Author: Kelley

The truth inside the lie

In 2003, Stephen King received the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Many in the world of “lit’rachure” were not amused, and a few went all foamy-mouthed bugshit crazy (a pause to imagine many froth-flecked moths batting frantically against a lit window, bump bump flutter flutter bump).

And then Stephen King made his acceptance speech..

The story and the people in it may be make believe but I need to ask myself over and over if I’ve told the truth about the way real people would behave in a similar situation…. We understand that fiction is a lie to begin with. To ignore the truth inside the lie is to sin against the craft, in general, and one’s own work in particular.
 
— Stephen King, accepting the National Book Foundation Medal

I have read everything King has written. He’s one of my favorite writers because in his work I always find joy (and you know I’m big on joy) and hope and truth. I find real people living real lives, and when the monsters come they heighten rather than diminish that reality. The everyday people in King’s work are laid low or made great, found wanting or given a chance for redemption when the monsters come.

And they take me with them. Their bewilderment and fears and unexpected joys in the midst of their own personal armageddons are mine too. I understand their metaphors and their rhythms of speech. They are quintessentially American people, and their stories are plain and visceral and rooted in the deepest layer of the country’s collective psyche in way that, for my money, the “great American authors” do not routinely achieve. Those people are not my writers. They do not speak for me or about me or to me as a reader. Stephen King does.

And when I re-read his speech yesterday, I found him also speaking to me as a writer:

There is a time in the lives of most writers when they are vulnerable, when the vivid dreams and ambitions of childhood seem to pale in the harsh sunlight of what we call the real world. In short, there’s a time when things can go either way.
 
— Stephen King, accepting the National Book Foundation Medal

I had that time fairly recently. I fire-walked my own hopes and fears and other people’s expectations, and now I am in a place where the air is cleaner and the world is bigger for me. I found my truth inside the lie. It sounds like Stephen King found his a long time ago, and good for him.

I’d love to meet him. Not to make forever friends — just for a beer and a burger and a conversation between two writers who are fascinated by the things people will do if given half a chance. I wish that someone who knows him would give him a copy of Dangerous Space and point him to the title story, because I think he’d like the rock ‘n’ roll of it, the everydayness in which Duncan and Mars find their whole world made new by music… I would like something I wrote to put a smile on Stephen King’s face, the way he has so often put a smile on mine.

Get happy

I went wandering around the internet the other day and found this article — “Five Things Happy People Do.” It’s at the Oprah website, a place I never thought I’d find myself, but that’s the (sometimes wacky) beauty of the wide-webbed world… we end up so many unexpected places. In web as in life, no?

[Happy people] design their lives to bring in joy. — from “Five Things Happy People Do” by Gabrielle LeBlanc

I like this. And I like the notion (also in the article) of eudaimonia, that happiness is found in “flourishing,” in becoming “one’s most golden self.” Happiness as a process, not a state of being. I am learning more and more that I can be essentially eudaimonic — essentially still in process with happiness — at times when I am fiercely angry or sad or feeling kicked in the teeth. Like certain kinds of hope, this is a kind of happiness that I can get down with.

Apparently, many of us are thinking about happiness these days. We’re studying it and measuring it and trying to find the formula. I hope it works, because the happiness of the flourishing self is a Good Thing, and I would wish it for all of us. But I am not so much a scientist, and I do not have Five Pearls of Wisdom or the Secret Equation to offer you. I don’t even have an equation for myself.

Or maybe I do. Maybe I do. I have a deck, and iced tea in the refrigerator, and a book. So I think I will take 20 minutes away from my work to sit in the sun and be Kelley and give attention to a part of myself that often gets short shrift but is also essential for the flourishing of me — the part that is not so much about doing as it is about being.

I tend to think of process as a dynamic thing, a moving thing…(shakes head). My perspective can be so fucking limited. Sometime the heart of a process is in a stopping point, a stillness that is necessary if there is ever to be movement again.

Today my wish for all of us is that whatever else we may be — peaceful or angry or afraid or joyful, dreaming big dreams or picking up their pieces, nursing wounds or back in the battle, smiling in the rain or watching the elegant aerobatics of crows or eating our second-favorite flavor of ice cream because the first has run out — that underneath it all, the stillness and the motion, we know that we are daimons, becoming, becoming.

Connections

Many thanks to you and Nicola for signing several books for me in the past few months. I gave them to my partner, Lisa, as a wedding present. We will be getting married next Tuesday, September 2nd, in San Francisco. She was terribly surprised and especially happy to receive a copy of Dangerous Space, a book she’d wanted since she found out it had been published.

