Story Untold

We were walking and the skies kept changing and the earth fell down and rose up and we turned a corner and here this was. The door to an old mill house (we presumed), slashed through, as if axed, as if it contained (and offered) a story of threat and rescue.

The mill house windows were steel barred and glassless. Its floor was sunk into the cool, dark mud. Its roof rafters were unsteady in places, disgusted elsewhere, as if they had given up on their questionable purpose.

What might we make of this? What was the threat? How went the rescue?

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Wishing for more from Goldengrove

I finished reading Goldengrove yesterday morning, before setting off for another day of friendship and holiday camaraderie. It's a book that I am very glad to have read, for I'd wondered about it in theory and needed to appraise it for myself, in actuality. Goldengrove is the story of 13-year old Nico who loses her older sister, suddenly, in an accident at the lake. Little by little, Nico (the narrator) takes on (at the urging of the sister's boyfriend) the traits and appearance of her lost sister, while the father and mother each fall apart in their own ways.

It sounds promising, I know. But the book didn't sit quite right with me on a number of levels. There was its tone—too adult-knowing, too retrospectively infused, on the one hand, and bogged down with surface teen observations, even cliches, on the other. There was the molasses stick of passages (about, say, the side effects of arthritis medications) that advanced neither character nor plot. There was the promise of entanglement, even outright spookiness, but things moved along at too matter-of-fact a pace to lose this reader in anticipation or wonder.

There was dialogue, long passages of it, that sounded like this:

"How are you, Nico?" (the mother of Aaron, the boyfriend) said.

"Okay," I said. "I guess. How's Aaron?"

Aaron's mother eyed the book and let it answer for her.

"Not great," she said. "It's been hard."

"I know," I said.

"I'm sure you do," she said.

"Say hi to him for me," I said. "Tell him to stop by the store and say hi."

"I will," she said.

"Really!" I said, startling myself. "I'd really like to see him."

"I will," she repeated." Take care of yourself, dear."

Lots of "said's" in that, for sure. Nothing the least bit turgid or lean (one or the other might have spiced it), nothing original, nothing that draws a deeper portrait of the characters (this is a rare interaction with Aaron's mother; should she not have been distinguished somehow here, either by what she says, or how?). To me, this passage, like so many others, feels like placeholder writing—like an author sketching out an outline that will be later embellished or deepened.

Except that the "later" didn't happen.

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Beacon

She beaconed blue on a day that kept changing shape.

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Sunday Prose

If all the clocks and calendars vanished, children would still know when Sunday came. They would still feel that suck of dead air, that hollow vacuum created when time slips behind a curtain, when the minutes quit their ordering tick and ooze away, one by one. Colors are muted, a jellylike haze hovers and blurs the landscape. The phone doesn't ring, and the rest of the world hides and conspires to pretend that everyone's baking cookies or watching the game on TV. Then Monday arrives, and the comforting racket starts up all over again.

I have begun, as you can see, to read the Francine Prose novel Goldengrove. The wind is howling outside, and I spent the day's first waking hour hovering over The New York Times Book Review, admiring the work of David Barber, say, who, in his review of William Logan's new poetry collection, Strange Flesh, writes: "A hard-boiled formalist with a redoubtable aptitude for tersely fastidious diction and sinewy prosody whipped into fighting trim, he's a poet who wouldn't be caught dead trying to dazzle or beguile, recoiling from anything that might smack of lyrical extravagance or bardic pomp."

I mean: Look at that sentence.

Imagine the thought and the knowing that lives behind that sentence.

I digress.

I have begun to read Goldengrove, and though Michael Pakenham, for whom I wrote countless reviews for the Baltimore Sun, once cautioned me never to express an opinion about a book until I was actually finished reading it, I already know and can express two things: This Francine Prose paragraph about Sunday, quoted above, encapsulates a thought I've had since I had the capacity to formulate thoughts (such as they are). I was that child looking out a Sunday window—waiting, waiting, waiting for something to happen. Where is everyone?, I wanted to know. What are they doing? Why have I been left alone, to Sunday?

But then there is this second thought: Not counting the lines that I've italicized above (which are tight and telling and so quintessentially Prose-esque), there is unexpected space between the words in Goldengrove, and I'm not referring to the typesetting. Sentences that feel not yet fully slashed or tightened. I've been spoiled by reading Liz Rosenberg's Home Repair, I know, which is at once taut and affecting, chiseled and heart big. Spoiled by Aleksandar Hemon and David Barber. But still, reading Goldengrove, I want to scrunch up many of its passages—clump them together, break them apart, pound out some of the air.

True: I feel that way every single time I read something that I've written.

Also true: It may be that such airiness is precisely what Prose needs to tell her story. I am intrigued. I am reading on.....

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What I'll Be Reading Next

In which I share (under terrible light on a rainy day, with my hair in my face and...(well, I could go on and on, but we're speaking of books here not fashion, and I've run out of parentheses)) a few words about the books that sit here on my glass-topped desk. I've not had time to read like this in perhaps 20 years. Each book making me hungrier for the next.

After thought: Roy Blount Jr. would never be my friend were he to watch this vlog. Because I use the term "of course" too much, for starters. Because I keep saying the anemic "I'm looking forward to...." I'm looking forward, of course, to improving my spontaneous speech in the year to come. I can and will resolve to resolve the same on New Year's Eve. I'm looking forward to that. Of course.

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Mirror Images

I read The Lazarus Project straight through to the end yesterday afternoon in the quietest room of a quiet house. The book has a surreal invincibility about it—you don't argue with its premise; you don't quibble with its construction; you surrender, and you surrender willingly. There's an implied hysteria in the tone—a desperation that goes comedic, even slapstick in places. There's the smashing about of a marriage, a ditintegration and then rebirth of the word 'home.'

Two (favorite) books came to mind as I read—Colum McCann's Zoli, in which a contemporary author (a quasi McCann) goes in search of a Gypsy poet of the mid 20th century, and Michael Ondaatje's Coming through Slaughter, which brings to life Buddy Bolden, the legendary horn player of New Orleans. All three books are engined forward by authorial quest. All of them yelp with sheer alivedness. The you, the I, the them become, at one point, indistinguishable.

Oh, to write a book like that. To be here, where I am—nearly a dozen books in and still a novice.

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Sitting, Reading, Falling through Hemon's Rabbit Hole

Into the final pages of Aleksandar Hemon's The Lazarus Project now, a rabbit hole of a book, W.G. Sebald reminscent. In which a contemporary writer goes searching for his subject (Lazarus Averbuch, a suspected anarchist shot down in March 1908, in the home of Chicago's chief of police). In which real life (but isn't this fiction?) collides with the imagined (but wasn't the suspected anarchist an historical artifact, his dead body photographed, the photograph here, in the pages of this book?). Hemon is a giant, a tease. He doesn't like the word novel, he has said. He observes the world astutely but refuses to take notes, or when he does, he can't decode them. He escapes classification. On purpose.

