December 23, 2019

If you are reading this on 12/22/2019, I am still one day away from celebrating the day of my birth, my first day of life on earth. Gotta make a note of it. Or that was my intent. Still is, but not the way I originally intended. At this point in my life I am good with it, if not yet completely at peace. I certainly do have "miles to go before I sleep", how many miles as yet to be determined. If I were Elaine Stritch I'd be singing, "I'm still here..." I've still got a lot to do, so, Fate, "Don't bring me no bad news." I'm gonna eat fried chicken and goddamn the cholesterol!

So much for background music.

Michelle Goldberg is a columnist for the New York Times. She's young (Of course, I'm at the point where Grandma Moses looks young), exceptionally bright (a higher form of really smart), literate, knows a lot about a lot of things, listens well, argues with conscience and facts, misses nothing. A passionate intellectual. There is nothing fake about her.

Her most recent column, Democracy Grief Is Real, reflects
my own current feelings: our nation is in serious trouble because of a rogue president and the politicians who violate their constitutional vows and enable him. Jesus had an easier time of it under trial than Trump? What person in his/her right mind would state such a thing?  A republican congressman just did. And people who vote believe this crap?

I, for one, am not ready to learn to speak russian. Maybe you are. I'd rather shoot first. Many years ago I took that same oath they're all talking about: to protect our constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic. I was a United States Marine, your basic grunt: an american citizen who basically wrote the government a blank check for any amount up to and including his/her life. I did that. So did millions of others. Thank God so many of us came home alive and in one piece, but too many others did not. I believe  Donald J Trump is doing his best to undo all that so many good  people died to preserve.

It's not my wish to drive anyone away. I am well aware we all do not believe alike. But this, for me, is a matter of conscience. Something is very wrong. I need to speak my piece. You don't agree? I've said what I had to say. My mother gave me one good piece of advice: "You've got a mouth. Use it!"

I hope the following link works and that you read this passionate cry from a person who fears we are losing what we have so valiantly defended for nearly three centuries, as am I.

Michelle Goldberg, "Democracy Grief is Real".

www.nytimes.com/2019/12/13opinion/sunday/trump-democracy.html 

By the way, since as all sane people know, there is no war on Christmas or Thanksgiving. More bullshit from Trump, the man who epitomizes "serial bullshit artist". So, from a nice, Jewish guy (who admits to having slung a bit of his own from time to time) "Merry Christmas and Happy Hannukah!!!!!!!!!!

Stephen

NOBODY IS PERFECT

Descendant of Mongol warriors, birthed North of India, East of Bangladesh. The wisdom of a great sage who reached one hundred years. Conjoin his view of the world with yours. Peace attend thee.


                                                    NOBODY IS PERFECT

Each one of us is a mixture of good qualities and some perhaps not-so-good qualities. In 

considering our Fellow Man we should remember his good qualities and realize that his faults

only prove that he is, after all, a human being...We should refrain from making harsh 

judgment  of a person just because he happens to be a dirty, rotten, no-good, son of a bitch....        


Enjoy your holidays!

Yo!

I would love more readers. 

Know anybody? If so, please send me their e-mail address, and I'll add them to my list...which, by the way, is growing, not by leaps and bounds, yet with the occasional leap and random bound, it's lurching its way along.

My intent is to keep this going for the duration. In my Hollywood days I used to day dream that one day, if I wanted to write about a blade of grass I could. Well, I am one lucky Jewish guy from Baltimore because I do that now. Of course, Hollywood paid handsomely, and a blade of grass doesn't pay at all, not even bupkus. Quid quo pro, right? Always the trade-off. But, hell, the house is paid off, there's gas in the tank, and plenty of gluten loaded food, so, yes, I admit it: I'm happy. I hope you are, too.

MORE READERS,PLEASE!!!

The Beauty of A Long Life

I'm not one of those Holy Rollers who preach the gospel of growing older as Glory Years. The Golden Age? Sorry, it's not. More like the Rust Belt. Of course, it has its very real pleasures, however these pleasures are fewer - your imagination might wander but your body stays put - and the penalties greater. I've taken falls in my lifetime with barely a bruise that would have pulverized me had I taken one this morning. Still, have all the fun you can because, why not? It's been a long and rambunctious ride, and I see no reason to quit.

One of the beauties of a long life is that people come back into it.  There are times when you know someone so well you might even die for them. You make room for them in all the minutes of your life, hold them there, hang out, listen to music as if you've been together forever - and then they disappear. It's not abrupt. If this were a movie they would slow fade to black. Decades pass, so they are remembered, if at all, as wisps that dissolve soon after they appear, memories as intense as they are frail.  

