Grace Before Dying/Lori Waselchuck: Reflections

By tomorrow afternoon I'll be walking the streets of New Orleans, a city I've long yearned to see. My dear friend Ruta Sepetys set her second novel, Out of the Easy, there. Katie, my student, has been living there this past year—absorbing the culture, bringing her compassionate heart to triage work, and lending her name to a leading character in the novel I finished first-drafting last week. And for a few important years, New Orleans was home to my new friend Lori Waselchuk, the award-winning documentary photographer and fellow Pew Fellow of whom I have written here and (in conjunction with the launch of Anna Badkhen's The World is a Carpet) here.

Today I dedicate this blog to Lori's deeply moving book, Grace Before Dying, a photographic essay inspired by the three years Lori spent documenting the hospice program at the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Lori was invited to do this work by the magazine Imagine Louisiana. She could not, after the assignment was done, imagine walking away. For within the walls of what was once the most notorious prison system in the world—cruel, overcrowded, filthy, murderous—Lori had met men caring for men in their final months. She had met double murderers with a gentle touch, coffin builders with loving hands, laborers waking early to sit in vigilance for their dying best friends, prisoners who had become expert quilters. The hospice program at this prison, also known as Angola, had gentled, and lifted, spirits. It had eased men—some of them locked up for life on drug possession charges—out of bitterness and toward love.

Lori documents the day to day in the hospice program with black and white photographs that are wide angled and intimate and exceptionally personal and true. She shows us the needle in the hands of the quilter, the name on the foot of a sock, a man's last moments, a procession of mourners. She shows us Lloyd Bone, "incarcerated at Angola in 1971 for murder" as he "guides the horse-drawn hearse carrying the body of George Alexander to Point Lookout II, Angola's cemetery" and the "procession of hospice volunteers and friends" as they "walk and sing behind the hearse."

I had looked through Lori's photographs the very day she gave me this book. Today I sat and read her moving introduction, Lawrence N. Powell's essay on the prison's history, and every single caption. I read, too, Lori's acknowledgments in the back, where she writes, in part, "My words of appreciation come up short, so I will express my gratitude through living a life and producing work that emulates the humanity they show for each other."

I haven't known Lori Waselchuk long. But I've seen her throw a party for a friend, lift a friend's child to her hips, talk about the neighbors she loves in West Philadelphia. I've heard Lori talk, and I've seen Lori carry the good flame forward.

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On the eve of the Out of the Easy launch, with Ruta Sepetys

Tomorrow my friend Ruta Sepetys will launch her second novel, a book rich with landscape, intrigue, color, and snap called Out of the Easy (Philomel). It's a book that transported me to steamy 1950s New Orleans during a steamy 2012 Philadelphia day. It's a book that people have been talking about for a year, a book that, in recent days, has been featured prominently in every major news journal (with a full-page Entertainment Weekly interview, to boot!). Set to embark on a ten-week tour, Ruta is also launching some pretty cool initiatives, one of which should be of great interest to my young writing friends.

This initiative is nationwide, a Philomel-sponsored scholarship contest that will award one high-school student with $5,000 toward the college of their choice; the participating school will also receive 25 Penguin books. Those interested will want to read Ruta's book and reflect as well on a certain Charles Dickens quote. For details, go here.

In the meantime, I encourage you to embrace Ruta, her stories, and her great big soul as she travels somewhere near you. Her extensive tour dates (which actually extend through the entire year and will take her around the world) can be found here.

Finally, here is Ruta herself, on the making of Out of the Easy.

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the Small Damages cake, from Ruta Sepetys

I have written many times on this blog about the exquisite writer and human being, Ruta Sepetys.  I am lucky to know her—it's that simple—and the gift of our friendship is a gift that Tamra Tuller, our Philomel editor, gave.  Tamra sent Ruta a copy of Small Damages a long time ago, and Ruta not only lent her voice to this story, but she stayed in touch, sending notes from all around the world as she met with teachers, parents, and children to discuss her international bestseller, Between Shades of Gray—and, later, to prepare us for the February 2013 release of her absolutely lovely second book, Out of the Easy.

