I cannot feel my body. I cannot feel my body, and someone is screaming. It takes me a couple of seconds to realize that the screaming voice is mine, so I stop. My first impulse is to cry. "It's really not going to do you any good," a voice in my head says. The voice is right, so instead I start chanting, "God will make everything OK." Over and over.

There is no place for me to move, and moreover, there is no place for me to lay my head down comfortably. My body is in a contorted angle in the passenger seat of the crashed S10 truck. Smoke like dust rising out of a dirty shaken blanket emanates from the dashboard where I can see. I am a little scared, but not confused. I know what has happened.

"What has happened?" Justin says.

He is in the middle seat of the truck, and the driver has already evacuated. I tell him that we have crashed. Eric must have fallen asleep while driving.

"Where are we?"

I try to rest my head, but it is pointless. I tell him we are in the truck. I hold up my head. I cannot move otherwise, and that is more than a little unsettling.

Someone sticks their arms in the truck from the back window which has been shattered from the impact. "I am a fireman," I hear the voice say. He holds my head steady.

"I cannot feel my body," I say, and I am truly scared, as if uttering it makes it real.

The fireman tells me he is off-duty, coming home from vacation with his kids, and was two cars behind us when we crashed. His name is Don Rob. I am calmer.

"What has happened?" Justin asks again.

I tell him again. It is very important for everyone to know that I have not sustained any brain injuries or head trauma. Answering questions quickly and accurately is priority one.

"Where are we?" he asks.

I answer him again. And again. And again. It is apparently not important for him to appear lucid. He is concussed.

"My leg hurts," he says. "I think it's broken."

My body is not hurting at all. My neck hurts a little, but what hurts the most is the top of my head where the airbag deployed. It stings pretty badly, but I don't feel like complaining.

Pretty soon, on-duty firefighters take Justin through the window. I try to watch, but I can't. Don Rob has my head cradled, and has asked me to remain still. Eric is outside the vehicle pacing and crying, absolutely in hysterics. I am his girlfriend. I can feel him more than see him. Don Rob tells him to settle down. A girl named Julie takes him from the truck, and that relieves me.

Don Rob has reddish brown hair and a mustache. His arms are strong, hairy and freckled. I feel safe with him holding my head steady. We talk for a while.

The on-duty firefighters want to take me through the window, too, but Don Rob won't let them. He says if I am jostled around it could further injure me. The helicopter has already taken Justin away. We have to wait for the jaws of life to cut the door off.

I worry about my family. I know I am going to be OK, but I know that they don't know I know that.

The door is cut off of the truck, and I am taken out and strapped to a stretcher, head immobilized.

"We're going on helicopter ride. Close your eyes so the dust won't get in." It is one of the firefighters, but he looks more like a SWAT officer because he is wearing all-black. I close my eyes and can feel the dust and wind swirl around my head.

Inside the helicopter, it is loud. During the ride to the hospital, I scream as loud as I possibly can to see if I could catch anyone's attention. No one hears me.

At the hospital, I keep on telling them the names of my parents and how to reach them on the phone. I'm worried that they will overreact. I don't feel all that broken.

The clerk at the Iowa City post office was overjoyed to see me. I had driven from New Jersey in an underpowered Volkswagen bug, one of those Spartan first-generation models with no gas gauge and certainly no room for eight boxes of books. It barely accommodated clothing and a few pots and pans. So, envisioning the post office of a town I had never seen as a structure much like a railroad terminal with a vast storage area, I mailed the boxes to myself care of general delivery. But when I walked into a small building, there they were, stacked right behind the poor clerk, cramping his space.

When I returned to New Jersey five years later in a new VW and two toddlers in the back seat, family clothing stuffed into the front hood luggage space, plastic bags under foot, even more boxes of books were shadowing my route east in the hands of the U.S. Postal Service. As much as I had scrimped for food and shelter and eventually diapers and formula, I managed to acquire several hundred more, the pages of my education.

I began acquiring books as a teenager with a massive ignorance of literary history—the canon of the time, which writers were important, those who must be read. My choices came from browsing the paperback racks at a local drug store in our small town, just whims, attracted by a title, a cover, a blurb about the story. I still have some of those books, their pages yellowed and brittle. In fact, I just stood up from my keyboard, walked two steps to a shelf and pulled down Aldous Huxley's Eyeless in Gaza, a "complete and unabridged" Bantam book that cost me all of fifty cents. The back cover touts another work from Bantam, Walt Sheldon's Trouble of a Star, "The Novel of the Korean War."  As far I can remember, I passed that one up. But I read a lot of Huxley and still have the evidence. What I don't have is any Erskine Caldwell, Tobacco Road or God's Little Acre. Most likely they were stolen in a high school study hall where my sex-starved classmates never got beyond certain dog-eared passages.

Our teachers certainly didn't instill a taste for good writing, not with their spoon-feeding of A Tale of Two Cities and daily quizzes with questions like, "What color dress was Lucy Manette wearing when such and such happened?" I swore never to read another Dickens and didn't until graduate school, when I even signed up for a Dickens seminar. A stack of his works was in one of the boxes shipped back to New Jersey. If I swivel my chair, I can look right at them.

A number of books from my undergraduate years are stashed around our house too. If I went downstairs now, I could go right to the copies of Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and others from a political theory course, still snug one next to the other.

As far as I can recall, I built my first bookcase in college. In those days very few of us could afford cars, and I remember carrying boards on my shoulder across town from a lumber yard to the fraternity house, then borrowing a hammer to nail them together. In houses and apartments over the years, too strapped to buy finished products, I constructed bookshelves from floor to ceiling and stuffed them as soon as the paint was dry. In a condo closet I installed metal strips with slots for metal braces for six rows of shelves that I invariably overloaded and would hear crash down several times a year despite my wife's warnings not to pile all those books again. Where else could I put them?

In our present house, one we've lived in for a dozen years, I do have professionally built-in shelves on a wall in this small room I use as an office. That's where I keep my British lit, the Huxleys and the Dickens and the rest, all those other writers I read to complete various degrees and just to know. The office also has a closet with a set of prefab bookcases with an unspecified mixture of books, a couple of shelves housing my own printed writings, out of sight behind a closed door. Other books sit stacked on the closet floor until I figure out what to do with them, not to mention even more heaped on cabinets in the office, on the floor, and even on a small easy chair, where—at this moment—one of our cats is happily snoring atop them.

The built-in shelves in the room we call the library, where we also watch TV, hold another random mixture, including many books written by friends and some there just because of aesthetic bindings and dust jackets. As Anthony Powell said in the title of one of the A Dance to the Music of Time series, Books Do Furnish a Room. I'll find almost all of my American lit two rows deep behind cabinet doors under those open shelves. In yet another closet off the library, sit my political theory, philosophy, history, European and Asian lit—dozens by Dostoevski and Tolstoy and Sartre and Camus. And who knows what else?

The basement contains more books shoved into three pressed-wood cases that came as kits and have followed me around to several residences over a few decades. Mainly, they're books that I've never sorted into more orderly categories. In fact, other than my Brit lit and American lit, most of my books are housed helter-skelter despite my resolve to create coherence when we moved into this house. But, as I've noted, that was twelve years ago. I'm ready to admit it will never happen, even after I've run up and down stairs, opened doors, gotten on hands and knees in search of a book I really need at that very moment and have no idea where I put.

And then there are my wife's books. But I won't mention them.

For quite awhile I've been telling myself that I have to get the library habit, check out a book, read it, and return it when done. But I rarely follow through. It's so easy to click through amazon.com or wander into a local bookstore. And then I've got all these friends who publish books. How can I not buy and own them?  What are friends for?

It's not that I haven't given away books. Boxes of them, in fact. When I retired from full-time teaching and cleaned out my department office, I stacked hundreds on a wide ledge in a stairwell leading up to our floor. Except for a handful of defunct 1970s literary magazines, all were taken by someone else, now cluttering their homes. And I've been to some of those homes, books piled from floor to ceiling, barely a space to walk though.

Perhaps because I'm old and am certain to die sooner than later, my wife occasionally asks, "What's going to happen to all these books?"  The subtext is that they're almost all worthless paperbacks of titles that exist by the thousands or by authors no one reads any more. A new edition of Eyeless in Gaza will be out in October 2009. As of today the old one is 712,518 in sales at Amazon. My copy, with the greatest luck, might end up as one of those one-cent specials on abebooks.com.

I'm certainly never going to read Eyeless in Gaza again in this lifetime. For that matter, it's very unlikely that I'll reread Moby Dick, Women in Love, Barchester Towers, or even Our Mutual Friend. For that matter, with all the people I know turning out new books, I'll never find time to read any of those old books in the days I have left.  So much for my one-time fantasy of completing all of Trollope.

So why do I have them all, so many that if I shipped them again, the Iowa City post office would probably bar the door?  Why don't I do my survivors a favor and get rid of them now?  I can't. It would break my heart. They're a fundamental part of my life, the RNA of where I've been and how I got here. Vital to what's made me me. I can just look at a shelf and recall hours of pleasure and discovery. In many cases, plots, characters, scenes, words, ideas still linger in my memory. But even when I've forgotten everything, as is the case with Eyeless in Gaza, the spine of that paperback brings back the sense of my teenage reading, baby steps out of ignorance, initiation into a world so much larger than my conscribed self.  These books envelop me in the abundance of the world and remind me of all that matters. It won't be till I go that they go.

This is an essay about mentors— how useful they are, mostly, but how difficult it has been for many of us to accept the idea of a new father, to submit to their guidance.
I suspect all generations struggle against the preceding one, because the space from father to son is supposed to be seeded with strife. As one decreases, the other increases—never a formula for happiness. Except for a lucky few, it is unusual for one's own father to be one's teacher in life.

•

My own father never quite got that writing was what I was all about. To him, an industrial engineer, vocation was a means to an end—making money, making a comfortable life for oneself. It took me years to realize there was humility in this thinking. My dad liked selling Fuller Brush door to door and wanted to pull me into the business. I totally hated it—what was a poet doing selling aerosols door to door?

The problem was that, writing aside, he was not an engaged father. Emotionally (and geographically) distant, unable to talk about much, and more concerned about his own prospects than those of his children. And he loved the TV more than he loved any of us. He wanted me to do well, but he was unable to walk the path with me.

So it was a problem for me when I got older and had opportunities to become disciples of older artists—and found I could not bend the knee. Some stubborn part of me, still burned by my own dad's indifference, refused to take on new fathers—it was too confusing for me.

None of these men volunteered to be "a father" to me, and I never asked them. And yet it was always in the air: What could we do that would be more valuable than sharing knowledge on how to do this stuff the right way. I think, because everyone was shy, we wound up stealing—me stealing ideas from them about how to live, and think, and be, and them slipping ideas to me casually, as if they meant nothing at all, as if they were passing me the salt.

•

My first shot came when I was 16 years old, with the poet James Wright. Visiting my stepfather's stepmother's home, I came upon signed books of his poetry, the emotional drama of which I liked very much, and was astonished that Elsie had a connection with him. Indeed, she had known him as a young man, and was in a position to introduce me to him.

One day in 1967 we drove down from Cleveland to Martins Ferry, Ohio—John Glenn's home as well as Wright's. His parents lived in a small railroad house, with a melon patch in the back. Wright was very kind to me, which seems astonishing when I think back on what kind of young man I was—murky, ambitious, and confused. We went for a walk, and he talked about the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, which we had both just seen.

As a prospective father Wright was gentle, thoughtful, and unobtrusive— ideal, really. And he validated my own tendencies toward victimization and hyperemotionality. He did not ask to see my poems, and I did not shove the file folder in his direction—though I had brought it with me. He was so nice, and I didn't want to be a beginner with him. Instead, I made plans in my head to go off, learn how to write, and then come back to him, and claim him as my true father—after I had made myself worthy.

Which never happened. I think I wrote him a letter a year later, desperate to be remembered by him, suggesting that I come to New York and apprentice myself to him. I offered to paint his wife Annie's school. He wisely declined my offer.

