The Only Thing Louder than the Talking Is the Silence

My short story "The Only Thing Louder than the Talking Is the Silence" is in this issue of Tethered. It's online, and it's right here, but also here are the first few words. If you're paying attention to the typesetting, you'll notice it's laid out weird, and if you know me in real life then you probably know this is a pretty good indication that it's a part of a novel I've written, because I always get super aspirational and super layout-geeky on a novel when I write it, and one symptom of this is that the chapters always begin in some dramatic way. Like, say, 48-point font, and then they transition to a regular old font in midsentence. Geez, Matthue, just get published the old-fashioned way and let the designers do their thing.

This is a horror story, not scary per se but horrific, maybe, the type of thing that gnaws at you where there's something wrong but you can't quite put your finger on it till the last page, and maybe not even when the story finishes. I've been writing a lot of scary stories lately, and I think it's mostly inspired by Virginia Woolf, but that's probably another story entirely.

The Giraffe who was Made of Cheese

I illustrated a chapter in The Rolling Eating Face and Other Stories, a new picture book by Effie Ross. I'm really honored to have been asked, and also really pleased with the way my pictures turned out. The story itself is sublimely weird, really superbly told and that sort of explosive & expansive creativity that only happens in the desperation of bedtime, and it was a thrill to do something to nonverbally evoke that mayhem.

My favorite music (and my favorite magic), 2022 edition

Every year, my faithful sometimes-editor David Levithan conducts his David Music Poll, and every year I faithfully respond. Here are my picks for this year (and here are everyone's). Spoiler: Orville Peck made me start loving music again in a big way. Combined with my other recent obsession, Magic: the Gathering, I made a double-sided card (see above and below). I know these are the two most niche things ever to be spoken of on the internet, but maybe you'll appreciate one or both of them?

Matthue R, Im-peck-able

Most essential:

Orville Peck, Bronco

This came along and swept me away in veils of fringe. I liked his sparse, moody first album, but everything about every song on here perfectly glistens. It stirs you. Rarely have I felt so happy as I do listening to these gay country anthems, and that is not a sentence I ever thought I would write.

Otherwise essential:

Big Thief, Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You

Campfire songs with a severe undercurrent of menace.

Taylor Swift, Midnights

Apologies to Miss Tay that this is no higher on my list. Zoinks, it's hard being a serious artist, especially as one is, forced to live up to one's legacy, and none the greater for it. If I were ranking just the song "Antihero," it may have placed higher, the mightiness of cramming several individually great images and motifs into 4 paltry minutes. It's not great. It's merely good. The best songs are the singles (although I love "Mastermind" [although the single cribbed line "When you fail to plan, you plan to fail" nearly ruins the spell for me]). The whole damn spiel could use an editor. Even, perhaps especially, "Antihero." It is a lesser novel by a writer I will nonetheless read everything by. But I am still here to read everything.

Twice, Between 1 and 2

My partner and I were having an argument about why I can't get into Reputation, Taylor's collection of techno (sorry, electronic dance music) thumpers, but I love Twice. Partly, I think, because these songs are both simple and constantly reinventing themselves: there's no moment of a song that is either hard to digest or understand (there's a perfectly simple hook, but there's a new one about every 5 seconds throughout each song), but also there's such a complete surrender when listening. Twice songs have 3 languages going on at once: Korean, most of which I don't understand (but I probably agree with whatever they're saying); English, most of which I do (likewise: on "Scientist," my insufficient brain hears "[Korean] [Korean] Einstein, [Korean] [Korean] Frankenstein" and, like, I get it), and the immortal and universal "fa la la la la." It's not the language of love. It's not even the language of happiness. It's the language of, I've got a song stuck in my head and you're gonna get it stuck too, and in that regard, as all others, Twice delivers.

A Halloween present for you

Art: from the prompt "your uncle wearing a creepy hat" on Craiyon

So, I'm up to something, maybe? I've been writing horror stories -- well, I think they're horror stories -- and I've been a little bit shy about sharing them, but, as is typical of things in horror stories, they find a way out nevertheless.

The literary magazine The Furious Gazelle had a Halloween short story contest and I submitted my story "The Man with the Hat" and I am tremendously honored that it won.

The Man with the Hat 

As soon as Edie’s Uncle Sly came to visit, she wanted to kick him right back out. It was how he entered the house like he owned it, left his oversized tweed suitcase sitting directly in front of the stairs. He wore a jacket beneath his jacket—tweed, but not matching—and a tie and dark sunglasses and a collared shirt like the men at the bank. She watched his skinny form swimming in the collared shirt and thought of her father’s muscles ballooning out of his Sunday tee. Clearly, this invader was the loser.

“You must be Edie,” he said, sizing her up. “Tell my sister I’ve arrived.”

Most decrepit of all was his hat. That lopsided tweedy thing that only appeared distinguished in his mind. To its original owner, maybe, long before Edie’s uncle acquired it in whatever way he did (found it on the street? took it from the coatrack of a moldy office lobby?).

She turned to go but didn’t say anything. She thought he should at least thank her for allowing him inside.

Here is the whole entire thing.

Praying in Strange Places, a new story

My short story "Praying in Strange Places" was published in Derailleur! Here's how it starts. I know, it starts with Chapter 5 and goes down to 1. Not consciously trying to be weird, just came out of my fingers that way. 

5.

A Hollywood backlot last week. I was there to visit a friend, who’d recently gotten a semi-regular job as a minor character on a major sitcom. Actually, she was my best friend’s girlfriend. But I was in L.A., and my friend wasn’t, and the girlfriend invited me to come to work with her. They were rehearsing, running through the same three-minute scene an infinity of times. I sat in the empty audience bleachers and watched them walk around a fake living room. I envied the ability to be able to do what they did, to rewind time again and again to make it perfect. Inside the hermetically-sealed warehouse, I got the sense the sun was going down. I went outside, to the hallway, and found a place to pray. Three steps back, three steps forward, I transformed that little area into a chamber for G-d to inhabit. I stood still and swayed back and forth.

