Nichole Bernier's Blog, page 8

Ides of March Giveaway: Win 27 Books!

 

No need to rub your eyes.

You didn’t read that incorrectly.

You can win up to 27 books published in the past year by major publishers.

A group of authors — a collective of New York Times bestsellers, literary award winners, Oprah picks and just plain great reads — have banded together to give away a year’s worth of reading for 2 lucky winners. Here are the rules:

Sign up for the contest by leaving your name and email address below. Every entrant will have a chance to win their choices from among 27 books — 1, 2, or every singe one, if you’d like.

All you have to do is add the books below (as many as you’d like) to your Goodreads shelf. Click the link and then click the WANT TO READ button below the book’s image.  If you add all 27 books and you win, then you’ll get 27 books. If you only add 2, then you only get 2, etc.  (Note: if all you have done is “enter,” and you are chosen, you will win one book of your choice among the 27.)

The original contest will be for 2 winners; for each 500 entry milestone we will add another winner, up to a maximum of 5 winners. So when we get to 500 entries, there will be 3 winners (1,000 will be 4 winners, etc). The winners will be chosen by random number generation and will be contacted through the email address they provided. US and Canada only.  Runs March 15-22, 2013. (Note: some books may not be available until their upcoming publication dates.)

Click away to add them to your Goodreads to-read shelf — and good luck!

Click here to add HIDDEN by Catherine McKenzie 
Click here to add SEDUCTION by MJ Rose 
Click here to add THE UNFINISHED WORK OF ELIZABETH D by Nichole Bernier
Click here to add THE COMFORT OF LIES by Randy Susan Myers 
Click here to add IN NEED OF A GOOD WIFE by Kelly O’Connor McNees 
Click here to add ORPHAN TRAIN by Christina Baker Kline 
Click here to add GLOW by Jessica Maria Tuccelli 
Click here to add BY FIRE BY WATER by Mitchell James Kaplan 
Click here to add THE WEDNESDAY DAUGHTERS by Meg Waite Clayton 
Click here to add MURDER BELOW MONT PARNASSE by Cara Black 
Click here to add THE LAST WILL OF MOIRA LEAHY by Therese Walsh 
Click here to add THE HOUSE OF VELVET AND GLASS by Katherine Howe 
Click here to add AFTER YOU by Julie Buxbaum 
Click here to add A SIMPLE THING by Kathleen McCleary 
Click here to add KITCHEN CHINESE by Ann Mah 
Click here to add THE DOCTOR AND THE DIVA by Adrienne McDonnell 
Click here to add WHY CAN’T I BE YOU by Allie Larkin 
Click here to add NO ONE YOU KNOW by Michelle Richmond
Click here to add THE SHORTEST WAY HOME by Juliette Fay 
Click here to add STUDIO SAINT-EX by Ania Szado 
Click here to add HOUR OF THE RAT by Lisa Brackmann 
Click here to add THE SEARCH ANGEL by Tish Cohen 
Click here to add THE BIRD SISTERS by Rebecca Rasmussen 
Click here to add THE HEADMASTER’S WAGER by Vincent Lam 
Click here to add DEATH IN THE FLOATING CITY by Tasha Alexander 
Click here to add THE GIRL WHO FELL FROM THE SKY by Heidi Durrow 
Click here to add THE PAINTED GIRLS by Cathy Marie Buchanan 

Now add your name and email address at the bottom of this entry page and hit enter. (Scroll past all the above you’ve just seen here — sorry, I didn’t know how to add it the entry button to mine! I’ll work on it.)

What does a novel’s interior design say about its characters?

Do settings reflect the mood of a novel?

Or do settings set the mood?

I’m not being cute, in a chicken-and-egg sort of way. Clearly in some books the environment and dwellings play just a bit part, while in others they cast such a spell you couldn’t imagine the story anywhere else.

I’ve been thinking about this since I was asked to give a talk at an architectural design firm linking the way writers build environments to suit their characters, not altogether unlike how architects and decorators customize environments to suit their characters.

I remember the trepidation I felt when I first began writing fiction after 15 years in narrative journalism. How do writers create people, and place them in made-up settings that supposedly complement their idiosyncrasies? I could no longer fall back on the excuse, Well, facts are facts, this is just the way it is, to defend writing, say, that a man lived with 50 cats in a house painted black. The entire package of a character’s life had to be believable, and I had to design it that way. Truth was relative; truth was what rang true to the imagination and intuition, not what was backed up by data to be given to the fact-checking department.

I thought of the novels whose distinctive settings stayed with me, years after reading the book, for being not just unforgettable, but critical in molding their characters. Environments that were epic not just because they were vividly drawn, but because they represented very specific emotional landscapes, sometimes packed into very small spaces.

