List

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I like lists. I make them in my head, on post-it notes, on scraps of a paper, on my computer, on my iphone, in fancy notebooks, in plain notebooks, in the margins of books. I make teux deux lists where I write down tasks I’ve already accomplished just so I can cross them off. I’m sure you do this too. I think it is a natural human behavior, like avoiding the chatty check out clerk at Target.

Yesterday, in the midst of my great purge and organize of every space in my house, I came across a list I made when my daughter was an infant of 54 items I’d like to accomplish in my life. Considering the list was numbered to 100 and it was tucked in with a similar version from my husband (he only had 10 written down). I can assume that the lists were some sort of ill planned reconnect with your spouse night written around the time our oldest child was six months old. Those of you with children will recall how insane you felt the first year of your first child’s life. Marriages go through accelerated change during that time and it can be scary and provoke all sorts of ridiculous behavior–like making bucket lists with your spouse.

At the top of my list is take a trip to Italy. Can’t say I can check that one off and unlike some of the other items on the list (find the perfect shade of lipstick) it is still an accomplishment I want to have under my belt. I can’t even comprehend what state of mind I must have been in to have written down the bit about lipstick. I haven’t worn lipstick in twenty years. I don’t like it. Charlie doesn’t like it. Then there were the accomplishments that are entirely out of my control (be surprised by a surprise party). Think about it. In order to be surprised I have to know nothing about the party. I might as well have written in number 11 on Charlie’s list: surprise wife with surprise party. It would have spruced up his list a bit, which starts with wear a tie and a hardhat and ends with write a book.

Reading over the list I was able to cross out about ten items–the highest ranking of which was No. 2: write a novel. That is a little more than an item a year, which given my family history is not too bad of a pace. I think I’ve got at least another 44 years left. Of course there’s a good chance I’ll never learn how to do a proper dive (no. 20) or own a small newspaper and be the editor (no. 27). This year, though, I plan on taking care of number 5 (invent a new cookie) and number 22 (ride a horse on the beach).

And maybe, just maybe in 2013 when my book is released in Italy, I’ll have a reasonable excuse to visit.

 

Generation Present Tense

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Meet Elizabeth Taylor. Not who you expected right? Even if she didn’t have a decades-long love affair with Richard Burton and smokey purple eyes, this Elizabeth Taylor is a rare bird. She, like the protagonist of my novel, stands as the matriarch of six generations. I am fascinated by the image of the oldest generation standing next to the youngest. And it is that image that propelled me into Roots of the Olive Tree.

In general I am fascinated by the differences between the generations. This fall I started teaching fiction to undergraduates and I was amazed by their undying devotion to writing in present tense, which can be one of the most difficult and limiting tenses to work with. Yet most of them are all too willing to trade hindsight and reflection for immediacy. There’s a lesson in there somewhere. One that tells me much more about how they view the world than the subjects they choose to write about. And now I’ve taken to referring to all of them–these twenty-somethings as Generation Present Tense, which I feel is much more fitting than the ‘Aughts or the Millennials.

Thinking about the vast difference between me (a late Generation X) and these college kids has made me more reflective about the generation gap between myself and my children. Now that they can read, their choices of entertainment are far more their own than mine. Most recently, they’ve started to request specific songs and recognize and listen to specific bands. Because Charlie cares so very much about music, he is carefully crafting their choices–so that what they want to listen to is less Justin Bieber and more Vampire Weekend.

I am known for my fabulously terrible music taste, but we got to talking about the twentieth anniversary of Nirvana’s Nevermind, we realized that to our children listening to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is the same as when we were younger and were forced to listen to “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” (Bee Gees). This is, of course, speaking in strictly comparison of time, not music. And somehow, that made the gap between my children’s generation and our generation seem more like the Grand Canyon and less like the pond it had been before we started down musical memory lane. To take it even further, if my parents were listening to the Bee Gees in 1971, then in 1951, my grandparents were extolling the virtues of Perry Como and my great-great grandmother might have had a serious crush on Guy Lombardo in 1931.

