Bruce Springsteen and the Beautiful Ambition

I love Bruce Springsteen. I can't help it; I do. He was the pounding backdrop of my freshman year at Penn. He was the songs I danced to when my son was young. He is the voice in my ear in the car when I'm alone. And after 9/11 Springsteen was everywhere. His anthems. His unprettied-up love for the big things that life takes and life yields, because what do we want from the people in our lives? We want them real. We want them honest. We want them color dripped and story wide and gracious with silence, and Springsteen is that kind of person in our lives.

About "Working on a Dream," his newest album, Springsteen says this to the New York Times today : "I wanted hooks, hooks, hooks—things for people to sing, and sound that was going to lift you up. I wanted to capture the intensity and immediacy of passionate love, and then its resonance in and beyond your life. And I wanted it to sound, like, classic: verse, huge chorus, sky-opening-up strings."

My idea of a beautiful ambition.

So he's singing at the Super Bowl, and I'll be watching. He's got a new album on the way, and I'm going to get me one, stow it away, in the glove compartment of the car, set it spinning when I need thrum.

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The Longest Distance (short story excerpt)

Even when you don’t ask you have asked by the way you look at me—by how you try to hold my eye, try to suggest (a touching gesture) that it is concern you feel, not curiosity. But if I had answers don’t you think that I’d confess them? That I’d have said by now, put out a proclamation, that Joelle died for this, or for that. That she died because. All I can tell you is what you know, which is: Joelle is gone. She’s the slash of black you see just after lightning breaks the sky. She’s the place where a cliff stops being stone and becomes the air that you could fall through.

From "The Longest Distance," a short story soon forthcoming in No Such Thing as the Real World, a HarperTeen collection also featuring An Na, M.T. Anderson, K.L. Going, Chris Lynch, and Jacqueline Woodson. And who had the idea for the anthology in the first place? Why, Miss Jill Santopolo, of course.

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Honesty: A Poem

The crescent moon has fallen to its back,
and the night is glass,
and on the wall in the room where I lie waiting
hang the hollowed eyes of a ram,
the perfect bone
of what gets left,
of what will be watchful then:
Self unto soul unto self.

There is a difference between
the dawn and the light.
One seeks.
One hurries.

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Vivid

So that I went out (between client calls and a dance lesson) searching for vivid. And I knelt down to the snow that had gained a patina (in the chilled night) of ice. I wondered, for a moment, what it might be to separate, from all the white, a snow crystal, a single one. Bending down, kneeling then, I felt Anna's scarf unravel. When it fell, it was the vivid thing that I'd been searching for all along.

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To Siberia

Those who read this blog know just how much I love Per Petterson's novel, Out Stealing Horses, which I bought by near accident while awaiting a train, and read on the way to Manhattan and back. I had a student, then, whom I was teaching—an emergent poet. I wrote to him that evening, insisting that he read the book. K. hardly ever did a thing I suggested (he did his own thing, better). But this time he listened. This time he read. And in an email just following K.'s high school graduation he wrote, The part when Lars shoots Odd and Jon is sinking to his knees outside the house, and his father comes storming out of the forest like a giant. It's all there, I can see it so well the way it is written.

It's all there. That's the writer's job: To bring the reader right there, where everything happened. Yesterday and early this morning, as I sat reading To Siberia, another Petterson novel, I marveled over Petterson's patience—how he waits a very long time to sink the reader into this story about a young woman growing up in the hard, white cold of Jutland. The novel is, for the longest time, a sensory slide. It is reminisce and recall, and the elements are fragments, until somewhere deep into the novel the reader understands that this is the story of a sister's love for a brother who ultimately (it is war time) disappears. True, Petterson signals this early on. But he doesn't make the reader care, he doesn't make it clear that this is the place where everything happens—that the entire story will live inside this vulnerable, nearly illicit love.

So that To Siberia feels submerged and coded and then, only then (but it takes time), essential.

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Winter Sounds

Today at HarperTeen's MySpace I'm blogging about weather and how it shapes my prose. A subject I likely would not have razzled up for consideration had not the ever-dear Lisa Bishop written earlier in the week and said, "How about a blog entry for our site?" Lisa and I spend most of our email time talking about movies. I just saw "Milk." She just saw "Slumdog Millionaire" and "Frost/Nixon" (both high on my list of wanna sees). Today she was telling me about "Happy Go Lucky." I hadn't known about that movie until she told me.

Imagine all the things I do not know. Oh. It pains me to imagine.

In any case, the world here went from snow to sleet to rain (to many people without power), and while I tried to capture the metamorphosis with my camera, I failed. Everything gray, meaning everything bleak, meaning no contrasts, which is what a photo needs. When I can't capture my world, I have a harder time feeling as if I've lived it. I want to go back and do the day again. Give me some vivid, I plead with someone, something. Give me some something to hold onto.

Tomorrow is another day. I'll go back out there. Intrepid.

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John Updike and the Beauty of the Book

It is often only after dinner has been cooked and all the spices put away that I travel back into my office to learn how the rest of the world has fared throughout the day. So that I did not know until late last night about the passing of John Updike. It took my breath away. It seemed wrong, not yet his time, for how Updike still gleams in his poignant October interview with Sam Tannenhaus at the New York Times, how gloriously that white hair still shines. Even as Updike suggests that perhaps it is time to step away from the writerly task. Even as he confesses the "stickiness" that attends the writing of an historical novel. Even as he notes the prevailing glory and glamor of youth.

