Estela of Small Damages arrives in the mail, in the form of an antique bookmark

I write YA books; that is true. But I never write strictly and only of teens. I care about the sweep of generations. I think generations are relevant. Some of my very favorite characters are women even older (believe it!) than me. My Mud Angel and physician Katherine of One Thing Stolen. Stefan's East Berlin grandmother in Going Over. Old Carmen, the rugged beachcomber, of This Is the Story of You (due out next spring). And, of course, my Estela, the old Spanish cook in Small Damages—a character I lived with for a decade before she found herself inside that gorgeous cover.

But now look at the silver wing near the right upper edge of that cover. That is Estela herself, who came to me this afternoon by way of my husband's cousin, Myra. Estela in real life was my husband's father's mother—a loved, buoyant, life-affirming General Counsel in the United States who had also served as the Philippine ambassador to Portugal. I wear her ring as my engagement ring. I hear stories. And today I received this bookmark, which once clipped the pages of the books Estela read.

Myra's words (in impeccable handwriting):

This is an antique silver bookmark from El Salvador my grandmother Estela picked up—probably 50 years ago.... I decided it was time to send you this now. I always thought this should go to you—since you are the writer in the family and it came from William's home country.

 I am so in love with this gift. This piece of then. A bookmark shaped like a coffee bean that might as easily mark my third memoir about my marriage to this Salvadoran man, Still Love in Strange Places.

I thank you, Myra.

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The El Salvador nuns—in the news, thirty years on

Readers of this blog know that I married a man from a land that was foreign to me. El Salvador. That I traveled there. That I studied it. That I tried to make sense of that world in a memoir that took years to write, Still Love in Strange Places. I read every last news story I could find at the time, every antique coffee brochure, every photograph made available to me (this one, here, I especially love, featuring my husband's grandfather on the far right). I talked to dear Aunt Adela, my brother-in-laws, Mario and Rodi, my mother-in-law, anyone who had the time.

But the story is never over, and this morning I found myself spiraling back toward El Salvador while watching this New York Times retro reportage on the four American nuns who were murdered in December 1980. Their story horrified me when I first heard of it (a few years before I met my husband). I never could make sense of it. But love and memory keep a story alive, and justice finds its way.

For those interested in footage of El Salvador that I never saw and in a story that has many twists and turns, I highly recommend this story by Clyde Haberman and important video.

I am off to Masterman High, in Philadelphia, to talk with students about the Berlin Wall, about the world beyond, about risks and responsibilities. There is, I believe (I stake my small legacy on it), nothing like the real world to inspire meaningful conversations. 

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Big Apple, Bryn Mawr, Jersey City, Hoboken, Buzz, El Salvador, Berlin: Where I've A-Been Running To

The snow would not defeat me. I've been flying. Through crusty white landscapes and down the slushed streets of the Big Apple (on Friday). Into the quiet calm of Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church, where I spoke about memories and memoir after Nicole Duran gave her powerful sermon on turning the other cheek. (That is my father, that is me, that is the Reverend Charles Grant, who extended the invitation and introduced me.) Up to Jersey City, then along the Hudson into Hoboken, to spend an evening and then a morning with our son (he showed us where Eli Manning is rumored to live; he showed us where Justin Timberlake recently collected a crowd (my son among them)).

Then a dash back to my home, so that I could interview two corporate clients and then set off running again—to the train station and into my own city and up through the campus of Penn, toward Kelly Writers House, where Buzz Bissinger, one of three 2014 KWH fellows, gave the best reading of his life before both students and friends who have known him for a very long time. Buzz was powerful. He was honest. He was among those who deeply respect his talent and heart. (There is Buzz, above, with the great Rolling Stone writer Sabrina Rubin Erdely, the fabulous famous author/editor Stephen Fried, and myself). After that a meal hosted by Al Filreis (who runs the hugely popular KWH fellows program) and another dash to the station. This time I missed the train, but it didn't matter that much; I had my students' papers with me and plenty to do.

Now I am moments away from heading back down to Penn to greet a classroom full of students whose expectation essays filled me up with joy and wonder. That's what my students—year in and year out—do. I think some angel up there is plucking strings.

In between everything, Serena Agusto-Cox found a book I'd written long ago—my memoir about marriage to a Salvadoran man (Still Love in Strange Places)—and wrote beautifully of it. Thank you, Serena. Finally, a dear book/life friend wrote to me about Going Over, that Berlin novel due out in a few weeks. She wrote with words that bolstered me.

My red shoes are at the door. I lace them up. I go running.

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what parts of our history do we save? (remnants of a magazine/newspaper career)

My husband, now returned from his trip home, to El Salvador, returns with stories of his childhood, recovered and retold over meals with families and friends. I wrote his stories once, or the ones I knew, in a book called Still Love in Strange Places. But the past, in El Salvador, is always present.

