With amazing grace The Elements of Style (aka Strunk & White) saved me, scoured clean the mucus clogging my prose. An enthralled disciple, I bowed to this iconic writing rulebook. I put myself in the background; I omitted needless words; I spared figures of speech.

Often, I shunned taking risks, unlike the writers I was devouring: the fiction of Cormac McCarthy, Charles D’Ambrosio, Francine Prose, Don DeLillo; the essays and journalism of Stephen Harrigan, John McPhee, Joan Didion, Susan Orlean, and Patrick Beach and Brad Bucholz at the Austin American-Statesman. Whosoever took risks committed naughtiness was the Strunkian mantra that had seeped into my writing and editing (oh, I sinned, but felt guilty later).

Over and over I sought advice from various writing gurus about how to invigorate my writing, punch it up with spunk and bite — a favorite was Richard Rhodes’s How to Write. And a recent bout with writer’s malaise led me to read Arthur Plotnik’s Spunk & Bite: A Writer’s Guide to Bold, Contemporary Style (2007 paperback). Reading the book was like attending an old-time tent revival. The spirited prose and Plotnik’s advice zinged into my soul. I felt absolved, washed of Strunkian dogma.

I felt better about myself as a writer, and I decided I needed to know more about Arthur Plotnik and Spunk & Bite, so, a week ago, more or less, I sent him an e-mail, asking him if would be interested in an interview via e-mail that I would post here. He wrote back, saying yes.

Below is the interview:

What was the catalyst for Spunk & Bite? As an editor were you seeing gaggles of writers attached to Strunk & White, and not taking risks?

Some of the writing I saw would have made the gods create Strunk & White — if only to save the universe from collapsing. My authors included tight-collared academics in love with jargon and obfuscation, and non-writers gone giddy with the chance to speak in print. The principles of S&W (The Elements of Style) helped me bring some clarity and concision to these, er, writings.

But, yes — when I tried to push inert prose into something more dynamic, I’d often get Strunked and Whited by authors who felt I didn’t know right from wrong and was out to humiliate them. I was sympathetic to a point. How many writers trust, under their byline, someone else’s risk-taking? But at the same time I might have been losing it for S&W as an editor’s best friend.

When you set out to write Spunk & Bite did you intend to write something as a challenge to Strunk & White or did the idea come in the process of revision?

Originally, my challenge to S&W consisted of one short piece in The Editorial Eye, for which I wrote regularly in the late 1990s. I wasn’t the first no-name punk to question The Elements of Style; but in my annual visits to the sacred tome I was growing weary of E. B. White’s 1950s conservatism — his attachment to rigid conventions, his disdain for organic, adventurous language.

In writing Spunk & Bite (which includes an expansion of the original piece) I needed to counter S&W’s dictates with abundant examples of acclaimed, rule-breaking prose. I sought brief examples and found plenty to patch into drafts of the book. As I revised, I was able to unify the theme, the examples, and my own shtick into one concussive spunkification.

On the subject of revision: I’ve read several interviews in which you talk about your revision process, and it sounds very meticulous. What is your process for revision? Do you use a different process when editing others?

Well, I am the guy who wrote The Elements of Editing (1982), in which I forced myself to codify some of the editing/revising techniques I’d developed by trial and error.

Revision has many levels, depending on time available and one’s purpose relative to an audience. A newspaper feature gets some revision in the lead, maybe a late update — and it’s on to the next day’s feature. A short story is tuned again and again to the sensibilities of a literary audience, to the requirements of its arc, the credibility of its characters, and so on.

Usually, revision starts with a re-reading of the whole piece some time after it was written. With the likely audience in mind, one kills anything irrelevant to the desired effect and beefs up the parts that need to be emphatic. (Beefing up might mean tightening loose structure, introducing live verbs, replacing laboriously modified words with words that do the job by themselves.)

I am Ming the Merciless in revising my own writing. I go schizophrenic, detaching myself from Plotnik-the-writer. It is Plotnik-the-editor who must be pleased. He beats, burns, and destroys everything that strikes him as crap. He kills with impunity Plotnik-the-writer’s most precious darlings. He lays down mandates for the writer’s next draft — which he will edit just as savagely.

