Non-fiction

Writing that rocks – Rick Bragg

Cathy LaGrow 4 Comments

Classification: memoir, non-fiction

He writes more gorgeous sentences per capita than any writer I’ve ever read. For a while, after you finish one of his stories, most other writing seems flat and uninteresting (yes, even the good stuff.) Without having a college education, he became a long-time reporter for The New York Times, won a Pulitzer Prize (and more than 50 other writing awards), received a Nieman fellowship to Havard, and is now a professor at the University of Alabama.

His name is Rick Bragg, and words turn to pure magic in his hands, that’s all.

In 1999, after many successful years as a newspaper journalist, Bragg started publishing memoirs, mostly about his own rural Southern family – and the critics went nuts. Several things converge in these stories: he is deeply passionate about these people; his family tree is chock-full of the most colorful characters imaginable; and Rick Bragg is simply one of the best writers and storytellers alive.

After I read the first chapter of All Over but the Shoutin, I set the book in my lap, looked off into the distance, and thought to myself, “You have got to be kidding.” You know how great writers can sometimes craft sentences that are so beautiful, they seem to reach out of the page and shake you? And you stop and read those sentences a few times over, just for the joy of it? With Bragg, every single page is peppered with those kinds of sentences.

It’s no good trying to articulate what he does. So I’ll give you some of his own words. (This is the very end of the prologue to All Over but the Shoutin, a book that is sort of a love letter to his mother):

No, this is not an important book. The people who know about books call it a memoir, but that is much too fancy a word for me, for her, for him. It is only a story of a handful of lives, in which one tall, blond woman, her back forever bent by the pull of that sack, comes off looking good and noble, and a dead man gets to answer for himself from deep in the ground. In these pages I will make the dead dance again with the living, not to get at any great truth, just a few little ones. It is still a damn hard thing to do, when you think about it.
God help me, Momma, if I am clumsy.

Incidentally, I met Rick Bragg at the public library in Salem, Oregon, on a rainy evening in early 2006 when I was very pregnant with my first child. My brother and I sat in a medium-sized lecture hall and watched as a woman from the library escorted Bragg to the podium. He was taller than I’d expected, a brick of a man with floppy hair and a heavy leather jacket that he never took off. He seemed guarded, as famous people are.

Like many great wordsmiths, he was not overly eloquent in person – or maybe he was just tired. He gripped the podium with one hand and talked a bit about writing his previous books, and about his upcoming one (The Prince of Frogtown, which I am reading now.) After answering a few audience questions, he went into the hallway and sat at a folding table to sign books.

My brother bought a book and we stood in line. When we reached Bragg, I was too shy to say anything more than “Hi.” But my brother bent over the table, gestured to me and said, “My sister, here, told me that you are America’s greatest living writer.” (It’s true. I had said that.) Bragg looked at me and his mouth turned up a bit at one corner and he joked, “Well, then, I’ll have to put your baby through college.” He scribbled his signature and we said goodbye and walked down the hall and out the door.

Sometimes I wish I could go back in time, to redeem that moment by saying something more than “Hi.” But how do you convey to someone, in thirty seconds, what a monstrous talent they have; and what’s the point? Surely they know it. Surely, when you reach a certain level of success, all strangers look like fawning sycophants.

If I had a do-over, though, I think I would tell him that his writing is beyond beautiful, and that reading it is a pleasure and a privilege. (And maybe, if I was bold, I would also ask him if those unearthly sentences flow out of him easily, or if he has to wrestle the words onto the page. But then, what if he didn’t give the answer I’d prefer?)

Do yourself a favor. Read his family trilogy, starting with All Over but the Shoutin or, if you prefer, Ava’s Man (a book about Bragg’s maternal grandfather.) Finish up with The Prince of Frogtown.

It’ll be some of the best few hours you will ever spend reading.

Writing that rocks – A Thousand Days in Venice

Cathy LaGrow 5 Comments

(Trying something new, for your sake and mine: shorter posts. We shall see.)

