WritingNurture: Work. Balance. sAnItY?

MonkeyBrains: Oh, Yeah? Zat so?

2012-01-25T09:46:00.001-05:00

This week someone challenged me about my beliefs, saying that clinging to our cherished beliefs is the cause of much suffering. She wasn't referring so much to belief systems or religion, but bread-and-butter beliefs. I'm pondering this, and I think it's true.

Some examples: "I didn't sleep well, so I won't have a good day." "I can't find my keys. This is a disaster." "This guy is always a bore." "My friend just landed a book contract. I can't get anyone to read my stuff." Often these thoughts are triggered by some small perception--the sight of mud ground into the carpet "means" that I'm not staying on top of things, that that house is somehow decaying around me...

Everyone has their own beliefs and their own triggers...I've only been up for about an hour, and I've already "believed" myself into a bad mood! Gotta take a walk and think about this!


Just because I always land in these situations	doesn't make me a sewer rat!

**THE NEXT POST WILL BE MY
INTERVIEW WITH WRITER
AND ZEN PRACTITIONER JESS
ROW.

MONKEY BRAINS, V: AFRAID OF SILENCE

2012-01-09T15:00:00.000-05:00

http://www.flickr.com/photos/visualpanic/

He understood me, he said. My pastor knew why I was drawn back to the silent meetings of Quakerism after years of churchgoing. I had been abused by adults as a kid and therefore had an "issue" with authority. Quakers are "anti-authoritarian." Ergo.

Actually, I was simply famished from all the words. So much talk in church! Silence is nourishing. There's a place much deeper than than the mental fitness center where we process events through words or images.

Silence is also scary. Hence "an awkward silence followed" and "Freddy gave me the silent treatment" and "Shhh in the library" and (when I was a kid) "children should be seen and not heard." If you Google "Democrats silent" or "Republicans silent" you'll find that the American political system is hiding under the bed with tape over its mouth.

Why is it up to religious people to set the record straight on silence? A Catholic website declared in October that "Vatican Spokesman Discusses Value of Silence." It's not a religious thing. It's just...silence.

"In truth this "Internet" baffles me" GF, 1697

George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, went to a meeting where people were having all kind of arguments about God. He kept his mouth shut: "I sate on a haystack and spake nothing for some hours, for I was to famish them from words." When he did speak, it was electrifying.

When you're struggling with a problem, sit in silence. Focus on something neutral or pleasant--your breathing, or the sleeping cat. (Play this Funeral March for a Deaf Man by Alphonse Allais. Okay, that's a joke) Keep silent for five or ten minutes.

See what shifts.

Monkey Brains, V: Lazy

2011-12-30T12:21:00.000-05:00

It's hard to get dressed on winter days. My new fleece pajamas and thick, yellowed old hotel-terry bathrobe swaddle me like bear fat.

My daughter is on vacation this week. She and a friend are sleeping in the living room after a Harry Potter film marathon last night (Blue Ray!) Structure has crumbled. I fit in freelance work around what my kids are doing. Dust and crumbs and hair gather in corners.

Cabin-fevered, I took a long walk last night in the dark, and I felt my heart open, gradually, thinking of longer days now unfolding.

This morning, a moment stretches to an hour. New emails come in. Old ones lie blinking at me like necessary mammals. (I should have answered that one last week.)

Will I ever finish my novel? Why does the washing machine smell bad, and what should I do about it?

For me, this is the way forward: It's both a discipline and a splurge of relaxation. Sit with what's happening right now. Pay attention. Meditate. Hello, body. Hello, mind, breath, feelings. Hello day.

Then I'll get dressed and see what's what.

If I looked this good, I WOULD stay in jammies all day.

INTERVIEW WITH CATHERINE STINE: HER NEW BOOK, FIRESEED ONE

2011-12-16T17:34:00.001-05:00

See below to purchase in multiple formats!

I'm very excited to announce an interview with Catherine Stine, the author of Fireseed One. Her new YA sci-fi novel made me think...Didn't I always know that teenagers have it in them to save the world?

Here Catherine talks about the genesis of the book, the spiritual aspects of her writing process, and the joy of creating her own art work. Pop over to her blog for more goodies: Interviews, giveaways, and excerpts (plus a special discount for Nook users).

Catherine, welcome! Tell me a bit about Fireseed One:

Thanks! Here is a two-line synopsis, the hardest thing in the world to write. I’m giving you this because others in the launch party are doing a great job of focusing on Fireseed’s plot, and your blog concentrates on more esoteric matters. Here goes! In 2089, Varik travels to a lethal desert with his enemy, Marisa who’s destroyed the world’s crops, for a mythical hybrid that may not exist. How’s that for brevity?

How did you come up with the idea of floating farms, a USA transformed to having Vegas on the coast, a devious female terrorist, and hybrid plants with magical breeding ability?

I’ve had versions of this on my mind since the late 80s. I created an 80-page text, with complex illustrations of floating ocean farms, an army of dolphins and a psychic scientist. At that time, you could walk into a publisher and show your goods. I took it to Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The AD gaped at it and said, “You ought to take this to California.” Translation: This book is wacky, and probably ahead of its time, like those weirdoes out on the west coast. I put the thing in a drawer and sat on it through my subsequent publications. But I never, ever forgot about it. It was always percolating, transforming, like the strange hybrids in Fireseed One.

You say that you have an unorthodox way of figuring out scenes.

I do creative visualizations. Not so unorthodox, but a sort of quasi-spiritual exercise. I’m also an artist, I’m highly visual, so this comes naturally. I call on my creative force—you could call it a higher power, instinct, whatever you like—and I concentrate on my fictional characters moving through scenes. It runs like a magical film. It almost feels as if the book has already been written, and I’m given pieces of it, on a need-to-know basis. It’s amazing what complex worlds are stored in one’s brain.

So, would you consider yourself a spiritual person?

Not religious, but spiritual. That means the coming together of all parts; taking brave actions. That means writing, even though it’s a continual challenge. I like the quote from Steven Wright, who wrote a novel about his time in Vietnam, Meditations on Green: “Be primal. Write from beyond what you know.” That quote speaks to how ideas flow out, flow in, flow out. Having finally illustrated Fireseed One, I feel that fusion strongly—that my art and writing are one—thus creating a more fully imagined world.

JUKO, art by Catherine Stine

Where can people purchase Fireseed, and where can they find you on the web?

Many places! It's available for Ipad and Iphone, etc. here:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/fireseed-one/id489625883?mt=11

On Amazon: paperback or Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/Fireseed-One-Catherine-Stine/dp/0984828206/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1323555932&sr=8-1

“Like” Catherine's Fireseed book page! http://www.facebook.com/pages/Fireseed-One/160174947415366

Website: www.catherinestine.com

Blog: www.catherinestine.blogspot.com

Goodreads author page: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1018139.Catherine_Stine

MONKEY BRAINS, IV: ENVY

2011-12-15T15:58:00.000-05:00

For a long time, I've been wanting my writing to be a spiritual practice, but I didn't have much idea what that would look like. I think I had this idea it should be a more exalted experience than the plain old hard work that writing is. It wasn't becoming meditative or prayerful or anything otherwise new.

In the years since grad school, I have had serious doubts about my work. It's incredibly hard to get published. Why is it taking me so long to finish the novel? What's wrong with me? Are my stories irrelevant? Am I irrelevant? What's the freakin' point, anyway? I play the comparison game: "So-and-so won a big literary prize, but can't get published. I didn't even make the freakin' finalists in the same contest. What does that say about MY chances?" There are times when I turn the writer's life into a losing game of Snakes and Ladders.

The thing is, considering what I have accomplished wasn't really helping me. This doesn't negate its intrinsic value, but it keeps me in Snakes and Ladders mode. I'm on Rung Two! It's better than being on Rung One! Yes, but I'm not on Rung Twelve! And I just went down that really long slide! The fact is, as Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals put it in the wonderful album Lifeline: "There's always someone younger, someone with more hunger/ don't let 'em take the fight outta you." As long as I'm thinking Younger, Published, Not-Published, Well-Published, Crap Published, whatever, I'm stuck in competitive mode. And this does not energize me. It takes the fight outta me.

Envy mode.

I needed a whole nother approach--a spiritual approach, in fact. So a couple of weeks ago, I went unsuspecting to my writing group (we work on our own stuff rather than critiquing); had a miserable couple of hours fighting to get some writing accomplished while sliding around on the Snakes and Ladders board in my head, and afterwards during our tea and discussion, I let it all spill.

Confusing, isn't it?

Being wise souls, my friends didn't encourage me to consider my accomplishments. They suggested a practice to undo my feeling of isolation and competitive envy. In Buddhism, Mudita (Pali) is rendered in English as vicarious or sympathetic joy. Sharon Salzberg puts it: Sympathetic Joy is the realization that others’ happiness is inseparable from our own. We rejoice in the joy of others and are not threatened by another’s success. I've already found one of her talks on the subject very helpful.

Because it's a practice, I don't have to beat myself up for still feeling envy. But I enjoy writing again, and even better, I am not separated from the community of writers. I never really was. I belong, but not because I have to prove anything.

The lesson is still there to learn, of course.

Postponed Due to Ice Formations

2011-11-16T12:11:00.000-05:00

This weekend, I was planning to post my interview with Jess Row, a Zen practitioner who is included in this years Best American Short Stories. Then someone in my family got sick...an illustration of the Buddha's First Noble Truth.

Enlightenment available in the gift shop?

Traditionally, Buddha is supposed to have given his first "sermon" at a place called Deer Park in what is now Varanasi, India, a several-thousand-years-old city. He laid out the Four Noble Truths, the basic principles of Buddhism, which are deceptively simple.

The first Noble Truth is that life involves "dukka"--a Pali word that is often translated as "suffering," but there's more to it. It involves acceptance that impermanence (change, illness, birth) is in the nature of all things.

Recently my husband told me he was sad about something that impacts both of us in a similar way (this was before the illness hit). I'm the tough guy in the family--I told him that what makes him sad is for me a matter of thrusting my head forward, moving on, getting the job done...like a solider in combat. Sometimes I like my icy heart; it makes me feel strong. After we had this conversation, I went upstairs and meditated for half an hour. Right nowI'm using a guided meditation download from Dharmaseed where you pay gentle attention to emotions and simultaneous feelings in the body. As I sat, I noticed a pain in my chest. It opened, got a little heavy, shifted a bit, but it didn't go away. When you look for an emotion in the body, it's hard to locate. Maybe some of that freezing is actually breaking me open.

Sometimes when plants freeze, frozen sap splits the stem open. Capillary action forces more sap out, which freezes on contact with air, causing flower-like formations. If I were made completely of ice, I wouldn't be able to move.

Today, I visited the person who is sick. It's hard to see someone so weak and suffering. We have had a rocky history, although recent years have brought a peaceful, uneventful relationship with no great closeness. Something odd happened today; as I was leaving, the sick person said she loved me, and then, thinking I didn't hear, she repeated it with great tenderness. When I got home, my daughter asked me if she had ever said that before. I thought for a while, then I said, "Maybe not." I cried, then my daughter cried.

In some ways, it would be easier to write the sick person off as insensitive, uncaring. If she's lonely, isn't it because she's chosen to isolate herself from other people? But what affect would that attitude have--on me, on my family, on the situation my husband and I are worried about?

It's pretty obvious that life is impermanent. A no-brainer. But what is our relationship to that truth?

Monkey Brains, III: From Pema Chodron, Help With Becoming Generous

2011-11-04T07:56:00.000-04:00

I struggle with needing things to go a certain way. Here's what a wise teacher has to say:

The basic idea of generosity is to train in thinking bigger, to do ourselves the world's biggest favor and stop cultivating our own scheme...The journey of generosity is one of connecting with the (fundamental richness inherent in each moment), the wealth that is the nature of everything. It is not "ours" or "theirs" but is always available to everyone. In raindrops, in blood drops, in heartache and delight...
by Pema Chodron

The journey of generosity is one of connecting with this wealth, cherishing it so profoundly that we are willing to begin to give away whatever blocks it.

From When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

I want to give a gift to someone I love, because I see--painfully--that I have taken something from her. Being in a position of authority, I continually exert pressure based on my view of how things should go for her. What I can do is give her a break. I can practice trust. Practice isn't perfection. It's...practice!

This commitment cuts to the heart of my biggest weakness. For me the issue goes pretty deep, of course, but an illustration will suffice: When I am caught off guard, say when I come home from a trip and notice a mess in the house that accumulated while I was away--funny how I notice the small mess, not the large effort others have made to clean up--when the physical environment seems on the verge of decay because things aren't where I think they should be, I feel groundless. Fearful. I flail around inwardly, and I cope by using my dominance in the family, my verbal acuity, get people to get things to shape up. It's THEIR responsibility, right? After all, I wasn't there to make the mess.

Insecurity? --Control!

This has hurt the people I live with.

How does generosity apply here? Offering a credit card, a trip to the mall would be easy, but it wouldn't be a healing generosity.

...the real transformation takes place when we let go of our attachments and give away what we think we can't. What we do on the outer level has the power to loosen up deep-rooted patterns of holding onto ourselves.

The strongest urge in myself will be to "yell," to use my considerable skill with language to control and dominate. I can even get away with this in front of therapists--I've observed it happen! The gift I can give the person in question is to accept the discomfort of feeling groundless. To sit in quiet meditation with the feelings that disaster will result in her life if I don't intervene. Just hang out, me and the feelings. To take the bullet myself, so to speak. And, life being the messy animal that it is, when I get up again I will have to make the uncomfortable choice to intervene--sometimes.

Sitting with that fear, honoring it for its creative energy (boy, do I get a lot done based on my delusion that I hold the universe together!!), but not trying to control the outcome: all of these are gifts I can give the person I love.

She'll feel the difference. And nothing will need to be said.

Monkey Brains, II: And Introducing Jess Row

2011-10-30T23:33:00.000-04:00

Nothing goes away until it has taught us what we need to know~
Pema Chodron

It's supposed to snow tonight (in Philly?!) so we're prepared! Wait! It's 10 a.m. and snowing right now!

In meditation these days, I am continuing to focus on my breathing, but that intention is attached to a thousand vines. My mind and body keep their little flirtation going. Thoughts--planning how I'll get to the grocery store, what to do about that dead rabbit on the deck, snatches of conversation, rehashing of long-dead unsolved problems--each of these is a little seizure during which I no longer seem to have a body at all. Then I come back; my body is there, sitting still, with tension now banding the crown of my head or around my eyes. The result of each thought-wander feels a little different. Planning, I say. Or: reminiscing. I label the thoughts to learn how each one feels and to learn to recognize what's going on.

Tonight at the meditation class, I was aware of a deeper mind below all the monkey-chatter. It was like skimming below choppy waves, with Sargasso weed and all that crazy stuff floating around. Nice.

Silence is necessary. The thoughts don't go away, so I'm trying to learn from them.

**********************************************************************

Now for the introduction to next week's interview:

Jess Row is a fiction writer and a practitioner of Zen Buddhism. He's a Zen Chaplain at The College of New Jersey, and he teaches at Vermont College, where I did my MFA, but I graduated before he came. Next week, I'll feature an interview I did with Jess, where he discusses his meditation practice and his writing life.

His story "The Call of Blood" is included Best American Short Stories, 2011. It comes from his collection titled Nobody Ever Gets Lost, which I cannot recommend highly enough.

Here's the opening of "The Call of Blood":

Mornings he finds Mrs. Kang upright in bed, peeling invisible ginger with an invisible knife. She watches her hands with rapt attention, picking up the stalks from a pile at her right and dropping the peeled pieces into a bowl on her lap. A cloud of white hair rises from her scalp, pale as spun sugar. The first time he tries to raise her, putting his hands gently beneath her armpits, she bats them away; the second time she forgets to resist. She weighs eighty-five pounds on a good day. In the wheelchair she sits up ramrod-straight, and waves a finger at him. Kaesul hun'bok chasaeoh! Her voice like wind in a crevasse. You are a bad boy!

Hyunjee, her daughter says, No offense, Kevin. But if she knew it was a black man taking care of her, it would finish her off.

She has a funny way of smiling, like squinting into the sun. He can tell she finds this thought faintly entertaining.

I'm not black, he says. My father was from Jamaica and my mother was from Queens. Irish Queens.

Oh, I know, she says. It's complicated...

If you look for religion, Buddhist or otherwise, in this wonderful collection where each story is related directly or indirectly to 9/11, you will find humanity--subtly observed and and lovingly understood--in its sometimes terrifying quest for justice, security and meaning.

Someone once told me that the root meaning of "religion" is "that which ties ends together." Row's characters are trying to put a square knot on life's raw ends. Whether due to the shock of violence or the attrition of years, they are desperate for meanings that lie just beyond comprehension. As each of us is, they are driven by their own histories, prejudices, and predilections as much as by their desire for resolution. His examination of race and class, as well as his ability to render the unique, subjective dynamics between people in relationship, is the among most skilled and nuanced that I have encountered.

I was fascinated by a fiction writer who also has an active meditation life. Next week I'll run my interview with Jess Row. What he had to say surprised me.

Monkey Brains, I: Outing Myself.

2011-10-23T11:25:00.000-04:00

This being my birthday weekend, (56!! I'll look really old in 30 years) it seemed time to begin a new segment for the blog.

This will be a true web journal--a record of my experience as a person who regularly does mindfulness meditation. (Visceral reaction here: That sentence rings a bit PC--as if I'd dropped into conversation the phrase a "person of color" instead of "Asian" or "Black"; or, as someone I once knew who was involved in Social Concerns with the Episcopal Church used to insist ad nauseum, those infected with HIV should be called "persons with AIDS." Despite the intention to cloak the people in question with verbal dignity, these attempts have a sterile whiff. "Persons" has a vaguely bio-lab feel.) But I digress. The truth is, I'm trying hard not to identify myself as a Buddhist. This despite the fact that I now have what my daughter describes as "a pagan shrine" in my meditation room, aka my son's former bedroom. (Yes, he still has a room all to himself when he's home. The attic garret. Get over it.) (Do I sound defensive? In this family, obtaining the privilege of a room all to MYSELF WAS NOT EASY. But that's another story.)

It made the Cape Cod nights less stark

So this month, I bought a Buddha statue. (Buddha? Zat you?) I was in Cape Cod recently on family business, and I saw it in a shop and it was beautiful and it wasn't ridiculously expensive.

But I don't know if I'm a Buddhist or not. (Helen: Is that honest?) I go to regular meditation sessions at Springboard Studio in Mt. Airy (the Granola capital of Philadelphia), and I meet regularly for, like, these talks with their main teacher of Buddhism, Brian Arnell, who has a heart the size of the ancient continent Pangaea. Springboard is a "secular" Buddhist organization, which as far as I can tell, means that it's okay to go just for the mutual support and to learn to meditate, and Brian makes a distinction between "religious" Buddhists and otherwise Buddhists, which is them, but I can't remember now what it is. Brian is very smart.

