Beauty/Memory

The first day of March. The snow is a smooth crust in our yard, but in the north corner near one of the tallest spruce trees it was a warm springtime.  Jan and I sat out there for a spell this afternoon.  She has a cold and I was tired.  We had cleaned house and sorted our recycling.  I was getting myself together to sign books at the local bookstore at three. But sitting in the wobbly plastic chairs in the sun for the first time in months I didn't want to go anywhere.  It was exquisite with the sun reflecting off the snow and the heat on our faces.  We are sixty, is that why these moments feel so fine?  Is that why I want to stretch them out?  A few more moments...just a few more moments. 

But I got up and took the recycling in.  Jan didn't want to go.  Her cold had gotten the best of her.  She hadn't taken her medication for her Parkinson's and she wasn't moving well, so I blasted off and I packed my good clothes to change at the store because I was running late and I would get smelly dumping the beer and wine bottles from our tree-burning party that were in the recycling.  

To tell the truth I wasn't looking forward to the local signing.  My hometown signing is always emotionally loaded for me. These really are the people I want to like the book.  This is my audience, if I have one in my mind, other than my siblings.  So...if they don't come out I take it personally.  I know I shouldn't.  But I do.  Another big problem was there was a big event scheduled at the same time, the very popular, Wearable Arts Show!  So...big draw for the likely readers.  Jan calls me Eeyore when the local signing comes around because I tend toward pessimism. 

But I have another problem with the hometown signing: tension, memory, and my terrible spelling all conspire against me.  Here's how it works:  I have a hard time with names, I can't spell, I get anxious about it.  I see someone in line, I know their name, but then as they walk up I start to freak out and their freaking name flies out of my head.  I panic. I try to cover and I say,  "Help me with how to spell your name," and they inevitably say,  " B... O... B"  and I say something like,  " Oh the American way, not the French Canadian way?"  and move on quickly.  

This time there were people lined up who I have known for thirty years at the book store. I knew all their names perfectly well but that wouldn't matter because for some stupid reason as soon as they walked toward me with a book my mind would go blank.  So, I  took no chances.  I announced to them that on the way over that I had suffered a severe head injury and that I would appreciate if when they came up to the table if they would all tell me their names and if they were buying books for someone else could they please write the names down on little stickies (which the bookstore provided) so I could spell the name correctly.  I thought about wearing a gory bandage but hadn't prepared adequately.  

The signing went swimmingly. I reminded Ashia, the kind bookstore manager, about my recent head injury and to keep telling the customers to tell me their names and everyone, even people I owed money to and had just seen that afternoon at the recycling center, came up to me gently and touched my hand and said, "John you are doing so well, are you sure you don't need a rest?"  and I bravely pushed on and inscribed a book for them as if I were on the fields of Flanders.  It was great.  

I spelled most of the names correctly.  I got one Kristen or Kirsten wrong but that name is fucking impossible anyway.     

I had a lovely time, and I remembered what is great about doing this.  Next to  alcoholism whining is the biggest occupational hazard.  Writers love to complain.  I have done my fair share of it.  I used to complain about how writing is so much about delayed gratification.  You write and you never feel the satisfaction.  When you play in a band and perform at the Moose Lodge you get to see the people dance and as a musician you feel GREAT.  But when you spend years writing a book you end up with a stack of papers and you just look at it and then ship it out in the mail.  

Not today.  Today when people came to the bookstore on a wonderfully sunny day, when they snuck out early from the Wearable Arts Show, when they told me their names, even though they knew I didn't have a head injury, when I could see in their eyes they were looking forward to reading a story I had written, when a native woman told me she was buying a book for her 87 year old mother who had read all of my books and just had to have my new book, and when I told her that I had based a character on her nephew she clapped her hand over her mouth and giggled in a very old way that I instantly recognized as a family trait I was overwhelmed and grateful, grateful, grateful.  And I was nothing but happy that I that I had chosen to be a writer today. 

