#72 Cheering for Karen Hood

Karen Hood’s family moved eight different times while she was growing up and she thought her family was destitute. Everybody else’s house seemed bigger than hers until they moved from New Jersey to Michigan. Karen brought her big hair and bright-colored clothes with her and the other kids at Waverly High School thought she was a rich kid. Karen used her beautiful voice to sing in the school choirs and to be a cheerleader. She has always liked the idea of helping other people to do better. After high school, Karen went to the University of Tennessee and majored in journalism. She started acting in TV commercials and do voiceover work on the radio. After college, she drove the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile around the country for a year. She was in lots of parades and tried to get in traffic jams (so they would mention her vehicle on the traffic reports). Karen had a series of jobs in marketing and public relations, but mostly stayed in Tennessee—in part because of the many early moves, but also because her mother was diagnosed with cancer and she wanted to spend as much time with her as she could. Her mother struggled with cancer for almost five years before passing away. After this, Karen hung onto other relationships to the very end. She was afraid of losing everybody. Years later, Karen struggled with her own difficult illness and she wished that her mother could have taken care of her (Karen’s mother was her cheerleader). Still, Karen found great comfort in the forty different friends who took turns staying with her for weeks after her surgery. Coming through all of this, Karen found a new kind of confidence and became her own cheerleader. Now she is finishing her Ph.D in marketing and will be moving to wherever her first academic job takes her. Everybody is cheering for this job to be wherever Karen wants it to be.

[Note: Karen and I went to high school together. It was great to get to know her again 23 years after we graduated.]

Time Out New York: "Michael Kimball Reinvents the Suicide Letter"

There's a very nice profile of DEAR EVERYBODY by Michael Miller in Time Out New York's Fall Preview: "Michael Kimball Reinvents the Suicide Letter." Here's a little bit of it: "In addition to writing stunning prose, Kimball evocatively hints at entire physical and emotional worlds lying just behind his story’s surface. In many cases, the author’s verbal compression both amplifies and dampens the tragic clamor of Jonathon’s letters ... they harbor such a strange emotional power that you’ll find them hard to forget." Here's the whole thing.

Also, there was an early review of DEAR EVERYBODY (pub date is September 1) in the Greenpoint Gazette. Here are the last three sentences: [Dear Everybody is] "inventive and often extremely funny, but it will also break your heart. Michael Kimball is one of the most talented and original writers in America today. You should read his books."

Plus, here are a couple of other nice things that people have said:

“Dear Everybody has the page-turning urgency of a mystery and the thrilling formal inventiveness of the great epistolary novels. Jonathon Bender's magical letters to the world that never wrote to him are at once whimsical, anguished, funny, utterly engaging and, finally, unforgettable.” Maud Casey

“Michael Kimball's wise-hearted epistolary portrait of an endearingly honest, suicidal depressive is by turns hilarious and haunting--and always thrillingly deep, surprising, and pitch-perfect. Dear Everybody confirms Kimball's reputation as one of our most supremely gifted and virtuosic renderers of the human predicament. It's as moving a novel as I have read in years.” Gary Lutz

#71 Sean Lovelace: Running, Reading, Writing

Sean Lovelace was born in a clinic, not a hospital, which may explain why he later became a nurse and worked in a hospital. His biological father left when he was 1 year old and his mother was going to put him up for adoption. He didn’t know this then, but he felt abandoned, angry. Luckily, his grandfather adopted him and his uncle became his best friend. Then his mom remarried and Sean moved back in with his mother and his step-dad, who was great. The whole family would run together and read together. He often saw his parents reading and he thought that this was what he was supposed to do too. He also used to read the encyclopedia cover to cover until he found something interesting to make or do. Despite this, many of his childhood memories are of pain—hitting himself with a bolo, impaling himself on a tomato stake, that kind of thing. He went to the best schools, but was a middle class kid, so he overcompensated by writing hyperbolic stories about his classmates. When he was 14 years old, his dad challenged him to read War and Peace, which he did, but Sean didn’t really know how to use commas until he was 18 years old. Years passed. Sean kept running faster and faster. Running is the closest thing to religion for Sean. He can feel the earth moving through his body with each step. Sean read more and more books. He became a psychiatric nurse, which is how he met his wife--at the hospital (she wasn’t a patient). She is a therapist and Sean loves her heart and how much she gives to people. Sean loves their two kids, though he feels as if he abandoned his patients when he became a writing professor. His patients were thankful for everything that he did for them, though, and Sean is glad that he still makes a difference in people’s lives, which he does in many different ways—including when people read his stories and are somehow transformed.

