Writing a novel by hand

            He [Henry James] began dictating directly to the typewriter. It’s a case of the medium being the message and with dictation he ran into longer sentences, and parenthetical remarks, and when he revised what he had dictated he tended to add further flourishes. In the old days when he wrote in longhand he [Henry James] was much briefer and crisper, but now he luxuriated in fine phrases and he was exquisitely baroque. It’s a grand style but not to everyone’s taste. —Leon Edel, “The Art of Biography No. 1” Paris Review interview.

 

            Not sure what "dictating into a typewriter means," but I’m trying to write a novel in longhand. Will my style become briefer and crisper? I’ll have to wait and see.

            I’m doing the actual writing by longhand, with two of my favorite fountain pens, both with italic nibs. A Parker Cisele, my first pen, and a Pelikan Souveran 600. I'm keeping my timeline and my bibliography on my computer.

The Sixteen Pleasures now an audio book.

     I'm happy to report that The Sixteen Pleasures, which was rejected 39 times before being published by a small press in New York (Soho) has now come out in audio book form. It's available at Amazon and at Barnes and Nobel and, at a better price, at Downpour and Ambling Books and other sites. It's read by Hillary Huber, who has won several Audie Award nominations. Here are the reviews posted on the Ambling Books site:

Audiobook Reviews

   “Fascinating entertainment... with a sympathetic heroine, a suspenseful plot, a cast of colorful characters and illuminating meditations on life, art, and love.” —Chicago Tribune
   “Part mystery, part romance, part guidebook... A lively first novel that communicates the heady peril, as well as the adventure, of Florence after the flood.” —New York Times Book Review
   “Although the pleasure of reading this book can hardly compare with any of the sixteen, still, I’d put it high on the list of pleasures one can have alone.” —USA Today
   “Elegantly moving…Everything about the narrator and heroine of this novel is appealing right from the first paragraph.” —New Yorker
   “Hellenga’s depth (and lightness) of characterization and description lift it high above its genre. And what better book than one about loving and loving books?” —Amazon.com, editorial review
   “Graceful, assured prose, a wry but empathetic view of the human character, and an authoritative command of fascinating background detail are among the distinguishing features of this deeply satisfying first novel...It is remarkable that Hellenga, a recipient of a PEN fiction award for his short stories, can at this point in his career produce such a witty, sophisticated and wise novel, its erotic passages underscored by a poignant, even melancholic undercurrent of change and loss and flashes of existential meaning about the conflicting demands of spirit and flesh.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
   “A rewarding read, with a witty heroine, a marvelous setting, and lots of fascinating detail about book conservation and the restoration of art.” —Booklist
   “A wonderfully rich and absorbing story that seems far too assured to be a first novel. Hellenga forms Florentine art, nuns, erotica, and American know-how into a kind of della Robbia arrangement of juicy forbidden fruit…Hellenga knows just how to build a story. The suspense he manages to create in a book auction scene rivals that of any thriller. In the course of mending books in Florence, Margot Harrington is releasing herself from the rigid bindings of her old life, and both processes prove to be absolutely compelling.” —Kirkus Reviews
 

Tantor Audio promotion of "Snakewoman"

http://www.tantorlibrary.com/BookDetail.asp?Product=1791_Snakewoman

Audie Winner
Kirkus Top 25 Book
Booklist Editors' Choice

SNAKEWOMAN OF LITTLE EGYPT

A Novel

By Robert Hellenga

Narrated by Coleen Marlo

9 Audio CDs (Library Edt.)	List Price: $83.99    Your price: $6.991 EAN: 9781400147915
9 Audio CDs	List Price: $34.99    Your price: $17.502 EAN: 9781400117918
1 Mp3-CD	List Price: $24.99    Your price: $12.502 EAN: 9781400167913

Publication Date: 09/14/2010	Running Time: 10 hrs 30 min
·       1Price reflects a sale price of $6.99. ·       2Price reflects a sale price of 50% off.

Synopsis

A winning new novel from the bestselling author of The Sixteen Pleasures—whose engaging, emotionally true characters could be right at home in the stories of Alice Munro or Bobbie Ann Mason.

