Brooklyn Rail (essay & fiction)

Michael Row the Boat Ashore

(05/22/2018)

Once upon a time, when I looked at the sky, I saw will. Today, the sky is the disappointments of my ancestors, as many lives as they had, as far as the eye can see.

In 1996, I wanted to publish a novel. I had already written a few, the third of which I believed was good enough to live on as a book—something which hadn’t happened. It was not an easy time to publish, and I decided to distinguish myself with historical fiction, which is notoriously difficult to write—to research and invoke. I committed to reading about a period in America that interested me. That reading, principally concerned with a few years in the middle of the nineteenth century, would eventually turn into my first published novel, A Still Small Voice, which came out in 2000.

But the period research didn’t start with the particulars of that story (a girl growing up through the Civil War, told in the style of a true fable). The first thing I researched was the song—spiritual, chantey, folksong—“Michael Row The Boat Ashore.” Not only did the song move me (it was a contemporary telling of the archangel Michael, who the Book of Daniel calls “the great prince which standeth for the children of thy people,”) it called from my familial memory, reaching back from New York to California to the American South.


Arthur Phillips Stole My Bike

(10/30/2012)

April 18, 2011.

7:30 a.m. The alarm. Meh meh. Clock radio, but I’m too deaf for music to wake me up; I lost my hearing, or made it go away faster, with 20 years of Judo. I reset the alarm for 7:45 and lie there, in a sand of bliss, knowing that the tide of a long day has just rolled in.

I have to get to 311 Henry Street, Brooklyn Heights. From my apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan, Google mapped it at 37 minutes, but it will be longer. I don’t want to take the R train, or a taxi, which will run $20 – 25.

The Wednesday before, my computer started melting down. I came home at 8 p.m., knowing I had 20 minutes of work to do, then spent eight hours “fixing” the computer. On Friday, the computer died. As of Monday, I was copacetic, my anarchist tech guy was on the way, and between my office and my wife’s laptop, I was keeping up. E-mails, teaching, and working on Bikini Bloodbath Shakespeare (my “directorial debut,” which voice-overs a low-budget horror movie with a new script culled from Shakespeare)….