not native fruit

Desert Sanctuary ~ my book is published!

I just wanted to let you know that I’ve self-published a mystery novel called ‘Desert Sanctuary’ under the pen-name of Karen Whittingham.  The book is available online at Lulu.com as a print-on-demand or as an e-book (see links below).  Here is the description of the book given on the website. 

 “In Desert Sanctuary, unconventional healer Madrigal Strahan investigates a mystery in the Nevada desert where she lives near her long-time friend and lover, Blaylock Pritchard.  Their silent and beautiful desert resonates with shock-waves following a mysterious fire in a remote location that reveals long-buried secrets leading to multidimensional resolutions for Madrigal’s family and friends, and an earth-centered spiritual epiphany.”

 

The reason I chose to write about the desert is because my partner and I spent many of our vacations camping in the high desert east of the Sierra and in Nevada .  The beauty of the desert and the mystery of its solitude has always stimulated my creativity.  This book expresses many of my beliefs about the importance of community, closeness to nature and healing.

 

I hope you enjoy reading my book!  

 

Desert Sanctuary by Karen Whittingham, available as print-on-demand:

http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/desert-sanctuary/17342000?productTrackingContext=search_results/search_shelf/center/2

 

Available as an e-book: http://www.lulu.com/product/ebook/desert-sanctuary/17364322?productTrackingContext=search_results/search_shelf/center/4

PS - for readers interested in the Ishmael books or readers of Daniel Quinn, Desert Sanctuary offers a literary fiction expressing a vision of reality consonant with his. 

dalva and crazy horse

My husband has read the Mari Sandoz book Crazy Horse: the Strange Man of the Oglalas two or three times and has always encouraged me to read it as well.  So, finally, just a few weeks ago I took out Larry McMurty's book, Crazy Horse: A Life on CD's from the library and was able to hear it being read while commuting through the park to work - about a 45 minute trip - twice a week, and also while driving on any other little errands or visits.  It was only three disks and went fast.

In the meantime, I was reading a memoir called Off to the Side by an author named Jim Harrison, whom I'd never heard of, but then I don't keep up with the NY Times Best Sellers List.  I have a more Daoist approach and let the Dao brings books to me. :-) And this is an example of how that process works!  I still haven't finished the memoir, but I liked it so much that I decided to try one of Harrison's novels, and as luck would have it, Dalva was the first novel to come into my hands.  And who is one of the featured characters of the major sub-plot?  Crazy Horse.  So the story of Crazy Horse, and his friend He Dog, and the military outpost of Fort Robinson - all of this was fresh in my mind as I read Dalva.  I've visited Fort Robinson once, by the way, knowing nothing of Crazy Horse's death there, but feeling averse to 'the energy' as they say.

Anyway, Dalva is a masterpiece of writing, most of it first-person narrative with a female voice (Dalva's), told in flashbacks to adolescence and other stages of life from a 45-year old standpoint.  The central section of the book is narrated by a crazy professor who is researching the journals of Dalva's great-grandfather, an early comer to the Sand Hills area of Nebraska, and someone sympathetic to the Sioux, in fact an agonized witness to their demise.

I find it interesting that I've characterized the professor, Michael, as 'crazy' and that this was also the appellate of Crazy Horse.  Harrison mentions that for the Sioux the word 'crazy' really meant something closer to 'enchanted' or 'magical.'  Well, the professor's academic mind is something like fly-paper, everything sticks to it, and his personal mind is very mobile, not being undergirded by a strong character.  He is thoroughly opportunistic, desperate and needy, but talented!  Harrison does a marvelous job in capturing the chaos of someone like Michael.  In fact, all of Harrison's characters are rich, nuanced and feel thoroughly authentic.  Despite Michael's failures, Dalva and her family are very kind to him, protective and nurturing, rather like the attitude of the Sioux towards those they regarded as 'crazy', such as Dalva's great-grandfather, a johnny-appleseed-Methodist Minister whome they saw as 'too strange to kill.'

Much of the book takes place in natural settings around the Niobrara River, the kind of country I just love and tried to depict in my own novel, Desert Sanctuary.  Harrison recreates the vitality of life lived close to nature.  Anyone who has ever experienced such a life will be grateful to him for this book, and other readers will appreciate the window onto a life that is still available here and there in the west.

