Tag Archives: memoir

Symphony 4

Leave a reply

William Campbell was a short, spare man with graying hair. When he rose from behind his desk to shake hands, there was no welcome in his face. He said, “I’ve read your resume, but go ahead and tell me about yourself.”

“I am twenty-nine and unmarried,” Neil began. “I graduated from Oregon State in English Literature. I spent a year in New York working for a series of magazines as copy editor and writer. Then I came back home and got my Masters and a teaching credential . . .”

“Why did you quit and come back?”

“The work was unrewarding. I was working for magazines no one had ever heard of, basically doing drudge work. There was no chance of advancement, so I chalked it up to experience and went back to college. I got my credential in English Literature. Jim Watkins gave me my first job, and I’ve been teaching now for four years.”

“What levels did you teach?”

“He started me with freshmen, but for the last two years I have been teaching mostly seniors. Beowulf, Chaucer, Shakespeare, the Brontes — that sort of thing.”

“Are freshmen the youngest students you have taught?”

“Yes.”

Campbell shook his head, and said, “Teaching high school students is no preparation for teaching sixth grade. The children in this school are very young. Can you bring your teaching down to their level? Because if you can’t, you have no business coming here.”

“I won’t know until I try.”

“Are you willing to attempt it?”

“I don’t have much choice.”

That put the preliminaries behind them.

# # #

Campbell leaned back in his chair and frowned. “No,” he said, “I don’t suppose you have a lot of choices. But I do, and I don’t like being put on the spot. I will only do so much, even for an old friend like Jim Watkins. You will have to convince me that you are no danger to my school or I will send you packing. That means not only today, but at any time during the coming year.”

Three years earlier, Neil would have walked out. Now maturity and need held him in his chair. He said, “What do you want to know?”

“Everything, from your perspective.”

“You know that I was accused of sexual misconduct and that there were no formal charges because the girl turned out to be lying. You probably don’t know how I got into the mess in the first place, or what came after.”

# # #

Alice Hamilton was fifteen. Somewhere in elementary school, someone had let her skip a grade, and now she was taking senior English during her junior year. That put her two years ahead. Her father was a prominent local surgeon and a member of the school board, and he was convinced that his daughter was a genius. She wasn’t.

Her parents demanded As. Alice tried hard enough to get them. Her papers were always neat, typed, and on time. The problem was, she was only fifteen, and it takes emotional maturity to react to Shakespeare. Her papers were childish, because she was a child. She would have been a happy and productive sophomore, but she had no business in a class for seniors.

Alice came to Neil after class one day and asked him to tutor her. She said that if she didn’t get As, she couldn’t get into Princeton. Princeton was her father’s fantasy, but she was the one who had to fulfill it.

# # #

“She asked me for help,” Neil said. “I knew that she had a reputation for manipulation, but a teacher is there to help.”

“And she was pretty,” Campbell said.

“Yes.”

“And it was flattering to be needed by her.”

“I suppose.”

“My God, that’s the oldest trap of all. You should have gotten one of the female teachers to tutor her.”

“Yes. That’s obvious enough now. It wasn’t obvious then. I thought I could handle the situation.”

Campbell just grunted and said, “Go on.” more tomorrow

Symphony 3

Leave a reply

May 1988

The heat of summer had already settled into the Central Valley of California by May. Coming down from Oregon, Neil McCrae felt it as soon as he dropped down out of the mountains, even though it was still early morning. By the time he reached Redding, sweat was collecting between his back and the car seat. The wind coming in through the window made the heat bearable, but the air was viscid.

Rolling southward, he passed the sentinel towers of Sutter Buttes. On his right, the coast range lay dry and golden; on his left and further away, the Sierras were lost in heat haze. All around him the valley was tabletop flat and impossibly green. Sacramento drew up, became a brief nightmare of traffic, noise, and ozone, then receded behind him. He changed freeways and the quality of the land changed as well. It was still green and alive, but the coast range had receded into the distance. The flatness seemed to go on forever, and now the valley was heavily peopled. The land along the highway was dotted with houses and farms, small towns and wineries. There was a used-up look to the land near the freeway. Neil could see hardscrabble apartment houses with dirt lawns and abandoned cars, a blown down drive-in theater, and a canal bridge made from an old railroad flatcar. Out beyond the highway fringe, the land was deeply green; dull and uninteresting to the long view, but vital and alive close up. Everywhere there were flowers. The oleanders which had been planted in a continuous hedgerow down the center of the divided highway were in full pink, red, and white bloom.