In any case, I have been sitting here, reading. I have glanced up now and then to get my bearings, watching the sun change shape on the door that divides my office from my home—the sun fisting through but bouncing back, turning around on itself. The camera, I realized, was nearby. I reached for it and took three photos. I returned to Hemon and then there was this—an exchange between Hemon's contemporary narrator (who is in Eastern Europe researching his Lazarus project) and his traveling companion, the photographer named Rora (who is not, we take it, to be confused with the actual traveling photographer who journeyed with Hemon to Eastern Europe as he researched this book).

In any case, this exchange was a startle in this, my mobius-strip afternoon:

Why did you take that picture?

That's a stupid question, Rora said. I take pictures.

Why do you take pictures?

I take pictures because I like to look at the pictures I take.

It seems to me that when people take a picture of something, they instantly forget about it.

So what?

So nothing, I shrugged.

They can look at the picture and remind themselves.

But what do you see when you look at a picture you took?

I see the picture, Rora said. What's with these questions?

When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.

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The Happiness Equation

Yesterday I got lucky as I set out on my long, winter walk: My son (just then knocking the soccer ball around in the back yard), whacked the thing into a yardly corner and volunteered to come along. He's taller than I am and walks straighter than he ever has. His features are sui generis, chiseled; his hair is buzzed and dark. His eyes would be the color of night except there's so much light in them, and whenever we're together alone, he begins, "So, Mom. How have you been?" As if there is more to any of us than the face we put out upon a day. And of course there is.

We got to talking about The Happiness Equation (Bridget Grenville-Cleave, Ilona Boniwell), a stocking stuffer of a book I'd given him. It's a fun book, if you have an interest (as my son forever has) in decoding one's inner life. You read along and you quantify your state of mind—giving yourself five points, for example, if you have a pet, subtracting five if you are anxiety prone, and on and on. Journaling increases your happiness, but not if you're stuck in the rut of writing down what went wrong. Material wealth is a downer (sorry, Paris). Idolizing celebrities will put you in the basement. Watching TV is you being stuck in a mucky rut, and choice overload isn't a condition to be envied. It's commonsense, obviously, but it's also cleverly set out, perfect for a kid like mine who said just the other day, "I've realized lately that we're not really meant to find the answers to all our questions. That if we did that, we'd be done."

We walked, and it was cold. We walked, and we talked about life—old happiness and new happiness, childhood regrets, nascent opportunities, the power of passion. We walked past my son's old elementary school and remembered. We walked past houses that have been torn down and replaced since he went off to school. We walked talking, and the three Christmas meals that I had fretted over were done, and the packages all had been wrapped and unwrapped, and the house was ridiculously clean (because yes, I overdo the housecleaning thing, which could put a dent not just on my own but on others' happiness) and there was nothing to worry over, nothing to do but keep walking beside my lithe son. I was writing my own Happiness Equation, just then. Or perhaps he was writing it for me.

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Home Repair/Liz Rosenberg

I had the privilege, this Christmas day, of reading an early copy of Home Repair (Avon/HarperCollins), Liz Rosenberg's debut novel for adults, which will be available this coming April. In this brief video/photo montage, I read a few favorite sentences from the book and talk briefly (though so much more can be said) about its impact on my own mood and mind today.

Liz has lived a remarkable life. She knows sorrow first hand, and loss. She knows the persuasive power of children. She believes in love. She writes extraordinary sentences that somehow tangle economy and heart.

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Merry Christmas

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Christmas Eve Paella

It is two rooms away, waiting for me. The jumbo shrimp and the two pounds of mussels. The boneless chicken and the chicken stock. The short, white rice. The peas. The tomatoes. The white wine. The garlic. The magic golden red elixir, otherwise known as saffron. And in an hour, or maybe two or three, I'll unwrap and chop and marinate and begin preparing our traditional Christmas Eve paella.

Just now, in the dark, I am remembering friends. Those who have met life's hard challenges this year. Those grieving through loss. Those searching for a way to move past. Those living their lives with such grace and pluck that sometimes I cry for the sheer honorability of them, and for the smallness of my concerns set against theirs.

Just now I am remembering: This life of ours. This imperfect mix. This sheen and most essential gloss of Christmas.

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Adjectival

I'm fond of adjectives; you know that I am. But I've had a bit of a wrestle with them lately. A walk around. A glare. Maybe it's all those wordy books I've been reading lately (the writer as autodidact, c'est moi). Or maybe I've been thinking that these blog entries have grown mighty polyphiloprogenitive. (Are you thinking that, too? Were you afraid to mention it?)

Whatever it is, the adjective is on my mind. I've posted some thoughts about its best self at MySpace/HarperTeen today.

Thanks once more to Lisa Bishop, who is about to head home, she says, and watch a really grand movie. (Which one?)

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Alive

After the storm, the ice held its own, high in the trees, so that when the sun hit the otherwise naked branches the color bursts were violet, gold, the color myrrh would be, were myrrh a color.

I wore Anna Lefler's red cashmere scarf and torn jeans and three coats. My hair snapped wildly about my head. I had left no work on my desk, no Christmas package unmailed, no have-to, not anywhere, not then.

It was just me and the weather.

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Wind Howls

I could not sleep, for the wind was howling through the iced trees and a conversation banged around in my head. I roamed the five downstairs rooms of the house, staring through windows, watching the darkness, the ice glints, the blank faces of neighbors' living rooms. Tired, still, awake, always, I took Aleksandar Hemon's The Lazarus Project from the pile of unread books and began, discovering this:

The ice-sheathed trees twinkle in the morning drabness; a branch broken under the weight of ice touches the pavement, rattling its frozen tips. Someone peeks from behind a curtain of the house across the street, the face ashen against the dark space behind it. It is a young woman: he smiles at her and she quickly draws the curtain. All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all the world is.

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Epistolary

Years ago I had a next-door neighbor named Andree with whom I exchanged, on an often-daily basis, letters. I'd write a poem about a missing tooth (her daughter's) or a bird's nest (high in my rafters); I'd write a short story; I'd rail at something; and then I'd tuck whatever it was into an envelope, walk it up onto Andree's porch and leave it in her box—being careful not to creak the hinged thing open, for it was important never to get caught. In time, Andree would write her response upon the thinnest paper imaginable with a loopy blue or black pen, and, at some never-once detected hour, return the favor.

