A Story Every Fortnight: The Hassler Memorial Challenge

I want to just push myself to write, and I don't think I can sustain a Nanowrimo every month.

If I can do this the whole year, and do Nanowrimo, I'll have about 20 stories plus another novel by the time WisCon comes around again next year.

Inspiration #1:
Jon Hassler was the first author who really responded to me (literally with several letters and postcards) and inspired me.
He just died this spring at the age of 74.
On Hassler's website there's a Q and A. One of the questions is:

Q. When and why did you begin writing? When did you first consider yourself a writer?

A. I began to write on September 10, 1970, at the age of 37. I believe I had imagined myself a writer form the age of five, when my parents read to me, but I was a late starter. On that morning I awoke to a voice in my head saying, "Half your life is over, Hassler, you'd better get started."

Note that eerily, the way it turned out, his life really was half over, but he wrote right up to the end.
And then this article goes into more detail about how he started - he sat down that morning and started writing the first story, finished it 2 weeks later. After 28 weeks, he had 14 stories.
This was 1970, and so there were 8 years of getting the stories published and trying to sell his first novel until 1977 when it was published (Staggerford).
So, I'm 34. I don't really know how much time I have. My mom died at 42. Who really knows?

Inspiration 2:
L. Timmel Duchamp (see Aqueduct Press Blog - could not find a personal site for her yet)'s guest of honor speech at WisCon, and the entire experience of WisCon.
There is nothing keeping me from doing this but myself, really.
And just like I had the Nanowrimo party and the play afterward with PM, EK, MR to look forward to, here I can look forward to going to WisCon next year and being able to say that I've done this. IN addition to Nanowrimo, and maybe even if I feel ready, applying to something like Clarion.

Inspiration 3:
Pat's work (and she didn't start writing until her twenties, so I'm just 10 years behind her, and 3 years ahead of Hassler).

So here's the thing, and I don't even need a bake sale to get it kicked off (or even need to tell anyone if I don't want to).

Every two weeks, on the same schedule as our sprints for work, I will write a story. The first "sprint" ends next Monday, which is only about a week, but otherwise I will be off kilter from the work schedule.
No promises as to the length of the stories, but they should have beginning, middle and end and they should be written as if someone is going to read it (even if they don't).
Let's see how this will work.

Remembering Jon Hassler

I was very sad to hear that Jon Hassler had died in March - Kari told me during the wedding week. She had thought I must already know, since it was all over the news in Minnesota at the time.

I signed the online guest book link that Dave found. I hope his wife and family are doing ok.

It's also really amazing that he kept writing even during the worst of his disease. Apparently there will be a new novel called "Jay O'Malley" which he was able to finish before he died.

Note on May 22 -
I reread Staggerford and A Green Journey again after buying them at the fountain of all lost books, BookBuyers in Mountain View.
It made me miss him more- there's a lot of stuff I didn't notice the last time I read.

1. I was a person nosy about teachers, and here's a book about a high school English teacher that is pretty candid - it begins "First hour, Miles yawned."

2. In both books I realized that I was gravitating toward the Miss McGee character and that I identify pretty strongly with the "hardscrabble girls" that she would take in and help out. I think I would have let her do that for me but maybe I would be resentful about it, I don't know.

The New Woman, by Jon Hassler

The New Woman: Buy on Amazon!
I was happy to see this book at Kepler's when I randomly decided to look to see what older Hassler books they had there, a few months ago.
A new book! Another visit back to the small Minnesota town of Staggerford, home to Agatha McGee, a retired Catholic teacher now in her eighties, who up until this book has lived happily in her own home.

Jon Hassler is one of my favorite writers and also my former "pen pal" when I was in high school, as he had responded to a letter asking him about his writing career initially, and then would send little postcards with updates about what he was working on, and what was going on with him.

That building on the book cover looks like it could be in Valley City, North Dakota, my hometown. I first met Agatha McGee in the pages of "Staggerford", Hassler's first novel, which spans a week in the life of Miles Pruit, Agatha's boarder.
The book is short but warm and comforting, and I don't have it in front of me right now to be more detailed, but it's like visiting an old friend from home to read it.