There’s the bare, claustrophobic cottage of Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child, a novel about a mid-life couple who relocated to a rural Alaska farm and found themselves a prisoner of the land, their infertility, and possibly their imagination. There is the brutal Mississippi farm in Hillary Jordan’s Mudbound, a World War II-era outpost of segregation, loneliness, and violence. And of course the tiny shed that comprised the entire universe for a 5 year old boy in Emma Donogue’s ROOM — right down to Wardrobe capital W, just like a character — because he’d been born there, a product of rape and captivity.

But for this interior-design reception, I suspected they wanted nitty-gritty of interiors, not just general architecture. Details about possessions and habits to show how well people are in sync with the way they’re living, or out of it. Houses are a goldmine of this, of course. The details we’re showcasing in our homes create the face we think we’re showing the world. But the cracks in the wall, the chinks in the armor, provide more telling glimpses of who we really are.

For example, what might each of these environments tell you about their owners?

* The meticulous professional who lives alone in a minimalistic condo, but the basement looks like an outtake of Hoarders.

* The woman who goes to great lengths to create a state-of-the-art kitchen, but six months later, has never used her red-enamel 9-burner designer stove.

* The librarian whose home has bookshelves are organized by color — not by content, or author — or whose shelves filled more with knickknacks than actual books.

* A Victorian antique home whose formal foyer is littered with shoes, boots, snowpants, hats, mittens — no proper mudroom or closet equipped to handle them.* Were the homeowners too lazy, the reader wonders, too busy, too cheap or too unimaginative to customize the house in a way that would work better for them? Or had they suddenly inherited a pack of children from a deceased relative?

In journalism these idiosyncrasies are called facts. In forensics and other sciences, they’re called data. In fiction, we call them telling details — visual or behavioral nuggets that speak volumes about a character.

For realtors or interior decorators trying to help homeowners, these clues are evidence of a problem begging for a solution. For authors it’s the same thing, but from the opposite side: Writers know the problem from the getgo, and eventually, the solution. But we have to cough up the telling details to back it up — the Hoarders basement, the unused gourmet stove — that make the characters and storyline feel authentic.

For a family in crisis, the home gives it away in a million small ways. In my novel there’s a scene where a woman visits a widower and his children — the family of her close friend who’d died a year ago. The kitchen shelves, which used to be perfectly lined with cookbooks and framed photographs, are now piles of junk-mail catalogs, kid art and mismatched Tupperware. In the family room, once a paean to Pottery Barn organization, nothing is collected in its wall unit of miniature bins any longer. The family-room detritus flows into what used to be a formal living room, like water finding its natural level. Because this is a man who no longer has use for such distinctions between rooms.

In the first draft I might well have added something like, “He was just trying to hold it together day by day and raise his family without his wife.“

But you don’t need that sentence if the details say it for you: puzzle pieces wedged under corners of the rug and falling into heating ducts, the wall-unit organizers with nothing left inside to organize. You don’t even want that sentence, “He was just trying to…”, now that you’ve built this room for readers to read like tea leaves.

Spoon-feeding the information that way, compared to the compliment of trusting them to intuit it, would be like an insult to their intelligence. And no fact-checking department can protect you from that.

The Next Big Thing

I’ve been invited to participate in an online literary-blog feature called MY NEXT BIG THING, thanks to my friend and fellow member of Beyond the Margins and Fiction Co-op Juliette Fay (THE SHORTEST WAY HOME, DEEP DOWN TRUE, SHELTER ME).

This rolling feature is a set of the same 10 questions about a writer’s work-in-progress, giving readers a glimpse into the working life of a writer, and hopefully, books eventually making their way to bookstores. Part of the fun is tagging someone else. It is with great delight that I’m tagging Megan Mayhew Begman, Julia Fierro and Joe Wallace at the end of this post.

And here it is:

What is the working title of your book?

THROW A ROCK IN MOSCOW 

 

Where did the idea come from for the book?

Back in 1989 I traveled to Russia with the Soviet organization Intourist, and saw what an arbitrary, dangerous thing group tourism can be in an unstable nation. I wanted to combine that setting with an idea that’s intrigued me for a long time: whether a mother would recognize her own child if it had been taken from her in infancy.

 

What genre does your book fall under?

General-literary-commercial-women’s fiction, or whatever mashup this category will be called in the near future.

 

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

I have absolutely no idea. I was asked this about my first novel, and I never was able to answer.

For this book, my way of envisioning the characters has entirely different, very visual. When I was deciding who they’d be and what traits they’d have, I wanted to physically see them. So I Googled search terms under images — say, “Russian cab driver,” “Armenian woman,” or, “half-Vietnamese man” (which turned up some disturbing photos of people missing half their bodies). On the scrolling thumbnails of images that came up,  some faces that matched the way I imagined my characters  jumped out at me with shocking clarity. I made a collage of them, and I use as a screensaver. 

 

What is a one-sentence synopsis of your book?

THROW A ROCK IN MOSCOW is about a maternal hunch that drives a persistent and perhaps delusional mother to the dangerous terrain of 1980s Russia, on a tour group that goes horribly wrong.

