Author: Post Road

The Sweater, the Pair of Shoes, and the Jacket

by Rebecca Curtis
from Post Road 3

A daughter disobeyed and the mother of the daughter hit the daughter very quickly with her hand, a thing she had not done before in the past.  Soon the daughter disobeyed again and again the mother struck the daughter in the face with her hand and then also with an object which had been nearby.  The daughter cried and ran away but soon came back and disobeyed and the mother took the object which had been placed nearby for use and broke it upon her daughter who moved from the room on her knees and came back and was beat by the mother who had become three mothers with three objects which had all been nearby and the daughter on her belly moved very slowly from the room and eventually came back and disobeyed and the mother took the daughter’s head in her mothers’ hands and pulled it close to her own and held it in that place for hours, and now that the mother had given the girl a sweater, a pair of shoes, and a jacket, one item upon each departure, the girl was dressed.

Ask the Dust by John Fante
Rebecca Donner
from Post Road 9

It’s not often that someone grabs you by the lapels and tells you that you must, absolutely must read a particular book. Not in my experience anyway. Usually my friends’ recommendations come with their fair share of disclaimers and qualifications, the sort of hedging we all engage in simply because we know that one person’s dog-eared treasure is another’s doorstop. But lapel-grabbing is what a friend recently did to me, and what I’m doing to you now, hoisting you up so only your toes graze the ground, and if your collar rips, so be it—hear me now, goddamnit: You must, absolutely must read Ask the Dust.

John Fante himself would have seized your hair by the roots and repeated the mantra until your eyes goggled, if you happened to be alive in 1939, when the publication of Ask the Dust went virtually unnoticed. Fante had the singular bad luck of being published by Stackpole Sons when the company was being sued for its unauthorized publication of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The Grapes of Wrath, The Big Sleep, and The Day of the Locust were also published that year—tough competition for any novel, especially one released by an obscure publisher on the verge of bankruptcy—and while Steinbeck, Chandler, and West received literary accolades, Fante went on to languish in relative obscurity for forty-odd years, squandering his talent writing hack screenplays. In 1980, Black Sparrow Press brought Ask the Dust back into print, and the 71-year-old author at last achieved some measure of the recognition that was his due. By then, Fante’s diabetes had taken its toll, and he was confined to a wheelchair, blind and legless.

Fante writes from his wounds, his fiction hewing closely to the facts of his own life. Ask the Dust—considered by many (including myself) to be his masterpiece—is the third in his quartet of books about Arturo Bandini, a second-generation Italian immigrant who flees his childhood home in Colorado for the gilded streets of Los Angeles, where he lives in squalor as a struggling writer. Fante’s hand-to-mouth existence during the Depression is vividly described through the eyes of Bandini, staving off hunger in his sordid hotel room with a nickel-bags of oranges. We meet a cast of desperate characters, among them Hellfrick, a drunk in the adjacent room who steals a live calf to sate his rabid desire for meat, and Camilla Lopez, the impoverished Mexican waitress Bandini pines after with a passion verging on madness, who repeatedly spurns his advances unless he insults the dirty huraches on her feet.

Like Céline’s Bardamu, Svevo’s Zeno, or Dostoyevsky’s “Underground Man,” Fante’s literary alter-ego is a stewing cauldron of nihilistic self-absorption, and every bit as memorable. He is given to febrile rants and arias of grief, often switching from first-person to second to a self-aggrandizing third within the space of a page, sometimes a paragraph. When he’s not chastising himself (“You are a coward, Bandini, a traitor to your soul, a feeble liar before your weeping Christ”), he’s indulging in delusions of grandeur (“I stood before the mirror once more, shaking my fist defiantly. Here I am, folks. Take a look at a great writer! Notice my eyes, folks. The eyes of a great writer. Notice my jaw, folks. The jaw of a great writer.”). For all his arrogance, Bandini is an endearing buffoon, and his confessional outpourings are shot through with black humor. Here’s Bandini walking the streets of downtown LA:

I took the steps down Angel’s Flight to Hill Street: a hundred and forty steps, with tight fists, frightened of no man, but scared of the Third Street Tunnel, scared to walk through it—claustrophobia. Scared of high places, too, and of blood, and of earthquakes; otherwise, quite fearless, excepting death, except the fear I’ll scream in a crowd, except the fear of appendicitis, except the fear of heart trouble . . . Otherwise, quite fearless.