It feels personal with me and John Updike. Not because I've loved or even read all 61 of his books, but because he always represented to me the potential elegance of the writerly self. In 1998, when I knew next to nothing about books but somehow found myself seated at the National Book Awards, it was Updike who spoke that night about the inherent physical beauty of books and type. I looked at the enterprise differently after that. I never opened another book without feeling its particular weight or noting the width of its margins or the roundness or sharpness of its letters "b," "w," "a."

So may the great man of letters rest in peace. In his own work, and in the reviews he wrote about the work of others, he had and has so much to teach.

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Because

Because tomorrow we are bound for snow, I tonight post color. Because it is winter and indoors, I declare early summer, a garden. Because I disappeared for a while to write a novel, and because the writing hurt, because it brutalized, because it taught me something, I announce the blessings of pushing through. For no certain win. For no sure glory. For nothing more than the satisfaction (weary, and good) of knowing that I asked the best of myself, and that the I of me stood tall and answered.

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Forgiveness: An Excerpt

Now Katherine stands at the window of the bedroom she and her twin once shared, watching a gull on the sill. It’s as if the bird has gotten lost all these miles from the ocean, all this distance from the color blue. Philadelphia is a steam swell, an ash pit, a scorcher. It is no place for a gull, not this September. But there the gull is, clinging to the sill beyond the window of Katherine’s room, casting a shadow on the pillow where Anna once burrowed her head. Katherine won’t turn to see what is inevitably there—absence and shadow, condemnation.

— Forgiveness, a novel-in-progress

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Writing My Life: Upcoming Talk

In a few weeks, on Tuesday, February 10, 7:30 PM, I'll be participating in the Tredyffrin Public Library Grand Opening Event with a talk called "Writing My Life." With my own photographs as my stage, I'll be musing about the ways my perspective and stories are shaped by the life I live (in a tiny house) on the storied Main Line. Ghosts in the Garden, a memoir, erupted from Chanticleer, of course, but so did Nothing but Ghosts, the young adult novel due out in June. Seeing Past Z, my memoir about teaching young souls the power of stories and words, is saturated with the regional and personal. Undercover was inspired in part by my years at Radnor High School, House of Dance takes place in a modified Ardmore, down the road, and the first long act of The Heart is Not a Size (due out next winter), is touched by the world in which I live. Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River and Forgiveness, that much-discussed novel-in-progress, are both born of the tactile pulse and power of my city, Philadelphia.

I have always loved my home. I have always turned toward it. But this will be the first time that I will be thinking out loud about how my facts conspire with my fiction, or, simply, with language itself.

I hope you'll join me, if you can.

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Words and the Real Life

This afternoon I stopped all other things to consider the content and nature of an advanced nonfiction course I'll teach at a university next fall. From filing cabinets I haven't consulted in years, I yanked folder after folder of workshop lessons, Xeroxed stories, notes I'd made to self. All old to me, all stale. Rising, tripping now over the paper columns on my floor, I traipsed toward bookshelves—tore my bookshelves down. Or not down (that isn't right) but apart. So that soon I was barricaded in with books and soon I lost all track of time. Soon I was all caught up reading passages I'd once thought to underline.

Here's a bit from Annie Dillard, her classic, The Writing Life. It reminds me of a conversation I had not long ago, around Christmas time, with one who believes that lives are to be lived, not written. (I'm thinking that we can both write and live. Oh, I'm hoping so.):

The written word is weak. Many people prefer life to it. Life gets your blood going, and it smells good. Writing is mere writing, literature is mere. It appeals only to the subtlest senses—the imagination's vision, and the imagination's hearing—and the moral sense, and the intellect. This writing that you do, that so thrills you, that so rocks and exhilarates you, as if you were dancing next to the band, is barely audible to anyone else. The reader's ear must adjust down from loud life to the subtle, imaginary sounds of the written word.

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Almost

Yesterday in my travels I came upon this boy on ice—sweeping a hockey stick before him, training a puck. The pond ice was blue, and beneath it swam herds of orange koy, slides of sunset colors going by. I walked the circumference of the pond, then walked out onto the ice, where I could imagine myself pushing off and gaining speed. Throwing myself open to the wind, a red scarf trailing behind.

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Driving

Driving the cold roads alone, hunting for photos. Bruce Springsteen songs pounding against the roof of my car, Anna's red gloves on, the sun dying too fast and chimneys smoking. I have 20 pages of a novel to write. Tomorrow I return to my shell.

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Unveiling

Jayne Anne Phillips made this essential point during the Q&A that followed her Lark and Termite reading at the Philadelphia Free Library this past Thursday: It is not until a book has been written and once again written that it reveals itself to the author—that the story itself becomes clear. For a long time one is only writing, only following the sound of words, the innuendo of character, the possibility of scenes.

Yesterday my own novel-in-progress revealed itself to me, finally. At last I understood just what is at stake, what must be raised up and made urgent.

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The Beckoning of Lovely

If you don't already know Amy Krouse Rosenthal, let me introduce her to you. She's the author of surprising, unexpected books (Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, for example, which comes equipped with its own theme song and two-minute short, as well as the children's classics-as-soon-as-they-were-released Little Pea, Cookies, The OK Book). She's a New York Times Book Review critic, the host of a Chicago Public Radio show called "Writers' Block Party," a greeting card creator, and the inventor, always, of radically delightful ways of seeing.

A while ago Amy produced a short film called "17 things i made," which was followed by an experiment—a call to viewers to meet her in Millennium Park on 8/8/08. Something special would happen, she promised. Those who came simply had to trust.

What happened that night was crystallized in a short film titled "The Beckoning of Lovely," which did a funny little thing to my heart when I first saw it. I'm not going to try to explain it. I'm simply going to say that, in a very difficult time, Amy asked the world to make lovely things—any lovely thing—and to send those things to her so that they might be considered for inclusion in a feature film. Amy gathered around her some of the best in every business and waited to see what might happen.

