Literary Hub

My Essay on Literary Hub

I wrote a piece about what really happens while writing a book (especially fiction, but this can apply to memoir, as well), and Literary Hub—many thanks to them!—published it on the day that MOLLY FALLS TO EARTH came out. I think a lot about the impulse that many writers, especially beginning ones maybe, have toward ten-step lists and formulas, and what this says about how writing is taught. This is not to say that there is anything wrong with lists and trying to find a concrete pathway through the sometimes murky terrain of creating something, but rather that the fever to plan everything out and know in advance what is going to happen—either in terms of the trajectory of the narrative or even what will happen to the book itself—can indicate a desire to dominate a process that is only partly concrete; the rest is mysterious, thankfully, and often out of our control. This is excellent and good news. Click here to read the essay on LitHub.

MOLLY FALLS TO EARTH!

It’s been just over a year since the beginning of the COVID lockdowns. I remember—vividly!—teaching an in-person workshop (the last of its kind) on March 14th, 2020, and by the 16th, everything was shuttering up. My husband recently went back to his office where he found the communal whiteboard still had writing on it, dated March 16, 2020. The whole office was pretty much a ghost town, he said, and so he continues to work mostly from home.

But home is not a ghost town, that’s for sure. It’s been action central for months now. My husband, two sons and I (plus the two felines) have carved out our own corners and office spaces. We had our previously unfinished basement finished, which was a huge project five months in the making and wildly noisy—at a time when our collective senses were already overloaded. We engaged in this apparently insane endeavour mostly because of my older son, Gabriel; he has Down syndrome and autism and his day program closed early on when everything went into lockdown. We’ve needed the added space, and now that it’s done, I have to say it has been so incredibly worthwhile.

The big news, of course, for this month—and also long in the making—is that MOLLY FALLS TO EARTH launches on April 27th. At last! Molly was scheduled to release last year, but due to the pandemic, the date was shifted. I’m grateful in many ways for that change, as we’re all had so much practice adapting to dealing with books in a new way, but more than a year in and circumstances generally are much the same. Slow vaccine roll-outs in many regions and the variants have meant that the world is still grinding along, hoping for all those numbers to get better. Hoping for some sense of liberation.

So I’m celebrating MOLLY against this backdrop, but celebrating nonetheless; and moreover I’m celebrating writing and reading in the larger sense because I think they are more than good pursuits, I think they’re life saving, especially now.

The Toronto Star recently called MOLLY FALLS TO EARTH, “Highly anticipated.” The story is this: a dance choreographer has a seven minute seizure on a sidewalk in Manhattan and encounters a kaleidoscope of memory, her past and present, secrets and mysteries, old love, the people gathered around her and questions of existence. There is a thread of missing people, also, as her old love is nowhere to be found, and so the narrative is an impressionistic unfolding and “inventive exploration of time, absence and desire.”

Meditation for Writers Remote GrubStreet Class

My upcoming GrubStreet workshop is Meditation for Writers, happening through March. I did a short class on this in October—and I’m amazed that these months have gone by (the last blog I wrote was in July). There was a need to both quiet-down and expand in other directions, and I think so many of us during COVID have experienced this, the opportunity (the demand, maybe) to do things differently. It’s been an intensely creative time, as I’ve been working on my next book and projects, and so there was on the one hand the outer—and sometimes inner—turmoil of this time period and ferocity of politics and disease, but on the other, also exciting things happening and the joy of making.

But back to this class! I became a certified meditation teacher because of this exact possibility: bringing it into the writing workshop. It’s hard to express how much I’ve loved this process, seeing what a difference meditation can make to writers, and in particular, how much effect it can have on VOICE. What I often encounter when working with writers, either in workshops or one-to-one, is a challenge around voice, and the accompanying ideas: the right to speak, the right to explore ideas, the right to play, be curious, give life to the vision that’s inside the mind (the one that writers often long to work with but hold back for various reasons). Writing can be so damn tough. Not everyone is called to create, and certainly not everyone is called to be a writer; it often requires enormous stores of energy, grit, a willingness to be intensely vulnerable (and I don’t necessarily mean here the baring of souls; this vulnerability can simply be a fear of working with an authentic voice, being true, a fear of being seen as different or unconventional). Because that’s what happens when we work with the real voice, the deep one. We end up discovering aspects of our own originality, and that can sometimes mean the writer is required to really stand in who they are.

Enter meditation, and this online class, which is for any genre of writer and any level of meditator. We’ll be covering foundations of meditation and mindfulness practice, and exploring each week how these ideas can be applied to writing. For more info and to register, click the button.

Memoir Voice Class!

I’m giving a new GrubStreet class (which will be on-line), coming up on August 6th—a four week memoir workshop that focuses on voice, and I have to say I’m really stoked about it. I love talking with other writers about their process and with all the social distancing, etc., of these last few months, I’m looking especially forward to seeing people and getting to talk shop.

The idea for this class came directly out of the last two workshops I gave before COVID rolled into town. We had been talking about Mary Karr’s notion that the most central aspect of memoir—the one that counts the most—is voice, which led to fascinating investigations about what exactly voice is. We all know a great one when we read hear/read it. There are certain concrete elements to it; after all, the narrative voice only exists through the details we write down. But the most intriguing part of voice is the mystery and atmosphere of it, the workings that are harder to define, yet carry so much power.

At my last workshop I wrote The Right to Speak on the board and there was something like an electrical pulse that rippled through the room. The writers seemed to have instant recognition and connection around this idea, and their personal struggles with it: the right to tell their story, the right to be themselves, the right to make time to develop their project and the right to finish it. It’s interesting that in a part of the world where we have a certain amount of freedom with regard to what we can write (relative to other places where a writer might be routinely jailed, or worse), so many fully grown adults still feel a lot of hesitation in their work, sometimes even consciously or unconsciously wanting to be granted permission or a kind of passage.

So, this four week investigation will uncover what voice is and how to better connect with it (amplify it, play with it, really use it—because it’s there to be used). This is about courage, maybe, or understanding what makes a particular writer tick and how to allow that energy into memoir through the most natural conduit there is: voice. If you’re interested in taking this class, here is a link with additional information and registration at GrubStreet.  

Rage Before Peace

Washington Square Park, NYC

As I’m writing this, there have been twelve straight nights of protests ignited by the murder of George Floyd (plus a few centuries of slavery, torture, racism, disenfranchisement, hatred). The collective pain and suffering has been so acute that there has been an enormous, and necessary, receding of everything else. The brokenness of seemingly every system has become plain to most people (at least I hope this is so; it’s likely arguable), except the most recalcitrant, racist and unseeing. The video of George Floyd is a vortex, a portal into untold stories of oppression and violence; I wept when I saw it. Other images have been on replay in my mind, including the thuds of police batons on protesters’ bodies, humans against humans, a 75-year-old activist lying on a sidewalk as blood pools from his ear, the bizarre footage of Trump with the upside-down bible in front of St. John’s church; this last image is remarkable to me for how surprising I found it, in spite of how in keeping it is with this president’s cartoonish rhetorical tendencies. I don’t know how I can still be surprised, but there it is (the problem of calling him cartoonish, however, is that it elides just how malevolent and destructive he is; the effect of his words and actions has reached the deepest level, while “cartoon” keeps him only on the surface).

