Daniel B. O'Shea's flash fic challenge: Hilary's Scar

We interrupt the hiatus of this blog to participate in the Daniel B. O'Shea flash fic challenge.

Here's the setup from Dan's blog:

So a little while back, Hilary Davidson let slip she’s had a bit of a health scare — seems some of her skin cells maybe caught a few too many rays and went rogue on her. She had to go in for a biopsy (everything turned out fine, thankfully) but that’s gonna leave a bit of a scar on her bicep. I jokingly suggested that perhaps Hilary’s Scar should be the subject of my next flash fiction challenge. I was kidding, but my subconcious wasn’t. Something nasty bubbled up — something, dare I say it, Davidson-like.

Since then, Hilary's Scar has been the subject of quite a few gripping offerings of flash fiction. They go from dark to darker. But I don't do dark. So here's my take. And be sure to read Hilary's debut crime novel, The Damage Done, out from Forge in October 2010. None of the publishing types appearing in my piece are at all based on Hilary's fine team at Forge. I made them all up.


Hilary's Scar
By Ellen Neuborne

“What about a knife fight?”

Faces brightened all around the conference room table at the suggestion, but optimism was quickly doused by Doug Miller, marketing team leader.

“No good,” he said. “A knife fight would need too many players. An adversary, witnesses, maybe even law enforcement. No way we could hold that story together.” He sighed and dropped his head into his hands. “We need a simpler lie.”

Hilary looked at the pained faces gathered in the glass-walled room. She willed herself not to shiver, even though she was sleeveless and the AC was whirring like an aircraft engine. On the conference table sat a stack of her soon-to-be released debut novel. On this meeting’s agenda: how to explain the brand new four-inch scar on her bicep during the already paid for book tour.

“Maybe a tattoo removal?” suggested Elias, from promotions.

“Sure, but why would she have a tattoo removed? A tattoo would be well inside her brand parameters – cool, sexy, mysterious…”

“We could say it was a skinhead tattoo.”

“Yes!”

“No,” said Hilary, trying to sound more firm than alarmed. Then she added, “Why can’t I just wear longer sleeves?”

“Un-ac-CEPT-able!” shrieked the stylist Hilary knew only as Cube. Wrapped in a black cashmere throw, curled in a ball in the corner of the room, Hilary had forgotten he was there. Cube unfurled to make his point clear. “You finally send me an author who looks like something. A woman with great cheekbones and lips to die for and Michelle Obama arms and you want me to put her in SLEEVES! I can’t work like this. It’s just too much. You ask too much.”

“Okay, okay, let’s just settle down a moment,” Doug tried to regain control of his meeting, which wasn’t easy. The six around the table had spent months convincing their reluctant bosses to invest in this book tour. Sherri Strom-Singleton, liaison to sales, voiced what everyone around the table was thinking. “That scar is just to big and angry to go unnoticed. And it’s not like we can say what really happened--”

“God, no!”

“Crazy.”

“Brand suicide.”

“True, that.”

“Which means,” Sherri continued, “come the January budget reckoning we are all--”

“What about surgery?” It was Elias again.

“Oh, yeah, right, she had her appendix out and they went in through her bicep.”

“So, some other kind of surgery.”

“You know an organ in the upper arm?”

“Tennis elbow?”

“Off brand,” said Sherri. “She’s cemetery chick. Not country club maiden.”

“Or mole removal?”

“A four-inch long mole? And we were considering sleeveless? They’ll just fire Cube.”

“Un-ac-CEPT-able!”

“Rogue cells.”

“What?” Doug lifted his head from his hands and looked down the table at Oliver, the summer intern from the marketing department.

“My Aunt Janice had a mole removed and they had to take out rogue cells. She had a scar like a hot dog.”

Silence around the table.

“Rogue,” mulled Sherri. “I like it.”

“Me, too,” said Doug. “It’s dark. It’s dangerous. And it’s easy to maintain the story. Anyone really asks for details and we’ll just cry HIPPA. Rogue cells it is.

Around the table, sighs of relief. Hilary had to clear her throat twice to remind them she was still in the room.

Doug turned to Hilary. “You know we only want what’s best for the book.”

Hilary looked at the stack of her novels and nodded.

“And no mention of… that other thing. No more going downtown, right?”

Hilary nodded again.

#

Downtown an hour later, Hilary entered the building through the basement entrance. She stood in the doorway for a minute, letting her eyes adjust to the darkness.

As she approached the double doors, she could hear them. Their voices rising, keening, shrieking. She was late; they’d be on edge. They were in there, waiting for her, her weekly hour in their midst. She took a deep breath and pushed open the doors and entered.

“Miss Hilary! Miss Hilary!” Eleven three-year-olds surged towards her, enveloping her in a massive pre-school group hug.

“Can we do the parachute first?”

“Can we sing the bubbles song?”

“Are we doing circle time?”

As quickly as they gathered, they spun back out into the room, jumping on the play equipment, shrieking and yelling as they ran.

Except for one.

“Hello, Milo,” Hilary said to the boy. He raised his eyes. “Green Arrow is sorry about your boo-boo,” said Milo, holding up the classic action figure he’d stolen from his father’s collection. An original, made in 1961, it had all its factory features. Including, gripped in the action figure’s plastic fist, a surprisingly sharp arrow.

