Last night at quarter-to-nine, I got a call from Jamie Roberts who has the long-running show Radiogram on our local public radio station KZYX. He was calling to say that in fifteen minutes he would be airing my reading of my short story Of Water and Melons, something he’s done several times since I moved to Mendocino in 2006.
“It’s such a beautiful story,” said Jamie. “I think it’s your best… well, it’s my favorite story of yours. I think it’s a masterpiece and I like to share it with my listeners this time of year.”
I thanked Jamie, alerted a few friends, and Marcia listened on her computer in her office while I continued scribbling away on my new novel The Farm at the East Cove Hotel.
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Jamie has aired many of my stories on his show over the years, and I can say with certainty that Jamie is the ONLY DJ in the world who airs my stories, though I’ve sent my spoken-word CDs to many spoken-word radio shows around the country. Those stories can be streamed and downloaded from Apple Music, Amazon, etc.
Marcia loved hearing Of Water and Melons again and had a good cry at the end, and a couple of peeps wrote to say they enjoyed hearing the tale, which is why I decided to recount the story of the story.
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If memory serves, and mine sort of does, I wrote Of Water and Melons in 1979 when I was thirty. I wrote it longhand in a single sitting on unlined white paper as I still write my first drafts today.
The narrator began to speak and I wrote down what he said. A few hours later I had a pile of pages I set aside to read the next day. As is often the case with my first drafts, I only had a vague sense of what I’d written.
I was living in Santa Cruz at the time, and because of the very recent success of my novel Inside Moves, I was free to write without having to work at another job for the first time in my life.
Though I hoped this freedom would continue, I was fairly certain it would not. My success with Inside Moves was the result of a series of highly improbable miracles, and I was keenly aware that such miracles might not befall me again. I had already been dropped by the publisher of the very successful Inside Moves because I refused to write another “sports novel” which is what they were calling Inside Moves, a novel that is as much a sports novel as Moby Dick is a whale-hunting novel. “Come on Herman. Whip out another whale-hunting novel.”
All to say, I treated those days of freedom as precious and finite, and in the early days of my freedom I wrote Of Water and Melons.
When I read my pile of pages I was amazed. For one thing, the story was set in the past during the Great Depression. Never before and never since have I written fiction set in the past. For another, the story needed no editing. I always rewrite my stories many times. Not this story.
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A year or so later I was living in Sacramento and was asked to open for a well-known fiction writer who was on a reading tour touting her new bestseller. The reading took place in a large room at a school converted into a community center.
There were a hundred and fifty people there to hear The Famous One, and maybe a few of those folks were curious to hear the new writer in town: moi. The woman who had invited me said I was to read for the first forty-five minutes, there would be an intermission, and then The Famous One would read for another forty-five. However, the Famous One said she’d rather I didn’t read at all, but if I must, make it fifteen minutes max.
I made it twenty-two minutes and premiered Of Water and Melons, the audience was enthralled, and The Famous One was Highly Displeased she had to follow my act.
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For some years thereafter I gave many performances combining stories and music, and my surefire showstopper was Of Water and Melons.
When I performed the story for an audience of several hundred in a gorgeous theater at Cal Arts in southern California, I was approached afterward by two filmmakers who thought the story would make a wonderful one-hour movie. “A Hallmark Thanksgiving Special,” they pitched me. I said, “Mahvelous” and gave them a copy of the story and never heard from them again.
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Nothing I’ve written since Of Water and Melons has been so beloved. I took to having piles of photocopies on hand to give away after my performances to the many people requesting them, and eventually my friend Quinton Duval, the great California poet, brought out a lovely chapbook edition of Of Water and Melons with touching illustrations by Vance Lawry.
Yet I could never convince any magazine, large or small, to publish the story, though I submitted it to literally hundreds of publications. And though countless people urged me to send a reading of the story to This American Life, which I did twice, as well as to other audio-fiction radio shows, I had no takers.
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In 2003 I recorded three short stories for my CD I Steal My Bicycle and other stories composed of the title story along with Of Water and Melons and The Dreidel in Rudolph’s Manger, a very funny story originally published in The Sacramento News & Review and then syndicated and published in several dozen free weekly newspapers AND some large daily newspapers, for which I earned thousands of dollars! You can listen to these stories on YouTube and download/stream them from Apple, Amazon, etc.
AND I have included Of Water and Melons in my book Oasis Tales of the Conjuror and other stories.
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When I moved to Mendocino in 2006, I sent my story CDs to Jamie and he’s been playing them for his listeners ever since. Thank you Jamie!
Fin
Todd’s latest creations Good With Dogs and Cats and the sequel Pooches and Kiddies are orderable as paperbacks from any good bookstore, and available online as paperbacks, audio books, and e-books from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and many others.