Beautiful Ruins & One Last Thing Before I Go

So often I come across books by happy little accidents. While browsing through a used bookstore, a book with an interesting cover or with a synopsis on the back or flap will grab my attention. It is one of the most thrilling things to find a novel I've never heard of, even better if it's by a writer new to me. Many of my favorite books have come to me this way.

Occasionally, though, there are those novels that I know are coming out and I look forward to for months. Jonathan Tropper's One Last Thing Before I Go is one such book. I've read everything by Tropper and have been wildly entertained by all of them. Hearing that he had a new one on the way was like hearing that a favorite relative would be visiting for Thanksgiving. Conversely, Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter was one of those I happened on in the bookstore. It was new at the time and the cover was so striking that it drew me in. Since its release and before my purchasing it, I'd read about it and seen some great reviews, so my interest was piqued. I haven't read anything else by Walter, but I look forward now to delving into his other work. And I'm sure I'll look forward to his forthcoming novels as well.

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter (HarperCollins 2012) is a multi-generational story that takes us back and forth between 1962 and the present day. We are transported from the rocky coast of Italy to Hollywood, from Seattle to Idaho to London. Pasquale Tursi is the heir to a failing hotel in a failing fishing village called Porto Vergogna near Genoa. His dream for his hotel, which his father named The Adequate View after a conversation with the American war novelist Alvis Bender, is to attract Americans, and to that end he is building a beach on his rocky outcrop and planning a tennis court that will cantilever out over the water. His dream comes partially true when a young American actress, Dee Moray, shows up from Rome while on hiatus from the filming of Cleopatra. Her arrival sparks something within Pasquale and visits upon the poor Italian hotelier a host of characters including weaselly Hollywood publicist Michael Deane, a couple of thugs from nearby Portovenere and Richard Burton. But her arrival also brings something else to Pasquale: hope. He learns something of himself and his dreams in his conversations with her, and in the drama that unfolds.

Present day Hollywood shows us a Michael Deane who has become successful many times over, lost it all at times, and rebounded quite well. When Pasquale Tursi shows up, older now and searching for a lost love, he is given the chance to atone for sins from decades before. Whether he takes the opportunity is a matter of character and momentum built up from so many years in a shallow and crass business. The inclusion of Dee Moray's son, and the revelation of the identity of his father, is another turn in a novel full of intricate plot twists.

Where Beautiful Ruins spans 50 years and shows us how people's lives, hopes and dreams will change – or stay the same – within such time, One Last Thing Before I Go by Jonathan Tropper (Dutton 2012), spans one week in the life of Drew Silver. Silver, as he's known, is the one-time drummer from a one-hit-wonder band called the Bent Daisies. We meet him just before his ex-wife is to be remarried and just before he finds out he may die at any moment. Sound depressing? The talent of Tropper is that he can find the humor in the most mundane, and most frightening, occurrences in life. There is plenty of sadness and despair, some tears, and yet many moments of laughing out loud.

Silver lives in The Versailles, a long-term efficiency hotel populated by divorced, middle-aged men who see, or don't see, their kids intermittently, and who spend much of their time around the hotel's pool ogling young women visiting from the nearby college. Silver's own daughter is college-age, and long absent from Silver's life, yet determined to ease herself back in with the news of Silver's impending demise. His ex-wife's fiancee is the surgeon who diagnoses Silver's condition, and who ironically wants to save the life of the man who is a constant wedge in his relationship.

There are ruins in both books that are not man-made monoliths decaying from time and wear of the elements, but are the very lives and relationships of their characters. Pasquale Tursi's dreams are only partially realized, Drew Silver's were realized for a fleeing moment and may have cost him his family, if not his life. Dee Moray finds and loses love several times, while Michael Deane's life is merely a thin sheen of fame and fortune.

We all know pain, we all know loss and all of our dreams seem unreachable at different moments in our lives. It's in how we handle such adversity and longing, and even successes, that makes our lives into beautiful monuments or beautiful ruins. Both of these writers – Tropper and Walter – are adept at capturing the heartbreak and euphoria, and, even more difficult, they do so with a gentle, easy humor.

Because I Said So: Dinner table conversation a test of dad's knowledge

I could write a different version of today's "Because I Said So" column daily given the range of topics my kids come up with. Just last night we discussed The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon, The Cay by Theodore Taylor, Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut, Mark Twain, bad words, school and dreams we've had. It doesn't seem like supper should take long enough to eat to have the been able to cover so many subjects but, believe me, it does.

Please enjoy today's column, because Middle-Aged Man says so.

Dinner table conversation a test of dad's knowledge

Suppertime conversations around our table often jump back and forth in topic like a poorly edited film. Non-sequiturs are served as a side dish to fried chicken and pot roast. Talk of school and television, upcoming plans and the gossip of friends are revealed like the striated layers of a casserole.

The other night the subject of superhero powers came up. Specifically the question was "What two superpowers would you want if you could pick?" It's the sort of palaver a palate might appreciate with a Southern staple of meat and two.

The kids bandied about the obvious choices — flying, invisibility, being really small or really fast. Me, I told them my superpowers, if it were up to me, would be a tolerance for lactose and to shape shift into a morning person. Such is the secret identity of Middle-Aged Man.

Kids, on the other gloved hand, consider themselves immortal and dream to flaunt that immortality with an ability to fly or jump or to be unseen as they lurk from room to room.

I flew to the kitchen mid-meal to refill a wineglass and returned to suggest, "X-ray vision!" not realizing the talk had advanced with a new question: "What country, other than this one, would you want to live in?" My superpower exclamation was met with super sighs and eye-rolling, you have to be quicker than Flash to keep up with the plot points around this table.

Italy, France, Brazil, England and Greece were all mentioned in this category. I'm pretty sure someone suggested Florida. The conversation devolved into a stereotypical discussion of accents, informed more, I'm afraid, by years of viewing "The Simpsons" and "House Hunters International" than anything learned in school. The kids are conversational lightweights at best.

It occurs to me now that I probably should have visited my own wish list for powers upon this nascent Jobless League of America. What would I imbue them with were I to inject a Super-Soldier Serum similar to Captain America's into their meatloaf? Invisibility is a possibility, though super silence might be better.

I leapt to the kitchen to slice more bread (and to top off the wine) only to return and hear my son talking about Middle-earth. "That's not even a real place!" I scoffed, imagining him applying for a passport and visa. But they'd moved on without me to a discussion of J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings," something I know even less about than gamma rays or the value of the euro.

There are many times I'm left out of the main course of discourse altogether; times when the incongruity of subjects leaves me standing still and unable to keep up, like a Hobbit attempting to walk up a mountainside of mashed potatoes.

Eating with kids is not a dinner party of high society talk, but a whirlwind of issues and debates that require a superhuman attention span. Stan Lee tells us that "with great power comes great responsibility." I tell you that with a great big family comes great suppertime confusion.

© 2012 Memphis Commercial Appeal. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

A Thousand Acres

A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992. No one won it in 2012. In response to the non-win of this year, Michael Cunningham, one of three Pulitzer jurors, wrote a piece for The New Yorker about why, or why he thought, there was no winner chosen. In this essay, he writes:

A proper respect for the mysterious aspects of fiction is encouraged by the Pulitzer’s guidelines, which are gratifyingly loose. The winning book, be it a novel or short-story collection, must have been written by an American, and should, ideally, be in some way about American life.

That’s it.

Smiley's novel is so much about American life that it's almost embarrassing to read, whether due to the raw emotions and familial relationships that leave the reader feeling naked and, at times, stripped of skin completely; or whether it's the knowledge of farming and farm life that she imparts so adeptly, knowledge that leaves a city boy thinking for the first time, "Wow, that all seems really hard."