The truth is that I was an evangelical Christian for so long--about 30 years, give or take-- (Yes, I was a Quaker child, but then some horrible stuff happened and the church rescued me) that partly because of what evangelical Christians describe as "the fear of man" (i.e. wanting other people to like you a lot, even if you haven't actually seen them in like ten years) I am afraid to publicly identify myself (on the WWW! (But does anyone actually read this blog?)) as anything other than an evangelical Christian. Which is sort of ridiculous, considering the "pagan shrine" I have going upstairs.

There's another reason I don't identify myself as a Buddhist. I'm not sure what being one actually is.

But here's the thing. One incredibly relieving aspect of the whole Buddhist thing is permission to look at what's true in any given moment and to make room for its existence, however putrid or self-indulgent or pathetic. You don't judge it. You don't resolve to overcome it, or vow to establish righteousness in its place, (so help me God). You don't beat yourself up. Well, duh, you do. But you notice that, too. And you make room for: Okay, well, I've spent the last twenty minutes beating myself up, and now my chest hurts and I might be having a coronary. That's kind of interesting. And you give yourself a break for noticing how hard it is to give yourself a break.

So the truth is, I am frankly weirded out to think of what all the Christians I was interknit with for so long would think of what I've turned in to. CONFESSION: The truth is, I used to pray that what has happened to me would not happen to me. I have broken out of the corral: that is, the Jesus thing is no longer my sole reference point. Anyone who has never been an evangelical will be like, Okay, so what's the big deal here? And anyone who has/is/ever will be an evangelical, world without end, will get it in an instant and start praying for my return to the fold. Or leave me up the Will of God, depending.

Okay, so now that's out of the way. Stay tuned as I claw my way to Enlightenment. Oh, and, also I'm going to talk about spiritual aspects of writing and interview people who are both meditators and writers. First up: Jess Row, who is currently featured Best American Short Stories, 2011. More about him next week.

Under the Influence: A Parable of Courage

2011-10-08T10:07:00.001-04:00

In September, Fiction Writers Review did a series on the teaching of writing. In this guest post, I share the best story I've ever heard about dealing with writerly discouragement. (Not to mention life!)

When I send out submissions, I’m easily spooked. After receiving my 4,575th “positive rejection”—i.e., “Not a good fit this time… send more”—I wonder if He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named is mwa-ha-ha-ing behind the scenes: “Everyone Else is Going to Be Published. Die, Sucker.”
Fortunately, better writers than me have endured the soul-sucking chill of the Dementor’s Kiss. My go-to writing mantra is a story about a Really Successful Writer (hereafter known as Harry Potter) told to me by my favorite writing mentor, whom I’ll call… Hermione Granger. Perhaps the story means so much because she believed in my work. When I can’t maintain faith in myself, I share the story with my own writing students. I repeat it to the cat; I grab despairing novelists at the coffee shop and recite the tale, spittle flying.

The event took place years ago at the prestigious Hogwrites School. Hermione and Harry were sitting side by side at a large table in a novel writing workshop. Professor Albus Dumbledore presided over the discussion of the not-yet-published Harry’s novel… as the work was ripped apart. The students mauled it. Reviled it. Cruciatus-Cursed it. Harry sat impassively listening while his fellow students reduced his work to a writhing torment of former character and plot. But Hermione noticed that under the table, Harry’s knees were shaking.

Some while later, a troubled Hermione found Dumbledore strolling the grounds. “We were really hard on poor Harry,” she told the venerable teacher.

“He deserved it,” Dumbledore replied. “The work was awful.”

Hermione swallowed.

“But he’s going to be a terrific writer.” Seeing my mentor’s shocked face, Dumbledore went on to add that Harry had come to him after the workshop and thanked him for the disembowelment. Harry was going to completely junk the novel and start another from scratch. That kind of drive, Dumbledore indicated, would be the making of him.

“Harry” went on to become famous enough that real names are impossible. I’m in the market for blurbs, after all.

For me, those still-obscure, hopelessly shaking knees are the most encouraging part of the story. It doesn’t matter if other people think your writing is dreadful. It’s okay if you’re scared out of your wits. What matters, in the end, is rising out of the ashes.

Read the original post here.

"I lay curled up like a broken comma"

2011-09-28T14:37:00.000-04:00

Last night, that sentence came to me as I lay awake, worrying about something. I thought it was pretty cool. I thought I might take it and run with it, turn it into an as-yet unwritten story.

The problem is that an image isn't a story idea. I have nothing to place it in. No context, no problem set. In the past I would have taken that line and kept on writing, hoping an elusive plot would rise from the mess. This may work for some people--not for me. I would have ended up with a shapeless mass, trying to revise it into life.

So for now, it's archived. I need a spine, not a vertebra.

Actually, real life has similar moments of discovery. A quick sense of clarity about a family problem. The thought, "You know. I really should try this." Or the converse, "I can't. I'll never. They won't..." But one difference between real life and fiction is that real life keeps happening, no matter what. Until you die, narrative isn't optional.

But there's a similarity. Moments of clarity can be nurtured, or they can be lost. They can be questioned or cultivated or put to use. Otherwise, life can have a random quality, and we might feel we aren't the authors of our own scenarios.

As in writing, making use of our clarity fragments takes work. But it's not always the kind of work we think of as Work. A lot of this work has to do with kindness. If you think it's cool to be kind to other people, why not be kind to yourself? The fragment of clarity might simply need you to let it hang out for a while. Give it air. Don't rule it out, and see what happens.

Other kinds of clarity are negative: The bitter "I'll never..." kind of conviction that makes you feel like a broken comma. Here humor is your ally. These thoughts tend to repeat over time, the bad jokes of a feedback loop. Oh! You again, negative thought. Thanks for sharing can be a pretty good strategy. If you give these thoughts air, rather than tightening around them, they may loosen their grip.

All this from one punctuation mark. Not bad for one night's insomnia.

How Do You Pronounce **?

2011-09-24T21:55:00.000-04:00

Along with other Philadelphia Stories authors, I will be reading on WXPN Radio's Live at Kelly Writers House, to be aired on Monday, October 3 at 8 p.m. 88.5 in Philly, and on the Web for my fans in Monrovia and Antarctica.

I'm going to read from two stories, one because it reflects my Quaker roots, and the other because it's published and available online. The FCC description of what you can't say on the radio makes a fascinating tone poem in itself. Preparation is arduous, study complex. Here's what Kelly Writers House sent from the FCC Rules (I'm not sure I'd want to be related to the person who wrote this):

“Assh*le, F*ck, F*cker, F*cking, Sh*t, C*nt, Clit, N*gger or other racial slurs, Bitch is inappropriate if it refers to a woman, Balls, Blow, Suck, Dick, Pussy, Swallow if referring to genitals, "The definition, language or material that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium, sexual or excretory activities or organs, vulgar and lewd references to the male genitals and to masturbation and sodomy broadcast in the context of 'explicit references' to masturbation, ejaculation, breast size, penis size, sexual intercourse, nudity, urination, oral-genital contact, erections, sodomy, bestiality,menstruation and testicles, sexual activity with a child."

Try reading that several times fast and see what happens.

"The Family That Slays Together, Stays Together"

2011-09-14T08:04:00.000-04:00

And now, for something completely different. Our son made a 2-minute SLASHER movie starring, well, us. Comments on YouTube most welcome! Repost the video on the web and I'll buy you a drink. Well, if you live near us, that is. (Not kidding, friends. Send me the link and we'll talk where and when.)

HERE'S THE LINK: MEMORIES
By Paul Frank Mallon, II

The real star is this innocent-looking house

(Thanks for the blurb, Jane Wilson!)

The Help, Considered

2011-09-06T12:31:00.000-04:00

I bought the book, enjoyed it, saw the movie, enjoyed it, and still I missed the most obvious connection to myself. I grew up in a family that embraced Christian moral values, but which was pervaded by what I call "atmospheric" racism. We made contributions to organizations that benefited black people, while racist comments (and attitudes) wafted up to the ceiling, unregarded.
And of course, even unspoken attitudes affect the world around us.

This letter to the editor provoked my ah-ha moment. I think the appropriate term is "white blindness."

LETTERS

How 'The Help' Depicts Race Relations

To the Editor:

Prof. Patricia A. Turner makes an excellent point when she criticizes "The Help" for implying that good white people of the 1960s were by definition non-racist. But it does something even more insidious. It invites white audiences, as do most Hollywood movies about race, to identify with an enlightened white character - in this case, the stand-in for the author of the book, Kathryn Stockett.

In so doing, it validates our fantasy that we would have seen the truth and we would have risked our comfort for the sake of justice. It assures us that we would have been, and by extension we are now, on the side of right.
Funny how racism persists despite us white people being so darn virtuous!

MARY BROWN
New York, Aug. 29, 2011

The writer is a director and producer of documentary films.

Mary Brown's letter is in response to the essay by Patricia Turner.

What Would a Blog be Without Followers?

2011-09-03T22:32:00.002-04:00

Many thanks to super creative YA fiction writer, Catherine Stine, for awarding me a Most Appreciated Follower! Check out her thoughts on writing, family, treasures, & city & country life.

To pass on the friendship, I'd like to award Most Appreciated Follower to:

1. Ryoma Collia-Suzuki, the most enthusiastic friend whom I've never met!
2. Richard Sidney, one of my oldest friends.
3. Jane Reed Wilson, Sister-in-Law Extraordinaire and fabulous graphic designer.

Feel free to copy the award on your own blog/website.

On another note, my husband and I spent a wonderful hurricane weekend on Cape Cod, walking in the maelstrom, lighting kerosene lamps, and cozying up in the new bedroom. Since there was very little actual damage done by the hurricane, we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves in an unexpected way. The old dark house is warm and intimate by candlelight. What could be better?

I'm about to blow away!!

Anyone else have a hurricane story to share?

Can I Get to the Moon?

2011-08-29T12:29:00.000-04:00

I want to shake something up. I want to start something. Or maybe I'm trying to finish something big.

Am I

(brave)

(smart)

(talented)

(original)

(strong)

(convincing)

enough?

The only way to answer that question is to pursue the goal, wholeheartedly, in spite of the question.

What Happens When You Cut Up an Elephant?

2011-08-21T22:24:00.001-04:00

Cut this elephant in four pieces? Ouch!

Today I woke early from a troubling dream. The images came from seeing elephant imagery in Buddhist art, and the 'trouble' from a timeless summer conversation on the porch of a meditation studio with my Buddhist teacher, Brian Arnell, and a friend.

I said that there could be no higher motivation in life than to aspire to be a loving person. Brian answered that while on a daily-life basis this is true, pure Buddhism would say that to make "loving" the highest goal is limiting because it only has meaning in reference to its opposite its opposite--hatred, or "not-loving." He added that there is something "beyond" those competing values.

So, as I struggle to understand it, "love" is conceptually tied to a dualism that is conditioned on some kind of conceptual, conditional battle (good vs. evil). In Buddhism, there's a higher goal than anything dualistic, something called Nibbana, something that my familiar world of love, pain, and stories does not comprehend. I felt threatened when Brian talked about something that touched on emptiness--I felt I could be annihilated in a bland, cosmic cream soup. Do I really WANT enlightenment?

At the same time, it was a lovely moment. I wanted our gauzy summer talk to go on all night.We dipped in and out of topics; the moon was overhead. I lost track of time. (Thanks to Anne Arian for the lovely "gauzy summer" description.)

In the dream I had afterwards, someone was telling me about elephants: "If you cut an elephant into four pieces, it won't walk again, but there is a high rate of survival." I don't know what says about quality of life! Imagine trying to wash yourself with a trunk sliced down the middle. The dream filled me with horror. Did the "high survival rate" mean that the quartered parts would exist in a helpless, monster state, like living specimens in some veterinary equivalent of the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia?

Used by permission of the (very cool) publisher, www.blastbooks.com

In other words, it means that I find the whole Buddhist thing a little scary. If I follow this path, is it the end of "me"? Well, that's okay. I found Christianity scary, too, but not for the fundamentalist qualities that (say) The Simpsons and other pop culture icons lampoon so accurately. Small minded literalism is actually pretty easy to dispense with. But any spiritual practice that truly touches on The Divine will tug at the seams of one's patched-together sense of reality. (In the Bible, people who encounter angels tend to wet their pants. Only in the Hallmark store are angels pretty beings who hang out on coffee mugs.)

Have you had "elephant dreams" that touched on fears about your spiritual life?

Ooh, scary. Souls sucked up in a divine vacuum cleaner in Dante's Inferno.

Modern Poetry: A Guidebook That's a Hoot

2011-08-14T12:21:00.000-04:00

My Philadelphia Inquirer Review of Beautiful & pointless {A Guide to Modern Poetry}

By David Orr (Appeared 8.07.2011)

If reading a guidebook to contemporary poetry appeals to you about as much as diving into a history of space heaters in this triple-digit summer, David Orr, poetry columnist for the New York Times Book Review, knows how to turn on the A.C. In Beautiful & pointless {A Guide to Modern Poetry}, Orr admits that books on poetry tend to read like math texts. Either that, he says, or they are rapturous “testimonials announcing poetry’s ability to derange the senses…(and make us) dance naked under the full moon, and so forth.”

Orr is no highbrow who expects readers to know the difference between a villanelle and valpolicella before he’ll pop a beer with them. If anything, he arouses reader sympathy for the poor poet, whose visions will never be optioned by Hollywood, and whose main audience will ever be other poets. Even though Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote in what amounted to an 1821 version of a self-help pamphlet that ‘“poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,”’ the political engagement of poets is in a “potentially awkward position relative to the larger political world, which is generally not paying much attention.” (At least not in this country. Shelley might have been heartened to know that in Soviet Russia, China, and Burma, poets would be hounded like domestic terrorists.)

This leaves the contemporary American poet laboring beneath the twin burdens of irrelevance and Greatness. In fact, Orr dedicates an entire chapter to ambition because “it’s especially difficult to talk about the situation of poetry” (Is it healthy? Endangered? Post-mortem?) “when the people talking about it appear to agree on little, except possibly that a poem should begin with words.”

Instead, he approaches “what it means to write a poem” slantwise, “by talking about a related concept…Not about what poetry is, but about what we want it to be.” This touches on what Philadelphia poet Daisy Fried calls “capital-G Greatness,” and opens up a discussion of style. A style approved as ambitious, Orr says, is “less likely to involve words like “’canary’ and ‘sniffle’ and ‘widget’ and more likely to involve words like ‘nation’ and ‘soul’ and ‘language.’”… “Our assumptions…work like a velvet rope: If a poet looks the way we think a great poet ought to, we let him or her into the club quickly—and sometimes later wish we hadn’t.”

Orr traces the implications of poetic assumptions. He enters these via the arenas in which poetry has traditionally taken a stand, including “The Personal,” “The Political,” and “Form”…and in his touching concluding chapter, titled “Why Bother?” which, it seems, is a question poets ask themselves with depressing frequency.

Regarding the personal: “Poetry, we’re told, is…a means of answering Pete Townshend’s question ‘Can you see the real me?’” Orr questions how personal a personal poem really is. Is the “’I’ of the poem in basic concordance with the facts relating to the poet-as-he-walks-around?” This is “tricky business, because the personal depends on juxtapositions, not revelations.” By way of explanation, Orr illuminates the contrasting effects of very different poems—‘The Tay Bridge Disaster,’ “possibly the worst poem ever written about a public calamity”; the embarrassing ‘Saved From Myself’ by pop singer Jewel; and the last by the “seemingly casual” poet Frank O’Hara. Orr argues that the successful “personal” poem, like O’Hara’s ‘The Day Lady Died,’ “relies on our sense that some experiences—grief, for example…don’t sit very well alongside our day-to-day activities, so that when they’re brought up abruptly in a poem filled with ephemera, we’re forced to decide whether the sudden emergence (juxtaposition) of this other, more personal identity can be accommodated. It’s a risky strategy,” he admits, because it courts humiliation. Perhaps a poem is ‘personal’ simply because it takes lonely courage to write one.

People keep writing the stuff. Yet if poets themselves are to be believed, it was all over a long time ago. Orr cites the “lamentations and counter lamentations” reflected over the years in essay titles by Dumbledore-caliber authorities: “Who Killed Poetry?” “Death to the Death of Poetry”; and “Poetry is Dead. Does Anybody Really Care?”

Although Orr concludes, “poetry is a small, vulnerable human activity no better or more powerful than thousands of other…activities,” the truth is that humans have been creating poetry far longer than they’ve been creating timepieces or gecko habitats. Perhaps Philadelphia’s lively scene means that poetry’s traditional yearning for immortality isn’t merely quixotic. “Yo, Philly!” Our poets sing. “There is life after death.”

Helen W. Mallon once got a black eye at a poetry reading. You can read about it on her blog via www.helenwmallon.com

How I Got a Black Eye at a Poetry Reading

2011-08-06T23:05:00.000-04:00

When I was studying fiction writing at the low-residency Vermont College program, we students sent out monthly packets of blood, sweat, and tears to our professors via the USPS. The postal clerk, half asleep, would ask, "Does this contain anything liquid, fragile, perishable, or potentially hazardous?"

I always wanted to reply, "God, I hope so."

Writers want their words to hold compressed power; we want to change the way readers see the world. We want IMPACT.

First, writing has to impact us. Before I succumbed to the desire to write fiction (it was a struggle) I took a poetry writing workshop at my old school, Germantown Friends. High school students and old people like me were mixed in together. The last session of the class was to be a pot luck dinner and reading held at the home of a father/daughter duo who happened to be taking the class together. I made a casserole, got my poems together, and parked behind several other cars along the U-shaped driveway. Balancing glass dish, poems, purse, and myself, I got out of the car, took a couple of steps, and inadvertently hooked my foot on a fallen tree branch I hadn't seen in front of me.

It was a beautiful pivot, ending in pain. I knocked on the large front door holding my poems, and thought, "This is a dramatic entrance." Blood ran from my nose to my chin .

I missed the actual reading and the potluck. My parents, who lived nearby, picked me up and took me to the ER with my face in a rag. I found out later that someone had scooped the contents of the casserole back in my dish and set it out on the table with the other food.

I still have the X-ray of my skull from that evening. There was nothing broken, but I developed a black eye worthy of a maudlin painted sunset. I loved it when people asked me how it happened. The incongruity! A poetry reading!

Actually, creative writing is not for the faint of heart. There's a huge amount of self-exposure involved with no promise of reward or fame. What we're trying to say may end up, on paper, neither liquid, fragile or potentially hazardous. It may be as clumsy as a sprawl on the ground.

But there's no point in trying unless we shoot for something beyond our abilities. Why stick with what you already know how to say? If it doesn't shake you first, how will it shake the reader?

Mine wasn't as pretty as this one.

