The Entangled Writer

Reading Kesey

2011-03-07T21:22:00.000-08:00

In these days of Wikileaks, oversharing on Facebook, and one-click answers from Google, library research has been relegated to the purview of yesteryear historians and diehard scholars, and the arrival of a cache of new information is often met with skepticism, or simply a big yawn. So it was somewhat surprising recently to find myself with two writer friends—Miriam Gershow, novelist, The Local News; and Lauren Kessler, author of numerous books of nonfiction—reading historic papers in the hushed atmosphere of the UO’s Special Collections room.

These were, however, not just any papers—they were the work of none other than Ken Kesey. We were searching for excerpts—juicy unpublished Kesey-esque gems—that we could use as part of a performance to raise public awareness of Kesey’s legacy. Within minutes we were in writer-heaven, whispering excitedly to one another, struggling not to be disruptive. Hey, listen! Get this! Let me treat you here to a few nuggets:

At twenty-four, feeling like a failure Kesey itemizes his paltry assets, ending with: “And three hundred and twenty-five first draft pages of pure drivel lying before me in a metal filing contrivance…I’m the laziest bastard that ever drew God’s breath.”

Later, about Sometimes a Great Notion he writes: “It’s a big book. Possibly a damned big book Certainly a remarkable book. Perhaps even a great book. If it fails—and it could, could fail, and still be very close to being a great book—I’ll have still learned a hell of a lot about writing from doing it, enough, I hope, to know better than try something so cumbersome again.”

“highoutofmymind on Peote or however its spelled.”

“Just remember, it isn’t all the drug, it is more that the drug is a key and your mind has a thousand doors most of which are never opened by the ordinary man.”

Kesey wrote and wrote and wrote. The collection contains dozens of books of journals, boxes of letters. Drawings. Poems. Fan letters others wrote to him. He was an avid communicator, and people responded by communicating back to him. Many of the ideas for his novels were explored and cultivated in letters to his friend and frequent correspondent, Ken Babbs. When Kesey wasn’t specifically writing about his fiction, he was tilling the fertile soil of observation from which his novels grew. Some of his letters are typed, but many are written in longhand, his language lush, raw, uncensored, oblivious to the niceties of spelling and grammar, but rich in inventive use of metaphor and syntax. While he is not known as the most prolific of fiction writers, these papers reveal how truly prolific he was.

What stands out above all is Kesey’s nearly super-human energy and his voracious appetite for life. One long handwritten missive to Babbs was done when he was bedridden, with a fever of 102. “The vital life force that sets me so apart from others ebbs slowly from my wasted body.” Vital life force indeed! He wanted to suck life’s proverbial marrow, all of it. “If I can’t live forever then I want an afterlife, I want more not less and my despair is the smoke rising from the fear I can’t have more.”

I never knew Kesey and only saw him once, spotting him and his entourage from high in the bleachers at Mac Court. Now I know what I missed. Reading these primary sources was a visceral experience. The ink and coffee stains, the cross-outs, the misspellings, the scribblings on the backs of envelopes all zinged the man to life. And what a man, a character himself, given to fits of despair and hubris, outpourings of generosity and love, compelled to record as much as he could, a life-guzzling, daredevil of a man who could go head-to-head with any of the fictional characters he wrote, a writer who embraced the seamlessness of life and art.

Long live letters! Long live handwriting! Long live libraries!

The Myth of Fingerprints

2011-01-26T09:46:00.000-08:00

“It was the myth of fingerprints
I’ve seen them all and man
They’re all the same”

from Paul Simon's “The Myth of Fingerprints”

One of my primary tasks these days is reading MFA applications, a Himalayan mountain of them. We have close to 400, possibly more. For six places in the fiction program! Needless to say, the task is daunting, often tiring and boring, and also hugely fascinating.

When you read so much fiction you begin to see trends. There are stories about growing up gay in a Christian family. There are the stories about being an immigrant, about domestic abuse, about drugs and addiction, about love gone wrong. Every once in a while a story startles you with the precision of its language, the words it uses to describe rebellion, or jealousy, or how it feels to be dumped. That is what we look for, the unique fingerprint, and finding it is thrilling, it gets you in the gut.

But the aggregate speaks not to the unique, but to sameness, and the sameness of these expressions sometimes culls up in me a kind of nihilism about the act of writing. What is the point?

On other days, the best days, I’m moved by what these applications reveal about the overwhelming human hunger to testify, to bear witness to our experiences, to share them with others. Some of these students are so committed to the writer’s calling they have given up remunerative careers; they are not just willing but eager to live the impecunious, solitary life of a writer.

Which scares me—and excites me. Because I know from my own experience that the mere act of testifying, joining that chorus of human beings committed to living the examined life, is by itself—whether you’re heard widely or not—deeply satisfying.

p.s. I know I have not been true to my vow to blog more frequently in 2011, but I'm working on it! I really will eventually figure out how to make it a priority!

Why I Blog

2011-01-08T20:57:00.000-08:00

I have been blogging since I returned from Zimbabwe last May, but I have been terribly erratic. This is my first post since early December. As the world slipped quietly into the 21st century’s second decade, I promised myself I would be more consistent.

I first thought of blogging as a way of building my “platform” as a writer, getting my name out there in hopes that more people might buy and read my books. It is now very apparent, and has been for a while, that no one is waiting for my next blog-encased utterance. I am quite sure that some of my posts have been read only by me and by my wonderful proof-reading partner, Paul. Yes, the sad—or could it be happy?—truth is that no one needs this "Entangled Writer" blog.

Nevertheless, something has kept me going, albeit anemically, and as I was posting my last blog I finally understood what it is. I began that post as a rant against sports mania, in particular the Ducks mania that has the entire town of Eugene in a stronghold. I am not a football fan, and I am not a joiner, and I feel entirely outside this ra-ra explosion of team loyalty. But, as I explored this point on paper (yes, I write longhand), I remembered back to a time when I was caught up in sports mania—1986, New York City, the Mets. I loved bonding with so many strangers over stunning plays and repeated victories. I loved the sense of community that existed throughout the city during that period. And as I recalled those days and wrote about that sense of community, my rant began to soften; I lost my sense of indignation and superiority; I changed my opinion, and discovered my more complicated and truer thoughts.