Crusty snow, warm sun 

we sit in rickety chairs 

and you hold my hand. 

jhs--3/1/2014  Sitka 

 

Should I Have Listened To My Mother?

Another fine sunny day in Sitka.  Cold, but clear, no snow melt yet.  All the shop keepers and the people in the coffee shops commented on the weather as if we had been given a gift.  

Today (2/25/'14) in the Wall Street Journal, an old high school friend, Ralph Gardner, wrote in his column, a nice story about our old English teacher, Joe Moriarty.  Joe was a black Irishman who drank to excess and was larger than life in our eyes.  He was wild and mercurial.  He let me read my writing aloud and caused me to fall in love with poetry.  He allowed me to find the rhythm and flow in language and to circumvent the dyslexic side of my brain from gumming up the music that words could make.  That tonight I am here typing rather than in a bar or behind the wheel of a long haul truck, or on the bandstand with a country band somewhere I think is due to Joe.   He was the hero to many of us.  He made doing well in school seem rebellious, which was important in the mid sixties and kept many of us in school.  

I'm grateful to Ralph for writing such a fine piece in such a prominent paper.  You can see it here: http://www.ralphgardner.com/articles/column/  But I have to wonder why he felt that he needed to use our yearbook photographs and reprint them in the Wall Street Journal?  

I remember my mother begging me to get my hair cut before the yearbook photos were to be taken in 1971  but would I?   No...of course not.   I think I even remember her saying words to the effect of: "There is going to come a day when you are going to look back on those pictures and, you know, fashions are going to have changed...."  Well you can guess the rest.  Today those pictures were distributed to the readership of the Wall Street Journal.  I don't know what their readership is, but I'm guessing somewhat more than the Daily Sitka Sentinel, and I would have paid GOOD MONEY to keep those photos out of the Sitka paper.  You can judge for yourself, but let's just say: Bozo the Clown with a bad part down the side.

Anyway... is today the day I'm embarrassed by my youth?  

Well...All I can say is this:  I hope I didn't cause my mother any real anxiety, but somehow I think she had more important issues to worry about in 1971,  besides my hair. The truth was I was doing all right, Joe Moriarty and my mom had taken good care of me, and even though they are both years gone now, they both take good care of me to this day.

I have lots to be embarrassed by, but the hair is the least of it.  Then...and now. 

 

Cold Day, north wind blows

and a few white caps stack up.

Tears come to my eyes. 

jhs--Sitka,  Alaska 

 

Home: 2/23/2014

Home in Sitka.  Beautiful clear blue sky. Twenty-five degrees. Four inches of icy snow on the ground.  Home to warm up the house, do laundry.  Pat the dog.  Walk in the snow with our friends, play the mandolin at the Larkspur, Sunday at noon, read the mail and fold clothes. Jan always works harder than I do.She shoveled the deck and made a million calls reestablishing herself back in town.  I lay on the couch and reestablished myself with Porter the old neighbor dog who can hold five tennis balls in his mouth at once.  He is quite proud of this trick and he loves to show it to me.  I could watch it all day.  

I love traveling but I love coming home.  

The reading in Seattle went well and the signing at Seattle Mystery was great fun.  What a great store that is.  Independent stores have wonderful staff; book people who do it for the love and make their stores unique community centers.  What will become of them in the future I wonder?  I'm not sure. 

Next thing on my to-do list is to put a bunch of pictures from my trip up on this blog.  Stand by for that, and look forward to the upcoming (not so true) crime edition of the johnstraley.com blog entries once I get a legal opinion from my bosses on how to manage that with my work.

Thanks for any of you who follow and please keep checking back.  I promise to keep bringing back new and different stuff.  And I promise to correct my typos. 

 

Hard ice underfoot,

alder limbs against blue sky.

Here... hold my hand. 

 

jhs   Sitka,  Alaska 

Book Tour 2014: Seattle.

