Looking Ahead

I always feel a kind of heaviness at the end of the fall semester. Every year as it winds down, and as my students work diligently (I hope) on their final papers, projects, and revisions, I can't ignore the fact that it's the end of another year as well. With its shorter days and chillier air, December provokes sobering reflection on the previous months, and--like usual--I have very mixed feelings about this particular year. On the one hand, it brought some incredible joy--the publication of my second book, That Hidden Road, for one, and the all-but-improbable World Series win of my beloved Chicago Cubs, for another. Yet there has also been the bleak political landscape and all the mess stemming from what has been--in my opinion--the most chaotic and meanest Presidential election of my lifetime.

For these reasons, 2016 stands as a year I'll regard with much more ambivalence than normal. And of course, the New Year is an arbitrary point; the repercussions of the previous year always continue into the next. But right now, the fear and uncertainty is way too big to take on, so I'll concentrate on something a lot more manageable (and self-serving)--some upcoming events early in 2017 where I'll be reading from and/or signing copies of That Hidden Road. Sometimes all we can do is share a little bit of ourselves with other people in the hopes of making a connection, and it's in this spirit that I look ahead to these places where I've been given the opportunity to do so:

On Thursday, January 12, I'll be at Anderson's Bookshop in Downers Grove, Illinois, at 7pm. For more info, click HERE.

On Sunday, February 5, I'll be at Warwick's Books in La Jolla, California, at 12 noon. For more info, click HERE.

On Tuesday, February 14, I'll be the featured author at the "Writers Read" program at the Fallbrook Library in Fallbrook, California, at 6pm. For more info, click HERE.

In addition to their intrinsic rewards, I've always found teaching and writing to be distractions from the sometimes oppressive onslaught of daily life, and I'm certainly hoping that they continue to be in 2017.

Thank You, Thank You, Thank You

Well, it’s almost here. In less than three months, on October 1st, my second book—That Hidden Road: A Memoir—will be released. It’s the story of a lot of things (and I’ve excerpted parts of it on this blog), but the framing narrative is the two months that I spent crossing the U.S. on my bicycle. Incidentally, if you’re interested, you can read the first chapter ON MY WEBSITE and preorder the book HERE.

It’s hard to put into words what it’s like to hold an actual copy of this book; for me, doubting that it would ever see the light of day became a twice- and sometimes thrice-daily activity.

In truth, I thought the whole thing would be a lot easier.

I don’t mean the bike ride. I knew that would be tough and it was. No, I mean writing this book. Way, way back, I thought, How hard could this be? I blogged regularly when I was on the road, and I kept a journal, too, so the book was pretty much already written. All I had to do was string together the posts, add a few things from the journal, do a little editing, and ta-DA…a book!

Well, it didn’t work out that way at all, and I’ve been writing and teaching writing long enough to have known better. In fact, I shouldn’t have been surprised to discover that in every way except for physical strain, the riding was a lot easier than the writing. It certainly took a lot less time. I’m reminded of something I wrote very late in the book, something about being incredibly innocent or stupid or (most likely) both as I stood on my bike, Rusty, at the beginning of the ride with no real idea of what I was getting into.

Turns out, that’s a pretty accurate way to describe writing a book, too. Not a single word written, and all those pages to go…

The truth is that I wouldn’t have gotten through either journey without a lot of help from a lot of people.

First, the ride. Deep thanks to everyone who helped me along the way—the people who stopped to see if I was all right or needed anything, the people who housed and fed me, the people who read my blog and left a comment or two, and the many people who just saw a guy with a ton of crap on his bike and decided to talk to him for a few minutes. All of them made a lonely endeavor a lot less so. I especially want to thank the people who were a big part of my trip but—due to the mercenary demands of storytelling—didn’t make it fully into the book: Brian and Angie McNeece; Eileen and Richard Travis and family; Jody and Dave Travis and family; Dave and Pamela Craig; Paul Winer; Daniel Young; Tom and Stanna Galbraith; Jake Heath; Karen and Jeff Wilson; Ron from Boulder (I never did get his last name); John and Sharlene Sampson; Bill Haddan and family; Alan White; Lance, Michelle, and Christian Freezeland; David and Erin Anthony; Eddie West; Christine North; and Chris Nielsen.

Special thanks to Jan and Bill Montgomery, who were the perfect guides through the “heart” of this journey, and to Tom and Ann McConnell, who were the perfect guides through the “tail” of it.

Thanks to all my family and friends who helped me recharge during my Chicago “intermission”: my brother Vince, his wife Jean, and their kids; my mom and dad; Pat Gonder and Teresa Aguinaldo; Jerry Karlin and Karen Klebba; Paul Sternenberg; Marc Kaplanes and Julie Hubbard. And a special thank you to Greg Hart for the dance and plane ticket (two separate things).

And the ride would have been possible but a lot harder without the work of whoever created the iPhone apps for “Track My Tour” and “Warmshowers,” so thanks, Anonymous Programmers.

Along those lines (and as regards the book), I owe a big debt to whoever created and maintains Google Earth and Wikipedia; both were instrumental when my memory or perspective failed, or when I needed to find out something about Dodge City, or the Irwin Cobb Bridge, or the Tennessee Valley Authority. I’m also indebted to Elliot Willensky’s When Brooklyn Was the World (Harmony Books, 1986) for helping to add a little color to my dad’s memories.

Big thanks and an even bigger hug to my favorite geologist, pseudo-sister, and dear friend Suzy Gonder, who patiently answered all my questions about rocks and geological time.