Writing letters gave us room to say what we actually meant to say—between raising children (the thing we most loved) and scouring sinks and cooking dinners and bemoaning the hedge that grew too fast. It gave us a shot at intelligence, when what so much of what we had to do was a drumming, a mind knock, a scrape against the knuckles.

It's funny that we never caught each other in the act, but there it is: We didn't.

In any case, we wrote letters. We wrote our ideas down, our stories down, our critiques and encouragements and disagreements down, and when I moved, we wrote some more, but the almost everydayness of the correspondence was gone, and my world was smaller for it.

I have been remembering Andree these past few days while reading The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, the beloved epistolary bestseller that has, in my opinion, earned its following, those four-one-star reviews on Amazon notwithstanding. The book charms, of course, but the word "charm" is like "precious," like "gem." It's like "cute," when applied offhandedly to women (believe me, I know; I've had my fair share of "cute"), and by all that I mean that the word "charm" diminishes. It doesn't go far enough toward the heart of this book, the research tucked within, the evocation of characters that—while certainly and deliberately contrived so as to steep Guernsey in Austen-ese—forced me at least to throw down my guard and get involved. Charm doesn't say enough about the power of letters, the back and forth, the honesty that rises up between the cracks. The mysterious marvel of questions asked, of answers eagerly awaited.

From Guernsey:

Do you live by the river? I hope so, because people who live near running water are much nicer than people who don't. I'd be mean as a scorpion if I lived inland. Do you have a serious suitor? I do not.

Is your flat cozy or grand? Be fulsome, as I want to be able to picture it in my mind. Do you think you would like to visit us on Guernsey? Do you have a pet? What kind?

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Subtlety's Persuasion

"That's what I look for in my work: when a writer can deftly describe the human experience in a way that you didn't think could even be put into words. That doesn't happen often, but it gives me something to play inside. Too much of the time our culture fears subtlety. They really want to make sure you get it. And when subtlety gets lost, I get upset."

— Philip Seymour Hoffman, quoted in "A Higher Calling," by Lynn Hirschberg, The New York Times Magazine, 12/21/08

(I vote for this. I err on its side.)

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Fuchsia, of all things

I have noted before that House of Dance was written in the wake of my friend Sandy's passing—that it began as a search to understand the gifts that might be yielded in a friend's final days.

I have not said this: After Sandy's sudden, inexplicable illness and death, her daughters celebrated her in a thousand ways—throwing parties in her name, upholding her traditions, giving gifts, insisting, Sandy would have wanted.... Among those gifts to me was a peach-colored sweater drawn from Sandy's closet, which evoked (through its color, through its spangling of beads) the glimmer of Sandy herself.

I bought the Christmas cactus that I've been photographing these past few days in honor of that sweater and in memory of Sandy. I thought it would be nice to have her color near. But ever since I moved the plant to a warmer spot in my window, it has been putting on a show—blooming in triplicate, deepening in color, yielding fuchsia, of all colors. Fuchsia. I wouldn't have thought these daring stigma possible, except that Sandy was just like that—always the first to notice (to celebrate) the thing that mattered most to you just then, forever bringing the birds to her garden and inviting you in.

Christmas is the creche scene we restore to the hearth. It is the blue lights on strangers' trees. It is last night's party at a neighbor's home, the late-night laughter of a home-from-college son, the right thing—found, wrapped, mailed. Christmas is the abundance of color and also the way that color returns us to old friends.

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Book Stash

"You Never Know What You'll Find in a Book," Henry Alford's back-page essay in this weekend's New York Times Book Review, has me remembering this morning; those essays often do. Alford's piece is a roam—across the slice of bacon Reynolds Price once found tucked inside a library book, through the books-as-banks memories of the now-sober Sherman Alexie, and past book-stashed Q tips, notes to self, faux history, cash, even a baby's tooth (I understand that one, and then again I don't).

The essay took me back to the years I spent visiting an old book barn 30 minutes down the road. I went in search of anything Spanish Civil War esque, anything that might tell me more about a novel I kept endlessly rewriting. I'd come home with boxes of things, books inside which had been stashed recipes, memos, polaroids, objets d'art kept safe—for whom? I wondered, for what?

Later, I began to write a novel about the writer who had gone searching—not just for that war, but for herself. I never published that book either, but this morning, looking back over those pages, I found that writer who is still searching, who still loves the holy ground of books:

She was not afraid to stow the seashells in her pockets. Not afraid to chase the moon into the mountains. Not afraid to spend almost the whole of every Sunday in the book barn down the road, which she had fallen in love with for its dozens of stairs, its risers that went up and down, Escher-ized. She had loved the way the books were shelved in old peach crates and how the overturned crates were also chairs. How thick the floors were with splinters. How there was the smell of fruit mixed with the smell of history, and no sound except the sound of turning pages, the sound of an occasional bibliophile’s shoes or the call of Mr. Shipley, “Finding everything you need?” She had loved the room she had thought of as her own: the Spanish room. She had loved the Andrew Wyeth painting on the wall below, and the rocking chair and the old church pew and the gigantic books nobody purchased. She’d needed no one but herself at the book barn. Nothing but the stairs and the gardens of color she could see through the open windows —the reds and greens, the occasional starched yellow.

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She (my muse)

I found her in La Jolla. They mummy wrapped her, sent her home. She stands guard, as you have now seen—with me, above me, near me, as muses must, especially on days like these, when all the skies will offer up is rain one single degree above freezing.

Snow would have been better. (Much.)

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Superior Persons

Since 3:30 AM this morning (with one bloggable exception), I have been amusing myself with Roy Blount Jr.'s Alphabet Juice, the subtitle for which begins (but does not end) with: The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof...

(Other Blount subtitle words include but are not limited to "innards," "pips," "tinctures," and "savory.")

I'm up to the letter "G," and already I have been willingly barraged by a Gertrude Stein quote with actual purchase ("It is not clarity that is desirable but force."), a top Urbandictionary.com definition for book ("an object used as a coaster, increase the height of small children, or increase the stability of poorly built furniture"), and an admonition (well, I took it that way): "Babble is the precursor to speech, babel the collapse of it. Full circle."

In short, I've been delighted.

I love these books-about-words books and the cunning outsized witticisms of their authors. Take Karen Elizabeth Gordon, who parses frequently confused words with fashionable fantasy. Here, for example, we are given the lowdown on unconscious versus unconscionable:

The sandman, sure of Miranda's unconscious condition and his powers of somnolent seduction, was less successful than he assumed as he tiptoed from her bedside: she was merely faking sleep before returning to The Hunted Reticule and its glittering denouement.

