Guest post by: Molly McCloskey

Author of Circles Around the Sun, Molly McCloskey appears at the Wordstock Festival on Sunday, October 9 at 4pm on the Wieden+Kennedy Stage.

My book was inspired, shaped, informed by letters – odd, because I’ve never been a fan of the epistolary novel. But I was writing non-fiction, and maybe that was the difference. In 2005 my mother presented me with a trove of family letters going back five decades. Most were between herself and her mother, detailed missives of family life that alluded to the social, political and cultural changes through which the wider world was passing. A number of the letters concerned my eldest brother, Mike, born in 1950, the first of my parents’ six children. There were also letters written by Mike himself at various ages – some perfectly lucid and full of youthful optimism; others rambling, incoherent and sometimes strangely beautiful; the more recent muted, medicated, wistful.

I was four years old when Mike left home for Duke. A young man of exceptional promise, Mike had won an academic scholarship. For the next four years, I didn’t see much of my brother. In 1972, when I was eight years old, our family moved from North Carolina to Oregon. It was there, a few months later, that Mike was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, an illness from which he has never recovered.

Throughout the 1970s, Mike was in and of the hospital. Sometimes he took off and hitched across the country, journeys that invariably ended in disorientation and homelessness. At home, he was often a figure of gloom: bizarre, unintentionally intimidating. He would sit in the family room saying nonsensical things, or laughing for no apparent reason.

By the 1980s, the more florid phase of the illness had passed, and Mike had settled in Oregon in a residential care facility. In the decades since, he has grown withdrawn, his personality muted, his capacity for emotional expression virtually non-existent.

For me, the last of my parents’ six children, that young man of exceptional promise was relegated to the unknowable past. As an adult, I found myself in a vague sort of mourning -a shadowing sadness that felt paradoxical, for I was grieving the loss of someone I could not quite remember, someone who is still alive and yet who is not, in any normal sense of the word, knowable. Schizophrenia, because of its effects on brain function, emotional expression and the capacity for meaningful communication, tends to make personal relationships difficult or impossible.

By the time I moved to Ireland in 1989, at the age of twenty-four, I had resigned myself to this state of unknowing. And then I read the letters. I began to see then who Mike had been. I saw the accomplishments, the honours, the school records set on the basketball court. I saw the celebrations, the plans, the values and opinions. Between the ages of sixteen and twenty, he’d had three serious girlfriends – intelligent, clever, independent young women who loved him for his wry humour, his underlying goodness, his beautiful eyes. He was a seeker and an explorer – hiking in the Rocky Mountains, practicing Kundalini yoga, studying for his degree in psychology. What I saw in the letters was a personality expressing itself, and the more I learned, the more I wanted to know. I wanted to bring the two distinct halves of Mike’s life into a single story, to find the person I had been mourning, to come as close to him as it was possible to come.

I began to track down and talk to people who had known Mike well when he was younger. I travelled more often to Oregon, and spent time alone with Mike, as I hadn’t since I was ten years old. (Mike hasn’t read the book – he doesn’t read anymore – but he responded positively whenever we spoke about it.) What others told me, and what Mike himself revealed, seemed to confirm something I had long suspected: that had he not become ill, we might well have been simpatico. I felt a sense of loss then that was more personal, less abstract, than anything I’d felt before. I also became acquainted with a different kind of sadness. I had seen my parents suffering as a result of Mike’s illness; I had felt my own grief. But in coming to know better who my brother had been, I saw at closer range the enormity of his own loss.

A lot of passages from the letters my mother gave me found their way into the book. There is one in particular, from my grandmother, that encapsulates the impulse behind my wanting to write it. It was from 1976, following my parents’ divorce, when my grandmother was hoping that my mother would leave Oregon and bring her two teenagers to live with her and my grandfather in New Jersey: Whenever you are happy then we are the same. When you are sad so are we.The years pass so quickly and everyone takes to the road. At least here you should feel at home having spent all your summers here . . . This is all a message of Love. Do not worry. Come home.

What I wanted was to bring my brother home. I recall the desire clearly. I could do no such thing, of course, and I knew it. The most I could do was to tell his story, to place it alongside my own, to know him in the only way that seemed possible.