•

When I went off to college at Wooster in 1967, we got a visit from the Oregon poet William Stafford. I knew nothing about his work. I was 17 and knew nothing, period. But because I styled myself as a poet, I was invited to interview Stafford, along with a handful of other self-styled bohemians, on closed-circuit TV.

I went in without any questions, half expecting Stafford to be "on the make" or just another dry old fuddy-duddy. He was anything but. In the midst of campus uprisings, be-ins and the other hysterical earmarks of the era, Stafford cut a calm, friendly, and modest figure. I liked him immediately. The other students rubbed their chins and asked academic questions about the meanings of this symbol and that, and about the use of classical form in his work.

But when my time came, I asked a question that made the other students cringe: "Is it fun for you, writing?"

Stafford brightened at the question, smiled broadly and said, "Yes. Yes. Yes!" And went on lovingly about the joy writing gave him, how it was the best part of every day, how it lifted him up from the barely breathing to the noticing, and wondering, and self-amusing tasks of poetry.

•

Later, as a literature student at the University of Minnesota I got word of the arrival by night of Russian dissident poet Andrej Voznesenski. The Soviet Union had refused him a visa until 24 hours before his schedule visa, so he arrived nervous and tired from his trip. But the energy returned when he took the huge stage. Northrop Auditorium was cordoned off so that 50 people dotted the 5,000 seats while Voznesenski groaned like a swinging pendulum through readings of "Goya" and other poems in the only language he knew. Voznesenski was Byronic in his charisma and mystery. I yearned for the pummeling power of his words.

Afterward we poets got together at English professor Chester Anderson's to boast and jostle and drink, Voznesenski sitting alone on the couch, a slight frown on his face. Several beers later, I took to the bathroom, where Chester's golden retriever lay, and stepped over him to pee. As soon as I started, Voznesenski entered, smiled politely at me, knelt by the dog and scratched his ears, not more than a foot from my pee stream.

Confused, I turned to see the poet kneeling, eyes closed, his hands stroking the golden dog, his face held out to me, the dew like manna on his face, and a smile as if finally, finally free. When I left the party, Voznesenski stood by the door and pointed to me. "You," he said, and smiled coolly. "Be great for me!"

That's all he said to me—but it stuck in my head like a spear.

•

That same year I edited the school literary magazine and I wrote to Robert Bly, who lived in the west of the state, offering to publish poems of his choosing.

He sent me a handwritten note—hand-drawn would be a better description, as he writes in a kind of pictographic swirl, using butterflies and birds as punctuation. But what he said he liked wasn't the poetry, but the design! He liked a photo of a pretty girl standing under a bare tree. I sent him the original print with my compliments.

The next few years saw a minor flourish of correspondence between us. Bly was flattering to me, and I was flattered. I was 20 when I met him, barely more than a boy. The idea of being taken in by a major figure like Bly was sweet.

Bly appeared at the university and I was enthralled with his cantankerous Norwegian self. He was rock and roll to me, grandiose as sky yet contemptuous of the complicated circles other people walked in and the big words they used. Bly snubbed the pretty and went straight for the spiritual fireworks. I dug that a lot.

But Bly in person was not as gracious as Bly on paper. Perhaps when he met me face to face after the reading he read the hurry and ambition that was written there. Or perhaps he saw I was younger than he supposed. In any event, he quickly took to teasing me with little jabs, nicknaming me "Irish." It was funny, but the joke was at my expense.

•

Doing a journalism gig I traveled outstate with regional poet Franklin Brainerd for a big prairie poetry reading at a rural university. Franklin, a very kind and down-to-earth man who liked young women poets very much, was then dying of leukemia, and I was writing a feature about him for the university paper. For several days we drank beer, talked, read poems and taped.

"A good poem is like a potato," Frank told me. "You have to dig it out of the dirt with your fingers. And it's as ugly and unpromising as you. And if it wasn't, what good would it be?"

Frank suggested I bring some poems of my own on the trip west, so I did. Bly and Thomas McGrath, the great and lovely chronicler of American radicalism, were also on hand for the poetry event. The three headliners took turns reading, and they were well received. Afterward, Tom and Franklin waved me upon stage for a kind of poetry improv—audience members would shout out an image, and poets would scramble to produce and read a poem featuring that image or idea. It was just nutty and open-ended enough, that I shone.

McGrath and Brainerd were very kind to me, parachuting in on their reading the way I did. But Robert scowled when I beat him to the punch by quickly locating a poem about hibernation.

Afterward we all caroused in his motel room, drinking cheap red wine, along with a half dozen other young men poets who had driven out to attend to Robert.

"You young men should stop writing for three years, get away from all this," he said, waving his hand toward the motel bed. "Move out to the Dakotas and live under the sky. Forget you met me, forget what made you so hungry and false—then start writing again."

We waited on every word of advice, but we were damned if we were going to leave that motel room. It dawned on me, through the haze of chianti, that we were acolytes.

•

I have two other stories about Bly. The first happens four years later in 1979 when I am a newspaper editor in a small town in the same part of the state where lived. Robert again came around to read his work, and I covered his visit as a journalist. Afterward he agreed to meet with several of us at a tavern. He was in good form, enjoying the attention, and playing the role of Sufi mystic, a person apart from the cares of the world, to the hilt.

To his dismay, however, his teenaged daughter sidled up to him and began begging him for money. "Come on, daddy, there are some cords for sale at The Gap, and they're only $14.99." She forced him to open his wallet for us to see. None of us took this as unusual. Teenage girls need jeans. But I could tell from the look on his face that he felt she had blown his cover. Robert Bly was just a man, with credit cards, a driver's license, and a couple of twenties. It was terrible.

I will save the other story for a moment,

•

All along, I had access to fathers who knew things that could save me from living a stupid life, the way fathers are supposed to, but either the father drew back or I did.

When I was a newspaper editor I apprenticed myself to Paul Gruchow, naturalist and essayist. I followed him around from bog to ridge, listening to him rhapsodize about his childhood in the tall grass. I admired the hell out of him, but I don't think he ever figured that out.

Paul hired me not knowing I was somewhat the same kind of writer he was— literary—so we made each other miserable during my stay in Worthington. Paul was old school, and wanted us to trade book talk over cigarettes and sandwiches. He loved Henry James, whom I found hard to read. I was forever disappointing him.

One night, after an especially vexing day, which resulted in readers calling him to complain about an article I wrote, he stood at the side door of my house. "Do you want to come in?" I asked. He said nothing. "I've got a good idea, Paul," I sighed. "Why don't we be friends?"

In truth, he outdid me in every way, but his response was to become more jealous of me. Once, introducing me for a reading at the local library, he merely said, "This is Mike Finley. I really don't know what else to say."

When I quit and moved away to Connecticut, a midwestern magazine published some poems of mine and cited me in the biographical notes as having his job. It was a magazine that had rejected his work.

"Congratulations," he wrote me in the shortest and bitterest note I have ever received, "on your big promotion."

•

The thing about fathers is, they tend to die before you do. All the lovely gentlemen I met over the years, with whom I shared an hour of light, eventually went away.

Frank Brainerd succumbed to leukemia in 1977. His disease was like an apotheosis for him. No one cares about a poet, until death comes knocking. Then everyone crowds around, and Frank delightedly met many women poets.

James Wright died in 1980 of cancer of the tongue. Working for the newspaper, I pulled the news of his death from the teletype machine and spun slowly in my swivel chair.

I ran into William Stafford on a stairway in 1978, at a publisher's party. It had been eleven years since I asked him my silly question on college television in the Amish country. Darned if he didn't recognize me. "Hello" he said, and smiled. "How are you?" Which still seems like a miracle to me.

Tom McGrath, who had always been in frail health, followed in 1990. About three years earlier, I invited him to a holiday open house, and he surprised me by showing up fifteen minutes early, and nursed a cup of hot cider, asking me questions about my children. He had been through a lot in his life, but to the end he was a tender fellow.

Paul Gruchow, the friend who so disliked me, took his life in the early spring of 2004, after many years of suffering from depression—but not before the two of us buried the axe on our misgivings.

I guess Voznesenski is still out there, sneaking up on young poets in toilets.

Sometimes, driving around Minneapolis, I see Robert Bly crossing a street or loading his car trunk with groceries. I was at a poetry reading against the Iraq War one Sunday afternoon in the winter, and for a brief moment, while I gave a brief lecture on the Mighty Republican Wurlitzer approach to propaganda, we shared the same stage.

Afterwards, I was milling about in the basement of the Macalester College chapel, and I looked up to see his hoary visage backlit by the winter sun. He was descending the steps and moving in my direction. This is it, I said, and straightened my posture for long-awaited fatherly reunion.

But Bly merely squinted at me and asked, "Is this where the men's can is?"

•

So now I am the old guy, and all the grand gents are gone. My own dad, who stopped smoking thirty years ago, has been diagnosed with lung cancer, and he is pissed. I talk to him on the phone. I wrote him a letter of amends, apologizing for being a remote if dutiful son for so many years. At the eleventh hour I remember how much he suffered in our family, losing his firstborn child, being married to a scary woman, my mom.

And I thanked him for his financial advice over the years. He always thought writing was an idiotic career choice, and urged me to take up an aspect of it that would net me some bucks. Which I did, drifting from poetry to fiction to journalism to business writing, which is how I fed my family over the years.

"You know, Mike," my dad told me, "if anyone should be apologizing to anyone, it should probably be me apologizing to you."

I waited a few minutes for him to clear his throat and deliver the actual apology, and then realized that his concession was all there would ever be. But it was good. It was all right.

•

And another thing. A few months after Paul Gruchow died, I got a call from Matthew Gruchow, his nephew. Matthew never met Paul, but he knew about him, and wanted to know more. I agreed to meet him for lunch, and we talked.

Matthew is in his twenties, and he too wants to write, and from what he has shown me, he will be very good. Books, adventures, essays—I looked into his eyes and saw all the desire, all the heat-lines that once radiated from mine.

I decided, in a moment of exuberance, to throw in with him, to tell him everything the old guys had taught me.

"Yes, write your ass off," I told him. "If you want to do a thing get at it now. Do it while you are young. You won't be ready, but unless you write you never will be.

"Write crazy, like a child. And when you rewrite, go over it like a parent, picking up toys and putting things right. And then wait a while, and make a final pass, and this time do it out of love, and out of the joy of it.

"And don't worry about who you are, or if you have a right to write. Don't stop, and don't apologize, and don't expect anything from anyone. Grow in the doing, and between sentences, breathe."

Recently, in a poetry collection by Renée Ashley (Basic Heart, which won the 2008 X.J. Kennedy Prize), one line of one poem particularly struck me: " ... every dark/Is not a shadow the dead cavort in." I wrote it down.

Next day, I felt the urge to look again at a scene in a novel I was about to send my agent. In this scene, a man is troubled by the fact that he thought he heard someone mutter to him, "You're a dead man." But the circumstances were such that he is uncertain. Later, he is in a restaurant with a friend, still worried about whether or not he really heard this statement; through a quick series of coincidences in the restaurant, he finds himself kissing a woman who is a complete stranger.

"Nothing came of it. Nothing needed to come of it. It was a kiss, memorable, pleasing, nothing more. She left. He left. His friend left with him. On the street, his friend, perhaps envious, said, 'Big deal.  A kiss. What does that prove?'

'I'll tell you what it proves. It proves what Renée Ashley said.'

'Who's she?'

'A poet. And she said, Every dark is not a shadow the dead cavort in.' But what he did not explain to his friend was that the coincidental impulsion which had led to that kiss had released him from the shadows of his troubled memory."

And what I did not explain was that, as surely as this coincidence had helped release my character's psyche from troubled uncertainty, so too had the coincidence of my stumbling over that line of poetry released me from my own troubled sense that that scene had not yet been complete. Further, what only I could have known, was that both events really happened—once I thought I heard someone mumble, "You're a dead man," and another time, I had experienced such a coincidental kiss exchanged with a total stranger. Both events were shadows in my memory which in some fashion were satisfactorily explained for me, and released, by that line in the Ashley poem.

