Why do we write books? True, it’s not to sell copies or acquire fame. Yet readership and recognition are things that we crave; it’s part of being human. So I’m grateful that Winter has received the attention that it has. The book is so uncompromising in its warts-and-all portraiture of myself and my family that I hesitate to call it a ‘likeable’ book. Yet people have liked it, even loved it. One reviewer wrote to me, “It’s a brave and beautiful book, and you deserve every good thing that comes of it.”

I remember when I first saw a copy of Winter. For the first time I was able to fully appreciate it as an object, so beautifully produced by Lethe Press, with Ben Baldwin’s cover illustration of two men holding hands in a snow globe looking even better in print than it did online. That was a thrill.

The greatest thrill, though, is when people tell me personally how much they loved the book. Sometimes I’m astonished that anyone would even take the trouble to mention it, but I know that when they do it’s because they have been touched by the story I had to tell. I’m very grateful to everyone who has taken the time to tell me, either in person or by email, that what I wrote was meaningful to them. Such heartfelt responses mean more than any award.

My mother's house in Scarborough, Maine

My aunt Louise continued to live in the house, by herself, after my mother passed away. Louise died in the summer of 2005. She had been in renal failure for a long time; the doctors had wanted her to go on dialysis, but she refused. She feared that being on dialysis would have a worse impact on her than the illness itself. Like everyone else in my family, she decided to go her own way–no one could tell her what to do.

My mother's house in Scarborough, Maine - side view

My father had this house built in 1965, at a cost of about $16,000. Unfortunately he only got to enjoy it for a few years; he died suddenly of a heart attack in 1971, at the age of 58. I was 17 at the time.

When my mother died, the house needed a lot of work, both inside and out. Since then it’s had many improvements, including a new roof and a siding job that has just been completed. Now it looks even better than new.

My brother has been renting out the house, as a way of getting income from it as the improvements are made. He still lives in Portland with his longtime partner. And of course I still live in Kansas City with Ralph. This past January we celebrated 21 years together. Like most gay couples we don’t have a “wedding date” to measure our anniversary by, so we use the anniversary of our first date, which I describe in Winter.

Cover of the novel 'Tales My Body Told Me,' by Wayne Courtois

My new novel Tales My Body Told Me has been released—the official release date is May 3rd, and the Kindle version is available now—and I couldn’t feel more like a proud new papa.

It is my wish that everyone who liked A Report from Winter would read and enjoy Tales as well. However, I don’t think this wish is likely to come true. While Winter is more suitable for general audiences, Tales is a different animal—kind of a wild animal.

If scenes of explicit sex bother you—especially explicit gay sex—then Tales is probably not for you. Since gay male sexuality and its place in the world is one of the themes of the novel, I pulled no stops in portraying the thoughts, actions, and obsessions of gay men. In fact, what I was aiming for was a kind of gay Portnoy’s Complaint. Some gay novels have approached that goal, but I haven’t seen any that actually achieved it.

I read the Philip Roth novel when I was only sixteen, but even then I could see that Roth was up to something more than just creating pornography. As outrageous as its sexual content was, Portnoy’s Complaint was a literary novel from start to finish.

That is how I see Tales—as a literary novel. I hope that it’s also a good read. Other people might find it offensive; and while that’s okay, I wouldn’t want anyone to be offended or disappointed because Winter set up expectations for a different kind of reading experience.

My three published books—My Name Is Rand (a forthright erotic novel), A Report from Winter, and Tales My Body Told Me—are radically different from one another. I can’t even explain why that should be the case; I only know that each book has to be what it wants to be.

F. Scott Fitzgerald observed that “Writers aren’t exactly people…. they’re a whole bunch of people trying to be one person.” That is as true a statement about writers as any I’ve seen. If readers find that the writer of Tales is different from the person who wrote Winter, I hope they will stick around anyway. Who knows who or what they’ll find in my next book? I can’t answer that question myself!

