Catherine Egan's Blog, page 5
October 22, 2013
Books I’ve Failed to Write, Part 3: Untitled Terrible Book
Dear Blog,
When my first son J was a few months old, he would only nap for any length of time if he was on my body.
Becoming a mother was disorienting and lonely. I didn’t know any other mothers and I didn’t know then that I needed to – that a community of parents was the thing that would save my sanity. I thought I needed to write. I would put J in the wrap tied firmly to my torso, dance around my living room until he fell asleep, and then I would stand at the bookshelf I’d cleared for my computer and type madly, swaying, until he woke up and I had to figure out what to do with him again. As you can imagine, the book I wrote this way was terrible. It is the worst thing I’ve ever written. However, it did feature a main character that I still feel tremendously fond of, and I hope I will find a worthier story to put her in eventually. The plot was so stupid I don’t even want to describe it but it involved a group of teenagers who can dream things into reality (pretty sure that has already been done, too).
It is strange and sad to think of now, the way motherhood panicked me in the beginning. I was so anxious all the time – was he really OK? Was he happy? Did he like being my baby or was it terrible, having only unsteady, uncertain me as his safe harbor in the world? I felt changed in ways I hadn’t expected and didn’t understand. I wondered if maybe I had post-partum depression, but now that I have a better idea of what that is I think I was just freaked out. I had no idea how to spend the time with him and the days felt endless. Whenever I put him down he cried, so he lived in that wrap and we just walked around a lot.
It was a bleak six months until he learned to sit up and crawl and I made some new friends and everything was different and better for both of us. I wrote the book like writing it could keep me connected to whoever I was before he was born, but it didn’t work, and I still feel very little connection to whoever I was before he was born. Now that I know him better, I think he probably hated being a baby. He was probably bored out of his mind. I wish I’d understood him better, and I wish I’d understood myself better. I wouldn’t have written that stupid book.
The book’s badness is not particularly interesting or instructive. I never came up with a title for it. It wasn’t badly written but the story is unoriginal and unexciting. It doesn’t offer much, besides a few nice moments and the fun main character. Next week, I’ll post a snippet from it that I actually like.
Yours, wishing-I-coulda-just-chilled-out-and-napped-on-the-sofa-with-my-cute-baby-back-then,
Catherine
October 15, 2013
Books I’ve Failed to Write: Excerpt 2
Here is a snippet from The Peregrina, the unfinished novel I ended up salvaging for parts. It borrows a few elements from my grandmother’s biography – the early fascination with Roma music and the enraged smashing of a toy fiddle when she was just five years old. None of this made it into the “new” book (my WIP), but the characters of Dek and Bianka did, in much revised forms (Dek is no longer a musician).
Dek’s most powerful memory of music was caught up with the memory of his mother and wolves. When he was five years old, he heard the gypsies playing in the hills one night. He left the Circus grounds and followed the sound to their campsite, where he spent the night sitting around the fire with them. They welcomed him, laughing, into their circle of music and dance. It was almost daybreak when Bianka appeared, haggard and furious, with an odd, unfamiliar smell lingering about her. She said not a word to the gypsies, who stepped away, looking down as she approached. She caught Dek by the hand and dragged him down the hill back to their own camp. The only thing she said to him was: “Didn’t you hear the wolves howling all night, you little fool?” When he was older, he thought he must have imagined the wolves that had watched them pass down the hill, dogging their steps yet never attacking the mother and child.
She spanked him soundly with her hairbrush when they got home, while Fru screamed and wept outside. But he did not regret his transgression. He was obsessed, now, with the music he had heard. He wanted a fiddle of his own. He begged and begged, while his mother put him off. Months later, Orlando the Great presented him with a funny little toy fiddle. Furious, he smashed it to bits against a rock. He did not want a toy. He wanted to make music as wild as the hills by night, music a person could not but dance to, music like watchful wolves, full of secrets.
It was his father who gave him the violin, after his illness. They saw him very rarely, but when he came, he came always laden with gifts from the city: wood-carved toys, or hair ribbons for Fru, jewelry and perfume and a packet of money for their mother. He took up too much space, with his shining shoes and his city clothes, his big voice. He towered in their trailer, hands deep in his pockets, an expensive watch chain dangling from his breast pocket, his handkerchief tucked just so. He rocked back and forth on his heels, smelling of cigars, and said things like: “Well, you all look fine, just fine! Country air, eh?”
On that first visit after his illness, when Dek met his father but could not see him, he was different. He was quieter. Dek, newly trapped in a world of total darkness, noticed for the first time how much his father seemed to shift about and fidget. But he brought him the violin, a real violin. Dek did not know much about violins, but he knew this one was finely made and must have cost a lot of money. He nearly wept when he first held it in his hands. It fit into his hands, it fit against his body, like a part of him that had been missing all this time. He taught himself to play with a little help from some of the musicians in the circus, as he could not read music of course. But he understood it instinctively. He held the violin and the bow in his hands and music flooded forth.
August 6, 2013
New Blog Home
Dear Blog,
I forgot to tell you that you have moved. Now you live here. I hope you like it.
Yours, hoping for a nicer view,
Catherine
I forgot to tell you that you have moved. Now you live here. I hope you like it.
Yours, hoping for a nicer view,
Catherine
July 15, 2013
Process & Result
Dear blog,
One day this past winter, or maybe it was early spring, I was at the playground with LittleK and everything was wet because it had been raining. There was only one other mother and tot there. I thought maybe we would chat and alleviate the boredom of the rainy-day playground with not-yet-two-year-olds, but I couldn’t think of anything to say to her and I guess she couldn’t think of anything to say to me either, because we just smiled and didn’t say anything. Then, as she was leaving, she thought of something to say to me. I was helping K climb a ladder and she said: “He’s never going to learn how to do things himself if you help him all the time.”
I sort of wanted to say, well it’s so wet and his boots are too big and he isn’t a very good climber and I am an anxious person and he is more precious to me than my own life and even though I know I can’t and shouldn’t, I want to protect him from every bump and tumble, I can’t help worrying about chipped teeth and bloody chins, but instead I just said, “yes he will,” and of course, a few months later, he climbs the ladder perfectly well on his own.
It bothered me, though. As we splashed our way home through puddles, I was thinking about how before I had kids I had no clue there existed this massive industry peddling various True Paths of Parenting, but once you have kids, it is almost impossible to be unaware of it: attachment parenting and free-range parenting and, god, French parenting, the judgment heaped on “helicopter” parents and Tiger Moms, all of that. The idea behind it all seems to be that if you Do Everything Right you can produce a child (and eventually an adult) who is secure and intelligent and independent and “successful,” whatever that might mean to you. They will not be daunted by the slippery ladders of life if they have been confidently climbing them all along. Or something.
I am as susceptible as anyone to that needling anxiety that I am somehow Doing It All Wrong. With Kid #1, I read a bunch of books, hoping they would tell me how to be a good parent. With Kid #2, as generally happens, I felt much more relaxed. After all, I only had to look at Kid #1 to see that while I may indeed be Doing It All Wrong, he was doing just fine in spite of me.
***
This may not seem related, but it is, so bear with me (if you feel like bearing with me, that is – you could also stop reading this and go do something else, obviously, it’s not like I’m going to know about it): I’m writing a novel. This will be the sixth novel I’ve written. Two of them were terrible – one a jumbled first attempt at a novel, and the other written in a sleep-deprived haze as if I was desperately trying to type my way back towards being a person who could function and write stories. Three others make up The Last Days of Tian Di series. Shade and Sorceress was published by Coteau Books last fall and its sequel, The Unmaking, will be out in September. Approving the final galleys of Shade and Sorceress was the first time I ever had to say of a book I’d written: OK, this is finished. It was terrifying, but thrilling too, to see it finally in book form, with its lovely cover and my name there on the front, knowing I couldn’t change it anymore, that it was really, truly done and I had now put it out into the world, beyond the reach of my edit-itchy fingers. It was my first taste of completion.
Now I am Almost Done something new. Or maybe not, but I think that I am. The first draft came out in a giddy six-week burst of excitement, and it has been through several revisions since. I’ve never found the process (and the revision process in particular) so deeply satisfying before. I’ve never been so sure that I know what I am doing. I find myself enjoying the mechanics of it so much, mapping out the plot in tiny detail and rearranging, cutting, adding, making character background notes for myself, pages of elaborate world-building, all of it. It’s the giddy, joyful feeling of getting better at something you love to do, and now as I get closer to done, I am really proud of it. While I might at times bemoan my limitations, I have a confidence as a writer that I don’t have, could never have, as a parent. I enjoy and I think I am good at the process, the notes and ideas, the outlining, the drafting, the rewriting and revising. I work at it because I love it and if you work at one thing long enough then there is a result: a book!
***
So anyway, maybe LittleK would have learned to climb a ladder sooner if I hadn’t helped him. And I guess this mom at the park who was so disturbed by my helping my kid up a wet ladder that she simply HAD to say something to me about it was trying to make a larger point about children becoming more independent and resourceful people in general if left to do little things like climb ladders by themselves. Maybe that’s true and maybe it isn’t but really, I cannot tell you how little I care. Of course I want my kids to be happy and healthy and kind, now and in the future. There is a kind of startled satisfaction and delight in seeing them sit at the table and eat with forks, and there was much celebration when K was potty-trained and we were Done With Diapers Forevah, there are a million ways in which we watch them grow and learn and change and feel like we had something to do with it and so yay us, but I intensely dislike the idea that childhood is a process and adulthood is the result. It belittles childhood, as if who they are now is secondary to who they might become, and besides, I think it’s a huge waste of energy, trying to carefully mold your child.
I don’t control the narrative here. I can’t go back and revise all my mistakes and while sometimes I wish I could, mostly that’s fine. I am not working towards an ending, laying plot points to carry the story where I want it to go. It goes so fast, this whirlwind of days and nights, the bandaids on knees and the midnight washing of pukey sheets and the crab that startled us jumping out of the oyster shell on the beach and that glorious run down the long grassy hill and I almost had a heart attack this morning when he chased his ball towards the road and now look, just look at them with their heads together over the book, so intent, such a pair, I can’t believe how long their legs are now, or their toenails either, yeesh, I need to find the nail clippers. I’m not really in control of the way it turns out. I may have given birth to them but now they are in the world I am not the author of any of this, I’m just on hand to make sure they eat some vegetables and don’t fall off the playground equipment. We are just trying to have a good time and be kind to each other. It’s busy and messy and frustrating and fun and there is very little time to look back or look forward.
What I mean to say is that I am not at all concerned about how my helping K up a wet ladder may or may not affect some older, future, unimaginable K. They are who they are now and, perhaps unluckily for all of us, I am who I am too, but we love each other beyond measure. I have faith that they will grow up to be kind people, if That Guy and I can manage to be kind to them and to each other. Beyond that, I don’t even know how to think about the future, who they might be, what our lives will look like.
