Barnes County Query Letter Sent

Three years after starting the novel, and a year after finishing it, I sent out the first query letter for Barnes County to an agent. As much as I know that writing is a business, and that the only way to get published is to submit, there is still so much anxiety tangled up in that process. It is not simply the business-end of an artistic process; it is the act of throwing the work out into the world for criticism and comment. Though that may be the point of writing, expression, there is always so much to worry about.

I've certainly sent my share of short story submissions (not enough, certainly), but this was my first query letter. I didn't realize just how hard it would be to distill 90,000 words into something short and coherent. Especially Barnes County with its many points of view and interwoven stories. Here, though are the central paragraphs of the query:

When Terry Stegman, a beloved female sheriff’s deputy of rural Barnes County, Missouri, is killed by a meth dealer, the men around her must find a way to go forward, to adjust, and set a new course.

Though Terry’s killer is injured and jailed, Sam Summers, a big-city transplant, friend, and fellow deputy whose feelings for Terry may have been something stronger than friendship, is on the hunt for why the killer murdered two others that day. Aging Barnes County Sheriff Bill Wallis is suffering through the break-up of his marriage, the changes taking place in the county, and the growing distance from his teenage son. Terry’s hired man and close companion after her husband’s death, Franklin Redbird quickly falls into drinking and trouble. Logan Wallis, the sheriff’s misfit son, outcast because of his public profile and rebellious appearance, meets a romantic interest, but when she winds up in trouble, he seeks a violent vengeance. A recent immigrant to the county, Harlan Lustig quickly falls in with a dangerous meth cook and, after learning the trade himself, seeks to usurp him. Their stories meet, mix, mingle, and collide among the back roads and abandoned farmhouses of the fictional Barnes County in Southern Missouri.

While there are elements in the novel of mystery and suspense, Barnes County, at 90,000 words, is a story of people in flux, how they struggle to find the right way, and how some fail at it.


While I don't know that this really gets to all of it, all of the conflict and tension, all of the psychological inquiry, I think this might get someone interested.


Dropping the envelope into the box was a relief. I'm happy to have done it and have it out there. Now comes the anxiety about how it will be received.

Book Review: The Humbling

The Humbling by Philip Roth

If Simon Axler's loss of confidence in his acting ability is meant as a projection of Philip Roth's loss of confidence in his writing ability, then The Humbling should stand as an excellent example of it. The novel comes off more as a sketch of book, as if he'd written it as an outline of a more developed novel that was still to come.

This is a novel of man in crisis, and though we spend a fair number of pages in the thin book dealing directly with the subject, the book wanders into Axler's new relationship. This relationship, with the lesbian daughter of old friends, is at times cruel and superficial. Their scenes together, when not involving sex, are cursory. One scene, the parents' confrontation with the daughter, is simply told in dialogue from the daughter to Axler. Where the reader may have benefited from actually being there in what may end being a pivotal scene, Roth treats it as unimportant. And so when things change in the novel, we don't have a reason to care.

This is a disappointing novel by one of America's great novelists. Maybe Roth is writing too much these days. A book a year might be a pace that doesn't make for good novels.

Poetry Resurrection

I miss poetry.

Last week, I stopped in the downtown Tattered Cover Bookstore to look at some poetry. Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency

Destroy yourself, if you don’t know!

It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you’ve set. It's like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.

Inspired by AMC’s Mad Men to take a closer look. But standing there, reading the words, the poems jagged edges pleasing to my eye, I realized how much I miss poetry.

For the last two years, there’s been no time for poetry. Barely any time for fiction. And even before that, I’d neglected it. There was a time when I read a lot of poetry, devoured it, wrote it, read it at poetry readings, published it. I turned them into songs. I even used to send out a poem each week to a long list of email contacts. I haven’t written a new poem in probably ten years. Even in the MFA program, I stuck with the fiction writers. You kinda got the feeling you’d better not go trying to play in the poets’ sandbox.