My great-grandmother, Winnie, is quite musical and although she’s a little on the senile side now, she can still sit at the piano and bang out a spritely version of any Gershwin tune. I can hear my daughter right now practicing the Carol of the Bells and it makes me wonder what she’ll be tapping out when she’s nearing the sunset of her life. It is this image that makes the gap between us all seem once again like a pond with each generation just a ripple away from the one that came before it.

Poisonous Trees

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I used to be a journalist. I filled inches and inches of column space with information about cities, businesses, people and even a pot-bellied pig. Most of what I wrote was entirely forgettable. A handful of the stories have become entwined in my own memory and altered the way I look at the world. But mostly what I got out of those years was advice on writing. One of my editors told me the surest cure for writer’s block was research.

It is advice I continue to use.

The current book is in the capable hands of a copy editor and I’ve started on the next one. There is too little of it to give anyone much idea of what it is about, but one of the characters uses wood to make art and jewelry. This means I have on my desk no fewer than a dozen books about trees, wood carving, wood identification, etc. And among the gems I’ve found when I can’t seem to write is a most lovely chapter on poisonous trees.

Did you know one of the drawbacks to using planks from the Arcwood (a tropical tree with heavy wood and yellow flowers) is that the sawdust created when cutting Arcwood lands on human skin and turns it a muddish red? Also breathing the sawdust can cause major breathing problems. Or perhaps you are familiar with the Carolina Allspice, an ornamental with seeds that mimic the effects of strychnine. I think though my favorite poisonous tree is the Giant Nettle. Its leaves are covered in fine hairs that have poison sacs attached to the tips. It takes only the tiniest bump to break these hairs free and then once it touches an animal or human, it causes unbearable stabbing pain that can be followed by paralysis.

Before this, I think the only tree I’d ascribed danger to was the Poison Sumac–easy to know its is poisonous because, you know, it is right there in its name. The same goes for the Poison Wood  tree. But I think the most interesting fact is that there aren’t that many trees that are dangerous to humans and most of them that are, only affect some of us. Like the famous tree from a Tree Grows in Brooklyn. It was a Tree of Heaven, which is native to eastern asia and many people after touching it come away with symptoms similar to what happens when you touch poison ivy.

Which is to say all of this just reminds me how different we all are. What is poison to me, you may find beautiful.

Our world strives so hard to take away all the danger–the threats to mortality. We wear seatbelts, bike helmets, have created laws about drinking and driving, texting and driving, policies about the proper temperature to serve coffee. But what is life without a little risk? What is life without mortality? What happens to us when despite all our precautions we bump up against a poisonous tree?

These are the thoughts that come to me when I think about my children and how much I’m trying to protect them. I see your children nearly everyday in my classrooms–or rather they aren’t children anymore, they are trying to become adults and venture out without all the precautions their parents gave them. And I think they need to be prepared to bump into a poisonous tree every now and then. I hope it isn’t a Giant Nettle, but a maybe a Osage that will give some folks a nasty itch if they get any of the milky sap on their hands.

Because recovering is what makes us stronger.

The nineteeth rejection

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One of the perks of my new job is that I get to hobnob with authors. Okay, maybe hobnob doesn’t quite describe the organizing and arranging I do, but the end result is I get to go to lunch and dinner with people who have published actual books and books that are esteemed, or have been made into movies. My friend and poet Tara Mae has an excellent post on the importance of learning how to network. Basically, she’s right.

Are you back? Have you stuck with me this long? Are you wondering where I’m going with all of this?  Well one of the amazing stories that Bobbie Ann Mason told me is that she started writing in her late thirties and nearing forty, she sent a story off to the New Yorker. She got an encouraging rejection back and so she sent another, and another, and another. You get the picture. She does this 19 times and then famed editor Roger Agnell took the twentieth story she sent them. And boom at the age of 40 she becomes a published writer with her first story in the freaking New Yorker. (sidenote: have you read her new book? you should)

If you are a writer, you are thinking well, sure that happened to Bobbie Ann Mason. That was back in the 1980s when editors at the New Yorker still occasionally read the slush pile and responded with personalized notes instead of impersonal emails. If you are not a writer, you don’t really get the fuss and that’s cool. If you want to know what rejection is like, take off all of your clothes and walk around in the middle of a group of super fit and attractive twentysomethings. That will give you some idea of what it feels like to get little mimeographed slips of paper in envelopes telling you that your work doesn’t meet a particualr literary journal’s needs.

