Chris Bohjalian's Blog, page 9
October 24, 2016
Putting a Face on the Refugee Crisis
For most of America, the heartbreaking faces of Syrian refugees this year have belonged to children. We have seen them drowned and we have seen them stunned into silence by warfare and covered in blood. (We’ve also seen them likened to Skittles, but that appalling analogy belongs only to the Trumps.)
At the moment, however, when I put a real face on the refugee crisis I see a balding 50-year-old man with gentle green eyes and a salt and pepper mustache. I met him on the second to last day in August in Ishkhanadzor, a modest village in Nagorno-Karabakh, the fledgling Armenian republic in the Caucasus that is still struggling for recognition. Ishkhanadzor is about 15 miles north of the Araxes River and the border with Iran. Among the town’s 360 residents is one physician, Haig Khatchadourian, a soft-spoken neuropathologist who now works as a general practitioner in the village’s seven-room clinic. He is also a refugee.
In the summer of 2014, ISIS fighters from Tunisia, Libya, and Iraq came to his summer home in Tal Hmedy, a town in northeastern Syria, and took him by force to their administrative building and court. Khatchadourian does not recall the date, but he remembers it was two in the afternoon and his three daughters — all between 12 and 14 years old then — were present. He told the girls that if he did not return home that night, they should take the bus to their relatives in the city of Al-Qamishli. At the court, ISIS administrators demanded that he renounce his Christianity, telling him that he would be brought to the center of the village and executed if he didn’t.
“I expected to be beheaded,” he told me as we chatted together in the shade from a small copse of trees outside his apartment in Ishkhanadzor. “I refused to convert. I was prepared to die a Christian because life has no meaning if you give up your faith.”
After four hours before the court, however, the ISIS tribunal released him. He has absolutely no idea why and they never gave him a reason. Two days earlier he had witnessed ISIS fighters executing a Muslim in the village center for saying something negative about the prophet Muhammad. The man’s executioner was his own nephew.
At the time, Khatchadourian and his three daughters were dividing their time between their primary residence in Al-Qamishli and Tal Hmedy. Al-Qamishli technically was never under ISIS control and the doctor and his family could have remained there. But the Syrian conflict was all around them and Khatchadourian feared everyday for the safety of his daughters — and lived with the prospect that he might not be alive to raise them.
And so in 2015 he and his girls emigrated north to Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous, Armenian-populated enclave lodged between Iran, Azerbaijan, and Armenia. In the village and the surrounding area, they joined 200 other Syrian and Lebanese Armenian refugees. He says he and his family are very happy here: “We like that we are surrounded by Armenians. And we like that everyone here has recognized us as human beings.”
Here in the United States, of course, “refugee” and “immigrant” are frightening words in some people’s opinion. This is especially true if the refugees are from Syria. So far, the U.S. has welcomed roughly 12,000 Syrian refugees, a number that has made barely a dent into the crisis brought on by the Syrian civil war and the rise of ISIS. To put this in perspective, Canada has taken in over 50,000 refugees, Germany has welcomed 600,000, and even tiny Belgium has accepted 16,000. And then, of course, there are the Middle Eastern countries that have taken in quite literally millions, including Lebanon, which is home to well over 1.25 million Syrian refugees.
I have met refugee children from Syria in schools in Lebanon, Armenia, and Canada, and their resilience and good cheer has left me awed.
The reality is that I am the grandson of survivors of the Armenian Genocide, which means that I am a grandson of immigrants from the Middle East. In the wake of the Hamidian Massacre in the 1890s and then the Ottoman Empire’s slaughter of 1.5 million of my ancestors during the First World War, the U.S. welcomed easily 75,000 Armenian immigrants. It’s why today there are such large Armenian-American communities in Massachusetts, New Jersey and California.
And so when I travel to places such as Ishkhanadzor, I’m ashamed of the way the U.S. has turned “refugee” and “immigrant” into synonyms for “terrorist.” (Even here in Vermont, the mayor of Rutland has been pilloried because he is bringing 100 refugees to his municipality.) It’s not merely that we are a nation of immigrants or that the bedrock of our national identity is our historical willingness to welcome the tired and homeless and poor, those “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” (thank you, Emma Lazarus). It’s that we have the resources that a struggling, largely unrecognized republic such as Nagorno-Karabakh can only dream of. The roads around Ishkhanadzor are dirt and have a diabolical predilection to flatten car tires. (On my journey there at the end of the summer, my small caravan of three SUVs suffered two flats in a morning.) Khatchadourian’s clinic only has hot water sporadically, because the boiler is an antique. Likewise, there are hours (and days) when it is without electricity.
But he insists he has found happiness there that he never had in Syria. “Everyone here is my daughters’ friend — and mine,” he said. “We are part of the community.”
I realize that a refugee such as Khatchadourian is less threatening to some Americans because he’s a Christian, not a Muslim. But like all refugees he is – as he put it when we spoke in the shade of those trees – first and foremost a human being. And that’s a reality that Americans should come to embrace.
(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on October 16, 2016 and in USA Today on October 18. The paperback of Chris’s most recent novel, “The Guest Room,” arrives wherever books are sold on Tuesday, October 25.)
At the moment, however, when I put a real face on the refugee crisis I see a balding 50-year-old man with gentle green eyes and a salt and pepper mustache. I met him on the second to last day in August in Ishkhanadzor, a modest village in Nagorno-Karabakh, the fledgling Armenian republic in the Caucasus that is still struggling for recognition. Ishkhanadzor is about 15 miles north of the Araxes River and the border with Iran. Among the town’s 360 residents is one physician, Haig Khatchadourian, a soft-spoken neuropathologist who now works as a general practitioner in the village’s seven-room clinic. He is also a refugee.
In the summer of 2014, ISIS fighters from Tunisia, Libya, and Iraq came to his summer home in Tal Hmedy, a town in northeastern Syria, and took him by force to their administrative building and court. Khatchadourian does not recall the date, but he remembers it was two in the afternoon and his three daughters — all between 12 and 14 years old then — were present. He told the girls that if he did not return home that night, they should take the bus to their relatives in the city of Al-Qamishli. At the court, ISIS administrators demanded that he renounce his Christianity, telling him that he would be brought to the center of the village and executed if he didn’t.
“I expected to be beheaded,” he told me as we chatted together in the shade from a small copse of trees outside his apartment in Ishkhanadzor. “I refused to convert. I was prepared to die a Christian because life has no meaning if you give up your faith.”
After four hours before the court, however, the ISIS tribunal released him. He has absolutely no idea why and they never gave him a reason. Two days earlier he had witnessed ISIS fighters executing a Muslim in the village center for saying something negative about the prophet Muhammad. The man’s executioner was his own nephew.
At the time, Khatchadourian and his three daughters were dividing their time between their primary residence in Al-Qamishli and Tal Hmedy. Al-Qamishli technically was never under ISIS control and the doctor and his family could have remained there. But the Syrian conflict was all around them and Khatchadourian feared everyday for the safety of his daughters — and lived with the prospect that he might not be alive to raise them.
And so in 2015 he and his girls emigrated north to Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous, Armenian-populated enclave lodged between Iran, Azerbaijan, and Armenia. In the village and the surrounding area, they joined 200 other Syrian and Lebanese Armenian refugees. He says he and his family are very happy here: “We like that we are surrounded by Armenians. And we like that everyone here has recognized us as human beings.”
Here in the United States, of course, “refugee” and “immigrant” are frightening words in some people’s opinion. This is especially true if the refugees are from Syria. So far, the U.S. has welcomed roughly 12,000 Syrian refugees, a number that has made barely a dent into the crisis brought on by the Syrian civil war and the rise of ISIS. To put this in perspective, Canada has taken in over 50,000 refugees, Germany has welcomed 600,000, and even tiny Belgium has accepted 16,000. And then, of course, there are the Middle Eastern countries that have taken in quite literally millions, including Lebanon, which is home to well over 1.25 million Syrian refugees.