Left the desert at sunrise and drove to the airport in Palm Springs.  No time for breakfast but we saw some egrets flying above the fields.  Also saw a dead coyote along the side of the road with some ravens on the wires over head.  Tricksters honoring a Trickster, or at least I like to think.  

Back in Seattle staying with my brother Hugh and his beautiful wife Linda who made us a wonderful dinner as always and set us up with a little office in their apartment building where we taught Humanities 120 again.  Tonight we finished off old John Haines and had a fine conversation with one of our students who is a young woman who lives on a reservation in eastern Oregon and we talked her through some of her ambivalent feelings about her land that she loves, because it is where her people were moved by force.  We talked about how the "Humanities" covers some of the horrific things that human beings have done to one another.  We talked about how "sense of place" was not always seeing landscape through rose-colored glasses and nature as beautiful but place as the setting of heartbreak and coming to terms with grief, and injustice.  We talked about how different types of faith could play a role in how we perceived our "sense of place." 

The second hour we visited with Heather Lende from Haines, and Heather talked about her coming to Alaska.  She talked about the dangers of writing about difficult and emotional subjects in a small town and how her faith guides her.  She essentially boiled it down to "Try to love everyone."  

Heather is a wonderful woman, and she deserves her success.  Her books,  If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name, and Take Good Care of the Garden and the Dogs,  should be on everyone's bed side table.  I travel a great deal and I meet many people who want to write books about the towns they live in.  Most of them don't know how difficult it is.  Heather didn't either at first,  then she did.  But then she did the amazing thing...she kept at it and did the tough work of keeping at it until she got it right,  by trying to tell the truth and by trying...trying to love everybody.  Now...she is not perfect and she is not a priss or a Pollyanna,  She has some pepper in the mix, that's what makes her lively, and she is not universally loved, but hell...I first met her working on a murder case thirty years ago and I love her because she at least would talk to me when no one else would...and she still does.  

 

I'm tired...and I better go to bed.  

 

Seattle, cool night,

who built this Ferris wheel here? 

The Circus in town? 

Book Tour 2014: The "Literary" P.I.

Around 1984 I lost my job as the Cabins and Trail Crew Boss for the Forest Service in Sitka.  It was a sweet job; Wage Grade, in the federal service, which was very good money, enough to work nine months back then and play for three.  Lovely.  After I lost that job I spent a while writing a book at the Sitka Pioneer Home,  I also got a job working for a young lawyer working as his investigator.  He didn't want an ex-cop.  He wanted someone he could train from the ground up.  He and I were friends and we talked about story telling.  We talked about how his job was telling a jury the story of this client's position.  It was a true story that the other side had often overlooked.  My job was to go out and discover the facts that other people had forgotten to ask about.  I became a private investigator.  I had a degree in English from the University of Washington.  I was dyslexic.  I had a certificate in Horseshoeing from Central Wyoming College,  I had been a wilderness packer and guide.  I could pack a mule carrying a decker saddle and throw a diamond hitch on a sawbuck saddle.   I could make sourdough biscuits on a clean shovel in a fire... but I knew nothing about being a Private I.  Yet...I was anxious to learn.  

I had read Chandler and Hammett.  My father and mother were HUGE mystery fans and had talked all my life about Mickey Spillane and Travis McGee.  They could down two a week.  I started packing a bottle of bourbon in my suitcase.  My boss forbade me a gun, assuring me that if I ever...ever shot anyone that I would serve 99 years in prison no matter what the circumstances.  NO MATTER WHAT THE CIRCUMSTANCES!  Simply by virtue of who I was working for and who I was.  The police investigators would cut me no slack what. so. ever.  

