Glenda Burgess's Blog, page 23

Two Reviews: Lives in Crisis, Part II

"Mr. Grosz?"
"Yes?"
"I don't really have a house in France. You do know that, don't you?"

- from "The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves," Stephen Grosz



It may strike you, as it did me, that the power of the human mind and the empathy of the human spirit speak clearly through the quotes above. Both of these books, THE EXAMINED LIFE by Dr. Stephen Grosz and ON CALL by Emily Transue MD, deal with the human condition. Dr. Grosz is a psychoanalyst in practice in London, and Dr. Transue is a teaching and clinical internal medicine specialist at the University of Washington. They are both in the healing professions, and their personal lives intwine intricately with those they endeavor to help, forming the engaging and oftentimes deeply moving content of their work.

I was struck by the power of empathy after reading these two authors. It is one thing to bring peerless technique and insight to treating the human mind and body, it is altogether another gift to bring deep compassion, empathy, even intuition to collaboration with patients in pursuit of understanding/healing. Stephen Grosz' book reads as a series of mysterious human fables, patients grappling with the big issues of their lives in telling and symbolic ways. In the quote above, Dr. Grosz is treating a man for whom "a safe house" has many deep-rooted psychological implications. It is not until the end of his tale that we understood the man's beloved house in France that at first appears so literal and substantive, is in fact a figment of imagination. A coping choice. What wonders there are in the way human beings navigate an uncertain world!

Dr. Transue's story is a collection of hospital vignettes that span three years in residency training following medical school as she completes her internal medicine training. ON CALL is a narrative of both the making of a doctor, and the beauty that comes when we bring an ear for the complexities of the human context to our work. Transue finds the story in each of her patients; she engages medicine - herself - and steps beyond the symptom or problem to understand the whole person, ever cognizant of the limits of the doctor-patient relationship, of medicine itself, and human idiosyncrasy.

Life, these authors show us, is both a task of adjustment and commitment to forward momentum. Consider the epigram to Dr. Grosz' work, taken from the author Andre Dubus II, "Broken Vessels,"We receive and we lose, and we must try to achieve gratitude; and with that gratitude to embrace with whole hearts whatever of life that remains after the losses.

I was moved and deeply engaged by both these books. The humanity and insight of both authors is stunning: every page offered a life lesson from both sides of the patient-professional story. I found myself marveling at the human capacity to care, as well as the honest, spiritual uncertainty when working in tandem with the vulnerable toward positive outcome. THE EXAMINED LIFE offers many surprising insights on our instinctive human coping mechanisms and their twisted, often marvelous purposefulness, while ON CALL offers a moving look at those moments life hangs in the balance and what it means to fight that fight. Both highly recommended.

*Because of a file limit on my website blog software, the book cover image for ON CALL by Emily Transue, MD is provided in second post above.

Two Reviews: Lives in Crisis, Part I

"And then she says: 'Do you think I'll be well enough in March to have the wedding?' March was when they had been supposed to get married. You have no idea how terminal she was - I mean really. Just slipping away. What do you say? I have no idea what I even said. Whatever I could think of to get through the moment somehow. And I went back to the residents' room, and I just lost it. The rest of the team came in and I was there sobbing, and they were like, what, what? And I told them, and you know what they said? They said: 'If you're that thin-skinned, if you're going to let things get to you like that, you shouldn't be in medicine.' That's what they said. And I spun on them and I said: 'If I ever stop letting things get to me, that's when I'll quit medicine.' And it turned out the chief resident in psychiatry was sitting there, listening to all this - I hadn't seen him - and he stood and said, 'That's the sanest thing I've heard all week.'"

- from "On Call: A Doctor's Days and Nights in Residency," By Emily Transue, MD

*Part I continues in Part II blog entry below: Two Reviews: Lives in Crisis.

Monday Morning, Late Summer

MONDAY MORNING, LATE SUMMER
On the fence
in the sunlight,
beach towels.

No wind.

