Guest Blogger

Things I Miss
By Suzanne Supplee
Author of Artichoke’s Heart and
When Irish Guys Are Smiling

I left Columbia, Tenneessee, the charming Southern town where I grew up, a long time ago. I was 25 at the time, about to be married to my first husband. Obviously, since I refer to him as my “first” husband, things didn’t go as planned. At any rate, I was optimistic, at least for a while, and I eagerly settled myself in another town called Columbia. This Columbia was in Maryland, however, and it was a smart, convenient, planned community, filled with terrific grocery stores, state-of-the-art gyms, and progressive school systems. It had everything I needed, but it wasn’t home. For a very long time, I was homesick, pathologically so.

There were the obvious things I missed: the house I grew up in, the courthouse clock chiming on the quarter hour, old friends, my mama. But there were other things, too, subtle things I found difficult to explain.

I missed saying things like Bless his heart or I’m doing good or We’re fixing to go to the store.

I missed celebrating Thanksgiving, Christmas, my birthday, and Easter twice in one day, with both sets of grandparents.

I missed the common understanding that in all of us, country clubber, golfer, pipe fitter, or mechanic, there is a big ol’ redneck.

I missed being around people who teared up when they heard The Tennessee Waltz or Rocky Top.

I missed hearing The Tennessee Waltz and Rocky Top.

I missed the Piggly Wiggly and Sundrops.

I missed listening to long-winded stories in the grocery store or at the beauty shop or the doctor’s office or the post office or the funeral home.

I missed the spirit of adventure that often came with eating—frog legs, rabbit, squirrel, potato salad at a picnic in July.

I missed my granddaddy’s concoction of buttermilk and cornbread, served in a drinking glass, and eaten with a spoon.

I missed my high school best friend’s Trans Am.

I missed the person I had always been, the girl I was so willing to leave behind.

This story does have a happy ending, though. I’m a big believer in happy endings, and the great thing about being a writer is that you get to decide how things end. Or, at least you can put a spin on the endings. So here’s my spin/ending: Over the years, I’ve learned to love Maryland crabs, Old Bay, the Bay, Charm City, and the efficiency of not having a shared history with every person you meet in the grocery store. I’ve learned that being far away from the people and places you love offers an opportunity for greater appreciation and much needed insight. I’ve learned that wherever you go, there you are. And, finally, I’ve learned that writing about a place is the next best thing to being there.


Suzanne Supplee is the author of When Irish Guys Are Smiling, a Students Across the Seven Seas series book, and Artichoke�s Heart. Currently, Suzanne is working on her third book, untitled as of yet, but due out in the spring of 2010.

Suzanne is a graduate of Southern Illinois University, and she earned a masters degree in creative writing from Towson University in Maryland. For a number of years, she has worked as both a teacher and a writer.

Suzanne is married and has three daughters. Her favorite hobbies include exercise, reading, and, of course, writing

Visit Suzanne on the web at http://www.suzannesupplee.com/

Good Neighbors

by Pamela Duncan

Every weekday morning for years, rain or shine, cold or hot, foggy or clear, my across-the-road neighbor Marie stood on her front porch and waited, not for the newspaper or the sunrise, but for me. Every morning she waved me off to work, waved even after the pine trees in her front yard came between us. I couldn’t see her anymore, but I knew she was there. And if I didn’t pull out of my driveway by nine a.m., she was on the phone wanting to know why.

Long before she got the idea for my morning send-off, Marie showed me what it meant to be a good neighbor. It was something I hadn’t experienced since childhood, much of which I spent in the Black Mountain mill village where my grandparents lived. There, the neighbors all knew each other, knew each other’s business, visited over the hedges, shared seeds and scraps and gossip, kept an eye on each other’s houses and children and animals. Then my family moved to the suburbs where nobody ever came calling. If it hadn’t been for us kids, the adults wouldn’t have known a single detail about the people they passed in their cars every day. Kids are neighborhood spies; they infiltrate foreign territory and bring back valuable information about who’s getting a new dog next week and who’s fighting and who had beer cans in their trash.

Elderly folks can be just as intrepid, just as fearless as kids when it comes to reconnoitering a new neighbor. When I first moved to the countryside of Alamance county, I automatically did as I’d seen my parents do in that suburb: I kept myself to myself. But Marie had other ideas. Every day when I got home from work and went to check the mail, here she’d come out her front door, hollering, “Hey there, neighbor!” as she made her slow way to our twin mailboxes. Out of politeness I’d wait, stand by the road and chat a few minutes, and escape to the house as quickly as possible. It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy talking with Marie, but at the end of a long work day, all I wanted to do was go in the house, shut the door, and decompress in front of the TV or with a good book, something that required no politeness or participation on my part. It got to where I’d wait until dark to go to the mailbox.

