Poem for a Monday

In Sunday's NY Times Book Review the author Sue Monk Kidd said she tries "to read a poem every morning" with her coffee.  I think this is a marvelous practice ... provided you can find the quiet space in the morning maelstrom to actually savor the poem.

I'm still crushing on Mary Oliver (see last Monday's post) so here we go with another one of hers.  This one fell open this morning, which was a little scary because only yesterday I was talking to someone about despair.

Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
      love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.


In other news from the Times:  author Jo Knowles wrote a very good review of Laurie Halse Anderson's latest novel, The Impossible Knife of Memory.  These two are among the best writers in young adult and middle grade fiction right now, and I want to rush out and get Knife as well as Living With Jackie Chan, which is Knowles' latest.

Where They Take You: NYC, 1/7/14

 I have a friend in Maine who raised three sons who all played ice hockey.

Those of you who fit that description ... parent of a hockey player ... know what that involves.  Dawn practices, gear bags which emit unspeakable odors, the heart-in-the-throat moments when someone delivers them a hard check into the boards.  Conrad and I were more than pleased that our two played basketball.  Warm gyms are nice places in the Maine winter ....

Anyway, my friend:  a Jersey girl, like me, who grew up in a family of sisters.  One morning (or was it still night?  Does five a.m. in January, the black sky still studded with stars and the mercury hovering at 7 degrees count as morning?) she was in the icy men's locker room at Bowdoin College's Dayton Arena (before it was razed and turned into a fine parking lot) tying skates on her young son's foot and marveling at the unexpected places parenthood takes you.

I remember how impressed I was by her buoyant attitude.  I would have been a complete piss-ant in that moment, no doubt yearning for coffee.  Instead, she was Mother Philosopher, taking the long, wise view.

Parenthood has taken me places I wish I'd missed:  a few I would gladly swap for a year's worth of pre-dawn mornings at Dayton Arena.  It's also taken me to emotional ... and actual ... peaks and valleys of pure joy impossible to imagine without the little darlings.  This is probably the subject of a book, or at the very least a long psychiatric journal article, and not a blog post, so I'll get to the point:  earlier this week parenthood brought me to the winter tunnels of New York City.

You think it's cold in Maine?  Think again.  Yeah, I'm sure there are places and seasons in the Pine Tree State where you spit and it freezes before it hits the ground.  But nothing gets you like the frozen, damp wind off the Hudson River when it picks up speed along the luge-like avenues between the gray skyscrapers.  I'm going to guess that the morning my son and I arrived in The Big Apple, the wind chill hit its low for 2014.

It was also the morning he'd scheduled for a new head shot.  A soon-to-be-graduated college student and aspiring actor, he's in the thick of all those things you do to prepare for employment in the Real World.  For an actor, that means obtaining a realio trulio professional photograph of yourself so you have something to hand out at auditions and mail off with your resumes.  Our son had found Xanthe Elbrick, an actress and photographer who specializes in using natural light for her headshot work.

I know what you're thinking, and yes:  outside.  Wind chill at 20-below.  And not just outside:  the Boat Basin, at the intersection of West 79th and Riverside.  My mother claims it's the coldest spot in the City.

We met the delightful Xanthe in this sort of grotto which, thankfully, shielded our lad from the wind.  And he needed shielding:  while the rest of us were protected by multiple layers and serious mittens (Xanthe had a parka Prince Harry would have coveted during his recent Walking with the Wounded trek to the South Pole), The Dude had several "costume" changes, all of which involved little more than a light sweater and tee shirt.

It was his best performance ever:  he played "warm."

Somehow, Xanthe succeeded in taking some great photos, after which The Dude and I cabbed it to our hotel, where he spent some time massaging his feet and restoring circulation to his toes.  We had time to kill before our show that night:  we had tickets to see Ian McKellan and Patrick Stewart in "Waiting for Godot."

I can't imagine anyone I'd rather go with to see a play, especially if it's something along the lines of "Godot."  I'm not smart enough for Beckett, whereas my theater-major son has studied it or read it or seen it more times than he remembers, and he can coax me along.  It's one of the unexpected places he's taken me: plays I wouldn't have chosen to see, sometimes in surprising venues.  Thanks to The Dude, I've attended "Julius Caesar" in a grimy college basement, as well as "Twelfth Night" in London.

But before the show we had time, so we wandered out again and within a few short blocks discovered an amazing exhibit at the New York Public Library: "The ABC of it: Why Children's Books Matter."

I found myself listening to a recording of E.B. White reading the opening to "Charlotte's Web."  We saw the actual stuffed animals which inspired "Winnie the Pooh."  Eeyore was a naturally bent donkey: of course A. A. Milne made him dour!

The original Eeyore, Tigger, Kanga, Roo and Pooh. With a photo of A. A. Milne and his son, the inspiration for Christopher Robin.