A Thousand Acres takes place on a farm. Never mind where it is (it's in Iowa), it could be anyplace that people make a life, such as it is, from putting seed in the earth, watering it, praying over it, and waiting a predetermined number of days before learning if they'll make enough money to sustain them until the next growing season when it happens all over again.

The farm is just as the title says, one-thousand acres, in Zebulon County and has been farmed by the Cook family for several generations. It's a hard life, a life filled with days of routine and back-breaking work, but it's a life the Cooks have come to know; the only way of life they know. Larry Cook, a widower, has three adult daughters - Ginny, Rose and Caroline - and Ginny and Rose each have married men who work the land there, and their families live on the land and within walking distance of the house where Ginny and Rose grew up. They enter each others homes without knocking, making coffee at will, preparing breakfast or dinner, as though they are one big happy family. In walking to each other's houses, however, they're crossing land that is fertile with family secrets that threaten to push through the topsoil like weeds. There is no chemical to stop them, no farmer's trick that will keep such secrets from invading the lives of those who live and work the fields and threaten to do more damage than drought or hail.

The story is intricate, and the setting and characters detailed. The pacing moves with the monotony of farm life, yet is not monotonous. We are caught up in the chores and the fears of weather, with the cycle of life for farm animals and the importance of teamwork. The plot blossoms like tomatoes on the vine, each revelation a succulent piece of fruit to be savored on the front porch.

The Pulitzer finalists in 1992 included Mao II by Don DeLillo, Jernigan by David Gates and Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals by Robert M. Pirsig. I haven't read any of those books, so I can't say with any conviction that A Thousand Acres is better or more deserving, but I can say that it is "about American life." It may not be my life, and it may not be your life, but the emotions, the character traits, the fears and lost hopes and want of something better, if not for ourselves, then for our children, are attributes present in all of us.

Because I Said So: Launching youngest daughter in first grade has its hurdles

As a kid growing up with books of science fiction and black-and-white movies ful of creatures and oddities from outer space, my entire universe consisted of Earth and Mars. Sure, the Moon was there, but the Moon is a neighbor, as familiar to us all as the property fence or a dog's bark. But Mars is the next neighborhood over, familiar for its proximity, yet alien with its different trees, styles of houses, cars and people who look just like us, though they're not neighbors; not completely.

And yet Mars is close. Certainly close enough for alien beings to fly a saucer over for a cup of sugar or to sit on the porch for a spell and, eventually, eat that neighbor's dog. It's close enough for me to have thought as a kid that we Earthlings would one day put a craft, if not a person, on Mars. It was doable. Of course it would be possible, we put a man on the Moon and Mars is just around the corner from there, isn't it?

Probably a stranger concept to a 7-year-old boy than one day touching the surface of Mars is parenthood. Being a father was an entire galaxy away from where I was, and as alien as whatever that was that came from the ship at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. At that age, there is no way a parent could understand what we feel, our fears, our interests, our complete inability to comprehend time and distance in outer space. And yet, when I took G to first grade last week and she melted into me with tears and pleading not to have to go to school, I knew exactly where it was she was coming from. It wasn't Mars, or even the Moon, it was a time and a place I remember well. It's another world called Childhood and it is as strange and exotic a place to me now as a planet called Parenthood seemed to me 35 years ago.

We're all explorers going through new worlds blindly whether those worlds encompass another planet, another continent, the next street over or being responsible for another little life. It's all exciting and, we find out, it's all very reachable. What we need to do is keep our eyes and ears open, learn as much about the landscape as we can and try to enjoy the ride.

This week's Because I Said So column from The Commercial Appeal:

Launching youngest daughter in first grade has its hurdles

Last week, I scattered my four kids like comet tails and left them with their various teachers at their various schools. For the older kids, this is old hat, they're pros who have been at this for years. They may not like it — in fact they don't — but they understand the routine and joined the countdown to the launch of another Memphis City Schools academic year.

But then there's Genevieve. She's the youngest and the most spirited, some will say. A challenge, her parents say. Things did not go well that first morning of first grade. There was a lot of clinging and tears, and even some desperate pleas for her sentence to first grade to be commuted. Alas, I left her there in the capable hands of Mrs. Armstrong and the whole Richland Elementary crew.

I came home, walked the couple of blocks back, and turned on the Internet to see that NASA's Mars rover Curiosity had landed safely the night before. Space exploration fascinates me, and I was enthralled watching video images from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, as the rover touched down and the scientists went crazy with exultation.

That celebration was rightly deserved. Those people landed a buggy on a planet 35 million miles away with more ease and less drama than I had landed my daughter in a first-grade classroom two blocks away. Granted, they're rocket scientists and I'm only a parent, and parenting isn't rocket science. Or is it? Maybe when scientists come upon a complex theorem that becomes easily proven, they say, "Well, it isn't parenting."

Adam Steltzner, a mechanical engineer with the laboratory, said the rover's landing "is the result of reasoned engineering thought." Reasoned thought is as unnatural to a 6-year-old as space travel. When told that school can be fun or that it won't last so long or that her friends will be right there with her, all she can imagine is an endless expanse of black sky, a vacuum of loneliness.

Upon re-entry into the school's atmosphere, while dodging other children and supply-laden parents, my daughter began to break apart, the heat from the classroom too much to bear; the promise of another school year built up until not even her protective khaki jumper could withstand the pressure and she exploded in a barrage of tears. And what could I do? I'm helpless. I'm a parent. I'm ground control, yet I failed to keep her grounded in any sense of safety and serenity, while floating there among her friends and siblings.

They call it the "seven minutes of terror." That's how long scientists had to wait upon Curiosity's entry into the Mars atmosphere before they found out whether their rover was intact on the surface of the planet. It takes us about seven minutes to walk to school in the morning, but I had to wait seven hours to find out that Genevieve did eventually compose herself, that she acclimated to the foreign surroundings of first grade and that her own curiosity about it all proved to be stronger than her home's gravitational pull.

Richard J. Alley is the father of two boys and two girls. Read more from him at uurrff.blogspot.com. Become a fan of "Because I Said So" on Facebook: facebook.com/alleygreenberg.

© 2012 Memphis Commercial Appeal. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

The Boost of the Olive Tree

Okay all you bookish people out there, it's time to rally the troops. My good friend Courtney Miller Santo has a major book release next Tuesday, Aug. 21, with The Roots of the Olive Tree (William Morrow). She has a lot of author events upcoming in places like San Francisco, Seattle, Nashville, Portland, Oxford and Asheville, so if you're in any of those cities, get out there and support her. And tell your friends!

Courtney also needs some reviews circulating out there, so give the book a read and tell the world what you think. Doesn't have to be long, just a few sentences, a paragraph or two, on your connection to the characters and stories. Now, we here at Urf! are big on books - paper, binding, covers, the whole package - but for those of you who like to download a novel and read it on your computer phones, the publisher has a great deal for you. For the rest of this week only, you can download The Roots of the Olive Tree eBook for only $4.99. You can do that right here. So go do that, I'll wait ...

Now, once you've read it, say something about it at the following sites (your review can be copied and pasted into each site to make things simpler):

Barnes & Noble (Scroll to the very bottom of the page to review)

Amazon (You can review the electronic copy now, but not the hardback)

Books-A-Million (Scroll to the lower third of the page, account creation required)

Reviews are also accepted at the Apple Store if an iPad or iPod are your preferred mediums

I was lucky enough to read an advanced reader's copy back in the spring and said a little something about it here.

I also wrote a feature on Courtney for The Commercial Appeal that ran in the paper on May 31, 2012. I'll copy that below so you can get a feel for where Courtney's story began and how it evolved. If this isn't enough, you can read her winning story for the 2012 Memphis Magazine Fiction Contest right here.