Come on. You needed that. I know you did.

Finally, may I share with you a favorite word from The Superior Person's Book of Words? Which would be "procellous," meaning, "stormy, tempetuous." If you don't like that, I yield to you "quakebuttock," which is, according to author Peter Bowler, "a nicely scornful word for a coward."

Earlier this week, another outsized wit suggested that I could do with a tad more "harsh."

Do you think he was calling me a quakebuttock?

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Brave

An email from a friend just now: The cancer she's been fighting for nearly a year is in retreat.

It was frightening news back when—all of us afraid for our friend, who promised a fight. No vitriol, no self-pity, not a moment when she asked, Why me? Her fight was something else altogether—faith in her doctors, strength absorbed from her garden, the deliberate welcoming in of family and friends, a trip to France, a trip to the seaside, three seasons spent steeping herself in goodness and thinking of the goodness first—not the operations, not the chemo, not the radiation, not the prognosis.

She sent photos of her adventures. She asked after our own travels, our concerns.

So that those of us who had the privilege of working with her would say, among ourselves, If only we had some small fraction of her in us.

She was on our minds, all the time. She was always there, in our conversations.

And today, her news.

Sometimes there are miracles. Sometimes we only stand back and say, Thank you.

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Wide Open

The day, that is. The hour.

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Truth and Beauty

I work in a room built partly of glass—the north and west walls each composed of two long, deep, and deeply silled windows. Along the western wall, on differently heighted tables, there is a treble clef of color—the prayer plant, the bloomed azalea, the violets, the beginnings of a tree. Beyond this, outside, is the dogwood full of finch, and beyond the tree is my long, sweeping, and, for now (save for the dancing mirrors) dormant garden.

Yesterday I noticed that one of my Christmas cacti, in bud for weeks, was refusing to fully spread its scintillated peach skirts. I moved the whole to a spot of sun, just to see. I went back to my desk to finish a client brochure, and when I looked up again, not 20 minutes later, the entire thing had gone into outrageous bloom.

I had the macro on my camera. I moved in close. This is beauty, then. And truth.

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Mirror Dance

The sun released itself just now.

Unto these.

Upon me.

Back to you.

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Nothing but Ghosts and the Lost Painting

A few weeks ago the entirely delightful Kelsey Boeckermann invited me to tell the story behind the making of the Nothing but Ghosts cover. Is it all right, I emailed back, if much of the process went on beyond closed doors—and if I had nothing to do with the outcome, save for holding my breath until the official unveiling and thanking my editor and cover designer to great excess in the aftermath?

Sure, Kelsey said, and thank goodness. Because that, in this case, is the absolute truth: Nothing but Ghosts, the cover, is the gift that I was given by two people who worked extremely hard on its behalf. Jill Santopolo, my editor, has appeared on this blog many times before—never gratuitously, always and only because she makes my writing life an infinitely richer one. Carla Weise has had her moments here as well; who wouldn't appreciate an art director who goes the distance for an author she has never even met? (Though I'm coming, Carla, and I'm going to find you.)

Like all my work—the memoirs, the poems, the autobiography of the river, the corporate fable, the young adult novels—Nothing but Ghosts is populated by the known, the actual. In this case, a version of Chanticleer garden, also the subject of my fifth memoir, forms a fictionalized backdrop. Katie, my narrator, is living through loss, something I have had to learn to do as well. And then there's this painting that Katie's father is restoring—scenes inspired by the restoration of the inherited family painting shown above.

In the novel, the painting is similarly strangely skied and time obscured. In real life, the painting was the work of my great uncle, Lloyd Morgan, who designed the Waldorf Astoria, the Pierre, the Boca Raton, and so many other indelible monuments to another time. Years ago, Lloyd Morgan also painted each of his buildings into this single skyscape; when he passed away, the 16 foot x 4 foot canvas was entrusted to my father. Under my father's direction and by the talents of two art restorers, the canvas (once referred to as "the lost painting" in architectural magazines) was brought back to life and now hangs in the Wolfsonian Gallery at Florida International University.

In any case, Kelsey's blogged the Nothing but Ghosts cover story today. Spend some time with her, on her site.

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Carol Houck Smith: In Memoriam

I was deeply saddened yesterday to learn, through my agent and friend Amy Rennert, that Carol Houck Smith, the long-time editor at W.W. Norton, had passed away. I met her only once, in 1998, when she escorted Gerald Stern to the National Book Awards, and sat with me and chatted, as if we were lifelong friends. As if I deserved to be there. I emailed with her just occasionally.

But you didn't have to be in her physical presence to feel her emanating goodness, to know that the world was a better place because she lived within it. She edited Andrea Barrett, Rita Dove, Stanley Kunitz, Ron Carlson, Rick Bass, Joan Silber. She was, wrote Andrea Barrett in a statement printed by the Washington Post, the sort of editor who did "the simplest (and hardest) task: she asked questions. Questions that presumed the characters created on the page were actual persons, the actions real and consequential, the meanings a matter of life and death." She was the sort who made you feel welcome at her table, who wrote, once, to say that she had "just finished The House of Mirth, if you can believe that. I needed a respite from this century."

Of the books that she edited, I hold as most special The Wild Braid, that magnificent end-of-life collage by Stanley Kunitz. It was so perfectly odd, so uncontained, a spill of garden, words, living, conversation, photographs, and a nearly final page that seems just rightly quotable, this day, in which so many of us are fondly remembering Carol Houck Smith:

When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgment of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself. And I think the world tends to forget that this is the ultimate significance of the body of work each artist produces. That work is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitude for the gift of life.

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Remembering my Mother, at Christmas

Except for this blog, I am not writing. I am reading, I am thinking, but I am not writing. If you were to ask me to write a poem I would say that I have no knowledge, at all, of poems—though of course I have written poems, some version of me has written poems, hundreds of them, journals full of them, but: How does one write a poem?

And if you were to ask me how a story gets made I'd ask you in return, What is a story? What does a story need? How do stories survive? I would ask, because it feels just now as if I don't know, as if I could never know, though some version of me has written dozens of stories, maybe hundreds, if you count tangents, drafts, revisions.

It is the holidays, and I am not writing; I am remembering. I am thinking about my mother at Christmas, all those Christmases (oh, how my mother loved Christmas) until her final Christmas, when she wasn't well and when it was my father and me every day for weeks in her ICU room. She was lost to us already, and yet I refused to believe, I held to the idea that she could hear me as I read aloud, that she could see the presents I brought for her—the handmade sweater, the ceramic tiles, the glamorous cooking ware, the roses (one for each of her children), the ornaments, the music and the machine that played the music.

