Bill Glose and Bill Walsh: How a novice writer's relationship with an experienced writer blossomed into friendship

Christal Cooper 1,622 Words (including excerpt)

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Guest Blogger Bill Glose

Homage To My Mentor Bill Walsh

www.billglose.com

·     http://www.chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2014/05/versatile-literary-writer-bill-glose.html

         When I decided to become a writer, I said goodbye to a successful management position with regular paychecks and hello to editorial whimsy and shoeboxes filled with rejection letters.  I had no idea how difficult a writing life could be; I simply knew I loved to write.

         After I moved back to the neighborhood where I grew up, I discovered that another writer lived down the street from me:  Bill Wash.  Not to be confused with the copy desk chief of the Washington Post, who authored Lapsing Into a Comma and the Elephants of Style, nor the NFL coach who led the San Francisco 49ers to three Super Bowl victories, this Bill Walsh was a writer whose published articles appeared in such diverse publications as Black Belt, Woman’s World, and GRIT.

         I’d only met Bill once before, and to say that meeting was less that auspicious would be like saying William Faulkner was a little wordy.  It was late at night, and I was a 13-year-old kid making a ruckus outside his daughter’s window.  I didn’t know Heidi’s father was an ex-Marine with a tough-guy reputation, but I found out moments later when he grabbed me by the scruff and shook me around to his front yard.

         He forgave my teenage indiscretions, in part because I only visited Heidi through the front door from then on, but also because I served as a paratrooper in the Gulf War and the old jarhead had respect for that.  So, when I showed up on his doorstep years later with the proclamation that I was going to be a writer, he warned me of the difficulties and asked if I was prepared.  “Do you want to write,” he said, “or do you just want to be a writer?”  The difference, he went on to explain, was that many people want to be known as a writer, to be some famous name that people talk about, but few are willing to do the work that good writing requires.

         I swore that I could do the work and proudly produced my work-in-progress.  He took my story and, while I watched in horror, began marking it up.  When he was done, the pages contained more red ink than type.  I was flummoxed.  I had expected praise.  I had expected him to recognize my work for the masterpiece it was.  I stewed for a couple of days before rereading the ink-scarred pages, intending to ridicule his suggestions.  But the story was improved with his changes.  Much improved.

         I did the edits and slunk down the street.  When Bill saw me, he smirked and said, “Wasn’t sure if I’d see you again.”  Inside his house, he gave me the first of many lessons.  “Good writing requires rewriting, lots and lots of rewriting.”  Much of Bill’s advice was of the big-picture variety, but his editing comments were always specific: show, don’t tell; have a reason fro every scene; avoid clichés.

         My ego suffered on those early trips to Bill’s house, where counsel was frequently delivered with the force of a shotgun blast.  Once, he stopped reading one of my stories after the first two pages and told me it was not worthy of this reader.  Bill is a pedant with no patience for sloppy work.  If something I’d written used a secondary variant of a word or – gasp! – a cliché, I could expect a scathing rebuke supported by excerpts from a procession of reference books.

         And if I hadn’t brought anything with me, he would bemoan the general state of grammar and how it was being butchered by common usage.  Many times he has lectured me on the misuse of such words as “minuscule” (“The universally considered incorrect variant ‘miniscule,’ though common, is always incorrect”), “enormity” (“Enormity’ defines something as being monstrously offensive; it is not a synonym for ‘enormous’”) and “podium” (“A podium is what you stand on; a lectern is what you stand behind”).

         Bill never went to college, but he reads voraciously and is better educated than many college graduates.  Better yet, he is worldly-wise and practical, giving him a better grasp on how to share his knowledge with others.  For every roadblock encountered, he showed me a path around.  And every path included examples, using classic literature or modern masters to guide me.

         Before I met Bill, my reading list consisted of thrillers, sci-fi books and an occasional cozy.  Everything I knew about classic literature dated back to high school, where lessons were so dull that I never dared to pick up a literary work again.  Until I met Bill.  He showed me that good literature was not something to be feared, and he guided my reading selections.  I went from a diet of James Patterson and Stephen King to John Steinbeck, Ernest J. Gains and Charles Frazier.  He introduced me to great novels.  I read, I learned, and I fell in love with the written word.

         We often discussed what I’d recently read.  Sometimes we’d chat about plot, but usually we’d talk about the writing techniques employed.  What makes David Schickler’s characters so powerful?  How had Ronald Wright so skillfully alternated voice in Henderson’s Spear?  Was Jonathan Franzen showing mastery or just showing off with his page-long sentences?  Sometimes we talked about literature in general.  Bill would tell stories about various writers’ lives, their notable books, their triumphs and flops, their peccadilloes and literary sins.  It seemed he had an anecdote about everyone and everything.