There are many astonishing things about Murdoch’s novels, not the least of which is her use of dialogue. When her characters speak, they speak volumes; and it takes very little—a few drinks, perhaps—to get them to drop profound thoughts into the most casual conversations. Here is a snippet of dialogue from the Fairly Honorable character Rupert Foster, a lifelong student of philosophy:

“There are times when one’s just got to go on loving somebody helplessly, with blank hope and blank faith. When love just is hope and faith in their most denuded form. Then love becomes almost impersonal and loses all its attractiveness and its ability to console. But it is just then that it may exert its greatest power. It is just then that it may really be able to redeem. Love has its own cunning beyond our conscious wiles.”

I don’t know of any other current or recent authors who write this kind of dialogue in fiction, with the exception of Saul Bellow. In fact, Bellow was sometimes accused of writing novels that were nothing but talk. His defenders countered with the assertion that at least it was excellent talk—and so it was.

Now that Murdoch and Bellow are gone, where do we go to find fictional characters who can expound like this? Is the problem that I am still stuck in the 20th century, thus missing the 21st century novelists who write great dialogue? I welcome your suggestions!

In years past I would have had to walk through the snow to get to the gate, feeling the hairs of my mustache stiffen and freeze. It was an initiation ritual, a sharp order to get a clue, bud, you’re in Winter Wonderland now. These days, of course, we all walked through an accordion sleeve directly into the terminal, clutching or wheeling or dragging our carry-ons. So it wasn’t the weather that struck me at first, but rather the bleakness of wistfully-named Portland International Jetport—bigger than it used to be but no busier, at least not on a Tuesday night in mid-winter. The only people I saw were from my flight, all of us moving in unison, as if we were on a field trip together, past the empty departure lounges toward Baggage Claim.

When we reached the luggage carousel I broke away from the group, and used a courtesy phone to call for the shuttle that would take me to my rental car. I got my bag and shuffled through the automatic door to wait and smoke on the sidewalk. The airport was close to the city—I recalled the LOW FLYING AIRCRAFT signs posted along the Veterans Bridge—but from here there was nothing to see but a parking garage, which was new, and some outbuildings, giant tin-roofed sheds. A hush filled the air as fine snow drifted down in no hurry. It was sharp and clean, that air, and my much-abused lungs absorbed it like a memory. I tasted snowflakes on my tongue, as if I were still five years old and running around with my mouth open to the sky.

The man who drove the shuttle-bus reminded me of my father, Lee: wiry and hail-fellow-well-met, particularly good with strangers. He died when I was seventeen; he never had to learn that both of his sons were gay. (It was a matter for speculation what, if anything, my mother ever learned. The homosexuality in the family was never spoken of, ever.) This man, the shuttle-bus driver, cheerfully hefted my suitcase onto a rack and rubbed his gloved palms together, savoring my presence as if I’d won a sweepstakes and some of my luck might rub off. The little bus chugged along the access road, skidded to the right—there were about two inches of fresh snow on the street—then right again.

The car rental office might have been one of the sheds I’d seen earlier, it looked as if it had been slapped together overnight. The clerk behind the counter was a fellow in his late teens, not unattractive. Cheerful, too, as he looked up my reservation, tapping two-fingered on his keyboard. He asked if I wanted a map of the area, and slid one across to me. There was a sketch of greater Portland on one side, and a more detailed street map on the other. On my last trip to my mother’s house, almost ten years ago, I hadn’t ventured into Portland proper at all; so it was many years, fifteen or more, since I’d had to make sense of these place names—Fore River, Libbytown, Deering Oaks. It was as if some lost territory of my mind had suddenly appeared on shiny paper, shrunk to unfathomable scale. Claw-shaped Portland thrusting into Casco Bay, neatly pincering up Back Cove: it didn’t mean a thing.

“Tell me where ya need to go and I’ll help ya,” the young man said, and I found myself gazing into his frank hazel eyes. Whenever I heard a Maine accent in a movie or TV show I tended to cringe, and had said to my partner, Ralph, more than once, “That’s horrible, nobody really talks that way.” But the shuttle-bus driver, the rental desk clerk—they did talk that way. It was like discovering that the moon really was made of green cheese. I couldn’t wait for the young man to say more, but instead of prompting him I just stared, trying to smile so he wouldn’t think I was having some kind of seizure. He was broad-shouldered, on the stocky side, and in addition to his frank eyes he had a beard. A first beard, a little too sparse and curly, but a good start just the same, announcing a full set of hormones and other juices just raring to go. I doubted he could sense I was gay, and doubted even more that he was gay himself, or even leaned in that direction; still, I wanted him to like me. It took some effort to break my reverie long enough to glance out the window, at snow falling through the parking lot light, nothing but darkness beyond. I had places to go and suffering to do; there wasn’t time to slake my thirst for a friendly encounter. I looked at the young man again, held up a finger, turned aside and pretended to sneeze while actually speaking—“My mother’s dying”—smushing the words together so he wouldn’t know. I faced the counter again and said I needed to get to Danforth Street.