    The place I’d picked to pray was one of those narrow alcoves, a Cubist lump where the wall hiccupped inward for no apparent reason. The wall faced east, toward Jerusalem, and I fit neatly inside. It was only after I’d gotten far enough into the prayers so that I couldn’t move--once you did your dance of the three steps, I was frozen in place until the concluding section hit--when I realized, inside my sandwich of three walls, I was literally two steps away from the men’s bathroom. I pushed it out of my mind, to keep focused on the prayers. One of the stars of the series brushed past me and into the bathroom. Our shoulders actually touched, even though the hallway wasn’t that narrow. I wasn’t sure why, if he was coming onto me, if he was drunk, if he was just clumsy like I was. I tried not to listen, but, can you close your ears, how can you willfully not hear something? The stream of liquid was long, unbroken, stretching to whole minutes. A strange thing: I’d long had this thought, I’d love to be an actor, except for the long periods on stage and the infrequent, time-mandated pee breaks. I’d wondered how they did it. That was how. Did you know there’s a prayer we say for going to the bathroom, thanking G-d for creating the system of openings and closings in our bodies, acknowledging that if those tubes and combines didn’t work exactly the way they did, we’d be poisoned, immobilized, unable to live? We say that prayer every time we urinate or defecate, after washing and leaving the bathroom. It was not, however, a part of the normal afternoon prayer. The prayer I was saying right now.

    The series star extracted himself from the bathroom, shook his hands in the air upon leaving, far enough away from his body so no loose drops were shaken onto his outfit. He gave me a long, hard look, as if he’d heard my every thought, my entire rambling eschatological intrusion into his pee break, the kind of look he probably routinely gave to paparazzi, a look that said, Don’t you have anything better to do with your life? Nope. No, I thought, I do not.

{ read the rest }

Saturday Night with the Reverend

 

“G-d needs us to believe in Him,” Rev. Vince extols us, “just like you need someone to believe in you.”

Just as the music drops in, he one-ups himself: “Just like I need you to believe in me,” and on the turn of a dime, he’s no longer preaching, he’s singing, he’s giving us deep-throated growls and can-you-say-hallelujahs.

We are in a biker bar called the Black Coffin, and we have been brought here by my summer landlord, Yoily, a Hasid in dress at least. Tonight, though, he is getting down with a Venus de Milo-like woman of some sort of island extraction — an island that could be any island in the world, really — just about five feet tall and at least that in diameter.

But that doesn’t make him any less of a Hasid, in his own estimation at least. Four shots in, he’s spending most of my month’s rent on the nicest whisky in the house, and it’s loosening him up.

Not that he needed any loosening. I remember once in a lecture being told by a rabbi that we wear the clothes we wear, black pants white shirt, as a sort of uniform, to keep us in line and to keep us from acting immodest or unbecoming. When you look like a Jew, you act like a Jew. For Yoily, who goes to the dance clubs almost every night, these clothes free him from any sort of social norm or expectation. Those clothes, that hair, he’s basically an alien. People assume he’s either a dangerous sex pervert or a kid who’s run away, Amish-style, for a single strange night in the town, looking for a crazy adventure in that American Graffiti vein, or maybe just in that The Hangover vein, he’ll have a dance, do some drugs, have a ’70s-music-filled-montage, have a half-awake conversation with a girl whom in a different state of consciousness he might have shared a kiss or something more, rolled into bed at 5:00 in the morning only to awake a few hours later, a little tired and beleaguered but ready to lapse back into his normal life.

But, no: This is Yoily. He’s never gonna wake up.

He dances harder. The woman gives a loud whoop, so showy and flamboyant it feels like she’s faking, but so fake it’s real. Yoily whoops back, even louder, even realer, and he grabs a piece of her stomach. I turn away, embarrassed to be a part of it, embarrassed to be there at all.

**

It’s been a cool night, a hot night. One of those wild summers in Brooklyn where by day the sidewalks are hot enough to give you first-degree burns and you find yourself checking with strangers on the street if they’ve had enough water. At midnight the air is still bubbling over 100. The people in the bar are sweating and thirsty, it makes them drink more, which makes them wilder still.

Rev. Vince feels it. He feeds off it, hungry for energy. He bangs the keys twice as hard, forcing the drummer to play twice as fast. The band can barely keep up.

The audience is having no problem, though. Our feet can stomp in time with whatever Rev. Vince plays. We need him as much as he needs us.

Tonight he plays fierce, sharp staccato chords at the high end and low end of his organ, one song after another. Then finally, he breaks so fast the rest of his band is thrown off track. The bass is still shaking, the unwilling bassist having struck one note after the rest of the band pulled to a stop, and the string trembles with the weight of every ear in the room.

Then he speaks. His voice is the only thing in our ears, the only sound in the universe.

“How you all doin’ tonight?”

The answer is a single lusty many-voiced yell.

“I can feel the L-rd here, can you feel Him?”

Harder cheers, louder cheers. Hands in the air, we are pouring ourselves into him.

“We gotta praise His name, give Him whatever we have! If you got spirit, give Him some spirit. If you got happiness, you got to share that happiness. Even if you got money, you gotta spread it around. You go on and tell me, is anybody here rich?”

A lone bro whistles from the back. A few heads turn toward us, to the Jews, but nobody says anything. In the rest of the bar it is utterly silent, except for the Rev.

“Hey friends, I’m not pokin’ fun at anyone. There’s no need to be ashamed. Whatever you are, that’s the way the L-rd made you. And the L-rd’s got gifts for all of us. Some of us are smart. Some are wise. Some are physically gifted — gifted in the face or the body,” he reaches down, hands cupping the overhanging bottom curvature of his own stomach to jiggle his own, and here the band starts to play again, soft, like the very instruments are whispering, “others are skilled with their words, or their charm, or even their music.”

His hands sink to the keys of the organ, and he jumps back in, and his voice climbs ever louder.

“So friends, what I’m askin’ is, who’s ready to accept G-d’s gifts? Who wants to be rich?”

“I DO!” shrills a voice next to me, and two white-sleeved arms shoot in the air and it’s Yoily, throwing his head back, tossing his beard into the air, shrieking with wild abandon.

