BATHTUB FAMILIES

I went to the pharmacy. There was a sign noting that I did not have to wait for my prescription. They would text me when it was ready.

Apparently the pharmacy is trying to create writer’s block. Writers should not go off willy-nilly and wait for pharmacy texts. We should wander the aisles as we wait. Otherwise, we would not, like Billy Collins, discover “Bathtub Families,” those collections of cows and pigs and other families to keep you company in the bath, and if we do not make those discoveries, we cannot write marvelous poems about them.

Why is it that Billy Collins always discovers things like Bathtub Families before I do? No wonder I have nothing to poeticize about. Billy has already jumped on all the good trampolines for poems.

Billy and Michelangelo see with the same eyes. Michelangelo said he saw David trying to get out of that block of marble. All he had to do was chip away the parts of the block that were not David and put him into a museum in Florence. [Italy, not WI. Florence, WI, has a statue of an ice cream cone.] Billy sees a poem trying to get out of a bunch of bathtub animals. Anything he looks at, Billy sees a poem trying to get out.

Good writers see the stories trying to be told, in anything and everything. If you have eyes to see and ears to hear, there is no such thing as writer’s block.

But Billy Collins,

In your fecundity,

Can’t you leave a little something

For my profundity?

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

Daughter Katie Kennedy’s Learning to Swear in America will be published by J. K. Rowling’s publisher, Bloomsbury Press, in 2015.

My novel, VETS, will be published by Black Opal Books in 2015. It tells of four homeless and handicapped Iraqistan veterans who are accused of murdering a VA doctor.

I tweet as yooper1721.

I also write, once in a great while, Christ in Winter: Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter. http://christinwinter.blogspot.com/

MY OTHER BOOKS:

NOW THAT I HAVE CANCER I AM WHOLE: Reflections on Life and Healing for Cancer Patients and Those Who Love Them [AndrewsMcMeel & HarperAudio, with Czech and Japanese translations] Paul K. Hamilton, MD, the co-founder of CanSurmount, called it “The best book for cancer patients, by a cancer patient, ever.”

AN ORDINARY MAN [HarperPaperbacks] Randall MacLane just wanted to be an ordinary man. But sent with a message for Custer, he became a drifting lawman with a knack for killing, and a deep well of loneliness. Then a twist of fate brought him full circle…

THE STRANGE CALLING: Stories of Ministry [Smyth&Helwys] I didn’t want to be a preacher, but I made a deal with God to save my sister’s life. Was that really a “call,” though? I said, “I’ll try t for 50 years, and if I still don’t know, I’ll do something else.” These are stories of what happened in those years of questioning the call.

WHEN FATHER RODE THE MAIL and Other Stories of Christmas [lulu.com] ISBN 978-1-300-38566-0

If you like baseball poetry, take a look at “Frosty & the Babe” http://www.baseball-almanac.com/poetry/frosty_and_the_babe.shtml

Who stands in for the reader?

In a story or a drama, one of the characters needs to be a stand-in for the reader/listener, the representative of their interests.

JRMcF

Winning and Losing

Last night I dreamed that I was writing in this blog. I wrote: “Stories are always about winning and losing.” Dreams are not usually that immediately relevant and realistic, and they are not nearly as interesting to the listener as to the one who tells about his dreams, but this one is right on. I would add to the Dream Editor’s words this: what is most intriguing in a story is not just who wins and who loses, but how we win while losing.

JRMcF

Borrow the Book, Keep the Story

            I think I really just wanted to be a reader, but since that is not exactly a profession, I figured I needed to be a writer.

            Reading was a profession for my great-grandfather, John White McFarland. He lied about his age to join the federal navy in the civil war. He was on a boat on the Ohio River. I don’t think he was wounded, but got a disease. At any rate, he was disabled and they didn’t expect him to live, so he was granted a pension for life. He lived to be about 98, I think it was. So while he was technically a farmer, he was really a reader. He would walk from Oakland City to Princeton, or other places, to borrow books from individuals. There was a doctor in Princeton who had an extensive library. My great-grandfather would borrow a book, read it as he walked home, stay up all night reading by candle light, or perhaps they had kerosene lanterns then, and then read as he walked it back the next day. It was a point of honor with him that a borrowed book was returned the next day.

            I loved reading as a child. I also loved books, the actual bound volumes. I also loved comic books. Anything with a story, but seeing books, holding them, possessing them, all that was important to me. We didn’t have money for books, though, or much of anything else, so I learned that even though I could not possess the book, I could borrow the book and possess the story.

            One summer I was in a reading program at the branch library on Washington St in Indianapolis. It was just catty-corner down the alley to my school, Lucretia Mott PS # 3. Kids had to read a book and then tell the story to the librarians to prove they had read it. Usually it was pro-forma, just enough to prove you had done it. They always made me tell the whole story, though, even called the other librarians over to listen. I could tell they were pleased, because they smiled a lot, but I was also afraid they didn’t trust me. It never occurred to me that they thought the way I told the story was cute.

            I’m still trying to tell the story, well enough that they’ll call others over to listen, well enough that they’ll think I’m cute.

