Category: writing

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Snow day

We’re snowed in, we lucky ones. The unlucky ones are out bravely slogging their way through it to get to someplace they need to be. The mail delivery got here, though it made me feel guilty–he trudged here just to bring a couple of catalogs and a magazine I don’t care about.

On Facebook it looks as if people are home everywhere–everybody changing their profile photos, adding 8, 10, 26 new friends. A sure sign everyone’s snowed in. Also, a sign that our concept of “friend” has been co-opted, but that’s another story or at least another blog post. I was recently at a party where one of my favorite people–yes, a friend!–noted that he had more friends in the room than he had on Facebook.

The snow is piling up outside and I’m reading and writing and making two kinds of soup, though I have doubts about one of them. We’ll see. Another friend sent me his annual list of the books he read this past year. I am awed. Haven’t even finished reading the list yet.

Last night I finished Pat Barker’s “Ghost Road,” the final book in her trilogy about World War I. Beautifully written and fascinating, just as many of you said. I continue to read “The Known World” by Edward P Jones, but find I need to take it in just a little at a time–it’s harsh.

Meanwhile, time to poke a little at the fire and feel grateful for warmth and firewood and for many other things, including friends on the phone and online.

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When good things happen to good writers

I have just returned from a lovely party celebrating my friend Edith Pearlman and her new book, “Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories.” It is Edith’s fourth book and begins with an enthusiastic intro by Ann Patchett, herself a wonderful writer. You may have read the glowing front page review in the New York Times with your morning coffee. Or the similar one in the Los Angeles Times. I can’t wait to read the book and you’ll want to read it, too.

Edith has published hundreds of works of fiction and nonfiction in literary journals, national magazines, and online publications. Her short stories have been anthologized (“Best American Short Stories”) and have won O. Henry, Pushcart, and other prestigious prizes. So why has the tone of the praise been along the lines of “why haven’t I heard of Edith Pearlman before?” More importantly, why are people hearing about her now?

Edith herself credits a few people–her agent, Jill Kneerim; Patchett, who has admired her work for years; and Benjamin George, the editor of Lookout Books, the brand new literary imprint beginning its life with “Binocular Vision.” What happened was that George, who had published Edith’s stories in the magazine he edits, “Ecotone,” simply liked her work enough to want to help it find a larger audience. Maybe “simply” isn’t quite the operative word here, with all the complications of publishing and promoting a book, getting it into the hands of reviewers, and then the hands of readers. But the short version of what happened is this: Someone. Paid. Attention. Someone noticed that these stories were, indeed, very fine, worthy of much praise and wide readership.

I am extraordinarily happy for Edith (to whom I am eternally indebted for introducing me to Dr. D!). And her experience, I think, has something to teach us all. For writers the message is to stay true to what you do. For readers–and that includes the writers–honor the work that has been offered to you. Read it with open hearts and let it touch you: pay attention.

Edith will be reading from “Binocular Vision” this Tuesday at 7 at Brookline Booksmith. See you there.

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Let us now praise copy editors

For the past few years I’ve been thinking about copy editors. Actually, I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for them: as a writer I’ve appreciated their ability to keep me from embarrassing gaffes and missteps. In fact, that keen second look is one of the things I miss now that I’m writing a blog instead of a newspaper column. And as a reader, I’ve appreciated their behind-the-scenes touch that leaves me free to concentrate on the sense of what I’m reading without being distracted by errors.

I just read about a major copy editing lapse at the New England Journal of Medicine where, you would think, attention would be paid to the fact that a mistake could actually be a life or death issue.

Typical, I say. For several years now I’ve been wondering if copy editing, even at major publishing houses, has been replaced by a quick run through a spell check program. So “here” can sometimes be “hear.” Or maybe “there’s” no “they’re” “their.” No book, it seems, is significant enough to get careful hands-on editing. I was particularly grieved to find two glaring mistakes in the late Wendy Wasserstein’s final work, her novel, “Elements of Style.” And more recently, the Pulitzer Prize winner “Tinkers,” too, had two sadly obvious problems. In fact, there’s hardly a book I’ve read lately where I haven’t noticed at least one error.

