On Endings, On Writing, on MFA Programs

 This essay was first published by Women Writers, Women's Books: http://booksbywomen.org/sarah-layden-on-writing/

Many years ago, while commuting to my MFA program in creative writing, I made a habit of seeking out an old windmill along my route. It was both a landmark for the distance I had yet to travel, and a reminder that I was back home again in Indiana after years away.

Now that windmill is gone. By spring, Purdue University’s MFA program will be gone, too.

Perhaps the victim of a passing storm, the windmill once stood along I-65 between my home in Indianapolis and the West Lafayette exit to campus. Acres of industrial wind farms loomed further north, but that lone windmill was no more. Out of habit I still searched for it, driving north to Chicago to promote Imagine Your Life Like This, a collection of stories that I started in the first year of my MFA. That was 2003, twenty years before the book would be done and on the shelf.

The road bled into my writing. So did Indiana, experienced anew after a decade away. In my notebook I wrote about connection and disconnection, speeding tickets (I got two), fields of corn and soybean, lonely drivers in search of a life that eluded them. The naked cowboy, a man wearing only a straw hat and boots and waggling his hips at the passing cars and semis. Had he lost a bet? Found a hobby? I didn’t know. I wanted to, from a distance.  

My stories also featured Central New York, which I missed intensely after my husband and I moved. I’d left a reporting job in Syracuse so I could write fiction, something my entire being wanted to do. While difficult to leave, I was thrilled to meet my new community at Purdue.

One of my first MFA professors, Patricia Henley, shared an Isak Dinesen quote that I still think about: “I write a little every day, without hope, without despair.” The work, Patricia told her students, was the reward. With so much out of your control in publishing—agents, editors, reviews, sales—you could control your relationship to the work. Her new novel, A Sad Thought You Can Dance To, comes out in 2024.

At Printers Row Lit Fest in Chicago, I saw another professor, Sharon Solwitz. I was there to present a panel and sign books, and I was honored to have Sharon’s blurbed endorsement on the back of my collection. In addition to three books of fiction, Sharon’s work appears in Best American Short Stories. We hugged. “You didn’t stop after Purdue,” she told me. This was her first year without a graduate workshop. She mentioned her colleagues, longtime faculty members who support each other amid budget and program cuts.

When I was a grad student, I worked on Purdue’s long-running literary journal, Sycamore Review, learning skills that later translated into a co-authored literary editing textbook. Fifteen years after I graduated, Sycamore Review published my flash fiction, “Gone for Good.” I keep years of issues on my bookshelves to loan to my college students, knowing the journal also might be gone for good.

I didn’t know back then how impermanent things could be; I only knew I felt compelled to record the world around me. On one commute, I brought my Polaroid camera to take a photo of the windmill. It was harder than I expected to find the right road to the farm after exiting the interstate. Then the dust from my tires needed to settle. My disturbance alerted the farmer, who drove out in his truck. He waved. It wasn’t friendly. I held up my camera as explanation. He sat and watched me until I drove away.

All I have is the photo. All I have is the memory. The windmill, too, makes an appearance in Imagine Your Life Like This. In “White Hands,” a woman’s car breaks down, along with her sense of responsibility. The windmill appears and disappears as she watches from the tow truck window.

I wasn’t towed, but I once ran out of gas when I misjudged the distance to the next exit. A State Trooper stopped to help and said he guessed that I wasn’t studying math at Purdue. Correct, sir. The work was hard to quantify. The work counted. There is no column on a spreadsheet to show the benefits of understanding the world through another point of view, and how thoughtful critique of your writing can change not only the writing, but you. Studying fiction does that.

Driving home from Chicago, I passed the wind farms that no longer seemed eerie to me. Now I am used to the towering height of these industrial windmills, their mechanical arms like slow and steady punches. On other trips, I took photos with my smartphone. This time, I didn’t.

More miles of cornfields and soybeans, then I reached the campus exit and caught a glint of metal through the trees. Another windmill in a field, waiting for nature to make its blades spin. Of course, it was there all along. My discovery only became possible from a different perspective.

Please welcome, uh, MY favorite band

I have spent a good portion of the summer enmeshed in books and music, thinking and recharging.  Recently I've given a re-listen to "Across a Wire," a live album by Counting Crows. It opens with a man saying, "Please welcome, uh, MY favorite band, Counting Crows." I know his voice so well from repeated listenings, but I don't know who he is.

Perhaps his name is in the liner notes, but the disc is somewhere in a ginormous CD changer, sans accoutrement. Someday I'll organize my music (or so I tell myself every so often, in fits of optimism. I've been listening on Hoopla via the library.) It's a great double album: slowed-down acoustic versions of many of their songs, and a second disc with rock/electric versions.

The first time I saw Counting Crows ("uh, MY favorite band") was twenty-five years ago in Indianapolis, at a little club on the east side called 2nd Avenue. All ages show, as the ticket attests. When I posted this on Facebook awhile ago, another friend said he was there, too, and helped fill in my memory: the power went out, and the band gathered around one working microphone to complete the set. I wouldn't have called that image up in my mind without help, but now I can see it all over again. I was there.

Saw the band at Woodstock '99 in Rome, N.Y., and in Ithaca, N.Y. around the same era. My last CC show was winter 2014, the Somewhere Under Wonderland tour in Indianapolis, which was  phenomenal. "They're going to open with 'Round Here,'" I told my husband, and they did, and I promptly burst into tears. Music! Feelings!

