Joseph O’Connell
jconne@austincc.edu

Joe O’Connell teaches English and Creative Writing at Austin Community College. He also leads graduate creative writing workshops in the MLA program at St. Edward’s University. He has taught at ACC since 1997. After receiving a journalism degree from Southwest Texas State University, he worked as a newspaper reporter and editor around Texas, concentrating on politics and winning awards for both feature writing and investigative journalism from the Texas Press Association and the Texas Associated Press Managing Editors. He returned to the school to forever be known as SWT to pursue an MFA in creative writing. While there he worked long distance with the famed short story writer Andre Dubus.

Joe’s short fiction has been widely published in literary journals including The G.W. Review,Other Voices, Lullwater Review and Confrontation’s special issue on Southern writing. His stories have taken first prize in both the Deep South Writers Conference and the Louzelle Rose Barclay Awards. His 2007 novel EVACUATION PLAN is loosely inspired by time spent with the terminally ill at Hospice Austin’s Christopher House and hailed by the Austin American-Statesman as “Tales alternately gentle, dramatic, surrealistic, that collectively affirm the beauty of being alive, even as they acknowledge that all of us face the necessity of making our own ‘evacuation plan.’” It was the No. 1 bestseller at Austin’s BookPeople in November 2007.

He is also a screenwriter who turned a budding career as a movie extra—including two days as a topless bar patron in Varsity Blues and one day as a blurry guy on the telephone in Courage Under Fire—into a gig as a film industry columnist, formerly for the Austin American-Statesman—where he also was an assistant entertainment editor and published numerous personal essays—and currently for both the Dallas Morning News and The Austin Chronicle. His articles have also appeared in Texas Monthly, Variety, Video Business and the San Antonio Express-News.

He lives on the outskirts of Austin with his wife Tiffany, an elementary school teacher, and young son Nicholas.

Finding the Equation of a Life

My stepfather was driving the highway between Boulder and Denver in his red Volkswagen Beetle when it happened. The wind whipped through the window he’d left open to enjoy the cool caress of an early summer breeze. His jacket lifted magically off the seat and glided toward freedom. He reached out an unsteady hand to yank it back, and my life was changed forever.

I was in a bright orange life vest bobbing up and down in the warm touch of Lake Travis when the call came to us in Texas. My father broke the news to his children that the big, jolly man who’d stolen our mother’s heart was dead. I hid behind our family lake house with my eight-year-old arms gripped tightly to the useless orange vest and cried alone. I didn’t know it then, but my tears mourned more than my stepfather; they rued the loss of a part of me that was to never be.

I’d lived in the Denver suburb or Northglenn for two years. Just long enough to discover the joys of snow, make a few good friends, become an expert at Kick the Can, and fall in love with a blonde-haired, freckle-faced girl named Collette Black. In an instant that world vanished and I was again a Texan.

My mother hired a company to load our possessions and transport them to an Austin house no more than a mile from the one my father now occupied alone. My summer vacation in Austin had become permanent. I was back in school with kids I’d known in kindergarten, before the divorce. Life went on and on and on.

In the next 25 years I fell in and out of love many times, graduated from college twice, saw my real father die, married the perfect woman (who bears a striking resemblance to Collette), experienced uncountable moments that molded and defined me as a human being. I thought about Northglenn often. It was a dreamy memory of innocence and deep sadness. Did I understand at that age what a divorce was? Did I blame myself?

When I made the decision to turn from newspaper reporter to fiction writer, the first short story that popped out of me was based on the cold Colorado day my older brother had written “Joe Loves Collette” on the back of my winter coat. My first-grader friends tried their best to read it as we walked to school, but they were still learning. I wadded the coat and shoved it in my desk until the end of the day. I froze during recess as Collette, unaware, skipped rope with her friends. Her blond pigtails floated in the air, timeless.

In an instant the needle skipped across the story that was to be my life and replaced it with a new version of the same tale. A Texas transplant learning how to skate down icy sidewalks quickly forgot snow when he was thrown back home to the Lone Star State. Life bolted down a new, yet familiar path.

But what of the story left behind, unfinished?

That “what if?” is the question that haunts. It’s the one gaping black hole stubborn enough to suck fiction writers in and hold them hostage for eternity. No, make that endless eternities, because the first thing a writer throws out is the silly concept of time and all of its black-and-white absolutes. To write fiction is to create possibilities, Bizarro universes where my stepfather lives and I own a dozen pairs of galoshes that I don for my job driving a snow plow, where Collette and I have been divorced for a decade and remain bitter from the custody battle over our 12-year-old daughter Hannah. No, make that Sarah.

For more than 25 years I have had no contact with the Colorado version of my life. It was an artery bluntly severed with only disjointed remnants to lend the least hint of reality. An address: 1007 E. 111th Place. A white, third place ribbon in the baton relay. A faded newspaper clipping no larger than the palm of my hand in which my stepfather’s Volkswagen skids off the page. A Polaroid of a grinning boy washing dishes, his front two teeth missing. The funny story I tell of my brother writing “Joe Loves Colette” across my rust leather jacket.

