Monster In My Mind

When Halloween rolled around in 1975, I was in sixth grade and still making friends at the new school my parents had transferred me and my brothers to earlier that fall. We had long been public school kids, but when I graduated fifth grade, my parents suddenly decided to move all three of their sons to the Catholic school across the street. This would be my academic home for the next three years. After years of dressing in street clothes to go to school, I now wore a hideous blue-plaid uniform daily. And I had to mind my manners in the presence of nuns.

Halloween that year fell on a Friday, which is a school day, which is why I feel certain the events I’m about to describe took place on that Saturday, the first of November.

I’d been invited to a classmate’s home for a Halloween party. No costumes, just fun, food, frivolity.

My new friend Christopher lived on the other side of town, the nice side. And as my mother drove me to his home in the car, we passed the town’s nature center, which was dominated by a giant pond that was the site of the town’s annual trout-fishing contest. The pond was enveloped by several acres of woods that thinned out at one point and opened upon a baseball diamond.

Traffic slowed as we approached the baseball field.

Police officers spoke to each driver in turn, peeked into the cars, asked a few questions, then waved us on.

The baseball field itself was crawling with cops. State troopers and plainclothes officers in windbreakers. The ones in blue windbreakers marched along the edge of the woods with German shepherds on leashes. Radios squawked, and everyone spoke loudly to be heard over the sound of the helicopter whirling overhead.

I asked my mother what was going on. She had no clue.

When we reached Christopher’s house, she told me to wait in the car while she spoke with a few other moms who had congregated on the porch to consult with Christopher’s mom, who we kids called Mrs. C.

The council of moms took their sweet time. Heads nodding. Hands gesturing.

When Mom came back, she popped the car lock and told me to get out.

“It’s okay,” she said, “You’re going to play in the backyard and inside.”

“What’s going on?” I said.

“Nothing.”

“But the police—”

“It’s okay,” she reassured me. “They’re looking for somebody. He was working in somebody’s house over here. Then he ran away, and they’re looking for him.”

I was what, eleven years old? That year I had begun methodically reading adult mystery novels. My imagination and my capacity for anxiety exercised themselves nightly as I gobbled up these books. (A story I have partially related here.)

Mom was being vague intentionally, I’m sure, but I did not have to be a Baker Street Irregular to know that if this many cops and dogs were looking for this person, he was no saint.

I couldn’t tell you what we kids did for fun that afternoon. It was Halloween, for Pete’s sake. We didn’t need a campfire or the cover of darkness with which to embroider our ghost stories. We had the perfect, homegrown plot points to fashion a far more terrifying tale.

Even as we played, we traded bits and pieces we’d gleaned from our moms as we were dropped off.

Here is what the adults had told us: The object of the quarry was a man who showed up to work as a house painter at one of the homes in the area. He’d erected a ladder outside some lady’s home and commenced painting. When she returned from running errands, she was startled to find him inside the house, rifling through her possessions. Surprised by her sudden entrance, he bolted. His description matched that of someone police were already looking for crimes we kids could not comprehend.

Nevertheless, we tried.

He was a robber!

He did bad things to people!

He was a murderer!

No—he was not actually human, but half-man, half-monster!

Moreover, we felt certain that he could not have committed these heinous crimes in New Jersey, where we lived and which was, as everyone knew, an oasis of tranquility. No—he must have done these bad things across the river in New York City. Where else?

Would they catch him?

He had fled into the woods. Maybe he was too far gone to be stopped now. Maybe the dogs would not pick up his scent. God knows what he would do if the cops didn’t find him in time! What if it got dark and he was still on the loose? Did his monster side come out at night?

By the time Mrs. C called us inside to eat, our minds were inflamed with dark tales of the fugitive’s past.

The house smelled delicious. They had a real-life fireplace, something I’d always been curious about. The decor was autumnal and wonderful.

As I shoveled spoonfuls of mac and cheese and franks and beans into my mouth, Chris’s mom explained the afternoon activities. Before things had gone awry, she had planned a grand scavenger hunt.

Her original party plan called for each of us kids to split into teams of two and wander the neighborhood, knocking on doors to ask homeowners if they could provide us with any of the innocuous items on a long list Mrs. C had probably copied out of a book of kids’ games.

But now, in light of the current neighborhood situation, she thought it was best if we worked the neighborhood in larger groups, led by Christopher’s older siblings.

Chris was the youngest of six. His was a family of Brady Bunch proportions. There were more than enough big kids to go around in that household. We would be fine.

I’ve since learned that I have the ability to magnify minuscule details until they occupy a space in my mind as big as a locomotive. Something Mrs. C said had captured my attention.

It grew and grew and grew.

Terror seized me.

Then I did what nervous kids have always done when they became anxious. I barfed into my lap. Quietly, you understand. Delicately. And quickly, probably fluttering an oversized orange Halloween napkin as camouflage for my sudden action.

Then I sat trembling in my seat, afraid that someone would find me out. I might have been content to sit there for all eternity, and never get up.

When I was finally outed, Mrs. C was more than kind. In that family, she was no stranger to barf. She whisked me to a bathroom, where I changed into a pair of Christopher’s jeans. (What a slender fellow he must have been, relative to me! I can still feel the denim digging into my hips.) My clothes descended to the basement for a wash.

And off we went on the scavenger hunt. It was as safe as safe can be, though in retrospect I wonder if the people who answered those doors wondered at the wisdom of sending gaggles of little kids around the neighborhood that afternoon in the company of high schoolers.

I had never been on a scavenger hunt before then or since. Here’s what I can tell you. The list they gave us was not written in stone. More like a suggestion, really. When the list commanded us to extort a stale dinner roll from a neighbor, we felt certain a toasted slice of bread would do nicely instead.

Sometime late in the afternoon, we learned that the police manhunt had concluded with success. A great evil had been plucked out of our midst. It was just another cool fall evening in the suburbs of Jersey again.

When she arrived to pick me up, my mortified mother was presented with my washed and dried wardrobe, and an all-too-compassionate story shared by Mrs. C.

“Well, with everything that was going on,” she told my mom. “Can you blame the poor boy? He must have felt terrified.”

And for years after, that was the explanation my mother trotted out when the memory of that messed-up Halloween was dredged up. A bad man who did bad things to women—my parents always employed that phraseology—had spread terror throughout the borough. And in his quaking heart, Joe did what he always did when he got a case of the jitters. And who could blame him, really?

Christopher and I went on to high school and college together. We worked in Manhattan as young creatives, and saw each other often. And when the spirit moved him, he regaled acquaintances—usually women to whom I was attracted—with the tale of that creepy Halloween.

Only, his story differed from his mother’s on one point. Gleefully, he told people that Little Joey barfed not because a rampaging murderer was on the loose but because he was a little Italian American kid whose belly knew only the taste of lasagna and manicotti, and rebelled when pumped with the likes of American fare such as mac and cheese.

But you know what?