Hilary took the action figure carefully and placed it on the windowsill. “I think Green Arrow should just watch today,” she said. Milo nodded soberly and ran to join his playmates.

A lanky young man with a set of bongos under his bony elbow approached.

“I wasn’t sure they’d let you come back,” he said, smiling at her.

“Oh, they didn’t.” She smiled back at him and picked up a tambourine. “I’ve gone rogue.”

Where are the new posts?

Sorry for the radio silence all. But I have a really good reason!

As some of you may remember, the point of my blog is to eventually generate interest in my novel MY MOTHER, THE PORN STAR. Well, one of the many, many (many) agents I've queried came back with an interesting response. She likes the first 2/3 of the novel, but thinks third act needs work.

So I'm not posting, because I'm off revising my novel. Hopefully, to the liking of this agent. If not, I expect I'll be back!

The Modern Love AAA Farm Team

How do I get to Modern Love?
Practice, practice, practice.

And guess what readers, I have a bit of concrete advice as to where you might engage in that sort of practice.

Consider writing and submitting to Brevity:

Brevity is an excellent online magazine with an impressive publication record of more than a decade (that’s forever in online years). It publishes some big names (Sherman Alexie, Lia Purpura, Bret Lott) and plenty of newcomers and graduate students pushing up through the ranks. Brevity accepts essays of 750 words or less. And it’s a Modern Love feeder market.

What makes me say that?

I was getting ready to write this week’s Monday Morning Quarterbacking entry on “Even in English, a Language Gap,” by Jennifer Percy. Ms. Percy’s cut line for the ML essay is a teeny tiny bit coy. “Jennifer Percy is a graduate student in Iowa City.”

(Gee, I wonder what school? I can’t imagine which course of study in Iowa City she might be talking about. Law school? Medical school? What -- an MFA program, you say?)

So I Google Ms. Percy and found she’d be published in Brevity. That’s nice. Then I noticed on the same Brevity blog landing page was an item about Brevity contributor Gary Presley being published in Modern Love. A few clicks later, I found two more: Ann Bauer and Lori Jakiela both graced Brevity and then went on to Modern Love.

In my old job as a USA Today reporter, we used to say three is a trend. I’ve got four examples of the Brevity-to-Modern-Love pipeline. And again, Brevity has been around for a decade. I’ll bet those four aren’t the only ones.

Now here’s another reason for all us Modern Love wannabes to click on over to Brevity. In addition to being a market for great creative non-fiction, Brevity offers something Modern Love does not; craft essays Lots of them. For all of us who have read the canned ML rejection email and wondered what we could do to do better next time, Brevity is offering quite the archive of answers. Perhaps, once you've learned the craft at Brevity, you're ready to try your game at The Show.

Monday Morning Quarterbacking XIX -- Complete with secret to Modern Love publication!

Happy Thanksgiving, readers. While my turkey roasts, I will post.

And now, as a reader service, I will unveil the Great Secret to getting your essay published in Modern Love:

Question: What are the Modern Love editors looking for in an essay?

Answer: Facebook.

Facebook is sexy. Facebook is the element that takes a regular juicy emotional story and elevates it to Modern Love material. It is the hot topic that gives a good essay the necessary boost into publication status. This is not as crazy as it sounds. Newspaper editors are always looking for the thing that is trendy, hot, talked about, to get into their pages. These days, that’s Facebook

This is not lost on the writers, trust me. Back when I interviewed my friend and classmate Kerry Herlihy about her Modern Love essay, she shared with me her a-ha moment about the Facebook element. Because Kerry is a talented writer of many, many great essays. So what made this one Modern Love material? Facebook. And she knew it even as she conceived the essay topic in her head. She’s a smart writer, and she leveraged the sexy, hot element of the moment to get her essay into Modern Love.

So too, did our essayist of the week, Charles H. Antin, author of The Boundaries of a Breakup. In Antin’s essay, Facebook is a main character. It is the way by which he somewhat creepily spies on his ex-girlfriend. And it is the way by which he has an unnecessary conflict with his grandfather. These are two love stories and their common bond is the Facebook connection.

Does this work? Mostly. Here’s the problem: there are two stories here and in my opinion, they don’t pack equal emotional punch. The story of the author with his grandfather is wonderfully nuanced. There are several great details that enhance this tale – the way his grandfather clearly does not “get” the way language is used online (he writes his emails in traditional letter format) he misses the social etiquette of the virtual world and when it creates tension in the family, he simply puts it down. This action horrifies the author, but you can sort of see it from Grandpa’s perspective: Whatever. It’s just a toy, right? No great loss if I never touch it again. Grandpa, obviously, is not all that concerned with creating a virtual brand for himself. I found the sections involving the author and his grandfather funny and touching and illuminating of the way technology has insinuated itself into our lives and relationships.

Therefore, I am disappointed with the other relationship in the story – that of the ex girlfriend. I get nothing of the detail in the grandfather section – no dialogue, no detail, no sense of why our author liked her at all, much less still carries a torch for her after the break up. There may be reasons the author has failed to flesh out this relationship for us. Maybe they are legal reasons? Perhaps Grandpa is not going to complain that his relationship with the author is appearing in the New York Times, but the ex-girlfriend (not to mention Charlie 2.0 with the unusual, Google-able name) might not be so generous. By making them unidentifiable, the author (and the Times) avoid any lawyer calls. But they also avoid the emotion needed to make this section as strong as the other.

