The West Continues to Tug at My Sleeve

Arizona neighbors

I have two books to share today, but first I’ll be taking a brief memory trip. By this time last winter, David and Sarah and I were in the high desert of southeast Arizona, bedding down in a small cabin in a ghost town, with mountains on all sides, and as I told David the other day, I think about it more than he would ever guess.

“What do you miss most about it?” he asked curiously. He never fell in love with the area the way I did. 

That kind of question, though, is almost impossible to answer! It’s like asking what you love most about someone you love: features and qualities of a person or place are not discrete building blocks, not elements at all. Everything goes together. But it seemed a worthwhile question to try to answer, so I thought a while and then said, “Maybe the light. The way the sun shone almost every day and the cabin was so bright and full of light.” 

Michigan winter

Continually overcast winter skies in Michigan are much harder to bear than snow and cold, although with the beginning of February our days are already significantly longer, and, I say happily (on a good morning), “Spring is only two months away!” Here at home, our beloved old farmhouse is divided into small rooms in the way people built in the old days in northern Michigan. Also, the gracious, windowed front porch, where we spend so many evenings in other seasons but which is unheated in winter, forms an insulating barrier along the front of the house, as does the woodshed in back, meaning that our central room, the one where we do most of our winter living, has no exterior walls and is thus protected from cold winter winds. Evening coziness is the room’s strong suit. During the day, however, it is almost as dark as tiny-windowed Basque stone farmhouse in the Pyrenees.

Contrast that with --

Dos Cabezas sunrise

Light comes in!

The ghost town cabin in the high desert was basically one large room, with uninsulated plywood walls and lots of windows. I was up every morning before or as the sun’s first light broke over the mountains to the east, and as the morning progressed I moved between my writing table and the cabin windows, with pleasure and satisfaction at the routine, first lost in working and then called to adjust, once more, the slant of the blinds. The idea was to close them against the night cold of the desert when darkness fell in the evening, open them slightly for the first morning light, open fully once the sun’s warmth became available, and then, later, angle them half-closed again to keep the cabin air from becoming uncomfortably hot. The regularity of light and darkness governed the hours of the days and nights.

I could go on at this point and start listing other things I miss, but my main point at present is only that the desert and mountains carved a place for themselves in my heart, so now I read books set in the West with greater interest and feel a personal sympathy that landscape and culture did not call forth for me before our time there.

One heart-rending book I finished reading last week was Dead in Their Tracks: Crossing America’s Desert Borderlands in the New Era, by John Annerino, and I wish I’d known about this book when Trinity was choosing to read on the subject of migrant workers from Mexico. The author’s research went further into the dangerous experience of border crossing than anything else I know or can imagine. At one time he and the four Mexican immigrant workers he was accompanying on their desperate bid to find work were out of water and facing death. His book, in fact, documents as many as possible of the lives that have been lost over the years in this dangerous crossing.

Art at border crossing

Annerino pursued his story mostly in northern Sonora, Mexico, and southwest Arizona, U.S. My little cow town in southeast Arizona, Willcox, was mentioned only two or three times in passing, Dos Cabezas (the ghost town) not at all. The low “killing fields” desert of saguaro is not the high desert of cows. Still, my single experience of being overcome by sun and heat in the Dragoon Mountains -- the part of the hiking story that I left out of my online account -- gave me some small sense of what those crossing the desert must encounter.

(One question: everyone stresses water, but no one, in either movies or books about la frontera, seems to mention electrolytes. I had plenty of water on my hike with a friend in the mountains – water, food, sunshade, sunblock – but it took me many months later, in conversation with someone who has spent years in Africa, to realize that as perspiration and breathing wicked moisture from my body, I was also losing salt and that water alone was doing nothing to replace the salt. I think, in fact, that the more water I drank, the faster I was washing out and depleting my electrolytes, because gulp as I might, I kept having spells of dizziness when my entire field of vision became nothing but buzzing light, and I had to sit down to keep from falling. Not many times in my life have I felt life’s fragility so keenly. So what about salt tablets? Does anyone carry them in the desert? If not, how do they manage without them? If so, why are they never mentioned?)

My head is spinning, my body is convulsing with chills and nausea, and the ground is heaving at me in dizzying waves of sand and rock when Marcelino first sees Interstate 8: “Mira! La carretera!” (Look! The highway!)

