Compared to what? The first day, week? Decade?

It seems “they” are right.

Late May. Roses in full bloom. The season of calls from nice detectives with an unbearable task.

(What families must feel when the find a soldier at their front door.)

“Is this a joke?” I asked. Like a bad actor in a bad movie, or a nightmare. Time stopped, but in my head, rushed the refrain: No. Not this. Not Dad. I just spoke with him. He was just here. Just in Italy. Just.   

“I’m afraid I’m not joking, Ms. Doyle. I’m very sorry.”

Afterward, I lit candles. Picked some of those roses out there last spring from the Mr. Lincoln, Double Delight, the Gemini bush he bought me for a birthday. Made a beautiful table to lay my sorrow.

“Here’s to more beauty in our lives. Love, Dad.”  This, in an enclosure card for the flowers delivered the day he proclaimed Daughters Day—lilies or orchids–I don’t exactly recall.

The roses, I remember.

I know it’s coming this time, you see.  I’m ready. This morning, I picked two blood-red Mr. Lincoln blooms, a Double Delight. Three Geminis. They’re in the cobalt blue vase on the little shelf in the kitchen, next to the candle and the photograph.

When the call comes, I’ll talk to that detective with the kind voice, set him straight. Tell him You can’t fool me this time.

Tell him the roses are blooming, and how much Mr. Thomas Doyle loves flowers in any size, shape and scent. That beauty makes sense to him. As for the rest of it, well.

How I’ll keep picking flowers for Dad every May; and loving those roses right along with him, every damn day they bloom, and every day they don’t.

1. “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” By Flannery O’Connor

2. “Red Weather.” By Lewis Buzbee (from the After the Gold Rush collection).

3. “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” By Raymond Carver

4. “The Twenty-seventh Man.” By Nathan Englander.

5. “Brokeback Mountain.” By Annie Proulx

6. “Everything that Rises Must Converge.” By Flannery O’Connor

7. “The Masque of Red Death.” By Edgar Alan Poe

8. “The Chrysanthemums.” By John Steinbeck

9. “Hills Like White Elephants.” By Ernest Hemingway

10. “How to Date a Brown Girl.” By Juno Diaz

The sucky times always turn out to be necessary. They have ultimately invigorated our relationship and made us love each other more deeply and honestly. This is the gift of hanging in there–not through the struggle, but through the pain of not knowing where the marriage is going. We show up and say what’s true for each of us, no matter what. 

Before we got married the Episcopalian priest who counseled us said marriages sometimes die. This and not literal death, was the ’til death do us part, part. Father Bradley had been divorced and had remarried. He wanted us to understand that while we were entering into a lifetime committment, there were exceptions. 

Tim and I went through a rough patch around our anniversary this month.  The details aren’t really important. On the surface, the struggle was related to finances. But really we were both struggling with change. Change in ourselves and consequently, change in how we see each other as partners, lovers, parents, and human beings.

Would these changes be  the death of our marriage?  Or were they simply part of the two of us growing up, and learning to be better people and partners?

We’ve come out the other side. It doesn’t suck right now. Not by a long shot. We’re closer. Standing on our own two feet more than ever. 

We found out that how we love each  in this moment is what matters. How can we do our best to see each other in a new light? How do we look for the humor, and not to sweat the small stuff even when it feels like big stuff? We’re figuring this out, and our marriage is stronger for it.  

The other morning, I walked Tim out to his car. The air had that cozy crisp smell of autumn; the fallen leaves were swirling in the street.

“It’s fall, sweetie,” I said.

“Yeah,” he replied, kissing me passionately. 

A few seconds later he came inside the house. He’d forgotten his keys. 

“Can we do that again?” he asked. 

I followed him outside again. The air still smelled wonderful, the leaves were still dancing. 

“It’s fall, sweetie.” 

“Yeah, it is.”

The kiss was twice as nice this time.

Voice is often confused with style. But style is concrete–the way we structure our sentences, our word choice and use of metaphor, whether we tend to write formally or informally, etc.

I think voice is something deeper and ultimately unnameable because it orginates underneath language and only takes shape through language.

The writer’s task is to write from this original source, particularly when first drafting a story. In revision, we must continue to listen for the original voice and build on it. The result is an authenticity of language that the reader immediately feels and wants more of.

On a more superficial (but equally essential) level, voice is shaped by the writer’s background, cultural heritage, and personal experience.

Voice changes with point of view. A cat sees the world differently than his master, a sister views the house she grew up in differently than her brother.

The writer’s experience of a landscape also shapes voice.  My first novel is set in the Salinas Valley where I grew up. Sheila’s story couldn’t have taken place anywhere else. The Valley is in my bones, my very being.

Finding Your Writers Voice by Thaisa Frank and Dorothy Wall stresses finding one’s ”raw” voice, and then refining it through craft (revision). What enables us to tap into this raw voice, “the writer’s most powerful tool?”

Writing about childhood–simple memories such as climbing the tree in your front yard or a meal your mother prepared–can unearth an interior language that existed before our egos had fully formed. Before we learned that writing required us to be someone other than who we are.

I’ll be teaching a two-hour class on Voice tomorrow night at Book Passage in Corte Madera. It’s the first in my Fiction Toolbox series, which will also include an evening each on character, plot and setting. Get dates and other details here.

