by Kirk Farber
The stars begin to vanish with dawn’s arrival, which I’ve always found a bit sad, but the hope of something brighter lurks beneath the horizon. I see a woman doing yoga a few dozen yards away. She has tied herself up in a pretzel position, but appears peaceful despite her interweaving limbs. I make my way toward her, push my reluctant feet through shifty ground.
When I arrive next to her, she opens her eyes to take me in peripherally, then shuts them again. She doesn’t seem alarmed that a stranger on a public beach has come to join her meditation. She must know it’s me. I plop down a few feet away in case I’m wrong, and stare out at the dark, vast lake. I watch the last star fade into the growing turquoise of the sky, and I wish we could sit here together, silently, until it’s dawn again tomorrow. I muster up the courage to break the silence.
“Melanie,” I say, “I want you to know something.”
She stares straight ahead. She hasn’t run away or attacked me, so that’s good. I stare straight ahead too, and talk to the lake, hoping it will serve as a good mediator.
“I’m sorry for leaving you the other night. I mean, really sorry. With-deep-feelings-of-regret kind of sorry.” She holds her gaze, a petrified oak tree. “I can’t really explain it,” I say. The waves lap rhythmically. One by one. Lap, lap, lap.
She waits for more.
I sit up and try to mimic her yoga position, but my limbs don’t bend like hers. I try to fold my right leg under my left knee, but it hurts to have my limbs at such odd angles. I’m not very good at bending. I give up and lay my hands on my lap instead, hold my legs straight out. This is hard enough. I take a deep breath.
“I really enjoy your company,” I say. “I feel like we connect somehow, like we’re on the same frequency or something, so I don’t know why—this all sounds so ridiculous. It’s just—”
I shut my eyes tight and watch the ghost image of the sunrise on the back of my eyelids—a blue-and-orange flashing apparition. I can’t look directly at it or it moves away, floating slowly off to the left, outside my field of vision. I need to say something concrete here, something that puts this all into perspective, or I will lose her. But all I can do is think of everything all at once.
I think about my dad and his copper pipes. I think about Natalie and the quickness with which she made a baby after Mom died. Dr. Singh with his plaques, Gerald with his underground library. Candyce’s dream interpretations. Mom’s wine bottle. Zoe’s postcards. Everybody trying so hard to be remembered, to stay connected to everyone else. There’s only one way I can think to explain all these thoughts to Melanie, and it will sound like madness.
“My dead mother’s spirit lived in a bottle of 1967 Bordeaux,” I say.
The sun shoots a knife of light into my tired eyes. I try to adjust my position but my legs are full of needles, the sand beneath me an indifferent mass of cold granules. I sit up awkwardly and wait for the inevitable.
Melanie pushes out a long, deep breath. “Well,” she says, and makes me wait—a long wait, the kind that makes you wonder if words were actually spoken, or if you just thought they were. “That’s pretty dramatic,” she says. “I don’t know if I’m up for so much drama.”
“I understand,” I say, a little relieved. “I’m not really either.”
And I realize this is it, the end of all my daydreams and rescue fantasies, the last moments of a promising relationship that never quite got off the ground. But then she tilts her head from side to side, as if the options she’s weighing are a physical presence inside her skull. I imagine tiny colored balls bouncing around the interior of her cranium, like a circus game, and I wonder which one will drop out of her ear to be the winner. She makes a humming noise, which I’m happy to hear because I know she’s working on an answer, but I can’t stand this.
Finally, after so much silence, she speaks. “I do love Bordeaux,” she says, with a welcoming but unfinished tone, like maybe she wants me to help her along a little.
Just then, a streak of light blazes across the horizon—a shooting star burning out. I wonder if Satellite Sixty has just fallen from the sky, destroying residences or setting cities on fire. Or maybe only I witnessed its descent, a silent dissolve into the water, unnoticed by the rest of humanity. Forgotten. But soon I realize that the world has not ended. In fact, I can feel it underneath me, albeit cold and wet and fairly uncomfortable.
In my peripheral vision, Melanie has extended an open hand. I don’t look at the hand directly because I don’t want it to go away. Instead I stare forward at the sun as it pokes its orange round head over the horizon. I feel a certainty that the sun is amused by me, that maybe it’s even laughing at everyone. Because to the sun, there is no rising and setting, only watching us spin around in circles. I suddenly have a strong affinity for it. I forgive it for all its brightness and burning, for all the pain it’s caused.
The wet sand has soaked through my pants—a cold, unpleasant sensation. I adjust my position by pushing off the ground, but it only rides my pants up further. My hands are dirty now, my clothing ruined.
Melanie’s hand is still extended. Her fingers wiggle at me, waiting for my response. And while we’re far from being orbs of lotus light floating above Jasmine Beach, I think I finally know what to do.
I reach out to get a better hold.
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More …
About the author
2 Meet Kirk Farber
About the book
4 A Conversation with Kirk Farber
Read on
7 Author’s Picks
About the Author
Meet Kirk Farber
Where were you born?
I was born and raised in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin. 1971.