Then I got the opportunity to work at home. For the first time in my adult life I knew the luxury of waking up without an alarm clock, puttering around my silent house with no requirements on my time or attention other than meeting my publisher’s deadline. For the first few weeks it was glorious, wonderful. Bliss. I thought I must be the luckiest person in the world. But day by day the silence grew bigger and I started to envy all my friends having fun at work while I was stuck home with nobody to play with. I’d never expected to be lonely, but I was. I found myself watching for the mailman, but not because of the mail. Because of Marie. We’d meet at the mailboxes, or sometimes she’d beat me to the draw and carry my mail over and we’d sit on the screen porch and talk.

And I started listening, paying attention to what she was saying instead of plotting how to get away. I finally realized Marie was giving me a gift, the gift of neighborliness, the gift of herself. The only thing required of me was that I listen. How easy it was to please her, by simply listening, and she returned the favor. Talking and listening and laughing at the mailbox, on our porches, and at our kitchen tables, we became friends. Marie reached out and kept reaching until finally at last I reached back.

When did the definition of a good neighbor change? It used to be somebody who stopped mowing or gardening to chat a while, who kept an eye on your house and picked up your paper and mail when you went out of town, and who brought food when you were sick or had a death in the family. Now the definition of a good neighbor seems to be somebody who remains anonymously indoors and only knows your name if they read it on the mailbox. Having experienced both, the old definition suits me much better.

Marie lives in town now. For health reasons, she had to move to a nursing home. Sometimes I almost can’t bear to look at her house, knowing she won’t be coming out on the porch to wave at me, knowing when night falls there won’t be any friendly light in the darkness. I came to depend on her presence, on the comfort of knowing I had a good neighbor, a friend just over the road who paid attention and cared whether I got up in the morning, who wanted me to know I wasn’t alone.

Now I’m about to move away, too, and it breaks my heart to leave my friends and neighbors. But as long as she can dial a telephone, I know Marie will never stop being my good neighbor. She’ll keep calling to check on me, to share her news, to gossip, to laugh. It won't be the same as meeting at the mailboxes or sitting on the screen porch together, but we'll take what we can get.

(Novelist Pamela Duncan is the author of Moon Women, a Southeast Booksellers Association Award Finalist, and Plant Life, which won the 2003 Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction. She is the recipient of the 2007 James Still Award for Writing about the Appalachian South, awarded by the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Her third novel, The Big Beautiful, was published in March 2007. Visit her website at http://www.pameladuncan.com/.)

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow by Jackie Lee Miles

I spend half my time in Florida living in a bathing suit and I definitely don’t want to offend y’all, but I’d like to address a sensitive issue that has been driving me bananas: Why do women have to have hair on their genitalia? I don’t care that men have hair there; they have hair everywhere. (Picture if no man ever shaved again, ever, as in never. You tell me how they’d look. Exactly—that’s my point.) No, I’m talking about we absolutely, positively exquisite and alluring women. I mean really. This genetic predisposition to have a forest growing below the navel is disgusting. And, it’s become more than just a minor inconvenience. I tried to shave the entire thing off (don’t ever use Nair—I thought I’d died and for three days ended up in hell), but after shaving I found five-hundred razor burns and enough razor cuts to surpass all the razor cuts my husband has sustained in his entire lifetime.

Someone told me blondes have a lesser problem with hair in that region, so I died my hair and then, you know, dabbed a bit “down there” hoping to coax it into behaving. No such luck. I developed a severe rash which necessitated seeing my gynecologist who howled when I explained the situation as to how it developed. “Absolutely never die your eyebrows or pubic hair,” she said. “Let a professional do it.” Right! She also gave me a prescription for an ointment my insurance carrier considered not on its list so it cost me eighty-five dollars for a tube the size of an Avon sample of their latest lip color. So, shaving is a major bother, Nair is out of the question, and dying does nothing to inhibit growth and costs big bucks at the pharmacy. What other choices are there?

As a young woman I don’t remember having the density of the forest that I cart around now, and then I realized why! I have four children. I birthed them during the years they “prepped” you for childbirth as though it were an alien experience they needed to get you ready for. In addition to a full-bag enema they shaved every inch of hair that was within two feet of the birthing canal. I remember not wanting to undress in front of my husband. I’d just given birth and my lower body looked age ten. Many years later I found out he thought it was “kinky”. Now he tells me! But the real point is that the birthing “prep” encouraged this forest to grow in leaps and bounds. Had they left me alone, I would not have this monstrous problem each and every time I don a bathing suit. We’re talking class-action law suit here. I simply need to find an attorney who is suffering from this same dilemma and go for it. And a female judge who feels the same way. At the very least I should come out with enough money to have a bikini wax every spring for the next three decades. After that I won’t be wearing a bathing suit anymore. I won’t remember what it is.