The music tumbles back into full force and Yoily starts to dance, and then so does everyone else, and in the moment it’s forgotten by all concerned. Only it’s not forgotten by Yoily, who was a good deal less drunk that night than I’d thought, or maybe he’d just never stopped being drunk, because Wednesday next the big lottery winner gets called, enough cash to never work another day in your life, and not only has Yoily actually had the forethought to buy a lottery ticket, he’s got all six matching numbers.

Now, there’s such a thing as coincidence in this world. G-d stopped sending us prophets, and there’s no longer a Temple to bring the holy offerings, so we got to make do with what we do. G-d’s Hand is still at it, but in a concealed way, and you don’t often see miracles granted as obvious as Yoily.

Right away he stopped going out at night. Started wearing his black hat again, never being seen without a jacket, or outside the neighborhood, or in bars, Least of all a bar where a licensed minister plays organ every Tuesday night.

Once I passed him on the street, asked him about it. He scowled and couldn’t say Rev. Vince’s name without spitting. “That goy?” he said. “All he wants to do is turn Yidden into sinners, one forbidden dance at a time.”

But on Shabbos I wound up at his house — since the lottery, he’d given himself to buying tons of food from the store, paying a shiksa to prepare it all, and inviting over whatever single or divorced or displaced men to feast with a good hot lunch. He’d had too much to drink, or not enough. And he threw a sweaty arm around me and told me why he’d stopped following the rest of us to Rev. Vince.

“I’d be back there in a second if I hadn’t won,” he said to me, his voice warm and cavelike in my ear. “What he did was, he took away the uncertainty. If all you need to do to believe is to get handed a miracle, what good does it do? I wouldn’t have to believe on my own, I wouldn’t have to shout and cheer and scream like an animal, I wouldn’t dance with the fat shiksas because I’d know that G-d was right there, ready to throw a lightning bolt in my face. The second you don’t need to believe anymore, what are you? You’re an angel. You’re a robot. All you do is G-d’s work, because there’s nothing else you can do.”

He says more, but I don’t hear it, because he unfixes his arm from my shoulders and slinks off, still talking. I don’t need to hear it. I don’t want to. I’ve still got my Saturday night dances, and I wouldn’t trade them for the world.

 

The Rev. Vince is loosely, but not entirely, modeled after Reverend Vince Anderson & the Love Choir. You should think of it as fan fiction. You can find out about the real one here and listen to here and, whoa!, he has live shows every Monday night here. We should go.

Write On!: Sometimes I’m Too Jewish, Sometimes I’m Not Jewish Enough

I want to believe that I’m the sum of all my experiences, that every time I pick up a pen and launch into a story I’m giving it everything that I have —

• the books I’ve read and the movie I watched on the plane here,
• the Jewish food my parents raised me on and the watered-down secular Jewish culture they gave me,
• the first time Eddie Torres kicked my ass walking home after school in sixth grade and the twenty times he did it after that,
• the time I became an Orthodox Jew when I was 20 years old
• and the time I started hooking up with a Catholic-raised pagan sex worker 3 years into it,
• the prayers I said this morning, including the entire story of the Binding of Isaac and his almost-attempted murder by his father Abraham, which we say every day, although I’m still not 100% sure why we say that and not, say, the story of Bilaam beating his ass,
• the archery lesson I took my Hasidic girls-school daughter to last night
• and us reading Dracula on the way home, her request
• as the people next to us stared.

But there’s a problem inherent within that. Stories are microcosms. Salman Rushdie says that, every time you tell a story, at the same moment there’s a million other stories you’re choosing not to tell. If I decide to write, say, a memoir about hooking up with my pagan ex-girlfriend, I’m not telling you the story of when I first became Orthodox, or going to secular Hebrew School as a kid, or how my wife and I celebrated Shabbos when we were dating, or how there’s a white nationalist guy sitting next to me on the plane right now and how I feel as someone who looks like me, with a beard, payos, tzitzis.*

When we write stories, we start at a point. Maybe it’s an idea. For me, it’s usually an image — it might not be the image the story starts with, but it’s an image that I know will come up.

The point is, it’s a point. As storytellers, we take that point and move it along an axis, we tell it, we create a line, and the line goes on as far as our story does, ad infinitum if we want it to. And I know I have suddenly started talking about math in front of a bunch of writers, but bear with me — for every point in the universe, there’s an infinite series of lines that can be drawn from it. If you start here {POINT IN THE AIR}, you can go this way {GESTURE IN ONE DIRECTION}, this way {POINT IN ANOTHER DIRECTION}, or this way. That’s the direction we choose to go with a story.

My first novel, Never Mind the Goldbergs, started with an image of a girl wearing three stacked, ripped skirts — a miniskirt, a knee-length skirt, a long gypsy skirt, all of them crowned with punk-rock patches — and she’s standing on a Hollywood set, and a non-Jewish wardrobe person is trying to tell her what clothes Orthodox people are supposed to wear. It’s a pretty clearly Jewish image, right? Pretty much every direction you’d take that in is has to embrace the Jewish angle, or at least include it at some point.

I wrote this other novel, Manhattan Beach. It hasn’t been published (yet?). Here’s how I first conjured it: imagine the movie The Goonies, where four kids find a map leading to buried pirate treasure beneath their hometown — and, of course, obstacles that keep rogue treasure hunters away — except that, in my vision, the kids are 80-year-old men.

This story didn’t have to be Jewish. Except that, in some way, it did. In the original movie, the kids’ homes were being foreclosed upon; in my remake, it was the synagogue where all the old men hung out all day. I told the story in ten chapters, one for each of the men left who made the synagogue’s minyan: the mentally-disabled caretaker, the celebrity skin-care doctor with the subway ads, the old gay guy who never got a chance to come out because he was a teenager during the Holocaust, and instead he lived alone in a forest stealing from Nazis.

I don’t have to make these stories Jewish. That quality, the Jewishness of it — the religious stuff, the Holocaust stuff, the one-off references to the texture of matzoh and the passing inclusion of an oy — they’re a part of the story, sometimes even a fundament of the particular story I’m trying to tell. But they’re just some of the tools in my toolbox, a few of the memories in the knapsack of my mind. At some point, I was on a hot streak of writing really really Jewish poems, one about my vegetarianism and the profundity of meat in my grandmother’s house, another about my gay Orthodox friends and my non-Jewish girlfriend, and then I wrote a poem about my teeth.

