Funniest Moment in My Classroom ...Possibly Ever

I'm always hesitant to post stories about my students for fear that someone will be offended, but in this case the students in question know that I'll be posting about this moment and they have every right to be proud of their brilliant wit. I'm not sure I've ever laughed so hard at a student's quip before. We were doing an assignment where students take a line or two from Romeo and Juliet and demonstrate that they understand them by converting them into some other voice. One student was working with Juliet's lines about how a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, and I told the class that a different character might use a different metaphor to make the same point, so they didn't have to limit themselves to roses.

A clever student shared his with the class. He made his voice as low and scratchy as he could and said, "Tequila in a Scotch bottle is still Tequila."

From across the room, an even more clever student shouted, "Mom?"

Interview on Carry On Harry!

I was interviewed on The Carry On Harry Talk Show, a great show out of Singapore. The host, Harry Johal, asks good questions and brings a lot of energy to his show. I think the interview went very well. Check it out here and let me know what you think!

Tonight I got to shake hands with Ursula K. Le Guin!

About a month ago, Sherman Alexie swore at me. Tonight I got to shake hands with another of my literary heroes, Ursula K. Le Guin. It's been a pretty amazing time, and it makes me wonder what's next. Will Margaret Atwood slap me? Will Cormac McCarthy kiss me on the forehead? Will the ghost of William Shakespeare appear in my room and command me to kill one of my uncles? I hope not. I love my uncles, but it would be hard to refuse an order from William Shakespeare. At the very least, I would dither, Hamlet-style. For those of you who are unfamiliar with her work, Ursula K Le Guin is probably most famous for her novels Lathe of Heaven and The Left Hand of Darkness, as well as her Earthsea fantasy series. She's won the Hugo Award twice and the Nebula Award four times (those are the biggest prizes for science fiction authors). She's won the National Book Award. Tonight I learned that the Library of Congress named her a "Living Legend" for her contribution to American literature. Not too shabby.

She's also an Oregonian, or, at least, she has been since she moved her in 1959. I think that qualifies her sufficiently. She came to the Civic Center in Dallas, Oregon, as part of the Literary Arts & Lecture series. This last year she won the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction, and part of the prize if that authors go around and give lectures throughout the state. I could imagine some authors resenting an award that came with an obligatory lecture tour, but if Ms. Le Guin resented it at all, she hid it masterfully.

Ms. Le Guin writes more than just science fiction and fantasy, and she showed off her range tonight by starting with some poetry, beginning with a poem written in sapphic stanzas (a 2500+ year-old form) followed by modern free verse. Then she read us a short story. As much praise as Le Guin has received for her novels, personally, I think her short stories are even more impressive. After the story, she answered questions from the audience. I selfishly asked two, both of which she answered generously, though with a bit less flair than Sherman Alexie. She was funny, sharp, and insightful about the writing process, her tastes, and the industry.

I managed to get a few of her quotes word for word:

• On archetypes: "It's not like you go looking for them. They come looking for you!"
• On her writing education: "I read a lot of good books. You learn what's worth imitating."
• On why she doesn't like complicated thrillers: "I finally learn who done it, and I hardly knew it was done."

After her talk, I made my way to the front and shook her hand before she could get mobbed by people who wanted her to sign their books. She probably thinks I'm a cheapskate, but I would have purchased another copy of Lathe of Heaven just to have her sign it if I'd brought the checkbook or they'd taken credit cards. I fought off the urge to tell her that I do have copies of her books in storage. That would have sounded like a back-handed compliment as much as a desperate defense, anyway. Instead, I just shook her hand. I'm sure she's already forgotten the moment, but I will treasure it and brag about it to anyone who will listen or read a long and frustratingly inconclusive blog post.

The Novel has Arrived in Seoul!

