The Reading Cure

My “on deck” reading list from Tolstoy and the Purple Chair:  Let the Great World Spin, Man in the Dark, Death with Interuptions, The History of Love

For me, reading Nina Sankovitch’s Tolstoy and the Purple Chair was like diving into a crystalline lake after trying to swim through mud.  Thrity Umrigar best described this book in her cover blurb:  “A dazzling memoir that reminds us of the most primal function of literature—to heal, to nurture, and to connect us to our truest selves.”

Nina Sankovitch’s sister died at age 46 and after three years Nina still hadn’t been able to shake off her sorrow.  As a lifelong bibliophile, it made sense that Sankovitch would turn to books for answers, and so she set herself the goal of reading a book a day, and then writing about each one, for a whole year.  How could I resist a story like that?  Especially in a year when grief had gained a stronghold in my life, with the death of my mother and mother-in-law.

Tolstoy and the Purple Chair is more than another book about books—it is a history of Sankovitch’s immigrant family, a tribute to her sister, and a monument to her extended family’s love of reading.  By the end of the year, Sankovitch reaches her reading goal.  And she heals:

I have learned, through books, to hold on to my memories of all the beautiful moments and people in my life, as I need those memories to help me through difficult times.  I have learned to allow forgiveness, both of myself and of people around me, all trying “with their heavy burden” just to get by….. 

There is no remedy for the sorrow of losing someone we love, nor should there be.  Sorrow is not an illness or an affliction.  It is the only response possible to the death of a loved one, and an affirmation of just how much we value life itself, for all its wonder and thrill and beauty and satisfaction. 

Our only answer to sorrow is to live.  To live looking backward, remembering the ones we have lost, but also looking forward, with anticipation and excitement.  And to pass on those feelings of hope and possibility through acts of kindness, generosity, and compassion.

Nina Sankovitch’s book continues to sooth me as I read some of the same books she read during her so-called “year of magical reading.”  I slide back into the muck of sorrow from time to time, but every book I read is like an outstretched hand, pulling me to clearer waters.

 

Help from Hemingway and a Paris Café

Les Deux Magots, café de Paris, December 2010. That’s Hemingway in the framed photo.

Hemingway brings to life the pleasures of a warm and friendly café, in his Paris memoir, A Moveable Feast.  This past winter I was fortunate enough to visit several of the Paris cafés where Hemingway wrote, and I turn to A Moveable Feast now, seeking relief from troubles that I will call, for lack of a better term, “writer’s block.”  Hemingway’s book offers much sustenance for a writer—his stories of the artists who flocked to 1920’s Paris entertain, and his accounts of the writer’s life instruct and inspire.  As a bonus, the reader comes to know Hemingway back when he had to skimp on food and heat, before he became “Papa,” the literary giant.

Reading is my biggest weapon against writer’s block.  I choose a piece of writing that gives me pleasure, such as A Moveable Feast, and as I read, I’m reminded of the importance of this difficult vocation.  What if instead of facing the empty page or the unsalvageable chapter, the writers I love had decided to abandon their stories?  Often the answer to this question is enough to make me carry on.

But if my blockage is still unmovable, I type a section of writing that I admire.  Typing 300 words can be enough to release a stream of my own words and also allows insight into another writer’s craft, much more so than by simply reading.

If this reading and typing exercise doesn’t open the flow, then a change of scenery may be in order.  Like Hemingway, I’m fond of writing in cafés, sipping café au lait, and people watching can be a creative stimulant as well.  You can bet that the girl with hair “black as a crow’s wing” shows up in one of Hemingway’s later stories.  Enjoy the passage below from the young Hemingway.

From A Moveable Feast, p. 17, Scribner’s 2010 edition

It was a pleasant café, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old waterproof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a café au lait.  The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write.  I was writing about up in Michigan and since it was a wild, cold, blowing day it was that sort of day in the story.  I had already seen the end of fall come through boyhood, youth and young manhood, and in one place you could write about it better than in another.  That was called transplanting yourself, I thought, and it could be as necessary with people as with other sorts of growing things.  But in the story the boys were drinking and this made me thirsty and I ordered rum St. James.  This tasted wonderful on the cold day and I kept on writing, feeling very well and feeling the good Martinique rum warm me all through my body and my spirit.

