Notes from A Stephen King Interview, Part 2

Photo: Stephen King at The Harvard Bookstore, June 6, 2005.  From his Wikipedia page.

[This is Part 2 of a blog started a few days ago, which you can go to here if you don't want to scroll.]

[Stephen King gave this sort of loose interview to The Atlantic on April 12, 2011.  The interview was in conjunction with a new-at-the-time short story, "Herman Wouk Is Still Alive," which you can read here.  (You should read the story first before continuing on with this blog entry.)]

To another vein.  You know how your writing and English teachers always tell you to walk around with pen and paper (or, today, an iPhone, or an iPad, or just talk into your cell, or--) because you must write down that great idea or you'll forget it?  Well, the guy who has sold more books than anyone currently alive says:

I never write ideas down. Because all you do when you write ideas down is kind of immortalize something that should go away. If they're bad ideas, they go away on their own.

For the record, I also believe this, and I very rarely write anything down.  When I do, I hardly ever use them.  I also believe that ideas you'll use will germinate in your head and simply not leave until you write them into a story.  All the other ideas are unwanted guests who are correctly shown the door.  The more I practice this, the more writing I get done.  The more I let every single idea take root, I stray or the elevator stops.

Out of nowhere, practically, King gives a pretty good description of what poetry is good for:

[Poetry] takes ordinary life, it takes things that we all see, and concentrates them in this beautiful gem. When the good ones do that, that's what you get. When the Philip Larkins or the James Dickeys do that, you get something that is heightened, that says to us that reality is finer and more beautiful and more mysterious than we could ever possibly express ourselves. Which is why we need poetry.

Indeed so.  I'm not a good enough poet to do this myself--I've only managed to sell one poem, though it's also true that I've only sent out one poem--but I agree that this is what good poetry can do.  It's life, super-concentrated, super-compact.  I wrote a line that says, "A poem is a thought shared in compacted time."  I believe this to be true.

But I respectfully disagree with King on one point.  When asked to compare the short story markets of his youth to the ones today, King said:

All those magazines published short fiction. And it started to dry up. And now you can number literally on two hands the number of magazines that are not little presses that publish short fiction.

While this may be true in terms of physical, tangible magazines you hold in your hands, this is not true overall.  There are a ton of markets--many of them big, that pay well--on the Web.  They're called e-magazines.  I've been published in a few of them, and they often pay better than the hand-held, paper ones.  A sign of the times, but a fact nonetheless.

In fact, when King says that people don't read short stories (or much else) anymore, I would politely disagree with that, as well.  Those online mags wouldn't be able to pay what they do if nobody was reading them.  And there's a ton of decent-paying online mags. Again, I know: I've been in them.

And, finally, here's an interesting irony:

JP: It is odd, though, if you think about it, that with all the speeding-up that we're being told about, and the dwindling of the attention span and all that, that people would rather chomp their way through a 400-pager than just get zapped by a little story ...

SK: And so many of the 400-pagers are disposable in themselves. When I see books by some of the suspense writers that are popular now, I think to myself: "These are basically books for people who don't want to read at all." It just kind of passes through the system. It's like some kind of fast-food treat that takes the express right from your mouth to your bowels, without ever stopping to nourish any part of you. I don't want to name names, but we know who we're talking about.

This is also true.  I'll name names for him: James Patterson.  Many of the heart-felt vampire books, or young-heroine dystopias.  But, I should also add, in all honesty: Stephen King himself, sometimes.

I think he would admit that, most of the time.  He was just having a negative, cranky interview.

The Skeleton Crew by Deborah Halber -- Web Sleuths and Cold Cases

Photo: The hardcover's hardcover, from this website at Simon and Schuster.


Though a little dry at times, The Skeleton Crew is a work unlike anything I've read before: a nonfiction piece about web sleuths, people who match missing people with unidentified bodies, thereby giving closure to the families of the dead and, to boot, solving a cold case.

That such people exist is a surprise, and yet not, to me at the same time.  Mostly the web detectives are obsessed people with a personal void to fill.  Some are siblings of someone murdered, or someone missing.  Todd Matthews, the man the book revolves around the most, had siblings die very young--just a few years old--and he thinks he's perhaps trying to resurrect them, in a way.  He doesn't really know.