There was much to do while Bill was gone. On the list was my need to respond to his hope that I might find a way to eliminate all the "unnecessary" clippings of my previous magazine/newspaper writing life. Philadelphia Magazine, Wall Street Journal Europe, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, New York Times, Washington Post, Real Simple, Parenting, Offspring, Madison, New Jersey Life, Book Magazine, Family Circle, Organic Style, Blue Ridge Magazine, Pennsylvania Gazette—even tucked away inside two boxes, there was too much of too much. Perhaps, he hoped, I would cut the piles by half.

And so on Sunday afternoon I began—sifting, sorting, tossing, trying to decide which stories of my past were worthy of space in a cramped, two-bedroom home. Would I ever really read any of these pieces again? Wasn't the act of making them (the pitching, the interviews, the writing, the editing) somehow more sacred than the printed pieces themselves? Why was I having such a hard time filling the recycling bin with molting paper? It was, after all, molting paper.

I kept, in the end, the stories that meant the most to me then—the El Salvador photo spread, the interview with Gerald Stern, the Oksana Baiul profile, just a few reviews, here and there, from a lifetime of intense reviewing. I kept a story about swimming, a story about creativity, a story about forgiveness, stories about being a mom. I kept what is there, on the table above, and tried not to think about the temporary nature of so many things. Too many things.

There were stories. I wrote them. They were.

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write the journey: a memoir exercise (and a passage from El Salvador)

Yesterday in class, after teaching ourselves the memoir Drinking: A Love Story (Caroline Knapp), we allowed music to take us on a journey. Three different pieces—a touch of Cuba, a touch of tango, a touch of reggae. I wanted the students to find within the rhythms some memory of movement—of their own bodies taken across place and time. What is it to walk, to run, to drive, to jolt, to slide forward? How do we find the language that moves a passage ahead while at the same time unblurring the particulars of place, weather, mood? It was, in part, a lesson in verbs, or it might have been.

Later, coming home, I tried to remember my own journey language. How might I have attacked the assignment I gave to my own students? I recalled this passage from my third memoir Still Love in Strange Places. It is an odd thing to read your own work, years on. But this day at St. Anthony's farm, my husband's home, is still alive in me.

Wanting time to myself before I surrendered to the Spanish, I slid out of the tree and set off across the courtyard and out through the crooked, metal gate, calling to no one in particular that I wasn't going far. I went down the dirt road between the two dug-out walls of earth that towered above my head. Hiking up the road while I was hiking down came two brightly dressed women, their hair the color of ink, their postures accommodating the pitch of the road as well as the woven baskets in their arms and the plastic water jugs that sat on the yaguales upon their heads. One jug was blue and one was orange, and the women kept their eyes low as they passed, not meeting mine, not inviting inquiry, not keen, I sensed, on my camera.

I hadn't gone far before the dogs found me, an ugly, snarly pack, half starved and probably only partly sane, three or four, maybe, I can't remember. Mongrels. Their coats short, sparse, bristly as a wild pig's hide, their ears angered flat against their heads. They had nothing between them but their hunger, no reason not to attack the thin, white American girl-woman who had come among them accidentally and who now stood, grossly transfixed, as they blasphemed her through yellow teeth. I was aware of a broken tree limb on the road. I picked it up. I heeled my way up the incline, holding the stick out before me like some kind of Man of La Mancha warrior. I inched backward. Jowl to jowl, the dogs howled forward. I wondered if Bill would hear, if I'd be rescued, if I should turn and run like hell.

But before I could act, I was saved by a barefooted boy who out of nowhere appeared with a fistful of dog-deterring rocks. He hurled. The dogs scattered. The dogs returned. He hurled again. In the dissipating dust, I gestured my thanks, then half walked, half ran to the place I'd come from. I held the camera tight against my chest. I cursed the country, and I blessed it. I hurried past the gate of St. Anthony's, past a herd of wild chickens, past more women bearing jugs. I kept on walking until I came upon a path cut into the high wall of earth beside the road. The path rose vertically on tight, hard, dirt steps, and it was at the end of this path, as I'd been told, that the peasant dead were laid to rest. I swung my camera onto my back and pulled myself toward them with my hands.

To be among the dead at St. Anthony's is to enter into communion with wild turkeys....

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

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sweeping generalizations don't help a soul

I am always surprised—and, indeed, why shouldn't I be?—when I find myself in conversation with anyone making sweeping generalizations about "certain" types of people.   

Of course he would do that, the person will say.  He's from (name a country).

Of course she would say that.  She's... Latina. 