 

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

Well, it took 18 months to finish a draft of THE UNFINISHED WORK OF ELIZABETH D. And then about a million years of revision. I’d like to think this one is going faster because I’m letting myself write more freely, and not trying to make each sentence perfect as I go. But maybe that will mean two million years of revision.

 

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

In terms of theme, structure and mood, probably AWAY by Amy Bloom, and THE LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS by Vanessa Diffenbaugh. Both of these great novels stuck with me, and influenced my approach.

 

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

I had wanted to write a book that took place in a transporting setting, and my background is in travel magazines. But because I have five young children I don’t really have the luxury of travel right now. One night about eight months ago I woke sweating from a nightmare about that trip I took to Russia, and how it could have gone much worse. I realized that I might not be free for globetrotting right now, but I’ve already had some rich experiences to tap into. And I kept pretty detailed travel journals and photo albums.

 

What else about your book might pique a reader’s interest?

If they like books about:

* The persistence of the human spirit, the determination to find what’s been loved and lost
* What it’s like to visit a tourism destination in a corrupt nation on the verge of collapse
* Whether it’s possible for humans to intuitively recognize their children, even if they’ve been missing since birth
* Stories revealed in snapshots from several points of view, sometimes out of chronological order. 

 

When and how will it be published?

If I knew this I’d set my sights on horseraces and lottery numbers.

 

It is my honor to introduce you to the three writers to whom I’m passing the baton:

Megan Mayhew Bergman lives on a small farm in rural Vermont with her veterinarian husband and two daughters. Scribner published her collection of stories, Birds of a Lesser Paradise, and will publish her novel, Shepherd, Wolf. She is a Justice of the Peace and occasionally teaches literature at Bennington College. 

Julia Fierro’s debut novel, CUTTING TEETH, about the complicated and often comical experience of modern parenting, will be published by St. Martin’s Press in the spring of 2014. An excerpt from the novel was recently published in Guernica Magazine.  
Julia is a graduate of The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Teaching-Writing Fellow. She teaches the Post-MFA Writing Workshops at The Sackett Writers’ Workshop, which she founded in 2002. What started as eight writers meeting in Julia’s kitchen has grown into a creative home for over 1700 short-story writers, novelists, memoirists and essayists. Her blog can be found at http://juliafierro.com.

Joseph Wallace is the author of magazine articles on nature, science, and health; nonfiction books on baseball, dinosaurs, and Thomas Edison; a handful of noir short stories (including one, “Custom Sets,” that was included in Best American Short Stories 2010); and Diamond Ruby, a historical novel set in Brooklyn. Later this year, his itinerant writing career will continue with the arrival of Invasive Species (Berkley Books), a globe-hopping end-of-the-world thriller. Joe lives in New York, but it’s easier to find him on Twitter, Facebook, his website, or his writing group’s blog.

A Twenty-Book Valentine’s Day Giveaway

 

To share our love of books this Valentine’s Day, we twenty writer-pals below are doing a joint book giveaway. To enter, simply click here and you’ll be guided through the (easy) process!

Scent, Sound, Words and Memory: Reading with their Great-Grandmother

The lobby was empty, decorated in the orderly, outdated way that nursing homes are. Tired but precise, precisely tired.

My mother waited in a corner chair. I was late, but she wasn’t disappointed. It had been a long time since I’d come to visit, but she was just glad I’d made the time. Everyone should be so lucky to have someone who thinks so well of them and forgives their limitations, even when they don’t do the things they ought to.

I was on my way to a book event for my novel, taking me through the town where my 92-year-old grandmother lived in a nursing home. My mother was coming for the reading, but she would have come with me to visit her mother-in-law anyway. It’s her maternal buffering reflex.

I have limited experience with dementia, and I’ve been told my grandmother is becoming increasingly agitated by small things. She likes dessert rather than dinner, sometimes tv over talking, and doesn’t like to be pressured on the things she no longer remembers, which is most everything. I knew she wouldn’t recognize me, and I wouldn’t press for it. I was there to give her a lovely half hour with a pleasant, if forgettable, young woman around her granddaughter’s age.

I brought flowers and a photograph of my five kids, a simple prop because most people enjoy the smiling faces of young children. She wanted to know which ones behaved and which ones caused trouble, and I narrated the circle of faces like I was telling a story. Then I told her I remembered visiting her house when I was a child (though I worried this hint of familiarity might distress her), and that I’d enjoyed playing hide-and-seek in her upstairs closet.

“That was a big closet,” she said, to my mother’s surprise. This might have been a spark of recall, or a throwaway comment disguised as one. My grandmother has been savvy for years about hiding the shortcomings of her memory.

