There was an old woman. I was quite young and green to the ways of the world. She looked like she might be a homeless person wandering about the mall in her shabby topcoat and unkept, mop-like gray hair. But she wanted to read something serious, she said, and this was in my bookstore clerk days, long before I managed to climb an ivy tower and teach eager acolytes and write books that appeared in stores.
I steered her away from Romance to Literary Fiction. She seemed cowed by the immense wall of novels by the greats. She picked a book off the shelf – Dickens, maybe. Or Austen. I never really knew for sure. She held the book delicately, as though it burst into flames or just dissolve into dust in her hands.
She said she didn’t know what was good and I admit that I had to suppress a smirk and turn my head to a side to hide what I have come to regret over the years: a casual sense of superiority – like that self-destructive fool Anders in the Tobias Wolff story.
Then the book appeared to grow heavy in her hand, and she shifted it to the other and back again, and I slipped it from her grasp and shelved it. She appeared relieved. Whichever great tome it was, it was certainly a heavy, thick book. Perhaps it was Pynchon, where literature is metered by the metric ton.
I judged (misjudged) her as paperback material, and so we strolled down the aisle, and I surveyed what we had: Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty, and all sorts of gems, but I didn’t sense (arrogantly assumed) they were for her. I dared not toss the molasses of James Joyce at her.
She said she just wanted to pass the time. She thought reading was the way to go. I rubbed my chin absently with a thumb and surveyed the shelf. Looking back, I suspect it may have just been random, no real logic behind it: when I raised my hand to see what it held, I saw it was Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet, and I handed it to her.
The paperback seemed the right weight for her, and she hefted it and smiled. She said she would take it but turned back on the way to the register and asked if it was any good. I told her it was absolutely superb, perhaps groundbreaking and all that. She frowned slightly and looked a little uneasy, but nodded and paid for the book.
That bookstore isn’t even there anymore, all these decades later. I’m in another town, far away, at a blueblood university, my own books behind me on a shelf. I think of that woman and wish time was as malleable as Einstein suggested, and I could go back and apologize to her.
And I still have not read Mr. Sammler’s Planet.
My stories have appeared in Alligator Juniper, Arkansas Review, I-70 Review, Litro Magazine, Adelaide Literary Magazine, FictionWeek, New Plains Journal. Westchester Review, Flashpoint!, Black River Syllabary, Verdad, Palooka, Hektoen International, Potomac Review, Home Planet News, SORTES, The Zodiac Review, Literary Heist, Evening Street Press & Review, Two Thirds North, JONAH Magazine, Press Pause, El Portal, Shark Reef, Cholla Needles, The Waiting Room, Burningword Literary Journal, Your Impossible Voice, Litbop, Flare Journal, Fictional Café, Deep Wild, Wrath Bearing Tree, and Johnny America.
I’m the author of six published novels. My novel The Armageddon Two-Step, winner of a Book Excellence Award, was released in December 2019. My novel Well Deserved won the 2008 Sol Books Prose Series Prize and my novel Not Famous Anymore garnered a support grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation in 2009. My novel Exile on Kalamazoo Street was released in 2013 and I have co-authored the stage version. My novel The Canary, which reveals the final days of Amelia Earhart, was released in 2011. King Biscuit, my Young Adult novel, was released in 2012. I am the winner of the 2005 Alligator Juniper Fiction Prize and 2005 The Writers Place Award for Fiction.
I earned a MFA in English in 1996 from Western Michigan University, where I was a Phi Kappa Phi National Honor Society scholar (3.93 GPA). I was also a fiction editor for Third Coast, the WMU literary magazine. At WMU, I studied with MacArthur Fellow Stuart Dybek, Writer in Residence at Northwestern University, and John Smolens, former head of the MFA program at Northern Michigan University. I earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Illinois, where I studied with Flannery O’Connor Award winner Daniel Curley. For ten years, I was a staff writer for newspapers in Arizona and Illinois.