Purge/Sofi Oksanen: Reflections

I end this year privileged with time—time to read and to reflect, time to walk and to spend an afternoon, and then again an evening, with friends.

I take no ounce of time for granted.

This afternoon, in the quiet of my family room, I finished reading Purge, the international bestseller by Sofi Oksanen.  It is a story that begins with a fly in an old woman's house—a dirty fly, an invincible fly, a bother.  Aliide Truu would like to kill that fly, but soon something more distracting has entered her view—a hump or lump of something crumpled at the foot of the birch outside.  Aliide has had plenty to fear in life and she is, by some, despised, and it takes her a long time to decide to investigate that lump.  It takes her even longer to decide what to do after she realizes that the lump is a girl—battered, bruised, torn, filthy. A girl at the base of the birch.  Her name is Zara.  She is, Aliide will learn in time, a victim of the sex-trafficking trade and, more than that, a girl with a tie to Aliide's own sorted and shameful past.

Aliide and Zara, then, are the protagonists of this haunting book—two women whose lives have been defined by politics and treason.  Aliide, for her part, is the victim of those wretched forces of oppression that ruled Estonia for much of the 1940s; she is also the victim of her own lust for her sister's husband.  Zara is the victim of her own innocence and desire:  promised money for a job she did not understand, she took the bait, and suffered.  Is there any rescue left in these two women?  Can they save each other, or themselves?  Working with snatches of stories and letters and reports, Oksanen goes back and forth in time, exposing horrors, incriminating, exculpating, braiding these lives around each other.  She is not seeking quiet lyricism on these pages, simple entanglements.  Instead, she is pulling back the curtains on a part of the world, and a chapter of history, that I for one knew little of. 

Pay attention, Oksanen says.  There are women being brutalized by sex trafficking, even today.  There are people living with facsimiles of themselves, impossible regrets.  There are landscapes terribly unknown to us and wars we haven't studied.  Open the book, and read.  Taking nothing at all for granted.

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Budejovicka/Beth Kephart Poem

Budejovicka

It was the way the dust hung, globed and white,

and how every room was square and thumbtacked green

with ivy.  She’d left three slips

drying on the line outside, and a peach on the table,

and the old bear of her winter coat in the closet because it was still,

in some ways, an animal, and, besides, you were only

passing through and it was summer.

You bought a heel of bread at the Metro stop and hung

a paper goose from a hook in the ceiling and when you tell

the story (you tell the story)

the puppets are alive because of you.

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Remembering the Beautiful, the Ever-Bright Tessa Edwards

The blogging world has lost one of its most exquisite voices this week, and I am brokenhearted.  Tessa Edwards was a woman who taught us how to love the world and what it means when the world loves you back.  She took us, by way of her artful, inimitable blog, to Africa, to the sighting of whales, to the pleasures of a fresh fruit dish, to the children whose health, through the Swazi Project, she so steadfastly supported.  She painted art, she cooked it, she wrote it, and when she sent this print of hers to me, by way of London, it was packaged in gold and sealed with gold bees—so gorgeously delivered, so lovingly done up that I did not dare open it for days.

Tessa fiercely loved her husband and her children, and was never afraid to say so.  When she grew ill, she did not complain.  She would somehow find a shred of goodness in it—would celebrate the hours she now spent reading, or the travels her daughter took when she could no longer travel herself.  We became friends through her blog, but I loved our private conversations, too, the emails she would send explaining a bit more about her life or about her home.  Modesty, always, prevailed, as when she wrote, about her beautiful home:

We've been lucky with South Down - it's such a well proportioned house so it's easy to make it look quite pretty.  Anyone with a love of colour could do it without blinking...honestly.

A desire to share the world she was privileged to see was all-pervasive, too:

Dearest Beth - Hello!  Thank you for your sweet note.  I'm very fine thank you, all sun-soaked and brown after our most wonderful trip to Turkey.  What a magical place it is - so seeped in history and so astonishingly unspoilt and so utterly beautiful.  We'd been to Istanbul before - a truly marvellous city - but had never visited the eastern coast.  Far from the madding crowds, it is a place where time has stood still and pastoral life continues as it has done for centuries.  I will be writing more about the region and posting photos on my blog in order to share its charm.

She made us feel, finally, as if we were there with her, as if we had indeed traversed oceans and miles and found ourselves in the same living room, sitting with a cup of tea.  She wasn't virtual to me, ever.  She was real and alive, and she will always be.  I am posting this, from an email, so that it will always live, and so that you will see how she made all of us more alive, with her:

Dearest Beth -

Oh, I'm almost dumb-struck!  

I had just finished catching up on your always fascinating, always thought-provoking, always profoundly luminous blog posts - and reading all the interviews you've had recently when I heard a knock on the door.  I got up from my desk, my mind awhirl with images and words from you, and opened the front door to Mr. Postieman.  He smiled and chatted about the weather as he handed me my mail which I took from him in dreamy manner, nodding vaguely at his forecast of rain to come.  