Classification: memoir, non-fiction

Four years before the titanic (and well-deserved) popularity of Eat, Pray, Love, there came a quieter, shorter book about another middle-aged woman finding new life and love in a foreign land.

A Thousand Days in Venice tells the story of Marlena De Blasi, a chef, cookbook author, and journalist who travels to Venice in 1993 to gather notes for a series of magazine articles. One day, while dining in a café, she is approached by a stranger who wants a date with her. She refuses him – for several days straight – before finally relenting. She discovers that he is a bank manager named Fernando, and that he had seen her from across a plaza a year earlier, without knowing who she was. When he saw her again, after all that time, he decided it was fate. Marlena is intrigued, but she has to fly home to St. Louis. Back to real life.

Eighteen days after they meet, Fernando comes to America to visit Marlena. By the end of his visit, they have decided that she will move to Italy and marry him.

This is the stuff of fairy tales, and Marlena, who is no young, dewy-eyed girl (she has grown children of her own) knows it. Of their first meeting, she writes:

Why can’t Destiny announce itself, be a twelve-headed ass, wear purple trousers, a name tag, even? All I know is that I don’t fall in love, neither at first sight nor at half-sight, neither easily nor over time. My heart is rusty from the old pinions that hold it shut. That’s what I believe about myself.

Once she moves to Italy, the book floats from one beautiful scene to another. Marlena visits the butchers and bakers and fishmongers of Venice, and cooks for Fernando (the recipes for some of the dishes she writes about are given at the end of the book); her descriptions of ingredients and meals are delectable. She throws herself into renovating and decorating their apartment in that old and mysterious floating city. She and Fernando come to learn each other, and trust each other, in fits and starts.

It’s an unusual love story, and Marlena’s writing is poetic and dramatic – she is dramatic, a woman who pins up her long, dark curls with enormous flowers, a woman who paints her dining room walls a bright, lipstick-red. The book’s chapters bear these kinds of titles: “Why Shouldn’t I Go to Live on the Fringes of an Adriatic Lagoon with a Blueberry-Eyed Stranger?” and “If I Could Give Venice to You for a Single Hour, It Would Be This Hour” and “Have You Understood that These Are the Earth’s Most Beautiful Tomatoes?”

Who on earth wouldn’t want to read chapters with titles like that?

This is one of those books that I wish I had time to re-read. Maybe someday.

Ultramarathon Man (or) Super Freak

Cathy LaGrow 4 Comments

Dean Karnazes is a complete freak of nature, and I don’t think he’d mind me telling you so; I do it with the utmost respect. Before I talk about him, though, let me give you a little personal context.

My siblings and I are very tall and we look like we should be in good physical condition, capable of handling all sorts of rigors. In reality, we bruise like fruit, have no stamina, and get listless and crabby when our blood sugar plunges. Various ones of us have been known to cap off a strenuous afternoon at Disneyland by collapsing onto a bed, pasty-faced and trembling, for the remainder of our vacation. (Sadly, this is not a lie.) Our daintiness is a source of great irritation to our partners, each of whom has a fantastic, ox-like hardiness that calls to mind pioneer stock of the 19th century. My brothers and I, by contrast, would never have survived in an earlier era. We are barely making it in this one.

When we were kids, our coach-Dad tried valiantly to mold us into world-class track athletes, but we were just too puny. Running has remained my exercise of choice, into adulthood, but the most I have ever been able to eke out, with peak conditioning, were a few 10K’s. I have friends who regularly run full marathons, and I find their abilities profoundly confusing. (Also, their tendency to use words like “fun” to describe running long distances. I have been running for 30 years now. I don’t believe I have hit the “fun” part yet.)

Given my own physical frailty, you will understand why I am absolutely befuddled by the humanoid that is Dean Karnazes.

I learned of Karnazes when I bought and read his book Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-night Runner. His writing is solid enough, but you don’t read books like this for the writing. You read books like this to blow your own mind by what some human beings are capable of. Human beings who are not, you know, YOU.

