Thomas Sullivan

Maybe I’ll write humor today, you decide.

It is 4:41 AM and your sawdust-for-brains next door neighbor has just “unleashed” Lion Lungs – the hyper barking pooch – for his pre-dawn serenade.  Your spouse slumbers next to you, and if you move to the computer downstairs, there is a good chance you’ll wake the baby.  Better to just lie here trying to make light of it by writing the funniest story ever in your head:

Q: “So, what does your dad do for a living, little boy?” 

A: “He doesn’t do anything.  He’s a writer.”

Dumb.  Even your two grade-schoolers would think that was juvenile.  Humor is tough this early.  Especially if you are awakened before First Light by First Dog.  But at 6:35 AM, when an exhausted Lion Lungs is replaced by Dementia Dog, the wind-up yapper, Second Dog is no better.  You switch genres:

Maybe I’ll write a cutesy animal story today.

So now you start to fantasize a mama eagle arcing above the houses.  This bird not only has keen eyes, she has keen ears (picture Mouseketeer ears like radar domes) that register every yap from Dementia Dog (yap, yap!  – translation: here I am, here I am!).  Suddenly mama eagle banks, swoops and picks up Dementia Dog, who continues yapping mindlessly in a cross-eyed frenzy as he is carried off to a duo of ravenous eaglets awaiting breakfast 316 miles away.  Oh, this is good!  You’ve really got it this time.  You are just getting into some seriously sociopathic stuff – donating Dementia Dog to McDonald’s pooched egg menu for eagles – when a pair of elfin bare feet hit the floor boards in the next room, followed moments later by another pair. 

A war story would be good: “The paratroops landed running, their boots hitting the ground one after another…” 

…begin REALITY, the 8-hour inconvenience to your writing career a.k.a. “gainful employment.”  This is where your long-suffering spouse mans the trenches elbow to elbow with Dr. Seuss while you rush out into the rat race of 9-to-5 stiffs in order to earn filthy lucre selling shoes at The Wild Pair.  By 10 AM you are struggling with depression. 

…maybe I’ll write an “Oh-Yeah” satire today.  (“Hey lady, you’ve tried on every shoe in the store, why don’t you just wear the shoeboxes home?”)

And when your 8 hours end, you return to Happy Valley where luckily you find a place to park in your driveway right behind the roof repair truck and several vans.  But inside the House of Chaos you discover remnants of three projects, two committees, a charity drive, and half a dozen mothers bartering their children into pools.  Everyone is late for something, and expressions of dismay over where the day has flown fill the air.  Somehow your arrival seems to settle arrangements, as all vehicles except the roofer’s truck quickly disappear from the drive.  Alas.  Of the children who yet remain, you recognize less than half the human menagerie waiting to use the bathroom. 

Note to self: write a medical drama about a writer who dies of uremic poisoning in his own living room.

On it goes, another precious hour of writing time slipping away.  But while the minutes winnow down, the children you do not recognize and may not be related to also winnow down, because now their Mazey Bird mothers begin to trickle back in their vans to pick them up.  Your muse stumbles back on stage…

Maybe I’ll write a story about a heroic father who rescues children wandering lost in the jungle/arctic/desert…

And that is when you begin to recognize subtle signs of stress in your spouse.

 Attention children: Do not look at that woman who-is-not-your-mother curled in a fetal position on the basement floor, surrounded by razor blades, rope, and a mega-size bottle of aspirins!  Bike ride, bike ride, time for a bike ride!  See Daddy do his famous killer garage door trick as you wait on your bikes in the drive. 

The kids love it when you push the inside switch to start the garage door down and take two quick strides, stopping right under it.  You wait until the descending panels are a hair’s breadth from guillotining you, then suavely rotate your neck so that your head passes just under it.  Only this time the door practically cracks your skull open, and you are left grinning idiotically.  The “roof repair” man standing by his truck is not grinning.  He is shaking his head.  Ah.  You see it now.  The lettering on the truck: Roof & GARAGE DOOR REPAIR.  Yes, a new motor on the garage door will definitely throw the ol’ timing off in your act.  “Daddy, you look like a bobble head,” your youngest informs you. 

The bobble-brained author.  How wonderfully tragic!  It’s been done successfully before.  Faulkner.  A tale told by an idiot.  Keyes.  “Flowers for Algernon.”   Attention, Muse, this will be the shortest bike ride ever.    

But the caravan turns into a demolition derby of skinned knees, jammed chains, loose handlebars and a flat tire.  Everyone is unhappy.  Everyone whines.  Everyone has to go to the bathroom.  Check that.  One unhappy camper no longer needs to go to the bathroom…  Maybe I’ll write a prisoner-of-war story, you decide, announcing in your best Nazi voice:  “Everyone WILL now have fun.  Anyone caught not having fun will go to bed at exactly 5:17 PM with asparagus up their nose.” 

Elder daughter rolls eyes.  Youngest pouts.  Even the dog, who is eating grass, looks stupefied.  A leering child you do not recognize pulls two leaves off a farkleberry bush and shoves one in each nostril.

…Definite cue for a horror story: Children of the Wild Asparagus.  Yes, you are losing it. 

Back at the house, things have improved.  Your spouse looks surreally animated, dinner is only slightly burned, and the baby’s sprue seems to have abated – or perhaps migrated to the dog, who is now throwing up as you drag him toward the door.  Losing it, losing it, losing it…

Maybe I’ll write a funny horror satire about a heroic father in a dysfunctional family who saves his baby by casting a magical trans-possession spell that transfers a fatal infection to a dangerous dog who is then carried off by an eagle…  (Going, going, gone!)

Pssst!  This is how it is.  For all of us.  A day in the life of…  Hope I’ve cheered all you struggling authors out there.  YOU ARE NOT ALONE.

Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com

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You don’t have to read too many of my columns to know that I am an advocate of first-hand inspiration as opposed to letting one’s imagination do all the work.  No matter how good you are, standing pat on your knowledge and memory as you create whole worlds is a sure way to cheat your potential.  If you want your work to be supercharged, you need to keep the chain reaction going in the fission/fusion part of your brain that made you what you are.  Rest on the laurels of your experience, and you will miss the YOU that could’ve been.  Call a halt to learning and growing, and you’ll connect far fewer dots by the time you assume room temperature.  I say this knowing I’m a hypocrite, that I love to hunker down and spin everything out of myself whole cloth, and that I have to overcome inertia every day.  Occasionally life makes it easy to fight that battle.  Case in point, my recent extended travels.  So, now I invite you to the second half of the writer’s diary I began last month in Europe.  It is, perhaps, of no value other than a personal account, except to say that searching and discovery require a certain mindset.  Searching especially.  Because sometimes when you’re lost on the yellow brick road Oz will find you. 

That’s what happened to me on returning from speaking at the House of Literature in Oslo (see last month’s column:  http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2011/04/15/thomas-sullivan-channeling-jack-kerouac-or-why-writers-need-to-get-out-more/#respond ) in the middle of a two-month journey.  In both a literal and a metaphorical sense Oz came to me.  The literal truth is the fact that Aussies Grant & Fiona, otherwise known as the “Oz”-ians, flew in for a visit almost on the tail feathers of my Delta flight from Norway.  The metaphorical truth is that they brought with them the magic of their own wizardry from the fabled land down-under.

