Cartouche writes:
In case you didn’t know, are new to OS, or have been living in a viaduct somewhere, Monte Canfield is the unofficial official pastor, confidante and friend extraordinaire of OS. As a rule, we have a very kind and generous community but nobody epitomizes this more than Monte.
When I first joined OS in late November of 08, I observed him from the sidelines for nearly two months before I had the courage to e-mail him and introduce myself. There you have it; even I have a shy streak sometimes too.
But back to Monte. From the minute we agreed to embark on the journey, he has proven time and again how kind and gentle a spirit he has coupled with a “real” life history, a genuine interest in others, a fabulous liberal streak, a warm heart and an intellect to match. You will find his comments all over OS, and the first thing you will notice is that each of them is always thoughtful.
As with the other interviews, the first section of four questions was “non-negotiable” and all the parties that signed up or agreed to this one (an interview with me) were required to respond to all of them. From there, I presented it like a Chinese menu whereby each person could pick four questions from the remaining two sections. I was hoping Monte would pick the boxer or briefs question but he didn’t so, I have included a couple of bonus questions that you might not find in any other interview with any other member of OS. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you “The Full Monte”.
1. HOW DID YOU COME TO OPEN SALON?
I got here because I was irritated with the ad page about OS that came up every time I clicked on Salon. Even when I clicked through the OS page, it still took a while to get the Salon page to load and that irritated me even more. Anyway, one day I decided to find out what this Open Salon was that was "destroying my life", and I clicked through to OS. That first time I read posts for four straight hours. And I really wanted to comment on some of them so I joined. It never crossed my mind that I would ever write here. I just wanted to read and comment now and then.
But this was in the middle of the election campaign and I was very worried about the possibility of the assassination of then Sen. Obama. So on October 21 I wrote my first post about how I, a mere 23 year old, was working in the Executive Office of the President the day that President Kennedy was shot, and how I was the one to inform the Budget Director and others, including some White House staff. Having lived through a series of years of one assassination after another I wanted people to understand that it was not an impossibility today.
From that time forward I haven't stopped writing.
http://open.salon.com/blog/monte_canfield/2008/10/21/it_only_takes_one_inviting_violence
2. WHICH POST ARE YOU MOST PROUD OF AS A WRITER AND WHY? (PROVIDE A LINK, PLEASE)
I'm not much into being "proud" of anything that I do, but I do think that some things are better than other things I write. I put a lot of research and careful writing into my religious Reflections because I try to write them so lay people can read them easily. I enjoyed writing my Motorcycle Memoirs series because it is true and funny and I lived it just the way I wrote it.
But I really found myself "living within" the series about how my Mom met my step dad toward the end of WWII. I called it "A WWII Romance". I was so into it that I could literally visualize it in my head even as the story left my fingers; and when what I wrote wasn't exactly what I saw in my head, the rewriting and editing were almost instantaneous.
The writing of it surprised me by bringing up emotions that were long suppressed. I knew that I was the only still living person who could tell this story, and that if I didn't tell it then it would be lost, not that anybody else would care if that happened, but I knew I would. To my mind it is one of the great love stories of any time. The characters are very ordinary, and yet also very vulnerable and complex -- but that is exactly how I remember them. So I guess I could be "proud" of that series, but mostly I am thankful that I was able to write it.
CARTOUCHE CONCURS: THIS WAS A BEAUTIFUL SERIES!
The link below is to the last post in the series "A WWII Romance." The links to all the prior posts are at the beginning of that post. While each post can be read on its own, the only way to really understand it and feel the emotion of it is to read it from the beginning.
http://open.salon.com/blog/monte_canfield/2009/02/08/a_wwii_romance_part_vi_conclusion
3. WHICH POST DO YOU THINK WAS MAYBE OVERLOOKED THAT YOU WISH MORE PEOPLE HAD READ? EXPLAIN WHY. (AGAIN, PLEASE PROVIDE A LINK).
I think that I have been pretty blessed in terms of readers. Most of my work has been read at about the level which I though it would be read when I posted it. I have no big disappointments in that regard. As I know more people here, and vice verse, my readership has picked up. I am surely glad that it hasn't gone down!
When I first posted what would turn out to be a very long, ten part series on some of my early motorcycle experiences, which is really pretty funny after the first two introductory chapters, considering that a retired pastor wrote it, I was probably hoping for a larger readership of it. But I was also cognizant that motorcycling memoirs, funny or not, would not be everyone's cup of tea. You can see what I mean, can't you? "Ah, yes, nothing I would like more that read a bunch of posts written by a preacher about a couple of drunk bikers. Damn. How did I miss it?"
