PAULA WHYMAN

Dear Officer K--,

I am also the kind of person who gets annoyed when people are late. Is their time more important than mine? If we say 7pm for dinner, I will expect guests to arrive by 7:15. If you show up at 7:45, I may well view that as inconsiderate. So please know, Officer K--, I wish we were all prompt. The world would be a more thoughtful place.

However, if I invite you to dinner for 7pm, and you show up at 7pm on the nose, well, that's a little freaky. I might start to think that you actually arrived earlier, and that you were waiting outside my house for, say, 30 minutes, looking at your watch every few minutes, just to make sure. Maybe you were merely checking out the landscaping. Gazing in the windows to see if we'd done any repainting in the living room. Checking our mailbox. Taking notes. Which reminds me, the envelope containing my phone bill was torn at the corner. I'm sure you had nothing to do with that, though. But Officer K--, the singing, that was a bit much. Do you know what I mean? It's very flattering, don't get me wrong, and I have no critical skills in this area, and I always enjoyed "Some Enchanted Evening," I just never heard a rendition quite like yours, with the bullhorn, and the standard-issue revolver. So, show up early, that's fine. But please, no singing, and no shooting into the air. We have plenty of starlings around so that's really not what's bothering me about it. I think the cat made off with the carcass anyway. I never did find it. But, please understand, when you show up in the morning and kneel behind the forsythia with your binoculars, it weirds out the neighbors.

Thank you!

I've been called for jury duty. They say they expect me to be unbiased. Hahahaha!

Oh, wait; I think they were serious....

Anyway, this has me thinking. The courtroom is a place full of stories. Everyone there presents his own version of the truth. The "winner" can be the one who tells the best story, the story that sounds the most like the truth to the most people.

Does a fiction writer make a good juror? Or will we just "vote" for the best story? Will I be distracted by story flaws, the primary one in this situation, perhaps, being whether I believe this character would behave a particular way in the given situation?

The last time I was called for jury duty, I was sent to a courtroom for a criminal trial, but I was dismissed during voir dire. It was the trial of a young man who was accused of robbing a church, selling drugs, and possessing firearms. He looked, in my opinion, very comfortable in the courtroom, as if he'd been there many, many times before. This was of course not information that was shared with us. Regardless, I was sure he was guilty before anyone said a word. Oddly enough, it was the prosecutor who dismissed me.

But this is what writers do, isn't it? I see someone on the bus, and I make up a story in my head about who she is, where she's going, and why. I guess what she does for a living and what she was like in high school. I guess whether she's married and, if so, how it's going. Am I ever right about any of these speculations? I'll probably never know. But I bet I can write a convincing character sketch. Is there a situation in which I won't have an opinion? Unlikely. Does that make me biased, in the legal sense? I suppose that depends on whether I'm willing to change my mind.

Curious Spouse may have something to say about that...

In an interview with David Wilk on WritersCast.com, Kermit Moyer discusses his new novel, The Chester Chronicles, which I also talked about here. Wilk points out that the linked stories in Moyer's book are autobiographical, and Moyer explains why he chose not to simply write a memoir:

"I decided the best way to tell the truth about myself was to write fiction." That way, says Moyer, he can truly express an emotion that's real, even if the events built around it are made up.

Wilk adds that it's less important for the reader to know which parts of the story are fiction and which are real than it is for him or her to feel a connection with the character. Wilk says he felt this connection with the narrator of The Chester Chronicles, and he compares the book to A Separate Peace by John Knowles.

You can listen to the complete interview here.

1. We were both born in February! Happy Birthday, Mr. Ford!

2. We are both writers! (Bet you knew that was coming...)

3. Richard Ford is one of my favorite writers. (I'm sure he is one of his favorite writers, too. Why not?)

4. We both write novels. Richard Ford's novels have been published!

5. Some of Richard Ford's books take place in New Jersey. I have been to New Jersey many times. (See how these commonalities start to pile up?)

6. We both used the expression "gorked off" in a book to indicate someone dying. Richard Ford may have used it first.

7. Richard Ford keeps his manuscripts in the freezer. I keep pizza in the freezer. We both use our freezers!

8. We both attended that gala award reading last spring! We both had a few drinks, got our courage up, and had a nice conversation. (Maybe that was just me with the drinks. And the courage.)

Anyway, Happy Birthday, Mr. Ford, from a big fan.
Hope you have a great day, because before you know it, the good times are gone like a fart in a skillet.

Listen to the podcast of my NPR commentary on Independence Day, and two other books about desperate suburban men. Angst Lurks Behind the Lawn Mower was broadcast on All Things Considered.

