In The Wampa Cave and Other Thoughts

It's three in the afternoon on the last Sunday of winter break, and the snow continues to rush to the ground like it's late for a bus. I shoveled the walk this morning before we left for church, clearing the two or three inches that fell last night, and then had to do it again when we got back from church three hours later. Now, three hours later still, there's another inch or two back on the sidewalk. I'll probably get out the snow blower this evening sometime so the driveway isn't utterly impassable by morning. Maryn and Avery are hoping for a snow day tomorrow. We are hoping they get the freak out of the house and go to school. We'll see who gets what they want.

It's been a pretty quiet break - or at least as quiet as any winter break is for the Brown family. Maryn's birthday on December 14th, our wedding anniversary on the 19th, Christmas, New Year's, and then back to school. Like I imagine most people's holidays are, it's been a combination of frenetic activity and utter stasis. We've shopped, visited family in the Detroit area, gone to movies, gone to parties, and been busy while simultaneously having days where we just sat around and did so little, outside observers may not have been able to tell if we were actually alive.

The weather has surprised us. I'm from Idaho, Suzy's from Michigan, we lived on the open plains of Illinois for five years -- you would think we'd be totally jaded about winter weather. We should be strolling out into five foot snowbanks in Hawaiian-print Bermuda shorts and flip flops with a virgin mojito in hand saying, "Huh, we could still golf in this."

But no.

Instead, we cower before the subzero temperatures and gawk at the seemingly endless supply of snow dumping on us. We wrap up in fleece pajamas, fleece bathrobes, and fleece blankets and sit in front of the tv like it's a fireplace, pining for summer. My brother Dave has already started giving me crap about it. (We're brothers - it is in our nature to give each other crap. It's how we roll.) Today when I told him about how people were posting Facebook photos of empty shelves at grocery stores ahead of the imminent storm, he laconically texted back, "I have found that all you easterners typically freak out over nothing." (Dave's an educated guy. He knows so much about bankruptcy law that he probably didn't have room to retain small things like the difference between the Midwest and the east. Alas.) Anyway, I know I should be tougher than this, but there really is a difference in the weather between here and anywhere else I've been. It's colder here. Snowier here. It's like this is Winter's gym. It's where he comes to work out and get stronger. It's where he stares at his icy white biceps in the mirror and says, "Oh yeah, baby. Look at those guns!" And then he punches Midland County in the face. It sucks.

Anyway.

We've watched three or four movies over the break. Let me give you some brief reviews:

Frozen: Great music and voice work. Slightly generic story and underdeveloped side characters. I like that the central relationship and the act of love that saves the day in the end are not romantic. It's about sisterhood, and, as a dad of daughters, I appreciate that.

Robot and Frank: Set just barely into the future, it's about a former thief who is suffering from the beginnings of Alzheimer's. His kid gets him a robot companion/assistant and the old guy teaches it to be his partner in crime. Saw it on Netflix. Suzy and I have determined that most everything available on Netflix streaming is kind of lame and sad. It's slow and not terribly entertaining. It's like a joke that doesn't make you laugh but instead you just smirk and say, "That's funny."

The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug: More of the same. I fear Peter Jackson lost his soul somewhere between Return of the King and King Kong and hasn't been able to get it back since. It has energetic action set pieces and giant CGI spiders so real, you can practically smell them, but who cares? Bilbo is played as an burgeoning heroin addict, and none of the other characters are emotionally engaging at all. The only blip of interest other than the best onscreen dragon I've ever seen is the weird, inexplicable cross-species romance between Turiel, the elf, and Kili the dwarf. And that wasn't even close to actually being in the book.

Sleepwalk With Me: Comedian Mike Birbiglia's barely veiled autobiography film about his beginnings as a comic and the ultimate demise of his long term relationship. It's also about how he suffers from a sleep disorder that makes him act out his nightmares. At one point, he dives out a hotel window because he's dreaming that he is running away from missiles pointed right at him. As far as this film goes, remember this: comedians are funny, movies about them usually are really not. It's surprisingly dark and flat for a movie about a guy learning to be funny. 

Thankfully, now that winter break is over, our tv shows are coming back on and I'll have a reason to live again. (Sad that making fun of Revolution is a reason to live - but there it is.)

