Saturday, March 7, 2020

#135 Inside The Emotion of Fiction "BLEACHERS fifty-four linked fictions" by Joseph Mills


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****Joseph Mills’s BLEACHERS fifty-four linked fictions is #135 in the never-ending series called INSIDE THE EMOTION OF FICTION where the Chris Rice Cooper Blog (CRC) focuses on one specific excerpt from a fiction genre and how that fiction writer wrote that specific excerpt.  All INSIDE THE EMOTION OF FICTION links are at the end of this piece. 

Name of fiction work? And were there other names you considered that you would like to share with us? “Bleachers: Fifty-Four Linked Fictions” For a while, I was considering something like “The First Game of the Last Season.” I wanted to pack as much information as possible into it, particularly the idea of change. It is about a recreation youth soccer league, and there was, in earlier drafts, a finality of the league shutting down. Each work stands alone, but just as you see the same people at games during a sports season, recognizable characters weave in and out of the pieces. Hopefully it ends up being a portrait of a community at a certain period of time.

          Martin Luther King Jr said that Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America. I think Saturday morning may be the most integrated as everyone with young kids goes to the park. 

What is the date you began writing this piece of fiction and the date when you completely finished the piece of fiction?  I don’t know the exact date I started. It began as a series of short dramatic pieces. Each year I take part in a “poem-a-day” PAD challenge (https://www.writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/poetic-asides/poetry-challenge-2020/2020-april-pad-challenge-guidelines) organized by Robert Lee Brewer. (https://robertleebrewer.blogspot.com/) He posts prompts in the morning, and participants write a draft that day. 

          Some years, I use the prompts to write fiction, and a couple years ago I used them to develop monologues of parents sitting on the sidelines. Although I had thought they were individual pieces, when I had several dozen of them, I realized that I could shape them into something where the whole was larger than the parts.
          I completely finished the manuscript in March 2019 right before I turned in the final revisions and copy changes for the publisher. He saw an earlier version and said, “I love this. I’m not sure what it is.” And he helped me shape it into its current structure.
  

Where did you do most of your writing for this fiction work? And please describe in detail. And can you please include a photo? I wrote so much of the manuscript at the Miller Street Whole Foods in Winston-Salem that I was tempted to thank the staff in the acknowledgements. Because it’s around the corner from my son’s middle school, I tend to go to the cafĂ© a couple hours before dismissal and work.


What were your writing habits while writing this work- did you drink something as you wrote, listen to music, write in pen and paper, directly on laptop; specific time of day? 

I write at coffee shops all around town. I don’t listen to music (although I used to). I wrote a draft in long hand, entered it in the computer, revised it, printed it and worked on the hard copy, then entered those revisions. I used to work in the mornings. 
         
          In the last couple of years, I work in the afternoons. Having a time limit – I have to get my children from school at a certain time – tends to make me more productive. I also think the body gets habituated to routines, so it’s ready to work at certain times and certain environments.

 Please include just one excerpt and include page numbers as reference.  This one excerpt can be as short or as long as you prefer. This is the first piece of the collection. It’s entitled “Aging.” There are 54 pieces, the number of a deck of cards, and they are titled A through Z like a primer.