We now find ourselves in a world so inflamed that we are in a literal portrait of hell; except that we were always here. Ages and ages this has been curdling and roiling just under the surface, held by a vastly racist network of systems on one side and something (wrongly) called politeness on the other. Say nothing, look the other way, don’t ruffle feathers, keep quiet in your corner. Now there is a gaping rent in the entire fabric through which all the due rage, suffering and unhappiness—the sprawling and intricate inequality—is escaping, no longer willing to be held under.

This cataclysm was perhaps inevitable; now it certainly seems necessary, if we’re ever to forge something better (though there are plenty of people, rightly cynical, who feel that better will never come). The collective howl is so extraordinary, so vociferous and pain-filled that there is something symphonic about it. A raging, thumping, bombastic series of cries and protestations that is coming in tune with itself. The process has been volatile, but what else is there? For the society that has been so dead asleep, so gleeful in its hierarchies or seemingly unaware of them, the alarm bell is now sounding without the option of a snooze setting.

The denial of anger runs deep. So, too, the denial of truth. What has changed everything is the simple and ubiquitous cell phone video—video taken by people with the courage to record. A story of a man held down by his neck for eight minutes until he died, right there on a public street, is no longer just a story when there is live footage of it. And not just still-photography, either, but the animated approach of death, Floyd’s voice as he said he couldn’t breathe, someone telling him to get up as if he wasn’t pinned to the ground by a terrible knee. Somehow story can be denied, but this is harder to do with moving images and actual voices (I listened last night, however, to a professor of criminal justice, who was once also a police officer, talk about how jurors can watch a video that clearly shows a murder by police and still come away saying it wasn’t murder). Similarly, the 75-year-old man who was shoved to the ground was originally described as having “tripped and fallen” until the video showed otherwise. As much as we can rail against the sometimes overwhelming nature of technology and its intrusions, it is people brave enough to use that technology who have unveiled what has always been in front of us and made our current moment possible.

And here’s the thing of this current moment: we’re suspended in it, carried in a stream so powerful that it will hopefully finally force people to let go, of old ideas, old habits of thinking, old biases, and embrace something else (each other? this is too much of a leap and simplistic maybe). Which reminds me that this is all unfolding when we’re in our separations and isolations, in our masks, and yet there are now millions of people, shoulder to shoulder, making a demand for change. And change happens whether or not we orchestrate it—it’s an energy and inevitable force of its own; now there is an opportunity for all of society, every facet, to be aligned with it.

The Hawk and the Rabbit

Jan Weenix, Dead Hare and Partridges, c. 1690 (Wikimedia Commons)

People keep talking about the natural world becoming prominent now that self-isolating is firmly established. At my house, we’ve had no shortage of encounters with wildlife, as we’re surrounded by abundant foliage and creatures, but I’m beginning to think that the creatures are, in fact, bringing their dramas closer in.

The area where I live in Rhode Island is partly suburban and partly rural and tends to a certain natural shagginess. Lawns might be neat (or not), but even where home owners have tried to impose order on their particular property, there’s almost always nearby scrub or woods or fully fledged forest. My own backyard is edged by a thin but tangled woods that gets larger and curvier as it winds its way down the road. It’s lush with vines and shrubs and is home to deer, foxes, coyotes, cottontail rabbits, groundhogs, possum, wild turkeys, fisher cats, squirrels and a large array of songbirds. Our feeder attracts cardinals, white-breasted nuthatches, tufted titmouse, gold finches and purple ones, chickadees, sparrows, junco, wrens, downy and red-headed woodpeckers, and bluejays. Cat birds and mourning doves also sit in the nearby trees. A few years ago, a pair of great horned owls sat in the oak near our bedroom window and exchanged mating negotiations around midnight, night after night, until at last the rituals were complete. Sometimes in summer we hear shrieks and cries from nameless wildlife in that shaggy scrub and the sounds can be terrible and haunting. More often we hear a cacophony of singing birds, and cicadas, and frogs.

There are hawks, too. Lately there has been an enormous female red-tail who hovers on the air currents, scanning the ground. You can almost feel her pass over before you see her or her shadow. She seems bigger than hawks normally are, though this could just be the effect of her being closer. Perhaps she’s incredibly well fed, and maybe we’re seeing more of her as one of those abundant-wildlife-consequences of COVID time. The rabbits on our property are large right now and numerous, and on Saturday this particular hawk swooped down onto the grass right behind our house and caught one. I didn’t see the strike, but could see something on the lawn that I thought at first was a large piece of broken tree branch. I couldn’t see the hawk. I looked through the binoculars and saw that it was a freshly killed, full-grown cottontail, lying stretched out with its beautiful long feet together. It appeared to be lacking a head, but I saw later on that it was just obscured. A bright red gash on the neck told the whole story; that, and the gruesome entrails, which had already been extracted and scrawled on the grass.

In the time that I waited for the hawk to return, there was a lot of activity in the yard. Clearly the hawk and her kill had created a ripple. The songbirds were gone for a time, but eventually returned. A crow swooped in and took an acorn-sized piece from the rabbit (a kidney maybe?), then flew away and didn’t come back. A very rotund groundhog hustled from the woods across the open grass toward the house, which I’ve never seen before. He was really booking it, almost comically so, but if his plan was to avoid the hawk he was right out in the open. Clearly he wasn’t thinking right. Eventually he dashed under the back porch and then was gone from there in a blink. The presence of this dead rabbit with its exposed viscera was both rattling and a normal occurrence (though certainly not for the humans in the house watching). The songbirds blithely went about their business.

Hours later and I was still checking the backyard. The sight of the rabbit was beautiful and terrible. The fawn-like colours of the fur, those quietly elegant feet, the curled front paws, the long ears. The gash was red and magnetic; impossibly bright. The rib cage sat alone and emptied, and all the entrails were loosely coiled on the ground, all wrong. Poor rabbit. But now that it was so fully in this arrangement, there was nothing to do but admire how complex and baroque the scene was.

I was setting dinner on the table when I saw a flash and turned to see the hawk arrive; she sat on the fence a few feet from the rabbit. She looked at me through the glass, but I stayed very still and she eventually swooped down on the carcass. I watched for close to twenty minutes as she worked at it, amazed by how big she was, and captivated by the straight-forward brutality of her work. Her feathers had the same lushness as the rabbit fur and shared some of the same colours. The rich textures and almost opulent nature of what I was seeing made me think of Renaissance still life paintings. It was vivid and right there: the idea of being consumed. Death and aliveness. (Our own dinner was vegan and served in ceramic pasta bowls and not nearly so suspenseful.)

Eventually the hawk flew off but much of the rabbit remained. Things had changed though. Death had settled in with a dazzling completeness. The red blood was no longer bright and crisp, but ruddy and faded. The fur, too, seemed washed out and the body even more deflated. Much of what was left was earth-coloured and dulling. I hoped the hawk was going to come back and finish, or that some other creature would pull the rabbit, or whatever it now was, into the woods.

When I got up in the morning and came downstairs, I found the hawk hunched at her work, finishing up. She caught sight of me through the glass, which startled her, and she flew off for the final time. But when I looked to see what of her meal was left, I was astonished to see that there were only a few puffs of grey fur and what appeared to be a leg bone. Nothing more. Later in the afternoon, I was looking out the window (which seems such a COVID activity these days) and I saw her flying, riding the currents, perhaps on the lookout for more.

