Reading as a Writer: “Street Portraits”

Richard Carr enjoyed an amazing year for publication in 2008: four poetry books.  Two of these books, Honey and Mr. Martini, I’ve already written about here.  And now the third book, Street Portraits.  This book might be considered as the source of several characters that inhabit the other three books, including Honey, Ace, Mr. Martini.  The title is vague for a collection of poems about specific moments and people.  From the first two lines (“The quiet boy sits very still on the bench,/one sleeve rolled up — or the other fallen down.”) Carr establishes anticipation and curiosity — what will happen next?  Who will we meet next?  (Full disclosure: I know Richard Carr.  He’s a neighbor.) 

The language Carr chooses for his descriptions create startling images that evoked memory of specific moments in my life.  For example: “Her thoughts snap and blow like a street map in the wind,” immediately brought a clear image to mind, followed by a memory of a sunny, windy afternoon on the way to Cape Cod and the map snapping in my mother’s face from the wind blowing through her open car window.  Some other examples:

• “She is chipped  and smudged like the painted brick facade.”
• “…the thick liquid/of daydream.”
• “his feet sinking into the floor like monuments in tall grass.”

In this collection, I noticed a preoccupation with eyes, watched or watching, described also in original ways:

• “His eyes make small movements,/intermittent,/like raindrops striking leaves.”
• “…–just the orbs of the eyes –/gone blurry in the chloroform of halted time.”
• “The Bee in a Boy’s Eye” (a title)
• “her eyes like sleek trains/speeding back and forth across the bay.”

Two poems stayed with me for some time: “Madman” and “Self-Portrait in a Public Toilet.”  I thought they were outstanding.

Another poem moved me for its ordinariness: “The Usual.”  Who hasn’t seen an old guy at a breakfast counter, whether on the road or some Sunday morning in summer?  The poems in this book heightened my awareness of the street and the people I see on it every time I go out.  These poems give those people their individuality and humanity.  Which is not to say the professional panhandlers no longer annoy me….especially the ones with cell phones.

One Thursday evening not long ago, I stopped reading on the bus to listen and watch a conversation occurring between two men, and I tried to imagine how they might appear in Richard’s “Street Portraits.”  One guy held a cane and large cardboard sign that read “Brain trauma, was in coma for 3 weeks,” but his speech was normal and his movements appeared normal.  He wore a baseball cap, plaid shirt and jeans with beat-up sneakers.  The other guy wore a white T-shirt tucked into khaki pants with a black belt, his apple-shaped body a contrast to his pointed nose, small mouth and eyes.  He said, “So you were in a coma?  Can you think?”  The baseball cap guy replied, “No, not really.” 

I wasn’t fooled….

Finalists Chosen for Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award

Have you voted for your favorite?  Sorry, polls closed on May 21.  Amazon and Penguin Group (USA) have revealed the three finalists for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award and you can go to the site and read excerpts from each novel.   They’ll announce the Grand Prize winner at a ceremony in New York City on May 27, 2009.

The finalists:

Ian Gibson of Victoria, British Columbia for his novel Stuff of Legends, a comic fantasy.  

James King of Wilton, CT for his novel Bill Warrington’s Last Chance, a family drama. 

Brandi Lynn Ryder of Napa, CA for her novel In Malice, Quite Close, an odyssey story (not quite a “road trip”).

The Grand Prize winner receives a publishing contract from Penguin which includes a $25,000 advance.

I’ll be interested to see how these books do in terms of sales…..

Work in Progress

A question I encounter periodically as a writer is when to share my writing?  Individual writers vary in their answers.  For me, I’ve learned that sharing prior to marketing my writing needs to be done with care and attention to what will be best for the writing, i.e. finding readers who are intelligent, honest, articulate and supportive.  They need not be writers, but that helps.  I never, never, never share rough drafts.  The first draft I might share would be around four or five, at the earliest. 

So, last evening the Guthrie Theater offered an interesting opportunity to be the “reader” of a work in progress.  The Guthrie is in the midst of a Tony Kushner celebration, producing his plays on all three stages of the theater.  Last Friday was the world premiere of his newest play, The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism & Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures.  An article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune yesterday morning about the Kushner festival and the new play said that Kushner had only finished the play in the last month or so, and he’d continued to work on it during rehearsals.  So, this was ballsy of him to proceed with the production.  Or perhaps Kushner was just following his usual writing routine, I don’t know.  What I do know is that the experience was probably one of the more interesting evenings of theater I’ve had in a while, despite its sprawling length of 3 hours and 32 minutes.

We, the audience, were in on the beginning, on the organic evolution of this play.  It does need work.  It’s too long.  The title is too long, although it is explained during the play.  Kushner needs to sharpen the focus: who is the main character, Pill or Gus?  What does he want?  What will he do to get it?  Does he get it?  We were talking last night about the core of the play, what drives the dramatic momentum.  I thought it was Gus and his desire to die, but a case could be made for Pill.  Kushner explores the connections among the relationships in a Brooklyn family which has come together to decide what to do about their father (Gus) who says he has Alzheimer’s and wants to sell his gorgeous Brownstone. 

