Periphery

                 Seamus  Schneider,  dancing  on  the  skin  of  the   earth, pedaling furiously in the rain, the drenching north London rain, a pair of garden shears balanced on the handlebars, wondered  how he  managed not to lose his balance. He presented a spectacle  to the  passing  cars. The people in these  vehicles, if they noticed him at all, must have thought Schneider represented  the  current shabby state of the  nation's  affairs. As soon as one hit the  M-25  things  improved, less  likelihood  of  terrorists  or lunatic  fringe  members disrupting one's journey. Then  one  was home and all of this was just more spectacle on the telly,  bread and circus for the working classes.

Schneider knew that he presented this sort of spectacle.  It would  have been all right for a younger man, but he was  getting pricklier as he got older and further afield. And the rain  never stopped.  But  he  didn't mind the rain as  much  as  the  blank, passive  stare as at a goldfish, the beefy sneer,  the  wide-eyed momentary sojourn. The worst of it was that they, the  ubiquitous they, were inside in cars and he was outside on an old  bicycle. If  anyone  had enquired, Schneider would have  insisted  on  the preference  of being on the outside looking in, but if honest  he was compelled also to ask himself where in the hell he thought he was going, and on a bicycle no less, purchased from some  hoodlum at the Brick Lane market.

He  once had believed, and the vestiges of this faith  still trailed  about  him  like  flotsam,  that  the  fetish  for   the acceptable  curriculum  had  long  ago  ruined  society.  But  he possessed not even the token of his passage, if one did not count the  wife  and  the bicycle that both tied  him  to  a  seemingly ceaseless rota in this former sink of empire.

The  shears were not his. They were only an encumbrance  and getting  harder to handle with the rain bearing down. The  shears belonged  to Lawrence. He knew him only as Lawrence. Schneider wondered whether Lawrence was  a man of the cloth.  He  wore  civilian  clothes  and  affected  a   neutral, standoffish  benevolence, but Schneider would have put  money  on his  being a vicar. Not that he'd ever known any  vicars.  But  Lawrence  worked from  the  Flower  Lane  Church of England.  The  secretaries  in  the  Good Neighborhood Scheme offices, in the Flower Lane church hall - the elderly  women perpetually undergoing aerobic classes as if in  a circle  of  hell  next door on the  basketball  courts, treated Lawrence with the sort of respect due to a representative of God on Earth, but Schneider was never quite sure where he stood vis a vis Lawrence, let alone God.

The rain continued to fizzle in the air for a short time and at last stopped. Good timing. Schneider pulled up on the sidewalk to check the directory. He was not far off from his  destination. Thin-lipped  women with overgrown, sour-faced children  in  prams

congregated  suddenly  outside shop fronts, in some kind  of  mid-afternoon ritual of which he was ignorant. There was  dissolution in  the  air. He could see it in the faces of  people.  Schneider welcomed  the  prognostications of global disaster made in  the  popular press.  He longed to have been right all  along  about things.  Bring on entropy, ye men of learning, said Schneider  to himself.

He  pushed  the bicycle along the sidewalk. Rows  of  houses were  empty, just this side of complete abandon, for  sale  signs teetering  eerily on the overgrown patches of weed and  brambles. Stray  cats  made dashes for cover across the  street.  Schneider

checked the directions Lawrence had scribbled on a piece of  Good Neighborhood Scheme stationery. The house was at the end of  the street.  Thick, woody brambles overgrew the picket  fence.  Paint was falling in jagged patches from the front door. Schneider rang the buzzer. It still worked; he could hear it sounding inside. He heard  footsteps,  and then the door opened.

"Mr.  Isaacs?" enquired Schneider.

The man, an older gentleman with a yellowed moustache, lanky thin  hair  combed  across the scalp  and  black  framed  glasses, studied Schneider with a blank expression.

"Yes?" he said.

"I'm from the Good Neighbor Scheme. Here to cut your grass."

 "Oh, yes. Seamus. Yes, yes. Come around the back."

"I've got the bicycle."

