Show & Tell

The secret life of objects

TIME FOR A GOOD DEATH

So many of us became begrudging Zoomers during the pandemic. I loved it. This habit of FaceTiming through whichever software instead of calling or texting has stuck for me as a habit that endures both at the office (even with people in the same building), in weekly virtual therapy appointments, and through the midlife dating app-purgatory I’ve been in for over a year. It’s been an efficient filter upfront, to see someone in 2D before committing to the risky long-distance drive to potential disappointment of 3D. Or, when you do meet and like someone from afar it helps traverse the vastness of the distance way better than a bad texting habit or phone call without gestures. And into this medium of attempted connection I’ve lately inserted a game. To each video chat session, how about a kindergarten-style Show and Tell? You pick one thing from your house or office to share today and I’ll pick one thing from mine and we trade off on a very sweet and specific story.

For instance, there’s this amazing little clock in my trinket cabinet which represents the time I learned about relativity, about how what you believe to be true is indeed true for you.

My grandmother, Marguerite, who lived just three houses down the street from us growing up, was in home hospice from colon cancer one summer of my college years, which meant she was basically starving to death. In the final hours, Grandma, a devout Catholic very much at peace with what was happening to her because Heaven was nigh, found the strength to summon my family to her bedside for her final words. We lined up and she had something witty or insightful for everyone. Though sadly I can’t remember whatever she told me, I remember her telling my dad to, effectively, chill out. (A lesson my dad could have well heeded at his own chaotic passing.)

The men wandered off nervously to go do errands or find lost glasses, but the women sat on the bed with her and massaged her into her passing as her breathe slowed, eyes closed, and throat started to rattle. Unable, we thought, to speak any longer after a while in this catatonic state, she suddenly roused and said “I’m coming Jesus,” with such clarity, and then not long after that, she was gone. Though I was raised Protestant, any faith I was taught to have was long gone, but she spawned the idea in me that she was indeed en route to her version of heaven. For years after, when I was in restroom stalls, I somehow thought of her who taught me to wipe my butt as a toddler. How she of course was up above somewhere seeing me in this awkward moment, or really anywhere private for that matter she’d be watching, so I’d better behave.

And, there was this other odd, and beautiful moment built into her passing. When she stopped breathing, and my grandfather stopped the clock there was this uncanny recognition. I looked down at my watch in shock. The night prior I was working late at my summer job as a reporter for our hometown newspaper. They had me set up with the police radio to cover any breaking news that night—I went to a minor car accident and knew I had to be back at the office to file the story by 11 pm. A quick glance at my watch reassured me that I had plenty of time. I didn’t know at the time that my watch had stopped—9:13, the very time grandmother was gone in the morning. Tick tock. I’ll always be telling this story, as I have here before, each time with a slightly different spin.

Now your turn. Whatcha got? Go!

Navigating life by way of these inanimate objects that still say so much about our history and who we are, has been so essential to me. From last week’s “No” brick to the foundational posts of this newsletter. Home|body started two-fold when I wasn’t sure which way the theme would ultimately go: I had unhoarded my parents’ house as my dad lay dying, and gathered some of the oddest artifacts unfit for keeping but so worth sharing. I knew a series of weird posts could spring from these and they delivered: a handful of the hoarded artifacts here. On the other hand, I had been converting my own house off fossil fuels and toward net zero goals, so I had these pricey artifacts and facts to share from that—data on dollars saved/spent but also some incredibly heavy iron radiators rendered obsolete and pipe trees I crafted from gas lines, replaced with solar panels, induction stove, an EV. The sustainability series, grounded in such objects, grew here. Out of hoarded items to talk about and done with giant house projects for the moment, I’ve explored many other ideas here since but always girded in images and tangibles, because showing to me is as essential as telling. Or is it more essential?

SHOW DON’T TELL

As a former writing teacher the common mantra went: Show Don’t Tell. Of course, it’s writing, we have to do both, but with the tendency perhaps ideally leaning to showing more than telling. Heavy Showing on the Hemingway end of the spectrum and maybe someone like Dickens more prone to Lengthy Telling.

Where does Show Don’t Tell concept come from? Supposedly Anton Chekhov, who said in a letter to his brother:

In descriptions of Nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture. For instance, you’ll have a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a piece of glass from a broken bottle glittered like a bright little star, and that the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled past like a ball.

From my old lectures of the ol’ Creative Writing 101 in which description loomed largest, I would lead a few exercises:

Look at an ordinary object you use every day as if for the first time. Describe it as richly and freshly as you can employing different descriptive techniques and revealing something about character looking in the process. Writers write about what others don’t pay much attention to, and render what may be familiar new. See as if through the eyes of an alien/tourist/infant who has never experienced this object before. No cliches allowed.

Or,

Now here’s the phrase you’ll hear here again and again when we read each other’s fiction—show don’t tell. Don’t get me wrong, there is a place for telling in fiction, when you need quickly to get from here to there you can do a sort of shorthand, a summing up. But more often than not, I want to see it all up close, I want to feel, I want you to show me, most especially when it comes to character. Telling in this context means to state the facts or perceptions about a person, while showing consists of these main categories: actions, speech, appearance, and thought. Be careful about relying too much on appearance (don’t judge a book by its cover!). Mixing these elements is best. 

Here’s a chart you might find helpful in the pursuit of revealing your characters. I’ve entered a few examples. You can practice by doing the same with people you know, people who have impacted you either positively or negatively, crushes you’ve had, etc. 

