Listening to Stink

My children have found audiobooks. More specifically, they love Stink and the Incredible Super-Galactic Jawbreaker. It's written by Megan McDonald, who wrote the Judy Moody series, and read by Nancy Cartwright, well known as the voice of Bart Simpson.

Stink (a precocious second grade boy) speaks entirely in hyperbole, as indicated by the title. I don't know the whole story of the book because my children have banned me from the room while they listen, so sacred is the audiobook experience, but it seems to be about a giant jawbreaker that Stink buys and eats and then he gets all upset because it didn't actually break his jaw. This is a great section of the story because his mean big sister lectures him on sayings and how they don't have literal meaning, and then within a scene or two he's turned it around on her and is lecturing her

on the exact same thing. (This prompted some pointed questions from my 6-year-old son, who demanded to know how a person could get to the second grade and not know that having your jaw broken by food is impossible and painful. Funny, because the G-man didn't know this, either, until it was explained to him.) Then Stink writes a letter to the jawbreaker company in complaint and they send him free jawbreakers. Wow. Then he goes on a letter writing tear and gets tons of free stuff and then he offends his best friend. Cue the epiphany, only it's not quite as sour a medicine as that. It's clever clear through, with lots of funny language. 

We've already moved on to Stink and the World's Worst Super-

Stinky Sneakers, in which Stink goes to a museum of bad smells, all of which he can correctly identify, because of his super stink-detecting nose. And he decides to enter a monster stink contest for the world's smelliest shoes. The G-man is all over that one. He loves all things smelly. 

Contract Blues

OK. The long-awaited contract did arrive in the agent's office. She called to give a run-down of the terms, which didn't take long. It seems that the primary advantage of working with a larger agency is that they've negotiated deals with all the big houses and they have those deals on file. So, they just go back to the last boiler plate and start with the best available terms that they have and work up.

That's the theory, anyway. Our agent wanted to double check the manuscript deadline, so we sat on the phone, me with my calendar and her with hers and actually counted out the months, plus two weeks on the end. It didn't quite match the deadline on the contract. We decided she should argue for ten more days. Hey, I'm all for more days. 

She said, "You don't want to blow this deadline."

I said, "We're not going to."

She said, "Because if you do, they can cancel the contract. They usually don't and they don't want to, but they can."

I said, "It'll be fine."

She went on to tell me that earlier this spring one of her clients had a manuscript deadline on the first day of the month. On the second day of the month he called her to tell her that he hadn't written a word.

That's right. Not one word.

I said, "Did you have him killed?"

She said, "The publisher wasn't very happy."

I said, "Can I have him killed?"

She said, "They ended up giving him an extension."

Well, that's just not right. 

Shining City, part II

The play was marvelous, except for the three oldster ladies who sat behind us. We sat in row two, so they sat in row three. And still, one of them couldn't hear the dialog. She kept saying loudly to her companions, "What? What was that?" And then when the line of dialog was repeated to her, "She said, 'Are you breaking up with me?'" so loudly that we couldn't hear the ongoing scene, the little old lady would comment on that line. "Well, what does she think he's doing?" 

And, And, at the end of each scene, she'd give us the color commentary on the acting. The acting! Because when you are talking incessantly over the dialog, you are, by definition, an expert in the acting. "Oh, that young man is very good," she said at the end of every scene in which actor John Judd appeared. "That was some very good acting," she said again, for emphasis. (By the way, Judd is stunningly good in this.  At one point he has to recount a disastrous attempt at an adulterous affair and he careens from guile to vulnerability to excitement to rage every few heartbeats.)

But the thing about this play is that there are no breaks between scenes. The lights stay up, and the lone actor on stage, the therapist in whose office this takes place, makes all the changes in the scenery himself. He even changes clothes onstage to show the passage of time, while the lights go up and down to denote the passage of days outside his office windows. It's very clever, this bit. But it is not a commercial break. The ladies behind us didn't notice this or care to notice. Instead, one of them kept talking and asking questions and exchanging gossip with her peers. Another whipped out her cell phone and answered it. No amount of pointed glaring would silence them. At the end, Larry had the line of the day. "Greatest generation, my ass."

Long, Long Day

Three different stories of mine were rejected yesterday. I opened the mail to find three self-addressed, stamped envelopes in which I found scraps of colored paper on which teeny tiny script detailed the vague regrets of a nameless editor. In one instance the mini-missive was signed "Editor."

Another editor, one with a name and my home phone number, called last Thursday with promises of an assignment, many assignments, really, and who promised to call with more details as soon as possible. I looked at the phone many times yesterday. No calls. None at all. 

Another editor has held one of my stories for two months now. No idea when it will run. I wonder if there's a problem with it, but there seems to be no way to ask. Sometimes that happens. Sometimes a story is liked, but not well liked. Sort of a "Death of a Salesman" thing. In that case the editors hold it until they have no choice but to run it. They bought it, and paid for it, but don't seem inclined to run it. And the people I interviewed hang in limbo with me. What a yummy feeling that is.

Larry has revealed that he has a medical situation that may require surgery, and our healthcare goes away at the end of the month. 

The long-awaited book contract has yet to arrive. Yesterday we co-authors got a note from our agent saying, "I'm going to call and check on this." To which my co-author responded, "Was it all a dream?" Don't even say it, buddy.

