2025 Yale Writers' Workshop-Work-in-Progress Intensive

What a terrific group of writers I had at the 2025 Yale Writers’ Workshop-Alumni Intensive! They made my year! Cynthia Johnstone, Victoria Hunt, Lisa Ann Dulin, Bruce Parker, Bettina Meade, Pranjal Shirwaikar, Robin Harris. We got so much work done, and I’m proud of them. 

 

Contra Viento Journal Intervews Sergio Troncoso

My interview in Contra Viento Journal was published today. Thank you Gabriel Dozal and Sean McCoy.

"I also think growing up dirt poor on the border had a profound effect on me. My neighborhood in Ysleta hasn’t changed too much: it’s become working-class, when it was actually poorer in the ’60s and ’70s. Not even working class. I believe, and have always believed, in los de abajo, the very poor, and what they have to contribute, the ideas they explore, the importance of their lives, even if so many others just ignore them. If that’s empathy, then I wholeheartedly embrace it. But even that word, ‘empathy,’ seems studied somehow: these are just the people I knew, the people I grew up with, my people."

https://contravientojournal.org/radiant-perspectives-on-the-border-conversation-sergio-troncoso-peculiar-kind-of-immigrants-son/

Stories from the Heart of El Paso

Matt Méndez’s Twitching Heart (Floricanto Press) is an evocative collection of stories set in El Paso that challenges the reader to explore the dynamics of relationships, gender roles, politics, and faith. The prose is simple but true, and the stories are suspenseful often without easy conclusions, which encourage the reader to ponder the layers of meaning in Méndez’s prose.

The interlinked stories begin with the title story, with Chuy and Teresa, father and mother to eleven-year-old Oscar, in a frayed relationship. Chuy has cheated and has been thrown out of the house. Yet Chuy agrees to take care of Oscar while the mother is at work, and agrees again to take Oscar to a tile job at a neighbor’s house, where paralyzed Angélica supposedly performs miracles at the behest of her mother María. The parents’ struggle is partly about their son, what kind of man he should become, whether he should learn skills with his hands, or skills for college. The struggle is also within the father Chuy, his life “silent and a stuck way to be.”

In “Tacos Aztecas,” Israel tries to remember how to show Cristina that he loves her, after homophobic thugs killed their son Artemio behind Ben’s Grocery one year ago. Israel believes it is his fault Artemio died, because he encouraged his son “to change his mind about being a sissy.” A big family never happened for Israel and Cristina. Cristina’s mother worried the family would be cursed, because Artemio was conceived before marriage. History is a crushing burden rather than a fount of pride or possibilities. Cristina is also wracked with guilt, because she encouraged Artemio “to deny who he was,” to hide it from his father, instead of defending Artemio like a Matachin. Revealing their sins to each other, Israel and Cristina might create another chance for themselves.

“El Terrible” is a gem of a story for two reasons: the details are terrific—from the father-son relationship to the basic skills of boxing—and the message about what work should mean, not labor, not the 9-to-5 grind, but work as caring about what you do, that message is so important. Martín is cut from the basketball team, and attends a school of “bored looking teachers and students.” His father José, a bus driver, has other plans for his son: to fight The Deacon’s kid—a star quarterback and “the biggest Mexican” Martín had ever seen—and to teach his son the skills and discipline of boxing.

At school, the promise of the fight takes on a life of its own, and Martín can’t back out. At home, Martín thinks his father is crazy and doesn’t know anything about boxing. But among the highlights of their training, José shows his son how waiting is sometimes better than attacking, the crucial lesson of counter-punching. Martín learns something new about his father, and himself, and why seriousness of purpose transforms the meaning of all work.

The language in Twitching Heart brings the reader to an authentic El Paso: homes are “chantes” and deflowering a young woman is “taking her cherry.” Even the right way to prepare and use thinset for setting floor tile brings you to the ground. Not the literal ground, of course, but that ground of the Chicano working-class too often overlooked in literature. This is the stuff that brings you to a place, and that brings to life a people. This is also what we should never be ashamed to explore, to criticize, and to laugh about: our struggling lives, with their imperfections and idiosyncrasies, our mannerisms and concerns, whether philosophical or stupid.

