Innocents and Others/Dana Spiotta: She'll leave you exhilarated

Long before my son enrolled in Dana Spiotta's undergraduate fiction workshops at Syracuse University, I was a Spiotta fan. No need for proof. I was.

You can't blame me, though, for confessing that my affection for Spiotta deepened as I learned more about her from my son. She's just really great, he'd say, repeatedly. She just makes stories fun. Saunders was fun. Critiques were fun. Spiotta's workshops were fun. I'd spent much of my motherhood hoping my son would make room for my kind of literature. And there was Dana Spiotta, liberating that kind of love.

Readers of this blog know that, in 2011, I declared Spiotta's Stone Arabia the book of that year, and that by many other estimations, I was right. Those who happened to be at a certain Phillip Lopate reading at Bryn Mawr College last year heard me gasp when Dan Torday (who managed to write this novel while creating and managing this exceptional series) announced that Dana Spiotta would be a Bryn Mawr guest in February 2017.

(Novella artist Cyndi Reeves was there. She heard me gasp.)

Given the history, you'd think I'd have been prepared for the Dana Spiotta I did in fact meet last Wednesday, but I was not remotely prepared. For her easy embrace of near strangers. For her willingness to confide about structure, process, economy, the pursuits of her immense intelligence. For her enormously endearing magic trick of not behaving like the most important person in the room.

Sure, as Spiotta noted during her time at Bryn Mawr, we all curate ourselves, whittle ourselves into the moment. But there's no faking Spiotta's brand of deep-leaning generosity.

Nor is there any denying the almost giddy power of Innocents and Others, Spiotta's newest novel. Recently nominated for the LA Book Prize, Innocents is a profound miracle—a mash up of artifactual nerdiness, filmic obsession, and unforeseen but somehow perfectly logical collisions of characters and ideas. I have no desire to try to describe this book, because the point is: it must be experienced. It must be yielded to on a cold winter day, when it's only you, the couch, the book, and a blanket. Ambition and fabules, listening and seeing, isolation and enduring friendships—you'll find it all here, alongside the arcane and the pop. You'll find riffs (and they don't for one second interfere with the novel's pacing) on rare facts of real life like body listening. This is a section taken from early in the book, from the POV of a woman who calls herself Jelly. Jelly practices the art of phone seduction:

It was when you surrendered to a piece of music or a story. By reclining and closing your eyes, you could respond without tracking your response. You listened. The opposite were the people who started to speak the second someone finished talking or playing or singing. They practically overlapped the person because they were so excited to render their thoughts into speech. They couldn't wait to get their words into it and make it theirs. They couldn't stand the idea of not having a part in it. They spent the whole experience formulating their response, because their response is the only thing they value.

Here, later on in the book, are thoughts about being an artist:

It is partly a confidence game. And partly magic. But to make something you also need to be a gleaner. What is a gleaner? Well, it is a nice word for a thief, except you take what no one wants. Not just unusual ideas or things. You look closely at the familiar to discover what everyone else overlooks or ignores or discards.

My friend Thomas Devaney was at the reading last Wednesday night. He had Spiotta's novel in his hand, but no words for it. It's just that good. It's just that wise. There's no actual point in talking about it.

Buy it, please, and read.

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Finding books with friends, and Adam Haslett on fear (IMAGINE ME GONE)

It was meant to be. There Cyndi Reeves and I were, in the lobby of the Bryn Mawr Film Institute, catching up with each other ahead of a Bryn Mawr College sponsored dinner with Phillip Lopate. That was all wonderful enough, but then there came Anmiryam Budner, of Main Point Books, with a box of Better Living Through Criticism, written by A.O. Scott, who was slated to speak at the theater later that night.

A. O. Scott, I said? Really? For I had, not long before, reviewed Better Living for the Chicago Tribune, and, before, that, simply loved reading Scott's movie reviews for the New York Times. A.O. Scott. A literary celebrity.

Two friends, a literary celebrity, dinner plans with the nation's great essayist, and then a conversation with Anmiryam in which she pronounced that the book Cyndi and I must read next (we always ask and she always tells) was Adam Haslett's Imagine Me Gone. Anmiryam is an impassioned book reader, which is what makes her such a stunning book seller. From her lips to our hearts, these books.

