A short story evolves to become a short novel, and is published. The author achieves success with his modest yarns about life on Cape Cod. He publishes his tales in the Saturday Evening Post, enjoys a respectable living from his writing, summers on the northern Jersey shore, and dies in Winter Park, Florida. Through his stories, readers discover a Cape Cod populated by dreamers and doers, practical idealists who define success in terms of personal codes more than popular myths of the America’s 20th century success machine. Readers travel from afar to experience his Cape Cod, and residents help them realize the dream. Soon, the Cape becomes a destination, an ideal of a better time in America, and a vacationer’s mecca.

In 1911, Joseph Crosby Lincoln (1870-1944), 41, published his story The Woman-Haters: A Yarn of Eastboro Twin-lights (A.L. Burt Company, NYC).  He was a third of the way through his career as a spinner of popular yarns set on Cape Cod, in a part of the country that was invisible to all but a few thousand residents and their occasional visitors from nearby Boston.  It was a place apart from the nation’s rambunctious urban centers, a throwback to an earlier, self-reliant America.  Its people were taciturn, pragmatic, and passionate about life’s possibilities. Lincoln distrusted modern progress and so he kept returning in his stories to the childhood home from which he had been taken after his father died and his mother moved him to the mainland. Lincoln’s anti-modernist tendencies found expression in stories about this Yankee outpost on a narrow finger of sand so far out to sea that on especially clear days residents might fancy seeing their ancestors’ old country to the east. Here adversity was vanquished, justice prevailed, and romance was eventually, ultimately requited.

In The Woman-Haters, once-married Seth Atkins and Emeline Bascom accidentally reunite on a beach at the extreme easternmost tip of the nation.  In this fantasy realm between sand and sea, they see their past actions in new light, comprehend their lives afresh, and rediscover their former attraction.

In 2010, enter Daniel Adams, a veteran writer-producer-actor-director who likes the cut of Lincoln’s literary jib. Adams is one of movie-making’s working class heroes who keep the dream of movie magic alive by gathering friends, locals, and would-be filmmakers together to put on a show. He attracts popular stars to his troupe, works long hours, stretches a dollar to the breaking point, and captures moments on film that become movie memories for the rest of us.  Previously, he had directed an adaptation of Lincoln’s 1911 story, Cap’n Eri: A Story of the Coast into The Golden Boys (2009).  Recently, he adapted Joe Lincoln’s The Woman-Haters: A Yarn of Eastboro Twin-lights a full one hundred years after it was published into the small feature film, The Lightkeepers.

Whether The Lightkeepers is a commercial or artistic success is not at issue here. As of this writing, it has grossed an estimated 4.5 million dollars, which does not qualify it as a commercial success in 2010. The 1911 equivalent, by the way, would have been $193,500. Reviews are mixed. Some critics have faulted the language, the staging, and Richard Dreyfuss’ interpretation of former sea captain Seth Atkins. Positive reviews have cited The Lightkeepers’ grown-up love story, the palpable sense of place, and the distinctively Yankee knack for understatement.

What counts is that Joseph Lincoln lived life and wrote stories his way. He spun yarns that made readers feel good about themselves. And Daniel Adams is living his life and making movies his way. Hats off to both artists. Thanks for keeping the dream alive.

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Related Links

Joseph Crosby Lincoln (1870-1944), Author

The Woman-Haters: A Yarn of Eastboro Twin-Lights (1911)

“The Lightkeepers” (2010)

Daniel Adams, Writer-Director

AMY BLOOM (J. Emilio Flores for NY Times)

AMY BLOOM (AWAY, Random House 2007) read her short story, Compassion and Mercy, at a Celebration of Writing seminar in Wesleyan University’s Memorial Chapel on Saturday afternoon while 200 yards away on Andrus Field, her alma mater’s football team hosted Williams College.  The significant audience that turned out to hear her revealed two things: there is always a choice to be made at Wesleyan between mind and body, and Bloom is a writer with the kind of forceful presence that can compete with anything.  And she competed well, eliciting several laughs throughout her extended remarks. Her reading also produced the operative metaphor for one’s creative muse for the rest of the seminar: a raccoon.

On short story vs. novel writing

If I write forty pages and I’m not done… it’s going to be a novel.

Character-driven work

I tend to think extensively about a story before I work on it.  I think about the characters.  Eventually I ask, “who dies?”   Because in fiction you have to have things that are compelling.  Going to the grocery store is not compelling.  People dying is.  People going off to war is.

