Can You Guys Cut This Thing Up For Me?

(Account of a creative writing workshop in Rhode Island)

Shannon says, I mean I’ve studied these things, and the thing you learn is, you don’t ever pick the date. Right? I mean you can tell your followers the world is going to end, you just shouldn’t ever name the actual day it’s going to end on. Cause then they can hold you to it.

And she sits there holding the rest of us with this very calm expression she has, a look in her eyes like someone sounding a brass bell on a grey New England morning, and everyone nods because what she spoke, frankly, has a ring of the absolute truth to it. You never pick the date.

By way of an aside, Shannon tells the group that she works weekends in a café called The Butcher Shop or The Abattoir or The Slaughterhouse – I forget exactly which – but some name that makes it possible at a stretch for a guy in a lumberjack shirt to walk into the place early one morning with seventy pounds of bleeding deer slung over his shoulder and ask, Can you guys cut this thing up for me?

And although the establishment is absolutely a café – with the panini bread stacked in big wicker baskets behind the counter, and the pickles and the cold cuts all laid out in white ceramic dishes ready for use, and the little tipping tin beside the cash register with the handwritten sign taped to it saying THANK YOU – although this place could not to any lesser extent resemble a one-stop carcass shop, Shannon decides to ask her manager if it might be possible to accommodate the gentleman’s request.

I guess she does this out of kindness. With those calm eyes she looks at the guy and she perceives that the guy knows, the second he sets foot inside that oddly misnamed café, that he’s come to the wrong place. But his question was already half-formed on his lips when he saw the café’s sign and pulled in. He’d been rehearsing it behind the wheel of his pick-up while the dawn broke and he drove back from the woods into the city of Providence. Trying to get the shake out of his voice; trying to get the question to sound nonchalant. Like this wasn’t the first time he’d tracked and killed a deer. Like he didn’t have a moment of regret as the light faded from the animal’s eyes. Like he wasn’t sad and pale with sleep deprivation; like he did this every day; like he knew exactly what the hell to suddenly do with a warm, bleeding body that weighed the same as his ten-year-old boy. Hey, can you guys cut this thing up for me? And even now it’s a sandwich shop, the guy can’t help blurting out his question.

And Shannon relays the question to her manager – even though she knows her manager is going to stare back at her for a full minute with an expression approaching pity – and she does it so as to not make the man in the lumberjack shirt feel like he’s all alone. To share the feeling that someone else – even someone else who actually works in the café, for goodness sakes – might allow in her own mind too some possible ambiguity concerning the place’s function; some ambiguity that was not immediately dispelled by the rows of gherkins and the salad onions glistening in their jars. In these situations human solidarity is important, and someday you hope some other human will return the favor. Because you never know the day when you’ll walk into the wrong shop yourself. You never pick the date.

Can you guys cut this thing up for me? Today we’re assembled for a creative writing workshop, so the thing is every human story and we’re going to need to slice and dice it somehow. How we started this was to find ourselves some news articles. Free choice. We went out into the wilds of the news media and we bagged ourselves one each and we walked into this class with seventy pounds of story.

I already mentioned Shannon. Shannon puts the same care into her story selection that she gives to making sandwiches at the café. She is calm and methodical and she takes pride in the small things. Her news story is called The Replaceable You. It’s about all of the body parts you can swap out of homo sapiens and still have a human being. The article doesn’t mention how to save human face, but I would imagine that voluntarily asking one’s café manager whether the establishment can eviscerate and butcher a wild deer – I imagine that would count.

Then there’s Stephanie. She looks at all the stories in the paper and none of them does quite what she’s looking for and so she’s unafraid to bring in a pictorial piece instead, a charity advertisement from the back of the paper, and she is absolutely right because the piece is mesmerizing. There are six kids with cleft palates, smiling, or making whatever that unpronounceable expression is that can only be made with a three-cornered mouth. And the headline is haunting: Each Of These Kids Needs Someone Who Cares Enough To Send $250 Once.

