Theodora Goss's Blog, page 55

Introversion

All right, all right, you were right. I mean those of you who said I needed to take better care of myself, that I wasn't particularly good at doing so. I've spent most of today randomly falling asleep. So yes, I've pushed myself too hard. It's time to rest. (I'm not sure when I'll find the time, but I'm trying.)

Yesterday, my friend Jason Eric Lundberg wrote, in a comment to my blog post "On Withdrawing,"

"I often feel the need to withdraw, especially now that I'm teaching full time (and have been since 2008). I'm exhausted nearly every single day with all of the interactions that I have to make with students, colleagues, and management."

Jason, I hope you don't mind my quoting you! Jason is a wonderful writer and editor, and is married to one of my favorite fantasy artists, Janet Chui. (I'm very lucky to own two of her paintings.) They live in Singapore with their daughter Anya, whom I mention because Jason also wrote,

"How have you been able to find your own space and withdraw when raising a little one? Anya's 20 months old now, which means for 20 months I've hardly ever had a chance to be alone (and you know how that affects an introvert)."

And then, this morning, as I do every morning, I skimmed the front page of the New York Times online. And I found an opinion piece titled "Shyness: Evolutionary Tactic?" that begins,

"A beautiful woman lowers her eyes demurely beneath a hat. In an earlier era, her gaze might have signaled a mysterious allure. But this is a 2003 advertisement for Zoloft, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (S.S.R.I.) approved by the F.D.A. to treat social anxiety disorder. 'Is she just shy? Or is it Social Anxiety Disorder?' reads the caption, suggesting that the young woman is not alluring at all. She is sick."

It's about our tendency, as a society, to pathologize introversion or shyness, which I think are actually two different things. (For example, I'm introverted, but not usually shy. Although I can be.)

So evidently this is an important issue not only for introverts like me and Jason, trying to figure out how to live our lives in a the midst of what is often a tiring society, but also because it's a part of the social discourse. Therefore, I thought I would write about it again today.

Like Jason, I teach. During a typical semester, I have sixty students. I spend nine hours a week teaching them, in groups of twenty at a time. And I spend many more hours meeting with them, emailing them. I teach writing, which is much more intensive than teaching literature. You can lecture about literature, but you have to teach writing as a workshop. That means many hours of meeting with students about their drafts. And I love teaching. But how do I reconcile it with my need for time alone?

I think what I do is make sure that throughout the day, I have time and space for myself. I close my office door and spend time reading. Or I take a walk around campus, anything that will allow me to clear my head, to hear my own thoughts again. When I started teaching, I tended to assume that I owed my students all my time, that I was somehow responsible for their progress. And I realized, as I learned to teach more effectively, that the more I made them responsible for their progress, the more they took on that responsibility. I still work fifty- to sixty-hour weeks. But I try to make sure that I have time to myself, for myself. (One thing this means, practically, is that I assign more peer editing than I used to. This past semester, we discussed the concept of copyediting, and they copyedited each others' papers before handing in the final drafts. How this worked: they sat in groups and handed their papers to the right. The person on the right would copyedit one paragraph, then hand it to the right again, so each paragraph was copyedited by a different person. At the end of the semester, the students told me how much they had liked having other people look at their papers in the final stages. And I got better papers, as a result.)

And like Jason, I have a daughter, although mine is considerably older. For anyone with a child under two, I would say, it gets better, a lot better, but those first few years are intense. Now that Ophelia's seven, it's so much easier – in part I think because of how we handled those early years. For example, when she was upset, we would ask if she wanted to have a temper tandrum. If she did, we would say, how about for a minute? We would agree on a time, and she would have a temper tantrum until we said time was up. It wouldn't be much of a tantrum, because the concept of agreeing on a temper tantrum was so funny. It would be a sort of fake tantrum. (Or what was even funnier? We would offer to have a temper tantrum for her. She would love watching an adult have a tantrum.)  But the point was, she was allowed to have it.

There weren't many temper tantrums anyway, I think because I decided early on that I wouldn't make Ophelia do anything I wouldn't want to do at her age. So for example, I never took her shopping unless I was buying something for her, because I remembered how boring it was to have to go shopping with an adult. If I had to take her, to the grocery store for example, we would make a game of it. Before we bought anything, we would go around and try all the samples. And afterward, she would always be allowed to pick out a special treat. (This worked in part because I would take her to natural food stores, not supermarkets. Those fluorescent lights! Children respond by getting anxious, and they're right to.) I once had a mother tell me that she insisted her children try new foods. A son of hers refused to eat a particular food, and so he was given no other food until he tried it. I believe he "broke" the next morning, and tried some after a night with no supper. I thought, what are you going to do next, send him to the Marshalsea, where Little Dorrit can take care of him? If someone treated me like that as an adult, I would hate him with a deep and abiding hatred. Why would I treat a child, who is more vulnerable, with less consideration than I would treat an adult?