Again with the microcosmos. We defamilarize the familiar, describing a watermelon as if no one in your audience has ever tasted watermelon before, and at the same time we create comfort in the unknown, describing the experience of descending into a ritual bath so it’s as close to the reader’s heart as if they dunk in a mikvah every morning. I don’t write much poetry anymore but I love it, it’s the aesthetic and intellectual challenge of writing a new novel every time you sit down with a new page. We rev up our microscopes and we go on full blast. Sometimes that’s looking at a ritual bath. Sometimes it’s my teeth.

Maybe because I am Orthodox, a word which here means that there are 613 rules in the Torah — some explicit and some obscure, from permitted foods to the correct way to tie your shoelaces — a lot of those minutiae tend to be Jewish in nature. Because I am human, or punk rock, or a boy, or relatively obsessed with the X-Men, a lot of them don’t. One way or another, you will probably be able to find something Jewish about most of what I write. The fact that I wrote my teeth poem on Shabbos morning, walking the bumpy San Francisco hills to shul — I had to keep repeating it to myself over and over again the whole day, till sunset when I could actually commit it to paper — might make it more Jewish now that you know that.

But it’s not going to show up on the page when you read it, and every story I write definitely does not pass muster as a Jewish story. PJ Library, an amazing organization that buys literally millions of picture books each year to send out free to children, has yet to accept anything I’ve written. I literally got two editorial notes back from them two months in a row, “This is too Jewish” and “this isn’t Jewish enough.”

The same thing could probably be said about myself. And yet, for all the good the PJ Library organization does, both for Jewish pedagogy and for the literary community, most of their books kinda suck. The characters are flat. They always do what they’re supposed to do, except when they make a mistake and learn a lesson from it. They are stuck in the eternal cycle of literature that exists explicitly to teach children a lesson, and because of that, they don’t stay in that cycle long. Most of those books, my kids read once and leave near the recycle bin, thinking perhaps that they’re like their weekly newsletters from school.

This might sound like a call to arms to end the canon of Jewish novels, but it’s actually a plea for the opposite. I’ve been dying to write a Jewish novel. Not because I think it might finally get me published as an adult novelist, although that would be very cool, but because I want to have something to read that resonates with me in that very specific way. As authors, we are so fond of taking our characters and systematically deconstructing them, putting them into precarious situations and risking their lives, their morals, and their emotional health. As readers, though, we read because we are isolated and alienated from the world and we want to find a connection, see inside somebody else’s head and say it’s really not so different from our own. And most of the time we’re looking for a bare emotional connection, another nerd as nerdy as us or someone heartbroken or full of heart or yearning to be in another place. But as much as sometimes I need to read about one of Sartre’s displaced journeymen or Winterson’s sexually diaphanous adventurers, I would love to see, or to create, someone who looks like me on a page.

And I’m trying. Yesterday, I was trying to explain why I loved Lolita and was deeply troubled by it — aside from the usual reasons — and I blurted out, “He could’ve written about anything in the world, why did he write about that?” The first time someone I knew read Goldbergs, it was a woman at my synagogue, and she told me she’d read it in the same way she might have told me that she saw me buying opiates on the corner.

Did you read the whole thing? I asked her. No, she said — she stopped right after the Orthodox protagonist hooked up with her costar. “But that’s right before she starts making everything better!” I expostulated (although it isn’t that simple). “I’d just had enough,” she told me, and that was that.

I have a friend who started calling up Jewish Hollywood writers and actors, trying to convince them to put Orthodox Jews on their shows. “Nothing crazy,” she told them, “just a minor character who happens to wear a yarmulke or runs out to shul.” But that’s the opposite of what I want. I want to make stories where everything a character does matters, and where who those characters are — their history, their relationship with G-d, even their anxiety about their teeth — isn’t just a way of telling a shocking and efficient story, but a way of giving people (and by people, I mean myself) something to love. 

 

This was delivered last week as part of a symposium on Jewish Writing vs. Writing by Jews, chaired by Goldie Goldbloom, at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in Tampa.

Still image from X-Men: Days of Future Past, as if you didn’t know. 

_______________

* – Yep, that part was true. I wrote that line really quickly, then scrolled my computer screen up to hide it. 

Write On!: How to Write for Yourself

 Every blade of grass has a story to tell

— Darshan, “Animate My Anatomy”

Hey! I'm just taking some questions from the ol' email inbox. Ready? Set? To corrupt Montell Jordan, this is how we go.

How do you become a professional author?

Poverty is the secret weapon of the writer.

I’m not saying that being poor is a good thing, because it’s not. It sucks. (And I realize that I just contradicted the wisdom of Fiddler on the Roof, which is only slightly more sacrilegious than doubting the authenticity of the Bible. It’s okay. Let’s keep going.) And I’m not saying that you shouldn’t get paid well from your writing — thank G-d, there are ways to do it.

I’m saying, have a job that isn’t writing — at least, that isn’t writing what you deeply and passionately want to write, that comes straight out of your heart and keeps all that passion and fire and rawness and fragility intact.

Because if that’s what you want to write, it’s a good thing to tell yourself, I’m not doing this to make money.

And keep repeating it to yourself.

Repeat it when you don’t believe in yourself.

Repeat it when you don’t believe in your characters, and so instead of making decisions you open yourself up to them and let them take the story in whatever crazy way it wants to go.

Repeat it when you don’t even know what the characters want, so you kill one of them in a freak thunderstorm. (It’s ok! Do it! If your brain is telling you to — and this is in writing, not in real life, mind you — then there might be a reason. You can come back later, after you’re finished writing, and figure out the reason, and what it Means for the Rest of the Story. Or you’ll realize that maybe you needed to keep her alive for the rest of the story. Don’t worry! By that point, you’re already at the end, and you have a complete story written, so you can pretty much do whatever you want.) (Also, if you’re curious about where I got this idea from, skip to the end of this essay.)

Repeat it when there’s one really obvious way you could take this story — it’s your first day of school, you’re so nervous you don’t know what to do, you’re gonna get beat up and teased and eventually win the science fair, but really you just want to write about the cookies you stopped to grab at your grandma’s house on the way home.

