not native fruit

the beet queen by louise erdrich

this book is the sequel to Love Medicine and chronicles the tale of three children abandoned by their mother in a rather comical fashion, of how they separate and eventually come back together again over the course of forty years.  it also the story of three women and a child - two cousins, an in-law and her daughter - living in a farming village in north dakota.  the native americans in this story are more or less peripheral, yet powerfully portrayed, and there is one main character, the part-native gal, Celestine, who becomes an in-law to the two cousins.  while i didn't enjoy this novel as much as love medicine, i will say that l.e. writes at times some of the most outrageously funny material i've ever read, including the scene where Aunt Mary teaches her niece's first grade teacher a lesson, and another scene that must be the funniest death scene ever written (probably) - and not disrespectfully so - I would imagine the deceased would never have wanted it any other way.

little miss by the day

"The older I get the more convinced I become that the most fascinating persons in this world are those elusive souls whom we know perfectly well but whom we never, as children say, 'get to meet.'  They slip out of countries, or towns - or rooms even - just before we arrive, leaving us with an inexplicable feeling of having been cheated or something that was rightfully and divinely ours.  That's the way I still feel about little Miss By-the-Day.  Perhaps you, too, have been baffled by the will-o'-the-wispishness of that whimsical young person.  Perhaps you, too, tried to find her but never did.

"She sounded so casual and commonplace when I first began hearing about her that I let her slip through my fingers.  She was just a little seamstress who had a 'vairee' odd way of speaking; it was quite a long time before I realized that everybody who spoke about her was unconsciously trying to imitate her drawling voice.  And then I noticed that everybody who mentioned her smiled dreamily and wondered where on earth she'd come from.  I kept hearing, just as you probably did, odd scraps of things she had said, droll adventures in which she had figured, extraordinary and fantastic tales about the house in which she lived.  And presently, when it was too late, I found myself listening to regretful murmurings of scores of baffled persons who couldn't find out what had become of her.  She suddenly vanished, leaving nothing behind her save her delectable house."

Little Miss By-the-Day was a novel by Lucille van Slyke, published 1919 by Frederick A. Stokes Co in New York.  It belonged to my mother and I discovered it among our books as a child and probably read it when I was about ten.  It's the story of a French girl of old New Orleans, who's parents (of course) die, and she is taken away from their grand old mansion by her grandfather to another manorial dwelling that has become quite ramshackle somewhere in the country-side.  While there, she nurses her aged ailing grandfather, and recreates her mother's gardens, based on her mother's original plan for the gardens in a book which she finds among her mother's things.

Later, after her grandfather has passed away, she becomes aware that she has inherited the old mansion in New Orleans, travels there and finds it has been subdivided into rooms and apartments and let out to immigrants.  (Immigrants always seem to get short shrift in our country, and they do in this book too.) She is not pleased, but moves into one of the apartments and takes work as a seamstress by-the-day in order to be able to pay off back taxes and fines to fully repossess the house.  Slowly she is able to regain possession of her house bit by bit. 

In her travels she finds destitute poets and sculptors and other artists and brings them home with her, ensconcing them in rooms in her mansion and trying to encourage them not to give up hope, to keep writing, sculpting, drawing, whatever.  She adds little touches around the house that she knows will cheer them up.  She has a certain something about her that some people at her various day-jobs notice while others do not.  In the end she restores her home, creates a community of happy successful artists (quite an accomplishment! lol) and is reunited with her long-lost love.

I was simply mermerized by this book as a girl, and have read it several times as an adult.  To me, as a healer, it is such a great book about healing! I feel that I learned the value of patience and time and process and synchronicity from her finding of her mother's garden plan and her ability to reconnect with her lost mother by recreating her garden.  Then she applies what she knows to her next challenge which is 'out in the world' - the restoration of her family's house to a place that protects and nurtures artists.  Gad, I loved this book!  Just had to tell you about it.

Also, might mention that it seems like I am doing something similar in my own life, which is really just too weird!

francine prose on writing classes

This question came up recently in the writing workshop I participate in, and here is what Francine Prose answers in her recent book Reading Like A Writer:

"Can Creative Writing Be Taught?

