Nancy Freund's Blog, page 3

Quit with Your Calling

Sixth grade, we were lined up at the school salad bar, wondering how much ranch dressing would render the so-called diet lunch no longer low-cal. My friend “Shannon,” (let’s call her Shannon), had recently broken up with her boyfriend and was officially single. She stopped in front of the iceberg and said, I need your advice. Who should I like?

-- Who? Should you like?

Three packets of club crackers shivered in my hand above my plastic lunch tray. Liking a boy, or boys, in priority order, was a choice? A choice one’s best friend could make for one? My world tilted on its axis. I eyeballed the chunks of cut cauliflower.

-- Well, who DO you like? 

-- I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you. 

Here we are now, 35+ years later. I don’t remember which boy won that day’s battle. In Shannon’s case, the boys lined up for her, and she didn’t often get to write a pure priority list anyway, what with all the jostling and manoeuvring among the candidates. But the question stuck.

Fast forward to when I was tutoring for the athletic department at UCLA. Certain star athletes were granted limitless tutoring. One enormous sweet-souled boy could throw his discus to the moon, blindfolded and with his arms duct taped to his chest. He worked hard in the gym and in the classroom, and he took advantage of every hour his tutors offered. One day he brought me a list of essay topics from English Comp.

-- Which one am I interested in?

There was that same question again, this time wearing a mint green tank top to emphasize the biceps. Who -- or this time what -- should I like? I envisioned that cauliflower of old.

-- Well, what DO you like? 

-- I don’t know. Which one will get me the best grade?

I could imagine which topic this young man might want to write, but he would have to do the research. The hours in the library would be his personal long, lonely, arduous slog, and even if I picked right and handed him his topic on a silver platter, would he still find it interesting, long haul, if he hadn’t picked it himself, or more to the point, if it hadn’t somehow called out to him? Me! Pick me! I am calling you, I am of interest, Gender Issues in American Post-Modern Literature! The Role of the Poor to Catalyze Social Change in Serialized British Literature! Point of View – How Perspective Shifts Impact Reader Understanding and Empathy! Pick me, big dude, they all shout. I am your calling.

Traditionally, only one or two people hear a calling, are called by a divine voice to the altar, to lead people who are not similarly called to scripture, to their best lives in a community, to their most fruitful versions of self, and to God.  You can't very well have a whole congregation of called people, or there'd be chaos.  If someone's going to be a leader, he or she needs a follower or two.  Yet today we are all asked to determine our individual calling and pursue it with passion. Live our bliss. In the workplace, at home, in the grocery store, at the pool with our kids and the stay-at-home moms who sell silk flowered pillows from Nepal for a megolith nonprofit.

What if our bliss is watching Soccer A.M. on Saturday mornings or playing Grand Theft Auto whenever possible? Can that be a calling? Can hours spent on Facebook, wishing distant friends happy birthday and liking people’s Throwback Thursday photos be a calling? Can making home-made mac-and-cheese for friends of your children be a calling? Reading great literature? Reading short stories in edgy online litmags and putting poignant comments there in the comments? How about pulling weeds from between your peonies? Doing yoga with your neighbors? Isn’t a calling supposed to be noble, somehow, or at least spiritually uplifting? And isn’t it supposed to call out to you? Surely, it can’t be bought, it can’t be demanded or requested or sought. If you go around yelling for your calling, you’re just going to get back an echo.

So my advice -- go back to Facebook and your video games and enjoy yourself until a calling comes, if it does. Get yourself to your job and grab your paycheck, pay your bills, and do your best to keep the lights on. Take care of business. And by all means, keep liking those Throwback Thursday pictures. Friendship and support and connection all matter hugely, and that stuff counts. Don’t think for a minute it doesn’t. And then, if some clear voice cuts through the noise, pay attention. Turn down the volume now and then, because games and Facebook can be noisy. Quiet yourself to listen when you feel like being quiet, but don’t worry about callings. Even if you live in a disco or near an airport or on a construction site with 72 pneumatic drills, if something or someone’s going to call, they’ll get through. And when they do, pay attention. That’s all anyone ever can do.

 

On the Pointlessness of Seeking One's Calling

Sixth grade, we were lined up at the school salad bar, wondering how much ranch dressing would render the so-called diet lunch no longer low-cal. My friend “Shannon,” (let’s call her Shannon), had recently broken up with her boyfriend and was officially single. She stopped in front of the iceberg and said, I need your advice. Who should I like?

-- Who? Should you like?

Three packets of club crackers shivered in my hand above my plastic lunch tray. Liking a boy, or boys, in priority order, was a choice? A choice one’s best friend could make for one? My world tilted on its axis. I eyeballed the chunks of cut cauliflower.

-- Well, who DO you like? 

-- I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you. 

