Pen or Keyboard?

Chris Sullivan over at More Than Fine last week asked his readers whether they used a keyboard or pen or whatever to write, and got a broad array of answers. Chris and I had an email exchange about it, and I got inspired. With this:

The summer between my freshman and sophomore years in college, I faced a rather unnerving dilemma. Come September, I would be enrolling in my first journalism course. You had to know how to type. And I didn’t.

So, I asked my parents for an early birthday present, an electric typewriter. I found a self-teaching plan that seemed easy enough to follow. I worked during the day, and every night, I sat at my desk, my teaching plan open, my hands poised over the keys.

I had no social life that summer.

The main thing I learned was where the keys were. Finding the right letters on the keyboard would turn out to be a critical piece of knowledge in Journalism 51, because one typo, one misspelled word, not to mention one style error or one grammatical error or one factual error – one of any of those things – earned you an automatic F on the assignment or the test. “Accuracy’s important,” the instructor would shrug after the class started. Seventy percent of the class was gone by mid-terms.

But that summer, it was me and the typewriter. I learned to hate it, but I kept slogging away. The ultimate result was – voila! – I didn’t learn how to type properly. To this day, I use my two forefingers and my right thumb, and very occasionally some other finger. But primarily those two fingers and a thumb. And I can type about 90 words a minute if I have to.

The sight of this amuses my wife. She knows how to type properly.

However badly I taught myself, it turned out to be sufficient for my journalism classes. What I wasn’t prepared for, however, was that my journalism school hadn’t invested in technology in quite some time. The typewriters in our classes were – old (really old) Royal manual machines. You could type easily on those old Royals, as long as your fingers were HAMMERS and you trained yourself to return the carriage at the end of the sentence. And we had to do timed assignments and tests on those things.

They were teaching us early that journalists have to suffer and, as a result, hate anybody who doesn’t have to suffer as much as journalists think they themselves do.

My typing abilities, such as they were, stood me in good stead through college and my first several years in the work world. That is, until I was assigned to write a speech at the company I was working for. I did my research and then started typing on my IBM Selectric (for those of you too young to remember, IBM Selectrics were like dying and going to heaven after the purgatory of manual typewriters). The writing went okay for a while, but then I started running into trouble. I’d type and I’d type, and then it would fall flat. I’d read what I’d typed, and then say it out loud (it was a speech, after all), and it seemed off.

So I wandered off with what I’d typed on paper and then read it aloud. At some point, I realized what the problem was (whatever the problem was), and I stopped, found an available chair and started writing the changes and the text by hand. And it worked.

I don’t know why, but I discovered that my writing of speeches was greatly helped by a combination of typing and writing by hand. The typing parts were the more basic, fact-oriented parts. The handwriting parts were the emotional, more “rhetorical” parts.

I have done this ever since. And now it’s carried over into poetry which, when I consider it, is not so different from writing speeches – both focus on language and sounds, rhythm, “movement” of words, choosing the exactly right word or phrase, and pulling disparate thoughts and pieces of thoughts into a cohesive whole. I write all drafts of a poem by hand. Only when I think it’s about done do I type it. I’ll do very minor editing once it’s typed. But all of the hard work (and it is hard work) is done with a pen. Some poems go through 10 drafts or more; a few are ready to go after only two or three. But most take a lot more. (I also didn’t understand how much “research” often needs to go into a poem, but that’s another story.)

So I can’t really explain all the reasons why, but I’ve found that I write differently when I use a computer and when I write by hand. One is more utilitarian; the other is a more free-flowing, emotional way to write. For me, anyway. The pen allows me to add comments, scratch-outs, add marginal notes. I know Word can do something like this as well, but it takes too long and I find the “Track Changes” feature to be totally confusing.

So in some cases, the pen is quicker than the keyboard.

(This was written almost entirely on a keyboard, except for the first draft of paragraphs two and three.)