Every day we all have thousands of small perceptions and ruminations that float through our brains. Most of these are fleeting, lost to the myriad distractions of plowing through a day. But when you stick with one of these ideas, when you do not let your mental gaze stray, you begin to see that thing in new ways. Writing is a way of staying focused, of probing an idea (or a story) until you see its concealed underbelly. By blogging I’ve been able to hold on to some of these fleeting thoughts and ask myself: So where does that take me? So what does this mean?

It is a truism in fiction writing circles that writing is a process of discovery, and I have always believed this wholeheartedly. In writing a novel I never know exactly where I’m going at the outset—it often takes getting down a complete draft before I know what the work is about. It is a process that can’t be rushed, has no shortcuts. Gradually the aboutness of the story becomes clear, but not unless you keep your gaze firmly fixed, unless you stay the course.

So that’s why I blog. Staying focused, I learn what I think.

Sports Mania

2010-11-30T10:10:00.000-08:00

I find myself living in a town that has, over the last couple of months, been hyper-afflicted with football frenzy. “Our” football team, that of the local university where I teach—okay, yes, the Ducks—is, at the moment of this writing, #1 in the nation and has been so since the tenth week of the season. Oh, wait, I stand corrected. Someone better informed than I has just told me that the Ducks have now slipped into #2 position, down from #1 by two thousands of a point.

I am not writing about this because I care; I am writing about this because I so deeply do not care.

How can I be so impervious? Even my mother on the East Coast has been impressed by the phenomenon and, on a recent Saturday when she could not get hold of me, assumed I must be at the game. (I was not.)

I could make a case against the amount of money that has been spent to create a winning team, money that could have been spent on other more worthy, cash-strapped programs at the university that serve greater numbers of students. But that is not my point here. My purpose is to explore why it is that I am so unmoved by the frenzy. How, in fact, it turns me off.

I don’t play football and have never understood the appeal of the game. But this isn’t entirely about football. I was equally as impervious when the soccer team of my high school won the Eastern Massachusetts state championship. They took us out of class for pep rallies, and I stood in the courtyard with my arms crossed, knee-socked and shivering in the chilly New England autumn, refusing to participate.

There was one brief period in my life when I was passionate about a sport. It was 1986 when I was living in New York and the Mets were on their way to winning the World Series. There was no escaping the fever. In every business, every taxi cab, every café and restaurant, people listened and watched and clapped and hooted. And I was right there along with everyone, hooting too. I cared. I learned about the game. I developed a crush on the catcher, Gary Carter. What I remember most vividly from that time is the magical intensity that pervaded the city, the ease of bonding with random strangers on the street over the shared love of a game. I felt part of the human family—yes, entangled—in the most wonderful and unexpected way. I wanted that state of jubilance and openness to last.

So what about now? In the course of this writing something has happened to me. I’ve suggested to myself a new approach. I think I can suppress my non-joiner DNA for a bit, if not to cheer, at least to remember the pleasure of rooting for a winning team, and to look more kindly on the cheering of others.

A Broken World

2010-11-03T22:10:00.000-07:00

Last night, while the Democrats were being pummeled, I went to hear Terry Tempest Williams speak. She talked about studying the art of mosaics in Italy, about the complicated communication skills of prairie dogs and of how ruthlessly they’ve been slaughtered, about the burying of the bones of genocide victims in Rwanda and making a memorial for those victims, about the death of her brother. She wove these disparate elements together, discussing both their sadness and beauty.

She spoke with a riveting, straightforward eloquence. Much of the time she was half choked up, though still speaking fluently, and we in the audience were also choked up. She said things we were all silently vowing to remember. “Whatever violence any human being can do, I could also do.” (a paraphrase) “Beauty is not an option, but a strategy for survival.” She encouraged us to have empathy for the lowliest of creatures. She made us feel connected to things larger than whatever we are when we're alone. It was an experience of renewal, like being in church, but so much better.

In the question and answer period a woman asked what she could tell her husband, who is cynical and depressed about the state of the world. Terry Tempest Williams thought for a while. After some silence, she said, “Thank him.” A cryptic response. But then she explained. It’s a natural response, she said, to a bad situation. Who would urge a widow not to grieve for her dead husband? You hope to reach the other side of grief, but you must pass through it. It is healthy and natural, and it informs where you go and what you do next.

It has seemed odd to me—and yes, this is a huge generalization—that Democrats get sad and depressed about the state of the world while Republicans respond to their setbacks with anger and action. And the Democratic response has always seemed somewhat deplorable. But since last night I have a new view. It is a broken world and it is important to see the multitude of ways it is broken, the genocides of people and prairie dogs alike. Bearing witness to these things, naming them, becomes a pathway to then beginning to see the beauty that can be found in brokenness, the beauty that comes from putting broken things together, like a mosaic, in new ways. And we need the beauty; the beauty saves us. "Beauty is not an option, but a strategy for survival."

I am only capturing a small fragment of what she said last night, but I wanted to make sure to get it down now, because I was awed, moved, and I will certainly read her new book, Finding Beauty in a Broken World.

Thank you, Terry.

Vive les Geeks

2010-11-01T11:05:00.000-07:00

Last week we visited our son Ben at college and took him to lunch with some of his friends. He was a live wire of energy. “Mom,” he said as we walked to the restaurant, “I just love vector calculus.” There was not a trace of irony in his delivery. “It makes so much sense,” he said. And he began to explain how useful vector calculus is in predicting, say, the trajectory of a soccer ball.

I listened and tried to understand what I could. I had never thought about vector calculus; I never even studied regular calculus. I was a good math student in high school, but I wasn’t interested in it, and I never took a math class in college because I didn’t have to. So many other things fired me up.