For more about Molly McCloskey and her novel go to www.mollymccloskey.com

Guest post by: Steve Almond

Author of God Bless America, Steve Almond appears at the Wordstock Festival on Saturday, October 8 at 11am on the Wordstock Community Stage, and Sunday, October 9 at 11am on the Wordstock Community Stage and 5pm on the National Endowment for the Arts Stage. He is also leading two workshops, Radical Disclosure (or Can I Really Write That About My Mother-in-Law?) on Saturday, October 8 at 1:30pm and How to Write HOT Sex Scenes Without Even Blushing! on Saturday, October 8 at 3pm. On top of all that, He is appearing at the 7th Live Wire! wordstock extravaganza on Saturday, October 8 at 8pm at the Aladdin Theater.

So I just got done reading Nicholson Baker’s new book, House of Holes. It’s filthy. Not “literary filthy,” but filthy filthy. As in, sex parts. As in, money shots. Baker has a history with the blue stuff, but this is the first time he’s totally unchained his id. It’s diverting enough as a read that I nearly missed my bus stop finishing up one sloppy scene.

 I’m a big fan of anyone who writes about sex. Especially when it’s someone like Baker, who seems to recognize the cosmic absurdity of sex.

Still, I found the book kind of dispiriting.

And here’s why: because it’s not really about sex. It’s about sex as imagined by a socially progressive heterosexual male. The participants are all horny and well-endowed and mostly liberated from shame. They conduct themselves a lot like porn stars.

The problem being that the world is full of porn already. What the world lacks, and what literature ought to be providing, is a sense of what sex is actually like – in all its brutal emotional complexities.

But here’s what I think happened here in America. I think the Europeans who settled this country were religious zealots, with a deeply repressed sense of their own bodies, and the needs of those bodies. And this caused all kind of humiliation to accompany the natural compulsions of their bodies. And thus, they sought to create a new, privately held, mostly imagined breed of sexual conduct, one in which the man was always powerful and the woman was always submissive and both of them were eager and empty of doubt.

As inevitably happens in America, the folks in marketing saw how popular this new fantasy form of sex was, and ran with it. And now virtually every product in our vast late-capitalist gift catalogue comes dipped in a shiny varnish of porn.

To my way of thinking, this pornification of the culture, should make writers that much more determined to correct the record, to write about the sex we’re actually having, as opposed to the sex we wish we were having. (I apologize to those of you who already are having the sex you wish you were having. I am speaking to the rest of America, the vast and silent majority of yearners.)

Am I advocating that authors write about sex merely for my entertainment? Yeah, I guess I am. But I also want them to write more about sex because our feelings about sex constitute a huge part of our lives: our desires, our wishes, our dreams, our shame, our regrets. All these emotions are centrally located in our sexual interactions.

Let me put it this way: I am often asked – thanks to all the smut in my books – why I write about sex so much. And I always want to say, What are you, crazy? I don’t write about sex half as much as I think about it!

I also always want to ask my literary comrades why they don’t write about sex. Again, I’m not advocating undressing your characters for the purposes of titillation. I’m suggesting undressing your characters because that’s one of the times where they become the most real. The idea is to lay them bare psychologically.

Think about it: when is sex not emotionally interesting? Never. The answer is never. Even boring sex is charged with a bruising disappointment. (If you don’t believe me, read Stephen Elliot’s My Girlfriend Comes to the City to Beat Me Up.) One of the most thrilling passages in all of literature concerns a woman struggle to climax (hint: it’s in Mary Gordon’s Spending.) Even good old Hemingway writes a humdinger of a sex scene in For Whom the Bell Tolls.

It is my own didactic and totally ridiculous view that American writers have a sacred duty to write about sex, and to do so in a way that cuts beneath the slick XXX fantasies we’ve vomited unto the world.

We’ve spent far too much of our national history hiding from the ruthless and tender things that happen to our hearts when our bodies are unleashed.

The time has come to correct the record, one brave citizen at time.

Who’s with me?