When we can do that artfully, then we have taken steps to value these lives from El Paso, and simultaneously we have taken steps to understand them and even transcend them. Matt Méndez succeeds on these counts in his admirable debut of stories in Twitching Heart.

(This book review originally appeared in the El Paso Times on February 17, 2013.)

My brother in Afghanistan

Last Friday I went to Zabar’s to select boxes of assorted nuts and dried fruits for my brother who is in Afghanistan with the Navy.  As the Christmas and Hanukah holidays are approaching, one family member will be missing from these festivities.  I think it was important to get this package in the mail, and not to forget those who are serving our country overseas and in harm’s way.

Until last May, Oscar was the principal at Anthony High School, just outside of El Paso, Texas.  He has been an educator for decades, but he has also been in the Navy Reserve for 22 years.  In other ways, Oscar also breaks the stereotype many of us might have of our military servicemen and women: he is in his 40’s, has a Master’s degree, and was working on his Doctorate.  Before he left for Afghanistan, Oscar was promoted to the rank of Chief Petty Officer in the Navy.  Administrators, teachers, and students from Anthony High School also recently sent him a care package.

It is strange to have a brother in places you read about in the newspaper’s front pages, where sectarian violence, for example, recently killed dozens of Afghanis and Improvised Explosive Devices still kill American soldiers in Humvees.  It is strange because on the one hand I know my brother well, but on the other hand he is in as remote and as foreign a place as I could imagine.

I worry about my brother, and I hope with a little luck and skill that he will return to El Paso safely.  My mother couldn’t stop crying for days after Oscar told her the news of his deployment.  Now she keeps a candle lit to the Virgen de Guadalupe in our living room, to ask Her to guide him home.  It is what we don’t know about his deployment, what our minds imagine, and what we see as ‘news’ about Afghanistan that is this cauldron of anxiety, fear, and hope.  Our family is proud of Oscar, because we know he is doing his duty for his country.

I believe many if not most Americans are smart enough to support our military, to remember and honor their sacrifices, but to judge the politicians in Washington by a different metric.  These politicians create American foreign policy, while the military is one of those instruments of that policy.  For example, I don’t believe we should have attacked Iraq to rid it of Saddam Hussein or the weapons of mass destruction that were never found.  That war was George W. Bush’s and Condoleezza Rice’s mistake, which of course they will never admit, because they are politicians.  They manipulated the fear after 9/11 to start a war that should never have happened.  From the start, we should have focused on Afghanistan, where Al-Qaeda operated.

But not for one moment would I ever disparage soldiers, sailors or airmen for their service in Iraq.  On the contrary, I would thank them for doing their duty.  Once they are back home, I would do what I can to help them.  I also believe how that war was started is one thing, but how it was carried out and how it evolved are different matters.  You may start a war for the wrong reasons, but what happens during the long course of any war may have benefits.  So even saying ‘Iraq was a mistake’ is too simplistic.  We may not know for years what true effect we had in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Give Obama credit for winding down the Iraq war, and for beginning the process in Afghanistan.  I believe the majority of Americans support this policy, in part because we see our economic problems at home as paramount, but also because the marginal benefits of what we can do in Iraq and Afghanistan decrease each year.  Obama has cleaned up a lot of messes he inherited, and he has also fallen short as a leader at times, yet I give credit where credit is due.

You know, I am not a jingoistic patriot.  But I am a patriot.  It plays better for simplistic hurrahs, and in our TV culture with three-second attention spans, to wave the flag and spout unqualified red-white-and-blue accolades to motherhood, apple pie, and the United States of America.  But I do not always agree with my mother, although I still love her.  I prefer apple crisp to apple pie, and buñuelos with honey to both.  I support our military and my brother in the military.  But I will never stop thinking until I am dead, and that I am able to write what I think, even if it is critical of the United States, is one of the reasons why I know I am lucky to live in this country.