Some would fault -- have, I’m sure, faulted -- Annerino for lack of journalistic objectivity, but I have no criticism of his book on that count. Here is a writer who walked way more than “a mile” in the shoes of his subjects – and walked with them for miles, too. Is an objective account of such an experience possible? Where is another journalist who has had the guts even to undertake such an experience, let alone attempt to write about it dispassionately? Besides, any reader is free to dismiss or skim over the writer’s pleadings on behalf his subjects, and still the bare, unadorned, hard facts remain, facts that must give rise to urgent questions demanding answers.

If you are an American, whatever your views on immigration and border control, you should read this book.

My only disappointment with this book was technical, in that the copyediting left a lot to be desired. For that I do not fault the author, however, but the publisher, the University of Arizona Press. The editing buck always stops with the publisher, as I see it. So what gives here? I expect any book from a university press to have regularity of pronouns and agreement between nouns and verbs. I do not expect to find infelicitous, badly chosen adjectives or confusing syntax. When my inner editor has to work as hard as it did with this book, more than one someone has seriously fallen down on the job.

I’ll zero in on one very specific criticism, too. With any obscure technical jargon or regional idiom, i.e., in this book, “cutting sign” -- a phrase that appears as early as the introduction and repeatedly through the book, sometimes as frequently as two or three times on a single page -- I expect the first instance to be accompanied by a definition for the uninitiated reader. In context, we gradually figure out that “cutting sign” has something to do with tracking, but is it different from tracking or just another way of saying the same thing? If different, in what way? Informing and being mysterious are mutually incompatible goals.

Still, read the book. Read the book. Read the book! Too many people with strongly held and very loud opinions about the border know nothing of its reality in the lives of desperate men, women, and children.

From the borderland, my reading next took me northward to Nevada. Sweet Promised Land, by Robert Laxalt, first published in 1957, is now considered a classic of the American West. Where Dead in Their Tracks informs readers about the present and challenges them to envision a better future, Sweet Promised Land looks backward to the rough frontier days of Nevada in the early 20^th century, open range, cattlemen vs. sheepmen, towns not yet come into their own, and immigrants who came primarily to make money, perhaps also to learn English, with always the dream of returning home to their native European villages as self-made American success stories.

Such is the time and setting of Sweet Promised Land, but that description tells you nothing of the reading experience. Part memoir, part biography, with much necessary history woven in, it is a book that rises above genre, but not with fireworks or the least pretension. A small book, only 158 pages, it begins modestly and proceeds quietly. You take it up with mild curiosity and find yourself drawn into another world – another life, that is, stretching between two very different worlds – and you are reluctant to have it far from your hand when you stop to do something else for a while.

“My father was a sheepherder, and his home was the hills.”

How does that simple sentence cast such an immediate spell? It reminds me of Isaak Dinesen’s “Once I had a farm in Africa” and also puts me in mind of the story of a nonbeliever who demanded of Hillel that he explain the Torah to him while he was standing on one foot. Hillel's response? “Love your neighbor as yourself. The rest is commentary.” In a very real sense, the life of the author’s sheepherding father in America, Basque origins in the Pyrenees, the long-delayed visit home to aged family back in that mountain range between France and Spain, and the realization of father and son that Nevada, not the Basque country, was now their own family home – all is contained, in seed form, in the book’s perfect opening sentence.

First the son tells of his own childhood and the relationship of his largely absent father to the family. While their mother managed family businesses in town, the father was in the mountains most of the time in his sheep camp, not a fixed abode but one that shifted as the sheep were moved to new grazing. All the Basque sheepherders talked of going back to France “next year” to visit families, but very few ever made the trip. But with Laxalt’s aging sisters back in the old country longing to see him again, Robert and his brothers conspire to arrange for their father to take, at last, the long-delayed trip.

And with that we leave the modern world behind altogether. In the Basque villages, following two world wars, nothing in the way of life had changed since Dominique had left:

...There was a little boy in a beret and short trousers, and under his arm a loaf of bread that seemed as long as he was. There was a crude, wooden cart pulled by two oxen, whose nodding heads kept rhythm with the gay fringes on their horns. There was a girl in a scarf and bright peasant dress....

Men still wore wooden shoes to work outdoors, and women still cooked in huge iron pots hung in fireplaces. Nothing had changed -- except the man returning to the country and everyone he had left behind almost half a century before. Years that left stone buildings exactly as they were had left their mark on human beings. Dominique would see a familiar face and think he recognized an old friend, only to learn that the friend was dead, and this was the friend’s son.

