Author: ellen

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“The Warmth of Other Suns”

If I didn’t already know it I am declaring it publicly now: I should never ignore a book recommendation from my friend Erica. After all, isn’t she the one who urged “Tinkers” on me before the Pulitzer committee gave its benediction? And “Life of Pi” soon after it came out? And…and.
“It’s about the Great Migration,” she said.   Ummm…okay….something about famine?  Manifest destiny?   Uh…..
So I finally read it. Forget that it’s an astoundingly compelling read. It’s…about the 20th century…the century I just lived through a good chunk of and…it’s news to me. How did I not know this? How did I live through the ‘60s–even, so I thought, working on behalf of civil rights–and not understand this huge and prolonged change going on in my country? How did I not know all this? I am not proud of this embarrassing ignorance, but I am stunned by it. How did I not know?
I would be even more embarrassed if I felt I was alone in my ignorance. But I get the feeling that a lot of (white) people share it. At least I can console myself that the book is referred to frequently as an “untold story.”
The movement of black Americans from South to North was “great” and a “migration,” but don’t picture some mass orchestrated event. There were no long columns of refugees moving along roads, no tents, no offers of relief supplies. This, as Wilkerson shows, was not a single migration except in retrospect. It was, rather, hundreds, thousands, ultimately six million individual migrations undertaken with the possibility of unthinkable danger, unimaginable courage. Wilkerson’s decision to follow the lives of three people who made the decision and the journey makes the book highly readable and the story immediately tangible. How could I not have read this book?
Thank you, Isabel Wilkerson and thank you Erica. And, by the way, Erica, what’s next on your list?

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When I went to vote this morning…

this is what I did: I walked into my polling place and began to cry. It was not mobbed, no long lines, just bustling. And something about seeing everyone there to exercise this precious right made me teary.
It’s easy to take voting for granted or to be cynical, but if events around the world like the Arab Spring teach us anything it is that people are willing to die for this right that has been handed to us by the lucky accident of our birthplace. This morning, like schools and libraries and storefronts across the country, the Graham and Parks School, was filled with people taking their place in the drama of democracy.
Yes, the campaign has been unbearable. Way too long, starting about the time Mitch McConnell declared his party’s primary objective to be replacing Barack Obama with a Republican to be named later. Way too expensive, using a lot of money, including my own, that could have been put to more socially just and useful purposes. Way too heated, making me, for one, dislike the person I found myself turning into. 
But this morning at Graham and Parks School no one was wearing campaign buttons. It felt like a moment of pure civic engagement, as if this wildly divisive campaign had ended in a moment of quiet, sober participation.
I am not so naive that I think we don’t have to worry about the lines in Florida and the voting machines in Ohio and many other et ceteras. Or that we’ll wake up tomorrow in our neighborhoods, shake hands with those on the other side of our political hedges, and seamlessly coalesce into “the American people” or, taking the words of Langston Hughes not entirely out of context, “…let America be America again.” (After all, that poem continues, “The land that never has been yet/And yet, must be.”) 
But when I got back in my car after casting my ballot, I heard a young man, a first-time voter, interviewed after he voted, saying, “Whoever’s elected, that’s my president.” And I cried some more.
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Pleasures of the page

My granddaughter Mia called the other night. She wanted to tell me about the book I had just given her, “Wonder,” by R. J. Palacio. What she said was, “The first sentence was amazing.” She couldn’t put it down, was up past her bedtime reading.
When I gave her the first book in the “Little House” series, she had to be coaxed into it. “Read the first chapter,” I urged her, “I think you‘ll like it.” She gobbled up the whole series. Mia has the gift of being taken up by books. Her brother and cousins, too. If I ask what they are reading, they never fail to have an enthusiastic answer. 
My sister-in-law Susan told me about a book by a friend of hers, Will Schwalbe’s “The End of Your Life Book Club.”  I haven’t read it yet, but it’s one of the next on my list. The book club of the title has just two members, mother and son, who spend the mother’s final months talking about books and life.  What could be better than ending your days in conversation about books with someone you love?
And today as the wind is knocking tree limbs against the windows and we have warnings of storm-caused power outages, I am thinking about the good fortune of being in the world with books. In fact, I am planning to finish this post and then, whether or not the lights are still on, I am going to give myself a day without power except for the power of words on the page.
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We are NOT “all Malala”

