Came home in the dusk from tonight's walk and saw a wood frog hopping across the driveway. By the garage, a small toad crossed my path. And as I was tanking up the hummingbird feeders so everyone has something to eat for breakfast tomorrow morning, I happened to look up — and saw a tree frog on the edge of the rain gutter above the front door!

I absolutely wasn't expecting to see a frog there. I know they are called tree frogs for a reason, and we do have a tree right beside our door with branches that reach out over the roof, but it still startled me to see the little head of a tree frog peeking out over the gutter.

The frog was distinctly watching me, probably trying to figure out when I was going to leave.

I'm sure it's one of the tree frogs who come regularly to the kitchen window to hunt moths at night. Usually they only show up at night, but a week ago, one tree frog stayed perched on the window sill all day long. I shot a little movie of him (see below) but made a point not to bother him. A couple of times when I checked on him, he seemed to be sleeping, or at least his golden eyes were narrowed.

In other nature news:

My article about the different reactions  to Thief is now up on The Huffington Post.

I had more to say about the concept of the demon lover, but I wanted to keep the article under 1,000 words. The gist of what I wanted to say was this: though I didn't know the term demon lover when I was 13, I did understand the concept.

Why? Because I listened to Heart's song "Magic Man."

In 8th grade I sat with a friend of mine talking about a boy we both knew, and I told her that song was how the boy made me feel.

It seems funny now — the boy was another 8th grader and not a man at all. But he was daring in a way other boys  weren't, and when he touched me, I felt as though I was in the presence of something larger and stranger than anything I had ever known.

I've said often that I believe sex is a life force, and I think that was what I meant even then. I could feel that force in the boy, and it compelled me and he compelled me. He kissed me even more hungrily than I kissed him. It scared me a little, but I knew I wanted to get close to whatever the power was between us.

Yesterday morning when I was sitting outside having my coffee, I saw three ravens fly overhead. Shortly after, they started raising a real ruckus north of the house. I dashed inside to get my camera and made the movies below.

There's nothing much to see - I only caught sight of one of the ravens once, and he isn't visible at all on my sad little movie. But you can hear the incredible sounds the birds made — plaintive cries as well as a throaty croak. Turn up your volume to get the full effect.

I made the movies traipsing around in my nightgown. I should have put on real clothing, but I kept thinking the ravens would stop their calling, and I didn't want to waste time.

So. All this got me thinking about sound and music and writing.

I kept literary talismans around me as I wrote Swimming Sweet Arrow, but I also had one musical talisman: Steve Earle's "Devil's Right Hand." I didn't play it from the start, but once I found the song I played it often, over and over in my car. I especially liked these lines from the start:

I saw my first pistol in the general store, general store
I was thirteen
I thought it was the finest thing I ever had seen

The song helped me think through and understand the characters of Del Pardee and Ray and Luke Sparrow.

Right now I'm listening to one CD whenever I get into my car or Jeff's Ford Ranger. I can't say what it is — I don't want to jinx myself. I don't know if it's just an obsession or if it has something to do with the new novel. I think the music is somehow leading me toward understanding something about the narrator. Which is all I can say for now.

American toads have been showing up around the house the last couple days. Tonight I spotted a tiny one, a little over an inch long, hopping through the tall grass and weeds of the yard. He hopped so quickly I didn't try to catch him, but two nights ago, I did nab and photograph a larger toad that was hanging around the garden hose.

I cupped the toad in my hand and brought him inside so I could grab my camera. Just as I got to my desk where the camera was sitting, the toad peed in my hand. Most of the pee stayed in my palm, but a couple drops fell to the floor. After I carted the toad back outside, took my photos, and let him hop away, I came back inside and cleaned up the droplets.

I actually know something about toad pee. Oldfield and Moriarty's book Amphibians and Reptiles Native to Minnesota  states very plainly that in addition to puffing themselves up to appear larger and to avoid getting swallowed, "[American] toads may also urinate on their attacker. This action seems to be the best defense when picked up by humans!"

I have to say, though, that in all my years of nabbing toads, I've never before been peed on. It felt like a tiny rush of cool water over my skin, and the whole experience was very moving.

If all this doesn't sound strange enough already, let me also say that one of my favorite books of all time, Lars Gustafsson's The Death of a Beekeeper, begins with a frog peeing on the narrator.  Here's the opening of the novel:

When I came to the path to the Sundblads', which runs along the lake, smelled the scent of the water and heard the waves beating without seeing them in the darkness, I clearly felt a small frog hopping over my shoe.

Then I did something I am sure I hadn't done since the fifites. I bent down quickly and moved my cupped hands through the wet grass just in front of the spot where it had to be.

This old trick always worked. It hopped straight into my hands, and I could hold it captive in my right hand as if in a cage, it was that small.

For a moment it sat there as if paralyzed, and I put both my hands together to make a larger cage.

