About 4:00 this morning, I was sitting alone in the dark living room, laughing. My wife and the cat were in our bed (and I use the word “our” to include the cat’s proprietary attitude about household furnishings and everything else in this place). I was having trouble sleeping—imagine that: a writer with bad sleep habits. Go figure—and I was reading an NY Times article about the making of computer chips when I misread a word. The article mentioned a “chipmaking facility” which my sleepless eyes read as a “chipmunking facility.” Mostly I was laughing at my misreading. I mean, chipmunking, on its own is not that funny. Well, maybe a little.
Some people worry about drinking alone. I don’t. Though I do wonder how healthy it is to howl with uncontrollable mirth when I’m by myself. I’d like to think it’s a sign of healthy self-confidence, a self-assuredness in my ability to find something funny in a world where so much is not.
For example: On March 4, 2004, my twenty-seven-year-old daughter, Lorien, died at the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo, NY. My wife, Lin, and I flew back east for the funeral, a sad affair, after which I fell into a seemingly bottomless grief pit. I was mostly a short story writer then and found I could not write short fiction anymore. It was (and still is) my belief that the first drafts of short stories need to be written spontaneously —without outline, plan, or God forbid, intention. My rule of thumb is “no surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” I could only write authentically, honestly, if I allowed my characters to do and say the next thing that popped into their nonexistant heads (as revealed in my head) as I wrote. There would be time to organize and edit things later, in the revision process. But at first, it was whatever came to mind.
After Lori died, I was so mired in self-pity I had no empathy for anyone else, including my own fictitious characters. For a while, the only thing that came into their minds or mine was the image of a young woman fighting cancer. If I had written The Adventures of Huckelberry Finn at that time, Huck would have been sharing his raft not with a runaway slave named Jim, but with a twenty-seven-year-old woman named Lori who—wait for it—was dying of cancer. I could only imagine one course of events for my characters, one outcome. That’ll kill a story faster than anything.
About six months after Lori died, Lin and I were back in Western New York for a happier event: my nephew’s wedding. I thought I was doing fine. While on that side of the continent, we took a few days to visit New York City. We were having lunch one day in an outdoor restaurant in Manhattan, when we discovered a baby bird sitting on the low stone wall surrounding the patio. The featherless, pink newborn bird was a forlorn sight I hope I never see again. The waitstaff tried to feed it lunch meat, but the baby bird didn’t know how to eat solid food. I called a professional bird rehabilitator friend and described the situation. My friend the expert told me the baby bird would only eat “crop milk” produced in the mother bird’s throat from half-digested seeds. Unaware of my loss and my grief, my friend explained that there was nothing that could be done for the baby. “Things, die,” she said. “Get used to it.”
A little close to home? You bet. I had spent some of the last days of Lori’s life watching her suffer, looking on helplessly and knowing there was nothing I could do to stop what was happening. And here it was happening again. We did not save that bird.
I wrote an impassioned essay about the experience and I fired it off to my agent in New York. My agent called me to say he couldn’t send it out because it was “a mess.” He told me to give the subject some time and maybe I could get control of the language. Thank God, he never sent that out. A good agent is the person who can help you avoid embarrassing yourself. I do like to laugh at my own gaffs. (Chipmunking?) But there’s a limit.
Then something good happened. Kathleen McCoy, an Anchorage Daily News editor, phoned to say they wanted to add a male perspective to the advice column then called “The Wisdom of Wanda.” I told her I was too old, too married, and that I hadn’t been on a date since Jimmy Carter was president. She said, “You’re a writer. Use your imagination.”
So, I created a character named Wayne who was to help answer readers’ questions about romance and relationships and such. I sent Kathleen a sample (fictitious) letter, and “Wayne’s” preposterous response to it. For the next couple years, Wayne and Wanda published a weekly column in which Wanda (the wonderful Cynthia Ritchie, bless her helpful heart) actually tried to provide useful advice for the ersatz letter writers, and Wayne just kept writing wackier, completely unhelpful responses. Of course, my identity had to be kept secret. The cartoon drawing of “Wayne” depicted a dapper, metrosexual, man-about-Anchorage. Someone who knew his way around women and love and other mysterious things I don’t pretend to understand. I was a fifty-something, broken-down construction worker from Anchor Point, but I hurled myself into the nonsense comedy with the intensity of someone trying to be the next Kahil Gibran. I was writing. That was the important thing.
Some years later, I finally got enough distance from Lori’s death to write about my grief in a long essay titled “The Killing Season,” published in the Anchorage Press. In it I described how I—a lifelong hunter and fisherman—was having trouble killing things. My account of a near-nervous breakdown when facing a razor clam that refused to die made people laugh, but it also clearly revealed—most importantly, to me—just how much pain I was in. Eventually I got well enough to write fiction again. I’d just needed to be reminded to laugh at myself a little. Good medicine for us all.
It’s now 4:00 in the afternoon, twelve hours since my predawn laughter. I still don’t know what chipmunking might be, but I do know that starting the day with a giggle fit might be better for you than even chair yoga.
Chipmunking? WTF?
Rich Chiappone has been teaching writing classes for University of Alaska Anchorage since 1995. He will be teaching a writing class, Bring in the Clowns: The Literary Uses of Humor, from 10 am to 2 pm on November 15 in Anchorage. Register now!
His short stories and personal essays have appeared in numerous mainstream magazines including Alaska Magazine, The Sun, and in literary journals including Alaska Quarterly Review, Catamaran Literary Reader, Mississippi Review, ZYZZYVA and others. He is the recipient of an Alaska State Council of the Arts literary writing award and grant, and has published three story collections, one essay collection, and one novel. His next novel will be published by Coffeetown Press of Seattle, an imprint of Epicenter Press.
Rich, a long-time writer of outdoor stories and essays is currently a contributing editor at Gray’s Sporting Journal. He lives in Homer with his wife, cat, and two goldfish–the only two fish in the world he hasn’t tried to catch with a rod and reel.