STORYBARKERS: A REPORT FROM THE FIELD
Brian Evenson
Introduction
In our previous report we explored the manual techniques that can be quickly and readily applied to a story, most notably hand-peeling, scraping and niggling, but also planing, griping, sanding, stripping, and so forth.
Yet not all stories will respond to such methods. A story still well-armatured in style might resist hand-peeling as well as many of the other techniques. A single such story can bring the workshop to a halt.
Your job as workshop foreman is to identify such stories in advance and process them through a story barker in the first few moments after their appearance, so as to regularize them.
Barkers now used in the Midwestern fiction workshops operate according to three radically different principles. In one type, style is “barked” by the friction of the words tumbling against one another; in a second type, it is beaten off the story by hammers and flails; and in the third type, it is cut off or peeled free by rotating knives. In all three, style will be more easily removed if it has been given several weeks to harden and dry.
Friction Machines
A practical friction barker is a cylinder 5 feet in diameter and 9 feet long, with a lockable hinged door on one side. A charge of sentences is placed inside and the drum is rotated until the tumbling of the words against themselves and against the inside of the drum removes all trace of style. The drum should be perfectly smooth inside. Any protrusion is apt to contuse the story and render it unsuitable for further reading.
Drum barkers are not manufactured commercially, but can be constructed by a small crew from 1/2-inch boiler plate or 6-inch channel iron. Old boilers—cut down, with flues removed, ends reinforced, and holes cut to allow the more elaborate fistules of syntax to tumble out—also make good drums.
One type of mounting centers the axle. The other mounts the drum eccentrically, thus giving to the words a sliding motion that increases efficiency but requires somewhat more power. The drums are rotated at 25 to 35 revolutions per minute by a gear or chain drive. Faster speeds are not required. In operation, the drum is loaded to about 85 percent of capacity. One such charge is about 200 to 300 sentences according to the size of the drum and the stories (blank sheets of paper or photocopies of previously workshopped stories may be used to make up the load if there are not enough pages). Barking takes 12 to 35 minutes for most stories, depending on season, crispness, length of time since drafting, and type of axle mounting.
A two-man crew can operate either type of machine, loading and unloading it, sorting the stories, and stripping by hand the small amounts of style that remain. The story should be seasoned immediately before the style manages to re-adhere.
Hammer Barker
Developed primarily for use with longer, looser stories, a large machine that removes style by pounding it off is being used by one operator in the Midwestern workshops. The stories are rotated and fed mechanically past a series of small hammers mounted on a rapidly spinning shaft. About 30 h.p. are required to operate this machine. A crew of five to seven can bark from 2,000 to 3,000 sentences per day. Operation must be very skillful if separation of narrative fibers, particularly at the extremes of the stories and around protrusions and irregularities, is to be avoided.
Peeling Machines
Machines that remove style by cutting it off are also used in the Midwestern workshops. Two distinct types have been observed. One is essentially a lathe; the other is a small edition of a pole-peeling machine in which style is removed by floated cutter heads.
The lathe-type peeler automatically centers the ends of the story on a powerdriven chuck or dog. The story is then mechanically turned slowly against faster-turning cutter heads mounted athwart a motor-driven shaft. A selfcontained motor of 17 h.p. is used for power. When turned, these stories are perfectly cylindrical and have no taper. Four men operating this machine can produce from 120 to 200 workshop-ready sentences per hour.
When stories are crooked or have seep, it is necessary either to remove enough sentences to cut out the defect or to hand-clean what the machine misses. This machine removes style from stories of all types and produces cylindrical stories of a diameter somewhat smaller than that of the original. The machine has an advantage in that it creates nearly identical and uniform stories that can be stacked close together and easily mailed in bulk.
The floating-cutting-head-type story peeler, or peeler device, is still in the development stage. It works somewhat like the standard story peeler. Stories up to twenty pages in length are held in position by small dollies running on the rails and made so as to let the stories rotate. The stories are moved forward and rotated by toothed and beveled “bull wheels,” the pitch of which can be adjusted to control the rates of turn and feed. A single cutter head, or carver, with 8-inch knives guarded by a metal shield, floats along the contour of the story, removing the style and rough surfaces to a regulated depth and leaving a good clean story with a normal, albeit minimal, taper. The assembly is portable. When actually operating, this machine, with a 5-man crew, will peel two stories per minute. At present this machine does not have enough range to peel both small (less than three pages) and larger stories efficiently.
A Cautionary Note
We cannot conclude this report without a brief personal note on the dangers of story barkers. In our travels through Iowa we saw ample evidence of injuries as a result of incorrect or careless deployment of barkers—thumbs caught in gearage and torn off, lumped forearms from broken and irregularly healed bones, puckered and suppurating scars on irregularly healed gashes, not to mention the thousands and thousands of mutilated and now useless stories. It is perhaps for this reason that many workshops still rely heavily on hand-peeling or have rejected the workshop process altogether, opting instead for each author to peel his own work in private.
Working with fiction, despite modern advances, still remains a dangerous proposition.