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Book Review Advance review by Bookreporter.com









DON’T FORGET ME, BRO









By John Michael Cummings









Stephen F. Austin State University Press









Families: they love us, they hate us, they confuse us, they support us, they believe in us, they hurt us, they forgive us, they never forget our mistakes …









It’s no good picking and choosing which of the above (in what could be an interminably long list) best applies to your particular family, or mine, because today’s assumption will become tomorrow’s irrelevance.









As author John Michael Cummings shows with such poignant and searing skill in DON’T FORGET ME, BRO families contain all of it. There’s simply no tidy, predictable emotional or dynamic boundary to draw around these most primal of human units. Even those who don’t know their biological families have collective relationships that daily test their autonomy, individuality, self-worth and dreams.









Cummings, who’s spent more than three decades writing about human beings, mainly of the everyday American persuasion, excels in uncovering those beneath-the-skin familial stories that realistically probe uncomfortable, often invisible, areas of life. And even in our current decade of sociological transparency, perhaps nothing is more resistant to illumination in this context than mental illness.









As a broad collection of chemical, biological and/or psychiatric disorders of the brain, it eludes clear-cut treatments and solutions as successfully as families elude pat definitions of who and what they are. When families and their perceptions of mental illness collide, as happens with such gritty persistence in DON’T FORGET ME, BRO all the discomfort of relationships, normal and otherwise, comes to the fore.









Returning home to West Virginia to deal with the premature death of his older brother Steve, long diagnosed as schizophrenic, Mark Barr carries plenty of his own emotional and psychological baggage, including a deep-seated distaste for a father he remembers as abusive, a mother who seems a passive bystander to life, and a middle brother who comes across as just plain weird. With a number of failed relationships on record – including the one that’s falling apart even as he sets out from New York – he’s not so sure about his own mental health either.









“Going back home” stories are often based on narrow cliché-filled themes that focus on a single character or experience. Like series TV shows, they are easier to control and wrap up in a satisfying sentimental or tragic package at the end.









Fortunately, DON’T FORGET ME, BRO isn’t one of them. It’s a gripping emotional and literary journey that hits just about every pothole one can expect to find on life’s road; that part is engaging and sometimes oddly familiar. And when Cummings throws in a few unexpected left turns, thanks to his character’s unpredictable relatives and colleagues, there are moments of surprise and difference to ponder as well. That skilfully managed dichotomy in itself sets this author apart, drawing the reader into places that challenge assumption and attitude.









At the outset, Mark does think this back-home story is all about him, but he’s not driven by ego or self-absorption as much as by fear, worry and chronic indecision. His own identity, perhaps even his future, are on the line.









But as he blunders into memories, people, and artifacts from the chaotic mosaic of his dead brother’s life he rediscovers who Steve really was. In spite of himself he grows into a kind of belated and bewildered stewardship over his brother’s cremated remains, which become a catalyst for revealing ever-deeper layers of family stories he never really knew.









Haunted by the last words he heard Steve utter – “Don’t forget me, bro” – Mark realizes that at the heart of every human existence is the fear of being forgotten, of simply disappearing into cosmic anonymity. After all, even families that can’t stand each other tenaciously remember their own.







With the unexpected complicity of his equally dysfunctional remaining brother, Mark hangs around his hometown, stumbling upon ways to build better memories than the ones he’d fled more than a decade earlier when he went to New York seeking success.









The Barr family changes a little, just enough for its surviving members to actually remain civilly in the same room together. That’s about it. Cummings doesn’t make their story television-comfortable, nor does he eliminate the heavy reality of an uncertain future.









Set against the larger contexts of contemporary economic depression, social despair, fear of the known and unknown, as well as multiple shades of guilt, remorse and anger, in the end DON’T FORGET ME, BRO can only exhale in a long sigh of acceptance.









Cummings adeptly leaves the reader suspended in that fragile moment before the next breath must be taken, yet strangely satisfied that compassion and justice have been attained. DON’T FORGET ME, BRO is a rare thing, a brilliant addition to a theme in which so many other novels under-achieve.









– reviewed by Pauline Finch, Bookreporter.com

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When I had a chance to sit down with my first book editor in New York, it was an era-turning moment. We actually met at her home in Rye, New York, a big rambling Victorian on a hill overlooking the Hudson River.  By email I already understood her edits, but in person I would quickly understand more.

