My project is the Peregrine Falcon. My partner is Patricia Harding. She was supposed to make a poster. I wrote up the facts and gave them to her, but she’s been absent all week.

I decided on the subject of the falcon because I was walking home and I saw a park ranger looking up at the grain silos through binoculars. He told me they released three peregrine falcons at the cliffs, but one flew away and made a nest on the tallest silo. The falcon did this because there are pigeons around there to eat. He was very friendly and he looked perfect in his green uniform with touches of red.

I started my nature journal and asked Patricia to be my partner. Some people think Patricia Harding agreed to be my partner because I’m good in school, but Patricia doesn’t care about grades so that wasn’t the reason.

I wrote about this in my journal and it is an important part of the project as you will see. I did not ask Patricia to be my partner just because she is popular. When Patricia came to school, I didn’t like her. She knew she was special because she’s tall and everything else, but later on I could see that she had things on her mind. I decided to be friendly to her even when she was in a bad mood. If I have a daughter someday that looks like Patricia, I hope other students will help her in school. There is more to life than the way things appear. That is the first point in my journal: you have to investigate things.

I asked the Park Ranger to meet Patricia and me at the front gate of the silos. I told Patricia she had to dress different. No bare belly or shoes with her feet showing. No silver rings on her toes.

Patricia wore sneakers when we met the Ranger, but her peasant blouse wasn’t that great. I asked questions and he answered them, explaining things to Patricia. He said that in 1961 tons of feed corn were stored in the silos near the train yard for the turkey farms. It was at this time that the rock doves, also known as pigeons, became a problem.

The Ranger said they poisoned the pigeons and the chemicals killed the falcons and other birds of prey. The silos are abandoned and the turkey farms are closed, but the pigeons are still here.

He said it costs four thousand dollars to raise one falcon and release it. He wanted to keep talking to Patricia, but I decided we had enough facts from the Ranger. I wanted to gather more information from other people so we could compare and contrast.

We walked to my mom’s to organize our presentation. I wanted Patricia to meet my mother. I considered this part of our project. My mother is fifty years old and even though she’s old, she has boyfriends. She says she does nothing to encourage them. She says this all the time, but she likes the attention. My mother has problems. Sometimes she sits at the kitchen table in our apartment and cries, her hair messed up, her eyes red, but she looks good, like she’s pretending.

I planned to interview my mother with Patricia. Was my mother aware of the falcons living in town? Was she aware of her environment? I was looking at cause and effects. The turkey farmers didn’t mean to have hundreds of pigeons in town carrying diseases and making messes, but it happened.

Patricia didn’t say anything about my mother’s housekeeping. I know Patricia’s house is nice. I’ve seen it from the outside. Her mother does hair. She has a pink sign on the porch that says, “A Cut Above.” Her front yard has a flower garden and a big shiny blue ball on a pedestal.

Patricia didn’t notice that my mother left the hamster cage on the kitchen counter next to the stove. This is my mom’s way of making me clean the hamster cage. I never wanted the hamster. Loreen bought it for my mother.

I cleaned the kitchen table with a sponge and Patricia sat down. I brought out my shoe box of photographs. This was part of my preparation for the interview.

I showed Patricia the pictures of my mother holding me when I was a baby. Her bare arms around me. Then I showed her the boyfriends and the ex-husbands. They started out the same, looking okay. Then they changed, wore different clothes and suit coats and weird shirts. My mom did that. She says she dressed them better to fit their personalities. The backgrounds of the photos changed too. The different apartments where we lived. I showed her the picture of my father holding my hand when I was a little girl. His face is small and blurry. You’d need a telescope to see his eyes.

Then my mother walked in with Loreen and I hid the photos. They had been to a party and were feeling good. My mother was dressed in her yellow jacket and skirt. She calls the color, butter cream, like cake icing. Her hair was in place, but her mascara was streaked and her lipstick smeared at the edges. I could smell sweet drinks and Chinese food.

Loreen did what she always does, walked around with her hands in her leather jacket never taking her eyes off my mother. Loreen wears suede work boots. She combs her short hair down in front of her ears like pointy sideburns.