More Sean Lovelace (check out the vs. pieces)

#70 The Happiness of Elizabeth Ellen

Elizabeth Ellen’s mother claims that she got pregnant on her honeymoon. She also claims that Elizabeth’s alcoholic father beat her and that was why she left him on their honeymoon in Europe without telling him. Elizabeth’s mother filed for divorce after returning to the US and because of this Elizabeth has no memory of her father before she was 8 years old, when she started spending part of every summer with him. After that, Elizabeth was rich in the summer (when she stayed with her dad) and poor the rest of the year (when she stayed with her mom). She was an only child, overweight, unsocial. She read a lot. She lived in a different house or apartment nearly every year until she was 18 years old, when went to college and majored in English. That first year, she was put on academic suspension and then things got worse. She tried to go to classes, but had panic attacks and stopped. Her grandmother continued to send her checks for her tuition, though, and she lived off those with her boyfriend for a couple years. A few years later, Elizabeth met her husband at the strip mall where they both worked and they got married a month later, though they didn't tell anybody, in part, because her husband feared that one of his friends would steal her. A year later she got pregnant. The eight-year marriage was incredibly stifling and emotionally stressful on a daily basis, but the divorce was amicable. It was an exhilarating time after that. Elizabeth and her daughter could do whatever they wanted and the simplest things brought them great joy. Around this time, she bought her first computer and began writing seriously for the first time in her life. She had always thought the greatest thing one could be is a writer and now she is the greatest thing. After that, Elizabeth met Aaron Burch online and they dated long-distance for a year before he moved across the country to live with her and her daughter, who is crazy about Aaron too. Elizabeth has a very full, very happy life with Aaron, Andromeda, and Heather (her step-daughter who stays with them some weekends), co-editing Hobart, and writing her own books. She never imagined that she would be this happy.

#60 The Fully Formed Kim Chinquee

Kim Chinquee was three weeks late being born and she was a big baby when she finally arrived. She started reading before anybody else in her class and was the salutatorian of her middle school, but her parents divorced when she was 14 and Kim stopped studying in high school. She preferred sports, boys, and parties. When she graduated, she didn’t go to college. She couldn’t afford it and nobody had told her about financial aid. She was going to join the Navy, but the recruiter wasn’t there, so she joined the Air Force instead. She didn’t want to fly planes, but she didn’t really want to be a medical lab technician either—it was her 10th choice. She married another lab tech and they had a son a little over one year later. Technically, they were married for 7 years, but they were separated for the last 4 years of their marriage because her husband wouldn’t sign the divorce papers. He couldn’t believe that she actually wanted to leave him. The divorce finally became official and Kim left the Air Force too. She joined the Reserves, but the next few years were a difficult time. She was a single mother working multiple jobs, taking classes toward her college degree, and paying for food with food stamps. She took her first creative writing class because it filled a general education requirement and has been a writer ever since--though she never admitted that fact until she won the Henfield Prize and the 5K dollar award that goes with it. Now she is a creative writing professor at Buffalo State College and has published a great book of tiny stories called OH BABY. She may have started her writing life a little late, but she has arrived fully formed.





More Kim Chinquee

Kim Chinquee’s OH BABY

Reading Things I Wrote into a Microphone

Dear Everybody,

I've also been meaning to tell you about this audio page that I set up over at myspace. It's me reading things that I wrote into a microphone. It has some DEAR EVERYBODY from an appearance on WYPR (your public radio) and a couple of pieces from THE WAY THE FAMILY GOT AWAY that were recorded in Milan and then some more DEAR EVERYBODY.

