Giving Away the Store, Part 7: Speak to a Decedent

I don't think I have ever cried at a loved one's funeral, and I have been to many. But recently I have cried with laughter when remembering some clownish antic of my father-in-law, Peter Kostares, dead 30 years. Not long ago, I have laughed like a madman as I walked down Broadway in New York City over some irreverent remark by my father, Francis Xavier, gone 28 years from this earth. I have cried over the loss of my mother Lucy's unconditional support, who passed away 26 years ago. I cry thinking that I could not communicate with my paternal grandmother, Carmela, now gone 54 years, because we spoke different languages before translation technology bridged such a boundary. 

I cry a lot, almost always when I am alone, and far from finding myself in the depths of despair, I become overwhelmed with joy, glowing with gratitude for being alive with such remarkable forebears to guide my walk through life. I continue to speak to these decedents, as well as grandfathers Philip and Carmelo, grandmother Elizabeth, uncles Emmanuel, Reno, and Fotios, aunts Katherine, Theresa, Salvina, Josephine, Rita, Katherine, and Maryanne, cousin Mario, friends Danielle, Tony, Tom, Victor, Deborah, Lucille, Ann, and Nancie, former employers Ida, Harry, and Mickey, and many more people whose names would run a dozen more pages.

If you are a writer struggling with something to write about, rely on your decedents. They are a source of rich material. They will never let you down. Talk to them. Ask them questions. Listen to their responses. They are wiser than we will ever be in this lifetime.

 

Giving Away the Store, Part 6: Do Something New

My college journalism professor assigned the class to interview someone we did not know and report about it. During this time, the early seventies, New York City's streets were teeming with homeless people much like today. I decided to interview a homeless person. 

In those days, I was living in the James Monroe Housing Projects in the Bronx. That neighborhood, a euphemism if there ever was one for the projects, was a drug haven, so I had seen plenty of gang members, dealers, junkies, pimps, and prostitutes. But homeless people were scarce in the projects. Riding the graffiti-covered, unwashed, fetid subway cars from the Bronx, where I lived with my immigrant parents and siblings, to Manhattan, where I studied and worked, was an adventure, frequently a scary and dangerous one, replete with vagrants, panhandlers, gangbangers, and muggers. During nighttime rides home, I would act crazy, pacing back and forth on the train platform and talking to myself loudly enough to be heard in the hopes of keeping everyone at a distance. Those were strange times for an 18-year-old man. The specter of being drafted into the Army to serve in a battlefield 9,000 miles away to kill strangers or die myself lay heavily on my mind, but sometimes I wanted to get away so badly that I thought about enlisting in America's war machine.

I don't recall why I chose to interview a homeless person. I'm sure I wouldn't have without the prompt from my journalism professor. I did pay close attention to homeless people whenever I emerged from the number 6 train at Twenty-third Street and Park Avenue South. Whether they were sleeping on the sidewalk against a storefront, pulling down their zipper or lifting their dress to pee in plain sight, screaming at invisible demons, or dragging their possessions in a shopping cart with a missing wheel in the midst of rush hour traffic, I was always shaken by their circumstances and feeling privileged to be in my own humble, relatively fortunate, situation.

With an hour to kill after classes before heading to work, I walked to Madison Square Park, two blocks away from Baruch College, where I was a student. The park is far more attractive today than it was in 1972. The benches were occupied by the nameless, the crazed, the hopeless, the wasted, the forgotten. Most businesspeople would walk a long detour around the park, which stretches from Twenty-third to Twenty-sixth Streets between Madson and Fifth Avenues, rather than make a beeline to their offices by walking through the park. Not I. I was young enough, curious enough, foolish enough, romantic enough to walk out of my way to enter the park whenever I could. I wanted to observe, to bear witness, to the most miserable humans on Manhattan Island amid some of the wealthiest real estate on Earth. The contrast got to me. I wanted to write about it.

I'll leave this post here for now. It's not important how many times I was unsuccessful in getting a coherent, cooperative interviewee before I met a forty-year-old Korean War veteran named Sal. It doesn't matter to the point of this story where Sal was from, what he did before his residence became Madison Square Park, or how he descended into such a desperate situation. I have long forgotten the angle of my writing assignment or the grade I received. But I do know that the assignment I chose changed me. Everything we do changes us. That's what writers do. Experience. Report. Change. Repeat.

Giving Away the Store, Part 5: Ask Questions

Writers ask questions. They are among the first people who will ask questions about someone or something that piques their curiosity. Why did your parents give you your name? At what age did you l arrive in America? Why have Black men held the 100-meter dash world record over the past 65 years? What are the first and last places on earth to see the sun rise? Are typewriters obsolete worldwide? How did a grand piano get into a tiny basement jazz club? What do the colors of the Timor-Leste flag signify? How often to do you visit your family in Bangladesh? Can people who speak Mandarin and Wu understand each other? Why are five years necessary to graduate from architecture school? Why do most people consider this person more attractive than that person? 

Of course, questions can get too personal. We should not be surprised if someone we question out of pure curiosity answers, "It's none of your business." Worse, we might become victims of the inept ethics police. But the problem is everything is a writer's business. Asking questions may not necessarily get us the answers we seek, but the imaginative journey is all about asking questions. Carson McCullers might have asked, what if people saw a man's deafness as a mighty advantage, which led her to writing The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Ernest Hemingway might have asked, can an old, poor, defeated man endure even more than most of us while remaining true to his principles, before writing The Old Man and the Sea. Alice Munro might have asked how can a woman reconcile her love of someone she believes to be a murderer, sparking her to write "The Love of a Good Woman."

Almost any good story probably comes from a writer asking questions, and the stories they write engage their readers, not necessarily by answering those questions but by making their readers ask questions as well. 

Giving Away the Store, Part 4: Living in Libraries and Bookstores

Writers read. Reading fuels writers. It feeds their perception, jumpstarts their animation, sparks their inspiration, ignites their innovation. While electronic media increasingly make research and reading accessible and immediate, writers still call libraries and bookstores their home. I passed one today, the Book Trader Cafe in New Haven, and found there a long-sought used book in excellent condition at a deeply discounted price. 

The title of the found book is irrelevant for the purpose of this post. What matters is that writers are continually on the lookout for information: data to interpret, stories to adapt, ideas to cultivate. They capture this content from what they read. (They also find source material in the art they see, the music they listen to, and the people they meet; these wellsprings will serve as topics of future posts in this series.) 

Wherever I go, I visit the libraries and bookstores, many of which I have mentioned in WORDS ON THE LINE over the past twenty years. I am a card-carrying member of two city and three college libraries. I feel rich. If you are an aspiring writer, I suggest you go home, to a library or bookstore.