Michael Dean Clark

Some thoughts on trash:

A homeless man in his fifties pulls aluminum cans from the trash barrel in front of the Ralphs Supermarket where I shop. He’s clearly no amateur. What catches my attention this morning is not the act itself. He’s not the only person I’ve seen scavenging to get by today. This is Ocean Beach after all.

What arrests my general distraction is the way he cleans as he pulls the cans out of the refuse, taking time to pick the cigarette butts out of the ash tray on the top of the stone-speckled trash barrel, dropping them one by one into the bag as if to earn the recycling fees others didn’t bother taking the time to redeem.

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When I was a reporter in Los Angeles, I worked for a newspaper that covered the Puente Hills Landfill in a strip of unincorporated county land that was once most likely a dairy farm. Now, it’s America’s largest trash heap at 150 meters tall and covering more than 700 acres. I once covered a meeting where officials discussed the rate at which the massive trash mountain was summiting the space allotted to it. At one point in the meeting, a plan to ship the region’s trash by rail into the Nevada desert was discussed, though not seriously. Apparently, the same objection came up every time the concept was mentioned. It’s less expensive (and thus, more profitable) to continue with the current business model until it is no longer viable.

No word on how viable the people of Nevada find the alternative.

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I love family stories, especially the ones from before I was born. Apparently, there was a DIY trend in the early 70s where particularly resourceful interior design types would piece together area rugs from a number of smaller pieces of (hopefully) corresponding color, though I did mention this was the 70s, right? In my mind’s eye, it’s like a shag quilt. All one needed were the remainders of other pieces of plush pile or low nap and the desire to turn said scraps into one Franken-rug.

My parents apparently harbored said desire, which is why, on more than one occasion, you could find my older brother in the dumpster behind a carpet store. I’m told the results were lovely, though no pictures exist as confirmation.

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I may be over-simplifying, but as I relive these scenes I can’t help but see the writing in them all.

Michael Dean Clark is the fiction editor at Relief, as well as an author of fiction and nonfiction and an Assistant Professor of Writing at Point Loma Nazarene University. He lives in San Diego with his wife and three children.

Michael Dean Clark

This is the fourth in a series of thoughts on how place shapes and is shaped by the stories we tell. The first three can be found here, here, and here.

Recently, the writers I’m working with in a creative nonfiction class were required to take a mundane action and make in original. I went the low-tech route for doling out said actions, printing up phrases like “shaking hands,” “crossing an empty street,” and “changing a shirt” on small pieces of paper that would later be pulled from a stack on my desk.

That’s right; I’m too lazy to bring in a hat for them to draw from. Sue me.

 Their responses were fun. One student drew “sending a text message” and included an account of a girl so preoccupied with her phone that she fell into an open manhole. Another student pondered the existential pain of the limp fish handshake and the relative certainty hand-touching will turn out awkwardly. Another went the passive aggressive route and wrote an entire response without ever addressing the action on her slip of paper. To be honest, I still don’t know what she was supposed to be writing about.

The point of the exercise, of course, was not sparkling exposition. Rather, its goal was to push writers toward that particular alchemy of good nonfiction – taking a familiar subject and presenting it in a way that challenges the ways readers have internalized it. The big academicky term I use is denaturalization (though as close to the border as I work, that often leads to discussions of immigration).

I think this process is extremely necessary if a writer hopes their work will arrest readers who are more and more inundated with information that does little to nothing in terms of being artful. The best chance literature has of maintaining a place of prominence in general culture is to do what it always has and lift halos from the mire of the macadam (to paraphrase – loosely – a dead French poet).  

One element that begs to be made foreign is place. People like to read about exotic settings, but the stories that matter most to us happen in the most familiar locales. They happen on our cul-de-sac, at our supermarket, on the freeway we take to work, in the cubicle three rows over.

These places are not exotic. People don’t plan vacations to sit at the local Denny’s restaurant they eat at once a week. But to a writer this is a great opportunity.

Take what should be experiential wallpaper and give it the Charlotte Perkins Gilman treatment. Skew the image of a bus bench in a way that forces readers to focus on the people sitting there; the people those same readers fail to see as they pass by each day, locked up in their “Lexus cages” with the radio on to drown out the life being lived around them.

I remember reading Ishmael Beah’s book A Long Way Gone about child soldiers in Sierra Leone a short while after spending a couple months in the country adopting my daughter. What struck me most about the experience was not the story (although it is amazingly powerful in its simplicity).

What caught me was how his descriptions of Freetown recast my own mental images of several places I’d been while we were there. Images drenched in sunlight and success are now clouded in shadow and sadness because of what so many children like my daughter suffered. But those shadows also heighten my ability to appreciate the daughter I sometimes forget is adopted.

And that is anything but mundane.

Michael Dean Clark is the fiction editor at Relief, as well as an author of fiction and nonfiction and an Assistant Professor of Writing at Point Loma Nazarene University. He lives in San Diego with his wife and three children.