Here we are now, 35+ years later. I don’t remember which boy won that day’s battle. In Shannon’s case, the boys lined up for her, and she didn’t often get to write a pure priority list anyway, what with all the jostling and manoeuvring among the candidates. But the question stuck.

Fast forward to when I was tutoring for the athletic department at UCLA. Certain star athletes were granted limitless tutoring. One enormous sweet-souled boy could throw his discus to the moon, blindfolded and with his arms duct taped to his chest. He worked hard in the gym and in the classroom, and he took advantage of every hour his tutors offered. One day he brought me a list of essay topics from English Comp.

-- Which one am I interested in?

There was that same question again, this time wearing a mint green tank top to emphasize the biceps. Who -- or this time what -- should I like? I envisioned that cauliflower of old.

-- Well, what DO you like? 

-- I don’t know. Which one will get me the best grade?

I could imagine which topic this young man might want to write, but he would have to do the research. The hours in the library would be his personal long, lonely, arduous slog, and even if I picked right and handed him his topic on a silver platter, would he still find it interesting, long haul, if he hadn’t picked it himself, or more to the point, if it hadn’t somehow called out to him? Me! Pick me! I am calling you, I am of interest, Gender Issues in American Post-Modern Literature! The Role of the Poor to Catalyze Social Change in Serialized British Literature! Point of View – How Perspective Shifts Impact Reader Understanding and Empathy! Pick me, big dude, they all shout. I am your calling.

Traditionally, only one or two people hear a calling, are called by a divine voice to the altar, to lead people who are not similarly called to scripture, to their best lives in a community, to their most fruitful versions of self, and to God.  You can't very well have a whole congregation of called people, or there'd be chaos.  If someone's going to be a leader, he or she needs a follower or two.  Yet today we are all asked to determine our individual calling and pursue it with passion. Live our bliss. In the workplace, at home, in the grocery store, at the pool with our kids and the stay-at-home moms who sell silk flowered pillows from Nepal for a megolith nonprofit.

What if our bliss is watching Soccer A.M. on Saturday mornings or playing Grand Theft Auto whenever possible? Can that be a calling? Can hours spent on Facebook, wishing distant friends happy birthday and liking people’s Throwback Thursday photos be a calling? Can making home-made mac-and-cheese for friends of your children be a calling? Reading great literature? Reading short stories in edgy online litmags and putting poignant comments there in the comments? How about pulling weeds from between your peonies? Doing yoga with your neighbors? Isn’t a calling supposed to be noble, somehow, or at least spiritually uplifting? And isn’t it supposed to call out to you? Surely, it can’t be bought, it can’t be demanded or requested or sought. If you go around yelling for your calling, you’re going to get back an echo.

So my advice -- go back to Facebook and your video games and enjoy yourself until a calling comes, if it does. Get yourself to your job and grab your paycheck, pay your bills, and do your best to keep the lights on. Take care of business. And by all means, keep liking those Throwback Thursday pictures. Friendship and support and connection all matter hugely, and that stuff counts. Don’t think for a minute it doesn’t. And then, if some clear voice cuts through the noise, pay attention. Turn down the volume now and then, because games and Facebook can be noisy. Quiet yourself to listen when you feel like being quiet, but don’t worry about callings. Even if you live in a disco or near an airport or on a construction site with 72 pneumatic drills, if something or someone’s going to call, they’ll get through. And when they do, pay attention. That’s all anyone ever can do.

 

Don't Just Do Something, Stand There

Doe, a deer, a female deer is running circles around my house on the hill in Switzerland. I was in the garage sorting ski gear for summer when this sweet little thing pranced up like it knew where it was going, encountered the closed the security gate, head butted it a couple of times and then started running circles. My big dog and I are now inside, hoping he won’t have to pee, and I won’t get so twitchy I have to go outside for my own stupid reasons. I really want to go outside and investigate.

After a phone call to a friend of a friend, I’ve now taken advice from the Communal Magistrate of Hunting. Stay inside. Open your gates. She probably has a puppy in the field opposite and she will eventually calm herself and go to it. “Puppy” was later confirmed as baby deer... the kind of error that happens once a week when a Swiss person speaks English (or any number of other languages), and once a sentence when I speak French. Bottom line though, Bambi’s mother is in my garden. She is alive! If I play my cards right, she will live!

My Dutch friend Ingrid and I took French lessons together when we both first lived here, and she woke up to find that a deer had perished in her garden. Deer. Chevreuil. She called animal control and said in her own version of perfect French, il y a un veuve morte dans mon jardin. The police arrived at her house in approximately two-and-one-half seconds. Even if you only speak the French of Champagne, you might recognize the veuve from Veuve Cliquot. A widow. The police were evidently relieved to discover that day’s dead deer at Ingrid’s.