One thing I didn't make mention of here or on Facebook was our anniversary. This was #15 which is kind of big. We kept our celebrations pretty low key because funds were low in the days leading up to Christmas and because we are locked here on the ice planet of Hoth. So we'll probably go out of town for a couple of days over spring break once we make our way out of the wampa cave. (Try that obscure reference on for size.)

Anyway, even though the actual day was a couple of weeks ago, I feel like I still need to say a couple of things to/about Suzy on the occasion of us being married for 15 years.

Marriage is a really complicated undertaking. Maybe it's a blissful skip through the daisies for some people (though I doubt it), but for most people, it's largely made up of a lot of hard work. I was raised in a home of all boys by parents who were pretty relaxed when it came to things like cleanliness or organization. (This is an understatement.) I grew up to be something of a know-it-all who remembers a lot of useless trivia but sometimes forgets what time his kids are supposed to be at school in the mornings. I have an almost maddening sense of "Oh, it will probably work out"-itis that sometimes verges over from a healthy sense of optimism to a lazy sense of "I'm too tired to think to hard about it so I'm just going to hope for the best." I have problems is what I'm saying.

So, despite the fact that, in my mind, I'm quite a catch, the reality of it is that I can be really hard to be married to. Despite this fact, Suzy has been married to me for fifteen years. I'm not being glib when I say I really admire and appreciate her patience and diligence. I appreciate her sticking with me for all this time.

We are still married and still enjoy spending time together. The intense romance of the early years changes and evolves into something steadier and more durable. Life becomes less about dates and more about getting homework finished and new shoes for basketball season. But amid all that dailiness, all that quotidian stuff that has to get done, there is this partnership that is constantly being forged and shaped. I am still in the process of learning how to be the husband Suzy needs me to be. I am still learning things about what makes her happy and what does not. I am still hearing stories (perhaps less often than before) that I've never heard from her.

Suzy has a lot of gifts, a combination of abilities and insights that I've never seen in any one other person. She has this way of seeing through to who a person is. She just manages to see past the smoke screens and bs people put out into the world and usually manages to see the heart of who a person really is. Often when she makes an observation about a person (or me), it has the effect of a really good metaphor in a poem. I think to myself, "I have never thought of it like that, but that is exactly right."

I really admire Suzy's work ethic. When she takes on a task, she really, really does it. She has this tenacity that I have had to learn to keep up with. As I mentioned earlier, I'm more of a "Isn't it time for second-breakfast" kind of guy and I am always happy to take a break. Suzy gets. it. done. Whether it is co-oping at Parker's preschool, overhauling our entire storage system in the basement, or just decorating our house for the change of the seasons, she starts a job and stays on it until the corners are swept and the windows are clean.

Suzy's aesthetic sense and her organizational skills somehow dovetail together. Whatever center of the brain it is that coincides order and beauty, Suzy got a double helping there. Some people have the ability to put things away, to file and label, to organize and straighten. Some people have natural skill at beautifying and making whatever thing they have influence over more lovely, more pleasing. Suzy somehow fuses these two things. If you think it's easy, try organizing 15 years of storage or even handing pictures in the bathroom all on your own and see how you do. Then invite Suzy over for some insight and watch how it changes. I honestly don't know what the secret is. I just know that when Suzy touches things (books on a shelf, the file cabinet, drawers in the kitchen, pictures in my office) they are more organized and more lovely than they were before. I think that's a Godly trait, frankly. God is an artist who works with grace and order. I think a person who is able to evoke those same characteristics is like Him.

One other thing I admire about Suzy is her devotion to us having an eternal family. She has been committed to that ideal since before we got married and has stayed committed to it through times when it was easy and times when it was excruciating and seemingly impossible. She likes me, she loves me, and there are times when she might think I'm pretty good looking. But she is married to me still for reasons that go beyond those things. She keeps her covenants. She has this steely place within her that is locked on to what is right and it has kept her (and us) anchored through many a stormy sea. I appreciate that about her - that steadiness and firmness that exists within her in the midst of all the small, daily annoyances and distractions. She's a good woman, and I love her. I am glad I married someone with so many gifts and with such strong character. She is a good example to me in so many ways.

