Thomas Sullivan

If something has to be kept secret, it must be true.  Secrets are self-proving.  Lies are loud and wear red hats, e.g. Santa Claus.  Okay, I’m being a tad glib here.  I do not mean that only secrets are true or that all red hats – i.e. loud proclamations — are lies (your red hat is still true blue, Santa).  But secrets tend to be true, else they wouldn’t need hiding.  I think that most people believe this at some level.  In fact some OVER-believe it, glomming onto every “exposed” secret as innately true because life after all is run by conspiracies and manipulative forces.  Consider the power that this reflex gives to persuasion.  Want someone to believe something outlandish?  Present it as a secret.

And in this way my premise statement moves from being a truism about content to a truism about style.  Because if you pretend something is secret only to make it seem valid when you expose it, you’ve given it the style of truth but not necessarily the substance.  And that can be a literary device to disarm the reader.  An effective literary device.  In fact, take it a step further.  Let the secret be some discovery you make contrary to what the writer is saying.  No truth is more acceptable than underlying truth you think you perceive by yourself, after all.  Better yet if you have to pry it out, testifying to your astuteness.  In this model the falseness is the literal statement, parading itself as truth.  The truth is the secret you discern hiding behind the falseness, and it is its opposite.  Thus we have Mark Twain giving us his truth about all humans being of equal worth by having Huck Finn believe he is going to hell for helping the runaway slave Jim escape.  The world has it backwards, Twain is showing us.  Social morality is the real falseness and Huck Finn in the simple purity and honesty of his soul has it right though he believes he will go to hell for his choice.  Edgar Allen Poe gives us an even more direct stylistic example in the beginning of “The Tell-Tale Heart.”  “True!” his first person narrator tells us too loudly in the very first word, “nervous, very dreadfully nervous I was and am, but why will you say I am mad?”  Already you know the character is mad.  (“Methinks he doth protest too much.”)  He is in your face, asserting his “truth” so loudly that you immediately know it’s a lie.

Life is full of opposites, isn’t it?  It is tempting – particularly in an improbable life like mine – to put more faith in the counterintuitive then into the face value of things.  But that would be another grave error.  Nevertheless, it is counterintuitiveness that seems to yield the most insight into truth when it comes to understanding people and presenting characters.  We are devious, after all, you and I; yet relatively transparent as well to the observer who has developed objectivity.  So, in human behavior, it is often enlightening to look for opposites, contrasts, and apparent contradictions lurking beneath the surface.

These show up most clearly under stress, but with some people the occurrence is pathological.  I find these pathological types to be the most predictable because they always try to be unpredictable, and I often use them for catalyst characters.  They are people who have discovered a game, a posture, an attitude, or a tone that works for them.  They are usually one-trick types who continually use the single gimmick of reverse psychology.  Over time they tend to lose credibility, and so they wear their audiences down to the gullible, the susceptible, or the impaired.  You might see them holding forth where education is scarce, or playing the victim, or sounding witty under neon lights just before “last call.”  Drunk or sober, “in the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”  Their conflicts are seldom internal but instead come from trying to manipulate the external world.  That’s why they make good catalyst characters.

More fascinating to me are people who are internally conflicted, because they are not neatly consistent or as predictable.  Especially if their emotions are strong.  This happens more with women than men.  And, no, I’m not saying that women are less rational than men.  But I am saying that they tend to be influenced by a more complex range of emotions than men usually are.  In evolutionary terms, anger and aggressiveness work strongest for archetypal men, while a fuller range of emotions has more survival value for archetypal women.  The former (male) tends to solve immediate tactical problems and be direct; the latter (female) may address long-term strategic goals and be indirect.  Which is probably why women get hung with the tag of being unpredictable.  In any event, if this makes sense to you, you can easily see why marketing biases favor physical action books for men (external conflicts) and emotional tension books for women (internal conflicts).  Of course, just as in reality these stereotypes of men and women exist as a mix within individuals of either sex, fully developed writing reflects a mix of simple action and character complexity no matter what the genre or gender.  The nod, though, goes toward internal conflicts with its focus on substantial characterization, if only because most readers are women.  I like that.  It takes me right back to the deliciously counterintuitive wildcard that emotions introduce.

Think of how many things can go wrong with internal conflicts as opposed to external.  In external you have things and events; in internal you have things and events plus all the interpretations and psychological/emotional consequences of external happenings.  Internal is where external crosses into human experience, the nerve center, the point of impact – if a tree falls, does it make a sound?  (Does it matter to you, if you don’t hear it – if you don’t internalize it?)  If you want to experience and communicate life fully, free your characters to be human.  Let them become contradictory, confused, emotional, unstable and changeable – then let them find their way back (or not).  And while you’re at it, free yourself from being that writer/person who has a one-trick pathology and writes/sees with one eye open in the country of the blind.  With two eyes open in life, you have twice the chance of seeing the magic.

Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com

http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=1219261326

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

Happy to be able to offer a job – well, half a job – to any readers who are receptive to same.  Here ‘tis.  Q&A.  You write the questions, I write the answers.  Pay is just the same for both of us.  Srsly.  I am amazed at your feedback, touched by your sharing, daunted by your killer questions, and grateful for your support.  Last month’s vignette of my Avatar moment at Elm Creek in particular brought in lots of e-mail world-wide with stories of magic, fate, and romantic destiny.  So, as promised, here is Bride of Q&A – Q&A 3.  I picked the questions this time based on one of three qualities: either they were things I’m asked repeatedly, are of general interest to writers, or are just plain fascinating and challenging to answer…

Q [Gatlinburg, TN]: When you write a novel how do you prove it’s not slander?  

A: First, understand that slander is verbal; libel is print.  In either case, the best defense is whether or not what you state is true.  Since you are writing fiction, you have another level of protection because you are not claiming it’s true.  In nonfiction your purpose in reporting facts must not be to harm someone with malicious intent, whether or not that becomes an unintended consequence of the truth.  

Q [Zhirkov, Russian Federation & others]: Why do you shave your head?   …      [Fontana, California]: Why do you shave your head in the rain?

A: To take a load off my mind.  Besides, I am in no danger of being mistaken for a Chia pet, and all-or-none is more my style, so I’d rather prune than preen.  As for the rain, you must be referring to the photo some team members took while we were building a church school in the Dominican Republic.  When you are in a part of a country where running water is infrequent, keeping an eye to the sky for purposeful plumbing makes sense.  However, I do not recommend it for flushing toilets.

Q [Roodepoort, S. Africa]: You wrote about your favorite fiction authors a few months back, do you read nonfiction and who are your favorite nonfiction authors?

A: Again, don’t want to rank order writers who include friends, so I’ll just say that I’m currently reading one fav I’ve never met – Mark Steyn, a political commentator whose savoir-faire, genteel manner, wit and intelligence are every bit in the class of Alastair Cook.  Love to read historical, social, political observations from people who come from multiple cultures on either side of the socialism/capitalism divide and can see America objectively. … And, yes, I’m a closet geek who daily combs the Internet for info, including world headlines in translation, the Drudge report for links to news that gets ignored or doesn’t fit the so-called mainstream media’s template/agenda, and especially science sources of every stripe.  I read far more nonfiction than fiction and have all my life.  And if you ask me to weigh into conversation with social commentary, history, or the oceans of science and philosophy percolating in my thin paper skull, I’ll deny everything I just wrote, unless you want to listen to me for the rest of your life or eternity, whichever comes first.  So far, no one has taken me up on the offer, though now and then I get asked why I play dumb.  Who’s playing? 

Q [Oak Grove, MN]: Is the waterfall you’ve photographed situated next to a bike path in Maple Grove?

A: Yes.  Runs parallel to Elm Creek south of Elm Creek Park.  The waterfall isn’t dangerous except for a couple of months a year, but the boulders that appear when t’s drying up can be treacherous.  I know a young man who had to be choppered out of there with a head injury.

Q [Oak Grove, MN]: What has caused you the greatest pain in your life?

