"Salome" finds a home

My short story "Salome" has been accepted by the online magazine Jersey Devil for their June issue.  It's funny, I've been sitting on this news for about a week.  The first story I got published seemed a milestone, but I thought that maybe it wasn't "professional" to keep putting up notices about subsequent ones.  I don't consider myself a natural short-story writer but I do have another one rattling around out there which I hope to place soon.  I think it's the best I've written so far, but it could easily be a year before I write another one.

Jersey Devil is published in New Jersey, naturally, and they have a small press (Jersey Devil Press) as well.  They specialize in the offbeat, as you might guess.  The Jersey Devil itself is a Bigfoot-like creature that is supposed to haunt the pine barrens of Southern New Jersey.

I'll post a link once the story is up.

The Anne books

A few nights ago I read the ending of Anne of Ingleside, the last book (written, not chronologically) in the Anne of Green Gables series to my son.  The final scene includes Anne, after a long day, looking in on her sleeping children.  Above the head of one of them is the shadow of a cross from a window pane, an omen, L.M. Montgomery writes, "of a cross-marked grave 'somewhere in France.' "  I remembered puzzling over that passage as a child, and I interrupted the reading to explain  that in a subsequent book (chronologically, but written before Anne of Ingleside), the character dies in World War I.  

The Anne of Green Gables books I checked out of the library when I was a child were hardbacks with little circular pictures in the center of a long-haired girl who managed to look very turn-of-the-century and very 70s at the same time. Reading the books today is remembering reading them as a child, puzzling over old-fashioned things I couldn't understand, being secretly enthralled by the darker episodes*, living entirely in the world Montgomery had created.  Oddly enough, there were two books in the series -- Rainbow Valley and Rilla of Ingleside -- which were not in the library and which were not even referred to by the publisher who had brought out those hardbacks.  I found out about these books on the visit to Green Gables mentioned in my recent post, and had the pleasure as an adult of reading them, and some other Montgomery titles I hadn't known about, for the first time. 

When I began reading them to my son I was a little doubtful.  I cut out a lot of the more flowery stuff, but other than remarking, "Anne talks too much," he took to them.  Because he is a child who doesn't take to change, I'm still reading them to him.  I wondered a little why he liked them, however, and it occured to me one day that that that, too, is related to his autism.  In the Anne books, emotions are writ large.  They're easy to understand.   I think it's something of a myth that autistic children don't read emotions at all; I'd say it's more accurate that they prefer emotions to be simple and straightfoward.  No guessing, no gray areas.

It illustrates that unpredictability of literature that Montgomery's books are still going strong 100 years later while so many of her contemporaries have fallen by the wayside.  But for all the comfort her books provide, they're never sentimental.  She had too much humor for that, humor that she uses to puncture any possible flights of fancy.  And then there was the dark side that so gripped me as a child:  underneath the message of love and reason, problems happily solved, is a near-continuous narrative of unhappy marriages, tyrannical families and poverty.  The tension between these two things gives an electrical charge to her books and is one of the reasons why, I think, people still read them.


*The Anne books are full of stuff that would never be put in a children's book today.  Example: on p. 50 of Anne's House of Dreams we are casually told about a man who is "slow in the uptake" because his father threw a stump at him when he was a child.  This is the same book where, a few chapters later, a character narrates how she saw her brother killed before her eyes in a farming accident and then walked into the parlor on her birthday and found her father had hanged himself.

The haircut

Sometimes you meet someone and it's a scene right out of a book.  When I write dialogue, I try to stay believable.  If I wrote a scene like what happened when I was getting my hair cut yesterday, it would not seem believable. 

