Tag Archives: big stone gap, bookstores, Wendy Welch, Jack Beck, roadtrip, wildlife,

THIS STORY IS NOT GOING IN THE BOOK!!!

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My husband became an American citizen this past week, a moment of pride and pleasure for us both–and for the 12 friends who attended the ceremony with us. Wearing his kilt and a broad smile, my beloved took the oath, renounced all foreign potentates, and became a vote-wielding US of A-er.

Meanwhile, my editor and I are racing toward the finish line of delivering my manuscript on time. And in trying to get that narrative to arc its back without hissing, we took out a couple of stories. One of them is so gosh-darn funny AND so timely to Jack’s new status, that we thought it would make a good blog post instead.

Here is the (typical small town) story of “Flaggate,” which will not be appearing anywhere else this season. I should add that Jack and I AND the attendees of the ceremony find this is a sweet and funny story, not a chance to make fun of anyone or anything. Basking as we are in the glow of our newest American, we love to retell this tale. Enjoy!

FLAGGATE

My husband is a laid-back, mellow person, embodying the gentle-soul-in-a-baggy-sweater image of the wise old bookseller. It takes a lot to rile him. So when our town exploded over the simple issue of whether or not to have a farmers market, Jack watched the whole thing with silent bemusement.

Such shenanigans for so little! Henry Kissenger correctly suggested that people fight harder when the stakes are smaller. The town factions pulling at each other (about  local farmers selling healthy foods to people who wanted to buy them) resembled nothing so much as parents of kindergarteners arguing over which team would bat first in the Little League Goodwill Games.

One fine day Jack closed the newspaper on an article ridiculing the “Market Master” plan, and said he was going to the town council to voice his support, along with others in favor of the idea. And off he went.

The town council had never met anybody like Jack—literally. As with many small towns, Big Stone tends to be a place where those who are different—like, say, the man who lives with his mother past the age of 30 and vacations annually at Fire Island—fly below the radar until the glorious day someone says, “Yeah, they’re weird, but they’re ours.”

Visitors to Big Stone still have the local Jewish family pointed out to them. A minister caught in a compromising position prompted folk to drive by his house throwing underwear onto his lawn until he left town. (Likely the poo-pants flingers later rounded up their offerings and donated them to the poor, being caring Christian souls.) Europeans and Asians use our bookshop as an informal support group, a place to talk about that “y’all ain’t from here” wall that foreigners—a group encompassing those from India to Kentucky—each hit at some point.

So as Jack spoke his support for the market, the council listened with quizzical looks on their faces. He repeated his words, slower this time, trying to flatten his Scottish accent for untuned ears. Other Friends of the Market members echoed him with fewer glottal stops. It worked; the town agreed to relinquish a centrally-located parking lot as a location, and offered a small stipend for getting the market going. No mess, no fuss, no bother.

Except, in the aftermath, a campaign started to undo all that. Jack,  who by then had joined the market’s Board of Directors, received a letter from a local merchant, calling him an illegal alien and swearing the writer “would see your green card revoked and you in Hell, Mr. Big Shot Irish Man.”

Back Jack had to go as the market board’s president, and re-request the council’s assistance, since the decision had become “disputed.” If he had any doubts as to how deep feelings ran, they ended when Garth (a benevolent council member) pulled him aside just before the meeting and asked, “Jack, would you mind putting your hand over your heart during the Pledge of Allegiance?”

Jack became momentarily befuddled. In our tiny town, Quakers (which Jack and I are) were just weird enough to sometimes be confused with religious groups who object to pledging the flag. But his council friend clarified. “Two of the other councilors said it was ‘disrespectful’ of you as a foreigner to stand with your hands at your side during Pledge.”

Ours is a patriotic town.

Jack put his hand over his heart during the Pledge of Allegiance, and two of the council members looked over their shoulders at my husband–twice. Standing next to him, I couldn’t help myself. My own hand had up to this point maintained a correctly American position—although it probably should have been over my mouth. The second time they looked back, I took my hand from my heart to twirl my fingers in a wave, smiling brightly.

Neither of them looked again.