I really appreciate you both going to such trouble to accommodate your readers. After Lisa told me how much she loved The Blue Place, I read it and the two other books within the span of a week. I just read your short story, “Strings,” that you mentioned in the past day or so on your blog, and I enjoyed it very much. I will read the rest of the stories after Lisa finishes the book, as well as your novel Solitaire.

Please pass my thanks along to Nicola. Very best wishes to you both.

Patti Weltler

And our best wishes to you! My apologies for taking so long with this — you’re practically an old married couple already (grin). I’m delighted for you and Lisa, and hope your wedding was absolutely splendid.

And you may have squeaked in under the wire on this incarnation of personalized books. I think we’re going to have to find a better system for the future. Since we moved, it’s very tough to get to University Books to sign things — we end traveling anywhere from 25 to 45 minutes each way, plus the time it takes to park and get into the store and sign, and then we get distracted by all the pretty books… It is a much larger cost in energy and time than it used to be. We may have to get people to start sending books to our post office box or something instead. We’ll see.

Because it pleases me to accommodate readers when I can. It’s a relationship, after all, albeit a distant and single-stranded one. It may only be a few words written on the title page, but I value it as the often most direct and personal connection between artist and art and audience.

And on the practical side, I think artists can no longer afford to ignore the importance — the imperative — of the direct and the personal. I imagine it’s a huge challenge for A-list actors and rock stars and mega-popular authors like Stephen King. There’s always been a cultural tension between privacy and access: the assumption that it’s okay to insert oneself into the private experience of famous people in a way that one would never do to some random stranger on the street. That’s been exploded by the internet — the ability to keep tabs on people anywhere in the world, to monitor everything they say and do in public, to “stay close” in a way that (I worry) feels “real” to people because it’s happening in real time. And I think the end result is that famous people no longer feel like strangers to us. We confuse (or choose to ignore) the difference between our personal connection to their work, which may be very deep, and our personal connection to them, which is usually none.

I certainly wish for personal connection with artists whose work touches me. But my mom and dad raised me right, so I don’t march up to celebrities in the middle of their dinner and demand an autograph. And it wouldn’t satisfy me anyway: that moment of interaction does not constitute a real relationship. It’s not a connection, it’s an encounter. It’s one of the unexpected consequences of art, I think, this blurring of the lines between art and self that translates into a desire to blur the lines with the artist. I don’t know what everyone else seeks when they approach an artist: I seek to touch them in an instant as deeply as they have touched me in hours or years. I seek to matter to them as much as their work matters to me.

Which is a fool’s game, of course. There is no way to re-balance the scales in an instant, unless you pull someone out of the way of a speeding bus or something. The truth is, I cannot have “a relationship” with these people. They are for the most part beyond the reach of the small-crowd appearance where everyone in the room is real to everyone else, the random-but-real moments of encounter, the situational golden moment.

But I’m not famous. I am a common artist, and it is both professionally important and personally rewarding to me to read for people, to sign books, to have the occasional beer, to have conversations here in my little corner of the internet about things that interest me. I’m glad I like it: not all artists do, and I think those who are not willing to create some space for connection with audience will find they have less audience as time goes by. This is the world we live in. And I’m glad to be in this world, Patti, to sign books for you and Lisa, and to wish you both a marriage full of joy and love.

Let’s talk about short stories

A while back, Tania Hershman, editor of The Short Review, published a review of Dangerous Space that I appreciated for two reasons. First, because she liked the stories (I am not immune to this, says the writer with a smile). And second, because she did not come to them as a fan of speculative fiction: her perspective was that of an avid reader and writer of (what I would call mainstream) short stories. She crossed genre lines to read my work, and discovered that, like the mainstream, speculative fiction is a big space with room for many different kinds of story, many different kinds of reader.

Tania talks about this over at Vulpes Libris in a guest article that I recommend to anyone interested in the writing, publishing, reading and general vitality of short fiction. There’s also a good discussion in the comments, including remarks by a reader whose resistance to short stories is grounded in the common experience of (rant alert! rant alert!) the kind of short stories that pass for “real literature” these days. You know the ones I mean. You can read them every week in The New Yorker. They are precious and self-conscious and all about the writer’s voice. They are often dreary beyond belief. They revolve around characters whose purpose is to be small in some way — trapped and fearful, or hapless, or so quirky that it makes my teeth ache — and to stay small, because that’s how we know that the story is “meaningful.” I choose the word revolve carefully, because these stories are designed as collections of beautiful phrases that turn in stately (or in carnival) fashion around the “idea” of the character, around the “theme” of the story…. oh, please shoot me now. No wonder readers complain: even those whom the literati would characterize as “unsophisticated” (a word that just makes me want to howl in rage when applied to readers — hello, Ms. LitSnob, these people are reading!) can tell when they are being fed 5,000 words of self-indulgent bullshit whose deepest message is look how well I write!.