But my deer is alive! If she’s still here at 5pm, I start the phone call chain to get the Hunting Magistrate to come. We’ve got four hours. The deer may already be gone now. Maybe not. After watching it fall off a 6-foot wall (directly in front of an open gate) and then jump right back up, I’m thinking it may also have a heart attack and remain here well past 5pm. "Bambi" all over again. The first movie that made me sob. Me and everyone, probably. There’s a lot riding on this goal of mine, to save Bambi’s mother.

But the advice is hard to take. “Don’t just do something, stand there.” The first time I heard this guidance, it stopped me in my tracks -- but only for a nanosecond, because let’s face it, I was in the middle of something, and I’m busy! Not a stand-there type. Not that I’m impatient. I’ve been called even-keeled, careful and methodical, a voice of reason in craziest chaos. But if something needs doing, and it needs doing by me, I need to be making progress toward doing it. Waiting is the most counter-intuitive, uncomfortable thing to do, toward making progress.

I grew up regaled by stories of wise Mr. Penny of the JCPenny Company interviewing candidates for a job, and he would leave a pencil on the floor of his office between the door and his desk. Candidates who saw the pencil upon entry, picked it up, and set it on his desk might be hired. Candidates who did not might not. From the time I was a little girl, I’ve been a pencil seer and pencil picker-upper. I want to usher Bambi’s mother to her safety, to her puppy in the field if indeed one is there.

But deer can have rabies, cute as they are, and my dog is nearly as big as she is, with paws that do asphalt and tile with speed, whereas her little hooves click and sclatter. He knows the terrain, and she does not.  He'd take one look at her and think "I got this." I do not need woman’s best friend chasing down Bambi’s mother only to end up with venison and rabies shots and sobbing. So I am doing my best to stay inside with my doggie. He seems a bit confused as to the enforced bladder control, but otherwise, none the wiser. (He's beautiful but kinda dumb). All good.

And me – I’m writing. This is what I can do. Waiting and writing.   Hopefully in a few hours, I’ll have good news for an update. In French they urge you: “courage,” which looks a lot like the word courage in English, as in, “be brave.” But mostly it seems to mean “be patient.” Maybe it’s a French thing. I’m going to try to be brave and be patient and not do anything to interfere other than hope the chevreuil finds her way home to her pup. Wish me luck.

 

 

Do not hurry, do not rest

Andre Dubus III told me to relax... write this novel right... remember, there’s no hurry. Au contraire, mon frère! Dude’s got to be wrong. Even if he IS Andre Dubus III. I’m an unbearably slow writer. Ten years for Rapeseed. Effort of Will is is now going on seven. Hurry is a relative term.

He also said, and I quote: “I offer you this: Harper Lee.” I get it. Write one good book. One change-the-world novel to put your indelible stamp on literature. I taught To Kill a Mockingbird in LA – my first, floundering year at Whittier High, where Richard Nixon went to school long before kids called the book Tequila Mockingbird. An excruciatingly gratifying professional experience. Believe me, I love Harper Lee. And I love Andre’s point and the split-second invitation to compare myself to Harper Lee. (As if). Write one good book. Don’t rush it.

Do not aim to gain a swamp of pseudo-fans with a bunch of also-ran publications. But times have changed since Tequila Mockingbird -- publishing times I mean -- print-on-demand and digital technology and so much fabulous literacy in the world, everyone you know both reads and writes books, and they blog, and they publish. There’s a lot of stuff out there. You might as well get in the game, rush or no rush. Also, perhaps I’m a swamp creature. Fetid, gloopy mess... I don’t know. The point was about hurrying. I am often distracted, side-tracked, waylaid, but in fact, I am in a hurry! Andre Dubus III!

You know that scene in the movie Airplane where a bunch of passengers line up to “encourage” a nervous woman to relax, each with progressively more encouraging methods? Fists, sticks, brass knuckles, numchucks. Yeah – Andre Dubus III tells me to relax and I want to, I really do, there’s no hurry, ok, check-mark, got that. But the more people tell you to relax, the more you can’t. And this novel I’m writing might be good. There are people I want to be able to read it while they still can. That’s what it comes down to, isn’t it? One’s people? Mine are scattered and drifting away. That’s not a metaphor. I’m in a hurry.

Here’s the deal. In case it wasn’t clear -- I recently met and workshopped my work-in-progress novel, Effort of Will, with National Book Award finalist Andres Dubus III, author of The House of Sand and Fog. I try to mention it often -- often as possible, in case you didn’t know how awesome a writer’s life can be (my writer’s life, in this case), in its glimmering moments. It was in Positano, Italy, in April... olive trees and lemon groves and sun over the Amalfi coast and limitless prosciutto and Prosecco and the most luxurious terracotta tile private balcony imaginable. I was lying out there in the sun with my headphones listening to a song my son put on a playlist before he moved away for school, the lyrics “...drifting away... slowly drifting...” and tears came and wouldn’t stop. That doesn’t happen to me often. I took note. It was the drifting. I’ve been dealing with more than a normal person’s share of that these days, and it got me.

