Barbara Shoup

Drawing Boxes: Thoughts on Perspective and Point of View

2012-02-15T07:53:00.004-05:00

My friend Marilyn, who’s a wonderful painter, has been trying her hand at writing the past few years. I’ve been trying my hand at painting and drawing. When we talk (which isn’t often enough), we marvel at how much the same they are. How seeing the world, really seeing it, is fundamental to both. How both have a set of rules and conventions you must commit to learning if you ever expect to get any good—and how learning them earns you the right to go your own way when going your own way seems the only possible solution to creating the painting or story in your head.

Perspective, composition, color theory; Grammar, punctuation, the elements of fiction are the good bones on which any good painting or story is made.

So I signed up for “Drawing for Future Painters” at the Indianapolis Art Center this winter, determined to get better at that "bones"thing.. “Everything fits in a box,” my teacher said on the first day. “If you can draw a box, you can draw anything.”

That is, if you can draw a box…in perspective.

Which is a lot harder than you might think.

But I love getting lost in the lines and angles, trying and failing to get one box right, then the one next to it, and the one behind. It’s like writing. You need to keep remembering that you’re trying to draw a certain box, the one in front of you—right now. If you move, the composition changes, and if you’re not careful you’ll find yourself drawing a whole other set of boxes.

Sort of like when you hang one strip of wallpaper out of plumb, which affects the next strip and the next and next and next until you get to the end, where the wallpaper meets the end of the wall in a very unfortunate slant.

Sort of like when you start out writing a story and go off on a tangent, eventually realizing that you’ve lost the focus, the thread. The characters are all over the place, doing and saying things that make no sense whatsoever based on what you were trying to accomplish.

Anyway. I’m struggling with staying in one place to draw the boxes, trying to master that little pencil trick artists do to figure out the proportion of one line to another. My friend, Marilyn, is struggling with point of view.

“What is it?” she asked. “For example, Beloved by Toni Morrison. I am getting the thoughts (things only they would know) of several main characters—Sethe, Paul D. Denver, Beloved. Is it okay to allow several characters to have their voice, but with the distinction of page or chapter breaks? This has puzzled me in several books, the really deep, good ones."

Oh, boy, I thought. Toni Morrison is not a good place to start learning the fundamentals of point of view. Talk about breaking the rules when the rules don’t fit what’s in your head. She’s a freaking genius at it.

The point of view in Beloved changes constantly from one main character to another. Now and then whole new points of view are added, when Morrison needs them to say something she wants to say. And as if that weren’t enough to drive an aspiring writer crazy, the novel doesn’t tell a linear story, but offers the reader fragments of shattered lives and asks him to make sense of it.

I was about to write back to Marilyn and say, “Forget Beloved.” And suggest some novels that treat point of view traditionally, as a way of getting a handle on how that element of fiction works.
Then I thought about how, drawing a still life, you have to keep looking at it from exactly the same place and it occurred to me that point of view works exactly the same way.

If you choose to tell a story from one person’s point of view, you have to keep seeing the world through his eyes. If, suddenly, you start looking at it through somebody else’s eyes, the world shifts—and the effect of that shifting is as jarring as a wrong angle.

Yes, you can tell a story from more than one point of view. But once you’re in one person’s point of view, you can’t jump in and out of others at will. When multiple points of view work, it's like crossing a river on stepping-stones. You move from one to the next, telling what needs to be told from that place. Then you move on to the next one and tell that part of the story.

Not unlike how you have to draw one whole box before moving on to the next one, whose placement will be dependent upon it.

Sometimes people confuse multiple points of view with the omniscient point of view. This point of view doesn't allow the characters any say in telling their stories. Instead, the story is told by an unnamed being who's not in it. Somebody who stands above the story, like a sentient God, who sees everything like an aerial photograph set in motion. "He" shapes and tells the story, making choices about which parts of the big picture to reveal and how to reveal them based on what the reader needs to know to understand the people and the situation they’re in.

Like I said, Beloved breaks all the rules.

Think of Picasso fracturing the world and putting it back together in way that’s all wrong…but absolutely right.

And Paul Klee's notebooks, filled with landscapes and figures rendered in perfect perspective juxtaposed against a gallery filled with his whimsical paintings.

So, Marilyn, does that help?

And thanks for the question, which made me see something I hadn’t seen before.

Perspective and point of view are exactly the same thing.

Dang! Who knew?

Fabulous Indiana Writers: Nicole Louise Reid

2012-02-09T18:01:00.007-05:00

First: Is this a cool book cover, or what?

Second: Who could resist a book titled, So There!

And—good things come in threes—the stories inside create whole universe, strange, compelling and absolutely real.

Take the opening story, “If You Must Know,” which begins, “These are the early cicadas, four years ahead of schedule, chirping, shrilling, blistering through their skins. Thirteen years ago the night was electric with their noise, and one burrowed right into me—that little flab of skin beneath the arm socket. Thinking me a tree because I lay so still at the thought of what we’d just done beneath the water oak, Wallace and me. It broke through my skin and climbed deep within, planning to live there for its next seventeen years, sucking and sapping what it can from me. And so there must be something in people akin to the marrow of a tree’s sweet pulp, because my locust is alive and waiting.”

The girl, who’s become a young woman by the time the story begins, absolutely believes that the insect has been living in her body since that moment, “…a completely enveloped thing three quarters of an inch long and a half an inch wide, hard and slightly humming.” It’s a reminder of the time she spent with Wallace, something to hold on to since he left. She’s been “…skating along just mediocre” when he appears at the Kroger, where she works as a checkout clerk.

Of course, when he takes her arm she goes with him—and in no time at all they’re right back where they left off. “He was gripping one of my hips hard, letting his other hand climb up the front of my blouse, letting himself rumple the rayon and tug at the buttons, letting himself pull down one of the cups of my bra.

“’What do you want?’” she asks him, knowing, “Any boy’s more than likely to opt for the I’d like you to suck me silly interpretation, versus the I want you always and forever, you’re my girl and I want you with me something bad.”

He’s a journalist now, and what he wants is to write a story about her.

I’ll leave you to imagine that heartbreak that comes of it.

One way or another, every character in Nicole Louise Reid’s universe of stories is a victim of a yearning for tenderness, her own or someone else’s. It overwhelms them, not unlike the black swarm, the whirring of the cicadas in that first story overwhelm the natural world. It’s mirrored in the lush landscape and steamy heat of Louisiana.

For those of us who live in our heads more than in our bodies, these stories are a revelation. Oh! I thought. So that’s what it’s like to feel that way.

When I closed So There! and put it down, I knew more about life than I did before I opened it.

Good books do that.

Nicole Louise Reid is the author a novel In the Breeze of Passing Things, and two fiction chapbooks If You Must Know and Girls . Winner of the 2010 Dana Award in Short Fiction and Burnside Review Fiction Chapbook Competition, her stories have appeared in the Southern Review, Indiana Review, Meridian, Quarterly West, Other Voices, and elsewhere. A graduate of the M.F.A. Creative Writing Program of George Mason University, she now teaches creative writing at the University of Southern Indiana, where she serves as director of the RopeWalk Reading Series, editor of RopeWalk Press, and fiction editor of Southern Indiana Review. She lives in Newburgh, Indiana.

www.NicoleLouiseReid.com.

Flannery O'Connor Rules

2012-01-19T07:25:00.005-05:00

Flannery O’Connor Rules
This is the name of the list of writing tips that came to me by way of a friend, but also a sentence.

Flanner O’Connor rules.

Yes, she does!

I discovered her collected letters, The Habit of Being, not long after I gathered up my courage to try my hand at writing a novel—a task for which I had no preparation, no training, nothing but the fact that I had been in love with novels from the first one I read when I was, maybe, seven.

I loved the matter-of-fact, suffer-no-fools voice in the letters, the way she wrote what she saw and felt and knew about life in the world and life of the spirit in language that was at the same time plain and complicated and deep. I loved her stories—the drudge and pain and horrors of the human condition rendered with a dark humor I’d never experienced before, except in my own heart.

It’s bad, I know—but when the Misfit shoots the grandmother and says to Bobby Lee, "She would of been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life,” I laughed out loud and thought, ohmygod, yes.

Here’s that same voice in these “rules” about writing plucked from her letters.

1. “I’m a full-time believer in writing habits…You may be able to do without them if you have genius but most of us only have talent and this is simply something that has to be assisted all the time by physical and mental habits or it dries up and blows away…Of course you have to make your habits in this conform to what you can do. I write only about two hours every day because that’s all the energy I have, but I don’t let anything interfere with those two hours, at the same time and the same place.”

2. “Try arranging [your novel] backwards and see what you see. I thought this stunt up from my art classes, where we always turn the picture upside down, on its two sides, to see what lines need to be added. A lot of excess stuff will drop off this way.”

3. “I can discover a good many possible sources myself for Wise Blood but I am often embarrassed to find that I read the sources after I had written the book.”

4. “I suppose I am not very severe criticizing other people’s manuscripts for several reasons, but first being that I don’t concern myself overly with meaning. This may be odd as I certainly believe a story has to have meaning, but the meaning in a story can’t be paraphrased and if it’s there it’s there, almost more as a physical than an intellectual fact.”

5. “That is interesting about your reading some Shakespeare to limber up your language before you start; though I think that anything that makes you overly conscious of the language is bad for the story usually.”

6. “It might be dangerous for you to have too much time to write. I mean if you took off a year and had nothing else to do but write and weren’t used to doing it all the time then you might get discouraged.”

7. “This may seem a small matter but the omniscient narrator never speaks colloquially. This is something it has taken me a long time to learn myself. Every time you do it you lower the tone.”

8. “I know that the writer does call up the general and maybe the essential through the particular, but this general and essential is still deeply embedded in mystery. It is not answerable to any of our formulas.”

So offbeat, practical, true.

Fabulous Indiana Writers: Jean Harper

2012-01-11T07:26:00.006-05:00

One of the cool things about my job as the Executive Director of the Writers' Center of Indiana is promoting the work of fabulous Indiana writers. I know a lot of them, which is one of my life's great pleasures. But I'm always discovering new ones--and Jean Harper, who lives and writes in Richmond, Indiana, is one of them. Rose City: A Memoir of Work was published by Mid-List Press in 2005.

Harper went to work as a rose cutter when she moved from her East Coast home Richmond, Indiana to be with a former professor whom she had loved since she was a student at Earlham College. She’s married; he’s married. It’s a difficult time. Harper risks everything for love and love is at the center of Rose City, but this memoir is not a love story. It’s the story of a smart, talented, well-educated woman in her thirties, who takes the only job available to her in this small college town, cutting roses, and whose co-workers accept her, teach her, and help her find her way into a new life. It’s about the rose industry, about roses. It’s about a once prosperous Midwestern town dying as new labor policies of the 1990’s lure American companies to countries where workers are unprotected and drastically greater profits can be made.

“All of it was foreign to me,” Harper writes early in the book. “I was an American, living and working in my own country, but it didn’t feel that way. I had crossed a border. I could have used a passport and a visa, entry stamped JUN 27 1992. RICHMOND, INDIANA, THE ROSE CITY.”

Thia world, which Harper so beautifully created on the page didn’t seem foreign to me at all. I grew up in the Calumet Region in the fifties, in a working class family that struggled to make ends meet—a world I left behind as soon as I could, but which, as time goes by, I realize shaped the strongest parts of me. I recognized Lil, Joy, Sammie Jo, Eddie, Bo, and Hank. They lived in my neighborhood in a different place, a different time, and so I know how well Harper captured the poignant mix of grace and resignation which they faced each day, the deep sense of responsibility they felt toward family and friends, the hope that sustained them even as the world seemed determined to drag them down.

I loved everything about Rose City: the story of this group of workers, which read like a novel; the social commentary about company practices with chemicals that put everyone in danger folded into their concerns about pregnant 17 year-old Sammie Jo; lush, lyrical forays into the world of roses; the deft characterization of Richmond, with its assortment of working class people and academics. The raw honesty with which Harper explored the disappointments and failures in her life that she knew she must face to be able to find happiness pretty much blew me away.

“The greenhouse saved me from an ordinary life,” she writes near the end of the book.

Having read Rose City, it’s hard for me to imagine that Jean Harper is a person capable of being ordinary. In any case, I’m glad she found work in the greenhouse and very glad she wrote this book about it.

Jean Harper grew up in Concord, Massachusetts. She earned her B.A. from Earlham College and her M.F.A. from Emerson College. Her short fiction, essays, and memoir have been published in The Iowa Review, Living Forge Journal, and Cimarron Review, among others. She is an assistant professor of English at Indiana University East and lives in Richmond, Indiana.

Kiss? Essay? Essay? Kiss?

2012-01-01T07:34:00.007-05:00

Okay. It is probably not a good sign that I sat down to work this first morning of the new year, opened my email to download a file I’d sent from my other computer, and could not resist clicking on “Best 2011 TV Kisses.” I don’t even watch TV, though I got the first season of “Glee” for Christmas last year, watched all the episodes in a couple of days, then rented and obsessively watched all other available season—and the “come-on” picture for the AOL teaser was of Blaine and Kurt. It was a great kiss. Still.

Maybe my first New Year’s resolution should be to start using my Mac e-mail, even though I find the me.com address extremely annoying. Me, me, me. But which is better? An annoying e-mail address or the constant temptation to waste time on stupid shit like “Best 2011 TV Kisses?” Plus, according to my daughter Kate, having an AOL address pegs you as an old person, which of course I am, but, hey, why broadcast it?

Okay. Resolution One.

On the other hand, it seems like a lot of trouble. Can’t I just not click on that stuff? And stop checking my e-mail I hate to think how many times a day? Not to mention Facebook. The New York Times, the Huffington Post. Whatever.

Years ago, leafing through a fashion magazine in some waiting room, this jumped out at me: “Discipline is remembering what you want.”

No doubt, the context was losing weight, buffing up your body, creating your own style. But I was teaching creative writing to high school students at the time, constantly talking (them to death, they probably thought) about the importance of discipline, and I think that’s why the “you” in the sentence hit me so hard.

Especially when you’re a teenager, “discipline” is something parents, teachers, coaches—grown-ups—are constantly saying you need to have. Naturally, then, it feels like being disciplined is something you do to please them, if pleasing them is important to you. If the grown-ups in your life are controlling, not being disciplined is one way you can have some control over your own life. They can ground you, give you a bad grade, kick you off the team—but they can’t make you have the discipline you need to achieve the goals they’ve set for you.

Weirder, and even more destructive, you actually want what they want for you, but there’s no way you’re going to try to achieve it because trying feels like pleasing them and there’s no freaking way you’re going to do that.

I wrote the quote, underlining the “you,” in the journal of a kid I was pretty sure fell into that last category, based on what he wrote about his life. The next time I saw him, he said, “That quote totally blew me away. I wrote it on my bathroom mirror with my mom’s lipstick.”

Not that he immediately became a disciplined person. But it gave him a new way of thinking about what discipline was, which was a start.

In fact, we all carry the residue of the dreams and goals that people had for us when we were young and they get all tangled up in the dreams and goals we have for ourselves. It’s hard to unravel them, though once you understand they’re there you begin to recognize them in the nasty little voice in your head that directs you away from the work you want and need to do. You’re no good, you’re unworthy, you’ll never, ever succeed—so why bother?

You don’t have time. You have to clean the house, rake the leaves, clean the closet, take your sick neighbor a casserole.

The voice can be sugary sweet, too. You deserve a trip to the mall? How about a movie? A nap?

Whatever it's telling you, once you identify it as the residue of what others wanted you to be, you have to remember what you want every day, every hour, every minute to keep it at bay. (Not only New Year's Day)

It’s a constant balancing act.

“Best 2011 TV Kisses?”

Work on the essay you set aside this time to work on?

Seems easy, but it’s not.

For one thing, anyone deeply involved in the creative process knows that sometimes the best stuff comes from an unintended seque. Yielding to temptation can trigger a light bulb moment in your head.

For better or worse, I did get this whole blog post out of yielding to the temptation of TV kisses. And, writing, I found focus for some thoughts I’d been pondering. New ideas floated up—as they always do.

But what if I’d resisted the temptation and spent the better-part-of-an-hour I’ve just spent writing this on the essay I sat down to write?

Can't know. The time is gone.

Seriously, this stuff can drive you crazy.

Still, remembering what you want can be useful in those moments of temptation.

And the old cliché, “Just Do It.”

Just write.

Dear God

2011-11-01T21:11:00.004-04:00

Okay, first, full disclosure: I don’t believe You are a You.

Of course, if I’m wrong and You are a You, You already know this—and everything else, for that matter. And if You really are the all powerful You so many people imagine, the one with long white hair sitting on a throne in heaven (wherever that is), maybe You’ve got Your finger raised right now, trying to decide whether to unleash that lightning bolt smite me for being insubordinate.

Or.

Maybe You’re thinking, Right on! Finally. Somebody actually using the brain I gave them.

And/or.

Laughing because, the brain You gave me was faulty. On purpose.

In which case, is this all some kind of cosmic game for You? Which would be pretty crappy on Your part. Still, I can see how You’d need something to counteract the boring, unrelenting goodness of heaven.

To be fair, I should say that, despite my deep reservations about Your existence, I make use of You. I tell my writing students, “Human beings are not only good or only bad. There are no pure heroes or villains. It’s way more messy than that. Creating believable characters is like being God. Imagine Him up there in heaven, creating us one-by-one, setting us in motion. Not controlling us, just rooting for us as we make our way through the world He made. High-fiving St. Peter when we do something good and right.

“Doh!” he says, covering his face with his hands when we blow it. When we’re stupid, mean, arrogant, stingy, unforgiving—or worse. Always hoping we’ll do better next time.

Maybe this next thought is blasphemous, it probably is—and if so, I apologize. Seriously.

But what if You’re just like us—fiction writers, I mean. What if you keep trying and failing to make the world You imagine here on earth?

Like me using the faulty brain You gave me to trick some unanswerable question into a story, hoping against hope that the world I make with words will offer up some small thing that helps me better understand the world You made.

What if each one of us is a story-in-progress?

What if writing a story is a kind of prayer?

Not the kind that asks for favors, but the kind that asks a question—the question always being “Why?”

For example, You may remember that my sister, Jackie, died of brain cancer a while ago. If you are You, all powerful, You decided this would happen to her.

When she called to tell me about the diagnosis, she kept saying in a stunned voice, nothing like her own, “But I’m a good person. A good person.”

And, as You know, she really, truly was.

She was not a religious person. Nor was she an unbeliever. Just one of those live-in-the moment people who didn’t think a lot about such things. In any case, she didn’t have the personal relationship with You that some people describe, the kind in which prayer is like talking to your dad, asking, wheedling, promising to do…whatever if You will just…whatever.

But lots people who claim to know You that way prayed for her.

At first they prayed, “Please make Jackie get better”; then, when it became clear that You’d decided against that, “Please don’t let her suffer any more.”

During her long illness, at her funeral, they said:

God always knows what’s best for us.

(Brain cancer? Please.)

God never gives us more than we can handle.

(But Jackie so could not handle it, God. She lived in terror from the moment of her diagnosis till the hospice nurse gave her enough morphine so that she could finally just slip away. The rest of us didn’t handle it all that well either. We still aren’t.)

God works in mysterious ways.

(Which, I have to say, made me freaking furious every single time and made me want to grab whoever said it and shake the shit out of them, then get right in his or her face and say between clenched teeth, “That is the stupidest, most condescending, thoughtless and annoying thing you could possibly say. Do you actually believe it’s acceptable for God to treat my sister this way—or anyone, for that matter.)

It’s making me freaking furious all over again, writing about it now.

Because, let me tell You, God, it will soon be ten years since I got that awful call from my sister and, as far as I can tell, nothing but heartbreak has come from what You made happen to her.

Just last night I went to the wedding of the daughter of some good friends. We’ve known the bride since she was a little girl, watched her grow into a gawky teenager, and rooted for her as she struggled in those first years after college, trying to find herself, longing for love. Tall, willowy, radiant, she was a picture of happiness in her beautiful gown. After the ceremony, she danced the traditional first dance with her new husband. She danced with her dad. I felt so happy, watching them.

Then the groom danced with his mother.

And it hit me. Jackie won’t be there to dance with her son Sam when he gets married this summer and, God, my heart cracked in a whole new place.

I don’t know. Maybe You feel as bad about this as I do. Maybe when you were writing the story of Jackie, brain cancer just came into it and there was nothing you could do. (That happens with stories, I know.) Maybe you watched it all come down just as I did, hoping for a better, happier ending even knowing how unlikely that would be.

But all this is moot because, as I disclosed earlier, I don’t believe in You.

I believe if there is such a thing as God, He, She, It is nothing like us at all—but so vast and amorphous and truly strange that there are no words, there is nothing in our experience of being human that makes it possible to describe It—and it would be absurd to try.

Here I am talking to You, though—and I have to admit it does feel like I’m talking to Someone. Go figure.

As usual, wrestling with that faulty brain has left me in a muddle, strands of thought tangled hopelessly in my head. As usual, I conclude that all I can do is to keep on writing stories, keep on hoping that each one of them will answer some part of he question, Why?

If you are a You, please receive them as prayers.

If you’re not the kind of God equipped to receive anything from us, personally, or if there’s no God at all, nothing but us, and life is no more than some random quirk in the universe, I’ll keep writing them anyway.

Because I can’t not write and stay even a little bit sane in this crazy world.

Because one of the few things I believe absolutely is that the connections we make telling each other stories about life on this earth really, really matter.

Recently published at On Earth As It Is

www.onearthasitis.net

Is This My Beautiful House?

2011-09-25T20:04:00.012-04:00

I’ve written before about house angst, that longing for the perfect house. Who knew I had one? I mean, I love my house (now, after years of a love/hate relationship with it), but I was pretty surprised when someone from the Broad Ripple Historic Home Tour left a note on my door last spring asking if we’d consider opening our house for it. Then, when I didn’t respond, showed up on my doorstep and asked in person.

“Well,” I said. “I guess you can come in and look around to see if you’re really interested.”

They were. I thought it would be fun, so I said, “Yes.

I got two basic responses when I told people about this: “Oh, cool!” and “Are you crazy?”

As for the latter, last week, as the Home Tour loomed, I was beginning to think “crazy” might apply. Not because I was feeling worried about 800 or so people tromping through my house, invading my privacy or, worse, stealing my stuff, but because I actually found myself polishing the leaves of my plants. Seriously. It was the pinnacle of days and days of cleaning and sprucing things up, generally. Not to mention spending an awful lot of money on kitchen and bathroom counters, newly painted rooms, and landscaping improvements.)

“But when it all got going on Saturday morning, I had a blast.

"I love the yellow!" people said, coming in.

"And the blue kitchen!"

“Are you an artist?” one woman asked. “You are very daring with color.”

I think it was a compliment.

People lingered in my nutty little office, which looks alarmingly like the inside of my head.

“Whoa!” they said when they walked out into my nifty little garden.

I was exhausted when it was over. Today, I relished the rainy, gloomy day inside my still-sparkling house, with it bouquets of flowers bought at the Farmers Market for the occasion.

Quantum Physics

2011-07-23T09:31:00.007-04:00

In a parallel universe
my sister is waking,
her heart full, thinking
about Sam and Katie,
how nervous they were last night,
at the rehearsal, how sweet
to one another, and all those
grown-up boys—David, so like
our dad when he was young,
and Sam’s buddies, all of them
still children in her mind’s eye,
playing Ghostbusters in the yard.

Which makes her a little weepy
about how quickly the time went,
how quickly it’s going.

But it is a happy day,
she is happy and that is all
she ever wanted. Her memories
are all happy. Holding Sam
for the first time in her arms,
his first words, his first steps
and how fervently he loved lawn mowers
and balloons and dinosaurs.
The year he went to preschool
every morning, a fabric tail pinned to his pants.

She remembers his head bent over a first grade primer,
the sound of his flutey voice, reading aloud,
his floppy white-blond hair and bony arms
and legs and little boy sweat. The smell of chlorine
on his skin after a day in the pool.

And when, suddenly, he was so tall
she had to look up to see him. She remembers him
driving away the first time in the car
and how he looked in his tuxedo on prom night,
the feel of his arm around her, the click
of the shutter, capturing them together
for all time, beaming.

In this universe, there is no memory
of sickness, she can’t even imagine not living
to see his wedding day, which she is rising
to meet on this sunny summer morning.

National Road Yard Sale

2011-06-06T06:22:00.004-04:00

Who knew there was an annual 800 mile-long yard sale along Route 40, spanning St. Louis to Baltimore—and running right through Indiana? And where else would you find out about it than a beauty salon? One of the women who works in the shop where I get my hair done had gotten up early to check it out between Indy and Richmond, near the state line, and was talking about the treasures she’d found when I got there Thursday afternoon.

Of course, we had to go! Highway 40 is archetypal Indiana, with its corn and soybean fields, old farmhouses, and little towns. We drove, stopping here and there, when something caught our fancy.

I've got to say, it was mostly a lot of junk. Still you had to appreciate the sheer weirdness of selection—everything used underwear to rubber-banded sets of restaurant swizzle sticks, Sponge Bob lights, cassette tapes, ratty baseball caps, worn combat fatigues, and a waxed, gleaming, cherry red chopper—being sold from yards, tents, barns, churches, parking lots,under beach umbrellas, and the back of pick-up trucks and campers.

I mean, who wouldn't jump at the opportunity to spend all afternoon on a ninety-five degree day for the chance to discover these irresistible ladies-with-fruit-hats salt-and-pepper shakers?

Back to the Future

2011-04-16T15:42:00.005-04:00

Last Saturday, we drove down to Bloomington for dinner to celebrate my nephew’s twenty-first birthday. Afterward, Steve, Kate, Heidi, Jake and I walked up Kirkwood Street toward campus. It was a beautiful spring evening, dusk. There were people everywhere, threading in and out of restaurants, eating ice cream, gathering for a street dance, playing hackey-sack in what used to be People's Park.

We crossed University Avenue and Heidi and Jake took off running through the gates, up the brick path. “This is so awesome,” they kept saying.

Jake to Heidi as some kids passed, laughing and talking: “This could be us.”

