Lindsey Markel Writes About True Things

I tried to write a letter to Ray Bradbury last year. It began, “Dear Mr. Bradbury, my name is Lindsey Markel, and this is the first fan letter I’ve ever written.” I wanted to tell him how hearing “The Veldt” read to me in sixth grade changed my life in a way that was undetectable at the time. I remember my teacher, Mr. Frazier, shuddering at the end, encouraging us to sink deep into the uneasiness of the story the same way he did each time he re-read it. Later that same year, my dad and I stopped at a thrift store after church one Sunday and I spied a paperback copy of The Martian Chronicles in the used book bin. Ten minutes later, I was sitting in my dad’s parked pickup truck as he ran a farmer’s errand, reading about the people moving to Mars, the strange weather and the yellow skies.

I couldn’t finish my letter. Fan letters feel embarrassing and clunky by nature; despite my best efforts to be personal and transparent, my letter fell into a cliché formula. And furthermore, after reading what I’d already written, I realized that Mr. Frazier was the one to thank.

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A topic that’s revisited a lot in Writing School discussions is whether or not we as authors “should” utilize brand names, topical trends, etc. in our writing; in these very internetty times, that usually translates to doodads-cum-entities like Facebook, iPods, Twitter, etc. We run the risk of dating our work when we mention things which will undoubtedly become obsolete in the next couple years, as newer better faster shinier things evolve; think how much you’d LOL if the main character in a novel supposedly set in the present-day updated his or her Friendster profile in the first few pages. Setting a whole novel in the orbit of the internet also puts you in a spot likely to alienate whole demographics of readers—my best friends and I may Gchat all day from our separate cubicles in far-flung office buildings, but my mom still can’t seem to figure out how to update her Facebook profile with anything except thumbnail-size photos, for instance, and my grandma actually shed tears of terror when presented with a new computer at Christmas.

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I must have been around five years old the first time I thought about the universe. I’d easily swayed my mother into buying a set of Childcraft encyclopedias from the salesman who had shown up at our door (a rare visit for our rural farmhouse). I stayed up late to read about volcanoes and examine the timeline of the world, ponder the extinction of the dinosaurs before falling asleep. Before I had been taught to fear math, I read excerpts from a book where a boy and his watch-dog eat subtraction stew and meet a Dodecahedron; The Phantom Tollbooth was my first favorite book when I read it in full a few years later. I begged Mom to buy tempera paints, the main ingredient in most of the crafts in Make and Do. They sounded exotic, my first non-Crayola medium; Mom had to stop at a special store to buy them.

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I guess I have always been afraid of Larry dying.

Of course I fear the death of anyone I love, but the roads of my life converged as such that I met Larry on the first summer after my first big death. Not “my” death, but our death—my family’s, our baby’s. Before the winter of Macey’s death, I had known the sudden deaths of high school classmates in speeding cars and the slow, confusing letting go of some older relatives. I had gone through adolescence, I had trudged my way through the swamp of my first broken heart, but I had never experienced grief. I was twenty when Macey was killed at ten months old and, like an animal knows how to fight or fly, I had never known grief but I knew how to shut down my body, how to mourn for months.

I met Larry the summer that I was still lost.

This evening I finished re-reading The Year of Magical Thinking, the memoir written by Joan Didion in the year following the sudden death of her husband, John Dunne, after a cardiac arrest at the kitchen table. It is a study of her own grieving—and all grief—as she moves her way through it. I first read it when it was released in 2005, during the few regrettable months I worked in a bookstore one town over. The owners were passive-aggressive and were in a Christian rock band, but I got a 20% employee discount, and I bought my first Didion hardback with part of my first paycheck. 

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