Our Story

by

Lawrence Abby Gauthier

ace reporter

Westphalia Periodic News

A Scholarly Paper

On Literary Style

Intended for Publication

In an Academic Journal

Everybody has a style, the way we dress and present ourselves. Writers, too, have a style.

I imagine a time in the distant future when college students who want to learn how to write literature are required to read The Collected Works of Gauthier, an obscure late 20^th, early 21st-century writer unearthed quite by accident by literary archeologists rummaging around in the metaphysical AI cloud of history. The students' assignment is to discern and write a paper on Gauthier’s “style.”

Like me and my Bohemian buddies did when I was in college, after a class and a lecture on Gauthier’s style the students of the future head over to Pap’s Pub to drink beer and argue about it late into the night. Some may decide to write a dissertation. This column is for them.

Before I got dentures and lost my embouchure, I liked to blow jazz on my silver flute. I was an athlete in high school, so I was never in the band. I learned to play the flute in college. I never learned how to read music, but I studied music theory and came to internalize the mathematics of sound; why a diminished third takes me to a rundown delta town along the Mississippi on a sweltering Friday night with nothing to do and no place to go; why a fifth is like leaving a half-eaten meal when you’re still  hungry; why a seventh makes one yearn for a home; and the octave when we know we’ve made it. Add to it the motion of a trout stream in the woods, foaming over colorful rocks, pooling in eddies where the big fish live.

When I was working in the St. Louis area as a newspaper reporter in the 70s, I liked to go downtown on weekday nights to the old riverfront jazz clubs where there was always an open jam session going on somewhere where I could blow with all my might.

Style is a reflection of what’s going on in the back of our minds. Some days we feel frumpy and dress like it. Some days there’s a chance for rain out here on the desert and we dress in bright colors. When I’m writing, in the back of my mind I’m improvising up on the stage with Miles Davis, Coltrane and Monk, Charlie Mingus thumping the beat on his big upright bass.

Also in the back of my mind when I’m writing is my younger brother, Mike. I imagine the two of us in the old Ford pickup heading up into Pine Creek country over gravel roads, going fishing or bird hunting or up to the camp to cut wood. {As I was writing the last sentence, Dave Brubeck was playing “Take Five” in the back of my mind, Paul Desmond on alto sax.}

I was maybe twelve years old when Mike was born, so I wasn’t around much when he was a little kid. By the time he was out of high school, I was already out of college and making my way in the world beyond the walls surrounding the small town where we both grew up in the northwoods.

I was Mike’s big brother who would show up from time to time with stories about the world beyond. We’d drive down gravel roads called “CCC roads” because they’d been built in the 30s as Civilian Conservation Corps projects. Grandpa “Babe” drove a road grader. It’s how they made it through the Depression.

The two of us driving down a gravel road in an old pickup, he'd tell me about his life finding his way as a young adult in the town where we’d both grown up. I’d tell him about my life and all the new places I was seeing and the ideas I was having.

So, when I’m writing, in the back of my mind I’m in the truck with my brother Mike heading up into Pine Creek country. When I can’t think of how to say something, I think about how I would say it to Mike.

And what comes out of all this soup is called “style."