There’s a power to writing that comes from its powerlessness. Even more so with poetry. Nobody reads anything these days, and especially nobody reads fictional stories or poems, so you don’t have to feel bound by them. You never have to be the poet who only writes rhymed poems about storms and pain — that is, unless you really want to be; the only one holding you there is you. Today it’s not raining and you’re the only person who caught sight of a rainbow before it disappeared. Why not write about that? Go for it. Nobody’s looking. And even if they are — well, hey, then you’ve got a reader.

We’re surrounded by stories. Literally — they’re everywhere. At one point, I remember asking David Levithan — my editor at Scholastic, who edits a crazy number of books and puts out one or two of his own every year — if he’s ever afraid of running out of ideas for stories. He said, I’m more afraid of having so many ideas for stories that some of the best ones fall through the cracks.

Every idea can make a good story. Just honor it and let it do its thing.

At what point in the writing process do you involve an agent or a publisher? Do you let them know as soon as you have a good idea, and get their… go-ahead? Their blessing? I don’t know what you’d call it. Or do you attempt to write a full, complete draft of whatever it is and then start shopping it around?

Okay, fine. Let’s talk publishing. EVEN THOUGH I just spent the past 400 words or so telling you why you shouldn’t think about that.

I’m going to first paraphrase Joshua Henkin, my writing professor, and say: as late as humanly possible. There’s a saying about too many cooks in the kitchen, and for most forms of storytelling, the exact number of “too many cooks” is 2.

It’s great to meet an agent or an editor. It’s double great if you want to show them what you’re working on, and it’s super double great if they actually ask and you offer. The thing to remember is: You’re still working on it. The sooner you show an agent, the sooner you open yourself up to them saying something like, “Hey, you know how you’re mostly writing a historical novel about the Second Temple, but with aliens? Maybe you want to lose the aliens.” And even if you say no, you’ve opened yourself up to the possibility that doing a story about the Bayis Sheni with aliens might not be the coolest thing ever. (Side note: this example might be the coolest thing ever. Can someone please write it?)

But: Doubt. In one word, doubt is why you shouldn’t show your story to publishers, or agents, or anyone except for helpful and supportive friends — and even if you do that, make them swear up and down, no bli neder involved, you DEMAND the neder, that they won’t say anything critical — until your story is finished, and edited, and you’d feel comfortable having it published exactly the way it looks at this moment.

As a side note, the literary industry is in a perpetual time- and money crunch, and editors and agents are looking more and more frequently to take manuscripts that require the bare minimum of editing. The more you can make it sound like a finished book — the closer it is to a finished book — the more likely they are to take it seriously.

Where did you get the idea for the freak thunderstorm?

Lolita. Which I never wanted to read, because the idea was gross, then needed to read, because Vladmir Nabokov basically taught himself English so he could do his own translations, and is one of the best writers this language has. It’s in the first few pages, and known as the shortest death in literature: “‘My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three.”

My new chapbook!

So I wrote a bunch of poems and bound them together, and the collage artist Katie Skau cut up some images for them, and Ghost City Press crumpled the whole dang mess together and threw it into a book so that you can have it for free. Go here to get it.

Write On!: But How Do You Make a Plot?

Hey, welcome back to the writing space. If you have writing questions, send them to me! It’s just my first name at gmail.

First lesson today: Always show up. I wrote 700 words of a different story, decided it was too depressing, decided to stuff it under my bed alongside those clothes that are almost-dirty, but still clean enough to maybe wear again some day. I wasn’t going to write anything. I didn’t have time, didn’t have another idea, was still pretty buried in my old idea. (Maybe you’ll see some traces of it in this one.)

So I dove in. This is a question I’ve been dying to address, but kept getting distracted by things like Aristotle (who is worth his own column) and Joseph Campbell (ditto) and the Torah (um, probably worth more than one column).

How do you develop a plot?

When I enrolled in a master’s program for creative writing, I assumed it would be all about answering this question. Two years, twelve classes, you’d figure that, of the three primary elements of story (plot, setting, characters), this one would happen first, right? WRONGEST.

That’s not to say we didn’t talk about it. But we didn’t talk about it enough. Of all the elements of writing, plot seems to come hardest to most writers I know. Plot is a monster. Characters, we have inspiration for all over the place. We know characters, we breathe characters, most of us are characters, of a sort, from Tom Wolfe’s rock-star white leisure suits to Virginia Woolf’s breathless romance and incomprehensibly sad suicide. And setting — we love settings; we love places; from writer’s nooks to exploring new places to the Narnias and Hundred Acre Woods of our mind.

But plot? Plot’s the nightmare of nightmares. Once you have these kinetic characters, this perfect place, what are they gonna do there?

Here’s why, in my opinion: Plot has to make sense. Not only that, it’s taking all the things that don’t make sense about your story — why does the detective have a limp? what’s in the nanny’s closet? — and it forces them to make sense. It’s the cowboy riding through a field of rebellious teenage cows, trying to wrap a lasso around every last neck. It is the most left-brained part of a right-brained activity, the part that collects all the random stuff we’ve sprinkled throughout a story. And it’s the part most readers nitpick the most about. If you’re a reasonably good storyteller, people will find very little to complain about objectively in terms of your characters — maybe they don’t like them? maybe they did something stupid?

But in terms of plot grievances, you hear it all the time: “That ending sucked!” “I didn’t understand what was going on!” “Those middle 200 pages completely lost me!” And probably for good reason.

EVERYTHING has a plot. Poems have plots. What’s the definition of a story, as opposed to an anecdote or a joke or a drunken/sleepy story (because we all know those aren’t real stories, they don’t make sense, and most of them don’t even get finished being told)? A story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The main character starts in one place, physically and mentally and spiritually, and gets the chance to change — they might take it, they might not, but that decision gives a story its story-ness. We want our characters to be bigger than they are.

When Shirley Jackson wrote “The Lottery,” she didn’t write about the Lottery in the abstract — she wrote a story of the day it was taking place. She described a typical Lottery that wasn’t typical at all, and the things that were normal taught us what the Lottery was, and the moments that weren’t typical also taught us what the Lottery was. The turning point of that story — the moment you realize who won the Lottery, and what winning the Lottery means — is both completely surprising and completely unsurprising. It makes a horrible sense; it feeds a feeling we’ve had since the first lines of the story.