Memory is a funny and fleeting thing, bobbing up like a submerged and inaccessible creature. We’ve all read the studies about sensory triggers, the memories brought on by a few bars of music or wafting perfume. For me, the smell of an old, dry, wood structure puts me back in my grandparents’ garage filled with equipment from my grandfather’s metal company, and evokes a spirit of exploration of old things not meant for children. The songs “Proud Mary” and “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy” still bring up the dark comfort of a motel lounge just off a midwestern interstate, where we were stranded during a snowstorm in the late 1970s. Oddly, it’s a warm memory, relief and safety in an exotic setting reconfirming a child’s belief that her parents can take care of anything nature  dishes out.

But I’ve never read anything about the power of words to evoke memory. People talk about rereading beloved books, and many say they experience a new dimension and appreciation each time. Some say poetry, prayer and mantras offer fresh calm and perspective. But that isn’t the same thing as memory, either.

Can words live in corners of our minds the way scent and sounds do, certain verses linked to specific experiences in our past? Can prose evoke nostalgia for period in time — the people we used to be, the people we used to know?

Maybe. My mother vividly recalls some lengthy nursery-rhyme poem she used to read me during potty training, something about a kitty sailing the ocean blue. She’s still sad when I admit I don’t remember it as she does. My other grandmother used to recite Longfellow’s The Wreck of the Hesperus, a poem she’d had to memorize in school. But I don’t know whether in her mind the verses evoked grammar school in the 1920s. All I remember is the way she’d said I looked like that after playing too long in the woods — the wreck of the Hesperus.

The nursing home visit with my grandmother went so well that I returned a few weeks later with my two youngest sons, age 3 and 5. It was a rainy Friday morning the week before Christmas. The elevator doors opened on the third floor, and I saw it through my boys’ eyes: The  hallway  plain as a boiler room, high narrow walls painted grayish mauve, with exposed pipes at the top. Residents in wheelchairs lined the narrow hall, many dozing with gaping mouths. A few reached out to touch the boys as they walked by, which surprised them as if furniture had moved. I pulled them close and helped them wave and say hello as we passed, hoping they saw the happy responses they elicited in the residents and not just their jarring appearance.

My grandmother was as motionless as the others, but she didn’t perk up when we came near. I asked if we could sit with her awhile, and she said that would be fine, that she didn’t care either way.

We ate cookies we’d brought her and showed her family pictures, and every so often she’d turn to one of the boys as if noticing him for the first time. “Well, aren’t you a handsome and well behaved fellow. What’s your name?” Or, “Oh hello there. You look a bit like this fellow over here.”

I’d also brought a copy of ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas in case the boys got bored, and the 5 year old asked me to read it. As I began, my grandmother leaned forward in her wheelchair, so I included her in the audience. I didn’t change my singsongy childlike cadence, strange as it felt to read in a childlike manner to a woman who’d been a nurse in World War II, raised four children and run a pharmacy. The book had beautiful silhouette pop-up images, and she touched the cut-out figures through windows and doors. Then she joined me reciting parts of the poem.

“His eyes how they twinkled! His dimples how merry!” She was delighted, almost giddy. “His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!” The print was tiny; she couldn’t have made out the words on the page.

What part of the brain contains the verses of old poems and stories?

What if words — like scent and taste and music — could be a conduit to a whole range of recognition and emotions, to a place where familiar faces and names still live, just waiting for the right verses to pull them up? Was she remembering having it read to her as a child, or reading it to my father ? Was there a chance that in that moment, she linked me to him and my children to me, a daisy chain of words and identity?

I started thinking about the books I could bring next time, poetry and essays I loved that might lead us to some new place, a limbo bridging strangers to fondness. But the truth was, she wasn’t a reader. If words mattered, I suspected it would have to be because they were familiar and beloved to the listener, not just the person reading them. If the words did not matter, then what counted was the warmth of a friendly face, reading. Which was lovely, but a different thing from evoking memory.

Before we left she let me take a photo of her with the little boys, even though she’s never liked to have her picture taken and doesn’t smile much. In it she’s  leaning toward the 3 year old, struggling to understand what on earth he’s saying (as we all often do), but with a visible half smile in profile.

If this were an essay in Reader’s Digest, it would end with my grandmother saying my name as we hugged goodbye. But it isn’t, and she didn’t.

Still, when I kissed the top of her head and asked if we could come back, she smiled and said yes, that would be fine, that would be nice, yes.

The Year in Reading

The literary website The Millions asked me to contribute to its year-end package of authors talking about their most memorable reads of the year. When I went back through my book journal of 2012, a diverse foursome stood out, and I thought, Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. I’m not a singsongy person, but the monkey mind does love patterns.

The something old was my re-read of an old favorite, Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner. This was my third time, occasioned by an invitation from my local indie bookstore to lead a book club on my favorite novel. Crossing to Safety is the story of two couples, their lifelong marriages and friendship, and it takes a clear-eyed look at how our strengths and foibles become more forgiving and more brittle over the decades. It’s brilliant, more so each time I read it. This time I treasured the voice and dry humor of the narrator poking fun at the champagne bubbliness of his own youth — hoo hoo, ha ha — naïve to the hardship up ahead.