"That's  all  right. You see, I've been done by  the  bloody doctors  for cancer. Haven't been keeping up with  things  around here like I used to."

 "Right."

"You are here to do the back lawn, aren't you?

"Anything you need done," said Schneider serviceably.

 "Yes. Well, my name is Ron. Ron Isaacs. You can come  around the back, Seamus."

Schenider  pushed the bicycle around by the back  gate.  Ron was holding the gate open for him.

"What line of work are you in, son?"

"Oh, I do a little bit of everything," said Schneider.

"It's absolutely dreadful the way this government is  running the country into the ground, isn't it?"

"Oh, yeah."

"I  know it's hard for the lads to find any sort of  steady work. I'm a roofer myself. Worked in the trade for 25 years. I've always been active. When you're a roofer you're always active."

Schneider set the bicycle against a rusted oil barrel.

"But I've been done by the cancer," added Ron.

The backyard was a scrap heap, piled high with rotted planks and  assorted timbers, rusted pieces of machinery set  among  the grass. A small brown dog barked at the kitchen door.

"All  right, Lady. It's been hard for her with the grass  so high, you see," said Ron.

He opened the back door and the dog ran out on stiff  legs into  its former fields of glory, yapping and jerking  into  the thicket.

"There's a hedgehog in there, you see," said Ron.

Schneider  took the shears and snapped them open and  closed once or twice, loosening the hinge.

"You need some oil for that," said Ron.

"What I need is a decent lawnmower," said Schneider.

"You can use mine," said Ron, stepping over and removing the canvas from a push mower that looked like it hadn't been used for decades.

Ron  was fairly alert for an old man, thought Schneider,  as the two of them adjusted the blades on the mower and tried to  get it to work. But then suddenly his eyes would  lose  their focus, and he would seem faded and gray, the spark gone. He  went

back  inside the house with the dog, letting Schneider  carry  on alone.

Schneider was glad for the mower for one big  reason, and that was the dog turds he kept coming across, slicing wet and sliding  between  the blades. He would have hated to  go  through them  with  Lawrence's shears. Somehow the dog got  back  outside again  and was running around sniffing the gory remains  of  the past. The dog was on its last legs. It relished being alive and then seemed to founder, like Ron, staring into the tall grass in memory of the ancient prey, the hedgehog. The sun was out now, and steam was rising from the grass  as Schneider  worked.  He  kept coming across rusted  tools  in  the grass, pliers and wrenches. He wondered if Ron would miss them. Probably not. Ron appeared with a  cup of  tea for him. Schneider took the cup. Ron smelled strongly  of tobacco  and  some sort of medicinal odor Schneider  could  not identify.

"You're doing well," said Ron. "I would have done it myself, but you see I've been done by the cancer. This is the scar  here, see?"

Ron lifted his shirt to show Schneider the scar, yellow  and grisly  like  an  old  rope burned into the  pale  folds  of  his stomach. Schneider sat on the concrete porch by the back door and drank the cup of tea. Ron folded his shirt back in his pants.

"How long they give you?" asked Schneider.

"Two weeks or two years. Nobody knows for sure. I've already ordered  my coffin." Schneider looked away, unable to take  Ron's stare.

The radio was on in the kitchen, broadcasting  Parliamentary Questions.  The Leader of the Opposition was blasting  the  Prime Minister.  In  the  same way death rebuked life for not fulfilling its campaign pledges. It showed in Ron's stare. He was  talking  about  his career as  a  roofer.  He  had been responsible  for the introduction of neolite, an  asbestos  tile, into the Wembley area. Schneider listened with interest. The  man was  making  a  summation of himself.  Schneider  was  witnessing something  important. 

"Say,"  said Ron. "Maybe you can help me cover the  roof  of the  shed. It's been leaking all winter, and I'd like to have  it covered."

"Sure,"  said  Schneider, looking over at the  shed. It was leaning dangerously against the side of the house. He thought there  was no way Ron could be serious. But he was.

 "This  was my motorbike here. Used to get around  everywhere on her."

