Proofreading and Second Chances

It has never yet happened that, reading proofs, I haven't found some dreadful if trifling error--often after 20 or 30 error-free pages, when I was beginning to wonder whether the task was, indeed, worthwhile. But there it will be, the third i in the middle of a word, the second however in a row. No matter how many times I've reread, revised, and corrected the manuscript. Is correcting proofs worth my time? Yes. Always.

I've just been correcting the proofs for Trafalgar, Angélica Gorodsicher's novel-in-stories. Sure enough, there were a few things to fix.    

Lisa Carter, in a recent post on her blog Intralingo, offers 3 Reasons to Review Galleys and Proofs. One of these is learning from the editor. The copyeditor for Trafalgar didn't make too many big changes, but there were several pointed questions (third cup of coffee? two pages ago, he ordered his fifth) I was glad to resolve. Not to mention a slew of commas I should have put in to begin with.

It's hard to read the same text again, and again, and still imagine one is reading with fresh eyes. But some months had passed since I'd last looked at the manuscript, and by forcing myself to read slowly, as if I didn't yet know the stories, I caught a number of errors (an excess letter here, an omitted  "  there) that I would have hated to see in the final, printed book. 

And, though this might seem to contradict that "fresh eyes" aspiration, this time around I also found it was fun to revisit the translation process, to remember conversations about particular points, questions I'd had, discarded solutions. I was lucky enough to meet with the author regularly while I was in Rosario, working on the translation. Reviewing the proofs was like a mini mental visit.

Finally, at a couple of points, there were still translation issues to be wrestled with, in particular a paragraph in which I found I'd omitted the verb. I read it a couple of times before I saw what was missing. The passage didn't quite make sense, but was that because I had mistranslated it, or because something odd was happening in the original? One of the challenges in translation is the need to convey the points at which the author is experimenting or playing with the source language. Maybe there was never a verb to lose. . .  

But there was. And, once I'd retrieved it, it wasn't immediately clear how to incorporate that verb into the English sentence, a long catalog that needed to accumulate and pile up and intermingle without too much interruption. Appropriately enough, the chapter in question is titled "Mr. Chaos." 

I came up with a satisfactory solution. I think. If I reread the proofs again tomorrow, there might be other things I'd want to change. But that's the case with any writing, translation no more nor less than fiction or poetry or criticism. That last-ditch chance at correction is another reason to read proofs: it's not quite as scary (though also not as thrilling) as opening the cover of the published book. There's still time.

Thanks to Small Beer Press for including this translator in the process and giving me the chance to go over the manuscript one more time. 

The Observer in the Frame

We spent the last days of August backpacking in the Three Sisters Wilderness, one of my favorite places on earth. Camped on a mini-ridge above Camp Lake, we watched the moon rise--fast!--and then the sunset and then, just barely (hurling myself out of the tent toward the pink glow, tangled in tent flaps and sleeping children and boots that wouldn't find my feet) the sunrise. Pink, and then bright yellow light, and then sharp shadows. And lots of photographs.

Two images from that trip in particular seem to focus my current revision preoccupations.  

I have been amply persuaded that the manuscript I'm working on (a novel I had fondly believed was finished, and beautiful, and ready to greet the world) is in need of major revision. I even have some ideas about the form that revision will take. But I'm caught between planning the revision--mapping out what I intend to do--and just jumping in. And how much will be enough--is it a matter of cutting or of adding, or more properly of replacing? It's a question, too, of framing and motivation: I know what the story is, but why is the narrator telling it? And just how far should the territory of that story extend?

Sunrise, then, above the lake, trying to arrest its different colors against the trees, and finding my own shadow contaminating the frame. Lean back, then, lean away, move the camera a bit. . . until I thought, here's my point of view picture, the narrator just off stage. But not all the way off. Whether visible or not, choosing what to include.

Framing the story just right is part of the problem. There isn't a story without a frame, something to give it shape--beginning, ending, even words trailing off at the end of the page or when the ink runs out, a de facto border, no less real for being accidental.