My inner editor lay back, mental pencil hand idle, while I lost myself in Sweet Promised Land. The effect of beautiful prose is to carry a reader effortlessly forward, its only drawback that the end comes too soon!

Besides nonfiction categorization and Western subject matter, the third commonality of these two books, and the most important, is the American immigrant experience. In both stories we as readers encounter the hopes of immigrants and the new land’s promise of a better life, if the newcomers only have the determination to work very, very hard to conquer poverty, overcome prejudice, and win a place for themselves in the sweet promised land.

Determination, willingness to work, and, it must be added, the good fortune to see their adventure through. One of Dominique’s fellow immigrants was not lucky. Many of those whose stories Annerino tells are not.

Poverty in Agua Prieta

And I want to dedicate today's post to my dear friend Helen. She will understand why.

Have We Left Macomb County Yet?

For thus hath the Lord said unto me,

Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth.

-      Isaiah 21:6

Go Set a Watchman,

by Harper Lee

NY: HarperCollins, 2015

Hardcover, $27.99

We’re back in Macomb County, Alabama. It is the 1950s. Jean Louise, formerly the child called “Scout,” now 26 years old and visiting from New York City, thinks she has outgrown her hometown -- but she still wrestles with the idea of marrying Hank, who would never live anywhere else. Her beloved  brother Jem is dead. Jean Louise doesn’t fit in with the women of the town, whatever their age. The last straw is discovering that her father-hero-god, Atticus, has feet of clay. Atticus is a flawed human being. But then, Scout herself is not perfect....

Everyone in America knows the story behind this book. We have all read in the newspapers and online and heard on the radio (and online) that Go Set a Watchman was Harper Lee’s first version of the novel that eventually became the award-winning classic To Kill a Mockingbird. Her editor in the 1950s was most taken with the flashbacks to childhood in the manuscript and suggested that the author rewrite the story, setting it entirely in that era, telling it all from the child's point of view. Perhaps it was the image of Scout and Jem in the balcony of the courthouse, watching their father from the “colored” section, that inspired the editor’s suggestions.

Did the editor also urge Lee to make Atticus a more sympathetic character? In the rewrite, was it Harper Lee’s idea or the editor’s to have Atticus lose the case in which he defended the black man from a rape charge, rather than winning it, as in GSAW’s backstory? Why the change? For the sake of realism or because the novel’s readership would find the TKAM outcome more acceptable?

Because I know so many writers and hear so many of their stories of revising and rewriting and responding to suggestions from agents and editors, and because I have been writing a first novel myself this year (writing, revising, beginning again after scrapping earlier chapters), I am fascinated by Harper Lee’s two novels – the distance between them, the changes, the different shapes, and the editor’s input. When I started reading the first pages of GSAW, I couldn’t help reading each word and sentence very consciously, remarking every choice of word and arrangement of words, but gradually the story took me over, and I let it carry me like a river.

When Jean Louise goes to visit Calpurnia and realizes for the first time what her aunt meant by insisting that Calpurnia was like family but not family, when Calpurnia does not respond to Jean Louise as if to her little child, Scout, a crack appears in Jean Louise’s picture of the way she grew up. I could not help thinking in this section of a far lesser novel, The Help. Love across such differences in situation could only be ambivalent. Soon Jean Louise realizes a similar ambivalence in her love for Hank and even for her father. She realizes her separateness. What she must learn before the end of the book is that separateness does not contradict her belonging to a community and that she does not have to agree with every opinion held by another individual to love that person.

If Harper Lee’s publisher had, years ago, given us instead TKAM instead of GSAW, would we ever have had the former at all? And what would have been the fate of GSAW if published in 1960 instead of TKAM? It strikes me that the American reading public in 1960 can be seen as Jean Louise at 26 years old in GSAW: on the cusp of growing up, starting in that direction, but with a long way to go.

If Harper Lee had published this newly released novel thirty years ago, might she have gone on to write a third by now, one in which Jean Louise reaches a wise maturity and works with Calpurnia to bring about a New South? We will never know, and there will not be a third Harper Lee Novel. But when I reached the last page of Go Set a Watchman, I was very glad to have been able to read it. I expected to find it interesting only because I was curious, for reasons mentioned above, and found, in addition, a novel satisfying to read in itself. That was a complete surprise, given most of the reviews.

