foxtales

Poems and Prose by Tim Fox

  • A Poem A Day

    What would happen, I wonder,
    If I wrote a poem a day for, like, a year–
    Would it just become one of those things I do,
    Every day,
    Only to survive?

    Like feeding the cats in the morning,
    their crunchy food and treats,
    George hopping onto the window sill for his,
    And then their meat at night, rank on the kitchen floor–
    Martha slinking around the corner for hers, sneaky.

    Or like shaving, a daily ritual for me–
    The feel of a smooth, clean face looking back from the glass,
    Smelling of water and soap and shaving cream
    Before I find myself in the shower, again,
    Rinsing yesterday’s known off to allow today’s evolving mystery.

    Would it change me? Make me better? Smarter?
    More centered? More focused? More myself?
    Or would it just be one of the many things I do without thinking–
    Breathing. Dreaming. Eating. Living. Aging.
    Lying awake at night to think, “Yeah, that was fun …”

    And how would I prepare for such a feat?
    By finally reading the Cohen that’s been on my nightstand for years,
    Or the slim copy of Howl or the thicker Leaves of Grass,
    Both picked up browsing in a used book store,
    Waiting for ballet class to end.

    And what if I tried to do it but failed to do it, even once–
    Would it become another took for the devil of my mind,
    Probing me and pricking me and pocking me with regrets,
    Like running and swimming and eating my vegetables,
    Now turned as soft and mushy as I sometimes see myself?

    Well, I think, it’s like I always say–
    When faced with the choice of doing something or doing nothing,
    It’s always better to do something.
    And the line between the doing and preparing and regretting will erode,
    Revealing the unity of all our evolving.

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  • Journalism

    Like most writers, I keep a journal. And like most people who keep journals, I’m not sure why.

    My earliest journals are from my seventh-grade religion class. Our teacher, Brother Tom, had us keep them. For most of my friends it was a chore, but the promise of performance and praise touched me. Brother Tom was my captive audience, and my journals were his favorite. I knew this because he would often say so in his comments, which I looked forward to like nothing else every week.

    I haven’t gotten rid of many of my journals, though I have gotten rid of some. I remember cutting pages and pages of them up into thin strips in high school. Then mixing up the strips and putting them in separate trash cans. Too embarrassing, I guess, though I’m not sure what could have been so embarrassing at that age. Or how it could be more embarrassing than anything I’ve done or thought since.

    But I’ve kept more than I’ve destroyed, and it’s a fairly unbroken record from 1978 to . . . well, to last week, I guess. And again, I’m not sure why I do this. I’m not sure why I carefully note not only the date but also the time of day. I’m not sure who, if anyone, will ever read them. I rarely do.

    Sometimes I go back and look in specific journals if I’m trying to reconstruct a fading memory. Remembering who that girl was I did that thing with that time by that place, stuff like that. But usually they just sit in a filing cabinet.

    The other day, out of curiosity, I randomly picked one out and started reading it. And it may be the beginning of understanding why I keep a journal.

    ome excerpts from the fall of 2013:

    9-30-13, 1:41 p.m. How I am feeling: icky. I feel violated by the carpet guy & his mystery 100 ft2. I feel stupid because I said “Nutmeg” instead of “Gingerbread.” I am tired. I am always tired; I could always sleep. What is wrong with me?

    10-3-13, 5ish. Starbucks, Webster Groves, ballet night. I did go to work & get Law Daily out but then went home to sleep. I was so tired. Woke up around 11:30 or so, feeling guilty for not being at work—so I started doing laundry & did laundry all day.

    10-8-13, 10:39 a.m. Why am I so tired every day. Depression? I sleep fine, go to bed around 10:30, up at 5:30, drink coffee. Today I also splurged on a cup @ McDonald’s so I’ve had 3 & still barely holding my pen up as my mind starts to drift again. So tired.

    11-10-13, 8:53 p.m. A quiet Sunday night. Kate & El are watching a movie in our bed; I will sleep in Kate’s room. I am so lonely. I was alone tonight. Kate had her end of year soccer party. I didn’t go.

