Nichole Bernier's Blog, page 7

The Myth of the Perfect Start

The log was 30 feet up in the air, a sort of telephone pole of a balance beam. I was supposed to walk from one end to the other, holding onto nothing. The rest of the group had done it. Ten minutes had passed, and I was still frozen on the business end.

Thirty feet was not a height that would kill me, especially in a safety harness. But from the way I stood paralyzed after a series of false starts, you’d think I was walking a tightrope over a rift in the earth down to its fiery magma core.

“Just take the first three steps,” the guide called up. “You just have to make yourself start. It’s like writing the first three words of a novel.”

“No. It really isn’t,” I called down, trying to be darkly funny, but the bitter was seeping through. So were the tears.

My two younger sisters, with whom I’d traveled to this Tucson resort to celebrate a Big Birthday, had both just done it successfully. And when they reached the end, they’d each tagged the far pole and walked back, backwards. That was the victory lap, a victory I’d assumed would be mine, too. After all, I like physical challenges, I like being out of my comfort zone. What I hadn’t figured on was how much I wouldn’t like it when I couldn’t use my hands (which our guide explained later was the ultimate bugbear of those who have an issue with being in control).

The group members down below had been calling out encouragement and advice — momentum was key, they said, just get that first step going and then another, and don’t stop. But 10 minutes was an uncomfortably long time to watch someone short circuiting, and they had put away the cameras and fallen silent.

I’d like to blame it on the high desert view, the dizzying vista of scrub brush and low hills, even the light breeze pushing my hair into my eyes from under the helmet. But the truth is I’m not afraid of heights. Yet each time I ventured a first step, bouncing lightly on the forward foot to fool myself into some sprightly momentum, I was seized with a certainty that it was not the RIGHT first step. It was not the PERFECT first step I needed to head out safely and successfully. It was a slightly-off step, a misaligned step, deadly and cursed.

Of course there was, and is, no PERFECT first step, only the first step that keeps on going. I think I realized this even then, frozen on that log, and recognized that there was something at work other than a fear of falling or dying.

After I finally did it — because I did do it, dammit, then walked all the way back, backwards — I went back to the casita, furious tears under my sunglasses, to write it out. It was all so transparent once I caught myself writing about the event as a failure, even though I had done it. I’d never actually had the terror of physical danger; what I’d had was a potent anxiety about not being able to do it as gracefully and athletically and bravely as others (including of course my sisters). And the further along I went in my frozen state, the more mortified I became that I was not only not as successful, but I was making a spectacle of myself.

I thought back on what the guide and the others had said about the first step, how walking the log was no more physically difficult than walking a line in the sand — that it was all about taking that first step and keeping up a smooth momentum. One foot in front of the other, no second-guessing or paralysis.

And though I had barked at the guide that it wasn’t the same as writing novel, I’m not so sure there wasn’t a lesson wedged in there like a splinter coming home in my heel. For writing, for anything. Whether it comes at the beginning, middle, or even near the end of a project, there can be a sudden stalling. For whatever reason you lose momentum and then confidence, and you pick up your head and see nothing but terrifying unbroken vista. There’s no roadmap. And swirling around all that exposed inertia is the breeze of other people’s progress, and success. It’s like the bleak pages of “Oh The Places You’ll Go.”

I can’t think of a time I was as viscerally upset and angry with myself. It was awful. And yet it was all in my head, the most trip-you-up tightrope place of all.  

Sochi, My Worrisome Valentine

I first heard about the stray dogs of Sochi via my twitter stream, when a sweet homeless Shepherd-mix was posted by ABC journalist Matt Gutman. Several days later, U.S. skier Gus Kenworthy posted a photo of the litter he plans to adopt.

Sochi, the world learned, had a dog problem, and had contracted with sharpshooter exterminators to make sure the vermin wouldn’t be an embarrassment during the Olympics.

Amid the oddities and malfunctions in the lead-up to the opening ceremonies (yellow hotel water, and bobsledder Johnny Quinn having to break down his hotel’s bathroom door), the strays of Sochi became big news, fast. This was no fun and games. Until a local billionaire stepped in with funds for a shelter complex, thousands of strays were targeted for death. More evidence, it seemed, of Russia’s authoritarian response to virtually everything — from building contracts and overspending to censorship and human rights.