There were the books I loved as a child ("A Wrinkle in Time") and the books I loved reading to my children.  For some reason, as a child I never read Robert McCloskey. But I read all of his to my kids, especially:

"Make Way for Ducklings" original edition.

Two of my kids' favorite "city" books were on display:

"The House on East 88th Street" and "Eloise."

And as an author, I was knocked out by this tower of titles which have all been banned at some point. Some of my favorite books are here!  Actually, most of my favorite books are here ....

Tower of banned titles

Close up of some of the banned titles.  Really?  "Little House on the Prarie"???

Another friend (whose children do NOT play hockey) found herself at an orphanage in Africa, volunteering with her daughter.  Yet another friend found herself celebrating Christmas in Istanbul thanks to her son.  Another found herself hauling a Thanksgiving turkey into the Barbara Bush Children's Hospital with her daughter.

Exploring New York in the extreme cold is fairly mundane in comparison, but surprising nonetheless.  I'm looking forward to seeing where else they'll take me.    

Poem for a Monday

The latest "game" on Facebook (everyone is posting poems and assigning poets to each other!) has prompted me to get back into my "Poem for a Monday" habit.  I think it's a good way to start the writing week ... especially this writing week and mizzly Monday, which is pouring down rain on several feet of what was only yesterday's beautiful snow.

This poem from Mary Oliver (my latest poet crush) spoke to me today.  Even though it's supposedly about death, I love it because it inspires me to live my life differently.  Favorite section of the poem:  "When it's over, I want to say: all my life/I was a bride married to amazement."

When Death Comes

By Mary Oliver

When death comes

like the hungry bear in autumn;

when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;

when death comes

like the measle-pox;

when death comes

like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:

what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything

as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,

and I look upon time as no more than an idea,

and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common

as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,

tending as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something

precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life

I was a bride married to amazement.

I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder

if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,

or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world. 

Getting to Know Your Characters: What's in the backpack?

One of my favorite getting-to-know-your-character exercises to do with young students involves a familiar object:  the school backpack.

We writers talk a lot about getting to know our characters, which, to those who DON’T spend entire days with imaginary people, might sound a bit odd.  Frankly … it is odd.  Really odd.  Because the whole exercise implies there’s an otherness to a character, an existence outside ourselves, when in fact these folks are inventions of our own design.  We control them, right?  In reality, getting to know a character is really about exploring your own imagination, digging deep or opening closed doors to discover what you really want to write about.

So these exercises are about springing locks.  Getting us to see things/people/situations in new ways.

For me, making lists doesn’t help much.  Lists lock me into traditional ways of seeing.  Asking my character, “What’s your favorite color? Your favorite food? The name of your dog?” relegates my character to a world strikingly like the one I live in.  And fiction is where we don’t live.  It’s an edgier, riskier place.  That’s why we like it.

So I like to pry, into shadowy places where my characters don’t expect me to go.  That’s when I learn who they really are … and that’s when surprising things, a.k.a. plot … happen.  The other day, I made serious headway on my latest novel when my character pulled out his coat from last season and I stuck my hands in his pockets.  You know what I’m talking about:  last fall’s jacket, it wasn’t sent to the cleaners, and … there’s stuff in the pockets.  Old, forgotten stuff.  For my character, it was ticket stubs and a mini tin of Altoids. 

Maybe that doesn’t sound very promising, but wow.  The storms that were unleased!  I’m not going to give away what happened after that, but hopefully you’ll read about it someday, when this is a book …

If coat pockets don’t work for you, try peeking into your character’s bathroom drawers.  Medicine cabinet.  Fridge.  Glove compartment.  Go through her purse.  Get hold of her phone and read her text messages. 

Sound creepy and invasive?  Trust me: it yields pure gold. 

This is very, very fun to do with adolescents and teens, who like anything remotely naughty.  And peeking into someone’s backpack is all of that.

Here’s the how to:  get hold of a couple of backpacks.  Into each, throw about seven items.  This is actually harder than it sounds … you don’t want to be too “leading,” or too banal.  The combinations of items usually yield a good harvest.  For example, in one of my recent packs, I put both a detention letter AND a National Honor Society pin.  The day before I had omitted the pin, and the results were far less interesting.  So give students some tensions to work with.

I also like to create one pack that screams gender specificity.  The kids often assume the character with the headlamp and the knot tying guide is a boy who likes the outdoors, and they ALWAYS assume that the character whose backpack contains cuticle cream, nail polish and hand sanitizer is a girl.  After we’re done talking about “her,” I ask them to tell me about the character if we assume it’s a boy carrying the cuticle cream,.  That’s when the fun begins … and when the story lines start to emerge.  He’s either a thief, or a boy with secrets, or a boy with unrequited love, or a flake who picked up the wrong pack … the kids start spinning tales.

