Coffee

Atlantic Center for the Arts. New Smyrna Beach, Florida. Rain poured in sheets. The Commons, the stove, my coffee seemed miles away. Outside, wearing a raincoat, flip flops, carrying a purse over my shoulder, holding tightly to the handle of my red umbrella, I sloshed through unavoidable puddles, then along wooden walkways, up a ramp. Inside the Commons, I boiled water, pressed espresso roast coffee through a filter, then walked back to my room, coat damp, hems of my capris soaked. Holding my coffee mug in my right hand, I figured I'd walk through a hurricane for a mug of strong black coffee. Time curved back, and she was, here, matching my stride, my mother dead these last eleven years, talking in that easy way we had with one another, “Do you remember when I did?”

            And I saw her short torso bent at the waist, shoulders thrusting forward, her salt and pepper hair, a wild halo around her head. She'd closed her fist around the black handle of a metal percolator. The pot had a glass ball at the top where coffee would bubble up, then drip through a metal filter. I used to love watching that glass ball, filling with coffee, the color turning from tan to nearly black. That’s when Mom would turn off the gas burner.

Gas burner, that was the problem the day Mom walked out into the eye of the storm. The year was 1947. I was eight. We’d gone to a friend’s house on higher ground for safety, a house with hurricane shutters. Dad had just bought the Lingerlong Hotel in Hollywood, Florida, a two story rectangular building with about thirty rooms. To buy the place, he’d taken out two mortgages. Little did he know that without hurricane insurance, the storm would ruin him. We three, Mom, Dad and I lived in an apartment in the back, two bedrooms, a kitchen and a gas stove. The storm had taken down utility poles and left wires snaking in streets and on lawns. No electricity. That stove was Mom’s ticket to a cup of coffee. She walked out into the eye of the storm, then, triumphantly, hurried back, fronds of palm trees already swaying, rain falling. Inside, she set the coffee pot down onto a hot pad, filling the kitchen with the aroma of fresh brewed coffee.

Take me to a Starbucks once, I’ll find the store for you again. I have a homing instinct for coffee, and Starbucks brews an espresso that meets my taste. You can go on about bitterness, about the way the company has pushed the small vendor aside, and I do have great sympathy for that. When I can, I frequent independent coffee shops and buy books at independent stores. But, let’s face it, I often succumb to convenience, ease and consistency. Consistency. I mulled the word and its synonyms, stability, equilibrium. That was Mom, comforting me after Dad raged and called me, stupid, said I was rotten and no good. Later, Mom would hold me close, tell me my father didn’t mean what he’d said. For years, I couldn’t see her complicity, the way her words, gave Dad permission to keep on raging, keep on yelling, keep on making me feel smaller and smaller. Still, I took comfort in her body, touch healing as my ghostly mother walked beside me in the rain, all these years later, Mom, holding the handle of a metal percolator, me clutching my travel mug. 

Waiting

At the VCCA, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, where the quiet is deep as writers write, composers compose and artists, sculpt, paint and draw, I leave my studio late in the day to walk before dinner. Behind the Center, a country road.The last of the cicadas lay dead, their orange and red wings faded and fading. They have completed their cycle. Another seventeen years will pass before they emerge. On both sides of the road grasses grow tall. So many birds here, blue birds, brown thrashers, mocking birds-- sparrows and robins, of course. After a severe storm, the intense heat is broken. It is hot, but air moves. There is a breeze. I turn at the crest of a hill. 

A train whistle sounds. I hurry along, half walking, half running. I want to watch the train from a bridge, as I am doing now, looking down on the freight rumbling past, open cars carrying lumber, closed cars, some of them probably refrigerated, shiny black drums I think are carrying oil until I read: Corn Products. Yes, oil, but a different kind than I’d had in mind, and I feel uneasy thinking about corn oil, the ubiquitous nearly hidden distribution of genetically modified seeds. 

The last two freight cars carry utility poles. I am disappointed. I'd waited and waited for the caboose, wanting to wave to a railroad man, as I used to wave long ago, a child sitting in the back seat of Dad’s car, Mom in front, all of us waiting at a railroad gate, Dad impatient behind the wheel because that’s the kind of man he was, irritable and quick tempered. What he hated most was waiting—waiting in line to buy a package of cigarettes or a newspaper. He refused to wait for a stool at a counter in a luncheonette, for a table in a restaurant, choosing to leave instead. Always, Mom and I trailed behind. Here, at this crossing, he was trapped, and I was climbing up into the front seat, kneeling in Mom’s lap, my upper body stretched outside an opened window, waving my arm at the railroad man, and he was waving back. 

Papa's Yhartzeit

Looking for oncoming traffic before turning on to York Street on my way to a yoga class, I saw the lead hearse in what turned out to be a very long funeral procession. Tears welled, and I cried. I had no idea who had died, no idea where those tears had come from—until at lunch, I told the story to Dick, my husband. “Is it anybody’s yhartzeit, (anniversary of a death)?” he said. “In April?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so.” 

Then, memory flooded back. I ran upstairs, opened the drawer of my bedside table, found the small piece of paper where I’d written my grandparents’ birth dates and the dates of their deaths. Abraham Block, April 25, 1958.

I raced downstairs. “Dick, what’s the date?”

 “April 25^th.