However—even with the problem sort of solved—it doesn’t answer my question as to why we woman are total apes when it comes to our genitalia. We can cure polio. We can send a man to the moon. We can invent computers that are so inexpensive that virtually every household in America can afford one. Why can’t we rid ourselves of genital forests, painlessly and permanently? That is the question. Surely someone has the answer. My personal favorite is a pill you swallow three days in a row and hair on a woman’s body ceases to ever grow again. Develop that and you’re richer than Bill Gates. Since it hasn’t been developed I’m back to where I started. As if the area of hair growth on my legs and in my armpits isn’t bad enough; which brings up another subject I must caution you about. I had laser hair removal on my legs. They promised me I would never shave again. It costs as much as three mortgage payments, but who cares if you never have to shave again. They lied. Also, they forgot to tell me not to go out in the sun for three weeks before and after each and every treatment. The reason is you will get brown spots all over your legs. In my case hundreds of them! How can they forget to tell me that? They claim they did tell me. It’s in the fine print right along with the disclaimer that each person’s results will vary and no guarantee of the degree of success is warranted. Add to that, the fact that the appointments have to be scattered over a period of eighteen months and the week prior to each appointment you can’t shave. So one week out of each month you look and feel like a gorilla.

The worst part of all was the pain involved. They stated there would be some minor discomfort. Huh! If having a hot match stuck to your leg three thousand times in succession is minor discomfort I’m the tooth fairy. After screaming my way through seven treatments they let me go. They apologized for my discomfort and said they had a topical ointment for sale that could be applied an hour prior to the treatments that anesthetized the skin and made the treatments much more comfortable. Now they tell me! When I asked why they didn’t inform me prior to the procedure the technician stated the cream costs a hundred dollars for four ounces and most patrons don’t elect to purchase it. THIS patron would have elected to purchase it. There’s no price tag on torture.

Obviously, using this method for the genital area is out of the question. Not to despair! I received a coupon in the mail for twenty dollars off a bikini wax. I made an appointment. They stated there would be some minimum discomfort, too. But I was armed with the hundred dollar ointment I purchased at the laser salon. I figured it might come in handy some day, so I bought a jar. I wasn’t worried. I figured nothing could be as bad as the laser-leg ordeal. Guess what?

I figured wrong.

Jackie Lee Miles is the author of Roseflower Creek, Cold Rock River, and Divorcing Dwayne. Visit the website at J.L. Miles. Write to Jackie at Jackie@jlmiles.com.

Perspective and Publishing -- Patti Callahan Henry

Book Tour.
Just the name brings up so many different images and emotions, doesn't it?
Well, right now I'm on one. A book tour that is.
For THE ART OF KEEPING SECRETS. I have three more cities remaining after visiting twelve already.
I think it was Pat Conroy who said that book tour was designed to humiliate authors, but that is another subject. Right now I want to talk about two things -- perspective and publishing.
The traveling tends to offer me many moments of insight. For example, right now I am sitting in the Atlanta airport at 7AM waiting on a plane to board. Nothing offers insight into FRANTIC STRIVING like the Atlanta airport on a Monday morning.
For example: the guy behind me was in a frantic and immense rush to get through the security line (aren't we all by the way?). But I guess he assumed he was more important than the rest of us. He finally cut in front of me, then changed lines five times looking for the fastest way through the massive crowd. He did get through security two people ahead of me. Good for him, right?
Now he is sitting here waiting on the same plane as me. Shows where FRANTIC STRIVING gets you, right? To the same place as everyone else, just a bit more frazzled.
My conclusion -- steady, calm determination will get you to the exact same gate, boarding the exact same plane.
You apply as you see fit.

While out here on the road, I have had this question more than any other:
"How did you get published?"
So, I finally sat down in a hotel room one night and wrote this little ditty about getting published.
Here it is:
Publishing
The desire to publish is a paradox in this: the more I wanted it, the further away it ran from me. Like a guy. Like a really good looking guy who wants nothing to do with me until I am going out with another really good looking guy.
When I first started writing, I just wanted to tell a great story. I had this internal need that was stronger than anything I’d felt since childhood. I hid my desire, and my writing, for at least three years. I wrote the story I wanted to tell: a story I really wanted to tell. I went to writing classes, read writing books, traveled to writer’s retreats. Then I showed my work to some other writers, who, like the miracle of the Red Sea parting, loved it and showed it to an agent who then also liked it and took me on as a client. This is where I’d like to write – And they Lived Happily Ever After. But this is actually where I became almost hopelessly lost.
Suddenly I thought I’d turned into an “author” (how delusional is that –a couple opinions make you any more or less than you were only moments ago?). I lost sight of my real desire. Now I wanted to publish to national and international acclaim. I’m not sure where the transformation took place – somewhere in my EGO, I am quite sure. Somewhere in that mushy place of need.
The big-time agent said she loved my work, just loved it, but could I please rewrite it to make it clearer, better, nicer? Of course I could – I am an author. Then she asked again – could I please rewrite it to make it clearer, better, nicer? Of course, I said again. Then she asked me again…you get it….
So, I began to write with big, pompous words. I wrote long, flowing paragraphs full of metaphor, analogy and alliteration. The return comments were “nice writing, don’t get the story. But we think you could be the next (fill in the blank with any writer you imagine).
What? I don’t want to be the next anyone.
I gave up. I really did. I wasn’t an author. I was a hack (which of course goes back to the delusion that someone else’s opinion makes you any more or less than you were only moments ago).
After months of trying to pretend that I didn’t care about writing, I ended up sick (really, pneumonia) and I turned back to desire – that true deep-down desire to tell a good story. I wrote another story, a different story. I found a new agent. And I sold the story – my first novel, LOSING THE MOON was born of desire and passion, and not the incessant need for approval.
I am now working on my sixth novel, and I still fight this fight within myself. I will be honest: sometimes I still get lost and must remember what I forgot: this storytelling stuff is powerful, and if it is to be any good, it must come from a deeper place within ourselves.
If someone had asked me (which no one did) what I looked forward to the most with publication – I probably would have said something idiotic like, “the money” or “the awards” or “the fame”. Embarrassing to admit, don’t you think? Now if someone asks me (which they do) what I love the best about publication, I will tell them – the writing world – the relationships, the camaraderie, the beauty of the written word, the honor of telling stories…and so much more.
Publishing is a business; storytelling and writing are passions. The mix between the two doesn’t always make a tasty cocktail. There is not a lot of glamour, or money for that matter. There is fulfillment and a great amount of joy mixed with the exhaustion and frustration.