They were all wrong. Mrs. C, my mom, even Christopher.

No. After fifty-one years, let the facts be admitted to a candid world:

It was not the ax murderer in the ’hood that did me in. Nor was it the copious amount of American food on tap that afternoon.

Friends, what really struck terror into my heart was the soon-to-be-launched scavenger hunt. I did not know what that was, and it frightened me to no end.

I did not understand why they wanted me to knock on doors and ask complete strangers for things such as six inches of kite twine, a rubber ball, and a tarnished penny.

Why would I want these things? For what purpose? I didn’t need them! Why would I bother people I did not know in order to get them?

A murderer I could stomach. Surely, they would get him in the end. But the thing that lurked in my mind was far more terrible. I could not stomach the thought of making strangers go out of their way for me. It was bad enough knocking on peoples’ doors for candy each year, but at least the culture had paved the way for such intrusions.

My constitution drew the line at a scavenger hunt.

It was all too much, and it still is. Happy Halloween.

* * * 

See you next time!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

joedenise.com

The Strangers Who Came to Dinner

Still life with kibori kuma.
(Japanese hand-carved sculpture of bear with fish).

When we bought this house in the mountains of North Carolina, I foolishly thought that this tiny parcel of land was all ours. Wrong. We were merely the only organisms living on the property dumb enough to pay for it. I learned that the first time a flock of turkeys traipsed through our vegetable garden with thirteen of their waddling poults, pecking at every single one of our tomatoes for whatever sustenance they could provide.

When one of our neighbors attached a night vision camera to a tree in the woods behind our houses, it became clear that when the sun dropped a menagerie held court: opossum, fox, deer, and bears.

The latter have become the unofficial mascot of our city. Local artists have given us and the tourists tons of bear chic decor to fill our homes with. We ourselves display two paintings of bears on our walls. (The bear carving predates our marriage.)

If traffic slows on our approach to the mall, we know chances are good that a black bear is crossing the road. If tourists are standing around pointing their phones at a tree in the downtown shopping district, it’s because an adolescent ursine is napping in its branches. Every summer we hear sad stories of bears euthanized for entering peoples’ homes, or tales of idiots “not-from-around-here” who think it’s a good idea to hug and then selfie with a bear cub on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

“He died for Instagram” is not a phrase I’d like to have on my tombstone.

My backyard, late July 2017, 7 AM.

We know why they’re in our midst. (See our friend Amy Cherrix’s children’s book, Backyard Bears, if you really need a primer.) Every passing second, we humans consume more of their habitat. If you’ve ever watched a Yogi Bear cartoon, you know the other reason. We make it easy for them to get food.

Hardware stores in the region sell bear-resistant trash bins and straps, but the bears have such an smorgasbord to choose from, they can easily find a snack a few doors down from those selfish homeowners who lock up their goods.

And—gotta say it—a warming climate means that the bears are increasingly confused by parameters of their annual nap. How dare Nature wake them on a 70-degree day after three weeks of frigid weather, and not provide them with something to eat? The effrontery! Wait—are there any of those bipedal meat sacks around? These boneheads always leave out something good to eat.

I was one of those dopey meat sacks one year. Normally, I don’t put out trash until the morning of pickup. If I have an abundance, I stash the plastic bags in our locked garage until the designated day. But a three-day weekend altered the trash calendar, and the sanitation department did not, for some reason, phone me immediately to let me know.

I walked out of the house, intending to do some yard work or drive to a store, and discovered a bear rooting through my toppled bin. I closed the front door, and quickly ticked off all the things I was supposed to do to scare bears off.

Timorous beastie flees in the presence of ruggedly handsome writer.
In other news: a great year for lavender.

In the wild, you are supposed to play dead if attacked by a grizzly. If attacked by a black bear, you are advised to loudly fight back. (Who comes up with these suggestions?) Yes, thought I, loud noises could work. After all, every creature in the peaceable kingdom fears human clangor.

I dashed to the kitchen, grabbed a pot and a steel serving spoon, and did my best impression of a clangorous scribe, while hiding behind my cracked front door.

Nothing. The bear did not lift its head, let alone budge.

Maybe I was not loud or annoying enough?

Back to the kitchen. I rooted in a cabinet for the portable Bluetooth speaker we use in the yard. I booted the thing up, and scrolled through my phone in search of Music to Frighten Bears. I nudged the speaker onto the porch with the steel spoon.

Folks, I am here to tell you that bears are not at all terrified of the Hamilton soundtrack.

You know what finally did the trick? Me, standing on the porch, stamping my feet and screaming at the top of my lungs.

It was the last thing I wanted to do, but it worked!

My wife has never let me forget that I attempted to scare off a bear with show tunes. I mean, could I not summon some Whitesnake in a hurry?

Another time, I returned from the market and was getting groceries out of the car when I looked up to discover that a mother and two cubs had just entered my driveway from our backyard.

Mother and I locked eyes, and I swear, my brain played tricks on me.

My first thought was, “Who is this now? Did someone invite themselves over unannounced?”

Yes, for a few moments, I thought I was peering into the pinched, narrowed eyes of an irritated person. That’s how human its gaze was.

After a bit, my brain coughed up another possibility: “Wait, are they dogs?”

Finally, I comprehended the truth. I flung the groceries back in the car, jumped in myself, locked the doors, and prayed that they had not packed their glass cutters.

I waited twenty minutes while they explored the front yard, climbed up and down our front cherry tree, and finally wandered off.

That memory came back to me when I read a review of Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling’s book, A Libertarian Walks into a Bear, about a New Hampshire town that is taken over by a group of freedom-loving activists who ignore such basics as taxes and city sanitation, only to have their Utopia trampled to pieces by black bears. A woman who survived mauling tells the author, “If you look at their eyes, you understand that they are completely alien to us.”

I once thought that. But the longer I’ve been here, the more I’ve become sympathetic to their plight. A painter doing work on our house one year put it all in perspective. He had stepped out our front door to wash his brushes, and beheld the sight of a mother bear strolling up the road with three cubs in tow. A furry parade that did not make eye contact with him.

“Can you imagine the stress that mother is under?” he told me later. “She’s got to find food every day to feed all four of them.”

Our neighborhood keeps a running mobile phone text thread to keep everyone in the loop on bear sightings. Usually, the texts arrive after the neighborhood dogs have raised the alarm, so it’s never a surprise. But we do want to know where exactly the bears were last seen, in whose yard, how many, and how big. For these reasons alone I’m never without the phone in my pocket.

The system is far from foolproof.

There was the morning the dog barked endlessly in the lower part of our yard. When I finally walked over to see what the deal was, I spotted an adolescent bear marching away from us, like a tightrope walker, over the top of the privacy fence. Denise came down to look. I grabbed the dog and pulled him back to the house. In my absence, the bear somehow reversed course, faced Denise, and hissed. She backed away and rejoined the dog and me.