“You’re sure?"

He gave me one his looks. 

"It’s my grandfather’s yhartzeit. I can’t believe it. How can that be?”

"I guess you remembered."

Taking a yhartzeit candle from a cabinet, I struck a match. No, not I. I didn't remember. Perhaps, my body did. But I wouldn't have known, really known unless I'd told the story. 

The Agent Search

I’m a writer searching for an outlet for my memoir, querying agents, gathering information on independent presses, thinking of going indie—indie, the cool way to say self-publish. I want an audience for my book, and that’s why I’ve driven nearly seventy miles to hear Jason Allen Ashlock’s talk, Agents For Today’s Author, a talk sponsored by Grub Street of Boston.

Jason stands at a podium inside a YMCA on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It’s a warm March evening. I shed my sweater, pull my blouse from my skin. Jason is young, probably in his early thirties, looking younger, vibrant and energetic. Intelligence and understanding pool in his deep brown eyes. He greets us, warmly, then asks: “Is the traditional literary agent still viable?” A brief pause before he answers. “No. Or not for very long.”

All of us in this audience know publishing is in crisis, smaller catalogues, fewer bookstores, fewer books sold. The industry is top heavy, investing somewhere in the range of $300,000 to bring a book to market. What if the book doesn’t sell? Returns flow back to the warehouse. No wonder agents tell me they’re only selling celebrity memoir or memoir with a strong enough hook which generally translates to drug addiction, alcohol addiction or dead babies. Why? Because they’re pre-sold.

And that’s where the digital revolution comes in. “Digital,” Jason says, “shifts the value chain to a value web.” The agent used to be the way a writer reached her reader. The chain was linear, writer, agent, publisher, distributor, book store, reader. Now, a writer can reach her reader in multiple ways, and because of this, agents are squeezed. Some have left the business. Some are charging fees. Some are serving as their clients agent and publisher. Others, like Jason, are changing the look of the traditional agency, becoming involved with design and marketing, moving from the background into an open explosive force. Jason says, “An agent’s job is to manage the possible in the digital space.”

And in this shifting digital world, Jason tells this audience of writers that we will need to become our own agents for a while. This is a spin on the advice we’ve been give for a while now with a difference. Jason is suggesting that agents get involved in helping writers launch their books in a new way. Is that way really new? Take my memoir. I’ve published excerpts, one winning a prestigious prize, in my quest for audience and a platform. Jason is suggesting that before an agent takes a book to a publisher, that agent might find digital ways to launch a writer’s work, perhaps by asking that writer for an eBook or perhaps an excerpt on various sites to create a buzz. Not so different from my traditional publishing in the literaries. But—in order for Jason to take on a client who writes a literary memoir, such as mine, he said when we spoke briefly after his talk, he needs to believe there’s a large audience out there for that book. The old catch 22? Not quite. I believe there’s more flexibility in this new model. So, Jason, expect my query. 

Memoir, Straight Up

Last night after watching the film, “The Artist,” the beautiful many layered story of a silent film star tossed aside when talkies come in, I slept badly, dreaming of closed doors, a filthy outhouse. I awoke disgusted, climbed out of bed, walked downstairs in the dark and made myself a cup of coffee.

I’m a writer of a certain age, trying to bring a literary memoir to publication which in today’s publishing climate seems to have as much relevance as a silent film. Five years ago, my credits in literary magazines, Ploughshares, the New England Review, the fact that chapters from this book have been published, one winning a prestigious award, would have made an agent notice. Now, few agents answer my queries, and those few who do, send a polite, but form rejection.

The culture has gone visual, and ironically as movie and television screens have grown larger, the book has grown smaller becoming an image on a laptop, an iPad, an iPod. Is the book dead? I don’t think so, but I do think traditional publishing is not only in transition, but as Steve Almond said in a recent seminar I attended, “crumbling under the weight of its own inefficiency, and what’s suffering is anything literary.”

In my query letter to agents, here's the way I describe my book: Girl Wrapped In A Curtain is a scene driven 78,387 word literary memoir that explores the complexity of love between a father and daughter. That day, sitting at the table with eleven other writers, all of us trying to figure out how to publish our books, traditional, electronic, small press, do it yourself, I nearly laughed out loud. Literary, once a respected word, was now the kiss of death.

I don’t even want a big New York publishing house. I’d like a small press, but I still need an agent and agents keep their eyes on the big houses, going to smaller presses later. Agents and editors say what’s selling are celebrity memoirs and memoirs with a hook, which means sensational, ie abuse, addiction or mental illness. My book is my story of coming to love my difficult, mean, charming, manipulative, narcissistic father. He is my Rochester; I am his Jane, for Dad is ninety-one, half-paralyzed, bedridden, incontinent and demented with startling moments of clarity and dying when, finally, he lets me into his life. Is he conning me? He’s that kind of guy.

So, who’s my audience? All of us out there who will be, who are, who have cared for aging parents.

Back to “The Artist.” Leaving the movie theater with me, my husband said, incredulously, “That was a silent film.”

Yes, it was. A modern silent with the old embedded in the new. My book is memoir, straight up. I’m not claiming the artistry of “The Artist;” yet, like the silent film star in the movie, who needed to find his way back into film, I need to find my way into publishing my literary memoir.