Literary Quiz Answers
T.S. Eliot
F.Scott Fitzgerald
Robert Frost
Mark Twain
Tom Wolfe
Flannery O'Conner
Bill Holm
Up-north Literary Life (with lit. allusions highlighted)
April, with its sunny days and frosty nights, is cruel to my perennials but still a reasonably good month for writing. [T.S. ELLIOT: "THE WASTELAND"] I live five miles east of Bemidji on the Mississippi River. Spring in the Twin Cities means open water and barges and tulips outside the Saint Paul Hotel; “up north,” the landscape remains chilly, bland, muted. The Mississippi outside my library window palely loiters [KEATS "LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI] icebound and still. On the far shore, the palette of colors is from the Ebenezer Scrooge Crayon Collection: leafless aspen, dusty-green conifer, a brush stroke of washed-blond riverbank grass. Nothing moves but a slow-flying raven, and, closer in at the feeder, a few dependable Black-capped Chickadees. The days are lengthening, though slowly. The afternoon certain slant of light [EMILY DICKINSON, POEM] is higher and wider, but still without heat. Seasons en pointe. Nature’s caesura.
This is the time of year I feel most literary. At the end of a winter’s writing, I can hold the full arc of a novel in my head; I can see its assemblage, and I can make cuts unimaginable just weeks earlier. My characters’ lives pulse in my fingertips. My editor in New York returns my emails within the hour. The whole world turns on the novel.
Then the robins arrive. Wood frogs hawk their throats in sunny ponds, and the river begins to groan and stir. As ice tectonics grumble in the night and daily heighten their pitch, I press to finish work-in-progress. Like someone diagnosed with incipient memory loss, with imminent derangement, I start writing earlier and earlier each morning; I wake up in the night to jot down notes. I try to leave myself a trail.
On April 16th, give or take a day, it’s “breakup” time on the river. Honeycombed, crushed ice slides downstream with the sound of a thousand chandeliers stirring in a summer breeze. I put my papers in order, and try to muster a happy face: only a crazy person or novelist would be unhappy for the arrival of spring in Minnesota. The same day the river is clear of ice, two loons swim steadily upstream, towing summer along in their perfect wake.
Spring up north is an hour long. It’s rough strife. [ANDREW MARVELL, "TO HIS COY MISTRESS"] It’s hot and windy, the air thick with pine pollen and aspen fuzz, the highways littered with road kill. Barely into May, there’s blue daylightat 4:30 a.m. Birds are in full call at 5:00, the woodpeckers drumming like the Blue Man Group; a beaver, not long out of her cold dark mud hut, thuds the water again and again with her spatulate tail.
No use going back to bed. I make coffee, look through some pages of my fiction. The sentences are flat and lifeless on the page, their effect diminished, as if written in disappearing ink, even as I read–but no time to fret over adverbs or semicolons–the dog is barking at a skunk, intervention required–and by then my wife is up, fully dressed in summer shorts and top, and has cooked eggs (it has taken her only seconds), and after breakfast I’m drafted to plant peas and onions in the garden, where the chives burst through the ground when my back is turned, and the Baltimore Orioles, hummingbirds and Rose-breasted Grosbeaks arrive as a cohort, an avian circus blown in on a warm south wind; I hustle to cut a couple of oranges in half and nail them onto the garden fence, but a thirty pound Snapping Turtle—her shell alarge, rakku serving platter etched in the lost language of turtles–blocks the front door, she who comes every spring, programmed in her turtle brain to lay her eggs where my house sits (which is why, for karmic reasons, I cannot pave my gravel driveway); I go for a stick–she’ll strike it and clamp onto it–and I can drag her away to a better spot, but when I return she has left, on the sunny side of the driveway, a scrabbled, damp-mouthed excavation softened by her own urine, a moist channel into which she has hunched out her twenty ping-pong ball-sized eggs; I make a mental note to cover it with chicken wire against night-sniffing skunks–however, first I must mow the lawn, which is already ankle high and rising (within minutes my old mower will not handle its lushness) because I want the yard looking good for the flood of summer visitors: daughter Caitlin and herfiancee’, both from Manhattan, who arrive only moments after I put away the mower–luckily the first peas are ripe, and a perfect complement for our lunch of fresh Crappie, buttered toast, a chilly viognier, and rhubarb pie, Caitlin’sfavorite. They stay only ten minutes, then fly back to New York, which affords me a moment to write, during which I manage the first sentence of a new story: “The funeral was not all that sad,” a sentence solid enough to sustain me through Bill, a pal from the old glory days [RICHARD FORD, "ROCK SPRINGS"] at Stanford (he’s getting divorced and stays only thirty seconds, twenty of which he spends online), and after him the Norwegians, a foursome of writers and filmmakers on some kind of New World, post-emigrant research/vision quest; they want to meet me, writer and