Have a Word With Yourself

Two writers inhabit the office where I’m sitting right now. If one of us is having a bad day, the other can’t help but notice. It doesn’t take long before the other occupant gets an earful. On one of those days, I asked my wife to pause in her exasperated recitation. I rooted around in our stash of stationery and produced a piece of textured card stock. I handed it to her, and urged her to write something in this format:

Dear (your name):

You did a great job yesterday writing (short description of the thing you wrote or edited yesterday).

Today you’re going to work on (short description of today’s goal). And you know what? It’s going to be awesome. Have a great day.

I love you,

(sign your name here)

She looked at me like I was nuts but she did it. And for weeks after, whenever I sensed or heard from her that she felt bad about the way the current project was going, I’d either present her with a card in person or leave it on her desk so she’d see it when she next sat down.

She originally thought it was a woo-woo idea, but she now has a little stack of these cards that she has written out. (I do too, because I couldn’t very well let myself off the hook when I was foisting this on her.) I bought two old-timey mail spikes so we could lend some order to our individual piles.

One day, when she resisted doing the exercise because it felt weird, she said, “Where did you even get this stupid idea?”

I did what any husband would do in such a circumstance. I blamed Lawrence Block.

Yes, fellow mystery scribes, that Lawrence Block. The MWA Grand Master. The author of the Matthew Scudder novels, the Bernie Rhodenbarr capers, the Ehrengraf stories… (Oh you don’t know them? You probably should. Very funny.) Block has written tons of books, including what his website calls “midcentury” erotica.

You can’t say this about many fiction writers, but I like Block just as much when he’s writing nonfiction. His advice books for writers, in particular, radiate a very gentle, conversational authority.
In the mid-eighties, Block attended one of those seminars that promised to change your life. He liked what he learned and thought it might even be useful for writers, except that no one had created such material. So Block created a group of exercises and a PowerPoint presentation. Then he booked ads, rented hotel conference rooms, and embarked on road trips with his wife to teach writers how to get in their right mind.

For instance, he had students pair up with another writer, sit across from each other, and recite a list of fears they have about their writing. While one person read off their list of fears, the other person’s job was to simply listen and respond as follows.

“A fear I have about my writing is that it’s all a big waste.”

“Thank you.”

“Another fear I have about my writing is that it’s not any good.”

“Thank you.”

“Another fear I have about my writing is that editors will reject it as soon as they see how bad it really is.”

“Thank you.”

Block’s logic is that fear and negativity are chickenshit. They run aground when they are exposed.
The technique reminds me of that scene in Good Will Hunting when the shrink character played by Robin Williams demolishes Matt Damon’s tough guy persona by repeating one phrase over and over again—“It’s Not Your Fault”—until Will’s subconscious finally accepts the truth about his miserable childhood.

Block and his wife presented these in-person seminars for two years. Attendees paid $100 for the one-day course. Hitting the road every weekend for three months at a time quickly got old for the Blocks. Little mistakes here and there often left them at the break-even point financially. Block hung up his spurs and got back to his writing.

But he did hear from former students who felt that the class had helped them enormously. Well, he thought, maybe I should write it all down in a book. The first book version of the Write for Your Life course ran about 60,000 words, 20 chapters, 175 pages. Back in the eighties, in the days before print-on-demand, the only way you could make a book was to order a full press run. Block printed 5,000 books hoping he wasn’t going to lose his shirt.

Far from it. He sold all but 25 via mail order. After 4,975 copies disappeared in the mail, Block allowed the book to slip from his mind. Those copies took on a life of their own, with vendors eventually hawking them online at astronomical prices. In 2013, Block says, an assistant of his found the 25 leftover books tucked in a storage facility somewhere. They slapped them up on eBay and alerted fans in an e-blast. The books sold out in three hours.

Block finally capitulated, making the text available as an ebook and a print-on-demand paperback. Though many of the exercises were originally designed to be conducted in a setting with other writers, you can easily adapt them. (Hence the subtitle The Home Seminar for Writers.) I reread the book to write this piece, and I discovered many exercises that I refused to do upon first reading it years ago, such as:

• I never got around to meditating at several points during the day: as a prelude to writing, after I had finished my writing for the day, or when I was stuck…
• I never got around to practicing automatic writing—putting down on paper anything that pops into my head—for 10 minutes…
• I never got around to compiling a list of all the eduction, expertise, life experiences, and references that I have accumulated that I might draw upon for my writing…
• I never got around to assembling a list of actions I can take to add to that “bank” of experiences…
• I never got around to decorating my home or office with positive affirmations that I can see on a regular basis…

I’ll stop there, but the book offers at least another 15 different exercises that I—haha—never got around to doing. Because I apparently was too busy not living up to my potential.

Oh—it turned out that the exercise I asked my wife to do is not in Block’s book. The closest is an exercise in which Block asks you to sign and date a letter to yourself in which you state that you no longer need to believe the aforementioned negative thoughts about your writing.

So it turns out that I, Joe D’Agnese, am also a self-help author!

You wouldn’t know it to look at me. I am not alone in buying such books and then not taking their advice. The entire self-help genre would die tomorrow if people did. At one point in the course’s history, Block realized writers so hate saying affirmations that he created and sold audiotapes where the affirmations were spoken aloud and you merely had to listen to them.

For me, what has become interesting about the “love letters to yourself” technique is noticing the negative reactions I have while doing it. I tell myself it’s stupid. I feel uncomfortable, almost sick, at the prospect of praising myself. In fact, I have already judged writing this very column about my experience to be a worthless and egotistical endeavor.

To which I can only respond: Thank you, Joe. Thank you very much.

But what does that mean for you?

Well, some morning soon, I hope you will rise, look yourself in the mirror, and say, “You know what, INSERT NAME HERE? You done good.”

If even thinking about such a thing makes you feel icky or weird, interrogate the feeling. That’s all I’m asking. And if it does make you icky, maybe you ought to check out Block’s book to see if it’s for you. Think about getting a paper copy so you can dog-ear pages or mark your progress as you work through the exercises.

Oh…and while you were looking at yourself in the mirror just now, I left this card on your desk. 

I use these Avery postcards
because they offer nice texture at decent price.

You know what to do with it. If following the instructions makes you feel weird, ask yourself why. Carry that question around with you for a few days as you go about your other projects and errands.

Not because it’s a big deal. Not because it’s supposed to change your life. Do it for yourself. Because it’s worth getting to know an interesting, creative person who builds such marvelous worlds.

* * * 

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

The Three-Legged Author Talk

Photo by Joseph Gonzalez on Unsplash

From time to time, we writers are asked to speak about our work. Some of us enjoy it. The rest of us scamper away and hide. The profusion of words we conjure up so easily in our work dry up the moment we step in front of an audience. Even if we have carefully outlined our talk ahead of time, it sounds unconvincing the moment it drops from our lips. 

What are we missing? Heart. Simply put, we are forgetting to give ourselves to the audience. I think if you knew just how easy that is to do, you’d volunteer for such talks.

About a decade ago I was in the audience at a weekend library event on Long Island, New York, where a well-known author was about to give a talk on the occasion of his latest book. As I took my seat, I dug in my pocket for my pen and notebook. I do this every time I’m in an audience, provided there’s enough light to see. Force of habit, I guess, for a former reporter.

Most of the time, I don’t bother taking notes because what I’m hearing is not worth capturing.

The speaker on deck that day was Garth Stein, author of a No. 1 New York Times Bestseller called The Art of Racing in the Rain. You may have read it. It’s heartwarming literary fiction about a golden retriever who dreams of being reincarnated as a human. (In the film version, the dog narrator was voiced by actor Kevin Costner.) Besides the movie, the book has since spawned a middle-grade/YA edition and four children’s picture books.