I still don’t understand how he was able to make a U-turn on a narrow fence top. They look blubbery and ungainly, but they’re incredibly nimble.

One night in late summer, my wife alerted me to a bear tearing down our bird feeder. (We have since banished feeders from the yard.) It was dark, and I had trouble seeing the culprit. When I finally discerned his shape, I gasped.

Hoping to explain my behavior, I blathered, “Well, I mean, first I thought it was a chubby man in a black raincoat. Then…I realized it was a bear—and I got scared!”

Thirty minutes later, after the bear left and we removed the attractant, she pounced on my words. “Oh, but a chubby man in a black raincoat…in our backyard, at night, was not at all scary to you?”

In May 2021, when she was out, a mother and cub surprised me in the yard. I scampered into the house and bolted the sliding doors of the den. My guests were not in a hurry to go. In fact, they settled in for a sweet siesta in the shadiest part of the yard. From the safety of an upstairs bathroom window, I filmed the interaction. The footage runs 90 seconds. (I put it on YouTube.) It’s the most tender mother-and-child scene I’ve witnessed outside of a nature documentary. Nat Geo, call me.

All these creatures want is space, peace, and to be left alone.

A hilarious book by William Kotzwinkle, entitled The Bear Went Over the Mountain, imagines a world in which a black bear in the woods of Maine discovers a completely finished book manuscript lying in a briefcase under a tree. Naturally, he lands a literary agent and passes the work off as his own. Zaniness ensues. It’s a clever satire about all the things wrong with publishing and Hollywood. And the bear, long a symbol of strength, protection, and seasonal renewal, becomes instead an unwitting player in a sordid drama of literary fraud.

Makes you think: They already eat our food and make themselves at home in our spaces. Would it really be so strange if they stole our livelihoods? Better them than AI. Vincant ursi.

My neighbor John gets bears who long to style their hair.

 Photo copyright 2026 Gordon John Gilbart.

 

* * * 

See you next time!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

joedenise.com

I Remember Everything—and Nothing

 

Erie Lackawanna tower, Hoboken.

I can’t believe it’s been 25 years. I can remember how it felt, sure, but at this remove I need a historic timeline to assemble the pieces correctly. So I have used that to help me remember.

I worked from home in those days, freelancing for a string of magazines. I don’t remember my morning routine, but I know that my browser home page was set to the front page of The New York Times.

That morning, when I woke my desktop, above the NYT headline was a tiny sentence in red or black announcing the breaking news: a plane had hit one of the towers of the World Trade Center. The plane had struck at 8:46 AM.

I immediately assumed the aircraft was something small, like a Piper Cub. I imagined a young, inexperienced pilot making the most egregious of errors. But I couldn’t confirm that because one sentence was all the newspaper knew at that point.

I wasted time poking around other sites, hoping to glean more than that single sentence. I came up empty at the Associated Press and a few other news sites before I turned on the television. I did so just in time to watch the second jet hit the second tower. That happened at 9:03 AM.

By then, everyone knew what was going on.

I don’t know when I called Suzanne. She was an old college friend who had recently moved to Hoboken, our little river town across the Hudson River from Manhattan. She was the only other freelance journalist I knew in town.

I don’t remember when she came over my place. Before, or after 9:37 AM, when the third jet crashed into the Pentagon? I know we were in my apartment watching TV, worrying about friends we knew who worked in the vicinity of the towers, when one of the broadcasters announced that the south tower had fallen.

Such a thing seemed unfathomable.

I had grown up watching those towers being built. For what seemed like forever, my family had passed the construction site every time my father drove us to Brooklyn to visit our grandmother. As an adult I’d spent a long winter night at the rooftop restaurant, Windows on the World, during a lavish Christmas party thrown by my then-employers at the children’s publishing house, Scholastic, a firm enriched by franchises such as Harry Potter, Goosebumps, and The Babysitters Club. Hell, I had been in one of those towers as recently as last Friday, taking the escalator down to the PATH station for my ride home after meeting with some editors.

But now, watching that morning, Suzanne and I could not believe that a building could be toppled so quickly. Were they absolutely sure? After all, there was all that smoke…

Only one way to find out.

I lived in an old five-story tenement building several blocks west of the river. We stepped out the back doors of my apartment, and scampered up to the roof.

It was was a Tuesday. A beautiful clear day. I do recall that.

I saw the river. I saw the smoke. I heard sirens emanating from the city below me.

But for the life of me, I cannot remember the color of the smoke. Black? Gray? White? Today I need the photos as badly as the timelines to fix those images securely in my mind.

While we were on the roof, the north tower collapsed. And yes, even with the smoke, it was obvious. There one second, gone the next.

Only minutes ago on TV, we had heard the voices of family members telling the on-air broadcasters just where in those towers they believed their loved ones were trapped. In elevators. On stairwells. On the roofs.

Had those people gotten out?

Suzanne and I hugged briefly, then went back to scanning the scene across the river.

Then, honestly, I don’t remember the next few hours.

I know that phone and mobile phone service were disrupted regionally. When I couldn’t connect with my parents, who lived about 20 miles north of me, I made the foolish decision to drive home to check on them. Foolish, because the traffic was insane, and my drive took forever.

They were fine, but of course they were. I spent a few nights sleeping in my old bedroom. I heard that my young cousin—who had a heart condition and worked in the Wall Street area—had joined the long line of dust-spackled commuters who trudged back to their homes over the Brooklyn Bridge. Her husband, then a school teacher at one of the public schools, had done the same.

By Friday, a group of us Scholastic alums carpooled to south Jersey to attend the wake of the brother of one of our colleagues. The drive down, on the New Jersey Turnpike and the Garden State Parkway, to a funeral home at the Jersey Shore, is associated in my memory with the sight and sounds of vehicles flying American flags and honking in soldarity to each other.

On the car radio, actor Henry Winkler was telling a DJ that going forward, our mourning nation would have to learn to take better care of each other and better care of ourselves. Why he stressed those words, I don’t know.

I don’t remember much of the wake. In, hugs, out, then dinner somewhere before the somber ride back north. Our colleague’s family were lucky only in the sense that their loved one had escaped to the presumed safety of one of the tower roofs. When that building pancaked on itself, his remains were among the first to be discovered and identified. Or so we were told. And thus one family was permitted the closure denied to so many others.

One of my other cousins, who then worked as a U.S. attorney, requested, nay, demanded, my presence over the weekend. Over the years, she had gotten chummy with the firefighters who worked at the firehouse near her office in downtown Brooklyn. They had invited her to a wake and pot luck gathering in honor of their fallen members.

“You gotta come with me,” she said. “It’s going to be too painful.”

Did she bring food for the pot luck? Did I? She was (and still is) the type who can be counted on to make a giant crockpot of meatballs, but I just don’t remember.

I do remember us standing outside that firehouse, pouring ourselves plastic cups of beer from kegs literally positioned on the sidewalk.