The ensuing 10 days were a hoot, a compounded inspiration, and a chain of nonstop adventures.  Our days and nights scintillated with meaningful conversation and irreverent pranks.  Grant & Fiona are a brilliant down-to-earth couple well versed in everything from quantum to psychology, and me – um…did I mention the pranks?  I could have easily missed this core friendship in my life from halfway round the globe.  Grant was simply another interviewer to me two years ago when that interview began by international phone call.  Several hours later we had bonded and were making plans to ocean kayak from atoll to atoll in Tonga.  Now the three of us have shared exquisite times and are planning yet another adventure starting with five days in China and ending on a yak Safari that follows Genghis Khan’s route through the Gobi desert in Mongolia.

But the geography is the least of it.  Life is about people.  And if you’re a writer, you can never be reminded enough of that, because the more broadly and deeply you know people, the more consummate a writer you have a chance of becoming.  Writers tend to dismiss that, perhaps because they think there’s nothing one can do to affect that process.  But you can affect it.  Moreover, making characters up from limited archetypes that you relate to from your past or from favorite movie roles is a little like trying to learn psychology by studying cadavers.  It ensures only a degree of caricature in your work.  If you trust your imagination to do this, you’ll end up cloning yourself on paper or discovering only your own fingerprints all over the world.  In order to exercise the God-power of sympathetically creating genuine and convincing characters, you must know people.  And for that you have to let go of your blueprint, your map, your schematic.  You have to open up to more than yourself and to things/people/ideas that are unlike you and your security zone.  You have to get lost.

Prayer: Dear Muse, if I can only know one person, let it be a certifiable schizophrenic or the biggest heart/mind/soul in the world. 

Alernate prayer:  Let me get lost every day on the yellow brick road to unknown destinations so that things to be discovered can find me.

Allow me to explain in some detail, please, what I mean here by the term “lost,” because as you can tell, I use the word pretty much as a synonym for escape.  Lost means you do not know in advance every hour of your day.  Lost means you aren’t able to walk your rooms with your eyes closed, perform tasks in your sleep, and use the indentation in your favorite easy chair for a mirror.  Lost means you are still learning, growing, searching.  When you know every menu, every TV show, every uninspiring conversation of your “free” time before they come to pass, you may as well replace your pillow with a tombstone, because you are not just asleep, you are as scripted as death.  Your day-to-day life is all mapped out.  Which is fine, if that’s who you really are and you just want to maintain your status unto death.  But that is fatal to creativity…to a writer.  Writers need to be lost.

So there I was between Norway and nowhere, soaking up Oz, and when my Aussie friends left I jumped in the car and headed west, headed back in time, until an adventure or two later I was in the Sawtooth Mountains cc skiing with another incredible friend who lives on a small ranch in Idaho along with two horses and a dog named Ziggy.  But then again, Bruce doesn’t live anywhere that small.  He doesn’t think small, he doesn’t do anything small.  Long ago and far away we swam thousands of meters a day in frigid 50 m pools together.  But now it is as if the water has burst out of those small venues, flowing from narrow lanes into frozen endless ski trails up and down glorious mountains, through paradise after paradise.  [Short video clip Bruce took: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itSpP3y430g  ]  I can’t tell you how haunting it is to hear his voice echoing across misty dawns on a mountain, across time really, filled with the same energy and wonder now as then and yet different now because of how he has lived.  I can tell you that the wonder is seasoned with wisdom and that his remarkable perspectives are hard-earned.  And I can tell you that knowing someone like that over time is gold to the soul and sometimes the only way to discover what is locked up inside yourself.

So now we are back on the highway – you and I – if you are still sharing this little road tour of mine with its object lessons on the benefits of getting lost.  You do not need to leave home to get lost.  I once wrote a book for someone who got lost in a tent for two days, blinded and clinging to life during a raging storm.  And in a sense, this final leg of my journey was a process of coming home even though I was still headed west, because I was going to Oregon to meet my grandson for the first time.  Only…I didn’t just meet my grandson.  I met my daughter.  Who was this woman who put her life on the line in an at-risk pregnancy to carry an at-risk baby to term?  Well, not to term.  Seamus was an 8-week preemie, born struggling and requiring almost heroic care.  My daughter and her husband triumphed in this, and Seamus is fine.  More than fine.  He has climbed a mountain.  That is, his mother climbed the mountain while he was strapped to her chest.  But he never cried, except for 100 yards at the top where the 2500 foot elevation results in a couple of deaths every year.  And the crying wasn’t for that, I don’t believe, but rather because Seamus is not on solid foods yet and the adults – Colleen, Dave and I – had a brief picnic on the narrow trail.  It was an eight mile journey over four hours through spectacular velveteen forests, reminiscent of Pandora in the flick Avatar.  I swear, neither loose slopes, nor perilously positioned logs, nor mossy stones in icy cascades that we had to cross could wipe the smile off Colleen’s face the whole way.  It was an odd displacement of time for me, a bit of closure in an unfulfilled fantasy, because it was exactly the kind of day I had envisioned but never experienced in my own parenting of Colleen and her brother Sean.  Like I said, sometimes when you’re lost on the yellow brick road Oz will find you.

There are many photos of the above in my free monthly newsletter (Sullygram), and if you’d like to see them, e-mail me at mn333mn@earthlink.net .  Here are some extra photos, as follows.  Lead photo above:  Sully, Colleen, Seamus on Mt. Hood.  Photos below: 1-Sully, Grant, Fiona at Crow-Hassan.  2-Bruce & Sully at Galena.  3-Velveteen forest on Mt. Hood.  4-Salmon River flowing down Mt. Hood.  Thanks for reading.  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 

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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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Having spent most my life outside the box, I love being lost.  All right, go ahead, nod your head and smile sadly.  But I mean physically lost.  Like in a snowstorm in the woods.  To be lost is to shed all shackles, to erase the façades of society for a time and – if there is even a little danger – to come fully alive with the effort of surviving by your wits and your will.  Now you might think that’s a classic description of escapism, but somehow the exhilaration of an adventure doesn’t supplant thoughts about the rest of my life, even while it’s happening.  On the contrary, it clarifies and enhances my whole world, putting things in order and perspective the way dreaming does.  I find myself remembering, analyzing, fantasizing, rehearsing.  The two tracks complement and inspire each other as if by metaphor.

Did I say tracks?  Extend that metaphor, if you will (by the time I let go of a double meaning, you’ll have stretch marks on your brain).  The physical tracks in nature and the psychological tracks that people leave in society are each profound with information about motive, purpose, will, i.e. fears and needs and wants.  And that’s where writing comes in.  Because all my writing is about people (how can it be otherwise).  So when I’m reading tracks while lost in the physical world, they often lead through people who inhabit my psychological world.

