Rasmenia

Soon.

“BROKEN ABROAD is a collection of stories about nine different Americans in Europe. They are not searching for traces of their ancestors. They’re searching for themselves, for the meaning of home and the road forward. A woman cuts the resemblance to her mother away from her flesh. A grieving sister tries to honor her twin brother, whose ashes she carries in her pocket. Survivors of a mass shooting find refuge in a fairy tale. These are stories of the lost, damaged and grief-stricken who have run far away from home, to another country, only to find that life and death will follow them everywhere.”

BROKEN ABROAD will be available some time in May. You will be able to download it on your shiny Kindle. You’ll be able to hold the dead-tree version in your fleshy hands. Of course, I will again be making signed copies available for sale right here, over on the Books tab.

As soon as I know more about availability, so will you.

I’ll be posting updates at all these fun places that you’d expect one to be shouting out bits of information.

Until then, it’s just nice to have you around. I’m always astonished to look up & see you there. So, thanks for that.

The reason we went to Buenos Aires had nothing at all to do with fun. It was all about work. Specifically, Olivier’s job. Occasionally, the company he works for sends people to Argentina, or puts some Argentinians on a plane for France. They’d sent Olivier to Buenos Aires for a week a couple of years ago, but I stayed home. It wasn’t a sad thing, since I had a BFF from back home visiting me.

About 6 months ago, Olivier was informed they’d be sending him again. But, this time I’d get to tag along & we decided to take an extra week just to spend time appreciating Argentina.

After our insanely shitty flight from Madrid, we arrived on a Sunday morning to find Buenos Aires calm & still half-asleep. After showers & a Burger King fix (give us a break – there’s no Burger King here, so we jump on it whenever we get the chance) we had a quick stroll, then drinks on the rooftop of our hotel with Olivier’s two coworkers, who we’d been traveling with.

We had a great view of the other rooftops from there.

We’d all noticed down on the street, in front of the hotel, these big yellow tourist buses that came & went every few minutes. You know the kind of buses I’m talking about — those big bastards you see in major cities that are always packed full of gawking, camera-wielding tourists on the roof.

Except, you know… when they’re completely empty.

All of us were so jet-lagged & so exhausted with a Sunday afternoon to burn. It was too hot outside to do much of anything — especially since the four of us had all just been in the midst of a cold, damp winter less than 24 hours ago. The 85° F temperature was a shock to our systems. The only sane thing to do was to drink on the rooftop of the hotel while we waited for the temperature to drop a little bit so that we could migrate from the hotel rooftop to a big bastard bus rooftop.

The 3-hour tour took us all around Buenos Aires. We put on the headphones & listened to the audio guide as we marveled at buildings with fancy facades, poor neighborhoods with cracked walls; murals, sculptures, monuments & parks. We saw crazy soccer fans hanging out of bus windows, shirtless & screaming. We saw people who reminded us of ourselves.

Uncanny.

The real excitement came from all of the tree branches hanging down low enough to smack us in the face as we gawked & pointed. I admit, we laughed hysterically & without mercy when the poor old man sitting in front of us (yep, that’s the back of his head in the photo) got the shit smacked out of him by a palm tree branch. Don’t worry — he was okay & the rest of us managed to hit the deck before it slapped us.

A 3-hour tour is long, even when there’s plenty to see, so around the 2 & a half hour mark, the four of us were getting a little bonkers. We started to lose our shit & became the loud, obnoxious laughing people on the tour.

“When is this ride ever going to end?”

“Where’s your headphones?”

“Fuck those headphones. I threw those off half an hour ago. Where are WE?”

“It’s getting cold. I’m going downstairs into the bus.”

“OH MY GAWD IT’S FREEZING DOWN THERE.”

“We’re trapped on the roof of this bus. HOLY FUCK BALLS WATCH OUT FOR THAT TREE BRANCH.”

We were cooped up & crazy. The wind picked up, blowing dust all over us. I licked my lips & they were coated with a layer of dust. My hair was blown into dreadlocks. My eyes, gritty with tiny rocks.

The next day, Olivier & his coworkers had to begin their work week. So how did I spend my days in Buenos Aires during their working hours? I spent them here.

Indeed, I locked myself up in this hotel room all day long with the “do not disturb” sign hanging from the door. Every morning I had my continental breakfast in the international business hotel with the three international business travelers I was with, then I put my ass on that little green stool & hunched over my iPad to write without the distractions of home. It was fucking excellent. That hotel room got a new story out of me, along with some progress on my novella.

Sometimes, Olivier would come pull me out of there for lunch, if he could get away & when he finished work in the evenings, we hit the street to meet up with the Argentinian coworkers. This is all a big blur of English, French & Spanish chatter sprinkled with techno music, laughter & generous quantities of Argentinian cerveza.

DAMN YOU! WHY MUST YOU BE SO DELICIOUS?

We did find some time to get together with our Argentinian friends & escape our working, writing mode for a while at el Museo del Bicentenario.

This is an excellent museum just next to the famous pink presidential palace in Buenos Aires & has only been open since May, 2011. First of all, museums are just cool… but this one is in a freaking archeological site. Specifically, an old fortress.

Before we knew it, the week had come & gone. Saturday morning, Olivier & I were on our own, back at the airport to catch a flight to Salta.