A: Spectacular.  Too intriguing to ignore, too probing to answer without flinching.  Should everyone ask themselves this?  Well, it’s a question no one would ask unless they had asked it of themselves, so you deserve some kind of candor.  Okay.  What would be the most painful thing to a romantic idealist who has created multiple paths – paradoxical paths – to follow through life, always keeping the central one as perfect as ideals allow, which of course means it would be impossible in the real world?  Would it be first to discover that the central path was – astonishingly – not only possible but that it had become seemingly inevitable (ah, be careful what you wish for) . . . and then to have it founder pointlessly, tragically, in a way that stumbled over surreal perceptions?  Kind of like successfully walking barefoot the length of a high wire across the Grand Canyon in pitch black night, then tripping over imaginary shoelaces at sunrise as you stroll blissfully unsuspecting over terra firma on the other side.  …  Forgive the generalization for an answer, but I don’t think anyone could relate to the rather emotionally spartan specifics of my life anyway.  The idea of irony, however, is more likely to match the experiences of others, whether it involves something ideal, extreme commitment, blindsiding perceptions, or all of the above. 

Q [Tranca, Philippines]: Why aren’t you writing new books?   …   [Hampstad, Maryland & many others]: When is your next book coming out?

A: I’ve decided to write to the world one person at a time.    Srsly, I know I’ve parlayed carp ‘n’ tuna syndrome ops into an excuse for not working book length, and if procrastination is the thief of time, I’m guilty of grand larceny.  But what with the Sullygram newsletters, this column, blogs, blurbs & forewords for other authors, and mucho correspondence, it seems like I’m writing more than ever.  And somewhere in that procrastination of novels I decided this was also a great time to reincarnate myself yet again, back into my original literary mainstream.  All options are still on the table for me.  Like a train moving through freight yards, I just keep getting longer and longer.  That said, I’m answering this particular question in order to announce that I’ve come to terms with two different companies this month (on the same day!) to begin bringing out my work, old and new, in e-book, audio and print formats.  The first two releases will come out as e-books.  And – ta da! – here’s a flash: the first release is – wait for it, wait for it –TODAY!  Just hours ago Crossroad Press released my Best Novel Finalist from WorldFantasy Con, THE MARTYRING, in E-book form in time for Christmas.  And Tell-Tale Publishing Group will similarly be bringing out BORN BURNING, whose popularity has now pushed it to a 4^th English language edition in two decades.  At $3.99 the E-publishing debut – which can be downloaded and read in any reader, including on a computer – makes a good stocking stuffer, so count on it, I’ll be most appreciative of anyone putting one or both on their holiday list.  Here’s the link where you can get THE MARTYRING now – http://store.crossroadpress.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=101_22_28&products_id=488  – and it will also be available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords in a few days.  My webmaster will be updating our website shortly to include all info: www.thomassullivanauthor.com .

And here’s a special offer I think I can keep up with if I prepare ahead of time.  If you give THE MARTYRING to someone, let me know and I’ll send them an author’s greeting to go with the e-book on Christmas Day or on whatever holiday you may celebrate.  Just email me at mn333mn@earthlink.net and include their name and the email address where you want me to send the greeting. 

Finally, if it walks like a chicken, and talks like a chicken, at my house we call it turkey on Thanksgiving Day, but there are no substitutions for my warmest wishes to you every day of the year!  My genuine best to you all!  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com

http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=1219261326     

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan  

As one control freak to another…  Uh-oh, way to go, Sully.  You’ve alienated your entire readership already.  But the essential thing about being human – about being anything with a pulse and choices – is trying to control one’s living conditions to make them beneficial to one’s self, isn’t it?  AKA survival.  Like I was saying, as one control freak to another, what might you notice about all those items in the title above?

Did you say they are all things beyond one’s personal control?   Or maybe you just thought, I hate friggin’ questions that try to force me to someone else’s answer, because that’s REALLY controlling!  Either way you reach the central point here: CONTROL IS THE SELECTIVE WAY WE ACCUMULATE PERSONAL BENEFITS AND ELIMINATE THREATS TO OUR WELL-BEING.  (Unless maybe you are an ant or a bee or a communist, in which case you derive your identity only as part of the collective.)

But what if the choices you make in establishing control end up controlling you, limiting you, ceasing to be a benefit?  We grow, after all, and as our needs change, the controls we opted for as security and fulfillment may confine us.  In fact, this is what happens to all of us to one degree or another, I believe.  If you feel like you are trapped by routine and dying inch by inch in the circumstances of your life, the point may not need emphasis.  And if you are a writer – or anyone creative – control may be that faceless enemy you call “writers block,” or maybe you call it boredom or stagnancy or something slightly more accurate that reflects your frustration like…fallow, sedentary, freedom-crushing, soul-rotting premature death.

In such a frame of mind you may regard that list in the title of this essay as the cause of your plight.  Bad joss, you sigh and knuckle under to life’s myriad social mechanisms, myths and pressures that keep you in line (now that’s CONTROLLING).  But those phantom concepts in the title are your escape route, and you should invite them into your daily life with urgent fervor.  Privately…if it must be (you are already living a secret life – shhh.)  You can call those title items anything you wish, but what they really represent is breaking with routine, abandoning the rut, making a right turn when familiar stresses demand you turn left.  Trust your gut – unless it’s filled with fear and guilt.  Fear and guilt bestow false virtue and lock one into a charade of honesty.  Trust your gut if your dreams are still nourishing you there.  Cultivate those terms I’ve used in the title as if they are your universal visa, your all-border pass to all things and all places.  Because that’s what they are.

You wanna take a test drive?  OK.  Escape with me.  Let me switch to my Cannibal Essay format, and give you an example.  How did I shake up my day today?  When did the magic get invited in?  Pick a time.  9:30 AM?…9 ½ is good.  We’re biking up the street on the way to anywhere/everywhere, specific destination unknown, and we stop in at Norby Nation – a family of seven who have sort of adopted me.  In my pocket are five Werther’s butterscotch candies, which I pass out to the kids, who are all clearing weeds from the backyard garden under their father’s (my buddy Bruce’s)direction.  I tell them that the candies are seeds and that if they plant them, a Werther’s tree will grow.  Annaliese – who from age 8 has appointed herself as my personal critic and social advisor – puts me to the test.  She plants one as a challenge to my credibility.  An uh-oh moment for me?  Nay.  This is kismet, serendipity – all those good terms in the title of this essay.  See, this is where you escape the pattern, the rut, and invite the magic in.  I mean, take note, you are hearing from one of the guardians of magic, a child!  You do not chuckle adult-like and blow it off.  Instead, you hie yourself to Walmart’s and buy a 1-foot tall tree (plastic is OK), and then you cram the branches full of Werthers and plant it in NN’s backyard.  Congratulations, you have just broken the Law of Living Tediously – jailbreak, jailbreak! – and your imagination is on the loose, because even if that plastic tree doesn’t take root, something else has.  Read the title again.  You have to nudge that stuff.  It’s there.  And when you do – when you let motivation spark imagination – you kick down the door to inspiration and things just start to HAPPEN.  Trust me, magic is looking for us.  Read on…

So, we’ve opened the door, left the beaten path of the ordinary just by doing a silly little thing, an eccentric thing, crazy and free.  And now we are taking a hike to Elm Creek, a 5600 acre park preserve, thundering along, enlivened by what just happened, keenly in tune with the open-endedness all around us, the sense of prerogative and the existential nature of nature.  The outré forces have stopped being coy with us, because we are true believers…so here it comes, here it comes…the magic!