I have met refugee children from Syria in schools in Lebanon, Armenia, and Canada, and their resilience and good cheer has left me awed.
The reality is that I am the grandson of survivors of the Armenian Genocide, which means that I am a grandson of immigrants from the Middle East. In the wake of the Hamidian Massacre in the 1890s and then the Ottoman Empire’s slaughter of 1.5 million of my ancestors during the First World War, the U.S. welcomed easily 75,000 Armenian immigrants. It’s why today there are such large Armenian-American communities in Massachusetts, New Jersey and California.
And so when I travel to places such as Ishkhanadzor, I’m ashamed of the way the U.S. has turned “refugee” and “immigrant” into synonyms for “terrorist.” (Even here in Vermont, the mayor of Rutland has been pilloried because he is bringing 100 refugees to his municipality.) It’s not merely that we are a nation of immigrants or that the bedrock of our national identity is our historical willingness to welcome the tired and homeless and poor, those “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” (thank you, Emma Lazarus). It’s that we have the resources that a struggling, largely unrecognized republic such as Nagorno-Karabakh can only dream of. The roads around Ishkhanadzor are dirt and have a diabolical predilection to flatten car tires. (On my journey there at the end of the summer, my small caravan of three SUVs suffered two flats in a morning.) Khatchadourian’s clinic only has hot water sporadically, because the boiler is an antique. Likewise, there are hours (and days) when it is without electricity.
But he insists he has found happiness there that he never had in Syria. “Everyone here is my daughters’ friend — and mine,” he said. “We are part of the community.”
I realize that a refugee such as Khatchadourian is less threatening to some Americans because he’s a Christian, not a Muslim. But like all refugees he is – as he put it when we spoke in the shade of those trees – first and foremost a human being. And that’s a reality that Americans should come to embrace.
(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on October 16, 2016 and in USA Today on October 18. The paperback of Chris’s most recent novel, “The Guest Room,” arrives wherever books are sold on Tuesday, October 25.)
September 11, 2016
Never Forget? Not possible.
Author's Note: I wrote this column for the 10th anniversary of 9/11. I hope it has something to say today, the 15th anniversary.
* * *
We all know where we were ten years ago today when the planes hit the towers. In my case, I was at Denver International Airport, standing at my gate and waiting to fly to San Francisco on a 7:15 a.m. flight – 9:15 in the east. I would learn more after I had boarded the flight, as all of us tried frantically to get information on cell phones that seem primitive now, frustrated that already it was impossible to reach anyone in Manhattan. It was my wife, home in Vermont, who kept me informed as best she could. Years earlier, she had worked on the 104th floor of Two World Trade. She knew that building well.
Among my memories? The cerulean blue sky over Denver that afternoon, where I would be stranded for a week. I wandered around aimlessly, staring up into the heavens that were oddly silent. There were, after all, absolutely no passenger jets in the skies by then.
Everyone has a story like that. The most poignant and powerful, of course, are those shared by people who lost family and friends on the four planes or in the mountains of rubble.
Likewise, we all sense how much the world has been transformed. In my own small, insular corner, the most noteworthy changes involve reading: The way the eBook and the digital newspaper are saving a lot of trees and wrecking a lot of attention spans. That sounds glib and I understand well that the digital genie is out of the bottle. The fact is that while I am still likely to read the print version of this paper, thanks to the digital age I read more of “the New York Times” than I did in the 1990s. And while I still prefer the paper book to the eBook, my wife reads novels both the old-fashioned way and on an eReader – and quite happily.
My point is simply this: Years from now when historians examine the first decade of the twenty-first century, my sense is that the way our brains assimilate and digest information in the digital age will be as noteworthy as a decade in Afghanistan, the war on Al-Qaeda, or the Red Sox ending their long World Series drought and winning the big prize twice.
September 11, 2001, however, the awful day itself, will always be at the core of our thinking. Make no mistake: 9/11 was a wrenching game-changer. People died. And they died horribly.
And then there are the American soldiers and members of the National Guard who have since given their lives nobly in Iraq and Afghanistan – and the many thousands more who have been crippled or traumatized or scarred. There are the New York City firefighters and rescue workers whose heroism has left them chronically ill. They have all served selflessly and we should be proud.
Which brings me back to memory. The two words, “Never forget,” are associated with 9/11. On some occasions, they have been the basis for the sort of xenophobia that makes for an offensive t-shirt or – far worse – this year’s demeaning Congressional hearings on the “radicalization” of Muslims. But most of the time, the two words have anchored deeply affecting tributes. I have always found it interesting how the sit-com, “Friends,” approached 9/11. The series was set in the West Village, at the corner of Bedford and Grove Streets. The fictional characters could have seen the towers pancake into the earth; they would have been draped in the tsunami of dust that followed. But the producers chose not to mention the attack in the episodes that aired in 2001 and 2002. (They even deleted a scene in which Chandler Bing jokes about blowing up a plane as he passes through airport security.) But there is one episode in which Joey Tribbiani wears a t-shirt with the Fire Department of New York logo and the name of a firefighter who died that day at Ground Zero. I find the understatement of that gesture moving.
Where will we be ten years from today? (Please, not Afghanistan.) Your guess is as good as mine. But I assure you: None of us will have forgotten where we were on 9/11.
(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on September 11, 2011. Chris’s next novel, “The Sleepwalker,” arrives on January 10, 2017.)
* * *
We all know where we were ten years ago today when the planes hit the towers. In my case, I was at Denver International Airport, standing at my gate and waiting to fly to San Francisco on a 7:15 a.m. flight – 9:15 in the east. I would learn more after I had boarded the flight, as all of us tried frantically to get information on cell phones that seem primitive now, frustrated that already it was impossible to reach anyone in Manhattan. It was my wife, home in Vermont, who kept me informed as best she could. Years earlier, she had worked on the 104th floor of Two World Trade. She knew that building well.
Among my memories? The cerulean blue sky over Denver that afternoon, where I would be stranded for a week. I wandered around aimlessly, staring up into the heavens that were oddly silent. There were, after all, absolutely no passenger jets in the skies by then.
Everyone has a story like that. The most poignant and powerful, of course, are those shared by people who lost family and friends on the four planes or in the mountains of rubble.
Likewise, we all sense how much the world has been transformed. In my own small, insular corner, the most noteworthy changes involve reading: The way the eBook and the digital newspaper are saving a lot of trees and wrecking a lot of attention spans. That sounds glib and I understand well that the digital genie is out of the bottle. The fact is that while I am still likely to read the print version of this paper, thanks to the digital age I read more of “the New York Times” than I did in the 1990s. And while I still prefer the paper book to the eBook, my wife reads novels both the old-fashioned way and on an eReader – and quite happily.
My point is simply this: Years from now when historians examine the first decade of the twenty-first century, my sense is that the way our brains assimilate and digest information in the digital age will be as noteworthy as a decade in Afghanistan, the war on Al-Qaeda, or the Red Sox ending their long World Series drought and winning the big prize twice.
September 11, 2001, however, the awful day itself, will always be at the core of our thinking. Make no mistake: 9/11 was a wrenching game-changer. People died. And they died horribly.
And then there are the American soldiers and members of the National Guard who have since given their lives nobly in Iraq and Afghanistan – and the many thousands more who have been crippled or traumatized or scarred. There are the New York City firefighters and rescue workers whose heroism has left them chronically ill. They have all served selflessly and we should be proud.
Which brings me back to memory. The two words, “Never forget,” are associated with 9/11. On some occasions, they have been the basis for the sort of xenophobia that makes for an offensive t-shirt or – far worse – this year’s demeaning Congressional hearings on the “radicalization” of Muslims. But most of the time, the two words have anchored deeply affecting tributes. I have always found it interesting how the sit-com, “Friends,” approached 9/11. The series was set in the West Village, at the corner of Bedford and Grove Streets. The fictional characters could have seen the towers pancake into the earth; they would have been draped in the tsunami of dust that followed. But the producers chose not to mention the attack in the episodes that aired in 2001 and 2002. (They even deleted a scene in which Chandler Bing jokes about blowing up a plane as he passes through airport security.) But there is one episode in which Joey Tribbiani wears a t-shirt with the Fire Department of New York logo and the name of a firefighter who died that day at Ground Zero. I find the understatement of that gesture moving.
