In partnership with the friends of the UNH library.

This is the New Hampshire Authors series from the Dimond Library at the University of New Hampshire.

♪♪ So here we are.

It's nice to see you again.

And very, exciting for me to be able to introduce you this time.

Most of your audience knows the Rebecca Rule, who writes hilarious books, tells very funny stories all over the state, all over New England, town halls, stages, schools.

In fact, New Hampshire Magazine has named Rebecca In fact, New Hampshire Magazine has named Rebecca the Thalia: The Muse of Comedy which has morphed into something that actually is a far better bumper sticker than the moose, of humor.

[Chuckling] Becky's worked in many communities all over the state, helping people tell and preserve their own stories.

And in my opinion, if you buy only one guidebook to the Granite State, I would suggest Live Free and Eat Pie, A Storyteller's Guide to New Hampshire.

It tells you everything you want to know about this state.

It's not entirely true.

We're getting to that.

Yes.

[Laughing] Her other book, another of her books.

Headin’ for the Rhubarb, a New Hampshire Dictionary (well, kinda) will set you straight on the correct meaning of New Hampshire's native expressions and how to pronounce them to boot.

And her newest book, Moved and Seconded, Town Meeting in New Hampshire The Present, the past, and the future will tell you everything also that you ever needed to know about town meeting.

Of course, if you don't want to read and drive, you can listen to Becky on her two audio books.

Pearly Gets a Dump Sticker and Better Than a Poke in the Eye.

That's the Rebecca Rule that most of you know very well.

I'd like also to introduce you to Rebecca Rule, the author of two collections of short stories, one called The Best Revenge, which was named Outstanding Work of Fiction by the New Hampshire Writers Project and listed as one of the five essential New Hampshire books, and Could Have Been Worse True Stories, Embellishments and Outright Lies.

This is the Rebecca Rule, who I am convinced, and I'm serious here Rebecca, will take her place alongside this generation's most accomplished practitioners of the art of fiction.

When I think about the decisions and choices writers often make, if they intend to spend their lives working at this craft, I'm reminded of Mark Twain.

Journalist, travel writer, lecturer, humorist and writer- Journalist, travel writer, lecturer, humorist and writer- writer of extraordinary fiction.

One writer drawing from the same well and pouring One writer drawing from the same well and pouring the water into different vessels like the two Rebecca Rules.

And today, I am happy to introduce you to both of them.

[Applause] thank you marie, that’s very nice.

[Applause] That’s a lot to live up to.

And just before you begin answering my questions, I also want to read two quick quotes to set you up.

[Chuckling] The novelist Alice McDermott, you've all heard of Alice McDermott, famous novelist, has said of Rebecca's fiction.

I love the sense of menace that underlines each-underlies each of Rebecca's stories.

It's like the eerie, far off sound of ice cracking beneath your feet.

She knows the exact moment when a stoic heart is chilled, when loneliness or longing grips the heart.

While another-writer remarks that he laughed out loud while reading it, to the point where his wife asked him to please read it in another room.

So I need you to begin our conversation by being both those Rebecca Rules.

I would like you to read a piece from Etta- well, a piece from, The Best Revenge, from the story called Etta Walks.

And this is the second Rebecca Rule, the Mark Twain.

Rebecca Rule.

The story actually began- I was walking my dog, and I looked- I walk in the woods behind our house in Northwood, I walk in the woods behind our house in Northwood, and I looked and I thought I saw these pillars of smoke.

And I thought, what the heck is that?

And then when I refocused, it was Birch trees.

Do you know how you see something and you don't know what it is?

So it started with that.

And, the story of me walking my dog wasn't all that interesting, so I made up a character to have that little visual, experience.

And she's walking, alone and the background is that she is someone who has had a miscarriage, and she's very sad, but nobody seems to appreciate how sad she is so she feels very alone.

And the other part of this story is that, she had a grandmother named Rosa, or maybe a great grandmother named Rosa who disappeared.

This is family land.

And she disappeared, walked away, disappeared, never found.

So the story ends this way.