What I'm Reading

I do this: I read multiple books at one time, and I think I always have, or since university at least (and maybe that’s the genesis—reading various textbooks at once). I like the sense of freedom, and juxtaposition, how the books speak to each other, in a way, though it has to be said that in this case, each one is very distinct. It’s possible, too, that COVID is influencing my reading—well, I’m sure it is—or at the very least it forms a background against which the tone of each book is highlighted (for instance, I very specifically turned to Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning last week). Since the shut-down, I don’t actually have more time for reading, as the level of care-giving has risen, though it seems imperative, more than ever, to make the time. My initial restlessness and lack of concentration (or rather the concentration on many other things that were deeply important) has begun to be replaced by a desire to think, read and write. So this is my current (not quite finished) reading rotation.

Caitlin Doughty’s From Here to Eternity is a fascinating look at death practices around the globe, and in particular the corporeal aspects, as in what gets done with the body after someone has died (which also leads to the provoking question, in a few of the cultures she examines: does the body left behind in some way have life? I found this very interesting and unexpected, that the question of an afterlife in certain regions involves keeping the physical body in a kind of stasis, protected as much as possible from decay).

I found a used copy of Lewis Hyde’s classic The Gift a while back, long before COVID, and I’m utterly surprised by it, also. For those of you who’ve read it, you already know it’s a book about creativity, but also something more; it is an entirely unusual investigation of creativity. The first part of The Gift is a scholarly examination of gift practices, using the lens of folk and fairy tales, indigenous histories, and mythologies, to illuminate not simply the process of gift-giving or the why, but the energy and mechanics that enliven what passes from one person to another. He uncovers what is almost a set of rules for that energy, or if not rules exactly, tendencies. Hyde is setting up the reader to then understand creativity, which functions as a gift.

Claudia Casper’s The Mercy Journals is a bit of an echo of the times we’re in, as it’s set in a dystopian future (though the cause of the chaos and emotional isolations is environmental, rather than specifically viral). I’m enjoying it immensely (and there is a troubled character who is a contemporary dancer, who I can’t help but like). There is certainly something to be said for reading dystopian books during this particular moment in history.

I had started Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead and somehow got pulled away from it. The good part of that, I suppose, is the re-discovery. In fact, it’s the sort of book to come back to and write about with some depth, which I think I will do. I loved her book Flights, which won the Booker International Prize (this is a prize for books in translation and each year the long-list is a bonanza of amazing, intelligent reading). Drive Your Plow was likewise nominated. It was published in Polish in 2009, and then translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones in 2018. I discovered, too, that there is a film adaptation of the book (called Pokot), though it seems unavailable for streaming at the moment; hopefully that will change. At any rate, the novel, which is a murder mystery that doesn’t play to the tropes, has me thinking a lot about the experience of reading layered, meaningful, intensely thoughtful work and how to describe the mystery—not the functional one in the story—that seems to be in the spaces and margins. And how vital that experience of reading work like this seems. The writers I love, and this applies certainly to Tokarczuk, do a lot of combining and drawing on disparate fields of study and thought, and there is the combining, too, of concrete and more nebulous aspects (in this case, death is a literal and recurring event), the lived world and the dream world, or aspects of the real that verge on dreams or something archetypal or mythological in feel. In Drive Your Plow, Tokarczuk folds into the narrative not only the question of who is murdering hunters, but also feminism, animal rights, astrology, the poetry of William Blake and ageism, to name a few of the larger aspects.

I’ve also re-read Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, as many people are at the moment (among his wonderful observations of a time of terror, he touches on the psychology of not knowing when something will end, which speaks, in a small way, to our current situation) and Susan Sontag’s journal, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh (this is a great book to read in the small hours of the night if I happen to wake up, as her entries are already fragmented within a continuous flow of her ideas and the content isn’t the Holocaust or a dystopian world).

Nova Scotia Shooting

This is Halifax Harbour in 2018, the last time I was there. I was on an early morning run. Now the worst mass shooting in Canadian history has occurred in rural NS, with 20 reported victims (at this writing). This is extraordinary to begin with, and even more stunning when you take into consideration the time we’re in, the physical and emotional isolation that is happening all around us, the global suffering. It’s difficult to imagine the full scope of grief that the affected families must be experiencing, how there is loss on top of loss.

I was born and raised in Nova Scotia. The province has been the scene of various disasters and tragedies over the decades, too many for its small size (mining disasters, the downing of Swiss Air 111, and most of all the Halifax Explosion). And yet it speaks to the tenacity of Nova Scotians that, similar to New Yorkers actually, there is an ability to gather up and rise, to keep going. This is an uncertain time, however, one in which the level of not-knowing has been acutely felt by everyone for weeks before this happened. Mourning in isolation, without the benefit of funerals and public gatherings of condolence, is another new thing that people in NS are now forced to learn.

People use this phrase (especially on social media), “My heart goes out—” It’s a cliché, but now that I think about it, it’s also beautiful, the idea of one’s heart traveling out to meet another, to reach over the miles and embrace, console, give something that is intangible but utterly foundational and important; the heart given as a gift: Here, take it. It is yours.

Anxiety in the Time of COVID

I ordered this Buddha months ago and didn’t imagine that it would make its arrival during a time when its box would have to sit in quarantine for a few days or that its presence would resonate so much.

I have an abiding interest in anxiety. I used to have anxiety disorder, and OCD as well, which began in early childhood (is there anxiety that doesn’t begin there, in some way?). I use the past tense not because I’m entirely convinced of it but because it doesn’t feel right if I use the present. I do still experience anxiety, mildly, but then more acutely, especially as of late, but it’s so radically different and mostly ephemeral that I consider the disorder part to be in the past (years of lifestyle and diet changes, plus heaps of meditation have been more effective than I can say). Regardless, I have a deep interest in the thinking mind, which is so often, for so many people, the anxious mind.

And this time, the one of COVID, is excellent for the study of anxiety; because wow. Every emotion, actually, seems heightened to the point of the surreal.

I can attest that each day here is a ferocious mix of being alive, gratitude, fear, sadness, anger, peacefulness, all of it on rotation. I saw the Instagram post of a friend who has a history of addiction and she talked about the full gamut of emotion, including swearing, picking fights with her partner, fear and anger, but also joyfulness and everything in between, how some of the feelings are reminiscent of the rawness of being newly sober.

Maybe a positive effect of this virus is that some of us are confronting, and possibly integrating, their shadow and the shadow side of our existence, what it is to be human. This seems to me sorely needed. As much as meditation has been so vital to me, and my teachers and fellow practitioners a lifeline, there is something about meditation communities as a whole (and this runs the spectrum from Buddhism to yoga to secular mindfulness practices) that gets in my craw a little, which is a misunderstanding of how we’re supposed to treat the stuff of our emotional lives. By “stuff” I just mean all the phenomena, whatever we experience, the full range. I notice sometimes an ingrained habit of rejecting and repressing what is negative, a denial especially of anger, but also anxiety, even as the teaching at the core of many Eastern philosophies is one of acceptance and integration. This is at work inside of Jungian theory, too, the need to acknowledge shadow content, the full “seeing” of both our light and dark selves (and by extension the light and dark sides of how we perceive the exterior world). But what I notice in meditators sometimes, and the western Buddhist community (and this is unavoidable, really, because everything contains its opposite), is a smoothing over of legitimate wrinkles and maybe even a vague competition to see who appears the most “together” and calm—the least wrinkled. No one wants to slip up and reveal the colourful, fiery array of experience underneath.

