Child of Light

Madison Smartt Bell (Doubleday)

Madison Smartt Bell’s biography of Robert Stone is a comprehensive, detailed, and thoroughly researched account of the author’s life, from childhood to his death in 2015. The day-to-day, human side of Stone—often cited as one of the best American novelists of the 20th century—and his struggles with alcohol and drug addiction are revealed, as well as his perfectionism for the craft of writing. When Stone moved to Baltimore in 1993 to teach at the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, Bell, a novelist himself and an English professor at Goucher College, befriended him. His book offers glimpses of his memories of Stone, including trips they took together to Haiti, as well as summaries and reflections of each of Stone’s major works. It’s a must-read for Stone fans, and coinciding with the biography is the release of a collection of Stone essays, some of which have never before been published, titled The Eye You See With and edited by Bell.

Diary of a Death Doula: 25 Lessons the Dying Teach Us About the Afterlife

Debra Diamond (John Hunt Publishing)

As a death doula and psychic medium, Baltimore’s Debra Diamond has a unique perspective on what happens during the end-of-life period—which is colored a bit differently for each individual but entails many common experiences. While sitting bedside with people in hospice care, as Diamond explains in her book, she’s able to communicate telepathically with patients and “see” what the individual is seeing and feeling. Her descriptions are truly otherworldly—and also uplifting. She’s been shown repeatedly, for instance, that individuals are in a deep state of peace as they transition, though their bodies may signal otherwise, and they remain aware of their surroundings, though they may appear incognizant. Diamond’s 25 lessons make for a mesmerizing read, but they also serve as a practical, reassuring guide for those witnessing a loved one who’s near death. And, as one might suspect, in learning about the afterlife, we learn about life, too.

How did you come to write Robert Stone’s biography? Had an autobiography or biography ever come up in conversation with him?
I’d never talked to Bob about a biography, nor thought about it. I’d never written a biography of anyone living in my own time, although I’d done a couple of 18th-century figures—a very different undertaking. Also, Bob, till very near the end, was very determined to keep living and working. I think he bought himself a few more years, fighting off the dark angel as best he could.

Soon after his death, I wrote a little piece for the New Yorker website [about Bob]. I got a note of appreciation from Bob’s agent, Neil Olson, with the line “We need to find a biographer.” I forwarded that to my agent, Jane Gelfman, wondering if we were supposed to take that as a hint. Yes, indeed, Jane thought, so we began to explore the possibility.

Bob had died in January 2015, and my wife and I had a ticket to Key West to visit him and Janice [Stone’s wife]. I counted Janice a good friend at that time—we became much closer during the three years of making the book happen—and I knew I couldn’t do it without her. I knew I wouldn’t want to do it without her. She had not suggested it but had been amenable when I think probably Neil [Olson, Stone’s agent] floated the idea with her. I went to see her in Key West and said, “If we’re going to do this thing, I need to know how frank you want to be about two subjects: drugs and other women.” Janice is a very deliberate person, unafraid of silence. She thought for some time and finally said, “I think Bob would want the whole truth to be told. And I think that’s what I want, too.” So we began.

And how did The Eye You See With come about? I noticed some essays in it had been previously published and others had not. Did he leave behind a lot of unpublished work?
Bob died owing a third book on a three-book contract to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. It was supposed to have been a childhood memoir (damn, that would have been great!), but all he had of it was an essay about his middle teens—published in Architectural Digest, of all places. Before I showed up, there was a plan to substitute his collected or selected nonfiction in a volume to fill the contract.

Most of the work was previously published in some form somewhere; I think there are maybe three unpublished pieces in the volume, which I found in the archive Janice had created. Aggregating this material and reading it through made a difference to the writing of the biography, because it gave me, as it will give its audience, a different angle on Bob’s mind. Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal were probably the last literary writers to try to play the role of public intellectual to the hilt, but Bob did have a streak of that. He thought deeply, and commented incisively, about the way America was in the world of his time. His masterpiece novels emerged from that thinking. The Eye You See With makes a nice companion piece to the first volume of Stone’s fiction, which Library of America publishes in March.

As for unpublished writing he left, there’s a clutch of early short stories, to be classed as juvenilia probably, although they do indicate the strength of the writer Bob would become. Past that, there are several unfinished novels and one complete screenplay, Phosphorescence. About 50 pages of Off to Zamboanga (working title) will be published in Narrative Magazine.

There are a few pages of his Alaskan novel, working title Arcturus—I regret he didn’t finish that one. There are some larger pieces of a novel set in a rehab center, reflecting Bob’s late-life experience in such places. Most substantial is the 200 pages under the working title Charlie Manson’s Gold. Bob had taken the characters from his great short story “Helping,” extended the situation, and begun to connect it to a murderous West Coast cult. Strong stuff, it contains some powerful thematic material to which he never returned, and was far enough along, I wonder why he didn’t have the momentum to finish it. Janice once half-seriously suggested I might finish it. She might have been half-reading my mind then, too, but I kinda doubt I’ll do it.

