Calling a Spade a Spade

My copyeditor, Heidi, made a suggestion that has got me thinking. I have a character digging with something I refer to as a "round end shovel," the garden variety shovel that I used to call a spade until about ten years ago. My brother Mike also calls it a "round end shovel." Heidi suggested the more proper variant "round ended shovel," but that doesn't sound natural. So I've been going around asking everyone I run into what they call the shovel in question, and most of them call it a "spade." According to all dictionary and encyclopedic definitions, that is wrong. A spade is a flat-ended implement across the board, and then there is something called a "garden spade." The farm and garden stores here in Kalamazoo and on-line call the rounded shovel a "round point shovel." Here's the passage in question.

"He was standing in mud, resting, with both hands on his round-end shovel, when he saw the big orange snake, its body as thick as his step-son’s arms, folded on the rocks."

I have until Monday at noon to make this decision and all the rest, at which time I will send the manuscript back to my copyeditor, Heidi. My Darling Christopher says I'm overthinking it... but that is just the sort of gal I am. And now that I've pasted that sentence in, I'm wondering if there are altogether too many commas going on.

Copy Editor Sends Corrected Pages

My copy editor said it took her 28 hours to go through my manuscript, and it is probably the closest reading my collection will ever get. Lucky for me my copy editor is Heidi Bell, who is excellent and professional and warm besides. I’ve never had a problem working with an editor, but people have told me that often there is trouble between creative writers and their editors. I have a little more than a week to look over Heidi’s suggested changes.

For my other two books, the editors sent me corrected paper pages in the mail, which I looked over and marked up at my desk. This time, Heidi asked if we could do it all on the computer, and that seemed fine with me. Heidi made the changes and suggestions using MS Word’s track changes, with notes in blue and red. Comments I make in response to those changes show up in hot pink. On my first look-through, Heidi appears to be right in nearly every case.

I have incorrectly used “though” for “although” and “back yard” for “backyard” repeatedly. A dozen times, Heidi moved a sentence or two up or down a paragraph, and a dozen times she said, “This doesn’t make sense to me,” and said exactly why.

Kristin Harpster Lawrence is the Editorial, Design, and Production Manager at Wayne State, said that they put a lot of resources into editing their books, and she isn't kidding. Over the next couple of weeks, Heidi will have another go at the manuscript, and then I will read it one final time, and on August 22, Heidi will send the final version to WSUP. Kristin said that would be a good time for me to take a vacation. When I return, the manuscript will be page proofs.

Thanks, Dan Wickett at EWN!

Dan Wickett conjured the Emerging Writers Network out of thin air in 2002, and since then he's been a powerful force for good in the writing world. He has generously reviewed both of my published books, and he has since reviewed two of the stories that will appear in my new collection American Salvage. Last year he reviewed "Winter Life" as it appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review. In June he reviewed the new issue of Kenyon Review (cover depicted above). Here's what he says:

The issue also has a story, "Boar Taint," by another EWN favorite, Bonnie Jo Campbell! I have to say, if there was one person that would write a story that starts out "The boar hog was advertisted on a card at the grocery ..." and I had to guess who wrote it, Bonnie Jo Campbell would have been on my short list. And not surprisingly, the story doesn't disappoint - Campbell may be one of the best writers around at blending stories about people who work or spend a large amount of time outdoors with their internal lives - their thoughts, beliefs, etc. She has given us in Jill, her protagonist, another in a long line of BJC independent females to enjoy reading about.

(http://emergingwriters.typepad.com/emerging_writers_network/2008/06/source-of-lit-3.html#comments)

Art for story collection "American Salvage"

(Scroll down to earlier entry to see photos)

My third book, my second story collection will be coming out in the Spring from Wayne State University Press (Yea!) Maya Rhodes, the fabulous assistant design and production manager invited me to send ideas I had for cover art by Michigan artists (with the understanding that the decisions on design are theirs) so I sent her the photos below. I put them on this site because I wanted to share them with all of you. Please forgive the low resolution of the beautiful originals, but I still have dial-up internet service. I'm describing them in order of appearance below. I'm not a design person, but it was fun to think about cover art for a while.

1. Daguerreotype of corn by Charlie Schreiner, Saugatuck Artist, boyfriend of my friend Lisa Lenzo. He's pretty famous in the Daguerreotype community.

2. Mary Whelan took this photo of her daughter Frances and her nephew leaning against his Dukes of Hazard car. The photo is large format. She has other versions of the photo in which the girl's face is not blurred.