Still, if you’ve got Facebook, even a vague breakup story can feel fresh and modern. So anyone with an essay out there with a Facebook theme polish it up and hit send. That window won’t stay open forever. Any minute now, the Times will discover Twitter.

Monday Morning Quarterbacking XVIII

Happy Friday, readers.

"That Delicate Membrane, the Heart"
By Kim Barnes

How convenient -- a father/daughter essay in Modern Love, appearing just as my own father/daughter essay is rejected by same. Really, very thoughtful of ML to not only tell me no, but publish an example by which I might see clearly my own shortcomings.

Sigh.

Well, there’s no way around this.

As I read the two side-by-side, I can see the differences. Here are the biggies:

Dramatic setting: Hospital room versus family vacation. Which one has the more intense natural tension?

What’s at stake? Routine family dynamics versus life or death.

Dramatic characters. Pentecostal mountain man versus professorial poet. Okay fine, I’m seeing the pattern. I’m picking softer subjects.

Moment of realization: Actually, this one is interesting. I think I do have a moment of realization in my own piece, but Kim Barnes is explicit about hers. “I came to understand that my father was my antagonist.” That’s an interesting choice as a writer, to tell rather than rely on showing. (Which is not say she doesn’t show. She does. But she also tells.) That might make sense for me to try.

And onward.

More for The Rejection Collection.

Dear Readers,
Below, please find my latest Modern Love reject. Thanks for reading.

The Jordan Runs Through It
By Ellen Neuborne

Standing in the extra-strength Israeli sunlight, I had a flash of understanding as to why this was called the Wailing Wall. Beside me, my teen-aged son argued with his father. My parents stood a foot or so apart from us, debating solutions to the family meltdown in progress. And my 9-year-old daughter was, well, wailing. She had marched herself up to the very edge of the plaza called the Kotel, found a sliver of shade, and sat down in it to cry out her late afternoon vacation frustrations.

I wanted to join her in the shade and in the cry. But I knew I couldn’t. I was making my own last stand that afternoon – indeed, that whole trip. I was doing my best to be an adult.

When I told people I would be traveling to Israel with my husband, my children and my parents, I got two reactions. The optimists said it was wonderful. The cynics remarked that it was the ultimate Sandwich Generation experience – eight days in the Holy Land with parents and children in tow. Both were right on the money.

Throughout the trip, I engaged in a constant tap dance to maintain my double role. I was still mother to my children – and that meant I was always carrying sunscreen, a water bottle, a snack and a Band Aid. I was always worrying, were they hungry? Tired? Bored? At the same time, I was there with my parents, and I was their child. In my child role, I shopped with my mother, listened to my father’s history lectures, and worried whether any given activity was too hot or had too many steps or was too religious for their tastes. It was not so much a vacation as a high wire act. One evening when we returned to our hotel, my husband began to voice some complaint to me and I cut him off and snapped, “Look, I have a lot of people to take care of on this trip and you’re not at the top of the list.”

Nasty, rotten thing for me to say, especially since my husband was on his vacation with his wife, his children and his in-laws. That had my Sandwich Generation complaint beat by a mile, but he didn’t press the point.

For eight days, we were together 24/7 and my parents were, well, my parents. They planned the day’s activities. They picked up the check. They told the tour guide what we all wanted. And I had to self-talk through a whole slew of complaints I knew were ridiculous. I mean, who complains when someone else picks up the check? Really. I was chafing and fretting and fully aware of just how much of a child I really was being. Grow up, Neuborne was my muttered motto. My parents were just being parental. The fact that this made me crazy was obviously my hang up.

I say my parents, but I really mean my father. My mother has adjusted relatively well to my adult status. My father would have pickled me at age 10, if given the option. To this day, at any given moment he can be counted on to call me by my baby nickname (It’s Tootsie. Don’t even try it.) or kiss me on the top of my head in greeting. My father was a helicopter parent before the term was trendy. I don’t mean he hovered over me at playgrounds. But he was always super involved in whatever I was doing – most especially whatever I was thinking. When I was a freshman at Brown, my dad got hold of my syllabi and read along with me through World History, Greek Drama and English Comp. Growing up around him was a constant Socratic dialogue from which he never tired. My advancing years altered nothing in that regard.

The day of the Jordan River raft trip we visited Safed, an ancient city of winding streets, beautiful art galleries, and not a whole lot to engage the passion of your average 9 and 13-year-old. To keep the kids from mutinying, our wise tour guide, a beanpole of a man named Yoel, told them we would cap off the day with a rafting trip. It was late afternoon and the sunlight was already turning pre-dusk golden when we pulled up to the raft location.

After a brief safety lecture, we were given life jackets, and helped into our boat – a 6-person dinghy. My father got into the back and my husband into the front. The rest of the family piled into the middle, Yoel (remaining on shore) took a picture, and we were pushed off into the green-brown, lightly moving water.

