Jeannine Atkins

Poems in the Greenhouse

Fri, 17 May 2013 19:32:39 GMT

Yesterday was the perfect day to smell lilacs and pass under the white blooms of dogwoods on my way to the Smith College Greenhouse. The museum area is currently devoted to a show called From Petals to Paper: Poetic Inspiration from Flowers. Poems printed on placards and arranged according to flower types were selected by Liliana Farrel and Janna Scott, class of ’13, who were inspired by Annie Boutelle’s poetry workshop. Walls featured irises, tulips, and other spring flowers. The section on daffodils offered Wordsworth wandering lonely as a cloud, along with Robert Herrick, Amy Lowell, and Alicia Ostriker giving the flowers a political context. Poets including Li-Young, Mary Oliver, and Louise Gluck show flowers as solace, taunting, sensuous, exuberant, or demure.

A small room was devoted to Smith alum, Sylvia Plath. We see a draft of Among the Narcissi filled with cross-outs and new words, with still more lines and notes from an editor at The New Yorker, then we see it published in the magazine.

David Trinidad had given us a brief introduction to both Sylvia Plath and tulips in his amusing and profound poem The Red Parade. Here we find Sylvia Plath’s Tulips on the wall and can also listen to a recording on a television. The poem tells of a red gift in a stark hospital room at a time when the narrator felt as if of nurses were claiming her clothes, the anesthetist her history, and the surgeons her body, so that I believed the line near the end: “Tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals.” I like the poem, but am glad I’m a person who can receive tulips and simply say “Thank you, what a gorgeous color!” The recording was made in 1961, two years before Plath would die by her own hand at age thirty, leaving two children.

This heart-tugging show is open until the first weekend of September.

Novels That Move Between the Present and the Past

Wed, 01 May 2013 13:07:53 GMT

Three recently published novels keep some chapters in the present, then switch the point of view to explore characters who lived in the past. MARY COIN by Marissa Silver examines the ways art, language, love, and fear shape memory. Art and legacy are also themes in THE HOUSE GIRL by Tara Conklin, which considers a broader sense of our country’s past and the ways we balance pride and guilt.
THE OBITUARY WRITER by Ann Hood is about the way losses and yearning shape two lives, with the two settings about forty years apart dropping into the background.

The three main characters in MARY COIN are a historian whose heart beats hard at the sight of stacks of old letters or even financial records, a photographer whose work begins as a way to earn a living, then turns into art, and a migrant worker who tends to her husband and children with exquisite care. Reading along, I only gradually had a sense of how the three strands might intersect, but I never doubted that they would. This book has sentences that made me stop and marvel. Here and there, entire life histories seemed contained within a page or even a paragraph.

The photographer finding her subject takes up themes of who we are, where we belong, and what can or can’t be found in a portrait. While we may initially ache at the evidence of hardships we see in the photograph of the woman here called Mary Coin, inspired by a photograph by Dorothea Lange, we get to see her dancing with her husband, for instance, in a small room surrounded by hungry children, who are struck wide-eyed and silent by their parents’ love. Themes of history are developed through the professor whose story begins and ends the novel, and also in scenes like one in which we watch Mary’s grown daughter help clean her trailer toward the end of the book, taking out an old hat that makes Mary remember the complex desires of her own mother, and how these got hidden. These are erased again, at least for the moment, as Mary waves her hand and says only, “Give it away.”

The novel’s three strands wind into a loose knot suggesting that so much of what becomes history is happenstance, and like life, is beautifully elusive. In a different way, THE HOUSE GIRL by Tara Conklin, with one part told in 1852, and the other in the present, considers what we take from the past. What goes missing? What can inspire? What must be forgiven? What memories, conversations, letters, pictures do we keep and what will slip away?

This novel begins with the line: “Mister hit Josephine with the palm of his hand across her left cheek and it was then she knew she would run.” Right then and there I was on her side, while when in the second chapter we’re taken from 1852 to the present, I felt at first resistant, for Lina didn’t capture my attention in the same immediate way. How could she? The voice telling Josephine’s story is urgent, and we get smells of moss, tobacco, collards or oil paint in steamy heat, and a tone that’s both gritty and languorous. Lina’s world is often climate-controlled, her time in the law firm clocked to the minute, which increasingly bothers her. As she faces her own losses and finds her own courage, the stories came together. More voices are added by letters written during Josephine’s time that Lina reads for a reparations suit in which she considers paintings that might have been painted by Josephine and not credited. Toward the end of the novel, these letters connect the two lives and time periods more deeply. Like the book’s first sentence, the last one is astonishing, but I won’t disclose it. The book both felt complete and made me wish to pick up another book devoted to these lives.

Reading Ann Hood’s novels or nonfiction is like eating your favorite bread with your favorite jam. Maybe there’s rain tapping the windowpanes, and your tea is still hot. THE OBITUARY WRITER is a departure from her usual contemporary settings, but both the goodness of her style and themes of loss remain, the assurance that we’ll be taken through common details or somewhat ordinary people into heart-rending places. Ann Hood has a gift like Jane Austen, and the best gossips, of being able to point out oddities and foibles in a loving way. In the opening of the novel, a child disappears from a suburban street, which doesn’t strike us as entirely harrowing, for the focus is on the reactions of neighbors who arrive at the house armed with casseroles and cakes, as if shields against fate, and comment that it seems the mother of the lost child could have washed her hair at least when she knew a TV cameraman was coming. The loss is an impetus for a central character in an unhappy marriage to instigate an affair. This isn’t the first or last time I read with thoughts that rolled like waves, one after another, “Really?” and “Of course.” We’re invited to smile at human folly both in this early 1960’s setting and in alternating chapters set in 1919 about the gifted obituary writer and her lost dream, which are woven together with a similar style built from a keen eye for detail.

The Empty Briefcase

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 14:40:48 GMT

Daffodils, magnolias, and cherry trees were blooming in Amherst as I walked to the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies. I put those yellow and pink blossoms at the beginning of my sentence, and I’ll add that a kind person had set out a plate of brownies, so you’ll know that hearing my student defend her thesis on the Holocaust in Literature for Children and Young Adults was a happy occasion, despite subject matter it hurts to think about. Tylar Suckau answered questions about work by Elie Wiesel, Jane Yolen, Art Speigelman, and others who wrote directly or indirectly about the death camps, and the various powers of fiction and nonfiction, and the ways lines blur between them.

As we settled in a room, I asked Professor James Young about a briefcase that was propped beside books in a glass case. He told me that the Institute had been given some papers from the Nuremberg trials, and the worn leather briefcase had belonged to a lawyer. Among the contents was a letter that began with the admission of responsibility for the deaths of about 1400 people, and ended with a plea that he was basically a good man, who was kind to animals.

Would I have noticed the briefcase if it were not behind glass, or even if it had been labeled? The display case gave it importance, while a little sign might have suggested the end of a conversation rather than starting one. An object in a case suggests that someone saw something worth saving. People change their minds about what matters most and what can or should be forgotten, but I’m glad that when historians sort, they preserve some ordinary old things that may provoke curiosity, perhaps especially when seen out of their usual context. I’m not planning to write about the Holocaust, but if I were to research the names of people and places, or theories on genocide, when feeling overwhelmed I might remind myself to return to that old briefcase, which made my heart thump. I’m sorry I didn’t take a picture, but here is the building that houses it.