Adding this to the scene in my novel—titled But Then Will Come the Angels— also reinforced and once again illustrated for me a lesson I had begun to learn some twenty years before about what I like to think of as the impulsion of spontaneity—or, more plainly, about the importance of allowing chance occurrence to influence the creation of a fiction.

My initial response to the urge to do so was resistance. The first time I recall this happening went like this: Two decades ago, I was sitting in my office sneaking time from what I was supposed to be doing for the job that paid my bills to write a short story which was insisting on being written. The story had been sparked by a scrap of overheard conversation in a museum of mechanical musical instruments and began to flow into a narrative; it was moving nicely until a colleague tapped at my door and interrupted me. She came in chuckling to share with me something her son had told her the evening before. Feeling guilty that I was not doing what I was supposed to, I put my hand over the notepad and my story-in-progress and listened with barely disguised impatience to what she was saying.

She told me her son had had an argument with a department-store salesman who had been so insulting that her son grabbed his necktie to give it an emphatic tug.  But in doing so, he discovered it was ready-tied and hung from an elastic neckband; when he tried to tug, it only stretched from the man's collar. So he stretched it all the way and let it snap back against the salesman's chin. I couldn't understand that my colleague found this amusing. It sounded inexcusably ill-mannered to me, and I told her so, whereupon she left in a huff.

Now I was irritated but still determined to go back to my story. It was a story set in Europe in an indeterminate time, perhaps late 19th century, and the main character, a builder of mechanical musical instruments named Vincente Gasparini, is at an impasse in his art and his life, living drunkenly off his inheritance. That was where I left him before my colleague had interrupted the narrative flow. Yet when I returned to him, I found that the drunken Gasparini was entering the shop of a pompous cravat salesman whose apprentice is his young son. Gasparini has an argument with the salesman and tugs him around the shop by his red cravat to the laughter and amusement of the other customers, but Gasparini spies shame on the face of the salesman's son, witnessing his father's humiliation. The vision of the pain he has caused the boy, the damage he has done to the respect of the son for his father, instantly sobers Gasparini and makes it possible for him to go on with his artistic mission.

Working in deep concentration, I completed the story by the end of the day. It felt, as Hemingway said, good. But when I reread the draft, it occurred to me that I could not allow the development of Gasparini's character to hinge on the chance occurrence of a colleague's relating an anecdote which I had somehow felt impelled to incorporate in the story. I decided that I had to tear this segment out of the narrative. But it was now an organic piece of the story; to cut out this part would kill the whole. Then, studying it, I recognized that the scene in question was, in fact, a distant cousin to an incident that occurs in Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov.

I decided to polish, type and submit the story and let the editors be the judge of whether it hung together. The story, "Gasparini's Organ," was accepted the first time out with considerable praise by the editor of Crosscurrents who proceeded to reprint it almost immediately in her hardback anthology, Literary Olympians, and again a few years later in The Best of Crosscurrents. It also received honorable mention in the Pushcart Prize volume that year and was included in my own first short story collection, Unreal City. A few years later, I met Walter Cummins, then Editor-in-Chief of The Literary Review, who told me that he had recently conducted a survey of literary editors about the state of the short story in the U.S. and had been told by the Crosscurrents editor, Linda Brown Michelson, that stories like "Gasparini's Organ" helped convince her that the American short story today is alive and well.

I repeat this not to sing my own praises, but to sing the praises of serendipity, the value of surrender to the impulsion of coincidence. It was not I who made that story work. The story came to me of its own volition. I had merely to be its medium, to allow it to be written—in fact, the distinguished story writer Robert Coover once told me, in answer to an interview question, that his best stories were the ones he had merely allowed to be written. At the risk of putting too mystical a turn on this, I might even say, so determined was that story to be written that it charged the air around the scrivener it had chosen with electric currents that magnetically co-opted what scraps it might need to continue, sent my colleague in to me with the anecdote from her son so that it could find its way into my story.

Enough: That, of course, is hyperbole. The exaggeration is not meant to deceive, but to elucidate.

Startled by the undeniable value of this serendipity, I became sensitive to its possibilities and discovered that this was nothing new. In the 1930s metafictional masterpiece by Sherwood Anderson, "Death in the Woods," the narrator hears his older brother tell his parents about a dead woman they had seen in the woods and is not satisfied with the telling; he intuitively realizes the experience has a greater significance than is presented in his brother's account so, years later, he retells the event, embellishing it with details he has witnessed or heard of from other times and other places, to arrive at a very powerful story. This, too, is an aspect of serendipity and coincidence:  the way in which something lodged in memory, something picked up by hearsay—a pack of dogs circling a tree in the woods on one occasion— could become infused with the dead woman he saw slumped against a tree in another wood years before to complete the story.

John Cheever also addressed this phenomenon, telling about the writing of his classic story "Goodbye, My Brother" in the textbook Understanding Fiction, edited by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren. Cheever tells how there are a number of elements in his story that came from life and were greatly separated from one another in time, place and context, but what that confirmed for him—that they all came together eventually into a single story—was the greater continuity of life, of the underlying meaning of life, stretching beyond gaps to form a creative whole.

My point is that a writer must be open to the fact that our unconscious, in fashioning our stories, indeed our identities, is a great appreciator of the serendipitous, of coincidence. One story I wrote was born from the simple, albeit strange, thing that two friends once unexpectedly said to me. Eating lunch together one afternoon, they turned to me and said, "We have decided that you have to kill your angel." I had no idea what they meant, but the statement immediately produced an image in my mind of an angel in a basement, cowering in mortal fear. I might have dismissed this, but it would not be forgotten and ultimately grew into the story "Murphy's Angel," published in New Delta Review to win a Pushcart Prize that year and to be reprinted in the Pushcart anthology as well as elsewhere, later to grow into another story, "Angel Body," which gave its title to the anthology in which it was included.

Perhaps the oddest—and, from my point of view, most important—example of the role of coincidence in refining story has to do with the novel which insofar as I am able to judge, is the best of the fifteen books of fiction I've published, a novel with which my agent won by far the best contract I've ever had, from Bloomsbury Publishers. Its title is In the Company of Angels and it will be published in hardback in New York and London in 2010 by that house.

The night that I was giving the final draft one last run through in order to submit it next day, I discovered that Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet was on television. Torn between the two—a firm believer that the best time to do something beautiful is when you are supposed to be doing something else, I decided to multi-task. Setting myself up on the sofa with the 400-page manuscript of my novel on my lap, my Heritage Club edition of Shakespeare's tragedies to the left (I always find it useful to have the text of a Shakespeare play handy when watching a film of it), I zapped on the TV.

Despite my experience that good things often come from such impulses, I was troubled by misgivings: Methinks, I thought, that this is not a serious way to work. But something told me to proceed.

One of the six characters in my novel, a secondary but still important element, is an old man in a nursing home who is dying of cancer. His mind is clear despite that his body is on the verge of extinction; yet, although he is in great pain, he will not give up the ghost. This old man is a proponent of the great European social democracies of the 20th century which, like him, are moribund, suffering the sickness unto death, but still hanging on. As I reread the intermittent scenes in which he appeared in my manuscript, glancing up from time to time to watch the progress of the Danish prince and those around him, checking lines in the Heritage Hamlet , I asked myself what it was that kept the old man clinging to life. And a fragment of Eliot's Prufrock flashed through my mind: I am not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be, am an attendant lord, one who will do to swell a progress, start a scene or two ... advise the prince ... at times almost ridiculous—almost at times, the Fool ...

And I was startled to realize that the old man in a sense was an embodiment of one of the central metaphors of the century which had just ended—Hamlet's doubt.  It occurred to me that this old man, politically active all his life and now facing extinction, needed to know who he had been, what the total of his life amounted to before he let it slip away. He could not die without knowing who he had been.

With a dash of my pen, the old man acquired a slim paperback version of Hamlet which, from scene to scene in the novel, he reads and rereads and rereads, studying each character, each part in the play, trying each on to see if it might explain his life for him before he lets it go.

This is only a subplot to the novel, but at last I understood the foundational role of this subplot for the main theme of the novel which could only have taken place in the kind of social democratic state which this old man, despite all his frailties and foibles, had struggled to support. That state was, indeed, the Kingdom of Denmark, Hamlet's kingdom—in whose capital city the old man was dying.

I watched Branagh's Hamlet to its closing flight of sweet angels and took a couple of extra days revising the scenes of the old man in my novel. And finally the manuscript was ready for delivery, as complete as I could make it, thanks to the impulsion of spontaneity and coincidence.

Perhaps it was less of a coincidence, though, that my agent, Nat Sobel, managed to place the book at a level of publication to which I had long before resigned myself I would not achieve. For that, I thank serendipity—and my agent!

We flew into Larnaca on a red-eye from Bahrain and abandoned the deserted airport en-route to digs at McKenzie beach. It was a mild Cypriot winter so we could hoof-it to our accommodation at McKenzie which sat just across a remnant of bleached whiteness, a small part of a juggernaut tip of the dry salt lake adjacent to the airport. We walked along a small, worn path guided by an encompassing pallor that yielded-up the splendor of the night: the glorious moon. Not just any ordinary moon but a full moon, the full moon of the Eastern Mediterranean. As the fiber optic reflections from the saline lakebed engulfed us, it seemed we were trekking into antiquity on an imaginary pilgrimage of sorts guided by a timeless spiritual power that has unfortunately become for most post-industrial pilgrims, nature's empty halogen street lamp, a meek, illusionary vestige of the brilliance and power that had once been classically personified in all that was the essence and beauty of Mycenaean tragedy as Iphigenia, the virgin's virgin, the pearl of Agamemnon's loins, the spurned, untouched damsel cursed with a beauty so pure she was sacrificed upon a pyre, burned alive to launch a thousand ships into the immortal womb of catastrophe; set apart nevertheless with a purity so sublime that the very memory of it all is still capable of scorning all the lukewarm elucidation rendered by pasty scented-candles bought in ubiquitous Midwestern American strip malls or purchased amongst the staid and proper apothecaries of Dorset and Essex—even after thousands of years. We walked onwards in sudden humility, surrounded by a natural, passionate illumination so stringent it could swallow-up Achilles' immortal soul, as well as our own deficiencies in Latin declination, with its sheer, overpowering allure. And as we stepped over and round all the discarded bottles, tires and plastic bags that made the dry lakebed mortal, Selene in all her grandeur parted the nocturnal clouds in twain and we below, mere mortals to such deific glory, were bathed in venal rectification. We carried-on in all our humanity led by the strobe-light beckoning of moonbeams on salt. 

We didn't stumble across Wordsworth's hedgehog—alive or dead, nor could such a small hike ever be compared to climbing Mt. Snowdon with or without Coleridge or Charles Lamb, but the awe-inspiring intensity of the moon dividing the clouds on such a pleasant winter night in the Eastern Med couldn't help but conjure-up undergraduate recollections of the 14th Book of the Prelude as we finally made it up and out of the salt bed to meet the roadway that led to the beginnings of McKenzie Beach, the advent of the tourist shore; and all the while Selene in all her smashing radiance danced and played the Merry Andrew to the empty resonance of winter waves crashing on the beach in the very dead of the Cypriot night.

 As we rounded the bend, the boardwalk lodgings rose-up to greet us: grieving structures that rose from sand and rock like blank cartridges loaded into a worn out, middle-aged pistol, faux-munition shoved into the cylinder of a worn-out revolver relegated to starting-gun status in a bang-bang, false start, try-again, "I didn't really mean to do it, but, yes—yes, you did," oh-so politically correct marathon for the physically and mentally challenged; a race that could only be negotiated by the halt, the lame and faint of heart or those marginalized by age, disease, self-loathing, redundancy or early retirement.

The empty, hollow, concrete ghost-hotels, devoid of their summer package tourists—the walled, prefab monoliths, cried-out to us breaking their vows of perpetual silence as they gazed outward with Polymestor eyes in sightless thousand-meter stares at the ageless Mediterranean. The empty McKenzie inns, the perfect choice for Hecuba's revenge: the seaside demise of the living-dead, shed their silent tears; and as they quietly mourned in concrete sack-cloth and ash, the silver, swaddling-clothes sway of Selene enraptured it all.