Look, Mom, I would say. Mom, Look.

My mother loved Rod Stewart, and I am remembering that, and I am remembering how we filled her ICU room with his music, and how we waited for her to show us, somehow, that she could hear him. Hear us.

Sometimes I can remember, only. Poetry lives beyond me somewhere. Stories, too.

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Readerville Flashback: Under the Bivouac of Words

Since the turn of this millennium, Karen Templer has been the force behind Readerville, "the social life of the mind." She has built a community around books as gracefully as she continues to rebuild her home and garden—gathering news, opinions, table talk around the headlining and obscure.

Back in 2003, I wrote an essay for Karen that I called "Under the Bivouac of Words." I'd just returned from a writer's panel—a memoirist's panel—and I was feeling confused, irked by my trade, disappointed (most precisely) by myself.

A writer’s job is to tell the best possible story with the most accurate language in the most intelligent way. A writer’s job is to be economical when economy is called for, and to be lavish or lush or ironic or vulnerable or alluring when something else is at stake. A writer’s job is to observe and then translate, to elucidate and entertain, to evoke, provoke, entrance, enthrall. Why not do it all with fiction?

Today Karen is reissuing that essay, posting it alongside a host of interesting matter. While I no longer write memoir, I still care deeply about these issues, still wish for a less tangled writerly life. So that when I re-read this piece of five years ago, I felt a sweep of recognition, a catch in my breath.

Readerville, the online magazine, is most assuredly worth your look, if you haven't had a chance to visit before.

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Rivers Rising

I was talking with a friend (well, not talking, but almost) about his river. He reminded me of mine, that seductress who rises from and through time on the first page of her autobiography, Flow.

From within the fissure I rise, old as anything.

The gravel beneath me slides. Blueback herring and eel, alewife and shad muscle in to my wide blue heart, and through. The smudged face of a wolf pools on my surface, and for that one instant, I go blind.

Hemlock to either side. Nut trees. Laurel copses. The stony backs of snapping turtles on the shore, muskrat, shrew, and from the unlanterned forest, the bark of a fox, the skith skith skith of snakes over leaves, the prowl of a bobcat, and when it rains the rain is its own kind of song, not just a drumming, but a lyric.

Were there language, I’d be my own lone letter.

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Curiouser and... (Zenobia, in multiple languages)

It seems like a long time ago now that Matt Emmens, then the CEO of Shire (and now its chairman), called me into his office and asked if I'd ever seen "that book" about mice, change, and cheese. Technically I'd seen it. I hadn't, though, actually read it, but that, as it turned out, proved immaterial. Matt was wondering, he said, if I might like to embark on a small journey—on the co-authoring of a book that wouldn't be about cheese or mice or hamsters, even, but about, say, the role of the imagination in corporate America. About risk, adventure, and dreams. I gave him one of my funny looks, then scurried away for awhile. Reread Calvino and The Little Prince, a few chapters from Alice in Wonderland. Began to conjure up a place that became, in time, Zenobia—an architectural wilderness, a corporate behometh, a case study in brokenness and ruin and its ultimate (in this case magical) repair. Zenobia: The Curious Book of Business emerged as a fable, a fantasy; its illustrations were entrusted to my partner. And all of this became an odd little book, published one year ago by a house that took (shall we say) a risk. A house known as Berrett-Koehler.

Old news. History. Brought up only now because my mail box has been filled of late with the most interesting concoctions—Zenobia done over in Spanish, Italian, Korean, Chinese (the complex characters). It's a wonder to see the same book unveiled in so many different colors, with so many reconvened titles, with extraordinary new illustrations that feature clowns and one-eyed men. Moira, our heroine, mostly gets to keep her bright red shoes. But her hair changes color, and it flows, a reddish brown, and I'm thinking that she's had her bright eyes Lasiked, because how else might you explain the sudden absence of her big-framed spectacles?

I am delighted by these renditions which I cannot read and wish I could. I am desirous of a bigger brand of knowledge that would enable me to know how a story has gotten told in languages that look like wash and wonder to eyes such as mine, which have seen too little of this planet.

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The What Next

I've seen it in the children with whom I've talked stories, words, and writing. I saw it among the young photographers of Centro Nueva, who joined me not long ago for an afternoon of seeing, recording, bearing witness. I see it every time I talk with my son, who is home with us now, an entire month between college semesters (he talks logic, he talks hymns that become rock anthems, he talks libertarian media and its counterpoints, he talks about yielding to a truer self). What knowledge does. What learning makes one hungry for. How learning begets wanting begets needing begets passion.

It's the passion that we want most of all for our children. That we want most of all for each other, for ourselves. The waking up to the moon, the urgent now. The question, jolted through: What next?

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Whether the Weather

We drove several hours and then we drove back, and the journey in between wasn't asphalt; it was weather. It was torrential, blinding rain yielding to cranberry-colored landscape (the rocks, the dust, the odd nuclearity of ice-wrapped limbs) and then everything was ice and the wheels beneath us slid and slid, toward darkness, toward blankets of snow. Returning home this morning, there was snow enough to build little snow creatures (had we the time) and slush enough to make us wonder whether we should actually attempt the half-plowed hills (were we crazy?), but after an hour of feeling like pioneers, we found ourselves on roads that again were calm, the gray lifting. Then there was a chunk of sun sitting on a throne of clouds. Then we were within a half hour of home. Then everything was familiar, our own lives again.

The point is: You can travel no more than 300 miles in one direction and experience an entire novel in weather—all the Shakespearean sturm and drang. I went a thousand places in my mind—back and forth, exhilarated, still, frightened, exasperated, awed. I remembered childhood weather. I remembered the weather from books. I thought of Faulkner again, that river rising.

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Amazing Grace

Last night, in the second tier at Verizon Hall in the Kimmel Center, a three-year old boy sat beside me. He was flawlessly dressed—his burnt orange jacket matching the laces on his shoes, his collar up around his ears, his pants dark, his shirt bright white—and his eyes were two fully rounded moons.

He sat on his grandmother's lap beside his mother, his uncles, his aunts, another child, perhaps his brother, while beyond, on the stage in that gorgeous, vibrant space, the Soweto Gospel Choir sang, and not only sang, but danced. Songs in Sotho, songs in Zulu, and the most revering, reverberating rendition of "Amazing Grace" that I will ever hear.

Through it all, the boy sat there on his grandmother's lap—undistracted, utterly seduced—his hands coming together for the beat, and sometimes he would syncopate that beat, and sometimes he would yield to the left, to the right, bend like a reed, for the choir's songs required dance of all of us. The colors of its costumes—mango, plum, lemon, salted lime—would not let our eyes go.