Scuttling off to the kitchen with the pile of magazines and envelopes and leaflets that he'd given me, I absently flicked through the stack and put it on the table for later perusal.   Then I filled the kettle and while waiting for it to boil, I noticed that a white package had slipped out from between two magazines.  I picked it up and looked at the postmark.   USA.    Hmmmm, I wonder......

I opened the seal and drew out a book which I recognised instantly -  Ghosts In The Garden! There, on the flyleaf, a message from the author herself to make it even more special, if that were possible.   Beth!  How will I ever be able to thank you sufficiently for this beautiful, precious gift?  Having literally just left your blog, it felt as though you were right there in the room with me - handing the book to me yourself.  I'll remember that moment always.

Sweet travels, Tessa.  We love you.

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The first time I ever heard Jayne Anne Phillips read, she was here,

in Prague. 

Sometimes I try to write about Prague.

I am trying again.  Losing footholds, gaining some.

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The Dark Side of Young Adult Fiction

I'd love to know how many of you are out there following this thread of Room for Debate on the Opinion Pages of the New York Times.  The question is:  "Why do bestselling young adult novels seem darker in theme now than in past years?  What's behind this dystopian trend, and why is there so much demand for it?"

The chosen debaters are Paolo Bacigalupi, Maggie Stiefvater, Jay Parini, Scott Westerfeld, Andrew Clements, Michelle Ann Abate, and Lisa Rowe Fraustino, with many others chiming in.

I rather like the tact Maggie Stiefvater takes.  I value Paolo Bacigalupi's sensibilities as a writer.  I have long struggled, especially since chairing the Young People's Literature jury for the National Book Awards in 2001, with the questions posited by Michelle Ann Abate.

What do you think?

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Building Book Buzz in Bethesda

My friend Ivy has a talent for sending me things that fit just right into my life (sometimes it's a book and sometimes a cheese dish and sometimes a tool to save my aching back) and yesterday, she sent this link to a Donna St. George Washington Post story titled:  "Wanted:  Young readers to build book buzz."

It's a story about the teen readers who gather at the Montgomery County library in Bethesda to talk books.  Not just the books already on shelves across the country, mind you, but books provided through a galley review program initiated by the Young Adult Library Services Association of the American Library Association.  What the teens have to say about the books tell publishers, librarians, and writers quite a lot about what excites and what does not, and about where a book might be headed.

I loved reading the story, because I love the honesty of teens, and I love what happens when they gather within libraries.  (The photo above, for example, was taken just ahead of a talk I gave in a Wisconsin school library earlier this year, and I was amazed by the buoyancy of those readers, by the questions they asked and the things they confessed to.)  I love, too, how librarians and publishing houses are working together to fuel the fervency of the book-loving young.

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Snow drifts and sun spoils

Wearing my new coat and gloves and my brand new UGGS, tucked in with a tried and true pair of jeans, I went out hunting for snow drifts and sun spoils at dusk.

I found these.

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Creative Nonfiction 135.302/Settling on a Syllabus

One writes a course description months ahead of teaching the course itself, and in the meantime, one inevitably reads deeper, thinks harder, disproves former standing theories, and reassesses writers they once loved.  At least that's how it is for me.

Yesterday and today, then, I'm studying the course description below and thinking about how I'll meld what seems pulsing and essential right now with the promises I've already made.  I have an idea about a particular Joan Didion essay, and I'm going to kick things off with that.  I'm going to insist on some Ander Monson and Carl Klaus to further set the stage. I'll bring some fiction in, and some poetry, too, so that I and my fifteen students might think out loud about wavering edges—about the nicks and tucks that are nonfiction and the elaborations that are not. 

I never teach to deliver what I know (what fun would that be, for any of us?, and besides, who really knows what?).  I teach for the conversations that erupt, for the work that might emerge, for the deep delve that is yearning and process. I teach because the possibilities are rich, and because there are no barricades within a classroom.

We’ll be asking questions throughout this section of Creative Nonfiction, and we’ll be writing and reading our way toward answers: What do we owe our writing, and what does it owe us? What is the role of imagination in memoir? How is the persona of our nonfiction different from the person we know ourselves to be, and how different should it be? How important is it, really, to distinguish between story and situation? We’ll be provoked and inspired by the work of such authors as Patricia Hampl, Lia Purpura, Joan Didion, Julian Barnes, Natalie Goldberg, Grace Paley, William Fiennes, Michael Ondaatje, Vivian Gornick, and Terrence Des Pres. We’ll workshop essays, memoirs, and profiles.

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Vida/Patricia Engel: Reflections

Last night I was explaining to my brother how you don't get perfect from perfect.  Glass deflects, I said.  Airtight frames let no one in.  You get perfect from raw and real, from quest and search, from words that feel ripped out, not placed.  You get it from writing that honors bewilderment, that shapes it, even, from stories and language that make you feel.  I said these things, and then I went to bed and when I woke up I read Vida, Patricia Engel's debut collection (Black Cat), from start to finish.