The dog shootings were eerily timely for me because they paralleled research for my second novel, set in 1980s USSR. In the aftermath of the Chernobyl/Pripyat evacuation, I learned, clean-up crews called “liquidators” went in to shoot the house pets that had to be left behind. The idea was to catch them before they could wander, radioactive, through the buffer zone toward other villages. Cats were wary and hard to shoot, according to interviews in Voices From Chernobyl. But dogs were easy targets, as they naturally approached people in search of food and affection.

It’s been awful research, but riveting. So much of the tragedy was caused bythe government’s delay in helping its people — a mind-boggling 36 hours passed before an official explanation, and then finally evacuation from under the radioactive cloud. The Soviet Union was loathe to admit incompetence on the world stage or create panic in its citizens, and wanted to take care of things quietly, superficially. So, families picnicked in the contaminated grass while their government kept up appearances.

But long before that, the disaster was was set in motion when inferior materials were purchased to build the reactor, in inadequate supply. Then in the rush to make deadlines, the reactor opened before all its safety tests had been done. So proud the Russians were, done on schedule. So good they looked internationally, all that complicated construction finished and facilities humming.

Sound familiar?

I visited the USSR in 1989 as part of an Intourist group — the primary way to visit then, officially chaperoned by the government in its bugged hotels. And what we saw were elaborate facades hiding chaos, corruption and deprivation. We ate in restaurants that no longer bothered with menus, because they were 86 not just certain ingredients, but entire food groups. One of our scheduled side-trips flew us to war-torn Uzbekistan instead of Kiev because lo, there was a cease fire in the civil war, and that’s where Intourist wanted us to spend our hard currency. We drank champagne for breakfast, because the shipment of fruit juice hadn’t come in from Cuba. We ignored the broken hotel smoke detectors, clearly dismantled and rigged instead to bug the rooms.

When you care above all else to contain the impression of chaos, chaos has a way of catching up. Sometimes it’s a missing doorknob and an oddly constructed toilet, a snowflake that doesn’t blossom into a ring. But sometimes it’s a lot worse.

I found myself squirming as I watched the Olympic opening ceremonies, physically uncomfortable as the camera panned the enormous new stadium. It seemed unnervingly ambitious for contractors who had also produced the likes of a bathroom with two toilets in a single stall. There were high wires, and elaborate soaring props. A young girl suspended Peter Pan-style in the air. Pyrotechnics everywhere. The margin for error felt very, very slim.

Then a photo of a stealthy stray appeared on my Twitter feed, a dog inside the stadium standing on a loge balcony, hanging out and watching the spectacle along with the rest of the spectators.

It was a nice spark of levity and defiance in an atmosphere of discipline and obedience.

But when it comes to Russia, I’m leery of sparks.

First You Crawl

I went to a dance pageant recently, a holiday performance of ballet, modern and jazz with local girls age 6-16.

Actually, I have no idea how old the dancers were. Some were clearly 25, which is amazing, since I know for a fact they were in 5th grade with my son just two years ago.

What a range of emotion watching these elegant not-quite-women, the pixies with flying limbs. Some were stunning, graceful and acrobatic in their unsettlingly mature bikini bodysuits. Others were still in the throes of growing pains, coltish and vulnerable. And they knew it; you could see it in the frozen smile of a girl trying to hold her quivery leg overhead, and struggling not to drop it a half-beat too soon.

God, I felt for them. All of them: the ones flailing awkward jazz hands at the outer edge of their ability. The ones so gorgeously at ease in their skin that I couldn’t help wincing, knowing the world would treat those bodies as commodities in a few short years. And the ones somewhere in the middle, hoping their smidge of talent would blossom into something like the big girls.

Artistic growing pains. It’s so true of so many expressive arts — and yes, of writing too, only it’s the young heart and mind that are quivery and vulnerable instead of the body. There are flying limbs to rein in. Oh, the big words and emotions! Themelodramatic poems, the handwritten middle-school novel hidden under a mattress. Sentences with such inappropriate metaphors they’re like heaving bosoms in the middle of an engineering textbook. The need to SAY THE THING IN THE MOST UNIQUE WAY IT’S EVER BEEN SAID IN THE HISTORY OF THE WRITTEN WORD. So much to trip over in order to get out of your own way.

I remember my first great assignment working on staff at a travel magazine you’ve never heard of. At 22, I was sent to write about  dogsledding in Canada’s Yoho National Park. In a lyrical frenzy, I described the dog’s baying while harnessing up as a “cacophony of canine enthusiasm.” And no one stopped me. After it was published, I sent a clip to the editor of Travel & Leisure (whom I’d met in passing at an industry event) with a note about my passion for travel writing and hopes of working for her someday. I mentioned that I’d even done my own photography for the piece. Yes, I wrote that as if it were a good thing.