More Info

Review Excerpts

"Marlo's reading is engaging, lively, and true to character." ---AudioFile

"The serpentine story solidifies into a captivating and original take on the strange ways of redemption." ---Publishers Weekly

"A well-written narrative that is both thoughtful and action-packed. Hellenga's appealing protagonists have streaks of darkness that keep us unsettled." ---Chicago Tribune

"A melancholy story, but it is also immensely satisfying and even uplifting in that unique way that only deeply felt life can provide." ---Booklist Starred Review

"Three reasons to love Hellenga: He's a fine storyteller; he gives us new eyes; he restores our sense of wonder. Attention must be paid." ---Kirkus Starred Review

"Hellenga mesmerizes with this brainy study of snakes and snake-handling churches, love, independence, and, yes, even the power of timpani drumming. Another flawless performance." ---Library Journal Starred Review

Trust the Snakewoman?

WNIJ “Morning Edition” interview, broadcast 2 December 2013. (Interview was 11/16). You can read it or listen to it at http://bit.ly/1hsO2cx

Trust The Snakewoman? Novelist Defends His Narrator

Here’s what happened. During the interview Dan Klafsted questioned the narrator’s (Sunny’s) reliability. Did her husband, Earl, really force her at gunpoint to put her arm in a box of rattlesnakes, or did she get a snake out of the snakebox and try to get it to bite Earl? That’s Earl’s version. In my mind Sunny’s version is the true one, but there’s a little wiggle room, and I'm not unhappy about that.

You can read a transcript or listen to the interview at http://bit.ly/1hsO2cx.

Good news from my editor about The Confessions of Frances Godwin

Dear Bob,

So I have to agree: it’s clean as a whistle!  And really, really wonderful.  I am awed. The revisions address the timeline issues beautifully; the Latin seems essential now; the story, the characters, Frances herself—I love it all.  It’s delicious, and deep, and immensely engaging. Thanks, Bob.

I’m going to send this right to the copy-editor, as I can’t even find a sentence to nit-pick.  

I’ll be out of the office next week but checking email….  Have a great singing party!  Wish I could be there.

And congrats on THE CONFESSIONS OF FRANCES GODWIN—another brilliant book from you!

xNancy

 

Reading/interview at WNIJ

Happy to be interviewed last Saturday (11/16/13) for “Morning Edition” at WNIJ. Also read a sex scene from Snakewoman of Little Egypt, about which the Chicago Sun Times reviewer had this to say: “Talk about purple prose. But also talk about how skillfully Hellenga injects humor to reduce the swelling.”

From WNIJ: ; Our interview (the 6 minute version) will air Monday, Dec. 2 at 6:34 & 8:34 in the morning at www.WNIJ.org (and on 89.5 FM).  You might be able to hear our Sterling, IL repeater at 91.5 FM so give that a try. 

As with all the Winter Book Series interviews, the text version and audio excerpts will appear on our website the morning of the broadcast.

A Tale of Two Fathers

   Happy to have an interview published in the latest (and last) issue of Memoir Journal, along with the first part of an actual (projected) memoir to be called My Life as an Italian. The piece was originally titled "A Tale of Two Cities," and I want to thank Claudia Sternbach at Memoir Journal for suggesting that I change it to "A Tale of Two Fathers." It begins as follows:

   "My life as an Italian began at about age twelve in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where my father operated a seasonal produce business–The Michigan Fruits Company. It was a seasonal business because originally my father handled produce from the world's largest open-air farmer's market in Benton Harbor, Michigan. Produce was shipped on boats from Benton Harbor to Milwaukee, where my father acted as a broker.…
   Most of the men who worked for my father were Italians, and they took me in hand.… And I see in retrospect that Sam [one of these men] became my surrogate Italian father, though he was the opposite of my father: short vs. tall; dark vs. light; smoker vs. nonsmoker; pleasure oriented vs. work oriented.…"

Quoting Song Lyrics

Guitar I bought in Ann Landers old office.