Exhibit A:  My kind of perfect.

You're going to want to know what Engel's stories are about.  I'm going to tell you to go read them.  To find out what a writer born to Colombian parents and raised in New Jersey and residing now in Florida makes of a character named Sabina, who shares at least some of her author's lineage.  Sabina carries these stories; mostly she tells them.  She takes us into shame, confusion, unrest, dishonor, one version or another of love, and of love's betrayals.  She gives us ascent and tip and instability, and in every single story, I believed I was reading the true.  I believed that a woman could hurt like this, want like this, wish herself to be someone other than this.  I believed a woman living this kind of life would make this kind of poetry.  The point is:  I believed.

And can we talk about language?  Can I give you this?

Just when I've beaten the night, I feel his arm on me.  Lou shaking me from my half sleep, his muscular fingers tugging my skin.  The darkness breaks with the glow of the street, spots of car lights on the walls, shining right through Lou so he looks as if he has a halo.  He turns on a lamp.  He's got a guitar hanging from a strap on his back and another, which he hands to me.  I sit up, let the quilt become a pond around my waist.  Take the guitar from him and run my fingertips over the fat metal strings.

That's from a story called "Refuge," the hands-down best post-9/11 piece of writing I've ever read.  Because 9/11 is both backdrop and mood, but it isn't, ultimately, the story.

Patricia Engel does not need me to sing her praises.  Vida is, among other things, a New York Times Notable Book of 2010, a Barnes & Noble Best Book of the Year, a New York Times Editors' Choice, and a Los Angeles Times Gift Guide Selection.  It is the debut that Junot Diaz said he'd been waiting for.

Vida is alive.  It trembles.

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The Hole We're In/Gabrielle Zevin: Reflections

I've been wanting to read a Gabrielle Zevin novel for quite some time, and after all the festivities of Christmas were bowed out and complete, I slipped away to the brand-new couch with Zevin's newest novel for adults in hand.  "Meet the Pomeroys:  a church-going family of five living in a too-red house in a Texas college town," the flap copy reads.  "Roger, the patriarch, has impulsively decided to go back to school, only to find his future ambitions at odds with the temptations of the present.  His wife, Georgia, is trying to keep things afloat on the home front, though she's been feeding the bill drawer with unopened envelopes for months, and can never find the right moment to confront its scary, swelling contents...." 

Too-red house, I thought.  Feeding the bill drawer with unopened envelopes.  I was already keen on the sound of this book, the implied possibilities, when I opened it to its first page and read:

Midway through his son's graduation from college, somewhere between the Ns and the Os, Roger Pomeroy decided that he owed it to himself to go back to school.  He was forty-two years old, though people told him at least once a week that he looked younger.  Last Christmas, a salesgirl had mistaken his then nineteen-year-old daughter for his wife.  Last week, a different salesgirl had mistaken his forty-one year old wife for his mother.  He knew it wasn't flattery, because in both instances the salesgirls had already made their sales:  respectively, a flannel nightgown (wife's Christmas) and a leather fanny pack (son's graduation).

In five seemingly effortless (though of course they are hardly effortless) sentences, Zevin has set a rather immaculate stage—framed a Mr. Pretty (if he does say so himself) who daydreams through his son's college graduation, declares himself worthy of just a little self-satisfying something, and dresses his wife, at night, in flannel. We're in for a ride, we eavesdroppers on the Pomeroys.  We're in for debt and guilt and shame and disaster; we're in for a portrait of our times and for killer characterizations achieved with economic zing.

Consider the way Zevin pulls back the curtain on a woman who is not the saintly Roger's wife:

Her lone suitcase was a creamy brown leather, a bit battered by glamorously so, the sort of thing a reporter carried to cover a war or a fashion show. She had a tiny spray bottle that she used to hydrate her face.  "Would you like a spritz?" she asked Roger just before they were told to put away their electronic devices.  He accepted and felt instantly transported to a tropical rainforest.  Why didn't George have tricks like that?"

All we need is the spritzer to conjure this woman.  All we need is the word "transported" to anticipate her oily impact on our anti-hero.  And of course Roger, so pretty, so self-indulgent, so righteous, so right, so self-forgiving, manages to riddle his entire family with pain, because when you're only paying attention to yourself, you are plain not paying attention.

There's parody here, and skewering.  There are scenes that made me cringe (Zevin wanted me to cringe) and scenes that made me cry (she's good at that, too), and all the while there are reminders that Zevin is up to far more than mere entertaining here, as when she writes, knowingly, "people did what they could live with; all sin was relative."

I received The Hole We're In as a gift from Black Cat—a surprise package brought on by a tired UPS mailman in the dark of Tuesday night.  I'm about ready to settle in with Patricia Engel's Vida now.  Let the snow fall where it will; I'm reading.  

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In search of lights on Christmas Eve

Following the Christmas Eve pageant, we drove, looking for lights.  Blue lights in tall trees, wreathed lights in windows, two stars drawn out on a slanting lawn, a blow-up Frosty, paired sets of twinkles.

