L. Annette Binder's Blog, page 3

the color of memory is blue

Melanie Thernstrom wrote The Dead Girl when she was still in college. It's a long book (430 pages) and not as polished as her later work, such as the devastating Halfway Heaven. But The Dead Girl has its own power. It captures what it was like to be young in a specific moment of time -- the early 80's -- and how Thernstrom grappled with first the disappearance and then the violent death of Roberta Lee, a troubled and gifted young woman and Thernstrom's best friend.

Deep inside the book there is a moment that has stayed with me for years. Thernstrom is sitting in a courtroom at the murder trial of Lee's boyfriend. The prosecutor plays the video footage taken at the discovery of Lee's body, and Thernstrom can't stop herself from watching:

you strain in your seat, trying to tell them one from the other -- limb from branch, dark shape from dark shape and blue mist. Five weeks' sleep and look how wedded already she is to the earth: think how she look now that years and years have passed, the transfiguring blueness, distance changing hue. Blue is such a lonely color. The loneliness as morning or dusk or distance or light is lonely: the loneliness that the image is so far away and was taken so long ago, and the loneliness that it doesn't really exist anymore -- it is an image on a blue screen, which will be turned off and blank before you have finished thinking about it.

I think about this passage often. The idea of transfiguring blueness, how people recede from us when they die no matter how hard we try to keep them with us. They are changed from living breathing people into characters. "The story is finished," Thernstrom says, "and you are the one to tell it. Roberta is dead and you are the one who remembers." There is no remedy for loss, of course. But stories give voice to our sorrow and our longing. They keep us from being engulfed by grief, and in their telling they bring us back into the world of the living.

sleeplessness

Like many people, I've struggled with insomnia. All my adult life, sleep has been tenuous. The insomnia comes and goes of its own accord, and at its worst has lasted for weeks at a time with only two or three hours of sleep a night.

Many of my short stories have been informed by my fraught relationship with sleep . One character can't sleep because he's almost the same age his father was when he died in his sleep. Another character is struggling with guilt over killing a child with his car, and the mother of this child visits him in his dreams and tries to keep him there with her.

Many writers have suffered from insomnia, and their proccupation with sleep often finds its way into their work. For an interesting discussion of writers and sleeplessness, check out Greg Johnson's "On the Edge of an Abyss': The Writer as Insomniac. Johnson notes that there is something unique about writers -- their self-consciousness and preoccupation with emotional turmoil -- that makes them suffer from sleeplessness and also lets them derive a strange satisfaction in the isolation it provides.

Johnson makes interesting points about writers and the lonely nights they spend struggling to sleep. But, for me, my insomnia started long before I ever wrote any fiction and it gives me no pleasure and no material about which to write. It has less to do with me being a writer than it does with me being a human being in a time and a place when the demands placed on us all are ever more difficult to negotiate.

Difficult as those sleepless nights may be, they have given me the gift of empathy. Sometimes our bodies betray us in ways large and small. We get sick. We can't sleep. Our memory starts to falter. We have less control over these failures than we like to think. My insomnia has taught me to be kinder to myself and to others because we are all frail sometimes. We are frail and strong in turn, and we are struggling in ways that are invisible to other people. It's a reminder to try to live with grace and gratitude even when I'm sure I can't.

The Vanishing Sky Giveaway

The Goodreads giveaway is currently open for The Vanishing Sky, my first novel. The novel is set in WW2 Germany and is inspired by my own family history.

My father was in the Hitler Youth. His father was the head schoolteacher in a small town and extremely demanding of his sons. My father, who was barely fifteen, ran away from his post near the end of the war, something I only discovered about him after he'd passed away. Writing the novel let me imagine the stories my father never got to tell me.

In another room

In his remarkable story "The Lives of the Dead," Tim O'Brien dreams the girl he loved back to life. She was nine when she died of a brain tumor, a fourth grader just as he was, and decades later he still conjures her back.

What's it like being dead, he asks her on one of their visits. She answers -- "I don't know, I guess it's like being inside a book that nobody's reading... An old one. It's up on a library shelf, so you're safe and everything, but the book hasn't been checked out for a long, long time. All you can do is wait. Just hope somebody'll pick it up and start reading."