Neil McCrae drove southward through the hot, thick air, through a tunnel of flowers, into a new and hostile country, leaving behind him all he had known.

At Salida, he took an exit onto Kiernan Road. Now he was surrounded by orchards. Orderly, man made forests stretched away on both sides of the road, narrowing his view and hiding the flatness of the valley. The dust beneath the orchards was dappled heavily with sunlight and shade.

Three miles further east, Neil tuned into the parking lot of Kiernan School. He stood beside his car, letting the wind dry his back, then slipped on his sport coat and crossed the tarmac. The surface had been renewed recently; it stuck to his feet as he crossed and sent waves of heat all the way to his knees. He entered the blessed coolness of an air conditioned office

Two children were waiting for the secretary’s attention. Neil watched them as he waited his turn. They were both about ten. One was a dark girl who stood quietly, gripping the edge of the countertop with tense fingers. She spoke a few words too softly for Neil to hear, received a scrawled note, and slipped outside, walking wide around Neil as she went out the door. The other child was a boy with dirty blonde hair, skinny and pale, with heavy glasses too large for his face. He stood twisting his hands together and squirming in place until the secretary got time to talk to him.  He wanted to call his mother. The secretary asked his reasons, refused him, then had to argue with him sharply before he left. He slammed the door as he went out. There had been a rehearsed quality about the exchange, as if the boy had known that he would be refused.

When it was Neil’s turn, he said, “I’m Neil McCrae. I have an appointment with Mr. Campbell about a teaching position.”

# # #

William Campbell was a short, spare man with graying hair. When he rose from behind his desk to shake hands, there was no welcome in his face. more next week

Symphony 2

Leave a reply

Here is the table of contents for Symphony in a Minor Key

The Ides of March
May 1988
August 1988
Day One
September 1988
Parents
Reading
Theory
Interlude
Halloween 1988
Evaluation
Discipline
Cooperation
Terror
Losses
Rumors
English
Sex Ed
Confrontation
Home

The Ides of March, a prolog which sets up the situation, occurs late in the previous school year in another state. In May, Neil applies for work at Keirnan school. During August he prepares for the coming school year.

Day One is very early September. Now it would be early August. Halloween announces itself, and Christmas occurs during the chapters Evaluation and Discipline.

Terror happens on Martin Luther King Day. That is not a political statement. That is the day in my real world that a school shooting happened in a nearby city. I had made an agreement with myself to match my fictional world with the real one, so this day took me places I would never have gone on my own.

Home happens at Cinco de Mayo (the fifth of May) as the school year is winding down.

I wrote an honest story. Everything that happened, could have happened in my real world. Many of these things were close analogs to things that did happen.

I never faced false accusation, but I was aware every day that I might. That is what it means to be a male teacher in America today.

Symphony 1

Leave a reply

The Ides of March

Where were you when the world ended?

For Neil McCrea, the world he had built for himself ended on a gray Friday afternoon in March, at eleven minutes after two, among familiar surroundings. 

Neil was teaching his sixth period class, literature for high school seniors — feeling end of the week weariness, counting the minutes until the end of the day, and passing back student papers he had spent far too many hours correcting. He stepped carelessly between the backpacks, purses, and spills of schoolbooks that littered the aisles between the rows of desks. With Shakespeare and Lincoln and Martin Luther King watching from posters on the wall while the day faded outside, he called his students’ names and handed back their essays.

Alice Hamilton sat at the back of the third row. She was blonde, spoiled, and at least half as pretty as she thought she was. Neil dropped a bluebook on her desk and moved on to the next student. Then he heard the hissing intake of her breath. 