Perhaps a function of this virus (not that I’m claiming to know), now that we are all saturated in anxieties, whether they belong to us or to other people, is that it has become universally more difficult to ignore what is prickling or dark or molten. I wonder if there’s a prior belief at work that to acknowledge difficulty is to lack gratitude, but real gratitude includes all aspects. It’s perfectly okay to be in this situation and not feel joy. A fake smile doesn’t seem helpful to me. Maybe a better state to cultivate is something like peacefulness, though not at the expense of allowing the full emotional range, including all the feelings we find untenable, and chief among these are anger and fear. We have to acknowledge that these states exist in the first place, in order to let them go.

Oh, shame, too. This can seem to be a lot of work: untangling (which is really just witnessing) all those shame threads and allowing them to dissolve away. Many of us grew up in families and cultures steeped in shame; and we were taught to be deeply ashamed of well-earned anger and rage, as well as that background murmur of nameless anxiety that is the soundtrack in many human minds.

When I was ten years old I was placed in a hospital, in an oxygen tent, for three days, because I was having an anxiety attack. In rural Nova Scotia, at the the end of the seventies, there wasn’t much of an awareness of childhood anxiety disorder—anxiety was the very last conclusion the doctors came to. I wasn’t given any sort of treatment, just released from the hospital with the words to my mother, “Something scared her.” The only available response to that seemed to be distraction, and so I was taught to neglect unlikable feelings, hiding the anxiety away from myself rather than investigate it. Question it. I recall being asked what had scared me, but, of course, I couldn’t articulate what was going on. Anxiety is a nebulous territory, lacking edges and borders and sometimes even a name. It can be hard to see. Its root is often a field of experiences and impressions, not always a single event. Even a single traumatic event would fall against an already existing background of mental formations. So I couldn’t say what was going on, especially because I was only ten—how to account for that wordless, unshakable fear, the one that stole my breath and caused me to think unequivocally that I wasn’t getting enough oxygen? There is nothing more primal than that.

For people with anxiety, COVID is an especially potent enemy (though it’s not really an enemy, of course, just another life form doing its thing; maybe we should call it a teacher), because it’s not only invisible but can cause difficulty with breathing. The virus moves so stealthily and quickly that it has covered an entire globe. It travels by air literally—drifting on currents and boarding planes to cross oceans and jump security checkpoints. Its network has the vastly intricate pattern of our own blood vessels and neural pathways. We recognize it even if we can’t see it, we know its gregariousness and naked desire to spread. It appears to have our own predilection to be unsatisfied.

The thing about the emotional low points that many of us have been experiencing, or at least glimpsing, is that those of us who are sequestered with partners, children, relatives, roommates, etc. are having the experience of those emotions in front of other people. We are replete with witnesses; overrun with them, in fact. Which can feel rather raw, and further complicates the aspects of shame already present. Even asking for a figurative time-out reveals the need for it.

I attended sangha via Zoom the other night and it was amazing how well it worked. Meditating this way, seeing everyone in their own habitat, was incredibly effective and even joyful. But during the night, as with so many people right now, my dreams were vivid, difficult and seemed endless. When the sun rose and I finally got up, I felt better, and it strikes me that the relaxation of the night before served as a portal to an anxiety that needed to be witnessed. Pulled into the light. I clearly identified too much with the story of it, though, and wrestled, but eventually I was able to relinquish it and the need to control everything.

This is the background for so many of us: the need to arrange external events so they look more like something we would prefer or at least recognize. The practice then is one of letting go, over and over and over, each time the anxiety (and the shame about the anxiety) comes up. It occurs to me, also, that perhaps I was repressing the anxiety during the previous day because I wanted, frankly, to be alone with it.

Which brings me to something that has been tremendously helpful. I don’t know about you but I have rarely journaled so much in my life; I haven’t always ascribed to the use of journals—I’ve kept them on and off since age ten, but I’ve always had notebooks where I’ve used a looser format of drawings, diagrams, scribblings, notations, especially about books I’m writing. COVID-time, however, has given me a renewed sense of the usefulness of detailed journaling and, to sort of paraphrase Julia Cameron, signal one’s location to the universe.

Time and the Story of MOLLY's Date

New Release Date: APRIL 27, 2021

My novel has a new release date, as do many books right now, due to the stresses of our current situation, to which we all have to adapt. I think there’s something in here about time, too, and our perceptions of it. Does time seem different to you, too? As they say, the present moment is all we ever have. Time in the land of COVID is a different animal, though, and has taken some adjustment. Part of the reason for the discombobulation is no doubt due to the wearing of pajamas or yoga pants for extended periods or, heck, wearing them continuously. Also the eschewing of regular bathing in favour of radical cleansing and disinfection methods for groceries and packages. In my case I also have an old-school calendar book that I’ve suddenly stopped consulting, giving me that what-day-is-it-even feeling; although, as the weeks have gone by I’ve gotten better at keeping tabs on the date. (It’s as if I removed myself from the calendar’s reach or have no longer found a use for it, or maybe I don’t like being reminded of the world and the sense of time that the calendar represents.)

*This is a note from the future: tonight Saturday Night Live’s cast will create their show from their individual quarantines and Tom Hanks, the host, will declare that Saturday no longer exists. There! I knew it. I told my husband that there is only Today and I-Don’t-Know, and they alternate.

But maybe the larger problem at work here is the emotional dissonance that many of us are experiencing (or we’re experiencing the dissonance of the people we live with or friends that we’re waving to on video or those neighbours in the distance). At any rate, the effect is there, the time warp of this time, the way that it’s more elastic than usual, more Twilight-Zone-ish. Dreams, too, have been unrelentingly strange and vivid, so that sleep is less of a reliable blank and more yet another experience of narrative time.

All this leads to forgetfulness. I forgot to pay some of the bills that aren’t already electronic, which rarely happens. If I have a scheduled call with someone I have to write it in big letters on a whiteboard in the kitchen, where I know I’ll see it, because I’ve been forgetting things—events, places, thoughts, names, schedules, all of it falling into a COVID void only to suddenly bob to the surface later (and for whatever reason scheduling it into my phone doesn’t seem like a better response). Everyone in the computer screen world is wearing their pajamas and clutching a coffee cup or a martini glass, their hair askew, regardless of the hour. A friend and her husband were having cocktails in the morning, because time no longer made sense, or rather it made sense to have a cocktail when they wanted it; she napped at dinner.

All of this is to say that time, as ever, is malleable and artistic, and we are all Alice in Wonderland, and our immediate family is more immediate than ever, and our friends now live inside our screens, and we are all too big and then too small. Not that our perception of time wasn’t this way before, only that the particulars have changed. In the larger, outer world, the postponement and rescheduling of things has been rampant, for good reason. Everyone is madly scrambling to adjust, re-tune, plan for a later time when we can stick our heads up from our burrows and look around, and maybe—someday—attend concerts and go to restaurants, and the beach.