Other times the borders of story or observation become less and less clear. Heading up the hill above Demaris Lake, I almost walked into this spider and its home. And here's the story again, but the frame's disappearing, the web that barely shows up once I have the spider well in focus.

I don't know what kind of spider it is. That's one of the story's unknowns.

Revision Detours

The beginning

Directions were meant to be changed.

   One definition of a detour, from the OED on line:  A turning or deviation from the direct road; a roundabout or circuitous way, course, or proceeding. That's certainly the kind of trip described in Detours. 

"Detour" can also describe the revision process. Revision often means reaching the intended destination by an unexpected route. It means keeping the end in sight while allowing for change, serendipity, or that harsh-sounding alternative, deviation. As if there were a clearly marked path that must be followed without fail; deviation brings punishment (shades of Little Red Riding Hood). 

Go back!

Try again.

   Revision might be avoidance: skip the pothole, the puddle, the flagger ahead, the expected delay--a roundabout evasion that can be a time-saver, or just the opposite. 

Diverge, converge, diverge

   But destination is another of those fungible categories. To a point. Rewriting, reworking a piece can be a means to a different end. It can be a long and complicated route back to the beginning, trying to say what I thought I knew I was saying all along, or a circuitous route that leads somewhere else--a longcut, not a shortcut, to a place I didn't initially understand I needed to go. 

Are we there yet?

Go left. No, right. Go another way.

     As I've been collecting detour signs, I've noticed the designers of those alternate routes are revising as well. Maybe not quite making it up as they go along, but reconsidering, reusing. Stockpiling against future need. There are models everywhere of ways to write, ways to think. As the traffic engineers responsibly recycle last project's sign, I might joyfully find a place in this poem for the glowing line that wouldn't fit in the last. 

Summer possibilities

Past or future route?

Here, again, is one of my favorite detour signs, an evident work in progress: 

"Path" may have been "route"? Ahead or behind? This way or that?

Detours can be ordered from Burnside Review Press. 

Microclimates

Running in an unfamiliar neighborhood, I passed a house, back up against the park, with a banana and two palm trees in the yard. Three blocks later, two more palm trees. It was raining hard, but not cold--around 60 degrees, gray sky offsetting the heavy June greens. For a moment, I was somewhere tropical, on a beach, maybe, or just before a real storm. A couple more blocks and yet another palm had pride of place in a full-on Victorian Eden poised to lure susceptible travelers into a B&B. It was a small palm beside a huge house, three or four stories, gables and gingerbread and tastefully bright purples and blues, easily twice the size of any house nearby, defining its own private world on a street of modest homes--a world with a lily pond and a cast bronze heron and that out of place palm tree next to the dogwood (still in bloom).

Either I'd found a little-known local torrid zone, or palms don't grow only where I think they grow. Or gardeners are out at night with felt blankets and smudge pots and buckets of horticultural love. Making their own weather within the invisible borders of those garden rooms.

There were Frisbee golfers in the park that afternoon as well. I felt a little foolish out there, ready to explain to inquisitive passersby that I needed to run and this was when I had time to do it; oddly enough, no one asked. Not because they were all safe inside. I crossed paths with people hauling groceries in flimsy plastic bags and man on a tippy bicycle loaded down with returnable bottles and cans. I didn't ask them, either--they needed food/cash and this was when they could get it. They had the course all to themselves. 

Sometimes you just need to get out of the house. Sometimes it's all in what you notice. It wasn't an unusually rainy afternoon, not for this climate. The palms weren't the towering coconut palms of fantasy white sand beaches, but they weren't planted last week. But so what if they were there all along, if only I'd bothered to look? It's the looking a different way this time--whatever the reason--that can redefine a landscape.

It's raining again today. I'm inside, looking out, revising and reordering and plodding through mental weather. No soggy socks, no silent explanations to strangers on the street. My garden has no palm trees. Dogwood, rhododendron, vine maple, cedar, an aging Ponderosa pine. Weeds. But maybe it's warmer than it looks from here.

Some River Twice

Because it's not the same river, right? But it's a river all the same--another river, or the same pebbled bank on a different day, or the same water, further down stream.

