What the Constitution Means to Me

Nearly fifty years ago, I was planning a double major in English and philosophy at Ripon College. My focus became the intersection of the two in esthetics and literary criticism. Who would have thought that one day I would find that perspective helpful to talk about Originalism and the U.S. Constitution? 

I just watched What the Constitution Means to Me on Amazon Prime. This program which captures a largely one-woman Broadway show is an astonishing primer on the power of our governing document and what it means for all of us. I highly recommend it.

Watching it caused me to reflect on this conservative idea called Originalism, which is much favored by our newest Associate Justice, Amy Coney Barrett. It purports that the Constitution must be solely interpreted based on what the words meant at the time written to those who wrote it—you know the guys who thought women shouldn’t vote and that slavery was okay.

Maybe you’re wondering what that viewpoint possibly has to do with literary criticism. A lot, I think. What makes a piece of literature great? Is it what the author intended? Is it what the reader brings to it? Is it what the words meant to the author or what the words mean to the reader? Or, is it something that emerges in the creative process and stands apart, both from what the author intends or what the reader adds?

Here’s a question to help you think about that? How do you feel about the use of the n-word in Huckleberry Finn—an American novel considered a great piece of work by most.

Is it okay because that’s how people talked in 1885? Would it change your opinion if you know Mark Twain was a racist or not? If the word were bowdlerized to something softer in a modern printing, does that then destroy the book’s integrity? If Mark Twain were alive and wrote the book now, would he use different words? Does any of that matter to the impact of the book?

I think often about this very question. In my first novel, Tales from the Loon Town Café, there is a scene based on an actual 1980s fishing rights incident that occurred between a Native American tribe and some of my home town neighbors. In my fictional account, I include a slur screamed by one of the white demonstrators that builds off the “n word.” 

When the actual incident occurred, The Milwaukee Journal covered it and the slur was included in the reporting. At the time, no one thought that odd. When I started working on the novel in ‘90s, I still didn’t worry about including the slur. By the time I prepared the manuscript for publication in 2012, I considered deleting it but kept the phrase to reflect the accuracy of its 1983 setting. But would I make that same choice today, some 8 years later? I don’t know. Maybe not.

So what is the true meaning of that scene, Mr. Originalist?

Let’s widen the picture. How do you judge the meaning of a book a century after it’s written? In one of my college classes, the assignment was to analyze a novel from multiple critical perspectives. I chose Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.  One approach I took was a Freudian critique. I found a lot to say. 

To today’s reader, should it matter that multiple biographers of Lewis Carroll have questioned the author’s relationship with young girls and why he wrote the book? If it turned out the book is a byproduct of his pedophilic interests, does it become a bad book?  If you consider that a theoretical question, just think about current arguments over the creative legacy of Michael Jackson and Bill Cosby.

For me, thinking as a creator, artistic value is ultimately determined outside of what the author intended. I intend a lot of great things that I am sure I never attain in my novels. But I also intend more mundane meanings that I know readers never realize. At the same time, they do find connections, implications and possibilities that never once consciously crossed my mind. When I hear them, I usually think “Cool, I can see that.” What is the real book? What I intended? What they see? And will it be the same a decade from now? Or two hundred and fifty years?

With art—whether it’s literature, music, sculpture or any other form—I think its importance and value is chameleonic and adaptable. It changes with the audience, the setting, and the time. That is what give art its true power and glory.

Ultimately, I think the same is true of most of human creation, including law and constitutions.  

But here’s the great thing I learned from the play mentioned earlier:  our Constitution built in that very quality of being a living document.  Consider the 9^th Amendment.  Added to the Constitution on December 15, 1791 as part of the Bill of Rights, it says that all the rights not listed in the Constitution belong to the people, not the government. In other words, the rights of the people are not limited to just those rights listed in the Constitution.

Of course, the Originalists argue against this. They claim that at one point the drafting of the amendment had an additional clause that was removed. But somehow the fact it was explicitly removed and ended up not being part of the Constitution—and therefore should be ignored by their own way of thinking—seems to not matter in this case.

But that’s usually the way with people who claim something is the word of God or the word of the Founding Fathers or their principled vows four years ago. It’s only the true word if it still meets the interpretation that is useful to their goals at the moment.

Alices learns a lesson about meaning from Humpty Dumpty. Or does she?

Like the creator of What the Constitution Means to Me, I prefer to view the document as a living document that reflects the overall world we live in at the time we live in it—just like all great masterpieces.