A big thank you to Lawson Mabry, who closely read and reread the sections about his family and its history and has offered nothing but hospitality and encouragement to me since I met him. Thanks also to Brian McNeece and Erin Anthony for their generous and rigorous readings of an early draft of the book. Big thanks to members of my Palomar family for the same: Barb Neault Kelber, Deborah Paes de Barros, Jack Quintero, and Carlton Smith. My colleagues are, quite simply, the best, and I’m also grateful for the friendship and encouragement of Leanne Maunu, Andrea Bell, Teresa Laughlin, and Jenny Fererro (to whom I might still owe a Clif Bar). And thanks, too, to my other readers: Pat Gonder, John Lucas (who also helped with the comics), and Colin Rafferty.

In terms of reading, I owe quite a bit to two assistant agents at two different agencies—Jennifer Herrera and Lena Yarbrough—who gave me invaluable notes that resulted in a much, much better final version.

Special thanks to Robert James Russell and the editors of Midwestern Gothic for publishing sections of this book. Many thanks to Hannah Krieger and the editors of the Georgetown Review for the same.

A big thank you to the good folks who run the San Diego Book Awards for honoring my work at a time when I needed some encouragement.

Huge thanks to Kevin Atticks, Alexandra Chouinard, Nicole DeVincentis (and her infinite patience with me) and all of the other hard workers at Apprentice House Press for their support, insight, and direction—all of which helped turn my dream into the reality of the book.

Thanks, too, to my Aunt Angie McConnell, who provided stories and details about my maternal grandfather. And a big thank you to my dad, Thomas Versaci, who patiently retold many stories, answered a ton of questions, enumerated details, and didn’t really care when I added some of my own. One of the gifts of this entire journey has been to sort through his memories with him.

As always, I’m deeply thankful for my students, many of whom were interested in my trip and some of whom had the energy and patience to read parts of this book—I’m thinking especially of Sarah Bates, Nolan Turner, and Deb Ebert. Working with all of my students inspires me daily.

And finally, I am grateful beyond words for Shannon Lienhart, Nick Versaci, and Tony Versaci—without them the book wouldn’t exist.

RIP, Darling

"In writing, you must kill your darlings."

--William Faulkner

             I've been working on the final revisions to That Hidden Road, which are due to my publisher by February 1st. This deadline, of course, is not the hard part. The hard part is following Faulkner's sage advice to cut those words, sentences, scenes, and chapters of our writing that we may have great affection for but that don't serve the needs of the story. Thus, I present to you one of my darlings, whose life I snuffed out yesterday. I used a pillow, so there was lots of thrashing around. Also, I wept the entire time. To ease the pain, I've also included some pictures.

"The Gospel According to John from Portland"

Somewhere in the Ozarks I met a biker heading in the opposite direction who told me that if I went through Farmington, Missouri, I had to stop at Al’s Place. The warm rain pelted us as we stood there astride our bikes, so I didn’t get many details about it other than that it was a biker’s hostel. I had forgotten about this conversation until late afternoon several days later, when—racing the rain—I ride into a little town and see painted on the ground the words “Al’s Place TA Trail Inn” along with two white arrows.

These stenciled announcements reappear every couple of blocks, turning me this way and that until I’m near the center of Farmington at the corner of Franklin and Liberty and staring at a two-story limestone and red brick building.

I peer into the windows in front, and all I see is a storeroom stacked with boxes and chairs. In back, though, there’s a black steel staircase leading up to a door. 

I lean Rusty against the stairs and walk up. The door has a keypad lock and a phone number to call, which turns out to be an office at city hall. Once I tell the woman on the other end that I’m a biker, she gives me the code.

Inside is a space that looks like a high-end urban loft. There’s a laundry room, a television area with two big couches, a table and chairs by a full kitchen, a big bathroom, a computer table in back, and several rooms filled with bunkbeds, clean sheets, and towels.

I call “Hello?” but no one responds.

Back downstairs, I detach my two rear panniers, my two front panniers, my rear bag, and my handlebar bag. This doesn’t take nearly as long as it sounds, but carrying them up is a different story. Because of the weight, I make two trips up the stairs and into the first room—the smallest, with only one set of bunk beds. Rusty comes next, hoisted over my shoulder with one hand while I grab the metal railing with the other and negotiate the rain-slick steps.
Once everything is upstairs, I take a closer look around. The bathroom has two showers and two sinks, and like the rest of the place, they’re spotless. Counting up all of the beds in the rooms, I figure that fourteen people can bed down here. More—many more—if some are willing to sleep on the couches or the floors. The computer has internet access, the television has basic cable, and the fridge and cupboards are stocked with pasta, sauce, crackers, drinks, and enough pots, pans, and utensils to cook just about anything.

I take a shower, and by the time I get out, the skies have opened up and the earlier drizzle is now a bona fide downpour. I hear thundercracks, too, and the last place I want to be in an electrical storm is out on the open road with a big hunk of steel between my legs.

On the wall opposite the kitchen is a gigantic frame containing a yellow, red, and blue biking jersey with “Long John Silver’s” emblazoned across the front. Next to this jersey is a sheet of typewritten paper explaining that the “Al” of Al’s Place is Al Dziewa, an avid biker who owned a Long John Silver’s in town. In 2003, just like me, he was diagnosed with cancer, and in 2005, the year I was cancer-free for two years, he died at the age of forty-nine. Some friends on the city council voted to turn this building, a 140-year-old decommissioned county jail, into a biker’s hostel.

           

             I poke around some more and find a sheet on the wall by the door labeled “Al’s Rules.” The only one that gives me pause reads “ABSOLUTELY no bikes upstairs. Please lock your bikes in the storeroom downstairs with the key provided.” To the right is a key attached to a wooden dowel. I glance into my room, where Rusty is propped up against the back wall.

I look out into the rain and tell myself that I’ll lock Rusty up when the rain lifts. I don’t think Al would mind.