Both a writer’s engagement and a reader’s belief often begin with artifacts. Tylar mentioned how crucial it seemed that Art Spiegelman included photographs of his parents within the drawings of his graphic novel, MAUS: A SURVIVOR’S TALE, as a record of a moment when fact merges with fiction, and personal into more generalized history. What she calls paratexts and I more often call the afterword or the stuff at the back of the book, are also fairly ubiquitous, often as a way to suggest the context or point readers to the vastness beyond this story. Sometimes an author’s method is described. At the end of NUMBER THE STARS, Lois Lowry shares her factual inspiration, including a friend upon which she based the main character, how she walked the cobblestone streets in Copenhagen where her characters walked, considered a photograph of a face so young it broke her heart, and used a hand-hemmed linen handkerchief, taken straight from history, as a major plot point.

In a discussion of how the Holocaust may best be presented to children, naturally we considered the ways authors balance a terrible reality and hope, how lines were kept or crossed between truth and evasion, depictions of evil and sentimentality. Just as many caregivers today put on emphasis on rescuers and others who do good even during times of horror, most of the earliest introductions to the subject feature people who saved lives. I NEVER SAW ANOTHER BUTTERFLY introduces young readers to concentration camps by showcasing the poetry and paintings of children, few of whom survived imprisonment at Terezin. These were less often pictures of barbed wire and more often of dandelions painted on scraps of informational paper. James Young pointed out that thinking about better days was sustaining, with Primo Levi reciting Dante from memory, and singing, and talk and thoughts of past warmth and beauty. When we confront pictures of the death camps, it’s important to remember that we don’t see everything.

There’s often some part of us that doesn’t want to see the worst, or which we let ourselves glimpse only from the edges. I was horrified to read the letter that had been in the briefcase, written by the man who was good to animals -- not that he shouldn’t be, but I was stunned that he thought it right to include that in his admission of killing innocents. I can’t understand, but that small window of his letter gives me some insight into a time and place that is in many ways incomprehensible. I’m glad that historians do so much more than tally losses, but continually uncover and rescue, sometimes one briefcase at a time.

We congratulated Tylar on her thorough study and her graduation, then passed through the kitchen on the way out. A string from an overhead light brushed my head. The linoleum and speckled Formica evoked the 1950s, closer to the time of what’s studied here, back when classes on the Holocaust didn’t exist, and this building was used for something else. Which would be another story.

Historical Portraits

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 00:28:21 GMT

I’ve been writing a novel based on a woman from history who’s known, but not as much as I think as she deserves. I have my own answers to the question of why and how one would one turn a real life not into fiction rather than biography, but I’m always interested in other approaches. Three books published within the past year suggest different possibilities of ways people might be remembered.

FEVER Mary Beth Keane is an imagined recounting of Mary Mallon, who came down in history as Typhoid Mary, the first person in the United States believed to be a carrier with no symptoms. I love the first line: “The day began with sour milk and got worse.” We read of the general sense of loneliness any outcast might feel, underscored by Mary’s particular tenderness, and get harrowing descriptions of how this fever took hold. As Mary moves from kitchen to kitchen in search of new jobs as cook, we’re shown how some servants help each other out within the upstairs-downstairs of grand houses, or view one another as competitors.
Mary Beth Keane’s list of sources is fairly spare, suggesting that much of her obviously extensive research was done on New York and its immigrant population in the early twentieth century rather than biographical material on Mary Mallon, who was developed through a novelist’s queries. She’s shown as sometimes sensitive and sometimes a spitfire, often generally oblivious, as we all are sometimes, blocking evidence of what we don’t want to see.

The life of Zelda Fitzgerald -- debutante, dancer, painter, writer, and wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald -- has been long documented by herself and others. She was famous in her time for her wit, beauty, stays in mental institutions, and accusations of being destructive to her husband’s career, sometimes in almost the same breath as she was called an asset. Who was she? We can’t really know, but in Z: A NOVEL OF ZELDA FITZGERALD, author Therese Anne Fowler takes a well-informed and imaginative stab at an answer. Lots of journals, letters, reportage, photographs, and the subject’s own stories and paintings were available, so well-informed, Therese Anne Fowler structured the book partly around some of the hidden motivations within any life. She writes in the afterword of the many myths that were passed down, and took it as her job to look for truths and motivations behind them. For instance, she knew that Zelda and Ernest Hemingway did not get along, and wrote to discover an answer as to why, which appears toward the novel’s send.

Jennie Fields wrote THE AGE OF DESIRE, a title which is a play on that of Edith Wharton’s THE AGE OF INNOCENCE. The voice that Jennie Fields created, sometimes sensitive, sometimes assured, fit what I imagined Edith Wharton’s voice to be. The novel’s texture is thickened by being told alternately from her point of view and that of Anna Bahlmann, who was first Edith’s governess, then became her secretary and a friend who knew her perhaps better than anyone. The time period focuses on the years when Edith was in her forties, with the plot taking shape around Edith’s affair with journalist, Morton Fullerton. The points of view of the two women show the tensions between rapture, guilt, hope, fears, and hiding. I was pulled in! As with the case of Zelda Fitzgerald, Jennie Fields had extensive biographical material to draw from, including many newly found letters, and she notes that she often began her daily writing by reading a few pages of Edith Wharton’s exquisite prose. And her study showed. I felt as if I understood parts of Wharton that I hadn’t understood before. And this novel, like the others, widened my sense of the lives of women from the past.

Historical Fiction

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 17:19:24 GMT

I’m speaking on a panel called “Sculpting Stories from Fact: Four Writers of Historical Fiction Share Strategies” on May 5 at the NE-SCBWI conference. What a treat to speak with three smart friends -- Sarah Lamstein, Pat Lowery Collins, and Padma Venkatraman, -- who have written about a 1950’s childhood (and whether or not you lived through that decade, we’re calling it history now), Venice in the 1700’s, and India at the time of World War II, among other subjects. As I consider the hows and whys of delving into the past, I’ve been immersing myself in historical fiction and thinking about the purposes of each novel, which not only depict different times and places, but suggest different answers to why the author chose to set the work in a particular era.

A crisis in CASCADE by Maryanne O’Hara is based on a historic event in Massachusetts, when towns were flooded to make a reservoir to supply water to Boston. The threat of rising water and drowning is used as both plot element and metaphor. Desdemona, named by her theater-loving father, reacts to pulls of love, money, power, and other events that seem beyond her control, while keeping some sense of stability by painting. I loved a scene in which she breaks lots of eggs to make tempera paint, and her sense of her own recklessness is underscored by this taking place in the Depression. How many breakfasts would be missed because she wanted to paint? I also liked learning about the role of government support of art during the New Deal, which made me think about ways art is important, and supported or not, in the lives of people I know now.

THE POSTMISTRESS by Sarah Blake came out a few years back to both acclaim and good sales, but though I’ve been advised as often as anyone not to judge a book by its cover, that wrinkled purple rose suggested to me something more romantic than what I cared to read. There is love in the novel, but not of the beyond-belief variety, and the effects of war on three strong women are prominent as their lives are gradually laced together. The setting is integral for many reasons. One character is loosely based on Martha Gellhorn, and we learn about foreign correspondents during the war and the role of communication gone astray. This theme is echoed in a missing letter, which, like a missed phone call, is unlikely to cause a crisis in our times: one can so much more easily try again. The ante is also up because the missing mail is no accident: the postmistress chooses not to deliver the letter. In the afterward, Sarah Blake explains that she conceived the novel after the September 11 attacks, trying to understand the ways that public and private grief and fears intersect, as so many people experience during a war.