It was the 5-star Le Sirenuse with its outstanding spa. (You get the idea yet, how entirely wonderful this thing was, how fabulous, in turn, I must be?)  Let’s just be sure that’s established. For a week! I met remarkable writers all over the place – Judith Sarah Gelt over breakfast, Sandra Jensen in the sauna. Ten incredible people in my workshop. It was the Sirenland Writers Conference with the aforementioned Andre Dubus III and his gorgeous wife Fontaine and their sons, and Dani Shapiro (Dani Shapiro!!) and her amazing husband screenwriter Michael Maren (whose film about Altzheimers, A Short History of Decay, also got me), their son Jake, and Meg Wolitzer and her tall and brilliant husband Richard Panek who writes with Temple Grandin, and Andre Aciman, Scott Cheshire, and perhaps my favourite person I’ve met in a long time, Hannah Tinti with blue hair and cool boots. But enough about all these famous, fabulous people I met, let’s get back to me, and you know – the big question.

Is there a hurry? Goethe says “Do not hurry, do not rest.” Perfect. But we still face the tricky balance. No writer should put their work out there until and unless it’s ready. You never get a second chance to make a first impression. We’ve removed the gate-keepers, levelled the playing fields, opened up publishing to all-comers, so as indie writers, as new publishers, it’s incumbent on us to produce highly professional work. We hire proofreaders and editors and graphic artists and publicists, yet we remain our own gatekeepers as we usher ourselves through those golden gates. It’s a bit like the agnostic – self-professed atheist, even – who firmly (perhaps secretly) believes in God, or certainly behaves as though they do. A topic for another novel I’m working on, in fact. But I digress. (I warned you, didn’t I? I do digress). Do not hurry, digress if you must, but do not rest.

I was asked by an eager writer at the Geneva Writers Group, couldn’t he just put his book out with a text-only cover? Good God, no. Now I don’t know the content of this man’s book – I know it’s philosophy and serious non-fiction, and I know his studies and his multi-national background and his crazy Einstein hair might give him access to something brilliant... and the way he talks about it, with a brave and soft-spoken insistence, I suspect his book might give readers access to something brilliant. But he has to get the book to readers – bottom line. HE has to get the book to readers. Indie writers usher themselves through the gates, they also have to usher the work to its audience. And usher and usher and keep ushering.

I want to quote my pal Andre Dubus III and tell the man: relax, dammit. Instead I gently say no. Take the time, hire the artist, get the cover that shows your writing in its best light. Luckily there were a handful of writer people at the table with me who jumped in and told him the same. Also, know that your book is not going to sell. At all. Ever. Start with that, and the rest is gravy. It’s not going to win awards, though you’re going to market the book, you’re going to mail it off with fingers crossed and hope in your heart and a deep-seated awareness that the Society of Authors will not even turn the five copies of your book over to look at the back cover before it gets trashed. The Saroyan Prize -- ha!

But we must enter. We write the best books we can write, we hire the best help we can find, we fix and fine-tune and invite feedback every step of the way. We learn to ask for help, often, which is a very hard thing to do for anyone who calls him or herself independent. Speaking of drifting, you’re now floating so far from your own tried-and-true version of self, you will have to simply let go. We learn to gracefully accept help. We fail and learn that lesson again. We’ve got work to do, and people who might read our stuff if they get the chance. Remember what matters, why we’re doing what we do. Every writer has his or her personal reasons. Those reasons, those readers, will help you find and find your own tricky balance.

And now, I should return you to your day... return myself to my projects and plans... make actual progress on my work-in-progress. As you may have suspected, this post (both writing it and reading it) might be a form of procrastinating, but that’s not bad! It’s how one can slow down, think things through, get things right, and not hurry.

 

Blanket Stitches

An apology in advance, because my poetry is obtuse sometimes – so it stands to reason that occasionally, my prose might be obtuse as well. Herein, case in point. You’re going to see an early turn of phrase that might be an unintended inversion. But it’s purposeful. I didn’t realize I’d flipped a common phrase till I had written and sat with it for some time.  We should all write as it comes out, sit with it, and when we can, let it stay.  So I won’t revert and invert now, because it said exactly what I meant  – "needle the thread." Gently nudge the fine cord with the sharp tip of the needle, lift the stitch and push the needle and its trailing thread through the gap. Needle the thread. Not thread the needle.  So now I ask you to read on (should you care to read on) with not just a willing suspension of disbelief, but also an open-mindedness and tolerance for grammatical gymnastics, syntactic shenanigans that might look more like tumbling than than a running-round-off-back-flip.  