Only, remember, this really happened and you’re borrowing my life, so you have to understand a little personal histoire first.  The exact spot where I’m standing is sacred ground to me, a place where on March 27, years ago now, I spent the most miraculous afternoon of my life.  So I’ve never stopped revisiting it or celebrating its magic.  It was very much like the romantic idealism of the forest scene in the movie Avatar where Neytiri discovers that Jake Sully (…hey, you know I didn’t write the script!) is the Chosen One because the floating seeds of the Sacred Tree suddenly waft to his arms and shoulders.  And that’s exactly what happens now. I am standing there in this galvanizing place and a half dozen diaphanous seeds floating from whatever mundane source suddenly catch a puff of something’s breath and settle gently on my arms and chest.  Have you ever had that happen with more than one dogwood or dandelion or milkweed “Santa Claus” at the same time?  I don’t know what the seeds were, but at that moment…in that place…parodying that movie right down to my name and romantic history/destiny…?  Wishful thinking, you say. OK.  But life takes place between the ears, and this essay is all about awareness.  Magic follows the path of least resistance, and like I said, when you put yourself in the way of fate, destiny, serendipity, karma, kismet and star-crossed ironies and coincidences, you allow internal realities to trump life’s external appearances.

So, yeah, I’m still a control freak (but one who knows where and when and how to be just the opposite).  I like to analyze (but not judge) and to notice patterns – especially the non-pattern pattern that refutes all other patterns.  Transcendent living begins where you drop logic, relinquish control, and embrace the intuition that arises from some nameless repository of the soul that harbors perfection, quantum leaps of imagination, insight without anchors, and – by any name you choose – magic!

Now, you take control – because even though I enjoy your company, you’re not going to be original if you’re following anyone.  I have no idea where your path goes.  I’m just suggesting that you have to DO something.  Something that refutes what you normally do.  Permit the meaningful and the imaginative to penetrate the predictable and the dull in your life.  It doesn’t have to be dramatic, but it can’t be automatic – i.e. routine.  Drive a different route, shop a different store, walk backward, whistle, splash in puddles as you hike in the rain, confront a lie, pursue a hidden truth, get out in nature away from four walls, talk to yourself when you’re alone and say all the things you don’t dare say in anyone’s presence, sleep on the floor, climb a tree, shout, laugh, revisit the best memory in your life in any way you can (and the worst), phone someone who inspires you, stay up all night, whisper your dreams to a star, whisper your FORBIDDEN dreams to a star.  OR…you can just skip all that and get through life with as little creativity and adventure as possible.  But as the saying goes, if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.

Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com

http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=1219261326

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

The Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition hisself – Torquemada – has nothin’ on you guys!  What a bonanza of questions and comments came in from around the globe last month in response to the Q. & A. format.  Probing, intelligent, deep and even beastly stuff – and damn near Truth or Dare.  You’re having altogether too much fun with this.  Do I get to cross-examine?  O.K.  Let’s go with it a-just-a-one-more-time (who sang that?).  And keep sending your questions in, so that I can revisit the format (won’t use your name).  Send any questions, specific or broad ranging.  It only takes one star to guide a ship – if it’s the right star – and each question I get is like a new supernova charting an interesting course.

Q. [Tamil Nadu, India] Did you shoot that mosquito in the bathroom?  [Refers to last month’s column: http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2011/08/15/thomas-sullivan-panning-gold-freedom-the-great-shopping-cart-fiasco/  ] 

A. She’s still waiting me out.  No more baths in the dark for me until this is over.

Q. [Quincy, MA] I published exactly one story, and that was for free.  What should I expect to get for a short story?  What’s the least to the most you get? 

A. Well, FREE might be just a little on the lean side – I mean, how easy do you wanna look – but virtually no one makes a living from short pieces, so if you got a little exposure and a decent credential out of it, consider it a worthy entry point.  There are a lot of literary and pulp pubs struggling to survive out there, and they may pay as little as 1/8 cent a word or two free copies or a bottle of scotch.  That said, I don’t remember selling anything for less than 10 cents a word.  My best payday for a short story began way back in 1979 with Omni Magazine paying me 28 cents a word for “The Mickey Mouse Olympics”– a story that continued to sell reprints until it netted me thousands of dollars.  But that’s rare.  I suggest you recognize that short stories prime the pump, if you are trying to establish your name for novels.  If that’s the case, the money isn’t all that important.  Once you’ve achieved recognition, short stories may simply be a way to keep in contact with readers, or you may opt for putting all your time into longer works.  For me short pieces are often the afterbirth of novels – leftover creative energy – and I seldom write them now except by commission from an editor.  The exception for me would be to do a collection of just my work, which to this date I’ve never attempted.  Finally, there is always the possibility of a movie even from a short story.  Francis Ford Coppola picked up the rights to one of mine, and it has been brought to my attention that another seems to have been the basis for a successful film, though it was never credited – which is the problem, because you can’t copyright ideas, only the expression thereof, and short stories generally require expansive scripts which can get around that.

Q. [San Diego, CA] What bores you? 

A. NOTHING.  Except maybe sophomoric people who can’t stop talking about beer.  I skipped that whole college beer-worshiping thing, so drinking just seems like a giant sleepfest to me.  I guess you could say I’m bored by anything that reduces maximum awareness and feeling. 

Q. [Toronto, Canada] Do you have any rules about writing sex scenes?

A. ROTFL.  Ah, sex…glad to see it made it through customs to Canada!  Sorry, sorry.  Rules, rules about sex — well, that’s a buzz-kill for openers, eh?  Kidding.  Not entirely, though.  Rules for sex are as unique as the desires of two consenting adults.  And so the rules problem for the writer is: Who are you writing for?  Because everyone who willfully reads your sex scene is sorta your consenting adult.  You will almost certainly offend or disappoint one extreme of reading tastes or another, while maybe satisfying everyone in between to varying degrees.  Different strokes for different folks, so to speak.  What is your purpose in the sex scene; i.e., shock? gratuitous pandering to grunt graphics? plot twist? character development (seriously)? emotional tour de force? the ultimate act of romantic love? the defining discovery of two soulmates? pure (or impure) titillation?  It would be easier if you were writing to one person, as in a love letter.  So when you’ve decided who you’re writing to, maybe that’s the way to think of it.  An audience of one.  I think most writers write sex scenes to themselves.  Which is kinda narcissistic.  If you’re writing to someone else, it should be altruistic.  Think I explained it better in a comment on my Facebook wall recently.  Let me be clear, art is an imitation of nature, and if I’m interested in writing about a guy and a German Shepherd for 300 pages, I’ll write that.  But I’m not really focused on gratuitous sex.  Okay, with those as givens, let me borrow from a comment I made on someone else’s column a while back.  To wit: There are a couple of other checkpoints for me in writing a sex scene.  One is the degree of exxx-plicitness vs. implicitness.  Sort of deciding where to point the camera.  Ditto the microphone.  And do you include the diary of what’s going on in either character’s/animal’s/group’s thoughts and emotions?  If you ECU with the camera locked on a tripod with full lighting, you end up with dessert but no nutrition.  Catch the shadows and silhouettes, the breathing, glistening flashes and the hiss of fingers through the sheets and it becomes sexuality and sensuousity.  Another decision for me as a writer is whether or not the scene is really about some other words, like “love,” “passion” or “romance” — which incline (recline?) toward “sexuality” (the aura and meaning of sex) as opposed to “sex” (flailing body parts).  And finally, the framing has major importance to me.  Call it foreplay and aftermath.  The latter tends to get more internal, maybe even stream-of-consciousness.  But it tells a lot about the degree of emotion in the characters.  All of these representations in a sex scene can be just as significant by their absence as their presence, though sometimes you have to point to that a little, i.e. show it in some overt way as opposed to just leaving a void.

Q.  Is the white feather still out in that field?

A.  Yes…if you know what it looks like, lo, these several years and counting.

Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  (Thanks for the questions – keep ‘em comin’!)