In no time I was out in the parking lot, making use of the brush-and-scraper that he had handed me along with the key. The little white compact looked like a snowball till I had the windows cleared. The car responded like a dream as I slewed around toward the main road and turned right. Why had I asked about Danforth Street? That wasn’t where I needed to go. Maybe it was the first name that popped into my head. No doubt there would be more surprises like this: I didn’t know what I knew, couldn’t predict what I’d remember. The main thing was that I was on Congress Street now, and if I followed the forks in the road correctly, it would take me to the Western Promenade, where my bed-and-breakfast lay awaiting me on a side street called Neal. Traffic was light, and in spite of the snow the visibility was good. I liked the compact’s tall windshield, and the way the car fit my body. I might even be able to parallel park this baby, if it came to that.

Sooner than I expected, the thousand bright windows of the Maine Medical Center loomed ahead, and I knew I was truly in town. I crossed St. John Street and struggled up the hill to find Neal Street about where I thought it would be. The car, relieved to be horizontal again, scooted amiably through the dark blocks of somber, narrow-eyed Victorian houses. I drove till I was sure I’d gone too far, and then turned around in someone’s freshly powdered driveway. Wherever the Pomegranate Inn was, it didn’t have a lighted sign out front. Again I drove till I was sure I’d gone too far. Missed it twice. Damn! I stopped the car and got out. My sneakers were none too steady in the fresh snow of the street. It coated my glasses, my breath steamed. Dimly I made out a large building with a canopy: that must be it. But no, as I got closer I saw it was an old school building that had been converted into apartments—pricey ones, no doubt. I backed toward the opposite street corner, turned and a saw a squat bush strung with white lights, a wooden sign hanging from gingerbread trim: Pomegranate INN. I shuffled back to the car, which was farther away than I thought it would be, the streets here seeming to be elastic, stretching and constricting at will. Seeing no other place to park, I pulled up against the curb in front of the house. A street sign warned against parking on this side of the street on Sunday nights, or during a snow emergency. This night was no emergency, judging by the number of other cars parked around me. I got out my carry-on bag and popped open the trunk for my suitcase.

The owner of the Inn had told me that, since I’d be arriving late, there’d be no one to let me in: she would leave a key for me in the mailbox. Sure enough, in the black box beside the door lay an envelope with my name on it. I wouldn’t be staying in the main house but in the carriage house. Directions on the envelope led the way back to the sidewalk, across the driveway, and down a narrow alley between the house and a church. I was ready for warmth and comfort, and the room was promising: not large but cozy, its centerpiece a full double bed with frilly throw-pillows, flowered wallpaper glowing warmly by the bedside lamp. An antique dressing stand, two small but comfortable armchairs, a few old books and magazines placed carefully about; a corner devoted to a glassed-in fireplace with gas logs operated by remote control: I was dialing up a glow before I even had my coat off. Large curtains opened onto glass doors that probably led to a patio, but I was content to leave them closed and peel off my travel duds. The bathroom was a treat, almost as large as the main room, all marble and scatter rugs and eye-catching fixtures, an elegant old towel-stand, and lots of room for my ever-growing supply of health and beauty aids. I luxuriated in walking around naked without feeling chilly, knowing that snow was still coming down beyond the four exterior walls. And it was quiet—I didn’t know what to do with so much quiet.