But he solved the now-infamous case of Tent Girl.  In this book you'll also read about the still-unsolved case of the Lady of the Dunes, from Cape Cod, Massachusetts.  Another case, of a young redhead killed in the desert outside of Las Vegas, haunts me still.

And you might be surprised to know that as many as 40,000--and perhaps more--unidentified bodies take up space right now in coroner's offices throughout the U.S.  More find their way into the unidentified statistics every day.

And they're not all homeless, addicts or prostitutes, either.

One article I read today--similar to this book but not in any way connected to it--concerned a woman who lived under a ton of aliases for over thirty years before she committed suicide in Texas.  Who was she, really?  Nobody knows--including her husband.  She'd covered her tracks that well.  Her latest driver's license was of a name she'd stolen off of an 18-month old's gravestone in Idaho.

Then there was the story of a woman who was kidnapped, sold to a man who molested her and married her (yes).  She's not dead, of course, but she tells the story of a woman, from her exact same situation, who was killed by the man she'd had to marry.  Who was this other girl?  Nobody knows.  She'd just been taken off the street, sold to some guy, and re-named.  And now she's dead, and nobody knows who she is--not even the guy who kidnapped her.

So who's The Lady in the Dunes?  The woman who had her head bashed in and her hands chopped off to hinder her identification?  Nobody knows.  And there's thousands of people like her, unidentified, unknown, unburied and ungrieved-for, all over the country.

Fascinating, in a sad, morbid, I-can't-believe-it kind of way.

And definitely worth reading, if you can stomach it.

It's written by Deborah Halber in a literary-mystery kind of way, weaving interconnected stories, flashing back, coming back around again.  You have to pay attention, but it's easy to do if you care enough.  I found myself Googling some of the nicknames and some of the victims, and reading a few of the websites mentioned in the book.

I even gave a passing thought to trying it myself.  Me, the web sleuth.  But I won't. 

I know better.  It's too depressing and too addicting, and I'd never recover.

The writer in me sees a good novel in here somewhere.  I'll add it to the list of manuscripts-to-come for now.  I've got to return the book to the library, but I'll look to buy it soon, so I can own it when I start to write my web-sleuthing novel.

You Know You're A Homeowner When...

Photo: A window in my house.  Notice the wooden shims holding up the second pane of glass so there's no open space between the plastic molding of the storm window and the top of the windowframe.

You know you're a homeowner (of an older house) when...


--you think wooden shims are the bomb.


--and you have hundreds of them throughout the house, in use (like in the pic above) and in storage.


--you've just spent $45 on steel wool, window insulation and caulking.


--you spent an hour walking through the house, studying the perimeters of your windows and doors to see where you need to use that stuff.


--and you've spent an hour or so stuffing steel wool into the gaps between the just-now-rotting wood of your shed and the cement of the shed floor. 


--and you've recently spent an hour or so stuffing steel wool into the gaps between your garage doors and the cement floor of your garage.


--and you've done that more to keep out the damn mice than to keep in the winter heat.


--you start saving money in the beginning of the fall to pay for the winter heating bills.


--you actually pay attention when someone prophecies how warm or cold the upcoming winter will be.


--you feel damn proud of yourself for cleaning out just enough garage space to get your car in there.


--you're happy to hear that two dead mice were found in your shed because last winter they ate your backyard work gloves to shreds and pooped all over the second and third shelves.


--you sing the praises of house spiders because they kill smaller bugs--but they also let you know where the unseen drafts are in your house.  (They'll build their webs there, and you'll see the webs shimmer slightly in the draft.)


--you have a handyman on speed-dial.


--and your landscaper, too.


--and the guy in charge of the water heater and pipes, too.


--and the guy in charge of the heating oil, too.


--you make sure you can pay the mortgage before you think about the next food shopping bill.  (Because you know the old ladies across the street will give you enough bagels, crackers and cheese to hold you over.)


--you realize you're a wood hoarder.  (I have more wood than you'll find in many small forests.)


--you can write a long-ish blog entry about the idiosyncratic things you do when you own a house.