Thank you all for your help!

Writer's first novel followed storybook path to publication

Courtney Miller Santo grew up in conditions fertile for a burgeoning writer, a conservative Mormon household with seven children where there was no television to be found. Instead, the large and close family told stories and created plays. They interacted in ways almost unheard of today. And they read.

"My dad was always reading, he would go to bed at 9, and he would always have a book," Santo said of her father, an elevator mechanic.

Santo, the oldest of those seven children, describes her childhood just outside of Portland in Milwaukie, Ore., as "chaotic," yet a bookish manner set in and has paid off for her in a big way as she prepares for her debut novel, "The Roots of the Olive Tree" (William Morrow), to be released in August.

The story is threaded along one olive-growing season, taking a look at the lives of five generations of firstborn daughters and Anna, the 112-year-old matriarch, who wants to be the oldest living human being in the world.

The story, set at Hill House and the family's olive groves in northern California, centers on a geneticist coming to study the longevity of the family just as the youngest, Erin, returns home alone and pregnant.

It's a combination that, the dust jacket of an advance reader copy explains, "ignites explosive emotions that these women have kept buried and uncovers revelations that will shake them all to their roots."

It's a novel with a road to publication almost as intriguing as the tale within the pages. Santo entered her manuscript in Amazon's Breakthrough Novel Award competition in 2011. Out of 5,000 entrants, she made it to the semifinals and the remaining 50 hopefuls. And then she was eliminated. But that's only the beginning of the story because she was then contacted by an agent with the Janklow & Nesbit Associates literary agency who had read the manuscript excerpts posted at Amazon, and wanted to represent Santo.

It is on the West Coast where olives grow and fantasies are realized, and it was there in summer 2011 that Santo's life changed. "I was in the middle of this cross-country vacation that had been planned forever ... and the day after we get home to my grandmother's house in Vancouver (Wash.), she (the agent) calls me and says, 'Sit down, I have an offer, and it's a really good offer,' and she told me the offer, and I was glad I was sitting down because I did not believe it."

That offer was that the book, along with an unwritten second book, would be sold to William Morrow, an imprint of Harper Collins, for six figures. Foreign rights for "The Roots of the Olive Tree" have already been sold to Italy, England, Spain, Germany, Holland and Turkey.

Santo doesn't downplay luck in this adventure. "It just doesn't seem real; it didn't seem real for a very, very, very long time," she said. "This is the dream; this does not happen that you get a company that is so excited about a debut novelist that they put this much publicity and effort into it. I feel crazy lucky."

The women of her novel might be illustrated by a photograph Santo keeps in her office, a tiny concrete bunker on the University of Memphis campus. It's one of her and her daughter flanked by her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother. Santo is a collector of stories. "My mother is a storyteller," she says. "I come from a long line of storytellers on both sides." Some she recalls verbatim in her fiction, those from decades of family lore, and others from time spent as a journalist, and others she presses like olives for the oil and essence that add flavor to her characters.

Though her love of reading and the idea of writing began in the Pacific Northwest, at the age of 18, she "decided to get as far away from home as possible" and went to school at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va. She met her future husband, Charlie, there and studied journalism. "I'm very practical, so to say something like, 'I want to write a book' seemed very stupid; it's like saying 'I want to be an astronaut.' Whereas being a journalist, you get your name in print every single day and you automatically get the title of writer. I think sometimes writers have a hard time owning that title."

She worked for the Roanoke Times and the Charlottesville Daily Progress. From those days as a journalist, Santo learned to love fact-checking and says that when she gets writer's block now, she does research. "Whenever I would get stuck, I had this huge stack of books that I checked out from the library about olive cultivation, and if I got stuck writing, I would just pick it up and start to read about how to take a branch from one olive tree and splice it into another olive tree, or about blight."

She would eventually end up in Memphis, where her husband took a job as associate professor of city and regional planning with the U of M, and it was here that she really began to own that title of writer. She worked as the editor of The Lamplighter, the newspaper of the Cooper-Young neighborhood, and was accepted into the Moss Workshop in Fiction, a community writing workshop with novelist Richard Bausch. "Once I got into his class, I realized all kinds of things, like there was such a thing as an MFA program," she said, laughing. "So Richard encouraged me to apply, and I got in and I got serious about writing."

The Moss Workshop took the idea of being a writer, in her mind, from being "abstract and foolish, to something that seemed plausible. But even though it seemed plausible, it's still not something I ever expected to happen in the way that it did." Through the MFA program, she met and worked with mentors such as Tom Russell and Cary Holladay.

"Cary really taught me that if you're going to write for somebody besides yourself, it comes down to revision," Santo said. "You have to be willing to roll your sleeves up and get into the prose and redo it, it's never perfect the first time out."

"She really listened, and she can recognize a good suggestion, and then she can just tear into it," Holladay said of her student and friend. "She's a very aggressive reviser of her work and, of course, it helps that she's got terrific talent and she's extremely well-read."

Last year was a good year for Santo, who also won the 2011 Memphis Magazine Fiction Contest for a short story that will appear in the upcoming June issue. "Her stories are just fun to read," Holladay said. "They're rich, and they're revelatory in terms of human character and experience."

Santo has her hands full with two children, Sophia, 9, and C.J., 7, and the writing of her second book as she anxiously awaits the release of "The Roots of the Olive Tree." But she loves teaching and intends to continue doing so with her undergraduate fiction and literature classes, saying, "I'm a better writer because I teach; it keeps me honest. It's very difficult to critique a student's work and see an error, or a way that it could be written stronger, and then not go back to your own work and recognize every single mistake that you've made."

Says Holladay: "I was eager to get her in the classroom, and right away I saw how comfortable she was as a teacher and how much her students liked her."

Though she writes these days in a place far from the Pacific Northwest, it's a land fertile with writers, where the streets teem with character. It's where her family has put down roots and made a home. "I feel like if you're on the right track, you get little nods along the way," she says. "So I feel like we made the right decision to move to Memphis as a family, and it's been the best decision we've made personally and professionally."

Because I Said So: Facing the new frontier (high school)

C, first day of kindergarten (2003)

I remember the beginning of high school. It's what makes it so difficult to believe that in just a few days my son will be a freshman in high school. I remember all of the larger-than-life worries, the drama, the heartache and unease, the lack of confidence and wonder of it all that I felt then. What a mess.

But perhaps it's different now. Maybe high school, and the ages of 14-17, are fun and simple and carefree these days. I'll just tell myself that because one of the treats of having kids is the chance to see the world through their eyes and to relearn life from their point of view day in and day out. And then they become teenagers and you're left thinking, "This? Again? But I've already done all of this."

When I become nostalgic, it's for an earlier time when I was seven or so and climbing trees in my front yard, riding bikes around the neighborhood and wasting time in front of three channels. If I have to go back, send me there. Or to the year I turned 40. Forty isn't so bad. But not high school, thank you. I'll take 1977 over 1987 any day.

As my oldest child stares down into the maw of high school, I take a look back for today's Because I Said So column to his first day of kindergarten (it seems like only yesterday) and find I owe a debt of gratitude to the great teachers he's had over the years. I wish I could have listed them all in today's paper, each one deserves it. He's a good kid and will do just fine at White Station High School, but as he registers and gets his notebooks and pens and lunch together, I can't help think to myself, "Better you than me, kid."

Facing the new frontier (high school)

Around this time in 2003 we started going to Downtown Elementary School. (This is how parents talk: "We" go to Richland Elementary or White Station Middle or Downtown Elementary. I haven't sat in a formal classroom setting since the late 1980s, but no matter; at some point it just becomes simpler to explain our kids' activities as a collective.)

