Friday Feature ~ “The Respite Room”

“The Respite Room” was born out of my experience of volunteering in such a place at the Children’s Hospital here in Kansas City. My wife and I worked there every other Saturday for four hours for ten years. Mostly it was a place for the families to get away from their bedside vigils. We had a TV room, a full kitchen, a quiet room, a washer and dryer, two showers, and seven bedrooms. My job was to check people in, explain what we had to offer, and then step back and leave them alone unless they asked for something. I read books. I wrote letters. I baked cupcakes. (I ate cupcakes.)

We saw all kinds of people in all emotional states. Basically we saw people at the worst moments of their lives because they all had a sick child in the hospital. Some just sat and stared out the window. Some were grateful to take a shower and wash the clothes they’d been wearing for days. Some took naps. Some fixed elaborate meals. Some found the amount of respite they needed happened to coincide with the length of a televised basketball game.

I wasn’t there to judge, only to serve. But I was struck by the attitude I saw in other volunteers who sometimes held less-than-charitable attitudes toward our guests. I suppose some of that was the kind of emotional distance you have to maintain to do that kind of work. At the other extreme were those who treated the work as a kind of science, with precise thoughts and timing and tolerance. They were brisk and efficient and aloof, and when things didn’t go according to plan, I could sense them shaking on the inside.

That was part of what I tried to achieve in my story. Just as all kinds of people were our guests, so were all kinds of people our volunteers. And sometimes that leads to incompatibility. At the end of my story the protagonist decides he’s not a good fit at the respite room and makes the decision to leave.

I had written the story based on my experience and then started shopping it around. There was no fun and games in it, no snarky narrator; I considered it an attempt at literary fiction. (See a more detailed anatomy of the story here.) According to my records, I had submitted it seven times before I sent it to Little Patuxent Review (and one more time after that). The lit mag had a theme of “social justice” and I thought my story might align with that. Apparently it did, though the acceptance email they sent was ambiguous and I had to write back to the guest editor to get clarification. A few months later the magazine interviewed me for its Concerning Craft column, and you can read that here. (That may be my actual face or it may be stock photo I stole from the internet. I can tell that that is not my cabin.) The story itself was online for a time, but that link is now broken.

Concerning Craft – Little Patuxent Review

I mentioned several weeks ago that I had written a short genesis piece for the Little Patuxent Review about my story “The Respite Room,” which they had so graciously published. My piece is now up at their site, part of their Concerning Craft series.

By clicking on my story title there, you can open a link to the actual story and read it online. There’s also a picture of someone there, but just ignore that.

If you’d care to, leave a comment (just nothing derogatory about the face in the photo).

bits and pieces

If you’ve read this humble blog long at all, you know that I have a healthy disregard for the so-called “rules” of grammar. I say this only for creative writing, of course. If you’re teaching high schoolers how to write term papers, grammar is good. If you’re writing technical manuals (something I’ve done) or legal contracts, or even if you’re guilty of committing journalism, then by all means use the lingua franca that grammar provides. But fiction writers have license to invent the language, not to be slaves to the mechanics of it. And poets? They are on the far frontier, finding the future for the rest of us.

Even so, there are times when people commit errors that grate on me. Peter Anderson points out a doozy on his blog. Where was the editor for this sin against humanity? Another that particularly bugs me is when people use “then” instead of “than.” It’s not as though these people are willfully misusing the language for a rhetorical effect. They’re just wrong, I tell you. Wrong!

This sentence may have a punctuation error, do you know what it is?

This sentence may have a punctuation error; do you know what it is?

I received one rejection this week, from Beecher’s Magazine. The submission was a long shot. Although my story, “Travel Light,” is a serious and worthy effort, I tried this magazine mostly because the story is set on the river that rolls through the college town the magazine hails as home. No worries. The story is under consideration at a couple of other places as well. It’s actually a chapter from my eternally limbo-ed novel, Larger than Life.

I never made it to that launch party at the Writers Place last Sunday that I spoke of in a recent post. Number Two son and his lovely wife arrived in town (from Portland, Oregon — a really fine town!) and we hung out with them. Certainly the wiser choice, but I still crave that fellowship of writers.

Recently, the Little Patuxent Review published my story “The Respite Room” but it’s a print journal. You can’t (couldn’t) read my story online. So I wrote to the editor asking how long I should wait to publish my story here at Lucky Rabbit’s Foot. I assume even if there is no contracted waiting period, there is probably a courtesy period. The response I got was a surprise. They thanked me for the consideration of asking and then asked me to write a short piece about the genesis of my story that they would publish on their blog. So I strung some words together and sent it to them. If they accept it, my strung-together words should appear there next week. I’ll post a link. Also, there is supposed to be a link to the story itself, so you’ll get to read it. And most amazing of all, there may even be a picture of my ugly mug, so you’ll get to put a face to the babble you read here. However, I sent them three photos that represent facets of my personality, and only one of them shows my ugly mug. We will see what they choose.