Girl's Guide to Homelessness by Brianna Karp

Photo: Book cover from the book's images on Goodreads


Very odd but very readable memoir that starts off as the story of Karp's extremely messed-up family (she has a few memoirs still left in the tank on this alone). But it then becomes the story of the unfortunate decisions she makes as she looks for love in all the wrong places.  The publisher is Harlequin, so I suppose this makes sense, but the story arc still comes across as schizophrenic.  The best (as in, well-written) parts are the details of her father's sexual abuse and her mother's mental, emotional and physical abuse, as well as the tenets of their religion--Jehovah's Witness--that makes all that possible.  A very well-written memoir still needs to be written about that alone--about how a religion imprisons the children of its followers.  One does not doubt that what she says here about the religion is true: apparently, a severely abused woman is told to be better to her husband, and the abuse should go away.  This would make a Pulitzer-winning memoir in of itself.  I'll never look at Jehovah's Witnesses the same again.  No longer will they be, for me, the quaint men in black who bravely go door-to-door, knowing said doors will be slammed in their faces, but doing it anyway.

One would think that this would create some controversy, but it hasn't.  What has created controversy, strangely, is the second schizophrenic half of this memoir, where she chronicles her rise from depressed homeless person living in Wal-Mart's parking lot in SoCal (Did you know that some Wal-Marts let homeless people live in their parking lots in their cars and campers?  I didn't.  I'm interested to see if my local Wal-Mart allows this.  If so, kudos to them.  This book brings up something I've wondered about: How are homeless people to sleep in safety if they're not allowed to park their cars in parking lots for fear of being towed?  Where are they to go?) to winning writer/blogger of the homeless and working for Elle Magazine and going on the Today Show to write about it.  The controversy starts when she mentions that some guy came to her trailer to interview her, treated her shabbily and did the same to other interviewees he tried to "help."  She wrote that she asked him to not mention her real name, or her real location.  He does, anyway, and says that it's too late when she complains.

I saw online yesterday that he says all this isn't true, but that he took the video of the interview down anyway, per advice of his lawyer after Karp's book came out.  Surrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrre...There was also some silly stuff about her not really being homeless, since she (usually) had a car, and a cellphone, and something that resembled shelter.  These people are simply not seeing the true face of homelessness for God knows how many: the homeless of the 2000s won't just be unshaven and bench-sleeping alcoholics and addicts.  They'll be recently-successful people who through downsizing have lost their jobs, and who through the housing crunch/crisis have lost their homes.  In other words, but for the Grace of God, one of most of us...

Even more controversial was her description of how utterly catastrophic her last relationship ends, with the same guy who'd helped her rise from homelessness to super-blogger and Today Show guest.  Lots of stuff online says all or most of this latter stuff was fake, especially the stuff about what happened when she hopped a flight to surprise him at his home across the pond.  Uh-oh...Those never turn out well.  But what happens to her here is truly horrible.  But is it true?  Sounds like it to me, though it does seem incredible that one person has gone through everything she chronicles here.  But being someone who's been to Hell and back several dozens of times, I can assure you with some bitter truth that several lives of horror and travesty can all happen to one person.

Very disturbing to me, though, is how Karp seems to have fallen off the map after October/November of last year.  I went to www.girlsguidetohomelessness.com to see what was new with her (it's her own blog, as well as a site to assist the homeless), to see if she's still homeless.  But the site seems to have been abandoned after Oct./Nov. 2012, as does her other online ventures, including her blog at Goodreads.  What gives?  This is odd for someone with a book released just last year, and for someone who was so ardent a helper with the homeless.  Her public appearances and book-signings also seem to have stopped very abruptly.  There is no Wikipedia page for her, for the book, or for the oft-mentioned website--all very odd for a new-ish author and book.  In short, I have a more thorough web presence than she now does, and that's not good for a new author of a bestseller.  There is not a lot of internet backlash about her book, a la James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, so I wouldn't just assume that she has had to take it all down.

I simply don't know.  One hates to assume the worst, so...I'll prefer to think that she's just taking a well-deserved break from it all.  The last thing I heard about all this is that, in Oct./Nov. 2012, she had to leave the apartment she was in because her landlord was selling, but that she was able to move into a much better place.  If anyone has an update on her, or her website of the homeless, please let me know.  I wish her well, and after reading this book, which you should, you would wish her the best, too.