Matt Cashion | February 2017

 
Lee K. Abbott, Matt Cashion

NOTES

Writers and readers have been learning from Lee K. Abbott for forty years. The author of seven story collections, he is a two-time recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, and his stories, first published in journals such as Harper’s, the Atlantic, and the Georgia Review, have been anthologized in the Pushcart Prize collections, Best American Short Stories, and in Prize Stories: the O’Henry Awards. William Harrison has called him “Cheever’s true heir, our American short story writer.” William Giraldi claims Abbott is funnier than George Saunders. As a teacher, he has helped a generation’s worth of students improve their crafts. He taught for twenty-three years in the MFA program at Ohio State University, where he won a distinguished teaching award, and he remains active in retirement, teaching part-time at New Mexico State University, and at numerous workshops and conferences. Abbott’s first two books hit the scene in the 1980s when the minimalists were taking up a lot of space, but contemporary writers continue to find his work and join the growing chorus of people who want to show it off and say it should endure.

When I finished the first paragraph of the first story of Abbott’s most recent book, All Things, All at Once: New and Selected Stories (Norton), I tried to slow my reading, to savor the sentences, to linger in the hyper-real worlds that allow escape and require immersion; I vowed to put a night’s sleep between stories so I could live with each one longer. It was difficult. Abbott’s energetic language, his beguiling voices, his characters’ constant movement toward deeper trouble—these are elements that feed the senses and beg for binge-reading. Such is the battleground of any Abbott story: overwhelming desire vs. white-knuckled restraint multiplied by no hint of rescue. But I took a page from Abbott: I gritted my teeth and forced a slower journey. And when I finished the last story, I took a deep breath and searched for his first collection, The Heart Never Fits Its Wanting, published thirty-six years ago. Out of print.

Recently, some book-loving heroes have taken action. Victoria Barrett, publisher of Indianapolis-based Engine Books, and Andrew Scott, Senior Editor, are re-released the book through their imprint EB2, a venture they started because they wanted to find worthy books that had fallen out of print and make them available again, both digitally and in print-form. Their first round of titles include books by Patricia Henley and Debra Sparks.

“We couldn’t stomach the thought of certain authors’ books being out of print,” Scott said. Plus, “A book of selected or collected stories is always welcome, but there’s something important about maintaining a story collection’s original order and design. A good book of stories isn’t just a group of stories, in other words. I tracked down a copy of Lee’s first book through eBay, but I knew most readers—even Lee’s many fans—probably would not. I’m not sure why The Heart Never Fits Its Wanting never got the same lease on life that his other collections seemed to get, especially because the stories are, in spirit, so aligned with the rest of his oeuvre.”

Many readers, like me, are eager catch up. Others, like Steve Yarbrough (The Realm of Second Choices), have been on board from the beginning.

“I was still a student when I read The Heart Never Fits Its Wanting,” Yarbrough wrote in an email. “I had gone to some trouble to acquire my copy, asking Square Books (Oxford, MS) to order it for me. I had read only one of his stories in a journal, and that alone compelled me to read everything of his I could get my hands on. What I found in the pages of that book was an energy that I had not come across before, as if every sentence had been injected with steroids. Such delight in language and yet such power to convey loss, hurt, longing—those were the qualities that made me fall in love with his work and kept me in love all this time. I don’t hear him talked about enough. I believe he is a truly original writer, one of the best short story writers we’ve ever had. His influence on other writers is a well-kept secret, but I’m only too happy to say that he has been one of my guiding lights for going on forty years.”

Abbott’s maximalist (more is more!) language swells with poetic devices that emphasize euphony. His stylistic moves revel in the agile stops, spins, and doubling backs of rhetorical constructions that illuminate busy minds in motion, dragging their histories. Add a sonic pause here. A generous disclosure there. His stories, set in the American southwest, are bursting with light, heat, vitality, exuberance, wit, tenderness, yearning, and poignancy. His narrators—always in full control of managing narrative time while advancing action—are manic storytellers who manage, somehow, a patient unfolding.