I'm trying to gather my thoughts here, because my relationship with Ophelia did not grow out of a systematic philosophy. But it does reflect a central belief I came to early: that she was a person, who deserved the same treatment from me as any other person. When we noticed that she started asking for toys on a regular basis, I suggested an allowance of $5 per week. She can spend that money on anything she wants. The interesting result is that she does not ask for toys randomly anymore. Rather, she saves her allowance for them. For a seven-year-old, she is exceptionally self-reliant and mature. Of course, she's also grown up in a quiet household with people who negotiate rather than arguing. And she's been taught to negotiate herself. So when she asks for dessert before dinner, I tell her, "All right, as long as you know that you won't get dessert after dinner." And we agree. After all, which is more important – eating dessert after dinner (which is an arbitrary social rule) or learning to negotiate for what you want (a skill she will need for the rest of her life)?

I don't know if these thoughts are useful at all to other parents. Children are all different, and I happen to have gotten one who is particularly mature for her age. I don't know how much of it is the way she was raised, or just her. But I do know how difficult it is, being a teacher and parent when you're an introvert – when you need time alone, and sometimes think about how lovely it would be to join that monastic order on a Scottish island where they never speak, and the boat only comes every two months. (I've been told they rent out rooms and have a waiting list, so evidently there are a lot of us out there.)

I have lots of thoughts on how to survive as an introvert in a society that values extroversion – or tries to sell us Zoloft. But I've written long enough on this topic, at least for tonight. It's time for some PBS and an orange cranberry cereal bar, which are some of the pleasures that get me through a busy day. Or even a day that I've spent mostly falling asleep.

On Withdrawing

I'm an introvert. When I take those Myers-Briggs tests, I'm consistently an INTJ, which means Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Judging. What does that mean? Well, for one thing, it means that these describe me fairly well:

"To outsiders, INTJs may appear to project an aura of 'definiteness,' of self-confidence. This self-confidence, sometimes mistaken for simple arrogance by the less decisive, is actually of a very specific rather than a general nature; its source lies in the specialized knowledge systems that most INTJs start building at an early age."

My specialized knowledge system was literature and writing, and I did indeed start to develop it at an early age. And I do think that I generally appear to be self-confident. I generally am, within my particular area of expertise.

"INTJs are perfectionists, with a seemingly endless capacity for improving upon anything that takes their interest. What prevents them from becoming chronically bogged down in this pursuit of perfection is the pragmatism so characteristic of the type: INTJs apply (often ruthlessly) the criterion 'Does it work?' to everything from their own research efforts to the prevailing social norms. This in turn produces an unusual independence of mind, freeing the INTJ from the constraints of authority, convention, or sentiment for its own sake."

Yes, I'm a perfectionist, and yes, I have a strong pragmatic streak. I want things to work. And be perfect, both. And I hope I have independence of mind. At least, I regularly question what I'm told by society, testing it against my own beliefs and experiences.

"INTJs are known as the 'Systems Builders' of the types, perhaps in part because they possess the unusual trait combination of imagination and reliability. Whatever system an INTJ happens to be working on is for them the equivalent of a moral cause to an INFJ; both perfectionism and disregard for authority may come into play, as INTJs can be unsparing of both themselves and the others on the project."

I think imagination and reliability are actually very good terms to describe how I act in the world. And yes, I am sometimes unsparing of myself, although I do try to be sparing of others. Unless something really does need to get done. (Notice that I'm ignoring the less flattering words, like arrogant and ruthless. I don't think I'm either of those things, in general. But I can be deeply, deeply annoyed when I think something is being done incorrectly.)

"INTJs are usually extremely private people, and can often be naturally impassive as well, which makes them easy to misread and misunderstand. Perhaps the most fundamental problem, however, is that INTJs really want people to make sense. This sometimes results in a peculiar naivete, paralleling that of many Fs – only instead of expecting inexhaustible affection and empathy from a romantic relationship, the INTJ will expect inexhaustible reasonability and directness."

Well, yes, I do usually expect people to make sense, and I sometimes don't understand when they don't respond to situations logically and rationally. That's the Spock in me, I think. And the intensely private part – that's really why I'm mentioning this category at all. Because my streak of introversion is rather strong.

What introversion really means is that in order to operate efficiently, I need time alone. In a quiet place, preferably with dim lights, doing something like this, writing. Time alone gives me energy, whereas time with others drains that energy. As do conflict and mess. (It's difficult to pick an argument with me, because I don't argue unless I absolutely have to. And when I absolutely have to, when it's something I care deeply about, I argue only to win, never for the sake of arguing. Because arguments make me feel sick.)