I'm sitting on Rosa's grave she thinks, and I'm the only one who knows.

She's come to the edge of a cavern, and she looks down in, and she's sure this is where Rosa is.

I'm sitting on Rosa's grave, she thinks, and I'm the only one who knows.

The only one.

The only one who walks the path her own walking created.

The only one who saw from that path the impossible columns of frozen smoke.

And lured by them.

The only one who knows what it is to be Etta in this strange place.

When Fred asks what's wrong, he means how long?

How long will it take for her to go on as he has.

To him, the curve in her back, the bulge in her stomach, the twinges, the heartbeat.

Had never been a child, just a fetus.

Deformed.

They said, non-viable.

They said, all for the best.

Etta pulls her feet from the hole and stretches out on the stony ground.

She lies flat on her stomach.

She pokes her head in as far as she can.

She breathes deep, feeling the expansion of her chest against a ridge of stone.

She stretches her arms, her wrists, her long fingers far into the darkness she touches.

She imagines touching hands, reaching toward hers.

She stretches a little farther.

The toes of her boots wedged my baby had a name, she said.

So did I.

My baby's name was Sandra, she says.

I know.

Etta pulls back then, with an instinct as strong as dropping the pan that sears your palm up on her feet and running.

The tears wet her face as she crosses the rough stone.

She tears through the hemlock.

She slides down one side of the ravine, crackles the ice on the brook, scrambles up the other side.

Not until she is back on the path.

Standing on ground, she is molded to the contours of her own feet.

Does she stop and look back?

Standing there, gasping, each breath air too thin too cold, painful, he thinks perhaps she never left this path in the first place.

She sees again the gray white columns of frozen smoke.

She feels their pull.

But even in Etta’s world, smoke can't freeze.

She peels her tears away.

And when she looks again, she sees that the columns were not smoke at all.

Only birch trees changed by the light.

[Applause] Oh, thank you.

Thank you.

[Applause] Now, we were talking about, this business of the same well and pouring that water into two different vessels.

And we got to talking about the fact that this is a sad story, and it's, it's about death and amongst other things.

And then Becky said, well, death could be funny, too, you know?

So we looked through some of the funny death, stories that Becky has, and we came up with the one, out of Headin’ for the Rhubarb, The Definition of Coffin.

Yes.

Well, I mean, we are a morbid people, aren't we?

We are, yeah, yeah.

We are morbid, Yankee humor is very, as I say, morbid.

It's very morbid.

And when I get to talking about telling funny stories about death, everybody has a funny story or two.

Cause you're sort of you're everything's heightened, you know, funny things happened.

I was, can I tell the story?

I was, I, volunteered as a hospice worker and, up in Concord and the story of this didn't happen to me, but one of my fellow hospice workers had found out that one of the, people who were there loved birds.

So she went and got her a bird feeder to put outside her window and filled it and walked down to the room, and the family was all standing around the bed.

And here's the bird feeder.

And one of the one of the family members said, I don't think she's going to be needing it now.

[Laughter] She didn’t need it anymore.

But this is from my- the C-section of my book, Headin’ for the Rhubarb a New Hampshire Dictionary (well, kinda) And there's a little, little something about cod.

The word cod, which is a fish.

Or it could be something that you plug into the wall a cord, or it could be a measurement of wood, a cod.

And then the next one is coffin, a casket for burying the dead.

And I wanted to include I didn't include all all words, just some.

I wanted to include coffin, in part because my my friend Arthur Slade told me an old saying, which I really love, and the saying is, it was not the cough that carried him off, it was the coffin they carried him off in.

[Laughter] But there's a little story.

Each word has a little story, and it goes like- this is an old Yankee story.

It's it's a classic.

Mother was a little hard to get along with.

So when she died, the family had mixed feelings.

[Laughter] They laid her out in the coffin in the living room, and the boys loaded the coffin onto a sledge for transport to the cemetery.

Unfortunately, the sledge got away from them, slid fast down the hill, and banged into a big pine tree at the bottom.

The coffin popped open and mother sat up.