But it was this, caught just before dusk, that said Christmas to me.  I had been rushing and working.

I stopped.

Merry Christmas to you all today.

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Two sons and their mother on Christmas Eve

And so it happened that we were driving down one road that led to another that wound past a sign that announced the college my Salvadoran mother-in-law attended years and years ago.

"We have to go see it," we said, at once, and so there we were, my husband, brother-in-law (visiting from Texas), and yours truly, walking through the lovely campus on a brisk day.  We were the only ones there, but somehow Nora was there, too—giggling with her girlfriends, running through the halls, begging for forgiveness.  I listened to the stories the brothers conjured and told.  I listened to them laughing.  I'm not sure it matters if any of their stories were true.  It only matters that two sons—one transplanted to Philadelphia, one transplanted to Dallas—were spending Christmas Eve day with their mom.

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Farmer's Market, 6 a.m., Christmas Eve

It isn't Christmas unless you join the dawn throngs at the local Farmer's Market, where Andrew, the young man from the vegetable stand, puts your winesaps into a briskly snapped-open bag (while reporting on college), and the lady at the bread stands makes her most honest recommendations (Italian, she suggests, not French), and the purveyors of fish go into the back to retrieve the best of the long black mussels.  I arrived in the dark this morning.  When I opened the doors, the night sky was a brilliant purple pink, a color that would not allow itself to be photographed.

You just had to be there.

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Scenes from this day

Sometimes it takes a day to create a moment.  We had, to begin with, an array of fabulous cheeses and fruits, moved on to homemade butternut squash soup and bruschetta, took a risk with saltimbocca (the risk paid off), asparagus, and fingerling potatoes, and finished with an Amish baker's cheesecake (I have no cheesecake making abilities).  By four o'clock, we were done. 

Tomorrow:  paella.

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The Last Brother/by Nathacha Appanah: Reflections

There is a boy named Raj, and he is nine years old.  He lives in Mauritius;  it is 1944.  Raj was the middle son of three, but now he is the family's only son, and what, he asks us, is the word for a boy who loses both his brothers in one day?  What is the word for a boy whose love will be even more strenuously tested?  What is the capability and culpability of memory when an old man looks back and remembers?

This is the Raj of Nathacha Appanah's extraordinary novel, The Last Brother (Graywolf Press, translated by Geoffrey Strachan).  This is the landscape of a book that will take you deeply and unforgettably into the abundant and cruel Mauritius, into the childhood of one fated with a violent father and a healing mother, into the topography of bewildering loss. In The Last Brother Raj is an old man looking back on a friendship that erupted, mysteriously, during his ninth year—a friendship between himself and a boy named David, a blond Jewish exile whom he meets in the hospital ward of an island prison.  Raj then and now is haunted, confused.  He wants to know, precisely.  He wants to honor the past by reviving its details, by not looking away—but can he?  Can any of us?

The artfulness of this novel is directly tied to the lack of pretense in Raj's narrating voice—the tangles he gets himself into, the sentences that smudge punctuation, change tense, get lost in the scribble of time.  What does it mean to write authentically?  I think it means recognizing that an old man looking back on an exotic, fated childhood might remember and recall the world, without artifice, this way:

During those says spent all alone at Beau-Bassin, immersed in that somehow muted light, which now took on the color of the forest, now the color of the flowers my mother had planted around the house to crate a benign ring, or else that of the bluish mountains in the distance, I discovered a taste for hiding places.  I would lie low in corners, tucking my feet and legs in underneath me, I would climb up into trees and crouch in the forks of branches, my body coiled in on itself like a snake, I would dig holes beneath the squash plants in the vegetable garden and crawl in there, with my belly to the ground, my hands buried in the earth up to my wrists, my face hidden among the creepers.

The Last Brother, already hailed internationally, is due out in the States in February from Graywolf Press.  I was blessed to receive an early copy from the press itself.  Sent to me because they know, at Graywolf, that I love great books.  I hold them to my heart.

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If I can write the story

(if there is room, if there is time, if my thoughts will multiply, then settle), part of it will happen here.  I drove my son to this spot a few days ago. He declared it good novel material.

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In which my niece takes me to southern Spain (for a moment)

My niece just called and we had the nicest conversation for the longest, sweetest time.  She's home with a cold, curled up in her bed with a stack of new books by her side, and she's done what we lovers of books all do—read the first few pages of each open option first, chosen one, and settled in.  Two of her cats are nearby.  Her shelf of personal books (so stuffed full she worries it will sink straight through the floor) stands near.  Her heart and mind are primed for adventure, and so today, reading in bed, she will have one and, because she called, I was having (a very nice) one.  Our conversation was nearing its end when Claire said that she had one more question for me:  What part of the world did I really, really want to see next?

"Oh," I said, sighing, and then there we were, the two of us, adventuring again—just words, just hopes, just our all-color, all afloat, ours alone imaginations.