Karnazes grew up in California, where he ran track throughout his school years but quit when he was in high school. Fifteen years later, on the night of his 30th birthday, Karnazes, a businessman who was married to a doctor, had a sort of mid-life-crisis moment. That night, he put on some old yard sneakers and took off, through the streets of San Francisco, and ran, off and on—all night. He loved it, despite the blisters and the shin splints and the strained muscles, and decided he would take up running again. But Dean Karnazes tends not to do things normally.

Did you, like me, think that the pinnacle of athletic endurance was perhaps an Ironman Triathlon? Guess again. Back in 1974, a man named Gordy Ainsleigh entered his horse in the Western States Trail Ride, a 100-mile equestrian race through the Sierra Nevadas. When Gordy’s horse went lame just before the race, ‘ole Gordy decided (as any sane person would) to run the entire course himself. Sans horse. On foot.

Almost twenty-four hours after starting out, Gordy revealed himself to be an extra-terrestrial being from a highly-advanced species finished the race. And a beast called “ultradistance running” was born.

By the time Dean Karnazes had his Come-to-Running birthday experience, Gordy’s little caper had evolved into the annual Western States 100-Mile Endurance Run, a race that incorporates a total elevation change of a staggering 38,000 feet. (Lest you breeze on past that figure, let me give you this by comparison: the peak of Mt. Hood, which is the highest point in my mountainous home state, is just over 11,000 feet. Try to imagine running up and down for 3 1/2 times that height, in one race.) In order to even qualify to enter the Western States, you have to have previously run fifty miles straight in less than nine hours.

Look, I would love to dwell on how insane this all is, but I have bigger fish to fry. Because two years after he started running again, Karnazes completed that 100-Mile Run in twenty-one hours – and decided that it wasn’t enough.

A year later, he ran the Badwater Ultramarathon, a 135-mile race across Death Valley, where the asphalt temperature can reach 200 degrees. An hour into the race, his first pair of shoes melted off. Thirty miles in, he started vomiting. By the 42-mile mark, which he reached at 1:00am, the air temperature was 112 degrees. After 72 miles, Karnazes passed out and was hauled off the course. But the following summer he was back, and that year he successfully completed the Badwater race.

During the next seven years, while holding down a day job, Karnazes did the following:

Scaled Yosemite’s Half Dome.
Swam across the San Francisco Bay.
Did triathlons, adventure races, and 24-hour mountainbike rides.
Surfed, snowboarded, windsurfed, and climbed mountains.
Oh, and continued to run ultramarathons, to the tune of almost one a month.

I know, this is starting to sound ridiculous, ludicrous, and fictional. Just wait, it gets better.

In 2002, Karnazes realized that no one had ever run a marathon at the South Pole. You know, as in Antarctica, the coldest place on the Planet (officially, at -128.6 degrees.) I don’t know about you, but if I learned that no one had ever run a marathon at the South Pole, I don’t think my reaction would be: “Well, this simply will not do.” But then again, I’m not Dean Karnazes.

Yes, our intrepid athlete went to Antarctica, and yes, he ran 26.2 miles in the snow there. He celebrated by stripping naked and doing a quick loop around a barber pole that’s planted at the exact center of the South Pole, so he could say he’d run naked “around the world.”

This might be a good place to talk about Karnazes’ mental state. Clearly, he has some “drive” issues, to say the least. Here’s what he says about it:

The average obsessive-compulsive takes seven years to get help. The average runner covers 10,920 miles in that time. Whether my affliction was clinical is anyone’s guess; I never did submit to testing. Some seek the comfort of their therapist’s office, other head for the corner pub and dive into a pint, but I choose running as my therapy. It was the best source of renewal there was. I couldn’t recall a single time that I felt worse after a run than before. What drug could compete? As Lily Tomlin said, “Exercise is for people who can’t handle drugs and alcohol.”

That doesn’t fully satisfy my curiosity about his psyche, but it will have to do.