When I edit others, I am much more considerate. I don’t want to interfere with their “voice,” but just help it come through. Help the fire show through the smoke, as I’ve put it. If I sense an excessive “pride of authorship,” however, I beg off the job. No one can fight writers who love their locutions unconditionally. To be revised means: Lose the pride, weigh other possibilities.

One small tip: After you’ve revised a manuscript on screen, print it out and read the hard copy. Guaranteed you’ll see some necessary changes you hadn’t noticed in pixels.

When I first started out as a daily newspaper editor, I must admit I tended to fundamentalize many of Strunk & White’s rules, especially “Omit needless words,” when working with reporters. I also saw the tendency in other editors to follow Strunk & White as if it were holy writ. How can editors become spunkier when editing other writers?

That’s a tough one. The editor-author relationship is one I’ve called an “uneasy alliance.” Ideally, as with co-authors, each partner enhances the other’s strengths and attacks the weaknesses.

Applying S&W to the attack — against needless words, passive voice, wandering modifiers, etc. — will usually do some good, even abet spunkiness. But using the iconic little rulebook to cast down the unruly is simply compulsive behavior. Out the window go personal asides, slang, offbeat modifiers, freaky imagery — in short, distinctive personality.

Instead, an editor might join the rebellion, help it out, give an audience something fresh and daring: Spotting an author’s attempt at whimsy, the editor suggests, “How about we take ‘horse’s ass’ a step further? Say, ‘unicorn’s ass?’” “Spunky!” says the author. “But ‘unicorn’s booty’ is funnier.” “Perfect,” says the editor.

How did you learn to be a spunkier writer and editor?

These things evolve in mysterious ways, like the writer’s “voice” — the sum total of all the hundreds of language choices in a manuscript. The general readership itself has grown spunkier, embracing slang and pop and funkiness where standard English once ruled. But writers may want to cross these expanded boundaries with caution. Much spunkiness is ephemeral, like slang or pop that goes from cool to cringey in a nanosecond. Too much spunkiness is a turn-off — what S&W might have meant by too much “breezy” writing.

Spunkiness may be best when it erupts from quieter context, thus yielding elements of surprise, contrast, and edge. Run-on spunkitude sounds like a couple of dudes on cell phones at the Hard Rock Café.

It’s a delicate balance. One must dance through it and not fear the pratfalls.

The samples demonstrating punchier writing are my favorite elements of Spunk & Bite. You draw on writers in all genres, from contemporary novelists like Martin Amis and Jonathan Franzen to samples from journalists like Mark Singer. Obviously you value reading. How should writers read?

Like hungry motherf*ckers. Hit every eating joint, savor every morsel, and take some home (for your journal). Lick your chops over fresh metaphors and other juicy tropes. Stop and take note of how old dishes are made newly mouthwatering.

I like to own books so I can mark passages; but I also write down or photocopy passages from the many library books I borrow. All this marking and copying makes one pay attention to language. That’s the key. Pay attention to the words. Don’t let plot carry you away from the language craft.

What are you reading now? Who are some of your favorite writers and why? Any recommendations?

You might guess that I favor writers who have a way with language, with expressiveness, along with skills in characterization, plotting, and exposition. And among the language masters, I love writers who can mix dictions — high with low, sacred with profane. Juno Diaz is the man of the hour in this respect, pouring out mixed-diction gems like this one from The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007):

. . . so keen was he about learning that any new piece of knowledge, no matter how arcane or trivial, could send his ass over the Van Allen Belt.

Mixed diction is, of course, in danger of becoming a trend. You hear it on once-staid campuses, you see it in The New Yorker. But among those authors who can still thrill me with it are Martin Amis, Richard Price, E. Annie Proulx, and Chuck Palahniuk.

Outside of diction, I’m drawn to the usual virtues: sensuality, inventiveness, humor, freshness and intensity of observation. My recommendations for today would be The Bad Girl (Mario Vargas Llosa), The Book of Dave (Will Self), Delirium (Laura Restrepo), and Brief Encounters with Che Guevara (Ben Fountain). From Fountain’s collection of stories, I copied these goodies into my journal:

Mason [in the presence of "new wave gangsters"] sensed a sucking emptiness in them, the void that comes of total self absorption.

The Ghanian soldiers stared back with scathing indolence.

Other than Spunk & Bite, are there writing advice/craft books you would recommend?

