1. You have to show up. During the writing of my debut novel, I heard Per Petterson give a talk. During the Q&A, a woman asked Mr. Petterson about his writing habits and how he gets his work done. His answer was candid and brief: You have to show up. There is no magic pill. You have to show up and do the work. A great idea is a nice thing to have, and lots of people out there have great ideas, but not many of them do the work and bring them to life.
2. Talent is not enough. [But maybe hard work isn't enough either.] When I was a beginning MFA student, I looked at my fellow students and wondered how there would be room for us all in publishing. Multiplied by all the other MFA programs across the country, the answer was simple: there wasn’t enough room.
If only a handful of us were going make it into print statistically, the rate of attrition would have to be high, and the problem wouldn’t be talent, it would be getting the work done. Life and circumstance would get in the way for some, others would write intermittently, allowing themselves to be distracted by minutiae, by a lack of confidence, by anything, until they no longer even called themselves writers.
- Kate Southwood, 7 Things I’ve Learned So Far
Southwood wrote Falling to Earth, a novel about the aftermath of the 1925 tri-state tornado that was the most devastating in US history. The track of the 1925 tornado was 200+ miles long and there were at least 695 fatalities. The book focuses on the town of Marsh, a fictionalized version of real life Murphysboro.
It’s not your usual disaster story. Rather than focusing on the havoc of the tornado itself, she is more interested in what happens to a family who is completely spared, and therefore the target of the jealousy and scorn of all the townsfolk who were not so lucky. I took this book out from the library in the middle of May and when the Oklahoma tornadoes hit I shuddered.
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Words don’t really do justice to tornadoes though. For that, we have Youtube. Close up, a tornado looks like a pretty convincing approximation of hell on Earth. “Act of God” is right.
There is a whole world of storm-chasing videos, and at the beginning of the year, I chain-watched a bunch, developing a severe irrational tornado phobia (we need a word for that – not lilapsophobia, which includes hurricanes). Friends, however, reassured me that in this case, fear is completely rational and in the interest of self-preservation.
Yet people pay $2400 for storm-chasing tours. You have to wonder how those late May Oklahoma City tours went. 3 chasers died in that second outbreak and there is a video of some people barely getting out. The shouting in storm-chasing videos always seems over the top until you realize what is must actually be like to be there.
But I understand why people want to face these things in person. A tornado may well be the most incredible yet terrifying thing a person can witness during peacetime. At least you can evacuate inland during hurricane warnings. Aside from moving out of the midwest and southeast completely, where can you go to escape a funnel that drops out of the sky anywhere in the span of a minute?
There is an amazing video (embedding unfortunately disabled) of the May 20th OKC tornado that shows the birth, adolescence and raging adulthood of the tornado, from skinny white funnel to a roaring black beast in ten minutes flat. For some reason watching the thing form out of thin air makes me think of birth. It is creation without a creator (or with, depending on your wordview) made visible and manifest.
Sometimes, they happen at night, and that is almost too scary to contemplate. Flash of lightning and you realize there is a tornado nearby? So I downloaded a tornado warning app in lieu of a weather radio before heading into the southeast to search for traces of De Soto. I’m embarassed to admit that I only picked February, which is, I was to discover, an utterly uncharming and barren (although not although unphotogenic) month in most of the south, to avoid tornadoes, but was alarmed to learn that tornadoes actually happen year round but peak in spring/summer. (The NOAA has everything you needed to know about tornado incidence in the US.)
I usually love driving at night, but this time I made sure to be indoors by 7p. But one night I was behind schedule after a spontaneous stop in Savannah, and had no choice. As I made my way down a series of small poorly lit Georgia highways, the sky turned orange (sometimes a sign of impending tornado) and as I hit the top of a small hill, the bare branches of trees were black claws against that creepy sky. Visibility was completely shot in the distance, which gave my mind cause to run wild. Earlier that day, there had been tornado watches announced along the Atlantic coasts of Florida and Georgia. I tried to convince myself that I was not as freaked out as I actually was, but eventually I gave in and turned off the music to listen for roaring from the sky.
Anticlimax: Turns out the orange coloring was diffusion of tungsten lights from a light fog I was approaching, which also accounted for why things where so murky in the distance. The trees were bare because, well, it was February.
Okay, so maybe the fear is a bit irrational. But in my own twisted way I was glad to have experienced it. As I was getting out of the car later, I was already thinking about how to incorporate it into my work. How much tornado art is out there? (Proper ones, not Francis Alys’ dervishes.)