Where will we be ten years from today? (Please, not Afghanistan.) Your guess is as good as mine. But I assure you: None of us will have forgotten where we were on 9/11.
(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on September 11, 2011. Chris’s next novel, “The Sleepwalker,” arrives on January 10, 2017.)
September 10, 2016
The First Goodreads Giveaway of "The Sleepwalker," My New Novel
Free books?
Yup.
That is one of the great gifts of surfing around Goodreads.
I have a new novel arriving four months from today, "The Sleepwalker," and right now my publisher, Doubleday Books, and Goodreads are giving away advance copies.
To enter to win one, click here:
https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sh...
Want to learn more? Goodreads has a terrific plot summary on the page for "The Sleepwalker." You can also find there Harlan Coben's opinion:
“The Sleepwalker is more than a mystery: it’s a beautiful, wrenching novel of family secrets and the enigmas that link husbands and wives and lovers. And then that ending? Devastating and perfect.”
— Harlan Coben
Fingers crossed my work never disappoints you.
All the best,
Chris B.
www.ChrisBohjalian.com
Yup.
That is one of the great gifts of surfing around Goodreads.
I have a new novel arriving four months from today, "The Sleepwalker," and right now my publisher, Doubleday Books, and Goodreads are giving away advance copies.
To enter to win one, click here:
https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sh...
Want to learn more? Goodreads has a terrific plot summary on the page for "The Sleepwalker." You can also find there Harlan Coben's opinion:
“The Sleepwalker is more than a mystery: it’s a beautiful, wrenching novel of family secrets and the enigmas that link husbands and wives and lovers. And then that ending? Devastating and perfect.”
— Harlan Coben
Fingers crossed my work never disappoints you.
All the best,
Chris B.
www.ChrisBohjalian.com
July 29, 2016
What I've Been Reading This Summer
Dear Friends Who Read and Readers Who Are Friends,
I’ve been asked a lot this summer what I’m reading, especially from readers who are either devastated that Lin-Manuel Miranda has left “Hamilton” or devastated that he has left “Hamilton” and chosen not to run for political office – any office.
I feel their pain. I really do.
In any case, these are some of the books that I have absolutely loved so far this year. In no particular order:
* Before the Fall by Noah Hawley. A private plane crashes and two people survive, only to confront the inevitable media madness. Hawley is the brilliant mind behind the “Fargo” TV series on FX, and he is one heck of a novelist, too.
* Eligible by Curtis Sittenfield. A modern retelling of Pride and Prejudice set in Cincinnati. Jane Austen would be pleased with the sly humor and deep characterizations that mark every page.
* Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi. A magisterial three-century epic about Ghana and America. This is a debut novel with sentences so luminous and perfect I would read them aloud.
* Fool Me Once by Harlan Coben. Another smart, gripping page-turner. This one has already been snapped up by Julia Roberts for the movie.
* The Nest by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney. Four siblings await their share of the family fortune. Their behavior ranges from horrible to hilarious, but it always rings true.
* City of Mirrors by Justin Cronin. The third and final volume of Cronin’s masterful, often terrifying vampire trilogy.
* The Hopefuls by Jennifer Close. An often laugh-out-loud novel of ambition and marriage and politics – and whether one young couple’s marriage can survive both the nation’s capital and Texas.
* The Girls by Emma Cline. It’s 1969 and Evie, a California teen, is attracted to a cult reminiscent of Charlie Manson’s. It’s a gripping coming-of-age novel.
* Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget by Sarah Hepola. This is a memoir about drinking and recovering from drinking, and page 214 is so exquisitely beautiful that it will break your heart.
And here are three novels arriving this autumn and winter that I am looking forward to immensely:
* The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. A pair of slaves head north from Georgia on the Underground Railroad in antebellum America. Moving and thoughtful and magnificent.
* Little Deaths by Emma Flint. It’s 1965 in Queens, New York. Did Ruth Malone really murder her two adorable children? A lush, moody, film noir of a novel.
* Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult. White supremacists, a heroic nurse, and a courtroom drama: a gripping exploration of race and class and justice in contemporary America.
Of course, you can always see exactly what I am reading right here on Goodreads. (I’m sometimes asked why I give every book I list on Goodreads a five-star rating. The answer is simple. I know a lot of writers, so I only list the books that I enjoyed on Goodreads.)
You may have seen on the social networks that I have been riding my beloved bike a lot this summer. I also have been writing. They’re connected: I do a lot of my best work on two wheels. So, you’ll see a brand new novel soon. Stay tuned for details.
Happy reading. Fingers crossed my work never disappoints you.
All the best,
Chris B.
www.ChrisBohjalian.com
I’ve been asked a lot this summer what I’m reading, especially from readers who are either devastated that Lin-Manuel Miranda has left “Hamilton” or devastated that he has left “Hamilton” and chosen not to run for political office – any office.
I feel their pain. I really do.
In any case, these are some of the books that I have absolutely loved so far this year. In no particular order:
* Before the Fall by Noah Hawley. A private plane crashes and two people survive, only to confront the inevitable media madness. Hawley is the brilliant mind behind the “Fargo” TV series on FX, and he is one heck of a novelist, too.
* Eligible by Curtis Sittenfield. A modern retelling of Pride and Prejudice set in Cincinnati. Jane Austen would be pleased with the sly humor and deep characterizations that mark every page.
* Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi. A magisterial three-century epic about Ghana and America. This is a debut novel with sentences so luminous and perfect I would read them aloud.
* Fool Me Once by Harlan Coben. Another smart, gripping page-turner. This one has already been snapped up by Julia Roberts for the movie.
* The Nest by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney. Four siblings await their share of the family fortune. Their behavior ranges from horrible to hilarious, but it always rings true.
* City of Mirrors by Justin Cronin. The third and final volume of Cronin’s masterful, often terrifying vampire trilogy.
* The Hopefuls by Jennifer Close. An often laugh-out-loud novel of ambition and marriage and politics – and whether one young couple’s marriage can survive both the nation’s capital and Texas.
* The Girls by Emma Cline. It’s 1969 and Evie, a California teen, is attracted to a cult reminiscent of Charlie Manson’s. It’s a gripping coming-of-age novel.
* Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget by Sarah Hepola. This is a memoir about drinking and recovering from drinking, and page 214 is so exquisitely beautiful that it will break your heart.
And here are three novels arriving this autumn and winter that I am looking forward to immensely:
* The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. A pair of slaves head north from Georgia on the Underground Railroad in antebellum America. Moving and thoughtful and magnificent.
* Little Deaths by Emma Flint. It’s 1965 in Queens, New York. Did Ruth Malone really murder her two adorable children? A lush, moody, film noir of a novel.
* Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult. White supremacists, a heroic nurse, and a courtroom drama: a gripping exploration of race and class and justice in contemporary America.
Of course, you can always see exactly what I am reading right here on Goodreads. (I’m sometimes asked why I give every book I list on Goodreads a five-star rating. The answer is simple. I know a lot of writers, so I only list the books that I enjoyed on Goodreads.)
You may have seen on the social networks that I have been riding my beloved bike a lot this summer. I also have been writing. They’re connected: I do a lot of my best work on two wheels. So, you’ll see a brand new novel soon. Stay tuned for details.
Happy reading. Fingers crossed my work never disappoints you.
All the best,
Chris B.
www.ChrisBohjalian.com
January 9, 2016
The Guest Room -- thank you for taking Alexandra under your wing
Dear Friends who Read and Readers who are Friends,
I am now through 5 of the 20 stops on "The Guest Room" book tour, and it has been such a pleasure to meet so many of you on the road. I hope I get to many more of you in the coming two weeks: I am so grateful to all of you for your faith in my work.