“Used to be when a bird flew into a window, Milly and Twiss got a visit.” From that first sentence, I would have been happy to stick around with the two elderly sisters in Rebecca Rasmussen’s THE BIRD SISTERS, rather than being sent back decades in the second chapter. But the games of Truth or Consequence, the yellow cakes, and shell-shaped soap all came together as a man with a box of framing nails and tin of black licorice escorted Milly from the general store to her car, where Twiss was reading the Farmer’s Almanac and drinking a cream soda. Love and sacrifice come together in a way that might be most believable in1947, and along the way we’re treated to moments of beauty and humor such as when Twiss asks a teacher about women during the Revolution, and is told that Betsy Ross sewed a nice flag. The novel examines happiness from more than the birds, who are often a symbol, but who the sisters well know have fleeting lives. In the first chapter, they run out of their mother’s old handkerchiefs that they used for burials of birds they couldn’t save.

A long ago sentence spoken to a boy who mows the lawn can change a life as definitively as a photographer chooses what will go in or outside a frame, a reference to the imagery in another wonderful novel, Marissa Silver’s MARY COIN, which I’ll write about next week, along some other novels that cross between scenes in both the present and the past. And I’d love to know the titles of some of your favorite historical novels!

Writing Poetry Together

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 01:22:24 GMT

Homes and Other Places We Remember

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 13:45:11 GMT

Inspiration often begins for me when someone’s inner life resonates with mine, no matter the variations of time and place. If a setting stirs my curiosity, and actions offer at least an edge of a plot, I read to find out more about what someone did and where she lived. Sometimes we don’t know why we’re drawn, but write to understand the pull, finding buried connections that may not matter to readers, except, perhaps, from traces of feeling left by our search. The details of houses, landscapes, and private drawers or boxes, the places where someone rested her head and put her hands, often give me a framework to work within. Places and old things don’t tell time or have calendars, but we can use them to create a sense of order by asking where someone was when she heard some kind of call to adventure, found hope, or felt her belief in her family, who may be almost all she knows of her world, break.

Setting may a good place for writers to begin because while it doesn’t seem as glamorous as theme, which we can argue about all afternoon, it also seems less threatening. Maybe we can’t always write deep, edgy, fantastical, or funny characters but, hey, we can put down what can be seen. We can let rooms, towns, or woods that haunt our characters haunt us, too, until we understand not so much what they mean, but where they fit in a story. They might begin adventures from fairly ordinary places, such as the wardrobe Lucy finds in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which is stuffed with fur coats. We hear something crunch under her feet – mothballs? – then touch something soft, powdery and cold. Instead of furry coats brushing her face, Lucy feels prickly fir branches. The transformation of the particular lets us believe in the magic, just as the description of the barn that begins chapter three of Charlotte’s Web acts as a portal leading to the animals talking together for the first time. The development of the farm animals as seen by Fern to characters in their own right happens so seamlessly that we blink only when some people call this novel a fantasy. The old barn is a place of refuge as much as The Secret Garden, with its hidden bulbs, overgrown briars, rotting swing, and rugged bluebells, which let two angry children discover love. Childhood sanctuaries and haunts behind sofas, under the stairs, in tree houses or forts may evoke both a sense of safety and traces of fear that foster imagination.

Beloved places of the past are often a source of inspiration, as they were for C.S. Lewis, whose mother died when he was ten, bringing about a temporary loss of faith and him being sent to a boarding school that he remembered as being worse than his stint as a soldier in World War I. His friend J. R.R. Tolkien moved from his home in South Africa when young, and spent much of his adult life creating new worlds. Even after P.L. Travers moved from Australia to England, she carried an early memory of telling fairy tales to a younger sister when her widowed mother left the house after having announced some sort of plan to jump off a bridge. In some ways P.L. Travers never stopped telling those tales, creating new worlds that fit better than the places her mother chose for her.

As we wonder why a story or place haunts us, we may find a way toward theme. C.S. Lewis wrote, “We do not write to be understood. We write to understand.” What does the main character learn? What insight about life does she need to understand by the end that she doesn’t know at the beginning? While we want to be able to say somewhere in our process what our book is about, and make sure each chapter if not each scene somehow address that, theme is not our job to state. The right setting may suggest a way.

I’ve been thinking about time, place, and plot as I prepare for the NE-SCBWI conference where I’m leading a workshop called “Nests, Rooms, and Gardens: Using Setting to Structure Fiction.” If you’re interested in more ideas and exercises, I hope you’ll consider coming. The conference is filled but if you’ve signed up for May 3, I understand seats are still available for this workshop. I hope to see some friends!

Three

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 19:17:07 GMT

TELLING TRUE STORIES: A NONFICTION WRITERS' GUIDE  edited by Mark Kramer and Wendy Call is a treasure trove for writers with any interest in narrative. The opening piece by Jacqui Banasynski brought tears as she shifted from describing effects of famine in Ethiopia, including digging shallow graves, for not much dirt was needed to cover thin babies, to an account of the starving people singing stories every night, through the coughing and keening. I loved Pulitzer Prize winner Katherine Boo’s remarks about how her career developed in part from having never learned to drive, so she took the bus, looked out the windows, and made unexpected stops. She mentioned that while it’s painful to omit stories that took hard work to find, she’s learned that “three well-articulated, nuanced examples – backed by sharply documented evidence of a broader problem – are far better than twenty examples that raise more questions than they answer.”

I learned something from almost every writer in this collection, but what struck me was that while none mentioned fairy tales with three bears, three beans, three spins around, or three wishes, several alluded to the power of that number. In "What Narrative Writers Can Learn From Screenwriters,” Nora Ephron tells us that Martin Scorsese says that the dream movie scene is three people in a room, and how she used this writing the film Silkwood, focusing on the whistle-blower Karen, her roommate, and her boyfriend, while piecing together where to begin and end and ways to keep up tension through the middle.

Jon Franklin writes about the three layers of stories: the events, ways the characters react to what happens, and a rhythm that evokes the story’s universal theme. He writes of how this seems backed by the work of neuroanatomist Paul MacLean with what he called triume brain, finding that we all have a brain that is cognitive, another that registers emotion, and another rhythm. Other writers here also mention layers of what happens and an emotional response, but instead of something musical they cite a hope to evoke why the story matters, what it all means, perhaps how the particular tale connects to the greater world.

Three objects on a page can give us the satisfaction of symmetry, but is also dynamic, whereas two by two, side by side, can leave us unmoved. Three is a good number to remember and isn’t just for those who like magic, trilogies, the trinity, tercets, sky-land-and-sea, or the Fates. I’ll be thinking of ways layers can unfold as I look ways for concrete and abstract to meet, while getting back to my own untrue story. It strikes me that triangles can have the enduring nature of circles, while being less cozy. Have you encountered the tug of three in an unexpected place?

Writing through Hesitations to Certainty (Or Close Enough)

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 17:56:38 GMT

I don’t think many writers would suggest this is a profession for the timid. We’ve got to set up sentences and stand by them. We may look as if we’re the sort of people who can’t be pushed around, but we have to be off the ground before we find sure footing, maybe off track to appreciate the one we finally make. Inspiration makes as many traps as footholds. While I shuttle between excitement and fear about a new path, my muse gets distracted, craving too much salt or sugar. It’s hard to settle down.

In The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing, Richard Hugowrites, “To write a poem you must have a streak of arrogance – not in real life I hope. In real life try to be nice. It will save you a hell of a lot of trouble and give you more time to write. By arrogance I mean that when you are writing you must assume that the next word you put down belongs not for reasons of logic, good sense, or narrative development, but because you put it there.” We follow the mind’s inclinations, even when they first seem random, trust change to reveal connections that seem permanent.