I may be agnostic when it comes to the existence of the soul, but I now have photographic evidence that Seoul has my novel [Groan]! Okay, that pun was painful, but the picture is great. Thanks to Sharon and Hyon, the models in the picture, and thanks to Mary, Sharon's sister here in Oregon, who went above-and-beyond to connect our uncooperative email accounts.

Sharon writes: "Here we are, my friend Hyon and I, in Seoul, South Korea, taking a break from a busy day of souvenir shopping. While resting, I was able to share and discuss a great book, The Sum of Our Gods, written by a fellow teacher, Benjamin Gorman, from Independence, Oregon. As you can see, we were so engrossed in our conversation about the book, that we were oblivious to the thousands of people passing by us on the busy street."

Review of Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Today my family and some friends made an event out of watching the first Captain America movie (well, the most recent reboot. Please forget this one. And this one. And this one.) and then going to see Captain America: The Winter Soldier. I won’t spoil the new one, but I can confidently say it was better than the first and worth your time. First, let’s revel in the fact that Chris Evans is one of the best miscastings of all times. His turn as Steve Rogers (Captain America) has not only made him very successful, but it’s had some surprise bonuses. For one thing, it’s redeemed his performance as The Human Torch in those painful Fantastic Four movies. I thought he was some Hollywood douchebag in those. Watching his Steve Rogers, I realize he was channeling something very real about Johnny Storm’s character: He was a douchebag. I would not have been surprised if the first actor to be cast as two different superheroes had been a woman. There tend to be a smaller pool of Hollywood “it” girls, while Hollywood treats its myriad wooden action-hero-types as interchangeable. The female characters in comic books almost always have the same body types, specifically ones no human woman possesses, so I expected Hollywood to find the closest woman to that vision and toss her all the female roles. When I first heard they were casting The Human Torch as Captain America, I thought they were making that mistake, which seemed to be more progressive than I’d expected but still an error. It turns out that this new role allowed Chis Evans to show he has some range. While Evans’ Human Torch was all feigned swagger on top of a layer of insecure human on top of a core of genuine but uninteresting heroism, Evans’ Captain America in anything but. He’s always throwing himself on grenades, tossing himself between gunman and their targets, leaping before he looks in order to save the day. His layer of uninteresting hero is on the surface. He clearly gets that part of the comic book’s character. The reason Chris Evans is miscast is that Steve Rodgers is a fundamentally boring character in the comic books, and I’m sure they could have found someone with an even more square jaw and crazy muscles to play the part in that boring way. (If anything, Evans is too buff for Steve Rogers, who wasn’t the most roided-out of all the characters in the Marvel Universe.) Instead, they picked an actor who can pull off a joke, something that was never particularly important in the Captain America comics. The Captain wasn’t the source of comic relief in the Avengers comics, either, but Evans can go toe-to-toe with actors with excellent comic timing in that franchise of films. In the original Captain America, he keeps up with Stanley Tucci and Tommy Lee Jones (the highlights of that film by far), and that’s quite an accomplishment. In this one, his banter with Anthony Mackie (Falcon) and Scarlett Johansson (Black Widow) shows more wit than the comics’ Steve Rodgers ever had. But Evans’ ability to pull off a joke isn’t even the best thing about his mis-casting. It’s the fact that he was cast as much to play the before-Captain-America Steve Rogers as the after version. He maintains the courageous weakling that the first film chose to focus on so heavily, and that carries over into this movie even as his central conflict shifts to that of a man questioning his loyalties and assumptions about his place in the world. Essentially, Chris Evans (and a good script) give Steve Rogers more layers than the comic book’s Captain America ever had.

