You're a paper boy on your bike and a car full of unshaven, heavily armed fellows rolls up on the morning route. Robbers? Kidnappers? Drunken thugs?
Nah, just a quartet of Pittsburgh Pirates looking for a bear to shoot in the western Maryland woods.
The meeting unfolds in Loaded for Bear, title story in George Miller's newly released book of short stories, Loaded for Bear: Adventures and Misadventures from the Appalachians to the Chesapeake.
(Spoiler alert: They turn out to be generous baseball players.)
Miller is an economist by trade who turned to poetry and prose after retiring from federal employ. He brings us 16 stories featuring a range of characters struggling against sometimes lesser-known but potent forces in everyday life.
They have a common denominator: Most sprung from what Miller saw, heard and presumably did riding the train from Western Maryland to Union Station in Washington, and back, for thirty-some years. Verisimilitude in dialogue suggests that Miller must have had a tape recorder running all that time.
Miller, of Calvert County, Maryland, talks with New Bay Books about his book and his craft.
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Q—As I understand it, many of the stories in Loaded for Bear were born on MARC train (Maryland Rail Commuter), the one you rode for years from western Maryland into Washington. Did you actually write and edit while riding a train?
A—My hour-long ride between DC's Union Station and my home to the west provided an uninterrupted hour each way for writing. The train ride also offered leisure for the newspaper and coffee in the morning, a beer and shared stories in the afternoon, and an occasional nap. Over the final several years, the train ride itself expanded to become the frame story around the other stories.
Q—Trains have a huge place in literature, everything from Hitchcock's 39 Steps, Murder on the Orient Express and Stranger on a Train to those Harry Potter books. Why do you think trains make such great settings for books and movies?
A—In my case, the MARC Brunswick line down the Potomac River coincides with the trajectory of my stories. I’ve lived as a youth in the mountain town of Cumberland, as a working adult in upper Montgomery County, and as a retiree on the western shore of the Chesapeake. The railroad setting paints time and place, a visual image for the reader. Stories are set throughout Maryland from Annapolis and Baltimore along the Chesapeake and Cumberland in the Appalachian.
Q—Tell us about that shoe box in your closet where stories gathered. Do you have more stories and poems captive there, ready to escape?
A—In the 1970s and 1980s I kept notes on sheets of paper, the back of envelopes, and paper napkins. These I consolidated into cardboard boxes. As technology progressed, my physical shoe box gradually morphed into a virtual shoe box. I still keep a physical inbox on my desk for random scribblings and dream sequences which seem brilliant at 3:00 AM but lame in the morning. Among other notes, my “shoe box” now includes several not-ready-for-prime-time novels. A while back, I came to realize that I was actually writing short stories, which I unsuccessfully strung together into novels. Many of the stories in Loaded for Bear originated in my unpublished novels. To answer your question, there will be more stories and poems.
Q—There’s a baseball glove on the cover of your book, if I’m not mistaken. For me, your story of meeting the Pirates hits every note given that I was a baseball-crazed kid and a paperboy. Might Smoky Burgess have been one of your boyhood idols?
Q—The dying grandfather sequences in the “Loaded for Bear” story are true. Greene and Lee Streets in Cumberland, Maryland, were the center of my paperboy universe. I stood on the corner selling the Times-News in 1960 when I was approached for directions by several Pittsburgh Pirates teammates headed into the hills to hunt bear. Had I known then what I know now, Smoky Burgess would have been one of my childhood idols. Bill Mazeroski and his World Series walk-off home run against the NY Yankees in the 9th inning of the final game have already been done many times. My story needed Smoky Burgess. Ask yourself, would have the story struck the same chords without his colorful name?
Q—Another of my favorite stories is called A Single Father in which the action through the night is directed by a cat named Mehitabel. You remind the reader that Mehitabel was a cat from a New York newspaper column long ago, and later a book. Are you a cat person or do you just like cat characters?
A—My father read from The Lives and Times of Archy and Mehitabel at the breakfast table. My story needed a colorful cat name like Mehitabel.
Q—Writers we have known have quite different methods of getting their words down. Some do so as soon as they jump out of bed. Some burn the midnight oil. When do you most like to do your writing?
A—Earnest Hemingway once said, “Writing is easy. Just sit at the typewriter and bleed.” I prefer instead these opening lines when, in 1916, New York Sun columnist Don Marquis purportedly found a cockroach prancing on the keys of his typewriter. “He did not see us, and we watched him. He would climb painfully upon the framework of the machine and cast himself with all his force upon a key, head downward, and his weight and the impact of the blow were just sufficient to operate the machine, one slow letter after another. The result was poetry.”
Q—Your career was in an entirely different field than writing. Did you write while otherwise employed? And now, in retirement, what place does writing have in your life?
A—The last fifty years provided the experiences and memories that I fold into stories and poems. If I’d retired at age 21, I’d have had nothing to write about. You are correct that economics and computer science are different disciplines than writing, but they pay the bills. Not long ago, I attended a poetry workshop at a college in Annapolis. Unfortunately, the computer was broken. I knew how to fix it, but also knew that if I did, I would be typecast at the onset as a technical person rather than an emotional person. We hobbled through the workshop with a broken computer.
Q—You’ve explained where some of your stories came from. Then what? How do you flesh out that idea into a fiction?
A—Let me give you an example. The story “A Pal’s Last Need” was based upon a non-stop, twenty-four-hour meeting with an old friend I met at the tennis court. I never saw her again, but the short time frame provided all the hooks I needed to string together bits and pieces from other experiences. Thank you, Sandy.
Q—You have several story reading events lined up to celebrate the publication of your book. Do you look forward to reading your story to real people?
A—Definitely.
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