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April 8, 2013

Own Your Opinions, Kids

JacksonMurphy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Topics: On Learning, On Parenting, On Writing | Leave a comment
March 25, 2013

I Dream of Genus With A Light Brown Flair

berryvines1Last night I dreamed I was in the grocery store looking for taco toppings, and wandered into the “New Produce” aisle — the place, of course, where new species are kept.

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

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

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

I actually woke up disappointed they don’t exist.

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March 9, 2013

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

strange-hotelroom-epn-dk1Do settings reflect the mood of a novel?

Or do settings set the mood?

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

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

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

I thought of the novels whose distinctive settings stayed with me, years after reading the book, for being not just unforgettable, but critical in molding their characters. Continue reading →

Topics: On Writing | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment
January 15, 2013

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

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

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

I was on my way to a book event for my novel, taking me through the town where my 93-year-old grandmother lived in a nursing home. My mother was coming for the reading, but she would have come with me to visit her mother-in-law anyway. It’s her maternal buffering reflex.

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

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

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

Memory is a funny and fleeting thing, bobbing out of reach like an inaccessible sea creature. We’ve all read the studies about sensory triggers, the memories brought on by a few bars of music or Continue reading →

Topics: On Faith, Hope & Love, On Relationships | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments
December 23, 2012

The Year in Reading

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

The something old was my re-read of an old favorite, Crossing to Safety (http://www NULL.indiebound NULL.org/book/9780375759314) by Wallace Stegner. This was my third time, occasioned by an invitation from my local indie bookstore to lead a book club on my favorite novel. Crossing to Safety is the story of two couples, their lifelong marriages and friendship, and it takes a clear-eyed look at how our strengths and foibles become more forgiving and more brittle over the decades. It’s brilliant, more so each time I read it. This time I treasured the voice and dry humor of the narrator poking fun at the champagne bubbliness of his own youth — hoo hoo, ha ha — naïve to the hardship up ahead.

Something new was The Light Between Oceans (http://www NULL.indiebound NULL.org/book/9781451681734), a summer debut by Australian writer   M.L. Stedman. I’ve been a bit of a zealot for this book while on book tour and probably should be on commission, because when I give my elevator pitch, the audience sighs with that reader-hunger that must be appeased. I tell them this: It’s set on a tiny island in 1920s Australia, and its sole inhabitants—a lighthouse keeper and his wife—have been unable to have children. One day a rowboat washes ashore with a dead man and a live baby. What to do? Report the child, or raise her as their own? The decision the couple makes that day reverberates through the decades, and through the lives of others. It’s the kind of novel I love because it involves a moral choice where there is no clear right or wrong, no clear path of lesser harm.

Borrowed is a bit of a stretch, but work with me here. My pediatrician told me recently about a little-known and out-of-print children’s novella by Faulkner called The Wishing Tree (http://www NULL.amazon NULL.com/Wishing-Tree-William-Faulkner/dp/0701102403/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1356287410&sr=1-1&keywords=the+wishing+tree+william+faulkner). My first thought was, What would Faulkner have to say to kids? That when you mimic the help, it’s important to get the dialect right? That you shouldn’t drink while doing your homework, only after you’re done?

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

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

Blue is how Salvage the Bones (http://www NULL.indiebound NULL.org/book/9781608196265/jesmyn-ward/salvage-bones) made me feel, the blue of neglected children and spurned love and rushing hurricane stormwater before it goes brown in its race through dirt lots of Mississippi. This is the Katrina most people didn’t hear about, put to merciless fiction by Jesmyn Ward. In her hands, four siblings’ fierce bickery loyalty is the closest thing to unconditional love, and a teen’s dedication to his fighter of a pit bull and her pups is as close as it gets to salvation.

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

 

Topics: On Reading | 2 Comments
December 5, 2012

Faulkner For Kids?

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be honest, it was more about my intrigue than any conviction my kids would enjoy it. Fast-paced contemporary books, full of suspense and the bells and whistles of modern fantasy, have left them lukewarm to quieter classics with antiquated language. And then there was the question of whether it would even be appropriate for them. Several articles proposed  Continue reading →

Topics: On Parenting, On Reading | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment
September 6, 2012

Does Publishing A Novel Change Your Life?

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

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

In the past 10 years of my writing life, I’d gone from being a magazine journalist and mother of one to being a sometime-freelancer and mother of five. That evening of the launch party felt like a line of demarcation down my life: who I was before, and who I was becoming. Here I was burning rubber in my Sienna minivan. Just look at that S car go.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The New York event was more fun with my two oldest along; they were wide-eyed at the hotel mini-bar candy, the Empire State Building, Amtrak’s café. The highlight of a reading on the Cape was my dinner date afterward, my four-year-old son who was so giddy about the high patio over the dunes that he dropped the ketchup bottle down into them. Ooops.

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

Here Mom, I can’t find the garbage.