I remember how congenial the firefighters were. How dry-eyed they were as they told us of the friends they had lost.

One man stands out in my memory for his wordplay. He talked about how, once they were allowed to search the rubble for bodies, they found so few.

“You know why?” he said “They were gone. Poof.”

Then he launched into a litany of words which all rhymed, and which all have roughly the same meaning: Decimated! Obliterated! Annihilated!

Over the years, I have tried to recall many of the other things people said and did doing those first few days, and I take myself to task for not taking the time to write much of it down.

You were a reporter, I tell myself. You should have known to capture what you were witnessing. Where was your pen? Where was your notebook?

I do remember walking to the water’s edge in Hoboken over the next week to watch smoke rising from Ground Zero. I remember the flowers and photos and tokens people left by the railing on the southernmost corner of that riverside park. And in the weeks that followed, I remember seeing posters of missing people fluttering on every surface throughout the city. Families holding out hope that their loved ones made it out alive.

At the time, I was researching a medical story for a science magazine about a family of physicians located in Massachusetts. On one of those phone interviews, the eldest sibling told me how Mass General in Boston had leapt into action, preparing their emergency room to receive potentially hundreds of patients who might be airlifted from New York City to Boston for care.

“But no one came,” he said. “They didn’t need us.”

Eventually, yes, I did write a short story based in part on what I saw that day and what came after. It’s the story of a former tough guy from Hoboken who has escaped his previous life until 9/11 forces him back into the fold.

“Back to the Boke” was written about ten years after the fact. By then, I was married and had left Hoboken for good. I based the piece mostly on the old-timers I remembered populating the city. Guys who played endless rounds of cards at the social club across the street from my apartment building. The guy on our block who earned money hauling scrap metal in his rusted-out pickup. The Italian American grocers, butchers (aka “meat-cutters”), bakers, and cheesesteak vendors who lamented the loss of families in a town made famous by Sinatra and Brando, and who ceaselessly excoriated the inevitable ascendance of Wall Street yuppies.

The story found a home at Beat to a Pulp, which kept it available until the site closed. It holds the distinction of being my first “long” story to be published at a mystery venue.

I still beat myself to a pulp wishing I had kept a better record of those days. A solid paper trail in my own hand would be far more valuable to me now than my recollections.

Once, at a book festival, I met an author who wrote a couple of books on the fragility of human memory. How what we think happened often turns out to be untrue when meticulously fact-checked. I recall being so impressed by the reporting in The New Yorker after Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans. Those writers had fanned out into the city looking for stories, they had carefully recorded them, and then they had rushed back to file their pieces. Maybe I would have done better if I myself had been on deadline. Who knows.

But hey—if there’s any lesson to be learned after 25 years, it’s to keep a notebook and pen handy, to know when to use them, when to tuck them away, and when to look, listen, and feel instead.

Hoboken days:
Visiting Sinatra’s birthplace.

* * *

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

joedenise.com

Angry Joe Writes A Letter

 

Months ago, my wife and I were invited to a community fundraiser event that would take place sometime this fall. At the beginning, the emails were somewhat vague because the people organizing it were just feeling everyone out. If they could get a group of writers to commit, would we consider attending to this quasi-literary, quasi-fundraiser thingie for a good cause?

We said yes.

Throughout the summer, emails came and went. The list of local writers grew. Fine. Great. That’s what happens. I stopped paying attention because while the emails were always wordy, actual details were sparse. At some point, a local bookstore agreed to send a staffer to sell the books of any writers attending this event. The evening had morphed into a book event and community fundraiser. I had never heard of such a thing.

About a week ago, a pair of emails arrived that struck me as incoherent. In the same graf, organizers asked writers to bring copies of their own books to give as gifts to VIP donors. And they reminded us that the bookstore would be on hand to sell copies as well.

Well, thought I, which was it?

If the bookstore will be on site, why would I need to bring my books? The way I saw it, there are too many ways such a thing can go south.

1. Writer A brings three books. Writer B brings 50. These “offerings,” if I may so describe them, would be lopsided.
2. Just because an author wrote a book does not mean that someone they are schmoozing with wants to take home a copy of said author’s book.
3. Unwanted gifts suck.
4. Not everyone is a reader.
5. Even if a person is a heavy reader, their tastes are bound to differ from the next guy. Offering a book to someone who has no intention of reading it falls into creepy, unwanted gift territory. It also makes writers look desperate.
6. Writers may indeed have their books lying around their homes. But chances are they paid something for them, and hope to sell them or offer them to someone who will appreciate it.

By the time I reached this point, I was angry. (Yes, folks—it happens.) Naturally, I sat down to write an email. Boy, was it satisfying. Spleen vented, I knew immediately that I also would never send that letter.

Because I’m chicken? No—because I am like Abraham Lincoln.

I know it’s a stretch, but work with me here.

All his life Lincoln had a practice where, if someone pissed him off, he’d write a letter to get those feelings off his chest. Then he’d stick the letter in a drawer and never send it. He called them “hot” letters.

His most famous hot letter was one he wrote in 1863 to Major General Meade right after Gettysburg. It was, you recall, a terrible, three-day battle that left 50,000 dead. About the same number of casualties on each side, but the battle was still considered a victory for the Union. Its conclusion came when troops under the command of Robert E. Lee retreated. Meade could have pursued them, crushed them, and taken prisoners. But he and his men were exhausted, and he declined to take that action.

In the letter Lincoln wrote but never sent, he said:

“…[M]y dear general, I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee’s escape-- He was within your easy grasp, and to have closed upon him would, in connection with … our other late successes, have ended the war-- As it is, the war will be prolonged indefinitely. If you could not safely attack Lee last Monday, how can you possibly do so South of the river, when you can take with you very few more [than] two thirds of the force you then had in hand? It would be unreasonable to expect, and I do not expect you can now effect much. Your golden opportunity is gone, and I am distressed immeasurably because of it--

“I beg you will not consider this a prosecution, or persecution of yourself-- As you had learned that I was dissatisfied, I have thought it best to kindly tell you why.”

I think we can all agree that if this is Lincoln when he was angry, maybe his practice of writing hot letters in the course of his life had served him well.

I myself have never told someone that I was “immeasurably distressed.” I have never been that, um, measured about anything. That’s why, in certain circles, I have earned the nickname Angry Joe.

I encountered my first hot letter as a kid, though I did not know it at the time. Working on a school project on the life of Benjamin Franklin, I came across this doozy, dated July 5, 1775, about three months after Lexington and Concord:

Mr. [William] Strahan:

You are a Member of Parliament, and one of that Majority which has doomed my Country to Destruction. You have begun to burn our Towns, and murder our People. Look upon your hands! They are stained with the Blood of your Relations! You and I were long Friends; You are now my Enemy, and I am, Yours

B Franklin

I was in eighth grade when I came across that letter in a book. I loved it so much, I committed it to memory.

As with Lincoln, Franklin never sent his letter to Strahan, though he shared it with others as a way of letting his feelings be known and exorcising his rage.

