Flies, Fairy Tales, and Shakespeare

Somebody left the screen door open, and now our house is overrun with flies. I keep killing them with fat insurance envelopes and a TCF Bank flyer printed on sturdy coated stock. I wish I had a fly swatter, but thank gooodness we still live in a world where there's junk mail.

C. Peevie has killed a few flies also, and likes to brag about it. 

He walked out of the bathroom and said, "I just killed another fly."

"Me too," I said. "I added three more notches to my belt this morning."

"You put the notches on your belt?" he asked. "I put them on my knife." I pictured him throwing a Bowie knife and pinning flies to the wall, their tiny legs flailing. 

He is apparently unfamiliar with the Grimm fairy tale, The Brave Little Tailor--so I sent him the link.

"Read it," I told him. "Clearly, your education has been sadly neglected."

"OK," he said. 

We both know he won't. You might want to re-read this clever story, however. It's more entertaining than I remembered.

The flies, however, who understood no German, would not be turned away. 

When he drew it away, and counted, there lay before him no fewer than seven, dead and with their legs stretched out.

His heart wagged with joy like a lamb's tail.

I could go on--but I'll just let you read it for yourself.

There are good reasons to read fairy tales even beyond the fact that they're entertaining.  Albert Einstein is questionably credited with saying, "If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales."

Whether he actually said those words or not, the essence of the quote -- that developing the imagination is key to an educated mind -- correlates with his belief that "imagination is more important than knowledge." Others have extolled the value of the imagination for learning, success, and life as well. 

Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things that escape those who dream only at night. --Edgar Allan Poe

Imagination rules the world! --Napoleon Bonaparte

You can find dozens of pages of quotes on BrainyQuotes, ThinkExist, and similar sites--but the chain of proper attribution on these sites unreliably begins and ends at "I read it on the Internet!"

I don't know how I got from a fly infestation to Shakespeare, but I leave you with these words from Theseus in A Midsummer Night's Dream:


Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, 
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt;
The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heavne to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name. 

Unabashed: Five Shopping Days to Go

My birthday is a day when I unabashedly receive all sorts of love and attention and presents from my minions, as well as from my friends and family.

Actually, now that I think about it, I'm unabashed about receiving love and attention and presents every day of the year. But especially so on my birthday, and during my birth-week and birth-month.

Aidan in costume. Can you guess who he is?

Last year was the first year since 2008 that I did not post a birthday wish list. I only wanted one thing last year. I still want Aidan back. But now, after spending a year and a half figuring out how to put one foot in front of the other--which is essentially what grief is--I have found that I can find moments here and there of peace and joy and contentment, even while my heart is broken.

So, with no further ado, and with a mere five shopping days to go, here's my 2014 birthday wish list:

1. Say Aidan's name to me. This is very simple. You don't have to have a script. I was texting my friend Soap about some assorted topics, and then suddenly I get a text from her that just read "Aidan today." I texted back "Aidan today what?", and she said, "I am thinking about him and wanted to say his name to you." I loved this. 

2. The recovery of the 200+ Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapped by terrorists more than a month ago. I just heard that they've been located.

3. Diet Coke. I know, I know--it's bad for me. So is pollution, but I'm still gonna breathe.

4. A hanging flower pot for the backyard. It doesn't have to be this elaborate.

5. An agent or publisher for my almost-finished novel.

6. Good Lord Bird by James McBride. I despise and eschew our selfie culture, but I took a selfie anyway with my friend The Generous Listener (TGL) at #FFWgr because James McBride was signing autographs in the background. His book sounds like a delightful and completely new take on the John Brown story.

OK, that'll do it for this year. Happy shopping!

[Update: Apparently James McBride's people do not allow unauthorized use of James McBride's image on wildly popular personal blogs with upwards of seven loyal followers. OK, whatever.] 

Hashtag FFWgr, Part Two: The Reading List

In case you missed part one, you can read it here.

I promised to put together a reading list based upon the books and authors I heard cited at the Festival of Faith and Writing 2014. I've organized the list list into four categories: books about writing, works of fiction, books about faith, other non-fiction, and poetry and poets.  The list that follows is only partially annotated because there were SERIOUSLY a LOT of books and authors mentioned. I got tired of annotating and linking. Sorry.

Books about writing

Janet Burroway, Writing Fiction
--This is a college textbook. Interestingly, Amazon only offers an option to rent the book for a semester; it's not available for purchase new. You can buy a used copy on Amazon for $43.98, or on EBay for $52.89.

Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change; A Grammar of Motives.
--the latter work offers the dramatistic pentad, a model for analyzing narratives to understand human motivations and predict behavior. The five rhetorical elements include act, scene, agent, agency (or method or means), and purpose (or motive). 

A]ny complete statement about motives will offer some kind of answer to these five questions: what was done (act), when or where it was done (scene), who did it (agent), how he did it (agency), and why (purpose)." -Kenneth Burke

Annie Dillard*
--Mr. Peevie presciently gave me The Writing Life for Christmas, so I will be starting there.

Sol Stein, On Writing
Just reading the description of On Writing from Stein's own website makes me want to drop everything and read it, and while I'm reading it, start revising my novel-in-progress.

Works of fiction

Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman
--I think I need to read more Margaret Atwood.

Raymond Carver*, Cathedral Stories,*, especially the short story A Small Good Thing; What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
--Carver's name was invoked at least three times during FFW.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
--I'm embarrassed that I have not read this yet, and I just downloaded it to my Kindle for zero dollars and zero cents.

Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
--If it took Harold Bloom three times to make it all the way through Blood Meridian, I don't hold much hope for my own ability to do so any time in the next century. But it's on the list anyway, because Bloom says McCarthy "has attained genius with that book."

Flannery O'Connor*, the short stories Good Country People and Revelation
--I have the complete short stories downloaded to my Kindle and ready for my summer beach reading; and I just read Good Country People for free here. Read Revelation for free here.

William Faulkner, Barn Burning, A Rose for Emily
Read Barn Burning for free here. Read A Rose for Emily for free here.

Ernest Hemingway, The Short Happy Life of Frances Macomber

Khaleid Hosseini, The Mountains Echoed

Washington Irving, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
--Here's a switch: instead of reading it, listen to it!

Barbara Kingsolver

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

Guy de Maupassant, The Necklace
--You probably read this one in high school, but in case you want to refresh your memory, you can read it online here.

John Steinbeck, The Chrysanthemums

Joyce Carol Oates, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych

Mark Twain

Anne Tyler, The Beginner's Goodbye

Books about faith

Walter Brueggemann
--There are 68 publications listed on his Wikipedia page; where is a beginner to begin? That's not a rhetorical question, Internet.

George Herbert


--You can (sort of) read The Temple, Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations online--but you may need a stronger prescription in your glasses when you're done. It might be worth it. 


Julian of Norwich
--Read the complete Revelations of Divine Love online here, as well as excerpts from the Revelations.

Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism
--From the Amazon book description: Turner "argues that the distinctiveness and contemporary relevance of medieval mysticism lies precisely in its rejection of 'mystical experience,' and locates the mystical firmly within the grasp of the ordinary and the everyday." A quick look tells me I'll need to read it with my dictionary at hand.



Karth Barth

Frederic Buechner

Andrew Krivak, A Long Retreat

C. S. Lewis*, The Screwtape Letters

Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life

Walker Percy*, The Second Coming

Eugene Peterson

Jan Richardson

Teresa of Avila

Other non-fiction

Henry David Thoreau
--I read Thoreau's essay The Last Days of John Brown because FFW speaker James McBride's new book, National Book Award Winner The Good Lord Bird tells John Brown's story from a brand-new perspective. I was delighted to see Thoreau refer to his neighbors as pachydermatous--which he used in reference to the thickness of their heads, not their skin. Awesome.

Mary Karr, Lit, The Liar's Club
--Stephen King wrote this about Mary Karr's writing: "I was stunned by Mary Karr's memoir, The Liar's Club. Not just by its ferocity, its beauty, and by her delightful grasp of the vernacular, but by its totality--she is a woman who remembers everything about her early years."

Verlyn Klinkenborg, The Rural Life
--Interesting. The Rural Life is a weekly column in the New York Times about life on a farm and boots getting stuck in mud and stuff. Some people think it's a little pretentious and condescending.

Michael Perry

Poetry and Poets

Maya Angelou

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Mary Oliver

Ron Padgett, Center of Gravity 

Lucy Shaw, The Crime of Living Cautiously

...

So now we have a reading list for the next two years--until FFW 2016 gives us another one.

Which of these books and authors have you already read? Which are you going to look for the next time you head to Myopic? (Shout out to M. Peevie--that's her favorite bookstore.)

I'm starting with Flannery O'Connor.

Hashtag FFWgr

Ninety-nine percent of you won't know what that title means--which is sort of the epitome of bad communication. Nonetheless, I'm starting there, because I ended there--at #FFWgr. 

