Hello everyone
It’s been a minute. I have been traveling, first to my high school reunion in Arizona and then to scout places for our post-Iowa life on the east coast. In the meantime, I’ve been working on my cycle of family stories that begins in 1875 and keeps right on going until more or less present-day. Biographical fiction is a tough thing to get right, since a writer tends to bend facts in service of the narrative.
“Aunt Bertha never said such a thing” would be the likely comment from family members who read the first story in the collection, The Colonel Goes West, which takes on the myth of one of my ancestors who traveled to Arizona in the 1880s. We had a lot of legends in my family, tales passed from person to person until the edges were worn smooth and shiny. I started this project because it was something my father began and never finished (and maybe never even started), so I feel filial obligation to continue his work.
I think my dad wanted to stick closely to history, using as his model Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose (which he disliked intensely and thought he could improve). In that book, a mining geologist and his wife move from place to place while trying to craft a marriage. Stegner used a trove of family journals, letters, and even a barely-published book written by the geologist’s wife as the skeleton of his tale, but took several dramatic licenses that royally pissed off the donors because they involved infidelity. Aunt Bertha never did such a thing. I have the same tenuous relation to facts as Stegner had.
Some of this is due to circumstances beyond my control. As much as I’d love to be accurate, my years of alcoholic behavior caused a rift with my stepmother that has detached me from the primary sources of research, namely a giant Home Journal full of entries written by all the family members as well as bundles of letters and newspaper articles. I had a chance to go through these materials when my grandmother died in 1990, and indeed I was the one who found them for my dad and got him going on the project. So far, I haven’t been able to get another look at this stuff so I have to rely on m memory.
Here’s the thing I have discovered while working on this project: while my memory of the particulars is uneven, the core question of this story remains: why would an accomplished man who seeming had everything suddenly abandon his life to attempt becoming a mining magnate in the uncivilized Arizona territory? It would be easy to credit the same old Horace Greeley tropes about making one’s fortune, but he was a middle-aged man with a thriving public career, a luxurious life, and a rooted family. His motivations may have had to do more with mortality than ambition, or maybe it was something else. In this I have discovered a compelling story. Is it factual? Parts of it are, One thing I know is that my grandmother would probably hate it.
But the following piece has nothing to do with that. I just wanted to add something to my Substack so it doesn’t die from neglect, and I picked something super short to spare my handful of readers a colossal waste of time. I will keep you updated on the story collection as I make progress. Thanks for reading.
INSTAMATIC
She doesn't have any pictures of her children.
When they were young she had taken scores of Instamatic snapshots.
In these photographs her children were frozen by the flesh-bleaching flashbulb, stunned faces and red glowing eyes making them look like demons.
In the background she could make out details of the house in which she still lives.
She'd kept these photos in a box.
Out of sight, out of mind.
One day she carried the box to the garbage and that was that.
She hadn't spoken to any of them in years.
Two Christmases ago David sent her a gift-wrapped Olympus digital camera.
There was no card.
She often wonders whom he thought she would take pictures of.