Here’s where Steve Almond says you can find more info
On Web: www.stevenalmond.com
On FaceDork: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Steve-Almond/105908579252

Guest post by: Ismet Prcic

Author of Shards, Ismet Prcic appears at the Wordstock Festival on Saturday, October 8 at 1pm on the McMenamins Stage.

I wrote Shards because people kept telling me to do it. Not the book that’s now being published mind you, but its precursor, a story about how I escaped the war and came to America. This is how it all started. I was twenty, living in a bachelor pad with my best friend Eric and he would take me around to meet his family, friends, to meet strangers at parties. And every time he would simply push me into the middle of a room and say: “This guy is from Bosnia. He survived the war and shit.” He would then go and suck on a Becks in some corner while strangers swarmed around me, asking for a story. Not that I hated it. I’m a theater dork. I would put on this Izzy persona and go nuts working the room.

But what I noticed was that, over time, I had started to exaggerate. My story became more and more dramatic, my role in it more and more heroic, and these strangers — who didn’t know what a wuss I am in real life — believed me. I asked myself what the hell is the difference between story and this so-called reality. Perhaps, reality is just a story that people believe or agree on.

Enter another complication. Having told this new story so many times I started to believe it myself. Gradually I became unsure what was true. The line of demarcation between my memories and the stories based on those memories was turning more and more transparent.

It got to be very creepy. I had been telling people that I was attacked by an Alsatian when I was a kid and that was the reason why I was so deathly scared of dogs. At a party, someone’s dog would sneak into the house from the backyard and I would freak out, climb the stairs into the attic, tearing through people and things in the process. Sudden barking would cause me to flash back, led to panic attacks. Then, on one of my annual sabbaticals to Bosnia, a family member would tell a nice story of how our late cousin Garo was attacked by an Alsatian. Whoa, whoa, wait a minute! If it wasn’t me who was attacked then what the hell was I flashing back to? Wherefrom this paranoia?

This landed me on a therapist’s settee and I have consequently rationalized that, due to PTSD, I was probably flashing back on all the loud sounds, not just sudden barking. It turns out memory is unreliable, particularly when you experience a prolonged traumatic event in your life. Our lives are stories we tell first ourselves, then to the others, stories we constantly edit in order to fit them into larger and larger communal narratives. Shards is my personal attempt to capture the volatility of “reality” perceived by a shattered mind and make these abstractions visceral.

I’m cool with dogs now as long as they keep their silly little faces outside of nipping distance.

NEA did a feature on Ismet that you can see at http://www.nea.gov/features/writers/writersCMS/writer.php?id=10_23. Or you can check out Ismet’s own site: http://www.ismetprcic.com/index.html

One of Wordstock’s themes this year is history, and one of the ways we have decided to celebrate history at this year’s festival is by creating a collection of literary and cultural artifacts that faithfully document this moment in Portland’s culture. With the help of our friends at the Dill Pickle Club, we’re creating a Time Capsule.

The purpose of this project is to take a snapshot of Portland’s literary and cultural communities by documenting the changes happening in our city’s artistic landscape. We want to celebrate the cultural work often forgotten by “official history”: Read more »

This installment concludes Wordstock’s serialization of Part One of Only Milo, the new novel by Barry Smith. Barry Smith appears at the Festival on Sunday, October 10, at 11am on the Wordstock Stage.

……………………………………….

64

At the time of my interrogation, I didn’t know

Christina had already spilled the beans.

We’d been kept apart throughout the day. I thought

maybe they thought maybe Christina was involved in

some way.
Read more »

In the penultimate installment of Part One of Barry Smith’s dark comedy about the publishing world, Only Milo, Milo does a Dexter—only to discover his scheme has a fatal flaw.
………………………………..

47
Margaret made a public announcement
of the IPO in late May.

She would be a multimillionaire by the end of July.

I was missing José. For two years I had been revising three of my books for publication in his name. Now I felt left out of the loop.

Margaret hired new employees to perform the other duties I had assumed when the need arose: designing covers, working with agents, monitoring budgets, setting deadlines. I didn’t even have an office in her new complex in midtown.

She was traveling with her investment banker,
schmoozing prospective stockholders, illuminating
them on her vision for the firm, driving up the day
one stock price.

I assumed Howard was along on most of the trips.