#FFWgr, the Festival of Faith and Writing in Grand Rapids, Michigan, is a biannual conference of writers and readers of faith: about finding faith, leaving faith, and returning to faith; about the connection between faith and writing. I make my pilgrimage there to find inspiration and motivation. I'm completely positive (in the ironic sense of those words) that I will eventually be one of the speakers there, talking to the little people about getting up at four a.m. and sitting down in front of the computer and waiting for God to show up.

Actually--that was James McBride's line. My perspective will be more of a p.m. perspective, because mornings give me hives; and my topic will be Why I Keep Writing Even Though I've Never Been Published; And As A Matter of Fact, Why Would You Even Listen To Me?

I'm going to give you two kinds of #FFWgr candy: motivational and/or interesting quotes from some of the talks I went to; and a reading list. I kept notes as I listened, and wrote down the names of books and authors that the speakers mentioned. I may have missed a few, but I've still got a pretty good list.

So first, the quotes, in order of their appearance:

Daniel Taylor:

"Everyone should write their own apologetics--how do you tell this story of faith to yourself?" This is a riff, he said, on Milton's idea that everyone should write his own theology. I tried to confirm that Milton actually said or wrote something like this, but could not. Internet, could you do me a solid and let me know a) did Milton ever say/write anything like that and b) what's the source?

The topic of Taylor's talk was The Use of Story in Apologetics. He said, "stories defend faith by making it desirable, powerful, winsome. Stories don't just tell truth. Truth can be a sledgehammer. Stories can make faith not just reasonable and believable, but also attractive."

"Stories are convincing; they require us to change, and tell us how to do it."

"Stories don't prove anything, but stories prove everything that's important."

"Don't just tell anecdotes, tell stories. Anecdotes are reduced; they lack personal experience and emotion." I'd like to learn more about this distinction.

"Look for evidence of the divine in the mundane and even in the profane." 

John Suk talked about something called "perspective by incongruity," an idea of Kenneth Burke's which I didn't quite get but will add to my growing list of Things I Want to Know More About.

(Sigh. #FFWgr always leaves me with the existential exhaustion of realizing ever more clearly how much I don't know.)

From James McBride: 

"Most of what I do fails. Learn to fail. Fail--then forget it." I'm not sure I believe this. Maybe it's hyperbole? I would like to know, operationally, what that looks like.

"I wake up at 4 a.m. and just sit there waiting for God to come into the room." Many speakers at the conference mentioned the productivity of the early morning hours, which discourages me a tiny bit.

"Skepticism is good, but cynicism is a killer of dreams." Ooooh, this was good. (And by the way, how do you spell "ooo" that rhymes with "mood" rather than ooooh that rhymes with "road"? Because I was aiming for the oo in mood sound there, but it just didn't look right without the h.)

Shannon Huffman Polson: 

"Grief and loss are lonely, but they connect you to humanity." I think this is why suffering is such a useful tool for an artist, writer, musician. Dammit.

"I wanted to suffer, wanted the pain of grief--because it would keep me closer to those I had lost." This certainly resonated with me, even though I remember when I said it to a friend, she looked at me strangely. I saw other heads nodding--and I was glad to see that this counter-intuitive feeling of wanting to hold on to the pain of grief was not merely a glitch in my otherwise well-adjusted persona, but that it had universal resonance.

"If the grief ebbed, did it mean that the love and connection were not that great? There is a lot of guilt in grief." This, too; both the question and the statement.

Andrew Krivak:

"Take small acts--actions outside of the interior life of grief and loss--and write them into your story." This is actually a paraphrase, but I like the notion that small acts have great value. I think he was making a reference to the book Small Acts of Resistance: How Courage, Tenacity and Ingenuity Can Change the World. 

Peter Marty

Peter Marty (whose appearance reminded me of Dietrich Bonhoeffer):

"If you want to be a better writer, become a deeper person." I wish he had offered Seven Steps to Becoming a Deeper Person.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"We keep on outsourcing our brains--we know and remember less. We externalize our knowledge, our taste, our experience, and our faith. We reference and rely on the faith and experience of others. In Genesis, by chapter three they stop talking with God and start talking about God."

"Is it possible for some people to miss their lives in the way that they miss a plane?"

"Tell me what you love, and I can tell you what you believe." Oof.

"We identify our center through suffering." More on this, please.

Anne Lamott:

"Life and writing are very, very hard. I don't think we're here to figure things out."

"There is perfect healing, but people die anyway. Frankly, if I were God, I would have a completely different system."

"I think if there is a God, he probably looks a lot like Isaac Stern. Or Bette Midler."