Constance Hale’s Sin and Syntax is both solid and liberating. My usage bible is Garner’s Modern American Usage by Bryan A. Garner (who says lowercase “bible” when it’s not a proper noun). I find Sheridan Baker’s The Practical Stylist a more useful standard guide than Strunk & White.

And, what the hell, Library Journal called my own The Elements of Expression “humorous, thought-provoking, and right on the mark.” And now it’s cheap besides.

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Arthur Plotnik is the author of seven books, including the acclaimed Spunk & Bite: A Writer’s Guide to Bold, Contemporary Style and two Book-of-the-Month Club selections: The Elements of Editing and The Elements of Expression. Among his hundreds of published items are award-winning essays, biography, short fiction, and poetry. He studied under Philip Roth and Vance Bourjaily at the Iowa (Graduate) Writers’ Workshop and worked as a reporter, government editor, and — for the American Library Association and others — as a magazine and book editor. He served as a contributing editor for The Writer magazine and is now on its Editorial Board.

A few days ago I saw that Rick Bragg had a new book out, a third part to his memoirs. I’ve never read anything but excerpts from Bragg’s memoirs, and I knew nothing about Bragg until I learned of him a few years ago when I was a newspaper reporter. Back then, I read his collected New York Times pieces, Somebody Told Me, and I read sentences like this lead:

This is a place where grandmothers hold babies on their laps under the stars and whisper in their ears that the lights in the sky are holes in the floor of heaven. This is a place where the song “Jesus Loves Me” has rocked generations to sleep, and heaven is not a concept, but a destination.

And I fell in love with such sentences (though I just noticed the antecedent-reference problem in sentence one. Does the second “their” refer to babies or grandmothers? Even editors at the New York Times slip, eh?).

These sentences were not the kind of sentences you read in daily newspapers, not regularly, at least. These sentences had a voice, a melodic Southern lilt, not the monotone thrum of AP style. They were the kind of sentences I wanted to write (though as I read them over again as I write this blog post, not so much. They have a treacly sentimentality built in; you can hear the “sad” in them if you listen well enough). They also vividly and succinctly captured the sad nature of the story they were telling — of a twister hurling itself through a rural Alabama town and church, and killing children.

Still, they are sentences with voice, the kind of sentences I wanted to write as I was learning to be a good feature writer. I wanted to write these kinds of sentences so bad I imitated them in my own newspaper feature stories.

Also, despite their treacly Southern sentimentality, they were the kind of sentences I wanted to serve as leads to the kind of stories I wanted to write when I was a newspaper feature story writer. Full of the elements of good storytelling so rare in newspapers. Narrative and description, setting and scene.

In this particular story, it seems, though it’s not a first person tale, Bragg put himself, his knowledge of growing up in the South, into the writing: It’s clear in the voice and in the images of the lead, in which the children’s hymn “Jesus Loves Me” appears as a song you should know if you, too, grew up Protestant in the South or Southwest and went anywhere near a church. Yes, Jesus loves me. Yes, Jesus loves me, for the Bible tells me so.

Bragg’s voice, the frame of his experience, lends authenticity to the piece. It makes you as a newspaper feature writer want to write this kind of feature, the narrative-driven feature that you now believe, like others, may be the amazing grace that saves newspapers, and the wretch newspaper sales have become, because you believe people actually do read, or want to read, newspapers and that there are readers out there in the world who are good readers who want real stories, the kind of stories you like to write.

But then Bragg goes and does something deceitful like not giving credit to an unpaid freelancer for gathering some notes, and then writes a story with a dateline on it, a dateline that belongs to a place where Bragg may or may not have been, or at least wasn’t there very long. And you shrug your shoulders and say, OK. It’s not really that big of a deal. It’s just the New York Times shaking in a holy-roller snit because one deceitful person — Jayson Blair — was enough for them, so another becomes a fall guy and Bragg does what seems the right thing: He resigns.

So, you forgive him. It’s not like he’s made shit up like Stephen Glass or even worse James Frey or Margaret Seltzer, who made shit up about whole chunks of their lives, or made up whole lives for themselves because somehow their quietly desperate life wasn’t good enough to write about.

So you forgive Bragg, because he didn’t make shit up, as far as you know, and you feel it in your gut that what he’s written is real, no matter who took the notes. It’s real because of the voice (you’ve heard the man speak, and you know the voice is real: It’s a personable Southern voice that makes you feel as if you’re welcome at Bragg’s table for a glass of sweet tea).