Please check out all my novels in paperback or Kindle format, including:  Tales from the Loon Town Cafe, The Finnish Girl, The Devil’s Analyst—and my latest, The Long Table Dinner.www.amazon.com/author/dennisfrahmann

Questions Only a Book Club Can Answer

An old postcard showing Mercer, Wisconsin, the small resort town that helped inspire the settings in all three of my books.

They say the third time’s a charm. That should bode well for The Devil’s Analyst, since it’s novel number three for me. Time will tell.

Actually, the biggest kick in launching each of my books has been those moments when a book club asked me to participate in a discussion of my work. It’s always a revelation to hear how readers interpret a scene or plotline, or learn what details they found interesting or important.

Often the passages I like the most are probably the ones I should have deleted. Back in grad school at Columbia, my master’s advisor, New Yorker writer Paul Brodeur, warned me that what the writer most likes about his own work is often the most self-indulgent.

With that in mind, be forewarned that the questions I think should interest a book club might be the ones of least interest. Still for each of my books, let me offer up a few questions to which I would find the answers most interesting.

1. In the beginning of The Devil’s Analyst, Danny Lahti seems shy, retreating and unwilling to control his own life. Do you think his experiences during the course of the story changed him? If so, in what ways?
2. There are many parts of Danny’s past that he prefers to keep hidden. How do you think those experiences shaped the way he reacted to the cascading events of the novel? How was he shaped by his mother’s suicide?
3. What is your assessment of Danny’s lover, Josh? Have you ever known anyone like him? Is the novel really about Danny or about Josh?
4. The Finnish Girl is a novel of many secrets. Which secret in the book do you think had the greatest impact on the characters’ lives? Should people have kept that secret?
5. It turns out two of the characters in The Finnish Girl, Eero Makinen and Professor Thomas Packer, know many of the novel’s secrets, but chose never to discuss them with others. Did you find the characters believable in the way they guarded information or avoided asking questions? Do you think most people live with so many secrets?
6. In the end, the reader has a deep understanding of why Lempi Makinen Lahti committed suicide. But does Danny? Does it matter, and how might that affect his life? How do you feel about ending up knowing more than the young boy?
7. In Tales from the Loon Town Cafe, narrator Wally Pearson tells the story in the first person. Do you think his perspective is credible? What are his strengths and weaknesses, and in what ways might that affect the way he tells the story?
8. Three old-timers – Bromley, Claire and Mr. Packer, frequent Wally’s restaurant, the Loon Town Cafe. They often serve to comment and reflect on the odd goings-on in town. Did you find these characters believable? Do you think such people exist?
9. Wally’s cook Thelma often seems the voice of reason in his life. Should Wally have listened to her more? In what cases? Why do you think she fell in love with Gilbert, the traveling salesman?
10. At the very end, Wally appears to see the ghost of Lempi Makinen Lahti walking with her still living husband. Is Wally imagining that or is it real? In what ways is Loon Town Cafe really a novel about love and people who fall in love?
11. Finally all three novels deal with quite different elements of small town life. What is your experience with small towns? Do you think such complications really exist in America’s small towns?

Of course, I will never know how most of my readers would respond to these questions. But if you want to share an answer to any one of them, please do. Or better yet, suggest to a book club that they read one of these books and discuss such questions.

My newest novel, The Devil’s Analyst, is now available as a paperback or e-book on Amazon. com. To check out any of my novels, visit www.amazon.com/author/dennisfrahmann

The Inspirations for My Fiction—Thoughts Behind My New Novel, The Devil’s Analyst

They always say, “Write about what you know,” and I have to acknowledge that all of my books draw heavily from my personal experiences.

But they aren’t autobiographical; they aren’t even a roman á clef. I never quite know what to say to  people who just read The Finnish Girl when they tell me how sorry they were that my mother committed suicide. I want to shout, “My mother lived until she was 83. The story of Lempi is made up.” And just to set the record straight:  I never owned a restaurant in northern Wisconsin. Nor did a sociopath ever haunt me (the story behind my newest work).

But at the same time, I do liberally and willingly dig deep into personal experiences, stories, and memories to populate my novels. Real-life instances are catalysts to imagined scenes and events. Some story elements, such as those acknowledged in the afterword to The Finnish Girl, were pulled directly from my extended family history. Others germinated in tales told by friends, encounters at work, or newsclips.

Sometimes I even forget the origin of the original seed. The other day I suddenly remembered the smart daughter of a local Finnish woman. Still a sophomore when she was a senior, I had kind of a gay schoolboy crush on this girl named Mona. She later attended the University of Wisconsin, was tear gassed in anti-war demonstrations, and was in Madison during the famous bombing of its Math Center. I hadn’t thought of Mona for forty years, and I’m not sure why I recalled her now, but suddenly I realized she was likely the kernel of truth behind my heroine in The Finnish Girl. But just as my mother wasn’t Lempi, neither was Mona. Lempi is imaginary.