Ron  was peeling plastic off the motorcycle in the shed,  revealing  a fairly new Yamaha 250.

"...ride her down to Bournemouth regularly. I'll sell it  to you if you like."

"I don't know. It's certainly a nice bike."

"Does seventy on the motorway."

"How much would you want for it?"

"Three hundred quid."

Ron  went  back  inside, vital with  the  old  struggle  for survival  gurgling  once  again in his veins  despite  the  large proportion of his insides riddled with decay.   Schneider  thought  he  could use a motorcycle.  Man  the  wanderer,  homo  migratorio  was Schneider,  sailing over the grass, rolling down the  street.  He never  wanted  to  end  his  days  with  the  stink  of  his  own decrepitude  in his nostrils. Schneider believed in the  practice of  mobility.  Luckily, the wife was not yet  settled  back  into local society. Schneider would not give her the chance if he  had his say.

There  was  an  old rake of Ron's he used  to  pile  up  the cuttings. Then he snipped the brambles back from the edges of the lawn.  Lady would have the upper hand once again in the  struggle for backyard supremacy with the hedgehog.

"You've got to help me with the shed now," said Ron,  highly excited. Lady yapped loudly around his heels. Schneider felt like going home before the rain descended again. But he knew he had to help  Ron. It would give him an infusion of strength to  work  on the  shed.  He was already rolling out the sheet  of  plastic  he intended as a covering, trying hard to control the shaking in the hands that had once introduced neolite, the miracle tile, to  the Wembley area.

Ron  and  Schneider  worked at covering the  shed  with  the plastic. Ron led the way down the narrow alley between the  house and the shed. Together they threw the plastic over the shed. Then the old man insisted on climbing the ladder while Schneider  held it steady below. Schneider could see the arc of the man's life as he  climbed  the ladder, his vanity and strength just  enough  to keep away despair. Ron tried adjusting the plastic.

"Hammer, please," said Ron. Schneider handed up the hammer. Ron  began to hammer. His trembling hands made  it  hard for him to get the nails into the rotting wood. 

“Why don't you let me do it?" asked Schneider.

"That's   awright,"  said  Ron.  Schneider  could  see   the condensation  forming  on the inside of his glasses.  The  hammer slipped and crashed to the floor. Schneider picked it up, letting go  of  the  ladder.  Somehow Ron got down off the ladder without falling. Sschneider was grateful for that. There were some  nails  on  the  floor  and

Schneider  went around the shed with them, reaching up to  hammer the plastic down to the rotten siding of the shed.

Ron watched.

"Good. Well done," he said, wiping his glasses.

Schneider  was sick. The whole idea had been to give  Ron  a sense  of pride in himself, and he'd had to go and do it himself. Schneider tried to make it up by coming inside with Ron and meeting his wife. He  had  a difficult time looking at Emma. Her  lower  teeth were missing and her legs were swelled from poor circulation.  She was otherwise a cheerful, ebullient sort of woman, and  Schneider saw  how much the two loved each other. She told Schneider  about her  two  sons,  both wonderful fellows,  one  an  accountant  in Watford. Schneider wondered why they didn't help out with cutting

the lawn if they were so wonderful. 

"Seamus helped me cover the shed, dear. It should keep  dry now," said Ron.

"Oh, that's very kind of you," said Emma. "How much do we owe you?"  she asked.

"Nothing.  The scheme pays me. It comes out of  the  council budget."

"Really?"

The  two  of them were Labor party  supporters,  old  style socialists.  Ron had campaigned for the local  Labor  candidate, but  someone in the neighborhood had stolen the  billboards  from the  front lawn. Schneider thought a decent interval  had  passed and made to go.

"About  the  motorcycle. I'll get back to  you,  Ron,"  said Schneider  as the old man showed him to the back gate. They  were best of friends now.

"What price did I quote you, son?"

"Two hundred," said Schneider. Ron's eyes faded to gray.