Before the holidays are over, and even after they are done and gone, connect with a military family, and invite them over for dinner or simply for a cup of coffee.  Send a member of our armed forces a care package this week.  Write him or her a letter.  When we go beyond our selves, when we do something good that is not necessary or even asked for, we are all ennobled.

Work@Character

Yesterday Laura and I had our last face-to-face teacher conference of the academic year for our younger son Isaac. Next year he will join his older brother at one of the best high schools in New York City, and this conference was bittersweet for us.

Both our children attended the Bank Street School for Children starting as three-year-olds. Aaron graduated two years ago, and I’m on the parents’ committee for Isaac’s graduation in two months. Bank Street has been a remarkable school for both our children, and it will be hard to leave it.

But what struck me was how Laura and I reached this point, with two similar, yet also different kids, both who work hard and possess unique abilities, but who also needed to overcome specific challenges. My kids are excellent students at their schools; they have scored at the highest levels in standardized tests to reach their goals. Both are avid readers of very different books, yet Aaron and Isaac share a sense of humor that is light years beyond mine. Do I even have a sense of humor? I am their strict, mercurial father.

What is obscured by this bit of bragging about my kids —who are not kids anymore but young adults— is the years of hard work of parenting to help Aaron and Isaac become the best version of themselves. I believe in learning by doing, Bank Street’s philosophy, but also Aristotle’s. I never did my children’s homework. On the contrary, in recent years, I have hardly seen what they have worked on after coming home from school. But when they have a question or a problem, I teach them how to find the answer for themselves. When they are stuck, I prompt them with questions to guide them to their own revelations.

We provide the space and time to focus quietly on their schoolwork. Friends who are wild or rude, I tell my kids, are not welcomed in our home. When Aaron and Isaac start wavering on the good habits we have encouraged, when they watch too much TV, or have not chosen the next book to read in bed, then yes, I am the heavy. I draw the bright line too many parents fail to draw: to turn off the TV, or to make finding a new book a priority, or to rewrite what they thought was ‘good enough.’ Real pride in your work is when you learn to do it yourself —not when somebody else does it for you— and when you know the work you accomplished was excellent. But often children have to be guided to get there.

Case in point. A few weeks ago, Isaac had brought home two short papers in which the teachers had given him only average marks. Isaac knew it wasn’t very good work, and he showed me the papers with what seemed a mix of fear and shame in his eyes. I read the papers, and yes, they were lightly researched, and his arguments were unsupported and often unclear. I remembered when he had worked on these papers, and I knew he had not given them the time they required, or the focus. Isaac is a bright kid and a good writer, but perhaps that week he had worried too much about succeeding at Oblivion on the Xbox, and too little about the failures of Reconstruction after the Civil War.

We talked about it, and we decided he would ask his teachers if he could rewrite both papers over the following two weeks of Spring Break. I told him it didn’t matter if his teachers didn’t give him different grades, but what did matter was that he should do his best work. And this wasn’t his best work, was it? No, he said, it wasn’t. Yes, I was a bit the heavy. I also told Isaac he wouldn’t play the Xbox over Spring Break, nor watch any TV, until those papers were rewritten, and well.

Isaac asked his teachers about rewriting the essays on the Friday before Spring Break, and they agreed. The teachers also decided to extend that offer to all the kids in the class: if anybody else wanted to rewrite their papers, they could. But, as far as I know, only Isaac would rewrite his papers during this vacation.

Now let me tell you about what happened over Spring Break. Isaac worked from morning until afternoon, for five days straight, rereading and expanding his source material, outlining his arguments, and reconstructing his essays. Sometimes he would ask questions. Occasionally he showed me what he had written, and I gave him my honest opinion. He rewrote page after page.

Whether he was motivated by his desire to get to Oblivion before his vacation ended, to please his mean old father, to show the teachers what he could do, or a combination of these, I don’t know. But Isaac worked independently, and ferociously. I was in awe, and prouder than any father could be.