Most writers get that about themselves – that all stories are really people stories – but I think very few writers learn to find the connections to their writing in the physical surroundings of their days.  Every day, any day.  Instead, they try to isolate their minds from the perceived drudgery of their lives and spin truths wholly out of imagination.  Getting lost is a better way.  Getting lost lets you set up an outpost where you can gain perspective.  You can do it as simply as writing by candlelight in the basement, or in the closet in the middle of the night, or in the bathtub, or on the roof.  Or you can go to a real forest and get lost among the trees, which works for me.  The minimum thing you want to achieve is to erase the four walls you are looking at but no longer seeing.  The maximum thing you are reaching for is an environment that actually inspires you, jangles your senses, awakens awareness, and connects all your circuits with metaphors and imagery.  Time for another Cannibal Essay, by way of example.  Call it the Walter Mitty Shuffle:

…you are on skinny skis, charting your own map through a new woods.  Deer tracks show you the path of least resistance and soon intertwine with known trails where some time in the last two days snowshoes have punched through the crust, creating a Swiss cheese of human tracks to follow.  You are warm with exertion, but beyond the woods is a brutal day of minus double-digit temps which high winds have dropped to a number you don’t even want to know.  Here in the woods it is very much like the routines of your daily relationships where you mindlessly follow the paths of others, sheltered from risk by immovable old growth towering paternally all around you.  Light splinters through the trees, beckoning you to a blinding freedom where life is unscripted and conventions must prove themselves by truth or be discarded as useless to survival.  There is beauty there, and pureness, and most of all insight.  But you stick to the path, which for all its trampled disfigurement suggests that others have survived if not actually thrived by following it. 

Civilization and communication are on this path.  God has been defined here.  By man.  But then, who made the light out there beyond the trees where there is no path if not God?  God not defined by man, then – God unscripted, unencumbered by a history written from the POV of one man-made religion or another.  It would be a generic God sans intermediaries, totally accessible even to those who walked the Earth before there was such a thing as writing.  This is God as First Cause, Prime Mover – a will, a motive for why there should be something as overt as a universe in the first place instead of just nothingness.  Would such a God be a polyglot, writing conflicting letters to his constituents with funny marks on parchment?  Wouldn’t that miss eons of humans who couldn’t read?  Better to communicate a consistent message through nature right from the beginning, don’t you think?  The way it’s happening to you now.  Written with light for ink (talk about illuminated manuscripts) – a picture book painted with light on the pages of time!  A single source in a universal language has its advantages.  Out there in the open, free of the shadows and silhouettes that hem the narrow path you are on, you wouldn’t have to pick a path to follow, wouldn’t have to sift through competing theologies, honest errors, lies, good intentions, manipulations and mythologies.  No translations necessary.  No revised editions of holy Scriptures or changing interpretations.  You can be 100% illiterate, and totally isolated, and still learn all the universal truths you need to live by a priori in nature.  Because there are no politically correct shades of gray out there where the man-made path stops.  White light diffuses evenly into all the colors of the rainbow.  So, what will happen if you dare to leave the path and let the spark within you merge with the natural brilliance beyond?

And now the woods thin and you come to the edge of a precipice sweeping white and veiled as far as you can see in the swirling snow.  The path vanishes.  Where did it lead before the storm hit?  To the left along the edge of the woods?  To the right through dunes and scrub?  Your instincts tell you that the shortest distance back is straight down the sweeping precipice and into the open maw of the storm.  Only, what if you’re wrong?  Better to play it safe, turn around and retrace your steps.  But the light is so compelling, and sparks are flickering inside you as if something strong and resolute is awakening.  The wind gusts impatiently, and you almost hear your name.  What is there behind you that is worth spending your life on?  Are you going to follow the same path forever?  And suddenly you are rocketing down the glazed crust while skeins of wind-driven powder lasso your feet and arctic cold slashes across your face.

10 seconds of soaring, 15, and it is too late to struggle back up the scarp.  You are into it now, and it is into you.  Recklessly you go to your poles, getting all you can out of momentum until gravity reasserts itself.  The disheartening drag of inertia brings you to a halt.  There is no calling of your name from the nearly complete white-out now, no sanctioning for what you’ve done, no precedents to guide you.  Stubbornly you begin to skate – hard thrusts with your skis, stabbing drives of your poles.  You do it endlessly to the point of exhaustion, then you do it some more, and when you glance back your tracks are almost invisible mere yards behind you.  Despite the snow pelting into your mouth, you are starting to dehydrate and your muscles are cramping.  Each time a pole bends, or a ski breaks through the surface, you risk a sprain or a muscle tear as you lift against the icy crust.  Only the angle of the wind gives you a sense of direction, but that is so cutting right through your clothes that you have to tack like a sailboat to lessen the risk of frostbite.  And if the wind shifts, will you even know it, or will you just veer in a circle?  Suddenly you doubt everything.  In a moment of panic, the all-forgiving grace of near-death and certain doom comes over you.  Physics isn’t working.  The geometry of who you are, where you are and where you should be is all scrambled.

But then the rushing surf of snow around your skis parts and you see faint tracks – animal tracks.  A dog, a wolf, coyote?  No matter.  Something less dominant than you is out here, surviving, adapting by using all its cunning and capacity.  It is living to the max.  And so are you.  This is who you are.  Not who you were forty minutes ago, following the narrow path of the herd.  And this is where you should be at this moment in time.  You almost laugh at the irony of your situation.  Because whatever the peril (and realistically it is minute), you are as good as dead for far too much of your life already, for the most part merely existing in sheltered conformity, living far below your capacities, following prescribed paths day and night that sacrifice your individuality.

The lee of a rise and the fickleness of the wind have allowed these tracks to remain, but you see now that the storm is also thinning.  To your right, there are trees and a break that might provide a shortcut.  And then you recognize dried husks sticking out of the snow that in summer would grow on the edge of a pond, and so you turn away.  No year-round access would lead through water.  Instead you skate up the rise, and – presto – there are the tracks again.  Inspired by your correct decision, a rush of bravado drives you over the crest.  For a few minutes you ski pell-mell into oblivion, and then the white room descends around you once more and hopelessness returns.  Take a lesson.  Arrogance can be fatal.  Is that your Achilles’ heel in the world of human interactions too?

You skate on blindly, steering by the wind and a vague sense of where the sun might be in the dense overhang of mist and snow.  How you would welcome your traditional antagonists out here now!  Like the yahoos who fire guns willy-nilly in the woods.  Shoot at me, please, so I can follow the sound.  Or the snowtoilets.  That’s what you call snowmobiles that roar up and down trails marked NO MOTORIZED VEHICLES, sometimes missing you by only inches.  I.e., what makes gaseous noises, spreads noxious fumes, and all you do is sit on it?  Um…a toilet?  No – wait, a snowmobile!  Snowtoilets.  Only, you wish one would come rescue you now.  What a hypocrite you are!  Take another lesson in survival: different strokes for different folks.