"We were taught to stay one step ahead of the abyss. If the abyss opens up at your feet, go to Ikea. Get an area rug."

"It's OK to admit that you're crazy and damaged. All the better people are."

Hugh Cook offered practical advice about writing fiction:

"Your character must desperately want something; but something thwarts her. She must make specific, decisive actions."

"Use dialogue not for narration or description, but to show your characters."

"Reveal your character's age early on."

Brett Lott:

Start a story with what you know, and head into "what if"--what if this happened, or that?"

Suzanne Woods Fisher:

"Answer the call to write; keep the calling at the forefront of your vision all the time."

"Living for the opinions of others is seductive; don't do it. Remember who you are."

I have no quotes from James Vanden Bosch, but his presentation on corpus linguistics was one of my top three sessions. Who knew. I might even sign up for the eight-week MOOC in September.

Miroslav Volf:

"Atheists point to ways that religion and Christians have failed and malfunctioned."

"We must listen to the voices of our brothers and sisters from around the world to penetrate our own self-deception. We must listen to the wisdom of saints and critics."

"We are restless for God; we reach for the transcendent. The orientation of our selves to the Divine is the primary function of faith."

This next quote is from an audience member who might have been quoting someone else, but it struck me as worthy of inclusion: "Christianity has become so sentimental and shallow that we can't even produce good atheists anymore!" This was connected to the part of the interview in which Volf said something to the effect that he'd take Nietzsche over Dawkins any day.

"I don't bemoan the marginalization of the Christian faith. There are strengths in the margins. When Christians were in the center of power we were used, and the faith was abused. Like the band of twelve followers on the outskirts of Jerusalem, we can testify to the beauty of Jesus Christ from the margins."

Rachel Held Evans:

"Every challenge--the challenge of writer's block, distraction, discouragement, fear, lack of ideas--is solved by getting back to work. In writing, that work is paying attention, naming things, telling stories." 

"Remember that God is generous, and grace is scandalous. God has called us to this work. There is no scarcity principle at work in writing--there's plenty of work to do, plenty of stories to tell."

Now, I bet you can't wait until #FFWgr2016! I know I can't.

Stay tuned for Hashtag FFWgr, Part Two: Reading List.

No Stories, Just Pictures

My muse has departed.  I have stories flitting around in the back of my head, but my words are failing me.

More on this later, but for now, I just feel like posting a few photos of Paradise.

Sand boy, AKA A. Peevie

Cousin T-Bone, airborne, watched by C. Peevie.

A. Peevie, C. Peevie, and Cousin Ri-Ri over there in the right corner

A fierce predator, sculpted by J-Sell.

Happy Girl, M. Peevie, expressing her joie de vivre

Cousin T-Bone and C. Peevie

Old-fashioned fun.

Sleepy Hollow, 11A.  Highly recommended.

Foray Into Fiction

Desperation

She left on a Tuesday morning.

The kids were fine--they loved the sitter; they knew their routine: lunch at noon, naps for the younger ones at one, videos for the older kids; mom back by three so the sitter could get to her other job in the coffee shop by four.  But today she'd be late.  Ronnie would be too responsible to leave the kids alone.  She'd call the cell phone and leave a perplexed message:  "Um, Janie, this is Ronnie.  I'm just wondering if you'll be home soon.  I was supposed to leave at 3 today.  Um, OK.  Bye."

But the cell phone was turned off.  She'd dropped it into the laundry basket, where someone would find it eventually.  Paul, maybe, or maybe even a cop, when he eventually called the police.

Ronnie would try Paul at the office, but she'd probably get voice mail there, too.  He'd pick it up and call her right back.  "She's not there?  Did she say where she was going?"  They'd go over a few unlikely scenarios, but in the end, he'd pack up his work and leave early.

He'd swear under his breath as he powered off his computer and arranged the papers on his desk into orderly piles.  He'd get mad first, and worry later.  He would load files into his briefcase like he did every night--files with names like STAT PROG and CHECK CODE--but tonight he wouldn't get to them until well after 9:30, after the last pajamaed child padded out for the last hug and the last glass of water, wondering my Mommy didn't come in to kiss him goodnight.

Checking the calendar on the refrigerator, Paul wondered if he had forgotten girls' night out.  It had happened before: Paul was supposed to be home by five to give her a chance to change clothes and put on makeup.  He knew that some days she didn't even make it into the shower before 11 a.m.; some days, not at all.  He couldn't really imagine what it was like, taking care of four young children all day, all alone--but he tried, and he tried to make sure that he helped out when she asked, and came home early when she needed him to.  He didn't even mind the expense of the sitter two days a week, to give her a chance to run errands, have some down time.

