Undercover and the Paperback Extras

When Miss Jill Santopolo invited me to create an "Extras" supplement for Undercover, my novel about a rising young poet and her escapades, I thought a while before concluding that I wanted to tell Elisa's' going-forward story through a letter and a series of new poems. Elisa's story didn't end for me just because I happened to stop writing it. She had always kept growing up in my mind—I'd find her in my imagination, I'd see her out in the streets—and creating the Extras gave me a chance to put down some of where she's traveled.

Yesterday, when I returned home from teaching the next generation of young writers, the Extras were here in my electronic mailbox, waiting for a final review. The timing was Jill-like—creating an intersection between the poet I'd conjured (and partly been) and the poets and writers I'd just left in a light-filled room on the second floor of a coffee shop.

Here is Elisa, then, from the letter that introduces her new book of poems. Undercover, with its Extras, will be available as a paperback in May.

I've gotten interested, I'm saying, in all the ways that language bruises itself. In things that bump and collide. The past against the present. The want against the need. The truth against the lie. The weird against the regular. The smell of red against the color of a song. Poems do not explain, but they do suggest. They mean the most when they buck up and buckle.

Read more...

Making Ready

"Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself. I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the house, marvelous elation. It's as though I could fly."

Anne Sexton

Read more...

Bone

Today I woke up thinking about Fae Myenne Ng, whose voice I first heard on the radio by accident, and whose Philadelphia reading of BONE I attended despite the fact that it was 1993, a time when I rarely got out for such adventures. BONE is exceptional, the story of three sisters growing up in San Francisco's Chinatown. It is one of the most controlled, deep-plunging books I've ever read.

I waited in line that night to speak to Fae. I wanted to tell her only how her reading had given me the sound of her voice, and how that sound would now carry me forward as I finished her book for myself. The line was long, every person telling Fae something about their own life, and Fae listened, patient and gracious. When it was finally my turn to speak, Fae (still patient, still gracious) asked me the simplest hardest question: Are you a writer? I didn't know. I had been publishing short stories in literary journals, I said, and yet, I didn't know what qualifies one as a writer. I didn't know how I would know when I had crossed that line.

A few months later (and this was long before the ubiquity of email), I received a package in the mail—Fae's name on the return envelope. I remember shaking, tearing open the envelope, reaching into the pouch to find what was inside, and do you know what was inside? A pen. She had been traveling, she wrote, and had remembered our conversation. She was sure, she said, that I was a writer.

A pen.

I was forever wanting to read Fae's next book. I was always asking in bookstores, then googling, but there was nothing. Today, as I sat down to write this blog, I googled again, and my news of today is that Fae Myenne Ng has a new book due next May, something titled STEER TOWARD ROCK.

Between us she will always be the real writer. She will also always be to me one of those rare people (but not, by any means, the only one) who reached out, who said, Believe.

Read more...

The Uncommon Reader

Yesterday's guilty pleasure was THE UNCOMMON READER, Alan Bennett's totally fine new novella that wonders what would happen if the queen of England suddenly morphed into an avid reader. Fabulous premise, telling lesson in how ideas can in fact advance plot, how apparent contradictions do indeed broaden understanding, how vocabulary pitched to just the right high can aerate the reading experience (words for the book of words: glabrous, divigation, opsimath). Reading is both passive and a muscle to be developed. Writers are equally brave and mewling. Reading is not for "doers" and yet, reading "tenderises," alters perspective, catalyzes new forms of doing. Bennett has a field day best and worsting the entire lit scene, but cruelty doesn't enter in, only astute observation.

Myopia, self-absorption, grandstanding, melodrama: It can all get the best of us writers. Reader talk, writer talk: Yes, you're right, it grows incestuous, can send my husband (the most happily determined non-reader I know) straight across the room—a cannon shot.

But everytime we write, and everytime we read, and everytime we're out there talking about reading, talking about writing, we are defining what literature is and what it means. We are being given the chance (we are taking the chance) to torque, twist, blue sky it, toward that thing that we want to be part of.

Read more...