Something new was The Light Between Oceans, a summer debut by Australian writer   M.L. Stedman. I’ve been a bit of a zealot for this book while on book tour and probably should be on commission, because when I give my elevator pitch, the audience sighs with that reader-hunger that must be appeased. I tell them this: It’s set on a tiny island in 1920s Australia, and its sole inhabitants—a lighthouse keeper and his wife—have been unable to have children. One day a rowboat washes ashore with a dead man and a live baby. What to do? Report the child, or raise her as their own? The decision the couple makes that day reverberates through the decades, and through the lives of others. It’s the kind of novel I love because it involves a moral choice where there is no clear right or wrong, no clear path of lesser harm.

Borrowed is a bit of a stretch, but work with me here. My pediatrician told me recently about a little-known and out-of-print children’s novella by Faulkner called The Wishing Tree. My first thought was, What would Faulkner have to say to kids? That when you mimic the help, it’s important to get the dialect right? That you shouldn’t drink while doing your homework, only after you’re done?

Intrigued, I tracked down a used copy online. The Alice-in-Wonderlandesque story is in classic Faulker terroritory, a sloshing bouillabaisse of race, relationships and social class but served up in kiddie bowls. It hints at many of the themes and characters to come in his later work, The Sound and the Fury, which I borrowed from the library to refresh my memory. The strong doomed sister. The disgruntled black maid carrying the weight of the world and none of the family’s respect. The menacing jaybirds, always swooping. No Dick and Jane.

I decided to read The Wishing Tree to my kids anyway and they loved it, along with the controversial way it found its way to publication some 40 years after it was written: First as a gift to an eight-year-old girl whose mom he wanted to marry, then to three other kids, including a girl dying of cancer. Each thought he’d written it only for him or her, and were in for a rude awakening when the first girl published it after Faulkner’s death.

Blue is how Salvage the Bones made me feel, the blue of neglected children and spurned love and rushing hurricane stormwater before it goes brown in its race through dirt lots of Mississippi. This is the Katrina most people didn’t hear about, put to merciless fiction by Jesmyn Ward. In her hands, four siblings’ fierce bickery loyalty is the closest thing to unconditional love, and a teen’s dedication to his fighter of a pit bull and her pups is as close as it gets to salvation.

This audiobook kicked my tail clear from Kansas City to Minneapolis to Chicago, where I bought a paper copy to finish on the flight home. Because I love a book that beats me up a little, makes the monkey mind sit still and show respect.

 

Faulkner For Kids?

At a recent visit to my children’s pediatrician, the doctor asked, “Have you ever read your kids that children’s book by Faulkner?” He said he read it to his kids a lot when they were younger, that it was their birthday treat.

This prescriptive advice wasn’t as random as it sounds. The pediatrician and I tend to talk books (while my children roll their eyes), especially since my first novel came out a few months ago.

I didn’t know Faulkner had written a children’s book. The doctor looked pleased to have stumped me. He pulled out his prescription pad and wrote The Wishing Tree plus WILLIAM FAULKNER, in case I forgot. This is a man who knows the fate of vague notes stuffed in diaper bags.

What, I wondered, would Faulkner have to say to kids? That when you mimic the help, it’s important to get the dialect right? That you shouldn’t drink while doing your homework, only after you’re done?

In academic journals, The Wishing Tree is described as Alice in Wonderlandesque, aimed at kids ages 8-11. It was originally written in 1927 but not published by Random House until 1964, when one of the children for whom it had been handmade offered it for publication (more later on the awkwardness of this). It had been out of print for years, but there were used copies online in middling condition for $30-$50.

I tweeted about my curiosity a few times, and someone replied with a tip on a used copy: a former library book, first printing, $3.99 plus shipping. I felt like I’d found a triceratops fossil in a Cracker Jack box.

To be honest, it was more about my intrigue than any conviction my kids would enjoy it. Fast-paced contemporary books, full of suspense and the bells and whistles of modern fantasy, have left them lukewarm to quieter classics with antiquated language. And then there was the question of whether it would even be appropriate for them. Several articles proposed that The Wishing Tree was in some ways a training-wheels version of Faulker’s famous and famously difficult later novel, The Sound and the Fury, which itself was no Dick and Jane. The strong, doomed sister. The disgruntled black maid carrying the weight of the world and none of the family’s respect. The menacing jaybirds, always swooping. The castrated bellowing family idiot. All of it a big sloshing bouillabaisse of race, sex and social class.

Little in Faulker’s other work suggested childsplay, either. As I Lay Dying is essentially a road trip with a mother’s stinking corpse backwards in her pine box, approximately 5,000 narrators, and one chapter that just reads, “My mother is a fish.” Light in August has an adulterous, frustrated, menopausal, religious extremist who makes her lover get on his knees and pray at gunpoint. Well, before she gets murdered off.

The Wishing Tree arrived, and I read it in an hour. No Dick, no Jane.