Her aesthetics.

Not so much through her margin comments, but through her house—the style of art on her walls, her furniture, the landscaping. Before the visit was over, I felt my book was now in two hands, hers and mine, and in many ways I now knew the nuances of language she liked because I knew her on another level.

I had a similar experience last week here at UCF. I sat down with my thesis director and, again, although I quickly understood her margin comments, there was a greater understanding awaiting me. I got a chance to see her office as if for the time—the high shelves jammed with books, her various writing projects stacked here and there. I also got a chance to chat informally with her—we shared a laugh over the laughably small computers being made today.

Then we got to work.

“Avoid the minutia of perceiving,” one of her margin comments read. “Give me the concrete details.”

She didn’t need to explain. Or did she?

“I already know it’s you,” she said. “It’s first person. Just”—she churned her hands in the air—“just give it to me without stage directions.”

I sat nodding, thinking.

For the longest time, I likened first person to having a big TV camera mounted on my shoulder, continually telling the reader, in some clever way, “Now I'm looking here, now I’m looking there.” Never did I stop and think—hey, they already know.

I left my thesis director’s office feeling a great burden off my shoulder—that heavy camera I had hoisted up all these years.  I was also happy to know her a little better.

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The best prose has poetic darlings in it, like phrases that repeat, that echo, that lead us forward like bread crumbs. Then, stop. Outside the window of the halted sentence lies a winterscape of fields snowdrifted so as to look like lemon meringue pie. All the world is silent, except for a tiny cry of wind through a crack in the glass.

The beauty and intensity of writing comes from its magnified, color-dripping images to its feelings that escape the page like a genie. In these moments, the beautiful, the imaginative, the elevated—all descend from the sky on white wings of thought to land on the solid roofline we call the paragraph.

Text.

Unit of discourse.

Topic sentence, supporting sentences:

                                        UNIFIED

                                                       Coherent

                                                                     VaRied

active, rhythmic ~ Adidas Bounce Shoes

Writing…

Daybreak brought an explosion of light and warmth to our eight-window row house apartment in Brooklyn, which Lisa called our "treehouse apartment." The exposed-brick wall in our living room was glowing ember-red; the refinished floor around our bed was shining honey-golden; and the high white ceiling was beaming with church-like radiance. Long gone were the piano keys of brake lights that had played across the ceiling at night, and in their place shone a brilliant lattice of sunlight, around which hung a kooky mobile of intense silhouettes--a triangle with a sawed-off corner, a crescent with a crisp, dark hole shot through it, and a wild-looking parallelogram bursting straight down to the floor in a platinum-white solar flare. One thing was for sure. Demons that had romped in the dark last night would be photosensitive now…

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The Calibri font, picture above.

For years I had been using Times Roman. It was and still is, I think, the preferred font. I wrote and published close to a hundred stories using it. I toiled through my first novel with it, too. Add to that attempts at other novels and ten thousand emails—all Times Roman. So when my computer sneezed, I was ready for a change, a change that complemented another one in me.

For years my writing had also been thinning out, becoming sparer and sparer. The high grass of jabbered-out phrases was now all but a barren dirt earth of truth. The farm on my emotional real estate is, I like to imagine, Lovesome Dove herself. Today I sit in stick furniture, feeling austere, Calibri now at my fingertips, like my hound dog on my dry, dusty, unpainted porch.

Termed a “Humanist” typeface and also called “Venetian,” Calibri is from a family of fonts from the 15th century, regarded as the unpretentious typeface of Italian humanist writers like Guillaume Budé, to name one. This is all interesting, but I’ll take just the word “humanist” to heart as I write my way forward.

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“What do you write?” That’s the automatic first question I get asked.

“How my childhood should have been.” That’s the automatic answer I wish I could give, instead of the safe, literal one—stories, novels.

My, um, counselor is intrigued and, I suspect, pleased by my first-choice answer. You see, by profession, I’m also doing his thinking homework for me.

“Righting past wrongs?” he asks.

When I give a nod, I get a battery of Freudian-based questions:

• How does writing about my past help me understand the
   unconditional love I missed?

• How does it help me see that as a child I blamed himself for
   my parents' unhappiness?

• Does the hero of my stories always reach a rainbow end,
   happy, strong, and complete inside?

My answers are mixed and difficult to decipher. Results are questionable.