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com

http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=1219261326     

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

Help…I have locked myself in the bathroom with a loaded pistol and I don’t know how much time I have left before I pull the trigger.  I know this is where I have to be now.  It’s a desperate move, but I am desperate.  I saw the mosquito fly in here, and if I don’t get it, it will get me…sometime in the early dawn…just when I’ve entered REM sleep mode.  So I’ll wait.  Sooner or later I’ll hear the little sucker hum, and that’s when I blast away.  But what to do in the meantime?  I have my wireless, so I guess I’ll write my column now.  No notes but I have all my e-mail.  Good time to write that column I’ve been thinking about for a long time, using some of the many interesting questions I get from around the world.  Maybe I’ll make it into a format to use now and again.  Maybe you’d like to ask me something for a future column.  So, ask me something.  Anything at all.  About writing, not about writing, something personal, something general.  Just send your questions to mn333mn@earthlink.net .  I won’t use your name.  You guys are so fascinating.  You should see the questions…well, you will, you will.  I’ll try to use ones that are relative to a lot of readers, but also a zinger or two.  Here are four…

 Q. [Victoria, Australia] How do you handle rejection?

 A.  Mine it.  It’s like panning for gold.  You examine the slosh for any bright nuggets that might enhance your fortunes.  Most of the time it will be just generic sand and gravel – editor comments that simply indicate your material isn’t really a fit for their narrow window of the moment.  It doesn’t mean that YOU and your children have been rejected.  Funny marks you put on paper have been rejected.  I’ve never heard of anyone who was told, Hey, give it up.  You are worthless, and so is your crapola writing!  But now and then there may be a glint of possibility in the sand and gravel you dredge up from a market to which you have submitted – mention of a specific element that you could change to fit their needs, or a critical reason they believe you should consider, or simply enthusiasm for your work in the hope that you will write something that is a fit for them.  On the latter score, one of my earliest rejections called my work, perfect, flawless, brilliant . . . and went on to say, in essence, we don’t want it.  Business is always subjective and rarely if ever is there such a thing as objective excellence in publishing.  So you mine the rejections for future possibilities.  If you’re going to take it personally, I suggest you separate anger and frustration from proactive marketing.  Have the envelope (or computer file) and logistics all mapped out for your next submission BEFORE a ms can be bounced.  If you then receive a rejection, immediately go through the process of turning that ms around and getting it back into the marketplace prior to throwing a hissy fit that ends in a blue funk of paralyzing depression.  Giving up requires only fear and a lack of courage and leads nowhere.  Not giving up is an end in itself, granting you a journey, and is the only way to reach Oz.  That doesn’t mean you have to be stupid about which direction you set off for or stay on.  Dead ends are all too common.  But it does require that as you discover the best road for you, you take it.

 Q. [Ranchi, India] You seem so free and full of energy in your Sullygrams.  How does one achieve that?  Were you always like that or did success just give you the luxury? 

 A.  Mmmm, how to make the complex answer as simple as possible?  Lemme take on the energy part first.  Because, aside from the genetics (all my family enjoy very active longevity), I believe that energy is a direct consequence of freedom.  You can’t reach your maximum output if you aren’t enthused, and you can’t be enthused if you’re living repressed, compromised, hypocritically or under some other kind of falseness.  Writers especially need to be free.  I’m not talking about the clichéd image of a bohemian artist, but a certain amount of nonconformity is obviously a part of creativity, and that means escaping the soul-crushing falseness I just described.  And, yes, as far back as I can remember I’ve always rebelled against that kind of pressure.  As I grew up, it became more of a conscious thing, I suppose, because many people yearn for that freedom but end up trapped in very unsatisfying lives.  They try to fake their own fulfillment, taking to heart the expectations of friends, relatives, relationships, careers and society as they attempt to will themselves into roles that smother their most basic freedoms to think, feel, dream and just generally interact with the emotional, intellectual and psychological fullness of who they really are.  For me, living a life of quiet desperation out of the misguided belief that it serves a greater good is (and was for a major chunk of my life) just tragically absurd.  It never serves the greater good to let your life be wasted, and it isn’t noble.  At best, it patronizes those you are fooling and is an affront to whatever created you.  That said, I don’t condemn anyone for living under any kind of yoke if that’s how they spell S-E-C-U-R-I-T-Y.  In fact, anyone who thinks they’re not living a lie at least some of the time is living at least that much of a lie all of the time.  Do I ever find myself trapped in a situation where I don’t want to crash someone else’s expectations at the same time that I need to carve out freedom for myself?  Sure.  But I will not let myself be bullied by fear and guilt.  It’s so easy to get the guilt backwards – letting others shrink-wrap us, stunting that intellectual and emotional fullness I mentioned above.  Isn’t it strange that so many of us feel guilty when we refuse to live DISHONESTLY?  How wrong is that?  But even that kind of usurpation can’t keep you from at least visiting freedom every day.  It can be a place, a relationship, an outlet, a private communication, or – ideally – all of the above.  My parents had exactly that – all of the above – so I know freedom can be shared.  But if I had not grown up with that model, I’d probably tell you it’s impossible to be so mutually focused with someone else.  I do not have that in my life, though I know that I was bred to it.  Like a one-owner dog, my loyalties are single-minded and never-ending.  A few years ago someone made me understand that about myself – that I need a substitute for what my parents had that I do not have, i.e. the all of the above.  That, it seems to me, is the spark I must nurture daily, even if by myself or in pieces with others.  Call it romantic idealism, really.  If I lose the inspiration of something perfect and magical in my life, I lose my freedom. 

 Q. [Manchester, UK] Who are your favorite authors?

 A.  Oh, I could be in a lot of trouble with this one, so I’m just going to mention a few authors I don’t know personally.  Vladimir Nabokov qualifies, as a side effect of being dead.  Obscure, pedantic, plotless and full of self-told jokes, Nabokov nevertheless captures the afterghosts of light, shadows and echoes, and understands how to use time and memory better than any other writer I know.  John Cheever could escape sequence in much the same way on occasion.  And among the living, I love E. Annie Proulx’s work, and – my current favorite – anything by Mark Helprin.  This is the Helprin who wrote WINTER’S TALE, not the Mark Helprin of the news media.  I also wish I could read Carlos Ruiz Zafon in Spanish better than I do, though even the translations are passably good.

 Q. [Catskill, NY…from a former swimmer of mine] Can you tell me the story about the time you pushed the shopping cart off the 10 meter platform…I am recalling stories from my youth to tell my daughter, she just turned 19 last week.

