Alone in Abu Tor
Eric Orner spends Passover in Jerusalem

A couple of years ago I found myself working as an artist on a new animated film being made overseas. Although the movie's creators were Californian, the money behind the film was Israeli, and the principal investor had a much cherished vision of creating a vibrant arts and culture hub in the unlikely location of Jerusalem. Dour, Stoney, Combustible, Contested Jerusalem. I kept a sketchbook diary of my times there, and Pesach seems like a good place to start: Having grown up a secular Jew, I am fairly well acquainted with how endless your normal seder can be. Wise to this, I was pretty determined to dodge whatever invites were extended to me by my new work colleagues. A two-hour seder with one's family is one thing, the four-hour version with devout strangers being quite another. All I really wanted to do during the long Passover weekend off was eat, sleep, read and maybe go to the beach...

Posted on April 9, 2009 | Etc. | Permalink

Zoe Strauss Documents Inauguration Day

Posted on January 20, 2009 | Etc. | Permalink

Writing Home
Keith Lee Morris Checks in from Sandpoint

Keith Lee Morris's story Testimony appeared in APS 3.

Thomas Wolfe couldn't go home and William Faulkner couldn't seem to leave very successfully and Ernest Hemingway seemed to be looking for some lost idea of it everywhere and T.S. Eliot apparently found it about five minutes after arriving in England, becoming even paler and more prunish and speaking with an accent, and then you've got Annie Proulx who seems to feel so right at home just about anywhere she is that she can't get a pen in her hand fast enough to suit her, and there's Eudora Welty who says home is where everything begins, really, in whatever little place, to which someone like James Baldwin might say, Yeah, right, it does, and isn't that a bitch, and then F. Scott Fitzgerald comes along and trumps them all by pointing out how home is not just a place, but a place in time, how we're all borne (born?) ceaselessly into the past.

Which is a fancy (or maybe just muddled) way of saying that I arrived in my hometown of Sandpoint, Idaho, again last week, at the end of a ten-day book tour. My last reading was in Moscow, home of the University of Idaho. The owner of the bookstore there, a nice man named Bob Greene who's had me read there before, miscalculated a bit this time around, scheduling my reading on the same day as the Idaho-Boise State football game. The biggest problem wasn't the small crowd, almost all the members of which I knew personally, but the lack of vacant motel rooms. I was traveling with four of my buddies from high school, and we huddled in John's Alley, the local watering hole, trying to figure out what to do besides drink beer. Someone finally mentioned that we might as well go to Sandpoint, and I tapped my ruby red slippers and there I was, a mere three hours later, walking down First Avenue with a group of people I'd known since I was about twelve, effectively thrust back into my childhood and adolescence. We ended the evening, appropriately, playing darts in a bar which, when I was a kid, was the town's only Mexican restaurant, and which, as an adult, I first met my wife in. The town still feels like home, and it's still where most of my fiction is set.

Okay, I know, a lot of writers--a lot of people in general--leave their hometowns and never look back, or they only do so regretfully. Has Tom (not Thomas) Wolfe ever written about Richmond? What's he trying so hard to forget--the ballet lessons he was forced to take there? Can anyone imagine that Donald Barthelme actually grew up in Houston? But I think that writers are, by and large, a bunch that looks steadily, if not ceaselessly, into the past, and that they tend to draw their inspiration more from the way back when than the here and now. Joyce, who went to France and forever wrote about Dublin. Twain, some part of him always attached to that river. Cather, holed up in Greenwich Village but still thinking about the grassy plains.

Me? Home is a small town inside a ring of mountains, on the shore of a massive glacial lake. Population roughly 7,000 now, 4,144 back when I was a teenager (I can remember it exactly from the sign on the bridge into town--at the next census, the number on the sign changed to 4,305). Why do I keep writing about Sandpoint? Here's a three-part theory that I'll advance in regard to writers and their hometowns in general:

1. We're never sure we know anyplace as well as we know our hometowns. We knew things there in a more visceral if less nuanced way, and we remember them better. Maybe we didn't study the mechanisms that drove the local economy or spend a lot of time worrying about the area's geography or hang out at the local museums, things we would do if we wanted to get to know a place nowadays. But we know exactly what it was like when, one winter day, our friend Mike tried to pet the German shepherd that always lay on the sidewalk on Lake Street, and the dog lunged at him and nearly bit off his ear. We can remember exactly how, when the dog sprang, Mike scrunched up his shoulders and shut his eyes tight and made that funny high-pitched sound, how he grabbed our arm with his cold fingers, how his breath came out like dragon smoke between his gritted teeth. And we can remember acutely the embarrassment of the time when we went to the drive-in with the cutest of all the cute cheerleaders, and we were trying to act cool but we were actually very nervous, and we twisted up the ketchup packet until it exploded all over our white pants. Fiction is ultimately memory.