That gets us talking about children, and Astrid has come up with a winner; one of those stories you could tell a dozen ways up and make it darker every time. A bunch of third-graders in Georgia conspires to kill their teacher with a paperweight and a steak knife and some tape and a pair of handcuffs and I forget what else. I mean, that’s quite enough already. The thing is, each of the kids is assigned to bring in one item, like a macabre show-and-tell, and their roles fit perfectly together into a textbook execution. It’s the opposite of the lone gunman: single target, incorporated assassin. The teacher has unjustly scolded one of the student body, and so in an expression of human solidarity as admirable in its own way as asking your boss about butchering a deer, the kids are going to tie up their teacher and concuss her with the paperweight and then stab her to death with the steak knife. It’s nothing if not systematic. There is absolutely no way the teacher is walking away from this. She’s staying after class. The kids have even delegated one of their number to be the cleaner. The plan is inch-perfect and it’s only through treachery that they are rumbled. And the kicker is that this is a special class: these young team players are supposed to have learning difficulties. When doomsday dawns the meek shall rise up and inherit the earth. Their teacher would have driven into school, blissfully aware today was not like every other day. Nobody picks the date.

Next there is Jenna, and you don’t argue with Jenna, or at least I don’t because she’s too smart. I brought in a story of my own earlier this week, a novel I wrote three years ago, and I guess I basically arrived with it slung over my shoulder asking if anyone could cut it up for me, and Jenna took a good look at it and said, sure, and handed it back to me in neat Ziploc bags all ready for the freezer. I believe this is known as literary criticism. It was a pretty damned professional job, if you ask me, and it’s a famously elusive novel so I wonder how she went about it. Tied it down and laid into it with a paperweight and steak knives, maybe. And Jenna’s article is about a doomsday cult of 25 adults and four children who’ve barricaded themselves in a cave near the Volga river. Following Astrid’s lead we start talking about the children and what’s going on in their minds, down there in the dark. It’s not looking great for them, in all honesty. Their leader is Pyotr Kuznetsov, and he says the world will end in May, and he does not appear to have left instructions regarding why it will be helpful to be twenty feet underground at that time. Kuznetsov is described in the article as a professional engineer, and described by Shannon as a total amateur cultist because, as she says, you never pick the date.

You could say this group is drawn to the extremes. Sarah has brought in a cult story too. And it’s a great choice, this one; another of those stories you could tell and re-tell, and she goes through it with fine skill, picking up on all the angles that make it come alive as a story. The hand-sewn, ankle-length dresses. The hair tied up in braids. And best of all, the name of the ranch: Yearning for Zion. We guess they’re not referring to a much-longed-for summer vacation in the Zion National Park in Utah (famous for its soaring granite towers), although the article doesn’t specify. 401 children have been forcibly removed from a compound occupied by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which is a place where bearded men can go to practice polygamy with minors (a chapter of Jesus’ own example that the gospels have inexplicably missed).

To this place we have chosen to bring the stories of children accelerating towards doomsday. These are the precise extremes: the start of life and the end of all life. We are slicing and dicing in between. The details count. The third graders’ paperweight was seized by police – it was engraved with a unicorn. A single bright glass unicorn: there is something untamable in this story. And on the other hand the Police Chief was called Tony Tanner. You couldn’t make that up. Again these extremes: from the ultra-esoteric to the comically banal. Absolute human transgression, and Anthony H Tanner. Cleft narratives and dark palates.

Now Mary says something amazing. She says she felt certain when she was a kid that all of the stories in the newspaper were somehow connected; that they were all fragments of one single narrative that fitted together and collectively made sense if you only knew the sacred trick of reading it. Then the whole story would reveal itself; everything would become whole. She says, when she was a kid, she was certain that the adults knew how to hold it all together.

She smiles and this is a high point and a watershed and now all of us are six years old again and we look at each other around the table and we laugh and just for this moment there is a single story that rings in this place like a brass bell, before the chime fades away and our narratives must deconverge and run multiplicitous to their extremities, ever downwards into the catacombs at world’s end, but always loud and always clear and always with this one bright sound dissolved in them.

Chris Cleave
Rhode Island and London, April 2008

Sunset in America

This morning I was in London but now I'm in here in Narragansett, Rhode Island, which is a far-away place unless you live here, I suppose. People fly their flags in this town. Getting here was so quick. My brain hasn't caught up. I recall Heathrow airport in some bug-eyed waking dream, then several hours of plastic meals and Will Smith slaying zombified New Yorkers in the in-flight movie, and a plastic woman with artificial hair asking, again and again, did I want coffee? And always my foolish answer was yes, and so the next thing that happened was a train ride that went by in a silver flash through swamps and gloomy gravel works, and now here I am in the midst of beauty.