As if the god of humility is rewarding your epiphany, the windblown snow suddenly swirls into a pair of snow devils that sashay out of your way.  Exit stage left.  And in its place there are the animal tracks!  Out here a dog would be accompanied by a human, you decide, neither are the tracks far enough apart to be a wolf’s, or anywhere near the size of a cougar’s.  A coyote’s, then.  A male marking his territory, it becomes evident, by the configuration of tracks around periodic archipelagoes of yellow snow.  A well-ranged, keen-sensed, wonderful creature left these, and in so doing taught you the difference between making tracks in pursuit of individual fulfillment and following a one-size-fits-all path.  But it was not an either/or choice – it did not exclude the path – because now you see that this instinctual creature found the safety of the woods just before the storm closed in.  That woods.  The one rising in the distance, split by a clear trail.  And thus you are indebted to your inner light as you must be every day that you wish to grow, to learn, to mirror back wisdom and beauty.  If you can manage to get lost for a bit, inspiration will find you.  Disguised, to be sure, but if you have the courage to leave the beaten path and trust your purest instincts, you will be able to read it, even if it’s written in white light and coyote pee. 

It was too cold to take photos during the adventure described above, but I’ve included pictures from similar days in my latest newsletter.  I’ll be happy to send you a Sullygram once a month if you e-mail me at mn333mn@earthlink.net .  I’m also on Twitter and YouTube.  The YouTube is kind of a joke, as I was dared to come out of the closet with the sax (sax, not sex).  A sample:  http://www.youtube.com/user/Sullysax1#p/a/u/1/d49rY3FQ5ic  .  Please feel free to hit the Subscribe button at that link to be notified of new videos. 

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   Recent Tweets:

If something has to be kept secret, it must be true. Secrets are self-proving.  Lies are loud and wear red hats.

Dear Muse, may I write today words that are worth 1000 pictures.

“Don’t expect too much” is a self-fulfilling prophecy for accepting too little.

Janus, the Roman god of gates and doorways, has kicked off another January.  True, he is two-faced, looking forward and backward at the same time (you can’t sneak up on him!), but I like that.  It sort of shows the circularity of things.

By extension, he gets called the god of beginnings and endings, but I think that’s either sloppy semantics or sloppy thinking.  Just as space can’t begin or end (because you would need a “where” in some other space to mark the beginning and ending), and time can’t begin or end (because you would need a “when” in some other time to mark that beginning and ending), Janus can’t be said to start or finish anything.  That’s the whole point.  His gift is to see the past and future at the same time.  He is a continuum, a bridge, a filter, a redirect, alpha and Omega in a circle, the Yin and Yang, a snake eating its tail. 

Writers – creative people – too often see themselves as on hold, caught in a matrix of beginnings and endings – fresh resolves and familiar rejections – when what they need is to see that they are a continuum in full flight, already underway, leaving indelible footprints whether the world chooses to follow them or not.  Life doesn’t hang around the starting line, and babies don’t wait to be delivered.  If you expect to be announced or sanctioned or heralded or loved before you take yourself and your dreams seriously, you will lose a lot of living.

This is especially true if you let feelings of worthlessness or rejection rule over you.  Who said you have to start at the finish line?  You only have to set out from the starting line and then not quit.  You have to act on your dreams.  Whatever you are at any given moment is quite good enough – but only if you have all your skin in the game!  Not trying, risking nothing, sitting on the bench or in the stands – that’s what you should fear.  That’s the killer, the waste of life, the no-show.  You don’t have to manage failure.  Failure doesn’t need your help.  It will be there by default if you don’t manage success.  And you can always manage success.  On your worst day you can make progress.  Even if success is just getting out of bed or refusing to wallow in self-pity or not succumbing to self-annihilating guilt or not fearing the next rejection or what others think of you.  Do not feel worthless over what you cannot control.  Write the damn book.  Send the manuscript to an editor.  Take your shots!  You are a good and righteous person when you put your honest heart on the line, and to hell with the consequences!  The world, for all its trumped up piety, isn’t your judge.  You are.

And you will succeed!  When you follow through and finish that book, then you will have succeeded.  Not because the book is finished, but because you will have given it your all and in the process become the best YOU you can be.  And that’s not just faint praise, because the thing of it is, THERE’S NO UPPER LIMIT ON THE BEST YOU, and quite likely (and magically) you will be astonished at what comes out of you when you stop giving up on your dreams and instead let the effort to fulfill them build relentlessly day by day.  The only limit on your potential is the amount of time or opportunity you lose by NOT reaching for your dreams.

To be sure, you need to be receptive to true opportunities that come from outside yourself.  It is simply tragic to miss the wild cards life gives us, the cues, and especially the rare connections.  They can form and fulfill you.  But they seldom fit a safe and convenient life, and they are easy to reject for all kinds of seemingly practical, responsible or even “noble” reasons.  Because what if we take a chance and still fail?  So there is always the danger that we may reject taking a chance out of misplaced fear or guilt.  Our dreams don’t fail or reject us…we reject our dreams.  And that’s real failure.  I think the answer is to strive for total honesty with yourself.  If you act on that, there is no reason for guilt, even if the chance doesn’t pan out.  But act you must.  Else you live by fear, and that can never be worthy of a dream.

If you are unique, then BE unique.  Rejection can’t keep you from living.  Well, it can, but you shouldn’t let it.  Trust me.  I learned the hard way.  Forever waiting.  Forever faithful to a cause or a person or a hope, as if they/it would then reward me.  I’m still that way… sort of terminal in my romantic view of life and still faithful to those same entities.  But the reality is I have no control over externals.  I have control over me.  And that’s what’s ultimately important: not robbing yourself.  I have not robbed myself.  I am living, loving, learning, evolving, giving…CREATING!  Not as a series of false starts, dead ends, rewinds and rejections, but as a continuum.  It is all a growth medium.  Nothing really dies as long as I keep what I control alive.  What decays outside me simply nourishes more knowledge and resolve.  If I give up, the real me ceases to exist.  How many people have that backwards?  Their inner selves never get to exist in the real world, because they give up – they let the external world define them and smother their uniqueness.  They usually do this passively by degrees, simply defaulting out of resignation into the circumstances life metes out to them.  Which, I suppose, is why there are relatively few writers, and maybe why there seems to be so much disillusionment and so little fulfillment generally.  Every month I am dismayed by the e-mails I get from writers, published and otherwise, who feel absolutely dead-ended.  Hey, it’s always about the journey.  Don’t end it prematurely.  Do you expect to die, or strike a permanent pose like a statue, after you achieve something?  Keep reaching and take your joy in that.  Believe me, that’s all there ultimately is.

There is only one person with whom you always have to live, and you know who that is.  You can be alone in a crowd, a career, a family, a marriage, a relationship, but you cannot escape yourself.  Might as well have good company then.  The indomitable, inspired, energized, fearless you wants free rein/reign.  Let yourself have it.  Surround yourself with what you need in order to survive and thrive.  Or if you cannot surround yourself, create an inner sanctum, a sanctuary.  Fill it with the right people, places and things.  It’s 2011!  Listen!  Hear that?  It’s your song.  Come out of the audience and up on the stage…

I’ll be happy to send you a Sullygram (a kind of newsletter with stories and photos) once a month if you e-mail me at mn333mn@earthlink.net  .  I’m also on Twitter and YouTube.  The YouTube is kind of a joke, as I was dared to come out of the closet with the sax (sax, not sex).  Here’s a sample:  http://www.youtube.com/user/Sullysax1#p/a/u/1/d49rY3FQ5ic  .  Please feel free to hit the Subscribe button at that link to be notified of new videos. 

