Setting out into the adult world the first thing that had to be established was my draft status. A high lottery number took care of that and suddenly my central preoccupation vanished. I wanted to write and climb mountains. I had been to Mexico on a climbing trip and found very little information in English about climbing there. I would go to Mexico, find all the information, and write a guidebook about what I found. My ride dropped me at an intersection in the desert north of El Paso in the middle of the night and the adventure began under the darkest sky and the brightest stars I had ever seen.
In my recent past life I worked with writers who were also teachers of writing. We presented “craft talks” to our students, even if we could not agree on what a craft talk actually was. This, for example, may be a craft talk.
“I would write and climb mountains” doesn’t really address the reasoning. Why do those things? I’ve never been very articulate about that. I know that my love of writing follows my love of reading. In his journals John Cheever wrote “This, then, is the thrill of writing, of playing on this team, the truly thrilling sense of this as an adventure; . . . the density of the rain forest, the shyness of venomous serpents, the resounding conviction that one will, tomorrow, find the dugout and the paddle and the river that flows past the delta to the sea.” I share these thrills, this conviction. I want to play on that same team.
When I returned from Mexico I had notes, a journal, photographs, and a couple books. I bought a sheaf of 500 sheets of typing paper. Very few words were ever written and it would be about a decade before the sheaf of typing paper was used up. I put all the Mexico stuff into a Strohs beer box and carried it around with me for a few decades.
Climbing was easier than writing. After about a decade, my writing caught up to my climbing. I can’t pinpoint the moment. It happened gradually over two or three years like an iceberg rolling over in a frozen sea, captured in film in slow motion.
One rationalization for not writing (many would follow under other circumstances) was that if a guidebook existed it would have the effect of making the mountain travel too easy. My reward, I rationalized, had been figuring out all that stuff for myself. Why would I wish to deprive the next person of that experience?
Some of my fellow writing teachers seemed to harbor unspoken questions about whether writing could, in fact, be taught. But I think we agreed that it can be learned, and that learning can be facilitated, encouraged, (sometimes discouraged) edited, steered, cheered.
In 1981 R.J. Secor published a guide to the volcanoes of Mexico. It was exactly the book I would have written. But by 1981 I had no regrets whatever about this. I harbored loftier writing goals–goals I instinctively did not share with others–than writing a guidebook.
Denis Johnson talking to the fiction editor at The New Yorker about his last book, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, which would be published shortly after his death. She was asking why the book took so long, seven years, to write. He said that seven years wasn’t long at all, and in fact it took him on average ten to twelve years to write a story from “initial impulse to abandonment.” He never comments on “the abandonment,” but the remark suggests that the work is not actually finished, only that he has stopped working on it. Later in the interview he remembers that one of the anecdotes recounted in the story “The Largesse of the Sea Maiden,” in fact, was first written down 38 years earlier. Thus he revised his ten-to-twelve year estimate to complete a work to thirty-eight.
Most of my books, four of the five I’ve written, are comprised of short discrete pieces, which over time accrued and became books. The book that did not accrue in that way was a novel, Forty Crows. That took me a long time to write and was finally published in 2018. I had around a hundred and fifty pages written, over many years, by December of 2006. On January 1, 2007 I committed to writing a single page a day for a year. This was a contract I had entered into with myself on many a New Year’s day in the past; after all, in one year I would have 365 new pages. But I had never before got past about day ten. What was different this year? I was in my fifties. I couldn’t fool myself any longer: it was now or never, with never looking the more likely scenario.
This was in the pre-laptop days, when our family of four shared a single computer. The computer sat in an alcove of the dining room and looked out on our backyard in the rural Midwest. Just below the window was an enormous forsythia bush in which I once counted nine cardinals sheltering from the wind. Every morning I tried to write for an hour before the rest of the family awoke and the daily drama of getting the kids off to school began.
Among Hemingway’s more famous remarks about writing is “I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.” This is commonly interpreted to mean that when one stops writing for the day they should stop almost mid-sentence so as to know where they are going when they take the work up the next day. But often when writing Forty Crows I did not know where the story was going. Some days when I finished writing I didn’t know what would happen next. I only knew that something would happen, because I was committed to the writing. This is more along the lines of E.L. Doctorow’s’ famous analogy in his Paris Review interview: “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
I think about climbing at night by headlamp, concentrating fully only on the terrain illuminated within arm’s reach, within the circle of light in front of me.
Forty Crows takes place mostly in Mexico City. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that I began thinking about it that day after I stepped into the Texas desert, crossed the border to Ciudad Juarez and boarded the train, second class to save money, to Mexico City. That was 1973. Although the book was finished in 2008, it didn’t find a publisher until 2018. An expanse of forty-five years, if we use Denis Johnson’s accounting methods.
For most of the ten years between finishing Forty Crows and it being published, the manuscript had only one reader (not counting any editors who may have looked at it before rejecting it). That reader was my son Macklin. He didn’t say much about it. It was like a secret we shared.
Although my wife is almost always my first reader, she didn’t read Forty Crows until after it was published. Upon doing so, she asked me: “Who wrote this?”