My mother cooked herself a hot dog in the toaster oven and made instant coffee using hot water from the tap. Loreen opened a window, sat on the sill, and lit a cigarette. She offered one to Patricia.

My mother introduced herself to Patricia, shook her hand. They both looked tall standing in the center of the kitchen. Then my mother talked about the new guy chasing her, how he was screwing up his life.

Loreen said he needed to be trained. My mother said he’d look good in a cowboy hat. Loreen said he needed to be more considerate of others. My mother said he ought to shave his moustache. And it went back and forth like that, Patricia listening.

Then Patricia leaned over to me and whispered, I know why you brought me here.

I thought Patricia understood things. I was sure our project was on track. I told her we had to talk in private. I led Patricia up the back stairs to the roof. I could hardly wait to tell her how great our presentation would be. We would plan together how she would tone down her appearance; make herself less of a dominant person. Different clothes and shoes. A new hairstyle. More natural. I wanted us to look good together presenting.

When we were on the roof, Patricia said, you’re so much like your mother it’s hilarious. She smiled at me like she was happy about it. My asthma was bothering me. I couldn’t breathe that good so I didn’t answer. And anyway, there are millions of reasons why that’s not true.

I turned away and looked up at the silo. I saw a white bird shoot across the sky. I pointed it out for Patricia, but she didn’t care. She went back down to the apartment to listen to my mother and Loreen.

This is what I have so far, but I’m conducting a further experiment.

Every day after school I take the hamster up to the roof and open the cage door. I sit in the shadow of the chimney so I cannot be seen and watch the hamster run around the roof. I keep my eye on the silo. My theory is, sooner or later, I’m going to get face to face with the falcon.

<<<>>>

Last night I dreamed the ice broke. The river thundered, floes thrust upward, and green water pushed the pieces to the ocean’s edge where the breakers shredded them.

I woke up and went to the window. The river was glazed shiny with frozen rain and quiet. I watched waves hammer the solid prow of ice that jutted out of the river’s mouth into the salt water. There was sea smoke under the dull sky on the eastern horizon and below my window the snow on the concrete boat ramp that descended down the riverbank was a hard dirty white. There was no weakness in the freeze.

Kamara knocked at my door and I let him in. He wore a tweedy brown sport coat over a blue polyester shirt decorated with a tumbling pattern of displaying peacocks as if the birds had been thrown from a great height and were falling head over heels. I had not seen Kamara since my accident more than a year ago. I was sure he had come to talk about the car. Kamara does not visit anyone without a reason. I sold him my Plymouth Volare for five hundred dollars when I left the state university where we were roommates.

“It was very hard to find you,” Kamara said.

“Not hard enough.”

“You are always this way, Billy. Funny again.”

Kamara has a west African phrasing and oddly formal English pronunciation that at one time might have been part British, part French, part East Indian, but now was something else entirely. I have that Maine turn of phrase, which is mostly no phrasing at all. In Maine, I had told Kamara once, the first person to speak aloud at any gathering is considered the idiot.

“Is this your apartment, Billy?”

I looked around and didn’t answer. I went into the kitchen and put a pot of water on the stove.

“What happened to your head, Billy?”

The scar takes up the upper right part of my skull. I stepped into the bedroom and grabbed my damaged motorcycle helmet. I threw it to him.

“Thank Allah you were wearing a helmet,” he said.

Kamara was raised a Christian and had come to this country as part of a Catholic resettlement program, but he had forgotten that I knew that. Then he remembered.

“Allah or God, it makes no difference,” he said and made a sighing sound.

I poured hot water into a teapot containing two green tea bags. I watched the wall clock for four minutes, removed the bags, poured cups for both of us, and returned to making breakfast. Green tea is supposed to lessen my headache. I can’t tell if it works.

“I am having trouble with the brakes,” he said.

I nodded and turned the gas flame up under a pan of Canadian bacon.

“It will cost three hundred dollars to fix,” he said. “To say the truth, Billy, the first time I drove the car I felt the brakes with my foot and I thought, these do not feel right to me. But I trusted you.”