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(My) Imprints of the Year

At the close of this year, I'd like to sidestep the naming of favorite books to honor two imprints instead—imprints whose books most advance my faith in publishing and occupy much of my shelf space. The first, of course, is Graywolf Press, which publishes my dear friend Alyson Hagy (Ghosts of Wyoming), introduced me to my now-friend Jessica Francis Kane (The Report), publishes the brilliant Per Petterson (I Curse the River of Time), puts out books that consistently surprise me (take Vanishing Point, that fascinating riff on memoir by Ander Monson), and celebrates some of the best poets of our day (Jane Kenyon, Linda Gregg, Carl Phillips, Thomas Sayers Ellis). Look for The Last Brother, a Nathacha Appanah novel being released from Graywolf in February.  I started the book this morning.  It is going to be an everlasting favorite.

The second honorable, wonderful, heart dance of an imprint is Black Cat, of Grove Atlantic, which publishes some of the most beautiful original trade paperback novels and nonfiction I've ever seen.  I first started connecting the imprint itself to actual book titles when I read Chloe Aridjis's Book of Clouds, an utterly sensational and surreal portrait of Berlin.  More fabulous Black Cat titles came my way (an angel sent them), and I was hooked.  This year The Disappeared by Kim Echlin engulfed me.  I laughed hard at Steve Hely's How I Became a Famous Novelist, and for Christmas I am buying myself Vida, the  Patricia Engle story collection that was named one of the 100 Notable Books of the Year by the Times. 

The end of real literature is not near.  It lives among gray wolves and black cats.

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Scenes from the same day (later)

A place for friends, a place to be.

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Scenes from the day

 awaiting a sofa...

 awaiting a bed...

something to eat in the meantime.

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Dave Eggers on (in) The Writing Life

All right, so I didn't see this rocking Dave Eggers (Washington Post) essay until just now, but maybe you do, actually, find things when you need things, and at 5:08 AM this Saturday before Christmas morn, I needed this.  I needed Eggers winding through his idea of the writing life like this—urging us to fidget and beguiling us with tales of what happens when teens read something they love.  They get excited.  They say what they think.  They press the words to their hearts. They inspire us writers who spend too much of too many days inside the lonely alone of striving.  "Their reactions can be hard to predict," writes Eggers, "and they're always brutally honest, but when they love something, their enthusiasm is completely without guile, utterly without cynicism."

I love Eggers for committing so much of his time to younger writers and readers.  I love him for reporting out from this work.  I love him for expressing so well what I feel myself, for I don't think I'd have made it through the past two weeks without kids—the young poets of Baldwin, the talented yearners of Norristown High, the utterly sensational personifiers of T/E Middle School.  They save me, these kids, every time.  They shake me from my fever, they restore my faith in now, they give me a reason to keep writing toward the real and daring—to keep hoping for the real and daring—when so much of my life is not about that at all.  

Yesterday, at the close of my T/E session, a young poet named Sarah showed me the work she had done during our time together.  It was ripe and brave, it was unguarded and true, it was tangled up with knowing.  It was a conversation I could enter, the salve I desperately needed.

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Because of them, the world is brighter

Today at T/E Middle School, we thought about the way the world sees us—about what, for example, a cloud floating above might conclude about our mood, about how the changing bloom on a rose would perceive the changing face of a young woman, about how a wind might gather its words to comment on the poor soul caught in its maelstrom.  We read from Louise Gluck and Mary Oliver; we asked whether it was possible (Rilke claims it is not) for young hearts to love knowingly or fully.

It was a truly perfect end to the week, and for the well-preparedness and graciousness of these students, for their willingness to imagine and their courage in presenting their work and ideas, I have Wendy Towle, Marguerite Gordon, and teachers Ms. Nagle and Mr. Boukalik to thank. The world is looking brighter and brighter, the more time I spend with kids.

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Let the season begin

My friend Jan Suzanne gathered her girlfriends around her last night and asked them to think about the gifts in their lives, and to think, too, about how they will engage with the world in the year to come.

I was privileged to be among these women—privileged because just knowing Jan herself is a glory, privileged because one of Jan's beautiful friends allowed me to ride with her to the party (I'd not have managed the city driving myself, given the weaker-by-a-mile self that I've become this week), and privileged because Jan has always drawn about her people powerfully committed to living full and inspired lives.

I have been pounded by the flu this week, and pounded by unremitting work.  Jan and her friends ushered in—were emblematic of—the spirit of this season.

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How Fiction Works/James Wood

In the middle of the night you grab the book that's nearest at hand, while your neighbors' floodlights (yes, they are floodlights) pour into your living room—so star bright that, at three in the morning, you can actually read by the light of them.