So why don’t I just leave my past alone? Why risk dwelling there in the construction of sentences and paragraphs that bring to life another version of it? What matters is the here and now. After all, so many of my counterparts have moved on from their pasts years ago, never to give it another thought.

Or have they?

Psychologically speaking, there are, my counselor assures me, innumerable adults who are just wounded children. They recycle through relationship after relationship, suffocating one another in “enmeshed boundaries.” They lean on each other like a crutch, only to hate each other because they can’t use their own two legs.

Becoming aware of the reasons behind our feelings and actions that lead to our weaknesses and ruin is like getting a psychological CAT scan. We discover the maladies in our thinking, and awareness, as they say, is half the battle. We can then make conscious decisions to break unhealthy patterns.

Writing stories that right past wrongs is not the same as reading daily affirmations or filling out mood charts, but it does force us to face our past, examine it, and decide, in the here and now, how to redeem ourselves and our villains.

We write about what we care about, and we care about what hurts us.

Keep writing!

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It was a eureka moment this weekend (aren’t those moments the best?) when the hurricane-like storm threw its shoulders against the glass sides of the UCF Wellness Center, sending thunder and torrent down to the ground, and standing there with puny dumbbells in my hands, I thought to myself—“Whoa, if only I could write like that!”

The monstrous black legs of clouds marched into the building of glass, kneeing it over and over, sending the facility into “lockdown.” Huddled in the gym with a hundred other grumbling exercisers, I thought—I could take a lesson from the skies.

The active voice of storms can be inspiring. How many of our sentences read like tranquil blue spheres, not a cloud of tension in them. But how to achieve the flash and sizzle of lightning, the rumble and roar of thunder? Active voice alone is not enough. It’s the choice of words. It’s the feeling behind the writer.

What was this storm feeling? What was it saying to Mother Earth? It sure wasn’t asking for my forgiveness as it pounded its mega-ton boots against the earth, swung its colossal fists against at the windows, hissed and ground out deep, throating-bleed howls, all while chewing at the sky as if to mutilate its own face. It was an awesome hulk of energy.

What a rant against tranquility it wrote.

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I missed the 58-year-old pop rocker’s free concert at the Orlando Amway Center yesterday. (My friend and I opted for a picnic in Cranes Roost Park instead.) But for days I had been eagerly awaiting seeing Springfield, even clinging to the expectation, more and more amazed and even amused by my building excitement to see an ’80s pop music singer who, in my hard rock youth, I scoffed at.

Growing up in West Virginia, it was all things Molly Hatchet and Lynyrd Skynyrd. The louder, the meaner, the better.  I'm talking dashboard-banging music like ACDC. Rick Springfield’s stuff was girly, sissy music, like the Bee Gees. He is an ex “General Hospital” pretty boy, for crying out loud!

More than that, Springfield was the unfortunate “spring” in the rising star collision of Rick Springfield and Bruce Springsteen. In the early ’80s, Springsteen, a name people were hearing more and more, rose up beside Springfield on the pop charts, and apparently the public got the two confused. Springfield was known to have publically said, with frustration, “Don’t call me Bruce!” Or “Don’t call me ‘The Boss’!” Springsteen’s trade handle. That, it seemed, did him in. He as much admitted being upstaged by his “spring” rival. Full attention turned to Springsteen who, as we all know, went on to become rock’s global icon.

Meanwhile, my life went on, and I found myself writing. The road to a writer’s voice is a thousand miles long, and I had to walk mine step after step. Book after book was rejected. Solitude withered me away. Little events, like an unexpected chat in the line at the grocery store, became greatly appreciated. Halfway through the second decade of my literary pursuits, the cocky stride of my youth was long gone. I would never bang a dashboard again.

Here in Florida, when my friend called the other day to suggest the Rick Springfield concert, I found my eyes brightening. “Well, okay, if it’s free.” It was another of those unexpected gifts I was grateful for, like the chat in the grocery store line, a reminder of my gratitude for the small things.

My new novel is filled with these Rick Springfield moments. Scenes I think I cannot write, people I think I cannot create, I manage to, and they arrive on the page with purpose and by design. So when I say Rick Springfield is writing my novel, I’m saying that the older I get, the more often irony reaches around my life, taps me on the shoulder, and says, “Surprise!”