It’s real because of scenes and images like this:

The 400 mourners stood and said the Lord’s Prayer. Then, Hannah’s coffin was moved slowly back down the aisle to the hearse. The organist played “Jesus Loves Me.”

But then you think, hell, if I hadn’t credited my former assistant editor on work she did, at the very least my editor would have ripped me a new one, and so would my assistant, and maybe I would have lost my job. And then you see Bragg putting out a book on Jessica Lynch and getting a job teaching journalism at the University of Alabama, and finishing up his memoirs, and you, on the other hand, are struggling to find a good job, and that makes it hard to forgive the man his sins (as much as you want to, because maybe he’s taken enough crap), even if he does write sentences like this:

Oseola McCarty spent a lifetime making other people look nice. Day after day, for most of her 87 years, she took in bundles of dirty clothes and made them clean and neat for parties she never attended, weddings to which she was never invited, graduations she never saw.

A consistent rhetorical thorn keeps jabbing me as I read Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Throughout the book — which slips through several points of view — Lawrence keeps having his characters repeat phrases. Here, for instance, is the gamekeeper Oliver Mellors: “The only thing was not to care, not to care about the wages.” Why does Lawrence throw out this rhetorical quirk?

In grad school we talked about the modernist novel and the breakdown of the narrative line, particularly when writers were trying to represent the Woolfian “halo of perception.” Is the repetition Lawrence’s way of showing the mind in operation, of the brain repeating itself as it wanders and sorts thoughts? If so, it seems to diminish the characters because each character has this tic in his or her thought processes.

Keeping the commitment to my 100-novels reading project (see here for explanation) seems harder than I thought it would be when I first began the project in 2006, especially when it comes to writing about the books I’ve been reading. Always, distractions.

If you’ve been following the blog lately, you’ll see one distraction has been an experiment, a six-part post, a personal essay about my recent appendectomy and its effect on my reading and writing. Writing that essay (which I’m revising and hoping to submit) led me to a renewed interest in another favorite genre — creative nonfiction — and along with rereading Lady Chatterley’s Lover, I’ve also plunged into a classic of creative nonfiction, Joan Didion’s The White Album.

Lady Chatterley I first read in graduate school when I was in my early twenties and more apt to accept fiction as a source of secular scripture; I needed something to replace the vanishing evangelical Christianity I had been reared on (that upbringing was nowhere near as frightening as the one Julia Scheeres describes in her memoir Jesus Land — another nonfiction read).

I’m no longer seeking salvation in fiction — I’m a confirmed and devout agnostic — and Lawrence’s views of sexuality are less interesting, and the sexually explicit language of the novel is hardly explicit at all now.

Another distraction has been Good Reads, a sort of literary MySpace, where I have made some comments about the books I’ve been reading, and have been searching the site to put books in my “Read,” “To-read,” and “Currently reading” bookshelves. At the site — where you can submit reviews — I was harsh about Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, saying of the classic, “It’s too much people sitting around talking.”

That’s not the whole review of the novel, and I didn’t dislike the book:

Austen is a brilliant psychologist and the relationships are dynamic. It also reveals something about writing:There’s so very little description in it, a lot of dialogue, and a lot of telling instead of showing through dramatic scenes, that it violates all the ‘rules’ of creative writing, and seems to prove that there really aren’t any rules for writing. Each book creates its own rules.

At the same time that I was reading Pride and Prejudice, I was also getting “unstrunkified,” reading Arthur Plotnik’s Spunk & Bite: A Writer’s Guide to Bold, Contemporary Style, and noticed as I was finishing Austen how contemporary and bold Austen was when she used the phrase “oppressively high” with ironic bite to characterize Mrs. Bennet, whose chief pursuit in the novel was to get her daughters married, even if it meant one of her daughters married a scoundrel under scandalous circumstances.

Despite the distractions, I do plan to keep up the 100-novels project. So, gentle readers, keep reading, and I will keep reading, too.

In the pages column of my professional site I’ve posted a small selection of recently published freelance work.

Check it out here:

Todd Glasscock

I’m in the process of building a professional Web site. Check it out at the link below. If you need any freelance writing or editing work, contact me.

Todd Glasscock

So I acknowledge death, accept the possibility that I could end at any time with little to show for as a writer. But I’m not sure my confrontation with death, or grief, can be awarded the status of Hemingway-esque heroism. I hurt. I went to the hospital. I had surgery.