As for his physical biomechanics, the reasons he can do things that most of us couldn’t do no matter how hard we trained…who knows? Evidently doctors have determined that Karnazes’ body somehow reduces lactic acid as he exercises, which is contrary to normal physiology; but that is all the medical information I could find. Obviously he is made of different stuff than the rest of us. He doesn’t stretch before running. He says he’s never had an overuse injury. His resting pulse is 40. And so on.

Your guess is as good as mine, folks.

Anyway, in the last decade, Karnazes has completed a 199-mile Relay Race (normally run by teams of 12 men), single-handedly, six times. He has run 350 miles, without stopping, in less than 81 hours. He has run on a treadmill for 24 hours straight (the thought of which makes me want to poke my own eyes out with a sharp stick.) And in 2006, he ran 50 marathons, in all 50 states, on 50 consecutive days.

It bears repeating: 50 marathons. 50 states. 50 days.

He is also president of his own company, a motivational speaker, and a media darling. In his spare time, he keeps an active blog.

His book, Ultramarathon Man, is utterly fascinating, especially to a runner (can I still call myself that, after all this?) Karnazes discusses some of his feats in great detail, and he writes in depth about his training and diet. For example: he eats while running, consuming 28,000 calories during a typical endurance run. He actually has a post on his blog where he explains, very sincerely, how to order a pizza and have it delivered to you while you’re running. With a side of cheesecake, if you’re so inclined.

I have always loved learning about people who push themselves to do unbelievable things. It’s beyond inspiring, and it lifts me a little out of my daily drudgery; it lets me know that I’m capable of more than I dream. Reminds me that maybe I can manage another mile or two, metaphorically or literally.

Which is nice and all. But I don’t believe I’ll go running with Dean Karnazes anytime soon.

Writing that rocks – Stephen King

Cathy LaGrow 12 Comments

(In two parts, for those of you who don’t have all day.)

PART ONE

Confession: I have been a HUGE fan of Stephen King’s work for many years.
Confession: I read my first and only Stephen King novel about six months ago.

Why yes, I’d be happy to explain.

For a long time, there were only three genres of fiction that I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. 1. Science Fiction, for no good reason (and, as we’ve already seen, I’ve overcome that aversion.) 2. “Bodice Rippers,” as I believe they’re called – I read one once, just to see, and it was not a successful experiment. And 3. Horror, because I am too easily scared, and I don’t like gore.

Like everyone else on Planet Earth, I was well aware of Stephen King, and had actually enjoyed the movie treatments of some of his famous novels (although I had to close my eyes in parts.) I knew he was one of the best-selling fiction writers of all time, with upwards of 350 million books sold. I also knew he had written a few non-horror novels – but I wasn’t interested in reading those. If I couldn’t sample what he obviously did best, then I didn’t want to sample him at all.

Then, in 2000, King went and wrote a little something that he called On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.

When On Writing was published, book critics, most of whom had long treated King’s work with either disdain or indifference, sort of collectively shuffled their feet. Because the book was…um…really good. As in, people were saying it was the best book on writing since The Elements of Style. Which was a bit outrageous.

And also, true.

The simple fact is, Stephen King has managed to sell several hundred million books, in a niche genre that is not even liked by anyone I know, because the man knows how to tell a freaking story (and I would use stronger language, but there are children around) better than just about anyone. This was evident to me before I had read a single word of his fiction. This was evident when I read his amazing memoir/guidebook.

On Writing contains a short (less than 100 pages) account of King’s childhood and early writing history. He then tells you everything he knows about writing. (In a postscript, he also writes about the 1999 accident that took place while he was writing this book, in which he was nearly killed by a runaway van while he was walking near his home.)

King touches on philosophical advice, as when he describes how he eventually traded in the massive writing desk he’d always dreamed of for a smaller one, so his kids would have space to come hang out in his office. He writes:

It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around.

And King packs his book with practical advice, much of it echoing The Elements of Style (which he references.) He hates adverbs. He doesn’t believe in dressing up your vocabulary, or lecturing while writing, or forcing your characters to do things your way. He does believe in trimming the fat from your writing; if a stretch of narrative does not move the story along, no matter how beautiful it is – it must go. He hammers this point home wonderfully, as here:

It’s also important to remember it’s not about the setting, anyway – it’s about the story, and it’s always about the story. It will not behoove me (or you) to wander off into thickets of description just because it would be easy to do so.