The trick with Canadian bacon is to heat it gently and evenly so the meat stays moist and the smoke flavor sweetens. I worked at this while Kamara continued explaining his feelings about buying a car from a friend. Nothing I could say would stop him. When he is in this mood, he wants hard evidence that he is understood. He is bargaining to win something tangible. He will not accept only words. He has plenty of words himself and considers them worthless.

“Billy, think on this, I have driven only a few hundred miles to and from work, and it was part time work, only a few days a week. And I am not driving to job interviews because no district is hiring vocational teachers now and I have not driven harmfully or done anything that could wear down the brakes so suddenly.”

I thought, what can I do for Kamara today? And as I have been taught in rehabilitation, I outlined the problem. How can I, a brain-damaged university trained actor, the son of an alcoholic father and a suicide mother, a man who is compelled to live in a rural areas and therefore has acted professionally only in disorganized community theater groups, help a state certified vocational arts teacher who saw his father and brothers killed by RU rebels and who has never held a job other than part time retail work and who has no hope of ever finding a position in a state with limited teaching jobs, and few vocations to teach, because he is completely impossible to deal with? And as I have been taught, I simplified the problem: there are two men, financial and personal failures, each living alone. There is a car with bad brakes. I removed the bacon from the pan and put it on a paper towel on a plate and put the plate in the warm oven.

“I understand how you feel,” I said, lying, because who knew how Kamara felt? Maybe someone who had also hidden in a latrine hole and watched their family butchered, but not me. “But Kamara, let me just say that I am having some problems as a result of my accident.”

“I am sorry to hear that, but…”

I held up one finger and he stopped.

“Kamara, we have talked many times about our cultural differences.”

His eyes burned with excitement. He wanted to tell me something about cultural differences and it frustrated him to have to wait for me to finish whatever nonsense I was going to say before he could speak.

“I have symptoms,” I said. “I have inappropriate emotional responses. A radio commercial can make me cry. I am not always able to tell memory from imagination. My dreams seem real to me and my decision making sucks incredibly. I have a loneliness and emptiness that immobilizes me.”

I was done. Kamara burst into words, they spouted out of him like a geyser. They were about cars and brakes and the proper buying and selling of large items such as cars and the cultural responsibility of the seller in all that buying and selling.

I scrambled eight eggs in the pan with butter. I placed them on a plate in the warm oven. I put on my jacket and walked outside. Kamara followed me, talking.

I opened the driver’s side door of the Plymouth and slid behind the steering wheel. I left the door open and made a show of stomping the brakes. After a moment, Kamara slid in the passenger seat, leaving his side door open. I gestured for the keys and he handed them to me. I put the keys in the ignition. I played with the emergency brake: pulled it off and then on and then off. I started the car. Kamara looked at me. I slammed the car into drive and accelerated forward. The car doors slammed shut. Kamara clawed at my right arm. Pounded at my head with balled fists. I drove down the boat ramp, bumped hard onto the ice, and roared out a hundred yards into the center of the frozen river.

I slammed on the brakes and the car spun a half-circle. I turned the car off. Kamara was holding the bottom of his seat with both hands. Some time passed.

I said, “The woman that hit me, she called to tell me she was sorry. She has nightmares about it. She wanted me to know about her nightmares. The accident was not my fault, but I feel like it was. Why am I like this, Kamara?”

He was silent, staring at the shore. I got out and stood on the ice. Kamara got out very slowly. He looked solemn. He took little skating steps toward the riverbank.

I walked up alongside him. Halfway to shore, he said, “Why would you do such a crazy thing, Billy? What is the matter with you?”

“That’s what I just asked you,” I said. “We’ll come back for the car later. We’ll drive to Bangor. I want to buy one of those peacock shirts.”

He pushed me. I ended up on my ass on the ice and I fell back with my arms outstretched. He laughed at me. I laughed back like an old roommate laughs, stupid with history. Then I felt the cold through my jeans.