To create a short story, I combined this tale of childish romance with one of men landing on the moon and exploring a different unknown. I took a fragment of reality and threw it into a soup of pieces, stirred, compressed. I worried that readers might think it just a sweet story, so I added a lurking darkness to keep them on guard. The finished story, “Walking on the Moon,” is not the real story, but it is. My brothers and sisters--I have one in the story, five in real life--read the finished pages, sink into the details they know are real, ponder the rest.

“I didn’t know you felt that way about me,” one says.

“I didn’t,” I reply. “It’s not real.”

But it is real. As real as anything I really experienced. I made it up.

So more than 25 years have passed and you know what comes next. I disregard all warnings about the impossibility and do indeed go home again.

As happens in reality but seems convenient and hokey in fiction, Brad, a friend and former coworker, moves from Texas to Colorado. He now lives less than a mile from my lost home and has a vacant couch if I can afford the plane ticket. I fly.

Lives are like pebbles thrown into a calm pond. They start with a small circle--one house, a city block--and grow outward to encompass a neighborhood, a city, a country, the planet. The boundaries of my Northglenn world were set the first day my sister and I were allowed to walk the three blocks to elementary school alone. Momma wrapped us in coats, mufflers and galoshes and led the expedition. With goodbye kisses on our cheeks she left us standing in the gravel by the monkey bars, confident of our safe return that afternoon.

Our school, North Cottages, is three little houses in a row. My sister’s class is on the end, mine in the middle. Our coats hang on a row of hooks in the hallways. At lunch, a woman emerges from the basement with a tray of tiny milk cartons. We play and learn until the final bell sounds.

We are proud big kids. Walking home by ourselves. No car waiting at the curb. No Momma’s boy and girl. The first block is easy. We push the crosswalk button and wait for the light to go green. Once I saw a man wriggling in the street when he didn’t stop and his motorcycle was crushed by a car. Second block, okay. All that’s left is to turn onto our street and then we are home.

“Is that it?” my sister asks.

“I don’t think so,” I say.

“Maybe you’re right.”

We walk on and on into a great curve. Fear slowly slithers around our tiny bodies and squeezes out liquid panic. We pass the junior high where my brothers are in class for another hour. We’re lost! Gripping each other’s mittened hands tightly, we turn around, run back to North Cottages and call Momma to pick us up.

Brad and I troll the same streets searching for the three-house school. I’m sure my memory can find it. We stop at the school I’d attended for first grade, but they’ve never heard of North Cottages. We drive past my old house--it doesn’t look smaller like I’d been warned it would--turn at the corner and follow my mother’s old directions in reverse. There, in the middle of the block. I recognize the door to the basement. I knock and a woman opens it, smiles and says reality has changed. No longer a school, just a house. But she’s heard stories. I’m certain she’s hiding the milk cartons behind her back.

It doesn’t exist, this place, anywhere but a scattering of memories and in a short story I wrote. That’s okay. The me that never left here would drive down this street once a week and grin at the memories. Perhaps he’d cry. Maybe he’d write a short story. A different story.

That’s the truth of the matter. I can’t feel cheated of the life that was yanked away with that coat floating in the breeze. I want all of the possibilities, all the moments of the life I was dealt and the others that could have been. I’m an angry child protecting his toys. I write stories to keep the possibilities alive.

As I walk the streets of Northglenn, talk my way into my childhood home and see the wall between my bedroom and my sister’s has been removed, my mind drifts back to Texas. I know if the other me had lived out his life with Collette and child, shook the snow off of his booties, and settled in for a hot toddy with my stepfather, it would not have been enough. I’m too greedy.

Consider this: a moment in time. If we could choose one event in our lives to relive fully, what would it be? Would I be lost on my way home from second grade? No. Wrong story.

Try this: It’s a few days before Christmas in College Town, Texas. I live in a huge boarding house that is empty and so cold I can see my breath in the hallway. My first love turns off the gas heater in my room, we lock the door and set off walking uphill to her apartment with me lugging a tiny, black-and-white television. I’m growing a scraggly beard and she is the most beautiful woman in the world. We’re broke college students in search of some central heat and a moment’s comfort.

That’s my choice. One moment. I was young, alive and had not yet written a single story worth telling. I’ll take it. Despite knowing that people are watching us walk away so that they can kick in the door to my house and rob me. Despite the certainty that this woman and I will hurt each other deeply and become strangers. Despite knowing the choice of this moment means my stepfather did indeed die.

When his car spun out of control on that fateful stretch of Colorado highway, it did change me. Countless pebbles have since landed in the pond that is my life and so muddied the waters that those early years are hazy, dreamlike. I’ve often wondered what it would be like to turn the home movie that is my life on reverse and feel a pile of pebbles collect in my palm. Would I grip them tightly to my chest greedily to stave off the pain that is to come? No, I would fling the pebbles recklessly into the roiling soup and cherish the chaos of unpredictable, endless possibilities. Then I would grab a pen and write until my hands hurt, scribbling it all down for you.