This was a disaster I should have seen coming. Because my husband doesn’t like boats. He doesn’t like boats or water or any of the activities therein. He was born and raised in El Paso, Texas and thinks desert is an ideal climate. In fact, David probably thought a raft trip was a terrible idea when Yoel first mentioned it. But as I mentioned, David was pretty much lowest on this family vacation totem pole, and not once during this very long day had anyone asked him what he thought of going rafting. He’d been a good sport and gotten into the boat as asked. But that was about as far as he could go masking this bad idea. The reality of it soon became evident.

First off, both my father and David are lefties. They both immediately began to try and manage the motion of the wide rubber craft by paddling on their strongest side. We got picked up by the current and began to slide downstream, paddling in a circle. My mother and I yelled helpful suggestions. (We thought they were helpful.) The kids just yelled. The tourists in the boats nearby laughed in several languages.

We crashed into the bushes and reeds on one bank. We pushed off, slid in circles banged into other boats on the water, and crashed into the bushes and reeds on the opposite bank. We didn’t move forward so much as we got dragged downstream. Slowly. So that all the picnickers on the banks could get a good look at us – the loud American family paddling in a circle. We were an international relations metaphor.

We were headed for our fourth bank crash when I decided to step back in time.

“Switch with me,” I said to David.

He didn’t say a word, but handed me the paddle and (I think) shoved me a little into the bow. I got up on my knees, grasped the paddle, and began to canoe.

When I was ten, my family spent the summer in Sag Harbor, New York. We spent every summer on Long Island, but that summer was special. That was the summer of the canoe. The house we rented was on the bay across from Long Beach. It had a dock that stretched out into the water, and a canoe. My father, my sister and I would go for long paddles, all over the placid bay. My father at the stern, me at the bow and my sister in the center. We paddled up the clear blue middle. We paddled around the marshy banks. We made one great effort to paddle all the way into the town of Sag Harbor. And I felt like a grown up, at the front of the boat, half the engine (or so I thought) responsible, strong, equal.

Dad liked to take us out – on bikes, on boats, on foot, even in the car. Exploring, he called it. Not bound by a destination or timetable or any discernable sense of direction. And he liked to recite poetry while we wandered – Robert Frost was a favorite and later Wallace Stevens. My sister and I were mostly willing. Although we did think our father had a remarkable ability to get lost in towns he’d been summering at for decades. One year, as snarky teens, we penned: “Whose woods these are, Dad doesn’t know. He lost the map three days ago. But that won’t stop him. Oh my, no. For ‘round that corner he must peek. There’s miles to go before Mom shrieks.”

(Apologies to Mr. Frost. Dad did the real poetry justice.)

But the canoe was a new iteration in our wanderings, mostly because it elevated me from passenger to co-pilot. And I understood the promotion. I remember learning not to turn around when Dad called out instructions (since that would rock the canoe) but to tilt my head to the side to show I was listening to him. When I call up memories of that summer, I don’t see Dad or my sister in them. I see water and sky before me – with the soundtrack of Dad in the background.

It had been 30 years since my father and I had paddled together, and yet on this tiny sliver of the Jordan, it seemed to come back to us. Quickly, we found a rhythm. I remembered to power. He remembered to steer. I felt the currents and shifted my paddling side to keep the boat centered in the water, moving forward. I didn’t swivel around, but instead, listened to him while facing forward, out into the water. Our boat grew silent, and we moved downstream, now not fighting the current but drawing on it. Our fellow tourists stopped laughing. We started to notice the scenery – green and gold in the late afternoon sun.

Then we approached the rapids.

To be fair, these were what I’d have to call Jewish rapids. By that I don’t mean, tough Israeli-Jewish, but citified, shrink-seeing New York Jewish. Really just a short stretch of fast-moving turbulence. Two employees from the rafting company stood on each side of the entryway to the rapids to guide the boats in. And there were two more to catch boats on the other end. Not exactly extreme sports. Still, for us -- the boat that couldn’t float straight -- it was a legitimate challenge.

“Paddle up!” the guides signaled, hands held high. I followed suit and we chuted in. Water shot up all around us. We forgot we were trying to shed our image as the loud Americans and shrieked as we barreled through the foam.

At end, we faced one more stretch of calm water as we headed for the dock. Dad and I resumed our paddling and we did the final stretch like pros. If Yoel noticed that we were not the same crew positions that had left the dock, he didn’t mention it. He just snapped another photo as we skidded up onto the sandy bank.

I jumped out onto dry land and back into mother mode. I helped my daughter out of the boat. I helped my son off with his life jacket. We all chattered excitedly to each other about the boat and the scenery and the rapids. Awesome, we agreed.

I looked back for my father – the first time I’d actually looked at him since we’d gotten into the boat upstream. Like the rest of us, he was drenched and smiling and shaking off his boating gear. He took off his life jacket, and hung it on the railing. Then he walked over to me. And shook my hand.

--End--

Monday Morning Quarterbacking XVII

On Friday? I am totally slipping. But it's been a busy week.

Anyway, on to the commentary. This week's essay is "A Brief Visit From My Soldier Son" by Charles Rush.

What struck me as I read this essay is that it’s not about modern love, it’s about ancient love. The love of a parent for a child. The most primal love there is.

The strength of this essay is the way it conveys the emotional roller coaster of parenthood. We get the mixture of pride and love and terror this father feels as his son moves through the world. He faces this moment of truth – his son is a man, and yet still his boy.

In many ways, this son is clearly a man. He’s gotten married. He’s made a career choice. He’s even done the mature work of putting his affairs in order, should the worst happen.