            For years, Colleen had mocked the “blue chair people.” They had infuriated her with how they clogged street parties and outdoor concerts so people had to thread around them. Who sat and listened to music? Was the field at Woodstock covered in blue chairs? Was the floor at the Savoy Ballroom? Did Astaire sing about “tying up my white tie/putting out my blue chair?” If they wanted to sit, they should stay home. To her, blue chairs and blue hairs had been synonymous. Blue blobs taking up space, space that could be used for dancing, for mingling, for moving, for living. In her mind, a blue chair was one step from a blue coffin.
Then, last year, she started taking Steve to soccer, and she looked around for a place to sit, expecting bleachers or benches, but at that field at Jackson Park, there was nothing. Just scrubby sod and a cracked parking lot. There weren’t even curbs. The other adults pulled collapsible chairs out of their trunks and backseats. She had tried to sit in the grass, but had been badly bitten in seconds. She had walked around for a while and then had sat in the car, but that had been hot and too far away for Steve to see her. If she was going to be there, she wanted credit for being there. So she had stood on the sideline, pretending to be interested in the drills, her feet hurting. That was the price you paid to parent. Sore feet.
Then Steve had needed new shin guards or more socks or another ball or something, and in Dick’s Sporting Goods, by the registers, there had been a display of foldable chairs. They were all different colors. And they were on sale. She had sat in one, just to see what it was like, and discovered it was comfortable. Distressingly comfortable. Maybe, she had thought, it might be good to have, just for places like Jackson Park. Especially since it had become clear that she was going to spend hours at practices.
The waiting part of parenting had taken Colleen by surprise. She hadn’t fully appreciated how much of a time commitment her children’s interests would require from her. Not the hours driving around, but the hours she had to sit somewhere. Parenting, at this stage, felt mostly like being in a waiting room, flipping through old magazines. They went off and played and she waited on a bench, on the bleachers, in a chair. This was her job. Waiter. She admired those who didn’t do it. The ones who dropped their kids off and drove away. But that wasn’t her. She was a waiter, and since she was, she could at least be comfortable.
When she had bought the chair, she had told Steve, “We’ll just keep this in the car.” She had wanted to say, “Don’t tell your father,” but that would have made it more likely that he would. Nick had heard her rant far too many times about “blue chair zombies” and The Sitting Dead, and she didn’t want to be charged with hypocrisy. She also didn’t want to hear any suggestion that she was changing, compromising, selling out, getting old. Sometimes she felt Nick looking at her as if assessing her graying hair or wrinkles. He was aging as well – the gut she pretended not to notice, the glasses he needed a few years ago, the way he didn’t take the stairs two at a time anymore – but there was nothing like a pregnancy to take a toll on a body. She relied on her son being oblivious, not thinking to tell his dad about the chair, not seeing it as important since it wasn’t about him. Colleen had realized long ago she rarely went wrong counting on the self-centeredness of men.
She keeps the chair in the trunk, covered with a blanket. It gives her an odd guilty feeling, in a way that her other secrets don’t. She keeps plenty of things from Nick. Shoe purchases, lunches out. Nothing like an affair, nothing big, but he doesn’t have to know everything. She assumes he does the same. Most marriages, like most plants, won’t thrive in full sun. This, however, feels different.
Games are held at fields with bleachers, and Nick comes to these, so the chair stays in the trunk. It’s nice, sitting and watching their son together, occasionally holding hands. But, the bleachers are also hard and cold, and a lot of the time Steve isn’t even playing. So, although she would never admit it, Colleen prefers practices. There she can be more comfortable and less attentive. This too has been a surprising part of parenting. The constant game of “Find the Differences” between the images of who she thought she would be and who she is, who she used to be and who she is, who she wants to be and who she is.

Why is this excerpt so emotional for you? And can you describe your own emotional experience of writing this specific excerpt? 

          It took me a long time to realize this should be the first piece, and that’s because it took me a long time to realize what the manuscript was about. I thought it was about sports, specifically youth soccer. 
         
          It’s actually about parenting -- how it differs from what we thought it would be and how it changes us. Initially the ending of “Aging” concentrated on guilt, in fact that was an earlier title, but then I recognized that it was about something else, something more universal, how we change over time and more understanding of those we’ve mocked.


Other works you have published? I have written six books of poetry with Press 53 (in reverse chronological order)
Exit, pursued by a bear
Angels, Thieves, and Winemakers (second edition)
This Miraculous Turning
Sending Christmas Cards to Huck and Hamlet
Love and Other Collisions
Somewhere During the Spin Cycle
I’ve also written to guide books to North Carolina wineries, non-fiction, and plays.
A faculty member at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Joseph Mills holds an endowed chair, the Susan Burress Wall Distinguished Professorship in the Humanities and was honored with a 2017 UNC Board of Governors Award for Excellence in Teaching. He has published six collections of poetry with Press 53, most recently Exit, pursued by a bear which consists of poems triggered by stage directions in Shakespeare. His book This Miraculous Turning was awarded the North Carolina Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry. He edited the collection of film criticism A Century of the Marx Brothers. With his wife, Danielle Tarmey, he researched and wrote two editions of A Guide to North Carolina’s Wineries, and his essay “On Hearing My Daughter Trying to Sing Dixie” won the Rose Post Creative Nonfiction Competition.
www.josephrobertmills.com

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#135 03 07 2020
Linked Fiction
BLEACHERS Fifty-Four Linked Fictions
By Joseph Mills

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