Nothing could have delighted me more when I came out of surgery than through the scrim of morphine and anesthesia seeing the blur of pink shirt that was my wife. A craving had settled. She knew I was well — and alive. We had only known each other four full months before we were married the last week of December and surgery wasn’t going to leave our relationship behind. I had never expected to meet the woman I would marry in Waco, Texas. When I moved to Waco it was with a sense that I was leaving much of my old life behind. I wanted something new — I even threw out my high school annuals; they were part of something old, worn, stripped of life; they meant nothing to me, as high school meant nothing to me. As much as I was willing to purge of my old single life in Temple, Texas, I wasn’t prepared for a similar cathartic experience by leaving behind the new life, the new beginning I had with with my wife and stepdaughters.

“Life itself involves a continual leaving behind — of stages, of parts of self,” McMurtry writes.

We step across Heraclitus’ river, look back and see fresh water, our footsteps washed away, only the present before us.

Surgery had altered my life, I just hadn’t realized it. A whole new aspect, and sense of self. It is a common post-op alteration, the sense of detachment, McMurtry writes. In November 2007, I stopped reading a blog that had been a favorite and regular read, the novelist Patry Francis’ Simply Wait. She hadn’t offended me; I just couldn’t read what she was telling me — the story of the triumph of having her first novel published suddenly dimished by revelations that she had cancer. I wasn’t ready to read about cancer because the disease — my father succumbing to leukemia — still haunted me, and here cancer was serving out its democratic injustice at a moment of success. But, a few days ago surfing my blogroll, I decided to check her site again. There were new posts. She had been in the hospital, several times, a long series of stays, and she was writing about her most recent stay after a surgery. Her surgery had altered her sense of self, too. “I’m not the same person I was when I entered the hospital for the first time on November 28th,” she writes, “and I don’t think I will be her again. Her preoccupations are not mine. Her sense of time and priorities are different, too.”

A writer’s life had altered.

My life has been altered by surgery. But no more than it has been altered by marriage. I shed part of my life Dec. 29 — I am now a husband, a stepfather. This alteration, though, has not diminished me. With my wife and her children I feel new. I never stop craving her. I had not stopped craving her when I was in the hospital. And, I suspect I had not stopped desiring to write then either, or I had come to desire to write again while there. Helixing up through the solar plexus of every writer is desire, or desire should be almost genetic, part of our DNA, according to novelist and writing teacher Dan Barden in the recent issue of Poets & Writers. “[De]sire is what makes a poet like Yeats,” he writes. “What’s important is the struggle — the struggle that desire creates in both writers and writing . . . . Desire is important to creative writing because it’s the only thing that causes conflict. Conflict is important to writers because it’s the only evidence of desire.”

In the hospital, once my mind was less fuzzy, I read. Only for about a week post-op, the week when it seem as if I were completely dimished, had the desire to read vanished. Reading, McMurtry realized, was a “form of looking outward, beyond the self, and that, for a long time, I couldn’t do — the protest from inside was too powerful.” My experience was different. I had no trouble looking outward, connecting with someone else’s words. Why is writing so intimate with desire? It’s as much part of personality as it is some teachable skill, and most of personality, of the self, seems motivated by desires, simple and complex. It’s why style is so individual. We can only imitate another writer’s style so long in the process of learning to write before we have to develop our own. The other writer’s desires and struggles and conflicts are not ours.

And yet the difficulty to expose ourselves, must lead to our difficulties when writing. Surgery had altered me, or I was afraid it had altered me. I was afraid that not only had my body been changed, but that somehow the surgery had unvealed all my fears, particularly that I was just fooling myself. I wasn’t a writer. I was just a failure — that’s why it was so easy for me to leave a full time writing job — for weeks, days, months, a year or more before the surgery, I didn’t want to expose myself in such an intimate way. Even when I wrote in third person, as I did as a journalist, as I most often did with fiction — my unpublished novel is in third person — I revealed my self to me first, and then to readers, real and imagined, and that, in itself can be terrifying.

My body is knitted together now, as evidenced by the still long red scar on the right lower quarter of my abdomen. My sense of self, as I write each day, seems mended, too. I’m no longer detached from the desire to write, any more than I was ever detached from my wife because of my surgery. I have new desires, new conflicts, and they share a space with the old desires, old conflicts, everything that made me a writer in the first place. I have come back to myself, and perhaps I have a surgery to thank for that.