Weeks later, at the conference, Isaac’s teachers noted how remarkably better the second go-around of his Civil War papers had been. They had given Isaac the highest marks for his rewrites. That was the work they had been accustomed to seeing from Isaac. Moreover, the teachers happily noted that on an in-class essay after Spring Break Isaac had again written a beautifully coherent essay on the Civil Rights movement.

Perhaps the teachers suspected that I, the writer-father, had ‘helped’ him on the rewrites during Spring Break, but the in-class essay confirmed it was Isaac who had done the work on the rewrites. And indeed it was. I just set the bar high. I did not allow him to lower it because I knew he could reach it. I gave my son advice to prompt him to think for himself when he needed it. Isaac learned by doing it, the hard way, the only way. The way toward good character.

Packinghouse Poet

I have spent the last week delightfully immersed in the poetry of David Dominguez, who wrote The Ghost of César Chávez and Work Done Right.  David is also co-founder and poetry editor of The Packinghouse Review from California’s San Joaquin Valley.  You should read this poet.

His narrative poetry struck multiple chords with me.  His images were evocative, from working at Galdini Sausage grinding pork, to driving his red pickup across the California desert, to setting the tile floor for his new house.  These images reminded me of growing up in Ysleta and working on Texas farms as a child. I hated the poverty of this existence, yet it also defined who I was.  There is a certain pride in work and in your body throbbing beyond any boundaries you imagined you could endure.  You identify with those who come home with pieces of pork fat wedged into their boots, with gashes on their arms and legs from their tools and machines, and with black grime etched into the folds of their dark skin.

Too often this country has turned its back on the working class and the working poor, not to mention the undocumented workers who harvest the food for American tables and build our houses.  We idolize Warren Buffett and the culture of wealth.  However, we don’t realize the meaning of the most radical recommendations for profitable companies and the ideal business climate: monopolistic or oligopolistic pricing power and predatory practices against hapless, powerless consumers.

What is best is a balance, between making money for entrepreneurs and their companies, and providing beneficial products and services for consumers, with protections against abuses.  I think we have lost that balance in this country.  The richest of the rich have dramatically increased their share of the nation’s income, while the bottom sixty percent of this country —yes the majority of the people— have seen their share of income shrink in the past thirty years.  Worse yet, multitudes have been convinced we need even less protection from the abuses of Wall Street, that we need to give more tax breaks to businesses and the super-wealthy, and that somehow these policies will rain money on the plebes below and return the United States to an idealized past glory.  Good luck with that.

But I digress, yet only slightly.  David Dominguez’s poetry brings us back to a focus on the working man, the pride and heartache of work, and the heritage of our families, Chicano and Mexicano.  This is what I think good literature should be: expertly crafted lines, unique images that spur thinking, and…and…a focus against the grain and against what society stupidly values, a view that unsettles our comfortable perspectives.  This kind of good literature fights against our über-focus on ‘material success equals what is worthy.’ This pernicious focus infected the literary world long ago, and transformed ‘what is good’ in books into only ‘what is entertaining,’ escapism for the masses.

What I believe propels David Dominguez’s poetry even a step further is his introspection. He wrestles with how his success as a writer and teacher has left him in an ambiguous place beyond obreros, beyond his father and grandfather, yet not quite an Americano:

At the register, the cashier glanced at my blazer.

“This it?” she asked, not “Hola, señor.”

Once, after weeding and hoeing my flower beds all day,

I came here to buy insecticide and Roundup,

and the same cashier asked me, “Cómo le va, señor?”

Like many, I prefer Macy’s over the swap meet

and would rather play a round of golf

alongside the wet eucalyptus clinging to the riverbank

than rise every morning to mow lawns

or gather with others on street corners,

praying for the chance to hop into trucks as underpaid

construction workers building housing tracts.

I’m spoken to informally in English if I’m clean

but in Spanish if I’m sweaty and dirty.

It happens all the time; I could bet on it:

the odds are as reliable as rope.