The apricots have ripened
and been picked.
The blackberries have ripened
and been picked.
- Robert Hass, from the poem "Cuttings"

The opening of the chest, the heart chakra - literally opening to the deep breathing and calm rhythms of a lengthy period on break - profoundly affects the mind as well as the body. When we step out of the box, the stress-filled, demanding, unrelenting responsibilities of the 24/7, the break from routine can begin the restoration of the soul. As an observer of my own fifty decades of living, the wide empty stretches on life's blue highways are far and few between in the 21st century. It's no news we live in a plugged-in, high demand, ever-changing, constantly stimulating world. The irregular dry spells, down time, wayside adventures, lags in scheduling all seem to have disappeared along with party-lines and land lines. We are "on" and plugged-in every moment of the day: pinged by messages, expanding lists of to-dos, global information, and social media even when we sleep.

Small wonder we find peace walking in the silence of tall cedars, lulled to sleep by lapping waves on the lake shore, listening to the creak of wind in the trees, bird call in the quiet dawn. Thoreau was a relentless champion of "disconnect and rediscover" for the human soul, and frankly, so am I. I found it interesting to watch my family, traveling to our rustic cabin on the lake shore with four smart phones, two laptops, three iPads, two iPods and one Shuffle, slowly adapt to first making the long trek down the trail to the nearest wifi center for internet signal, to eventually, mournfully, accepting there would never be more than one half-bar of cell service off the lake, to at last letting the devices sit in their cases, untouched. Withdrawal from the digital world was both painful and amusing - catching ourselves automatically engaged in a pointless click to check email, Twitter, FB. The urge to connect releasing, ever so slowly releasing its grip, to be replaced by long naps sunning on beach towels on a gently rolling dock, acoustic jazz guitar on the porch, long conversations by wine and candlelight at the picnic table, delving into not just a chapter but an entire book, board games and cards accompanied by a crackling fire and mellow whiskey.

We learned the nurturing quality of quiet. The sweet richness of intimate conversation. Walking the mountains, taking in the whole of life.

We disappear to the cabin every year, coming from wherever we are in the four corners of the world, from whatever education, work, or travel schedules occupy us, ready to find our way back to ourselves. To recharge in the power of tranquility, the open spaces of daydreams, sunny contentment, the deep truthful night and undisturbed sleep. We reconnect not just within, but together. And when the last spider is slapped with a sandal and tossed out the door, when the last huckleberry has made its way to a pancake drenched in maple syrup, the last pot of camp coffee poured to the dregs, we pack up our beach chairs and book bags and return to the world.

Halfway down the road to civilization the electronics buried in our duffles ping on, buzzing and downloading in a bursting hive of fury and we have to laugh. The world. It doesn't wait, and it doesn't matter.

In August

SWIMMING, ONE DAY IN AUGUST
It is time now, I said,
for the deepening and quieting of the spirit
among the flux of happenings.

Something had pestered me so much
I thought my heart would break.
I mean, the mechanical part.

I went down in the afternoon
to the sea
which held me, until I grew easy.

About tomorrow, who knows anything.
Except that it will be time, again,
for the deepening and quieting of the spirit.
- Mary Oliver

Tomorrow I head north to a cabin on Luby Bay, to the remote tranquil beauty of Priest Lake, Idaho - a long, deep, cold water lake surrounded by the forested Selkirk Mountains. The northernmost tip of Priest Lake narrows to a shallow canoe and kayak thoroughfare that connects to a pristine unsettled upper lake. We hike every year through the spice trees along the shores of the thoroughfare to picnic by the upper lake, picking huckleberries, basking in the wisdom of the wilderness and its quiet. For me, this is the week that restores the soul; the place and time, as Mary Oliver writes so beautifully, for the "deepening and quieting of the spirit."

I am taking a sack of books with me (yes, actual print books, bright and beckoning in their artistic jackets) and I thought I would share with you my mixed fiction, poetry, and nonfiction reading for the week:
"& Sons" by David Gilbert
"The Love affairs of Nataniel P." by Adelle Waldman
"The Examined Life" by Stephen Grosz
"First, Do No Harm," by Lisa Belkin
"Long Life, Poems & Essays" by Mary Oliver
"The Interestings" by Meg Wolitzer
"Beautiful Day," by Elin Hilderbrand

Who knows how far through these treasures I'll get between swimming in the lake, hiking the trails, basking on the beach...but trust me, I will be reading, feet propped on the porch rail in the shade of the cedars, glass of wine in hand. It will be lovely to sail into seas of new thinking. At ease.