Going on the assumption that this might well work for me, here’s the email I didn’t send.

Dear J—,

We haven’t met, so forgive me if this sounds rude. It is unclear to me why the writers invited to this fundraiser are being asked to bring copies of their books as “donations” for the major donors.

According to the link you shared, VIP donors are those who can afford to donate $500 to $3,500 per person to the cause. If this is a night to celebrate local writers—and considering the local bookstore will be on-site with books for sale—I am sure the VIPs can inspect and purchase whatever they like. Given what the VIPs will have paid to attend, our books are a steal at only $15 to $30 a copy.

Unless, of course, this is actually an evening where local professionals are gathering to offer their services for free to everyone in attendance.

If that is the case, then count me in!

If there is a physician offering free medical consultations, I have an elbow that needs looking at. If attorneys are offering free legal advice, I’ll take that too. And I am happy to accept any interest-free loans local business owners wish to extend.

Please understand that when you ask a writer to give something for free, you are implicitly devaluing their work and reducing them to the status of an organ grinder’s monkey.

Here is a link to one of the greats, Harlan Ellison, explaining this simple concept.

I said good day, sir. 

Cordially, 

Joe D’Agnese

And yes, SleuthSayers, I will attend the event. But I’ll arrive empty-handed.

* * * 

See you next time!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

The Case of the Waltese Falcon

Back in April I bought a bunch of craft books for writers in a StoryBundle charity offering curated by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. The one that left the greatest impression on me was a book by Rusch’s husband, Dean Wesley Smith, entitled Writing Novels with the Waltese Falcon.*

That was the nickname of Walter, one of the couple’s cats at the time. (A pure-bred Red-Point Birman.) Mr. Smith had grown accustomed to writing in his office while the cat napped nearby. 

I know the feeling.

My writing partner, who contributes nothing to the word count

 but still gets fed. Go figure.

In this book, we watch as Mr. Smith writes three novels. One is a ghostwriting project that he is writing for an unidentified major author. Mr. Smith has already been paid to deliver a 70,000-word book. He budgets ten days of writing, and of course he nails it, writing on average 6,895 words a day. (Day #7 he “only” writes 3,005 words. Day #9 sees his greatest output: 9,373 words.)

In the second third of the book, he writes a book in seven days (a short novel of about 43,050 words), starting with a goal of hitting 3,000 words on Day 1, and adding 1,000 words each day after that. On the 7th day, he must hit 9,000 words. He “only” hits 7,000, but by then the story has neatly concluded.

In the last third of Waltese Falcon, Mr. Smith takes a vacation to hang with his poker buddies in Vegas, and manages to write yet another short novel (37,100 words) in five days. He doesn’t own a laptop, so he humorously seats-belts his giant iMac to the back seat of his Caddy, cushioning it with pillows, and barrels off to Sin City.

You might quibble with the lengths of the last two books, but he explains that he is a devotee of the great writers of the pulp fiction era, whose novels typically clocked in under 50,000 words. He argues that publishers in the modern era began contracting longer books from writers so they could charge more for them.

More significantly, he loves challenging himself to write at speed. He never plots anything in advance—not even the ghostwriting project—choosing to “write into the dark” each time. (During the writing of the ghostwriting project, he laments not knowing where this “stupid” book is going.) But each time he figures out the plot points and wraps each of these stories to his satisfaction.

He’s proud of the seven-day book because he had just turned 65 years old at the time, and was frankly wondering if he was too old to pull off an “add-1,000-words-each-day” challenge. He clearly wasn’t.

What made the biggest impression on me as a reader and writer is how much other work he accomplishes in his regular work days. He takes careful notes of all his activity, and shares his daily schedule with us. He usually wakes at noon, checks in at the offices of his publishing business—then located on the Oregon coast—and does all the things the head of a small firm usually does. Bank runs, dealing with movers, buying office furniture, keeping up with emails and bills. (I believe that during this period he may have also owned and operated other businesses in town, such as a collectibles shop.) So that work also consumes his time. And of course he’s hanging with his wife and pets, enjoying decent lunches and dinners with Rusch and friends, and watching a whole lot of television.

Usually he gets to his writing computer about 6 p.m. and writes in bursts of 50-minute sessions into the wee hours of the morning. He estimates that he required 42 such sessions to write the 43,000-word book. “In other words,” he quips, “I typed at the blazing speed of 20.5 words per minute.”

This impressed me because like everyone on the planet, I feel that I constantly have more on my plate than I can handle. When I am feeling stressed, the first thing to go out the window is my current creative goal.

Not my writing partner, but tasked with the job
 of decimating my spinach.

Mr. Smith has a full day of work at the day job(s), but still manages to write prodigiously in his creative work. The delightful conceit of all of this is that while he is writing each of these novels, he is also blogging about and writing the larger nonfiction book that details their creation.

Which of course sent me down memory lane. Back in 2011, Denise and I signed a contract to ghost-write the memoir of a man who was big in the world of pugilism. The manly art, as history so describes it.

At the time we signed, I was busy working on another ghostwriting project. Denise had finished the research and was drafting the book that would become The Girls of Atomic City. We did not have time to write the fight book just yet, but we did have time to schedule regular phone interviews with our client. This we did, once or twice a week, dutifully recording each call using the audio-record function that was a nice feature of old versions of MS Word.

Cut to February 2012. Both Denise and I had sent our manuscripts to our respective editors. Submission usually means that we have about a month to fritter away while the editors read the MS and write their editorial letters.

Great, I thought. Now we can finally put our heads together and write this damn fight book!

Not so fast. At the last minute, our agent poached Denise to ghost-write yet another memoir for a veteran Hollywood actress. The contract had been signed months ago, but the first writer bailed and left behind little copy that was usable. “I’m begging,” the agent said, and how often does that ever happen?

The money was good, and we knew what would happen.

Denise flew to Los Angeles the next day, planning to spend four weeks in the guest cottage behind the actress’s home and conduct daily interviews with her. I would write the fight manuscript, due in a month.

There are two things in the world I know nothing about: music and sports. But I am a Paganini and Gehrig in those domains compared to my knowledge of punching big men repeatedly in the face. Not to worry: Everything I needed was contained in 20 to 25 audio recordings, and my crappy handwritten notes. Or so I hoped.

Every day I stationed myself in front of the computer from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. I took breaks and ate decently, but not as well as I probably should have. The problem with journalistic nonfiction is that you can barely write a paragraph or even a sentence without checking your facts. I sprinkled a ton of TKs in the text as I went, jotting down questions, and researching on the web during my breaks.

At night after I wolfed down dinner, I sat in the living room and listened to our audio recordings. Transcribing them faithfully would take far too much time, so I did the next best thing: I took short notes as I listened, marking the timestamps so I could go back and listen during my writing sessions if I needed to check facts or get the client’s exact phrasing correctly. I nearly wept when I discovered that one of those files was corrupted!