At lunch Ben and his friends drew with chalk on the table, using their serious math skills to graph absurdities. I was entirely out of my element, couldn’t chime in with any comment at all. I could only laugh at the delightful strangeness of having a son who is a geek, who is majoring in physics, who builds race cars, who is deeply committed to martial arts, who loved jumping from a plane last summer to skydive. All that testosterone! All that passion! How different he is from me, and how satisfying that has turned out to be.

Most mornings I awaken thinking about what I will write that day, where a scene has to go, what a character has to do. Sometimes a particular word or phrase, brewing all night, is ready to hit the page. The years have honed my brain to focus and work this way.

There are certain sacrifices I’ve made for honing my skill as a writer; certain ways of thinking I’ve had to let go, mathematical logic being one of them. Some days it seems terribly sad to think that I’ll never be a surgeon (I adored dissection in high school), or a film director (I tried my hand at that for several years), or a politician (thank god). But usually the pleasure of what I have learned to do outweighs regret. I feel driven to write, the activity I have passion for, as well as I can.

And it’s comforting to know my son and his friends are out there feeling equally driven and passionate about such things as vector calculus.

Stalking Jonathan Franzen

2010-10-06T17:37:00.000-07:00

Now that Jonathan Franzen’s glasses have been stolen, it is time for me to make a confession. A few weeks ago, when I was deeply immersed in reading Freedom, I began stalking Jonathan Franzen. Well, I wasn’t breaking any laws to do so. I wasn’t even leaving the house. But I was traveling wherever I could in cyberspace to uncover Franzen facts.

Uncover I did! I learned about his new house in Santa Cruz, about his girlfriend who is writing plays (and might be a teeny-tiny bit jealous of his recent fame). I learned about his life after college in Cambridge Massachusetts where he and his then-wife lived like hermits, writing for eight hours a day, then reading for five, living mainly on rice. I found out that he wrote twenty—or was it thirty?—stories during those years and none of them was ever published. I heard Terry Gross interviewing him and I loved his voice and what he said, and then I saw a YouTube clip and found his attitude disdainful. And, if I’d been willing to pay through Zabasearch I could have found his exact address on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, along with his phone number and e-mail address.

My fascination with these details, none particularly juicy or shocking, surprised me. Embarrassed me really. I knew it wasn’t the charms of the book itself that had spurred me to this dubious and obsessional activity (I enjoyed the read, loved some of it, some of it left me cold), it was the Franzen phenomenon—his sudden catapulting from ordinary writer to celebrity writer, which has included, among other things, his picture being featured on the cover of Time Magazine. I’d always thought I was immune to the allure of celebrities—excepting Meryl Streep :-)--but now I saw so clearly that I am disappointingly susceptible to the fame of another writer. Am I jealous? It feels more like fascination, but I suppose its underpinning might be jealousy. I’d love to have so many people reading my work and talking about it. The money wouldn't be bad either.

I have always thought it was unseemly to want to be famous, that fame is a crass and suspect desire. So I was surprised when the newest issue of The Writer’s Chronicle (a publication of AWP) came in yesterday’s mail and I discovered an interview with Patricia Hampl, an accomplished memoirist, in which she addressed this very issue.

“It’s very difficult for a young person to understand that it’s a good thing to have a feeling of wanting fame or greatness. It isn’t simply ambition in some kind of rapacious way. Keats talked about it, and he, of course, never got to be more than young. It’s all about having the imagination to want to do the best, to want to achieve. In a way, a writer has to want to be famous, has to want that because it’s the only way to say you want to do the best work possible. If there isn’t a reader on the other end, it is rather solipsistic, the whole relationship with art or words.”

What a bold notion. And of course it’s true that writing is somewhat self-centered without a readership to receive the work, but I am still absorbing her statement, wondering if I can fully inhabit—admit to—wanting fame. Well, perhaps. But maybe I’d settle for a somewhat smaller readership if it means I can keep my glasses.

Googling Characters

2010-09-21T09:51:00.000-07:00

I have always taken great pleasure in naming my fictional characters. The act of naming them goes a long way in bringing them to life. In the service of this I have collected several “name your baby” books that I often consult in the process. I look for names that are appropriate to the nationality and ancestry of the character, names whose meanings are in line with the character’s role in the story, names with the right degree of formality or informality, names in the right place on the spectrum of oddity. The name has to be one I can live with for a year, or two, or three. It has to be memorable. Above all, it has to sound right. Emory Bellew. Cadence Miller. Morgan Gyorgy.

Once I’ve named a character she takes up residence in my brain in the same way a friend does. I think about her, want to stay in touch, want to find out what she’s doing and thinking.

I’ve always thought of my characters as entirely unique people, people I’ve birthed with DNA and names all their own. But when I was writing my last novel a story question prompted me to google one of my characters—and I discovered that someone named Audra Vandermeer really is out there. I was stunned. I immediately googled some of my other characters, and it turned out many of them are out there too. Hayden Risley. Renata Dengler. Skylar Stone. These people I thought I invented have counterparts in the real world, people with addresses and phone numbers and lives that are not the ones I’ve imagined for them.

What a thrilling and horrifying discovery. At first I wondered if I was in dangerous territory and should change the names. But then I thought—no. This is the perfect metaphor for what it is to write fiction. I am writing about what’s out there, a big wide educated guess based on my experience and the overall experience of being human, and so I should not be surprised if it turns out to be real, in terms of names, yes, but also in terms of all the difficulties life coughs up, all the annoyances and incongruities, all the grief and losses, all the joys. None of what we writers imagine is exactly new, writing is more a question of synthesizing and reordering the building blocks of human experience to find new shapes and patterns. So it shouldn’t surprise me when there turns out to be a Varney Miller, or an Angus Risley, or a Nelda Stone out there. That is precisely as it should be. Let’s get to know each other.

End of Summer

2010-09-11T07:39:00.000-07:00

When I was in elementary school we were routinely asked in early March to talk about “signs of spring.” We listed them on the blackboard; we were sent out to the playground to find them; we were assigned to assemble Signs of Spring collections at home.

