writing

What’s a Weekend?

/ lewisdesimone / 1 Comment

We used to have martinis on Monday evenings as consolation for beginning a new week, and again on Fridays, to celebrate having survived it.

Wednesday was Hump Day, the beginning of the much-craved slide toward the weekend. And the weekend, of course, was what it was all about.

I’ve been retired for more than a year now, and one of the strangest things to get used to is the absence of those markers. I no longer dread Mondays because they’re no different from Tuesdays. In fact, the sole day of the week that stands out now is Sunday—and that’s only because the New York Times shows up on my doorstep. (Side note: Martinis are still a twice-weekly event. At least.)

For the longest time, I looked forward to retirement. That’s what I was working for, I told myself. Along the way I imagined all the things I’d do when the time finally came—the new hobbies I’d start, the places I’d go. Half of my bucket list was designated for post-career activities. Most of all, though, I pictured retirement as the time when I would be free to write.

How a retiree tells one day from another

The most common question I get at readings is whether I have a ritual for writing. Everyone seems interested in how a writer squeezes in the time. The truth, for me, was that while I wanted to write every day—to be one of those mythical creatures who get up in early-morning darkness and dash off a few pages before heading to the office—when it came right down to it, there were too many other things going on. So I basically wrote my first few novels on Saturdays (which explains why so much time passed between publication dates).

Now that’s all changed. In theory, at least. I do write every day, if only for an hour or two. (The concept of being a “full-time” writer has never really appealed to me. Kafka was crazy enough with a day job; imagine if he’d sat alone in a studio for eight solid hours.)

Exit Wounds was written in less than a year—a record for me. It’s not spilling out the words I find difficult. The time-consuming part is revision. That’s where most of the work is, and frankly, most of the fun. The manuscript becomes a bit of a puzzle at that point, and my job is to rearrange the pieces, or add more, or cut some, until it all makes sense.

I once wanted a career as a writer, but over the years I’ve come to embrace writing as an avocation—if only because making a living at it isn’t in the cards for the vast majority of us scribes. And even in retirement, that’s what it is. I don’t want to think of writing as a “job”—that connotes drudgery. When writing stops being fun, it stops, period. Like my newer hobbies—gardening, wine tasting, bridge—writing has to be done for joy. Otherwise, I don’t have time for it.

Building Community

/ lewisdesimone / Leave a comment

I just returned from the annual Saints and Sinners Literary Festival in New Orleans. It was my first time there since the pandemic, so it felt a bit like a homecoming. The weekend was full of thought-provoking panels, inspiring readings, and the joy of community.

Sharing words of wisdom at the panel on Generational Change in Gay Culture and Literature

As always, the festival offered opportunities not only to reconvene with old friends but to make new ones. Writing, of course, is by definition a lonely activity, and it’s also a widely misunderstood one. That fact was underscored for me by an incident at the hotel bar the day before the festival officially began.

A few stools down from me, a thirtyish man was networking to his heart’s content, chatting up the bartender and other patrons, telling each one about his new law practice. He was looking for leads to build up his client base. When a middle-aged woman took the seat beside him, he launched into his spiel and asked what she was doing in town. She told him she was a writer attending the festival. He grew excited and took the opportunity to ask her what sort of work her attorney did for her. She laughed and said she didn’t have an attorney. This he could not fathom. “You’re a writer and you don’t have a lawyer?” “Believe me,” she said, “with the amount of money I make from my books, it wouldn’t be worth a lawyer’s time.”

The conversation encapsulated the misperceptions writers face in the world and why we need our own community for sustenance. At the festival, I was surrounded by people who got it, who understood that the majority of us will never make a living from our writing. They understood that the pleasure of creativity is our primary motivation. Some people write to make money, but the majority of us write out of love.

And for the weekend, we came together as a tribe—commiserating about our challenges, sharing tips on publishing and promotion, honoring one another’s efforts. And most of all, encouraging our peers to keep going.

I came away with a renewed commitment to my work. I even found inspiration for a major development in a piece I’ve been struggling with for ages. Such is the power of community in the creative process.

On Reading “Finnegans Wake”

/ lewisdesimone / 3 Comments

Bucket lists are pretty individual things. While other people want to skydive or bungee-jump before they kick the proverbial, I’ve chosen less foolhardy things: Learn French. Visit Stonehenge. Read Finnegans Wake.

What, you say? Is it a bucket list or a self-torture device?

I’d say the same about skydiving. There’s no accounting for tastes, or definitions of foolhardy.

I fell in love with James Joyce way back in college, when my junior tutorial focused on Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses. At the time, Ulysses seemed a herculean task—and, faith and begorra, it was—but I somehow knew that my voyage into Joyceana would not be complete without reading his final book, purported to be the most difficult in the English language.

Spoiler alert: it is.

Where do I start? Perhaps in the middle of a sentence? (See below.) I’d waited years to read Finnegans Wake; only once I’d retired did I think I’d have enough free to time to give it the attention it would need. I ended up reading it fairly quickly, though—a chapter a day except for the longest couple, to which I dedicated two days each. That schedule required about two hours with the Wake per day, plus another hour for the reader’s guide by William York Tindall.

The most important decision I made was to be gentle with myself. Even Joyce scholars—including Tindall—do not claim to understand the whole thing. It’s simply too dense. Consider this: It took Joyce 17 years to write a 600-page book. That means he was writing at the rate of one-tenth of a page per day. Every word is impeccably chosen. Every word holds multiple resonances, including a plethora of delicious puns (“Ourh Former who erred in having”; “with my bawdy did I her whorsip”) and portmanteau words (“humptyhillhead”; “middayevil”). Nothing is straightforward. The language itself pulses with life in every sentence.