I want more than that. I want stories of people who feel so real to me that I hurt and hope and laugh with them, so real that they carry me out into a wider world, or deep into myself. I want writing that is so good it isn’t even there, writing that is not a performance but a bridge, a transporter beam, a mainline to the heart of the story.

Okay, rant off. For now.

I’m grateful to Tania for her passionate support of short work of all kinds. One of the grandest things about the InterWeb is that there is room for so much more than there used to be — more opinion, more art, more stupidity, more curiosity, more silliness, more difference. More connection, if we want it.

And certainly for more story, which is nothing but good.

I’m especially pleased today to point you to a couple of those stories. Sarah Kanning is a writer who generously gave a lot of time and words-in-email to a stranger (me) to help with background for my Kansas book. Sarah’s first fiction sale “Sex With Ghosts” is up at Strange Horizons.

And Karina Meléndez, who frequently comments on this blog and is currently translating Dangerous Space (the writer bows in the direction of Canada), has “The Sound of Morning Glory” up at Joyland.

Congratulations, Sarah and Karina, and my best wishes for many more stories out in the world.

I’ve been writing stories since the days when there were only a few print publications that would publish “that sci-fi stuff.” These days are better.

Friday pint

Every Friday I transfer posts here from the Virtual Pint archives.

A beautiful hanging-onto-summer day in Seattle. Enjoy these little flashes of the past.

Enjoy.

No matter what

It’s our 15th wedding anniversary. Nicola wrote about it today and posted some pictures, and as she showed them to me last night we had the inevitable god, we were young conversation. So predictable (grin), and so amazing to have that kind of predictability in my life. I never expected it. I did not see her coming, this fascinating person with whom I can mark milestones and drink wine and laugh and cry and talk and talk and talk about the changes that come to us all if we live long enough.

As she says in her post, we have no matter what engraved inside our rings. Of all the promises we have made to each other, that’s the fundamental one. No matter what happens, no matter how we change and grow, no matter what we need to do, how we fuck up, whether we always understand each other or like each other’s choices… well, we are Kelley and Nicola no matter what.

No matter what is the biggest responsibility I’ve ever taken on, and the biggest safety net I’ve ever had. And that’s the real trick, isn’t it? When something is both the challenge and the reward.
Nicola and Kelley, 1992
photo by Mark Tiedemann

Get busy

The best novella I know is “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” by Stephen King. It was made into a brilliant movie, but the novella is even better.

It’s about hope. I talk a lot about hope, mostly in ambivalent ways. But perhaps I am coming to some conclusions. Perhaps there are different kinds of hope, like mushrooms, some that are truffles and some that will kill you dead.

“Shawshank” is the most comprehensive, brutal, joyful examination I’ve ever read of the different kinds of hope. The hope like a rattlesnake you keep insisting makes a really good pet until it bites you hard and then coils away looking for its next meal. The hope that is indistinguishable from fear. The hope that relies on magical thinking, if only… And there is the hope that is the first cousin of will, that sees you to the end of a long hard road.

When I was learning to swim, the instructor would step back ten feet from where I clung to the edge of the pool, and hold out his arms, and smile: swim to me, he would say, and I would throw myself out and gasp and thrash and paddle like hell, and he would step back and back and back, and I had to keep going. But he was always there at the end. That is perhaps the only hope that has ever really done me any good, the hope that makes me willing to keep swimming because there will be something at the end that is risk rewarded, that is safety and triumph and relief and a new kind of knowledge of myself and the world. Not if only, but rather if I do…

Dear Red,
 
If you’re reading this, then you’re out. One way or another, you’re out. And if you’ve followed along this far, you might be willing to come a little further. I think you remember the name of the town, don’t you? I could use a good man to help me get my project on wheels. Meanwhile, have a drink on me — and do think it over. I will be keeping an eye out for you. Remember that hope is a good thing, Red, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies. I will be hoping that this letter finds you, and finds you well.
 
I didn’t read that letter in the field [… ] I went back to my room and read it there, with the smell of old men’s dinners drifting up the stairwell to me — Beefaroni, Rice-a-Roni, Noodle Roni. You can be that whatever the old folks of America, the ones on fixed incomes, are eating tonight, it almost certainly ends in roni.
 
I opened the envelope and read the letter and then I put my head in my arms and cried. With the letter there were twenty new fifty-dollar bills.
 