         Once my work started getting published and I began promoting it, Bill’s advice turned to effective readings.  “Even if there’s only one person in the audience,” Bill said, “he gave his time to come listen to you.  Make it worth his while.”  At many of my outings, readers actually did outnumber listeners.  However, well-constructed presentations and word of mouth soon had me reading at venues where the assembled crowd outnumbered available chairs, and patrons had to line up against walls or sit cross-legged on the floor.

         He shepherded me through the finer points of literary presentation – practice beforehand, use dramatic pauses, arrive early and ensure the reading area is set up properly – and he accompanied me to early outings.  Once, he read an essay about his father that made the hairs on my arm stand on end.  Another time, he acted out a humorous scene that had a bookstore crowd laughing so hard that everyone else in the store bunched into our little section.

         Now Bill tells me that I’ve outgrown what he can teach me, but after every visit I leave his house stronger and smarter than when I entered.  Sometimes his mere presence affects my work.  Before I share with him anything I’ve written, I labor over work choice and shave off all the fat I can find.  And even when I don’t share something with Bill before sending it out to an editor, I still hear his voice in my head as I edit.

         The lessons I’ve learned at Bill’s house are with me every time I face a blank screen or scratch a typed page with a red pen.  But just as important as anything he’s taught me is the friendship I’ve gained along the way.  I did not always go to Bill for advice.  Whenever one of my stories was published, I’d bring the magazine or journal to his house, and we’d marvel at the layout or the other names on nearby pages.  His joy over my successes often inspired me to write something else.  And, when the mail brought nothing but rejection letters, he’d share a beer with me as we criticized the editorial decisions and discussed methods of retribution.

         Bill is sick now. Congestive heart failure keeps him bedridden for most of the time.  Occasionally, he’ll have a good day, and I’ll visit.  We still talk about books and writing, what’s going on in the world of publishing, and arcana of the English language.  He still rants with vigor, but that tires him out so the length of our discussions is limited.

         Bill has been more than a mentor to me; he’s part teacher, part confidant, part friend.  In the years since I first asked for help, I have become a professional writer, with all of my income generate by the words I produce.  Bill made this possible.  He taught me hard lessons and gave me comfort when I faltered.  While I will always strive to be a better writer and a better editor, I know I am a better person for knowing him.  

*Below is an excerpt from “Memoir of a Ball Well Hit” by Bill Walsh.  Used with permission from the author.

         During the Great Depression, my father was a legendary figure in the mountains of western North Carolina.  Whether they wrestled plows, labored in mills, or hauled whisky by the dark of the moon, the bone-tough hillbillies of his generation were bound each summer Sunday by a common bond, a cultural phenomenon of the rural South that lifted their spirits even higher than fire-and-brimstone preaching:  semi-pro baseball.  Every village, institution, or enterprise that could round up a dozen men not crippled by war, flue epidemics, or the quotidian brutality of mountain life fielded a team.  Baseball was the defining sport of many Appalachian communities.  This was the era of file-sharpened cleats and emery ball pitchers, when red-clay playing fields the color of substance of brick exacted a payment in flesh for every diving catch or slide into home.  These were hard times, this was a hard place, and garments worn to work or to play were as often stained with blood as with dirt.

Photo Description And Copyright Information

Photo 1

Bill Glose. 

Copyright granted by Bill Glose.

Photo 2a

Jacket cover of Lapsing Into a Comma

Photo 2b

Jacket cover of The Elephants of Style

Photo 3a

William Faulkner in December of 1954

Attributed to Carl Van Vechten

Public Domain

Photo 4

Bill Glose during the Gulf War.

Copyright granted by Bill Glose.

Photo 5

Bill Glose and Bill Walsh.

Copyright granted by Bill Glose.

Photo 6

Bill Glose writing in his home office.

Copyright granted by Bill Glose.

Photo 7

Jacket cover of The Human Touch by Bill Glose.

Photo 8

Jacket cover of Ten Twisted Tales edited by Bill Glose.

Photo 9

Jacket cover of Half a Man by Bill Glose.

Photo 10a

James Patterson on August 18, 2008.

Attributed to Susan Solie-Patterson

CCASA 3.0 Unported License.