I'm writing all of this simply to say that today was a withdrawing sort of day. I've been doing a great deal lately, and much of it has included interacting with people. Which is wonderful, and I do love interacting with people – I'm particularly glad that I got to spend so much time with the Odyssey students. But after action and interaction, I always need to withdraw, to go off by myself. The real different between an introvert and an extrovert is that an extrovert gains energy from being with others and loses energy alone, while for an introvert it's the opposite. Being with others is draining, solitude restores.

I think most writers are introverts. They have to be, to be able to spend so much time by themselves, in front of computer screens. They pretend to be extroverts in order to go to conventions and do readings. They become extroverts, temporarily. But then they go back to their houses and cats, where they can be as introverted as they like.

Today, I withdrew. This morning, I dropped off the rental car, then went back home and to bed. I woke very late. Then I did the following:

1. Took Ophelia to downtown Lexington, where we bought ice cream and went to the library to check out movies and more books for the library's Reading Challenge, which she's doing this summer.

2. Drove to my new favorite antiques store, where Ophelia was allowed to pick out one item. (She picked out a small plastic pouch of children's games.) I bought another shelf I had my eye on last week and a linen runner edged in lace.

3. Drove to Whole Foods, where we picked out the ingredients for a special dinner to celebrate the end of her school year: sesame noodles with shrimp and broccoli, and her favorite food, which is sushi.

4. Made the special dinner while Ophelia read for her challenge. Then we ate noodles and sushi. And now I'm going to work on my Folkroots column, which is due on the 29th.

It's been a calm, quiet day.

I don't want every day to be calm and quiet, but I need a certain percentage of my days to be. That's something I need as both a person and a writer.

Tomorrow, I should be more myself. But right now I'm going to sit in bed, wrap a blanket around me, and read ghost stories. A quiet end to a quiet day, that's what I need. I wish the same to all you introverts out there.

Back from Odyssey

I had the most wonderful time at the Odyssey writing workshop!

I want to post more about it, but I'm very tired tonight, so you're just going to get a synopsis and some pictures. Yesterday, I drove to New Hampshire, through unexpectedly heavy traffic. But I arrived in time and immediately headed over to St. Anselm College for a reception with the students. I answered their questions for about an hour, being as honest about writing and the industry as I could. At the reception, I received three more stories to critique, so afterward I went back to my hotel room and worked on those. I also went over my talk again. You may remember that it was called Writing Your Voice(s). Here I am, post-reception, looking very tired:

And collapsed.  Hotel lights aren't exactly flattering, are they?

The next morning, I headed back to St. Anselm College for a full day. Here I am ready to go over:

Yes, I dressed in all black. In addition to talking about voice, I mentioned my philosophy of packing. If you're a writer, you're always traveling to one convention or another, so you need to be able to pack quickly and easily. I do it by bringing one, or maybe two, colors – and jeans. ICFA was brown. Wiscon was burgundy. Odyssey was black. (Looking at my calender, I realize that I've traveled somewhere almost every month this year. And it will be the same for the rest of the summer, with trips to Asheville and New York.)

First, I gave my talk. Then lunch and critiquing the three stories I had read the night before. Then meeting with four students whose stories I had read and critiqued beforehand. Then dinner and another unscheduled question and answer session, because the students had more questions and of course I wanted to answer them. The students seemed exceptionally smart, talented, and together. I'm not sure my Odyssey class was as together, the third week! And all the stories I read were interesting and accomplished. I would do it again in a heartbeat.

Then I drove back, through no traffic at all. The return trip was so quick and easy. In my email inbox, I found some illustrations for the Secret Project that I'm not yet allowed to show you. But I can't wait, because honestly, they're going to blow you away. Also, my preliminary schedule for Readercon, which is as follows:

Thursday:

9:00 p.m. There's No Homelike Place

Doyle, Goss, Janssen, Kiernan, Warren

Friday:

11:00 a.m. Rudyard Kipling, Fantasist and Modernist

Dozois, Feeley, Goss, Schweitzer, Taaffe

12:00 noon Classic Fiction: Howl's Moving Castle

Cooney, Files, Goss, Link, Taaffe

Saturday:

3:00 p.m. The Rhysling Award Poetry Slan

Allen, Lunde, et al. (I'm part of the al.)

7:00 p.m. Wold Newton Reading Extravaganza: Special Readercon Edition

Rosenfield et al. (Again, I'm an al.)

Sunday:

10:00 a.m. Interstitial Arts Foundation Town Meeting

Allen, Bradford, Kushner, Lipkin, Vanderhooft (I'll be in the audience for this one.)

And I'll have a reading, but I don't yet know when.

So it's been a very writerly sort of day. Talking about writing all day, then coming back to the gorgeous book cover (honestly, I just hope the story lives up to it) and my Readercon schedule. The rest of this week, I have a Folkroots column to finish and a great deal of dissertation work to do, so it's going to be busy. But that's all right. I'm meeting the deadlines (mostly), doing work I'm proud of. And that feels good.

