4.26.13. On Entering Davenport
It’s the latter months of 1972. I’m a freshman at Eastern Illinois University. So is John Malkovich. I doubt that we ever met, and we both transferred soon enough to other schools and continued on our separate paths, his lined with millions of dollars, mine with pages. Twenty-seven years later, you could enter, as I did, a movie theater and enjoy, or not enjoy, Being John Malkovich. Two years before that, summer of 1997, three guys who bonded at the University of Illinois while finishing their PhDs in Literature met in Missoula, Montana, for a few days of laughing and drinking. The two who took their time driving west? Rick Canning and me. The one we traveled to see? A young Assistant Professor of English at the University of Montana, Brady Harrison. We were all three newly married, and Brady and I had already learned our wives were pregnant for the first time. (Our daughters would be born two days apart the next year in February.) Rick would receive the same news from his wife when he returned home to New Hampshire. (His first son would be born 2-3 months after our daughters.)
We knew our lives were changing. We decided to use the occasion of that Missoula get-together to talk about our shared interest in becoming writers. Make that Writers, authors of something of our own, short stories, novels, poems, anything. We called our three-man writing club Buffalo Jump Collective, talked about a manuscript or two, laughed, drank, talked some more about things we’d like to write, about each other’s voices, sensibilities. Mostly, we laughed and drank and got drunk and laughed. Over the years, even with five more children added to the responsibility count, we’ve managed to reconvene Buffalo Jump Collective three times that I can remember, Missoula again (2003), Austin (2010), and the St Louis Metro area (2011), an adventure that included American Bottom, my beloved floodplain on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River. While there, we paid our respects on Gasoline Lake over beers at the only watering hole in that canal town.
Though we travel a long way to hold our three-day BJC meetings, I don’t know that any of them are troubled by more than 15-30 minutes of talk about our writing projects. What mostly happens is the more important, necessary Brudder Project, three old friends drinking and laughing, swapping stories we’ve been swapping for years, tales that don’t want or need ink. Air’s the place for them. When we’re apart, we manage to get some writing done. You can find a story of Rick’s, “Take It from Me,” in The New England Review (27:3, 2006), and if you’ve sent a story to NER in the last year, there’s a chance it was Rick who pulled it from the slush pile and did or didn’t like it. We’ll never know for sure. If you’re looking for a story by Brady, you can find one called “Robbie” right here in Serving House Journal. Dude knows slaughterhouses and the people who work there.
In hero-writer Charlie Kaufman’s brilliant Being John Malkovich, there’s no experiencing-of-other (no “re-being”) without “entering” (rabbit hole, you know). To experience what Malkovich is like, Craig Schwartz, played by John Cusack, must enter his mind through a hole behind a filing cabinet. I’m not sure what Brady, the sunglassed Strummer-wannabe under the Entering Davenport sign, is inviting you to do. In a way, Collected Works of Gasoline Lake is a filing cabinet, but I can assure you there’s no magic Kaufman hole behind it, no experience here worth $200 a pop/visit/re-being. Look around the joint. Get lost in the links. There’s plenty to read for free, some books, songs, and lit mags you can buy, links to all sorts of writerly things and people who live far from Gasoline Lake, writers I admire and think worth your time. I dedicate this website to all of the other writers I’ll introduce you to in future blogs, but especially to my Buffalo Jump Brudders.