Oops 2: The Critique

 

If you read my last blog post you’ll know I accidentally sent a story about a boy disenchanted with the Catholic church to a Catholic publishing company, asking for a critique. Fearful of the slaughter I would be subject to, my amazing husband agreed to take the brunt of their fury and censor it for me before relaying the content . BUT eight minutes after he dropped me off at the airport my phone buzzed. An email from the Catholic publishing company. I was to spend a week 5000 miles away from my husband without him to protect me from the blazing fires. I had no choice. I had to read it myself. Unabridged. This is how a Catholic publishing house responded to my story:

Critique

God Turned Up Uninvited

I thoroughly enjoyed this memoir. It is original, and full of vivid detail and moving anecdotes. You deal with big questions in a grounded and authentic way. Both the process of disillusionment and that of forgiveness are convincing. Your prose style is attractively lyrical, witty and economical. The title and the first paragraph immediately create intrigue. Detailed critique below:

• ” and I certainly never caress magical jewelry while uttering incantations” This graphic description shows up this practice very effectively.
• Your fluent, confident voice convinces me of the impossible!  I love the precise detail of God’s arrival: ” sitting on the fallen trash can I hadn’t picked up in eight months”. The capitalisation of his elaborate title is great.
• I didn’t understand  “burning cherry” – a joint perhaps?
• I love how God answers in your own words: ” “Just to warm my divine hands on your fire,””.
• ” I knew that was a sin, Ma had smacked me upside the head before for not keeping my eyes shut when I prayed.”  I’ve never heard that rule but I like your childish logic and sympathise with your uncertainty.
• ” soggy cereal. It was like soft pieces of skin in lukewarm milk” – is a suitably disgusting image!
• ” Father Murkowski new commitment” – should be “Murkowski’s”.
• At the beginning the focus is on your mother. I thought you had no Dad but later you mention him. I wonder why he did not shovel the snow.
• ” Even if I had something really funny to tell him, he wouldn’t laugh.”   Jimmy’s seriousness is touching
• ” the heavy plumes of smoke bellowing”. Bellowing means shouting or roaring. Do you mean smoke billowing? (Author’s Note: Yes I do. Oops.)
• ” I’m the space between everywhere and everything.”  Ooh that is a good answer!
• ” which dribbled down my neck and down my collar.” – “under my collar” would save you repeating the word “down” and be more accurate. (Author’s Note: Good observation, I need to pay more attention to that in my writing)
• ” excited, honored, humbled and unworthy” You capture that peculiar Catholic mix  of privilege and contemptible sinfulness.
• ” Then, when he wasn’t smirking, he was staring at the service sheet which I knew concealed a smutty magazine.”  This is in stark contrast with the image of the solemn boy who wouldn’t even laugh at your jokes before Mass.
• ” for bringing Father Murkowski his talismans and paraphernalia at different points of the ceremony.”  Your ability to paraphrase is refreshing!
• ” picked up from Salvation Army” you need to carefully proofread your text to avoid omitting small but essential words – “the” here.  Reading your text aloud slowly will help you to catch these. (Author’s Note: Oops. Critiques are helpful!)
• ” “But there are many ways up the mountain, aren’t there? Do you think Ma would be happy if she was as free as you? Thinking you know the best route to the top is a very dangerous philosophy.””  I found God a bit confused and contradictory here. (Author’s Note: Don’t we all?)
• ” I suddenly realized I had no idea at what point we were at in the service.” this contradicts the earlier claim that you could “stand up and sit down at all the right moments” while daydreaming your way through the service. (Author’s Note: Ah, but Mickey had fallen asleep, and wasn’t in the congregation but at the altar, waiting to pass the cruets.)
• Even though you had prepared us earlier in the piece, Jimmy’s death comes as a huge shock.
• ” my eyes pressed so tightly together I could see stars in the hot redness of my mind” is powerful.
• “standing, sitting, kneeling, crossing ourselves, repeating, mumbling.”  The litany of activities reinforces your feeling of futility about it all.
• ” and ventured out into the adventures..”  The repetition of sounds doesn’t work. (Author’s Note: Oh yeah. It sounds awful.)
• ” a routine to protect my Ma from her fear of the unfamiliar” – unfamiliar doesn’t seem to be a strong enough word here. But the list of grievances is convincing.
• ” Since you are mostly space, then you are mostly Me.” I like God’s logic. The dialogue here is great.
• The magical orange tree is wonderful.   A tree’s normal growth suddenly seems a miracle and of course there is a nice reference to Jimmy.
• ” your faith in you is a lot more valuable than your faith in me” makes great sense.
• “ I felt the waxy skin of an orange and squeezed the fruit. It squirted a fresh, acid citrus into the outdoor air. It was real, alright.”  I would suggest saving the fruit itself for the very end.
• “ galaxies to ignite, eternities to measure” the first works, the second not. Why would he want to measure them?