Jack laughed it off, but I seethed for days. Big-hearted and easy-going, my husband had never disrespected anyone in his life; he just wanted to help build something good for the town, namely this farmers market so many people had asked for. So I researched what foreigners were supposed to do during the American Pledge of Allegiance, and brought Jack my findings.

“According to the U.S. Code of Conduct, non-Americans should stand quietly with their hands at their sides, facing the flag.”

Jack smiled and took the printout from my hands. “Let it go, Wendy.”

I tried, I really did, but using patriotism as a shield for flat out being meaner than a rattlesnake in the rain irked. Of course, I had underestimated my husband—as had the councilors. Without telling me, he went to their meeting a third time, to thank them for finally agreeing to support the market.

And apologized.

Standing in front of the chamber’s long curved table on its raised dais, Jack said, “It appears that I behaved disrespectfully to you on a previous visit. I am not from this country, and when you pledged allegiance, your flag’s Code of Conduct states that I should have stood facing the flag with my hands at my side, silent and respectful. Instead, I put my hand over my heart. I most sincerely apologize for this, and hope that no one has taken offense. Please be assured I will properly show respect at all future salutes in the way your United States Code of Conduct stipulates.”

One of the councilors who had been checking Jack’s hand position couldn’t find anywhere to put his eyes; his partner reshuffled papers with deep concentration.  The rest of the panel looked either baffled or amused. Garth hid a grin behind his coffee mug. The mayor, a cheerful woman who would have liked people to believe our region less bigoted than circumstances sometimes suggested, let her smile reach her eyes as she thanked Jack for coming, culminating with, “We are lucky to have the diversity you add to our town.”

A murmur of assent rippled around the assembly, while councilor number two still couldn’t get his papers in order.

Keith Fowlkes, one of my friends from the nearby college, often quotes his favorite Chinese proverb: “Ma ma, hoo hoo.” This translates idiomatically two ways: put simply, it is a nice expression for “mediocre at best,” but its more complex etymology suggests that, in life, some days one is the horse, some days the tiger.

I think my husband must be the gentlest tiger in the world.

Me-me-me Memoirs

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Most of you reading this will already know that St. Martin’s Press is releasing The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap: a memoir of friendship, community and the uncommon pleasure of a good book in October. Which makes me very happy, of course.

And very busy. The month of January and (it now appears) most of February are sacrifices to editing. Waking moments are consumed with questions like “where in the story should this part go, where it happened in time or with the stuff it matches philosophically”; “how long should I spend on this painful subject as opposed to the funny stuff, where’s the balance”; and “flow, flow, narrative arc, flow.” Soon they’ll find me in a corner, gibbering sentences full of split infinitives and dangling participles. I’m already boring as a lunch companion.

Patricia Hampl said, in her wonderful memoir The Florist’s Daughter, that nothing is harder to capture in a straightforward flow of words than an ordinary life. She’s right. I’ve been reading a lot of memoirs lately, looking for that elusive quality. Some of the 100 or so I’ve read deal with extraordinary circumstances–like The Russian Word for Snow, about a couple bringing an orphan back to the States through red tape and corruption. And some with very mundane things, such as Sweaterquest: my year of knitting dangerously. It’s a lovely, well-written book about a woman’s attempt to knit a very difficult sweater pattern from an exacting designer.

Yeah. It’s a book about making a sweater. And I really enjoyed it.

The secret to memoirs seems to be that relentless pursuit of ordinariness in extraordinary terms. Memoirs fall into big categories: the silly experiment (A.J. Jacobs spending a year living Biblically, or the number one bestseller in April 2011 about the woman cleaning out her closets to get happy); the city slicker move to the country (Have you got time for a list of these? Printed on paper, it would fill a Subaru.); ordinary people coping with extraordinary circumstances (many of these having to do with illnesses and adoptions); and the homecoming (Mennonite in a Little Black Dress is a great example, and a great read.)