***

After the rain stops about an hour later, I don’t move Rusty, but I do walk a few blocks to take a look around Farmington and get something to eat. By the time I get back, two more bikers are there. Alan from New Zealand and John from Portland. Both are riding the TransAmerica Trail, but in opposite directions. After the introductions, Alan goes back to checking his email at the computer down the hall and John joins me by the TV area. He looks to be about fifty, and he’s wrist-deep into a quart of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.

“My son tells me I need to eat one of these every couple of days and drink a half gallon of juice every night,” he says.

Over the next hour, I get to hear much more about John’s son and his wealth of knowledge about bike touring. I hear all of his son’s tips about nutrition. I hear all about why his son believes that touring with a trailer—as John is doing—is far superior to touring with panniers. Emboldened by his son’s obvious authority in all matters bicycling, John issues some authoritative statements of his own regarding the importance of sticking exactly to the TA Trail as opposed to “cheating” by finding shortcuts. He also asks me no less than three times what my name is. Now I don’t claim to be a memorable guy, but I’ve never had problems with people forgetting my unusual name. I’m convinced that he’s trying to establish some weird kind of dominance in the conversation.

I turn on the television and find ESPN.

“You’re not going to tell me that you miss TV, are you?”

I just look at him.

“God, getting away from all that has been one of the true blessings of touring. My son told me how much I’d appreciate being out on the road, but I had no idea.”

The SportsCenter guys are sitting down with LeBron James, who plans to announce what team he’ll be playing with next year. “You like basketball, John?”

“Do I like basketball?” he says, looking thoughtfully up at the ceiling. “Now that’s an interesting question…”

He doesn’t say anything else for a good fifteen seconds. I figure that as long as I keep looking at him expectantly, he’s going to keep quiet, so I turn back to the television.

“Well,” he says. “I used to do some IT work for the Blazers, and let’s just say that I had some insights into the sport.”

Or let’s not, I think. Better yet, why don’t you jam some ice cream into your ear? Or does your son not recommend that?

I gesture at the TV.

“Watch,” I say, “they’ll take what should be a five-second statement and stretch it into an hour.”

“Oh, he won’t say anything,” John announces.

“Yeah, it’s a special show for him to make his statement.”

John laughs, shaking his head. “That’s not how it works. The agents are in charge of this whole deal. The fans just eat it up, no offense.”

Before I have a chance to hit John between the eyes with the remote, Alan comes over and sits between us. The talk shifts back to biking, and Alan is more than happy to ask John all sorts of questions about the road ahead. Ten minutes later, when the wire ticker on the bottom of the screen delivers the news that LeBron James will leave Cleveland for Miami, I’m tempted to jump up and shout “Aha!” but by then I’ve resigned myself to the fact that John is a douchey little peckerwood and I hate him.

***

A little later the front door opens and a guy in a suit walks in. He introduces himself as Greg Beavers, a member of the Farmington City Council. He’s one of the guys who helped turn the old prison into Al’s Place, and he likes to stop by to meet the bikers and find out where they’re from. Alan, being from New Zealand, makes Greg’s eyes go wide, at which point John quickly points out that he and Alan are actually biking the same distance.

“So, the only thing we ask is that you keep the bikes downstairs,” Greg says. “I saw someone’s chained to the railing…”

“That’s mine,” Alan says.

“We have a storeroom downstairs,” Greg says, looking at us. “Did you guys find that…?”

Rusty is about twenty feet behind us, behind the closed door of my room. It’s pouring again outside.

“Yeah,” I say. “The key was right over by the front door.”

I’m smiling at Greg, but I can feel John’s eyes on me.

“Yes, I locked my bike down there,” John says. “Is there more than one storage room?” he asks Greg.

“No, why?”

“I thought my bike was the only one down there,” John says, turning to me for an explanation. Greg’s eyes follow his. He doesn’t know what this is all about; he’s just politely following the flow of the conversation.

I should just say that I didn’t see the rule until after I brought my bike up and that it was raining and that I plan to take it down as soon as there’s a break in the weather—all reasonable courses of action—but before I can get any of this out I hear myself say, “Nope, I put it down there when I got here.”

John frowns and tilts his head as if he’s analyzing some evidence that doesn’t quite add up. “Hmmm. Wonder why I didn’t see it.”

“I put in the back corner.” I’m committed now and can’t blink.

Greg’s clearly not interested and wants to get going. “Well, listen…if you guys can think of anything else you might need, let us know.”

Greg takes off, Alan heads back to the computer, and I retreat to my room to get away from John.

***

I leave Al’s Place early the next morning, partly to stay ahead of the rain and partly to avoid having to talk with John again. Unfortunately, he’s eating a bowl of cereal as I walk out of the bathroom. He’s still eating it or maybe another one—as per his son’s recommendation, no doubt—after I get dressed and carry my bags down the stairs. He’s still there when I return and head to my room, and when I come back out with Rusty, he’s standing on the edge of the kitchen, nodding and smiling tightly as he delivers his final judgment.

“I thought so.”

Good News!

Just a quick update that I'm making in part because I have timely news to share and in part because it's been over a month since my last post.

So, the news. I received word just before Thanksgiving that my memoir, That Hidden Road, was accepted for publication by Apprentice House Press, and the fact of all this is still sinking in. AH is a small press that's affiliated with Loyola University in Maryland, and it's a great fit for two main reasons.

First, in the editors' wish list were "travel stories" and "memoirs of personal discovery." Check and check.

Second, AH has a story that really resonates with me. Here's an excerpt from their website:

Apprentice House is the nation’s first entirely student-managed book publisher. Students at Loyola University Maryland are responsible for every aspect of the publishing process, from acquisitions to design and publication of every book. Our mission is, first and foremost, to educate students about the book publishing process.