So. JUST in case you are thinking, holy batcow lady, what are you trying to say, this is what I am trying to say: when you are writing a book, there is this process that is partly an end in itself but not really, because the point, the REAL point, is the result: a book. You work on it until it’s done, until it is the book you wanted to write. But when you are taking care of a child, that’s not the way it is at all. It’s all process and then we die. There is no finished product. There is no completion. We are always being and becoming and there is so much beyond our control, so much we are always getting wrong, that sweating the small stuff just means sweating a lot. My conclusion: children are not books and vice versa. You’re welcome.
Yours, always-ready-with-a-radical-philosophy,
Catherine
One day this past winter, or maybe it was early spring, I was at the playground with LittleK and everything was wet because it had been raining. There was only one other mother and tot there. I thought maybe we would chat and alleviate the boredom of the rainy-day playground with not-yet-two-year-olds, but I couldn’t think of anything to say to her and I guess she couldn’t think of anything to say to me either, because we just smiled and didn’t say anything. Then, as she was leaving, she thought of something to say to me. I was helping K climb a ladder and she said: “He’s never going to learn how to do things himself if you help him all the time.”
I sort of wanted to say, well it’s so wet and his boots are too big and he isn’t a very good climber and I am an anxious person and he is more precious to me than my own life and even though I know I can’t and shouldn’t, I want to protect him from every bump and tumble, I can’t help worrying about chipped teeth and bloody chins, but instead I just said, “yes he will,” and of course, a few months later, he climbs the ladder perfectly well on his own.
It bothered me, though. As we splashed our way home through puddles, I was thinking about how before I had kids I had no clue there existed this massive industry peddling various True Paths of Parenting, but once you have kids, it is almost impossible to be unaware of it: attachment parenting and free-range parenting and, god, French parenting, the judgment heaped on “helicopter” parents and Tiger Moms, all of that. The idea behind it all seems to be that if you Do Everything Right you can produce a child (and eventually an adult) who is secure and intelligent and independent and “successful,” whatever that might mean to you. They will not be daunted by the slippery ladders of life if they have been confidently climbing them all along. Or something.
I am as susceptible as anyone to that needling anxiety that I am somehow Doing It All Wrong. With Kid #1, I read a bunch of books, hoping they would tell me how to be a good parent. With Kid #2, as generally happens, I felt much more relaxed. After all, I only had to look at Kid #1 to see that while I may indeed be Doing It All Wrong, he was doing just fine in spite of me.
***
This may not seem related, but it is, so bear with me (if you feel like bearing with me, that is – you could also stop reading this and go do something else, obviously, it’s not like I’m going to know about it): I’m writing a novel. This will be the sixth novel I’ve written. Two of them were terrible – one a jumbled first attempt at a novel, and the other written in a sleep-deprived haze as if I was desperately trying to type my way back towards being a person who could function and write stories. Three others make up The Last Days of Tian Di series. Shade and Sorceress was published by Coteau Books last fall and its sequel, The Unmaking, will be out in September. Approving the final galleys of Shade and Sorceress was the first time I ever had to say of a book I’d written: OK, this is finished. It was terrifying, but thrilling too, to see it finally in book form, with its lovely cover and my name there on the front, knowing I couldn’t change it anymore, that it was really, truly done and I had now put it out into the world, beyond the reach of my edit-itchy fingers. It was my first taste of completion.
Now I am Almost Done something new. Or maybe not, but I think that I am. The first draft came out in a giddy six-week burst of excitement, and it has been through several revisions since. I’ve never found the process (and the revision process in particular) so deeply satisfying before. I’ve never been so sure that I know what I am doing. I find myself enjoying the mechanics of it so much, mapping out the plot in tiny detail and rearranging, cutting, adding, making character background notes for myself, pages of elaborate world-building, all of it. It’s the giddy, joyful feeling of getting better at something you love to do, and now as I get closer to done, I am really proud of it. While I might at times bemoan my limitations, I have a confidence as a writer that I don’t have, could never have, as a parent. I enjoy and I think I am good at the process, the notes and ideas, the outlining, the drafting, the rewriting and revising. I work at it because I love it and if you work at one thing long enough then there is a result: a book!
***
So anyway, maybe LittleK would have learned to climb a ladder sooner if I hadn’t helped him. And I guess this mom at the park who was so disturbed by my helping my kid up a wet ladder that she simply HAD to say something to me about it was trying to make a larger point about children becoming more independent and resourceful people in general if left to do little things like climb ladders by themselves. Maybe that’s true and maybe it isn’t but really, I cannot tell you how little I care. Of course I want my kids to be happy and healthy and kind, now and in the future. There is a kind of startled satisfaction and delight in seeing them sit at the table and eat with forks, and there was much celebration when K was potty-trained and we were Done With Diapers Forevah, there are a million ways in which we watch them grow and learn and change and feel like we had something to do with it and so yay us, but I intensely dislike the idea that childhood is a process and adulthood is the result. It belittles childhood, as if who they are now is secondary to who they might become, and besides, I think it’s a huge waste of energy, trying to carefully mold your child.
I don’t control the narrative here. I can’t go back and revise all my mistakes and while sometimes I wish I could, mostly that’s fine. I am not working towards an ending, laying plot points to carry the story where I want it to go. It goes so fast, this whirlwind of days and nights, the bandaids on knees and the midnight washing of pukey sheets and the crab that startled us jumping out of the oyster shell on the beach and that glorious run down the long grassy hill and I almost had a heart attack this morning when he chased his ball towards the road and now look, just look at them with their heads together over the book, so intent, such a pair, I can’t believe how long their legs are now, or their toenails either, yeesh, I need to find the nail clippers. I’m not really in control of the way it turns out. I may have given birth to them but now they are in the world I am not the author of any of this, I’m just on hand to make sure they eat some vegetables and don’t fall off the playground equipment. We are just trying to have a good time and be kind to each other. It’s busy and messy and frustrating and fun and there is very little time to look back or look forward.
What I mean to say is that I am not at all concerned about how my helping K up a wet ladder may or may not affect some older, future, unimaginable K. They are who they are now and, perhaps unluckily for all of us, I am who I am too, but we love each other beyond measure. I have faith that they will grow up to be kind people, if That Guy and I can manage to be kind to them and to each other. Beyond that, I don’t even know how to think about the future, who they might be, what our lives will look like.
So. JUST in case you are thinking, holy batcow lady, what are you trying to say, this is what I am trying to say: when you are writing a book, there is this process that is partly an end in itself but not really, because the point, the REAL point, is the result: a book. You work on it until it’s done, until it is the book you wanted to write. But when you are taking care of a child, that’s not the way it is at all. It’s all process and then we die. There is no finished product. There is no completion. We are always being and becoming and there is so much beyond our control, so much we are always getting wrong, that sweating the small stuff just means sweating a lot. My conclusion: children are not books and vice versa. You’re welcome.
Yours, always-ready-with-a-radical-philosophy,
Catherine
July 1, 2013
why social media is good for authors
Dear Blog,
Before my first book came out with Coteau books, the marketing guru there (yep, that is totally the official title: guru) suggested I develop a social media “presence” as it is called: ie. get a website, a facebook page (as opposed to a personal profile), get on twitter, try blogging, etc. For YA authors, this is pretty much par for the course these days. This makes for a whole cacophony of blogging, tweeting, facebooking authors, and when I first dipped my toe in I felt a bit queasy about the whole endeavour and skeptical that it was in fact a useful marketing tool.
I realized pretty much immediately that most authors don’t use social media as a marketing tool – or at least not primarily. Of course it’s important to be findable on-line, in case anybody is looking, but mostly writers use the various on-line platforms for community, for conversation, for validation / encouragement in the long space between books, and to let the fans they already have (more on that in a minute) know about their books. It is less about promotion and more about fun. Writing is a very isolating activity and being able to connect with other writers and readers has, for me, been the great delight of social media. It is not, for most of us, a particularly effective way to find or build an audience.
(I don’t know what sort of thing actually garners a readership for books – reviews, awards, bookseller recs, word-of-mouth, the same stuff as always I guess?)
HOWEVAH, while social media may not be a good way of finding new readers, I do think it is an excellent way of keeping your readers. Maureen Johnson (aka Queen Of Twitter) entertains her fans on twitter daily, and obviously has a blast doing so. When she has a new book coming out, those of us following her will know about it way in advance. I’d never given much thought to the idea of “keeping” your readers – Donna Tartt makes her readers wait a good decade between books and still, we flock out immediately to buy the newest, propelling it up the bestseller lists – but the rediscovery of two old faves this month brought home to me the fact that it is really very easy for readers to forget about authors between books, even authors they really liked, if they aren’t huge names being reviewed Absolutely Everywhere. It would be hard to miss a new book by Donna Tartt, but there are a lot of authors I enjoy whose new books don’t get that level of attention.
For example! Sometime in my twenties, I read and loved Hiromi Goto’s first novel, A Chorus of Mushrooms. Then, I don’t know, I didn’t hear about her next book, I guess. She slipped off my radar - until I read something in passing a few weeks ago that mentioned her deliciously creepy new YA novel, Half World. I might not have paid attention, except I recognized her name, and suddenly remembered loving her first book all those years ago. I bought Half World, and it is a weird, dark carnival of a novel, a wonderful read. She has three other books, written between A Chorus of Mushrooms and Half World, and a sequel to Half World. I’m going to try her short stories, Hopeful Monsters, next. Anyway, I found her on twitter and followed her. I found her blog. When she has a new book out, I’ll know about it.
The same thing happened, in an even more random way, with the author Jen Sookfong Lee. I read The End Of East when it came out in 2007 and thought it was great. Then I never heard or read another word about her, and I guess I wasn’t looking, until Carrie Mac, who I follow on twitter, retweeted a funny haiku and, again, I recognized the name. So I followed her as well. I read her new book, The Better Mother, and I reread The End Of East. She has a blog, she is on twitter = I won’t miss her next book.
So maybe my point (if I can claim to have such a thing) is that if there was any kind of marketing that really worked, I would have known about their books before now. Who is the target audience for these books, if not me? Who is a more obvious reader for your new book than a reader who loved your previous book? I really enjoyed the first novels by both of these authors and then I never even heard about their second books. I guess I wasn’t reading the right reviews or keeping up with new fiction from Canadian authors. I read a lot of books and I move around a lot so I don’t keep a lot of books, and I just… forgot them. Until now. So how is an author supposed to hang onto their readership between books? The New Answer is: twitter. Or facebook. Or tumblr. Etc.
Having said all that, I actually have “discovered” a few authors via social media. I read Karen Rivers’s books because I fell in love with her blog, I read Broken Magic because Eric Sipple was making early chapters available to subscribers to his blog, and I will probably read something by Maureen Johnson Queen of Twitter at some point because she is so endlessly entertaining on twitter that I figure her books have got to have some chuckles in them too. So I don’t mean to suggest that readers are not to be found via social media, only that I think it’s probably not worth the effort of “maintaining an on-line presence” if you’re only there in the hopes of catching new readers in your clever twitter-web.