Nine years ago we began school when I dropped my oldest son, Calvin, off for kindergarten. I'd been taking him to day care every single day for years and it had not gone well. Those mornings were full of screaming and clinging and pleading and teeth gnashing, by the both of us. I had little hope that day one of kindergarten would be much better.

But something happened that day and I don't even know if it was him or me or his new teacher, Mrs. Porter, but I got lucky. She and I stood talking for longer than normal due, no doubt, to my need for reassurance. The point came when Calvin seemed to grow so tired of standing around listening to us with his oversized backpack and overwhelming curiosity weighing him down that he wandered off by himself to find his assigned seat. There were no tears and only a wave of his hand in farewell. Thus began his educational career.

That little boy who surprised me that day with his courage and initiative and impatience with long-winded adults will walk into his first day of high school next week. I won't be there with him because that's just not how it's done at this stage and age. There will be no reassurance from his teacher (for me), no handholding, no oversized backpack. All I can hope is that we've done a good job through these first nine years of school, that he's taken to heart the lessons taught by Mrs. Porter and Mr. Scott and Mrs. Erskine and Mrs. Brenneman, and all of the other wonderful teachers who have influenced and guided him over the years.

I try not to write too much about my 14-year-old here; he deserves his privacy. It's a shame too, because in that hour he's not sleeping or eating, he's really quite engaging and funny. But this milestone deserves mention as it is a momentous occasion for our collective, it's the next big adventure in parenting.

As a student at White Station High School, Calvin will be dealing with a workload he has never known; with the constant reminder that every test, every grade, every club joined will have bearing on his college career and then his eventual career. Mixed in with that, there will be peer pressure and driving permits and proms and the whole high school caste system to negotiate. He will face growing pains unlike those that have propelled him to his nearly 6-feet tall.

It's a time I wouldn't wish on anyone, and yet I'm willingly sending my child into that roiling, bubbling gumbo of uncertainty.

We begin high school next week. Wish us well.

© 2012 Memphis Commercial Appeal. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

(Classic) Because I Said So: Team Alley dreams of gold in 2024

This isn't the week for a new Because I Said So, but in honor of this year's Olympic games which began yesterday, I take you back four years – to that gold medal year of 2008 – and a classic Because I Said So celebrating all that is Greek and competitive and sponsored and wearing a unitard.

This column originally ran in The Commercial Appeal on August 28, 2008. Enjoy!

Team Alley dreams of gold in 2024

Five events my kids would excel in if they were actual Olympic events:

• Sofa jumping
• Spilling things
• Bath procrastination
• Falling down
• Screeching

We've been watching some of the Olympics at home. Not all of it, mind you, because there is just too much.

Not even my children, who are Olympic-level television watchers, could be expected to direct so much time and concentration toward the hours and hours of coverage that are available.

The kids are learning a lot from these games, though. They learn about hard work and determination, teamwork and patriotism. And nutrition; they have learned that eating McDonald's every day for lunch will set you on the road to gold.

They've also learned that their mother doesn't care for their father watching women's beach volleyball.

There have been some athletic dreams in the past week and a half. My kids know their potential and have pictured themselves running and swimming on an Olympian plane. They've also been known, though, to dream of eating a wall of Pop-Tarts and of being contestants on "Deal or No Deal."

If they ever expect to compete, it would probably be in 2024 when they'll be 18 to 26 years old. Although Somerset, who is now 5, could probably join the Chinese gymnastics team for the 2012 games.

As long as the Olympics coverage runs some nights, it would probably seem even longer with my children winning, due to the photo session following each medal presentation. After every snap of the shutter, the kids would find it necessary to run down off the podium and see the picture in the camera's little LCD monitor.

I would allow my kids to go through the grueling training regimen of an Olympic athlete only if I was sure we could stay focused, as a family, on what is truly important.

Endorsements.

I would dress my son up like Cap'n Crunch and push him into the deep end of an Olympic-sized pool if I thought it would get him a Michael Phelps-sized payday.

You want exposure? I've got a 5-year-old I'd strap to the back of Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt and paint Coca-Cola red for his next shot at the 100-meter record.

No major sporting event like this is scandal-free, of course, and the 2024 games would be no exception. The difference is you'd have my kids there to let the officials know who is doing what. To tattle on Australia should they take Uganda's spot on the couch when Uganda gets up to get a drink from the kitchen, or on Albania should they call Botswana a "stupid head."

Just rest assured that my kids would be there to give that extra amount of effort when it comes down to it, when they need to cross the finish line or pass off the baton, because they'd understand that the only way to come back home is with a gold medal around their necks.

And a Nike check in their pocket.

On Cotton Row

From Peter Taylor's short story "A Friend and Protector":

I stood at the top of the stairs watching the three old people ascend the two straight flights of steps that I had come stumbling up half an hour earlier – two flights that came up from the ground floor without a turn or a landing between floors. I thought how absurd it was that in these Front Street buildings, where so much Memphis money was made, such a thing as an elevator was unknown. Except for adding the little air-conditioned offices at the rear, nobody was allowed to do anything there that would change the old-fashioned, masculine character of the cotton man's world. This row of buildings, hardly two blocks long, with their plaster facade and unbroken line of windows looking out over the brown Mississippi River were a kind of last sanctuary – generally beyond the reach of the ladies and practically beyond the reach of the law.

From my piece on unique museums found within the Mississippi River Corridor of Tennessee for the River Times magazine:

Cotton Row in downtown Memphis was the hub of worldwide cotton trading in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The Cotton Exchange – at the intersection of Union Avenue and Front Street, firmly in the center of the Row – was a place for sellers, traders and buyers to meet, discuss the issues of the day and industry, and keep track of the most up-to-date pricing. "A lot of our history, art and culture comes to us as a result of the people who gathered here," says Melissa Farris, special events coordinator for the museum. That exchange floor now is home to the Cotton Museum and welcomes those interested in agriculture – and the Southern way of life – from around the world.

Visit the Cotton Museum on Front Street and at memphiscottonmuseum.org.

Read Peter Taylor's story in his fine collection, The Old Forest and Other Stories.

Because I Said So: Don't worry kids, Dad is watching whether you want him to or not

Watch me copy and paste today's Because I Said So column over onto this weblog! Just watch.

Don't worry kids, Dad is watching whether you want him to or not

Hang on: My kids want you to watch them do something.

They want you to watch them jump in the pool. They want you to watch them swim across the pool. They want you to watch them jump rope, climb a tree, play a drum, eat a peach and act a fool.

Nothing happens with these children unless someone else is watching.

Did I do this? Did I instill this need for attention in them? Or did they miss the point of George Orwell's "1984"? The constant surveillance of Big Brother was supposed to be a bad thing, kids. ("Hey, Dad, watch me misinterpret a theme in classic literature!") Or perhaps it is Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook and his culture of "look at me, I'm doing this right now" that has infected and inflated their egos.

I've heard a lot of talk recently about "helicopter parents," those parents that hover over their children, noticing every move, nudging them in the right direction, keeping them as safe as possible in the dangerous world of play dates and roller skates. Is this helpful or ultimately detrimental to a child's well-being and sense of autonomy? I have no idea. You raise your children the way you see fit, and I'll raise mine by shouting commands from the sofa in my office.

But then they find their way into my office. "Watch me tie a shoe. Watch me count to 100. Watch me spill this milk." They advertise their every anticlimactic activity in a manner even more irritating than television promos during sweeps week. It's as if Dave Brown was going to not retire every single evening at my house.

I don't recall this need for attention as a child, though it's possible I begged my parents to watch me struggle with my Stretch Armstrong, become more and more confused by my Rubik's Cube, or watch "The Six Million Dollar Man" again.