One of the things I somewhat dislike about getting my hair cut is that the stylists always want to talk to you.  I feel for them; I'm sure that if I were in their position I'd be dying to talk to somebody, but I'm not a talkative person at the best of times and hair salons have a sedative effect on me.  (The place where I go is not one of those high-energy places, they were playing Roberta Flack when I was in there, and a couple of the stylists were singing along.)  I'm sorry I never caught her name, but this is what she said:  do I watch "Real Housewives of Atlanta?", you know, they were going to do a reality show about Las Vegas called Trailer Trash, isn't that awful?  I think they should do a show like they did in the 70s, did you ever see it, it was called "Vegas" and it had a guy driving his car into his garage below his house, he was a p.i.  They should show that again, like on TVLand.  I'm going to write a letter...another letter...to TVLand if I can find where I put the address and tell them to bring it back.  I'd never want to live in a trailer, though, would you?  Actually, you know, what I've always wanted is to live in a log house.  They cost a lot of money, though.

There was also something in there somewhere about bowling tournaments and the Showboat Casino being imploded.

My husband said later that he would have liked to have seen my expression while this was going on.  But when you are sitting in a chair and the person saying all this is holding scissors and the scissors are right next to your face what you say is:  "Yes, I've always wanted to live in a log house, too."

The Orange Moon

One of my recent reads is Mal Peet's Life: An Exploded Diagram.  Like his earlier Tamar, it's a multi-layered book, a story with tentacles that reach back to WWI and forward to 9/11.  The heart of the book -- and really the best part, as I thought a lot of the layering was unnecessary -- is the relationship between two small-town teens, deeply in love and lust, during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
This, and the current setting on my WIP, brought me to thinking how to convey the atmosphere of the Cold War to teens reading today.  The oddest part of it, for me, is the way we dealt the prospect of total nuclear war:  we just tried not to think about it.  I was well aware that in Europe there were massive protests against missile silos and sit-ins at Army bases, but for me it was just a reality that couldn't be looked at.  It had always been there, and it was insane, and it just didn't bear thinking about.

The thing about things that you don't want to think about, however, is that you do think about them, sometimes when you least expect it.  One summer when I was in college my mother and sister came up to New York and we took a long car trip up into Canada, through the Maritime Provinces, culminating in a stop in Prince Edward Island.  It was a beautiful place, still remote (we had to take the ferry over), green hills, red roads, stormy clouds coming in off the sea and the sun shining through them.  We stayed in Cavendish and went to the Green Gables house, walked Lovers Lane and the Haunted Wood.  That evening we decided to drive out to "lobster supper", a traditional event held in a basement of a local church.  Now, I don't eat lobster and my mother can't eat it, so why we decided this would be a desirable thing to do, and what we did end up eating, have been lost in the mists of time*, but what I do remember is driving back along a lonely, winding PEI road.  The moon had come up, and it was orange.  I had seen orange or red moons before and I vaguely knew that it was just some atmospheric-type phenomenon involving dust or something, but in the darkness, in that strange place, I began to wonder if maybe it wasn't something worse.  What if, while we were on vacation, the nuclear button had been pushed?  What if the moon was orange because it was reflecting distant fires burning in the lower parts of North America?  (It was easy to believe that the Russians might not bother to bomb PEI.)  We'd be trapped up here, forever, everything familiar gone, homeless, stateless, alone.  The world gone, the future gone.  I mused on and on and worked myself up in to a state of cold terror that not even our arrival back at our rooms in Cavendish  could dispel.  I don't remember anything else,but I suppose in the light of the next morning everything was normal again, and so we packed up and went on to Nova Scotia.

The strongest feeling from this memory is the feeling that there was no hope.  We were slowly, inexorably moving towards the day when everything would end.  If it wasn't today, it would nevertheless come.  (We always believed it would be very sudden too -- without warning, although the experience of the Cuban Missile Crisis should have proved otherwise.)  For me, the end of the Cold War has been a modern miracle.  It's something I always try to keep in mind no matter who the enemy is made out to be, and no matter what we are supposed to believe about them.


*The mists of time have no power against my old diaries, which reveal that  the church was called St. Ann's and I had potato salad while Mom had filet of sole, and that my opinion of the cuisine was uncomplimentary.  Of my nighttime terror I simply wrote, "lonely drive home in the dark."

