Thank you so much Nancy.
That was very nice.
Very thoughtful analysis of Devils in the Sugar Shop.
I'm so glad to be here.
I don't know if you know or not, but I actually
was a student here in the creative writing program.
I started in 1991 at the tender age of 23,
and left three years later at the age of 43,
or something like that.
But I studied with Elizabeth Evans, which was--
taught me everything I know-- and had an opportunity
to work with Kate Bernheimer, who's here.
And Brent Hendricks was at the program at the same time.
And so it's a real pleasure to be back.
I was thinking I should tell a little story
of like inspiration and creativity from those days.
But I decided not to.
I'm going to tell another story that--
Aurelie had asked me to think about my experiences
here and write a little piece about it.
And I've not done that yet.
But one of the things I want to talk about is--
It was funny because I don't-- maybe this still happens
in workshops, but when I was here,
there was a lot of stories and novels longed to offer the view
from the gutter, kind of thing.
Do you remember?
Like there's a lot of stories of point of views of hustlers,
and that sort of thing, and their points of view.
And there was one workshop in particular
where a woman had written a story from the point of view
of a stripper.
And somebody in the class said, "well this is inauthentic
because I know because I dated a stripper,
and this is how it works."
And then another woman in the class
said, "well actually, I was a stripper."
And so there was all this sort of effort to outdo each other,
in terms of the sort of honesty from the point of view
of the low life.
But Tucson was a great environment for that.
So we would-- so yeah.
And we would go to The Buffet because it
made us feel dangerous or something to hang out there.
And it was a little, because there was actually a gunfight
that I witnessed in the streets in front of The Buffet,
and it made me feel incredibly cool to have witnessed that.
And I met a Hooker named Precious.
She'd had a tattoo on her.
I don't know that she was a hooker,
but she kept leaving like every 10 minutes with a different guy
and came back.
And then she had like a Harley Davidson tattoo on her hand
here.
And she said it was the most painful one-- most painful
tattoo she'd ever gotten because she'd gotten it in the joint,
and when she wasn't drunk.
And so-- but that really had nothing to do I guess with
the tenderness of that spot, but--
So do with that what you will.
And I'm going to read a little bit from the new book,
or new-ish, The Coffins of Little Hope,
and just to read from the beginning of that.
And then I wanted to read something
that I'm working on now, a book called The Swan Gondola.
So I'm going to just start from the beginning
of The Coffins of Little Hope, so it doesn't
require much explanation.
The chapters are very short, which
is kind of a selling point.
So if you're looking for a quick read,
short chapters can be pleasing.
This is chapter one from part one.
I still use a manual typewriter--
a 1953 Underwood portable, in a robin's-egg blue--
because the soft pip-pip-pip of the typing of keys
on a computer keyboard doesn't quite
fit with my sense of what writing sounds like.
I need the hard metal clack, and I
need those keys to sometimes catch
so I can reach in and untangle them,
turning my fingertips inky.
Without slapping the return or turning the cylinder
to release the paper with a sharp whip,
without all that minor havoc, I feel
I've paid no respect to the dead.
What good is an obituary if it can
be written so peaceably, so undisturbingly,
in the dark of night?
Though my name does not begin with S,
my byline has always been S Myles because I'm
Esther, but more often Essie, or Ess,
and thus S-- just S, no period-- on the page.
Two--
Our town, statistically, was the oldest it had ever been,
population-wise.
At 83, I was years and years past a reasonable retirement
age, but I'd never been so busy.
We were all of us quite old, we death merchants--
the town's undertaker, 78; his organist, 67;
the desairologist, desairology-- dressing and ironing the hair
of the deceased, manicuring their nails,
rouging their cheeks with a simulated blush of heat--
73; the florist, her freezer overgrown with lilies, 81.
The cemetery's caretaker, who procured
for the goth high schoolers who partied among the tombstones,
was the enfant terrible among us, at an immature 56.
I'd chronicled the town's dead since dropping out
of the eighth grade to work for my father, the publisher
of the County Paragraph, a newspaper eventually
to be run by my grandson, Doc--
called Doc for his professorial carriage,
in three-piece suits and neckties,
and for his use of overly brainy words in his editorials,
words lifted from a brittle-edged, outdated
thesaurus in his top desk drawer.
My first obit had not been meant as an obit
but rather as an essay about my mother, who'd
died giving birth to me.
