Words for Readers and Writers E-Book

Larry Woiwode

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 360

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

From poetry to social networks, writing affects us all. Having taught the art of writing for years while producing literary works of national renown, Larry Woiwode thus explores the mysterious power of language, offering readers a diverse collection of thought-provoking essays on the meaning and significance of writing. In teaching the art of putting words on a page, Woiwode highlights the crucial role that writing plays in communicating with others and fashioning meaning for our lives. The book's 21 essays will help Christians grasp the foundational importance of writing and to be more intentional about how they use words to express their emotions, desires, and beliefs.

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“In Words for Readers and Writers, Larry Woiwode—one of our most compelling and important contemporary voices—illuminates his life and his experience as a writer-of-faith, as a writer within whom and within whose works a profound Christian belief resides. In these essays and interviews, Woiwode takes us into his interior life, offering artful meditations on the holy acts of reading and writing. Woiwode explores what it means to be a writer-in-Christ, to celebrate the durability and holiness of language, to work at that place where the imagination and the soul intersect and flower. We should listen earnestly to what Woiwode has to say.”

Gregory L. Morris, Professor Emeritus of American Literature, Penn State Erie; author, A World of Order and Light and Talking Up a Storm

“I knew that I was in for a treat the moment I looked at the table of contents, which reads like a tempting menu of topics. When I started to read the essays I was captivated by the energy of Woiwode’s mind and even more by how widely read and broadly informed he is. To read this book is to receive a liberal education. I believe that this is one of Woiwode’s best books.”

Leland Ryken, Professor Emeritus of English, Wheaton College; author, Christian Guides to the Classics series

“A book on craft, yes, but more a book on living, Larry Woiwode’s Words for Readers and Writers in my library sits between Flannery O’Connor’s Mystery and Manners and John Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist. Not since O’Connor has a writer put the reader in such comfortable and uncomfortable places at the same time.”

G. W. Hawkes, Professor of English and Creative Writing, Lycoming College; author, Surveyor and Gambler’s Rose

“Few writers can match Larry Woiwode for craft and care. Sentence by beautiful sentence he traces the lineaments of thought, feeling, and experience. He inhabits the roles that life has given him, as writer and critic, father and husband, and Christian, with a constant difficult grace. I admire his writing deeply; it is always gratifying to be in its presence.”

Alan Jacobs, Distinguished Professor of Humanities, Baylor University; author, How to Think

“The word ‘words’ and the name ‘Woiwode’ are not only similar sounding but are practically synonymous. Who better to parse the subject of words than Larry Woiwode, one of our country’s ultimate wordsmiths?”

John L. Moore, author, The Breaking of Ezra Riley and Take the Reins

“Why do you write? Where does it come from? What sort of life is it, anyway? We badger our writers with those questions certain that living that close to fire must surely have taught them something. Woiwode has been asked those questions many times, over the years, and this volume collects a vigorous, various set of answers. While settings and interlocutors shift, Woiwode’s core insight, quietly returned to, remains always the same. What is writing but faith expressing itself through love?—giving yourself over to that first stab of insight, spending yourself prodigiously for others, certain that the one who calls you has already given you all things. One can learn much here about reading and writing, but one can learn even more what it means to believe.”

Thomas Gardner, Alumni Distinguished Professor of English, Virginia Tech; author, John in the Company of Poets: The Gospel in Literary Imagination

“I loved it. I’d like to read it again this weekend. The way Woiwode phrased things humbled me completely . . . . Lots of food for thought . . . ”

Victoria, college student

“‘Metaphor is the meditative center of a writer’s inner universe.’ That’s just too cool. This essay got me reading sections aloud to my parents because I needed to gush about it with somebody. Woiwode’s essays have been a great encouragement—artistically and spiritually.”

Phoebe, college student

Also by Larry Woiwode

Novels

Beyond the Bedroom Wall

Born Brothers

Indian Affairs

Poppa John

What I’m Going to Do, I Think

Short Stories

The Neumiller Stories

Silent Passengers

Poems

Even Tide

Poetry North: Five Poets of North Dakota

Memoirs

A Step from Death

What I Think I Did

Non-fiction and Essays

Acts: A Writer’s Reflections on Writing, the Church, and His Own Life

Aristocrat of the West: The Story of Harold Schafer

Words Made Fresh*

For Young Adults

The Invention of Lefse*

*recent publications of Crossway

Words for Readers and Writers Copyright © 2013 by Larry Woiwode

Published by Crossway                 1300 Crescent Street                 Wheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Cover design: Josh Dennis

First printing 2013

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. 2011 Text Edition. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.