She slammed the bluebook down and screamed, “How could you! How could you give me a C after all I did for you!”

Neil just stared, too astonished to respond.

A slow flush rose up Alice’s neck and spread across her face; then she leaped to her feet and fled the room. Neil watched her go, carrying his hopes and dreams with her.

Innocence is no shield, when the world ends.

=========================================

So begins Symphony in a Minor Key, a novel written in real time, before the concept of real time was ever heard of.

Briefly, I started teaching when it became apparent that I could not make a living by writing. It was a day job at first, but it was a very satisfying day job that I eventually held for twenty-seven years, and from which I eventually retired.

About five years in, I decided to write a novel about teaching. I also decided to write of a fictional school year while a real school year was progressing. Rainy day in my world; rainy day in the book. Opening day on opening day, Christmas on Christmas, and so on. If you look at the table of contents (tomorrow’s post) you will see how that worked out.

Despite what Alice Hamilton implies, Neil is a good guy. Take my word for it. He’ll explain it all to you over the next several posts.

Today is August 12. I’ll be telling the tale as a serial, beginning September 12 to give myself time to get organized, and carrying on to something close to May 11. That is fairly close to a school year but, although I wrote this in real time, their Christmas and Halloween probably won’t fall exactly on our Christmas and Halloween.

Stick around. I think you’ll like it.

407. Where Life Is

5 Replies

This is a repost from very early in the history of this blog.  SL

I was in the shower getting ready for a day at school when my wife called to me. A plane had hit the World Trade Center. By the time I dried and dressed, the second plane had hit.

Twenty minutes later, driving to work, I listened to the radio as the towers fell.

All day long I taught science, keeping to the lesson plan. I didn’t want to teach, and no one wanted to listen, but it was necessary to keep a semblance of normalcy. Every break we teachers watched the television, but we didn’t take any news back to the classroom. Our students needed to be in their own homes, with their parents, before they began to deal with the details of America’s disaster.

At the end of the day, I drove home. I had upon me the need to write, but not of the tragedy. Others wrote that day of what had happened, and wrote well. I needed to write of love and joy and beauty – and of my wife who is all those things to me.

Poems come slowly to me; usually they take years to complete. This one rolled freely about in my head as I drove, and when I arrived at home, I only had to write it down.

                    There Am I

Where there is water, there am I.
In sweet, soft rain and in hard rain,
driving and howling,
or filling the air with luminescent mist.
Water is life, and there am I.

Where there is sun, there am I.
In the soft heat of morning or in the harsh afternoon,
or heavy with moisture, forcing its way through clouds,
or dry as a lizard’s back.
Where the Sun is, is life, and there am I.

Where Earth is, there am I.
Whether dark loam, freshly plowed
or webbed with fissures, hard as stone,
or sandy, or soft as moss.
Where Earth is, is life, and there am I.

Where life is, there am I.
rainforest or desert,
broad plains of grass, or brooding jungle,
Where life is, there am I.

Where She is, there is life,
and sun and rain and earth, and all good things.
Where She is, is life,
And there am I.

The “I” was supposed to be me, of course, speaking of my own love for wilderness, and “She” was, of course, my wife.

However, when it was done it felt more like a religious poem. Strike the last verse, let the “I” be God and it sounds like something written by someone with a great deal more faith than I have. Odd.

405. Blondel’s Future

Leave a reply

You really should go to Serial and finish Blondel of Arden before you read this post.

#                    #                    #

I enjoyed writing Blondel of Arden. I like formal language, and I don’t get to use it often. I also rarely get the chance to write something completely light.

Blondel was pure fun, with every possible cliché in place. Quite sexist, actually. Somewhat like John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara in McClintock or in The Quiet Man. She gives him hell in both movies, and he paddles her at the end. (Pun unintended, but noted.) That is actually more than I can tolerate and I usually turn the TV off somewhere short of the end.