Tananarive Due was my cherub-journalist roommate at Northwestern when we were sixteen. It only took me thirty years to needle the thread and lift the stitch, close it nicely. You make progress in your life, move things forward, projects, bullet points on your resume... but you must double back, you must. Lift the loops to catch them tight. Your blanket stitches matter, my love. (I’m talking to myself here, gently, and to you). Keep track. Keep the yellow yarn on track. Slow yourself down and double back to keep your seals shut snug. The folded satin blanket edge. Listen again, thirty years later, to Ten Years Gone, listen to the riffs and Led Zeppelin guitar chords, and you might know the swollen heartstrings that fill you blue and purple and pearly pale. That filled you then. You might know those colors once again as you knew them then.  Lift them, loop them through and keep them tight. Red, metallic red, the sheens that vibrate bold and blood and brave when once again, he sings:

"Do you ever really need somebody, really need ‘em bad? Do you ever really want somebody, yeah something you never had? Do you ever remember me baby? Did it feel so good? Cause it was just the first time, and you knew you would.

To the eyes now sparkle...since you ... ? Taste the love along the way, see your feathers break. Kinda makes me feel so fine, ... go.... we are eagles... "

There you have the scurry- scramble to write the lyrics down that we’ve never really known, the meaning is there, the intention of the lyricist, whether we’re right or not, but we really never knew the words. Eagles? Where’d the eagles come into it? Today we have google and you can read the right lyrics with a click. Don’t, though.

I like what my brain does playing with the words I’ve heard. I like to roll my own dice and make up the game as I go. Eagles!

 

Back to my first roommate Tananarive. She knew me when I wanted something bad. Someone bad. She knew my nightime heart and aching yearns and when I snuck out and in, a head full of conversation, teasing and music and politics on the boys’ floor. She knew it then, knows it still. I trust her silence and her willingness to forget and her blanket stitches, that yellow thread she weaves through her words. She seals her silences, blanket stitches running time. A soft sheen, that satin edge. The whole world remembers everything, the people I’ve met along the way, remember all. In collaboration, we could stitch everything together and the stitches would hold. It would be an endless quilt of experience, real and imagined, remembered and wished-for, wanted, unwanted, it would be things we have purposefully forgotten and wished others would forget and wished we could remember, and things we wished had happened sooner, or later, or somewhere else with someone else, and things we no longer know whether we dreamed or invented... And things we talked about with others, and things that no one ever mentioned. Between us, I imagine, if we could double back and stitch up all the pieces with our gentle blanket stitches, the truth would lay itself down in cotton flannel patterns, beyond memory, beyond words, and knowing it is there would give us comfort.

That's what I wanted to say.  But now  --  eagles!  I know there’s the tiniest chance that you can’t stand not knowing, so here’s what the interwebs deliver...

Through the eyes an' I sparkle, Senses growing keen

Taste your love along the way, See your feathers preen

Kind of makes makes me feel sometimes, Didn't have to grow

We are eagles of one nest, The nest is in our soul

 

Vixen in my dreams, with great surprise to me

Never thought I'd see your face the way it used to be

Oh darlin', oh darlin'

 

I'm never gonna leave you. I never gonna leave

Holdin' on, ten years gone

Ten years gone, holdin' on, ten years gone

 

On Choosing Your Major and Planning Your Future

It's that time of year when the college freshman come home for the summer, the high school grads get excited about leaving for college, and there are a lot of summer conversations about in-between-ness and limbo, and how best to step towards the future.  (Do the limbo toward the future!  Or not).  Anyway, here's my own personal anecdote, for your edification.

I always wanted to be a novelist and started UCLA planning to major in Psycholinguistics.  I wanted psychology to learn what made people tick and I wanted to study language to learn how people communicate with one another.  I bravely made an appointment with the head of Psycholinguistics before the first day of freshman year.  He held up a hand and said, "Let me guess -- you have two questions." (Indeed I did have two questions).  He said, "one, what is psycholiguistics, exactly, and two, what can one do with it?"  I was stunned.  Those were my two questions.  Clearly a psycholinguist could read minds. Great!  But then came the answers... I'd be studying the way the tongue works in the mouth to form sounds more than the way the mind works in the brain to form meaning.  And what to do with it?Answer: Nothing.  Or teach Psycholinguistics.  

Wow.  Burst my newly inflated psycholinguistics bubble, big time.  I still enrolled in an entry level class, just to be sure, but after my 4,000th tongue drawing and learning what bilabial and guttural stops were, I'd had enough. I still wanted to be a novelist, so I kept looking for a way to meet my goal.  I didn't yet know that UCLA's English department offered a nearly secret opportunity for a BA in Creative Writing.

