https://brianstumbaugh.substack.com

I’ll be posting any publishing news here on the stories page, though, and if anything major happens, well, I’m sure I’ll post here as well.

But for now…I’ll (hopefully) see you over on SubStack.

And I hoisted it on my shoulder and brought it this far. I have decided to not put it down, because you can’t really do that, can you? No, instead I have decided to handle it in the best way I know how: I am going to write.

The start of a school year brings with it the promise of new starts, new challenges, new obstacles. Also, new successes and new positive memories. As I chug through my twenty-ninth year of teaching (yes, I am old), I can’t help but look to it all to provide the leverage I need to carry all of my stuff and still thrive. So here I am, loving my classes, generating new class material, working with new colleagues, and actually thinking about writing. Which is a start. Not a finish, mind you, I realize that, but still a start, something unheard of around here for the last nine months.

I’m a sucker for optimism.

This post is proof positive that I’m trying to shake off the cobwebs and exercise the atrophied writing muscles. That’s why I posted the photo of the playdough figurine my wife made during one of our recent sculpting sessions with the grandchildren: it’s all about creation. It’s essential. Richard Wilbur says it best in “The Writer,” one of my favorite poems (one I teach every year). The narrator, a father, is listening to his daughter alone in her room as she types a story. He says, in the third stanza:

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

He goes on to equate her journey with a long sea voyage, and then connects it to a memory he has of a sparrow that was once trapped in the house, and how they watched it repeatedly daash itself against closed windows until it picked the right window and escaped, bloody but alive. What a metaphor, right? But what really gets me (every year) is, in the last stanza, how he brings it back to writing, and just how important it really is. He states:

It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.

I know that feeling. And I need to remember (don’t we all?), that creating is essential for some of us. Whether it’s taking pictures, creating videos from drones, painting, writing, or sculpting playdough, it is a matter of life and death. And life is too short. Let’s get to it.

It will be infinitely more of a challenge to overcome for some in my family, I know this, and I don’t want to downplay it. But for me it’s just simple enough of a gesture to start the keys up again, to recognize that, for me, the answer is a keystroke away.

Woo hoo!

Of course, I’ve been on break for ten days, so it’s only natural that I’m rested and recharged (as much as I could rest and recharge after the shitshow of a year we just slogged through), and therefore writing a post is only natural. But I haven’t been doing it. My last post before my last post (last week) was November of 2019, in which I proclaimed a new start to my writing and creative output. Rookie mistake. I should know better than to proclaim that I’m turning over a new leaf before I’ve actually turned it over.

But, inevitably, New years come with new thoughts, new goals, and new ideas. I’ve set some workflow transitions in place— got a new computer for Christmas— and have some new story ideas percolating, so I’m optimistic of the direction 2021 is taking.

New Computer

The first big change is that I received a new computer for Christmas. My MacBook Air was over six years old and struggling with the demands of Google Meets and online learning, so I bit the bullet and went full tablet. The iPad Pro 12.9” was a great call, as all of my daily computing needs (so far) can be handled on this beast of a machine. I even took to drawing a bit, even though I am admittedly no artist. The tree I did on ProCreate is the cover image for this post. Be kind, I’m learning!

New Stories

With the end of the year came a flurry of new ideas. This is not uncommon. But I’ve outlined a few new stories, written some chapter notes for a longer story, and, overall, feel generally optimistic about the whole endeavor. That’s a bright spot for me, because, like others, writing was actually really hard for me in the pandemic. I empathize with all of the writers I follow on Twitter who bemoaned the pressures they felt to create during a time of national panic because I, too, felt completely blocked. And when I did eventually get to sending stuff out in late July, well, those, weren’t my best efforts. Which showed in the flurry of rejections that have been coming home to roost this month. Sigh.

But I’m hoping that with a new start I can get the writing practice under control and really build towards a habit— that’s all I really want. The rest, they say, will take care of itself.

So here’s to 2021. May it be filled with joy and change and wonder.

And lots of good writing.

So goodbye, 2020. It’s been, well, surreal.

As I, like many of the other rough beasts out there, slouch towards our proverbial Bethlehems to be born, I started thinking about what possible good points, positive takeaways, we could all salvage from this dreadful dumpster fire of a year. And I came up with a few personal wins, but also a few dreadful losses.