And here I am in the Brewster Hotel, technically a fugitive from justice again — parole violation is my crime. No one’s going to throw up any roadblocks to catch a criminal wanted on that charge, I guess — wondering what I should do now.
 
I have this manuscript. I have a small piece of luggage about the size of a doctor’s bag that holds everything I own. I have nineteen fifties, four tens, a five, three ones, and assorted change. I broke one of the fifties to buy this tablet of paper and a deck of smokes.
 
Wondering what I should do.
 
But there’s really no question. It always comes down to just two choices. Get busy living or get busy dying.
 
–from “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” by Stephen King
 

Bookend Bowie

Today Nicola brings you a little musical politics (and I’m afraid the musical chairs analogy may be more apt for this election than I’d wish). Yep, I’m worried about McCain too… but all I could really think when I watched the video was damn, David Bowie has got it going on.

I’ve always thought this show at the BBC Theatre in 2000 was awesome. I love the early Bowie — Low, Aladdin Sane — and I love this Bowie too, who seems so much more comfortable in his own skin. I love watching experts at work. And I thought, really, can there ever be too much good music let loose into the blogosphere? So here you go — “Hallo Spaceboy”. Charismatic people playing fantastic music and having so much fun. Wander on over to Ask Nicola for more.

Cherchez les naked folks

Here are some of the keyword searches that brought people to my site in August.

  • Naked people photos, people naked in public, naked beach people, beautiful naked people, happy naked people, real naked people….
    If I had a dollar for every person who came here looking for pictures of naked people, I could buy that Mac we’ve been wanting.
     
    And here’s a thing…I just googled “real naked people” out of curiosity to see how many hits there were. There were 1,170,000 (yep, 1.7 million hits) — and my blog post about naked people is number 6. Why? I don’t know. It’s a mystery.
     
    It’s interesting that so many of us want to see naked strangers. Perhaps these searchers are all life studies art students (hah, probably not). Are we in search of sexual fantasy material? Are we curious how our bodies compare to others? Do we admire these naked people, lust after them, want to be them, or maybe just want to get a look at what it’s like to lie in the sun in nothing but our own skin…
     
    Best naked people searches: naked people high (sounds great!), forced to go nude at beach (not so great… embarrassment and sunburn!) and — I swear — as naked as when one was born in a state of nature in one’s skin in the nude nude. That one pretty much covers all the bases.

  • become invisible nobody can see you, sorry we thought you were invisible, what would i do if invisible…
    A dollar for each of the invisibility crowd would certainly get me an iPod. I would have suspected at least one homework assignment in there except that it’s August…
     
    The winner in this category: how to know if someone is invisible. I keep trying to imagine where this question comes from or where it’s going…

  • cats
    Just for grins, I also googled “cats” and got 220,000,000 hits. Now seriously, how far down the list did this person have to go to get to my site? All night, at least.

  • nice way to say be quiet
    Please, be quiet… Okay, I couldn’t resist that, but I mean no disrespect. It’s hard in this culture to turn around in the movie theatre and tell someone to stop chattering — there’s that burst of are we gonna have a fight now adrenaline that really yanks me out of the immersive movie experience, you know?

  • why do people strip naked for sex
    Um…If you are under the age of 11, go ask your parents to give you more information about sex. If you are 11 – 18 or so, well, trust me, it will become clear very soon. If you’re over 18 then I think you should find someone who makes your knees weak and ask them…

  • i want to get a lot of emails
    For whatever reason, this actually makes me a bit sad. I guess if that’s what you want, I hope you get it.

  • low sparks of a high heeled gal
    Did we go to high school together? And were you way cooler than me? I bet you were — I’ve loved the song for more than 30 years and it would never have occurred to me to think of it that way.

  • make her dance like a snake
    The thing that gets me about this search are the words “make her”…

  • short nice words
    Love, hope, sex, joy, friend, sun, wine, talk, play, fun, tea, bed, dream, smile…

  • werewolf transformation while having sex artwork
    Someone else has been reading the Anita Blake books!

  • am i crazy to want to write a book
    (smiling) No, no. Well, maybe just a little. Okay, yes, but it’s a good kind of crazy to be.

  • free formulas or common models for writing novels and short stories
    (shrieking) No, no, no, no, no!

  • what are dangerous spaces
    The ones inside where our deepest dreams live. The ones between us and other people. Go read the stories, find out for yourself.

  • And this month’s WTF award goes to: never yawn like spiders
    The management is constantly amazed at the infinite possibilities of people.

As long as one keeps searching, the answers come. — Joan Baez