In any case, the nearest book was How Fiction Works, by James Wood.  Am I the last writer alive to read this book?  Probably so.  But that doesn't dim my enthusiasm for the passages I find here, my sense of discovery.  I grow enamored, for example, of declarations such as this:

Novelists should thank Flaubert the way poets thank spring: it all begins with him.  There really is a time before Flaubert and a time after him.  Flaubert established, for good or ill, what most readers think of as modern realist narration, and his influence is almost too familiar to be visible.  We hardly remark of good prose that it favors the telling and brilliant detail; that it privileges a high degree of visual noticing; that it maintains an unsentimental composure and knows how to withdraw, like a good valet, from superfluous commentary; that it judges good and bad neutrally; that it seeks out the truth, even at the cost of repelling us; and that the author's fingerprints on all this are, paradoxically, traceable but not visible.  You can find some of this in Defoe or Austen or Balzac, but not all of it until Flaubert. 

I'm not about to review this book.  I'm just going to sit with it, let it stir within me arguments for or against, let it guide me as I set out to write (as I fight to find the time to write) this new novel for adults.

Light on.

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Joan Rivers, Gail Godwin, and Age, Invincible Age

Last night, in between bouts of fever-induced delirium, I watched the IFC documentary, "Joan Rivers - A Piece of Work."  It was, in a word, riveting—a blow by blow account of Rivers' 76th year, of months spent seeking work, seeking access, seeking acclaim, seeking relevance, seeking, above all else, respect in a world that honors youth.  She is relentless, Joan Rivers.  She is needy.  She is not afraid to show it.  She wants to squeeze every hour for what it can deliver unto her, and she wants you to show up—at her signings, her shows, her roasts, her Apprentice TV—so that she can be sure that she still matters.

This past weekend, in the New York Times Book Review, Gail Godwin, now 73, wrote a moving piece about what she, as a writer, still wants.  "You want to be taken seriously; that doesn’t change," she wrote.  "What has changed for me is the degree of compromise I am willing to inflict on my work in order to see it in print."

Godwin, unlike Rivers, is not making impossible demands on every hour.  She does, she tells us, "a lot of lying around."  She has accepted that her "supine dithering is fertile and far from a waste of time."  She has gained an "increased intolerance for the threadbare phrase."  She hopes "to do credit to the material that has been hers...."

Reading Godwin's essay and watching the Rivers documentary back to back is like being offered two utterly dichotomous versions of your future—the future in which you still trust time to give you time (and story) or the future in which you do battle with every second.  I hope I have the presence of mind to trust time, if I live to that age.  I hope that I do not need to be loved, but that I still have a talent for loving. 

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You wake

from the chill and sweat and torment of a fever, and who are you?  what are you? where are you? Have you been reconstituted?  Does sun shine through blisters of cold?  Has someone called out, "Catch!"?

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The stunning kids of Norristown High

I never quite know what is going to happen when I enter into the world of students, and earlier today, thanks to Asha Verma of the Montgomery County-Norristown Public Library, I spent an hour and a half with the ninth graders of Norristown High School—students who had read Dangerous Neighbors as an independent reading project and who had questions they wanted answered.

We created classified ads declaring our secret ambitions or yearnings (WANTED:  Peace.  WANTED:  Fluency.  WANTED:   Summer freedom.  WANTED:  One more chance to say goodbye.  WANTED:  Sunday, Again.  WANTED:  Someone to look up to.).  We identified those 2010 world phenomena that, were the kids in charge of a contemporary world exhibition, would get top billing:  Puerto Rican culture, iPads, student grades and grading systems, a slice of ocean, a sliver of mountains, the history of cancer treatment, a display revealing the history of computer technology, a peace congress, a collage of 2010 headlines from a multitude of media, a history of music.  We talked about how books get made and why they are read.  We talked about faith in the face of rejection.  We talked about the kids' own writerly aspirations.  We talked about birds.  We talked about my character Anna's last word—the why of it, the impact.  These were beautiful kids, with wholly invested teachers, and it was an honor to share my morning with them.  It makes what I do so worthwhile.

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On feathered wing

We take the long drive to collect our son from college today.  Through dark clouds and rain, toward mounded snow and suspensions of ice.  And then home again, where the sun always shines when he's near.

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Our journey begins

My husband and I have known each other for twenty-seven years.  He is the artist, the multilingual world traveler, the photographer.  I am the writer who likes to take pictures, who loves nothing more than steeping myself with all the essence of a place—Philadelphia, El Salvador, Juarez, Seville, Barcelona, San Miguel, Cascais, Sainte-Eulalie d'Olt, Chanticleer garden—until that place becomes a story. 

What do we do with what we can do, with what we love? we have asked ourselves, all these years.

Last night, we found our answer.

I am marking that decision here.  As things progress, as work gets done, I will share with you our journey.

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On the street where I live,

they tore it all down.  They dug their holes, they filled their holes, they paved a drive, they muddied it over, and every day has been a bulldozer day.  We have waited for progress.  Today the bare land was made green again.  The vanquished trees were replaced.  No new houses have risen from the din, but it is the din that we remember.

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It's not every day

that I see all my young adult novels in one place, dressed up in red, to boot.  Thank you, Lisa and Marguerite and all of those who helped create this year's Baldwin School Book Fair. 