The Winter Soldier does a good job of not going overboard with the characters’ angst or the allegory. It uses Steve Rogers’ return to the waking world after seventy years trapped in the ice as a nice parallel for the soldiers returning home from modern wars, though Anthony Mackie’s turn as Sam Wilson, a soldier returning from Iraq or Afghanistan, makes that metaphor a lot more believable and less forced. The movie resists the urge to dwell on this too much, especially since it could have confused the situation if they’d tried to contrast this struggle of Rogers’ and Wilson’s with the character of The Winter Soldier. I won’t give away too much about him, but it’snot a spoiler to say that The Winter Soldier is not an appropriate allegorical equivalent of a soldier struggling to come home from war or one tempted by the potentially lucrative benefits of becoming a mercenary, since it’s made explicitly clear that he is not really returning from a war and that he’s not a willful mercenary cashing in on his super-warrior skills. The Winter Soldier is something else, and if this movie took itself too seriously it might have inadvertently made some more bitter critiques of returning American soldiers than this light Hollywood fare would ever dare touch. If there is any sharp allegory, it’s not connected to the returning soldier plot-line, but to the danger of the surveillance state.  Even that is subtle enough that no one at the NSA is worrying this movie will inspire a great public outcry. It was nice to see characters who held nuanced positions on the subject though, rather than good guys who uniformly support Freedom and bad guys who support Tyranny. Even the movie’s ultimate head villain is revealed to be someone who does not cackle or think of himself as evil, just a pragmatist who thinks he’s doing what it takes to make the world better. Comic book villains too often lack believable motives, and it was particularly satisfying that a number of the movies heroes occupied spaces between Captain America’s and the chief villains, and could articulate those positions in persuasively.

Of course, mostly The Winter Soldier was about cars crashing and bullets ricocheting harmlessly but dramatically off of surfaces very close to the heroes’ faces. There was also a lot of acrobatic fighting, well-choreographed and better edited than the first. (While watching that one, my nine-year old son noticed that there was a hard cut between a shot of Captain America swinging on a chain and a shot of him running without any hint that he’d landed at some point in between. Noah theorized that it was a deleted scene in an extended edition, which is both nerd-dorable and more generous than calling it a mistake.) The body count in The Winter Soldier is both disturbingly high and unrealistically low considering the number of bullets flying and cars crashing into one another. An argument could be made about Hollywood’s desperate need to up the stakes always resulting in conflicts that threaten complete world-wide disaster, but, if that’s a problem (it is), comic book movies are not the place to start rectifying it. In the source material, the entire world is imperiled multiple times each month. At least in this movie, no major downtown areas are destroyed just to show that the bad guys are, in fact, dangerous.

One last note from a comic book geek: It’s not a major spoiler to reveal that one of the villains in this movie is Batroc The Leaper, a character sometimes credited with being the lamest villain in the entire Marvel Universe.  This movie did a great job of making him barely menacing and appropriately minor, a little shout-out to us old comic book fans that didn’t spoil the movie for people who are new to Captain America’s nemeses. I imagine that someone bet one of the screenwriters, Edward Brubaker, Stephen McFeely, or Christopher Marcus, that no one could ever get Batroc into a major motion picture, and that one of those gentlemen is now the proud owner of a crisp new five dollar bill. Well earned, sir!

Bertrand Russell's "Ten Commandments"

I just discovered this, and I love it. This is Bertrand Russell's "Ten Commandments." 1: Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.

2: Do not think it worthwhile to produce belief by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.

3: Never try to discourage thinking, for you are sure to succeed.

4: When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.

5: Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.

6: Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.

7: Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

8: Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.

9: Be scrupulously truthful, even when truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.

10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.

I wonder what Russell would think of The Sum of Our Gods. On the one hand, it revels in uncertainty and shows very little respect for authority. On the other hand, while it strives to tell the truth, it's the truth of fictional characters. Would Russell consider fiction to be "scrupulously truthful" or merely convenient?

Review of Divergent

Today I read Veronica Roth's Divergent. All of it. In one day. I'm not a fast reader like my wife or some of my colleagues, so that feels like an accomplishment to me. My verdict is ...mixed. The fact that it's a remarkably fast read doesn't really win or lose the book any points for me. I've torn through books before because they were so good I couldn't put them down. I also read Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code very quickly, rolling my eyes every time he described Audrey Tautou's character as "incredulous," which was about 400 times. Roth's writing is certainly better than Dan Brown's, but that compliment feels more like an insult than I intend.