The editor, God bless her, wrote back with something kind that amounted to, Keep at it, kid.

Years later I buried the piece at the bottom of my portfolio, and somewhere along the line I must have torn it out altogether. But now, 20-odd years later, I look back with a fondness for my flailing jazz hands. We all have growing pains. So important to be large of spirit about that awkward phase, whether you’re the one in it, or guiding someone else through. Because it’s part of the process, and has to come first. You crawl, you walk, and eventually run, or dance, or whatever your joyful form will be as you keep growing. I assume that if I look back, in a few years or thirty, at the work I’m doing now, I’ll see quivery legs. But I hope I won’t want to throw it away.

There’s a Rikki Lee Jones song I love called Stewart’s Coat. It was used, I think, in the closing credits for film “When A Man Loves A Woman,” in which Meg Ryan portrays a woman emerging from rehab. “Just give me time to learn to crawl,” Jones croons against an acoustic guitar. Every time I hear that line it evokes a wistful sort of patience. A plea for understanding when we fall short, and generosity with our imperfections.

Personalized holiday copies — FREESHIPME

Care to give someone a personalized copy of THE UNFINISHED WORK OF ELIZABETH D?

Let me be your Amazon prime:

If you order it this week through my local bookstore, Wellesley Books, I’ll go down and sign it however you’d like, and they’ll wrap it.

Then I’LL SHIP IT FOR FREE myself (well, within the U.S…we do have 5 kids to put through college).

Yes, you read that right, I’ll hoof it to the post office with my kids and oversized puppy, and send it to you.

It’s my holiday gratitude for supporting indies, and my book. Thanks! 

The priest asked, “What’s your field?”

We have a new priest at our church. Great priests aren’t a dime a dozen, and we’d been lucky with our last one, so I’d spent the fall curious about who the replacement would be.

After I met him once or twice, someone told me he’d been a lobbyist in the Boston State House before going to seminary. Yesterday morning I asked him about it during after-Mass donuts in the parish hall.

I was a lobbyist, he said. In healthcare.

So I asked him what he thought of Obamacare. He laughed — “okay, this is my political side talking, not my theological side” — and offered his opinion that it was important to build a broad base of support on an issue so large.

“For example, it’s important because….well, what’s your field?” He asked this looking for a basis of comparison in journalism, and then asked the same of the couple I’d been talking with when he walked over.

What’s your field. With that simple question he stopped me short and made my day.

I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve been asked that question by a man, let alone when I had a child hanging off one arm. The assumption is always that I don’t have a field, or at least don’t anymore, or that it would be dicey to ask and infer that working at home wasn’t work.

I can’t tell you how refreshing it was, and to hear my friend Jill answer “finance” along with her husband Ricardo, even though her day job now is raising two boys. Because that is her field. It’s what she worked in, built a reputation in, and where her expertise lies. It’s her thing.

It made my day, hearing that kind of assumption of a woman’s thing outside of momming. And it came from a Catholic priest. 

A Tribute, A Grumble, A Novel in the Drawer

Lee Thornton, journalist

In 2007, when I was pregnant with our fourth child and our family was preparing for a move from Washington DC to Boston, I sneaked away from the chaos for a three-day publishing conference in New York. 

I was placed in a group of about 15 people, all of whom had finished their first novels and were there to pitch them to editors. (In hindsight, I’m confused about why this was encouraged, skipping the literary-agent step.)  In between our meetings, we gathered as a group to hone our delivery of the infamous elevator pitch. 

I hit it off particularly well with one group member, Lee. She’d retired as a television reporter and had become a journalism professor a the University of Maryland, and she was whipsmart and worldly and funny as all get-out. Throughout the weekend, as editors (and our own workshop leader) said the darndest things about our books, she cracked me up with her searing asides. Hers was a novel that, if I remember correctly, was set in the 1940s South, based on a real group of women soul singers (think early Supremes) who almost made it big. One editor who heard Lee’s pitch told her, dubiously, Who is going to be the audience for that? Lee had a polished reply that culminated in a fantastic rolling grumble, under her breath, a barely audible commentary on her indignation that I’d pay cash money to be able to do, myself.

What I didn’t realize immediate is that Lee wasn’t just “a” tv reporter — she was the first black female White House correspondent in the 1970s, and for NPR’s “All Things Considered.” She also did a stint at CNN. As we stayed in touch via email over the years, she became the dean of the University of Maryland’s journalism school, then the provost of diversity for the university. And then she died of pancreatic cancer. 