Here’s the first paragraph of “Ninety Nights on Mercury”:         

She was Betty Porter, a being as much of magic as of muscle, and I who I ever am—Heath Pokey Howell (Junior), banker, Luna County commissioner and, as events will prove, the dimmest of sinners, male type. We’d known each other, yes, as acquaintances in this commodious desert, she a widow and me a recently estranged husband, and then, at the Valentine’s Dance at the Mimbres Valley Country Club not so very long ago, we shed the selves ordinary folks had said howdy to, and, fumbling fiercely at each other, we took up the private half of lived life.¹

Abbott’s people are desperate to extricate themselves from the immediate trouble we find them in, trouble that grows (ever inwardly) more severe, more complicated, more bizarre, more emotional, more entertaining. Yes, some Cheever comparisons do seem evident—the consummate craftsmanship of exquisitely constructed scenes consistently accruing meaning and causality, characters trying to solve a kind of loneliness endemic to their landscapes (suburbs vs. deserts). Beyond Cheever, the echo one hears in Abbott’s work, at times, might be more aligned in pitch to the likes of Barry Hannah. There are verve-filled notes that vibrate with loony desperation. There’s a kind of measured madness his narrators are trying, with helpless urgency, to temper with talk alone.

And while their conflicts multiply and their gut-stabbing sorrows accumulate, a certain slant of light plays between the lines and in the periphery, luring us into neo-lucid worlds where despair is too vivid to be depressing. Plots accelerate even as they stretch into the kind of scope and scale we expect from novels. Consistently, the stories slam into moments of awe and wonder that enlarge our view of mysterious behaviors, which often provokes a chuckle.

In an article that first appeared in the Georgia Review, William Giraldi writes, “The Heart Never Fits Its Wanting is an orgy of style, one that performs the magic trick of being at once inebriated and exact—his narrators akin to world-class drinkers who can down a fifth of Jim Beam and still stand straight.”

There’s plenty of pathos-fueled zaniness. There is humor whose secret source is not joy, as Twain deadpanned, but sorrow.

Giraldi claims: “I think Abbott can challenge George Saunders’s position as the current king of wit in American short fiction; in fact, Abbott is frequently funnier than Saunders, whose fun is often too satirical and cerebral to be moving. He has a cult following, and deservedly so, but I’ve seldom met a reader who has been touched by Saunders’s work—impressed by his fine intelligence and partial to his silliness, but rarely touched. Saunders is having fun all right, but sometimes he’s the only one on the playground. Abbott’s wit, in contrast, is always in the service of feeling, of embracing the truths of our emotions.”²

Let’s hope no balloon-throwing literary feud erupts over this comparison; perhaps our playgrounds should accommodate even more writers who are taken seriously for being funny.

Just watch poor Pokey Howell, whose pitiful and recognizable heart is near-to-bursting with grief and regret and a kind of unquenchable longing his estranged wife believes is beyond repair. Watch Pokey visit his old house to pick up his children for a brief visit, where he squats atop his daughter’s tricycle (where else?) while his soon-to-be-ex breaks the news that she is three months pregnant with their fourth.

“When?” I said.
She wasn’t sure, she said, her shadow not moving even one iota. In January, probably. Maybe at the Commissioners Congress in Gallup. Maybe after that Champagne reception. Maybe in that Holiday Inn. Maybe on that bed on that Holiday Inn. Maybe.
“You’re crying,” I said, it something harmless to say.
“It’s a cold, Heath. Pay attention.”
I was paying attention. I was paying attention to the heat. And to the wind. And to our daughter, Mary Beth, now behind the screen door, ready to go. Yes, I was paying attention—to the gravel and grain of us, the string and the spit, the mud and melt we are.³

Abbott’s characters do pay attention, albeit often in hindsight. Other times, they watch their own self-destruction with meticulous slow-motion and painful clarity. They pay attention to the ways time and honesty effect a full reporting of how everything, all at once, brings them to a moment where all the conditions in a scene are exacting climactic pressure on their already-damaged nervous systems. Abbott pays attention to the cadence, syntax, and diction of thoughts unraveling from people who are paying attention to the pressure. And his people are always under pressure—much of it self-imposed, magnified from overactive minds fighting the idea that sense exists, or can. He makes it easy for readers to pay attention too—to grow more acute in the act of seeing. His characters (like his readers) are wide-awake, alert, alive—perhaps as wide-awake, alert, and alive as Abbott was reported to have been in the classroom. In 2004, he received the Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award from Ohio State.