Cyndi and I were in. Soon our friend Kelly Simmons was in as well. We'd all buy Haslett's newest, and then we would discuss.

Books and friendship. Like coffee and cream.

Maybe you'll be in, too. Maybe we could all discuss? Because Haslett bears discussion. For now I would like to share with you the most exquisite passage in a book built of exquisite passages—a story about the long-lingering affects of a father's mental unwellness. Here is Michael, the oldest son, who has some of his father's imbalance. He's talking about fear. It's devastating because it's so true.

What do you fear when you fear everything? Time passing and not passing. Death and life. I could say my lungs never filled with enough air, no matter how many puffs of my inhaler I took. Or that my thoughts moved too quickly to complete, severed by a perpetual vigilance. But even to say this would abet the lie that terror can be described, when anyone who's ever known it knows that it has no components but is instead everywhere inside you all the time, until you can recognize yourself only by the tensions that string one minute to the next And yet I keep lying, by describing, because how else can I avoid this second, and the one after it? This being the condition itself: the relentless need to escape a moment that never ends.

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making the day what it can be, in the winter of should have/would have

We're frustrated. Face it. We are. Our delayed trip to see our daughter. Our thwarted trip to see the sun. Our meeting that's been canceled. Our promise we can't keep.

This is our weather, and this is our now. We've tilted our planet on its axis, so to speak, and the planet was always going to be larger, and more powerful, than we are.

Today I was to have joined Professor/Writer Cyndi Reeves and her students at Bryn Mawr College to talk about memoir. I was to have later lunched with her and her teaching colleague. After that I was to have headed down to the Philadelphia Flower Show with my husband, looked at flowers and pots, and joined my friend Adam Levine for the official launch of his glorious horticultural magazine, GROW. And finally, 8 o'clock, thanks to my brother and sister-in-law, I was to have dined at Laurel, the "intimate French/American BYO restaurant by Chef/Owner Nicholas Elmi." (Top Chef viewers will remember him.)

All of that now jeopardized, junked, postponed, terminated by all the snow that falls.

"Peaceful out there," my husband just said, having opened the door and stood, for a moment, in the white plenitude. "Peaceful." I stop typing. Can barely hear the wind. Can almost hear a train on its track. Can see no one in the street, no car passing.

Peaceful, he says.

Make the day what the day can be, I remind myself. A lesson that my son keeps teaching. A lesson that the world is demanding that we learn—again. Make the day what the day can be. In this sudden wash of white time, I will write an essay about my students, My Spectaculars, and what they teach me (and us). I will count the eggs and measure the sugar and experiment, again, with my new KitchenAid. I will read the new memoir, Walking with Abel: Journeys with the Nomads of the African Savannah, by my brilliant friend, Anna Badkhen, who walks the world to learn the world and who whispers one word, again and again: compassion.

Peaceful. To you, from me, while the planet reminds us how small we are, how temporary and shifting our plans.

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The Last Flight of Poxl West/Daniel Torday: Reflections on a book I haven't finished because I haven't wanted it to end

I had a good plan. My plan was this: read and reflect on Daniel Torday's much-acclaimed debut novel, The Last Flight of Poxl West, in time for Daniel's birthday. When you can make a big day even better, why not?

The problem was—the problem is—that I'm enjoying the book too darned much. Sure, I could have stayed up a little later over the weekend reading and gotten a few more pages in. I could have kept reading even now, in this frigid morning dark, beneath the blanket in the family room. But I don't want this story to end. If I read more pages, and read them too fast, then this story will end.

Noble thoughts, right? Little good they do for Daniel (who, by the way, directs the Creative Writing program at Bryn Mawr College). Daniel's birthday has come and gone, and his book is due out soon.

So let me then crawl out of my self-indulgent shell, raise my head for a moment, and say, "Wow." Because what an adventure this book is—the story of a former Royal Air Force bomber who happens to be Jewish, who isn't even a Brit, who lives in America now, touting his bestselling, big persona memoir. His memoir is right there, in the accordion folds of this book, layered in against the adoring accounts of his "nephew" Elijah, who hasn't just been privy to the book's making; he is (wait for it) in the acknowledgments.