Starting with the negatives, well, my list runs pretty much to varying degrees like most people’s: the awfulness of lockdown (thank you, Covid), the fear for personal safety (again, thank you Covid), the loss of regular routines (ditto), to name just the high, er, lowlights. And while I can safely say that I am luckier than most when it comes to lockdown partners, it still is true that eight months of togetherness can stress even the most rock solid of relationships. While we both frequently say how fortunate we are to have had each other while going through a global pandemic, my wife and I both agree, too, that we have not handled 2020 as well as we could have. While some friends have exercised, studied new interests, read new authors, explored new hobbies, and learned new cuisines, we — like most people, I’m pretty sure– have decidedly gone in a different direction. We have settled into a decidedly miasmic funk that has permeated and, not ironically, completely annihilated our drives to do the things that we really felt defined us as individuals and as a couple. In short, lots of Netflix, less personal activities that elicit wonderful personal gains.

I’m looking at you biking, hiking, and exercising. I know you’re hiding out there somewhere.

My hope is that 2021 will bring with it a new outlook, a fresh start, one free from the constraints of a deadly global virus. I don’t mean that I think all of the ingrained bad habits that have formed this year will miraculously disappear. Rather, I’m really hoping that I can muster the strength to reverse some of the damage that I’ve incurred, and with the reversal get back on a good, healthy path.

Not that I want to throw out ALL of 2020. Some very good things have brightened the darkness. I won’t start in about the brightening political landscape in the US; I’ll just sit back and continue breathing my long sighs of relief and continue hoping that we will all be on a more even keel from here on out. I won’t even talk about the development and distribution of a vaccine for the Coronavirus. That’s a massive positive. Instead, I’m choosing to focus on the uptick in writerly discipline I have been experiencing as of late. More time on task, more devotion to the stories that are queing up in my head, and rising confidence that what I want to say has value and is worth saying. It has been a rough year, no doubt. I’ve garnered more rejections this year than in recent memory, and some have been hard to take (primarily because I really love the story that keeps getting rejected–which has only made me double my effort to edit it– a win), but the glimmer of hope is that I’m committed to keeping on toiling away at the thing that intrinsically makes me who I am.

And while a deepening devotion to my craft is a definite source of hope, my biggest, shiniest moment has got to be the birth of my grandson, Colin. My daughter’s pregnancy has given me lots to worry about in this disease ridden year, but the early birth (not too early; right on time for him, actually, even though his due date was two weeks after his arrival) of my fourth grandchild has been the brightest spot, the best Christmas gift, and the most miraculous turn around I could hope for in all of this direness.

And that is what I will take away as the biggest win of the year. New blood in the family can only revitalize us, give us new and wonderful things to look forward to. Vacations, holidays, family dinners– all in a post-Covid, vaccinated world– all will take on new sheen, new hopes, and deepen the love we all have for each other.

That, I guess, is my Christmas wish here in the waning days of 2020. Goodbye, begrimed and miserable year; hello and welcome to hope, all decked out in its shiny new duds. We all missed you, and need you, desperately.

I’m not sure what I will produce, but I thought I’d say hey and let the world know that I’m still here. The website was down for about six months (a long, boring story that I seem to have told before), but is now back up and live. I’m trying to piece together some of the missing photos that seemingly were lost in the move, but that’s proven difficult, so I went ahead and started to post again.

And post I will. Starting now.

The one major mishap I’ve had recently occurred last week. I was logging into my website when, to my surprise, my password simply failed to work. I was stunned. I’d been logging in to check my site for years, and I am fanatical about keeping track of my passwords whenever they change, so this really kind of rocked my world. I tried every variation I could think of, yes, even with the capital letters and special characters. The more I tried, the more I was rejected, the more frantic I became. It had to be this version. No, maybe it was this one. Could it be this one from 1992? But all the time I was doing this I had the sneaky suspicion that it wasn’t me, that I hadn’t forgotten such an important thing.

Then it hit me…maybe I’ve been hacked.