Reflection on a Tweet Party

Several of us participated in a Tweet Party (poetry jam) on Tuesday night. Most of us tweeted by design, and three accidentally stumbled in. You can see the completed edited version of the jam at TweetSpeak Poetry, under the title of "Love at the Masquerade Ball." The theme was “Love in Character,” and it used famous fictional and not-so-fictional lovers as the starting point (Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet, Yuri Zhivago and Lara, Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara, and so on).

I have a dual role in these jams – I participate and I edit the final version. Editing (for me) means following the jam via Tweetdeck with a search open for the #tsp hashtag, Twitter open, and Microsoft Word open, so I can copy and paste from Twitter. The jam lasts for an hour, and sometimes the tweets are flying so fast and thick that I find myself almost breathless while I’m tweeting, reading, copying and pasting, commenting – well, it’s busy. But great fun. The #tsp hashtag is important for capturing all of the contributions, because not all of the participants follow each other on Twitter.

Here are a few of my own contributions to the jam.


Antony: I remember you before the asp.
Cleo: I remember you before the sword.
We danced in the sand
Under the light of the pyramid moon.
She turned to fortunetellers
To see the lines of the sand.

***

In John's England did I
Find myself
A proper lady.
They said I was spectacle,
Eye-catching of courtiers.
The redness of mine,
The whiteness of John's,
Our skins peeled together.
The courtesies of courtiers
Were like sharpened knives at the table.

***

So said Delilah, she of the Philistines.
He wanted stars
But was blinded by pokers of light.

***

Frankly, my dear
I wish for hand of lilac scent
To touch my brow.
Will you remember me, tomorrow, Rhett?
Another tomorrow, another day,
With pride, with prejudice, perhaps with love.

***


Of all the famous loves I've known
Across the pages of imagination,
None surpasses my own true love

***

My green earth
My good earth,
The soil of my love.

***

As the sun fair doth rise in the east
As the moon most pale doth set in the west,
Strangers when they met,
Bonded souls when they parted.
In the cold mist did
Yuri touch
The pale cheek of Lara.
The reds and the whites,
He thought,
Were no longer wines but soldiers.
The trees,
All aspens,
Sang of love and Russian nights.
Was Lara the Russian Guinevere?

***

For another view of the jam, see L.L. Barkat’s Ticket to Party.

And Maureen's Tweets of Love at the Masquerade Ball.

Athol Dickson's "Lost Mission"

Athol Dickson’s novels always seem to include at least a touch, and often more than a touch, of the apocalyptic. In River Rising it’s a flood. In The Cure, it’s a town under siege by desperate alcoholics. Winter Haven, perhaps the least apocalyptic of Dickson’s works, still portrays a sense of unease and then menace and impossible, almost paranormal things happening. And now there’s Lost Mission.

Lost Mission is apocalypse, Southern California style, crossing two centuries – the late 18th century, when missions were being established by the Spanish from Mexico (New Spain), and the 21st century, with its eclectic and politically/socially explosive mix of wealthy Americanos and illegal aliens. Layer on both eras the rigidity of religious belief (Franciscan Catholic in the former and evangelical Christian in the latter), and you discover some fascinating parallels.

You also find an incredibly good story.

In the late 18th century, three Franciscans, Abbott Guillermo, Brother Alejandro and Brother Benicio, travel with a contingent of soldiers to Alta California to establish Mission de Santa Dolores. They gain early converts among the native population, but Abbot Guillermo’s rigid sense of propriety and order, and his inherent condescending attitude, soon begin to work against the goals of the mission. Brother Alejandro is ordered to paint an altarpiece, a triptych of paintings, so that the converts can visualize the crucifixion of Christ and related events.

In the 21st century, Guadalupe Soledad Consuelo de la Garza leaves her small shop in Mexico to preach to the pagan Americanos. She is given a triptych, kept safely locked away by the local priest, to help lead her onward. She will need to enter the United States illegally, and she is helped by Ramon Rodriguez, crossing into the United States to find work. She wanders in the desert, until she is found by Tucker Rue, a seminary graduate spending 40 days in the wilderness to understand his calling. Eventually, Tucker established Sanctuario to help illegal aliens and their families, and Lupe goes to work for Delano Wright, a wealthy Californian who lives high atop a mountain and who will eventually develop a plan for a Christian enclave, separated from the world.