For Bloom, it’s always about the character’s story, finding ways to show who they are by how they react to events.

By the time you are an adult, events don’t make you who you are; they show who you are.

On writing for television

First, no one has to write for television. It’s not like they kidnap your children and hold them for ransom. They pay you.

And, if you have other things that you do, and you have the time and space in your life, then collaborating with very, very smart visual artists is positive and rewarding.  And they pay you.

It’s different for me. I’m an exotic. I’m older, I’m from the East, and I’m a novelist.

It’s funny. I always go out to Los Angeles and the second sentence out of my mouth is, ‘That’s okay. I’ll go back to Connecticut.’  It’s best [for a writer] if you can walk away.

If I can’t write the final beat of a story, brief, or article, or the last five seconds of a commercial or video, I know that the premise is not yet fully realized. Those concluding seconds, or those cascading syllables leading to a final conclusive sustaining note should resonate.  The end should resolve, summarize and underscore the point.  If those qualities are absent or not sufficiently present, then the foundational work – the premise in most instances – is not done; the ad, video, short story, screenplay or novel is not complete. The piece might move, twitch, even walk, but it won’t fly.

This morning while writing a University President’s Thank You video to the worldwide university community for its continuing support through the most trying worldwide economic downturn in seventy years, a low rumble filled the air. I was hungry, and my mind didn’t distinguish between an almost tectonic scraping of geologic plates outside my window and my own stomach. At first anyway.  Then there was an eery groaning of great forces surrendering to an even greater force.  Then all hell broke loose: wood shattered… birds shrilled… squirrels chattered… monkeys wailed… alright, maybe I imagined the monkeys.

I arrived at the window in time to see the grandfather red oak on my property fall fifty feet from its dominant station overlooking a steep cleft in the hilly terrain where I live. It arced slowly into the woods formerly in its shadow. Squirrels flew through the morning light in odd trajectories to the left, to the right, and as far from the falling giant’s muscular and now lethal branches as their stunned instincts could catapult them. Birds moved outwards from the center of the chaos like clouds from an imploding building. And still the giant swung heavily outward and downwards.  There was nothing anyone could do to manage the destruction descending upon the surrounding woods.

As the reality of the event finally penetrated my thoughts, three things occurred simultaneously: I swore. Questions battered down the ordered routine of my otherwise quiet morning. And I bolted outside in a rush of adrenaline-fueled dynamism that will impress me later when I have a chance to consider it. I passed my wife on the way to the door. She was engaged in her own emergency response, rushing to identify what it was that has upended our sense of peace and security. Neither of us were panicked, only resolved to meet the facts squarely, and do what we could. From her expression, it was clear that she too was realizing that this was big, and whatever our plans had been for today, this year, this life, priorities might be about to change. Were the neighbor’s children playing under the tree? The tree had not fallen on either our house or Ed’s, but was there collateral damage?

Outside, the woods were still swaying, hissing, and crackling in the aftermath of the giant’s fall. There was no wind, yet the surrounding trees were responding as if there was a stiff breeze and wind shear was pressing down on the crowns. At the base of the fallen tree, a five foot deep hole lined with severed roots the size of my thigh, snapped clean as if sliced by a razor.  The soil was black and wet, loosened by three weeks of daily rain. Looking down the length of the tree, broken limbs were pretty much everywhere.  High in the surrounding trees great lengths of the giant’s branches hung wedged in the crooks.

Down to the left, I saw my neighbor Ed with his young son looking on.

“Are the kids alright?” I asked.

He smiled, nervously. “Oh yeah, just us here. Birthday party for Davis in a while, but just us now. Yeah, we’re good.”

I breathed my first in the what seemed like the last hour. It had probably been only seconds.  Crisis, adrenalin, and recognition of how one event can alter everything – landscapes, relationships, families, lives, personal histories – including, it seems, the time-space continuum.

Alright, the largest tree on our property – a fifty foot red oak that is one of the elder natives in these woods – has fallen. Like the economy. I would eventually realize and find inspiration in the metaphor. Miraculously, the oak’s collapse did not injure any of the neighborhood residents, damage property, or create a situation by falling into our neighbor’s yard.  It fell precisely along our shared property boundary and in a barely accessible, steep terrain wood.  Now what?  A summer’s worth of clean-up.  A winter’s worth of firewood.  Two or three other house maintenance projects delayed.  And an indelible sense memory that suggests that when a tree falls in the woods, yes, it makes a mighty sound.