Las Vegas gets a Research Library

I've written here a little about how difficult it can be to find much about Las Vegas history. Well, I will whine no more.  Las Vegas now has a research library, part of the Nevada State Museum, which recently re-opened at the Springs Preserve.  (If anyone out there ever visits Vegas, I highly recommend going to the Springs Preserve, which is sort of a natural history museum and has extensive grounds and gardens.  It's easy to get to and gives you a glimpse of a different Vegas.)  I spent the last two Fridays there, looking at old photos and high school yearbooks, reading newspaper clippings and school guides for parents and historic preservation district applications. 

It's always interesting to me to see who else uses a research library, besides an eccentric novelist.  On my first visit a man was reading about a political scandal long ago in North Las Vegas.  Later there was a woman looking at obituaries, perhaps doing geneological research.  Then a man looking for the early history of Red Rock Canyon.  Finally a group of high school students came in, researching a project on Helen J. Stewart, who was one half of the first couple to settle here in the late 1800s.  The library is only open 3 days a week (Friday-Monday) so far, but it seems to be doing very well.  And I plan on making many return visits.

I love small town museums.  Years ago on my first trip out West I noted in my diary some of the artifacts we saw -- different types of barbed wire!  A dime once handled by Calamity Jane!  A gramophone which belonged to Susan B. Anthony's niece!  But I really became serious about small town museums in Roslyn, Washington, which was famous at the time for being the place where the tv show "Northern Exposure" was filmed.  We went into the museum thinking to kill 15 minutes and we came out 2 hours later.

Nevada is dotted with small towns and many of them, like Roslyn, are mining towns.  Mining towns are not your midwestern small town, settled by pioneers and immigrants looking for land.  Mining towns flare up and die out.  Some of them barely last a decade.  They were inspired by greed, particularly out here in Nevada, where the land looks so unpromising for any kind of life.  They were a deliberate effort by people to to pit themselves against nature, to take as much wealth as they could, no matter how, come what may.  The effort failed, of course.  Money was made, and spent, but it was spent elsewhere, and then the mines closed, and the towns were left behind, broken buildings on the sides of a mountain.

But while that effort at wealth went on, something else was happening, and that's what you see in museums like the one in Tonopah. High school graduation day, with everyone standing in front of the school.  Sunday school picnics, the priests long figures in black.  A open-air boxing match.  High school bands, Elks, Odd Fellows, Women's leagues.  Saturday night dances.

In towns like Tonopah, or Goldfield, or Austin, I try not to think, here is a place that failed.  I try to think, here, civilization was planted.

Early January always means upheaval in my life, and the name of that upheaval is basketball.  Middle-school basketball:  shoes squeaking on the floor, wild throws, the boys self-conscious in baggy shorts, the girls faster, taller, more aggressive.  Late dinners, homework not done, and driving across town to some brand-new middle school in an unfinished neighborhood.  UNLV games: sitting high in the upper balcony, watching the cheerleaders jump around, the lights dim, fireworks shoot up, the players run across a red carpet onto the floor and everyone shouts as if it isn't just another weeknight.

With me, basketball is definitely a childhood thing.  It's long dark winter nights, listening to Kentucky game on the radio, drawn into an unmapped, virtual world of reputation, gossip ("good squad this year") and rival schools ("after that the 'Cats'll be up in South Bend to face Notre Dame"), learning about working off the clock and drawing a charge and that'll be two from the charity strike.  (No one says "charity strike" -- a.k.a. free throw line -- anymore but it was a favorite of Cawood Ledford, the UK announcer.)

It's been said that baseball, because its not played on a clock, is a sport which stops time.  Basketball is nothing but clock.  It's a sport of the individual moment, the moment you're living in, the bobbing wave, to borrow F. Scott Fitzgerald's image, which always seems about to bring you forward, the moment when it seems everything can change.