Stay tuned as I travel on book tour, and we’ll talk more about the joys and travails of the book tour life. Visit www.patticallahanhenry.com, and then BLOG.

Patti Callahan Henry is the National Bestselling Novelist of four novels with Penguin/NAL. Her latest, THE ART OF KEEPING SECRETS was released on June 3, 2008.

RENT, NOT THE MUSICAL by Kerry Madden

We have never owned a home. We have one kid in college, one on the way to college next year, and a nine-year-old. We have always paid rent. My sister, who is almost seven years younger, has just bought her first home with her husband. I have soul-searched for jealousy, but all I feel is pride and admiration for her. They did it. They bought a house in Northern California after five months of struggling and looking and bidding and losing and finally winning. We have lived in Southern California since 1988, and yet we have never managed homeowner status. She is also nine months pregnant with a three-year-old, and I’m so relieved she’s out of Haight-Ashbury and will have a driveway! Her new neighbors even threw them a welcoming party. She’s so happy, and I’m happy for her…and it makes me think, well, maybe one day, we can do it too. But it’s got me thinking about rent…and all the places and people to whom I’ve paid rent…

MANCHESTER RENT
The first time I paid rent was in Manchester, England, and I paid it in pounds to an Indian landlord, whom I never met. I lived in a flat with two British Drama students in the Indian area of Manchester called Rusholme. I was an exchange from the University of Tennessee, and I was thrilled to be out of Knoxville and living in Manchester for a year. The first semester I had lived in a dorm with Americans. They lumped all the Yanks together on the seventh floor of Owens Park Dormitory, and my next-door neighbor was from Maryville, Tennessee and the one next to her was from Union, Missouri.

Not that there is anything wrong with being from Maryville or Union, but I didn’t apply to be an exchange student in order to meet Americans. The way I figured it, I could meet Americans any time. I plotted my escape and jumped at the chance to move into a flat with two British Drama students around December, who happened to be male. My parents FREAKED and there was a rush of Transatlantic calls to one of my flatmate’s girlfriends (the only student who had a landline) and threats to haul me back to Big Orange Country, but I had already given up my dorm room. The British girl who moved in had desperately needed to leave her own flat due to “an insidious assassination of character.” In Knoxville, we didn’t say “insidious assassination of character.” Everyday in England was a new adventure in language. Manchester shopkeepers and taxi drivers regularly called me “Luv,” as in that’ll be “Ten P, luv” or “Five quid, luv” or “Ta, luv.” It may never have stopped raining, but I felt loved.

And I wasn’t living with “boyfriends” in my new flat. We each had our own room, and they stayed at their girlfriends’ flats. So I was often alone in our home, which was freezing and forever damp. I had a gas heater that I lit everyday if the matches stayed dry. I learned to brew tea in a pot with a tea cozy and tea strainer – the proper way to make a proper pot of tea. Hot water bottles were also essential. It took three kettles of boiling water to keep the bath hot, and mostly I showered at the student union.

But I liked writing that check from my Barclay’s bank account in pounds. I loved everything about that year, stuffing masses of giant ten p coins into red phone booths to ring up Tennessee and tell them of the latest adventure for a minute or two. I remember listening to the radio and the DJ yelling, “It’s going to be wet and horrible for the next three years.” And it was true - it hadn’t stopped raining for months, but it was my rain – my Manchester rain.

KNOXVILLE RENT, SONNY GIBSON, THE LANDLORD
The next person I paid rent to was Sonny Gibson. He owned a house on Lake Avenue in Knoxville, Tennessee. I lived with four nursing students, and we each paid ninety dollars a month. Sonny drove a truck and had a basement full of vintage dresses that belonged to his mother, Gracie Gibson. They fit perfectly, and I wore them to every theatre party in Knoxville and affected a British accent and longed for pubs and hard cider and flared up at anybody who dared criticize BOY GEORGE, who I had seen once at a make-up counter in Harrods, so I felt a connection.