So now, writing again after two years off in the EMBA program, I feel it might be time to reconnect with poetry. I really want to shake up my use of language, to be inspired to take chances, to not go for the obvious word choice, to seek out unique metaphor, to see things again from a poets perspective. So I pulled down from my shelves Carolyn Forché

You recognize strangers,
think you lived through destruction.
You can’t explain this night, my face, your memory.

You want to know what I know?
Your own hands are lying.
“Taking Off My Clothes”

Sylvia Plath

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars.
Inside the church, the saints will be all blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness—blackness and silence.
“The Moon and the Yew Tree”

Not the poets I know well. I went to the library, checked out Theodore Roethke

Is pain a promise? I was schooled in pain,
And found out all I could of all desire;
I weep for what I’m like when I’m alone
In the deep center of the voice and fire.

I know the motion of the deepest stone.
Each one’s himself, yet each one’s everyone.
“The Sententious Man”

Denise Levertov

From the tawny light
from the rainy nights
from the imagination finding
itself and more than itself
alone and more than alone
at the bottom
of the well where the moon lives
“Everything that Acts Is Actual”

Li-Young Lee

And one day, when I need
to tell myself something intelligent
about love,

I’ll close my eyes
and recall this room and everything in it:
My body is estrangement.
This desire, perfection.
Your closed eyes my extinction.
“This Room and Everything in It”

We all should more poetry in our lives. At least I know I should.

Another Dissent of the FOMC Statement?

With the meeting of the FOMC starting today, there seems to be a great deal of uncertainty about what the Fed statement will say. I’m pretty certain that there will be no change in the target rate (with the “extended period” statement remaining), the comments about the economy will be dour (but not likely strong enough to drive the market dramatically downward), and they will reiterate that they are prepared to take whatever measures are necessary as conditions warrant. The real question for me is whether Kansas City Fed Chief Thomas Hoenig will continue to dissent. For the last year or more of Fed statements, Hoenig has insisted that the Fed should be raising the target rate in order stave off inflation or the creation of another housing bubble. The facts, though, continue to point away from his fears. In fact, many are now suggesting that there is a greater risk of deflation than inflation in the near term.

I would like to see him drop his dissent. Bernanke runs a more democratic Fed and is willing to support the differences of opinion, but a dissent now will only add to the uncertainty. Investors, not just fed-watchers, are looking for something definitive out of the FOMC. They’re not likely to get it, but a dissent now, at this inflection point, would leave them questioning the statement in its entirety. It’s not a matter of differences of opinion on how to chart the course of recovery; the concern now is slipping backwards. Saying that we need to raise rates in the face of the current economic conditions isn’t going to add any much-needed stability.

Book Review: A Gate at the Stairs

A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

Sometimes I like a novel that spends much of its time wandering through the mind of its protagonist. A Gate at the Stairs is, in fact, very good at doing that, making simple scenes stretch long as each bit of dialogue or slight action sets the main character off on a new tangent of thought. Plot, itself, shouldn't suffer. And it does here, with surprises that arrive without set up, with dead ends and changes of pace that doom the novel.

Centered around a college student who takes a job caring for the newly adopted part-African-American baby of a flighty restaurant owner and her absent husband, the novel carries us close to the mind of Tassie Keltjin, the narrator. Tassie is from the country and out of place in the college town, not a bumpkin but naive. She makes a good narrator because everything she sees in new, and as she gets swept up in this new family we want to urge her to be careful.

Not only does the plot stumble, but Moore also seems to miss opportunities to make the story richer. There are tensions surrounding the child's race, and there is discussions around it. But just discussions. No conclusions seem to be reached, no revelation or resolve of any sort. Other, secondary story lines, suffer similar fates. Then when the main storyline is interrupted by a surprise, the story just falls apart, finally wandering to conclusion many, many pages later.

It's generally not a good sign, when I want to be done with a novel just to be done with it. That was the case here.