A girl came in the café and sat by herself at a table near the window.  She was very pretty with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin, and her hair black as a crow’s wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek.

I looked at her and she disturbed me and made me very excited.  I wished I could put her in the story, or anywhere, but she had placed herself so she could watch the street and the entry and I knew she was waiting for someone.  So I went on writing.

The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it.  I ordered another rum St. James and I watched the girl whenever I looked up, or when I sharpened the pencil with a pencil sharpener with the shavings curling into the saucer under my drink.

I’ve seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought.  You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.

The Big Boys of Book Burning and a Book Buying Binge

“Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.”—Heinrich Heine, from his play Almansor (1821)

In 1497, Savonarola, a Florentine religious fanatic with a large following, instigated “bonfires of the vanities” which destroyed books and paintings by some of the greatest artists of Florence.  (The following year he was hung from a cross and burned, along with his propaganda.)  In 1933, a series of massive bonfires in Nazi Germany burned thousands of books written by Jews, communists, and others.  On September 11, 2010, a certain Florida pastor is threatening to burn the Koran, hoping to go down in history as one of the big boys of book burning.

Call me unambitious, but I’d rather buy books than burn them.  So to anyone who leaves their mailing address on the comment section of this blog on September 11, I will send a free copy of a book that promotes construction, rather than destruction—Three Cups of Tea:  One Man’s Mission to Build Peace…One School at a Time. A portion of the proceeds of this book will go to Greg Mortenson’s Central Asia Institute, which has built over 145 schools, most of them for girls, in the remote regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

It will be my pleasure to buy you a book, to celebrate Mortenson, a humble man of good deeds.  It will be my way of throwing one small bucket of cold water on a Florida pastor with illusions of grandeur.

Please note:  Your address will not appear on the blog; I will not share it or save it.  This is a gift, free and clear.

Special

Click here for Rose Metal Press

As requested by my “Fear of Fiction” students at the Worcester Art Museum:  Click below for my story, “Special,” published in the Rose Metal Press anthology, Brevity and Echo.

Rose Metal Press Special

Trouble Making the Leap to Fiction?

If the leap from writing nonfiction to writing fiction seems wide and daunting, try this exercise, excerpted from Christopher Castellani’s “Nothing but the Truth,” published in Naming the World (edited by Brett Anthony Johnston).

Make a list of five to ten significant “firsts” and “lasts” in your life.  Do the same if you are writing about someone else or something else (a city or neighborhood).  The significance can be subtle or dramatic.  For example:

1. The first time I shoplifted.
2. The first time I saw the Grateful Dead in concert
3. The first immigrant family who moved into Anonymous, USA
4. The first boy who broke my heart

1. The last time I saw my father
2. The last cigarette I smoked
3. The last major sports team victory in Bigcity, USA
4. The last day of college

Pick the entry above that feels most compelling to you.  Take, for example, “the first time I shoplifted.”  Jot down all the things you remember about the experience, focusing on the sensory:  sights, sounds, smells.  Now write the scene but change something fundamental about the experience.  For example:

• The gender of the main character
• The time period in which the experience occurred, for example, make it happen in the 1920’s or the 2020’s.
• The outcome of the experience.  If, in reality, you got away with it, show what happens if the main character gets caught.
• The basic situation.  Instead of stealing a Milky Way from CVS, maybe you stole a condom.  Or maybe a tie from Saks.
• Combine one of your firsts with one of your lasts:  Maybe the last time the main character saw her father was at a Grateful Dead concert.  Or the first boy who broke your heart did so the night the Red Sox won the 2004 World Series.  To me, this option has the most exciting possibilities.

This exercise works because the author is confidently grounded by the actual experience but still forced to stretch his or her imagination.  The more drafts you write, the further from “real life” you will get, and yet the entire piece will likely still retain a sense of authenticity.

Help for Haiti: Partners in Health

Prints by Haitian artist Frantz Zephirin benefit Partners in Health.  Click to donate.

I have recently begun a manuscript consultation service to supplement the family income as we prepare to send our sons (a sophomore and a senior) to college.  For many years we’ve worked hard to make sure they can attend the best schools they’re able to get into.  While we are proud of them and grateful to be in a position to do this, we’re fully aware of how many kids, just by the bad luck of where they were born or who they were born to, don’t stand a chance at the opportunities our sons will have.