The fact that this particular son is a soldier makes for a wonderful contrast. The father is facing the fact that he can no longer protect his boy – and that in fact, his boy is now protecting him.

Revenge of the Essay Subjects

I've always felt a little queasy about using my family in my essays. I've wrestled with the issue of letting them read the text first, before it goes out of the house. Does this undermine the essay? Am I pre-censoring? Should I be brave rather than worry about what all anyone is going to say to me at Thanksgiving?

Well, then my good writer friend Lisa Romeo sent me this link.

Clearly, the answer is not in pre-publication. It's in post-publication. Let the subjects talk back! I love it.

I may change my mind the day my children start posting their own versions of my essays. But for right now, I think it's genius.

Monday Morning Quarterbacking XVI

Before I get into this week's critique, I thought I'd let readers in on a fiction project I'm working on with a Modern Love twist. I'm writing a series of revisionist fairy tales called Once Upon How It Should Have Happened. (Or somesuch. It's a working title.) I'm retelling or expanding on some well told tales in my own oddball fashion. So far I've done Little Red Restraining Order and Cinder Best Seller. Next up is Dating Nemo. It's a fictional Modern Love column, penned by Nemo's girlfriend, all about the long term impact of helicopter parenting.

Okay, now back to our regular programming.

Lots to like about “All I Wanted Was A Hug” by Holly Welker. A well-crafted essay that takes us to a far away land and into a tightly structured and often secretive society. That’s a great place to write from and the author gives us lots of detail about what her life as a Mormon missionary in Taiwan was like.

But that’s not what I’m going to talk about today.

Holly Welker’s essay is admirable not just for its subject matter. It’s a winner because it does not play the blame game. This essay recounts a painful period in the author’s life – a time when she felt alone, confused, in need of comfort and human connection. She found she was unable to find this solace among her fellow missionaries or in the work of the mission itself. This was the beginning of the end of her relationship with the church of her upbringing.

And yet, there are no villains in this story. Welker tells this story with emotion, intensity and detail. But not with blame.

Perhaps one of the biggest sand traps in the writing of a personal essay is the tendency to blame. Whenever we write about intensely emotional experiences, this can happen. We blame our parents, our exes, our bosses, our teachers. When we write about something hard that happened, we look for ways to make our choices look right and often that leads us to create a bad guy for contrast.

Welker doesn’t do this. Despite the rich territory for blaming – who doesn’t love to blame the church (or any religion) for being over-bearing, insensitive, sexist, etc. – she avoids this. The characters we meet in this story are there as contrast to the author – but they are also beautifully humanized. The apparently judgmental companion in the opening of the story is found stealing a few moments to play her beloved piano at the end. The fellow missionary on whom the author develops a crush won’t be the boyfriend she desires. But he compliments her, even expresses that he loves her. And even when the author has a true angry confrontation with a church supervisor, she finds a way to make him three-dimensional. Look at this bit of dialogue that takes place after Welker has yelled at an elder and created a scene in a missionary meeting.

“President’s really mad at me, isn’t he?” I said.

To which her fellow missionary replies: “I think you hurt his feelings.”

Awww.

When you can’t even hate the pushy church elder in a story about a religious break, the author has worked a nifty miracle.

Monday Morning Quarterbacking XV

This week I'm getting smart and posting before the Giants game. That way my writing ability will not hinge on the status of Eli Manning's sore foot.

What’s love got to do with it?

This week’s essay provides an interesting window into what Modern Love editors mean when they say “love.”

Because frankly, there’s not a whole lot of love in this essay.

This week’s gripping piece is by Michelle Nicole Lee and it tells a fascinating, sometimes painful tale of the author’s lifelong battle with depression. Like many a great ML essay, “When Madness Is in the Wings” takes a familiar topic and travels an unfamiliar route. Mental illness – certainly depression – have been well covered in essay land. What makes this one different? It’s the relationship the author chooses to share with the reader.

Instead of friends and family, the author tells us about her relationship with a woman she encountered as a graduate student – a woman who displays signs of mental illness and becomes a mirror and a reference point for the author as she travels her own route through depression.

And so that brings me to my original question: why is this a story that belongs in a column about love? Even as the author expresses her sympathy, her connection and finally, her gratitude to this woman in her life, she does not say she loves her. There isn’t any indication that the emotion of love, as we understand it commonly, is present at all in this story.

So the essay is interesting, because it isn’t really about love. At least not traditional love. And that gives me a new insight into the market. The title of the column is not “Love.” It is “Modern Love.” What’s the difference? The addition of the word modern allows the possibility of reinterpretation of the emotion, of relationships, of what it means to feel love.

Perhaps the author does not feel the kind of love for this woman that she might feel for family or friends. On the other hand, there is a powerful, emotional experience there. And perhaps it’s one that shouldn’t be relegated to anything less than love.

On the road...

...Monday Morning Quarterbacking will post later this week.
Besides, I'm too depressed about the Giants to face a football metaphor. Maybe by Thursday I'll be over it.

"Thank you for writing to Modern Love at The New York Times."

My latest, The Jordan Runs Through It, is off into the email ether.
Go, baby, go.