But never, ever, were we asked to list signs of summer’s end. Who would do that to a child—it is too damn sad.

The signs of summer’s end these days—were they always like this?—come shockingly, reprehensibly, early. Newspaper ads in late July (one month into official summer by my reckoning) for end-of-summer sales, back-to-school specials. Bathing suits, which I am just beginning to use, are marked down, along with sandals and sunglasses. No!

Summer’s going too fast, people begin to say by July 15th. Then August descends, the downhill slope. For those who teach or attend school—and by association and proxy for most of the rest of us, parents of kids, friends of teachers, etc.—this is the beginning of the end. My niece started her senior year of high school on August 19th this year; another niece began college later that same week. My son and I have more time—he starts college in late September, the same time I go back to teaching—but still by Labor Day the summer felt done, the precious mentality that characterizes the season had vanished, the just drop by, the come what may, the anything may happen, optimism of summer.

Summer is a time of dreaming and floating, of concocting new ideas and imagining where they might sail. It is a time of existing at the juncture of sensual body—that soaks up the sun, loves to swim, savors berries—and the dreamy mind.

In Oregon, the end of summer is particularly poignant (read, painful) because our summers, divine as they are, are so short. When in May and June summer is surfacing in other regions (it might be hot and humid in New York or Houston), the weather in Oregon is still rainy and cool, still more akin to February than to July. The folk wisdom here is that summer never reliably begins until after the 4th of July. I have found this to be horribly apt and try to schedule visiting my east coast relatives in June, so the gloom does not affect me quite so much. When the rain begins again—as it did this year—on August 30th, still three weeks shy of the official end of summer, there is cause for outrage—or sadness, depending upon your bent. Usually I am a reasonably optimistic person, but I am distinctly glass-half-empty on this issue.

For me the passing of summer—much as I love the sensual gift of fall with its moist sharp air, its array of phenomenal produce—is unremittingly sad. As a writer and professor the summer allows me to inhabit my animal self, to sink from public view (no students, few industry “events”), to daydream and to cull those dreams for my work, to thumb my nose at the angst of the publishing industry. Once fall starts I’m on notice again, looking alert, responding to students, marching in step to what is required of me by academia, and by the “publishing public.” Dreams and daydreams are harder to come by, harder to capture and keep when they do visit. My performative self prevails.

That is all I have to say on this issue. There is no happy ending. I will adjust as I always do, but I am not happy about it. Today is September 11th—yes, a fateful day—and I will do what I can, resisting the culture, to savor, perhaps alone, the remaining days of summer.

Faulkner on Writing a Novel

2010-08-28T15:35:00.001-07:00

"Writing a novel is like trying to knock together a chicken coop in the middle of a hurricane." William Faulkner

How true, true, true. Trying to manage all the disparate parts. Things flying here and there, entering and disappearing without warning, demanding inclusion or deletion. Mind you, I've never tried building a chicken coop, but I have been in a hurricane and I have written novels, and I am know instinctively that this is a very apt metaphor!

[I post this with some trepidation, as I am not sure where or when Faulkner said this, but psychologist Mary Pipher quoted this in her book Letters to a Young Therapist. It was too wonderful for me not to pass on.]

Community

2010-08-26T15:04:00.000-07:00

About ten days ago I returned from one of my very favorites places: the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, an annual writers conference that takes place near Lake Tahoe in California. The physical locale is one of unparalleled beauty—snow-dappled mountains, crisp dry air, everything redolent of sage and evergreen—but it is the strong sense of community which binds me there and takes me back again and again. A community of writers, some published, some close to being published, some just starting out, all of whom are bound by the singular purpose of finding a way to use words to express the ineffable about being alive. For most writers, whose daily lives are relatively hermetic, membership in a community of like-minded people for one intense week is stimulating beyond belief.

I came back inspired as a writer—and also thinking a lot about community. I’ve often mourned aloud the absence of community in contemporary American life. I was keenly aware of this after returning from Zimbabwe where most of the people I met seemed to be cognizant of the rewards of community and ready to make personal sacrifices to strengthen group ties. In the U.S. we move often, we’re perennially busy, we’re constantly distracted, and much of our socializing is not conducted face-to-face; all these things legislate against the slow build of deep community.

But I’ve been thinking, too, about how easy it is to romanticize that which is hard to come by. Participating in groups where everyone holds the same beliefs and values can be restrictive, even oppressive. Religious groups, work groups, family groups. Don’t we all reach a point in adolescence where the family “community” begins to feel intolerable? We cannot bear any more to move in lockstep with parents and siblings; we need to assert our differences, branch out, move on independently.

For me this pattern of joining a group, surviving happily for a while, then feeling a need to resist, branch out, move on, has played itself out throughout my adulthood. Perhaps I was not born to be a joiner. Perhaps it is the nature of most writers to be hesitant to align with others—and more, perhaps it is necessary for writers to remain independent and non-partisan, in order to preserve the stance of the observer.

This makes me all the more grateful to have a place to go where, at least for a week I can revel unreservedly in the vibrant community I find there.

Controlling the World

2010-08-05T10:36:00.000-07:00

A couple of months ago I heard a Terry Gross interview with Judith Shulevitz, whose book The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time, discusses the history of the Sabbath and her own attempts to observe it within the context of a busy two-child, two-career family life. The Talmud forbids thirty-nine categories of activity on the Sabbath, including such things as baking, plowing, shearing; updated prohibitions forbid driving and urge limiting the use of electricity—and, of course, electronics.

Gross asked how it is possible to observe such prohibitions for an entire day with two kids, and Shulevitch admitted that her family has made compromises; they do drive for family outings, they do turn on lights, but they preserve some deep spirit of the Sabbath by spending time together as a family, and limiting both television and computer. The central purpose of the prohibitions, Shulevitch said, is to help human beings understand that they do not control the world. “For one day a week you let the world be as it is, and you be in it and try not to dominate it.”