So assuming I don't die an early death by freezing solid here in Meatlockerville, USA and assuming she doesn't kill me for again drying a shirt that she has distinctly told me four hundred times does. not. go. in. the. dryer, here's to the next fifteen years, and the next fifteen after that, and (depending on my heart health) another ten after that. I love you, Suze. Thanks for being my wife.

FLW

It's been over a month. I know. Sorry.

I've been reading a lot about Frank Lloyd Wright lately. As everybody knows, Wright was kind of the atom bomb of architecture in the 20th century. He's been dead for over fifty years, but his designs are still ubiquitous in books, documentaries, calendars, films, etc. His influence was so powerful and so wide-reaching that even after all this time, he's probably one of the only architects anywhere that your average joe can name. He was a big deal and continues to be.

What not many people know is that when I was growing up, before I wanted to draw comics or write poetry or do anything else, I wanted to be an architect. I don't know where the idea came from -- my mom probably -- but some of my earliest memories are of me drawing plans for ridiculously fanciful houses. (One, as I recall, used a rainbow as an entry sidewalk. That should tell you how young I was when I was making these drawings.) Anyway, when I was twelve, my dad arranged for me to visit an actual architect's office and hang out for a while. John Watson was a family friend and he had a small firm that at the time had its offices on the second floor of a beautiful old building just across from the river in Idaho Falls. I sat at giant drafting table and had my run of all the tools and materials I wanted. I talked with Mr. Watson and he answered all my questions. At the end of that visit, I was more of less resigned to not being an architect. Too much math, too much management and seemingly not enough creativity. I left with the impression that it was an architect's job to just sort of manage everyone else, and that idea didn't appeal to me in the slightest. So I left that idea behind and went on to study portrait painting, landscape painting, literature, and poetry. (Jeeze, is it any wonder I am poor? Look at that list. I might as well have taken classes in "Would you like fries with that?")

Anyway, even though I left it behind as a professional pursuit, I have always been interested in and moved by architectural design. A well-planned, beautifully designed building can be as exciting to me as a good poem, song, story, or movie. I just dig it. Working in downtown Detroit from 2006 to 2009 was kind of a thrill for me because, for all the homeless guys and decay, there were all the gorgeous buildings everywhere I looked. Narrow row houses and Victorian mansions in Corktown, art deco sky scrapers downtown, crazy Modernist and Brutalist campus buildings at Wayne State - it was an architectural bonanza.

So, like a lot of buffs, I'm fascinated by FLW's designs - his big, famous ones like Fallingwater and the Guggenheim but also his small, obscure ones like Teater's Knoll, a tiny artist studio perched on an outcropping of basalt above the Snake River, the only FLW design in the entire state of Idaho. Every aspect of his buildings is fascinating - exterior, interior, landscaping, lighting, all of it. His designs always catch my eye, are always distinct and, I think, really lovely.

So, out of curiosity, I've been reading about him lately. First I finished a small, narrowly focused non-fiction book called Death in a Prairie House by William R. Drennan. It focuses on a story I'd heard about but never really understood. In 1914, seven people were killed and a fire was set at Wright's Wisconsin estate, Taliesin. Written by an academic but with a nice literary flourish, the book carefully explains and contextualizes what Wright was doing in rural Wisconsin, who was in the house, who committed the murders, and a lot of other information about Wright's career and life at the time.

Once I finished that, I checked out The Women by T.C. Boyle. The book fictionalizes Wright's relationships with his first wife, Kitty; the mistress he builds Taliesin for, Mamah Borthwick; his crazy, heroin-addicted second wife, Miriam Noel; and his mistress-then-third-wife Olgivanna Lazovich. As that list might indicate, FLW had his issues with women.

While I've been reading these two books, I've been checking out big coffee table books filled with pictures of FLW's drawings, houses, office buildings, textile designs, etc. So I've been going back and forth between full-color evidence of the guy's obvious inspired brilliance and tales of his dishonesty, unfaithfulness, impatience, and just sort of ridiculous hypocrisy. It just combines into a really weird picture in my head.