The world of Divergent is genuinely interesting and engrossing. I love dystopias, and the use of factions based on virtues is interesting. Calling the factions "factions" is a bit on-the-nose, but I can forgive that in YA. The choosing of the faction, though cliché, is also forgivable in a YA coming-of-age story. Whether it's the sorting hat or the Reaping or the shooting of a first deer, these moments are dramatic and speak to a longing in our culture for distinct coming-of-age rituals which we lack. I get that, and Roth handled that part just fine even if it wasn't unique. The protagonist, Tris, isn't sure whether she belongs in Slytherin Dauntless or Hufflepuff Abnegation, wrestles with the decision, and ultimately chooses a faction only to find that they are all flawed and none fit her perfectly. It works, and if it ain't broke ...well, a bit more creativity would be nice, but I can handle it.

Here's what is broken and which must be fixed. The narrator, Tris, is a gawky, accident-prone, scrawny, pretty (but not too pretty) girl who thinks she is ugly. Since she's the narrator, we are only exposed to her beauty by reading about all her self-doubts and then recognizing that they don't fit with the reactions of the boys around her who find her attractive. I can forgive Roth for drawing from the archetypal coming-of-age myths, but do we need another Bella Swann or Katniss Everdeen? Katniss is better than Tris in that she has confidence in her hunting ability and her role as the provider for her family. Tris has more pride than Bella Swann, but she even feels guilty about that pride. At least Tris doesn't have to get knocked-up by a guy who is more than a hundred years old on their honeymoon in order to discover her own self-worth by becoming a mother. Can we please stop telling teenage girls that, in order to be likable, they have to have unrealistically low opinions of themselves? This trend can't be good for anybody.

It's difficult to read around a protagonist who is unlikeable, but the other characters kept me going. Tobias/Four, the love interest, is genuinely interesting and somewhat complicated, at least until his unswerving adoration of Tris becomes clear. Then he just becomes a realistic swooning teenage boy, and that's bearable, too. Considering his backstory, he could have been a lot more insufferable in his brooding. Points for Roth on that.

And why present tense? Writers, listen to me! Present tense is great for action sequences, so I can see why it appeals to people who are setting out to write fast-paced, action heavy books. If you have any sense that the time period covered by the book will extend for any prolonged period of time, resist this temptation, especially if the book is written in first person. Learn from Suzanne Collins' mistake. After a second reading, I have grown to like Mockingjay, the third Hunger Games book, but I completely understand why it gets such mixed reviews from my students. In The Hunger Games trilogy. the first book happens over the course of a handful of days, so the present tense works. The second book happens over the course of a couple weeks, so it works, but slightly less well. The third covers a much longer period of time, but Collins couldn't switch because she'd painted herself into a corner. Unless you can maintain the urgency of an action scene for the whole series (which would probably be exhausting for the reader and would lead to a lot of blunt exposition at the expense of more beautiful prose), don't make this mistake. Better yet, write the thing in one tense, then rewrite it in another and see which works better. I suspect that, most of the time, you'll find that the demand for intensity is overbalanced by the fact that we naturally tell stories in the past tense in our daily lives, so this compulsion to haste leads to a stiff, awkward writing style.

The most interesting element of Divergent is the mystery of how this seeming-utopia is breaking down and what that says about the virtues which under-gird it. We really only get to see that starting to play out in the last third of the book, so I'll read the sequels to see if the series gets deeper into those questions of values and motivations. Also, my wife says Tris gets more likable. Color me skeptical. Still, I have to remind myself that The Lightning Thief, the first book in the Percy Jackson series, was painfully derivative of Harry Potter, but the series found its own way in the second book and ended up being pretty great by the end. Maybe the Divergent trilogy will find its own path and break free from some of the more well-worn elements of YA fiction in the second and third book.