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    Recent Tweets:

 

There are people who are batteries and people who are drains.  Make sure you are compatible when you connect.

Old years are memories, new ones are dreams.

Picture a carrara marble room whose fire pit blazes silver in its reflection on a curved glass wall which overlooks the Grand Canyon by day and tilts upward to magnify the universe at night.  The jaws of the black granite Sphinx in the center of the room open in a kind of Savonarola throne made of solid gold.  Against another wall there are nine cages, each containing a Muse.  This is where I write…

Or maybe not.  (Actually I’m in one of the cages.)

I’ve never been particularly curious about where creative people work, but maybe that’s because I don’t associate the act of inventing or being inspired with a single setting.  Imagination is homeless and inspiration goes comatose whenever it’s confined.  So, when anyone asks where I work, they generally get an elusive answer.  Not sure I can do better here.  I’ve decided to try, though, as much to see if I can find some meaningful pattern for myself as to answer what others ask. 

When I was married I wrote in restaurants, parked cars and bathrooms.  When I taught school I wrote furiously for 2 min. in the library loft each day before first bell – having thought out scenes or narration on the drive in.  I’ve written at weddings and funerals, in a cemetery, in trees, in a phone booth, left key phrases in the snow and with a paint brush while painting flats for a play, left a memory tag in my own blood on a cash receipt, left episodic notes through serial phone calls to an answering machine, and when the plot for my first novel attacked my brain like a case of mental indigestion while jogging I borrowed a pencil and paper from a lady hanging clothes.  You get the idea.  The point is that it’s difficult to pin down the externals that accompany a free-flowing process within.  Sort of like trying to predict the next eruption of a volcano.  But like the scene of the crime certain settings beckon my return.  For what it’s worth, here are some of the current locales w/photos where I corner a Muse.

[NOTE:  I am so toast if these pictures don't post!]

Trees turn me on.  Especially when they’re naked and you can see which way their legs and arms (so many limbs) contort.  It’s like a blueprint or an x-ray of their lives, each turn showing where they made a free choice to grow in another direction.  And yet, ultimately there is structure and form and balance and symmetry and total logic in where they went.  They do it their way and weather the storms.  No clichés in a forest.  Highly unique individuals.   Trees know the nuances of freedom.  I think that’s why I want to look at them when I write.  I wrote a book about a tree once (BORN BURNING), I have a tree in my living room, and I even talk to a certain tree out at Elm Creek.  Am I out of my tree?  In this picture you are looking at my Creatorium (no “m” in the middle, please) where I put down roots in a computer.  The print you see is one of four on the walls.  The other three are stoic oaks in b/w against the Mexicali rose of my inner sanctum.

And the flick Avatar may have a cliché of a plot, but its magic forests (remember the mega tree) and romantically ideal culture make it my fav film (yeah…Jake Sully – irony).  Thing of it is, I go to Pandora every day/night to gather inspiration.  I’ve stood steaming on skis in a violet forest clearing many a magic midnight, listening to the silence of the universe and daring dreams as real as the surreal elements my senses are actually taking in.  You cannot write less than “romantic reality” after that.

Rarely someone will deliberately inspire me to write.  Shared dreams are hard to come by – which makes them all the more potent – but I count visions sent by a soulmate as inspiration.  Here are a couple of triggers that worked on me – photos of Tintern Abbey and of interacting galaxies.  The first photo followed a gift book of the Tintern Abbey poem containing a bookmark that reads “Live in the sunshine, swim in the sea, drink the wild air,” and the galaxies photo followed a CD of Howie Day’s “Collide.”  Such communication puts poetry in my head, as in “Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.”  Wordsworth’s poem was all about how he lost the inspiration nature provided him and recovered it again and searched for a way to keep it in his life.

And then there are my nightly drives to points of light and darkness, like stations of the cross.  Writing fairly roars out of passion and perspective.  I do not want to forget anything meaningful that has happened to me, to lose high points or low, to revise history or heal hope with scar tissue that would forever dull the potential to feel and soar.  Night focuses memory, perception and anticipation.  I would rather bleed fresh than turn my heart into stone, rather gasp in anguish than breathe the sterile air of amnesia.  A writer cannot afford to go numb.  Motion and proximity are essential to keep track of who I was, am and will be.  Driving at night does that for me, particularly if I am right there in the presence of a memory.

No, I don’t hibernate in the summertime.  Contrare, contrare!  And this gazebo at a place called Noerenberg Gardens always seems to inspire possibilities for me.

 

 

 

Okay, whether it’s got a tub or just purposeful plumbing, I still write in the bathroom.  I’ve just finished putting down black granite tile with matching fixtures and a chair rail in one of my four baths.  AND…there are three prints of TREES on the walls.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus…well, at least there’s a Christmas Eve.  You might not believe it, but on most Christmas Eves there is absolutely no one out late at Elm Creek.  So that’s where I go, and it never fails to inform my writing for a while thereafter.  It is a most summary hour or two, bittersweet yet somehow affirming.  And this year I will ski to the highest point and shout out to the crystal universe my warmest regards and gratitude for all the kindnesses that have been given me.  So, if you are suddenly wondering whether or not you heard a faint call in the distance…

Hmmm.  Guess the only pattern this reveals is that I might write anywhere anytime.  In fact, the only place I can think of where I don’t sometimes write is my bedroom.  Now why is that?  Sanctuary?  Timelessness?  Nothing has changed in my bedroom in four years.  Same bed, same furniture, same snowscapes on the walls, cinnamon and vanilla candles, red and white feathers – there had to be something around which the carousel revolves.  Whatever anchors YOUR life, may it never drag you down or keep you from reaching your horizons in 2011.

I’ll be happy to send you a Sullygram once a month if you e-mail me at mn333mn@earthlink.net .  I’m also on Twitter and YouTube.  The YouTube is kind of a joke, as I was dared to come out of the closet with the sax (sax, not sex).  Here’s a sample:  http://www.youtube.com/user/Sullysax1#p/a/u/1/d49rY3FQ5ic .  Please feel free to hit the Subscribe button at that link to be notified of new videos. 

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   Recent Tweets:

 

Cell phone died after 1 call. Figures. You get 1 call when they put you in a cell.

 

Guess I’m a miser with my emotions, but when I spend them, they are non-refundable.

 

 

If this column was a character in a novel, he/she/they/it would be schizophrenic.  Begin with the fact that a month after writing the first two paragraphs, I no longer remember where they were going.  Here they are:

This is for women.  Okay, men can peek.  I mean men like to peek at women, right?  But I’d like to address something that has historically been genderless, and in the nearer term has become more relevant to women – at least in “developed” Western societies.  Call it…um, boredom.

Historically there wasn’t any.  Boredom, I mean.  People were too busy.  Except for the aristocracy.  And the educated class.  And the idle rich.  And the clergy.  And, uh…I guess we could include the working class caught up in the Industrial Revolution doing cog-like things in the big machine.  And the uneducated class scrounging for a living in any old itinerant way – yeah, those too.  Pretty dull when you’re just sweeping, digging, lifting.  And farmers – can’t forget them.  Shooing birds, watching bean sprouts grow, squashing bugs, gathering, picking, more digging.  Borrr-ing.  …okay, maybe I need to call this thing I’m addressing something other than boredom.