While a sentence may look like it stood as long as a mountain, and never have been written any other way, we can remember the sprawling or skimpy strands of words, the rehearsals with syntax, that went into its making. A sentence may look as inevitable as the shape of a life does when looking back, but look deeper, and we recall the mire of opportunities, setbacks, decisions, and whims that went into its making. We take one sure step, the next tentative, but within that hesitation we may find our best prizes. We first imagine, then impose.

Maybe we look particularly arrogant when we slip through the details of history to bring back a voice from the past. I do such work with what I consider humility, feeling respect for what I find and a sense that this work carries a great chance of error. But when has it not been so? I loved reading this from poet Eleanor: “I am in the habit of saying, when people wonder about the chutzpah of revising biblical stories, that they should imagine the chutzpah it took to write them in the first place.” Before paper and screens, stories were passed along by mouths, and literary sorts would step in with their own renditions of, say, a girl who lost her glass slipper or animals lining up two by two before an ark. Sources that seem certain to some are a puzzle to others. Scholars still unwind strands of what has been published as the Bible, the Torah, the Old Testament and other titles, trying to figure out who first wrote down what from a panoply of sources. Stories about Adam, Eve, Noah, Sarah, Abraham, Hagar, and others have long inspired poets and fiction writers, including those in the present day such as Sena Naslund, Anita Diamant, and Alicia Ostriker. Some see ancient stories as invitations, not lectures, a beginning and a place to stand together, not an end or spot to sit alone. And for me, history holds a similar poetry, presenting holes and questions as much as facts. History bends, depending on where one stands when looking. I try to leave pictures of how something once leaned toward me or whispered, what was pure chance, a narrow escape, a glance at just the right time, and make a frame with a hint that it could crack.

Intruders at the Laptop

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 18:12:29 GMT

A writer friend invited me to meet her this morning at a café, where we talk as a little girl and her dad at the next table sing “Itsy-Bitsy-Spider,” running their fingers up each other’s arms. Spring-starved people drink coffee at picnic tables, pointing at small green shoots. I’m glad to be warm inside, opening my laptop and hearing the tap-tap of my friend’s new novel being born.

This rhythm of getting back to normal is just what I need. Yesterday my desk was crowded with spirits pressing me with sweet or sad memories and as many rogue conversations as I’d recently fielded in the church basement where I’d tried to thank people who should be thanked, see that hungry people ate soft sandwiches, stop people from apologizing for things that need no apology, listen to people I love, and people I never met before, and my neighbor who told me about her goat, Stinky, and another neighbor’s clothesline and a rifle. Maybe not the most appropriate funeral story, but then did I cross a line speaking about the fraught, fragile beauty of my last conversation with my father-in-law? Well, I told this to a friend I later learned had given Peter a small box of totemic figures not part of the pantheon of this old New England church, telling him the names or purpose of each being, which of course he promptly forgot. It was all we could do to hold onto stories from the woman who said she seated my in-laws at the same table sixty-five years ago or a man who joined the entire Clarksburg Baseball Team at their wedding.

It’s hard to leave such days behind. Writers may have it both harder and easier than people returning to tasks with boundaries that parallel those we’ve been performing, such as picking up flowers or tracking down a missing prayer shawl. Such tasks can steady us, but grief pounces when my hands hover over a quiet keyboard, wanting to set old characters in new motion. It’s tricky to get back to work when grief, like life, sets its own schedule. Memories spiral, offering revelations with each re-telling, or burrow in, creating the sort of richness we expect from compost. Or sometimes they just lead to places dim as the early drafts of my fiction. Such murkiness doesn’t rise just because we can’t find the right words or structures, but reflects our minds, which pull in all that we don’t know, overwhelming what seems certain. Letting thoughts stray and puddle may make new connections or ideas. The wandering mind is also the creative mind. We might need to dwell in what’s uncomfortable, trying not to bat off sadness or even loving gestures in an effort to hold on to a world that has changed. We have to respect everyday time and ritualized time, when we may contemplate cycles and fit the everyday into bigger patterns.

And there’s a time to rein in wandering thoughts, and no clock to announce when to use a little force to separate waves of plans and waves of mayhem. Just as kind friends try to figure out how much quiet and how much company the bereaved might need, we also try to figure out how much we should sit or nap with sadness and how much we need our feet on what we guess is normal ground.

Now it’s lunchtime at the café and I smell grilled cheese sandwiches. I look up to see people carrying bags of hot cross buns and braided bread. A baby in a green sweater gurgles. Those people at the picnic tables aren’t quite as hunched as they were; one even unwinds a scarf. I’ve put together a blog post, which may be a step back to my novel. I’ll take a walk through snow-melt and mud, then see what’s waiting at my desk.

Beyond Broken Lines: What Makes a Verse Novel?

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 22:59:58 GMT

A few days ago at the Associated Writing Program conference in Boston, I was lucky to attend several panels about writing poetry. The question of what a verse novel is was raised in a session called “It Could Always Be Verse.” Helen Frost, author of the forthcoming SALT, answered poetically, comparing verse and prose to water and land, and saying that a verse novel is neither one nor the other. She cautioned about how narrative’s need for clarity can weigh down the poetry. Lesléa Newman mentioned how verse is a good fit for intense subject matter and that she chooses the form when it can do something she can’t do in prose. She gave the example of how in her collection OCTOBER MOURNING, which is a response to the murder of Matthew Shepard, as a poet she could personify the fence and stars and let them tell stories that a journalist, for instance, could not. She noted that the repetition some forms call for let her go deeper with each round.

Marilyn Nelson, author of books including CARVER: A LIFE IN POEMS, said that she does not write verse novels, but considers herself a verse historian, a title she was given by a seventh grade girl. She said that as a formalist her definition of verse has to do with rhythm that’s intentionally made different from prose. This combined with being book length gives the double pleasure of narrative and verse. Meg Kearney, whose books include THE GIRL IN THE MIRROR about a teen dealing with wanting to know her birth parents, felt the form was right for this as poetry’s white space reflects the silences of a family who could talk about some things, such as the moment the mom and dad got a call that a baby was waiting, but not at first the daughter’s wondering about her birth parents. She spoke of each poem representing a scene or emotional state that moved the story forward, using “the tool of the line break, which layers meanings, creates tension and rhythm, and undercuts expectations.”

In a session called Staggered Tellings: Immediacy, Intimacy, and Ellipses in the Verse Novel, Kevin Young, author of ARDENCY: A CHRONICLE OF THE AMISTAD REBELS, spoke about wanting to reclaim the word epic as used by Ezra Pound, and noted that one important thing about poetry is that there is no division into fiction and nonfiction sections. Poetry naturally lets us move back and forth between truth and imagination. Rita Dove, former poet laureate and author of SONATA MULATTICA, told us how this book was inspired by seeing a lone black violinist on a biopic of Beethoven, wondering who he was, finding the bare bones about George Bridgetower’s life via Google, then becoming obsessed with a story she first resisted telling, not wishing to spend years with men from eighteenth century Europe. She was pulled in for about five years, and felt bereft when she finished the book. She spoke of knowing the basic plot points, so that her work became an “excavation of a life.”

I didn’t speak on a panel about poetry, but in the hallway, some friends asked me about what I think makes a work poetry. I muttered this or that, but now that I’m before my computer hope I can be clearer about why I love to read history and poetry together. The elevated language of poetry can shed light on what’s wrongly been forgotten. In BORROWED NAMES, I worked around big moments that made the women famous, and focused more on what happened before and after them, which may be as important as what might happen in a family between posed snapshots. I used common moments to frame poems and let us see bigger ones from a more intimate angle than one usually taken by historians. These ordinary moments can connect an extraordinary person with the rest of us, and using devices such as alliteration or metaphor, repeating sounds or imagery, was a way to suggest those links. Each line should have a weight and a reason for being there. A clunky sound may be forgiven in a novel in which readers are gripped by characters, but a thud in a poem may stop the reader. Line breaks can offer a way to enter silence that may tease out a feeling.