But perhaps, in a larger sense, each of my characters is only some aspect of me, floating through alternate universes in which events and circumstances conspired to create a totally different version of history.

As I enjoy the official launch of my third book, The Devil’s Analyst, I’ve been considering how often readers think the stories I write are the stories I lived. There’s a lot that happens in this novel that I neither would have wanted to have lived nor even have people imagine that I experienced. Yet I’m sure at least some folks will think just that.

Then in some strange way, reality also has a strange way of intersecting with my novels. When I started writing Tales from the Loon Town Café back in the early ‘90s, I envisioned an elaborate indoor swimming lodge in northern Wisconsin. By the time I published it there actually was something called the Great Wolf Lodge in Wisconsin Dells and it was pretty popular.

I felt it happen again. Just the other day, the FBI alerted someone in my orbit of friends and family that that person’s name was on a terrorist group’s target list. Imagine getting that call! Suddenly something that happens near the end of The Devil’s Analyst no longer seems quite such a stretch . . . but you’ll have to read the book to find out what I’m referencing.

In the end, I suppose, fiction is just a remix of reality—chosen and honed to create a few hours of entertainment, or maybe even enlightenment. You can’t really say exactly where it came from, or where it might go, but we all—writer and reader—hope to enjoy the journey.

 

My newest novel, The Devil’s Analyst, is now available as a paperback or ebook on Amazon. com. To check out any of my novels, visit www.amazon.com/author/dennisfrahmann

WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW: REFLECTIONS ON INSPIRATIONS

Having just wrapped up the first one hundred pages on the first draft of my next novel, I have been thinking about the interplay of life experiences and writing fiction.

The old adage is to write about what you know. Given that, it’s probably no surprise that famed legal thriller writer, John Grisham, first worked as a lawyer. Or that crime novelist Michael Connelly had a police beat for the Los Angeles Times. Did you know that Michael Crichton was a doctor, and his first novels were set in hospitals?

Of course, it’s more than genres that flow from one’s backgrounds. Often, book settings reflect the author’s background. Most know that the writer of Main Street, Sinclair Lewis, was actually from the Midwest. And any Southern California reader of Sue Grafton (A is For Alibi) won’t fail to recognize the real life Santa Barbara inspirations for the scenes that pop up in her fictional Santa Teresa.

Of course, writers travel further than home base. Edna Ferber is one of my favorite novelists from the first half of the last century. She researched all sorts of subjects to write novels as varied as Cimarron, Show Boat, Saratoga Trunk and Giant. But she was a Wisconsin gal and one of her books, Come and Get It, took place in a town modeled after Hurley, Wisconsin, just up the road from where I went to high school in the 1960s. Decades after she wrote the book, the town still matched her fictional Iron Ridge. In my first novel, Tales from the Loon Town Café, I swirl together Ferber’s Iron Ridge, the real life Hurley and some imagined past to create a town called Timberton.

A postcard image of Hurley, circa 1970

I always like recognizing the real world in a fictional one. Having lived in Los Angeles for several decades, I am adept at recognizing specific streets, buildings or locations when they pop into a movie or television show. Often they play the role of an entirely different part of the world.

Similarly, one reason I like Jonathan Kellerman mysteries so much is that he once worked at a hospital near where we lived in the Los Feliz neighborhood, and real locations pop up constantly in his books. The TNT series Major Crimes, whose heroine lives in a Los Feliz condo, is always remarkably accurate about its depiction of the real geography of Los Angeles.

My first two novels pretty much focused on small towns in Wisconsin. But the bulk of my life was spent in technology on the West Coast. Maybe I should make that the focus of my next book. Guess what? I am.

 

To check out my novels, visit www.amazon.com/author/dennisfrahmann

Inspirations for “The Finnish Girl” – My New Novel

Recently on GoodReads, I was asked a question. “What inspired your latest novel?”

I gave a short answer. In reality, there were so many inspirations to this tale of a Finnish American family and their daughter who cared too much.

In one way, the original concept for The Finnish Girl came from an old steamer trunk filled with fancy goods. My mother inherited it from a neighbor lady called Selma. Mom never knew why the woman left her these treasures. Once she told me one of her theories (an idea that put my grandfather in a rather unflattering, but rakish light), and I often wondered if Mom actually believed her own musings.