And, really, copy editing is one of those things that shouldn’t be noticed. It should be invisible. You should be able to read a book without thinking that someone had to make sure each word was right. Each word should, simply, be right.

Putting something in print gives it authority, so it had better be right. There is a lot of fine writing out in the world. And there is some good, careful editing, too. Maybe it’s economics. Maybe it’s the democratizing effect–good in so many ways–of everyone being able to publish instantly. Whatever the cause, there’s also a lot of bad writing, too, and it chips away at our respect for the craft, to the detriment of the good writers. And, perhaps even worse, careless editing leaves us distrusting the written word.

To all you copy editors, my thanks for work well and unobtrusively done. Your work may be invisible, but when it’s left undone or poorly done, it shows all too clearly. And we, as writers and readers, are the worse for it.

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Life lessons

I’ve lost people lately–family members, friends, people I had known for years, and those I’ve known only recently. In each case I attended a funeral or a memorial service in which tributes were offered that spoke to various aspects of who these people were and what their importance was in the lives of others.

Yesterday I heard a nephew’s deeply loving–and beautifully written–tribute to a grandfather who, he said, had “only one laugh”–never a sarcastic or condescending or polite laugh, but only a genuine expression of humor to be relished and shared. A few weeks ago heard a woman talk of a poet friend’s passion for reading not only poetry but about the lives of the poets and what may have led them to write the particular words they wrote. I heard about a new friend–a man I met only after he had become quite ill–whose unremitting appetite for life lasted through physical trials that might have discouraged someone else.

And from hearing about each of these lives, I learned a little more about what I want in my own.

I’ve found that kind of lesson, too, in obituaries I’ve read. I know people don’t like to admit they read obituaries. It seems like the occupation only of the old. But I’ve been fascinated by them for years, these mini-biographies of people who have left some mark on my own times. They may have been well-known, maybe people I admired. Or maybe they were people I had never heard of. But their stories told me something about how lives are lived.

There is a line by Willa Cather which sounds very true to me and which I have quoted in my own writing: “There are only two or three human stories and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.” Those stories have been lived before. Other people have discovered ways to live them and their examples offer lessons that can inform, even enrich, our own lives.

And so, to those writers of memorial service tributes and to the writers of obituaries as well as to the writers of biographies, my gratitude for teaching me more about what is important, what is enduring, what make a life of meaning in the world.

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A favorite poem from a poet friend

Just for a treat today, here is a lovely poem by my friend June Beisch. This was published in the Harvard Review in 2006 and also appeared online on Verse Daily.

I had the great pleasure of reading with June a couple of months ago at the Concord Library. Everyone thereI enjoyed hearing her read her work and also hearing her use her natural teaching talents in her comments between poems.

In Muir Woods

Last night, a giant redwood fell
    either from old age, disease, or
“sometimes they just give up,” the ranger said.
Listen, I was in the woods, I
    heard it too, like my own death
falling inside me.
Here in the last of the old growth forests
    where some trees are still virginal,
some older than Moses,
I thought, then, of you. You are not the one
    dying, you said to me,
and I quoted to you from Montaigne
that death was not a proper object of fear
    but only the end of life.
What is a proper object of fear, you asked,
and I said death of the heart.
    But life, you said, was
everything. And you were in love
with that beautiful lie.
Sometimes these trees send out
    all their sap at once
making them vulnerable, sometimes,
they grow burls of anxiety
Look, the ranger said to us,
    the bark is so wet because the tree
drinks hundreds of gallons of water a day
from the fog that rolls in
    over the Golden Gate Bridge.
That bridge which is so beautiful and which
holds such promise for tomorrow
    with its blue shimmering bay.
Every day when I see the fog now,
I think of you and then I can almost
    feel the fog cover me with
that enveloping mist, can almost feel
the branches of the redwood
    being kissed by its cold
ministrations. I would, if I could,
stand here all day like these trees, but my
    heart is so sore, it is almost ready to burst,
and I am filled, suddenly,
with a wild and insatiable thirst.