Photo 10b

Stephen King

Photo 10c

John Steinbeck and son John visit LBJ at the oval office in the White House. To the left is 19 year-old John Steinbeck, IV with his father, John Steinbeck, III. The senior Steinbeck, a friend and sometime speech-writer for LBJ (they had first met in 1963), has written the president to ask on his son's behalf that he would be posted in Vietnam. The 4-minute meeting takes place on Monday, May 16, 1966, shortly after the younger John has finished bootcamp, and a few weeks before his departure for Vietnam.  The visit is to say thank you in person, and to give the younger John the chance to shake the president's hand.

Attributed to White House Photographer

Public Domain

Photo 10d

Jacket cover of A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest T Gaines.

Photo 10e

Jacket cover of Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier

Photo 11a

David Schickler on January 2, 2013

Attributed to David’s wife

Previously published at www.davidschickler.com

GNUFD License Version 1.2

Photo 11b

Ronald Wright speaking in the Myer Horowitz Theatre at the University of Alberta as part of International Week 2007

Attributed to Nick Wiebe

CCASA 2.5 Generic

Photo 11c

Jacket cover of Henderson’s Spear by Ronald Wright.

Photo 11d

Jonathan Franzen at the 2011 Time 100 Gala

Attributed to David Shankbone

Public Domain

Photo 12

Bill Glose speaking at the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Conference.

Copyright granted by Bill Glose.

Photo 13

Bill Glose.

Copyright granted by Bill Glose.

Photo 14

Bill Glose’s office.

Copyright granted by Bill Glose.

Photos 15 and 16

Bill Glose and his partial library.

Copyright granted by Bill Glose.

Photo 17

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt throwing out the first ball at a Washington Senators baseball game in 1934.

Public Domain.

Poet Alison Brackenbury - On June 9, 1870 Charles Dickens died from a stroke

Christal Cooper

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Guest Blogger

Poet Alison Brackenbury

Charles Dickens & The Old Curiosity Shop

It was the Vicar who noticed that we had no Dickens in the house.

My father, to my knowledge, never bought a book in his life. (He would, however, get up half an hour early to finish a library book, often a story of marriage or family, before he left to load and drive a lorry for the farmer who still owned most of our village.)

My mother had a small set of books, including poems, from the teacher training for which she had, briefly, left the village. She had then dabbled in bookclubs, which seemed determined to promote the complete works of Howard Spring.

Our Vicar, the surprisingly bookish son of a rich farming family, must have realised there were no classics amongst the fading covers in our bookcase.

So, aged, eight or nine, I found myself fingering a Sunday School prize with a royal blue cover embossed in gold: ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’.

The re-discovery of my old friend briefly brightened a dark and dreadful first term in North Oxford. ‘You’re good on this often neglected novel’, a patient tutor scrawled in the margin of an essay which seemed, even to me, longer than the books themselves. Dickens had been engulfed by homesickness and mental confusion.

When I came home, sleep-starved, in December, I was asked by my busy parents to take Mrs. Haywood her Christmas present.       

Twice a week, even before the arrival of ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’, Mrs Haywood had cleaned our house so that my mother had time for teaching. She worked with enormous energy, occasionally colliding with the odd bowl or vase. She would then insist we that we accept an expensive replacement.

As a child she had a disfigurement (a hare lip?) and been tormented at school. Her prickly pride was matched only by inexhaustible kindness. She would come and look after me when I was ill, even in the middle of family bereavement, staying all day, boiling her thick custard, which I loved.

Now thin and eighteen, standing on her doorstep in the windy dark, I tried to answer her eager enquiries about Oxford. I could not tell her about the unhappy hours in my room. I tried instead to describe some of the exotic creatures I encountered in the College corridors, with their black cloaks from Benenden and their pale, fine-grained handbags from Florence.

Mrs Haywood stared at me disapprovingly. ‘But they are’, I said desperately, ‘really quite ordinary people’. ‘Don’t you think, Alison dear,’ said Mrs Haywood, unfailingly kind even in indignation, ‘that we are all ordinary people?’ ‘Yes,’ I muttered miserably. Mrs Haywood softened. ‘And what are you studying?’ ‘Dickens’, I offered, at random. Mrs Haywood’s awkward mouth opened into her rare, wide smile. ‘I love Dickens!’ she cried. Her face was happy as a child’s.

Like one of the racehorses turned out to grass in the village, I ‘broke down’, broke off the course, worked in a shop (fairly old, very curious), then went back.

Like Mrs Haywood, I could now love Dickens again, because I knew that I was not going to stay in a claustrophobic university town, as my teachers had dreamed.