My dad was a textbook salesman, and my mom was the Avon lady. My dad would go on trips for a week at a time and come back with stories of his travels and presentations. We always had books piled around the house because of his job. I’m sure some of my storytelling comes from him. My mom was a homemaker but also a saleswoman, so she was very active in the community, very connected with people. I think I got my sense of humor from her, as well as the red hair. My sister, Kari also has the red hair. The three of us were quite the spectacle growing up.
When did you first start writing?
I was a hyper kid, so I didn’t write my first novel when I was five years old or anything like that. My parents directed my energy into playing the drums, so I spent most of my youth playing music and wanting to be a rock drummer. I eventually ended up playing in a band throughout my twenties, but as a kid, I didn’t really seek out books much. When I did, it was the Chronicles of Narnia, and the Douglas Adams books, and Ray Bradbury. I enjoyed weird stories, surreal stories, funny stories. Still do.
Writing really started for me in high school. I took an advanced composition class and strangely enjoyed all of the assignments. It was a class that many people feared and loathed, but I had fun with it, which was exactly the opposite of my math class experience.
One of my high school teachers, Mrs. Newburg, was very passionate about literature and taught in unconventional ways that really made books fascinating. When we read Lord of the Flies, she had the class chant “Deus ex machina!” over and over like savages. And after we read Welcome to the Monkey House, she took us to see Kurt Vonnegut speak at a local university, which was a thrill. His stories and books made a huge impression.
One big turning point for my writing came at the beginning of my freshman year in college. My mother died from cancer a few weeks into the school year. I took a couple of weeks off to be with family, and when I returned, I just sort of isolated myself for a while. I remember going to the university bookstore and seeing all of the assigned novels for various literature classes, and I felt compelled to read all of them. I bought fifteen or twenty novels and spent most of my first semester reading. I read Slaughterhouse-Five, The Catcher in the Rye, Catch-22—all the stuff you’d expect on the freshman college list. But I had never spent so much time
reading, and suddenly there were all of these incredible worlds to visit, all these stories that needed to be read and new ideas that needed to be written down. And that was it. I got the bug and have never stopped.
Any odd jobs to support your writing?
I’ve worked as a catastrophe cleaner, a caregiver, a group home supervisor, a rock drummer, and a website programmer.
Currently I work at a library, which is a great day job for a writer because you are surrounded by books and people who love books. Your coworkers also happen to be very savvy at finding information, which can be helpful for research. My job is in interlibrary loan, so I process the books our patrons want but we don’t happen to own in our huge collection. So I get to see some very specific, unusual stuff come through, which can be great for story ideas or just personal entertainment. 1978 Collectible Salt & Pepper Shaker Pricing Guide? Check. Mind Control for Your Slaves During the Coming Apocalypse? Check. Electromagnetic Subterfuge Experiments with Reverse Angled Matrix Pressure Static Gages? All three volumes, please.
About the Book
A Conversation with Kirk Farber
So, a book about postcards from a dead girl? What was your inspiration?
My initial inspiration came from a song called “Letters from the Dead” by a Nashville band called The Silver Seas (formerly The Bees). The lyrics are about someone who has found postcards from a past relationship and he doesn’t know what to do with them. I was always listening to their whole album, and every time that song came up, my “what if” question would resurface: What if instead of discovering old postcards, they were being sent to you, but you weren’t sure if the sender was alive or dead?
One day I sat down to write the first scene of the book (where Sid receives a postcard and suffers the accompanying anxiety-and-lilac spell), and two more scenes immediately followed that same day. The themes of the book naturally developed from there. I didn’t set out to write a book about this or that. I just had this main conflict, this character in crisis. But as I wrote, I started exploring things like memory and idealization of the past. And disconnection, especially with language. Sid is always misunderstanding what people say, or hearing them wrong, or not hearing them at all. Often his dog is the only one who understands him.
I was also interested in how we deal with loss and tragedy—how we can put too much emphasis on escaping, or try too hard to be happy when maybe we just need to feel miserable for a while. Most of the people in the story get along just fine in life, yet Sid can’t stop flailing. I found a lot of humor in Sid’s flailing, though, because we’ve all done it—hit the brick wall a dozen times before we learn we’re actually supposed to go around it. I figure if you can’t laugh at some of the inevitable suffering in life, you might lose your mind.
What was your writing process for this novel?
I knew the beginning and the end before I really got going, so I just had to fill in all that middle part, which took about two years. I started by writing longhand, basically brainstorming, filling up legal pads with thoughts and themes until scenes started to reveal themselves. During that time I wrote up 3x5 index cards with the guts of the scenes. Then I hung a bunch of cork on my wall and tacked all the cards up so I could see the whole book. I liked to see all the story points and character arcs, so I’d have these cards and charts and scribbles all posted on my wall. After a while, my office got to looking like that Russell Crowe movie about the guy with schizophrenia.