A Boomer's Guide to Alienating Your Fellow Man

2011-08-04T13:09:00.001-04:00

Admit it. Life as a middle aged person can be kind of a drag. Work, work, plod. Worry about the economy. Be nice. Clean the toilet. Yeah.

Forthwith, here are some jazzy comebacks to sprinkle throughout your day. Won't cost you any money, and the outcome of your impulsive remarks will make your glad that your impetuous youth has gone the way of all flesh. Or these encounters might make you ready for senility, when you'll be able to get away with anything.

So. Say one of your coworker says "Howzit going?" and you can tell he doesn't give a rip and you think he really thinks he could do your job in half the time (but you might be wrong). Try this out: "Just what do you mean by ''IT'"?

For those times when the MacTeenager at the MacDrivethrough is MacRude and messes up your MacOrder, but you know that only the young and desperate would take a MacJob: When she simpers "Have a good one," reply, "Which french fry are you referring to?"

When you're at the mailbox, and your neighbor, at her mailbox, calls out "How you doing?" Consider responding, "Oh, I'm all sorts of things." It could be the start of a deep soul correspondence. Or not.

"Nice day," says the UPS man. "Yes, it is," you say, "and I like the way this box smells."

"How are you?" asks your neighbor who never talks to you. Look over your shoulder, then say, "Who?"

These were very cool but tipped over easily.

The clerk at the liquor store has gauges in his ears, a sleeve tattoo, and a pierced lower lip with a soul patch. "How're you?" He asks. Recall the magic of the sixties. Then look him in the eye (is it bloodshot?), and say, "I am Far F**cking Out."

Those who really lived the sixties may not remember them, but the tribe has to stick together. Is there something you've always wanted to reply to a cab driver, investment broker, convenience store clerk, telemarketer, department head, certified public accountant, therapist, or zookeeper, but never have?

Guest Post: Finding My Way Home

2011-07-23T13:43:00.000-04:00

For my own encouragement and yours: From time to time, I'll be featuring guest posts on how people keep going in the face of difficulties. The first of these, by poet Wendy Brown-Báez, speaks of how the communal aspects of poetry gave her shelter in a time of unimaginable loss.

It has been said that poetry can save us. I learned the truth of this only through tragedy. In a place of extremity, I discovered that language can bring to light what is beyond words. In the process, it returns us back to ourselves. When my partner and then later, my son, died from suicide, it was poetry that threw me a lifeline and pulled me in from the tumult. I thought I would drown in the emotional storms, but poetry floated me back to shore.

In 2002, I lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico with my partner, Michael, who was bi-polar and increasingly unstable. He spoke of suicide daily; one night, he read me the suicide notes he had composed. I belonged to a women’s poetry group and as I poured my frustration and fears onto the page, these women became my best friends.

I urged Michael to attend Write Action, a writing support group for those coping with illness. One week, when he was out of town, I attended in his place. In this safe environment, I could express myself with complete honesty. I kept coming back. As I wrote about my anguish, my rose colored glasses began to fall away. Gradually I saw that Michael didn’t want to be saved.

I lost my dynamic, affectionate companion and I also lost the grey pall of depression. A burst of creativity swept through me. In my determination to speak my truth, I produced a poetry CD. As I traveled and performed, audiences held me in their rapt attention. It was a powerful form of communion.

But I soon faced another crisis, the death of my youngest son. Shattered, I was unable to meditate or to pray or to write, the practices that had held me so firmly while grieving Michael’s death. And yet, since both writing groups were my friends, my support system, I returned to them. I thought I could at least distract myself from my unbearable despair.

Once the pen was in my hand, it was automatic to put it to paper. I wrote about my pain and shock, memories and regrets. The writing deepened, became raw, vulnerable and real. It amazes me how often writing makes me aware that gifts can be found in tragedy.

Time doesn’t heal but those

small actions of living--

the spoon of soup, the footsteps

through the park, the quick farewell

before more damage is done—these take

away the direct attention.

....This is a STUPID STUPID

STUPID death—no I won’t

stop screaming it—I blame

God as well and I don’t care if

there are millions lost

in the war or that children are

being gunned down as I

write. I am talking about

a death that did not have to be.

This death has teeth, they bite at my

insides, they have excavated a

hole in my womb.

--from Finding the Way Home

I moved to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico in 2006 and created a bilingual poetry performance for Día de los Muertos. As my performance partner and I called out the various names of Lady Death (La Muerte) back and forth across the stage and the audience lit candles for their departed, I realized that Death comes for all of us. For me to accept death as another phase of life, one that touches us all, was healing. Later, as I wrote about my anger and my guilt, I understood that my story was a story: that I didn’t have to hold onto it and keep it, I could share it and release it. I felt I could be a voice for others. The recently published transparencies of light is a collection of women’s voices, some in challenging circumstances. For example, Ahmed’s Mother is a mother’s keening for a son who has been killed by a bomb. While she is fictional, her voice arose from my experiences of living amongst women like her. I have earned the right to be her voice; I know her rage and her anguish.

Poetry has transformed my suffering into a work of art with beauty and meaning. Language is how we connect to each other. By sharing language with open hearts, we step out from the abyss of our essential solitariness. From that perspective we see that we are held, all together, in a web of light.

Wendy Brown-Báez is the creator of Writing Circles for Healing writing workshops. She received 2008 and 2009 McKnight grants to teach writing workshops for at risk youth. Wendy has performed her poetry from Chicago to Mexico, and her poetry and prose have been published in numerous literary journals such as Wising Up Press Anthologies, The Chrysalis Reader, Mizna, Minnetonka Review, Interfaithings and We’Moon Datebooks. She is the author of a full-length collection Ceremonies of the Spirit (Plain View Press, 2009), and a chapbook transparencies of light (Finishing Line Press, 2011).

For more information or to purchase books: www.wendybrownbaez.com

Guest Post Coming This Weekend

2011-07-20T22:06:00.000-04:00

One of my preoccupations has to do with the incredible survival ability of human beings--and, specifically, how artists keep going when jobs consume, health fails, crises hit. This weekend I will be privileged to run a guest post by poet Wendy Brown-Baez, who writes about how poetry rescued her in a time of great personal tragedy.

Check in later to hear from Wendy!

Procrastination for Breakfast

2011-07-17T22:23:00.000-04:00

Yesterday morning, I heard my neighbors chatting on their deck and smelled their good breakfast smells. I felt a little envious of their laid-back approach to weekends, so instead of jumping into the work I had going, I decided to sit on the deck with a mug of tea and the local paper.

But here's the thing: Reading the local color, I discovered several...typos. Before I knew it, I was lasering through articles, highlighting errors, and planning a trip to the newspaper editor's office to convince him that he ought to hire me as a proofreader. Regular income, however small! What a concept!

I must be explaining something.

Before I knew it, I was...WORKING. Saturday morning, and the brain was grinding, the pencil circling . My neighbors were still lazily chatting. Okay, they were chatting in Russian, and they're both scientists, so for all I know they were hashing out theories about DNA and inter-office brain chemistry, but they SOUNDED lazy.

People with regular jobs have it so easy, I thought. Their weekends are weekends. (my neighbors get in their cars to go to work.) Freelancers like me never stop working. I can't sit on the deck with a freakin' newspaper without...

You get the picture. Later I learned the truth: My neighbor's job is so stressful that when she wakes up on a weekend, her brain is madly whirring with all the household stuff she can't get to. "I make myself sit out on the deck," she told me later, "Otherwise I'd never relax." Actually, she admitted, "I'm procrastinating. It's hard to face all the household stuff."

I say, let's hear it for procrastination. If we have to make ourselves sit in the dappled shade for half an hour on Saturday morning, it's gift to ourselves. And to our work--T. S. Eliot spoke of the "necessary laziness" of the poet, a notion that could greatly benefit all of us. It takes courage to put the pencil down without the distraction of electronic devices; to turn your back on the urgent and spend unshaped time alone with yourself or someone you love. If all you do is what you have to do, you'll miss the universe.

"I am moved by fancies that are curled/Around these images, and cling: The notion of some infinitely gentle/Infinitely suffering thing." From Eliot's Four Quartets

The Care and Feeding of Procrastination

2011-07-07T12:37:00.001-04:00

This is not a lecture about procrastination. We all avoid in different ways, anyhow. I am a non-traditional procrastinator. Being a restless soul, when it comes to writing, I can fill pages easily. I OCD-edly revise; I once worked on fiction while one of my kids was throwing a tantrum not twenty feet away.

In my life, avoidance looks like productivity. I sometimes fill pages to avoid the harder task of examining where a story is going. Sometimes the hardest thing is to Not-Write; to wait, to trust the brain's hidden wisdom.

Whether you're like me or a more garden-variety procrastinator, the cure is the same: Focus on small progress and do what you can. Doing a little bit is better than doing nothing. Today at my Cape Cod writing retreat, my task is to find the single word/phrase that drives the main character through the plot of my novel. (Much as in The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy wants one thing: To go home.) My goal of coming up with a single phrase is "enough" for a days' work. It's more than enough. My whole plot hangs on that, and I'll save myself a whole lotta rewriting once I nail this.

Yeah, it would have made sense to focus on this before writing several drafts of the book. I feel kind of foolish, actually. But if I let that feeling segue into avoidance, it can become a black hole.

There are always valid reasons to procrastinate. But whether the issue is sitting down to write at all or finishing a story, starting with a few steps can lead you home.

CONTEST RESULTS REVEALED!

2011-07-04T12:34:00.000-04:00

DRUM ROLL, PLEASE... WE HAVE A WINNER!

And now, the results of the Bloggers Clearinghouse Contest! (A little late, but I'm currently at Very Cool Writers retreat where email access is not included.)

Lucy Mueller, now of former college student status (good luck in Hollywood, Lucy) is our near winner and will soon be receiving a fabulous prize found in a kitchen drawer. Lucy identified a punctuation glitch; it was not The Contest Error, however.

Rich and Torrey, valiant efforts.

THE ACTUAL TYPO was identified by Catherine Stine, noted YA author and Manhattanite: In the tag below the post of 6/27 I wrote "Jerry Garcian" instead of "Jerry Garcia." Catherine, your prize will be arriving soon by passenger pigeon.

I know. The setup was misleading. But if contests were easy to win, would the lottery system be a bazillion-dollar industry?

Jerry, do you care that I misspelled your name?

Next Post: The Care and Feeding of Procrastination

Bloggers Clearinghouse Contest!!

2011-06-29T09:24:00.001-04:00

To any readers who are able to find the TYPO in the recent Jerry Garcia/Seth Godin post: I will personally snail mail you a fabulous prize of no monetary value, culled from my family's generations-old habit of high-class hoarding. You think I'm kidding? The catch: You have to be brave enough to send me your mailing address. (Note: I am too busy stalking my kids to stalk other people, and everyone in my family gets lost going to the bathroom so I wouldn't be able to find your house, not to mention your city.)

Hint: Not easy to find typo. After all, I am a world-class editor. I'll send my email adds after you comment. Privacy guaranteed!

HOW TO KEEP WRITING, PART 4: Advice From Jerry Garcia (& Seth Godin)

2011-06-27T15:11:00.000-04:00

Today's post comes from Seth Godin, uber-sales guy. What sets him apart from the slick and slimy is that he shows actual respect for human beings. (Among his zillion book titles, my personal favorite title is Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing Out of Sync?)

His message is for us, writer tribe. What is "success?" Here's a confession: Once I received a gorgeous note from someone who'd read my chapbook Bone China. A certain poem helped her through a tough family situation. The next day I got a form rejection from a magazine I was dying to publish in--a magazine that had led me to believe they liked my work. Guess what I spent the next two weeks obsessing over?

In his post The Grateful Dead and the Top 40, Seth wonders whether "Jerry ever got jealous of acts that were able to put songs on the radio. (The Dead had exactly one hit record...) I hope not..." he continues.

If you think your writing career resembles the walking dead, Jerry Garcia will give you something to live for.

HOW TO KEEP WRITING: PART 3. ADVICE FROM MY DAD

2011-06-21T22:18:00.000-04:00

My father was an intellectual and grammarian whose profession was advertising, which left him with a certain amount of inner conflict. He took fine umbrage at the cigarette ads, which, in the presophisticated 1960s, promised that "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should." "It should be AS a cigarette should!" he thundered.

Correct English was a given in our family. My grammar is almost impeccable; I only have trouble remembering definitions of grammatical terms like "pluperfect."

Actual writers spend very little time on words like "pluperfect." The word "perfect" is another story. We get very hard inside when it comes to evaluating our own work. Our brains become like a fist around them, trying to squeeze out the flaws and air bubbles. (Or should it be "as a fist"?)

I didn't start writing fiction until after my father died. But when I was 10, I snitched the manual typewriter from my parents' bedroom because I had an urge to write a story. For some reason, I wanted to write about life in a bubble gum factory. Because I knew nothing about how gum is made, I clacked out one sentence and then stopped. I hit the return a few times to make a space, then typed, "Just how in hell does one write a short story?" (Note the elegant diction.) I went off to do ten year old stuff and forgot about it.

Later, I saw that my father had come into my room and read my sentence. I knew this because he answered my question, writing in pencil on the typewritten page: "You just keep on going."

It was good advice, but it also shows up one thing that keeps writers going: relationship. What my dad really meant was: "Keep on. You can do it." He could have yelled at me for taking the typewriter. He could have gotten mad that I used the word "hell." Or not bothered to read my sentence.

I'll always remember how his casual advice made me feel. Thank you, Dad!

Do the people who evaluate your work encourage you to do better? Is there an emotional intelligence to the criticism, however tough the criticism may be?

HOW TO KEEP WRITING: PART 2. Tricks, Chocolate, and Being Stuck

2011-06-13T22:09:00.001-04:00

Here's a categorical statement: Time spent not writing IS writing time. This Zen-ish conundrum speaks to some core truths about creativity:

Remember being kind to yourself? (More on Chocolate below!) Consider: Would it detract from a vacation to find a book to read on the plane? If you don't resent preparing an itinerary for a trip, why beat yourself for "not writing" if you spend time editing, doing research, reading for inspiration, or mulling over your characters' conflicts?

writing is putting one word in front of another

The creative brain thrives on detours. Once I endured days of frustration because I had the time and inclination to write a short story, but no ideas. It was like constipation, only worse. Then I happened to watch The Darjeeling Limited. I think the movie's off-center dialogue jogged the non-linear part of my brain. An idea for a story came to me in the theater, and it had nothing to do with the movie (except that 2 main characters are Indian). It was an emotional connection.

There's hard science behind this anecdote. Livia Blackburne is a brain scientist and Young Adult fiction writer. In a 2010 guest post for Problobber on brain function and creativity, Livia briefly explains their science. Her Brainy Writer's Blog is inspiring because of how she unpacks the creative process.

When you're stuck, change gears. Let go of your current direction.

1. Walk away from the work. Let go of the urge to "fix" it. Concentrate on physical tasks; clean out that awful closet. Changing focus may feel dreadful. You may think you'll never write again. This only proves that you care too much ever to quit. Or take micro-breaks. Look away from your work environment (out the window, at pictures on the wall). Don't try to accomplish anything. Just observe. There's more going on in your field of vision than first appears.

2. Catch yourself slant: Keep notebook and pencil around; catch yourself at unguarded times: On waking first thing in the morning, or when you emerge from a completely non-writing task. Write down whatever comes to mind regarding any potential solution to your writing problem. Don't censor. Keep this up for a week or two. See what emerges.

3. Have the courage to trust yourself.

4. Read out of your genre. If you're intimidated by poetry/science writing or avoid biography,

dive into them. Try reading out loud. Confuse your habitual mind with new information. Marisel Vera, in a post on She Writes, describes how painful criticism of her "workmanlike prose" led to a practice of reading poetry that deepened her language and understanding of her characters...and led to the publication of her first novel, If I Bring You Roses. Kudos to Marisel!

Marisel Vera's First Novel

5. Chocolate! Reward yourself after a period of work with a meaningful treat. Don't worry about whether you met your original writing goal. Did you put in the time?

What do YOU find helpful when you're stuck?

HOW TO KEEP WRITING: PART 1

2011-06-05T18:05:00.000-04:00

Following through on writing projects (or any other endeavor that's not "necessary" to life) is a common problem for people who really DO want to write, or paint, or learn to refinish furniture. Over the next few weeks, I'll be posting a series on how to deal with it.

Time can be a bear. Work/family/money responsibilities can suck up energy and leave us wondering if we'll ever have the mojo to finish a project. Still, a lot of the problem stems from things we either believe about ourselves or tell ourselves. Here are some solutions:

1. Accept yourself. Telling yourself "I should be writing," or more specifically, "I should get up at 5:30 a.m. and write for an hour" or "I should write x-# words per day" FEELS motivating. It puts you in a position of solid judgment where you're the one who tells...well, you, what the score is. The problem is, it really ISN'T motivating. It's actually punitive. It implies an accusation should you fail. Finding your writing voice is much deeper than discovering how your words sound on the page. It has to do with giving yourself permission to be your screwed-up self.

2. Inertia is not your friend. Life will conspire to make it difficult for you to carve out writing time. Accept this. When the moment to do ANYTHING remotely related to writing presents itself, go for it. I began a novel one September afternoon 15 minutes before my daughter was due home from school. 15 minutes has a way of adding up.

3. Make friends with the voices in your head. They will tell you "there's no point," they will tell you you suck, they will tell you nobody cares, they will tell you that you're selfish for pursuing writing. The point isn't whether they are right or wrong. After all, who can say for sure? The point is, the voices don't go away. Writers/artists/strivers both famous and obscure all struggle with this. I sure do! Make friends with those nasty monkeys, knowing that they will always have some rude comment for you. When they tell you you're wasting your time, smile and say, "Thanks for sharing." Humor them, but laugh at their acne.

4. Structure is your friend. Whatever structure looks like for you, it will help you keep going. Input from other writers, whether online or via email or face to face, deadlines (however you come by 'em), use of editorial services, scheduling, whatever might help, try it. More on this next week!

5. Incremental progress is progress. See #2. Better to write a sentence a day than none at all. Better to write crap than nothing (and maybe it isn't crap--you're not always the most objective judge). See #3.

6. Don't wait to feel the magic. Published writers all have one thing in common--they work very hard, through boredom, discouragement, and every other state of mind. I've found that feeling inspired when I write a passage doesn't necessarily make it good. (Sometimes that's just about emotional release, when really I need to focus more on structure.) A writing session that feels "clunky" and "off" can produce fine work.

7. Detours are part of the journey. MFK Fisher, renowned food writer and author of How to Cook a Wolf, experienced her lover's dire illness and suicide, the suicide of her brother, gave birth to an illegitimate child (in 1943), and married (and divorced) a mentally ill man who'd already been through 5 wives. In the middle of all this, she published 9 books. Then Fisher went to care for her dying father, and for 12 years she published nothing, considering herself a has-been. Oh, but she didn't stay in the doldrums. She published 14 more books.