Home for Ruta is states away from here.  Life for Ruta is many obligations which she, with all the grace of a true diplomat, seamlessly fulfills.  Still, on July 19th, the day Small Damages was released into the world, Ruta thought to send me a gift.  Enclosed is a little cake, not quite full of taste, but certainly full of love, she wrote.

It had been my son's birthday, and then my husband's.  There was endless corporate work to do.  My party for this little book was two months away.  But there Ruta was, reminding me to take a moment for this book that had consumed ten years of my life and almost (so many times) vanished.  Her cake will always sit among my treasured things, a reminder:  Take a moment.

Today, taking a page from Ruta, I stop to remind us all.

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Out of the Easy/Ruta Sepetys

The dignity of Ruta Sepetys is telegraphed from afar. It's in the books she writes—the international sensation Between Shades of Gray and now (coming in February 2013) Out of the Easy.  It's plain as day in her interviews, her commentary, her web site, her broadcast segments.  And if you ever have the chance to meet her (and I'm lucky; I briefly have), it's all right there in her face.  Ruta isn't a writer simply and only because she wants to be a writer.  She's a writer because she has something to say.

She's a writer, too, who knows the value of deep research—the liberating and liberalizing ways that rooting around in both personal and world history, in the files of the Soviet secret police and the murky streets of the historic French Quarter, in old maps and and the catalogs of Smith College, in the workings of all kinds of watches will, when pondered long enough, when tacked and quilted, generate story.  Research, particularly historic research, can be hard to master and harder to contain.  Ruta makes it look easy.  What she knows never trumps the many things that she imagines.

I spent today lying in a steamy east-coast house, circa 2012, reading Ruta's delectable new circa 1950s New Orleans novel.  Often I forgot just where I actually was as I slid into the dream, drifted in and out of the old bookstore (and the chatter, always smart, about books), had a good old walkabout in the brothel (equal parts gaudy and opulent), and fell in with Easy's seventeen-year-old heroine, Josie.  Josie has found her way despite her mother's poor profession, witless selfishness, and fancy for bad men.  She's a spitfire, an I'll-do-it-myself-er, a girl walking around with a pile of lies but without a dent in her actual morality.  She's the favorite of the wily, big-hearted madam known as Willie.  She's loved by two boys—Patrick, her co-worker at the bookstore, and Jesse, a beautiful boy with a mysterious past—not to mention a whole lot of poor souls who make her tattered life rich.  Josie's mother's on the lam and Josie's in trouble, and there will be murder, mayhem, lies, sacrifice, and choices before this story is through.  There'll be a whole lot of color and New Orleans twang, a rip-roaring cast, and, always, Ruta's intelligent sense of humor, not to mention instructions from Dickens.

Easy, which is a Tamra Tuller book, which is to say a Philomel book, which is to say the product of a remarkable book family headed by Michael Green, sounds spectacularly like then (the details are so right, their webbing-in so clever), but it resonates for now.  It's going to generate a whole lot of book love when it debuts next winter.  

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Ruta Sepetys/Out of the Easy

In the heat of the summer, after a night of hail and thunder clashes, a white package arrives on my stoop.  It's a book that I've been longing for—an early copy of Out of the Easy by the tremendously talented, radiantly successful, and I-know-it-for-a-fact-good-hearted Ruta Sepetys.

This book will, I'm sure, be as beloved as Ruta's first, the New York Times bestselling, multiple-award winning, translated-into-every-conceivable-language Between Shades of Gray.  I just have a feeling, and besides, this is a Tamra Tuller Philomel book.  We know that that's a formula that works.

I'm all done with my complicated sentences.  I'm going to spend the weekend reading this book.  I'll let you know how great it is, so that you can look for it eagerly in February 2013, when it officially debuts.

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