See all of you in a week or so.
En Vacance

Welcome the Good

When the good comes, recognize it as such; you�ve worked hard to get here, readied yourself in a hundred ways so that it could find a home in you. When the good comes, nod to it and the circuitous route it had to take to find you in this exact moment of rightness. When the good comes, seat it comfortably while you tend to your old companions fear and doubt � they have done their best to protect you, but their journey with you must end here. When the good comes, meet it with an open heart and a willingness to explore. It�s your time.
- Kathy Freston, "The Daily Lean"

The juncture when a writer turns in a manuscript and waits, full of hope and apprehension as the nascent work's first critical review progresses, the all important assessment that evaluates the work on merit, the market, the quality of writing, and against the professional reader's own taste and expectations, is a very hard crossroads indeed. One direction lies elation, the other disconsolation. Whenever I submit work, I think of Cynthia Oznick's comments "Writers have a little holy light within, like a pilot light which fear is always blowing out. When a writer brings a manuscript fresh from the making, at the moment of greatest vulnerability, that's the moment for friends to help get the little holy light lit again."

Kathy Freston's post today from her wonderful blog "The Daily Lean" spoke deeply to me. As you know, two plus weeks ago my new manuscript entered review with my literary agent. As I waited (paced?) there were bread crumbs along the way as she read (it's a big book - 445 pages) - "Reading...and loving it!" Glimpses of what every writer hopes for: a book that captures a reader, pulls them through, delivers the goods. When she finished the manuscript on Sunday she sent me an immediate email that began "Brava!...."

Elation, my friends. The pilot light is lit once more. And yet... I'm already worried about what comes next. I have barely allowed this precise shimmering moment of goodness to sink in.

Freston reminds us we must accept our good inwardly or we devalue ourselves, our work, our dreams. Why is it so hard to feel deserving? It's easy to toss good moments off to luck, or accident, to cheat ourselves of the satisfaction of appreciating what we worked for. This is very different from the lovely bounty that comes solely of grace. (As I write this a random selection on my music playlist fills my study with Ray Lynch's ebullient, transcendent soundtrack "Deep Breakfast" and the track "Rhythm in the Pews." Joyful music!)

What comes next? Stage 2: Spending the next days doing light turnaround edits. However many times you comb through your work, there is always one dastardly cliche or an exclamation mark to weed out, a dropped verb missing in a sentence, an anchor the writer needs to craft to better anchor the reader in the narrative - all of which the critical reader meticulously sieves from the manuscript. (Do the dedicated and tremendously talented professionals in literary agencies and publishing ever get thanked enough?) As my manuscript gets this final grooming, a synopsis of the novel, an author bio, and critical reviews of previous works must be crafted and gathered together. The manuscript, our race horse - prances in its gate, ready to fly down the track. The grand prize? Win an offer from an acquisition editor in a well-respected publishing house.

Why am I once again anxious? Stage 3: selling to the capricious and uncertain publishing market. Books are a gamble full of inherent risk. This stage is a stride by stride commentary of trips, surges, and wobbles as our book charges through packs of rejections and lukewarm interest, never stopping, utterly focused on landing that one all-significant "Yes." You can race your heart out on that track. Cross the finish line dead last, or not at all. The writer's pilot light, as Oznick puts it, faces a great vulnerability when a book goes to the market. Publishing is, after all, a business. Perhaps Steinbeck summed it best when he wrote, "The profession of book-writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business."

As promised, that's the latest update on my hopeful new manuscript. Let you know how that horse race goes.... Wish me luck!

