If you want to lend a hand to the magazine, they’re currently running a Kickstarter campaign to raise some funds to help offset the cost of printing Knee-Jerk Offline Vol. 2. You should pitch in; literary journals hold a mirror up to our society. They’re crucially important. So help one out. As of this posting, they’re over halfway to their goal of $500.

Yesterday, though, I got news that my essay “Firefighting” placed as a runner up in the inaugural Knee-Jerk Magazine Essay contest. If you click the link (and you should), you’ll see that not only is it a placement in a writing contest, a publication, but money. Money! For writing! Gasp!

So I would be remiss if I didn’t thank the judges. Because it wasn’t an easy essay to write.

It started off as a series of vignettes about covering house fires when I was a journalist. I wrote it during the summer, and eventually, it dawned on me what I wasn’t writing about: my dad sold firefighting equipment for years—as long as I can remember, in fact—so that got folded into the essay. And it’s impossible for me to write about my dad without getting into his decline into alcoholism and eventual suicide.

So like I said, not easy to write. But what story worth writing is easy to write?

When I was a senior creative writing and journalism major at Miami University, I had the fortune of taking a week-long writing class with Richard Bausch, which was a beautiful week that made me much more cognizant of my own writing. I have a journal full of things he said during that week, and he’s since started posting pearls of wisdom on Facebook. This is one of my favorites:

You don’t have to be so terribly smart, or fast. You only have to be willing. You get smart going through it and through it after being open to what it is tending toward. Don’t worry about what you will finally say; it will tell you.

This happens every time somebody sits down to write. It certainly did for me in my essay. The key is to let the story tell you what it’s about, not the other way around. Try to manhandle the story, and it won’t ring true. So when you sit down today to write—a fictional story, a blog entry, a piece of breaking news—remember this. Let the story tell you what it has to say.

Birch Hills at World’s End has a release party at Reading Under the Influence, and if you’re in Chicago next week, you should go. The theme is “apocalypse,” and the lovely writer Ilana Shabanov will also be reading, among others. Seriously. Go.

Her mantra comes to mind every morning when I’m waiting for the bus to work.

You see, every morning, I walk a few blocks to the corner of Campbell and Lawrence Avenues to catch the 81 bus to the Red Line on my way to work at Fisheye Graphic Services. The last bus I can catch and make it to work on time comes around 8:25. Across Lawrence Avenue, every morning, there’s a line of people standing outside a nondescript building, the only hint of its contents is a small sign that says “Illinois Department of Employment Security.”

This office opens at 8:30 a.m., and today, I saw a line of at least thirty people, some holding umbrellas to shelter themselves from the late summer heat. They have it hard, as do millions of other Americans.

But seeing this, I can’t help but feel incredibly thankful for my job—my new job; I’ve only been there since the beginning of July, and I can honestly say I love going to work every morning. I get to use my design experience, my ability to put out fires as they come up, and I get to smell printing ink again, like I did when I was a reporter at the Chillicothe Gazette. I’m incredibly fortunate, and each morning, I’m reminded of that.

So to quote Cheryl, “Gratitude. Gratitude.”

How do you hire people? How do you help folks identify problems? How do you know which problems to work on and how to apply your resources? I asked so many questions when I spoke with the research hospital administrators. But I came to realize that my work is not much different. We have a ton of similarities on personnel, budgeting, and how to get our arms around all the data we collect. The talented research hospital administrators helped me to understand that we are working in a new type of leadership space. My dad used to say that if you are not consistently changing and improving, you are getting passed up. Leading in a culture of continuous improvement is actually what my best teachers do with their kids. They inspire, invent, and produce.

It’s heartening to have had the opportunity to read this, especially when states (including my home state of Ohio—and my mom works in a high school) seem to be turning against the teacher politically. To be clear, Dr. Ban doesn’t just talk a good game. He plays it hard. The sheer amount of data he’s collected in just a few years is driving innovation at CPHS. With the research hospital as a model, it’s almost impossible not to.

And it’s even better to see it in action. I’ve had the pleasure of visiting CPHS twice now—once for an Elephant Rock DVD shoot, and students seem engaged and tuned into their own goals. When you see the results firsthand, you know he’s on the right track.

The Chicago Tribune wrote up a featured obit, which played second only to that of Sarget Shriver. But to Chicago’s literary community, losing Ric is a serious blow. Let’s all keep his family in our thoughts.

They appear in books, movies — even television shows, and I’m not much of a TV watcher.

And I know why. My relationship with my own father, from the time I turned twelve, went downhill. That’s the age he was when he watched his own dad keel over from a heart attack at the breakfast table while he got ready for his day. My grandfather, as my dad told it, was dead before he hit the floor.

He only told me this because, around that time, he was yelling at my brother for not picking up a candy wrapper, and I stepped in between them. He told me to mind my own business. I grabbed him by the shirt and slammed him into the wall and said, “Why should I listen to you? You’re nothing but a fucking drunk.” He had a few inches on me, the body of an All American football player and wrestler softened by middle age, but in that moment, I stood eye-to-eye with him; I had him back on his heels for once. He called me a loser, though he apologized the next day.

The next day he tearfully apologized to me and admitted he was a drunk. He never uttered the word alcoholic, as far as I know.

I’ll skip a few years, a divorce, a few arrests for drunken driving, a distancing in our relationship to the point where we didn’t talk for a few years. But the truth of the matter is that he was a raging alcoholic, and nobody knew extent of it — he started seriously drinking when he took a job sweeping up at a bar when he was fifteen.

Of course, I didn’t know about this until after he shot himself in the side of the head on June 2, 2009.

That’s when I started noticing fathers in nearly everything, and in hindsight, everything I’d ever read. The image of Quoyle’s fatherhood in Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News breaks my heart now, where it once inspired me. The distance between Frank Wheeler and his sons in Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road seems eerily prescient now. I ache for Ballinger, the father who learns his pregnant daughter will marry one of her college professors in Richard Bausch’s amazing short story “Aren’t You Happy For Me?” I could go through my bookshelves and list you example after example, and do the same with my DVD collection.

In that one moment of despair that followed infinite others, when Dad squeezed the trigger of that .32, my view of life began to change. I truly believe fiction is a mirror of life, but I know — not just understand on an intellectual level, but know it in my core now — that that compact between reader and writer, director and viewer, is a two-way street, though not one that the writer or director has any control over.

I’ll be the last person to urge restraint upon writers; self-censorship makes for crap fiction on the page or on the screen, and stories of happy families don’t make good stories. Neither, though, do laziness or easy exits from plots. Every single example I mentioned does the hard thing and puts the audience through the wringer.

And as someone who’s been through the wringer of life lately, I’m damn glad they did.

The number of books I buy while sober is, I have noticed, inversely proportional to the number I buy while drunk. It’s a zero-sum game, as Proust once observed of wet dreams: when all the resources are consumed in the night, none are left for waking life.

Counting free samples and e-books from the pre-1923 copyrightless domain, the total number of books I “purchase” per month has actually gone up by about 200%, while the number of books I purchase while sober has dwindled to about 5% of the total. You used to be able to say that someone’s library looked like it had been assembled by a drunk person. Now, for me, the metaphor has become a reality.

It’s an absolutely brilliant piece, if not for the content, for the writing. Turns out if I ever end up with an e-reader (or an iPad), I may be drunkenly downloading some Elif Bautman.