Scripture references marked NKJV are from The New King James Version. Copyright © 1982, Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-3522-2 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-3523-9 Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-3524-6 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-3525-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Woiwode, Larry.     [Essays. Selections]     Words for readers and writers : spirit-pooled dialogues / Larry Woiwode.         p. cm.     Includes bibliographical references.     ISBN 978-1-4335-3522-2 (tp)     1. Christian literature—Authorship. I. Title.

BR44.W562013814'.54—dc232012040112

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers..

For Laurel

Words, Words, Words,

that’s life

The illusion of reality is a recurrent “idea” in Nabokov’s fiction. A lily, he once remarked, “is more real to a naturalist than it is to an ordinary person. But it is still more real to a botanist. And any further stage of reality is reached with that botanist who is a specialist in lilies.” In short, one gets closer to the reality of an object the more intensely one studies it, but no final or pure state of knowledge about lilies, or God, or life, or the mysteries of nature can ever be attained.

PAGE STEGNER

Without minute neatness of execution the sublime cannot exist.

WILLIAM BLAKE

CONTENTS

Introduction

PART ONE: USES OF WORDS

 1 ABCs That Tend to Family Unity

 2 Readers’ Literary Guide to Litigation

 3 The Worded Flood, Rural to Academy

 4 Autobiography, Biography, Fiction, and Fact

 5 Using Words, a Continual Spiritual Exercise

 6 Examining the Writer’s Image with IMAGE

 7 Pooling Metaphors: On Words Overflowing

PART TWO: USERS OF WORDS

 8 A Fifty-Year Walk with Right Words

 9 Getting Words Plain Right to Publish

10 Tolstoy’s Words March Right to Truth

11 Nabokov’s Words Not Fading to Nothing

12 Exchanging Words: Aural Northern Lights

13 With Inside’s Words inside SUNY Academy

14 Words at the Last from a Martyr Who Lives

PART THREE: REALMS OF USERS

15 A State Laureate’s Graduation Address

16 A Concern for the State of Indian Affairs

17 A View of the Ethics Related to Writing

18 A Turn in Aesthetics as a Century Turns

19 A Final Meeting at the Algonquin Hotel

20 A View on Writing from Another Country

21 A Writer’s Feel of Internal Bleeding, A to Z

About the Essays

Notes

INTRODUCTION

The following essays formed an eerie architecture of meaning as I selected them from two drawers of a four-drawer file. The dialogues they record are both inner and outer, between me and memory and interviewers and editors. They deal with the act of writing, with a reader’s response to writing, and the ways we all use words, including Facebook entries, to fashion meaning for our lives—even identities.

Words about writing, once on a page, form pooling metaphors that a reader can enter into in a dialogue. Recurring motifs reflect across the pools and a variety of meanings form a growing unity. This is abetted by a spirited gravity that sets them in pooling emphases.

If that’s what writers feel when they say they’re inspired, I feel and have felt inspired. The Spirit has pressed out a variety of views that counterbalance one another in the spirit-pooled dialogues of my title.

PART ONE

USES OF WORDS

1

ABCs THAT TEND TO FAMILY UNITY

a.

Settled families tend toward melodic unity. Unsettled families create alternating disharmony. A settled family atmosphere can arrive by finding a place to live, one agreeable to both parents, if both are present to weave their baritone-bass and contralto among the melodies of piping offspring. The voices of children affect a family’s composition and establish the countermelodies the children’s lives will assume as they mature and move on. All family members carry secrets in an unvoiced region at the center of their selves—a symphonic and hidden second home to each.

The pressures of the unvoiced region can cause family members to broaden their understanding, first for one another and then for an interrelated community, forming works from words that include others—theother. Healthy members situate even the unappealing in their interiors, from the Grimm or Disney characters of childhood to the Ophelias and Othellos of an adult. Members release ghosts and welcome guests who gather in the sunny or leaf-speckled spheres of their hidden interiors.