And I am deeply appreciative of the way some readers and critics are taking Alexandra -- the Armenian sex slave born Anahit -- under their wing:
“The book’s real throbbing heart is Anahit, an aspiring young dancer from Armenia who was tricked into the life of rape and prostitution that brought her to Richard’s home. The narrative steadily and masterfully slinks away from Richard and over to Anahit, and in her chapters we discover a deep portrait of a brutalized and manipulated young woman…The narrative’s frequent somersaults from Anahit’s devastating backstory to the Chapman family’s more sheltered world is a remarkable artistic feat. . .a steely exploration of the very human cost of bachelor parties and other games of male pleasure.”
-- Eliot Schrefer, USA Today
"Well-written and psychologically astute. . .Alexandra is the conscience in this conscienceless world, a girl who manages to hold on to her innocence and compassion despite the horror of her life. Her voice, with its sometimes uncertain, quirky English, is rendered with such perfection that it's easy to forget that the author is male. This, the book tells us, is what happens to the innocent. . .enjoyable."
- Arlene McKanic, BookPage
"Heartbreaking. . .I won't give away of the surprising twists and turns that The Guest Room takes on the path to Bohjalian's daring conclusion; I'll only note that much of the pleasure that comes from reading any well-constructed narrative lies in trying to anticipate how the author will write himself out of seemingly inescapable corners. But here, for a change, we also have a novelist who seems more concerned with examining and dramatizing a much more universal question: whether, in the end, any amount of love or compassion, retreat or nobility or forgiveness, can overcome the remorseless workings of evil."
-- Skip Horack, The San Francisco Chronicle
"Bohjalian's deft and light-handed storytelling makes this book a compelling and captivating read. In particular, his treatment of guilt and paranoia is realistic and downright scary. You will remember Richard and Alexandra long after the last page."
-- Tracy Sherlock, The Vancouver Sun
"Bohjalian is at his best in The Guest Room, one of his most compelling books so far, combining an explosive premise, a timely social topic, and fast-paced storytelling with a purpose."
-- Amy Driscoll, The Miami Herald
"The Guest Room has an edge-of-the-seat momentum that propels the reader straight to the last page...For those who value the well-researched novel, the author's 18th book will please."
-- Anita Shreve, The Washington Post
"Chris Bohjalian keeps readers turning each page. . .painfully honest. . .compelling."
-- Amanda St. Amand, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
As some of you know, I missed Alexandra so much this autumn that I wrote a short story about her.
In any case, I thank you all. Truly.
To 2016: may -- somehow -- our world find peace.
All the best,
Chris B.
PS: You can see the 15 stops that remain on the tour at www.ChrisBohjalian.com .
I am now through 5 of the 20 stops on "The Guest Room" book tour, and it has been such a pleasure to meet so many of you on the road. I hope I get to many more of you in the coming two weeks: I am so grateful to all of you for your faith in my work.
And I am deeply appreciative of the way some readers and critics are taking Alexandra -- the Armenian sex slave born Anahit -- under their wing:
“The book’s real throbbing heart is Anahit, an aspiring young dancer from Armenia who was tricked into the life of rape and prostitution that brought her to Richard’s home. The narrative steadily and masterfully slinks away from Richard and over to Anahit, and in her chapters we discover a deep portrait of a brutalized and manipulated young woman…The narrative’s frequent somersaults from Anahit’s devastating backstory to the Chapman family’s more sheltered world is a remarkable artistic feat. . .a steely exploration of the very human cost of bachelor parties and other games of male pleasure.”
-- Eliot Schrefer, USA Today
"Well-written and psychologically astute. . .Alexandra is the conscience in this conscienceless world, a girl who manages to hold on to her innocence and compassion despite the horror of her life. Her voice, with its sometimes uncertain, quirky English, is rendered with such perfection that it's easy to forget that the author is male. This, the book tells us, is what happens to the innocent. . .enjoyable."
- Arlene McKanic, BookPage
"Heartbreaking. . .I won't give away of the surprising twists and turns that The Guest Room takes on the path to Bohjalian's daring conclusion; I'll only note that much of the pleasure that comes from reading any well-constructed narrative lies in trying to anticipate how the author will write himself out of seemingly inescapable corners. But here, for a change, we also have a novelist who seems more concerned with examining and dramatizing a much more universal question: whether, in the end, any amount of love or compassion, retreat or nobility or forgiveness, can overcome the remorseless workings of evil."
-- Skip Horack, The San Francisco Chronicle
"Bohjalian's deft and light-handed storytelling makes this book a compelling and captivating read. In particular, his treatment of guilt and paranoia is realistic and downright scary. You will remember Richard and Alexandra long after the last page."
-- Tracy Sherlock, The Vancouver Sun
"Bohjalian is at his best in The Guest Room, one of his most compelling books so far, combining an explosive premise, a timely social topic, and fast-paced storytelling with a purpose."
-- Amy Driscoll, The Miami Herald
"The Guest Room has an edge-of-the-seat momentum that propels the reader straight to the last page...For those who value the well-researched novel, the author's 18th book will please."
-- Anita Shreve, The Washington Post
"Chris Bohjalian keeps readers turning each page. . .painfully honest. . .compelling."
-- Amanda St. Amand, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
As some of you know, I missed Alexandra so much this autumn that I wrote a short story about her.
In any case, I thank you all. Truly.
To 2016: may -- somehow -- our world find peace.
All the best,
Chris B.
PS: You can see the 15 stops that remain on the tour at www.ChrisBohjalian.com .
January 5, 2016
For the Love of Writing: The Journey from Process to Product
John Gardner was thrown from his motorcycle and died the year before his book, The Art of Fiction, was published in 1983. Consequently, he never saw the influence that his short, smart guide to good writing would have on so many aspiring writers – including me.
In the last thirty years, I’ve thought often of a point he makes in the preface: “Though the ability to write well is partly a gift – like the ability to play basketball well, or to outguess the stock market – writing ability is mainly a product of good teaching supported by a deep-down love of writing.” I never took a creative writing class, so his book was my Bread Loaf, that almost mythic writing conference in Vermont’s Green Mountains where (among other places) Gardner taught.
Just for the record, I did try once to take a creative writing course. I was a sophomore in college and the writer in residence read a sample of my work to see whether I was worth her time. She summoned me to her office and said, “I have three words advice for you.” I could tell this wasn’t going to be good. “Be a banker.”
My sense is that by a “deep-down love of writing,” Gardner meant an appreciation for the way that we string words together: the finished product. But I like to believe he might also have been considering the process of putting words down on paper. Writing, in this case, would be both a noun and a verb.
The reality is that not all writers enjoy the process of sitting down and writing. Dorothy Parker once confessed with her usual cleverness, “I hate writing, I love having written.”
But most of us do enjoy it. We have a deep-down love for the process. Even Hemingway, whose letters and interviews are rich with melodrama about the pain and hard work of being a writer, on occasion would confess to Max Perkins (and others) how much he loved it.
Certainly I do. I write every day. I’m at my desk with an eight-point-four-ounce can of Sugar Free Red Bull (the first of two I will finish by lunch) by six AM. The goal each day is to produce a thousand words. Yes, like Hemingway, I count them – or to be precise, Microsoft Word for Apple counts them. But even when I was a young man writing with blue, fine-point Bic pens on yellow legal pads before going to work at an ad agency, I counted the words. I don’t always reach a thousand, but the point is to get something down on paper I can work with. As novelist Jodi Picoult has observed – a remark that captures both her wisdom and humor – “You can edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.”
And the reality is that a lot of those words will wind up on the cutting room floor. The first draft of my novel Before You Know Kindness was 185,000 words. The final draft was 135,000. In between, I did not merely cut 50,000 words; I probably cut 85,000 and wrote 35,000 that were new.