“I loved Lee’s teaching demeanor from the get-go,” said Rebecca Barry (Recipes for a Beautiful Life) in an email. “He had all of the things I loved about the men I was writing about: grit, tenderness, humor, a sharp ear and eye. He actually has eyes like a hawk—very dark and alert, and I like that about him, too, like he could see everything.”

While Abbott’s narrators are observant and generous enough to show us everything in precise detail, his brilliance may lie in his ability to move us quickly, even in the longer stories, as his characters take their time revealing themselves through the actions, thoughts, and speech they’re consistently and rapidly disclosing.

“The Talk Talked Between Worms,” for example, takes thirty-five necessary pages for a son to tell the persuasive story of how his father, Tot Hamsey, comes to be institutionalized, eventually, following a summer night in 1947 when he drives his truck through the Roswell desert and meets a crash-surviving alien who points to his dying alien brethren and says, “Help them.” Tot can’t help, of course, and this becomes one of those stunning moments of Abbott-produced awe and wonder, when our empathetic reach extends, realistically, to aliens. Instead, a chat ensues. And while Abbott (once again) generously and patiently renders the texture of this strange night, what he leaves out is impressive too.

“Listen,” the thing said. And Tot Hamsey was powerless not to.

My mother has told me he came home around sunrise.⁴                                                     

That’s a packed space-break. After that sunrise comes thirty more pages about humans—their hearts, the mysteries in them, and the problems that develop while people keep trying, impossibly, to make that undersized organ fit its outsized wanting.

Another of Abbott’s former students, Holly Goddard Jones (The Next Time You See Me) said, “Lee cares about stakes. High stakes. And that made a significant impression on me. One of the reasons I was so drawn to Lee as a mentor was that I wasn’t so interested in writing quiet little literary stories with a subtle turn.”

Abbott-land is populated with characters who straddle the razor-thin line of grief-induced insanity while onlookers struggle with the fallout. Characters go to war and die (in the Bataan death march, no less), some return in emotional pieces, some live with the guilt of staying home. A teenage daughter runs away toward disturbing and dangerous conditions her father chases. A school shooting-spree unfolds in slow motion, with extreme close-ups. Older protagonists try to recognize the sinners they once were. When ruined love is the subject, as it often is, the most painful moments, again, go slowest. The quietest scenes are the most uncomfortable, lingering as they do, though the clarity of what’s unspoken deepens our gaze toward the moment to come that will forever mark a victim and make the story necessary.

Most of Abbott’s stories feature first-person male protagonists who guide us through mostly traditional forms that favor strong beginnings, middles, and endings. But there is formal risk-taking too. And there are imaginative leaps that take on wide-ranging points of views.

 “One of Star Wars, One of Doom,” (included in The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction edited by Richard Bausch and R.V. Cassill, ^8th ed.) is a story Abbott challenged himself to write soon after the Columbine school shootings, but only after researching (a common practice) the lives of the killers, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris. He said, “I came to understand—slowly, albeit, and with some horror—that I, too, but for time and circumstance, understood their rage and need and frustration: I was Klebold and Harris, alas. Then I was at the keyboard and the first line was complete: ‘The slaughter hasn’t happened yet.’ A promise, evidently, had been made: I was to write it in the omniscient point of view.”

Points of view alternate between the killers, the students, a pair of philandering teachers, and even jumps (for a full paragraph) to a post-massacre viewpoint from a dead teacher’s spouse. Time and pace is expertly controlled to allow us to get to know each of these complex characters before the first shot is fired. Seven pages later, comes a reminder: “The carnage? Still an hour away.”

Abbott said, “I’d never used the third omni. But I quickly learned that it uses the two oldest moves in the book (now that I think about it, maybe they are the same move, just in different English): ‘Meanwhile, back at the ranch’ and ‘Little did he know.’ What great license that was, the opportunity to go anywhere in time and action to tell the story. No worry about violation. (And, yes, I use prolepsis in that story, too—still another of my tics, I suppose).”