"What confuses me is not the sensibleness of the question but the fact that it’s being asked of a writer who has taught writing, on and off, for almost twenty years.  What would it say about me, my students, and the hours we’d spent in the classroom if I said that any attempt to teach the writing of fiction was a complete waste of time?  Probably, I should just go ahead and admit that I’ve been committing criminal fraud.

"Instead I answer by recalling my own most valuable experience, not as a teacher but as a student in one of the few fiction workshops I took.

(She praises the editing help of the teacher, and the help she got by being ‘listened’ to, by the class, while she was reading her own work in those 'few' workshops she herself took.)

"That’s the experience I describe, the answer I give people who ask about teaching creative writing: A workshop can be useful.  A good teacher can show you how to edit your work.  The right class can form the basis of a community that will help and sustain you.  But that class, as helpful as it was, was not where I learned to write.

"Like most, maybe all, writers, I learned to write by writing and, by example, from books.  Long before the idea of a writer’s conference was a glimmer in anyone’s eye, writers learned by reading the work of their predecessors.  They studied meter with Ovid, plot construction with Homer, comedy with Aristophanes; they honed their prose style by absorbing the lucid sentences of Montaigne and Samuel Johnson.  And who could have asked for better teachers: generous, uncritical, blessed with wisdom and genius, as endlessly forgiving as only the dead can be? 

"The truth is this sort of education more often involves a kind of osmosis.  In the ongoing process of becoming a writer, I read and re-read the authors I most loved.  I read for pleasure, first, but also more analytically, conscious of style, of diction, of how sentences were formed and information was being conveyed, how the writer was structuring a plot, creating characters, employing detail and dialogue. 

"This book is intended partly as a response to that unavoidable question about how writers learn to do something that cannot be taught.  What writers know is that, ultimately, we learn to write by practice, hard work, by repeated trial and error, success and failure, and from the books we admire.  And so the book that follows represents an effort to recall my own education as a novelist and to help the passionate reader and would-be writer understand how a writer reads."

harry potter

I went with my eighty-three year old friend, Elizabeth, to see 'Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix' the other day, after having just re-read the book preparatory to beginning the new one.  (I've since finished re-reading 'The Half-Blood Prince' - is it Sirius? - and will begin the new book this weekend.)  We both enjoyed the film production.  My friend has been a therapist for many years, and I have the theological and pastoral counseling background, as well as my own healing work, so we approached the film from those angles. 

Up until this most recent re-reading and viewing, I was starting to feel that the books were getting 'too dark' - but now I realize I was wrong about that.  These books are just the most phenomenal creation!  Nearly every fairy-tale motif and folk-fantasy is represented within their pages, and the psycho-spiritual wisdom is simply astounding.  Not to mention the author's grasp on the psychology of the young, as represented by Harry in particular.  In fact, what she was doing in these later books escaped me until I re-read them.  So glad I did! 

the prayer hut

“As it was, the hut felt just right: flimsy, isolated, almost furtive, a place to pray truly, a theft of time from a greedy world.  A place where prayer still felt like what it really was, something dangerous.  “Is not my Word like a fire?  saith the Lord; and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces?”  He had drifted; you always drifted.  Mike found his breath and rode it into the flame again, and memory sweltered and cracked in that soft fire, into shards of regret and bewilderment, benediction and dread: the mystery, the burning knot, the impossibility of self and world.  The slipshod walls of scrap and junk sighed and settled like a hearth; the fear within him burned and burned, and he sat at the heart of the fire it fed and breathed cool air. "

from The Monk Upstairs, by Tim Farrington, HarperSanFrancisco, 2007

ruined by jung

I'm participating in two novel-writing groups.  They are very different and balance each other quite well.  I have learned a lot through this process, and one of the main things I've learned is that thinking 'The Manticore' is one of the best books in print ruins me as a successful modern writer.  I say this at least partially tongue-in-cheek.  Seriously, folks, I did read a lot Jungian authors in my thirties, meaning books by Jungian therapists about their theories and discoveries and case studies.  Robertson Davies' book is simply a fictionalized version of those.  And I do sometimes wonder if I'm ruined as a novelist because of it.