The  rush hour traffic was growing menacing and  threatening to  whip out of control. Soon Schneider would be home, but still he  cursed and made faces at the cars,  hoping  indignation would keep away misfortune.

Anthony Caplan's latest novel, Savior, will be published April 18, 2014, on Amazon's Kindle by Harvard Square Editions. Read a sample on his website at: http://www.anthonycaplanwrites.com/savior

Kaminski on Retreat

Author note: This is a story I wrote a few years ago, trying to imagine what it would be like to be a certain kind of writer, with ambitions but not totally out of touch with reality. The kind of person who could get swallowed up by the changes sweeping the publishing world, which at the time seemed minor and surmountable. Now I'm not so sure what I think of Kaminski. What do you think?

Kaminski on Retreat

                    The little birds, finches of some sort, came the closest, hopping along the sea wall to examine the pieces of bread Kaminski had set out. The gulls were prouder, not as efficient at close work, preferring to make watchful circles, dip down and catch the bread in the air. At the end of the promenade a troop of schoolchildren marched along the path through the palms, some running ahead and shattering the stillness with their cries and hand-clapping games.

Kaminski retreated under the veranda with his beer, leaving the rest of the chicken sandwich on the stonewall for the little birds.  From under the veranda the deep blue of the ocean was comfortingly   more distant, less immediately impinging on Kaminski’s feeble reserves of morale. The rest of the bar was empty, it being the off-season in the island resort of St. Barnabas.  He drank the rest of the beer from the glass with the air of a man determined to cadge any use from bitterness, put the glass down and pushed the chair back in order to rise. He hated the sound the metal legs made scraping across the tiles and determined to remember never to push the chair back again while still weighting it down with his corpulent frame. The voices in the kitchen ceased, and Kaminski could feel the pairs of eyes on him, watching his every move for cues as to the service he required.  It was disconcerting to be the hidden focus of    attention when all he wanted was to slide away into tropical anomie.  It was a little morbid, a little precious to have such preoccupations he knew, watching him with the habits of observation of a lifetime trained on a favorite subject.

His wife would have liked it here. The remnants of British rule would have amused her, the well-groomed hotel staff with the air of resentment bubbling away under the surface of their black faces, just like parts of England.

"Mesta Boodle J. Kaminski. Telephone for Mistah Bodley J. Kaminski."

Kaminski was purposefully stroking his beard, wandering in the lobby reading the historic maps and charts of the Antilles above the furniture, when he was thus paged. On the first morning in the hotel he had paused outside the doors by the oversized Grecian urns full of flowers where he’d overheard   the Northern English hotel manager exhorting the desk clerk, "For God’s sake, don’t leave out the J, man. He's a best-selling author."

And the poor man had taken the admonishment to heart ever since.

"I'll take it in my room," said Kaminski.

"Yes, suh, Mistah J," said the desk clerk.

It would be Gerald Cate, his agent, the only other person who knew where he was. He had purposely left the Blackberry in New York, but found him in the elevator looking forward to Gerald’s impertinent, sneaking requests, whatever they might be. In the room, he dallied by the balcony, overlooking fishermen in the bay pulling up their long dugouts on the sandy beach.

"Hello, yes?" said Kaminski, picking up the phone. He could hear Gerald’s voice crackling over the long-distance line, speaking to someone else.

"Hello?"

"Yes?"  Gerald was unaware he was on the line. Just like him to be so distracted.

"Bodley?  Oh, hello. I didn't know you were on. How are you, Bodley?"

"I’m fine,” said Kaminski, hoping Gerald would hear the utter indifference in his voice.

"Bodley, I’ve got something here we think should interest you."

"Oh, no."

"Well, I know you'd like to see the sales figures improve, Bodley.  I'm sorry about your wife, by the way. I just heard the other day. I had no idea. We're all very sorry."

"Yeah, well."

"Bodley, The Chakra Report is languishing, just languishing. It would be a shame to let it just drop. After all the work you put in, we think it deserves a good shot. We've got to appeal to the broadest possible audience, Bodley."

"What is it, for God's sake?"