Lara is one of those people. I first saw her on an early Spring morning thirty years ago. I was standing on the small bridge that spans the creek in front of our house. I don't know what made me turn around - maybe it was a bicycle bell? - but there she was, couldn't have been more than eleven, speeding by on a battered boy's bike, long blonde hair streaming behind her, a wisp of forsythia her headband. I can't remember how we began talking or how Jamie joined us, but the day came when Lara knocked on our door for the first time. She with her mother and her mother's boyfriend had moved into the cabin on the edge of our property that had earlier been a one room schoolhouse. I thought of "A Midsummer's Night Dream" when I first saw them, phosphorescence cavorting in the forest, slender and fetching the way (if you had a strong stomach) Keene paintings were in the sixties, in their own dimension, victims of the city, refugees from daily life. We live way up a small, beautifully isolated valley in the midst of the Catskill State Forest. By coming here they chose Thoreau over Warhol. They had both been on the cusp of that world. Lara's mother, Nancy - cropped blonde hair, a damsel fly on moss - had sung back-up on the 70's spoof hit, "Monster Mash." Her father, (now dead) danced in West Side Story. I don't know what Oliver did. He looked like a jockey,  but I've never been sure. The first time I went down there to say hello, he was sitting in the crotch of a maple tree maybe ten feet up, elf-like, and he never did come down. Later on I learned he fantasized being a hobbit. He actually came up here to be a Hobbit! Lara, on the other hand, wanted nothing more in life than to get back to New York City. She'd been born and bred to the rhythms of the streets, and that's where she wanted to be. Jamie and I, a tenth of a mile east, were the next best thing.

She knocked and told us her mother wasn't feeling well, could she come in? The first of many more knocks, the beginning of a relationship neither Jamie nor I had intended nor were we prepared with how deeply we would come to feel for this child, and she for us. Had we invited it? Had I? Had Lara herself put things in motion and kept them there, albeit unconsciously? Basically, she barged into our hearts, and we reciprocated: kite flying, cookie making, walks with Hank, our springer spaniel, snacks, meals, sleepovers, a fishing trip on the Chesapeake Bay with my niece and nephew...Best of all, Lara favored the bubble baths. There was no water and no tub in the cabin - they drew water from the creek out front - so Lara craved hot, soapy baths more than food or anything else. Anticipation made her giddy, giggly, really silly. She was spending more time at our place than her own. Eventually, it came out that her mother had been very sick and had gotten sicker. Would I please go down there with her?

As long as we'd lived here, I'd never been inside that cabin. Edie Falco and her dog lived there before she was Edie Falco. No running water. No electricity. Compost toilet behind a wooden screen. I was prepared for shtoonk alley, so it was a nice surprise to find it neat and clean and...Minimalist. Any sparser, it would have been empty. Nancy lay on a mattress. The mattress was on the floor. Normally thin, she looked cadaverous, a drastic change from the times I had seen her outside. She whispered she'd contracted girardia from the water in West Kill Creek, but she knew how to treat it. Had she been to a doctor? "I've got what I need," she said patting a box of herbs in plastic containers. "How can I help?" "Lara loves being with you. It makes her happy," she answered.

I told Jamie, "That's not girardia." I'd begun to recognize that gaunt look. It was the mid-80's. AIDS was rampant - the distinctive skeletal faces of its victims. "J, it's AIDS," I said, "Nancy's got AIDS." It didn't take a month. We checked Nancy into Belleview on a floor where every patient was a young man with the face of the young man next to him. Nancy's face. "What am I doing here?", she asked, but, soon, she would return to California with her mother, an aging flower child, and die of it. We stood there at her hospital bed - Nancy so weak, almost inert - the skin on her face, stretched thin, opaque - with Lara, Oliver, and Nancy's mother, knowing that the dreaded question was coming, and it did, "Will you adopt Lara?" Will you take this child as your own who loves you and whom you love? We could not. Time and circumstance were just not right. We had no children, yet, although caring for Lara helped ready us for the ones we have. She sucker punched me. I wasn't prepared for such an abundance of feeling, never even knew it was there. What I felt and feel for Jamie was and is no less intense, but it's not the love for a child, is it? It was agonizing to say no, but we could not say yes. When memory replays this scene, as it does from time to time, I feel just as I did standing at Nancy's sick bed saying, "No", to Lara.  Awful. What had happened to her? Where had she gone? What had she become? Was she still alive? When she thinks of me does she loathe my memory?

Cut. Dissolve. Two months ago.

I think I was in the living room. Maybe my office? Jamie comes in with her notebook on facetime and says, "Somebody wants to talk to you." "Tell 'em I'll call back." "You want this," she said, thrusting the notebook forward. Who is it? Some woman. Mid-forties. You want me? No clue. Until I hear her say, "Hi, Stephen," and wave and smile. Jesus! Lara? Lara! Retired Army. Successful marriage. Two kids. Drama teacher. Grown woman. A good life. Lara had never forgotten us, and now she had come back into our lives. She sought us out. She wants to visit. She's remembers how we were back then, how much we cared for her, how much she cared in return. The love we felt was deep and it was real. Her heart was still full of us. Yet, those were troubled days. We just couldn't protect her anymore, but, now, here she is again: strong, loving, capable, ready.

I'm trying to remember what Lara likes to eat, for when she visits. Jamie aims to buy bubble bath, just for the hell of it.

The perk of a long life.

Next!