I like beginning with facts, and using them as a framework, then inviting in my imagination and that of readers. Poetry gives me a license to do this, for as Kevin Young pointed out, this is a form that historically blends fiction and fact. I read primary and secondary sources with an eye out for things such as who quarreled with brothers, messed up on tests, or kept a spectacularly untidy room. I read a lot and select ruthlessly, like a person who spends a long time in attic and returns with one small, revelatory object. A biographer or historian would be on more of a lookout for general patterns, which I watch for, too, but I depend upon small moments. Looking for the right word is like approaching possible treasure with proper reverence. As I polish until it shines like something sacred, I may find my way deeper into theme or plot.

We know the rules of grammar for sentences and the beats and sounds of meter and rhyme in formal verse, but we may feel uneasy with free verse in which we get few clear ways to measure. Some say a definition of verse novel isn’t so important, but all of us working in the regions where verse and narrative cross should struggle to define what we do and why we do it. What does the form tell us about the speed with which someone might read? In yet another panel, David Levithan, who both writes and edits verse novels, mentioned that all publishers seemed to have placed the form as sold to young adults under novels, which seems a good decision, as it’s likeliest to find readers there drawn to story but who may be invited into poetry.

For Poetry Friday posts, please visit Check it Out.

Creating Characters in the Dark

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 13:58:29 GMT

Last weekend I walked with a friend who laughed when she mentioned my facebook posts, saying something like, “You make writing sound so complicated.” I’m not sure what she said, but there wasn’t envy in her voice. I really don’t mean to suggest there’s a maze on my desk every day, even if I often feel a little crazy. Most of the writing I’ve done for the past decade has begun with a real person with a real history, so starting now from a mix of whim and obsession makes me feel as if I’m floundering in deep water. I remind myself that a long distance swimmer might have to swim a long time with no markers. But doesn’t she usually have a boat beside her, someone ready to pull her aboard in case of jellyfish, frigid water, sharks, or getting lost?

Looking for a direction, the state of mind I’ve called feeling stupid, isn’t entirely unfamiliar. It’s just not one I usually choose. I want to know what’s going on, but as a fiction writer, I pretty much have to wait for strangers to speak. Will they, and will they say anything worthwhile? I feel awash in doubt, but am trying to rename that, calling it a space where something new can happen. I need to find my own balance of drawing from life and sheer imagination, recollecting and letting memories go. I’ve been here, or somewhere like it, before

Some fictional characters have origins in real people, often strangers, or those we’ve read or dreamed about. Something about the way someone bends to pick up a stone at the beach or turns her neck to see who’s behind her while in line for popcorn may become the seed of a story, and even carry the importance we feel when an owl appears under moonlight in a fairy tale, all omen-y. We may feel a softening in our belly or a pinch behind our knees, as if a ghost has entered the room. We might call it chance or coincidence, and may feel haunted, gifted, or bedeviled. Or simply relief. Here’s a place to begin, even if the process leaves behind the moment that set off the sparks.

We don’t need to analyze this too much. We probably don’t need to analyze anything too much. A novelist may be best off honoring a moment that whispers to us by writing it out and seeing where it leads. In fact maybe it’s that imbalance of knowing and not knowing, an awareness of life’s quiet connections and many missteps, that starts the story. Maybe the overheard sentence or semi-familiar gesture stirs a memory, so someone steps out of the shadows, though perhaps not too far. It seems good to work within a sort of dusk for a while, where characters may be comfortable enough to confide in ways they might not at a dinner table.

Following these chance encounters takes a willingness to end up in the mind’s back alley. I ask myself a series of questions to develop characters which I’ve posed to students, but suspect it helps to have the questions spoken by an instructor with perhaps a little chicken-shaped timer at her elbow. Surprising answers may come from the unmystical format, the measured box of time that lets writers hurry past the inner-decider-of-what’s-stupid, which most of us have been taught to cultivate more than the hey-whatever-happens part of us. I’m talking neuroscience here, referring to the same principal as writing too fast or steadily for the discriminating part of our brains to catch up.

I ask about characters’ favorite dreams and worst nightmares, the contents of their handbags, knapsacks, or top bureau drawers. What was the most damaging thing their mother ever said to them? What was the happiest moment of their life? What color is their favorite shirt? Such questions can be useful, especially when limited time means we’re bound to use our first thoughts, which can be developed later. It’s not so much interrogation as hanging out with someone that deepens a friendship or characters. It’s important to step in and commit to bringing in some of what we know and some of what we didn’t know we knew. And also important to step back and listen up. Characters we so-call-create have some kind of free will, and if we respect it, we may be swept to places we’d never have thought to go if we’d just relied on our judgment. “Keep your pen moving,” I tell students, and tell myself. Sometimes we slam through words into something never seen before, perhaps a character that readers will feel that they’ve met before. Some readers may even recognize themselves

Shaping a Theme

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 15:47:18 GMT

I started my work-in-progress with a quiet, curious girl and an intention to write for children about ten years old, tossing in some magic. I had a big old house in mind and a shimmering sense of a world beyond. That’s really not so much, but I managed to get a few characters talking, and started to learn more.

Of course I bumped into silences as I worked my way through the first few chapters and tossed ropes toward what might be a corner of the ending. At the ends of my chapters I stuck in notes about what might happen or be spoken, but not yet. I followed up on some of these, but when I feel disoriented, or wonder if the plot I’ve lightly sketched will hold, I’ve been returning to a single scene in my second chapter. The action there takes less than a minute and it’s not particularly spectacular. I mean there are no tornadoes picking up houses, boys flying through bedroom windows, or governesses sliding up banister rails. But it’s a scene I found early on and feels important to me.

So I keep coming back to shine up this little scene of a sister and brother on a plane. I knew a bit about what they’re leaving and where they’re going, but learn more as I return to the snapping seatbelts, safety plans, tray tables that rise and fall, the paper sheets meant to protect them, armrests that can hardly fit two elbows, an aisle that pretty much goes nowhere in either direction, and small windows looking out to the night sky. What I find gives clues about the roles in my book of safety, intimacy, getting stuck, and looking out.

And I’m looking for other ways to suggest the theme through gestures or the subtext of conversations. Maybe I’ll even be so bold as to spell it out in a conversation. In Save the Cat, Blake Snyder tells us that in the movies, a minor character often states the theme within the first five minutes. Composers of musicals speak of songs early on that express the main character’s yearning. In poems, too, I’ve often been swept in by images, then found direct statements in the second or third stanzas. So now I‘m looking for ways to slip a sense of what my book is about into the dialog without being heavy handed. Or maybe I’ll try to press my hands a little harder. I don’t want to set up placards with arrows. A theme should be the bubbles under the waves. We don’t necessarily need a girl to tap her shoes and murmur, “There’s no place like home,” to get a sense of a journey’s meaning. But sometimes a song or wise person speaking up can help.

Second Chapters

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 14:31:21 GMT

Writing a first chapter is like tracking down the perfect outfit for a big occasion, then knowing the hem needs to be adjusted, or the right scarf found, while already having second or seventeenth thoughts. Did the scarf change everything, and should I start again? A second chapter is more forgiving. We’re older, and the outfit doesn’t seem quite as important, and if it’s a little bit wrinkled, so what? We’ve set up the characters, and can let them speak. A second chapter doesn’t have all the bother of pulling in readers with neither too much nor too little information, but it’s time to develop what’s at stake in the small world we created. We’ve brought readers through, but can we keep them? Maybe we should get out the iron one more time.