And then one among them on that stage said (a lilt in her voice, a song even as she spoke) that the Soweto Gospel Choir was singing for peace and global union. She said that, and the place went absolutely wild—first the clapping, then the roaring, then some standing tall, to say yes, yes, global union—and the child beside me went wild, too. As if he knew.

For he has his whole life ahead of him, and peace is still a possibility.

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What Becomes the Heart

I have been thinking, over these past quiet days, about all the books I've failed to complete, or to render finely enough. I spent years writing a novel about the campesinos of El Salvador; it sits in the basement somewhere. Five years were given over to a domestic tale called (after my great-grandfather, Horace Kephart) The Aura of Loneliness; it was too quiet, found no publishing home. I've written 80 drafts of a novel that takes place in an olive cortijo in post-Spanish Civil War Spain—and I'm still writing that novel in my head. There was a book of essays, back when my life was given over to the planful writing of essays.

What is the point of writing books that others may never read? What is the point of writing at all? This morning, reviewing my own failed fragments, my own self-contained or collapsed concepts, I feel not angst at all the "wasted" time (which is how I've often referred to those projects—what a shame, such wasted time). Instead I feel gratitude at my own younger, yearning self, who thought to grab at the float of life passing by and to tether it—imperfectly—to the ground.

For the sake of mornings like these—so pitch dark, so set up against storm—when I rediscover, for example, my uncle, Dan D'Imperio, sitting here so that I might find him all these many years on:

My Uncle Danny was always taller than the rest of us, and his hair, whooshing as it did across his head like some deracinated wave, made him seem even taller than he was, as if he came from Hollywood, when in fact he rarely left the Jersey shore. He was idiosyncratic, and we loved him for that. He was an artist and a writer, a seeker and horder of the singular and strange, so that his modest split level was filled with antiquities and kitsch, broken busts and amulets, a peg-legged couch, a bear-head rug, a Waterford, that briny air. I vaguely remember the dynamic of his house, the way, at the kitchen, where he poached his eggs, you could go downstairs, or you could go up. And I remember—like a dream, I remember—how, if you went outside through the thin screen doors, there was absolutely nothing—no trees, no grass, no zinging fireflies. Only the smell of the beach, several miles east. A ghost of a smell. Ephemeral. Lasting.

For we were hardly ever in our Uncle Danny’s house, my brother, my sister, and I. We imagined it mostly, from the stories he told, and from the gifts that he brought us, each Christmas. We imagined how he lived from what he gave to us, imagined that we came to possess what he left behind—the shells and sweaters and old scrapbooks, the rose-shaped earrings in their little turtle box, the Christmas balls he fashioned with his long and graceful hands. We imagined his gifts into covenants. Into ligaments tying truth to us, and us always back to him.

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Scuttering Halt Again

Yesterday, an argument deep into the night: What is the value of work that does not reach toward and appeal to the broader spectrum—that does not, through whichever (often mysterious) mechanisms this happens, become, in its own time, popularly known? An old question, certainly not original.

There were three of us, and on the table between us sat Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, a book that I am re-reading for the fourth time which, when it comes to Faulkner and me, often feels like the first time, so wrangled and new are the sentences, the phrasing, the means of disclosure.

And I kept saying, or trying to say, or wanting to say, that those who stand in the margins taking risks, who fight against all odds to get their stories heard by some one, or two right now, today, matter (that is, they, too, have meaning) because they redirect the eye and ear, force a new kind of attending, herald emergent byways.

My words useless and inarticulate, and besides, I should have simply quoted from Faulkner himself, who didn't write sentences the way others did and didn't tell stories that had (over and over) been told and who wasn't writing (I would guess) for the "average" reader, whomever that is. Who mixed up language so newly that horse and his rider got rendered in rigid terrific hiatus and scuttering halt:

They stand in rigid terrific hiatus, the horse trembling and groaning. Then Jewel is on the horse's back. He flows upward in a stooping swirl like the lash of a whip, his body in midair shaped to the horse. For another moment the horse stands spraddled, with lowered head, before it bursts into motion. They descend the hill in a series of spine-jolting jumps, Jewel high, leech-like, on the withers, to the fence where the horse bunches into a scuttering halt again.

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Whole Happiness

"Your happiness could be contagious," the headline read (Melissa Dahl, MSNBC, December 4), and who is not going to stop and read an article that describes the state of joy as a catching kind of virus, with Framington Heart Study researchers "able to measure a three-degree spread of (one) person's cheer"?

"On average," the researchers wrote, "every happy person in your social network increases your chance of cheer by 9 percent—and the effects of catching someone else's happiness lasts up to one year." A "stranger's good mood" packs more wallop than a pay raise. It enhances health, fuels longevity. It rests responsibility for reverberating goodness right back where it belongs: on the shoulders of each one of us.

If such is the case (and from now, I'm banking on it), my own life was extended immeasurably last night at Julia and Gene's gracious home, where we celebrated the happiness of parents-to-be, Cristina and Jeremy. In that big, Wissahickon-schist house with a hallway built for waltzing, we were teachers, entrepreneurs, students, those just starting out on a career and those weighing the possibility of new directions. We were, in other words, the ballroom dancers who have found their way to a studio called Dancesport and who have, in the course of going toe-to-toe with the party samba, the pass-your-feet foxtrot, the too-fast cha-cha, the deep-kneed bolero, and the go-slow-so-you-can-dance-it-fast salsa, forged a community of the viral-happiness variety.

Last night was whole. It was warm and good and moving and right—a fire in the fireplace, a to-die-for spread, cloth napkins!, provocatively shaped forks, a Georgette-caliber cake (and that would make it quite a cake), a child named Mercy taking notes, and a father-to-be's expression of love for the woman whom he has chosen as his wife.

I will float on this happiness for weeks to come.

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Heart Traces

Adam Gopnik's "Man of Fetters: Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale" (Dec. 8 issue of New Yorker) is a work of Gopnik-caliber art, jam-packed with the curious, the rending, and the infinitely quotable.

Take the following truism, for example. Every famous man gets reduced to a single word: Darwin is evolution, Wilde is wit, Mill is liberty, and Johnson is his dictionary. I read it several times. I stopped. I pondered. If I were famous what would I hope my reduction word would be? I came up with absolutely nothing while managing painfully to recall many one-word zingers that have in the past been tossed at me.

But what I really love, what will go inside my book of words and quotes, is Gopnik's final, singing line:

Love, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper.

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Kite Caught in Tree

I woke up remembering the children to whom I once taught writing—the ones who came to my house during many summers, the ones I later joined at a garden, Chanticleer.