These are the characters of bedtime stories or tales of Grandpa growing up. Collections of stories gather inside family boundaries in a compression of artistic collaboration that encourages expression. Stories form a family’s outlook, whatever its origin or ethnicity or age or character, and this outlook is apparent in a family’s ability to use language and in the gestures and the poses their bodies take on.

That is why children—and those who grow into parents—page through albums of family photographs. The fixed and still gestures suggest further routes into the inner self of the family, over paths leading to the past from the present. The ground note underneath, informing integration, is place. When a family needs to define a gap or find what’s lost, they return to the place where their thought began—from the basement of forgetfulness to the kitchen or computer desk.

Place is the home base for both hide-and-seek and philosophical speculation. Both need a binding origin to begin. Both use words in their countdown. A common bond is that all houses and apartments, invested with the artwork of family stories, resound with a variety of routes for each member. The source of resonance is the historical base of the stories families tell. They construct personages and place them in phenomenal existence. That’s the primary use of words.

b.

My wife and I introduced to existence, in this order: daughter, son, daughter, daughter. I hoped to be a father to all, not a patriarch or rival, and before any were able to speak I began to carve a separate space to meet with each. Photos exist of the four, from their early months, sitting in my lap beside an open book I’m reading from. I didn’t use reading as a means of setting my seal on their consciousness—the stories weren’t mine—but as a way of assembling for them, through the metaphor of words, a pleasant and reassuring space where the two of us—or more if I was reading to more than one—might meet.

The meeting place was specific and objective or, if not quite objective—my wife and I chose the books—benign to their forming personalities and not crowded with parental rule. As an adult I could contain the content of a children’s book and in that way establish a realm where each child could rest. One would cling to my shirt, another grab at my lips or hair or the skin of my cheek, imprinting my person on them, I presume, as provider of an external habitation that held a story containing us in its weave.

Each one could enter and strobe the substance of that story in his or her way, while as reader I was merely a medium providing a slip-step to a safe state. The jaded or squeamish or overly worried parent might wonder whether reading-in-the-lap is too intimate. Don’t worry; be happy! Its benefits outweigh outmoded fears.

I write stories and novels, where all is metaphor, aware that the cultivation of metaphor can be a trying occupation. When our children were growing up, I was often so immersed in my work I had to rise from it like a deep-sea diver from ocean depths to keep from inflicting the bends of my mind—overly mature or unfamiliar emotion—on my children or, worse, drawing them into the undefined underworld I was exploring, word by word, as an adult. These are stories that our children, as children, never heard.

Gerald Locklin, a poet who enjoys a day out with his daughter, says,

When we get home I am smart enough

To downplay to my wife what a good day

We have had on our own. Later, saying

Goodnight to my little girl,

Already much taller than her mother,

I say, “days like today are the favorite

Days of my life,” and she knows

It is true.1

Parents can speak of love for a child that wholeheartedly, as long as it’s not habitual, because children are guiltless of a past history of disagreement or agenda, hidden or otherwise. Children are guiltless even of their birth.

c.

Young adults who find fault with their parents or harbor negative views about a parent have difficulty keeping out of trouble. A primary reason is lack of intimacy with a parent. A young adult’s criterion of judgment is often cultural, most of which originates outside the family, at school or on a playing field or in a mall or on Facebook, and has less to do with the character of a parent than with the values of friends. And when values overtake morals, chaos has come again.

A father who does not communicate with his family, however, no matter the views he holds or, worse, who inflicts the silent treatment on a daughter or a son, is on the road to enrolling himself as a target of disdain. A mother may ameliorate that, but eventually the father has to engage in a juggling act to keep his relationship to his children from loosening into the disruptive clatter of free fall.

The way to keep those routes or, better, highways of communication open is by reading to a child from the beginning of his or her perceptions. A developing child experiences your voice forming the shape of a story, the story unites you as one, and in that unity a child learns to listen and respond to your voice. Finally, a father must listen to the newest story from a variety of sources that rise in the voices of his children.

The experience of listening to a child’s story is a parent’s aid to newfound perception. My wife and I encouraged communication in our children, and I’m surprised at how they keep in touch. One or another phones or texts or sends e-mails daily, asking our opinion or advice or merely wondering about their stand in the present. We speak to them from the realm first formed by the stories they heard us read over the years when they, and we, too, were growing up.