   I once heard Richard Bausch advice a young writer not to use song lyrics in a story. I thought this was odd advice, but what I didn't understand at the time was that Bausch was talking about copyright infringement. The music industry will pursue you aggressively if you quote a song lyric without permission. And they want you to pay for permission. Sometimes a lot.
   And, you can't quote anything from My Fair Lady for any reason or for any amount of money. So if you want to write a novel about musicals, you'll have to forget about My Fair Lady. Steven Sondheim, on the other hand, is much more reasonable. (You can't quote a Madonna song either.)
   To get permission you have to identify the copyright holder, which you can do by searching for the title or the performer on one of the following websites: BMI (http://www.bmi.com/licensing) or ASCAP https://www.ascap.com/Home/ace-title-search/index.aspx). Then you have to write to the company that holds the copyright and the company will quote you a price. But you have to send in the lyrics in the context of your story or novel, and you have to quote exactly.
  

"Snakewoman of Little Egypt" at WNIJ

10/22/13

Snakewoman of Little Egypt to be part of the WNIJ Winter Book Series.

WNIJ Launches Community Read

Snakewoman has become a favorite of Morning Edition host and Book Series editor Dan Klefstad, and he wants your opinion of it.  Here's how:

Get the book. Read it. Get ready to talk about it.

As you read, use #readwithWNIJ to engage in conversation with WNIJ staff and fellow readers. Then on Saturday, Nov. 16, join WNIJ's virtual book discussion in our studios with Hellenga and you. Tweet your questions and comments (again using #readwithWNIJ) or post your questions and comments on WNIJ's Facebook page or email them to readwithWNIJ@gmail.com.

Timelines

11 October 2013

Timelines

            There’s so much good advice about writing available on line that I hesitate to add to it, but one topic I have hardly ever seen mentioned is timelines. If you’re like me the excitement of having a novel accepted for publication makes you think that the scutwork that’s remains to be done will be pleasurable, and often it is. But not always. You can save yourself a lot of headaches by getting a timeline in place early on and keeping it up to date.

            Even if your story focuses one person and you tell it in chronological order, your character will have a past, and this ‘past’ can come back and bite you in the ass if you’re not careful. Say you want to give a sixty-year old character a stint in the army when he was younger, and say you want him to get married at a certain age, and say you want him to spend a year abroad on Rotary Scholarship, and say you want him to meet his wife when they’re both in graduate school. Fine, but when you line things up you may find that you don’t have time for him to do all these things. Okay, so you skip the hitch in the army. But then you may have to explain why he wasn’t drafted. You have to get the dates of your wars straight, and your information about the draft. If you want Grandpa to be in WWI and Grandson in Vietnam, you’ve got to watch your step.

            If you’re dealing with several characters and with multiple storylines over a long period of time, the need for a timeline becomes more imperative. Does one of your characters (Call her “Grandma”) recall hearing the news of the Japanese invasion Pearl Harbor? You have to have your dates straight and the ages of your characters straight, and you need to coordinate them with events in the “real” world of history. If Grandma was ten years old in 1941 then she’s got to be eighty years old in 2011, it’s as simple as that. But you have to forget about her son being drafted in the Vietnam War unless he was born when his mother was only ten years old. (He’d have to be born before 1951 or he wouldn’t have been eligible for the draft.

            This advice seems so obvious that it’s hardly worth mentioning, and I’ve hardly ever seen it mentioned. I’ve never been able to follow it myself, however. I always start out with a good, clear timeline. You don’t need any fancy software, just a table with a separate small columns for the age of each character and larger columns to keep track of (a) events in the story and (b) events in the “real” world. But then I start changing things around, making one character a couple years older, another a bit younger. I start rearranging events, but I’m in too much of a hurry to keep my timeline up to date. I figure I’ll take care of the details later.

            Better to take care of the details sooner. If your copy editor points out that if your protagonist was born in 1954 he couldn’t have been drafted in the Vietnam War, you’re in trouble. You can, of course, just let it go. The reader probably won’t notice anyway. Or you can go back and make some difficult changes in a manuscript that you thought was finished. Very stressful.

Snakewoman, dancing girls

SUNDAY 6 October 2013

Snakewoman, dancing girls

            Happy to report that Snakewoman of Little Egypt has been selected for the WNIJ Winter Book Series (#readwithWNIJ):

Join WNIJ and your fellow book lovers for a community reading of a novel from our Winter Book Series. Snakewoman of Little Egypt kicks off the series in December but on Saturday, Nov. 16, you'll have an opportunity to tweet your questions and comments to the author, Robert Hellenga, during an interview with Dan Klefstad. Use the Twitter hashtag above to be part of this special event.