remnant of the great war

My mother lived in a social world populated by  little old birdy ladies in fidgety hats, with china teacups-and-saucers precariously balanced over art nouveau brooches, silk scarves,  and delicately scented floral handkerchiefs with lace edgings.   They were the remnants of the World War I ‘girlfriends’, the ‘widowed fiancees’, the semi-sacred female relics of the Great War - the abandoned and bereaved, the well-preserved.  When I was a little girl in the 1950’s, and Mother would take me with her to the Wayne Avenue Tea-room for lunch, with its stained glass windows, huge urns of rubber plants and mother-in-law-tongues, I had to be on my best behavior.  Nevertheless, I loved to go there, and I often wondered why there were so many of these ladies, eagerly chatting over tiny corners of toast and melted cheddar cheese, Waldorf salad, raspberry sherbet, and the omnipresent orange pekoe tea in tiny pots.  Although ‘with snow on the roof’, their eyes shone bright with an inner fire never quenched by the prosaic realities of everyday life.  They were courageous, they were survivors.

What was the well-spring of their intense energy?  Where was the source of their tenacious grip on life?  Was it because they were faithful to spiritual beings?  They were loyal and true, even ever-so many years later.  Or was it because they were a female society unto themselves.  They were Herland, although they were not all ‘lesbians’ (woman-identified women)  by choice, exactly.  Circumstances of life had forced them into a female society where they flourished exultantly, courageously, spiritedly, in perpetual virginity and old-maid-ism. 

They lived together in apartment buildings, boarding-houses (of the better quality), hotels and ‘pensions’, if they were lucky, or lived at home with relatives if not.  They worked in offices, shops and libraries by day, spent their evenings dining together, then attending lectures, musical recitals, poetry readings, church-services or seances, according to their predilections.  They read, embroidered, wrote letters, sketched, and conversed, visited the sick and organized philanthropic ventures.  Undoubtedly they denied and subsumed many of their less pleasant passions into these activities.  These ladies often had what might be called an acerbic edge, which made them witty and interesting.  They channeled the considerable dynamism of their feminine goddess energy in socially acceptable and altruistic ways, though the ways of society had to expand with the vigor of all those unmarried females on its hands.

baltic writer on writing

More from Suzanne Brøgger of Denmark, on writing:

"I begin each morning by practising yoga.  And after that - fasting on a lemon - I set about writing, which is only another form of yoga.  Writing is an excellent ritual for training the concentration, memory and observation.  It is an exercise of the capacity to dream and associate, and not least a training in truthfulness.  For I agree with Saul Bellow, that one knows immediately if a sentence has come from the right layer of one's consciousness.  If it has, it straight away begins to breed and flourish on the paper, in that it gives birth to and attracts to it a whole mass of other sentences.  If it is a lie, or you write from a shallow place in your consciousness, then sooner or later you go stale and can write no further.  Sometimes this morning ritual is a catharsis of tears and laughter.  In any case it is an extra dream dimension to everyday life, which allows a person the rare privilege of bathing twice in the same river.  Still I wouldn't attribute to 'writing' any greater importance than to baking bread, knitting a shawl, planting asparagus, or playing the piano."

I'd like to let this paragraph just stand here by itself, because it certainly warrants a singular attention, but I just have to mention what happened on Sunday evening, after I took that solitary contemplative walk through the neighborhood and then returned home.  When I turned back onto my street, I saw the emergency vehicle coming around the corner.  I'm sorry to say it was coming for my neighbor, G., who is only 54 years old.  Apparently he'd had a heart attack and they could not revive him.  I watched his wife cover her face with her hands, I watched them fruitlessly pounding on his chest when adrenaline and electric shock were not enough.  It was such an ordinary night.  A gentle, quiet Sunday evening.

It reminds me of the words of a Spanish-language poet, whose name I don't recall, who was read in translation at "Freight and Salvage," a local folk-music spot in Berkeley, on Saturday night.  I may be paraphrasing, but here is how I remember the lines:  "And those are the good men, the ones who love, and work, and who, on an ordinary day, lay themselves down under the ground."

from baltic shores

At the Berkeley Public Library Central collection, while searching for an Alan Furst novel for my husband, by chance I came across a book of short stories titled "From Baltic Shores" .  Now, as you may know, I've been exploring my baltic heritage, and this felt like a very serendipitous find.  I'm trying to find out something about my cultural roots from the british isles and the baltic region.  I can sprinkle my speech with Jewish idioms and Italian phrases, thanks to my upbringing, but I know nothing about what it means to be danish!  So, here are some excerpts from my explorations:

"In the summer, I have several guests in my garden.  Sometimes I have the feeling it's like Epicurus' garden, where one 'laughs and philosophizes.'  'Bene vixit bene latuit' - he who lives in obscurity lives well - said the same Epicurus.