    11-14-13, 4:02 p.m. Why does she stay with me? I’m not just worthless, I’m a strain, an expense. I should be written off like a bad debt. WORTHLESS.

    12-4-13, 3:44 p.m. I need validation. I need to feel good. I need to stop doubting myself.

    These entries could have been written three years ago. Or last year. Or this afternoon. Yet even in 2013, amidst all the fatigue and loneliness, I was doing a lot. I had a full-time job. I had a family. I was editing a book. I was learning just enough about Carl Jung to allow me to review a book called Art and the Relic Cult of St. Antoninus in Renaissance Florence for the Jung Journal. I was thinking through my own book project, a memoir of growing up in St. Joseph, Missouri. And I was apparently making a second full-time job of beating myself up for not doing any of this fast enough, well enough, consistently enough.

    The value of these journals may be that they illustrate the workings of the productive depressive’s mind. The fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual lists nine types of depression. The one that comes closest to mine is persistent depressive disorder, or dysthymia. However, it doesn’t quite fit.

    One article states, “People with dysthymia often find it difficult to be ‘upbeat,’ even during good times. They might be perceived as gloomy, pessimistic, or a complainer.”[1] This is not how anyone would describe me, except maybe my closest family members—and anyone who might ever read my journals.

    I imagine that someone will read my journals, someday, and they will look at everything I have done, and they will think of how I presented to them, and they will wonder, “How can this be the same person?”

    It’s a good question. Even today, I am a hyper achiever. Again, on top of a full-time job, I am writing two books, editing a magazine, editing a book, consulting for a bank, editing for training company, reading Proust, and fantasizing about things I may never do—the Jungian analysis of John Lydon/Johnny Rotten, the memoir project, the lines of poetry lying around . . .

    And yet, most days . . . life? Yeah, OK, if I must. Whatever. Then I go about filling my day with lists and activities and presenting myself positively, always ready to cheer someone else or make a joke, often at my own expense—and I work, work, work.

    My solace now is that I have the journals to contrast how I feel to what I have done—a physical counter to the ongoing weight of worthlessness and failure. It’s the mystery of me, and of the 3.8 million dysthymiacs in the U.S. I am better than I was in 2013, or 2007, or 1983, and yes, I am in therapy, and I have been since I turned 18. Therapy helps. Exercise helps. Getting older helps. Perspective helps.

    Passages like this from the 2013 journal also help. It is one of a handful, scattered here and there, in which I finally break away from the day-to-day recitation of fatigue and loneliness and caffeine—places where the sky cracks open before the clouds roll back in:

    10-12-13, 11:35 p.m. OK, so forget all that other shit I’ve written over the past 35 years. Seeing Judy Collins in concert has made me want to dedicate my life & writing to finding the truth—that magical hole that can open in time & space, the perfect moment captured like a fly in amber. The pain, the cold, dark pain,. . . . Transcendence, the fog of your breath shading Orion’s belt on a freezing Christmas Eve night in Ellsworth KS ca. 1970 something. “Everything dies, that’s a fact but maybe everything that dies one day comes back.”

    [1] Katie Hurley, LCSW, “Persistent Depressive Disorder (Dysthymia),” https://www.psycom.net/depression.central.dysthymia.html

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  • Too Good to Last

    Tom Petty, who died last year, wrote two of my favorite lines of 1970s rock ‘n’ roll: “Two cars parked on the overpass/rocks hit the water like broken glass.”

    At various times I’ve tried to unravel why those two lines have lodged in my head . The first line is great because there is so much that could be behind it. Parked on an overpass. Why? What’s happening? Make-out session, knife fight, accident, throwing-up drunk? The second is great because it combines, in seven words, imagery that is both aural and visual, creating not just an unforgettable scene for the listener but a scene that is unforgettable for the song’s character.

    It occurred to me this week that my obsession with writing memoir is, as I’ve written before, not just about remembering the good old days, but about capturing events that can never be again, and that in their never-can-be-againess, have their painful poignancy and power.

