Susan Conley's Blog, page 7

Notes from the Road: On Fortune Cookies

At the Boston Book party my friend, Electa, gave me a large cardboard box full of hundreds of fortune cookies—the kind you get with the bill in Chinese restaurants—wrapped in plastic and a little bit stale. It had been such a fun party—professors of mine from the old days at Middlebury and colleagues from when I taught at Emerson College and old friends I used to wheel baby strollers around Boston's South End with and all kinds of new book friends.

We brought the motherlode of fortune cookies down to Chatham, New Jersey and got them into people's hands at the great book party there. I had never danced at a book party before. Nor had the bookseller I don't think. Good fun.

And then Tony and I took the box—it's big and hard to carry—but by now I know it brings the book tour good fortune—to New Haven and gave the fortune cookies out at that very special reading in the beautifully restored Lyric Hall that I posted photos of.

Then we didn't get them out again until Philadelphia and the great book signing party in Mt. Airy. It was the first time I did an open Q and A at one of these book parties and what a nice idea that was. A hundred people all standing and sitting together in this wide open living room talking about the book and about China and life there and about breast cancer and hope. I felt lucky to be there.

Tomorrow we are on to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and a reading at River Run Books. I'm bringing the box of fortune cookies with me in the car. Aidan and Thorne are still devouring handfuls of them every day. They say yeah, they're a little stale, but still tasty! And we still probably have close to 500 fortune cookies. Enough good luck to last Tony and me up and down the West Coast when we fly out there next week for more of my book readings!

A Music Playlist for The Foremost Good Fortune

This blog post was originally published on Largehearted Boy.

I wrote the first draft of my memoir The Foremost Good Fortune in a Beijing music black out. I was living in China for two years with my husband and two young sons and internet connections were sketchy (this was back before the 2008 Olympics—before China's great coming out party) and my iTunes account didn't work. I'd brought a few CDs with me to Beijing. But after a month of writing to the same Van Morrison and Madeleine Peyroux, it felt like it was going to be a long Beijing winter if I didn't find more music in China.

There were black market CD stores in Beijing's back alleys and I started going to them for anything to shake up my playlist. These stores carried Dolly Parton and Frank Sinatra and Abba. Lots of Abba. There wasn't a lot there to add to my sound track. But eight months after we'd moved to China, I found out I had cancer.

The Foremost Good Fortune changed from being a book about mothering in China to a book that was also about contending with cancer in a foreign land. My book changed. My life changed. And then my playlist changed.

We moved back to the States for a summer of cancer treatments and here is where I began gobbling up enough songs to get me through the next year in Beijing after my radiation was over. The playlist I chose here is a soundtrack of what I listened to when I wrote the memoir. The memoir is a kind of road trip through China and then through cancer. And then home again.

"All of My Days" by Alexi Murdoch from the Away We Go movie soundtrack

This song was how I started most of my writing days in China. It is a quiet, meditative, gentle song and it got me into a writing place, day after day, no matter how bad the pollution was in Beijing. No matter how bad the homesickness was at first.

R.E.M "Night Swimming"

China's capital city is a dazzling, wondrous place. But there is this sense of how far the sea lies beyond our reach. I longed for the ocean in Beijing. This song would take me back to the skinny-dipping and the cold water. The song is also a study in quiet and a distillation of a very simple story. This was the kind of crystallized narrative I worked towards in the book. I like to play music before I write to set the mood and tone. I listen and move about the apartment getting ready, and then I turn the music off and go to my desk to carry on more of the conversation with the songs on the page. This is what I do with "Night swimming" anyway. It's part of the pre-writing ritual.

Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" has a sacred spot on the book's playlist. This is because my younger son, Aidan, wouldn't stop playing this song the first few months we lived in China. He played it over and over, compulsively—and the song made its way into my head. We were all exhilarated and wobbly from living in China that first season. And this song got us through. We didn't speak the language. I got cancer. But at least Johnny Cash was having a harder time than we were, and he'd written this great song about it—with a big band, mariachi sound and those opening trumpets. What I did was take Aidan's obsession with this song and turn it into an early chapter of The Foremost Good Fortune, so in a way this song became part of the very bedrock of the book.