Romantic Anti-Heroes

This morning, I rented a car to drive up to New Hampshire. And this afternoon, I'll drive up and meet the Odyssey students. I can't wait!

So I'm writing my blog post for the day this morning instead of this afternoon.

What inspired me today was Alexa Duncan's blog post on her "Love Interest Handicap."

Alexa writes,

"Anyway, I thought I'd use my updates to talk about what I'm discovering about myself as a writer during this process. There are some things all writers have in common, but we also have our weird quirks and hangups. What works for one person doesn't always work for another. Part of becoming a writer is figuring out how you operate, what motivates you, and what will stop you cold, staring at a blinking cursor."

Which I think is very smart. We do all have our own individual quirks, and I find that my problems with writing a love interest are quite different from hers. She goes on,

"Earlier this week, I ran into the Romantic Interest wall. The main character of my novel is a girl (hey, write what you know, right?), and while it isn't the entire point of the story, she's going to have a romantic interest mixed into her adventures. I reached the point in the story where she meets him for the very first time and . . . stopped. This guy was a blank spot in my head. I kind of knew what I wanted him to BE like, but I had not idea how I wanted him to look. Here is the point where I confess that most of the men in my stories are based on my husband to some degree or another. Sure, he may have a different haircut, or maybe some tattoos, but there's always some aspect of him in there."

So I started wondering, how do I write love interests? I actually wrote a love story recently – the Secret Project is a love story. And my love interest in that story is at least somewhat like the love interests I usually write. They are based not so much on real people as on a particular type. (Although I have dated real people who fit that particular type.) I would call it brooding, dark, and damaged. It's the type of the Byronic hero, which is really an anti-hero, isn't it? (I think my attraction to that particular literary figure was influenced both by my reading and my actual experiences.)

So when I think of the love interests I write, I think of certain touchstones. Heathcliff, of course. Here he is, played by Tom Hardy, who was the best Heathcliff I've ever seen. (And his Cathy was thoroughly satisfying, as Cathy rarely is in film or television versions.)

Yes, I know exactly what you're going to say. Heathcliff could never been in a good, sane, healthy relationship. To which I answer, what does literature have to do with good, sane, healthy relationships? (I'm not sure life has much to do with them either, to be honest. I mean, all the good relationships I know have been negotiated over the years and look nothing like the television versions of good relationships. They are highly individual and idiosyncratic. Perhaps because people can't actually live in clichés.)

Anyway, Heathcliff gets the best declaration of love in all of literature, when Cathy says,

"My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods. Time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees – my love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath – a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff – he's always, always in my mind – not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself – but as my own being – so, don't talk of our separation again – it is impracticable."

My next touchstone is Mr. Rochester. (You saw that coming, didn't you?) Here he is, played by Toby Richards, who is my favorite Mr. Rochester of them all.

I'm not sure the next one is fair, because I've only seen the BBC version, not read the novel. But it's Steerpike from Gormenghast. (Talk about brooding, dark, and deeply, deeply damaged.)  Here he is, played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers.

And finally, Severus Snape. I thought the Harry Potter books were generally engaging. I read most of them when I was sick, because they were books I could read when I couldn't focus on much else. But the only part of the books that actually stayed with me, that I continued to care about, was the character of Snape. Of course, it helped that Snape was played by Alan Rickman in the movie versions.

What do these characters have in common? Well, hairstyle, for one. But more importantly, none of them love sensibly. None of them think, is this a good, sane, healthy relationship? Will she be supportive of my aspirations and goals? How will we share the housework? They love intensely, completely, passionately. And I think that's what we want in a love story. (In real life? Well, that's up to the individual, isn't it? Personally, I would take Heathcliff over Mr. Darcy any day.)

My own romantic leads tend to be more realistic. But you can see the Heathcliff in them. In The Mad Scientist's Daughter, I'm not going to focus on romance, except to the extent that Mary already has a crush on Sherlock Holmes. (My Holmes will be more Heathcliffian than the original.) But I hope there will be more novels about these characters, and then they will need to find love interests. I don't know who they will be yet, what they will look like. I have so many late nineteenth-century characters to play with. But I do know those relationships will be troubled, intense, passionate. Because that's the way I write them. What that says about me, I don't know. (Except, perhaps, that I never worry about who's going to do the housework. Which may be a failing of mine, but then, I'm a writer. )

Alternative Values

Last night, I watched a PBS documentary called Emile Norman: By His Own Design. Here's a description of the documentary from the PBS website:

"Emile Norman: By His Own Design is a portrait of the self-taught California artist, Emile Norman, who worked with a passion for life, art, nature and freedom that inspired him through seven decades of a changing art scene and turbulent times for a gay man in America.