We went to the Student Union and showed them where Steve and I met on the very first day of my freshman year, then walked past Beck Chapel, where we were married.

There, they spotted colored lights near the Fine Arts Building and took off running again. An installation, an erector-set-like tower, was casting the changing lights on the side of the limestone building, and some students were lying on the sidewalk, feet against the building, looking up. So we did, too. Something shifted and it felt as if we were standing, the side of the building flat, in front of us, and the one square window, high up, like a black hole you could step into.

From there, we walked back toward town, past the Sigma Chi house, where a bunch of guys and girls were going up the sidewalk, inside.

It felt magical and strange to be with our grandchildren in that place where we started. Walking up the same sidewalk on so many Saturday nights so long ago, we couldn’t possibly have imagined it.

Not those particular beautiful, beloved grandchildren, not that particular spring night.

Poem in Your Pocket Day

2011-04-15T06:30:00.006-04:00

Yesterday was “Poem in Your Pocket Day." I tried to trump up some excitement about going downtown to hand out poems on downtown—but, in the end, it was me, wandering around the Circle and over to the State House at lunchtime, a beautiful day, with a handful of poems.

Approaching people, I said, “It’s National Poetry in Your Pocket Day, part of the celebration of National Poetry Month. Here’s a poem by an Indiana poet from the Writers’ Center of Indiana.”

I gave a poem to a policeman, who took it with a smile; to a young clerk in a shoe store at Circle Center Mall, who turned out to be a journalism major who missed writing and was delighted to hear that the Writers’ Center existed. I dropped poems on the tables of people eating at outside cafes, handed them (or tried) to Men in Suits and down-and-outs at a bus stop. I handed them to legislators and lobbyists near the statehouse, adding, “Please support the arts!”

There was a guy on the street handing out flyers for a jewelry store. I took one, gave him a poem in return. A barista at Starbucks, a visual artist, said poetry often inspired his work and he took a bunch of the poems to hand out himself.

High point: handing poems to two businessmen in Starbucks and walking past a while later to see one guy, now sitting by himself, reading his. It was this one, by Norman Minnick, a poem I particularly love.

While You Work

While you sit at your desk
water striders dance upon the surface of a pond,
high, thin clouds stretch across the sky,
and acres of tall grass, reticent after a long dry summer,
practice nothing but grace.

Low point: I walked up beside a stout gray-haired woman, did my spiel, poem in hand. She took it (no eye contact), folded it in half without looking at it, and put it in the trash. “Bad karma,” I said in a cheerful voice, as she crossed in front of me to enter a building.

Most amusing: “It’s National Poem in Your Pocket Day, I said to a receptionist.” She looked confused. “Comb?” she asked. “No, no, poem,” I said. We laughed.

“I’d much rather have a poem,” she said—and happily took the one I offered.

Impossible Questions

2011-04-13T06:28:00.005-04:00

Richard Russo read at Butler last night: three parts of an essay and two novel excerpts that were connected to the material he explored in it. He talked about writing the same kind of scene all the time, sometimes inadvertently repeating a description or turn of phase in his stories and novels. How there were a few things you looked at all your life, in different ways, trying to capture the essence of them but never quite succeeding—or at least it didn’t feel like you’d succeeded. All true, from my own experience.

But the most interesting thing he said was in response to a question a student asked. He was reading Russo’s collection of short stories in his English class and observed that all of the stories set characters in situations that seemed impossible to deal with. “What’s that about for you?” he asked.

“Science has answers,” Russo said. " A story can’t be interesting if the problem it posed didn’t seem impossible to solve. If a story has only two possible outcomes—what the character clearly should do and what he clearly shouldn’t do—it’s boring."

He said he knows he has a good story idea when he asks himself what he’d do in the same situation and thinks, “I have no idea.”

I love that. It’s not the cleverness or intricacy of a plot that creates tension, but the sense that the problem it poses seems impossible to solve—and, in fact, is impossible to solve, like any human problem that really matters. You keep reading to find out whether/how the characters will make the best of it or whether/how it will destroy them.

Conversation about Etheridge Knight

2011-04-05T07:26:00.006-04:00

The African American poet Etheridge Knight was raised Indianapolis and for the most part made his home here after an eight-year stint in prison in the 1960’s. He discovered poetry while incarcerated, publishing his first collection, Poems from Prison, a year before his 1968 release. According to Poets.org, “The book was a success, and Knight soon joined such poets as Amiri Baraka, Haki Madhubuti, and Sonia Sanchez (to whom he was once married) in what came to be called the Black Arts Movement.

“This movement, according to the poet and critic Larry Neal, was 'radically opposed to any concept of the artist that alienates him from his community. Black Arts is the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept. As such, it envisions art that speaks directly to the needs and aspirations of Black America.' Knight embraced these ideals in his own work and in 1970 edited a collection entitled Black Voices From Prison.”

His sister, Eunice Knight-Bowens, established the Etheridge Knight Festival of the Arts after his death in 1991 to celebrate his life and work and to encourage people, young and old, to choose words as a way of expressing themselves and changing the world they live in.

Last weekend, the Writers’ Center co-sponsored the EK Festival’s “The House that Etheridge Built” as part of our “Be a Better Writer” craft lecture series. The program featured four African poets who never knew the poet Etheridge Knight, but were profoundly influenced by his work and his life. Dwayne Betts, Randall Horton, Marcus Jackson, and John Murillo read their own work and Etheridge’s, reflecting along the way about what might be called Knight’s literary family tree.

The night before the festival, we hosted a “conversation” at the Writers’ Center and invited people who’d known Etheridge to talk with the visiting poets about their personal relationships with Knight. He was a mentor to African American poets Michael L.L. Collins and Sonny Bates. Saundra Jo Holiday only met him once, when her college creative writing class visited him in his apartment. She’d been having difficulty in the class, nobody seemed to be able to relate to her poems at all, and she was about to give up on writing. She was shy, sat down on a couch while others in the class clustered around EK. But he left them and came and sat beside her and said, “We are an aural people.”

“As if he knew I was struggling,” she said. “It changed my life.”

Kittrell Andis talked about going to a poetry reading at the Hummingbird Café in the 70’s and being blown away by Etheridge Kight who “said” his poems, who “knew how to take up the space.” Later that evening, he read a poem of his own and Knight came up to him afterward and said he should come back. He did—and developed a close relationship with Knight over the years.

I never met EK myself. I might have; he was in and out of Indianapolis a lot in the years after I started writing. He read around town, hung out at the Hummingbird Café and the Chatterbox, gave his legendary Free People Poetry Workshops. But I was put off by how people were in awe of his prison creds, thrilled by his outrageous behavior. He drank to excess, did drugs, conned people out of money. Fairly regularly, he’d show up drunk or stoned or worse at readings that people had gone to a lot of trouble to put together for him—if he showed up at all.

Why would I want to know somebody like that?

Growing up in a household with an alcoholic father had scared me away from drinking or drugs —or anything likely to make me lose control. It gave me a nasty little puritan streak that I am sorry to say still occasionally plagues me.

But over the years, I’ve come to love Etheridge Knight’s poetry, its honesty and originality, its depth of intelligence and compassion. I understand that he wrote them to save his life—and they did save his life. Listening to Friday night’s conversation, I understood something else about him. Writers—the best ones, the ones with promise—are people who don’t really fit anywhere, solitary in their pursuit of words. EK recognized them, embraced them, and made himself the community that each one needed. He was the guy at the reading who said, “Come back;” the mentor who said, “Be your own self.” the one who saw right through you. He was your friend, your literary father, your own lost dad. He was the poem slid under the prison door.

I wish I’d had the courage show up at a Free People’s Poetry Workshop when I was just beginning. Who knows how completely or subtly different my work might have been for it.

Sad Stories of the Death of Kings

2011-03-16T07:48:00.005-04:00

Barry Gifford’s Sad Stories of the Death of Kings is a series of vignettes that, in the beginning, feel random, but glue themselves together in your mind as you read until, by the end, you’ve got a picture of a time and a place and a kid’s life in it

The late fifties/early sixties is the time, Chicago is the place, and Roy is the kid.

It’s a time and place I remember well. I grew up in Hammond, Indiana, about forty miles from Chicago. When I was a child, there were occasional excursions to the city—school trips to the Field Museum or the Museum of Science and Industry and family outings to White Sox games or to see the Christmas windows at Marshall Fields and Carson Pirie Scott. My mom worked at Carson’s, in Hammond, and once a year we drove into the city for their annual employees’ day, when the store was open on a Sunday only for their employees and families with special discounts galore.

My English grandparents visited us in 1957, when I was ten, and I remember driving along the lakeshore in early evening after we’d picked them up at Midway Airport feeling so proud when they said how lovely it was. Thrilled by the way they said it, in their wonderful English accents.

My friend Linda’s dad worked in the city and when we were in high school sometimes he’d let us drive in with him on Saturday morning and drop us off in the Loop. It was too early for the Carson’s or Marshall Fields or—our favorite—Krochs & Brentanos Book Store to be open, so we’d get Cokes at the soda fountain in Walgreens and hang out there for a while. We never had much money to spend, but we loved to browse the big department stores, and look at the books and stationery in Krochs & Brentanos, the sticks of sealing wax in a dozen colors and the gold stamps, each with a letter of the alphabet on it, meant to press into the hot wax over the sealed part of the letter so the recipient could tell if someone had opened it. A boyfriend, preferably, though neither of us had one. Late in the afternoon, we’d walk over to the Randolph Street station and take the South Shore home.

When we got drivers' licenses, sometimes a bunch of us girls would sneak off for a night on the town in somebody’s parent’s car. At least once an evening, stopped at a red light, someone would yell “Chinese Fire Drill” and we’d all jump out of the car, run around it, and get back in. All the better if the light changed in process and people started honking. We’d head north, past the building we knew housed WLS radio, where Dick Biondi was spinning the tunes turned up full-blast on our radio.

But the absolute best thing was Old Town. It was the closest thing to Greenwich Village that the Midwest had to offer, with its mix of beatniks and down-and-outs and young city people out for the evening. Wells Street was one big traffic jam in the early sixties and we’d cruise from one end to the other and back again, radio blaring, flirting with carloads of boys doing the same thing. Then we’d get out and thread our way through throngs of people on the street, stopping here and there to listen to the folk music we could hear coming out of the clubs we were still too young to enter.

Sad Stories of the Death of Kings brought all this back to me—and more.

“Fruit boots,” for example.

“Style of shoe popular in the 1950’s and 60’s, ankle-high suede shoes with crepe rubber soles conventionally known as desert boots. English Mods embraced desert boots made by Clarks and their popularity spread to the U.S. where they were labeled “fruit boots” because of their perceived popularity with perceived homosexuals.” (Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English.)

Of course, I was clueless about what “fruit” meant at the time. Not to mention “queer,” which was a word we used regularly to describe someone or something weird or uncool.

(“Don’t you ever let me hear you use that word again,” my father said, truly upset, when I called my brother a queer at the dinner table one night. “Why?” I asked. But he wouldn’t tell me.)

“There they are,” Jimmy said. “I told you she’d be here.”

Standing halfway down the block were two girls, both wearing black scarves around their heads, navy blue pea coats, short black skirts with black tights and black fruit boots. One of them was smoking a cigarette.

“Bad Girls,” said Roy.

“I hope so,” said Jimmy Boyle.

I wasn’t a bad girl. I was too scared. But I knew those girls, and Barry Gifford got them just right. He got everything right.

If you grew up in the Chicago are in the fifties or sixties and you want your kids (or, gasp, grandkids) to know what it was like, or if you’re a Social Studies teacher who wants to bring that time alive for your students, introduce them to Sad Stories of the Death of Kings. The cool thing is that it comes in a special young adult edition.

How cool is it that Seven Stories Press figured out that this book, like so many good YA books, is equally compelling to kids and adults. We adults get our own edition, with a grittier image on the cover.

Though Gifford wrote the book for adults, he likes the idea of dual editions. “I thought, why not? I’m happy to have this double-barreled publication,” he said. Seven Stories asked him to change only one sentence. The new sentence ended up going into both editions.

I hope Sad Stories of the Death of Kings will be wildly successful for two reasons. One, because it’s a really good book and two, because success might mean good things for YA authors writing books that appeal to older readers as well as young ones.

Worlds & Houses: Thinking about the Novel

2011-03-05T07:17:00.006-05:00

The last month or so I’ve been trying to make myself write creative nonfiction-—skimming the surface of some ideas that are compelling to me for a variety of reasons. But I can't seem to engage.

The other day I took out a novel I started last fall, still in the early stages, and fell into it,as if into a whole different world.

It is a whole different world, and that is I love most about writing novels.

I also love teaching and writing about writing because of the way I have to try to get to the bottom of how writing works to make it as clear as it can be to students and readers so often enlightens my understanding of my own process.

This passage was in Novel Ideas: Contemporary Authors Share the Creative Process (University of Georgia Press), which I co-authored with Margaret-Love Denman:

You have seen or felt or dreamed something that you can't name, but that you know you can't live without. You set off on a journey to find it. There is no map; no one has ever been to this place. You barely know the people you are traveling with—your characters—but you know that they are the only people who know the way. You watch them, listen to them. You follow along, putting down the words to mark the path they make. It is a long journey, with many wrong turns and surprises. Every day, or as often as you can, you go to the world of the novel. Months pass.

Sometimes years.

Your journey through this world becomes an alternate reality. The people you "see" there every day are as real and confounding as your own family. You live with these characters, worry about them at unlikely moments. You are amazed, sometimes, at the way all kinds of things work their way into the story: newspaper stories you read, stories friends and family tell in passing, memories, ideas that delight you; the occasional glimpse of something beautiful, funny, or sad that you cannot forget; a passion for some person, place, or thing that you feel compelled to preserve—or that, perhaps, your life in the real world will not accommodate.

Sometimes you have to stop and do research; sometimes you have to stop and get a clear picture of what's there. Sometimes, like a recalcitrant child, the book just stops, and you have to trick and tease it into moving forward.

As the end nears, possibilities narrow, as in real life. This is partly comforting, partly appalling. The novel won't be all you hoped it would be, but you keep on anyway. To abandon it now would be unthinkable, like walking away from your own imperfect life.

And finally it is done. For a few days, you feel wonderful, free. You attend to business, clean your house, rake your yard, change the oil in your car, read, watch movies—actually pay attention when someone is talking to you. Then you begin to miss where the novel took you, the people in it, what it was. You feel anxious. There's nothing to organize your life around. What are you going to do? Have you written every single thing you know?

Yes, if you were doing it right.

But pretty soon you know some new things. You look at the book again, and you see that what you thought the book was the day you finished it and what it actually is don't quite match up. So you go at it again. And again, if you must. Until it is as close as possible to what you wanted it to be.

Trying to get to the bottom of why I can't resist the novel, why it almost always trumps the impulse to write creative nonfiction, pondering the completely different feel of the two processes, (don't ask me why) I started thinking about houses.

Writing creative nonfiction is like looking for something in a big house that has many rooms in it, each containing a mystery about my own life. The house is very much in the real world. What I'm looking for is mine, but I won’t know what it is until I find it. Some rooms lead to other rooms and sometimes back into rooms I’ve already visited, but all of the rooms are inside the house. The pleasure is in the possibilities, the connections, the insights, the release and resolution and, finally, the satisfaction of knowing that I’ve let somebody else in to the house and (for better or worse) made it feel like home to them. Maybe even made them see something they need to know about themselves. The house is, of course, my own mind.

Writing a novel, I have to create the world and find the house in it. Then I have to live in that house for a really long time with a bunch of people I might or might not like but have to get to know because they hold the keys--the clues--to the mysteries inside the rooms but won’t open the doors until I prove that I truly want to know what’s inside and won’t judge them, no matter what the rooms reveal—even if it’s something I don’t really want to know about myself. Paradox (lovely paradox): Though the house is not in the real world, once I find it I have to stay inside it to find the story.

The pleasures are in many ways similar to writing creative nonfiction—possibilities, connections, insights, release and resolution. The house in the alternate world is my mind, too—but maybe comparable to the difference between a seed and the flower that grows from it. Vivid, real—invisibly linked to its origin. The satisfaction lies in the knowledge that I’ve created a world that others can live in and believe in, and that may even hold some insight that will make it easier for them to live their own lives.

Each finished (and unfinished) novel has its its own physical feel--not unlike the physical feel of memories. Each is a whole world, a whole life inside my head. No so different from the feel readers get, first living inside, then remembering a book they love.

This floated up taking my dog, Louise, out this dark, rainy morning: A work of creative nonfiction is the story of a person thinking about the real world; a novel is the story of a person thinking about the real world…in metaphor.

The world and the house idea works for essays and stories, too—the worlds and houses are just smaller. A collection of essays that explores a particular world would be comparable to a collection of linked stories—the house of each essay or story in the same neighborhood.

What do you think?

Tattoos on the Heart

2011-03-03T06:34:00.006-05:00

I just finished Tattoos on the Heart, which some dear friends gave me for Christmas. The author, Gregory Boyle, is a Catholic priest who took over a Latino parish with serious gang issues in L.A. in the eighties—and ended up founding Homeboy Industries, which provides all kinds of employment to gang members and kids who are on the cusp of becoming gang members. The subtitle is “The Power of Boundless Compassion,” which is what the book is really about.

It’s a wonderful story about loving people just because they…are. It’s not a panacea for solving the gang problem—or any other problem, for that matter. For the most part, the kids Boyle’s parish stay in the gangs, they wound and kill their enemies, their enemies wound and kill them. All too often innocent people are wounded or killed when they get in the way. What Homeboy Industries does is make them work together, side-by-side, and get along in that place under the theory that it’s a lot harder to hate somebody you know. Things get less black and white, more complicated. There are personal consequences to your actions.

Here’s something I liked a lot—not a new idea to me, but the way Boyle said it shifted things a bit and brought some new understanding: “Jesus, in Matthew’s gospel says, ‘How narrow is the gate that leads to life.’ Mistakenly, I think, we have come to believe that this is about restriction. The way is narrow. But it really wants us to see that narrowness is the way. St Hedwig writes, ‘All is narrow for me, I feel so vast.’ It’s about funneling ourselves into a central place. Our choice is not to focus on the narrow, but to narrow our focus. The gate that leads to life is not about restriction at all. It is about an entry into the expansive.”

Yes! It’s another way of saying, “Let something matter,” which is what I believe in. The gate is a thing, not an idea about the thing. As we say about writing, “Show, Don’t Tell.” It’s all about finding a place to stand.

In the end, though, Boyle's book begged my big questions about religion. I can understand a god that sets us in motion and loves us no matter what we do, but what compassionate god would set some of us in motion in a loving, plentiful world and others in a world of poverty and brutality? “God works in mysterious ways” is the usual answer to this question, but it’s not an answer, really, and I don’t buy it.

And heaven: always perplexing. Assuming it's the same for everyone, is that fair? Depending on the circumstances of their lives, it’s a whole lot easier for some people to be good.

I remember having a conversation (okay, argument) about religion with my sister-in-law years ago that came down to this: “If there were no God, why would anyone be good?” she asked. This shouldn’t have totally flabbergasted me, but it did. And she seemed no less flabbergasted by my response: “Why do you need God for that? Why wouldn’t we be good to people when it feels so much better than being mean-spirited and unforgiving?”

Maybe the better question would have been, what if hell and heaven weren’t in the mix? What if there were no eternal consequence to consider when faced with the option of being kind or unkind, helpful or indifferent?

I get faith. I understand and respect that part of the nature of faith is an acceptance of the fact that there are questions about what you believe that cannot be answered in any rational way. What bothers me is not acknowledging the questions, not even being interested in them—and, worse, being afraid to ask them. If there is a god, s/he gave us a questioning mind, which you have assume s/he meant us to use—and the mind is best put to use by trying to get to the bottom of things.

The operative word being, “trying.”

You can’t ever really get to the bottom of things, but that doesn’t mean that you aren’t supposed to try.

In the end, what bugs me most of all is the refusal of paradox, which is at the heart of being alive. If you don’t acknowledge it, don’t allow it to enlighten and delight you—and profoundly scare the crap out of you—then in some very fundamental way you haven’t really lived at all.

And what if God is us, what if it’s as simple as that? That there is as much power in loving each other and knowing that we are loved by each other as in being loved by God?

Boyle writes about Cesar, who called in the middle of the night and said, “I gotta ask you a question. You know how I’ve always seen you as my father—ever since I was a little kid? Well, I hafta ask you a question…Have I…been…your son?” And when Boyle said, “Oh, hell, yeah,” Ceasar, relieved, said, crying, “…then I will be your…son. And you…will be my father. And nothing will separate us, right?”

“That’s right,” Boyle responded.

He goes on. “…Cesar did not discover that he has a father. He discovered that he is a son worth having. The voice broke through the clouds of his terror and the crippling mess of his own history, and he felt himself beloved. God, wonderfully pleased in him, is where God wanted Cesar to reside.”

Then, making a leap that Cesar might or might not have made himself, “There is vastness in knowing you’re a son/daughter worth having…We see our plentitude in God’s own expansive view of us, and we marinate in it.”

My guess is that Cesar would say it was Boyle’s human love that saved him, Boyle’s love he was ‘marinating’ in. And I think Cesar would be right.

The Amazing Lynda Barry

2011-02-25T07:26:00.003-05:00

I went to hear Lynda Barry at Herron School of Art last night, part of IUPUI's Reiberg Visiting Writers Series. She was absolute and total genius talking about image. It’s where all art comes from, she said—what gives it power. She asked us to remember our first crush—then for everyone to say the name aloud. She big-grinned, put her open hands beside her face as we did it. “This is what everybody looks like when they remember their first crush,” she said.

“Now remember your fourth,” she said, and laughed.

No image, no physical response.

She talked about kids and their sacred objects—blankets, stuffed animals—in one case, the battered leg of a doll, which was all that was left of it. Kids know these things aren’t alive. But if you ask them if they’re dead, they look at you like you’re crazy. They’re something else: a physical metaphor of comfort and security. The image is the object, which is why, if lost, the object cannot be replaced.

And invisible friends, alive as very specific images in children's minds. A friend’s Mr. Sprinkle could only be talked to through a blowing fan, she said. (I thought of my daughter Jenny’s Christine, Doodle-Duck, and the Turtle, who came every morning to play—until, one day, they refused to "cooperate" and she flushed them all down the toilet. Kate’s Linda, who lived in the closet. They played checkers together.)

Images are satisfying even when they don’t make sense to the “top of the brain,” Barry said—and sang a few bars of the old Sixties song, “Groovin’,” by the Young Rascals. “Life would be ecstasy, you and me and Leslie.” A song she loved until she found out the lyric was actually, “Life would be ecstasy, you and me endlessly.” Without the image of Leslie—whatever h/she looked like and what being with him/her might mean—the song became stupid and boring.

(Until last night, I thought the lyric was “…you and me and the sea.” Yep. Without the sea, the song just doesn’t have the mojo.

I love this stuff. I love how the brain works. We’re so much weirder than any of us imagine; there’s so little we can ever really know about…anything, least of all ourselves.

Like, how weird is this! Barry described a guy who had his hand amputated and experienced the phantom limb thing—but, in his case, the lost hand was clenched in a tight fist. It hurt and it was driving him nuts. Nobody could do anything for him, until a brain researcher tried this experiment. He made an open box with holes on either side and a mirror that reflected the real hand. He told the phantom hand guy to put his forearm with the real hand in one hole and his forearm without the hand in the other hole. “Make a tight fist in your real hand,” he brain guy said. He did. “Now slowly release it, looking in the mirror.” Yikes! The phantom hand unclenched simultaneously—and stayed unclenched.

Who knows what the brain did to make that happen, but it for sure had something do with image.

I believe that writing can be taught, that grown-up things like discipline and devotion to craft are absolutely crucial to good writing. But what I love is that magical, completely unpredictable part of writing--and all art--that Lynda Barry talked about last night. The child-place you have to go to get the images to write about, the playfulness and what-iffing, the state not-being-in-the-real-world required to keep those images alive and powerful until you can get them to the page.

The Revenge of the Original Novel

2011-02-23T06:22:00.006-05:00

I love Elizabeth Stuckey-French’s new novel, The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady, and it’s been a kick to watch it take off these past weeks, with great reviews from the very literary New York Times Book Review (every serious writer’s dream) to People Magazine (every serious writer’s secret dream.)

This starred review from Publishers Weekly sums up the book nicely:

“Glowing with dark humor, Stuckey-French's fabulously quirky second novel (after Mermaids on the Moon) spotlights a wild would-be killer: Marylou Ahearn, a 77-year-old retired teacher in Memphis, Tenn. She's obsessed with killing Dr. Wilson Spriggs, who gave pregnant Marylou a radioactive cocktail in 1953 during a secret government study. Helen, the daughter Marylou gave birth to, died in 1963 from cancer. Accompanied by her Welsh corgi, Buster, and as "Nancy Archer" (the heroine of the 1958 movie Attack of the 50 Foot Woman), Marylou moves in 2006 to Tallahassee, Fla., where Wilson lives with his daughter, menopausal Caroline; her husband, Vic Witherspoon, who's contemplating an affair, and their children: 18-year-old Elvis-obsessed beauty Ava; 16-year-old science geek Otis, who's secretly building a nuclear breeder reactor; and overachieving, attention-deprived 13-year-old Suzi. As "Radioactive Lady," Nance creates mucho mischief for Wilson, but her revenge plans mutate after discovering the old doc has Alzheimer's, and dang it, she really likes his kinfolk.”

The book is, indeed, “glowing with dark humor.” Also, in the words of other reviews…

“…generous”

“…fabulously wacky”

“…poignant”

“…funny”

“…sad”

I am in total agreement with them all.

But what I love most about the novel is that it is utterly original, by which I mean nobody who’s living on the planet, ever lived on the planet, or ever will live on the planet could have written this book except Elizabeth Stuckey-French.

Which got me wondering, “What is originality, anyway?”

Everyone who’s ever studied literature knows about Hemingway’s iceberg: "If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of the iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water."

They are also probably familiar with Grace Paley’s advice to fiction writers: “Write what you don’t know about what you know.”