"Long May You Run" by Neil Young is the best love song to a child that I know of—Young's scratchy, melodic ode to his son. I have two sons of my own. And this song was on my playlist long before I got cancer. This song helped me to write my memoir with an open heart and a frame wide enough to capture my boys in China, translating their own experiences into a little boy dialect they could understand.

"I Must Be Saved" by Madeleine Peyroux was part of the morning writing playlist. I go to her when I want my writing to be very still—when I want it to be as transparent as I can make it. I didn't need to be saved in Beijing, the way the woman in this song does. But my book needed access to the kind of vulnerability that Peyroux's voice can evoke. And I needed to understand a woman who must be saved.

"And the Healing Has Begun" by Van Morrison

Back in the States during my summer of cancer treatments this was the first song I got my hands on. I needed this song. I love almost everything Van Morrison does, but this song was important for all the obvious reasons and because of its great musicality—its big symphonic moments that inspire bursts of hope in me.

David Torn's "Lars and Margo" from the Lars and the Real Girl Soundtrack

This soundtrack is trippy and lovely and has a haunting quality. All of which I love. I put this song on the playlist very early on in the writing of The Foremost Good Fortune because this song made me get quiet. And so it made the book better.

"No Bad News" by Patty Griffin

When I finished the second draft of The Foremost Good Fortune I was living in a cottage down a long dirt road in the woods in Maine, listening to a lot of music. I came downstairs after I'd written the last word of the draft, put this song on and turned it up loud. I can't not dance to this song. There is an urgency to its acoustic guitar and to Griffin's big vocals. The song is warding off disease. It's a song that refuses to allow for bad news: "So leave the rest of us, because there's a lot of us, who want to live in peace to live in peace." So I danced that day in Maine to this song and it became a kind of anthem for me. And for the book.

Notes from the Road

My mother and I were eating arugula salads today in a bookstore in New Haven called Atticus Books. The Foremost Good Fortune wasn't on the shelves of the New Non-Fiction. We went up the register. My mother asked where my book was. Then the manager looked my book up. "Wait," she said. "We just got twelve in!" So she ran to the stock room. She brought back an armload, and I signed six of them and then she said, "This is so exciting, I can't wait to put them on the shelf." It was kind of a debut author's dream. And then she did put them on the shelf while I stood there watching. And where she put them was right next to Tiger Mother. The Amy Chua polemic. Amy Chua. Susan Conley. Alphabetization. I didn't realize until that moment that it was my fate to be next to the Tiger in every bookstore in America. Is this a curse or a blessing?

Here is a picture of the books.

Excerpt from The Foremost Good Fortune on The Daily Beast

"When author Susan Conley learned she had breast cancer, her first instinct was to hide it from her young sons. But in an excerpt from her new memoir, The Foremost Good Fortune, she discovers their bravery is a source of strength."

Read the except on The Daily Beast here.

I Had To Trust That Intimate Voice

Four years ago my husband, Tony, and two young boys and I left the States to live in China, and I began to write what I hoped was a memoir. I didn't call it that at first, because as yet the writing felt more like travelogue. I wrote accounts of the outdoor turtle markets in Beijing and the five-hour line Tony waited in to see an embalmed Chairman Mao. I wrote about dumpling houses and ballroom dancing in public parks, but there was no voice yet to these pieces—they relied mostly on image.

A Chinese man and his American wife had fixed up an old, stone courtyard house in the flatlands on the outskirts of the capital. Every Thursday I took a dicey Chinese cab ride out there (the drivers never knew the way) and taught a writing workshop from 9 to 12 in the morning. There were ten in the class—a Dane, and two Brits, three Americans, a Malaysian, two Australians and one Chinese woman. Her Western name was Sophia, and she'd grown up in China during the Cultural Revolution. She'd never owned a book until she was a teenager. Her parents were criticized publicly by the government and harassed and sent away for being bourgeois.

Sophia had been able to get out of China in the seventies, and she'd made it to the States for college. But she was back in China now, because she wanted to bear witness to that hard past. For class she'd bring in veiled attacks on the Communist Party and the short memory of the Chinese people. How, she asked, could the nation be embracing a free-market economy and fake Gucci hand bags, when so many had died only decades before?