A social media presence is totally worth the effort to keep readers that love your books in the loop, and it is totally worth it for the encouragement and friendship of other writers and readers on-line. It is also totally worth it if you are a self-obsessed ninny who just likes the sound of clacking your own words out on a keyboard. Yes, blog, I am talking about you. Sheesh.
Yours, author-stalkingly-(but-not-in-a-creepy-way-I-swear),
Catherine
Before my first book came out with Coteau books, the marketing guru there (yep, that is totally the official title: guru) suggested I develop a social media “presence” as it is called: ie. get a website, a facebook page (as opposed to a personal profile), get on twitter, try blogging, etc. For YA authors, this is pretty much par for the course these days. This makes for a whole cacophony of blogging, tweeting, facebooking authors, and when I first dipped my toe in I felt a bit queasy about the whole endeavour and skeptical that it was in fact a useful marketing tool.
I realized pretty much immediately that most authors don’t use social media as a marketing tool – or at least not primarily. Of course it’s important to be findable on-line, in case anybody is looking, but mostly writers use the various on-line platforms for community, for conversation, for validation / encouragement in the long space between books, and to let the fans they already have (more on that in a minute) know about their books. It is less about promotion and more about fun. Writing is a very isolating activity and being able to connect with other writers and readers has, for me, been the great delight of social media. It is not, for most of us, a particularly effective way to find or build an audience.
(I don’t know what sort of thing actually garners a readership for books – reviews, awards, bookseller recs, word-of-mouth, the same stuff as always I guess?)
HOWEVAH, while social media may not be a good way of finding new readers, I do think it is an excellent way of keeping your readers. Maureen Johnson (aka Queen Of Twitter) entertains her fans on twitter daily, and obviously has a blast doing so. When she has a new book coming out, those of us following her will know about it way in advance. I’d never given much thought to the idea of “keeping” your readers – Donna Tartt makes her readers wait a good decade between books and still, we flock out immediately to buy the newest, propelling it up the bestseller lists – but the rediscovery of two old faves this month brought home to me the fact that it is really very easy for readers to forget about authors between books, even authors they really liked, if they aren’t huge names being reviewed Absolutely Everywhere. It would be hard to miss a new book by Donna Tartt, but there are a lot of authors I enjoy whose new books don’t get that level of attention.
For example! Sometime in my twenties, I read and loved Hiromi Goto’s first novel, A Chorus of Mushrooms. Then, I don’t know, I didn’t hear about her next book, I guess. She slipped off my radar - until I read something in passing a few weeks ago that mentioned her deliciously creepy new YA novel, Half World. I might not have paid attention, except I recognized her name, and suddenly remembered loving her first book all those years ago. I bought Half World, and it is a weird, dark carnival of a novel, a wonderful read. She has three other books, written between A Chorus of Mushrooms and Half World, and a sequel to Half World. I’m going to try her short stories, Hopeful Monsters, next. Anyway, I found her on twitter and followed her. I found her blog. When she has a new book out, I’ll know about it.
The same thing happened, in an even more random way, with the author Jen Sookfong Lee. I read The End Of East when it came out in 2007 and thought it was great. Then I never heard or read another word about her, and I guess I wasn’t looking, until Carrie Mac, who I follow on twitter, retweeted a funny haiku and, again, I recognized the name. So I followed her as well. I read her new book, The Better Mother, and I reread The End Of East. She has a blog, she is on twitter = I won’t miss her next book.
So maybe my point (if I can claim to have such a thing) is that if there was any kind of marketing that really worked, I would have known about their books before now. Who is the target audience for these books, if not me? Who is a more obvious reader for your new book than a reader who loved your previous book? I really enjoyed the first novels by both of these authors and then I never even heard about their second books. I guess I wasn’t reading the right reviews or keeping up with new fiction from Canadian authors. I read a lot of books and I move around a lot so I don’t keep a lot of books, and I just… forgot them. Until now. So how is an author supposed to hang onto their readership between books? The New Answer is: twitter. Or facebook. Or tumblr. Etc.
Having said all that, I actually have “discovered” a few authors via social media. I read Karen Rivers’s books because I fell in love with her blog, I read Broken Magic because Eric Sipple was making early chapters available to subscribers to his blog, and I will probably read something by Maureen Johnson Queen of Twitter at some point because she is so endlessly entertaining on twitter that I figure her books have got to have some chuckles in them too. So I don’t mean to suggest that readers are not to be found via social media, only that I think it’s probably not worth the effort of “maintaining an on-line presence” if you’re only there in the hopes of catching new readers in your clever twitter-web.
A social media presence is totally worth the effort to keep readers that love your books in the loop, and it is totally worth it for the encouragement and friendship of other writers and readers on-line. It is also totally worth it if you are a self-obsessed ninny who just likes the sound of clacking your own words out on a keyboard. Yes, blog, I am talking about you. Sheesh.
Yours, author-stalkingly-(but-not-in-a-creepy-way-I-swear),
Catherine
June 24, 2013
Interview with Karen Rivers
Dear Blog,
Have I mentioned my infatuation with Karen Rivers's blog? It affects me in the same way that beloved novels or poems do - in other words, not the way blogs usually do, although I do enjoy a good blog. I giggle and sob my way through it, and having become totally addicted to it and read all the archives, I started in on her novels because, guess what? She writes books too! So I've giggled and sobbed my way through some of her books now too, and she very kindly agreed to do a Q&A with me here on my blog. So voila!
I really enjoyed your xyz series. While there is a supernatural thread running through the books (in each book, one teen protagonist is dealing with a remarkable new power) they felt more like contemporary YA than fantasy. How would you describe these books and can you remember when / how the idea(s) came to you?
My mum is a huge fan of Tiger Woods, always and forever, in spite of everything. When I was growing up, she would often tell me stories about other teens, like me, who (unlike me) were accomplishing Great Things at a terrifying rate. I started thinking one day, when she was telling me about Tiger Woods game on the weekend, that it would really suck if I was a black, male teen because then I'd feel all this pressure to be an excellent golfer. So I told her that, and we laughed, and I thought, "Hey, what if I wrote about a black teenager who happened to be good at golf, who immediately got pigeon-holed into this whole black-kid-good-at-golf-must-be-the-next-Tiger-Woods thing, which I could see happening, in sort of a racist-without-meaning-to-be-racist-way, particularly if the kid in question was being raised in a pretty isolated place where he was already a bit of a novelty. So that's where the character came from. Then I thought, "Hey, what if he could fly?" Thus having a skill that trumped the whole golf thing, but not really knowing how to deal with it. The rest grew from there, as these things do. When the publisher asked me to turn it into a series, I knew I wanted to do that, but I also knew that I couldn't write the same character for three books. His story had already been told. So I what-if'd my way into the next two books, somewhat accidentally.
Each of the xyz books is told from multiple points of view, and how your teen characters see themselves vs. how others see them is very central. The Encyclopedia of Me is told in the first person but self-image and the gap between self-perception and how others perceive us is still important in the story. Umm… discuss? Why is this something you return to?
I didn't know I did that, but if I did, then great! Yay me! I definitely think it is one of the defining qualities of adolescence. We are so hard on ourselves, we never really accurately peg what others think of us. We either way over-estimate our importance to them, or grossly underestimate their feelings for us. It seems nearly impossible, as an adolescent, to get it right. Later, as adults, you'll hear people say, "I always liked you! You were so awesome!" And you'll think, "ME? Really? You must have me confused with someone else, because I don't see it." We get caught up in our own self-loathing, or at least self-criticism.
I was totally charmed by The Encyclopedia Of Me. Your editor for this book was the amazing Cheryl Klein, and somewhere I think you mentioned that she was the one who suggested the book be made up entirely of encyclopedia entries. I can’t even imagine how much revision / rewriting that must have entailed. Can you describe the process of writing this book, from idea to completion?
The book originally was meant to be a series of encyclopedia entries, offset by chapters of narrative. This -- as you can imagine -- was much EASIER than trying to force narrative into encyclopedia entries. Cheryl wondered if it should be one or the other, narrative or entries, but not both, as one voice kind of pulled you out of the other. Because I'm a sucker for punishment (and I sensed it's what she thought would work best), I offered to try the encyclopedia-entries-as-the-whole-book option. It was hard, I'm not going to lie. It was fun, it was challenging, and sometimes it was IMPOSSIBLE. But I think we pulled it off. I hope so, anyway. That book was such a labor of love: It was rejected resoundingly by every single publisher in Canada before I approached Cheryl with it after she posted on Twitter that she was accepting unsolicited books. By then, the manuscript was a couple of years old, and then another couple of years in editing. But I loved (OK, sometimes I didn't LOVE) every minute of it.
[wow, stunned you couldn't find a Canadian publisher for it, but anyway, it is doing really well, so yay to a happy home for it at the end of a long bumpy road!] So I have read the xyz series, and The Encyclopedia of Me. What should I read next?
EVERYTHING I HAVE EVER WRITTEN. I'm kidding! Except not really. The Haley Andromeda series is funny YA, if you're looking to laugh, and loosely based on everything that ever happened to me, personally. (I'll tell you which things after you read it.) The Carly series (Waiting to Dive, etc) is possibly my favourite. It's middle-grade, but I just loved her voice.
Congratulations on both a new agent (Jennifer Laughran, yes?) and a new book deal! Can you tell my legions of blog-readers about your next project?
Yes, Jennifer! I am very excited. She is amazing and passionate and so interested in all facets of kid's books. PLUS she took me on, so she must be the best. The next book is a sequel to Encyclopedia of Me, loosely, in that it features Ruth, who was one of Tink's good friends. The premise, loosely SO YOU DON'T STEAL MY IDEA, is that Ruth accidentally discovers -- while looking for pictures of herself that her friend may have posted on the internet -- that she has an identical twin who lives in England. Think "Parent Trap", but not really. It's all told through correspondence between Ruth and Ruby and their friends and parents. (Another challenging form factor, believe it or not. The books that look the easiest to write? Often are NOT.)
[oh, excellent! I loved Ruth! *annoyed at lack of specifics making idea-theft impossible*]Which book of yours was the fastest to write and which took the longest? Why?
I took five years to write my adult book, mostly because I had no reason to believe anyone would ever care if I wrote it or not. The fastest was my first YA, Dream Water, which is not terribly good because I wrote it so fast. I was under the (incredibly uninformed) impression that YA was fast to write, so I indeed wrote it very quickly. (I then had to rewrite it a good number of times.)
What does your writing day look like?
A mess? Mostly I write at night (still) when the kids go to bed, even though they are now both in school full time. I thought I would get so much more done, but as it turns out, that is not always the case. I walk a lot during the day, and clean up the house, and take care of everything that's a nuisance to do with kids around, and then I sometimes write for a couple of hours at best. Once they are asleep and everything is done, that's when the writing comes the most easily to me. If you believe in muses, and that sort of thing. It could just be that I'm a night owl. I don't procrastinate at night, whereas during the day, I find it harder to ignore the siren call of All The Things On Teh Internets.
What have been the high and low points of The Writing Life, for you? You have published 15 books! Any advice for newbs like me?
The high points are always when you sell something, when someone else says, "Hey, this is great!" All that lovely validation. I did have a couple of years when I found it hard to sell anything, I was between agents, and I felt like, "Uh oh, this isn't going to work." Mostly all the years (and books) blur together a bit. I feel lucky. I guess my advice is to keep feeling lucky. Keep writing things down, even if it feels like no one is going to care about it. Just keep going. Follow your heart? Is that cheesy? That's what I think. Do what feels right. If writing stops feeling right, then stop doing it. It still feels right to me. I have four projects on the back burner in various stages of completion. If I ever click around on my desktop and find nothing there, I guess I'll think about getting a real job. Let's hope that doesn't happen.
I blog and think overly about writing and parenting and trying to balance writing and parenting, because that’s pretty much my life: writing and parenting. And I am self-obsessed. What does that balance look like for you?
Pretty much the same. I wish I hadn't sweated so much about it when the kids were littler. The truth is, I always worked best late at night anyway, but I would get so frustrated when they wouldn't nap, which they picked up on, which made them entrench early in the No Nap philosophy of life. And I got so upset about it. I wish I hadn't wasted so much time upset, and just stayed in the moment more. More and more, life is teaching me to stay in the moment, damn it. Stop wishing it away. Stop stressing. The time opens up eventually.
Your blog is beautiful and sometimes excruciating. I stumbled across it first via a Cheryl Klein tweet (love her) and read all the archives, sitting and sobbing and giggling in my chair. It is powerful and thoughtful and often very personal. What is the purpose of blogging for you? Do you have qualms / doubts re. how personal to get on-line?
I think I blog mostly to understand what I'm feeling, like today when the kids and I were almost struck by lightning. I had two choices. I could sit here and hate myself for the way I reacted and feel sick and terrible. Or I could write it down and figure out what I really mostly feel, which is lucky. I don't really have qualms about how personal it is, because it's personal in a vague way. Most people don't know the players in my life, and the people who do already know all my feeling-y feelings about everything. I try not to say anything that hurts anyone. Mostly it's like therapy, but much cheaper. It's also a great writing exercise. Writing personal things is the best way to unblock whatever might be blocking you, because it's often the personal things that get in the way of what you are meant to be doing. Also, it's amazingly unifying. No matter how perfect other people's lives look, you just never know. I've had a lot of people say, "I really appreciate that you wrote that, I'm going through the same thing." And I'd never have guessed to look at them. It makes me feel a bit more like the member of a tribe, rather than, say, a lonely old salmon swimming upstream. I feel less afraid, less sad, and more loved, when people read what I'm feeling. Maybe I'm an exhibitionist, but on an emotional level. It's liberating.
[I definitely appreciate the honesty of it - so often blogs sound so peppy or hold you at arm's length and it can feel like everybody out there is more productive and intelligent and pulled together and confident... it's very refreshing to see the messiness of life written about in a way that doesn't glamorize it but still somehow makes it seem sort of beautiful, maybe just because the writing is beautiful. The lightning story is totally terrifying. Read it here. I mean really, go read it. We'll be here when you get back.]
Your first book was a novel for adults. How did you come to write YA? Do you imagine writing fiction for adults in the future? (Not that your books are not for adults – I like to think I am an adult! – but you know what I mean).
I love writing YA because the characters are so immediate with their thinking, and everything is so big and meaningful when it happens to you at a certain age. Plus, it deals with firsts, which are always fun to write. I'll probably write adult fiction again one day, but I don't know when. The market reality is that YA is the better call and right now, it's also what feels right for me to write. I have lots of YA (and middle grade) humming along in my head. Maybe dealing with grown up stuff right now is not what I feel up to doing. One day, sure. I have nothing against it, I just have nothing to say right now in that area.
What is a writer’s job?
To entertain and to distract and to provide a window into a different life. That's about all there is to it, isn't it? To tell the story as well and as honestly as possible, maybe.
Can you share some of your favorite authors / books?
Eleanor and Park was one of my favourites of this year. I love Rainbow Rowell. I just read her other book on the weekend (and loved it). I'm a huge fan of Jaclyn Moriarty (and her sister Liane, for that matter). I read everything. I'm not that particular. I go through phases of reading only memoir or only YA or only chick lit or ... whatever. Wild was one of my favourite memoirs. (I always stumble on this question because the only books I can think of are the ones I read most recently.) Graffiti Moon was terrific. Marcelo in the Real World is one that I buy for everyone because I loved it so much. It took me by surprise. I wasn't expecting to love it and then I did. Francisco Stork can do no wrong. I love Kate Atkinson. There are certain people I get excited about when they have a new book out but I'd have to see a list to tell you who they are. Is that terrible? I feel like I have a sloppy enthusiasm for everything everyone writes. I just put The Interestings and Love is a Canoe on the Kindle. The last book I read was Me Before You, which I also loved. I'm looking forward to reading Owen King's book. The King family are crazy talented. I can't read the scary ones though. I'm not good with scary. I loved Justin Cronin's The Passage, for example, but the sequel, The Twelve, is scaring me so badly that I have to read it in small bursts, during the day, in a crowded room. It's taking a while, because I'm sort of a hermit.
[Jaclyn Moriarty is one of my big favorites as well! Rainbow Rowell coming up on my list since I keep hearing raves]. Any questions I didn’t ask but should have? Pretend I did, and answer them!
I have no idea! Pretend I answered them very wisely, with a touch of humour and irony.
Thank you for visiting my humble blog!
You can find Karen in the following places on-line:
http://www.karenrivers.com/
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Karen-...
https://twitter.com/karenrivers
Yours, fannishly,
Catherine
Have I mentioned my infatuation with Karen Rivers's blog? It affects me in the same way that beloved novels or poems do - in other words, not the way blogs usually do, although I do enjoy a good blog. I giggle and sob my way through it, and having become totally addicted to it and read all the archives, I started in on her novels because, guess what? She writes books too! So I've giggled and sobbed my way through some of her books now too, and she very kindly agreed to do a Q&A with me here on my blog. So voila!
I really enjoyed your xyz series. While there is a supernatural thread running through the books (in each book, one teen protagonist is dealing with a remarkable new power) they felt more like contemporary YA than fantasy. How would you describe these books and can you remember when / how the idea(s) came to you?
My mum is a huge fan of Tiger Woods, always and forever, in spite of everything. When I was growing up, she would often tell me stories about other teens, like me, who (unlike me) were accomplishing Great Things at a terrifying rate. I started thinking one day, when she was telling me about Tiger Woods game on the weekend, that it would really suck if I was a black, male teen because then I'd feel all this pressure to be an excellent golfer. So I told her that, and we laughed, and I thought, "Hey, what if I wrote about a black teenager who happened to be good at golf, who immediately got pigeon-holed into this whole black-kid-good-at-golf-must-be-the-next-Tiger-Woods thing, which I could see happening, in sort of a racist-without-meaning-to-be-racist-way, particularly if the kid in question was being raised in a pretty isolated place where he was already a bit of a novelty. So that's where the character came from. Then I thought, "Hey, what if he could fly?" Thus having a skill that trumped the whole golf thing, but not really knowing how to deal with it. The rest grew from there, as these things do. When the publisher asked me to turn it into a series, I knew I wanted to do that, but I also knew that I couldn't write the same character for three books. His story had already been told. So I what-if'd my way into the next two books, somewhat accidentally.
Each of the xyz books is told from multiple points of view, and how your teen characters see themselves vs. how others see them is very central. The Encyclopedia of Me is told in the first person but self-image and the gap between self-perception and how others perceive us is still important in the story. Umm… discuss? Why is this something you return to?
I didn't know I did that, but if I did, then great! Yay me! I definitely think it is one of the defining qualities of adolescence. We are so hard on ourselves, we never really accurately peg what others think of us. We either way over-estimate our importance to them, or grossly underestimate their feelings for us. It seems nearly impossible, as an adolescent, to get it right. Later, as adults, you'll hear people say, "I always liked you! You were so awesome!" And you'll think, "ME? Really? You must have me confused with someone else, because I don't see it." We get caught up in our own self-loathing, or at least self-criticism.
I was totally charmed by The Encyclopedia Of Me. Your editor for this book was the amazing Cheryl Klein, and somewhere I think you mentioned that she was the one who suggested the book be made up entirely of encyclopedia entries. I can’t even imagine how much revision / rewriting that must have entailed. Can you describe the process of writing this book, from idea to completion?
The book originally was meant to be a series of encyclopedia entries, offset by chapters of narrative. This -- as you can imagine -- was much EASIER than trying to force narrative into encyclopedia entries. Cheryl wondered if it should be one or the other, narrative or entries, but not both, as one voice kind of pulled you out of the other. Because I'm a sucker for punishment (and I sensed it's what she thought would work best), I offered to try the encyclopedia-entries-as-the-whole-book option. It was hard, I'm not going to lie. It was fun, it was challenging, and sometimes it was IMPOSSIBLE. But I think we pulled it off. I hope so, anyway. That book was such a labor of love: It was rejected resoundingly by every single publisher in Canada before I approached Cheryl with it after she posted on Twitter that she was accepting unsolicited books. By then, the manuscript was a couple of years old, and then another couple of years in editing. But I loved (OK, sometimes I didn't LOVE) every minute of it.
[wow, stunned you couldn't find a Canadian publisher for it, but anyway, it is doing really well, so yay to a happy home for it at the end of a long bumpy road!] So I have read the xyz series, and The Encyclopedia of Me. What should I read next?
EVERYTHING I HAVE EVER WRITTEN. I'm kidding! Except not really. The Haley Andromeda series is funny YA, if you're looking to laugh, and loosely based on everything that ever happened to me, personally. (I'll tell you which things after you read it.) The Carly series (Waiting to Dive, etc) is possibly my favourite. It's middle-grade, but I just loved her voice.
Congratulations on both a new agent (Jennifer Laughran, yes?) and a new book deal! Can you tell my legions of blog-readers about your next project?
Yes, Jennifer! I am very excited. She is amazing and passionate and so interested in all facets of kid's books. PLUS she took me on, so she must be the best. The next book is a sequel to Encyclopedia of Me, loosely, in that it features Ruth, who was one of Tink's good friends. The premise, loosely SO YOU DON'T STEAL MY IDEA, is that Ruth accidentally discovers -- while looking for pictures of herself that her friend may have posted on the internet -- that she has an identical twin who lives in England. Think "Parent Trap", but not really. It's all told through correspondence between Ruth and Ruby and their friends and parents. (Another challenging form factor, believe it or not. The books that look the easiest to write? Often are NOT.)
[oh, excellent! I loved Ruth! *annoyed at lack of specifics making idea-theft impossible*]Which book of yours was the fastest to write and which took the longest? Why?
I took five years to write my adult book, mostly because I had no reason to believe anyone would ever care if I wrote it or not. The fastest was my first YA, Dream Water, which is not terribly good because I wrote it so fast. I was under the (incredibly uninformed) impression that YA was fast to write, so I indeed wrote it very quickly. (I then had to rewrite it a good number of times.)
What does your writing day look like?
A mess? Mostly I write at night (still) when the kids go to bed, even though they are now both in school full time. I thought I would get so much more done, but as it turns out, that is not always the case. I walk a lot during the day, and clean up the house, and take care of everything that's a nuisance to do with kids around, and then I sometimes write for a couple of hours at best. Once they are asleep and everything is done, that's when the writing comes the most easily to me. If you believe in muses, and that sort of thing. It could just be that I'm a night owl. I don't procrastinate at night, whereas during the day, I find it harder to ignore the siren call of All The Things On Teh Internets.
What have been the high and low points of The Writing Life, for you? You have published 15 books! Any advice for newbs like me?
The high points are always when you sell something, when someone else says, "Hey, this is great!" All that lovely validation. I did have a couple of years when I found it hard to sell anything, I was between agents, and I felt like, "Uh oh, this isn't going to work." Mostly all the years (and books) blur together a bit. I feel lucky. I guess my advice is to keep feeling lucky. Keep writing things down, even if it feels like no one is going to care about it. Just keep going. Follow your heart? Is that cheesy? That's what I think. Do what feels right. If writing stops feeling right, then stop doing it. It still feels right to me. I have four projects on the back burner in various stages of completion. If I ever click around on my desktop and find nothing there, I guess I'll think about getting a real job. Let's hope that doesn't happen.
I blog and think overly about writing and parenting and trying to balance writing and parenting, because that’s pretty much my life: writing and parenting. And I am self-obsessed. What does that balance look like for you?
Pretty much the same. I wish I hadn't sweated so much about it when the kids were littler. The truth is, I always worked best late at night anyway, but I would get so frustrated when they wouldn't nap, which they picked up on, which made them entrench early in the No Nap philosophy of life. And I got so upset about it. I wish I hadn't wasted so much time upset, and just stayed in the moment more. More and more, life is teaching me to stay in the moment, damn it. Stop wishing it away. Stop stressing. The time opens up eventually.
Your blog is beautiful and sometimes excruciating. I stumbled across it first via a Cheryl Klein tweet (love her) and read all the archives, sitting and sobbing and giggling in my chair. It is powerful and thoughtful and often very personal. What is the purpose of blogging for you? Do you have qualms / doubts re. how personal to get on-line?
I think I blog mostly to understand what I'm feeling, like today when the kids and I were almost struck by lightning. I had two choices. I could sit here and hate myself for the way I reacted and feel sick and terrible. Or I could write it down and figure out what I really mostly feel, which is lucky. I don't really have qualms about how personal it is, because it's personal in a vague way. Most people don't know the players in my life, and the people who do already know all my feeling-y feelings about everything. I try not to say anything that hurts anyone. Mostly it's like therapy, but much cheaper. It's also a great writing exercise. Writing personal things is the best way to unblock whatever might be blocking you, because it's often the personal things that get in the way of what you are meant to be doing. Also, it's amazingly unifying. No matter how perfect other people's lives look, you just never know. I've had a lot of people say, "I really appreciate that you wrote that, I'm going through the same thing." And I'd never have guessed to look at them. It makes me feel a bit more like the member of a tribe, rather than, say, a lonely old salmon swimming upstream. I feel less afraid, less sad, and more loved, when people read what I'm feeling. Maybe I'm an exhibitionist, but on an emotional level. It's liberating.
[I definitely appreciate the honesty of it - so often blogs sound so peppy or hold you at arm's length and it can feel like everybody out there is more productive and intelligent and pulled together and confident... it's very refreshing to see the messiness of life written about in a way that doesn't glamorize it but still somehow makes it seem sort of beautiful, maybe just because the writing is beautiful. The lightning story is totally terrifying. Read it here. I mean really, go read it. We'll be here when you get back.]
Your first book was a novel for adults. How did you come to write YA? Do you imagine writing fiction for adults in the future? (Not that your books are not for adults – I like to think I am an adult! – but you know what I mean).
I love writing YA because the characters are so immediate with their thinking, and everything is so big and meaningful when it happens to you at a certain age. Plus, it deals with firsts, which are always fun to write. I'll probably write adult fiction again one day, but I don't know when. The market reality is that YA is the better call and right now, it's also what feels right for me to write. I have lots of YA (and middle grade) humming along in my head. Maybe dealing with grown up stuff right now is not what I feel up to doing. One day, sure. I have nothing against it, I just have nothing to say right now in that area.
What is a writer’s job?
To entertain and to distract and to provide a window into a different life. That's about all there is to it, isn't it? To tell the story as well and as honestly as possible, maybe.
Can you share some of your favorite authors / books?
Eleanor and Park was one of my favourites of this year. I love Rainbow Rowell. I just read her other book on the weekend (and loved it). I'm a huge fan of Jaclyn Moriarty (and her sister Liane, for that matter). I read everything. I'm not that particular. I go through phases of reading only memoir or only YA or only chick lit or ... whatever. Wild was one of my favourite memoirs. (I always stumble on this question because the only books I can think of are the ones I read most recently.) Graffiti Moon was terrific. Marcelo in the Real World is one that I buy for everyone because I loved it so much. It took me by surprise. I wasn't expecting to love it and then I did. Francisco Stork can do no wrong. I love Kate Atkinson. There are certain people I get excited about when they have a new book out but I'd have to see a list to tell you who they are. Is that terrible? I feel like I have a sloppy enthusiasm for everything everyone writes. I just put The Interestings and Love is a Canoe on the Kindle. The last book I read was Me Before You, which I also loved. I'm looking forward to reading Owen King's book. The King family are crazy talented. I can't read the scary ones though. I'm not good with scary. I loved Justin Cronin's The Passage, for example, but the sequel, The Twelve, is scaring me so badly that I have to read it in small bursts, during the day, in a crowded room. It's taking a while, because I'm sort of a hermit.
[Jaclyn Moriarty is one of my big favorites as well! Rainbow Rowell coming up on my list since I keep hearing raves]. Any questions I didn’t ask but should have? Pretend I did, and answer them!
I have no idea! Pretend I answered them very wisely, with a touch of humour and irony.
Thank you for visiting my humble blog!
You can find Karen in the following places on-line:
http://www.karenrivers.com/
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Karen-...
https://twitter.com/karenrivers
Yours, fannishly,
Catherine
June 17, 2013
On Beginnings
Dear Blog,
I’m trying to rewrite the opening of my work-in-progress, which has me thinking about great openings to books I’ve loved. Like Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History,” which opens with the answer to the who-dunnit, setting up a brilliant, complicated “why-dunnit” (ripped that off from someone but I’ve no idea who so can’t credit). Or like “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” – you know from that first line that you are in the hands of a master. The first line, first paragraph, first page of a book will ideally offer a voice that the reader can fall in love with and, of course, stay in love with for all the pages to follow. I don’t know if I’ve succeeded in my own effort, and may find myself rewriting it again, and again, but since it’s on my mind, here are seven openings to books (picked quickly and randomly off my shelves just now) that equaled love-at-first-glance, for me.
Imaginary Girls – Nova Ren Suma
Ruby said I’d never drown – not in deep ocean, not by shipwreck, not even by falling drunk into someone’s bottomless backyard pool. She said she’d seen me hold my breath underwater for minutes at a time, but to hear her tell it you’d think she meant days. Long enough to live down there if needed, to skim the seafloor collecting shells and shiny soda caps, looking up every so often for the rescue lights, even if they took forever to come.
It sounded impossible, something no one would believe if anyone other than Ruby were the one to tell it. But Ruby was right: The body they found that night wouldn’t be, couldn’t be mine.
Bones of Faerie – Janni Lee Simner
I had a sister once. She was a beautiful baby, eyes silver as moonlight off the river at night. From the hour of her birth she was long-limbed and graceful, faerie-pale hair clear as glass from Before, so pale you could almost see through to the soft skin beneath.
My father was a sensible man. He set her out on the hillside that very night, though my mother wept and even old Jayce argued against it. “If the faerie folk want her, let them take her,” Father said. “If not, the fault’s theirs for not claiming one of their own.” He left my sister, and he never looked back.
I did. I crept out before dawn to see whether the faeries had really come. They hadn’t, but some wild creature had. One glance was all I could take. I turned and ran for home, telling no one where I’d been.
I Capture The Castle – Dodie Smith
I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. That is, my feet are in it; the rest of me is on the draining-board, which I have padded with our dog’s blanket and the tea-cosy. I can’t say that I am really comfortable, and there is a depressing smell of carbolic soap, but this is the only part of the kitchen where there is any daylight left. And I have found that sitting in a place where you have never sat before can be inspiring – I wrote my very best poem while sitting on the hen-house. Though even that isn’t a very good poem. I have decided my poetry is so bad that I mustn’t write any more of it.
…
It is comforting to look away from the windows and towards the kitchen fire, near which my sister Rose is ironing – though she obviously can’t see properly, and it will be a pity if she scorches her only nightgown. (I have two, but one is minus its behind.) Rose looks particularly fetching by firelight because she is a pinkish person; her skin has a pink glow and her hair is pinkish gold, very light and feathery. Although I am rather used to her I know she is a beauty. She is nearly twenty-one and very bitter with life. I am seventeen, look younger, feel older. I am no beauty but have a neatish face.
Goodbye Without Leaving – Laurie Colwin
During my career as a backup singer with Vernon and Ruby Shakely and the Shakettes, it often occurred to me that this was not a lifetime occupation and that someday I would have to figure out my rightful place in society.
I did not want to think about these things: I wanted to get out on stage and dance. The Shakelys thought it was cool to hire a white Shakette every once in a while, and for a while I was it.
Previous to that I had been a graduate student, sitting in the library at the University of Chicago getting older and older, trying to think of a topic for my doctoral dissertation and, once having found the topic, trying to write about it. I was an English major and I intended to write something that would turn into a book entitled “Jane Austen and the War of the Sexes.” Another thing I did not like to think about was how much I did not want to write about this or any other thing.
The Pursuit of Love – Nancy Mitford
There is a photograph in existence of Aunt Sadie and her six children sitting round the tea-table at Alconleigh. The table is situated, as it was, is now, and ever shall be, in the hall, in front of a huge open fire of logs. Over the chimney-piece plainly visible in the photograph, hangs an entrenching tool, with which, in 1915, Uncle Matthew had whacked to death eight Germans one by one as they crawled out of a dug-out. It is still covered with blood and hairs, an object of fascination to us as children. In the photograph Aunt Sadie’s face, always beautiful, appears strangely round, her hair strangely fluffy, and her clothes strangely dowdy, but it is unmistakably she who sits there with Robin, in oceans of lace, lolling on her knee. She seems uncertain what to do with his head, and the presence of Nanny waiting to take him away is felt though not seen. The other children, between Louisa’s eleven and Matt’s two years, sit round the table in party dresses or frilly bibs, holding cups or mugs according to age, all of them gazing at the camera with large eyes opened wide by the flash, and all looking as if butter would not melt in their round pursed-up mouths. There they are, held like flies in the amber of that moment – click goes the camera and on goes life; the minutes, the days, the years, the decades, taking them further and further from the happiness and promise of youth, from the hopes Aunt Sadie must have had for them, and from the dreams they dreamed for themselves. I often think there is nothing quite so poignantly sad as old family groups.
Goblin Fruit – from Lips Touch, Three Times – Laini Taylor
There is a certain kind of girl the goblins crave. You could walk across a high school campus and point them out: not her, not her, her. The pert, lovely ones with butterfly tattoos in secret places, sitting on their boyfriends’ laps? No, not them. The girls watching the lovely ones sitting on their boyfriends’ laps? Yes.
Them.
The goblins want girls who dream so hard about being pretty their yearning leaves a palpable trail, a scent goblins can follow like sharks on a soft bloom of blood. The girls with hungry eyes who pray each night to wake up as someone else. Urgent, unkissed, wishful girls.
Like Kizzy.
And in terms of a hook to grab the reader with, I think the opening to R.J. Anderson’s “Ultraviolet” cannot be beat:
Ultraviolet – R.J. Anderson
Once upon a time there was a girl who was special. Her hair flowed like honey and her eyes were blue as music. She grew up bright and beautiful, with deft fingers, a quick mind, and a charm that impressed everyone she met. Her parents adored her, her teachers praised her, and her schoolmates admired her many talents. Even the oddly shaped birthmark on her upper arm seemed like a sign of some great destiny.
This is not her story.
Unless you count the part where I killed her.
I should add that these are all books that live up to their killer openings, and that, I suppose, is the real challenge. Feel free to share favorite openings, here or on my Feel free to share favorite openings, here or on my facebook page.
Yours, beginning again,
Catherine
I’m trying to rewrite the opening of my work-in-progress, which has me thinking about great openings to books I’ve loved. Like Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History,” which opens with the answer to the who-dunnit, setting up a brilliant, complicated “why-dunnit” (ripped that off from someone but I’ve no idea who so can’t credit). Or like “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” – you know from that first line that you are in the hands of a master. The first line, first paragraph, first page of a book will ideally offer a voice that the reader can fall in love with and, of course, stay in love with for all the pages to follow. I don’t know if I’ve succeeded in my own effort, and may find myself rewriting it again, and again, but since it’s on my mind, here are seven openings to books (picked quickly and randomly off my shelves just now) that equaled love-at-first-glance, for me.
Imaginary Girls – Nova Ren Suma
Ruby said I’d never drown – not in deep ocean, not by shipwreck, not even by falling drunk into someone’s bottomless backyard pool. She said she’d seen me hold my breath underwater for minutes at a time, but to hear her tell it you’d think she meant days. Long enough to live down there if needed, to skim the seafloor collecting shells and shiny soda caps, looking up every so often for the rescue lights, even if they took forever to come.
It sounded impossible, something no one would believe if anyone other than Ruby were the one to tell it. But Ruby was right: The body they found that night wouldn’t be, couldn’t be mine.
Bones of Faerie – Janni Lee Simner
I had a sister once. She was a beautiful baby, eyes silver as moonlight off the river at night. From the hour of her birth she was long-limbed and graceful, faerie-pale hair clear as glass from Before, so pale you could almost see through to the soft skin beneath.
My father was a sensible man. He set her out on the hillside that very night, though my mother wept and even old Jayce argued against it. “If the faerie folk want her, let them take her,” Father said. “If not, the fault’s theirs for not claiming one of their own.” He left my sister, and he never looked back.
I did. I crept out before dawn to see whether the faeries had really come. They hadn’t, but some wild creature had. One glance was all I could take. I turned and ran for home, telling no one where I’d been.
I Capture The Castle – Dodie Smith
I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. That is, my feet are in it; the rest of me is on the draining-board, which I have padded with our dog’s blanket and the tea-cosy. I can’t say that I am really comfortable, and there is a depressing smell of carbolic soap, but this is the only part of the kitchen where there is any daylight left. And I have found that sitting in a place where you have never sat before can be inspiring – I wrote my very best poem while sitting on the hen-house. Though even that isn’t a very good poem. I have decided my poetry is so bad that I mustn’t write any more of it.
…
It is comforting to look away from the windows and towards the kitchen fire, near which my sister Rose is ironing – though she obviously can’t see properly, and it will be a pity if she scorches her only nightgown. (I have two, but one is minus its behind.) Rose looks particularly fetching by firelight because she is a pinkish person; her skin has a pink glow and her hair is pinkish gold, very light and feathery. Although I am rather used to her I know she is a beauty. She is nearly twenty-one and very bitter with life. I am seventeen, look younger, feel older. I am no beauty but have a neatish face.
Goodbye Without Leaving – Laurie Colwin
During my career as a backup singer with Vernon and Ruby Shakely and the Shakettes, it often occurred to me that this was not a lifetime occupation and that someday I would have to figure out my rightful place in society.
I did not want to think about these things: I wanted to get out on stage and dance. The Shakelys thought it was cool to hire a white Shakette every once in a while, and for a while I was it.
Previous to that I had been a graduate student, sitting in the library at the University of Chicago getting older and older, trying to think of a topic for my doctoral dissertation and, once having found the topic, trying to write about it. I was an English major and I intended to write something that would turn into a book entitled “Jane Austen and the War of the Sexes.” Another thing I did not like to think about was how much I did not want to write about this or any other thing.
The Pursuit of Love – Nancy Mitford
There is a photograph in existence of Aunt Sadie and her six children sitting round the tea-table at Alconleigh. The table is situated, as it was, is now, and ever shall be, in the hall, in front of a huge open fire of logs. Over the chimney-piece plainly visible in the photograph, hangs an entrenching tool, with which, in 1915, Uncle Matthew had whacked to death eight Germans one by one as they crawled out of a dug-out. It is still covered with blood and hairs, an object of fascination to us as children. In the photograph Aunt Sadie’s face, always beautiful, appears strangely round, her hair strangely fluffy, and her clothes strangely dowdy, but it is unmistakably she who sits there with Robin, in oceans of lace, lolling on her knee. She seems uncertain what to do with his head, and the presence of Nanny waiting to take him away is felt though not seen. The other children, between Louisa’s eleven and Matt’s two years, sit round the table in party dresses or frilly bibs, holding cups or mugs according to age, all of them gazing at the camera with large eyes opened wide by the flash, and all looking as if butter would not melt in their round pursed-up mouths. There they are, held like flies in the amber of that moment – click goes the camera and on goes life; the minutes, the days, the years, the decades, taking them further and further from the happiness and promise of youth, from the hopes Aunt Sadie must have had for them, and from the dreams they dreamed for themselves. I often think there is nothing quite so poignantly sad as old family groups.
Goblin Fruit – from Lips Touch, Three Times – Laini Taylor
There is a certain kind of girl the goblins crave. You could walk across a high school campus and point them out: not her, not her, her. The pert, lovely ones with butterfly tattoos in secret places, sitting on their boyfriends’ laps? No, not them. The girls watching the lovely ones sitting on their boyfriends’ laps? Yes.
Them.
The goblins want girls who dream so hard about being pretty their yearning leaves a palpable trail, a scent goblins can follow like sharks on a soft bloom of blood. The girls with hungry eyes who pray each night to wake up as someone else. Urgent, unkissed, wishful girls.
Like Kizzy.
And in terms of a hook to grab the reader with, I think the opening to R.J. Anderson’s “Ultraviolet” cannot be beat:
Ultraviolet – R.J. Anderson
Once upon a time there was a girl who was special. Her hair flowed like honey and her eyes were blue as music. She grew up bright and beautiful, with deft fingers, a quick mind, and a charm that impressed everyone she met. Her parents adored her, her teachers praised her, and her schoolmates admired her many talents. Even the oddly shaped birthmark on her upper arm seemed like a sign of some great destiny.
This is not her story.
Unless you count the part where I killed her.
I should add that these are all books that live up to their killer openings, and that, I suppose, is the real challenge. Feel free to share favorite openings, here or on my Feel free to share favorite openings, here or on my facebook page.
Yours, beginning again,
Catherine
June 10, 2013
All Roads Lead To The End Of The Road
Dear Blog,
Quite frequently the boys and I will be heading to the park or the grocery store or the bus stop or wherever and they will stop to admire some flowers. They can spend a long time admiring flowers. Or maybe there will be an ant crossing the pavement, or a whole anthill bursting up through a crack in the sidewalk, or an inchworm dangling from a tree, or a particularly appealing stick or rock or leaf. Sometimes I’ll see a big ant before they do and I’ll think please-don’t-see-it-please-don’t-see-it-please-don’t-see-it, and then one of them will yell “ANT!” and they’ll both abandon their bikes and go crouch near the ant, watching it scurry and weave and stop and start again. I know supposedly ants are incredibly organized but they always look totally discombobulated and confused to me.
I hear myself saying, “Come on guys, let’s go,” as they are delicately sniffing flowers, and I always think to myself, ha ha, I’m not letting them stop to smell the roses. I try to slow down, I try to enjoy these moments, but it drives me crazy every single day.
I was a fidgety little kid and I am a very restless adult. There is something so impatient in me. It is what makes motherhood so difficult at times. I want to be in motion. I want to be going somewhere. I try, I really do, but I do not want to watch that ant. I do not want to smell those flowers. I want to keep moving.
And I want today to roll into tomorrow, I want it to be next month or next year because I always think the really good times are just around the corner, that things are about to get easier, that I am about to become better at living the life I’ve made for myself. I’m always racing towards the future like it’s all green grass and milk and honey thataway, and you would think at my age that I would know better. I mean, as I hurtle through time, through days and weeks and months and years, of course it would be a good idea to take a break right over here and marvel at the cooperation of ants. My sense of smell is quite poor but even so, it might be a good idea to do as my kids do and give that flower a sniff.
It’s hard to change and I’m never sure how much I want to. But sometimes when I take a breath and stop myself from yelling hurryuphurryuphurryup-stop-marveling-at-nature-and-let’s-get-moving, I think about my favorite poem by Katha Pollitt and its heart-stopping ending. She is talking about sex (and death) and I am just talking about my restless feet and mind (and death), but I think about it sometimes and I wonder when the turnaround will come for me, when I will recognize where it is taking me and will beg my restlessness, please just wait, just wait, there’s no hurry, there are some flowers over there, hey waitaminute, I see an ant!