Anatomy of a story ~ “The Respite Room”

I probably shouldn’t do this, but I want to write about the genesis and development of my short story “The Respite Room” since it has been on my mind recently. (The story will come out next month in the Little Patuxent Review, about which I am inordinately vain. The editor asked me to tinker with the last line, so I’ve been revisiting the writing of the whole piece since everything leads to that last line, of course.)

As you probably know from reading this humble blog, I am wary of knowing too much about my creative process. I fear that a consciousness of it may somehow slay its natural flow, the way I think some people’s slavish devotion to “writing rules” and “grammar rules” slay their own creativity (but that’s a different lament).

This story came from my experience for the last ten years volunteering in a respite room at a local hospital. The respite room is a place for the family members to get away from their patient’s room — the beeping monitors and sucking respirators, the unrelenting grimness — and take a break, have a sandwich, make some calls, watch some television, or just sit and relax.

Over the years, I have seen a lot of people pass through the room; I’ve seen the extremes of humanity because often their souls are laid bare. As I say in the story, these people are going through the worst moments of their lives, and I’m present as a mute witness. (I did not begin this volunteer work as a means to generate story material. If I had, it would have been a poor decision since it’s resulted in only a single story, one that I have struggled with for nearly as many years as I’ve been volunteering. But my personal motivation does flicker into my character’s motivation a bit, which I think gives him credibility.)

Conversely, I’ve seen a lot of volunteers who have helped run this respite room through the years. It’s tempting to believe that I’ve seen these people at the best moments of their lives, but I don’t think this is always true. I think that there is a predatory type of personality who is attracted to this kind of work. There are many types of personalities who do this work, of course, but I’m interested in the superior, arrogant person, the one who sees helping the unfortunate as a way to “straighten out their lives.” Who see managing such resources as requiring control and judiciousness. Who see the needy as “grasping” and “greedy” and the victims of their own poor choices who are lucky to get any help at all and ought to show more appreciation for it dammit! I’m not altogether fair in this portrayal, of course. I’m stressing this attitude a bit (but not very much, in my observation) in order to make it easier for me to understand and work with. And this kind of “predatory charity” is manifested in many other avenues of life in our complex society, which I think makes my story more universal while remaining specific. But I think I’m straying from my point in this post.

Anyway, this combination of seeing people at their worst and seeing others at their “not-best” has kept me reflective for a long time, and trying to write a story to crystalize my thoughts is the natural outcome, at least for me. And thus “The Respite Room.” (By the way, my original title was merely “Respite Room.” Somewhere along the way it picked up that definite article. I don’t know when that happened, but I don’t suppose I mind.)

I started writing the story as a first person reflection by a volunteer in such a room, mostly as an account of a typical day. My original goal was to suggest that the human interactions in the respite room were a microcosm of our overall society, and to that end I had intended slipping in all sorts of characters who would represent various groups who provide service in our communities: police, janitors, trash collectors, ministers.  That effort turned out to be more of a vignette than a true story, and I soon had to evolve it. I took it into third person narration so I could discuss my protagonist’s thoughts more objectively, and I found that all of the service-sector characters I had intended were drawing away from the point of the story (which was growing more clear to me as I struggled), so I dropped most of them, keeping only the police representative in the form of a hospital security guard. His presence does instigate a plot point; otherwise I might have dropped him too.

And I found I was lacking a clear representation of that “predatory charity” personality, so I added a new character. She makes an appearance at the end, though I reference her early in the story, and I think that fix is what made the difference and finally allowed me to see the real story I wanted to tell. It allowed me to pull together the fragments I had. I often get these kinds of epiphanies in my writing; they’re not necessarily some revelation a character receives but rather ones I receive about how to develop the story. When this happens, a story I’ve struggled with for years suddenly seems to flow through my fingers onto the keyboard in final form. (This recently happened with the story “Velvet Elvis” — which should appear this month in Bartleby Snopes — I had been casting about for a plot for the basic idea behind it for many years too.) The trouble with relying on this writing-through-epiphany process is that it can sometimes take years for it to happen, which tends to limit productivity.

But now I have “The Respite Room” finished and accepted. I’m enjoying all of the warm fuzzies that come with that and chiding myself for not working on more stories. But I think I needed to get through my analysis of this story, which has been on my mind as I said earlier, so I could be free to work on those other stories. Will the stories now flow? I will watch and see.

A few stray thoughts:

I had written about my struggles with this story as long ago as this post back in January of 2009. In that I discussed the placement of a single word. Curiously, in the final story I’ve chosen the wording that I had rejected in that blog post. Also curious is how my intention in the wording has been taken from me and completely subverted by current events. Back then, I wanted to suggest that my hospital security guard character was a benign, almost comical person and certainly one with no menace. (It makes sense in the story.) I speak of his menace as being seen in nothing more than the canister of pepper spray he has on his belt. The point was to suggest that he was not menacing at all. Recent events with the use of pepper spray in the Occupy movement turned that completely around. I don’t think it hurts the story, but it does add another bit of meaning to it I hadn’t intended.

I use sentence fragments throughout the story. I have no reluctance with flagrantly breaking the so-called “rules” of grammar. As you know if you’ve read my rants in this humble blog, I think creative writers get a pass on grammar if they are able to get their meaning across in some rule-breaking way. (I recently saw the adverb “hectoringly” used in My Antonia. I’m sure the writing mavens would have catalepsy over that — adverbs are bad, don’t you know. Willa Cather didn’t seem to get that memo.)