This strange, in-between existence has certainly been central to my life.  To succeed in the American literary world, you must write in English, perfectly and singularly.  You must appeal to what most literary buyers want to read (or at least a significant number of readers). This 'market appeal' often has nothing to do with obreros, or Chicanos, or issues that criticize the mainstream.  You must appeal to the lowest common denominator in this culture, and that is ‘entertainment that transports you somewhere, without making you think too much, without being too complex.’  As you, the writer, push forward into American culture (should you?), are you leaving more of yourself behind?  Who were you anyway?  Who should you be?  These questions have no easy answers.

Mr. Fixit

I have spent the past two weeks fixing broken things, or having them fixed by experts.  My son’s MacBook needed the RAM replaced at the new Apple Store near Lincoln Center.  I fixed the blinds on our window that were about to crash down on our heads.  I called the A/C repair guys, who came to oil and clean out the air conditioners in our apartment, but I wasn’t very impressed with them: I had to make sure they did the job right, and often they were sloppy.

Our electronic Yamaha piano had four keys that wouldn’t pop up anymore, in part because our fat cat Ocistar jumps on the piano to launch himself out the front door whenever I go to the trash room on our floor.  I found an electronic piano wizard, courtesy of the Sam Ash Music Store, who repaired it beautifully.  I’ll permanently fix the cat-piano-problem with the thick cover I ordered for our Yamaha.

A reliable handyman in our building fixed the kids’ toilet, which didn’t flush properly anymore, and replaced our tub faucet, which during a shower gushed water onto my feet but precious little on my head.  Another handyman re-caulked both bathrooms.

I fixed the navigation system on our Honda Pilot, and repaired the filter and cleaned out the pump that produces a nice waterfall for a small fish pond in our house in Connecticut.  Two dead trees are decaying in our side yard; they need to come down.  When will it end?  I wish I could repair the state of Arizona, or pay someone to do it, but even some problems are too big for me.

There comes a point when too many things are broken.  I reached that point two weeks ago.  Everybody was complaining, but not doing anything about it, and so I grabbed my Fixit flag and charged into the first problem first, and then the next, and the next.  But it really never ends.  Today the mop broke.

Of course, I’ve been ‘repairing’ my novel all throughout this Fixit frenzy, which means I’ve been rewriting it.  That also never ends, until it does, and how you know when the writing is ‘finished’ is an epiphany of sorts, a sense of judgment that this, what you have on the page, is what you always meant to write.  Whether someone will publish it is, again, another matter.

But I still do have a sense of tired accomplishment, that several of the things I fixed, or got fixed, will stay fixed, at least for a while.  This state of ‘fixedness,’ so to speak, is but a brief moment in time.  Soon enough something else will fall apart and need repair.  I don’t live for that stasis, but for the struggle to reach it and for what I learn by fixing things.  It’s really philosophical, and all that crap, but I’m exhausted.  So maybe that’s the point of the state of ‘fixedness,’ to rest.  I sorely need it.

“Dad, something’s wrong with the printer!”  I have to go.

The Poetry of HTML

I like fiddling with the inner workings of web pages.  Over the years I have created my website, instead of farming it out to a web-page developer.  True, my website is not as spectacular as many I have seen on the Internet.  But I have extensive and ever-changing content, pictures, text, audio, video, podcasts, and now this blog.

There were many reasons why I began to develop my own website years ago.  First, I really like to tinker.  Second, I’m a bit of a control freak, at least as far as my work is concerned.  Third, yes, I’m a cheapskate.  Fourth, I believe a certain amount of my work should be available free, particularly for those who don’t have much money.  Finally, I love to understand by myself how things work.  This gives me a sense of being autarchic, a country under its own rule.  Tinkering is about curiosity, in my mind, whereas independence is about enjoying being alone and working on a problem.  These traits certainly reinforce each other.

It’s a similar feeling I get when I chop my own wood in Connecticut, instead of buying it in neat bundles at the supermarket. When I am finished with a task, and I have done a good job, either by splitting the wood right so that it fits into my woodstoves and fireplaces, or by seeing the effect I wanted on my blog or website after tinkering with HTML, I know I have accomplished this feat.  I’ve learned something new.  I gain enough confidence to try something a bit more complex next time, to expand my expertise.