Monday Morning Quarterbacking XIV

For the Boy Who Makes Waves by Joe Blair

This essay beautifully illustrates the benefits of simplicity in writing. It is an intimate and powerful vision of a father confronting the limits of parenting and the limitless nature of love.

There are several elements of this essay that just blew me away:

*Focus. Clearly, there is a lot of rich material going on in this writer’s life. He’s a pipe fitter in Iowa getting ready to relocate the family to California. No job. No waiting family or other community. Just a full out pilgrimage west. Already, that’s a book. But Joe Blair shows his writing chops by not insisting on telling the WHOLE story and instead, taking a small slice of his book-worthy life and giving it full treatment. Smart, and great reading.

*A new take on a popular theme. There is one word that does not appear in this essay, but is thematically all over the text: Autism. I’m not trained in developmental disabilities, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say Michael appears autistic. He stims (pacing and cracking the belt in a repetitive wave-pattern). He does not communicate in a socially recognizable fashion. He sings, screams, howls. He engages in what looks to my layperson eyes as echolalia – repeating rather than responding to conversation. And autism is a popular theme in writing today. It has gained greater recognition and stirs heated debate in medical and educational circles. But this essay does not wander into that territory. There is no discussion of diagnosis, school issues, dealing with unsympathetic friends and neighbors. In fact, the essay doesn’t even utter The Word. It’s a new twist on a well-covered topic.

*Tension. The writer injects tension into this story at several junctures. The opening graf creates tension by describing items that sound scary: a padlock, a bolted six foot fence. The scene visiting the hugging saint is disconcerting, surreal, and it serves to destabilize us. In the final section, the author is describing Michael’s behavior and casually drops this line “…which might seem cute to you but to me indicates Michael is on the edge of a seizure.” And like that, we’re afraid. Is a medical crisis about to unfold? The writer’s style is quiet and restrained but he does not allow us to be lulled by it.

A quick Google tells us this author is an experienced essayist. I'm not surprised. His skill shows.

Monday Morning Quarterbacking XIII

Well, I finally got to Modern Love column that I’m not wild about. And it may be because I’m a cat person. But I don’t think so. I think it’s because I didn’t find anything new or dramatic to bond to in this essay.

This is an essay about how someone who wasn’t sure he could love a dog, finds out he can and what’s more, the dog makes his whole life better than it was before.

Nice story, but not new. And it’s not made new by the fact that the couple in this story is gay. Although that does allow the author to get off a great line expressing his concern about owning a long-haired miniature dachschund. “She’s too small! She’s just too gay!”

I thought the essay was well written. But it didn’t turn me in any new directions. In the end, it was just another happiness is a warm puppy tale. Ever since John Grogan managed to make a mint off his Marley, the world has been quite well-populated by How Great Is My Dog stories.

I guess this essay does give me one bit of good news: you don’t necessarily have to tell your deepest, darkest secret to make Modern Love. I’ve read Bob Morris before, in the NYT and elsewhere. This is not his most revelatory piece.

Maybe the editors decided the column needed a break from the My Most Humiliating Moment trend?

Monday Morning Quarterbacking XII -- the short version.

I’m too backed up this week to do a full critique -- but I do want to point out the value of good timing when it comes to essay writing. Sunday’s Modern Love essay “My Mother’s Imposed Fast: I Feel Her Hunger” by Natasha Singh ran on erev Yom Kippur -- the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, marked by a day of fasting. Obviously, that’s not an accident. The essay ran at a time when many readers would be thinking about the fast they would undertake a few hours later.

So had that essay dropped into the Modern Love email box today, it might have missed its news hook.

Monday Morning Quarterbacking XI: Modern Humiliation?

Sue Shapiro (last week’s ML author) made a key reveal in her Q and A with this humble blog last week.

“I teach a class called Instant Gratification Takes Too Long. One of my assignments is: Write about the most humiliating thing that ever happened to you. It’s produced something like ten Modern Love columns and 12 Lives columns. There’s something about writing about the worst thing that ever happened to you that works. “

Certainly, this week’s ML essay fits that pattern. “Forget the Men. Pick a Guy,” by Cathleen Calbert is an essay that looks like it’s going to be a light-hearted socio-semantic rant about the difference between men and guys. Until Graf 14, when it hangs a sharp right with the phrase “After I was molested in a deserted schoolyard –“

Wow, way to move the center of gravity in an essay. My head almost swiveled off.

At that point, the essay moves decidedly from lighthearted rant into familiar Modern Love territory: The most humiliating thing that ever happened to me. Calbert keeps her man vs. guy debate rolling throughout the text, but the heart of it, the gripping moment, is the reveal that she was molested by two teenage boys from the neighborhood, and then further victimized by her father (a typical “man”) who blamed her for not screaming.

I liked this essay very much and I was especially impressed with the technical skill of the writer – she didn’t rush her story, she trusted her writing to keep us with her until she was ready to land her big punch.

But I’m not sure what to do with the realization that humiliation is often a key component of success in this market.

I’m thinking back over the essays I’ve critiqued here over the last few months. And many of them have that common theme of “my most humiliating moment.” The 70something woman whose doctors thought her sex life was weird. The 50something woman whose dog bloodied her new lover’s nose.

They’re not all about a humiliating moment. But a lot of them are. Sue Shapiro has revealed a truth and Cathleen Calbert is just one of many ML essayists to back it up. So, the question is: what are we, who want to be in this market, prepared to do with the information? Are we willing to go there?