My Life Is Like A Word On The Tip Of My Tongue

My life is like a word on the tip of my tongue: I've...almost...got...it!  It's there. It's there. I've just about...I've almost...Oops. Slipped away. OK. Breathe. Breathe. In. Out. In. Out. Breathe. OK. Better?

I was fifteen, failing in school, face full of sclurbs, clothes from the "husky" rack, desperate to play freshman baseball, failing to make the cut, no drivers license - life was a mess! Better times had to be out there somewhere. Lordy, did I ever look! Everywhere! Nevertheless, it seemed all my part-time earnings went towards Acnomel, an anti-zitz product, designed to make my pimples disappear. It didn't. I was getting nowhere. One day, my father, who was a very funny guy, said to me, "Son, one of these days you're going to find yourself, and, when you do, you're going to be awfully disappointed." He smiled, cleared his throat, tapped the ash off his cigar. He'd always clear his throat after a joke - our signal to laugh. Years later, backstage after the first performance of my first play, my father, nattily dressed in his light gray Chesterfield overcoat with the black velvet collar, put his arm around me, smiled, and said, "I guess you're not going to be a bum after all." Funny guy. He died two months later.

So, where does that find me now?

What a blessing: to be sure of one self! Happy with the face one sees while shaving. Content with one's credit rating. Certain of one's sexuality. A team jersey for each season. The absolute auto. A wife who still likes you. Life is good. I'm wondering if I know anybody like that? One or the other, yes, maybe two, three, but all six at once? Give that man a sticky bun.That man, of course, is not me, not yet, maybe not never, but I'm working on it. The father of a dear friend once advised, "It's a great life if you don't weaken."

So, here's what I want to know: when does the Will go? Is suicide the end of Will or the ultimate act of Will? I recently read about a 95 year old woman who gladly, with all her reason intact, chose to starve herself to death, simply and happily stopped eating. She also stopped drinking water though moistened her dry lips with wet gauze. It took six days.  She was cheerful and thankful until shortly before her end. Apparently, this is not so unusual. Others have done it. You die by your own agency, your choice, your time, in a way that appears to cause the least amount of trauma to every one. Did she just give up or did she muster an exercise of incredible will? Does one make a decision to give up, or does it happen when gravity finally pries your grip off finger by finger? I'm clinging to the top of a sheer stone face with a drop of a thousand feet. Can't pull up. Have to hang on. Fingers cramp. Arms ache. Have to. Muscles get weak.Will I never let go? Will I give in and accept, what? The Fall. The Fall? And just how does one face that? I stop the dream before I need to make any rash decisions.

To Saunter

                                        To Saunter

It’s late October yet it feels as it did last May when it was finally comfortable enough to keep on walking, simply walking, rather than risking a busted hip racing back inside the house with an arm load of firewood. I’m not interested in power walking, or my heartbeat, or my personal best, or your personal best, or a gluten-free breakfast, or pushing through pain (Haven’t we all had enough of that one?). I just meander, poke around, change direction, look up, down, stop, start. Attention to detail. Which detail? Doesn’t matter. One is always there. The goal is to…saunter.  A la Sainte Terre. To the Holy Land. A pilgrim walking to Jerusalem. A sacred journey.


Now, I’m neither proposing nor pretending to go that far, but there are wonderful words, ancient words, abracadabra sounding words from all the British Isles that evoke what I do with whimsy and the ecstasy of morning dew. I love to “doddle”, to walk slowly and pleasurably. I can also “dander” or “nuddle”, walk in a dreamy manner, with my head down, like Christopher Robin searching for a toadstool. I could also “soodle”, if I wanted. My choice. Any one of those will do. You get my meaning.


60 degrees. Days like this won’t be around much longer. The hawk is on the way, so I sauntered forth on what could be the last of these junkets for a while. Joe, my pure black, sixty pound, brilliantly goofy, doodle loped ahead. We headed north towards the foot of Evergreen Mountain, an uphill walk that gradually increases grade. Easy. We cleared high brush and reached a spot bordering the woods, yards from a briskly running brook where the sounds were the same sounds for as long as this land has been – the very same sounds - breeze, some scurrying under brush, sometimes thunder, rushing water - the same as forever. Breeze and brook. The caw of a crow, the whisper of an owl, the bleat of a deer. A deep-throated, drawn out squawk jarred me out of whatever state I was in, picked up an echo, and kicked it back. I swear it sounded like a shofar, the haunting wail of the ram’s horn sounded by observant Jews to begin and end the High Holidays. Who knows? Some cultures might say the brook knows, the trees know, the breeze knows, but me? What do I know?


One thing I do know: I love being alone in a place where no one else in the world knows I am. Alone. No one. Not forever. Not even for very long, a month, long enough to feel cushioned by the world round me. Current geography has altered this somewhat. One is no longer in the middle of thousands of miles, and it’s not likely one’s going to get there again any time soon. Still, I can wander out my door and settle in somewhere with the understanding, at least until dinner, that I’m the only one who knows where I am, assuming, of course, that I do. Selfish? The people I love know I won’t stay away too long. 