What an incredible book!  And what a wonderful coincidence to have read McMurty's Crazy Horse: A Life just before reading Dalva.

jim harrison

i've discovered a new author i like a lot.  jim harrison has written poetry and fiction set usually in the areas in which he grew up (Michigan, Minnesota, northern mid-west states) or where he maintains a second home today in the southwest, Arizona, New Mexico, Southern California.  his writing reminds me a bit of louise erdrich, and i'll say more about that later.

I discovered jim harrison by (uncharacteristically) reading a mystery novel set on the north coast of California (one of my favorite places on earth) by Janet LaPierre who has one of her characters, Verity Mackellar, mention that she is reading a good memoir called "Off To The Side."  So, I googled that title, and discovered that it is a real book, by author Jim Harrison.

I began to read the memoir, and wasn't sure whether or not I was going to connect.  His voice is very masculine, his concerns seemed at first not to relate to me - a friend said his concerns were very regional, midwestern - booze, dames, and hunting.  But I found that I really did enjoy his style of self-disclosure, his way of communicating something honest, yet occasionally diverting, in the sense that he can surprise me with a turn of phrase, and not just a knack of phrasing but a nice juicy sliver of insight.  I began to feel this guy is like some kind of Americana wisdom-bum combining the likes of Erich Fromm, Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac and Carl Sandburg - if you can believe such an ungainly combination - plus something that is characteristically himself.

The more I read, the more I liked.  And so I soon went out and picked up one of his novels, an early one called Dalva, written, I believe, in 1988. 

This is when I began to see the similarities to Louise Erdrich.  I began thinking to myself, is this a style of writing that is somehow organically produced by the north-country?  I was thinking 'he is like the male version of her, and as an author, she is the native-american-part-white voice to his white-american-part-native voice.'  in other words, erdrich, who is part-German and part-Ojibway, and writes both parts brilliantly (imho), specializes perhaps in the native-american perspective in her literature.  i'm assuming harrison is part-Sioux because he always includes part-Sioux characters in his novels, (although i don't recall if he mentioned it in his memoir, however, it seems likely to me, given things he writes about his father's people).  Based on my own experience with home-grown variety native-american people (as differentiated from hollywood-style or even AIM-style "indians"), I would say that both of these authors write the white, the native-american and the mixed characters very very well, and offer us something of a perspective that I seem only to find in literature that combines these two American influences quite consciously.

This indicates to me a degree of authenticity.

Let it be said, simply, that i am very happy to have found jim harrison's work, and to put it on my shelves next to Louise Erdrich's.  Oh, and by the way, just out of curiosity, I googled 'jim harrison + louise erdrich' and found that others see similarities in these two writers too! 

I may write more about harrison in the near future, as there are some specific topics he gets into, in Dalva, that I find interest me personally.

shadow tag, by louise erdrich

I have to warn you there are going to be some spoilers in this post, so if you haven't read the book yet, I advise you to come back here after you have.  There are quite a few reviews out there from reputable sources, some of them are good but others seem not to have quite 'gotten' Erdrich's main point.  She makes quite a few 'points' and the various reviewers pick up on some of them. I'll quote my favorite 'bon mot' (with credit) further down in the text.  Here are the links to some of these reviews:

New York Times Book Review, Washington Post,

okay, so the novel is the taut and spare three-narrator tale of a decaying, dissolving marriage that involves a husband-wife team of part-native-american artist and model (also sometime doctoral student) Gil and Irene America, and their three children, Florian, math genius, 15, Riel, would-be-native artemis, let's say 11, and youngest son, Stoney, budding artist, age 6. 

it's a sad and disturbing tale of love, lust, obsession, deception, vulnerability, cracking-up, home-grown kinds of minor violence, substance abuse, and overall, the futile attempt to stop it.

for myself, i found the deception the most difficult part to bear.  perhaps because of my own personal emotional make-up the notion of ever-shifting sands, never having a footing for trust to take hold, disturbed me the most.  As anyone who's read any review of the book must know, there are two diaries involved here, the real 'blue' one kept in a bank vault in which Irene records her real thoughts and feelings, and a 'red' one kept at home where she knows her obsessive husband will read it and become enflamed (red) with jealousy, doubt, and fear.  here is the bon mot I liked best from the various book-reviews: "As a story of aggravated jealousy, it's as though the same person were playing Desdemona and Iago."  (Ron Charles, Washington Post)  that statement ought to provide an intriguing hint for you if you haven't yet read the book.  The New York Times titled its review 'Cruel Love.'  How apt.