[Laughter] Alive and sputtering.

She lived another 15 years.

[Laughter] Even harder to get along with than before.

Well, death comes to us all.

And once again it came for mother.

And once again it came for mother.

They loaded her into the coffin.

Loaded the coffin onto the sledge, and started out for the cemetery At the top of the hill, father cautioned, hold tight boys- [Laughter] -and mind that big pine tree.

[Laughter continues] Morbid.

Yeah.

Morbid, but a true story I'm pretty sure.

What else do you want to know Marie?

What else I want to know While we’re right here?

Yeah, while we're at it, your, your stories are filled with what one might call New Hampshire characters.

Except that, I'd like to take that, a little further.

This isn't- these stories are not caricatures.

I hope not.

And, I was listening the other day I hope not.

And, I was listening the other day to an interview of a North Carolina novelist called Ron Rash, and they were speaking about his characters in his books, which are filled with with, Southern Hill Mountain people.

And, he said that he was not simply trying to capture those people the way they speak, the way they dress, what they do.

But he was also, in a sense, preserving a culture.

And it occurred to me that may also be what you're doing in your stories.

And I wondered whether you'd like to talk about that, if, in fact, I'm correct.

You are correct.

Good.

And, you know, it's one thing to go out and tell funny stories and make people laugh, which I love to do.

There's nothing better than, nothing better than being in a room full of people laughing, nothing better.

But when I sort of started on this, you know, this, path, I started with the very serious fiction that I read from at first, and then I, as I promoted the fiction, people started to laugh at the funny parts.

So I wrote more funny parts, and I- But what the other thing that happened, the magical thing that happened was as I began to read stories to people, they were reminded of stories and they would tell me stories.

And then when I moved away from the page and started telling stories, which is very different from reading even more, even more people started telling stories.

And what I- and these people were so special, I mean, they'd be they'd be somebody like Daniel Webster Harvey over in Epping, New Hampshire, and he'd tell, you know, Daniel Webster Harvey in Epping, New Hampshire, you know his you know what he says?

He says, how do you spell Epping?

I said, well, how do you spell it, Daniel?

EP-EP-I-N. [Laughter] Where did the G go?

Went to Exeter.

[Laughter] I mean, that's a character.

That's a character.

And I meet them everywhere.

David Griffin over in, over in Auburn, New Hampshire.

And so you're- as the years passed, I got to meet these people and they would tell me these stories.

And I thought, if I don't preserve these stories, they're going to be gone.

These people are going to die.

And their stories, some of them get handed down through families.

A lot of them get handed down through families.

But I felt like I was on a mission to preserve these stories and in essence, preserve these people and preserve the identity of that Yankee culture that I love so much.

That dry humor that you you don't know whether to laugh or cringe.

You don't quite know what they mean.

Maybe they're being funny, maybe not so much.

And, and maybe it's one of the reasons that the stories don't, aren't necessarily passed down the way you think they might be in families, because in fact, half the family is cringing.

That's probably true.

And-It’s probably true.

They're probably not going to be repeating- They might not be.

- Some of it.

Well, the, there's a man named Warren Angus Wilbur out of Seabrook, New Hampshire, and I never met Warren Anglus-Angus Wilbur, but his, I think granddaughter, maybe great granddaughter, sent me a tape that had been made in 1975.

So they had preserved that on tape.

And I took it and I typed it up because until it's on paper, it's not really saved.

And then I've been telling some of this man- some of these stories that Warren Angus Wilbur told on tape in 1975, when he was 90 years old.

There you go, yeah.

And that's I don't know if that's archiving or what it is or folklore?

I'm not sure how to name it, but it's to me, it's a way of preserving the culture, which is, you know, it's fading.

Town meeting is going away.

The whole landscape and not the not the landscape, the cultural landscape, the physical landscape of New Hampshire is going to be there.

Mount Washington's not going anywhere.

Although the old man did fall down.

Yeah, that was kind of sad.

But, the cultural, the old, the old timey New Hampshire.

You go to the small towns and you find-you still find it.