But this post isn’t about rejection. It is about success. My daughter, who takes Chinese at school, (I know, I know) told me 2011 was a very lucky year. It was the year of the GOLDEN rabbit and that it would be full of good luck. I’m inclined to believe her. For the last six years I have entered Memphis Magazine’s annual fiction contest. Some years I sent two stories in. One year, they sent my rejection to my neighbor, who had also entered the contest. She opened the envelope–making my rejection that much more painful. But this year. The year in which I have already had more luck than one person deserves. I won.

My story “Wind Gap” was selected by the editor as the grand prize winner and it will be published in the June 2012 issue of the magazine. Marilyn Sadler, the editor often added a kind note at the bottom of her mimeographed rejections. I took them to heart. I kept trying. It means the world to me to add this contest to my list of wins. My writer’s group now boasts three winners. They helped me fix this story. They told me it was okay to put Oprah in a story–because what better symbol is there than the all powerful Oprah? I’m glad I trusted them and I’m glad I kept submitting. I hope you do too. And look, you don’t even have to be a writer to keep trying. Soon it will be your year of the golden rabbit and life itself will explain itself to you.

The unbearable difficulty of poetry

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Poetry is like coconut to students. They firmly believe they don’t like it.

Richard Tillinghast says this attitude is our own fault. That we’ve made poetry out to be for the superliterate. We tell them it is more complex that it seems, that to quote Whitman it “contains multitudes.” To read poetry requires you to have read Dickens and Joyce. Or at least this is the culture we’ve created. During the interview he gave earlier this fall at the University of Memphis, he essentially told us to knock it off and encouraged us to read a poem everyday. Because what is more consumable in our fast-paced, multi-tasking world than a poem.

I took his advice to heart and have been starting most of my mornings with a poem. I do what I’ve not allowed myself to do since I was in high school–I jump around, skimming and looking for poems that catch me, catch my mood. Which means I’m mostly reading contemporary poets. I like poetry foundation–where I can type is a word like “rain” and get all their poems that contain that word. I like poems by women. I don’t like poems that set up an elaborate specific situation–either historical or imagined. I like poems that are full of marvelous turns of phrases or that redefine an abstract concept.

Sometimes I post parts of them as my status update and try not to worry that it makes me seem high-faluting or showy. I post them because they made me cry, or smile, or laugh, or inspired me to write a paragraph of my own. I am letting myself feel about poetry like I did when I was young enough to write an entire graduation speech about “The Road Not Taken” only to realize several years later that I’d never truly understood what Frost wanted me to about the two roads in a yellow wood. The woman who taught me that went on to win a Pulitzer for her own poetry, thus teaching me that first-year composition teachers are highly undervalued.

For a while, back in college, I fancied myself a poet. I became unholy fascinated by Sylvia Plath and started down my own path of intensely autobiographical poetry that was for all intents and purposes intensely bad. Not as bad as the bunkum I wrote in my high school diary, but of the same spirit. But it introduced me to a wonderful teacher, Heather Ross Miller, who is a tremendous writer with novels and poetry and stories. And deep down in my practical heart I decided it would be okay to pursue writing someday.

I hope you read poetry.

Time is on your side

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My daughter keeps asking me what I wanted to be before I wanted to be a writer. I’ll say, “I’ve wanted to be a writer since I could read.”

She’ll respond, “But what did you want to be before you could read?”

“I don’t remember not reading,” I say. And that, of course, is not exactly the truth, but before I wanted to be a writer, I wanted to be an astronaut. I stopped wanting to fly into space when I, along with an entire generation of children, watch the Challenger explode as our teachers tried to explain what had happened. And that isn’t an event I’m ready to explain to my daughter, just yet.

It also is partially true. I have only one or two memories of the time before I could read. So, after the spaceshuttle blew apart, I started to dream about being a writer. In my dream I had a window seat, a spiral college-lined notebook, and a ballpoint pen. In my dreams I existed in a cocoon of silence–completely uninterrupted and open to the creative spirit that would move me to write a masterpiece.