Today I'm joining Amy's Next Phase Team as, in her words, a Supremely Excellent Judge (International Panel). I've judged many things in my life—chaired the National Book Awards panel for Young People's Literature, chaired the PEN First Nonfiction Prize jury, sifted applications for the National Endowment for the Arts, took on a Family Circle poetry competition, judged the feature stories of the nation's university magazines, selected the winner of a University of Pennsylvania student essay contest. But I've never been involved in a project like this—never been asked to go to the very heart of lovely—and I find the challenge exhilarating.

Stay tuned.

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Revisioning

On finding the energy to remake one's own book...

And thanking that most remarkable Anna Lefler, who graced my life with J. Crew before the whole nation was clamoring for Crew, sent me flowers that still sit here, whole, and remarked on 36 pages of a newly made book with the words I absolutely needed just then.

And I'm thanking you, too, Miss Jill Santopolo. Despite the fact that our ships cross in the night, and also because of it. (And also despite the fact that you own better shoes than I ever will. But we knew that. For years we did.)

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The Blur of Childhood

Perhaps because we here on the east coast have had a bit of a cold spell lately. Perhaps because the heating system in our old house went down a few months ago (and cannot be repaired til summer, leaving us with a patchwork of space heaters, leaving me endlessly bone-chilled, cold pounded, fractured), I keep thinking about my early days on ice skating rinks.

This was after I'd taught myself to skate on Boston ponds. After I'd told my parents that I wanted nothing more than blades and ice beneath my feet, that I might die if I didn't have this, that I might not grow up to be me. After Robyn Rock, the skating sensation of the Wilmington, DE, rink, came out one day during a public skate session (this being a few months post-Boston) and taught me to waltz jump for real, to rightly spin. This was after that, when I was skating early morning, late afternoon, most every day. It's those days that I've been thinking about lately.

Days when the cold was something I sought, I craved, when I craved that music playing. I wanted to float—forever, always. I wanted to leap and never land.

There are few photographs of me as a child. There are just a handful of me on skates. I have in my possession two. It seems right that they are imprecise, blurred through.

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Laundry: A Poem

Two years gone and still your hand
Lifts over the notes we sang to ease you
Home. Winter, and the dark had fallen

Through. Your future then
Was the tricking back
Past time. The smell of laundry
Hung to dry. The strand
of pearls you dared to buy.
The day your mother

Died. Your future was your sight,
Which had gone before you,
And your words,
Eclipsed now, too,
And your hand lifting over the notes we sang,
As if we might go with you, touched.

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Clockless

When you work for organizations around the world—in China, in England, in Chicago, Connecticut, Pennsylvania—the hours of the day track against few measures. At 4 AM you're on a conference call with someone just finishing their afternoon cookie. At 10 AM you're e-mailing with a client just back from lunch. All along you're trying to remember to hit 5 PM deadlines, for that's when your Connecticut friends are headed home.

Time loses scale, perspectives shift, and in all these years of doing this, I've laid a claim to one timeless zone that is mine alone: an afternoon walk through familiar streets, in any weather. I take my camera often, just in case a fox trots by, or a gang of deer, or if ice hangs in spectacular daggers from the limbs of a tired tree. I unjam the thoughts I might have had the rest of the day long.

Yesterday I went out in the thick of snow, looking for color and succeeding hardly at all, for it was white against white, gray against gray, footprints already swallowed by drift. Until finally I happened upon this child with her bright pink saucer, living a clockless moment, too.

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Fire

You think that because I make fear I don’t fear, but you’re mistaken. I am afraid of rain showers, spigots, pitchers, sea mists, and snowfalls. Of bricks that won’t burn, of macadam, of blankets. Or pearl ash and compressed air, of gunpowder. Of anything that snuffs or dampens, of pine combs and seeds that burst to life when I am in the mood for killing. I am afraid of being hemmed in and broken, of thinning out to only smoke and only vapor, of tracking high, toward the sky, and disappearing, fading.

Of being made extinct.

Of being forgotten.

Fear impels me. Fear is where I draw my courage from.

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Make it Simple

At the consistently wonderful Readerville, we can today ponder the 2008 international fiction bestsellers, in which Khaled Hosseini ranks first and Stephenie Meyer fourth, Jodi Picoult twelfth, Lauren Weisberger seventeenth.

In the Guardian story that presents the list (and that Readerville links to), Philip Jones, the managing editor of the Bookseller's website, offers up this explanation: "They are all telling fairly simple, universal stories. From vampires to evil businessmen to wizards, these are recognisable tropes."

Note to self: Find yourself a recognizable trope.

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Lima Nights/A Chicago Tribune Review

My review of Marie Arana's new novel appears in this weekend's addition of the Chicago Tribune. The photograph was taken a few summers ago, in a park in Barcelona.

There was the hint of the sui generis about Marie Arana's 2001 memoir, "American Chica." Born of erupted memories, crackling with kismet, forever scuttling between the past and the now, "Chica" was the story of the author's own Peruvian-American childhood. It questioned collisions and reveled in them. It wrestled with demons and angels, with the intoxicating smell of sugar, with the consequences of a marriage—that of Arana's American mother and her Peruvian father—that yielded, in Arana herself, a "New World fusion." "Chica" was high art, a seraphic amalgamation.

"Lima Nights," Arana's second novel, likewise wrassles with the intersection of people drawn from different worlds. This time, however, the star-crossed lovers are a 15-year-old tango dancer—indigenous, dark-skinned, desperate to escape her shanty life—and a married, middle-aged man named Carlos Bluhm whose heritage suggests upper class but whose daily reality veers toward tawdry. Carlos sells cameras for a living while his mother and wife conspire to pawn family valuables to keep the household afloat. He has gone out to a bar with friends. He spies Maria. They tango—almost. Maria slips a note into Carlos' pocket. The line has already been crossed.