I admit I'm very curious to see how they handle the severity of the book's violence in the film, so I'll be checking that out, too. My prediction, a largely bloodless version of a bloody, savage story. Hopefully my low expectations will cause me to be pleasantly surprised. Those who've seen the movie, are the directors really bold enough to make the audience sit through multiple beatings that continue until one of the participants is an unconscious, bloody pulp? I would respect that for both its faithfulness to the book and its audacity, but it doesn't sound like a lot of fun, and it would certainly upset some parents. How far do they go? Far enough? Too far?

Review of Watership Down

Today I assigned my nine-year-old son, Noah, to write a short review of the book he’d just finished. I explained that this wasn’t just busywork. It’s actually a good way to collect one’s thoughts about a book after finishing it. Well, tonight I finished Richard Adams’ Watership Down, a book that had been on my “I really should have read that a long time ago” list for many years. I guess it’s time to walk my talk.

If you are one of the three or four people in the English-speaking world who, like me, managed to miss this book, allow me to give you the basics. It’s about rabbits. It’s a remarkably subtle blend of anthropomorphization and well-researched naturalism. It draws heavily on great human epics about heroes and journeys and battles.  Essentially, a character named Fiver is Cassandra (the character in Greek mythology cursed to always tell the truth but never be believed), but his brother, Hazel, does believe him and takes a group of rabbits on a journey. Hazel turns out to be Odysseus, only instead of returning from a war to his beloved wife, he’s using clever tricks to get his rabbits to a new warren. Then there’s Bigwig, the old warrior who is brave enough to stand up to the monstrous tyrant who wants to destroy the new warren. I guess that makes him like Achilles or Beowulf, but in his defense of the warren on Watership Down, he’s more like Hector bravely willing to give his life for Troy and his brother’s honor. No, that’s not quite right, either. Anyway, they are all great characters who deserve to have their stories told to many generations of rabbits and humans.

One of the things that struck me was Richard Adams’ insistence that the book is not an allegory for any human events. I think he’s being totally honest that he didn’t intend for any allegory, but that doesn’t mean that one doesn’t exist. Perhaps it’s a testament to the human need to create stories, just as the rabbits of Watership Down tell one another stories (beautiful stories interspersed throughout the book), that we connect this story to our own experience whether the author intends for us to do so or not. When General Woundwart, the leader of the opposing warren, comes to Watership Down and rejects the offer of peace out of fear and obsession, I couldn’t help but think of times I’ve made similar (though less deadly) blunders based on pride and a need to save face. I also thought of all the human wars started due to the same base motives. It’s not comfortable to discover a connection between my own failed attempts to maintain control in situations where I should have sought a win-win and times when whole nations flung themselves at one another because leaders made the same blunders on catastrophic scales, but that’s just the kind of connection that these non-allegory epic tales of adventure can produce if we are willing to let them.

Though I told Noah it was fine to spoil the ending in his own notes, I won’t do it here in a public forum. Suffice it to say that the ending was entirely satisfactory in that it resolved all the issues but made me wish Hazel, Fiver, and Bigwig could get caught up in another series of adventures so that I could spend more time with them.

The writing is masterful. It’s always difficult to know how much to describe the natural world in a human story, and too often writers allow themselves to wax on and on about the movements of clouds and the play of sunlight through leaves fluttering in the wind without any thought to the fact that the human characters in the story don’t give a flying photon, and thus the readers don’t either. In general, these are prime examples of the darlings that must be killed. But in Watership Down, the descriptions of the natural world are direct products of the characters’ interests and their immediate sensory impressions. Just as a description of the direction of the wind is entirely relevant in a story about sailing ships, a description of scents on a breeze really matters in this book because it matters to the rabbits. That’s a good reminder for writers; if the reader cares about the characters, he/she will care about what the characters care about. But if you spend too much time on trivialities that are unimportant to the characters, the reader will not only lose interest in the story, but may cease to like the characters, too. I’ll be giving that more thought as I revise thanks to this novel.