***

            If I were to teach Yeats’s “The Long-Legged Fly” again, I would pair it with an excerpt from Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. In the second stanza of “The Long-Legged Fly” we see Helen of Troy in a private moment, dancing alone, thinking that no one is looking. In the chapter “Style” in The Things They Carried, a young Vietnamese girl dances alone in the ruins her village.

The Long-Legged Fly

That civilisation may not sink, 

Its great battle lost, 

Quiet the dog, tether the pony 

To a distant post; 

Our master Caesar is in the tent 

Where the maps are spread, 

His eyes fixed upon nothing, 

A hand under his head. 

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream 

His mind moves upon silence.   

That the topless towers be burnt 

And men recall that face, 

Move most gently if move you must 

In this lonely place. 

She thinks, part woman, three parts a child, 

That nobody looks; her feet 

Practice a tinker shuffle 

Picked up on the street. 

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream 

Her mind moves upon silence.   

That girls at puberty may find 

The first Adam in their thought, 

Shut the door of the Pope's chapel, 

Keep those children out. 

There on that scaffolding reclines 

Michael Angelo. 

With no more sound than the mice make 

His hand moves to and fro. 

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream 

His mind moves upon silence. 

From "Style" (The Things They Carried)

The girl danced mostly on her toes. She took tiny steps in the dirt in front of her house, 

sometimes making a slow twirl, sometimes smiling to herself. "Why's she dancing?" 

Azar said, and Henry Dobbins said it didn't matter why, she just was. Later we found her
family in the house. They were dead and badly burned. It wasn't a big family:
an infant and an old woman and a woman whose age was hard to tell. When we dragged
them out, the girl kept dancing. She put the palms of her hands against her ears, 

which must've meant something, and she danced sideways for a short while, and then 

backwards. She did a graceful movement with her hips. "Well, I don't get it," Azar said. 

The smoke from the hootches smelled like straw. It moved in patches across the village 

square, not thick anymore, sometimes just faint ripples like fog. There were dead pigs, too. 

The girl went up on her toes and made a slow turn and danced through the smoke. 

Her face had a dreamy look, quiet and composed. A while later, when we moved 

out of the hamlet, she was still dancing. "Probably some weird ritual," Azar said, 

but Henry Dobbins looked back and said no, the girl just liked to dance. 



  

Biggest Regrets

The following list of regrets, which has been posted on The Manchester Guardian site and on a lot of other sites, prompted me to think of my life as a writer and to answer the last question on the blog, which is:

What's your greatest regret so far, and what will you set out to achieve or change before you die?

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

"This was the most common regret of all. When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made. Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it."

RH: I’ve been a good student, a good teacher, a good husband and father, and a good writer, but I haven’t been a very responsible citizen. On the one hand, I’m sorry about that; on the other hand, I found my vocation as a writer and one I’d found it, I stuck to it and did what I wanted to do. No regrets there.

2. I wish I hadn't worked so hard.

"This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children's youth and their partner's companionship. Women also spoke of this regret, but as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence."

RH: I’m not at all sorry I worked so hard, and that’s probably because both teaching and writing are vocations, not jobs.

3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.

"Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming. Many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result."

RH: Not a problem. As a writer I spend most of my time expressing my feelings.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

"Often they would not truly realise the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down. Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years. There were many deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved. Everyone misses their friends when they are dying."

RH: I do regret that I’ve let my writing get in the way of nurturing old friendships. No excuse for that. I’m trying to remedy that now. I used to think that if you wrote a letter a day you’d get a letter a day, but I couldn’t manage to write a letter a day. And now it’s all electronic mail, though I did send two handwritten letters this year, and I received two handwritten letters in return.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

"This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called 'comfort' of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content, when deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again."

RH: I’ve been pretty consistently happy over the years, but I’d be a little happier now if I didn’t feel a lot of pressure to spend time trying to “manage my career.” O well.

Just live.