I only found out she’d passed away when she didn’t reply to an email I sent, and a Google search yielded an obituary in the New York Times five weeks earlier. It also turned up a video made by her colleagues and students upon her retirement in 2010. They called her “Dr. T,” and talked about her tough-love style of teaching and mentoring. The video tribute had messages from newscasters all over the country who’d at one time been her students; in total, they’d won more than 80 journalism awards.

She tried reworking her novels over the years — she had a second one about a black southern minister — but she was also caretaker of her elderly mom, and busy with school responsibilities that followed her into retirement like a beloved stray that won’t go away. When she’d write about the ways she got pulled back into work, in the email messages we exchanged every few months, I could hear her rolling grumble between the lines, but also her affection for her work. 

I wondered how many of her colleagues, students and friends knew she was working on this fiction on the side. And how many people like Lee die with novels in the drawer, the quiet dream of someday seeing their book on the shelf dying with them.

We didn’t have any mutual friends, so I have no way of knowing whether she gave her books to anyone while she was sick, or if she would have wanted someone to try self-publishing on her behalf, posthumously.

All I know is that Lee Thornton was whipsmart and worldly and funny as all get-out, and that now she’ll never have the chance to show the editorial world just who, thank you very much, is going to be the audience for that.

Blind Date

Earlier this year I wrote this essay for Redbook. The magazine was running a collection of writers’ reflections on life experiences involving a car, and the story of a pivotal road trip with my husband (then boyfriend) was a good fit.

My husband and I celebrated our 15th anniversary this week, which got me thinking about the spirit of serendipity and risk-taking that  got it all started. Is that true of most relationships in one way or another? Feel free to chime in down in the comments section.

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THE SUMMER I TURNED 30 I took a gamble on a road trip, picking up and moving to a new city with I guy I barely knew in a car I could barely drive. This was more than a little out of character for me. I don’t make aggressive investments. I don’t even wear two patterns at a time, or buy a novel unless it’s been recommended by someone I trust.

It started with a blind date orchestrated by mutual friends. I was a magazine editor living in New York; he was a Bostonian working at the State House. He drove down one Friday night to take me to dinner and one long-distance date led to another, until after three months of  high phone bills and even higher mileage, we agreed someone needed to move. I flipped a coin — mostly for the humor value of saying we had, because we both knew who was packing up and who wasn’t. My career as a writer — magazines were everywhere, contributors were everywhere — was far more portable than his 10 years in Boston politics.

On moving day he drove to Manhattan in his brand-spanking-new soft top Jeep Sahara, to caravan with me in the U-Haul we had crammed full with all my earthly possessions. The better driver by half (I hadn’t even owned a car in years), he took the wheel of the truck, and I followed in the Jeep.

The four-hour drive north was like one of those montage scenes in a romantic comedy: dramatic passages over bridges with the windows down, googly eyes in the rear view mirror, stopping to gas up our vehicles in tandem. When I rolled through the tolls, the guy in the booth would say, “The guy in the truck up there just paid for yours.” Then, at the final toll, there was a line. Idling behind him, fiddling with who knows what, I got careless with the brake pedal. I rolled his shiny ten-day old Jeep into the back of the U-Haul he was driving with my stuff, smashing up its grill.

No more googly eyes in the rear view mirror. He didn’t yell, but since we hadn’t had a big first fight yet, I couldn’t tell what, exactly, was behind his restrained anger. Fury? Regret? For the rest of the day we moved around one another carefully, and I tried not to wonder what I’d just done. I’d given up my writing job, my rent-controlled apartment, and my city to be with someone who was essentially an outline to me, a story that had not yet been fleshed out. He was likely thinking the same sort of things. We walked on eggshells around one another all afternoon. Curbside at the end of the day, he surveyed the damage to the Jeep one more time. “Things are just things. People are people.”

His restraint that day contained all the things I couldn’t yet know about him, but it also marked the moment I knew that no matter what we’d given up, there was more to be had together. Fifteen years later, things are still just things compared to the people we love — including the five small ones that now fill our minivan. 

The Demise of Private Writing?

Shortly after my novel came out, I got an interesting email from a reader.

She said she hadn’t been sure she would like a book half written in the form of journals, but had been grabbed by the point of view: the private side of a woman that made her public self look like a facade, and the surprise of the friend who inherits them.

“No one hears about journals anymore, now that everything is about blogs,” the reader wrote. “Were you afraid it would seem dated?”

