Mcmanus Explains His Craft In ‘Deer’

“The Deer on a Bicycle: Excursions into the Writing of Humor” By Patrick F. McManus (Eastern Washington University Press, 188 pages, $25, $10.95 paper)

A book such as Patrick F. McManus’ “The Deer on a Bicycle: Excursions into the Writing of Humor” is not meant to be read front to back. No, this is the kind of book that you read in order of interest.

I, for example, turned immediately to page 29, which bears the title “Why do you give your characters and places such odd names?”

Not that I was searching desperately for an answer. I mean, I did read the title. I do know what the word “humor” is supposed to mean.

No, all I wanted was to again read some of those names.

Say them aloud and listen to them lurch off your lips: Retch Sweeney, Rancid Crabtree, Gert’s Gas & Grub.

McManus’ point is crystal clear, but he provides an explainer anyway: “By calling my sister `Troll,”’ he wrote, “I give the reader a quick indication of my relationship with her.”

Bad, I’d say. Tumultuous even.

Certainly funny.

And McManus would know. A former creative writing instructor at Eastern Washington University, McManus has written more than a dozen books filled with offbeat characters involved in humorous situations.

Beginning with “A Fine and Pleasant Misery” in 1978, continuing with such titles as “They Shoot Canoes, Don’t They?” (1981) and “The Night the Bear Ate Goombaw” (1989), and most recently “Into the Twilight Endlessly Grousing” (1997), McManus has used characters such as those named above, and several others, to show just how humorous the great outdoors can be.

In this book written expressly for Eastern Washington University Press, McManus explains how he practices his craft. He does so by using the traditional Socratic Method, using a fictional character named Newton to pose random questions.

In providing answers, McManus wrote, he replies “with equal randomness, and occasionally with wild abandon.”

All of which provokes the occasional chuckle.

When he talks about being born in a farmhouse near Sandpoint, for example, he notes that there was some question about when the event occurred. Seems the doctor, whom his father had gotten drunk, wrote down the wrong date.

“That is according to my mother,” McManus wrote, “she and I being the only sober ones in the house at the time.”

In the chapter titled “Can one learn to see funny?” McManus tries to answer by relating a story involving him and three friends getting stranded in a Montana blizzard. While the others fretted, McManus wrote, “I was overcome with an almost unrestrained urge to burst into maniacal laughter!”

Maybe the key, he wrote, is “that absurdity is the deeper reality of human life, and some of us are born with absurdity detectors, a kind of X-ray vision, a power to see beyond meaning and into lack thereof.”

Or, he added, “Maybe `seeing funny’ is a psychological aberration one is born with.”

Either way, it’s something McManus has in excess. He demonstrates that fact throughout “The Deer on a Bicycle,” which is split into two general sections.

The first half is filled with practical advice (how to get published? consult “Writer’s Market”) and suggestions (use the “Recognition Factor” to connect with readers).

The second is a compendium of a dozen of his stories, including the hilarious title story, with explanatory “commentaries.”

As a final touch, McManus includes a four-page list of humorists who have influenced him, a lineup that includes everyone from Woody Allen and Erma Bombeck to Robert Benchley and Mark Twain.

Above all else, those writers had one thing in common: They knew that good writing, like good teaching, stresses showing over telling.

McManus is the rarity. As this book makes clear, he can do both at once. And he does them well.

McManus wrote “The Deer on a Bicycle: Excursions into the Writing of Humor” as a way of providing funds for the Eastern Washington University Foundation, an endowment he set up to help provide scholarship for creative writing students. Profits go both to the foundation and to EWU Press. For order information, call (800) 508-9095.