If you have a very limited amount of time, snooping through the packs and discussing, as a group, who these characters might be, is all you can accomplish.  That’s okay:  the snooping exercise is truly “news they can use,” a technique not only for jump starting new stories, but also for fleshing out characters in stories-in-progress.  For example, the revision stage is a great time to dig a little deeper into a character’s life.  The better we know them, the more consistent they will be!

On days when I have lots of time with students, we take what we learned from the backpacks and move on to the “Plot Follows Character” prompt.  But … that’s for another post!

In the meantime, teacher and middle grade author Kate Messner had a great National Novel Writing Month post with lots of ideas for kids who want to get to know their characters.  Take a look here … and happy writing!

The Gift ... and the Challenge ... of Time

Today is the first official day of fall, my favorite season.  Even the depressing darkness of November (in Maine we lose the sunlight by 4:30 pm in that bleak month) brings certain delights:  wood stove fires; roasts; hot cider.  Though I'll be almighty sick of snow and ice come March, the first cold snap in September thrills me. We pick apples and eat donuts (a food I shun the rest of the year), conduct the hat and mitten inventory, resurrect favorite sweaters. I love the slant of the sun this time of year, even when it's a driving hazard heading west at rush hour, and the low, persistent whine of crickets. True, I don't love the spiders who migrate into my basement office as the weather cools, and all those need-to-be-raked leaves on the lawn stress me out, but the rest of it? Wonderful.

This fall, I find myself in the Disneyland of All Things Autumnal:  Vermont.  The stars have aligned in such a way that I have several weeks of what I can only describe as a Writer's Retreat in Vermont, and I have nothing ... absolutely nothing ... to do besides feed myself, observe the changing foliage, feed the cats (more about them, later) and write.  It's a little mind blowing, to be honest.  A surfeit of riches I never imagined.  A novelist's dream come true.  Acres and acres of uninterrupted hours to be wildly creative, stopping only for a brief hike up to Robert Frost's cabin (yes indeed it's around the corner) or getting up from the desk to toss another log on the fire.  Amazing.  Just amazing.

And utterly frightening.

For the first time in my life I have absolutely no excuses for not getting my work done.  And oh, I love my excuses.  They are the salve I apply when distraction, laziness, insecurity, and overall professional brattiness set in.  Of course I can't get to writing, my kids need me this morning!  Of course I haven't started that novel I'm painting the house!  How could I be writing when I need to get dinner on the table/visit my sick friend/walk the dog/etc./etc. 

But it's more than that.  Sometimes this just feels hard.  Sometimes I hate my characters and I'm so completely bored with their lives (aka my story) that I fantasize about a factory line job.  I've had those jobs.  Back when I was in high school, scraping together a few bucks in any way possible, and let me tell you: they are amazing.  As long as you stay alert enough to avoid losing a finger, you can mentally drift all day and still collect a paycheck at the end of the week.  In the writing business, you can concentrate until your head pounds and still not get paid for two years.  And at the end of it, you have reviews to look forward to, but don't get me started on that.

Writing a book is a pregnancy that lasts years, followed by a very long labor without an epidural, and might still require a C-section.  Add to that someone is bound to say, "Your baby's ugly," when it's all over and you gotta wonder:  why?  For God's sake, why?

This is the part of the blog post where I'm supposed to seque into the joys of the creative life ... but no.  No pablum today.  The joys do not outweigh the aggravation.  Writing and publishing a book does not change your life (unless you make a ton of money, but ha! to that) and even after the rush of opening the box when those first volumes arrive, one is still someone's wife and mother and dog owner and daughter and sister and if you weren't already satisfied with all that, well ... that box of books isn't going to help you.

You do this because you can't help yourself.  Because even if writing doesn't make you incredibly happy, not writing makes you unbearable even to yourself.

So here I am, with this amazing gift of time, no excuses: and I'm between books.  Yup.  And that's the positive spin: between books.  It implies another one is on the way.  It's actually more like this:  interested friendly people ask me, "What are you writing now?" and I have to stop myself from grabbing them by the shoulders and shaking them and screaming hysterically, "Nothing!  Absolutely nothing! And I don't know where to start or what to do! What should I do?"

This does not engender further conversation.  It does not solidify friendship.  Most importantly, it does not get the writing done.  The only thing that gets the writing done and the next story written is Nike wisdom:  Just Do It.

So for the next ten days, and then again in October for another block of days, I'm in full retreat. From excuses. From insecurity.  Because no matter what came before, it always comes back to this: the blank page.