See what I mean?  I know I was going to title the column PUSHING BABIES & DRAGGING DOGS, but I don’t know why.  Something to do with exceptional women who dumb down their lives, I think.  Should I turn this orphan beginning into a contest for the best reader-submitted theme?  Feel free to take a shot at where you want it to go…

So now this November’s column takes on a second identity.  Call it DRAGON BURPS, and let’s go with the following list of caveats for writers who dare to use Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice activation software.  I love version 11 of Dragon, but it still hasn’t figured out my jangly way of speaking or what to make of rogue metaphors.  Some of Dragon’s interpretations are amusing, some are lethal.  I live in mortal fear of alienating God-fearing people everywhere with what slips through.  Here are examples of dictation that Dragon has mangled:

siren mermaid = Syrian mermaid

cheers and best = Cheers and deaths

simpaticos = some tacos

Momma duck baited me = Mama duck dated me

my daughter lives in Oregon = my daughter is an organ

logistics = lard of just six

canoed = nude

Turkey in the Straw [rendered as an anagram] = TITS

whacking my head = lacking my head [so what’s the problem, right?]

your very friends = your fairy friends

bright eyes = bright lies

magic stuff = magic stud

elfin face = elephant face

T-sax = tee sex [I recommend Dragon to Tiger Woods]

that giddy = dead kitty [and on a second try it came out: fat deity]

balmy = ball me

compadre = go potty [second try: cephalopod]

a peace feeler = appeased Hitler

put funny marks on the pulp = put funny marks on the Pope

experimental mode = ass for a medal but

lone swallows = Mona swallows 

musicians = mutations [so…?]

putting my soul through brass = putting my soul through breasts

big thought here = Dick thought here

brassiness = brass anus

sax video = sex video

finely prepared food = finally prepared food

grab a weekend = grab a weak end

So that’s the second identity in this multi-personality column, and I’ll close with a third theme by elaborating – as promised two months ago – on an answer I gave to a comment posted by Janet Berliner.  That column [ http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2010/09/16/thomas-sullivan-zen-pot-throwing-combat-boots-128-squirrels/   ] was about respecting your characters, and I was using an example from my recent trip to the Dominican Republic.  I promised to reprise a tale that explains why I fix the line between psychological and practical necessities in the human soul where I do.  Here it is:

“I was a young man in Washington D.C., just entering a government building – I think it was the National Gallery – and there was one of those still lifes, a ragged black man perched on the top step while crowds flowed up and down.  Rail thin, burning eyes in a body that was ashes, he didn’t have his hand out, nor did I read a con in those eyes.  He just looked like he was taking a break from life, from caring, from trying.  Maybe that’s why I stuck out a bill as I reached the top step.  No big show, I just wanted him to take it.  But he didn’t.  And when we made eye contact, I got the challenge.  What the hell, I thought, I ain’t whitey trying to humiliate you, man.  Looking back, I can see how stupid the thing I did next was, but I knew damn well he was desperately hungry, and there was a wire trash basket next to him with McDonald’s bags and plastic cups to the brim.  It occurred to me that he might have been picking through it, or waiting for someone to lob a half-eaten quarter-pounder onto the pile.  So I tucked the bill into the mouth of a bag sitting on top.  That was all.  He saw me do it, but I didn’t look directly at him again.

“When I came out maybe half an hour later my glance caught the empty step and I remembered.  There was the wire basket.  Whether it was to prove I had understood his pride and knew it limits, or perhaps a disquieting suspicion that I had not, I had to look.  Well, you already know what I’m going to tell you.  Because the bill was right where I had left it and the ragged man was gone.

“I’ve never doubted the desire for dignity and independence in another human being since, however oppressed, beaten down, corrupted, or enslaved by false notions that desire for respect may be.  And I see no reason to downscale that universal human need in fictional characters.  Searching out the unexpected contrasting elements in characters can only bring them to life and deepen their authenticity.”

I really appreciate the feedback, most of which seems aimed at my newsletters (Sullygrams) and the photos therein.  I’ll be happy to send you a Sullygram once a month if you e-mail me at mn333mn@earthlink.net  .  I’m also on Twitter and YouTube.  The YouTube is kind of a joke, as I was dared to come out of the closet with the sax (sax, not sex).  Here’s a sample:  http://www.youtube.com/user/Sullysax1#p/a/u/1/d49rY3FQ5ic  .  Please feel free to hit the Subscribe button at that link to be notified of new videos. 

Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com    

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan    Recent Tweets:

Cell phone died after 1 call. Figures. You get 1 call when they put you in a cell.

Snow, my element! Pure & perfect, filling the midnight air like white feathers whirling on a carousel.

Writers are like optometrists.  They put their writing on the wall and try to get you to read the bottom line.  If they are good writers, they shift lenses before your eyes, sharpening the focus until you can see what they want you to see with 20-20 vision.  Life goes from blur to blaze, and you find interest and meaning where before you saw only the mundane and the vague.

As a writer, I think you have to do the same thing.  You have to shift lenses until you see deeply enough to find interest and meaning.  You do it by noticing the small and the large and the relationship between the two.  You don’t do it by reveling in your own internal world with the windows and doors shut tight.  The external world is trying to come to you.  Let it.  Read the writing on the wall.  I still catch myself blocking input, blind to all but my own inner vision.  Let me use a recent personal experience and some verbal lenses to show you what I mean.  Here’s the eye chart:

BLURRY     BLURRY

I am sitting in a cold park, playing T-sax under a gazebo this past Labor Day weekend.  A tall thin man holding a toddler by the hand approaches slowly down the hill.  I lean away, trying not to notice them, hoping they won’t interrupt.

 

LESS BLURRY    LESS BLURRY

Despite my negative body language, they are still coming.  The man is wearing a dashiki.  He is Somali – maybe Nigerian – and probably doesn’t speak English.  The toddler is stumbling.  Something is wrong with him.  Sometimes I play for mentally challenged children in wheelchairs in this park, but right now I don’t want to lose my focus.  My world seems more meaningful to me.  I do not want this connection.  This could be awkward.  Please don’t stop…

 

CLEAR     CLEAR

They stop.  The toddler cannot be more than three or four years old.  Hard to tell because he has sunglasses on and his face has something unique about it, ghostly.  He has black features but his skin is white.  The man, who I take to be his father, is almost holding him up, yet the child tries to squat and jump to the rhythm, clearly enchanted by the music.  I stop playing and ask the boy if he wants to be a sax player, telling him that with his sunglasses he already looks the part. 

 

RIVETING                    RIVETING

In soft graceful English, the father says something about eyes and removes the boy’s sunglasses, revealing a lack of pigmentation.  Suddenly I get it.  Albinism and maybe something more.  The father is here on a holiday from his job, using the music to share something with this fragile child who perhaps has no other language.  I keep my sunglasses on, a little choked up by the child’s infirmities coupled with his shy enthusiasm for the music.  And I play and play and play for him.  At one point in his squirming to the music, he falls back off the picnic table where he is sitting and his father’s hand shoots out and grabs him just before his head can hit the cement.  Even that scare doesn’t dampen the boy’s glee.  So simple to give him pleasure, so very simple.  We are communicating in the world’s most basic language – music – and I am privileged to share for an hour the lives of two other travelers with all that affords of insight and passion and the humanness I say that as a writer I want to discover.  Sometimes putting your soul through tarnished brass touches other souls made of pure glass.