But what can one family do?  For many years this question has gone through my head without answer.  Finally, after the earthquake in Haiti, I knew I couldn’t wait around anymore, hoping to become smarter, richer, more self-sacrificing—in short, someone who could make a difference.  I decided that even though I ‘m not a heroic person who can make real inroads in the poverty and suffering of the world, I can at least support those who are doing just that.  From now on, one quarter of all the income from my manuscript consultation service will go to Partners in Health (PIH) www.pih.org.

Before the earthquake, Partners in Health co-founder Dr. Paul Farmer was named U.N. Deputy Special Envoy for Haiti by former President Clinton.  Farmer has been a hero of mine since 2004 when I read Tracy Kidder’s account of his life in Mountains Beyond Mountains.  His organization has been on the ground in Haiti, building hospitals and training Haitian doctors for over 20 years, and they know how to make the most of our dollars in Haiti, not just for this present crisis, but for the long term.

I’m in this for the long term, too, and will continue to support Partners in Health with a monthly contribution.  I’ll do what I can to support the PIH heroes in their efforts to make a better life for children who have never had the advantages that my sons have had.

Help for Haiti: James Taylor and Me

James Taylor and I are simpatico these days.  Even before I heard about Taylor’s benefit concert and the additional $150,000 he planned to donate, I had already sent my contribution to the same charity that Taylor is supporting:  Partners in Health (PIH).  The amount of our contributions is almost exactly the same, too—uh, minus four zeros.

Until I finish that novel, land an agent, and sign a mega book deal, my contributions will continue to be minus the four zeros.  But I am committed and plan to continue to make monthly contributions to PIH.  Partners in Health has been working on the ground in Haiti for over 20 years, training doctors, nurses, and community health workers. The organization works to bring modern medical care to poor communities in nine countries around the world. For more information visit www.pih.org.

For more on how I plan to raise money for PIH, check back here next week.  And thanks, James, for showering the people of Haiti with love.

Shower the people you love with love
Show them the way you feel
Things are gonna be much better if you only will

NaNoWriMo: Much More Than Twaddle

For me, November means National Novel Writing Month, and for the fifth year in a row I will embark on that insane, voyage whose destination is  50,000 words.  I’m happy to say that I have gone the distance every November.  Kudos go to Chris Baty, who founded this movement eleven years ago and who now shepherds a flock of over 100,000 writers every November (as well as a non-profit charity throughout the year).  NaNoWriMo has given me permission to indulge my creative spirit, shake off the shackles of my school-marmish inner editor, and write with abandon for one month.

Why would I, a “serious” writer, promote a movement that values the quantity of words written above all else and celebrates run-on sentences, intentional plot tangents, and characters created just for the pleasure of killing them off?  Because it’s fun.  And because it actually improves my writing.  Writing is hard work; a novel requires years of hard labor—but every November I join the big writing party that is NaNoWriMo.  Before the party can begin, however, I must ditch my inner critic.

Every writer is comprised of two parts:  The Critic and The Creator.  The Critic constantly bullies The Creator and tries to hijack the whole writing process, tearing apart sentences before the periods are even in place.   This won’t work, stupid, it says.  Your plot can’t hold water; your characters are even duller than you, and by the way, I’ve always hated your hair.  This kind of talk stops The Creator in her tracks.  She’s forced to wait until The Critic is occupied by re-living the humiliations of your high school years or until it finally falls asleep after having devoured your latest literary efforts.   It takes a long time to create anything when you have to tiptoe around a sleeping Critic.

But in November The Critic can’t catch us, me and The Creator, because we are riding the wave of NaNoWriMo momentum.  The gang plank is up and we have launched our novel before the Critic even knows we’re gone.  And how do we manage to escape?  We have a deadline:  50,000 words in 30 days.  Critics hate deadlines.  There is no time for second guessing.  There is no time for perfection.  And with 50,000 words in 30 days, sometimes there is no coherence.   Sometimes there is outright twaddle.  (Allow me to digress:  I had no idea twaddle was even a word; my Creator came up with it—she liked the sound.  The Critic was about to reject it and was amazed when the spell checker didn’t underline it in red.  I got out the dictionary and discovered that twaddle is “silly idle talk:  drivel.”  Perfect!  The creator shyly smiled.  I thought it might be, she said.)