What is the greatest piece of wisdom that you learned through your friendship with Bob?
Let’s just say “No man is a hero” and forget the valet. I entered my friendship with Bob with a totally worshipful attitude, mainly because of his work. When I got to know him well, and I think that would happen with almost any two people, I understood he wasn’t a demigod. He had tremendous weaknesses. In fact, I might say that his greatest strength—outside of the work—was fighting off those weaknesses for as long as he did. By the same token, there was a moment later when he began to admire me more than I could live up to, and I’m thinking no, no, no, you’re making a big mistake here.

Your introduction to him was his novel A Flag for Sunrise, and after reading it on a plane, you said you wanted to become the writer that he was. What was he doing that you hadn’t seen previous writers do?
Well, he was doing three things at once: telling a captivating story and bringing news about the way the real world is right now [while] combining both into a diamond-hard literary artifact. I also think his convergence structures are really cool.

How has his writing informed your own?
Ha, well, I like to think I’m so original as to be beyond influence, but in my second novel, my efforts to imitate Cormac McCarthy came out sounding a bit like Stone—go figure, but I thought, hey, okay. I have used those convergence structures. The editor of the biography, Gerry Howard, once said in a different context that I had the same ability to infuse an ordinary scene with an inscrutable energy—not in those words but I think that’s what he meant.

In a conversation with Bob, you realized that you’d been subconsciously writing “this stuff not so much to communicate it . . . but ultimately to be free of it.” What is your conscious motivation to write?
Very simply, to tell myself a story that engages me and maybe helps me understand something about the way the world is. With luck, maybe other people receive it the same way.

What do you think are the pros and cons of being married to another writer?
The other writer will understand the experience of what you’re doing, which is huge. In my youth, I knew a couple of wonderful women who would have devoted themselves wholly to me and my work; they scared me to death and I ran. I think I felt sure I would disappoint them, though I wasn’t very conscious of that at the time, nor of the fact, which unveils itself in hindsight, that I wanted to be married to a peer, intellectually and artistically. My great good fortune is that that’s what I got.

Behind the Moon

Madison Smartt Bell (City Lights Books) 

From the start of this novel, Madison Smartt Bell magically plays with your perception of reality. He weaves together narratives that read at times like honest declarations of facts and, at others, like hallucinations, challenging you to decide for yourself what you believe to be the truth. The central story involves Julie, a teenager who has skipped school and set off on a camping trip in the Badlands with her best friend and a group of boys. While fending off a drug-fueled assault, she falls down the shaft of an enormous cave, and as she hovers between life and death, she has encounters with the spirit world. At the same time, Marissa, Julie’s mother who placed her for adoption years before, feels mystically called to be at her daughter’s side, to help her back to consciousness. Bell—who co-founded the creative writing program at Goucher College, and is best known for his trilogy of novels based on the life of the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture—has an engrossing, seductive style that keeps you urgently turning the pages. When you’re finished reading, it feels like you’re waking from a dream.

See the full interview with writer Madison Smartt Bell.

Not Without
Our Laughter

Black Ladies Brunch Collective, edited by Celeste Doaks (Mason Jar Press) 

For three years, a group of black female poets has been meeting monthly over brunch to talk writing and life. Now, we get to see what those literary conversations have inspired. These six belletrists run the gamut of poetic style, which they unite by organizing their works into distinct categories. They ruminate on body politics, aging (“I have snored so loud I made friends weep for my next breath,” confesses Saida Agostini), misbehavior, music, food, and, of course, men (“He is hot fudge topping / dripping over shiny silver piping / of the Harley,” writes Celeste Doaks). There are more serious words, too, like in “#NotYourModelSurvivor” by Tafisha Edwards: “This morning I drank wine for breakfast / So / what I’m saying is / I have no encouraging words / to give you.” What makes the collection shine is the writers’ honesty as they enlighten the reader to the black female experience. Through their words, the reader gets the sense that they, too, are sitting and listening in at the brunch table. 

You’re best known for your trilogy of books about the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture, which is really different subject matter from this book. How did you come up with the idea?

Well, there actually is a connection. The first glimmer of an idea for Behind the Moon came from this Judith Thurman article in The New Yorker about the Chauvet caves. There’s some anthropologists that have a theory that cave paintings were part of prehistoric religious practice, the original shamanism. Some of the details reminded me of my experiences in the context of Haitian Vodou. I tend to fall back on that kind of stuff in Behind the Moon.

How did the idea evolve from there?