    One mysterious example for me: I’m 10 or 11 years old, walking home from school. It’s a sunny afternoon, late winter, and it’s warmer than it’s been–above freezing, maybe for the first time in weeks. There is still some snow on the ground, but it’s melting, slushy on the grass and sidewalks. I look down to see where water had been frozen along the curb, but it’s melted underneath now, and I can see through the remaining ice the water flowing underneath, and I can hear it, too. It is beautiful and promising; winter is ending, spring is coming. Not quite an olive branch carried by a dove on the 40th day of the flood, but something like that. And that image–the sun glistening off the ice, the cold water rushing underneath, the feel of cold and warmth and change in the air, all at the same time–it sticks with me. When I think about it long enough even now, 40 years later, it still seems fresh and hopeful and sad.

    Ice shatters. Glass shatters. Waves splash. Rocks fall. A ker-plunk and a splash and concentric waves fading at the edges.

    I see myself now, standing in my rubber boots, book bag in hand, looking at the crystal-clear ice with the water flowing underneath, hearing the gurgle of it, the air fresh and cold–today I think, what wonders am I missing around me now? What is there, still in my past, that will never be again exactly as it was? And how can I capture it with just words so that others can see them, hear them, feel them?

     

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  • Disordered

     

    I like my face shaved
    I like my head caved in
    I don’t like Kool-Aid
    I like my beer and gin

    I like to wander
    sometime I don’t know where
    I never ponder
    because I just don’t care

    where you may end up
    now that your fun is gone
    where you might show up
    when you might hear this tune

    we had a good thing
    but now it’s gone away
    we had to break up
    that night I chose to stay

    under your covers
    you liked the night light on
    but now it’s over
    and I just have this song

    to tell you goodbye
    I don’t know where you’ll go
    but you’ll remember
    that time we saw the show

    about the vessel
    that was trapped undersea
    you had to walk out
    instead of lean on me

    I like my face shaved
    I like my head caved
    in I don’t like Kool-Aid
    I like my beer and gin

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  • Life, Unqualified

    Selfie-portrait with Kate, Summer 2015

    As a writer, qualifiers are useful. Words and phrases like “usually,” “almost always,” or “mostly” buy room for the likelihood that a statement will not always be true.

    Last night, as I often do, I was journaling about my failings of the day. Usually at the end of such an entry I’ll write, “What’s wrong with me?” But for some reason last night, I decided to write “What’s right with me?” instead. And I started a list.

    But as I wrote, I found myself wanting to qualify everything. “I am usually a survivor.” “I am a somewhat successful writer.” “I am starting to let go of the past.” And I thought: what if I wrote without the qualifiers?

    So I started writing flat-out statements. “I am generous.” “I am forgiving.” “I don’t hold grudges.” “I’m a great dad.”

    The shift was palpable. Without the qualifiers, the statements felt empowering. Writing them was empowering. Life without qualifiers felt good.

    I am. Period.

     

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  • Chase the Dragon: The Uses and Misuses of Memoir

    We build our lives on lies.

    The stories we tell about our pasts are just that–stories. We either ignore the bad and romanticize the good or we ignore the good and exploit the bad. Either way, the result is less than truth.

    If I wrote my memoir in the traditional vein, I would write about an idyllic, small-city, Midwestern life of growing up near a creek, catching crawdads in the summer, skating on the ice in my white rubber boots in the winter, climbing mulberry trees and putting the fruit in my cereal, playing hide-and-seek in the evening as the fireflies started popping until mom yelled from the back porch to come inside, playing with fireworks, riding bikes with no helmet, wandering the woods and the parks and the streets unaccompanied, with abandon.

    All of these things happened.

    The problem is, these things happened for many kids in my neighborhood. According to memes and accounts from friends on Facebook decrying the loss of the good old days, these things happened for many of them, too.

    But it’s not all that happened. It’s never all that happened.

    Such memoir is not bad, but it’s not useful. Maybe it’s even dangerous. Living in a post-truth world, where the cultural relativism of the postmodern era has come full-circle to mean not the acknowledgment of others’ realities but the denial of any reality, idyllic tales of the past lead to unhealthy comparisons between our current state and a past that never fully existed.

    Thus, “Make America Great Again.”

    The political is also personal. When we as individuals compare our current lives with a romanticized past, we shut out the possibility of learning from what we have lived to face the reality of our current existence. We cannot move forward by saying that our lives will never be as good as they were, because they were never all good in the first place. Ever.

