When History Burns: The End of Civic Stadium - OR - Why a Writer Cares About Baseball

It was a place where you and your history made peace with each other, at least for the duration of the game.  It was a place that made sense in a way that needed no explanation, a place where strangers became instant allies as the ball streaked away over the fence and you all came to your feet.  It was summer evenings in a grassy field, the smell of hotdogs and beer, the score cards balanced across a knee, the feel of dirt under your fingernails sliding into home when you were nine years old. And, yesterday, it burned to the ground.

The ballpark had been abandoned by the local triple-A team five years ago, and in the intervening years, battles raged in the community to save the historic structure, which had been, in 2008, listed in the National Historic register.  Work to renovate the old stadium for use by local youth and sports groups had been set to begin in just six weeks, but, in the midst of 90+ degree heat June 29th, fire broke out, from initial reports in the old press box, and within moments the entire stadium was engulfed in flames, burning to the ground within two hours, after nearly 78 years standing.

Within moments, pictures and videos were everywhere on social media.  It is how I learned of the fire.  I had been out most of the day, running errands for a family wedding happening later in the week.  Finally at home, I settled into my most comfortable chair and picked up my computer to check emails and lazily surf the web.  The first thing that I saw was a picture of the fire, with a “Farewell, Civic” tag line on a friend’s Facebook page, posted less than fifteen minutes after the fire began.  After the initial “NO!" my first reaction was to be flooded with memories - the game-winning homer in the bottom of the ninth at the game friends and I went to on my birthday, taking my grandkids to their first ballgame ever, munching popcorn with my buddies and spitting beer as they made lascivious remarks about the youth (and tight pants) of the young players.  I have only lived in this town for 16 years, but the memories were overwhelming.  In moments, everyone was telling their stories - from those who first visited the park as children, to taking an old friend to his last game there before he passed.  Everyone had stories, and told them.  Even as the old structure still burned, stories were told and shared, and cried over.

It is what happens, in the human tribe, when things end - stories of its life are told, shared, held

close, as though the stories will keep the destruction, the ending of things, at bay.  And, in a very real way, they do exactly that.  Stories are what maintain our history, polish it, make it shine, change it into something that connects us. Civic Stadium, with its wooden grandstands and funky ancient bathrooms and wide view of the surrounding hills is now a pile of charred wood and embers, but the stories maintain.

It is, quite honestly, why we tell stories, why those of us who write tell them, make them up, fashion a history from whole cloth and get to the point where we believe in the reality of what we’ve created - to hold close to those things that shape and define us, and to share that with others.  Like any baseball fan, I’ve been to many a ballpark, watched many a game, witnessed many stories.  At ballparks, people I’d never seen before and was never to see again touched me - the marriage proposals, of course, the strangers in the crowd helping a disabled fan to his seat, the little kid catching his first ever foul ball in the stands.  Civic stadium to me was memories of dirt-lot ballgames in the high mountain summers as a kid, it was the raggedy stadium my husband and I went to just a week before we learned he was dying, it was the summer we regularly had tickets to The Mariners games at the old King Dome, and watched Randy Johnson pitch a 17-K game from just two rows up behind home plate, and, later that season - The September to Remember - bouncing up and down with joy in the living room with my daughter as she and I watched the game that sent the M’s to the playoffs.  

It is the point of stories that they bring up my memories for me, and yours for you. It is something all writers should remember each time they sit down to write - that history matters, and the telling of it in personal stories, whether real or fictional, is the way we keep the truth of our lives.  It is the reason to write those stories - that whatever fictions they may contain, they contain the essence of the truths that all of us know, so that we do not forget them.  

The 4 A.M. Breakthrough and the History of Sleep

Two days ago, my eyes popped open at 4 in the morning, and all I could think was, “NO!  I need sleep!”  I produce a small local theater company - we do single-night showcase performances a few times a year - and we had a show that night. It was going to be a busy afternoon and long night;  rest was essential.  I closed my eyes, but, predictably, did not go back to sleep.  After a while, I got up, made myself some Sleepy-Time tea, and sat down to drink it.

Two and a half hours later, I looked up at the clock, then back down at the table and the 23 pages I’d just written.  As I had sipped at my tea, more and more a scene from the boyhood of my main character grew in my mind, playing there like a reel from a film, till I had no choice but to write it down. Reading back over it, I was delighted with every word.  And it was now 7 in the morning, with one of the busiest days I could imagine (not to mention that loooooong night) ahead of me.  I knew that I had to be busy, out the door, running errands, loading up props, etc, etc, no later than noon, so I set an alarm, went back to bed, and slept for 2 ½ more hours.  I woke and burst into action, running from that moment till the actors took the stage at 7 p.m., and then adjourned with all of them to the after-party, where I was among the first to excuse myself and head home around 11:30 p.m.  

When I got there, did I sleep?  Did I fall into bed and crash to sleep the sleep of the over-worked?  No. I sat back down at my writing table, and wrote another dozen pages.  Then I slept.

I had recently ordered (and read) two books, called  The 4 a.m. Breakthrough,  and The 3 a.m. Epiphany.   I recommend them.  While they don’t exactly tell you how to make this kind of breakthrough happen, they are filled with unusual (sometimes bizarre) writing exercises that keep your writing chops edgy, like finger exercises for a piano student.  In graduate school, my adviser had often given us random elements we were required to try to work into whatever fiction we were working on at the time - a requirement which led to some of my favorite work. Intentionally bending your own mind, making your inner self uncomfortable challenges your creative self in productive ways.  Try these books out.  But I hadn’t done any of these exercises in quite some time, being very focused on the discovery and development of the characters for my most recent piece.  So I don’t think that’s what caused this sudden flush of nocturnal juices for me.