Plot is driven by character. This is a big one. My professor, Josh Henkin, says that if you really know your protagonist, you’ll never have to stop and think, what happens next? This never actually happens, partly because we aren’t perfect, but also partly because we aren’t really in the character’s head space. We’re creating people. And people always find something to do. They always keep moving.

Plan ahead. Yes, you hate outlining. We all hate this. Outlining robs our story of its soul. When we tell a story naturally, the writer’s head is in the same place that the reader’s is — we’re learning about the characters, we’re diving deeper into the story. And this is good. Sometimes I’ll startle myself by throwing a major surprise into the story as I’m writing it — in Never Mind the Goldbergs, I knew that Moish was secretly filming a movie everywhere he went, but I didn’t know that he would return to Los Angeles and go straight to the movie’s premiere. It made sense within the context of the story (if you haven’t read it, it did! I assure you!), but it wasn’t something I’d prepared for.

Here’s what I do: on the last page of whatever I’m writing (short story, novel, haiku) I keep a running of what I think should happen next. In the scene, in the chapter, in the book. It’s never set in stone, and often changes — as I get closer to a Big Event, I’ll add in new little things that need to happen before and after it, and when something big changes, I feel totally free to change or trash other things.

Basically: keep a map. But remember that your destination will change.

Any time you open a door, make sure you close it. It doesn’t have to be a big deal every time. Sometimes the biggest buildups lead to the smallest payoffs — Netflix series have become experts at this, where 9 episodes’ worth of hints will lead to a really good one-liner between two characters. The important thing is, you close it. Keep track of these things. (An outline, ahem, works wonders.) Not only will they make your story feel more professional, it’ll feel more satisfying, too.

Less is more. This isn’t a plot tool so much as it is a tool for everything you write. I’m hyper. I try to leap from idea to idea, to get as much in as possible. DON’T. One of the best things about writing, and there are a lot, is that you have control of the reader’s mind. When you play a song, you have the reader’s ears. When you make a movie, you control the reader’s eyes and ears. Words are the least and the greatest of all powers: you can tell a story that lasts a moment and make it last an hour of the reader’s life, make them think about the same thing twenty different ways, take them inside the mind of two warring characters.

There are so many ways for this to go wrong. But there are also many, many ways to do it write — and do it different than anybody’s ever done.

Our minds are yours. Now go and do something with them.

The Friend I Never Called

 I steal names. You should know this, first of all, if you want to be friends with me (or friends of friends, or one-night drinking buddies, or if you just wanna ask me about my weird hair). If you have a good name, or a strange name, or a musical name, I might swipe it and stick it in a story.

Alexandra Blitman didn’t just have a name that stuck in my head like a song, but she was a person who did. She was the first person I knew who played cello — before her, the only actual cellist I knew about was the Slovakian cellist in the James Bond movie The Living Daylights, which my dad let me see with him when I was 9.

So I’m writing a story about a kid named Alex who’s a boy, and his best-friend-who-he-maybe-has-a-crush-on, also named Alix, who’s a girl, and I used real-life Alex’s name. Two strong trochees that might rhyme even though they mostly don’t. And Alex herself — she’s one of these people I always meant to keep up with and never did, and the few times I searched her nothing came up.

Then, last night, this did.

I tell stories for a living, and know that each is more than its headline. But Alexandra Blitman’s feels different:

I met her when we were kids, and we graduated from middle and high school together. We weren’t close, but we were friendly. Alex was friendly with everyone, though — a bright, free spirit whose genuine enthusiasm for life drew all of us to her, the straight arrows and the skaters and the jocks and everyone in between.

She died March 7, days after overdosing on heroin. She was 38.

**

Most of my friends, I don’t deserve to call friends. Most of the people I’d like to be friends with, I don’t even talk to. They seem like such magical people, with magical little worlds, and I’d hate to disrupt that with my stammery bad-haired self.

When you know someone even a little bit, they’re limitless. We see tiny glimpses of other people, two-second .gifs of a ten-hour series. Those people we think are our best friends, we’re only with them for a fraction of their lives.

And those people we barely know, we don’t even know how much we don’t know about them.

Alex and I were never part of the same social circle, although we were in orchestra together — Alex was the only cello, and I was a horrible second violinist who sat all the way back at the end of the section, even as an eighth-grader. I thought I would’ve gotten promoted maybe, just out of charity, except that Mr. Meyers was brutal and honest. When Alex played, he had none of the overwhelming praise he saved for Ashley Wilkes who played oboe or Lori Pay, the concertmistress, but she always hit her notes, and that made him proud.

We got along. I probably had a crush on her, but I had a crush on anyone who deigned to talk to me in those days of pimples and squeaky violin solos. More, I always just wanted to be her friend. She seemed like she’d be a good friend. Our lives converged, and then diverged, when she got in an accident with my best friend Patrick. He was trapped in a halo for the next three years, and she emerged relatively unscathed, and maybe I felt guilty being friends with her after that, or felt that I shouldn’t. Or maybe we just had different groups of friends. The Patrick business overshadowed everything, governed most of my social interactions over the next few years (my mom racked up hundreds of miles driving me to the hospitals where they reconstructed his spine). A few years ago I wrote a little book about it and this is one of the things I said about her:

In another life, we could have been sisters or maybe best friends, hiding out at each other’s houses, tumbling into bed and telling each other everything. In this world we were lunchmates, and we shared that with a tableful of other kids. I don’t remember how it first happened, whether she asked if she could sit at our table or if Patrick and I took our seats unobtrusively at the far end of the bench, sliding closer each day, having similar conversations about the same things until one day they finally converged. Pam’s conversational strengths were classical music, cartoons on TV, and what other people were really thinking.

(I changed her name to Pam. Patrick’s name isn’t really Patrick, either. Maybe I just save people’s names for what they sound like they should be doing, or for what I wish they would be doing?)

I should not be surprised, right? The opioid epidemic is everywhere. It’s hitting all kinds of people. According to the articles, this is kind of person Alex was:

She worked as a therapist with women and children in crisis, kids who were being raised amid abuse and addiction. It was hard work, emotionally taxing, and Alex often internalized it.