Many years ago, the Hollywood years, I took off for Alaska while I was in the midst of writing a script. My plan was to follow a trap line deep into the bush and stay there for a while. Pre-cell phone. My producer wanted to make sure we kept in touch. The phrase “off the grid” had not yet been invented, so when I explained to him how completely out of reach, I’d be, it really rocked him, dazed, like a fighter who had just taken a good punch. “Aren’t you even gonna read the trades?”, he asked, attempting to process what he’d just heard. Was that a quiver? He could barely get the words out. It took me a second to realize the man was serious. I laughed a friendly laugh because I didn’t want to appear as condescending as I was actually feeling, but, really, I thought, why would I want to read the trades? That last sentence seems to explain my Hollywood career.

Put me in the middle of Alaska. Put me anywhere. I am never in the middle of nowhere. I am where I am. No matter where that is. It’s a gift, a perk from birth. Really, it is. I am safe. It’s not a lonely feeling at all. There is no yearning. Perhaps that’s why I need it? Trekking across Alaska there were times when I was many miles from another human being. Truth is, I didn’t really think about it. My feet hurt too much. It was hard enough moving one of them after the other. 


One night – late, dark – I stopped where I was, laid out my caribou skin, my sleeping bag on top of that, shed my boots and climbed in. It so happened, that particular night, I had a joint in my shirt pocket. Somebody back in Eagle must’ve slipped it to me. I can’t remember what I ate or if I ate, but I do remember lying back under a sky flush to the horizon with Northern Lights wafting in the solar wind like opera house curtains, firing up that joint with a waterproof match, and sending its bewitching smoke skywards. I’m surprised I didn’t levitate. Maybe, I did. Maybe I came as close to Heaven as I might ever come. Maybe I was actually there, you know, just passing through. Fine weed can make one a believer, but, of course, you already know that.


October, 2019

FALL WOOD (a poem), October, 2019

                                    FALL WOOD



Scuffling through dried leaves
I think of slurping hot soups
Turnip chunks, ‘shrooms, Swiss chard
Spaghetti
A table made of barn wood.                                                                     

Passing a young white pine
A smatter of snagged leaves
on limbs and needles:
Red maple, cinnamon oak, 
Golden birch, crimson sumac.
Three years from cutting.
I think of Christmas.

I am a Jew, but the thought was instant 
How could it not?
Were this the Bible would I have shared
Paul’s experience?

I heard my name.
Beyond that pine trills Hunter Brook.
I looked.
Come here.
Listen. 
Stroll along. 
Listen.

Stones there once not there not now.
Small steps.
Balancing.
I never walked with my arms out
To my sides
Before. 

Rocks convert
Pools deepen
Lanes clog with leaves
The words change.
Listen.
It’s what I have to say.

Sit this rock 
Slippery with moss.
Water lapping.
Cut banks and overhangs. 
Fractured rocks.
Tossed and twisted limbs. 

No Paul
Or the book that started it all.

Now be still
And I was still.

When cold seeps in
I wander home
Having heard something 
I may hear again
When I dream.



October, 2019

FALL WOOD - october, 2019

October 6, 2019

                                  FALL WOOD

I don’t know how it happened, but it has happened. To us. We had nothing to do with it. Evolution has played a dirty trick on us sentient beings (the ones on two legs with opposable thumbs and a smattering of Neanderthal genes). She has reversed the natural order on a whim. When we’re young, time seems endless. It is endless. Was endless. What did we know? Now, someone please explain to me in detail the point of speeding it up as we grow older? You can’t. No point. Absolutely arbitrary. Mean spirited. But there it is. Time rockets by, like you’re always rushing through the subway station, up and down, people jigging, jogging, pushing for the train, rushing, running, and there it goes, a cannon ball just out of sprint range. You’ve been butt-ended, but, you know, keep on keepin’ on ‘cause y’gotta get there, right? That’s how fast time seems to go when you know better. Wasn’t it just April? Where have I been? What the hell just happened? Did I cross the finish line? I won? Really?

That’s what it feels like.

Hunting season was what started all this because suddenly it’s October and the firebushes are bright red. The trees aren’t all bare, but soon to be and bare enough to catch sight of the creatures that live here with us, their terms, not ours. I haven’t seen the bear lately, although enough sign tells me he’s back there, but dozens of wild turkey, mostly small flocks and some singles, with those tiny heads and long, stringy beards, and a few mornings ago, an eight-point buck, a six pointer, and a large spike were eating granny apples under the tree out back our house, not thirty yards, mystical creatures with racks grown graceful, even whimsical, yet with surprising heft. Rut was still a few days away. Wind whispered over the leaves. Some skittered. That sight! Imagine holding a rock from another solar system in your hands. Imagine swimming in the open sea with a white whale. Imagine watching the one you love undress in moonlight. 