I’ll give you an example.  Although I have loved the different layout possibilities of Blogger’s blogs and templates, when I created a short video of reading my story, “The Abuelita,” for an anthology in which the story appeared, there was a problem.  I was able to embed the YouTube video at the bottom of my blog’s front page (with the latest three entries), but whenever anyone clicked on individual blog entries the video would remain at the bottom of the blog, out of sight of readers.  An enormous amount of white space was always left between an individual blog entry and the embedded video.  The Blogger template did not adapt to single blog entries, but remained the ‘long layout’ of the three latest entries even when readers clicked on separate entries.

I popped the hood of the template HTML, and began tinkering.  I found, after trial and error, I could override and then simply delete the right HTML instructions that pushed my video to the bottom.  Now as you can see, individual entries as well as the ‘long layout’ of the latest three entries both have the video immediately after the last words of any blog text.  For Garage Band podcasts, iMovie videos, favicons, sitemaps, slideshows, and so on, the story has been the same.  How do you do that?  Let’s try this.  I want to give up!  My head hurts.  Oh, my God.  Yes!  Hey, guys, look at this!  True, it’s not always a happy ending, but so often, as long as I’ve stayed on the case, I have figured it out.

Why am I this tinkering fool?  It really gives me a deep pleasure to figure it out.  There is a certain grammar to HTML, and once you begin to understand this grammar you can manipulate it to your heart’s content.  Strangely, I have begun to read poetry on my iPhone, Emily Dickinson’s collected works, and I have found a kinship between my tinkering with HTML and figuring out the lady of Amherst’s grammar, so to speak.  Invariably, every second and fourth lines in her quatrains rhyme and are trimeter, like a poetic hammer.  I have so much to learn, but in discovery there is an infinite joy.

Getting Ready For Winter

As I write this tonight, my arm muscles are still twitching from the trauma. I was splitting wood this weekend, getting our firewood stack ready for the winter. Our woodpile, hidden behind two small maples in front of our house in Connecticut, has blackened, three-year-old wood. That’s where I started.

I carted one twelve-pound, double-faced sledgehammer to the woodpile. I have two, one is newer, and from the second, the one in my hand, the hickory had split just below the head. I taped it last year with duct tape, and it seemed to be holding. The newer one’s my backup. I also carried two two-pound black metal wedges. I made a second trip to the garage, for my Husqvarna chainsaw.

We need to burn aggressively this year. Already I have two dead trees on our property that will soon be added to our woodpile. We have two fireplaces and a wood-burning stove, and there’s nothing more sublime than the fall display of colors in Litchfield County and the smell of fireplaces keeping homes warm in rural Connecticut. It takes you back in time. It instantly transports you to the antithesis of the City. It saves on heating bills.

I removed the green tarps covering my woodpile, starting with the oldest wood. I know when and where each pile of logs was placed every year. I rolled old massive oak stumps, which had already been cut when we bought our property years ago. As I split these stumps, using the two wedges simultaneously and bringing the sledgehammer alternately on each wedge, the crack of the wood revealed a nest of termites. Hundreds of them. Two of the old stumps were contaminated, and I wouldn’t bring them into the garage, even though I sorely wanted to incinerate the vermin. I rolled the split, contaminated stumps away from the woodpile, into the forest, and let the termites have their feast.

The rest of the wood was termite free. I held a wedge on the flat wood, smashed it hard with the sledgehammer, avoiding pulverizing my wrist or fingers. Once the wedge stuck, I lifted the sledgehammer overhead, and brought it down on the wedge, often imagining the face of a critic or nemesis, literary and political, as the wedge. The adrenalin flowed, and I didn’t feel my muscles twitching until hours later. For each log, for each split (thick logs need to be quartered, instead of just halved), three, four, five times I brought the hammer down. It’s like lifting weights and doing squats at the same time. You feel it in your shoulders, arms, and legs, as you split the logs, carry them to the pile to go into the garage, over and over again.