I had nothing else to do but plot their demise.

Read more »

Barry Smith’s new novel Only Milo continues this week as the title antihero broods over his alter ego’s success and visits the dark side for a solution to his problem.

.……………………..………………...

24
Margaret was glowing.
I don’t think she noticed.
No mention of Milo.
None.
NOT
ONE
WORD.

25
When the next segment began, the first novel was
discussed.

Set outside Mexico City. Young police officer hero in a rural village terrorized by a serial killing priest. Innocent children, including the police officer as a young boy, initially received love and comfort from the priest, protection from a world of poverty, hunger and fright.

Sexual molestation.

Serial killings.

Long, hushed pause.

As a boy, José had sought solace from a harsh and
unfair world. The church was his sanctuary, the
priest his surrogate father, the weekly homilies the
inspiration for his poetry, his fiction, his life.
Sexually molested by his priest.
Writing about the abuse. Catharsis.
Finally moving forward.

Long, hushed pause.

Oprah was concerned.

Read more »

Last week in Barry Smith’s new novel Only Milo, Milo started publishing his own manuscripts under Mexican author José Calderon’s name. As our story continues, José’s advent is an epiphany for all concerned, since he sees something mutually advantageous in the arrangement….

………………………………

12
“Milo, mi amigo, you are a genius!”

I started to breathe again.

He grabbed my face with both hands and planted a
kiss on my forehead.

I guess he assumed I knew who he was.

“You made my book far better than the original. What
can I do to thank you?”

Another kiss.

That would not have been my first choice.

13
We ate birthday cake to celebrate.

It wasn’t bad.

I told José it might be best if he didn’t mention
to Margaret that my “translation” was only loosely
based on the original.

“Señorita Margaret told me she is running out of
books to sell and will be making more. Many more. In
Mexico, we sold less than three hundred copies.

“I have no intention of rocking the canoe.”

He was actually quite endearing.

We both had a second piece of cake.

14
José asked about the story line for the second novel.

Under normal circumstances it would have seemed an
odd question, coming from the book’s author.

I told him about my JFK assassination conspiracy
theory novel, set in Mexico City during the summer
of 1963. Did he know who Lee Harvey Oswald was?

“I wasn’t sure how well my second book would translate.”

We didn’t have to worry about that anymore.

I told him the story needed a great deal of revising
and updating, given it was my first novel and it had
been written about forty years ago. I told him I
had been going to the library to review the Warren
Commission Report and had been sifting through
hundreds of Internet sites for information.

He asked if he could help. He seemed eager, in a
puppy sort of way.

I decided it was only appropriate, given it was his
novel.

15
Until now, José had never been out of Mexico.

His life in Mexico City had been hard. His father
left home before he was three. His mother was a
drunken whore. He was raised by his grandmother.
Writing had been his only escape.

He considered his small apartment in Brooklyn a
palace. Indoor plumbing, clean water, and a shower
were luxuries to José. As was the computer that sat
unused on his desk.

He didn’t like any of the Mexican food he could find
near his apartment. He said it was too greasy and he
had trouble keeping it down.

I rarely saw him eat.

16
Margaret told José they needed to make arrangements
for his third novel.

The rights she inherited only included translation
rights for novels one and two. With the runaway
success of the first translation, she was eager to
purchase the rights to his third novel.

“I was quite sick in Mexico City,” he told her. “It
still needs a lot of work.”

She said she would prefer to publish it directly in
English if he thought that was possible.

“I will get Milo to help you.”

17
José was always sick.

He looked like he still lived in the slums of Mexico
City. No matter how hard Margaret and I tried to
fatten him up and bring color to his face, he looked
worn out and malnourished. He reminded me of the
lead character from that foreign film, Il Postino,
the actor who died the day after filming ended. José
always appeared to be at death’s door.

He told me things had not gone well in Mexico after
he finished his two novels, which had both been
written before he turned twenty-five. He had been
driving a cab and waiting tables for most of the
intervening years. The income had barely provided
for necessities.

And he had not written a word in more than five years.

18
“When I was a boy, I was sexually abused by my
priest.”

It was said completely out of context. We were
watching a “Seinfeld” rerun.