We shuddered in the charity of disbelief and bewilderment, conscious of what man could eternally do to man, walked-up the beachfront and crossed the street in reticence. We crouched behind a small beach wall to wait-out the sunrise, overwhelmed by the stark, empty and unflattering buildings, the beauty and awe-inspiring power of the imagination, the magnificence of moonlight on the Med and the endless sound and movement of the wine-dark sea.

1.

How I remember Russia: a girl with two low pigtails, dressed in a pink leotard and white socks folded at the ankles; her feet tucked into white slippers, shuffling against the floor as she sprinkled it with a watering can. Her face was the delicate pink of the insides of shells, soft, light, almost translucent. Her hair was dark, darker than my own, polished ebony. She was preparing the room for class, wetting the floor for traction.

A dirty light filtered through a filthy window. No one cared. The girls filed in and helped each other stretch. The girls had perfect turnout. Their faces were serious; not smiling, just concentrated. Their faces were scrubbed to a rosy shine.

What I also remember is color. Russia was full of peacock blues and bruised purples and tarnished silver. The colors of an eerie feeling, like the sun had turned to ash but never set.

2.

We sat on my porch. "You should write about that," you said. "The raked stages. And about drinking Tab and smoking."

Actually, what you said was "You should write a poem about that." And so I got it half right, which is about as right as I can get it. You see, I'm not a poet. I was a dancer, a ballet dancer. The difference between a poet and a ballet dancer comes down to these essentials: a poet distills and refines the magic of language. She has faith. A ballet dancer distills and refines her body, which resists magic. She believes only what she can see and feel.

You reminded me of a small band of gypsies I once encountered. Your hair was pulled back beneath a bright pink Hèrmes scarf; you carried an expensive-looking, red, pebbled leather bag with smart hardware. You wore fabulous black kitten-heeled shoes.  Perhaps you were a gypsy in haute couture. Because, like the gypsies, you had the ability to watch, to see, to capture something true and fundamental about a person, even one you didn't know very well. Perhaps you saw best without trusting your eyes.

3.

My first Russian word was "nyet."  It was unmistakable. My main teacher at the Bolshoi School was Lyudmila, who spoke very little English. When she corrected me, which was often, she cawed, "Nyet!  Nyet!" and followed it with what she must have thought was intelligible English.  Then she slipped into French. The French, I think, was mostly swearing. Thankfully, my French was not so good.

I would not be a ballet dancer if I was a Russian. Or, if somehow I had slipped in, I would probably have been shipped off to do folk dancing in one of the provinces, like Armenia. I would say Siberia, but that's too easy. A gulag of failed dancers in Siberia was not as interesting as being shipped off to Armenia, which somehow, unexplainably, felt more like a reality. A so-called Zen-place for my failure as a ballerina.

Lyudmila squawked about my turnout—how the legs rotate out from the hips. It really wasn't much different than what I'd heard before, especially at School of American Ballet. Ballet has these constants. At School of American Ballet in New York City, half the world away, Kay Mazzo and Suki Schorer squawked about my turnout—and in English, and in terms I definitely understood. "You have to turn out from the hips, the hips! You know what those are, don't you?" I sometimes wondered.  I would, stretch my hip sockets, working to loosen the joint, but still, I never had perfect turnout. Over and over I was told, "Turn out more." All of these teachers who asked me for better turnout were tiny women, delicate-faced and, of course, perfectly turned out themselves. Perfect ballet bodies. Brutal in their corrections.

Lyudmila's nostrils flared when she was excited, and somehow even this gesture had a kind of grace to it. Her corrections to me were agitated, as if she were incensed not just with me, but the whole American system of teaching dancers. I promised Lyudmila that I'd work harder. All dancers promise this to their teachers.  It's our pact.

4.

My room was bugged. I lived in a boarding house which was walking distance to the school. Our landlady, Vera, ran the house, cooked the meals and, in the beginning, walked us to classes. Early on, I had a small withdrawal problem—there was no Tab in Russia, my favorite beverage. I drank no less than three a day back home, hooked on the caffeine. So I had to learn to drink coffee—cold coffee. It was 1988, and there had been words—perestroika, glasnost—but there was a Soviet conscience at work. I heard its low crackle at night before I fell asleep.

I imagined KGB officers listening to me in my room. They must have thought that I was absolutely boring. They weren't getting some beautiful spy-girl, James Bond-style, sent with a wink to pose as a ballet student.  What the KGB heard was almost sad: in my free time, I mostly talked to myself about corrections, wrote letters home, and stretched or practiced relevés. I played Prince on my bright yellow Sony Sports walkman that a man on the street had tried to buy from me. He had also asked to buy my jeans and any tampons I might have. This man knew I was American. I never told him; I was obvious. He said he could get me vodka and Bulgarian cigarettes. Also, KGB paraphernalia. The black market had strange demands, strange rewards, but I didn't make the deal.

5.

The truth about Russia: there's no way through. For me, Russia will always be the beautiful failure of my dancing. But even failures can have a remarkable kind of beauty, especially in hind sight.

6.

In class, Lyudmila was surprised to find I could jump. I had ballon. Her eyes widened and she pinched my cheek. She had a nickname for me that I couldn't translate, because my Russian vocabulary was limited to nyet.

I made a Russian friend. Vlada. She was in my class, a striking beauty. Vlada had the whitest skin I'd ever seen, so white it actually looked fragile pale blue. Her eyes were large and nearly black, and she reminded me of a Madame Alexander doll, very sweet and slightly creepy and somehow also pretty, pretty but almost wicked.  Pretty like sin. But I didn't tell her this because she might have been offended, or she might not have known what a Madame Alexander doll was, because, how could she? I didn't think there were any in Russia, which was ironic, because Madame Alexander was, of all things, a Russian immigrant. But then I'd have had to explain it to her, and I wasn't confident in my abilities to communicate all the complexities. Vlada was all long limbs, which was the part of her not like a Madame Alexander doll. Those dolls were chubby-looking, the way, I suppose, their maker pictured spoiled little girls. Vlada was not chubby. Her face was long and thin, like the rest of her. She had perfect turnout and high, graceful, effortless extensions, and excelled in adagio work. I often thought the Russian word for adagio ought to be "Vlada."

Vlada's English was much better than the teachers. "Your nickname means 'Little Potato'," she explained to me.

I was crushed. Folk dancing in Armenia:  I imagined mountain roads and puffy skirts and lots of mazurkas. Little Potato, that was me. I saw myself as a Mr. Potato Head toy, one with big bright lips, the tulle of a violet sugar plum tutu sprouting where my waist had turned into a great brown lump.

7.

Vlada and I began to walk home together after classes. She spoke her wonderful broken English, which left me a little confused, but it was clear enough that I could have conversation, which I desperately needed. There were seven girls from the United States here in Moscow as part of an exchange program, but none of us were friends. Back home we would all be competing for spots at School of American Ballet and in ballet companies.  We couldn't afford to be friends, not even abroad, and especially not Katie and me. Katie was another girl in the exchange program. We had spent the summer before in the same division at School of American Ballet, both of us hacking it out against each other to be considered something better than mediocre. Katie had naturally curly hair, and it sprung at the temples in class when she started to sweat. She had nice turnout, but couldn't jump. I knew her faults, she knew mine.

Vlada lived on the same street as the boarding house where I stayed. It was a small one bedroom apartment she shared with her aunt who was unmarried and worked, as far as I could discern from Vlada's descriptions, as a low-level diplomat's administrative assistant. I often wondered if Vlada's aunt worked for the poor son-of-a bitch who was tasked with monitoring the bug in my room. "She's talking to herself again," I imagined him sighing, only to have an interpreter tell him that I was reciting ballet corrections.

On our walks Vlada liked to smoke—the Bolshoi girls liked Bulgarian cigarettes, and Vlada had told me I should have traded for them. "Hard to get," she said. "Very expensive."  She liked to listen to my bright yellow Sony Sports walkman, especially Purple Rain, which I'll admit was my favorite too. We sang along to "Baby I'm a Star."

At the bridge we stopped. One day, without warning, there was a collection of people, mostly women, one very old and missing a front tooth on the bottom row. A pretty young girl with toffee colored hair to her waist, who wore a long skirt, collected rubles from those who crossed the bridge. Vlada pulled out her toll, and I reached for my wallet and the old woman with the missing tooth began to screech, a sound that I think was meant to be words but sounded like an angry peacock.

I thought, of course that crazy woman was missing a tooth. What a stupid clichéd thing.  Staged, I was sure. I believed it was all a rouse for the silly American girl trying to learn ballet at the Bolshoi School.

The toffee haired girl spoke in rapid sentences to Vlada, who responded but looked bewildered, her skin looking even a little bluer than before. She turned to me and said, "They don't take your money."

"What?" I asked.

"They don't take your money," Vlada repeated.

"Why?" I demanded.

"Gypsies say magic not work on you." Vlada looked concerned, but her voice was as low and flat as I had become accustomed to.

I studied these gypsies, most of whom had pulled back away from us, as if I was sick and contagious—how I think people in medieval times might have acted toward those with the plague. The old woman cackled, and I got the impression that there was something wrong with me. Very wrong. What was wrong with me, gypsies? But I didn't ask. I thought that whatever it was it had to be why I was a mediocre dancer who'd been nicknamed Little Potato. Russia conspired against me.

We moved along.

"I never know no one who doesn't pay the gypsies," Vlada said, after we were well past the bridge and were nearing my building.

I scraped my feet on the pavement, just to hear the sound. Then I answered, "We don't have gypsies in America."

Every time I crossed the bridge, the gypsies eyed me, suspicious, perhaps wary. I wanted to think of myself as some sort of gypsy-master, a girl who would not be thwarted by them. But when I'm honest, I can admit that I was upset at these gypsies.  What had I ever done to them? The gypsies made me feel abnormal. And I already felt clumsy and out of place at the Bolshoi Ballet School. I thought, Stupid gypsies, with your stupid magic. I thought, I don't believe in your magic anyway.

The gypsies, I think, knew better.

Sometimes I wonder what to do with what I remember. I am not at all sure by which threads our memories are strung together. But this memory of the gypsies makes me think of an expensive-looking, red, pebbled leather bag with smart hardware, which I want to believe was really full of secrets. And it makes me wonder, did you believe in gypsies? I think you did. I want to believe in gypsies, and magic, but then again I don't want to believe, because I don't want to be left out.

What's easier for me to believe in are the things that I can feel. And so, I believe in pain. When I was a dancer, my body ached all the time—pulled muscles or knotted ones, swelling joints, or just a dull ache all over. It's the ache I remember—a very particular ache, but one that was comforting. I took my pain and believed it made me beautiful. It wasn't magic, it was real. That's what I told myself.

Of course, the gypsies knew better. Maybe you knew better, too.

8.

I have a very odd history with the beet. I never ate beets, but I love beet eggs—bright purple and pickled. But I'd only ever eaten the eggs.

Vera made our meals and one night she made borscht, which is made with beets. I'd never had borscht; I didn't even know what it was, but when I tasted it, oh, how delicious. Vera said, "It's from Ukraine." This, I understood, meant Vera was from the Ukraine. I wondered how she was living in Moscow, found it ironic that she wasn't in Kiev, hosting girls with the Kirov instead of being here in Moscow with girls at the Bolshoi. It seemed all turned around. I didn't even think of it in terms of the US—where I had moved from North Dakota to West Virginia to Florida, and then studied in Michigan and New York and all sorts of places in between. The odd thing about being in a foreign country was the static feeling. I couldn't conceive of the people I met in Russia ever moving someplace else in the country. Like they were somehow fixed, like the little mechanical figures dressed in ethnic costumes in the It's A Small World ride at Disney World.

We ate hot borscht. Vera told me, "Can also serve cold," on my second helping, an occurrence that had not happened before with her American wards. We were all dancers, one portion eaters, if that.

I asked, "This is made with beets?"

Vera replied, "Also has cabbage." It was like stew, served with bread topped with fresh garlic. I had another helping.