The takeaway from this is NOT" and I can't even manage to spit out one!" The point is: Unless you're dead, it's not too late. Unless you give up.

And even if you give up, you can still go back to writing.

Next Week: Writing Structures, Tricks and Chocolate.

Where's My Body in All This?

2011-05-28T13:49:00.000-04:00

Nowadays when I get stuck on a writing project, I'm learning to move my attention away from the problem I'm trying to solve. I close my eyes and pay attention to what's happening in my body as a result of being stuck. Where's the tension located? I take time to feel it. Is there sadness beneath the hard surface? A feeling of freedom somewhere under the skin? I simply watch; I don't feel obligated to obtain a result from the momentary quiet, which is a relief.

It's kind of weird how we run around in our bodies, but we live as if reality takes place in the mind. Actually, the body is a kind of subtext--things that we don't want to consciously acknowledge are written there.

And sitting quietly can free up access to corners of your consciousness where you already know how to solve a problem. When I'm really tense, sitting quietly reminds me that there's more to me than the reactive, pissy me.

Again and again, I have to remind myself to do this. Old habits die hard! The body can be a source of wisdom, but it's too easy to treat it like a household appliance, used so often it's almost forgotten.

Slow-Roasted Writing, or Fast Food?

2011-05-19T17:51:00.002-04:00

There's quick-turnaround writing, and then there's the slow roasted variety.

Blogs are in the first category. No matter how long the writer spends on a post, the reader's click and scan are very fast. Not interested? Click somewhere else. To compete in the boundary-blasted crazy virtual world where we increasingly hang out, some bloggers hint at instant gratification. Lifestyle blogs. Parenting blogs. Spirituality blogs. Sometimes you get the impression from the "About" section of the home page that the writer has mastered Zen and is offering you enlightenment in about 3 weeks.

But if you read on, behind that slick surface can be a pretty damn interesting life. You find a lot of travail and intelligence and guts in the posts--as when Vietnamese Zen monk Thich Nhat Hahn says that if you look deeply enough at a flower, you can see the presence of compost and garbage, rain and sunlight.

Scientists tell us that plants actually contain light particles

The problem is there are so many of us doing this. The slick interface is a bid for attention, but it risks turning people off. Come to think of it, competition is the problem with "slow" writing, too--there are books that take years to write and never find publishers. To generate actual subscribers, bloggers engage in the similar intense marketing practices that book authors have to pursue. Then again, some don't! ("0" comments, anyone?)

In both cases, the writer is in danger of losing something. Writing is pretty magical--totally symbolic, those squirmy marks on the page can create worlds. They can make a reader feel that someone understands. Words can bring back the dead. They grope toward wisdom.

We writers teeter on a razor's edge--once a writer creates a world, she wants people to experience it, and we can become obsessed with marketing, as if that determines the validity of the work. Once I received a lovely email from someone who had found a poem of mine greatly helpful in a family situation she faced. The same week, I got about 4 rejection letters for my work. I poured all my energy into pouting about the rejections, as if the genuine connection with a reader didn't "count."

Something wrong with that picture. So, bloggers, writers: Remember the nature of the flower. Try not to get caught up in trying to package it for a quick sale. It's a lovely truth--the nature of the flower remains the same, even if no one's looking.

P.S.
Here's a cool blog that shows real guts and life experience: http://www.evolvingblog.com/ The ever-sassy Torrey Shannon really has something to say.

After the Fight, Pip and Estella Kiss, and...?

2011-05-10T21:29:00.002-04:00

(PICTURE OF SWEET VICTORIAN COUPLE HAS BEEN REMOVED. I STOLE IT AND I DON'T WANT TO GET SUED.)

If Charles Dickens were writing today, would there be sex scenes in his books?

If the answer is Yes, would he still be Charles Dickens?

(This is a real question.)

National Short Story Month and the Near-Death of My Son

2011-05-06T21:12:00.060-04:00

Since May is my son's birthday month, here's one way I'm celebrating: With a tale involving short stories...

May is also National Short Stories month. NSSM was started by Dan Wickett of the Emerging Writers Network and Dzanc Books. (Thanks for the cool logo, Dan!) In a guest post at Fiction Writers Review, Dan explains how the idea came about--and how EWN and others are celebrating short fiction. (NOTE: Above titles ARE live links...don't know why it doesn't appear that way.)

PF's birth was traumatic. I was well into labor when I got yanked from the Jacuzzi in the birthing suite at Pennsylvania hospital. The midwife ran me through a tunnel below Eighth Street on a wheeled stretcher and into the OR. The baby's heartbeat had dangerously slowed.

"I should be praying," I thought. "I should be doing something." There were a million people running around. I asked the obstetrician, "Is my baby gonna die?" She was too intent on her work to give much of an answer. The anesthesia worked, so I didn't feel the knife cutting through seven layers of tissue. The birth felt like someone rummaging in a drawer.

My husband stood up to watch, but he sat down when he saw the blood. Someone brought the baby for me to look at. PF was big--full term and over 9 pounds. He had large dark eyes, his face was speckled with blood, and he gazed at me calmly. He seemed interested.

During labor, the placenta had separated from the wall of the uterus, and we were both in danger. A day and a half later, while a nurse was feeding him, PF stopped breathing. They rushed him to intensive care and intubated him.

He was the biggest baby there. The preemies looked to be almost a different species. My husband was watching when PF pulled out his breathing tube. The kid was done with hospitals. He came home on a breathing monitor, which continually malfunctioned, but his breathing remained stable.

PF's early claim to fame was that he slept through the night from birth. We set a timer and woke him up for midnight feedings. I considered it divine intervention. In fact I was overwhelmed and depressed, and that I could rely on him to sleep gave me a small feeling of normality.

In those time-lost days of C-section recovery, I cuddled my son and read the short stories of John Cheever. They reassured me. The world I grew up in was still there, despite the financial stress of my new marriage. Cheever's myth of privilege and family disconnection gave my sadness a focus, helped me feel less overwhelmed. Emotionally, I'd come apart. If I wasn't me anymore, I wasn't anyone. I had no faith that I could be a mother to the mysterious being who'd been pulled from my body.

Cheever's The Day the Pig Fell Into the Well describes a family's attempt to maintain its sense of being special, or favored, by refusing to admit the mediocrity of the choices they've made. Reading it, I inhaled the atmosphere of our family's summer house on Cape Cod. I "shared with (the Nudd family) the feeling that the clear light of July and August was imparting something rare to all their minds and careers." This promise fails as the Nudd children become grown. Toward the end, the "realization that none of them had done well made (their mother) sink back in her chair." This comforted me. There was a reason for their despair, and possibly for mine; I felt compassion for the Nudds, who told each other the pig story yearly because the truth about how life had drowned them was too painful: "What made the summer always an island, she thought; what made it such a small island? What mistakes had they made?...Why should these good and gentle people around her seem like the figures in a tragedy? --'Remember the day the pig fell in the well?' she asked." Everyone jumps on the old story, relating their parts as if scripted, and Mrs. Nudd feels better. Life can go on.

In The WASP culture where I grew up, the world Cheever explores, emotional disconnection was a choice that enabled people to maintain their feeling of privilege. Having a child unmoored me. But I knew even then that I was privileged to be able to make different choices where my own children were concerned.

Always telling stories...

On his way to Istanbul, Junior year

23 years later, as my son is about to graduate from college, I still love the story, but now I read it from a different perspective. As a family, we have dealt with the tough stuff. My fragile infant son has grown into a man of compassion and wisdom. In Mrs. Nudd's words, he has "done well." And that's going to continue.

HOW TO ENJOY INSOMNIA

2011-04-30T09:24:00.000-04:00

You can learn useful things about yourself when you're lying awake in the middle of the night not doing anything. Things that might make a difference the next time you find yourself awake when you don't want to be. For me, it's the most mentally chaotic state to be in--my mind pings from one scenario to another, and yet my body is still.

Or is it? What I'm learning is that mind and body affect one another equally. It's tempting to think that insomnia is all in the mind--that the body's at the mercy of the racing mind, and if I could just slow that down...Actually, I've noticed that when muscles tighten in my back or neck, my mind reacts, jumping around faster.

If I try to use the time to think about something, say, what to do with a certain character in my novel, maybe get rid of him altogether, I can't concentrate worth squat. When I really get going, I'm in one thought for about 3-5 seconds before popping to the next scenario.

It's interesting to observe yourself. Don't try to get anywhere. It's an experiment. The nice thing is, this approach lets you off the hook. You don't have to accomplish anything; you don't have to get back to sleep or solve some thorny problem.

The night isn't really barren

I manage to relax one muscle in my back, and my mind quiets...just a little bit. Or I pay attention to my breath. The breath reveals where I'm tense, and being tense is okay. Then I try breathing in a way that feels good in my body. But maybe I'm too worked up to pull that off. Okay, so where does my body feel comfortable? Oh, my feet are actually feeling happy there under the covers...

It's kind of enjoyable. And I surprise myself. I go back to sleep.
Or maybe I don't. Maybe the concentration lasts five minutes, and maybe the five minutes is chopped up between worrying. That's okay. It's incremental. Writing a novel is incremental. Raising children takes a long time. Learning to quiet down inside is a skill, and it takes practice.

And tomorrow night, maybe you'll sleep like a kitten.

THE BEATINGS WILL STOP WHEN MORALE IMPROVES

2011-04-23T14:39:00.002-04:00

My creative writing students recently asked me about my work process. I was flattered. It made me feel like an authority. The funny thing is, although they seemed to be interested in what I said, I can't REMEMBER what I said.

The truth is, that process (whatever the heck it was) has been driving me crazy. I'm really good at sitting down, getting a bead on my work goals for the day, zapping the target dead center. I'm dogged about revising. I'm obsessive about sending work out to magazines. But I was so focused on the frustrations of trying to get published, trying to accumulate readers, trying to finish the blinkin' endless novel, that I was turning into some post-modern incarnation of a WWII fighter pilot, who'd mark the plane with a red slash of paint every time he made a kill. (In my case, an acceptance. And for all my relentless diligence, there weren't many slashes.)

It's beginning to dawn on me that the writing-as-air-warfare model has nothing to do with why I started writing in the first place. Being raised Quaker oughta kinda shoulda told me that my true inspiration might not be Mars, the God of War...?

Funny how we miss the obvious

Can it be that one sign that you're on the right track is: Are you enjoying the work? No, I'm not talking about rejection letters, the financial uncertainty, the insecurity of wondering if the last revision was really an improvement. You'd have to be crazy to enjoy these. But the act of writing--or cooking, or whatever you do that you once found joy in doing. Do you lose yourself in it, or does the work make your jaw tighten, your mind obsess?

I'm going to start small in my exploration of how creative work can be nurturing, not straining. I'll begin with my body. As I work, I'll spend some time in silence, looking not into the screen of magic and disillusion, but out the window. Just look...notice how vibrant the grass is with all this rain. I won't push for a result. My eye rests on something that causes relaxation to settle in my back and shoulders--at this moment, the motion of birds, the fast, gentle rain as it causes horizontal surfaces to dance with motion. Words will come to me; they always do.

I'm waiting for the arrival of a new muse, a female one. A Quaker one?! :)

What about you? Can you take a moment away to refresh your body and mind? If you don't have a room with a view, are there pictures you can rest with in a meditative way? Does certain music reach below the tension? If concentration is an issue, start small. Don't pressure yourself. Take a few seconds here and there. Just look, just listen, just close your eyes and feel the air on your skin. See what happens.

New Blog: WritingNurture. For writers, readers, and anyone who wants to maintain their sanity despite the work they do.

2011-04-20T06:39:00.001-04:00

The above is too long for a tagline, so I've settled on this (for now):

WritingNurture: Work. Balance. Sanity.

What do you all think?

Small Blog Seeking Healthy Tagline

2011-04-18T12:29:00.000-04:00

I'm happy with the new title of my blog. The next step is a tagline--a short phrase, maybe three words, that appears right after the title and clearly promises what the reader will find.

I don't want to appeal only to people who self-identify as "Writers." I'd like the tagline to make that clear--the blog is for anyone who uses words thoughtfully, in whatever sphere of life. I for one don't only "work" as a writer! I'm a mother, wife, writer, manager, editor--changing roles a zillion times a day. I'll be exploring ways that the work we do can nurture us and other people, rather than wearing everyone down. Awareness of what's happening in our bodies, which we often ignore, is a good place to start.

I'd love your suggestions!

Some possible taglines: WritingNurture: Working for Joy
or Writing for Joy ??
Is that...I don't know. New Age cheesy? Sound like the title of a self-indulgent seminar?

WritingNurture: Body Mind Joy
Does this make me sound like a yoga teacher? I don't do yoga!

WritingNurture: Writing, Life, Balance Kind of like that one. I think this may be it.

How about Live, Balance, Write ? Too vague?

I would really appreciate your feedback. Let me know if you have other ideas for a tagline!

WWJC, or, Which Chaplain Would Jesus Choose?

2011-04-14T10:11:00.003-04:00

I am going to change my blog. Not my life, mind you. That's too much of a project. In weeks to come, the look of it will change. No more drab, 70s powder-room decor with vague birds flapping off somewhere! This is the age of clean white possibilities. Oh, and search engines. (Soon. I promise.)

The new focus will be on the writing process and spiritual growth. So there's going to be humor, natch. For one thing, I've got a lot of religious ambivalence. Choices! Who's right? Aaagh! One thing I like about being a Quaker is that it can contain all that. You can be all, Which end is up? and still be an okay Quaker.

So, forthwith, my first post takes a "searing, compellingly readable look" at the smorgasbord of religious options available to us here in the US through a sociological sample of a representative population. (I stole the quote from the back of someone else's book.)

Observations on viewing photograph portraits of the various chaplains at a large university. READ AND CONSIDER:

The Zen chaplain looks like a cancer patient without any hair, but she actually looks really healthy. She seems happy.

The Evangelical Christian chaplain looks friendly and happy but unhealthy and blowsy, like he might drop dead from corroded arteries during a service.

The Historically Black Church chaplain looks like someone you'd want to invite to a tense family gathering, because he'd get everyone talking and help them to relax. Ergo, he looks happy.

The Islamic chaplain looks extremely intelligent and his eyes sort of bore into you. He might be happy. He probably has 3 PhDs. He has a tasteful little beard.

The Pagan chaplain looks like she would rather not have her picture taken. She looks like she would be happy if she weren't being frozen in film. She looks healthy in an earthy sort of way. But clean.

The Protestant Christian Ministry chaplain has a very funny name which I can't repeat here. It's good that he has a funny name because his picture is so boring. His surname rhymes with that of a famous porn star.

The Episcopal chaplain looks very smart and friendly in the way of person who never got a bad grade in her life but saw right through the popular kids. Possibly her legs are quite heavy, but if so she doesn't care. She's so beyond that.

The Jewish chaplain seems to be the oldest one in the group. He might be happy, but he's doing something self-conscious with his mouth. He is never seen without his jacket and tie. Of all of 'em, he probably spends the most time sitting at white-linen-covered tables at fundraising banquets.

Maybe the Lutheran chaplain has to wear the collar, but with that wide lapel blue jacket? Her photo looks like the kind of high school graduation picture you'd hide in a drawer. Ooohg, this is getting petty! Hey, it's a photo, not a biography.

The Baptist chaplain looks like someone's awkward teenage son. I said "awww," when I saw his picture, and I hope the students are nice to him. He looks like he's trying really hard to look happy, but like he doesn't understand half the foul language the college kids use. He tries to fake it with this anxious smile.

Judging from the hooded robe, the Roman Catholic is an actual monk--a Vote in his Favor. But his haircut is middle management. He looks happy and fun, as if he's about to say, "Please. Call me Tony." (Interesting that the guy has the first name of a famous cartoon character.)

--So, based solely on my completely superficial interpretation of their photos, which chaplain would you go to for spiritual counsel? And what, pray tell, would Jesus do?

The Art of Silence

2011-04-05T07:52:00.000-04:00

I suppose being raised in Quaker meeting predisposed me to learn to meditate. Meeting for Worship is based on the notion that sitting in respectful group silence is a way of directly hearing from God. Really there's a lot of faith involved. As I grew up, I always felt confused in church services, even run-of-the-mill Protestant ones. What to do with the bulletin? How do you know you're turning to the right hymn? Then there was the agony of shaking hands with strangers, and all of this was somehow supposed to have to do with prayer.

In Catholic services, I was so lost I didn't even try. Plus there was worship stuff non-Catholics either didn't need to do or weren't supposed to do, so I was safer as an observer.

Along with First Day (Sunday) Meeting, I've been going to a "secular" Buddhist center a couple of times a week for the past year. We sit for 30-45 minutes, then there's teaching. The kind of meditation they teach focuses simply on the breath. I love the fact that meditation is experimental, that it doesn't seek results. This diminishes anxiety--the goal isn't to relax, but to notice. Where is the tension in my body? Does it hurt? Does it move? What happens if I relax my jaw?

There's nothing passive about it, but it's blessedly without a goal. In my writing life, I'm so driven to get the work written, to be published. I needed a counter to all that--ambition can dominate the mind and throw everything off.

What do you do to relax? Does your mind ever race for more, striving for achievement, then tumbling downhill into worry? How do you deal with it?

My Interview on Seattle Examiner: How Artists Persist, Despite Discouragement

2011-03-30T23:12:00.000-04:00

Jennifer Connor, editor of Books to Go Now, kindly offered to feature my essay on how artists keep going in the face of rejection, discouragement over one's perceived inabilities, etc...(etc. etc. ad nauseum!)

Writers, Don't Give Up!

My Latest Story Publication!

2011-03-12T15:51:00.000-05:00

I'm thrilled that my new story, "Did You Put the Cat to Bed?" is available for download onto either ereader or computer. It'll set you back by $1.99!

Did You Put the Cat to Bed?
from BookstogoNow

It's also available for Kindle on Amazon.

Blacks, Whites, Quakers, Trouble: A History

2011-03-04T07:08:00.000-05:00

The first official protest against slavery in North America was written by four Quaker men in Germantown, Philadelphia in 1688: "And those who steal or robb men, and those who buy or purchase them, are they not all alike? To bring men hither, or to rob and sell them against their will, we stand against."

The petition was kicked around to varying levels of Quaker decision-making bodies, each of which dismissed it (in the words of what is now Abington Monthly meeting) as "so weighty that we think not expedient for us to meddle with it here."  The "weighty" part was that a lot of Quakers owned slaves.

The often agonizing relationship between American Quakers and African Americans from colonial days to the present is exhaustively covered in Fit for Freedom, Not for Friendship: Quakers, African Americans and the Myth of Racial Justice written by Donna McDaniel and Vanessa Julye. According to them, "the 1750s became the 'crucial decade' for those (Quakers) working against enslavement." Quakers were the first denomination in America to prohibit its members from owning or trading slaves.  60-some years, 16 pages of tiny print in the book, and lots of waffling, debate, and pain lie between that first appeal and the actual steps toward justice for which Quakers are renowned. That sterling reputation is, unfortunately, a myth, at least when it's applied to the Society of Friends as a whole.