A Glimpse, Sideways

MY LIFE
By Billy Collins

Sometimes I see it as a straight line
drawn with a pencil and a ruler
transecting the circle of the world

or as a finger piercing
a smoke ring, casual, inquisitive,

but then the sun will come out
or the phone will ring
and I will cease to wonder

if it is one thing,
a large ball of air and memory,
or many things,
a string of small farming towns,
a dark road winding through them.

Let us say it is a field
I have been hoeing every day,
hoeing and singing,
then going to sleep in one of its furrows,

or now that it is more than half over,
a partially open door,
rain dripping from the eaves.

Like yours, it could be anything,
a nest with one egg,
a hallway that leads to a thousand rooms�
whatever happens to float into view
when I close my eyes

or look out a window
for more than a few minutes,
so that some days I think
it must be everything and nothing at once.

But this morning, sitting up in bed,
wearing my black sweater and my glasses,
the curtains drawn and the windows up,

I am a lake, my poem is an empty boat,
and my life is the breeze that blows
through the whole scene

stirring everything it touches�
the surface of the water, the limp sail,
even the heavy, leafy trees along the shore.


The first time I read My Life by Billy Collins, past poet laureate of the United States and arguably one of the most popular and well read contemporary poets in America, I was years younger than I am today. What stands out this morning as I share this poem with you is how different stanzas resonate for me now than did then. Lines once evocative but not familiar are now familiar, evoke an accumulation of yesteryears. Perhaps a poem taps a tuning fork within us, the base note ever changing. How can one poem do this? Ripple through our consciousness, pick and thread through dreams? My Life offers language to rest on as we journey the unknown. We read "everything and nothing at once" and find solace and recognition. A stream of islands that glisten in an existential sea - some inhabited, some not at all. Delicate, ephemeral, sturdy, sharp. Bones cast shadows in sunrises of wishfulness. Tide pools of regret shimmer at our feet, and above our heads move clouds of utter hunger. Our feet find "a dark road winding" and cross toward tomorrow - making, leaving, already moving on.

A glimpse, sideways.

Lean In, Sometimes

Throughout my childhood, my parents emphasized the importance of pursuing a meaningful life. Dinner discussions often centered on social injustice and those fighting to make the world a better place. As a child, I never thought about what I wanted to be, but I thought a lot about what I wanted to do. As sappy as it sounds, I hoped to change the world.
- Sheryl Sandberg, "Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead"

I read Sheryl Sandberg's "call to battle" memoir awhile ago. It has taken me time to process the mixed emotions her book, co written with Nell Scovell, raised in my thinking. I am a midlife feminist and older than Sandberg, so much of what she has to say (and liberally quotes throughout her book) is old hat. Inequalities in pay, in support available to single parent families, in shared domestic duties in double income families, in the availability of decent childcare, maternity leave policies, balancing the child-bearing years with promotion ladders... All very familiar. And frankly, after all these post-Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem decades, disheartening to admit such issues continue to burden the plate of the working woman in America.

Sandberg grew up, as she says, wanting to make a difference. Not to be, but to do. Others have pointed out, and Sandberg herself admits, it is easy to say "give your ambitions a full go" if your family also has the financial resources to deploy meeting the twin demands of childcare and running a household. A good deal of Sandberg's story comes across as lucky girl cheerleading. "Heh, don't envy me, be me!" Women are always choosing how to change the world - a pot roast at a time (Julia Child), refining radium (Marie Curie), writing a child's first book (Beatrix Potter), rallying a nation in dire straits (Margaret Thatcher), and on the list goes. Artists, scientists, teachers. Women who work at life within the circumstances they are dealt. That Sandberg leveraged a stable advantaged upbringing and education (Harvard) into a position in the ranks of corporate leadership should not amaze. Nor do most of us hem and haw over whether to leave one stellar job for another. Sometimes what is big is changing a nursing shift from day to night to sit at the breakfast table with your preschool child and make school lunch. To those to whom much is given, much is expected, as the saying goes.