2

READERS’ LITERARY GUIDE TO LITIGATION

It may seem odd, or perhaps revelatory, that Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson developed a close relationship, largely by correspondence. James was acknowledged as the superior artist, although Stevenson was no slouch, and their bond seems the sort that occurs in opposites. The lesson of their relationship, with its several different angles, is a lesson practicing lawyers might attend to, and I don’t mean in choosing clients.

A distillation of that relationship can be found in Graham Greene’s essay, “Two Friends.” Greene is reviewing a biography of Stevenson by Janet Adam Smith and in its midst shifts to an examination of the friendship that developed between the two writers.1 The biography of Stevenson, “sees in the friendship the aesthetic appeal to James of Stevenson’s situation”:

The man living under the daily threat of a fatal hemorrhage, yet with such an appetite for the active life; the novelist who could only gain the health and energy for writing at the risk of dissipating them on other ends; the writer who had to spur his talent to earn more and more money to pay for the life of action that kept him alive; the continual tug between the claims of life and literature—here was a situation not unlike those which had provided James with the germ of a novel or story.

This glimpse of Stevenson could as well be a thumbnail sketch of a high-powered, occasionally reckless litigator.

James, on the other hand, once he moved from the security of the family brownstone on Washington Square, off Fifth Avenue, to England, maintained the reserved and distant (some thought cold) composure that perhaps only an expatriate writer with no financial worries in the world can adopt. He seemed comfortable only at his writing desk, and is the exact person one would want to work on contracts and briefs. His weighty seriousness, as Greene points out, was no match for Stevenson’s agile metaphors, as in a moment in their correspondence when Stevenson confronted James on the inability of fiction to compete with life:

These phantom reproductions of experience, even at their most acute, convey decided pleasure, while experience itself, in the cockpit of life, can torture and slay.

One can imagine the effect of this poised and colorful statement in a courtroom, where “phantom reproductions of experience” are recounted, some of which may include a torture or a slaying. In a mode more instructive, perhaps, Stevenson writes to James that “catching the very note and trick, the strange irregular rhythm of life, that is the attempt whose strenuous force keeps Fiction upon her feet.”2 It is the tricky capture of the note of “the strange irregular rhythm of life” that will enable the lawyer as communicator to keep listeners, especially a jury, alert.

But it was James who proved more relevant to courtroom procedure, and not for his rolling, periodic sentences or fine-tuned sensibility. James nailed down for all artful communication that would follow the concept of point of view. Before his strictures, narrators of fiction were often omniscient or the point of view shifted from epistle to epistle in the earliest novels or from character to character or scene to scene, as with Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy and later their American counterparts. James said in more than one preface (and in his practice) that a novel or story that begins in third person point of view must adhere to that point of view in every movement to its end, for aesthetic and conceptual veracity to adhere.3

His view arrived with such intellectual weight that by the 1940s and 1950s into the 1960s, American writers and instructors of creative writing were talking noisily as telegraphers about violation of point of view, as if it were an imbedded law about the human body.

The points of view can be summarized in simple fashion: first person, meaning “I did this, I did that,” the I—I—I of too many modern novels; second person, meaning “You were the one, you did that,” seldom used for a novel although long stories have been composed using it; third person, meaning “She did that, he did this,” the mode commonly used in distanced writing of a Jamesian mode; limited third, meaning “She or he is I”—that is, limited within the skull of the same, singular person—an effect similar to first person, when handled judiciously; and omniscient, meaning “I am like God” in that I maintain an all-seeing overview of every mortal within my weather below, as epitomized in Thomas Hardy. The shifting Tolstoyan view, however, often accommodates all of the above, excluding the first person “I” that entered with Ivan Turgenev and Anton Chekov.

These compartmentalized limits, as they may be seen, must be adhered to in a courtroom. The defendant is always “he” or “she,” unless he takes the stand, and in that movement takes on the first person “I,” as in “I did not do that”—although she may include references, within limits that don’t extend to hearsay or impugning others, in the third person: “He did it.”

The litigator, in referring to this witness, must be solicitous to use the second person, as in, “Is it true that you . . .” Occasionally this litigator may step back inside his or her first person to say, “I think that you . . .” but this step is best taken with prudence or is likely to summon the first person response, “I object, Your Honor!” The only situation in which a litigator may safely use the first person singular (“we” is the province of judge and jury) is when he is called to the bench to explain himself, as in the instance of using first person too freely in interrogations.