Even More Words for the Workshop, 2019

          Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

      Writing in the Woods

    

"Stephen's writing is pure wisdom. Listen to him closely," Charles Irving Beale, Film Maker

"I had the honor of taking a writing workshop with the talented novelist and screenplay writer, Stephen H. Foreman, two years ago in the lovely Catskills. Stephen offered a perfect balance of writing instruction, shared work in a positive and encouraging environment, personalized attention, and time for writing and reflection. The participants had the opportunity to learn from the instructor and from each other in a relaxed, beautiful setting. An invigorating blend conducive to inspiration!" Carol Allen, Poet


"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God", Gospel of Saint John


Welcome to the Third Annual Spruceton Inn’s Writers Workshop, nestled into the Spruceton Valley, hidden within the Catskill Mountains. 


What do I want from you? To write fiercely and honestly. To love words as the tools that tell your tale. To dig so deeply you are stunned at what you find, yet that is the only way you and you alone can tell that tale because it is a tale like no one else’s. Because It Is Yours.


What will you get from me? I bring you the lifetime of a free-lance writer and adventurer brimming with experience in the world writ large. I bring you the eyes of a creator, a scholar, and a critic, reader of some zillion or so books, decades of teaching experience – this country and others, college grads and undergrads, street people, high school kids, at-risk kids and prison inmates, ex-cons in halfway houses, hungry screenwriters, poetry in elementary schools, elderly memoirists, snazzy writers’ conferences…And now you. 

Trust me on this one: Wherever you are in your writing life, I have been there.


I’ve hugged Jane Fonda and shaken hands with Muhammad Ali. I survived the wilds of Alaska, the back-country desert of the Superstition Wilderness, and the mountain rainforests of Dominica, and and and…I’ve been a social worker. I’ve been a United States Marine. I’ve worked in the White House. I am at your disposal. Pick my brain. See what’s in there. Maybe something you can use. Sometimes even I’m surprised.

THE MOST IMPORTANT RULE OF ALL: NEVER give anyone an excuse to stop reading.


METHOD AND PHILOSOPHY


Your work is your work. It’s not my work. This is not Hollywood. Nobody’s gonna force an opinion down your throat or fire you or pay you lots of money so doing what you don’t want to do doesn’t hurt as much. I attempt to see what the writer means to do, and then I try to help that writer do it. I offer incisive, thorough, yet gentle reasoning. We disagree? OK.  You’re the boss. We’ll put our heads together to get the words where you want them.


Experience has shown me that dogmatism starts wars and breeds mediocrity. Yes, of course, there are creative ways to make a                    tone-deaf line sing. Good technique alerts you to these things. Better technique alerts you to more. You test them out, and, if they don’t work, you go beyond them. So, how do you learn technique? I got it by osmosis, by reading. 


ONE MORE RULE: Read. A lot. Read more. Read what you want to write and then read everything else.  Fiction, non-fiction, plays, poetry, newspapers, billboards, labels, stop signs, parking tickets, graffiti, faces. Go large. Range wide. Cross reference. Peer under rocks. Let all this seep into your bloodstream until it becomes a permanent part of the flow. Nothing is unimportant.


There are “How To” books at Barnes & Noble, and you’re welcome to them. You’re bound to pick up something useful. All I’m saying is, I didn’t.


BEFORE YOU GET HERE 

Write a brief essay, 400 - 500 words, on a single theme, for example, a near death experience; what it feels like to be in debt; what made you want to write; when did you become a writer. Do you deserve to be a writer? Why are you a writer, anyway? And, while we’re at it, who are you, and why are you here? Take that metaphysically if that’s your bent. How about a great joy, a first kiss? What intrigues you, entrances you, haunts you, frightens you, ignites the fire? A book or books that have been with you all your life, and what about them? Mine?  Bambi by Felix Salton, A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean, Wind in The Willows by Kenneth Grahame, and Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo.


Now, e-mail a copy to me and to everyone else on the list a few days before you arrive. Give us all time to read it. Everybody reads everybody else. Everybody critiques everybody else. You probably have a program that enables you to type critiques and comments on the manuscript in another color. Print them out. First thing bring them to the table and let’s see what each of you did. Each participant gets to keep all the critiques of their work. Burn them. Save them. Print on the other side. Tuck them away. Yours forever.

info@sprucetoninncom
September 22-24

More Words for the Workshop

THIRD ANNUAL SPRUCETON INN WRITERS WORKSHOP AND                                     RETREAT   
          

           Words from the heart – Writing from the Inside Out


September 22 – September 24

Spruceton Valley, tucked away in the heart of the Northern Catskills.


A time and place to reflect and find your story.


CONTACT: 

HTTPS://WWW.SPRUCETONINN.COM/WORKSHOPS-RETREATS


Experience has shown me that dogmatism starts wars and breeds mediocrity. Yes, of course, there are creative ways to make a tone-deaf line sing. Good technique alerts you to these things. Better technique alerts you to more. You test them out, and, if they don’t work, you go beyond them. So, how do you learn technique? I got it by osmosis, by reading. 