The real nugget of trouble exposed by Sandberg's book is her acknowledgment embracing "the committed career" remains relevant for the twenty-first century woman. As it was twenty, forty, sixty years ago, a meaningful home life/parenting commitment still butts heads with the high demand promotion years in a successful career. Women are still splitting themselves in pieces to cover the bases. To have children while they are still fertile and somehow put in the necessary after hours to make partner. To make ends meet as a single parent and build a family life in the limited hours of the day. While some may feel accomplished in some areas, none feel satisfied in all. Sandberg's children are still too young to let her know how it's working out for them; she remains happily buffered by abundant personal resources from the exigencies in the average woman's life that shift choice from the personal to the essential.

I believe women should give themselves as wholly as possible to what they believe in, to the lives they intend to lead, to the families and careers they desire to build. I just know from my experience and that of my mentors and friends that such choices rarely easily cohabitate. Commitments demand attention from women, as Mary Catherine Bateson wrote in her seminal work, "Composing a Life," sequentially. We move through phases of life and phases of work that intuitively correspond to our reality as women. There may be phases of single childlessness when we earn educations and build careers, a period or two where family - from children to aging parents - take precedence. We dodge and weave our way through choices and commitments, composing a life unique as a necklace of handcrafted beads, each bead something of ourselves then and when.

The real value in Sandberg's book for me was her rallying cry to continue what generations of women before us began - the push for true economic equality between the sexes. Until expectations for men and women and career versus family are crafted on equal terms, we create liabilities and roadblocks for both sexes in seeking fulfilling lives as individuals and in families. "Lean In" is not so much the takeaway for me from Sandberg's book as the subtle importance of "freedom of choice." Until every woman has the education, support, and resources needed to build the life she wants, we have work to do.

Why Write?

The story chooses you, the image comes and then the emotional frame. You don't have a choice about writing the story. There's a filter at work which says this is or is not a story...I think a story ideally comes to the writer; the writer shouldn't be casting the net out, searching for something to write about.
- Raymond Carver

In any work that is truly creative, I believe, the writer cannot be omniscient about the effects that he proposes to produce. The suspense of a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero.
- Mary McCarthy

We do not write in order to be understood, we write in order to understand.
- C. Day-Lewis

The period in which a writer awaits review of a work in the pre-publication stages is nearly unbearable. What has been until this moment completely within your control - your story, characters, the work and its process - what has been a private endeavor, full of angst and determination, faces it's first critical review in the publishing venue. Someone else will now determine whether your beloved project moves ahead, or stalls. So you wait. And in waiting the devils take root in your soul. Was it ready? Why would anyone read this anyway? Wait, can I get it back? To be honest, for every success or failed effort I have had in my writing life, I still do not know any more what makes a story succeed than not. As Raymond Carver put it - the story chooses you. And then you do your best by it.

For the novel writer, the process of building a book is ultimately a zero sum game. The novel is difficult to condense to the equivalent of an abbreviated film treatment or proposal. There is no way to "float" a story - it must be written, nailed down, breathed to life. The novel has a crazy organic originality that must be seen to be believed. Organic, yet divergent interior paths within the writing process become a sober burden for the novelist. What if your beautiful idea failed in execution? Choosing poorly amongst your possible choices of character, landscape, plot or word smithing? A novel cannot be easily recast. Each sentence leads down a path that creates its own next sentence, change of relationship, plot point or conflict. Characters evolve on the page. If a story collapses, it may or may not be capable of resuscitation.

As much as I fear and dread this phase toward publication, I have great respect for the review process. As the writer I certainly lack perspective - I have lived inside the story, grown familiar with my characters, forgiven them their weaknesses, encouraged them to bust out on the page. Only a cool clear head can truly assess the cumulative power of what is there. Is the story boring? Thrilling? Moving? Does it lag here or there? This early critique determines the viability of editing intervention. What more is needed, and where? The very thing readers ultimately appreciate is a well-edited book.

As I wait through this process, restlessly banging around my office doing all the ridiculous tasks side-railed during the writing of this novel, feel kindly towards me, won't you? Of course I hope the response is an enthusiastic thumbs up, but the risks are high: I love that complicated runt of the publication world, the character novel. Without spy rings, explosions, gun battles, or fantasy landscapes, the words must work truly hard indeed. Literary worth is hard to define, but we know it when we read it. It's a hard bar for me to reach, honestly. Always has been. Still, every writer writes for the reader - for that fleeting, shared private dialog about an idea that matters to us both. If I did my job right, one day perhaps I'll hear back from you.