Do not continue to make the mistake I made for so many years. Grab a copy of Watership Down posthaste.

...after you get a copy of The Sum of Our Gods, of course.

Tonight, Sherman Alexie said, "Fuck you!" to me!

I totally deserved it. Some background. First of all, getting to hear Sherman Alexie speak is a privilege for anybody because he's a supremely talented speaker. It's a bigger deal for me because he's in my Top Ten. Those aren't the ten writers I enjoy reading the most, though I thoroughly enjoy reading Mr. Alexie's work. Saying he's one of my favorite writers, though true, feels too much like saying, "I'm on Team Sherman!" Bleck. No, my Top Ten are the writers whose work I respect the most because they are masters of their craft. The roster of the Top Ten sometimes changes, but he's been a consistent member since I was 17 and read The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. Some of the other writers are dead. Some are alive, but recluses, like Cormac McCarthy, so I don't expect I'll get to hear them speak anytime soon. One member is dead and he was an asshole, so I'm not sure I would even have wanted to hear him speak. I might be paraphrasing, but I think Stephan King said something about how Earnest Hemingway was an asshole, but he was also a motherfucking genius. If Hemingway asked me to go out drinking with him I would demure because I know he would get me drunk, challenge me to a boxing match, impugn my masculinity until I agreed, and then beat the tar out of me. On second thought, I would still say yes and be grateful to have the chance to be beaten up by Hemingway. On third thought, I'd say no because I'd be too creeped-out if a dead guy asked me to go drinking. Nah, I'd still say yes.

Anyway, back to a member of the Top Ten who is less likely to beat me up (I'm still wary of you, Margaret Atwood!). I've heard Mr. Alexie speak before at the Portland Arts and Lectures series, but I didn't ask a question. I told myself that I was letting the high school students have that opportunity, but really I was too star struck. Tonight, I girded my loins and jumped for the mic when the time came.

Then, like a douche, I tried to make a joke about how I was still reeling from the news that this is the 20th anniversary of The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, a book I read when I was 17. I wanted to explain that the book was hugely important to me because it was one of the first things I'd read that taught me that good writing can punch you in the gut. Up until then, I'd read classics without the ability to put myself into another time and place and fully feel how impactful they were to the audiences of their day. I also read a lot of fantasy and sci-fi that were wonderful, but which were largely vacations from my life, not books that openly challenged me. (That's not a knock on fantasy or sci-fi. I just hadn't yet found books like 1984 or The Year of the Flood that pack a wallop.) Somebody put The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven into my hands when I got to college (some friend in the dorm, not one of my profs. It was too new to be canonized yet) and I found that short fiction and poetry, especially the poetry, could knock the wind out of me. I thought Mr. Alexie might take particular pleasure in the knowledge that his writing delivered a beat-down to a suburban white kid, but he'd also appreciate that it carried his images into my classroom, into my own writing, and into crevices in my brain where they have resided for twenty years and show no signs of vacating.

Of course, by pointing out that the twentieth anniversary made me feel old, I couldn't help but imply that Mr. Alexie is even older. So, before I could try to shoehorn all that praise into a short preamble to my real question, he said, "Fuck you!"

Now, this was great for a couple reasons. For one thing, I'd brought a group of my high school students. They absolutely loved watching a great writer tell one of their teachers off. On the bus on the way home, they kept asking, "Can we tell people what he said to you in school tomorrow?"

I shrugged. "You'd be quoting, so I guess it's fine as long as you put it in context and cite your source. Always cite your sources."

The other reason why this was so great was because it was Sherman Alexie and he was saying it to me. A couple weeks ago, as a fluke, I had my name drawn out of a hat and had a chance to go meet a couple of the Portland Trailblazers. It wasn't just a handshake/signature affair. We got to participate in a mock practice. Their great new center, Robin Lopez, who is listed at seven feet tall but struck me as more like eight, was kind enough to swat one of my attempted layups into the stands. That's what this felt like. Having Sherman Alexie tell me, "Fuck you!" was like having an NBA player swat my weak shot into the stands.