I know I don't do it now. You won't see me saying to my kids, "Hey, watch me come up with another metaphor. Watch me Google up a thesaurus."

I suppose we parents all hover to a certain extent. It's become part of our buckled-up, helmeted, surveillance-heavy society. But I try to mitigate it. I send the kids outside to the backyard, down the block and to the park in an effort at encouraging them to do things on their own.

I know they'll go off on their own one day, far away to live their own lives. And they won't travel like helicopters then, but like jets feeling the need to get away. Or more accurately, as teenagers they'll ease out of the driveway onto a Memphis city street in a 26-year-old Volvo with no air conditioning and a missing taillight, and whispering to themselves, I'm sure, "Please don't watch me. Please don't watch me."

But I will be. Left there in the driveway, finally landing after a lifetime of hovering, I'll be there hoping they call soon to tell me what they've been up to.

Richard J. Alley is the father of two boys and two girls. Read more from him at uurrff.blogspot.com . Become a fan of "Because I Said So" on Facebook: facebook.com/alleygreenberg.

© 2012 Memphis Commercial Appeal. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Because I Said So: Dad sees library card as ticket to new worlds for daughters

World explorers

What I left out of this Because I Said So column was that on the day we were at the library, there were kids who appeared to be unsupervised running throughout the children’s section of the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library. So, on top of getting S & G their very first library cards, and some good books to take home, I also had the opportunity to make the point that they should never act like that in a public library.

Be kind to your books, people. Be kind to your libraries and be kind to your librarians, they’re not daycare facilitators.

The girls had been asking for a couple of days to go to the library and there’s no better request to get from your kids, is there? It’s better than “can I get a new video game?” or “can we go somewhere?” or “why can’t you just have a pool put into our backyard?”

G read through her books and a few days later was asking for more library. The next step, of course, is to teach them both how to use public transportation so that I can stay on the sofa in my air conditioned office the rest of the summer.

Today’s column:

Dad sees library card as ticket to new worlds for daughters
 

On a recent summer day, it came to my attention that my children were bored. This alert was not a subtle one; these are not subtle kids. The two syllables of "I'm bored" came out in the droning, whining tone of one of those French police sirens: "I'mmm bored … I'mmm bored."

Because the temperature was creeping up toward 100 degrees, I packed up my two daughters and took them to the coolest place I could think of: the public library. Once there, I filled out enough paperwork to either get them their very first library cards or to buy a whole other child.

The proud girls were handed their new cards to sign on the back, and then each stared at the shiny rectangle of plastic as if wondering how to turn it on and download something. I told them that with those cards they could take any book in that building home with them.
And that they could now drive a motor vehicle within the city limits. "Really?" they said, wide-eyed and expectant. No, that's fiction.

Is there anything we can give our children that is more exciting, more educational, more free than a library card? It is Alice's rabbit hole, Dorothy's yellow brick road, a winged Pegasus. That little piece of plastic can teach them how and where to satiate their curiosity, the responsibility of keeping up with the card and borrowed books, and that if they sound the alarm "I'm bored" within earshot of me, that they will be forced to better themselves.

Through the colorful forest of trees, we went into the children's section of the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library, that gleaming glass and steel lodge of literature. The girls perused titles, pulled out some books to get a sense of them, put some back and found a few to take home. My youngest, Genevieve, leaned toward oversize picture books with their tales of tigers, bugs, little boys and girls, and fables from far away. Nine-year-old Somerset focused on her folded-up summer reading list from Richland Elementary School.

During summer breaks when I was a child, my mother would stop by the main library when it was at the corner of McLean and Peabody to pick up a stack of books recommended for a boy my age. It was like a 100-degree Christmas for me. I would make my way through the pile, and she would then return them for another. I don't remember my first library card, but it must have been like being given a license to the world.

Watching my daughters and their growing excitement was especially heartening in today's world of the Internet, Google and the immediacy of knowledge — some good, some bad.

As they walked among the rows of books, their heads crooked slightly to read the spines, it was like the slowest web browser imaginable. Yet it was a great way for me to learn of their interests and to see where their curiosity, if unleashed in a room full of history, science and stories, might take them.

Will there be other milestones as exciting? Sure. They will both one day receive a driver's license, be accepted into college and get married. Those will be days of triumph and of excitement, days when boredom will be as forgotten as that overdue library book underneath Genevieve's bed.

Richard J. Alley is the father of two boys and two girls. Read more from him at uurrff.blogspot.com. Become a fan of "Because I Said So" on Facebook: facebook.com/alleygreenberg.

© 2012 Memphis Commercial Appeal. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

The story of a fiction

(Warning: spoiler alert. Subtle though they are, there are characteristics of character and story here that I believe the author meant to be revealed slowly as a part of plot and structure. To make a point later on, I reveal a bit of that here.)

THE STORY OF A MARRIAGE by Andrew Sean Greer (Picador, 2008) is just that, it’s the story of a marriage. It’s not the story of all marriage or of how a marriage should be, but spotlights the fact that every marriage, every relationship, is so personal and so unique that behind every door is a different story. That’s how it is in Sunset, the book’s setting, a community built outside of San Francisco for soldiers returning home from World War II. “ … and they built a grid of streets and low pastel houses with garages and Spanish roofs and picture windows that flashed with the appearance of the sun, all in rows for fifty avenues until you reached the ocean.”

Within the walls of every house on all fifty avenues, we get the sense that a different story – some happy, some sad, some violent or dramatic or just beginning or in the throws of dying – is taking place. The story Greer lays out for us, though, involves Pearlie and Holland Cook, and how their world is turned upside down when an old war buddy shows up out of the past, wanders into their lives out of the dense fog that hangs over the bay. It’s a riveting story and Greer is adept at giving just a hint of something to come in the next chapter or the next section, and it’s generally something unexpected.

While there is no way to ever know what goes on in someone else’s marriage, the small tragedies and bright flashes of happiness, Greer gets into the lives of his characters, into the mind of Pearlie Cook and what makes her tick or, rather, what she thinks makes her tick; it’s forever changing, it seems, as are the times of the early 1950s, and she struggles with this.

The book is a unique one and not easily labeled, which adds to the appeal for me. As I continue my search for an agent for a couple of novels I’ve written, I’m amazed by the many genres, sub-genres and sub-sub-genres that fiction is placed into in an effort to buy and sell work. I use a website called querytracker.net and on its search page for agents and publishers just a few of the categories for fiction include action/adventure, chick lit, commercial fiction, family saga, general fiction, literary fiction, mystery fiction, romance, western and, of course, young adult. It’s daunting. It’s also a little ridiculous. I recently had some people tell me a book might not be for me because it’s “women’s fiction.” I wasn’t sure what this meant, that my brain, as full as it is of testosterone, football, hunting, Jason Statham movies and ball scratching wouldn’t be able to understand something as nuanced as discussions of menstruation, childbirth, hem lengths and pie making?

So, how to categorize THE STORY OF A MARRIAGE? The protagonist written by Greer, a white male, is a woman. So, it’s women’s lit. But she’s also black. So, it’s African-American lit. There is the theme of homosexuality in the book. Gay/Lesbian lit. Yet it takes place in 1953 and there is a lot of talk of WWII and the Korean War. Military lit … historical lit. The price sticker on the back of this Picador paperback, bought at the Borders going out of business sale a couple of years ago actually labels it as literary fiction.

Literature should be the great equalizer. The printing press itself was more of an impetus to equality than any other invention in our history, yet our books are pigeonholed. I’m not so naïve that I don’t understand why. I know literary agents need to describe a book in few words to sell it, and publishers need it branded before they’ll consider buying it. Bookstores need to know where in the store to place it and online sellers need to know whether to pair your purchase with a set of grill tools, a nursing bra or a pistol.