"The film tells the story of Norman's independent spirit – how it developed from his early days on a walnut ranch in the San Gabriel Valley and brought him success in New York City in the 1940s and 1950s. This independent spirit later gave him the confidence to leave the New York art scene and find freedom in Big Sur, where he and Brooks Clement, his partner of 30 years, built a house and created a haven for a circle of friends that still grows today."

Norman's art is beautiful, but for me, not particularly ground-breaking. What interested me more was the life he and his partner built for themselves in Big Sur. In the mountains, above the sea, they built a house for themselves: an artist's house, in which everything was carefully chosen and finely crafted. It's a beautiful house, filled with art. Norman worked there until he died two years ago, at the age of 91. He and his partner lived through difficult times for gay men, and in Big Sur, they created a sort of alternative society, a place where they could live and create.

There are artists who fit perfectly into the societies they live in. Jeff Koons comes to mind, but you probably already know what I think of Koons and his mylar bunnies. Most artists end up having to create a space for themselves, as Norman did. To create their own societies, with alternative values.

What do I mean by alternative values?

We live in a society that values certain things: popularity, wealth, ease. That's why we have Wal-Mart, fast-food restaurants, hybrid tea roses, The Da Vinci Code, and Las Vegas. It does not particularly value beauty, difficulty, or insight. The artists I like best value those things, and teach us to value those things.

For that reason, I do not like Jeff Koons:

And do I like Andy Goldsworthy:

So I guess the question is, how can I become more like the artists I admire? How can I live a life that honors those values: beauty, difficulty, insight? I suppose one way is by doing what Emile Norman did: creating my own space. I don't have acres in Big Sur, of course. But in the life I live, even in a city like Boston, I can make choices that reflect those values. I can fill my life with beautiful things, and try to create beauty myself. I can choose what is difficult and challenging, rather than what is easy. I can go to the theater, or to see dance. I can spend time in art museums. (I can even try to understand what in the world anyone sees in Jeff Koons.) And I can, in my own art, try to do what challenges me, to embody my own insights and hope they allow others to see the world in new ways.

Although I live in the world, I don't have to accept its values. I can choose my own. That was the lesson of the documentary, for me. It does make life more difficult, not to accept what everyone else accepts. (Because you know me, there I'll be, standing in front of a bottle of shampoo, asking myself, does this embody my values?) But it also makes life more interesting. Instead of Wal-Mart, fast-food restaurants, hybrid tea roses, The Da Vinci Code, and Las Vegas, I choose old hardware stores, corner cafés, Virginia Woolf, and Paris. And someday I will have a garden filled with old roses, albas and gallicas and damasks, with the scents I love.

Perhaps some day, I'll have the sort of space Norman had, with a house that is completely individual. Until then, I'll continue to stand in front of the shampoo bottle, interrogating it. And reading Woolf.

(And, if we live our own lives according to alternative values, perhaps we can eventually change the values of the society we live in.  If enough of us insist on equal rights regardless of sexual orientation, on the importance of environmental protection, of all the things we decide we stand for and live by, perhaps the world will begin to look different.  That's part of what we do as artists, isn't it?  Change the world?)

Preparing for Odyssey

Oh my! It's been such a busy week.

Today, I've actually had some time to rest, for the first time in about a week. And you know, it feels nice. I'm eating dinner as I type: a chicken hot dog on a whole-wheat bun with ketchup, a sliced heirloom tomato with salt, and steamed carrots, broccoli, and cauliflower with a pat of Olivio, which is a butter and olive oil blend. And for dessert, blueberries and low-fat cottage cheese.

Over the weekend, I went back to the antiques shop and bought two more pretty things. The first is this collection of shelves:

I love mission-style shelves and stands, and these were particularly inexpensive. And I saw these silver salt and pepper shakers and thought they would be useful:

And today, in the mail, I got a bottle of my new favorite perfume: Pacifica's Persian Rose, which does actually smell like a garden of old roses.

I mention all this because, as I've said before, pretty things get me through. Whether it's a dinner that makes me feel healthy and balanced, or furniture that makes my space neater. Or the scent of roses, which is the freshest, sweetest scent I know.

As you know, I spent this week fixing things, but I think they're all fixed now. So I can go on to the other things I need to do, which are preparing to teach at Odyssey and writing my Folkroots column. Although I've actually been working on both of those things for a while now. I just need to pull what I've already done together.

My talk for Odyssey will be on Finding Your Voice(s), and I'm thinking about that phrase in three ways. First, in terms of your identity as a writer: what is your individual voice? Second, in terms of the voices in your stories: the voices of your various characters, as well as your narrator who is, of course, a character as well. And third, in terms of what you can give voice to. Can you give voice to something that has no voice? Can you make an ant speak? How about a city? I think of these three ways of talking about voice as focused on identity, versatility, and diversity.