I have to make a big speech at the university tomorrow so I was nervous and I went for a walk on the beach. There was a glassy swell this evening, maybe a two-foot swell, and a cold offshore breeze holding it up. Half a dozen of the local kids were surfing longboards, in thick wetsuits and hoods. A couple of them knew what they were doing. We're way out of season still and the beach here is long and bleak and beautiful, and the surf rolls in like there's no great hurry. I love these kids who still have time to learn how to surf. The sea mumbles and rolls like the big always.

In between waves the oystercatchers scurry as far out as they dare, and they dig their faces full into the wet sand that roars with retreating water. At first they're frantic in their greed for whatever godforsaken mollusc they prey upon, but then some unseen moment sounds and they skitter hysterically back up the beach, each bird racing a single inch ahead of the white spume of the next advancing wave. They teeter with such insouciance, those birds, but I can feel the terror that animates their comic little legs as they scuttle one inch ahead of annihilation. It's the same terror that informs my working day, after all.

Far out to sea, as the sun set between the lowest edge of the cloud base and the highest extent of Earth, a sullen purple flashed on the white superstructures of the container ships that snuck across the horizon. I went for a drink that turned into another and then a meal at the only restaurant in town that seemed open. Someone told me I really should stay awake till bedtime on the East Coast, so I was in that restaurant trying to stay awake like a good little soldier. I was so hungry. I'm hungry now, just thinking about how hungry I was. I was the only customer in a sea of white tablecloths that mumbled and rolled all around me as if there was no great hurry, and I took a table for two - just me and my jetlag - and I ordered the thing the waiter advised me to order. I admitted I was too tired to know what I wanted, and he told me to try the local paella. I came to Narragansett ten years ago, he said, and that's my favourite dish, and I stayed here ever since.

People around here seem kind and they have a little more time. They fly their flags and if you don't know what you want to eat, then they will serve you what they would have eaten if they were you. The paella was good. It tasted of the ocean I flew across.

Hello URI !

This is a special message for members of the University of Rhode Island and those considering attendance at the forthcoming writer-in-residence events there. I am very excited and honored to be visiting URI next week, and I am looking forward to meeting a great many of you.

Here’s why I think you should come to the events!

First, because of Alain-Philippe Durand and Naomi Mandel, the faculty members who invited me to visit and whose work I think is special and unique in the study of modern writing. Their published work on Novels of the Contemporary Extreme is an exciting and provocative look at a new movement in literature which “forces the confrontation between irreconcilable differences, most notably the difference between reality and art”. This is a wild and wonderful space to be working in as a writer, and Alain-Philippe and Naomi through their in-depth work and their eclectic interests (in subjects as diverse as the Holocaust and hip-hop culture) are a great deal more than commentators on the new field; they are defining it and they are challenging and helping writers to explore its possibilities and push its boundaries.

They are the kind of academics, in other words, with a pulse - and anything they’re running is going to be fun. This stuff isn’t only for students of English literature; it’s for everyone who enjoys thinking and talking about the loops and whorls of contemporary culture. Alain-Philippe and Naomi’s work has informed and influenced the way I write, and I feel very lucky to be asked by them to visit URI and contribute to what promises to be an enjoyable and highly charged week of discoveries.

I also have a very high opinion of the students at URI, having participated in an intensive online forum with them last year. The level of honesty and the insights that were shared exceeded anything in my experience of public literary discussion, so I’m looking forward most of all to the series of interactive sessions that have been arranged for next week. I will be involved in four creative writing workshops and two classes where we will explore the outer reaches of our creative and analytical powers. I am a writer who believes that the writing is the first word and not the last word in a conversation, so I will show up with all my energy and I hope you will too.

I will also be giving a public talk on the use of humor in changing widely-held opinions, and later in the week I will be reading from and discussing my forthcoming novel. I can promise that the reading from my new novel will be good. As to the public lecture, I can offer no such guarantee. I’m about halfway through drafting the lecture right now, and so far it’s looking totally unhinged. I suggest you show up to that event, if only for the spectacle of an Englishman potentially becoming spectacularly unstuck at the podium.

There is a good URI press release that gives some of the timings of the week’s events. If you do decide to come along, I look forward to meeting and learning from you.

In the meantime I want to send my sincere thanks to all of you who have worked so hard to put the week’s events together, and to all of you who are working right now to stage the week’s sessions. See you there!