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Philip Cioffari on The Evolution of Character

Philip Cioffari, author of If Anyone Asks, Say I Died from the Heartbreaking Blues, writes of character and the way life and writing fuse to build a story.

The main character, Joey “Hunt” Hunter, in my coming-of-age novel, If Anyone Asks, Say I Died from the Heartbreaking Blues (Livingston Press, 2020), came into being over a period of many years. My earliest stories featured young boys in the 10-15 year-old range. These too, for the most part, were coming-of-age stories, usually involving a boy’s being thrust into a confrontation—sometimes at his own instigation and sometimes by the external forces of fate—with some aspect of the adult world. The emotional crux of these stories was the collision of innocence, naïveté, and curiosity with the harsher elements of human existence. By and large, these confrontations had negative consequences.

But I think these boys—in their openness to life, their unarticulated early hopes and desires—served as the basis for Hunt’s character. Though they suffered for their experiences, they came through them—if not unscathed, at least not destroyed. In short, they were survivors.

 It has always been a curiosity to me why these early stories were as dark as they were. After all, my own childhood was what I would consider relatively normal. It did, however, contain some familiar obstacles—after-school bullying, feelings of self-doubt and inadequacy, perhaps a greater than normal sense of isolation from my peers—and maybe those things were at the heart of the darkness that I wasn’t conscious of, that is, until I started writing.

 When the character of Hunt began making itself known to me, though, it came from a different consciousness. I wanted to take a lighter, more humorous look at the teenage experience. And I knew early on that Hunt would take me there. He possessed some of the same characteristics as my other youthful characters, in that he was basically good-hearted with a deeply-felt sense of compassion; he was full of hope and energy and curiosity and determination. What was different this time around was my attitude toward the experiences he struggles to find his way through.  

Although he must deal with the loss of his younger brother, a loss that at the beginning of the novel he is not yet able to accept, his other struggles—with a girlfriend who dumps him, with his self-doubt and sense of inadequacy—I saw this time around in comic terms. It was as if my perspective had grown large enough to accommodate a more layered view of youthful pain. Yes, childhood had its dark side; but it also, if you took a step back, was pretty amusing too. And that, of course, is closer to the true nature of reality—its complexity and contradictions—than my original, unilateral view of it.

I guess I have age to thank for that, and because I’m a slow learner—slow developer might be a more accurate term—I’m more than a little embarrassed to acknowledge it took me so long to get to this point.

Nonetheless, I think I’ve arrived and as a consequence, the scenes involving Hunt’s awkwardness with girls and those involving his combative relationship to the neighborhood toughs, and even his battles with himself—his self-doubt—I tried to make as comic as they are heartbreaking.         

EXCERPT
If Anyone Asks Say I Died from the Heartbreaking Blues

The Bronx. June 22nd, 1960

Joey Hunter, known in the neighborhood as Hunt, turned eighteen the day of his senior prom, the most hopeful day of his young life—or so he believed—because it would be his first date with Debby Ann Murphy.

That morning he waited in his Religion in Society class as Brother Aloysius James, blond hair ascending in waves from his soft pink forehead, clapped his hands to call them to attention. Forty boys, paired into reluctant couples, glared at Brother from either end of the St. Helena’s Boys’ Division basketball court, their faces in the gym’s unflattering light a mix of curiosity, amusement, resentment and outrage.

“Why we gotta do this?” from Kevin Flanagan, his face dominated by little red volcanoes.

“Why can’t we use real girls?” This time the question came from Hunt’s assigned partner, Sal Buccarelli, first string varsity linebacker, known on the gridiron as Sal the Butcher and, in the after-school hours, as leader of a local gang of would-be toughs called the Brandos.

Brother Aloysius turned to face Sal of the massive shoulders. “We want you to be ready for them, that’s why. Tonight at the prom we want you all to behave like the gentlemen we know you can be.” And not the hairy apes you so often are, his muttered aside so soft only Hunt caught it.