This idea has gotten under my skin and been needling me ever since. What do I do these days that isn’t about trying to control—or perhaps I would say cajole—the world into doing my bidding? Listen to me; agree with me; hire me; pay me, cut me a break; love me, admire me, forgive me, entertain me, give me some space and time to write, read my books. It exhausts me to enumerate all this striving, the hutzpah, the me-centeredness that suffuses the activities of my day. It is a full-time job whipping this world into shape!

What great appeal resides in the idea of letting go for a full day each week, even for a few hours. To forget the striving! To hide the To Do list! To think about simply being!
(This concept is not the exclusive purview of Judaism; it is found in Buddhism and in branches of Christianity.)

But how can I let go without an entire culture to support me? Can I imagine setting aside a full day a week to honor this idea? Probably not—no, definitely not. What about a few hours once a week? Maybe an hour a day? Even a self-proclaimed hour a day is difficult, ignoring the phone, averting one’s gaze from that self-regenerating list.

But thanks to Shulevitz, I can sometimes get to this state of will-lessness for a few minutes at a time. I close my eyes, breathe as slowly and deeply as I can, and for a moment I seem to step out of time, feeling—even with dinner heating in the oven, lights blazing, my computer humming with urgent messages—that the world will happily go on without me.

(Pictured are two of my nieces who excel at letting go.)

Negative Capability

2010-07-27T13:08:00.000-07:00

Since I began this blog sometime in May, I have been working on a new novel—well, I am always at work on a new novel, but I thought it was high time I mentioned this particular one—called Spuyten Duyvil. The title is taken from a place just north of Manhattan, a part of Riverdale named after the Spuyten Duyvil Creek, the creek running from the Hudson to the Harlem River. In the early days of Manhattan, before the creek was altered to facilitate boat passage, its strong currents made crossing difficult. Hence the Dutch settlers called it Spuyten Duyvil which means —depending on your source—“spinning devil” or “to spite the devil.” The novel is so-called because my narrator has just moved—retreated—from Manhattan to Spuyten Duyvil.

As usual, the particular challenges of this new novel make it feel as if I have never written a novel before; in a sense that is true, as every novel poses its own unique set of challenges. One of the adventures of this novel is that it is the first time I am using a first person narrator. I have written first person stories before, but never a first person novel. I have long been aware of the hidden difficulties of writing in the first person and have several times taught a course called "First Person Narratives" in which I've spent a considerable amount of time warning students of these landmines!

The other more immediately pressing challenge is that I have created, in the first twenty to thirty pages, a huge inventory (I credit Ron Carlson for that oh-so-useful terminology), meaning there are many elements that might be expanded, and some are already competing for supremacy. How will they weave together? What is the spine that unites them? Which of them will fall by the wayside?

There is no way of rushing to the answers to these questions which still, over a hundred pages into the book, remain unanswered. The answers reveal themselves slowly, over days, weeks, months. I must trust my unconscious to serve me, suspend judgment, forestall the urge to draw facile conclusions. In short, I must dwell in the state Keats called negative capability.

“I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Keats

It is a difficult place to reside and yet, it is the condition under which we all live—not only writers, all of us. We never know for certain what life might deliver, a disturbing fact certainly, but also the very thing that makes life interesting.

As I struggle with the uncertainty of this novel’s destination, I try—in my best moments—to revel in the mystery, the discoveries along the way, the slow emergence of a narrative that coheres without falsely resolving things. Much of the time it is akin to swimming Spuyten Duyvil Creek.

When a Stranger Says WE

2010-07-16T11:33:00.000-07:00

It has become my habit, as summer deepens, to exercise early in the morning when it is still cool. I head up the hill behind our house which, at its peak, offers a spectacular view out to the coastal range. On my way up I usually pass a woman who follows the same route at approximately the same time, in reverse. We exchange pleasantries—Nice weather…Stay cool…etc.—but we don’t stop moving.

A house is being built halfway up the hill. The owner was outside this morning and the woman stopped to ask him when he’d be moving in. I paused to hear his answer. The woman nodded across the street to me. “We pass each other every day,” she explained to the man.

Emotion plumed in me at her use of the word “we.” It delighted me. It pointed to the thing we have in common. She could have said, “I pass her every day,” reinforcing our separateness, but by using the word “we” she had brought us into a kind of relationship.

Through much of the rest of my walk I contemplated this interesting emotional shift wrought by a simple word choice. I thought about prefacing a comment to a stranger with other pronouns. You must…You should…You look…You are…You can…You can’t. Every “you” sentence I thought of that might be directed at a stranger seemed confrontational. What about “I” statements? I notice…I think…I want…I feel. These too, seemed intrusive, coming from an assumption that the listener should care about the speaker.

But “we” is a friendly pronoun for the way it assumes connection and equality. (I am sure this is debatable, so please dispute this if you see things differently!)

On the return leg of this morning’s walk the woman walker—whose name I do not know—and I passed each other again. This time we stopped to talk. We chatted about the horrific road construction at the bottom of the hill. We laughed. And when we went on our way I thought: We are a we, newly connected. One might say entangled.

Vacation!

2010-06-27T19:55:00.000-07:00

Dear Entangled Writer Readers,

I am going on vacation for the next two weeks, so do not expect another posting until mid July (yes, I know you're all waiting with baited breath :-)).

Who knows what will be on my mind then, but I expect to be heavily entangled throughout the two weeks (old haunts back east, family, etc.).

Meanwhile, wallow in summer...

David Foster Wallace's Words

2010-06-25T20:36:00.000-07:00

It is not uncommon for me, in the course of writing a novel, to find myself gravitating to one word which I use unwittingly over and over. Skud. Cleave. Oneiric. Certain words, at certain times in my life, hold an irresistible appeal. I like the sound and look of them. I like saying them aloud.

I suspect that a love of words—individual words, as well as words combined in sentences and paragraphs and ultimately, stories—was the driving factor that made me become a writer. In junior high I set out to read the dictionary (I never finished it); in high school I wrote poetry that was often an effort to deploy a particular word; for years I have kept a series of chaotic notebooks in which I make notes about words I love and want to remember to use. My partner and I keep a list of various words that turn out to have meanings that are opposite, words such as cleave, which means both to split apart and to adhere closely.