The guy straight up abandoned his wife and six kids. Left them in the dust and took off with the wife of one of his clients. He was constantly on the verge of bankruptcy, borrowing here, taking out loans there, hawking prints and drawings, taking advances against projects he knew he'd never complete, the whole deal. He was a control freak who would manipulate his apprentices' personal lives, use their property as his own (if they brought a car to Taliesin, they had to repaint it to Cherokee red at their own expense to match everything else on site), and generally use them as slave labor on his property. While his creative work continues to influence the world even now, as a person he wasn't very admirable at all. In general, he comes across as deeply flawed and slightly ridiculous as a human being. It seems like he was almost a savant -- super brilliant in one area and almost completely helpless in every other way.

The more I read and watch about people who are the absolute best at what they do (pick anything - sports, arts, politics, etc.), the more it seems they all share a kind of extremity of personality. They're all focused on their pursuit in an intense way that excludes almost everything and everyone else around them. They shut out their families and children because they need to design, write, practice, whatever. Their focus allows them to excel in their field but it also almost always seems to encourage a really messy kind of selfishness in their personal dealings. It almost makes me wonder if someone can be the very best at what they do and still be a balanced, kind, faithful human being or if excellence automatically equates egomania. Or, more realistically, is it simply that they are people like everyone else but none of the rest of us have biographies or feature articles written about us? If anyone researched and wrote about your life, how good would you look? For myself, I imagine I'd come out looking a lot like FLW - deeply flawed and slightly ridiculous, but minus the famous, world-changing influence or lasting works of beauty.

These driven genius types are just regular human beings with hang ups and obsessions and mistakes, but amid all that, they manage to create stuff that lasts, that moves people, that changes the world. I guess I can admire their accomplishments and have compassion for the rest.

A Long Post About Nothing

One of my mother's favorite sayings was, "Everything is connected." She was a very faithful woman who saw God's hand in just about everything and believed strongly in a Mormon version of karma. Whatever happened in life, she was able to connect the dots and point out the ways in which this event was somehow the result of these earlier choices and actions. She simultaneously loved and didn't believe in coincidences. "Everything happens for a reason" was one of her other favorites.

I was thinking about this worldview of hers this morning as I was reflecting on my master's thesis. It was not nearly as big of a deal as my dissertation is turning out to be, but it was certainly important at the time. The last year of my MFA program was spent working on what eventually became The Book of Saint Anthony, a book-length series of poems about a Mormon kid named Tony who slowly falls away from his faith, makes bad choices, ends up accidentally shooting and killing his best friend while they are out target practicing, and gets sent to the Saint Anthony Juvenile Correction Center. Shakespeare it ain't.

Before it became this whole thing, it started as an idea I had a year and a half before while in a poetry workshop. I wanted to write a series of six or seven poems based on things that had happened to my best friend, Tony, and I when we were teenagers. There were four or five moments in our friendship when we probably should have died - driving too fast on icy roads, climbing too high on treacherous rocks, building fires in stupid places, etc. So I wanted to write this series of poems called "The Dangers." I liked the idea of calling some poems "The" something, you know? Like the name of a band - The White Stripes, The Strokes, The Commitments, etc.

I had an idea for a little chapbook and knew what I'd do for the cover, the binding, and so on. So I started tinkering with the poems and ended up writing a kind of preamble poem about Tony himself, a very loose, mostly fictionalized biography of him that I called "Hagiography." I'd recently learned that a hagiography is a biography of a saint in the Catholic church. I thought it was funny that, as Mormons, technically any biography of any of us would be a hagiography - because we're all saints, right? So I thought that was witty and wrote around that for a while.

The idea of a series of biography poems about this fictionalized version of Tony started to take hold. I figured I could add in "The Dangers" in with all the other work. Somewhere along the line, I melded Tony's fictionalized story with an actual experience from high school - a friend of a friend who had accidentally shot and killed a kid while a bunch of kids were out on a group date.  I was supposed to be on this date. The plan was to go out to the riverbottoms to shoot cans and then roast marshmallows over a fire. I was too lazy to find a date and didn't like guns anyway. Tony, who was never too lazy to find a date, went. There wasn't any drinking - it was just an careless mistake. Sitting around the fire, a kid named Chad noticed he had a few of bullets left in the chamber of his rifle. He pointed the barrel up to the sky and pulled the trigger three times. The problem was that the barrel wasn't pointed straight up but instead slightly backwards. A kid named Matt had just gotten up to get something from his coat. One of the bullets hit him in the back of the head. His body hung on for two or three days, but he was probably brain dead from the moment Chad pulled the trigger. It was a horrible thing. Needless to say, it stayed with me for years.