To be honest, that never occurred to me. Certainly blogs have become enormously popular: personal and professional blogs, hobbyist blogs, blogs about illness, health and parenting. But have they taken the place of writing people used to keep privately? In this age of everyone trying to have their platform, are blogs to journals as banks are to money hidden in mattresses?

They can’t be. Blogs are simply a different beast than journals. No matter how candid and self-effacing a blog might be, in the end, it’s always written with the consciousness of someone else reading. With the most sincere of intentions, there’s a certain amount of posturing because they are crafted to be seen by others. It’s the difference between a candid photo and a portrait.

In my novel, journals show the unexpected portrait of a young mother as she really was, including the mystery of where she was really going when she died. The bestseller GONE GIRL, which came out the same day, uses journals to the opposite effect, reimagined for public consumption (I won’t say any more than that, no spoiling here) — which to me felt emblematic of the modern changes to private writing.

The evolution of blogging has been fascinating to watch. Blogs, with their comments boxes and links to one another’s sites, are looking for community, sometimes even crowdsourcing opininions. But in journals, people are working toward insight, alone — essentially asking of themselves, What would the wisest person I know advise me on this? And then digging deep for the answer.

Journals aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. Not everyone processes issues by writing them out. But of those who do — if they take up blogging, is there no longer a need to keep a journal? Even if it’s not quite the same kind of writing, is it close enough?

Last year author Chris Bohjalian wrote about this in his newspaper column for the Burlington (VT) Free Press, which he also reprinted on his blog. He said he didn’t keep a journal, because he found that his essays scratched that itch for personal expression and synthesizing observations.

“Young writers ask me often if I keep a journal. I don’t,” he wrote in a retrospective essay marking the 20th anniversary of the column. “I have notebooks that hold research for my novels, but I have never kept a diary. Why? Because ‘Idyll Banter’ has been my diary. This column has been where I have tried to make sense of the loss of close pals and parents, and where I have celebrated the wondrous joys of marriage and fatherhood and friendship. Likewise, it has been where I have chronicled the unremarkable but universal moments that comprise every day of our lives. The first snow. The last leaf. The swimming hole. The ice jam. And I have enjoyed it more than you know. This column has been a great gift.”

I couldn’t agree more; first-person essays might be my favorite kind of writing. But I do have a fondness for the journals I used to keep when I was younger, the place I went to work out the pebble in my shoe. It wasn’t about crafted sentences or analyzing events for others or a strong concluding line. It was an unshowered-with-a-baseball-hat-on kind of place, where there was much telling of it as it is and where there were no trolls, unless you counted the siblings who jimmied the locks on my early diaries. As I got older journals became the place where I processed the big things: what kind of person I might become if I went to this college instead of that one. Whether I should let go of a relationship that was not healthy. And later, whether I should gamble everything — job, rent control, beloved city — for one that was.

But a funny thing happened as the years passed. My kids started to grow, and publishing outlets grew — it felt like everything was growing but time. If you had two hours a day to write, what would it be? A magazine assignment, a newspaper piece, a web site or blog essay, a piece of fiction in progress, a volley of tweets? There were countless places to post your writing, ways to connect with the people who might pick up your book if they took a shine to your style. There were even places to write about writing — like, say, this space. It was both wonderful and a little absurd: How many places could a writer write if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

Somewhere along the line I stopped keeping a journal, though it was never a conscious decision. Maybe on some level I shifted sensibilities, and grew into someone who preferred making sense of the big things out loud, puzzling them out in community. Or maybe I got tired of the sound of my own voice, unshowered in a baseball cap, muddling through the same conundri over and over. Or maybe it was simpler still. There are only so many hours in a day, only so much writing you can do.

I don’t know if there is in fact a falloff in people keeping journals, a demise of writing that is truly private. Though in this age of putting-it-all-out-there-and-up-there, it feels as if there is. I’d be curious to hear from others who either used to keep a journal and stopped, or those who started keeping one in recent years — particularly folks who are active on social media, but find it’s a different itch that needs to be scratched.

 

Own Your Opinions, Kids

One of my children told me recently that he couldn’t ever be a reviewer — of books, art, restaurants, or a sports columnist — because he didn’t want to hurt people’s feelings. (Never mind that just a few weeks before, he gave a dramatic reading of my book’s one-star reviews while I cooked dinner. Ha. Oh yes, ha.)

Of course empathy is a good thing to encourage in kids. But the more I thought about my son’s aversion to critiquing, the more I wondered what it said about his comfort expressing opinion. Sometimes when I ask him to make a preference — choose this favorite over that one, or explain what he doesn’t like and why — he acts like he’d rather pull out a fingernail and dip it in ink quill-style, and write, Just because.