The prose has the immediacy and colloquial fluency of the Beats, whom Fante prefigured by over a decade. Charles Bukowski, dogged champion of free-form verse, called Fante “my God,” and was responsible for bringing his work to the attention of Black Sparrow Press. In the preface to Ask the Dust, Bukowski describes the day he discovered the book in the Los Angeles Public Library, carrying it away “like a man who had found gold in the city dump.” Fante, he writes, “was not afraid of emotion. The humor and the pain were intermixed with a superb simplicity . . . [the] book was a wild and enormous miracle to me.”

Fante’s biography is the stuff of literary legend, the kind of story that makes you weep at the injustice of it all. It’s some consolation to know that Fante was buoyed by the attention his work at last received, and spent the last few years of his life dictating a novel to his wife. Dreams from Bunker Hill is the fourth and last in his Bandini series—the others are Wait Until Spring, Bandini; The Road to Los Angeles; and, of course, Ask the Dust. Read them in order, or begin with Ask the Dust, as I did, then devour the other three.

Testing

Student Paper
by Justin Taylor
from Post Road 29

The negation of the negation is based on a correct reading of the wrong books.

 — Donald Barthleme, “The Rise of Capitalism”

Let the reason remain outside of the fact that the world does not involve magic: only chance, intelligence, and skill. There’s this idea of people creating their own stories but in the beginning what they thought was horrible ended up good. It makes sense. I mean let’s say you are a person who hasn’t gotten sick in many years, and then I offer you an opportunity for meaningful exchange, to transform fantasy into a fragment of communication widely spread without visible limits on the scope of being understood. The thing is that you always have these people who support or oppose a situation. My thesis is that a problem is something which is caused by something else.

            As Gladwell points out, events take place. Try to estimate where you stand. A broken window does not allow us to decipher that in fact the culture has taken a detour. A major concern is the anger that each of us holds inside the same ability. Our human thoughts, the normal daily epidemic misdemeanors, stimulate an invitation. People have realizations in the homeless and polluted air.

            Not all religions accept the idea that limitations should not be banned completely. Rather, they should focus, should be conscious. A sense of belonging overwhelms the participants. Without the comprehension of others we are alone in the world. With the rituals and customs of a clear and concisely revealed stimulus, the youth walk hand in hand provided communities symbolize identities that have not yet been discovered to preclude an overall better chance of adaptation or the idea of creating different forms.

            The preoccupation of hunting down pirates is a major epidemic. Underneath the water hid the legal owner of the so-called “catchphrase” and the relevance of this information is just another method expanding on the depiction designed solely for the purpose of staying dependent on the main point. Now let me just explain the advantageous reaction: forces shape ideals. There is a current need to participate in another medium, a small but unmistakable link between opposing views.

            We must all embrace or fall behind a world that doesn’t yet exist and no one knows how to accommodate the traditional commercials. A new form of existence: limitless control of one’s own product. Every year—every year—we see the advancements. The normal is falling apart.

            Through one’s lifetime the exhaustion of traditions are witnessed. Who has as much power as that which rests in the hands of the children we must all become? The harsh cruel truth was exposed to the public and no longer remained a secret for the privacy of the academy. Though it is not necessarily possible for anything of this sort to happen, it is a capable representation of how minds are lived in an environment. The theory points out where to act precisely. There is a vital difference between an individual. This is something that will not be passed without a fight to the dance.

            Consistent attitudes lead to comfort and normality. We are opening our protective plethora and can vouch for the extreme velocity of our country in a bad salutation. Authorities must enforce constructive rules as they play. It is crucial to allow exposure to the main transmitters surrounding the exact root of the motivation to do better and earn a pizza party so we expect a community where guidance is provided for who we are and what we become. In the wild we are empty vessels filled with who we are.

            Choose a new way of enduring the vigorous original knowledge of the false being who claims we have the power to admire a bond we form with the participant. Community can shape amazing features and our surroundings persuade us there are things people might wish to do to prove that they really have the power to do the things they want and become people. This is where lies the true significance of a name.

            Johnson states that different experiences teach people how much they have underestimated different mountains, the mysteries of the forest. Discovery leaves behind questions. With everything that happens one must realize one can not especially dislike the spooky baby because babies are usually symbols. A man steps into fulfilling his needs where they are lost and as an American I define morality as something that provides people with an incentive to make good decisions because of all the silence. I am talking about anything inside us all: a battlefield or a cliff that has no end.