"Okay, okay. I'm just glancing through the brochure.  Bear with me."

They were getting sillier and sillier ideas. He didn’t know who was worse, Gerald or Lucretia Margarethe over at Illicit Press. Next they would have him dressing up in a Bozo suit and doing belly flops at conventions.  As if there was something sacred about the sales figures.  Kaminski didn’t like to think his books were token offerings to destiny designed to improve his standing in the here-after, so of course he was prepared to do what was required, just that it was so humiliating sometimes to have to actually perform.

"Okay.  Ann Stevens sent me this and asked if you might be interested in doing a book signing.  It’s a convention in Minneapolis, New Age sort of thing. They'd have some sort of stall."

Kaminski groaned into the mouthpiece.

"Gerald, I mean, how could you."

"Bodley, you don't have to go if you don't want to. It just happens that Minneapolis is a good place for your sort of books. The convention is the Third Annual North American Cosmobiological Conference.  Apparently they'll all be there, Uri Geller, Madame Bovary, you name it. Just a joke. Lighten up, Bodley."  

"Give me a few days, Gerald."

"Of course."

Kaminski lay on the bed, face towards the ceiling, listening to the chatter of the hotel maids as they worked their way down the hall with towels and sheets. He had not been this lonely in fourteen years. Sandra, if there was a heaven as conceived by the Episcopal church, with trim, green lawns and squash courts, would be engaged in joining the most interesting organizations, reforming the trickier, more Oriental customs that led to poor posture among the angels. She would have recommended activity, sea breezes, long walks, up on the balls of your toes, Bodley.

They’d hiked in Nepal the year before, and she'd been in fine health. It was the poor timing of her death that shook Kaminski. They had no children and had looked forward so much to spending the next few years traveling the world together now that his writing was getting him somewhere. Kaminski found he no longer wanted to keep up with interests they'd shared in common. He'd stopped doing the TM he'd been practicing for years. His stomach grumbled, and he regretted having left the rest of his chicken sandwich downstairs for the birds. He rose and checked his appearance in the bathroom. The sallow skin and bags under the eyes aroused deep-seated feelings of    regret. Maybe the lights were to blame. He should at least try to get some sun, he thought. He started out again for the beach, this time determined to actually set foot on the sand.  Kaminski the conqueror.  Away, timidity. In with the new Kaminski, the   positive thinking man for all seasons. Sandra would not have minded if he kept his eyes open for eligible female companionship. It was just the thing to vanquish the blues.

The sunglasses went on in the lobby and Kaminski perused the bulletin board, smiling ironically at the thought of limbo dancing entertainment during the night’s buffet provided by the Carries Carnival Society Dancers. But first he would take the cruise into Camries in the afternoon aboard the Jolly Roger. A family of what looked like Canadians was checking in at the desk. The husband consulted his diving watch and adjusted one of the bands. Perhaps he was decompressing, thought Kaminski   cruelly.  The wife was a thin, little woman with a startled expression, and her adolescent daughter   happily   exchanged appraising glances with the male hotel staff loitering between duties.

The beach was mostly empty of people except for the gathering of Rastafarian vendors under the first palm trees. They had given up approaching Kaminski. He was not interested in buying crafts or marijuana. They no longer paid any attention to him, laughing and gossiping among themselves in low, rasping voices as he took off his loafers and trudged across the sand to the plastic recliners set under frond-thatched shelters.  Kaminski sat under the palm fronds and stared out at the wavelets hitting on the shore, heaving deep sighs occasionally when his stomach grumbled.  He thought of Sandra in Nepal against a backdrop of snow-covered mountains and the apartment on Columbus Avenue she had loved. He was thinking of selling it and moving out of New York.  The city only depressed him now where before he’d taken pride in the rugged adaptability it required of its inhabitants. 

Restless, Kaminski decided to check the time the cruise was sailing to Camries to make sure he would not miss the boat.  He walked back to the hotel across the beach. The Canadian family was out on the veranda with some soft drinks, looking out at the    ocean with beatific looks on their faces.  The weather was  beautiful, every day a perfection of blazing sun and blue sky. But Kaminski had discovered he became nauseous if exposed to the sun for too long.