After the talk, as attendees traipsed out of the auditorium to buy books and have Mr. Stein sign them, I reviewed my notes and realized that he had used a very compelling structure to shape his talk. It was supremely logical, and has stayed with me all these years.

Open With What They Know

Mr. Stein had worked as a director, producer, and screenwriter of documentary films. At the time, he had produced three films, written two plays, written five novels, written one of those picture books, and won an Academy Award for short film. But on that day in the library, it was a safe bet that everyone in the bookish audience had heard of him because of his “dog book”—even if they hadn’t read it!

A lot of writers who are “perhaps best known” for a particular book rail against talking about that one. One writer I know tells people who hire him for speaking engagements that he will only talk about his current book. That’s his ground rule for book clubs too. He doesn’t want to talk about the same book for fifteen years.

Rather than shy away from the dog book, Mr. Stein made it the lede of his 45-minute talk. He told a charming story about how he got the idea, the struggles he had writing it, and at long last his agent’s reaction to the finished work.

“The book is narrated by a dog!” the agent said.

“Yes it is!”

“You can’t do that,” the agent said, enumerating all the reasons why.

Mr. Stein had a momentary crisis of faith, then he canned the agent and found one who believed in his work. A great story, because who can resist the tale of an artist standing by his work? Knowing just how hard it is to find an agent, I was impressed. And of course, it helped immensely that the book hit the bestseller list. It was the perfect squelch to the first agent’s objections.

The Valley of Youthful Dreams

From there, he swiftly recounted how he first dreamed of becoming a writer, and the sacrifices he made to get there. I don’t need to share his story because anyone who writes has plenty of material to work with. In this section, he also described his manner of working, because for some hilarious reason civilians always want to know about a writer’s PROCESS—a word I have come to hate.

“What’s your process?”

“So, what your process like?”

“Tell us about your process.”

Jeez Louise, you would think it was some kind of bewildering mystery.

So…if you are going to give a talk using this structure—which is where this is all going, if that isn’t already obvious—I will tell you right now that the folks in the audience don’t want to hear, “Well, um, I just sit in a chair and make sh*t up until it’s done.”

No way. Romance the heck out of them. Tell as good a story about your writing of a story as the ones you sell to your editors.

Heck, Gay Talese told a reporter once that he hung his typewritten pages on a clothesline in his New York City apartment, using clothespins. Then he read those pages from across the room with a pair of binoculars. He insisted that this was the only way he could develop the requisite distance to judge and edit his work. (No, I am not making this up. I heard a recording of the interview in college.)

If you don’t have a process, steal Talese’s. Or tell people that in between writing short stories, you write earwormy songs about the Ides of March. (See below.) Make yourself adorable. You probably are; you just can’t see it.

Wrap with What’s Hot, What’s New

Mr. Stein wrapped his talk by discussing his latest book. Makes perfect sense, right? That’s the reason he was on tour! Even here, he repeated some of the classic storytelling beats: how he got the idea, the challenges that he knew he would face during the writing, and the ones he didn’t expect. In any good story, there are always hurdles to overcome. Audiences eat that up. Such anecdotes are perfectly acceptable so long as you have triumphed.

Sometimes the triumphs are small ones. My wife and I have written a few books together. Three have been works of nonfiction history. For the entire writing period of that first book, we stopped in the middle of the day, got in the car, and drove to one of those restaurants in town that sell prepared meals. We’d buy a sandwich or salad out of the case, drove right back home, and eat lunch together on the front porch. It was summer. The weather was always beautiful in the Carolina mountains. We were working so hard to meet our deadline, and this was our only way to enjoy the weather. Crumbs swept from our laps, we went back into the office to write for a few more hours. We did that for three months straight, weekends included, until we had a decent first draft. Every time we tell this story, a chorus of awwwwws ripples through the audience.

You don’t have to try very hard. People like a story that makes them fall in love with the writer. If they think they understand you on a personal level, they’ll be moved to try one of your books or they’ll turn to your story first when they pick up an anthology. Hey, it happens every time I hear Lisa Scottoline speak. She’s hilarious, and I want to spend more time with that voice on the page.

Remember the three-legged stool: The thing they know. Your writer’s journey plus process. What’s hot right now.

It’s so easy, you don’t have to obsess about it. You just have to recount things that really happened, and make sure your anecdotes conform to the usual story beats. Up/down, try/fail, culminating with…success. If you show up for the audience, they will show up for you. Your obligatory Q&A session at the end will be a delight.

Years later, when I came across my Stein notes, I realized just how critical each part of this three-legged stool structure was to the overall effect of the talk. If he had omitted one, the stool would have collapsed.

If he had not opened with the dog story, or if he had not spoken of it at all, it would have been thrumming in the back of everyone’s mind. If he had opened with the new book, we’d be panting like dogs to ask him about his hero, Enzo the golden retriever.

Following his big success story with another up/down tale of his writing journey—a story nearly every writer has of trying and failing until something clicks—stoked our sympathy. By the time we got to discussing his latest book, we were all so emotionally invested in his career, we were eager to stick around to learn what happens next. He had coaxed us on a journey of suspense to boot.

At the end of the signing, my wife announced that all of us were going out to lunch at a cute place not far from the library.

“Who’s all of us?”

Well, Mr. Stein, of course. Plus two other writers, my wife, and me. I was only expecting to dine with my wife and our hostess for the weekend, who was, yes, a writer. (No one ever tells me anything.) A publicist from the publishing house came as well, making a party of six, but she left early. Folks, believe me when I tell you that she and I were the only ones at the table who had not been on the bestseller list.

That all changed some years later. But that’s a story for another time. Until then, go forth and tell the world about your work. You’ll kill. I just know it.

See you in three weeks!

Joe
josephdagnese.com

Watch Rob’s video tomorrow on the 2,068th anniversary of Julius Caesar’s assassination.

Speaking of killing, short story writer and fellow SleuthSayer Robert Lopresti debuted this March-appropriate song this week. Since it refers to a murder, I feel it’s appropriate to include on this blog. I just happened to see the video shortly after he posted it, while I was diligently adhering to my daily procrastination regimen of dog training, gardening, and home repair videos.

Rob reports that he is taking a songwriting class and this video represents a rare case of him doing his assignment. He’s playing an autoharp, which is resting on his lap and goes unseen in this video but appears in others on his YouTube channel. (You might enjoy his album of droll folk songs here.)

Fun fact I learned in high school Latin class: the ides are not always on the 15th of a month. Discuss.

With knives and flowers coming out of hiding, Spring must be just around the corner! Well done, Mr. Lopresti.

Dimes, Mules, and Starvation: An Inspirational Guide to Short Story Success!

I’ve been obsessed lately with sticking to a decent writing schedule, and still having some semblance of family life. How do you pull it off? To find out, I’ve been collecting anecdotes about writers who came before us. Alas, their stories tend not to be terribly helpful because the times in which they worked and their personal circumstances are so varied. But they are nevertheless inspirational.

Back in the 1930s, when radio was still in its infancy and print was king, a writer we all know adhered to a solid schedule for producing and selling short stories. His writing regimen is a matter of record, enshrined in a collection called Selected Letters of William Faulkner.

At the time, writing “good” stories for magazines earned Faulkner between $300 to $400 per story, so if he could stick to this schedule, he could support himself and his widowed mother on $1,200 to $1,600 a month.

That money was decent for Depression-era Mississippi, but it was still tight. When his father died, he tells a correspondent in 1932, Faulkner’s mother had just enough money to live on for a year. After that, her support fell entirely on Faulkner’s shoulders. And he could never rule out the possibility that his brothers and wider circle of kin would hit him up for money.

