Whether He Would or Wouldn't Is Up to Me

Last night at his PEN/Faulkner reading on Capitol Hill, Richard Ford quoted Lewis Lapham as saying, "Nothing necessarily follows anything."  He and Washington Post book critic Ron Charles were "onstage" (in a church) in conversation about whether a character's action can rightly be deemed believable or not.  Ford's position was basically that he was the writer, so he could make the character do whatever he wanted him to do.

What a freeing moment for me as a writer.

At the reception afterwards, standing in front of him at the book-signing table, I said, "It was great to hear you say that, because at the summer writing workshops I attend, someone always says, 'Well, I don't believe the character would do that.'"

Ford looked up and said, "Well, now you know the answer!"

(Allow me a brief digression to share this with you: I'm shaking hands with celebrated novelist Richard Ford, yes, that Richard Ford, who wrote Independence Day, the book that won both the Pulitzer Prize AND the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction - the first time any book had won both - and he is signing that same lauded book, writing a personal greeting to me...and I am nervous, tripping over my tongue, telling him I write fiction, too - how embarrassing, did I just tell him that?! - and he looks up at me and asks where I go for my summer workshops, and I say, "Provincetown, the Fine Arts Work Center," and he says, "Oh, yes!" and then goes back to finishing my inscription.  (He lives in New England, after all.)  He is somewhat intimidating, tall and grey-haired, such a literary luminary, but it's mostly his eyes - those blue-grey eyes that are so pale you can almost see into his head, like maybe you could catch a glimpse of some of his ideas, some of the magic and style of his writing, though it's almost frightening to look.  But I'm completely won over by his warmth, so genuine and patient, the way he looks right at you when he's talking to you, the way he takes his time with you, even though he's never seen you before, and when he says, "It's nice to meet you" and "thank you for coming," he takes his time, and you get the strong feeling he really means it - as if he hasn't already said it to the twenty people before you and as if he isn't going to say it to the fifty people behind you...as if he's not a 70 year-old famous writer who could probably use the rest more than you but won't get to bed until long after you.  Despite his austere publicity photos, Richard Ford is one very nice man.)

Why do writers always challenge other writers in questioning the behavior of their characters?  Sure, actions usually need the support of motivation, but sometimes people do stuff seemingly out of left field.  Would anyone have thought the following plausible?

• A young boy considered a "normal kid" by the neighbors goes on a slashing spree one day at school, severely injuring many, and gets charged as an adult
• A young couple takes their baby and toddler child on a boat into the open ocean, intending to sail around the world
• A grad student waiting for his wife to travel cross-country to join him in married student housing drops out of grad school and returns home to help her raise the child fathered by his (former) best friend

Though none of these seems particularly likely, all of them did happen in real life.  But workshop people would tear plots like these to shreds, claiming he/they "wouldn't do that."  Is human behavior that predictable?  Do we always know what people are or are not going to do?

And do we want to write or read only stories in which everyone behaves as expected and no one does anything surprising?  ZZZZZZZZZ  Not me!

Thanks, Richard Ford, for giving me the freedom to let my characters do strange, inappropriate, fascinating things that keep the reader turning pages!

PHOTO CREDIT:  Amazon.com

What He Left Me

Down in the basement of the house where I grew up, on the floor of an old grey metal cabinet that stretched far above my head, were supplies that held silent mystery: flat yellow boxes of Kodak Ektachrome photosensitive paper and scary-looking bottles of developing fluid.  Sometimes I would pick them up and just wonder, excited about my dad's occasional mention of setting up a darkroom.

On another grey cabinet, this one large and squat, with shallow drawers for flat storage of blueprints, sat some kind of developer machine.  We never knew how it worked.

Somewhere in my dad's past, he had apparently developed his own photographs, though he never gave us the details.  That remained for us to imagine, especially when it became clear that the darkroom would never happen.

Dad, always the shutterbug!

We all knew he liked taking pictures.  He documented everything, from holiday dinners (every one of them), to how we looked before going off to church, to the trees in our backyard.  I thought it was kind of ridiculous - and that was during the days of film, when every frame counted and cost something.  Weren't all the poses the same, whether around the dining room table at Thanksgiving or in front of the house on a Sunday morning?  Didn't we always look the same?

After he died in 2004, we discovered that this passion went back to his years as a young adult.  We found boxes and boxes of photos going back to the 1960s, World War II, and even as far back as his early childhood - meaning he kept pictures belonging to his father, who died before WWII.  And in an old Army foot locker were hundreds more photos from his days as a young draftee in the China-Burma-India Theater - along with rolls of movie film.

Young Man, as subject

Too bad he wasn't as good at organizing and mounting pictures as he was at taking them.  Since they were all loose - in envelopes, boxes, or simply bound with a disintegrating rubber band - it's hard to know if he meant for them to be passed on or if it was all just part of his general tendency not to throw anything away.

Whatever the case, he showed me over the decades that it was important to capture moments of time that will never be repeated (even if they seem to recur, in a young boy's mind).  That there was value in documenting events, family get-togethers, the seasons.  That even the ordinary was worth photographing.  And this, I have come to realize, was his greatest gift to me, this way of seeing and valuing life, this sense of urgency to capture a fleeting moment.  

From the time I received my first camera as a child - a cube-shaped Brownie, which I still have - I've always loved taking pictures.  I finally realized recently that this passion was hard-wired in me, and I decided to stop suppressing a years-long drive to pursue photography beyond simple snapshots and see where it would take me as an art form.  In 2012 I jumped in with both feet, crossing over to the visual arts side at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, and taking my first week-long photography workshop.  This summer I will be taking my second one, working with David Hilliard in an exploration of photography as storytelling.  (And in my own full-circle experience, we will be working synergistically with Pam Houston's fiction workshop, which I took three years ago at the Taos Summer Writers' Conference.)

When you're cool, you're always ready

As photography takes up more and more space in my head I feel grateful to my dad.  My friends get impatient with me for "taking 500 shots of the same thing" (that's a direct quote) the same way we would always groan when my dad wanted to take yet another picture of us around the dining room table as the food got cold.  He was on to something and passed a little more of it on to me each time he forgot to wind the camera first and we had to say "cheese" again.

Henri Cartier-Bresson couldn't have summed it up any better.  I've quoted him before in this blog and will likely do so again.  It is so much the reason my dad and I shared a drive to photograph:

Life is once, forever.