The Authors Guild has developed a new way for authors to track what Amazon is doing to their book's page:

The Authors Guild is pleased to announce the launch of WhoMovedMyBuyButton.com, which is now live in fully-functional beta form. Who Moved My Buy Button? allows authors to keep track of whether Amazon has removed the "buy buttons" from any of their books.

Simply register the ISBNs of any books you'd like monitored, and our web tool will check daily to make sure your buy buttons are safe and sound. If there's a problem, we'll e-mail you an alert.

Although we've launched WhoMovedMyBuyButton.com in response to Amazon's wholesale removal of buy buttons from Macmillan titles, we believe Amazon should be monitored for years to come. Amazon's developed quite a fondness for employing this draconian tactic (there's a chronology at the website); it's only grown bolder with its growing market clout.

Vigilance is called for: sounding off is our best collective defense. Register your ISBNs today -- it's free and open to all authors, Guild members and not. (Though we'd prefer you join.)

Look here for more information and a screen shot.

And, if I may put in an additional word for the Authors Guild, they help make this here website possible, and I'm pretty happy about that.

See my guest post on novelist Susan Coll's blog, Alternate Sides: Adventures Along the Northeast Corridor, if you'd like to hear about my embarrassing experience on the USAir shuttle: The Apple Juice Fiasco.

And, while you're at it, read Susan's clever and funny posts about parking-- in particular, parking after a snowstorm in DC.

Susan Coll is the author of four very funny novels, including Acceptance, which was made into a film for Lifetime, and the forthcoming Beach Week. She is the fiction editor of Bethesda Magazine.

Kermit Moyer is not, technically, a new writer. But he is probably that great fiction writer you’ve never heard of. Until now. The Chester Chronicles is Moyer’s first book in more than twenty years, and his first novel.

Michael Cunningham calls Kermit Moyer “one of America’s undiscovered treasures.”

Publisher’s Weekly says Moyer’s stories “bring to mind the stories of Lorrie Moore.”

And according to Booklist, which gave the book a starred review, Moyer “displays an unerring feel for those moments that distill both the pathos and the comedy of growing up.”

In The Chester Chronicles, Chester "Chet" Patterson describes what life is like as an Army brat growing up in the 1950s and coming of age in the 1960s. His mother is a seductress and a lush, and his father is an Army officer whom Chet both resents and admires. Moving every two or three years, Chester is a perennial new kid as well as a bookish and movie-obsessed romantic. At the age of thirteen, he falls in love, he thinks, with his own first cousin. Each chapter could stand alone as a story about a pivotal moment, but taken together, the reader gets the whole of Chester's life. As Andre Dubus is quoted in the epigraph, "A life is a collection of stories." Each of Chester's stories takes him deeper into himself as well as a little farther into the century, during a time that includes the birth of rock and roll, the Civil Rights Movement, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the assassination of President Kennedy.

As Lee K. Abbott says, “I am…keen to see that this moving [book] reach as many folks as have eyes.”



Kermit Moyer was my first teacher in MFA school. He soon became my mentor, thesis advisor, and friend. Back then, I read his collection of stories, Tumbling, which The New York Times called “impeccable,” when it was published in 1988. I was floored by Moyer’s ability to channel a child’s perspective in those stories, including the often sexually charged circumstances in which his characters found themselves. Now, in The Chester Chronicles, he has honed and concentrated this skill, conveying the richness of one man’s inner experience as he comes of age along with the 20th century.

Moyer has a surgical ability to pare down to just the right phrase to describe a sensation or a gesture. Here’s the beginning of one of my favorite chapters, “Learning to Smoke,” in which Chester, at the age of 13, gets lessons in a bit more than smoking from his older cousin:

My cousin Frenchie is teaching me how to French inhale—a neat trick that involves jutting out your jaw just far enough to draw the smoke up from between your lips directly into your flaring nostrils. I’m sure that the dizziness I’m feeling is caused less by the carbonized tobacco hitting my still pristine lungs than by the taste of Frenchie’s cherry-red lipstick on the Parliament’s famously recessed filter tip.

Kermit once told me that for him, writing could be a slow, methodical process, because he works like a painter who, with a whole huge canvas before him, concentrates on one tiny segment at a time, getting each detail right before moving on to the next and the next.

He may work like a painter, but these stories are like gems, cut with the greatest of care and attention. They communicate through the simple drama of truths, multifaceted, and yet without pretentious devices. They build to a whole life’s experience, and they sparkle.

The Chester Chronicles by Kermit Moyer is available now from Amazon and The Permanent Press. Read it, please. I am lucky to have such talented friends.