In Abbott-land, suspense is literary. He doesn’t withhold information (which might be manipulative and coy) so much as pursue—patiently, methodically, generously, and openly—detailed narratives that help readers understand the multilayered mysteries that can lead to bad behavior.

Bruce Machart (The Making of Men and The Wake of Forgiveness) said, “There’s nothing I know about craft that doesn’t have Lee’s footprints all over it. If I had to choose one lesson, it was the distinguishing of ‘suspense’ from ‘surprise’ in fiction. The former, he insisted (and rightly so), was always a function of giving the reader knowledge, which is why it’s so very effective. Surprise comes from withholding knowledge, for a kind of narrative dishonesty. Lee never had much patience for that.”

Another story Abbott challenged himself to write, “Men of Rough Persuasion,” was inspired partly by reading an Elmore Leonard mystery. “A genre I am a sucker for,” he said. “I’ve also come to believe that all stories, no matter their putative genre, are mystery stories: X is trying to find out what Y is, that truth dimly seen, that secret badly kept, that passion ill-suppressed, and so forth. Leonard’s characters are fully alive from word one, his dialogue pearls of palaver, his twists and turns worth twice the price of admission at Six Flags.”

Abbott decided he wanted to write a tough-guy story that stopped just short of macho melodrama. “Later, I went to Google, typed in something like ‘gangster slang’ and, seconds later, was reading a site which was a dictionary/glossary of all the ‘talk,’ colorful and inventive, that folks like Dashiel Hammet and James M. Cain and Big Jim Thompson and Mickey Spillaine had used in the heyday of noir (’30s, ’40s, and ’50s). I had my assassin, my focal character, and now I had the lingo peculiar to his world. Maybe a paragraph or two in, I had my insight: I could make up my own talk, make metaphor my own way, maybe get within shouting distance of outright gibberish (tone, you see, was always going to be an issue, right?).”

Abbott plays with form again in “As Fate Would Have It,” employing second person. “But more than that, I wanted to complicate the telling and flayed around for a while until I chanced on the subjunctive mood. Then, somewhere in the middle of a draft that wasn’t turning to ash beneath my fingers, I decided to further complicate life between margins by using a flash-forward (yes, prolepsis again). So, what did I find one morning: a story contrary to the condition of fact in which I leap forward in time to a time that can’t possibly exist. Again, I was trying to match the excessiveness of the action with a language equal to it. One happy result was the sense of the imperative that turns what happened to someone else into something that is happening to you (no pun intended).”

Matching action and language is always an Abbott priority. One story in particular takes this dare and doubles it. “The Eldest of Things” is a third-person account of a Romantics professor, Dr. Mozer, whose love for lofty language and his lust for Elaine Winston (a Miltonist) is elevated, with artificial help, to sublime heights. “I found myself wanting to write a cocaine story (shoot, it was the ’80s, everybody was writing such), but I wanted to bring to the yarn a new language. In this case, I was borrowing, by indirection, from John Milton. As a graduate student working on my MA in English, I suffered through a seminar about the great blind poet. Mr. Milton, I had no issue with (indeed, I try to read a little Milton—the versifier, in this case—every morning before I turn to my fiction). Instead, it was my professor, whom I urge you to imagine as the worst of the breed: smug, precious, haughty, happy, and far too reverent. Among the books he had us read was a real stinker: too full of critical jargon, insensitive to good sense, nit-picky, and unnecessarily Latinate. Hence, some years later, I found myself putting the blow and the blowhard together in story.”

Witness the blowhard in third person, language spun with Abbottesque style:

In one class, rolling on a circuit made smooth and gleaming by two lines of what Spoon [his dealer] claimed was flake chipped from Eden’s first tree, Dr. Mozer forged a lecture that linked, in a moment quiet enough to have come from death, the Ens, the hinder part of God’s essence, and the ‘houmoousian,’ the latter of which his pupils were to conceive of not as the Father and Son and the Holy Ghost, but as Larry, Curly, and Moe—the modern wise men of burlesque and pain.⁵

Dr. Mozer’s situation, of course, grows complicated. Actions cause reactions that create escalations that inspire wrong choices that cause more desperate actions that will, inevitably, trigger change and loss.