Elijah Goldstein, future professor, has seen his name in print.

(Damn, that's intoxicating.)

These, then, are the ingredients of Torday's book—Poxl's memoir, Elijah's recounting of the making and marketing of the memoir, and a couple of red herrings along the way, but we don't really care, not yet; we're just busy reading about Poxl's mother in a city north of Prague (who posed for Schiele, that outlaw artist, imagine how that messed with her head), Poxl's passive-seeming father, Poxl's flight to Rotterdam, Poxl's love indoctrinations with a prostitute, London during the blackouts, those planes....

Okay. That's where I've gotten—so far. I was going to read another chapter before I posted these words, but it's freezing out there, and I'm going to want this book to dive back into after I return from my upcoming trek to the city for a (dear) client project.

But wait. Before I go, I'm going to give you this: A few words from Poxl, who, as you will see, is an enchanting storyteller—the kind who strikes that right balance between not hurrying and not tarrying, the kind who knows when to quiet a scene and when to razzle it up, who also has a fine little knack for that universal philosophizing that memoirists (even those who may not be telling the truth—not judging here, just saying) get down pat. Poxl is walking through a park in London. It's the height of fear and damage:

Where my outings to Prague had been comprised of the joy of thousands of people forever rushing at me—I learned that to live life is to lay oneself down to a wave, to feel as best one could the direction the current was flowing and then allow one's body to go slack and have the wisdom not to fight it lest one drown—London at night during that anxious period of the war was tensile as the thin frozen sheet atop a moving river.

The Last Flight of Poxl West will be released in March by St. Martin's Press.

Update: I finished this novel. I Love This Novel. The World Will Love This Novel, Too.

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what happens when a former student reviews your book about memoir making

A few moments ago, a link was posted on Facebook. One click, and I was reading a review of Handling the Truth, written by my former student Stephanie Trott. Stephanie had come into my classroom fully formed, best as I could tell. A Bryn Mawr senior who'd already worked in Manhattan publishing and was crafting perfect sentences, Stephanie made the trek each Tuesday, and made us all better people for her presence. We have stayed in touch since, Stephanie and I. Postcards arrive. Emails. Funny and alluring updates from her travels around the world, for Stephanie has a truly interesting job which I suspect she will tell you about in some book, some day. She's destined.

So it made me teary eyed—that's what happened—to read her words about Handling the Truth in Cleaver Magazine, a stellar and well-reviewed literary magazine that was created by my friend, Karen Rile, and her daughter, Lauren. Karen teaches with me at Penn. She's been there far longer than I have, has taught far more classes, is widely known and loved, and deservedly won a new teaching award a year ago. Karen has been my guide to many things at Penn—me the spring-semester adjunct, and she the every-semester teaching goddess. And what a magazine she has built. What content, and what a following.

How beautiful then, to be able to thank them both, in this single post. And to do that on a day when I'm writing about my love for Penn and that riverway, Locust Walk, in today's Philadelphia Inquirer. It all circles back.

Stephanie's review begins like this, below, and can be read in its entirety at Cleaver Magazine, here.

It is a rainy Tuesday in January and I lace up the new cherry-red boots before heading out the door of my warm little warren. Through the stone-laden campus, across the slippery streets of town, and onto the train that will take me into the city. I am in my final semester as an undergraduate student at Bryn Mawr College and I still have not learned to buy shoes that fit my feet — I dig into the walk through West Philadelphia, burdening myself with blisters that will not heal until the first flowers have shed their petals to spring. Stumbling onto the porch of the old Victorian manor, I step into the most challenging, inspiring, and rewarding fourteen weeks I’ve yet experienced: I step into Beth Kephart’s Creative Non-Fiction class.