Soon enough I discovered that the bourbon was cause of headaches and vomiting.  It was called being an alcoholic and I didn't like it, I was going to lose my job, I was going to wreck my marriage and my life was going to turn to shit.  This didn't work.  I quit that and I had good success with the young lawyer...there is enough heartache and suffering in crime without inviting it in by being a drunk.  We won cases...well, he did and I helped him.  I took on other cases and I helped other lawyers win difficult cases.  I discovered something that comes back around the the subject of this blog: 

The P.I. of fiction has a proud and long literary heritage.  They come to us all the way down from Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost, through Lord Byron's rowdy heroes, to Edgar Allan Poe's sleuths:  the fallen angels, the tarnished knights, the lonely cowboys turned gunslingers on the wrong side of the line, the hooker with the heart of gold.  They come from the shadows...the noir...they are of  the shadows... 

Now the only point I want to make here is that they ARE A LITERARY DEVICE!  They are great devices.  Writers love them because you can send a Private Eye anywhere, across class lines, across gender lines, they make great travel guides and great teachers.  Private Eyes will go down in that dark basement without question and without straining credibility. They are the best literary device ever!  

But when I started doing the real work of gathering, examining, and explaining information to be used in criminal litigation  I found that I had nothing in common with the real work of P.I. work and the Literary Device work of Literature.  One big difference:  real crime was terribly sad.  What specialized piece of equiptment do I use most often in my work?  The tissue dispenser.   Most people cry when they come to my office.  Do they deserve it?  Who am I to say?  I don't know... they are witnesses most of them...family members of the accused....family members of the victims....victims.... I'm not in the business of sorting out what people deserve.

Now, there are folks that don't like my writing that say I'm all hoity toity (sp?) and am too  literary  and I don't begrudge them that.  I think what they mean is that I don't write to the formula of a conventional mystery. But here is the truth and I'm not bullshitting you, I don't know what the formula of a conventional mystery is...I suppose that's a terrible thing to admit.  But I've never read what I've considered a conventional mystery, and what I do is the opposite anyway.  I'm trying to think beyond the literary conventions in my novels into something new, and I do that because that's the only way I know how to make it interesting.  Any other way would be like doing homework, and God knows I've had enough of that.  

 

Wind in the orange groves

rows of trees with heavy limbs:

trying to sweep up. 

 

jhs---Borrego Springs, CA

 

 

I

Book Tour 2014: Getting Your Work Out There

Now is a great time to be a broke ass writer, and there never was a better kind of broke ass writer to be than a poet.   There are always lots of writers groups around.  I belong to an interesting group of poets who publish a magazine during the winter months.  There are nine of us and we publish only nine editions of nine volumes.  Each of us writes a poem a month, and we send it to an appointed editor for the month.  That editor copies the poems and makes up a cover and mails (that's right actually mails) a physical copy of the poems out to each poet.  If we feel like commenting on the poems we do.  Mostly we don't.   All of the poets except for two, I think, are professors at various universities.  I think they are very fine poets.  I was invited in by a poet who was teaching in Fairbanks, and when he didn't get tenure he hoofed it back to the midwest and invited me in to keep in touch with some of the people he had met up North.  I'm not mentioning all their names because I don't have their permission to talk about the group.  I guess it's kind of like Fight Club.  I'll probably be killed at the first meeting.  If there ever is a meeting...if there really is such a club.  

I only mention this because it's a great way to create your own zine, and it's a good way to discipline yourself.  One poem a month doesn't sound like a lot but...you would be surprised particularly if you get good poets in your group it ups your game.  My book of poems for my book of poetry was 75 percent filled with poems I wrote for this group.  

Here is my poem for February,  not all that great...but I got it done. The title comes from the story Teddy  by J.D. Salinger.

 

 

                IT WILL BE HERE OR SOMEWHERE ELSE 

 

Wind in the desert

and sand rises above the ridge lines

so that the moon, when it rises

shows itself first, as blood orange

on the horizon. 

A raucous bird, I do not know 

mocks me from a Palm tree 

and a pack of coyotes yip in the dark.  

 

I am far from my home country

and I hardly know who I am.

Yet, I believe this is the same moon 

that has chilled my bones 

up north so many times before

and this is the same night that will cover me 

like the shadow of the owl’s wing 

lifting from the island

in my home country

or someone else’s

country all together. 