I walked back to my apartment and Kamara followed. I served him breakfast at the table near the window with a view of the river. He dipped buttered toast in his scrambled eggs and drank tea. I ate sitting across from him, and for a moment I felt like crying, but as I have been taught, I controlled my emotions. The Plymouth looked handsome on the ice with its grill pointed upriver.

I am posting often at the new site and linking to places you might like to visit. The new site is part of the Google universe. It is easy to use and easy to access from anywhere, however, whatever you post on Google, you give to Google. I am keeping this site open as an archive. (Because I can retain ownership of what I post here.) And I plan to upgrade this site so I can offer original stories and essays for download and print at no cost to you. I can share my work and still own it. It strikes me as ridiculous that I even have to say that. The Google motto is “Do No Evil”, and I know there are concerns that someone would try to sue Google for cash money if something someone posted on YouTube or Blogger went viral, but it seems to me that a terms and condition agreement could be written that would allow writers to keep ownership of their own work they publish on their own sites.

But that is not the future that I see arriving. My NEW SITE will have links to other sites that are dealing with copyright issues and privacy issues. There are only two choices here: either we look at these issues and try to do something about them; or we stop sharing. And to tell you the truth, if I am going to give my work away, I’d prefer mimeograph publishing and samizdat distribution. Then someone might, at least, buy me a cup of coffee.

To order request quantities and CD titles and send check or money order 19.99 each (includes handling/shipping) to:
Dan Domench
P.O. Box 516
Union, ME 04862

Thanks for your understanding. We are updating the site to remove all credit card buttons, etc. Stay in touch: <ddomench “at” tidewater.net>.

I made a decision to respect this genius writer, but I didn’t like his work. He writes about the east. I am from the west. He writes about the upper middle class. I am from the edge of the middle class: the bottom is right there where I can touch it with my toes.

Then something changed. I was traveling north into Oregon with a family of migrant workers, picking fruit, writing, taking photographs, and living in my 1972 Nova. I stopped to get gas. There was a table with used books for sale and I bought the paperback “Too Far To Go” that had just come out. There they were, the same people, but something was different: spare prose, clean description, emotional depth in perfect dialogue. It was as if John Updike had stepped out of the frame and told his story plainly. I could feel his heart in that book. I was in my twenties, living in a car, and he made me care about these characters. What was once respect became awe. I came to understand that he wrote books about people in the world he lived in because he loved them. He had to write those books. Read “Too Far To Go.” It’s there.

Tricia Vance asked me, when I was young, why was I spending time in the morning writing? What was I doing? At that moment, I was sitting on an overturned bucket watching a ragged group of friends, an ex-lover, and a woman I was in love with, playing softball in the parking lot of a run-down apartment building. I told Tricia, because of this, because someone has to catch this.

She smiled like she felt sorry for me, and then dragged me into the game. A year later, she was dead.

The great Mr. Updike taught me that if we write what we know about who we know because we love them, we will write something that can touch anyone — even a broke kid reading by flashlight trying to fall asleep in the back of a Chevy.

Each quarter a new VERB is released. Volume 2 Issue 2 is presently out and the last three issues are available on the University of Georgia Press site. The issues are also available as a download on audible.com. I know what it takes to produce two audio books containing two CD’s of original writing, performance, and music. Daren Wang is putting out four audio books like this a year and the quality is high. This new issue has a music piece performed by Hem and composed by Dan Meese from the album “Funeral Cloud” that is beautiful and haunting.

The writing is consistently good. I am a raving perfectionist (ask my recording engineer if you want details) and I am usually holding my breath whenever an author reads his own work. There is just usually so much “telling” or “acting” in the voice, or worse, a kind of holding back: both of which make listeners aware of the distance between themselves and the material. I am happy to say that every piece in this new release is extremely well presented.

There is no honest writer alive who can read or listen to an entire literary magazine and claim that all of the material worked for them. Writers are not like that: they are editors also. But frankly, I will say that the fiction is of the highest quality and it is stunning. I listened to the R.T. Smith piece about John Wilkes Booth four times. It’s great. Joseph Rogers did a fine job reading his story and it felt right and true, despite my resistance to pieces that have ghosts who drink beer. Betsy Boyd is not just a reader, but an actress .She did a great job. The fiction is consistently superb.