Your Honor, the judge and court, must be addressed in third person, to signify his or her objective distance, excluding an advocate for the lowly who spurns unseemly excuses, such as Judge Judy, and is often referred to in an elevated third that suggests an omniscient entity, as in “If it please the Court . . . ” The court, the judge, is permitted to use any person she pleases: “You, sir, are out of order,” or “I rule that . . .” or “She may retake the stand,” or “This Court, having reviewed the arguments for introducing evidence . . .”

If the lawyer-litigator does not mind his manners to remain inside the circumscribed points of view set solidly in place in American fiction by Henry James, then that lawyer, though he might ascend to the colorful language and stories of Robert Louis Stevenson, had best exempt himself from another day in court.

3

THE WORDED FLOOD, RURAL TO ACADEMY

Poetry was my pursuit in high school, and in 1960 I enrolled at the University of Illinois, Urbana, with 35,000 students in residence, plus a meager number who met on a pier in Lake Michigan—the Navy Pier Chicago branch. The Urbana population formed a community, mostly cohesive, and it was there that my faith faded and went underground for a decade.

Agnosticism and atheism and a welter of other isms—more than words to those who encounter them in their youth—including some I’d never heard of, were in the air along with whiffs of smoke with the scent of burning leaves. Professors and graduate assistants held forth at the front of classrooms from oak lecterns that had the appearance of sawed-off upper halves of pulpits. They set these on their desks at the front of the room, chopping the church in two and taking over, puffing on pipes or cigarettes as they spoke.

It was a new religion they preached.

A Big Man on Campus (“B-Moc,” in that era’s lingo), the sort who wore a suit and tie and topcoat and was campaigning for the office of president of the student senate, stopped me one day in the corridor of Lincoln Hall, used by many as a passageway between the journalism and English buildings, and said, “You must be Woiwode, right?”

“Yes.”

“It looks like you’re a real existentialist,” he said, naming one of the isms I hadn’t heard of.

“Oh?” I said, wary, and felt the red flag of an entity I couldn’t define start fluttering. Existentialism?

“You know, Camus and Sartre and those guys. I mean, those poems of yours!” They had appeared in a campus publication. “They’re existential, man, if anything is! Keep it up!” I was flattered, of course, even if I didn’t know what the word meant, and nobody I asked could give a satisfactory definition. But I wonder now, with sobering shots of cynicism added to my outlook, if he wasn’t fishing for a vote.

A professor of mine, an impeccable and widely published scholar with a sweet sense of humor, a true gentleman, referred to people of faith as “Christers,” as in “That Christer!”—dissing them, as we say now. It hurt at first to hear that word from a dear person otherwise so tolerant and kind, and then I fell into his fashion—or anyway imagined the label amused rather than included me.

Nobody told me you need faith to write poetry—some larger view to draw the arrangement of words free from mere verbal construction, no matter how technically sound or pyrotechnic, into the realm where they sail off in song. I enrolled in an advanced course in the metaphysical poets—John Donne, George Herbert, and Andrew Marvell—because one of the draws was the instructor. He glowed with intelligence and was lively and witty, able to cause students hardened by groveling study to laugh. I preferred the precise and subtly dodging movements of his mind revealed in his lectures to my generally flat-footed method of getting at matters, but I grew disenchanted with the class. I couldn’t imagine why I was troubled about it. For a while I found it difficult to attend, and sometimes didn’t.

Was it because he never mentioned that the poets he assigned to study were applying their faith or singing in ecstasy out of its holy strictures? I was drawn to the poets, pulled into their worlds on my own, but I don’t recall any explanations about what it was that captivated their intellects or generated the force behind their poetry—other than, as the professor said, they followed the form of metaphysical conceit or extended metaphor to the breaking point, and so forth.

Let me confess that I did well in science but wasn’t the sophisticate fit for literary study. What I probably needed to hear was “They wail in faith, baby!” One of the lows in my academic life came when I submitted a paper to this instructor on Marvell. I worked it over in my dogged way and received a grade of C, with this explanation: “Good as far as it goes but needs detail.” I asked the professor what details he meant, since my paper was mostly details, and the fellow I found so witty frowned at me in a frosty way, and said, “You can’t possibly know. You didn’t attend all my lectures.”