Whereas "Chica" concerned itself with meaning, "Lima Nights" concerns itself with sequence, with the question "What happens next?" What happens when Carlos decides that he must see this young dancer again? What happens when Maria makes it her business to win Carlos' heart (or is it his heart?) so as to gain access to his seemingly upper-class existence? What happens when Carlos' wife learns of the affair, as of course she will, for Carlos, who isn't particularly bright, blazons a trail with the evidence of his dalliance? What happens when Carlos and Maria get stuck with each other, for frankly (and soon enough), few others will have them?

Love isn't at stake here; consequences are. The house where Carlos and Maria live, 20 years after their first flirtation, is falling down around them. Carlos is aging. Maria has cut and dyed her hair, collected some weight around her once graceful limbs. They have gained a talent—each of them—for denying the other what is wanted.

"Lima Nights: makes a quick dart across time—purposefully maintaining its distance from its protagonists, shuttering their thoughts, rendering Carlos and Maria as near mysteries to themselves. About Carlos, for example, Arana writes: "He was keenly aware of the stiffness in his knees, the shrinking girth of his chest, the soft little pot of his belly, but he couldn't quite say why he had lived with the woman upstairs for twenty years, or even how he felt about her, really. The days had slipped by. That was all."

Maria, for her part, does not ever seem to know if she wants Carlos solely for the once-glorious house where they (in separate bedrooms) live, or if something greater stirs within. She craves marriage, that much is certain. She craves the safety such an institution purportedly confers: "All I know is that I need to understand why, after twenty years, the man I live with won't marry me," she tells one of Carlos' friends. "I'm afraid more than ever now that I may lose him, and if I lose him, I lose my roof, my security, everything."

Despite its gorgeous cover and tender opening pages, "Lima Nights" is for the realist, not the romantic. It is for those who are willing to stare unblinking into the dark tunnel of irreversible choices.

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Remembering Venice

This morning, in the shiver of my office, slight snow outside, I am remembering Venice in summer, the hour before the crowds, before the pigeons, even, before the sun had notched the sky. The whole place was mine. I could have danced it. I almost did.

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The Sacrament of Vulnerability

At four a.m. reading Forrest Gander's As a Friend. Like Carole Maso's Ava only a harder strike against the heart. The brutality of it. A liar's life yielding the purest chords of truth. Fractures and fragments (for that is how this story is told—in fractures and fragments) suggesting the whole mesmerizing ruinous sack of the universe. "To be consequent to those around me." That's what the brilliant, profane hero of this story wants. To accept our own vulnerability. That's his prayer:

Maybe the best we can do is try to leave ourselves unprotected. To keep brushing off habits, how we see things and what we expect, as they crust around us. Brushing the green flies of the usual off the tablecloth. To pay attention.... To approach each other and the world with as much vulnerability as we can possibly sustain. To open out. With all our mind and body and imagination, to keep opening out.

Like I said. As a poet. As a friend.

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Louise Erdrich: The Red Convertible (a Chicago Tribune review)

I have two brief reviews in this weekend's Chicago Tribune. I share one with you here, for Louise Erdrich's The Red Convertible, a collection of short stories that I wholeheartedly embrace. The second review spotlights Marie Arana's Lima Nights, a novel about forbidden love and its consequences.

It was Louise Erdrich's fault that I fell back in love with fiction. I speak of years ago and the opening pages of "The Beet Queen." I speak of "Love Medicine" and "Tracks." I could not get enough of the odd modifiers, the unglossed people, the immaculate tattling on about butchers and knives peddlers, weigh-shack employees and sink holes, Jell-O salads prettied up with sliced radishes, 24 fried fantail shrimp on a bed of coleslaw. It was all so quirky, also authentic. It was so tumbled down and awkwardly fine, and it didn't matter who was talking—male or female, child or adult, love bruised or love infatuated. Erdrich got it right. Laughing, I read her. Amazed, I couldn't set her down.

"The Red Convertible: Selected and New Stories" is Erdrich's compendium of greatest hits—30 familiar stories (many of which formed the backbones of her multi-narrator novels) and six not previously published ones. The short story, Erdrich tells us in her too-brief preface, is where her novels often begin, where ideas "gather force and weight and complexity." So Mary and Karl, the abandoned children of "The Blue Velvet Box," could not be left alone once they stowed away on a freight train in the spring of 1932. Karl would go west, and Mary east. Mary would stay right where she landed, in that place called Argus, in that life of sausage stuffing and butchering. Karl would return, years later, "fine boned, slick, agreeable, and dressed to kill in his sharp black suit, winy vest, knotted brown tie." They'd keep showing up in short stories—changed, familiar, irresistible—until a novel had been webbed together of the most immaculate parts.

Erdrich's stories don't grow old. They grow more astonishing for how fresh they still feel, packaged this way, wide, wrinkly, back-to-back. You only have to read the first story, which is also the title story, to get a whiff of authorial wizardry—to understand that Erdrich is, in the space of 10 pages, going to give you not just a whole family and the way they talk, but the way they hurt and the way they almost heal one another. She's going to give you one line, "My boots are filling," that is going to go and break your heart. She warns you. You follow. You fall.

Erdrich's stories always sound like Erdrich, but they don't go and get stuck in some rut. Take, for example, "The Painted Drum," originally published in The New Yorker in 2003, about an estate appraiser who helps the widowed, the orphaned, and the just plain baffled sort and assess the stuff of the deceased. The story takes place in New Hampshire in spring—a season "virginal and loudly sexual all at once." It starts out feeling sober but quickly changes mood as the narrator, trusted to help appraise a particular estate, is tempted into an act of thievery, which may also be the same as survival.