On Writing has an easy, conversational tone to it that makes it sound like you’re talking to your Uncle Stevie (as King often refers to himself.) DO NOT BE FOOLED. Producing his kind of writing is in no way easy. It is one of the hardest things in the world to get right – and the only reason King can do it, as he oh so casually relates in the book, is that he has written his fingers to the bone since he was a child. He wrote his way through grade school, and high school, and college; he wrote in the laundry room of a double-wide, far into the night, every night; he wrote through addictions that were so bad, he can barely remember writing some of his books; he wrote his way back from the brink of death, in a variety of ways; he wrote when no one would pay him for it and when his first four completely-finished novels all went into the permanent reject heap. He writes because (I suspect) for him, to stop writing would be to stop breathing. King has natural talent, absolutely. But he has also worked at his profession as hard as anyone ever has. He has paid his dues, and then some.

Check out the list of books and stories he has published, from his web page (and then come back.) When I scrolled through this list, I got the strong urge to giggle, because the quantity of work he’s produced is insane. And bear in mind, he was writing long, long before he was ever published.

Anyway, by halfway through On Writing, I was a die-hard Stephen King fan.

Then in 2007, King was chosen as the guest editor for that year’s Best American Short Stories compilation. (This is a marvelous series in which every year, a different distinguished author selects the 20 or so best short stories from the most prestigious American magazines, and they are re-printed in a paperback book.) I bought the book and eagerly read Stephen’s choices, and I loved every one them, even though they all bore a slightly macabre King stamp. My opinion was cemented – Stephen King simply knows great writing. After that, I found and purchased another of his books on writing that my brother had told me about, the little known, out-of-print Secret Windows, which was published in 2000 as a Book-of-the-Month Club collection of essays, interviews, and articles.


PART TWO

By this point, there was no way I could continue to avoid King’s fiction. I had to read one of his novels. And I wanted it to be one of his best.

In late 2009, King published the 1074-page Under the Dome. I have always found it hard to resist the siren song of a Really Big Book, and I sensed that this novel would be my first foray into King fiction territory. The New York Times book review clinched it – the review begins with these words: “Under the Dome gravely threatens Stephen King’s status as a mere chart-busting pop cultural phenomenon. It has the scope and flavor of literary Americana, even if Mr. King’s particular patch of American turf is located smack in the middle of the Twilight Zone.”

A few months later, I checked out Under the Dome from my local library. Our state was having a streak of beautiful, warm weather last Spring, and in the afternoons, while my boys napped, I sat in the sun and read King’s book. And could not put it down.

King would probably be the first person to tell you that he is not the greatest writer alive. But he is far and away the best I’ve ever read at one thing: keeping the reader turning the pages. Under the Dome is, as I’ve mentioned, 1074 pages long – and if there was a dull page in that book, I never found it. I cannot tell you how much that blows my mind. It should be impossible to write 1000+ consecutive pages, and not get mired down in a bit of rambling. But I did not run across a single page where I thought, Oh, this would be a good place to take a break and go make myself a turkey sandwich, or put the clothes in the dryer.

That, my friends, is genius. And that is someone who has faithfully toiled away at his craft for untold hours, spanning untold years. Of course, one could credibly argue that King has an advantage over most writers, in that he deals with the supernatural. Since anything can (and does) happen to his characters, there is always some fantastic or unbelievable event going on, which creates tension and keeps the story moving forward briskly. But 1000 pages? In which the story never flags? That is the product of remarkable self-editing, and an incredibly finely-tuned ear.

(I won’t explain the plot of Under the Dome. If you’re not going to read the book, the plot doesn’t matter. If you can stomach some gore, then read the book – but I must mention: King’s writing is NOT for the faint of heart. Evidently, there is no subject that he considers taboo, and I mean NO subject. You have been warned.)