I depend upon two techniques that Hemingway championed. First, I always begin by rewriting the last 200 or 300 words I wrote the day before. This reacquaints me with the material and gives me momentum: Think of a plane gaining velocity and then rising as it hurtles down a runway. I am also, of course, editing the text. Improving it. Second, I always knock off around lunchtime. This way I always have a little gas in the tank for the next morning.
Now, that doesn’t mean that I spend my life working only half-days. The afternoons are filled with research: interviews with people who know more about a subject than I do (heart surgery, human trafficking, why planes crash). But the afternoons are often filled with biking, too, at least for the seven months a year when it’s pleasurable to ride here in Vermont. I am an avid bicyclist, and the riding helps my writing. Someone – I don’t recall who – once observed that the most important tool a writer can have is a walk. For me, it’s a ride. When I am alone on my bike somewhere between the Lake Champlain Bridge and the top of the Lincoln Gap, I am invariably thinking about whatever book I am writing.
There are a couple of reasons why I have found my bicycle such an important tool. One is the shower principle – a term I learned from the fictional Jack Donaghy on “30 Rock.” It has less to do with sweat than it does with clearing one’s mind. “The shower principle is a term scientists use to describe moments of inspiration that occur when the brain is distracted from the problem at hand – for example, when you’re showering,” Donaghy explains. I have no idea if this is a real term that any scientist outside of TV Land has ever used, but we all know there’s a certain truth to it. On my bike I have figured out how books will end and determined whether characters will live or die. My 2007 novel, The Double Bind, was born on a bike.
And over the last few years, I have grown more likely to stop and pull my iPhone from my cycling jersey, and write entire scenes on the device. The moment in Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands when narrator Emily Shepard retreats into a shopping mall bathroom with her cutting kit was written on my iPhone while sitting beside a gazebo in New Haven, Vermont.
Finally, it is worth noting that as much as I love writing (the verb), I probably love writing (the noun) even more. I doubt anyone becomes a serious novelist who doesn’t love reading: savoring paragraphs that precisely capture longing or dread or desire. Being riveted by a plot twist that is utterly surprising but, you realize, perfect, because it was inevitable.
I don’t play basketball well and heaven knows I have never guessed right on the stock market. But I can’t imagine a gift for either would have made me any happier in this life than writing.
* * *
This essay appeared originally on www.Signature.com on January 5, 2016. Chris's new novel, "The Guest Room," was just published.
In the last thirty years, I’ve thought often of a point he makes in the preface: “Though the ability to write well is partly a gift – like the ability to play basketball well, or to outguess the stock market – writing ability is mainly a product of good teaching supported by a deep-down love of writing.” I never took a creative writing class, so his book was my Bread Loaf, that almost mythic writing conference in Vermont’s Green Mountains where (among other places) Gardner taught.
Just for the record, I did try once to take a creative writing course. I was a sophomore in college and the writer in residence read a sample of my work to see whether I was worth her time. She summoned me to her office and said, “I have three words advice for you.” I could tell this wasn’t going to be good. “Be a banker.”
My sense is that by a “deep-down love of writing,” Gardner meant an appreciation for the way that we string words together: the finished product. But I like to believe he might also have been considering the process of putting words down on paper. Writing, in this case, would be both a noun and a verb.
The reality is that not all writers enjoy the process of sitting down and writing. Dorothy Parker once confessed with her usual cleverness, “I hate writing, I love having written.”
But most of us do enjoy it. We have a deep-down love for the process. Even Hemingway, whose letters and interviews are rich with melodrama about the pain and hard work of being a writer, on occasion would confess to Max Perkins (and others) how much he loved it.
Certainly I do. I write every day. I’m at my desk with an eight-point-four-ounce can of Sugar Free Red Bull (the first of two I will finish by lunch) by six AM. The goal each day is to produce a thousand words. Yes, like Hemingway, I count them – or to be precise, Microsoft Word for Apple counts them. But even when I was a young man writing with blue, fine-point Bic pens on yellow legal pads before going to work at an ad agency, I counted the words. I don’t always reach a thousand, but the point is to get something down on paper I can work with. As novelist Jodi Picoult has observed – a remark that captures both her wisdom and humor – “You can edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.”
And the reality is that a lot of those words will wind up on the cutting room floor. The first draft of my novel Before You Know Kindness was 185,000 words. The final draft was 135,000. In between, I did not merely cut 50,000 words; I probably cut 85,000 and wrote 35,000 that were new.
I depend upon two techniques that Hemingway championed. First, I always begin by rewriting the last 200 or 300 words I wrote the day before. This reacquaints me with the material and gives me momentum: Think of a plane gaining velocity and then rising as it hurtles down a runway. I am also, of course, editing the text. Improving it. Second, I always knock off around lunchtime. This way I always have a little gas in the tank for the next morning.
Now, that doesn’t mean that I spend my life working only half-days. The afternoons are filled with research: interviews with people who know more about a subject than I do (heart surgery, human trafficking, why planes crash). But the afternoons are often filled with biking, too, at least for the seven months a year when it’s pleasurable to ride here in Vermont. I am an avid bicyclist, and the riding helps my writing. Someone – I don’t recall who – once observed that the most important tool a writer can have is a walk. For me, it’s a ride. When I am alone on my bike somewhere between the Lake Champlain Bridge and the top of the Lincoln Gap, I am invariably thinking about whatever book I am writing.
There are a couple of reasons why I have found my bicycle such an important tool. One is the shower principle – a term I learned from the fictional Jack Donaghy on “30 Rock.” It has less to do with sweat than it does with clearing one’s mind. “The shower principle is a term scientists use to describe moments of inspiration that occur when the brain is distracted from the problem at hand – for example, when you’re showering,” Donaghy explains. I have no idea if this is a real term that any scientist outside of TV Land has ever used, but we all know there’s a certain truth to it. On my bike I have figured out how books will end and determined whether characters will live or die. My 2007 novel, The Double Bind, was born on a bike.
And over the last few years, I have grown more likely to stop and pull my iPhone from my cycling jersey, and write entire scenes on the device. The moment in Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands when narrator Emily Shepard retreats into a shopping mall bathroom with her cutting kit was written on my iPhone while sitting beside a gazebo in New Haven, Vermont.
Finally, it is worth noting that as much as I love writing (the verb), I probably love writing (the noun) even more. I doubt anyone becomes a serious novelist who doesn’t love reading: savoring paragraphs that precisely capture longing or dread or desire. Being riveted by a plot twist that is utterly surprising but, you realize, perfect, because it was inevitable.
I don’t play basketball well and heaven knows I have never guessed right on the stock market. But I can’t imagine a gift for either would have made me any happier in this life than writing.
* * *
This essay appeared originally on www.Signature.com on January 5, 2016. Chris's new novel, "The Guest Room," was just published.
November 21, 2015
"The Guest Room" arrives in 45 day -- but their is a Goodreads Giveaway right now
Dear Friends who Read and Readers who are Friends,
I haven't posted here since I stopping penning Idyll Banter on a weekly basis. I miss the column some days more than others, but I never wanted to impose on your goodwill by phoning it in.
But make no mistake: Its absence has meant I have missed hearing from so many of you.
And in case you missed the news flash, I have a new novel arriving in 45 days from Doubleday Books. It's called "The Guest Room," and right now there is a Goodreads Giveaway going on. Please enter!
Among the early reviews?
“A good man’s momentary moral lapse plunges his happy, prosperous life into a nightmare of murderous gangsters and remorseless sex traffickers. Bohjalian’s deftness as a story teller is on full display here, as he couples the urgency of a compulsively readable crime thriller with a quiet meditation on the meaning of family and relationships; the painstaking, quotidian, essential business of how we win love, and how swiftly we can lose it.”
– Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize winning author of March
“The Guest Room pulses quick as a page-turner, but its concerns run deep into the moral consequences following an eruption of violence in ordinary lives.”