For many, English was a second or third language. For some, home was an un-airconditioned two rooms in the heart of West Philadelphia. One was a burgeoning actress. One had a vocabularly that utterly dwarfed mine. One was an internationally acclaimed child pianist and composer who, though already in graduate school at the age of 12 and a frequent guest on David Letterman, hadn't had, in his short life, the chance to hang out with kids his own age, or to write his ideas onto the page. One hailed from Egypt, and one hailed from Pakistan, and one was my son, oh, the stories they told, and oh, how I loved them. Truly, I loved them all, not a single exception to that rule.

Today, perhaps because my friend the literacy coach Andra Bell had written to me about the children she loves, I woke up thinking of them.

Once, in the garden, I asked the children to break into groups and to walk the paths with me—some imagining themselves an elephant attempting to shimmy down the narrow macadam, some as 17th century explorers, some as a raft of musical notes, and some as a kite whose string was caught in a tree. As teams they collected metaphors. Singularly, then, they wrote their poems.

This morning I remember my friend, Samir, and his gift of a poem to Chanticleer, and to me.

What A Kite Thinks of a Garden

I the kite
Avoid water,
Avoid elephants.
I seek out danger,
I want to know
Where everything is.
We have fears
Of lawn mowers and trees
Because we always want to be free.
We attract to color
Because we want to see
If there are more of us
Who want to be free.

Samir

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The Details, Stoked

The high, sweet smell of an overripe Bartlett pear, sun that falls silver on the branch across the way, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly read through this morning, a promise I kept for myself. I'd watched the movie a few weeks ago and couldn't get it out of my head, nor was there any reason to: It is a bright pirouette of a film, an affirmation.

Appreciated even more now, in light of this masterful book, this memoir, a mere 132, big-type pages long and steeped. Bauby, the former editor, rendered locked-in by a massive stroke and speaking through the blinking of one eye. Letters read off to him until he consents to one and then another. Words congealing. Story. Hope.

Most of us are blessed with hands that grip pens, fingers that do our calling on keyboards. And yet we are, perhaps, tempted to hurry through scenes for the love of writing the next one, or to subsume a detail not readily recalled, or to lean on a familiar turn of phrase because the melody is familiar (I have done these things; I confess). If we are, if I do, I will again read Bauby, to be reminded of what a man blinking each letter into place can achieve with language and with heart:

The lighthouse and I remain in constant touch, and I often call on it by having myself wheeled to Cinecitta, a region essential to my imaginary geography of the hospital. Cincecitta is the perpetually deserted terrace of Sorrel ward. Facing south, its vast balconies open onto a landscape heavy with the poetic and slightly offbeat charm of a movie set. The suburbs of Berck look like a model-train layout. A handful of buildings at the foot of the sand dunes gives the illusion of a Western ghost town. As for the sea, it foams such an incandescent white that it might be the product of the special-effects department.

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Sun through Rain

A friend, writing yesterday, described a friend. She is, my friend wrote. She is: a wonderful soul, smart, opinionated, talented, fearless, full of energy and passion and love.

That present tense: is.

And then this: She passed away last week at age 33 in a rock climbing accident.

The is and the was. The impossible breach between. The utterness of loss.

This blog, then, a tribute to my dear friend's dear friend.

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Thanking my Lucky Stars

Clearly, I've already said much too much today.

Except there's this: I have two extraordinary women and bloggers to thank for noticing the work that I seek to do here, the stories I try to tell with images and words.

First, might I thank Barbara, whose beautiful, thought-provoking blog was the subject of last Sunday's New York Times article on "slow blogging." I was moved by Barbara's comments in the story, logged onto her blog, discovered the value of her mind, and said something. She took the time to visit me here, and to mention my work on her site. I thank her.

Then, last night or this morning (I didn't sleep; this day has blurred), I discovered somehow (I really don't know how) that a clearly generous, quite popular, and talented blogger soul named Amy had mentioned my blog on her site.

Well, what can you do, when the heavens open up and sweetness rains down?

One thanks one's lucky stars. And the stars themselves.

Speaking of stars—this photo montage was created by my artist husband/business partner years ago, when I was working on a novel that takes place in southern Spain. Something Lenore posted a while ago has me thinking about that novel again. I have something I'd like to write into it. And I just might.

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Ron Rash, Serena, and the Horace Kephart Legacy, continued

I have just finished reading Ron Rash's novel, Serena, a book I referenced yesterday in this blog, and I feel less anxious about the whole matter now. To begin with, as a few other critics have noted, it's not entirely clear what Rash is up to here, for this is a book full of extreme and, therefore, nearly one-dimensional characters.

Take the title character, Serena, a Lady MacBeth (save that she suffers no guilt), who rides a white Arabian horse with a snake-fetching eagle perched on one arm and a one-handed ruffian at her side; she's married Pemberton following a three-month courtship and now rules, with him, his logging lands in the Great Smoky Mountains. Pemberton, for his part, climbs off a train in the first pages of the book and slays the father of the young teen he impregnated before marrying Serena. Thinks nothing of it. Never looks back. Next plot point. Next murder.

Against this backdrop is the making of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and hence the introduction of my great-grandfather, who is referred to, by Rash's characters, as "a Harvard man turned Natty Bumppo," as "stubborn and cranky," as "overly fond of the bottle and not nearly the saint the newspapers and politicians make of him," as "the hermit fellow," and in one scene, "Kephart sat beside the newspaperman, looking badly hungover, his eyes bloodshot, hair uncombed. He huddled inside a frayed mackinaw, a pair of soggy boots in his lap. Kephart stared straight ahead, no doubt envying his companion's expensive wool Ultser overcoat."

Kephart's work on behalf of the making of the national park is also cited here, and toward the end of Rash's novel, there's a touching scene in which Kephart reaches out to the young teen who has given birth to Pemberton's son. But Kephart as a person, even a fictional one, never fully emerges, and having read Rash's book through, I'm not sure that it was the author's intention to create the sort of nuanced personalities that Waugh, for example, enlivens in Brideshead. Perhaps Rash's intention was to write more in the manner of myth, while using people who actually lived, on land that stands today, as integral to his tale.

(In his acknowledgments, Rash writes: "Although some of the minor characters in this novel actually existed historically, they are fictional representations." Which I squinted at, didn't entirely comprehend.)