Whatever the issue: from the morality of slavery, the dynamics of Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws and segregation, equal rights, how European-American Quakers should relate to the Black Power movement, to figuring out how integration can work successfully, progress has always been incremental. Quakers stood for the integration of public schools well before most were ready to consider opening the doors of Quaker schools to Black students. Initially, some of those who were accepted had to live as pariahs in the community.

The 350-year sweep of the history says something about small steps. If progress is incremental, then every flicker counts. In 1688, a couple of miles from where I live, 4 men issued a protest. They were ignored, but other voices spoke up, increasingly, until momentum swung the course of history. In a way this is encouraging; the cumulative effect of many individual acts of courage on the part of Blacks and Whites is like the accretion of spring water into a lake that's harnessed to power electricity.

Racism persists. There's still plenty to do, and there are plenty of opportunities to challenge it. In a way, there's good news:  What each one of us does, says, and thinks really matters.

NICE TRY, YOUR MAJESTY

2011-02-17T20:30:00.000-05:00

Apparently, the King of Bahrain recently attempted to squash protest in his domain by giving each family among his subjects $2,650.

I don't think it worked. Bahrain, which hosts a fleet of the U.S. Navy seen as as safeguard against Iran, has been rocked with demonstrations. Maybe the marginalized Shia majority in that nation used some of that money to purchase a book of poems by the 14th-Century Persian poet Hafiz. Here, in honor of all holy protest and discontent, is a poem by Hafiz. It could have burst out of the heart of the late 20th century.

DAMN THIRSTY

First

The fish needs to say,

"Something ain't right about this

Camel ride--

And I'm

Feeling so damn

Thirsty."

What would your personal retreat look like?

2011-02-05T11:52:00.001-05:00

I'm lucky. This week I took a few days away at Pendle Hill, a Quaker retreat center near Philadelphia. I have about an hour before lunch, then it's back to real life.

But hey, dummy this is real life!!
Some things I've gotten from my time here (in no order, with no particular evaluation of relevance):

a) I'm not ready to become a vegetarian.
b) Realizing I need to change my relationship to the computer. I feel tyrannized by it.
c) Reading a pretty amazing book on the history of the relationship between Quakers and African Americans.
d) Realizing that my reading life is too driven by what I think I ought to read, rather than what I love. As if I could ever catch up!
e) Spent a fruitful afternoon at the Quaker Collection in the library at Haverford College. Read the original letters that my grandfather wrote home from France ca. 1918. Writing-wise, something's cookin', but I can't say what. Because I don't know yet. They have a roomful of fiction either by Quakers or about them. The room isn't very big.
f) Not-Doing is important.
g) Grateful I could hang out for a few hours with my friend Wol.

This retreat was a success because my perspective has shifted a bit. I didn't come in with any goals, but life is all around us, always changing.

If you could take a personal retreat, where would you go? What would it consist of? Would you take a computer? Would you let yourself take naps? Chime in!

BARACK OBAMA, TIGER FATHER

2011-01-27T06:48:00.000-05:00

My daughter had school on Wednesday. It wouldn't have been unusual except that snow had been falling for hours when we got up, which usually sends Philadelphia into a tizzy. Three hours later, she called from school to say the place was shutting down.

On the tortuously slow drive in, I joked that her head of school made the decision to open because of the Sputnik Moment--Obama's observation that too much of the world outstrips the US in education, and that the collective "We" would have to kick some serious math and science butt in order to keep up economically. Probably her school was going to fire the art teachers and double up the math classes.

She was not amused. But it made me think. Okay, this was also inspired by reading about Amy Chua (no, I haven't read her book.) The Russians didn't get Sputnik up there by jumping in and doing the job for their kids every time they had trouble making a bed or using a screwdriver. By letting rudeness dominate when a meal isn't to a child's liking. By worrying that if we set firm limits and stick to them, we might damage their psyches.

All of which I've been guilty of doing. Chua's message is that kids are strong and capable. Don't discredit them by forgetting that. Obama's message is that the United States is strong, but disciplinary measures will be needed to keep it that way.

I'm in the arts; arts funding is going to be cut. Well, they gotta do something about the deficit. I say, let's not waste a moment's energy by directing our energies away from the creative work at hand. Under the system that produced Sputnik, artists and writers either gave up or risked their lives to keep working. That's a far cry from where we are. We're challenged. But that's not an excuse to throw in the towel.

At least, that's what I'm going to tell my daughter when, today being an actual snow day, that Yes: some work around the house will be involved.

NEW AND IMPROVED WEBSITE

2011-01-22T16:18:00.000-05:00

New and improved is an oxymoron. But everyone knows what it means! Here's my updated website, designed by my very talented husband, Steve.

Helen W. Mallon, Editor

Definition: An editor sits in the sun all day and doesn't work very hard. Oh, and people send her money.

HEADS UP, CONTEST-HUNGRY LITERARY WRITERS!

2011-01-17T11:34:00.000-05:00

The Guide to Literary Agents blog is sponsoring a cool contest--no fee--for writers of literary novels. The deadline is next Sunday, January 23. They want the first 150 to 200 words of your novel and a one-sentence synopsis. (Piece of cake!) 3 prizewinners will receive critique of the first 10 pages of the novel by the agent judge and a free one-year subscription to writersmarket.com

The website, run by Chuck Sambuchino, is a great resource for any writer seeking publication.
Contest details here

I'm entering. And good luck to everyone else who does!

Does Thee Like Bob Dylan?

2011-01-15T11:56:00.000-05:00

The Quaker plain speech began as a way of protesting social rank. The early English Friends did a lot of jail time for their radical views, and their somewhat combative social identity was predicated on not deferring to people of higher rank with the pronoun "You," or condescending to those of lower rank with the more familiar "Thee." We were all meant to be "friends," after all.

It's still around today. More broadly, at issue is the Quaker testimony of "simplicity" in life and speech whereby (as Jesus admonished in the gospel) our yea should be yea, our nay, nay, and we shouldn't have to swear by God's name in order to prove our honesty. Titles conferring rank are discouraged, if sometimes necessary.

When I was 10, my family applied for passports to visit the English side of the family. It's hard to believe now, but the process involved some sort of government official in an office building in downtown Philadelphia, a Bible, and a discussion between my parents and said official about "swearing" versus "affirmation." In the end, we affirmed, rather than swore, something that made the government okay with letting us out of the country. This is, apparently, protected in the Constitution, no doubt having to do with the influence of early Quakers and other non-conformist religious groups. I can't remember if we touched the Bible or not. If we did, I think it was a concession to The Man on my parents' part. (The first time I heard anyone use the word "idolatry"--in a shocked and disapproving tone--was when I came home from tennis camp and told my mother that we kids had to recite the Pledge of Allegiance every morning.)

My English grandmother, who lived near us in Philadelphia, used the plain speech all the time. It was so much a part of her that I can't remember how she handled non-Quakers--increasingly, most of the people in our lives. She, and other plain speakers I've encountered, used a non-grammatical form of "thee and thou" that was once common in the North of England, where, incidentally, she grew up. So the fancy-schmancy "dost thou want tea?" never entered my ears. Rather, "Does thee want tea?' Nice and homely.

When I was about ten and my brother twelve, our mother embarked on a doomed Plain Speech Crusade in our household. We were too old; we were unwilling to be dragged backward in time. "We Quakers are a queer lot," my grandfather complained in a 1920 letter to his father, and my brother and I didn't want to feel queer-er than we already did. I considered myself locked in a time warp in a house dominated by the somber tick and chime of various clocks made from dark wood that were tended and wound up like family members.

"Baby, it's you," the Beatles sang on my rickety record player in those days. "Nothing you can do but you can learn to be you in time." "You say you want a revolution..." And when Bob Dylan told me, "Whatever colors you have in your mind/I'll show them to you and you'll see them shine," it just wouldn't have been the same, rendered in plain speech.

Mommy Angst

2011-01-10T07:06:00.000-05:00

A few days ago, I thought my daughter was having a seizure. She's a teenager. Perhaps those go together, perhaps not. We were having dinner at Applebee's. I glanced up from the menu to look at her sitting across from me, but her eyes were out of focus, pinging bing bing bing, up down, sideways in a complicated trajectory. I stopped breathing for a moment and envisioned her on the floor. Waitstaff calling 911 while she flailed in my arms.

Then she looked at me. "What?"

"I thought you were having a seizure."

She laughed. "Really? I was just rolling my eyes at the stupid song they're playing." I listened. It was a stupid song. So stupid I don't even remember what it was.

***
Two summers ago, I was going through a bad time with my novel-in-progress. I had recently read it through, and it wasn't good. Worse, I didn't know how to fix it. I took to carrying the manuscript around with me in a pink plastic binder in case I should be seized by answers and needed to scribble in it, fast.

It was a broiling hot July day. I had arranged to meet a friend for coffee in Philadelphia. I was running late, I didn't want to be carrying stuff, and I decided to leave the manuscript in my car. So my friend J. and I met, we were drinking iced coffee, she was talking about Virginia Woolf. I distinctly remember that, but I don't remember what she was saying because I had been hit with a moment of panic. I thought of the pink binder containing the book I loved & had been struggling with for 8 years. I thought of the extreme heat of the enclosed car. "Oh, my God," I realized. "I didn't crack any windows and there's no air in there. It can't breathe."

I caught myself before J. could notice my panic and ask "What?" I was the one who started laughing, and as soon as I'd told her about my lunacy, she was laughing, too.

So here's the thing: Embarrassment aside, these moments count for something. There's a touch of insanity in the loves we bear. After all, we're vulnerable. Mothers are not omnipotent; nothing in my power could prevent my child from having an unexpected seizure if that's what her brain was up to.

I think it's one reason people write books and read them--they let us explore our feelings of helplessness in a context over which we have some control. They help us pinpoint what we can change--and how to handle the things we can't.

As far as what might be considered a lapse in sanity, chalk it up to artistic license.

The Guru of Laughter

2010-12-14T17:28:00.000-05:00

In Quaker Meeting for Worship on First Days (Sundays), the elders, or people who carry responsibility for the meeting, sit on the facing benches. (Nowadays that's changed a bit, but anyway.) When I was a child, at our meeting the facing benches were at the front of the room. On a raised bench in one particular spot, week in and week out, sat Dr. McP. He was ancient. He never moved.

I thought he was dead. The reason he was there seemed obvious to me. Every First Day they'd cart him in and prop him up for all to see to remind us to take Meeting really, really seriously.

In Quaker Schools, regular Meeting for Worship is mandatory. During one memorable 7th grade meeting, my friend L and I fell into laughing fits. We were "eldered" out of the room and found to our dismay that life wasn't half so funny on the meetinghouse porch.

I'm not saying that letting 7th graders meeting-bust is a great idea, but what is it about religion that fosters such grave attitudes? According to the New Yorker, the Buddha essentially disapproved of laughter because "the world is burning." I've heard one or two church sermons where the minister went to some lengths to assert that "God does have a sense of humor." Which, if this were obvious, wouldn't need to be hammered from the pulpit, right?

Enter Dr. Madan Kataria, founder of a spiritual movement called Laughter Yoga. With a thousand-bazillion years of Indian religious tradition behind him, he has founded a new spirituality based entirely on the notion that laughter can heal--physically, emotionally, spiritually. It's free, it's social, and it's (duh) fun. No one will boot you out of one of his loose network of laughter clubs for falling-out-hilarity. Dr. Kataria's goal is modest: To win a Nobel prize for creating a worldwide healing movement. Being from India, it seems that the "guru" part of his calling is almost a given.

Medical science hasn't exactly jumped on the bandwagon, but medical science isn't exactly known for its sense of humor. One thing we do know: There's no way science can call this stuff harmful.

It makes me think. No, actually, it makes me want to go find a rubber chicken and do something ridiculous. I mean, life isn't always easy, is it? We can go on with our lives, which may or may not include: Daily/weekly Mass; church services; "quiet times"; keeping a guardian angel air freshener in the car; Bible study; no study; Freudian analysis; meet-a-friend-for-coffee analysis; meditation; Dharma talks; prayer before meals; prayer after meals; yoga; gym workouts; drum circles. Etc.

But I for one am going to look for opportunities to laugh. Really laugh. Full-out, embarrassing, nose-snorting, tears-down-the-face laughter. After all, one reason people make religion such a serious matter is that we take ourselves so darn seriously.

Pileup

2010-12-06T14:16:00.004-05:00

Sometimes, worries pile up. You find yourself awake (again) an hour before you need to get up. Maybe you had a bad dream. Maybe the financial-anxiety gears are already engaged, even before your outer mind has a chance to know what's going on.

Yesterday, I sat in Meeting for Worship in a small Quaker meetinghouse. Someone had lit a fire, and the glass in the old, tall windows around the room rippled when I moved my head, making patterns of the trees outside. I've been seeing that most of my life, and it gives a comforting sense of oldness.

Yesterday, I felt gnarled. Closed and small inside, distracted. I was there, but I wasn't there. Someone stood and spoke the words of Jesus: "Unless you become as little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven." Christianity has a way of turning assumptions upside down; so does Buddhism. Tibetan Buddhist nun Pema Chodron puts it like this: "...when we are nailed with the truth, we suffer...This is where tenderness comes in. When things are shaky and nothing is working, we might realize that we are on the verge of something. We might realize that this is a very vulnerable and tender place, and that tenderness can go either way. We can either shut down and feel resentful or we can touch in on that throbbing quality...When there's a big disappointment, we don't know if that's the end of the story. It may just be the beginning of a great adventure."

Who is more open to adventure than a child? The key is embracing what hurts. Children howl and wail when things go wrong because they haven't learned to put on the mental armor. Their joy is also that much greater.

Much as I'd like to fly away from all this, I am nailed to the present moment. Welcome, life. Sometimes it hurts. What I'm learning is that if I flee from the hurt, it only magnifies. Being with it in tenderness brings in lightness, clarity. The glass may be rippled, but it's more fascinating that way.

My Review of W. D. Ehrhart's The Bodies Beneath the Table

2010-11-28T16:48:00.000-05:00

The Bodies Beneath the Table is the newest book of poems by W. D. Ehrhart, anti-war activist, husband, father, and teacher (at the Haverford School). My review appeared in today's Philadelphia Inquirer. He was kind enough to send me a thank-you note!

OUR FAMILY STORIES

2010-11-20T23:10:00.002-05:00

I teach a creative writing class at Cheltenham Adult School near Philadelphia...It's incredibly gratifying, because you couldn't find a more motivated group of students wedged into the desk chairs of a public highschool classroom.

Recently in class, we discussed the family stories we grew up with. Did our families tell ancestor stories around the dinner table? Was the atmosphere fogged by secrecy? Did the chaos or conflict of the moment dominate conversation? How did the particular voices shape us and our writing?

In the years I've taught the class, our backgrounds and life experience have been about as different as you can imagine: Over-privileged, under-privileged, Black, White, Latino, physically challenged, highly educated, high- school educated. This semester we are joined by a sweet-faced seeing eye dog who rests on the floor, sometimes offering a sigh in response to the conversation.

As we talked about family stories, commonality emerged. The voices we heard as kids shaped us as people, found their way into our writing. Some families spoke one language at home, but English at school. Within those shifts, sometimes deeper shifts demanded adaptation. Street lingo shapes a kid's identity, but maybe it's forbidden at home. Someone else might have heard too much of it at home, wishing the grownups would talk more like grownups. Those voices become part of how you think, how you see the world. Was correct grammar a moral crusade in your household? Do you rely on the world being a formal, highly ordered place? (Those who know me know what I'm talkin' 'bout!) If language was ever used against you as a weapon, what do you now believe about the power of words? And what if most of what you heard at home centered around the phrase "don't ask"?

More complicated, what if the message don't ask was never stated outright? Who'd you go to for information? An aunt? How does that shape your view of what it means to be close to someone? Did you ever dig through anyone's desk, looking for the person who wouldn't reveal herself to you? Were family relationships so chaotic that stories never saw the light of day, except in skirmishes? Was a potential storyteller silent in your family, closing off part of your history? Did stories remain at the level of anecdote, safe, avoiding territory potentially threatening to the family's view of itself?

Secrets. Lies. Lies disguised as truth. How do you find the 'real' story about your family? If that's not important to you, what stories have you created to shape your own identity? What stories are important to tell your spouse, your friends, your kids? What's your "native" diction? In my case, it was highly formal: Two words I knew at a very young age were vulgar and impertinent (the latter often directed at me).

Our heads are full of running commentary--the interior monologue that dominates so much of our conscious life. Family and friends reshape the monologue in relation to our history--the story of who we are changes all the time.

In my view, the really lucky ones get to explore these questions through their writing.

WHY I CAME BACK TO QUAKERISM

2010-11-12T10:16:00.000-05:00

[News flash: the Odyssey lives to tote us around for at least another year. We hope. Parts were replaced. Unless that recent, chugging noise when you turn on the ignition means something dire...]

Here's the real post:

A pastor at the Presbyterian church we attended a few years ago told me that he thought my interest in returning to the Quaker meeting of my youth had to do with authority: Quakers are anti-authority, he said. Since I had been abused by authority figures in my life, I was attracted to a place that didn't have leaders who, though perfectly fine men, made me feel threatened.

It's plausible, but I don't think it's accurate. I find it interesting that the pastor assumed that some pathology or trauma lay at the root of my interest in Quakerism. And did he think I found him threatening? I didn't.

Actually, it's quite simple. I needed silence. Church was full of talk and restlessness. Stand up. Sing a hymn. Sit down. Recite something. Listen to more talk. Go home, cogitate, and then tell someone what you got out of it. Oh, and keep talking to your kids to make sure they 'get it.'

In actual fact, there was nothing wrong with that church. It's a perfectly fine way to conduct worship. Cogito ergo sum. Which looks weirdly (to one who failed Latin) like "cogito is the sum."

For me, in that particular church, the talk was of an exhaustingly rational bent. My verbal and reasoning capacity is already on "hyperactive hyperdrive," to quote Buzz Lightyear. I get tired of walking around under my own head.

And as a fiction writer, it was beginning to dawn on me that words emerge from a well of silence. That deeper part of my mind needed nurturing. So I returned to Quakerism, which I had left behind in evangelical Christian zeal at age 19.

It's really that simple. But I was afraid to talk about it on the blog because of how I would have responded years ago, with all good motives, to anyone who appeared to be rejecting my version of Christianity.

RIP Odyssey?

2010-11-01T08:06:00.004-04:00

When I was little, cars smiled. This made me happy. I had no notion of what a "Ford" or a "Chevy" was. I only cared about anthropomorphizing them. The world was a picture book, and we drove from page to page. In our Ford. Or was it a Chevy?