But I pushed on. Those nighttime sessions with the audio files usually took me close to midnight. I crashed into bed each night, and did it all over the next day.

Keeping track along the way.

I do not regard what I’m telling you as something to brag about, by the way. Each time I have told this story, I always say that it was like waiting too long to research a college term paper and then trying to cram it all in one night. Not good.

The thing is, it worked! Averaging 5,700 words a day, I had 40,000 words by the end of the first week. I was frankly astonished that it could be done. I was sure that I’d made mistakes, misspelled the names of the client’s colleagues, or screwed up his family chronology. Nervously, I hit pause on the writing for two days to reread and proof everything. The client was ecstatic to get the first half of his book, and within a few days, responded to all my queries. Those answers added about 4,000 words to the manuscript before the end of the second week.

By the time he was due to fly to Asia on the Thursday of the second week, he had a first draft as it stood, at 70,083 words. (I have no doubt that he told everyone on that flight—in a private jet?—that they really ought to keep the noise down because he was, ahem, busy Reading His Future Upcoming Bestselling Book. Fifty percent of the clients I get are like that.)

After I hit that 70K, I relaxed, for two reasons. One: I knew from past experience that clients always add more to a book when they read. And two, I also know that publishing contracts allow for a variance of 10 percent up or down. The contract asked for an 80,000-word book, but the editors would accept 72,000. The client could cough, and we’d hit 2,000 words more.

I really only had to write that first 70,000 to prime the pump. When the client read the manuscript, he was inspired to riff on topics that we had never touched upon. Before he was back in the states, he was firing off long emails expanding on anecdotes in the book. 

When he got back, he overnighted a pencil edit with still more recollections. We easily met the deadline at the end of the month with 78,393 words. The biggest chunk, that 70,000, was largely written over a 14-day period of time, with one day and a morning off to proof. 

Still, that’s about 5,800 words a day for me.

The biggest pain point for me were those damn audio files. Call me crazy, folks, but since 2012, has technology changed significantly, or what?

Today you can easily upload an audio file and have an instant transcript. At no time in my journalism career has that been possible until the last couple of years. You either laboriously transcribed audio yourself, or you paid someone else to do it. I could never afford hiring out. The rates were exorbitant because such services were aimed at the physician dictation market.

But you know what’s funny? A dead, lifeless transcript could possibly have meant more work for me. The key to the project was reliving our conversations each night before bed. When the client got stubborn about sharing his vulnerabilities, I could hear one of us—usually Denise—pushing him, saying that if he wanted people to understand what he had gone through in his life, he had to be honest.

I heard his voice crack a few times, but he always came clean. And I swear, I felt that as I wrote it. To this day, the reviews he gets for that book online all reference the sensitive side of his character that so few people knew existed.

That was my only experience with writing at speed. But the Waltese Falcon experiments got me thinking I should try something similar again. I’m 15,000 words into a nonfiction project that I’ve wanted to do for a long while. Currently, my average daily output is only about 3,000 words, but I’m not beating myself up. In summer, after all, I am apparently only a part-time writer yet a full-time farmer. But I want to get this done before I go on the road again for Denise’s book tour.

When the nonfiction speed test is over, I hope to try a fiction project. I’ll let you know how it goes. 

I will leave you with one last scene that made me laugh. On one of those nights in a casino in Vegas, Mr. Smith and his buddies encounter two very drunk girls who ask what they do for a living. He responds:

“I sit alone in a room and make shit up.”

* * *

* Writing with the Waltese Falcon has since been revised slightly and re-released as three titles: Writing a Novel in 10 Days: 2026 Edition; Writing a Novel in 7 Days: 2026 Edition; Writing a Novel in Five Days 2026 While Traveling.

Two fun pieces of news:

* Since I saw you last, a country western star released a single entitled Girls of Atomic City, inspired by Denise’s book. Did not know this was happening until a friend sent us the press release.

* Denise’s book, Obstinate Daughters, is now a National Bestseller.

Talk to you soon!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

Déjà Vu, 1776

"Study the Past,"
National Archives Building, Washington, DC.

Since June 22, my wife has been promoting her new nonfiction book about the American Revolution. At the events where I’ve tagged along, I’ve experienced a curious sense of déjà vu.

Very déjà, oh so vu.

Starting in 2009—17 years ago—she and I hit the road around this time each year to visit a number of gift shops and bookstores in the former 13 colonies to hawk one and eventually two of our Revolutionary-era history titles.

Our travels took us as far north as Boston and as far south as Georgia. We usually visited sites associated in some way with the Declaration, the Revolutionary War, and the lives of the Signers. Instead of the local Barnes & Noble, we were more likely to be signing at the home of Long Island signer William Floyd, whose home and estate is today managed by the National Park Service. In Philly, we signed in a building across from the Liberty Bell. In Boston, we signed at a shop in the Old State House, which sponsors an annual reading of the Declaration of Independence each Fourth of July.

At the Independence Visitor Center Store, Philadelphia.

Since summer is prime travel season, on those trips we encountered countless tourists. Most often, they were Moms, Dads, and their families on their summer road trip. 

Sometimes, we encountered visitors from overseas whose vacations just happened to coincide with Fourth of July week. I imagine the foreign tourists trying to comprehend why the strangers in this strange land were decked out in red, white, and blue earrings, sneakers, face paint, and T-shirts, and why the slightest hint of evening darkness brought the clangorous pops and sizzles of distant fireworks.

Still…this year’s travels have felt special, and not because of Denise’s book. It was not just any Fourth, after all. This year the US is celebrating its 250th anniversary, so my déjà vu is at least two layers deep. 

On one hand, I remember our 2009-2012 bookstore trips and I remember America’s Bicentennial year, 1976.

That's me in the center, my two brothers at right and left.

Remember, both my parents were garment workers. I recall my Mom hand-stitching the costumes you see in this image, using a Butterick sewing pattern. The outfits were for a parade our school participated in. She also baked and decorated the cakes you see in front of us, the layer cake and the flag sheet cake on the right.

I consumed every children’s book about the Revolution, hoping to soak up as many details as I could of colonial life. Chief among the books I devoured were by the children’s author-illustrator, Robert Lawson: Ben and Me: An Astonishing Life of Benjamin Franklin by His Good Mouse Amos (1939) and Mr. Revere and I: Being an Account of Certain Episodes in the Career of Paul Revere, Esq. as Revealed by his Horse (1953). And there was a charming book about Ben and his grandson living abroad in the year 1776, entitled Poor Richard in France by F.N. Monjo (1973). My fascination with Ben Franklin dates to that era.

Yes, I still have them.

Those books omitted the fact that over the course of his life Franklin owned seven human beings. He later changed his mind about slavery, and devoted the last years of his life to the abolitionist cause.