He experimented with ways to earn more. By 1934, he was working on two novels and still maintaining his weekly short story output. He tried upping his short story output to two stories a week, but found that exhausting. If a check from a magazine editor ran late, he mortgaged one of his late father’s mules, mares, or colts to tide him over. (Note to self: Joe, what is your horseflesh back-up plan?)

Then he hit upon a genius plan: He would crank out six—count ’em, six!—short stories aimed at the Mac Daddy of American magazines, The Saturday Evening Post. If they bought all six of these “pot boilers,” he would raise $6,000, enough money to live on for six months while he wrote another book. But the plan failed. The Post bought only one of those stories, and Faulkner—who would win the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and a Nobel in his lifetime—despaired because in his mind the remaining five stories were fit only for the trash. He seemed to believe that The Post bought lesser stories that other magazines wouldn’t touch.

Another time, agent Harold Ober told him—either by mail or by phone, I forget which—that he would try to sell a story to The Post if Faulkner made some changes. Faulkner agreed, then told Ober to air-mail him back the damn story because he didn’t make a carbon copy.

Well, crap, we know that it would not do to wait, right? Our man needed cash and he needed it now. So what did he do? He rewrote the story from memory, incorporating Ober’s requested edits, and mailed it off so it could get in the pipeline and he could get his check that much quicker.

The story was “The Bear,” a hunting novella that is found in every high school and college anthology. The Post published that “pot boiler” in 1942.

That is the real point: The story that teachers and professors celebrate as a work of genius, fit for days of analysis, was written to stave off hunger, bills, and the loss of another mule.

In his lifetime, Faulkner wrote 125 short stories, possibly more. Fitzgerald wrote 181. Hemingway wrote 70, the slacker.

Another writer returned stateside after World War II and cranked out 800,000 words in his first four months out of the Army. He worked 80-hour weeks, amassing 1,000 rejections. He never had fewer than 20 to 30 short stories in the mail. Eventually, John D. MacDonald sold 600 stories, and launched a career writing mystery novels. If his early output figure is correct, he wrote just under 7,000 words a day during those critical four months.

Like I say, that’s an amazing story of one’s dedication to craft but not terribly helpful to a guy who is looking for lessons in the realm of life/work balance. MacDonald lost 20 pounds sticking to this regimen. If the purpose of writing is to earn one’s bread, he was doing it wrong.

Let’s see…who else have I got here? Nathaniel Hawthorne, another darling of school anthologies, calculated that he could only write about 10 to 12 short stories a year–about one a month. If he could manage to sell them for $25 each, he could support his family. Getting $25 a story was feasible but difficult in pre-Civil War America. It forced him to be exceedingly choosy about which publications he submitted to. Philip K. Dick wrote 121 short stories, and I’m sure every single one of them will eventually be made into a movie. The Canadian writer Mavis Gallant sold 116 short stories to The New Yorker. Our genre’s Ed D. Hoch wrote 950 short stories.

One of my favorite true stories concerns an American writer whose eyesight was so bad the military would not enlist him to fight in World War II. Hence, his creative adolescence, during which he sold his first few stories, extended well into his adulthood. He lived with his parents in Los Angeles until he married at 27.

Every week, he adhered to the following schedule.

“On Monday morning I wrote the first draft of a new story. On Tuesday I did a second draft. On Wednesday a third. On Thursday a fourth. On Friday a fifth. And on Saturday at noon I mailed out the sixth and final draft to New York. Sunday? I thought about all the wild ideas scrambling for my attention…”

Even at that young age, the writer, Ray Bradbury, had begun to trust his imagination. The more he wrote, the more ideas came. Even though he lived at home, he was driven by an intense work ethic.

“There was another reason to write so much: I was being paid twenty to forty dollars a story, by the pulp magazines. High on the hog was hardly my way of life. I had to sell at least one story, or better two, each month in order to survive my hot-dog, hamburger, trolley-car-fare life.

“In 1944 I sold some forty stories, but my total income for the year was only $800.”

One technique that served him well was to draw up long lists of story ideas. He’d write down the word “the” followed by a noun, usually something from childhood that scared or fascinated him. One list might have looked like this, he tells us:

THE LAKE. THE NIGHT. THE CRICKETS. THE RAVINE. THE ATTIC. THE BASEMENT. THE TRAPDOOR. THE BABY. THE CROWD. THE NIGHT TRAIN. THE FOG HORN. THE SCYTHE. THE CARNIVAL. THE CAROUSEL. THE DWARF. THE MIRROR MAZE. THE SKELETON.

From there, he picked one of those ideas and let his subconscious take over. By the time he ran those personal memories through his process, he had a fresh story that bore no resemblance to its real-life counterpart.

In essays he later wrote about his process, he attributed his success to his early consumption of poetry and short stories. Those twin loves trained him to sharpen his prose, to bake economy into every sentence.

Short stories were his early bread-and-butter. It’s believed he wrote 400 of them, but at first glance they were useless in helping him land his first book deal.

In June 1949, he took a Greyhound Bus to New York, where he made the rounds of book editors, all of whom inquired if he’d written a novel. He hadn’t, and they could not care less about his stories. Even then, the world of New York publishing greeted a collection of shorts by a single writer the way one would welcome a shoebox filled with a three-day-old catfish.

He finally met with an editor at Doubleday, the friend of a friend, who cheerfully announced, “I think you’ve already written a novel.” The editor explained what he meant: Wasn’t there a common thread in the series of stories Bradbury had written for several years on the topic of Mars?

Why, yes, Ray said. He wrote them like that because he was so moved by Sherwood Anderson’s novel in stories, Winesburg, Ohio. Ray had never confided that inspiration to anyone and he certainly never thought of collecting his Mars stories in a book.

The editor requested an outline. Bradbury hurried back to the YMCA where was staying, stripped to his underwear, and pounded on his typewriter in the sweltering heat until 3 AM.

The next morning, the delighted editor offered him a contract and a check. “Now that we’re publishing your first ‘novel,’ we can take a chance on your stories, even though such collections rarely sell. Can you think of a title that would sort of put a skin around two dozen different tales—?”

The “skin,” or framing device, of that 18-story collection was the story of a carnival refugee whose extensive tattoos spring to life, thus engendering each of the tales in the book.

So the first two books Bradbury ever published were fashioned entirely of short stories. The “novel” was The Martian Chronicles, the collection was The Illustrated Man. He triumphantly returned to his wife in Venice, California, with two checks totaling $1,500 (about $20,000 today). The sale of those two books gave the Bradburys enough money to pay their rent for a year, finance the arrival of their first daughter, and help with a down payment on their first house.

The following spring, Ray needed to find a quiet place to write and couldn’t afford an office. He escaped to the basement of the UCLA library, where he rented a desk-mounted typewriter for 10 cents per half hour. You put your money in, a clock ticked away, and you typed furiously to get as much of your money’s worth as possible in those 30 minutes before the machine bricked.

In nine days Ray had the first draft of a manuscript. He thought it might become a novel, but it was still too short, only 25,000 words. He would eventually expand the story to a whopping 45,000 words. It only cost him $8.90—about 44.5 hours—to bring Fahrenheit 451 to life. Considering it has sold 10 million copies, I think we can all agree that the dimes were well spent.

* * *

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

Selected Resources:

Recent article on Mavis Gallant.

The material on Bradbury comes from his 1990 book, Zen in the Art of Writing, a collection of about 11 essays on writing.

The material on John D. MacDonald is drawn from two articles, here and a 2019 SleuthSayers post by Lawrence Maddox here.

The material on Faulkner is drawn from Eudora Welty’s review of the Faulkner text, found in her book The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews (Vintage Books, 1979).

Citadel of Ignorance

Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash

Back in June 2022, I deleted my social media accounts. I shared that news right here on SleuthSayers, enumerating the resources that help nudge me to that decision: three books and two documentaries. Each of those resources were sightly different, but they all telegraphed a truth that took a while in coming, but is now taken for granted by anyone who reads: social media rots your freaking brain.