My trusty chainsaw? I used it to cut longer logs in half. It’s a machine you need to pay attention to, lest you lose a finger or a toe. It’s a blast of noise in the quiet forest, and I prefer hearing the crack of split wood, but you need the machine once in a while. The chainsaw also determined when I stopped. When I became too tired and my muscles and reflexes stopped responding as they should, that’s when it was time to call it a day, before I made a bloody mistake.

Some people might think it’s crazy to spend a significant part of your weekend doing this kind of work. You can certainly pay somebody else to do it. Or you can drive to a supermarket and buy neat, shrink-wrapped piles of wood. My wife Laura has threatened to buy me a wood-splitter, but so far I have resisted. I like connecting with the wood. I like the exercise and being outside. I like doing things for myself, instead of being separated from what I need and what I need to do to achieve it. I’m not about to slaughter my own chickens, but I will split my own wood. Writing itself already separates me from the world; I don’t need another activity to divorce myself from preparing for the turn of the seasons.

Yin-Yang, Opposition and Balance

I recently helped my eleven-year-old son on a project. He had been studying religions of the world, and his focus was to study Taoism for school. Isaac had already written a short paper on what he learned about Taoism and drawn a map of where it is practiced. The assignment now was to make a three dimensional object which characterized Taoism. He chose the Yin-Yang, black and white figure so many of us are familiar with.

In our garage, he found an old solid wooden wheel, which we had found at the dump and which I believe had been originally used as a platform to hold a candle, for a reddish wax had hardened on one of its sides. Isaac cleaned the wheel of the wax, and used sandpaper to smooth the wood and remove the splinters. I watched my busy bee of a son in the garage, his sleeves rolled up, perfecting the wheel before he started painting it white. I gave him a can of white primer from our basement, and held the wooden wheel as he painted first one side and then the other. Outside, a granular sleet had already covered our driveway, and I could see my breath in the garage.

Once the wheel was white, Isaac drew the curvy S that separates the black and the white, with pencil, adjusting the curve so that he got it just right. He had to erase his work several times before he was satisfied with the symmetry of his Yin-Yang. Finally, I gave him a small bottle of black enamel paint I have had in my desk for years, which I believe was originally used by my wife Laura to touch up the frame to an old mirror she loves. With the care of a brain surgeon, Isaac colored his Yin-Yang black, following the S curve with an amazing precision. He also took a yogurt container and drew the dots of the Yin-Yang.

I mention this minutiae of our Thanksgiving weekend, because watching my son work reminded me of several important things. Work bestows pride on the worker, for his accomplishment, for his product, for his craftsmanship. Isaac beamed when he placed the finished Yin-Yang on his desk, away from our pesky, but affectionate cat, Ocistar. He could not wait to show his class what he had done.

When you are working hard on a project, when you feel you have the skills to accomplish something on your own, you lose yourself in your work. Time becomes irrelevant in a way. I feel the same way when I am working on a story. I have written stories before, so I feel I have the skills to do a good job. Perhaps, as with a story I am working on now, I have written half of it, and I have not thrown out what I have written, but I don’t quite yet know how it will end. So the ‘good product’ is not a foregone conclusion. It may in fact be a story that is never told, because it was never a ‘fully formed story’ to begin with. Whatever that means, and it seems to mean something different for every story.

But the point, at least for me, is the work. The work to finish the story. The work to lose myself in the quiet I steal away from my family obligations and daily responsibilities to try to write. The work is what matters, even if you don’t end up with a good representation of what you imagined your ‘story’ to be, as you wrote it. Because this moment, when you say this is a ‘story,’ instead of saying this is garbage I should throw away and forget about, is a moment that is probably impossible to pin down, to regularize, or even to explain clearly. Yet it is a moment that becomes easier to appreciate the more you work at writing stories. The more you work, the easier it will be to have that judgment, like Isaac, to tell when your work is done, when you have in front of you what you imagined you wanted to create.