Flash forward one and a half years later and I am standing on the back steps of my first apartment, wearing shoes that (finally) fit and hooting jubilantly at the tiny brown box in front of me. I hug the cardboard to myself as though I could absorb the details of its journey osmotically and greet it with as much euphoria as though it were a friend returning from a far off journey. But I suppose that’s exactly what Beth Kephart’s Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir is: stories of both the familiar and strange, a chance to learn through another’s experiences, and an invitation to have our own unique adventures while meditating on the specialness of times we have already put to rest.

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on meeting Patti Smith, ever so briefly, at Bryn Mawr College

Last evening, at Bryn Mawr College, the multi-media legend Patti Smith was given the 2013 Katharine Hepburn Medal at an absolutely beautifully orchestrated event.

And oh, did she make us cry. From her heart, without prepared words, she spoke directly to us from the stage above about Little Women, Jo March, and a certain season when Patti was twenty-two years old and Katharine Hepburn herself came shopping at Scribner's, where Patti was working. Ms. Hepburn had tied an overlarge man's hat to her head with a green ribbon. She asked for help in locating books. While Patti escorted her down the aisles, Ms. Hepburn would note that Spencer (Tracy) would have loved this book or that, giving Patti (she said, so eloquently, so flawlessly) permission years later to shop for her own husband, even after he had passed on.

Sometimes people really are who they are on the page, and I have never doubted that Patti Smith is the Patti Smith of Just Kids, a book I loved so much (for its integrity, its soulfulness, its ungreen love, its sentences) that I forfeited meetings with writers at a certain Orlando, FL, event so that I could stay in my hotel room and read it. Woolgathering, too, reveals the Patti Smith we met last night.

Patti Smith has, she herself has said, always sought to lessen the distance between herself and her audience. She does. She did. Taking on the obvious questions from passersby during the cocktail and dessert hours, allowing us to exclaim over her, noticing us.

"I like your dress," she said, as I stood near, photographing my friend, Elizabeth Mosier, second photo down, above.

I very rarely like my own clothes. I will always love this dress.

Oh, and in case you are wondering? That bit of graffiti up there does in fact belong to me. I try to stay in the background, whenever I can. But sometimes you just have to tell someone how much you love them.

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Woolgathering/Patti Smith: Reflections

What are we to make of Woolgathering, this hand-sized book by the legend Patti Smith? First published in 1992 as a Hanuman Book and described by its author (years later, upon its re-release) as absolutely true. The book, legendary singer/writer tells us, was such that in its writing Smith was drawn from her "strange torpor." Here she is, looking back:

In 1991 I lived on the outskirts of Detroit with my husband and two children in an old stone house set by a canal that emptied into Lake Saint Clair. Ivy and morning glory climbed the deteriorating walls. A profusion of grapevines and wild roses draped the balcony, where doves nested in their tangles.... I truly loved my family and our home, yet that spring I experienced a terrible and inexpressible melancholy. I would sit for hours, when my chores were done and the children at school, beneath the willows, lost in thought. That was the atmosphere of my life as I began to compose Woolgathering.

There are photographs in this slight book—many of clouds, many of childhood places. There are concentrated memories, phantoms, distillations intensely personal and inescapably vivid. Some of the passages begin like the beginnings of psalms, or songs, while others break toward a private vocabulary.

Here is a line:

Exclamation! Questions of origin, scope.

Here is a scene, a codex, a rebus:

How happy we are as children. How the light is dimmed by the voice of reason. We wander through life—a setting without a stone. Until one day we take a turn and there it lies on the ground before us, a drop of faceted blood, more real than a ghost, glowing. If we stir it may disappear. If we fail to act nothing will be reclaimed. There is a way in this little riddle. To utter one's own prayer. In what manner it doesn't matter. For when it is over that person shall possess the only jewel worth keeping. The only grain worth giving away.

Woolgathering is a book of parts. It is a prayer set into motion. It is a return to child awe, a vindication of at least some part of adult responsibilities to make sense of things, to cohere. What do our minds do when we let them roam and wonder? Something perhaps, like this. Let Patti Smith lead the way.