"Shit," he said, falling back into the butt-shaped divot on the leather couch.  "Where the hell is she?"

Janie was driving across Oklahoma in a beige Toyota--she'd sold her own car in Missouri, and bought this one with cash--carefully observing the speed limit and listening to Josh Turner asking why don't they just dance.

"I'm not a big fan of country music," she said out loud, looking over at the empty seat as though he were there.  "But if I listened to you for very long, I think I might just change my mind."  I'm going to be changing a lot of things, she thought, starting with my name.

Amanda.  Jenny.  Kate.  Janie ran through the names in her mind, seeing how they matched up with the new life she was envisioning for herself.  It wasn't a glamorous life--she didn't need Roberto Cavalli sunglasses or a Hermes handbag.  She needed to be a real person, to feel true, to experience a life that made her eyes open wide and her breath catch in her throat.

She'd felt that way once, when Mattie was born.  She couldn't get enough of his smell, his softness, his tiny perfection.  But the sweetness of those moments had faded with sleep deprivation and the intensity of day-in and day-out parenting.  Soon the other three kids joined him.  The fourth, Boo-Boo, was an accident--Janie already knew that three kids was tipping her over the edge--and the last traces of her identity circled the drain and disappeared like that blue Polly Pocket shoe last week.

Her friends all laughed over margaritas, and commiserated with one another--"I just can't wait until I can pee without someone watching me!"--but Janie knew that only drastic action would save her.  Hence, Oklahoma, the Toyota, the soon-to-be-chopped-off-hair, the new name.

"Kate," Janie decided.  "I'm going to be Kate.  I'm going to work at a bookstore during the day, and play guitar on weekends."  Under the vast night sky, she drove toward Texas; and she wondered if Paul remembered to give Boo-Boo his antibiotic.

I will NOT be there for you, nor do I want you to be there for me.

I swear.  There is one trite, annoying, meaningless, banal, cliche, hackneyed phrase that English speakers and writers rely upon to express the concept of emotional support that I believe has lost all meaning, if it ever had any to begin with.  It is "is there for [personal pronoun]," as in "he is always there for me," or "my mother was never there for me," or "What the hell do you want from me? I just want you to be there for me."

Maybe the long-lasting sit-com Friends started it 16 years ago, giving U.S. popularity to the catchy but lyrically lame song by The Rembrandts, "I'll Be There for You."

I'll be there for you
When the rain starts to pour
I'll be there for you
Like I've been there before
I'll be there for you
'Cuz you're there for me too...

But it's not just a sitcom theme song.  It's all over pop music:

Wyclef Jean, in Class Reunion:  

Baby girl, the world is yours, just look through
That open door, I'll be there for you
If you ever feeling blue (oh), it's a beautiful world

And Prince, in Adore:

Until the end of time
I'll be there for you.
You own my heart and mind
I truly adore you.

Bon Jovi succumbed to the allure of the cliche, with "I'll Be There for You"

I'll be there for you
These five words I swear to you
When you breathe I want to be the air for you
I'll be there for you
I'd live and I'd die for you
Steal the sun from the sky for you
Words can't say what a love can do
I'll be there for you

It's all over TV and movie dialogue, all over eavesdropped conversations on the El. It has become the catchphrase of a generation, and it makes me want to puke.  (Although I do kind of like the Bon Jovi song, in spite of the hated phrase.)

When I was teaching freshman composition, I gave my students the assignment of writing an essay on a person they admired.  The phrase "she was always there for me," or some variation, showed up more times than the word maverick in a Sarah Palin speech.  I made my students rewrite their essays without using that phrase even once--and they complained like I asked them to make their own ink out of mangos and Elmer's Glue.  But when those essays came back, the students instead discovered creative and thoughtful language, images and illustrations to convey the love and support they received from their admired one.

"She stayed up listening to me until 2 a.m. the night my boyfriend broke up with me," one girl wrote about her mother.  Another wrote about her best friend, "She's a great listener, and she lets me borrow her clothes, even after I got a stain on her sweater."  See what I mean?  Specific, meaningful illustrations that put a clear picture in your head of what the speakers/writers appreciate in their friends.

Here's my challenge to you, my readers, who are clearly smarter and more talented than all the rest:  Count how many times you hear or read this phrase in a week--on TV, in music, from your friends and colleagues.  I heard it six times the other day on TV and in the grocery store.  In one day! 