In a nutshell, it’s about a girl who wakes on her birthday to find a strange boy in her room, and embarks on an adventure with him in search of “the wishing tree.” While on their quest, she and others learn about the responsibility of choosing their wishes carefully. Along the way there’s a little violence, more than a little marital hostility, a flourish of swordplay, and a toddler whose cruelty is met with swift surreal punishment. There’s an eccentric cast of extras: a surly maid who rediscovers her runaway soldier of a husband, and a poor-white-trash old man, and his wife chasing him with a rolling pin. Fair enough. We’re in vintage Southern storytelling terrain here, Faulkner real estate, early and always.

The story’s end climbs out of the rabbit hole and back to reality, with a moral lesson and a tragic subtext. Choose your wishes unselfishly, and your birthday is a playground of opportunity. Except that the child of the birthday dreamscape happens to be seriously ill, so her hope for a playground on next year’s birthday is far from a given.

Sad, sure. But this isn’t verboten terrain. Children’s books are full of sickly and dying kids, from Little Women to The Velveteen Rabbit and The Bridge of Terabithia. If I decided not to read them the Faulkner, it wasn’t the sick child I was protecting them from. But I wasn’t sure yet what I was protecting them from.

One night soon after, school was declared canceled the next day due to bad weather, and the kids were in a mood to break from routine. I sat the older four in the living room, and like some Marmee in the dim light, began to read.

I set it up by telling them the controversy about how the book came to be published, some 40 years after it was written. “Here’s a book by a famous man who wrote it as a gift to an eight year old girl whose mom he wanted to marry,” I said. “Only he didn’t tell her that he also gave it to another girl, a friend’s daughter who was dying of cancer. And then he gave it to two other kids. Each of them thought he’d written it only for them, and were in for a surprise when the first girl published it, and the three others thought they owned the rights.”

My kids were wide-eyed. Regifting and lying? This they could all understand at ages 11, 10, 7 and 5. So uncool. So snagged.

And then we read. Straight, all the way through, 90 minutes. Whenever I stopped to call it a night, they insisted I keep going. When I read the dialogue for the black maid, they asked, Why are you talking like that, and, Why is she hanging around with the kids all the time instead of the parents? They wanted to know why the maid was so mean to the old white trash guy, and to her husband who came back after running away to the war. And they wanted to know why the old guy’s wife always hitting him with a rolling pin. We talked, in kid-speak, about the South and the 1920s, about socioeconomic discrimination, stereotyping, and horizontal violence.

“Some people aren’t sure this is okay as a kids’ book,” I told them. “Why do you think it might not be?”

My 11-year-old son said something to the effect of, There are a lot of things that aren’t the way we talk today or treat people today, and maybe they don’t want it to set a bad example. And my 10-year-old said, Or maybe in some places they still do treat people that way. My seven year old said, What way? And the five-year-old, Can you stop talking and just read?

It was fascinating to see what caught them up in the book, and what caught them up short. At the end they were full of literal questions, preoccupied with the mechanics of dream travel and the inconsistency of making wishes that came true sometimes, but not always. If it had been Alice in Wonderland, they wouldn’t have been bothered by the talking rabbit. They would have been hung up on how the Cheshire cat’s smile could take up so much of his face and whether that made it harder to swallow and why he could still be fat and get up the tree. They were accustomed to books about fantasy; students at sorcery school could ride brooms, after all.

But they were also accustomed to thorough editing for consistency, which might not be something given a posthumous Faulkner. To my kids, if a broom could fly one minute, there’d better be a damn good reason it couldn’t fly the next. The things that didn’t make sense made The Wishing Tree nonsense to them. But it was fun nonsense. Even while they furrowed their brows, they were entertained.

They called it the best late-story-night ever. And then they argued that if this was a rare book, how would we decide which one of them would get to keep it for their kids? Maybe it would be most fair to come up with a schedule to divide it monthly. But how did 12 months divide evenly among five kids? And so on.

So literal they are. And I realized they might need not just more Faulkner in their lives, but more Alice in Wonderland.

Originally written for Beyond the Margins and Salon. 

Women Writers on the Writing Life

 

Dawn Tripp, author of GAME OF SECRETS

Two Authors in Conversation at Partners Bookstore & Kitchen in Westport, MA:

Sunday, November 4th, 3 p.m.

Nichole Bernier, THE UNFINISHED WORK OF ELIZABETH D.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* Where do characters come from?

* Are they stolen from real life? A little? A lot?

* Are the plots fully formed before you start writing, or do you wing it as you go? 

* What are some of the hottest reads of 2012? 

Partners Village Store presents the first in their new Writer’s Series — a dynamic, interactive discussion with authors about the work of creating a story — co-hosted with local author Dawn Tripp. I love Dawn and her latest novel, Game of Secrets, and am excited and honored to be the first writer in the series. I’d love to see you there! 

Where: Partners Village Bookstore and Kitchen, 865 Main Road, Westport MA

Does Publishing A Novel Change Your Life?