The enclave, of course, occupies the same site as the old Spanish mission. And the old mission was destroyed in an attack by the native population following a long period of plague. And plague, under certain conditions, can remain dormant.

The author credits his agents for slogging through “an ugly early draft” and his editor for her work on the novel. Whoever is responsible for the final outcome did an extraordinary job – Dickson tells the two stories as one, moving deftly from one to the other. And gradually the reader comes to understand that one story is actually being told.

Lost Mission is the work of a master writer, a good story told incredibly well.

(Attention Federal Trade Commission: I purchased this book from Amazon.com. No one gave it to me. I have received no compensation from it other than the pleasure of reading a really good novel.)

Jonathan

In the dawning
Will come the battle,
The last for
Our house, for
Our families, for
My father’s name
And position and
Rank and favor and
Crown, the crown
Already long lost.

In the night eve of death,
Across the campfire
I see his eyes, staring,
Filled with anger,
Stilled with hate.
He stares through
His madness at me,
The surrogate.
My treason is I
Loved my friend.

That day on
The hillside,
That day when
He slung the smooth
Stones,
That day when he held up
The giant’s head,
That day, my
Heart knitted
To his.

I knew then,
Just a boy,
I knew then my
Father’s fate.
I knew then my
Friend would
Be given, one day,
The crown my
Father intended for
My head.

We became men together,
Two beings, two minds,
One heart, one soul.
My father would not understand
What I did, what I said,
What I knew.
His anger with,
His fear of my friend
Was measured out
In fury to me.

After this night eve of death,
I will die
In the dawning,
Near my father but
Not next to him.

From Cicadas in the Wilderness to Erfurt, Germany

I’ve been reading The Wisdom of the Wilderness by Gerald May, as part of an online book group discussion over at the High Calling Blogs led by Laura Boggess. This past week, we read chapter 4 – Cicada Song.

May spends time in the wilderness as a kind of healing therapy, including experiencing some extreme conditions like below freezing cold, isolation, a bear in front of the tent, and hearing voices. In this chapter, he's a bit more conventional and talks about listening to the cicadas, including a mating pair. (Listening to the mating calls of insects in the wilderness – not my dream vacation but it’s his story so I let him tell it.)

At one point in the narrative, he says this: “I am lost now, lost into the firelight’s flickering on the tree leaves, warmth mingling with cool night star sparkles, all into the cicada song; I have been shown the way into the joining, I have been guided in a harmony path, to a oneness within which I am, once again, freshly and absolutely alive.”

Those words could easily be structured into a poem; they sound poetic. But what really struck me about the passage, especially that last line about “a oneness within which I am, once again, freshly and absolutely alive.” Something like that happened to me, but it wasn’t in wilderness. Or maybe it was in a kind of wilderness.

In 2002, I was part of a three-man communication team sent by our church to Eastern Europe. We had Jack, the video guy; Steve, the guy who did all the logistics and planning; and me, the writer. Our charge was to meet with missionaries in Hungary, Czech Republic and Dresden in eastern Germany, interview them, and then use the resulting videos and stories in a variety of communication media – newsletters, videotapes and as “live reports” the missionaries could send back to their home churches and supporters. Our church had never had a short-term mission team quite like us, and for a while we were quite perplexing. The missions program coordinator who’d championed our team told us one thing that stuck in my mind: have your detailed plans and itineraries, she said, but be prepared to go where the spirit moves.

As we waited in St. Louis for our flight to Chicago (and then Frankfurt and Budapest), we saw on CNN that a shooting had occurred in Erfurt in eastern Germany – a shooting in a high school that sounded like a German version of Columbine. Several people had been killed. We saw the story but it didn’t register with us as a game-changing event for our trip. We’d no plans to be anywhere near Erfurt.