Alex loved the beach and the mountains. She was forever dancing, listening to and talking about music — everything from trance to Tori Amos, classical to Alicia Keys.

“You’d be walking through the mall and she’d see someone and say, ‘He looks like a really interesting character. I want to meet him,’ ” Sarah said. And she did.

Alex was an original — quirky and complicated, restless and gifted. Her parents didn’t give her a middle name at birth, but Alex declared one for herself, Victoria. She liked the way it sounded, cool and feminine. She started spelling her own name Alecks, just to be original.

**

I don’t want to quote the whole article — every little paragraph of it is another little treasure — although, maybe, I do. I didn’t know her that well. Some of the people the reporter spoke to, I vaguely knew (most of them, I knew as the kids on the other side of the classroom, the ones who were either way cooler than me, or not as cool as me, depending on how you felt about Dungeons & Dragons as a way to spend a Saturday night). The only one I knew was Alex, and I barely knew her.

Are we drawn to death because it reminds us of ourselves? Is it what these people meant to us, or didn’t mean to us, or because we’re hitching a ride on their final journey, wanting to claim some of the glory of it for ourselves, or some of the pain, to use it to define us, to make ourselves martyrs so other people feel sorry for us, so they feel jealous of us, because we have touched a piece of the infinity of this person that can no longer be touched? I read that, when someone dies who knows you, a tiny part of yourself dies along with them, the things you shared with them that you didn’t share with anybody else, the way they experienced you, which no one else will ever have the exact same experience.

If that’s the case, Alex barely took any of me when she died. And the parts of her — the microscopic, insurmountable parts of her I carried — are contained more in that article than anything I can write.

You know how I said that, even when you barely know someone, you don’t even know what you don’t know about them? I just want to tell you about the person who wrote the article. In middle school, she was one of those cooler than/not-as-cool-as people. We were definitely friendly and definitely not friends. Maybe she wore shirts with sports teams on them and I scoffed at her. Maybe I wore shirts with sports teams on them, hoping people didn’t think less of me because I was in camouflage.

Let me tell you what she does today. She’s a reporter for the Philly Inquirer. She’s won a Pulitzer. She’s a reporter — she uses the paper as a platform to show how public schools are fighting dropouts and raising prodigies and how a ghetto school went a year without fights. I think of what she’s doing and I tremble. I feel reverent. I think of the once-a-month phone calls I make to my state senator, the stories I write that try to make people laugh — it’s necessary, I know, but with the few people I make feel a little better, I wish I could figure out how to do as much straight-up good with my life as her.

Is that hubris? Chutzpah? A wish to touch more other lives, and my own basic egocentrism? Or is it that same feeling we get when people we know die, wanting to absorb their life’s glory into our own?

It is neither, I think. Maybe I’m wrong. Or maybe it’s covetousness — the kind we talk about in the Bible, the kind that’s not I wish I had that but how can I get one too, the kind where we see greatness and it inspires us to do great things. It’s been eons since I’ve talked to a stranger but maybe I should. It’s been forever since I’ve put on Tori Amos, since I’ve listened to music that made me dance without thinking about it. Our long winter is over. Maybe I should.

 

photo by Bostankorkulugu

Sympathy Pains for the Speaker’s Stand

I wrote a new poem! Go here to read the whole thing. Usually I write (well, usually I try to write) on paper, because I take more time with each word, the physical effort of it. Today I had too much to do, and I just opened the posting screen and let the poem all fall out. I knew exactly the image that it should have, but by now (January 2021, still a week after the Capitol insurrection) we're all sick of that image. A little creative Googling, and I found this. Felt right. And just enough of a twist on the original image. (I tried to find a source for it, but couldn't. Whoever created it, fait accompli.)

Anyway, here's the poem.

I’ve been drinking soup out of mugs in the morning
calling it coffee
stretching my mouth wider so that
nobody notices the noodles

These days I feel so sorry for the world
everyone is upset about a faraway foreign government
being overthrown in Washington
I’m just like, at least it’s not your family

This morning my flavor of coffee is my own anxiety
and I’m blowin’ on it right now cause it’s too hot
Needing the simple on/off switch of caffeine
while everything else is too unreliable

Feels a little too much like an abandoned store
at the end of an apocalypse, mobs of moms and incels
ransacking baseball bats and canned vegetables
while I’m patiently waiting in a line that never advances

Me, I’m nothing
selfless self-important something stuck on the way to salvation
trying to feel the pain of the universe
and drown out my own while I’m at it
Me I’m nothing          and I like it that way

Monument Valley, a poem

Tonight I just wanted to sleep alone
each touch of skin and furtive blanket movement

nails across the blackboard 
of my sleep.

Sometimes I pray because I don’t know what else to do
then drive myself crazy till sunset.

Freed prisoners will commit a crime
to return to the solace of jail.

I’ve been listening to music by dead people
hoping to set their souls at ease

though it might be because there’s nothing
I want to listen to.

Tonight I am having trouble surrendering
to the night, my body quaking 

with each wave of thought, unable to disconnect
from the maelstrom of my head

How I wish for something diagnosable
The ability to put a limit to my problems, say this is it

draw a box around them
then step outside it

G-d just seems to never want tonight to end
I open the blinds to the field of unblinking stars

Wondering what happens if I start walking among them
and don’t stop till I reach what comes next


______
Image from page 138 of The call of the stars; a popular introduction to a knowledge of the starry skies with their romance and legend (1919)

There Is Always a Graffiti Maker

This is part of a story I've been writing for, yikes, way longer than it should have taken me. If you want, you can read from the beginning, or just start here.

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In Flagstaff we checked the mileage, realized Albuquerque was only four and a half hours away. That was basically less than 2 movies. That was a tiny slice of our days. We had the longest days, didn’t we?, especially waking up early, the sun shoving through the sheer curtains in the motel room, having forgotten to smush the normal curtains closed.

Not that it mattered, because Joey kept us on schedule anyway. Joey was our matron, our den mother, our sheep dog and our shepherd and our team coach all in one: landing on top of me in the morning, then bounding over to Elyse’s bed, slopping his tongue over our faces and digging his nose into our armpits and reminding us in great amounts of glorious slobbery slime that it was time for his morning walk.

