The Written Word

By Ann Hutton

When Dorothy Parker said something to the effect that she hated writing, but loved having written, she echoed the sentiments—as only she could do in her inimitable style—of many writers. That’s what “writer’s block” is about: the dread of the page, the fear that words won’t come; and even if they do, they might be met with ridicule and misunderstanding, exposing one as an amateur, a poser. It’s a formidable barrier to getting anything down in print, accompanied by the impulse to do anything else instead—laundry, shopping, drinking, even keeping dental appointments—all of which might forestall the fearful discovery that one is not really a writer after all, and should probably go get a day job with benefits.

And then there are other writers, very probably in the minority (a conjecture on my part), who simply must write. Stephen H. Foreman finds himself in this category. He swears that if he had the gift of seeing or hearing life in the manner of an artist or a musician, he’d paint or play an instrument. But he doesn’t, and so is consigned to a life of words and ideas that he’s compelled to record in print. He writes from 9:00 to 5:00 every day. “I don’t have any choice but to write. If I don’t write, life is not worth living. A successful day gives me enormous satisfaction.”

He’s hooked on the process, which is a good thing for anyone who yearns for a product with their name attached to it. In Foreman’s case, the product is a first novel titled Toehold, published by Simon and Schuster and scheduled to be released on October 9. Set in a remote village beyond most modern amenities, the story is what he calls a sort of “adventure romance.” Life is rough in Toehold, Alaska, and most folks consider making it through the winter a stroke of good fortune. Foreman’s protagonist, Mel Madden, is a young woman on a quest to prove herself—to herself if no one else bothers to be impressed. Once a teen runaway who left a baby behind to be raised by her own uncaring mother, Mel takes on life in the Alaskan bush as if it’s her last chance to get it right.

The first chapter finds her stranded in a sudden blizzard, alone and unprotected, and unable to make her way back to safety. She instinctively drops down and digs a hole in the snow pack where she huddles fetus-like and goes unconscious from hypothermia. Wondering what death will be like just before passing out, Mel’s thoughts reflect her basic curiosity: who will get her truck, did she leave the coffeepot on, will she be retrieved or left for the birds in the spring thaw? This is no drama queen, but awakening to a freezing cold, fresh world the next day is like a rebirth.

None of Foreman’s characters are your typical upwardly mobile, socially conscientious, dressed-to-impress citizens. Foreman collects a crew so full of their own idiosyncrasies and versions of thwarted dreams that it rivals the cast of Northern Exposure. There’s Sweet-ass Sue, the owner of the town’s sole liquor establishment, and Buddy Barconi, the entirely inappropriate sidekick of anyone who will put up with him. And Mel’s best friend/eventual love-interest is Cody Rosewater, an independent and self-made man, born of a true Hippie and eternally free-spirited. His expertise, besides having been in Alaska long enough to know how to make it through those winters, is taxidermy—an art not lost on the region’s trophy hunters. Their relationship is one of mutual convenience and growing respect—no sizzling love scenes, although the benefit of sleeping close to another body becomes obvious to them both.

The literary tension in this plot is understated, much like the daily life in any outpost of civilization might be. Still, Toehold’s contemporary survival lore and stunning geographical references are dispensed with lots of rough humor and down-home dialogue, and Foreman manages to create an admirable depiction of such an existence. His many years writing for television and movies equipped him with the skills to pull this off, although doing a full-length novel requires a very different mindset, he admits. He enrolled in an extension course at UCLA when taking the leap from screenwriting to prose. And after a stint at non-fiction pieces about his personal adventures—travels through Alaska and the Caribbean, and living in Montana for five years in the Bitterroot Valley, where he says he could walk from his sixty acre parcel next to a couple million acres of National Forest land into Idaho—an agent suggested he try fiction. A brilliant idea, it turns out, since Foreman admits to dawdling in his imagination a great deal of the time anyway. He maintains, “Writing fiction is liberating because I can say anything I want through my characters.”

In a café on Tinker Street, we talk about all the personal permutations of having made it this far in life. We compare the requirements of a wilderness lifestyle to inhabiting a metropolis like L.A., and talk about raising children. He and his wife, actress Jamie Donnelly, have two adopted kids, one of whom sits with us sipping steamed milk and playing with her new tongue jewelry. He mentions his preference for mixing with the locals when he travels to exotic places, referring to himself as a Jewish emissary, out to perhaps tweak the stereotypes that people might have about Jews. He considers himself impressionable and naïve, and an inveterate optimist. Now at work on a darker, edgier novel concerning the 1953 uranium strike in Utah, Foreman revels in his own good fortune to be able to stay home, garden, be with his family when they’re around, or hole up in his Greene County retreat to write for days at a time.

After bumming around Kerouac-style—he says reading On the Road felt like “the guy wrote me a personal letter [to] get on the road”—Foreman earned a BA from Morgan State University in Baltimore and his MFA from the Yale School of Drama. After teaching writing and literature, and writing poetry and plays, he swung a contract to write and direct films in Hollywood, a creative environment like no other—intense, uncertain, and crazy. He admits he’d like to see this story turned into a movie, a potential boost to his income that would also promote the sale of the book itself, but acknowledges that it might be existentially gruesome for him. Compared to working in the film industry, his rewrites for Toehold were not excruciating. “This is such a delicious process, I have nothing to complain about.”

Juxtapose Parker’s literary fears—the ones Foreman seems not to wallow in—to a healthy fear of wild animals. We who live in the mountainous upstate have a passing familiarity with the presence, if not also the menacing danger, of bears. As a lifelong hunter and wilderness trekker, this writer is fascinated with the mammalian family Ursidae. He waxes poetic as he talks of his up close experiences, once tracking a bear for hours when it suddenly disappeared after leaving a footprint in mud so recently that he watched it fill with water. Just as suddenly, the animal roared behind a nearby thicket. “It literally curdled my blood, and my spine ran cold!” He didn’t take the one shot he had. It seemed beside the point of being out there, alone and engaged in this ancient, mystical activity. Anyway, he says his wife draws the line at cooking or eating bear meat.

We discuss famous bears in literature, William Faulkner’s in The Bear and Jim Harrison’s in Legends of the Fall, and conclude that if the Native Americans are not exactly accurate about an animal’s ability to get personal with those who hunt them, the mythology makes for a good story. Foreman’s literary bear appears when Mel recognizes a grizzly she’d encountered the day she awoke from her temperature-induced coma, and literally sets her sights on the beast later in the story. Foreman interjects, “The Indians in Alaska say that if you’re hunting a grizzly, the grizzly knows it. I don’t know if the bear has an intellectual perception of you, but their senses are so keen, they can smell and hear so well that if you’re tracking one, it’s aware of you. It will circle back around you. They’re very smart and canny, and they can run so fast—40 miles an hour.” I’m sufficiently impressed, enough to reconsider my own petty bouts of writer’s block as being not so fearsome, really. At least it doesn’t roar.

A father who came to parenting in mid-life, Foreman attributes his patience with that challenge to the skills he learned as a hunter—observing, waiting and watching, not making a move until the time is right, using energy economically. And when things get difficult and noisy, as they do raising teenagers, he says, “I just click off and go to another planet.” It is a writer’s gift to do so, one he puts to good use. All adventurers, hunters, parents, and lovers of a good tale are invited to hear Foreman read from his work and talk shop—be it writing or hunting or whatever—at 2:00 pm on Saturday, October 20 at the Catskill Mountain Foundation (map) in Hunter.

The Readers and Writers Series is produced by Carolyn Bennett. For information about this event, call 518 263 2000 or visit www.catskillmtn.org.