On this morning, the huffy kid who used to sneer and grunt Judas Priest lines is instead humming the catchy light lyrics of sweet Rick’s big hit “Jessie’s Girl.” Strangely enough, I am also reminded of a John Wayne western in which one of his saddle companions says, “There's times I’ve drunk water from a muddy hoof print and been glad of it.”

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Recently, I’ve discovered a treasure trove of adjective-driven objects to decorate my fictional settings. Heaps of glass, ceramic, and silk finds are available at the Oviedo Goodwill (as well as at other Goodwill locations) to replenish my writing with tactile details. Crowding the aisles are alabaster-white ceramic angels, peacock-colorful silk flowers of all types and sizes, and genuine wood knickknacks of every droll, dandy, and delightful kind. Granted, we’re talking mostly 1950’s Americana leftovers. But in any domestic setting in our narratives, there’s still of touch of the Eisenhower illusion, which can easily be modernized with our imagination—turn a pink polka-dotted white vase fanned out with an assortment of pine-yellow wooden spoons into a fire-engine-red KitchenAid mixer with a stainless steel wire whip.

So, description-weary writers, shop Goodwill. Having trouble with your University colors? Browse and find a Boston University red sweater or a Dartmouth green sailing jacket. I personally found a Cambridge blue food bowl for my astute boy cat.

Or your colors in general? There are earth-yellow dishes and electric-blue plastic glasses, along with robin egg blue watercolor prints and screamin’ green beach shorts.

Let’s not forget textures. Reach out and feel things hairy, soft, rough, gritty, smooth, sandy, course, cottony, hard, and spongy.

Read what I recently conjured up for my novel from a walk-through with a notepad in my beloved Goodwill:

I switched on the lamp. What I first saw, in the whirl of my eyes, told me I had indeed just broken into anyone’s but Steve’s apartment: wine-red sofa, pale-green loveseat, floor lamp with a cobalt-blue glass globe. My eyes ran in every direction, following dots, splashes, and bands of colors to their sources: a miniature white-spotted jade Buddha sitting cross-legged on the glass coffee table, nicely complimenting the tea cans, a Kodachrome-red wax apple beside it, and violet-blue silk flowers bursting from a bleach-white pot, beside which was a silvery, mirror-like gift bag with pink zigzags around the borders. I would have been stilled by the beauty of this apartment if not for the picture frame on the bookcase that, first, caught my eye, then, creased my mind in half in further confusion. The picture was of Tammy.


So, remember, there are heaps and loads and oodles of bits and bobs and loose ends at your neighborhood Goodwill. Think of it as your Hollywood prop shop, and you are Steven Spielberg’s assistant.

Good luck Goodwill hunting!

JMC

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Here's the latest from my publisher on my new book coming out this year, Ugly To Start With.

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Hello, everyone--


I thought I'd create a second post this week. (Please see "The Danger of Grammar" for my first post this week.) Below is an irresistible excerpt of an interview with French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, 2008 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. It speaks to some of the writing issues we are discussing.

Full interview available here: http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2936883

Enjoy!

JMC

                                                                                Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio

Q: What do you pursue in your literary works? As you mentioned, literature is written in a native language, meaning it contains a writer’s point of view.

A: Of course, the writer’s own experience will be shown in the works. People might question how the events happening in one country and how one person thinks of that event can become universal.

I think, no matter where it happens and what happens, if the feeling one person has in that country can be felt (by someone) else from a different country, there the feeling itself becomes universal. You don’t need to know well about whom the writer is and what experiences the writer has had personally. Take a look at works by William Shakespeare. Not that many people know when he was alive, or where he lived, but people still read his pieces and sympathize with them. They even create many adaptations to find their own universal value within his literary works.

Q:  At the same time, some writers incorporate local sentiments within their pieces to promote their culture to larger audiences. Other writers incorporate the cultural sentiments they have been living with and are exposed to.

A: Of course, writers would use the places, time period or any background set that suits them in their creative works. And that’s what makes the characteristic of each writer. However, there is no answer to how to make that character. Would a novel heavily based on the local culture always fail to induce sympathy from the global audience? No.

But what if one just tries to include the local cultural element within the novel just because (a previous book set in the same culture) was a hit before? In this case, the chance of failure is much higher, since it is not really what naturally came from the writer. I’ll say that writing genuinely is the answer to this question. There’s no recipe for good writing. You just write from your heart.

Q:  How would you describe yourself as a writer?