 

I could’ve missed this.  The writer’s window opened for me just in time.  If you want to capture the world in words, you have to know it.  And the first thing you must know is:  It Isn’t About You.  If you only tell your story, you will miss everyone else’s.

 

Last month I included a tale from a recent trip to the Dominican Republic to make a point in my column (Zen Pot Throwing, Combat Boots, & 128 Squirrels), and Janet Berliner made a comment that I promised to answer more fully in this column.  Going to put that off until December, if I may.  I really do appreciate all the feedback.  Much of that seems aimed at my newsletter (Sullygram), which always has photos as well.  I’ll be happy to send it to you once a month if you e-mail me at mn333mn@earthlink.net  .  And I’m also on Twitter and YouTube.  The YouTube is kind of a joke, as I was dared to come out of the closet with the sax (that’s sax, not sex).  Here’s a sample trick-or-treat:  http://www.youtube.com/user/Sullysax1#p/a/u/1/d49rY3FQ5ic   .  You can also hit the Subscribe button in there to be notified of new videos. 

Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com     

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan    Recent Tweets:

 

“It’s one thing to get what you want, and it’s another to know what to do with it.”

“You can’t make a dead duck fly…a dead phoenix maybe.”

                                              8  COMMENTS follow

The trouble with Fame & Fortune is that once you reach that destination, it’s very hard to keep the journey going.  You may, in fact, be all through traveling.  You may instead be consigned to rest on your laurels, at best returning to places you’ve already been on the road to success to see things you’ve already seen.  Not that I would know this from personal experience, you understand.  I’ve never reached that rarefied strata where the world seems to love you and money flows in like you’re playing Monopoly.  But you don’t have to reach it in order to discover the pitfalls.  Each royalty check you cash, each autograph you sign is a foretaste of destination and a sudden unexpected grasp of what that means.  It can mean that the plaster cast of who you set out to be is hardening, that you are fixed to a pedestal like a statue, no longer capable of movement, of growth, of being anything but what fans expect and of doing anything except keeping dust, mold and the elements from bringing you down.  There are exceptions.  But they always involve separating the reality of who you are from recognition and reward ($).

Like I said, that’s never been a huge problem for me, because Fame & Fortune on that scale are just having a helluva time finding my address.  Writers in general are blessed with anonymity, and I’m more apt to be recognized in a restaurant for some other notoriety than I am for leaving funny marks on paper.  But that’s not all bad.  I mean, man, I don’t have to wear shades the size of a DC-7 cockpit windshield when I go out.  And I like to remain solitary, picking my moments to soft-shoe through the limelight, then scurrying back to private sanctuaries.  Running into fans/critics in public is almost always an anomaly: the chimneysweep who happens to be reading one of my books when he shows up, the interviewer who calls from Australia and discovers that I wrote something cherished in his library, or — ghastly — biking back from Cro-Hassan county park one morning and finding my first novel in a ditch a zillion miles from nowhere.  So, a lot of my experience with fame rising comes from looking over the shoulders of people who truly are celebs. 

Sometimes those shoulders are very young.  The point at which newly-arrived luminaries gain fame is especially telling for me.  Perspective is never more under assault then and they are never less equipped to handle it.  Some, however, weather the early stages because they understand the danger of becoming a caricature of themselves and shrinking into a cliché as reality slips away by degrees.  Still others jealously guard their private inner island and remain anchored firmly in who they really are.  I remember that Sutton Foster was ready to hang it up and go teach children’s theater somewhere in Middle America a scant week before she landed the role that won her a Tony for best musical actress in “Thoroughly Modern Millie.”  Fame changed her plan, but it didn’t change Sutton.  She is still at heart a mentoring person, as she has been since around the age of 11.  And another young person perhaps on the verge is Deacon Frey, whose father Glenn (co-founder and driving force of the Eagles) has afforded me many insights through musical venues I could not have expected to experience on my own. 

Like pitch-perfect notes coming across an empty lake with sudden clarity, music has focused certain palpable realities for me.  Performing is in fact creating, I believe.  And creating is in fact performing.  Each requires a full soul press, a summoning of all available muses.  You cannot simply remember how you “always do it,” because the moment you rely on that, you become a mere derivative of yourself, a knock-off, a hack, a pale shadow and a weak echo of already dead scenes in your life.  You are creating/performing by rote at that point.  It is too easy to get lost when you create/perform by prescription, to simply forget something in the sequence and to get lost in your own boredom as you sing, play or scroll out words on a screen.  Some people call it writer’s block, creative exhaustion, or an empty well, but by any name it is a lack of Imagination and Inspiration. 

Those are the two “I’s.”  Imagination and Inspiration.  Everyone needs two “I’s.”  Not necessarily a pair of baby blues, but two types of vision for sure: one to see in, one to see out.  And you have to use both kinds of vision if you would be at your best.  You see out to gather information from the world around you; you see in to process it and find meaning.  The Inspiration comes from the external world; the Imagination dwells within you.

I’ve written extensively in these columns about inspiration, because it seems to be a no-go subject that few writers try to work out systematically.  The very idea of systemizing inspiration is a contradiction.  How can you be creative by making inspiration into a formula?  Isn’t that what I just cautioned against in the previous graph – rote vs. full soul press?  It is, and yet you can generalize the circumstances under which you do become inspired, and then you can revisit those inspiring circumstances again and again.  Surround yourself with the things you are passionate about, stand next to magic and perfection as much as you can, and you will take on the color of those surroundings.  Every hour you spend in the company of what excites you will bring out your best and grow you the most.  Unfortunately the reverse is also true.  Every hour you spend compromising your passions shrinks you and puts you in a doze.  Nothing wrong with dozing, I suppose.  Living a sound-soother existence.  Unless you want to hear the music of life instead of just the white noise.  And if you want to actually MAKE music, you really have to love perfection and dwell on inspiration, it seems to me.  Anyway, that’s what I see in my buddy Glenn Frey’s instinctive approach.  And what I see now in Deacon Frey. 

Whatever the struggles and obstacles ahead of him, Deacon Frey already has a wary instinct for perspective.  I got a good look at that during a long weekend at the Manhattan Beach concert in Crosslake, Minnesota, last year.  Deacon was debuting solo and also performing live with his old man in a very loose outdoors venue where logistically speaking just about everything that could go wrong with the weather did.  The sudden short storms that rolled in across the lakes seemed bent on chaos, designed to keep everyone off balance from crew to audience to band.  Promoter/host Jerry Born was understandably apprehensive over the possibility of cancellation, and at one point all the performers (and one shiftless author) fled to an upper room of the lodge to wait out a rain delay.  It should have been a nightmare on the nerves for Deacon, but he kept his cool by keeping his perspective. 