I understand the bondage symbolism in this kind of fiction. The climax of McClintock when O’Hara is running from her husband with all the town cheering him on is too much like a rape scene with spectators for my taste. I stopped well short of that in Blondel of Arden.

Blondel is a cynic, Grat is an innocent, and Sylvia is a twit. That’s thin characterization, but adequate for a short semi-comic piece. I enjoyed this brief encounter with more-or-less cardboard characters.

However, I’m a sucker for people, even people on paper. I thought Sylvia had some quality hidden beneath her flirtatious exterior. I liked her. I thought she had potential.

You have to understand that I wrote this many years ago. I thought of turning it into a novel, but I never will. I have four or five novels waiting in the wings now, and by the time I finish them, I’ll have a half-dozen more tugging at my sleeve.

But when I was considering a novel, this is what I had in mind —

#                    #                    #

Sylvia returns home, sans broach, to a pointless round of “women stuff”. She hates it. She misses the one great adventure of her life. She also reviews he own behavior, and finds it wanting. Grat and Blondel served her well and she served them with contempt. She broods about her behavior, and works to make herself better in her everyday round.

This is not enough. She owes a debt. (See, I told you she had quality.) If she can’t pay it, she can at least acknowledge it.

Something – I don’t know what – happens which frees her from her obligations at home. She sets out to find Blondel and Grat, to do something for them if she can, or at least to say thank you and I’m sorry I was such a twit.

Blondel and Grat have become companions. Grat is beginning to lose his innocence. Blondel fears that it is from associating too closely with him. Grat is also lovesick; Sylvia was his first romance and he can’t forget her. Blondel finds this alternatively endearing and irritating.

Blondel’s crust is thinning, and that is dangerous. He is a smart, little guy in a world of ignorant, thundering clods. His ability to “do unto them” quietly and unnoticed is his only defense. Every time he does something self-serving – which is basically how he survives – Grat looks on, once again disappointed in his friend.

Sylvia eventually finds them and joins them. Nobody is really happy with the arrangement. Any pair of the three could find a way to coexist, but the three-way relationship cuts too close to each of their hidden weaknesses.

Each person finds him/herself in peril and escapes that peril only through the aid of the other two. Grat and Sylvia grow in romantic love, while Grat has to wrestle with the understanding that Sylvia is no longer a damsel in distress. Blondel, to his external disgust and his disguised satisfaction, find himself in an avuncular relationship with these two innocents.

What perils? How do they overcome them? Beats me. Writing peril and escape are the easiest parts of writing a novel. They will present themselves as needed, if you know your characters and where they are going to end up.

I was also planning to use this as an excuse to build a story around a fantasy version of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, a real event in 1520 when Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France held an extravagant series of jousts in the fading days of classical knighthood. Think kings in golden plate armor whacking each other for sport and bragging rights, in a world where cannon balls could blow fist sized holes through either of them if the battle were real.

This gives us three real and relatable people trying to survive on the fringes of empty magnificence. Now the kings are cardboard — which is their normal state of being.

I don’t have time to take six months to write this novel, but I would love to spend two days reading it.

404. Various Anniversaries

Leave a reply

I was really busy two years ago, and forty-two years ago.

On September 2, 1975 – the day after Labor Day that year – I sat down to see if I could write a novel. By Christmas, the first iteration of Spirit Deer was a reality, and I had become a writer.

Two years ago, six months after learning that Cyan had been accepted for publication, after several months of learning about blogging, after learning how to use Word Press, after pre-writing a few dozen posts — on August 29, 2015 I posted the first introduction to A Writing Life and Serial.

I seems like yesterday, and also like a lifetime ago.

402. Nuclear Spacecraft

Leave a reply

I taught middle school science for twenty-seven years, and always, whether I was supposed to or not, I taught the space program.

I grew up with space travel, first in fiction, then in fact. I loved it, and the kids I taught loved it, too. How much of that rubbed off from me, I’ll never know.

By the time I started teaching, the big show was over. When Gene Cernan stepped back into his LEM in 1972, it was the high water mark of manned space exploration. It’s been downhill since.