Erdrich holds nothing back in "The Painted Drum;" as a writer, she never does. It's as if she's perpetually writing her first story and her last.

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Ice Skating

The cold snap has me thinking of ice and blades, of first waltz jumps on frozen Boston ponds, and of the Schuylkill River, years ago, when skating clubs rose up along the banks and men pushed their ladies about on bladed chairs. (Ah, gallantry, where has it gone?)

But what does it feel like to be skated upon? I wondered about that as I wrote Flow, the river's autobiography. I thought it might go something like this:

Imagine taking a needle to the point of blood upon your palm. Imagine drawing that needle around and around, leaning in on it, forcing an edge, tearing at the creases and the lifelines, the ridges and slightest hills that forecast your happiness. Imagine the skin giving way.


That's skating.

(with thanks to The Library Company of Philadelphia for use of this iconic Boathouse Row image)

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How to be Brave in El Salvador

We taught each other, Ana Gabriella,
In the kitchen, in the courtyard,
Wherever Nora’s maids weren’t looking.

This was after the war and before the earthquake,
When the country smelled like coffee
And optimism was a saunter on the street,

Though there were men with rifles everywhere and cautions:
Go nowhere alone, go nowhere bearing jewelry.
Sometimes I held your hand or you took mine,

And my Spanish was incurable so we talked
By walking, by noticing the same bird in the sky,
By sinking our fingers into the bullet holes that

Splattered stucco homes, turquoise and salmon
And porcelain-colored homes. You were nine,
And had I daughter I’d have chosen you, and this was

Before you stole me roses from Nora’s garden,
Cut them with stolen scissors when they were whole
And redly bloomed. You have grown up in the meantime,

I have heard, and five years of growing at your age
Is a long time, so that last week, when your card arrived
And I saw your handwriting for the first time,

I was both humbled and surprised. Remembering
El Salvador is also always remembering you,
Ana Gabriella, and the roses I longed to carry home.

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The Only True Genius in the Family

The morning after my mother passed away, the sky was every color—cranberry, orange zest, azalea pink, lemon peel. I told my dearest friends that this was proof of my mother's lingering presence, a peace offering after a terrible time. Several weeks later, a package arrived in the mail—a perfect knitted purse of sunrise colors. It was small, an ornament, to be hung not used, to be filled with nothing more than the essence it already contained, which was the love of my friend, Jennie Nash. Her time. Her thoughtfulness. It is a work of art that hangs here, in my office. I note its brilliance every day.

This morning I rose early to read Jennie's second novel, The Only True Genius in the Family. I was for many reasons feeling blue and not at all convinced that I could be lifted from the closed shell of myself. On a day I needed elevation (transformation), Jennie was once more there. I love this novel of hers—so quintessentially Jennie, which is to say honest, deeply felt, smartly paced, and highly relevant. Genius is the story of a woman named Claire (another Claire, I smiled to discover) whose daughter is an exceptionally gifted painter and whose father was a renowned photographer. Claire stands in the middle—a bridge, yes, a facilitator, maybe, and perhaps an artist, too, though she doubts herself, questions the career she's forged in food photography.

Jennie's book is due out in February. I quote a passage here that reminds me of my own last Thursday, when I got out to the beach too late to catch the pink that I'd been chasing. Claire, like me, is a photographer, stalking the perfect picture of a sun-touched sea.

The sky gets light by small degrees. It is night, and then there is a moment when it is something else. I wanted to catch the sun itself, emerging over the houses, so I waited while the light rose. But when the sun peeked over the roofs, I questioned the moment. I waited one beat, then two. And then the sun was there, glaring bright in the sky. "Take it, take it," I told myself, but the sun kept creeping higher and I kept stalling and then it was too late.

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A Writer, Still?

It's been a long time since I've coiled into an empty place, silenced the phone, turned my back to clients, and written the start of something new. So that often the thought behind the thoughts in my head is, Am I a writer, still, and also, If I didn't write again would I be whole?

In the beginning I wrote toward the seduction of language, toward the song of the stories in my head, toward the need to understand them. It's different now. If I were writing I would be writing because the work is medicinal. Because it cures me of myself like little else can.

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Nothing but Ghosts, An Excerpt

My mother’s things are in there—her clothes, her jewelry, her boxes of shoes, her collection of tinted glass bottles. She had lined the bottles up on every inch of windowsill, so that the room would never repeat itself—would be the color of whatever bottles the sun had struck, whatever ways the reflections mixed on the walls and on the ceiling. “It’s like being inside a giant kaleidoscope,” she said. And the thought of that made her happy.

In the end, after the doctors said that there was nothing they could do, after my father had begged for a better answer, after I hated every living thing for living past my mother, the kaleidoscope was all my mother did—she watched the room change as the sun moved toward and then beyond her. There would be spots of lilac and tangerine and moss green on the ceiling up above. There would be shades of ruby in the creases of her pillow.

“You’re so beautiful, Claire,” my dad would tell her. But mostly he would sit, saying nothing. The chair where he sat is still there, empty. The colors collide, but no one’s watching.

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From My Office Window Just Now

As I work into the night.

(Some days just don't turn out as planned.)