José said it was the reason my “translation” was so
powerful for him.

“It was as if you wrote the book I was unable to
write, mi amigo.”

He began to weep.

19
Margaret needed a new office.

Her converted warehouse in Brooklyn was no longer
suitable. José’s success led to the initial Howard
Rush breakthrough, and that opened the floodgates.

It seemed as though everything she touched turned to
gold.

Her investment banker began discussing a real
expansion, an IPO. Strike while the iron was hot.
Sell millions of shares to the adoring public.
Margaret would become a multimillionaire in his
scenario.

She needed a plush new office. Upscale. Something to
entice the public to purchase millions of shares in
her firm.

And she needed to have José finish his third novel.

20
Margaret had no idea José had not even begun his
third novel.

She assumed he was having marathon writing sessions
in his apartment, pounding out another masterpiece,
while I was finishing my translation of novel number
two.

In reality, he had become hooked on afternoon soap
operas and “Seinfeld” reruns.

There were days he went to the library with me, but
rarely more than once or twice a week, and it was
primarily out of boredom and loneliness.

He really wasn’t much help. I got more research and
revising done on those days when he stayed in his
apartment. Once again, the translation was entirely
my work, not his.

He was closing in on year six of his writer’s block.

21
Margaret loved it.

“It’s far better than his first novel, Milo. I can
see his growth as a writer. It must have been quite
satisfying for you to see how his work evolved. His
voice is becoming stronger and more confident.

“It deserves a major ad campaign.

“Do you know how his third novel is coming along? He
seems very secretive about it. I hope that’s a good
sign.”

What could I say?

22
I thought José would enjoy the circus.

Barnum and Bailey at Madison Square Garden.

He was thrilled by the elephants. He was shocked by
the fire eaters. He was enthralled by the skill of
the trapeze artists.

He loved the clowns.

It was the only time I saw him laugh.

23
I went to Margaret’s apartment to watch “Oprah.”

She lived in Brooklyn, but at the opposite end of
the city from my roach-infested slum. It was my first
visit.

Her apartment had a 42-inch flat-screen high definition
TV.

And drapes.

And no SPAM.

Oprah could hardly wait to have José appear on her
show, but Margaret carefully controlled the timing.
His first “translation” sold more than 200,000 copies.

A phenomenon.

With the second translation complete, Margaret had
planned a Thanksgiving week release. She made Oprah
wait until early November, and she insisted José be
the only guest.

Christmas season. 400,000 copies.

Another phenomenon?

Faded jeans, blue denim shirt, rumpled corduroy
jacket, dirty gray socks, two-day-old beard, tousled
hair, no makeup. Downtrodden, third-world existence,
risen from poverty, bright-eyed, soft spoken.

The sympathetic young Mexican novelist.

Christmas season. 400,000 copies. Second print run
in March.

When he walked on stage, it looked as though he
might collapse before reaching his seat. Nervous,
fidgety, eyes at his feet, deathly gray complexion,
hollow cheeks, greasy hair, oversized ears.

And then he smiled.

Christmas season. 400,000 copies. Third print run in
June.

His speech was slow and halting, but his face began
to exude confidence. Raised in rural Mexico, absent
father, drunken mother, steady grandmother, no
friends.

First trip to America. Many people to thank.

Grandmother. Only constant in his life. Solid as a
rock.

Mexican publisher. First true amigo. Suicide.
Long, hushed pause.

He squirmed uncomfortably. He turned away from
Oprah. He looked directly into the camera.

Margaret, Margaret, Margaret.

Guardian angel, protector, savior, goddess.

Successful first novel, best time of his life, bright
future.

Margaret, Margaret, Margaret.

Guardian angel, protector, savior, goddess, genius.

Humbled by his success, beyond his comprehension,
how could he thank her?

His eyes began to tear.

Christmas season.

400,000 copies.

Final print run in September.

Paperback rights.

Movie rights.

New Spanish translation.

Cut to commercial.

…………………………………………

To be continued …next week!
Only Milo, winner of the 2010 IPPY Gold Medal for Popular Fiction, is published by Inkwater Press (© 2009).