I was aware of grief. This past July I read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, her memoir written after her husband John Gregory Dunne died. I had not taken time to grieve, or rather, the gambling match the cosmos was running against me had left me no time to contemplate what all my losses meant. I understood Didion’s overwhelming sense of bewilderment over her loss. I shared, for instance, a similar sense of guilt toward my mother’s death as Didion did about her husband’s death; she kept thinking about how it might have been possible for her to recognize the signs of a heart attack and somehow save her husband. I have wondered if my sister and I could have saved my mother somehow. What if we had gone to see her a day early, taken a Thursday off and driven over and made sure she had been safely transported from one nursing home to another? I had the desire, as had Didion, of “trying to reverse time, run the film backward” to get at least one more chance to do something, anything different so the outcome changed, to recover the self I had before, an old life.

The third week after the surgery, one morose morning as we are getting dressed for work — a chore for me because I’ve become increasingly disappointed by the job, a sense of failure overwhelming me — the yearning to run the film backwards, to regain my old writing life surged. “I should’ve never left the paper,” I say to my wife. When I left the paper I was so put out with raging editors who didn’t follow the paper’s policies when it came to friends of the publisher that I didn’t bother making a portfolio of page designs and clips. Then I was finished with daily newspaper journalism. Now the newspaper had become an idyll, a place I loved because there I was a writer. I missed who I had been as strongly as I missed my mom, my dad, my . . . the boy who was no longer my son. (I had gains, of course, as rich as anyone could have — a loving wife and stepdaughters, an emerging sense of family. I can’t say enough about Chris without sounding like a treacly Hallmark. I love her dearly, though.) That same week I read the McMurtry post and then began to reread the essay, bit by bit, letting McMurtry’s words guide me to my own words, and nudging me — as reading often does — toward self insight.

The four of us — me, Chris and her girls — are heading to dinner one evening when I tell Chris about the McMurtry essay, about how I can relate to it, especially McMurtry’s post-op separation from himself. “Now, looking back from a distance of eight years,” McMurtry writes, “I realize that even in the first months after the operation, when I thought I was feeling fine, what I was really feeling was relief that I was alive and not in pain.”

Throughout my recovery, until a day or two after I had read the essay, I had put aside the possibility of dying from such a routine procedure as an appendectomy, from such an ordinary illness as appedicitis. I assumed all was well physically, at least. On the Web, when I look up appendicitis, I find the National Digestive Diseases Information Clearinghouse (that there is such an organization is remarkable, I suppose) and I read about the illness and its complications. Appendicitis constitutes a medical emergency, the site tells me. “If the blockage is not treated,” the site tells me, “gangrene and rupture (breaking or tearing) of the appendix can result.”

My appendix had ruptured. Had gangrene set in? Gangrene left untreated kills. A ruptured appendix left untreated can kill, the site tells me. Complications of a burst appendix can lead to peritonitis, “a dangerous infection that happens when bacteria and other contents of the torn appendix leak into the abdomen,” the site tells me. “In people with appendicitis, an abscess usually takes the form of a swollen mass filled with fluid and bacteria. In a few patients, complications of appendicitis can lead to organ failure and death.”

“You’re lucky.” In various ways that’s what I hear when I return to work, as well as from my aunt on the phone.

If I were to run the film backwards to Monday, Feb. 18, and had taken more painkillers and stoically gone to work and had not gone to the doctor and had taken stronger painkillers that night and maybe one or two more that Tuesday and had waited too late, would I have died? How long would it have taken for organs to fail? My end, the end of the body and the self, of personality, of everything that goes with it was nearer than I thought. Perhaps like McMurtry I had failed to grieve the loss of self or personality, or that some portion of myself had truly vanished. That failure to grieve had interrupted the desire to write. If only I properly mourned, it would all come back.

It made sense to think that if by acknowledging death, I would somehow return to normal. Isn’t that the mode of the Hemingway hero, to confront death and either be strengthed by the confrontation or die gloriously and bravely and good? Dying would mean the end of fighting for all I wanted of life, an ultimate failure. No novel published. No more articles published. No more rants on the blog. No possibility of another book following the novel, or preceding the novel. No movie option. No essay collection. No short story collection. No interview in the Paris Review or an acceptance letter, finally, from the New Yorker for articles to rival John McPhee or Susan Orlean. No op-ed pieces in the New York Times. All the hours at a keyboard — for nothing. Nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada, eh, Papa?