It didn't register at first. I'm not particularly prurient when it comes to language. Words are tools. They have no moral weight. When the right tool for the job is a four letter one, then it should be used. When any word, no matter how innocuous it might seem out of context, is employed to hurt someone, it becomes a "bad word." Even then, sometimes a bad word is also the right word. This casual attitude about so-called "swear words" is a bit dangerous for a school teacher. After listening to Mr. Alexie speak, I almost said that the revelation about the book's age made me "feel fuckin' old," and that would have been a bad slip-up in front of my kids. (They would have loved it, but I probably would have gotten hell from a parent or two.) When Mr. Alexie said, "Fuck you!" I not only wasn't offended; I was relieved. Standing up in front of a room full of people might be de rigueur for him, but there were a lot more grown-ups in that room than I am used to, and he made me feel like we were just two guys talking. Sure, he's the literary equivalent of an NBA seven footer and I'm the literary equivalent of ...well, I have one novel published, so I guess I'm the literary equivalent of the fan who jumps out of his recliner to shout at the TV sometimes. Still, he was talking with me, and that was very cool.

After that, I stumbled my way through my question. He used to stutter, so that's probably why he was patient with me. I asked him about how difficult it was to edit the beginning of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian, a description of poverty and its psychological effects that is so carefully crafted and effective that I think every politician and policy-maker should have to read it to even be considered for office.

"Where do you teach?" he asked.

Now that really freaked me out. After all, this was a guy who had just said, "Fuck you!" and if he didn't like my question and had decided to light me up, I was about to give him a huge opening.

I told him. "Wow," he said. "They have some good teachers at Central High School." This is true. I'd ridden on the bus with some teachers who are better than I am. But I got the impression he was talking about me, and I will accept that praise (uncomfortably, as always).

Then he answered my question. His answer was generous, too generous for me to recount completely. He said that he'd edited that particular portion of the book probably 50 times. Then he demonstrated how one finds that sweet spot where a story manages to hit home without being preachy. You read that correctly. He demonstrated. On the spot. He told a story about the time his family got their first toilet. They didn't have indoor plumbing before, and, when they got it, it was magical. He had us all laughing as he talked about the mythic men from Sears who carried it in, and how the family drew straw to see who would get to use it first. He was the first Alexie to use the first Alexie toilet. Once he had us all feeling amused and included, he showed how the story can pivot in a natural way, grab us by the guts, and twist. He told us about how, when he was little, he was so scared that his dad would disappear on another bender that, when his dad would go into that bathroom to sit on that toilet, Sherman Jr. would go down the hall and sit by the door, knocking, just to make sure his dad was still home.

Bam! That's how it's done.

After demonstrating, he reminded us all that a lot of the editing process comes from reading. That was a good reminder for this English teacher. I always tell students how important it is to read often in order to become a better writer, but I forget to tell them that they need to read in order to become better editors, to analyze their own work and measure it by what has been successful in the writing they enjoy. I will make a point to share that with the students in my creative writing class tomorrow, though I know I won't do so half as well as Mr. Alexie did tonight.

To sum up, iIn just one evening, Mr. Alexie made me a better editor, a better writer, and a better teacher (and probably a better father, a better liberal, and a better white person, if I'm totally honest). To him, that's probably just like every other fucking day, but, to me, it was one helluva night.

But I didn't get to tell him how much I loved War Dances.

Grumpy Cat Pumpkin

For Halloween, I carved a pumpkin for my wife, Paige, that looked like her favorite animal in the world, Grumpy Cat. The other pumpkins quickly rotted away, but Grumpy Cat Pumpkin lingered, so I started taking pictures of his slow and bitter decline. Want to know what's grumpier than Grumpy Cat? Click your way through these:

I love you, Paige!