The Final Period

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.
- W. Somerset Maugham

When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a woodcarver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year.
- Annie Dillard

I work constantly within the shadow of failure. For every novel hat makes it to my publisher's desk, there are at least five or six that died on the way.
-Gail Godwin

Tuesday I put the final period on a manuscript that has been five years in the making. It was a moment of great satisfaction and gratitude. You begin a novel with an idea, discover what you have to say writing the first draft, and then revise to ensure you've said what you intend. As Annie Dillard observed, writing leads deep into new territory. It is an organic, evolving discovery. Working "in flow," writers translate thought onto the page as it comes without critique or big picture thinking - that enters later. Drafts are time-consuming, solitary, and often miss the mark. (Drafting on a computer is risky in its own special way. Yesterday my blog on this subject evaporated, victim of a random software log-out error. Any recollection of what I wrote, gone.) Flow produces raw material, but editing skills shape story. Creativity requires both vision and control.

Before I became a published working writer, the completion of a manuscript brought me to my knees in tears. That final period marked an inner vision brought into being through disciplined work and a driving faith/ambition. "Butt in chair," as the saying goes. Then I learned completion of a work is an essential, but oddly minor element in getting that book into a reader's hands. What happens after I send my word-perfect darling to my agent for professional market and story evaluation, after it goes out for readings by (hopefully) interested acquisition editors, after it lands in the hands of public relations and distribution experts and book reviewers, falls entirely out of my hands. Books are commodities, subject to trends, news timeliness, celebrity hooks, the whole gamut of what sells something when. Writers, like journalists, photographers, artists and others, are today's "content providers." Making something good does not make it necessary.

Despite this reality, the magic of creativity resides in each and every design, book, or print we put out there. Tuesday when I placed that final period, computer cursor blinking steadily, patiently on the page, I experienced the familiar surge of emotion - tempered by experience. The observation by Gail Godwin that for every book that reaches her publisher several others expired on the way is every writer's truth. Revisions are books lost in process, themes hammered out, language refined, defined, condensed into only what needs to be on the page. If there are rules for novel writing as Maugham laments, no one knows what they are. That's part of the fun - and the risk. The artist reaching out to a frenetic distracted world.

Do I think this novel will survive the journey to publication? I don't know. I have a good feeling about it. I'll be sure to let you know.

The Whole Self

VARIATION ON A THEME BY RILKE

A certain day became a presence to me;
there it was, confronting me - a sky, air, light:
a being. And before it started to descend
from the height of noon, it leaned over
and struck my shoulder as if with
the flat of a sword, granting me
honor and a task. The day's blow
rang out, metallic - or it was I, a bell awakened,
and what I heard was my whole self
saying and singing what it knew: I can.
- Denise Levertov

I think we try so hard to be perfect, we miss life.

What if we let ourselves stop the pendulum swing of self-critique? The swing from "Nailed it!" to "You loser..."? Allowed our souls to find center - to neither push nor desist, but just hold space for awhile, and in that sacred space find permission to be, to try, to perhaps change our minds, or give it a shot and fail, gently settle in with ordinary happiness? None of these daily human emotional and mental experiences are the antithesis to success: perfectionism is. In the pursuit of what is "perfect" is the negation of all that is not. A huge eraser we drag across life. And when we devalue our smallest efforts, be they sufficient or barely forward motion, we devalue the essence of our human nature - which is to strive. Humans are not born perfect, they are born to evolve. To understand, to take action, to plan, to expand, to be joyful. Life is not a target. There is no bulls-eye that says, Bingo! Got it. Life is about process, about being present in your own skin. Accepting that however, or wherever, you may be today on the spectrum of your goals, it's good enough. It's you.

Let today be a day of presence. Welcome yourself in. After all, you're pretty special - and you always have been. Pretty sure you will be tomorrow.