Apply Grace Paley’s advice to Hemingway’s iceberg theory and you get something like:

“If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.” But it’s the process of writing the story, wrestling with what he doesn’t know about what he knows, that provides the opportunity for the writer to earn the knowledge needed to write the story. And what the writer doesn’t know, starting out, needs to matter to him—desperately, and in the most personal way. Which means that the part of Hemingway’s iceberg beneath the surface is also made of bits and pieces of the writer himself.

So, yeah, idea behind The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady is delightfully original. But its true originality lies in the honesty and courage with which Stuckey-French wrestled down the big, unanswerable questions beneath the surface of this deceptively goofy story.

What is a happy family?

Can we ever really know…anyone?

What can and cannot be forgiven?

And speaking about what people don’t know about what they know, it would be nice to think that The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady might make publishers consider what they don’t know about what they (think they) know about what the market wants.

All too often, they’re are scared to death of original work. It doesn’t fit anywhere. It can’t be hailed as the next Twilight or Harry Potter. They have no idea what to do with it.

So, bravo to Doubleday for believing in this wonderful, original novel.

And, of course, to Elizabeth Stuckey-French for writing it.

Elmore & Eudora

2010-12-08T06:51:00.006-05:00

Last night I heard Elmore Leonard read, the last of Butler University’s visiting writers this semester. He’s in his mid-eighties now, but the moment he began reading from his novel, Freaky Deaky, years fell away and he was at the same his own low-life characters carrying on a hilarious dialogue about a gangster who might or might not be about to get blown up by a bomb and the writer delighting in his own words, sometimes half-chuckling at a line.

During the Q&A a guy asked, “What’s the secret to good dialogue?” Leonard looked bemused. “Don’t you hear it?” he asked. “There are people all around us, talking. I listen.”

Someone else asked if he knew what the end of a story would be when he started it. He said, no, he just got a couple of interesting people talking and let them go. If someone gets boring, he shoots him. About three-quarters of the way through the book, he starts thinking about how it could end. A book could end in a lot of different ways, he said.

I loved the matter-of-factness and pleasure with which he talked about writing. Though he didn’t say it exactly this way, I think he’d agree that his message was: Pay attention to the world you’re living in; be curious about people, listen to them talking; if something interests you that you don’t know about or don’t understand, find out about it. Being a writer is seeing the potential for stories in the world around you, taking time to find out about things you don’t already know about or understand. Asking, what if? And when you find the story, leaving out every single thing it doesn’t need—the parts people skim.

Don’t. Be. Boring.

Later, it occurred to me that hearing Elmore Leonard read was a lot like hearing Eudora Welty read in Birmingham, Alabama, years ago, when she was around the same age. Sitting onstage during the introduction, dressed in a flowered church-dress, her turquoise pocketbook set firmly on her lap, she looked like the archetypal little old lady. But when she went to the podium and started reading “The Petrified Man,” years fell from her voice and she became the ladies in the beauty shop, every single one of them.

Another writer who talked about writing plainly, she once observed, “Children, like animals use all their senses to discover the world. Then artists come along and discover the same way…Or now and then we’ll hear from an artist who’s never lost it.”

Elmore Leonard is one of those artists. So was Eudora Welty.

Their work couldn’t be more different, but both have seen the world through the clear lens of a child, both retained their sense of wonder about the sheer strangeness of it all their lives.

On Losing a Friend

2010-12-07T19:22:00.004-05:00

Here's an e-mail my friend Dan Pattern sent me and some of his other friends. I"m posting it here because I think it captures the disappointment that so many of us are feeling about President Obama these days.

Dear Friends with a similar political bent.

I feel like I've lost a friend. Two out of the last three nights I've lost a lot of sleep agonizing over what has happened to Barack Obama. Here's this man I saw in 2008 with 75,000 people convinced he was going to usher in a new era. The man who made me weep as I heard his inauguration speech and Aretha singing. I envisioned us moving away from war, away from torture and abuse of power, away from corporate control of medicine, and away from the reckless finances of George W. Bush and the upward redistribution of wealth, and towards determined action on global warming.

I've lost faith slowly. I know Barb, you've been terribly disappointed for a long time.

Here was a man who opposed the war in Iraq from the start, who said as a senator that single payer was the best deal for taxpayers, who vowed as a presidential candidate that he would close Guantanamo Bay prison within a year.

I had been so impressed with his intellect and integrity that I gave him slack for a long time. I thought he was being naive with the Republicans; it seemed pretty clear within a fear weeks of taking office that all they would do was oppose whatever he wanted. Still I admired his determination to think well of people and give kindness a chance.

I was really disappointed he didn't stand up to BP after the oil disaster. And it did hurt how his White House has referred to progressives as the "professional left" and shut us out.

I knew the Democrats would get crushed on election day. That's almost inevitable with unemployment so high. I wasn't that upset the day after the election. Sure, we got crushed. But a lot of good officeholders stuck around, especially out here in the west. And I saw the scale of the carnage as an indicator that it hadn't worked for Obama to shut out his base and run the White House like a blue dog Democrat reelection headquarters. I thought it was time to roll up our sleeves with a nutty bunch taking over the House of Reps.

But days later I found Obama was blaming himself for Repubs intransigence. And when I found out he was negotiating to renew the Bush tax cuts even for the superwealthy, I was livid. Let's make up our minds: is the deficit a problem or isn't it? And not standing up to the GOP preventing extension of jobless benefits? I guess the problem is that the poor aren't poor enough and the rich aren't rich enough. If a Democrat isn't going to stand up for this, he's not really a Democrat.

I spent years fuming over the pliability of Bill Clinton. Moral flexibility on the issues. And a loosening of the markets with Robert Rubin and the GOP Congress that helped bring us the financial bubble. Obama makes Clinton look like a steely jawed Churchill or MacArthur. Remember how he stood up to Newt Gingrich trying to shut down the government?

Of course, I'm reading the newspaper and finding people who think like me. Like Paul Krugman, with the headline that Obama is punting on the first down. "Whatever is going on inside the White House, from the outside it looks like a moral collapse-a complete failure of purpose and loss of direction." And Frank Rich on Sunday on "All the President's Captors".

I need to get away from the media and distract myself with some good literature. Let see, here's Dante's Inferno. Hmm, what circle does Obama fit into? Does he belong in limbo with the indecisive and uncommitted, or does he goes with the traitors who abandoned their folks?

Rats, I don't think that's getting me into a better frame of mind.

I'll pull out my Thich Nhat Hanh Touching Peace. Ok, so we have mind consciousness in the living room of our brains. And store consciousness, which is all of our memories and life experiences in storage. "Upstairs in the living room, we sit in a chair and watch these films as they are brought up from the basement. Certain movies, such as Anger, Fear, or Despair, seem to have the ability to come up from the basement all by themselves. They open the door to the living room and pop themselves into our video cassette recorder whether we choose them or not. When that happens, we feel stuck and we have no choice but to watch them. Fortunately each film has a limited length..But each time it is viewed by us it establishes a better position on the archive shelf." Yes, that's it! I keep watching the Obama movie and it doesn't get any better so far. I need to redirect my mind.

It's weird how personally I'm taking it. Obama really was a hero for me. And that Jeremiah Wright speech was one of the best I've ever heard. Seemed he had so much guts and courage. And now he's a waterboy for the Right. A waterboy who makes better policy suggestions before the Republican minority (at least till January, and then still a minority in the Senate) shuts him down.

You know the sneering White House comments about the professional left? I think someone should start a grassroots organization in Obama's face called the Professional Left.

Peace in every step, brothers and sisters. Let's be sure to transcend the present moment. Confused smile

Dan

Black Friday

2010-11-26T05:28:00.008-05:00

Yesterday morning my Indianapolis Star carrier tossed a plastic bag with five pounds (I weighed it) of “Black Friday” advertising flyers in my yard. The plastic bag itself was an advertisement for Kohls:

HAPPY THANKSAVING DAYS
Friday, November 26 3 AM-MIDNIGHT & SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 27 6AM-MIDNIGHT

OVER 400 EARLY BIRD SPECIALS
FRIDAY ONLY 3 AM-1 PM

A minimal sampling of items available at fabulous deals included inside said five-pound bag included:

Diamond accent & gemstone bracelets: entire stock of Mattel, Ty, and Fisher Price toys; unlimited text, web and calling; plasma TVs, digital photo frames, kayaks, treadmills, Wii games, boxer shorts; Fender acoustic guitars, vacuum cleaners; Nora Ephron’s I Remember My Neck; Emu (fake UGG) boots; yarn, printers, mattresses, cozy socks, hoodies, Electric Reindeer White Zinfandel or Chardonnay wine; craftsman 255 piece mechanic’s tool set; iCraig Tower Stereo Systems; Zhu Zhu Hamsters and Armor; leather sofas and recliners; numerous items from the Martha Stewart Collection; ladders; washing machines; Flash Memory Camcorder & Digital Still Camera (minimum 30 per store); GrillBOSS 10,000 BTU Portable LP Gas Grill; Italian mufflers; licensed ball pits and tents; Bratz Keyboard and Bratz Speakers; DVD’s; luggage; waffle-makers; bubble jackets; Kitchen Aid Cookware 10 Piece Hard Anodized Cookware Set; Blackberries; candles; cosmetics; blenders; Ab Circle Pros; storage ottomans; gumball machines; telescopes; Simply Vera Vera Wang princess jeweled tote; Barnes & Noble Nooks; Chi Styling Irons; Viva la Juicy Eu de Parfum Spray; Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Ugly Truth; Colts Team apparel…

Oh, and Christmas trees, Christmas lights, Christmas ornaments, Christmas wrapping, Christmas cards, Christmas candy, Christmas wreathes, Christmas china—

Christmas, you know, that the religious holiday that for the marketplace has become an opportunity to exploit our worst human instincts: greed and desire. Not to mention create anxiety and dread for the people (most people, in this economy) who can’t afford to make the materialistic dreams of their loved ones come true.

“Black Friday brings out bad behavior,” yesterday’s Star headline said.

“Retailers set battle for disorderly shoppers fueled by impatience, limited quantities, long lines,” the story went on. “There will be pushing and shoving and—oh yes—shopping carts rammed into backsides. On Black Friday, shopping isn’t a leisure activity. It is a sport. Sometimes it’s a fight. Sometimes it turns deadly.”

So much for the season of light.

What He Said

2010-11-25T07:50:00.006-05:00

My cosmic brother James Still sends this poem to his friends every Thanksgiving.

LET US GIVE THANKS

Let us give thanks for a bounty of people
For children who are our second planting
and though they grow like weeds
and the wind too soon blows them away,
May they forgive us our cultivation
and remember fondly where their roots are.

Let us give thanks:
For generous friends, with hearts as big as hubbards
and smiles as bright as their blossoms;
For feisty friends as tart as apples;
For continuous friends, who, like scallions and cucumbers,
keep reminding us we've had them;
For crotchety friends, as sour as rhubarb
and as indestructible;
For handsome friends, who are as gorgeous as eggplants
and as elegant as a row of corn,
and the others, as plain as potatoes and so good for you;
For funny friends, who are as silly as Brussels sprouts
and as amusing as Jerusalem artichokes,
and serious friends, as complex as cauliflowers
and as intricate as onions;
For friends as unpretentious as cabbages,
as subtle as summer squash,
as persistent as parsley,
as delightful as dill,
as endless as zucchini,
and who, like parsnips,
can be counted on to see you throughout the winter;
For old friends,
nodding like sunflowers in the evening-time
and young friends coming on as fast as radishes;
For loving friends, who wind around us like tendrils
and hold us, despite our blights, wilts, and witherings;
And finally, for those friends now gone,
like gardens past that have been harvested,
but who fed us in their times
that we might have life thereafter;
For all these we give thanks.

What he said.

Ginkgo Leaves

2010-11-21T07:27:00.005-05:00

Yesterday Steve and I drove down to Bloomington, had a late breakfast, and took a long walk through the campus. I’m about to undertake new revisions for my novel, An American Tune, part of which is loosely based on my own life as a student there in the 60’s, and I wanted to see what walking around campus might dredge up or suggest.

In a passage from the book, the main character, who has returned to campus for her daughter’s freshman orientation, remembers what I remember from my first day at IU:

“This morning, pressing the elevator button in the dorm where parents who’d accompanied their children for orientation were staying—the dorm she once lived in—she was, momentarily, a college freshman herself, saying goodbye to her own parents and her little sisters on the day they dropped her off there, more than thirty-five years before. She could almost hear the stereos cranked up loud along the corridor, as they had been on that long-ago day. The Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Byrds. The Rolling Stones, inciting them to rebellion. She’d stood with her family, watching the elevator light blink each floor on its way up, feeling like a can of Coke shaken up hard. Finally, the door opened. Did they hug? Speak? They must have. But all she could remember now was how, suddenly, they were gone. And herself flying back to her room, her arms wheeling, her soul rising, wild and joyous. Thinking, anything can happen to me now. Absolutely anything.”

Which is exactly how I felt (and always feel) walking through campus—along with gratitude, wonder and a touch of melancholy at the richness and complexity of what “anything” turned out to be.

Later that day, my character would meet the love of her life at the Commons, just as I did. Her life played out differently from there, a life I might have lived—but, gladly, didn’t.

It’s so weird the way living a life is not so different from writing a novel. The material you’re given could be spun countless different ways, depending on choice, serendipity, fate.

I was thinking all these things, walking, yesterday.

But what I am thinking about this morning, what I’m seeing in my mind’s eye, is a carpet of yellow ginkgo leaves in a clearing just off the wooded area in the old part of campus and a not-young woman dropping to lie down in them, spreading her arms, and moving them in arcs, the way you do to make angels in the snow.

I am thinking about a November day, freshman year, the campus deserted because everyone was at the football game, which I had to miss because I’d put off making my leaf collection for my nature study class. I remember wandering through campus, looking for the leaves on the list—red oak, sycamore, sugar maple…

Ginkgo leaves: each one a tiny yellow fan.

The trees on campus are ancient. There’s a good chance there was a carpet of ginkgo leaves in exactly the same spot on the day I gathered the leaves for my collection. If I’d noticed it, thrown myself down onto it, made an angel would my life have been different in any way?

I can’t of course. Real time moves relentlessly forward.

I might have done it yesterday. Who knows what might have happened if I had?

It didn’t occur to me to do it, though. I didn’t know seeing the woman making an angel in the leaves would stay in my mind and make me wonder about…everything.

But I’m pretty sure that carpet of leaves will end up somewhere in the revised version of the novel, though I won’t know how or why until Jane throws herself down onto it and shows me why it matters.

My So-Called Career

2010-11-15T06:46:00.005-05:00

I miss being a student sometimes—sitting in class, taking reams of notes, typing them over, highlighting them, outlining them, finally winnowing them down into weird anagrams that made facts and insights bloom in my mind when I glanced at where I’d jotted them down on the front cover of my blue book.

I especially miss being a student in a really good class, one with a passionate, knowledgeable, generous teacher who made me take those reams of notes not only because I would need them to do well on the test, but because something inside me knew I would need them for…my life.

Last Saturday, I got to take a class like that with memoirist Thomas Larson at the Writers’ Center of Indiana. I loved sitting in the back corner of the room, being a student, and at the same time having the pleasure of watching a whole roomful of students, rapt, madly scribbling, just as I was.

I loved and felt honored to hear about the memoir ideas of the group, among them: food and grief; a family processing the loss of the early, death of a daughter; growing up and growing into a life one’s parents can’t understand: forming a steering committee of friends charged with presenting challenges to help you figure out who you are and where you’re going; weaving as a metaphor for integrating family photos into a narrative.

I loved one student’s title for a humorous memoir, a phrase her southern mom used when things weren't quite right: One Bubble Short of Plumb.

The title for the memoir floating around in my own head is My So-Called Career: How I Became a Writer and Ended Up Right Back Where I Started.

Or something like that.

Tom’s focusing exercises helped me see that the memoir I imagine could be framed by finally gathering up the courage to write way back in the late seventies and the good luck of discovering the Writers’ Center, which gave me a place to start, to finding myself the Executive Director of the Writers’ Center, still learning about writing and at the same time knowing that I’d made the class happen, perhaps providing that crucial spark for someone in the room, a springboard for fulfilling her own writing dreams.

Bagels

2010-10-27T05:14:00.005-04:00

Einstein’s Bagels kindly agreed to give us all their leftover bagels on Friday for our Gathering of Writers on Saturday. At the last minute, though, we found out we weren’t allowed to take any of our own food into the venue.

What to do? I felt kind of dumb calling them up and saying we didn’t need the bagels, after all and I thought it would be rude to just not show up. How many bagels could there be, I thought. I’ll just pick them up and we can all take some home and freeze them.

I got there. There didn’t seem to be that many, some of the trays were empty. But when 5:00 arrived and the employees dumped them all—along with probably a dozen plastic cups with “bagel poppers”—in them, they filled a gargantuan garbage bag. One of the guys had to carry it out for me.

Within five minutes my whole car smelled like garlic.

Anyway. We had the Gathering of Writers the next day, at which the caterer provided those crummy little wrapped muffins that get all sticky from sweating in their cellophane packages.

Nonetheless, Marian University was a lovely place to have our event and a good time was had by all. Elizabeth Stuckey-French gave an inspiring keynote, tailor-made for this year’s theme, “Unlock Your Voice.” Tom Chiarella, Skip Berry, Alessandra Lynch, Jill Christman and others gave sessions on fiction, screenwriting, poetry and the memoir.

Cathy Day’s session jolted me out of my confusion about the novel I recently started—at least temporarily.

Of course, I brought our fabulous prize wheel—featuring photos of the day’s presenters. Elizabeth was the best prize, a tee-shirt. I got to be a notebook!

As always, the best part for me at Writers' Center events watching writers connect with one another.

The evaluations were overwhelmingly positive.

The bagels, however, were still in my car.

I’d bought a box of bags and I opened up the hatch and sort of bullied people into taking bagels home with them. I made up a bag for our freezer, then took some to my daughters.

My son-in-law, Jim, packaged up the rest to drop off at a shelter the next day. Which, I know, is what I should have done with them in the first place.

Still, they made an such an amusing little subplot for the day that I can’t quite make myself feel guilty about it.

Monet & Me

2010-10-16T06:54:00.002-04:00

For the past few years I’ve needed glasses for reading and I wear them, sometimes, for driving—especially at night. I’ve never had to wear them all the time, though, and can’t quite get used to the idea that maybe I should.

Lately, I find myself misreading posters and headlines because of my less than fabulous vision. A few recent examples:

“E-mails show chubby IURC, Duke.”
Instead of “E-mails show clubby IURC, Duke.”

“Onward Christian Monguls.”
Instead of “Onward Christian Moguls.”

“Can I receive joints?”
Instead of “Can I relieve joints?

“Don’t hyperventilate.”
“Don’t hyphenate.”

The thing is, I kind of like my versions better. It amuses me to think of chubby bureaucrats and CEO’s, Christian marketers with the brutal savvy of Ghengis Khan, an arthritis sufferer seeking marijuana to ease her pain, someone hyperventilating over punctuation.

Okay, it’s a stretch—but it occurred to me that this shift in my spelling universe due to growing older is a little bit like this poem I love, in which Lisel Mueller imagines Monet explaining to the doctor why he’s decided against a cataract operation.

MONET REFUSES THE OPERATION

Doctor, you say there are no halos
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end

The world flux.

Yes.

And astonishing, no matter what your eyes reveal.

The War Nobody Notices

2010-10-07T07:37:00.004-04:00

Last night, journalist Doug Wissing presented a lecture entitled "Finding Truths in Afghanistan: An Indiana Writer Talks about War," during which he observed that the U.S. has been trying for years to be involved in a war that nobody notices—and seems to have achieved this with the war in Afghanistan.

Booking this lecture as part of the Writers’ Center of Indiana’s Clowes Craft Lecture Series, “Be a (Better) Writer” seemed like a no-brainer to me. What serious writer wouldn’t be interested in knowing about how your personal experience under fire finds its way into stories, what responsible American citizen wouldn’t find it interesting and necessary to hear, first-hand, from a person who’s been in the thick of it—from living with soldiers in the field to eavesdropping on policy wonks in Kabul?

But only about twenty people showed up at Central Library to listen to what Wissing learned while embedded one of the Army’s Agricultural Development Teams, unfortunately proving his point.

So, do I just do a rant about that? I mean, it’s a temptation. What’s wrong with people, anyway?

But been there, done that—and, mainly, it makes me weary and depressed.

Instead, I’ll just say—you guys missed a truly enlightening event.

Against a changing backdrop of slides portraying the ADT team, the Afghan villagers, and the harshly beautiful landscape of Afghanistan, Wissing introduced us to some of the ADT team and talked about their good work with respect and admiration, but also described the tangle of graft and corruption that results in all too much of the billions we’ve spent in Afghanistan falling into the hands of unscrupulous politicians and contractors—not to mention the Taliban.

He described the virtual training soldiers undergo—like living in a video game. He talked about the relationship between women soldiers and the Afghans, the complex negotiations that must occur for each baby step of progress that’s made there, what it’s like to wake up and find yourself under fire. He talked about the increasing concern about after-effects of mild brain damage in Afghanistan vets and the failure of the military to acknowledge and provide much-needed treatment.

“Remember Agent Orange?” he said.

Notice: the title of his talk was “Finding Truths in Afghanistan,” not “Finding the Truth in Afghanistan.” As he so brilliantly illustrated, there are countless truths in Afghanistan—many of which are contradictory.

There is no one simple answer to the questions we all should be asking, a few of which are:

Should we be there?
Can we win if we stay?
What is the cost in dollars and integrity and heartbreak?
Can we afford it?

The important questions we encounter in life—whether they are personal or political—never have simple answers. Some (maybe most) don’t even have answers. All you can do is face a problem honestly, seek reliable information to help you see it more clearly, and then form an opinion, staying open to adjusting that opinion as new truths emerge.

I learned a lot last night, some of my opinions about what’s happening in Afghanistan shifted based on the story Doug Wissing told about his experiences there. He raised many questions in my mind that I feel compelled to explore.

Too bad so few people were curious enough to come out and hear what he had to say.

Novel Writing at the Robot Store

2010-09-30T07:46:00.005-04:00

Last weekend I taught a novel-writing workshop at the Robot Supply and Repair Store in Ann Arbor, Michigan—actually, 826 Michigan, an offshoot of Dave Eggers’s 826 Valencia Street, an after-school tutoring program in San Francisco.

All of the offshoots are in are in storefronts and each has a weird little retail business in the front. Why? When Eggers inquired about renting the San Francisco, he was told he couldn’t have a tutoring program there because it was zoned for retail, he said, “Fine. We’ll have a Pirate Store.” So there’s the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Company, the Chicago Undercover Secret Agent Supply Story, the LA Time Travel Mart, The Boston Bigfoot Research Institute and the Seattle Space Travel Supply Store.

Thus, the Robot Supply and Repair Store in Ann Arbor with its robot toys and books and models and key chains and magnets and every other remotely robot kind of thing you can imagine. Plus, anthologies of writing by kids in the program and cool tee-shirts! Of course, I had to buy one of each.

You leave the Robot Store through a dramatic red velvet curtain to see 826Michigan is really about. There’s long room set up with library tables, computers, bookshelves full of books, and robot artwork on the walls. Volunteers staff the drop-in tutoring program every day after school, helping kids with their homework, encouraging them to write for pleasure when it’s done. Volunteers also take 826Michigan projects into the schools, and teach an impressive list of creative writing classes for kids of all ages, taught in the evenings and weekends.

For kids, everything is free. Sometimes, though, 826Michigan sponsors writing workshops for adults and charge a reasonable fee to benefit the program. That’s why I was there.

Lucky me. I’ve done writing workshops in Ann Arbor before and have always been impressed by the lively, generous energy of the writing community there and by the quality of writing submitted for critique. There were ten participants this time, each with the beginning of a novel, and the writing was better than ever. We spent about three hours a day—Friday, Saturday, and Sunday—puzzling over how to make them better than they already were. In between, we heard terrific craft talks by Jack Driscoll and Margo Rabb and publishing tips and cautionary tales from a panel that included Margo, Kathe Koja, Laura Zielin and Karen Simpson. (The first chapter of Karen’s novel, Acts of Grace, set to be released by Plenary Publishing in 2011, was workshopped in a class I taught in A2 a while ago. How cool is that? ) Not to mention wonderful conversation over lunches and dinners in funky Ann Arbor restaurants.

I had a blast. I was so energized I didn’t get one bit tired on the long drive home.

Hey, Keith Hood—writer, board member of 826Michigan, and organizer extraordinaire—thanks for inviting me.

And when do I get to do this again?

What Can the Statehouse Do for the Arts?

2010-09-23T22:14:00.003-04:00

The Writers’ Center of Indiana had a booth at the Penrod Art Fair Sturday before last and despite the on-again/off-again rainy weather, we had a great time talking to people about the Center and what’s on offer there—which is a lot.

In the afternoon, during one of the sunny patches, a local legislator came by the booth with his handler, who introduced him. “What Can the Statehouse do for the arts?” the legislator asked—then added with a meant-to-be charming grin. “Besides money.”

He was a Democrat and Democrats at least give lip service to the importance of the arts, so I’m pretty sure he meant, “What can the Statehouse do for the arts—in addition to better funding as opposed to in lieu of the crappy funding we have now. But having spent the better part of the last two years trying to keep the WCI alive with virtually no funding at all, his question just didn’t seem all that charming to me. And I’m so totally disgusted with politics right now—all politics and all politicians—that I told him just exactly what I thought.

The arts need to be everywhere, especially in schools. Making and studying art teaches kids how to think—the kind of creative thinking you need in the real world, not the kind required to second-guess a bunch of multiple-choice questions on a standardized test. Art is all about process, like life, and the long process of trial and error, the dawning realization that it’s trial and error that creates—well, everything. Committing to it, embracing it is what predicts how well a student will do in life, not his SAT scores.

And speaking of what standardized test scores predict. I recently learned that one way future prison capacity needs are predicted is by looking at fourth-grade reading scores. Ponder that.