My advice? Read. A lot. Read more. Read what you want to write and then read everything else.  Fiction, non-fiction, plays, poetry, newspapers, billboards, labels, stop signs, parking tickets, graffiti, faces. Go large. Range wide. Cross reference. Peer under rocks. Let all this seep into your bloodstream until it becomes a permanent part of the flow. Nothing is unimportant.

So, come, write, reflect, and we’ll talk.

More Words for the Workshop

THIRD ANNUAL SPRUCETON INN WRITERS WORKSHOP AND                                     RETREAT   
          

           Words from the heart – Writing from the Inside Out

September 22 – September 24

Spruceton Valley, tucked away in the heart of the Northern Catskills.

A time and place to reflect and find your story.

CONTACT:

HTTPS://WWW.SPRUCETONINN.COM/WORKSHOPS-RETREATS

You will spend three days in the most peaceful place on this earth. It will be a time to write, and a time to reflect. Of course, we will read your work and talk about it. I look to see what you are trying to do, and then I do my best to help you do it. What I really want to do is enhance the way you see. For me, that is the key to good writing – the ability to see things that others do not. Where others see a forest, you see trees. Where others see trees, you see a tree. When you see a tree, you see an entire network of life you never knew existed, from way underneath the ground on up.

I am also in love with words. I believe words used as only you can use them become magical incantations that bring entire worlds into existence. 

What do I want from you? To write fiercely and honestly. To love words as the tools that tell your tale. To dig so deeply you are stunned at what you find, yet that is the only the way you and you alone can tell that tale because it is a tale like no one else. Because It Is Yours.

What will you get from me? I bring you the lifetime of a writer and adventurer brimming with experience in the world writ large. I bring you the eyes of a creator, a scholar, and a critic, reader of some zillion or so books, decades of teaching experience – this country and others, college grads and undergrads, street people, high school kids, at-risk kids and prison inmates, ex-cons in halfway houses, hungry screenwriters, poetry in elementary schools, elderly memoirists, snazzy writers’ conferences…And now you. 

I’ve hugged Jane Fonda and shaken hands with Muhammad Ali. I survived the wilds of Alaska, the back-country desert of the Superstition Wilderness, and the mountain rainforests of Dominica, and and and…I’ve been a social worker. I’ve been a United States Marine. I’ve worked in the White House. I’ve taught on a college campus and a maximum-security prison, at risk kids and the homeless. I am at your disposal. Pick my brain. See what’s in there. Maybe something you can use. Sometimes even I’m surprised.

Third Annual Spruceton Inn Writers Workshop and Retreat

Here's what I find difficult to tolerate: bad spelling, incorrect grammar, lousy punctuation. Your words are your tools. You want them sharp and firing smoothly. Otherwise, if you're writing for publication, its a sure bet those folks won't read beyond page one. They're not looking to finish. They're looking to get grabbed. Who isn't?

THE MOST IMPORTANT RULE OF THEM ALL: Don't give anyone n excuse to stop reading!

Words for the Workshop

Your work is your work. It's not my work. This is not Hollywood. Nobody's gonna force an opinion down your throat or fire you or pay you lots of money so doing what you don't want to do doesn't hurt as much. I attempt to see what the writer means to do, and then I try to help that writer to do it. I offer incisive, thorough, yet gentle reasoning. We disagree? You're the boss. We'll put our heads together to get your words where you want them. - Stephen

My Marine Corps

 MY MARINE CORPS

Part One                                                                                                                               Memorial Day, 2019    

When I die, bury me in my Marine Corps uniform in case I need to fight my way out of hell.

I’m a peaceable guy, but it never leaves your system.

Three score years ago my platoon waited below decks of a troopship for the signal to deploy topside where we’d climb down rope landing nets in full battle gear into landing craft circling below, waiting to spread out into a wave which would take us to shore. We’d been warned not to fall because getting smashed between the two iron hulls smacking back and forth in the rolling sea meant you’d have to be identified by your teeth. It wasn’t Iwo Jima, but a piece of each of us wished it were so. To have fought in a legendary battle! The Few. The Proud. It was amphibious assault training way back when there was still amphibious warfare, in other words, hit the beaches, the way John Wayne pretended to do. Jets screamed in to pound the area. They always amazed me because by the time you hear them, they’re not there anymore. The entire landing zone was seeded with explosives strong enough to knock us off our feet or worse if we got too close. Our mission was to hit that beach and move forward. Every Marine, regardless of occupational specialty – grunts, engineers, cooks, armorers, motor pool, supply, Remington Raiders, i.e., the clerks – it didn’t matter – everyone was trained as an assault troop. You get the order. You grab your rifle. You go. Forward.                                                                                                                                      

We had formed up at dawn to wait our turn. Everybody seemed relaxed, loose, no grab-ass, just scuttlebutt and bullshit until a hideous buzzer shrieked like a strangling coyote - our signal to saddle up. Every man snapped to. Move! Do it! Helmets on. M1, locked and loaded, secured by the sling to the pack of the guy in front of you, while the guy behind you secures his to yours. Hands free. Facing forward. Poised to go. Suddenly, so quiet, so hushed, so still. Waiting to move out.

And that’s when I got it. That’s when it hit me.