– Charles Frazier, National Book Award winning author of Cold Mountain
"Gripping. . .Venturing into crime-thriller-territory familiar to fans of Harlan Coben, Bohjalian's page-turner about an average Joe caught up in sordid events beyond his control resonates with chilling plausibility."
- Carol Haggas, Booklist
"Bohjalian catches a key social moment with a book that's fresh and different. . .a tale of scandal, shame, and escalating suspense."
- Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
"It reads like a thriller...I did not see the end coming. Chris does a terrific job of exploring the very dark side of trafficking and the women who are preyed on...Lots to discuss, and book clubs should take note."
- Carol Fitzgerald, The Book Reporter
And I will be on tour from January 4 - January 22: 20 cities in 19 days.
I will post the full schedule in a few days.
Thank you again for your faith in my work. Fingers crossed my books never disappoint you.
In the meantime? Please stay in touch.
All the best,
Chris B.
www.ChrisBohjalian.com
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter
I haven't posted here since I stopping penning Idyll Banter on a weekly basis. I miss the column some days more than others, but I never wanted to impose on your goodwill by phoning it in.
But make no mistake: Its absence has meant I have missed hearing from so many of you.
And in case you missed the news flash, I have a new novel arriving in 45 days from Doubleday Books. It's called "The Guest Room," and right now there is a Goodreads Giveaway going on. Please enter!
Among the early reviews?
“A good man’s momentary moral lapse plunges his happy, prosperous life into a nightmare of murderous gangsters and remorseless sex traffickers. Bohjalian’s deftness as a story teller is on full display here, as he couples the urgency of a compulsively readable crime thriller with a quiet meditation on the meaning of family and relationships; the painstaking, quotidian, essential business of how we win love, and how swiftly we can lose it.”
– Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize winning author of March
“The Guest Room pulses quick as a page-turner, but its concerns run deep into the moral consequences following an eruption of violence in ordinary lives.”
– Charles Frazier, National Book Award winning author of Cold Mountain
"Gripping. . .Venturing into crime-thriller-territory familiar to fans of Harlan Coben, Bohjalian's page-turner about an average Joe caught up in sordid events beyond his control resonates with chilling plausibility."
- Carol Haggas, Booklist
"Bohjalian catches a key social moment with a book that's fresh and different. . .a tale of scandal, shame, and escalating suspense."
- Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
"It reads like a thriller...I did not see the end coming. Chris does a terrific job of exploring the very dark side of trafficking and the women who are preyed on...Lots to discuss, and book clubs should take note."
- Carol Fitzgerald, The Book Reporter
And I will be on tour from January 4 - January 22: 20 cities in 19 days.
I will post the full schedule in a few days.
Thank you again for your faith in my work. Fingers crossed my books never disappoint you.
In the meantime? Please stay in touch.
All the best,
Chris B.
www.ChrisBohjalian.com
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter
September 6, 2015
Goodbye. Godspeed. Farewell. At least for now.
Vermont has never been spared the yin and yang of the world. We were certainly reminded this summer that we are not exempt from violence and death in Berlin and Barre and Greensboro, as well as on our interstates and usually quiet country roads.
Most of us, however, simply went about our lives. We swam in Lake Champlain and the New Haven River. We climbed Camel’s Hump. We drank any one of the seven million Vermont microbrews. We gardened.
I mention this because my work over the last quarter century has reflected the shadows and light that mark our state. On the one hand, I wrote novels set in the Green Mountains that focused on domestic violence, racism, and our discomfort with the transgendered. In one novel, I put a Vermont midwife on trial for manslaughter. In another, I had a beautiful young social worker savagely attacked while riding her bike not far from Burlington. Most recently, I wrote about a homeless girl trying to ride out the winter on the Lake Champlain waterfront in an igloo made of black plastic trash bags filled with wet, frozen leaves.
But this column, Idyll Banter? It was always about that other side of our little world. It was, I hoped, about the phantasmagoric beauty of our autumns and the cerulean skies of our summers. On a weekly basis I tried to celebrate the eccentricities of my neighbors and the kindness of strangers. I wrote about the joys of being a husband, a father, and (yes) a son. I wrote (perhaps too often) about my cats and their epic turd hockey matches. I was never shy about my colossal ineptitude as a homeowner and the reality that – once upon a time – I was a young man and an idiot flatlander who needed all the help he could get. (I am no longer the former; I will, I imagine, always be the latter.)
Since the first Sunday of February 1992, I have filed a column every single Sunday but three. The final total is, I believe, 1,225 columns and roughly 827,000 words. That’s the equivalent of eight novels. When I started in 1992, I hoped I could find the wherewithal and the spark to write 52. One year. That was the goal.
This column has been among the great blessings of my professional life and I loved writing it. It was both a memoir and performance art. I hope I entertained all of you, because heaven knows I entertained myself – even, yes, as I eulogized my mother, my father, my mother-in-law and far too many friends and neighbors and cats. (There is that yin and yang again, the shadow that comes with the light.)
And so I want to thank Candace Page, the first editor at the “Free Press” who ever let me file a column. It was actually in the business section and it was way back in February 1988. I want to thank Steve Mease, who as features editor published my first lifestyle essay in 1989. I want to thank Ron Thornburg, who took a chance on me and this weekly enterprise in the first weeks of 1992.
Others at the newspaper over the years to whom I will always be grateful include Jennifer Carroll, Joe Cutts, Geoffrey Gevalt, Mickey Hirten, Becky Holt, Stephen Kiernan, Ryan Mercer, Julie Metzger, Melissa Pasanen, Julie Pidgeon, Sally Pollak, Dennis Redmond, Brad Robertson, Adam Silverman, Aki Soga, Philip Tortora, Mike Townsend, Clover Whitham, and Jym Wilson.
I have to give a shout-out as well to Rita Markley with the Committee on Temporary Shelter and Mark Redmond with Spectrum Youth and Family Services. It’s not merely that you both do the work of the angels day-in and day-out; you both shared with me dozens of stories over the years that gave this column gravitas and heft.
I am indebted to the people of Lincoln (and Bristol) whose stories brought Idyll Banter to life, particularly families with the last names of Brown, Goodyear, Cram, and Wood. I want to thank the church, the school, the preschool, the Lincoln Volunteer Fire Company, and the general store. You gave me material – and you gave me perspective.
My lovely bride, Victoria, and our daughter, the always amazing Grace Experience, allowed me to exploit them shamelessly and share with the world how very much I love them.
And, of course, I have to thank all of you: my readers. You opened the paper and gave me the great gift of your time. You brought me into your homes. As I wrote at the beginning of the summer when I announced the formal end to Idyll Banter, I will pop in to the “Free Press” periodically in the coming years. Old habits are hard to break. But in the meantime? Please know that I will miss you. I will miss you more than you know.
Goodbye. Godspeed. Farewell.
At least for now. . .
(You may still see Chris riding his bike this autumn around Vermont. You can also visit him on www.facebook.com or www.chrisbohjalian.com .)
Most of us, however, simply went about our lives. We swam in Lake Champlain and the New Haven River. We climbed Camel’s Hump. We drank any one of the seven million Vermont microbrews. We gardened.
I mention this because my work over the last quarter century has reflected the shadows and light that mark our state. On the one hand, I wrote novels set in the Green Mountains that focused on domestic violence, racism, and our discomfort with the transgendered. In one novel, I put a Vermont midwife on trial for manslaughter. In another, I had a beautiful young social worker savagely attacked while riding her bike not far from Burlington. Most recently, I wrote about a homeless girl trying to ride out the winter on the Lake Champlain waterfront in an igloo made of black plastic trash bags filled with wet, frozen leaves.
But this column, Idyll Banter? It was always about that other side of our little world. It was, I hoped, about the phantasmagoric beauty of our autumns and the cerulean skies of our summers. On a weekly basis I tried to celebrate the eccentricities of my neighbors and the kindness of strangers. I wrote about the joys of being a husband, a father, and (yes) a son. I wrote (perhaps too often) about my cats and their epic turd hockey matches. I was never shy about my colossal ineptitude as a homeowner and the reality that – once upon a time – I was a young man and an idiot flatlander who needed all the help he could get. (I am no longer the former; I will, I imagine, always be the latter.)