A:  I write because I like it. It’s an egocentric pleasure. I like to write because it’s like living (the same life) twice. I like very much to relive what I did in the day again at night as I write it down. The pleasure is essential to me. I also find pleasure in reading. It gives me k

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Hello everyone,

I want to share a confessional piece I wrote that fits in nicely with this blog's broadened scope to discuss writing issues.

Enjoy!

JMC

I remember when I first spoke, my jaws shredding and snapping the wires of my six-year silence. Sounds of speech cracked from my mouth. I spoke, not perfectly, not easily, not always even sensibly: I stammered and giggled to the cabby who, growing more and more concerned as I chatted about my sickness, hurried me to the psychiatric clinic, where he then undercharged me, in sympathy; I rambled confessions to scads of phone counselors without last names; I seemed flighty and manic in support groups for grieving spouses. In my search for employment, I overtalked, confessing to anyone who would listen that for six years I had been silent. I was proud of the length of my suffering.

In Rhode Island, at my sickest, I feared that, if I were to speak in the open, my incompletely terse phrases, my unidiomatic choices of prepositions, and my imperfectly rhythmic syntaxes would rise like silver helium balloons out of my grasp and, being unfit for heaven, would twist and turn in the sky forever as suffering souls.

English, spoken by ordinary people--by an elderly man casting a hello, by a tourist asking a question, by anyone trying to make conversation--seemed to me, at my sickest, a deadly shrapnel of sounds. My then wife threw herself on these grenades by speaking for me. The sky over her, not over me, was filling with balloons of blunders in speech. Better her soul than mine, I thought then.

"That’s freakin’ nuts!" my friend Gary says today.

I like Gary a lot. Every time I look at him, he reminds me of Gary Cooper in a defiant role. He is much taller than I am, and in this additional height of his rises his duty to listen to me.

I had insisted of myself to speak as well as I wrote, and writing, during those years, had been an exact surgery of thoughts: Sentences, spoken as well as written, were the living bodies of ideas, verbs the hearts, nouns the brains, modifiers the bones and skin. A conceit above God, was how one counselor described it. On the lowest level, I was grammar obsessed. (Grammar-obsessed.) In how I talked, I had strived to outdo John Updike, in how he wrote.

Says Gary, "Who in the hell is John Updike?" He really does not know, and that’s the beauty of it.

For me, he was the father of my arrogance. I was 26 when it started, not long out of college but long in the vacuum they call writing. I had had some success, emulating Updike’s short stories. But not enough success. It was never enough.

Worse than being young, I was recently married and earning nothing as a writer and living in a Rhode Island town where that was the same as loafing. I hated my wife’s parents for their working stiff’s mentality. Get a real job, they said. You can’t make no living putting words down on paper.

Then something happened, I got quiet. "Took yourself out of the world in spite?" is how Gary puts it.

"In spite?" I say, playing it back to him. "No, in shame."

Shame. I will not say how bad my childhood was, what it was like growing up a Catholic in isolation in West Virginia, or how difficult it was finding my way out. Nor will I

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Hello, Professor Roney and fellow CRW 5020 classmates. Welcome to my blog, JMC-Notes. Basically, it's for talk about my work as an author--what's getting published, who's reviewed it, and where I'll read. It's been a little neglected of late, thanks to my being snowed under in Florida by graduate school work. Blog neglect, though, is a no-no. Search engines will overlook my blog if it's not updated regularly, to say nothing of the fact that site visitors will become disinterested if there's nothing new to check out. Some authors buy ads on other sites to draw in visitors to their blogs, but I'm not there just yet.

Speaking of something new, I have my second book coming out this October. Ugly To Start With is a collection of short stories coming out through West Virginia University Press. The 13 stories--about growing up in the Mountain State--have all been previously published in good literary journals, including The Iowa Review. It's an exciting time for me, contacting newspapers for reviews and gearing up for reading events.

Well, I hope you'll visit JMC-Notes from time to time for new and exciting updates. Thanks for stopping by. Now, on with our exciting summer writing workshop!

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(Note: School visits not open to the public.)