In my 2022 post, I promised to check back in the future to let you know how my cessation was going. The future is now.

The backstory: I joined Twitter in 2010, and from that point forward, I joined everything else under the sun because everyone said it was in a writer’s best interest to do so. I did Pinterest, Google+, LinkedIn, and Instagram. For a time, my only working blog operated on Tumblr. I created accounts on sites that lasted four minutes in the life of the Internet. (Who remembers Klout?)

Remarkably, perhaps, presciently, I never created a personal account on Facebook, but don’t let me off the hook so easily there. My wife and I did create four Facebook Pages, one for each of the books or series of books we were touting at the time. Well before my breakup with social media, I deleted three of those four because I just didn’t see the point.

At the very beginning, I took the advice of a buddy, who served as the social media guru for Barnes & Noble. He said to keep the promotion of my books and work to maybe 20 percent of my feed. The rest should be a mix of writerly service to my community (“Hey, look at this cool article I found on pitching agents!”), and personal observations and interesting tidbits from my personal life (“I cooked a ham this weekend! Look!”).

Well, I did all that, and I still felt stupid, awkward, and icky doing it. Everywhere I turned, people offered advice on the right way to do social media. Some of that advice came from the idiots that ran the publicity and marketing departments at publishing houses. Their underlying message was, “Do our jobs for us, please, since our employers have never trained us to do it properly!”

Like most people who declare themselves sick of the technology, I just didn’t know where the hell I was going to get the “content” I was expected to share on these platforms. I resented that agents and editors judged me for my low numbers of followers.

I read articles that said I should strive to be as authentic as possible, and I was at a loss how to accomplish that. (“Guys, I really, really need to share how I feel about the ham I cooked.”)

I finally dropped the pretense of promoting my work, and used, say, Twitter to disseminate a series of hilarious one-liners. I was a hoot on Oscar night, not that anyone noticed or cared. I gave up talking about books unless I adored something. Instagram became fun when I decided to simply share one photo, just one, every day. If it revolved around writing or a book, so be it. It was on Insta, for example, that I announced to the world that Pat Conroy’s cookbook was the only one I’d ever read cover to cover, because I just had to know how it ended. I still mean that. Mostly, though, I shared pics of nature, food, glasses of wine shot against the backdrop of the flowers in my garden.

You might say that social media rewarded me after I stopped caring.

And then one morning, I accidentally swiped to the right of my iPhone’s home page, revealing statistics about my daily phone usage. The phone insisted that in the last 24 hours, I had spent 3 hours and 25 minutes on Instagram alone.

“Liar!” cried I.

If I had been paying attention, I would have noticed that my behavior around these apps had become obsessive, and, ahem, compulsive. If I was out with my wife, I checked the phone when she left for the restroom. I scrolled while waiting in the car for stores to open. The phone helped me kill time on queues the way that paperbacks did in the 1980s. And while I still read short stories (because, methinks, they’re short), my reading of books had dropped to all-time lows. Like the journalist Johann Hari, whose book I mentioned in my earlier post, I felt as if my mind was too splintered to finish most of the books I started. The thought of reading an entire series of mystery novels by an author I enjoyed—the way I had as a kid—seemed exhausting. Why read the Slow Horses series, when I could just watch it?

What’s worse, after a series of troubling political events in 2016, I obsessively checked social media and three to four news sites every morning, to keep myself apprised of current events. During the Covid lockdowns, my ritual was to read aloud the morning headlines to my wife as we sipped coffee on the patio, then read aloud the articles she requested, until we were both too sick and terrified to continue.

Scrolling—whether for fun or doom—had become a problem.

For a while, to assert control over my life, I merely deleted the apps from my phone. Cal Newport, one of the authors of the book referenced in my earlier post, advised checking social media on your desktop, and only if you needed to for work. That worked for six months, then I began simply reloading the app to sneak peeks anyway.

By 2022, I had read and absorbed the message of the 2018 book by Jaron Lanier—the computer scientist who advised everyone to completely delete their social media accounts in their entirety. The man is a genius, and his arguments were based on a deep understanding of the underlying technology and the corporate structures of the social media firms he consulted with. I understood why he urged this action, but I still felt I had to maintain those accounts. (What if someone claimed my old account and pretended to be me?)

By 2022, I had watched and rewatched the 2020 HBO documentary The Social Dilemma, and digested Hari’s 2022 book, which opened with him escaping to an isolated beach community for a month, sans phone and laptop. He found that his brain returned, and he read copiously, joyously, promiscuously.

Intrigued, I took the plunge mid-year 2022. Deleted all my remaining accounts, as well as the News app on my phone. From that moment forward, I was on a permanent social media purge, and tentative-for-now news fast. A journalist friend scoffed at this when I ran into him at a funeral of a colleague: “News fast? News. Fast! Come on! Is that even a thing?”

He and others like him wonder aloud how I can live without knowing what’s going on in the world. To be honest, I do feel sad when I don’t know that some personage has died. The In Memoriam reel at the Oscars has been something of a shock for the last two years, sure.

But you know what? If something is so huge, it’s not like the rest of you peeps aren’t talking about it. I do still maintain a Feedly account. It’s keyed only to news of the genres I enjoy, articles on writing, and the book world at large. Inevitably, news of the outside world seeps into those articles. If I want to know more, I allow myself a peek and do a search. Just one, then I close the browser. When the hurricane hit our city in autumn 2024, I sat on the patio in the dark and listened to my hand-cranked NOAA radio for updates. Because that’s what you do.

And yes, it is a pain not to be able to announce when I have a new story in a publication, but I am trying to preserve my sanity. In the world beyond literature, I know that there are school shootings, wildfires, and reprehensible political behavior. I don’t want to (or need to) ride that daily roller-coaster anymore. I can’t. Like my nephew used to say when he was young and a classmate offered him a bite of a peanut butter sandwich, “No thank you. It’s not good for me.”

I don’t keep a reading journal, though I probably should. But I do read a lot of ebooks. There, the evidence is clear: in 2020 I read 12 ebooks, in 2024, 64 ebooks. Granted, a lot of those 2024 titles were single short stories or novellas, but the same is probably true of 2020. And there are still other paper books in both years for which there is no record.

While it’s nice to have proof that the void inside my cranium functions still, I am troubled by the most recent attack on my Citadel of Ignorance. Many writer friends have migrated to Substack, so my inbox and browser teem daily with their irresistible musings. Substack is social media, which means these folks can, within the body of their newsletters, refer you to still more articles that they found interesting by equally fascinating writers.

Anyone who is interesting (and many who aren’t) has a Substack. People I like or find compelling. Without even trying, I discovered Substacks by people such as Stephen Fry, John Cleese, Cheryl Strayed, Margaret Atwood, Michael Pollan, David Sedaris, Barbara Kingsolver, and Michael Moore.

In the coming weeks or perhaps months, I will discover if I have the strength to unsubscribe from this new temptation, and leave it all behind. I’m sure that all these scribes have important things to say, but who has the time? If their words stand the test of time, they will have the good sense to put them in a book, where I will read them some day while waiting at the DMV, the way the good Lord intended.

* * *

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

The Force Beyond You

The closest I have come to believing in divine insight, inspiration, or intervention—or maybe magic—is after I have written something that surprises me. I have created characters who are smarter (or nastier) than I am or ever will be. I have typed dialogue for these beings that shocks or humbles me because I know I don’t have the ability to be so kind, wise, or even so cruel. (A word to non-writers: if you want to write crime fiction, you want to access the darkness. It’s a good thing.)

