Photo Courtesy of Sherry Wilson

Using a safe and approved mode in a pandemic period of the 21^st Century, I Zoomed back to Nowata, Oklahoma, this week to discuss with Nowata High School junior and senior English students a book they could understand immediately and intimately.

They are experts, because the book, in large part, is about their hometown—and mine.

As my disembodied head floated frighteningly on a large screen above a smaller identically ugly computer image, we discussed Football, Fast Friends, and Small Towns: A Memoir Straight from a Broken Oklahoma Heart, the writing of it and things Nowata.

Nowata High School counselor Sherry Wilson and the students’ English teacher Branndi Staehle thought reading a perspective of their small town written by someone nearly sixty years removed might provide them with a Nowata they had not considered.

Wilson and Staehle are educational whirling dervishes. They had better be. Wilson, besides serving as photographer for my “visit,” seems to have a hand, foot, and many, many brain cells applied to anything and everything that goes on with today’s Nowata students. She once was one, and her Facebook page proves how invested she still is. And Staehle? Talk about overworked and underpaid—all teachers are—in addition to teaching English and finding great books for her students, she teaches and advises the yearbook classes at both the junior and senior high schools, is librarian and sponsors prom. Such is the glamorous life of a dedicated small-town teacher. I had many like her.

That is one of the reasons that Nowata plays in my head on a seemingly endless reel. It will not stop until someone tucks my cremains onto a columbarium shelf that is already in place in Nowata Memorial Park Cemetery. One of the students asked me if I would ever come back to Nowata. He meant to live. I told him and classmates about our plot.

I could never, however, devise the sort of plot which would have allowed me to make a living doing the only thing I have seemed capable of—writing. (I didn’t think the Nowata Star weekly newspaper, previously a daily, had been for sale or if it had that I could have afforded to buy it and name myself editor and publisher). What I did know is the students were curious about whether or not I had considered writing in a genre different from journalism or the creative nonfiction into which my six books could be categorized.

Part of my answer might have amounted to taking my head in my hands—were it not already disembodied—because Oklahoma is a Reddest of Red States. I said something not unlike what prompted Republicans to remove Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney from leadership. To paraphrase, I told the students I do not write nor do I believe journalists commit what former president Donald J. Trump famously labeled Fake News.

In writing, Fake News is more commonly referred to as fiction. That, too, can be fact based, though a writer is allowed to manipulate facts to suit his fancy and/or story. Memoir requires fealty to the truth; lives can look different on paper than they were lived, if the writerly persona does not dig for the truth with skepticism and self-criticism. When I was not sure of the truth of what I remembered about my Nowata, I turned to friends I had known me since childhood to remove my blinders and set me straight.

The students, whether wondering about fiction or nonfiction, focused questions on learning how one goes about becoming a writer of whatever stripe. Before applying rules that double as jokes—butt in seat, stare at paper: type, type, type—it helps to know that the secret to learning to write well is to become a relentless reader. I practically learned to read with the Tulsa World sports section in my hands. That was only an igniter, and good thing, too. Newspapers have for years struggled to find their footing in the slippery-slope world of electronic media. The staffs at all but the largest, most powerful newspapers—The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal—have dwindled and writers’ futures have become less and less assured.

In reflection, that may have come off more negative than I might have intended, but a dose of truth should only prepare those who want to write for the realities that come with it. If writing is what you love, do it. Make the attempt. Whatever it is a person loves, she will have the opportunity to be better at it than at something about which she is lukewarm. While teachers and professors can guide, and even inspire, as some of mine did, the will to persevere and become as good as innate talent will allow comes from the writer or machinist, the physician or plumber. Sherry Wilson recently took students to visit a machinist who discussed the importance of machinists’ work. He piqued interest.

I don’t know that I did as well. I was surprised when asked what I cared about besides football. The answer was in the other two-thirds of the book’s title: friends and small towns. And another question regarded the success of those I had grown up with and played with for years. As inexperienced varsity players—I was shifting from single-wing center to fullback—we had a poor result (1-8-1). The next two years: 7-3 and 8-2 against tough competition from almost always larger schools. Maybe I was the problem.

The true problem is that I didn’t ask the students to do one very important thing if they might one day hope to write about their lives and those who populate them. Besides reading and learning from everyone they read, I would encourage them to record family and friends, as they interviewed me. What I had to say was unimportant compared with what family and friends will be able to tell them. Ask questions. Listen carefully to the answers. Follow-up on those that prompt additional questions. I left so much unasked—hey, I was a dumb kid—to which I wished I had had the answers for my memoir.

• Why did my parents not finish adopting the sibling I had so longed to have?
• Why did Daddy quit his veterinary practice and then not get his ultimate job?
• Why did we have to move away from the one place and friends I loved?

I had to extrapolate and fill-in-the-blanks based on insufficient knowledge. My bad. I should have done better and perhaps would have with better coaching. But by the time I knew what to ask, and of whom, everyone had died who could have answered the questions and helped me to better understand. Please don’t let that happen to you.