son of the pioneers, and I tell them mystory, how my great-grandfather, out of loneliness for the Old Country, drowned himself in the shallow lake on the home place, and whether it is that tale, or the aquavit talking, within seconds we are all weeping (I really need a nap), and when they’re gone my wife and I head down to the dock to lie on the hot cedar boards for sun and a siesta with the dragonflies circling around us [VIRGINIA WOLF, STORY], and I am just drifting off when there is aviolent shrilling, squalling, flapping in the air directly above: I jerk upright as a prism falls from thesky, its rainbow colors flashing, and an osprey screams at an eagle which has tried, mid-flight, to grab the osprey’s catch–a fat sunfish that thumps onto the shore, then flips onto the dock six feet away where it lies stunned: the raptors fly off, harping at each other, and the iridescent fish, gasping and punctured, we push back into theriver; remarkably, it swims away: enough is enough! I tell mywife, and I head to the house for a real nap–at which point Lin and Jay, and Marsh and Linda, friends from upriver, arrive by pontoon bringing champagne and a croquet set, and as their golden retrievers race about with my dog,“clock-clock” go our mallets, though none of us knows the colors of our stripes [STEPHEN CRANE "THE OPEN BOAT"],and tomorrow will be one of those mornings when everyone sits around saying “I drank too much last night,”[JOHN CHEEVER "THE SWIMMER"] but we complete the croquet game in four minutes after which time the Icelanders arrive, a group of teachers, aneducational exchange, and we drive them on a speed tour around the area,stopping at Red Lake Reservation, at Itasca State Park with this handsome groupof people and their language that confounds all amateur linguists– “It’s the language of turtles!” one of the Icelanders says, and we all laugh wildly(we’ve been drinking wine) while we pontoon, turtle-spotting, over to Marsh’sisland upstream from my dock; there we picnic and bonfire and sing Icelandic folk songs until as the stars wheel out, Andromeda and Cassiopeia (what has become of the constellations of midsummer?) [CHEEVER, "THE SWIMMER"]
We shiver in our summer wear. It is, we realize, Labor Day weekend. In the morning, the yard and river are quiet. The loons have gone. The last geraniums glow ruby and garnet. A tardy hummingbird, as fat as an oversized thimble, buzzes the petunias, which we have stopped watering. Inching across thedriveway is a turtle the size of a fifty cent piece; skunks got the rest, but this little one survived, and is headed for the river.
My wife murmurs something aboutgoing inside to take a long, hot bath.
I go to my study.
I sit down and look around. It’s a comfortable place. A manuscript lies beneath a large, agate paperweight. I open a chapter at random and start reading. It’s like somebody else wrote these sentences, but they’re not half-bad.
Natasha Tretheway
Annie Proulx
Finding an Agent
There are lots of avenues toward finding an agent. I found my agent via an article in the Minneapolis Tribune. A Twin Cities writer had a big splash with a book, and the agent’s name was mentioned. I tracked him down and sent him a chapter. He liked it, asked for all that I had, and sold the novel within 3 months.
Trade writing magazines like Writer, Writer’s Digest, etc. have useful articles on agents, and sometimes lists of current agents, but I should think that the internet would be the place nowadays to find agents. Obviously you must be wary, and use your usual spidey senses when doing business on the internet. A key indicator of an agency's legitimacy is the list of authors it represents. As well, an agent should charge you only if he/she sells your work. Commission is usually 15 percent.
Big agency versus small agency is a consideration. Small agencies, often just one person, are agile and attentive, but you are more vulnerable if that agent has any kind of personal or professional trouble (which has happened to me). Giant agencies move slowly and are impersonal, so I would look for a small-to-medium sized agency, one with at least 3-4 agents that have worked in publishing prior to becoming an agent.
The previously-mentioned magazines have useful articles on “submissions” to agents. Try to track down one of those, though on the other hand, so many people probably read those and follow the instructions exactly, that you might catch an agent’s attention by an ‘original’ letter—one that suggests that you are a writer but not a cliche'. A good, fresh letter, and of course your gripping, can't-put-down sample chapter.
A more creative approach: Say you read a book recently that you really liked. Don’t be afraid to track down the author and ask for his/her agent’s name. If you can “sell” yourself through your email, which means a short, clear and polite query, then the author more often than not will give you the agent’s name--at the same time making clear that they are not recommending you, but only giving you information, which is fair for everybody.
The Business of Writing
Remiss on my blog, but with good reason: a family vacation, then (as often happens after a holiday), home to business left undone. In this case, a can of worms. Serious drama involving serious money.
