FUN OUT OF A HAT!

How The INSIDE JOBS Stories Got Written


from "The Ivory City on the Moon"

 

     Storytellers love to tell stories, and every story comes with a built-in bonus story, the tale of how it came to be written! Below I share the delightful, often colorful circumstances behind the "birth" of the nine tales that eventually found their way onto the INSIDE JOBS tape.

     The Dreamer— This story was born way back in 1983. During a confusing period of my life, I took a Greyhound bus from St. Louis to New Jersey, to see if my second wife and I could reconcile. The bus stopped for an hour or two in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Never having been in Pitsburgh, I decided to spend the layover strolling around downtown.
     After an hour, though, instead of feeling energized exploring a new place, I felt exhausted and disoriented. It was a week day morning. The rhythm of men in suits marching to another drummer besides the one I could hear left me feeling metaphysically homeless.
     With my last strength, I staggered to a dime store lunch counter, ordered a diet coke, got out my notebook, and began to write. I had to pull from someplace "unseen" in order to create a sense of Order I could fit into.
     Beyond that, writing the story was, and remains, a mystery. "The Dreamer" came from an intuitive place. I felt strength flow into my pen as the
first words, then the sense of where the story was going, came to me.
     By the time I finished, it was time to return to the bus station. I was able now to walk through the city with a degree of composure, the notebook containing the healing words of "The Dreamer" tucked safely under my arm.
     In 1987, MAGICAL BLEND phoned me and asked if they could publish
the piece. It appeared in the next issue.

     Another Ordinary Day—In 1990, I was driving on the New Jersey Turnpike, from Piscataway, where I lived, to Manhattan, a journey of 26 miles. I often passed the time listening to the radio. Today, however, a picture just "came" to me of a family sharing dinner at home. But instead of passing each dish around the table so that every member could get a helping, in this fantasy each family member took all of one dish!
     It was the heyday of "dysfunctional family" groups. I and most of the people I knew were "working on themselves" intensely. I laughed out loud at the picture that presented itself. In fact, I laughed uncontrollably! I kept laughing, as a story began to emerge from that first picture and memories that began coming to mind.
     Throwing caution to the winds, I got out my notebook and began to write
while I drove at 60 or 65 miles an hour! Don't try this at home, kids! As a writer, I was concerned the story, if not recorded immediately, might "get away".
     While I certainly don't justify my writing it while both laughing and driving,
the story didn't get away.

     The Martyr—Can't say I know precisely where this one came from! It seemed to recapitulate a period in the late '60s and early '70s when I'd been
politically involved. Then during the brief period when I was influenced by the Yippies and psychedelics, I got expelled from college. It had seemed like my rebellion had been a going toward something, but in actuality, all forward momentum stopped even as I'd moved in at a utopian commune.
     "The Martyr" just poured out one day, almost two decades after all this,
as I sat at a New Jersey mall's food court.

     Meruscha— The whole story arose spontaneously as I tried to write my way through some obsessions about being unconscious.

     Soup-er Good Luck— This was a funny one! I was a substitute teacher in
various school disctricts in New Jersey. One day I taught in a 5th grade class. The regular teacher had left an assignment: have the children write what they'd wish for if a genie came and granted them three wishes. (This was right after
"Alladdin" had come out.)
     Shocked that the children all wished for 1) Money, 2) More Wishes, and 3) World Peace or a Clean Environment, I wrote and read them this little story both to amuse them and to try to broaden the scope of what might be worth wishing for.

     The Bird—"Something happened" when I was little, that resulted in a breakdown in my 20s. It appeared as though I might spend the rest of my life emotionally disturbed. I wound up writing to Ram Dass, and then visiting him,
and experiencing a release that was as dramatic as that described here.

     Farmer Brown's Menagerie—This story is the result of another instance
where a comic mix-up that suddenly presented itself to my mind "out of nowhere" left me laughing wildly and scrawling an outline on some tiny pieces of paper in my wallet as I substitute taught.

    The Ivory City on the Moon— The birth of this story was unique in my experience. Back in 1991, around the time when I wrote most of the tales in this collection, a female friend told me one night that she was depressed.
     "Tell me a story," she implored. Now, I don't usually make up stories spontaneously, as I speak. But in this case, I said a prayer and just began. The tale that unfolded stunned me in its elaborateness and sophistication. I don't know what the correspondence was between the little girl who was the story's heroine and the grown woman who brought the narrative into existence by her request. But she was satisfied, and I remembered enough details to write the bones of the piece down soon afterwards.

  

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