 A.  Ah, the Great Shopping Cart Fiasco.  I’m so ashamed.  Don’t know what came over me.  But there it was, on the deck – a supermarket cart that kickboards were sometimes stored in.  So when I saw it that fateful morning next to the 18-foot deep diving well in the 55-yard long pool, it just struck me that it would be magnificent to watch it descend from the 10-meter platform and break that crystal surface in the well.  A 33-foot soar in the silence of the dawn and then a slow settling to the bottom like the Titanic.  Hope to tell you, it was hell hauling it up there.  Narrow, zigzag staircase ascending through all three platforms.  But, hey, I was the 97-pound version of Superman in those days, right?  (…hot damn, still am ).  Anyway, it must’ve taken 20 min. to drag it up those cocoa-matted stairs, clinging to the rungs with one hand, hanging onto the dead weight of the cart with the other while trying to thump it up one more step and another and another, all without committing sudden-death by pitching off the sprawling divers gestalt of platforms and boards (I am terrified of heights).  So, when at last the cart was up there, I went through a little ritual of running it the full length of the platform and pushing it off the end, savoring the freefall and smiling with satisfaction – though it did not waft to the bottom like the Titanic but rather sank like a stone (duh).  Then I turned to descend the stairs, and that’s when the Detroit police car pulled out of the bushes up to the iron fence next to the diving platform.  Both officers got out of the car to regard me on high, and the ensuing conversation was brief but earnest.  “Why did you do that, son?” floated up to me as in a dream.  Realizing that I had been ambushed by a bush, and that they had been parked behind it through the whole preliminary of bloody cart being dragged up three stories, I allowed as to how I had brought the thing up there for the divers towels and that it had slipped.  In retrospect, I can see that that was a tad lame…a ton lame actually.  I probably should’ve said something like I had a seizure, or better yet, that Birdman [my swimmer] made me do it.  But there it was, the treacherous absurdity “slipped.”  The nice officers just kept smiling and staring.  And then they told me to “get it out of there.”  There?  They couldn’t possibly mean out of the 18-foot deep well, right?  The well whose steep sides sloped abruptly up to the 9-foot deep level?  Yes, alas, they could mean that.  And they stayed there for the next hour or so while Seaweed Sully set world records for frustration, for holding his breath, and for futile attempts to raise the Titanic.  Each effort was the same: push the diabolical cart up the sloping sides of the well by kicking breaststroke like a banshee; and if it finally made it to the 9-foot level where it teetered on the slightly lesser slope of the 55-yard pool, hook one foot through the handle and frantically bob for air.  I was like the Coyote and the cart was like the Roadrunner.  Inevitably, air and gravity would win.  Which is to say the cart would slide back into the depths, and I would gasp and gurgle for a while in plain view of two stony-faced cops.  But then there came that one superb effort, which cost me several million brain cells (though I could not have had many more than that when I hatched the idea, could I), when I managed to get the cart not only out of the well, but a few feet further up the length of the 55-yard pool to where it was perhaps 8 feet deep.  This worked well for the oxygen, though I was now developing Charlie horses.  The idea here was that I had to get the cart out of the deep-well end of the pool and all the way to the other end, which was about 5 feet deep, so that I could somehow hoist it onto the deck.  You may recall, Birdman, that the curb edge of the pool all the way around was probably a good 2 feet high as well, since it doubled as starting blocks.  So, when I finally managed to breaststroke kick the cart the whole length of the pool as if it were a kickboard, it was another tactical feat to drag it out by hanging onto the poles of the ladder with one arm.  The kicker – so to speak – was that when Detroit’s finest left the scene, another swimmer – can’t remember if it was BN or maybe KK (you remember when I trapped him in the sewer and also got Big John to serve the phony extradition papers on him after he broke out of jail in the Bahamas?) – came blithely onto the deck.  Immediately I suggested that he haul the supermarket cart up to the 10-meter and push it off.  Which that swimmer did.  Alas, I scrutinized the bushes in vain, because no Keystone cops showed to make the pinch.  Some days are just like that.  [Photo at top is from the 10-meter, but you can only just see the start of the well at the very bottom of the pix]

Don’t forget to send me your own questions.  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com

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http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

I hope you’re as uncomfortable as hell.  Nothing sucks like being too comfortable.  Four walls are comfortable.  6 feet under is comfortable.  Conversely, stepping outside your comfort zone is when you start to live, learn, grow.  If you’re a writer, you thrive on being uncomfortable.

Yet when Norwegian publisher Jan Fredrik Lockert invited me to speak at the House of Literature in Oslo, I was reluctant to interrupt the flow of my life.  After all, I moved to Minnesota for a sanctuary, and I’ve found that here and much, much more.  The thought of taking so many days and traveling halfway around the world hearkened back to the years in my life when I spoke three or four times a week and felt like I could never get away.  All the same, I know that I am easily seduced by isolation, that I can make myself invisible to the point of extinction.  It’s a kind of agoraphobia that attends hyper-thinkers and creative types, I believe.  Writers may or may not end up with parallel speaking careers, but I’ve known enough entertainment people who are constantly in front of a mic or a camera to realize that many of them are timid and shy in special ways, keeping their true selves under the radar.  They may know that they need the limelight, but they can also wither in it and end up fleeing to the deserts of their souls.  It’s a balance, and this is how I must live my life – even though I am more notorious than famous, and little of either in reality.  I hide by getting in people’s faces, but I share my total self with no one.  So, I really need to fight that comfortable isolation.  And when insightful Jan Lockert added the inducement of skiing at (not in – sigh) the World Ski Championships, I went to Norway.

The skiing was grand beyond belief; but as I might have known, the real rewards were all about people [see last month’s story: http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2011/03/16/thomas-sullivan-norway-out-takes-from-a-writer%e2%80%99s-diary-or-the-girl-on-the-mountain/ .  And, of course, this is what a writer needs most: to collect people.  True to his word, Jan delivered all the logistics.  The tickets, the connections from planes to express trains and waiting cars and a hotel shift that put me at the doorstep to the Palace and the House of Literature next door and then moved me to another posh hotel where all the international skiers were staying.  It was superb.  Jan even delivered a listening audience of 200,000 fans…well, okay, maybe it was 200,000 ski fans at the Award Ceremony just outside the House of Literature, but I spoke through a mic very loudly, and the window might’ve been open a little, so I’m sure 400,000 ears heard my every word.  I thank them for their applause, which may have coincidently occurred simultaneously with the presentation of the awards to Norway’s rock-star skiers.  Seriously, these athletes are ROCK STARS, making headlines all over Europe.  At the hotel, I even ran into the cynosure of all eyes of the championships, Petter Northug – Norway’s badboy legend and gold medal miser. 

200,000 or not, the intelligent, talented, eclectic audience inside the House of Literature was gold-medal all the way.  Sharing an evening with them was a joy.  A Vice President of Parliament was even there, and later that night, walking outside the palace, King Harald V drove past in his entourage.  (What a cozy country!)  Jan and I had what you might call a serial conversation in the hustle and bustle of my visit.  From car to dinners to ski venues to ceremonies to sight-seeing to hiking up and down Holmenkollen, and finally to an extremely pleasant evening before an embering hotel fireplace, the subjects were equally far-ranging.  A modest man of many accomplishments, it took me three days to find out that Jan was once the 3^rd top ranked classic skier in Oslo. 

I was given so many things by so many people that you might think it had to do with my status as an invited guest; but Norwegians are a sincerely generous population, and most of my contacts were from people who I don’t think knew any more about me than I knew about them.  Like the two teenage girls who shyly approached me twice and never did get out some question one of them wanted to ask.  I signed autographs, though for God knows what.  I remember signing for an intoxicated young woman in a cow costume who hugged me until I felt like a milkshake. 

Oslo may be the most gorgeous city in the world, sitting on a fjord with its mystic islands, swept up into mountains from which you can see vast horizons miles away, and everything is uphill or down with breathtaking fall-aways and awesome grandeur.  I love Scandinavian decor and architecture and innovative electronic technology.  Ditto love the delis – multi-tiered pastries and chocolates – and seeing people clump down the streets in ski boots carrying their skis and poles.  The food was exquisite, from reindeer to incredible salmon delicacies.  Norway is bigger than life but utterly real – you know it’s real when the snowflakes sculptured in the hotel lobby are not plastic but have actual frost on them.  Other memories include the creative driving, particularly by buses, and dogs in the stores, cowbells and flags waving, and riding back to the airport with one of the Finnish cross-country skiers and a woman who was searching for her past in America.  Also novel was walking around airports with three national currencies.  I flew home via Amsterdam and then over northern Europe, Scotland, Iceland, Greenland, Canada, and finally – would you believe – right over my house in Maple Grove.  My adoptive family, Norby Nation, had shoveled the driveway, but the pilot declined to drop me off.

And I’m still flying.  Norway was the first segment of a dynamic two months.  As soon as I returned to Minnesota, phase 2 began, a welcome 10-day visit from Australian friends, followed by more incredible adventures with lifelong friend Bruce Norvell in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains, and hiking velveteen forested Mt. Hood with my daughter, her husband and my infant grandson in Oregon!  If you want see some short videos, the link below will lead you to my Facebook page, and there among the entries you will find a couple of very professionally done YouTube videos by my Aussie friends from that part of the two months.  Also, many breathtaking pictures and another video of skiing mountains outside Sun Valley and hiking the Pandora-like Mt. hood which was straight out of the magic forests of the movie Avatar.  The sense of being in a movie was echoed nearby when after coming down from Mt. hood we drove around Timberline Lodge, which was where they shot the exteriors for “The Shining.”  I’ll be catching up for a while, so more to follow.  And when I catch up, there are already plans to fly to China, take a train to Mongolia, and trek the Genghis Khan route with yaks.  Hey, it’s research.  Drop me an e-mail, if you like, and I’ll send you a free Sullygram each month with many more adventures, pictures, and thoughts.  So, all best until next time, and – uh…make yourself uncomfortable, won’t you? 