(To be continued)

A machine, and later a surgeon, had looked inside my body. “All the machines can tell the surgeon or cardiologist,” McMurtry writes, “after all, is about the defects and flaws of a given body; the machines can’t read strengths, particularly not psychic strengths.”

“I’m sorry I’m defective,” I said one day at home after the surgery, joking with my wife. “Are you going to trade me in for a better model?”

My wife laughed; she loves me for my quirky sense of humor. Of course she wasn’t going to trade me in.

But, two weeks after the surgery, I still felt defective, dead, my old self excised along with my appendix. I still lacked purpose, though after two weeks the desire to read had returned — I picked up Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice about midway through, the point where I had stopped reading a week earlier — and a fresh bag of coffee made mornings lively again. Daily routines were recaptured. Except one. The desire to write seemed fragmented. Lost was the sudden inspiration I had in the hospital bed. Not even a book on building a freelance business inspired me. In that two weeks after my surgery, the longest blog post I’d written was a 92-word paragraph on Mark Bowden’s Blackhawk Down, an uninspired fragment. The breath writing had given me for more than two and a half decades seemed knocked out.

Larry McMurtry seems a guru of sorts, his essay leading me to more possibilities as to why I felt unable to write. Grief. A sense of grief for a lost self, or a grief not fully realized. I was aware of grief, however. My Aug. 1, 2006 blog post contemplates what my father might have felt as he lay dying in the hospital. Almost two years after my father died, I was still haunted by that death. I was not there in the hospital at the moment of his death. I was there several hours before, watching his kidneys fail, his blood rinsing his catheter, and at the same time me and my family — sister, aunt, uncle — gathered in a circle with my father’s pastor, forced into a prayer to a god long dead in my heart and mind. I knew then death was coming.

I didn’t know my mom would be the next to go. A year and a month to the day after my father’s death, around 7:30 in the morning, my sister calls me. “Mom passed,” she says. Mom dead in the ER, my aunt — her sister — holding her hand at her last breath, me half an hour away, my sister more than an hour. I felt bewildered then. I was still bewildered almost two years later when I wrote a simple declarative sentence in my journal: “I want my mom back.”

No one in my family died in 2006. It seemed a brief respite, a break from grief. That March after a drawn out legal battle with my dad’s new family over a trailer house, a beat up van and an old pickup, my sister and I received a small inheritance from my father’s estate. I changed jobs, able to quit the paper that August — I felt secure enough for the first time in my financial life to take a chance and accept a position as an adjunct writing instructor at McClennan Community College in Waco. A full class load — and I had wanted to teach writing since graduate school, when I never was able to pick up a graduate teaching assistantship. And then I’m blindsided.

The cop knocks on my front door the first weekend of November. That knock would surgically excise a part of my identity permanently.

When the cop knocks the boy is asleep on my bed. I let the cop in when he asks if the boy is there. My son is there, asleep since his mother brought him over that morning before she went to work. The cop checks the boy over for bruises.

At some point over the course of the next week and the next and over the next month and into the new year I get the story pieced together. My son’s mother left him home alone for hours, claiming she couldn’t find a sitter — I was at my apartment a mile or so away, had left only once that day to do laundry. I had been available — had she called. The boy is 9, but autistic and unable to take care of himself.

Nine years earlier I had not taken a DNA test. I had wanted a child, even if that child was with a woman I no longer loved, and had not questioned his parentage. The only way I could possibly claim the boy I believed to be my son was to take a DNA test. The envelope from DNA Diagnostic Center in Ohio is stamped Jan. 5, the DNA test report inside. My eyes scan the report, a single sheet — not making much sense of the list of allele sizes in the middle of the page — to the paragraph below the numerical data. “The probability of paternity is 0 percent,” the last sentence of that paragraph reads. A sentence has stripped me of an identity, of a part of myself, as much as death had stripped me of my parents.

One weekend earlier only one class had made for the spring semester. I lost my identity as a teacher, and eventually as an employed, viable person with a savings account. Chunks of me, of many selves — son, father, teacher, professional writer and editor — were floating around like chum in the shark-infested waters of a bad soap opera script. I waited to be rent into nothing.