When someone asks how a particular idea came to me, I always make a joke. Because I have no freaking idea. Sure, I can point to a string of plot points that I scrawled in a notebook before I started—proof of my complicity—but the finished story never quite adheres to them. And yes, I can often recall how or when I first learned certain factoids that I worked into a story, but when they pop up in my prose they are often employed in a manner I had never previously considered.

What I’m saying is that I have come to accept that Creativity is ultimately a mystery. I must leave it at that. I have no choice. The process is too ephemeral to explain any other way. In fact, I’m worried as I write this that words will fail me. We have all heard certain writers claim that the story just wrote itself, or that their characters took on a life of their own. Those sorts of pronouncements are often parodied because they sound fatuous. (Please enjoy the scene below from the film Wonder Boys that marvelously skewers that type of writer.) That’s why I have today brought into the lecture hall the words of other creatives that I have collected. These folks are far more eloquent than I am about this mystery, so I’m going turn it over to them.

The writer Kristine Kathryn Rusch, recently discussing a novelette for which she won a Reader’s Award from Asimov’s, wrote:

“‘The Nameless Dead’ has an opening that I actually heard in my sleep and managed to wake up and write it all down. I really don’t know where these stories come from, but I’m so pleased that readers like them.”

Ever since my wife and I bought two paintings by the fine artist G.C. Myers some years back, I have enjoyed reading his daily blog. He’s an eclectic reader, and often the words that a writer, poet, or philosopher wrote somehow inspires his work, or suggests a title that he contemplates as he creates his canvases. Here is what he says about the process of bringing a painting to life:

“I have often written of sometimes feeling surprised when I finish a piece, as though the end result, the sum of my painting, is often far more than what I have to personally offer in terms of talent or knowledge. Like there is a force beyond me that is arranging these simple elements of this work into something that transcends the ordinariness of the subject or materials or the creator.

“This feeling has remained a mystery to me for almost twenty years, driving me to write here in hopes of stumbling across words that would adequately describe this transformation of simple paint and paper or canvas into something that I sometimes barely recognize as being my own creation, so marked is the difference between the truth of the resulting work and my own truth.”

Someone, possibly Myers, referenced a Rolling Stone interview with songwriter Jeff Tweedy, lead vocalist of Wilco. I went digging, and found a couple of interviews the magazine did with him. Here’s just one that spoke to me:

“I’m not sure I can demystify something I feel wholly inadequate to explain. For me, the moments that make my scalp tingle a little bit are when I hear myself sing a lyric out loud for the first time. On occasion I make myself cry. Not because I’m marveling at my songwriting genius or I’m overcome with my poetic gifts. It’s a moment that feels more like I’m witnessing something better than me, or better than what I imagined I could make, being born. Certain things I’ve written that, at first, didn’t strike me as being remotely worthy of being sung have, when sung for the first time, startled me by uncovering truths about myself I had no intention of revealing.”

By the way, in the same interview he talks about having to write 50 songs or “almost-songs” to get to one, or to reach a point where he is “supernaturally in touch” with his abilities. I liked that turn of phrase immensely. It beats saying what I have always told people: “It came from my subconscious—where the eff else?”

Tweedy’s phrasing reminded me of an essay on writing that I first read in my twenties, and which I have reread over the years. I’ve recommended it to readers here in the past as well. In a 1993 piece in LA Weekly, the writer Michael Ventura said he thought there was a difference between writing and other kinds of creative arts. I think he’s touching on Jung’s idea of archetypes, but you tell me:

“The psyche is dangerous. Because working with words is not like working with color or sound or stone or movement. Color and sound and stone and movement are all around us, they are natural elements, they’ve always been in the universe, and those who work with them are servants of these timeless materials. But words are pure creations of the human psyche. Every single word is full of secrets, full of associations. Every word leads to another and another and another, down and down, through passages of dark and light. Every single word leads, in this way, to the same destination: your soul. Which is, in part, the soul of everyone. Every word has the capacity to start that journey. And once you’re on it, there is no knowing what will happen.”

If Ventura is a little too heavy, then let’s get back to belittling the very question of where art comes from. In a book called The Daily Pressfield, writer Steven Pressfield asks:

“Have you seen archival footage of the young John Lennon or Bob Dylan, when some reporter tries to ask them about their personal selves? The boys deflect these queries with withering sarcasm. Why? Because Lennon and Dylan know that the part of them that writes the songs is not ‘them,’ not the personal self that is of such surpassing fascination to their boneheaded interrogators. Lennon and Dylan also know that the part of themselves that does the writing is too sacred, too precious, too fragile to be dumbed down into sound bites for the titillation of would-be idolaters (who are themselves caught up in their own Resistance). So they put them on and blow them off.”

Pressfield, whom I’ve also discussed before, thinks that creativity springs from a Muse, defined as a part of ourselves that is hidden from us but ever present and powerful. He says:

“People ask me sometimes, ‘Don’t you get lonely being in a room by yourself all day?’ No. I’m not lonely because I’m with this other ‘me,’ who is me and not-me at the same time and whom I have spent my entire life trying to find, to prove myself worthy of, and to labor in collaboration with.”

In his most famous book, The War of Art, Pressfield admits that before he starts work each morning, he prays to this Muse. His practice is to recite a few lines from the beginning of Homer’s Odyssey, believing that all any of us can do is show up for work, signaling to the universe that we intend to labor in good faith.

If you’re in the chair, determined to write, good things can’t help but show up. Or so the theory goes. The opposite corollary, of course, is that if you procrastinate, you cannot be surprised that that Muse has passed you by.

Pressfield’s “show up for work” concept reminded me of another story drawn from the world of music. The songwriter Tom Waits, who doesn’t do too many interviews, once shared this experience with the writer Elizabeth Gilbert. He was driving down the freeway when, out of the blue, a great idea for a song popped into his head. In that situation, flying down the road at sixty-plus miles per hour, Waits couldn’t exactly hit the brakes and jot down the idea. Gilbert, who has told this story a bajillion times in various interviews and her famous TED Talk, describes Waits railing at God or his Muse through his windshield:

“Excuse me, can you not see that I’m driving? Do I look like I can write down a song right now? If you really want to exist, come back at a more opportune moment when I can take care of you. Otherwise, go bother somebody else today. Go bother Leonard Cohen.”

Ok, so let’s say you know all that. You accept that you either have a Muse, or a genius mini-you-who-is-not-you within you, or you accept that you are jacked into the divine source of creation. Would it really be so bad if you ignored that call?

Well, no. Not if you want to get through this life. In an interview with Ken Burns, the late Kris Kristofferson talked about how his family disowned him when he gave up a promising career as a pilot to take a job as a janitor so he could write music on the side. In the middle of this interview, Kristofferson, who studied the Romantic poets, begins quoting from a famous letter by William Blake, which Kristofferson summarized thusly: “He’s telling you that you’ll be miserable if you don’t do what you’re supposed to do.”

He’s referring to an 1803 letter by Blake to Thomas Butts. Here’s a bit of it. You’ll forgive, I think, Blake’s punctuation and mode of expression:

“If you who are organized by Divine Providence for Spiritual communion. Refuse & bury your Talent in the Earth even tho you Should want Natural Bread. Sorrow & Desperation pursues you Thro life! after death Shame confusion of face to eternity —”

See? I started by saying that I don’t know what I’m talking about. And I think I have proved it. But I am grateful that so many people I admire have had exactly the same feeling. Bottom line: Those of us who create really don’t know know where our art comes from. We only know that it comes when we apply ourselves joyfully to the task. That is at once beautiful and relieving.

It seemed appropriate to wait until the turn of another calendar to share these quotes with you. I do so with a prayer that you will get out of your own way in the coming months and let this indescribable mystery lead you into a wonderful, productive new year.

The Fatuous Writer. A scene from the film Wonder Boys.

---

Happy New Year. See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

Alimentary, My Dear Watson!