"My garden is surrounded by a hawthorn hedge and high trees and runs down a slope covered in violets to where the fields of barley, rye or wheat begin.  Cows also graze there, and I think it gives a quite special sense of luxury when you go for a walk and twenty cows come running delightedly toward you.  I well understand the psalmist Kingo, who lived in the Løve district and wrote an ode to a cow.  That cannot be done too often.

"Apart from lilacs, wisteria, laburnam, jasmine, apple and plum trees, I have a big copper beech in my garden, to the right of the two rockeries.  There are usually two nests here.  Uppermost is a hawk's and below it a little wood-pigeon's nest.  You could say: Uppermost is the Pentagon or the Kremlim, a nest of stones, gravel and concrete, and below it, the dove of peace in its thin little nest of straw, grass and leaves.  No sooner has she hatched eggs than the hawk swoops out of the air and snatches them all.  All the same she stays there, year after year building her nest under that of the bird of prey.  So if the garden reminds you of life and death, you also come to think of futility.  A bird of prey and a dove in the same tree; it can never turn out well.  But it keeps on going."

This is from Suzanne Brøgger of Denmark, whose short story "I Live as I Write and I Write as I Live" is the first in the collection.  I enjoy the understated sense of humor, the country-wisdom, the appreciation of simplicity and of nature, the sense of relatedness to the Greeks, the love of obscurity and 'humility.'   She makes a point to let us know her garden is only 100 km from Copenhagen.  I feel exactly the same way she does about the dove of peace and the bird of prey.

vintage fragment

i used to write what i called 'fragments.'  i came across this one recently while cleaning through old shelves of notebooks.  i think i wrote it about twenty-five years ago.

Susann clambered up the pile of old cans and crates to the top of the old stone wall that separated the alley from the railroad tracks.  She swung her legs over the edge and dangled her heels against the jutting gray stones, sparkling silver with mica and sandwiched together between layers of ivory concrete.  She looked over the rows upon rows of black-creosote-painted tracks, their smell pungent in her nostrils as she chewed an apple meditatively.  Of course, the apple was too mealy, but the sun was shining and her bare legs were comfortably cold in the late autumn air.  Her sweater, too small for her, worn and shrunk by many washings, was short in the sleeves and too billowy in front where she had stretched it out of shape by pulling on it and rolling her arms in it.  Now it was more or less wrapped around her long flat-chested bodice and tucked under to hold.

Susann liked it down here by the railroad tracks.  It was peaceful and deserted and different.  Trains moved through the maze of tracks very slowly, and not very frequently anymore.  Bits of broken glass shone like jewels among the stubble here, and the old tin cans rusted by the side of the tracks, the twisted chunks of wire and metal strewn about, reminded her of the people she saw around the city, sitting in doorways, slumped over on the subway, everyday.  People who had been refused, and were now refuse.  Poor people.  And not just the really poor, poor people, but also a lot of the nicer people too.  Little Mr. Benton, who sat still and quiet for hours at his newspaper stand, and if you spoke to him, would grin into your eyes until his whole yellow face was a mass of long wrinkles, and who would talk loudly and with great gusto except none of the kids could understand him.  He spoke something called ‘geechie,’ which, Susann thought, might possibly mean he was crazy.

And then there was quiet Mrs. Jones, who always seemed to be pulling a loaded shopping cart, usually with clothes in it, a big turtle-shaped old black woman, whose knees and feet seemed painfully distended, yet who always smiled, and when she spoke in her soft deep rich voice, and called you ‘honey-chile’ or ‘angel-lamb’, it made you feel so good inside.  All these old, funny-shaped, funny-talking, used-clothing-wearing people.

A cold invigorating breeze occasionally blew down as if funneled into Susann, reminding her of the tartness of a winesap apple, the kind of apple she wished she were eating right now instead of this old mealy one, and making her dream of the North, a land of snow and ice, of short days and green skies at sunset.