He checked the bulletin board. There was just enough time to go back to the room for a fresh shirt. He debated whether or not to bring a book along. He was rereading The Grapes Of Wrath, but decided against it when recalling the episode on the flight down.    The man next to him, a lawyer involved in some industrial dispute, had told a story about Steinbeck's widow in Japan asking at a bookstore for one of her husband’s books.  The man had thought it hilarious that the Japanese had called the book The Angry Raisins. It was pretty funny, but the trouble was he found the good-natured Joad family also made him nauseous.  Kaminski was heartsick with loss.  The goodness of common people was something he no longer put any faith in.  He kept hoping Tom Joad would reveal an incestuous longing for Rosasharon, which was no way to reread Steinbeck.

The jetty which served the village of Chastened was a short walk and around a minor headland down the beach. Village girls swam near the jetty with all their clothes on. In a clearing, fishermen repaired nets draped over their dugouts. The Jolly Roger was moored off the end of the jetty, rising up and down in the swells. A crowd of people stood by the gangplank.  Kaminski inquired whether he could go straight on.

"Jus go on her, mon," said someone amid a flurry of competing responses.

Kaminski proceeded up the gangplank unsteadily. He stopped once on deck, adjusting to the sensation of being water-borne, and then continued sensibly clutching the handrail.  He stood against the handrail in the stern as the boat began to fill with  people.  There was much jostling and socializing.  Many people seemed drunk. Kaminski began to wish he'd stayed on shore. He was the only white person on the boat and felt he stood out like a sore thumb. The sight of a little girl heaving over-board while her mother held her, afterwards wiping the debris from the front of her dress, put Kaminski on the verge of losing his lunch himself. 

The coastline unfolded, the rock face of ocean-battered land, green forest cover inland of the sugar cane plantations. The fishermen in the dugouts waved as the Jolly Roger passed, rocking their small craft in its wake. A man in a dashiki    clutching a bottle of rum yelled at someone he knew in a boat. Kaminski envied his easy smile. He turned and looked past Kaminski as if he were not there, chuckling. Kaminski smiled and looked out at the boat as if he shared in the knowledge of the fisherman’s picaresque ways.

The boat made its way into the harbor of Camries, a town with white-walled houses and bougainvillea in bursts of violet and pale yellow on its hillsides. A banana boat was moored at the dockside, and thin, disfigured men walked idly back and forth in    the shadow of its hull. Kaminski prepared to disembark along with the other passengers. Two young black women in tight pants moved ahead of him down the gangplank. Kaminski thought to stop them, invite them somewhere for a drink and a chat, but of course he did not.  Instead he wandered the dockside, amid the coarse-featured    countrywomen sitting in front of their taros, yams, melons and fruits, fishmongers and the daily catch of parrotfish, long blue kingfish and pink squid.

Kaminski moved through it all unperturbed, solemn, unmoved and oddly unscathed.  He would have bought something just for the human contact, but Sandra's illness had been expensive and The Chakra Report was not selling well and he did not feel like sailing back clutching a sack-full of breadfruit. He walked into a bar and sat on a stool drinking a beer, hoping in this way to find the inspiration in the flow, the improvised communion of life. But Sandra's absence had stung his heart.  He could feel his body failing in its functions, and he feared his gas would offend the two other men in the bar.  In the end, he nursed three or four beers until it was time for the Jolly Roger to make the return voyage. Kaminski motioned that he wanted to pay. The bartender paused in his work and moved down the bar to take his money. The two men in the corner of the bar continued to mumble in a thick-tongued drunken patois.  Kaminski said   goodbye.  The bartender looked up, as if shocked to hear a human voice addressing him.

The boat was preparing to leave when Kaminski walked up the jetty. There were more people on board now, but the two girls in tight pants were nowhere to be seen. He stood along the rail again.  The salt spray stung his eyes. People kept bumping into  him. The journey seemed twice as long as before. Kaminski finally gave up trying to move out of people’s ways, scowling at everyone, whereupon he felt the others accepted him as some sort of mildly amusing crank.