Absolutely, you find it.

I was in Sutton this last week.

Sutton, New Hampshire.

Oh, my gosh.

We had a potluck supper it was most excellent.

And then we told stories and it was most excellent.

And people say that you have a funny accent.

I'd say no, go to go to Sutton, you know?

Go to Danbury, go to Wilmot and go to Colebrook.

You're going to hear that accent.

Yeah, it's there and you're preserving it.

Yeah, it's there and you're preserving it.

You're not parodying it.

You are preserving it, this is like-I hope so.

I'm-Oh, I, I don't think you can parody it.

No, it's not possible.

Now let me back up a minute to talk again about your roots as a writer.

You, you studied with, several wonderful writers here at UNH.

Do you want to talk a little bit about the role of a mentor in a writer's life?

Absolutely.

I would name to two mentors.

I mean, I studied with John Yount I studied with, with Andy Merton.

I studied with Don Murray, I studied with Tom Williams, and they all helped me in their own ways.

We called them the Boys.

At that time, there were no women teachers here at-of fiction or nonfiction here at UNH.

But, but I learned a lot from them and Don Murray in particular, who was the first person I interviewed here.

Really?

The first person.

Don Murray, he's- I remember when he said to me, I when we were in the mailroom over at Ham Smith, and I was upset because I was thought I was going to be an elementary school teacher till I actually went into an elementary school.

[Laughter] That'll do it.

[Laughter continues] I said, Don, I don't think it's going to work out I'm a junior and they frighten me.

And he said, well, you're not a teacher, you're a writer.

Write!

Oh okay!

And then Tom Williams, who, was such an inspiration to me, not only did I love his work, but he he knew how to teach me.

I mean, other people, you know, you find someone who really teaches you, and, he I remember he said to me, I was struggling with an ending one time.

I don't know how to end this story he says, well, it ends here, two pages back.

Oh, thanks.

I was struggling with how to describe a hair in a sink.

Seemed important somehow to the plot.

And he said, we'll just say the hair curled in the sink.

Thanks.

That'll work.

And, he was also the person who really said to me, you know how to write short stories.

In fact, early on, well, I tried to write novels for many years, as you well know.

Why don't you tell everybody what the conclusion you finally came to about writing novels?

I can't write novels.

I know, but you said it.

You said it rather well.

I said.

I said, I said you could ask me to build a barn or write a novel I couldn't do either one.

I tried to write novels for many years and I showed Tom one of my first novels, and he read it, and I went to see him in his office, and he said, he looked at me, said, you know, you're a really good short story writer.

[Laughter] Thanks, Tom.

He-I wish I had listened to him then, it took me another 25 years to figure out.

But, you know, I'm a miniaturist.

I, I go small, not big, not big is making a living, any kind of a driving force between these, choices that you make?

[Rebecca laughs] Just curious.

[Laughter] [Laughter intensifies] I'm married to an engineer.

I've been on a John Rule fellowship for 37 years.

[Laughter] Thank you John Rule.

[Applause] I’ve-I've never really- I've never really made a living in the sense of money.

You know, you make a little here and there, people pay you to do things, and sometimes they don't.

And, you know, well, you know, people don't go into- I wouldn't know.

I'm a poet.

She's a poet.

[Laughter] But, you know, I've if I had been living on my money, I would be in a one room apartment.

I wouldn't even have cable, and I'd be riding a bicycle.

I'd be in very good shape, however.

But, it's it's not.

I mean, I need to do it.

I love to do it, and I can't imagine not doing it.

But it's not a way to make lots of money.

Surprise!

Do you have any kid- unserious boy stories?

I love kids stories.

I love stories about kids.

And I-As long as you're not in the first grade classroom teaching them, yes?

Yeah I enjoy kids not-[Unintelligible] I enjoy going to schools also-I meant being a teacher.

Oh, being a teacher, that's a lot of work.

That's a lot.

That's a lot, a lot of responsibility.

I like to go in for one day and be Becky Rule.

Becky Rule is here, yay!

Goodbye!

Have a good rest of the year.