When we landed in Budapest Saturday, we were greeted by our missionary host with this: “They want to send you to Erfurt.” While we had been crossing the Atlantic, phones calls between our church in St. Louis, our denomination’s headquarters in Minneapolis and the Eastern Europe mission headquarters in Budapest had been occurring, with the discussion about the communication team switching gears and heading for Erfurt, to record what was happening and to help a young pastor. All we really knew was that this pastor had been counseling the families of victims – both the dead and the wounded – almost non-stop. What we didn’t understand was how we could help.

Jetlagged though we were, we talked about it for hours. It would clearly wreck the carefully planned (and packed) schedule. We weren’t sure what we were supposed to do, and no one could really tell us. And then we remembered what the missions coordinator had told us weeks before – be ready to go where the spirit moves. So we did. Driven by Gary, one of the mission staff in Budapest, we traveled to Dresden, arriving late Sunday night. The next morning, we met with a local pastor and a missionary couple as we had planned, and then left for Erfurt.

Erfurt was where Martin Luther had attended seminary. It’s close to what had been the border of West Germany, but all those years under communism had left a spiritual wilderness. We drove down the autobahn; the pastor of the church was waiting for us just off the highway.

His name was Mattias, and he and his wife were originally from Hamburg. He was pastoring a small church in Erfurt constructed from a former communist social hall (there’s something delightfully ironic in that – a communist social hall converted into a church). As we'd planned with all of our other meetings, I rode with Mattias and the rest of our party followed. This allowed some time for me, the writer and interviewer, to introduce myself and talk a little bit about our team and what we were doing.

As soon as I sat in the passenger seat of Mattias’ car, a strange thing happened. We looked at one another and began to laugh for no discernible reason. We just started laughing together. It was as if we had known each other for a long time, and then found ourselves in an odd situation. As he drove and we talked, this strange feeling kept reinforcing itself. We didn’t openly talk about it, but it was there.

We drove to the church. From the outside, it didn’t look like a church. But the inside was definitely a church, including the smell. The design was contemporary – light-colored wood, royal blue carpeting. We toured the building and met two other church members.

We set up the interview in the sanctuary. Our logistics guy and driver wandered off to explore. Jack started filming, and Mattias and I started talking. And in the course of that 40 minutes, something profound happened.

Mattias was close to physical and emotional exhaustion. The shooting had happened on Friday; for three days he had been meeting with and counseling and praying with family and friends of the victims. He had been going on virtually no sleep, and hadn’t seen his wife and children in all that time. There weren’t a lot of pastors around to help; Mattias had been pretty much on his own. I asked questions, and he talked. And then we talked together. And in those few brief moments, the three of us became as one. I can’t explain it. But never have I felt as “freshly and absolutely alive,” as Gerald May described his cicada moment. The interview ended with all three of us in tears. Jack and I knew what Mattias had been experiencing because we were now going through it with him, as one with him.

Steve and Gary reappeared and could see something had happened. But not one of us could adequately explain it. I could only offer Steve what Mattias had said during the talk: “God is in this place.”

The four of us then went to the school, where thousands of people had gathered. Thousands of people – and almost total silence. I think we were the only Americans there – and we were recognized as Americans, as “people who know what this is like,” a reference to Columbine.

The last thing we did before we left Erfurt that evening was to lay our hands on Mattias and pray for him. We did this on a street corner. And then we left, driving back to spend the night in Dresden. I said very little during the drive.

A few days later, when we arrived back in Budapest, we were having dinner. I tried to explain to Gary what had happened in Erfurt, but I could only come up with a rather lame description.

Finally, I said this: “I don’t know what happened. But I came from America and unexpectedly went to Erfurt, and found I’d come home.”

Lillian

She sits before her
Mirror,
Brushing her long hair,
Three, four, five.
She hears him
Move behind her.

She married above,
They said,
Surprising all
Including her,
Child of immigrants
Fleeing the German
Peace of Alsace-Lorraine.
Married above
To linen-and-lace Irish.
He’d searched for love,
Finding it first
In drink
Until he saw her.
Displeasing his mother,
Fearful for her only child,
Fearful for her
Own position,
Displeased he
Chose below,
Married below,
Married at all.