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Spring Mills Middle School
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Harpers Ferry National Park
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Francis Scott Key Mall
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Washington High School
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Romney, WV 26757



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Romney, WV 26757

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Baker, WV 26801-0260

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High Street
Harpers Ferry, WV 25425

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Waldenbooks
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Winchester, VA 22601

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Winchester, VA 22601

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Maysville, WV 26833

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105 N. Main Street
Keyser, WV 26726

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Tucker County High School
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University Town Center
University Town Centre
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Waldenbooks
9611 Mall Road
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5/3 (TBA)
Books-A-Million‎
720 Venture Dr.
Morgantown, WV‎ 26508

5/3 2:00-4:00 PM
Bookshelf
139 Greenbag Rd.
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5/4, 8:30 AM
Belington Middle School
Rr 2 Box 343
Belington, WV 26250

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Kasson Elementary/Middle School
Rt. 1 Box 233a
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Philippi Public Library
102 South Main Street
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Washington Irving Middle School
443 Lee Avenue
Clarksburg, WV 26301

5/8, 1:00 PM
South Harrison Middle School
Rr 1 Box 58b
Lost Creek, WV 26385

5/8, 5:00-8:00PM
5/9, 4:00-8:00 PM
Waldenbooks
2640 Meadowbrook Mall Ste 150
Bridgeport, WV 26330

5/11, 8:30 AM
Short Line School
Hc 60 Box 170
Reader, WV 26167

5/11, 1:30 PM
Valley High School
One Lumberjack Lane
Pine Grove, WV 26419

5/11, 7:00 PM
New Martinsville Public Library
160 Washington St.
New Martinsville, WV 26155

5/12, 9:00 AM
Hundred High School
P.O. Box 830
Hundred, WV 26575

5/12, 12:30 PM
New Martinsville School
20 E Benjamin Drive
New Martinsville, WV 26155

5/12, 5:00-6:00PM
The Book Store
265 Main St.
New Martinsville, WV 26155

5/13, 9:30 AM
St. Vincent De Paul School
127 Key Avenue
Wheeling, WV 26003

5/13, 12:30 PM
Warwood School
150 Viking Dr
Wheeling, WV 26003-7027

5/13, 4:30 PM
Books-A-Million
520 Cabela Drive –
Triadelphia, WV 26059

5/14, 8:30 AM
Follansbee Middle School
1400 Main Street
Follansbee, WV 26037

5/14, 1:30 PM
Wellsburg Middle School
1447 Main Street
Wellsburg, WV 26070

5/15, 8:30 AM
Weir Middle School
125 Sinclair Avenue
Weirton, WV 26062-3351

5/15, 12:30 PM
Weir High School
100 Red Rider Road
Weirton, WV 26062-4295

5/15, 6:00-8:00 PM
Oak Glen Middle School
39 Golden Bear Drive
New Cumberland, WV 26047

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Thank you, everyone, for your kind and thoughtful letters. It was joy to read them. They truly made me feel special! (And the papers you printed them on were all so colorful and different, and the typefaces expressive.)

It was wonderful coming to your fine school. I talked about my visit to my wife for hours. (She would tell you “for days.”)

As you could probably tell, it does my heart good to talk about my novel. If I can be helpful or even inspiring, then it’s all the more gratifying.

Though I am not a mystery writer by genre, all good stories, from the realistic to the fantastical, have some degree of mystery in them. Mystery is what keeps us poking our noses on to the next page. As readers, we don’t like not knowing whole picture; it bothers us to be left puzzled. This is the insatiably curious mind at work.

Sometimes the slightest unknowns will get our curiosity going.

On the street where I live stands an ordinary blue house—ordinary except for the top window, which always has a blind drawn over it. I can’t help but notice it. The rest of the many windows are clear, sparkling clean, and often brightly lit, showcasing a family inside—parents talking on the sofa, kids running around in front of the TV. But this top window is always dark and covered. It seems to be hiding something. If I didn’t know better, I’d say this house, as perfect as it seems, is ashamed of something up there.

Then there’s the big tree in front of this house. The roots are enormous and creature-like. They plunge down through the concrete sidewalk like the claws of a gigantic T.rex having stepped down here millions of years ago, only to be petrified over time. The more I look at the trunk and roots together, the more I see the leg and foot of a tyrannosaurus rex. It’s unmistakable!

There’s definitely the smell of a secret in this house, and the little covered-up top window and these dinosaurian roots are my only clues, each as baffling as the other. I don’t like being left baffled—I want to find out what it means; I want to follow the clues until I solve the puzzle.

So see the mysteries around you, in people as well as places. They’re everywhere!

Here are a few writing tips.

