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.

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.

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

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.]

Here’s a portion of how I described the book in Population 485:

I have never seen any photographs of Cartwright, but the title page of Western Wild Animals is faced by an engraving tagged with the caption, “David’s Return to Camp.”  He wears a white beard and a flat cap, and he is striding down a wooded trail, a rifle in his right hand and a dead deer balanced over his left shoulder.  In short, he looks like a forbidding version of the Quaker Oats man.  A selection from the preface seems a continuation of the furrow in his brow:

He is…not a professional book maker, and he knows that it is only by practice that there comes any great degree of perfection in any art or trade.  What he gives you, he puts upon the basis of an experience of forty years, and gives it with that assurance that he believes should come of practical knowledge, as opposed to any hypothetical and visionary trash.

No dancing ‘round the campfire with patchouli and rain sticks, then.  All well and good.  But here’s where my ears really pricked:

Since the author of this book claims for himself an incompetency to the task of putting it into shape, and the more exact wording of its pages, and has placed that part of the work into the hands of another, it is due to him to say that…

Just a cotton-pickin’ minute.  Back to the title page.  Western Wild Animals, etc, and etc.  By David W. Cartwright.  In much smaller print: Written by Mary F. Bailey.  Turns out David W. had a ghostwriter.

Thanks to nanaze for the note.

Why do software/equipment makers remove things like this?  It was a fundamentally useful option.  Without the keystroke ability, transcription takes twice as long.  When I contacted customer service, they said:

We are aware of this issue, and hope to have it resolved in a future release but do not have a timeframe for when this will be fixed.

I’m not yelling at anyone, just honestly baffled by any process in which an “upgrade” includes removing a fundamentally useful capability.

I said thanks because the room was full of people who spend their every working day introducing readers to books, one by one, hand-to-hand.  I would be nowhere without them.  Above all I thanked them not so much for helping me tell my stories but for helping me share the stories of others…because it is in the unanticipated stories of others that readers seem to find resonance and – sometimes – a measure of peace.  With these comments I had my brother and his little family in mind.

Before the event, I signed a mountain of books.  This is only one stack.  There were many more.  Still, it seems easier than logging.  Again, a tip of the hardhat to my brother.

After giving my heartfelt thanks, I used the remainder of my time to share critical insights related to bovine artificial insemination, because that’s what I think people expect at a literary gathering.

Most of all, though, I gawked.  I love my mostly non-literary life.  As in: I fed the pigs sour goat milk and old bread right before I left for this event (did shower first).  And took the dang garbage out to the mailbox.  But then a short drive later, I was listening to Neil Gaiman spin an effortless, wry, witty tale of how he came to discover he had accidentally become Midwestern – even as he spoke in his fabulous burbling English accent.  I got to talk shop with David Wroblewski, a gentle man and engaging conversationalist.  I was able to witness as Elizabeth Berg paid loving tribute to her parents.  I got to hear Todd Boss read a poem that brought my father to mind and tears to my eyes.  I got to look over three tables and think, “Holy shnikies, that’s Jonathan Safran Foer!“  I got to hear children’s book authors discuss the creation of books I’ve read to my own little girls.  And I got to meet some of the people who put my books in boxes and ship them all across the United States.

In short, it was kid-in-a-candy-store time.

Finally, in the category of things a guy never anticipates when he’s in nursing school twenty-some years back, I got Twittered by Neil Gaiman.  I would be a disingenuous fakey-fraud if I pretended that’s not the coolest thing since the new chickens started laying.  Thank you, sir.

“I’ve always wanted to be what I have become, a journeyman writer,” he told The Guardian of London in 1994.

I also liked this bit:

He was the founder and life president of the Association for the Annihilation of the Aberrant Apostrophe, a fictional organization dedicated to combating false plurals like tomato’s and road signs like the one he spotted near Sevenoaks, with letters three feet high that read BUSE’S ONLY.