My freshman roommate, a brilliant and creative girl from Orange County, said, it almost doesn't matter what you choose now, it almost doesn't matter what you major in, you will find throughout your life, you'll keep coming back to the thing you truly want to do.  She was applying to the super competitive Design Major -- and she knew even then, that as much as that major would open valuable doors for her, not getting accepted by it would not necessarily prevent her from pursuing a career in design.  Soon enough, I discovered the Creative Writing major and applied, applied again, and I eventually found my way in.  No doubt, it has served me well.  But what has served me REALLY well is that newsflash from my roommate.  You'll keep coming back to that thing you really want. 

How to choose a major?  What do you keep coming back to?  Despite other plans, other programs, other successes, where do you find your curiosity leading you?  What do you hear yourself talking about with people you don't know well?  How do you WISH you could introduce yourself?  If it's as a writer, forget the major, the course of study, all the trappings of being a writer, and just BE A WRITER.  I'm not saying be "out and proud," because there's a time for that, and it may not be now.  But if you might like to be a writer, then for godsakes, WRITE.  Get stuff written.  Squirrel it away... write it backwards or in Spanish or in code.  Write a blog that no one knows is really you.  Email it to a password-protected secret email address and delete it from your hard-drive.  Print it and mail it all to your uncle in Topanga with strict instructions to keep everything in a fire-proof box.  Don't tell anyone, don't show anyone... unless of course you're ready to, in which case, by all means, DO.  But begin doing the thing you love doing, and get some inventory stacking up, so that when the time comes -- and trust me, it WILL come, you'll be ready.  

That's one thing that's true.  The time does come.  Just when you're in the middle of saying, it'll never happen, it happens.  It's never going to happen until it happens.  That's another wise thing my roommate said at the time.

And if you can major in the thing you want most to study, for goodness sake, do it.  Even if they reject you the first time (or two) you apply.  That major is there to serve and to honor and to be served and honored by YOU.   Do not thwart yourself.  You'll be dealt hard knocks throughout life, but this isn't the time for that.  God knows, do not do this to yourself.  Get up and get in there.  If they HAVE finally accepted you, it's because your time has come.  Don't question it, don't sabotage yourself, just get in there and do the work they think you're capable of, and they hope you'll do.  And in the meantime, regardless of major, or school, or job, or time you wish you had to commit to it, JUST WRITE.

On Knowing Yourself and Revealing It

Partly, I write this post because I want to be sure I can easly find and click Dani Shapiro's excellent speech from Arianna Huffington's Thrive event.  I have been reading her writer's guide 'Still Writing: the Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life' and let me tell you, when I finish this thing -- which will NOT be soon, because I'm only allowing myself tiny paragraphs at a time, to make it last -- but when I DO finish it, I'll have to post a review to Youtube that will be so glowing, it's going to light up the night sky.  

People gush about Dani Shapiro and her generosity and intelligence and willingness to be vulnerable on the page and in life and in conversation.  

These are real people I've met and had dinner with -- numerous real people -- quite different in personality and background, in fact.  And I agree with all of them 100 per cent.

I didn't know Dani Shapiro, and I confess I didn't know her writing before I applied to the Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano.  I'd applied before -- unsuccessfully --  and I'd been aware of and then reading One Story for some time, but until I was actually accepted (!) to attend this writers' conference, I had not yet discovered her writing.  (Nor Meg Wolitzer's, who I'll just add was another instructor at Sirenland 2014.  Her novel The Interestings is stunning, and her character Ethan Figman is someone I want in my life forever.  If you haven't read it, run, don't walk!  I DID know 'The House of Sand and Fog' by Andre Dubus III, the third Sirenland 2014 instructor -- my instructor, as it happens, my incredible instructor in the most astonishing, creative, vibrant, supportive, intelligent workshop I've experienced -- and now I know more of his work, including his memoir 'Townie' and his latest novella-short story collection 'Dirty Love.'  Continuing the tangent here though, I just want the blog record to state I am blown away by all three of these writers -- by their writing and by their truly invaluable instruction).  An excellent workshop is worth gold.

But for now, back to Dani.  Knowing the conference was coming up in April, I spent my Christmas holiday listening to her memoir 'Devotion' on Audible.... my first experience with an audio book memoir on the iPhone, in fact.  I was in Florida, walking two miles back from the gym after it closed and it was getting dark, and it was still hot and humid and I was deathly afraid of alligators as usual, and I was wearing fluorescent yellow nylon, super sweaty, (ready to run zig-zag if I had to, and reminding myself that in the end it was a frightened stingray that took Steve Erwin's life, not an alligator), and I was walking on the golf cart path and pissing off golfers because I had on headphones and didn't hear their little electric vehicles approaching -- but I simply could NOT get enough of this woman's story, the difficulties of her upbringing, her parents' incredible long-term spiritual conflict, her own childhood voicelessness -- told through my iPhone in her own beautiful voice.  It was magic.  