I recently participated in a writing workshop with Gary Soto--even better, I went as my daughter's guest; a workshop spot was part of her winnings in a local writing contest. One prompt asked us to write about a river journey, point A to point B: what do you see?

Iguazú turtles (with bird)

I see the Red Cedar River, Mother's Day in Michigan and hot, our first big spring outing of the year. Just being outside, doing something outside: that's my mother's present. 

We're old enough to paddle two canoes--one kid, one parent each--up from the university rental dock. The turtles are out, the spring pollen is itchy, but here's the rub of memory: what I remember most are the turtles, baking their shells to summer hardness on logs or rocks, and the four of us in our hollow aluminum logs, burning rather than basking, because who remembers sunscreen, the second week in May? But were the turtles really out, so early in the year? I'm brought up short. 

We canoed later on in summer--maybe that's the source of my persistent memory of turtles. I can't think of the river without them. The scents I remember are the sweet sneezy haze of spring and the mildewed sigh of the orange lifejackets, also from the rental barn, last summer's damp that never dried out drawing a still underlayer to the spring heat smell, the drying mud.

Swimming near Wheatland Ferry

I haven't been on the Michigan State campus in years; I don't know if the canoe rental's still in place. But that was the first river that came to mind, like a slide flashing up on a wall of the library conference room. No need to elbow aside other, more recent rivers. They weren't even overlaid, one image crossing another. But now that I'm thinking about rivers, I'll list a few more: several times a week, I run beside the grandiosely-named Amazon Creek. That's not a river, I know. Once the rains really stop for summer, it will be scarcely be a creek. But the water's cloudy as milky tea after a storm, it sloshes against its banks, tempts nesting ducks. Point A to point B, I'm on the towpath, not navigating, but the watercourse suggests a route. Then there's swimming with my son near the ferry docks further north, or watching the fast, empty cereal ships cruising up the Paraná. Most recent basking turtles: just above Iguazú Falls in November. I was even there with my mother. 

I pulled out my little workshop notebook (more treats, more prizes), looking to retrieve that first river version. Like any revisited, reopened manuscript, it's a little different than I remembered. Some images are clearer, others are vague. It's a river all right, but it's not the same one. Still, it's what I have to work with. I'll just dip in a toe--over here, where the murk starts to clear with the current.

Happy Mother's Day!

Imaginary Weather (running and writing)

I have gone back to a draft of a story that takes place on a hot day. A really hot day. 

Today is not a hot day, not where I live, and it is taking a strenuous effort to muscle my imagination anywhere near air shimmering over asphalt, t-shirts sweaty around necklines, glare that makes you squint. Anything more inventive than the clichéd sizzle of eggs on the pavement.

If I want to sweat today, I have to run. If I run, under (or over) the sweatiness, I will be cold. Not freeze-your-eyelashes-together cold (thank goodness I no longer live in that climate) but throat-stinging cold, tug-my-fleece-beanie-a-little-lower-on-my-ears cold. Most of all, mud puddle cold. Only in the winter is the much vaunted ventilation of my running shoes really evident. The air goes right through them, along with the water when I inevitably misjudge as solid one of the floating islands that decorate the jogging-trail-cum-mud-wallow where we crazies congregate. Kind of the local variation on mad dogs and Englishmen, here where there's not much midday sun this time of year.

So, I'm going to run (because it clears my head even if it sogs my toes) and I'm going to try, flexing my leg muscles, to push that mental muscle back toward that hot afternoon when my story is supposed to start, the heat that is somehow motivating to my character (how? when has she ever experienced heat that would make you choose? where does she live, anyway?). 

I know that more than a few of my brilliant insights-while-running are lost among the woodchips before I get home--how else to explain the recalcitrance of certain drafts that stubbornly resist revision? So I don't run too fast, hoping any laggard inspiration might have the chance to catch me up before I round the bend. But as a plan, a run right now seems more promising than one more sunny-side-up stuck on the metal bus stop bench in my little urban desert that refuses, today, to be more than a mirage.