I was told there would be wine in Salta… & snow-capped mountains that would make a surly woman from Colorado feel whole again, so I couldn’t wait to get there. Also, I was promised there would be empanadas & I really, really wanted to eat a pile of empanadas. Even better if I could eat a pile of empanadas with a decent view of the Andes.

And that’s all I have to tell you for now. Later, I’ll tell you how amazing Salta is. I’ll tell you about the llamas & how my rigid forcefield of misanthropy was so easily penetrated by the many warm, smiling Argentinians I encountered who are somehow so… human.

“My characters are fictional. I get ideas from real people, sometimes, but my characters always exist only in my head.”  -S. E. Hinton

“Any writer’s work is a map of their psyche. You can really see what their concerns are, what their obsessions are, and what interests them.” -Kim Addonizio

“To ask an author who hopes to be a serious writer if his work is autobiographical is like asking a spider where he buys his thread. The spider gets his thread right out of his own guts, and that is where the author gets his writing.” -Robertson Davies

***

A few nights ago, Olivier, the cat & I were curled up in bed, enjoying our pre-sleep reading time. Me & Cat with a paperback; Olivier reading my latest short story published by an online literary journal.

When he finished, he turned to me & said, “Yeah, I know where you got that idea from.”

“What? No you don’t. I made it up.”

“Sure. Parts of it, but I recognize a few traits in the main character & the setting. I see the parts you didn’t make up.”

“How?”

He shrugged. “Probably because I already know so many of your real-life stories. Most of your fiction is a Frankenstory made from bits of your imagination stitched together with chunks of your experiences.”

I admit it. I’ve cannibalized people that I’ve encountered in my life. I’ve taken bits & pieces of one person, mixed them with another person & given them the physical appearance of another. Fragments of conversations & memorable incidents get thrown in. The character that appears in the story is something akin to my very own Frankenstein’s monster, all made up of stitched together scraps from various impressions that others have left on me.

For me personally, I try to stay away from putting an exact copy of a living person in one of my fictional stories – for several reasons.  But, other people have been known to do it – with great success.

Read any novel by Céline, Hemingway or Kerouac. Or Bukowski. Or John Fante. Or Tom Spanbauer & a million others. There’s truth & real life in their fiction. Sometimes, only the names have changed. The roman à clef has been around for hundreds of years.

Even some of the most famous & well-loved fictional characters were inspired by real people…

Without so many weird & fascinating real-life characters, we couldn’t have so many great fictional ones. So, from time to time, a writer must cannibalize. The title story of my short story collection, Human Detritus, is about this very thing.

It’s not only the fictional characters that are born from reality. It’s the places, too. Anyone who was hanging around me in the offline, real world from 2002-2003 will recognize the seedy apartment building from my stories Shit Water & Evan Fading. Not to mention the cities & landmarks in stories like A Moment in Montmartre.

This is what “write what you know” means. It doesn’t mean if you really know a lot about growing tomato plants & removing stubborn stains from boxer shorts that you should only write about a gardener who shits himself a lot. It means you need to open yourself; to rip yourself apart at the seams & pull out the stuffing. Extract the memories, emotions & experience. Examine the scars. The guilt. The anger & the hilarity.

It’s the reason why Harry Crews never wrote about slick Wall Street guys in New York City & why Bret Easton Ellis doesn’t tell many stories about skid-row types down south running dog fights.

So… what’s up with writers? Why do we think we’re so fucking special that our lives & our stories, our feelings & our experiences are worth telling?

Because we wrote this shit down. Really. It is that simple.

Okay, some people are better at writing shit down than others. Some have a greater imagination. That has something to do with it, too. However, in the end, the most significant difference is Those Who Grabbed a Pen vs. Those Who Didn’t.

But, why? Why the compulsion to invent stories based on our memory fragments & mind movies?

I can’t answer for all those other writers. I can tell you that for me, it’s an attempt to make sense of being alive. It’s capturing a fragment of human existence in a tiny shard of amber. It’s an exorcism. It’s taking an enormous shit to relieve myself of relentless stomach cramps.

It isn’t all about me, though. Once someone else reads it, it stops being about me. A reader brings their own shit into it & in many cases, reads something completely different than what I’ve written. Telling my truth under a fictional façade isn’t just about ripping myself open to show you all of my ugly & ridiculous insides. It’s about reaching a hand out to another person & saying, “Hey, fucked up things happen. People are capable of terrible things. Life is complicated & it hurts a lot, but we face it. We go through it & until we are pressed down into ashes & dust by the World, we will have proven that we can be so much more than fleeting flecks of goddamn nothing.”

Since Olivier is the very first person to see any of my work, before anyone in my critique group, before editing & way before publishing, he’s pretty much read everything I’ve written so far. So, when he told me he was able to see all the stitching, seams & knots on my Frankenstories, I began quizzing him about various stories I’d written to see if he really could spot the truth. The pieces of the real me hiding between the lines. He knows me better than anyone & is the best equipped to find me lurking anywhere.

“Well, what about the one I just finished that took place in Denmark?”

He nodded. “Yeah, I could see traces of a couple of people we met there. And my uncle.”

“Your uncle? That’s weird,” I said. “I wasn’t really thinking of your uncle when I wrote it.”

“Really? Huh.” He opened his book, pulled out the bookmark & turned his head away from me & toward his story about WWII. “Weird. I guess I brought him into it myself.”

“Yeah. I guess you did.”

***

“All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.” -Fellini