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Just four words

I read the death notice for my friend Carol’s mother in The Times the other day. I never met Carol’s mother and didn’t know much about her aside from the lingering decline of her last few years. But four words in the obit made her come alive in my mind. Not as the 90-something woman who had become the object of care and worry, but as her actual self. She had been, the paper said, a “double-dutch jump-roper.”

What a picture. Four words and she leaped–jumped!–off the page and back into to her own vibrant, active life. Those were just the exact words, like Cartier-Bresson’s exact moment , to capture her image. I could picture her eager, spunky, full of fun, and maybe a little more athletic than was convenient for a young girl growing up in the 1920s or ’30s. I could also imagine her as a likely source of Carol’s own spirit, energy, and courage.

Those four words also made me think, once again, about the power of every single word we choose to write or utter. Just a few can create a whole world. They can bring someone back to life.

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Letters

Lately I’ve been thinking about letters. The kind we don’t get anymore. The kind we don’t send anymore. The kind we’re glad someone once wrote and saved. When Mozart was writing his opera “Idomeneo,” for example, he wrote long letters to his father discussing his work. I heard a talk about the opera the other night that included some discussion of how significant the letters were, to Mozart in thinking through and explaining what he was trying to accomplish in writing his first opera and to those who want to understand the work and the process more fully.

I heard that talk soon after I finished reading a book of letters between Wassily Kandinsky and his lover, also an artist, Gabriele Munter. I hadn’t known anything about her, or about their relationship I until I saw it referred to throughout an exhibit of Kandinsky’s paintings at the Guggenheim Museum in New York last winter. The letters in the book were filled with triumphs and–more frequently–self-doubts about work on the part of each, along with talk of their relationship and also very touching encouragement from each to the other.

A few years ago I read another collection of letters, between Edith Wharton and Henry James. Again, with ups and downs and those self-torturing questions about their work and their lives. And, again, the focus on doing the work (James) and on how to get the work done in the face of family demands (Wharton). A reminder that probably the female half of any creative couple still has to figure out what’s for dinner, not to mention who bears and cares for the children. But that’s another discussion.

Anyhow, all this leads me to wonder where the next generation of letters will come from , or if there will be any. Is anyone saving e-mails or text messages? And, if so, what will they tell us? Will it still feel like eavesdropping on a private conversation–in a good way?

In just a few years we’ve become conditioned to dropping everything at the sound of a “you’ve got mail” indicator. But remember the (admittedly less frequent) excitement of finding in an actual mailbox an actual letter with a stamp with handwriting and maybe a few smudges or cross outs, carrying, even invisibly, the fingerprints of an actual person who has written it? Aren’t we still–once we get over the shock–still excited to get one?

Maybe the next Mozart is, right now, sending a txt msg: “gud wrk on nu opra. mnc. l8r” Think someone’s going to save it?

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New on the bookshelf: “Had Slaves” by Catherine Sasanov

What if you discovered a family secret, something that shook your whole idea of the family you came from? How would you begin to think about it, make sense of it? If you’re a poet, you might write about it, which is what Catherine Sasanov did when she discovered that members of her family had been slaveowners in 19th century Missouri. The result is her new poetry collection, “Had Slaves.”

I spoke with Catherine for my Boston Globe column back when she had written a chapbook called “Tara” about her family’s slave-holding past. Now this full-length collection is out from Firewheel Editions. In 2009 it was the winner of the Sentence Book Award, which is given annually to a manuscript consisting entirely or substantially of prose poems or other hard-to-define work situated in the grey areas between poetry and other genres. It was also a finalist for the National Poetry Series.

Catherine spent four years researching the lives of the Steele slaves of Southwest Missouri. She is the author of two previous poetry collections, “Traditions of Bread and Violence” (Four Way Books) and “All the Blood Tethers” (Northeastern University Press), and the libretto for “Las Horas de Belén: A Book of Hours,” commissioned by Mabou Mines. She is the recipient of fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, Mexico’s National Fund for Culture and the Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. Her journal publications include Pleiades, Field, Hotel Amerika, Agni, and Poetry. She lives in Boston. Her readings are listed at her website.