            The other day my editor’s assistant at Bloomsbury asked me how many more books I had in me. This got me thinking about my life as a writer. I retired a little bit at a time, first on a “bridge” program and then doing some teaching as piecework, but now I’m out of the game. That’s OK most of the time, but classes have started at Knox without me, and that’s a little sad. For years I relied on teaching as an important and even necessary source of meaningful work. But now I’m on my own as a writer. So far so good, but for the first time in years I don’t have a novel in progress. There’s still work to be done on The Confessions of Frances Godwin, and I’ve finished a novella (very hard to sell, as my agent reminded me, though he hasn’t read it yet), but there’s nothing big coming up on the horizon.

            “Just live,” I tell myself, and that’s what I tried to do this weekend. I read; I went to an excellent reading by Peter Orner, I played my guitar and recorded a Doc Watson song and, after years of trying, got it to sound the way I wanted it to sound; I cooked down ten pounds of tomatoes and made sauce. This sauce is so good that we hoard it and in fact still have tomato sauce left from last year. And now Sunday morning, I’m writing down these thoughts about writing. Maybe that’s what I’ll do. Write about writing, and maybe even write about writing about writing, as I’m doing right now.

 

 

             

       Put on a turtle neck this morning for the first time since last winter. Feels good. Fall is the best time for a writer. Not too hot, not too cold. Maybe I’ll try to be like Raymond Carver. Here’s the end of a Carver poem that I say to myself every morning as I’m in the shower:

I hate to seem greedy–I have so much

to be thankful for already.

But I want to get up early one more morning, at least,

And go to my place with some coffee and wait

Just wait, to see what’s going to happen.

My lovely wife has already made the coffee. It’s in a thermos on the kitchen counter.

Literary emotions: FEAR

Literary Emotions: FEAR

For the reader:

            The difference between real emotions and literary emotions is often unclear. “Fear” is an exception. The Fear we experience when reading a good thriller can one of the most intense of all literary experiences. Consider the warning on the back of Lawrence Block’s All the Flowers are Dying: “Extraordinarily suspenseful… Those with weak hearts may want to try some other novel altogether.”

            And yet when we put the thriller down, we are no longer afraid. What we experienced was not real fear but vicarious (substitute) or virtual (pretend) fear. We enter into the fear of the character who is about to be tortured or who is tied to the railroad tracks (empathy), and we pity these characters too (sympathize), though the distinction between empathy and sympathy is often difficult to maintain in practice.

            It’s always possible, of course, that this literary fear may carry over into real life. A reader of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Premature Burial,” for example, might develop a lingering and very real fear of being buried alive. But this is the exception.

For the writer:

            What is the challenge for a writer? Actually, fear is one of the easiest emotions to evoke in your reader. All you have to do is conjure up an empty office building in the middle of the night; have your protagonist pick the lock of an office door and start going through secret files; then add footsteps in the hall and the sound of a key in the door. Sara Paretsky’s V. I. Warshawski, who has a set of lock-picking tools given to her by a burglar whom she defended, often finds herself in this position. Or have your rookie protagonist cop mention several times, early on, that she needs new batteries in her cell phone. Remind us that she knows perfectly well that she should call for backup before doing something dangerous; have her lose her flashlight; and then have her poke her nose into the abandoned warehouse in a dangerous part of town where she thinks the bad guys might be hiding out (And you’ve got Linda Wallander in Henning Mankell’s Before the Frost.) It’s hard to go wrong.

Literary emotions: NOSTALGIA

             Nostalgia’s gotten a bad name, but I think it’s one of the most important literary emotions. The Greek word nostalgia means pain for home, longing for home, and that’s what I experienced yesterday morning, the morning of our fiftieth wedding anniversary.              

             Early that morning my wife and I and Caitrine (who’d come from St. Louis) and Rachel (who’d come from Chicago) and the dog (who came from the animal shelter) walked over to our old house on Prairie Street, now the home of our middle daughter, Heather, and her family. We loved that old house and couldn’t have sold it to anyone other than a daughter. My wife and I lived there for over thirty years. Our daughters grew up in that house, which we bought for $18,500 in 1970. Two of our dogs lived out their lives in that house.

            When I need a house in a novel, this is the house that comes to mind. I find it almost impossible to imagine any other house, hard to imagine a house without a Baccarat crystal chandelier in the dining room, and so on.