I turned on the small television on the dressing stand and found a local newscast. Gone were the staunch, lantern-jawed New England types that had populated these shows when I was a kid. Now there were smart goobers in designer eyeglasses and double-breasted suits, mouthing the unaccented newspeak they learned in graduate school. This was too much like being in Anywhere, USA, but I stayed tuned for the weather, an eye-popping video-ganza of radar screens, galloping clouds, and winterscapes zooming in and out. Again I thought of those forecasts of old, the nerdy-looking guys slapping crude snowflakes on a magnetized map. They weren’t kidding, those snowflakes: a winter storm was always at least as bad as they said it would be. If the weatherman predicted a foot of snow, we could be sure we’d get that much, and probably more. A lot was part of the meaning of the word snow; and later in life, when I lived in different parts of the country, I’d find it hard to take their winter weather seriously. What they called snow in New York or Kansas City was only a dusting, no more than a sprinkle of powdered sugar on a pound cake.

I turned the TV off, having finally learned what I needed to know: there would be no storm—not tomorrow, anyway. Then, restless, I turned the TV on again. Turned it off. Suddenly the roar of the gas logs got on my nerves, so I clicked the fireplace off also. So far today I’d been traveling in my own little world, through the odd fears and startling synapses of my mind. Now it was time to let others in. I had to call Louise and tell her I was here. I touched the phone that sat on a darling little table between the armchairs, took my hand back, touched it again. It was not only time to talk to Louise, the aunt I had always been closest to, but approaching the time when I would actually see my mother. My brother, who still lived in Portland, would be fitting into the picture, too, at some point. How many movies had I seen where some scientist-adventurer broke the time barrier, traveled to some unimaginable place, and barely lived to regret it? Now I began to know the remorse of the irreversible flight, of taking time and distance into my own hands. What had I done?

“Oh, it’s you,” Louise said, her voice flat and spiritless, as it tended to be these days. She had been through a rough several months, taking care of my mother during her decline.

“It’s me,” I said, “and I’m here in Portland.”

She perked up a bit. “Here? Where?”

“I’m staying at a bed-and-breakfast up on the Western Prom. Got in about an hour ago. It’s called the Pomegranate Inn.”

“I heard of that place. There was a write-up in the paper when it opened.” Then, “Pretty fancy?” she asked in an accusatory way.

“It’s all right,” I said. I didn’t tell her about the key-in-the-mailbox thing; she’d think I was feeble-minded for staying in such a place. This from a woman who believed everything she read in the National Enquirer. “I came today,” I said, “because Dr. Brown called me at work this morning and said I’d better get here as soon as possible. She didn’t think Friday would be soon enough.”

“Yeah, well….” She sighed. “Sometimes you go in now and your mother doesn’t even know you’re there, or she opens her eyes for just a few minutes, you know, and then she’s out of it again. Of course they’ve got her on a lot of drugs now. Morphine.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, and then “Uh-huh, uh-huh” again and again, until it was time to say goodnight.

For a few moments I stared at the phone in my hand, then set it back on its base and got up to look for my dopp kit. The bathroom’s marble floor was cold, even through the rugs and my thick socks. My conversation with Louise—her end of it, anyway—was far from over. Her words kept coming back as my bedtime chores bumped along on auto-pilot. A lot of the time she doesn’t even know you became the rhythm to which I brushed my teeth; morphine-morphine-morphine was the cheerleaders’ chant to which I forced floss between my molars; you wouldn’t even recognize her fouled me up as I tried to count pills, my Tagamet and anti-depressant. This was something my aunt had been saying for months, as my mother became more and more bed-ridden, shedding pounds at an alarming rate. You wouldn’t know your mother if you saw her. I cleared the bed of the possessions already scattered there, the odds and ends from my tote bag, the crinkled city map which I’d apparently sat on. Honest to God, Wayne, you wouldn’t recognize your mother. You’d pass her right by on the street, you’d think she was somebody else. I turned down the bedclothes, found my travel clock and set it for 7:00. Louise was wrong. Take my left hand, for example. It could be mutilated, burned, or painted purple, but I’d still know it was my left hand. The same was true of my right hand, or right nut, or any other part of me. It was what any relationship came down to, a kernel of knowledge impenetrable to outside eyes. I could picture my mother ravaged by illness, I could unleash the overactive imagination I’d always had; but even as a skeleton, even as a bit of ash clinging to a white sheet, she would still be my mother, recognizably so.