Choice? Run this so-called fabulous idea out to the end and it’s not too hard to figure out that all it really does is allow parents with enough savvy to play the system to get their own kids into the good schools, leaving the kids whose parents don’t have a clue about how to get them what they need in the worst ones. Plus, say you’ve got ten fabulous schools in a school system and, suddenly, every parent did figure this out and decided to choose them. The best you could offer them is a lottery. Not choice, in my book. In fact, many of the best schools in the Indianapolis Public School system already have lotteries, some have long waiting lists. Second choices being pretty abysmal, families who can afford it often opt for private schools.

Charter schools? Do the research. There are some good ones, there are some really, really bad ones. But the real problem is, schools aren’t businesses. Education isn’t about profit and loss and competition. It’s about creating an environment that engages the minds and hearts of young people and prepares them for the world they’re stepping into.

I didn’t swear, which (I guess) was a good thing. I felt like it, though.

But I did swear (a lot) when I saw this front-page headline in the Indianapolis Star a few days: Library system never has had ‘cutback like this: 26% reduction in hours is expected to save $1.5 million, help avert closings.”

NOTE. This in a city that just taxed us to build Lucas Oil Stadium for the Indianapolis Colts at the cost of more than $700,000,000 in 2008—with $60,000,000 dollars left to pay on the demolished RCI Dome. Not to mention recently forking over more than $13,000,000 to the Indiana Pacers who were unhappy with the deal they’d cut when the city taxed us to build Conseco Fieldhouse for them to the tune of $183,000,000 in 1997 and threatened to leave town. In anything but sports, this would have been called blackmail.

And we can’t come up with a measley $1,500,000 to keep our libraries open.

Come on, people! Get a clue about what matters.

Back to the Blog!

2010-09-21T14:39:00.002-04:00

Fall! The season of purpose! Thank God!

I'm back to blogging--as a guest bloggger at teensreadtoo. Check it out.

Last Splash

2010-09-07T07:45:00.007-04:00

Yesterday evening we went to the Monon Community Center’s annual “Doggy Dayz,” a fabulous and fitting end to the summer in which dogs are invited for a swim before the pool is closed down for the season.

There were at least a hundred of them in the pool area when we got there, and another hundred or more lined up (with their owners) waiting to get in. Every kind of dog you can imagine—from Chihuahuas to Greyhounds, and every incarnation of Heinz ’57. Some were on leashes, their owners up to their knees in the water; others fetched Frizbees or balls, and carrying them, triumphantly, back to their owners who were waiting on the side. A lot of dogs played together, running and splashing and occasionally getting a little out of control. Little dogs ran under the legs of the bigger ones or paddled around happily, some wearing life-jackets. A few sat with their owners, tails in, reluctant to take part in the festivities.

This would have been our dog, Louise, who is—to say the least—a bit neurotic. So we left her at home and watched our granddog, Fergus, a deliriously happy, wonderfully dumb mutt, who seems to have no neuroses at all. He sat on the side awhile, checking out the scene, but was pretty easily lured into the water with some treats and, once in, joined one of the dog groups at play.

The image of all those dogs swimming, fetching, playing, shaking themselves silly would work nicely as the dictionary definition of “joy.”

Who, with any sense at all, wouldn’t want to be a dog? Or second best, watch a swimming pool full of them having more pure fun than any human being is programmed to be able to experience?

Thieves

2010-07-07T05:34:00.003-04:00

When I got to the yoga studio yesterday, I was surprised to see that iron security "fences" had been installed on the windows and door of the nearby quilt shop.

There had been four burglaries since the first of the year, ten quilts stolen in all.

Quilts?

Okay. Apparently, one was worthy $2,500. But, still.

Here is the moral dilemma of the writer: Instead of being appalled that anybody would steal...anything, the writer becomes obsessed wondering who in the world would break into a quilt store four times and steal ten quilts--and why?

We considered this before class. Nobody came up with anything that made much sense. One person did suggest that they might put those little chips in them so they could be traced.

"What if they traced it to a nursing home and some old person was all wrapped up in it," someone observed. "What would you do then?"

And therein lies one of probably a gazillion stories you might write, starting with this weird little incident. What if...

Years ago, in the eighties, when Laura Ashley dresses were all the rage, I happened to be in London during the store's big July sale. Prices were astonishingly low, and I got into major frenzy--grabbing dresses, trying them on, keeping some, abandoning others, getting more to try. When, finally, I had decided which ones I wanted and went to the check-out to pay for them, I went to take the smaller purse (with money, credit cards, and passport in it) out of my big shoulder bag, but it wasn't there.

All I could figure was that someone had reached under the dressing room partition and taken it from my (stupidly) open bag, which I had set on the floor while I tried on the dresses.

Which meant the thief had to be a woman. Plus, it was an upscale store in an upscale neighborhood, there was a security cop keeping an eye on things. Which meant she had to look enough like the other women in the store to escape notice.

It got weirder.

It was too late to go to the embassy to see about replacing the passport, but when I called the next morning, prepared for a major ordeal, I was informed that the purse, with passport, had been turned in at the Victoria Station Lost & Found. I could pick it up any time.

Predictably, the cash (about $300 in sterling, francs and guilders) and travelers' checks were gone. But the passport was there, so was my credit card. When I travel, I always make a little index card with money conversions on it for handy reference. The index card was still in the purse, torn in half by the thief and put back in its place--as if to say, Ha! You won't be needing this anymore.

This detail thrilled me. It seemed worth the lost cash and the hassle. I knew I would get a story out of it--and, in time, I did.

I wonder where people who aren't writers put the things in their lives that make them angry or dispirited or sad. Or happy, for that matter? All that build-up of emotion. Where can it go? How do they make sense of it?

Those quilts. Was the thief a kind of Robin Hood, stealing the beautiful quilts to keep frail elderly people warm? A pissed-off kid, maybe belonging to the middle-aged lady who own the store? The lady herself, collecting insurance to pay bills for a sinking business? A jealous customer who botched the quilts she tried to make herself? A quilt dealer who...

Like I said, there are a gazillion possibilities.

Pick one. Begin.

House Angst

2010-06-08T08:59:00.003-04:00

I’m not sure exactly when I first noticed “The Mansion,” but I remember walking or driving past it countless times during my childhood and adolescence, on the way to my Aunt Ruth's house. It was (I realize now) a moderate-sized Tudor house, which I regarded with deep longing every time I saw it. It was as if it was my house, but some awful trick of fate had kept my family from living in it. If we lived in that house, we would be happy. Not to be happy in a house like that simply wasn’t possible.

The house we actually lived in was in one of those subdivisions that sprang up after World War II, a little crackerbox of house on a row of other little crackerbox houses that looked more or less the same. We moved in at the height of the Baby Boom, the mid-fifties. At one point, there were 55 children on our block alone!

It was a long walk to…anywhere. The park, the library, school. Sometimes I would pretend I was walking home to The Mansion. The living room, with its brick fireplace; the dining room, with its big bay window; the cozy kitchen; the rec room. My own bedroom, of course, with a canopy bed, a window-seat. Books, a radio, and a huge bulletin board covered souvenirs and snapshots of myself having a fabulous time with all of my fabulous friends—who would magically appear when my life in this house, my real life commenced.

I was absolutely convinced that I would own this house someday. Weirdly, though, dream was so attached to the idea that living there would automatically right all the sad, unspoken problems of our family that I couldn’t imagine past living there with them, in some teen-magazine version of the perfect life.

Thursday evening, I visited my friend Connie Mitchell’s young adult literature class for librarians at IUPUI. It was fun because most the students had read several of my YA books and had great questions. One observed that both Wish You Were Here and Everything You Want had “dream houses” in them. But in WYWH, the mom got the house she dreamed of and seemed genuinely happy in it, while in EYW, the mom refused the house she used to long for, even though, having won millions of dollars in the lottery, the family could easily have afforded it.

(A connection I’d never noticed before, myself.)

“Why is that?” she asked.

Starting with The Mansion, I described my lifelong dream of the perfect house, which began with the belief that life lived in my mansion guaranteed a happy family and morphed, over the years, to what I think of as “house angst.” The closest I can come to defining it is, “What I know now about what real happiness is, coming up against that old longing.”

Even after I understood that the house I imagined wouldn’t really make me happy, even after I chose teaching part-time so that I could write seriously and chose traveling, which I’d also always longed to do, instead of staying put in the perfect house I still can't help wanting the house.

Sometimes not having it, knowing I’ll never, ever have it feels like grief.

Which is crazy because the truth is I don’t want it anymore. I really don’t.

One thing that interested me about writing about a family (very much like my own) winning the fifty million dollar lottery, as I did in Everything You Want, was the idea that having all that money would bring you smack up against your dreams. Suddenly, you could have…everything you want.

Actually, everything you thought you wanted. Which is a whole other ball of wax.

Abby, the mom in the book, who gets totally whacked out about the money, explains why she doesn’t want to buy the big, beautiful house she’d dreamed of for years—which I realized, writing it, was exactly the way I’d come to feel about my own dream house.

“[The house is] what I used to want, she says. "I wanted it so bad I could taste it. I’d drive by it sometimes at night, when the lamps were on, and I could see inside to the living room and I’d imagine us all there. It scared me, it seemed so real. Like it was a life I’d lost. Or the life I should have had…It’s too late…The last thing I want to do is buy a big house and have to decorate it, buy stuff to fill it up, get used to living in it.”

Honestly, I think one of the major reasons I write novels is because it’s like getting to live more than one life. The houses in WYWH and EYW are real houses I’ve driven past countless times over the years and fantasized about—and I got to own one of them by way of a story.

How cool is that?

I see now that I gave Jackson’s mom her dream house because the time in her life was right for it—and it actually did make her happy. But that happiness played off of Jax’s sadness at leaving the house where his divorced parents had last been happy together. So there was a cost.

There always is.

Abby might decide to buy that fabulous house in her post-book life, she might not. I don’t know. What mattered was at that juncture in the story of her life she understood herself well enough to know that she needed to figure out what she really wanted before making any huge decisions.

As for me, in my real life, now--I’ve lived in our little brick bungalow since 1969!

I have a sort of love/hate relationship with it. I love how cozy it is and how our whole history is in it. I hate that it doesn’t have a window seat or a breakfast nook. Or a screened-in porch, where I could sit and read and listen to the rain.

But if I didn’t live here, who would I be?

Summer Break

2010-06-03T07:09:00.003-04:00

A former student of mine once sent me an essay she’d written in a college class that began, “I asked God to give me a break.” She was a lovely girl, a straight-A student. Sweet, earnest, with a flinty streak of determination that I loved to watch in action. She had been raised as a conservative Christian and was active in her church.

She was a good, solid writer in high school, but she had trouble engaging fully in the mess of creative process, especially when a piece took a turn and she found herself making an observation or asking a question that made her strong faith waver.

I remember writing in the margin of her journal, “God gave you a questioning mind. Why would He have done that if He didn’t want you to use it?”

College cracked her mind open in that wonderful way it does, when it works—and made her the writer I always knew she had it in her to be. The essay she sent me was about the evolution of her conservative childhood faith into one that embraced the questions and contradictions of a person fully awake in the universe.

I loved that she asked God to give her a break so that she could do whatever she needed to do to make that happen. If I believed in the kind of God that grants requests, I would ask him to give me a break, too. But from myself.

Seriously. I would like to take a break from feeling so driven about—everything. At least for a while, I would like to write without ambition, for the joy of it—just to see where writing would take me—instead of constantly wrestling with the puzzle pieces of a novel, obsessed with trying to put them together when I know that crucial ones are missing, not to mention the fact that the shapes of the ones I do have keep shifting. Plus there’s no box with a picture on it that shows what the completed puzzle is supposed to look like.

I love writing novels. I really, truly do. But right now, I feel weary of the long process, the constant clutter of people and places in my head.

Lately, I've been thinking about a summer day a few years ago. Steve was gone, fishing, and I’d just returned from a trip and hadn’t gotten back into my routine yet. For a whole Sunday I just did whatever I felt like doing.

Mainly, I remember being on my bike on the Monon Trail and being so happy. It seemed like the world was offering up all sorts of things as I rode along to make me see this was how life is supposed to be. There was a man with a parrot on his shoulder! There were babies and dogs. The trail felt like a big parade and I was in it.

I remember thinking, is this the way some people live their lives? You feel like riding your bike, so you just…do? Or watch a movie, go to a museum, dig in the garden for a while? What would it be like not to be thinking constantly that you should be should be attending to some made-up world in your head, trying to wrestle it into words?

I’d like more days like that in my life.

So, it’s official. I’m taking a (summer) break.

From myself.

(If I can.)

Conversation in the Target Parking Lot

2010-05-28T18:43:00.004-04:00

So I get to my car with my purchases and come face-to-face with a very cute little boy, about four, sitting in his car seat in the van next to it. The door's open, his mom's loading what they've bought into the back.

Me: Well, hello there!

Boy: What's your name?

Me: Barb. What's your name?

Boy: Oscar.

Me: That is a fabulous name. You are going to grow up and do amazing things with a name like that.

Boy's Mom: What do you say?

Boy: Do you know everyone dies?

Me: I do. It's sad, isn't it? But usually it doesn't happen for a long, long time.

Boy: (Nods, contemplative.) Everyone dies.

Boy's Mom (mortified and somewhat alarmed): I'm so sorry. He's just obsessed with this. I don't know what to do.

Me: What can you do, really? He's right.

Boy's Mom: (Sighs.) What do you say, Oscar?

Boy: Nice to meet you.

Me: It was really nice to meet you, too, Oscar.

And I load the stuff I bought in Target into the car and drive away.

The Jim Morrison Phenomenon

2010-05-23T14:27:00.015-04:00

When I went to Paris in 1981, I got it into my head that I wanted to see Jim Morrison’s grave. I’m not sure why. It’s true that I loved the Doors’ music in the Sixties. “Light My Fire,” “Riders in the Storm,” “Break on through to the Other Side.”

Who didn’t love a band that got kicked off the radio for inciting kids to riot then? Jim, though—he always seemed to go one step too far. Did he really have to expose himself on stage, drink himself into oblivion, do every drug invented by mankind?

Not to mention write all those dreadful poems.

Anyway, my traveling companions, Pat and Joan, and I set out for Pere LaChaise Cemetery on the Metro. Looking for Jim, we passed but were not sidetracked by the graves most people came to see—Proust, Chopin, Balzac, Collette and Moliere, to name a few. It was a weird place, graves as far as you could see and family tombs that looked like tiny houses set in rows on winding paths so that it seemed like a neighborhood of the dead. We followed signs that said things like, “This Way to the Soul Kitchen,” “This Way to the Morrison Hotel,” or simply, “Jim”—with an arrow. More than one skeletal black cat crept across our path.

The grave—and everything around it—was a mess. Dead and dying flowers strewn on the ground. A smashed cross. Graffiti everywhere, including on adjoining graves. “Sex, drugs & love forever!” “Morta la Bourgeoisie.” “Bientot Jim.” “My only friend.” The usual names and initials people feel compelled to leave wherever they go.

Two women stood, heads bowed—one maybe twenty, the other fortyish. The younger carried a single red gladiola, which she propped against the monument. The older woman took her photo. Then I took their photo together.

“You know,” the younger woman said. “He’s not really dead.”

Just then a cemetery guard came into view, quite official in his uniform and cap, and walked toward us—we thought to chase us away. But, no. He wanted to chat.

“Bonjour,” he said, tamping his pipe. “You are American?”

Pat, Joan and I said, yes, we were.

He leaned toward us, his eyes bright. “Do you know the brand Zenith?” he asked.

Turned out he’d just bought a new Zenith radio and wanted reassurance that he’d made a good choice. The conversation went from there to the Germans in WWII to the relative merits of New York versus Paris (thoug it wasn’t clear whether he’d ever been to New York), to a Roman bath somewhere behind the Pantheon. When we left, he walked with us a ways, smoking and talking until disappeared, mid-sentence, down a wooded path.

That was weird.

But the weirdest thing of all was how, when I got home, it seemed Jim Morrison was everywhere. I’d turn on the radio, and a Doors song was playing. Walking through a tunnel under Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, I saw Doors graffiti. I walked into a bar cluttered with pictures of Jim, picked up Newsweek and saw his name mentioned, passed a guy on the street who was wearing a Doors tee-shirt. I stepped on an elevator and heard “Riders on the Storm”—in muzak, for Christ’s sake!

Seriously. Jim was everywhere—and, in time, this birthed a fabulous epiphany, which I dubbed “The Jim Morrison Phenomenon.” Jim was always there. I just hadn’t noticed until the surreal experience at Pere LaChaise put him on my radar.

Over the years, this has happened with all sorts of things.

Which brings me to…Silly Bands.

Early last week I was somewhere, can’t remember where, and saw these flimsy little bight-colored rubber bracelets shaped like animals set on the counter with a sign that said, “$1.99.”

Each, I thought? Then promptly forgot about them.

Until I went to Heidi’s “Personal Best” program at school on Thursday morning, where her dad had a couple of bags of said bracelets to give her as a reward for being so smart. At which point, I noticed that most of the kids were wearing them. In fact, some had so many bracelets on that their arms were half-covered with them.

“Silly bands,” Heidi told me when I asked what they were. (In that duh-implied tone of voice reserved for completely clueless people.)

Suddenly, Silly Bands were everywhere. Just like Jim had been!

I swear, every kid at the Art Fair on Saturday and Sunday was wearing at least one. So when we realized that it was the kids who most wanted to play our groovy Writers’ Roulette game, we went out and supplemented the prizes with….Silly Bands.

We raked in the dough after that. No matter what they actually won—tee-shirts, notebooks, pens, buttons—most of them wanted a Silly Band. Fine with us. They stood, agonizing over which one to take. A red star, a purple dinosaur, a neon yellow duck, a blue boat, an orange car.

“What are those?” a lady asked.

“Oh, Silly Bands,” I said. “They’re all the rage.”

And felt like breaking into a wild rendition of “Hello, I Love You,” just to confuse her further.

Writers Roulette & Other Literary Pursuits

2010-05-18T20:25:00.012-04:00

I spent Saturday and Sunday manning (womaning?) the Writers’ Center of Indiana’s booth at the Broad Ripple Art Fair, along with a group of fabulous volunteers. Betsy Lewis, volunteer extraordinaire in all manner of Writers’ Center needs, had the genius idea of having a prize wheel, which turned out to be the absolute best part of the weekend—both for raising money and for sheer entertainment.

I mean, who (in their deepest heart of hearts) doesn’t want to gamble?

Who can’t afford a dollar—for a good cause? (Well, at an art fair, anyway.)

Plus, there was the unexpected benefit of parents feeling guilty for dragging their kids around looking at art who were willing to throw in a dollar to let them spin the wheel.

Betsy also made very cool story-starters, which also drew kids to our booth (and the wheel) and it was lovely to watch them bent over, writing earnestly. My grandkids, Heidi and Jake, volunteered, too. Their job was to write sample stories to post on the tent. Needless to say, the stories were…brilliant.

For adults and teens, there was an ongoing story to add too—also lots of fun.

Tony Brewer and Jason Ammerman, of the Reservoir Dogwoods, as well as Sarah Skwire and Joyce Brinkman were on hand to write poems on demand for $5. Sarah wrote one for a brand new baby, also one for a couple’s sixth wedding anniversary, which made the bride cry (in a good way:-).

Best, we talked to so many people who were interested in writing and glad to know we existed. We collected well over a hundred names to add to our e-mail newsletter list and there was an unusually large number of online memberships and class registrations waiting to be processed on Monday morning.

Beach Reading

2010-05-05T07:11:00.003-04:00

What could be better than spending virtually all day reading on Hilton Head Island, looking up occasionally to see dune grasses, ocean, and sky spread out before you? It is my favorite thing in the world to do, my favorite birthday present (yesterday was my birthday), and one of the things that makes me feel lucky to be alive.

Better yet, the first book I read on said beach this week was the new Elizabeth George, This Body of Death. A deliciously fat, complicated, can't-put-it-down mystery with an ensemble of recurring characters even more compelling than the plot--the kind only she can write.

I say characters, but George's people are absolutely dead-on real to me. Handsome, brilliant Inspector Lynley getting over a tragic loss (which freaked me out so much when it happened a few books ago that I actually had to stop reading for a while); his partner,the disheveled, determined, Barbara Haver; the ultra-cool, former gang chief turned cop, Winston Nkata.

How. Does. She. Do. This?

I would truly love to know. I would love to interview her sometime. What about her unfolding plots surprise her in process, I wonder? Lynley's tragic loss, for example. Did she set out, knowing? I'd bet she was as shocked as I was when it happened.

In any case, I highly recommend this new installment.

And if you've never read Elizabeth George, I recommend starting with the first book and reading up to This Body of Death.

Lucky you, with her whole world yet to be discovered.

Wild Things

2010-04-27T08:08:00.005-04:00

Last Thursday was Fine Arts Night at John Strange Elementary School. We visited Jake’s second-grade classroom first, where we read his first published book—poems! Illustrated by Jake himself, with a nifty author’s bio. Then on to Heidi’s third-grade room, where we read Heidi’s second published book, a fabulously illustrated alphabet book.

I love it that the kids write books at John Strange. I love the school itself, with its corridors full of children’s artwork and its friendly principal who actually stands outside to greet the children every morning. It feels happy there, the way I think a school should feel.

But what I love most at the moment is the new music teacher, who put together a production of “Where the Wild Things Are” that was, without doubt, the high point of all school productions. Ever.

To tell the truth, we were feeling a little grumpy. We didn’t know there was a program after the open house part of the evening. We were hungry, we didn’t want to wait a half hour for it to start. We wouldn’t have stayed, except for the fact that the second graders were the ones performing—and Jake is in the second grade.

So we’re sitting, waiting. There’s the usual shuffling behind the curtain, they’re running late, the principal is scurrying around, looking anxious. Finally, a kid comes out with a copy of Where the Wild Things Are, sits down on a chair at the edge of the stage, and opens it.

Then curtain comes up and maybe 75 second-graders on risers, wearing these monster costumes made of paper bags with string hanging on them, like fur, are suddenly singing along with the music blasting into the auditorium. That old 60’s song—

Wild thing,
You make my heart sing,
You make everything
Groovy
Wild thing!

Oh. My. God. It was hilarious.

Talk about groovy! They were doing dance moves (more or less) in unison. Every single kid was totally into it. The audience was hooting with laughter and delight.

I was sublimely happy. I loved watching kids engaged, really engaged, in the arts.

Yes! This was the arts. This was school, as it should be

Plus, I was having one of those weird what-is-time-anyway moments in which I was dancing to that absurd song at fraternity parties when I was in college and watching my grandchild (grandchild!) dance to it now.

Whatever now is.

“Born to Be Wild” followed, shortly thereafter (featuring sunglasses).

And I think everyone in the audience felt a little wild with them. The applause was wild, at the end. That’s for sure. There was a standing ovation.

The kids on the risers grinning that embarrassed grin kids grin when they know they’ve done something cool and right and they're really, really happy with themselves.

It makes me grin myself every time I think of it!

Blooms of Darkness

2010-04-20T15:27:00.005-04:00

When this wonderful new book by Ahron Appelfeld begins, 11 year-old Hugo is waiting for the peasant who is to take him to the mountains, where he will be safe from the Nazis. Other children are disappearing one by one, including his friends Anna and Otto, but Hugo’s peasant doesn’t come. Hugo’s father has been taken away to labor camp in one of the “actions.” Hugo and his mother sleep in the cellar, hoping this will keep them safe from the night raids of soldiers looking for Jews. When they dare a glimpse through the window, the see people burdened with packs so heavy they can hardly move, herded through the streets to the railways station by soldiers brandishing whips. Hugo recognizes people sometimes: classmates, neighbors, an aunt. Eventually, his mother decides she must take him to live with Mariana, a childhood friend who’s “fallen low.”

“What does ‘fallen low’ mean?” Hugo asks himself.”

“What is the meaning of ‘fate hasn’t been kind to her?' Hugo wonders.”

Mariana is a prostitute. Hugo and his mother escape from the ghetto through sewer pipes, in the dead of night, arriving at the brothel where Mariana works well after midnight. Within moments, Hugo’s mother is gone and Hugo is left to live in Mariana’s closet.

Of course, Hugo doesn’t know she’s a prostitute; he doesn’t even know what a prostitute is. He’s barely eleven. In fact, what made this book so compelling to me was that I felt like I was figuring everything out right along with Hugo. I lived in the dark closet with him, waited for Mariana to come with food and water. I heard the voices of the German soldiers and the sound of their boots in the hall. I felt the dangerous, irresistible comfort of Mariana’s bed and understood the love that bloomed between Hugo and this poor, wrecked woman who cared for him the only way she knew how.

This is not a young adult novel. Yet is has the immediacy, the rawness of emotion that characterizes the best YA’s. Reading it, I felt like I was growing up myself, the world cracking open—for better or worse, all around me. Some might feel Hugo’s world is too harsh for teenagers to experience, but I believe that the greater understanding of what love is and how it can save us it brings is well worth the pain of sharing his journey.

Interview with Jane Hamilton

2010-04-17T10:04:00.001-04:00

Click here to read my interview with novelist Jane Hamilton in Butler University's online literary journal, Booth.

Between Water and Song

2010-04-16T06:49:00.006-04:00

Last night I went to a poetry reading at Marian University to celebrate the publication of my friend Norman Minnick’s new anthology, Between Water and Song: New Poets for the Twenty-First Century. David Shumate, a Marian professor and prose poet, began the program with this poem from the anthology, by Ruth Forman:

Stand

why so afraid to stand up?
someone will tell you
sit down?

but here is the truth
someone will always tell you
sit down

the ones we remember
kept standing

He said that of his students loved this poem so much he declared he was going to have it tattooed on his body. The student was there, he admitted he hadn’t done this quite yet, but…he might. Which I hope he does—not because I like tattoos; I don’t, particularly—but because I think it’s such a fabulous example of how the right poem can totally blow you away.

It’s not the same poem for everyone. I’ve taken to reading poetry collections the same way I look at paintings in a museum—wandering through, letting myself be drawn to the work that seems to have been made just for me. Like Vermeer’s “View of Delft” or Jill Bialosky’s “Another Loss to Stop For,” which I carry, folded up in my wallet.