Lately I’ve fallen into the blogger doldrums, posting with decreasing frequency. But today, after posting yesterday, I must put up a new post. I just read a Daily Beast story headlined, “Angelina Jolie: We Are All Malala,” and I am afraid I must differ. Not that Ms. Jolie’s heart and sympathies aren’t in the right place, urging concern for Malala Yousafzai, the young Pakistani girl gunned down by the Taliban for the crime of wanting an education. Not that we all should not be outraged. And not that the “Here’s how you can help” link isn’t well-intentioned, though inevitable.  
But I must confess, at least this one person is not Malala, and I wonder how many of you are either. I am an adult, not a 14-year-old, but I know I would not have had the courage Malala showed. I am sure I would have been tempted to stay inside, shut the door, maybe find a way to study in a less public way. I might not have fearlessly stepped onto that schoolbus or spoken out to urge other girls to do the same. I don’t know if I would have had the courage her parents showed, either, knowing their daughter was certainly in danger and yet knowing that without the freedom to pursue the education she wanted, the kind of life she was destined for was neither what she wanted nor, apparently, what they hoped for for her.
What gives a young girl the strength to defy her society? Where did this thirst for education come from? She began writing a blog for the BBC at the age of 11, detailing her life under the Taliban. She wrote of hiding her books under her scarf, of hiding her school uniform. She titled one of her blog posts, “I am afraid,” But she wasn’t, or at least if she was, she wasn’t afraid enough to stop going to school, to stop learning and to dream that what she learned could ultimately help make her country a better place.
I hope she is able to recover from her injuries, though being shot in the head and neck sounds dire and “stable condition” is far from home free. No matter what her age, she is remarkable, inspiring. She is the epitome of courage. Much as I wish I could be, I am sad to say, I am no Malala. 
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“Some book”

Today is the 60th birthday of “Charlotte’s Web.” Definitely a day to celebrate, but how? First, I think I’ll leave all the spider webs in my house undisturbed, even if they don’t have important messages woven in.
I heard that E.B. White himself considered the book to be about the barn, the atmosphere he described with rich sensory detail–the smells, the warmth, the sounds. But I think most readers would think of the friendships as the book’s central theme. Tonight I’m having dinner with friends, so I will certainly have a chance to celebrate that.  
For writers, of course, the book has a special message–the power of a well-placed word.   Oh to write such a life-changing single word! 
And who among us wouldn’t be satisfied to be remembered as Charlotte was: “It’s not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and also a good writer.”

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Where the poem comes from: Elisavietta Ritchie