No, this is not a picture of the family car. Just a happy one, smiling at all the cute kids. Being the Quakers they were, my parents had no interest in 'status' cars. I think our then-car was a smiler, but I never looked at it, head-on, driving toward me.

Somewhere about 1962? cars started looking angry.

GRRRR! Wipe that smile off your face!

As a kid I was convinced that manufacturers had done this deliberately...indeed, it's hard to find a straight-on view of an early 60's car. Hmmm. Maybe manufacturers decided that since they weren't marketing to kids, their product had better look like it knew how to mix martinis.

Fast forward through adolescence to the Ford Pinto, aka Doc. It was my first car and as such was memorable. To the right is the dinner theater version of Doc. The picture makes me think of someone acting the role of Robert De Niro, who's playing a loser who's pretending to be some cool mobster.

The real Doc wasn't shiny, and this pea soup color didn't age well. Doc had an interesting problem, which will be the subject of the next QUIDDITY QUIZ!

Now to today.

Now THAT'S a car. We've had our Odyssey since 2000, and for a while, it turned heads because these were hard to obtain. (It helps if you say you don't care what color you get. We got white, the ugliest car color, except for that pea green.) We've put almost 200k miles on the Odyssey. It's well-designed, even down to a cool sunglass holder. It's been barfed in, cried in, prayed in, driven by children (only on private property, you understand). It's carried bicycles, Christmas trees, and a rescue dog (hence the barf) as well as a Tibetan monk in full regalia.

Two days ago I was on my way to a doctor's appointment. Once the engine warmed up, the car started making that anxious noise that cars make when you try to drive in neutral. I considered pulling in for an investigatory latte at a Starbucks, but decided not to. This was a mistake. The van died five minutes later in traffic, at a red light. "Sounds like the transmission," my husband said when I called him. "Sounds like the transmission," I told the tow truck guy. "Transmission," I told our mechanic. He looked impressed.

We're still waiting to hear the prognosis. The thing is, I'm not ready to say goodbye. I know it's a machine. It doesn't have feelings. But...not once in almost 11 years has this car complained. It's carried us through hail and across national borders. In the same auspicious September a few years ago, it took my son to college and my daughter to her new school for 6th grade.

When I look at the Odyssey head-on, I can't say that it's smiling, but inside, tears and laughter are embedded in the upholstery. Come on, baby. Get well.

QUIDDITY QUIZ: AND THE WINNERS ARE...

2010-10-28T06:58:00.000-04:00

Which was my favorite birthday gift of all time?

A. Those who guessed the Irish fisherman's sweater were on to something. Fablique1 remembers me in such a garment--it didn't hang to my knees (that was poetic license), but I wore it all the time. The sweater was a nice addition, but it didn't change me.

C. I had to include Doc, the Ford Pinto, ugly faithful old pea-green clunker, which was of the kind known for exploding gas tanks, but mine never did. I bought it myself from a roommate of my boyfriend's for one buck. I sold it for $80. Doc had a subtle, insidious problem which will be the subject of the next QUIDDITY QUIZ!

D. The album was to throw everyone off the scent. I was surprised that more people didn't go for it, although some instinct may have told them that a Quaker kid might not value an autograph, symbol of vanity, but this was Bob Dylan, after all. Yes, we had Highway 61, but it was my brother's and it bore no autograph.

B. Which leaves the correct answer, the miraculous red jumping shoes, and TWO WINNERS! Laura and Gina. I was just at the right age--7 or 8, when I still enjoyed frequent dreams of flying around the house. The fire engine red metal plates strapped to my feet, when I bounded around the neighborhood, I felt as though I leapt as high as the trees, transformed. I was a different me. That's what made this the best gift of all.

If the two winners would send either their mailing addresses to hmallon@navpoint.com, they will receive a special gift of no monetary value! If you're not comfortable sending your mailing address, shoot me an email, and I'll do virtual honors. Thanks for playing!

What's In a Name: Or, What's Up With These Quaker Schools?

2010-10-26T07:53:00.003-04:00

At my daughter's Quaker school, the kids call their teachers by their first names. It wasn't the case when I was at Quaker school back in the Neolithic era. It was Mrs., Miss, Mr. "Ms." was still a news item at the time, not yet filtered into the culture.

Some people are convinced that this breeds disrespect in the students. I'll concede that names are powerful. As a kid, I had trouble saying my own name when I met people. For me, anyone labeled Mr. or Mrs., was, by definition, someone I couldn't open up to. My job was to be polite to the "Mrs." I encountered, and the relationship ended there. I probably I lost out on some potential relationships--"Of course I can't risk opening up to adults"--which the adults I encountered would, in fact, have encouraged. Of course, the problem was bigger than how I addressed anyone. When my kids were little, I had a lot of ambivalence about how they should address adults, and the result was a piebald mix of Mr., Mrs., Ms., first names, and the occasional 'Aunt.'

What about respect for authority? What I've noticed at C's school is that the kids who are disrespectful to teachers are the same kids who would, in another, more traditional school, be just as disrespectful--if more outwardly conforming than at a Quaker school.

I'm very grateful that C. is in a place where teachers are approachable. The first-name-basis thing is symbolic of that. The authority/respect issue is mediated by the mutual respect that this community works very hard to maintain across the board. It's not static, and I'm sure it's more time-consuming than the traditional approach. Teachers are accountable for how they interact with students, and students mature in respect as they get older. It can be a messy process, and this is the heart of the matter. Openness is hard to maintain skillfully, but it's necessarily not the doorway to laxity and disrespect.

***

KUDOS TO THOSE WHO PARTICIPATED IN THE QUIDDITY QUIZ.

RESULTS WILL BE POSTED WEDNESDAY NIGHT, 10/27!

QUIDDITY QUIZ

2010-10-23T17:06:00.000-04:00

Quiddity is the essence or whatness of something. Periodically, I will be offering a small prize (virtual or physical) to however many people correctly guess which is true, or on other occasions, which is the whoppingest lie, of several options.

With appreciation to everyone who sent me good wishes, a little party game.

Which of the following was my favorite birthday gift of all time?

A. An Irish fisherman's knit sweater that hung to my knees
B. A pair of bright red jumping shoes (like the old strap on roller skates, but with BIG springs instead of wheels)
C. A 1976 Ford Pinto named "Doc" (more about him later)
D. An autographed copy of Dylan's album Highway 61 Revisited

A Novel About Religious Extremism of the Jewish Variety

2010-10-16T22:45:00.000-04:00

Wherever You Go, the just-published novel by my fellow Vermont College alumna, Joan Leegant, explores radical faith in both its benign and terrifying forms.

Yona Stern, a secular Jew, travels to Israel to restore her relationship with her hardened sister, Dena, who is now part of a radical, right-wing illegal settlement group. Mark Greenglass, an Orthodox Talmud scholar based in Israel, has lost the oceanic, reassuring faith that once rescued him from drug addition, but he's nevertheless been asked to teach at a Yeshiva in New York. Aaron Blinder, a college dropout who's a product of parental indifference and too many hours of Hebrew School, finds meaning and a container for his rage as part of a fringe group in Israel bent on reclaiming all of the land "covenanted to them by God." Leegant deftly braids these three lives together culminating in a conflagration that's much bigger than any of them. Just as the small parcel of land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan has seen outsize conflict, those who walk on its soil risk tripping the wires of religious ideology that are wound tightly around the core of its civil life.

ON SILENCE, FOR FIRST DAY (AKA SUNDAY)

2010-10-10T14:57:00.001-04:00

This brief excerpt is from my novel in progress titled "Quaker Playboy Leaves Legacy of Confusion."

"When she was a child, Quaker meeting had taught her that silence is not empty. It can be rich as plum cake, and sometimes, sitting between her parents on the plain bench, the silence had warmed her. Uh, huh, her mother had said, distracted, when Perry told her and asked her Is that the Inner Light? but it hadn’t really been light; it was more of a color, as if God had smiled and left something behind."

Take a moment to feel the quality of the silence around you.

SARCASM: A LUXURY ANYONE CAN AFFORD

2010-10-07T20:16:00.000-04:00

When I was writing a personal essay about my first marriage at eighteen to a man I affectionately call PsychoTeacher, I sent a draft to my friend, Cynthia, in Texas. My family life as a child and teenager was fairly pickled in black humor (somehow it went with the martinis--my brother and I fought over the olives--and with the boiled tongue that lolled on a platter at the dinner table while my father stood, sharpening the carving knife). This kind of humor being (IMO) one way families have of dealing with stuff that everyone feel-knows is there but no one dares to risk mentioning. Because then it might all come crashing down. Witty put-downs of other family members were quickly atoned for by even wittier (so it seemed) jibes at oneself.

I thought I'd nailed that essay. I'd finessed just the right droll irony to keep it humorous, yet painful. True to life! It was even fun to write! But Cynthia in Texas didn't see it that way. "The sarcastic humor is off-putting," she wrote. "I think you need to go back and feel the pain."

The next two drafts were hell. I didn't sleep, remembered stuff I didn't want to remember, felt feelings I thought I'd left behind in that crappy little apartment with my flute that PsychoTeacher hid when I left. "If I ever, ever, say I want to write a memoir," I told my husband, (my real, first husband, as I think of him) "Shoot me."

"Um," he said.

But I Went There. That's the thing. In order to write stuff that's worth something, you have to go to the places you really don't want to go into. And I found that with the fourth and fifth revision, it became just another piece of writing. "You're rockin' it," Cynthia in Texas wrote to me.

So yes, sarcasm has its place. But as the poet George Herbert said, "Wit's an unruly engine/striking sometimes a friend/sometimes the engineer." I'd say I came out of that writing cauldron somewhat the better. After all, the essay, My Charlie Manson, won a prize. Now you can read it.

A Quaker Child Can't Escape the Silence

2010-09-30T08:57:00.002-04:00

Silence was what drew me back to Quakerism after a long time away from meeting.

Quakerism as I've experienced it is about as no-frills as it gets. "Friends" as they call themselves (as in Religious Society of...) sit in silence and wait. When the Spirit moves someone to speak, she or he stands and talks. That's it. Occasionally a whole Meeting for Worship will pass in which no one is prompted to speak. At the end, a key person shakes hands with the person next to him, and the handshake spreads around the room. Now let's go get some coffee.

The process is hard to write about, because waiting in active silence involves no stuff-- no liturgy, music, ceremony, ritual--though the format being the same, week after week, is a kind of ritual--instead it involves a deep, corporate listening. When I started writing fiction, I realized that my words and stories came from the same inner silence that, despite the tedium, must have impressed something on me in those First Day (Sunday) meetings as a child, and in mid-week meetings at school.

Though meeting at school tended to be more lively. In high school, for weeks my friends and I discussed the possibility of one of us sitting next to the Head of School, and at the handshake, offering him a rubber severed hand complete with bloody stump. Then there was the laughing fit that seized my friend L. and me in 7th grade. We were ushered out of meeting and made to hang out on the porch, which turned out to be boringer than the meeting.

Apparently, the word mystic derives from a Greek word that carries a meaning of silence. If nothing else, mystics hunger for God, and they tend to do it in quiet. As for me, the more words I accumulated in writing, the more I began to hunger for silence. George Fox, the original Quaker, is reported to have held a silence at a meeting where he was presumably the main event, "for some hours...to famish them from words."

To some people it may seem pointless. That's fine. But the mind is deeper than the rational part that chooses words and arguments. That's my experience, anyway.

Here's a book about it., by Brent Bill. Which I admit I haven't read. But the cover is nice.

Quakers and modesty: Hustle, hustle? Horrors!

2010-09-25T20:21:00.002-04:00

For years, I had trouble saying my own name. If anyone asked me, I hid behind my untrimmed teenage hair as if I'd forgotten it. They had to tease "Helen" out of me, or, sometimes, new acquaintances just gave up.

I'm not saying that being raised Quaker caused me to stumble over what felt like announcing myself in flashing neon lights. But the Quaker emphasis on modesty, while praiseworthy in itself--who likes arrogantly religious people?--bears looking into.

Having lived in Philadelphia all my life, I'm no longer surprised by how little even Philadelphia natives know about Quakerism. "Do the women wear those little net caps?" No. "Aren't they terribly conservative?" Well, yes and no. Not politically, anyway. Not in Philadelphia.

Why is it that in the American Vatican City of Quakerism, so few people know about us? My subjective feeling is that it's due to Quaker modesty: Quakers are very uncomfortable with anything that smacks of 'self-promotion,' and they keep an incredibly low profile. They founded the first humane mental hospitals and prisons, they pioneered progressive education. But beware advertising that fact.

--No wonder there are so few Quakers, my cynical side carps.

Or maybe my snarky attitude is merely a reflection of my Quaker family of origin. We were so proud of our modesty: I remember a close family member huffing about the "hubris" that my father-in-law exhibited by putting a so-called 'vanity' plate on his car that showed the name of the company where he happened to be president. Who was more prideful, really?

The truth is, you can't escape hubris. At least one well-regarded Quaker school refuses to put 'honorifics' in its family address book: No "Dr." or "Rev.", etc. Just first and last names of the parents. But--in the faculty section, you can read where everyone went to college and where who got their PhD. In the very competitive realm of college-prep-school-admissions, prospective parents who get hold of the address book will surely check out which teachers went to Harvard.

Eileen Flanagan is the Quaker author of a wonderful book about the Serenity Prayer called The Wisdom to Know the Difference. I have read the book twice. I don't generally like self-help books, but this one has sparked some significant and wonderful changes in my life. I highly recommend it.

In her blog, Eileen talks about the tension between the need to promote the book and the Quaker value of modesty: I've been giving many talks lately, and I can't help but notice that most Quaker meetings haven't bothered to post my coming event on their websites. I haven't complained about this because I don't want to seem overly interested in self-promotion, though I see promoting my talk as an opportunity to tell people in the community that there is a Quaker meeting doing something that at least some people will find interesting. Almost every community has at least one website or Twitter group that announces local events, but Quakers rarely seem to make use of these, let alone submit information about themselves to the newspaper, which is usually quite easy.

In my view, this is a little sad. People could be helped by this book. Potentially, lives could change. And we're hiding the information?

A POEM

2010-09-18T22:09:00.000-04:00

Here's a poem from Bone China, my poetry chapbook:

Wilderness

Where a thousand shadows fell
on a great scourged stone
forgotten, tongues whisper
oh, all the sorrow--
spent cartridges, rain, bruises
a hand in a ditch, silence,
the year after, feathers,
thoughts of sinking, the hard
decisions of small children--
from shadow mouths
grow flowers
white roots in rock

Race: Not a Level Playing Field

2010-09-09T08:17:00.000-04:00

Recently I was talking with another white person about race. I mentioned the study discussed in my last post, which demonstrates that white prejudice against black males is a factor in job hiring in New York City. That part of the conversation went fine. But we went on to discuss prejudice in our own neighborhood. In us.

Immediately, my friend got defensive. "People of color do that, too," she insisted. "They can be just as racist as anyone." That argument is called "Parallelism". Parallelism suggests that the playing field is level. The blue team can commit a foul, so can the red team. I think it's erroneous. Here's how the blog Resist Racism puts it: "An experience you have as a white person that you think is similar to an experience related by a person of color is not a valid proof that racism doesn't exist."

Here's an extreme example of parallelism: In Germany in the late 1930s and early 40's, Jews didn't trust Germans. Germans didn't trust the Jews, either. But in those days, Europe was hardly a level playing field.

No, I am not saying that for people of color, America today might as well be Nazi Germany. And I'm not saying that people of color can't be prejudiced against white people.

But if we're willing to admit that "racism against people of color still exists out there in our society"--and most white people are--we also must take an additional step. Where is it in my life? In my neighborhood? In my heart? My white friend's defensive attitude posed the question: Are you accusing ME of being racist? No. But we need to talk about race. We need to examine our attitudes, because to avoid the race issue proves my point. Who can afford to ignore racism against people of color? Who can pretend it doesn't exist? Only those who aren't affected by it. It's called white privilege.

Why Talking About Race is Good for White People

2010-08-29T12:13:00.000-04:00

Maybe I'm just given to subversive thinking, but I believe that if a lot of people tend to avoid talking about something, there might be a wound at the heart of the subject.

In this case, the 'wound' is the size of the Grand Canyon: the mutual history of race relations in this country. And history doesn't end. It's not as though racial problems became untwisted, all fixed, with the passage of the civil rights act or the election of Barak Obama. Whether we want to admit it or not, we whites are actually IN the Grand Canyon. We can pretend that race is a non-issue, but only at a cost to ourselves.

If we were to speak of how we've experienced issues of race, we might reveal pain and confusion. Beverly Tatum, in her excellent book Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? says that for people of all races, recalling their earliest childhood memories of racial awareness conjures the emotions of "confusion, sadness...embarrassment." And, she adds, the majority of these, however young they were, never discussed these formative experiences with anyone. Say a young white child is unused to seeing anyone but white people. According to Tatum, it's developmentally appropriate for a small child to ask why the darker skin looks "dirty". Many parents would shush the question, sending a tacit message: talking about skin color is shameful. But what if they gently explain that skin naturally comes in different colors?

By not wanting to make a big deal about race, we make a big deal about race. This makes us mistrustful, and it fosters stereotypes. A study done by Princeton University reveals that in New York City, when young men of equal skills and similar background apply for entry level jobs, white men with criminal records are more likely to be hired than black men with impeccable histories. Chances are that most of the white people involved in the hiring would not consider themselves racist.

I think of it as "atmospheric racism". It's everywhere, and it's subtle. I've seen it in my own family, in my neighborhood. And in myself.

Is it possible that white people aren't affected by racism against people of color? Think again. The US economy is directly impacted by incidents that happen even in a racially diverse city like New York. Extrapolate the findings of the study across the economy, in the areas of housing, law enforcement, education, political life. I am not saying that people in these professions are more likely to be racist than anyone else. What I am saying is that each small action motivated by prejudice digs the hole a little deeper. We have a choice.

Next Post: Aren't Black People Prejudiced, too?

"The Prep School Negro": More On Race at Germantown Friends School

2010-08-16T16:36:00.000-04:00

Andre Lee, a graduate of Germantown Friends School, has made a film about his teenage years, which he spent in two very different worlds. Give him your support and check out the trailer! His title is provocative: The Prep School Negro

The White Fool: Dealing with Race in America

2010-08-09T08:26:00.000-04:00

Not talking about it...A pretty wide-spread approach I see among white people is to treat the question of race as a no man's land, a territory of such prickly feelings that we're better off not going there. I've seen white kids go to great lengths to describe the lone black person in a group by everything but skin color, which can turn the process of relating routine events of a school day into a Byzantine exercise.--"The one in the red shirt--the tall one, the short one..." Red shirt? Tall? Who?