2. We aren't at all sure that the people we are now are really as us as the people we were then. Weren't we more authentically ourselves? Didn't we compromise less? Weren't we not so full of shit? Weren't we more open, more vulnerable, more generous, more easily frightened, on occasion a whole lot more cruel? Didn't we wear ourselves on our sleeves? Weren't the heights higher, the depths lower, and couldn't we go from one to the other in a heartbeat? My God, so much could depend on a single day. The morning didn't break fair, and we didn't get to go to the lighthouse, and we remembered it all of our lives.

3. It's not so much that we can't go home again, it's that we don't go home again. Most of us writer types have moved on to someplace else--the college campus, the big city. Writing about our hometowns is a way of revisiting them. My parents used to own a small house on the Pend O'Reille River. It had a long, sloping lawn that went down to the water and it was very quiet and in the autumn bald eagles nested in the fir trees along the shore. Years after my parents sold the place, I began to realize that it was slipping from my memory. And so I wrote about it, in extremely close detail, using a character who was slowly going blind as a metaphor for the way the place was slowly receding from my mind's eye. A lot of people have asked me about that character, but to me it wasn't the character who mattered--it was getting that place down on paper, before it disappeared. When I walk the streets of Sandpoint now, I'm usually with friends, and I'm usually distracted, and I've usually had a few beers, and the old town isn't the same anyway--it's only when I write about Sandpoint that I'm fully there. In the years after he left, Thomas Wolfe wrote literally millions of words on the subject of his hometown in the North Carolina mountains, Asheville. Which is to say that he did go home again, over and over, every time the pen touched the page.

Posted on November 25, 2008 | Etc. | Permalink

You Can't Say That!
Keith Lee Morris on Homecoming and Banishment

Keith Lee Morris’s story Testimony appeared in APS 3. His new novel, The Dart League King, is out this month from Tin House Books.

I’m from north Idaho and most of my fiction is set there, so last month I met up with several old friends in my hometown of Sandpoint, where Tin House Books helped my friend Denise organize a book launch party for The Dart League King.

It was at Pend Oreille Winery, a very nice place owned by a high-school friend of mine. My high-school English teacher, Mrs. Love, was there, and lots of other folks I hadn’t seen in forever. My friends are gracious to a fault in playing host. They all buy copies of my latest book and ask questions about it and buy me drinks afterward… basically it’s an ongoing conspiracy to humor me by pretending that I’m special when the truth is, as everyone in town who’s paying any attention knows, the real writer from Sandpoint is Pulitzer winner Marilynne Robinson, whose book about the town, Housekeeping—has, mmm, well, it’s done a little better than any of my own.

I once took a workshop from Ms. Robinson, whose fiction I admire immensely (Housekeeping really is one of the most beautiful and intelligent novels I’ve ever read). At the end of the week-long course, I had an individual meeting with MR to talk about my work. I envisioned it as a literary milestone of sorts, the passing of the torch from one highly respected Idaho author to a highly promising (this was my view, at any rate) youngster from the same neck of the woods, a scene that would be recounted years hence by serious biographers.

It turned out, though, that she doesn’t like the sort of thing I do as much as I like the sort of thing she does. I had this short story with a character who cussed so much that even I was offended, and we had a discussion about it (him) that after roughly twenty years or so I remember this way:

“You can’t do this,” Marilynne Robinson says to me.

“Huh?” I say to her.

“This won’t work,” she says.

“What?” I say to her.

“All this cursing.”

“What?”

“No one talks this way.”

“What?”

“No one uses this much profanity,” she says to me. “No one talks this way.”

“What?” I say.

“What’s wrong with you?” Marilynne Robinson asks.

“Look,” I say, “I know this place called the Capricorn Lounge. Come down there with me tonight. Every single person in the Capricorn Lounge talks this way.”

“No, thank you,” Marilynne Robinson says to me.

Sigh.

She was probably right, about all the cussing, I mean, and I probably should have learned my lesson way back then, but no, apparently I did not. The Dart League King, I found out recently, has already been sent packing by one angry bookstore owner due to its excessive profanity (it’s really just one character, and I would think a bookstore owner could tell the difference between a profane character and a profane novel, but all right, whatever).

The nice lady who owns the store in Spokane, Washington, told my publisher that even though she had agreed to schedule a reading for me, that was before she’d actually read the book, and now she wouldn’t be requiring my services. Maybe she wanted my writing to be more like that nice young man’s she had in the bookstore once, Chuck Palahniuk—he has a really interesting anecdote about his visit to her store, which you can read here.

That’s it for now—next time I think I’ll talk about Sarah Palin, who’s also from my hometown. And maybe about why I still have such a strong bond with my old friends from there and what that has to do with writing, if anything

Posted on October 14, 2008 | Etc. | Permalink