walking West Philadelphia with the incredible documentary photographer, Lori Waselchuk

Eight years ago I was honored by a Pew Fellowship in the Arts grant. It was a gift of time; it was also a gift of hope. I was working on that odd Schuylkill River book (Flow)—the book no one got, the book no one could label. I was given the chance to keep working on those prose poems/narratives/not fictions and to find them an eventual home (Temple University Press) and then to go out into the world and meet those open-hearted readers who didn't give a whit if the book could not, for the life of itself, conform to a category.

But there are many gifts associated with the Pew, and they continue. Yesterday, all these years later, was the gift of Lori Waselchuk, who won a Pew last year for her incredible photography—work that has shown up in the New York Times, Newsweek, Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. Lori is also the creator of the book Grace Before Dying, which, in the book's words "tells the emotional story of the extraordinary breakthrough in humanity that has helped transform Angola, once one of the most dangerous maximum security prisons in the United States, to one of the least violent..... Waselchuk not only shows a culture of caring and compassion that challenges stereotypes of incarcerated people, but also provides an intimate and personal perspective on what long-term and life sentences signify for those inside." Lori's photographs speak. They humanize.

I met Lori for a long-awaited conversation at the edge of the Penn campus. We had no plan, just an idea about fellowship. I'm working, or should be working, on a book that partly takes place in West Philadelphia (this book also partly takes place in Florence, Italy), and I've been walking that neighborhood each Tuesday before class. Lori happens to live there. Lori happens to actually know things about the puzzle of the place, its great ethnic charms, its upstairs bars, its blue grass, its mosques, its thrift stores, its cats, its park, its schools. I didn't have to do much more but express my curiosity, and we were off for one of the best guided tours in my personal memory. We capped the walking with a meal at Manakeesh. We had stuff to say, and kept on saying it. I found myself with a copy of Lori's book.

By the time I returned to the Penn campus to meet one on one with my fifteen students (and then, later, with Alice Ma, my fellowship student), I was in that exhausted/exhilarated place a mind/body backs into after days of long hours and little sleep. Who better to run into, then, but Greg Djanikian, who leads the creative writing program at Penn and has for quite a while. Greg is beloved. Just last week one of my students was talking about what happens to a poem when Greg reads it out loud. It gets lifted, my student said, into greater meaning. I sensed what a great man Greg was by reading a book of his own poems (So I Will Till the Ground) for review many years ago. Every single conversation since has been affirm-atory.

And so there Greg was, near the campus edge—busy, I'm sure, but perfectly willing to stop and talk, to not steer clear of the vrooooom of my enthusiasms, to let me be me.

I love people like that.

I loved the day.

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I return (at very long last) to Florence

I'm not just teaching sixteen memoir makers this semester at Penn. I'm also working with the very talented Alice Ma, whom I selected from a strong field of applicants as the Bassini Writing Apprentice. Alice returns me to my novel-in-progress. We think together about what kind of research must fuel a novel like this one, what questions must be answered, and how truth becomes fiction of an engaging but authentic sort.

There's been one small problem with this arrangement. Too many consecutive twenty-hour work days have left me no time for the novel-in-progress. So there is Alice, pursuing questions. And here has been Beth, suggesting in theory.

I had promised myself and others that I would right that tilted ship this weekend, and today I honored the pledge. I had 30,000 words of the novel, banged out during a few weeks last fall. Today I printed those pages, sat beneath a blanket, and forced myself to sit and read. If there was some horrid stuff, and there was some horrid stuff, there was also a book that makes me happy. Happy to work on. Happy to pursue. Since the best part of the writing life is the writing, in my humble opinion, I better be happy to pursue.

Having spent this day righting the wrongs of my in-progress novel, I will spend tomorrow writing forward. I will be afraid, very afraid. And I will let the fear propel me.

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a first raw scene from the Florence novel, for Alice

Next semester at Penn I'll be teaching my memoir class and at the same time working with Alice Ma, whom I selected from a slate of talented students as my Bassini Writing Apprentice, a program hosted by the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing.  Alice will be working with me on the research of my next novel.  We'll be talking about how fact becomes fiction.

Now nearly 50 pages into the writing of this book, a novel mostly about Florence, I stop to post these few words for Alice.  There are scenes in this novel that flash back to the University of Pennsylvania campus, where my heroine grew up with her professor dad.  We're at the Frank Furness-designed Fisher Fine Arts Library with this small, raw, very new (written an hour ago) scene:

... I remember being five or six or seven.  I remember Mom saying, "Let's go surprise your father."  I remember her taking Jack in one hand and me in the other and walking us down the wide wood steps of our Spruce Street twin and through the leafy corridors of West Philadelphia until we reached the edge of the sleeping giant campus.  We were a parade of three.  We were young and smart, and the campus was silver and brick, moss and ivy, castles and courtyards, and at the far end of our forever journey sat the fine arts library, red and round and tall and chimneyed, fantastic as something from the Brothers Grimm.  That's where Dad would be—through the heavy notched doors and past the turnstile, in the massive reading room.  It was a courtyard space with a roof four stories high.  It was arches and arched southern sun.  It was big books with thin pages and the smell of old things, cracked pencils, eraser nubs.
    "Oh, my loves," Dad would say, "here you are."  As if we'd wakened him from something.  As if history were now.  And my mom would lean toward him and let her long hair fall, like a screen between their love and ours.
  My mother loves my father.  She's just forgotten why.

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