Last week, as you recall, our eponymous antihero decided to pass off his own unpublished manuscripts as translations of an unknown Mexican writer’s work. Now Part One of Barry Smith’s new novel Only Milo continues apace as consequences come home to roost.
………………………………..

4
At the end of the summer I submitted my translation
to Margaret.

I waited.

And waited.

And waited.

“Brilliant, Milo,” she said. “I had a very good
feeling about young Mr. Calderon.”

She decided to print 20,000 copies. She usually
printed no more than 2,500.

She begged.

She borrowed.

She maxed out four credit cards.

She invested in a major ad campaign.

She gambled the future of her business on “young Mr.
Calderon.”

5
I had little time to work on my own novel.

José’s translation had priority. There were proofs,
there were revisions, there were production delays.
Margaret kept reminding me it had to stay true to
the original.

I told her not to worry.

There was artwork, there was jacket design, there
was promotion.

I was feeling closer to Margaret.

I was nearing sixty-three and was successful for the
first time in my life. My creative juices were flowing.
I felt like I was just out of college, starting my
career in publishing.

And I already had twelve novels “in the can.”

Maybe Margaret was not such a reach.

6
His second novel was no better than the first.

Margaret appreciated my initial effort so much she
asked me to “work my magic” again.

Little did she know.

This one was even more difficult to figure out. It
had something to do with a rising star in Mexican
politics who had skeletons in his closet. As a young
political activist, he’d killed two of his co-workers
in a fit of rage, as far as I could figure out. The
current political machine was putting him forward for
the presidency but then discovered his murky past.
Something important probably happened at that point,
but I lost interest. I never read the final hundred
pages.

This book would never work for an American audience.
What did they know about Mexican politics?

I had lived in southern New Mexico for twenty years.

I couldn’t name one Mexican politician.

I couldn’t name one Mexican political party.

I couldn’t tell you whose face was on a Mexican peso.

Was there a face on a Mexican peso?

7
Margaret was nervous.

Everything she owned was on the line. The future of
her business rested with my translation of a young
unknown Mexican author. She was in debt to the max,
hoping José’s book would be the one.

She had not even met José Calderon.

He was too sick to travel from his home in Mexico
City. First it was a bout with diverticulitis, then
pneumonia.

But she had faith in his words, in his story, in his
voice.

In my words, in my story, in my voice.

She pushed, she prodded, she promoted.

She gave interviews, she bought ad space, she created
a buzz.

The first 20,000 copies sold in sixty days.

She ordered a second print run of 100,000.

Her future was assured.

8
In college, I was obsessed with the JFK
assassination.

I was probably one of the few people in the world
who read the entire Warren Commission Report. Twice.
Conspiracy theories were my real obsession. Had the
Internet existed in the mid-sixties, I never would
have left my dorm room.

On a lark, I took a fiction-writing class. Since the
only thing rattling around my head at that point
involved JFK conspiracy theories, I wrote a story
about a fictional theory set in Mexico City while Lee
Harvey Oswald visited there during the summer of 1963.
It eventually evolved into my first novel.

9
I decided José’s second “translation” would simply
be my conspiracy theory novel.

It was already set in Mexico City.

In my book, Oswald killed two co-workers in a fit of
rage that summer. Corrupt elements in the Mexican
government, those supporting Cuba’s Castro, jumped
at the chance to use Oswald for their own purposes.
They offered Oswald amnesty if he would cooperate
with them in their plans to assassinate President
Kennedy when he visited Dallas in the fall. They
would use Oswald’s knowledge of Dallas to assist
them in developing their plot, use his insights to
make it perfect. They would make him feel like a big
man, a keystone in the planning process, the most
important member of the team.

They would let him rot in a Mexican prison if he did
not cooperate, never to see his family again.

Oswald never knew the real plan. The plot was already
in place. All they needed was a patsy to serve as a
fall guy.

The lone, crazed assassin.

This story would sell much better than José’s drivel
about Mexican politics.

Since it was my first novel, I knew it would need
significant revisions. It would give me a chance
to turn back the clock more than forty years as I
revised my earlier work.

The Baby Boomer Generation would eat it up.
And this time I had access to the Internet.