The indecision over the weather after the concert fired up would have been lethal to a lesser performer.  Pressure had been there all day, and chilling out pre-concert with the Family Frey at their residence, I saw the young man deal with it in the context of a laid back family meal on the barbecue, helping set the table, enjoying the conversation, strumming a little on the guitar by himself, and taking in his father’s occasional advice for prepping.  The excitement was already building then — you could feel that — but it didn’t change anything outwardly.  Deacon sat in back when we drove to the concert and set-up every bit the professional.  And when the rains hit and we wound up waiting out the verdict in that closely packed upper room, he really got tested.  All those performance-ready musicians sitting there in the heat and humidity with lightning flickering over the lake, and Deacon not knowing whether his solo debut was going to come off or not — that was the moment when a prima donna would crack, blow-up or lose their edge.  I joked about the Eagles changing their name to the Seagulls, if the rain didn’t let up, and gave him a discourse about rolling thunder in a Sheryl Crow song in an effort to keep him loose, but I might have saved my breath.  Deacon Frey was still outside his own skin.  He had the presence to laugh when it suited him and the courtesy to usher me through a couple of halls to find the room with the porcelain acoustics when I had to tap a kidney (this kid is ready for prime time!), and the easy-going sincerity that marks him 24/7 never faltered. 

In Deacon’s case, he comes by this honestly.  His mother Cindy — herself an accomplished theater alum — is razor sharp about what makes for graciousness and growth.  And Glenn has an uncanny grasp of excellence and what it takes to keep mythical perfection in front of you.  Because if you ever think you’ve caught up with it — in effect, held it in your grasp — you’re all done achieving.  At best you will only repeat yourself after that.  There are a lot of things you can recover from in life, but overreaching probably isn’t one of them.  It’s like a shadow that reappears every time you step into the light.  I’ve seen my share of stage and celebrity disasters, and I’ve come to appreciate that the hardest thing about that level of achievement is keeping a firm hand on who you are while it’s happening.  You must reach for and believe in perfection at the same time that you remember you are not and never will be perfect. 

Probably sounds very effortful if you haven’t thought about all this before, but really it’s just the opposite.  Living with the angst of less than perfection is what is taxing.  If you don’t empathize with that, either you’ve never reached your potential for inspiration or you may be in the wrong line of work.  I’m always amazed to listen as Glenn and his manager Tommy Nixon (the Lone Star Texan) or Jerry Vaccarino dissect a concert from the night before.  What sounded flawless to me at midnight may be the subject of considerable debate the next day, as they parse out every phase of a program.  It is always a revelation and a renewal of light on my own creative efforts to realize how nuanced an artist must be in pursuit of perfection.

So the quest for Fame & Fortune without the underlying perspective of what’s truly important ultimately becomes a dead-end (i.e. Is that all there is?).  You tell yourself that recognition is your motivation — candidly admit it — but if you aren’t a serious perfection junkie for its own sake, a lover of inspiration, a passion-head at some level, you probably won’t find fulfillment or satisfaction in mere F&F.  You can’t farm out your worth to an audience.  Just sayin’. 

No one knows Deacon Frey’s destination, or his journey.  But in or out of creative enterprise, he’s already won something major.  He’s kept his perspective under fire.  Whatever obstacles, setbacks and challenges await him, you can’t take that away from him.  He knows the way.  If he ever gets lost in the process of growing up, he won’t have to reinvent himself, he’ll just have to find his way home…

May I invite you to follow me on Twitter?  It’s fun and unintrusive.  Here’s the link:  http://twitter.com/thomassullivan .  I’ll also be happy to put you on the mailing list for free newsletters packed with stories and adventures, including photos, if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net .  Past newsletters are archived at the website below.  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/   

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan    

[If you’d like to see a sample of my fiction, a new short story, “Case White,” is out in the #60 issue of Cemetery Dance and is already receiving recommendations for a Stoker Award.  Here's the link: http://www.cemeterydance.com/page/CDP/PROD/_cd060  .  And the opening chapter from my novel THE WATER WOLF is on my website.] 

Thomas Sullivan

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Comments

Comment by Robert Jones on September 16, 2009 @ 9:20 am

You have exposed yet another investment that often pays large dividends, namely, revisiting inspiring circumstances. It doesn’t have to be a merely repetitive exercise. There will always be something different. If one is alert to that fact, s/he can often find new perspectives. Thank you, amigo, for reminding us where there are replenishing springs within a sometimes seemingly arid desert.

Among the fine daguerrotypes accompanying your newsletter, the picture of the snarl of trees at waters edge is most interesting to me because it evokes a different response every time I look at it and triggers changing responses while I’m looking at it. In your unplug, you wrote, “stand next to magic and perfection as much as you can, and you will take on the color of those surroundings.” Your picture is a subtle but exquisite example. I recommend that readers look it for a time and observe the varying thoughts that run through their minds.

Amalgam

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on September 16, 2009 @ 9:31 am

You know, I think you’ve put your finger on the active part of inspiration. It doesn’t depend so much on what’s outside a person as it does on the person’s ability to respond to it. You can’t just sit in front of life and be a spectator. You have to train your mind to see things, associate, analyze… Thanks for that, Amalgam, and for your kind comments.

Yeah, that photo of the gnarled trees was from one of the islands in Burntside Lake. Spooky and spectacular. Anyone who reads my newsletters in formats that don’t replicate the photos can e-mail me at mn333mn@earthlink.net and I’ll send you the real McCoy each month.

Sully

Comment by Janet on September 16, 2009 @ 4:30 pm

There you go again. Just when I think I’m too tired and too doped up to think, you force it upon me. Thank you for that, Friend.

As a P,S,, This week our buddy Rick suffered his 8th stroke. Incredible that he’s still with us and can talk. Bob calls him daily.

Much love, Janet

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on September 16, 2009 @ 4:39 pm

Very disturbing about Rick, but thanks for the info. I gather that the strokes are minimal. One hopes he hangs onto his ability to think and express. That is essentially the only thing each of us is, not just as people but as writers in particular.

And your own capacities are of such a magnitude that a little fatigue and chemical obstacles don’t stand a chance against the tide of thoughts, ideas, memories and musings. Bestest,

Sully

Comment by anne on September 16, 2009 @ 4:41 pm

Sully,

You’ve hit the jackpot of perfection here. Your 2 “i”s (eyes) thoughts are brilliant. They inspire life whether it is writing or any passionate pursuit of excellence. Your encompassing example of how your surround yourself with magic( the concert and watching a young artist be born) echo back the inspiration and imagination theme. It is reverberating the two “i”s simultaneously and it impossible to see which is on the inside or outside. It’s akin to an imagination tranfusion. Thanks for the energy.

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on September 16, 2009 @ 4:50 pm

Well, what goes around comes around, Anne, because I wish I’d written it the way you did. Always gratifying when someone posts back with such total grasp. “Imagination transfusion” is now in my personal dictionary of phrases. Will try to live up to that, and also receive transfusions of my own from whatever enters my life. Thanks, and write on…

Sully

Comment by Trish on September 17, 2009 @ 10:10 pm

Thank-you for taking the time to be a part of Story Tellers. You always manage to inspire.

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on September 17, 2009 @ 10:15 pm

Of course, the thing that keeps people going who try to inspire is the inspiration they get from kind readers who take the trouble to let them know. Thanks, Trish…

Sully