Abbott’s influences are many and wide-ranging, but he cites two books as being especially important. Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! is one. He details the reasons in an essay called “The Most Daunting Book I Read.” The essay discloses how he stumbled upon reading while suffering a tumultuous childhood with a violent father (retired Army officer, three heart attacks under his belt) and a drunk mother (locked up for eight years in a state hospital in Las Vegas). Finding great trouble much of the time himself, and at the age of thirteen, brandishing money stolen from his father’s wallet, he stepped one scorching summer day into a bookstore that looked out of place in his small town of Las Cruces, New Mexico. The owner, Arlene Belkin, put books in his hands. “Evidently, from the instant I crossed her threshold, she’d seen in me something that I, despite many hours in front of the mirror, had not seen myself. Maybe she was a sorceress come down to Planet Podunk to help me survive myself and one day type a story that would ravish a stranger the way a stranger’s story was about to ravish me.”⁶

Absalom, Absalom! deals in high-staked themes: civil war, family war, war with self, war with history, war with ghosts. “And yes,” Abbott writes, “it is about language. The purl and swirl of sentences that go as much backward as forward, monologues tangled as thickets, the talk talked between wight and welkin, the yarns of more modern sons of Ham, and the near-verse unique to ‘space and time and massy earth themselves.’”⁷ Which is not to say he finished the book that summer. That would take forty more years, he confesses. But meeting the book at that time in his life introduced him to a language that would live with him a long time as he made his way toward becoming a writer.

“The other book which more specifically shaped my sentences was Poetic Form and Poetic Meter by Paul Fussell, Jr. which was the text of choice in a graduate seminar in the Form and Theory of Poetry I took under the direction of the late poet and novelist James Whitehead. It taught me the music a sentence can make, and it convinced me that the sentences I could use need not be fey or arch or precious or obviously arty-farty.”

Whitehead was one of four teachers, “the uncles,” as he calls them, who were important to him at the University of Arkansas, where he earned his MFA. The others were William Harrison, John Clellon Holmes, and Miller Williams (“yes, Lucinda’s father”), the same professors who taught while Barry Hannah went through the same program a few years ahead of Abbott. “We heard and attended to the same things the uncles sought to impress us with: no conventional wisdom, sentences that someone can’t film, kick the censor off your shoulder, risk is your pal, find your material, aim for the fences, go through the wall not around it, screw fame and on and on and on until you felt like a guy from Delta Force with many millions to slay. We were convinced to go to war against the safe, the quiet, the small and the jejune.”     

Abbott’s long career as a teacher has been important to him.

“I like (almost) everything about the classroom, workshop or no. The to and fro. The give and take. The high energy. The insights. The cliffs we betimes tumble over. Sharing Pauline’s perils. As far as my own writing is concerned, I’ve always seen the classroom as that place where I test what I think I know. Somewhere Joyce Carol Oates says that it’s in a writer’s interest to write criticism. She sees this as a means of explaining yourself to yourself. I view teaching as something similar. Defining yourself. Taking your own measure. Seeing if your aesthetic principles are both sensible and demonstrable. I have, therefore, never had a bad day in the classroom.”

Many of the essential craft principles Abbott values most can be seen by reading his essay “Thirteen Things About the Contemporary Short Story that Really Hack Me Off,” published in Lit from Within: Contemporary Masters on the Art and Craft of Writing (Ohio University Press). To his credit, the stories that inspired the essay were not easy targets—they were stories included in the Best American Short Stories anthologies he used in his fiction seminars over several years. He and his students set out to discern whether there existed a particular aesthetic in the contemporary short story. “Trends, not tics. Manners and methods. Sensibilities, if not sense. Proclivities. Vocabulary, not idiom.” At the end of many years of exhaustive study, Abbott reports, “we are aggravated, annoyed, flummoxed, and saddened by our conclusions.”⁸    

Those thirteen things—too succinctly summarized here for the sake of space (buy the book!) are these: (1) characters whose sources of income are unmentioned and unwitnessed; (2) points of views that don’t risk inhabiting ones very different from the authors’; (3) tidy resolutions; (4) characters too easily redeemed; (5) few funny stories; (6) too little omniscience; (7) too much present tense; (8) too little second person; (9) too much exposition; (10) too little exposition; (11) too few stylists; (12) the muted climax; (13) too much epiphany.                         