Her writing was sharp, but I wanted to be let inside the material and to discover the emotional wake that the Cultural Revolution had left behind. I also wanted her to be more generous with us. "Please," I said. "Could we see how you felt the day you were asked to publicly criticize your own sixth grade teacher on stage? What did you wear to school that day? Where did you sleep that night your parents were taken away?"

Sophia wanted to stick to the facts. At times our writing workshop felt like a cultural stand off. I wondered if I was too American in my approach to Sophia's voice. Too Oprah? Too People Magazine? Sophia said that the Chinese way was not to write about herself. I said the only way that the reader was going to care, was if Sophia made the pieces partly about herself. I also said there was a balance to be struck. Intimacy with the reader didn't have to mean a cult of personality around the narrator.

Back in my Beijing high-rise, I continued to write my own China story. My boys were my lens. I tried to capture the understanding they came to with Mandarin and the Beijing school bus, and the live turtles on the street. But then I was diagnosed with breast cancer and the travelogue voice was officially over.

When my treatment ended, I knew if I was going to finish this book, it would need a different voice. I tried out one that was distanced and prone to irony. Then one that was humorous. But I couldn't quite land it. I wrote notes to myself in capitals on my desk: write as if you were talking to Sara back home about trying to buy apples in Beijing. This helped. This got me closer.

Then I gave chapters to an American writer named Anne who'd been living in China for twenty years. She read the excerpts, looked me in the eye and said, "Nice. But are you going to write this story or not? Because this is half way and you can't go half way with a cancer story." I'd detailed my surgery in China and my fear. Now Anne wanted more?

Then it was August, and I flew home to Maine and showed the manuscript draft to some of my writer friends. "Good," was the word they used. "But it's not personal enough," my friend Debra said. Not personal enough? "We want to see what was going on inside your mind while you lay in that Beijing hospital. It's a problem of voice."

I flew back to Beijing and started teaching the workshops again. Sophia enrolled and showed me a piece she'd been working on. The writing had a new, urgent voice. Sophia had been able to put herself into her story—she'd taken her experience and distilled it down from the sweeping epic into a tight personal narrative.

After class I went home and sat down at my desk. I knew that to fully write about my cancer and the trip back, I had to trust that intimate voice I'd talked Sophia into using. I wrote a new chapter about how my four-year-old, Aidan, had drawn butterflies on pink construction paper the day before my next surgery—and how he'd looked me in the eye and said any time I wanted to leave the operating room, all I had to do was remember those butterflies. I wrote. and something shifted.  This new voice was the most intimate voice I could have imagined, but I had access to it and to more, and the book was launched again. In the end it was a matter of trust. From writer to reader and back again.

The blog post was originally featured on Christina Baker Kline's blog.

I Had To Trust That Intimate Voice

Four years ago my husband, Tony, and two young boys and I left the States to live in China, and I began to write what I hoped was a memoir. I didn't call it that at first, because as yet the writing felt more like travelogue. I wrote accounts of the outdoor turtle markets in Beijing and the five-hour line Tony waited in to see an embalmed Chairman Mao. I wrote about dumpling houses and ballroom dancing in public parks, but there was no voice yet to these pieces—they relied mostly on image.

A Chinese man and his American wife had fixed up an old, stone courtyard house in the flatlands on the outskirts of the capital. Every Thursday I took a dicey Chinese cab ride out there (the drivers never knew the way) and taught a writing workshop from 9 to 12 in the morning. There were ten in the class—a Dane, and two Brits, three Americans, a Malaysian, two Australians and one Chinese woman. Her Western name was Sophia, and she'd grown up in China during the Cultural Revolution. She'd never owned a book until she was a teenager. Her parents were criticized publicly by the government and harassed and sent away for being bourgeois.

Sophia had been able to get out of China in the seventies, and she'd made it to the States for college. But she was back in China now, because she wanted to bear witness to that hard past. For class she'd bring in veiled attacks on the Communist Party and the short memory of the Chinese people. How, she asked, could the nation be embracing a free-market economy and fake Gucci hand bags, when so many had died only decades before?

Her writing was sharp, but I wanted to be let inside the material and to discover the emotional wake that the Cultural Revolution had left behind. I also wanted her to be more generous with us. "Please," I said. "Could we see how you felt the day you were asked to publicly criticize your own sixth grade teacher on stage? What did you wear to school that day? Where did you sleep that night your parents were taken away?"