She sits before her
Mirror,
Brushing her hair,
Forty-one, forty-two.
She hears him
Move behind her.

The glass reflecting
Catches the slow
Flash,
Fifty-three, fifty-four.
Willy? Willy?
He looks down,
Staring at his hand,
Drops the knife
In tears.
The drink, he says,
The drink.

His mother, too late,
Sends him for
The cure;
Sends her home
To her father,
Seventy-six, seventy-seven.

She sits before her
Mirror,
Brushing her long hair,
Ninety-one, ninety-two,
Waiting for her
Willy,
Aching to hear him
Move behind her.

A Love Affair with Chad and Jeremy

(From left, Anita from Albuquerque, Chad Stuart, my sweet wife Janet, Jeremy Clyde, and Nancy Emrich of LilFest in Chicago.)

Last night, about nine months of planning, anticipation and work by my sweet wife came to fruition with a concert by Chad and Jeremy at the Sheldon Concert Hall in St. Louis.

If you’re not familiar with Chad Stuart and Jeremy Clyde, they are a singing duo who were part of the “British Invasion” of the 1960s. My wife met them when she was 12, after a performance at the Louisiana State Fair in Shreveport. She’s been in love with them ever since. I understand, and I am not jealous. I also know the words to all of their songs, because I’ve heard them enough over the years. If I knew how to sing, I could probably do the karaoke version of everything they ever recorded.

They broke up in the late 1960s. Jeremy went to pursue an acting career (playing lots of villains, oddly enough) and Chad pursued music. Today Jeremy lives in London and Chad in Sun Valley, Idaho, and they get together several times a year to perform.

We’d seen them in St. Louis in 1986, when they were touring as part of the “British Invasion Tour Part 2.” I remember it well because we were early for the event. I mean, like an hour early. So early we were first in line at the door. If you think I’m emphasizing “early” because we’re usually late for everything, you’d be right. Chronic lateness in my family is not a problem; it’s a condition. You can’t solve it; you have to endure it.

In May 2008, I had to give a talk in Chicago at a conference, and it happened to be right before Mother’s Day Weekend. And guess who was doing three concerts in Chicago? My wife found about this from the Yahoo message board on Chad and Jeremy, where she was also meeting fans like herself all over the country. Coordinated by Nancy Emrich of LilFest, the duo did a house concert in Wilmette, which was the coolest thing ever, then an auditorium concert, also in Wilmette, and finally one at Bill’s Blues Bar in Evanston. My wife was thrilled, so thrilled she began to work on how to get them to St. Louis. And she knew the perfect venue, too.

She knew one of the marketing people at the Sheldon Theater through an old neighbor of ours. She contacted him, and then connected him to Chad and Jeremy’s booking agent. It took some period of time but one day, there it was – they were coming to St. Louis Oct. 23, 2009.

We saw them again in Chicago this past May, and our next-door neighbors in St. Louis joined us for the concert at Bill’s Blues Bar (they have grown children in Chicago; he’s also an gifted musician). Ever since, my wife’s been plotting how to help the Sheldon promote the guys who recorded “Summer Song,” “Distant Shores,” “Willow Weep for Me,” and a bunch of other songs that spoke directly to my wife’s teenaged heart in the late 1960s and continue to speak to her heart today. She worked tirelessly, handing out and posting flyers on every bulletin board in St. Louis, tweeting it on Twitter, bugging me to retweet and post on Facebook. Me, I go along for the ride. It’s magic to watch my wife be transformed into a 14-year-old again.

And magic reigned at the Sheldon last night. The theater seats 700; about 600 people were there, an unusual number, given the economy, according to the people who know this stuff. And it was a wildly enthusiastic audience – you could literally see the audience energize Chad and Jeremy and vice versa. And I watched all the concerns my sweet wife had for this being a success melt away, and she became a fan again.

That’s about as cool as it gets.