As a program within the Communication Department at Loyola University Maryland, it is driven by student work conducted in four courses: Introduction to Book Publishing, Manuscript Evaluation & Development, Book Design & Production, and Book Marketing & Promotion.

Therefore, students in these courses serve as staff in Apprentice House’s acquisitions, design, and marketing departments, respectively.  After students leave the courses, AH professors and AH student staff sustain the on-going operation of the company and market its frontlist and backlist titles.

Though I spend a fair amount of time writing and like doing it (most of the time), I consider myself a teacher first, and the teaching project of which I'm most proud is my college's literary magazine, Bravura, which is a much, much smaller version of what they do at AH.

So I'm looking forward to working with the students and teachers at this press, and I'm looking forward to seeing That Hidden Road in print, which should happen in or around next fall.

Next up is my deadline is February 1, when I need to turn in the final revised manuscript. So, if you'll excuse me, I've got work to do...

Some Good News

I’ve been on a brief hiatus. Last fall I took over as department chair, and I’ve been busy figuring out my new duties, at least one of which is to figure out how to sleep during meetings without calling attention to myself (hint—it’s easy; that’s what everyone is doing).

Anyway, I’ll be back with more posts soon, but I wanted to get something quick out to share the good news—my book, That Hidden Road, just won the San Diego Book Award in the “Unpublished Memoir” category. I was selected as a finalist earlier in the spring, but I didn’t want to say anything until they selected the winners (a complete list of which can be found here).

Parts of That Hidden Road have appeared on this blog, and I’ve been fortunate to publish a couple of stand-alone chapters (in slightly different form) in the journals Midwestern Gothic and the Georgetown Review. My job now is to get the whole thing published. There have been some close calls (stories in themselves), but no go. Maybe now luck is on my side…

Voices from the Road

I'm working on a longer, more text-heavy post (teaser: it might have the words "bucket list" in the title), but in the meantime, I wanted to share some of the comics from my recently-completed book, That Hidden Road. The images below represent a sampling, and they are sprinkled throughout the manuscript. I decided to draw and write these comics because, when I bicycled across the country, I had a lot of encounters with people that stuck with me, but they didn't seem substantive enough to warrant space in the narrative proper. These comics seemed like a good solution, especially because I've always thought that the medium excels at amplifying quiet moments.

Here they are:

To any publishers and/or agents out there, the book is finished and clocks in at 100,000 words. And if the fact that I have cancer makes you interested out of pity, I'm totally okay with that...

Numbers Don't Lie

Good news to report: I got the results of my blood tests back after the first week of chemo, and my two tumor markers--alpha Fetoprotein (AFP) and human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG)--are dropping. So, the evidence is strong that the chemo is doing more than just turning me into a naked mole rat.

Also dropping, unfortunately, are my white blood cells, which apparently are important in fighting off germs and bacteria. That means some changes for me: I'm carrying a little bottle of Purell and squirting it on anything and anyone I come in contact with, I'm not driving on any roads where there's a Taco Bell, and I'm no longer honoring the "Five Second Rule" (although truthfully, I've always stretched it to more of a "Five Minute Rule," especially if the fallen object was candy. Or bacon.)

In other news, with some help from my buddy John, I've got all of the comics done that are going to go in my second book, That Hidden Road. There are about 35 pages all together that will be intercut with the larger narrative, and I may post some of these pages here if there's any interest. That, by the way, is my non-subtle invitation to any readers out there to express some interest.

Round Two

When I went through chemotherapy ten years ago, I kept a journal. Today, on the day before I start “Round Two – Ten Years Later,” I thought I’d dig it up and see what was on my mind. Here’s what I found:

Sunday, July 13, 2003

It’s the night before my chemotherapy begins. What am I thinking about?

How badly will it kick my ass?

Will there be any long term effects?

How bad will Nick and Tony be frightened?

How bad will I be frightened?

Will it even work?

I can’t dwell on this last question too long. It has to work. It’s important that I stay positive about the whole thing. I know I’m tough and that I’ve got a lot to live for. I also know that I’ve had it pretty fucking easy for all these years, so maybe I’m due for a little suffering. That’s fine—that’s life, and I accept it. I don’t think that my kids are due for any suffering, though.

When I think about dying, I think about the people I’ll leave behind and how devastated they’ll be. But I’m too arrogant—or stupid?—to think that I’ll really die. I’ll probably feel so shitty that I’ll wish I was dead, but I do believe I’m going to come out of this OK.

Other than surviving, I hope that I come out changed in some way. I want to learn something from all this, other than a bunch of tired clichés like life is fragile, you never know what might come next, blah blah blah bullshit bullshit bullshit. I know all this already. Maybe what I’m hoping for is some perspective. Or something about fear.

The bottom line is that I’ve never really faced a struggle, and I’m anxious to see how I’ll do.

Turned out that my thoughts were pretty on target.

There was an incident during my second week of treatment—a severe allergic reaction to one of the drugs I was given—that sent me to the ER and left me feeling so shitty that I did, in fact, want to die (a story for another time, readers).

I came out changed, too, and it had everything in the world to do with perspective. My bout with cancer set in motion a lot of changes in my life and led me straight to the seat of my bicycle and a two-month journey across the country. Since I finished that three years ago, I’ve been working on my book (That Hidden Road) about the ride, about cancer, about a lot of things. Now comes the tricky part of convincing a publisher that people might find it interesting.

And I did learn something about fear. Or rather, I thought I learned it but didn’t know until just recently whether it was true. When I came out the other side ten years ago, I told myself and anyone who was interested that I never expected to be that frightened for myself again.