One Good Poem

"To have written one good poem—good used seriously—is an unlikely and marvelous thing that only a couple hundred writers of English, at the most, have done—it's like sitting out in the yard in the evening and having a meterorite fall in one's lap." Randall Jarrell

(Happy Halloween!)

Read more...

UNDERCOVER and The Book of Words

Ever since I published UNDERCOVER, whose language-craving heroine is encouraged by her English teacher to keep a journal full of words, I've been hearing stories about others' books of words, bulletin boards of words, scraps-of-loose-paper-in-file-folders collections of words. Even my son came home one day not long ago saying, In English they're asking us for our own book of words. He groaned (he didn't love studying the SAT vocab lists either). But in the end he came up with something so cool and defining that I had to sneak away and look up some of his words myself.

You could ask what for and why keep a book of words, since there's always a dictionary nearby, since any word you could conceivably want is already in some book somewhere. Since you can't really own a word, can't say, This word is mine.

Me? I keep a book of words because my brain is rather small, because it doesn't remember what I want it to remember, needs jogging, much of the time. You, for example, might carry the meanings of "despumate" and "thigmotropic" around in your head. I have to go back, look them up, remember why I liked them to begin with, think about how I might use them somewhere. (I just did.) You might be reading along and know "vatic," no problem. I had to look it up and after I did, I rather liked it, and now it's in my book of words so that someday (maybe) I'll return to it and wrap it up inside some poem.

Read more...

Conversation First

A child asks: What is the surest way to success as a writer? Success being (the child says) fame, being fortune. Because it happened to J.K. Rowling. Because it should happen to us all.

I want to say: Change the terms of your equation. Seek, first, conversation with yourself. Then conversation with others. Then impact.

Read more...

Mimed

Barcelona was hot three summers ago, when I was there, but the mimes were out in force. It was morning when I found this one. He hadn't yet finished his face.

A few days ago, when I was thinking about beginning a new project—crafting a new voice, shaping a new promise—I returned to this image. How perfectly it captured my state of my mind. The grimace. The incompleteness. The checking of self against self in the mirror.

It doesn't matter how many books you have written, how many poems. The first words are the first words. An experiment. A tremble.

Read more...

Teaching UNDERCOVER

This past Monday I went to Baltimore to spend some time with booksellers, librarians, and other writers. Mostly I went to answer one question: Is UNDERCOVER teachable, and if so, what sort of writing workshops and conversations might it spark?

The funny thing is that I didn't write the book with "teachable" in mind; I really was just following a story, building characters, looking toward and past conflict. But inevitably (probably) there are a whole lot of lessonesque moments in this book, scenes in which Elisa, the heroine, begins to build her own book of words, or to learn villanelles, or to think about what metaphors mean. I happen to be one of the biggest proponents of the imagination out there (my fourth book, SEEING PAST Z: NURTURING THE IMAGINATION IN A FAST-FORWARD WORLD, W.W. Norton, was dedicated to the theme) and I guess I just couldn't help layering into UNDERCOVER some of what I've tried to teach young writers myself.

If any of you reading any of this would like a flyer on the topic, let me know. I can send the PDF to your email address.

Read more...

Not a Competitive Sport

Writing is not a competitive sport, nor, as my son likes to say, post-timed SAT essay test, should it be undertaken to the tick of a stopwatch. You play a sport, you are playing by rules. You write, and what is often most glorious is the rules you break, the tenses you re-make, the guideposts you ignore to pull your readers close. You play a sport and you're hunting trophies. Writers hunting for trophies, by and large, are disappointed, which leads to disillusion, which spells either silence or sourness, which is the paired malaise writers must fight hard to avoid, if not for themselves, than at least for the sake of those who love them.

I go for elisions in writing. For bridges and breakaways, slides and stutters, repetitions. I write books that break form, dodge categorization, mess with genre, and if I had to think of myself as going head-to-head against some other writer, as match-worthy, race-wise, suited up, I don't think I'd get far. I think I'd shut down, fall back on what has already been done.

What is already known.