Each time you hear it, ask yourself if the phrase gives you a clear sense of what the person means when he uses it, or if he could use more specific and descriptive language to communicate more effectively.  And then take the pledge to rid the English-speaking world of this phrase which is the zucchini of language--it's all over the place, and virtually tasteless.

The Writing Life: Festival of Faith & Writing Recap

Two weeks out (or so) and I'm still processing the lessons learned at the Festival of Faith and Writing. Here are the highlights:

Michael Perry was humble, gentle, honest and funny as he described the church of his growing-up years, and his departure from his parents' fundamentalist faith. I cracked up when he said he learned to write by reading The Writers' Market chapters on "How to Write." I could have listened to him all day.

Scott Russell Sanders described essay writing as "a search for pattern and meaning." When he starts an essay, he said, he has an experience, or story, in mind, but not the meaning or purpose or point. These come out of the writing process, and are gradually uncovered or revealed as the essay develops.

I'm not sure I understand this. I might not be smart enough, or patient enough, or secure enough, to be that kind of writer, but I think it might be worth pursuing.

Then Wally Lamb took the stage. "We knew Wally Lamb was a pseudonym for a woman," the person who introduced him said, "because when we read She's Come Undone, we knew only a woman could have written it." Everyone in the audience nodded in understanding. "And then we read I Know This Much is True, and we knew he was also a twin," she continued. "And a schizophrenic."

Wally (can I call him Wally?) told us how a line of dialogue popped into his head when he was in the shower.  Out of that line of dialogue, he envisioned a character, and he started writing in order to find out who he was and what was going to happen to him.  Two years later, his first short story was published, and nine or ten years later, while still teaching high school, Wally Lamb published his first novel. 

Also? Parker Palmer is my new boyfriend. "I was born baffled," he says, and writing helps him sort of figure things out. "Writing is truth telling through questioning, through struggle," he said.  He discussed the analogies between faith and writing, and said, "God companions me as I navigate the dark places."  Everything that came out of his mouth was quotable, although I did not take notes and didn't write any of the quotes down.  Also, I fell asleep three times because JH kept me up talking the night before until three-fricking-a.m., and she kept having to nudge me awake.  I have not yet read anything he's written, but I think I might start with The Promise of Paradox.

Mary Karr was funny, honest and inspiring.  She reminded writers to do two things: Rewrite; and, unexpectedly, memorize poetry.  The woman has a memory like double-sided tape.  Everything sticks.  She recited poems easily, and she made me hear the difference between reading a poem from the page, and reciting it from the mind and the heart.

The Andras Visky play Backborn was strange, poetic, and completely non-linear.  It was virtually unfathomable to my Western mind, and yet I was strangely intrigued.  We discussed it at dinner, and the veils of cultural and intellectual ambiguity parted a tiny bit.

I talked to three editors about my incomplete book proposal.  One reluctantly stuffed it into her purse and said she'd read it.  Another referred me to an editor at a different publishing house.  And the third sat down with me like an editorial therapist, asking me questions about me, my background, and my proposal. 

And now I need to get to work, fleshing out the ideas of the proposal, and putting meat on the bones of the chapter-by-chapter outline.  The working title is Fight Nice: Restoring civility in public and private discourse, and the challenge is to make the topic of civility so engaging, so real and provocative and maybe even a bit humorous, that people will want to read it.

Wish me luck.

Poem in Your Pocket 2010

Sheesh! I almost forgot! Tomorrow is Poem in Your Pocket Day, brought to you by the Academy of American Poets. So quick! Choose a poem from this page or this website or this list, print it out, and put it in your pocket. Pull it out during the day and read it to yourself, or share it with a friend or colleague.

At the recent Festival of Faith and Writing in Grand Rapids, poet and memoirist Mary Karr said that writers must do two things, and one of them was memorize poetry. (The other was rewrite.) Yes, that's right: memorize poetry. I'm not a poetry-memorizer (yet), but I'm putting it out there as a good idea for everybody, not just writers.

Why memorize poems, or put one in your pocket? The NYTimes published an editorial last year that attempted to answer this very question -- but Jim Holt's answer is "because it's deeply pleasurable." Interesting, but is it persuasive?

Two more reasons why it's good to read and occasionally memorize poetry:

1. Memorizing, in general, exercises the brain, and improves your brain's ability to remember other shit. That's good, right? I'm going to try to find some research that supports that statement.

2. Memorizing poetry, in particular, embeds vocabulary, syntax, and rhythmic language patterns into the brain so that you have them available for your own speaking and writing. The Well-Trained Mind elaborates on this theme quite well.