I alternate plot-furthering paragraphs in the story with backstory paragraphs. I hadn’t realized I was doing that until a recent read through. I’ve been told before that I’m pretty good with seamless flashbacks. I’ll take that on faith; I just write what I write. But I was a little surprised to see how I was telling two stories. As I’ve said before, half the tale is in the telling. It seems to work.

Some of my liberal politics do creep in. They’re in keeping with my protagonist’s ethics, and it think they give counterpoint to the antagonist’s attitude. But I’ve done it so subtly that I think you would have to go looking for my bleeding heart in the story to find it. The lack of universal health care? The lack of a national service model? The fact that every aspect of our community is tied to every other aspect? It’s in there, and sometimes a paper cut is more than a paper cut.

This is one of my “serious” stories. I do seem to write in dichotomies. My stories have either been serious, “literary” works or they’ve been snarky, comical works. (“Velvet Elvis” is one of the latter.) I can’t account for this — maybe I don’t want to know why — but it may be that I need the release of a comical story after all of the wrenching effort of writing a serious story. Or I write the serious story to persuade myself that I’m not just writing stuff to make people laugh. Whatever. I write what I write.

Somewhere along the road I also “realized” that my protagonist is married to one of the minor characters in that novel I’ve been struggling with: Larger than Life. His wife does not make an appearance in the short story — I’m not even sure he’s married yet in the setting of the story. And he is only mentioned by name in the novel-in-progress — though by then they have two children. Faulkner did this a lot in his stories and novels. (Nota bene: I’m not claiming I’m in league with Faulkner!) Characters who are the subject of whole novels are given tangential references in other of his novels. Often, this illuminates both works in unexpected ways. I don’t think this brilliance is happening in my humble scribbling. Nor was this relationship between these two characters my original intention with either work. I just sort of realized it one day. I suppose that strengthens my understanding of these two characters, making it easier to write about them and find their places in their respective stories.

As I said above, my intent on taking this perilous journey into my creative process was to give myself some closure on this story that has occupied my heart and mind for nearly a decade. I’m pleased with it, but I’m eager to move on as well. Catharsis achieved, I think.

Little Patuxent Review is a print-only publication. I won’t be able to give you a link to find the story online. After a suitable time, I’ll post the text of it here on the odd chance that you might care to read it.

In search of an ending

I’ve been fortunate (I guess it’s fortunate) in that nearly all of my stories that have been published have not been altered by the editors who accepted them. Of my thirteen accepted and/or published pieces, only two have been revised (and those were merely suggestions for revision, which I accepted).

The first was my story “Race to the summit,” which you can read here. The editor wanted some of the story order rearranged, and some of my original description in the story he found comical (which it wasn’t supposed to be). So I made those changes, he published the story, and the rest is history. (Or fantasy in this case.)

The second is a recent acceptance, “Velvet Elvis,” which will be coming out in Bartleby Snopes sometime next month. In that case, the editor wanted to change only the last sentence; in fact, it was only the last word of the last sentence that he wanted changed. I made that change willingly. You’ll have to judge whether it works or not when you read it.

Today, I received the third editorial change request of my humble career. My latest acceptance, “Respite Room,” which will come out in Little Patuxent Review in January (print only), needs its ending fixed too. In fact, once again, it’s the last sentence that the editor wants strengthened/clarified. So I’m working on some ideas, and I’m open to suggestions from the editor. I agree that it will likely improve the impact of the story.

But am I starting to see a trend in my story-telling skills? Can I not always write a good ending?

Ungrammatical submission

I submitted one of my short stories, “Respite Room,” to a magazine today, asking for consideration. The description of the editorial approach of the magazine was that they try not to do heavy editing on pieces they accept but that they will correct grammar errors, except in dialogue.

Long-time readers of this humble blog (both of you) know that I consider grammar to be optional for creative writers. We are innovators of the language not servants of it. We’re not writing term papers or official reports. We have a free pass on the “rules” if we think it makes our writing more effective or communicative.

I gave my story a read through before submitting it (and I managed to find one word to change, though not for grammatical reasons), certain that since it was a straightforward telling, there would be no fancy rule breaking in the grammar department. I found I was mistaken. I came across several strings of sentence fragments, which seems to be my “error” of choice when I write. I did not fix these. I submitted them as written because I believe they express the story most effectively.

I’m not sure what the editor will do with this. I got the sense that the magazine won’t automatically reject a submission because of a grammar “violation” and that they are interested at first in the substance of the tale. But suppose they like it enough to accept it. What if they want to “fix” my grammar “mistakes”? Will I hold my ground and resist? Will I surrender for the chance at getting the story published? Likely I don’t have to worry about either option, and their response time is months. So I’m just going to forget about it.

Update 9-DEC-2011 – Subsequent posts show that this story was accepted by The Little Patuxent Review. Although this was not the magazine I was hinting at above, and although they had me tinker with the ending a bit, they had no reservation about the grammar “errors” I employed throughout.