My childhood was chaotic. Ask my friend Cassie and she’ll tell you that everytime she entered my house there was a chair overturned. It was loud–there are seven of us children and only 8.5 years between all of us. I routinely used my outside voice inside–to the annoyance of teachers and parents of only children.

Still, I chased my dreams. When I was in fourth grade, I convinced my mother to let me sign up for a community education class on creative writing. Picture me in a room with 13 middle aged adults. I also got to take with me a college-ruled notebook and an entire box of ballpoint pens. The particular smell of blue bic ink always brings back to that class. It was there that I wrote my first story about a girl who lived in a very loud house.

None of this has come true. My little house has plenty of windows, but no built-in bench underneath the wells. My office has no windows. I write on a computer and my world is as noisy as ever. What I’ve learned is that none of this matters. My characters march around in my head all day as I teach classes, read other people’s stories, ferry my children to school, to piano, to soccer, to scouts. And when I have a ten minutes, I write. I do not and cannot wait for inspiration to strike or for a quiet house.

Time is another commodity I no longer have in abundance, but I’ve learned that I can be what I’ve always wanted to be in ten-minute bursts interspersed through a very noisy, very full life.

On being a mother and a writer

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I am secretly Canadian.

Okay. So that’s a lie, but I wish I were because so many of my favorite writers are. Carol Shields, who wrote The Stone Diaries, says “I don’t think I would have been a writer if I hadn’t been a mother. I wanted to construct something that contained some of these feelings that I had, some of these discoveries or revelations.”

That feels true to me. Except that I would amend it to say that I am a better writer because I am a mother. I decided to be a writer when I was 8 and then decided in high school that I needed to be practical about my dreams. Because no matter how much support and encouragement you have growing up, no sane adult will tell you that wanting to write fiction is a practical career. I switched to journalism and felt quite satisfied to see my name in print nearly everyday–nevermind that I was writing about pot-bellied pigs, cell phone towers, and taxes.

Then I got married and became even more practical–using my writing skills to craft corporate communications. There was decidedly less satisfaction in seeing my name at the bottom of press releases. Then I had children and pretty much lost myself for about six years. I dinked around at a neighborhood newspaper, and I read. I devoured books in a way I hadn’t since I was 8 and spent a summer reading all of Laura’s books and all of Lucy Maude’s books. I remembered I wanted to write–not the truth, but truthfully.

The year my youngest turned four, I started graduate school. It was hard. The first couple of years at school, I felt old and irrelevant and not good enough. And then I’d go home and feel needed. But gradually, I started to realize that my work was better because I wasn’t 22. That the time I’d spent doing other work was good for me as a writer. (There are plenty of 22 year olds who are amazing writers already. I would not have been. Go ahead, track down the poetry I wrote in college. You’ll see I needed another decade of life experience).

I graduated in May and I expected to have more time this fall with both my children in school (and the same school at that). Instead I got a full-time job and a publishing contract for my book and one I haven’t written yet. There are days like yesterday, when I lose an entire day of writing because my son has the stomach flu. But there are moments in those days, too. The perfect moment of  watching movies at 3 a.m. with my son because he’s too sick to fall asleep. Patting his leg and thinking how no matter how grown up a six year old looks in motion, at rest, he is nothing more than my baby boy.

All of this leaves me grateful for my life and the way it has unspooled. I’m not saying you have to be a mother to be a good writer, or even that you have to be a parent. This is my path and the writers I love most are not only Canadian, but mothers. The best of them is Alice Munro and what she says about children is, “the deep, personal material of the latter half of your life is your children. You can write about your parents when they’re gone, but your children are still going to be here, and you’re going to want them to come and visit you in the nursing home.”

I say thank God.

Record Keeping

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the life story of Alice Johnson

The women in my family keep the stories. I’ve written before about my great grandmother Winnie who took a word processing class in her 80s so that she could write a book about her experiences growing up in a small northern California city. Earlier this year I had the opportunity to visit with my paternal grandmother, who has her own book about our family. She’s written up short vignettes about her life and the lives of many of my family’s ancestors. All of these stories, with pictures, are protected by plastic and collected in a foot-thick white binder.