3. Maybe this goes back to the NYTimes editorial, but I'm convinced that poetry is worth the extra effort it takes to read, ponder, and digest. Even if we don't "get it" when we read a poem, if we spend time with it, read again more slowly, and possibly memorize it, that poem will likely gradually reveal itself to us, like the sculpture reveals itself to the sculptor, like a fingerprint shows up with the dust and the microscope.

Anyway, here's the little poem I'm putting in my pocket tomorrow:

Hope is the thing with feathers, by Emily Dickinson

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it on the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea,
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

I'd love to know what poem you're putting in your pocket tomorrow (or today, probably, since it's almost after midnight).

Blogging the Festival of Faith and Writing:

Dateline: Chicago

Getting excited about the Festival. Arranging logistics: what time are we going to leave? Who will drive? Can we get there in time for the 1:45 interview with Wally Lamb on Thursday? Can we stay until Mary Karr gives the final plenary on Saturday night? (By the way: click on that link. It's an interview with Karr in Salon.com.)

No, no. We MUST stay until after Mary Karr's talk. To leave before Karr would be like going to the Oscars and leaving right before Tom Hanks announced Hurt Locker for Best Picture.

Here's what I'm slating on my dance card in between Lamb and Karr:

• Possibly Michael Perry on "Life as a Bumbling Agnostic," or Matt Ruff confessing "An Interesting Moral Education; or How I Learned to Lie for a Living."
• Another Wally Lamb event: "There But For the Grace of God: What My Writing Has Taught Me About Sin, Redemption, and the Complexity of the Crime-And-Punishment Equation."
• The talk by the poet Christian Wiman sort of intrigues me, even though I am not a poet, and only barely a reader of poetry. His topic is "Hive of Nerves: On Modern Anxiety and Its Ancient Remedy." I loved his essay, Gazing Into the Abyss."
• Maybe I'll check out Kate "The Tale of Despereaux" DiCamillo's talk on "Why Writers Write: Questions and Answers on the Craft of Writing."
• And, fondly remembering my conversations with Andras Visky both in my own home and also in Romania (name dropper!), I am interested in seeing his new play, Backborn.
  

There's more, of course; so much more. But this is a good start.

The primary reason I love to attend the Festival of Faith and Writing--other than the fact that it is three days of NO KIDS! NO DISHES! SHOWERING ALONE AND WITHOUT INTERRUPTIONS!--is that it is inspiring to me as a writer.

So far, the first thing I've learned from the FFW this year: I'm too lazy to be a real writer. These writers are prolific, focused, dedicated, focused, hard-working, focused, and apparently un-distracted by Facebook, 24, and Angel DVDs. So far, in reading through the speaker biographies, I have not read about any writers who seem even a little bit like me. They're all very evolved, spiritual, and terribly, terribly focused on their Craft.

Maybe I can spin that to a publisher as some kind of advantage.

Book Review: Notes on a Scandal

I received Notes on a Scandal as a white elephant gift for Christmas. Turns out, it was the opposite of a useless white elephant (a black mouse?)--it's a beautifully written psychological case study. I loved it because it's not really about what it is ostensibly about--a forty-ish woman having an illicit affair with an under-age student; rather, it narrates the sometimes subtle, always disturbing socio-pathology of a controlling, narcissistic, messiah-complected personality.

It's brilliant.

What's amazing to me is that someone read this book and saw movie potential in it. I haven't seen the movie, but the story is so acutely internal--there are literally NO explosions!--that I cannot even fathom how a movie translation would do it justice. (I hear it does, though.)

Barbara Covett (her name, and the names of other major characters, represent intentional literary allusions) is the intensely observant, randomly opinionated, pedantic first-person narrator who nurtures a scary, subversive friendship with a younger woman. Whether or not Barbara is a repressed lesbian is totally beside the point. She becomes obsessed with her younger colleague, the alluring Bathsheba Hart, who joins the faculty at a small private English school as a pottery instructor.

With cool certainty, Barbara describes their inevitable friendship as "spiritual recognition," and she waits patiently for what she anticipates will be an "uncommon intimacy." She observes precise and intimate details of Sheba's body, mannerisms, and relationships; she becomes jealous when Sheba develops a close friendship with another woman.

Zoe Heller develops her protagonist with a subtlety that makes you know, without realizing why you know it, that Barbara is creepily malevolent to Shakespearean proportions. For example, Barbara describes Sheba's friend Sue Hodge as

the sort of woman who wears Lady-Lite panty liners every day of the month, as if there is nothing her body secretes that she doesn't think vile enough to be captured in cotton wool, wrapped in paper bags, and thrust far, far down at the bottom of the wastepaper bin. (I've been in the staff toilet after her and I know.)