A trunk, like the one that inspired my novel

But her fancy was only one inspiration. My book was also a reaction to translating a long letter from my uncle Armas. He had been one of the fervent American Finns who left for an ill-fated Russian mission in the ‘30s, and never came back. Near his death, he wrote my mother about his early days in Russia. The letter was all in Finnish. None of my Finnish-speaking relatives remained by the time I decided to try to read it. But through the wonders of Google Translate, Robert and I managed to decipher the entire 17-page letter and found it a striking tale.

The other impetus to my novel were characters in Tales from the Loon Town Café, specifically a sad boy named Danny, his widowed father and a mother who committed suicide. I wanted to explore how all of that came to be.

As I thought about how I might weave these elements into a novel, I began to research many related items. Books on Finnish emigrants to Wisconsin, the Red Scare of the ‘50s, Russia in the ‘30s and Wisconsin’s impact on politics littered my desk. Along the way, I started to unearth intriguing nuggets. Suddenly, an odd statement in my uncle’s letter made sense in the light of a published autobiography of another Finn who went to Russia. I understood why my grandparents might have immigrated to America. I saw ways to tie together different strands into one emigrant family’s story.

But so much of it remained disconnected until I actually started to write. Then the characters took on their own lives. I can’t even say for sure when their stories and their complex secrets took over. A person I had initially imagined as an unpleasant old man instead turned out to be a wise character. My heroine did not remain a hero.

The end result is now done and available on Amazon, and I am happy with the story that emerged from so many places. I was pleased that Publishers Weekly described The Finnish Girl as “a tale to remember” – even though, in truth, I will never be able to recall exactly how all of it was inspired.

You can order The Finnish Girl or Tales from the Loon Town Café by visiting my author page. Amazon.com/author/dennisfrahmann

LESSONS IN SELF PUBLISHING

Earlier this week, Amazon promoted the power of their Kindle Direct Publishing program. Increasingly, the Internet seems to be  again disintermediating another type of agent—this time, the book agent and the publisher.

As a self-published novelist, I relish this freedom. It gives a writer a new ability to find an audience, or perhaps more accurately, new challenges. As a marketer for over 20 years, I thought it would be easy. Not so much. But here are some things I learned since I published my novel, Tales from the Loon Town Cafe, in March.

First, friends matter. Thanks to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, I was able to spread word about publication quickly. An initial heartening rush of orders resulted. But then the challenge began.

Second,  old media is, well, old. I purchased listings in places like Publishers Weekly and the New York Review of Book that had special sections on independent titles. As far as I could tell, these listings didn’t prompt one sale. (By the way, in my final years running advertising for Sage North America, I saw exactly the same results with our investments in national newspapers and business magazines.)

Third, Facebook works. After creating a page for Loon Town Cafe, I experimented with various ways of sponsoring posts to likely readers.  (Did you know that fans of Northern Exposure were more likely to respond to a book about small town life in Wisconsin than Garrison Keillor followers?) Each sponsored post clearly generated bumps in Amazon sales, and although each new experiment resulted in better sales, they never quite paid for themselves. But analytics were great. Apparently, women over 35 are much more likely to be interested in my novel’s story.

Fourth, listen to those who came before. So many recommended a broad initial giveaway of the title to maximize exposure. Well, I waited a few months to follow that advice. But then I enrolled in the Kindle Direct Program, which provided an opportunity to promote the book as free for a few days.

The result was incredible. Nearly 20,000 people around the world downloaded the ebook. At its peak, Loon Town Cafe reached number 9 on the list of free books on Kindle. Suddenly, I had an audience. Now a few days later and with a reduced price on the book, I am seeing much improved sales over the days from before the giveaway.

Over 30 years ago, as a journalist, I wrote for Mpls. St. Paul Magazine, which until now was my biggest audience. Now more people own my book than ever read my articles in that publication, and I hope the readership will continue to grow. Already, I have received my first fan letters and my first criticisms. (I am disappointed to find I have a very thin skin.)

But whatever happens next, I feel I have truly published a novel.

To check out the book, visit

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1482555077

Looking Towards My Next Book

For those who have been asking about my first novel, Tales From the Loon Town Cafe, please know that it’s only days from being available online or in trade paperback. But before the ink is even dry on the first, I have already begun researching my second, and that’s my topic for today.

If my first book was inspired by the events and locations of my own youth, then the second will take its cue from the lives of my grandparents and parents, a multi-generational story from 1890 to 1980 involving the wave of Finnish immigrants to the US  around the end of the previous century.

Already my initial research has uncovered so many interesting facets of my own family heritage. I have been to Finland in recent years and was always struck by its straight-forward sensibilities and general air of prosperity. Maybe all those years of using Nokia phones shaded my perceptions.

