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The morning has been broken wide by sun. The trees that hadn't bloomed before I left for Appleton are shockingly alive; everything is color. I'm hopping a train for Philadelphia in a few hours and walking, then, to the Philadelphia Book Festival, to see a few friends and to have the honor of reading with Catherine Murdock and Rita Williams-Garcia.
A few days ago, in Appleton, a seventh grader asked what it is like to live the author life.
It's a privilege, I said. And I meant it.
I knew he'd be in Appleton, and I saw him, from time to time—a thorough gentleman without an arrogant air in the hotel lobby where the writers were staying. It isn't my way to interfere, to barge in, to announce. It was right enough with me that this former poet laureate was somewhere near.
But then the morning of my last day in Wisconsin, the elevator doors slid open and he was exiting while I was entering and I couldn't help it, I said: "I read your poems to my mother in the final days of her life. It brought us both comfort." He could not have been kinder, but I wasn't surprised. The kindness is in Ted Kooser's poems.
... Across the ice she swooped
and then turned back and, halfway, bent her legs
and leapt into the air the way a crane leaps, blue gloves
lifting her lightly, and turned a snappy half-turn
there in the wind before coming down, arms wide,
skating backward right out of that moment, smiling
back at the woman she'd been just an instant before.
(from "Skater," by Ted Kooser, Delights & Shadows)
Had I ever had a mentor? What did I read when I was young? Had I ever published a book in which there were mistakes? How could I be sure that I wasn't copying anyone? What is the difference between an essay and a memoiristic essay? How long does it take to write books? Where does one go for ideas? How many times had I ever given a talk? Had I ever met Stephanie Meyers? Was I friends with J.K. Rowling? How does it feel to...?
And then, this morning, this: How do you get people to give you criticism on your work instead of just saying "I like it" or "It's good?"
To which I say this: I rarely share my work-in-progress, but when I do, I hope for a conversation, not a mere "sounds good." (And oh, I've often gotten that mere and deflating "sounds good.") It can't be forced (just as one cannot force another to listen keenly), but I find that if you ask your reader at the right time (when he or she isn't already caught up in an idea of his or her own), if you make it clear what kind of response you're hoping for, if you delineate the questions you may still have and the input you are seeking—if you prepare your reader, in other words, before he or she starts to read—you have your best shot at a meaningful response.
It's not easy giving criticism. It takes time, it can get dicey, it can shift a mood, or even a friendship. It's up to the writer to make the conversation safe for the reader.
Late last night (or was it early this morning?), I returned from my whirlwind trip to Appleton, Wisconsin, where I met with avid adult readers, talked to school assemblies, workshopped with young writers, answered the questions of artful high schoolers, and conducted two intensive memoir-writing workshops with truly dear and talented adults. It was an experience like none other—immaculately coordinated by Judith Owen and carried forward by a team of prompt, thoroughly generous souls including Beth Carpenter, Pat Wucki, Pat Milheiser, Maggie Waggoner, Donna Young, Amy Stanwood, and Mary Bend.
What struck me most deeply was the utter preparedness of this team, for I was but one of dozens of authors who were visiting on behalf of the Fox Cities Book Festival last week. Ted Kooser and Mary Karr were in town, David Wroblewski and Jane Hamilton, Kim Edwards and Lesley Kagan, Chris Crutcher and Gennifer Choldenko. Up and down the river and out, into the farmlands, we authors were ferried, and wherever I went, I encountered people I won't soon forget. There are real readers out there, in Fox Cities. There are librarians and teachers who love their students and prepare them for life's greater possibilities. There are young readers and writers—boys and girls—who sit peaceably, attentively, while a writer talks, then surprises her, enormously, with the quality and enthusiasm of their questions.
I am not a touring writer, not typically. I made the choice to go to Wisconsin nearly a year ago, and I will be forever grateful that I did.
He wore his shorts long and his sandals straight through October, when finally he’d trade them in for his deconstructed Doc Martens, ten years old and split down two seams. She’d met him at Café Conversation, his cousin’s place, where he put such a sugar lip of sweet on the chocolate face of each espresso that the clientele called it candy. Give me some of that candy, Vin. He talked without smash and fraction, without contradiction, without the undercutting hurry of ambition. He preferred, he’d once said, the simple gain.
She wondered about it afterward.
I'm Wisconsin bound, and those in the know are telling me that Wisconsin is the place to be. Wonderful people, I'm told. Well-read people. Nice people. I shall keep those goodnesses close to my heart as I travel to Little Chute Public Library, Roosevelt Middle School, Madison Middle School, West High School, Kaukauna Public Library, New London Middle School, Appleton Public Library, and East High School.
I walked the empty Horse Show grounds because no one said I couldn't, because there was just one man, on a high roof, painting white whiter. "Hey," I said. "Do you mind?" And he said, "Why should I?" That's the way it should be, I think: Two people, co-existing, bothering no one.