Brother flicked the switch on the turntable, set the needle delicately on the vinyl: the trombone sound of Moonlight Serenade filled the gym’s barren spaces. Never mind that the big band era had passed, that the boys before him were now dancing to Bill Haley and the Comets, this—Brother believed—was music with elegance and grace. He saw it as his duty to bring civilization to their imprisoned, barbarian hearts. “I need a volunteer,” he called out sharply.

Instinctively he turned to Hunt.

“Oh no, Brother.  I’m always the girl. Sal never lets me be the guy.”

With relief, Hunt watched Brother re-direct his attention to Sal. Something about the over-sized, lumbering linebacker and self-proclaimed gang leader—with a face the texture of stucco and eyes the color of an overcast sky—being led around the gym in the feminine role seemed to tickle Brother’s fancy. “Sallie,” he said, using the nickname Sal detested.

“Nah, Brudda. Not me. Not me.”

But Brother Aloysius marched to him, bowed briefly and said in a loud clear voice, “May I have the honor of this dance?”  He cupped his hand firmly around Sal’s waist. “Hand on her hip,” he instructed the class, “not where you’d like it to be, ha-ha. Your touch should be firm but gentle. Take her right hand, extend your arm and lead her, glide her, into the music. At the prom tonight, apply the moral standards we’ve discussed in class. Treat her with respect. Treat her like she was your sister.”    

A collective groan rose around him.

Brother Aloysius, one eye on the less-than-graceful technique of the boys dancing under the back boards and along the foul lines, confided to Hunt later that waltzing with Sal Buccarelli was like pulling a two-ton truck though a muddy ditch. Hunt could empathize. Being shoved around the dance floor by Sal was like being rammed by a two-ton truck. Mid-song, Brother  guided Sal back to Hunt, muttering before he turned away because he couldn’t help himself, “You big oaf.”

Sal directed his response to Hunt, as if he were the source of the insult. “I ain’t no loaf.”

“Oaf,” Hunt corrected him. “He called you a big oaf.”

And for that clarification, Hunt was rewarded with a bloody nose, compliments of Sal during lunch break, as soon as they were out of sight of Brother Aloysius who had cafeteria duty that day.

 More bad luck soon followed.

PHILIP CIOFFARI grew up in the Bronx. He is the author of the novels: CATHOLIC BOYS; DARK ROAD, DEAD END; JESUSVILLE; THE BRONX KILL; and the story collection, A HISTORY OF THINGS LOST OR BROKEN, which won the Tartt First Fiction Prize, and the D.H. Lawrence Award. His stories have appeared widely in anthologies, literary journals and commercial magazines. He wrote and directed the independent feature film, LOVE IN THE AGE OF DION, which won a number of film festival awards, including Best Picture at the Long Island International Film Expo, and Best Director at the NY Film & Video Festival. He is professor of English at William Paterson University in New Jersey. Visit his website for more information on his publications and his events.

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Guest Post: Mary Fleming on her new novel, Paris, & Place as Character

Many writers talk about the idea of place as character in fiction or nonfiction, where the setting of a story may reveal the tone or even deeper insight into a main character. In Mary Fleming’s guest post, she writes on place and the bigger role it plays in her new novel, The Art of Regret (just released from She Writes Press). You can read an excerpt below, and, courtesy of She Writes Press and Caitlin Hamilton Marketing & Publicity, there’s a book giveaway! Enter the giveaway by Tuesday, October 29th for a chance to win a copy of The Art of Regret. Now, welcome Mary Fleming!

novel: cover image, The Art of Regret

It’s no accident that Paris takes up so much space in the opening paragraph of The Art of Regret. The book actually has two protagonists. There’s the narrator Trevor, who has undergone more than his fair share of personal tragedy but who has yet to come to terms with those crippling events. The novel recounts his long road to redemption.  