My previous novel The Color of Night had been rejected by my usual New York publisher, which perplexed me because I thought it was one of my best. About nine months went by where I didn’t know what was going to happen with that book, and then my New York editor changed his mind about it and published it anyway, which was nice. But during that gap, I was in the situation where I needed to write something, but I didn’t need to write to please anybody, so I thought I’d do something different, I’d do something strange and hopefully have a good time doing it. 

I rely a lot on unconscious processes and with this project maybe more so than most. Particularly the first movement had this thing going on where I found myself repeatedly fracturing the story line so episodes repeat with minor variations. Then the Marisa character appeared and she has a more conventional story line, and the parts with her in them are more realistic. Once she was in there, it hardened into an area of South Dakota. The upside of all of this, which I’ve really just started to understand from hearing people react to it, is there’s a non-linear process going on that’s in contention with the more linear story line. But that all happened kind of by accident. I didn’t do much planning for this one. 

I really appreciated the overall mood of the book.
One of the things I realized during the overall publication period—I was not conscious of this goal at the time—is not to describe the shamanic journey to readers but to have them actually experience that. So all the vagaries in the writing were toward that end. It’s a pleasant way to write. If you can write without thinking about what you’re doing too much, that’s the best way. 

I read an article in The New Yorker in which you talked said you put yourself in a trance to write. Is that still part of your method?
I honestly think that every writer does it, we just don’t necessarily think that’s what we’re doing. My wife and I were living in London in the early 1980s, and I went to a therapeutic hypnotist for some trivial cause. It was a really interesting experience. One part of me was saying, “Hey, this is cool, I could probably use this for teaching,” and the other part of me was experiencing it and thinking, “Wow, I didn’t know this was possible.” 

I thought it over afterward and I realized that writers try to get into a flow state where you’re writing easily, you’re not conscious of your material tools or craft knowledge, it just happens. It gets deployed automatically in the same way that musicians and athletes deploy their training automatically, and I think the mechanism for getting there is a kind of self-hypnosis through all the writerly rituals you hear about—the sharpening of pencils, writing in a certain place. Those basically are elements of the self-hypnotic induction.

Did you use that method when you were writing Behind the Moon?
It wasn’t so much that I thought, “Oh, I’m now going to do this.” I just realized I had always done it. I was a naturally committed daydreamer from the time I was a small child. Before I had this experience with hypnosis, I was trying to say to students, “I’m going to teach you craft, but the most important thing that can be taught is to enter the world you are writing about with your entire imagination. Once you can do that, describe what you’re experiencing and the whole thing becomes a lot easier.” 

You and your wife, poet Elizabeth Spires, have taught at Goucher College since 1984. How do you balance your own writing with your teaching?
The program has grown so much in the last few years. When my wife and I started it in the 1980s, there were a couple of courses and now we have this whole four-year program with about 60 students in it. A side effect of that is, though I used to teach everybody, now I get them typically in their third year so they’re all worked out and very committed and have some pretty good skill sets, so it’s really a luxurious teaching experience. 

For most of my teaching career, I’ve been able to say, “I’m going to write for two or three hours every morning and do whatever else I have to do after that.” I teach half time, since my wife and I split a single position at Goucher, so it’s not too arduous and probably more important than any of that, I am not one of those writers who feel drained by teaching. I’m actually able to take energy out of it and use it for my own projects. That’s a piece of good luck there. 

How has the Baltimore literary scene changed since you’ve started the program?
Having spent 25 years running around to readings and stuff like that, I don’t do too much of that any more. I’m an admirer of what Gregg Wilhelm and Jen Michalski do in terms of running reading series. And then the academic writing program at Johns Hopkins University—I think we can give them a run for their money at the undergraduate level, but at the graduate level, we’re not really doing what they do.

What can we expect to see next from you?
I have a novel that’s in submission right now, and then I have two contracts. One to do a biography of the late novelist Robert Stone. And then he actually owed a book to a publisher when he died, and they needed someone to curate that whole process, so I’m doing that on a second contract. I’m pretty busy. The unfortunate thing about that is I can’t really permit myself to write fiction until I’ve finished these project and I’m starting to get a little itchy about that. I’m on sabbatical this coming year and I hope to wrap both of them up in that amount of time.

When you start writing fiction again, do you already have ideas that you want to pursue, or do those come out once you start writing?
I do have a couple of projects that I had started before the Robert Stone stuff happened. One of them I might not go back to and one of them I probably will. 

Can you tell what it’s about?
A school shooting. It’s got the Columbine element in it. I created this imaginary place, a private school in this pocket between affluent neighborhoods that’s in the Rust Belt sector. The linchpin figure in this is a janitor who lives within the premises of the school who can go out the back gate to get to this other neighborhood, so he’s a person between two worlds. 

You could say that about Behind the Moon, too. The character Julie is literally caught between two worlds.
Yeah, I thought about calling it Girlfriend In a Coma, but that title was already taken.