I Forgot to Tell You

I forgot to tell you that I was going away for a week, Maine, an island off the coast of Maine, Peak's Island, in a friend's summer house. It was a $130 flight, an $18 cab ride, a $7 ferry ride, and then you're on an island and it feels like you're living in another time (pre-internet, at least). The air feels different there than it does here. We rented bikes and rode around the road that went around the island. We made cairns on top of the rocks that are right next to the Atlantic Ocean. We explored an abandoned American battery from WWII and a 9-year-old boy told me that he found a skeleton in there once. We ate ice cream every day. My favorite is pistachio.

The life stories will start going up again tomorrow.

I'm the Man Who Loves You

There has been some confusion lately concerning Wilco and whether I was ever in that band. The passing resemblance is understandable, but this isn't me. If I had a that hat, maybe. If I could sing just a little bit, maybe. But I don't and I can't. I do love you, though. Know that.

I Have a New Website

I'm pretty excited about my new website at http://michael-kimball.com/, which has audio, video, excerpts, book tour information for the fall, everything that I could think of for all three novels. Of course, let me know if you think of something else. If you like it, feel free to let the wonderful and glorious Tita Chico know. And feel free to make links. I mean, we're already connected.

#66 We're Lucky There's Blake Butler

Blake Butler’s two older brothers were miscarriages. Blake was almost a miscarriage too. He was blue and not breathing. He scored 1 out of 10 on the Apgar scale, which is almost not alive, and lived under the lights in the ICU for days. When he went home, he was his mother’s miracle. Understandably, she was overprotective with Blake when he was an infant, but that turned into permissiveness as he grew older, which gave him a sense of freedom that continues to inform his writing today. By 4 years old, Blake was performing considered monologues, crazy dances, music videos, and both sides of talk shows. It’s all on video (his mother will show you, if you want). Despite these performances, Blake was a fat child by the 4th grade. He liked comic books and video games. By 10th grade, he weighed 250 pounds and felt disregarded. His bedroom walls were covered with pictures of women that he tore out of magazines at the grocery store. He started playing bass in a band and started to feel better. By 11th grade, he weighed 170 pounds and people were nicer to him. He lost all the weight for a girl named Jen. He thought his weight was the only thing keeping her from him. It wasn’t, but Blake stopped being shy and started talking to girls. He played in lots of different rock bands—15, eventually. The first time Blake was on stage, under the lights, it reminded him of when he was in the ICU. Eventually, writing replaced music, though Blake brought the rhythm of the bass with him to the page. Blake still thinks of himself as the fat kid and he writes to find out what is inside him. This is one explanation for his tremendous written output. Another explanation is his insomnia, which allows him more conscious hours than most people are allowed. Blake is never fully awake or fully asleep, though, and the normal often becomes strange. But Blake keeps giving us everything that is inside him. It’s not pounds, but it’s a different kind of weight.


More Blake Butler

The Trailer for DEAR EVERYBODY

Luca Dipierro and Rachel Bradley, of Black Arrow Studio, made a beautiful book trailer for DEAR EVERYBODY. If you like it, please feel free to spread it around. I would appreciate it and Luca Dipierro and Rachel Bradley would appreciate it too.

#62 Micah Ling: Outside of Time or Competition

Micah Ling’s name has always given her problems. She is not Asian or a man. She is Native American (mostly) and a woman (completely). Micah has a twin brother, but she was born first (by about 45 seconds), and her twin likes to say that she ditched him (which she would never do). She loves her family and thinks of her parents as her best friends. She started writing her mother little poems when she was about 7 years old. Her father drives a motorcycle and she started running with him when she was 10 years old. When she was 11 years old, she became a vegetarian after seeing how the turkey was killed on Thanksgiving. It made her sad, especially since she gives a name to every animal that she sees. Micah ran through high school and through college. Running is her meditation and she can think about things while she’s running without getting overwhelmed. Micah went to Indiana University for her MFA in poetry and MA in literature—and met her future husband, Nate, there in Bloomington. Nate drove a motorcycle and she would ask him to give her a ride on his bike every time she saw him. After about a year of asking, he did and that was the beginning of them. It is years later and she continues to live on his endless supply of kindness and forgiveness. It is years later and Micah is still running, but her feet are full of pains these days. In college, she ran the national race with a broken foot that still comes back on her. She wishes that she had never raced. She would rather just run outside of time or competition. Now she has the best job she could have, teaching writing and literature. And she still writes poems, often formal poems, so that she can break all the rules.