So my novel, also, is in this category of movement (and funnily enough, at the heart of the book is the individual, impressionistic experience of time by one woman). The original date was for the end of this month, but that was arranged long, long before COVID; now publishers, bookstores and the entire delivery system are under an unprecedented strain and so Simon & Schuster Canada has scheduled the release of MOLLY FALLS TO EARTH for April 27, 2021. Given the topsy-turviness of the world, and on a micro level, the fact that my home-life is filled with Gabriel-care at the moment, this is a good decision, and it makes for something to look forward to. So now the event that was on the brink of happening has made a leap in time; this reminds me a little of leaving a party one night as a teenager, very possibly having smoked some pot, and getting closer and closer to the end of a street where the end continually seemed to move out of reach. But I did eventually get there, my destination, and so will we all, and hopefully we’ll be in the present moment as we go. Happy Saturday (Sunday?).

The COVID experience so far

Goddard Park, the last time I was there before it closed.

Hidden talents as revealed by COVID-19 seclusion so far:

Focaccia maker (with the last known packet of Fleischmann’s in the Western world)

Grocery launderer

Gabriel hair cutter and stylist (turns out I’m an ace barber—who knew?)

Sleeping cat annoyer

This seclusion has been very revealing of everything, including the light-hearted, but more often it shows the fears and anxieties that growl there in the background. I used to grind my teeth every night, long before the virus, though years of meditation and body awareness have helped with this more than I can say; but I woke from a quick nap yesterday with my jaw clenched tight.

Nameless, shapeless anxieties have become re-articulated in the tendons of my back. I noticed this when I was in the kitchen this morning, but this noticing is helpful—the most effective thing, I think, to do with all the feelings and sensations passing through. Maybe the most fundamental skill is to learn to witness, to allow judgment to cool down, to be easier with not-knowing and uncertainty. Bare observation is evidence of that lovely paradox that shows up in the territory between our minds and pure beingness—you accomplish something by doing nothing. Except watch.

But speaking of doing, simple witnessing isn’t by any means easy to accomplish. I don’t always have the knack, and these are unprecedented times (not unprecedented in terms of horror, but in the way of the specifics; I think we can all agree that, in general, human atrocity is perfectly predictable). Things and attitudes change daily. The entire globe is now connected in this intricate net of sickness, anxiety and (maybe) hope. New York City, beloved by so many, is roiling in a fear so palpable that it’s felt everywhere, and each day of seclusion, regardless of where you are, is a rocking between catastrophic thinking and perhaps moments of peace or the ability to witness. I have found it’s a uniquely bizarre experience, for instance, to wash a load of groceries in the kitchen sink like so many babies, but on the other hand there is food, plus soap and clean water. My husband puts his arms up toward the ceiling every day and says, “We’re alive!” and then I do this, too, and we start laughing, not because any of this is at all funny but because it’s an entirely human thing to do, especially to ward off suffering. There have been many moments when I’ve teared up or been frozen with anxiety. “We have to be grateful,” says the mechanical engineer whose scientific mind is often the counter to my literary one, but lately he is philosophical. Gratitude is the best antidote, true enough.

The parks and beaches here in Rhode Island are now closed, which is a necessary measure, but a blow to people with disabilities (and their caregivers) who need a safe place to go to be outside. Gabriel’s world gets (inexplicably, to him) smaller and smaller, though he seems to be adjusting now. Music, as ever, is the saviour, as it has been for so many years for him (us). The accessibility of vast cathedrals of jazz, big band, funk, classical, and opera is a brilliant light in this whole business; it feels like a miracle, actually, to download lists of tunes, and to hear the intricate and soaring record of musicians’ personal suffering and hope—what is jazz if not the most ingenious telling of profound hardship made wholly listenable? I think the lesson here is that the suffering isn’t repressed or shoved aside or falsely turned into a positive, but rather paid attention to—witnessed. And allowed to sing.

Gabriel in the Time of COVID-19

This photo of my son Gabriel was taken last September, in more liberated times! The last few days he’s been sick with a sinus infection as he, and we all, try to adjust to the new circumstances in which we find ourselves. His beloved day program has been closed for the time being, and so, like many people, he finds his routine upended and his circles much smaller. We are on “vacation,” but clearly something is different, and he possesses immense awareness, even if he doesn’t speak, of body language and telltale facial expressions and sheer energy. He knows, on some level, that we’re in new territory, that his parents, his brother, his caregivers, his friends and neighbours are all trying to get a grip. But none of this is something to “grip.” It’s nebulous and unknowable—precisely the qualities that the human mind tends to dislike; hence all that banging and resistance going on in there.

He has taken apart my office (his favourite place to sit) and so I’ve reorganized to better accommodate him. He likes spaciousness (how ironic) and for objects to be beyond his reach (if they’re too close, they ignite his desire to throw them; if they’re far enough away, they get to live in peace). Lately he’s been loving his usual jazz playlists, but especially Big Band and also opera (Maria Callas is a new discovery and he wants to hear her daily). Glenn Miller has been on repeat, and he likes to hold my hands and swing them while we listen to In the Mood, Chattanooga Choo Choo and the like (these are really uplifting tunes and I highly recommend). He has his shakers, bells and drum sticks, but mostly he just likes to listen. We drive to the ocean, too, and listen to music there, and sometimes podcasts, though this is clearly my choice and not his (but I figure I get to have some of my own listening in this whole affair).

The world over, people with intellectual disabilities are finding themselves confined to smaller spaces and different routines, because of something hard to define, explain or bring an end to. It is seismic, really, this adapting that we all have to do. There has to be a kind of elasticity and fluidity and you wonder where to find those things. The question hangs there palpably, “How long will this go on?” A snow day you know will end, and vacation, too. This thing, not so much. In our house, we have the added element of Gabriel’s needs, his sometimes tumultuous behaviours, but also his deeply felt presence, his utter sweetness. He is both delicious and sometimes impossible. And we have to do the impossible, for his sake and ours, of learning to float and be elastic in this new era. I was listening to Russell Brand’s recent podcast with Gabor Maté (if you want to hear cogent, sage responses to the pandemic, this is the podcast to listen to), which was brilliant and made me laugh with surprise, which is no small thing right now. Two of Gabor’s offerings that delighted were the Buddhist idea of “Relax, everything is out of control,” and the Chinese saying that a crisis is danger plus opportunity. I have a friend who calls difficult times “another fucking growth opportunity,” though this is clearly what is at work here: another growth opportunity, if an entirely unwanted and overwhelming one. So how do we sit with difficulty, how do we do the impossible?

It’s okay to have no idea. The mind can’t think its way through this. I think fully acknowledging the roar in the brain—that this seems like a shit-storm—is important (and it especially feels this way for caregivers who suddenly find themselves maxing out). It’s okay to feel perfectly, exquisitely overwhelmed—in fact, it has to be felt for it to dissolve. When I stop wrestling so much with my thoughts and resisting my resistance, I notice that that space opens up—the one beyond the mind and all our calculations and unhappiness and struggle. When I wrote my memoir, Know the Night, one of the transformative ideas that arrived toward the end was STOP STRUGGLING. It was the singular and simple lesson of that time period. My resistance had caused so much grief and wasted energy. But learning to float is hard to do, to let go, to say and actually mean, “Relax, everything is out of control.” We can’t fake it (and, as Deepak Chopra has pointed out, forced positive thinking causes more stress). Nor can we reason our way out. The one thing I’ve felt that I can do reliably is locate myself in my body, and have an awareness of my breath—but especially important is the part about being in the body, feeling that energy field. The tumult is still there, and so both of these modes are present: the expansive energy in the body and the difficult, seemingly impossible situation in which the body finds itself. The trick is to allow for both, and then it’s possible to float, at least for a moment.