I was going out into the wide world, as the lovers pass into London at the end of ‘Little Dorrit’. First devoured at Oxford, it is perhaps my favourite Dickens novel. I have never forgotten the moment in which the wide steps of Mr Dorrit’s Italian palace shrink, in his dying mind, to the narrow staircase of the Marshalsea. If the prison is inescapable, it is partly because he denies it. In the ridiculous grandeur of his pretensions, truth returns from his past.

So I will return, gratefully, to the Curiosity Shop -where is that small blue book? – with what my daughter’s generation would call some random thoughts about Dickens. First, how terrifying he is. As with the course, I needed two attempts at ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’. I almost slammed the book shut when I first encountered Quilp, crunching eggshells.

Dickens is, if anything, still more alarming on stage or screen. My mother-in-law, who had iron nerves, screamed aloud in the cinema at the graveyard scene in ‘Great Expectations’, when Magwitch leaps out at Pip.

But when I edged past Quilp, I followed Nell and her unreliable grandfather on their journey out of London. Despite the odd brush with the monstrous fires of industry, this becomes a book of green places, overlooked patches of countryside where a girl can tether a horse. It looks backwards. Dickens, I believe, is an eighteenth century writer.

I was startled to discover that Oliver’s request for food, unlike its tear-jerking dramatisations, is described in the book with cool satire. (This sudden distancing of tone, the reversing of the telescope, may make Dickens an awkward author for schoolchildren.)

I know other readers who think, as I do, that there is a vivacity and sympathy in ‘The Pickwick Papers’ which is never recaptured. Amongst his stagecoaches and ostlers, Dickens is at home. His later descriptions of the building of railways are raw as nightmare. But, in his waking life, Dickens proved adaptable.

The fierce cleric Dean Close, who terrorised nineteenth century Cheltenham, thought that railways would encourage travel on the Sabbath, for immoral purposes, by the working classes. He might have included famous novelists in this class. When Dickens was caught up in a train crash, he was transporting not only his MS, but his teenage mistress, and her mother.

Dickens worked, incessantly. But one of the fascinating features of his books is the inability of either Dickens or his young heroes to find any useful job which they can do.  Dickens, I believe, had been a Parliamentary reporter, and worked for a lawyer. He held politics and the law in the same cold contempt.

But what was left, for David or Pip? Industry, to Dickens, was Nell’s lurid fairytale of flames. What would Dickens make of a girl whose parents worked hard, and whose money bought her an excellent education, after which she did nothing but pose, gaunt under high-class cosmetics, at the side of the balding heir to a feudal monarchy?

He might not have tacked a happy ending on to that fairy tale, even though Wilkie Collins persuaded him to improve his commercial expectations, by replacing his clear-eyed verdict on the cold-hearted Estella with a final rosy glow.

Finally, how do ‘ordinary people’ encounter Dickens today? I tend to hear him, on the radio. Dickens was the keenest of listeners, perhaps due to his shorthand training. There is nothing in English like the breakneck monologues of Sam Weller. But I heard a radio presenter admit recently that neither he nor his widely read wife had ever attempted Dickens. Were his books ever on school exam syllabuses? His best novels are long, and wildly varied. Somewhere, I suspect, English critics devised a notion of the uniform novel, compact, pale and smooth as those costly handbags. Dickens does not run along even tracks. His prose is a bulging bag, a lurching coach. But if you hang on, and peer out of the tiny window, what crazy, unforgettable views!

Sharon Osbourne, no stranger to craziness, nominates Dickens as her favourite author: ‘I love his books’. Had Mrs Haywood read him? When I stayed with her once, the bedroom shelf held only green copies of ‘The Reader’s Digest’. Perhaps she had borrowed his novels from a library van. Or had she watched the BBC’s serialisations at Sunday teatime, where the bonnets were stiff, but Dickens’ dialogue leapt into life? It is time for a whole new generation of TV adaptations and films. Dickens, I say unhesitatingly, would have loved them, although the producer would have to steer him well away from the young actress playing Little Dorrit or Nell. How did you – and/or your children? – encounter Dickens? Do let me know.

Recently, I was asked to write a poem about Dickens for an anthology. I heard a comment on the radio that very little survives of Dickens’ London. Statistically, I am sure that this is true. But I was once walking South of the Thames when I passed under a wet, black bridge and was suddenly struck by a panicked sense of evil. I almost ran out into the daylight. By a set of dripping steps, I saw a plaque. Here, in ‘Oliver Twist’, Dickens set the murder of Nancy, by Bill Sykes. So some of Dickens’ places do remain.