In her introduction to her new book, Denise tells her 1976 story. She was a few years younger than me. She tells of watching a parade amid red, white, and blue fire hydrants. She was particularly taken by the men and boys playing fife and drums. (Years later, she would master the flute.) Any women and girls she spotted in patriotic reenactments were dressed like Holly Hobby and were either sewing flags, churning butter, or doing laundry.

Surely, she thought, there’s gotta be more for girls to do than that. As you might imagine, that was the spark that led to her current book.

The Betsy Ross story, which is the biggest story Americans remember of a woman contributing to the Revolutionary War, is probably myth. Yes, she did make flags, but it’s impossible to prove that she made the first American flag. Her flag-making was not the most interesting fact about her. Far more interesting is that she buried three husbands, lived into her eighties, and ran a successful business as an upholsterer at a time when doctors and lawyers had trouble paying their bills. I don’t know why I didn’t learn that in elementary school. Was the word businesswoman deemed too difficult for kids in the 1970s?

American patriotism and jingoism are fraught with problems because so much of it is driven by the stories we learned in childhood. What appears in school curricula are the easy facts we know will entice kids and keep them engaged in the story. It’s also what will mollify schools and parents. What is not ever said is that we hope that children will check back in when they’re old enough to learn the fuller story, whatever it is, for better or worse.

Unless that kid grows up to be a dedicated reader, their knowledge of the past will remain stuck at the grade-school level.

The founders expected that citizens would stay informed. But even they would probably not have expected voters to be devoted readers of multi-volume works of history. In their day, the average citizen got the news via word of mouth, public readings, broadsides, and newspapers. And yes, there was just as much propaganda then as now.

But hey—I still look back fondly on those long summer road trips we took nearly 20 years ago. Over time, the booksellers we met on our annual pilgrimage became like friends who looked forward to our visits.
I especially treasured the time we spent in the National Archives, where the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, and the Bill of Rights are housed. Usually on those visits, we’d stow our bags in the gift shop downstairs, then go up to reacquaint ourselves with the so-called Charters of Freedom. You press a button to illuminate the documents, which otherwise repose in darkness.

The letters are faint, but they are still there.

We got so friendly with the publicity person in that building that we were permitted to film a naturalization ceremony in the Rotunda one year. What a moving experience! Under giant murals depicting dead white men, men and women of all races and color raised their right hands and pledged to support and defend the Constitution and the laws of the United States from all enemies, foreign and domestic.

One fellow, Dennis, ran the gift shop in the building. He’d set us up with a table outside the shop, and bring us boxes of books to have us start signing stock. Then he’d sprinkle the signed editions around the store.

One year, just as we were packing up, he presented us with adorable pair of goodie boxes he had designed and filled just for us. I was astonished by his kindness.

Bookseller's gift:
On the Road Writer Survival Kit
The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics
"Take this, write something, have a nosh..." —Allen Ginsberg

Another year, as we hawked our books, we were told that David Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States (AOTUS) appointed by Obama in 2009, would be coming down to meet us. 

Imagine my surprise when this man stepped off the elevator and walked toward our table, carrying in his hands a copy of my children’s book on the life of Fibonacci. Turns out, the man everyone called the Collector-in-Chief was also a math geek. He introduced himself and asked for my signature. I was so nervous I nearly flubbed the spelling of his name.

The tourists who moved me the most were always kids.

Families that were recent immigrants to the US often appeared at our table in one large group, speaking another tongue, urging their youngest member to step forward and speak. Indian and Pakistani families stand out in my memory because of the ladies’ dress. But we met a lot of newcomers from eastern Europe and South America as well.

“I would like to buy your book,” the child of these families would say.

“Would you like us to make it out to you?”

Nervously, the kids would look to their parents and grandparents, uncles and aunts, and older siblings. As a group, the elders would nod. Thus emboldened, the kid would announce loudly, “Yes, please!”

By 2011, after we had been doing this a few years, I really loved the kids who announced proudly that they had read our first book on the signers of the Declaration and now wanted the one on the Constitution. We didn’t write those books for kids, but they were decent works of popular history, and funny to boot. Sometimes a child would quote a pun or a one-liner we’d forgotten we’d made.

A special spot in my heart is reserved for those kids who announced that history was their favorite subject. Ditto the ones who told us that they themselves were writers or writers in training. (Some of the girls carried their handwritten works in progress in their backpacks, which they were happy to show us.)

As we signed their books, the kids peppered us with questions:

“How long did it take you to write the book?”
“Do you write them on a computer?”
“Do you go to a library to look things up?”
“Are you married?”
“Do you have kids?”

In other words, they basically asked the same questions grown-ups ask writers, only far more seriously. 

And as we answered, both of us thought of the kids we were once. Kids of 1976. The Bicentennial. Kids eager to learn the history of the place we called home.

At the end, we always had a gift for those kids. 

“Would you like a sticker?”

Of course they said yes, as did their older siblings, who I was quite certain would think wearing a red, white, and blue flag, rainbow, or field of stars on one’s cheek wasn’t cool.

Writing is hard. Selling what you write is harder. But sometimes all the work and all the research you've done comes together nicely, and the result is a single product in the hands of one person who will take its words to heart. E Pluribus Unum.

Exterior, National Archives

* * * 

Thanks for reading. See you next time!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

Anyone Can Write: Be a Lion! Be a Pirate!

 

Write like this.

If you have kids or grandchildren, you have probably encountered the animated Pixar movie, Ratatouille, about a French rat whose dream is to cook his filthy little heart out. The film’s mantra, expressed by a legendary chef who is deceased through much of the story, is “Anyone can cook.” Chef Auguste Gusteau’s egalitarian dictum drives the plot of the film, and inspires and ultimately uplifts our rodent star, Remy.

Gusteau’s words pop into my head every time I re-read Brenda Ueland’s charming book, If You Want to Write. I don’t re-read many books, especially books about writing, but I do find myself turning to Ueland every year and I get something out of it each time. For many years I kept a few extra copies in the office to share with friends.

This time I picked it up because I had re-read a short story I’d written a few years ago that I now felt certain was, as long as we are on a French theme, merde.

I can’t believe I sent this to an editor!

What was I thinking?

No wonder they rejected it!

And like that.

That’s when I knew it was time to dig out Brenda and dip into her wisdom. Her book first saw the light of day in 1938. Ueland was born to Norwegian Americans who settled the American midwest. A judge for a father, a suffragette for a mother. Ueland lived and worked in New York City in the early teens of that century, counting among her friends radical writers such as John Reed and Louise Bryant, and the playwright Eugene O’Neill. (Watch Warren Beatty’s film Reds, to get up to speed.)

I can’t tell you much about Ueland’s literary output. She wrote for the major magazines of her days such as Saturday Evening Post, Ladies Home Journal, in addition to newspapers and radio shows. She married three times and had many lovers. Some of her short pieces have been published in collections. She walked nine miles a day on her best days, and treasured that time because it’s when she did her best thinking.