"You're going to get fat," said Katie, who barely touched hers. We'd learned to watch each other in the cafeteria in the Rose Building when we were at School of American Ballet, taking inventory of what every other student ate, adding calories and pounds in our heads. We were better spies than the agents who bugged our building. We had the goods on each other.

I wanted to say, "You're already fat." I didn't say it. I remembered something else. "Well," I said to Katie, "I was never the one who Kay Mazzo said couldn't jump." I ate the rest of my borscht. Vera beamed, the only time I saw her smile. It was actually an eerie smile, more smug than happy. I reeked of garlic.

Not long after this, Lyudmila sent a note home with me for Vera. I asked Vlada to translate: stop feeding the American girls borscht. I wondered how she knew, but somehow I have an idea of who ratted me out. Vera was not amused either. All she made after that, it seemed, were omelets. Occasionally she made these little mincemeat pastries, which I didn't like at all.

9.

Sometimes we American girls were taken on tours. This was explained to us as part of our exchange, for our understanding of the local culture. Once we went to see Lenin's body.   I had imagined that this would be a very disturbing experience, but when I looked at him, embalmed, preserved, I couldn't feel anything. Lenin didn't even look real. I was shocked that I didn't feel horrified or reverent or anything. I thought about the gypsies and wondered if this was why their magic never worked on me—maybe magic, in general, was beyond my grasp?

It made me think about what we did on stage, how dancers represented ideas—or maybe more accurately, ideals—sylphs, nymphs, fairies. Imagined women. Maybe my problems in the studio stemmed from not being attuned to magic, and thus my body rejected the movements of ethereal magical creatures. Maybe if ballet dancers were gremlins, elves, gnomes, and imps I would have been better suited. Even gypsies. I wanted to blame my bridge's gypsies and Lenin's preserved body, but the problem was me. The problem with me has always been me. I've never just believed. I lacked faith. How many times had I heard in ballet class, "Just do, don't think so much." Thinking was made out be the death of dancers. I was slowly killing myself.

Of course, more famous people had talked about this dancing/thinking problem. I remember a moment of clarity while reading Dancing on My Grave. Apparently, Gelsey Kirkland, a famous ballerina and the book's author, was also an over-thinker.  Or at least that is what she claimed. Part of me discounted her because she was so close to ballet's ideal, so nearly perfect, and I was nowhere near that perfection. I was barely good enough; with a body that wasn't bad enough to hold me back and not correct enough to do what it really needed to do. And maybe because I was only barely good enough, I wanted to think of her confession as overly dramatic. This was the way of my envy. But what ballet dancer didn't envy Gelsey Kirkland?

Which brings me to my tour of the Bolshoi Theatre. It was also part of our cultural enlightenment, but one that was much more exciting than seeing the embalmed body of Lenin. The theatre was smaller than I thought it would be but very beautiful. I remember the balconies catching my eye, but what captured my attention most were the raked, or sloped, stages. Gelsey Kirkland had talked about them like they were the dancer's equivalent of a terrible road hazard—something that sends you toppling off the highway and flip-flopping over yourself. I decided I didn't trust her and I was going to find out for myself. They let us walk across the stage, where I slipped off my shoes—I intentionally had worn clogs so it would be easy to slip them off. I took fourth position, prepared for a simple pirouette. I rose up onto my leg, the other neatly pulled up into passé, and spotted the turn and…

Whack!

My butt smacked against the stage with force. Just like Gelsey Kirkland had said, I couldn't find my equilibrium, and then couldn't balance. I thought I was going to spin headlong into the front row of empty seats. Sure, I'd felt the slope, but I hadn't trusted that it would throw me off. I was cocky—something I usually wasn't in the ballet studio. Maybe I just wanted to prove Gelsey Kirkland wrong, or maybe I wanted to feel like I could do something, any one little thing, that she couldn't.

My understanding was that the stages were raked so that the audience could better view all the action, both upstage and downstage. I could only imagine what a series of turns and leaps might feel like coming down stage, gathering force and momentum from the decline. But for the audience, the raked stage helped create the magic, helped create the world of the stage. Once again, I didn't tap into the magic. I was a non-believer.

Raked stages: you'd have to get used to them and adjust, but there's something even more basic than that. It does have to do with the magic on stage. I've been looking for the magic my whole life, and yet when I'm presented with evidence of it, I turn away, or fall on my ass.

10.

And, then, of course, there was a boy; there's always a boy. His name was Mikhail—Misha—but I had to call him Little Misha because in my mind, Mikhail—Misha—meant Mikhail Baryshnikov. I never knew that Misha personally, although everyone in the dance world referred to him by this nickname, like we were all friends. It was ironic, too, that Little Misha was the one who I called little, because he was taller than the famous Misha, who was notoriously compact.

Little Misha started walking home with Vlada and me, and it was Vlada who first said, "I think he likes you." I invited Vlada and Little Misha to come over to the room where I stayed, and we played Prince on my walkman and passed around the earphones.  And then one day Vlada stopped coming. She said, "I have to get home to my aunt," when we reached the boarding house, and then only Little Misha came in with me, Vera suspiciously eyeing him, barking hello in Russian.

Maybe it was that I was in a foreign country, and maybe he was just that handsome, but I was surprised that Little Misha liked me and that I liked him. I never dated dancers—in the past either I wasn't interested or they weren't interested or they were gay, openly or closeted—and I hardly dated back then at all.   But I suppose I thought that being in a foreign country, everything was different. Little Misha had green eyes and dark hair and a brooding way about him that struck me as very sexy, even though I really wasn't old enough to understand what sexy really was. 

At first we sat in my room and shared the earphones and listened to music. I also had brought Duran Duran, which was out of date but still a favorite, The Cure, The Smiths, Echo and Bunnymen. Then we listened to Prince.

Even with a Russian boy who was just a slightly older teenager than I was, and who spoke minimal English, he got the point of the songs we played on the walkman. Especially, Prince. Particularly when we'd been listening to fairly popular songs like "When Doves Cry" and then we listened to songs like "Darling Nikki." Like sex oozing through the walkman into the earphones. It translated, and suddenly, I was kissing Little Misha.

This should have been thrilling—after all the only other boy I'd kissed was a trumpet player named Mike at Interlochen Arts Academy. Kissing boys was supposed to be something exciting for sixteen year old girls, even dancers. Maybe kissing a trumpet player spoils a girl. The problem was that Little Misha was a terrible kisser. He was a well trained and very talented dancer, with a great physique—as dancers we spent our days in the tightest of clothes, where, perhaps, the nickname Little Misha proved to be the most inaccurate. He could leap higher than any other boy in his division, but his idea of kissing was basically to stick his tongue in my mouth and wait for me to kiss back. His lips were limp. But worse, they were wet, slobbery wet, boy wet in the worst way. I got a ring of saliva around my mouth that made me shudder I was so disgusted by it. In late 1980's teen vernacular: I was, like, totally grossed out.

Little Misha misinterpreted my shudder as one of pleasure and his fingers tried to work the zipper of my jeans—the jeans that the guy I met who worked the black market tried to get me to sell him, for both vodka and Bulgarian cigarettes, which might, in fact, have helped in this situation.

I pulled away and immediately pressed the stop button on the walkman. Little Misha looked like I'd hit him with my knee in the groin during a botched supported pirouette.  He yelled something at me in Russian and stomped around. Famous Russian temper, I thought. I wanted to be upset, too, but I was relieved. I got up and went to the bathroom I shared with the other girls in the boarding house, and washed my face, several times, lathering the soap, letting the water get as hot as I could stand it. I scrubbed and scrubbed. By the time I returned to my room Little Misha was gone.

I was sure there was going to be fallout in the studios the next day. But Vlada insisted there was nothing damaging about me in the school's gossip. She said all that Little Misha had said was, "American girls are fun but they will never be good dancers." I didn't even get mad about it. Although I have always wondered if Vlada was telling me the whole truth. Despite this, she and I went back to walking home together and listening to music until it was evening and she was expected at her Aunt's apartment.

11.

In the last week I was in Russia, Lyudmila liked me better. She even said Little Potato in a softer tone which betrayed her fondness, as if she believed that if she just had more time with me she could turn me into a dancer that maybe, just maybe, wouldn't be sent off to Armenia for folk dancing. She would gently prod me, tapping my Achilles heel lightly with her index finger, and I would try my best, inching my extension a tiny bit higher, wishing of course, that I might please her. I promised to keep working on my turnout and my extensions when I returned home. 

"You promise," she said and sounded a little sad, even though she still flared her nostrils.

During that last week, Vlada and I didn't listen to music. We sat in my room, staring at my bed, sitting slumped against the wall with our legs flopped in front of us.  She would sniffle but never cry and I only cried after she left. I had no Vlada in the United States, and if I did, we wouldn't be friends. We could only be friends here because we really weren't competing. We would have never competed anyway; she was a much better dancer than I would ever be, and a year younger, too. Before I left, I gave her a pair of my jeans and my tampons and my walkman and made her promise that she would never sell them on the black market, no matter what the cost of Bulgarian cigarettes. I said I'd come back and she said she'd come to the US and both of us knew neither would ever happen.

The colors of Russia are like a bruise, and the bruise is on my heart and never goes away. In my ear I still hear the soft incantation: nyet, nyet.  I wish I'd tried to pirouette again on the raked stages of the Bolshoi. I can see the red velvet seats in the audience, the gold tassels on the stage's heavy curtains.

The night before I left Russia, Vera made me borscht. "No complaining now," she said on my second helping. We left early the next morning. I thought Vera would be up to make us breakfast, but we ate on the plane. It makes me sad when I remember that I never got to say goodbye to her, but to tell the truth, I've never been any good at goodbyes. But I'm good at remembering.

12.

The colors of Russia: ashy patinas over deep purples, velvet blues. The colors of you: bright pinks and bold reds. The color of me: white; the color of the sylphs and swans and wilis of classical ballet, the hot light of the stage, the absence of all color.

This story, I know, should have ended with goodbye.

But when I'm remembering, I can't help but to imagine Russia, and I can see myself there now. In my imagined Russia, I eat Vera's delicious borscht and, of course, never gain any weight. Vlada meets me at the boarding house. She is still painfully beautiful. We trace our old route; Vlada leads, taking me to the bridge we always crossed. The old woman with the missing tooth smiles and cackles, but I'm not mad at her anymore. The rest of her clan looks at us, not accusing, not scared, but curious. I put my hand in the old woman's, give her my money, and command, "Gypsy, work your magic."

www.LindaLappin.net     

Linda Lappin's second novel, Katherine's Wish (Wordcraft of Oregon, 2008) won a gold medal at the IPPY awards in the category of historical fiction, honorable mention in the general fiction category of the Eric Hoffer prize, and was a Finalist for the ForeWord Book of the Year award.

In 1978 Lappin received a Fulbright grant to participate in a two-year seminar in literary translation held in Rome at the Centro Studi Americani. Her translation of Carmelo Samonà's novel, Brothers, won two prizes in literary translation in the United States: The Renato Poggioli Award in Translation given by the New York PEN club and a National Endowment for the Arts grant in translation. She was awarded a second translation grant from the NEA in 1996 for her work on Tuscan writer Federigo Tozzi. Her first novel, The Etruscan, was published in 2004 by Wynkin de Worde.

Since 1976, Lappin has published essays, poems, reviews, and short stories in many US and European publications.

Lappin recently completed a creative writing book entitled, The Genius Loci: A Writer's Guide to Capturing the Soul of Place. A brief section of the book will be featured in the November issue of The Writer. In addition to The Genius Loci Lappin has also written a mystery novel, Signatures in Stone.

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R.A. Rycraft: When did your interest in writing emerge?

Linda Lappin: Even as a child I wrote poems and stories, and I felt an irresistible attraction to my father's Royal typewriter. There's a photo of me at age four, standing stark naked at the typewriter, writing a poem.

R.A.: What a great image! Baring it all for art. Lovely. Do you, as a writer, take things from your life and turn them into fiction?