Today, Day One of my Amazing Vermont Writing Adventure, I began with a ten-minute Peter Elbow exercise (his book, "Writing Without Teachers" is my bible) followed by a brisk walk to the food co-op where I purchased a Red Hen Bakery organic baguette, Vermont Cheddar, and apples for lunch, all the way thinking about the fellow who emerged during the Peter Elbow exercise.  I decided to blog, put it out there, so to speak, about the No Excuses Plan to Get Working and Find Your Next Book, and after posting this I'm going to start that chapter I imagined during the walk.  I usually do this sort of writing warm up with my dog, but she's still in Maine.  However, this place where I'm staying has cats.  Very independent cats who must be lured indoors at night by shaking bags of kittie treats.  Something for me to get used to ... but I'm happy for the company.

Meanwhile, there's been some joy:  I made a pilgrimage to The Flying Pig independent bookstore (recently named best bookstore for kids in 2013 by Yankee Magazine!) in Shelburne, Vermont yesterday where I found they had one of my books in their YA section (I left them with a signed copy of Out of Nowhere so perhaps they'll carry that one, too.) This is a fabulous indie; check them out.  They had my friend Stephen Kiernan's book, The Curiosity, prominently displayed. Yay. Visited the harvest festival at Shelburne Farms yesterday, followed by dinner at Jessica's restaurant in Middlebury.

Okay.  To work.

Ramadan Mubarek

I had to begin this post with a picture of the food. Tandoor Bakery and Restaurant in Portland, Maine, kindly and deliciously provided an amazing meal for all of us who "broke the fast" for Ramadan together this past Friday night. The line was out the door at the Rines Auditorium, the conversation was great and even though I thought I knew about Ramadan I discovered I had more to learn.

This was all part of the I'm Your Neighbor multicultural community read which is going on in Portland throughout the year, and Friday's event focused on Ramadan and featured my book, Out of Nowhere, and Moon Watchers, by Reza Jalali, illustrated by Anne Sibley O'Brien.

The evening began with Reza sharing memories of Ramadan from his childhood, explaining what the month-long fast is all about, and telling us how his family practices today.  Even though this is a "childrens" book, readers of all ages would love the story and gorgeous illustrations.

Throughout the evening there were prayer rugs on display, books from the I'm Your Neighbor collection for sale and to check out from the library, and henna hand painting demonstrations.

Following Reza's presentation, Pious Ali, of Maine Interfaith Youth Alliance, led a panel discussion which included me, my friend (and great resource for Out of Nowhere) Shobow Saban, Reza and Anne.

From left: Reza Jalali, Anne Sibley O'Brien

Shobow, left, and me.

After that, it was time to FEAST.  We broke the fast with a prayer, and those who hadn't eaten all day were first in line.  Great food and fun conversation followed.

Anne Sibley O'Brien serves up dessert!

Pious Ali (center) shares dinner with friends.

From left: Shobow Saban, Reza Jalali, USM students

Shobow was eager to get to his meal (you can't see it but he's holding a plate) but conversation came first.

I was thrilled to be part of this amazing evening.  Next up on the I'm Your Neighbor schedule: A Path of Stars, a celebration of Cambodians in Maine, Thursday, August 8th.

From left: Shobow Saban, Reza Jalali, me

Books in Boothbay

The Maine author fair formerly known as Books and Blooms (that was back in the day when it was held at the Botanical Gardens), now known as Books in Boothbay (and held at the Boothbay Railway Village) is a rite of summer and I was so happy to attend this past Saturday.  Sponsored by Sherman's Bookstore and the Boothbay Public Library, it's a great day to connect with readers and author friends.  And pick up books!  So many great books.

Katie Quirk and Ellen Booraem

I bought a copy of Katie Quirk's A Girl Called Problem, a young adult novel about a teen from Tanzania who is determined to overcome tremendous adversity in her life and go to school.  I've been an Ellen Booraem fan since I read her book Small Persons With Wings, bought a copy of The Unnameables, and can't wait to read Texting the Underworld, which is coming out this August.

Lisa Jahn-Clough (left) and Jennifer Gooch Hummer

Novelist Lisa Jahn-Clough signed a copy of her new book, Nothing But Blue, for me.  And I got Girl Unmoored, by Jennifer Gooch Hummer, which recently won a 2013 Maine Literary Award.  

Paul Doiron

Of course, the biggest score of the afternoon was a signed copy of Paul Doiron's latest thriller, Massacre Pond.  His publisher provided copies even though the book doesn't officially "launch" for another couple of days so I've been feeling smugly ahead of the curve, curled up with my latest Mike Bowditch installment!

One of the biggest draws of the day was Farmer Minor and his Pot Belly Pig, Daisy, who apparently loves being read to.  I was a little concerned about the pig, frankly.  As you know from my earlier post about cute animals (Never Compete With a Blind Raccoon, 3/11/13), it's a real hazard for authors.  However, Daisy conducted her business in a nearby barn, kids and authors alike were happy, and a great day was had by all. 

And in Daisy's case, a great nap was had!  For a complete list of all the authors who attended Books in Boothbay this year, with links to their websites and descriptions of their books, please click here.