With our helmets on we looked no different than the guys in newsreels doing what we were now about to do. We were those guys, or we would be. That was the instant it all became very real. We weren’t kids playing cowboys and Indians in the neighborhood. We weren’t dressed for Halloween. Regardless of what we had been, none of us were us anymore. We were Marines, descendants of the third division at Chosin reservoir, the troops Mao feared over all the others, the ones he labelled “Yellow Legs” because of the puttees they wore. General Chesty Puller, a revered, reviled, and singular son-of-a-bitch, when informed that the Chinese had them surrounded, exclaimed, “Good. Now we know where they are.”

The Corps was the stuff of legends, every one of them geared to send you to your death and render you proud to go there.

I don’t know that many of us or any of us really considered what we were doing, certainly not then and maybe not now, but I am not the same person I was then. I told a friend of mine the other day, “At this stage of my life, I want to be Mr. Rogers.” Hold on. Course correction. Mr. Rogers Plus. The Marines haven’t gone anywhere, but Mr. Rogers has moved into their neighbor.

                                                   ************

My Marine Corps                                                                                                                          Part Two

I was no hero. When people thank me for my service I’m prompted to reply, and often do, thank you for yours. However, I was determined to be the best Marine I could be, but I was never a hero and would no way claim to be one. I never threw myself on a grenade or charged a machine gun nest with my bare hands. I did not wake up each and every morning wondering if it was my last day alive or in one piece, and no other man’s blood splashed over me.

It wasn’t patriotism, either, as I’d not given much or any thought to being a patriot one way or the other, that is, until fairly recently when the braying of right-wing blowhards brought with it the realization that I might actually be one without having known it. But I became a Marine, a Jewish kid who survived Parris Island (“dayenu”), trained as a combat engineer with a unit that also trained as recon. It was difficult, and it was dangerous, but I never faced the worst of it. I would have, but I didn’t, and I would never dishonor the men who did by saying I did, too. There’s reason behind all this. Patience. I’m working on it.

I’ve never been keen with authority figures, so how did this all come about? My mother designated our home a free fire zone. That woman taught us to duck. Life was fraught. Unexpected explosions from outer space. One day my Drill Instructor bellowed into my face, “What’re you doin’ in my Marine Corps, clown?” “Sir,” I shot back, without thinking, “It’s safer than being at home, Sir!” He sneered like I was a turd under his nose and hissed, “Get outta my sight, maggot.” Yet, he was the same DI who stopped another from an adjoining platoon who took to harassing me for being Jewish. “Hey, boy, you know what the fastest thing was in World War II?” I did. A Jew on a bicycle in Germany, but I didn’t want to say it. My DI, Staff Sgt. Smith, reached out and touched the menacing DI on the arm, a very subtle touch, a signal: don’t. Would I have broken? Would I have answered? What I do know is that my DI put an end to what promised to be a serious clusterfuck.

Parris Island. PI. I wanted to survive. I was terrified, as were we all, of getting “set back”, meaning you failed some element of training and were kicked back to one platoon behind – an extra month on the island – and every man in that platoon including the DI’s would hate you for being a fuck up. A setback was death, worse. Whatever it was I wasn’t going to go there. Imagine what the Fat Man’s platoon was like! Yes, there was one. Think the enemy’s scary? Spend time with a squad of hardcore grunts. These guys were dangerous, like if they found out that underneath my own hardcore grunt disguise, they’d find a scared shitless, chubby little Jewish kid, and kill me.

Anyway, that other true fact: As badly as I wanted to be a good Marine, I needed to keep a small piece of me operating on the sly. So, I took to lacing my combat boots one set of eyelets from the top thereby assuring myself that I was the only Marine in the entire Corps to dress this way. I was different. Nobody knew it but me.

So, why? As a kid I read a war comic story about a guy who grabbed a flaming cannister in both hands to save his crew. I wondered if I could do such a thing? Who knows what anyone will do in a split-second crisis, but I suppose I hoped I would? Once, in the midst of a grinding wargame, my squad reached a stretch of barbed wire. The word on this was that one of us would throw himself on top of the wire and everyone else would use his back to run up and over. I threw myself on that wire with no thought at all, not one, while eight guys ran up my back. I had no notion of heroism or any notion other than just do it because that’s what we did. It felt a lot better than rigging a booby-trap to shred another man’s face. The “beauty” of planting an anti-personnel mine was that “all it did” was take off a man’s foot thereby necessitating two more to carry him thereby taking three men out of action for the price of one. I did buy into all that for a while. I began to understand the logic of war. In the killing fields it made some kind of sense. Years later it occurred to me that if I’d become a corpsman, I could’ve been in the thick of it without killing anyone. Still, why? For excitement. Survival. Defense. It didn’t hurt that I’d been tossed from college and had nothing else to do except bag groceries at the local A & P. I wanted the best. The toughest. Death Before Dishonor. Raising the flag on Iwo. Just look at those billboards: “A Few Good Men”. Navy SEALS did not exist nor did the army’s Green Berets. Frog Men did, but I didn’t take well to cold water. There were only “the Few, the Proud, the Marines.” Those billboards still give me goosebumps. I may well be “woke”, but, like the man said, once it gets into your system it stays there. Like malaria, it crops up from time to time. But that really isn’t it. It’s more like resolve, more like wearing a back brace that reminds me daily to stand up straight.