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

Topics: On Faith, Hope & Love, On Parenting, On Writing | 12 Comments
July 18, 2012

Daring to Care: What fostering animals taught me about parenting

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t have a medical bone in my body beyond the fact that, well, I have bones in my body. I don’t know if various animal and insect-borne diseases are on the rise, or if it just feels that way. But I do know a few things about anxious things: namely, that in the space between knowledge and confusion, paranoia blooms. Continue reading →

Topics: On Faith, Hope & Love, On Learning, On Parenting | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment
June 16, 2012

If You Can’t Stand The Heat, Get Into The Kitchen

 

When my first novel came out two weeks ago, I had most of my ducks in a row. I’d arranged a book tour to places where I had the most friends and family. I’d written magazine articles related to my book, and planned a launch party. I bought a few dresses. Notecards sat in neat piles, waiting to be called into duties of gratitude.

But there was one area in which I really wasn’t well prepared, and it was sort of an important one. I hadn’t read my work aloud under pressure.

Over the years I’ve done public speaking, and used to appear on television a bit for my old job. I’ve even interviewed authors for a fun piece (http://beyondthemargins NULL.com/2011/09/authors-how-i-learned-to-read-my-work-aloud/) on how they became comfortable reading in front of a crowd. But read my own fiction? Out loud? That had only ever happened in the privacy of my shower-stall auditorium.

A few days before my book was to be released, I faced up the fact that this was a pretty big Achilles heel. So I sought out the toughest training ground I could think of, the crucible in which my fortitude would be forged. The harshest audience, the most easily bored and most vocal one I’d ever seen.

The Sisters of Charity Nursing Home.

My children play piano recitals there several times a year, and each time without fail, they’re heckled. At Easter, while my daughter plunked out a slow ballad from Titanic, a woman in the second row became increasingly agitated. She looked around for a friend to share her resentment, and finally just shared it with the room. “Who are these children,” she cried, “and what the hell are they doing in my kitchen??” I knew I had to read there.

It was a Friday afternoon, just after lunch but before naps or game time. The residents came into the Rec Room in singles and pairs, wheeled in by nurses. Fran, the activities director, told me how excited they were to hear me read from my novel. “Many of them like to read quite a bit. Or, used to.”

Fran introduced me, and I stood in front of the silent and still room. It was almost entirely filled with women in wheelchairs, crumpling grand dames and matriarchs who’d outlived most of their partners and contemporaries. About half of them looked up expectantly. The rest were slack-jawed and inattentive, asleep, or listening to their own internal monologues.

“Thank you for letting me come today,” I said, taking pains to speak very slowly, because as my mother reminds me, I’m guilty of speaking far too fast. Continue reading →

Topics: On Learning | Tagged , , , | 8 Comments
June 11, 2012

Novel Catharsis

The day I accidentally started my novel, there was a torrential downpour. I remember sitting in the car waiting to pick up my children from preschool, rain streaming down the windshield. Like tears, I thought. And out of nowhere—because they’re always out of nowhere, the mental triggers of grief—I thought of my friend who’d been on Flight 11 on September 11th.

Four years had passed since the terrorist attacks, but the thoughts were still with me. In the midst of mundane activities, I’d find myself wondering the sort of things that aren’t polite to wonder alound. About her last thoughts. Who sat beside her on the plane, and what they said to one another. Whether she’d had time to cry.

I had always expressed myself through writing. I’d been a magazine writer for a decade, and I kept a journal to scratch the itch for anything more personal. But suddenly it wasn’t enough. As much as I love reading fiction, I’d never had an urge to write it, not even so much as a short story. Yet after I got home that rainy day and put the kids down to nap, I wrote a dream sequence about a woman imagining her friend’s last moments. Not on a flight that day, because that was too close to the bone. A generic plane crash, if such a thing can ever be generic.

It didn’t occur to me that this would be part of anything more than an unusual journal entry. But that raw spurt of writing would become chapter three of a novel, to be bought by Crown four years later, just before the birth of my fifth child.

We each have our own methods of catharsis, of letting the tapes finally spool themselves out. Some people establish charitable foundations, some plant memorial gardens, or throw themselves into athletic challenges. Some go quiet until the tears run dry.  

Writing the novel was my way to make sense of the thoughts I couldn’t quite put a name to. I’d just had my third child, and after I’d tucked all three into bed at night I’d settle into writing this thing that was not a thing—not an article any magazine was paying me to write, so too indulgent a use of daytime sitter hours. But I kept writing, and the further I wrote, the more I shed anything that resembled my actual friend, her actual husband, their actual baby. The nameless piece of writing became peopled with strangers familiar only to me, driven by unique motivations, idiosyncrasies, pain, and joy. Most fiction writers I’ve come to know Continue reading →

Topics: On Faith, Hope & Love, On Learning, On Writing | 12 Comments