Reading Forever with Boys

Another essay to join the Not Ready for Modern Love Collection. In this one, I think I get closer in topic and tone to my goal, but ultimately, this doesn't clear the hurdle. Maybe it lacks drama? The ticking clock I've set up is artificial so perhaps there's no real tension in the story. Anyway, Onward.

Reading Forever with Boys

By Ellen Neuborne

I have a copy of Judy Blume’s Forever. It’s ten years old and it’s never been read. I purchased it at the now-closed Astor Place Barnes and Noble when my daughter was a baby. As I nursed her in the one semi-discrete corner of the coffee shop I happily day-dreamed about when she’d be a teenager and I would give her this book. We’d read it together, I knew, and have long mother-daughter talks about love, sex and relationships.

I kept that fantasy fully intact until this month, when my oldest prepared to enter high school. My oldest is not my daughter. My oldest is a boy. And it’s a very different thing, reading Forever with boys.

As his first day of school approached, I took the book out of its hiding place – and promptly put it back. I couldn’t do it. It’s not like I’d never discussed sex with my son. We’d given him the birds-and-the-bees lecture years ago (to which he had responded in typical 7-year-old-fashion: “That’s disgusting!”) And I had no illusions as to what he’d already seen -- on the Internet, on cable. Heck, his favorite sports programs are sponsored by Viagra. He’d been briefed.

But my vision for Forever was not to have a sex conversation, but a love conversation. What did it mean, I’d say to my daughter, to be in love? How and why does sex enter into that conversation? How do you know what you want and when you want it? How do you say that to your boyfriend?

Or girlfriend?

I had never envisioned the Forever conversation as anything but woman-to-woman. Clearly, I was caught short.

Thinking I could get around my hang up, I marched up to the remaining B&N in my neighborhood and purchased Changing Bodies, Changing Lives and handed that to my son.

“When you’re reading, if you have any questions, you can ask me. Or your dad.”

“Whatever,” he responded.

When I went into his room later that week to pick up his laundry, I noticed the book open on his bed. I patted myself on the back mentally for being such a good, educating mother. I peeked a little closer to see – it was open to the page on sexual fantasies. Oy vey! I fled.

And worse, I knew I’d cheated. I’d skirted the issue, avoided the hard part. If it was my responsibility to face and educate my daughter, did that not also apply to my son? Is it not also our mission to raise feminist boys?

I read Forever for the first time in junior high, standing in the stacks of Community Bookstore while my mother shopped at the Key Food across the street. I read it 15-20 pages at a time, as my mother’s shopping schedule would allow. I have no idea if she would have purchased it for me. It had sex in it. I wasn’t even brave enough to ask.

I read it again as a graduate student, this time more critically, looking for ways the author used sex as a craft element of the novel. I was stunned and moved as I read with adult eyes, the story of Katherine, the 18-year-old protagonist, who moved through her first relationship with clarity, self-awareness and maturity. She was no push over, this young woman. She was fully in control of her life, her sexuality, her relationships. She was everything I would want my daughter to know and admire.

So, what did I want for my boy?

I tried buying a new copy of Forever for him. I thought maybe I could do it if I wasn’t giving my daughter’s book away. Didn’t help me. Now I just had two books stuffed into my nightstand drawer. And I think they were both laughing at me.

But finally, in the weeks before he would step out into the full world of high school, I did it. I took a copy of Forever, knocked on his door.

“This is a book I’d like you to read,” I squeaked out. “I think you’ll like it and there’s lots for us to talk about in here.”

He eyed it. “Looks like girls book,” he said.

I tapped into my mother/daughter daydream for the response. “This book is a story about young people in love. There’s a lot here that I want you to think about, that I want you to know about, as you go to high school and start, well --”

“-- meeting women?” he supplied helpfully.

God, this was harder that I expected.

And then he sat up from where he’d been slouched on his bed and gave me the signal that he really was prepared to listen: he took his ear phones from around his neck and placed them on the nightstand. “Why do I have to read a book? Can’t you just tell me what you want to tell me?” he asked.

So I did as he asked and took the direct route. For the next few minutes he listened politely while I pontificated about girls and respect and listening and inner beauty. And sex. How sex changes everything. How it’s more than a physical act and you can’t possibly imagine how it changes you and changes a relationship until it’s already over. How I wished I could do it all over again, knowing what I know, that I wanted him to read and think and ask questions.

When I stopped, he looked at me. “All done?”

“Yes,” I said. “Do you want to say anything?”

“No, it’s fine,” he said. “Whatever.”

I put Forever on his nightstand and left. In a few days, it was covered up by his copies of “Sporting News” and “Modern Drummer.”

If you’re looking for a nice, wrapped-up, closure ending, it won’t happen here. Teenagers don’t give you closure. They are an open-ended conversation. When you say Forever, they say whatever. That’s what I have to embrace as my oldest starts high school. You hope they’ve heard you, but you don’t know for sure. No book can give you the certainty of forever. With teenagers, you only get today.

Ellen Neuborne is writing a novel about mothers and daughters and sexual politics.

Monday Morning Quarterbacking X

Are our families fair game?

Every essay writer faces this at some point. Families make great stories. When we write about our families, do we owe them anything?