I mean, why not? My site is, after all, a hotbed of e-commerce and radical foment. Who wouldn’t want to peek under the hood of something this controversial and mine it for all it’s worth?

Yeah, I know. Right. I reached that same conclusion, but hey, you never know. People get hacked all the time, and it’s often for far less compelling reasons than the ones I have listed. It didn’t make me feel any better, though, once I got it through my head that this site is probably no hacker’s Holy Grail, that I still couldn’t access my site. I had people to reach. Thoughts to expunge. Oratory to orate. What was I to do?

I admit I didn’t want to, but what I did next I felt was absolutely necessary. I contacted my hosting company. They gave me some pretty honking good advice, too, that included changing the password via cPanel, a sort of backend dashboard for your site. Which would have been fine and dandy had the instructions not included navigating to a place called phpMyAdmin, clicking on a tree of folders, then making edits to the wp_users folder, all of which needed to happen in the least user friendly interface for non-programmers I have ever seen. It kind of reminded me of my UNIX days when I stumbled around a mainframe and pretended that I actually knew what I was doing, all the while praying I wouldn’t bring the whole college computer system down with one errant keystroke. Frustrated, I begged my ISP tech gurus to reset the password, which they happily did.

And here I am writing on my blog again, good old Ozymandias trying to keep it straight that the world I create online is way more fragile than I’d like to think it is. The tech world may present us with a smiling, warm facade most of the time, replete with the illusion of security and solidity, but underneath that softly glowing exterior lurks a complicated, confusing, unforgiving code monster. One wrong move under the hood and the wheels will most assuredly come off (I wonder how many metaphors I can throw in here?). One mistake can bring it all down and grind it to a halt.

It’s kind of like the tower of Legos I was building with my granddaughter the last time she came for a visit. No, really, it is, trust me. I used lots of blocks, made the tower really high, and I balanced it perfectly. But when she knocked it over– I just knew she was going to, she had that look in her eye that two year olds get when they’re ready to unleash the chaos on you– it all came tumbling down. Our tech worlds are like that. We pile high the layers of connectedness in our digital lives– social media, blogs, work accounts, GMail, spreadsheets, the works– but when something as unforeseen as the loss of a password rears its ugly head, the whole tower comes crashing down. It’s just that simple.

I have no real message to impart here, no words of wisdom gleaned from the experience. I know I didn’t forget my password, and I still question how I ended up being locked out. Maybe I will pursue it. Maybe I won’t. Like you, I’m really busy with all of the other ephemera of life. What I do know, or I should say what has been confirmed for me, is that despite the illusion of control, I really don’t have much. Things happen, and, yes, we can safeguard against them by saving passwords and backing up data, but the tower is still shaky, still vulnerable despite our best efforts.

One misplaced brick is all it takes and down they all come.

Stay safe, my friends, and keep track of your passwords!

If April is the cruelest month, then February is the grayest. Or so I thought. After two trips this winter, one south and one, believe it or not, north, I have come to the conclusion that upstate New York may indeed be the geographic oddity I have been claiming it to be for the last thirty years. As in, the sun doesn’t shine on those of us who choose to call the capitol of New York home. As in, while others may bask in the brilliance of the winter sun, those of us in this world north of Manhattan simply must bundle up, toss our Ray Bans aside for a few months, and resolve ourselves to the fact that the grayness is here and here alone.

But I get ahead of myself. Allow me to review my travels this winter, and perhaps this will shed some light on the whole gray, upstate thing. We started in late January, my wife and I flying south to visit our daughter in sunny central Florida. We stayed in Orlando, and although it wasn’t as warm the week we were there as it was forecasted to be the week later, it still had our Siberian homeland beat by, believe it or not, seventy degrees in heat. What passed as chilly for Floridians, and, yes, there were many who commented on the unseasonably cold temps, we viewed as downright balmy. We even wore shorts and tee shirts on our last day there. But beyond the heat, the real kicker was the sun. The old Vitamin D machine really got us cooking and probably rejuvenated the already waning stores of sun-kissed happiness that our New York summer and fall provided. No sun burn, but lots of warm glows. It really is no surprise why people who retire in New York go to Florida in winter.