As much as I enjoyed that novel, I don’t plan to read any more King fiction. I do better when I don’t fill my head with dark and scary stuff. But I will go on being a big fan, from afar. If I ever publish a book (could happen), and Stephen King were to read it (never gonna happen), his approval would mean more to me than just about anyone else’s. Because he knows, better than anyone, what makes a great story.

Long live (and write) the King.

Writing that rocks – E.B. White

Cathy LaGrow 2 Comments

Classification: Letters, non-fiction

For the last several months, I have been working my way through Letters of E.B. White – “working” only in the sense that the book is 660 pages long, and (as I may have previously mentioned) I have two small boys to chase after. In every other sense, reading this book is the absolute opposite of a chore. People just do not write like White any more, and that’s a pity.

E.B. White is, of course, one of the grand-daddies of American literature. He is most famous for penning his children’s classics: Stuart Little, Charlotte’s Web, and The Trumpet of the Swan. (We owned copies of each of these books when I was a child, and I wore them out.) White also contributed to the prestigious The New Yorker magazine for roughly 60 years, and he co-authored a little book that has become the “bible” for writers – The Elements of Style (it is also commonly called “Strunk & White,” after its authors.)

The Elements of Style should be required reading for would-be writers (and you need your own copy, because you’ll be highlighting and underlining, and writing in the margins.) The book covers grammar and word usage, but it also explains principles of style and composition, giving such golden instructions as “Omit needless words.” Messrs. Strunk and White believed in making writing as clear and concise as possible, by slashing all extraneous words from one’s prose, and I cannot tell you how often that chant echoes through my head (“Omit needless words! Omit needless words!”) Whenever I obey, my writing becomes better. (An example, from the book: “He is a man who” can be simply written as “he,” without losing any of the meaning – and with a savings of four words!)

Back to Letters of E.B. White. I found this thick book at my favorite used bookstore, and it is just about the best $2.00 I have ever spent. White never wrote an autobiography; instead, in 1976, he collected and published this book of his life-long personal correspondence. Letter compilations often make great memoirs – IF the author is a talented and prolific writer – because people tend not to self-censor when they’re writing personal letters, and also because you are reading details and feelings exactly as they happened, not as they were remembered decades after the fact. I’m afraid this kind of book is a dying breed. No one writes letters by hand any more – certainly not to the tune of hundreds or thousands of them.

Letters of E.B. White begins with a few childhood letters, but the collection really “kicks in” after college, when White and a friend hit the open road in a model-T, in 1922. While driving across the country (working odd jobs when he needed to), White wrote long letters home, to friends and family. At 23 years old, White had not yet developed the beautiful conciseness he would later display, but his writing skills were already impressive. Portions of his letters are so descriptive, they actually sound like great fiction.

Once White had married, he settled into life on a farm in Maine, and he enjoyed puttering around with his animals almost more than he enjoyed writing. (One has only to refer to the subjects of his children’s books, to see how fond he was of small creatures.) Although White was always courted by the most elite literary publications in New York City, he seemed constantly on the verge of giving up writing jobs altogether, in order to devote more time to his country pursuits, and his descriptions of early 20th-century rural life are charming.

White was a gentleman, as men of that era were, and his writing was elegant, but he also had a marvelously droll sense of humor that really made his words sparkle. He was self-deprecating without sounding either grouchy or cynical. You cannot teach that kind of clever wit, and you can’t fake it.

Two years after publishing his book of letters, White won an honorary Pulitzer for his lifetime of work (he had previously received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.)

Reading through White’s letters is like having a chat with a delightful companion, and it’s an excellent way to spend a warm summer evening, with a cool drink in hand. Or a crisp Fall morning, with a steaming cup of coffee in hand. Or a rainy afternoon, with an afghan over your lap and a fire crackling next to you. Okay, yes. I find reading to be a lovely and appropriate way to pass any time of day, in any season. And if you couldn’t relate, you probably wouldn’t be reading this blog in the first place.

I raise my coffee mug to you.