Sonny Gibson didn’t mind when summer came and the nurses moved out, and new roommates moved in…One brought home two dachshund puppies, Rudy and Peter – one for me and one for her. Rudy and Peter were wild brothers and egged each other on and chewed up shoes and thoroughly shredded houseplants, album covers, underwear, everything. Once when I was so broke, I bought a burrito supreme for a $1.35, and Rudy inhaled it in just seconds when I wasn’t looking. It was too late to walk up to try to sell plasma for fifteen dollars. Times were hard on Lake Avenue.

I moved into the theatre house the next year with Rudy into James Agee’s old neighborhood on Clinch Avenue in Fort Sanders. Peter moved out to a farm. I paid rent to a rental company and it was $180.00 split with a roommate. Rudy was the theatre dog. He attended all theatre rehearsals and parties with me and went to foreign films at the student center in my backpack.

I had a roommate for a while, a lovely girl, Keytha, who acted in tons of plays, but then she moved out with her boyfriend, and my husband-to-be moved in…He was the first boy I dated who cooked me dinner, walked Rudy and introduced me to lentils, bulgur wheat, and the Knoxville Co-op. He acted in my plays and worked the night shift at St. Mary’s on the psych ward and came with stories of “Thorazine shuffles." I wrote plays about England and paid rent through money earned working at Apple Tree Bookstore, West Knoxville Dinner Theatre, and a graduate teaching assistantship in Voice and Diction at UT. No more plasma!

CHINA
My husband, Kiffen, and I then eloped (Gay Street wedding rings, Knoxville Justice of the Peace, rooms at the Budget Inn with a Flannery O’Connor theme – the whole thing cost less than a hundred dollars, but that is another essay.) We moved to China to teach English, and my parents adopted Rudy.

The University of Tennessee found us jobs in Ningbo, China. We didn’t have to pay rent in China but we were paid in Chinese currency, which could not, at the time, be converted into dollars and all earnings had to be spent in China. We stayed eight months teaching English in Ningbo, “City of New Vigor.” I thought I would acclimate to China like I did to Manchester. Logically, or so I thought, I had loved Manchester, therefore, I would love China, but we were living in the middle of rice fields, and I was deep in culture shock. We read to each other at night, and I watched the only movies available – KRAMER VS. KRAMER and AMADEUS. I played a lot of Laurie Anderson and Mozart on my walk-man for miles in the rice fields…I’d watch the ship sail up the river to Shanghai and long to go too. Once we took it and smoked clove cigarettes and drank thick, sweet black coffee on the deck while everybody sang "Auld Lang Syne." It was April, 1987.

The majority of people still wore blue Mao suits and rode bikes. We stood out and attracted attention no matter where we went, but I loved my students, and that made it bearable. I had them write plays in English, which they performed on the Chemistry Lab “stage” – twelve plays in all! It was a broiling hot night and giant bugs from the rice fields flew into the lighted windows during the packed performances, but it didn’t matter. Occasionally, a teacher would remark, “Perhaps you are too tired. Perhaps you work too hard. Perhaps your students are too tired.” I heard the word “perhaps” a lot that year. “Perhaps it is not necessary to do the plays or make the English newspaper.”

I remember once hiking to a temple with Kiffen and a British teacher, Patrick, when we came upon a family of tea-pickers. The women had thick black braids and baskets of tea leaves under a pale sun…we hitchhiked the rest of the way to the temple, and caught a ride with a horrible driver, who careened around precipices. Patrick saw my fear and said, “Well, I always believe that the driver doesn’t really want to die either…” I remember reading FRANKENSTEIN at the Temple and wanting to go home, but I didn’t know where home was anymore…New York? Los Angeles? Atlanta? It was not going to be Knoxville…I knew I could never make a living as a writer in Knoxville.

At the end of our teaching term with our Chinese money, we bought silk and train tickets on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, which took us through China, Russia, Poland, and then East Germany and West Germany. We arrived in West Germany with a few traveler’s checks and net bags bulging with our China life. I had an American Express card, and we bought plane tickets back to the States after several weeks in Stuttgart with Kiffen’s sister, Celina and husband, Bill, who still make their home in Germany. I remember they took us to see James Bond dubbed in German…I believe it was Timothy Dalton playing Bond. There were no subtitles. It was before I knew that I could say no to relatives and James Bond in German.

HOLLYWOOD
Pre-China and Post-China, we lived in my parents’ (furnished, carpeted) basement to save money. My mother has taken umbrage when I’ve written about the basement digs in the past, because she said my description “harkens images of a cot with a swinging light bulb above it.” So to set the record straight, it was a beautifully finished and furnished downstairs room (not a basement at all) in Roswell, Georgia. The swap/rent was that my mother insisted I go to my father’s Atlanta Falcons games, and I made her go with me to see Flannery O’Connor’s home in Milledgeville. It was a good trade. She also got to keep Rudy for good. She fell in love with him while we were in China and couldn’t give him up, and I understood.