In reviewing her work for NewPages.com, Sima Rabinowitz wrote, “Sasanov demonstrates here, as she has in the past, that it is possible to tell a story in verse that takes advantage of what makes poetry so powerful, its magnificent potential for restraint, economy, and a kind of emotional precision that nearly defies comprehension.”

I asked Catherine to tell more about “Had Slaves” and this is what she said:

“’Had Slaves’ was written out of my discovery in 2005 of slaveholding among my Missouri ancestors, and my field and archival research into what happened to their slaves. The book consists of lyric poems and prose poetics ending with a notes section. The notes are not there to explain the poems, but to help with greater historical or cultural context if readers want that. Since America’s racial history has been so poorly looked into and discussed, it felt important to make notes available.

“I’ve come to my subject as a first generation northerner on my father’s side. Except for two pieces of paper in my family’s possession (an 1857 will where my ggg-grandfather, Richard Steele, leaves nine men, women, and children to his family members, and a note left by an elderly cousin where the words had slaves appear) there were no other written or spoken traces in my home of my bloodline’s involvement with slaveholding. For that matter, except for the mention of a handful of events, the lives of my white ancestors were shrouded in silence, too. As if the past couldn’t endure the journey from Springfield, Missouri, to Rockford, Illinois, the city my father settled in after WWII and where I was born and raised.

“It still takes my breath away to think that I could have gone to my grave without any idea of my family’s slaveholding past, that something so terrible could have been swallowed up in silence. It didn’t help that I also grew up with a very ‘Gone With the Wind’ idea of the landscape it took to nurture slavery. A small Ozarks grain farm with tarantulas mating in the corn wasn’t my idea of Tara. As if slavery couldn’t survive outside of an environment rich in moonlight, magnolias, Spanish moss, oak alleys, Southern belles, mammy, and the big house. These revelations really drove me to work against myth and bad history regarding where slavery took place, and who was involved in it. God-fearing ministers held slaves. Revolutionary War soldiers fighting for freedom owned them. Small landowners and men who supported the Union troops during the Civil War kept them. Examples of all four of these slaveholders exist in my bloodline alone.

“I traveled to Southwest Missouri in 2006 to do field and archive research, trying to find out what happened to the Steele slaves and freedmen. If I hadn’t come to the area already knowing that slavery was a part of its landscape, I would never have guessed it. Evidence that the black Steeles ever existed kept coming back paper, kept coming down archival, since every visual trace of slavery has been passively or actively eradicated from Greene County except in words. The evidence lurks in census, probate, and court documents, in business ledgers, doctor’s notes, bills of sale, tax lists, wills, appraisal sheets, death certificates, land deeds, Civil War pension files, marriage licenses, and plat maps. Paper as a kind of amber preserving the past. Its data are often untrustworthy, sometimes on purpose, sometimes from sloppiness. And while I logically knew that the information I looked at translated into human beings, the language of slavery is often constructed to make it easy for readers to distance themselves from the people being discussed. They can never be clearly envisioned.

“In writing ‘Had Slaves,’ I became something of a forensic anthropologist, fleshing out the bare boned, fragmented information I was uncovering about the individuals my ancestors owned. I wanted to make real that it was lives my family held in bondage, not a bit of cursive on a page, or a group of names that could be lumped into a faceless, unindividuated mass called slaves. At the same time, I wanted to reflect on how difficult it is to resurrect the dead when one works within the straitjacket of a shamed history: the paucity of details, lack of images of the people one is discussing, and nothing in their own words. I reflect on this absence in a number of poems, but the poem that most embodies it is the shortest in the book. It was written out of my knowing only that 19-year-old Steele slave Edmund was bequeathed by Richard Steele to his eldest son, a man who’d come up from Tennessee to collect him. The poem in its entirety reads:

Willed, Bequeathed: Edmund, Walked Towards Tennessee,
Is Never Seen Again: September 1860

The sky, the bloody
meat of it,
sutures itself
with geese

“Life was particularly brutal the further south a slave was sent, and it’s possible that Edmund may have been sold beyond Tennessee by his new owner, a man who may have been more interested in cash than another slave on the eve of the Civil War. It was something I had to consider since Edmund isn’t named among the black Steeles of Tennessee or Missouri after Emancipation.