    This is the beginning of an emotional journey. I know the market is flooded with memoir. Most memoir like what I have described ends up in people’s drawers after writing workshops. Most of what gets published is in the second vein–exploiting, for lack of a better word, childhood abuse and trauma, because that is important and needs to be exposed and acknowledged and validated, but also because that is what the market rewards.

    My vision is to write memoir that includes the good with the bad; memoir that leads to lessons for the present, not nostalgia for the past. My hope is that others will read it and be inspired to see their own pasts more clearly so that they may live their own lives more fully.

    And so I begin.

     

     

     

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  • Write About Now

    My first job as a paid writer was with the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s student newspaper. I wrote for the arts section. Album reviews. Exhibit reviews. An interview with the new head of the dance program. My cult classic “MTV Hell.”

    img_1903

    The editor of the arts section was a very serious older student named Frank. I had no car, so when Frank wanted me to review an art exhibit  off campus, he offered to give me a ride on his motorcycle.

    Frank roared up in front of the dorm. I climbed on the back of the bike.

    “Where’s you notebook?” he asked.

    “I didn’t bring one.”

    “Pen?”

    “No.”

    “Never go anywhere without something to write with and something to write on,” he growled. And away we went.

    So began my education as a writer.

    At several points during the past 20-some years of being paid to write in one form or another, students or their parents have asked for my advice about how to earn a living as a writer. Frank’s advice is a good place to start, but I have learned some other things over the years that might be useful for people who are interested in writing as a career.

    If you’re not one of those people, you can just read “MTV Hell” and move on. But if you are interested, here are some things I have learned.

    • Call yourself a writer and introduce yourself as one.
    • Never turn down an opportunity to write. Especially if someone is willing to pay you. Anything. Anything at all. Just do it.
    • If you don’t have an opportunity to write, create one. Almost everybody has a website or blog to feed.
    • If something is boring, find a way to make it not boring. Metaphor, simile, pointing out how an unfamiliar thing is a lot like a familiar thing–find a way to make it interesting.
    • Word counts matter. Deadlines matter more.
    • Knowing nothing about topic is not a reason to avoid writing about it; it’s the reason to write about it.
    • Finally, in school, let your instructors know who you are through your writing.

     

     

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  • Keep On Rockin’ in the Joe Town

    In the late 1970s, my hometown of St. Joseph, Missouri, was a hotbed of pop music criticism.

    Bibens Neil Young

    The reason was two young reporters at the St. Joseph News-Press and Gazette, Conrad Bibens and Terry Jordan.

    For a couple of years, I faithfully clipped their album and concert reviews from the paper’s weekend Spotlight magazine, which published the television listings for the week, and other sections of the paper. I recently found the collection while cleaning out my dad’s house.

    Bibens’ album reviews compose the largest part of the stash. Each review is a little gem, starting with background on the artist, including previous recordings if he or she had any, before launching into a thoughtful critique of the work itself.

    For example, his review of Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps opens with, “There’ve been times when Neil Young represented all that’s good about rock ‘n’ roll,” before summarizing Young’s years with Buffalo Springfield, Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young, and his solo work. “His output was erratic and often sloppy, sounding like a man trying to work out his personal problems on vinyl,” Bibens writes. (Which, of course, he was.)

    Of that album’s acoustic side, he states, “Young sounds as if he’d be at home at a folk festival,” while cuts on the electric side “are fierce enough to blow any punk group right off the stage.”

    His closing claim that the album shows Young to be “a vital performer who seems ready for whatever changes the 80s will bring” didn’t turn out to be quite accurate, as Young would flounder to find a style before returning to form at decade’s end with Freedom and its early ’90s follow-up Ragged Glory, but based on the promise of Rust Never Sleeps, it was a sound statement.

    Bibens Top 10At the turn of the decade, Bibens wrote “A personal top ten of rock in the 70s.” Some of his list is predictable–Led Zeppelin’s fourth album (“Stairway to Heaven,” etc.) is #1, followed by The Who’s Who’s Next–but there are surprises from a 35-plus years perspective: A Yes album? Eagles? Poco?