So I was thrilled when I learned that Slate.com had published a list of words David Foster Wallace had circled in his dictionary. I can think of few writers with the linguistic virtuosity of Wallace, so it did not surprise me at all that he had studied the dictionary closely. I downloaded and printed the list, feeling like an acolyte on the road to enlightenment.

To my surprise most (or at least many) of his circled words do not excite me. They don’t have the heat and energy I seek in a good word. They don’t deliver a direct onomatopoetic punch. Many of the words on his list are Latinate words that speak more to the intellect than to the gut: appoggiatura, condonation, metagenesis. I tend to be drawn to the gutsier words originating in Anglo-Saxon roots. When I first saw his list I struggled with disappointment. I wanted ALL of his words to delight me. Why didn’t they?

I don’t want to put too fine a point on it: I certainly use my share of Latinate words, and his list contains many words that seem to be non-Latinate in origin (the English language has many tributaries). Consider for example (on his list):

skirl—verb, to play the bagpipe or the sound of the bagpipe

strickle—noun, a straightedge for sweeping off heaped-up grain to level of the rim of a measure, or an implement for sharpening scythes

moke—noun, slang for a donkey, a poor-looking horse, or a disparaging term for a black person

spavin—noun, a disease of the hock joint of horses
[NB: I am abbreviating these definitions hugely.] These words delight me on the basis of sound, but I can’t easily imagine using them.

Which brings me to meaning. What pleases me most is not only the sound and look of certain words, but also the happy convergence of powerful sound in a word that is highly utilitarian. Think of the following words:

swoon—a verb, to loose consciousness or enter a state of ecstasy, also a noun
caviling—verb, to raise trivial objections, also a noun
sessile—adjective, from biology, permanently attached, not freely moving

All of these words fit my criteria for being wonderful words. Not only do they sound good to my ear and on my tongue, they are also words I can put to use.

Periodically I teach a class called Deconstructing Style. One of the things I ask the students to do is bring in ten words each week that interest them, along with definitions and etymologies. They can be words the students do or don’t know, but they must be words that interest them. The lists are always hugely varied. Some students are drawn to archaic or occult words, others are drawn to the quotidian.

It strikes me that this is as it should be. DFW and I should not necessarily be fascinated by the same words, any more than my students should be. We want to keep this gallimaufry of words—with all their diverse etymologies and riveting sounds and suggestive associations—circulating. We want the English language to keep surprising us, and entertaining us, and pleasing us—and sending us back to the dictionary again and again.

Thank you, David Foster Wallace. I hope you know that you are a writer with whom I feel entangled.

The Habit of Art

2010-06-17T16:53:00.000-07:00

I have been writing for more years than I like to tally; as a child and teenager I wrote poetry, as a young woman I wrote plays and screenplays, and now in middle-age I write fiction. Early on I realized that if the writing was going to happen I needed to make room for it, room meaning not space but time (though space is important too). It takes a long time to train the various parts of the brain to work in concert—the frontal lobe with its nuanced command of language, the hippocampus with its congeries of memory, the amygdala with its strong passions—and eventually to serve up that unique brew a writer seeks. Writing is biological and muscular—akin to athletics in many ways—and habit encourages better instincts, better reflexes, better overall functioning. In my twenties I developed fairly reliable writing habits or, what Alan Bennett in his play about W.H. Auden calls “the habit of art” (which is the play’s title). I learned to write daily, and I learned to seclude myself in the early morning when my creative imagination is most active. This has served me well, in the sense that I have been able to keep writing, honing my craft, producing work which is (hopefully) better and better.

But recently, just after I returned from Zimbabwe, my habit failed me. I had embarked on a new novel earlier this year and had set it aside while I was away. Coming back to it was unexpectedly difficult. I could not re-immerse myself. This had never happened before, or not in this particular way, for so many days on end. I was putting words on paper, but they were not the right words. My sentences held no music. Nothing flowed. The premise seemed possibly stupid, the characters flat. I was second guessing everything I had done so far, everything I was thinking about doing. It was like being struck with a sudden awareness of the apparatus of breathing which makes it almost impossible to breathe smoothly. I was nervous, distracted. I couldn’t sit still. I became hyper-aware of the publishing marketplace, what was and wasn’t selling. I began to use Twitter, but Twitter drove me even more crazy. I felt like the dateless girl at the prom, flat-footed, flat-chested, clueless, conspicuously out of it. I considered therapy. I considered trying to stop writing. I thought how great it would be to unshackle myself from having to mine my imagination and memories, from having to put together rhythmic sentences, from having to produce pages, lots of them, that added up to something that would stimulate and move people. I started looking longingly at the jobs other people did. Wouldn’t it be lovely, I thought, to have a gardening business, something physical and comfortingly repetitive. What about being a baker, or a chef? A bartender, or a waitress?

Some writers do stop writing, I suppose, but it seems to me that most don’t. We can’t stop; we’re addicted to something about the act of writing, to the way it rewards us when it’s going well. Most of us keep returning, for better or worse, to wrestle words onto the page.

A couple of months ago I read a New York Times article about the recent resurgence of psychiatrists using hallucinogens to treat conditions such as depression. One man (a psychologist, I believe) was suffering from depression following his treatment for cancer. He went through a supervised hallucinogenic “trip” from which he emerged profoundly transformed. His anxiety fell away. The experience, he said, taught him in a deep bodily way that his worry was unnecessary, that all he had to do was “show up and be open.” That phrase stuck with me. So simple. So seemingly right. Could this be the solution to my writing problem?

The showing up I could do, I had been doing, more or less. But the being open was trickier to put into practice. How could I force myself to be open? I thought of the advice I give to my students. Do not answer the phone. Do not check e-mail, Facebook, Twitter. Don’t leave the room. Pull the blinds. Lock the door. Ignore the doorbell. Breathe deeply. Let your mind to wander. No one is watching. No one needs you. Play.

And sure enough, back it came, little by little, the habit of art.