 

John Straley, Borrego Springs, CA

Book Tour 2014: Reading and Writing

Windy here.  The dust sweeps up off the desert floor so that the sky is hazy.  The moon, as it rises is a bright orange lifting over the horizon and launching into the black night.  

After a walk up into a narrow canyon I settled onto the porch and read my sister's copy of The Sun Also Rises  by Ernest Hemingway.  This fall Jan and I went to Paris, France, for the first time, (as opposed to Paris, Texas, which I still  haven't been to)  so I thought I would give Hemingway another tumble since my high-school reading list.  It was a little disorienting reading about Jake Barnes,  waiting for Lady Ashley at the Cafe Select,  while sprawled out on a cracked concrete floor listening to a dove sing from a smoke tree down the road. Jake Barnes drinking beer and Pernod, and wine...and whiskey...and absinthe and more wine. 

Hemingway was said to write standing up.  He wrote in pencil.  He was quoted as saying he didn't write while drunk but then the longer he lived, he had a difficult time finding those times when he wasn't drunk.  

Writers and drink.  It used to be a self-defining occupational hazard.  The more we've learned about the lives of some of these writers the more the picture gets hazy.  PTSD and classic depression seem to have been a factor.  The Lost Generation writers had seen the First World War, and Hemingway had taken a peek at the beginning of the greatest killing event humanity would ever see.  When I read him now, I don't see him as the bullying alcoholic.   I think he was then, even in Paris, at the beginning, a sorrowful man.  

This is something I know about; sorrow and depression.  My own father was a Hemingway man, a drinker who would not turn against his style or his manhood.  I learned from his example and have sworn to choose another path.  Avoid Self Pity Like the Plague  as Nelson Bentley would teach...but also avoid repression that turns to bile.  

J.P. Seaton the remarkable translator of Du Fu  and Han Shan among other great Chinese Poets describes the wonderful quality of Du Fu's poetry as "melancholy joie du vivre"  this is what I try to capture in the Cecil books.  This is what I tried to capture in Cold Storage, Alaska. 

That's for me:  life is bound by suffering, yet it is over far too soon.  

Warm day, moon rises

becoming a fragrant orange

floating on the Seine. 

jhs--Borrego Springs, CA

Book Tour 2014: The Virtual Tour Thanks

If you've been keeping up, you've caught on that this is not your usual book tour at this point.  No hotels, no media escorts, or Lincoln Town Cars waiting in the Lobby.  This, I have to say, is a good thing.  The book business is different than it used to be and it's silly to spend that kind of dough on tours any more.  

It's much smarter to learn the ropes of the virtual world and take the reins of the social media and try to reach out to as many people as I can from one pleasant location without burning a hole in anyone's pocket and the ozone layer.  So...here I sit in the desert with a group of people I love and type away and try to learn the ropes. 

I'm excited to see new reviews come in: one from Saint Louis yesterday, with comments about how "if you think it's chilly here, you should check out Cold Storage, Alaska," which almost made me feel guilty for walking around the desert in 86 degree weather...but not quite. 

I do have to say something in favor of physical proximity.  On Thursday night, Jan and I taught our University Humanities 120 class from here.  We went to the local middle school and we connected up to their phone system and we connected with our students who we usually talk to on the phone from Sitka.  This week we were talking about John Haines and the first chapter of his book:  Living Off The Country. Haines was Alaska's preeminent poet, in his book he was concerned that "Alaska" itself was in danger of being replaced by the "cliche of Alaska."  This can happen when we lose familiarity with the actual, and become lazy with our ideas of what we want to believe about a place.  We discussed this in our class.  We had students in Wasilla and Juneau, and in the village of Buckland, and in Oregon and Washington.  As Jan and I walked out into the dark, desert night there was a Great Horned Owl in a palm tree guarding her nest with at least four fledglings.  