Can you teach writing? It's the age-old question. I think the better question is: How can we clear more space in which writers might work? How can we help them honor their own imaginations?

P.S. A thank you to the ever-gracious Maureen at my local Barnes & Noble for holding the event that enabled some of us to talk about some of this, yesterday.

Read more...

On the Beauty of Being Lost

Here in Pennsylvania, autumn took a long time coming, but the winds blew hard from a cracked, blue place today, and the sun came more coyly through my window—pushed through ruby-tipped leaves before it forced its way into my room.

Smashed itself onto my desk.

Rearranged shadows.

Super-charged weather, as my writer friend Alyson Hagy has taught me, takes you halfway down the road toward plot, toward the new. So today I decided not to do much at all, just to open myself to the wind.

A note from writer/teacher Lia Purpura blew in. I took a long time reading, considering. Lia was thinking out loud about the importance of something she calls "lostness," about the value of not knowing. Writerly technique can be taught, it can be pressed upon a writer, she said (and she should know, since she's taught at the Iowa Writer's Workshop). But knowing simply can't be taught. Knowing takes time, and how can any writing matter, really, if it doesn't have wisdom at its core? Lia is one of those people who doesn't judge if she doesn't have to. She's got an essay coming out in Seneca in November, called, " What is a Lyric Essay: Provisional Responses." Take a look. It will surprise you.

After reading Lia's note and essay, I picked up Mary Oliver's OUR WORLD again. The book fell open to an Oliver essay about the importance of paying attention. "I was eager to address the world of words—to address the world with words," Oliver writes. "Then M. instilled in me this deeper level of looking and working, of seeing through the heavenly visibles to the heavenly invisibles."

I took the picture of the little girl in this blog earlier this summer, in the main plaza of San Miguel de Allende. I had this sense, when I first found her sitting there, that if I took her picture, and took that picture home, I'd know something of her story. See through to an invisible. Find a story.

Is she watchful or bored? Is she timid or bold? Is yellow a borrowed color, or her own?

But it's been a few months, and I still don't have any answers—no trail to walk down, no open portal. I am still thinking about what this girl might mean. About who she might become in a story. It's a form of lostness. It's an essential part of process.

Read more...

Kids, Fabulous Kids

So I've been writing, in this blog, all about books and words and photos and sounds, but let me take a morning's moment to celebrate the thing that transcends all that, which is (of course) young souls. I have had the most terrific time as a mom (and yes, my son, who thoroughly blows me away with his own edgy, classy, dialogue-fabulous, plot-enhanced writing, is nearly college bound), and I've had the greatest time kicking back and reading and writing with kids in classrooms, gardens, my own tiny but sun-filled house.

But this beautiful creature here in this photograph happens to be my youngest niece, who taught me a little about reading nine months or so ago. We were all gathered at my parents' house and she'd brought a library book with her, and nothing made her happier—nothing—than to be able to read that book out loud. The predictable patterning of the rhymes helped her out. The pictures kept her on track. The fact that her own mom had read it to her until it had the free-falling flow of the familiar. It was like watching a dance, watching this little one read, and it was also like seeing the future. Because she was opening doors for herself and she was so entrancingly eager for more. Watching her blonde head bob, watching her sky eyes shine, I sat there thinking that we who deign to write have responsibilities—to make it fun, to make it smart, to keep readers wanting more.

Read more...

A Poem

A White Flower Blooms in a Red Garden
(Beth Kephart)

When I die:
The bloomed-out pink of a peony nearest my head,
a deer at the edge of the gazebo,
a soprano bird in the near limb
of the river birch,
the river birch peeling.

It will be a day like today begun
with dahlias in the garden,
lisianthus in full crown,
something once said in my head,
sky settled on the tongue
of the bearded iris,

and what you call metaphor
will be just my way of saying God
while the breeze carries by on the smooth stone back
of a common turtle
in the final syllable
of the final hour.

This morning,
in a clump of flowers that has always ripened red,
a white stray with only a zest of that blood color
at its prayerful center.
The end of something.
The near beginning.

Read more...