Meditation & Writing (plus coronavirus, politics,...)

I just finished teaching a class at GrubStreet in Boston, a six-week course that combined meditation and memoir. I’ve rewritten this next sentence numerous times, trying to find the way to describe such an extraordinary experience. That’s the thing about creativity in general, though; so much of that energy lies beyond language, beyond our attempts to conceptualize. Suffice to say, the students showed up every Friday evening (!) and each time, we spent three hours exploring the foundations of meditation (vipassana specifically) and then weaving that in and through memoir, covering everything from voice to structure to managing the often unwieldy material of a writer’s life experience (which, after all, is the content of memoir, and which makes memoir workshops inherently different from ones that focus on fiction). As it turned out, this weaving was organic and intriguing—the two subjects “spoke” to each other almost effortlessly. It made so much sense.

Beginning the class with meditation (and a really close look at its components) had incredible effects, not the least of which was making a container for the rest of the course work and all those deeply personal stories. I’ve written across genre (one memoir, one story collection, one novel, and—in my twenties and thirties—poetry) and often talk about the illusion of boundaries between them and how fluidly the territories can blend if we open up to that. But there are, of course, some intrinsic differences, and I was reminded of some of these during the class, including the often tangled and oppressive spaces that a writer has to enter when they work with their own conflicts and obstacles as material; also how alive that material is, most especially when it rings true. And that that authenticity has so much to do with the writer’s willingness to bring awareness into their work.

Something that came up repeatedly was the appearance of the Jungian notion of persona and shadow and this was so fascinating to witness. I hadn’t really considered, prior to this, the extent to which the ability to see one’s shadow (or at least some part of it) and invite it into the writing is so wildly important to memoir. I understood this in my heart, but wouldn’t have phrased it this way. I know how much meditation has made a difference in my life, and my writing life, and I could see how it made a difference in the way the students approached their work, how they were able to look at all aspects of themselves, including their shadow, even in the small time-frame of those six short weeks. And it was short—time flew, as they say, and yet the hours we spent tending to this work were so full. Each week, three hours didn’t seem to be enough. There was so much to talk about, and so much energy in the class and in the ideas.

I started meditating nine years ago, and even though my approach to it is mostly “goal-less” (or as without a goal as I can make it), I can see, looking back, that there has been a palpable energy in those nine years, an increasing, alive one that has shown itself in all areas of my life. In particular I can see its movement through my writing and the three books I’ve published while parenting a child (now a 22-year-old man) with Down syndrome and autism. Meditation, and extending the awareness developed on the cushion into the experience of each day, has transformed me, bit by bit, and my relationship to my writing and creativity.

The biggest changes occurred when I started looking into Buddhist meditation and vipassana (and I’m now in a teacher-training program) specifically and becoming better able to sit with the narrative that the mind produces, to see it more clearly. Writing a book-length manuscript requires the ability to sit not only with the narrative on the page but also the stories we tell ourselves about writing, how we’re doing, when we’ll reach the end, if we’ll have the stamina. Meditation also deepened my appreciation for some of the mechanical aspects, including getting up at 4:30 a.m. to write (happily, I might add; not happily every single day but happily on more days than you might guess), and it’s helped me handle self-doubt and periods of low energy. I already had a good respect for process, but my appreciation has deepened radically and it’s possible to see that the ups and downs of writing are just that: an undulating pattern that can just be, instead of being an obstacle.

Then there is the business of the exterior world right now (or the imagined exterior, since, at the end of everything, there are no real distinctions) and the various (perceived) marauding energies of the coronavirus and politics and the financial world and the intersections of these things. I felt my energy get low, in spite of going out on the trails as much as possible to recharge, and some constrictions in my body due to anxiety, and here again meditation and awareness have helped me navigate. We’ve been so trained to see viruses as our enemy, unseen forces that we long to corral and control with warfare and money. It’s easy enough to see that our treatment of the natural world—because we perceive ourselves to be apart from it—is the source of our on-going problems. We made an inflamed world and now we live in it.

Being here in New England, I see that while meditation is popular, it’s also equally scoffed at; meditation and mindfulness received a whole lotta press a few years back, and the cover of Time, even, and an entire industry has grown around it in terms of books and apps and cushions and retreats. Which is maybe not a bad thing, necessarily, but it seems that whenever we get our hands on an idea we make it so ubiquitous and watered-down that we end up drowning it. There are always polar ideologies: the nefarious forces in politics that are against civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, etc. are met on the other side with people who advocate for the vulnerable. Unfortunately, many of those latter people mistakenly believe that meditation equals passivity and not taking action to correct the mistreatment of the environment and certain portions of the human and animal population. My experience of meditation is that it is necessary for living and for making change, that it is an alive process, one that gets taught and handed from person to person in an enormous and complex web of vitality. It seems to me that meditation and the awareness that it enables are at the heart of any really creative endeavour, any good doing, that non-doing and just being is vital to doing something well and with integrity and longevity. Meditation is this very simple thing (made complicated by some) that should be ubiquitous, because it’s our essence. It’s amazing to me how many people effectively argue themselves out of being fully themselves. “I don’t have time to meditate,” they say, “or just don’t want to.” And at one time, prior to nine years ago, I was one of them.

Many people who have heard about my class express surprise at the combination, and even my students and I laughed several times about the “weirdness,” though I can see it isn’t weird at all. After spending weeks preparing for the class and then more weeks actually teaching it, I feel that the whole idea of weaving meditation into writing makes so much sense that I’m only sorry I didn’t think of it sooner.

Molly Falls to Earth... advance copies!

I’ve been busy with the beginning of teaching a class, and so haven’t posted yet in January, but this happened on Saturday: the postman delivered, while I was having a winter’s nap, a parcel containing the ARCs (advance reading copies) of my novel! Et voila, here she is, with her dynamic cover. Much excitement and gratitude.

There’s a palpable shift from reading a manuscript in word-processor form to reading it as a bound book. Seismic, really. The book form has a new authority, a personality and a kind of permanence (or an illusion of permanence, anyway, in an impermanent world). It’s on the heftier side, too, being a longer book than my previous two.

So here we go! Molly is beginning to make her way.

Swans at Twilight and What Happened Next

Monday late afternoon I was out for a run/hike in Ryan Park. It had been raining all day and was already quite dark when I set out from the parking lot (I had my light in my pocket, planning to run the last bit in the dark). All the leaves are down, so the woods are quite grey and twiggy (but beautiful in their way in winter), plus there was the misty sky and absent sun. When I got to the pond, I saw three enormous swans alternately gliding and feeding with their heads under water. I loved seeing them, their bright forms in all that accumulating darkness. Rain was falling hard at that point, and I continued past the pond, along the gravel road and then back into the woods to cross the arched bridge. At the bridge, it started to absolutely deluge, so wildly that I laughed out loud (it happens a lot, actually, that I laugh out loud when I run). The temperature was in the mid fifties, so it was warmish, and being in the downpour was delightful. There was something undeniably funny about being the lone, sodden human underneath all that rain. I’ve had similar experiences in summer when running in a hard shower, but it’s been a long time. 

