The week has been filled with things linked to writing---well, they are linked for me, at least. Not relationship or statistical correlation that may be positive or negative, but a joining, building, bonding. A construction for the future.

I’m joining a flute quartet that is providing an instrumental background for the choir singing “All Things Are Connected.” The song, composed by Mary Lynn Lightfoot, emphasizes how we must care for the earth and has its roots in Native American wisdom. As I privately practiced my Flute 3 part alongside the droning metronome set at 72, it felt technical, methodical, and craft. But even as a quivering, rookie flutist I knew this was necessary—I had to get this as right as I could.

After a week of this private drone and focus, I joined the other three flutists under the direction of a musical artist who understood the power of merging, the essence of craft and art. Not only did she unite the four of us, but she also was building our work to join the choir. This was a choir I have never met or heard in an organization where I was not a member. All along, the musical director knew the choir and understood the congregation, the purpose of the service, the bigger picture.

Connecting the individual flute players in the quartet, then to the choir, and finally to the message and listeners was like joining my words and sentences to the plot, the purpose, and then to the readers. At that moment I realized music and writing are connected. There are steps in building these connections—you probably knew this all along but then and there, I saw them in a different way.

As a writer, there was a time I believed the focus on target audience was the highest priority. Maybe it is, but my flute quartet experience called me to reconsider. Strong, basic writing craft is essential—words and sentences and their connections to a plot with the metronome droning at 72. First things first.

Then comes the focus on readers. This may be nuance, light twists, a touch of hand—the art. This may be pace, pianissimo or forte, staccato or legato. The spotlight changes; sometimes it’s the choir and sometimes it’s the instrumental. The goal in music and in writing may be similar—a strong craft first, and then an artful connection to the reader and listener.

Does this connect for anyone else?

In her Best Supporting Actress 2017 Oscar winner speech (for Fences), Viola Davis begged artists to tell the stories of forgotten ordinary people. “Stories found in the graveyard,” she said, “exhume those bodies, exhume those stories.” Davis, who is the first Black actor to achieve the Triple Crown of Acting (Emmy, Tony, and Oscar) described these as the stories of the people who dreamed big and yet never saw those dreams to fruition—“people who fell in love and lost.”

I continue to read novels that give voice to middle-class and upper middle-class characters who attend private schools, debate hybrid cars, and compare notes about the Riviera.

But where are the eleven-year-old characters who fumble out of bed at 5:00 every morning to mix formula to feed the newborn calves? “So I can sell a couple of ‘em and buy a car someday—well, maybe a truck,” she says without embroidery when I ask her why she does this. From the barn to the house we trek in silence, bending our bodies against the wind, swiping the tears from our cheeks before they freeze. Our headlamps sway with each step, sending playful shadows on the snow. She dresses for seventh grade, checks in with her dad who’s already at work, and commands two younger siblings in their breakfast-backpack routine before they all catch the school bus.

Today I was a visitor in her life. With two buckets in each hand, I saw her elbow into the pen and shove away the aggressive calves with her leg to allow the weaker and smaller ones to drink. With that shove, did she also plead for me to write her story? Or—and I can barely breathe the question—will she, and so many others like her, be one of those graveyard stories, where no one exhumes the body and writes the story?

What stories of forgotten, ordinary people do you know? I would love to hear how you might write them....or is it right them?

See video of Viola Davis' speech here.

           “You’re off to Great Places! You’re off and away.” My dad used Dr. Suess’ words to raise me. Well, not those words exactly, as I’m positive he never heard of green eggs, cats in hats, or fox in socks. But with his twist of gusto, love of learning, and all the resources he could muster, despite his sixth grade education—Dad waved me off to spaces and places he never imagined.
              As I’ve fumbled and stumbled to find those places—and read and write those pages—my dad was spot on. I did find high heights and see great sights. I also learned about lurches and prickle-ly perches.
            Welcome to my blog “Oh, the Pages You’ll Go!” I will do all I can to notice the pages and the places. I will think and write about what I notice . . . here we go.
           I recently read Matthew Desmond’s Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City which was the selection for our Eau Claire, Wisconsin “One Book One Community.” A Harvard sociologist, Desmond used ethnography as a research approach to study housing in Milwaukee, our state’s largest city. The book is essentially a research report but it reads like a novel—characters, action, details, plot. It disturbs and it is intimate.
            Desmond described ethnography as a “way of seeing.” He said it’s “not something we go and do—it’s a basic way of being in the world. It’s a sensibility.”
            Is this way of seeing an essential skill in fiction writing? To be observant, to notice, to be in the world basically? Perhaps fiction writing is like being an ethnographic researcher . . . to “remain alert to the heat of life at play right in front of you?”
            I’ve recently had a few “heat of life” moments in front of me. At the candlelight ski at Lake Wissota State Park in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin last night, I saw a man with his head bent down, checking his phone and texting as he snowshoed through the pine trees stretching far into the silent sky and past the candles flickering in white paper bags. I tried to understand, not to judge.
         Sometimes those heat-of-life moments are too funny. An article in the local paper described a semi-truck driver who was weaving through traffic and finally went off the road. The driver tried running away after he was pulled over but the police quickly caught him and arrested him for drunken driving. The driver was hauling a 40-foot trailer filled with wine.
             In that same paper, I read about a 76-year old man stopped for drunken driving in central Wisconsin, his 10th OWI. The police officer told the driver he could smell beer on his breath. In the most convincing tone possible, the driver replied, “I just had some beer-battered fried fish at the Bear Cat up the road.” The gavel declared seven years in prison.
           These incidents are funny at first glance, perhaps, but extremely troubling. They may find their way into my fiction writing. I’m rehearsing my way of seeing, of staying alert. I’m thinking more about the connections between ethnography and fiction writing. What connections do you see?