I wrote about that bitterly cold night in A Report from Winter. This year, to mark the occasion, I’ve written a poem as well. I hope you enjoy it.

On a Night When Nothing Happened

An onlooker would have seen two men on the sidewalk,
perhaps taking leave of one another,

the night so cold they kept their hands in their pockets,
the words they might have said turning to clouds of vapor,

the kiss they might have shared in that public spot
so unthinkable that even the stars were laughing.

Two men facing each other, that was all.
Yet here we are, twenty-one years later,
still facing each other, remembering that first goodnight.

Many critics have noted that 2009 seems to have been the Year of the Memoir. In the Lammies’ Gay Memoir/Biography category there are 20 entries; the Lesbian Memoir/Biography list totals 13.

Familiar names among the gay memoirists include Lev Raphael, Martin Duberman, David Plante, Augusten Burroughs, and Reynolds Price. I’m so far behind in my reading that I can’t say I’ve read more than a fraction of the books, but I have read what is perhaps the best-known book on the Gay Memoir/Biography list, Blake Bailey’s massive biography of John Cheever.

Cheever is, in many ways, a sad book. The man led a miserable life, not least because he was tormented by homosexual impulses that now and again led to some sordid, not to say despicable, acts. He even blackmailed some male writing students into having sex with him. It was only near the end of his life that he admitted, in his journal, that he was gay. Is this a book that we really want to be known as a “gay” book? I certainly don’t want to be seen as a member of Cheever’s particular club.

That’s not to say that Cheever isn’t a great book. It’s a remarkable achievement by anyone’s standards, impeccably researched and immensely readable. I also loved Bailey’s earlier biography, A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates.

This is a formidable selection of books and authors to compete with. I hope you will wish me luck!

The finalists for the Lammies will be announced by March 15, 2010; the winners will be announced at the awards ceremony in New York in May. You can see the list of entries here.

Inviting a writer to edit his own interviews is like asking a fox to baby-sit the henhouse. It can lead, at the very least, to all kinds of evasiveness and tergiversation (hey, haven’t used that word in a while), as Kinnell freely admits in his preface.

One of these interviews features this exchange between Margaret Edwards and Kinnell:

Edwards: Do you think a person has to be crazy or unbalanced in some way to be a writer?

Then there’s what you might call “real” craziness. As readers, we can’t surrender to a work we feel has been written by someone controlled by paranoid suspicions and sick fantasies. The poems we love are those in which we believe we find the truest and most encompassing understandings. The poets we admire are the ones whose responses to experience we feel are reliable. In this sense the best poets are the sanest.

As one would expect, Kinnell takes the high road in his answer. Personally, I think that paranoid suspicions and sick fantasies can lead to some pretty compelling writing–but that is an exception, not a rule. And I agree that at least part of the writing life is grounded in “uninspired, plodding, hard work.” He forgot to add “for very little reward.” It is that dedication to work for work’s sake that separates the true writer from the rest of the crowd, and perhaps more than anything else may give him the reputation for being “crazy.”

As fiction editor at Esquire, Lish was responsible for bringing Carver to national prominence during the 1970s; he also edited Carver’s first story collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? that came out in 1976. Lish tended to edit with a heavy hand, and it was this volume that gave Carver a reputation as a “minimalist,” a term he didn’t particularly care for.

But with Carver’s second collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (WWTA), Lish went totally out of control—or rather, took too much control into his own hands. The text notes in the Collected Stories quantify the extent to which Lish made cuts in the stories. This is just a partial list:

“Where Is Everyone?” cut by 78% (to appear in WWTA as “Mr. Coffee and Mr. Fixit”)
“Gazebo” cut by 44%
“Want to See Something?” cut by 56% (to appear in WWTA as “I Could See the Smallest Things”)
“The Fling” cut by 61% (to appear in WWTA as “Sacks”)
“A Small, Good Thing” cut by 78% (to appear in WWTA as “Bath”)
“If It Please You” cut by 63% (to appear in WWTA as “After the Denim”)
“So Much Water So Close to Home” cut by 70%

Cuts of up to 78%? The list reads like a Red Tag Clearance Sale in Literary Hell.