(To be continued)

Easter week I reread a blog post from almost two years ago, stumbled upon it idly reminiscing past blogging glories. I reported in the post that I had been reading Larry McMurtry’s Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, a chapter of which McMurtry writes about how his life changed after quadruple bypass surgery, and was reminded of my own recent experience of surgery.

In my case the most startling evidence of the profound effects of bypass surgery was that, about two months after the operation, I ceased to be able to read . . . . The content of my life, which has been rich, began to drain rapidly away. I had been leading a typical type-A East Coast life, reading three newspapers a day, reading many magazines, and in general, trying to stay informed. But more or less overnight, staying informed ceased to matter to me . . . . From being a living person with a distinct personality I began to feel more or less like an outline of that person — and then even the outline began to fade, erased by what happened inside. I felt as if I was vanishing — or more accurately, had vanished.

Clearly, I can’t compare my relatively uncomplicated routine appendectomy to McMurtry’s oppresively serious bypass surgery. But, when I started to reread the essay, and read the passages above, I felt a connection to McMurtry’s sense that the content of life was rapidly draining away.

Oh, it was a sensation I had begun to feel more than a year earlier, a few months after I quit my job at the newspaper - the content of my life, though not at the stature of Larry McMurtry, was that of a writer, a feature writer at a newspaper, one with aspirations to reach at least to Mr. McMurtry’s bootheels. That content was fading, or seemed to be fading, first after I traded myself in for the teacher of writing in me, and then, as my college teaching career came to an abrupt end, losing another identity — father (a complicated story for another time; I found out after eight years of believing otherwise that I wasn’t the father of a wonderful 8-year-old boy).

Then, with the climax of my teaching career, came what seemed an inability to find a job as a writer or editor, other than a few short machinegun bursts of freelance work for Waco Today, a lifestyles magazine. The only thing I kept up with was finishing the second draft of a novel. Still, as job prospects seemed to fade away, so did my sense of myself, my sustaining purpose. And now, in my current job — it seems a backward step careerwise — my content feels even further faded. I can’t find a rhythm to my writing. This essay is the longest sustained piece of writing I’ve written in months, since my last major — a minor thing probably in most writer’s notebooks — freelance assignment in July.

One night, a week after the surgery, when my funk had renewed itself, I told my wife, “I don’t have a sense of purpose anymore.” She knew writing meant everything to me, and had been worried that I hadn’t been writing very much. My saying this worried her even more. My life no longer felt rich, alive with rivers of words. Reading McMurtry’s essay, feeling a connection to McMurtry because of a shared experience of surgery, I began to wonder if the surgery elevated my already fading sense of self. The surgery itself became portentous. A burst appendix left unexcised could kill.

All through my hospital stay, post surgery, I never thought about the possibility of dying. That possibility only occurred to me after the nurse in the ER exam room told us my appendix had burst. Once I was in a gown and lying on the bed, I stopped thinking about the possibility I could get sick enough to die. I just wanted the morphine to kick in and the surgeon to show up. McMurtry writes about being hooked to a heart-lung machine during his bypass, and how, because the machine takes care of two major functions — circulation and breathing — the operation places you in a state in which you are neither alive nor dead. A comparable state for me might have been those moments in surgery when I was under anesthesia, unconscious, unaware a self of any sort existed. Before the surgery, after being placed on the operating table, I only recall taking off my boxers and the nurse telling me my legs will be strapped down so I don’t fall off the table. As fas as I know, I ceased to exist after that, recovering only to a brownish Purgatory of shadows moving around me, and a burning sensation at my side.

But dropping away under anesthesia can best be only a farce of death, a play on it, a gentle unconscious reminder there will be a time when we go under and won’t wake up. Appendicitis hadn’t eliminated me physically. Surgery hadn’t elimated me, all the content that makes up who I am. A CT scan, a machine, had peeked inside me — with the help of a Diet 7-Up and iodine cocktail, everthing was illuminated, as far as I know, my stomach, my intestines, and certainly the muck hiding what was left of my appendix, discerning the details of my body and its flaws. The surgeon saw even more of me, the me that was my body, opened it up, poked around in it, and stapled it together after removing a flawed part. The body was alive, altered, but alive.

(To be continued)