Ugly To Start With by John Michael Cummings - Guest Post, Excerpt

Literary Fiction

Jason Stevens is growing up in picturesque, historic Harpers Ferry, West Virginia in the 1970s. Back when the roads are smaller, the cars slower, the people more colorful, and Washington, D.C. is way across the mountains—a winding sixty-five miles away.

Jason dreams of going to art school in the city, but he must first survive his teenage years. He witnesses a street artist from Italy charm his mother from the backseat of the family car. He stands up to an abusive husband—and then feels sorry for the jerk. He puts up with his father’s hard-skulled backwoods ways, his grandfather’s showy younger wife, and the fist-throwing schoolmates and eccentric mountain characters that make up Harpers Ferry—all topped off by a basement art project with a girl from the poor side of town.

Ugly to Start With punctuates the exuberant highs, bewildering midpoints, and painful lows of growing up, and affirms that adolescent dreams and desires are often fulfilled in surprising ways.

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GUEST POST

Loneliness, Inner Damage, and the Writer

by John Michael Cummings

All my life I have hated being alone.  That you would think would have stopped me from becoming a writer requiring long hours of such.

But, somehow, no.   Actually, it did the opposite.

Let me start at the beginning, which is really after high school.  Sometime during these years, being alone began to unnerve me—to shake me around inside.   It felt like an evil presence in the room. This presence would attack without warning and take the breath out of me.  I’d feel as if drowning.
 

Before you think panic or anxiety attacks—no, not so simple.
  

The more I shuddered and paced from this feeling, the worse it got, and the more frequently it happened.  The more I surrounded myself with “friends,” meaning anyone who served as company, the stronger this creeping loneliness as soon as I was by myself again.  It was as if by stepping inside the warmth of a house, the cold outside only felt all the colder. 

To give a biographical sketch, my very early childhood years were more or less fine:  loving mother, bossy older brothers, and father whose anger was somehow outside the range of my perception.   Then, late elementary, junior high, and high school—all hell broke loose and burned unchecked.  Slaps to my face by dear old dad, ugly abusive words. 

Damage done, right?

To jump ahead to today, my counselor calls my need for constant company my need to fill a void.  All of us, he explains, as children need unconditional love.  If not getting it, we wander the earth as adults like Marley’s ghost looking for it, moaning, our ball and chain of neediness and clinginess clanking the whole way.  Hence, codependent relationships, and far worse.

It all makes sense, in a dreadful way.

So how in the world did the flame of writing in solitude survive in my airless environment?  To make matters worse, I work like Marcel Proust—long hours by myself, in burning focus, sometimes with just a few paragraphs to show.
  

The answer is not easily found.   Does writing ease the loneliness?  Hardly.  It leaves me feeling like a hermit amid overpopulation. Is the work itself therapy?  I don’t really think so; it doesn’t empower or cast a positive light.   In fact, it could viewed as stewing and brooding in dark places. 

Rather, it feels as Luke Skywalker must have felt pursing Darth Vader—a fate.

You see, my father is my dark muse in art and life.  Countless failed relationships, temper problems—he has guided me time and time again down through the clouds only to smash me to smithereens against the unforgiving ground.

Oh, I fight him.  Daily self-affirmations.  Exercise for the beta-endorphin surge.  And, most recently, a little pink pill that promises to make the countless fingers of electricity in my brain twitch at the right pitch, sending off millions of smiley faces.

But somehow I still need my pain.  I need it like I need my ribcage.  I don’t have answers to this paradox, only suspicions.  While it seems writing unscrews the lid on the urn in which my father’s evil genie lives, there is the fact that great literature plays in the void of such existential despair as boys do in half-pipe skateboard ramp.  So what does it all mean?

How close the word “presence” is to “essence.”  What is the soul?

I worry about the words narcissist and martyr—are these yellow and red stripes running down my face like war paint?  Or am I still Frankenstein having kicked through a cotton candy machine and now hideously sugar-sticky with neediness?

“Nurture the space around you.”  I heard these words recently as advice to those of us who endeavor in isolation. 

So I did, in the literal sense.  I filled my four walls with $50 in charming, delightful, rare, sometimes exquisite knickknacks from my neighbor Goodwill—dried flowers, prints, vases, candleholders, an old-time broom, a water can filled with cattails, and a lithograph print of the Virgin Mary.

Oh, and one final item.  A little framed picture of Hemingway’s house tucked back in the green thickets.  It’s so beautifully lonely.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Michael Cummings' short stories have appeared in more than seventy-five literary journals, including North American Review, The Kenyon Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and The Chattahoochee Review.

Twice he has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize. His short story "The Scratchboard Project" received an honorable mention in The Best American Short Stories 2007.

He is also the author of the nationally acclaimed coming-of-age novel The Night I Freed John Brown (Philomel Books, Penguin Group, 2009), winner of The Paterson Prize for Books for Young Readers (Grades 7-12) and one of ten books recommended by USA TODAY.

For more information, please visit:

http://wvupressonline.com/cummings_ugly_to_start_with_9781935978084
http://www.johnmichaelcummings.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Michael_Cummings