Carver was shocked, to say the least, when he saw the cuts Lish had made. In an extraordinary letter written on July 8, 1980, Carver went so far as to beg Lish to halt production of the book. He felt he would be humiliated if the stories—some of which had recently appeared in literary magazines—showed up in a collection in truncated form.

Carver was ever polite, even self-deprecating, in his correspondence with Lish, and was willing to take all the blame for canceling the volume. Upon receiving the letter Lish called Carver, and managed to plant some seeds of doubt in Carver’s mind as to whether the collection should proceed as Lish planned. In a follow-up letter of July 14th, Carver asked Lish to “take another hard look” at the stories; but as we know, the collection did come out with virtually all of Lish’s edits intact.

WWTA was a success, although some critics felt that Carver was pushing his minimalism to the limit. Reading these stories again, and comparing them with the same stories from Carver’s original manuscript—all of them appearing for the first time in the Collected Stories—is a startling experience. What Lish did to the stories is appalling. He not only changed titles and character names willy-nilly, he often changed the very nature and intent of what Carver was trying to say.

Lish’s versions were Carver’s stories with much of the humanity sucked out of them. Lish turned them into dry, brittle objects; and where Carver’s characters were mean, Lish made them meaner. It says a lot about the stories that they still packed a wallop, even in truncated form. But to get the true flavor of Carver’s fiction, it is necessary to read them in their entirety.

Some of the stories were restored to their original versions during Carver’s lifetime, in Where I’m Calling From and other collections; but now, thanks to the Library of America, we can follow the complete path of one of the strangest journeys that an author and editor ever took together (or, more accurately, apart). It’s required reading for anyone who cares about the way fiction is made.

Oops, maybe I shouldn’t have said “coming out.”

“Throughout its 30-year history,” says the release, “Alyson Books has been known as a publisher catering strictly to the LGBT community. With the arrival of publishing industry veteran Don Weise as its new Publisher, the company is branching out, publishing works that reflect Weise’s highly-regarded taste and reach a broader audience. At the same time, Alyson firmly retains its roots in gay culture.”

At this point Weise jumps in: “Since coming on as publisher of Alyson last fall, I’ve radically rethought the list, particularly around publishing literary works that stand more on artistic merit than mere gay-themed content alone. Quality before content is the new order.”

Hmmm, okay, nothing wrong with quality before content—in fact, shouldn’t that have been the goal all along? And of course there is something appealing about “branching out” while retaining roots—nice follow-through on the tree analogy. Except that branches are often the most visible part of a tree, while the roots tend to remain buried.

McConnell’s novel takes place, we are told, “on an unidentified coastal landscape that exists outside a defined period in time,” and concerns a “nameless protagonist…who exists outside a defined sexual orientation.” His task is to safely transport a load of silver coins through a city, “assisted by a cast of sexually ambivalent sailors.”

Now, we’ve been told many times that the Kinsey Scale is a sliding one, and that no one is 100% heterosexual or homosexual. And we’re familiar with the tendency of the younger generation to eschew labels like “gay” and “straight.” The problem comes in when you try to define “sexually ambivalent” in a way that doesn’t take you right back to the G-word…or to the closet.

In his blurb on the book Edmund White gushes, “The Silver Hearted is our Hearts of Darkness.” But wait, Ed. “Our” implies a “we,” and who are “we”? The sexually ambivalent? Please, Ed, if you mean this is the gay Hearts of Darkness–and you can hardly mean anything else–then go ahead and say so.

Meanwhile, Peter Cameron’s blurb squeals over the novel’s inclusion of a “soupcon (sic) of Tom of Finland (sailors!).” But there’s nothing sexually ambivalent about Tom’s men—the whole point of their fetishized figures is that they are gloriously, unmistakably gay. And they look like they would sit on you—and not in a good way—if you called them anything else.

Look, I don’t blame Alyson for wanting to sell more books. I just hate to see them acting so disingenuously. And now is hardly the time to exchange the rainbow flag for a standard of dull gray. We face a world where homosexuals are being put to death and jailed abroad, and denied human rights at home. There’s no honor in retreating into a sexually ambivalent closet—especially not if you’re a publisher that claims to have gay roots.