When she returned home to Minneapolis after Greenwich Village, she wrote a column for the Minneapolis Times, and—lucky for all writers everywhere—began teaching writing classes in 1934. Not at Iowa. Not at Harvard. Not at Yaddo. Her pulpit was the YMCA in the Twin Cities.

Her students were men and women, rich and poor, sales clerks and housewives, hopeful magazine writers, self-important men of business, and people on the edge. Many of them had grown up in farm country, and carried memories of that life. They came each night to listen and learn and try their hand at something they had always dreamed of.

It is clear that Ueland learned as much from them as her students learned from her. After giving a speech at a local writers’ conference one year, she received so many comments from admirers that she finally compiled her observations and lessons into a slim volume that lifts me every time I turn to it.

How could you not be cheered by the very first chapter, which echoes Chef Gusteau, entitled: “Everybody is talented, original and has something important to say”?

The book is eighteen chapters and only 179 pages long. She’s a fan of William Blake and quotes or references him 45 times. She has consumed all of Van Gogh’s letters, and quotes or discusses him 17 times. There are asides on de Musset, Plotinus, Mozart, Tolstoy, Kreisler, Saint-Beuve, Ibsen, Inge, and an interesting scene featuring Sandburg, about the time he visited her in Minnesota and they took a chilly stroll around her beloved Lake Calhoun.

In other words, as she warns us early on, her book is technically about writing, but she is really speaking about anything you long to do. Her true subject is the creative life, for creation, she reminds us, is at the heart of what it means to be human.

Her thesis: As children we learn to tell stories and we’re fantastic confabulists. We intuitively know how to shape a tale with a beginning, middle, and end. Then we get older and freeze up when we sit down to write. Why? By then legions of teachers have made writing seem far too serious. If we dare to set a pencil to paper, we have been schooled, we must follow rules or...we will fail.

Ueland taught her students to set down their words as plainly as possible. If they learned to get out of their own way, they would get to the heart of their stories. “Art is infection,” she says. (Another chapter title.) If the writer feels passionate about what they commit to the page, the reader cannot help to feel it too.

Her favorite Van Gogh story: At first he did not know he wanted to be a painter. He lived in London, studying to be a preacher. Sitting in his dingy flat, he peeked out his window at the rainy night. A lamppost, a star—that was all. In the midst of writing a letter to his brother, he stopped and wrote, “It is so beautiful I must show you how it looks.” And he proceeded to draw on the page of his letter what he saw in front of him. Ueuland writes:

[T]he moment I read Van Gogh’s letter I knew what art was, and the creative impulse. It is a feeling of love and enthusiasm for something, and in a direct, simple, passionate and true way, you try to show this beauty in things to others, by drawing it.

Why don’t we all do as Von Gogh did? she asks.

“[B]ecause we have been discouraged into thinking what we feel about the sky is not important.”

She did not critique her students’ work. No. In chapter eight, when she begins to share samples of their writing with us, she explains her process. Congratulate them. Celebrate their wins. Then, ask them questions:

I am blessed with a fascinated, inexhaustible interest in all my pupils—their thoughts, adventures, failures, rages, villainies and nobilities. “Tell me more. Tell me exactly what you feel when you tried to kill the man.”…“You say ‘his muscles rippled through his shoulders.’ Did they really ripple? Did you really see that?” Then the young novelist’s excited defense: “Yes, they did! His muscles were so big they seemed to burst the seams of his coat!” Myself: “Well say that! Hurrah! Put it that way. That’s alive, great!”

In another section, she shares the work of a young Irish woman who works in a stultifying sub-basement as a department store stenographer. The lass writes a simple essay about a trip she has taken to Wayzata, Minnesota. It’s so rich, your heart breaks reading it. Van Gogh could not have rendered Wayzata more beautifully.

Ueland then quotes passages from flashy magazine stories of her day. She singles out sections she feels have fallen short because the writers did not adhere to her first rule: be true to yourself. They got caught up in writing what they thought would sound literary, and she can sense it.

No, she says. Write from the heart. Write simply. Write what you feel or know to be true. Only that will connect with readers.

Now, look, I did not say that this was a book about how to write fiction. Yes, she does touch on the topic, and even proudly quotes a fun passage by a student who has written a mystery. But to me, every time I read the book I come away feeling that her true gift was helping students overcome their fear and craft fine personal essays.

If I were teaching a group of new writers, this would be the text I’d read to inspire myself, and them. I read Ueland to more fully understand my compulsion to embark on this insane career. If someone were just starting out and asked me for advice, I’d hand them this book, and have.

Just reading the titles of her chapters fills the room with light:

Chapter 2: “Imagination is the Divine Body in every Man”—William Blake 

Yes, that is the title of the freaking chapter.

Chapter 7: Be careless, reckless! Be a lion, be a pirate, when you write 

Chapter 14: Keep a slovenly, headlong, impulsive, honest diary

Chapter 18: “He whose face gives no light shall never become a star”—William Blake

I will warn you that she was also a writer of her time. When she celebrates Columbus in a footnote, calling his discovery the gift of imagination, Tonstant Reader nearly frowed up. I may be wrong, but none of the luminaries she cites in her inspirational stories are women. She does, however, celebrate the work of her female students.

She supported herself and her daughter on her writing after her first marriage ended. She knew the life of a single mother, but she urged her female students to make time for their writing, believing that committing to one’s dreams set a fine example for one’s kids.

“If you would shut the door against your children for an hour a day and say: ‘Mother is working on her five-act tragedy in blank verse!’ you would be surprised how they would respect you. They would probably all become playwrights.”

She describes a funny scene in which she poses for some young girls for three days while they paint her portrait. She remarks how quiet the children were while they were “playing”—and how interesting the final, unschooled works of art were.

(Sidenote: What adults can learn about art from children is the theme of a new book—Don't Call it Art, by Austin Kleon, that I've been hearing about all week. Funny that I should re-encounter this anecdote by Ueland around the same time.)

Ueland set a swimming record in her eighties. She was 93 when she died in 1985. By then, she’d been knighted by the King of Norway and written some six million words. That figure awed me once. It still does, but I now see it as a reasonable allotment for someone who supported herself her whole life by her pen. Yet I cannot help thinking that her true worth was measured by how she enriched the lives of her students and helped them to see that their voices mattered.

Judging from the number of different versions of this book found online, I surmise that it is now in the public domain. If you do seek it out, choose the editions published by Graywolf Press, the nonprofit publisher in Minnesota that has been entrusted by the Ueland estate to keep this work in print since the 1980s. You don’t want to go wrong; the book is filled with delicious footnotes that poor publishers can easily screw up. If You Want to Write is Graywolf’s bestselling book, for good reason.

My copy.

The current Graywolf edition.

* * * 

BSP: My wife's new book arrives next Tuesday. I hope you check it out.

See the video on YouTube.

Learn more at Denise's website.

Check it out on Bookshop.org, not the place run by the billionaire.

See you next time!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

joedenise.com