Obviously, I'm not going to give you the substance of my Odyssey talk. You'd have to come to Odyssey for that. But I thought it might interest you to know what I'm going to talk about and how I'm thinking about it. And of course I'm going to have exercises. For example, I'm going to ask the students to compare passages written in different voices and try to figure out how those voices are produced. How does the author create the voice in the passage? What sorts of words does he or she use? What sorts of punctuation? So we're going to get deeply into technique, I think.

I've been thinking about voice myself, lately. I started thinking about it last summer at the Sycamore Hill writing workshop, where a fellow writer said, about a story I had written, "I wanted a Theodora Goss story." And I had to think about what that meant, what a Theodora Goss story was. Particularly what that meant to me, to write like myself. I realized that there was a Theodora Goss story, that there was a voice that was authentically mine. Which didn't mean that I couldn't experiment with other voices, of course. But underneath every voice I wrote in, there had to be something of myself. The story as a whole had to be a Theodora Goss story, had to belong to me. I realized that I wanted to write in my voice. (Friends of mine have used pseudonyms, but somehow, I don't think I ever will.)

So I'm looking forward to typing up the notes I've made for my talk, which is what I'll do tonight. And then I have some critiquing of student stories to do. And Thursday I'll drive up and meet the students. I don't think it even entered my head, when I went to Odyssey a decade ago, that someday I would be teaching there myself.

I've also been thinking about teaching, just in general. I've wondered, in the past, if I would ever give up teaching to just write, if I had the opportunity. And you know what? I don't think I would. I love teaching too much. It gets me out, gets me talking. And I love working with students.

I have so much to do this summer, but I know that I'm heading to a place where I'll have incredible opportunities: to write, to teach, to be the self I want and was meant to be. I'll leave you with one thought: what I've been working on all this week is the Secret Project. And I think it's going to be beautiful. I can't wait to tell you more about it.

Four Things

First, I saw the video, and it reminded me of the painting, which reminded me of the photograph and a poem I had written some time ago. But I'll give you the poem first, then the photograph, then the painting, then finally the video. This is the way my mind works, most of the time: the world becomes a continual series of links.

The River's Daughter

She walks into the river

with rocks in her pockets,

and the water closes around her

like the arms of a father

saying hello, my lovely one,

hello.  How good to see you,

who have been away so long.

The eddying water

tugs at the hem of her dress,

and the small fish gather

to nibble at her ankles, at her knees,

to nibble at her fingers. They will find

it all edible, soon, except

the carnelian ring by which her sister

will identify her.

Bits of paper

float away, the ink now indecipherable.

Was it a note? Notes for another

novel she might have written, something new

to confound the critics?  They will cling

to the reeds, will be used

to line ducks' nests, with the down

from their breasts. The water

rises to her shoulders, lifts her hair.

Come, says the river.  I have been waiting

for you so long, my daughter.

Dress yourself in my weeds,

let your hair float in my pools,

take on my attributes: fluidity,

the eternal, elemental flow

for which you always longed.

They are found not in words but water.

You will never find them while you breathe,

not in the world of air.

And she opens her mouth

one final time, saying father,

I am here.

Exquisite Things

My poor old camera is on its last tripod (get it? on its last legs, but cameras don't have legs? sorry, it's been that sort of day). And I still haven't had time to figure out my lovely new camera yet. So I apologize in advance for the quality of these pictures.

As you know, I've been having one of those weeks. I've been working very hard, and today I needed a break. So first, I went to downtown Lexington. I bought myself some ice cream, a scoop of heath bar with extra heath bar pieces on top. With my ice cream, I climbed up to my favorite place in Lexington: the top of the bell tower hill. There's a large rock up there, and from it you can see all around. Here I am on the rock, in weekend working gear (an old v-neck shirt, an old pair of jeans that are two sizes too large but very comfortable, Keds with no shoe laces because they broke and I've never bothered buying new ones).  Looking somewhat ragged, but then I was up until 3:00 a.m. last night, reviewing and correcting.

Then, I went to the library, which was having a book sale, and bought two books: an anthology of ghost stories edited by Roald Dahl and On Writing by Stephen King. I've actually read very little by Stephen King, having been traumatized by Pet Sematary when I was a teenager. Also, he writes in a style that I've never found all that compelling, although perhaps I haven't read the right stories. But I'm interested in what he has to say about writing.

And then I drove in the other direction, toward the town of Bedford, to an antiques store that had been recommended to me. There, I bought three things. The first was a small silver pin. I'm afraid the photograph did not come out well, and also the silver is tarnished and needs cleaning, but it has a glass insert at the center with a design of oranges and leaves. It's a pretty thing for me to wear on sweaters.

The second was a green Wedgewood plate. I have several pieces of green Wedgewood, and this is a nice addition to my collection.

The third was a Chinese snuff bottle with a reverse-painted design of rabbits on both sides. I love Chinese snuff bottles, and I liked this design.