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
www.thomassullivanauthor.com

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan 

http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=1219261326 

My recent tweets:  Living with unfulfilled needs is like living with a corpse in your bed.

“I feel more like I do now than I did when I first got here…”

Yeah, that’s one of my stock nonsense lines, but this month it makes sense.  That’s because I’ve been hopping time zones for two weeks now and will continue to do so into April.  Have recently returned from an exquisite trip to Norway where I spoke at the House of Literature in Oslo and spent quality time with some of the finest people I’ve ever met.  It was too good an experience to give it short shrift, so I’ll have to put off a summary until I’ve completed the rest of my odyssey.  At the moment I’m returning from a resort called Cragun’s with some other superb friends who have come all the way from Oz (oh, don’t you just love intelligent conversation with fascinating people), and when they return to Australia in 10 days, I’ll be jumping into the car to visit more unique friends, skiing in Montana and Idaho, then on to Oregon to see my first grandson!  All by way of saying that for now I’ll just give you a brief take on a poignant moment that highlights the people connections you inevitably make on a journey such as Oslo provided.  So call this a writer’s diary entry then, an out-take that maybe you’ll recognize too, and I’ll double down with it both as Sullygram and column this month:

…The morning after my speech in the House of Literature, publisher/host Jan Fredrik Lockert drove me to the World Ski Championships in famed Hollmenkollen and left me to ski to my heart’s content.  The waving flags, cowbells and Alpine mini-horns were exciting, but the mist-shrouded Norwegian pines beckoned me up the mountain until finally I was alone – if “alone” is possible when less than a kilometer below were probably 200,000 people pouring syrupy roars over the elite skiers on the planet who swept past them in the blur of a 30 km race.  It was the best of two worlds for me: contact with the grandeur of the distant fjord upon which Oslo sits while gliding in the serene stillness and solitude of nature’s awesome majesty on a mountain.  Towering Norway pines flanked the trail, and suddenly from over the next crest a beautiful blonde girl came walking.  I squinted in the bright light of sun on snow as I skied uphill, but all I could determine was that she was perhaps still a teenager.  And then as we passed I heard her whisper “hi” in a strangely terrified voice.  Something inside me melted a little.  By the time I glided to a stop and turned, I was 10 m above her and she was walking awkwardly – hesitating as she looked back.  For some reason she was reaching out – I felt sure of this – reaching out, though not wanting to take anything for granted.  Why?  What had she sensed?  What had I sensed?   “Hi, how are you?” I said, skiing back.  Either she had already pegged me for an American or her initial “hi” was actually a Norwegian greeting of “Heia,” but now she responded in broken English.  At first I thought that explained the slight slur in her voice.  And then I saw that speech in any language would be difficult for her…because her face was half frozen by a scar that ran cheek to cheek, paralyzing a corner of her mouth and causing one eyelid to droop. 

I tried not to let my expression change, and in that at least I may have been successful.  She was beautiful now not just because her face had once been gorgeously symmetrical, but because the ghastly accident that had severed its muscles had not severed her spirit.  How beautiful of her to reach out in her terror, her fear of rejection, her need to be accepted for simply being human despite the cruel irony life had played on her.   

All the more unforgivable that in the awkwardness of a language barrier I didn’t keep the conversation going.  I tell myself it was because I was surprised, and because I did not want to stare at her, and I was going up the mountain and she was going down – but my God, man, why did I let myself be surprised?  I barely remember what I said in the minute or two we spoke.  She needed that so desperately, though.  How could I let awkwardness cut it short?  It seems absurd.  I hate the cowardice of vanity – people who worry about how they might look if they reach out.  She had overcome her fear, shown courage, and I had tripped over mine, a mere social fear that exposed both my vanity and my cowardice.  But that’s what happened in that blazing minute.  A New York minute there on a mountain in Oslo, Norway.  I wished her a great day and skied on, and when I looked back from 30 m, she was stopped too, looking up at me.  But it might as well have been half a universe by then.  We both turned away.  She must have felt rejected again.  And I felt hollow.  Which is why I left the trail a few minutes later and skied off between the trees.  Sometimes when you fail, you don’t feel fit to be among your own kind, and I don’t think I could’ve handled meeting anyone else right then.  Despite her youth and disfigurement, she had so much more courage than I did.  Being alone is wonderful, but not all the time.  You’d think I’d know that.  So, I missed another cue – the angel unaware thing – and I need to work on that.  Funny how you can go halfway around the world and find the same object lessons that exist in your own backyard.  I did look for her when I came back down, but that was a pathetic gesture, given that there were 200,000 people…  Wherever she went, I hope she found someone to talk to.  There’s nothing worse than being alone in a crowd. 

Photos below: A gate of a beautiful Norwegian gardens that reminds me of a special place named Noerenberg Gardens near me in Minnesota; a Norwegian forest trail; an overlook from one of the hotels where I stayed; Hollmenkollen Park Rica Hotel; Norwegian ski trail cabins. 

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
www.thomassullivanauthor.com

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan 

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“Quiet onstage, please!  Go live with the mics.  Cue Aretha Franklin.  R-E-S-P-E-C-T…find out what it means to me!”

Oh, that haunts me.  See, I done a bad thing once…um, more than once.  And it seriously disrespected Aretha.  Can’t tell you the details because – well, I just can’t.  But it has to do with 128 squirrels, and a pink Cadillac, and a roofer I met – on a roof – in the remnants of a hurricane, and a house in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and midnight sojourns, and a G.I. Joe doll.  And Aretha Franklin.  So I listen up whenever she sings her mega-hit song, as if she is staring down her nose at me and wagging a finger in my face.

What RESPECT means to me when I’m inventing characters is: do not underestimate a human being.  I have to believe it’s the same for any writer trying to breathe life into meaningful characters.  After all, you become The Creator when you manufacture mortals, and even though you’re doing it with paper, would God make paper dolls? 

This has nothing necessarily to do with virtue.  Not that kind of respect.  The capacity for evil can still be there in these characters you’re respecting.  Evil as greed.  As self-centeredness.  Megalomania, lust, pride – count the deadly sins, and when you get to seven, keep on going.  Respect the range in people, is what I mean.  It doesn’t even have to be their depth.  If superficiality, or aimlessness, or innocence, or ignorance, are what you are illustrating, a shallow person makes a spiffy character (e.g. Candide, Billy Budd, Mishkin, Huck Finn, Casper Milquetoast, Walter Mitty, Oblomov).  But most people are genuinely complex.  They are worthy of sustained examination as they evolve through life or the chapters of a book.  As authors, or just students of human nature studying erect bipeds with hair, it is one thing to delineate a truly simple subject and quite another to simplify a person because of our own lack of insight. 

But that’s what we tend to do as observers of people, isn’t it?  Simplify them.  Rob them of dimensions so that we can fit our minds around who we want them to be, or because that’s as much as we see.  Our limitations become the authors of their limitations.  Sometimes we do this because we want the world to be black and white, sometimes we do it to rationalize our relationships, but most of the time we are just modifying individuals to fit the collection of stereotypes in our minds.  Speaking strictly for myself, I don’t want a collection of (borrr-ring!) stereotypes, no matter how much simpler it makes sizing up life.  Sure, you need familiar patterns in order to make sense of people or put them in context.  But what you don’t need are so few patterns that you end up distorting the people you know to fit them.

A writer may have a natural bent for uncovering layer upon layer of meaningful characterization.  Or not.  The people I know who I consider have the most insight into their fellow humans are not writers.  What they have is enough objectivity to eliminate their personal motives in sizing up others.  You can learn a lot if you consciously and objectively slip out of your own combat boots and stand in the shoes of whoever you meet. 

That said, I love it when I’m caught ignoring my own advice.  The aftermath of underestimating someone or taking something for granted is when I learn the most.  Last month I promised that if there was enough interest I’d go one more column mentioning things from the Dominican adventure (there was), so that’s where I’ll turn here for an example of really stepping in it.