A chapter of a different book I'm editing was sent off to the author last week and has come back with a screaming note about how I've ruined his text. He insists, "This must be fixed." Yet another author is fuming because I changed his subheads. Subheads! No joke.

In all the hours of the day, I didn't do any of my own writing. Not one word. That's a failing all its own.

Shining City

Larry bought tickets to this play for today. We're going to the matinee, while the kids luxuriate in their grandma's attention. 

Party Animals in Mattapan

We started coaching this week in Mattapan. With the Memoir Project, we spend four weeks doing a straight writing workshop in which we give them notebooks and pens on the first day and then do writing prompts--two or three per week, every week. They write in class for fifteen minutes at a time and then they share what they've written with the group. 

The challenge during these first weeks is keeping the energy in the room high enough so that they want to keep going. That means encouraging people to read out loud even if they are nervous about sharing, which they all are. They all come into the class saying, "I don't have anything interesting to say. Nothing interesting ever happened to me." And by the end, well, they won't sit down. They want to read all the time. And that's the idea.

Bolder characters always emerge in those first four weeks. There are people who want to take over the class or who want to start talking about issues. And that becomes a secondary challenge, keeping the class on track. In Mattapan, one woman wrote about having been adopted by a family as an adult. She'd been an orphan all her life, then she moved to Philadelphia, met a woman at church who became her best friend, just instantly. Then the friend's family adopted her. Amazing, amazing story. But then she said, "I spend so much money on telephone bills." And just as instantly, the class erupted into a debate about how to get the cheapest long distance rate. Eighteen people shouting over each other about different calling plans. It was all I could do to get them back to their notebooks.

During the coaching phase, other challenges emerge, mostly interpersonal issues. How can we turn the stuff in your notebook into an essay? How can I edit your work and ask questions to get the level of detail we need here without offending you or writing it for you? There are even deeper issues. At some point in an hour long conversation about someone's personal life, he or she stops being a participant and starts to become someone else. On Weds, I worked with Mary who talked about her experiences moving into a nearly entirely white neighborhood in Mattapan, one in which the neighbors were openly hostile to her family. She and her husband and children endured four years of harassment and vandalism and threats before they moved out, to another section of Mattapan, one that had already become integrated. But then she was talking about her husband of more than forty years who recently became ill and died. She talked about the surgeries she's facing, about her failing eyesight, about being let go from her job, about the new and higher property tax bill that arrived in the mail, and her struggles with the bureaucracy over that bill.

I hear these stories every session. The losses these seniors cope with, the isolation, the encroaching poverty that they endure and fear, seems overwhelming. At one point Mary said, "My neighbors are worried about me. They think I need to get out." I realize that her friend has been bringing her here for the past six weeks to get her out of the house. Mary has been one of the participants who has stood to read and to tell her stories every week, stories about how she met her husband, about her grandmother's curio cabinet, and about those tough early days in Mattapan, about her political activism in the 70s. Then Mary brightened. "We should have a party at the end of this," she said. "We should keep this going." I'm ashamed to say that my first thought was, "I don't know." I have my life to get back to. I have stuff to do, important stuff, I thought. But Mary was already talking about the different kinds of food people could bring, vegetarian lasagna, and curried goat. And she was ready to start a committee for refreshments. She won me over, and when I brought up the idea to Sheila, our representative from the city, she said, "That would be great. Can you imagine the food they'd bring if it was a potluck?" 

Party on, Mary from Mattapan.

Is That a Walnut in Your Pocket?

So, Larry took the kids to the G-man's gymnastics class yesterday, while I took a conference call. (I don't understand the importance of conference calls. They feel like an old fashioned party line, but less interesting.)

Found myself cooking dinner while others droned on. Chopping onion and frying up hot Italian turkey sausage on the QT, with the phone on mute. And then it ended and Larry trooped in with both kids in tow, the G-man gloating and Sammie crying with great heaving sobs. Fake ones. Larry ordered her to her room and she stomped up the stairs.

What happened? As though I needed to ask. Sammie-boo's deadly charm is matched only by her defiance.

Larry: She wouldn't leave the library. She punched me right in the nuts.

Me: Yeah, well, what should I give them for dinner?

Garret: What does that mean?

Larry: Nothing.

Garret: Do you have nuts on your body?

Larry: Of course not. Forget it.

Me: Peanut butter? They can't have that. He had that for breakfast. Burrito?

Garret: But Samanfa punched you in a nuts. What's a nuts?

Larry: We have chicken nuggets.

Garret: Daddy! Where are your nuts?

Larry: No. No nuts. I had a walnut in my pocket. She punched that.

Garret: Really?

Me: Oh, yeah, Daddy, keep dancing.

OK. Then today, after school, Garret was playing a game of Sorry by himself. It keeps the cheating to a minimum if he plays all the parts at once. And I heard him say, "Oh, for the love of God" to one of the pieces on the board. He said it several times, trying out the intonation. I called Larry at work. What is the meaning of this?

Larry: I may have said that on the way to gymnastics yesterday.

Me: Uh-huh.

Larry: I got to start editing myself.

Me: Uh-huh.

Larry: Wait 'till he says Jesus Jumped Up Christ.

Me: Uh-huh. The first time he does that, you're dead.