Malina Morling, whose work is featured in the anthology, said that when her high school English teacher read “The Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” aloud to the class she knew suddenly, absolutely that she wanted to be a poet.

Talking about how she collects the details and sentences that make their way into her poems, she observed that writing poems is a lot like remembering dreams. People often say they don’t dream or they don’t remember dreams, but if they make an effort to remember their dreams—they do. Poetry is like that, she said. If you make up your mind to write poems and keep writing them, the things you notice start to make themselves into poems.

I was glad I went to the reading last night. It made me remember that, in the right frame of mind, the whole world becomes a poem--and a a single wonderful poem can crack open the universe with its astonishing, ordinary truth.

Like this one by Norman Minnick:

While You Work

While you sit at your desk
water striders dance upon the surface of a pond,
high, thin clouds stretch across the sky,
and acres of tall grass, reticent after a long dry summer,
practice nothing but grace.

Indiana Basketball

2010-04-05T07:45:00.006-04:00

There were not a lot of great things about growing up in the Calumet Region in the ‘50’s and 60’s, but high school basketball was one of them—especially tournament time. There was no class system then. Every school was equal—on the bracket, anyway—and every school had hope (no matter how small, no matter how absurd) that this was the year they’d make it to the finals.

The absurdity of this hope did not scar us, in the least. It was fabulous.

Sectionals started on Thursday, which meant we got a half-day off when our team played, and we’d pile into cars or take the bus and head for the game—dressed in our school colors, armed with crepe paper shakers and homemade signs. Our cheer section was a sea of red, our cheerleaders lined up before us, their hair sprayed into perfect flips, and whipped us into a frenzy as our team ran out onto the floor.

On the few occasions that we actually won that first game, we were sure we were on the way to the Regionals. When we lost, as we invariably did, we were crushed—but good sports about it. And picked another team to root for. When they lost, we picked another…

All the way to the final game, which was always held in Indianapolis at Butler University’s Hinkle Fieldhouse. Some rooted for those powerhouse teams. I always loved the underdogs—especially small schools in Podunk towns whose run-up to the Final Four seemed nothing short of a miracle.

My dad was a basketball nut. He was a wreck watching the final game on TV. He paced. He yelled at the players, coaching them from the living room. He yelled at the refs, challenging the calls, citing this rule or that.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” he said again and again.

I knew nothing about game of basketball myself. For me, tournament time was about a story: romance, passion, triumph, tragedy.

The players, so tall and cute--and so out of my league.

The wild joy of the new state champions at the final buzzer, each one climbing the ladder brought out onto the gym floor to clip bits of the net they’d keep forever to remind them of that night.

The abject despair of the losers, compounded by having to watch the victors clip the net—all the while thinking about what might have been.

In 1997, the Indiana State Athletic Commission insanely decided to go to a class basketball system in Indiana. It just wasn’t fair for the small schools to have to compete against the big ones, they said. So now we have four classes, four tournaments, four state champions—and nobody pays a bit of attention, except (maybe) the schools involved.

I feel like calling up the commissioners and saying, “Hey! Morons! Have you been following Butler in the NCAA the past few weeks?

Small school, small budget, modest stadium.

Hello!

They're playing in the final game of the final game of the tournament this evening.

No doubt you have tickets. I hope any pleasure you might have in watching the game will be wrecked, remembering the tradition of the high school tournament you so stupidly threw away.

GO, (UNDER)DAWGS.

Teaching Moment

2010-03-26T20:14:00.003-04:00

I have always loved those moments, teaching, when whatever I’m trying to teach becomes visible in a student’s eyes, or in the way her posture shifts to alertness, or, even better, when, suddenly, there is a certain quality of quiet in the classroom in which the new idea is caught for a long moment, alive and quivering.

Today I had a brand new kind of teaching moment. I was talking to my friend Bryan Furuness’s creative writing class at Butler University about writing novels. I began by reading the new first chapter of my novel-(seemingly forever)-in-progress, Looking for Jack Kerouac—which was a little harrowing, because it really is new and I’m still not sure it’s going to work. Anyway, the novel is set in 1964, and there’s a reference to “The Fugitive” in the part I read.

After I finished reading, I talked about where the idea came from, how it evolved—the wonderful catastrophe of creative process—and, eventually, about revision.

How it helps to love revision. But if you don’t, you have to accept the fact that it’s necessary. You just have to keep doing it and doing it until the novel you’ve made with words comes as close as it can to matching the novel you feel and know and see inside you.

But you can’t figure out what kind of revision the novel needs by yourself. When you read the words on the page you can’t separate them from the stuff in your head, so you can’t know what's really there. You need a reader who will read the words and, by asking you questions and making honest observations, let you see what they what they say—and what they don’t say. Only then, can you see the nature of the gap between what's there and what you hope is there.

I think I got a little obsessive about the honesty thing. I usually do.

The importance of being brutally honest with yourself about your writing, appreciating the honest of your editors or critics, even if they say something you don’t really want to hear.

I’m so dead serious about this stuff I embarrass myself sometimes.

Anyway. The period came to an end. Everyone left, but one girl who wanted to ask a question. We chatted for a few minutes and, suddenly, a bunch of kids from the class burst back into the room. Kind of like an anxious posse.

“We have a question,” the spokesperson said.

Then somebody blurted out, “The Fugitive was a movie in the ‘eighties.”

I smiled. “It was also a TV show first, in the early sixties,” I said.

I think they were a little embarrassed. In any case, I hope I convinced them that their decision to tell me something, honestly, about their reaction to the words I read to them truly and purely delighted me. It was, for me, one of those lovely moments in which something I tried to teach visible.

I have been thinking about it all day—and smiling.

Urgent Please!

2010-02-23T08:16:00.000-05:00

I got this e-mail a few weeks ago—allegedly from a friend, “Urgent Please” in the message line.

Hi,

How are you today? Anyway I'm not feeling good at the moment, Well I'm stuck in London,England as i speak to you i was mugged last night by some robbers at gun point, i got terribly beaten up by the robbers and injured as well..and right now i speak to you,i got bruises on my neck all cash on me was stolen away including my phone and credit card and now I'm talking to you from a local library close to the hotel where i lodged. I've been to the embassy and the Police here but they're not helping issues at all please i need your help out from here,my flight leaves in three days time from now,but I'm having troubles sorting out the bills i owe here at the hotel where i lodged..i would have loved you to help me call someone..But i already sent bunches of email to everyone and still waiting for response..Please i need you to get me a quick loan of $1,500. i promise to definitely pay you back when i return. Honestly,it was a brutal experience,but thank God i still got my life and passport saved, I already filled a report to the police and they are on investigation But sincerely speaking,they are not helping matters at all. Please get back to me as soon as possible.

All best,

My friend's name

First response: it scared the crap out of me. Could this actually have happened to my friend, from whom I had received a happy “catching up in the new year” e-mail just days before?

Then I read it again and thought—grammatical errors, punctuation errors, run-on sentences, not to mention the voice—there’s no way my friend, who’s a wonderful writer, would have written this, even under the worst kind of duress.

Of course, it turned out to be a scam. I got another e-mail a few days ago—down-and-out in Nigeria this time. My friend has changed his e-mail address since then.

But I keep wondering, what kind of person does this?

If You Love Kids and You Love to Read...

2010-02-21T19:55:00.005-05:00

Click here.

It will make you really, really, really happy!

I promise.

This Year's Valentine

2010-02-14T12:03:00.000-05:00

A poem by my friend, Phil Appleman.

THIS YEAR'S VALENTINE

They could
pump frenzy into air ducts
and rage into reservoirs,
dynamite dams
and drown the cities,
cry fire in theaters
as the victims are burning,
but
I will find my way through blackened streets
and kneel down at your side.

They could
jump the median, head-on,
and obliterate the future,
fit .45's to the hands of kids
and skate them off to school,
flip live butts into tinderbox forests
and hellfire half the heavens,
but
in the rubble of smoking cottages
I will hold you in my arms.

They could
send kidnappers to kindergartens
and pedophiles to playgrounds,
wrap themselves in Old Glory
and gut the Bill of Rights,
pound at the door with holy screed
and put an end to reason,
but
I will cut through their curtains of cunning
and find you somewhere in moonlight.

Whatever they do with their anthrax or car bombs,
however they strip-search or brainwash or blackmail,
they cannot prevent me from sending you robins,
all of them singing: I'll be there.

D-Day Assault: Day Three

2010-02-01T14:50:00.009-05:00

Today we went in search of the Maisy batteries, but never found them--and went on to look at Utah Beach, the farthest debarkation point on D-Day. It's beautiful country, with huge dunes like you find in Michigan, grasses waving.

Farmland rolls away from the sea. Cows and horses grazing, two donkeys that came up to greet me when I got out of the car to take their picture.

Hedgerows lined the rows and fields, the paratroopers' nemesis as they tried to move inland.

We took a wrong turn on our way to St. Mere-Eglise and, serendipitously, came upon the best battlements we've seen so far. A whole string of them, one of them gargantuan, along the dunes--and a working farm no more than five-hundred yards behind it. The Germans would surely have occupied it. Today, though, the farmer was his tractor, working in the fields. We walked the length of them, amazed to consider how ominous they must have looked to soldiers coming out of the boats. The others were up high, mostly hidden (except, that day, for the smoke and fire). These, though--you'd be able to see them from way out on the water.

We came upon a remnant of one of the "mulberries" that had washed up on the beach, rusty and green with algae, but you could see the structure of it--and the hook on the end nearest the water by which it had been dragged from England by a ship.

Back on the road, we found St. Mere-Eglise, eventually--and visited the museum there, where I came upon this photo (no names, no label) that looks disconcertingly like my (younger) self.

All the stranger for the fact that when I was here in'94, I stood at the edge of the American cemetery, gazed out at the landscape of fields that looked a lot like Indiana and saw in my mind's eye a young soldier waking to that view, thinking he was in Indiana--then reality slowing dawning on him. He was in France, in a farmhouse, being tended to by a family who'd taken him in when he was left for dead.

There was a girl in the family...

And when he comes back, all those years later for the fiftieth anniversary of the landings, he sees a man who looks almost exactly like his younger self.

I don't know what happens from there. I guess I should write it and find out.

D-Day Assault: Day Two

2010-01-31T14:19:00.009-05:00

See that little stretch of stone in the water behind me? It's the remnant of the "mulberries," artificial harbors that were made secretly in England and put in place just after D-Day to allow easier access to troop and supply ships. I love this kind of stuff.

You get a good view of them standing on the boardwalk of the little beach town of Arromanches, and I remember seeing them when I was here in 1994. It was low tide, so they seemed closer--I guess because there were people in the water. It seemed weird to see them swimming, tossing beach balls with the mulberries as a backdrop.

I saw them from different perspectives all day. We went from Arromanches to Juno Beach, where the Canadians landed, and I could see them from there.

I saw them from way up on a cliff, outside the Arromanches 360, a nine-screen circular theater with a movie that "plunges you into the heart of the action, among the fighters on D-Day, and [you] will thus feel tall the intensity of the great moment of the Normandy Landings." (Mainly, this attraction made me dizzy.)

And there were the mulberries again, viewed from the battlements Longues-sur-Mer--a remarkable site, with its ominous gun emplacements that seemed to me like pre-historic monuments. The guns were still in place in several of them, and you could go inside and stand where the gunners stood, looking out over peaceful farmland.

A pretty gray cat crept out of the emplacement closest to the sea and tried hard to adopt me, rubbing her head on my legs, leaping into my lap when I sat down on the concrete and burying her head in my warm jacket.

What did the animals do on D-Day, I wonder? Where did they go?

The gulls, squawking, today. Did they fly inland to escape the smoke and fire, coming back later to feast on the remains of the dead?

And what about the people, waking to the sound of guns that morning?

D-Day Assault: Day One

2010-01-30T12:54:00.008-05:00

My husband Steve, a major World War II buff, has long fantasized seeing the D-Day landing sites in Normandy, and—here we are. I saw the area in 1994, during the 40 year anniversary of the landings, and found it incredibly fascinating—and moving—so I was excited to take this trip with him.

We arrived in France yesterday, drove to Bayeaux (in the rain) with only a few minor mishaps, checked in at the fabulous Hotel D’Or, napped, had dinner—and got a good night’s sleep.

First thing this morning, we set out for Omaha Beach.

First on Steve’s agenda: stand at the shore line and look inland to see how utterly impossible this mission was. The beach, with no cover whatsoever; rocks—eventually; then hills that go straight up, from which there was constant fire from the Germans.

We found what was surely was one of three “draws,” roads that led up from the beach—and the gun emplacement protecting it. (Gun facing directly at the road.)

On down the road, we found the “official” Omaha Beach memorial, where we stood and surveyed the beach in both directions. Each landing craft unloaded 31 men, Steve said—and they came relatively slowly in the beginning, each one of those guys an easy mark.

We spotted a small gun emplacement set into a hill and hiked up to it. How strange to think of it occupied by a real person, looking out over the water, perhaps seeing the first of those landing crafts on the horizon that morning.

Monday night, before we left, I watched “Saving Private Ryan,” which I had avoided watching in the past because I thought it would freak me out too much. But watching it didn’t really faze me at all. I knew it was a movie, I knew the blood and fear weren’t real.

Just imagining that German in the gun emplacement, the flimsy landing craft on the horizon filled with men who knew that, within moments, they might die seemed more real to me than anything somebody else’s imagination could create on the screen.

Dear President Obama

2010-01-21T08:40:00.004-05:00

A year ago today, I awoke in a hotel room in Washington, D.C. filled with anticipation at the prospect of witnessing your inauguration. I am not a political person; in fact, I loathe politics. I had never worked in a political campaign in my life, but I made up my mind to work for you because I believed that you were our last best chance at becoming the country we claim to be—and must become if we are to survive. I spent hours, days, weeks, months making phone calls, going door-to-door, and sitting at a card table in the parking lot of a grocery store in a ghetto neighborhood, signing up people to vote.

I will never be sorry that I did it. I will never forget the whole families that stopped by on Sundays to register, after church, the ladies in their beautiful hats. And the down-and-outs, the kids—barely eighteen, people just pulling in on their way to or from work. There was a sign on the door of the grocery store that said, “Felons can vote.” Some came, tentatively, to sit down at our table, and left standing taller.

The last day of registration, people came all day long. I walked up the block with my clipboard to where a bunch of guys were hanging out on a front porch, spilling out onto the street. “Have you registered to vote yet?” I asked. It was very quiet for a moment; they looked at me. Then one said to another, “You register, man?” The guy shook his head, no—and his friend gestured toward me. I signed him up—and several others. “Thanks for coming down,” they said, when I left.

We signed up thousands of voters at that corner from May to October; in November, we took busloads of people to the polls.

Election morning, my husband and I were at the gathering place for poll workers at 5 a.m. Spirits were high. It turned out to be a chilly day, but sunny—and we sat outside of our assigned place on lawn chairs all day, hoping, hoping, hoping.

“YES WE CAN,” you said. And we did.

It was the most amazing feeling. That, too, I will never, ever forget.

We hadn’t really talked about going to your inauguration, but the morning after the election, my son-in-law Jim made hotel reservations on an impulse. “We have to go,” he said.

I will never forget the day of your inauguration, either. It was bitterly cold, and I remember setting out, all bundled up, merging with the river of people heading for the mall. Everyone was so—happy. We had tickets, but when we got to Fourteenth Street we couldn’t get across because it had already been closed. We didn’t care. We walked back toward the Washington Monument and watched on one of the Jumbotrons dotting the inauguration landscape that day.

I remember looking at the monument, so white against the cloudless blue, blue sky—and the flags circling it, thinking that it was lovely to be able to look at American flags and not feel angry. To think, maybe, I could begin to feel that the flags were mine, too. I remember all our little clouds of breath mingling in the cold air. Thousands and thousands of people. People as far as I could see in any direction. So many kinds of people, all of us gathered for this momentous event.

In time, the dignitaries began to arrive. Eventually, President Bush. Dour Dick Cheney—in a wheelchair! I swear, there was a collective gasp of pleasure that had to have been heard all the way to Virginia when your beautiful girls appeared on the screen—our girls, too.

Then there you were, striding onto the screen. Calm, collected, there. You raised your hand, your voice rang out. “I, Barack Hussein Obama…”

The inauguration of the first African-American president! I had wanted my grandchildren to see that, to tell the story of your inauguration to their own grandchildren years from now.

But most of all, I wanted them to be able to tell their grandchildren about being present at the moment when, finally, America grew up and began to fulfill it’s true promise.

I wanted them to be able to say, with wonder, “Before President Obama, people were hungry, they suffered and died because they couldn’t afford the health insurance they needed to get medical treatment, some kids went to schools were there weren't enough books.

“Before President Obama, we were arrogant, we believed we were entitled to try to make everyone in the world believe what we believed, to be like us—though what we said we were, a beacon of freedom and equality, really didn’t match up with the way things were on the street. We were wasteful with our natural resources, we allowed greedy corporations to send jobs to countries where labor was cheaper because there were no laws in place to control the exploitation of workers. People died in a war we initiated based on intelligence we manipulated to make people believe it was necessary. We treated gay people as second-class citizens. We wouldn’t let them marry, we wouldn’t even let them serve the country in the military, though many were highly qualified to do so.

“And get this! Before President Obama, there was this insane practice called lobbying, in which people with special interests were allowed to organize to gain power of legislators through money and favors. And another one in which major bills went to a vote trailing dozens of minor, but costly, bills—pet projects of legislators who agreed to support the major bill only if they were included as part of it.

“Can you imagine that?” I wanted them to be able to say.

“No way,” I wanted my great-grandchildren to be able to answer.

I didn’t think you were a god, like some of my fellow volunteers did. I knew it would be hard. I knew you’d have to compromise. I certainly didn’t expect you to change everything over night.

But I did expect you to do the right thing when it was possible. Gays in the military, for example. You could have changed that ignorant, discriminatory possibility with the stroke of a pen. You still could—and should. You owe it to the GLBT community that came out to support you.

I expected you to recognize the mistake W. made in turning over billions of dollars to banks whose greed and dishonesty had gotten us into the economic mess we were in. I thought you knew that about them, I thought you knew they were the last people likely to care about the millions of people losing their jobs and homes, their life savings. I never thought you’d endorse the continuation of that misbegotten policy—certainly not without establishing the kind of controls that might force the banks to behave responsibly.

I expected you to take a stand against the immoral greed of insurance companies, too, as you worked to fulfill your promise of affordable health care for everyone.

I expected you to see that war in Afghanistan would be as fruitless as war in Iraq. Not to mention the fact that we simply can’t afford it.

(“Nobody Denies that Kids Need Literacy Help…But Can Indiana Afford It?” That’s the headline in the Indianapolis Star this morning. The answer, according to our state government is, “No.” Just a small slice of the billions and billions of dollars allocated to the war in Afghanistan would make such a difference to countless kids who must have a decent education if they are to grow up and become the kind of citizens we need. It makes me heartsick.)

I didn’t expect you to surround yourself with, well, politicians. I expected to see new faces, to hear new voices speaking new ideas.

But mostly,I expected to hear your voice—the voice I heard during the campaign, the one that spoke so decisively, intelligently, compassionately and, above all, honestly about race and about so many other things.

I respect and value your belief in consensus; I admire your determination to give everyone a voice in the legislative process. But consensus is only possible when the people involved have the best interest of our country at heart. Not self-interest or the interest of their party, certainly not the interest of pet projects or, worse, political grudges.

When that happens, as it inevitably has, there must be one brave voice that speaks out above the others. As president, that must be your voice. For better or worse, you must stand up for what you (and we, who elected you) believe is right. If it means you’re a one-term president, so be it. You could do a lot in one term, really. And, even if you lost in 2012, there’d be millions and millions of us who would remember that we had made something amazing happen, electing you in 2008, and we’d be willing to gather our strength, find the next person with courage of his convictions, and try again.

Please, President Obama, speak. It’s not too late, not yet.

But I’m sorry to say that I feel less and less hopeful that you will. I’m not angry at you, I don’t feel I was tricked into believing in you. I still believe you are a man of great integrity who wants to do the right thing.

And, like I said, I’m not sorry I worked so hard for your campaign. It was one of the most profound experiences in my life.

I’m just very, very, very sad.

Watching People Write

2010-01-17T18:58:00.005-05:00

Few things make me as happy as watching people write. I love the bent heads, the scratch of pencils, the occasional whisper of a page turning. The particular silence of people lost in a world of words.

Yesterday was the Writers' Center's "New Year's Resolution: Write," an annual class geared to get kick recalcitrant writers' butts into the new year. We dredged up material, which brought both laughter and tears. We experimented, doing exercises on character, voice, and the ten-minute play. We wrote rough drafts of poems using stories from the news, and wonderfully absurd lists inspired by Sei Shonagon's "Pillow Book." (My favorite was: "Why It Is Terrible to Be the Least Crazy Person in a Mental Hospital.)

It was the kind of day that makes me remember why I love to teach writing. That silence, yes. And, okay, I've got to admit I like a captive audience, too. Hardly anybody in my real life wants to talk about this stuff.

But what I love best is the moment when a tentative aspiring writer surprises herself by writing something wonderful, something she didn't know she knew.

Eulogy for My Friend Mike

2010-01-10T07:51:00.006-05:00

"Old friends," Simon & Garfunkel sang in 1968. "Sat on their park bench like bookends.

"...Can you imagine us years from today
Sharing a park bench quietly?
How terribly strange to be seventy."

Well. Mike didn’t quite make it to seventy, but it’s pretty darn strange to be sixty-seven. Or sixty-two, as I am.

Or fifty—as some of our former students are now.

Time, it turns out, is nothing at all like we thought it would be when we were young.

Who knew you could be—old—and still feel like a teenager inside?

Who knew that a song, a photograph, a smell, the sound of church bells or a motorcycle engine could send you backpedaling through time so that for one sometimes wonderful, sometimes sad or embarrassing or scary—always very disconcerting moment you are fully alive in a different time and place, some younger version of yourself, often in the company of younger versions of people you’ve loved for a long, long time?

Time is fluid. Life is—well, we don’t really know what life. Only that we have one shot at it and that it matters. Who we are, what we do has repercussions down through time long after we are no longer, physically here. Maybe forever.

Mike’s life mattered.

The work he chose: teaching. The nature of the relationships he had with the countless people who threaded their way through his life.

Mike was my first adult friend. He was my first male friend, which was no small thing when we met in 1974. We shared a family group in Learning Unlimited—and had tee shirts made, playing off of the Campbell soup commercial of the time: Cupp and Shoup: A Family Group in an Instant.

Mike and Pat were Steve’s and my first—and most enduring—couple friends. Also a kind of family group in an instant. I remember once, on a lark, going through a huge, beautiful double on Meridian Street, fantasizing about how cool it would be to buy it and have our own little commune.

As it was, we spent many happy times living together in our cozy chalet in Michigan-skiing in the winter; Steve, Mike and the kids out on their dirt bikes in the summer while Pat and I (and eventually Joan) took a walk through the woods or just stayed inside, reading.

In time, Joan’s husband Bill was added to the mix. Just a few days after Mike’s death, we gathered at their house for our annual Christmas Eve Brunch—a bittersweet event. But so good for all of us, still stunned and brokenhearted by the idea that Mike was no longer among us.

In a stroke of brilliance, Joan and Bill established what I hope will become a Christmas Eve Brunch tradition. Each of us drew a slip of paper with the name of a character from Dante on it; then Laney, Mike’s granddaughter, drew from a duplicate set of names for the winner. It was Virgil. Drew won—a gift certificate to Target.

Mike loved Dante; he loved Target. He was a complex guy.

The white index card in your program is there for you to write a favorite memory of Mike to share with his family. I know. That’s hard. There are so many. But pick one, write it down—and I guarantee that, for a moment, he will come alive in your mind, just as he always was.

I’ll cheat and tell you two—from early times.

In the first, I am embarrassed to say, we are heading (with cans of shaving cream in hand) for the sound booth where Mark Edelstein is broadcasting the daily Learning Unlimited news. It is our misbegotten plan to occupy it. We burst in, laughing, shoot Mark with the shaving cream, but it’s such a shock to him that he falls backward and hits the button on the console that causes the news of our occupation is broadcast to the whole school. The incident was written up in our files. Enough said.

In the other one, Mike and Pat give me my first blank book. Christmas Eve: 1975. It is green with gold stamping. Inside, in Pat’s beautiful handwriting, it says, “To Barb—A very special person with a great deal to say—here’s a place for it.” Just holding the book in my hand thrills and terrifies me. I see myself later, alone, after midnight, the house asleep around me…finally beginning to write.

It is good that we could all come together this afternoon to remember our friend, Mike. To celebrate the essence of him—

His intelligence; his sharp, irreverent wit; and that endearing goofiness

His passion for motorcycles and the Cubs and art

The beacon he was for thousands of students over the years, especially those who’d lost their way.

And, most of all, the beautiful simplicity with which he regarded love and friendship.

If Mike loved you, he loved you. That was that. And he loved every single person in the auditorium today.

For all of us, the world is a sadder, harder place for the fact that he is no longer in it.

To end, here is a poem by Lisel Mueller.

AFTER YOUR DEATH

The first time we said your name
you broke through the flat crust of your grave
and rose, a movable statue,
walking and talking among us.

Since then you’ve grown a little.
We keep you slightly larger
than life-size, reciting bits of your story,
our favorite odds and ends.
Of all your faces we’ve chosen one
for you to wear, a face wiped clean
of sadness. Now you have no other.

You’re in our power. Do we
terrify you, do you wish
for another face? Perhaps
you want to be left in darkness.

But you have no say in the matter.
As long as we live, we keep you
from dying your real death,
which is being forgotten. We say,
we don’t want to abandon you,
when we mean we can’t let you go.

Teens Blog

2010-01-05T16:29:00.003-05:00

I just got an e-mail from Reyna inviting me to the Grand Opening of the Teens Blog Network. I'm in!

In fact, I like the idea of teens blogging about the books they love so much that I'm offering a copy of my novel Everything You Want to the reader I think wants the most interesting thing.

If you want a chance at winning, respond to this post. I'll announce the winner on January 12, as part of the celebration.