“Slavery officially ended in the 1860s, but many of the people who survived it lived deep into the twentieth century, nipping at the heels of my birth. It staggers me that John D. Steele, the youngest slave owned by my family when the Civil War ended, died only four years before I was born.”

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Where do our words go?

This Sunday afternoon, March 14, I’m reading in Plymouth in “Poetry: The Art of Words,” the Mike Amado Memorial Series. The series is named for someone I never met, but to whom I am connected in a strange and humbling way.

One thing I know about Mike Amado is that one of the great pleasures of his brief life was writing poetry. Mike was ill for most of his life and died of kidney disease when he was just 34. He lived in Plymouth and was a musician and poet, the author of two collections, “Poems: Unearthed from Ashes” and “Rebuilding the Pyramids.”

Mike was also a member of the Bagel Bards, an informal group of Boston-area poets that meet on Saturday mornings, usually around an Au Bon Pain table in Davis Square. And that’s where he and I have a connection. I’ve sat around that table, too, and, when I wrote a column for The Boston Globe, I once wrote about the group. Mike read the column, found a poetry home at that table. The contacts he made there led to wider publication of his work and to frequent readings. He published his two books, started a reading series in Plymouth, attended a summer writing conference, and became a presence among area poets. Then he died, in early 2009.

His friend Jack Scully told me all this this later. It was Jack who had shown Mike my column and it is Jack who keeps the reading series going, with featured readers and an open mike.

Here is an excerpt from Mike’s poem “An Offering of Eagle Feathers,” which was published in Wilderness House Literary Review 4/4:

Show me the path through the pines, Let me feel
raindrops from young, green maples drape
my shoulders as I freely walk home again.
Here I will lay eagle feathers before we all become extinct.

So this Sunday when I’m the featured poet, I’ll be feeling the connection I have with this young poet I never met. But I’ll also be thinking about how our words, written and spoken, ripple out from our small circles and end up in places we cannot predict. We can never know their impact, good or bad. We can only know that they take on a life of their own. Sometimes we find out a little about where they go and whom they touch. And we can hope that they go out into the world to do good things.

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The time of our lives

I have the honor of being a guest blogger on the blog of Melusine, an online journal of literature and art. (I am also delighted to have a poem in the current issue.) The blog post is about boredom, something I always dismissed, but am now taking a new look at.

A few years ago someone said that time plays a major role in my poetry. If that’s the case, I’m not surprised. It is a major theme in my life–my use of time, our allotted time, the accumulation of time. What I was thinking about when I wrote the piece on boredom was how we have so many tiny and often inconsequential demands on our time that we don’t even have enough time to get bored, and I think that’s a loss.

I used to have no tolerance for boredom. “Only boring people are bored,” was my watchword. But I’ve begun to think that what used to be boredom may now be more aptly called “unstructured time.” Every minute of our lives seems to have its demands, its–as Keats said in a way-pre-Google age–“irritable reaching after fact.” Few of those demands are important and most of them are set up by us.

I thought about this–and wrote about it–recently when I found myself tempted by a shiny new smartphone. I have to confess that I have still not entirely closed the door on that, but I’m hoping I’ll be able to make my decision in a way that still keeps me in charge of my time.

So here’s my new thinking on boredom. If we fill up every available minute, maybe we’ll never experience boredom. But maybe, too, we’ll never have the available time to think the thoughts that would be most creative or would make us most aware or would in some way add to the pleasure and significance of our lives. Maybe the free time, the unconnected time, to be a little bored would be the best gift we could give ourselves.

Here’s a challenge I’m setting for myself and offering to you, too: unplug a little. Not completely, just a little. See what comes into your mind. Maybe think of it as the new and improved boredom.