L.L.: Writing for me is the output phase of a process of absorption, crystallization, and transformation of impressions. For me, the output takes the form of inventiveness with language and story. A sense of place—or rather the soul of place—has been the chief source of inspiration for nearly all my fiction. My stories begin with a process of enchantment and interaction with a place. Vernon Lee, the British travel writer and ghost story writer of the early 20th century, once claimed that she could not live anywhere that had not been warmed by other people's lives. I know what she means. She could somehow sense the presence of previous lives permeating landscapes and interiors. That's what happens to me when a piece of fiction comes into being. I get caught up in the soul of a place I have visited, and then as I muse about it, I begin to hear different narrative voices—voices materialize, characters emerge and define their identities, and then their stories unfold. That's when I start writing it all down, following the stories through the landscape. In the initial stages, most of my work begins by "writing itself."

My short fiction is all set in contemporary times. Early stories are based in Rome and relatively autobiographical—the struggles of a single woman getting along in a foreign culture and seeking some kind of direction. My longer fiction tends toward historical novels. My first novel, Prisoner of Palmary, is set in the 18th century, while the others—The Etruscan, Katherine's Wish, and my new novel, Signatures in Stone—are all set in the 20s. One theme that dominates my work has to do with the problem of being a writer, or an artist, reconciling "imagination"—and a commitment to imagination and its fruits—with "reality" and its limitations. At the same time, displacement and exile are also key issues in my fiction, and I guess that reflects some of my own experience as an expat.

R.A.: I imagine that the development of a historical novel is different from a novel that is purely fiction. For John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath evolved from articles he wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle about the plight of displaced people from the Midwest, migrating to California in search of work during the Great Depression. How did Katherine's Wish evolve for you?

L.L.: I started collecting books, essays, and other material about Mansfield in 1978. A couple years later in London, I picked up a book called Gurdjieff and Mansfield by a writer named James Moore. Moore had written a dazzling piece of literary and cultural scholarship, which reads like a novel, in vivid, quirky prose. I became interested in Gurdjieff, too, and in other writers, artists, and "people of note," including Peter Brook, who had been attracted to Gurdjieff's school. Piecing together all this material was very exciting. I spent a fortune on books and microfilms and interlibrary loans. I remember how excited I was when I found Ida Baker's memoirs available at the British Council Library in Rome. One thing that fascinated me was reading the chronicle of Mansfield's life through Ida's eyes and seeing how their two versions of the same events fit together and how they deviated. That, of course, led to my reading all the critics and friends and associates of Mansfield, describing their relationship and her relationship with Murry from the outside, trying to blame the peculiar dynamics and suffering of this triangle only on one of the three—and not seeing, in a way, what a complete "whole" the story made when you stood aside without judging the three main actors who could not be other than they were.

R.A.: It sounds as though Mansfield obsessed you. I wonder why Mansfield? What about her captured your interest and imagination?

L.L.: My interest was not so much from reading her stories but from picking up C.K. Stead's Penguin edition of the letters and journals back in 1978. The vivid writing, the struggle with illness, the loneliness, the desire above all things to become a writer and to improve at her art are what struck me most. The sense of displacement and longing that comes from her letters resonated with me. And then I attended the Paris Writing Workshop in 2000, which turned into a pilgrimage of sorts. While there, I visited the cemetery of Avon, where Katherine Mansfield is buried, and the Prieurè of Fontainebleau where she had been the guest of Gurdjieff's Harmonious Development of Man—an institute created by George Ivanovic Gurdjieff, the much-discussed spiritual leader of the last century. Mansfield went there after a long, sterile journey seeking health, which began in 1918 when she discovered she had tuberculosis. From that moment on, her life became a restless pilgrimage, crisscrossing Europe on trains, accompanied by her companion Ida, separated most of the time from her husband, John Middleton Murry, looking for a better climate, a new cure, a home. This particular aspect of Mansfield's life intrigued me, and I sought to discover how this writer from New Zealand, a little land with very little history, ended up at Prieurè of Fontainebleau, knocking at Gurdjieff's door.

Mansfield never overcame her sense of being an "exile"—due to the great stretches of time she spent away from Murry looking for a cure—also she felt an intense nostalgia at times for the New Zealand of her childhood. As an expatriate, I identify with her feeling of rootlessness.

R.A.: Visiting the Prieure where she died must have been haunting experience.

L.L.: Yes. And sad too. When my husband and I went to the Prieurè we discovered the building in the process of being renovated and turned into a prestigious apartment residence. There was no trace of Mansfield or Gurdjieff ever having been there, no plaque or inscription on the building or gate. The only evidence of Mansfield's presence was a nearby street with the illustrious name Rue Katherine Mansfield. On that particular day, the gate was open. And then a side door was open. I went inside the building and was able to take a look around. Sergio snapped a wonderful photo of a staircase. I imagine it to be the staircase Mansfield might have ascended just before dying of a hemorrhage on January 9, 1923.

R.A.: You said you wrote about that experience.

L.L.: After I returned from visiting the Prieurè, I wrote a sort of pilgrimage essay about my trip to Fontainebleau and Mansfield's sojourn there. At the same time, I was working on an essay about Jeanne Hebuterne (the subject of my current fiction project).

R.A.: Who is Jeanne Hebuterne? I'm not familiar with that name. You say you're writing about her as a "fiction project?"

L.L.: Yes, a fictional account based on the life of Jeanne Hebuterne entitled The Diary of JH. She was the companion of the painter Modigliani. It has only come out in the last decade or so, thanks to research promoted by Modigliani's daughter, Jeanne Modigliani, that Jeanne Hebuterne was a promising artist herself and that they worked closely together in his studio. She is usually pictured in memoirs of the period as a shadowy long-suffering companion, but rarely as an artist with her own aspirations. This is partly because her works were hidden to the world by the Hebuterne family for eighty years after Jeanne's death and have only recently begun to circulate as her story becomes more widely known.

I should mention that Modigliani had previously been the lover of Beatrice Hastings. Hastings had also been the mistress of Orage, the man who pointed Mansfield in Gurdjieff's direction. I was interested in finding some information about Hastings, since there wasn't much in print, and discovered James Moore's address on the Internet. I wrote to ask him if he had any information and also told him I was researching Mansfield. Amazingly, he replied that my query was an extraordinary coincidence. He was in the very process of eliminating material from his files he no longer needed and offered to send it to me; this included some very hard to find documentation about Mansfield's stay at the Prieurè. Moore's material helped me complete my essay, "The Ghosts of Fontainebleau."

R.A.: That is an extraordinary coincidence. Was it "The Ghosts of Fontainebleau" that became the first chapter of Katherine's Wish?

L.L.: No. I first showed "The Ghosts of Fontainebleau" to David Applefield, who was publishing the French literature and arts journal, FRANK at the time. He suggested I turn the essay into a story, which I did. Then I showed the story to Thomas E. Kennedy, who suggested I write another, so I did. The second story was called "Hotel Beau Rivage." It eventually became the first chapter of Katherine's Wish. At that point, the project took off. Once I started, the story just flowed. I "knew" how the voices of the three primary characters ought to sound and what settings I should choose for framing the action. I knew where the story would begin and exactly where it would end.

R.A.: How did you incorporate your research into the novel?

L.L.: Originally, I interwove brief passages and phrases from Mansfield's writings into my own text, thinking it wouldn't be hard to get permission to use the originals. But this turned out to be a nightmare because some of the texts I had used were under copyright in the United States and others weren't. The people at Knopf and at the British Society of Authors, which holds the rights to the Mansfield estate, tried to help, but it was such a mess that I decided to comb through the novel, remove direct quotes, and paraphrase what I needed. It was like picking a dozen needles out of a haystack. A lot of people thought I was crazy to do it. But to me it seemed the path of least resistance, so I did it.

R.A.: The Etruscan, Katherine's Wish, and Signatures in Stone are set in the same era and place—early 20th century Europe—an apparently prudish world experienced through the eyes of nonconformist women. What attracts you to this era and subject?

L.L.: At the University of Tuscia where I taught English for many years, there was a great interest in women writers, Bloomsbury, Virginia Woolf, modernism, and to a lesser degree, Katherine Mansfield, so that I was continually receiving stimulation and new ideas. Aside from that, I guess I am just naturally attracted to this period. I love reading about (and researching) Paris in the 20s and lesser known figures connected to Bloomsbury.  I am attracted to the sense of freedom, modernity, openness to alternative lifestyles, sophistication, and willingness to take all kinds of risks in their lives and work that writers and artists of this period show. I am fascinated by the communities they created, the magazines, presses, and bookstores they founded. Many Americans went abroad to live at that time because they felt suffocated by the provincialism of the United States and by the mentality that would later lead to the banning of Ulysses.

R.A.: You mentioned earlier "the palpable soul of place." What do you mean by that? What puts you in touch with the "soul of place" you weave into your stories?

L.L.: The search for the soul of place is one of my passions as traveler, writer, and writing teacher. My work is often inspired by places: islands, ruins, old houses and buildings, and the atmospheres found there. For several years, I have been researching the "genius loci," the spirit or soul of place. The Romans and the Etruscans believed that every place—every mountain, field, body of water—had its indwelling spirit or soul, which was beneficial or harmful to human activity. And every house and household was believed to have its tutelary spirits. Similar beliefs in guardian spirits exist all over the globe. For the Romans and Etruscans, the soul of place was an entity with which human beings were constantly interacting and communicating. At the same time, the soul of place gave a place its specific character, and the people living there reflected that character. This idea has stimulated me for a long time, and it influenced me while writing The Etruscan as well as my island stories and my first novel, Prisoner of Palmary, set on an island in the gulf of Gaeta in the late 1700s. Many of the travel writers of the early twenties, including D. H. Lawrence and Vernon Lee, focus on the soul of place—how and where it may be found. Vernon Lee often showed how harming the soul of place could also lead to obsession and death.

Soul of place is portrayed in my most recent novel, Signatures in Stone. This is a mystery novel set in Bomarzo, a sculpture park here in the area of Tuscia, created between 1550 and 1570. The sculptures represent bizarre creatures and pagan gods and were probably meant as "visions" of a personal, pagan pilgrimage through hell in order to recover Persephone and liberate her from Hades. For centuries, the place was abandoned, all-but-forgotten by art historians until about eighty years ago, so that it became completely overgrown. Signatures in Stone takes the rediscovery of the park as its starting point. The heroine is an older British mystery writer who is staying in Bomarzo in 1928 with a group of eccentric tourists while the park is being cleared of hundreds of years of thorns, vines, and debris. In the midst of this process of "uncovering," a murder happens, and she is the prime suspect. I can't say more without spoiling the fun. I will say that the heroine is loosely based on the writer Mary Butts, and, like Butts,  is obsessed with the idea of "signatures" or "correspondences"—the idea that insignificant events, objects found in the street, words overheard, minor changes in our immediate environment can be "read" and interpreted to reveal the secrets of the past or predict the future.

R.A.: You have said, "Writing is an exhilarating process through which writers briefly estrange themselves from their own lives. This may or may not be therapeutic." What do you mean?

L.L.: By being estranged from your own life, I was referring to the fact that you can write about yourself and your own life through situations that are remote from your own outer circumstances and through characters who are quite different from yourself but into whom you distill some of your deepest insights, conflicts, or experience. Everything we write is a projection of ourselves, though we may not immediately recognize ourselves in our projections. In this sense, writing may be therapeutic because you "work out" hidden or unconscious content without even realizing that you are doing it. I was also referring to the fact that there is a curious "getting outside ourselves" thing that happens when we write, so that we can look at ourselves—our thoughts and our actions—from a totally new perspective. It's like those flashes that sometimes come to you when waking from a dream. Maybe you glimpse your arm or your hand as you lie there in bed, and you think for a moment how strange it is to be the person you are, in the body you have been given. Through writing we discover things, about ourselves and the world that we didn't know before, or, rather, that we didn't consciously know before. Whether or not that is therapeutic depends, I suppose, on the attitude we take to it, and what we do with what we discover.

R.A.: Has writing been therapeutic for you?