The impulse is good--we don't want to offend. We breathe the same air that our grandparents exhaled at the height of Jim Crow, that our great-great grandparents breathed during slave times. Those molecules affect our awareness. We don't want to come across as "racist", which is laudable, but what we are is confused. We don't know what to do with our common and agonized racial history, and this being America, where knowledge of our own history is less emphasized than what's over the next rise on Route 95, we can get away with pretending that racial differences don't exist. Most of the time. The other times, we're not prepared for.

The result is a passive segregation...because, of course, we know the differences are as real as the facts of our history. We tend to avoid more than workplace acquaintance with people of color, sensing that more involvement would make us uncomfortable...and we might inadvertently say the wrong thing. We may avoid offending, but we also fail to challenge our own stereotypes, because avoidance doesn't humanize the person we view as "other."

When I felt the pull to deal with the question of race in my own life, I made a fool of myself a few times. I got over it. Certainly the people of color I was worried about "offending" didn't need me to stand up for them. Next post, I'll talk about some of the benefits of looking at race and asking oneself some hard questions.

Book Review: Fly Away Home by Jennifer Weiner

2010-08-05T12:47:00.001-04:00

This appeared in Wednesday's Philadelphia Inquirer and was picked up by NPR (well by their website, but still...I'll take it!!)

Privilege: Clueless in Philadelphia

2010-07-31T18:15:00.000-04:00

In my last post, I mentioned feeling envious of the black scholarship kids at Germantown Friends School because of their tight, warm, easy bond with one another.

Obviously, that was an outsider's view of their experience--not because what I observed wasn't true, but because it was virtually all I knew about them.

We were, all of us, part of a great racial experiment. I sort of knew about it. They lived it. The Community Scholars Program at GFS in Philadelphia was formed in response to the bombing of black churches in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1963. I knew about the bombings, about the Civil Rights Movement, but being in the camp of the "good guys" was actually an opportunity not to think about race. The Quakers were helping to solve the problem, right? Now I wonder what life at Germantown Friends was like from the point of view of the black kids.

To get there, I have to peel back the layers of what prevented me from really seeing them:

I wasn't really sure who the Community Scholars were. (In some ways, this was a good thing.) They just started showing up, but I figured that there were suddenly a lot more black/brown faces around simply because it was the 1970's. We had the Beatles, we had hashish, we had black kids. At least one girl in my class had a doctor father, so I figured that at least some kids had the means to pay full tuition.
I rarely, if ever, asked myself how their home lives were different from mine. So my grandparents had a black chauffeur. Big deal.
When I almost got thrown out of school after 9th grade (not attending class or doing homework tends to draw that kind of reaction) I felt fortunate not to be a scholarship student: think of the pressure!
I had no clue how much my parents paid each year for the privilege of having a daughter who cut class.
I enjoyed friendships with mostly male CS students. They met me on my ground, which meant that they didn't act 'different' or talk 'different', so I assumed they didn't think differently than I did about their school experience...nor did it occur to me that they might talk differently among their families.
I never entered the house of any of the black or otherwise CS kids; We kept our friendships within the (white) vocabulary of the school community.
GFS didn't prepare us for an influx of kids whose grandparents had worked at menial jobs for our grandparents. Our understanding of their lives was a vacuum, which we filled with data from our known world.
I believed that to talk about race, even to other white people, was bad manners. Much better to pretend we were all the same.
I had no idea how competitive the scholarships were. Didn't the parents just walk up to Dee Bristol at the switchboard in the front hall and ask when the next opening was?

Maybe it's human nature to assume that someone who shows up on your turf and acts like you also thinks like you. Maybe that's part of what creates the illusion that race is no longer a major issue in post-Obama America...Does participation in the culture of a dominant community (in this case, a prep school) require suppression of the less-dominant culture? Why is that? At least GFS made the attempt to bring together two very different American worlds.

ON QUAKER IDENTITY: HOW DO YOU TELL A FISH IT'S WET?

2010-07-24T23:06:00.000-04:00

When I was a teenager at Germantown Friends School, I envied the black kids. After graduating its first black student in 1958, the school had made a concerted effort to integrate in the 60's. From my point of view, what was notable about these mostly scholarship kids was the fact that they belonged to a definite culture. They seemed so easy about it, hanging out in relaxed groups, sometimes calling each other brother and sister. They shared something warm, and I wished I could be included. It was the era of 'Black is Beautiful', and yes, it was.

If I'd been able to put words to it, I might have said that I lacked ethnicity. White kids often feel that, as if they their racial identity is so 'normal' (are people of color 'abnormal'?) that it's not anything to take note of, like a shade of paint you see everywhere in institutional buildings. But for me, it was more than that--the culture I came from, Philadelphia Quakerism, felt...wispy and insubstantial. There seemed to be so little to it. My parents didn't speak with pride of my father's conversion to Quakerism from Midwestern Presbyterianism, of my grandparents' relief work during World War I with the British and American Friends. (That was how my grandparents met--my existence is due to Quaker action in the world.) On First Days (Sundays) we went to a plain meetinghouse where we sat in a quiet group until someone was moved to stand up and speak, but we didn't talk at home about why we worshiped that way, what it meant, or how other religions managed the God thing. Other Quaker families talked about their faith, but we didn't.

In fact, I was like a fish so wedded to the placid water of a lake that it has no idea it's wet. Quakerism subtly affected everything in our household. For one thing, we valued silence. The implication was that silence isn't empty, but full, a place in which God can speak. Hanging out together didn't have to be full of chatter. I was part of a self-effacing but prideful culture. Decor was ever tasteful, never glittery. Fabrics were natural, not synthetic...and for me as a young kid, flowered underwear was out of the question. White ruled! White sheets, white walls, white underpants. Humility and modesty were "better" than ambition, money seeking, any kind of hard pursuit. Never mind that the same Grandfather who did relief work in France had left my mother a nice inheritance. "Doing" was never a priority for either of my parents. It took me a long time to adjust to the fact that I'm an ambitious person, and that it's okay to put my name out there.

For a long time, if I went to an author's reading, it felt 'wrong' to me to ask the writer to autograph a book. Book signings! What hubris, my father might say, criticizing the author's 'need' for recognition. Ah, but he also brought me to the rich well of silence from which words and stories emerge, like lovely creatures, blinking in the light of day. Writing itself was all there, in the silence. It was waiting for me to discover it.

(Thanks to Beverly Tatum and her thoughtful book Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? for insights about white racial identity. If I ever hear her read, I'll be sure to have her sign my copy of the book.)

Here's a Summery, Sexy Poem from Bone China, My Poetry Chapbook

2010-07-16T10:11:00.003-04:00

Link to Bone China on Amazon

Newt

My body is a bowl
of water, and you are tipped
into me, a newt
from a jar, lip
to nipple, fingertips--
you swim
down
where
you are the vortex
around my warm rock
where you will bask
in the sun, after.

How Do Artists Keep Going?

2010-07-12T20:12:00.009-04:00

Writers' Retreat: After a glorious week of immersion in our fiction projects (and, in one case, an illustrated book for children)...plunging into laughter, fellowship, and the grace of wind, ocean, woods and sky with several fellow writers on Cape Cod, I'm in awe of our staying power.

We, the tribe of artists. How do we keep going? Some of us have chronic illnesses. Threats of severe illness. Financial pressure...Kids with issues. The need to generate income. When important decisions need to be made about creative work, family needs tempt us to all but forget we're writers. We have trouble getting published. We are remaindered, rejected, on the wrong side of whatever genre wave is cresting at the moment we seek recognition. Other people get recognized ahead of us. Yeah, we're jealous.

Joan Acocella, dance critic for theThe New Yorker, celebrates the courage of artists in her wonderful book, Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints. I return to these essays again and again while I clank away at my anvil, nine years now and counting since I began writing my first novel. It's encouraging that she rejects the notion that art is born out of "neurosis", that artwork is a rare metal wrested by the refined few out of their childhood traumas. No, it's all about work ethic, she insists. The survivors are those who rolls up their sleeves, every day, and get the work done.

This is the best news we could receive. The creative process doesn't always feel good, but you get down and do it. Despite everything. Whatever the work needs; you find it and follow the heat. Somehow.

I wrote her once to tell her so, and her response to me is burned into my heart: Corragio, wrote. Be of good cheer. Keep the faith. In the book's introduction she relates that during three years of corrosive criticism after his company was invited to perform in Belgium, the choreographer Mark Morris was questioned by a reviewer hungry for his "reaction" to the booing and hissing audiences, the terrible reviews. The interviewer wanted bitterness--serrated, quotable words.

Instead, he made a statement that every artist should spray paint onto the nearest wall: "It's just a review--it's not a gun."

It's a rejection slip, not a comment on your work or on you as a human being.
It's an opinion; opinions vary. Why give a negative opinion more credence than a positive one?

Readers, what keeps you going?

Get Rich Writing for the Internet!

2010-07-03T12:59:00.001-04:00

Trying to make money as a freelance writer is no joke. For about 15 minutes, I was a "member" of a "community" of writers who, if their articles are accepted, get paid (generally less than 20 bucks) to write content for the Internet. Since the Internet is about Everything in the Universe, you'd think I'd find a topic to fit my interests. I'm a mom, I edit PhD dissertations. I know some things, I didn't grow up in a closet. I've been around, right?

Well, not around enough. Here are some sample article titles. It's odd that the site, while it is scrupulous about format, wording, etc., gives no context for topics...at least in the initial stages. Are you writing for kids? Employed Ninja fighters? And for that money, who's willing to submit several drafts until they tell you who your audience is?

Anyone care to get rich answering the following?

HOW TO GET RID OF FILLMORE MOLES (Who's he?)

MAKING A PALM LEAF HAT

HOW TO BRAID KANGAROO LEATHER

HOW TO MAKE A SEAWEED VEIL (for your sister who's about to marry the god of the sea)

HOW TO BUILD A GREENHOUSE OF TEXAS NATIVE PLANTS makes me wonder how good their editors are. Cactus walls? Or do they mean FOR Texas native plants?

HOW TO INSTALL RECESSED CEILING LIGHTS IN A FINISHED TWO STORY HOUSE (Duh, call an electrician)

YOGA AFTER A TUMMY TUCK (freelance writers can afford tummy tucks?)

THE IMPORTANCE OF HUNTING VESTS (there has to be a catch. that one is too easy.) Ditto WHAT IS EMERGENCY HOUSING?

HISTORY OF DANCE FLOORS

Do I really want to tell the world WHICH STATES RECIPROCATE THE VIRGINIA CONCEALED WEAPON PERMIT?

WHAT CAUSES LARGE CRACKS ABOVE A SLIDING GLASS DOOR? Probably the same shrapnel featured in THE DANGERS OF BECOMING A DENTIST

And why are WOVEN ROVEN AND FIBERGLASS CLOTH USED TOGETHER? Funny, I woke up thinking about that.

It's making me feel stupid. I mean, I don't even know WHY IRISH DANCERS WEAR WIGS.

This one has real creative potential: HOW TO MAKE PORTALS (As in Being John Malkovich?)

Here's an intriguing listing. The only information given is PUNITIVE DUTIES. Do I write for prison guards or my friendly neighborhood dominatrix?

G2G, everyone. I need to see if I remember how to use a toilet.

My All-Time Favorite Rejection Letter

2010-06-27T21:40:00.004-04:00

Once upon a time, rejection letters from literary magazines came on slips of paper of different sizes and colors. I have a sheaf of the 'best' ones--where the editor scrawled either his initials, or something like sorry on the standard 'thanks but no thanks' slip--which I took to mean that someone thought enough of my work to encourage me.

I mean, they see a lot of crap, right? I've read for magazines. It's enough to turn you into Simon Cowell.

My best rejection letter is on pretty, parchment-goldy paper. This was for a set of poems, back when I was writing poetry regularly. I won't name the magazine. The editor hand-wrote me a letter for each set of rejected poems, the fourth one saying, "these came pretty close." Be still my heart! The fifth one, I decided, would be it. If I didn't get in, it wasn't meant to be.

Helen W. Mallon (he wrote),
The problem here lies not in the technique but in the tenor...As an editor I have made it my position to publish only work that indicates in some way that life is worth living, that existence is a positive process. Those writings of yours I that I have seen do not fulfill--to my sensibilities--those requirements. Thank you for your continued interest.

I've been called a lot of things, but depressing isn't one of them. Well, that was the first time. I love the fussy tone of this letter. Oddly, my "continued interest" in the magazine didn't continue. The note made me laugh so much it's probably the one rejection I least minded getting.

WRITING ME CRAZY: OR, HOW MY NOVEL GOT ITS NAME

2010-06-22T13:37:00.004-04:00

(Vacation Delay: I meant to post this over a week ago...)

Some standup comedian really should do a routine about writers. The problem is, unless the audience consists of writers, people might not understand it.

Take rejection letters. Would a normal person get all excited and happy about receiving a "positive rejection letter" for which she has already, personally, provided the addressed envelope AND paid the postage? The whole point of an oxymoron like "positive rejection" is that it doesn't mean anything. Yet this dry bone, tossed into the mailbox courtesy of a magazine or book editor, is enough to send a writer into canine paroxysms of hope. Why? There may yet come a time when someone--anyone--will actually read some damn story that's already been through 1,756 revisions and rejected by 37 magazines.

In the days before email, most rejection letters from literary magazines were photocopied slips of paper with Readers-Digest-bland messages: "While we receive many fine submissions, we can only accept a very few..." DING! DING! DING! The You-Suck-O-Meter sounds its bell, and the Published Writers Club slams another door in the writer’s face. I suspect that I'm not alone in trying to divine messages from these uninspired missives. Did an editor scrawl his initials at the bottom? Delete half a DING from the You-Suck-O-Meter. Did someone take the time to write "thanks"? A whole DING gone, just like that! Did someone write on the back? (they never do) If I stick the note back in the envelope and pull it out real fast, will the juicy words appear in some barely legible hand?:

"Nice work. Send more."

And the filet mignon of rejections? A personal letter, on letterhead, from the magazine's managing editor, saying that the story almost, just quite nearly, squeaked very close to actual acceptance. SCO-ORE!! Well, not exactly. These paper (okay, sometimes electronic) fans of the hope flame have a way of setting a person up for quite a sucko-punch. Oh, boy! I've got an in! I'll send another story, this time personally addressed to my new BFF, the Managing Editor of Refinement Review (--what was her name?)!!!!

So you prepare the submission, scan the story for typos, change the gender of your protagonist because you’re seized with the conviction that the magazine might "find it a better fit" (who knows), check story again for typos, re-print it, re-word your cover letter (a fine opportunity for creative writing since you have no new acceptances to add to your bio)…and you wait. And wait. And wait. And six or ten months later, the hopeful selfaddressedstampedenvelope that you enclosed with story number two (without the SASE they won't get back to you at all) appears in the mailbox.

Don't think don't think don't think, you tell yourself as you enjoy a paper cut in the process of opening it- (maybe email is safer)-because from the skimpy feel of the envelope, your fingers already know that what you're holding ain't a full-sized letter. DING! DING! DING! DING! DING! The full Monty from the YSOM...Refinement Review has sent you a form rejection. But there, on the desk in front of you, is the previous letter from their Managing Editor, whom you have recently added to the guest list to your wedding: "We strongly encourage you to send more work."

This M.E., you conclude, never saw the piece. Or maybe she did. Who knows? Literary mag editors are, by definition, overworked and understaffed.

The really crazy thing?

You’re going to keep doing it. You’ll keep writing and sending out work, probably to that same magazine. At least that's the kind of crazy I am.

All of this does, actually, have to do with the promised blog post about how my novel got its name. Not its title, but a name. Like Fred. The point is, writers are sanity-challenged. After all, when I remembered I’d left my novel manuscript in a hot car in July, I panicked, fearing that it would suffocate.

Fortunately for us writers, most of us have friends who are also crazy. I mean, friends who are also writers. When I told my friend Andrew about the hot car incident, he patted the manuscript’s pink binder lovingly. “Aww,” he said. “You left Novelly in the car? Oh, but he looks okay. He’s starting kindergarten this year, right?”

I’m happy to report that Andrew did not call DHS on me, and that a year after the Incident, Novelly is developing…slowly. He’s going on ten soon. By the time he’s fourteen, I might even have him in shape for his high school applications. I mean, ready to send around to literary agents. He’s leaner than he was, more focused. Knows what he's about.

If I keep my wits about me, he’ll grow up just fine.

RELIQUARY: OUT OF THE CLOSET AND INTO LABOR AND DELIVERY

2010-06-03T21:23:00.000-04:00

When I spent all those nights reading in my closet with a flashlight as a kid, I had no idea a seduction was taking place, that some day I'd be married to writing.

At least women giving birth in the natural way don't have to push out fully-grown adults, but most characters in fiction don't start out as babies.

Last summer, I went through one of my novel-writing meltdowns--I'd just read through the latest draft, 8 years and counting, and wished I'd gone for genetic testing before I started it--and I took to carrying the manuscript around with me in my daughter's old French binder. It was a pink plastic binder with cheerful doodles markered all over it. I toted it everywhere in hope of sudden clarity regarding revision, like those sacks of flour high school girls lug around to simulate the omnipresent needs of an infant.

It was July, it was hot, and I drove to meet a friend for coffee. I decided not to bring the manuscript with me since I was already running late, so I left it on the back seat.

I think J. was talking about Virginia Woolf. I was seeing her eyes, her pretty face, sipping my whatever, but all I thought about was the novel. It wasn't thinking so much as experiencing something like a tidal pull in the mind. The tide hit a rock; I panicked. "I left the manuscript in the car," I realized, "and I forgot to crack the windows. There's no air in there. It's ninety thousand degrees. It's going to die."

I looked at my friend with sagacity. "Yes, Bloomsbury certainly was one crazy assemblage of post-Victorians," I said.

"Are you okay?" she asked.

"Um. Well."

Fortunately, J. is also in the family of writers, so she didn't question my sanity. Or maybe she was just showing the kind of tact that normal families, non-writing families, reserve for their crazy cat lady aunt.

NEXT POST: How my novel got a name. No, not a title. A name, like George.

RELIQUARY: HOW FAR WILL YOU RUN (REALLY?)

2010-05-30T11:00:00.002-04:00

Yeah, I have dreams of a different life. Once in a while. I'd live in a place where I don't have to hop in the car to buy a coffee or go to the gym. I'd live in a city...There'd be trees nearby and great views from the bedroom. I'd be responsible for...me. I'd only cook when I felt like it. I'd write till my eyeballs fell out.

Whether I'd be happy without husband and children to fuss over, is another question.

This weekend, I got my wish. I'm dog sitting for my old friend M.. in a really cool apartment with huge windows in Center City Philadelphia. The building was built by the Board of Public Education, and the pup and I can play ball in the august granite hall outside the apartment. This morning I spent tourist dollars at Whole Foods--candles, CDs. I go there all the time, but never with such abandon.