I hope this doesn’t seem a disaffected student taking a poke at a professor who gave him a C. I’ve been a professor and know the theme. I admired him as much as the Christer professor but he helped define an angle of the atmosphere of the sixties—the “Me Generation” about to implode over the United States and then the globe, as if “I” and “me” were the only entities able to provide proper answers. That was the animating religion behind most of the poetry I read a decade later.

What I needed was a collection like A Sacrifice of Praise with a discerning and gentle guide like James Trott.1 In his anthology readers will find what I was able to only suspect in some small area sovereignly preserved in me: that the tradition in Western literature is Christian.

Arbiters of consensus and taste, let’s call them, who are drawn from the academic community, tend to overlook this historical statistic. They would like to expunge any suggestion that God appeared incarnate on the earth, in the person and realm that the poets in Trott’s collection celebrate. Academics have been scrupulous to alter even AD (the Latinanno Domini, meaning “in the year of our Lord”) to CE, Common Era.

No matter how you change the name of centuries of artistry, however, or sift the entries in the pantheon of poets of the past, you always arrive at an unassailable truth: the tradition in Western literature is Christian.

You see glimmers of it in Beowulf (Verses added by a monk? Who can say a monk didn’t write Beowulf?) and then the métier arrives full-blown in Chaucer, with subject matter unclouded by Victorianism—which has no part in Christianity and dampens the appreciation of poetry for present-day Christians. The subject and object of the body is holy to God, the sacrifice of praise Christians are expected to offer, as Christian painters down the centuries have done. I know of Christian writers criticized in their community for using words like “naked”—a word the Bible leans on. If that’s your view, watch out for Chaucer, lock up Donne, banish husband-clinging Anne Bradstreet, expunge portions of T. S. Eliot, and keep an eye out for those doubled metaphors in Emily Dickinson, and please, please, please, steer clear of that master of double entendre, William-the-bard-from-Avon Shakespeare.

But, dear reader, I expect better of you, and propose you take Trott as your guide and with him meet the magnificent residents of A Sacrifice of Praise—centuries of poets with Christ at their center. It’s a commendable work Trott has arranged, and you’ll find Sauls and Jepthahs present, engaged in a hope that the highest reach of their words will touch the hem of the Word.

Two decades ago I was working on a novel and hit a stretch when the words ran like cream—a dozen pages or so. I usually write in pencil, anyway for my first draft, but that afternoon I was at a computer, because of time constraints and who knows what, diving through a section of action that had me so engaged I couldn’t pause to hit the “save” button, a necessary adjunct to word processing then, when a lightning bolt hit.

Out went the computer and the twelve pages dissolved in a sinking dot on the screen. This had happened before and I knew that with all the well-intentioned effort I might summon, I could never recapture the onrush of words as they had arrived. It wouldn’t do any good to turn on God or shake my fist at the electric company. By a force majeure the pages were gone, and perhaps a swift distillation would be better—or so I was trying to persuade myself to think. No hope of the electricity appearing seemed in the offing, in the midst of the thunderous downpour the arid high plains often receive on a sweltering summer day.

We lived twelve miles from the nearest town, dependent on the fallible intricacies of rural electricity. So I followed the impulse of my children, donned rubber boots and a slicker, and went out to enjoy this visitation on our parched land. I’m not sure I’ve been in a rain that heavy. I felt I was under a cataract, the weight of the water over my rain gear adding greater gravity to any movement I made. Runnels and rivulets were appearing where I’d never seen water, forcing grass flat, sliding down our lane, turning it slick, while ditches everywhere I looked were running clay-yellow and red-brown. The pour of rain increased, and a narrow creek at the bottom of our pasture, usually dry at that time of year, was spreading so wide it started to climb the incline of the pasture that bordered it.

According to a later news report we had six inches of rain in an hour. A gravel road runs between our pasture and the pasture of a neighbor, down an incline from our lane, and a mile and a half into his fields a hogback butte rears up two hundred feet high for a good mile. I heard runoff from the butte hit the already pouring water in the pasture across the road and told our children to move to higher ground, and then it came, a rumbling sea wave that hit the road with a tsunami crash and started boiling in a rise to gain its top, the road banked high here for a bridge that spans our usually dry creek.