Now, that you’ve created these three columns and filled them with a few examples, cross out that middle column with its labels. In your writing, you should only be using the last column with its concrete examples not the summing up version in the middle. The middle is “telling” and the last is “showing.” Let the show begin!

One of my favorite all-time stories for showing the art of showing is Aimee Bender’s masterful “End of the Line” where there is the magic of description and discovery of a strange shrunken world of tiny people. I love the level of detail here Bender establishes, creating the metric for this little world with all its objects, drawn to scale. The bus signs the size of toothpicks, the trays the protagonist’s wife creates with bottle caps, a regular doorknob as tall to them as the Empire State Building, the backyard the African veldt. The little people use an oil rub to repel animals. He is served whiskey in the indent of the crosshatch of a screw. You really feel the writer herself is having fun working out these details, getting creative with everyday objects seen anew. 

And then there’s the colder, harsher “camera-eye” or “objective” perspective, like a newspaper article, where only action and dialogue rule, no thoughts at all, only what is measurable and seen, not what goes on privately inside people’s heads. I wrote in my lecture:

The pros: it lets the reader piece stuff together. The reader must read between the lines to infer thoughts (perhaps a facial tic can reveal to us the nervousness of a character). Hemingway is often quite objective, but we never feel slighted since there is so much energy vibrating between the lines. This is also a good way to underplay melodramatic material that might just be too much to take from the perspective of someone more closely involved. The objective point of view forces the writer to show not tell. The con: it deprives us of getting into character’s minds.

But oh for the love of prying open the skull! Let’s just decide to do both.

SLEEPY HOLLOW SHOW & TELL

I have a new book out, but I can’t claim it as mine since I wrote an introduction for a newly packaged public domain classic, so when Washington Irving’s own church asked me if I wanted to do an October event there for its release, I wanted anything but a reading or lecture that had anything to do with me. I was suffering a lack of inspiring community-based ideas leading up to the meeting at the church the next day, when my friend, an old colleague from my days running the Hudson Valley Writers Center, just happened to email me this unbelievable yarn about a grotesque stone head that was dug up from his grandparents’ Sleepy Hollow yard, a terrible and wonderful treasure he’d been carrying around ever since. (In much more wonderful detail that I won’t give away yet here.) Somehow reading about my new book inspired him to share that with me, complete with attached pictures. And suddenly, I had an event idea. I will host the first ever Sleepy Hollow Show & Tell!

The promo materials:

It’s a book release party like no other. Join us for the first ever SLEEPY HOLLOW SHOW & TELL, featuring spectacular, strange and spooky true stories from our neighbors accompanied by odd objects. Tangible tales from the Cemetery, the Historical Society, Lyndhurst Mansion, and someone’s backyard. This unique event will take place in the historic Christ Episcopal Church San Marcos, Washington Irving's own congregation when he lived at nearby Sunnyside at the height of his world renown. 

The event is also a fundraiser—proceeds will assist the church with their altarpiece restoration project.* Plus, every ticket gets you a signed copy of the new “best of” edition of Irving’s classic THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW & Other Stories**, produced here in the Hollow and introduced by local author Krista Madsen. 

Reception with light refreshments to follow.

SLEEPY HOLLOW SHOW & TELL
4-5:30 pm, Saturday Oct 5, 2024
@ Christ Episcopal Church San Marcos, 43 S. Broadway, Tarrytown NY
Advance ticket reservations encouraged but not required
No recording/filming allowed; all rights reserved.

TICKETS and flyer:

*A NOTE ABOUT THE FUNDRAISING: The triptych behind the church’s altar, a three-paneled oil-on-canvas Last Supper scene, was painted likely in 1902 by Ida Rosenquest (1864-1940). Ida grew up in Tarrytown on Neperan Street at Rosehill (part of the park now), and is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. She was an instructor (of fundamental art courses in the Elementary Dept) at the New York School for Applied Design for Women in New York City. The School was established in 1892 by philanthropist Ellen Dunlop Hopkins as part of the Arts and Crafts movement. It aimed to “afford women practical instruction which will enable them to earn a livelihood by the application of ornamental design to manufacture and the numerous Arts and Crafts.” The school provided courses in book cover design, stained glass, textile and wallpaper design, illustration, etc., with a salesroom for student products. With this triptych, Ida memorialized her mother Harriet, a very active member of this congregation, who had died of diabetes in 1890 at the age of 45. The paintings are in bad condition from age and the elements and require expensive restoration. 

**ABOUT THE BOOK: Selected works from Washington Irving’s classic “The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.” collection (from the 1848 G.P. Putnam edition) include his most popular and enduring tales originally serialized from 1819-20: “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” along with a lesser known but equally interesting ghost story, “The Spectre Bridegroom,” and two odd essays verging on the fantastical: “The Mutability of Literature” and “The Art of Book-Making.” 

This slim yet gift-worthy “best of” volume, produced in that very real yet mythic village of Sleepy Hollow by publisher Sleepy Hollow, inK., begins with a contemporary introduction by local author Krista Madsen, and ends with blank “sketch pages,” inviting the reader’s own musings and drawings. The vibrant cover design celebrates two female artists from the second wave of the Hudson River School movement.

See how I did that? Announced my first self-published book exists but buried in a poster and a story about a grotesque head? This is how I will hack bookselling, just pad it in the ticket price of a really cool event. If you’re local, or a Halloween-season tourist on the hunt for the Headless Horseman or a missing stone head, I hope you will consider coming. And if this trial run goes well, this may very well become a series, or at least an annual occurrence.

And meanwhile in my introverted household, the Show & Tell will recur regularly via Zoom or elsewhere for private one-on-one audiences by appointment only. Every object eager.