So what makes  a memoir good, asks the soon-to-be-published-author-of-one? Years ago, when I was a young’un cutting my teeth in storytelling, Dan Keding made his first appearance at the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesboro, TN. Everybody loved him, and since my job at that time involved setting up storytelling workshops at ETSU, where I was the grad assistant in the storytelling program, we quickly booked him for one. During his three days with us, Dan gave some great advice about personal storytelling, which I can’t exactly quote, but here it is from memory twenty years down the road:

A personal story is not about you. It’s about all the people around you. If you are the hero of your own story, it’s not going to come out right, ring true, or be interesting enough to hold people’s attention. You won’t be able to tell the difference between what’s important to you and what’s important to the story. Talk about what happened to other people first, and how you felt about that, what you did because of it, will naturally flow as part of the story.

Then he told us  about growing up in Chicago with a Holocaust survivor friend named Stan. His story was about Stan, but when it was over, we all knew so much more about Dan. And we understood what he’d meant about not being the star, just shining through the background.

It’s good advice for memoir writers. The story is the star, we the privileged, lucky ones who get to tell it. That’s certainly a theme emerging as I’m wrestling The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap into final form. It’s fun, and it’s hard work, and even when I’m ready to chuck my laptop across the room and take up sheep farming (not a slight on sheep or their peeps; this appeals to me!) it’s compelling. The bookstore has a good story behind it, an American story, as one editor put it. It resonates with small towners, big dreamers, crushed spirits and persistent cusses; it’s my job to make sure they get their story told.

So I’d best get back at it. But because they’ve been on my mind lately, here are some memoirs that I thought did a great job of  telling a simple, or complex, or personal, or universal, story.

Cherries in Winter, Suzan Colon – a nice read about family history and current economic times, weaving together past and present and the strain of resilience that threads from generation to generation, particularly but not exclusively mother to daughter

Confessions of  a Prep School Mommy Handler, by Wade Rouse – Now here’s a good example of how an ordinary story can capture people with no common interest. I’m not gay, male, rich, a teacher, or interested in the doings of prep schools, yet I laughed my way through this book. Rouse makes it right there for you, full of what it would feel like. Humor and truth dance the jitterbug together in his work.

Heart in the Right Place, Carolyn Jourdan – [disclosure: Carolyn is also a friend] This is a universal-theme story about doing the right thing by family, and how silly that can get. The “coming home” motif from Washington D.C. to a small town is thought-provoking, offset by the hilarity of pandering to hypochondriacs and x-raying goats.

If You Lived Here I’d Know Your Name, by Heather Lende – a fun read specifically about living in small-town Alaska, but more about just living

My Korean Deli, by Ben Ryder Howe – Okay, so a lot of the books I’ve enjoyed have the theme of people burning up or out and leaving power-play places for “simpler” circumstances. But this cliche only goes so far for Howe’s book. Editor by day, deli owner by night, family man always, he tries to negotiate his own life when control seems to hard to get. The story is funny, poignant, and sweet, and it might be a little sadder than anyone wants to admit.

The Necklace, by Cheryl Jarvis – Perhaps less memoir than journalism, this is a professional writer’s interviews with 13 women who went together and bought a diamond necklace, then shared it across a year. What they learned about themselves, material consumption, values and being American got really interesting without being particularly preachy. A lot of food for thought, especially as the author keeps a light touch. She tells you what happened, not how you should feel about it.

The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio by Evelyn Ryan – The movie actually did the book justice, but her turns of phrase are so very worth reading.

Queen of the Road, by Doreen Orion – A neurotic cat, a fitted-out-for-camping bus, and two people with a huge poodle and another cat set off to discover themselves by pretending to discover America. Fun, cheerful, like a sing-a-long for writers…

Riding the Bus with my Sister, Rachel Simon – This is a lovely read about family ties tied up in a lot of details and annoyances. Never saw the Lifetime Movie, assuming they would seriously mess such a subtle, nuanced book up big time…

So Many Books, So Little Time, Sara Nelson – a cheerful romp through why we read, what we read, when we read it, and how all that jumbles together to make us who we are

A final word to the wise: if you are trying to publish a memoir, go poke about a bookstore and library, read several, and see how they put their stories together. Then, when you write up your proposal and send it off to an agent or publisher, do NOT tell them your book is just like Eat, Pray, Love. Trust me on this one. :]