Try to see the end of your story as soon as you begin it, but allow your characters to take over the show. After all, you gave them life.

Build a bridge into your story—almost literally. You know that feeling when you walk across a bridge, say, the Brooklyn Bridge? That high-up, exhilarated feeling? A good story has the same suspense. In the way a bridge is suspended, so should your story be—s-u-s-p-e-n-d-e-d.

Along the way, tighten your writing for power. Your writing has a purpose. You care about it. You’re pouring your heart into it. So take the most direct route.

And take pride in being original. Don’t worry about seeming unusual, strange, or even a little bizarre. Readers will appreciate you for being fresh and innovative. Someday critics will hail you as unique!

Remember, finally, writing should be what I call “fun work,” purpose with pleasure. Be intense, be passionate, but breathe.

Best wishes,

John Michael Cummings

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This is the first part of a two-part interview

Interview by Scott (Scoop) Butki

I love when interests intersect, and such is the case with this interview. Please allow me to explain.

I find history fascinating. It is one of the reasons I, a Southern California native, love living where I do in Hagerstown, MD, surrounded by such historic landmarks as Gettysburg, about an hour's drive one way and Antietam Battlefield, a 45-minute drive another way. This also means getting to know Civil War reenactors, who I find fascinating and have written nearly 100 articles about for the Hagerstown newspaper.

Also within an hour's drive is Harper's Ferry, WV, a famous national park for several reasons, but for me it's best known as the place where John Brown made his last stand.

John Brown is, to me, one of the most fascinating men in American history. Was he a hero despite being guilty of cold blooded murder? Or was he a psycho who just happened to be fighting for the right cause, namely freeing the slaves? When he was hanged near Harpers Ferry, did they realize they would make him into a martyr, someone whom would be discussed centuries later?

Well, he is. Enter John Michael Cummings, who grew up in Harpers Ferry across the street from the John Brown Wax Museum. John wrote this novel which is partly about John Brown.

I was reading Bookpage at my library about a month ago and noticed they alluded to a new book aimed at young adults on the topic of John Brown. I did what I normally do these days when I see a book that interests me: I fired off an email begging for an interview with the author.

I have been to Harpers Ferry several times both to write news stores and to show it to friends and family. I have frazzled tour guides with my questions about John Brown, particularly asking if they had read Cloudsplitter, a brilliant book about Brown by Russell Banks, written from the perspective of one of John Brown's sons puzzling over the usual questions: Was his dad a religious zealot who went too far? Was he in the right ethically even when in the wrong legally? You know, good light reading. I was told in no uncertain terms that the park had no position on that book, which I found odd. I do suggest checking that book out but only after, of course, first reading the one we are talking about today.

John Michael Cummings did something great - not only did he write this fantastic book and agree eagerly to this two-part interview - but he joined Newsvine.

Now, without further ado, here is the first part of our interview. The second part will focus more on the book itself.

Scott: Why did you decide to write a book - your first novel - about John Brown?

It is not really about John Brown. My novel is about how John Brown's legacy influences a boy’s need for a father figure and ultimately inflates in him a sense of hero worship of, debatably, a saint or madman.

If I could not write this story, then I did not know my own life. This more or less happened to me, at one stage of my life, growing up in a little house across from the John Brown Wax Museum, in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, the site of Brown's raid and capture.

I should add that if I could not find enough grist for a novel out of a childhood in Harpers Ferry, then I had better see a career counselor!

What kind of research did you do? What was the most surprising thing you found?

Research was fairly minimal, in that this novel, in large part, is about a boy's idolization of Brown, so the basic facts were enough. There are fictional embellishments that are in keeping with the young hero’s sense of imagination and exaggeration, but the essence of Brown is accurate.

Keep in mind it’s a native's view of a town that raises John Brown up in historical accuracy, letting the world weigh in on the moral controversy on their own time. It is also a town that won't admit, in part, he's a historical figure as a commercial icon.

Some research was done on John Brown's trial. What I did in my novel is a fictional treatment of this trial, enhancing the essence of John Brown's words for the sake of my young hero.

Was the plan always for this to be a young adult novel?

No, not at all. In fact I was barely familiar with the genre before it was suggested to me. My original plan, with a previous version, was to make it a memoir. Revisions led to the idea to make into a To Kill A Mockingbird-like coming-of-age novel. But this met with the rigid reality that the book market has long been pushing these types of dark-bordered novels far across the aisle into YA, where they must be "child safe" for schools and libraries. I soon accepted that if I wanted to get published, I had to adopt this story to the YA genre, losing some of its harsher elements.