What turns a creative impulse into a finished poem? What inspires? What becomes the jumping-off point?  The poem here is called “Tradecraft in Iambic Pentameters” and the poet, Elisavietta Ritchie, has given it this subtitle: For a child who doubts I can keep secrets. 
Elisavietta is another of my fellow poets with books out from Word Tech. Her book, “Cormorant Beyond the Compost,” was published in 2011 under Word Tech’s Cherry Grove imprint, which will also publish her next book, “Tiger Upstairs on Connecticut Avenue” next year. She lives in Washington, D. C., where, in addition to writing, she edits, translates, mentors other high school seniors, and leads a workshop, “Re-Write Your Life: Creative Memoir Writing.” Her credits are extensive enough so that, rather than listing them here, I direct you to two web sites about her, where you can get a more complete picture of her range of publications and many accomplishments. 
 Tradecraft in Iambic Pentameters
                   For a child who doubts I can keep secrets
So many secrets you will never know
long hid in lines upon my face and page.
Although my random chatter seems to flow,
true tales remain confined within the cage
of my long skull, while most of those who shared
their riddles and their loves with me have died.
I too have lived adventures, and much dared.
Who’d guess? I do know better than confide.
Whispers through the skin are safe—no need
for megaphones: what if the listener spoke?
I may broadcast my sacks of words and seed:
the small birds twitter and the large ones croak.
For I’m the owl, who flies on unheard wings,
foretells when others die, but never sings.
About this poem, Elisavietta says, 
“ At a Sunday lunch my daughter said in front of her children that I could not keep a secret, gossiped too much, because I was describing some friend to them, I forget who. I was indignant! However, although I seem to talk, there is a great deal I cannot or do not say (and not only because others are talking nonstop!). I hear and hold a number of other people’s secrets.
“Anyway, this poem leads off my last collection, Cormorant Beyond the Compost, and if you follow Kevin Walzer’s http://www.cherry-grove.com/ritchie-cormorant.html
you will see he leads off with it.
“And we seem to have a pair of owls in residence in the nearby woods, and though they twit-twit-twoo back and forth on a rare occasion, when they fly, it is indeed on silent wings.
“And in my collections of poems and stories, no one can be sure what is fact and what is fiction, so I am fairly safe.”
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Making art out of what happens

I just got a chapbook in the mail. It’s called “To the One Who Raped Me” and it’s by a poetry friend, Dustin Brookshire. I’ve known Dustin for several years, though we’ve never met in person.  An earlier poem of his was featured in a “Where the poem comes from” post three years ago.  Dustin let me know about this new chapbook and I asked to read a copy. 
The poems in this book tell the story of the horrific assault Dustin experienced at the hands of a former boyfriend.  I happened to read them on a day when the news is filled with the political fallout from delusional rantings about “legitimate rape,” whatever that may be.  Violence against women is rampant in our society–in many societies–and for a woman to speak up as a survivor takes courage.  I have no doubt that speaking up as a man who has survived rape takes even more.
How to strip yourself bare on the page and yet wrap yourself in dignity and grace? How to take a brutalizing thing and use it to make art? How to take something traumatic that happened to you and create something that could give voice to others?
Dustin’s rage is undeniably personal, but it is also societal. The poems are interleaved with facts from the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, including that sexual assaults occur in the United States at the rate of one every two minutes and that men make up 10 percent of rape victims and are among those least likely to report the crime. 
Telling the people close to you, watching a violent movie, feeling regret for what you think you might have done differently, the images that remain to haunt–all these are the subjects of his poems and they are not easy to read or to think about. But they are important to read, just as they were important to write. Dustin writes about how hard it is to say the word, to say that it happened to you. And yet, “the words open a cage door./ I will never go back in.” His words may give others the courage to open the door, too.
“To the One Who Raped Me” is published by Sibling Rivalry Press. One dollar from each sale of the book will go to the DeKalb Rape Crisis Center

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Girlfriends at a distance

Did I spend time thinking about Nora Ephron before yesterday? A little. I admired and enjoyed her movies, her books, the wise and funny things I heard or read from her. But I never met her and, in truth, I didn’t think about her often. Until yesterday, when I was caught by surprise by my intense reaction to her death.
Here was a woman who, really, had spoken for and to the rest of us women. To my generation, for sure, but also, I think, to a much broader group. She chronicled the pleasures and displeasures of all our lives, the petty annoyances and indignities of aging and upkeep and societal demands, and the great joys of friendship, love, family, and relishing good moments and experiences. 
I had one of those experiences last night, out to dinner with Dr. D. and a tablefull of friends. The women–and the men, too–toasted Nora as if she had been a personal friend.  There was a down-to-earth quality about her that made each of us certain that, given the chance, Nora and we would have certainly been friends.
It felt like that, too, when Wendy Wasserstein died. Maybe what so many of us felt in remembering these two women, was how fearless they were in exposing what they felt and thought and believed and how their fearless honesty helped us define and understand and respect what we felt and thought and believed, too. And what we experienced. Yes, they both lived lives of huge accomplishment and resulting recognition. Yet somehow they included us on their journey. Somehow we got the sense that they were not rarified creatures living in a world we could never hope to know, but that they were us, writ larger. And way funnier. They inhabited the very same world, It will be so much less without them.
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New on the Bookshelf: “What I Saw.” by Jack McCarthy