Sure, when my doctor told me the news a few weeks ago, my first feeling was that I was in an elevator whose cable had snapped. But the shock didn’t last too long, and what replaced it was calmness. I thought that I was in some kind of denial, but the calmness has stuck with me over these weeks, and it has a voice, too, that’s been telling me You’ve been here before (well, not the surgery, but still), you know what you’re in for, and you know what you didn’t know before—you can handle a struggle. There’s no new fear here.

When I saw my students last week, I told them that cancer is a shitty thing any way you look at it, but one thing I took from it was self-knowledge. Cancer taught me something about myself that I suspected but didn’t really know until it came along to show me: I’m a survivor.

The Evolution of a Page

Time has really gotten away from me. I can’t believe that my last entry was way back in June. Between now and then I’ve been to Chicago twice, taken a trip up the California coast to look at colleges with my high school senior son, and waded through armies of costumed fans at Comic-Con.

Oh, and I finished my book.

To recap, the book is called That Hidden Road, and it’s about my solo cross-country bicycle ride, which I made in the summer of 2010. It’s also about those parts of my life that made me think I needed to go on a long, long ride by myself.

I knew from the start that I wanted comics in the book, and I knew that I wanted to draw them myself. Problem was, my drawing skills were a little rusty and I’ve never made comics before.

As I drafted and revised the manuscript, I played around with some ideas for comics and eventually came up with three main types. Backin early December, I posted a few pages from one of these, which I called the “StuffI Saw” pages. Pretty simple idea—one page of six panels each in a more or less “realistic,” sketchbook-y style. The second group of comics I called the “Voices from the Road” pages. These would also be single-page comics, but have only four panels. The style would be a little more cartoonlike and focus on some people I met along the way who made brief but memorable impressions on me. I finished these over the summer. Finally, the third group of comics would be more sustained narrative; there’s a brief two-page story in the prologue called “Pre-Ride Jitters,” and there’s a longer (eight pages) story in the middle of the book called “Welcome to Springview Farm.”

This story covers the few days that I spent on a farm in Missouri—a farm that belongs to Jan and Bill Montgomery, who happen to be the mom and stepdad of my best friend. I didn’t want to fold that story into one of the other chapters; instead, I wanted it to stand on its own even though I couldn’t—at least early on in the writing—say why.

Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I decided to write a blog post that went into some detail about how part of this story came together, and I thought that the easiest way to do that would be to document the evolution of a single page from “Welcome to Springview Farm.” The page in question is the third of the story, and it covers part of the tour that Jan gave me of the farm and house.

In writing this and assembling the materials I used, I found it very helpful to me as a writer to step back and examine my creative process a little more closely. As I said before, despite my lifelong love of comics and the fact that I teach and write about them, I’ve never—until this book—tried to make comics myself, at least not in any organized way. So I thought I’d give a shout-out to several helpful sources along the way, including Scott McCloud’s Making Comics, Barrington Barber’s How to Draw Everything, Bruce Blitz’s The Big Book of Cartooning, the many Facebook postings by Ed Piskor of his work on Hip Hop Family Tree, several Youtube videos by Alison Bechdel about the construction of Fun Home, my friend and comics goddess Mary Fleener, and conversations with students much more talented than I am in this regard.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly how the story came into being. I think I got the idea within the first hour or two I spent with Jan and Bill. They're incredible people who are also pretty wacky, and as Jan showed me around and told me stories, I realized that the written word alone couldn’t do justice to this bizarre and comic experience. I was going to have to tell the story through comics.

Coming to this realization was the easy part. In writing this book, I’ve found that the most challenging part of memoir comes in trying to shape and narrativize your experience. Fact is, there’s a lot of dead time in our lives, but story demands at least some kind of structure. To get there, we need to arrange, amplify, and discard the pieces of our experience and hope to hell that in doing so we arrive at a meaningful truth. With comics, one’s experience becomes even more fragmented—literally, by individual panels. Plus, the canvas is much smaller, and the words that make it in must be pared down yet still work effectively in conjunction with the corresponding image.

Because I’m a textual kind of guy, I started with a script, though that’s a little generous of a description. It was really more of a sketch with words—lines of dialogue loosely coupled with some ideas for images. The draft was long and rambling, and like most drafts, I ended up axing close to half of it. The section of the script that covers this particular page reads as follows:

Springview Farm is filled with strange and wonderful creatures…

Underfoot, the invisible barn cat

Goosey and Goofy (two llamas)

??? (pygmy goat)

A Watusi bull (image of me taking its picture while it’s trying to mount cow)

      Jan:  “Oh for the love of Mike, don’t show them that.”

      Me:  “Why not?  It’s nature!”

Jan:  “It’s Eskimo!”

Me:  “Huh?”

Jan.  “I don’t like the word ‘nasty,’ so I say ‘Eskimo’ instead.”

Inside the house is just as interesting…

Fisherman lightswitch

Stuffed owl that watched me.

Jan’s closets

      The Fairy Closet

      The Shower Closet

      The Memories Closet

            Closeup of Chuck and Dewey poster

Jan’s dolls

The events depicted on this particular page took place in late June of 2010, and I didn’t really start drafting this script until almost a year later (fortunately, I had my photographs and journal from the trip). Like most of the drafting I do, I didn’t pause too much to double-check details. For example, I couldn’t remember the name of Jan’s pygmy goat, so I let that go. I also didn’t know what kind of bull they had (just that it looked really strange), so I let that go and filled in “Watusi” later, after calling Jan. At that point, I knew that the goat wasn’t going to make it on the page, so I didn’t bother to find out its name (sorry, pal). As I wrote, I also knew that part of my brain was thinking in terms of comics. I had an idea about what to do with that bull, and I see in the writing that I had an idea for both the image and the word balloons.