The other main character is Paris. She is as present in Trevor’s life as his family and friends and the novel is also the story of his relationship to the city. It traces the way boyhood feelings of resentment and alienation grow into a more positive force so that by adulthood she provides solace and a reminder that life goes on, no matter his own suffering.

novel: Paris at sunrise

The city’s complications contribute to this sense of Paris as a character, as more than a mere backdrop to everyday life. Like a friend she is multi-faceted and can continue to surprise you, even after many years. My breath still catches when I see the morning light on the Seine and its bridges or look down a yet undiscovered little street. Trevor too, later in the novel, is taken aback when he visits a friend who lives in a house surrounded by the remains of a vineyard, all hidden from street view by a perfectly ordinary building in Montmartre.

As someone who has also lived in Paris for many years, I can testify that Trevor is not the only one to feel that symbiotic relationship. Whether it’s her long history or her great beauty, there is something close to human about the city. She is in fact one of the reasons I wrote the book, as an ode to this great lady.   

novel: Paris monuments up close and in background

The monuments become like friends, which goes some way to explaining why Parisiens were so upset by the burning of Notre Dame earlier this year. For Trevor the iconic relationship is to the Sacré Coeur that sits atop the hill of Montmartre and pops up on the horizon from many points in the city. Since he first caught sight of the church as a child, he associated the towers with his family before his father and sister died. The one big and the three small ones that were visible represented his mother and the three children, the basilica his father. As a young man he saw it from a room he rented. Now he sees it every day when he walks out of his bicycle shop Mélo-Vélo.

Like a friend Paris helps in times of trouble. While recovering from an accident and a betrayal as a young man, Trevor finds that the city coaxes him out of his pain and misery. Ditto in the second half of the novel, when walking becomes an integral part of his daily routine. The city helps him see beyond his own troubles, to feel part of a bigger story. It’s done the same for me on many occasions.

All of which doesn’t mean the city is static. She continues to evolve. Fortunes change; quartiers rise and fall. The rue des Martyrs, for example, may have been deemed unremarkable by Trevor in 1995 but it’s since been gentrified, has moved upscale.

Change or no change, Paris remains a steady friend to the end.

Excerpt: The Art of Regret, Part I, Chapter One

          For many years, in what might have been the prime of my life, I lived and worked on the rue des Martyrs. This narrow market street, which begins its climb at the northern edge of the banking and insurance district and ends in the skein of streets that wraps around the Sacré Coeur at the heart of Montmartre, is not on the tourist circuit and has no pretensions to Parisian grandeur. Behind and above its modest shop fronts are forgettable lives. Lives like my own, which I had reduced to a box, a one-room apartment on top of a one-room shop. Though the two were once a unit, at some point and for some reason—to make more space, to rent the shop and studio separately—the connecting stairs had been disconnected and my room could only be reached by an enclosed stairway in the courtyard. It’s not unusual in a city with a long history. Buildings change their function and configuration, and one structure is squeezed in front of, behind, or beside another. It’s just such quirks that have made Paris Paris, a city of endless layers and perspectives, a city of story upon story.
          Though my story began in New York, the firstborn son of two Americans, it was moved across the Atlantic with a mother and a brother, minus a father and a sister, when I was eight. There on European soil the story reluctantly remained, until near the end of a resentful adolescence. Unfortunately, the long-awaited return to the United States of America, via a small college, proved a disaster, and back the story came to Paris, where it drifted into young and not so young adulthood. By the time it had settled on the rue des Martyrs, I had hoped that that was where it would end, the unremarkable tale of a not-so-proud bicycle shop owner.
          One October morning in 1995, I pulled up the orange security grille to Mélo-Vélo. No matter how carefully I coaxed it, the clang of juddering metal scraped my nerve ends. It seemed such an offensive start to every day, I was thinking, as I walked to the back of the shop and assessed my morning’s work, a bicycle that had spent the last twenty years in a basement. The airless tires were cracked, the handlebars rusty. Cobwebs draped every spoke, and the leather saddle was speckled with mold. The wheels squeaked and wobbled. A complete overhaul was in order, but for Camilla Barchester, the name I had noted on the repair slip, it might prove to be worth the trouble. I turned the bicycle belly up on the repair stand.
          The Tibetan chimes jangled while I was contemplating which bit of the wreck to attack first. It was Madame Picquot, the concierge, with the morning post. Though I had long ago made it clear to her that I was not receptive to morning chatter, that I had no interest in the secrets and rumors, the scandals and grievances that scurried through the building and up and down the street, that I wished she’d just drop my post at the bottom of the stairs to the studio, she passed by the shop every morning to deliver my letters in person.
          “Voilà, Monsieur Mic-fa,” she croaked. “Registered letter. I saved you a trip to the post office and signed for it. Ca va?”
          “Yes, thank you.”
          Normally, since I received little of interest, registered or otherwise, I would have been in no hurry to look at my correspondence, but for some reason—perhaps a fundamental lack of interest in the task at hand—I went straight to the counter and looked at my misspelled name: “Monsieur Trévor MACFARQUAHAR.” If my name is systematically shortened when spoken in French, it is lengthened when written, unfailingly adorned by superfluous vowels and unnecessary accents, and forever a reminder of my general square-pegged existence in a round world.
          I sighed, ripped open the envelope, unfolded the slim sheet of white paper, and in the few short paragraphs saw my life crumbling before me.