L.L.: For a long time, I faced continual rejection. I spent enormous amounts of time writing and rewriting. I spent money when funds were very limited (and we all know that writing is an expensive hobby), struggling to get my work into print, to make connections with editors or magazines, and all those varied chores you have to see to in order to further your writing career. This was done while working two "real jobs" in the "real world" (one as a teacher and one as an Italian translator) as well as taking care of my home and husband, commuting between two residences, and creating a writing center at the Centro Pokkoli. Through it all, I would get up from my desk after hours of work and ask myself—Now, why am I doing this? Should I keep on? How long before I throw in the towel? These questions tormented me for years.

Prior to last spring, I would have said that far from being a form of therapy, writing was both an obsession and a dis-ease.  A compulsion. However, last spring something happened that caused me to challenge my identity as a valid member of the "working world." I found myself washed out by an "identity" tsunami, treading water, and the thing that kept me afloat and paddling back to shore was my writing. I realized that the sacrifices and efforts made up to that point had not been useless. The parallel life I made for myself as a writer came to my rescue and helped me keep alive my self-esteem at a very bad moment.

R.A.: Some writers accept their identity as "writers" enthusiastically, while others are uncomfortable with the term. I once heard Judy Blunt speak about her uneasiness when described as a writer. She explained that she felt a bit like a "fake" because, at that point, she had published several essays and but one memoir. I found her admission intriguing given that she is a best-selling author and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. In my mind, she's earned the title. How about you? Have you come to terms with your identity as a writer now?

L.L.: One doubt that sometimes comes to me is that I don't really have the "stuff": the talent, the dedication, the intellect to become a "real writer." I still have problems thinking of myself as a "real writer." And when I see those words—"Linda Lappin, writer"—some little mischievous part of me smirks and makes a deprecating comment. Again, this is related to what I was just talking about—the torment about why one does what one does. Recently, I realized that that whole little song I sang to myself about not being good enough distracted me from the antidote to the malaise—working harder to improve.

They considered themselves as midnight adventurers, coming off the hill they so lovingly called Henshit Mountain, to cross the pond in the dead of winter with sleds to "borrow" lumber from Artie Donolan who had "borrowed" it from Breakheart Reservation, a state park. The park, at its deepest end, bordered on land that the Donolans had worked for years, including timber they ripped out of the state park as long as a few eyes stayed closed. To the boys from Henshit Mountain, the Donolan rape was not unknown, not to these teenagers, who were only enacting their own form of justice, borrowing enough lumber to build themselves a clubhouse at the thickly-treed section of the mountain. With various spurts of energy, even in summer when they floated rafts of lumber across the same pond from the same lumberyard, rooms were added to the clubhouse. The building rose majestically, they all agreed, they who had to a man become proficient carpenters and finish men.

Over a number of years, as they grew toward a global war surfacing on both oceans, meetings were held, elections concluded, designs and improvements of all genres initiated, trysts enamored, hope burst continually from that domicile in which no one lived, not as a home site.

And came the day when the town, through the office of the chief of police, demanded taxes be paid on the property, thus quickly abandoned by the clubmen to the town, to the weather, to the times, as they relocated their activities to another site, another phantom house they'd build on a tract of land without a road, further uphill, deeper in the patch of tall pines, stray apple trees feeding off the ground since the Civil War days, soft maples, and tyrant oaks that never let go their territory.

The building membership included Frank Parkinson, Eddie Oljay, Bud Petitteau, Homer Barnard, Allie Devine, Clete Weavering, Asa Parnell, Poker Symonds, Nial O'Hara, Chuck Grabowski, and others, by adoption or temporary association, whose names will only resurface as the story progresses. Some girls, of course, toward that quick run at war building in Europe, had honorary admission at all hours of day or night after a code of secrecy had been imposed. Not one of those girls, from what I have heard over the long years, ever broke that code of secrecy.

Even as the members pillaged materials in small doses from other ready sources on Route One, begged and borrowed in addition to the stealing, the noises on the far side of two oceans began to sift into their meetings.

"Hey, guys," Poker Symonds said one night as the moon sifted down through the trees atop them, "I just heard today Buzz Marchowski joined the Canadian Air Force, the RCAF, and is already up there in Moncton or Shediac or St. Something somewhere. Eddie Smiledge down The Rathole told me. Says Buzz's all pissed off about the Germans screwing up Poland where his grandparents are, still living on the family farm."

Symonds, whose name had been changed from a hard–to-pronounce beginning like Sczy and whatever, kept shaking his head as if he wondered why his name had been hidden behind soft edges. As it turned out, he'd be the first to leave the clubhouse one night soon and never come back again. Under the moon that night and in the light of the kerosene lamps, others knew what was cooking in him, for his eyes told about the deep unrest so recently kicked free.

Each knew his turn was coming, that he was bound elsewhere on the face of the globe. If it touched Saugus in any manner, any manner at all, they all swore an oath they'd be in the first line of recruits.

Germany was making too much noise, stepping on too many toes, bustling and bragging of their great inroads on small nations guarded by token armies, and Japan, like a lecher, was stretching its imperial hands across the rich skin and into too many orifices of the tasty Orient. In a matter of a week the balled fist of war came at them; one classmate, flying for the RCAF, was shot down over the English Channel; another enlistee, a neighbor of Parkinson's, was missing from an RAF flight over France; an uncle of Clete Weavering was stomped to death on the China coast as he tried to sneak out to sea to board a submarine after secret service on the mainland, and Oljay's distant cousin was shot in front of a firing squad  at the edge of a ghetto in Poland.

War, in its demand for enlistment, called them, young and exuberant in their outlook, and it was in the next week they gathered in the clubhouse, the house nobody lived in, and made their plans to help save the world.

Frank Parkinson said, "We don't go as a group. We don't get in one line to any branch of the service, and end up in one squad or one flight or one patrol, go down with one bang. We each go our own way. If we come back, or those who do come back, we'll meet here. No Trafalgar Square for us or even under the clock at The Ritz. We will celebrate here someday. We ought to go down to see the Chief and tell him our plans. He might understand. If not, we'll tell him not to tell us."

"Why can't we go as a group, the whole club of us?" Oljay said, seeing the whole group as a squad of its own, firepower from the start, Robin Hoods or Lone Rangers waging battle.

Parkie said, "No matter if we walked in and got consecutive numbers, they'd split us up. They do things like that so we don't clique it up. Makes sense to me, so we should each go our way. I'm going in the army. When I heard about Big Red in Burma, I knew that I'd end up in the army."

In a day's time, it was all decided, for each of them, and all services were involved.

The war to end all wars bruised them all, each one, each in different ways, some with dread permanence. Clete Weavering was blown off the deck of a Navy supply vessel in the Pacific, never to be seen again. A year later an envelope ended up at the Legion Hall, from Clete, simply addressed to The Boys of Henshit Mountain, Saugus, Massachusetts. The Post Office, having no proper or known address, delivered it to the Legion Post, #210, to hold for any survivors of the war who might have been The Boys of Henshit Mountain. As it was, one old WW I vet said he knew of them and would deliver it to the first one who came home. The Legion held the letter for almost two years.

Then it was delivered to Bud Petitteau one evening at the Meadowglen Club as Bud had come home from two years in the far Pacific and hospital time, one hand gone from a nasty grenade. The old Legionnaire had heard Bud was home, spending time at The Meadowglen with some guys who had come home, and made a trip to deliver the letter, which was simple enough in its message:

"Miss you guys like hell, but some good guys here. I just wanted to see if this gets through to the clubhouse or to any of you. We have heard stories about miraculous deliveries of real short addresses. If I don't get to see you on the mountain, I am sure that we will catch up to each other sometime, someplace. Your clubhouse pal, Clete

PS: Say hi to Mildred Derning for me. I got her last letter about a year ago and never did answer it for one reason or another. She's a real cute kid I've thought about a few times.

(A note here: It was not revealed until 1950 that Mildred Derning had an eight-year old son she had named John Cletus Derning. She never married as far as I know and died in 1981. John Cletus Derning took down his physicians shingle in 2002. I don't know if he ever knew anything about his father, but I hope he did. If this tells him, it's about all I can do.)

Homer Barnard didn't come home from the 12th Infantry Division in the Pacific, and the 31st Infantry Regiment of the 7th Infantry Division in Korea, until 1954 and after he had served in a POW camp in North Korea for two years. One of his letters, addressed to The Clubhouse on Henshit Mt, Saugus, Mass., was hung up in a dead letter box and a postal center under construction until it fell from between the cracks of time in 1963. It was delivered back to Homer by a personal friend, an employee of the USPS and an army comrade from basic days, who had intercepted it finally en route to Saugus and recognized the sender's name. He drove from New York one day in the fall to deliver it and spent a week in Saugus. He even visited the original clubhouse, which by then had been jacked up and a cellar placed under it, three rooms added, and a porch wrapped half way and more around the house from  where a huge section of Rumney Marsh was visible as well as a great chunk of the Atlantic Ocean on a good day. The two men sat on the porch a good part of one afternoon with the owner, in Italy with the 10th Mountain Division with a few other Saugus boys, and the beer was free. They even went to see the Patriots play the Kansas City Chiefs at Fenway Park, which ended up in a tie game.

Parkie, who admittedly  only wrote one letter to the guys, which has not yet surfaced, but about whom much has been written by me, ended up on the hot sands of the Sahara and could have been dead a few times. Of him it has been said, him being The Municipal Subterranean in a poem: He comes up, goggled, out of a manhole in the middle of a street in my peaceful town, sun the sole brazier, like an old Saharan veteran, Rommel-pointing his tank across the four-year stretch of sand, shell holes filling up quick as death. I think of Frank Parkinson, Tanker, Tiger of Tobruk, now in his grass roots, the acetylene smile on his oil-dirty face, the goggles still high on his high forehead, his forever knowing Egypt's two dark eyes.

Frank told me his story one evening as we drank beer by old Lily Pond. It came around as "Parkie, Tanker, Tiger of Tobruk," and many people have read it elsewhere.

Asa Parnell, it has been said, wrote dozens of letters to the guys but sent his via Harry Clemson at The Pythian Alleys (The Rathole Poolroom its other half), who held them until one of the guys picked them up in 1945, after the big boom went down. Parnell had 25 missions as a waist gunner of a B-17 over Europe, went to school on the GI Bill, ended up with his PhD, taught at two Maine colleges for more than 30 years before he drowned in a kayak ride on the Allagash River when he was over 70 years old. He only came to Saugus at the Founders Day festivities, out front of the Town Hall in September of the year when, at times, 10-15 thousand people might pass through the center of town during the celebration, the accompanying mini-marathon race, and the high school football game every other year. One year I heard that he found two other guys and they sat for four hours on the steps of the library hashing over the old days, and then he went north again, for his last ride a few years later.

Every so often, as if I'm being summoned by a voice, a face, the edge of a shared incident, I leave the vets section of the cemetery and visit Henshit Mountain, trying to find any remnant of a clubhouse, cellar in place, second floor added, perhaps a porch and a garage, a garden for summer attendance. Once an old fishing buddy, who had lived on the mountain for many years, pointed out two or three places that had strange beginnings. "There are no shortcuts in those places. They were built well by guys who knew their business. They had OJT before there was OJT. Go down alongside old Lily Pond and more than half the houses down there were summer camps before the big war, and when the boys came back home and were looking for cheap quarters, they bought a camp erected on cement blocks and after a while jacked it up, put in a stone or poured foundation, got central heating, raised a family, added rooms, sold it, bought  or built a new place, all part of the economy. Some of the original camps are now so sprawling over the landscape you'd have to get a pre-war aerial map to find the beginning forms of them.

Parkie carried on for 20 some torturous years before he hugged the earth for the last time, but not on Henshit Mountain, home away from home for a long time in his short life. Every Memorial Day I re-flag his grave along with a host of people re-flagging other graves, and have done so for more than 25 years.

All of them are gone now, some here, some elsewhere. Four of the membership share the same plot with Parkie. None of them ever climbed to the back end of Henshit Mountain after the war. The house that no one lived in really had passed on in their growth, even its nostalgia, for they had rushed onto the real estate of the whole globe.