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Overwintered: A Poem

There will be another spring: The overwintered bulbs
Have begun to crack and send up early measures,
And the sleeves of forsythia that you soaked in your tub
Grew buttons of yellow that bloomed. It just took hoping for —
The painted birds, the worms after rain, the humanity of bees,
The sun on the bark of the birch that turns the color white
To amber. The balance tilts — fewer words than scenes — and green
Is antidotal, and old lovers linger longer over what was had
And what not taken. There’s more of morning,
More of the afternoon, and while snow is still a possibility,
So are tulips. I am working on becoming someone who is in need
Of less forgiveness, and I’ll want my hands for that, my eyes,
I’ll want more sleep, which I shall find, and if the hawk comes again
To my garden I will not interrupt him with my questions.
For we all worship weather in our own way, and stories, in the end,
Cannot be bargained for.
Nothing’s enough and everything must be.
It will be another year til winter.

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Of My Own Always

It doesn't get any easier saying goodbye. I don't expect it ever will. I look into my son's eyes, I sit with him, we talk, and everything is right with the world. Everything else disappears.

While my son was home he read one of my favorite thin books, When the Emperor Was Divine. He declared it (very) good. A boy after my own heart. Of my own heart. Always.

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Snow-lit Drive

We'd waited all day for the snow, and when it came the flakes were saucers—huge and slant, conjoined. We had had our time as a family of three, but the next day our boy would be headed back to the hills, to Literature and Advertising, to Probability and World Cultures, to a sound engineering booth and a dorm. So that we drove through the night on back country roads—the snow falling, the moon rising, the world bright and wholly bittersweet, for what does one do with the deep, rutted, impossible love for children who grow, too, who emerge, like us, into the age they are becoming? What does one do, but drive across roads and inside the shell of a heart-quelled silence?

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The Age I Am Becoming

A short (just over a minute) story about a dance lesson, a life lesson, and another coming to terms.

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Young at Heart

I have a new hero, and his name his Bob Cilman. He's the charismatic leader of that average-age-equals-80 singing group that calls itself Young@Heart. Have you seen this documentary? Do you know who is out there rocking the Stones and Cold Play and the Ramones and Springsteen—screaming or gentling or whatever the song demands? Do you know how lyrics change their shape and meaning depending on who is singing? Take "Stayin' Alive," sing it at 92, and see what that means. Take "I will Survive" or "I Wanna Be Sedated" or "Road to Nowhere."

But most of all—oh, most of all—take "Fix You," and give it to a man whose singing partner has just, a few days ago, passed away, to a man who himself is four months older than the doctors said he ever would be, and who sings seated beside his oxygen tank, which grabs at the air as his resonant voice wrestles with the words. Lights will be guide you home ... and I will try to fix you.

They sing at a prison and every damn thing that can happen to a face happens to the faces of those prisoners. They sing for those who mourn, and hearts crack open. They sing because they are not afraid of who they are, who they have become, what time has done to them. They sing for each of us, and Bob Cilman—the man who made this happen, the man who was serving meals to the elderly and then assembled a group and then started needling and even yelling when they got it wrong because he expected them to get it right and who now stands on that stage singing and dancing and prideful and gorgeous alongside his singers—Bob Cilman is my new hero.

Watch just one of these videos, and he'll be yours, too.

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In Thanks

Thank you, Miss Em, for naming House of Dance one of your top ten reads of the year. I know how much you read. I know how graced that recommendation feels.

Mari, thank you for naming House of Dance as one of your favorite books of the year. I am in such tremendous company in your list. I'm ... astonished!

To Becca, who writes one of the smartest book blogs in cyberspace—her idea of a review being my idea of a review, her tastes often mirroring mine—thank you for giving me a set of butterfly wings in your latest post. To Lilly for so sweetly acknowledging me in her own blog, and for entering this community so gracefully. To Tapestry100, for being such a kind supporter of Into the Tangle of Friendship, and for naming it one of his favorite books of the year.

To Sherry, who not only raised the remarkable Miss Erin we all love, but who also leaves exquisite comments on this blog—thoughtful comments.

And thank you, Lenore, for your rocking yesterday honor. You are your own tour de force in this wide web world. I'm honored to count you as a friend.

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What Makes a Child Lucky

Years ago, Alane Mason introduced me to Gioia Timpanelli, through her exquisite Sometimes the Soul. A few days after Christmas this year, a package, wrapped in pink, showed up at my door. Another gift from Alane—Gioia's newest, signed. What Makes a Child Lucky.

This is the slim volume I read early yesterday morning while the sun rose over the kicked-up ocean and the wind blew the gulls from from green-slicked rock to rock. A perfect book in that it is an ageless book, timeless, too (the two not being the same thing at all, I realized, as I read on and through). Lucky is the story of a boy whose best friend is murdered by the very gang of thugs who soon absorb the boy into their strange circle. The setting is rural Sicily. The hills are ripe but also lonely. There is a shepherdess who tends her flock and then there's Immaculata, the old woman who keeps the boy alive amidst the murderers and kidnappers. She teaches him to cook and to hunt for wild asparagus. She whispers a saving grace into her ear and teaches him the meaning of compassion.

Lucky feels like fable, except that it's so immaculately told. It is saturated with the patient knowing Gioia has marked out as her own. "A great poet said that we make all art from memory and hope," her narrator says toward the end. "Memory is a funny companion. I myself love and trust it. And hope? It is stranger still. Both qualities are essential in my everyday life, as essential as seeing that thin red bird that stitches the high branches of a fir tree with its flight."

Joseph, who tells his story after he's grown up, reminded me of the children I met in the squatter's village of Juarez a few years ago. Of this boy, pictured here, who had nothing but his own great happiness and a borrowed baseball cap, and who would not be defeated.

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Atlantic City

For one moment yesterday, it was all possible: The misted winter cold. The hazel-eyed warmth. The silence. The communion. Outside, down on the beach, four walked toward a storm.