The next step was to sketch the panel breakdowns. I  saw that there was way too much material here to fit coherently, so I had to narrow it down, to start shaping the experience into narrative. I wanted to make this part of the story unfold as a kind of a “walking tour,” but the big question was, What to keep? Two parts of this section jumped out at me: the Watusi bull and the dolls. For the moment, I put the dolls aside. I knew that I wanted the panel with the bull to be big—the width of the page. In part, that was out of necessity; there was too much image and dialogue to cram into a smaller panel. I figured the rest of the page would break down in a steady rhythm of three equal-sized panels per row. I laid out the panels as textboxes in Word, and they came out like this:

To accommodate this layout, I had to start this page with the bull scene, so I moved the the material in the script that comes before—the cat and the llamas—onto the previous page. That seemed to work well in terms of rhythm, where my introduction to the various animals would climax with the bull, and he’d be at the top his own page in a panel befitting his size and, uh, horniness.

Now, back to those dolls. Sifting through photos, journal entries, and memories, I recognized that the real “punch” of my tour of the farm was Jan’s collection of creepy dolls. Anyone who knows me well knows that I’m terrified of dolls; it all dates back to an episode of Night Gallery that you can read about here.

Because I wanted the “weight” of the page to come down on these dolls, I reserved the bottom row for them. With three panels left in the middle, I had to pick and choose from the remaining details. I knew I needed one of Jan’s closets in there (she has an interesting array of closets in the house), and I went with the converted shower closet, because it’s just so Jan. I also liked the light switch cover where the switch became the naked fisherman’s penis (again, very Jan). It seemed like it would be an interesting visual to pull off, so to speak. I also liked that it comes right after the bull trying to hump the cow. For the third image, I decided on the owl. I originally picked it because my plan was to make it the third image in the row so that two figures—a naked man and a bird—would “frame” the closet. Only later did I come up with a better use and reason for that owl. I did a very rough sketch of how I saw the panels:

The drawings are intentionally primitive; my purpose here was simply to get a very rough sense of what’s going to be on the page.

Now I had to decide on text and put the words into boxes and balloons. By visualizing the “containers” for the text, I’d get a better sense of how much space I had to work with and how to compose the panels. By sharpening the text into the exact language, I’d get a better sense of what exactly to draw. At this stage, I started to think more about that owl and what I was trying to do with the story as a whole. I said earlier that I didn’t want to fold my time at Springview Farm into a prose chapter and I wasn’t sure why. In actively mapping out the story, though, it came to me that it was about finding a substitute family on the road. In fact, “Welcome to Springview Farm” is split into two parts, and they bookend the very central chapter of That Hidden Road, when I drive to Chicago to see my real family. Thus, “Springview Farm” serves as a kind of counterpoint to that experience.

Anyway, back to that owl. The very end of the story is the day I leave the farm. It was raining when I left, and I wound up spending that night in a tiny Missouri town named Houston. I called Jan and Bill to let them know I made it to my next stop in one piece, and Jan confessed to me that they followed me for a few miles in their truck, just to make sure I was okay. As I was writing this part of the script, I wanted to convey that feeling of being watched over, and I remembered the owl, stuffed and staring at me in my room at the farm. Now, the thing about Jan is that she names everything, but I couldn’t remember if the owl had a name. Indulging a little bit in the “creative” part of “creative nonfiction,” I decided to name it “Mama Owl” and attribute it to Jan. I mention Mama Owl again on the last page of the story. At this point, I knew that I had to move Mama Owl to the middle of the page, which is the most important space in a comic. The panel breakdown with text inserted looked like this:

It’s worth noting here that once I typed the text on the page, more revision was needed. I had to shorten some lines, move some of the dialogue around, and play around with font sizes. The point here—and one that I stress to my writing students—is that revision is ongoing and the writing process is recursive; you take two steps forward and one step back almost constantly.

Once I was happy with the page, I printed it up, taped it to my drawing board with artist’s tape and the help of my t-square, boxed and ballooned all the text, and got ready to sketch my pencils. To help with this, I had two main tools at my disposal. First were the many, many photos I took at the farm. Here are some of the ones I used:

    

The second tool was my sketchbook. I’ve found that it’s been indispensible in testing out different visual ideas and to practice drawing different things. Here are a few of the sketches I made while penciling this particular page:

  

In the original sketch, I had Bill standing there, too, but the panel was getting a little crowded. Plus, the dialogue focused more on a back-and-forth between me and Jan, so I cut Bill out. But not to worry; Bill is very present in the rest of the story. And he knows I love him.

The next stage was actually biting the bullet and getting the pencils in the panels. I decided that I wanted to have some fun with the style, so I made the top panel more cartoony and the bottom six panels more realistic. I wanted to give those six panels more of a documentary feel to them—like a camera’s eye roving around the farm—so it made a certain sense to me that the art should reflect that. After the better part of a day filled with plenty of erasures, here’s what the page looked like with the text, boxes & balloons, and pencils:

The final stage was the inking. This is where pencil lines get sharpened and more depth is added through line weight and shading. I’m not yet completely confident with this very difficult skill, so I turned over inking duties to my talented buddy John. He threw my pencils on his lightbox, inked it up (without the text), and scanned it for me. I then opened it in Photoshop, retyped the text (and, yes, revised it some more), and performed some minor tweaks to the images. Here, then, is the final product:

All told, there are over thirty pages of comics in the manuscript of That Hidden Road, and I’ve developed a newfound respect for the work that comic book artists do. I knew intellectually that it was difficult work, but until I tried it myself, I had no idea how difficult.

But it’s also incredibly rewarding, like any kind of creative activity that allows you to “disappear” inside of the work. Entire afternoons would evaporate as I’d get my drawing supplies out, set my iTunes to “shuffle,” and get busy turning my life into story.

Well, if you've made it this far, I thank you. I'd love any feedback on what I have here or on your own process of writing, drawing, or both.