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

Daughter Katie Kennedy’s Learning to Swear in America will be published by J. K. Rowling’s publisher, Bloomsbury Press, in 2015.

My novel, VETS, will be published by Black Opal Books in early 2015.

In case you missed it, a Tweet Repeat: I like to sit in coffee shops and fantasize about being a writer. Perhaps actually writing would add something to the fantasy.

I tweet as yooper1721.

I also write, once in a great while, Christ in Winter: Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter. http://christinwinter.blogspot.com/

MY OTHER BOOKS:

NOW THAT I HAVE CANCER I AM WHOLE: Reflections on Life and Healing for Cancer Patients and Those Who Love Them [AndrewsMcMeel & HarperAudio, with Czech and Japanese translations] Paul K. Hamilton, MD, the co-founder of CanSurmount, called it “The best book for cancer patients, by a cancer patient, ever.”

AN ORDINARY MAN [HarperPaperbacks] Randall MacLane just wanted to be an ordinary man. But sent with a message for Custer, he became a drifting lawman with a knack for killing, and a deep well of loneliness. Then a twist of fate brought him full circle…

THE STRANGE CALLING: Stories of Ministry [Smyth&Helwys] I didn’t want to be a preacher, but I made a deal with God to save my sister’s life. Was that really a “call,” though? I said, “I’ll try t for 50 years, and if I still don’t know, I’ll do something else.” These are stories of what happened in those years of questioning the call.

WHEN FATHER RODE THE MAIL and Other Stories of Christmas [lulu.com] ISBN 978-1-300-38566-0

If you like baseball poetry, take a look at “Frosty & the Babe” http://www.baseball-almanac.com/poetry/frosty_and_the_babe.shtml

The Difference

"Good writers borrow. Great writers steal."

Hoping Marc Dies Soon

It is not a good sign if you are hoping by page 52 that the main character, the narrator yet, is killed soon, because he is so stupid and self-destructive that he does not deserve to live even one more page.

While reading Andrew Grant's RUN.

In Praise of Multi-Author Poetry Books

JUST WORDS: A review of GOOD POEMS, Selected & Introduced by Garrison Keillor [Penguin Books, 2002]

I have several books of poems scattered throughout the house in strategic places, and I read a poem from each of them each day.

I prefer books that contain poems from many different writers, rather than a single author, although one or another of the volumes of Billy Collins is always in my rotation, and usually another individual writer or two, Ferlinghetti or cummings or Frost.

Perhaps my preference for multi-author volumes is because the first book of poetry I ever had [and I can’t remember its provenance] was The Best Loved Poems of the American People, edited by Hazel Felleman. Each day I heard a different poetic voice, got a different slant on language and the world.

Reading the same poet each day can get you into a rhythm, and that is good. However, I still appreciate getting jarred out of my own ruts each day by having to hear a new rhythm, a different voice.

I think it was Halford Luccock who told of the man who loved macaroons. He hid them all over his house. He was forgetful, so he never remembered where he had hidden them. But every once in a while, as he rummaged through a drawer or opened a cabinet, he would be delighted by the appearance of a “macaroon unaware.” That is how I feel about a book of poetry by different authors.

So one book stays in the rotation. I finished GOOD POEMS, Selected & Introduced by Garrison Keillor this morning, “Fishing in the Keep of Silence,” by Linda Gregg, but it goes back onto the shelf, back into the rotation, back tomorrow morning to “Poem in Thanks” by Thomas Lux. I look forward to encountering Jane Kenyon and Wendell Berry and all the others as they suddenly appear, “macaroons unaware.”

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

Daughter Katie Kennedy’s Learning to Swear in America will be published by J. K. Rowling’s publisher, Bloomsbury Press, in 2015.

My novel, VETS, will be published by Black Opal Books in early 2015.

In case you missed it, a Tweet Repeat: You never have to reboot a yellow pad or a ballpoint pen.

I tweet as yooper1721.

I also write Christ in Winter: Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter. http://christinwinter.blogspot.com/

MY OTHER BOOKS:

NOW THAT I HAVE CANCER I AM WHOLE: Reflections on Life and Healing for Cancer Patients and Those Who Love Them [AndrewsMcMeel & HarperAudio, with Czech and Japanese translations] Paul K. Hamilton, MD, the co-founder of CanSurmount, called it “The best book for cancer patients, by a cancer patient, ever.”

AN ORDINARY MAN [HarperPaperbacks] Randall MacLane just wanted to be an ordinary man. But sent with a message for Custer, he became a drifting lawman with a knack for killing, and a deep well of loneliness. Then a twist of fate brought him full circle…

THE STRANGE CALLING: Stories of Ministry [Smyth&Helwys] I didn’t want to be a preacher, but I made a deal with God to save my sister’s life. Was that really a “call,” though? I said, “I’ll try t for 50 years, and if I still don’t know, I’ll do something else.” These are stories of what happened in those years of questioning the call.

WHEN FATHER RODE THE MAIL and Other Stories of Christmas [lulu.com] ISBN 978-1-300-38566-0

If you like baseball poetry, take a look at “Frosty & the Babe” http://www.baseball-almanac.com/poetry/frosty_and_the_babe.shtml