My discharge from active duty coincided with a program to train enlisted men as chopper pilots. Upon completion, you’d be awarded the rank of Warrant Officer and an all-expense paid tour to Viet-Nam. It was 1961, I think. It wasn’t like I was driven towards anything much in civilian life, except maybe freedom, never having to run in sand again, longer hair, also the unadulterated pleasure of moving one’s bowels in private rather than in a twenty-pot row with twenty more grunts growling for you to hurry up. Marines were already in Viet-Nam. A few. Chopper inserts were underway. I knew a crew chief, a hard-core leatherneck, who had just returned from Viet-Nam. Can’t remember his name but can still see him clearly. I told him about the Warrant Officer commission which would take me to Viet-Nam. “You don’t want to go there,” he said, level, stern. “You went,” I said. “Yeah,” he answered. Here’s what he told me. “We landed our chopper right outside a friendly village to pick up a squad under fire. The enemy was right behind them. Our guys made it, on-loaded, and I gave the signal to take off. Shit. We couldn’t. We could not get off the ground, God damnit! We were taking fire now, but the problem was that the villagers were hanging onto our runners, begging us to take them, too, because the Viet Cong would slaughter them as traitors. Make a decision, corporal. You got the enemy closing. Eleven men to keep safe. Make a decision, corporal.” I knew what he was getting at, abruptly glad I didn’t have to get at it myself. “We turned the guns on them,” he said. “Shot ‘em off. Men. Women. Some kid. What would you do?” The same damn thing. “I didn’t become a Marine to kill civilians,” he said. I knew of another crew chief who shot an old lady in the head with his .45 as she tried to board. “How’d I know she didn’t have a bomb on her?” Sometimes they did.

I liked to fight. I liked the excitement of dangerous situations, but I learned I did not really want to hurt anyone, not seriously, anyway, maybe punch out a politician or two, but that’s it. Like those crew chiefs, I didn’t become a Marine to kill civilians, either; actually, I realized I didn’t want to kill anybody. What I wanted was to keep them from killing me, and I did get pretty good at that.

I’m proud of my service, and carry the best of it with me each day, ideals I try to meet but don’t always: demeanor I admire; behavior, considered, collected; the trust to “just do it”; a call (usually uncomfortable) to stand witness to my beliefs; courage if I need it, but I will never again support military adventurism ever because the people who start these things send others to fight them. And because it is a terrible thing to take a man apart. And because I’m not angry and afraid anymore.

Recently, it dawned on me that I have a specific form of survivor’s guilt, a particular kind of PTSD, applied to vets who never had anyone trying to kill them on a daily basis while others they trained with did. A piece of my bedrock laments that I was not there with them. Another piece whispers softly, “Thank you.” I had seen deadly wounds before the Corps, including gut wounds and a head blown off by a shotgun, so it wasn’t queasiness, and I have had to deal with physical situations both in and out of the service, so I really don’t believe it was fear. It was the evolution of principle that had earlier, without my knowledge, taken root.

I can’t remember where I was stationed at the time, but the base had a library, and, one day, a squad member, a very smart guy whose father was a physicist at Oak Ridge, came back from the library and handed me a book: “Johnny Got His Gun” by Dalton Trumbo. “Read it,” he said. I did. So, should you. I can only surmise that the base librarian miscalculated on this one thinking it was something pure and patriotic. It sneaked by, the first anti-war novel I had ever read, and, to this very moment, the most visceral and painful of them all. World War 1. A soldier is speaking to us from his hospital bed. The shock comes when we finally realize that this voice comes from something with no limbs and no face, something that once was a young man.

Photographs of the severely wounded come across my desk from time to time: men and women without arms and legs, without arms and without legs; blind and deaf; men with their faces burned off; men who have stepped on mines and triggered IED’s. All of them are awful. Most of them unbearable. That I trained to do this to men just like these except for their language or their skin! I live with enough not to have been burdened with that one. The kneejerk is to look away from these photos, but, no, uh, uh. I have no right to look away. If these men and women need to live like this, I’d better damn well honor them by looking at them as they have become. These are the vets to whom we owe our thanks, not just our thanks but the nation’s treasure and worldly goods, whatever it takes to ensure that they may live out their days in whatever comfort they can find. I know what they fought for. They fought for each other, not for the reasons they were sent, certainly not for the politicians who contrived those reasons. Look at those pictures yourselves. Look hard. Go beyond repulsion to gratitude and grace, then tell me you want to send another innocent to war.

                                                            END

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Words From The Heart

"Personality-wise he's a dynamo, witty, and compassionate. Writer-wise he's insightful, lyrical, evocative, and strong" Ellen Stern, journalist, NY Magazine, writer, Gracie Mansion and more