 |
"I grew up in a house of voices," Rob begins his autobiography in Seek. Though his was a duplex in San Francisco,
it was my own childhood home in Santa Monica, in southern California, that I saw in my mind: 100 years old now, with two stories and fifteen rooms, the source if not the setting for nearly all my
books. Let me give you an audio tour.
You enter the living room—large, with west windows that let in the afternoon breeze off the ocean, ten blocks away. It's here that
my father, Sid Fleischman, read his books aloud to the family, chapter by chapter, as they were written, from my ninth year until I left for college. Listen. He's speaking Praiseworthy's lines from By
the Great Horn Spoon. The room was an island of oral culture, where words were spoken, heard, performed, their sounds and rhythms relished. His readings were living-room theater, intimate,
no-tech, without props or costumes, but riveting nonetheless. Decades later I found myself writing for the same stage—Bull Run, Seedfolks, Mind's Eye, Seek, all spoken,
all suitable for performance. Breakout, coming this fall, incorporates the main character's one-woman show.
In the corner of the room is a baby grand piano. Under it sit two guitar cases. Both my parents played classical guitar for a time.
My mother's real instrument, and my own, was the piano. Both my sisters played flute. I grew up hearing guitar duets, flute duets, and loved playing four-hand piano pieces with a partner. It was here
that Joyful Noise and my other multi-voice poems were born—attempts to carry the camaraderie and synergy and do-it-yourself pleasure of chamber music into poetry. Those books weren't designed for virtuosos, but for family and friends. The stage I had in mind was our living room couch.
In the kitchen resides the radio. While my mother cooked, she and I would listen to the Dodgers. A baseball game is a three-act
play, complete with suspense, climax, and intermissions for sustenance. It teaches plotting and pacing. We loved Vin Scully, but Jerry Doggett mangled the Spanish surnames; my mother, a Spanish
translator during the war, shouted the proper pronunciation back at the radio. Enter later, and the radio might have been tuned to KFWB, playing the Beatles' new hit, "Daytripper." Later, it would be
pouring forth Beethoven on KFAC. Early the next morning, I'd listen to Lohman and Barkley's comedy riffs on KFI. My mother would tune into pop music—Nancy Wilson, Burt Bacharach. I took it all in.
DJs were part of my extended family. Finding one of them in the obituaries years later was one of the sparks for Seek.
Go down the hall into my father's study. The room was always full of voices—the voices of books. The shelves are floor to ceiling.
When I was young, they seemed twenty feet tall. Over here are the books he's used to research his novels set in the west: Thirty Years a Cowboy, Beans and Bacon, Bancroft, marble-edge
collections of Harper's Weekly. Over there are the old Baedeker guides he used for his adult books. I loved their microscopic print and fold-out maps. Little did I know that I'd later build Mind's Eye around his 1911 edition of Baedeker's Italy.
Coming out, you pass through the den. The TV is there. So is the copy machine. We got our first one in the 60s—the only family I
knew who owned one, possibly the first west of the Mississippi. To avoid endlessly renewing library books that he was using for research, my father had bought it to copy the pages he needed. After
college, I began experimenting with using copiers in art projects, the result collected in Copier Creations.
Go up the stairs. I can still hear the Bach unaccompanied flute sonata coming from my sisters' room. It's the model for all the
monologues I've written. Outside, on the sundeck, my father spent hours with his eye to the telescope. Here was the sound of silence. Privacy and quiet were always available in such a large house, a
necessity for the writer I would become.
Go down the hall. Turn back the clock. Strange voices are coming from my room. Enter. The lights are off, but my shortwave is on.
I'm listening to Radio Canada. The announcer is reading letters to listeners' friends and family who live beyond the reach of a postman in Yukon and Northwest Territories. For writers, eavesdropping
is a job skill. I roam the dial after a while and find Radio Peking. The shortwave allows spirit travel, much as a book does. I proceeded to visit Saudi Arabia, Norway, the Dutch Antilles. I finally
turn it off and my bedside light on. I look at my bookshelf—Twain, Gogol, Dylan Thomas, Richard Brautigan, J. D. Salinger, Sophocles, Edward Lear. Living voices, no matter how long-dead the writers.
I wasn't a reader until high school. Suddenly I found myself reading three books at once, the chorus of voices ever-enlarging.
My father still lives and writes in that house. I still sleep in that pine-paneled room when I visit. And in my own books I continue
to aspire to the power of a voice coming from a radio late at night in a pitch-black room. •
|
About the Artist:
Paul Fleischman attended University of California-Berkeley after leaving Santa Monica, moving onto New
Hampshire, New Mexico, and points between before settling back on the California coast. He received the Newbery Medal for Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices, the Scott O'Dell Award for Bull Run, and the PEN
West Literary Award for Weslandia.
Recent titles by Paul Fleischman:
Seek (Cricket Books, 2001)
Weslandia (Candlewick, 1999)
Mind's Eye (Cricket Books, 1999)
Whirligig (Henry Holt, 1998)
Seedfolks (HarperCollins, 1997)
To contact this author or illustrator, please use the information for his or her publisher provided on our list of CBC member publishers.
Meet the Author/Illustrator Archives
|