In Memory of the First Author Who Broke My Heart

Daniel Keyes, the author of Flowers for Algernon, left us this week at the age of 86. I never met the man or really knew much about him but his story had a profound effect on my life. I read his book Flowers for Algernon, identified with and rooted for its central character Charlie as he underwent his intellectual metamorphosis and cried after his Icarus like decent. Almost 40 years later I’m still a little haunted by the fates of Charlie and his friendly rival Algernon the mouse.

I first encountered Flowers for Algernon sometime back in the early 1970’s. This was during my hominid phase of reading, my hunter gatherer instincts leading me to forage in discount book bins and rickety garage sale foldout tables for anything legible with a flashy cover. I truly read anything back then that an early adolescent might find interesting, regardless of genre or style or simple good taste. I read tons of Tarzan, hulking heaps of Hercules Poirot and stacks of Sherlock. I read Tolkien and Heinlein, explored my way through Andre Norton’s Witch World series and flew along with Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern.  I also read box loads of old National Geographic magazines, Reader’s Digest condensed books and pulp science fiction and detective magazines  and when none of that was available to my greedy eyes I read the back of my cereal boxes.

With all that reading going on you’d think I would have been prepared for the impact of Flowers for Algernon but let me tell you that book gut punched me. The brilliant devise of the book was it was told through Charlie’s journals, beginning with the halting misspelled words of a man with an 86 IQ and slowly advancing to the prose of a man with an IQ of over 180. I found myself cheering him along his assent, commiserating with him at the troubles he found at the peak of his intellect but then my heart started breaking at his rapid decent, the grammar degenerating along the way to the inevitable conclusion. Far worse than seeing a beloved character undergo sudden catastrophe was witnessing this terrible decline, like sitting with a loved one during a terminal illness.

I’ve read countless books since Flowers for Algernon and a few of them have broken my heart as well, but somehow, that first heartbreak is the one you remember the clearest.

 

 

Learning to Write Well Told Stories

I’ve always loved a story well told and never realized how difficult a thing that can be until I started trying to tell my own well told stories. After a lifetime immersed in words, both written and heard, one would think it a simple thing, just tell the story well. I know a good story when I see or hear it but trying to create my own story, well told or otherwise, has proven to be one of my greatest challenges in life. The struggle to capture my thoughts and ideas in the written form has enriched my life far beyond my youthful daydreams of the Writer’s Life, tweed jackets with leather elbow patches and everlasting worldwide fame, the process of writing has made me a better person.

Writing is an art and like all the arts it not only influences its audience but profoundly affects the minds of those who create it. The way I view the world, how I perceive the people and things around me, has been influenced by my writing. The challenge of finding the perfect expression or word for something, searching for that key detail that encapsulates the whole person or situation I’m trying to describe or finding the right combination of words that make the text leap out and sing to the reader is just like a painter searching for just the right shade of color on the canvas or a potter seeking the proper texture on the wheel.

To be honest with you I don’t think I will ever master this art of writing, in my lifetime or a dozen more like it, but that’s OK. It is the process of writing that has taught me so much over the years; it has taught me empathy toward others and created a greater understanding of myself. To occasionally find that right word or pinpoint the perfect detail in a story I’m working on is a huge thrill but it has also taught me how to see those things in the works of others. My appreciation and joy of a story well told has increased tenfold since I’ve tried learning to write my own.

With all that said it is both awesome and more than a little humbling to announce that one of my stories has been published in the 2013 edition of the Clackamas Literary Review. The essay is called One Last Meal and if this were the kind of blog that told well told stories rather than talked about them I would post it on this site. The story is about my mother and her death 20 years ago and to be honest I’m just too emotionally close to it to fairly judge it, lets just say I’m incredibly honored to have it printed in the company of so many other Well Told Stories.

Book Hoarding

A peek inside my garage

How many of you out there are book hoarders?  You know who you are, you love books, really love them, not just for reading but amassing large multicolored piles of them, filling up boxes and crates or, where space permits, overstuffing groaning bookshelves.  You’re one of those people who would much rather visit the dustiest and moldiest used bookstore than go to any clean modern library because they don’t expect you to return your books after reading them.  You panic if you don’t have at least half a dozen books on hand to read when you finish the book you’re on now.  People have asked you the following question when they have seen only a fraction of your collection, “Have you read ALL of those books?” 

Unless you are blessed with an uncommon amount of storage space in your home you can hardly hide the fact that you are a book hoarder.  Clear horizontal spaces become rarer as books and magazines with articles  you haven’t gotten around to reading yet smother them with their presence.  You find stray books in odd locations throughout the house, creeping by the toilet and bathtub, hiding under the bed and perching above major appliances like refrigerators and TVs.  Yes, you can deny your book hoarding ways all you want but your friends and family know you better. Why else have they stopped shopping for gifts for you all those years ago and started buying you those shiny new gift cards from all those maga bookstore franchises?  