    Jordan, at least based on what’s in my collection, wrote more concert reviews. Kansas City was the place for concerts, and the headlines alone tell the story: “Boston gives smoking concert.” “Concert overshadowed by bad location” (Ian Hunter). “Tarnished Legend” (Stephen Stills). “Styx wows 13,000 at Kemper.”

    When heavy rain came to Summerjam ’79, the headline wrote itself: “REO rides the storm out.” However, Jordan followed that bit of predictability up with a clear-eyed overview of the proceedings. REO, “a band from the Corn Belt that was eager to please,” catered to its “predominantly high school crowd.” Pat Travers’ “Ted Nugent-inspired heavy metal was sluggish.” Santana’s “traditional favorites . . . were dispensed with rather perfunctorily.” One-hit-wonder Jay Ferguson (remember “Thunder Island”?) was canceled.

    Jordan Summerjam '79

    Sometimes I fantasize that I’ll be asked what the most influential book I ever read was, and I will say, without missing a beat, “The first edition of The Rolling Stone Record Guide.” Now I think I’d have to follow that up with, “Oh, and the pop music critics at the St. Joseph News-Press and Gazette.”

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  • For Richer or for Poorer: A Love Story

    This Wednesday, Ellen and I will celebrate our 25th anniversary.

    We have both had jobs for almost of all those years. But this will be our second consecutive anniversary that I have been technically unemployed.

    wedding photo

    No paycheck. No benefits. No vacation time. No sick time. Just waiting time.

    I have filled that time as best I could. I created and launched the Write Fox website, took every freelance job I could get, and became something I thought I’d never be: a shameless self-promoter. I also looked for full-time jobs–about 35 of them in 2015, resulting in half a dozen interviews and a few second interviews at some great employers.

    But here I sit.

    Well, now I’m entering a new phase. This fall, both girls will be at Crossroads College Prep, which will make logistics of working full-time again a lot easier. And because of the lag between applying for jobs and getting jobs, the time to start seriously applying for fall is now.

    With all of that said, we are extremely fortunate. We have amazing kids. We have very supportive extended families . We have lots of friends. We have a great house, with great neighbors, in a good neighborhood. We have good connections in the community.

    And I have Ellen.

    Like my mom did, Ellen supports me and all my schemes. Always, and in all ways.

    Want to write for a startup magazine out of East St. Louis? “Sounds interesting!” Need childcare so I can hear an author speak? “I’ll call mom.” Small amounts of money slowly dribbling in from work done weeks ago? “We’ll figure it out.” Want to train for a half marathon though you’ve never run a full mile in your life? “Just be careful.”

    There was a time when one worker could support a family, but that time is passed. Like everyone else, we live in a new economy now, but my home economy has been the same for 25 years. Love is our currency. Patience, our dividend. Understanding, our savings.

    So here’s to Ellen–and here’s to continuing to grow The Write Fox as I job hunt and even after I finally get that full-time job. Like we’ve done everything else, we’ll do that together, too.

    Because no one stays married for 25 years by going it alone.

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  • Memoiries Can’t Wait

    For a long time, I’ve thought about writing memoir. Not autobiography, which is mainly an act of chronology (this happened, then that happened, then this happened), but memoir, which is more about finding meaning and universal truth in what has happened.

    Several things have held me back. First, I’ve never been comfortable writing in the first-person, but that has started to change since I started writing my blog.

    Second, memoirs–at least the famous ones–seem to always be about deep personal trauma that I have been blessed to have never experienced: rape, incest, child abuse, horrible parents. Not part of my life. My life has been blessedly boring.

    But as painful (and, I hope, cathartic) as it must be to write about trauma, I wonder about the meaning found in an ordinary life. A life of Catholic schools, big public colleges, stable families, steady employment. A life, in short, of privilege. Maybe because such a life is more typical (or maybe not?), the meaning found in it might be applicable to more people, and thus worth exploring.

    I don’t know; this is just something I’ve started to think seriously about undertaking. I would be interested in your thoughts in the Comments section below. And while you’re at it, you can check the box to get email notification of Write Fox Blog posts.

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