But, one of my favorite stories, and it's sort of, it I like the story because it speaks to many of the reasons that I collect stories and that I tell stories.

It's a story I heard in Potter Place, New Hampshire I dont know, five, ten years ago?

A woman named Gracious Snyder told it to me in a group.

We were at the little hall, and as she told the story, I realized everybody in the room already knew it.

It was a community story, and it was a story that had passed around the town.

And the man that it was about, Wolfie George had been gone for many years.

And the story went- I mean dead, for many years, and the story went back to when Wolfie was three years old.

So there’s a kind of immortality in the story.

It's a story that the community embraced and then they sent out into the world.

And the story goes like this I call it Wolfie George's First Words.

When Wolfie George was one year old, two years old, three years old, he never spoke.

He never uttered a syllable.

People thought maybe there was something wrong with young Woof.

But other people said, you know, he's got four older brothers and sisters.

They talk all the time, Wolfie doesn't need to.

Well, one day Wolfie was home alone with his mother, and the brothers and sisters, I guess, were in school.

He was little, he was just three years old, and mother was going to make a pot of beans in the big old Glenwood stove.

You know, those big old Glenwood stoves?

Great pieces of-hulking pieces of cast iron.

And she had made a little fire in the firebox with some kindling and some newspaper, and that was crackling away.

And then she went to get a chunk of wood, or, as they say, up in Berlin, New Hampshire, a junk o wood.

She got a junk o wood off the pile and went to put that into the firebox, but it was too big.

So she'd done this before.

She took a couple of the cast iron covers off the top, and you can access the firebox from the top.

So she took that chunk of wood and she shoved it in through the top, and it went in about halfway and stuck.

She couldn't pull it out.

She couldn't push it in.

And that's when the flames began to lick.

And that's when the smoke began to fill the kitchen.

And that's when Wolfie George, three years old, said his first words.

He said, t’wont go ma, too goddamn big.

[Laughter] [Applause] Isn’t that a good story?

Love that story.

That's a true story.

That's a true story.

[Rebecca laughs] It's a good story.

It’s good one.

It's because it speaks to the family dynamic.

I see a lot of story underneath that.

It's a lotta story underneath that.

I wrote a story once called The Widow and the Trapper It was based on a story my grandfather, Trapper Bill, told me, and he was really mad at the widow who lived across the lake because she had put bleach bottles on a rope and roped off the Loon's nest.

And he liked fishing there.

And so he was kind of ticked off.

So I wrote a story, and in the story, he gets together with the widow and they're out in the boat and romance ensues.

And and I thought he would never see it because it was in Yankee magazine, and he didn't get Yankee Magazine.

But somebody gave him the magazine.

And the next time I saw him, he said, I saw that story you wrote in the Yankee Magazine.

I said, yeah, he said, yeah.

I was kind of worried.

I thought you might give away some fishing secrets.

[Laughter] All right.

I'm going to, I'm going to wrap this interview up myself.

Oh, she's taken control, she's out of control.

I’m taking control rather than only leaving everyone laughing.

I want to end this interview with just a small bit, another small paragraph from the wonderful fiction that Becky Rule writes.

This is, also from Dreams End.

The day of Mim's visit, Grammie was in her room, resting in the press backed rocker painted Ivory.

Her face was ivory, too, except for the mauve line of her lips and hollows, a cheek and temple.

She looked like a little old ghost wrapped in a bright Afghan.

The room was dark except for slits of sunlight.

At the edges of the drawn shades.

The old woman's eyes were closed, the back of her skull dented, a feather pillow, her forehead drawn and pale as a boiled potato.

Mim sat low on the tapestry footstool, arms wrapped around her knees.

The room felt clammy, too damp for a sick old lady, but Grammy insisted she was warm enough.

Perfectly comfortable, she said, except for her head, Big as the moon Mim, probably doesn't look it, but it is.

She wasn't complaining.

She seemed full of wonder.

Thank you Rebecca Rule.

[Applause] They love you.

Oh that’s good.

[Applause continues] ♪♪