short story collections

Traveling Back to France During My Michigan Lockdown

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“Look me up whenever you come to Paris.” 

That’s what famed author Edmund White said to me when we met at an awards banquet in D.C. in the late 80s.  I was frazzled in the 90-degree heat that weekend and not prepared to meet an author I admired so much.  He was the very first person I saw as I walked into the banquet and I probably gushed when I told him how much I admired his work. 

White surprised me with his very specific praise for a story I’d contributed to the anthology Men on Men 2, a story that would become the title piece of my first collection a year later.  Both the story and the collection would help get me national recognition, earn me scores of reviews, and start a series of book tours that ultimately led to readings on three different continents.

White meant what he said.  My spouse and I did look him up a few years later on a trip to France.  We were taking advantage of a great exchange rate and basing ourselves in Paris for three weeks, planning day trips.  When we asked White at dinner what we should make a point of seeing  that tourists tended to miss, he didn’t hesitate: Vaux-le-Vicomte, whose official website is here. 

I had never heard of this chateau only an hour’s drive from Paris.  The team of artistic geniuses involved in building it for Louis XIV’s superintendent of finances, Nicolas Foucquet, was the same trio who later designed and built Versailles and its gardens.  White assured us of two things.  Versailles was mammoth and would be teeming with busloads of loud and cranky tourists (he wasn’t exaggerating).  Vaux was more jewel-like and he’d be surprised if we would find more than a few dozen people touring the chateau and its exquisite grounds.

He was right.  The day we visited was sunny, and like Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited, we were “drowning in honey” as we moved from one amazing room filled with gorgeous paintings, sculptures, furnishings to another–and then out into the gardens to enjoy elegant vistas that seemed almost too perfect to be real.

That day and White’s advice came back to this week when I read the biography above of Foucquet, who was tried on a trumped-up charge of treason and for various financial crimes by the young king.  Louis XIV wasn’t just jealous that Foucquet had the most beautiful dwelling in France,  he was out to flex his muscles and show other rulers who was in charge in France.  He was also moved by people scheming against Foucquet for complicated reasons that would make for a great miniseries.  Foucquet’s long imprisonment in a remote fortress reads like chapters from The Count of Monte Cristo.

But despite his ignominious last years, he left behind a monument of architecture, painting, and landscape gardening that some call the most beautiful building in France.  Even rooms with a less-than-august purpose were magnificent: Vaux was one of the first chateaux to have a dining room.

©Sylvia Davis

Like millions of other Americans, I’ve had cabin fever for weeks now, but this biography opened up an unforgettable day for me, one that happened thirty years ago.  It sent me to a closet where I keep my travel photo albums—remember those?  I hadn’t thought of them in years and realized now that each one is a doorway to another life, another time, and a very welcome escape.

Lev Raphael is the prize-winning author author of 27 books in genres from memoir to mystery.  He offers individualized writing workshops and manuscript editing at writewithoutborders.com.

 

Twitter Vive la France! photo below: (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Getting Fantastic Fan Mail

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I’ve been getting fan mail for many years now and from many places–but last week was the first time someone wrote me from Brazil.

Just seeing the word “Brazil” curiously shot me right back to 7th grade Social Studies class where I had a snooty teacher who liked taunting us students.

One day he was lamenting how little we knew about current events.  He said we probably didn’t know any world leaders outside of our own president and I raised my hand and said, “The President of Brazil is Costa e Silva.”  I had seen the name in the New York Times, which my parents read daily, and it somehow stuck in my head.  This only briefly deflected our teacher’s snide little speech, but I still remember his beady-eyed glare….

brazil flagBack then, even though I had my favorite authors like Dumas and Isaac Azimov, and I sometimes dreamed of being a writer myself, I never thought about fan mail.  When it started coming after I published my first short story in Redbook years later, I wrote back to everyone (of course now it’s email).  That’s because when I was only about twelve, I wrote to an author of a YA novel and he actually replied–from Paris.  I lost many things over the years through moves, but never lost that.

So here’s my surprising Brazilian fan email (with the town name and the writer’s omitted for privacy):

I am writing to you all the way from ——–  in the countryside of Pernambuco, a Northeastern state of Brazil. I teach American Literature at a federal university, and I would like you to know that your work is read by my students, and it is really inspiring to us all.

Because my students are usually at different levels of English language acquisition, I usually have them read and analyze short stories. The one we worked on this term was “Shouts of Joy,” from Secret Anniversaries of the Heart. We all loved it!

Congratulations on your great and inspiring work!

secret LRThe story they all enjoyed appeared in my first collection of short stories Dancing on Tisha B’Av which won a Lambda Literary Award.  It was later reprinted in the book mentioned and pictured above, which collects 25 years of my short fiction.  I originally published “Shouts of Joy”–an erotic Passover tale–in the mid-1980s.

Given all the time that’s passed, getting mail about that story is like finding a letter in a bottle washed onto a beach: mysterious and fascinating.  It’s almost as if it’s happened to someone else, as if I’m a character in a story, or I’m a reading a story about someone else getting this email.  In fact it is, since I’ve published so many stories since then, so many books, and become such a different writer.

What do I mean? Back when I conceived, wrote and published “Shouts of Joy,” I thought I’d only write short stories for the rest of my career.  I’d started my career by having won a big writing prize and publishing in Redbook–which had 4.5 million readers-–before I left my MFA program, and there were many short stories writers I idolized.

But life had other, more interesting plans for me, and I’ve ended up writing in genres I never dreamed would call to me, including psychology and historical fiction.

Hearing now about the impact of this thirty-year-old story of mine makes me wonder who–if anyone–might be reading it thirty years from today, and where.  You know,  I think there might actually be a short story in that…..

If you’re a writer, what’s some cool fan mail you’ve gotten, and if you’re a fan, what’s the most surprising response to your fan mail you’ve received?

Lev Raphael is the author of Writer’s Block is Bunk (Guide to the Writing Life) and 24 other books in many genres which you can find on Amazon.