Dickens’ descriptions of London are, of course, not photographs, but selections, from Dickens’ roving eye. What would Dickens see today? He would see Canary Wharf, but he would also see the immigrant workers with no papers, sleeping in the streets behind Victoria Coach Station. I do not think he would be impressed – perhaps appalled – but still, fascinated. And blogs? He would have had six of them.

Out of all this came a poem, and with it, Mrs Haywood’s final kindness to me, in suggesting its first refrain. She thought that we are all ordinary people. Dickens, less kind, knew that we are all extraordinary. Here is the poem.

Dickens: a daydream


The scrapman’s son bangs at our door,


skives school, like father, his before,


all crammed in van’s hum. ‘Anything, sir?’


curls wild, your scavenging people.

The doe-eyed girl at the café till


is child’s height, yet does not spill


one bean from heaped trays, hammers bills,


your frantic, stunted people.

Bad teeth, bent hips, the pitbull’s snarl


called you out from the lawyer’s yarns.


Happiness bored you most of all,


white tables, good, quiet people.

One was your wife. You glimpsed ahead


the young actress’s breasts instead,


buds crushed by silk. She never said


your name, changed dates, fooled people.

London, in its lost party time,


the trees’ lit snow, the towers’ gold chime,


the heat of bars, the twist of lime,


you shun as in a fever.

We meet beneath the dripping bridge,


soot, fear and sorrow on each ledge.


Hurt child, you scour each rag-strewn beach,


walk all night, stride and shiver

until the dawn strikes London’s walls


and clangs Good morning from St Paul’s.


Waitresses, Poles, striped bankers pour,


your million words. Sleep, river.

Alison Brackenbury

(Published in

A Mutual Friend: poems for Charles Dickens Ed. Peter Robinson, Two Rivers Press, 2012, 978-1-901677-78-2 Highly recommended!

Reprinted in The Times Literary Supplement.)

Photograph Description and Copyright Info

Photo 1

Alison Brackenbury.

Copyright granted by Alison Brackenbury

Photo 2E

Alison’s grandfather Fred Brackenbury, who was a shepherd. 

Photo 3

Howard Spring

Fair Use Under the United States Copyright Law

Photo 4a

Jacket cover of The Old Curiosity Shop

Photo 5a

Charles Dickens in 1850

Public Domain

Photo 6G

Alison, age 4, holding a hand-fed-lamb Grandmother Dorothy was helping Grandfather Fred rear. 

Photo 7N

Charles Dickens in New York in 1867

Attributed to Jeremiah Gurney

Public Domain

Photo 8

The Old Curiosity Shop

Photo 9P

"Little Dorrit" avatar (engraving) 1856

"Harper's New Monthly Magazine" Vol. XII, No. LXIX, February, 1856, New York: Harper & Brothers (Publisher)

Public Domain

Photo 10O

The Marshalsea after it had closed.

Photograph taken in 1897.

Public Domain.

Photo 11

Early illustration from The Old Curisoty Shop depicting Daniel Quilp sitting in his chair drinking rum and smoking while his neglected and abused wife sits nearby

Public Domain

Photo 12T

Magwitch leaps out at Pip.

Illustration from Great Expectations

Printed in 1890

Public Domain

Photo 13

An early illustration depicting Nell and her grandfather from The Old Curiosity Shop

Public Domain

Photo 14

Illustration depicting Oliver Twist requesting food.

Attributed to Harold Copping

Public Domain

Photo 15K

Illustration from The Pickwick Papers

Photo 16V

Charles Dickens’s mistress Elen Ternan,

1858

Public Domain

Photo 17W

Engraving of the Staplehurst Train Crash that Charles Dickens and his mistress were victims of

1865

Attributed to Illustrated London News

Photo 18Q

Charles Dickens at his desk in 1858.

Public Domain

Photo 19

Old vintage painting of Nell from The Old Curiosity Shop

Public Domain

Photo 20

Wilkie Collins (a close friend of Charles Dickens) in 1874 at age 50.

Photograph attributed to Napoleon Sarony. 

The signature of Wilkie Collins was added later.

Public Domain 

Photo 21X

Character Sam Weller from The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens

Public Domain

Photo 22R

Painting titled “Dickens’ Dream”, depicting Dickens at his desk surrounded by his characters.

1875

Attributed to Robert William Buss

Painting donated by Robert William Buss’s grandson

Public Domain

23

Early vintage illustration of the murder of Nell from The Old Curiosity Shop

Public Domain

Photo 24

Alison Brackenbury

Copyright granted by Alison Brackenbury