Self-deception and self-righteousness cloud Barbara's narrative about her friend's illicit entanglement as she manipulates every fact and every rumor to strengthen the ties of her predatory friendship with Sheba. But Heller develops Barbara's character through her relationships with other characters as well, and through Barbara's own subtle self-revelations. "According to my notes," Barbara writes, "Sheba had no further contact with Connolly after the disastrous H.C. encounter until a couple of weeks into spring term."

According to her notes? Creepy!

Barbara never misses an opportunity for a caustic observation, and her sociopathology ultimately costs her any chance for true intimacy. Early in the book, in two abstruse and easily overlooked paragraphs, Barbara describes a close friendship that had ended abruptly and mysteriously. It's such a subtle hint at a history of social and personal dysfunction that every time the friend's name comes up later in Barbara's Notes about her new friend's troubles, many readers won't connect the dots of pathology unless they re-read the forgotten episode on page 36.

This book is the fictional version of The Sociopath Next Door: it's both brilliant and disturbing. One review quoted on the back cover suggested that the perfection of Heller's voicing of Barbara's subtly malevolent sociopathology was literary ventriloquism. It makes me wonder how Heller acquired such penetrating insight into Machiavellian psychology. Hmmmmm?

A Little Rant About Fair Wages

I check Craig's List almost every day for writing jobs. I've found many good leads there, a few of which turned into paying projects.

But sometimes what I see there cranks up my irritability to PMS levels. For example: This ad for a customer service process documenter for a downtown IT company requires a fastidious, skilled and detail-oriented writer who can generate well-written reports based upon the data she collects, and who can also interact comfortably and professionally with customers on the phone.

They are paying minimum wage ($8 per hour) for this communication maven--which basically means that they're looking for someone just out of high school. A Starbucks barista makes more than that ($8.80 per hour). So does a receptionist ($9.18 - $12.46 per hour), a clerical assistant (up to $12.33 per hour), and a babysitter who is still in high school ($10 per hour). The IT company probably pays more per hour for its janitor.

What is up with employers not valuing a skill that most college graduates don't even have? If someone who pours coffee, taps a calculator, answers the phone, cleans toilets, or watches TV while your kids sleep makes more than what you want to pay your writer, then, let's be honest, you are not really seeking a candidate with "exceptional writing skills."

Phew. All-righty, then. I feel better.

Resolution Recap

Following in the footsteps of my blog-friend Elbee, I will update the 2010 resolution situation:

1. Listen to new (i.e., new to me) music. SUCCESS! This month I've listened to Wyclef Jean (before he started raising money for Haiti), Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Ben Folds. I'm so "with it."

2. Work out on Wii Fit two or three times per week. I have learned several yoga poses, and not one of them is named the "lunging lemur." I have met my goal of doing WiiFit at least twice per week, but I have to say--I am not a fan of the abuse my WiiFit trainer (whom I have named Vincent) dishes out.

"So," he says, with an edge of sarcasm in his voice, "You haven't been able to make the time to work out for the last four days. Been busy?"

"Yes, Vincent," I tell him, hanging my head as I step on the WiiFit balance board.

"Ooh!" it says, wincing under my weight. "You've gained 1.2 pounds since your last workout," the lying slab of plastic tells me. "You now have 3.2 pounds to lose to meet your goal."

Fine. Whatever. It's not about the weight, I tell myself. It's about being healthy. It's about having pants that fit.

Then when I start doing the poses and/or exercises, it tells me, "Oh, E. Peevie, you're a bit wobbly! You need to work on building your core muscles."

Sometimes I trick the Wii into thinking that I'm totally fit and have perfect balance. I use a chair to do some of the poses so that I don't actually hurt myself--and Vincent tells me, "Hey, baby! You're pretty strong and fit! Are you free Saturday night?"

3. Write my book. Let's see. I think I have written a total of 2,000 additional words this month. This pace is not going to get my first draft, or even my first several chapters written, before I head to the Festival of Faith and Writing in Grand Rapids in April. I must pick up my pace.

4. Take my sin to the cross, over and over again. Why is repentance so hard? It's so good, and it feels so good--it's like working out: it feels so good when you're done. I have not improved in this area. Fortunately, repentance and forgiveness are, by their very definition, always available, waiting, unchanged in their power to change me.

I will go to the cross. I will write my book. I will work out. I will listen to new music. It's not too late to begin, to start becoming a New Me.

How are your resolutions going?