Here's the info about the Grand Opening:

Time: January 12, 2010 from 6pm to 7pm
www.youngadultsblogging.ning.com

The End of the 00's

2009-12-31T11:38:00.003-05:00

'Nuff said.

Christmas Motel

2009-12-26T06:17:00.003-05:00

Once, while in the midst of the (I believed then) obligatory baking of Christmas cookies, my friend Chris Torke called. Apologetically, she said that she had received a sheaf of poems from a student and had no idea what to say to him about them. Would I help?

"Yes!" I said. "And thank you, thank you, thank you for reminding me who I am. Please! Bring them over right now!"

I think she thought I was kidding, but I was as serious as a heart attack.

To say the least, I don't "do" Christmas well. I try, but it always gets me in the end. I sink lower and lower into a bad mix of sadness, guilt, anxiety,and dread. I get tireder and tireder, until I can barely stay awake.

Anyway. After Chris's call that day, I salvaged what I could salvage of the burnt, broken cookies, cleaned up the mess in the kitchen, and swore, Scarlett O'Hara style, As God is my witness, I will never, ever bake Christmas cookies again.

I don't remember anything about the poems Chris brought, just that reading them and saying something useful and encouraging was something I knew how to do. I felt like myself reading them. It was such a relief.

This picture of the Christmas Motel, sent my pal Mary Nicolini, captures how Christmas feels to me. It cheered me up all through this season--though, alas, not enough to avoid the holiday plunge.

I know I'm not alone out there!

Next year, a few days before Christmas, I am going to offer "Christmas Motel: An Afternoon of Escape from the Holiday Spirit" as a Writers' Center class. We'll write, commiserate, write some more.

Refreshments: store-bought Christmas cookies.

I'm betting it will fill.

Anal-Rententive Left-Brain Novel-Assessment Exercise

2009-12-23T18:36:00.007-05:00

This exercise is guaranteed to help you assess the first (second, third, whatever) draft of your novel and set revision tasks for the next. It takes ages, but it's worth it. You'll be amazed what it reveals!

Go through your manuscript chapter by chapter. Type the first line of the chapter, use bullet points to summarize what happens in it, then type the last line of the chapter. Skip a line. Do the next chapter. Keep going...

Weirdly, keeping your left brain busy allows the renegade right brain to range all over the place, triggering useful ideas and observations once you get into the flow. So keep a notepad nearby. But don't get side-tracked for too long. Keep going.

When you get all the way to the end, consider what floated up to make a list of things you want to look at closely. For example: character, emotion, description, the balance of scene and narrative, dialogue, transitions.

Isolate one element, and go through your "outline," highlighting/marking each place it appears on the page. Work through everything on your list, using a different color or symbol for each element.

You might track a character through the book, highlighting every place that character is present, mentioned or even thought of. Insights and ideas often occur in the process, as they did when you went through the manuscript page by page. Jot them down, of course.

But the greatest insights will most likely come when you finish the highlighting, spread the pages on the floor, and literally see the path of the character through the novel. Are there whole chapters or sections where the character is not there at all? If so, is his absence appropriate or do you need to find ways to weave him more tightly into the novel? What might those ways be? Scene? Narrative? Flashback?

Perhaps it occurs to you, looking at one character, that it would be helpful to see his relationship with another character more clearly. In this case, highlight the second character with a different color. Where do both colors appear on the same page? What happens between the characters on those pages? How does the accumulation of moments define—or fail to define—the relationship?

You can highlight for anything. If you notice a lot of narrative passages, highlight for both narrative and scene to see if they are in good balance. If your novel moves back and forth in time, highlight each level of time with a different color to help you see if they are in the right balance. If it has multiple points of view, highlight each. Is each character given equal space? Should each be given equal space? Is each different point of view necessary?

Perhaps tension concerns you. Consider the various elements in the novel that contribute to the overall tension, and highlight for each one. For example, if one of the novel's tensions lies in a character's realization that his girlfriend wants to get married fear that his girlfriend is pregnant, highlight every place in the book where marriage or anything relating to it comes into play. What do your discoveries about this and other tensions in the novel suggest in terms of heightening the tension throughout?

Where are the tense moments in the novel? Where, exactly, does the story torque? Are there enough torques, are they paced effectively, do they work? What do they suggest in terms of heightening these elements throughout?

When you’ve finished highlighting, spread the pages on the floor end-on-end. Viewed this way, the outline looks rather like a tapestry, the various elements threading their way through it. Let your eye take in the effect. Do the colors seem in proper balance? Are there any chapters that are significantly shorter or longer than the rest?

Now consider the elements you highlighted, one by one. Use your eye, your analytical skill, your intuition, and all you know about the craft of fiction to create a list of specific observations, questions, and tasks to consider during revision.

...Revise!

This exercise is adapted from Novel Ideas: Contemporary Authors Share the Creative Process, by Barbara Shoup and Margaret-Love Denman. (University of Georgia Press)

The Real Slaughterhouse-Five

2009-12-19T17:52:00.006-05:00

Sixty-five years ago today, Kurt Vonnegut was captured by the Germans, setting in motion the experience that would eventually morph into his greatest novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. Two years ago today, I had the privilege of talking with the late Bob Kelton, who shared that experience with him.

My friend, Joan, had mentioned Bob in the past; he had lived with his family in the neighborhood where she grew up up, in Danville, Illinois. I’m not sure how it came up that he’d been captured with Vonnegut—maybe in the course of conversation about Vonnegut’s death, which had occurred earlier that year. In any case, I’m fascinated by the intersection of reality and fiction and asked Joan if she thought he might be willing to talk to me about what he remembered from that time. He kindly said, yes—and invited us to his home in Champaign, Illinois, where he told us the story.

A student in chemical engineering when the war started, Bob had been selected to receive training in chemical warfare at the University of Tennessee—until, as he said, “…they decided, we don’t really need college graduates, we need fresh cannon fodder. That’s you!”

He was sent to Camp Atterbury in Indianapolis for thirteen weeks of training before he would be shipped out as a buck private in the infantry. That’s where he met Kurt Vonnegut, who showed him around town and introduced him to his friends. There were six of them who hung out together—Vonnegut a little less so because Indianapolis was his home, and he had a girlfriend there at the time. They arrived in Belgium together on December 16, at the beginning of what would come to be called “The Battle of the Bulge.” All six were assigned to intelligence reconnaissance, which meant they would go ahead of the front line to find out where the enemy was, what they were doing, and how many there were.

“We were captured running our first patrol,” Bob said. “We came to an opening about one-hundred yards long. We were in the woods and there were woods on the other side. My best friend, Bill Sieber, started to go across and got about halfway, when there was a shot. Bill dropped to the ground and called, ‘Get the medics. I’ve been hit.’”

If they went into the clearing, they knew they’d be shot by the Germans. Even if they escaped, the Germans would follow them. So they went back to camp and asked for a medic. The colonel said, no. They were going to surrender in moments, they had to turn in their weapons.

“There we were,” Bob said. “Our best friend had been shot, we didn’t know how seriously, and we couldn’t go back. I’ve thought about that ever since then. We never found out what happened to him.”

“There’s that moment in the book when Billy Pilgrim is standing in the clearing and the Germans shoot at him,” I said. “He’s paralyzed. Then Roland Weary grabs him and saves his life. It’s exactly like the scene you described.

“[Kurt] played that a little different,” Bob said.

The capture was different, too. In the book, it’s more…personal. Roland Weary is beating up Billy Pilgrim, the two of them having been ditched by the other members of their patrol, and five German soldiers appear, with a police dog on a leash,

In fact, 8,000 Americans were captured at once. Kelton, Vonnegut and the others were part of a group of 150 whom the Germans marched eastward for several days, until they reached the railroad tracks. “They put us on what they called ’40 & 8’ boxcars—they were made to hold forty men or 8 horses," Bob said "They put sixty of us in one. There wasn’t room to lay down. They traveled us by night, not by day because we could have been seen. We traveled until we came close to the Dresden area, then they marshaled us into that location. We had to stand outside for six or seven hours when we got there. They weren’t prepared to interrogate 8,000 men. That’s how we ended up with the frozen hands and feet, the frostbite. Finally we got in. Name, rank, serial number—that was about it. We were assigned to walk to Dresden, that same group of 150 or so, where we got into a barracks. It was on a hill, on the very outskirts of Dresden.

“So the part about being in the slaughterhouse was made up?” I asked.

“Yes and no. We went into the slaughterhouse, but later—to help out where we could help out. There was meat in there. With the fire from the bombing, some was cooked, so we just grabbed some of the meat and ate it. But we weren’t incarcerated there. We were in the barracks. After a short time there, they put us to work in this malt factory, where there were a few older ladies who befriended us and would give us something extra.”

“That sugary malt syrup, in the book,” I said.

“We’d get a spoon of it,” Bob said.

“And what about the British? In the book, they had all that food. There was that party. And the crazy theater production.”

They didn’t have that much food; there was no party, no theater production. “But they had more Red Cross packages than we had—and they shared it,” Bob said. “Somehow they were able to put together a crystal radio set, and they could get the BBC on it. So they kept track of what was going on in the war and passed that on to us.”

The Americans worked in the malt factory till after the bombing, then guards marched them into Dresden to help clean up the rubble in the streets. “Almost everything was leveled,” Bob said. “They wanted to make the streets passable, so we had the job of going in with shovels and wheelbarrows. Hard physical labor—and our diet was a bowl of soup and a piece of bread for the day.”

One day, they were walked through a bank vault—one guard at the front, one at the back. “We came to large area with safety deposit boxes,” Bob said. “I glanced over and saw that they were open. Darn fool that I was, I looked. There were watches and rings. I thought, well, the guards are going to get these, the people who own them are not going to get them back. So I reached in and grabbed a whole bunch of stuff and put it in my pocket.”

“The diamond ring!” I said. “In the book, Billy Pilgrim’s wife has a diamond ring that he found in the pocket of his overcoat.”

Kelton smiled. “When we went back they put us in an area, the guards on the periphery. We sat down on the ground and I dumped the stuff out of my pocket. We split it up. My trousers had a big fly, so I pulled the threads and stuck my share in there.

“[Later] I sold one of the rings for a peck of potatoes. I traded a pearl and some flanking diamonds [from another ring] for a Mowitzer pistol.”

Near the end of the war, Kelton, Vonnegut and the others were moved to Pilson, Czechoslovakia, where they were housed on the second floor of a gasthaus. They thought about trying to escape, but one of the older, decent guards caught wind of their plans. “Don’t try to walk out of here,” he said. “The war’s going to end pretty soon, but if you walk out now, they’ll shoot you.”

“We slept on hay,” Bob said. “We’d go out in the field and find some dandelion greens and eat them. We found that sometimes, if we sneaked into a house with a cellar there’d be a jar of canned goods or something we could get. When the S.S. found out about it, they marched to where we were staying that night and took one of the individuals and told him to dig a hole. After he dug the hole, they shot him and pushed him into it.”

“It’s the teapot,” I said. In the book, Billy Pilgrim keeps talking about the guy who was killed for a teapot. It feels exactly the same. It’s just…weirder.

“Yep,” Bob said. “That’s where that came from.”

There is a mystery at the center of every good book, of course. Still it is so interesting to discover fragments of reality that the imagination uses to create something realer, richer, more meaningful than whatever the whole real thing was. In this case, also a cautionary tale which should be required reading for any person, anywhere who holds the power to send young people off to war.

Rest in peace, Bob. Thanks for telling me your story.

The Organizing Gene

2009-12-18T08:13:00.005-05:00

I have a weird, blissful, very vivid memory of myself at, maybe eight years old, “organizing” the Christmas cards that my mom had addressed and put in a shoebox to await mailing. Was I alphabetizing them? I have no idea whether I knew how to do that yet. The memory is all about the niftiness of the shoebox, so like the filing drawers I’d seen in the office of the pawn shop where my dad worked; the feel of my fingers organizing the cards into whatever system I had in mind; and a kind of secretarial sense of purpose.

I had forgotten this memory, which surfaced when I was organizing classes for the Writers’ Center of Indiana’s winter/spring term last week. I was feeling overwhelmed with dates and descriptions, wracking my brain for a place to start. Of course, I needed a calendar, a chart. There would be markers and highlights and post-its involved.

What could be better than that?

I was happy as a clam making the calendar, placing the post-its just so—coded for day, night, single session, multiple sessions. I loved the way that slowly, visually the schedule began to make sense. Eventually, I transferred everything its very own DayMinder Calender—and did a little color-coding there, too. Who-hoo!

I moved from that task to finishing the second (and maybe, maybe close to the last) draft of Looking for Jack Kerouac, a novel I’ve been working on for a couple of years. Then it was time to do my never-fail, anal-retentive novel assessment exercise. This involves going through the draft, chapter-by-chapter, typing the first line, doing “bullet” summaries of what happens in the chapter, typing the last line…from beginning to end.

It takes hours. Actually, days.

I love it!

Concentrating on that utterly left-brain task, my right brain is left to its own devices. I feel the novel’s flow, hold the whole thing in my head—sort of like an ecosystem,. I know where everything is, I see large and small patterns and repetitions—some effective, some just…repetitive. I recognize serendipitous details that an English teacher might later identify as symbols.

Things float up. Questions, observations, issues to consider in setting revision tasks for the next draft—and there are always revision tasks. You could keep revising forever, really. Which, in truth, I would be perfectly happy to do.

Toni Morrison said, “The best part of all, the absolutely delicious part, is finishing it and then doing it over again.” Amen to that!

Anyway, the exercise. Next comes my favorite part: highlighting.

I love, love, love highlighters.

I decide what I want to look at. For example, in “Jack” I’m looking at music, ideas, 60’s details, flashbacks, and baseball. Books, generally, and On the Road, particularly. I’m looking at the balance of scene and narrative. I’m tracking characters to make sure they appear and disappear effectively throughout the book; I’ll track the main character’s relationship with them, how it changes, how it resolves. And tension--where it is, where it's not.

I'll go through my “outline” again and again, once for each thing I’m tracking—often noticing things I missed previously, marking them. So I end up with a handful of markers. (And sometimes a rather colorful face.)

In time, it becomes clear what I need to do in the next draft. I make a list, and start to work--knowing the list will change in process. I’ll abandon some things for new, better ideas.

I’d never seen this before—probably because I’ve never gone so directly from one organizing task to another—but, dang, the classes and the novel exercise use the exact same part of my brain.

I first felt the pleasure of that organizing gene, playing with the Christmas cards when I was a little girl.

Playing. Yes. It feels like that.

The creative process is (serious) play, after all.

On Saying "Yes"

2009-12-13T12:57:00.014-05:00

I am one of those people who can’t resist saying "Yes" to—well, a lot. Whatever it is I say yes to sounds fascinating, maybe exciting: or it matters to someone I care about. (Sometimes to people I don’t even know.) And there’s the calendar factor, whatever I say yes to isn’t…now. The calendar is more or less empty when I mark it down.

Then the day comes. The calendar is crammed with stuff to do all around it; new possibilities have offered themselves up. Things I might rather do, or even should do. But I said, yes. So, unless it’s absolutely impossible, I do what I said I’d do.

Who says creative people can’t be terminally responsible, too?

Anyway. I said I would participate in this mosaic workshop presented by the CompleteLife Program at the IU Melvin and Bren Simon Cancer Center:

From Broken to Whole

Individuals with serious illnesses and their families are invited to share personal stories, create artistic imagery, and fashion a collaborative mosaic in this healing workshop that illuminates inspirational journeys.

I must have realized it was on a Saturday, all day on a Saturday, when I said yes to it. And I wanted to do it. I really did. I admire and am fascinated by the work that my friend Dr. Larry Cripe does there with cancer patients, cancer survivors, and those whose lives are profoundly affected by the suffering of their loved ones. I lost my sister Jackie to brain cancer in 2003. The day of the workshop, my daughter Jenny would keeping vigil with her husband’s family for her brother-in-law, who was dying of that same terrible disease.

But I’d been so busy the past weeks. Plus, doing the workshop meant I would have to miss my grandson’s laser tag birthday party.

Competing guilt, I hate that. I said I’d do the workshop; I miss Jake’s birthday party if I do the workshop. Lose/lose.

I’d go, do the writing exercise, beg off afterwards, I decided. Grandchildren trump, after all. Right?

I got there, sat down in a circle of a dozen or so sad people who’d come, hoping to find some light. Among them were a mother and her teenage-age daughter, in a wheelchair, who hoped to begin to learn how to talk about the daughter’s chronic illness; an elderly lady, whose loss of loved ones over the years had become too much to bear; a cancer survivor on crutches, making her way in the body left to her after her illness.

There was a woman, maybe in her early forties, who’d suffered two bouts of lymphoma and had recently learned that the cancer had spread to her kidneys. I thought, when she came in and sat down, her mother and her six-year-old daughter on either side of her, that she was the saddest person I had ever seen.

We introduced ourselves. I did my never-fail “I Remember” writing exercise. “Write ‘I remember…’ about your illness,” I said. “Anything, everything that comes to mind. Don’t worry if what you write seems disorganized or insignificant. Just—write.”

They did—and I watched, as I always do when I give this assignment, moved by whisper of pens on paper, the particular silence of people alive inside their own heads.

Some read—the elderly lady, a really lovely piece about her mother.

“She was there while you were writing, wasn’t she?” I asked.

Momentarily beatific, she said, “Yes.”

How could I leave then?

And, okay, there was a family birthday party for Jake the next day. So it wasn’t like I was going to be a complete failure as a grandmother. Plus, playing laser tag makes me anxious. Should “killing” people be so much fun? Even children?

After a few others read, we moved into a room set up for the mosaic-making process. We divided into groups, each at one of the two long tables. Watercolors and brushes were laid out, and we were directed to paint how the writing had made us feel. It might be an image, it might be something abstract. Or just color. I painted the yellow of my sister’s hair, the blue of her eyes, a dot of orange here and there--freckles. Some green. Life? I loved the feel of the brush in my hand, the bright shock of color on the page, the surprise as one blended into another and became something new. Painting, remembered my sister as a little girl, which pleased me because since the moment of her diagnosis I have had a hard time remembering her as anything but frightened, helpless, and sick.

The sad woman was in my group. Her watercolor was intense and luminous: a band of black at the bottom, one of deep purple, one of drenched blue. A golden sun, a sick green ring around it, took up the top left corner. Something—a tree, a bush—grew up from the bottom left corner. With bare branches.

Some drawings were happy, some dark and disturbing, some peaceful. We looked at them together, and Tina (from Creating Hope) sketched on a piece of mason board as we talked. A lotus, a butterfly, spirals, bits of confetti from someone’s broken rattle, a figure emerging from darkness, bands of color, something growing. Black, brown, blue, green, orange. A wide swath of yellow light.

Then we set to work on it, choosing from an array of colored tiles, breaking them in to the sizes and shapes we needed to fill in the shapes. Breaking, yes. It felt good. And it felt good make something from the broken pieces. Beautiful. Our own.

We talked as we worked. About cancer. About life.

But what I loved best about the day was watching the sad woman lose her sadness, for a little while. Little by little, painting, breaking, gluing, she was released from thought and knowledge. I watched her guide her daughter’s hand, concentrating on placing the piece onto the mosaic just right. I watched her pleasure at the little girl’s accomplishment. I watched her own mother watch her, tears in her eyes.

“I know she worries about me all the time,” the sad woman said, at one point. “But she drives me crazy.” And they both laughed.

She had made up her mind, she had told us earlier. If the treatment she was undergoing for the kidney cancer now didn’t work, that would be the end of it. No more. She couldn’t bear it. Whether she had any real hope that the treatment would work, she didn’t say.

The cancer was was still there at the end of the afternoon, in any case. There was plenty more suffering to face before it was all over—one way or the other.

But she left, smiling. Restored, for that moment, to her true self.

And I left, humbled, grateful. Glad, as I almost always am, that I said, “Yes.”

Where's the Story?

2009-12-01T20:47:00.003-05:00

Last Saturday morning, Steve rolled out the ’55 Chevy and we drove downtown to have breakfast with our friend Mason. It’s such a cool car—as I’ve said before, a one-car parade. Red and white and waxed to a mirror shine.

We parked on Illinois Street, walked up a block to LePeep, had a great breakfast and lots of fun catching up with Mason. Afterward, approaching the Chevy, Steve stopped short.

“Shit,” he said. “I don’t fucking believe this!”

Someone—in broad daylight—had stolen the chrome “Chevrolet” from the front fender on passenger side of the car. He (or she) must have wedged a pocketknife or maybe a key just underneath it and flipped it off.

My question is, Why?

I am a professional imaginer, after all. I teach imagination—and how I teach it is to say, simply, “Your imagination is not more than your ability to ask, What if?’ And to keep asking it until you hit upon the right thing.”

But, for the life of me, I cannot imagine why a person—in broad daylight, on a busy city street—would have done this.

Okay, I know the chrome “Chevrolet” was cool. I can think of any number of kinds of people who might like to have it. Car nuts, for example. Collectors. Or the 60-ish lady who once asked Steve if she could please sit in the back seat, just for a moment—as a memento of that other time.

Maybe it’s the in broad daylight/on a busy city street that has me stumped. You (whoever you are) are just walking along and you see this cool car parked on the street and getting closer you notice the chrome “Chevrolet” and…

You saunter over and flip it off with your pocketknife?

Why?

You’re pissed off that somebody other than you owns a cool car like that and want to do something to spoil his day?

You’re hopped up on drugs or maybe mentally ill and you’re drawn to the chrome sparkling in the sun and some wacko voice in your head tells you it’s a cosmic message just waiting for you and directs you to take it—and you do?

You’re old and homeless and sad and the “Chevrolet” reminds you of happier days? You need it, so you take it.

You’re young and cocky and you take it on a dare?

Help me here?

What if? Where’s the story.

And where is that “Chevrolet” now?

Vegas, Baby!

2009-11-24T09:19:00.005-05:00

Las Vegas may not be one of the Seven Wonders of the World, but of there was list Seven Weirdest Places of the World, it would certainly be there. In a couple of hours, you can walk from Venice to Paris to Mandalay Bay to Luxor—and hit New York and Bellagio on the way back.

Caesar himself would be proud of Caesar’s palace. Seriously! If didn’t know my history, I’d believe the Romans made it to Vegas, too.

There are pirate fights on the hour at Treasure Island, an erupting volcano at the Mirage; the fountains at Bellagio burst with color and music into the night sky.

Once, when there was a Monet exhibit at the Guggenhiem gallery at the Venetian (sadly, now defunct), I looked at a painting of the Doges Palace for a long time, then walked out on the traffic bridge and looked at the Vegas version, cars zooming under me on Las Vegas Boulevard. Except for the gargantuan video screens advertising Wayne Newton or Bette Middler or Cher, it was eerily right-on.

Speaking of art, note the fabulous sculpture from the Riviera, the posteriors of the women shining from being touched gazillions of time for good luck.

It’s Vegas, Baby.

And here’s a shoe from a shop window at the Mirage. Women wear these shoes here! Some can actually walk in them without looking like their ankles are going to give out on them any minute. It’s kind of a miracle.

Me, I play video poker on the nickel machines. My idea is winning is taking a really, really long time to lose my $20 stake. Better yet, playing a long time and cashing out the same $20—or maybe, on a good day, $25. Or $30. Who-hoo!

Steve, though—he wins more often than not. $6,000 this time! A trip to France.

Of course, there’s a sad side to Las Vegas, too. Yesterday morning, walking, we saw a guy up ahead of us, weaving a little, talking to himself. He was filthy, his hair tangled, his clothes in tatters. As we followed him up the escalator to cross on a traffic bridge, Steve took a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet.

He tapped the guy on the shoulder. “Have you had anything to eat today?” he asked.
The guy shook his head, no. Steve gave him the money, and the guy’s face broke into an astonished smile.

“Some people aren’t as lucky as we are, you know?” Steve said to me, as we moved on.

“Yes, we are very, very lucky,” I said.

Mary's Rant

2009-11-16T13:06:00.004-05:00

This, from my friend Mary, one of the best English teachers I know. It expresses so well how frustrating it is to care about kids so much and work so hard to educate them in the fact of the stubborn stupidity of policy-makers and, alas, some citizens, too, who persist in denying teachers the resources they need to get the job done.

"I have one of the dept. document cameras, but the projector and laptop I have checked out is from the IMC with their cart and my own speakers. I use it at least once a week; the document camera not as much because it's such a pain to rehook it all up.

"21st century classrooms? I've been ready for the last three years; even the soldiers I had as guest speakers today were a bit frustrated with the system that Sara Berghoff, my husband, Laura Phillips, and I have jerry-rigged together.

"Thankfully, I assured the soldier boys (and they agreed wholeheartedly!) our tax dollars pay for excellent military equipment, food and clothing -- just not for technology for our schools. (and ditto to Sen. Lugar's aide since the laptop kept "freezing" on the DVD she brought to show, and she finally scrapped it and ad-libbed the rest. She can take THAT impressive bit back to the senator, and maybe he can talk with our wonderful, new state supt. who must have left his heart in San Francisco or "our man Mitch," aka "the Blade," or that impressive roundtable of experts when they want to pay us based on test scores and continue to cut funding for schools, or even our newest boss who will solve all matters of education on the federal level with a continuation of "No Child Left Behind, No Child Moves Ahead.")

"And, if you live in [our township] and didn't get out and vote for the recent referendum as well as push it to your neighbors, what a shame.

"I wonder how many sharp, new colleagues of mine (who are now friends, too)will now get riffed this spring?

"Grrrr....a frustrating day, in more ways than one, even though spending the day with active-duty soldiers and someone in public service trying to make a difference as we all attempt to help teach the "future leaders of tomorrow " (YIKES!) how to appreciate what we have in America is usually a "best day" of the year for me. And, truly, it was, despite my 10 p.m. rant. :)

"I'm still smilin' and will be back to "mold minds" manana!

"Mary

"P.S. Oh, wait. Sorry. You asked for only positive replies, and I just realized mine probably wasn't. Dang.

"P.P.S. What DID you ask? Oh, yeah. NO, I don't have a department projector."