I called the series "Motorcycles: A Magnificent Obsession." If anyone wants to go back and look at it the link to the first of the ten posts is here:
http://open.salon.com/blog/monte_canfield/2008/11/20/motorcycles_a_magnificent_obsession_part_one
4. WHAT AUTHOR, PERSON OR EVENT HAS MOST INSPIRED YOUR WRITING (INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE STYLE), AND THE SUBJECT MATTER YOU WRITE ABOUT?
No one event or person or author has particularly inspired my writing. I am too eclectic for that and my posting reflects it. I say my "posting" because a lot of the stuff, some would say the fluff, that I post really has essentially nothing to do with writing. I do not see my blog as being constrained to just writing. Rather it is a playground for me and my friends.
Nor do I have a plan about what to write. My mind doesn't work that way. I post about life, and I write about life, all facets of life. I write about things that are going on now, things that happened decades ago, and even about things that I hope might happen in the future. And I never know very much in advance what or when I will write. I don't have a style or a writing hero. Nothing like that.
I have co-authored a couple of books and edited a couple dozen more; and have written professional magazine articles, speeches, sermons, testimony before Congress, and innumerable reports to the Congress and to the President. Writing has been a major part of my professional life.
So while I was never employed as a "writer" I would have been fired on the spot if I could not write. And some areas are natural areas for me to write about. I like to write about things I know a lot about. I cannot abide the thought of writing about things that I really haven't a clue about but think that other people should think I do. I see far too much of that phony "expert" writing. That translates into being so full of oneself that you have no real clue as to what the hell you are doing.
So the areas I tend to be comfortable with are politics, economics, government, theology, religion, Christianity, motorcycles, remembrances of times past, personal and family memoirs, OS as a community, and some eras and forms of music. But chances are that, unless it is pure fluff, you will not find me writing about something that I have not studied and/or lived and that I am passionate about.
5. IS OS ABOUT THE WRITING AND THE ART OF IT OR JUST THROWING YOURSELF OUT THERE IN THE WIND?
I am not sure what OS thinks it is, but it is much more than Kerry thinks it is trying to be. I like good writing. But I hate to be told by the writer than he or she is good, and I hate it when writers write drivel and haven't a clue that they just did that. So I think that OS will always be composed of very good writers and clueless hacks and everything in between. That's what being "Open" means. Open means not having any writing standards for membership. You can be as dumb as dirt and get into OS. Or you can be so smart that you actually glow with intelligence and get into OS.
And I believe that since that is true then something more than "writing" has to hold OS together. I believe that something is the sense of community, of family if you will, that grows up within subgroups within OS. We never acknowledge such sub groups since someone is always railing out about cliques, but they exist nonetheless. But they aren't cliques or clubs or even motorcycle gangs. They are just groups of people who like each other for more than just the writing but also for the real life person behind the words.
These groups overlap and change and flow and merge and split. But we all have them and we draw strength and approbation from them, and we can grow as we learn about each other and share our knowledge. If anyone believes that OS does not have this family sense then he or she just isn't looking. When something bad happens to any OSer and they write about it, then just watch the concern, the caring and the feeling, the genuine feeling of solidarity with that person expressed in the comments. And when something good happens, the same thing happens. People are happy for the poster, giving her kudos, and congrats, and virtual pats on the back.
That, for me, is every bit as important a truth about OS as is the writing.
6. WHEN DID YOU KNOW THAT YOU WERE BITTEN BY THE WRITING BUG?
It never outright took a bite out of me. It must have been nibbling and nibbling and I finally decided to scratch the itch. And that just made it worse and I can't stop scratching. First bug that ever tried to infect me by nibbling me into submission that I am glad I didn't kill.
7. WHOSE WRITING MOST MIRRORS YOUR SENSIBILITY AS A WRITER?
The writer that expresses the sense of the need for a moral imperative to help improve this almost hopeless mess we have made of our God given lives is Walker Percy. Percy died in 1990 but I grew up in an age when I had a standing order at the local bookstore for his next book.
I still see Percy as the next great southern writer after Faulkner. He was deeply influenced by existentialist philosophy and the work of Søren Kierkegaard as well as some of the Russian existentialist writers. Though trained as a medical doctor, after a bout with tuberculosis and the long recovery entailed in that, he decided to write about people's souls rather than try to repair their bodies. At the same time he decided to become a Roman Catholic and was a devout believer that science cannot account for the truly important things that this life reveals to us.
As I write this I can feel how much of what I write about him is what I feel about me. Some of his best works for openly and brutally describing the insanity of human existence, and yet holding on to hope for the better angels within us are The Last Gentleman, The Moviegoer, The Second Coming, and my favorite, The Thanatos Syndrome. These are all fiction pieces.
Of his nonfiction works, many of which are really interviews and copies of his correspondence, two that he actually sat down and wrote stand out for me: How to Be an American Novelist in Spite of Being Southern and Catholic and Novel Writing in an Apocalyptic Time.