The poetry is also done well. I would like to see the poetry selections balanced a little more in the next issue. There was a sameness in the tone of these selections for me. The poems were as modern as they get, and I understand what these poets are doing and why it is important, but I would like to hear other voices also. Different music. But this is a minor complaint. This issue is very fine and thoughtful and well-produced. We need to support this work. Download it, buy it, pass the word on. Do all you can to support Daren Wang and his crew. This is important work and it deserves our attention.

Everything I have ever read by Paul Horgan has been excellent. His works deserve to be talked about and praised and kept alive. He is a great writer.

The following paragraph is from the short story “An Outpost of Progress” by Joseph Conrad. It is in the anthology “Short Story Masterpieces” edited by Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine. It has 36 tremendous stories and cost me a dollar used on amazon.com.

This paragraph comes late in the story. Two white men working for a British corporation at a trading station in Africa find that their assistant Makola has sold their workers and families into slavery in order to obtain the ivory the corporation seeks. The paragraph is describing what happened the day after they confronted Makola, but have done nothing to rescue the newly enslaved workers or to report the kidnappings. The ivory, after all, means that the men have been successful. The two men are named Kayerts and Carlier. Gobila is the leader of the village nearest to the outpost.

“At midday they made a hearty meal. Kayerts sighed from time to time. Whenever they mentioned Makola’s name they always added to it an opprobrious epithet. It eased their conscience. Makola gave himself a half-holiday, and bathed his children in the river. No one from Gobila’s village came near the station that day. No one came the next day, and the next, nor for a whole week. Gobila’s people might have been dead and buried for any sign of life they gave. But they were only mourning for those they had lost by the witchcraft of the white men, who had brought wicked people into their country. The wicked people were gone, but fear remained. Fear always remains. A man may destroy everything within himself, love and hate and belief, and even doubt; but as long as he clings to life he cannot destroy fear: the fear, subtle, indestructible, and terrible, that pervades his being; that tinges his thoughts; that lurks in his heart; that watches on his lips the struggle of his last breath. In his fear, the mild old Gobila offered extra human sacrifices to all the Evil Spirits that had taken possession of his white friends. His heart was heavy. Some warriors spoke about burning and killing, but the cautious old savage dissuaded them. Who could foresee the woe those mysterious creatures, if irritated, might bring? They should be left alone. Perhaps in time they would disappear into the earth as the first one had disappeared. His people must keep away from them, and hope for the best.”

There is more to the story to come, but that paragraph alone says something about politics and global commerce.

The first day of class Mr. Elkin had walked in limping and sat down behind the front desk. He was uncomfortable in the chair. He introduced himself and then said, “I joined the Army when I was much older than your usual recruit.” He eyeballed the class. I had seen him read his fiction so I knew he was a tremendous performer. I thought, “Uh-oh, a tough guy, we’re gonna get blasted.” Then he said, “It was the biggest mistake of my life.”He described his boot camp training to us. He waved his hands as he acted out trying to reason with a screaming drill instructor. The laughter started. He described being surrounded in the barracks by the young soldiers who call him names like “Pops,” accuse him of slacking on the obstacle courses, and who blame him personally for their lost privileges. He explains to them that it is the Army’s fault. He is physically threatened and he shrugs it off, showing how he did it by jerking his shoulders down and turning both hands palms up. This, of course, only infuriates his attacker. At this point, our laughter echoed down the halls of the English and Philosophy building. Then Mr. Elkin lowered his voice and described his isolation. His despair. Why had he done this to himself? What was wrong with him? The classroom went silent. He told of setting out on a long hike, a twelve-hour march with a heavy pack that he had never successfully completed before, but that he now must complete in order to get out of boot camp. He is last in a long line of soldiers. Soon there is no one near him. He is collapsing. He staggers to the top of a hill, half-dead, near the finish, and sees all the young soldiers — it seems like hundreds of them — sitting around waiting for him. He is sure they will curse him, but instead they stand and applaud. He is not sure if there is mockery in the applause, but no matter, the welcome is such a surprise that he savors it. Mr. Elkin took a long pause. Then he smiled at us, eyebrows high. He had boxed our ears with a story.

