Joseph Conrad said, “In art, as in no other form of endeavor, there is meaning apart from success.”
Who by Fire is published by a small, independent publisher, Outer Banks Publishing and is distributed by the non-profit, devoted-to-the-arts distributor Small Press Distribution.
Tillie Olsen said in her wise book Silences: ‘Who will read me, who will care?’ It does not help the work to be done that work already completed is surrounded by silence and indifference—if it is published at all. Few books ever have the attention of a review—good or bad. Fewer stay longer than a few weeks on bookstore shelves, if they get there at all. … ‘Works of art’ (or at least books, stories, poems, meriting life) ‘disappear before our very eyes because of the absence of responsible attention,’ Chekhov wrote nearly ninety years ago.
This week, journalist Michael Johnson reviewed Who by Fire. (I must admit I did pray. Who knows, perhaps someone heard?)
Read, if you will, Michael Johnson's review.
To all of you who may have come here, I thank you and I offer this encouragement: Creativity operates in all endeavors. But creativity in the arts operates against all odds. Do not give up because the odds are not in your favor. Believe this: The process of the creation of something “other” gives life a fullness that I think only the attempt to create art can do. Be encouraged. Speak. Write. I'll be listening.
Here is the first chapter of Who by Fire:
THE FIRE
I
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This fire would have amazed her. The heat was so incredibly
hot it reminded me of something I learned in physics: the fact that the air
around a lightning bolt is hotter than the surface of the sun. It was a barn
burning—not with any political or racial overtones, but a necessary burn of an
old wooden grain bin in the center of town in Whiting, Iowa, where I grew up.
She was a Baltimore-grown city girl who wouldn’t be able to imagine this story
of the burning though I suppose it’s a common enough event in rural parts of
our country.
That I know something Lena couldn’t imagine amazes me.
I go home to Iowa—rarely—and, as it turns out, after Lena
died, fortuitously: the controlled fire.
I grew up in Whiting, the son of a farmer—three hundred and
thirty acres of soy beans and corn. When the burn took place, I watched it with
my father. It scored me like a knife on wood. It hit me like the Schubert in G
Flat, like that score, the staffs of music that I can hear by looking.
Leonard Bernstein said about music, “It doesn’t have to pass
through the censor of the brain before it can reach the heart … An F-sharp
doesn’t have to be considered in the mind; it is a direct hit.” The fire was
like that for me. It made me see how few times in my life I’ve experienced
that: a direct hit, the strike to the heart—despite my perfect pitch.
My father and I watched the burn from beginning to end.
The firemen were mostly older and younger men I knew, had
grown up with—perhaps a few out-of-towners, sure—but mostly guys I could tilt a
howdy finger off the steering wheel of my father’s pick-up—the old blue one I
like to drive around when I’m in town, rare as that is now.
My father didn’t see fight-fire in the War, the second big
war when he flight tested P-51 Mustangs, the fighter plane, but didn’t shoot
its guns.
These guys, the firemen, let me get closer to the fire than
most other onlookers—although I was surprised by how they trusted the oglers.
They trust their neighbors to have good judgment. That too amazes me because I
now live in downtown Washington—the center of politics and corruption.
My mother didn’t come to watch the fire.
My mother’s mouth turns down at the corners. She says she
doesn’t smile because there are gaps between her teeth, and indeed there are,
but she doesn’t smile because she has accepted what she views as her lot: That my
father will rise early and make coffee, that he’ll scramble an egg in the
microwave while she sleeps, that she will always make him his peanut butter
sandwich for lunch, that she’ll eat her Hershey bar alone in the kitchen while
he listens to the evening news, that these will be the things they’ll do and
that each time they occur, the daily moments of her life with him, they remind
her that she doesn’t love him.
She had nothing to learn from the fire.
I had much to learn. In the danger that the fire comprised
and the safety of its control, I began to understand “heroism.” My father did
not win the word hero—not in combat, by definition not a hero, no medal of
honor, no wound—no purple heart.
“Heroism” is a big word often used loosely. It is a word
that is central to this story. I am sure of it the way I am sure that Lena
would have wanted to know about the fire. She would not have thought
“obsession,” as perhaps you do. She would have understood what I meant when I called
the fire “a direct hit.”
I keep a list of heroes, of people who save others, who
receive awards for these acts: A man in Nova Scotia saved a man and his
seven-year-old son from a fiery auto accident. A sixty-two-year-old man in San
Diego pulled his eighty-four-year-old neighbor from a fire. A
twenty-seven-year-old man of Centralia, Illinois, rescued a man from a burning
house. A twenty-seven-year-old of Dalles, Oregon, rescued two eleven-year-old
girls from an apartment fire. A twenty-five-year-old man of Syracuse, New York,
a twenty-four-year-old man of Oswego, New York, and a thirty-five-year-old of
Webster, New York, together saved a woman from electrocution when a 300-ton
crane at a construction site overturned and pulled electrical wires onto her car.
But I am like the woman
who, when her house was on fire, rescued her fire tongs.
Mary,
ReplyDeleteI think the best art is made not for approval or a sale but because the artist needs to make it. She must!
That is one reason "primitive", traditional, and outsider art is so compelling. That is why religious music lifts our souls. That is why we sing the blues.
Or write a novel. Looking forward to reading beyond chapter one!
Wendy, how eloquently you speak! I sing in praise of you.
ReplyDeleteI agree. The artist has the need deep down to give into the fire to create. That need and desire to manifest their vision into reality. To have a talent and profit from it, is a gift indeed. But what about creating a work of art that solely gives the artist satisfaction? Only being concerned about their sense of purpose and accomplishment regardless of outside approval.
ReplyDeleteJames, Long ago I took to heart Annie Dillard's advice in Living by Fiction, p. 173-4, and I think her words apply to any one who attempts to create something "other":
Delete"The most extreme, cheerful, and fantastic view of art to which I ever subscribe is one in which the art object requires no viewer or listener—no audience whatever—in order to do what it does, which is nothing less than hold up the universe.
This is a fundamentally insane notion, which developed in my own mind from an idea of Buckminster Fuller’s. Every so often I try to encourage other writers by telling them this cheerful set of thoughts; always they gaze at me absolutely appalled. Fuller’s assertion was roughly to this effect: The purpose of people on earth is to counteract the tide of entropy described in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Physical things are falling apart at a terrific rate; people, on the other hand, put things together. People build bridges and cities and roads. They write music and novels and constitutions. They have ideas. That is why people are here; the universe as it were needs somebody or something to keep it from falling apart. … Thoughts count. A completed novel in a trunk in the attic is an order added to the sum of the universe’s order."
I absolutely cannot wait to read this novel!
ReplyDeleteI do think that it is slightly unnerving to write and think that no one will read it. However, the flip side to that is that you create a piece of work that is immensely enjoyed by others and remembered by generations. An artist's desire to create is akin to that of the desire for survival. There is no greater passion and emotion given back to the world than that which comes from someone who cannot imagine not creating-regardless of the amount of readers/viewers.
Beautifully stated, J. Thank you for stopping here and for considering my work. I am in your debt.
Delete