So it’s been a bit of a shock to discover just how bleak life was for for the average Finn in the 1800s, and how unequal their society really was. It was a land hit by several waves of famine, a country where primogeniture still governed inheritance, and a place where the landless had little hope of a good life. Knowing that my own family held the same large farm since the 1500s has made me wonder if they were part of the oppressor, not the oppressed. Did my grandfather flee the old country to escape parental pressure as family lore would have it, or only because he was the second oldest who held no chance for any inheritance and faced a newly installed draft by the Czar who still ruled the Grand Duchy of Finland?

And then I realized that the Wisconsin farmlands my grandfather cleared beginning around 1915, were on the border of the Cutover – that beautiful expanse of  northern woodlands that had been raped by lumber barons’ clearcutting and then profitably sold off through unsavory land agents to immigrants too naive to realize that their plot of land was too weak to ever sustain a good life. The idyllic meadows and woods of my youth have taken on a different hue.

Then there was the idealism of those Finnish American youth eighty years ago that erupted into what was called Karelian Fever, a burst of energy that prompted nearly 6,000 Americans, including my uncle, to move to Soviet Karelia near the Finnish border in the Depression years. Instead of being rewarded for helping to tame the cold lands around Kalevala, most of them ending up dying in Stalinist labor camps because they weren’t trusted to be near the battlefronts of World War II.

In short, I have been reminded how the past gets told and retold across the years in a way that adds a gauze of purity and happiness to a reality that never existed. But I believe there are real stories worth being pulled out for today’s readers. So I intend to try to do just that by serving up a bit of the American melting pot that few Americans have ever tasted.

On to new adventures

November 2 is the big day.  I am retiring from Sage and from marketing.

It almost seems anachronistic to talk about retiring.  It feels as though the last decade has created a generation of people who think of retirement as only some shimmering mirage in the distance, never to be reached.  To step into the oasis when only on the cusp of turning 60 feels unthinkable to many.

Yet that is what I am doing.  I am a long-term planner.  When I was 27 and an instructional designer with Control Data Education Company, I wrote a computer-based course on personal financial planning.  I created a 30-year plan then to be able to retire early.  Despite the ups and downs of markets and real estate (remember that stock market crash of 1987?), I persevered.

Along the way, I’ve had more than my share of excellent moments.  I still remember the excitement on seeing my name on my first cover story in Mpls. St. Paul Magazine.  I also still remember my dreadful debut as a public speaker as a last minute replacement to speak about computer-based training to a group of Dallas educators.  I don’t know who suffered more:  them or me.

When Xerox launched the Star workstation in 1981 with its groundbreaking introduction of icons, the mouse and so much more, I received an unexpected lesson after visiting Arco’s L.A.  headquarters shortly after launch.  We had designed the training and support for Star to be all on line.  But those Arco employees had quickly figured out a way to print out every help sheet and organize them into three-ring binders.  The paperless office had to wait a few decades for faster network times and a new generation.

I also fondly recall escorting a group of industry analysts to the Xerox pavilion at the 1992 global exhibition in Seville.  Everyone should go to at least one world’s fair to experience the sheer ingenuity and creativity of mankind.

Then there was the excitement of unfurling a 12-story banner saluting the winter games in Salt Lake City in 2002.  The entire giant image was a mosaic comprising photos of thousands of Xerox employees from around the world.  Little did I know then that our special guest at the event, Mitt Romney, would one day be running for president.

And just this past July, I was privileged to be part of the best Sage Summit customer and partner conference to date, where we unveiled some cool customer solutions that are just around the corner.

So with all that, why retire, people demand.  Won’t you be bored?  Surely, you’re going to do consulting on marketing – or something similar to what you are doing today?

No, I am making a clean break of it.  Back in 1970, in my college application essay, I wrote that I aspired to balance a career in business and the arts.  Since I haven’t really achieved that, I plan now to approach it serially.  My  life partner Robert and I are moving full time to a beach house on the Central Coast of California, where I plan to focus on my interest in fiction writing.

If you want to know more about the novel I plan to publish next spring, check out www.loontowncafe.com, and register to download the first chapter of the book.  Or follow me at @dfrahmann on Twitter or continue to follow this blog at frahmannthoughts.wordpress.com.   (Robert and I are departing in March on a 57-day cruise from Hong Kong to Ft. Lauderdale, via Singapore, South Africa and Brazil, so expect a few travel reports.)  

I may still talk at times about branding or marketing.  It has been nearly 40 years of my life.  I will likely write more about politics and social issues, since I won’t be concerned that people will confuse me with my employer.  And I will certainly try to look for lessons and insights from the events, people and sites I encounter.

I hope you continue with me as I start this new adventure.