THE STORY OF A MARRIAGE is a book about love and hope and fear and loneliness and happiness, just as that women’s fiction novel is that I read not so long ago. These are emotions and themes that make up all of us, it’s what we all have in common and should be able to relate to regardless of where on the shelf it’s found.

Every book and story, just as every marriage and relationship, is different. But each is filled to capacity with great characters, plot twists, drama and emotions.

I also highly recommend Andrew Sean Greer’s THE CONFESSIONS OF MAX TIVOLI (Picador, 2004).

Because I Said So: Bugs not peskiest pests of summer

Those who point to the lowly cockroach (Periplaneta americana) in illustrating resiliency, noting that after the apocalypse only that little bug will survive to inhabit the world, don't know the stubbornness of a five year old who has seen a cockroach in the living room. Nor do they know the awe with which that child will be in when he discovers such a creature inside the house. Inside the house!

"It's on the wall," he'll announce, leaving the room again to scout the situation. "It's on the ceiling now," he'll come back to say. "There's a cockroach in the living room," he'll remind you, three minutes later.

Pests. It's what today's Because I Said So column is all about.

Bugs not peskiest pests of summer
 

There are bugs in my house. I'm not ashamed of it; it's inevitable this time of year. Those of you in the South understand that when the weather turns hot and sticky with humidity, when the nighttime temperature fails to dip much below that of noon, a whole new phylum of life will emerge from the ground to invade our homes. And those of you from elsewhere certainly have children now broken free from the chrysalis of elementary school and know what it's like to find half a Pop-Tart where you weren't expecting it, or a casually discarded pizza crust beneath a piece of furniture to create a sort of vermin vending machine.

So, yes, there are insects in my home.

But the true pests this summer are the smaller children who find it necessary to tell me about every single cockroach, spider and beetle they come across as if they're conducting a silverfish census. With the intensity and focus of a trained pointer dog, they are able to pinpoint a bug's location from two rooms away.

The kids are mortified by them all -- gnats, weevils, wasps, cicadas, bees, flies, ants, daddy longlegs and damselflies -- regardless of size or the ability to fly, leap and scurry just to attack them. So this infestation of junior entomologists comes into my office like a swarm of locusts, breathless as though they've barely escaped with their lives, to tell me that -- gasp! -- "There's a cockroach in the kitchen!"

And this is what really bugs me.

I'm expected to rouse myself from where I lie on the couch in my office with my eyes closed, working, and take up a magazine or flip-flop to dispatch a spider. Because my duties around here include getting that one thing down from that top cabinet, changing the light bulb in the closet and killing any insects scouted by the children, I have to get up and go hunting.

In the interest of staying on that couch, I've suggested that they name the arachnid, that the cricket or moth become a new pet, a best friend of sorts. They have yet to buy into that plan, such is their fear of the bug and their utter disbelief that it is now on the ceiling.

Am I happy to share a house with the occasional insect? No, of course not. Would I be happier in blissful ignorance of every bug that scampers beneath the piano? Definitely.

It's all good training for the kids eventually to become the worst census takers ever as they can't discern one bug from another. The six-legged visitor making its way up the woodwork, as far as they can tell, is the same one they saw last week inching its way across the back door threshold.

Granted, it could very well be the same one from day to day. There are those times when the alarm is sounded that I simply walk into the kitchen for a fresh cup of coffee and tell them I took care of it. Instead of risking life and limb, and a perfectly good magazine, to climb on a chair and smash it against the ceiling, I just wink and tell "Jiminy" or "Charlotte" to have a nice day.

Richard J. Alley is the father of two boys and two girls. Read more from him at uurrff.blogspot.com. Become a fan of "Because I Said So" on Facebook: facebook.com/alleygreenberg.

© 2012 Memphis Commercial Appeal. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Look At The Billion Year Old Birdie

When I first moved to Midtown Memphis in 1989 or '90, the very first day I was driving to my new apartment on Belvedere with the key pressed in my sweaty little hand, and while stopped at the corner of that street and Union Ave., I saw an old man vomiting on that apple pie slice of grass right there at the Shell service station. It was the middle of the day and I remember thinking to myself, "Welcome to Midtown."

I've just finished reading a couple of books: "Look at the Birdie" by Kurt Vonnegut (Delacorte Press, 2009), and "We Are Billion Year Old Carbon: A Tribal-Love-Rock-Novel Set in the Sixties on an Outpost Planet Called Memphis" by Corey Mesler (Livingston Press, 2005). I am embarrassed to say that this is the first book of Mesler's that I've read. It won't be the last. He evokes, in his stories populated with characters such as Johnny Niagara, Camel Jeremy Eros, Madame Sabat and Sweetness Enlight, the mythical Midtown Memphis. He conjures up the feelings I had as a nineteen-year-old watching a man give up his breakfast on the nexus of town, taking late night walks to the Pig, past Decadence Manor and in the near vicinity of The World Famous Antenna Club, an all-night doughnut shop and a small graveyard. There were things going on that were unseen then, yet they were there all the same, in apartments that abutted the sidewalk, their one window that wasn't painted shut blaring music or television, love and argument. There were things within the Pig not to be seen anywhere else or believed by your own eyes.

Mesler captures it all in a time before my time, the Memphis of the sixties, a time of the Bitter Lemon coffee house and a home-grown counter culture that tends to get buried within the world-changing tales of our city's history. It's a love poem (and there is plenty of poetry throughout this book), not just to a city on the river, but to the geographic and soulful boundaries of Midtown. And it's written to the soundtrack of Captain Beefheart, Buffalo Springfield, Furry Lewis and The Beatles. One surprising and delightful chapter gives us a series of reviews of Beatles LPs, from 1964 and "Meet The Beatles" to 1969's "Let It Be" wherein we witness the reviewer's, Creole Myers (Corey Mesler?), love life fall apart over that span of five years and ten albums. The ever-evolving persona and music of the band hearkening a change within Myers's courting, engagement, marriage and dissolution.

I didn't know what to expect from this book though I expected it to be well-written because I know of Mesler's work ethic. It is exciting for me to have an author with so much out there that I have yet to tap into.

It's difficult not to expect a lot when the author's name is Vonnegut. All I have to do is say the name and my mind is filled with passages from "Bluebeard," "Cat's Cradle," "Slaughterhouse Five" and "Breakfast of Champions." These are old friends who I've visited many, many times over the years. The expectation that Vonnegut will bring the most delicious dish to the table is a given.

However, I'm wary when anything, especially short stories, are published posthumously. Perhaps even more wary in this case because of the über-literary name attached to them. Were these stories that were previously passed over by publishers? Did Vonnegut have rejection slips hidden away someplace with these titles attached? Not likely. I imagine he could have called upon any number of publications to print these stories at any time. My guess is he didn't feel they were ready, or they were exercises or, because the author has always seemed like a fairly playful character, simply something with which to amuse himself. Either way, The Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Trust felt it was time for them to see the light of day.

The stories are good. Don't get me wrong, of course they're good. They're just ... different. They put me in mind of some old "Twilight Zone" episodes, replete as they are with a sense of unknown, of dread, and that there is a hand somewhere unseen controlling the players in a scene. And there's a bit of noir here, too, sometimes with a voice more Dashiell Hammett than the Vonnegut we know. A particularly dark story is Ed Luby's Key Club in which a naive and innocent couple out to celebrate their anniversary are caught up in, and falsely accused of a murder. The hopeless spiral downward is one you will feel in your gut and with sweat on your brow. Only a true master, possibly only Vonnegut himself, could accomplish such a feat.

Pick both of these books up for highly engaging and entertaining reads. In fact, pick them both up at Burke's Book Store in Cooper-Young (Midtown).