Somehow, a version of these events found their way into these poems I was writing, and I had this idea to have my fictionalized Tony end up in juvenile detention in Saint Anthony. Saint Anthony is a real town and there is a juvie there. Again, like Tony's life, I took a vague bit of truth and had my way with it. I really liked that in the Catholic tradition, St. Anthony is, among other things, the patron saint of lost things. That seemed appropriate. Also, the idea that St. Anthony's creepy reliquary leftover was his tongue. Supposedly, his tongue never decayed and you could visit a reliquary to see it. A holy tongue seemed appropriate for a poetry project, I thought.

Around this time, the project evolved into a bookarts project that was going to be a file folder full of hospital and police reports, letters and postcards to and from St. Anthony, psychiatric notes, photographs, journal entries, and other ephemera that a reader could go through and end up creating their own version of the book.

That idea eventually shaped the different kinds of poems I wrote. I visited home and made a couple of special trips out to the Menan butte (where my version of the shooting takes place) and to Saint Anthony to take black and white pictures. I eventually incorporated the pictures and other images I found in public domain books into the final manuscript though the file folder of ephemera version never came to pass.

The title changed from "The Dangers" to "Hagiography" to "Casebook" to "The Book of Saint Anthony." I tinkered with it a little even after I submitted and defended it, and now both the library version (hardbound with an introduction and my committee's signatures) and the handmade version (chain stitched signatures between two cardstock covered bookboards) sit on my shelf.

When I think of what I originally intended and what actually happened, I am reminded of John Lennon's lyric, "Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans." I thought I knew what I was doing, knew where I was going, knew what I wanted. Rather, I ended up with something entirely different and probably better and more interesting.

This has to do with my mother's favorite quote like this: everything is connected. Everything is part of God's larger plan. It isn't as though things happen in our lives (professional, personal, academic, or spiritual) and He's like "Hey, how did that happen? I did not see that coming!" He knows. It's all part of the gig. So, He can work through my bad ideas, my half starts, and my mistakes to get me to where I need to go. A small malformed idea I had in a poetry workshop in Martin Corless-Smith's living room in Boise, Idaho eventually evolved into something that allowed me to graduate, get a job, and be eligible for more schooling.

So often we see inspiration or revelation depicted as this big, light-filled moment in which we can see the whole picture from beginning to end. It probably happens like that sometimes, but I think more often than not, divine direction comes in the form of falling asleep at an unexpected moment so you miss the bus and are late for class and take the long way to campus and end up seeing the flyer advertising the job that you apply for but don't get but leads to the other job that you do get that eventually leads you to meet that really great friend that you otherwise never would have met.

Suzy got called to the nursery like two weeks after we'd been in the ward. No one in the Bishopric or any presidency met with us, asked about our skills or previous experiences, or knew a single thing about us. The call seemed totally uninformed and, frankly, kind of stupid. They just needed a body to fill a spot. A couple had just moved out, and the ward was short one nursery leader. No one likes to feel like your needs aren't being taken into consideration or like you're just a generic space filler. And for the Primary Presidency and Bishopric, I'm guessing that's all this was.

However, my point is, God can work through people's uninformed choices and dumb mistakes too. I'm not saying Suzy being in nursery for another year or two will necessarily result in the greatest spiritual experiences or best friendships of her life, but it could. Our mortal limitations don't necessarily thwart what God has in store for us.

I guess I am trying to see the world more the way my mom saw it: an organized, purposeful design that, while sometimes difficult and sad, is ultimately beautiful. I'm much more of a cynic than she ever was, and I don't think that tendency helps me when life gets hard. I think I would rather be a person who believes that everything is connected, rather than always doubting people's motives and always looking for the dark cloud in the silver lining.

Everydayness

I handed back my last batch of papers for this go-round last night. Today I spent my office hour recording odds and ends, updating grades, and planning the next essay (argument!), and so now I feel alright about spending a moment or two blogging before getting out of here.

It's that middle season when it's as cold as a winter day, but we don't have any snow and the sun is out most days. You look out the window and think, "Oh, it looks really nice outside. Maybe we should go for a walk!" But when you get outside, your nose hairs freeze together, and you scamper back into the house to watch some more tv. Ah well. It beats having cold weather AND cloudy skies and slushy snow everywhere.