Stuff I Saw

As I continue to work on the final revisions to That Hidden Road, I'm also thinking about how I'm going to assemble the different narrative pieces. Most of the book consists of long chapters that "cross cut" between my experiences on the road and various memories, but there are also shorter chapters that will pop up from time to time, like the "FAQ" writings that I've posted here.

And then there are the comics. My plan is to sprinkle throughout the book several different comics--a couple of multi-page stories as well as some one-pagers. One group of these one-pagers is a short series called "Stuff I Saw," which I intend to appear a little rough, as if from a sketchbook. I did all of the layout, lettering, and art myself. Most of the images are based on pictures I took, and observant readers may notice two of them that already appear on this blog. Anyway, here's a preview of four of the "Stuff I Saw" comics:

A little gruesome, maybe, but I had to pay some kind of tribute to all of the dead animals that I saw. By the way, coming across roadkill while biking is about a hundred times worse than while driving. First of all, there's the smell. Second, there's the fact that I was moving slowly, so I had plenty of time to take a good, long look. Third, there's not much you can do to avoid it. I tried to move around a dead possum in Missouri and almost got hit by a pickup truck.

I love roadside kitsch, and to my mind, there's none better than big statues of fake people. My two favorites are on the bottom row, both found in the tiny Illinois town of Metropolis. The best part was that "Big John" is about ten feet taller than Superman.

Comics are good at amplifying the quiet moments of life, and I tried to keep that in mind when I sketched these landscapes from various parts of the trip. I'm the least happy with the "Tennessee" panel; all of that dark stuff is supposed to be kudzu, which grows crazy-fast and has taken over thousands and thousands of acreage in the South.

Not every dog was my enemy. I made some canine friends along the way, too, and I wanted to get them into the book in a unique way. 

I'm planning to post more of the comics if there's any reader interest, so let me know!

FAQ Check, Part Deux: Godfather Time

Here's another question that I've been asked about my cross-country bike ride: "Did You Get Bored out There?"

And here's my answer:

Sometimes.

Biking for six, seven, even eight or nine hours a day—often on seldom-traveled roads in wide-open landscapes—I had to invent ways to keep myself entertained and distracted.

For instance, I’d make up little stories about the things I saw on the side of the road.

A water bottle filled with cloudy yellow liquid became a trucker’s emergency bathroom, filled while driving and then tossed out the window. He’d been breaking the speed limit all night long ever since he’d checked his phone in Phoenix, saw that his daughter had left a message, and heard only part of a garbled sentence—You’d better get back here fast—then nothing else.

A plastic triceratops was a teenage boy’s revenge on his younger brother, who was getting all the attention on the family vacation and generally making the car trip miserable. I could almost see the younger brother napping, the older brother snatching the dinosaur and then dropping it out the window of the moving car.

A broken syringe was cast off from a young couple—rail-thin and heroin-addicted—on their way south, following the road by day and wrapping themselves in an old blanket at night.

During a five-mile stretch near Jacumba, California, I spotted a red onion or two about every hundred feet. The reality was that they had probably squirted loose from some truck’s cargo, but reality can be boring. I preferred this: a husband and wife are on their way home from the market, where they’ve stocked up on red onions for pickling. The basket sits between them in the front seat. The wife looks out her window while her husband divides his attention between the road and the back of her head. He’s losing her, he knows. In fact, he’s pretty sure she’s already gone, thinking of someone else. He reaches a dirt-caked hand into the basket and pulls out an onion, feeling its heft. He squeezes it and asks a question. When she answers with what he suspects is a lie, he tosses the onion out of the window and grabs another. Onion after onion out the window. I was just getting to the part when that basket is empty, but then the road dipped precipitously and I suddenly had other things to worry about.

These were games, and I’ve always loved playing games—especially with my older brother, Vince. “Ker Plunk,” “Sure Shot Hockey," or "Life.” Home Run Derby with a wiffle ball and bat. Nerf football outside with some of the neighborhood kids. Vince, being several years older and wiser than the rest of us, was always head coach and quarterback. We’d invent games back then, too. Once we found an egg-shaped superball. It was as hard as a little rock and bounced in violent, unpredictable ways. So naturally, the game we came up with involved throwing it at each other. I stood at the top of the stairs, Vince stood at the bottom, and we whipped it back and forth for either a direct or ricocheted hit. We called the game “Acid Egg,” and if a guy got hit, he had to writhe around on the ground for a few seconds as if his flesh was burning.

There were no acid eggs on the trip, but there were awful winds, and during one brutal stretch in Kansas, I decided that the thing to do was sing every television theme song that I could remember as loudly as possible. The trick was not to swallow any bugs. I started in on the easy ones first, shows that Vince and I had spent hours watching together, sprawled across the gold shag carpeting of our living room. Gilligan’s Island, The Brady Bunch, The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres. Next was a Norman Lear medley. All in the Family, The Jeffersons, Maude, Good Times. After that, random songs that I knew most of the words to. WKRP in Cincinnati, Welcome Back Kotter, Laverne and Shirley, The Love Boat. When the words escaped me, I’d make something up. My brother has always had a gift for getting all the words to a song the first time he heard it. Naturally, he hated when I improvised. Pedaling into the wind, cornfields on both sides of me, trying to remember exactly why Chico shouldn’t be so discouraged by the Man, I could hear Vince’s voice cut through the whistling in my ears.

If you can’t sing it right, then don’t sing it.

But my favorite game, which I invented on my fourth day out while riding from Glamis to Blythe through southeastern California, was called “Godfather Time.”

About seven miles into the ride that morning, I was already tired, fighting the strongest headwinds that I’d ever experienced. I had a long way to go that day, and as I stopped to catch my breath, I took note of the time: 7:00 on the head. Later that morning and still far from my destination, I stopped again at the ominously-named Three Slashes Road. I checked my clock again: 9:55. I’d gone a little over twenty miles in two hours and fifty-five minutes.