This coming Monday, I'll be joining the students of Norristown High School at the Montgomery-County Norristown Public Library, where we will be putting some of the Dangerous Neighbors Teacher's Guide exercises to work.  I look forward to talking my city, and to bringing the past alive, if only for an hour or so.

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I danced instead

Yesterday afternoon, save for a single client call, I did not work.  I headed off to DanceSport Academy instead, where I took not one, but two lessons.  At the end of the second, Scott Lazarov worked on some cha-cha choreography, and we recorded it, so we wouldn't forget when we got back to it.  I'm walking my way through most of this, for most of it is new.  My point is this:  I went to the dance studio yesterday and all the stress of which I've been lately speaking vanished.

Vanished, I say.

Which is what dance, every single time, does for me.

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Not wasting away

It doesn't seem right to me (does it seem right to you?) that I spent the last many months working twenty hour days, frying my brain down to a mere fraction of its former self, frittering away my finger tips, pacing the floorboards at 3 AM in search of just the right sentence to begin the eighth corporate story of the day AND to emerge from all of that five pounds heavier.

My brain is nugget sized.  Shouldn't the rest of me be, too?

And do I have to give up cookies?

Sigh.

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A very special Dear Author honor

I have had a year of gifts—quiet moments I'll never forget.  Late today (it was bitter cold; I was blurred by exhaustion), another gift arrived—word that John of the wonderful Dear Author site had chosen Dangerous Neighbors as one of the top published books of the year.

I choose this Michael Tolbert photo, taken on the day Mayor Michael Nutter and I celebrated a First Book milestone at KIPP, to celebrate John's generosity.  Because books are written to be read, and it's especially wonderful to be read by a reader like John. 

Thank you.

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We talked about a book long in the making

Yesterday afternoon, a dear soul who read a book I've been writing for a long time called, and we talked for quite awhile. 

Those are the conversations you remember, the moments you keep—those quiet hours when you are invited to explain a scene not just for what it is on the page, word by word, the gathering of sentences, but for where it came from, what it means, how it shifted over time.  Such conversations are the fires that burn, that dream you back through the story you've lived for perhaps a decade now.

I never gave up on this book, and because I didn't I had the privilege of yesterday's conversation. 

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Into my office

at this dark and cold hour I go.

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Of a Piece: The Teen Teach, Figment, Chasing Ray and Elizabeth Hand

I spent much of the weekend preparing for my long morning at The Baldwin School, where I will today be talking about, reading from, and building exercises on the shoulders of Wordsworth and Mary Oliver, Sei Shonagon, Rilke, Neruda, Sandra Cisneros, Marilyn Nelson, and Gerald Stern, among others.  I never conduct the same workshop twice, don't give the same talk over again, and while my husband will be the first to remind me of how terribly inefficient all that is, I know no other way.  No two students or group of students are the same.  It matters, I think, that we actively lean in their direction.

The students pictured above were girls I met during my spring trip to Wisconsin for the unforgettable Fox Cities Book Festival.  I was thinking about them earlier this morning, as I explored Figment.com, a new site designed to enable the young to "share your writing, connect with other readers, and discover new stories and authors."  How cool, might I ask you, is this?  I know dozens of young big-dreaming, risk-taking blogger/writers whose work should grace this site and whose insights could power it forward.  You know who you all are.... and you know that I love you.  Take a spin through Figment and let me know what you think.

And while you're at it, spend some time at Chasing Ray today, because Colleen Mondor has assembled a bang-up interview with one of my very favorite writers/people, Elizabeth Hand.  I wouldn't know Liz if it weren't for Colleen.  I wouldn't know a lot of things, were it not for Colleen.  But listen to Liz talk, for example, about the beautiful big rawness of teens, the "thrilling and often perilous" process of self-discovery for young artists.  I was cooing just this weekend about how happy the Johnny Depp-Patti Smith interview in Vanity Fair made me.  Substance! I declared, I danced.  Substance! I shout again today. 

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The Depp-Smith Conversation (to die for)

I am powerless when it comes to intelligent conversation—utterly done in when two learned, well-lived, curious people go back and forth, talking craft, talking wanting (this need I have for real conversation renders me pretty useless at most cocktail parties, I confess, an utter bore).  Conversation is what we get in the January 2011 issue of Vanity Fair—Patti Smith (and you know that I loved her memoir) interviewing Johnny Depp (who needs to say more?).

Look at how far afield from the traditional celebrity interview this goes. Look at what Hollywood mashing with Rock and Roll can be:

Smith:  When you spouted a few lines of poetry to Samantha Morton, who played Elizabeth Barry in the movie—that was my introduction to Wilmot's work, to his poetry.  And I noticed in Alice, when the Hatter recites, "Jabberwocky," that you have a gift for giving us the full measure of a poet's work. It is really quite difficult. Could you imagine doing a recording of works of poetry?

Depp:  I don't know.  It's daunting, because you don't know exactly... I mean, you can decipher the intent, and you can kind of swim around in the guts of it, but you just don't know how the poet would have wanted it read.

