Lynne Handy

I’ve spent the past few days reading Nancy Pickard’s novel, The Scent of Rain and Lightning. Not only did I enjoy it thoroughly—it’s a page turner—I also learned from it.

Pickard set the novel in the ranch lands of western Kansas. As I read, I absorbed the locale into my bones, and wondered if someone born and raised in an urban setting would feel the same. (Will some urbanite please read it and tell me?)

In Pickard’s novel, Rose, Kansas is a small town, miles away from any city. People use plain speech, and the author sometimes uses metaphors, like tense as fresh strung barbed wire, to convey state of being or action, and a sense of setting. A horrendous storm comes in from the west, serving as the musical score for a tale of violence and death. Rose is a dying town. Hard work is valued. A female character bakes wonderful pies.

I grew up in Benton County, Indiana, one hundred miles south of Chicago, its western edge on the Illinois/Indiana state line. Our farmhouse faced north. Banks of storm clouds rolled in from the flat lands of the west and slammed against the kitchen windows. A mile away, the little town of Freeland Park slid into oblivion when the railroad diverted to another town. Grain elevators were the skyscrapers of the prairies. My mother was known for the flakiness of her piecrust.

Here is a sentence from the first chapter of The Scent of Rain and Lightning:

A person could, for instance, belong to a nice family living an ordinary life in a small town in the middle of nowhere, and on some innocent Saturday night, violent men could drop in like those tornadoes and turn those nice people into the dead stars of a Truman Capote book.

What a masterful sentence! Setting, culture, language, foreshadowing, and the metaphor: dead stars of a Truman Capote book.

The light of dead stars can be seen long after death.

Memories. Makes you think of In Cold Blood.

Pickard is the genius who thought up the CASTS formula: Conflict, Action, Senses, Turn, Surprise. I re-read her first chapter to find each component, and sure enough, they were all there. Conflict: Jody’s boyfriend, Red, loves her and she doesn’t love him, and her three bossy uncles are downstairs, and she’s in bed with Red, who works for them. Action: Jody and Red jump out of bed and into their clothes, and the three uncles, dressed in their Sunday best, enter her house. Senses: the smell of honeysuckle; tastes of mint and hot sauce; truck doors slamming; the feel of cowboy skin, all banged up, healed over, raw; sights of sky, furniture, uncles. Turn: the interruption in the day—Jody and Red making love and her three uncles showing up unexpectedly, wearing their best straw hats (Where have they been?) Surprise: the uncles tell Jody that the man sent to prison for killing her father, and maybe her mother twenty-three years ago, was let out of prison that morning. And that was only Chapter One.

As I mentioned last week, I attended a workshop called “Writing Masterful Scenes” at the Writers’ Institute in Wisconsin. The presentation began with advice to immerse the reader in the story and make him/her feel something. Presenters Garvin and Storm talked about conflict and tension. To make the reader feel the sensuality of a love scene or the breathtaking tension of a chase, the writer must either have known these states of being or be able to imagine them sufficiently to describe them in poetry or prose.

But do we want to unmask ourselves? Do we want to reveal that we know how it feels to make love or how it feels to be chased?

This leads me to share what I’ve learned in Neil Gaiman’s Master Class. Though not a regular reader of Gaiman’s fantasy genre, I’m always curious about the workings of the creative mind, and what better way to find out than to take a master class from someone like him!

Lesson Two partially focused on revealing oneself in stories, or as Gaiman put it, “walking down the street naked.” Since I sometimes write emotive poetry, I’ve experienced the shudder of putting into verse an experience so personal or painful that it is difficult to share. “My Guernica,” published in Let Us Be Raucous, is a deeply personal poem about the suicide and an attempted murder committed by my grandson, Gideon, while on drugs, and the death of another grandson, Matthew, who jumped off a viaduct. Both events occurred within a six-month period.

In the poem’s attribute, an excerpt from my diary, I asked, “Don’t these calamities happen to other people?” Not always. After recovering from the initial shock, I knew it had happened to my family and to me. Years later, I decided to write a poem about the tragedy.

Gaiman talks about cloaking truths in fairy tales. The truth for children in “Little Red Riding Hood,” and other fairy tales, is that you can’t trust everyone. When I decided to write about the boys’ deaths, I wrapped the horror of our family tragedy in Picasso’s painting “Guernica.” I conveyed our violent truth through Picasso’s truth about war and needless killings.

From the last two stanzas of “My Guernica”:

A three-eyed nurse says: Guernica has come.
Like the matador, my pretty grandsons are dead.
My daughter’s baby lips, which compared my breasts
to apples, now propped open like a guppy’s.
She will live. The bullet lodges near her left ear. 

I sit on a chair and howl.
This is written on newsprint, this telling. 

I walked naked down the street in this poem. Though I chose to tell this story through the conveyance of Picasso’s masterpiece, (one of my grandsons was a handsome Latino), I revealed my personal hell. I did sit on a chair and howl.