UNDERCOVER and Mary Oliver

If you've ever read Mary Oliver's poetry, you'll know why I felt compelled to weave it into UNDERCOVER. Elisa, my novel's heroine, is struggling to define herself, to use her gift for language to emerge as her own important person. Dr. Charmin, Elisa's English teacher, wants to help. She's asked Elisa to create a book of words. She's encouraged her to believe in her own work. And then, toward the end of UNDERCOVER, Dr. Charmin gives Elisa a copy of Mary Oliver's poem, "Wild Geese," which begins, "You do not have to be good" and leads toward a line that starts, "Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,/the world offers itself to your imagination...."

"Wild Geese" is extraordinary—heartrending and uplifting at the same time. It's the poem that Elisa needs to push through to herself, the gift that Dr. Charmin shares.

Many volumes of Mary Oliver's work sit across from me as I type, alongside the work of other favorite poets (Stanley Kunitz, Ted Kooser, Rainer Maria Rilke, James Wright, Louise Gluck, Jack Gilbert, Gregory Djanikian, Gerald Stern, C.K. Williams). Recently I learned of another extraordinary Mary Oliver book, this one called OUR WORLD and featuring the photography of Oliver's long-time partner, Molly Malone Cook. It's a composite book—part journal, part poetry, part reminsce, and loss, always, and love, always. It is a book so full of clarity that you feel the breeze blowing through.

Read more...

Belonging

Here's a confession: Beyond my fabulous high school English teacher, I didn't have someone looking over my writing shoulder until I had already given birth to a son. I took History and Sociology of Science courses at the University of Pennsylvania (enduring calculus, biology, and chemistry along the way). I graduated and filled journal after journal with poems. I married a guy who draws spectacularly well but doesn't have, shall we say, a passion for reading. One day I picked up and read a book that advertised itself as memoir — ROAD SONG, by Natalie Kutz — and decided, right then, to try my own hand at the form. Kutz had published her first essay in a magazine called "Iowa Woman." I (and this still registers as a miracle to me) published my first essay there. I wrote Kutz a letter telling her how much I loved her work. She wrote a letter back (an even grander miracle) complimenting the letter that I'd written her, telling me something of her ambitions with story. I framed that letter. It sits here still.

But it wasn't until my son was four years old that our family of three headed for Spoleto, Italy, so that I could take a writing workshop with Rosellen Brown and Reginald Gibbons. The entire thing was revelatory—the exercises we were given, the critiques that were levied, the way we'd head off for a cemetery, say, and then be asked to fashion an entire life out of the birth and death dates on tombstones. We fiddled with past and present tense inside a cool, white room. We traded favorite books beneath a faded canopy at lunch. We talked about how each other's stories might be shaped on the trains we took to Florence or Assisi.

The point is — well, there are a lot of points, but one of the points is this: I learned the value of camraderie in writing. I began to reach out. Took another writing workshop another summer or so later—this one with Jayne Anne Phillips and William Gass in Prague. Continued to write to authors whose work I loved, and to hear, more often than not, back (I have, in my possession, a most-prized postcard from Michael Ondaatje). Would find myself sitting on panels or judging contests or contributing stories to anthologies with people I respected, people who became lasting friends.

There are a lot of great things that can happen in a writing life. There are achievements that we're all running after. But for me, the very best thing has been this forging of friendships with those whose work I respect, whose opinions I weigh, whose lives I care about. Writing has set me down inside a world of conversations about process, archetypes, disappointments, breakthroughs that I find, frankly, thrilling. It has given me something that I might as well call "belonging"—word by word, and story by story.

Read more...

Evocations vs. Declarations

As you've probably figured out by now, I'm keen on photographs. I make them. I study them. I rely on them. Always. I go out taking pictures the way some people go out shopping, and when I'm stuck for light or life in a sentence, I start sifting through my images. Hunting for details. Hunting for mood.

But you have to be careful when working with photographs. You have to know what they mean. They're not definitive, that's for sure. There is always a before and always an after to every picture taken, always something elusive and lovely just outside the frame.