I find generalizations of any kind both treacherous and appalling.  I have been squeamish around bucketing, categories, labels (applied to people, literature, opinions, persuasions) for as long as I can remember.  But it's personal, too, for me, for I married a Salvadoran man, and I have raised a beautiful half-Latin child, and any bracketing, tiering, or typing assigned to "those Latinos" is an assault of sorts against my family.

This image, above, is El Salvador, years ago.  It is my husband's childhood home, and it is home, still to Nora, my mother-in-law, and to Bill's aunts Adela, Ana Ruth, and Marta, and to his uncle, and to my husband's best friends, and to a gardener named Tiburcio, and to so many more.  Nora's first language isn't English, far from it, but Nora has taken such an interest in my writing life that she has asked three times already for a copy of my newest book, which was only released a week or so ago.  It will take her a long time to read it, but she will.  She's interested in the stories I tell, even if I'm not "from her country" and was not, perhaps, the kind of woman she first imagined her son saying yes to, and do happen to have skin that is lighter than her own.

We are a web, we are human, we are mutual planet dwellers.

Sweeping generalizations don't help a soul.

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In search of a title

What do you do when the very perfect title you'd picked out for your new book is—uncomfortably, sadly, a fact discovered late in the game—a title David Foster Wallace used for a short story a few years back?  What do you do when nothing else seems to fit?

You find a quiet place in which to think, for one thing.

And you call your son, a genius at titles, among other things, who, years ago, when a certain untitled book was a day away from final catalog copy, called out to you, from where he was writing,

But Mom, he said, isn't that book (a memoir about marriage to a Salvadoran man) about how there is still love in strange places?

Still Love in Strange Places? you said. 

Yeah, he said.  Something like that.

Two minutes later you were on the phone with Alane Mason, your W.W. Norton editor.  We have a title, you told her.  She didn't skip a beat.  She agreed.

Late last night, you called your son.

I need another miracle, you said.

Give me a day or two, he told you.

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Getting it right (or not) with memoir

We bring out the old albums, and, remembering, they talk.  The long gone near again, curiosity alive.  I could almost imagine (listening to them remember) that the stories themselves had not yet unfolded, had not revealed their denouement.  When I wrote Still Love in Strange Places years ago, I was writing about my Salvadoran husband's family stories, about the capacity for reimagining, and about the pliable nature of marriage.  I was writing to get it right.  But listening again to his family tell his family stories this weekend, I remembered what perhaps I've always known:  You never get it all just right.  Stories mutate with time, and with the teller.

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Still Love

Two days ago, while in line at Whole Foods, a friend approached with some news. "I've fallen completely in love with your husband," she said.  And when I didn't say anything, she continued: "Head over heels."

It's not an uncommon line in my world; I've been told the same thing by any number of women who have been charmed by my husband's Latin bearing, unusual stories, and incredible talent for the samba.  But in this case, I wasn't even certain that my friend had met my husband, so when I asked her to clarify, she said five words—Still Love in Strange Places—which is the title of the memoir that I wrote about my husband, his family, and the ways in which El Salvador, war, and coffee growing have shaped them.  "I just read the book," she said, "and I love everything about him.  Everything.  I want to meet him."

I smiled at this, of course, and thought of how often I have wished that my husband, a visual artist, would find the time for the books or essays or poems I've written.  He hasn't often, but he did read and bless Still Love, and perhaps because of that, the making of Still Love stands as one of my favorite experiences as a writer.  I worked for all those years to understand.  He opened the book, and he read.

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Torn Photograph, Sepia Stained: The El Salvador Memoir

In preparing to teach the advanced nonfiction course at Penn, I read and re-read and remember. I re-enter the mind-space that took me here, to the first page of my Salvador memoir, Still Love in Strange Places.

The tear runs like a river through a map, hurtling down toward his right shoulder, veering threateningly at his neck, then diverting south only to again pivot east at the fifth brass button of his captain's uniform. Below the tear, two more brass buttons and the clasp of his hands, and below all that, the military saber; the loosening creases on his pants; the shoes with their reflections of the snap of camera light. He is one of three in a sepia-colored portrait, and someone had to think to save his face. Someone had to put the photo back together—re-adhere the northeast quadrant of this map with three trapezoids of tape so that his left hand would fall again from his left elbow and he would still belong to us. We suppose he is the best man at a wedding. We suppose that it was eighty years ago, before the matanza, before he was jailed and then set free, before he saved the money to buy the land that became St. Anthony's Farm.

“Did I ever tell you what my grandfather did the year the farm first turned a profit?”

“No.”

“He threw the money into the air, the bills, and they got caught up with a wind.”

“And so?”

“And so he ran after those colones through the park. Chased his own money through the leafy streets of Santa Tecla. Imagine that.”