8. IF YOU COULD SPEND A DAY WITH ANY WRITER AND LEARN, ABSORB AND ASK ANYTHING FROM HIM OR HER, WHO WOULD IT BE? WHAT WOULD YOU WANT TO KNOW?
Robert B. Parker if you mean a living author. I would spend the entire time trying to understand how he can write such seamless and realistic dialogue. His plots can be thin and sometimes repetitious, but his sense of writing dialogue is a thing of beauty. Nobody alive touches him. And, ironically, because he is a writer of popular crime fiction I would imagine I am the only person on the planet who consciously appreciates how very, very good he is at that part of his craft.
Interestingly, the only writer of dialogue that I think was better than Parker is another crime writer who died in 2005. I worshiped at the alter of his dialogues. Salvatore Albert Lombino wrote his more "serious" work under the name, Evan Hunter. But he sold more of his police procedural 87th Precinct novels under the name of Ed McBain. He was the master of the procedural and nobody has come close to writing police procedurals as well as he did.
But the dialogues in the books written under the Evan Hunter name, such as The Blackboard Jungle, Strangers When We Met, Mothers and Daughters, and Nobody Knew They Were There are pure delight. They are effortless and true to character and subtle in so many ways. They are a feast for the eyes, demand that they be read aloud, and carry me as close to the heaven reserved for great writers of dialogue as I will ever get.
So if it is a living author make it Robert B. Parker. Otherwise, Evan Hunter.
9. WHAT TIME OF DAY ARE WE MOST LIKELY TO FIND YOU LURKING AROUND OS?
Two times of day are the most likely. In the late morning, after I manage to get down the stairs and take my meds, I head to the Lazy Boy to get my feet up and start getting the swelling out and getting a fan on them so they will begin to cool down while the pain meds start to kick in. That is usually a three hour proposition. So the first period is between 11 am and 2 or 3 pm. Then again after Sue goes to bed I am back on OS from about 11 pm to 3 am.
Both periods are not exclusively OS because I usually am listening to music in the background or watching news shows on TV at the same time. If I notice something new and interesting on TV I will turn up the sound and watch that segment giving it all my attention. When I am on OS I am normally reading and commenting. When I write I do it in the same time periods but I do it in a word processing program so OS is not on. Actually, nothing else is on when I write, just me, my thoughts and my laptop.
10. HOW MUCH OF WHAT AND HOW YOU WRITE OR RESPOND IN COMMENTS IS REFLECTIVE OF THE PERSON YOU ARE IN "REAL" LIFE?
Interesting question. For almost 20 years now 100% of what I write is exactly reflective of me in real life. I consider my OS involvement to be a major part of my "real" life. But I am who I seem to be in all the things I do. "What you see is what you get" pretty much covers how I am.
There was a time of almost three decades when I used several different personas, mostly to hide the fact that I was a heavy drinker. So there was the person that drank kept separate from the one who worked and yet a third person that was the face presented to my family. Those never were very successful at hiding my problem once booze had me by the throat, but I tried to keep up the facade. I also realized that I didn't like any of the three people who were 'me" and once free of the booze I promised God and me that I would be just Monte, no hiding, no pretending, no bull. I am a much happier person for having done that.
11. YOU GET TO SAY ONE THING TO KERRY OR JOAN. WHAT WOULD IT BE?
I would say two things. First, thank you so much for creating and sticking with the OS playground. It has become one of my great loves.
But, second, I would ask them to get serious about making the OS platform much, much more user friendly, paying attention to what we users know that we need. The PM system is primitive beyond description, there are serious glitches just trying to type material into the "new post" boxes, the comment system is a joke, ditto the folder system for keeping track of your PMs. If the PMs in your folders go beyond one page you can't even access behind the first page. You cannot manage your folders at all: alphabetize, drop folders, rename them or change them in any way. Mostly my frustration is that you can send PM after PM to them about a problem and not get even the courtesy of a reply. The Administration/User interface is functionally bankrupt.
12. WHO HOLDS THE KEYS TO YOUR KINGDOM (AS IN YOUR MIND, NOT YOUR RESIDENCE) AND WHAT WOULD WE FIND IF WE GOT TO TAKE A LOOK INSIDE?
There are no keys to my mind kingdom. It is always open to you. If you took a peek inside you would find exactly what you would think you would find. No surprises, no hidden agendas, no changes from what you see now. Rereading that I would have to say that is not 100% true.
The one exception is that over the years as a pastor, a professional counselor and just as a trusted friend, many, many people have confided in me some of the most intimate parts of their lives. Much of this has been done at times when they were very vulnerable and at the end of their rope. I consider that to be a great honor and privilege that they have given me. I have pledged to them that what they said to me stays with me. It always has and I will never violate that trust. So there is that small part of my mind that is off limits. Not because of me, but because that part belongs to them.
THE FINAL QUESTIONS ARE FOR YOU SPECIFICALLY.
