as well. Apparently this story was one Timberlake’s grandfather told her when she was a kid, and when she decided to write her first book, this was the story that most wanted to be told.

The Cowboy of the title is one filthy hombre. Timberlake lists his crimes against hygiene as follows: “(his) hair housed thirty-two fleas and a small grey spider”; “he’d discovered a tumbleweed in his chaps”; “a flurry of flies flocked round his body buzzing so persistently that he experienced a distinct loss of hearing in his left ear”; and “(his) stench stuck to passersby like mud splashed up from a wagon wheel.”

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Birds of America: Stories

By Lorrie Moore
Alfred A. Knopf
1998 (first edition)
Condition: Some wear on book jacket including evidence of water damage; annotated text; owner’s name inscribed.

Why I keep it: intellectual, emotional, personal ^[*]

I reviewed Moore’s collection “Birds of America” in October 1998. The piece ran in The Capital Times, and it was my first review for the paper. I had previously written a profile about poet (and fiction writer) Tenaya Darlington (who later became a very good friend), but the Moore review was my first run as a real reviewer.

I’ve always suspected that my editor, John Nichols, chose me because I was utterly unknown in local literary circles, and when he asked me to do the review, I didn’t immediately start giggling like a small child over the honor of writing about one of America’s most revered short story writers (”Self Help”). I was excited to write the review, yes, but I wasn’t star-struck. I believe that suited Nichol’s purposes perfectly.

He reminded me with an appropriate amount of gravity that Moore, who serves as the Delmore Schwartz Professor in the Humanities in the Creative Writing Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1984-present), had a strong local following, a move that injected just the right amount of tension into my consideration of the book. I was stepping into some big shoes with the review, and I knew Nichols wouldn’t accept any opinions that didn’t have the hallmarks of careful, incisive thought. I wanted to please Nichols, and I wanted to be true to the collection’s literary worth.
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I’ve been absent from this blog for months, not because I have nothing to say but rather because I vowed to leave the blog alone until I finished my long-unfinished novel.

Yeah, so that was an empty promise. In other words, I’m baaaaack. Oh, and the novel isn’t finished. Yet. (I’m getting closer and closer, though, and 2010 will be the year of finishing it.)

I’m sure I’ll be recounting a few stories of animal high jinx, and certainly the growing season is nearly upon so there will be gardening information to relate. Yet, today my thoughts turn to the past, specifically reading I’ve done over the years.

On this fine snow day, Jesse and I finally got around to moving the six-foot wobbling book shelf that houses my all-time favorite books to a safer, less wobbly location. (The shelf threatened to kill me and a poodle recently, so relocating it was very important.) Moving these books has made me realize that every reader must have, as I do, four or five shelves of “wow, I really need to read/finish/crack open” books and perhaps one or two shelves of beloved, adored can’t-live-without volumes.

Or as avid reader Jennifer H. wrote, as we debated the pros and cons of e-book readers:
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