I thought about this issue a lot in the last week. Sue Shapiro’s essay brought it up. Hers is an essay that reveals quite a bit about her husband and his pack rat tendencies. And I’ve also faced it in my own Essay of the Month, "Reading Forever with Boys" which is about my son.

What do we owe our families when we write about them?

Sue handles the issue nicely by portraying her husband as somewhat whacky but ultimately lovable. Among the items he hoards are 100 personalized yarmulkes from their wedding. Awwwwwwww. So while the essay reveals some personal stuff, it’s not bad stuff. Also, her husband is a writer and presumably familiar with what goes into a personal essay. If he got a lot of emails on Sunday morning ribbing him for his pack rat-itis, he probably wasn’t surprised. He knows how the game is played.

So what about my son, who is 14? Can he consent – with true understanding – to appearing in my personal essays? I’ve written about him before. Here’s one that I’m particularly proud of: http://dir.salon.com/story/mwt/feature/2004/09/02/protest_parenting/print.html

And I’m working on another one now that features my daughter – and my long-standing phobia about cheerleaders.

Writers have long leveraged their families for material. But this is the age of the Internet. As I say to my children when they post on Facebook or other social networks: the Internet is forever. What you post today can be Googled for a long, long time.

I know an essayist whose policy is don’t ask, don’t apologize. “I don’t need permission to write about my life,” she says. Even if other people are in it? “They can write their own memoirs.”

I see her point, but I’m not willing to go there. I let my family read before I hit send. My children read essays that feature them before I send them out. My husband blessed my essay on Green Sex before it went out for public viewing. Because maybe I don’t need permission to write about my life. But I do want their okay to write about theirs.

Susan Shapiro Speaks

The latest generous Modern Love columnist to share her story with us is Susan Shapiro. She is the author of today’s Modern Love offering “Making Room for My Junk Man” and the new novel “Speed Shrinking” (St. Martin’s Press). She has a lot of great information about what makes a great Modern Love essay, what it’s like to be edited by Daniel Jones and why those of us who have put a few months, even a few years, into trying to crack this market have nothing to whine about.

Tell us about your path to Modern Love publication.

This is about my tenth try. I’ve been teaching since 1993 and I can’t tell you how many of my students have gotten into Modern Love. I was like the wedding planner who couldn’t get married. I’ve been writing essays for 28 years and this was making me crazy. At a certain point, I thought: I’ll never get it. I’ll just help all my students get it. But I kept trying.

Did you have any inkling that this essay was The One?

The minute I brought it to my writing group, everybody cracked up. So I had an idea.

Tell us about the editing process.

Dan is a brilliant editor. He is like a good shrink. I always say a writing teacher is just like a therapist except we get paid less. Dan was great. He said – and I’m paraphrasing -- that he likes pieces that start in one emotional place and go to another. The early draft of my essay did not have enough of that transformation. I teach essay writing. If there’s not a transformation, it seems staid and one-note. I am good at helping others but I didn’t see that in my own work until he pointed it out. Dan was very incisive.

What advice do you have for us wannabes?

Read the column. I always say to people: Buy Dan’s book, The Modern Love Anthology, read it. The more you read, the more you understand the tone, the length, the structure of the Modern Love essay. Really analyze them. They tend to be high concept. “I married my gay friend for his green card.” “I fell in love with a man who wears an electronic ankle bracelet.” The biggest mistake my students make is they write, “I had a bad breakup, Bummer.” Those don’t have a beginning, middle and end. Go for the bigger, higher concept. Go for deeper meaning. And darker. Go darker. Write about the worst thing that ever happened to you. I teach a class called Instant Gratification Takes Too Long. One of my assignments is: Write about the most humiliating thing that ever happened to you. It’s produced something like ten Modern Love columns and 12 Lives columns. There’s something about writing about the worst thing that ever happened to you that works.

Is your Modern Love essay connected at all to the promotion of your new book, Speed Shrinking?

I’ve literally been trying to get into Modern Love since the first day the column started so I can’t say I planned this. But with my novel out now, it couldn’t have been better timing.

Monday Morning Quarterbacking IX

In this week’s Modern Love column, the author provides an excellent lesson in choosing your moment.

“Giving Myself Consent to Let Go,” by Elizabeth Scarboro is an essay about a single thing: a woman’s decision-making process around the frozen sperm sample of her now-deceased husband. It is the parameters of this topic that make the essay so successful. The author has reined in what is obviously a long and complex story and told one slice of it.

Clearly, this is a much longer tale. The author met her first husband as a teenager – a man with an illness they knew would eventually kill him. The story of their life together has got to be rich with drama. It could fill a book. Probably it already does – the author has deftly used the cut line space to let us know there’s more where this comes from. “Elizabeth Scarboro, a writer in Berkeley, Calif., is working on a memoir.” But in the writing of this essay, the author chooses one element of the tale and sticks there. Her restraint allows the reader to become involved without being overwhelmed by details.

Finding focus is often a huge hurdle for essay writers. I encounter it myself in my work and I run into it all the time in the essay and memoir classes I teach. Writers have a tendency to want to tell the whole story. They feel compelled to fill you in on all the back story, everything that lead up to the moment. In doing so, we dilute what we came to say. The best essay is a slice of a great story – a moment in time, captured and presented as its own little island of truth.