Reading Local

Roots & Rabbis

Eat local. You can't escape this directive these days, it's there on the screen every time you turn on the internet. To that end there are farmers markets and dinner parties serving nothing but locally grown or butchered fare. The community at large is rallying around the agrarian community.

I've recently made the decision and a concerted effort to read local. Memphis is home to, or has given birth to, many fine writers. The land here seems almost as fertile for short stories, novels, essays and memoirs as it is for tomatoes, okra, radishes and melons. The literary community has roots that run deep in the Delta.

While at the beach last week, I finished "The Roots of the Olive Tree" by Courtney Miller Santo and immediately picked up "The Frozen Rabbi" by Steve Stern. Santo is an Oregon native now calling Memphis home while Stern is a Memphis native residing in upstate New York.

Both books are multigenerational with Santo's Anna Keller, the family matriarch, born in 1894, and Stern's Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr frozen in time in 1890. Both books are also steeped in secrets known and unknown. In "Roots of the Olive Tree," a geneticist comes to Hill  House, the family home set among olive groves in Kidron, California, to study the longevity of firstborn daughters, and clues and hints are gleaned from stories told and blood drawn. In "The Frozen Rabbi," the secrets hidden by Max Feinshmeker are kept under wraps - kept under layers of clothing - to keep him anonymous and alive; Shmerl Karp's equine lair is an intriguing laboratory of pulleys and cranks that will yield the mysteries held aloft.

Both books are also steeped in age - the age of the olive trees and women, the age of traditions and lore - yet driven by youth. When the youngest, Erin, shows up at Hill House unannounced and pregnant, the women of the family rally around her protectively even as family secrets seek to turn her world, and theirs, upside down. There are questions she wants resolved and chapters put to an end before her own child is born. And when the Rebbe ben Zephyr thaws after more than a century, it is 15-year-old Bernie Karp, a descendant of those entrusted with the safekeeping of the frozen tzaddik, who discovers him and introduces him to the present age, ways and culture.

Stern's book, while riddled with more Yiddish than drawl, is nonetheless colored by the South and with recognizable cultural and concrete landmarks to Memphians such as the Harahan Bridge, Pinch District, local newspaper and various city streets. Santo's book takes place almost entirely in the Pacific Northwest, yet its theme of family, storytelling and the tendency to come together over an item of food is instantly recognizable to all of us from the area. In fact, family is at the root of both novels and both storytellers are adept at bringing alive the individual characters and characteristics that detail each tribe as a whole.

Read local. There are nuances and details within these books and stories that one might only get from a local writer, whether they are in a manner of speaking, a reference to an obscure cultural icon, food or even weather pattern. They are details that will leave you nodding your head and whispering, "yes." Any bookstore in the area should have a section devoted to local writers, this is your farmers market. These books may not make up the bulk of your shopping list, but there should be one or two thrown in to add some homegrown flavor to your literary feast. Memphis is replete with good writers from fiction - Stern, Santo, Cary Holladay, Corey Mesler - to nonfiction - Kristen Iversen, G. Wayne Dowdy, Molly Crosby. And then, of course, there are those no longer with us - Shelby Foote, Peter Taylor and William Faulkner.

Buy their books, attend their readings, alert your friends both near and far of the tales they tell. These writers should be staples on anyone's shelf, for the health of our imagination and of our community.

The Frozen Rabbi by Steve Stern
2010, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

The Roots of the Olive Tree by Courtney Miller Santo
Available Aug. 2012, William Morrow

Read more about Santo here

Because I Said So: Vacation agenda sure beats duties back home

The first morning of vacation M, S and I took a walk along the surf's edge and into Grayton Beach. Not knowing exactly where we were going, we ended up at Grayt Coffee House where we sat on the porch, ate cinnamon rolls, drank coffee and chocolate milk, and one of us wrote a column.

It's such a peaceful way to spend an hour, watching the people who pass by as the sun rises higher and the shadows move among the Adirondack chairs, sculptures, scrub plants and flowers of the front yard of this house. I felt I could've spent the entire week sitting right there in complete serenity.

There were things to do, though. There was the beach and frolicking in the waves and sandcastles to build and books to read, so I've done those as well. But I've also made it back to that porch and that porch is what today's Because I Said So column is all about.

Vacation agenda sure beats duties back home

I'll tell you how much longer we have. We have about 500 more words to go.

That's right, it's time for our annual family beach trip. It's the one-year anniversary of finding out how well this family fits into a minivan loaded with beach toys, snacks, DVDs, CDs and a few clothes. Our destination this year is Grayton Beach with its eclectic shops, laid-back environment, funky cafes and, of course, the white sands of the Florida Panhandle.

I sit and write this now on the front porch of Grayt Coffee House with my daughter, Somerset, and her friend, Meredith. It's morning of the first day, and the sun is filtered through the leaves of gnarled water oaks, a musician from Atlanta and his family just introduced themselves and their dog, Annabelle, and joggers pass by at a leisurely vacation pace.

And I think I may never leave.

Instead of packing up in a week to find out how much sand we can squeeze into the van with all of our other belongings, would it be unreasonable for me to just stay on this porch and wave at the people passing by as though I were the business' mascot, or a sunburned and sand-flecked cigar store Indian?

Do my kids expect more of me?

They expect me to make enough money during the year for this trip, though they have no concept of what a vacation like this costs. They expect me to drive them 980 miles round-trip, though they have no idea what it costs me mentally to have them whining and pleading for stops behind me, and asking me that same question again and again (only 220 more words to go now). It's a week in which they expect me to build a sandcastle, throw them in the surf, slather them in sunscreen and grill supper.

Nobody expects me to stay on this porch for the rest of the week. Or the rest of the summer. Or, if it's not a problem, the rest of 2012.

Do they really expect any more from me?

My concern is that they may all want to join me on this porch where I sit beneath a handmade metal wind chime with the word "serenity" stamped into it. They and their snacks and their toys and their DVDS and sandy beach towels.

As we get older and have more and more kids, the agenda for vacations is filled less with what we want to do and more of what we have to do. But we also find that what we have to do while away is more fun and, in some ways, more meaningful than what fills the responsible days at home.

Planning and building that castle, jumping in the waves with my youngest on my back, pointing out constellations in the pitch black night and spending a morning lounging on the front porch of a sleepy little coffee shop with a few kids is what they expect and, it turns out, just what I expect as well.

This porch is the perfect place to start a vacation. We're here, kids.

Read more from Richard Alley at uurrff.blogspot.com. 

© 2012 Memphis Commercial Appeal. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Writers I know

It was just a few years ago, it seems, that I didn't know any writers. Or maybe I just didn't know I knew writers. Or perhaps my idea of a writer was different then than it is now. It was a narrower definition, if anything. A writer was one who had written a novel and had it published; someone who traveled the world and answered to no one, drinking with empresses and wretches. Writers were named Hemingway and Salinger and Vonnegut and Maugham.

But now I know quite a few. They're an average lot, you might see them at a local café or walking around the grocery store, bicycling through your neighborhood, walking a dog and picking up its poop. Certainly you'll see them at a local bookstore. These writers I know, they aren't tortured souls, for the most part; or alcoholics, that I know of. They're teachers and reporters and business owners. They're husbands and wives and fathers and sisters. They have names like David and Jeffrey and Courtney and Andria. And they inspire me every day.

There are a few who are well-known, and a few more who will be soon enough. What I've found over the years is that writers are accessible. They aren't big time actors, untouchable behind handlers and agents (unless, maybe, their name is King or Crichton or Clancy or Grisham). Many of them are on Facebook and give their personal e-mails right there on their personal websites. I am a friend or two removed from some really, really big-time authors, though I'd never contact them for folly. It's just nice to know that they're there, on the opposite end of the internet, probably goofing off on Twitter like I am.