The thing is, she's been through some really difficult things, and rather than hide them away, she has found a way to put them out there, and make everyone's difficult things ok. Not ok to talk about, not "fair game for writing," but part of life.  Important to understand. MAYBE I should go so far as to lean toward the word: NORMAL.  It's so much more meaningful, so much more valuable than "guidance for writers," which, in and of itself, can be pretty awesome as well.  But reading 'Devotion' or 'Still Writing' or watching this video featuring Dani Shapiro isn't about writing -- it's about life.  I know mine's better for having found her work.  Hope maybe yours is too.

On Thick and Thin Skin -- inevitable injuries and the beautiful business of books

Having just found a feature in Twitter that allows me to embed a tweet into a website, check this out:

 

21 Things I Wish I'd Known Before I Started Writing: Must-Read Advice for Writers at All Levels | The Review Review http://t.co/Jh55kBZIMM

— Nancy Freund (@nancyfreund) May 7, 2014

 

If I've lost you to the tweet, so be it.  A worthwhile departure.  It's Robin Black's excellent list of 21 things she wishes she knew about writing before diving into the career of it.  I want to pull a quote from nearly every item. But let's cut straight to  #21: 

"Make your skin as thick as you are able to, for your career. Keep it as thin as you can tolerate, for your art." -- Robin Black

Let me add, it's both.  It's your career AND it's your art.  It's your story, and it's your PR.  It's your characters and it's your readers.  It's your plot and structure and metaphor and dialogue, and it's your cover blurbs and writer friends and publicists and the overwhelming decisions of whether or not to go offset in Michigan or print-on-demand, matte laminate or UV-coated or spot-UV or drop caps to start chapters, and whether to sell non-returnable in Europe and why you can't seem to get the databases changed when you want that bookstore in Bern to be able to buy with standard trade discounts and returnability.  And it's days when Amazon has upped your Kindle price with no notice, no reason and no response to requests for information... which might just happen to be the same day you'll get the most astonishing review by a bookblogger who seems to know your writer's soul and who gets exactly what you were trying to do with the novel throughout the ten years you were holed away writing it... remembering all the while that NO ONE asked you to do this.  No one wants you to do this.  No one is paying you to do this wriitng, and God knows there is laundry needing doing, children needing feeding, and so many other things we writers push to the side to honor our need to write.

It's the business of books, and it's the books themselves.  It's both.  Whether you're traditionally published, or legacy published, or big-house published or New York published (all the same thing, really) or university or small (similar but by no means the same) or "indie" a publisher who can sneak into any book business category it chooses, really, or you are "no-longer-stigma-self."  You're going to need that skin -- both thick and thin. You're going to need to write what needs to be written, and rewrite it and rewrite it and rewrite it, till it sits with your readers the way you intended it to sit.  And when you're ready to release it to the world, do so lovingly and with trust.  You're going to be wounded, and your skin never will be thick enough when you need it to be, but you knew that going in.  You read Robin Black's list of 21 things.  You're going to be jealous!  You're going to be genuine! You're going to forget someone in your acknowledgements and be beyond horrified, and you're going to need to cut yourself some slack.

Bottom line: if you need to write, write.  And if you are game for readership, get in the game. There will be injuries -- let me rephrase that -- YOU will be injured.  Damaged.  Wounded.  Hurt by good friends and anonymous readers and the person at the Saroyan Prize who doesn't realize that they really shouldn't start an email with "We are very pleased to tell you..." and then make you click something else and change computers in the middle of the night to finally follow the path down the writer's rabbit hole to the fact that their excellent shortlist does NOT include you.  Injuries are inevitable, playing dangerous games.  And yeah, you mostly sit at a desk,  you're Mr. Cautious, The Original Over-thinker, Madame Observant...but you've also always been a little bit fearless.  Am I right?  Not everyone knows it, but FEARLESS.  Fact.  So get your thick-and-thin skin on, and go for it. SOMEONE'S going to win the Saroyan Prize after all. It might just be you.  

fierce and bewildered

"Push it. Examine all things intensely and relentlessly. Probe and search each object in a piece of art; do not leave it, do not course over it, as if it were understood, but instead follow it down until you see it in the mystery of its own specificity and strength. Giacometti's drawings and paintings show his bewilderment and persistence. If he had not acknowledged his bewilderment, he would not have persisted. A master of drawing, Rico Lebrun, discovered that ''the draftsman must aggress; only by persistent assault will the live image capitulate and give up its secret to an unrelenting line.'' Who but an artist fierce to know - not fierce to seem to know - would suppose that a live image possessed a secret? The artist is willing to give all his or her strength and life to probing with blunt instruments those same secrets no one can describe any way but with the instruments' faint tracks."  

That's Annie Dillard speaking, through Andre Dubus III who quoted this thing pretty much verbatim while I took crazy shorthand, so I could google it later, fill in my many blanks, and try to understand. It's also Annie Dillard speaking (ok, writing) in the New York Times of May 1989.  Her name will take you there.