In my travels, I found this tree—split and chunked away from itself, crooked and ungainly, and still capable of green. I felt myself a kindred soul. Leave me be for just an hour, ask nothing of me, and I stir inside with story. I don't know how old I look to the world outside. When I am writing I feel ageless.
(I run from blooming tree to blooming tree, afraid that the next day the blooms will be gone.)
In The Heart is Not a Size, Georgia and Riley have a tradition of visiting the Devon Horse Show each year. As always, the event is held at the end of May. Today, I went and took a walk around, while craftsmen painted and big trucks spread their new white snow of sand.
I don't, as many of you know, look for reviews of my own books, but every now and then one will filter in, and sometimes I'll be reading a favorite blog and come up short against my own name.
That's what happened a few minutes ago, when I was checking in with Chasing Ray, where I've had the privilege of appearing from time to time in a truly wonderful series of Colleen Mondor orchestrated think-a-thons.
I was reading along, about wish lists for Navajo and Apache teens and other typically important topics, when I happened upon this:
After finishing Beth Kephart's latest, The Heart is Not a Size, I have decided she is becoming almost her own little sub genre - a writer who creates stories around, and perhaps also for, a particular sort of teenage girl. The one who seems to have it so together but has numerous little worries, and concerns. Not the drama of violence or addiction ala Ellen Hopkins but of quietly going a wee bit unhinged while trying to hold it all together. Not that Georgia goes crazy in the slightest in Heart, but she worries. And in Nothing But Ghosts there was quiet worrying as well. This all strikes me as something that is perhaps more common than anything else among teenagers - the worrying about holding it all together, doing the right thing, not being a disappointment.
I am taken aback by the perceptiveness of this. It's true. This is what I've been up to. I just didn't know anyone had noticed.
Inkpop, the tres cool HarperCollins aspiring writers' and book lovers network, asked me a few questions about writing from the heart. I answered them here.
The exceedingly smart novelist-poet-critic-teacher Lisa Zeidner has invited me to join an exquisite cast of writers for the 24th Annual Rutgers-Camden Summer Writers' Conference. Running from June 21 through June 30th of this year and designed to be taken for either undergraduate or graduate credit (or a non-credit certificate), it features the writers Jewell Parker Rhodes, Brenda Shaughnessey, Daniel Bergner, Lisa Tracy, Stephen Dunn, Jonathan Dee, David Shields, Max Apple, Paul Lisicky, Mark Doty, Mat Johnson, Patrick Rosal, and Lisa herself, as well as yours truly.
I'll be there on June 25th, teaching creative nonfiction and doing a reading with the much-beloved Max Apple of the University of Pennsylvania.
I hope you'll join us. To register, or for more information, see the web site.
while I burrow in, while I stay where I am, with this novel. This adult novel that has in fact found its way, that has opened itself to me, then opened again, thanks to a recent conversation with an oh-so-smart editor. I am in the final third of remaking it. I have eight chapters to write; I am obsessed. I had planned to apply this Sunday to real life—to weeding my garden, to trying a new recipe, to folding the clothes, to checking in with all of you—but: there are five women, two eras, an asylum, a Book of Thoughts, and a kite. There's a lost lover named Vin; he may be coming home.
They have found me. They've let me in.
I have a new camera—something sweet, small, and hot pink. Portable, plane-able, willing to travel with me. It's a Sony, because I'm loyal to Sony, and it's all charged, plugged in, and awaiting: Barnes and Noble Educator's Day, Fox Cities Book Festival, Philadelphia Book Festival, Children's Book World (thank you, Libby Mosier), Book Expo (unveiling Dangerous Neighbors!), Book Bloggers Convention (meeting so many of you), Rutgers-Camden Summer Writers' Conference (I'm teaching fiction), the ALA in Washington, DC.
I travel light. I bring my stories. I've got a camera to help me hold onto it all.
I'm not a shopper. I'm always here at my desk. Today was an adventure.
One day I took my mother to the garden. It was a warmish day, just us. She made her way slowly down the gentlest decline (holding my arm, sometimes touching tree branches), then chose a bench beneath a tree inside the woods. I sat beside her, and between us fell a triangle of sun. A gardener was at work across the path; people walked by. We sat there peacefully, my mother and I, a wedge of yellow sun between us, but otherwise in shadow. We talked of nothing much, and it was good. We said, every once in a while, Remember this? Remember that? We talked about how the branches of one tree reached toward another and formed an arch. We talked about how high vines will climb if they’re rooted in good soil.
Things were blooming in the Asian Woods.
There was so much color in the shadows.
In the wake of my mother's passing, Chanticleer allowed me to place this stone beneath the great katsura trees, in her memory. Doug was the one who fit the stone to the earth, making sure the sun had room.
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