Now and then, usually close to Memorial Day and again at Veterans Day, I drive up the hill, for that's what it really is, a rise of about 500 feet above sea level, on a series of paved roads. From the road I can see two houses, now lived in for more than half a century, where no one lived when they were built. I can visualize the membership crossing the pond in winter on sleds loaded with purloined lumber and supplies, or on rafts tied together in the dead of summer nights. I know where they kept their beer in underground coolers, where it stayed cool and was hidden from the temptation of potential thieves. I know some of the girls, still here with us, grandmothers time and again, and great-grandmothers, who swore to the secrecy code and will carry it away with them.

It's on a rare occasion when I come face to face with one of those ladies in the aisle of a mall store, or at the library with a chosen book, or in the cemetery on a special day, and get a wink acknowledging the deep and mostly hidden years. We understand the past, the pact, the passions. We understand what loyalty means, and where things have gone in this short passage.

When I first became an agent, I didn't know any writers. Because I had the time, in the beginning, I read omnivorously. But even in those days I had to find my way to a system of reading the literary reviews and little magazines. I had to find short cuts in order to stay on top of the growing mountain of magazines that was building in my office. In talking to editors of the reviews and of the major magazines, I learned that everyone skims. They read the first page or sometimes only the first paragraph of a story, before rejecting the work, so the writer had to engage the editor very early on in the process. I began to read that way, too. I had to. Many of the younger editors I deal with at publishing houses seem to be overwhelmed with submissions. The salesmen for the large publishing conglomerates no longer have time to actually read most of the books they sell. The publisher's rep is a dying breed and may soon be extinct. Once one large publisher is acquired by another, the big saving, at least initially, is in the firing of one of the two sales forces. Now each remaining rep has double the number of titles to sell, and fewer buyers to sell them to, as the big chains force out the independents. The bookstore that gave me my start on the Upper West Side of Manhattan has long been gone, forced out of business by a giant book chain, eight blocks South.

The result of all these cutbacks in staff is that the survivors, be they agents, editors, salesmen, or booksellers, have less and less time to read. The writer must capture their interest early on. For this reason, I ask writers to send me only the opening chapters of their novels or a few of their short stories.

When the editor of Eureka Literary Magazines asked me to write this article on how I read the literary reviews and little magazines, I had to give the idea some thought. What was I looking for in a short story? What grabbed me? What made me write to the editor and ask for the writer's address? I decided to backtrack to the earliest stories I had read by some of the writers I represent whom I had found in the reviews. I wanted to take another look at the opening paragraph or two of each of the stories that had first attracted me to their work. Would I still be drawn to their material? Have my tastes changed over the years? Looking at the earliest story in the group, I re-read Richard Russo's story "The Top of the Tree," published years ago in the Mid-America Review:

The Lilacs usually bloomed early. The tree in our yard always had the purple kind, and they were nice enough, but I preferred the white lilacs because they smelled prettier. Not thick and perfumy like roses, but light and airy, the way running water smells in the spring when the snow is melting. Probably I just liked the white kind because they grew on a tree on our next door neighbor's property. My mother wouldn't let me climb in it.

This one breaks all of my preconceived rules. For one, it has a youthful narrator. On the surface it doesn't seem very grabby. I wonder what made me keep reading and can only think that the metaphor "running water smells in the spring when the snow is melting" as a description for the way white lilacs smell was unusual. I'm not sure whether today I would have kept reading, but I am glad I did, for I regard Rick as one of our best writers.

A few years later I came across Jack O'Connell's story "Nevada" in the New England Review:

Now things are calm. The barking has stopped. The dog, most likely, has fallen asleep out in the garage. It's cooler there. The rain that was forecast never arrived. Jenny watches Barry. His body takes up all of the couch. She wonders how he can stay so rigid, his arms straight down by his side, still wearing his watch and rings. The color has gone from his face and though she tries to see some form of breathing, there isn't any. He looks cramped with both his head and bare feet pressing into the couch. She thinks this must be how a person looks laid out for an autopsy.

This always intrigues me. A male writer writes in third person (nearly always my favorite mode) but from the viewpoint of a woman. Is Barry dead? Did Jenny kill him? I'm hooked. Jack has gone on to publish four very literary, very unusual thrillers set in his home town of Worcester, Mass. No one writes like Jack. He's a real original.

In 1991, I started to read James Carlos Blake's novella "I, Fierro," in Quarterly West on a subway train going uptown for a lunch meeting. I got so involved in this story that I missed my stop and almost didn't care:

The greatest tragedy that can befall a man is never to know who he really is. So I have heard. I have also heard that the greatest tragedy a man can meet is never to find something to love. It seems to me that these notions mean the same thing, but even if they don't, I cannot agree with either. Who has not known men who discovered the truth about themselves only to be tortured by it for the rest of their lives. Is man worse off when he doesn't know who he is or when he learns he is truly a coward? When he is ignorant of his true nature or when he knows he is a traitor at heart? My point, I think, is clear. Not that I pity either cowards or traitors. To the contrary: in a just world they would all be made to face the hard truth about themselves before they died. In my fashion I made many of them do exactly that.

When I got to the last line of that paragraph, Blake had me. This tale, told in first person from the point of view of Rudolfo Fierro, the bodyguard of Pancho Villa, and one of the most notorious killers of the Mexican Revolution, would later be expanded into a novel.

FX Toole's story "The Monkey Look" was an instant grabber. Who could resist the speed and punch of these opening lines as they appeared in Zyzzyva?

I stop blood.

I stop it between rounds for fighters so they can stay in the fight. Blood ruins some boys. It was that way with Sonny Liston, God rest his soul. Bad as he was, he'd see his own blood and fall apart.

I found it hard to believe that this was Toole's first published story. He was nearly 70 years old and had spent the last twenty five years of his life training professional boxers and working as a cut man in the fighter's corner. Toole had a box full of unpublished stories that we turned into the prize-winning collection, Rope Burns. He's currently working on a boxing novel, Pound for Pound. It's never too late to start writing.

When I read the opening two paragraphs of Laura Hendrie's "Arroyo," in the Missouri Review, I found myself being pulled into this memorable story.

When I heard Dinah start crowing, I got up and dressed in the dark. Pa Jopa was snoring and my brother, Brice, was grinding his teeth, and from the kitchen it sounded like one person whistling and walking back and forth in the gravel outside. I cut two pieces of bread, wrapped them in a dish towel and put them in my pocket. The rest I left on the table where Brice and Pa Jopa could find it and then I went out to the barn.

The sky was beginning to turn but inside it was as dark as ink. Brice's horse, Jacob, nickered to me from the middle stall. I felt past him, put my hand out and Mattie breathed warmth there. Mattie's my horse. She's too old for work—Pa Jopa called her the knacker's gas money—but she has more common sense than all the horses we'd bought and sold put together. Pa Jopa's gray was in the farthest stall. When he smelled me, he shied so hard he slammed into the back wall.

The writer has set the stage here for the drama to come. When I contacted the magazine for Ms. Hendrie's address, I learned that this story was to be included in a collection called STYGO to be published by a small press out of Denver, Colorado. I bought a copy of the book and, once I'd read it, I wrote Laura a fan letter telling her how much I'd enjoyed every story in the collection. A few years later the writer sent me her first novel, Remember Me, a wonderful book which I later sold to Holt.

Robert Young's story "Empire of Worlds" appeared in Another Chicago Magazine. It has one of the longest first paragraphs ever to capture me. Miles Derry is the most hapless, bummed out character to appear in a short story that I've ever read. He's running away from something that takes him to the farthest edge of the West coast where he works in a triple XXX video store as the night manager.

Possibility and willfulness intersected for Miles Derry, at long last, half a mile from the imaginary point where the U.S. border runs out of land and continues into the Pacific. For this was where, stopped by water and Mexican mountains, he had ceased moving west and south, so completely humbled that it required all of his hyperalertness, at three in the morning, closing time, to come out from behind the cash register and walk past the red neon entrance of the video arcade, up an aisle of shiny magazines, past the salmon colored dildoes, which stood variously on the shelves like up-pointed weaponry, until he arrived, unhappily at the mop closet of the Little Pink Bookstore. Kari, Kari, Kari, he was thinking as he rolled out the bucket on wheels, knowing this was easier if he concentrated on her name. He hadn't missed a support payment in all three years. The canceled checks came back monthly from Illinois, with Mary Lou's signature on their backs, the only evidence of his responsibility and fatherhood. Last Christmas, when he'd been working at the Laundromat in Salt Lake, there'd been treat-pictures—and he had them in his wallet, which he kept in a front pocket of his pants because he didn't want those pictures anywhere near the latex gloves he carried in one rear pocket or the hardened sponge he carried in the other.

This character caught my imagination; can anyone so low be sympathetic? Could we, somehow, want this guy to make it in life? Young answered the question by making this story the opening chapter of his novel, One of the Guys (Harper Collins), and finding an opportunity for Miles to become an unexpected hero.

Turning a short story into a novel has happened for me on other occasions as well. Sometimes the writer creates a character in a story that you don't want to let go. You want to hear more about him or her. This was the case with Julianna Baggott's story "Girl Talk," in the New Delta Review.

One month before my father died in the fall of 1999, Church Fiske appeared at my door. I hadn't seen him since the summer my father disappeared with a redheaded bank teller from Walpole when I was fifteen, the summer my< mother decided to teach me the art of omission, how to tell the perfect lie, or more accurately, how you can choose the truth—with a little hard work and concentration—from the assortment of truths life had to offer. But for me to truly appreciate her art, my mother knew she would first have to give me the bare, naked truth so that I could see how she altered it. Like a gangster who has to tell his child he doesn't play violin, that the case is used for concealing a semi-automatic, my mother, Dotty Jablonski, spent the summer of my father's disappearance opening violin cases, showing me her guns.

This is a classic opening for a short story and yet it breaks several of the personal rules I have for not reading further. It is first person, and we assume the narrator is a teenager, and the story will be about the break-up of a marriage. I usually stop right there. But Julianna grabbed me with the tone and sense of humor of her narrator. When she received a letter from me telling her how much I enjoyed the story and asking, as I frequently do, for the first fifty pages of any novel she might be working on, Julianna sat down and in two weeks turned her story into the first fifty pages of a novel. It worked. I encouraged her to finish the novel, which was later sold at auction to Pocket Books.

Rarely has a single short story had the success of "Poachers," by Tom Franklin, first published in The Texas Review. After I read it I wanted to share it with every editor I knew.

At dawn of the first day of April the three Gates brothers backed their ten-foot aluminum boat in a narrow slough of dark water. They tied their hounds, strapped on their rifles and stepped out, ducking black magnolia branches heavy with rain and Spanish moss. The two thin younger brothers, denim overalls tucked into their boots, lugged between them a Styrofoam cooler of iced fish, coons and possums. The oldest brother, twenty, bearded, heavy set carried a Sunbeam Bread sack of eels in his coat pocket. Hooked over his left shoulder was the pink body of a fawn they'd shot and skinned, and over the right, a stray dog to which they'd done the same. With the skins and heads gone and the dog's tail chopped off, they were difficult to tell apart.

The imagery of that last line was like a kick in the gut. This story would go on to appear in several anthologies of best fiction and would win an "Edgar" from the Mystery Writers of America for the best mystery story of the year. Working with Tom in putting together his collection of stories (with this as the title story) was a great pleasure for me. In order to interest book editors in the collection I sent out this story as a teaser. Every editor who read the story asked for the collection. It was later sold to William Morrow as part of a two-book deal. Later, Morrow reprinted 5,000 copies of this story and sent it out to booksellers. The response was terrific.

Looking back over the years, I realize that for every one of the stories that led to success there have been an almost overwhelming number of failures: writers who never responded to my fan letters (you'd be surprised how high a percentage that is), writers who could not engage me with their collections or novels or their non-fiction books. I have also been pleased to discover that many stories I do finish reading and admire turn out to be by writers who have already launched a publishing career. I never write to them, as I assume they are already agented, but what great pleasure I have taken all these years in being one of the first to enjoy and recognize real talent. For this I will always be grateful to the editors of literary reviews and little magazines.