13. HAVE YOU WRITTEN ABOUT WHAT LED YOU TO BECOME A PASTOR IN A POST? IF SO, CAN YOU PROVIDE A LINK? IF NOT, WHY? AND COULD YOU GIVE US A LITTLE CLIFF'S NOTES VERSION ANSWER AS A TEASER?
The specific answer to this one is "No". I have always felt that what I do in the name of God was far more important than how I got to the place where I could do it. And I no longer remember how long Cliff's Notes are, but I will make this as short an I can. And that is none too short. Sorry. But I blame the question on you! ;-)
The truth is that I was called to go into the ministry a couple of times and turned it down because I was convinced that I could achieve more being in public service. Plus I could not reconcile my alcoholism with being in the ministry. So, after I got sober I was out of government, had had a stint in the NYC/St. Louis corporate world and had owned my own little starving retail business, and I had no more excuses. My business partner retired from our failing business, and then died within a month of that. That woke me up to the shortness of this life and the sometimes unexpectedness of its conclusion.
About a month after that I was lying in bed reading C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity long after Sue had fallen to sleep and the house was dead still. A voice, as clear as if it were coming from right next to me, said simply, "Its not too late." I about jumped out of my skin and started looking for a radio or TV or something I left on, and at the neighbor's to see if they were up and talking out in their driveway. Nothing.
So I thought about what it could mean and about who it must have come from, and decided, reluctantly over a period of months, that what was "not too late" was to devote the rest of my life to God. I was at that point 50 years old. So I spent the next months going around to people I respected, in the church, friends, former business and government colleagues, telling them about this event; and about my "stupid" idea that it meant that I should devote the rest of my life to God and go to seminary. I got an earful and it was always essentially the same message: "I was wondering why you waited so long."
So, that Fall I enrolled in Eden Theological Seminary, got in the back seat, told God that I had quit driving and that he could take me wherever he wanted me to go. And I never looked back. Lest some think me to be some kind of kook that thinks that God talks directly to me all the time and helps me fill out my grocery list, that was the only time that I have experienced anything like that, never before or since.
14. IF THE MEMBERS OF OS WERE YOUR CONGREGATION, WHAT WOULD YOU BE PREACHING TO US THIS SUNDAY IN YOUR SERMON?
Actually, this one is pretty easy and you can read a written version of what I would be preaching on this, the Sunday before Palm Sunday. The words would be quite different because I have found that preparing a sermon and writing a Reflection on the very same thing are quite different exercises. But I would be preaching the third of the four Lenten Reflection themes that I have just published here on OS in the series "The Death of the Messiah."
If anybody is still interested in them, and we aren't through Lent yet so it is quite OK to still read the series and be "timely," the link to the first of the four is below. And this is one series that you really need to read all four of the posts to get a reasonable understanding of what I am talking about.
http://open.salon.com/blog/monte_canfield/2009/02/25/lenten_series_the_death_of_the_messiah_introduction
15. IN THE FACE OF YOUR CURRENT HEALTH ISSUES AND THE ONGOING PAIN YOU MUST ENDURE, YOU ALWAYS MANAGE TO RISE ABOVE AND REACH OUT TO OTHERS. IS THIS A LEARNED TRAIT OR ONE THAT CAME NATURALLY? COULD YOU TEACH OTHERS HOW TO DO IT?
I don't want to discourage anyone from doing the kinds of things I try to do here on OS and in the rest of my life. I believe that anybody can be empathetic and reach out to others. We all are called to do that by Christ and he would not call everybody to some activity that could not be universally done. And once someone decides to act upon this concept, whether they are Christian, or of another faith, or of no faith at all, they can be taught how to be more effective in their ministry to others.
If one doesn't think about what he or she is doing, for example, it is possible to think that you are really helping people when what they feel is that you are looking down on them, feel that they are inferior, or that they are unable to care for themselves, etc. It is really easy to step all over someone's self esteem and have no clue that you are doing it. So, yes, you can be taught how to respect the integrity of those you serve, and how to love and show concern to people that you may have thought you would not ever feel any positive thing about in your life.
What cannot be taught is the compassion that would drive you to want to reach out to others. I can teach the mind but I cannot teach the heart. Some people have a heart for service and others are clueless. The clueless are not bad people, per se, they just do not have it in their makeup to go that extra yard to help others.
The problem is the sense of sacrifice. If you are unwilling to sacrifice something that you otherwise would be doing, or sacrifice something of yourself, your time, your talent or your treasure, then I cannot teach that. But, if you have a compassionate heart that is inclined to help others, then, absolutely, you can be taught how to do it well.
Thanks, Cartouche, for all the work of doing all of these interviews. It always helps when we can learn about each other just a little more. It helps break down barriers and open up new opportunities for friendship and mutual growth. I salute your efforts. God bless.
Monte
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