About too much epiphany, Abbott writes, “Too much insight, I say, most of it unearned, most of it phony (and obvious) as a clown’s red nose.”

On the muted climax: “Nowadays stories… seem to dribble to a close. Climax has been shortened, subdued.” He cites a lesson learned as an undergraduate from his teacher, the pulp writer James Mealy, who “suggested that climax should be four double-spaced pages at a minimum. Because, scenically, climax has the most at stake, it should be the most thoroughly rendered.”

And “Where,” Abbott asks, “are our stylists? On the continuum of style, from Hemingway to Faulkner (from min- to max-, in other words), we have more Carvers than Nabokovs. I wonder if contemporary writers have lost their appetites for the riches peculiar to our medium, language. Whither the complex-compound sentence?

“The elliptical sentence, parallel structure, subordination, coordination—animals rarely sighted. The way of the dodo has gone the periodic sentence. I miss anaphora, chiasmus, diacope, metanoia. I yearn for zeugma, hyperbaton, aporia. Come back, epistrophe. Please.”

About the dearth of funny stories, Abbott writes, “Shoot, I’d settle for the wry, the rueful, the amused, the lighthearted, the risible. Some days, I’d settle for merely the spirited, over what, in brief, we see too much of nowadays: the dour, the achingly earnest, the MEANINGFUL.”⁹

If he had wanted to be earnest enough to make the list longer, he says he could have mentioned other things that hacked him off, like, say, a general inattention to form, a tendency for characters to be disassociated from plot, too many stories that supposedly take place anywhere, or nowhere.         

“Some people found his workshop intimidating (I’m not sure he wholly minded this),” said Michael Kardos (Before He Finds Her) in an email. “But all of us found it to be no-bull. He could say the things we didn’t feel like we had the right to say yet: that fiction matters. That writing ought to cost the writer more than time. To be in Lee’s class meant you had no choice but to consider yourself a writer, because he considered you one.”      

Jennifer Crusie said she owes her career to Abbott. In the introduction to her story collection, Crazy People, she writes: “I went to get a PhD in feminist literature and got co-opted into the Creative Writing Program when [Abbott] stopped me in the hall and said, ‘I hear you’ve published a novel.’ You really have to know Lee K. Abbott to appreciate how startling that was: big guy, looks like the Marlboro Man, terrifying in his reputation for grilling students. And then there was me: frumpy middle-aged woman who’d written three novels for Harlequin, only one of which had been published so far. So I pushed my glasses back up my nose and said, ‘Uh, yeah, but it’s for Harlequin,’ and he said, ‘I don’t care who it’s for, you should be in the program.’ My brain shorted out about then, but Lee is not somebody who gives up, so I agreed to audit a creative writing seminar. Just dip my toe in, wait for somebody to make fun of me, and then leave. But as it turned out, the only biased person in the program was me. As far as I know nobody else gave a damn who I wrote for, they just wanted to write good fiction, although the lack of cheap shots might be in part attributed to the fact that Lee stood in front of the class the first day and said, ‘Anybody who makes fun of romance fiction is making fun of Jane Austen, and anybody who makes fun of Jane Austen answers to me.’ I would walk across broken glass for that man.”

Were there enough broken glass to go around, I might too. When Abbott selected my book for the 2015 Katherine Anne Porter Prize, it elicited the kind of elation you’d hope to find from any lottery winner, but what followed was curiosity: just who was this guy who said “yes” when so many others had said “no?” My curiosity then veered (perversely?) toward suspicion—the kind of suspicion one might direct toward a drunk uncle who’s winking from across the room. Had he read the entire manuscript? How else to explain all the writerly doubt, despair, and confusion I entertained in the deepest part of the soul’s dark night just prior to Abbott revealing his good news?