Something else happened, though. I noticed as I was going over the bridge that it was really darkening. I continued winding my way along the trail through the woods; eventually the path comes up behind some houses, and then the parking lot isn’t far from there. I don’t like starting out a run in the dark by myself, but ending one in the dark is different. I love the process of the woods getting dimmer, as long as I have the light in my pocket. Then I have a choice, which is to turn the light on or just stay in the deepening twilight and let my eyes adjust. I did eventually turn it on, but the batteries were on the weak side and so it didn’t make much of a difference; which gave me the opportunity to really look around at the forest and suddenly feel it more. I felt a shift, since I couldn’t discern as much with my eyes, to feeling the woods as a whole. It seemed a bit like disappearing, but also not. There was an unmistakeable merging, or submerging, of me within the forest, or a dissolving of boundaries. Words can’t really convey what happened all that well, since disappearing and appearing all at once can’t really be conceptualized, but there it is. I realized that being in the dark twilight like that, feeling those transitions, surrounded by the power of the woods, facilitated the dissolving of borders. It seems to me that this is something missing from contemporary life, the opportunity to be in the dark without lights of some kind; and that experience would have been entirely common once upon a time; and I’m guessing the experience, too, of dissolving and being part of something larger, the sensing of the magnitude of the natural world.   

Writing Acknowledgments

Last week was Thanksgiving, and I’ve been thinking a lot about gratitude and expressions of it. Eckhart Tolle says, to paraphrase, that being grateful for something is to pay attention to it—the thankfulness can be wordless; the point is the quality of attention. Gratitude has definitely developed a public face and something people post about on Facebook or Instagram. I’ve seen various friends over the years with a daily gratitude practice that then becomes their social media update; it becomes clear that the posting of thanks is something deeply separate from the original practice and maybe even undermines it. Not to knock the saying of gratitude out loud, of course, and we all feel good when someone thanks us (don’t we?), especially when we weren’t expecting it (or demanding it on some subconscious level). But we all know true alignment when we see it, and genuine gratitude, too. Maybe thankfulness is best when it’s a somewhat private affair, spoken between two people or to no one in particular—or not spoken but felt—and maybe that’s when it has the chance to be the most powerful, and something like a wonderful secret. Maybe that’s when it’s more of a practice, something quiet and without agenda.

I’ve been thinking of the last tasks of writing MOLLY FALLS TO EARTH, all the signals that a book is coming together, and creating the acknowledgments is one of them; and so I had to come up against whatever feelings I have about public thank-yous. And it made me wonder if, at the same time that I sometimes enjoy reading the acknowledgments for a book (maybe because you can get another sense of the writer, one that you didn’t glimpse in the rest of the work), I’m a bit uncomfortable with long ones, especially at the end of novels where they can seem over-the-top and unhinged from the real. They can seem to have a competitive heart. Nonfiction is possibly the exception (and I seem to recall the acknowledgments for KNOW THE NIGHT as running to the longer side, in part because it was my first book; would I write it shorter now?)—there tend to be numerous sources to thank and point out, permissions people, even institutions. So maybe what I’m saying here applies more to fiction. 

When I see long acknowledgments, I sometimes wonder if what I’m seeing is really the immense pressure, unconsciously expressed, for status that’s driven by social media (nothing against social media per se; everything has a dualistic nature and a shadow side), something like a desire to protect oneself with a complexly-rendered shield of helpers. Or at least to give the appearance of it. #squadgoals. If I thought that the gratitude was simply gratitude—that is, without another intention behind it—I wouldn’t be writing this. And I would have to include my own experience here, which is that when I’m writing my gratitude I find it impossible to escape the social-construct aspect of it and that the enormous thankfulness I may feel (and most certainly do) and its nuances and surprises, how it is often aroused by very simple occurrences, has little to do with the expectations and social conformity of writing the acknowledgments page. At the same time, getting to that point feels like a privilege, something to be considered deeply and savoured... but then let go of. You say your thanks and hope it is enough. But for whom? The people you’re thanking, the readers, yourself, the cosmos? I noticed in Ali Smith’s latest novels that she simply makes a list of names and that’s it. No indication of what position the person behind the name fulfills, how they rendered help, or how close they are to her. There’s a very spare hierarchy in that it’s a list, but that’s all the hint you get. And I really, really like that. It seems a very Ali Smith thing to do, too. 

Anyway, in the end, to each their own. It would certainly be a shame if all acknowledgments could only be a few words (though using only a few words has become so decidedly unique, that it now seems radical) or had to be any particular way. If someone has really dug down and done their work and made a long acknowledgments that rings with whatever in them is genuine, then who am I to suggest they shouldn’t? It would be amazing, though, to see other, completely different expressions. What if the acknowledgments was just an image—maybe even an abstract one? 

When the day came that I sat down to write the acknowledgments for Molly, I decided to go toward the short, if not the bare list of names. I’ve been practicing metta (also called lovingkindness) meditation, and it suddenly came to mind and seemed appropriate. But whatever I wrote down is only a shade of the real experience. How do you say, once you’ve finished a book, everything there is to say about what goes into it and the people—not to mention chance opportunities, the sheer luck—who helped you along the way? 

Which is maybe exactly why many writers choose to devote pages and pages to it... 

Completing a Novel... Part Two

Photos for MOLLY FALLS TO EARTH

A space forms after a big project; small ones, too, actually. I’ve had this feeling after finishing short pieces, like a story or an essay, and it happens especially after finishing a book. And it happens in stages, because finishing happens in stages—you complete a round of edits and there it is: a space forming, or a pause that’s both bright and shadowy. The world had been full of words and then suddenly it isn’t. Or the words have changed, maybe, neglected ones coming to the surface, or maybe it’s images or sensations. Something, anyway, is different.

Some writers have the next book already queued up, so one project is simply exchanged for another in a seamless word fabric. When I finished my story collection, I was in that position, having already started MOLLY FALLS TO EARTH because it began, literally, as one of the stories before I understood it wanted to be something bigger and removed it. But I still took a pause, or rather the pause took me, and there was that space again, both welcome and uncomfortable. If you’re too hooked on doing, the space can be disconcerting. Somehow boundaries have shifted, gotten bigger and maybe unwieldy. New terrain, or old terrain that had gone unseen for a time. But I know better than to avoid spaces and pauses; they’re maybe the most important “thing,” for not being a thing.

Anyway, the photos above. They’re of Washington Square Park. Molly, my novel’s protagonist, is a contemporary dance choreographer who has a seizure on a sidewalk in Manhattan—right on the edge of WSP. Her seizure lasts seven minutes, which is the crux of the book, as she experiences a confluence of her past and her present, including her secrets, and the people who have gathered around her. WSP is the kind of smallish park that seems big in memory. It has an outsized history and presence and colour. The trees and plantings in it are wondrous. The people, too. The wanderers and settlers and chess hustlers. There’s an enormous English elm that’s perhaps 300 years old, and there are some 20,000 people buried beneath the park’s surface. Walkways weave through that are made of hexagonal pavers. There’s the fountain, of course, and the gleaming white arch, and the beginning of Fifth Avenue. It’s been the scene of untold protests and subversive gatherings, and you can feel that energy when you’re there, all the possibilities.