My quibbles are mostly minor matters of word usage.  This is an accomplished and imaginative piece of writing. Well done and good luck in the next round of the competition.

Needless to say this constructive critique was a weight off my shoulders. And it made me wonder: what else is fear preventing me from doing?

Oops!

I just made a pretty big mistake, and I reckon the Pope is going to be jolly pissed off.

And funnily enough it comes the day after I recently read Neil Gaiman’s advice for graduates. “Make mistakes,” he advises. “Make lots of mistakes. Because if you’re making mistakes, it means you’re out there doing something.”

I wonder if his advice to me would be the same if he heard what I just did.

If I could have anything in the world, it would be a career writing compelling fiction (and buckets of cash!) so naturally I’m doing all sorts of things trying to make that happen. Mostly misguided and confused things, but while I’m fumbling around blindly in this murky industry I’m at least giving it a jolly good punt!

My most recent endeavor is called The Foible (oh God, I just realized the irony!), which consists of a collection of short stories and parables aimed at reflecting the key message of the Bible; love a lot, be true, have faith, keep donkeys, etc. Of course, my stories take place in wildly more relevant settings (in my opinion, which qualifies as at least partly valid because I’m the writer).

I just wrote a piece called “God Turned Up Uninvited”. Anyone who has read it knows it’s not very Catholic Church friendly. Through the mind of Mickey, a young boy disenchanted with the futility of church practice, we explore the foibles of faith and belief. “I never caress magical jewelry while uttering incantations,” Mickey tells the reader. “I’m a terrible Christian.”

When God turns up Mickey is less than thrilled. “What do you want?” he snaps.

The story goes on to relate embarrassing and uncomfortable anecdotes from Mickey’s childhood at the clutch of the church, with his devout mother’s constant disappointment every bit as predictable as the ticking of a metronome.

When I finished writing the story, I gave it to three friends who I knew would be honest. The agnostic hippie said it totally rocks. The Jew said, in very few words, that it’s awesome.

The Catholic hated it.

This is a phenomenon known in this industry as foreshadowing.

Because when they had finished with it, I entered it into a memoir competition I had noted a few months earlier, before I even knew I was going to write this story down.

I clicked submit.

Feeling very pleased with myself and taking great pleasure in the ball of pride swelling in my abdomen, I poured myself a glass of cheap white plonk and sat back, grinning at the glare of the computer screen.

Then I spotted something. The website for the publishing house hosting the competition was still up. What had suddenly captured my confused attention was the company logo.

It was a fish. Not a scaly, slippery fish with glassy eyes and miserable gaping mouth, but one of those simple stick figure Jesus fish you see on bumper stickers all up and down the American Bible belt. Ah. Christians, then. But perhaps I was in luck, maybe they were the tolerant, open-minded liberal Anglican type.

With a stirring sense of unease, I looked up the location of this particular publishing house—and dropped my glass of plonk. They’re based in Ireland.

Jesus fish + Ireland = …

Oh Holy Blasphemous Christ, they’re Catholics! And as if that wasn’t enough, I remembered with sudden horror that just before clicking submit I’d checked the option for a full critique of the piece! What was I thinking? I never do that! What in God’s name had possessed me to pay extra for a critique now?

I couldn’t have just made the mistake of sending an anti-church story to a Catholic publishing house, I had to force them to really read it, and demand that they tell me, in the harsh and brutally honest style publishing companies adopt, exactly what they thought of it. They aren’t going to just reject it, I’ve given them the option to thoroughly murder it! Needless to say, for the foreseeable future I won’t be carrying umbrellas or brass keys attached to a kite string, or any other objects that can conduct massive bolts of electromagnetic charge.

So, Neil Gaiman, you who hope I make many mistakes this year – looks like I won’t be disappointing you! I think this giant blooper counts a whole lot towards my track record of terrible mistakes, and my reward will be plenty of teeth gnashing and tense wailing while I wait for the Catholic publishing house to tell me just what they think of my true story about how a young boy was failed by his church.

Oops.

• To satisfy your schadenfreude, watch this space. If I survive the bloodbath, I’ll share the devastation.
• To read “God Turned Up Uninvited” visit http://www.thefoible.com
• Like my Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/thefoible