Smith:  Yes, but that's no different than Glenn Gould having to anticipate how Bach would want his work played.  I thought the Hatter's reading of "Jabberwocky" was luminous.  Yesterday you read me a poem written by the Elephant Man.  I didn't know he wrote poetry.  The poem you recited was heartbreaking.  How did you come to find it?

Depp:  I made an appointment at the hospital where they had his remains....

 

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Unassailable: Reiko's Poem

My friend, Reiko, a novelist and memoirist, lost her mother too recently, and every day when I wake up, I think of her.  Today I remember this poem I wrote for Reiko years ago.  Both of us, then and now, undone and remade by the desire to remember.

Unassailable

From where we stood, on the castle rock

Of Central Park, Harlem was as near as

Twenty years ago.  Everything

Between then and us was green.

The pond turtles were stacked up like stones

On stones.  The trees were a day away

From shucking their own shells.

The red wing of a black bird was like a hand

That had been dealt, and we were the splendor

Sight we had given ourselves.

Afterward, it was Amsterdam to Broadway,

Columbus Circle down to the sweet

Remembered squalor of Times Square,

And on every corner:  Song.

The high hollows of the Peruvians,

The mesquite of a jazz trombone,

The Mennonites in hairnets and black sneakers.

I wondered later whether we had become

The engine of concatenation,

Two women made radical
With unappeasable want,

The unassailable desire to remember.

 

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Self-portrait with son

Two pins on a line. 

(he's the tall one)

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I have written

... the first full page of a new novel.

I had not started on something utterly new in at least three years.

I was afraid I had forgotten how. 

A first page is a stake in the ground, is all.

A first page says anything is still possible.

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Vanishing Point/Ander Monson: Reflections

"Am currently in the middle of Ander Monson's VANISHING POINT," Carl Klaus wrote to me, a few weeks ago, "and find it such a venturesome work of literary nonfiction that I think it might be of considerable interest to you and your students."  Since Klaus is himself the author of the venturesome The Made-Up Self, not to mention the founding director of the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program, I didn't much hesitate in making my purchase.  Yesterday and early today I've been reading Monson's essays (a Graywolf publication) through.

It's interesting stuff—quotable, inventive, daggered, asterisked, me-dominating and me-avoidant, not quite memoir, though Monson himself would be the first to count all the sentences beginning with (or featuring) that wily single letter "I."  Monson, like Klaus, like many of us teaching and writing personal pieces today, is full of rue and half-steps, full of self-disclosures that may or may not reveal the actual self.  Full, most of all, of the questions:  Can the actual self be revealed?  Can the we be known?  Is the I a reliable story? (Not a bankable story; that question, in the wake of so many bestselling memoirs, does not have to be asked.)

Monson is thinking out loud, in these pages, about truths and dares, about how the technology we write with may or may not shape what we write.  He is thinking about solipsisms and (magnificently) assembloirs, and he gets us thinking, too.  Perhaps the most powerful pages of this book are Monson's asterisk asides.  For example:

If we choose to represent our lives as story, it's no surprise that our stories converge, that we all want highs and lows, the reckonings with our pasts and flaws and loves that we are otherwise incapable of in real life.  Maybe we are the same, we are telling ourselves, no matter how much we try to invent our way out of this, and that's the thing we can't stand to hear or know.

I also like this:

The snap of art onto life is bothersome, too, a delinquent, a troubled fit.

What do we teach young writers, I kept wondering as I read, about truths and dares?  How do we talk about the flawed veracity of the assembled self without turning each and every one of them either to despair or to some version of David Foster Wallace (not that he was a bad thing, of course, but he was and should remain his own one thing)?  I want to speak honestly, want to teach truly, want to leave my students with something that means something.

Monson—playfully, insistently, self-defeatedly, self-aggrandizingly—puts even more at stake.   




 

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How Smart are Younger Readers? I Can't Count the Ways

Over the course of the last several weeks, I've been interviewed by two high school journalists (Cat Mosier-Mills and Lavi Ben-Dor) as well as a university student (Rosella Eleanor LaFevre) about Dangerous Neighbors and the writing life. 

It has been, above all else, an honor.

I've been asked questions that no one else has ever asked me.  (Did you intend [the battle between the twin sisters] to represent the battle of past and future, old and new?)  I've been forced to explain nuances in my novel that few others have noted.  (Where does Katherine's sense of right and wrong, of impropriety, come from?)  I've been required to articulate (in actual human speech) the dreamy things that typically move untethered through my thoughts.  (What is the significance, to you, of birds?) And I have been so very moved and impressed by the results.

Late last night, Lavi Ben-Dor, a ninth grader at Conestoga, wrote to say that his piece had recently been published in Spoke, the school newspaper, and could be found on-line.  I share his piece with you today, because Lavi, like Cat and Rosella, represent the best of the next generation.

We clearly have a lot of good to look forward to.

Over the next few weeks, I'll be spending time with the students of Baldwin School, T/E Middle School, and Norristown High School.  It will, I know, be an adventure, and they'll teach me more than I will ever be able to teach them.

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