Life is remarkable: just when we get all our plates spinning smoothly, a dog chases a cat across the stage. A rope breaks. A car drifts across the center line. Falling space debris hits the house. All metaphors, of course, but in real life I'm facing an unpleasant issue on the business side of my writing. I have to fire, then sue someone whom I’ve worked with and liked (and still like) for over twenty years. The issue is money. Royalties owed me for books I’ve written. The problem is not with my publisher or filmmaker, but with someone in between, which is all I can say right now, a matter that also annoys me greatly. I’ve become one of those people who say, when the reporter calls or the television camera lights them up, “Sorry--I can’t comment because the matter is in litigation.”
Okay, just one comment: I had this stupid, naïve idea that only artists like Willie Nelson and Bo Diddley lost money to bad managers, but now I’m up against the same thing.
Stay tuned. When I can say more, I will.
In the meantime, my only response can be to keep writing. Here’s a poem written today. I’m no danger to MaryOliver or Billy Collins, but the ending is nice:
Bird Feeder
On gray, still days
Birds at my mother’s feeder
Confuse her windows with sky.
She starts at another thump against
Plate glass—“What must they think?”
She asks. Another head-on.
Holes in the air gone shut.
Light firmed up like clear sap or amber.
“A Rose-breasted Nuthatch
Weighs hardly anything,” she says.
Close your eyes: all you feel
In your palm is their needling feet
And a wisp of feather.
She has saved many a stunned bird.
She warms them in her hands.
Straightens their necks
Blows lightly into their open beaks,
Then sets them on a leaf or a twig,
Somewhere safe.
“When I come back later,
They’re usually gone,” she says.
This tiny, woman, 88 now,
With thin white wings of hair.
Off the Road
Notes from the Texas Gulf Coast
I'm way deep in the heart of Texas tonight. Down from Austin to Seguin, and further south to Sinton, which is only 20 miles from Corpus Christi ("Body of Christ") and the coast. Palm tree fronds blow and rattle in a humid, on shore breeze. I'm bunked at Best Western just off the bypass, my generic black rental car looking small among the row of big, crew-cab pickups of construction workers.
I'm here at the invitation of school librarians, who in many ways hold the world together. A couple of them scored a Federal grant to buy books and bring in authors (I'm one of three this year in the Sinton schools). Earlier in the year a woman author came, and all the girls in the school received one of her books. This spring it's Guy-time. Librarians are ingenious as a group, and also communicate like no other group. A librarian, Karen S., in Seguin saw that I was on book tour and headed to Sinton, so asked if I could make a stop in her town, "as Seguin is right on the way." I replied that I'd love to, but I'd be passing through on a Sunday. "No problem," she said. "We can open up the library on Sunday afternoon for you, and have ice cream. You'll need something cool."
How could I say no to that kind of offer? As well, several of her middle school boys had written me letters recently, about books of mine they had read. But I was wondering if any of them would want to come back to school on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. Turns out at least a dozen did come, along with their parents. We ate ice cream, talked, I signed books, we had pictures, and it was just a great time--memorable in many ways. The shy boys, some athletes, some motorheads (and one girl), Hispanic, black, white, came with their books and questions, and I left full hope. Hope and optimism. There are teachers, librarians, parents and kids out there who are going to save the world. It felt great to be a small part of that on Sunday in Seguin, and today in Sinton.
P. S. On grants: the one that brought me in was called, I believe, a Federal ISIL (Improving Literacy in Schools). The librarians who wrote it said "it's a hassle" (the federal bureaucracy), but we agreed it was a matter of keeping eyes on the prize, that is, the students who benefit.