My name is Carl and I’m a book hoarder.  I guess it started when I was in 6th grade.  I started reading JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Ring series from my middle school library and had just started The Return of the King when the school year ended.  I begged and pleaded with my mother all summer long to take me to the public library to check that book out, but the library was a whole seven miles away and she wasn’t going to drive that far just to satisfy a childish whim.  God, I suffered that summer.  I was compulsively reading everything I could get my hands on, reading and rereading the breakfast cereal boxes at breakfast, reading old Sears catalogues and even trying to read some of my mother’s Harlequin Romance novels.  I guess I wasn’t desperate enough to actually read one through.  Finally, the summer ended and I got my hands on that book, but I read it a changed man.  No longer would I take books for granted, having suffered the pains of withdrawal, I vowed I would never go through such agonies again.  I began hoarding, packing boxes with old paperbacks of sci-fi and detective fiction, Tarzan novels and Conan books, Sherlock Holmes collections and Lovecraft stories .  A wild eclectic mix of genres amassed by an addict.  Thanks to hoarding I never had to go without a book again!

Tell Me a Story

Tell me a story.  These words are as ancient as Man is himself.  Stories told around the fire to keep the night at bay, stories told to understand the world around us and stories told to tell us who we are and where we come from.  There’s something primal about a good story, something that connects us to the world and the people around us.  I can remember my first picture books as a child and even more special to me I can remember my mother and father reading them to me. I can vividly recall how intimate it felt to have them read to me, how special it was to share these moments between us, nothing else existed then but their words and the pictures on the page.  A feeling so wonderful I never wanted it to end.

When I got older my favorite part of grade school was reading time.  The teachers I had back then all had  names that started with Missus and all  of them knew the trick of turning down the lights a bit before opening up their books to us. I can remember some of those stories better than the teachers who read them.  The magic and heartache of the Velveteen Rabbit still rings clearly in my head though I can’t for the life of me remember the woman who read it, though I can still hear her voice when I think hard enough and close my eyes.  Later on I can remember my 4th grade teacher Mrs. Bruce much more clearly, not for the lessons she taught, but for her love of British children’s author Roald Dahl.  That year she read to us Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator and James and the Giant Peach.  Thank you Mrs. Bruce, a part of me will love you forever.

The book that made the greatest impact on me back then was read by my 5th grade teacher, another worthy woman whose name I can’t remember.  But I do remember Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time!  What an amazing book that was, a science fiction story of three children, Meg Murry, her younger genius brother Charles Wallace Murry and their friend Calvin O’Keefe who travel the far reaches of time and space via tesseract with the mysterious Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who and Mrs. Which in order to rescue the Murry children’s astrophysicist father. That book fully captured my imagination and heart and though I have read it many times since, it was that first reading, in that long ago classroom, that I most vividly recall.  I really think that this was the very first book where I entirely lost myself in the story and yearned for more when it was finished.  What more can you ask for from a book than that?

The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant

Back in the summer of 1980 one of my buddies whom I used to play Dungeons and Dragons with, gave me three books and told me I had to read them right away.  By three books I mean the first three volumes of what would become known as The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever and by right away I mean 30 years later. Yep, you heard me, 30 years. What can I say, I got distracted.

I did try to read them a couple of times, taking them off of some bookshelf I had constructed or digging them out from a cardboard box, I fully intended to honor my friend and read each one, except I couldn’t get past that first chapter of that first book, Lord Foul’s Bane. It’s about a leper… and he’s complaining. Mind you, if I was a leper I would be complaining too. Leprosy is a horrible disease and if I was treated half as poorly as Thomas Covenant was in that first chapter you would be hearing about it. Poor Thomas looses his wife and infant son, his friends and half of his left hand in that first chapter and is justifiably upset about it when the town he lives near adds insult to injury when they decides he should move his leperous self to a another zip code. This makes for some seriously depressing stuff leading me to ask what the hell does this have to do with the cool artwork illustrating the book’s cover? I wanted cool battle scenes in underground caverns, like those in a full 90% of my other fantasy novels, not this sniveling leper! Oh to be young and callous.

Recently I took the books down again from their new shelves and gave them another try. As a middle-aged man who has experienced a few of his own setbacks in life I found Thomas Covenant’s plight much more understandable and quite frankly more compelling than that of the average fantasy hero. Covenant is fragile, not only in body but in spirit, he seems to have an almost infinite capacity for pain and self loathing that makes his inward reflections as interesting as the landscape he suddenly finds himself transported to.

Yup, he gets transported to another land by the end of that first chapter and had I only stuck with Thomas Covenant all those years ago for only a few more pages I would have gotten to all that fantasy stuff those book covers promised. The funny thing was, by the time I read them 30 years later, it was the complaining leper I was really interested in. His inner journey proved to be much more fascinating than all those underground battles.