Sophia wanted to stick to the facts. At times our writing workshop felt like a cultural stand off. I wondered if I was too American in my approach to Sophia's voice. Too Oprah? Too People Magazine? Sophia said that the Chinese way was not to write about herself. I said the only way that the reader was going to care, was if Sophia made the pieces partly about herself. I also said there was a balance to be struck. Intimacy with the reader didn't have to mean a cult of personality around the narrator.

Back in my Beijing high-rise, I continued to write my own China story. My boys were my lens. I tried to capture the understanding they came to with Mandarin and the Beijing school bus, and the live turtles on the street. But then I was diagnosed with breast cancer and the travelogue voice was officially over.

When my treatment ended, I knew if I was going to finish this book, it would need a different voice. I tried out one that was distanced and prone to irony. Then one that was humorous. But I couldn't quite land it. I wrote notes to myself in capitals on my desk: write as if you were talking to Sara back home about trying to buy apples in Beijing. This helped. This got me closer.

Then I gave chapters to an American writer named Anne who'd been living in China for twenty years. She read the excerpts, looked me in the eye and said, "Nice. But are you going to write this story or not? Because this is half way and you can't go half way with a cancer story." I'd detailed my surgery in China and my fear. Now Anne wanted more?

Then it was August, and I flew home to Maine and showed the manuscript draft to some of my writer friends. "Good," was the word they used. "But it's not personal enough," my friend Debra said. Not personal enough? "We want to see what was going on inside your mind while you lay in that Beijing hospital. It's a problem of voice."

I flew back to Beijing and started teaching the workshops again. Sophia enrolled and showed me a piece she'd been working on. The writing had a new, urgent voice. Sophia had been able to put herself into her story—she'd taken her experience and distilled it down from the sweeping epic into a tight personal narrative.

After class I went home and sat down at my desk. I knew that to fully write about my cancer and the trip back, I had to trust that intimate voice I'd talked Sophia into using. I wrote a new chapter about how my four-year-old, Aidan, had drawn butterflies on pink construction paper the day before my next surgery—and how he'd looked me in the eye and said any time I wanted to leave the operating room, all I had to do was remember those butterflies. I wrote. and something shifted.  This new voice was the most intimate voice I could have imagined, but I had access to it and to more, and the book was launched again. In the end it was a matter of trust. From writer to reader and back again.

The blog post was originally published as a guest blog here: http://christinabakerkline.com/

How Much Can Any Narrative Form Hold?

When I moved to China four years ago with my husband and our two young boys, I knew I wanted to write an account of our time there. There was a story unfolding before me in that concrete Beijing high-rise we lived in for close to three years. And that story had everything to do with those boys of mine, ages four and six, who looked out their bedroom window at the Beijing moon and asked me if I understood that China was in outer space?

So after my husband and I got the boys enrolled in pre-school and first grade, and after I'd bought us mattresses (think of very hard Chinese ones) and sheets (top sheets don't really exist in China) and a teapot, I finally sat down at my desk and faced the page. The story was still there waiting to be told, but how to tell it? I'd been writing for years before we moved to China—first poetry in college and then more poetry—lyric-narrative hybrids—in grad school. I loved the form for its concision and mystery and surprise. But after I had the boys, I stopped writing poetry. And I didn't know why.

What I see now is that I needed something continuous—a narrative I could step in and out of while I tried to learn how to be a mother. Poetry demands a kind of crystallization that I didn't seem capable of in that sleep deprived place we all live in after our babies are born. And I wanted to tell a longer story by then—one that I could pick up after the boys went to bed, and drop as soon as one of them cried out for me.

So what I did once my second son began crawling, was I started a novel. Writing prose was like entering a whole new border region in China—the novel spoke some of the same dialect as poetry but the sentences could go on a whole lot longer and there was all that back story needed. All that character development. I dove in and found a rhythm and the novel began to write itself, and then I knew I'd found myself a different form.

Around that time, I opened up a creative writing center in Portland, Maine, with two writer friends. We called it The Telling Room, and we went to all the schools in Portland, proselytizing about the power of story and how writing could change your life. I was the teacher who said it didn't matter what you called the things you wrote—it just mattered that you generated material: poetry, fiction, non-fiction, who cares what the form was. My mantra became (and still is) writing begets writing begets writing.