Alice's Workshop

2009-11-13T20:22:00.005-05:00

I’ve published some poems, but I’m not really a poet. What I mean by that is, I might write a decent poem, but I couldn’t explain why it’s decent. If a poem is seriously flawed, I generally can’t identify the source of the flaw; thus, I have no idea how to fix it. I can’t take apart a poem, like I can take apart a story or a novel to see how it “works.”

Still, there’s something so satisfying about writing a poem—a moment caught and saved forever or a thought made visible in images.

The poet Alice Friman says that writing a poem is like trying to capture a ghost. Imagine that someone gives you a sheet and says, ‘Find the Ghost.’ So you go around the room throwing the sheet into the air until, suddenly, there’s form beneath it—and that’s how you know where the ghost is.

“The poem is the ghost,” Alice says. “The words, the sheet that gives it form.”

I treated myself to a poetry workshop at the Writers’ Center of Indiana with Alice last Sunday afternoon—several delicious hours of considering one poems-in-progress from each of eight participants. Alice is a marvelous teacher, smart, practical, passionate about poetry. She sees what you’re trying to do and is able to make you see what’s actually there. (As opposed to what you thought, hoped was there.)

“What if?” she says. “What if?” Thinking out loud about strategies and solutions, surprising herself with her own ideas along the way, which is a pleasure to observe. But it’s your poem,” she always concludes. And it is—though always better once you apply whatever she had to say about it.

Here’s the poem I submitted—improved by the cuts that Alice and the group suggested. But I’m still not sure about the last stanza. I like it, but do I need it? Alice said, “I can live with it. But it’s your poem.”

What do you think? Keep? Cut?

FINALLY SEEING CANALETTO

1.

I worked a whole year in this museum
and never saw the painting until that summer
you nearly died. The year of the drought,
the whole world burned brown,
so that sometimes, outside,
away from where you lay in the hospital bed,
the air seemed more alive than anything else, pressed
against me until I thought I could not breathe.

I came alone one afternoon, while you slept,
wandered the galleries, hoping
to find sadness larger than my own, made beautiful
and saw this painting
I had passed a hundred times, saw the care
with which Canaletto had rendered the architecture:
the precision of the domes and arches,
the perfect regularity of the windows,
the long balustrade above the promenade,
the repeating diamond design on the face
of the Doges’ Palace.

I saw the luminous pink of that building.
I saw the blue sky.
I saw people: quick, curved colors, sometimes
no more than dots on a balcony,
half-hidden by pillars--
like ghosts
like the second thoughts they were.

He had made the world first, I saw that
in the way the stones of the piazzetta bled
right through the men and women there.

2.

Five years pass. It is November: cold,
clear, and I come back because I am happy,
because I think I know what this poem will be.
I will sit before the “View of the Piazzetta
San Marco Looking South,” paint
with words what I remember.

But the bench where I sat before is gone,
the walls are pink, the painting hangs
near the doorway to a room flooded
with sunlight, and the Doges’ Palace
dissolves into it, all the lovely verticals
collapse, leaving a clutter
of shacks at the base of the campanile,
hungry dogs, children at play, ladies gossiping,
tradesmen leaning into secrets--
in the far corner, a solitary figure
in a black cloak with red cuffs, vivid
as the bells that announce themselves
in the long shadow of the tower falling
across the square.

And I see
that I know nothing, I am prepared
for nothing. Each painting, each sadness
and happiness will yield to me
what and when it chooses.

The Gathering of Writers

2009-11-09T06:06:00.007-05:00

About a year ago, when nonprofits everywhere were crashing, I became the Executive Director of the Writers’ Center of Indiana. Long story. Mainly, I took on the job, as a volunteer, because the Writers’ Center was there when I finally trumped up the courage to try to write and I wanted it to be there for others who dreamed of being writers and needed a place to begin.

Believe me, being the Executive Director of anything was the last thing in the world I ever thought I’d be.

(Once, in Las Vegas, my husband and I watched a disgustingly scruffy, eastern-European guy losing big-time at the high stakes Baccarat table and being a really bad sport about it. When the Casino employee leaned down and said something to him, the guy leapt up, pointed his finger at the Casino employee, and shouted, “You! You are imbecile! I want never you should be in charge of nothing!”

This has become a joke in our family. When somebody screws up—or has major potential to screw up—it’s what we say. It says a lot about I felt about this unlikely turn of events in my life.)

Anyway.

With the help of an amazing Board of Directors, numerous volunteers and supporters, and the indispensible Roxanna Santoro, who keeps chaos at bay in the office, the Writers’ Center is not only surviving, but thriving!

Plus, I love this work. Who’d have thought?

Saturday we had our annual Gathering of Readers and Writers, coordinated by Victoria Barrett, who, in my humble opinion, should be put in charge of organizing the universe. Award-winning poet Alice Friman, who helped found the Writers’ Center in 1979 (just in time for me to take my first class)gave a keynote address that celebrated the Writers' Center's 30th anniversary by way telling of her own story--and ended with a reading of a half-dozen poets who were there from the start.

More than a dozen Indiana writers gave break-out sessions and participated in panels on poetry, fiction, memoir, mystery-writing, screenplay, publishing, and other topics. (FYI: there are many, many accomplished, award-winning Indiana writers whose work is recognized on the national level and beyond.)

It was a wonderful day. The foyer and galleries of the Indianapolis Art Center, where the conference was held, were lined with Day of the Dead altars, each one just waiting to be turned into a story, a poem, a memoir, a movie—maybe a mystery. Even the weather was inspiring; sunny and balmy, autumn’s last gift.

But my absolute favorite moment of the day was glancing into the library where Norman Minnick, a new, young voice in poetry, was presenting a session and seeing Roger Mitchell—

well, here’s his (abridged) bio:

Roger Mitchell is the author of nine books of poetry and a work of nonfiction. Roger Mitchell is the author of nine books of poetry and a work of nonfiction. The University of Akron Press published his most recent book, Half/Mask in January, as they did his previous book, Delicate Bait, which Charles Simic chose for the Akron Prize in 2002. Mitchell is formerly the director of the Creative Writing Program at Indiana University, where he held the Ruth Lilly Chair of Poetry. Other recognition for his writing includes the Midland Poetry Award, the John Ben Snow Award for Clear pond, his work of nonfiction, two fellowships each from the Indiana Arts Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts, the River Styx International Poetry Award, and others. He was a 2005 Fellow in Poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

…sitting in the audience, taking notes.

“All writers are beginners,” Alice Friman said.

She’s right. And it made me really, really happy to watch close to a hundred writers spend a whole day beginning together.

The Morning after Halloween

2009-11-02T05:02:00.003-05:00

We took our dog, Louise, for a walk as we always do on Sunday morning, weather willing. Not long after we left our house, I saw a pair of dingy white house slippers on the sidewalk, positioned so that they looked as if someone had just stepped out of them and kept right on going. Not far away, resting in some ferns, was a single rubber glove (yellow).

Along the Monon Trail, I found a curly brown wig, a black sock, pink and purple boa residue, a red plaid cap with a fringe of fake brown hair along the back, a bunny tail,a flame headband, bits of pillow stuffing, the tip of a plastic sword, and a nifty red sequinned trident.

In the gutter outside Three Dog Bakery, Louise's favorite store, there was a stemless silk rose (red).

You write the story!

Mr. Kipling Bramley Pies

2009-10-26T06:27:00.007-04:00

My sister went to Paris and brought me a gorgeous silk scarf: red, printed with mille fleurs from the Lady and the Unicorn tapestry in the Cluny Museum. I love it. But what I went berserk over was what she brought me from the London leg of her trip: two boxes of Mr. Kipling Bramley Pies.

Okay, I’m a food philistine. I know it. I embrace it. In France, I’d eat a baguette, some cheese and a raspberry tart at every meal, if I could. In the Netherlands, I crave the stroupewaffels you buy on the street: two thin, hot waffles with to-die-for caramel syrup in between. In Italy: gelato. Preferably pink grapefruit from the stand just up the hill from the Hotel Giotto in Assisi.

In England, it’s Mr. Kipling Bramley Apple Pies. I’m extremely fond of Mr. Kipling Apple and Blackcurrant Pies, as well. But, according to my sister, none were available in the London stores—or in Woking, where my cousins Kim, Tim, Max & Zoe live. Tim made a special trip to grocery stores in Woking, where he lives, in search of them.

Anyway. They are absolute heaven: tart apples, crust that melts in your mouth. Plus, they’re so cute, like doll pies, each in its own little foil pie pan. But what I love best about Mr. Kipling Bramley Pies is the way that, for a delicious moment, eating one takes me right back to England.

I’ve eaten Mr. Kipling pies on numerous memorable outings with my cousins over the years—in the garden of Jane Austen’s house in Chawton, on the Roman wall at Silchester, on a hill overlooking Pilgrim’s Way near Compton, and in the strange silence of Maiden Castle, which is not a castle at all, but an enormous hill fort of stone and earth, like Stonehenge, built of England’s mysterious prehistoric inhabitants.

With my intrepid traveling companion, Pat, I consumed Mr. Kipling pies while exploring Roman archaeological sites, wandering through churchyards, marveling at the green, green countryside in the Lake District, tracking down the (sometime pretty obscure) literary haunts of Dickens, Hardy, the Brontes, Wordsworth and other authors we love. Not to mention, mesmerized and a little spooked while visiting Avebury at dusk.

Later, visiting my friend Margaret-Love, when she was directing the University of New Hampshire summer program at Cambridge, I snacked on Mr. Kipling pies in her cozy room overlooking the green courtyard at Gonville & Caius College, hiking the River Cam to Grantchester, and tagging along on field trips to Stratford-on-Avon, Dover, Canterbury and other places.

I no doubt had a box of them in my backpack the day I took the train from London to Newmarket, where my parents met at a dance at the Golden Lion Pub during the War—he, an American G.I.; she with the Women’s Royal Air Force. Mr. Kipling pies weren’t invented then, but I like to imagine them sharing a box of them, nonetheless.

My sister and I ate an apple pie for dessert after having lunch together on Friday. I am embarrassed to say that I ate two more on the way home in the car, leaving the steering wheel so sticky that I was busted when Steve drove it and I had to give one to him.

Dang.

I ate the all others myself, though—all the while thinking of England.

They were gone by Sunday morning.

Dear Dan--

2009-10-17T06:26:00.004-04:00

Birthday greetings from your devoted but too-freaking-busy friend. So busy, in fact, that I still haven’t answered your letter that came in April. That is absurd.

May I say first that I love that you wrote said letter on a finished writing tablet—something that nobody else I know would even thinking of doing? (And that your letter begins: “Things are tough in America spring, 2009. Who ever thought the end papers of cheap stationery would ever be so useful and valuable?”)

I love that you still write letters, rather than take the easy route of e-mails, Facebook, or—God forbid—Twitter to keep in touch with people you care about. (Or, uh, blogs.) Bravo for holding the line, being one of the last true men of letters. I have a fantasy of someone coming across a cache of your letters far, far in the future and assuming that everyone living at the hinge of the centuries was like Dan Patterson. How cool would that be?

Better yet, if everyone living at the hinge of the centuries really was like you. It would be a better world, for sure.

Thank you for telling me that Alan remembers that I’m the one who gave him the Colts cap—and that when he turned three, he claimed to be thirty-three. I think that is hilarious.

I loved hearing about Kate’s attempts at sounding out words, though I’ll bet—by now—she’s reading like a champ.

Reading about them made remember visiting you guys in Portland last year and what fun I had. Plus, I like being able to imagine My People in their places, so it was lovely to see you in your cozy house, full of books, and to eat pancakes that you and Kate had made for dinner.

And, of course, I always love your “Important New Theories of Life.”

As in, “If your whole house, so to speak, is in good order, that’s a bad sign.

"But if there’s something completely awry, you’re on the right track. For instance, your gums won’t stop bleeding from lack of flossing, or there’s a hole in your roof where the water pours in. Or your library books are two years overdue. If means you’re doing something right.

"Because if everything is in good order, you’re not focused. You’re committing the sin of dabbling. Sure, everyone is healthy and well-fed, but what are you getting done?”

Brilliant! Spot on!

Or maybe I just like to think it's spot on that because my life is pretty much utter chaos at the moment, and I really need to believe that I am not completely insane. The thing is, I love every single thing I do—and would do more, more, more--if only there were time.

Writing, of course. I love living inside my own worlds, constantly astonished by how they evolve. I finished a draft of Looking for Kerouac and am back at it again, trying to make it more real. It’s set in a steel mill town in 1964. When things get too complicated in his life, the main character takes off with his friend to look for Jack Kerouac. But the Kerouac they find—a sad drunk living with his mother in St. Petersburg, Florida—is not the Kerouac they thought they’d find. It’s been fun—and disconcerting sometimes—to be back in that time and that place all these years later.

I really want to write a creative writing book for high school kids, too. And I’ve got this Piero della Francesca novel mixing it up in my head. Among about a million other ideas.

I love being the director of the Writers’ Center, too—though I never in a million years thought I would (or should?) be the director of anything. But it’s a kick making things happen, connecting people—and ideas. I like the idea that I started as a writer there (What would I have done if the Writers’ Center hadn’t been there?) and that, helping to keep it alive, I’m making writing possible for someone out there who needs it as much as I did.

I love my fabulous family—and being with them, too. And my amazing friends. Every single one of them.

I love traveling. The Assisi workshop was wonderful this year: painting, teaching, walking the beautiful countryside…gelato. Afterwards I met Jenny and we spent ten days together seeing Venice, Florence and Rome. Also wonderful.

How lucky I am! I shouldn’t complain that there’s not enough time, but:

THERE IS NOT ENOUGH TIME!

I mean, really. What is wrong with people who sit on their couches watching television? All. The. Time.

They need to tape Mary Oliver’s poem, “The Summer Day” on their refrigerators, the one that ends:

"Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?"

Uh-oh. I feel a rant coming on.

So I’ll stop here—but not before saying that I cherish our long friendship that began when you were in my first creative writing class at Broad Ripple. I still use your story “Yard Wars” as an example of good student writing—and it still makes me smile. I remember the time you guys gave me the surprise 35th birthday party at the cemetery, complete with gray-iced tombstone cake and my own personal epitaph written by the inimitable John Smith that read: Here she lies/Cold as ice/Barbara Shoup/She was nice/She wrote many a book/with many a plot/And now she has one in which to rot.

What ever happened to John Smith, anyway?

I remember, too, reading your journals—even into your twenties. Those little blue spiral notebooks you bought first (I think) at the long-gone stationery store in Broad Ripple. I always felt so honored that you would share them with me.

I’m so glad that Jen was out there waiting for you—and that you found her and, together, made the kind of life you imagined when you were in high school. I’m glad you’re teaching again, too. I can’t imagine any person in the world better suited to shape the lives of little children.

Have a happy, happy birthday, Dan.

I’ll write you a real letter soon. I promise.

Love,
Barb

Beginnings, Middles, Ends

2009-10-16T14:53:00.003-04:00

I love poems that serve as vehicles for learning elements of—well, anything—but, especially fiction. If you (or your students) are stuck on that “Show, Don’t Tell” thing, use the structure of this wonderful poem by Billy Collins to practice. Use the first three lines of each stanza to get started, then replace Collins's imagery with your own to make the reader see/hear/feel the nature of beginnings, middles, and ends.

Aristotle

This is the beginning.
Almost anything can happen.
This is where you find
the creation of light, a fish wriggling onto land,
the first word of Paradise Lost on an empty page.
Think of an egg, the letter A,
a woman ironing on a bare stage as the heavy curtain rises.
This is the very beginning.
The first-person narrator introduces himself,
tells us about his lineage.
The mezzo-soprano stands in the wings.
Here the climbers are studying a map
or pulling on their long woolen socks.
This is early on, years before the Ark, dawn.
The profile of an animal is being smeared
on the wall of a cave,
and you have not yet learned to crawl.
This is the opening, the gambit,
a pawn moving forward an inch.
This is your first night with her, your first night without her.
This is the first part
where the wheels begin to turn,
where the elevator begins its ascent,
before the doors lurch apart.

This is the middle.
Things have had time to get complicated,
messy, really. Nothing is simple anymore.
Cities have sprouted up along the rivers
teeming with people at cross-purposes –
a million schemes, a million wild looks.
Disappointment unsolders his knapsack
here and pitches his ragged tent.
This is the sticky part where the plot congeals,
where the action suddenly reverses
or swerves off in an outrageous direction.
Here the narrator devotes a long paragraph
to why Miriam does not want Edward's child.
Someone hides a letter under a pillow.
Here the aria rises to a pitch,
a song of betrayal, salted with revenge.
And the climbing party is stuck on a ledge
halfway up the mountain.
This is the bridge, the painful modulation.
This is the thick of things.
So much is crowded into the middle –
the guitars of Spain, piles of ripe avocados,
Russian uniforms, noisy parties,
lakeside kisses, arguments heard through a wall
too much to name, too much to think about.

And this is the end,
the car running out of road,
the river losing its name in an ocean,
the long nose of the photographed horse
touching the white electronic line.
This is the colophon, the last elephant in the parade,
the empty wheelchair, and pigeons floating down in the evening.
Here the stage is littered with bodies,
the narrator leads the characters to their cells,
and the climbers are in their graves.
It is me hitting the period
and you closing the book.
It is Sylvia Plath in the kitchen
and St. Clement with an anchor around his neck.
This is the final bit
thinning away to nothing.
This is the end, according to Aristotle,
what we have all been waiting for,
what everything comes down to,
the destination we cannot help imagining,
a streak of light in the sky,
a hat on a peg, and outside the cabin, falling leaves.

Billy Collins

The Heavens Are Hung in Black

2009-10-13T06:10:00.005-04:00

One of the best things about being a writer is having friends that are writers and being privy to their creative process along with your own. This is especially true when a writer-friend is a playwright and you get to see the early draft of a script that you read (and loved) come to life, deepened and polished, on the stage. Better yet, as the “date” of said playwright on opening night.

I met James Still about ten years ago, when he became the playwright-in-residence at the Indiana Repertory Theatre. Just before his first visit to Indianapolis in that role, he happened upon my book, Stranded in Harmony, in his library in L.A. He liked it, and asked Janet Allen, the artistic director, if she knew me. She did; Janet Allen knows everybody. She invited me to come down to the theatre and meet him. We were friends instantaneously, real friends, and we’ve been friends ever since. In fact, over the years, I’ve come to think of James as a kind of cosmic brother.

Friday evening, I had the privilege of being his “date” for the opening of his amazing new play, “The Heavens Are Hung in Black,” also the opening of IRT’s season. He was kind of a wreck, which I found endearing and which also made it all seem more exciting, more real.

He was the playwright, for Pete’s Sake! I grew up in “The Region” in one of those dreadful subdivisions full of ticky-tacky houses that sprang up after the War. I had nothing but library books and the dreams they set spinning in my head. In high school, I read Moss Harts’ Act One and the world of writing plays and opening nights and agonizing over what the critics would say made its way into the mix. And here I was, living what I had imagined.

I loved “The Heavens Are Hung in Black” when I read a draft of it several years ago. I could feel James’s wrestling with this rich, unwieldy material in the text. I was astonished and humbled by the depth of his knowledge and insight about Abraham Lincoln and by the fact that there was something in this play about Lincoln that seemed absolutely new. The ending gave me that cold feeling in my head that I get when I know something’s really, really, really good.

And, to be honest, with that came the moment of despair that inevitably follows such a response. Will I ever write anything this good myself?

But the play, seeing the play! The set was gorgeous, as IRT’s sets always are. The actors perfectly cast. Lincoln was Lincoln for those few hours.

I was intensely conscious of James sitting beside me as we watched the play together. Sometimes I felt him noticing a glitch or being aggravated by people down the row, whispering. Sometimes he laughed along with the audience, which pleased me so much, because I knew he was living in the play, as we were.

How strange it must be to see your characters come to life before you, I thought; how wonderful and harrowing the visible response. It’s nothing like sailing your novel out into the world, then waiting the good, bad, or (worse) nonexistent news of its reception in the safety and privacy of your writing room.

The response to “The Heavens Hung in Black” was exactly what any playwright would hope for. The theatre was abuzz at intermission, people excited about what they were seeing, marveling at the performances, remarking on particular details—and on the play’s timeliness, as our country is poised on the brink of a war as likely to tear us apart as did the Civil War, and Vietnam.

Afterwards, James invited me to join the company for the celebratory toast, an IRT tradition on opening nights. The cast was crowded in a tiny, dimly lit room, some still hurrying down the hall half-dressed. Mary Todd Lincoln wore a bathrobe; Lincoln lounged in a chair, grinning. Glasses of champagne were set out on a low table—and when everyone had gathered, they were distributed and the toasts began.

I toasted, too. To my cosmic brother James, to the cast, to the IRT—and, secretly, to a long ago flight of imagination made real.

The play runs through October 25. See it, if you can! For tickets visit www.irtlive.com

Hope Is That Thing with Feathers--Also...

2009-09-25T21:54:00.009-04:00

Hope is Like a Skateboard

Hope is like the grip tape on my
skateboard that’s barely holding on
because its been used too many times.

Hope is the glue that puts the
new neon green grip tape on so it
can make it.

Hope is the wheels on my board that
go through dirt and cracks but never
stop moving.

Hope is the way my board will
let me do a 360 nose grind tray flip
and not crack from the pressure.

Hope is the power of the board
that doesn’t show.

Hope is the magic of the board
that will take you anywhere you want.

Hope is all in a ordinary, special,
beat up, prize winning, board, just
like its in you.

This poem was written by Destiny, one of the juvenile offenders in this summer's writing workshop at the Indiana School for Girls sponsored by the Writers' Center of Indiana and Very Special Arts.

She was recently released, and I hope she is on her skateboard right now! I also really hope she keeps writing.

Time

2009-09-22T21:34:00.006-04:00

At 5:18 this morning, it was still summer; at 5:19, it was fall. Who said? I mean, why not 5:25 a.m. or 9:53 p.m. or yesterday or tomorrow? Next week? The whole concept of time seriously confuses me. A friend of mine once explained it this way: “Time exists so everything doesn’t happen at once. ” So far, it’s the only thing that makes any sense to me.

I live—or feel like I’m living—in dozens, probably hundreds, of times on any given day. An old song comes on the radio and, suddenly, I’m the person I was when the song was popular. Lifting into downward dog in yoga class, I’m roller-skating in Central Park. Right now, typing, I’m ten, walking home from school. Which is real?

Then there's that disconcerting Chutes and Ladders sensation, in which my granddaughter Heidi went from being a baby to Saturday, her ninth birthday. Where did that time go?

Right now, I’m sitting in the waiting room of the hospital, anxious for news that her Caesarian birth went okay. Now the nurse comes to say she’s here! We can see her!

Now all of us hurrying down the hospital corridor—Kate said, later, we sounded like a herd of elephants coming.

Now holding her for the first time, feeling the grip of her tiny fingers around mine.

Grief

2009-09-18T16:31:00.003-04:00

A young friend of mine's husband died after a bicycling accident last week, and since then she has been much on my mind. A good marriage is a rare and wonderful thing, and she had one. Her husband clearly adored her and they both adored their two small boys. Now, suddenly, that life is over. It hurts my heart to think of it.

It also takes me back to my own husband's nearly fatal accident more than twenty years ago. He had to have open heart surgery to repair the outer layers of his aorta that had been shredded by the impact and surgery to repair the arm he'd nearly torn off. Nearly every bone in his chest was broken, his urethra was punctured. The situation was so dire that the doctors didn't discover that he had a broken ankle till a week after the accident.

I remember looking at Steve in the hospital bed, unconscious, on a respirator, hooked up to a half-dozen different machines and thinking that he was the one I needed to talk to about this incomprehensible turn of events. Months after I knew he was going to be okay, I saw a guy walking down the street who was sturdy, like Steve is, and who had the same springy gait and Steve's had the same kind of springy gate and was sucker-punched by such a weird mix of gratitude and grief that I had to pull over to the side of the road and sit a while. I hadn't lost my husband, but in that moment I understood a little bit of what it would have felt like if I had.

These past few days, I've thought a lot about my sister, Jackie, too--how suddenly and completely the life she knew changed with the diagnosis of inoperable brain cancer and the disability that came with it. How, in the long months between the diagnosis and her death, she so often said that she wished she could just wash the dishes or vacuum or go to the gym. The large things—the tumor itself, the prospect of dying—were, I think, incomprehensible or maybe just too terrifying to consider. It was the small losses, the shock of them, that undid her.

One day, not long after she got home from the hospital, she decided she’d check her e-mail at the bank. I helped her to the chair at the computer table in the living room. She pulled up the site, pecking with her left hand, frustrated at the slowness. Then—I could see it happening, but couldn’t get there fast enough—she tipped sideways off the chair onto the floor. She sobbed and sobbed afterwards, for…everything. I felt helpless, heartbroken, as I did every time I was with her—as much for this loss of the day-to-dayness that had been her life as for the knowledge that her death was inevitable.

Our routines, whatever they are, joyful or annoying, are in great part the fabric of our lives. The loss of them that inevitably comes with the terrible, profound loss that death or incurable illness brings makes the heartbreak all that much difficult to bear. For my sister, they were things like the drive to work every morning with a good friend, lunch downtown, the bald spot on her head from radiation—just when she’d grown her hair out, missing a parent-teacher conference, fixing herself a snack when she was hungry, walking up and down the stairs.

Grief creates a kind of fog in our lives; it’s there, in the gray air we breathe, in the numbness we feel doing what we have to do, in the flatness of color and intensity of all that used to bring delight. It’s suddenly, repeatedly plunging through the holes in our routine made by the loss of small things bring us to our knees, make the large, unimaginable loss visceral and real.

I grieve for for my friend her two small boys—for the loss of the man they adored and who adored them and for the smaller losses of their day-to-day routine with him that I know will break their hearts again and again as they try to find their way in the world without him.

Remedial

2009-09-15T20:26:00.003-04:00

As in:

I am a better, happier person when I write every day.

And the only way I’m going to write every day is to go directly to my writing room (with computer sans internet) after taking Louise out to do her duty and fixing myself a cup of coffee.