After Georgia, we moved to Valentino Place in the shadow of Paramount Studio. Aphrodite lived on the top floor, and the courtyard was gargoyles and palm fronds. By then, I was pregnant with our first child, Flannery. My brother-in-law, a sitcom cameraman, gave us his place so he could go back to Hawaii. He was sick of Hollywood and wanted to fish on the beach. The apartment cost $250.00 a month, and the managers were Marshall and Kim from Nebraska. Kim did make-up, and I’m not sure what Marshall did, though maybe he wrote screenplays? It was a strange time. We shared a kitchen with a kid (he was our age but seemed so much younger.). The kitchen divided us, and so did all the Chinese silk I hung to pretend he wasn’t there. He was rarely there anyway as he was always taking road trips to Mexico.

We had awful temp jobs at banks, except for the day or two when Kiffen drove the prop truck for THE GOLDEN GIRLS, which made for a funny letter home and a good pay day. Still, I never understood why our roommate never had to work. I eventually learned that his father would send him pot from Hawaii to sell.

We moved down another floor, a studio, for $350.00, and Flannery’s first room was a walk-in closet. He was a wild, happy baby, and Marshall, the apartment manager, would call up and tell me to keep my windows closed during the day so people could sleep and not listen to some kid.

We moved to Silver Lake...

SILVER LAKE, OLIVER, THE LANDLORD
Our first landlord in Silver Lake was Oliver. We only lived there a year. It cost $500.00 a month. It was a one bedroom. We were moving up in the world because we could shut a door! Hooray! We got a dog, Birdy, from friends moving away, but the living room was a hot box by afternoon, and the Chinese silk slowly faded to shreds in the California sun. One neighbor wanted me to sit with her and make her write stories, so she could find discipline. Another neighbor ignored her two-year-old daughter so often that we called Child Services. I’d see the child swinging from the balcony, filthy. Once in a while I scrubbed her in the tub and fed her. The mother never knew or if she did, she didn’t care. The little one had a big sister, and we talked about programs, and she explained her mother didn’t used to be this way…I don’t know what happened to them…

My husband was teaching in Watts, South Central, and in downtown Los Angeles as a substitute teacher…then he got a real job as a real teacher in South Central. I got a job in East Los Angeles teaching ESL…I was pregnant again and a house for rent became available…

SILVER LAKE, CONNIE, THE LANDLADY
I met Connie, our new landlady in a park – or rather that was where she wanted to meet me. She said the rent was a due a few days early each month and no dogs. She said we could paint, and she would reimburse us. The rent was $735.00 a month. We moved in but had to give up Birdy, our dog, who ran away from her new home immediately to find us. We painted everything, and we asked not to be reimbursed if we could keep Birdy. I was seven months pregnant. Connie agreed. Did I mention she lived directly behind us?

At first, it was great…the house was a dump, 763 square feet of stucco, but we had a huge backyard, and Kiffen made it look like Tennessee. We had a giant garden and the kids grew up picking vegetables. Pumpkins grew the size of basketballs. We had winter gardens with Swiss chard, beets, broccoli, and cauliflower, and summer gardens of tomatoes, beans, carrots, and lettuce…and lots of spices, roses, sunflowers and champagne poppies. He built a King Kong topiary and jasmine grew all over it, until we had a fragrant King Kong of jasmine under the apricot tree. Birdy, however, fell in love with Connie and her husband, Jack, and stayed over on their back porch most of the time. They led a back-deck life of wine and jazz and never went anywhere except to visit troubled adult children “in the desert.” We never once entered their home in eight years.

Kiffen invited Connie and Jack to help themselves to the garden, and they always did, and they were fine, but actually, they weren’t fine – they were cheap. If something needing fixing, Connie would appear in her wig and muumuu and sad story about the price of things. She’d sneaked into the house to snake our toilet. She replaced a door and her son hung a plywood door that Birdy dug through to get back to them. When the earthquake hit and rocked the house off the foundation, they refused to tell FEMA or anybody. She replaced broken windows with panes of Plexi-glass. When I had the 1928 toilet replaced myself for sixty dollars by the DWP, she hit the roof and demanded the money back. She said she knew where to find deals on used toilets that were perfectly good. It was becoming intolerable.

When I became pregnant with our third child, everything about the house made me throw up. I was terrified of turning into Connie and Jack – the warped sense of money, decay, cheapness…She would give the kids birthday presents – a dusty set of tweezers and nail file for a three-year-old…a beat-up copy of SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON for a seven-year-old. She’d drop off bags of old candy congealed together in brown paper sacks or once a bottle of Apple Reunite when we moved in…When we moved, she demanded an extra month’s rent and my mother and my mother-in-law, children of the Depression, both called up and said, “Don’t you pay them another penny!”

We moved a half mile away, and I blocked their number…We had lived there eight years. The last time I saw Connie was at the 99 Cent Store on an Ash Wednesday. We didn't speak.

