Irrigation Ditch by Laura McPhee from River of No Return

I have many stunning students, but every once in a while I read something so terrific it makes me shiver.  Adam Bedell’s writing glitters with passion.  I love my job at Hofstra University.  I adore my students.  Working with this quality of prose, I believe there can’t be a better job out there.

From Bedell’s “The Graveyard Lies Like an Inuit”

We had been walking over an eroded bridge in the woods by Shu Swamp.  A stream trickled underneath us, a canopy formed above—branches in the night hung like lanky piano fingers.  The sky was deep dark blue with white mountain clouds puffing past the moon, sending eclipses of light between the branches of the canopy.  I swear I could hear flutes singing in the wind and crickets, crickets, crickets.  She nudged her shirt up, enticing me to finish.  Her body peered out like moonlight and I shadowed it with lunatic kisses.

After, we floated on our backs in the stream with the bottom of our feet each touching, one pointing to the left, the other to the right.  Our knees bended, making an oval between us — a giant womb; I saw Triton rising upward, blowing his wreathed horn, our precious…Lily said something real strange.  “If we have enough love, we could raise a god,” then she pushed up out of the stream bed, water dripping down her legs.  She pulled a leech off, and I jumped out of the water, panicked—she laughed as we hugged…dripping wet, drops sliding off our bodies and pelting the stream.

By the artist Janie Geiser, given to Mark and me as a wedding present

I have never been able to spell.  This is a humiliating fact for me.  I write fast and with a studied sloppiness so that the reader will think I have bad penmanship rather than bad spelling.  I can remember wincing many times, a burning humiliation.  Once even on top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii at the observatory with twelve members of my family, including my father, an impeccable speller.  Up there, on top of the world, I left behind an incorrectly spelled word.  In the guest book we all noticed that a few days before us the news anchor, Tom Brokaw, had been to the observatory with his family.  Elegantly, they’d signed in and saluted fellow visitors.  Trying to be funny, I wrote something about us being up there too, but we, in our caravan, many children, one in diapers, were like the Joads.  I spelled it Jodes.  It’s up there with my signature, on top of one of the tallest mountains in the world,  if you measure the height from its base on the ocean floor to its summit.  It’s there in the guest book for everyone to see.  When I gave my father the manuscript of my first novel, Bright Angel Time, this was long before spell check, he said to me, “There are so many egregious spelling errors in here I don’t know where to begin.”  (He did enjoy the book.)  Meanwhile the manuscript was being shopped around to publishers, filled with pimples and blemishes and scars.  I can’t spell.  When I became upset in front of my father, frustrated with my spelling incompetence he comforted me, “Many writers can’t spell.  You don’t need to be able to spell to write.  Flannery O’Connor famously couldn’t spell.  Read her letters.  In fact, so many fine writers can’t spell. I always wondered if something were wrong with me since I can spell.”    It made me feel better for a bit, and I try to recall it when suffering a bout of spelling inadequacy.

The other day in one such bout, my father’s insight from years before not helping me out of it, I googled I CAN’T SPELL and found an article by Steve Hendrix, “Why Stevie Can’t Spell,”  from 2005 in the Washington Post. It was wonderful and funny and insightful and above all I am not nearly as bad a speller as he is!

The Elements of Drawing by John Ruskin

My sister, Jenny, says a little bit of Ruskin goes a long way.  Here are two little bits:

“Now a stupid painter would represent, for instance, a drinking-glass beside the hand of one of his figures, and because he had been taught by rule that ‘shadow was darker than the dark side,’ he would never think of the reflection from the glass, but paint a dark grey under the hand, just as if no glass were there.  But a great painter would be sure to think of the true effect, and paint it; and then comes the stupid critic, and wonders why the hand is so light on its dark side.

“Thus it is dangerous to assert anything as a rule in matters of art…”

O.K. that’s enough Ruskin for now.  I’ll save the second bit for another day.