Mary Fleming

Mary Fleming, originally from Chicago, moved to Paris in 1981, where she worked as a freelance journalist and consultant. Before turning full-time to writing fiction, she was the French representative for the American foundation The German Marshall Fund. A long-time board member of the French Fulbright Commission, Mary continues to serve on the board of Bibliothèques sans Frontières. Having raised five children, she and her husband now split their time between Paris and Berlin. THE ART OF REGRET is her second novel. Find her online at https://www.maryfleming.co/.

Don’t forget: Enter the giveaway by Tuesday, October 29th,
for a chance to win a copy of The Art of Regret!

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Searching for Missing Pieces: Guest Post by Myles Hopper

I met Myles Hopper when Lisa Rivero and I co-edited Family Stories from the Attic (Hidden Timber Books, 2017). Myles and I worked closely together on his essay, “Exodus Redux.” I came to know him as a writer with great introspection and dedication, one who strives not only to uncover the pieces of a story but to retell it in a way that builds meaning and insight, for the author as well as the reader. Today he shares excerpts from his forthcoming book, THE COLOR RED: That Was Then & This Is Now, which speaks to the power of writing and the art of the story.

The Color Red is a collection of stories that comprises a memoir, rather than a chronological autobiography, which isn’t how I remember my life, nor is it the way many other people remember theirs.

Pieces: Roll of film in a spiral across image from left to right.

The experience is like standing in an editing studio ankle-deep in old-fashioned, raw film footage, searching for missing pieces. Some can be found, and memories can be refreshed; others, alas, are lost, perhaps forever.

Nevertheless, the search has been productive. The result is this book, in which characters and events move back and forth in time, the same way memories present themselves in unexpected flashbacks and associations.

Preparing this collection has been a long process. A story of mine, first drafted in 1992, languished in a file folder for the next twenty-five years. Before it had been relegated to that folder, another author had encouraged me to write the rest of the stories I wanted to tell. I told him I probably wouldn’t­––actually, I told him I couldn’t––though writing was what I most wanted to do. To his “Why?” I said, “Because, I don’t know if I’m able to tell the truth, and if I don’t, none of this is worth writing about.”

“The truth about what?”

“About my relationships with members of my family, maybe my father, most of all. There was a great deal of love and caring, but there also was violence and rage, and I still have trouble dealing with the lifelong aftermath.”

“Then I guess you have a decision to make.”

Though it took many years, I made that decision to finish what I had begun. It has helped me to keep in mind Joan Didion’s final sentence in her preface to Slouching Towards Bethlehem, where she reflects upon how her interests as a writer run counter to those she writes about:  “…writers are always selling somebody out.” [emphasis hers]

I was determined to avoid writing only for myself, about myself. My purpose has been to write this book in a way that might provide readers an opportunity to gain new perspectives on some of their own life experiences, to discover something of value that might have eluded them, to gain a deeper understanding of themselves. 