Anytime I bitch about not wanting to write, revise or send a story out, I think of Elizabeth. She was tenacious, humble and exuded more grace than any other person I know.  I’ll miss her terribly.

1. East of Eden by John Steinbeck

2. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

3. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

4. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullen

5. Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

6. Middlemarch by George Eliot

7. Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

8. Eva Luna by Isabel Allende

9. Victory by Joseph Conrad

10. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishigura

11. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

12. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

13. Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follet

14. Atonement by Ian McEwan

15. Independence Day by Richard Ford

I’ve learned an interesting lesson with one of these stories, “Letting Go.”  I took a chapter from the novel I’m working on and tried to make it a standalone story. The novel is in first-person present.  I may change that, but for now that’s the narrative point of view.

So I printed out the chapter excerpt from the novel (the point in the novel when the heroine’s mother is dying) and marked it up, adding a little information to make it clear who the characters are, why the mother is dying, etc. My writing group gave this revision the thumbs up. Mind you, they had the benefit, or disadvantage, of having read everything that proceeds and follows this chapter.

I thought the story was ready to send out.

Then I gave it to my husband to read. He hadn’t seen any of the new novel. So he came to the story cold. He was very frank, which I love about him. The story didn’t work. Not enough background, not nearly enough time with the main character. It was “weird.”

I sulked for a day (for me, resistence always proceeds a major revision), then got to work. Cut the story to ribbons. Changed the point of view (to third-person) and tense (to past).

Guess what? It’s better. And different. The standalone version gives the reader enough distance and background (I hope) to be able to take in what the main character’s experiencing at a critical moment of her life.  

I’ll give the story another pass for typos, substitute a verb here and there for better one, and then it’s outta here.

Nathan Englander’s, “The Twenty-seventh Man,” the story of the house arrest and execution of a group of poets and writers in Stalinist Russia, is one of the best pieces of fiction I’ve read in years.

Here are seven reasons why you should read ”The Twenty-seventh Man,” which you can find in For The Relief of Unbearable Urges, Englander’s startling debut collection.

1. A minor bureaucratic error leads an unpublished writer (the 27th) to find his readership seconds before his death.

2. Most of the story takes place in a single cell with only four men, and yet you feel the presence of the other 23 because Englander doesn’t let you forget them.

3. Englander illustrates the obsessive passion of writers. The 27th man composes a story in his mind, which he completes and recounts to his colleagues only moments before their execution.

4. A literary symposia takes place in the cell in which arguments about the state of literature in Russia eclipse the poets and writers’ self-interest and survival instinct.

5. Englander is a pre-modernist (my term). He’s a good storyteller whose prose is ample, and characters deeply sympathetic.

6. One of Englander’s characters drinks and fornicates with abandon and when he cleans up uses the DT’s and his remorse to fuel his poetry. Another character is so pious he thinks the state has arrested him because he possesses a deck of girly playing cards.

7. Englander knows his history and he knows people. In “The Twenty-seventh Man,” he shows the transcendent power of art and humanity in the face of evil and extreme ignorance.  

Give the story a read, then read “The Tumblers,” the second in the collection. It’s almost as good.

Pretty much every day, after working on the new novel or a story (I’m cranking on one at the moment), I apply for projects and jobs on Craig’s List. I rarely hear back on these job posts. I can only assume employers are overwhelmed by the volume of applicants. Or that the expanding talent pool is making it tough to stand out in the crowd. Or as a colleague explained to me, some posted jobs are cut before hiring even begins.

So, yeah, we’ve been feeling the economic situation. But my husband has a steady job, thank God. Consequently, the sense that things are “bad out there” is still somewhat suggestive. A feeling in the air. A refrain one hears, daily, maybe hourly.  In line at the grocery store. In Peet’s Coffee where dozens of customers peer at lapstop screens–polishing resumes, surfing the job sites, calling old contacts. Hoping to make something–anything–happen. 

On Sunday our neighbor across the street told me he was on “work furlough,” a euphemism for work without pay. He works for a clean technology company looking over the financial precipice. He’s hitting the pavement, worrying about his COBRA health benefits running out for his family of four. 

One of my dearest friends, an IT and operations executive with decades of experience, has applied for 90 jobs. Out of this effort, he’s had two promising interviews for jobs that have fallen through. 

The country, maybe the world, is waiting for the other shoe to drop.  Fear (perhaps rational) stops us from consuming, borrowing, investing. This may be a good thing in the long run–a chance to reflect on how we’ve been living and the choices we make. An opportunity to redefine “need.”  

There’s a sense the banking and real estate debacles haven’t fully rippled out. That more jobs will be lost, more homes foreclosed on. The economists and pundits say we we ain’t see nothing yet. 

This is what I try to remember: At the moment my family and I are okay. Better than okay. This isn’t smugness or denial on my part–at least I hope not.

What I know with certainty is tonight we’re making dinner with close friends visiting from Bend. The kids are a building a fort of pillows and blankets under the dining room table. The chicken on the grill on the patio smells heavenly. And outside my window, right now, I can see the California Poppies on the hillside, vibrant as freshly lit flames.

Right now, everything’s all right.