The pressure of the water sent a fifty-foot column shooting through the arch of the bridge, raising the water level in our pasture as fast as we could watch. It didn’t seem the bridge could handle the onslaught and, sure enough, the water surged to the level of the road and started slithering over its top, then came pouring over the raised length of it in a thundering waterfall. Our children were young enough to cheer and their voices helped me weigh my lost pages against this force of nature.

All the interconnected technology that I and others depended on every day was insignificant compared to this—a ripple across the thousand inventions over the centuries. No matter how much I might prepare to preserve what we had, and no matter the effort engineers and road builders installed in the local landscape to direct the aftermath of rains and melts and floods, nothing could contain a force of this magnitude that was up to do what it would do.

And nothing can contain the outpour of poetry that carries us on a current to the source of the power of words, as the uncontained cataract seemed the worded flood of tradition pouring down to us out of centuries past, and no degree of denial or patronizing or belittling or exclusion could keep it from pouring in thunderous collusion to the glory of its origins into centuries to come.

4

AUTOBIOGRAPHY, BIOGRAPHY, FICTION, AND FACT

At the beginning of 1999 I sent off, for the last time, a biography that took four years to finish. I had estimated it would take two. During the third year, the manuscript rose to a thousand pages and finally ended at five hundred. My experience should be a warning to anybody who has worked in nearly every form of writing, as I had, except biography, and is tempted to try.

I was tempted because of a commission, and my interest in the subject of the biography. He was the founder of Gold Seal, the distributor of Snowy Bleach and Mr. Bubble for starters—able to boast that every American household at one time held two of his products, based on number of sales. He shook hands with or befriended every American president from Herbert Hoover to George H. W. Bush. His son Ed served two terms as governor of North Dakota. Above all, he was a Christian gentleman who gave away millions to anybody who asked: Harold Schafer.

Before I get into the genres of writing in my title, all of which touch on the actuality of life, I want to glance at a topic that has most Americans in its grip: money. I’ve had well-intentioned, intelligent people say to me, “You mean you write for money?” They might as well ask a teacher if she teaches for a paycheck—or ask that of most. Teachers teach because they love to, I assume, as my father did, and receive pay as workers worthy of their hire.

“But how can you accept a huge amount as an advance on a book you haven’t even started yet?” Or “How can you agree to do a piece of so many words for x amount of dollars in x amount of time?”

These are questions I’m asked and I need to say, first, I don’t remember the advance as so huge. The questions come from a perspective that assumes the marketplace sullies creative pursuits. Another side to this can get tortuous. I was attending a conference in Chicago and met a pastor who asked, “What do you do?”

I was beginning to develop a resistance to admit what I did, because of the responses I tended to get, especially in the churchgoing world I had recently merged with. But I was also aware, as a writer, that lying is not a salubrious trait.

“I write,” I said.

“Write?”

“Books.”

“What does your wife do?”

“She proofreads and offers suggestions.” I nodded at my wife, who was holding our infant son in her arms. “She’s my best critic and a wonderful intellect and mother.”

“Is she independently wealthy?” he asked.

“No.”

“Are you?”

“No.”

“Then how can you write?”

I feel no shame at being paid for my work and, like any professional, I bank on that. Besides, every writer is working against a deadline, whether imposed by an editor or grocer or landlord or the IRS or the ultimate deadline, death.

When I was introduced to the material gathered on the subject of the biography I was asked to write, stacked in overflowing boxes in a forty-by-twenty storage room, I said, “Goodness, this is going to take at least two years.”

“Well,” the president of the foundation who hired me said, “you have one.”

That it took four years is proof that all deadlines aren’t met. The foundation decided to fund one year of the work with no archivists, no librarians, no research assistants, no assistance. A fortuitous gift to my wife helped us through another year, and an annuity of mine two more—to return to the pastor’s question of how writing is funded, and to my early topic, money.

A major difficulty with the biography, as I look back with a sigh of freedom, wasn’t just the mass of materials—thousands of pages, for instance, merely of transcribed interviews—but a sensation I had never experienced that seemed to creep from my feet to my fingers in an enveloping grip: I had to secure every sentence with a counterweight of appropriate facts. Sometimes I checked half a dozen sources or variants on a story in order to draft a single page.