There are outlets for sharing opinions today on just about everything. Anyone with an email address and a wire in the wall can broadcast his or her views on literature or Lysol, and they can also go off on virulent diatribes about total strangers — their appearance and their lifestyle choices, things that have nothing to do with the thing being critiqued. Every frustrated person who’s ever felt disenfranchised, maybe their teachers never listened or their mother never loved them, can bullhorn their power to the world. My kids have seen me blindsided by a few weirdly personal attacks. But I don’t want it to inhibit them from learning to put their own views out there.

There are useful and appropriate ways of expressing your opinion, and there are troll ways. But that’s not what I’m talking about here: I’m talking about encouraging young people to have their say in a constructive way with relevant details, even if it means overcoming fear that the person whose work they’re critiquing might see it and be quietly hurt, or loudly disagree.

I visited my son’s English class recently, because his teacher asked me to speak with the studentsabout creative writing. They don’t know this yet, but their projects are leading up toward workshopping one another’s work in memoir. I’m curious to learn whether they’ll sign their names to their critiques of one another’s writing. I can see the benefits of doing it — the sensitivity encouraged, the accountability demanded. But I can also see the usefulness of giving the students free rein to explore their reactions to a piece of writing without being paralyzed by the social pressure that is so acute in middle school. Will the critiqued person hold a personal grudge? Will the critic go too easy, afraid of social repercussions?

Still, even as I write that, I know which way I lean. That it’s important to put your name to something, to express it constructively and be willing to stand up to those who might disagree. It takes a certain bravery to state your opinion and put your signature to it. Not a lot of bravery needed to anonymously slam someone’s creativity, or make personal judgments that go beyond the page.

As the writer, this is the risk you take in creating something: you are putting yourself out there. You’re putting your little soapbox up in Speaker’s Corner, telling the truth as you see it, and others can call you out on what they think is baloney or shallow or inauthentic. And when you’re the reviewer, you’re more or less doing the same thing.

I talk a good game here, but in truth, I am very squirmy about commenting on others’ work. It would be hard for me to ever review another author’s book. I get an all-day stomachache when I think I’ve hurt someone, or been misunderstood. But I’m trying to do it more in a variety of arenas. Stating your opinion is an important skill I want my children to have, and I’m trying to model it.

Criticism, learning to give and take it graciously, is part of being human. Having to state your case persuasively is instructive; it shows your mind to yourself, and teaches you what you really think. If you don’t back up your case  enough, academia will deduct points for being vague, and when you do it in life, people will think you’re wishy-washy. Friends who want substantive feedback on things — it could be a short story or a resume cover letter or an outfit — will respect you and seek your opinion if they know you’re honest. More, if you’re honest with care.

From time to time I give my kids something we call “school of mom” homework (no, I don’t homeschool), usually on a slow bickery summer day. The idea is, Do this offbeat educational exercise, and we all win a cool scavenger hunt or field trip. I’ve decided to ask the older three (the ones who can read and write) to pick a book they’ve read recently in which something bothered them, and write short thoughts explaining why.

I’m looking forward to hearing their reasoning, the things they’d suggest: Will it be something toothless like, “the dog should have been smaller and less mean,” or something more substantive like, “it doesn’t make sense to me that this character would have made this choice?”

Afterward, I might ask if they would have written it any differently if they had to sign their name and if they knew knew the author would see it. For example, if we decided to mail the letters to the authors, or post the comments on an online book community site. And if they say they would have written it differently — well, I guess that’s the money lesson, the why.

I’m curious: What ways can you think of to encourage children to voice their views in a bold but thoughtful way?

I Dream of Genus With A Light Brown Flair

Last night I dreamed I was in the grocery store looking for taco toppings, and wandered into the “New Produce” aisle — the place, of course, where new species are kept.

Nestled next to an orange lettuce  was a bouquet of  vegetable berries, clusters of vines dripping with different colored berries, translucent with liquid inside like a snow globe.

Each colored berry held an intense extract of vegetable: crimson for red pepper, pale green cucumber, orange for carrot, light brown for butternut squash. They were rich and beautiful and I knew how each one would taste, how it would explode in my mouth like a gel capsule of vitamin E.

I imagined sprinkling them fresh on top of tacos, as we do shredded lettuce or diced tomatoes, and it struck me as the most brilliant discovery in the agricultural world. 

I actually woke up disappointed they don’t exist.