I conjure my own dead back, too. I suppose we all do. My father is alive in another room. He's reading his books and smoking his cigarettes and he looks at the world with the same tired eyes I knew when I was little.

For me the dead live not in books but in other rooms, in a house that goes on forever. Where you can wander from room to room and never find them and never retrace your steps. The characters I write live in these rooms, too. Freda is there and little Teddy, Etta and Josef and Max and Georg, and when I finish their stories they live on without me.

None of this makes sense. My father is buried in Colorado and my characters exist only in my imagination. But maybe imagination and memory are just different forms of the same human impulse. Maybe they're different forms of love.

On loneliness

I struggled with shyness as a child. I spent years looking down when people talked to me, covering my mouth with my hand when I spoke, struggling and often failing to say hello to someone approaching. It's better now that I'm older, and while it's hard to know why, I think part of the answer lies in my writing.

Writing means enforced solitude, so how can it help alleviate shyness? I'm not really sure, but I think empathy has something to do with it. Writing -- and reading -- for me are acts of empathy. By living with my characters while I write their stories (and sometimes for long afterwards), I've learned to love them even with their flaws. We're all flawed, of course. I don't know why I didn't understand this when I was a kid. We're all struggling in our various ways, some visible and some invisible to outsiders.

Of all the things writing has taught me, the most important is this -- Be kind. Be kind to yourself and to others. Don't assume you know a person by how they present themselves to the world. And -- most importantly -- look for ways to reach others, to connect in a world that is moving ever faster. Writing and reading are balms for loneliness and so is saying hello even if you're scared to.

Colorado Book Awards

Thrilled to find out Rise is a finalist for the Colorado Book Awards. It's a huge honor but it means even more to me on a personal level because the collection is in some ways a love letter to the years I spent there growing up.

There is so much blood in a thing...

Joe Wilkins' poem "Then I Packed You Up the Ridge Like a Brother on my Back" is astonishing for what it doesn't say.

Here's the moment:

I waited and watched the river.
I was very still. You know how it is—

the stars closing their bright mouths,
the dew a gift on your lips.

You did not see me,
or my rifle, blue

as the dark. But I saw
you step from the willows,

give your nose to the black water.
And you were beautiful. There is so much

blood in a thing—
yours welled up from the clean hole

I made in your heart and steamed
on the river stones...

Perfection. You can read the whole poem here . Wilkins has a new book of poems (Killing the Murnion Dogs) as well as a memoir (The Mountain and the Fathers) out this year.Killing the Murnion DogsThe Mountain and the Fathers: Growing Up on The Big Dry

James Leer

"The overcoat was a trademark of his. It was an impermeable thrift-shop special with a plaid flannel lining and wide lapels, and it looked as though it had been trying for many years to keep the rain off the stooped shoulders of a long series of hard cases, drifters, and ordinary bums. It emitted an odor of bus station so desolate that just standing next to him you could feel your luck changing for the worse."

Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys


I think I owned this trench coat in college. I was on a plane when I read this, and I laughed so hard the people one aisle over started to look uneasy.

Wonder Boys

the deep still water

"She began to feel the pressure of the Hoover Dam, there on the desert, began to feel the pressure and pull of the water. When the pressure got great enough she drove out there. All that day she felt the power surging through her own body. All day she was faint with vertigo, sunk in a world where great power grids converged, throbbing lines plunged finally into the shallow canyon below the dam's face, elevators like coffins draped into the bowels of the earth itself. With a guide and a handful of children Maria walked through the chambers, stared at the turbines in the vast glittering gallery, at the deep still water with the hidden intakes sucking all the while, even as she watched; clung to the railings, leaned out, stood finally on a platform over the pipe that carried the river beneath the dam. The platform quivered. Her ears roared. She wanted to stay in the dam, lie on the pipe itself, but reticence saved her from asking."

Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays


I go back to this moment in the novel again and again -- the prose, the palpable menace. Reticence saved her. Reticence brought her to this moment, too. Remarkable.

Play it as it Lays

Miss Lonelyhearts

"He was too excited to eat and afraid to go home. He felt as though his heart were a bomb, a complicated bomb that would result in a simple explosion, wrecking the world without rocking it."

-- Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts

I read this line for the first time while waiting for the dryer to finish at a laundromat in Missoula. I couldn't believe somebody had put those words to paper. Perfection.

Nathanael West