Perhaps some day I will be able to write the piece that adequately explains the debt I owe Jim Harrison. For now, it is enough to say that when I read Just Before Dark sometime around 1995, it blew my writing to bits. How clearly I remember sitting in the old green chair on Main Street in New Auburn, reading and reading and reading and marking and making notes and then reading everything else he had written to that point, and hungrily attempting to apply everything I was learning to my own constrained typing. And the stuff I wrote after reading Harrison was different. Different enough that it finally caught someone’s eye somewhere, and now five books later every time I hear Harrison’s name I tend to babble on, but it’s a heartfelt babble.
The man has a reputation as a nettlesome handful. Watch the video and you will draw your own conclusions regarding the nature of his mileage. These things are irrelevant to me. We have never spoken. Never been anywhere near each other, far as I know. Although I believe we were in Jackson, Mississippi, on overlapping nights. I was offered the opportunity to meet him then. I declined. Couldn’t imagine what I’d say that would amount to anything more than useless pudding. I don’t regret the decision. It is his work, you see. It broke something loose in me. If I can’t express it clearly here, I can’t imagine how I would explain it to him.
If you decide to watch the clip, note what he says from 5:08 to 5:40. I think of my mother surrounding me with books, I think of my father taking us to the farm, I think of the blind luck chance that dropped me into this…and I hope he feels my gratitude somewhere in the air.
Every week I receive a number of manuscripts, books, and email attachments from authors requesting that I read the material and provide them with a review or other comments. I receive many more emails simply asking if I would be willing to read and review a manuscript if it was sent my way. Some of these materials come direct from publishers; the rest are sent by the author personally. Nearly all of them are posted politely and without onus, but I get guilt pangs anyway, because, A) guilt (lapsed post-Calvinist flavor) is one of my specialties, and B) I know I probably won’t be able to fulfill the request.
I love to read. I love to read even more than I love to write. Well, wait a minute, that was a tad hasty, I’d say it’s 50/50. But the preponderance of my reading is tied to something I’m writing. And when I’m not reading something for purposes of researching or fleshing out a specific writing project, I’m chiseling away at the “life list” of Things I Just Gotta Read Before I Croak and Who Knows When That Might Be. My office is filled with stacks and stacks of books read and unread and so is my pole barn (and let’s not even discuss my electronic and audiobook devices).
All of these books are a happy problem.
Also a happy problem: The 80-100 days I spend on the road researching writing projects or trying to get my own work out there to a wider audience. Worth every second when I get to shake hands and thank readers in person. Plus I have gotten a lot of writing done in the Super 8.
Not a problem at all: The blessed responsibility to spend some time on Dadhood.
What I’m working up to here – I’m a bit of a beat-around-the-bush’er when it comes to saying anything but “yes” – is that the odds of me being able to read or comment on something sent my way are vanishingly slim. It is not impossible, but it is sitting on Impossible’s couch. And I don’t take this lightly, because I have had many people – known and not known – offer kind and boostful words in the days since I first got serious about typing. So what I want you to know is that if you sent me something and I didn’t get to it or write it up somehow somewhere, it wasn’t because I was being snooty or snotty or formed grim opinions, it was simply because I’m working and being my version of Dad, and you should grow neither meek nor thunderous nor should you lose heart but rather press on and write and write, and write some more, and set up talks and signings and read at open mic events and go on book tours if they’re arranged and set up your own if they’re not, and grow your audience one reader at a time, and set up your blog and tend it and write some more and share your work and just don’t stop unless it’s not fun anymore. That’s what worked for me. And it’s still fun. I’m a lucky fool to have fallen on this wagon, and I know it.
I am. More than one, as a matter of fact. More on that in time. As the photo below demonstrates, there is still a ways to go before anything gets slapped between two covers:
C. Dale Young is a poet and an inspiration to me (in particular I have acknowledged him for a piece he wrote that helped me shape a part of Truck). He just attended a literary convention and talked about it in a recent blog post:
Best thing overheard yesterday:
“I don’t really know what they do here, but I know they all look like they are in pain. I think they are all writers.”
–Convention Center person answering question from a participant of the Auto Show next door
A woman who greatly influenced my writing is gone. We were not acquaintances. I seem to recall seeing her speak once, but I might have been remembering a video I watched in a Bruce Taylor poetry workshop long ago. Her work is on my bookshelf, and – if she would allow me to say so – between the lines of my own pages.
Some of her work is here. Hear the power of her reading here. [Sometimes that audio link doesn't work. Here's the text of the poem she's reading.]
Visit Mike on Facebook too!