But then we came home and had two weeks of lock solid gunmetal skies before we departed for the Great White North. Two weeks of intermittent snow, sleet, rain, thaw, slush, and icicles before we joined my brother-in-law and sister-in-law for a quick excursion to Montreal. Four days within the borders of our friendly northern neighbors. And, yes, it was cold. Kind of. In reality, it wasn’t really colder than upstate New York, although we originally feared the worst and packed accordingly. What really got us was the unforeseen revelation that, despite its location in land of the Mounties way up yonder, it was sunny.

Now you have to understand that we came loaded for polar bear- pardon the expression- with our parkas and ski jackets, gloves, and scarves, and yes, it was cold. But the Canadians do it right. Montreal’s extensive underground allowed us to travel with just sweatshirts and sneakers, and I really do think we could have stayed underground for the entire trip and never once braved the outside world. But the sun, the glorious sun, beckoned to us, and we opted often to walk the fifteen minutes from our hotel (the Bonaventure- highly recommended) to Old Montreal’s many breweries, museums, and tourist attractions. It just felt right.

But it left me wondering, as we made our way down the Northway on our way home, why Montreal wasn’t gray, like Albany? I mean, I can understand Florida being sunny, it is the “Sunshine State” after all, but why wasn’t this city, so alike in age and geography to my own city, also alike in it’s silvery patina? Why wasn’t the great northern grayness universal?

I suppose I could look into the science behind it. I’m sure that it has something to do with the mountain ranges and local river configuration. Geography and magnetic lines of force, maybe. But I don’t think I will pursue the Earth Science. I think, instead, I’m just going to allow myself the wild idea that Albany truly should be renamed Gray-bany. That to live here is to be able to hunker down and sustain yourself when the sky is washed clean of all color and the stores of natural light have been drained. That it somehow makes us stronger, but certainly not happier; it seems that people in other spots are, again with a pun, sunnier than us. I’ll live with this notion of my hometown as a proving ground for the seasonally affected, that if you can make it here in winter you can make it anywhere. I’ll even put a little chip, albeit an ice chip, on my shoulder and flaunt it in front of all of those warm weather seekers.

But I’ll also remember that when I retire in nine years- the financial gods willing- I, too, will seek out the sun in January, February, and March. I love my hometown, but, come on, we all need a little sunshine.

PS- today, in the face of a high wind warning that ripped through the area and downed power lines, it seems that the sun made a grand entrance. Funny, it seemed as if the wind scrubbed the skies clean and cleared out the clutter for the sun to shine through. For a brief moment I reconsidered publishing this piece, then the frigid wind whipped outside my window, misty snow became airborne, the power went out, and I lost all the doubts I had.

Story #9 has been published! I had my ninth story, “Threat of Rain,” published in Adelaide Literary Magazine, both on their website and in their December 2018 print issue. I’m really excited about this story being published for many reasons, but the one reason that is the most surprising is the theme of this post.

Pack rat is a term that applies, I think, to most writers. We keep everything. Bits of writing are no exception here. I have notebooks and folders dating back to the eighties, all filled with scraps of things I felt were important and relevant and, most importantly, good. I am not unique in this. Every now and then I’ll take out an old notebook or dig through a file on my Mac and peruse the old entries. Granted, most of the writing is the equivalent of writing practice, thank you Natalie Goldberg, but every now and then a real gem pops up.

That’s what happened with “Threat of Rain.” This story was a brief sketch, one of three connected vignettes I planned to put together to form a longer story. It never went anywhere, and two of the three stories are predictable and cliched. The third, after an extensive editing session, became the published story that is in Adelaide magazine. It underwent some serious retooling, too, to become a story that focuses on the relationship between the husband and wife, as opposed to the teenage daughter’s problems. It’s a tighter story. A better story. But that’s what editing is all about: reworking a draft, stripping it down to its bare essence if necessary. And all because the scraps of writing were still around.

So being a pack rat works for me. All of those little tidbits of prose are sitting there waiting for me to pluck them, a fertile bed of possible story pieces. I’ll keep looking at them. That’s where #9 came from, after all.