#59 The Storytelling Instinct of Shaindel Beers

When Shaindel Beers was 4 years old, her mother kidnapped her and they fled cross-country. For a year, they lived with strangers. Because of this, in part, Shaindel has never been afraid of anybody or anything. During this time, and before she could write, Shaindel told her mother stories, which her mother wrote down with crayons. This storytelling instinct and the fact that she observed adults often writing things led her to believe that this is what adults did, a behavior that she would later emulate as an English professor and a writer of poems (when she starts with a feeling) and fiction (when she starts with a character). Eventually, Shaindel and her mother drove back to her father, but the family was still dysfunctional—in part because of her mother’s OCD, which manifested itself, partly, as a hoarding instinct. In fact, growing up, Shaindel always thought of her friends’ houses as strangely neat, oddly empty. Her mother’s hoarding led to the family house being condemned and her mother going to jail for pulling a gun on two people who were trying to clean out the house. This might not have happened, but Shaindel’s father was at Subway getting a sandwich. Another thing that almost didn’t happen was Shaindel meeting her husband, Lee. Two hippies who live in a trailer on a reservation had fixed them up on a blind date—because they both read all the time and they both are hermits—but the hippies told them each a different meeting time. When Shaindel got there, Lee had left. Shaindel found out where Lee lived and went to his house. He answered the door in a wife beater that showed off his skull tattoos, but Shaindel was not afraid. They got married, and—oh, wait, did I tell you that Shaindel means pretty in Yiddish? It does. She is. Ask Lee. He’ll tell you.

Shaindel's Website

[Note: In between when I wrote Shaindel's life story and when it went up here, she was offered a two-book deal with Salt Publishing (second item on the left), so feel free to congratulate her on that. The white space at the bottom of the postcard bothered me, but I'm glad that this good news is what it was for.]

An Early Review of DEAR EVERYBODY

There's an early review of DEAR EVERYBODY (pub date is September 1) in the Greenpoint Gazette. It's three paragraphs of kind words with no "but" anywhere to be seen. Here are the last three sentences: [Dear Everybody is] "inventive and often extremely funny, but it will also break your heart. Michael Kimball is one of the most talented and original writers in America today. You should read his books."

The One Thing I Have Learned So Far

Everybody is amazing. Gena is amazing. Gina is amazing. Blake is amazing. Josh is amazing. Christopher is amazing. Zachariah is amazing. William and Heather and Joy are amazing. Graham is amazing. Peter is amazing. Micah is amazing and Micah's mother, Deborah is amazing. Red Delicious Apple is amazing. Karen is amazing. Adam is amazing. Anya and Anastacia are amazing. Rob and Rob's twin brother Kenny are amazing. Barbara and Holly and Bethany and Joe are amazing. Minas and Peggy are amazing. Emily and Ann and David and Albert and Gail and Kristina and Joe are amazing. Lynn is amazing. Bart is amazing.

#10 The Life of Zachariah Zebadiah Handler

His parents named him Zachariah Zebadiah, but most people knew him as the Miracle Baby, this because only weighed 1 pound, 11 ounces when he was born 3 1/2 months early. While still in the incubator, his father took the wedding ring off his finger and put it on ZZ’s wrist. His father doesn't know it, but this is one of the reasons ZZ survived. And it is one of the reasons they are so close today (though his father doesn't realize that either). Since his birth, ZZ has gained 193 pounds, an increase of over 100x his early birth size. And by surviving, ZZ has gained other powers, which he uses to perform his own miracles, this in his work with the deaf and the blind.