I’m not going to start off with a disclaimer that Jack McCarthy is one of my favorite poets and one of my favorite people. I’m not going to say how eagerly I offered to write about his new book. Nope. Just going to start right in and tell you about it.
The book is called “What I Saw,” and that in itself foreshadows its pleasures and its wisdom: what Jack sees is what lies beneath the details of daily life. Give him a chipmunk darting in front of his car and he sees the urges that have us all in their thrall. Give him a box of non-winning raffle tickets and he sees a benediction for a bridal couple’s future. 
He’s not seeing miracles, mind you. In the poem, “What I Saw on My Walk,” he lets you know right away that he saw no bears or cougars, hawks or eagles. No major celebrities of the wild, in other words. But a coyote and a deer looked him in the eye, a rabbit melded into a prayer, and an old woman with an old dog led him to a vision of what the world is. He sees no more than what most of us see, really, but what he does with the noticing is his gift to us. 
I’ve often thought that Jack’s poems look like him in a way–long and lean and loose-limbed, with a tendency to amble comfortably and then zero in unerringly.  I’d like to quote a few lines from one of the poems to give you a small taste, but that ambling conversational style with its detours and roundabouts doesn’t make it easy. He doesn’t go straight for the easy linear narrative. Take some random lines out of context and they just don’t give you the whole picture of, say, glimpsing a copy of Poetry magazine in the corner of Hannibal Lecter’s cell or taking his small daughters hiking. Can’t do it. Sorry. You just have to get the book.
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The art of fielding the big book

I just finished reading “The Art of Fielding,” by Chad Harbach. It has a lot of wonderful writing and I found it engaging, despite my having only a marginal interest in baseball and a low tolerance for reading about guys being guys. (In fact, I know so little about baseball that when the fictional Aparicio Rodriguez is introduced my thought was, “Is that A-Rod?”) And yet there’s something bothering me about this book.  
This book arrived on the scene with Major Buzz.  Not to make light of the 10 long hard years Harbach worked on it, but this book was anointed. It was on all the “best of 2011” lists, was a finalist for the National Book Awards, and was among the favorites not selected for this year’s Pulitzer in fiction. A Vanity Fair article and, later, an e-book, was written about it. It carries a blurb by Jonathan Franzen, among distinguished others, and has inspired comparisons to David Foster Wallace. HBO is reportedly making a film of it.  
And yet…and yet…there are things that bother me. There are cliches (Owen, impossibly cool, stylish, handsome, brilliant, fanatically clean, AND effortlessly athletic, introduces himself with “I’ll be your gay mulatto roommate”); verbal tics (who uses “freshperson” without irony? who uses it all the time?); and ham-handed plot devices (was ever a death more conveniently timed?) In a climatic scene a character reads an excerpt from “Moby Dick,” a book intimately entwined with this one, and the excerpt is not given. What’s that about? Sure, you can Google it, but was this intended only for readers who would know it?  Surely a trusted mentor, not to mention a good editor, might have steered Harbach away from some of this.
And there’s one more thing. Just indulge me for a minute, but I’m trying to picture a big fat good read about women doing “women things” (though I’m not sure what that would be–shopping? primping? cooking dinner? studying neurobiology? applying for a Fulbright?  Ok, I’m ranting.) in a book that has only one major male character getting one-tenth the literary respect that this book has received. Or even getting published.
I’m just saying.