University of Central Florida STARS Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2004-2019 2012 Evidence Of Lives John Cummings University of Central Florida Part of the Creative Writing Commons Find similar works at: https://stars.library.ucf.edu/etd University of Central Florida Libraries http://library.ucf.edu This Masters Thesis (Open Access) is brought to you for free and open access by STARS. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2004-2019 by an authorized administrator of STARS. For more information, please contact [email protected]. STARS Citation Cummings, John, "Evidence Of Lives" (2012). Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2004-2019. 2377. https://stars.library.ucf.edu/etd/2377 EVIDENCE OF LIVES by JOHN MICHAEL CUMMINGS B.A. George Mason University, 1989 A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in the Department of English in the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Central Florida Orlando, Florida Fall Term 2012 Major Professor: Jocelyn Bartkevicius ©2012 John Michael Cummings ii ` ABSTRACT Evidence of Lives is a novel that deals with themes of childhood abuse, mental illness, and alienated families. The book opens with the main character, forty-two-year-old Mark Barr, who has returned home from New York to West Virginia after eleven years for his older brother Steve’s funeral. Steve, having died of a heart attack at forty-six, was mentally ill most of his adult life, though Mark has always questioned what was “mentally ill” and what was the result of their father’s verbal and physical abuse during their childhood. When Mark discovers that there is to be no funeral, but a cremation without service, he calls his girlfriend, an attorney back in New York, who tells him he has a “legal responsibility” to voice his brother’s oral will. Just nights before his death, Steve called Mark and conveyed his last wishes to be buried, not cremated. The book unfolds into an odyssey for Mark to discover love for his brother posthumously in a loveless family. Evidence of Lives is a portrait of an oldest brother’s supposed mental illness and unfulfilled life, as well as a redeeming tale of a youngest brother’s alienation from his family and his guilt for abandoning them. iii To the memory of my brother Joe iv ` ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Grateful acknowledgement is made to Dr. Jocelyn Bartkevicius, Pat Rushin, and Dr. Darlin' Neal for their invaluable editorial help. Special thanks goes to Susan Smollens for her guidance and support. v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: THE WRITING LIFE ......................................................................... 1 CHAPTER ONE ............................................................................................................... 10 CHAPTER TWO .............................................................................................................. 19 CHAPTER THREE .......................................................................................................... 32 CHAPTER FOUR ............................................................................................................. 52 CHAPTER FIVE .............................................................................................................. 68 CHAPTER SIX ................................................................................................................. 80 CHAPTER SEVEN .......................................................................................................... 89 CHAPTER EIGHT ........................................................................................................... 95 CHAPTER NINE ............................................................................................................ 112 CHAPTER TEN.............................................................................................................. 132 CHAPTER ELEVEN ...................................................................................................... 145 CHAPTER TWELVE ..................................................................................................... 154 CHAPTER THIRTEEN .................................................................................................. 169 CHAPTER FOURTEEN ................................................................................................ 180 CHAPTER FIFTEEN ..................................................................................................... 194 CHAPTER SIXTEEN ..................................................................................................... 209 CHAPTER SEVENTEEN .............................................................................................. 224 CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.................................................................................................. 243 vi ` CHAPTER NINETEEN.................................................................................................. 251 CHAPTER TWENTY .................................................................................................... 267 CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE ........................................................................................... 280 CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO .......................................................................................... 292 CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE ...................................................................................... 300 vii ` INTRODUCTION: THE WRITING LIFE In 1989, I was a twenty-six-year-old art student who hadn’t read his first novel. Secretly, though, I loved words, just not those written down, but sung. Bruce Springsteen’s songs, in particular, had as much meaning as my ears could hear. No artist put as much “heart and soul into ordinary words” as he did, wrote Dave Marsh. But how could so much human meaning be captured on the page without music? During an elective poetry course at George Mason University, I tried to find out. As an experiment, I typed out lyrics to a few of his songs, put in line breaks to make them look like poems, printed them out, and read them quietly. Here’s a verse from “Drive All Night.” When I lost you honey sometimes I think I lost my guts too And I wish God would send me a word send me something I’m afraid to lose Lying in the heat of the night like prisoners all our lives I get shivers down my spine and all I wanna do is hold you tight I was shocked. Nothing. Flat. Where was all the heartfelt feeling so richly steeped in the music? Not only that but the Boss had bad grammar. Reading him on paper, I thought he sounded, well, dumb. I was let down. Whatever I would write in my poetry class, it would not sound like Bruce. 1 Around this time, by chance I opened a book by John Updike—and out poured sentences bejeweled with commas and printed in Technicolor, as in this passage from his story “Separating.” “Yet, a summer ago, as canary-yellow bulldozers gaily churned a grassy, daisy- dotted knoll into a muddy plateau, and a crew of pigtailed young men raked and tamped clay into a plane. This transformation did not strike them as ominous, but festive in its impudence; their marriage could rend the earth for fun.” Now this was writing! The visual artist in me was enchanted. His sentences didn’t read as if scratched out in the dirt with a stick. His sentences were endless and ornate, like fancy, curly, golden lines on sensationally green Victorian wallpaper. Every word was “written.” Even as I went on to finish my degree in art, I found myself writing. For years afterward, I referred to Updike’s Trust Me collection to study for technique and range in narratives. As my stories written in imitation of his rococo style and epiphany-capturing structure began to be published in prestigious journals such as North American Review, Kenyon Review, and The Iowa Review, I grew bigheaded and overly confident. I scowled at the idea of master’s program in writing. And why not? My undergraduate degree wasn’t in English or writing, but still I was getting published. In fact, not six months after graduating with my art degree, I even got a job as a newspaper reporter for The Fairfax Journal by putting together a few mock news stories and pulling off a certain moxie in my interview. I was all the more smug. Writers aren’t made in classrooms, I told myself. They’re forged out in the real world or in their hovels, alone. Could 2 ` Miguel de Cervantes have been taught to write? Could Charles Dickens? Rudyard Kipling? If anything, writers were reclusive and miserable, like Faulkner, to name one, and this misery was all the knowledge they needed for their blood-encrusted words. But I soon became frustrated with so-called journalistic objectivity because it made no room for my own personal perceptions. The more I reported, the more I wanted to write in first person, to include my own observations, views, and opinions, all of which ran contrary to a reporter’s code of factual impartiality. Looking back, there may have been a Tom Wolfe-inspired hybrid of New Journalism I could have adopted, but at this particular publication, I saw only a future of plodding, fact-driven, same-sounding, overly structured, scant write-ups. As far as going into a master’s program in writing, I remained skeptical of the value of it. Besides, it had just taken me seven years to get through the B.A. art program at GMU as a part-time student and full-time worker, so I was in no hurry for another college commitment. Over the next decade, leaving both formal education and journalism