A huge part of writing the novel was the rewriting, which I did with the help of my roundtable group at Redbird Studio in Milwaukee. We met every other week for read-alouds and critiques, and their feedback was invaluable. Plus the sense of community really made the lonely part of writing much more tolerable, and the regular sessions motivated me to keep pumping out scenes. If you can find a writing community who are honest and supportive, I highly recommend it. Just knowing other people are “out there” doing this writing thing can be worth your time and the price of admission. Honest, constructive feedback is priceless. Now that I live in Colorado, I’m part of Pikes Peak Writers, which is a great big group that is very active and connected—there is always something going on with PPW.
Do you have any writing rituals?
I tend to write when the world is quiet. Late night is best. I need total silence to hear myself think, and I achieve this by wearing foam earplugs as well as a set of noise reduction earmuffs. I look kind of ridiculous with this gear, but it gets the job done. I can’t listen to music while I’m writing because I’ll focus on the melody or instruments or lyrics. I’m pretty much a caveman: if I try to do more than one thing at a time, I get frustrated and confused and start grunting at the fireball in the sky.
If the writing isn’t going well, I try to remind myself that as long as I sit at my desk long enough, something will get written. One sentence, even. It’s kind of a trick for me. Just write one sentence for today, Kirk. And then inevitably more will follow. But if I sit down to write 1,200 words, it’s a struggle.
The coolest thing about writing for me is the metaphysical part of it, how one minute you can be staring at a blank piece of paper, and the next you’re off in your imagination, or the ether, or whatever you call it, and an hour later there is a page or a scene written down that didn’t exist before. Norman Mailer called writing “the spooky art,” and I agree.
How did Postcards find a publisher?
It started with my receiving a phone call on my birthday from literary agent Sandra Bond saying she wanted to sell my manuscript, which was a really great birthday present. After I signed with her in March, I settled in for the big wait of her sending the manuscript out to houses. I assumed it would take six to eight months because publishing is a very slow-moving machine. And I was preparing myself for the inevitable rejections, having gone through that process with short fiction.
But about one month later, Sandra called to let me know someone at HarperCollins was very interested, in fact was already faxing her pages of edits. This person was the estimable Carl Lennertz. He loved what he’d read but had some improvements in mind, so Carl and I worked on editing the book over the summer and fall. After several drafts and passing the muster of several more readers, Harper Perennial made an offer on Election Day. Quite a wonderful day, that one.
Read on
Author’s Picks
These novels have always stuck with me and really sparked my “you should write a novel” impulses:
Slaughterhouse-Five: Kurt Vonnegut is one of those writers who totally engages my imagination. Science fiction and literary thriller and satire all wrapped up in one bizarre, beautiful book. This is one of my favorites, as well as his short story collection, Welcome to the Monkey House.
Fight Club: Chuck Palahniuk’s style knocked me out (ooh, bad pun)—sparse, provocative, and original. So much going on in this book, such a great twist at the end.
The Beach: Another summer book that swept me away. Alex Garland’s take on Lord of the Flies was all-consuming for me. This updated paradise-gone-wrong story was totally engrossing.
Misery: This was the first book I remember not being able to put down. In fact, my boss at my summer job caught me carrying it in my back pocket and yelled at me. I just couldn’t stop reading. Other books I love by Stephen King are The Shining and The Dark Half and Bag of Bones—hmm, all books about writers in peril.
A Trip to the Stars: Nicholas Christopher made me stop reading books for a month after I finished this story about a young boy named Enzo who is separated from his family when he’s kidnapped at a planetarium. Intricate and heartfelt as Enzo searches for the people he’s lost in his life. You also learn about mysticism, spiders, vampires, celestial navigation, and botany along the way.
The Virgin Suicides: What a beautiful book. Dark, lyrical, poignant. All good things, from Jeffrey Eugenides. Love this book.
The Great Gatsby: This is my “classics” pick. I reread this recently after fifteen years and just loved it. I think this Fit
zgerald guy has got a future in writing.
In the Lake of the Woods: Haunting, dreamy, and tragic. A love story and a horror story at the same time. A gracefully written thriller. Tim O’Brien is one of my favorite authors. I think of this book every time I water the plants.
Other writers who do the dreamy, surreal, literary thing I love so much are Paul Auster and Haruki Murakami. I get sucked in to their stories, and it’s like a magic trick: I try to figure out how they got me to the end and I can’t, but I’m happy to be there.
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acknowledgments
I would like to say thanks to Harper Perennial, and especially my editor, Carl Lennertz, for his wonderful insight, keen eye, abundant generosity, and exclamation points.
Thanks to my amazing agent, Sandra Bond, for her guidance, hard work, and enthusiasm. Most important, for believing in my manuscript, and getting it in the right hands.
In Milwaukee, Postcards spent countless Wednesday evenings at the Redbird Studio roundtable workshops. Thank you, Judy Bridges, for creating such a great atmosphere for writers. And thanks to everyone at Redbird for the feedback, encouragement, and camaraderie.
Special thanks to those who took the time and energy to read my first draft in its ugly entirety: Andy Jurkwoski, Dave & Mary Jo Thome, Les Huisman, Kari Barnes, and Kelly Schroeder. Your initial feedback was incredibly helpful.
Also a big thank-you to everyone at Pikes Peak Writers, for your support and excellent writing resources.