My book’s launch party felt a little like a wedding. Well, one where my five children had already been born, and were racing around jacked up on chocolate-dipped strawberries.

The bash was in an old brownstone in Boston. There was a long brass bar and passed hors d’oeuvres, a few speeches, some roasting. I read a bit from the first chapter in front of friends who appreciated the efforts it had taken to get there, and wore teetery yellow shoes more than a few inches beyond my comfort zone. (My fear and secret thrill: I’ll never be able to chase the kids in these.)

In the past 10 years of my writing life, I’d gone from being a magazine journalist/mother of one to being a sometime-freelancer/mother of five. That evening of the launch party felt like another line of demarcation down my life: before kids, after kids, and kicking it back into gear. Here I was, burning rubber out of my Sienna minivan cocoon. Just look at that S car go.

Shortly after the launch party we got an au pair for the summer, and I started traveling for readings at bookstores. It was both heady and humbling: One night an audience of 75 and the next just a few people, including several who had to, because they worked there. Mornings, I’d get in a rental car and drive to bookstores that weren’t stocking my book in hopes they might give it, and me, a chance. My father asked in an email what it felt liketo be on book tour. I told him that while one person did squeal excitedly to meet me (I’m pretty sure she mistook me for someone else), a lot of the time it felt like being a Fuller Brush salesman, hawking your wares door to door. Brushes you’d made yourself. One split-ended bloody-rooted hair at a time.

The truth is, I love it. Just about every single bit. After a pretty intense diaper decade there is a sense of settling back into myself, with the miscellaneous scattered parts — personally, maternally, creatively, professionally — coming into alignment. I feel incredibly fortunate that all the years of of being the crazywoman writing in the attic have resulted in something I can hold in my hand, and share.

But with the sharing came traveling, time away from the kids and from a household that operated, on the best of days, like a catamaran flying a hull. I created this travel schedule myself, and had anticipated it for forever three months. The bigger trips shimmered on the calendar like tinsel and Easter grass. Why was I so excited? Did I think I was going to shed my momma skin and slip back into the my 20s professional self, the travel and independence, the adult stimulation and striving? The shoes?

But to be honest, I had dreaded it, too. I imagined reading in a Chicago bookstore and receiving a call from a hospital back home. Or almost as bad, a simple text message that I’d failed to call in time before bed, and small people were sad. (Which happened.) My husband was able to come on several trips — my parents gave us babysitting as a Christmas present — which was wonderful. He’s my best supporter and critic, and things are just plain more fun with him around. It reminded me of the early years of marriage, zipping around at the top of our games.

But a funny thing happened once I got home and started doing the regional events this summer: I wanted my kids around, too.

I started feeling this way when some health issues hit my parents and father-in-law, and all three needed surgeries. Home didn’t feel like something that was functioning just fine back there. Home felt like something that needed to be in my back pocket, my tote bag, the train seat beside me.

I adjusted my travel plans, put rollaway beds in small spaces. Reading in New York was more fun with my two oldest along; they were wide-eyed at the hotel mini-bar candy, the Empire State Building, Greenwich Village street vendors, Amtrak’s café. Likewise, on Cape Cod, the highlight of a reading was my dinner date afterward — my four year old so giddy about the high patio over the dunes, that he dropped the ketchup bottle down into them. Ooops.

Back to the launch party, which I’d both hoped and feared would represent a thick yellow line down the middle of my life. Toward the end of the evening, as I sat signing books, my oldest child walked up. My 11 year old, my mature one. He interrupted my conversation with the publisher of a magazine where I’d once worked to hand me his stained napkin and empty kebab stick. “Here, Mom, I can’t find the garbage.”

Here Mom, I can’t find the garbage.

And that — along with the fact that after the party, I was squatting in those vertiginous yellow shoes to change a diaper — perfectly summed up the line of demarcation. Sure, there was stimulation and striving, but mostly, the change to my life was invisible. Because of course there’s no going back to that person in her 20s, and nothing had substantively changed in the watchworks of my daily mamma world. Nor did I want it to. Except every so often, the shoes.

Daring to Care: What fostering animals taught me about parenting

The kids were clamoring for a new pet. A year earlier we’d said goodbye to our dog, and before that, the cat. In between was an unsuccessful series of hermit crabs. When each one crossed that proverbial rainbow bridge in the sand, we’d stood around its tiny hole in the ground and offered a tearful remembrance for little guy who never ever pinched, well, almost never.

The kids now wanted a dog, only I wasn’t up for it. I didn’t feel like going back down the pet road. I kind of didn’t want to go down the anything road. We had five children aged 2-10, and we’d had a few losses in addition to pets that left me feeling less than resilient. So I said no when my husband and kids wanted a giant Leonberger puppy. I said no to the rescue rabbit and chinchilla, no to the turtle, please no to the Christmas hamster. How about fish?