We write like the wind.  Our fingers move so quickly (1, 667 words a day!) that we leave The Critic prostrate and panting on shore.  He’ll be there at the end of the month, licking his chops over all that raw prose, fodder to feed on for at least the next year.  But we’ve made it t, The Creator and I; our novel is standing—a wonderful mess!   We have met our goal and The Critic is forced to respect us, just a bit more, willing to give the benefit of the doubt before pouncing on mistakes.  And eventually we’ll join together, The Critic, The Creator, and I, and finish that novel.  Nice work, The Critic will mumble.  The Creator will beam. Couldn’t have done it without you.

If you would like to join me for National Novel Writing Month 2010 at the Worcester Art Museum, check back here in the fall.

http://www.worcesterart.org/Education/

Why You Should Read the Dark

I Finally got around to reading Night, after I learned that it will be required reading for my son, a high school sophomore–the same age as Elie Wiesel when he was deported to Auschwitz.

On p.6 is one of the single most devastating sentences I have ever read: “Infants were tossed into the air and used as targets for the machine guns.” And it only gets worse. I had to take a break from the book after p.95: Elie’s comrade Juliek plays Beethoven on his violin, “before an audience of dead and dying,” as if his “soul had become the bow.” What I have quoted here does not begin to deliver the full emotional impact of the scene.

So why am I glad that my son will read Night? Why should you put yourself through the agony of this book or other books that deal with brutality, suffering, and preying on the “different”? Because there are those who would prefer to forget or deny the Holocaust, present-day victims of racism, political persecution, and hunger. Because when we refuse to take heed of what happens to those on the fringe of society, the tears in the fabric grow longer and deeper until one day they finally reach us and those we love. Finally, you should read this book for the same reason that Eli Wiesel forced himself to write it: “For the youth of today, for the children who will be born tomorrow.” So that his past will not become their future.

Objects of Imagination

What do these objects have in common?  They all come from my childhood home in Pennsylvania, where last week I packed them in a box with a few dozen other miscellaneous items to bring home.  Driving across 500 miles of turnpike, I had plenty of time to think of all the stories bouncing around in that box.  By the time I reached Massachusetts, I had decided to seize the literary opportunity.

The next day I unpacked the box in my fiction writing class at the Worcester Art Museum.  There’s always high energy in a room full of writers at work on a timed writing exercise, and my box seemed to up the voltage.   Each student chose one object from the box and then imagined how a fictional character might have acquired it.  Next, they wrote scenes in which their characters explained how the items had come to take on a deep significance.

Until the end of the exercise, students had no idea where the objects had come from or why I had chosen them.  Some of the scenes they wrote were remarkably similar to the “true stories” and some were shockingly different.  In one scene, my mother’s World War II good conduct medal belonged to a character who spoke a line of dialogue that almost perfectly echoed words my mother had spoken a few days earlier: “The medal meant nothing.  Everybody got one.”  Another scene featured the box made from green marble, which my parents had purchased in Scotland: a character died while on her honeymoon; the box constantly reminded her widower of a casket. My mother’s flour shaker was inherited by a character who toted it around in her purse, filled with salt, and shook it over her shoulder for good luck (In both fact and fiction the shakers had been owned by excellent pie bakers.). The sixty-year-old hotel soap that I had rescued from my mother’s trash bin (without really knowing why) became the fictional property of a geriatric serial killer who collected hotel soaps from the scenes of his murders! All four scenes vividly illustrated that the objects connected to a character add depth to their past and to their future motivation.

By the end of class, my keepsakes held even greater significance, thanks to the stories my students had created.  As I repacked the good conduct medal, the box of green marble, the flour shaker, and the bar of soap, I had a better understanding of how deeply they represented my parents.  I had chosen them for reasons that seemed random at the time but actually now made sense in the larger story of my life and how I came to be who I am.  The exercise also illuminated how objects of significance can help us travel between the landscapes of fact and fiction, to find deeper meaning in our characters’ lives and in our own lives.  As I drove home, box safely stowed in back of my RAV4, I hoped the stories that were sparked that evening would burn bright again the next time my students picked up their pens.

Try the above exercise with your own meaningful objects. For further reading, see R. T. Smith’s chapter in Bret Anthony Johnston’s fine book on writing, Naming the World.