I was recently asked to join a writers' group that's been together for quite a few years. It's a group that came together during the Moss Workshop in Fiction with Richard Bausch, of which I am an alumnus, though my session was a few years after theirs. As it happened, this group had a member or two leaving for various reasons and they were kind enough to ask me to be a part of their reading and critiquing (and drinking). Within this group there are several winners of the Memphis Magazine Fiction Contest and several with published books or books on the way. It's a good group to be associated with because they take their writing, though not themselves, seriously, and appear to be endlessly encouraging. I hope I am able to hold my own within these ranks.

One member is David Williams, who has a novel, LONG GONE DADDIES, coming out with Blair Publishing in 2013. Another is Courtney Miller Santo whose novel, THE ROOTS OF THE OLIVE TREE (William Morrow), will be released in August. I wrote a feature for The Commercial Appeal on Courtney for yesterday's paper. She grew up just outside of Portland in Milwaukie, OR, the oldest child of two sisters and four brothers. It was a raucous household where, she joked, "it's a good thing we all converted to be Mormon because otherwise we would be Irish alcoholics and we wouldn't have done anything with our lives." Imagination in the Miller household was fostered early through reading and plays and storytelling. There was no television in the house until Courtney was in high school and, she told me, "I used to pretend I knew what 'Family Ties' was about. I'd go to school the next day and say, 'I love Alex, he's the best!' but I had no idea what I was talking about for years until I saw it in syndication."

I had a great time sitting with her in her tiny office on the University of Memphis campus and hearing how she began writing, how she made it to Memphis, how her book came to fruition and how it was ultimately sold. The publishing world is fascinating and fickle and evil and wondrous. Courtney has done well so far and I wish her, and all of us, the best of luck going forward.

Writer's first novel followed storybook path to publication

Courtney Miller Santo grew up in conditions fertile for a burgeoning writer, a conservative Mormon household with seven children where there was no television to be found. Instead, the large and close family told stories and created plays. They interacted in ways almost unheard of today. And they read.

"My dad was always reading, he would go to bed at 9, and he would always have a book," Santo said of her father, an elevator mechanic.

Santo, the oldest of those seven children, describes her childhood just outside of Portland in Milwaukie, Ore., as "chaotic," yet a bookish manner set in and has paid off for her in a big way as she prepares for her debut novel, "The Roots of the Olive Tree" (William Morrow), to be released in August.

The story is threaded along one olive-growing season, taking a look at the lives of five generations of firstborn daughters and Anna, the 112-year-old matriarch, who wants to be the oldest living human being in the world.

The story, set at Hill House and the family's olive groves in northern California, centers on a geneticist coming to study the longevity of the family just as the youngest, Erin, returns home alone and pregnant.

It's a combination that, the dust jacket of an advance reader copy explains, "ignites explosive emotions that these women have kept buried and uncovers revelations that will shake them all to their roots."

It's a novel with a road to publication almost as intriguing as the tale within the pages. Santo entered her manuscript in Amazon's Breakthrough Novel Award competition in 2011. Out of 5,000 entrants, she made it to the semifinals and the remaining 50 hopefuls. And then she was eliminated. But that's only the beginning of the story because she was then contacted by an agent with the Janklow & Nesbit Associates literary agency who had read the manuscript excerpts posted at Amazon, and wanted to represent Santo.

It is on the West Coast where olives grow and fantasies are realized, and it was there in summer 2011 that Santo's life changed. "I was in the middle of this cross-country vacation that had been planned forever ... and the day after we get home to my grandmother's house in Vancouver (Wash.), she (the agent) calls me and says, 'Sit down, I have an offer, and it's a really good offer,' and she told me the offer, and I was glad I was sitting down because I did not believe it."

That offer was that the book, along with an unwritten second book, would be sold to William Morrow, an imprint of Harper Collins, for six figures. Foreign rights for "The Roots of the Olive Tree" have already been sold to Italy, England, Spain, Germany, Holland and Turkey.

Santo doesn't downplay luck in this adventure. "It just doesn't seem real; it didn't seem real for a very, very, very long time," she said. "This is the dream; this does not happen that you get a company that is so excited about a debut novelist that they put this much publicity and effort into it. I feel crazy lucky."

The women of her novel might be illustrated by a photograph Santo keeps in her office, a tiny concrete bunker on the University of Memphis campus. It's one of her and her daughter flanked by her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother. Santo is a collector of stories. "My mother is a storyteller," she says. "I come from a long line of storytellers on both sides." Some she recalls verbatim in her fiction, those from decades of family lore, and others from time spent as a journalist, and others she presses like olives for the oil and essence that add flavor to her characters.

Though her love of reading and the idea of writing began in the Pacific Northwest, at the age of 18, she "decided to get as far away from home as possible" and went to school at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va. She met her future husband, Charlie, there and studied journalism. "I'm very practical, so to say something like, 'I want to write a book' seemed very stupid; it's like saying 'I want to be an astronaut.' Whereas being a journalist, you get your name in print every single day and you automatically get the title of writer. I think sometimes writers have a hard time owning that title."

She worked for the Roanoke Times and the Charlottesville Daily Progress. From those days as a journalist, Santo learned to love fact-checking and says that when she gets writer's block now, she does research. "Whenever I would get stuck, I had this huge stack of books that I checked out from the library about olive cultivation, and if I got stuck writing, I would just pick it up and start to read about how to take a branch from one olive tree and splice it into another olive tree, or about blight."

She would eventually end up in Memphis, where her husband took a job as associate professor of city and regional planning with the U of M, and it was here that she really began to own that title of writer. She worked as the editor of The Lamplighter, the newspaper of the Cooper-Young neighborhood, and was accepted into the Moss Workshop in Fiction, a community writing workshop with novelist Richard Bausch. "Once I got into his class, I realized all kinds of things, like there was such a thing as an MFA program," she said, laughing. "So Richard encouraged me to apply, and I got in and I got serious about writing."

The Moss Workshop took the idea of being a writer, in her mind, from being "abstract and foolish, to something that seemed plausible. But even though it seemed plausible, it's still not something I ever expected to happen in the way that it did." Through the MFA program, she met and worked with mentors such as Tom Russell and Cary Holladay.
"Cary really taught me that if you're going to write for somebody besides yourself, it comes down to revision," Santo said. "You have to be willing to roll your sleeves up and get into the prose and redo it, it's never perfect the first time out."

"She really listened, and she can recognize a good suggestion, and then she can just tear into it," Holladay said of her student and friend. "She's a very aggressive reviser of her work and, of course, it helps that she's got terrific talent and she's extremely well-read."

Last year was a good year for Santo, who also won the 2011 Memphis Magazine Fiction Contest for a short story that will appear in the upcoming June issue. "Her stories are just fun to read," Holladay said. "They're rich, and they're revelatory in terms of human character and experience."

Santo has her hands full with two children, Sophia, 9, and C.J., 7, and the writing of her second book as she anxiously awaits the release of "The Roots of the Olive Tree." But she loves teaching and intends to continue doing so with her undergraduate fiction and literature classes, saying, "I'm a better writer because I teach; it keeps me honest. It's very difficult to critique a student's work and see an error, or a way that it could be written stronger, and then not go back to your own work and recognize every single mistake that you've made."

Says Holladay: "I was eager to get her in the classroom, and right away I saw how comfortable she was as a teacher and how much her students liked her."

Though she writes these days in a place far from the Pacific Northwest, it's a land fertile with writers, where the streets teem with character. It's where her family has put down roots and made a home. "I feel like if you're on the right track, you get little nods along the way," she says. "So I feel like we made the right decision to move to Memphis as a family, and it's been the best decision we've made personally and professionally."

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