Thanks to my friend Elizabeth Mosier, I will be seeing Patti Smith this coming Thursday evening at Bryn Mawr College. Elizabeth knows what a huge Patti Smith fan I am (I could not stop raving about Just Kids, for example (a book featured prominently in my forthcoming Handling the Truth), or about Smith's interview with Johnny Depp in the pages of Vanity Fair). She knows how proud I was of her piece about Smith in her alum magazine, here. And she knows that, even if I cannot find just the right cocktail dress to wear (because I end up looking so lousy in all of them), I will stand proudly at her side on Thursday, when the Main Line welcomes Patti to town.

For more thoughts on memoirs, memoir making, and prompt exercises, please visit my dedicated Handling the Truth page.

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Lucky Life (again)

This morning, driving home from the dentist, I thought back on what the morning had already yielded.  Clean teeth, thanks to Loretta.  Time enough to read the Proust chapter in Jonah Lehrer's Proust was a Neuroscientist (recommended to me by Haverford College's Tom Devaney).  Continuing email conversations—about John Gardner, about the after life of projects, about NYC graffiti, about children—with new and trusted literary friends. An invitation (thanks to Elizabeth Mosier and the generous folks of Bryn Mawr College) to spend some time in the company of the master writer, Rick Moody.  A peace-inducing note from my friend, the actor/activist/writer James Lecesne, about the why of writing, the real why.  An invitation to dinner with a beloved client.  A note reinforcing this afternoon's plans, where I will spend time down on the Penn campus with the editor of a favorite magazine, before going off to celebrate another client's grand achievement, before coming home, late, to a dinner with my husband.

And then these words, sent along by my poet friend, Joseph.  Subject line:  Beautiful Quote.  Quote:

 “The great interests of man:  air
and light, the joy of having a body,
the voluptuousness of looking."
             -Mario Rossi 

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Moving Past No

Today, in Elizabeth Mosier's class at Bryn Mawr College, I told stories about all those times the world has said no to me.  No, this book will never sell.  No, your writing sings too slow a song.  No you can't combine this with this other and hope to achieve that.  No, you can't make up a genre and expect that it will sell.  No, you can't color outside the lines.  No, we don't like the way you've colored within them.  No, we won't hire you for that job.  No, I do not wish to know you.  No, I will not continue the friendship that only last week we appeared to be having.  It happens often where I live; it doesn't matter how many books I've published or how many client projects fill my cabinet drawers or how much I think I've learned about relationships.  And it doesn't only happen to me.  All of us, on one day or another, are looking no-ness in the eye. 

I started gardening a few years ago, and the no's started hurting less.  Then I started dancing, and a greater easiness set in.  I got into the habit of daily counting my blessings, and the no-ness became an even dimmer ache; I would not let it paralyze me.

Late this afternoon, I came upon the following words on MSNBC.com, and I thought at once that I must share them with you.  The story is about the ways in which bottled anger can actually damage your heart, and the words are these:  Anger can strangle blood flow in the heart and lead to abnormal heart rhythms, and has been linked to an increased risk of heart disease.  

I have to think that bottled heartache can do the same.  My message with this post is simple, then:  Learn from the no's what you can, and then move past them.  Keep your own heart in tact; let it beat free.

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The Florist's Daughter

I've written elsewhere in this blog about the magnificent Patricia Hampl, whose various memoirs have elevated the genre, and whose thinking about memory and imagination is required reading for anyone hoping to pin truth to the page. I've taught her essays and I've learned from them, and last fall I won the review lottery when the Chicago Tribune asked for my opinion on the author's latest, The Florist's Daughter. She's made a difference in my life, this writer—in practice and in theory, from a distance.

Last night, thanks to the generosity of Karl Kirchwey, Libby Mosier, and Bryn Mawr College, I had the privilege of listening to Patricia read in a hall so grand she felt, she said, as if she were on the verge of being knighted. I sat while she fielded questions with humility and grace. And then I joined a really lovely group of people for a round-tabled dinner, in which Patricia proved herself to be that rare breed: as human and dignified and smart in real life as she has always been on the page.

Here's to memory and imagination, then. Here's to ahi tuna and bundt cake and to a writer who reaches past herself in the interest of others—with interest in others, with that sort of wanting-to-know that defines our greatest.

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