Since the first Sunday of February 1992, I have filed a column every single Sunday but three. The final total is, I believe, 1,225 columns and roughly 827,000 words. That’s the equivalent of eight novels. When I started in 1992, I hoped I could find the wherewithal and the spark to write 52. One year. That was the goal.
This column has been among the great blessings of my professional life and I loved writing it. It was both a memoir and performance art. I hope I entertained all of you, because heaven knows I entertained myself – even, yes, as I eulogized my mother, my father, my mother-in-law and far too many friends and neighbors and cats. (There is that yin and yang again, the shadow that comes with the light.)
And so I want to thank Candace Page, the first editor at the “Free Press” who ever let me file a column. It was actually in the business section and it was way back in February 1988. I want to thank Steve Mease, who as features editor published my first lifestyle essay in 1989. I want to thank Ron Thornburg, who took a chance on me and this weekly enterprise in the first weeks of 1992.
Others at the newspaper over the years to whom I will always be grateful include Jennifer Carroll, Joe Cutts, Geoffrey Gevalt, Mickey Hirten, Becky Holt, Stephen Kiernan, Ryan Mercer, Julie Metzger, Melissa Pasanen, Julie Pidgeon, Sally Pollak, Dennis Redmond, Brad Robertson, Adam Silverman, Aki Soga, Philip Tortora, Mike Townsend, Clover Whitham, and Jym Wilson.
I have to give a shout-out as well to Rita Markley with the Committee on Temporary Shelter and Mark Redmond with Spectrum Youth and Family Services. It’s not merely that you both do the work of the angels day-in and day-out; you both shared with me dozens of stories over the years that gave this column gravitas and heft.
I am indebted to the people of Lincoln (and Bristol) whose stories brought Idyll Banter to life, particularly families with the last names of Brown, Goodyear, Cram, and Wood. I want to thank the church, the school, the preschool, the Lincoln Volunteer Fire Company, and the general store. You gave me material – and you gave me perspective.
My lovely bride, Victoria, and our daughter, the always amazing Grace Experience, allowed me to exploit them shamelessly and share with the world how very much I love them.
And, of course, I have to thank all of you: my readers. You opened the paper and gave me the great gift of your time. You brought me into your homes. As I wrote at the beginning of the summer when I announced the formal end to Idyll Banter, I will pop in to the “Free Press” periodically in the coming years. Old habits are hard to break. But in the meantime? Please know that I will miss you. I will miss you more than you know.
Goodbye. Godspeed. Farewell.
At least for now. . .
(You may still see Chris riding his bike this autumn around Vermont. You can also visit him on www.facebook.com or www.chrisbohjalian.com .)
August 30, 2015
A good teacher sees the promise of September
The back-to-school sales fliers started arriving in our mailboxes back around the 4th of July, the scariest mail of the summer for students and teachers alike. And now the moment has arrived: for much of the world, classes have resumed. At the 116-student elementary school here in Lincoln, Vermont the new year commenced last Wednesday.
It was 17 years ago that my daughter started kindergarten there, but I still have precise, vivid memories of her mother and me waiting with her for the school bus at the end of our driveway. Rather tenderly she reassured her mother that she’d be fine, telling her not to cry, and then took one of the biggest steps of her life (and I mean that quite literally): she stepped up onto the bus.
Our daughter started at the school about the same time that Anna Howell arrived in Lincoln. Anna, 42, wound up here in 1998 because she was looking for a cheap house to rent where the owner wouldn’t mind the fact that she would be moving in with her dog. She was an aspiring schoolteacher, and soon would start work at the Lincoln Community School, teaching the combined third and fourth grade class there.
First, however, she volunteered at the Lincoln Library — or, to be precise, the remnants of the Lincoln Library. In June 1998, after four weeks of rain and four inches in an hour, the usually lazy New Haven River overflowed its banks and flooded the library, destroying eighty percent of the collection and leaving all of us in the community a little unmoored. But the library reopened and newcomer Anna was there to help. Among her first friends? Four-year-old Lydia Stearns, whose grandmother Linda Norton was the librarian and whose mother Vaneasa Stearns owned the general store across the street.
“Lydia kept talking about her new friend, Anna, and wanting me to schedule a play date with Anna,” Vaneasa recalled. “So, I brought some snacks across the street for the girls, assuming that Anna was four years old, too.”
Nope. But it was an indication of how generous with her time Anna would be as a teacher. She was certainly among my daughter’s favorite teachers there (and anywhere), and still teaches the same grades in the same school. This past week she welcomed 15 students to her classroom.
“August is one long Sunday afternoon,” she told me when I asked her what this time of the year feels like to her. “There’s a sense of foreboding. It’s bittersweet. But it’s also exciting. I see the kids and they’re ready to be with their buddies. There’s the novelty of packing their backpacks and getting back on the bus.”
She volunteered that she particularly enjoys working with third and fourth graders: “I love that 8 and 9-year-olds have a totally unreasonable, wonderful sense of their abilities. They go grab paper for a story and grab a hundred sheets because they plan to write a novel. When we come up with plans for public service, they intend to save the world.”
Of course, that also means, “Invariably they bite off more than they can chew, and so it’s a fragile place, too. They come up against their limits.”
One of the reasons why I appreciate living in Lincoln is that little school. It was such a gift as a parent to know my daughter was there, learning from teachers like Anna: educators who are not merely creative and fun, but seem always to have their students’ backs.
A few years after Anna met Lydia Stearns at the library, she had the girl’s older sister Alyssa in her class. Alyssa would be hospitalized for three months that year and endure five separate surgeries — one at Boston Children’s Hospital. Her mother recalls everyone’s fear that Alyssa had missed so much school that she would have to repeat the grade. “But Anna said, ‘No way. Alyssa is staying with her class,’” Vaneasa told me. “Anna would come by our house after school, put on her surgical mask, and work with her for hours.” And, indeed, Alyssa did just fine and moved on to fifth grade with her peers.
Yes, the start of the school year can make us a little wistful. But when our children are in the care of a really good teacher, we feel a bit like those 9-year-olds, and we see only promise and potential. The days may be growing short, but the vista is limitless.
(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on August 30, 2015. There is now one Idyll Banter column remaining. After 23 and a half years, Chris will be filing his last column next Sunday. His new novel, "The Guest Room," arrives on January 5, 2016.)
It was 17 years ago that my daughter started kindergarten there, but I still have precise, vivid memories of her mother and me waiting with her for the school bus at the end of our driveway. Rather tenderly she reassured her mother that she’d be fine, telling her not to cry, and then took one of the biggest steps of her life (and I mean that quite literally): she stepped up onto the bus.
Our daughter started at the school about the same time that Anna Howell arrived in Lincoln. Anna, 42, wound up here in 1998 because she was looking for a cheap house to rent where the owner wouldn’t mind the fact that she would be moving in with her dog. She was an aspiring schoolteacher, and soon would start work at the Lincoln Community School, teaching the combined third and fourth grade class there.
First, however, she volunteered at the Lincoln Library — or, to be precise, the remnants of the Lincoln Library. In June 1998, after four weeks of rain and four inches in an hour, the usually lazy New Haven River overflowed its banks and flooded the library, destroying eighty percent of the collection and leaving all of us in the community a little unmoored. But the library reopened and newcomer Anna was there to help. Among her first friends? Four-year-old Lydia Stearns, whose grandmother Linda Norton was the librarian and whose mother Vaneasa Stearns owned the general store across the street.
“Lydia kept talking about her new friend, Anna, and wanting me to schedule a play date with Anna,” Vaneasa recalled. “So, I brought some snacks across the street for the girls, assuming that Anna was four years old, too.”