But there I was in China. How would I find the right form for this travel story I wanted to tell? It was a tricky thing at first. I recently read that Mary Carr said something to the affect that memoir is poetry's first cousin. But back in China, I didn't have Carr's wisdom. I sat at my desk that looked down over the old work barracks in the hutong out behind our apartment building, and I wrote what I saw. The words came out in long, narrative prose poems. And these poems didn't connect back much to one another—they seem to live untethered to any larger, narrative arc.

That's because I didn't understand non-fiction yet, or the arc of my own journey. What I did know about was metaphor. Poetry had given me that, as well as the tools to edit a flabby paragraph. So I squeezed all the metaphor I could out of daily life in Beijing. A lost homing pigeon landed on our windowsill, and because I'd been trained in poetry all those years, I looked for the metaphor that would give language to the experience. And slowly, very slowly, I began to weave these poems together, until low and behold, the poems became prose and told a larger story. There was an arc happening. I was walking the path between poetry and memoir.

Then something happened that derailed the whole thing. I got cancer in China. Suddenly, there was no book project, no form to decide on. I hadn't ever intended to write a story about breast cancer in China. And so I wouldn't. I could write pages about how hard it was to learn Mandarin in Beijing and how long it took me to figure out how to weigh apples at the Chinese mega-market. I could write about my loneliness in China and my doubts about myself as a mother. Because there were many. But what I didn't think I could do was take my memoir and turn its gaze towards my disease.

Because what form could hold all the confusion and fear inherent in the place that cancer lives? Certainly not the book I wanted to write. That book was cancer-free. And how could I put the weight of cancer on that narrative structure? How much could any narrative in the end hold? I thought on it.

I got different cancer treatments from a whole soccer team of doctors. And I thought on it some more. And after my treatments were done, and we'd moved back to China for another year, I looked at that draft of my memoir and I saw that there was no way back to the place where cancer wasn't in the story. Cancer had become part of all my stories now. And maybe memoir was more malleable than I thought. I saw that it could bend.

I titled my book The Foremost Good Fortune and I put the cancer in. Then I went back and wrote more stories about the boys and the Mandarin lessons and the view of Beijing. It was a view that had been changed by my cancer, but my memoir had a subtext now and a context, and I learned that the form could hold it all and more.

This blog post was originally published in San Francisco Book Review: http://This blog post was originally published in San Francisco Book Review: http://www.sanfranciscobookreview.com/featured/2-1-11-how-much-can-any-narrative-form-hold/

Mother Writer

Last January, just after I'd moved back to the States from Beijing with my husband and two boys, I sat down in my kitchen in Portland, Maine, opened up my laptop and joined SheWrites, a lovely social network for female writers. I hadn't known about the site while I lived in China. Facebook was banned there and Internet connections were sketchy. During the close to three years we were in Beijing, I divided my writing time between two different book projects—but it was a writing life in isolation. No mutual support. No blogosphere or comment threads or online friend making.

A Different Chinese Century, Guest Blog at LittlePo Adventures

Just before my family moved back to the United States from China, we took a trip deep into western Yunnan Province:  my husband, Tony, my sons, Aidan and Thorne, and myself, all piled into a white mini-van for five days up and over a series of stunning, snow-capped mountains until we reached the Mekong River. We'd been living in Beijing for close to three years by then and had been planning this trip to Yunnan for months. We wanted to get far away from the capital city and the screaming traffic and the miles of high-rises. We hoped to camp in the valleys and hike over two different mountain passes.

Notes from an American Mother in Beijing

Amy Chua raised the hackles of a whole legion of American moms when she dreamed up the title of her recent incendiary Wall Street Journal essay, "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior." She touched a nerve. So much of what we American mothers read these days is about the demise of schools here in the States and the reign of the Chinese student. We read the buzz over the Shanghainese fifteen-year-olds who blew away the American field last month in an international assessment test, and we worry. Then Chua comes along and tells us how to really get things done.

When I lived in China, I was the American mother on the playground—the one looking for all the Chinese mothers, and where were they anyway?