Hassler's impetus to write at 37: (from his web page linked above)

"I can trace my desire to be a writer back to the age of 5 when I was being read to by my parents and cousins and uncles and aunts. However, not until I was 37 did I, upon waking one morning in September 1970, hear a voice in my head saying, Half your life is over, Hassler, you'd better get started."

With a pen and notebook, he headed for the library at the Brainerd community college where he was teaching, and began "A Story Worth Hearing." He hasn't looked at it in years but doubts that the never-published story was worth hearing. It was, however, a start.

He took a sabbatical in 1975-76, moved into his nonwinterized cabin 75 miles northwest of Brainerd that October and started what became "Staggerford." It was based on diaries he had kept of his real-life teaching experiences. He had been haunted by a murder in the small northern Minnesota town of Clearbrook in the 1950s, and its echo is in the book.

North of Hope by Jon Hassler

Jon Hassler!!! - Link to his official "Writing Room"
North of Hope is being re-released in paperback!

January, 2006
I just happened to re-read North of Hope over the last few days because I felt like it, and then was really happy to see at Keplers that he has written a new book The Good Woman which I will also write about when I have finished it.

I have been reading and enjoying Hassler's books for at least 15 years. In 1990 around the time that North of Hope came out (and after reading A Green Journey) I also started writing letters to many people quite frequently. Uncles, aunts, cousins, pen pals, and also Jon Hassler. Perhaps I was inspired by all the letter writing in A Green Journey, I think I was.

Most people that I knew responded, and to my surprise, so did Mr. Hassler. The initial letter was on two pages of white note paper, which I still have at home in Valley City, and then I also got several other postcards in response to my chatty letters telling him what was going on with me and asking him what he was writing. The postcards of course I have also saved too.
On the first letter he had responded to one of my questions about being a writer, and he said something like "You needn't decide whether to become a writer or not. " and said something about how the voice would become too insistent to ignore, but I'm not remembering exactly how he worded the last part.
I'm not sure, maybe my voice is getting more insistent but it's certainly not loud enough yet to keep me from ignoring it (although I almost did the "write a novel during November" challenge this year.)

Rookery Blues was written during the time of the postcards, and I know from the postcards that he was thinking of calling it The Icejam Quintet. It felt like I was on the inside track when it came to what he was planning to write, which was fun.
We met once at least at a book signing, he remembered one of my letters from one of the teacher descriptions I wrote. ("that crazy teacher!")

His books are really well drawn from life in the Midwest, specifically in small towns in Minnesota -- about teachers and priests, old ladies and teenagers. And most of them are Catholic, which I am not but I found fascinating then and also now as well.
I was just reading his new intro to the North of Hope paperback where he was talking about being a "priest-watcher" all his life - I think perhaps I have been a bit of a "teacher-watcher" as well.

His first book, Staggerford, came out in 1977 when Hassler was 44. Staggerford, and the other books set in and around that town, including A Green Journey, The Love Hunter, and Simon's Night, all have their dark moments but they have much more of a cozy humor to them.

North of Hope is probably the darkest of all his books but it may also be one of the best. You want things to work out better for the characters but if they did it would just be a pretty sappy love story just like anything else.

(His book A Green Journey was made into a TV movie starring Angela Lansbury and Denholm Elliot. This was a bit cheesy - the movie, not the book, which I loved. The biggest problem I remember was Denholm Elliot, who was not believable to me as James O'Hannon because I had just seen him as a bumbling fool in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. We (my sisters and I) had our own casting for James O'Hannon but I can't remember now who it was. Definitely better than Denholm. It was someone tall, white hair, piercing blue eyes, but not Paul Newman as he wasn't old enough at the time I think).

When I got to Stanford I took a class from John L'Heureux, who writes even darker novels about priests, teachers, and professors. L'Heureux is almost like the other side of Hassler it seemed to me. I wrote to Hassler about L'Heureux and told L'Heureux about Hassler but neither seemed to know anything about the other.