My New Book: The Reviews
SATURDAY NIGHT DIRT. Will Weaver. Farrar,Straus & Giroux, $14.95 (176p) ISBN 978-0-374-35060-4
SCHOOL LIBRARYJOURNAL: April 2008 In this first title in the Motor series, a few days at a small dirt stock-car track in northern Minnesota are described through the eyes of adults and kids who are involved in various track activities. All eyes stay fixed on the weather forecast, since a washout weekend can make or break a track that is just barely hanging on financially. Despite the lack of a strong plot, Weaver presents compelling character studies, as he examines the outlying bond that unites all of his characters—a love of cars and racing. In fact, it is the atmosphere of the track that is the real star here. The noise, smells, and flying dirt stand out sharply against a background tensions of small-town life. Young racing fans, particularly those familiar with the small tracks that dot rural parts of the country, will find much that rings true here. --Todd Morning, Illinois
BOOKLIST: March 1, 2008 Gr 8 Up–This thoroughly enjoyable sports novel is set in rural Minnesota and centers on a quarter-mile dirt racetrack struggling for economic survival. The plot plays out over the course of one Saturday, culminating in that evening’s racing. The story is divided into four chapters–Noon, 3:00, 6:00, and 9:00 PM–and within each one, various characters are introduced. The cast, composed of both genders and multiple ethnicities in a variety of racing roles, includes young drivers starting their careers, older drivers hanging on for the love of the sport, the track owners and their employees, the mechanics, and snack-food vendors. As bad weather threatens, the track draws star drivers from out of town in an effort to boost the gate, with the event concluding just as the storm arrives. Throughout, the author keeps readers’ interest, as curiosity grows about how the many characters will eventually fit together. Racing terminology is used accurately, and the scenes are plausible, although the positive outcome of almost every problem seems too good to be true. Still, this book presents a fascinating look at small-time racing where the love of it gives the glitz of NASCAR its roots.–JeffreyA. French, formerly at Willoughby-Eastlake Public Library, Willowick, OH
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY. April 7, 2008 Weaver (Defect; Full Service) launches his Motor series with this fast-paced introduction to the rough-and-tumble world of car racing. Headwaters Speedway in northern Minnesota is a struggling track desperate for some big-name racers to draw in fans and revenue. One Saturday night, when rain storms force cancellations at other tracks throughout the state, owner Johnny Walters, a former racer left paralyzed after a severe crash, and his 17-year-old daughter, Melody, get a bigger crowd than they ever imagined. Weaver entertains readers with a motley cast: Maurice Battier, the track's fastidious flagman; Beau Kim,16, the tai chi–loving Mod-Four racer; and Sonny Down Wind, who refuses all sponsorship offers. At times the language gets mired in hardcore automotive lingo: “He was cranking over the engine to find top dead center, or TDC, valve position.” And with 10 characters introduced in the first 50 pages, it'sinitially difficult to keep them straight. But in limited space, Weaver fleshes each one out enough to leave a lasting impression on readers and make them curious to know what happens next. Ages 12-up. (Apr.)
KIRKUS REVIEWS: March 15, 2008
Librarians need to steer boys who tinker with internal combustion engines to Weaver’s latest work, set at the Headwaters Speedway, a dirt racetrack locatedin Northern Minnesota. The large cast of blue-collar characters doesn’t get blisters from video-game controllers but happily accepts skinned knuckles from cranking on torque wrenches. Teenagers Trace Bonham, Melody (Mel) Walters and Beau Kim get their thrills from competitive racing at the decaying track, but they have run into problems: Trace finds that his mechanic has sabotaged his engine, Mel struggles to keep her injured father’s track financially solvent and Beau works to keep his rolling wreck running. A major storm compounds these difficulties by threatening to wash out the big race. Although several race scenes are exciting, minute and potentially boring mechanical details too often interrupt the by-the-numbers plot. Short chapters and a brisk pace, however, may attract those reluctant readers who can recite the firing order of a V-8 and know how to tighten down a valve cover. (Fiction. YA)
TeensReadToo.com by Sally Krueger (aka"ReadingJunky")
It's not NASCAR or the Indy 500. It is small town,dirt track racing. There's dust in the air, and colorful characters racingtheir cars around the track. There's plenty of competition, an intense desireto win, and enough mystery and intrigue to keep even non-racing fans on theedge of their seats. SATURDAY NIGHT DIRT is set at Headwaters Speedwayin Minnesota. Mel Walters and her father, Johnny Walters, are struggling tokeep their little race track in business. Johnny, once a driver himself, is nowconfined to a wheelchair after a tragic accident years ago. Mel's mother neededonly a few short weeks to determine she couldn't stay married to a man in awheelchair, so Mel and her dad have been on their own for quite some time. Stillin high school, Mel acts as track manager, and she is probably the sole reasonfor the track's continued success. The story begins and ends on one Saturday.Because of Mel's drive and determination, it's a Saturday that makes historyfor the track and just might breathe some new life into it. Othermembers of the cast of characters include several young racers like Trace,Amber, and Beau hoping to make their mark in racing. There's Patrick, whohandles parking and sings the national anthem before the night's racing begins.Maurice is a retired navy man who handles the signal flags like a pro. Thereare also the down-and-out racers like Sonny from the local reservation who lackthe funds to really be taken seriously by the other competitors. Even the everpresent threat of bad weather becomes a player in the non-stop action at thetrack. Each plays a part in the Saturday night excitement and helps make thestory a real page-turner. SATURDAY NIGHT DIRT is billed on the cover as"A Motor Novel." Hopefully, that means it is the first of many more.Weaver's book is especially excellent for reluctant guy readers, even if theydon't have a special interest in the sport of dirt track racing.