Thanksgiving in New Hampshire was then, like it is now, a warm, family-centered event. We gathered and ate and laughed and, during that early visit, spent lots of time getting to know each others’ adult lives. We talked late into the night, played board games, and basked in all of the togetherness that is still a hallmark of our family gatherings. The next afternoon we headed over to Steve’s childhood house, Eleonore and John delighted to see us, having invited us over for a meet and greet so they could get to know the people that had only recently then come into her son’s life.

We all went on that brisk post-Turkey day Friday, driving the five minutes across Merrimack and down the tree-lined street that Stephen grew up on, the fallen leaves blanketing the pavement and gathering in front yards in vibrant piles. We pulled in the driveway, a small caravan full of bundled up New Yorkers, clambered up the front walk, and rang the doorbell. She greeted us at the door with a big hello, and then ushered us into their warm and inviting home. Warm lights beat back the November chill in the front room, illuminated the overflowing book shelves and picture laced walls. John played host to my parents, serving drinks and making smalltalk in the kitchen, while Eleonore led me on a guided tour of her literary life, walking me through the first floor collection of books and literary souvenirs she had accumulated from a lifetime of reading. She apparently had been given the heads up that I was an English major that had just started his teaching career, so I’m sure she sensed a kindred spirit, much like the connection she had with her son. She led me from shelf to shelf, pulling books out and asking my opinion of each. She really put me to the test, peppering her questions with quick wit and, at times, laugh out loud commentary on the books. It was exhausting, but in the good way that only a really solid conversation about books can be.

And then we got to the Pepys diary. Nine leather bound volumes, weighty, thick, and imposing.

The thing that struck me so quickly was that she really loved Samuel Pepys. For those of you that don’t know who Pepys was- well, that’s most of us- join the club. He was a seventeenth century British bureaucrat that had a penchant for the “lived” life- new experiences that only cosmopolitan London could offer. He drank deeply from the well of life, so to speak, and, better yet, he wrote about it in his diary. And she loved it. Was conversant in it. She showed me the nine books she had on her book shelf, pulling volumes off and excitedly talking about entries. She knew it cold. In that moment I realized that my whole visit to their home was a tour through a literate and intellectual mind., one that was sharp and had a level of curiosity about literature I had not encountered outside of the collegiate classroom. I would only later find out from Stephen that she was fluent in numerous languages, but that really came as no surprise.

What was most striking about the visit, this brief moment in time that has become so indelible to me, was that I learned such a valuable lesson. I was in my mid-twenties, fresh out of graduate school with a still shimmering Master’s Degree in English. I had spent the early part of my twenties immersed in literature, and predominantly British literature, and, despite the fact that I was teaching middle school English, still felt pretty good about where I was as an intellectual. Heck, I had even toyed with the idea of going back for a PhD., a path which, thankfully, never materialized. So to walk into someone’s house and be schooled in my own field, well, that was humbling. I couldn’t quite place the feeling I had in the pit of my stomach that night, but now I can identify it as the feeling you get when you recognize that you aren’t the expert you feel you are, even in your own perceived area of expertise. English major or not, I didn’t know anything really about the work of literature that my cousin’s mother was so casually and enthusiastically chatting up.

And she was excited, make no mistake here. Happy to chat with a new person, one who liked to read. She, I think, was looking to see what insight I could give on the subject she really loved, but, sadly, I had none to give. When she figured that out, which was very quickly, she put the diary back on the shelf, smiled, and moved on with the tour of the house. She was magnanimous and lovely and welcoming, and we all had a great time. We left soon to return to Sue and Steve’s house for turkey sandwiches and a round of karaoke (which has become a tradition for us at Thanksgiving and probably needs its own post to fully explain!).

As an English major, I had only peripherally heard of Pepys, his diary being a brief entry in one of the huge Norton Anthologies I lugged around as an undergraduate. And even then my knowledge of the man really was limited to that minuscule bit of biographical data inscribed at the beginning of a few sample diary entries. I couldn’t really tell you anything that was in the diary specifically. Still can’t. I couldn’t really even list a humorous anecdote from its pages. And I haven’t really had the urge to pick it up, either. No, the lesson I learned had a lot to do with me recognizing that people can and will surprise you all the time. Young, old, white collar, blue collar, it doesn’t really matter. People of all stripes will surprise you with their knowledge, their expertise, their hidden caches of unexpected information. It doesn’t matter that you’re taken by surprise by any of these, really. What matters is that you are open to the surprise, the joy, that accompanies learning something from someone that you hadn’t expected to learn from.

We all have our proclivities, our areas of expertise that we curate and grow. Rather than shutting people off because they aren’t what I expect them to be, I try to stay open-minded and willing to learn from anybody. I can’t tell you how many students have taught me things over the years, and I’d like to think that this early lesson in humility I was given in New Hampshire on that chilly Thanksgiving weekend helped me become the teacher I am today, even if I still haven’t read Pepys’ diary.

I think of Eleonore now, at her passing, and thank her for that beautiful lesson. She was a wonderful lady, full of life and joy and wit and intelligence. They say as long as people think of you you are never truly gone, and, if that’s the case, then she will live on forever in the lesson of humility she gave to me. It has served me well.

I’ve been thinking a lot about making scenes.

Not that I do that in public often, but I sure do it a lot when I’m writing. So to clarify, I’m talking about the scenes writers craft when telling a story, not the fracas or tumult that can result when people behave badly in public, although , come to think of it, the latter often ends up the fodder for the former. No, I’ve been ruminating on the difference between scene and story, and how the fact that I sometimes confuse the two leads to endless problems with the internal workings of my stories.

Scenes are the building blocks of stories. Successful stories string together scenes that, when read in the order the writer delivers them on the page, build to deliver a certain effect in the reader. Sometimes the writer can mess with the order- that often happens- but the underlying effect is still the same. The problem is when one scene takes center stage and forgets that it is one of a chain of scenes working together. When a scene becomes a prima donna, well, the story ends up failing on some level.

I suffer from this malady. I’m pretty good at developing good, dramatic scenes. What I sometimes fail to do is recognize that one scene doth not a story make. Case in point: my story “Blackbird” was built around a central scene of a woman jumping off of a yacht and swimming in the ocean. Trust me, it was way more dramatic than that single sentence, but the truth is that I fell in love with that scene. The story progressed, but the central scene was still the most developed of all in the story, and that was a problem. The supporting scenes didn’t lead up to this climactic scene. In fact, the scene in question wasn’t even the climax of the story. It’s a problem I’m still working out, in fact, and I suspect that, until I do, “Blackbird” will not be published.

A success story. My story “What You Wish For” is a flash piece built around the central scene of the protagonist relieving himself in a bathroom after an ill thought out tryst. The bathroom scene is built up to with only one other scene to support it, that of the two lovers grabbing a beer in the dimly lit kitchen. The regret of the character tied in nicely with the fact that he could ruminate on the mistake he has just made as he urinates. Ruminates as he urinates. Ha. But the point is that the story was strengthened by the scene. It fit nicely into the structure of the piece. Flash pieces, by nature of their brevity, lend themselves to this foregrounding of scene. The scene may be the thing for flash fiction, but those scenes have the even greater task of carrying the whole, or nearly the whole, story within their parameters. Tricky business, that, and not everything I aspire to write is under 1,000 words.

Solutions aren’t easy. I’ve been trying to work more on outlining. I’ve been working on developing a process like the one Kris Loomis outlined in her Writing Cooperative article “Between Plotting and First Drafting.” I’ve looked into Scrivener’s cork board features. The bottom line, though, is that the process and the tools only matter if I can get my head around building a more complete story, which is where I’m struggling. And maybe the answer is just going back to the basics and really foregrounding what the story is about, taking time to think things through, and drafting the heck out of the story once it’s there. Which sounds pretty logical, right?

Writing is a process, after all. When I look at the stories that I have had published, I can see that I instinctually built scenes that added up to the whole. But there have been many more stories that didn’t get published- which is natural- and when I actually study them I can see that they lack the build up of scenes. So it all comes down to translating the instinct into the practice, creating the habit of foregrounding the effect of the story before writing it. And yes, once that is done, then revising the right scene or scenes so they add to the impact of the story can happen fluidly.

I’m banking on it. Tuesday starts a new school year, and, hopefully, a new writing habit for me. I’m ready to start making scenes.