I chose to let the language wash over me rather than trying to pick apart every sentence. To make it easier, I found an audio version of the book and followed along with the reader—to keep me from stumbling over words and to bring the text more to life. The primary reader, Irish actor Barry McGovern, modulated his tone to represent different voices (often, there’s dialogue within a single paragraph, unmarked) and also enlivened the text with various Irish accents as appropriate. Marcella Riordan also appears in a couple of chapters, with a lively take on the female characters. I don’t know if I could have finished the book without them.

If Ulysses is the story of a single day, then Finnegans Wake is the story of a single night—most of it narrated in a dreamlike state. There are major characters—H.C. Earwicker, Anna Livia, and their children—but they tend to blend together at various times. In the end, they’re less individuals than arbitrary representatives of humanity. And the plot is ultimately unimportant. This is a story about cycles (starting with the final sentence, which merges back into the first)—wakefulness to sleep to wakefulness; life to death to life. The place where this theme resonated best for me is a sex scene in Chapter 16 (“For they met and mated and bedded and buckled and got and gave and reared and raised…”), in which the coupling of two individuals yields not just a child, but all of history; life, whether individual or communal, starts in a bed and is continually renewed there.

Throughout the book, Joyce jabs at literary history and criticism. He toys with the reader, making the text deliberately impenetrable, as though relishing the image of critics twisting themselves into pretzels trying to understand it.

I can’t say I understand the Wake, but by the end, I did feel that I “got” it. I fell into the rhythm of it, as if I were part of Earwicker’s dream. Which may be the point. One of his nicknames is Here Comes Everybody. No doubt, Joyce intended us all to see ourselves in the Wake. As a dream book, it dwells in the depths of the soul, the primordial soup of the subconscious, the foundation of humanity.

It’s also one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. The puns alone are worth its heft. In all honesty, I haven’t laughed aloud so much with a book since John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces.

As for the bucket list:

  • French—check
  • Finnegans Wake—check
  • Stonehenge, you’re next!

First-Person Problems

/ lewisdesimone / 2 Comments

Many years ago, I was waiting for a friend in the lobby of the New York City Opera when a passing lady mistook me for the famous bass-baritone Samuel Ramey.

Well, actually, that’s not entirely true. The woman approached and told me I looked like Mr. Ramey. I shook my head with a flattered smile, and said she was mistaken. “No,” she said archly, “I didn’t think you were Samuel Ramey. I just said you looked like him.”

There’s a big difference between being someone and being similar to him. So, in that spirit, let me state clearly that I am not Craig Amundsen. I just play him in a book.

Craig is the first-person narrator of Exit Wounds, my recent novel. Like the book, he is a work of fiction. But try telling that to some of my readers:

“I love the scene where you dump your boyfriend.” (While I’ve dumped a boyfriend or two, it never happened the way it does in the book.)

“I felt so bad when you lost your job.” (I never worked in a bookstore, let alone was laid off from one.)

I suppose I should take it as a compliment. Perhaps the assumption that Craig is really me is evidence that he comes across as an authentic person and not just a cardboard cut-out. Nevertheless, there’s something creepy about being mistaken for an imaginary being.

These comments, of course, have so far come from friends, people who know me well enough to catch some of the true-to-life references in the book and to imagine me in the role of Craig or any of my other narrators. But I do have to wonder what other people think: Do all readers assume that a first-person narrator is a stand-in for the author? That Melville was in a shipwreck and floated to safety on a coffin? That Charlotte Brontë’s boss kept his wife in the attic? That Nabokov was a pedophile?

Every book has a narrator, of course; the third-person kind just gets to slide by unnoticed. It’s still a person, and may even be a character observing the story. It’s not always a god looking down as she manipulates her hapless characters. But if she communicates the story to you as an I, a personal bond is forged between narrator and reader (spoiler alert: this is often precisely what the writer is hoping for).

Perhaps contemporary readers are more likely to mistake the narrator for the author because of the dominance of memoir in the market these days. Readers are told to believe that everything in a memoir is factual (even dialogue and detailed memories from childhood), so they may have a Pavlovian reaction: if you see an I, then automatically believe what it says.

The truth is that no book is or can be a perfect representation of real life. No matter how much the story or character has in common with the author, nearly everything is modified in some way—for clarity, to elucidate a theme, or “to protect the innocent,” as they used to say on Dragnet. I would posit that this process is no less common in the highly problematic genre of memoir, but that’s a subject for another time.

It always seems to come down to the crucial difference between fact (what happened) and truth (what it means): writers should be primarily concerned with the latter. When necessary, we use fact to illustrate that truth—but still, everything is filtered through the imagination.

So yes, some of the events in my work are based on my own experience. Some of the characters’ personalities (narrator or not) are inspired by mine. Like Craig, I lived in the Castro for many years and served as a juror on a case much like his. But I never ran a bookstore, I didn’t go to Stanford, and I’m not from the Midwest. On the other hand, I’ve spent a lot of time in bookstores; I’ve visited Stanford; and I moved to Minnesota in my fifties. All those things helped me paint a picture of Craig’s life, but his lived experience is not mine. No more than Samuel Ramey’s marvelous voice.