Even if I only have an hour to write before the day officially starts, I feel grounded, whole. I don’t second-guess myself.

Is the novel any good? Even if it’s fabulous, what are the odds of being able to sell it? Even if it sells, it’s just going to get tossed out there with a million other books to sink or swim--and it’ll sink.

I don’t think the fate of my novel in the world when I’m actually writing it. Living inside it is enough. And I need being inside a world completely my own at least part of every day to be able to live in the real world with some measure of balance and grace.

So why do I let myself get overwhelmed by real-world obligations to the extent that I say to myself, okay, I absolutely have to get…whatever…done. I’ll write tomorrow.

And keep on saying it, sometimes for weeks at a time, until I get so whacked out that I finally go to my writing room and write.

Like I did this morning. Finally.

After which, everything seemed possible.

Italian Lessons

2009-08-24T15:30:00.007-04:00

Seeing Michelangelo's David and his unfinished Captive Slaves at the Accademia on Saturday made me think of this little scene in my (alas) unpublished novel, Italian Lessons:

They made their way through the crowded streets to the Accademia, where the line stretched the length of the building and around the corner. It moved steadily, though—and there was good people-watching to pass the time. Young lovers, rambunctious clusters of college students; families with bored, impatient children; married couples leafing through their guidebooks; middle-aged women, like themselves. Near the entrance to the museum, there was a mime draped in white muslin, with a white muslin headdress and white makeup on her face and hands. She stood perfectly still on a low white base, infinitesimally moving her head or a hand each time someone threw a coin into the hat offered by her assistant.

Once inside the museum, they had to thread their way through a crowd of people to see the David, which stood, gleaming, at the end of a long gallery. He had been placed high on his marble pedestal, surrounded by a wrought iron barrier that made him safe from the touch of careless tourists who would have worn him away, given the chance. Five American girls, blond, giggling, leaned against the barrier, and a man they had pressed into service stepped back to snap photographs with each of the five cameras that his wife handed him, smiling. When he’d finished and handed the cameras back to them, the girls moved on, never turning to look at the sculpture. Instantly, a group of Japanese tourists took their place. The repeated clicking of shutters was audible; people walked slowly around the sculpture, their video cameras capturing it
from each angle.

Lucy and Isabel stood and looked at him a long time, circled round to see him from every angle. Light fell from the domed ceiling, casting parts of him into shadow, making other parts of him gleam. The marble was so white, whiter than any marble Lucy had ever seen.

“He’s such a boy,” Isabel said finally. “His hand, it’s like my boys’ hands. God, and did he get it: the way boys stand, the way they are their bodies at that age. I don’t care what the copy looks like in the Piazza Whatever. I wouldn’t have missed this for anything.”

Lucy agreed. But what she loved best were the Captives, four figures for the Julius tomb that Michelangelo had begun and abandoned. They were nothing like the David. The most nearly finished of them was bearded, his eyes closed, his head bent with the weight of the stone still upon it; his raised arm strained to lift it away, but it was only half made. There was no hand at all, just rough, pitted marble.

This was a middle-aged body, fit, but thickening in the torso and waist. Not glorious, like David’s. Hard work, the kind of brute force this man exerted now against the stone had made it strong, and, looking at him, Lucy couldn’t help thinking that, even if he were real and free, the world would not make an easy place for him.
The David seemed to have appeared in the universe by some miracle of birth, she thought, bearing no visible evidence of his creator’s hand upon him. But in these unfinished figures, you saw the stuff of the earth from which they were made, the mark of the chisel, the way the artist worked his way through parallel planes of marble in search of the figure deep what each of us might be, strains and goes weary captured, bound by the limits of what real life brings.

The cares of the morning fell away, and it seemed to Lucy that even if she saw nothingelse the whole time she was in Italy, even if life with Delia, Sydney, and Eileen in the next days continued to bring forth every doubt she’d ever had about herself, the trip would have been worth taking because it had brought her to this place.

Florence: From the Ridiculous to the Sublime

2009-08-23T10:31:00.020-04:00

(Not necessarily in that order.)

My daughter Jenny and I arrived in Florence Friday evening and we've pretty much been walking nonstop since then. We started at the Baptistry, where I was amused by this happy trio above
one set of the Ghiberti doors..

At the Accademia, we saw Michelangelo's David and his amazing unfinished sculptures that look like they are bursting out of the marble--with Robert Mapplethorpe photographs displayed near many of them, which looked like sculptures themselves. Then on to San Marco, one of my favorite places in the world, with its beautiful Fra Angelicos and the monks quarters above, a fresco in each tiny cell and Savonorola's own personal cell complete with desk and hair shirt. Afterwards, we climbed (seriously climbed) to the cupola of Brunellschi's dome for the view--both into the dome and out over the city.

We saw the Giottos at Santa Croce--and the Cimabue crucifix that had been damaged during the 1966 flood. But my favorite was this annoyed-looking adolescent angel, just a detail from a larger painting. (In which she's holding Mary's foot. I mean, who wouldn't be annoyed?)

Modern art can be fun, too. We saw these in a gallery, meandering through the city.

Things got really crazy in the evening! As we neared the Ponte Vecchio, these "newly-weds" strolled into the street...

With their beautiful baby. Yikes!

Shortly followed Hare Krishnas singing and chanting and wheeling around.

And, finally, this amazing sunset.

Feast of the Assumption

2009-08-16T02:09:00.001-04:00

Saturday was the Feast of the Assumption: more bells than usual, the Basilica closed to tourists for two hours during mass, a true feast at the Hotel Giotto and--

Monks and nuns partying. No lie. We went for our passagelato after dinner and, meandering back to the hotel enjoying our pink grapefruit gelato, we followed the sound of rock n roll and voices to a little church. Next to it, down a passageway packed with parked cars, there was a lit courtyard full of people of all ages...dancing. It was a live band, the kind that gets hired for weddings--not very good, but who cares because the party is what it's all about.

The song that drew us there ended. A voice cried out, "Let's twist!"

The nuns (in their long black habits and their starched white wimples) and the monks (in their brown St. Francis robes) got down. They twisted (with vigor).

And did the tango.

Then they formed formed a conga line.

Who'd have thought?

Seeing

2009-08-15T06:39:00.000-04:00

Years ago, in a difficult time, I spent an unscheduled hour or so at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, where a Canaletto caught my eye. I’d seen it many times before, but never really looked at it. So I stopped and…looked.

The more I looked, the more intrigued I became by some kind of tension that I felt but could not explain. I had (and still have) no formal training in art, and assumed that was why I didn’t understand it. I put “Learn about Canaletto” the long list of things I wanted to do when my life returned to normal. Meanwhile, I spent the time I had standing in front of the painting jotting down things I noticed about it.

Months later in the art library, reading about Canaletto, I was astonished to realize that the observations I’d made pretty much mirrored those in the art history books. It was one of those turning point moments for me: suddenly, I understood that I could trust my own eye. If I looked hard enough and objectively enough, I would see what was important about a work of art.

This insight mattered so much to me for a lot of reasons—not the least of which was that I am not an academic person and am often intimidated in academic settings, where people talk about beautiful, heart-stopping works of art in technical language that I don’t understand and that doesn’t address or even acknowledge the intensity of beauty and emotion that makes it worth talking about. Nor, except in very technical terms, does it address how the work of art is made.

Seeing the Canaletto gave me permission to trust my eye. It also gave me permission to look at paintings in a variety of ways. Once I did a jigsaw puzzle of a Vermeer I loved—which made me realize how much of it was not blue. For two summers at Art Workshop International, I made playful paintings out of the Byzantine hats in Piero della Fancesca’s Arezzo Cycle.

My painting challenge to myself during these two weeks in Assisi has been to look at some of the Piero’s paintings by way of painting them myself, Not really painting them. I mean, I know I’m not Piero and never could be. But isolating some aspect of their architecture to consider.

I traced the Madonna della Misericordia, then painted only the shapes, trying as well as I could to replicate the color values—and I got this.

It showed me the rhythm of the penitents, which was good, but not enough. I needed to push the painting to learn the next thing, but I didn’t know how.

So I let it sit and moved on to paint the shapes of St. Augustin, and let it teach me—

About the painting itself, which had more black in it than I would have thought. And about myself. Who knew I could have painted the detail into the scarf as well as I did! (Especially that little painting in the left bottom square. I am really quite happy about that.)

Anyway. That black I learned from St. made me look at the Madonna in a new way. I went back at her and darkened everything, I made a kind of haze with black and white pastels. I used yellow-gold pastel to give the blue behind her some texture and design. And at the end of the day, when I stepped back and looked, she felt more like the real Madonna della Misericordia. Well, to me.
I’ll never capture her, of course. Ever. No matter how hard and well I look. No matter how well I might learn how to paint.

It’s the Catch-22 of any work of art, after all. The more you look, the more intelligence you bring to that looking only makes you realize that its deepest meaning is and always will be a mystery. Which is exactly as it should be.

Giotto Blue

2009-08-14T01:17:00.001-04:00

One of the many pleasures of being in Assisi for Art Workshop International is that I can look at Giotto’s fresco cycle about St. Francis’s life any time I want. Sometimes I look at them—that is, I sit in a pew for a while and look, look, look, look, look. Sometimes I just take a turn through the Basilica on my way to someplace else. It’s the color that draws me back to them, and there is particular quality of blue-green that I love

Wednesday—along with my walking pal extraordinaire, SJ Rozan—I hiked an hour-and-a-half straight up Mt. Subasio to the Hermitage, St. Francis’s retreat. The cave-like dwelling is set into dense forest, and there’s a narrow, winding path that leads down from it to the grottos where the monks went to meditate and pray.

As we walked, we began to notice crosses everywhere we looked. Made from twigs and branches, tied together with everything from bits of plastic bags to ponytail holders to leaf stems and twine, they had been placed on ledges and boulders and in the hollows of trees.

But the really amazing thing was that, as we went deeper into the forest, it became the blue-green in the frescoes. Eight hundred years ago, Giotto had walked the path we were walking; he saw the blue-green we saw.

I imagine him returning to the Hermitage again and again during the years he was at work at the frescoes, descending to the grottos to stand in the silent, working out the problem of that blue-green in his mind. Probably thinking, I’ll never be able to capture this.

But he did.

My Seatmate Vinnie

2009-08-08T19:06:00.000-04:00

Yesterday afternoon, I was walking up the street (you’re always walking up some street in Assisi) on my way back to the Hotel Giotto with a stash treats I’d bought from the little grocery store nearby, when I looked up and saw a bunch of people at the edge of the parking lot laughing and pointing at me—one with his index fingers cocked like two guns.

“Stick ‘em up,” he said.

I was totally disoriented for about two seconds and then I realized it was Vinnie, my seatmate on the flight to Rome. Along with his wife, Melanie; his mom, Ida; and his son, Mario.

Vinnie and had chatted about a million different things during the flight—including the fact that his wife really wanted to go to Assisi while they were in Italy. “You should take her!” I said, in my usual bossy fashion. We figured out there was a good chance it was more or less on the way to where they were going to visit family after a few days in Rome, so I said, “You should stop and spend the night—and I know just where you should stay, too. The Hotel Giotto!”

And darned if they didn’t take my advice.

Even aside from the fact that I love it when people take my advice, I was truly happy to see them. I sent them down to the Basilica, where (they reported to me at breakfast this morning) they spent several happy hours. They were heading out to explore the town until it was time to leave on the next leg of their trip, but before they left I took them on a tour of the studio so they could meet some of the painters here and see their works-in-process. Then, of course, we had to take some pictures.

“Only connect,” E.M. Forster said.

And this delightful chance connection with Vinnie that played out in Assisi made me think (again) that he was right.

Eight Accordians, Red Rover, Pompelmo Rosso and the Bell Tower of San Pietro

2009-08-07T17:12:00.001-04:00

Here is the view from my window in Assisi. I got here for Art Workshop International on Wednesday—the good news/bad news of the trip being that I missed my 5:00 p.m. connection at JFK because of bad weather in Indianapolis and had to take the 7:20 flight—on which I was bumped up to first class.

(I know why they put the curtain between first class and coach: they don’t want the peons to see how much different it is—champagne and little dishes of mixed nuts, nifty little traveler packs with cozy socks and sleep masks. Not to mention miniature quilts and real pillows.)

However, when I got to Rome and found myself the one and only person watching two bags go around and around on the luggage carousel I had to face the fact that my luggage had not come along on the trip. That was Wednesday morning. It’s Friday night here, and my luggage is allegedly being delivered tomorrow morning. The amazing thing is that I totally did not freak out about this. I had packed enough to get by for a few days, and I have. The truth is, just a few more things and I’d have been fine for the whole time I’m gone.

I feel like this has been an excellent lesson for me. But I also know that the next time I travel, I’ll probably still start throwing all kinds of stuff in the suitcase at the last minute—just in case. It is my great flaw as a traveler.

I’m great on wonder, though. Everything here astonishes me.

Last night, after a fabulous dinner on the terrace at the Hotel Giotto, a bunch of us walked up to hear a student concert, which would have been wonderful even without the accordion octet. Yes. Eight accordions playing Piazzolla’s “Libertango.”

Afterwards, we walked on up to the piazza outside Santa Chiara, where a bunch of Italian kids were playing what looked a lot like “Red Rover.”

And on to the only gelato place in town that has my absolute favorite: pink grapefruit. Pompelmo rosso. Saying it is half the pleasure. (Alas, the only pleasure last night, since they were closing down and had already put the pompelmo rosso away. I had limone instead—an excellent substitute.)

Then to sleep, the lit bell tower of San Pietro framed by my window.

The Time Is Now

2009-07-26T21:57:00.000-04:00

I was walking through Broad Ripple Village on Friday afternoon, just after lunch. It was a nice day; things were already cranking up for the weekend. As I headed toward my car, I saw two young women—maybe college-age, maybe in their twenties—walking toward me holding hands.

I smiled at them, but maybe they didn’t notice because, as they got closer, one called out, “We’re sisters!”

I didn’t quite know how to respond. I was pretty sure they weren’t sisters, but girlfriends. So as I passed them, I smiled again and said, “Well, whatever you are, it’s lovely to see you so happy together.”

Moments later, one of them yelled, “I love you!”

I turned, we waved, and went on into our weekends.

Yesterday, I attended the wedding of a young woman I’ve known since she was a child. Claire was raised by her mom, Nancy, who’s a lesbian, and her mom’s partner, Ann, and nurtured along the way by her gay godfather, Michael—and if anybody still wants to argue that gay people aren’t fit to raise children, they really need to meet her. Not to mention Nancy, Ann, and Michael.

Claire is bright, compassionate, fun-loving, competent, with a dazzling smile.

I got to know her because Michael, who’s been a friend for nearly thirty years, used to bring her to our Thank-God-It’s-FINALLY-Over gatherings on Christmas evening—which involved eating leftovers, viewing “This Is Spinal Tap,” and played pool. Well, most people played pool. I sat, still mostly catatonic, unless Claire came up from playing pool to play with my dollhouse.

It was a very cool dollhouse: Victorian, painted lavender with white trim. It opened from the front, revealing the doll family at work and play. The mom had a study with a tiny typewriter, the kids had an attic playroom with a hobby horse and a miniature copy of The Cat in The Hat. There was no garage, alas, so the dad was stuck in the living room, on the couch. Nobody was in the kitchen, which is pretty much par for the course in our real house. It was, however, stocked with little cokes and teensy bags of chips.

Claire would climb up on a stool (until she got tall enough to reach the top) and move the dolls and furniture around, making up stories. Michael would come up from the basement to watch sometimes, and it was always so lovely to watch him watch her. He couldn’t have loved her more than he’d have loved his own daughter.

I thought of that yesterday when the groomsmen and bridesmaids had taken their places at the altar, Purcell’s “Trumpet Tune” pealed out, and the huge doors at the back of the chapel swung open to reveal Claire in her bridal gown, with Nancy and Michael on either side of her. Light poured into the chapel as they proceeded up the aisle.

All of which is to say that I am really, really tired of people, especially those who think of themselves as advocates of gay rights, continuing to avoid the issue with the argument that “…it’s going to take time.”

Come on, people! This has been a major issue since 1992 when Bill Clinton sold out the gay community with “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

By my math, that’s seventeen years! What are we waiting for?

Gay people all over America are raising wonderful children just like Claire. Their families are just like ours—closer sometimes, it seems to me, for the fact that the world makes it so difficult for them to be who they are.

It’s time to give them the rights they deserve.

You know, that “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” thing we’re supposed to stand for?

What This River Keeps

2009-07-19T21:48:00.000-04:00

For years, there’s been talk about creating a reservoir to control the flooding in the acres of river bottom land around Logjam, Indiana every spring, so few people take it seriously when the talk starts up again. But when government agents appear to survey the land and gossip abounds about deals offered and made, it becomes increasingly clear that it’s really going to happen this time.

Greg Schwhipps’ first novel, What This River Keeps, tells the story of what happens to an elderly couple, Frank and Ethel Withered, when they are faced with the inevitable loss of the farm that’s been in Ethel’s family for a hundred years. Ethel was born in the house where they still live; Frank farmed the land with her father and, eventually, by himself. He knows every inch of the river that runs behind it, where he’s fished for as long as he can remember. The impending loss is constantly in their minds, but they cannot bring themselves to speak of it.

Life was hard enough without this. Old age has forced Frank to lease his land to be farmed by someone else; Ethel is plagued with aches and pains—and sorrow. They are estranged from their son, Ollie, who lives in squalor in a broken-down trailer at the edge of their land, drunk most of the time, oblivious to any problems but his own.

What This River Keeps conveys the richness and drama of Midwestern lives that are all too often considered of little interest to serious fiction. Schwipps, recently nominated for the Glick Indiana Authors Award in Regional Fiction, grew up and still lives in small-town Indiana, and he renders its people and places honestly, respectfully and with compassion. Family is everything in this world—and what I love most about his book is how he made me see, for the first time, that land is family, too. For Frank and Ethel, to contemplate losing their land is as impossible, unbearable as contemplating losing one another.

In Schwipp’s novel, as in real life, small things help bring resolution to sorrows that can never truly be overcome. A nice, plump catfish on the line, a little girl, a dog you’d thought you’d lost running in leaps and bounds toward you. You go on, you have to. Despite all you’ve lost.

Building a Rainbow

2009-07-10T14:34:00.001-04:00

Black, white, Hispanic, the twenty young women assigned to the Writers’ Center of Indiana’s third memoir-writing workshop at the Indiana Correctional Institute for Girls file into the visiting room for the first session looking wary. They’re all dressed exactly the same: khaki pants, ugly green v-necked shirts, plastic sandals. Their hair is poorly cut, their complexions pale from being locked up inside. No makeup is allowed. Some have crudely done tattoos; in some cases, their arms are criss-crossed with small white scars, evidence of cutting. Too many look dazed by the too-high dose of whatever drug some medical bureaucrat prescribed to control them.

The volunteers—writers, teachers, college students—call the names of the girls in their group and the girls go sit down, glancing back at the others still in line. There are six marbled composition books on each table, two each: the one with the “Building a Rainbow” image pasted on front for the writing we’ll do in class, the other for the writing they’ll do between sessions, on their own.

“These are for us?” at least one girl at each table asks.

They ask it every year and, every year, are astonished when we say yes.

I talk to them about the rainbow image, a scaled down version of the huge poster that hung in my office years ago, when I began teaching. “I grew up in a poor family,” I tell them. “My dad drank. My mother was sad. I had big dreams, but I thought whether or not they’d come true was all about being lucky or not being lucky.

"I was confused about happiness, too. I thought it was about how nice your house was, how much your parents didn’t have to worry about money, how much stuff you had. I thought it was a state of being. Once happy, you stayed happy, like being in a place.

“But, in fact, you have to make dreams come true,” I say. “Look at the rainbow. It’s under construction, covered with stick people painting, hammering, working cranes to put things in place.

"And, as for happiness, it’s no more than a collection of mostly small moments, strung like beads on a necklace, throughout our lives.

"You can learn how to take the hundreds, maybe thousands of small steps you’ll need to take make your dreams come true; you can learn to recognize and cherish those small moments when you feel right with the world and to build on them until the weight of happy moments is greater than the ones that hurt you and make you sad."

They listen.

They open their “Rainbow” notebooks and, as instructed, write “I remember, I remember,” dredging up all kinds of memories—happy and sad. I ask them to pick one happy memory and do the “I Remember” exercise again, dredging up details about that one thing. Willingly, they bend their heads to the task—all but one.

“I don’t have any happy memories,” she says, scowling.

I go and sit beside her. “None?” I ask.

“None.”

“When you were little?”

She shakes her head.

“Toys?” I ask.

“I had a yellow ball."

I ask her to tell me about it.

“It was big. My brother busted it when I was twelve, and all the air went out of it.”

But she smiles (for the first time) when she says this. “I loved that ball,” she goes on. “I had it from when I was three and my brother was scared I was going to beat him up when I found out.”

“But you didn’t?”

“Nah,” she says. “It was funny he was so scared, though.”

I ask if she remembers when she got the ball, and she does. Her uncle bought it for her at Walmart. It was at the top of a tall bin full of balls of all colors and sizes. There were yellow balls closer to the bottom, and her mom said she should just get one of those. But she wanted that yellow ball. Her uncle tried to climb the bin, but it was too rickety. So he went to get an employee to help and, when the man got the ball and held it out to her, her uncle told her to say thank you.

“I ran up and hugged his legs,” she says. “I loved my ball so much. It looked like the sun. Yellow is my favorite color, ever since then.”

By now, she’s talking and writing. Smiling, even laughing at what she remembers. Her mom was wearing a blue dress; her uncle an orange shirt that made him look like a huge tangerine.

Near the end of the class, I ask if anyone would like to read what she's written to the group, and she raises her hand.

So there is one remembered bead for her necklace of happiness: the day she got the yellow ball.

And one, I hope, for the memory of writing about it.

There’s a bead for my necklace of happiness, too: watching her face change as writing took her back to that happier time; listening as she read her memory aloud; thinking maybe, maybe it will make a difference.

Little Women

2009-06-29T22:40:00.001-04:00

I went to a memorial service for my Uncle Joe on Saturday—and I took the copy of Little Women that he gave me for Christmas in 1956 so that when it was my turn to say something about him I would have it with me. I was nine years old, in the fourth grade when I received this gift. I didn’t own many books during my childhood, and just holding the beautiful book in my hand thrilled me. It was mine.

I have no idea how many times I read it. Many. Of course, my favorite character was the writer, Jo. She was a tomboy, she strode. She was always writing plays and putting on fabulous theatrical productions. She was loyal and passionate. She was impetuous, outspoken. She had a lot of trouble being good.

It was a hard time in my life. We had moved that summer from our neighborhood in the city to one of those awful subdivisions that sprang up in the Fifties. The houses all looked the same, the people were all the same, and it was so far out in the boondocks that I couldn’t ride my bike to the library any more. Worse, I had to change schools. At my old school, I was a star. But at my new school I was just one more kid from the subdivision that had generated such an influx of new students they had to divide the cafeteria and gym into makeshift classrooms. The stars of class had been established long ago—including a girl who was not only the smartest person in the class, but played the piano, had perfect banana curls, and lived in a nice white-frame house with green shutters right next door to the school.

Things weren’t so great at home, either. I wouldn’t understand until later that my dad had a chronic drinking problem and, with the move from the old neighborhood, it had begun to worsen.

Wherever I was felt like the wrong place. So I lived in books when I could—and now I had this wonderful book of my very own that I would never, ever have to take back to the library.

I loved the March family. The four sisters—Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy—who loved each other fiercely and whose squabbles and disagreements were always mended with tears and laughter. Their mother, Marmee, who knew them all so well and guided them gently, but firmly toward the right path. Their father, off fighting in the Civil War, but ever-present in their thoughts and deeds.

If only I could be in that family, I thought. And I was, when I was reading. The book was my prized possession; now I keep it on the bookshelf behind my desk, along with my published books.

The book shaped me in so many ways—some, I realize now, turned out to be a little problematical. There’s an echo of it in my annual Christmas malaise: shouldn’t I be wrapping up my special breakfast and carrying it to the closest poor person I can find? Shouldn’t I be telling people not to buy me presents, to use the money to buy presents for poor people instead? (Actually, I wish I could do that.) And if, by chance, I receive a present I don’t like, shouldn’t I be happy with it, anyway—like the March sisters were with their copies of Pilgrim’s Progress?

It’s in the little voice in my head that tells me that I should always, always think of others before myself. Morbid little child that I was, my favorite part of the book was Beth’s death; in fact, the book opens naturally right to it. I read it again and again, thinking about how people would appreciate me (finally) if I died—though the realization that I would be there to revel in it did take a bit of the pleasure away. I read the chapter when my own sister, Jackie, died in 2003, thinking it might give me some comfort, but I was shocked to read what Beth says to Jo just before she dies. “You must take my place, Jo, and be everything to father and mother when I’m gone. They will turn to you, don’t fail them; and if it’s hard to work alone, remember that I don’t forget you, and that you’ll be happier in doing that than writing splendid books or seeing the world…”

Holy cow, I thought. There’s the source of that damn voice saying, “You shouldn’t be so selfish” every time I do something completely for myself.

My love affair with Italy, for example.

It took me a while, but I know better than to listen to it.

And any of the difficulties my obsession with Little Women may have caused me were well worth it, because the great gift the book gave me was my first real glimpse of a writer’s life--and the absolute conviction that it was what I wanted my life to be.

I don’t know if the books I’ve written are splendid, but I’ve sure had a splendid time writing them. (Well, when they weren’t making me crazy.) I’ve seen a whole lot of the world that I dreamed of seeing, just as Jo did.

Little Women, the book my Uncle Joe gave me for my ninth Christmas, set me on that path, and I am forever grateful for that. I'm glad I told him so, more than once, over the years.

May he rest in peace.

Hey, It's Global Beatles Day

2009-06-25T21:26:00.000-04:00

Yeah, yeah, yeah!

MY TOP TEN (in no particular order):
I Should Have Known Better
The Long and Winding Road
Paperback Writer
In My Life
Day Tripper
We Can Work It Out
Norwegian Wood
Come Together
All you need Is Love
Hey, Jude