Former UA creative writing student returns with new works

FAYETTEVILLE — There are tales that get told and retold, passed down through generations. The characters and actions of these tales are part fact, part myth and part memory. Memory is the trickiest of the mix because it depends on the perspective of the teller.

Such a tale inspired Michael Downs, formerly of Fayetteville, to write about a 1944 circus fire that devastated his hometown of Hartford, Conn. The resulting short stories comprise his new collection, The Greatest Show: Stories (LSU Press).

A reading with Downs is scheduled for 7 p.m. Monday (March 19) at Nightbird Books in Fayetteville.

The lore of the circus fire was part of Downs’ childhood, part of the “cultural consciousness” in Hartford.

“As disasters go, it’s one of the strangest, most awful disasters,” he said in a recent phone interview from his current home in Baltimore. “There’s a lot of strangeness to it; there’s a lot of drama. And a lot of innocence.”

The Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus — billed as “the greatest show on earth” — drew eager children, their parents and others. The very big-top tent that showcased the circus animals, acrobatics and clowns, caught fire and collapsed on the crowd of more than 6,000. Many people were trampled as they tried to escape. The blaze caused 168 deaths, 56 of them children age 9 or younger. (That’s the same total number of people that died in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.)

And, bringing this tale even closer to Downs was the story about his dad. As that story goes, his father’s parents were separated at the time. His grandfather went to pick up his father, then 3 years old, intending to take him to the circus. The parents — both heavy drinkers — bickered, and the father left without the son, neither going to the circus that fateful day.

For Downs, the question became this: What if his dad had gone? Instead of sending his dad, Ned, he created a 3-year-old character, Teddy, whom he sent in his stead.

Downs’ interest in the circus fire was renewed by stories published in the Hartford Courant newspaper when he worked there as a sports reporter. (His met his wife, Sheri Venema there, when she was bureau chief.) But he didn’t write the first story of this collection until he was in the creative writing program at the University of Arkansas, in the mid-1990s.

“Assembling the book and writing the book was sort of a weird combination of accident and intention,” Downs said.

Once Downs wrote that first story, he wanted to write more. But in the creative writing program, students were discouraged from tackling novel-length works.

“It just started as stories, so it stayed as stories,” he said.

Following the advice of a respected writer, Downs wrote what he feared might have happened if his father did go to the circus, rather than the reality. The Teddy character is not his father, though they are the same age. The character doesn’t die; he ages and shows up in stories throughout the book. In fact, many elements in the stories are amalgamations.

“It was a sense of morbid curiosity, I suppose,” Downs said.

Downs’ research was vast and varied. He found newspaper accounts and collected oral histories. One of his grandparents’ neighbors worked the switchboard that day, which was overwhelmed with calls.

At Mullins Library in Fayetteville, he discovered a Red Cross pamphlet printed a year or so after the fire. So many people had been treated for burns there, that it became a case study. The pamphlet contained photos Downs hadn’t seen before, and told how burns were treated in that era.

Other research was unique to Downs understanding the characters in these tales. Because the mother character, who was burned, wants to put on makeup again for the first time, Downs sat in front of a mirror while his wife applied makeup to his face.

Because the stories are centered around fire, Downs turned on the gas stove in his kitchen and held his hand above the flames, as close and as long as he could stand, paying attention to how intense heat feels. It’s one thing to be burned and pull away quickly. “It’s another thing to be surrounded by fire for a long period of time,” he said.

Downs also studied the Polish culture and learned some of the language. He played a lot of Benny Goodman tunes, to put himself in the mood of that era. And he listened to music by composer Henryk Gorecki, internalizing the mood, tone and structure of one piece, because it seemed to imitate the overarching structure of his stories. The music climaxes long before it ends. With Downs’ stories, the fire scene is really the climax, and that happens early on.

Early in his research, Downs was introduced to Stewart O’Nan, who had just written a nonfiction book about the fire, The Circus Fire: A True Story. Downs calls the book one of the most thoroughly reported examples of historical journalism he’s ever read, and the book proved very helpful when researching and writing his later short stories.

Downs wrote 10 stories all together, with two story lines. One tells about a family that went to the circus, suffered burns, but survived. That tale is in the first story and six more. The second story line involves a family that lost a relative, Sophie, in the fire — their ex-wife, sister and aunt, depending on the character narrating the story. That's told over three stories.

“I wanted to look at how, over generations, something like the fire would come in and out of the lives of people who were directly involved and people who were tangentially involved, but profoundly affected,” he said.

Downs had been working on the circus fire stories, then the 9/11 attacks happened. In the year after that, people were saying that they would “never forget.”

“I was struck by that because here I was writing about a circus fire that many people had forgotten,” he said. “It was a circus fire, and it was so strange. But still, people forget; generations pass.”

While writing the 10 stories, which cover more than 50 years, Downs thought about how “forgetting and memory can be cruel and kind.”

The young boy character doesn’t remember being burned in the circus fire, but his burned body shows the evidence of it. He has to deal with schoolmates teasing him. The fire also shapes the father, who wasn’t there but carries survivor’s guilt.

Remembering and forgetting hinge on an emotional connection. People born in the years after the fire don’t have the same connection. By the time the young character is older, and wondering if he should be trying to remember what happened, “the question is almost moot,” Downs said.

Downs teaches writing courses at Towson University in Towson, Md. He and his wife write a blog, Him + 17, about their age difference — she’s 17 years older — “because it’s fun.

Downs also is the author of House of Good Hope, which won the 2007 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize. His writing has been published in several literary journals, and he won a literary fiction fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2005.

Northwest Arkansas has changed dramatically since Downs and Venema moved away in 1999. During their visit, he plans to visit his former creative writing professors. And the couple’s absolute, must-see tourist stop: Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville.