Pat Schneider's Blog, page 7

WRITING WITH OTHERS

I thought I wouldn't be able to write in workshop last night, waiting as I am to hear from a major publisher who is considering my new book manuscript. The editor has told me she wants it, but the marketing department is where the real decision is made. This is a little bit like being pregnant.  When you are consumed with hope and fear for your long writing project, it's not easy to begin again to put pen to paper.  When you're eight and a half months pregnant, you really don't want to think about whether after this one you will  ever want another baby.

This is a crazy time to try to sell a book, of course, with Borders declaring bankruptcy and nobody really knowing what is going to happen to book publishing.  I keep thinking about medieval monks – how they must have sat around their great monastery desks drinking mead or whatever they drank, saying things like, All our beautiful scrolls!  No one is going to read any more! Some fool has invented a thing called the '"printing press'"and now anybody can write!  It's the end of literature!

But we gathered in our circle and everyone grew quiet. I gave the first prompt, we all put our pens to our pages, and in spite of myself the magic happened.  My book, the editor and her marketing department all disappeared and I found myself putting words on my page about what happened to me this week -- receiving hearing aids.  I decided to get them because when everyone in my workshop is laughing, I can't understand the joke through the ambient noise.  Admitting that you need hearing aids is a kind of loss, and writing about that took me to my brother, Sam and his teeth, how it hurt me that he had made the choice to have them all removed before he was sixty years old, because he couldn't afford dental care.  Then I thought about all the women my age in the world who can't afford to hear, how privileged I am. I thought about health care of all kinds as a human right. I wrote about myself, and I wrote about women in public housing along the Connecticut River near where I live, and women in refugee camps and barrios.  How they can hear the laughter, but they can't understand the joke.

I didn't write something that became a poem or a story or a personal essay, but I did get to what was more important last night than whether or not my book is accepted by the marketing department.

NEANDERTHAL IN CYBERSPACE

Is this exciting, or what?  I am moving out into cyberspace – WoW! A brand new website, and this is my first blog entry. I might even take a friend’s offer to initiate me into Facebook – something I’ve resisted until I could manage incoming email (dream on!)!

      All of this is because I have finished my new book and in today’s market, the author is expected to help a lot in getting the word out. For me, that means joining my sixteen-year-old grandson, Natty, in knowing something about the brave new world of cyberspace.

      Recently I went to our local computer shop with a snarl in my computer that Peter and I and a man we were paying spent hours trying to unsnarl.  A lovely young man behind the counter fixed everything in a few minutes.  I told him, “I am a Neanderthal in cyberspace!”

      He replied, gently, seriously, “I am a student in anthropology at the university, and I can tell you for certain that you are at least Cro-Magnon.”

[image error]

     That’s me, sitting at a writing desk, reflected in the the window of  “A Studio of One’s Own” writer’s retreat.

     ABOUT MY NEW BOOK:

      It is finished.  I have worked on it, and on no other writing project, for six years. Partly as a result of some springtime challenges health-wise that made me think about mortality, (if you want to finish this book in this lifetime, you’d better get at it,) I set for myself the deadline of Labor Day (first Monday in September) to have it in the hands of my agent, and I met the deadline.  It meant, of course, going ghostly like that picture above – pretty much disappearing for the entire summer.  I worked at least four hours a day on it – some days as much as seven hours – and got it to the agent’s desk two days before Labor Day.  I don’t expect anything to happen soon, given publishing at this moment.  I am prepared for nothing to happen except publishing a limited number of copies ourselves. The pulishing world is topsy-turvey.  But the good news is,  – being “the little red hen,” who said, “I’ll do it myself!” really is a possibility.  If Emily Dickinson could sew her pages together with a needle and thread, we can self-publish our own books.

      I like the book.  I like very much the journey it took for me to begin it, and the journey it took for me to finish it.  Near summer’s end I was talking to Jean Chapman, a friend of almost fifty years, and she quoted to me four lines from the song, “Anthem” by Leonard Cohen:

Ring the bells that still will ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

      I have taken as my title “How the Light Gets In” with the possible sub-title of “Writing as a Spiritual Practice."

[image error] 
      Old folks at home:

      Peter:  Here’s Peter and me, laughing into the camera of our youngest daughter, Bethany.  He is one of the funnier men on the planet, but Bethany must have taken three hundred photos to get this one with both of us looking – well, respectable – at once.  There’s a story about that hat.  It developed those sweat stains that seemed yukky to me.  I took it to the cleaners and told the man, “My husband loves this hat, but it’s so dirty!  It has grease stains from where he bent under the hood of the car, and sweat stains – what can be done about it?”
  He examined the hat, held it up to the light coming in through his store window, and said solemnly, “If this was my hat, I’d be proud of every single stain.”
 “Oh,”  I said, “I see.”  And chastened, I took it back to Peter.

      There’s a poem by Peter hidden under one of the pictures on the home page. If you haven’t found those four poems, click on the autumn picture and you will see Peter’s poem, from his book of poems, Line Fence. 

      Peter has dug out his clarinet, where it lay abandoned in the attic for forty years – and he is still very good!  2010 ended with a musical holiday: Peter on the clarinet, Paul on the trumpet, Katie Louise (Bethany’s partner) on the piano, and the rest of us on our vocal chords.  We made a joyful – if not entirely musical – noise!

      THE SISTER I NEVER KNEW I HAD

      In May, my half-sister Sharon visited me from Missouri.  It was simply wonderful.  Here we are, planting Hollyhocks for our grandmother, Elzina, who never saw me after I was four years old.  I met Sharon for the first time recently, and our conversations has brought me to a greatly revised understanding of my own origins.  I tell part of that story is in How the Light Gets In.

[image error]

      I’ve lost a lot of weight, as you can see. I weigh less than I did in college, and I’ve been told for the first time in my life “don’t lose any more weight.”  There are good things about getting sick – as long as afterwards you get well again. Sharon is 9 years younger than me.  I am still somewhat in shock to find that I have a “little sister.”

      THIRTY POEMS IN THIRTY DAYS

      Along with a lot of other writers in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts, I have taken on the challenge of writing thirty poems in thirty days, and people are pledging so much per poem.  It’s sort of like those events where people run and you pledge per mile.  This one goes to The Center for New Americans, for literacy work. http://www.firstgiving.com/patsthirty...   Here’s my poem for November 1.

THE FAMILY PHOTOGRAPHER

I was forever trying to capture you:
this minute!  Don’t forget this minute!
And you, being three, or thirteen, or
thirty-three, resisted of course
the camera in your face, the sneak
approach, the instant of distraction.

But now, now that time has sped
and had its way with us, now

how you bend over the old photographs,
how you laugh, or suddenly go still,
standing for one instant with one foot
in this full-color sun, this present light,
and one foot back there in that
disappearing instant, black and white.

-- Pat Schneider

[image error]      LAST AND NOT AT ALL LEAST:

      Last, and least in physical size but not in importance, we have finished our grieving the loss of our much loved cat, Nellie, (pictured with me on my website home page) and have made room in our hearts for a little teenaged terrorist named officially, “Mozart” (Moe for short.)  If you get rumpled letters from me, it’s because Moe owns my printer.

      There are other stories I would love to tell you – about our granddaughter, Sarah’s wedding here a year ago August, to her true love, Megan, and our grandson, Natty’s expertise surfing this past summer.   Here, in closing, is how I basically feel about my life right now.  Grateful, deeply grateful that you are in my life, and that there is so much new and good going on, in spite of us imperfect human beings.

      Love,

      Pat