3. "Burl in the Beans" is by Kalamazoo photographer Jeff Mitchell

4. "Walking Man" is by Dylan Seuss-Brakeman. He leaned out of a car window in a blizzard and snapped this. Cool, eh?

5. This photo in green with train tracks is by Erin Dorbin, a Kalamazoo photographer. I took it from her Flickr site. I hope she doesn't mind.

6. This photo of four guys is by my dad, Rick Campbell, who worked as a news photographer for 52 years. The characters are Tracy Call, Mike Campbell, Tim Bowling, and Tom Campbell. It was the seventies, wasn't it?!

7. My dad took this photo of a wild woman at a bonfire, and it really looks like a book cover, don't you think?

8. This photo is Kellee, my niece. Susan Ramsey says she looks too good, almost Hollywood good. It's true that she's beautiful. My husband Christopher Magson took this photo.

9. Chris also took this photo of my mom outside the greenhouse she was constructing for her pawpaws saplings. She looks very proud.

Photos For American Salvage

Dawgs arrive promptly at 7 pm

But it was (brrrr) too cold to sit outside on the screen porch, so we moved on inside. “Dawgs” is the name of a poetry group originally made up of folks who took a poetry workshop with John Rybicki. Of course the group has re-formed over the years, and new people like me are occasionally allowed in. Seven of us had wine and snacks and enjoyed each other’s smart company and looked at our poems. (And among these polite gals, none mentioned the cobwebs or the duct tape holding the toilet seat together.) Susan Ramsey brought her wild west romp, “My Grandmother in Support Your Local Sherriff.” I brought “The Last Fat Woman in Galesburg, Michigan.”

Marie Bahlke’s Mother’s Day poem brought us:
peanut butter macaroni and hatted boarders eating pork roast

Elizabeth Kerlikowske gave us a (sticky?) image that sticks with us
fish wrapped in maps and money in the glove box

Kit Almy’s sonnet-ish piece, “Miss Movie Star and Mr. Lumpy Mattress,” moved swiftly and logically from sandbox (and eating clover or peeing in the bushes) to sarcasm to death.

Margaret DeRitter did not have a poem but wielded a copy of the Tuesday Gazette and said, “Look! I’m writing again!” Highlights of her recent writing include her article about her French hospital adventure, “An Ordeal in Provence” which perhaps Margaret will condense into a poem that includes the line: Amy’s painkillers long gone, her anti-clotting syringes all used up.

Amy Newday’s poem featured a line I have been repeating to myself over and over ever since:
The brass of our ball valves no longer delights us.

Heidi Sits on Screen Porch

When Heidi Bell comes to town, it's always exciting. She brings cookies, molasses-ginger and chocolate chip oatmeal this time, and she has wicked and clever things to say, and Carla Vissers came down to complete our trio---we all got our MFAs together at WMU in 1998. Heidi had just read Andy Mozina's book (The Women Were Leaving the Men), so we made him come over and he brought his wife Lorrie (also my Christopher, Heidi's Adam and Carla's Eric were in attendance, as well as Dave Magson who dropped by casually when he got home from work at 11:00). As far as Screen Porch business, the wine and something colored like green poison and called an Appletini kept us from getting too serious, Carl and Heidi and I decided we would like to have a literary contest of some kind. I suggested that it only makes sense to have our contest attached to somebody elses' contest (such as WMU or Kalamazoo College, at which we would offer some additional prize to our own favorites among the finalists as Jaimy Gordon has done with the Gordon Prize at WMU), or else it makes sense to have our contest attached to a publication, to which we would give money from the entry fees and offer publication. On Saturday, we discussed Heidi's story featuring vignettes of human/insect interaction and my story in which a guy named Jerry becomes obsessed with a snake, much to the distress of his wife. We all decided my story needs a lot more work. I surmised that the writing life feels a lot like a long drawn-out nervous breakdown, but maybe all lives feel that way. If any of you have thoughts about contests, let me know. It would be fun to reward some of the more lively and light-hearted fiction being written today; it would be fine to have a number of contests associated with different institutions and organizations. Anybody who wants to be involved with organizing or judging some sort of contest, let me know. Another possibility is for the Screen Porch Literary Guild to give its own genius award every year. The winning prize could be some fudge candy, and of course the whole business would be kept secret. Some candidates that come to mind are: the writer Andrea Barrett, my carpenter Steve Barett, Alice Munro, Tim Gatreaux, and my mother for her cabbage rolls. Please make nominations in the comments area or email them to me.