the violence, although it was unpleasant and destructive, seemed to me to fall within the realm of the normal.  what does that say about me?  but i do know, having grown up with exactly that degree of violence in my own home - although the source was not my father -  that for children it is quite destructive and not easy to forgive.  children are such vulnerable critters and sometimes i think that, as adults, we forget that.  things that seem minor to us, some slightly cruel jest, for example, can be taken in as a mortal wound by the youngsters, what to say of sharp raps to the head, (common though they may have been in the neighborhood where i grew up.  see joe queenan's 'closing time' for comparisons.)

i've also had my whirl with obsessive artist-love and i'd just like to be spared that ever happening in my life again.  so i certainly can sympathize with the plight of Gil and Irene from that angle.  i've also been in a long 30+ years marriage so i know some of the sheer craziness that can come and go as a part of that process.  it isn't always pretty, what?

Okay, now here comes the SPOILER, so stop reading at this point if you haven't read the book yet, unless you think you never will: for most of the book, i found myself quite angry and not all that sympathetic toward Irene.  Of course, I love Louise Erdrich's books, so I am naturally disposed to be sympathetic towards a character who seems to 'represent' on some level the actual author.  People say that the book is not autobiographical, and strictly speaking it is not, but the parallels are too many and too plain not to warrant some sense that either LE is working something out in writing this book, or more likely, offering to her reading public some - what? - explanation?  insight, perhaps into her own situation with its, i think it's fair to say, tragic outcome.

Anyway, this is the REAL SPOILER - and also, for me, the MAIN POINT OF THE BOOK - and I'll try not to ruin it completely for you - after I read the book I found myself feeling much better about LE.  At the end of the story, when the two parents are drowning, the daughter expresses that she is angriest at her mother for taking this foolish chance of saving her husband instead of saving herself for them.  Well, isn't that just what Louise Erdrich did in real life?  The two of them were drowning, and she was cruel enough to perform the 'dastardly' deed of the divorce, which Michael Dorris couldn't survive, but she saved herself for those six children.  Unlike in the book, when he 'swam' toward her, in real life she didn't swim toward him.  It's hard, it's tragic, but that sometimes is life.  He didn't survive and she did. 

In the end, the nuclear family has given way to a larger, more invented family/community, and I gather from my own limited observation of their present-day situation, that is how they now live. 

I certainly walked away from the book with more respect for Louise Erdrich and a sense of sheer awe at the power and artistry of this book.

the secret by eva hoffman, mind-body identity theory fiction

while i've been recuperating from a sprained ankle, twisted elbow and the flu, i've been reading eva hoffman's 'the secret.'  I stumbled upon eva hoffman by reading 'yesterday's child' where her memoir is often cited as an account of a well-integrated immigrant identity.

perhaps because we live in the united states, such a nation of immigrants, we take the immigrant experience for granted.  i've always suspected that psychologically it's a much more difficult process than many people realize.  anyway, i'm enjoying the channel andreea deciu-ritivoi has opened up for me through her book, and have since been hoping to read more of her work.  soon after conceiving this intention, i found one of her novels, "the secret," at our local library.

i don't think it's much of a secret that the protagonist is a young girl who is a clone on a search for her identity.  in a certain way the story could be written of any young person raised with a scientific world-view, trying to understand whether or not there is any real personal 'identity' beyond the label of a name and social security number or whether one's perceived identity is just a trick-of-the-mind produced by chemical processes. 

many of the scenes of mother-child symbiosis could also apply to most mother-daughter relationships and the issues of separate identity that frequently arise between them.

the book is extremely well-written, a pleasure to read, and dips into many compelling areas on its journey to fruition. 

when i was an undergraduate at ucb, a long time ago, i studied the mind-brain identity theory as a philosophy major.  philosophers were constantly citing comparisons to artificial intelligence in their discussions of the human mind-brain identity problem.  i recognize some of those posited questions given 'flesh' (so to speak) in the story of Iris.  I recommend this book.

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