            Wilderness happens to everyone. The reader finds himself choked. He has chosen to open the door and molest the young buffalo. Content cannot be told. There are no such things as stories. The presence of absolute moral indifference allows us to experience life in a whole new way. We want to enter and escape traditional countries; the words a vivid difficulty, a virtuous blur. What is aesthetic is actually fantasy. You figure out that though you see things you don’t have to believe in them. The larger scales of trouble are inevitable to avoid the certain dangers of underlining comfort without order. A city inhabits the creatures of the jungle. The voice and footprint ameliorate functionality, collaborate better. Laws struggle to stray the deeper factors from the facts. Character emerges in the space left over, a beauty inflicted by institutes that get sucked into ascendance toward the dire public void between perfect works.

            The people become subject or “addicted” to their specifics. Growth away from the security net is due to the fact that some of us have healthy relationships, infectious moods, constant recurrence of exuded feelings, terms for achieving cohesion of desires, something on the table, the long chance to be respected, refined alienation in the wilderness of media attention, links between reading and living, an extremely influential tie. Expectations infringe on desire, a situation that in a lot of ways guarantees journal entries, a wealth of susceptible wisdom, a map, and many other things. At the important end of pleasure, we are all different and we are all we have.          

            Some of us may not like what society gives us. Hope suffocates a man intent to join the isolation principle to the unpopular strain of the shining riddle. It is not always easy inside the walls of aversion, the critical lens shaken to show affect brought down to mere presence: a pack of wolves like a bubble. We may now live in a time period. A person can be lonely without being alone.

            The absolute cannot be spoken for. All are strangers before the court. It was never about the travel or the fact this is just a metaphor for primitive truths inside us. Most circumstances incorporate the example of a firefight to beauty, where many have met their deep end. Others, meanwhile, live their whole lives residing in a childhood dream. In some cases animals and keys grow long over the temples: basis enough to live in fear of attitudes portrayed as mystical and full of depth.

            We can do whatever we want whenever we want. Nightmares and abandoned buildings shrouded and reacting as if alive. We are what we are doing. We are satisfied or confused. We find ourselves. We find a little haven in a break we knew before. We are content. We may not yet be able to understand. We as readers suppose that we as readers cannot judge. We were not there. You are looking for characters with the same intentions. The word can be an empty forest. We are truly broken, not acting stripped by the force of wanting. In conclusion, I tried to say something to the maximum degree possible. I have learned that experience is one of the main things we endure.

Periphery
by Bradley Clompus
from Post Road 36

As though stuck at thirteen,
as though mother were
fixed in mid-forties. Beside,
an uncomposed demolition
of sounds, iron ball slowly
arcing into the top level ruins,
muddled whump of impact, girders
shearing, tumbling, concrete fists,
shoulders, joints staggering
down to cutters and torchers,
massed pushers, haulers. Building
guts spilling from pre-crash fruition
of 1920s: lawyers, insurance agents,
accountants pale from overwork, hopeless
hoarding of others’ assets, plaster
a sickly mint green granulating
from every exposed, torn off
room, secrets mixed with
unaccustomed white, newly
opened to wind, to light.

From one of those half
de-created spaces, floor jigsawed,
dust billowing, paint chips mothing
down, a thin object falls, twists
while falling, hits ground
noiselessly, lost behind a drift
of debris. I say Something just
fell from a building. Mother
doesn’t answer, keeps walking.
Next day the news allots
a name, a past, a truncated
present. He was working
the 11th floor, wore a yellow
hard hat. If we stayed, we might
have seen a crowd assemble,
a few lance-like arms pointing.
There could have been a subsonic
hum of frightened bees, a plea
for reckoning. Try to remember
this, I remind myself. Mother says,
not to me, not to the watchers,
That poor guy, that poor, poor
guy. Rubble is piling on the ground,
a minor mountain, its peak unstable,
sloughing off the hard and soft
stuff we’ve made, the brownish
scarlet rusts, dirty beige, broken
Wedgewood blues. The man waits
for his pickup, his arrangements.
Verging toward mourning,
the crowd might have huddled
a bit, leaned in tentatively,
sheltering an absent core.
And two of us who’d partly
seen, partly known, left it
all behind, kept walking.