I think it was M. who first put the notion in my head that running away from home might be a cool thing to do. We were in third grade, and naughty was the way to go. Not that there was much to run away FROM. Rather, the notion of escape whispered an exotic, no-holds-barred siren call.

Did she ever take off? I'm not sure. We'd made a plan, but it was never carried out. There was no available stick in my house to carry my hobo bundle; I worried over this, but I gathered the essentials anyway. A hairbrush. Socks. A very old, very fragile porcelain doll. Dried apricots and slices of lebanon bologna., all wrapped in a bandanna and stowed in my bottom bureau drawer.

There they sat. I forgot about my plan to escape. There were spelling tests to take, there was TV to watch. A month or so later, caught by my mother in either A) belligerance B) impertinence (these words entered my vocabulary at a very young age) I was sent to my room without any dinner. The lebanon bologna--no. Quite smelly. I'm surprised my mother hadn't found it herself. I peeled an apricot off the face of the porcelain doll and enjoyed my light dinner; enjoying even more the victory of undoing my punishment.

I did run away, much later. Twice, actually.

I've got it out of my system. The thing is, running away doesn't mean the same if you don't have a home to return to. I'm one of the lucky ones, it turns out.

(Thanks to Ryoma Collia-Suzuki for inspiring this post!)

RELIQUARY: THE HARD, PERSONAL WORK OF DYING

2010-05-22T12:04:00.003-04:00

THIS ESSAY APPEARED ON THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER'S OP-ED PAGE ON APRIL 28, 2003. UNFORTUNATELY, IT'S JUST AS RELEVANT TODAY.

It’s a simple gesture. In the newspaper photo, an Iraqi man squats between two rough wooden coffins, his arms spread wide. In each box a small body is loosely wrapped in a coarse blanket. A shiny knob, perhaps a charred anklebone, protrudes from one. Each of the man’s palms bears a planet of grief. I do not need the caption to tell me these are the bodies of his children.

Why does his posture disturb me? In the past weeks, there have been so many available images of war on TV, on the Internet: artillery shells streaking like apocalyptic UFO’s into the burning desert. Images of survivors; a four-year-old shot in the head clings to her father’s hand, her sweet face crumpled like a piece of cast-off fruit. Americans weep in Wyoming, in Kansas, New Jersey. In a close-up photo, a young woman in Kirkuk washes her husband’s marble-colored face with small hard tears.

The Iraqi father extends his arms as if to opposing points of the globe. His grief invokes my private tears. Before the US declared war on Iraq, my own father lived in a nursing home in Germantown. He received first-rate care, but no one could do his job for him. He was engaged in the hard work of dying.

He was also a man whom words had failed. They said it was caused by the Parkinson’s; they said it was the Alzheimer’s, but a few months before his death he spoke no more than whispered, unfinished phrases. No more conversation with this voracious reader, a man who had studied journalism in college and later crafted words for advertising.

From my father I tried to learn the eloquence of gesture and mute blue eyes. I’d stand by his hospital bed. While I untangled his sand-colored blanket, the machine for his 24-hour tube feeding clicked, clicked, fell silent, clicked. His palms up, his arms extended, he tried to revive his familiar and decorous greeting. Or perhaps he was trying to tell me what it was like: How it is for a man to regress into infancy. Maybe a boyhood memory of cabin-building in Colorado had popped open in his head. Or maybe he was just thirsty. I looked for the pink swabs.

“It’s okay, Dad,” I’d say. “I understand.” But how could I? We no longer spoke the same language. A television flickered in his room, which was warm as a desert. I was glad for the distraction of TV, for it’s hard to rivet attention on someone who does not speak. I kept the set tuned to the forced happiness of game shows, avoiding the buildup to war. His hands were full enough already.

He became agitated. He plucked doggedly at the blanket. I felt helpless, as if he wanted me to change its color. He liked to be read to; I pawed through my handbag. Wanting to offer him control over something, I asked him if the Bible would be okay. Yes, He growled.

Psalm 102 was a random choice. Hear my prayer, O Lord¼Incline thine ear to me¼for my days have been consumed in smoke, and my bones are scorched like a hearth. My heart has been smitten like grass and withered away, I forget to eat my bread¼

I stopped reading. “Do you ever feel that way, Dad?” Suddenly I saw a blue flare of understanding, even relief, in his eyes. He spread his arms again. His hands indicated the railing of his bed, his roommate dozing in his wheelchair with his back to us, the thin sunlight that hesitated through slanted blinds.

I took his bony hand. I wanted my touch to say that someone was in it with him. He pulled away; he’d been sensitive about touch recently. Again, he showed me how his life had collapsed around him like a tent, his palms indicating the points of his remembered world. The Iraqi man in the photograph had tilted his hands in just that way. “I understand,” I said, and this time I meant it.

Now, with so many images of war spreading open in our minds, there are more of us who understand.

RELIQUARY III: WHY CAN'T I CALL YOU MOMMY?

2010-05-16T21:31:00.000-04:00

When I was five, I asked my mother if I could call her 'Mommy.' That was the name my friends all had for their mothers. "No," she told me. "If you call me that, I won't answer you."

She's 86, and she's still Mummy. You could say that certain aspects of my childhood were bracing: like giving the kiddos a shot of black coffee before they tumble out the door on a frigid schoolday morning with their itchy woolen scarves and oversize coats. The parameters were nothing if not clear; affection-wise, you knew where you stood.

Sometimes I think that early training served me well. I can be tough. But then, sometimes, I worry. Am I Helen the Lizard Hearted? When my father died several years ago, I thought there was something wrong with me. I wasn't broken up. I wasn't even very sad. Insensitive types might comfort someone in the claws of grief with: Death isn't a big deal. It's in the order of things. The problem is, to me my father’s death wasn’t a big deal.

Was I that callous?

Several months after he died, I was alone at night in my dorm room at my 10-day graduate school residency, and I couldn't stop worrying about my daughter, who was pretty young then and several states away. Lying awake, my mind ranged into conversations my father and I could never have, conversations I'd probably never have had the courage to initiate with him, even if he were still around. I cried as much for the father I never had as the one I’d lost.

There had been other tears. My father had always had a talent for contentment—complacence, even—and he'd been reasonably content in the 'memory unit' of an assisted living place. Then he landed in the hospital, and we knew he wasn’t going to get better. One Sunday, my mother and I were visiting him. When it was time to leave, I embraced him, sobbing so quickly I took myself by surprise.

"Helen, really," Mummy scolded. "Don't you think that's a little premature?"

I didn’t say it, but grief could only come in increments. In our family, affection had been meted out in small gestures: When we were little, every morning when he left for work, my dad would 'bonk' my brother and me on the head with his rolled-up New Yorker. I have no memory of bear hugs; his quick embraces involved a nervous pat on the back.

I did have a moment of farewell. The last time I saw him, he kissed me goodbye, which he hadn't done in weeks. In a family that never discussed potentially risky topics, this is a significant intimacy, and I think about it often.

After his death, when my lack of grief worried me, someone whose family had been similarly frosty told me that her reaction to her own father's death had been like mine: We were trained, above all, to be polite.

In truth, both my parents looked the other way, twice, when I was a child and in serious trouble. I learned to armor myself in more ways than one.

But the small tears I shed were, if nothing else, genuine. I loved my father, and I felt no bitterness toward him when he died. That’s enough.

RELIQUARY II:I LOVE YOU AND OH YES ABOUT THAT MISSING BOOK

2010-05-03T18:27:00.002-04:00

Generally, when my mother calls me up these days it's to ask something like: "Do you have my college yearbook?" or "Were my grandfather's diaries not included in the move to my new apartment?"

Once we settle on the whereabouts of the book or object, or even if we don't, it's goodbye until next time.

I guess it's normal when you come from a family of reliquists. (You're right--that wasn't a word until I invented it just now.) She really means, "I've always wanted to tell you how much I respect your intelligence and perspective, but never got around to it." Or maybe she means, "I'd invite you for a tete a tete in the shade of memory lane, but I've got something that needs dusting."

Objects, by which I mean THINGS, aren't very reliable. (My great-grandfather's diaries were smiling in a box in my mother's basement, the whole several months we thought they'd been lost)--but people are even less reliable. Years ago, when my parents' home insurance company insisted that they install a burglar alarm, she was convinced that an alarm made them LESS safe: Now the burglars would know they'd got stuff worth stealing. It makes sense. If you're my mother.

In a way, her choice of objects of affection make sense, too. Why invest emotion in high-risk assets, such as your own children? Of course, one must do right by one's offspring: duty above all ! As kids, we were made to sit under sun lamps in the winter to assure against Vitamin D deficiency, and we wore orthopedic shoes until fifth grade for reasons I've never understood.

Hey, the British built an empire on such wisdom. And when I broke my parents's hearts at 18 by marrying a psycho, they did not disown me as I'd expected. Was it duty or love that moved them to pay for my college education though I hardly ever saw them? In my mother's world, love and duty are inseparable. Perhaps even indistinguishable.

I can be thankful for that.

--Helen W. Mallon

RELIQUARY I: I'm in a museum?

2010-04-22T22:56:00.006-04:00

My mother saved a lot of toys from her childhood. They were tenderly kept in boxes, sometimes in boxes within boxes. As kids, we played with many of the old things: I remember a Shirley Temple doll with real, flossy hair and pearl teeth.

I loved the school set. It was an old-fashioned one-room-schoolroom-in-a-box. There were slates, slate pencils, doll-size lined notebooks, a brass bell, the teacher's spectacles. A small blackboard, handwriting exercises.

The last time I played with this set, I was thirteen. Breaking out all over, asking big questions, slightly mad at the toys because they didn't satisfy me as they once had. They reminded me that I was being pushed out of childhood. I abandoned the set for my mother to put away, which was not part of the deal, and probably she scolded me for this.

A few years ago now, my mother donated some old toys to the Germantown Historical Society. She grew up there, so it made sense. I went with her to see an exhibit: Toys of Old Germantown, in a historic house at the center of what in Colonial times had been the town square, now absorbed and diminished into Philadelphia. It was strange to see some things that had belonged to me and my brother out for public view--a bubble-blowing monkey, for one, battery operated, which had ceased to work when I was about ten.

On the other side of a barrier was the school set. I stared at it. There was writing on the blackboard. The handwriting looked familiar. It took a moment, until I turned to look at something else. I had left that writing when I abandoned the school set at thirteen, never to touch it again. There they were, my four questions; which meant that my mother chose not to erase them when she wrapped the whole set up to give to the museum.

Who is God?

Is he good or bad?

Does he hear us when we pray?

Does he answer us if he hears?

I remembered. Raised in a devout Quaker home where questions were not encouraged, I had felt subversive, slightly law-breaking, when I wrote them down. My mother, with her eye for the quirky detail, must have felt pleased by them in some way. She not only left them years ago when she cleaned up after me, she brought them to the museum. I said how strange it was to see these casual chalk marks on display, public and arranged.

The museum curator, who had casually shown us around, commented: "What you wrote is part of our collection. No one's allowed to erase it now."

Later, in the car, I asked my mother why she didn’t erase what I’d written. I knew how she’d respond. “Oh, I don’t know. I suppose they were interesting.” I didn’t pursue it. Never ask my mother to reveal her feelings. For a sense of those, you have to look at her carefully preserved things.

"In My Secret Life"

2010-04-12T20:27:00.005-04:00

The title is a line from a song by Leonard Cohen. I have a headful of masters. Another one is Micheal Ondaatje, who wrote The English Patient. One of the most beautiful books I have ever read. (The last 3 sentences, one a fragment, are pure Ondaatje.) TEP won the Booker Prize, and there’s a movie I haven’t seen.

Perhaps there is no original craft—there is only right homage.

(Damn, another Ondaatje sentence! Only he would (probably) take out the word “perhaps.”)

I digress.

“Quite early on I had discovered the overlooked space open to those of us with a silent life.” This is from The English Patient.

The man speaking is an Indian Sikh who endures racism in the English army during World War II. He doesn’t argue with a policeman about the barriers set against him because of his race. He is silent, he waits, and he slips through— “Like a cricket. Like a hidden cup of water.”

This phrase about a silent life got me thinking about a song my mother sang to me at bedtime. I was about 7 years old. Did she sing it more than once? I must have begged to hear it again, but it never became a tradition, because now she doesn’t remember anything about it.

It’s a real folk song…Until it dawned on me to do a Google Search to find out if I’d dreamed it up, years of life and preoccupation had left it detached from my memory, and I started thinking and wondering about the song again only after I became a writer. Not given to song and expressing outright dislike for much of music, my mother found it somewhere and brought it to me once before sleep. She knew it well enough not to require a songbook.

That in itself is a mystery, but she is a locked drawer.

It’s an English folk song from the mid-nineteenth century.

As sweet Polly Oliver lay musing in bed,

A sudden strange fancy came into her head.

"Nor father nor mother shall make me false prove,

I'll 'list as a soldier, and follow my love."

So early next morning she softly arose,

And dressed herself up in her dead brother's clothes.

She cut her hair close, and she stained her face brown,

And went for a soldier to fair London Town.

I didn’t particularly care that she found her wounded boyfriend, who the doctors had given up on, and nursed him back to life.

What delighted me was that Polly ‘passed’ in the same sense that light-skinned brown people may pass as white. I saw no injustice in the fact that a woman was not allowed to fight alongside her brothers. No, the delight lay in her ballsy disguise. The tanning of her skin seemed especially clever, and using her dead brother’s clothes was shocking and wonderful. Polly had everyone fooled, which made her far more powerful in my 7-year-old mind than if she had struggled for and obtained her rights. That would only have meant she was like everyone else.

Of course I didn’t know then that disparate elements in Polly’s story were in any way political. My mother certainly wouldn’t have wanted to see it that way.

For me, it was about secrets. How someone could slip into a no-man's-land and emerge in the glare of noon to join the ranks of those who have no idea what she is.

Secrets can allow you to be two things at once.
Secrets can keep you safe.
Everyone has a secret life.
Everyone is a universe.

Don't Rock the Boat?

2010-03-25T22:38:00.003-04:00

If my Quaker family had had a motto, it might have been Don't Rock the Boat. To this day, discussions about politics make me uneasy. My parents agreed on politics for the most part, but whenever the subject came up, the bickering escalated until the subject was abruptly diverted to something non-consequential. In the extremely clean rooms of our lives, a lot of energy went into keeping a smooth surface over unhappy relationships.

In many ways, we stayed afloat on an ocean of contradictions. People can be very good at that.

Which was more significant, the denial enacted between members of the same family, or the denial that didn't recognize that liberal-minded and prejudiced really don't belong together?

I'm still untangling those threads. It's only recently, though, that I've been examining my own assumptions about race. It is, admittedly, a privilege that I made it so far without asking myself those questions.

I think it's uncomfortable for some of the white people I know to talk about race beyond making casual remarks (within our own circles) that reflect our prior assumptions. Sometimes these remarks have a racist tinge, and sometimes they don't, but one thing they tend not to do is break new ground in our understanding.

Why should one's thinking about such an important topic remain static, after all?

Is is a particularly American trait that we have so little awareness of the ways our conjoined history still shapes present-day society? The immigrant ideal involved the notion of shedding your ethnic background and reinventing yourself on the road to prosperity. Sometimes I think white people expect people of color to live in the world as if slavery had never happened; as if the Jim Crow era were not a fairly recent memory; as if there had been no need for the Civil Rights Movement; as if racism didn't still effect them. It's quietly arrogant because it presumes that people with very different experiences should see things as we do.
The truth is, we're all in it together. Our history is a shared history. To the extent that our future can be a shared future, and not one of mistrust and exclusion, we can diminish some of the centuries-old shadows. Let's not wait for the other guy to change first, though, before we examine our own hidden racism.

A QUAKER CHILD DISCOVERS SKIN COLOR IN AMERICA

2010-03-14T21:29:00.000-04:00

We had a housekeeper, and I loved her. I'll call her Julia. She grew up on a farm in Virginia, but she didn't like country life. Philadelphia became her home, white families her employers. She worked for my parents from my early childhood until arthritis forced her retirement, and we used to visit the senior citizen high-rise where she ended her days. I think my mother was the only one of her employers who religiously paid her Social Security taxes. Julia never married, and she used to joke that my brother and I were "her children."

She was part of the atmosphere of blessed, surface order in our home. Twice a week she came by bus, changing into her white uniform in our basement bathroom. We'd come home from school and half-welcome the scolding we got if we walked on the newly washed kitchen floor. One of my brother's earliest memories is of toddling toward Julia and my mother, both on their knees before him in the living room, arms outstretched, calling him to walk. Now I wonder which one he went toward?

I loved to sit in Julia's lap when she could spare me a minute. Her smell was so different than my mother's, both earthy and warm, unlike anything in our house. I imagined she carried it with her from the vaguely envisioned home she told me of, where she kept a cat called Smudge. When I was about three, Julia was holding me in a chair, and I happened to notice my small arm resting on hers. I was amazed at what I saw. "My arm is pink!" I cried. "And yours is brown."

Julia gave me a little cuff on the cheek and said, "Don't be fresh!" She added that she had to get back to work. I slid to the floor. I wasn't hurt. I knew she loved me. But I started to cry, shocked and confused. Later, I realize how I must have taken her by surprise. It was 1959 or 1960, and in a subsequent year, she might have felt it was okay to be low-key about the whole thing. I think of how she was continually aware of my mother's presence in the house, and how Julia had the skill of drinking a glass of water without making a sound, as if she had taught herself a kind of invisibility. And, though I doubt she ever heard my father make one of his infrequent racist comments, she had surely learned how close these remarks can be to the tongues of white people.

This was the only direct exchange I can remember having in my childhood household on the issue of race. The conclusions I grew up with were a slurry of observation, confusion, and experience, all steeped in what I've come to think of as an atmosphere charged, as if with unseen electricity, by the agonized legacy of slavery and the Jim Crow era.

Much of what I learned supported what Julia taught me: That here in America, skin, in its varieties of pigmentation, is like the outer layer of a dangerous, sleeping animal. To avoid hurting anyone, I learned it was expedient to pretend that skin color didn't exist. But that awareness never went away.

OUTSIDE, THE BIRDS ARE GOSSIPING ABOUT SPRING

2010-03-01T07:20:00.002-05:00

Paying attention to signs of spring and warm weather, wherever they hide!
This morning outside my window, the birds sing of it--there's a fresh urgency in their cries.
http://www.amazon.com/Bone-China-New-Womens-Voices/dp/0972613617/ref=cm_cr_pr_pb_t

Here's a summer poem from the book:

Inheritance

The wealthy child's entourage
created summertime
from neap tides and bone china,
slim genteel peninsula

between youth, aging
death and birth.
She feels one room's air, then another
where they slept.

Bell calling the servants is
shelved. Sea and wind scour
her Cape's changing arm--
play at songs on window screens.

More rooms are silent
doors remain closed.
She cuts bittersweet from a wall of stone.
Even the dust is a layer of pity.