We are getting used to the everydayness of life in Midland.

Our stake got a new president last Sunday. We didn't know the old one and don't know the new one, so it means about as much to us right now as a shift in the city council of Taos, New Mexico. It's just kind of a meh moment for us.

We had Parent/Teacher conferences this week which Northeast Middle School treats as a giant cattle call. Teachers sitting at tables and long, long lines of parents waiting to have their five minutes. There's no schedule or sign ups. You just dive into that pool of sweaty humanity and hope for the best. In an hour and a half, we made it to three teachers - one of Avery's and two of Maryn's. It was a sweaty, b-o filled night.

Parker started a new dance class last week and so is now interested in showing off her sweet moves every so often. She still had her tutu on yesterday when I got home so did a mini-recital in the living room which was a sight to behold. The thing is, you'd think all these things we have her doing (a dance class, an exercise class before that, preschool) would wear her out and make her sleep really well all night. But no. Apparently, Parker is some kind of life-force vampire who only gets stronger the more tired her poor parents become. Lately, she's taken to waking up somewhere between 3:30 and 5:30 to come into our bedroom to sleep. We've started turning her away so she'll go back to her own bed and, oh I don't know, go the heck back to sleep?! But instead, she just wanders around the house turning lights on. So instead of doing what I would like to be doing at 5:30 a.m. (you know, dreaming about unicorns and rivers of soup), I am corralling her back into her bed, shutting off lights, and praying that I can go back to sleep before my alarm goes off. I love Parker. More specifically, I'd love for her to stay in her own freaking bed and sleep through the night.

The semester is on the downhill slide now. Week after next is Thanksgiving and once that happens, the rest of the term is pretty much a bust. It feels like I just started here, so it's weird that the first semester is winding down already. But I'm glad. I need a couple of weeks off to reset and recalibrate. All the newness has thrown off my game quite a bit, and this has been far from my best teaching session. Hopefully, next semester will even out a little, and I'll feel a little more settled and less insecure. I think I really took tenure and the security it provided for granted back at IVCC. Now that I'm here, I feel all nervous and uncertain about everything again. That's a weird sensation to have at age (almost) 40 after teaching full time for over ten years. I'm not a fan.

Well, my office hour has run out. I'm due to head back to Midland for a dentist appointment. Suzy had her time there this morning and apparently they took two hours just to get through a basic cleaning. Awesome. Guess I'd better bring a book.

The Answer Is Love

I think a lot about tv. Probably more than I should given all that I have to do. But because I am Mormon and, therefore, not a beer drinker, tv is the thing that I use at the end of a long day to unwind and relax. Favorite shows come and go. We give some new, hyped-up program a chance, and sometimes it sticks, sometimes it doesn't. Some shows we watch out of morbid curiosity (most reality tv), and some we watch because, like a good book, they have characters and plots that we care about.

Right now, Wednesday night is our primo night for good stuff. Our DVR hums with activity on Wednesday night and makes up for the wasteland of Tuesdays and Thursdays through Sunday. (Dancing With The Stars still brightens our Monday evenings with lots of glittery fringe.) On Wednesday, we get Revolution, Nashville, Top Chef, and Arrow - four hours of what I like to call "high quality programming."

Arrow is strictly for me. Suzy has never seen an episode, and that's okay. It's a modernized adaptation (a la Superman in Smallville) of the DC superhero Green Arrow. It's fun to see physical versions of characters I've been into since I was a kid, and the writing is good. Most every character has an arc and evolves a little with each episode. I bank up two or three of them and binge watch when Suzy goes to a church activity or something.

Top Chef is simply Top Chef. It's one of the less exploitive, more enjoyable reality shows. The personalities are big, but more importantly the talent is big. I enjoy watching experts do their thing. It fascinates me. Tom Colicchio is getting curt and crabby in his old age and Padma Lakshmi seems to be on auto-pilot in this, their 11th season, but it's still fun to watch.

This brings me to our other two shows: Revolution and Nashville. Thanks to the magic of DVR, we usually watch them one after the other after the girls have gone to bed and we have a solid two hour block to just veg out. Because they are always right up against each other, I've given some thought to the differences in the two shows and in our reactions to them.