When the Farmer Clutches the Rake: Writing the Real
by Cheryl Strayed
from Post Road 22

The first story I ever wrote featured a talking parrot named Poncho who busted a trio of diamond thieves on a late night train. What a fantastic story! my seventh grade teacher scrawled in red ink on the top of the page. She was right. It is, literally, my most fantastic story to date — my writing in the intervening years swirling ever further from the farfetched and toward the real, if not the mundane. I write fiction. I write nonfiction. I move back and forth across that genre divide, but the real is the thread that joins the two. In my tiny literary universe of one, style supersedes genre at the root. My avian caper aside, my primary ache as a writer is to do as Robert Lowell famously suggested and simply say what happened.

It took me a while to accept this. I feared that what happened was hohum. But I’m the sort of writer who believes that writing is a calling and furthermore that when we’re called to do something we don’t get to be terribly picky about the details.

There was an actual moment during which this became perfectly clear to me. I was in graduate school, taking a fiction workshop taught by George Saunders. There were only four students in the class, so instead of meeting at school, we met in George’s living room, where we reclined in cozy chairs around a coffee table on which sat a very large book that featured reproductions of paintings various artists had made over the past several hundred years. One week George opened up the book and asked idly which of the paintings we each thought most closely represented who we were as writers. We all gathered in to look as he turned the pages, the search on for the one that was “ours,” though — at least speaking for myself — search is not precisely the word. There was nothing lost, then found. When I saw the painting that compelled me to say “that one,” the sensation was more like rounding the final bend on a far-back road and spotting at last the familiar house one knew was there all along.

The painting was a portrait of a farmer so meticulously accurate, so particular and true, it was more vivid than a photograph: the farmer’s pale level gaze, his rough hands clutching a rake, the parched yellow crops in his field. It wasn’t the prettiest picture in the book. It wasn’t the most innovative or outlandish or even, perhaps, the one I’d most like to hang on my wall. But there it was: mine. Something and everything about that image seemed to be lodged in my chest. Looking at it was like gazing into a mirror, my own intentions reflected back to me. It’s the best way I can express what I strive for in both my fiction and my nonfiction: I madly, deeply, honestly want to show you exactly how it looks when the farmer clutches the rake.

This is a long way of saying that the real is my road and the genre is my vehicle. It’s from the standpoint of content and style that I make the decision whether to write a particular story as fiction or nonfiction. The question is always how best to convey what is most true. Will it be the freedom and invention of fiction that shows readers most acutely what I hope they’ll see, or is it the constraint and wondrous specificity of how it really went down? Does the story demand that I mine a character or excavate a life?

There isn’t one answer to these questions for me. I’m often asked if it’s hard to switch back and forth between the two genres, but it would be much harder for me to limit myself to one. Like playing a piano with only one hand, it could be done, but there are keys I’d inevitably find it impossible to reach. There’s a symbiotic relationship between the two genres and also a funny paradox, in which each yearns to achieve the greatest effect of the other. When we praise fiction it’s often credibility at the core of our delight: these characters seemed like real people to me is high praise indeed. Nonfiction writers are lauded for something like the opposite. It’s only when they transcend the self, when the real person behind the prose disperses into someone more universal, that the reader feels altered by the life of another.

This isn’t to say I think the two genres are the same. Writers who assert there isn’t much of a difference between fiction and literary nonfiction baffle me. In my mind the line is clear and bright: on one side you can write whatever you want; on the other side you can write whatever you want without making shit up.

The not making up of shit is the magic dust of nonfiction. It won’t do your work for you — even if you’ve had an incredible life, your writing could easily be crap — but if you hone your craft and find your story and figure out what it means and write it well (which is to say without fear, even if you’re frankly terrified), the fact that you didn’t make this shit up is capable of blowing your readers minds into smithereens.

That power is also the reason they’ll want to sue you if they later learn you lied.

I write nonfiction when I think the story I have to tell would be best told through the thinnest possible screen. There really isn’t anything like the author standing right before the reader saying this happened to me. And there’s nothing like it’s opposite either — when the writer is free to manipulate the possibilities of action and interaction and plot, as one can do in fiction, and therefore set the intimate on the grandest possible stage. Can the self tell the biggest story? is a question I ask a lot when I’ve opted to write something as nonfiction. Sometimes the answer is no, other times yes. Sometimes it’s both.