Among the items my grandma Jackie has collected is her own mother’s hand-written account of her life. Although my great-grandma Alice isn’t with us any longer, I have one of those image memories in my mind of meeting her and my great-grandfather Watz when I was eight or nine. Humans tend to glorify the past–to remember it as being better than it actually was. But what I’m learning as I read what the women in my family have written about their lives is that beyond technology, very little has changed over the past century.

Alice had a difficult childhood. There were issues of abuse and instability. In one of the most memorable passages I read, she writes of the one place she felt happiest, “I dearly loved my grandfather. I’d follow him around like a puppy. He wouldn’t let anyone spank, pull teeth or any of those things. He even got me a great Dane dog and there I was really protected.”

Protected. I cried when I read that word. I’d turned the page expecting her to write about being happy, but instead of a preoccupation with happiness, which I now realize is an obsession of the well-off, she craved safety. Alice’s story is incredible and the sort of true story that if I ever made it into fiction no one would believe it. The heart of her story her love affair with her husband, Watz.

That’s a story for another day, but at this moment in the midst of my dreams coming true, I wanted to acknowledge that it is the matriarchs in my life that have made the stories possible.

Super Agers

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I come from a long line of fabulous women. The oldest and most fabulous is my great-grandmother. Winnie is 103 years old and lives in Northern California. I had the amazing opportunity to introduce my children to her earlier this summer. At six months, I’d taken Sofia to meet her and was able to get one of my most treasured possessions, which is a photograph of the five generations of women in my family.

However no matter how amazing I think Sofia is, there was no way she was going to remember that meeting. I hope that this meeting will stick in her memory and in my son’s. I never met my great-great grandmother, as they did, but I do remember spending time with my great grandparents on both sides of my family. These memories give me a perspective that I think sometimes we miss. There’s a saying about how the days are long and the years are short and it is true. Thinking about my great-grandmother and how much she’s seen in her lifetime gives me perspective on the craziness of our world.

This morning CNN ran a special on their morning program about people like my great-grandmother who live to be well over a hundred and who have bodies that seem (at least for their age, not to age). Science Friday hosted a discussion about longevity today.  These reports are all prompted by new research that shows that longevity has less to do with prescriptives and more to do with genes.

The centarians profiled have done everything they’re not supposed to–drink, smoke, not follow any specific exercise regimen and yet they are healthier than people decades younger than them. CNN called this group of elderly super-agers and profiled a woman, who is living an amazing life at 104.

At eighty, Winnie went back to school to learn how to use a word processor so she could write a book. She wrote that book, an amazing history of her family, and while we were visiting her, we talked about that accomplishment. For as long as I can remember, her breakfast consisted of M&Ms and Mountain Dew. She ate a lunch at Taco Bell, until she decided she was too old to drive.

So I think the scientists are right. To a large degree, longevity is in your genes. The life I want to live and the one I want my children to live is one where they can enjoy life, not obsesses over exercise or calories or antioxidants. I hope that they get that and that they can tell their great-great grandchildren about the afternoon they spent with Winnie in the small Northern Californian town where she grew up.

Book Writing

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John Steinbeck said that the profession of book writing made horse racing seem like a solid, stable business. I rather agree with him, but sometimes, like in horse racing, a writer gets a run of luck. Well, not luck exactly, but hard work paying off in an incredibly unbelievable way.

As a result of the Amazon contest, I was contacted by an agent who had read my excerpt and was interested in the book. I sent it to her and then checked her out. She was everything I wanted in an agent and then I spoke with her and knew she was the person to sell my book. I signed with her and counted myself lucky that I hadn’t had to go through the whole sending out query letters rigmarole.

I did a revision and sent it to her, and then took off for an epic cross country road trip that had been three years in the planning. The trip included a visit with my great-grandmother in a small town in Northern California. The town and my 103-year-old great grandmother were both inspiration for the novel. We had a lovely visit and my son got to meet her for the first time.

The very next day, my agent called to tell me that she’d not only sold the book, but the next one (as soon as I write it)! I may have done a few cartwheels when she told me the news. All I’ve ever wanted since I learned to read was to write a real book. Now I’ve got an agent, a tremendous editor at an amazing publishing house and a whole other book to write.

So, here’s to starting a career that makes horse racing look like the office.