There was a guy in the front row holding his camera phone up the whole time. Lead singer Adam Duritz had enough and asked him what he was doing, man. They handshaked it out later. What was he doing, man? There's a strong impulse to prove you were there rather than just being there. Says the woman with piles of saved ticket stubs, proof I was there, a thing to post on Facebook, which didn't exist in 1994. But tickets don't obstruct the view or distract from the concert itself. I took a couple short videos, too, and replayed them once or twice, especially for my kids, who loved that album, especially "Earthquake Driver," "Elvis Went to Hollywood," and "Scarecrow." And then the videos were lost when I dropped my phone and broke it and hadn't backed up all the stuff you're supposed to back up. Is Front Row Guy still watching his full concert footage? Somehow I doubt it.

None of this was on my mind when I started thinking about the introducer on "Across a Wire." When I click publish on this short post, my query into the void on "Please welcome, uh, MY favorite band, Counting Crows," I fully anticipate someone will respond, "u could just google it." And so I did google it, pre-emptive googling, and did not learn a thing except that Rolling Stone gave pretty low ratings on many CC albums that I love in their big almanac o' ratings. (u can google it, but y? Like wut u like. Rolling Stone don't know all.) And if I'd googled and found it, then I wouldn't have had a moment to think about this band, this music, that has existed throughout 25 years of my life, a soundtrack for college ("August and Everything After") and work and marriage and kids and teaching and writing books and the rest of it.

I like when something isn't so easy to find; I like to work for my trivia. Though I would love to know what that announcer is doing now, and if his briefly stated sentiment, still imprinted on my brain, remains true.

The Next Big Thing

The Next Big Thing is a blog hop, a chance for writers all over the world to talk about what they're working on. When you’re tagged, you answer ten questions about your next book or story, link to the person who tagged you, then tag 3-5 other writers.

I was tagged by Barb Shoup, writer and advocate extraordinaire. I like to refer to her as my literary fairy godmother. (Read her Next Big Thing post here.) And while you're at it, read An American Tune, Barb's new novel from IU Press. Great stuff.

Check out a post here from Sarah White, an excellent writer and all-around person.

Now, the questions...

What is your working title of your book? Sleeping Woman

(NEW TITLE IN THE WORKS! 8/31/13)

Where did the idea come from for the book? When I started my MFA program at Purdue University, I knew I wanted to try to write a novel for my thesis, though I didn't know yet what I'd write about. In my second semester, I began a very short story told in second person, a "you" who becomes very sick while traveling abroad and is sent home. That short piece became a chapter, and ultimately the "you," once a man, turned into a she: Carey Halpern, the main character. Her physical ailments were revised out in later drafts, and it turned out that her real sickness was grief over her boyfriend's murder.

What genre does your book fall under? Literary fiction.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition? When my sister read a draft a few years ago, she pictured James Franco as Ben. And look, if this is fantasy, I'll just go ahead and cast Jennifer Lawrence as Carey. Now that she's done blockbusters, perhaps she'll be looking for some indie work. For Mike: Matt Damon circa Good Will Hunting.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book? Indianapolis native Carey Halpern buries her grief and guilt deep inside when her boyfriend is murdered in Mexico during her junior year abroad; seven years later, her new job among recent immigrants, a familiar stranger online, and a break in the murder case force her to confront the role Ben played in her life – and the role she played in his death.

Do you have a publisher for your book yet? Not yet. It has come close a few times at places both big and small, which by turns gives me dyspepsia and encourages me to keep trying.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript? About 2 1/2 years. I estimate that I've written about six or seven more drafts since then.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre? Trick question. My work is completely original! But, if you like X, you will love Sleeping Woman! How's this: some books I found helpful while working on this novel were The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, Don Quixote by Cervantes, Birds of America by Lorrie Moore, You Shall Know Our Velocity! by Dave Eggers, and Child of My Heart by Alice McDermott. Also, Susan Minot’s Evening, Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, Kate Atkinson’s Started Early, Took My Dog and Case Histories. For starters.

Who or what inspired you to write this book? The summer between my junior and senior years of high school, I studied in San Luis Potosí, Mexico. It was life-changing, as these experiences are, and I often found myself returning in memory to that trip, particularly a side visit we made to the medieval city of Guanajuato. When I moved back to Indiana for my MFA, I was amazed at how much the Hispanic population had grown in Indianapolis. My study abroad experience came back to me instantly, though my Spanish was a little rusty. The changes in Indy -- and the way memory changes as you look back -- became topics I was interested in exploring.

A few of us from the exchange program recently reunited, and I found myself caught again between the memory of things that happened, and how other people remembered the same events. Small things, small differences, but still important ones. I returned to Mexico in 2005 to research the novel; much had changed, but there were some things I was surprised to remember wholly. They're in the book.

Guanajuato, GTO, Mexico

What else about your book might pique the reader's interest? There's a lot that people might relate to. Things like coping with a senseless death. Understanding yourself and your place in the world. Navigating language and cultural barriers, both at home and abroad. The electronic miscommunications that occurred in the mid-1990s -- the early days of the Internet and e-mail. Tourism, photography, and being socially aware. Immigration and all its risks.

The issues of immigration, forged documents, and illegal drugs are woven into the novel. Last October, The Indianapolis Star reported a record marijuana bust of more than 5.25 tons in an Indianapolis warehouse. The drugs came from a Mexican cartel. Immigration continues to be a hot-button topic, both locally and nationally, as Latinos are the fastest-growing group in the United States. Indianapolis’s Latino population (based on the city’s West side, the setting in the novel) grew 70 percent from 2000-2005; that’s more than any other group. American tourism in Mexico has plummeted, largely due to fears of drug-related violence.

These are current problems, and there are also evergreen themes: loss, grief, regret, and what to do with love when one’s intended will not or cannot accept it.