Nope. But it was an indication of how generous with her time Anna would be as a teacher. She was certainly among my daughter’s favorite teachers there (and anywhere), and still teaches the same grades in the same school. This past week she welcomed 15 students to her classroom.
“August is one long Sunday afternoon,” she told me when I asked her what this time of the year feels like to her. “There’s a sense of foreboding. It’s bittersweet. But it’s also exciting. I see the kids and they’re ready to be with their buddies. There’s the novelty of packing their backpacks and getting back on the bus.”
She volunteered that she particularly enjoys working with third and fourth graders: “I love that 8 and 9-year-olds have a totally unreasonable, wonderful sense of their abilities. They go grab paper for a story and grab a hundred sheets because they plan to write a novel. When we come up with plans for public service, they intend to save the world.”
Of course, that also means, “Invariably they bite off more than they can chew, and so it’s a fragile place, too. They come up against their limits.”
One of the reasons why I appreciate living in Lincoln is that little school. It was such a gift as a parent to know my daughter was there, learning from teachers like Anna: educators who are not merely creative and fun, but seem always to have their students’ backs.
A few years after Anna met Lydia Stearns at the library, she had the girl’s older sister Alyssa in her class. Alyssa would be hospitalized for three months that year and endure five separate surgeries — one at Boston Children’s Hospital. Her mother recalls everyone’s fear that Alyssa had missed so much school that she would have to repeat the grade. “But Anna said, ‘No way. Alyssa is staying with her class,’” Vaneasa told me. “Anna would come by our house after school, put on her surgical mask, and work with her for hours.” And, indeed, Alyssa did just fine and moved on to fifth grade with her peers.
Yes, the start of the school year can make us a little wistful. But when our children are in the care of a really good teacher, we feel a bit like those 9-year-olds, and we see only promise and potential. The days may be growing short, but the vista is limitless.
(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on August 30, 2015. There is now one Idyll Banter column remaining. After 23 and a half years, Chris will be filing his last column next Sunday. His new novel, "The Guest Room," arrives on January 5, 2016.)
August 23, 2015
A Ferris wheel is still food for the soul
A couple of years ago, Chris Ashby, director of operations at the Champlain Valley Exposition, saw three boys peering longingly through a fence at the Champlain Valley Fair. He guessed the kids were 8 or 9 years old. On the other side of fence was the fair’s tractor pull, and Ashby could hear the indefatigable growl of the engines. He gave the kids tickets so they could watch the competition properly. “They didn’t walk into the venue and they didn’t run into the venue,” he recalled. “They bounced.”
That’s what the fair is all about, Ashby told me, adding, “You see an inherent delight on all the kids’ faces when you walk around.”
The fair opens in five days, a 10-day bacchanal to commemorate the end of summer. For some people, the fair is a celebration of agrarian Vermont, with majestic Morgans and Belgians, Holsteins with “good dairy strength,” and pumpkins the size of Mini Coopers. For others, it’s the midway, with rides called Zyklon, Zipper, and Fireball that are designed to terrify us — yet with the presumption that we are nonetheless perfectly safe. And for still others, it’s the food: the fried dough, the maple creemees, and (yes) the pork boners.
I have gone annually since I was a young man, watching my daughter and her friends grow from savoring the classic carousel to standing in line for the centrifugal (and myriad) vomitrons. My wife and I met the Batman there. We watched the dogs that dive and the pigs that race. Every year I consume a bloomin’ onion on my own; she eats all things maple.
And while so much of the fair is predictable by design — we want there to be blue ribbons for tomatoes and cukes, we want carnies assuring us that it’s easy to win a stuffed Pink Panther as tall as a toddler — there are always moments of re-invention. This year there is a home brew contest, with the Best in Show beer getting to brew a “pilot batch” at the 14th Star Brewery in St. Albans. Chefs from the Essex Resort and Spa will be giving cooking demonstrations (although rumor has it they will not be whipping up pork boners). There will even be vegan smoothies.
There is another reason, however, that we gravitate to the Champlain Valley Fair. There is a reason that we love all the fairs that pepper Vermont in August and September. “There’s a certain amount of melancholy because it’s the end of summer,” Ashby said. “The kids are going back to school. We’re all about to change into a whole different set of clothes. Everything changes after the fair.”
In other words, this is summer’s last hurrah. We are not precisely fiddling as the season burns, but we are all cognizant that the days are growing short, there is a chill in the night air, and our tomato plants look like the tentacles from dying man o’ war jellyfish. The fair is the ritualistic point of demarcation our souls crave. We will see people there we may see once a year, returning like barn swallows to that nest they built in the rafters twelve months earlier, drawn inexorably (and magically) back. And we will connect.
Yes, much of what we will eat at the fair is empty calories. I get it. Most of the games we will play at the midway are bait-and-switch. And the rides are never as long as we’d like.
But we all also know this: there is a phosphorescent beauty in a Ferris wheel at night. There is charisma in a miniature horse. There is confidence attached to those 4-H ribbons our children earn.
And there is the bounce in all of our steps when suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, someone gives us tickets to the tractor pull.
(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on August 23, 2015. There are now two Idyll Banter columns remaining. After 23 and a half years, Chris will be filing his last column on Sept. 6. Chris’s new novel, “The Guest Room,” arrives on January 5, 2016.)
That’s what the fair is all about, Ashby told me, adding, “You see an inherent delight on all the kids’ faces when you walk around.”
The fair opens in five days, a 10-day bacchanal to commemorate the end of summer. For some people, the fair is a celebration of agrarian Vermont, with majestic Morgans and Belgians, Holsteins with “good dairy strength,” and pumpkins the size of Mini Coopers. For others, it’s the midway, with rides called Zyklon, Zipper, and Fireball that are designed to terrify us — yet with the presumption that we are nonetheless perfectly safe. And for still others, it’s the food: the fried dough, the maple creemees, and (yes) the pork boners.
I have gone annually since I was a young man, watching my daughter and her friends grow from savoring the classic carousel to standing in line for the centrifugal (and myriad) vomitrons. My wife and I met the Batman there. We watched the dogs that dive and the pigs that race. Every year I consume a bloomin’ onion on my own; she eats all things maple.
And while so much of the fair is predictable by design — we want there to be blue ribbons for tomatoes and cukes, we want carnies assuring us that it’s easy to win a stuffed Pink Panther as tall as a toddler — there are always moments of re-invention. This year there is a home brew contest, with the Best in Show beer getting to brew a “pilot batch” at the 14th Star Brewery in St. Albans. Chefs from the Essex Resort and Spa will be giving cooking demonstrations (although rumor has it they will not be whipping up pork boners). There will even be vegan smoothies.
There is another reason, however, that we gravitate to the Champlain Valley Fair. There is a reason that we love all the fairs that pepper Vermont in August and September. “There’s a certain amount of melancholy because it’s the end of summer,” Ashby said. “The kids are going back to school. We’re all about to change into a whole different set of clothes. Everything changes after the fair.”
In other words, this is summer’s last hurrah. We are not precisely fiddling as the season burns, but we are all cognizant that the days are growing short, there is a chill in the night air, and our tomato plants look like the tentacles from dying man o’ war jellyfish. The fair is the ritualistic point of demarcation our souls crave. We will see people there we may see once a year, returning like barn swallows to that nest they built in the rafters twelve months earlier, drawn inexorably (and magically) back. And we will connect.
Yes, much of what we will eat at the fair is empty calories. I get it. Most of the games we will play at the midway are bait-and-switch. And the rides are never as long as we’d like.
But we all also know this: there is a phosphorescent beauty in a Ferris wheel at night. There is charisma in a miniature horse. There is confidence attached to those 4-H ribbons our children earn.
And there is the bounce in all of our steps when suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, someone gives us tickets to the tractor pull.
(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on August 23, 2015. There are now two Idyll Banter columns remaining. After 23 and a half years, Chris will be filing his last column on Sept. 6. Chris’s new novel, “The Guest Room,” arrives on January 5, 2016.)