The exact running time, coincidentally, of my favorite movie, The Godfather.

I could have watched the entire Godfather in the time it took me to bike those twenty miles in that desert wind tunnel.

From then on, when I needed to distract myself from some pretty miserable biking, I’d measure out the ride in Godfather units.

Less than a week later I was headed to Tuba City, Arizona, through desert terrain in high-90 degree temperatures, approaching the end of my first eighty-mile day. I saw a billboard for a Tuba City McDonald’s proclaiming that it was JUST 15 MINUTES AWAY.

In a car, schmuck!

I looked down at my speedometer. On an uphill grade, as loaded down as I was, as tired as I was, my top speed would barely reach above four miles per hour. Just fast enough so that I wouldn’t tip over into the ditch. I was looking at about another hour, assuming the grade didn’t get any steeper—an assumption, I’d learned, that it was neither safe nor smart to make.

In Godfather time, an hour would stretch from the film’s opening line—I believe in America, delivered in blackness—to roughly when the crooked cop McCluskey breaks Michael Corleone’s jaw.

In other words, a long god(father)damn time.

In the time it took to climb to Wolf Creek Pass and reach the Continental Divide in Colorado, I could have watched from the opening line to just past Sonny’s brutal death on the causeway. One hour, fifty-seven minutes.

In the time it took a biker I’d met to explain his philosophy of nutrition to me one endless evening in Missouri, I could have watched up to the scene where movie producer Jack Woltz finds his beloved horse’s head in his bed. After thirty minutes of this guy prattling on about sugars this and breads that, I was picturing his head—and not the horse’s—lying on top of Woltz’s bloodied silk sheets.

In the time it took me to bike on the I-40 in Arizona from Ash Fork to Williams, on a grade so steep that I passed two semi-trucks catching their breath on the shoulder, I could have watched up to the scene where Don Corleone calls in his favor with the undertaker, Bonasera, showing him Sonny’s bullet-riddled corpse. Look at how they massacred my boy...

And in the time that I spent climbing on the Cherohala Skyway, a punishing ride through the Appalachian Mountains that twisted and turned through what seemed like eight hundred false peaks, I could have watched The Godfather twice. Twice. The whole time climbing.

Anything five minutes or so—pedaling from one end of Dodge, Kansas, to the other on a quiet Sunday morning; getting from the Longbranch Coffeehouse to the Bicycle Surgeon in Carbondale, Illinois; taking a bathroom and sunblock-reapplication break near White House, Tennessee—was a “Baptism of Fire.” To the uninitiated, that’s the five-minute bravura sequence near the end of the movie that crosscuts between Michael in church, standing as godfather to his sister’s newborn son, and a series of violent gangland executions that he has ordered.

I saw this scene for the first time at some point in the 70s, when The Godfather made its network television premiere. The piece that struck me the hardest was when Moe Green, naked on a massage table, gets shot in the eye. One lens of his glasses spiderwebs, blood flows from beneath it, and his head slumps forward. I’d never seen anything like it, and for a second I kind of believed that they’d actually murdered a guy on camera.

“What happened?” I asked Vince, who was watching with me.

“Easy,” he said, shrugging. “Blood pellets.”

It wasn’t much of an explanation, but I felt lucky to get a verbal response at all. Most of our conversations at the time went like this: I’d ask a question and he’d make a face. College was on the horizon for him, and I was still in grade school, so while I’d be looking up to him, he was looking somewhere else—probably at a future that didn’t include an annoying little brother.

Despite its impact on me, the “Baptism of Fire” sequence is not my favorite part of The Godfather. Neither are any of the film’s other famous scenes. No, my favorite part is one that most people don’t notice, and the scene itself doesn’t even last long enough to serve as any kind of useful measure in my little game. It doesn’t, in fact, really mean anything the first time you watch the movie; it’s only when you watch it a second time do you become aware of the loss that it registers.

About halfway through the film, Sonny and Michael are going over the final details of their plan to kill Sollozzo, the drug dealer who put out a hit on their father. In a few minutes, Michael will be picked up by Sollozzo and his bodyguard for a sit-down where the two of them are supposed to negotiate a truce. But a gun has been hidden for Michael at the restaurant where the meeting takes place, and he’s going to use it to kill the two men. Right after, Michael will be whisked off to Sicily to hide out until everything blows over. Before Michael leaves for the meeting, he says goodbye to everyone, saving Sonny—his older brother—for last. Sonny agrees to “smooth things over” with both their mother and Michael’s girlfriend. The two brothers look at each other and then embrace.

As they hug, Sonny and Michael think that they have all the time in the world, that somewhere down the line, they’ll get together again.

But they don’t; a few scenes later, while Michael is in Sicily, Sonny is gunned down, and that embrace of theirs turns out to be the last time that they see each other. Whenever I watch that scene, I tighten up.

For me, it’s not as much about death as it is about drifting. When we’re young, the world sometimes seems like an endless series of games. Everything makes sense and problems can be solved by checking the rules on the inside of the box top. That security is a sham, of course, but it’s easy to fool our younger selves with tidy explanations. Easy. Blood pellets.

But things change when we get older. We have to work harder to explain the things that confound us. We gather obligations. Our lives become messier. Through all of this, brothers can drift apart. I think about this with me and Vince. I think about this with my sons, Nick and Tony. Like me, like Vince, the two of them have only one brother.

So is there any other way I can watch that scene in The Godfather? Sonny and Michael hug all too quickly, and I want to say to them, to those two brothers, “Pay attention, guys. It might not ever be like this again.”

Sorry…what was the original question?