A beautiful little sister and a homely older one — Kathryn, Thelma.  1910.   An intrepid mother who wants freedom from a husband and the confining life of a wife.  They run away to Montana — beneficiaries of the homestead act of 1909 — leaving Vernon behind in Ohio to find a letter saying they are gone.  The girls are afraid, wonder what will become of them.   It’s winter and cold and they ride in the 3rd class car of the train, a coal fire in the center, around which passengers hover, trying to stay warm.  The mother, Glenna, though she doesn’t have money (only what she’s been able to steal from Vernon’s pockets), has a sense of class and finery.  She carries with her a harp (yes a big, beautiful harp that she can play like an angel).  She carries a trunk of summer dresses and an iron and ribbons for her daughters’ hair and they look impeccable, if cold, in white linen.  She carries too her own great grandmother’s China wedding bowl and Temple Notes to Shakespeare.  She’s a reader, a dreamer, ambitious and will not be trapped.  In Montana there are jobs for women and she wants to work, wants to earn money, wants to feel the power of providing for herself and her girls.  She loves men and loves to flirt and when the train gets stuck in a snow drift it is not long before she’s playing her harp for the gentlemen in first class, warm in a Pullman Sleeping Car with fine Scotch.

Glenna’s school house in Winston, Montana.  And the town covered in snow.

My grandmother, my great grandmother — snippets of story.  The frontier at a moment that welcomed women, offering opportunity.  (Montana would elect the first woman to the House of Representatives in 1914.)  Who were these women?  Of course, I knew my grandmother well.  I adored her, adored listening to her elaborate stories of our lineage.  I could imagine her as a little girl, learning the tales of where we came from, from the refined Glenna who refused to accept that her circumstances were what they were, that she wasn’t a queen or a duchess.  But it didn’t matter now because she had been and would be again.  Her life didn’t begin when she was born; it would not end when she died.  Rather, she was just one link in a miraculous continuum, that reached back to Germany and Scotland, that included men like Helmut von Keller, advisor to Bismark from Mechlenburg-Schwerin along the Baltic Sea and women like Mary Queen of Scots and the Royal Stewarts of Nairn — princes and duchesses and queens and the War of 1812 that brought some of her people to America where their children and children’s children became novelists (James Fenimore Cooper among them) and the first woman to go to college and fine painters of the human anatomy who stole cadavers from graves.  One started the Dole pineapple empire and another became the milliner for Granny Taft, William Howard Taft’s aunt.  They survived the Civil War.  They were fabulously wealthy and then lost it all in the various 19^th century runs on banks.  From my grandmother’s telling, the lineage made perfect sense — her mother’s line (German), her father’s line (Scottish).  They were nobles both, cast on the shores of America by war and the great hope of something more.  Her details were precise, born it seemed to me, of a fierce imagination.  James von Slagle, her great great grandfather, came to America during the War of 1812 as a military advisor to Major General Andrew Jackson and saw to the training of rough, unschooled farmers, preparing them for battle against the Indians.  He led his troop in the battle of Horseshoe Bend on the shores of the Tallapoosa River in Alabama in 1814, a success that would make him a national hero.  In a picture of James von Slagle that my grandmother described, he had the finest mustache and the broad strength of an aristocrat, “Von,” she told me, “indicates noble birth.”

The stories were Glenna’s who died long before I was born, but who has lived in my imagination ever since I was a girl through the stories retold to me by my grandmother.  And now, finished with a fourth novel, there are days such as this, in which I begin to dream about writing a fifth novel.  1910 — the 20th century spreading out before Thelma and Kathryn and Glenna — the long road their lives will follow.

She wondered what would become of them — the novel could begin as the three head west on the train in winter, pioneers.  Who would these women be (alive in the continuum of their descendents) at the end of the 20th century, a century in which so much changed for women?  Here is where fiction starts for me: at the intersection of memory and imagination.

Glenna and Thelma posing on wooden horses during a long stopover in Saint Louis, on their way home to Ohio in 1914 for Christmas

Kathryn, the beautiful younger sister.

“I guarantee you that no modern story scheme, even plotlessness, will give a reader genuine satisfaction, unless one of those old-fashioned plots is smuggled in somewhere. I don’t praise plot as accurate representation of life, but as ways to keep readers reading.”
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.