I blame Dickens for my household’s attempt to cook a Christmas goose some years ago. My wife and I had always been charmed by the Cratchit family’s dinner of goose and Christmas pudding depicted in the 1999 TV version of A Christmas Carol starring Patrick Stewart. We followed Julia Child’s instructions to the letter, but did not have the “tight-fitting lid” for our roasting pan that is so critical for properly rendering the bird prior to roasting. For weeks after, I felt as if everything I touched in the house—my eyeglasses, my computer keyboard—was coated with a fine film of goose fat. It’s not a fowl I desire to ever eat again. The Cratchit bird fed eight, and I get it. One slice of that rich meat is all anyone needs to survive winter.

I’ve since come to respect geese. The living specimens are fierce protectors of their turf who figure prominently in ancient art. In Rome people told us that if you didn’t have a dog, you could rely on a goose to keep your yard safe from intruders. No one wants to be bitten in the butt by an angry honker.

Alas, when the fowl shows up in literature, it’s usually on someone’s plate. The “unimpeachable” goose who is the star of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” starts out alive, then ends up dead and the centerpiece of a mystery. Interestingly, as we shall see, that goose kept coughing up mysteries well into the 20th century.

The 8,000-word story is the only Christmas tale in the Sherlock Holmes Canon. It first appeared in the January 1892 edition of The Strand magazine. (You’ll find it in the first book of collected stories, The Adventures.) If you know your Holmes, it’s the story that starts with the great man deducing the heck out of a bowler hat that has lost its owner, and later confronting a nervous amateur jewel thief who has stolen a precious gem—a blue carbuncle—from the belongings of a countess lodged at a London hotel. To keep the jewel safe until he can consult with his fence, the thief thrusts the gem down the throat of a living goose in his sister’s backyard. The goose gets switched on him, is sent to market, and zaniness ensues.

I reread the story recently to see what sort of Christmasy details Conan Doyle folded into his prose. They’re sparse; mostly Watson describing cold weather, warm fires, a cast of chilly characters, and ice crystals forming in windows. There are no Christmas trees or presents. Since the story is nearly 133 years old, I don’t think I’m spoiling anyone’s enjoyment by revealing that in the end, Holmes lets the repentant thief off scot-free. Because, he argues, “it’s the season of forgiveness.”

I enjoyed the story immensely this time around, and then foolishly read all the notes about it in my copy of Leslie S. Klinger’s The Annotated Sherlock Holmes. That’s how I learned that serious Sherlockians have long quibbled with fine points of the tale.

Some examples should suffice. A carbuncle is a garnet, which are typically red. Though they have been found in other colors, there’s no such thing as a blue carbuncle. No garnets have ever been found in the Chinese river Holmes mentions as the origin of this stone. The detective botches a discussion of the jewel’s weight, presumed value, and chemical composition. The law enforcement official in the story conducts a hardness test on the stone that does not prove what he thinks it does. Moreover, of the eleven or so deductions Holmes makes about the bowler, Sherlockians dismiss at least four as highly illogical.

But hey, if our author couldn’t get the number of Watson’s wives straight, or the location of the shrapnel the good doctor brought back from Afghanistan, why do we expect him to get such details right? Conan Doyle wrote to make glad the heart of geekhood. He was a little like the Hungarian-American director Michael Curtiz, who when someone pointed out all the implausibilities in the script for Casablanca, replied, “Don’t worry. I make it go so fast nobody notices.”

Sometime after WWII, however, a clever female reader proved just how much the largely male membership of Holmes societies knew about geese. Throughout the story, we are told repeatedly that the stolen gem was found in the goose’s crop. That word is mentioned five times in the story. Since many birds do not have teeth, they pre-digest their food by funneling items into a separate anatomical pouch, which is sort of a pre-stomach.

I remembered seeing such a thing as a child, watching my mother butcher a backyard chicken. The bird’s crop was filled with tiny pebbles, which chickens instinctively swallow in their pecking. That grit is later used by the gizzard, the muscular end of the stomach, to grind bugs and vegetation so they can more easily be digested.

In a sidebar in Klinger’s Annotated Holmes, our editor tells us that the “Blue Carbuncle” was referenced during Christmas season 1946 by Chicago Tribune columnist Charles Collins, who was a friend of Vincent Starrett’s and a founding member of the Chicago chapter of the Baker Street Irregulars. A longtime journalist, Collins wrote a popular column called A Line o’ Type or Two for the newspaper. Some days later, astute reader Mildred Sammons fired off a note, taking issue with his six-paragraph summary. Her brief note appeared in the newspaper the day after Christmas that year. 

Regarding the Sherlock Holmes Christmas story, “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,” discussed in the Line o’ Type column on Dec. 17: It contains a statement that the missing jewel was found in the crop of a goose. Let me remind you that a goose has no crop.

You could hear a feather drop in the great and glorious Kingdom of Holmesiana. By then the tale was 54 years old; in all that time none of the geniuses had spotted this error.

After consulting various waterfowl experts and butchers, the U.S. experts conceded: “[T]he lady is correct. Holmes made an alimentary error, which the Baker Street Irregulars should have noted long ago.” There was talk in the pages of The Baker Street Journal of granting Mildred Sammons some sort of award “in gratitude for her discovery.”

I don’t know if she ever collected, because of course it didn’t end there. Scholars on both sides of the pond kept interrogating poultry experts, further beating a dead goose. The problem went all the way to the UK’s office of the Minister of Agriculture and Fish. The Ministry’s Chief Poultry Adviser—who of course turned out to be a Holmes geek—weighed in, saying that the American experts were correct. “However,” he added, “as a Sherlock Holmes fan I am glad to say that this fact does not necessarily invalidate the theory in the story of the ‘The Blue Carbuncle.’”

The reasoning: Yes, chickens and turkeys have a separate organ or pouch called a crop. Waterfowl such as geese and ducks have no such pouch, but their gullet is just long and extendable enough to accommodate food—or the occasional precious gem—that will be stored and later digested. If the goose’s stomach is full, a swallowed item might well remain lodged in the gullet, awaiting its turn. (I beg your indulgence here. I am not an expert on poultry anatomy. I am relying on articles such as this, on the glories of the digestive tracts of waterfowl. Feel free to cry fowl if I've screwed anything up.)

Naturally, this engendered a flurry of further academic papers, the most hilarious of which was written by a Sherlockian who posited that the hullabaloo was all beside the point. Maybe, just maybe, quoth he, “the long debate is centred on a printer’s error, which substituted an o for Watson’s a.”

And on that note, I’ll wish you all the best of the season, however you celebrate and whatever graces your table.

* * * 

Please use the comments to share some of your favorite holiday stories. I could use a few suggestions.

I recommend Connie Willis’s 544-page A Lot Like Christmas, if you can stomach that much Christmas, much of it novella-length SFF. I also recommend Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s Holiday Spectacular, which she describes as a virtual advent calendar that delivers one new story—a romance, mystery or fantasy by various authors—to your inbox every day from Thanksgiving through New Year’s Day. All holidays are represented, not just Christmas.

See you all in the New Year!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

 

Writers, Black Friday's on You!

Hello? Hello? Is anyone actually there?

As long as I am once again stuck posting on Black Friday, the day after American Thanksgiving that marks the start of the Christmas shopping season, I might as well take a bold, clickbaity tack and blame the commercialization of Christmas on short story writers.

Yes, fellow scribes, j’accuse!

In years past, I talked about how Christmas in America went from being a holiday marked by drunken hooliganism to one supposedly dedicated to blissful domesticity. The agent in that drama was Santa Claus, whose literary popularization in the 1820s allowed civic-minded adults to focus the holiday on children. That twist also forced young men to be responsible. They could no longer wander the streets on wintry days off; they had to earn and spend wisely if they were to produce presents for children (and eventually all their loved ones) on Christmas Day.