Throughout my childhood, I'd studied the sewing room
my father had left untouched, and I'd stitched together
a portrait of her based on notes she'd
scribbled in the margins of recipe cards--
"orange peel works too--" and on the particular velvet dress,
with a patchwork of mismatched buttons,
that had been left unfinished on the dressmaker's dummy,
and on the postcards she'd had the bad habit
of starting but not finishing--
"Dear Millie," her sister, "just a fast, quick, short,
unimportant note so I can get this into the mail
before the carrier comes," then nothing else.
You would think a woman in her 80s wouldn't cry for her mommy,
and I don't really, it's really for the little girl
that I was that I cry after I've had three
or four whiskeys of an evening.
But the weeping is pleasure.
When I cry like a baby, my aches go,
and I feel skinned, refreshed afterward.
At that moment I'm happy to be sad
and I wish I could be so melancholy for hours.
But it's fleeting.
Sobriety is quick, and the night too long,
and as I lie awake with sleeplessness,
nervous from drink, I wish I hadn't drunk a drop.
Three
And this very book began not as a book but as
an obit of a kind for a little girl who up
and went missing one simple summer day.
On this girl we pinned all hopes of our dying town's salvation.
The longer we went without seeing her even once,
the more and more dependent upon her we grew.
She became our leading industry, her sudden nothingness
a valuable export, and we considered
changing the name of our town to hers;
we would live in the town of Lenore.
Is it any wonder that we refused to give up hope
despite all the signs that she'd never
existed, that she'd never been anybody-- never,
not even before she supposedly vanished?
By the time Daisy, the mother of that vaporous Lenore,
finally called me to her farmhouse,
after all the weeks of bickering and debate
that enlivened our town yet ruined its soul, after most
of the events of this book had passed,
no one anywhere was any longer waiting
for word of Lenore's death.
It was the last Thursday of January,
and the week had moved from an unseasonable thaw
into a bitter chill that pained your teeth as you
leaned into the wind.
I went, alone, as requested, intending to help Daisy,
as if plotting to steal her away from her own delusions.
For some of us, Lenore was nothing but a captivating hoax,
while for others, she was a grim tragedy,
a mystery cynically left unsolved.
You were either one of the ones who truly believed in Lenore
or you were one of the ones who believed in
the same way you believe in the trickling stigmata
of a plastic Virgin, with a trust in magic and miracle
mostly for the thrill of it.
Or you were one of the ones with no faith at all.
Those were the ones, the ones with disbelief,
who benefited the most, who made the most
money on the sad pilgrims who skulked in and out of our town.
Some of you may say I'm just as bad as the worst of the people
who've exploited the summer, fall, and winter of Lenore,
that I've played this story like an accordion for the purposes
of melodrama, squeezing and stretching, inflating
and deflating scenes and events at will.
You'll say I wasn't everywhere; you'll
say there's no way I can know all that I've depicted.
But I stand behind all the truths
in this story of deception.
Maybe because I've so long looked so old,
even when I was relatively young, that people
feel they can be revealing around me,
that they can unbutton their lips
and let slip intimate facts and trust that I have the maturity
to keep my mouth shut.
Four
What will you most remember?
It's a question I've asked of the grieving hundreds
and hundreds of times.
The people I ask almost always take a deep breath and exhale.
"What will I most remember?" they most always
say, looking up and off as they're thinking back.
Their first responses, which come too quickly,
simply to fill the silence in the room,
are unexceptional-- her infectious smile,
his playful wink, her bubbly laugh, his gruff demeanor,
in which disguised his sweet, soft heart.
But here's what I do--
I write nothing down.
I give them absolutely nothing, as
if they've not yet said a word.
I sit, my skinny legs crossed beneath my long skirt,
my steno pad atop my knee, the point of my pen
pressed on the paper but not moving, not even to doodle.
They know that I know they can do better than that.
To please me, then, they see past their grief and breathe
vivid life back into their beloveds,
in idiosyncratic detail.
What will they most remember about me?
Will it be the cherry cough drops I constantly
popped and the tart, antiseptic scent
they gave my breath and the noise
they made knocking against my teeth--
my "death rattle," my great-granddaughter lovingly
calls it?
Because, you see, I've always been nervous
among all the despair.
And the older I've grown, the more nervous I've become.
Once upon a time, I could ease into a house of mourning
as inconspicuously as a neighbor dropping off a coffee cake.
An obit writer should not, by nature, be a memorable visitor.
But when my crooked shadow falls across the doorstep,
people likely think I've come grim-reaping.
My hair is snow-white, and I'm quite
tall, my head only just clearing some
of the shorter of the door-jambs,
even with an old-lady slouch I've had since girlhood.
