LITMIR.BIZ

       Introduction

      WELCOME TO THE BOOK OF MY ARCH ENEMY. “RIVAL” would be a nicer word, but let’s be honest.

      In 1991, in Tom Spanbauer’s kitchen, where our whole workshop of beginning writers still fit around his dinky kitchen table, every week Monica Drake was the star. The stories she read to us…about sitting all night locked inside the Portland Art Museum, alone to guard the ancient mummy of a Chinese empress, staring at a dish filled with the preserved contents of the mummy’s stomach—mostly ancient pumpkin seeds. As Monica talked about being locked behind steel gates and barred doors and bulletproof Plexiglas, the rest of Tom’s students, we’d forget to breathe.

      Every Thursday night, Monica told about hunting for cash register receipts in supermarket parking lots, even begging shoppers for their receipts as they loaded bags of food into their cars, all because the store sold eggs for twenty-five cents per dozen if you could present receipts totaling twenty-five dollars. Monica wrote about a world where characters ate nothing but cheap eggs, getting stinkier and stinkier in apartments where everything had been broken at least one time. Wire or glue held together every cracked lamp and dish or splintered chair. Poverty and violence haunted every situation. People bought and sold food stamps for enough profit so they could drink NyQuil all day and stagger the streets with a permanent green mustache. Her characters, like the best characters, Monica based on real people in her life.

      To make Thursday nights even worse, Monica’s stories made everyone in Tom’s workshop laugh. Laughter so loud and honest that to people passing on the sidewalk, in the dark, we might have been apes hooting, or dogs barking.

      No matter what you’d bring to read, Monica would write something better, funnier, more surprising, and sexy. Every week, Monica Drake showed us how good stories could be. Tom taught us craft, but Monica taught us freedom. Courage. If my writing improved, it’s because her work was always better. If a story of mine got laughs, hers were always funnier. Monica moved away from Portland to study with Amy Hempel and Joy Williams, and now she has a first novel. Clown Girl. And all over again, Monica’s showing us just how funny and nuts and sad storytelling can be.

      Writing this introduction, I’m not doing an old friend a favor—I’m paying a decade-old debt. This isn’t charity or flattery—this is honesty.

      Writers are nothing if not rivals, but competition as good as Monica Drake is a blessing.

      Clown Girl is more than a great book. Clown Girl is its own reality.

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