SILVER LAKE, SAM, THE LANDLORD
We’ve lived in this house ten years now. How can that be? But it’s true…we pay $1400.00 a month in rent for a five-bedroom in Silver Lake. Our landlord is a good guy. He doesn’t raise the rent, and he has American Home Shield Insurance, and if something breaks, they come out and fix it without a sob story. Good schools are in the neighborhood, and it's a safe place and full of friends for the kids. But it does feel like a holding pattern. Should we look to buy? We have good credit and some savings although college tuition is here and now.

But in the backyard, Kiffen is building a tree house for our youngest. We know the neighbors. Yet, it still feels like a holding pattern. Once our middle child, Lucy, wrote a letter to the landlord. “Dear Sam, Please let us buy our house.” I didn’t mail it.
I spent a childhood moving and hearing “The realtor is coming! Clean up!” It was the life of a football coach’s family. Moving. And Los Angeles is also such a place of extremes – one time, a friend was whining about how hard it was to maintain two homes - one in the Pacific Palisades and one in Park Slope. Another friend was applying for a Section 8 apartment.

The truth is, I do want to own a home. I want hardwood floors, a front porch, and a fireplace. I was leading a writing workshop in North Carolina for teachers, and one asked what I had “sacrificed” by writing books. I said, “I think owning a home…My husband is a teacher, and I wanted to write books, and we’ve never quite been able to manage to do both.” I didn’t think before I spoke. I blurted it out without even knowing it was there, and the silence in the room was palpable and little embarrassing. I’m not sure if it was pity, but it was close, and I certainly hadn’t meant to incite that response. And suddenly, I knew all the young teachers in the room probably already owned homes…

But on the other hand, we have made a home wherever we’ve lived. We may not own it, but we have made it a home with our children, who’ve grown up to be such wonderful people. I feel incredibly lucky to be their mother. I would just like one day to own our own house, and maybe our grandchildren will have a place to come home to that truly belongs to us and not a landlord. In the meantime, I am heading up to Northern California to help my sister have her beautiful new baby, because she was there with me the whole time when two of our three children were born. I want to be there to welcome my new niece or nephew into the world, and then we’ll go back to her new home and tell stories – our favorite thing to do as sisters. Her new little one will hear us, and her three-year-old will crawl on to our laps for cuddles. I hear she has a screened-in side porch – the perfect place for stories. My parents will be there. It will be home.

Good Old Boys Make Good Daddy's

My Daddy was a man's man, a mama's boy, and a good old boy. Folks who make fun of those good old boy’s down south don't know what they’re talking about. They'd be lucky to meet one, befriend one, or marry one. A real one. Not that Hollywood game.

In 1933 my Daddy was born in the back woods of North Florida. He was born there to a life that never came easy. Raised on a creek in the woods that offered him a magic so strong that it became his touchstone. An army man for life, he traveled the world over on duty and on leave and when asked where the best place in the world was he laughed and said, “Right here,” standing there on that swampy piece of creek in the backwoods and he meant it.

When my mother first met him he was a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne with ‘those pants tucked tight into his shoes and I mean to tell you,” and she raises an eyebrow and smiles as if to say, “what choice did I have?” Of course, when she first met him it was at little bar and restaurant on the beach called Jimmy’s which has now turned into the infamous Breakers Club but back then it was just beer and barstools and hamburgers and the living was easy in the summertime. All waves and sunshine and southern boys on a quick three day pass. When she first laid eyes on him, and I swear this is true, he was teaching waitresses how to jump out of airplanes by taking them up to the roof and holding their hands while they jumped off into the sand dunes below. The true tale goes that the waitresses were more than just a little lovin’ it. He took one look at my mother as she was dropping her niece off that morning for work and made her the same offer. She said, ‘no thanks.’ Even to the tough pants, the green eyes, the easy smile. She was a serious woman after all. Had real work to do. No jumping off roofs for her that day.

He was waiting for her when she returned that afternoon. Apparently, he had come up with a different offer. Apparently, one she ended up jumping at in the end after all. And the rest, as the man says, is history. And a part of that history was in me coming to be.

I saw my Daddy jump out of planes thousands of feet high, and saw this tough man cry with a broken heart over an open coffin.

Saw him return from Vietnam with a Silver Medal and stories he wouldn’t tell except to say years and years later, “We had no business over there.” But he was a soldier and a soldier follows orders, fulfills the promise of his oath, and my Daddy was a good Soldier. Even if he was a good soldier followed by all the ghosts of young boys who died too young.

I've seen him make a small man feel important. Make the lost feel found.

He had a heart tattoo that said, ‘MOM’ on it. And I know no matter how many beers he might of had at 19 to get that engraved there, my Memaw must have loved it. She being the one that made those Peanut Butter cakes for him that were seven layers tall and who always called him ‘my boy’ long after he was man.