It’s much easier to look at a piece of writing and point out what the problems are with it.  It’s harder to think about those problems and try to be constructive in the feedback.  I thought the play was standard in its subject matter (family relationships) with some interesting characters, namely gay son Pill (the nickname for Pier Luigi), Gus, gay daughter Empty (which is the nickname of Maria Teresa or “MT”), Eli the hustler, and Paul (Pill’s husband).  Kushner includes a third child for Gus, another son who is straight and married with children — he’s the dutiful son who visits Gus every day and works on repairs with him.  And then there’s Gus’ sister, Bennie (Benedicta), who was the only character who seemed to simply accept Gus and his plans, but beyond that, I wondered why she was there and what she wanted.  

I believe those characters and their stories were quite enough — the story didn’t need Empty’s pregnant wife subplot, and Empty’s ex who added nothing after the first act.  Some scenes went on for too long with dialogue that did nothing to reveal character or move the story forward (e.g. the scene with Pill and Eli after Paul has told Pill he must make a choice).  There were times when two scenes ran concurrently side by side onstage (the front stoop next to the interior living room, or the living room below an upper bedroom) that were only confusing and stopped the play for me.  I didn’t know which action and dialogue I was supposed to focus on.  Related to this were scenes when everyone talked at once and we heard very little of anything that was said.  And not one of the characters told anyone to shut up, which I found really unbelievable.  The most powerful scenes tended to be those with only two characters.  We didn’t understand why the socialism/economic/political stuff was relevant to the emotional landscape of the play with the exception of the real estate dialogue. 

The actors were amazing.  We loved the very beginning when Pill, on the cell phone with Eli, complains about cell phones going off during a play he’d attended the night before and how it had affected the actors on stage.  Kushner included Minneapolis — Pill and his husband, Paul, have moved there — and the coming economic freefall — the play occurs before 2008.  I wanted more emotion, more  realization by the characters about the connections among them, or the lack, and some sense of understanding by them so that I could understand.

Tony Kushner has written a major play, I think, that needs some work.  The Guthrie has been brave in producing it and inviting its patrons to be part of the artist’s process in seeing this work in progress.  As a writer, I admire and respect the work and what has gone into it so far…..

Does Mental Illness an Artist Make?

Since I was a teenager, I’ve been aware of a “tradition” of the creative artist as being perceived as or actually being unhinged, neurotic, mentally ill.  This week I’ve been trying to figure out where I first saw or heard this, and I’ve failed in coming up with a specific example.  Creative artists were defined as being “different,” a vague enough term to possibly hide something else.  I remember reading a biography of Peter Tchaikovsky that painted him as a suffering, emotionally unstable man — and not once mentioning his homosexuality, which, in 19th century Russia, would have made life difficult for him especially keeping it secret.  In college, I learned of Sylvia Plath, the poet who committed suicide, so she must have been emotionally unstable.  There seemed to be a way that societies found to accept creative artists while demeaning them at the same time, i.e. explaining their gifts as a by-product of some sort of mental or emotional instability.

Earlier this week, a friend and I went to see the movie, The Soloist.  It reminded me a lot of another movie about a schizophrenic musician: Shine.  In both, an extremely talented young musician suffers a mental breakdown while in music school and spends the rest of his life playing music but in much different circumstances.  For Nathaniel Ayers, it was on the streets of L.A., but for David Helfgott, it was in an institution.  As I watched the friendship develop between Ayers and the L.A. columnist, Steve Lopez, I kept thinking, inexplicably, of Virginia Woolf and her bipolar disorder.  I have been amazed by Woolf’s output, how she wrote in spite of the intense mood swings and headaches she experienced, as well as the psychotic episodes.  It was almost as if the writing was a channel of relief from her suffering, her way of holding reality.  Surely, that was something I noted in Ayers’ love of music.  And like Woolf, his playing for others on the street became a gift to the world…and back to Ayers himself.

The population of writers worldwide, I’d guess, is no more likely to have a high percentage of mentally ill people than the general population.  I suspect that’s also true for musicians.  But is it true that only great art has been created in the past by people who suffered in some way psychologically and the mediocre stuff by “normal” people?  What is “normal”? 

For Evan Quinn and all the creative people that he knows in his future world, I wanted to show their humanity, their vulnerability, their fallibility, their intelligence.  I refused to think of any character as “normal,” but rather, unique in him/herself.  I decided that I wouldn’t go for the easy stereotypes of artists as alcoholics or drug addicts, the suffering artist in the cold, empty garret, or neurotics, as such.  I wanted to create characters who are creative and show their creative processes, the way they live.  As I’ve worked on the novels, I’ve realized that creative artists see the same reality as everyone else, just at a different angle or focus, or from multiple angles.

And isn’t that the way people with mental illness see the world?  It’s like they have cable while the rest of us are stuck with only network TV.  But I don’t believe that psychological health determines creativity or one’s access to the imagination.  There was something childlike in the way Ayers behaved, the way he related to the world and other people.  All children are creative in their play, curious about the world, wide open to the imagination and to learning.  Are they crazy?  Do humans begin their lives psychologically unstable and grow into stability?  I think creativity is a connection to childhood and the imagination….

I enjoyed The Soloist very much.  The friendship that developed between Ayers and Lopez and how it helped each man in different ways was moving.  Ayers love for Beethoven’s music gave us lots of Beethoven’s music on the soundtrack.  My one gripe involved two sections of visual symbolism offered by the director — one showed two pigeons soaring into the sky as Ayers played his cello, and the other filled the screen with changing colors and patterns while Ayers and Lopez listened to an L.A. Philharmonic rehearsal of a Beethoven symphony.  Both of these visual sections struck me as cliched and really schmaltzy, not terribly original.  Now if Ayers and Lopez had soared into the air on the music….