Like every chapter, my second one will go through a lot of drafts. But because it’s not quite so slippery or delicate as chapter one, this is the place I keep coming back to when I stall on my way forward, peering for threads I might be able to use. Looking back over my own work is a little like reading as a diligent English major. Themes or symbolism can pop into view. Back when I was in college, I never wanted to take this too far, and I don’t want to take it too far as a writer, either. It’s good to carry maybe a plastic toy shovel, not a killer spade. And the trick is to not bring in the vocabulary of someone who’s infatuated with literary theory, but to register, say, the differences that might come from describing someone’s hair as silver, tin-colored, or some other variation on metallic, make a choice, and move on, trying not to leave footprints of an author who thinks too much. Sometimes a rose is a rose, a bird is a bird, spring is a season, and swings, seesaws, and slides are just part of a playground.

Whenever we look back we’re likely to find something new, the way something may emerge from memories of someone’s long ago words, pauses, or gestures. Most of us grow up with shadow stories, and perhaps ten or twenty years later think, Now I get it. Let’s hope understanding as a writer isn’t quite that slow, but something can always be spotted from stepping back, like a new feeling that rises from an old photograph.

Falling in Love with an Unwritten Book

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 17:59:21 GMT

Falling in love means swooning, but also falls and hesitations. I’d forgotten the shakiness and second thoughts, being giddy one moment, then the next wishing that someone was around who could tell me if the new book I’m working on is as good as it seems one moment, or when my confidence shifts, as awful. What is going on?

Intimacy seems not so far from loneliness as I get to know these layers of stories, a process which must happen in one quiet room. Before I’m certain of whether this is flirtation or true love, it’s way too soon to introduce even a chapter to my critique group or inquisitive relatives. We have to work things out ourselves through the getting-to-know-you stage. It’s usually best to even avoid confessions over drinks. While friends may tolerate tales of flesh-and-blood romance for their drama, there’s not much to say about a new relationship with pages, especially since many of us are superstitious, perhaps another word for anxious, and don’t like to reveal details that may turn on us tomorrow. We might just grunt, “Eh, chapter one. Erghh, chapter two,” and our friends with their own creative trials may nod and say, “I know.”

Writing a brand new novel is exciting, but when it’s not, doubts prickle my skin. I set down ideas and clipped scenes wishing for guides who could tell me if a single one is good. I try to skip past scales and just record the middle hunks of dialogue, blurry action, and a bit of fairy tale dust in the haphazard ways these come. Trying to never mind whether any of this will stay for the long haul, some mornings I manage to revel in the brand new shine of each detail. But by noon, I may find it just plain hard to pay attention to the vast unknown, where new ideas enter slowly and without signs of any kind. Are my ideas upscale, or do they belong in the bargain bin or worse?

We may yearn to spend all our time with a new beau, but this is where I have to break my human-book analogy. Spending time with a fresh off the fingertips manuscript makes the rest of the world seem so very attractive. I wish the phone would ring, consider organizing my files, and wonder if it’s time to check on the status of old work. Sometimes the last isn’t entirely procrastination. Most of us aren’t starting from a vacuum. Other manuscripts and books came before, and as they make their way into or out of the world our dismay or pleasure about this can color our feelings about the new. Counselors advise taking plenty of time between an old and new relationship, but. I like to start a new book when the last isn’t entirely finished, winking at chapters which will be there to greet me instead of a silence between old and new. But this does mean we have to be careful that judgments on the old don’t spill over to the new.

So I’m back to asking if what I’m writing is perfect enough for me? Can it be worth spending the next year or two or three with, when I’m so riddled with doubt? Wait. Those hesitations are familiar. This is writing, something I know from every day, and not just part that’s starting out. Maybe this is a book after all.

A Little Love and Courage

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 19:05:40 GMT

As a child, I associated bravery with commanding lone deeds, sacrifice, or being part of a swaggering team. None of this looked anything like me. Even when I played games like Robin Hood, I was aware that the sticks I used for arrows were more apt to dribble to my feet than soar toward an imagined foe. Maybe I could be Dorothy at the moment of truth in Oz, accidentally spilling a bucket of water on the witch. But I never thought I could be Gretel, deliberately pushing a murder-minded lady into an oven. Even to save my own life.

As I grew up, I learned that some people act truly brave while feeling fear, and some manage derring-do that masquerades deep insecurity. Now I can give myself some credit for pushing past my own fears, which aren’t the kind that will be featured in any films. I was scared to post my new year’s theme of loudness, to risk stating that I want something that I might not be able to achieve. I don’t want to jinx even luck I don’t entirely believe in, don’t want to annoy any listening spirits, who might mock me for sounding greedy. It’s embarrassing to display hopes and make them look big and fabulous and like we mean it. No one wants to be laughed at. One of the first signs of a child leaving childhood is when they’re spotted flubbing up, and instead of moving on, they say, “I meant to do that.” Kids no taller than tables start wanting to look always in control, which may take many more years to learn is a mythical state.

I wanted to commit myself to taking a bolder stance to getting more of my words into the world, so made that vow public, thinking I’d then be less likely to turn back. I got even more. Generous cheers from friends made me not only less afraid of stopping in my tracks, but aware of how much I don’t want to. I’m going to move more of my words from my room, which means doing some self publishing and checking in on work that’s idled for months with no response. I’m going to tone down calculating vacations and problems and all the things that might get in a reader’s way, calling this being patient and polite, but is more truthfully being scared to be called a bother, a mask for a lack of self respect.

I believe I’m on the right path, which I didn’t clear alone. Courage is a form of love. I feel a little bit brave now not with that stomach-twisting sensation of stating a goal for all to hear, but with the affirmation of listeners. Naming our dreams for candy houses, a good mother, or a book we can hand to others makes us more apt to find the good people along the way who lend their sturdy enthusiasm. I’ll keep writing, which is always a bit like dropping bread crumbs, making a path that shows a way out of all the forests we enter. One true story is that if a an orphan, a princess, a boy named Hansel, a girl named Gretel, or anyone at all can find a way out, so can we.

You Mean to Intrude? Be my Guest.

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 16:53:16 GMT

When I sit to write, I’m hardly ever welcomed by a voice rising from the page. My characters haven’t been waiting patiently as dolls shoved in a closet, ready for a girl to come back and make them chat. Instead I’m greeted at my computer with the voices that have been in my head all along. There’s that list of chores, the emails owed, fragments of thoughts from the book I want to write someday but not now. I hear calls about all the other things I should be doing instead of what I planned.

I let these voices in, but not too far. Slamming the door shuts out everyone. The smack of the door is that unpleasant. Chores can be simple: there’s a notepad beside me where I can add to the list of things to get done. Some of those emails do get written. And those voices that tell me I’m off topic, that this scene doesn’t belong? I often put them right on the page. Who do you think you are to write this? You’re going to have to throw out the entire morning’s work. This isn’t pleasant to see, but it’s better than having such thoughts drift between my ears. Giving them their due seems to dim their power. And when the spoil-sporty words come back, sometimes they echo the old ding of a typewriter hitting the end of a line. A simple chime, to which I can say: You’re wrong. And move along.

Old Quilts

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 23:24:09 GMT

While wandering through an antique shop some years back, I found a small stack of great old patches for a quilt that someone had painstakingly sewn, but never put together. I bought these, then some new fabric for borders and a backing, and stitched away. As I worked, I noticed that the old fabric pulled. As I kept on, full-fledged rips appeared.