I am not making this up. It all comes from a fantastic book, The Battle for Christmas: A Cultural History of America’s Most Cherished Holiday, by historian Stephen Nissenbaum. (A terrible title, but a wonderfully instructive book nonetheless.)

Americans had a huge hurdle to overcome to finally embrace Christmas. The nation’s earliest settlers, Puritans, banned the holiday. But by 1680, Professor Nissenbaum argues, their cultural impact had begun to wane in the colonies and in England as well. Slowly, printed materials such as almanacs began denoting December 25th as Christmas-Day once again. Hymnals began including Christmas hymns. By the 1730s, Benjamin Franklin prescribed what Nissenbaum calls “temperate mirth” (Nissenbaum’s italics, not mine or Franklin’s) for the season.

And when our historian studies the diaries of Martha Ballard, a Maine midwife, he finds that Mrs. Ballard often worked on Christmas. By the 1790s, if Mrs. Ballard did anything special at all to mark the holiday, she and her husband visited friends and family. She shopped for ingredients such as rum, sugar, ginger, allspice, and other fancy ingredients, and spent the run-up to the Christmas week baking cakes or pies. The implication was that good, honest, industrious folks did moderately festive things for Christmas. They might sip a cup of drink or eat a slice of mince meat pie. They’d sit in someone’s home and chat or sing. They didn’t extort money from their neighbors on a wanton parade of inebriated wassailing, as was the custom in big cities. They also didn’t buy presents for each other. That just was not part of the early U.S. Christmas tradition.

Mrs. Ballard—who was, remember, a midwife—did note that young people of her acquaintance did apparently go a-courting during this time of year. (Dutiful historian Nissenbaum notes that, statistically, babies in this era were often born in great numbers in September or October, indicating that Christmas-time was indeed busy for some people.)

The poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” became popular in the 1820s, and by the 1830s publishers in the U.S. major cities cranked out annual books intended to be purchased by adults to give to children. They had names like The Girl’s Own Book, or The American Girl’s Book, and were filled with stories, games, puzzles, poems, that promised to be absolutely wholesome and edifying for the child you loved. There were books for boys, too. In one of these books in the 1840s, Nissenbaum discovers a reprint of E.T.A. Hoffman’s “The Nutcracker,” which was first written in 1816.

The earliest advertisement for “Christmas Gifts” that Nissenbaum was able to find dated to 1806, in a Salem, Massachusetts, newspaper. Tellingly, the ad was placed by a bookseller. Eventually, adults also became recipients of the book-buying tradition. These books were more lavish, with gold-leaf paper edges, embossed covers, colored engravings, and “presentation plates”—a page at the front where the giver would inscribed the book to their loved one. Husbands and wives gifted each other these books; suitors presented them to young ladies who were the object of their affection.

Today, we would call these books anthologies, because they included a mix of stories and poems by different writers. Back then, they didn’t yet have names for such tomes. At first, these books—whether for adults or children—were called “Christmas Boxes,” co-opting the term Brits used for the tradition of Boxing Day. Eventually, these books and any other gift offered to a loved were dubbed Christmas presents. (Hence my italics in the previous paragraph.) 

And because tokens of love back then were typically jewelry and flowers, these hardcover volumes were often named after those things, suggesting that they were of equal value. Indeed, these were probably the most expensive books Americans of this time ever bought, aside from fancy family Bibles, which were also bought in profusion at Christmas.

Nissenbaum enumerates a long list of the annuals:

“Thus, for jewelry, there were the Amaranth, Amethyst, Brilliant, Coronet, Diadem, Gem, Gem of the Season, Jewel, Literary Gem, Lyric, Opal, Pearl, and Ruby. For flowers, there were Autumn Leaves, Bouquet, Christmas Blossoms, Dahlia, Dew-Drop, Evergreen, Floral Offering, Flowers of Loveliness, Garland, Hyacinth, Iris, Laurel Wreath, Lily, Lily of the Valley, Magnolia, May Flower, Moss-Rose, Primrose, Rose, Rose Bud, Violet, Winter-Bloom, Wintergreen, Woodbine, and Wreath.”

To carry the analogy to the present day, it would be as if readers in our genre looked forward to year-end anthologies such as Mr. Pachter’s Christmas annual, The Poinsettia, or Mr. Bracken’s Christmas Silver Bell.

Cover of the 1844 edition of The Opal.

I tracked down a 1848 copy of The Opal: A Pure Gift for the Holy Days. With nine engraved plates and gilt-decorated moroccan leather, this copy will sent you back $3,000 today, not because of the book’s scarcity, but because this particular copy was once owned and inscribed by FDR. The scanned copy I found online contains 42 different poems and stories, written by as many writers and poets.

During the colonial period in America, publishers in the colonies and across the pond shamelessly plagiarized works to fill their newspapers, almanacs, and magazines. But the 1820s and 1830s marked a shift, a time when editors began paying decent rates to writers for original work. For the first time in U.S. history, one could earn a living as a writer.

That said, the only two bylines I recognized in the 1848 Opal were those of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and the book’s editor, Mrs. Sarah Josepha Hale, aka “The Mother of Thanksgiving.” And yes, as I began reading some of the pieces at random, my eyes began to bleed. Victorian prose is not my cup of tea.

Mrs. Hale, you might recall from one of my earlier posts, was once the most influential “editress” in the country. For Godey’s Lady’s Book, which had the highest circulation of any publication in the nation, she bought the work of countless writers, now famous or otherwise. Throughout the year, as she worked on her lady’s magazine, she also compiled stories destined for her Christmas edition. In May 1844, when she was buying for the 1845 edition, to be published in the fall of 1844, a writer wrote to say that he’d offered a story to one editor, N.P. Willis, who declined it, suggesting he send it to Mrs. Hale for her Christmas Opal.

Under these circumstances, I have thought it best to write you this letter, and to ask you if you could accept an article from me—or whether you would wish to see the one in question—or whether you could be so kind as to take it, unseen, upon Mr Willis’s testimony in its favor. It cannot be improper to state, that I make the latter request to save time, because I am as usual, exceedingly in need of a little money.
With high respect
Yr. Ob. St. Edgar A Poe

Those of you who write short stories really ought to try this gambit sometime.

Hi. Remember me, the penurious writer? Will you buy a story someone else rejected sight unseen because I need a little casheesh?

This becomes all the more hilarious when you consider that the story Mr. Poe offered Mrs. Hale was in fact “The Oblong Box.” Good editors then and now hew closely to some sort of theme when selecting their stories. Mrs. Hale would later tell readers of the 1845 Opal that she choose stories that “all harmonize in one deep holy sentiment of Christian love.”

Gee—I suppose we cannot fault her for choosing not to include a seafaring tale of a dead-wife-in-a-wooden-crate in her pure gift for the holy days.

Pure and holy: the title page of the 1845 Opal.

But she did dangle a carrot before Mr. Poe, who had written a snoozer of a travel essay (“The Elk”) for the 1844 Opal. He jumped on it:

New-York. May 31rst 44.
My Dear Madam,
I hasten to reply to your kind and very satisfactory letter, and to say that, if you will be so good as to keep open for me the ten pages of which you speak, I will forward you, in 2 or 3 days, an article which will about occupy that space, and which I will endeavour to adapt to the character of “The Opal.” The price you mention—50 cts per page—will be amply sufficient; and I am exceedingly anxious to be ranked in your list of contributors.
Should you see Mr Godey very soon, will you oblige me by saying that I will write him in a few days, and forward him a package?
With sincere respect.
Yr Ob. St
Edgar A Poe

At the time he accepted her $5 payment, which amounts to about $210 in 2024, his most famous stories (“The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Gold Bug,” etc.) were all behind him, and he was a well-known lecturer, poet, and critic. It was also five years before his death.