I'm interested in the suggested, the evoked, when I work on my stories, poems, and memoirs. I'm interested in the words in column 2 below, try to work past or through that which sits in column 1. I'm not writing legal briefs or journalism, and so I have that freedom. I have that right, that opportunity, and so I seize it.

Column 1 Column 2

Explain/ Illuminate
Record/ Remember
Argue/ Explore
Retaliate/ Evolve
Condemn/ Liberate
Accuse/ Understand
Obliterate/ Rescue
Attach/ Approach
Demand/ Long for

Read more...

On Writing Villanelles

Though, Elisa, the heroine of UNDERCOVER is an aspiring writer, she still has a whole lot to figure out. There's an entire universe of words that she still hasn't explored, or made her own. There are voices that she's been hiding behind. And then there are all the ways that poems can get crafted—forms she's still struggling to master.

One day Dr. Charmin, Elisa's English teacher, asks the class to create a villanelle, which is in fact a French construction—a type of poem that takes its power from the repetition of refains. The first line of the first tercet (a three-line stanza) becomes the last line in the second and fourth tercets, while the third line in the first tercet appears as the final lines of tercets three and five. And then there's a crescendo of four lines—a quatrain—in which the two refrains appear one last time, to close the poem. Villanelles take their readers on circuitous journeys--in and out of a mood, around an idea, toward something true but elusive. You could chant an infant to sleep with a villanelle. You could ride the endless crest of a heartbreak.

I find the villanelle to be a terrific challenge. I've loved gathering young writers together and hearing them read famous villanelles out loud—Theodore Roethke's "The Waking," for example, or "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" by Dylan Thomas (these and other villanelles can be found in the wonderful Norton anthology THE MAKING OF A POEM). I love watching them ease into the rhythms as they pass bits of the poem off to one another. But what is even more exciting is watching young writers fashion villanelles themselves. With the sound of masterful villanelles in their ear, with the patterns and the beat pressed upon them, they seem to transition effortlessly into the making of their own poems, the discovery of their own essential repetitions.

Villanelles require the opening of one's thoughts to song. They require a poet's faith that meaning itself can be found within sound.

Read more...

Try This at Home: A Writing Prompt

How daunting do you find the blank page? How intimidating—this inescapable fact that stories have been written and told and retold and critiqued and embossed and fictionalized and exposed as autobiography (and vice versa) since the beginning of time? Is there anything left to write? Any impact we can have, as writers writing today?

I used to wonder about this all time. Then I stumbled over a few stunning little facts in Richard Lederer's book, THE MIRACLE OF LANGUAGE. He makes the claim that, with the exception of everyday phrases like "How are you?" and "I am fine," most of the sentences we speak are not borrowed, but our own. We may think we are seeing the same thing as someone else, we may be absolutely sure that we are thinking about it in the same way, but in the end, we find our own way to tell the story.

Choose a photograph. Gather a group of friends. Give yourselves just 20 words—no more, no less—to tell the story of the photograph. Take five minutes, and compare your work. Chances are that each of you have now composed the beginning of utterly different stories.

Read more...

Beginnings

For eight consecutive summers, not so long ago, I had the privilege of hanging out with young writers. Sometimes they came to my house. Sometimes we met in a garden. Sometimes we sat on someone else's porch. We'd read some of my favorite writers out loud, or imagine a room built of shadows, or work together to create a neighborhood of unforgettable characters. We'd write villanelles and pastorals and advertising lines. We'd imagine ourselves to be kites caught in trees. We'd listen to music and write to its mood.

Wherever the writers were, there was light. There was laughter. There was something that I held onto for a very long time.

When I was creating the heroine of my first novel, UNDERCOVER, I was thinking a lot about the young writers I'd met and what they'd taught me. I was thinking, too, about who I had been as a child—how much I'd loved words, and how much I also loved to ice skate. For me, language and movement will always be bound. I think of writing as an act of choreography, just as I think of ice skating as a form of storytelling.

UNDERCOVER has elements of my own life in it, therefore. But it is also inspired by the young writers working today.

Read more...