Laziness.  This scares me...because I am lazy by nature.  Being on vacation reminds of this.   I have to be pushed...often by myself, often by the people who love me...to be attentive to this world.    Anyway...I have always been skeptical of the "virtual world."  I've even been known to say,  rather haughtily:  "There is no virtual world, there is one world with different sets of tools used by different sets of people."  But that was one of my fathead opinions.  

So this virtual tour is new ground for me.  Here are my thanks for going there: Juliet Grames,  Rudy Martinez,  Madison Kozma who keeps the likes coming.  Thanks too for all the reviewers who choose my book over the hundreds of others that pile their office floors.  

A profound thanks to Curtis Alan Edwards, my oldest and dearest friend who has always embraced technology and by doing so, has kept me in the world.  He designed this web site and I think it is just the bee's knees.  

So keep tuning in.  Each post will not sound like an awards show but I need to show my appreciation for fear that Toto will pull back the curtain. 

Song birds in the Palm

singing to the desert night. 

I reach out to you. 

 

jhs   Borrego Springs CA

Book Tour 2014: Love and Obedience

Another fine warm day. We walked down an old family favorite wash in the desert locally known as "the slots".   A beautiful geologic formation where water periodically grinds the mud and stone down the narrow rock walls of the canyon so that over the years there has become a very slender pathway to squeeze through on the bottom. 

This morning my family... including friends of such closeness they might as well be family... tumbled down the path chattering like a bunch of magpies.  I squeezed through the narrow spots with a little more difficulty than I have in the years before and labored up the hill with more effort, confirming that my body does not change at geologic rate.  

I'm sixty years old now. I first started coming to this desert when I was six years old.  My parents loved it here with intensity.  They tried living here year round but the summer heat and the expense of it beat them back.  I was only here once in June and I thought someone was kidding me when I stepped out of the air conditioned car: Blast Furnace on a reflective surface.  It was an earth not meant for humans.... but of course it was,  just not me.  

Someone asked me about Cold Storage, today and why it was dedicated to Sophie Rosen.  Well...  Sophie is a fan of my books who wrote to me after I published The Big Both Ways.  She was at that time a Librarian in British Columbia and she is a very perceptive and sympathetic reader.  Her criticisms were always on point but kindly put, very bookish, and learned in a very sweet and generous way.  She is wonderful to correspond with.  I have only met her once and I don't really know much about her personal life.  We have almost always discussed books when we communicate, not always mine, but books we like.  

I asked Sophie to read an early draft of Cold Storage, Alaska and she commented on the number of biblical allusions there were in the novel.  To which I learnedly responded,  "huh?"  Then she asked,  "Would you mind if I pointed some of them out?"  and this time I responded, "Not at all."  This was how I became reacquainted with the Book of Numbers and the story of Baalam's Ass, who only speaks to his master before being kicked for the third time.  

I had studied the Bible as Literature with Nelson Bentley at the University of Washington in the seventies, and Nelson was a generous and lively soul.  Nelson's first rule in his poetry group was, "Avoid Self Pity Like The Plague!"  and I suspect he saved the life of many young poets.  I know he did mine.  I still keep a Bible on my desk. 

Sophie Rosen is a generous Christian woman.  I can tell this from her tone and from her generous nature and from a few of the things she has said.  Never has she proselytized. Once as we were talking about Scripture I mentioned that I had problems in the Bible between the two   aspects of Scriptures,  "I'm good," I told her,  "with the love part, but I'm not so good with the obedience."   

And Sophie chuckled.  "What are you laughing about?"  I asked.  "It's just funny," she said.  I wrote the book and years later I realized what she thought was funny.  

So, if you are reading my new book and are wondering about my relationship with Christianity or Buddhism or any other organized religion.  I will try and express it here: I'm a student of Literature and not an advocate of faith. I love people I meet and communicate with.  I love Sophie Rosen,  I love the pieces of ground within the context of my own short round feet.  I'm the fat guy walking in the slots.  I am a writer who does not walk among the Gods.  I am the writer who walks with the un-kissed frogs: pursing my lips.