Back at the hotel, the desk clerk was busy trying to please the Canadians, all three of them, who had a problem with their lodgings. Kaminski felt better. He had come to St. Barnabas to get away from life but found instead he was in a place with complaining Canadians and feeling oddly the better for it.

After a shower, he sat out on the balcony reading The Grapes of Wrath. He flicked to the end, to the scene where Rosasharon breastfeeds the starving, old man. Kaminski had tried writing a book, his first attempt at a novel, called The Country of  Desire, about a family of Puerto Rican immigrants in Newark, New Jersey.  He had researched it for three years and written it in two, but that was before he'd met Sandra.

A few Rastafarians were down in the sand practicing their yoga. The sun was sinking and the hotel staff was preparing the buffet out on the veranda. The little birds, finches of some sort, hopped along the sea wall, looking for scraps of food.   Kaminski found he was hungry. Hungry and lonely.  Minneapolis suddenly  made sense. He checked the time.  Gerald usually worked late. Kaminski went inside, sat on  the bed and picked up the telephone.

Wicked Sick, Jen Smith Riffs on Non-fiction and Perception

Today we have a new author in the second installment of the series The Virtual Writing Scene: Everywhere and Nowhere. Jen Smith is the author of Sick, a memoir of addiction and recovery,  blogging about truth and perception from a writer's point of view. Here she is, Jen Smith, with links down below to her blog and website.  

Is Truth in Non-Fiction Really Just Perception?

What is truth?  Is truth a fact?  I can look at my car and say there are four tires.  That is a fact.  I can look at my car and say it’s red.  That is a fact.  Or is it?  Another person could look at my car and say that it is burgundy.  Is burgundy red?  Some would say yes and some would say no.  So then, what is the true color of my car? 

Truth really is a grey area.  Recently I attended a writer’s workshop at Grub Street Boston about breaking the rules in non-fiction and a great discussion formed around this topic.  At one point the instructor gave us an example of an author that took the liberty to change the number of heart attacks that happened during a particular time, in a particular state, and also the name of a bar in a journalistic piece.  The author’s reasoning was that the number four sounded better than eight and Bucket of Blood, as a bar name, was cooler than the actual name of the bar.

Interestingly there was a student in the class that was fine with the number change but thought changing the name of the bar was outright wrong.  I felt the opposite.  Changing the name of the bar was fine to me but changing a statistical number was appalling to me.  I found our contradicting views fascinating.  Neither one of us was right nor wrong, we just had different perspectives based on our experiences with the world.

As the author of a memoir, SICK, I write about the memories of my past.  I do this to the best of my ability but in all honestly my memory is not the greatest especially when it comes to the time frame of events.  Sometimes I’m not sure if an event happened before or after another event so I have to make my best guess.  There is also the matter of perception.  I’m well aware that I may perceive a past event very differently than someone else that was there.  Does that mean one of us is wrong and one of us is right?  The reality is that probably both of us are wrong and perceive the past event based on our personal views and experiences.  That’s usually how it works in my opinion.

So is what I’m writing not the truth?  I don’t think so.  It’s my truth, my perception of the world as I understand it.  We have a genre called creative non-fiction.  This is when writers take true events and makes them more interesting by adding detail and dialog that may not necessarily be true or accurate.  I get this.  Then there’s the controversy over Jeff Frey’s book A Million Little Pieces that he originally claimed was a memoir but later came clean that the book contained fictionalized events.  If you look at this from a business perspective, Frey couldn’t get representation when he tried to sell the book as fiction.  Non-fiction is where it’s at now, it’s what sells.  So Frey changed his tune and said his book was a memoir and got on Oprah and sold millions of copies.  I’m not saying what he did was right but I definitely get it.

What do you think?  Is there such thing as truth? Is non-fiction merely one person’s perception of the world?  Is creative non-fiction ok?

 

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