Some time ago, a friend sent to me (on social media) a copy of an article about sleep.  After reading it, I did more research.  It seems that waking at night, and breaking your sleep pattern into two distinct chunks, is the natural human pattern.  For centuries, it was referred to in multiple cultures and in multiple languages, as first sleep and second sleep.  Less than a decade ago, after reading research which detailed references to first and second sleep in literature going all the way back to Homer, a researcher named Thomas Wehr conducted a study with hundreds of volunteers.  For four weeks, each of the subjects was only allowed exposure to light ten hours a day, and no exposure to artificial lighting.  By the end of the four-week period, every subject had fallen into a pattern of what is now referred to as segmented sleep.  They (like I normally do, though for years I worried that it was some kind of aberration) would sleep soundly for four hours or so, then be awake for anywhere from one to three hours, then sleep again, more lightly, for two or three hours.  It seems, from this research and others, that segmented sleep is the natural human pattern.  The invention of artificial light, however, changed things - tempting people out into the streets at night, extending work days, and compressing the amount of time available for sleep.

So I am, apparently, not as weird as I thought I was - or at least not for the reason of my sleep patterns.  I am, these days, pursuing segmented sleep.  I reject the notion of getting by on as little sleep as possible (really?  Margaret Thatcher only slept four hours a night?  Or LESS?).  Sleep is as essential to good health as diet and exercise, and it is no wonder, in this cram-everything-possible-into-your-day kind of world, where many glory in such pronouncements as “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” .. that we are all so fundamentally, all-consuming tired.  But it isn’t just for my health that I now actively respect my night-waking pattern.  It doesn’t take long, when looking into the research on segmented sleep, to discover that, historically, artists and writers and scholars thought of that interval between first and second sleep as their most productive, most creative, most free-thinking time.  Certainly, at those times that I honor it, like that night two nights ago, it has been for me.  

So, friends and fellow writers - sleep well - for four hours.  Then, when your eyes drift open and you think to yourself that you must be awake just to go to the toilet, reconsider.  Pick up a pen, or a book, or a drawing pad.  Sit quietly with it, and let go of your preconceived ideas about how and when and for how long you should sleep, and let your mind do what it really wants to do in those hours.  

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For more information on segmented sleep, or "second sleep" - follow these links:

BBC News Segmented Sleep
Rethinking sleep: The New York Times
A History of Bimodal, or Segmented, Sleep

Purge and Renew - The Slow Path to a Story

A former roommate of mine used to accuse me of talking like Yoda - when I would do it, she would quip:  “Joda speaks!”   The first words that came into my mind as I thought about beginning this entry were:   “Away from this a while, I’ve been,” and hence came the Joda-memory.  I have been away a while - wrestling, as writers so often do, with my own demons.  The writing process is odd - unique to each individual, often unique to each project.  This time, I have the entire story I have been working on in my head - beginning, middle, and ending.  It’s a piece I began years ago, wrote more than 400 pages, and then put it away because I’d realized that I’d gone off in the wrong direction, away from the truth of the story.  Recently, it’s returned in the person of the main character’s son, and I have been struggling to get close to him, to feel him flesh out, because it’s clear to me he is central to that truth for this story. It has been, and remains, a difficult battle.  More difficult than any story I’ve written since my first published novel - which tells me that it’s worth the battle, that there is something important here.

I’ve tried all the tricks I know - everything I’ve walked writing students through, every strategy discussed in seminars in grad school, every trick ever published in any book, and there have been no late-night revelations, no 3 a.m. breakthroughs.  Progress has been slow, though there has been progress.  

Last night, a short series of words came to me as I was driving home from the store, and, when I got home, I sat down with my old Olympic typewriter and a stack of reclaimed paper from work - printed on one side, blank on the other - and began typing.  Several pages later, I was inches closer to a real understanding of this young man, and the battles, secrets, and betrayals that have shaped his life.  That part is wonderful - unlike those 3 a.m. breakthroughs, the deep night revelations, his is a slow growth in the story, a careful, considered unfolding of events.  I am learning to respect him.

But what really hit me this time, as I sat back last night, warm tea in hand, and read through the pages that I’d written, was the truth and necessity of the transient, the temporary.   I haven’t been able to write a word of this story on my computer - everything I’ve written so far has been either by hand or on that old Olympic.  If I were to write on my computer, there is a sense of permanence in the words electronically saved - even if the computer crashes, somewhere that file is held in the Cloud - permanent, fixed.   

When I write by hand, (or on the Olympic), those pages are as transient as a puff of smoke - once crumpled or torn or burned - the words are gone, saved nowhere, existing nowhere but in memory.  Since so much of this story is about the transient nature of life and loyalty across the generations of a family, that seemed appropriate.  It’s freeing.

I am sitting here remembering clips from old films of a writer at his desk, ripping the paper from the typewriter, crumpling it and tossing it away -  across the room, into a trashbin, into the fire - pages essentially, fundamentally gone - and then beginning again.   For this story, that sense of purging and renewal is central not only to the story, but to the nature of these characters, so of course I have chosen a temporary, destructible medium to write for them.  And, as it turns out, for me.   

I heard a story once, possibly apocryphal, that Amy Tan once came home to find her house burned to the ground, her nearly-finished manuscript with it.  She had to begin again, from word one, to rebuild it, and said ever after that it was this purge and rebuild that made The Joy Luck Club so strong.  I don’t know if this is true, but the sense of purge-and-rebuild speaks to me.  I can rip pages from the typewriter, or from under my pen, and demolish them - whether they sang or were awful, I can let them go, and take a step toward the story’s truth without them behind me.  I face each page like my characters face each day - with the past burned away behind us, and only one direction left to go.