Humility

2010-06-09T22:25:00.000-07:00

A month ago I returned from a trip to Zimbabwe. I was visiting an amazing young woman, Jennifer Kyker, an ethnomusicologist who has been visiting Zimbabwe for the past fifteen years (since she was fifteen) and has started a nonprofit organization called Tariro, whose mission is to keep orphaned teenage girls in school. She asked me if I would hold a writing workshop for some of the Tariro girls, and I agreed, excited by the idea. But when I began to think about what I might actually teach them in a single two- or three-hour session, I was stymied.

These girls speak English as a second language; they are orphans (mostly due to AIDS); some of them live in huts without water or electricity. They rely on Tariro to pay their school fees, buy their uniforms and texts. Without Tariro it is unlikely they would attend school. In short, these girls are nothing like me, nor like the students I teach at the University of Oregon. I thought long and hard about what I had to offer them and whether I had anything worthwhile to offer them at all.

But I had agreed, and the time came, and there we were, seven Zimbabwean teenagers and me. They are timid girls, on the whole, and I already knew that getting them to speak might be a challenge.

I had made up a “lesson plan” focusing on how to get character onto the page, thinking this might be useful no matter what they were writing. And so we began to talk about how we learn about the people we meet in life, deducing things from speech, from behavior, from appearance. They took an interest and began to talk.

“What can you tell about me from the way I dress?” I asked, urging them to be as candid and specific as possible.
“You are humble,” said Lillian
I laughed. I was wearing dark clothes, no adornments, my hair was pulled back. I suppose I did look humble. Still, the word surprised me.

After our discussion the girls wrote and read aloud their work (you can find their pieces on the blog at http://www.tariro.org/).

Later, I shared Lillian’s comment with Jennifer and the program manager, Fadzi, who is from Zimbabwe. I was slightly embarrassed to report that they’d called me humble. But it turns out, according to Fadzi and Jennifer, that humility, or humbleness, is a prized quality in Zimbabwean culture. This is a culture that values community. To be humble means you think about others, you fit in, you’re a team player. Jennifer and Fadzi said that the word humble is often used in recommendations from teachers.

I cannot imagine using such a word to recommend one of my students unless it was as a postscript to extremely lavish praise. I might praise a student’s drive or ambition or initiative, but to describe a student as humble would seem to be a way of sidelining her, of saying she wasn’t a player.

I would like to step out of my American-ness in this regard. I would like to be able to place humility in higher regard. There are too many individuals stridently hawking themselves in this country: Listen to me! Admire me! Buy my product! My partner, Paul, has written a play called I Hear America Barking which addresses this subject wonderfully.

Arrogance, braggadocio, self-promotion—all of these I find to be objectionable, and yet they are critical keys to survival in our culture. And so I find myself straddling some fence, toeing some line—or trying to—between driven and humble.

Joining the human race

2010-06-01T21:45:00.000-07:00

I can identify the exact moment when I became a card-carrying member of the human race, the moment when I understood that the 99.5% (or 99.9% depending on the study you look at) of genetic material I share with most people is vastly more important than the .5% (or .1%) that I might not share.

We were in the birthing room of a Denver hospital—my husband, Richard; our newborn son, Benjamin; his birthmother, Karla; his birth grandmother, Mickie. We took turns holding this five-and-a-half-pound baby, born six weeks early but nevertheless in perfect health. After the anxiety of a premature birth, we were all nearly speechless with relief, with his beauty, with the wonder and exhaustion of childbirth, with the fact that we really were going to go through with this exchange. Karla would exit the hospital without the baby she’d just birthed. Richard and I would take Baby Ben back to California, vowing to raise him as well as we could.

At the moment of Ben’s birth Richard and I had known Karla and Mickie for only three months, and those months were like a courtship. We shared family photos, medical information, confidences. We fell in love. While it was always intended to be an “open” adoption (we had met the birthfather too), we had no idea we would like each other so much and that we would visit each other regularly in the years that followed.

I am thinking of all this because my son will be graduating from high school in less than a week. His birth family will be coming to celebrate the occasion. Not just Mickie and Karla and their respective spouses, but Karla’s father and his wife, and Karla’s father’s sister and her husband. Our extended family. We will all lavish attention and praise on the beautiful bright boy (give me a break—I brag for all of us!) who brought us together. I am sure I will cry—we will all cry?— with joy and amazement.

There is so much more to say on this subject, but I fear I might sink into sentimentality. Now I will simply say that, thinking back to the day of his birth, I suspect my entanglement with the idea of entanglement really began back then.

BABIES

2010-05-27T14:54:00.000-07:00

Last week I went with my partner—okay, “husband” according to Facebook, but that is a socially constructed falsehood; we aren’t really, in the eyes of the “law” married—to see the movie BABIES. My partner and I do not have a child together, and it is *highly* unlikely that we ever will, but we both adore babies, so going to see BABIES was a way to indulge ourselves in the fantasy of a shared baby.

OMG—the movie made me fall in love with the human race again. The babies—one Namibian, one Mongolian, one Japanese, one American—are all unique individuals, and I can’t imagine even the most curmudgeonly not enjoying the chance to observe these little human beings. In the wonderful lingering close-ups you can see the apparatus of the babies’ minds as they make connections and begin to understand how things in their worlds work. Their reactions are, as you would expect, completely unguarded. While we see a little of the parents, the primary focus of the film is decidedly on the babies themselves. Often hazardous things are happening, and you begin to wonder where the adults are. It is particularly harrowing to watch the little Mongolian baby trying to get down from an upside-down barrel. He is wearing only a shirt, no pants, and you can’t help but worry that he might crush his little weenie. Just as he makes it down, a herd of cattle comes rushing toward him and, panicked as they surround him, he tries desperately to get back up on the barrel.

This is true anthropological/ethnographic filmmaking, as observant and “neutral” as it is possible for any human being to be. Whoever it is behind the camera does not judge what is happening, nor make any attempt to rescue the babies. Not when the little Mongolian is being stampeded, not when the Namibian siblings come to blows, not when the Japanese baby throws a tantrum, or when the U.S. baby is taking a shit. The camera simply watches, unswerving, mute, unresponsive.