We didn’t always travel with my Daddy. We (my mother and me and later me, her, and baby sister) stayed put and kept the home fires burning, took care of two sets of elderly grandparents, made care boxes to send here and there and overseas. Then Daddy retired and came home to stay full time in this strange house full of women who had strange female habits like sleeping late in our most unmilitary ways.

And I can say these things to my Daddy’s credit.

He didn’t try to change us. He didn’t bark orders. (Although he could give us a look that meant we better shape up quick faster than a thousand words from Momma). He taught me by example not to judge a man by his skin color, by the size of his wallet, by who his Daddy had been, or which side of the tracks he came from, but instead by the look in his eyes and by his actions.

He taught me to go easy and to know that sometimes what might seem insurmountable was just a bump in the road. He taught me, by watching him, that growing older can be good for a man’s soul, align his priorities, help him to say, “I love you,” as easy as a breeze.

When I told this backwoods good old country boy that I wanted to be a writer when I grew up, he didn’t laugh. This man with a tenth grade education and a GED under his belt, this man who didn’t read much, believed me. Believed in me. And sent me a huge old Thesaurus from Ft. Polk Louisiana Army camp with a note that said, "I heard all good writers need one of these."

I had hoped with all my heart that my first novel, The Gin Girl, would make it to print before Daddy died but it didn’t work out that way. Such is life. But he knew it was on its way.

“So it’s really going to happen?” he asked me in those final days. And I said, “Yeah, it’s really gonna happen, Daddy.” And so it did.

He’s been gone six years now but it seems like yesterday. Mother, sister, and I are still stepping easy around the empty spaces of where he isn’t. And, as I prepare this morning for a phone conference with my editor and agent on another new novel, one set right smack down on that creek in those back woods of Florida where my Daddy showed me all it's mystery and magic, I just want to say thanks to that Good Old Country Boy for believing in me.

Happy Father’s Day, Daddy from your writer girl on this side of forever.

RIVER JORDAN is a storyteller of the southern variety and has been cast most frequently in the company of Flannery O'Connor and Harper Lee. The Messenger of Magnolia Street was applauded as "a tale of wonder" by Southern Living Magazine, who chose The Messenger of Magnolia Street as their Selects feature for March 2006, and by other reviewers as "a riveting, magical mystery" and "a remarkable book."

Ms. Jordan teaches and speaks on 'The Power of Story' around the country and produces and hosts a radio program on WRFN, 98.9 FM, Nashville Saturday's at 4:00 CDT, www.radiofreenashville.org. She recently completed a new work of fiction, Souls In Limbo. Jordan and her husband live in Nashville, TN. You may visit the author at www.riverjordan.us

The Way We Read

I am sure there are people out there who can gauge our personalities by how we read and what we read. I don’t have the knowledge to do that kind of thing but I do know we humans vary in the way we do these things and what we choose. Over the years I have observed the variety of ways our reading habits form.

For example I am a first word, first sentence, first chapter type of person. I start at the beginning and head on with no looking back. If the book is really good I like to read it in one sitting, if possible. If it only mildly entertains me I put it aside, pick it up and read a little, and slowly but surely make my way through it. I rarely stop reading a book once I start. I won’t say that has never happened but it is rare.

My brother has a different way of reading. He reads two or three books at a time. He will read a chapter in one and then move on to the other(s). He never cheats and reads more than one chapter at a time no matter how exciting or compelling the book is. He has done this since grammar school so I guess it is totally engrained in him now.

He also has a stack of books that he is considering reading. He never moves a new book to the head of his stack or list. Each must wait its turn. There is no cheating allowed. Even when I wrote my first book it went into the stack and had to wait its turn before he read it.

Then there is my favorite quirky reader. I have a friend who always reads the last chapter of any book she is considering. If the last chapter interests her then she reads the entire book from the front. I have asked her if finding out “who done it” ruins it for her, and she always says no.

This is better than another friend of mine who skims the entire book before he reads it. After he skims it he reads it for the details. Why not just read it cover to cover I ask, and his answer is he has always done it this way. If it works for him……

My friends also have a variety of book types they like. One never reads anything but always just listens to them on tape. I have to admit I have not come under the spell of the books on tape craze. I can’t think of any person whose reading would so entrance me that I would want to hear a whole book on tape. I prefer to read the words and let my imagination provide the looks and sounds of the characters.

Another friend only reads non-fiction. She says she wouldn’t waste her time reading a made up story. She is balanced by another friend of mine who only reads fiction. She says she has no desire to read non-fiction stories. I just couldn’t be that rigid. I take my reading pleasure where I find it.

A publicist for one of the major book publishers e-mailed me the other day. She said she would put me on her list for review copies of books. She then asked me what type of books I preferred. I pondered over that and then replied, “Good books!” I just don’t have a special category. I am willing to try anything from science fiction to historical non-fiction. I guess I prefer fiction but I am open.

Like those individual snowflakes, we all have our reading peculiarities and none of us are exactly alike. I for one am very pleased it is that way.

Happy reading!

Jackie K Cooper's next book of short stories, THE SUNRISE REMEMBERS, will be published in September 2008