The “Christmas” article he submitted, and which Mrs. Hale did publish, was a ruminative essay about art, its creators, and personal growth entitled “A Chapter of Suggestions.” As one modern writer says, it’s an article filled with “profound sh*t” that discusses, among other things, why artists tend to drink heavily, and why creators are never appreciated for the genius they inject into the world. As for Mr. Godey, Mrs. Hale’s Philadelphia publisher, I cannot imagine what Mr. Poe was sending in that package. 

COPY BOY: Mr. Godey, sir? You have a package from Mr. Poe in New York. It’s..um… leaking.

History reveals that Mrs. Hale was just crazy enough to print “The Oblong Box,” his horror/detective tale, in the September 1844 issue of Godey’s Lady’s Book, which did not at all scare the bloomers off hundreds of thousands of American women living in remote areas of the country with taciturn husbands and poor night-time lighting.

So you see, Christmas shopping would not be what it is without the contributions of us short story scribes. From Christmas annuals, it was a hop, skip, and a jump to expensive kicks, Gameboys, the sports car with a giant bow parked in the driveway, piles of shredded gift wrap, and gluttonous feasting in the company of family members we detest. If you give an American a great short story, in three decades or thirty, they will crave Burberry scarves and winter trips to Turks and Caicos. It’s inevitable.

And when it all became too much, Professor Nissenbaum says, everything we complain about today—the crass commercialization and materialism, the fatigue, the unflagging sense of obligation—was also expressed by a writer in a Christmas short story entitled “Christmas; or, the Good Fairy.” In that piece, a harried female character muses:

“Oh dear! Christmas is coming in a fortnight, and I have got to think up presents for everybody! Dear me, it’s so tedious! Everybody has got everything that can be thought of… 

There are worlds of money wasted, at this time of year, in getting things that nobody wants, and nobody cares for after they are got.”

The writer of those words was Harriet Beecher Stowe, and she expressed them in a story published in 1850, not long before Americans heard of her bestseller, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Christmas shopping is a horror, and short story writers helped make it so.

The Oblong Box card
from the Poe Tarot Card Deck.

* * * 

Happy Thanksgiving to readers who are celebrating it this week.

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

Fascists in the Family

Every summer my father climbed to the top of a rickety ladder and hacked away at the tall arborvitae shrubs surrounding our house in the New Jersey suburbs. My brothers and I dutifully collected the dropped branches, and dragged them to our Mom, who stood ready to bundle them with twine so they could more easily be dragged to the curb for our town’s weekly trash pickup.

Mom was absurdly proud of her branch-bundling skills. If we tried to bundle them ourselves, she’d watch for a while before chiding us that we were doing it the wrong way. “Hmph,” she’d say. “You don’t know how. I learned the right way. From my grandfather!”

To this day, I am not sure I can’t even describe her method, but I could probably duplicate it if you watched me. The point was that when she was done tying, you could shake that bundle as hard as you could, and none of those branches would come loose. Yay, Mom.

I reminded one of my brothers of this annual ritual some years ago, and he chuckled, “Well, sure she knew how to bundle sticks. She was a good little Fascist.”

And we had a chuckle at our late Mom’s expense.

Joe's Mom:
Top row, second from left.

He was referring, of course, to Mom’s upbringing in Italy during the rise of Mussolini. And the freakish images (which I’m sharing here) of those days. They are a reminder to me how easy it is to mold young minds to believe that This Is The Way. The Only Way. The Way of Our Leader.

Like it or not, a war intervened and erased the world of her childhood.

The word fascist and fascism gets lot of play these days, especially this week. The word is derived, of course, from the fasces, a bundle of wooden rods (not sticks or brush) enclosing an ax, that has been a symbol of government going back to the days of the Etruscans.

I rooted around the web some time ago, trying to learn more about those wooden-rod bundles, and how fascism differs, say, from totalitarianism or authoritarianism.

The Romans meant the ax to refer to the right of the state to use violence to keep order, when necessary. When the legions returned to Rome from war, the ax was removed from the symbol carried aloft by soldiers, indicating that military power yielded to civilian authority. Minus the ax, the wooden rods alone symbolize governmental authority.

The fasces motif is still used today in that context. You’ll find them on the Great Seal of the United States, the Lincoln Memorial, on the walls of the Oval Office, and so on.

The "Doll Dance":

Mom, second from left.

I had heard growing up that the fasces were a symbol of unity. Together, went the notion, the rods were stronger than each was alone. But it turns out that that concept came later, thanks to a fable by Aesop. The earliest users of the symbol would not have ascribed that meaning to the rods and axe.

My brothers and I were surprised later in life to discover these photos of Mom in various school pageants with a giant portraits of Il Duce in the background. She had described these events to us, but seeing the photos was another thing entirely. In the context of her time, she would have been called a “Piccola Fascista,” or a “little (female) fascist”.

She was under the age of ten when these pics were taken. She hailed from a family of four siblings. Near the end of their lives, I interviewed her and her older brother, Mike, whose story was slightly more troubling. As a teen he was sent to a fascist youth camp on the Adriatic coast, where young boys trained in calisthenics, marched around in green knickers and Tyroleon hats. Later that year, they performed for Il Duce himself in their regional capital.

I don’t have a pic of Mike handy, but at the time he was a husky boy, what Italians then and now would describe as ciccione—chubby. Laughing, he described to me the trouble he had performing the most basic feats of strength required by the program. He could not, for example, climb a rope, and watched with envy as one of his camp mates performed the act handily, twirling in the air like an aerialist. When he descended, the expert rope climber strode over to my uncle, sneered at him, and slapped his face in a gesture of derision. You can’t do what I do.

Mike was rescued from further involvement in Mussolini’s program when his father returned from the U.S., where he’d gone to seek employment, and brought his oldest son back to Brooklyn, New York.

From that point forward, each half of the family had vastly different wartime experiences. Mike enlisted in the U.S. Army, fought all across Europe, and served as an engineer at Normandy. His most soul-crushing experience, he said, was carrying emaciated survivors out of Buchenwald in his arms.

My mother, her two other siblings, and their mother remained behind. Nazis camped in her grandfather’s fields, threatening the old man with a gun to get access to his barn. When the Americans started bombing, the Nazis dumped their gunpowder in her grandfather’s fields and fled. Mom, her family, and her neighbors hid in (yet another) barn to wait out the air strikes. When the smoke cleared, their village was filled with a new crop of soldiers: Americans, Brits, and their Indian allies. The family was reunited after the war, when all but one sibling moved to the U.S. with their mother.

In the immediate occupation after the war, Mike was stationed in Germany, where he was assigned to question and repatriate Italian soldiers—a portion of about 30,000 POWs at one site who had been captured by the allies. Every day for weeks, he sat at a desk in a local gymnasium, asking one soldier after another—in their native tongue—their name, rank, home province, and one question: “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Fascist Party?”

To a man, every single soldier said no, they weren’t, and never had been.

One day, as he was working in the gym, Mike looked up and saw a POW climbing a rope and twirling in the air like an acrobat.

Seething, Mike waited for this Italian soldier to descend.

Mike asked him the question.

“No,” Expert Rope Climber said. “I am not a Fascist.”

Mike slapped him in the face. Sweet justice. “Liar,” he said, proceeding to spell out the athletic games where they had together performed for Mussolini: “Campo Dux. Campobasso. 1935!”

Mike estimated that he had interrogated 5,000 of his countrymen. Every single one denied involvement in the ideology that had sent a nation to war and so many to their graves.

Sick to his stomach, one day he leaned over to his captain and said, “Hey, you know what? Looks like I’m the only Fascist here!”

Angels and Devils.

Mom, first, top row left.

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Thanks for reading. See you in three weeks!

— Joe josephdagnese.com