I do. I am often imagining that. Imagining that I know him—this man whose likeness is my husband's face, whose features are now borne out by my son. His are the sepia eyes that passed through me. His is the broad nose, the high cheekbones, the determined mouth, the face not like an oval or a heart, but like a square. He died long before I'd ever meet him, but I carried him in my blood. Just as the land carries him still, remembers. Just as St. Anthony's Farm will someday, in part, belong to my son, requiring him to remember what he never really knew, to put a story with the past. Words are the weights that hold our histories in place. They are the stones that a family passes on, hand to hand, if the hands are open, if the hearts are.

“You look like your great-grandfather.”

“I do?”

“Yes. Come here. See? That’s him, in the photograph.”

“Him? My great-grandfather?”

“Yes.”

“But he looks so young.”

“Well, he was young once. But that was a long time ago, in El Salvador.”

We remember. We imagine. We pass it down. We step across and through a marriage, retrieve the legacies for a son.

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When the World was New (an excerpt from Ghosts in the Garden, a moment for Tessa)

I know that I've said it, but it bears multiple repeatings: An Aerial Armadillo is one of the most blessed blog spots on the virtual earth. Go there and be somewhere else—in Southern Africa, in Lantau, in a sacred before, above a plate of sushi. Go there and see beauty captured with utter verisimilitude, or with bold, painterly geometries. Go there. That's the thing. You won't want to come back.

Tessa, the force behind An Aerial Armadillo, has been reading a book I once wrote about marriage and El Salvador. I was honored this week when she mentioned Still Love in Strange Places alongside a mention of the reliably hysterical (humanly, craftily, and originally so) Anna Lefler.

Today is Earth Day, of course, a day that always has me remembering a long time ago, when the world was new to me. That's something I wrote about in Ghosts in the Garden, and so I excerpt that here.

We come to gardens bearing memories of gardens. I came to Chanticleer remembering a fringe of strawberries that pressed up against my childhood home. Whether we ever actually ate the strawberries that those tousled plants bore, I don’t remember. Whether my mother planted them there, or perhaps my father, I cannot say for sure. But I know I crouched the little girl’s crouch and peered, the way children peer, toward the fruit. I know I loved how the red would follow white, and how the white had come from green, and how the pendant of juice, with its thistle of seeds, would plump until it was too fat for its serrated cap. There is nothing exotic about a strawberry patch except that it delivers on its promise.

A strawberry fringe is a garden to a girl, just as the creek that runs between the old shade trees across the street is a child’s haven. I was the one who didn’t mind mud in her shoes, the child who named the tadpoles, then the frogs. I was an adventureress at the creek across the street, where it was cool and dark and also many shades of green (moss, algae, leaves). In a year I would move with my family to an isolated outpost in Alberta, Canada, where nothing anywhere was the lucky color of the Irish and I couldn’t find a seed, and I grew determined — always, forever — never to see that much comatose brown again. Three months later we would be home again, in the house with the strawberry fringe. My toes in the creek. My hands on the frogs. My dreams of fruit and flowers.

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Boy in Yellow Shirt, in Tree

Though there was a war on and I'd been cautioned, I was often alone in El Salvador. I never believe, as much as I should, in danger. On this day we'd left in a mad hurry from the white house in Santa Tecla and driven a highly militarized road (guns everywhere, soldiers at attention) to the raw edge of a cattle-and-pigs somewhere, where we loaded our hastily assembled things into a pontoon of sorts and floated to an estuary. No one told me, until much later, that we were escaping the threat of bombs, a report that the American Embassy had been targeted.

The others unpacked and spoke in their Spanish. I was confused and wandered away. Down a dirt road where women balanced jugs of water on their heads and the houses were brilliantly thatched.

Finally I stopped and waited for this boy to look up and see me. Beyond the thin barbed wire, he would not. I wonder to this day what he was thinking.

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Haloed

I'd come through the coffee jungle. I stood at their door, and one turned, and though I was intruding and do not mean, when I take my camera out, to steal the private (only to spare the moment from the regret of time), I could not move—for their beauty, for the light that haloed their hair. As if they were angels settled into a one-room cinderblock shack.

Does the one write at her desk?

Does she mean to?

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Raw, Guileless

Although I've had an obsession with photography since I built my first pinhole camera back in elementary school, it wasn't until I married a Salvadoran and began to travel to his country that portrait photography became my great passion—photographs of people living their real lives, children, in particular. In El Salvador, then in southern Spain, then in Juarez, San Miguel de Allende, and West and North Philadelphia, I have been confronted, again and again, with the raw, guileless beauty I ache to carry home.

The camera frees me from the need for conversation. It demands of me an observer's stance. It requires no vocabulary—not, at least, right then, when the child stands before me, in her bird-colored dress.

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