Still, I am glad I did. YA writers know how to punch their stories forward. They don't laze around in literary abstractions - they go for the sizzling concrete. My editor constantly showed me how to "tighten for power." I could have used her help on my adult short stories!

You've written many short stories, right? So what did you like better - writing short stories or a novel?

Short stories have always been easier for me, as they probably should be, but succeeding at a novel has been a tremendous triumph. There is no denying the bliss of spreading a fabric of writing across two or three hundred pages. It is the difference between a journey and an outing. Naturally, it's umpteen times harder, too. More than that, there's an irreplaceable feeling of playing in the big leagues now. It will be hard for me to return to the short story form

Did you read Russell Bank's Cloudsplitter?

I started some time back, but regrettably became sidetracked. I’ve heard nothing but good things about it.

If you could talk to John Brown and ask him three questions, what would those questions be?

This is a wonderful question! I’ll take the liberty of making him a reincarnated John Brown.

First, what were you thinking that fateful day - letting the eastbound B&O train go freely out of Harpers Ferry and on to Washington to spread a warning call of your attack?

Second, are you surprised it took a hundred years (a whole century!) after your death and a four-year Civil War for our nation to enact the Civil Rights Act?

Third, clearly you have no compunctions about letting a nation purge its sins by its own blood, as you foretold. As you look at the changes in our society today - equality of sexes, multilingual communities, a black presidential candidate - you have to admit surprise. You undoubtedly also know we have recently been attacked by those who hold themselves out as righteous martyrs. Given your role in history, how do you see 9/11?

Do you consider Brown a cold-blooded killer for his actions in Kansas and/or W. Va or was it somehow justified?

Certainly not a "cold-blooded" killer - Brown was nothing but hot blood - but a killer, yes. He was also a hero against a barbaric wrong.

The problem is, Brown can't be captured by any one word, because our language is not set up to easily name people of his deeds. Behavior like his is simply too uncharacteristic. He leaves us with the Rashomon effect.

full interview can be found at:

http://sbutki.newsvine.com/_news/2008/09/12/1858335-scotts-interview-with-john-michael-cummings-author-of-the-night-i-freed-john-brown-

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I will start with the biggest statement I can make. The greatest gift a writer can give to language is himself. His sincerity and his best effort. And the greatest gift language will give him back is all of us, at our best. Think of language as a great pond receiving rain from above, and we are the rain drops, each of us. In another way, the millions of words that make up our language are like a data stream of the collective unconscious, alphabetized and stuck in a dictionary. All the words we have come up with, saved over time, or changed come as close to putting a tangible place for the human soul as we can imagine it. Hate. Fear. Love. They're all rolled up in language like concrete mixed with dirt, mixed with flowers.

In writing, unlike in speaking, we have time to get it right. We cannot easily stand on a corner and tell our story. We miss thoughts, say the same ones too many times, sound strange, gushy, angry; we get weird, glance around, fuss with our hair. Message lost. Instead, we live in the best age to write. Computers are magical. We can nix sentences and move paragraphs around as if by a magic wand. I get pumped up by the chance to improve my words, because I know that with each pass of my eyes over my sentences, I’m getting closer to arcing my message across some great mystical transom and into the readers' heart. There can be no better spelled-out intimacy than writing to a reader and having your message keenly known inside. It's heart on heart.

Fiction in particular gives us a chance to right wrongs. Wouldn't it be great to tell a story about a horseshoe-shaped magnet flying low over our earth, drawing out through the chimneys of every house from Minneapolis to Madagascar the guns and knives poisoning our society? Would it be wonderful to invent a President with a scholar's mind and doctor's soul? Or a teacher who decides to give everyone A's because he has scientific proof that the shape of the letter A is hypnotic and will entrance any student receiving it to perform like an A student?

Bookstores and libraries are our treasure houses of language, yes, but they're also the writer's funhouse of mirrors: No image cast by another's book quite gets you right. Some come close, but close like an amusement park's mirror, maybe making you fat and wiggly, skinny and long, or hourglass-shaped and ghoulish. True books are like fingerprints. No two alike. So there's always room waiting for yours, mine, everybody’s.

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