My husband was surprised: So, we’re not going to have pets anymore? But you were the one who raised all those crazy animals as a kid.

There’s a scene in my novel in which a woman sees her children touching baby rabbits in the bushes, and freezes in panic. On the island where they are vacationing there’d once been an outbreak of tularemia, a sometimes-lethal disease carried by rabbits. And though my main character isn’t ordinarily paranoid, it’s the summer following the September 11th attacks, and she’s becoming unhinged in a million small ways.

Writing this fear hadn’t come naturally to me, because I spent much of my childhood loving and raising wild baby animals. Each spring, the wildlife rescue hospital where I volunteered would be inundated with orphaned and injured raccoons and squirrels. Junior staffers would bring them home to bottle feed them, wean them on fruit and dog food and, if we were lucky, keep them alive to be released in a park upstate. It was a formative experience, maybe the most significant one of my teen years.

But I’m not sure how I’d feel if one of my children wanted to do something like that, themselves. This occurred to me recently when my kids were aflutter over a baby bird we found on our driveway, so young it was still mostly bald, and we were trying to find something to do for it. I cupped it up gingerly while the kids dug up a syringe of water, a nest of grass, a worm. A neighbor came outside, visibly stunned to see us doing this. What about avian flu? She asked. I didn’t know. What about avian flu? After we did what we could for the bird, I made the kids wash up like Lady MacBeth.

I don’t have a medical bone in my body beyond the fact that, well, I have bones in my body. I don’t know if various animal and insect-borne diseases are on the rise, or if it just feels that way. But I do know a few things about anxious things: namely, that in the space between knowledge and confusion, paranoia blooms. When bovine spongiform encephalopathy (Mad Cow disease) was discovered in beef several years back, I was all too aware that this disease could lurk in any hamburger, could have migrated from the fields of Britain to Canada and the ranches stateside. For the better part of a year I wouldn’t buy beef for the kids unless, I decided, it was from one of those Canyon Ranchish ranches, the sort that fed their cattle hothouse-sprouted organic grass from fields sprinkled with pixie dust.

I don’t mean to be flippant about the disease, which is terrible — just about my knowledge and obsession, which were tiny and huge, respectively. Once I got it into my head that this was a potential area of danger for my family, I couldn’t ignore it. I’m not a germophobe, and I’ve always had a pretty high threshold for what I do not know and cannot control. But a little knowledge and a little control — well, that’s a dangerous thing. It suggests action is called for. I could have thrown myself into research: the exact fields identified to be infected with BSE and any Americans ever to have set foot there; the best retail outlets for the Canyon Ranchesque beef. But as a busy mother trying to triage her mental energy, I opted for the safe way out: I just said no.

OF MY BABY raccoons and squirrels, only half ever survived, maybe less. I had the worst success rate of the junior staffers because I took the hopeless cases. The babies with a wobbling not-rightness caused by some disease or other, and the ones brought in after dog attacks, their backs split open and writhing with the sorts of things that don’t belong there. I triumphed over the ones that did make it, each raccoon-puppy that ran from the crate toward the woods to (in my mind) the swelling strains of “Born Free.” But each time I’d come home from school and find a furry body lifeless and cool, I’d cry my heart out. Then I’d go out back to the woods behind our house with a large shovel, adding to my sad collection of small animal graves. Someday anthropologists are going to wonder what odd cult flourished in our leafy Connecticut suburb.

In hindsight, I’m surprised my parents agreed to let me do it. Certainly it was a learning experience, even if a tough one. There was teetery organic lesson to be had from each attempt and failure, each foster relationship with its decent odds of heartbreak, and though I didn’t think of it that way, my mother likely did. An acceptance of the cycle of life and the small part we play in it. Loving what’s before us right now needing help, doing the best we can in the moment. Saying yes to something that needs help and taking the risky emotional investment instead of taking the safe way out, with No.

Last summer, a high school friend who works in animal rescue in Brooklyn posted a facebook message: SIX PREEMIE KITTENS! HEALTHY BUT BEING KILLED TMRW ONLY BECAUSE THEY’RE TOO YOUNG TO BE ADOPTED! FOSTER FAMILY NEEDED FOR 3 WKS! Each hapless tiger-tabby baby had its own mug shot.

I still didn’t feel ready for pets, much less high risk ones, but the kids were apoplectic with desire. I told them about the hard work. The syringes of formula and the eyedroppers of medicine, and the stinky whelping box our mudroom would become. I told them that sometimes babies don’t make it. They made a sign for the car window for a drive Brooklyn, “The Great Kitten Rescue!” And I said yes.

When I was editing my manuscript for the umpteenth and final time, going back over those scenes of the mother with rabbit anxiety for emotional truth, I asked my own mother why she let me do it. Why she let me raise all those baby animals that might or might not have had rabies, or ebola virus, or might have left me emotionally paralyzed by the young intensity of nurturing and loss.

She shrugged.

It’s what you did; it was your thing, she said. All I had to do was say yes.