I liked his short stories, but understanding what he was doing in his longer fiction did not come natural to me. I grew up on the street poetry and short fiction of San Francisco and the down culture of Stockton. I favored sparse dialogue and the short line. My favorite literary novel at the time was Joan Didion’s “Play It As It Lays”. Elkin’s dense rolling prose and the momentum in his novels and long stories could overwhelm me. I am Spanish Basque and Irish Catholic from a working-class and farming background. My saint of a girlfriend in those years was Jewish and I often stayed at her family home in San Rafael where I grilled her English professor father about fiction writing.

We were three weeks into the semester and discussing one of Mr. Elkin’s longer stories in class. I raised my hand and asked why in the story he had made the gatekeeper to hell Jewish. I was thinking Dante. Joyce. This was the kind of question that Mr. Elkin had asked us about other stories. But this time, Mr. Elkin stared at me for a long time. No one in the class moved. He said, “You are a prick.”

Class dismissed. In the hallway, fellow students circled me. Some are outraged. One wants to snitch to the administration, but I made him promise not to do it. At this time in my life I am living in a trailer park and supporting myself working as a bartender at Joe’s Place downtown where I am regularly called other names. Besides, as a daily drinker with the trashed life that follows that addiction, I felt Mr. Elkin’s declaration was true enough.

A week later, the next scheduled class began and Mr. Elkin asked the class a question about the assignment. I raised my hand. I honestly had a question, but then I remembered what he had called me the week before. Everyone else in class put their hands down and waited. I wanted to put my hand down, but it was too late. Mr. Elkin, with one cocked eye, called on me. I said, “Well, sir, speaking from a prick’s point of view…” I never got to finish the sentence. The class howls. Stanley beams. We had landed safely.

Stanley and I developed a certain bond. We never had the time or opportunity to become real friends. We moved in much different circles, but when we did connect outside of the classroom, it was always a story.

Stanley was great in the classroom and when mentoring writers he was direct and generous. Outside of the classroom, he could get jumpy. Agitated. One night I ran into him at a party, an event he said he had to attend. We leaned against the back wall of a dining room overlooking a large room crowded with writers. He was not happy. The phone on the dining table rang. The host came into the room and picked up the receiver. There was that strange lull in the buzz of a room when a phone is answered. Stanley looked at me. It seemed that he was daring me to react. I leaned toward the larger room and said, as if I had answered the phone and was making an announcement, “Oh my God, your novel has just been published.” Heads turned and everyone in the room looked at our host. He kept talking into the phone, oblivious as to why he everyone was squinting at him. Stanley muttered, “Perfect, just right.” I told him I stole the line from a John Hawkes novel and so we talked about Hawkes. He seemed happy for awhile.

There were other encounters inside and outside the University. We never talked about each other’s writing, but he knew I was writing first-person short stories in a wide range of character voices and he liked that. When we did connect we often told each other stories. What had happened the night before. Anything that was fast and funny. His laugh was one of the best I’ve ever heard. We talked about what made a story work, and other writers and their writing. I want to make this clear: I loved this guy. It took me a long time to accept his death. (I can hear him now, “What do you mean ACCEPT? Who uses a word like that? What’s that supposed to mean?” And I’d say, “You know what it means, Stanley, give me a break here.”)

The last time I saw him it was winter in Iowa. Snow falling. I was no longer one of his students. We ended up at the same party. There were some publishers there and most everyone was on their best behavior. We talked for a few moments and he was seriously upset about the weather. He ducked into the kitchen to get away from the crowd and after a few moments, the host of the party asked if I would take Stanley home. He said Mr. Elkin was having some kind of attack. I walked Stanley out of the house. As we approached the street, we passed a circle of my drinking friends standing in the fresh snow, smoking. Without saying a word, they followed me to my car, a 1937 candy-apple red, four-door, hump-backed Chevy with a cave of a back seat. Stanley is startled by the look of the car, but my friends surround him and ease him into the back seat, one on each side. A bottle is passed around. Stanley refuses. Cigarettes are lit. Stanley coughs. We drive down the snowy street. Stanley says, “You guys are taking me home, aren’t you? This is the way to the Iowa House, right? I stay at the Iowa House. No, this is wrong. This isn’t the way. This is mean streets. This is bad. This car shouldn’t be out in the snow. Am I right about this? This is a dangerous car.”