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Self Portrait at Beach, Winter's Morning

Earlier today I was walking the beach alone. The sky was (at last) blue. The ocean was frisky. The gulls paid me no nevermind. Fervency had replaced the fever of a pent-up winter.

I have been gone just 24 hours and my back isn't aching as much as it had, and I read a book, and I saw the sea, and I did nothing I was supposed to be doing, and it was good.

But two friends—a bookseller, a librarian—had happy news for me upon my return to reality, and I thank them both here. Em for telling me about how The Happy Nappy Bookseller has put in a long-shot Newbery wager for House of Dance. Charlotte for discovering (and then passing on the news) that Chasing Ray has today expressed hope for Nothing but Ghosts in her provocative (and wonderful) scouring of upcoming YA titles. I'm honored to be noticed by both reader-bloggers (and to have the friends that I do).

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Ice Storm

Last night: Ice. The slick embalming, the weighted branches of trees, the snap of power lines, while on the streets one heard the constant blare of ambulances, fire engines, police. Someone was hurting out there. Within, all was dark and chilled.

I thought of the girl I'd seen at the grocery store the day before—her cheeks scuffed red, her eyes swollen, her features heavy with some secret, incurable sadness.

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Chanticleer and the Girl Beneath the Water's Edge

A few days after Christmas, I received a comment on a long-ago post from someone who calls herself Barnswallow. She wondered about this statue that keeps appearing in my books—in Ghosts in the Garden (a memoir) and then again in the YA novel, Undercover. She is a real statue, as the photos attest. Her home is Chanticleer garden. I've always called her The Drowning Girl, but only because when I first found her, I was drowning myself and full of false projections.

I promised Barnswallow that I would find out more from Bill Thomas, the executive director of Chanticleer, this garden that has in some way or another inspired so much of my work and teaching and which appears again, in fictionalized form, in Nothing but Ghosts.

Today Bill writes to say that this statue was designed by a sculptor named Edward Hoffman III, who was born in Philadelphia and whose work appears in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. He reminded me, as he always does, that the Chanticleer gardeners never think of her as drowned, but as a peaceful image under the water. She is owed that, this correction of terminology, and in honor of her, and in respect for Bill and Chanticleer, I reprint a small bit from Ghosts in the Garden here—a piece nested toward that brief book's end.

March 6 2009: Anne Sims of Chanticleer has just written with new news (research will do that!). Her words today revise the words above: Hi Beth – I’ve been doing a little research on our lady – in checking the archives and old appraisals, I believe the artist for this sculpture is Paul Anthony Greenwood; Ned Hoffman made some other pieces for the Rosengartens, but not the bronze of our lady. I didn’t see her in her non floating position here, but there are photos of where she was in the garden off Minder House.

It happened that I met the gardener who’d thought to nest the girl inside the pond. He had found her, he told me, near one of the houses, sitting in dry air, on a pedestal, and she had seemed lonely to him, in need of water.

So he conveyed her down the hill (this I imagine as a struggle) and placed her in that little pond, making sure she did not topple. At first, the gardener said, the girl suffered from a slight miscalculation, for she had been placed so close to the small pond’s edge that children stroked her head too often. So one day the gardener moved the girl out further toward the pond’s just slightly deeper center, again taking care so that she would not fall or topple.

I told the gardener that at times (on darker days) I called this girl the drowning girl; disappointed, he shook his head. She was not drowning at all, he said; her life was neither violent nor tragic. She was peaceful, she was serene, and besides, she was in love with an old catfish. “Catfish?” I said, for I had seen the rosy-red minnows and the three goldfish and the uncountable frogs, but not a catfish. And he said, “A catfish, of course; he swam from far away to find her. Swam down a stream and up a pipe and through something else until he was there, where she was, with all those minnows.

“He’s with her all the time,” the gardener said. “And somehow you didn’t see him.”

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The Sun Rises where it Sets

We spend years writing our books. Finding the pulse of them, taking the risk of them, summoning our own courage in the daunting face of them. Say what you want. Tell your own stories about writers you may have met who seemed so sure-footed, so self-contentedly fierce, so immune to the critic: At the kernel of every writer is a bleeding, tender spot.

Yesterday this thing happened: An editor read a book that I have written and re-written at least a dozen times over the past few years. That historical novel that I sometimes reference here. This editor is the only who has read these pages as these pages (my agent, bless her, read a very early draft early last year), and while I know that the chances of being published these days are slim, and while the fate of this novel is anything but secure, I wanted, to begin with, to know if at least one other would join me in the journey this novel takes. To know if it might be as alive for another as it is for me. In the midst of preparing taxes yesterday morning, the editor's words came in. The generosity of them went straight to my own bleeding, tender spot.

I stood from my desk. I walked to my window. I cried.

Today this other thing happened: My friend Jayne Anne Phillips, who has worked for nine years on a novel she's called Lark and Termite (I've written about her in this blog, I've written about this miraculous story) received a most exquisitely glowing review in this morning's New York Times. The sort one dreams of getting one's whole writerly life long. I saw Jayne Anne's photo (she looks beautiful as ever), read the review, and did a little dance for her.

It's not always doom and gloom in publishing. Sometimes writers find readers who will live their books with them.

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Poetic Beauty

For poetic beauty is a composite of ruthlessness, arrogance, irony, carnal love, imagination and memory, of light and dark, and if we cannot achieve all of these together, our result will be impoverished, precarious, and scarcely alive.