As a gangly teen, I thought it made me
lady-like to curl in on myself.
I thought it demure to lean forward into invisibility.
All the admonishment I took from my concerned aunties
for letting my hair fall on my face-- flirty-like,
one aunt said with disdain--
failed to get me to straighten up,
but I did take to wrenching it all back into a tight ponytail
with silk ribbons, and I do still
twist my knotted braids atop my head
and riddle them with combs and clips
and, my favorite, an ostentatious dragonfly hairpin
bejeweled with colored glass.
It's how people know me, for better or worse.
Five
The January afternoon I was summoned to Daisy's farm,
on the pretense of writing Lenore's obit,
Daisy welcomed me in and brushed the snow
off my disgraceful fur coat, a mink that
had long been on its last legs.
She helped me to unravel the wool
scarf I'd wrapped around my head,
fussing with it when it caught on the wings
of my dragonfly hairpin.
She stuffed the scarf into a sleeve of my coat
and hung the coat on the corner of the open closet door.
We sat at the kitchen table with cups of coffee,
and after she told me stories of Lenore's childhood, all stories
I'd heard before, she poured more coffee into my cup,
though I'd yet to drink a sip.
The coffee smelt burnt somehow, and it spilled over the brim.
I held my hand above the rising steam in hopes
of nursing my stiff joints.
Daisy pulled a thin cardigan tight over her shoulders.
She wore a wispy blue dress meant for summer.
She had a craggy, haggard beauty,
all her troubles having taken their toll.
Even sitting still and shivering,
she had a bitter edge, a low-level fierceness.
Middle age had rendered Daisy wasted and lovely both.
Daisy bit at the dry skin of her lip.
"Your lip's bleeding, sweetie," I said.
Daisy took the tissue tucked into the cuff of her sweater
and dabbed at her lip.
She pulled the tissue away to check the spot of blood,
then dabbed again, then checked again.
She kept dabbing and checking until the spots of blood
shrank away.
"I know you're not going to print what I've told you,"
Daisy said, gesturing toward my notes in my steno pad,
making a little scribbling motion in the air.
I removed my reading spectacles, partly for effect--
like a doctor pained by the diagnosis
he's delivering-- and partly because of the glasses' weight
on the bridge of my nose.
I set them atop my notebook.
"No," I said, "we won't print it."
I took off my watch, heavy on my wrist.
How many more winters until my bones
simply shattered beneath the weight of my skin?
I lifted the dragonfly hairpin from the knotted braid
atop my head.
The insect's hooked legs had felt snagged in my hair,
yanking at my scalp with my every nod.
"I won't be writing an obituary for Lenore."
"Then what'd you come here for?"
Daisy said, looking up at me with a genuine interest.
"I thought it might help you," I said.
"I want to help you."
Help her, I thought, sneering to myself, even then.
We were the ones who'd done all the damage,
every last one of us.
How could any of us help?
I unclasped the cluster of rhinestones clipped
to my left ear lobe, a cumbersome piece
of costume jewelry, and placed it among my other things.
I hear best with that ear.
"Daisy, I think you're hurt, is what I think.
I think your heart is broken.
Do you think my heart's never been broken?
I know what such a thing does.
If there's anything I know from this life,
I know what heartbreak does."
Daisy said nothing, only stared at my undrunk cup of coffee.
I then felt compelled to drink it.
I leaned over to sip off the excess before lifting the cup.
The coffee tasted humid, like the smell of a dishcloth left
in the sink.
"OK, I'll tell you the truth, Mrs. Myles," Daisy said.
"Please," I said, putting my chin in my hand
and leaning forward, my good ear out.
"I lied," she said.
"I don't really think Lenore is dead.
I wanted you to write her obituary,
and to print it, to wake everybody up.
People would be disgusted by it, an obit for Lenore;
I know they would.
And they'd care about her again.
Because, Mrs. Myles, I know he didn't kill her.
He loved her.
That's why he took her.
She's somewhere alive, and afraid."
Finally a tear rolled down her cheek
and over the pout of her lower lip.
I was unmoved.
Maybe I didn't want to help her at all.
Maybe I just wanted to hear a confession,
and I wanted to be the one to tell the truth to others.
If I live to be a hundred, I'll still
have this infantile need to know everything
before everyone else.
None of this was an effort toward closure.
It seemed just another beginning in a story
that was all beginnings.
And that was probably why my little town
couldn't get enough of it.
We were so tired of endings.
I'll stop on that there and then--
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]