My experiential sense of this was the need to keep my sentences from rolling away on their own, so the feelers of their words would grip, as it were, the shape of the facts, and the sentences grip the page. I realized, too, that in a certain sense these weren’t facts—the moments the person of the biography experienced were indisputable for him (and me)—and any reconstruction of those, using any of the genres of my title, was a metaphor, a recapturing of a state in words.

As you see, I’ve been indulging in autobiography. If anybody decides to write about my mention of this project, that could be biography, or if you wanted to include the matrix of the year this moment is rising from, it might better be fiction. Each of the genres uses the form of metaphor to deliver its “facts.”

No fact exists without an interpretation of it, as a philosopher by the name of Cornelius Van Til once said. What he meant is if I say, “The Civil War,” anybody who hears those words is stormed by separate sets of facts, some merely by my naming it as I have. If you view it as a war of northern aggression, you have facts to support that. If another sees it as a conflict that installed commercial manufacture over agrarian interests, facts might well support that view. If I say its genesis was slavery, I might be closer to the truth, but I would have to summon my series of facts to support that.

Look at a less controversial fact: tree. A different tree may come to mind for each, but if we can agree on one tree, a birch, say, standing separate against a green landscape, what we know or are able to observe will govern our description of the facts about the birch that each of us sees.

Take a step farther back. If you believe trees are the result of random happenstance or believe they were ordained to look as they do, part of a design fulfilled, then your view of the tree and facts about it will differ, according to your ideology. One may end up a tree hugger, as it’s put, gripping the birch as if it’s a god, another an ecologist studying the relationship of this birch to an indigenous ecological system—a “tree” among the interrelationships at the heart of the reason the universe continues to cohere.

A further complication of the biography I was working on was that the subject was in full health, in Technicolor, in his eighties. His personality kept shifting into further potentials that seemed fitting paths to follow to describe him. What he was in the world had not been sealed off as it usually is at death. So my idea of exactly who the essential persona of this person was—even that idea altered.

When I say “Civil War” or “tree,” if the words have no more meaning to you than a post, or none at all, then my arrangement of the “facts” will define the phenomenon for you and, in a sense, you’re at my mercy. This happens with the words of self-promotion that politicians employ until life-practices intervene.

Finding the right words to describe a person is true to a far greater degree, since each person is endowed with many dimensions, some hidden. When writers arrive at a definition, it’s because their thoughts form or slip into a metaphor that feels suitable. The thoughts may not be entirely clear at first or, if they are, the writer may not know in which genre to cast the accumulating words.

Factual work can be inaccurate or assembled to deceive. Fiction can be more factual than nonfiction. These are the facts.

I learned that the checking department at the New Yorker is or was as scrupulous about fiction or a “casual,” as fiction was called, as a “fact piece.” A phrase “the Willet subdivision in San Jose” appeared in a story of mine, and a checker wrote in a margin, “There is a San Jose in the area of Illinois where the story is set, with an x-and-x subdivision, and there is an x-and-x Willet in a nearby town of Manito, but there is no Willet subdivision in San Jose. Does author know this?”

Yes, I did, and I switched names and details to keep from implicating any person or town while retaining the local color—words indigenous to the area with local resonance—San Jose, for instance, in its central Illinois form, pronounced San Joze.

An awful urge for accuracy animates authors of fiction. You see it across the spectrum, from Eudora Welty to Vladimir Nabokov to John Updike to Annie Dillard to David Foster Wallace. It’s a trait that can send a writer into a tailspin of hours or days to confirm a fact before moving to the next paragraph, rather than plowing ahead and straightening out the details later, as a biographer—a writer of facts, one assumes—assured me was the way he worked. He wrote the story first, he said, and fitted in the facts later.

The urge for the absolute animates writers of fiction because it’s their truth that’s on the line, not a “fact” from Britannica or a reference from yet another biography that to an auditor other than the author might seem to have a slant so steep it could be called “spin.” So any serious writer of fiction feels from head to toe a tremor similar to an earthquake when somebody who isn’t familiar with the process says they don’t have time for fiction because they prefer only real facts.

On the E-Channel website, Charles Johnson answered a question from an inquisitor nearly every day of the year over 2011, and in a post for June 1 (only partially reproduced here), he tallies some of the potentialities of fiction:

In an article published thirty-one years ago in Obsidian