The biggest story of my own life so far, the one that’s obsessed me as a writer, is the death of my mother at age forty-five. Turns out, my grief is more enormous than any one genre can contain. I wrote about it fictionally first, in my novel Torch, because I had a story of loss to tell that wasn’t just mine. And then I wrote it about nonfictionally, in my essays and memoir Wild, because I had things to say about love and sorrow and healing that so breathtakingly belonged to me I couldn’t possibly locate them in someone else.

I’m working for something slightly different in each genre, but in each I plow the same field. This is what I mean when I say I write the real instead of I write fiction or nonfiction. I’ll do whatever it takes to transform the paint into a guy standing in a yellow field with a rake.



Lucy Gayheart by Willa Cather
by Mary Morris
from Post Road 8

I came to Willa Cather late. It was odd that she escaped me because as a girl and young woman I read books that grew out of my love of the heartland where I am from. I read Twain, Dreiser, and, of course, Laura Ingalls Wilder, but never Cather. In a sense I believe that books come to us at the right time and that’s how Willa Cather came to me. It wasn’t until I was married and living in New Mexico that I read Death Comes for the Archbishop. I was mesmerized by the gift of her storytelling, the cumulative effect of the narrative delivered with grace and ostensible simplicity.

A few years later when I was teaching at Princeton, I started talking about Cather with a friend who said, “But you haven’t read My Antonia?” It was her favorite book in the world and she told me how lucky I was—to read this book for the first time as a grown-up. I read it as one might listen to a person who is slowly coming to discover a life-long friend. Cather grew on me in that way, but it wasn’t until I caught a small squib in the newspaper that my bond was truly, irrevocably, formed.

A newspaper account said that for years Joanne Woodward had been trying to make a film out of the Cather novella Lucy Gayheart. I’d never heard of Lucy Gayheart, but I went out and got it. I opened it and read these lines:

In Haverford on the Platte, the townspeople still talk of Lucy Gayheart. They do not talk of her a great deal, to be sure; life goes on and we live in the present. But when they do mention her name it is with a gentle glow in the face or the voice, a confidential glance which says: “Yes, you, too, remember?”

I settled into my chair with a cup of tea and my dog at my side, because I knew that someone was going to tell me a story about a person’s life filled with all the tenderness and nostalgia I felt for the Middle West and a childhood I too had left behind. From the moment I began Lucy Gayheart, which opens with a touching, but portentous skating scene and ends with one of the most poignant images in fiction, I knew I had come home.

I found myself for days, living in a parallel universe with Lucy and Harry and the town of Haverford, the corrupting Chicago. The heartbreak of disappointment and mistakes that cannot be made right. Then I read the other short Cather novellas—A Lost Lady and Alexander’s Bridge. But Lucy Gayheart was the turning point for me. I had found my American Chekhov.

I realize I am not the first to feel this way about Willa Cather and I feel somewhat naive as if I am stating the obvious. But Cather came to me at a moment when I needed her. I had forgotten what it was that I loved about writing and being a writer. Why I’d begun this in the first place.

What has drawn me into Cather is the clarity of her uncluttered prose—as vast and lonely as the places she writes about. There are no pyrotechnics of language, no tap dancing turns of phrase. It is language stripped to its essentials; everything exists for the purpose of the story. When people speak of Hemingway and Raymond Carver in terms of clean, clear sentences devoted to the telling of the story I do not know why Cather is not mentioned in the same breath.

I have long been a fan of Midwestern Writers and intrigued by their migratory patterns and by the fact that from afar what they write about most is home. Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dreiser, Twain, Nathaniel West, and, more recently, Baxter, Dybek, Patricia Hampl. Writers of straightforward, no-nonsense prose whose goal is to create characters we care about who live inside a story we want to hear. It is what writers are supposed to do.

We read these writers. And by that I mean we don’t have to ponder them or explicate them or use the dictionary to understand them. We read them as if someone was stoking a fire or sitting on a front stoop and telling us something we had never heard before. We grow patient and the business of our lives comes to a halt as if we’ve got nothing but time and follow the story as if being led by the hand.

Alberto Moravio once said that life is chaos; only literature makes sense. It’s as if someone has come in and straightened up the house. And for me that someone is Willa Cather •