Revolution is a sci fi show that takes place in a future when all electrical power is gone. Something happened and suddenly there was no power of any kind other than steam and other pre-electrical sources. The country falls apart and society basically devolves. The story focuses on one family who have various connections to the reason why the power went out in the first place as well as to the crazy military government that rose up after the fall of the United States.

It got a lot of hype leading up to its premiere last year, and Suzy and I were both intrigued. Dystopia can be fun, you know? So we started watching last year, and spent a lot of time making fun of some of the bad acting (Tracy Spiridakos, are there Razzie Awards for television? If so, you're gonna clean up, sister!) and counting how many people died literally by the sword in each episode. (Guns are in short supply, so most people defend themselves with knives and swords.) But we kept watching because we were interested in seeing what happened next.

Nashville is a drama set in the titular city and revolves around the lives of people involved at various levels  of the country music scene (struggling singer/songwriters, old established stars, agents, managers, etc.) The central character, Rayna James, is a Faith Hill/Reba Mcentire type - a "queen of country," and we follow her as she tries to continue her career while raising her daughters, dealing with her flawed but ambitious husband, navigating a relationship with the true love of her life and bandleader, and facing off with a young upstart Carrie Underwood type. Some would argue it's a soap opera, and it might be hard to argue otherwise. There's bedhopping, secrets, and dramatic revelations about fake pregnancies and that sort of thing. I would argue though that, if it is a soap opera, it's an excellent one and not because of it's extremity or absurdity (see Desperate Housewives.)

It's excellent for the same reason that I look forward to it far more than Revolution.

Before I go further, I should point out that, on the surface of things, I should enjoy Revolution way more than I do Nashville. R has action and an impressive speculative future where the WHOLE FATE OF CIVILIZATION AND MAYBE THE WORLD hang in the balance. N is about country music which I don't really even like and has precious little in the way of what might be called "action." Lots of people talking in rooms, you know?

So why am always excited for Nashville and generally "meh" about Revolution? The answer is love. I don't mean Valentine's Day, hearts and flowers love, although there is that. I mean, the characters in Nashville experience love with and for each other. Parent/child, friends, mentor/student, husband/wife, etc. I am convinced that that these characters are, for the most part, three dimensional human beings who go through their lives giving and receiving love in its various forms - compassion, devotion, desire, forgiveness, affection, etc.

Revolution, for all its budget and big name talent (Jon Favreau co-created and produces), lacks love. It is ultimately a plot-driven show that cares more about what happens than about who it happens to. It is a puzzle to solve and little more. The characters, even those who are supposed to love each other, are simply cardboard cutouts with swords, acting as placeholders. They're meant to represent real people but aren't actually emotionally real in any way.

I took an acting class in college, and our textbook was by the famed teacher Uta Hagen. One of the chapters focused entirely on the importance of finding the love in every scene. Didn't matter if it was Shakespeare, Miller, Wilson, or a new scene fresh from the hands of some untested playwright - every human being experiences love, even if it's only in the form of wanting it or not having enough of it. Hagen argued that if you want your character on stage to be a real, convincing human being, you have to find the love in that person. I think that is absolutely true for any kind of character, written or performed.

So, I know I began by saying I was thinking about tv, but what I really mean is, I've been thinking a lot about stories. TV shows are just one form of storytelling in our 21st century world, and, I would argue, one of the most important and powerful. But because I am teaching a creative writing class this semester and have been reading a lot of stories that involve trick endings, jokey premises, and an almost rabid insistence of writing sci fi or fantasy, I have been trying to articulate what it is I want from stories of any kind.

There are lots of reasons to read or watch or listen to stories. But in the end, for me at least, I want stories because I want to feel something, and since we spend our lives (or should) pursuing love - for and from our family, for and from God, for and from our fellow man, doesn't it make sense to seek out stories that help me to experience and understand that emotion better?

One of my mentors, Scott Samuelson, once told me that he reads "in order to love people more." The older I get and the more I think about my relationship to stories and storytelling, the more this makes sense to me. I'm not saying Nashville is some kind of spiritual experience or a guide to how to live your life. Not at all. What I'm saying is is that it accomplishes what good stories do: it makes me care about not only what happens but who it's happening to.