I googled, I found, I copied it down, and I've now read it repeatedly, and yet, I confess I'm not sure I fully understand.  Concerning MUCH of what Mr. Dubus said at Sirenland -- his own words, or other writers brilliantly quoted -- I fear that I remain unqualified to "get it."  The SAT results long ago would tell you I'm a verifiable genius, and yet I am often standing in the dark corner of a glowing purple room.  Indulge me a sec -- this is a real room I want to tell you about, not just a metaphor. (Not JUST a metaphor!) White cushioned flooring pumped with air, and airpockets line the cushioned walls.  Black lights illuminate neon greens and yellows in a hazy, happy mirage of movement, and there's sweet, crazy music pulsing, and beautiful, energetic American parents in this Swiss place, and bouncing children, knees and arms akimbo, and there are scattered coins to find in there, if I could only enter.  I want so to step into it, to find the instant rhythm and unlock the mystery of it, and leap and bounce around and join the laughter, and -- you know -- dance, dance, baby. Yet I'm immobilized by my own inadequacies, and I remain assigned to, adhered to the dim-lit edge.  

Maybe that's a good thing.  Maybe that means I'm bewildered, like famous Swiss man Giacometti, and maybe my relentless yearning to "get it." means I'm persistent.  Maybe someday I'll be described by some kind-hearted person as fierce.  Fierce to know, not just fierce to seem to know.  On the other hand, maybe it means I'm a dumbshit. Maybe it just means I stood at the doorway to the bouncy-castle room at Planete Jeux when my children were tiny, and I wondered if the little boy who'd lost his two franc coin would ever bounce over to it and pick it up.  Maybe I was only watching from a selfish point of view, collecting metaphors for later.

But here's why I put that Annie Dillard thing down here now... There's an awful of lot brilliant stuff I heard directly or overheard at Sirenland -- the most incredible writers' workshop I've had the pleasure of experiencing.  I want to keep it all, and I want to share it all.  We pick up and take the gems from where we find them -- in my case, even before I fully grasp the concepts or the value of what I've found.  But I remain convinced that by putting the words down and sharing them in covnersation with other writers, other artists, and here, I throw pebbles on the water. Those pebbels are my live images, I guess.  My scattered coins in the psychedelic bouncy-castle room. And when I toss my pebbles, the ripples then expand and spread, and ultimately, ripple back, perhaps delivering new understanding within the tiny waves. 

A River Runs Through It

I'm a reckless blogger, picking up threads where no one was prepared to follow, and today's post will probably prove that.  It's not a blog post so much as it's a huge tweet that won't fit on Twitter, or a Facebook link that doesn't really make any sense over there, but I want access to this piece from The Daily Beast Stacks, pulled from an 1981 Esquire profile myself, long-term, so I'm putting it here.  A beautiful article about Norman Maclean, his writing, his fishing, his logs and trees and bourbon and bears, his Montana. And a word or two on the film industry -- that was interesting too, especially having just heard Michael Maren talk about getting his film A Short History of Decay made last year.  It reminds me to watch the River Runs Through It film again.  And definitely to return once again to the book.

It's also the actual Esquire piece, The Old Man and the River, I want to read a few times first, but even before that, let me throw you a Daily Beast pull-quote on the columnist, Pete Dexter.  

"Dexter came at things from the side, never hitting a story square on the head. His columns were hilarious and odd and often disturbing."

I like to think that's how I write, when it's working.  I like to think occasionally readers might be willing to untangle my own sideways stuff and find meaning.  So the threads are braiding themselves together nicely today... and I like to think one tiny cotton fiber in there is me and my work.

But on to the real thing... If it would fit in Twitter, plus the link to the full Pete Dexter piece, here's the pull-quote I'd want to use, from when Pete Dexter was given Maclean's book by his brother, and despite normally never reading Christmas gift books, this time, he did.

That night I called Tom. “Holy shit,” I said. “Who is this guy?”

“I had him for Shakespeare,” he said.

I said, “The fucker is Shakespeare.”

Don’t tell me literary criticism is a dead art. It turned out Maclean wasn’t Shakespeare, but then Shakespeare wasn’t a forest ranger. Or a fisherman or a logger. He may not even have been a literature teacher at the University of Chicago, but they don’t talk about that there.

Maclean was all of those things, and when he retired from the university at seventy, his two children talked him into writing down some of his stories. A River Runs Through It was published in 1976, when he was seventy-three, and the first 104 pages of that book—the title story—filled holes inside me that had been so long in the making that I’d stopped noticing they were there.

It is a story about Maclean and his brother, Paul, who was beaten to death with a gun butt in 1938. It is about not understanding what you love, about not being able to help. It is the truest story I ever read; it might be the best written. And to this day it won’t leave me alone.

Anyway, if I didn't already lose you to the link up above, that's the point of this thing today.  Go.  Read.  Enjoy.