These stories acknowledge childhood trauma, tragic losses, and confusing, sometimes violent relationships within a family; they also celebrate the love and reconciliation, acceptance, and forgiveness. The result can be transcendent.

Winter 2017

December came and went, and it was my seventy-fifth January birthday. On that day, I had already lived five years longer than the too-short lifespan of my father. Frequently, throughout the winter, my thoughts drifted to how difficult it had been for me to unravel our complicated relationship. I recalled the day when, in my mid-twenties, a half-century earlier, I had been regaling my therapist with stories of my father’s magnificence.

“So, your father can walk on water?”

“Huh?”

Thus, began the healing. It has been a slow, sometimes imperceptible, process until heart and mind could remain open to understanding life experiences in new ways. I needed to arrive at a place where my love and admiration of a father––gone now more than thirty years––weren’t expressed in order to camouflage my darker feelings. I have needed all of that time to cease repressing or denying what was painful and debilitating. Only then could I allow another reality to emerge and coexist. To heal has required embracing the “other” and transcending the limitations of being lost and drowning in the lonely “self.” To heal has required relegating certain memories, photographs, and spoken words to a place called “that was then,” and cradling close to the heart the ones that are called “and this is now.”

Pieces: sunlight and fog coming from upper right corner through canopy of trees

Now, when I think of the person I was then, I imagine him walking slowly on a path under a canopy of foliage, all veiled in a gray, pre-dawn fog. He isn’t aware of my presence close behind him. His unhurried steps slow until he comes to a halt, and I give the slightest of nods as I pass him. 

At the sharp bend in the path, I look back just as beams of sunlight penetrate the canopy. In the light and warmth, he begins to dissipate along with the night fog. I watch until I see only green leaves glistening at daybreak. 

Midsummer 2017

In late afternoon, I leave my writing behind and walk outside to the garden. The oversized terra-cotta pot has been back in its place since early spring, and now the white rosebush it contains is blooming, as is the rest of the garden. In the midst of this loveliness and tranquility, it takes only a few seconds for a perennial fantasy of mine also to be in full bloom. In it, my father is alive and I ask him to work with me in the garden––mine, not his. He welcomes the request, and I welcome his suggestions regarding the placement of new plants and the appropriate preparation of the soil.

At the end of the day, we sit on the patio, enjoy a glass of scotch, and admire our accomplishment:  Not only has the garden been improved, but we’ve spent the day working as father and son without an angry word between us.

It waits until our second glass for me to tell him how much I learned as a boy and as a man during those times when we had been able to work and play together in peace. Then, I tell him that I have provided my children the chance to experience a garden’s peaceful beauty, but never have demanded anything from them in return. I tell him that they, now adults, take pleasure in asking me which plants they should choose and how to care for them. They do this not because I am a gardener, but because I am their father.

I know he understands everything he has heard from me, because he gives one of his self-conscious laughs, more like a quiet clearing of the throat, revealing the depth of his emotions.

By the time I emerge from my fantasy, shadows have grown long and advanced across the patio and the garden and onto the lawn, but there is one more task to complete before dinner. I select the proper spade for transplanting a languishing rosebush, so it will receive the sun and nourishment it has been deprived of for too long. At the new site for the rose, I lift a handful of the loamy soil and inhale its clean, sweet aroma.

On this day, nothing eclipses my sense of well-being, not even as my foot presses on the shoulder of the spade, and I remember standing at the side of my father’s open grave and releasing a shovelful of earth onto his coffin.

Pieces: image of Myles Hopper

Myles Hopper is the author of the forthcoming collection of stories, THE COLOR RED: That Was Then & This Is Now––a memoir. As a cultural anthropologist, he taught in several universities in the United States and Canada, and consulted with nonprofits engaged in strategic planning and organizational development. Writing is now his full time pursuit, with the exception of occasional consultations with organizations whose mission he supports. He and his spouse are parents of two adult children and live in Shorewood, Wisconsin.