Recall, if you will, the richly peopled textures of Villa Esfuerzo, an impoverished and crime-blighted village in the Dominican where I spent 8 days in June.  I told you about the people who sit ankle-deep in water in their living rooms, and about the songs and dances at the worksite, about the children with luminous eyes, and the handbags woven from bread wrappers, and the tarantula badlands.  This time I want to take you to downtown Santo Domingo, population 2+ million people.  Welcome to The Mercado (Market).

Alas, I ain’t proud of the fact that some of my companions wanted me to negotiate their purchases in the barter atmosphere of this collection of stalls.  Yeah, nice to be thought of as having the gift of gab, but then too there is the recognition that I would be uncompromising in an atmosphere where poor vendors are cutting pretty close to the bone to sell their wares.  How do you tell a landscape painter with huge talent and marginal circumstances that he is worth half of what he’s asking when he’s just come down a third?  But I did that and worse.  I should have just nodded and walked away, leaving him his dignity.  To be fair to myself, I took a break from the hard dealing, wandering behind the scenes to a loft where I discovered painters cranking out canvases and a Zen pot thrower in an off-shoulder robe spinning his clay at warp speed.  I resisted offering up my cement-encrusted work shoes as a joke to a shoe shiner, realizing he might actually try to polish them.  But there were no twinges of conscience holding me back when I got to the final stall and asked for postcards.  A child shouted to a woman, who called to a man, who ran off to acquire the sought for merchandise while everyone held up their hands in a communal plea for me to wait.

I waited.  And when the man returned puffing and glistening with exertion, I low-balled his modest price for a few postcards.  Yes, I did that, but believe me it was pure reflex.  When I realized what I was doing, I deliberately overpaid him – not with rounded up bills but in coins.  And that was my real sin.  Because he saw through it.  He knew that I expected he would say nothing and keep the extra change.  How patronizing of me, how cynical and condescending.  I, who believe in human excellence, in motivating people to fulfill the highest expectations possible, had slipped into the crippling philosophy of misguided charity that I detest.  More to the point, I had reduced him to a stereotype that must have been lurking in the laziest part of my mind.  You RESPECT people by holding them to account for what you should respect them for, not by underestimating them.  What a thin price I put on his integrity.  It is an old lesson I should have remembered, namely what I wrote above about limiting people to fit your expectations.  I took the change, but I will be a long time forgetting the indignation in his eyes…

There are new photos from the DR adventure in the September Sullygram (newsletter) being released today — e-mail me at mn333mn@earthlink.net and I’ll send it to you.  You’ll also find archived copies of Sullygams w/pictures on my author’s web site, though the latest one is always slightly delayed so that it can include a Permalink to this column.  The July and August Sullygrams have cool pictures from the Dominican as well as full accounts [ http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2010/07/16/thomas-sullivan-skinny-dogs-skinny-chickens-skinny-people-or-how-to-blow-the-cap-on-your-own-deep-water-well-and-free-your-imagination/   and http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2010/08/16/thomas-sullivan-a-red-shirt-molasses-in-a-feathered-world-the-other-side-of-the-wall/  ].   

May I also invite you to follow me on Twitter?  Sample of recent Tweets:  “Kill your so-called foolish dreams and you become the person everyone expected you to be.”  …and  “Trying to undo who you have become is like trying to make a warped record flat again by pressing it under an encyclopedia.”  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com   

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

“Don’t worry.  I forgot your name too.”  That’s what my red T-shirt proclaims.  I don’t wear it to be funny.  I wear it out of fear.  Names zip into and out of my ears like grease through a goose.  I’m dense as a box of rocks when it comes to retaining that most basic of labels.  Given that I’ve mingled in mobs most of my life, this is a major problem.  I use the term “mobs” lovingly – referring to coaching, teaching, a stint as city commissioner, writing & public speaking, and just generally rolling along like a drop of misplaced molasses in a feathered world.  Used to beat up on myself over my inability to remember names.  Sheer arrogance, I thought.  Which is what the nameless victims of my selective amnesia had a right to feel about me.  But I’ve come to believe it is anything but arrogance.  Moreover, I think it underlies a critical author skill.

Mmm.   Skill.  Maybe that’s wishful thinking.  Okay, an author focus.  But critical.  Definitely that.  Because the reason I don’t catch names is that I am intensely focused on whatever is coming at me below the verbal level.  When I first meet someone my attention is like an iceberg, 7/8ths beneath the surface of what they are saying.  I will notice minute psychological details, mannerisms, gestures, expressions, verbal clues behind spoken words — tone, repetitions, hesitations, any pattern — the choices the person makes as indicated by their appearance, where their attention drifts, their responses, fears, wants, ad infinitum.  I am overwhelmed with information to process.  But I am unlikely to remember their name.  Whether I do the below-ground noticing with any particular insight, or even accurately, does not really matter, I suppose, as far as being an author.  The relevant thing is that I am engaged in perceiving people, and whether I’m spot-on in what I see or simply inventing stuff it all goes into the bit bucket of my imagination and mental filing cabinet for new characters.

It does matter, however, that I do this without being threatening or judgmental.  After all, if I’m going to learn anything, I need to be trusted and accepted as capable of understanding.  Moreover, what I personally want is to know truth.  In human relations it is very hard not to unconsciously cue people as to what you want or expect.  And so we end up with anything but truth, namely lip service, false testimonials, and illusions presented to us by those with whom we interact.  The deepest human passions and the darkest secrets reveal themselves best when they come at you without being bidden in any way.  Create an expectation for them and you will likely get what you wanted rather than truth.  So dialing back on your persuasiveness and repressing your subtle expectations as best you can makes learning truths possible.  Authors need to have that objective mode, if only so they can give back truth in their writings.  

Permit me to double down here.  Last month I received a large amount of e-mail pertaining to that column about my stay in a Dominican slum (http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2010/07/16/thomas-sullivan-skinny-dogs-skinny-chickens-skinny-people-or-how-to-blow-the-cap-on-your-own-deep-water-well-and-free-your-imagination/  ).  I promised to follow through with more info about that, and I’ll do it here by way of illustrating the above points – it was a time of truth-gathering for me. 

Poverty wracked Villa Esfuerzo, where people may sit ankle-deep in water in their one-room shotgun shacks as slashing rains come through, has its outposts of security behind razor wire and iron bars.  There was a wall and iron bars around where we slept.  Beyond the wall roosters crowed all night and local children gathered in silent packs to watch us through the bars as we talked of profound things or sang the evenings away.  This mute audience bothered me greatly.  Children shout, children move and make noise, children laugh.  Not these.  They stood barefoot in their worn shirts and shorts and watched and watched and watched in total stillness as we moved and laughed.  They stood as if they were watching an irresistible movie.  It haunted me.  It still haunts me.  The first time I saw them I was reminded of a home-made movie I saw years ago taken of some stone-age hunters in Borneo who had never visited civilization but were taken to a modern airport where they stood in silence outside a chain link fence watching giant airplanes land and take-off.  During WWII these same hunters had aided marines who had come in planes and given them chocolate.  When the war ended the natives built a crude narrow runway and erected a model plane lure and lit the sides of the runway with torches at night while they watched the skies for a return.  They watched and waited for decades.  And here they stood in their feathered finery and fierce face paint, looking very small before the soaring airliners on the other side of the chain link.  What were they thinking?  What did these children here now in the Dominican think?   

Every night that they came I went to the iron bars and in broken Spanish tried to talk to them.  I asked them their names.  And, of course, I don’t remember any of them.  Well…one.  I remember one.  Juanita.  All the same I was searching for answers, for clues as to what they felt and how they would remember our presence in their world and what that might tell them about the rest of the planet.  My concentration was as fierce as the Borneo hunters’ faces, but I could glean nothing.  Nada.  They watched expressionlessly through the bars or smiled shyly when I talked to them — the older boys hanging back a little warily — and that was it.  Not a clue.  They came each night by climbing a second stone wall into a kind of garden that I had jokingly dubbed “the tarantula badlands” because we had hunted down the giant hairy spiders there one night.  They seemed so transitory – these watchers.  Impossible in eternity.  I wanted to open those gates and bring them in.  Did they sense that?  Have they forgiven me for not finding a way to include them?  Ah, vanity.  I want to be forgiven.  That’s the kind of liberal guilt I can’t stand.  Love is what you give, not what you get.