Mind-Body Problem
by Katha Pollitt
When I think of my youth I feel sorry not for myself
but for my body. It was so direct
and simple, so rational in its desires,
wanting to be touched the way an otter
loves water, the way a giraffe
wants to amble the edge of the forest, nuzzling
the tender leaves at the tops of the trees. It seems
unfair, somehow, that my body had to suffer
because I, by which I mean my mind, was saddled
with certain unfortunate high-minded romantic notions
that made me tyrannize and patronize it
like a cruel medieval baron, or an ambitious
English-professor husband ashamed of his wife –
her love of sad movies, her budget casseroles
and regional vowels. Perhaps
my body would have liked to make some of our dates,
to come home at four in the morning and answer my scowl
with “None of your business!” Perhaps
it would have liked more presents: silks, mascaras.
If we had had a more democratic arrangement
we might even have come, despite our different backgrounds,
to a grudging respect for each other, like Tony Curtis
and Sidney Poitier fleeing handcuffed together,
instead of the current curious shift of power
in which I find I am being reluctantly
dragged along by my body as though by some
swift and powerful dog. How eagerly
it plunges ahead, not stopping for anything,
as though it knows exactly where we are going.
Yours, ant-indifferently, flower-snubbingly, ever-restlessly,
Catherine
Quite frequently the boys and I will be heading to the park or the grocery store or the bus stop or wherever and they will stop to admire some flowers. They can spend a long time admiring flowers. Or maybe there will be an ant crossing the pavement, or a whole anthill bursting up through a crack in the sidewalk, or an inchworm dangling from a tree, or a particularly appealing stick or rock or leaf. Sometimes I’ll see a big ant before they do and I’ll think please-don’t-see-it-please-don’t-see-it-please-don’t-see-it, and then one of them will yell “ANT!” and they’ll both abandon their bikes and go crouch near the ant, watching it scurry and weave and stop and start again. I know supposedly ants are incredibly organized but they always look totally discombobulated and confused to me.
I hear myself saying, “Come on guys, let’s go,” as they are delicately sniffing flowers, and I always think to myself, ha ha, I’m not letting them stop to smell the roses. I try to slow down, I try to enjoy these moments, but it drives me crazy every single day.
I was a fidgety little kid and I am a very restless adult. There is something so impatient in me. It is what makes motherhood so difficult at times. I want to be in motion. I want to be going somewhere. I try, I really do, but I do not want to watch that ant. I do not want to smell those flowers. I want to keep moving.
And I want today to roll into tomorrow, I want it to be next month or next year because I always think the really good times are just around the corner, that things are about to get easier, that I am about to become better at living the life I’ve made for myself. I’m always racing towards the future like it’s all green grass and milk and honey thataway, and you would think at my age that I would know better. I mean, as I hurtle through time, through days and weeks and months and years, of course it would be a good idea to take a break right over here and marvel at the cooperation of ants. My sense of smell is quite poor but even so, it might be a good idea to do as my kids do and give that flower a sniff.
It’s hard to change and I’m never sure how much I want to. But sometimes when I take a breath and stop myself from yelling hurryuphurryuphurryup-stop-marveling-at-nature-and-let’s-get-moving, I think about my favorite poem by Katha Pollitt and its heart-stopping ending. She is talking about sex (and death) and I am just talking about my restless feet and mind (and death), but I think about it sometimes and I wonder when the turnaround will come for me, when I will recognize where it is taking me and will beg my restlessness, please just wait, just wait, there’s no hurry, there are some flowers over there, hey waitaminute, I see an ant!
Mind-Body Problem
by Katha Pollitt
When I think of my youth I feel sorry not for myself
but for my body. It was so direct
and simple, so rational in its desires,
wanting to be touched the way an otter
loves water, the way a giraffe
wants to amble the edge of the forest, nuzzling
the tender leaves at the tops of the trees. It seems
unfair, somehow, that my body had to suffer
because I, by which I mean my mind, was saddled
with certain unfortunate high-minded romantic notions
that made me tyrannize and patronize it
like a cruel medieval baron, or an ambitious
English-professor husband ashamed of his wife –
her love of sad movies, her budget casseroles
and regional vowels. Perhaps
my body would have liked to make some of our dates,
to come home at four in the morning and answer my scowl
with “None of your business!” Perhaps
it would have liked more presents: silks, mascaras.
If we had had a more democratic arrangement
we might even have come, despite our different backgrounds,
to a grudging respect for each other, like Tony Curtis
and Sidney Poitier fleeing handcuffed together,
instead of the current curious shift of power
in which I find I am being reluctantly
dragged along by my body as though by some
swift and powerful dog. How eagerly
it plunges ahead, not stopping for anything,
as though it knows exactly where we are going.
Yours, ant-indifferently, flower-snubbingly, ever-restlessly,
Catherine
June 3, 2013
On becoming someone else
Dear Blog,
When I was younger I was braver than I am now, and I was more selfish, and I was stupider, and I was more fun. I would have laughed at your jokes, even if they weren’t funny, not something I can promise anymore, but if you were a stranger crying in a corner I might have pretended not to notice, whereas now I would go over with a tissue and ask you if you were OK.
I would have been appalled, at fifteen, at twenty, at twenty-five, if I could have seen what my life would become in my thirties. I think I understood even back then that Domesticity had its eye on me. I spent my twenties gallivanting all over the world, eschewing a real career or any real responsibility for / to anything / anyone because I was On The Run from dreaded Domesticity. Not that it mattered. I ran far and wide and had a great many adventures but the run-on-sentence of my adventuresome youth came to a full-stop in a hospital in New Jersey when I looked into the startled eyes of my first child. He looked back at me and proceeded to scream his fucking head off.
I had a baby and everything changed. I changed. I stopped laughing at bad jokes and started carrying tissues. My worst fears expanded with my capacity for love, and it feels sometimes that it is all love and fear now, tangled together like shadow and light. The worst case scenarios now are beyond what I can bear to imagine, it makes me shake just to write that down and I have to stop and breathe, stop and breathe. And maybe I wasn’t very good at love before, I don’t know. I don’t think it’s true for every mother but I think it is often true, and it’s true for me, that this love I have for my children dwarfs every other feeling I have ever had. I see ridiculous headlines sometimes saying things like, “parents are happier than non-parents”, or “the childfree are happier than parents,” and I think that it is so laughable and so absurd to try to frame it that way.
Look, I was happier before. I didn’t have kids because I thought it would make me happy. I kept running around and boarding planes with my visas to this country or that country like get-out-jail-free cards, but as I got older there was more often than not this hilarious, clever man with me – that was a clue, but I didn’t catch on. We shared bed after bed in country after country so how I still thought I was going to escape I don’t know but sometime after I turned thirty this longing opened up in me. I was on a mountain in Peru and I put two leaves on the rock, pointing to another mountain peak as directed, and two rocks on top of them for two wishes. I wished for healthy, happy children. There on top of the world, free as I had ever been, adventure before me and behind me, I wished for children.
There are people who go gallivanting and adventuring with their children and there are people who balance fulfilling (or unfulfilling) careers with parenting, and there are people who are truly happiest giving their days over to the constant care that small children require. But becoming a parent, for reasons logistical, financial and emotional, stapled my feet to the ground, filled me up in ways I never expected and left me starving in equally unpredictable ways. There was a year, after having my second son, when I didn’t sleep. Someday, when it is less raw, I will write a blog post about severe, chronic sleep deprivation and what it does to a person, or at least, what it did to me – how it undid me. Emerging slowly from the other end of that tunnel, I don’t really know who I am anymore, besides mother to these boys, anchor of their world.
But the surprising (to me) thing is that my writing took off with parenthood. I mean, I was writing all along, but I didn’t have much discipline or much ambition. There were long stretches of time when I didn’t write, because I was busy laughing at bad jokes, marveling at the stars in the desert, drinking too much and boarding trains and whatnot. (“I think we’re on the wrong train,” I said, and he said, “There is no wrong train,” and it was true back then). It didn’t matter to me so much if I was writing or not. It was something I liked to do and wanted to do, but I didn’t need it the way I do now. I didn’t need an answer (for myself, because “I’m a writer” is something I have a hard time saying to other people) to the question “What do you do?”
Now, not a day goes by when I don’t write. I complain too much about not having time and kind, sympathetic friends say to me oh it must be so hard to find time to write with the kids and I say oh yes it really is, but the truth is that writing and parenthood have been, mostly, a pretty stellar combination for me. I’m finding time I didn’t find before I had kids, because I need it in a way that I didn’t before I had kids, and because my days and weeks are structured in such a way that there is this time and this time only that I can choose to use in a self-centered way, and that time is so precious I can’t bear to fritter it away.
“Look, you can watch more TV!” I say desperately, and they shout, “No! We want to play!” Kids these days, pfft. I can tune out most of it. The crashing and smashing and shouting and whooping and laughing and even the crying, if it doesn’t go on too long. I pretend that this is a time for them to learn self-sufficiency, and I hear LittleJ adopting my tone and my words when comforting LittleK, kissing his bumps before urging him back to the game, whatever it is. When I close the computer and look up they are grinning at me, having wrecked the apartment, these two gorgeous boys. They say “Do you want to play hide-and-seek?” and I do, and also I don’t, same old story. I say “yes” and go curl myself into the bathtub while they count. I hear LittleK saying “thirteen, sixteen, thirteen, sixteen, thirteen, sixteen” while LittleJ tries to get him to count properly, yelling with frustration. I lie there in the bathtub like the shell of who I used to be or maybe like something that came out of the shell that I used to be, I don’t know which it is most days, and I wait for them to find me.
Yours, stapled to the ground but in reach of my computer,
Catherine
When I was younger I was braver than I am now, and I was more selfish, and I was stupider, and I was more fun. I would have laughed at your jokes, even if they weren’t funny, not something I can promise anymore, but if you were a stranger crying in a corner I might have pretended not to notice, whereas now I would go over with a tissue and ask you if you were OK.
I would have been appalled, at fifteen, at twenty, at twenty-five, if I could have seen what my life would become in my thirties. I think I understood even back then that Domesticity had its eye on me. I spent my twenties gallivanting all over the world, eschewing a real career or any real responsibility for / to anything / anyone because I was On The Run from dreaded Domesticity. Not that it mattered. I ran far and wide and had a great many adventures but the run-on-sentence of my adventuresome youth came to a full-stop in a hospital in New Jersey when I looked into the startled eyes of my first child. He looked back at me and proceeded to scream his fucking head off.
I had a baby and everything changed. I changed. I stopped laughing at bad jokes and started carrying tissues. My worst fears expanded with my capacity for love, and it feels sometimes that it is all love and fear now, tangled together like shadow and light. The worst case scenarios now are beyond what I can bear to imagine, it makes me shake just to write that down and I have to stop and breathe, stop and breathe. And maybe I wasn’t very good at love before, I don’t know. I don’t think it’s true for every mother but I think it is often true, and it’s true for me, that this love I have for my children dwarfs every other feeling I have ever had. I see ridiculous headlines sometimes saying things like, “parents are happier than non-parents”, or “the childfree are happier than parents,” and I think that it is so laughable and so absurd to try to frame it that way.