            My editor’s assistant at Bloomsbury had asked me on Friday how many more books I thought I had in me. I didn’t know. I had just emailed a novella called The Truth About Death to my agent that morning, and my agent had reminded me, almost instantly, that nothing is harder to sell than a novella. But then on Saturday morning I thought, maybe I could write a novel about the house on Prairie Street. But then I thought, I’d already written that novel; I’d better think of something else.

Interview with Chicago Book Review

I'm pleased to report that after some communication problems (I forgot to press "save" on my email to confirm the interview, and then Kelli Christiansen didn't get my phone message because her answering machine wasn't working) I survived an interview with Kelli Christiansen at the Chicago Book Review. It was a pleasure in fact, so why do I worry? Kelli brought order out of chaos. You can see for yourself at http://www.chicagobookreview.com/ or by clicking the above link.
.

The Death of a Dog

photo by Tim Barker

For a writer everything is material, including (I suppose) the death of a dog. Our Norwegian elkhound, Mishka, died two days ago. I’m not ready to write about his death yet, but I’ve written about the death of our previous dog, Maya, in a novella that I’m planning to call The Truth About Death. In this passage Olive, a black-lab mix like Maya, has just been diagnosed with liver cancer:

            That night, on the way back from our walk, Olive stumbled again on the stairs. Just a little stumble, as if she’d misjudged a step. It was hard to be sure, but I was sure, and it broke my heart. That night I talked to her and we made a list of all the things we were going to do in the next couple of months. I hadn’t been planning on going to Lake Michigan again, but I changed my mind. I looked into her eyes and she looked into mine. I thought she was trying to explain to me why things were the way they were, how they were all tied together.

            Put my face in her thick ruff and then kept my hand on her head while I made arrangements about the cottage. We’d never been there except in the summer. I asked about the heat. There was electric baseboard heating. Not a problem in November. A fireplace too, which we’d never used. Didn’t think Olive would be able to walk down the sixty steps to the beach, but there was another way down, from the park down to the public beach.

            That was on a Monday. On Thursday, coming back from the park by the depot, she stumbled badly, but made it up the stairs. She ate her supper. Half an hour later she threw it up. I cleaned it up and sat with her in the living room.

            About nine o’clock she got up to go to bed. Walking down the hall she had a seizure. Frothing. Flailing around. Banging into the walls, then falling down. I called Dr. King at home. He said to meet her at the hospital right away. Olive was able to walk. Went down in the elevator. Gilbert went with me. But then she had another seizure in the garage. When it was over we managed to get her up into the back of my Mazda hatchback.

            Dr. King and his assistant were waiting for us Animal Hospital on Freemont Street. He said that the medication to control the seizures would feed right into the tumor and kill her. We decided to put her down. I kept my arms around her while the doctor inserted the needle into her shoulder–acepronaciner and ketamine. She kept her eyes open for a bit, but she didn’t look at me. She was looking past me. Then the eyes closed. Olive was dead. And that was about as close to the truth about death as I ever got. Not something you can ‘tell’ anyone. You have to experience it.

            Death is like life. Like poetry. Like great art. Like the blues. It doesn’t mean anything. It just is. This is what Olive was trying to tell me. Maybe. Or, any ‘meanings’ you assign to it–like the meanings we assign to life, to poetry, to great art, to music–are trivial compared to the experience itself.

            As I said before, I’ve never rejected the conventional wisdom about grief, but Olive’s death pushed me to the limit. brought me to my knees, not to pray, but because I couldn’t stand up. Maybe it’s that we can’t explain death to a dog. Not that we can ever ‘explain’ death. But at least you can talk it over, the way Simon and I did. You can… I don’t know what you can do.

            I didn’t call anyone that night. Knew I wouldn’t be able to talk. But I sat in the tower. I was lonely, but not exactly lonely. Not the way I was lonely when I first went to college and was homesick… but in some other way.

            I’m aware of the limits of great art. You can’t eat it or drink it. You can’t curl up on it and go to sleep. It won’t keep you dry if it’s raining or warm if it’s snowing. It won’t keep you afloat if you’re drowning. It won’t clean your blood or set a fractured bone. But… Well, you can’t explain great art either.

            I was waiting for something to happen. I didn’t know what it was. I was still waiting when I drifted off to sleep in the big chair-and-a-half in our bedroom. When I woke up in the middle of the night, I reached down for Olive, but she wasn’t there.