When one sees one's ancestor in a book, the hope, of course, is for a fully nuanced account, even if that character is, as Kephart is here, a secondary one. It's a hope fueled by ego, perhaps, or for a desire to set things right on the page, for Kephart was so many things to so many people, and I've often struggled to understand him myself in essays on, for example, his book, Our Southern Highlanders (a book Rash clearly draws from but never cites in the acknowledgments). For those of you who may be reading Rash's book and may be wondering about this enigmatic man, Kephart, I'd like to share with you this passage from the writings of one Karl Brown, who interviewed Kephart during the course of a movie shot in 1927 in Graham County:

“He was a small man, something below medium height, but chunky and intrinsically formidable. But the one feature that distinguished him from all other human beings I have ever met was that one of his eyes was a bright blue while the other was a deep brown. …

Kephart leaned back in his creaky-springed swivel chair and said, as a sort of cue, ‘Well?’ … I decided then and there that this was no man to fool with. There was something so direct and honest in his bearing that he reminded me of others of his kind … and so, even though I knew in advance it would be an uphill job, I decided to be as honest as I could manage, considering that I was somewhat out of practice …

Kephart advised Brown, “to be a gentleman and you’ll be treated like one” and that “honesty is not only the best policy: it is the only one.”

And here, for the record, is Kephart himself, in his own melodious, soulful, fully three-dimensional voice:

When I went south into the mountains I was seeking a Back of Beyond. This for more reasons than one. With an inborn taste for the wild and romantic, I yearned for a strange land and a people that had the charm of originality. Again, I had a passion for early American history; and in Far Appalachia, it seemed that I might realize the past in the present, seeing with my own eyes what life must have been to my pioneer ancestors of a century or two ago. Besides, I wanted to enjoy a free life in the open air, the thrill of exploring new ground, the joys of the chase, and the man’s game of matching my woodcraft against the forces of nature, with no help from servants or hired guides.

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Distinguishing Greatness

Back to Brideshead Revisited, for it is important not to leave that book behind before celebrating a few more aspects of its differentiating greatness. I mentioned structure in yesterday's blog, and I should have been more clear, I should have said: Isn't it extraordinary how Waugh is able to shift his camera's lens from character to character, giving us all we need to know about each one, precisely when we need to know it? Waugh unveils relationships, and this trumps any adherence to strict chronology. It is by shuffling his time deck that he gains much of his power, so that by the time we begin Book II and we are told, "My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time," we already fully understand that we are not just reading a masterfully assembled story. We are being steeped in something much deeper.

That's one thing. But there is also, of course, the peeling away that Waugh does, his sui generis descriptions of people, his way of showing the magnitude and mystery of time passing. Take this passage, about his heroine, Julia, whom Waugh's narrator knew as a 20 year old, and whom he rediscovers several years later:

She was not yet thirty, but was approaching the zenith of her loveliness, all her rich promise abundantly fulfilled. She had lost that fashionable, spiderly look; the head that I used to think Quattrocento, which had sat a little oddly on her, was now part of herself and not at all Florentine—not connected in any way with painting or the arts or with anything except herself, was her own essence, and could only be known in her and by her authority and in the love I was soon to have for her.

One last thing, just for today: Waugh's mastery of nuance. Not just the nuance of telling one story overtly while suggesting another (the told story of one aborted love affair, the never quite told story of a suppressed one). But Waugh's ability to pin a concept to the wall. Here he is on charm:

"... Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you."

Brideshead Revisited is a classic, as my niece Claire would say. An electrification, on so many levels. An instruction.

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Serena and the Horace Kephart Legacy

And so I finished reading Brideshead Revisited, and I stand, with so many of you, in awe of it: the miracle of its structure, its graceful folding in and out of time and perspective, its flawless sentences and interesting words. A masterpiece, as countless many before me have said.

I turned, then, to Serena, the new Ron Rash novel that is getting such play on best of the year lists, and what do I find but a fictional recreation of my great-grandfather, Horace Kephart, of whom I have written in this blog before. A troubled soul, a brilliant librarian, who left his wife and children following a calamitous breakdown and who never truly returned to them. Went off, instead, to the Great Smoky Mountains, where he studied the people and wrote books about them, where he refined his campcraft and wrote books on that, too, where he became a mayor, where he loved nature with supreme erudition. Toward the end of his life, my great-grandfather fought with others to create the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and whatever else you might wish to say or think about him, he helped save part of the world for the rest of us.

In any case, Kephart is here in Rash's book, and from what I can tell, Rash has not made a pretty figure of him—attributed thoughts and deeds to him that might be hard for a Kephart such as myself to swallow. An interesting choice, I think, to use Kephart's name and work while fictionalizing his character.

But I'll read on and report more fully when I'm done.

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Juarez: The Failed State?

The cover line of the current issue of Newsweek reads "How to Fix the World," and so I opened the magazine with hope. Desperate hope, of course, for aren't we all in need of true, good stories—proof that we have what it takes, somehow, to right our planetary wrongs, to be trustworthy caretakers of Country Earth.

But the first article I fell upon blared at me with this headline: "Bloodshed on the Border: Life in Juarez, where drug violence has created the equivalent of a failed state on our doorstep." The border between El Paso and Juarez is the most menacing spot along America's southern underbelly, I read. Juarez looks a lot like a failed state, with no government entity capable of imposing order and a profusion of powerful organizations that kill and plunder at will. Later: The absence of authority has opened the way for hordes of criminal gangs—some of them offshoots of the cartels; others, bands of opportunistic street thugs—to carve out specific rackets, like kidnapping, human trafficking, and car theft. Another burgeoning activity is extortion.

The more I read, the sadder, more desperate I became. For this is Juarez of which Arian Campo-Flores and Monica Campbell write—the country where, just three years ago, I along with my husband, son, and about two dozen others, had the week we will never forget. A week living among the gracious people of Juarez. A week helping to build a community bathroom on the high, white sand plateau of a squatter's village called Anapra. A week where we felt as if our actions, our doing, our seeing, meant something.

Yes, at the time, Juarez had its share of problems—a history riddled with the unaccountable, unforgivable murder of women, an economy that was afflicted with drug trade. But every country, every city, has its underworld of menace, and in Juarez, we didn't just discover an entire community of gorgeous children and caring parents and construction workers who waved happily at us from their trucks or from rooftops. We discovered group after group of American citizens who were building houses, or providing care, or teaching children. Americans who had found an undeniable, irreplaceable happiness in Juarez.

There were thousands of us finding meaning in Juarez. And an uncountable number of Juarez citizens yielding goodness to us.

In The Heart is Not a Size, due out next winter, I write about this place that I came to love. I allude to the children I met and photographed, to the power of working in the hot sun on behalf of others. I refuse to believe that all is now lost in Juarez. I will pray that Juarez is webbed into the emerging plan to "fix" this world in which we live.

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