I mentioned this to a friend who’s a seamstress and had given me some advice. Now she said, “Oh, yeah, that would happen. The old and new cloth won’t really go together, and the fresh stitching will stress the old. But anyway, it’s about the process.”

Um, no, I thought. I wanted a quilt. Something to put on a bed. But sometimes the process is what we get. Sore hands, soft curses over the sewing machine, and a quilt that’s sort of pretty though it’s left folded and untouched. Or stories we thought might astonish, but that stay mostly in our rooms.

As a writing instructor, my job is to encourage people to write more and vividly and deep. Maybe something of theirs will be found between covers down the line. None of us know. I’m also friends with writers who watch each other’s backs. Sometimes there are celebrations. Often there are disappointments. Always, I’m grateful for our conversations, and the ways we help each other to look more carefully at what’s under our hands or in rich and complicated pasts.

These include childhoods in which we played a lot of games that had finishing lines, or winners and losers. We couldn’t help taking these in as metaphors for life. But looking back, it’s the playing, friends, and family I remember, not when I crossed the lines or who won what. And when I look at my life as a writer, the people are what matter, too. Most of us keep setting goals of books to finish and publish if we can. But getting there means trying to see more steadily and widely, which is a good in itself, one that usually happens on paths that don’t lead in a straight line to glory. We’re not the grownups we thought grownups were back when we were children. We’re more confused. We keep making mistakes. We learn that some things we thought were possible aren’t, and that some things we believed were impossible are possible after all.

Maybe we don’t belt out songs in the grocery store, as I heard a child tucked in a shopping cart do yesterday. I’m not going to wear red ornament-sized earrings like a woman in another aisle, bells jingling under her gray curls. The most I could manage was to take a breath when another shopper nearly tripped me in a dash to the dairy case. Hey, we all want butter. But if we’re lucky, the sense of hope and mystery we had when we were little doesn’t entirely fade away.

Writers work by ourselves, but we draw from each other’s courage. No matter whether we write science fiction, edgy novels, nostalgic essays, picture books, anything at all, when we’re facing the page we’re at least sometimes facing ourselves, and that’s never easy. Some of us are hugely ambitious, and some of us are happy for a small audience. All of us strive to balance a drive to keep going with the ability to cherish where we are.

Stitching those old quilt squares, I was trying to finish something beautiful that someone else had started, then put away, for reasons I’ll never know. I’m sorry that my work didn’t turn out as I’d hoped, giving an unknown woman a space her work deserved. I’m not looking for neglected projects under any more tables at antique shops, but I won’t stop looking for unfinished stories. Like people who’ve been sewing through the centuries, almost always without their names attached to their work, we can’t know what part of what we leave is going to matter. Some of us will keep pricking our fingers, making stitches whether or not they hold. Some of us will keep blowing on candles, watching flames waver.

Conversations with an Outline

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 15:05:01 GMT

When I teach writing, I try to keep in mind that everyone has a different method. Just because I’ve plunged into work without a clear idea of where I’m going doesn’t mean that other people won’t write something great by beginning with a structure. So I offer exercises that focus on developing scenes, wherever they’ll end up, and exercises that ask writers to turn their eyes from particular moments to glance toward beginnings, middles, ends, and back again. A painter has to be very careful about the spot where her brush touches canvas, but often steps back to see how one color looks against another, how a particular shape looks within the frame.

As we near the end of the semester, I asked students to write one through ten, starting with their character’s birth, which is probably going to be outside the narrative frame, and use ten for the last scene of their novels. The other numbers should be key points of action or insight, and again, some may not appear within the story. They had ten minutes. I’m never very generous with time, as we have so much to do. Most found it helpful to take this long view with a rough outline, before going back to early chapters.

Recently, Amy Greenfield wrote a great post called How to Write Fast(er) about picking up speed (noting that speed is relative) while writing the sequel to her novel, Chantress. Her method includes outlining, and breaking away from it. I’m in the very early stages of the first novel I’ve begun with an outline, albeit one that’s so saggy it flutters in the slightest breeze. I’ve got index cards and maps, but no push pins -- I’m willing to let everything slip-slide around as the characters develop, or change from minor to major, or disappear. I’m inviting a sense of structure earlier in my process, but also spending relaxed time with my characters to get to know them, and let them change before my eyes. A sloppy process, and when I’ve tidied some dialog, sometimes I go back to check my sketchy maps. Letting the outline speak to the paragraphs under my fingers, and letting them talk back.

I still write out of order, collecting parts of scenes that don’t belong. I won’t let myself stop until I’ve found them a place. And now my smudgy outline also gives me a sense of safety, like the stack of books at my elbow. People have made their way through. There’s something ahead to keep reaching for.

Growing a Book

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 18:25:51 GMT

Those first ideas are as small as seeds, which gardeners can scatter, while writers seem bound to dive after them into the ground. It’s not particularly pleasant under the earth, though with the right clothing, one can get along. Murk, muck, mud, lots of m words come to mind. But ideas grow in the dark, and that’s where I’ve been, hoeing, roughing up the dirt, letting the seeds spread, get lost, or nestle. Gardeners don’t expect all the seeds to grow. I never liked thinning out carrots, but this meant I got a lot of scrawny and twisted vegetables. It’s better to be brutal. And add manure.

At last I can get to my knees and watch something sprout, before hacking it down not long after the first glimmers of light. I’m still coming up with bad ideas and even okay ones that I’m going to pull out to make room for the best. So I wait, watch, and after some vigorous weeding, it’s starting to look like a garden. I mean a book. I just started a file called Chapter Four, along with a title I might change tomorrow, and will surely change before I’m ready to taste anything, never mind consider a basket for friends. Between pages, I change point of view, and not in a meta-fiction but just messy way. Images flash and burn out. Characters come and go and evolve, trying out and losing all kinds of traits. But I’m starting to fall in love with some, though I can’t forget to push them into hard places. After a bunch of ideas that didn’t sprout, there’s a sentence that I scribbled Ta da beside and haven’t deleted it yet. There’s still enough murk in these drafts that anything could happen, and I try to let that be good news.

In the manuscript garden business, we have to not just conjure the seeds, but the dirt and water and sunlight, so there’s bound to be a lot of words, and we’re bound to take most out. I’m practicing the gardener’s faith. The plot of ground doesn’t look like much. But things have grown from patches of dirt before, and they will grow again.

The Goddess Kali at the Computer

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 14:54:45 GMT

Yesterday I had lunch with a friend who told me about drawing day after day until at last the girl under her hands felt like the one who’s been in her head. She’s now happily progressing through a dummy for a picture book. This made me think of hands rubbing over and over, trying to start a fire. It made me think of me the last two weeks, hunkering down with an idea both murky and compelling. I started scenes, but they were still warm on the page when I recognized they didn’t have the spark that would tell me, Yes, that’s mine. I’m a believer in storing up ideas so I don’t have to face too many blank pages, but the notes I’d put under labels with a variety of attempts at titles didn’t seem like ones that would grip me for the year or so it may take me to fulfill them.

Starting a new project seems more full of stops than starts, whether or not that’s mathematically possible. I recently celebrated finishing a major project, but this was quickly followed by an uncomfortable hole, which felt drafty no matter how much I tried to call it freeing. I’ve got my main character, sort of, a theme, and a pale vision of a rickety plot, and have spent mornings dreaming up sisters, brothers, and friends who I kill off by the afternoon. Dads and a magical bird come and go.