[Note: This is one of the first ones I wrote, when I was wriiting on the fly at the Transmodern Art Festival (see first post, down at the bottom there). They were a lot shorter in the beginning, though maybe more distilled. I'm glad that ZZ stayed in touch and sent in some family photos to go with his life story.]

#58 William Walsh, Private Man

William Walsh is a private man and there is little public knowledge of him. We know that he was born in the 1960’s, an event that quite possibly took place in Massachusetts. Not many specifics are known of his early life, but we can be certain that certain things happened—that he fell down while learning to walk, that his parents didn’t always understand him when he first learned to talk, that his baby teeth fell out and that the Tooth Fairy visited him without him knowing it. At some point, he learned to tie both of his shoes at the same time. When he was in the first grade, he was sent home from school for whistling. That was the last time that he did anything wrong or was in any kind of trouble. He was so good that he once played hopscotch with Pope John Paul II in Vatican Square. He always did his homework. His adolescence may have been awkward and he once ate his weight in clams. Regardless, he grew up, filled in, and became quite dashing. Later, there are public records concerning his attendance of Stonehill College and then the University of New Hampshire, concerning his marriage to a woman to whom he vowed everlasting love and, following this, the birth certificates for four children (he was recently spotted playing ski-ball with one of them at Dave & Busters). Other evidence for William Walsh’s existence includes his writings—a documentary novel called Without Wax, a formally inventive work about the adult film industry. But we should not draw any conclusions about William Walsh from this novel, his short stories, or his derived texts. This would not be dependable biographical information. Little else is known about William Walsh, but he was last observed watching late night television somewhere in Massachusetts. If you go look for him, then he might still be there.


[*This postcard life story was written, as a kind of challenge, based on what I know of William from our e-friendship—that is, without an interview.]

Without Wax

Questionstruck

The Deep and Reflective Michael Kimball

[Note: I have been thinking that I need to write my own life story (on a postcard), but then Heather Fowler did it for me.]


Michael Kimball was born in 1967 in the days after the Great Midwest Blizzard and Ingham County snowplows had to pave the way to his parents' house to clear enough roads for his mother to get to the hospital. He loved his childhood babysitter and wanted to marry her. He wanted to marry his wife-- and did. He has the sort of movie taste people either treasure or hate, but he’s reluctant to share this. He spends his time writing people’s lives on postcards in his small, neat script, or writing novels that also pull heartstrings, or smashing things. The postcards are written so he can delve into the majesty and pain of the greater population, one person at a time. When he is not writing postcards, his longer work is about sad people, happy people, erotic people, and everyday people—because he does not pretend to be above them, though he often hides the full scope of his intelligence behind an easy or charming demeanor. He is charming because he is kind, and, because he is kind, his postcard portraits empower the dreams and dilemmas of his subjects. Because he is talented, each small note reads like a person’s story told to him or her by the innermost part of his or her subconscious. Michael’s words are tricky that way, transformative. Michael is deep as Lake Michigan, which is, on average, nearly 300 feet deep, thereby equating depth at nearly 50 times his physical height. He believes in destiny and childhood memory. He is a brimming fire burning behind veiled lids and a charming, soft spoken man who runs through cold and hot mornings, contemplating, with passion and compassion, those who live and breathe.

Where the Postcards Are

Dear Everybody,

The knee surgery, which you can read about here, combined with a serious uptick in traffic and requests, has left me a little behind on your life stories. Please note that this delay does not in any way reflect a diminishment of my desire to write your life story. I'm going as fast as I can. So here's an update of sorts. Lonely, Micah, Blake, Gena, and Tim--yours are almost done and will go out this weekend. Jen, Sally, Elizabeth, and Kate--yours are coming after that. Timothy, Steve, Pat, Kate, Karen, Daniel, and Deborah--I'll try to give all of you calls in the next week or so. In the meantime, let's all live some more life. Then let's write about it.