Natalia Ginzburg, translated by Lynne Sharon Schwartz
"My Craft," in A Place to Live

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Forever Young

Sometimes when I'm out walking in the dark, as I've just been, I find myself in the company of K., who has lived seven full decades at least, but isn't a day over 33. She has spectacular green eyes and a jumbo turtle in her back yard, and once, when a girl in Philadelphia, she watched an entire circus come to town, unpack, surprise, then leave; let her tell you about the elephant when you see her. There are hats in her background and many children, two lost already, and K. will tell me about stews and how she makes them; zinnias and how she holds them over, year to year; an after-dinner drink that is hers alone.

She knows who has come and gone in the neighborhood, and we mourn together, as tonight we have, over the loss of a young neighbor—too soon, unexpected, unjust.

Finding K. in the dark is like finding hope on a day when hope is up to no good, has gone hiding. It is this promise whisper, these words in one's head: Beauty, true beauty, never leaves.

I've never photographed K., though someday I must, I will; I need those green eyes forevermore. But last week I was photographing my friend, Judy Evans, whose beauty will never leave her, either.

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A Mercy (Toni Morrison)

I walked toward and finally into Toni Morrison's A Mercy. My feet a little uncertain on the slippery path, one voice of the many not ringing entirely right to my ear—at first. It's 1680 and a hazy, betraying time. It's a trader named Jacob, his wife Rebekka, their servant Lina, a promiscuous child named Sorrow, a traded-to-cancel-a-debt girl named Florens, and a blacksmith, an African, who walks about Jacob's homestread free. It's a time of religious radicalism and flesh trade and small pox—a time when to own more is to seemingly store up legacy, and when to love hard is to fall.

A choral story—not limpid but liquid, where brutality bathes in prose that is sometimes so gorgeous that one cannot reckon the act with the words used to describe it. It's necessary to read Morrison, or at least the best of her. It is important to go back to slave trade, to the jungle overhang and to the panting bears of a not-yet-settled country.

From the end—like a prayer, like the rising final words of a sermon, like a truth that will not be suffused:

... to be given dominion over another is a hard thing; to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing.

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Olive Kitteridge: Shadow and Light

I was not prepared for the power of Elizabeth Strout's extraordinary novel-in-stories, Olive Kitteridge. I'd read Abide with Me in total and Amy and Isabelle in pieces, and while both of those earlier Strout books are well-made, they aren't nearly as inhabited as Kitteridge, which brings to forceful life a retired schoolteacher who has not made it her business to please. Olive Kitteridge has been herself—her hands the size of a man's, her height unnatural for a woman, her bulk an unapologetic presence. She is frequently disappointed in others. She's not in the habit of honest self reflection. Her husband, Henry, was the good one, the kind soul. She was the undeterred realist.

Novels in stories often don't work—can feel like grab-bag constructions, a publisher's label applied to loosely related themes. This one does. In stories that don't seem to be much about Olive (they are about neighbors, rather, about a piano player or illicit lovers or a young anorexic), she is revealed, and in this lies suspense (one feels her on the horizon, one awaits her knock on the door). In stories in which Olive claims every page, she is transfixing, appalling, somehow sympathetic. She is the shadow and light, wholly given up and over.

Strout's writing here is superb, by which I mean not just her style, but what she has to say about the messy gist of things. I share with you this:

... She knows that loneliness can kill people—in different ways can actually make you die. Olive's private view is that life depends on what she thinks of as "big bursts" and "little bursts." Big bursts are things like marriage or children, intimacies that keep you afloat, but these big bursts hold dangerous, unseen currents. Which is why you need the little bursts as well: a friendly clerk at Bradlee's, let's say, or the waitress at Dunkin' Donuts who knows how you like your coffee. Tricky business, really.

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Far Away and Back, But Different

Yesterday, at the home of a writer friend (the real writer sort, Pulitzer worthy, you see, you wait, he is) and his librarian wife and their very beautiful child, the conversation kept changing hue. So that it was horses, cooking, politics, the science of information, rigor mortis, first-grade art, the search/find/rescue of a 1965 silver Globetrotter. A tour, even, of the silver Globetrotter, which belongs to the neighbors, who are also collectors of lampshades, collectors of color, collectors of records, both the big ones and the 45s. They own a jukebox; you should see. They own a basement that reminded me of my mother's mother's.

It was all happy knock, yesterday—step to the right and the talk is of a bone-marrow meal; step back and stoop, and you are racing a dark-haired boy's cars across a polished wooden floor; just keep standing there and someone will say, But how do you know Jay?

There is an art to gathering the people in your life. To making your home their home for the afternoon. While upstairs a giant of a manuscript waits for the midnight Mahler, the feverish imagination, the talent that feeds equally on life and solitude.

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Writerly Process: Special Features

An impromptu gathering at our home last night—two dear friends and our son coming in and out from a party of his own. Late into the night (rather, earlier today), the conversation turned not to books, but to writers and to writer talk.

It was suggested (by one) that the writerly process is too internal to be of any communicable interest. That what goes on inside a writer's head should stay right there, in a writer's head—the poem or the story or the book ideally speaking exclusively for itself. Process talk has inherent wings in the field of design (how did the green swan-footed couch come to sit beside the pink silk lampshade?) or in film (who doesn't luxuriate in the "Mad Men" special features? who doesn't want to know every last thing about that series' how?) or in the kitchen (which spice and how much and what is the chemistry of baking powder?), but not in writing, where the obsession is the writer's alone and the gist, the longing, the choice making, the fears, the megalomania do not make for relatable tales.

I didn't sleep the rest of the night, retracing the contours of this conversation in my head. I considered how long it takes to produce a story, even, that is worthy of another's glance—of all that time in between that is only choice making, only process. I thought of this blog, which is nothing if not process talk—the splintering off of obsessions, the dwelling with them, the fervent hope that what is said will be of some inherent interest.

I thought of you, reading this blog. I thought to say, Thank you. And happy new year.

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