Part of what makes these things exquisite is their size: the pin is about an inch and a half long, the plate is about four and a half inches in diameter, and the snuff bottle is about three inches tall.  (And I'm 5'4″, but I wasn't counting myself among the exquisite things.  Not looking as ragged as I did today.  And I don't know yet whether the books will be exquisite, but I rather think not.)

Then I came home again, to get to work once more. But just as it was getting dark, I walked around the yard, and in one corner I saw three white bellflowers. No one would see them where they were, in the middle of a lilac bush, so I cut them and put them into a vase. They are now sitting on a corner of my writing desk. I think I'll take a picture of them with my cell phone – right now – so you can see what they look like. They're exquisite too.  (That's my glass of lime fizzy water, on a coaster I sewed ages ago from cotton scraps.)

And here I am, back home, getting back to work, reviewing and correcting. I'll probably be up until 3:00 a.m. again tonight.

I've been thinking a lot about meaning – what is the meaning of my life, and why do I keep going, even when the going is as tough as it has been lately? Sometimes, to be honest, I'm not entirely sure. It's at those times that exquisite things can help. That I can look to my right, as I'm looking now, and see bellflowers in a vase, and think – yes, lovely. And that gets me through, at least a little while longer.

YA Challenge Friday

This week, my work on the YA novel came to a screeching halt. Why, you ask? Because of a sort of writing emergency, something that needed immediate attention. That happens sometimes, when you're a writer. It's happened twice in the last couple of months, on two different projects. Often it has to do with problems that come up just before publication. And then you swing into emergency mode, and there you are, making sure that everything is fixed. Making sure that when the reader gets the book or magazine, it's perfect. Or as perfect as you can make it.

But before I get back to my own YA novel progress, what about the other participants? I've had some comments from people who want to participate, but have not sent me their URLs. If you want me to link to your blog, send me your name and URL (to tgoss@bu.edu), because I can't tell if what you have in the comment is what you want me to use. And I've been terrible about responding to comments lately. I'm so sorry! It's, you know, what I wrote above. Emergencies, and my own exhaustion.

So, those of you writing or revising YA novels, how are you doing? I'd love to hear from you! Here's how I'm doing so far. I have the first five chapters:

1. The Great Detective

2. Seeking Hyde

3. The Mutilated Body

4. Rappaccini's Letter

5. The Poisonous Girl

Those are tentative titles, of course. Some chapters are typed, some handwritten, one still just plotted. I'm going to get back to it soon. I just need to, somehow or other, catch up with everything else.

But working on the novel and on the writing emergency I described above has gotten me thinking about the importance of technique.

We are all readers. We are not all writers. Writing is, at least in part, a craft that is learned. And that craft consists of being able to lead a reader through a story in such a way that the reader participates in it, lives in the story. The story becomes real to the reader. That's a particular skill, and there are techniques the writer uses. What the writer does is craft an experience for the reader.

I'll give you two examples.

She entered the room and heard three knocks. She wondered if it could be his ghost.

She entered the room – knock, knock, knock. What had she heard? Could it be his ghost?

Do you see the difference? You read the first, you participate in the second. You hear the knocks along with the character.

That's the writer's craft. The tools of that craft are words, punctuation marks, even blank spaces. So, for example,

She had finally realized what she should have known all along, that she loved him.

She had finally realized what she should have known all along – that she loved him.

She had finally realized what she should have known all along: that she loved him.

Those sentences mean different things, even though the only actual difference is a punctuation mark. In the first one, "that she loved him" redescribes "what she should have known all along." In the second one, the dash seems to hold those two parts of the sentence in tension. "That she loved him" starts to look more like a conclusion, what she finally realized. And in the third, "that she loved him" is a definite conclusion coming out of the rest of the sentence. It is her realization. All of the sentences say the same thing. But they emphasize different aspects of it. The third one is the most definite.

A good writer knows how to use all the available tools to create effects. A good reader is sensitive to those effects, having been trained by years of reading.

A good reader can feel when he or she is in the hands of a good writer. He or she relaxes, knows that everything will be all right. Characters may die, the world may be destroyed, but the one terrible thing, the one forbidden thing, will not happen – the reader will not be thrown out of the book. The reader will not be out in the cold, looking in, saying, "I don't believe it. It's just a bunch of words."

There's more to writing than technique, of course. There's art, which raises writing above mere effect. Which gives it mind and soul. But I find that I return to technique often. I return to it whenever something isn't working, when I think, how in the world am I going to make this chapter interesting to my reader? How am I going to make it vivid? And I find that the best writers have great technical skills: Kelly Link, for instance. Her story "Travels With the Snow Queen" begins,

"Part of you is always traveling faster, always traveling ahead. Even when you are moving, it is never fast enough to satisfy that part of you. You enter the walls of the city early in the evening, when the cobblestones are a mottled pink with reflected light, and cold beneath the slap of your bare, bloody feet."