There I stood now listening to the wind, a frog in my hands as if locked in a cage, and the same warm wind was continuously moving through the trees. A sour smell came from the swamps on the wooded shore. I clearly felt the frog trembling in my hands.

And then suddenly it peed right on my hand.

I believe that is an experience not many people have had.

The pee of a frog is ice-cold. I was so surprised that I opened my hands and let it hop away. Thus I stood there, deeply moved, above me the wind passing through the treetops, and my hand cold from the pee of a frog.

We begin again. We never give up.

I think that is one of the truest passages I've ever read in a book. And when I've felt troubled or temporarily defeated by something, I've often recalled the final lines and found them to be both calming and sustaining.

I'm proud of myself - I'm cooking today. I just put a pan of pigs-in-the-blanket into the oven.

I've blogged before about my shortcut recipe for pigs, and today I made another small change: in addition substituting buffalo meat for the ground beef, I used a mixture of brown and wild rice in place of white rice. I still think my Slovak grandmother would be proud of me.

My other news is also about how good some things taste.

Wild raspberries are starting to ripen. I forage for them along the driveway when I come home from my morning and evening walks. I nab the berries as soon as they're ripe because I figure I'm in competition with the black bear that showed up here at the house a couple weeks ago.

A couple of tree frogs cling to the kitchen window almost every night so they can eat the bugs and moths drawn to the kitchen light. I like to watch them hunt. The frogs creep very slowly across the window toward their prey, and when they're close enough, they dart forward with open mouths. Sometimes they have to use a front foot to stuff the moths into their mouths.

All of which makes me wonder: what do moths taste like to a tree frog? Do different moths have different flavors? What kinds of taste buds do frogs have?

I know my gray cat likes to eat June bugs and dragonflies, and I can only guess that she likes the taste or perhaps the feeling of crunchiness in her mouth. Maybe dragonflies are like Doritos to a cat.

I think Thief delves into the idea that not all valuable relationships last. But just because something is passing or transitory doesn't mean it's unsuccessful or a mistake.

When I was in my late 20s I had a relationship that went on too long and never withstood any test; I was glad when it was finally over. But I'm not sorry I loved the man or opened myself to his world, at least for a time.

I suppose a relationship like that might represent failure or a foolish choice — you know, it's contrary to pop songs like "Put a Ring On It" and even to the idea of true love. I loved any number of people, but either I didn't stay with them or they didn't stay with me. But I don't discount those relationships. They were real and true.

I'm not sure which of William Dickey's books contains this poem, but it's anthologized in Robert Mezey's Poems of the American West. I know I've had a typed version of it in my poetry files for the past 30 years.

 ~~~~

On His Way Home to Wyoming

We were too brief to expect to keep in touch.
The traffic stream has carried you past my stop.
I am no time you should remember much:
the moment of tenderness your mind lets drop
the way a cigarette drops from the hand
of a lover who is drunk or half-asleep
and harmlessly burns out. I understand
the pleasure of having what we need not keep.

And when you leave, I understand the pleasure
of silence, of keeping my body to myself,
of washing your glass and putting it on the shelf,
of measuring out the day to my own measure,
at ease, not glad, not sorry that you have gone,
the bed stripped bare, the clean sheets not yet on.

                                                —William Dickey

I read at Prairie Lights in Iowa City on Monday and a good crowd showed up, including some old and new friends. I also had a chance to stop by the new Writers' Workshop offices at the Dey House. Pretty impressive and nothing like the old warren at the English-Philosophy Building.

After my reading, I went for a drink at the Deadwood. While the place oddly seemed pretty much the same, the red-haired waitress with the interesting scars wasn't waiting tables anymore, and that's when I understood that none of my memories of the town existed anywhere but in my head.

Which is as it should be.

ANYWAY, I used to walk to the Deadwood right after I got off work at a church just around the corner. (Most places in downtown Iowa City are right around the corner from a bar.)

If I don't sound like the kind of person to be a church secretary, I agree — but I took the job one summer when my work study money ran out. It was a perfect job because I could walk to work — and from work right into a bar. It was a perverse kind of thing to do so that made me like it, but I know I also felt like I had to get the religion off me as soon as I could.

One of my duties at the church (in addition to mimeographing the Sunday bulletin and straightening out hymnals in the pews) was changing the white letters advertising that week's sermon on the sign outside the building. I always did that as quickly as I could so no one would see me. I had my reputation to protect.

Tuesday morning before I flew out, I thought about walking down to my old apartment, but I decided to let 706 E. College Street stay as I left it 20 years ago, and as it still is in my mind.  

In an article in The Independent called "Summer of Tainted Love: A Season of Strictly Adult Stories About the Shadow Side of Love and Sex," writer Boyd Tonkin connected my character Alpha Breville to Emily Brontë's Heathcliff, stating that, "The demon lover has stepped back over fiction's threshold." 

Tonkin goes on to write about several books that explore "potentially deadly desire," including Mud by Michèle Roberts, True Things About Me  by Deborah Kay Davies, and The Shape of Her  by Rowan Somerville. 

Maybe that's why Thief is getting more (and better) press in the U.K. than it is here in the U.S. Maybe they have a longer tradition of acknowledging the attraction of the demon lover. Here in the U.S. my characters get called "willfully stupid" and "dum-dum."

The same reviewer who used the word (words?) "dum-dum" about one of my characters also objected to my frequent use of the word cock. To boot, she wrote that she kept envisioning Tori Spelling playing Suzanne in "a bad Lifetime made-for-TV movie."

You can read that review here.

While I'm at it, let me throw in the review I got in Publishers Weekly that called my writing "abysmal" and concluded with this statement: "Suzanne is less a character than a phoned-in grotesque thrown together to serve the requirements of an ill-considered story of petty self-enlightenment." You can read the whole thing here on Amazon.com.

I was catching up on the New Yorker the other day and read the article about soccer by Hampton Sides, "National Defense ." The article is about the entire U.S. team but focuses on goalkeeper Tim Howard.

Howard has Tourette's and believes that the syndrome helps him in the game. Soccer also provides a focus for his intensity. But Howard told writer Hampton Sides something I found even more fascinating: he hasn't ever had "fun" during a soccer match.

There's too much tension and Howard can only (literally) let down his guard at the end of match when the "danger" of the other team scoring is finally over. And yet it is clear through the article that Tim Howard is doing what he absolutely loves.

That might seem like a riddle or paradox: Howard loves something but he never enjoys it. But I think it makes perfect sense. Soccer is for Tim Howard what writing is for many writers — including Colm Toíbín.

I read an interview in The Manchester Review in which Colm Toíbín told M. J. Hyland that he hadn’t enjoyed writing any of his books, saying there was "no pleasure" in it. When M. J. Hyland asked Toíbín why, then, he didn’t stop writing, Toíbín replied, “Because I have things that will not go away.”

This spring when I told students in my fiction writing class that I didn't like to write but I liked when I was done writing (something Dorothy Parker said, if I have it right), they seemed surprised and maybe disappointed. But I meant it, and for similar reasons to the ones Tim Howard gives for why he doesn't enjoy soccer matches.

Writing is filled with tension for me — trying to figure out how to tell a story and then trying get what's in my mind onto the page. But there isn't anything else I'd rather think about than my characters and how to tell their stories. No matter how much anxiety writing brings, it's what I want to do.
 

So the other night Jeff and I were in the bar that I write about in Thief (page 33) at 8 pm. and the place was deserted. It was a nice night, and the drink-after-work people had gone home, and the drinkers of the evening hadn't yet arrived.

In fact, we weren't even there for a drink — we went to town to get dinner, but a couple of places stop serving food by 8 at night, (including the A&W), so we decided to get a burger at the bar. They've always had great burgers, and now that there's no smoking, it's even more enjoyable, at least for the two of us. In the old days the bar was the kind of place that would even make your bra smell smoky if you sat there too long.

Anyway, this only matters because I want to be clear that the insight I got wasn't alcohol-induced. But sitting in the bar it became very clear to me that at least part of what I was trying to do when I wrote Thief was to create a portrait of specific people (Suzanne & her cowboy, as well as Breville) in a place (the north woods). Lots of the talk surrounding the book focuses on the relationships in the novel, and that's certainly the heart of the book, but there's a whole context for those relationships that I was trying to evoke.

I had certain images in mind as I wrote, and those images were my companions during the writing. Smoke-filled bars. Driving alone on gravel roads up here in the north woods. Jack pines and cold lakes. Coming home at dawn after I spent the night with someone, my feet bare inside my Dan Post cowboy boots. And the song "Tougher Than the Rest."

It's a Bruce Springsteen song from 1987's "Tunnel of Love," but the version I kept playing in my head was Emmylou Harris's cover from her 1990 "Brand New Dance." The song changed meaning entirely when Emmylou sang it because it was a woman declaring that "If you're rough enough for love / Honey I'm tougher than the rest."

I love everything about the song as Emmylou sings it, but what resonated so much with me while I was writing Thief was the idea that you have to be tough if you want to love some people, if you want to become entangled with them. Love isn't all sweetness. But I also don't mean that it has to be "dark" or "dysfunctional," which are the terms people are always trying to apply to Thief. I mean that when people have lived long enough and are no longer innocent, there's some ground to cover with them that isn't easy or straightforward because they carry a lifetime of experiences.

"It ain't no secret
I've been around a time or two..."

All that ground to cover only increases in size and complexity if you choose to become involved with someone who's difficult in any way. But don't many of us have difficult people in our lives? People we go on choosing to love because they're valuable or cherished in some way in spite of their flaws?

ANYWAY — that was the backdrop of Thief. That was the world and the way of looking at things that I tried to put on the page.