I loved walking Joey. He was no higher than my waist, but strong, always with a determination and a clear direction. Later that year, in summer, once I had made it to the East Coast and moved in with an Orthodox aspiring hip-hop DJ in a warehouse deep in Hasidic Williamsburg, I would learn from rendezvouses with kids in pizza places and kosher markets that Hasidic kids, by and large, dreaded dogs. The families had so many kids that there was no money to have pets, and no space. It puzzled me so, since the only way I managed to get up in time for morning prayers was Joey. Caring for a dog was so much like being a religious Jew: this constant presence, nagging but righteously demanding, diverting your attention away from the ego and reminding you of the miracle of Creation and the demands of a higher power.

We circled back to the row of crystal shops. They were slowly opening up, one by one, like heavy eyelids rustling up motivation after a heavy sleep. The first we entered was almost a clothes boutique for crystals, a well-dressed if slightly ’80s-looking woman who inquired what we were looking for, which colors or styles or what we wanted to correct in our lives. “Just browsing,” I half-muttered, half-swallowed up, those instincts honed in me since teenagerhood of being in stores solely to have somewhere to be, never any interest in actually buying something. To my surprise, Elyse said, quick and guilelessly, “I’m looking for a love spell.”

“Sure, I can show you our love potions section,” said the woman, taking us down an aisle whose shelves were sparsely populated — or was it generously spread out? — with caterpillar-like crystals crawling their way across stone, gorgeously smooth stones the softly postuled shape of breasts, with a breastlike incline and curve, with intensely spiny knifelike undersides full of sharp crystal.

“Now, are we looking for a gift for a lover, or a spell to arouse the interests of someone who hasn’t yet fallen under your thrall?”

“A gift,” said Elyse coyly.

They narrowed it down to two: a darkly spiraling purple cone and a sort of cotton candy pinkish-white bowl-shaped structure. Both were distinctly more femme than anything I’d identify with Elyse, and it made me wonder about this trip, this mysterious endpoint of hers, who she might be and what sort of life might lie after these few weeks for Elyse, for Joey.

She settled on the purple cone. The woman boxed it up, and sinking into the pillowing tissue paper it looked like Darth Vader’s evil castle tucked inside a nest of peaceful clouds. As we walked by the other stores, we couldn’t avoid window-shopping, or second-guess window-shopping, which is what you do when you’ve already bought what you set out to buy but you can’t help thinking, was it the right choice, and what if, and would they take returns. I caught sight of the proprietor of one other establishment, a hippie woman in a long flowing skirt with her hair tied in a dangling thin cloth, skin the color of the desert sand, watching me as I watched her. I had on a baseball cap over my yarmulke and I couldn’t help thinking, does she know I’m Jewish? And then, is she?

I asked Elyse if she wanted to stop anywhere. She said no, and we kept walking.

We hung out in a park with gorgeously sinister graffiti tags and waited for the people who’d made them to pass by. The town had a newspaper filled with punk-band ads and snarky personal essays, but no cool kids, no outcasts, barely anyone on the street. We lay in the grass all afternoon while Joey went wild trying to scratch his belly with his nose. It didn’t work, and we didn’t find anyone. We didn’t know who we were looking for, but once they showed up, we’d be able to tell.

The town was heating up, and the sun was just starting to lick the horizon, when we thought of dinner, and of the road. Joey stretched in the grass. Elyse checked the time.

“Uh, Matt,” she said. “If we stop for dinner, we aren’t going to get there till eleven thirty.”

I checked my watch. Sure enough: the day had gone, and what felt like early evening in this temperate desert town would long ago have been nightfall anywhere else.

We grabbed fast food (her: actual McDonald’s, me: peanut butter and a loaf of bread from the mini mart where we got gas), ate in the outdoor seating, then hit the road. We were both from the East Coast before this, but had spent so long living in California that the existence of other states seemed like a tease. When we passed a sign saying we’d entered New Mexico it felt like an event. And when we realized it was still a good number of hours till Albuquerque, the next city on our agenda, we slowed down and started giving the icons on the highway exits more serious attention.

Soon, we realized that was not the optimal plan. I dug out a AAA manual and started flipping pages. The only motel we could find didn’t allow pets. “It’s only an icon on a page in an old book,” I suggested. “Maybe they do in real life.”

We got there and there was an even bigger sign on the door. But the place looked so picturesque, it seemed a cruel lie. It was one of those motels where the doors had pastel colors and different numbers. The office was in its own cabin, wooden with a triangle roof, built into the side of a cliff. We sat in the car and debated whether to go in and ask, not say anything and try to sneak Joey in, or keep driving. Driving was out of the question. It was late, we were tired, and there were no buildings at all on the horizon, let alone a motel with vacant rooms.

Inside it was homely. Red velvet curtains. Framed family photos. The woman at the desk looked like a Golden Girl, her hair plastic and symmetrical, sweetly wrinkled jowls of cheeks. Her voice was the sweetest thing, and I would swear she knitted her sweater herself. She gave us a look when Elyse said two beds — we were getting used to that — and when she walked away, I whispered to Elyse, “Let’s just ask.”

Elyse looked on the verge of agreeing with me. Right before the woman returned, she hissed to me, sidelong, without making eye contact, “Just don’t.”

“Here are your keys,” said the woman, slipping them across.

“Thanks,” I said. “We’ll just get the bags and unpack.”

On the way out the door, I said to Elyse, “What’s wrong?”

“That,” she nodded across the counter at the wall.

There, in the center of dozens of family photos, was one with a more elaborate frame, gold, with gilt covering and a sort of genuflectable position. It was of President George W. Bush, and it was autographed. Bush, of course, had been on the radio all week, a vote on gay marriage was up, he was promising to reject it. His rejection, as we drove deeper and deeper into the country, and left the ocean farther and farther behind, was celebrated more and more, and its implications were darker and darker.

The woman at the counter, apparently resolved to our cohabitational weirdness, offered up a gentle wave as we left. I went into the car, slung a suitcase over my shoulder and held another at my side. Elyse quietly, quietly cuddled Joey against her, kept pace with me, and together, we slipped into the room.

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