What I wonder now is, where is our country in 2015, fifty-five years after the original publication of Harper Lee’s beloved classic? How many Americans are able to continue a conversation across differences, political as well as racial and religious? Do we run away from those whose opinions we find distasteful and repulsive, refusing to have anything to do with them, seeing the world as Us vs. Them?

After reading the new release, do we think Jean Louise will grow up? At the end of the story, we have hopes that she will, but the larger question probably is, will we? And where are we today, relative to where we were in 1960? What do you think?

Reply to Duncan on the Role of Traditional Publishers

This post began as a comment to be published on Duncan‘s blog, but as my intended comment grew longer and longer it seemed to me that posting it on my own blog, with links, would make more sense. So here’s the post that sparked my response and will give a clearer picture of what follows below.

15 September 2014

Dear Duncan,

As you and I are both booksellers with open shops, and you are in addition a working writer with your own books to sell, I’m always interested in comparing your perspective on publishing and self-publishing with mine. As I’m sure you know, best-selling author Stephen King did experiment with self-publishing an e-book but then turned back to the traditional road. Here’s a link with a brief discussion of why King and others might not want to self-publish.

My own bookstore experience with a majority of self-published authors continues to be fraught with difficulties. Not always—the self-published titles I carry in my shop are clearly exceptions!--and more often than not I give self-published books, whether brought to me in person or hawked to me by e-mail, a cool reception. For me as a bookseller, there are two big large, distinct problems, and here they are:

First (and labeling one “first” and the other “second” is completely arbitrary), all too many self-published book authors want to be writers but don’t realize that by self-publishing they are also going into business. Let me repeat: Publishing is a business. If you’re going to self-publish, you’re going into business. Instead, most of the authors who come to me (there are exceptions, thank heaven) are neither prepared for nor interested in accounting, advertising, bookkeeping, distribution, marketing, publicity, or any of the myriad other business aspects of getting their books into readers’ hands and keeping track of even the most modest paperwork. “I just want to write books.” And so they bring their books into my bookstore without any kind of basic written consignment forms or invoice forms. The serious writers among them do better or quickly learn their lessons, but as the wannabes increase in number, the problem grows rather than diminishing. You suggest that a distributor take on this problem – who would want to? Herding cats and taking on responsibility for litter boxes? Distributors, like publishers, like booksellers, need their businesses to survive. The writer who has an agent as well as a publicist still has to do a lot of personal appearances and other kinds of marketing these days, but being with a legitimate publishing house smoothes the way.

My second (or should I say simply “other”?) problem with self-published books, be they fiction or nonfiction, is that way too many  are very poorly edited, even in cases where the author has paid someone for “professional” editing. Yes, I use the scare quotes intentionally, because I often wonder, other than charging for editing a manuscript, what other professional qualifications were brought to the job? Editing problems range from the level of words and sentences (e.g., misspellings, inappropriate word use, run-on sentences, bad punctuation) to the level of narrative (e.g., undeveloped characters, confusing transitions, or even a “story” in which little if anything happens at all).

Your own willingness to rewrite and rewrite, tightening up your stories and bringing your characters to life (as I read in many of your blog posts) is admirable. If only this willingness were more widely shared among those who dream of becoming book authors! (Readers, Duncan writes very forthrightly about his own writing, as will evident to you if you read some of the older posts on his blog.)

It’s child's play these days to have a book "designed" and those dearly beloved pages bound – easier still, perhaps, and probably cheaper, to throw it out into the world in e-format. Regardless of investment, however, most self-published authors don’t want only to see their book in the marketplace. They also want readers. And that’s where offering a product that has recognizable value, along with offering it in a professional, businesslike manner to make it worth the while of intermediaries, makes all the difference. As a bookseller, I am much more comfortable dealing with traditional publishers through traditional book distributors, whenever possible, for these reasons. 

Outdoor States of Mind and Phases of Writing

Meadow with morning dew

Out in the Garden

If I wake up in the morning worrying and fretting, my mood always lightens when I step through the door and out into the green June Michigan world. Watering gardens enhances that lightness of spirit, as imagining the relief of the plants at these gentle showers from my hand induces a calm, generous, altruistic mood.

Actual planting – seeds or plants – is more exciting than calming, but the state of mind created by that activity is positive and altruistic, too, like watering. Both have to do with nurture, with a turning outward from self, a caring for the world.

Little plum tree, pruned

I didn’t used to like pruning at all. It felt like wanton, cruel maiming. Only after working with a master gardener friend, who taught me not only how to do it and why, was I able to consider pruning as beneficial, and now when I set to pruning a tree or shrub, I see myself setting it free to be more, paradoxically, than it would be otherwise be. Pruning stimulates growth, too. 