Stanley is going crazy in the back seat. I’m driving twenty miles an hour through blowing snow. It’s hard to talk to Stanley when he gets like this. It’s a rolling routine: part act, part instigation, part challenge, part straight man, and definitely powered by an honest anxiety. We laugh like kids and Stanley laughs too, and then shakes it off and continues his ranting. I try to assure Stanley that everything’s fine, but I can’t finish a sentence because he won’t stop. He says, “This is it, isn’t it? Your taking me for a ride. Where are we going? Oh, forget it. It doesn’t matter. I shouldn’t care. It’s over. What should I care? I don’t. Where are we going?”

It’s a long, slow, hilarious, drive. I park in front of the Iowa House and one of the guys gets out and holds the door open. Stanley starts to get out and then hesitates. He asks, “Where’re you guys going? What comes after this? I’m home, right? I’m going in right here. This is the walkway, right here. What happens next?” He doesn’t get out of the car. He can’t leave, he can’t stay. It’s like he wants to hang out more, keep going. He has this little smile on. He finally gets out and walks away from the car, thanking me many, many times for taking him home. He walks with his shoulders forward, hunched-down, toward the lights of the Iowa House, looking back at us over his shoulder, at four young guys standing around a ’37 Chevy passing a bottle. I call out, “Goodnight.” Stanley stops at the door, turns back and looks, not at us, but at his footprints in the snow.

What famous writer said he hated writing, but loved having written? Producing is like that.

There is a line that is repeated in the movie “Shakespeare In Love.” The stage manager/producer is being threatened by his creditors. He assures them he will have the money to pay them when the show goes on stage. But the thugs know that the playwright is missing and the actors have no script. The stage manager says, the show will open as planned. When they ask him, how? He says, I don’t know.

It’s not that producing or directing a performance that involves actors and technicians is especially courageous. It’s not warrior time in a warrior culture. It’s foolhardy. And if you do it right, it will take all you can give to get it done.

If you are trying to do something new for yourself and for everyone involved, then you will be hanging yourself over some edge and everyone will be experiencing the free fall that comes from embracing new material in a new way. Take that challenge and add in the normal schedule, technical, and financial problems of any performance work and you have the real thing: anxiety and confusion and doubt and frustration. And it all has to somehow serve the performance. It’s a strange and magical stumbling.

I once did a series of short performances for Maine Public Radio for broadcast during the Friday news show. We recorded two stories at a time. One night the actors and I struggled to get one three minute sequence done. Take after take, we couldn’t get it right. Finally, with some editing and some luck, we were able to patch together a take that worked. Then we did a second story and we did it right the first time in one take. After the engineer shut off the recorder, we all looked at each other in shock, then clapped like kids. Sometimes that happens.

So the first thing I try to remember about production is that sometimes it works easily and sometimes it doesn’t. This project was all about schedule problems. We recorded 24 pieces. We ended up with 18 and cut that to 16. We lost week after week due to cancellations and time conflicts. The most recent example: my graphics and web director is moving out of state so I will be doing the final covers and inserts as he is moving.

The second thing I have to remember is that the production itself is not the final work. You strive for a high quality production values, but once you bring the final 140 minutes of 16 voices and effects and music together, the complete work makes its own demands.

I am fortunate to be working with a great experienced team. We are working to do something new with the audio literary experience. We don’t want listeners to be amazed at the acting or the writing or the music or the production. We want that to be invisible. We want the stories to ambush the heart, not stick in the ears. We want willing listeners to be surprised and moved by the desires of people in a world as real as can be imagined.

This project has been a tough one and it’s not over. It will get done. How? God only knows.