In the classic science fiction novel I had planned to serialize, Rip Foster is heading out toward the asteroid belt on the nuclear powered spacecraft Scorpius. That’s how we all thought the future would look. That’s how the future should have looked. Chemically powered rockets are simply not sufficient for exploring the solar system.

We have have nuclear power plants for electricity, nuclear submarines, nuclear aircraft carriers, even a nuclear cargo ship. Why not nuclear spacecraft? Weight? Do you really think we couldn’t have overcome that problem? Maybe it was the danger, but . . .

Here is a quiz for you. How many nuclear submarines are lying on the bottom of the ocean, tombs for sailors and ecological time bombs for the rest of us? Two from America and six from Russia. An additional Russian nuclear sub sank twice, but was raised both times.

How many nuclear and thermonuclear bombs have gone missing? The U.S. admits to eight. How many more are hidden under the umbrella of security? Your guess is as good as mine. How many have the Soviet’s lost? You ask them, I’m keeping my head down.

Did I mention Chernobyl and Fukushima?

Let me put it another way. When the Soviets launched Sputnik and initiated the space race, then followed up with a man in orbit before we could even launch a sub-orbital flight, we did an end-around and went to the moon.

If the Soviets had launched a nuclear powered space craft, we would have launched a nuclear powered space craft. Technology would not have stopped us. Fear of radiation would not have stopped us.

That was then, this is now. The best thing for manned space exploration today – though not for American interests or world peace – would be for the Chinese to launch a nuclear powered space craft. It wouldn’t even have to be a good one. Just the threat would be enough, and in a few decades ships like the Scorpius would be filling the solar system.

399. I Changed My Mind

Leave a reply

No, I did not change my mind about cutting back on posts in the A Writing Life blog. Since I made that decision, I have outlined most of, and written the first six chapters, rough draft only, of a new novel. The title is still in limbo so I won’t say more until I can name it properly. The decision to cut back was a good one.

I am actually making a change in Serial. I had planned to run a guest novel. I had written two posts explaining why and giving a bio of the author, Harold Goodwin. I had also reduced the first several chapters of that novel to serial posts, enough to carry through mid-September, and positioned them in the queue, ready to publish.

So, why? First, why a guest novel — then why did I change my mind?

Since 2015, Serial has been a place for me to present short stories, a novella, presentations from Westercon, long and short excerpts from novels, and complete novels.

Christmas week of 2015 I presented five classic poems that have inspired me. Otherwise, everything in Serial has been something I have written.

The cupboard isn’t empty; four novels remain. Valley of the Menhir, Scourge of Heaven, and Who Once Were Kin, are complete fantasy novels. They deserve to be held back to be presented in a more traditional way. Symphony in a Minor Key is a complete novel about teaching. I’m quite proud of it, but it didn’t seem right for this blog, which has been largely aimed at science fiction readers.

I argued with myself through the month of June. Should I run a classic SF novel that is unknown to today’s audience, or should I run a novel of my own about teaching. It was a big decision, since once committed, it would be six months before I could change course. I opted for the SF novel.

One the decision was made, I placed the first 20 posts in the Serial queue. Then I went on with my life, still mulling over the decision. Spirit Deer began appearing, and you all kept reading. I found no reduction in reader’s responses. Hmmm. You had stayed with me through Raven’s Run and through Voices in the Walls as well. Hmmm, again.

I started this blog to reach two audiences. First, I was looking for lovers of science fiction and fantasy who might want to read my novels, if I could make them aware of them. Second, I expected the blog to be read by new and would-be writers.

I found both but, clearly, in reverse order. Ok, I hear you. I never was comfortable with a guest novel, anyway.

New plan — I will post Symphony in a Minor Key. But first, I need to buy time. It takes many hours to turn a novel into a serial (see 245. Serializing), and my guest novel was due to start today.

No problem. I have several pieces that were published in Serial before anyone was reading this blog. I’ll recycle one or two — no one now reading has seen them, anyway — while I am preparing the next novel.

And so, PRESENTING—

Blondel of Arden, beginning in Serial today.