Look, I was happier before. I didn’t have kids because I thought it would make me happy. I kept running around and boarding planes with my visas to this country or that country like get-out-jail-free cards, but as I got older there was more often than not this hilarious, clever man with me – that was a clue, but I didn’t catch on. We shared bed after bed in country after country so how I still thought I was going to escape I don’t know but sometime after I turned thirty this longing opened up in me. I was on a mountain in Peru and I put two leaves on the rock, pointing to another mountain peak as directed, and two rocks on top of them for two wishes. I wished for healthy, happy children. There on top of the world, free as I had ever been, adventure before me and behind me, I wished for children.
There are people who go gallivanting and adventuring with their children and there are people who balance fulfilling (or unfulfilling) careers with parenting, and there are people who are truly happiest giving their days over to the constant care that small children require. But becoming a parent, for reasons logistical, financial and emotional, stapled my feet to the ground, filled me up in ways I never expected and left me starving in equally unpredictable ways. There was a year, after having my second son, when I didn’t sleep. Someday, when it is less raw, I will write a blog post about severe, chronic sleep deprivation and what it does to a person, or at least, what it did to me – how it undid me. Emerging slowly from the other end of that tunnel, I don’t really know who I am anymore, besides mother to these boys, anchor of their world.
But the surprising (to me) thing is that my writing took off with parenthood. I mean, I was writing all along, but I didn’t have much discipline or much ambition. There were long stretches of time when I didn’t write, because I was busy laughing at bad jokes, marveling at the stars in the desert, drinking too much and boarding trains and whatnot. (“I think we’re on the wrong train,” I said, and he said, “There is no wrong train,” and it was true back then). It didn’t matter to me so much if I was writing or not. It was something I liked to do and wanted to do, but I didn’t need it the way I do now. I didn’t need an answer (for myself, because “I’m a writer” is something I have a hard time saying to other people) to the question “What do you do?”
Now, not a day goes by when I don’t write. I complain too much about not having time and kind, sympathetic friends say to me oh it must be so hard to find time to write with the kids and I say oh yes it really is, but the truth is that writing and parenthood have been, mostly, a pretty stellar combination for me. I’m finding time I didn’t find before I had kids, because I need it in a way that I didn’t before I had kids, and because my days and weeks are structured in such a way that there is this time and this time only that I can choose to use in a self-centered way, and that time is so precious I can’t bear to fritter it away.
“Look, you can watch more TV!” I say desperately, and they shout, “No! We want to play!” Kids these days, pfft. I can tune out most of it. The crashing and smashing and shouting and whooping and laughing and even the crying, if it doesn’t go on too long. I pretend that this is a time for them to learn self-sufficiency, and I hear LittleJ adopting my tone and my words when comforting LittleK, kissing his bumps before urging him back to the game, whatever it is. When I close the computer and look up they are grinning at me, having wrecked the apartment, these two gorgeous boys. They say “Do you want to play hide-and-seek?” and I do, and also I don’t, same old story. I say “yes” and go curl myself into the bathtub while they count. I hear LittleK saying “thirteen, sixteen, thirteen, sixteen, thirteen, sixteen” while LittleJ tries to get him to count properly, yelling with frustration. I lie there in the bathtub like the shell of who I used to be or maybe like something that came out of the shell that I used to be, I don’t know which it is most days, and I wait for them to find me.
Yours, stapled to the ground but in reach of my computer,
Catherine
May 27, 2013
On Tyranny vs. Writing In The Cracks
Dear Blog,
I ended my post last week with a poem by Lucille Clifton. Somebody asked her once why her poems were so short and she said it was because she had six children and a memory that could hold about nine lines. That made an impression on me, even before I had kids.
My grandfather was a writer. He was the kind of writer whose writing became the terrible god of the house. His daughters tiptoed around trying to be silent. He was Not To Be Interrupted, and if he was, there would be Hell To Pay. Now, when I am constantly interrupted in my own writing to fix snacks and encourage the sharing of toys, when I write to the crashing of lego and the roaring of dinosaur warfare and, sometimes, the overlong silence that means without a doubt that my boys are Up To No Good and I pause at the keyboard, wondering if I should keep going while I can and pay the price later or if I should get up and nip whatever is going on in the bud, I can sort of appreciate his Writerly Tyranny. I could never pull it off, of course, because I don’t have the kind of temper and narcissism required (not to say that I am not temperamental and narcissistic, but I lack the self-assurance to go all out with my worst tendencies). And anyway nobody is scared of me, which is probably for the best but is occasionally a bit frustrating.
When I was in my teens, I struck up a correspondence with my grandfather, because I wanted to be a writer too and wanted to know The Writer In The Family. (In fact ours is a family of many writers, but he was the one who made it his life and defined himself by it). He wrote wonderful letters, and I tried to write wonderful letters too. When I was seventeen, I visited him by myself for the first time, staying in the spare room in his cottage in the Welsh village of Hay-on-Wye, known for its bookshops and literary festival. He gave me food that had clearly gone bad, read me poetry tapping out the rhythm on the table, and took me to visit a man he called “the One Real Intellectual in Hay-on-Wye.” The One Real Intellectual may well have been just that. From my seventeen-year-old perspective, he was a man who was very drunk at midday and had pornography all over his walls. I think even my grandfather decided, partway through the visit, that it had been a bad idea. Except for the food, I had a wonderful time.
Not long after this visit, I discovered Lucille Clifton’s poetry (via Ani DiFranco). I wrote my grandfather a letter all about her. I copied out several poems at the end of the letter, a series of poems to God from the fallen angel Lucifer, from The Book of Light. Now, the WHOLE LETTER was about Lucille Clifton, and at the top of the page where I’d copied out the poems, I’d written POEMS BY LUCILLE CLIFTON. However, my grandfather obviously didn’t read the letter or look at the top of the page. It’s sort of touching, I guess – he thought I was sending him my poetry, and was so excited he just read it and reacted. He called my mother and my aunt, raving about my talent. He sent me a postcard, raving about same. A letter, raving, followed. I was brilliant. Brilliant.
We both felt crappy when I explained that I hadn’t written those poems, and of course I never did send him any of my own poetry after that.
Neither my grandfather nor I have anything approaching the brilliance of Lucille Clifton. Still, I find it comforting, as I try to write in the cracks between the chaos of life with children, that the Tyranny Of The Writer who locks himself in his study did not, after all, produce the kind of beautiful and lasting body of work of a mother who could hold nine lines in her memory while taking care of her six children. In the end, I tell myself (as often as I need to hear it), perhaps a full heart is better inspiration than ten uninterrupted minutes.
i am accused of tending to the past
(by Lucille Clifton, in case you didn’t read the letter)
i am accused of tending to the past
as if i made it,
as if i sculpted it
with my own hands. i did not.
this past was waiting for me
when i came,
a monstrous unnamed baby,
and i with my mother's itch
took it to breast
and named it
History.
she is more human now,
learning languages everyday,
remembering faces, names and dates.
when she is strong enough to travel
on her own, beware, she will.
Yours, unpoetically,
Catherine
I ended my post last week with a poem by Lucille Clifton. Somebody asked her once why her poems were so short and she said it was because she had six children and a memory that could hold about nine lines. That made an impression on me, even before I had kids.
My grandfather was a writer. He was the kind of writer whose writing became the terrible god of the house. His daughters tiptoed around trying to be silent. He was Not To Be Interrupted, and if he was, there would be Hell To Pay. Now, when I am constantly interrupted in my own writing to fix snacks and encourage the sharing of toys, when I write to the crashing of lego and the roaring of dinosaur warfare and, sometimes, the overlong silence that means without a doubt that my boys are Up To No Good and I pause at the keyboard, wondering if I should keep going while I can and pay the price later or if I should get up and nip whatever is going on in the bud, I can sort of appreciate his Writerly Tyranny. I could never pull it off, of course, because I don’t have the kind of temper and narcissism required (not to say that I am not temperamental and narcissistic, but I lack the self-assurance to go all out with my worst tendencies). And anyway nobody is scared of me, which is probably for the best but is occasionally a bit frustrating.
When I was in my teens, I struck up a correspondence with my grandfather, because I wanted to be a writer too and wanted to know The Writer In The Family. (In fact ours is a family of many writers, but he was the one who made it his life and defined himself by it). He wrote wonderful letters, and I tried to write wonderful letters too. When I was seventeen, I visited him by myself for the first time, staying in the spare room in his cottage in the Welsh village of Hay-on-Wye, known for its bookshops and literary festival. He gave me food that had clearly gone bad, read me poetry tapping out the rhythm on the table, and took me to visit a man he called “the One Real Intellectual in Hay-on-Wye.” The One Real Intellectual may well have been just that. From my seventeen-year-old perspective, he was a man who was very drunk at midday and had pornography all over his walls. I think even my grandfather decided, partway through the visit, that it had been a bad idea. Except for the food, I had a wonderful time.
Not long after this visit, I discovered Lucille Clifton’s poetry (via Ani DiFranco). I wrote my grandfather a letter all about her. I copied out several poems at the end of the letter, a series of poems to God from the fallen angel Lucifer, from The Book of Light. Now, the WHOLE LETTER was about Lucille Clifton, and at the top of the page where I’d copied out the poems, I’d written POEMS BY LUCILLE CLIFTON. However, my grandfather obviously didn’t read the letter or look at the top of the page. It’s sort of touching, I guess – he thought I was sending him my poetry, and was so excited he just read it and reacted. He called my mother and my aunt, raving about my talent. He sent me a postcard, raving about same. A letter, raving, followed. I was brilliant. Brilliant.
We both felt crappy when I explained that I hadn’t written those poems, and of course I never did send him any of my own poetry after that.
Neither my grandfather nor I have anything approaching the brilliance of Lucille Clifton. Still, I find it comforting, as I try to write in the cracks between the chaos of life with children, that the Tyranny Of The Writer who locks himself in his study did not, after all, produce the kind of beautiful and lasting body of work of a mother who could hold nine lines in her memory while taking care of her six children. In the end, I tell myself (as often as I need to hear it), perhaps a full heart is better inspiration than ten uninterrupted minutes.
i am accused of tending to the past
(by Lucille Clifton, in case you didn’t read the letter)
i am accused of tending to the past
as if i made it,
as if i sculpted it
with my own hands. i did not.
this past was waiting for me
when i came,
a monstrous unnamed baby,
and i with my mother's itch
took it to breast
and named it
History.
she is more human now,
learning languages everyday,
remembering faces, names and dates.
when she is strong enough to travel
on her own, beware, she will.
Yours, unpoetically,
Catherine