Lots more to tell, but no space to tell it.  Well.  Actually I’ve been saying it a lot lately face to face with people.  So, I’ll tell you what.  If there’s enough interest in this, as there was last month, I’ll go one more column with something else from the Dominican adventure.  Maybe that’s how I’ll take some of the bars down and exorcise my vanity of conscience.

There are new photos from the DR adventure in the August Sullygram (newsletter) being released today — e-mail me at mn333mn@earthlink.net and I’ll send it to you along with July’s Dominican photos.  You’ll also find archived copies of Sullygams w/pictures on my author’s web site, though the latest one is always slightly delayed so that it can include a Permalink to this column.   

May I also invite you to follow me on Twitter?  Sample of recent Tweets:  “Kill your so-called foolish dreams and you become the person everyone expected you to be.”  …and  “I wish I didn’t know all the things that have been lost or thrown away, and I wish I could forget the time wasted in the wrong life.”  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com    

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

Sometimes you don’t know you’ve lost something till you find it again.  Inspiration, adventure, laughter, love, honesty, idealism.  The best things are like that.  Unscripted, nebulous, ill-defined, ephemeral.  It’s their nonconformist free nature.  After all, how can you define magic?  If you could, it wouldn’t be magic.  And writers depend on magic.

Want to borrow some?

I’m just back from the Dominican Republic and a massive transfusion of the kind of magic I search out 24/7.  People magic.  Nature magic.  And it re-silvered the mirror I hold up to life in my writing every day.  Here.  Take my place.  Hop on the bus or the pickup truck that will take you down the roads, lurching around rubble, flat tires inclusive.  This is your first religious experience.  Because if U-turns into on-coming traffic don’t put the fear of God in you, nothing will.

You have to travel 45 minutes to get to the work site each day, but little Manuel with his chirpy voice and luminous eyes shining with hope, and his thin arms reaching out to you in desperation for love, will be waiting no matter what time you arrive.  And a hundred others like him.  But before that, gaze hard out the window.  Skinny dogs, skinny chickens, skinny people.  70% live in poverty — not the kind of poverty defined in the US that includes color TV and a second car, but sweep-the-dirt poverty, shotgun shack poverty, one room of tin and cinder block with curtains for walls same-clothes-every-day sit ankle deep in water in your “living room” when the slashing rain rolls through every few hours poverty.  Over the next eight days you will not see a toilet seat that is attached, or uninterrupted electricity if any electricity at all, or potable water if uninterrupted water at all, or plumbing that can flush paper, or hot water. 

Welcome to Villa Esfuerzo, or as I call it (because I can’t pronounce it), Villa Espresso.

See the man who was playing dominos when a gang fight broke out, killing two and costing him his leg.  See the razor wire on the church school where you are working.  Yeah, lots of violence, and screaming poverty, BUT… also angels.  Angels everywhere.

The people are not time oriented here.  They are event oriented.  And you are an event.  Even though they have seen you before.  You came and went.  Thousands of times.  So forgive the guardedness in the faces of the adults, especially the women.  Especially the poorest women, who by their early 20s so often have five children and no prospects.  Yeah, you can sneer at that.  But in this depressed neighborhood where children raise children there is very little else, and maybe someone told them they were wonderful at age 15 and so there was the first baby.  I do not know why there were four more in quick succession.  You’d think after the hardship of the first one became acute they would…what?  Stop escaping?  Hey, what do I know?  But the women and dogs seem terrified sometimes, as if to step from the figurative and literal narrow margin between doorstep and road is to invite being run over.  Driving is, in fact, creative.  A car horn is indispensable, and you may see five people on a motorbike, including that 15-year-old girl with her first baby in her arms.

But there is great love here.  Huge love.  You see it in the children first.  They shine with it, and if you look at them a second time, or remember their name, you might as well adopt them, because they will follow you like the crocodile shadowing Captain Hook.  They want so desperately to be held and hugged.  I remember embracing a frail old woman in a church when I felt something clinging to my right leg.  Looking down, there was an angelic little girl about three years of age.  Usually I am the dry rot, the mold, the rust that brings things down, but at that moment I was Sully the bridge.  Quite unforgettable.

Yeah, you can find resentment if you look for it, but those walls collapse pretty quickly.  One can only live on indignation so long, however painful one’s awareness.  And these are not uninformed people.  They get it.  Who they are, who you are.  Most of them have seized the courage to live life with honest pride.  When you own nothing, nothing owns you.  So go ahead.  Walk through the winding streets.  Accept one of the invitations to come inside.  Sit in the cool darkness on a tropical day and drink their tea.  Look hard in the gloom and you’ll notice that medal on the wall for a child who graduated from the church school.  Do you see the elegant purse on the table with its vibrant patterns that looks like a Birkin bag original?  The matriarch of this single-room dwelling weaved that handbag out of bread wrappers.  They throw nothing away.  Pull tabs become chainlink jewelry.  A mason’s level is a string between two cinder blocks.  When you are done working at the end of the week, and decide to throw your skuzzy cement-encrusted clothes away, they will collect them, wash them, sell them, buy medicine for the children.  The kids are so often sick…

I speak a little Spanish, and there were translators, but that wasn’t the lingua franca that broke through with the adults, if you want to know.  It happens like this.  You are pouring third-floor cement when some women bring food.  They form a circle and start clapping.  Then they call out someone’s name and that person is obliged to dance a few steps in the circle amidst much laughter and encouragement.  Everyone knows someone, and so all the names get called, including yours.  Maybe you grab someone up and make them dance with you.  The more outrageous your signature moves the better.  Walls.  You are pouring a floor but walls are falling down.   It happens differently with the men.  The day after the circle dance, you are shoveling cement in the dizzying heat and sweat and you suddenly sing out a line of “La Bomba.”  To your surprise, men you’ve worked with elbow to elbow for three days without exchanging a word spontaneously answer in chorus.  It is impossible not to throw out another line, and in any case, they won’t let you stop.  Like a brush fire in the heat of the day, it keeps flaring up until you’ve lined out “Day-O” and every song you thought you’d forgotten.  Music.  The universal language.

But that music is nothing compared to the haunting rhythms that flow out of the church on the last afternoon.  Choral voices that stab the soul and heal the heart.  Keyboard, drum kit, guitar.  Interpretive dancers.  My kingdom for even just a grainy cell phone recording of that!  I’d give up lemon pie for life for a video.  Not gonna happen.  It’s gone now.  Some things are too perfect for anything but memory.  When it’s your turn to speak, you try to tell them.  You try to say that this simple open room they call a church, with its open wooden shutters and open iron gates and the breath of life flowing in and out and fans whirring overhead like hovering angels, is more alive, more impressive than the cathedral in Santo Domingo with its vaulted domes and cold saints in stone coffins.  You try to say that you came here to this place of contrasts to find the sameness between people.  You try to say that you came to build rooms but together with them have built bridges.  Ruben – my 17-year old translator – is golden and a close friend now, but Lord knows how it all came across the mic we shared.  Doesn’t matter.  We didn’t have to say anything.  Those people knew.

Going to leave off the last million pages here because, well…you just had to be there.  But you see what I mean about finding the magic every day, don’t you?  Easy to discover in the Dominican.  Tougher in your own backyard.  But absolutely do-able (see last month’s column).  There is more about the DR experience in the July Sullygram (newsletter) being released today along with many photos — e-mail me at mn333mn@earthlink.net and I’ll send it to you.  You’ll also find archived copies of Sullygams w/pictures on my author’s web site, though the latest one is always slightly delayed so that it can include a Permalink to this column.  And please feel free to follow me on http://twitter.com/thomassullivan .  As always, your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued. 

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com    

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan