THE MORNING NEWS

I told my Advanced Comp class

last night that if I couldn't read upside down, if I didn't eavesdrop in restaurants, I might have very little to write about.

There are, I think, two kinds of writers - those who think the story is about themselves, and those who think the story is about those around them. I am of this latter. Even when I tell my own story, it is always The Story of Us - ordinary folks in their ordinary lives out here in the great middle.

Partly I want to tell our little stories because so few others are telling them. How often do we see anything on television or in the movies that even remotely resembles our lives? Not often. The same story set in New York City or the south of France could get attention; but these stories of ours, coming out of the great empty middleness, are of little interest to those who are more "cosmopolitan" than we are. There are none so provincial as those who dismiss us as regional.

There is joy to be found in the little places in our lives, these small interstices between dream and reality, in the gap between reach and grasp. That's true whether you're wearing oxfords, or steel-toed work shoes, or cowboy boots.

Currently my students are working on their short pieces of memoir. Each of them needs to tell me a bit of his personal story, or hers; yet I reminded them they need to find in it and to tease out of it those strands which connect their own stories to the story of the rest of us. This is subtle work; slapped-on morals are not what I'm talking about. There are themes of universal interest to be found here, in these small moments from our lives, whether the great arbiters of cultural taste can believe that or not. All great writing is local in the extreme. Good memoir is myth in a very personal disguise.

"We're not even done writing our memoirs and you're already telling us about what we need to do for the profile pieces!" the students exclaimed last night, for I seem to be making their lives more stressful. The profile is a wonderful exercise for a developing writer: in writing it we have to understand and relate someone else's story. The task is not so simple as re-arranging the details of our own lives: we must step out of ourselves and into the shoes of someone else - into oxfords or steel-toed work shoes or cowboy boots that don't belong to us. As we talked about the profile during class, a student concluded that she should profile one of the school's janitors. "What's his story?" she wants to know. This is where the leap to universal truth is made, in this moment of reaching for understanding.

I know already what my gravestone will say: it will read: "Tom Montag, Minor Regional Poet." I'm okay with that. I will proudly wear the label that is meant to dismiss and marginalize my writing, because I know better. Those who would consign me to the Minor Regional Bin in the Great Poetry Store, why most of them don't know pig shit from shinola, and hence as far as I'm concerned anything they say is diminished in measure equal to their ignorance.

Oh, let me predict there will be a great rising up of the dismissed and unappreciated writers, the neglected and the marginalized: as a result of shifts in publishing technology, the monolithic system which blesses and approves writers will crumble, and all these neglected scribes will blossom like a million flowers in the fields. Literature is being wrestled away from the money-changers. "If it was any good, it would make money" will be seen for the lie it is.

Admittedly the same shifts in technology will allow a lot of crap to issue forth, but I'm confident that the cream will rise, that good writing will find its audience unmediated by those who would be the cultural king-makers. That's progress, as far as I'm concerned.

And for the developing writer, the journey towards the new audience starts with the sentence she is working on right now. I hope to help my students with those sentences, the ones each of them was put here to write. I want to show them that the stuff of literature is to be found here, right here, if we observe closely, if we listen carefully, if we value these small moments that make us human.

Comments

[Peter]

I'm already enjoying some of the flowers in your own field: Saturday's poets here.

The "Great Poetry Store" -- I'll keep that phrase around to induce vomiting when necessary.

[Tom Montag]

Thanks, Peter. Yes, the "Saturday's Poem" poets are one example. The writing at the collaborative blog Qarrtsiluni is surely another example. And between us I'm sure we could name several blogs we know about where literature is getting done. And that's just a start.

Yep, the Great Poetry Store: it's set up a lot like one of those discount record places with bins for everything - "Bluegrass With Dobro" here and "Bluegrass Without Dobro" over there, and "New Grass" in this bin and "Old and In the Way" in that one. You've seen those stores. Indeed they induce vomiting.

[Dave]

"There are none so provincial as those who dismiss us as regional."
What a great way to put it!

[beth]

You know I am with you on this subject, Tom. Beautifully put. Like you, I'm hopeful about new technologies breaking the monolithic hold that publishers have had over who gets read. Already this is happening, slowly, and the local author has the chance to broaden his or her audience and get the books and poems out there - and be encouraged enough to keep writing.

[Tom Montag]

Thanks, Beth. You know, every day I see more and more evidence of it. How else would I have found out about Rebecca C.'s West Virginia place blog. And then find out she lived down the road from and went to school with my double-first cousins is SW Iowa?? Amazing!