Trans/plant/portation

I think we’ve established that in the big scheme of things, Walla Walla is a pretty small town. It’s bigger than Ember, Wyoming, yes, but I’m sure 99.9 percent of the United States has more than 50 people in its city limits. Overall, the few tens of thousands of folks who call Wallyworld home understand that it’s a bit isolated, a bit small, and a bit lacking in big city sophistication.

Even in big cities, there are the door-to-door solicitors, mostly hawking church services in a town known for secular government. I can see why this congregation or that would think that sending out local missionaries is a good idea, but in Walla Walla, most folks are already associated with a house of worship. The biggest parking lots here, after all, have aligned themselves with one church or other. Yes, the lone synagogue has a pretty small parking lot. I’ve looked. Read More…

Way back in June 2003 I had a dream that began a long string of nervous decisionmaking to embark on this whole gender transition journey of mine. As I progressed, I gained confidence, but I was making everything up as I went along. Somehow my culture hadn’t already identified a ready to wear outfit for having a sex change. I plunged into the Internet, which at the time was All About Messageboards, and somewhere beyond the thick soup of hyperspace were actual people. Some of them were newbies, like myself, asking questions, others were at the intermediate level, as it were, and still more folks had set themselves up as mini-gurus on the topic.

To say that in the midst of these personalities, there was some conflict would count as something of a stunning understatement. Read More…

Riddle: what do you get when you combine an overtired klutz, an avid reader of 40 years, and a person’s observation that a particular bookshelf looks more than a mite unsteady on its feet?

Answer: I think we all know how this is going to turn out. Read More…

I understand the appeal of putting up the best of the worst queries that land in an agent’s inbox, of letting off a little steam of frustration and giving everyone a laugh in the process, I really do. There is no end, after all, to the pipeline of awful query letters. After reading through agent blogs, Twitter links, fan pages and the occasional Writer’s Digest article, I can even scratch out some categories of Terrible Queries:

1. The Delusional Query Letter—This is the best book evar!!! Nobody has my lyrical, lyrical, lyrical prose, and you, dear agent, whoever you are, will love it and love it and die happy for the reading of it. Pay no attention to the fact that it gives the same tired storyline, be it Eat, Pray, Love, or boy meets girl, or a hero’s journey. At least this writer is no stranger to fiction. Read More…

In all of the traveling I’ve done since moving to the Pacific Northwest—a journey through Glacier National Park, driving through the Rockies and Bighorn National Forest more than once, exploring Yellowstone, walking through the unbelievably tall mountains in Alaska—I have not seen a single moose. I’ve even driven up next to a lumbering bison, which by the way, didn’t smell all that good, but which was still amazing. I’ve stood 50 yards away from a brown bear lolling around on the soft carpet of moss. Black bears make my list of eyewitnessed nature, too, as I’ve taken in a newly independent cub feasting on fresh salmon in a glacier-fed river as close to the Arctic Circle as I’ve ever come. Yes, I really want to explore the Yukon now. Read More…

Some time ago I brought up the importance of back story to the intrepid novel writer. I think I declared its significance critical because all good books have rich, memorable characters who stick with us, the hearty meals of literature, or something. I talked about layers of storytelling and animating the actors in a tale, and all of that is well and good. But in thinking about some of the most well known real-life stories in recent history—the threat of terrorism, the collapse of the housing market, the latest wave of immigration in the United States, the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt—I started thinking about counter narratives. I think about them for what they are, and how people’s perspectives motivate them to behave accordingly, but for the purposes of this little blog I’m not discussing those politics today. I just want to ponder counter narrative as a tool for the writer. (Even as I’m wishing the protesters well.) Read More…

Most things worth doing have their moments of frustration—it’s as if a whole world of negativity opens up, abounding with endless possibility, and all of it unpleasant. Maybe I should just give up. I knew I sucked at this. I’ll never get out from under the thumb of so-and-so. This was a stupid project to take on in the first place. Failures too, come in a variety of shapes and sizes: our own motivation may seize up, we run into grown-up versions of bullies, markets shift, opportunities close. Whatever the situation that led to this moment, we’re growling.

In this context, let’s consider the rejection letter. Read More…

Long-time readers of this blog will recall that our last abode in Walla Walla did not reach the pinnacle of success as family shelters go. It did make my Top Two in House Disasters, displaced from the top spot only by the 1-bedroom apartment in Syracuse, New York, in which a 6-by-8-foot section of plaster ceiling came crashing down after a few weeks of increasingly bowing out from a rotten joist. That debacle will be tough to beat, and the “Liar House”—so named because it looked cute on the outside but was awful inside—just sucked too much to work hard enough to be king of the ignoble hill. Read More…

As part of our ongoing welcome back from friends, a buddy of ours texted late last week with an invitation to go to the Jim German bar in Waitsburg, about 20 minutes east of Walla Walla. I’ve written about the town in this blog before, for its quaint two-block downtown and its anti-abortion protesters, who seem to assemble at random on the main corner in town. It does have a few good eateries, like the Whoop ‘Em Up cafe (low country Southern cuisine) and the Whetstone Public House, which I like to call “classy pioneer.” The Jim German bar isn’t a German tavern at all, it’s a what-is-it-doing-so-far-from-the-city nightclub of clean lines and pretentiously prepared drinks that one should sip with pinkie extended, or at least with a semblance of attitude. And when wearing a lot of black. Read More…

The tracks stretched so far toward the horizon that the individual rails merged into one point, and then they devolved into something indistinct. If men had laid down a railroad here, at some point it became lost to the wilderness. I followed the tracks, using a scrap of paper I’d received a couple of hours earlier. Edgar camped out where the tracks took on a look of modern sculpture, the result of a terrible derailing several years ago. Not that modern art was anything anyone had heard of yet. The old conductor told me I couldn’t miss it.

I’d been tracking him for a week, and I was running out of time. I crunched through a stream of broken glass and pottery. Moonshine bottles, brown beer glass, growler jugs, or so I guessed. Hopefully I was getting close. If the story was right then he hadn’t started to spiral down yet, but this was the last night for his sobriety. Read More…