Dreaming up ideas means you have to be willing to let many go. One of the students in my writing for children class is an illustrator, and when I recently brought in colored pencils, she asked where was the eraser. Sorry, I said. She told me she always drew with an eraser in her other hand, which opened and closed around nothing. She managed, because she’s flexible and kind. This reminds me of how I don’t even think of how close the delete button is to my pinky. It reminds me of Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction and creation, who makes space for the new by clearing out the old.

Then three days ago I had an idea that still makes my eyes shine. I told Peter, around four in the afternoon, about an hour before I had to leave the house, that I was going to my writing room to write, not delete. And I did. Yesterday I might have let more words stay than I struck out. I don’t know what I’ll get today, but I do know that I have to write a lot of trite, flat, wishy-washy, just plain bad scenes before a plot snares or sparkles. So I’ll continue with my Kali files, the scenes that no one but me will likely ever see. And I let one of my favorite goddesses rant, so she will be my friend.

Keeping the Peace

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 14:29:53 GMT

When you “finish” writing a book (I can’t even think “finish” without feeling my lips pucker to form quotes), it seems some people expect revelry, and there is a lovely sense of feeling one shoulder’s fall to more normal levels. Much has been put aside while working on last chapters that needs tending. Days quickly get filled, and it won’t be long before I start obsessing about the status of the manuscript in someone else’s hands or Kindle. But I’m determined to spend some time enjoying a spaciousness available after hitting “send,” looking at the leaves, now mostly fallen, but fragrant.

Yesterday I wrote with friends in a café where we smelled bread baking, and I drank this latte.

My friends were writers, with projects representing the various states of a writing life. I worked on an editing project, Linda impressed us with her maps blocking out structure for a novel, Cindy quietly revised, and Jo pulled together a talk about her work. The largeness of it all the tasks for one book can make one feel overwhelmed.

But driving home past colorful mountains, I let my thoughts drift toward an unborn novel. I’ve been tucking away thoughts as quietly as I pick up an occasional leaf, though it will dry up in the pocket of my flannel-lined jacket. I’ve been letting thoughts come, and letting them go, in the spirit of autumn, when trees show off, then step back. I’ve been trying to look close at what feels as mysterious as this exposed log.

My pace is slow. I’m planning, but in a loose way, letting a new idea shuffle past the old, letting the old ones drift away. A novel can be daunting – and I still swear I’ll never again write one as long as that last one – so I’m trying to trick my way in with a page here, a page there – really “there,” often way past that page “here.” I’m fooling around with characters, ideas, and, yes, action – a word that was passed across the table yesterday – and like a bystander who’s not terribly invested, seeing what will happen. Maybe just leaves blown aside. Maybe a book.

The Poetry Friday Anthology

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 16:10:29 GMT

The Poetry Friday Anthology was the dream child of Sylvia Vardell and Janet Wong, who have compiled other great collections. In their introduction, they advocate reading poetry first and foremost for pleasure, but also point out ways that reading poetry fulfills the Common Core standards for kindergarten through grade 5. Each poem is accompanied by five discussion questions, which relate to language arts skills, personal experiences, or comparisons to other poems. I love how easy this makes it for teachers to add poetry the day, providing enough poems for five minutes on each Friday of the school year. These poems are written by dozens of well-known poets, and many are full of humor and enchanting twists, providing ways for students to bond over the language, the topics, and some original silliness. You can see samples on the Poetry Friday Blog.

I’m happy to have two poems included. Here’s one followed by a picture of an inspiration (which Peter took when we were walking a few days ago).

Good Dog! Bad Dog!

Good dog never wakes us up.

Yip! Bad dog jumps on the bed.

Good dog shakes for a biscuit.

Bad dog snitches jam and bread.

Good dog chews dog toys.

Bad dog chews the chair.

Good dog comes when called.

Bad dog doesn’t care.

Good dog snuggles by my feet.

Bad dog steals my heart.

No, that’s our good dog!

Some days we can’t tell them apart.

For Poetry Friday links, please visit Irene Latham at Live Your Poem, where she’s featuring a collaborative zoo poem (I wrote a goat couplet) to celebrate her new novel. which has a zoo setting: Don’t Feed the Boy.

The Silence In Between

Wed, 17 Oct 2012 18:30:35 GMT

I spent part of this morning moving some books from piles to shelves, while some were bagged for the next library book sale. But the aloe is still leaning over under the weight of its thick, prickly self, waiting to be repotted. The garden is still waiting for me to appear with clippers and rake. I won’t mention housework. After finishing my novel, I did tend to some chores, but I’m trying to make myself available to the muse, too. And she likes to find me on the window seat, looking unproductive.

There’s a silence before a new work comes that can feel prickly, no matter how I longed for it was while hunching over a hefty stack of pages. There’s been a goal in mind, a sense of how I want this big thing to look. Now my novel has reached that state. Peter has almost finished kindly combing it for errant letters, missing articles, apostrophes doled out too randomly, the occasional if that should be it, or she’s that need a name. He’s put gentle question marks beside too flighty poetic flights. He makes me smile with his sweet manners on my pages: It might be more clear if you had a verb in that sentence. Um, yes. And I’m glad for his occasional praise. “This may be the best description of a color I ever read.” Yay! Anyway, I think we’ll have finished tidying by tomorrow, when I expect the drama of hitting Send. And already I’ve set blank paper before me, which needs to get filled one page at a time.

Empty paper can bring up panic, which I’m trying to ride out with deep breaths, when I’m tending to shallow ones, and a still bottom, when I feel wiggly. The aloe and dried plants can wait just a little longer, while I mull my way to and through false starts, dead ends, ideas not quite interesting enough. I’ve written a lot of notes about a girl and a place and their particular powers, but I’ve kept myself from opening that file. And my stillness (well, a few more books were re-shelfed) is paying off a bit. I’m catching a few birds that may or may not be important. An older sister. An aunt. Rocks and a clay-bottomed river. These are enough to begin with. I scribble around them, as if they might mean something.

Time will tell, so that’s what I’m trying to give the process. Saying no to the new yarn, the ever-so-attractive unread books, the sack of flour and cranberries, the spade. I’ll get to them, but for now, I’m trying to be as quiet as the paper and the patient, sprawl of roses that I promise to cut back before winter.

Finished!

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 14:46:20 GMT

Finishing is a good verb, even if it’s imprecise. It can scoop in a lot of time, and usually implies a circle, though one hopes they get quicker with each round. Maybe you can guess from my plans for the next few weeks what I finished?

Get a new toothbrush. Bake. (Apple cake or pumpkin chocolate chip cake?) Hang out with my husband. Clean the house. Tend to the garden. (i.e, wrestle with sumac and bittersweet.) Read poetry. Write poetry. Read books not set in the nineteenth century. Climb October Mountain. Blog more (it’s sad that I’m writing from a file I’ve named spring 2012). Mull over and wade into new projects. Wait. Try not to obsessively check email. Savor the yellow and orange leaves before they’re gone. Remind myself not to write another 500 manuscript-page novel (which I think is about the right length for this historical novel for adults).

Which is what I finished, until, you know, I start getting pulled into again. Peter is kindly using his eagle eyes to go over my draft, but I hope to send it to my agent next week. And in a spirit of celebration, I broke away for a trip to see my daughter. We spent a weekend in Santa Barbara by the beautiful sea, and returned to her home. where we ate good food with great people. Em’s friend Jesus took this picture of us with some lovely fall flowers he brought us, with a light L.A. laugh around that word “fall.” Now I’m back to fall in Massachusetts, which means serious scarves and fingerless gloves. With a few picture books on my mind.