After I ordered All Things, All at Once, I emailed Mr. Abbott to introduce myself. I wanted to express my gratitude, and I also (nervously) wondered if I could impose upon him a couple of book-related questions I continued to worry about. His reply was gracious, wise, and helpful. He said, “I think, to answer one of your questions, that you’re over-thinking the order. My instinct is to put my best story first and my next best, however such is determined, last.” In a later email, however, he revealed his strategy for organizing his New and Selected Stories, a decision owing, in part, to a desire to avoid over-thinking. He said, “Did you recognize that the stories in All Things... were in alphabetical order?” I had not.

We entered an email exchange over the course of a few months, and even in his casual email-language, I heard the lively and melodic voice his narrators have access to.

When I asked him how he felt about the reissuing of The Heart Never Fits Its Wanting, thirty-six years after its first release, he said, “I am humbled and honored by the chance to bring fire once again to the old forest. I am also a touch embarrassed: Many of its pages, I fear, are cringe-worthy, a youngish writer learning how to dance in public.”   

Another writer expressing doubts? Maybe, but many fans anxiously await that dance; we’re grateful it exists, and we’re grateful it will endure.

Finished, for the time being, with book talk, Abbott devoted the rest of that particular email to a subject of higher stakes, providing the precise and generous detail I’d come to love in his stories. He said, “Thanks for asking about water, particularly water in the west. I’ve plenty. I have a well and never had an issue, other than burning out, over the years, two submersible pumps (which gets pretty pricey when my well guys have to pull seventy feet of pipe to get to it). I also live about 500 yards from the Bonito River, which, given the winter we had and the exceptional monsoon season late last summer, means I didn’t have to go very deep to get my water. Shoot, I have pals here who had to go down 500 feet (at 20 bucks a foot, mind you). The expensive thing was softening it (I’m at 75 grains of hardness, which is hell on plumbing). Clearly, I’m telling you stuff you could’ve lived without.

“Thrive, Lee.”

Thrive?                                 

Abbott signs off with this imperative, which makes me want to obey him, even in—especially in—the face of whatever writing-related doubt and despair promises to crop up next. Still, I wondered about the particulars: how, exactly, do writers practice the art of thriving when we work and wait and go great distances between bits of good news? Then I thought about what I’ve written here and saw what he’d helped me see: one thrives by paying attention to the work. A little patience helps a little. Lots of patience helps a lot. One thrives by being helped and by helping. Helping, if nothing else, allows us to forget, for a time, the narcissism that wants to visit while we wait. What might help the most, however, is this: slowing down to savor the work of a maestro we can learn from, taking the time to read the book someone is putting in your hands.                                  

Matt Cashion’s story collection Last Words of the Holy Ghost won the 2015 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. His second novel, Our 13th Divorce, is forthcoming in February (Livingston Press). He is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. (www.mattcashion.com)

Notes

1. Abbott, Lee K. “Ninety Nights on Mercury.” In All Things, All at Once: New and Selected Stories (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006).
2. Giraldi, William. “Next Stop Abbott Land: The Stories of Lee K. Abbott.” The Georgia Review, Vol 61. No 1 (2007), pp. 69–79.

    

3. Abbott, Lee K. “Ninety Nights on Mercury.” In All Things, All at Once: New and Selected Stories.
4. Abbott, Lee K. “The Talk Talked Between Worms.” In All Things, All at Once: New and Selected Stories.
5. Abbott, Lee K. “The Eldest of Things.” In All Things, All at Once: New and Selected Stories.
6. Abbott, Lee K. “The Most Daunting Book I Read.” In Remarkable Reads: 34 Writers and Their Adventures in Reading, ed. by J. Peder Zane (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004), pp. 45–50.
7. Ibid.
8. Abbott, Lee K. “Thirteen Things about the Contemporary Short Story That Really Hack Me Off” in Lit from Within: Contemporary Masters on the Art and Craft of Writing, ed. by Kevin Haworth and Dinty W. Moore (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011), pp. 128–137.
9. Ibid.