And yet, the camera is there. In fact we can surmise that there was probably more than one filmmaker in attendance. And so—I can’t help returning to quantum physics again, the idea of “observer effect,” the way in which the presence of the observer affects that which is being observed.

From a strictly filmmaking perspective I have seen this before. I worked as a film editor on a documentary called Family Business. It was part of the 6-film Middletown Film Series, a PBS documentary series produced by Peter Davis. Family Business was about a family who owned a Shakey’s Pizza franchise in Muncie, Indiana. There were seven kids in the family and six of them worked in the restaurant along with the mother and father. The father played the banjo in the restaurant, and all the kids had big performer personalities. As our film crew took up residence, filming for several weeks, the family became extremely lively (histrionic?). They didn’t shrink from the camera’s attention, even when they were going through extreme financial trouble and family discord. It made for a very interesting film. Who knows how much the film crew’s presence incited that interest and changed the outcomes in that family. It can’t be parsed.

Lynne McTaggart says: “Cocreation and influence may be a basic, inherent property of life. Our observation of every component in our world may help to determine its final state, suggesting that we are likely to be influencing every large thing we see around us. When we enter a crowded room, when we engage with our partners and children, when we gaze up at the sky, we may be creating and even influencing at every moment.”

I can’t decide if this is wonderful or terrible. Food for thought, but it doesn’t change the way I feel about BABIES. Observe them. Love them! Watch below.

Look for upcoming posts on: Teaching a Writing Workshop in Zimbabwe, Humility, and Entanglement with My Son.

Reading in a Foreign Country

2010-05-21T19:41:00.000-07:00

I am recently back from a trip to Zimbabwe where I went to visit a friend and learn about her non-profit organization, Tariro, that helps keep teenage girls in school. It was my first trip to Africa, and as I was packing I became somewhat—okay, very—preoccupied with protecting my body against the potential assaults of opportunistic microbes. I visited a travel doctor, got myself heavily inoculated, purchased a water purifying wand, filled dozens of Zip-lock bags with home remedies. You get the picture. In the midst of all that body-protecting obsession, I paid little attention to what I would read! At the last minute I grabbed three paperbacks in my “To Read” stack and headed out.

On the marathon seventeen-hour plane trip from Atlanta to Johannesburg, I read Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. Fine, no problem there, I was still in a U.S. (European?) frame of mind. But once on the ground in Zimbabwe, I found myself reading—late at night when my young friend released me—Lisa Genova’s powerful novel, Still Alice, about a fifty-year-old Harvard professor who is diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s. It would have been a disconcerting read anywhere, but it seemed a downright strange reading choice to pick up after a day of traveling on pot-hole-ridden streets to a rural township where the girls we visited live without running water, plumbing, or electricity. I considered holding off on finishing the book until returning to the U.S. but I kept on, partly because the book held my attention and partly because it served as a kind of escape from the poverty I was seeing.

When I finished that book I moved on to Jennifer Gilmore’s Golden Country, a novel about Jewish immigrants in the U.S. in the early twentieth century. A lovely novel, full of wit and wisdom and quirky characters. But again, I was reading about a world so removed from my immediate surroundings that I kept asking myself why I was reading this book, now, here.

Which of course raises larger questions: How do we ever choose to read what we read? What informs these choices? (Is there a should?) Do we read to have our own sense of the world confirmed, or challenged? Is reading an activity that should stabilize us, or destabilize us? Or both?

I began thinking about the Zimbabwean authors I might have been reading? I wish I’d researched them before I went. Only when I got home did I remember Alexandra Fuller’s wonderful memoir Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, much of which takes place in Zimbabwe (the former Rhodesia). If I’d thought about it I would definitely have brought that book which is remarkable for its voice and honesty. Also, Zimbabwean Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel Nervous Conditions.

I can’t help but wonder how my own writing might be read in Zimbabwe. With its focus on such U.S. preoccupations as dysfunctional families, school violence, transgender identity, would it make any sense?

I’m raising questions here for which I don’t have answers. I know that what I read in Zimbabwe engaged me, despite the discordance between subject and place. Maybe that’s all that matters…I invite your responses.

Why Entangled?

2010-05-11T20:43:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the inaugural posting of THE ENTANGLED WRITER blog...

Who am I? Why entangled?

"It's possible to link together two quantum particles ... in a special way that makes them effectively two parts of the same entity. You can then separate them as far as you like, and a change in one is instantly reflected in the other."
—Paul Comstock, author of The Strange World of Quantum Entanglement.

Here is my limited understanding of entanglement: once two entities have interacted then they retain forever an imprint, or memory, of each other.

I am a novelist, not a scientist, but when I learned about entanglement theory a couple of years ago (from reading The Intention Experiment, by Lynne McTaggart), I realized that it was/is the perfect analogy for the focus of my work as a writer.
The high school friend who dissed you behind your back, but you heard about it and can't forget it.
The co-worker who you enjoyed so much but hardly knew and who has now moved to Australia and you wonder if you should friend her on Facebook.
The lover you jilted and feel guilty about.
The ex-husband who haunts your dreams.
The grocery store clerk who felt sorry for you one day and gave you free chocolate, and you still feel beholden although it was two years ago.

All these invisible but continuing relationships! All these ineradicable connections! All this lasting (if unacknowledged) impact on your mind, and ulimately, your cells! This is the stuff of fiction—or at least my fiction.

And then there is the day-to-day. Who of us is not entangled, enmeshed, engaged, entwined in too many relationships and commitments?! Such is modern life. Entangled.

"Although there is a real connection between two entangled particles, we don't know what the information is that it's going to seek." Paul Comstock

That's where fiction comes in—the uncertainty, the speculation.

So, welcome to this ride. It is my intention to post no less than once a week (hopefully at least twice). It is my intention to discuss the ways my lived life and writing life are entwined/entangled.

See you soon,
Cai

caiemmons.com