10
Meanwhile, Margaret was building an empire.

José’s first translation had three print runs. This
encouraged her to take another big gamble.
She had published the first two novels of a young
author named Howard Rush, both written while he was
a graduate student. They were small works, but based
on her previous standing as a minor, independent
press, very successful.

He had recently finished his third novel, a much
larger work that followed a fictional American family
(loosely based on the Kennedy clan) through their
trials and tribulations during the twentieth century.
Margaret thought it was worthy of a large initial
print run and a Madison Avenue-type ad campaign.

The success of José’s book gave her the resources to
proceed.

The Howard Rush novel was a runaway bestseller. As
were his next, and his next.

She was featured in a piece in The New York Times
Book Review. Bright young authors and their agents
began flocking to her door, the ancient, weatherbeaten
door on her converted warehouse in Brooklyn
where her publishing firm was housed.

She was becoming a rock star in the publishing
business.

11
The second translation took much longer than the first.
Research was needed to make it sound and feel
authentic. After all, José grew up in the Mexico
City area, so I could not make mistakes about
important places, dates, or historical events. I
spent hours and hours poring through Internet sites
on the subject.

Have you ever Googled “JFK assassination conspiracy
theories”?

I no longer owned a copy of the Warren Commission
Report, so I spent many afternoons in the local
branch of the New York City Public Library reviewing
it, especially those parts concerning Oswald’s time
in Mexico City.

Upon returning to my apartment one afternoon, my front
door was ajar. I had lost my only key, so I never
locked the door while I was out. Sometimes lonely
neighbors stopped by while I was gone and waited for
my return. Two days earlier, the widow at the end of
the hall had left a birthday cake in my apartment.
It wasn’t even my birthday.

“Hello?”

I entered slowly and could see the ankles and feet
of someone sitting in a chair around the corner from
my front entrance.

“A priest?” asked a male voice with a thick Spanish
accent.

I stopped in my tracks.

The shoes and ankles disappeared. I could hear
the man rising from the chair. I tried to locate a
weapon.

“A serial-killing priest?”

It didn’t sound like his happy voice.

As he came around the corner, I recognized the face
from the dust cover.

A knife?

A gun?

A baseball bat?

What was José Calderon’s weapon of choice?

And who would discover my rotting, bludgeoned body?

My landlord?

My next door neighbor?

That loony widow when she brought me another birthday
cake?

…………………………………………
To be continued …!

Only Milo, winner of the 2010 IPPY Gold Medal for Popular Fiction, is published by Inkwater Press (© 2009).

Here’s a literary first for the Wordstock blog. During the coming weeks leading up to the Festival, we are serializing Part One of Only Milo, Barry Smith’s comically macabre tale about a writer who plagiarizes himself to become the ghostwriting darling of the publishing world. Success at last! But as he takes the literary world by storm, Milo’s path for personal recognition takes on an ever-growing body count…

The winner of the 2010 IPPY Gold Medal for Popular Fiction, we’re sure you will enjoy the twists and turns of this darkly funny spoof of the publishing business, brought to you by Inkwater Press (© 2009).

………………………………………………

1
Maybe it was the SPAM Reuben sandwich.

I had noticed the recipe on the back of a can of SPAM
several months earlier, which seemed to legitimize
serving the SPAM Reuben to Margaret. I had tried it
several times in the intervening months and thought
I had determined the proper proportions of SPAM,
sauerkraut, Swiss cheese and Russian dressing. The
marble rye I’d found at the deli across town was
pleasing to the eye, and it was a lunch date – I
would never have served it for dinner.

If we ate quickly we could catch the “early bird”
matinee at the Rialto. $3 a ticket.

Maybe it was the TV tables.

They were not the flimsy, cheap aluminum type my
family had when I was young. They were purchased soon
after I moved into this apartment, and they still
looked new. They were wooden and nicely stained in a
reddish-brown color that sort of matched the wood in
my stereo speakers.

I used real plates, not the plastic ones I had in
the cupboard. And how do you beat a kosher dill
pickle with your SPAM Reuben sandwich? I served the
longest, plumpest pickles left in the jar.

Maybe it was the drapes.

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