So, the photos. I took some of them in summer and some in winter. Naturally, the park changes dramatically and when the branches are bare and you can see the curving shapes of them against the sky, there’s a spookiness and atmosphere. Not unfriendly in the least, but certainly stopping. The photos I took are mostly very simple, and quiet, and I avoided shooting people or the arch or the fountain. I took numerous shots of the hexagons, and some of the chess pieces, and a couple of pigeons; also various bits of litter: an old crossword, a folded blue-lined paper, a crumpled napkin. A small delicate white feather. When I shot there in summer, I was with my husband, and the park was full of movement and people. I was busy, focused on my camera, with my gaze mostly to the ground, looking for interesting items. I missed, according to my husband, the bare-chested woman sunning herself on a bench very close to me. And no one paying much mind, this being New York.

Back to space. I realized the photos are a kind of space or pause. The mind can’t help making its interpretations, it has to come up with a story or a meaning of some kind when it sees a picture—it’s almost helpless to the process, I think—but at the same time the image in amongst prose forms a void, or it can. And that’s one of the reasons that I find images within novels and short stories so fetching. There’s a shift, even one that’s in a blink, and something opens up that feels, if you’re open to it, almost eternal. Or something like that.

Completing a novel... Part One

Introducing Molly…

to be released

April, 2020

It’s done!

Complete!

This is my third book, but my debut novel (yes, friends have joked with me about writing a book in each existing genre). MOLLY FALLS TO EARTH is now complete, even the acknowledgments. All the larger edits have long been done, and the copyedits, too, and then a proofreader read the manuscript after that (which is when you really know you’re done). And this being my third go-round, I can say that the copyediting still astonishes me, and maybe a little more so than the general editing, which is its own kind of magic for sure, but one that I more or less expect. The fineness of the copyedits is what I’m talking about here, how every tiny decision in terms of commas and paragraphs and eccentric wording is accounted for, every character (meaning both characters and the letters on the page) noted and gone over numerous times. There are, too, the ensuing discussions in the margins and by email of what is meant by something and should it stand or be changed for something else. It’s a beautiful process, in part because it means you’re almost done, and it involves other people, including ones you don’t know, after you’ve spent so much time (months, years) of being with the ideas and story mostly alone (apart from, in this case, the wonderful company and astute mind of my acquiring editor, and then a few writing friends besides). And if you can get over the closeness of the inspection, how you’ll be questioned on things you’ve taken for granted, the process itself becomes enjoyable, even if it’s arduous (and you don’t want to do yet another read-through, but you must…). It becomes easy to see that great copyeditors are a godsend, and their attention to detail is an art form. And did I mention that it signals completion? Done-ness!

And the jacket design, too. If you’re very visual (I am), maybe that’s the best magic of all. More collaborations and mulling and going back and forth with the (long-suffering) designer. I’ve loved each jacket I’ve had, and the process of finding the right image, the right font. In the case of MOLLY FALLS TO EARTH, the chosen design was one of various iterations, all of them attempts to get at the topsy-turvy atmosphere in the book. The other arrangements and colour schemes were completely different. As the author you get a bit of say, if you’re lucky, but the jacket decisions tend to fall to the larger team, including, naturally, the marketing department. I did campaign for certain things, though, including the title font that you see up there, which, for whatever reason, makes me absurdly happy. If font can make one happy, which I can guess it can. I’ve realized fairly recently that I have a thing for typography and book design and all the small but entirely big details. (WHEN WE WERE BIRDS has a tiny pair of bird scissors on the dust jacket and then a tiny pair of bird scissors embossed on the actual spine, which blew my mind.)

… more to come…

What Does Fiction Do?

I love this, which was spoken by one of the characters in Vi Khi Nao’s wonderful Fish in Exile. The idea that we can contain in stories the suffering inherent in being human. I think what Vi Khi Nao is saying here (which is not to assume that a character says the thoughts of the author, of course, but I have a hunch that here, at least, she’s in cahoots with her character) is that the act of containing makes the hardness of this place more bearable. Maybe the containment is a transformer, too, and shows that the suffering can be beautiful in some way, or underscore beauty, or it can at least become interesting or useful if we have a small distance from it. We see the tragedy in a particular story and it becomes both ours and not ours.

A writer friend on Facebook the other day posted that she’s been having difficulty just being, that the weight of all the current political and environmental disasters is keeping her in bed; she wondered how other people were managing to carry on as if these things weren’t happening. She was both being accusing and seeking advice—how were they doing it? I think she was mistaking other people’s Facebook updates for actual happiness, but maybe that’s beside the point. It’s possible to suffer (acutely, even) and still take out the trash. Whether a particular tragedy is happening to us or happening on the other side of the globe, the suffering belongs to us in some way. Because we recognize it, because on some level we know. Because we’re all human.

I was listening to Russell Brand’s podcast (an absolute favorite of mine) the other day when he was interviewing the Turkish/British writer Elif Shafak, whose latest novel Ten Minutes and 38 Seconds in This Strange World has been nominated for a Booker. I loved the interview so much, I went into the Youtube rabbit hole and watched a TED talk she gave where she talked about suffering and global political divisions, and that she sees fiction as a means to bridge the divide, that we can experience empathy or a kind of union through reading. I don’t know if she’s right—it’s not a new argument, I realize, as many others before her have offered fiction as a kind of moral or spiritual joiner—but I don’t know that she’s wrong either. I suppose it depends entirely on the reader and their particular openness. The Bosnian writer Aleksandar Hemon wrote in his essay collection, The Book of My Lives, about the discovery that his former mentor, a professor of literature, was actually a war criminal; he made clear that novels didn’t stop his mentor from becoming a monster. I take his point. I wonder, too, if we say things like “fiction creates empathy” because of an unconscious desire to bolster fiction’s reputation at a time when people seem to read less and less.

Having said all of that, I think the part of me that is cynical about fiction’s empathy-generating aspects (and also wonders why we can’t simply know that fiction is vital because it is vital, without having to defend its existence) has been affected by maybe a too-big dose of rationalism, and the part of me that likes the idea of fiction performing a kind of magic act has been energized by my growing interest in the things we can’t explain, the mystical side of our transactions with art (and people, too, for that matter). So I was reasonably swayed listening to Elif Shafak, who seems to be a wonderful voice at a compelling intersection of politics and mysticism (and I can’t wait for her book to arrive).

On a given Tuesday...

This is coming up next week. It’s a lucky thing to get to read and talk at an event with another writer; sometimes—usually—the other writer is a relative stranger, but in this case the other person is Ron MacLean, a dear friend that I met several years ago when we were both in the inaugural Launch Lab sessions at GrubStreet in Boston. His new book of short stories is We Might As Well Light Something On Fire, and it’s wildly inventive, genre-bending, astute, funny and warm, all of which makes me so happy to get to chat with him at the legendary Newtonville Books. We’re going to read from each other’s collections, and talk about something I like contemplating (and have been mulling recently), which is curiosity. What is curiosity, exactly, how does it function, why does it exist and how do we both use it (or does curiosity use us maybe) and how do we write with it? I want to find out what he thinks of all that, especially since his stories do the sort of bendy things I like to see stories do, and we both write with a certain openness toward boundaries (some might say disregard, but that’s not quite right, since to play with boundaries, it seems to me, is to regard them).