One task that can lead my mind into a negative path, though, is weeding. Something about grubbing out invaders of my precious garden space -- maybe the time it takes -- calls up thoughts of slights, resentments, annoyances and irritations with human beings in my life. Perhaps the energy generated is well spent, weeding, but I don’t like dwelling on negative encounters. I would rather let go of annoyance than nurture negativity.

A lesson from the garden: What we nurture will grow; what we don’t want to grow, we should not nurture.

How, though, to resolve my weeding state of mind? It’s a good thing I mulch as heavily as I do, substituting heavy applications of spoiled straw for bare earth that must be tirelessly cultivated and weeded! But there is no escaping entirely the presence of weeds. What to do? Let them remain?

Untidy strawberry bed

One morning last week while pulling grass and dandelions from the strawberry bed, I tried to enter my pruning state of mind. Instead of hating the weeds, instead of a warring approach, I focused on the strawberry plants and their desire not to be crowded and strangled. Still pulling out unwanted plants by the roots, whenever possible, I found myself handling them more gently. They hadn’t done anything wrong. They were only trying to live, like any other plant or animal on earth. Killing them isn’t the point: giving the garden plants room to thrive is.

Parallels? Writing//Gardening?

Oh, the excitement of beginning a first draft! It’s like planting, isn’t it? Returning each day to add pages – that’s watering. To fill a notebook is to sow a field. Will there be a harvest? 

How much work between planting and harvest? The discipline of practice combines with the background excitement of hope. Maybe this will be really good!

Can you see the corn shoots emerging?

Revising and rewriting involve pruning – and sometimes grafting. That is, the revision process may be subtractive, additive, or both. The similarity to pruning is that it is a process of shaping. What might have begun as messy wandering fragments or a sprawling, ungainly mass must be relieved of extraneous material and dead ends. Sometimes beautiful, beloved sentences or paragraphs need to be sacrificed for the form of the whole. Tempting to defend, difficult to cut!

And where does weeding come in? That’s the copy editing phase. Most of us who write have certain words or phrases on which we lean too heavily – an adjective that crops up three times in a single page, for instance, signals a need to weed. Little words, too (and, but, said, etc.), can clutter the page is they are too numerous. But it’s difficult to copy edit one’s own work! (Exclamation marks generally weaken the statements the end. Does the exclamation mark preceding the opening parenthesis need to go?) Grammar and spelling software prod you inappropriately in one sentence and let errors slide on the same page.

Copy editing someone else’s work can be like weeding someone else’s garden, calling forth the terrible temptation to be annoyed. How can a writer not know the function of a semicolon? The difference between ‘rein’ and ‘reign’? When to use a subject pronoun and when to use an object pronoun? What's with all this pesky grass smothering the iris? The paradox is that the good copy-editor must pick nits but will be happier if she can do it while continuing to admire the writer and love the work. Focus on freeing up the garden, not destroying weeds!

I’ve worked as a copy editor, doing my first copy editing, unofficially, while working as a typist. I’m pretty good at it. But these days I say no, thank you, to offers of copy editing jobs, because they take up too much mental space for too long a time, and I already feel my mental space, like my free time, is scant and precious.

Outdoors – with sketchbook and pen or pencils, with camera, with dog, mowing grass, watering or weeding gardens – I can engage in activity and have my mind free at the same time. Then, when the time comes to immerse myself once more in written words, my own or someone else’s, I go to the page with a refreshed spirit.

Reminder: This Friday is our 21^st bookstore birthday party with live poets! We have gone from a round dozen to a baker’s dozen (thirteen), adding Teresa Scollon to the list of those who will be present. Official start time is 5 p.m., but come early to choose your seat for the readings and to get a head start on enjoying refreshments.

“Life is short. Have dessert first.”

Note: Guest poets will be 
Patricia Clark, 
Linda Nemec Foster, 
Joy Friedler,

Francine J. Harris, 
Dennis Hinrichsen, 
David James, 
Josie Kearns,

Bill Olsen, 
Anne-Marie Oomen, 
Mary Ann Samyn, 
Teresa Scollon,

Alison Swan, 
and Keith Taylor. 
The cost of the anthology (which also includes beautiful color art reproductions of work by Michigan artists), including sales tax, is $42.50. Bring your own folding chair and receive a 5% discount off the $40 list price of the book.