You're there, right? At least by the words "bare, bloody feet."

I've spent the last couple of days trying to fix things. Which should be fixed soon, and then perhaps I'll be able to catch up with everything else, and then perhaps I'll be able to rest, and this horrible exhaustion will go away. I hope.

But I miss writing my novel. I'm just at the point where Mary and Diana have found out about Beatrice, and they're about to go see the exhibition in which she kills various things merely by breathing on them. And they talk to her, and she tells them about the other girls. And that's the real beginning, when all five girls, my lovely monsters, are together. That's the beginning of what they call the Athena Club. (Oh, I'm not giving anything away. All this information will eventually be on the jacket, you know.) And there's a murder to be solved.

I want to get back to late nineteenth-century London. Because when I write the novel, that's the only time I get to do anything like what the reader will eventually do – live inside it.  After it's written, when I'm revising, I'll be outside looking in – making sure that the novel works for the reader, which is a completely different experience. But I want to get back to London and see my poisonous girl in action.

Soon, soon, soon.

On Darkness

When I was a teenager, I read Flowers in the Attic. You probably did too, if you are female and around my age. I don't remember much about it, although every once in a while I see a movie version as I'm clicking past some obscure TV channel.

It's a story of cruelty and abuse, rather crudely written. About four children who are locked in an attic, almost starved. And the beautiful older girl has her hair cut off. That's about all I remember.

I mention this book because of the recent controversy about darkness in Young Adult fiction. We're living on internet time now, and that controversy has already blown over, although I suspect it will occur again. These things are cyclical. But no one is seriously going to suggest censoring Young Adult fiction, or negatively affect a genre that is so profitable. After all, we live in a capitalist system. The market decides.

While it was still going on, serious and thoughtful people suggested that there was something troubling about offering such dark images to teenagers, that they genuinely thought such images did harm. And I thought back to my own reading of Flowers in the Attic. Did it harm me?

I have a complicated answer to that question that begins, yes. Reading that book, and others equally dark, put images into my head that I have sometimes wished weren't there. Such books do have the ability to familiarize us with cruelty. They do make our minds cruder. There is a way in which they desensitize us to the real cruelty of the world by familiarizing us with representations of it.

But – and I write this as someone who kept her hands over her eyes during most of Nightmare on Elm Street and never went to see a horror movie again – for me, they acted like a vaccine. I was a sensitive child, and in a way, reading about darkness prepared me for the much greater cruelty and crudity of the world. Reality is worse than almost anything we can write. Growing up involved learning that lesson. Learning not to be shocked by the photographs of Abu Ghraib. It may sound silly to say that Flowers in the Attic prepared me for that. But the book did prepare me for the idea that people could behave in that way. The lesson shocked me then – the reality still does. But it was something I had to learn, to function in the world. (Which, after all, doesn't actually work a whole lot like Little Women.)

There was another kind of literary darkness that I also read, and that affected me differently. It was the darkness of Edgar Allan Poe, of H.P. Lovecraft. The darkness in which Hyde roams London, in which Dracula feeds. That was not crude, ordinary human darkness, but a deeper psychological and metaphysical darkness – and it was profoundly freeing. Its message was – there is something more than this, more than ordinary human society, with its rules and judgements. There are monsters.

In a way, the second kind of darkness offered an alternative to and even combated the first. In the first, darkness was crude, meaningless. Just the way the world was. In the second, darkness offered something. In the darkness, you could fight monsters, or become one. Becoming a monster, in particular, meant escaping from ordinary human meaninglessness. Monsters didn't wait for Godot. (They had probably eaten Godot in the first place.)

The second kind of darkness was valuable not because it conferred immunity, but because it provided the possibility of freedom. At least, I felt it was freeing. By the time I finished college, I had read every Poe and Lovecraft story I could find. The Lovecraft stories were more difficult to find back then. They had not yet entered the cultural mainstream. When you saw Campus Crusade for Cthulhu stickers and Miskatonic University sweatshirts, you smiled because you knew – here was one of your tribe.

I feel as though I should come to some sort of grand conclusion about darkness in literature, about the two types of darkness I've written about here. But I don't have one. Today has felt dark, and I'm grateful that there's a hand in that darkness, as monstrous as my own, to clasp. Perhaps my grand conclusion is this: I recently bought a new edition of At the Mountains of Madness, which I have not read for a long time.  I think it will be the next book I keep on my bedside table, to read before I go to sleep each night. I will find it profoundly reassuring. And when I read the news, about what the crude, ordinary, human monsters are doing, I will think about how wonderful it would be if they could be eaten by Shoggoths. And I will look out into the darkness of the night, and feel that there is so much more than these human lives we live, this human world we have created for ourselves. There are wonders in the darkness.

Monstrous Dora: