Monday, January 31, 2011
Fresh Writing: Jo’s World
Today, due to the back up of pre-pub demands, I call on an old post of Fresh Writing about my sweet young one, Jo. 
She has a new doodle book and shows me as we lay in bed-kissing away another day. The instruction on pg. 21 of the doodle book reads: If you could, what would you choose to erase from your world?
She explains each drawing she's put on the page: "asparagus, spiders, axes (which cut down trees), cigarettes, McDonalds, cars and broken hearts."
As I marvel at this child of mine, just eight years old and full of her wonderous happiness, she continues to doodle new ideas as they come. She adds, "WAR, WEAPONS, knives and stinky socks." "Why do people need weapons, anyway?" she asks. "If you have a problem, you just resolve it!"
What more do I want than this child of mine? What better life than this?
Labels: art, children, Doodle art, mothering
Friday, January 28, 2011
Book Talk: Elizabeth McCracken & New Guest Writer Coming!
This week, Book Talk is a re-run from several months back because guess what? I am getting crazy busy prepping for the launch of Found! Look to the right to see all the events stacking up on my calendar. Wow, I was on the phone ALL DAY today. 
I am delighted to announce I have a guest writer, Anne Gudger, who is a student and a lovely writer in her own right. Anne is the one to watch, very soon, as she is writing a stunning memoir about the loss of her husband when she was expected their first child. She is a rising star.
Anne is also a writing teacher and a reader like no one I've ever met. Whenever I call her to chat, she's reading. Anne will begin Book Talk features next week, on books that have impacted her as a human being and a writer. More on Anne next week.
Until then, here is the conversation on Elizabeth McCracken's memoir with the longest title in history! 
This tidy memoir (just 184 pages) is the sad and intense story about McCracken’s stillborn baby.
I want to explore McCracken’s choice to tell the reader about the death of the baby right up front and then to repeat this over and over again. Here are the opening lines of the first four chapters (although they are never numbered or titled, so I don’t know if they are chapters but rather are more like breaks).
1. Once upon a time, before I knew anything about the subject, a woman told me that I should write a book about the lighter side of losing a child (this is not that book). (3)
2. A child dies in this book: a baby. A baby is stillborn. You don’t have to tell me how sad that is: it happened to me and my husband, our baby, a son. (6)
3. I will always be a woman whose first child died… (13)
4. This is the happiest story in the world with the saddest ending. (16)
McCracken also tells us that she is writing the book while holding her healthy second child—so all turns out relatively well in the end. But what purpose does her approach of complete revelation serve and why does she approach telling her story in this manner?
Perhaps McCracken tells us the baby dies in order to get the hard part of the story out. She lets the reader into the deep, primal shock and asks her to sit, for a bit, in the cultures odd way of considering such a loss. On one side, we all can agree that one of the most difficult losses a human can endure is the loss of a child. A child’s death seems unfair and premature. And yet, when it comes to the death of an infant, there is a special category of confusion. To many, a new baby hasn’t taken on enough features and personality to be counted fully as a “child.” Those who have gone through miscarriage and the death of an infant are often told things like: “it wasn’t meant to be or it was best due to some flaw in the biology.” Babies often don’t count and so a mother who has a deep connection to her unborn child is left in a kind of horrible limbo of confusion about how to feel, while also facing real grief.
I recall my own pregnancies, my intense feelings of love and protectiveness for my unborn children and the surreal primal fear that I lived with when I imagined something might go wrong before the baby entered the world. There was no basis for this fear—the premature death of babies wasn’t part of any known lineage—I was scared in proportion to my deep connection to my child. During the final trimester, when my water broke six weeks early, the first thing I did was poke at my stomach to get the baby inside moving. Alone in the middle of the night, worried sick that my baby was dead inside me, I shoved him hard and said, “MOVE” in a way that wasn’t very gentle or kind. Blessedly, I was rewarded with movement. My child was okay.
But here is McCracken, living my worst nightmare and also cutting right to the fact that a lot of people—a lot very ignorant people—dismiss her. She speaks to what happened directly and repeatedly in order to dig into the void of stunned, frozen cultural silence and chink away at it in order that we can inhabit the glacier sized sorrow that is her experience (as well as the experience of so many others).
She writes: No matter how I vowed to hold on to the happiness of the pregnancy, it was impossible, such a solitary pastime. When your child dies you cannot talk about how much you loved being pregnant. (20)
And: That is one of the strangest side effects of the whole story. I am that thing worse than a cautionary tale: I am a horror story, an example of something terrible going wrong when you least expect it, and for no good reason, a story to be kept from pregnant women, a story so grim and lessonless it’s better not to think about it at all. (43)
Another answer to the question, “why does she tell us what happened up front?” might also be found in McCracken’s background as a writer. She is a novelist first—trained in that form. As the great novelist Kurt Vonnegut taught: tell the reader everything up front.
I’m not well read enough in the form of a novel to know if this counsel is standard for fiction but the “tell everything up front” teaching is clearly what she is doing and her training likely brings some bearing on her choices.
For my own work, as a memoir writer, I prefer the “surprise” technique or the technique of telling the reader what is going on but allowing the story to unfold as a revelation of sorts. I like to sprinkle hints—so the reader is in the know—but to take some twists and turns in the body of the work in order to amaze the reader, catch her off guard and even up the ante of the forward moving action.
And I can also fully appreciate what McCracken has done in her own work. I found the directness of her approach gave time to let the shock of such a loss sink deeply into my mother bones (as it had in her own). I was able to read her memoir in a more open and receptive way. Sometimes it’s a very good idea not to keep your reader guessing.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Countdown to Publication: 34 Days
Featured today on: SheWrites.com 
Oprah Winfrey’s mother had a child and put her up for adoption when Oprah was nine. The news is out, the show is run, and in response—adopted people, birth mothers and countless fans toss emails around the internet and scramble to their computers to watch the show that “tells all” about this star-studded reveal.
In thirty-four days Found: The True Sequel to Blackbird will come out. Thank you to Seal Press. This book is the story of my own search and finding of my birth mother, and with the Oprah reveal of this week, is likely well timed. In fact, friends are writing about how lucky I am that Oprah is releasing this story at this time. It’s free publicity. Go. Go. Go.
Free publicity? Perhaps. Good timing? Yes, indeed.
As I straddle this line between a truth seeker and now, a book marketer, I find that I struggle. As an artist in a world where the buck funds my process and my creative venture, I must be tuned to want and seek a coveted slot on Oprah Winfrey’s program--and any other program that will have me. But what if this never happens? What if my work never sees the light of day and more, what if, when it does, the work I've spent so many years of my life on is not given the depth of consideration? And more, can a talk show, a review or an interview ever really bring out the essence of a book and make it shine?
These are truly haunting questions, are they not?
As a seeker of healing and of truth, I have to admit that I am very happy someone of Oprahs stature is “in” the story of adoption via first hand experience. Considering the number of people who have been adopted in this country, I am not surprised at all. The Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute tells us that something like 80% of the people in this country are impacted, in some way, directly or indirectly, by this phenomenon of adoption. 
In researching and writing Found, I have learned first hand about this least spoken of and yet the most mind-boggling sorrow of these last one hundred years. Women, countless millions, due to economic, social and family pressures, were (and continue to be) forced to make impossible soul-shredding decisions to part with their children.
Like William Styron showed us in his stunning novel Sophie’s Choice, when that woman was forced at gun point—by a Nazi—to chose between one of her children or both would be killed, the outcome was beyond grim. Both children died and Sophie was haunted until taking her own life. Styron portrayed this global epic tragedy—where cultures force woman make these kinds of choices daily—perfectly.
Think of our poor sisters in China, Vietnam, Korea, Russia, Africa, here in the U.S., and countless other countries, imagine their children, and see how we, as a race of supposed higher beings, chose not to take action. We look the other way, we speak in generalities and platitudes and in some cases we pluck the babies from the arms of another and say “ho hum” she is too poor, too ignorant, too too too, in order to get what we want—a solution to infertility.
Let me state, emphatically, that there are children who need to be adopted and there are good, no remarkable and enlightened adoptive parents out there who place the needs (and sorrows) of their adopted children first. This is true. And there are others who don’t give a nit for the fate of the original mother who bore their child or the deep sorrows contained in the child herself. In far too many cases the original mother has been forgotten, psychically annihilated and in some cases legally obliterated. The child is assimilated, adapted and called "lucky" for her new family and worse is often denied access to ancestry.
It is time to talk, with heartfelt candor, about adoption. So bravo Oprah. Bravo. And I have to also say this is a subject that aches to be looked at, very closely, from the perspective of the adoptee--who let's face it--has the least heard voice in the many conversations being held around the nation. We are hearing from one popular commentator on the radio that his experience of adoption (as an adoptive father) is nothing but a blessing. We hear from Oprah how she is honored that her 1/2 sister had integrity enough not to sell her (O) out and of course, get a deep view in how this woman feels now that she has Oprah as a sister. And we have heard more than enough about a woman in the U.S., fed up with her adopted child, puts him on a plane back to Russia.
But where is the adoptee's voice in all of this media?
Found took eighteen years to write and I used to beat myself up over the snail like pace it seemed to take me to "figure" myself out. But in watching all this media around adoption and seeing how the adoptee experience isn't figured into the conversation in a real way, I see a different view. Perhaps it took me eighteen years of earnest effort to dig through the many layers of cultural and family denial around the issue of my adoption and the importance of my ancestory.
So all this is a long way around to the very big question. Will this book, this heartfelt, true and achingly honest book, be understood? Will Found ever make it to the talk show circuit? And, will my journey be any less valid if the answers are no?
Of course, these are the most troubling questions I ask myself in the dark of the night as I wait out these final days. I am, like all writers, all artists, caught in that place between what I've created and the delivery of the creation to the world. And so, sister-writer, here comes another question: As a writer, artist, truth teller, how much would you do to get on Oprah? And how much more valid do you believe your work would be with that kind of public recognition?
Monday, January 24, 2011
Fresh Writing: The Newsroom
This is a story I ran last week, part I and then, as usually is the case, I got busy on an idea that led to a revision and the completion of the story. I had this rif in my head, "On the day I got fired..." and it played over and over so I decided why fight it. Re-write the story off that line. Who knows if it worked.
On the day I got fired, I left my boyfriend—Steve, at my place with my dog named Carmel—the two of them together in my apartment to enjoy a lazy Saturday while I went to work because that’s what I did. I worked on the weekends and I worked the late night shift and I worked the holidays too. All of them. I loved to work. I lived for work. If anyone asked, I’d say I was my work.
“Have a great day,” Steve said, his feet up on my sofa. I knew, as I pulled the door closed that he would spend the greater hunk of the day right there, reading the paper and eating the food in my refrigerator. Maybe later he’d take a shower in my bathroom and forget to hang up the towel and when I said something about the wadded wet towel on the white tile floor later, his response would be, “man, are you uptight.”
On the day I got fired, I wore a form fitting Calvin Klein suit—black and white checks in the pattern of the fabric. A forest green linen shirt gave a splash of color to the ensemble and my shoes were sensible black pumps. All snazzy and sharp, I also stopped at the 7-11 to get Ava a cup of her favorite coffee and two donuts with sprinkles on top. I made sure to get the creamers on the side too but these details wouldn’t matter to Ava, being nice wouldn’t matter either. Ava, her afro poking up this way and that, a tilt of crazy hair that wobbled around her head like it was supercharged with some kind of electricity, would be elbow deep in the morning paper, police scanners blaring behind her and three TV’s on too. She’d be pissed, like she was always pissed and ready to tell me to get to work because that’s what an assignment editor did. She barked at reporters and reporters got to work.
And that’s how it went down, that day, my last day in T.V. news working as an investigative reporter at the age of twenty-three. KXLY-TV. Spokane, Washington, a tired little town on the eastern edge of the state which was fast drive to and through the panhandle of Idaho and two hours from the Montana state line.
“You’re late,” Ava pointed out when I walked into the newsroom.
I set her coffee and donuts on her desk.
“Your welcome,” I said.
Ava nodded at the coffee gift and went back to her newspaper—silent.
As if I didn’t sting from her bitter tone, I dropped my purse on the back of my chair, put my own coffee by the typewriter, an IMB Electric Selectric with an automatic back up correction key and checked my mail slot—the one marked LAUCK.
Tilted on its manila side was a letter that read “Society of Professional Journalists.”
“Look at that!” I said.
I slid my thumb under the flap, a little shaky for how I knew it was good news or bad. You win. You lose. The Society of Professional Journalists gave out annual awards but before I could fish the results, Ava shook a pile of pink message slips in my direction.
“Hello?” she said, “remember your story? From last night? Wake up, it’s time to get to work!”
I wanted to ignore her but something bigger won out. Guilt? Very likely guilt and the accusation in Ava’s tone of voice that said, “ you’re blowing it, Lauck. You are not acting like a real reporter. You’re not doing your job.”
Of course she didn’t say those words. She didn’t need to. They were spoken in every exasperated eye roll, every smart assed comment and every shake of the head. Ava didn’t think I should work at KXLY, didn’t deserve to be promoted there from the tiny little outback where I worked before in Montana and she didn’t think I had the “chops” to survive in the business. Which was funny, in retrospect. Spokane was not New York or even L.A. Spokane was small potatoes, a snag along the river bank to much bigger destinations—a whirlpool where I was temporarily turning in circles and going around and around and around to no-where-fast.
On the day I got fired, I forgot the notification from the Society of Professional Journalists and flipped, instead, through the message slips, which were “call in tips” from viewers. People who were claiming, according to the messages, to have seen a kid who we reported about last night as a possible abduction.
I already knew about the tips, Ava had called me at home last night to tell me but we both agreed, at least at midnight, that the tips were common at the beginning of a missing person’s story and that it would be best not to chase every crazy lead. We agreed to wait until daylight, check in at the site of the search, interview the cop in charge and then talk about what story I would file—as an update—about the missing kid.
What I hoped, deep in my gut, was that the kid would be found—safe and sound—over the long night and that we would be able to report that all was well in his world. I wanted a good outcome for a scary story. No one wanted to have a seventeen-year-old kid, who had gone missing, to end up being a victim of foul play. That was, to me, a bad story. It was sad and cruel and even painful—especially for the mother and the family and for everyone. How did anyone gain from the death of a kid?
Except in the real world, in small-town-Spokane, hearts were small and reporters who worked in that town salivated for a good murder story. Who cared about the age of the victim? The goal was to beat the competition—break an exclusive—and get the best video. The goal was viewers. Cash in on fear. Make people cry in front of their televisions. Get them hooked on your channel long enough to see the commercials we ran selling furniture and light bulbs and dishwashing detergent.
The story about this kid went like this. A teenage boy from a local high school, an honors student from a good family, disappeared from Riverside State Park at about noon. His car, a black Chevy Nova was found in the parking lot. His wallet, empty, was found a few feet away. The keys to the car were gone. There was no sign of the kid or a struggle. Police had no leads. The mother, interviewed by every reporter in town, asked anyone and everyone to please, please, please look out for her child. The photo of the boy, released by the mother, showed a good-looking youth with dark hair and eyes, slim, narrow face, slight build. His feet, according the mother were size twelve (he was apparently in a growth spurt) and he was wearing jeans, a black t-shirt and a navy blue windbreaker. He might be wearing a red baseball cap. The mother wasn’t one hundred percent sure. She didn’t see him the morning he left for school, she had gone to work before he was awake. Instead, fellow students, who had seen the kid earlier on the day he disappeared, described his outfit.
“These messages say he’s been spotted along the interstate.”
“Brilliant, Lauck.”
“Near the Sprague exit too,” I added. “Okay, so what do we do with that? Should we go to the highway, get some video, interview a few of these people?”
“That’s a start,” Ava said. “Look, this is your job. Figure it out. Get a story though. You’ve got…” Ava eyed the clock set to Pacific Time, “…eight hours. Go!”
With my courtesy coffee in her hand, Ava flicked at me like I was a bug that needed to go away and I took up my purse, left my coffee behind and walked out of the newsroom in search of my cameraman—Allen.
~
Allen and me had clocked a lot of hours together in the front seat of the news rig. Press conferences, fires, traffic accidents. Allen was the guy I worked with most weekends and no matter where we went, he always drove. While he was driving, Allen kept his eyes on the road and made sure to stay safe—driving with both hands on the wheel. From the passenger seat, I had a close up view of his right ear canal. For most people an ear isn’t memorable but Allen had more crap in his ear. Was it wax? Lint? Dandruff? How many hours did I sit, on the road with Allen and perplex myself over the puzzle of his ear contents. I would try so hard not to look only to find my eyes drawn in. How I wanted to tell him, no beg him, to go to the store and purchase swabs.
But I didn’t.
I just averted my eyes and made small talk and forced myself to stop staring at Allen’s ear crud.
Allen wasn’t a bad guy. He was a little heavy around the middle and soft in the shoulders and he did wear striped rugby shirts that seemed to draw the eye to his swollen belly, but over all, a nice guy. Bland. Vanilla. Allen wasn’t exciting or daring or even dangerous. He was just like his name. Allen. Like the wrench—Allen was a bit of a tool. Reliable and then, when we were done working our shift together, forgettable.
My favorite cameraman was Lyle, blue eyes like ice and curly black hair (with a hint of gray) that I wanted to touch just to see how soft it was. Lyle was exciting and sexy and hot beyond description but he was another silence I kept to myself. Besides, Lyle didn’t work weekends. He was too fantastic for holidays too. Lyle was one of the people Ava adored (with good reason), he had an amazing eye behind the camera and good artistic instincts. Although Lyle was known as the “complainer,” he was so good-looking, that part of his personality was set aside.
On the day I got fired, I worked with Allen all day long. We drove to the scene where the kid disappeared, interviewed the cops and the guy who had the search and rescue dogs. I wrote down a statistic in my book, the cost of the search, which was passed directly to tax payers. It was costing like five thousand dollars a day to search for the missing kid. Why this was important, I didn’t know but Ava would be happy. She loved obscure and irrelevant factoids.
By noon, Allen and I were in the parking lot of Zip’s getting a burger and fries. Allen ate two Belly Busters—the ones with ham on top—and had a milkshake to wash it all down.
Ava and I talked on the phone and that’s when we agreed I would follow the call in tips and drive up the interstate. I told her, “why not, we’ve got all day. Allen and I will just drive around a little bit and see what we can find.”
From her end of the conversation, Ava said that she had been monitoring the other stations and they were all doing the standard follow up story. Nothing new was coming in. She gave Allen and me the okay to sniff around.
As I look back now, at that decision, I have it in my memory that I was the one who had the idea to check out the random leads, that I had an intuition in my gut that kid wasn’t missing or even dead but instead was up to something. Perhaps a prank or maybe was even a runaway.
I want to believe I was the one who thought this scenario up but if Ava or even Allen were telling this story it would be different. Ava would be the one who knew and forced me to go check it out, she’d likely say that I didn’t want to, being a lackluster weekend reporter from Montana who had no journalistic instincts and didn’t even deserve the job. Allen would likely say it had been his idea, wanting to go out and search for the kid on our own. But that’s not how I remember it. I just remember thinking, “that kid isn’t missing. He walked away. He’s running.”
And here’s why. The boy in question was the son of a local activist. I cannot remember, if my life depended on it, what she was for or against. I want to say she was pro-life and that she was high profile meaning she carried signs of dismembered fetuses in her car and picketed on corners and in front of Planned Parenthood clinics and yelled at anyone within twenty feet: “SAVE THE BABIES. GIVE THEM TO ME!!! ABORTION IS MURDER!!!!”
Yes, the mother of that boy was prime time loud and with a mother like that, who wouldn’t run away?
So off we went, Allen and me, bellies full of burgers and fries, his ears full of gunk and my mind full of comments I wouldn’t dare say out loud.
On the day I got fired, Allen and I ended up in a little farm town called Sprague with it’s wide open spaces and fields laid bare in swatches of green and brown for rotation farming. The crop out in Sprague was wheat and the fields lifted in gentle hills that unrolled to the east as far as a person could imagine. It was the beginning of Palouse country, which, if you saw it from a birds view, looked like virgin sand dunes blown by the wind.
Why we ended up in a little corner store in Sprague, I don’t know. Was Allen thirsty for a Coke? Did I want to call Ava on a landline? I just know we were in that little store and I ended up talking to the man behind the counter. Another man was in the store too, getting three inch nails.
“You guys hear about a kid who’s missing in Spokane?” I asked. “Name of Tim?”
“Yep,” said the guy who sat behind the counter. He had a chaw of tobacco in his lip and yellow stained spit along both sides of his mouth. The man, somewhere in his sixties, gray stubble on a double chin and white hair poking from under a striped baseball cap, was balanced on the edge of a metal stool and wore zip up coveralls in a shade that once had been beige but had, due to time and neglect, become grayish black. He pulled an empty can from under the counter and let go of a long stream of yellow spit.
“Well,” I said, “we’ve got some tips that a kid was spotted out here, last night. Hear anything about that?”
The man wiped the back of his arm over his mouth and shook his head like nope, he ain’t heard nothing about that.
I chewed my lip, double thinking my reason for being in the store when the other man came up the aisle with the box of nails. He thumbed at the window in the general direction of the northeast.
“Old Seth’s got a new kid out at his place, washing trucks today,” he said.
“Hmm,” said the man behind the counter, taking up the nails and looking for a price tag. “You don’t say.”
My heart skipped a full beat and due to a lack of breathing, I felt light headed.
I looked through the dirty window of that store, in search of Allen who was out getting gas but I only saw a swatch of his yellow and blue striped rugby shirt on the other side of the truck.
“Seth?” I said. “Can you tell me where his place is? I sure would like to check that out and see if it’s the same kid.”
There was no response for the longest minute of my life as the men took me in from the top of my short, stylish haircut to the bottom on my practical black pumps. Just what did they made of this woman in a hounds tooth suit anyway? Where they thinking, “city girl?”
The fan in the store, high on the ceiling, was the only sound in that place and made a thawp, thwap, thwap that went right up the back of my neck.
The man buying the nails wasn’t that tall but he was thick and solid. A farmer. His hat was tipped back on his head, John Deere written across the brim and his face was clean shaved. He had dark blue eyes, like still water.
In a few minutes, that farmer gave me the directions to Seth’s place, five hundred acres of prime farmland just east of town. A right turn there and a left turn here and next thing, Allen and I pulled up to a huge metal building where several semi truck’s were shining—as if just washed—in the afternoon sun.
I just knew, in my gut, the boy was there. I could feel it like energy pulse. It was hot and wavy and my heart pounded in my chest so hard it hurt.
I didn’t call Ava though. Not yet. I wanted to be sure.
I told Allen to hold back on shooting any video. “Let’s be polite,” I said. “I don’t want to scare these people with cameras. Let’s take it slow.”
We both agreed, before I left the truck, that he would not tell Ava where we were either, because if he did, especially on the two-way, the other stations would here and the story wouldn’t be ours anymore.
A knock on the door of the farmhouse and a woman answered right away. She wore a cotton dress, baby blue and over that was a white apron. She looked like she was fifth generation farm girl with her hair up on top of her head, a whole gaggle of little ones clustered around her legs and flour on her face. She had been baking a pie.
“Are you here about Jack?” she asked.
“Jack?” I said.
“He’s been helping out today, doing chores for some extra money.”
“Oh,” I said, “well, actually, yes. Is he here?”
The woman looked at me and I looked at her and she had soft mother eyes that knew about boys who ran away from home and were looking for another way. I wasn’t a mother yet, that would be a long ways off, but I had been a wanderer for all of my life and knew a few things too. My parents died when I was small, my brother had shot himself just a couple years back and I had been passed around, as a child, from family to family and when it suited some, from man to man.
That’s why I worked all the time, why I tried so hard to be liked and why I would never succeed playing this heartless news game or even become a great reporter who cared most about leading the news with a story of disaster and pain.
Pain had been my life story. I was looking for a different tale to tell.
The woman looked up as if he might be over her head and then she bit her lip and nodded. She leaned forward and whispered. “He’s hiding upstairs.”
“Can I talk to him,” I asked, “just talk. That’s all.”
The farmwife nodded and made her kids move off to the side in order to open the screen door. As we went up the stairs, I told the woman I was a reporter from Spokane but that I wouldn’t put any of this on the news. I told her all I wanted to do was make sure the kid was okay and was the same kid everyone was searching for and if he was, I’d call his mother and get him home safe.
The woman nodded while I talked and seemed to take it all in stride. At a door at the end of the hall, she knocked a couple times and then turned the knob to let me in. Her kids were down the steps, all their little faces looking up and I went into the room by myself.
As if the photo of Tim grew to be full sized, there he stood—the missing youth—the good looking boy with dark hair and eyes who was slim with a narrow face and a slight build. His feet were big and of course, could have passed for a size twelve and he was wearing jeans, a black t-shirt and a navy blue windbreaker. There was no baseball cap.
Tim hung his head, as if busted, the way you see teenagers do sometimes. His hide out was a room with two bunk beds and a dresser shoved to the side.
I did not know Tim, we were not friends and I did not know his family and yet something in me snapped and I stopped imagining that we were separate in any way. Being a stranger didn’t matter. He was a human being and he was alive! I reached out to this kid, pulled him into my arms and hugged him like a mother would do. I hugged that boy so tight and no, he didn’t hug me back but he did laugh like he had been taken by surprise and I laughed for how out of character it was for me to show that much emotion. I set Tim back from me and looked him level. “I’m so glad you’re okay,” I said. “Everyone is so worried about you.”
Tim was like a rag in my hands, so frail and worn out from running to wherever he was going. He also looked spooked by his adventure and the decision he had made. After the initial exaltation of finding him, we sat together on the bottom bunk of one of those beds and I told him who I was and where I worked and then I asked what was going on. Why had he left?
Like I suspected, Tim ran away. His mother had been on his case, things were crappy with his dad, school was a bummer and the pressure to go to college was just too much. He wanted to be free. He wanted a different life. He wanted something but didn’t know what.
He talked and cried and then talked a little more.
I yanked a napkin from Zip’s out of my pocket and handed it over to him.
Tim swiped at his face and blew his nose. He was so young.
“What do you want to do?” I asked. “Do you want to keep running? Do you want to go home? Tell me. Just tell me what you want.”
At that moment, I was as good as fired. I had entered the worst terrain a reporter could enter. Without even realizing what I had done, I had left the land known as “impartial” and walked down the path of heart. There was no turning back. Yet I had no map.
Tim asked me to go ahead and call his mom. He was sorry he had upset everyone. He just wanted to go home.
Tim asked if I would leave too. No video. No interview. Just let him and mom work things out on their own.
“Could you do that?” he asked.
On the day I got fired, I said yes, I could do that.
Back at the station, Ava had called in the news director to tell him how I had blown it on every possible channel. I had missed the big story that every other station had run, except for us. I didn’t even get an interview and we were smeared by the completion—creamed on a story we owned until I walked away.
Steve Johnson, the big boss, was waiting for me when we got back. He did a finger motion that said, “get into my office, right now.”
On the day I got fired, I cleaned out my desk, dumped everything into a cardboard box and carried it out to my car. I loaded my stuff into the passenger seat of my Honda Civic and came around to the driver’s side. Ava didn’t say goodbye. Neither did Allen. I was old news, history.
Somehow Johnson had gotten someone from payroll in to cut me a final check so that would be it. No more contact.
As I sat in the parking lot, hands on the wheel, I felt as low as I had ever felt. I was a failure. Total and complete but the thing was, no one I knew would care. All my people were dead.
About to cry over my pathetic state, I remembered that envelope that came from The Society of Professional Journalists. Leaned over the cardboard box, I shuffled through the papers and reporter note pads until I found it, flap open, the mystery letter tucked inside.
I fished out a white page, just one and read how I had won five awards. One of the stories had been about an abduction, last year, of a woman who had never been found. I had hated that story for it’s futile and sad end and yet, look, I had won a prize.
Hot tears burned down my face and splashed on my dark green linen top. Who cared? I didn’t. I just sat there, a kid myself and I cried only there was no benevolent person to hand me a napkin or help me get home. I was on my own that day. I had to figure out what came next.
On the day I got fired, I started up my car and drove home to find my dog and my man where I had left them. On the sofa. There was, indeed, a wet towel on the bathroom floor. But this time, I didn’t say anything.
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Announcements: Spring Tour & Teaching
Many wonderful and exciting things are happening. Among them are the events for the release of Found which will be March 1, 2011. That's little more than a month away.
A page will be placed here on the site for events that are coming up. Keep your eyes out and here is what is coming up as of now:
EVENTS:
Adoption Mosaic-Reunion Panel and Reading - Saturday, March 5th from 10-2 ( I'd love to get Broadway books to come sell for them)
Powell’s Bookstore, Portland, OR - Monday, March 7th, 7:30pm
Elliot Bay Bookstore, Seattle, WA –Wednesday, March 9th at 7pm
Book Passage, Corte Madera, CA –Sunday, March 13th at 7pm
Books Inc, Berkeley, CA – Monday, March 14th, at 7pm
American Adoption Congress - Teaching - April 13/19 - Orlando, FL (available for events in area)
Hoffman Center - Workshop & reading - Saturday June 19, 10-3 & 7 pm Manzanita, OR
Sitka Center - Workshop - July 25-26, - Lincoln City, Oregon
TEACHINGS:
Writing Life: How to Write a Memoir-Audio: A downloadable audio teaching is coming March 1st. The cost is $39.95 for five hours of insightful, uplifting and mind boggling teaching on how to craft a memoir, beginning to end.
Write Your Book in a Year: In Aug. 2011, a nine month program held in Manzanita, Oregon, will take six writers all the way through their memoir projects, from beginning to end. Look for the formal announcement of this exciting program next week.
Master Class Writing Teaching: These classes, in Portland and via a virtual format are coming this spring for upper level writers crafting their novels and memoirs.
Back to Basics Writing: This amazing class, also beginning this spring, will help writers get some of the basic tools of memoir writing in the toolbox.
For more information on all these classes, CONTACT ME via this site and I'll get you more details.
Friday, January 21, 2011
Book Talk: Without a Map by Meredith Hall
Meredith Hall tells of being a sixteen-year-old girl, in 1965, forced to give up a baby and how she lives so much of her remaining life in emotional (and sometimes physical) exile.
She writes: Shunning is supposed to keep bad things from happening in a community. But it doesn’t correct the life gone wrong. It can only expose the transgression to a very raw light, use it as a measurement, a warning to others that says, See? That didn’t happen in our home. Because we are good. We’re better than that. The price I paid seems still to be extreme.
The story begins in 1964 when Hall meets a boy who gets her pregnant. She is the youngest child of a divorced mother who is distracted with a new career and a new lover. The story carries forward through Hall having her son, isolated from the life she once knew and then (post relinquishment) how she attempts to go on as a college student, a wanderer, a mother, a caregiver for her ailing mother and finally a mother in reunion with her relinquished son.
The aspect of this book that haunted most was the relationship between Hall and her mother.
In the prologue and then in the second chapter, Hall decribes the scene where her mother says, “Well, you can’t stay here,” in response to the pregnancy.
The mother doesn’t even hesitate. She doesn’t say, “oh, hey, this is complicated,” or “whoa, didn’t see that coming,” and later, she never says, “wow, big mistake with my initial response. What I meant to say is…okay, you are my child, this is a sticky situation, let’s figure it out.” No, the response is and remains, “Well, you cannot stay here.”
Hall writes, My sister will say later, “It was just the times.” But this is not true. There was something more, something I should have known, a capacity for this betrayal I should have sensed was coming. I should have prepared myself, kept my feet under me better, not spent a lifetime wondering how this could happen, and, always, wondering at my own lack of worth. I wish I had been able to see my mother—my two mothers—more clearly, to predict her capacity to judge me so fiercely, to withdraw so abruptly her love and protection of me.
Eventually Hall’s mother declines due to MS and Hall is able to step over the line that marks the betrayal and take tender care of her for many years. They never speak of the wound between them. Hall writes: And then she is gone. On the bed lies a pure and perfect—sublime—casting of a woman’s form, my mother’s body. Finally, here is peace, for her and for me. God seems to move in the room, incomprehensible, brutal, embracing.
….There was no atonement. My mother died with our past laced between us, love and its failures, love and its gravity.
It seems absolutely stunning that the sacred covenant of unconditional love for ones own child could be broken and never restored and yet, I must look inward to understand my own reaction. Aren’t I also struggling, still, with the fact of my own relinquishment—that impossible decision made by my very own caring mother, who went on to have more children, to keep them close and to nurture them with great love—which resulted in my own lifelong exile from the world and myself? I find myself asking again and again: How could she have abandoned me? Me? Why me?
No answer makes lasting sense to my heart and it seems to be the same for Hall.
Hall is, in my opinion, a truly exquisite writer. She wholly captures the inclination of mankind at this ruinous time, which has evolved it’s social morays to such a degree that it is acceptable to annihilate any mother who has the audacity to become pregnant prior to the arrangement of acceptable conditions, ie: being married, of a certain age and within certain economic conditions. In China, you cannot keep your baby if she is a girl. In Ethiopia, you cannot keep your child because you are starving to death. In many other countries, you cannot keep your baby because you simply do not have enough money for medical care.
And around the world, it goes.
Humans are not in the habit of empowering a mother to keep her children. Rather, we take the children away and exile the mother to her unfortunate situation (which often leads to death). We adopt these children and call them “miracles” and “gifts from God.” Don’t we wonder about about the results of our actions? What do these morays say about us and our capacity to love and to teach love? What will be our future with a such past?
I hear people say, "adoption is a way of life, it is a historic fact." I would like to note that similar rhetoric circled through conversation during the times of slavery. These are not times to be complacent and make excuses based on what has transpired through history. This is a time to awaken and to take action in a way that reflects our goodness.
Meredith Hall’s book is a beat of sanity, during an insane time, primarily because she has been willing to be honest. That she does so with such glorious craft is a testimony indeed.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Countdown to Publication: 41 Days
Featured today on: SheWrites.com
Every year, I purchase (for a buck) the “countdown to Christmas calendar” for the kids. For twenty-four days of December they open a colorful door decorated with snowflakes and are rewarded with a tiny piece of waxy chocolate thus getting them that much closer to the BIG day. As I picked up the calendars this year, I thought about my own countdown—not to Christmas—but to the publication of my fourth memoir. I imagined up my own little countdown calendar pre-set with doors that read “blurb day,” “first pass pages day,” “cover decision day,” “gone to print day,” and “great review day”. Why not toss in some bonus doors like: “appear on Oprah day,” “New York Times Bestseller list day,” and “your book gets made to a movie day.” Behind every day there could also be a nice wedge of dark chocolate, perhaps laced with orange peel or a touch of lavender. Why not? It’s my fantasy calendar, right?
Alas, there is no countdown calendar for authors and Santa won’t be showing up on release day with a bag of goodies to reward my year of goodness. This is the real world and a writer has to make her own magic as she counts down those last grueling, exciting, terrifying and agonizing days to the release of her book.
Then along came SheWrites.com and it seems there is some magic in the world afterall! I now have a wondrous opportunity to tell you, in detail, some of the stories of my countdown as a way to help us all become savvier in making the transition from being the creative force who wrote our books to the promotional dynamos who get the word out and make our books a hit!
My fourth memoir, Found: The True Sequel to Blackbird, releases March 1, 2011. This book, long in coming, is an end to an 18-year journey that began in the mid-90's and kicked off with the book Blackbird: A Childhood Lost and Found which released in 2000.
I began my memoir writing life wanting to get the answers to some very specific questions. One, I wanted to know who I was and two, I wanted to know who my mother had been. Initially, I thought I had been asking after my adoptive mother, Janet, who had died when I was seven years old and under mysterious circumstances. But in fact, I was searching for much more than I knew. That story is contained in Found and includes a stunning reunion with the woman who gave birth to me and had to relinquish me under the most heartbreaking conditions a woman can imagine.
Back in 2000, I was published by Simon & Schuster and watched Blackbird take its spot on Oprah, achieve international sales and land on The New York Times Bestseller List. Blackbird was followed by two not-so-successful sequels, which were “pressure creations,” meaning the publisher and my agent were eager to latch onto the success train that was being lead by the engine Blackbird. While these were fine books and I stand behind them, they were not true sequels.
And this is one of the first points about releasing a book verses creating a book. The call to write comes from a deep place in the soul and the soul—as we all know—is timeless. Publishing, marketing, selling and making money—capitalism—is on a deadline and part of a culture that has a very short attention span. As a seeker-of-truth and a writer-of-my-discoveries, I had to straddle the world of the soul and the world of capitalism. It was a messy walk sometimes and I fell down. Hard!
My second and third book, Still Waters and Show Me the Way, did not get the attention Blackbird enjoyed and they did not earn back their advances. This meant, when I did finally finish my creative process last year and produced Found, no one in New York was interested. The book was lovely, my agent was told, the writing was “breathtaking” and the story was “stunning” but “Jennifer didn’t earn back her advances,” and “we cannot take the risk on her again.”
How can a writer overcome what might appear to be a terminal blow to her career?
Yes, it was painful to be rejected by New York, especially after having such a stunning run of success, but once I cried, moaned and complained, I decided to toss out the old story and begin setting new goals. I told myself I would get published, period and if I had to do it myself, I would make it happen. This “can do” attitude led to a series of synchronistic decisions which included attending the Associated Writing Programs conference in Denver, meeting the editors of smaller presses and talking until I lost my voice. A few weeks later, a deal was struck with Seal Press and since my book was truly finished, Seal decided to push the book out for a Spring 2011 release. In less than six months, I went from being a writer who had “no hope of ever getting published,” to “having a book out in a few months.”
This is what is now happening: My agent works to sell foreign rights, Found has been beautifully laid out, made into galleys and has gone out to major American media publications for review. I have met the media rep for Seal and she is booking my speaking events in the Northwest. And on my own, I am setting up events in Florida (for the American Adoption Congress), at Sitka Center on the Oregon Coast and in Minnesota, Pittsburgh, Palm Beach, L.A. and Georgia. Finally, I am writing and submitting for publications around the country.
Over the last few weeks, we have also gathered a solid collection of blurbs from Hope Edelman, Cheryl Strayed, BJ Lifton, Nancy Verrier, Adam Pertman and (soon) Karen Karbo. It must be noted that the Lifton quote came just two weeks before this remarkable woman passed away. I feel both blessed and baffled. How lucky could I be, to have a quote from one of the pioneers in the area of increasing awareness around issues of adoption, and more so now that she is no longer with us.
There are just a few weeks ahead, so many opportunities to fly or fail. As I embark on this remarkable journey—which I am delighted to share with you—I wonder about you my sister-writer. Have you had a time in your own writing life when you fell down and had to pick yourself up? How did that work out?
Jennifer Lauck lives in Portland, Oregon with her two kids, thirteen-year-old Spencer and eight-year-old Josephine. She mentors, teaches memoir writing and is just wrapping her MFA with Pacific Lutheran University.
Connect with Jennifer at her SW profile page, via Twitter , or Facebook.
RELATED: Memoir Writers group, Memoir Enthusiasts group
Monday, January 17, 2011
Fresh Writing: The Newsroom Part I
This story is true, from a long time back and I have to do some research on exact dates...so don't hold me to a damn thing. But it's fresh and now and a beginning.
The backdoor is an industrial gray number with a window that has wire in the glass. I’ve got a special key that gets me in and after tumbling the lock, I tuck the key back in my purse and walk the long dark hallway past a line of editing suites that are all dark now. The click of my high heels is the only sound.
It’s Saturday morning, eight a.m., and the newsroom—which feels as big as a pro basketball court—is twenty empty cubicles and that many desks. In the middle of the massive room, elevated in order to have a view over everyone and everything, is the assignment desk and Ava is already at her post with her frizzy afro poking up all over the place.
“Hey,” I say.
“You’re late,” Ava says without looking up. Her voice is flat.
I reach over the top of the assignment desk with a cup of coffee the way she likes which is Seven Eleven fresh brew, three cream’s on the side and two vanilla crullers with sprinkles on top.
“You’re welcome,” I say.
Ava’s milk chocolate face is buried in the morning papers from local to national and behind her the police, fire and emergency medical service scanners, set on low, buzz with that sound that means nothing is going on, at least not yet. Against the wall, the electronic printers hammer out national news from the Associated Press and the United Press International and at her back are three TV’s, suspended from the ceiling and set to our station which is ABC and the other two, CBS and NBC.
As the smell of coffee hits her, Ava smiles just the smallest of smiles but she doesn’t look up and she doesn’t say thanks. Ava isn’t that kind of person. She doesn’t show she’s happy or even pleased but we’ve got it down, Ava and me. Saturday mornings, I bring her coffee and donuts—every single time—and she’s halfway human to me the rest of the day.
I drop my purse on the back of my chair and put my own coffee by the typewriter, an IMB Electric Selectric with an automatic back up correction key. It’s the same typewriter everyone else uses—from the weather guy to the sports guys to each anchor woman and man. We all use the same typewriters.
Ava and the news director, a guy named Steve Johnson, are the only one’s who use computers and Johnson bitches about his all the time. Too slow. Too complicated. Give him an old fashioned typewriter every day of the week. Johnson is old school and even though I’m just in my twenties, I’m old school too. I prefer a manual typewriter to this stupid electric jobber. With a manual typewriter, you know you’re whacking the keys and hammering out a story. The feel of those keys is powerful, active and alive. Staring at a computer screen is like having your soul sucked out your eyes. No thank you. That’s what I think.
It’s the late eighties. Technology is still a long ways off.
“Anything on the kid?” I ask.
“You haven’t read the paper?”
“I read the paper,” I say.
“Bullshit,” she says. “You haven’t read the paper.”
“Okay, fine, I haven’t read the paper.”
I sit hard in my chair, a swivel number that goes up and down with a little handle pump on the left side. I’m less than five feet from where Ava sits and the only lights on in the place are over her and over me. Flood lights which bombs brilliant florescence down on our shoulders.
“Catch,” Ava says.
A rolled up Spokesman Review is lobbed over the wall of her desk and drops down in a graceful arc, which I catch one handed. I snap off the rubber band and unroll the paper on my desk. I un-wedge the lid from my cup and the smell of coffee mixes with newsprint.
Front page, there it is. Missing kid. Son of abortion Rights Activist. Blah blah blah.
I already know the whole story. It’s my story, which broke yesterday afternoon and we were the first ones on the scene. The kid, a high school senior, disappeared at a place on the little Spokane River called Bowl and Pitcher named for the way the rocks are formed into those shapes. The boy’s wallet was found next to his abandoned car and that’s all anyone knows.
KXLY (that’s us) was on the scene early, got the video and even had an exclusive interview with the cops. Celebration happens when you can kick out breaking news and beat the pack. We did it. Ava at the desk, Allen as my cameraman and me as the reporter and best of all, it was my little victory since I got the tip off from a cop who is my personal source. Norm and I worked together a year ago, on an abduction case, which remains unsolved. When I called, just checking in like I do every week, Norm told me about the missing kid. “It could be another abduction,” he said, off the record of course, and that was it. We were out the door.
“There’s nothing new here,” I say.
“Read,” she says, “Jesus. Why don’t TV people read?”
“I’m reading. It’s a total rehash of last night.”
“Go to the inside.”
I flip the paper open and follow the story to the smaller print.
While I read Ava sits back from her papers and swivels in her chair—back and forth. She’s got the lid off her coffee too and looks up at the ceiling the way she does when she’s waiting.
Ava is a beautiful African American woman with wide hips, heavy breasts and strong shoulders. I’d guess she’s in her twenties, like me, maybe a few years older. I’m twenty-six. She’s probably thirty. But that’s all I know. I have no idea where she is from, who her people are or even where she went to school. I have no idea how long Ave has worked at this station or if she has ambition to go anywhere else. I do know there is a resigned, low down quality to her though. Ava is worn out and that seems odd for a woman so young. What’s got her down anyway? I’d like to ask except I don’t know how and I’m too damn young and too damn serious about other things—like becoming the next Barbara Walters, working in New York or L.A. or maybe even in a war zone somewhere. At twenty six, I’ve been promoted to this station from the outback of Montana where I worked in a teeny tiny station covering cattle round ups and in this larger market, I’m all high-strung ambition and competitive about just about everything. And defensive. I’m defensive and argumentative and feel like I’m always trying to prove myself. Each exhale is an opportunity to validate my existence, each inhale is a way to try a little harder.
I push out of my chair and go to sit across from her.
“Okay, so the story says there have been tips. People are calling in sightings.”
Ava afro shines under the spot light and she adjusts her glasses on her face, nodding like this was the new news she was waiting for me to find for myself.
“It’s pretty common to get call in tips and sightings,” she says, “it happens.”
“Okay, so did we get any?” I say.
“Sure did,” she says, smiling and I guess that’s the magic question.
Ava swivels around and scoops up a handful of pink paper, notes she’s taken in her odd little scrawl of letters and numbers and sure enough, the boy has been spotted along I-90 and out in Sprague which is a farming community west of Spokane.
“That’s weird,” I say. “These aren’t random. I-90 is a pretty straight shot to Sprague.”
“See, you’re not as dumb as you look.”
She’s joking but it hurts. I brought the woman coffee and still, she’s such a bitch.
“Jesus, Ava, what are you getting at? Just tell me.”
“He’s probably not an abduction at all,” she says, in that droll, I’ve-got-it-all-figured-out tone of voice. “He’s a run-away.”
“Well that’s good news,” I say.
Ava tucks her chin and looks over the top of her wire rim frames. Her dark eyes, milk chocolate too, are bloodshot from how she never sleeps.
She shakes her head at me like I’m hopeless.
“I’m just saying it’s good. He could be alive.”
“That’s not the point, Lauck,” Ava says. “A run-away isn’t lead news. Run-away isn’t national news. No one cares about a run-away.”
“Tell his mother that,” I mumble under my breath.
Ava says nothing more.
Last year, I covered a story about a woman—a beautiful young woman with a fantastic husband, beautiful home and few horses she liked to ride—she was abducted and never heard from again. One day, she was working at her job as a sight inspector for Bonneville Power and then she was gone. Her vehicle was abandoned, her tools were on the ground and a whole year has passed without a clue as to her whereabouts. Her horses wait, her husband waits, her family waits. Even her co-workers wait and the police can find nothing.
We all know that poor woman is dead. She was stolen in the middle of the night. Gone to some unthinkable fate. I hate being a reporter of that kind of news even though it’s exactly that kind of news that leads the show, wins awards and makes a career as a reporter—if you do a good job.
I’ve done a good job—the best I can and I’ve been nominated for an award for my stories on that poor woman but it’s not an honor for me. Sometimes, I really hate this job. And deep down I just want this kid to be okay.
Ava says I’m too soft hearted to be on the hard news beat. She says I should have stuck to crop reports in Montana. She says there’s no way I have the chops to make it to New York, L.A. or even a war zone overseas and deep down, I am afraid she’s right. Another part of me—the ambitious part—thinks Ava can go fuck herself because I’m tough too. I can learn how to be like everyone else who works here—hard and uncaring and mean enough to chew metal. I can.
I go back to my desk, reading through the messages and formulate a plan for the day. I’m going to call all these people who sighted kid, go to the scene and video tape the search efforts and then—who knows. We’ll see.
Ava says I’ll have a cameraman—Allen—in about an hour and I pick up the phone to make my calls.
Friday, January 14, 2011
Book Talk: The Red Book by Carl Jung
Not everyone is interested in individuation but Carl Gustav Jung was and his work is some of the most interesting you can find on the subject. Jung worked on this book for years and his family kept it from being seen or sold. It was a "private" work although aspects of it were apparently made available to the writer who helped pull together the book Memories, Dreams and Reflections. It seems the writer of that book didn't really "get" what was going on in The Red Book and didn't take advantage of what was being presented in that material. So we all remained in the dark.
Jung's worry was that the contents of his The Red Book, wasn't "professional" or serious enough. This work is basically an accumulation of "active imagination" exercises, where Jung engaged in awake dream states in order to meet all aspects of what he called Personality II, that deep unconscious material that existed in the realm of shadow and at the animus/anima level. His goal, of course, was to meet the ultimate self at the core of being.
As he did this work, he gathered others to a salon format, to make the journey inward with him. He would often show clients and fellow seekers The Red Book, but again, he was uneasy with what he was creating. He felt it wouldn't be understood.
How interesting, the Buddha felt the same thing about his teachings called Dharma. He didn't think people would understand and almost didn't teach it but after great pressure from his followers, he decided to try. Look what we have now.
Jung's work is very interesting to me. I have spent 18 years of my own life meeting all aspects of Personality I, which is the conditioned outer self because I am searching for Self. Of course. What else is there? Fame passes. Beauty is just a bridge. Even money isn't all one hopes...yes, you are more comfortable but you are still in the miserable dark most nights. 
I want to know the Self and as enlightened masters in all traditions will tell us, the Self isn't out there...it's in here. In the core of the house that is our being. Jung went there and this book is his map. I want to go and so I am reading this book very carefully. The illustrations and insights are stunning.
This book was a gift, for my birthday and it is huge and amazing. We are so blessed that the book is now available, due to much perserveance of those who follow Jung's work and brought it to the world in published form.
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Count Down to Publication VI
So, here we are, in a kind of holding pattern of waiting/waiting/waiting for reviews and feedback from the media on Found. And I've just talked to the last person...who is in my book...about the fact that the book is coming out. My mother. Better to say my birthmother, because she is that and of course, we haven't known each other for many years.
When we reunited, in 2008, I told her I had been writing a memoir that was about this part of my journey and likely would write about our meeting. She was very generous and told me to "just write whatever you want, I trust you."
That comment was made at the rosy beginning of the reunion but of course, as is common with reunions, the process made a hard turn, personalities clashed and old pain surfaced on all our parts. She and I took time apart and didn't speak for almost eighteen months.
During that quiet time, I finished and sold Found and it is coming out in March. Finally, my mom and I have begun a slow re-establishing of relationship. So, suffice it to say, I think it's pretty important for her to consider reading the book. And I respect that she might not want to. I've protected her privacy and the privacy of her other children and I have been very careful with all that went down in order to keep the spotlight on myself. But it's a sticky area.
When you write memoir, you are talking about your own experience and mulching it for meaning. That's the goal of the well-wrought memoir, but in the end, the people you include as part of your journey will have a different perspective. Of course. No one among us sees a situation the same way. We all have different perspectives and viewpoints and will even go to the death insisting that our truth is THE truth. Which is, of course, ludicrous. Ultimate truth is bigger than experiences like meeting someone and having a cup of coffee together and getting every line of dialogue exactly right in the rendering of that meeting.
This is the debate of the memoir writer and what has so many of us so frustrated that we just throw up our hands and say, "forget it, I'll write fiction instead."
Too late.
In my own case, it's too late. I have chosen to write memoir and must take the heat of the debate. I also try to do the best I can to be open but also to be diligent in protecting my art/my truth/my experience and the meaning taken away. That is my work.
After our careful conversation, my birthmother has opted not to read the book and I respect her decision.
Another day closer and I must remind myself that one day, not to far from this day, the book will release and this will all pass away like a wave on the sea. This is the way of the world. All of this is fleeting. All of this will pass.
Monday, January 10, 2011
Fresh Writing: The Stunning Mary Oliver
Well, this week has been harried and I've not had a chance to write a fresh story (although one is tick, tick, ticking within). I have had this poem drumming in my head though and so...here it is. This is a photo of Mary Oliver with her dog, the sea out her window. This woman's writing is vital for the soul.
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours,
and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
from Dream Work by Mary Oliver
published by Atlantic Monthly Press
© Mary Oliver
Friday, January 07, 2011
Book Talk: Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes
I have had this book, in hard copy, since it came out in 1992. That's nineteen years ago. I was twenty eight years old.
At that time, I read it cover to cover, underlined like mad and then set it away. When my second marriage ended, I was forty years old and out the book came again. I focused all my attention on the story The Handless Maiden, as a metaphor for my self imposed and determined time without a husband or a man in my life (I was convinced from a deep soul place that men were wholly distracting me from a larger purpose). While I could barely understand why I was taking to the mountains to meditate and immerse in Tibetan Buddhism, I drew strength from Estes reminding me that there was a time for a man and a time to be without and I carried on being drawn, by a large wild instinct, to land and a practice that were called Tara. After several years of this immersion, man-less but maintaining my work as a mother, I discovered the hidden truth about my soul wounds. Tara, it turned out, was the name my first mother gave me when she gestated me.
Soon after I reunited with my beautiful mother and the rest--well, you'll just have to read Found, when it releases in the spring.
What is still stunning to me is that I had been so anestized by my culture that I had no idea my origianl mother was of the utmost importance to my sense of self, my identity and my understanding of a cloud of perpetual misery that rained whereever I stood. 
Estes writes of this wound as part of her conversation around the myth of The Ugly Duckling: One of the least-spoken about oppressions of women's soul lives concerns millions of unmarried mothers or never married mothers throughout the world, including the United States, who, in this century alone, were pressured by cultural mores to hide their condition or their children, or else kill or surrender their offspring...
And...When a mother is forced to choose between the child and the culture, there is something abhorrently cruel and unconsidered about the culture. A culture that requires harm to one's soul in order to follow the culture's proscriptions is a very sick culture indeed. The "culture" can be the one a women live in, but more damning yet, it can be the one she carries around and complies with within her own mind.
Yes. Yes. Indeed yes! 
1992
1999
2010
I look back to the young woman in 1993, who held this book before bearing children. I look at the brave soul who left her husband and a very limiting marriage that was stunting all possible evolution due to a larger committment to soul deadening consistency and I look at myself now in 2011. As I read the book and take it in, I can say "My god, I've come a long way."
How have I done it?
How have any of us done it?
This week, I am reading this book very carefully, all over again, and underlining still more. I adore the depth and the storytelling and the examples. Reading Estes' writing is like getting a damn good talking to from the wisest woman you'll ever have to good fortune to speak to.
Last night, I read Chapter Seven titled Joyous Body. I almost skipped it because I wanted to revisit The Handless Maiden. But I didn't and faced a lifelong compulsion surrounding my own loathing of my body. I realized all this crazy Weight Watches crap I'm doing is just starving my beautiful body, bossing it into a kind of odd conformity and creating war out of discontent. What's the matter with me? Why do I buy into this odd culture and it's demand that I look like a twenty year old Olympic athlete or will have no worth?
Estes writes: Destroying a woman's instinctive affiliation with her natural body cheats her of her confidence. It cause her to perseverate about whether she is a good person or not, and bases her self worth on how she looks instead of who she is. It presses her to use up her precious energy worrying about how much food she consumes or the reading on the scale and the tape measure (let me add...the points she adds up via programs like Weight Watchers). It is unthinkable in the instinctive world that a woman should live preoccupied by her appearance in this way.
If she (a woman) is taught to hate her body, how can she love her mother's body that has the same configuration as hers? Her grandmother's body, the bodies of her daughters as well? How can she love the bodies of other women (and men) close to her who have inherited the bodies of their ancestors? To attack a woman thusly destroys her rightful price of affiliate with her own people and robs her of the natural life she feels in her body no matter what height, size, shape she is.
After reading these passages, I went down and made myself dinner (which I hadn't had as I had been busy and also busy dieting!). I ate two lovely beef tacos with cheese and arugala, soft shells drenched in olive oil, drank a glass of blood red wine and then slept the deep sleep of a woman well fed and at peace. I believe I will toss my WW book into the garbage, thank you very much. It's time to start loving my body (and my life) and the way it is shaped (and the mistakes I have made) and stop wasting my life following the culture (as well as my own limiting thoughts about my value). I'd rather follow the truth and the beat of my own heart as well as the call of my own appetites. I guess this book has helped me into the center of what we all crave--which is my own power and my own being.
Thank you, Dr. Estes for your timeless wisdom and your care for women. Women Who Run with the Wolves is an absolute essential.
Wednesday, January 05, 2011
Count Down to Publication V
What kind of publishing world are we in today?
What does it take to reach readers?
How will a writer reach readers without the infamous hope of getting on Oprah?
I guess what I'm asking: "what are my promotional alternatives now?"
As I have been prepping myself for the release of Found with Seal Press, March 2011, I am going for the "saturation" approach. This means I am writing and submitting articles and essays like mad. One a week. These are going to spiritual pubs, writerly pubs., parenting pubs and adoption focused pubs.
Second, I am connecting with bloggers and writing for them. For the latter, I hired an intern from St. Mary's High School (a fantastic idea proffered by Karen Karbo).
Third, I am posting regularly to this blog which connects to my Facebook Fan Page as well as SheWrites.com.
Fourth, I have updated my blog, website and created links to my Facebook Fan Page and YouTube (reminder to myself...ask my website designer to put YouTube button on blog).
Fifth, I have joined professional organizations: The International Writing Guild (IWWG), Assoc Writing Programs (AWP), Willamette Writers, American Adoption Congress, Evan B. Donaldson Institute, Adoption Mosaic and Concerned United Birthparents.
Sixth, I write for these pubs (or am writing for them) and I am seeking cooperative relationships where I can.
Seventh, I am teaching for Literary Arts of Portland, Oregon, have two of my own private classes going of about twenty students and am building a Writer in Residence opportunity with a local college (TBA).
Eight, I am booking workshops in various cities (I anticipate six) and am working now with a host in each city to pull together a public reading, a weekend teaching on memoir and a salon style evening. There may also be an opportunity to speak at the local collage.
This is all on my own. 
Nine, the publisher, Seal Press is doing their fine work as well, submitting galleys for reviews and article possibilities) and they are creating a three city tour of book store events in Portland, Seattle and SF (I'm doing L.A. but Seal is helping out there too). And they are planning a radio tour as well as a virtual book group type tour.
Slow and steady wins the race, that is my sense.
Ten, I've set a goal. In fact, I've set a lot of goals and I say these goals to myself every single day along with a series of affirmations and visualizations (courtesy of the amazing Jake Gudger. Go see him to ramp your focus up). One of my big goals is to take this book--in a pairing with Blackbird, to the big screen. Video is the place we are all going, apparently and this makes sense when we look at the trends. I personally adore movies and watch them all the time. A well made movie is as good as a great book.
Being very human, not feeling overwhelmed is another goal. While I write this, I'm in bed sick (for the first time in something like five years). Perhaps I'm resting up?
Finally, I have been told to "hire a PR person" and while I appreciate this advice, I did hire a PR person for the book Show Me the Way and I have to ask you this. Did you know I wrote a book called Show Me the Way? Your answer, if you are honest, is likely, "no." And you don't need to feel bad about that.
I need to feel bad.
I spent $10,000 of my own cash for a PR person and it was the biggest waste of money ever. I will not hire a PR person. I AM A PR PERSON.
My advice to every writer, set your pride aside and get out there and sell your own damn book. It's good for your sense of worth. You'll quickly see how self deprecating you are and even how low your self esteem is. Both are not helpful in the process of reaching the world. People gravitate to the light for a reason. It warms them--body and soul. So shine. Shine your light. That's my goal, each and everyday: Be real & shine.
Monday, January 03, 2011
Fresh Writing: The Assassination of Language
I am writer. This is my craft. The love of words, of language, is what brings me to work each day and has me wander, with creative abandon, over the canvas of the open page. So much can happen with words and the way they are shaped together.
Words can make us cry for what we regret, can send us to the corner bakery to acquire a gooey chocolate chip cookie (or make a batch ourselves) and even escort us to forgive a million sins of humanity. The well wrought story of an orphan child, forced to eat a meal from the gutter, will keep us up into the dark hours of the night in order to discover her fate and then will have us leave our cozy bed in order to cradle our own sleeping child and whisper silent prayers for his or her happiness and well being. Words can slice, devastate, ruin and on the other side, they can make a million promises that the heart wants, perhaps needs, to believe. Words are an alive tapestry with a history that contain layer upon layer of meaning and they point to our evolution as a species—beginning very often in Greek or in Latin and then traveling through countries and time to be more or perhaps less than they were originally intended to be. To know a word, truly know it from the beginning, is to understand others and to know ourselves. Insight can be gleaned by one word spoken or placed just so on the page.
Words. Words. Words.
Like a true New Yorker will talk about her love of Manhattan—I am a wordsmith who can talk forever about my love affair with words, which began in the womb when my sixteen-year-old mother was removed from school and confined to her room for most of her pregnancy. As we traveled together, my mother and me, she focused her attention on books. The epic romance novel, to be exact. Gone with the Wind was a favorite. From that tempestuous love story, my young mother culled the name Tara. She spoke loving words to her swelling stomach. “I love you, little Tara,” she said, again and again.
And then there was my father, a boy from the wrong type of family, a “bad” boy who wasn’t considered good enough for my mother. His name had been Wright.
Together, their supposed wrong, made me. Tara Wright.
Although I was adopted away and named something else--Jennifer Lauck--I never forgot. Because of my beginnings, it's makes sense I was born with a love of words and books. As soon as I could read, I was a goner. Dr. Suess, Mary Poppins, Oz, fairy tales from The Brother’s Grimm, all the books of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Maya Angelu too. I read love stories, epics, autobiographies, novels and even poems. The turn of a phrase, that perfect twist on words, could send me into a swoon and I transcribe those little pearls into a notebook in order to savor them again and again.
In college, I became a journalist trained to hone my words with deft precision. Who? What? Where? Why? And when? Word count mattered, time mattered and so word choice mattered too.
And now, here I am, some forty plus years into my love affair with the word and I see the advent of the death of language (with it, the death of the attention span). Technology now gives us the coded, to be decoded. What started as little dots and slashes, binary code, has evolved to be Twitter and Text.
L8r. OMG. Brb.
Later? Oh my God? Be right back?
These abbreviations, as part of a new world of speed and character count send my eyes into spasm and my mind into a form of tilt one might see on those old pinball machines. I cannot even try to decipher what these combinations of letters and numbers mean and the effort (which requires a primer for translation) takes far longer than it would have taken to simply use the language as it had been intended—in it’s fullness.
The other day, I sent my husband a photo of a drawing I had done—one I spent hours crafting. While albeit, I am rusty with the charcoal, I was surprise to get an email of that read “LOL!”
Laugh out loud?
Had my fifty two year old scholar of ancient Chinese medicine actually typed LOL in response to my careful creation of art?
In my own home, it seemed I had become archaic, a relic, a toss back to perhaps a more romantic age where humans took the time to speak in compete sentences and considered what we said with care. Long ago (like about three years ago when this phenomenon of texting appeared), word choices came from the depths our heart and were made like little offerings to show our wisdom and potential.
As I squint at the letter combinations that people send to me now, I wonder if the ripe harvest of language been consumed? Has the sweetness of whole words departed for good? Are we left now with shredded cores and empty rinds like: “idk,” “omw’ and “rofl?” (I dont know, on my way and rolling on floor laughing).
What meal is this that we create as we talk to each other in code?
Who are we hiding from?
What is the point?
It feels to me like a language of fear. We are cutting it all down to nothing, in a hurry, rushing about, accepting these odd like contortions of ourselves that technology demands.
The philosopher Ram Dass once said it best: We bought science as our religion, we bought the intellect and materialism
and the analytic mind
with it's off-shoot technology as that which would save us.
It's made life interesting but it hasn't freed us.
It's tangled us in the addictions to things our minds produce.
I rebel.
My cellular phone was retired a year ago and I am now free of that miniature distraction. I look people in the eye when I speak to them. I don’t have to search around when something is ringing. I am with the one I’m with, choosing my words carefully and saying what matters in my heart.
And, I am saving money.
And, I am being glad I don’t profit AT & T.
And, I am free of the fear that my phone will give me brain cancer one day.
I now reject all this slicing and dicing of the beloved word. I won't do it. Silence would be better, is better and in fact it was Ram Dass who pointed out that the space between words and the silence they were born from is where it's at anyway. Perhaps all this texty-twitter chatter will lead us where we so need to be. Into silence, the birthplace of words.
Until then, I stand firm in my freedom to speak and write in full sentences, using whole words, even if the audience has it's head down, eyes focused on the little screens--typing/texting/coding away.
Saturday, January 01, 2011
Top Ten for the New Year!
Giving back is good and that's what had me compile this list. These are the people in Portland who make my life worth living. Each place and person on this list is a master at what they do. And they've been tested out by me personally, so I vouce for all I write here. Enjoy!!
Number One Full Service Healer: Dr. Roger Batchelor 
For mothers who are tired of taking their kids to the doctor, sitting in germ infested waiting rooms, being given yet another prescription for antibiotics and watching your child be sick—all winter long. Roger is a natural healer who does acupressure and moves energy in kids—who are so sensitive, they respond very quickly. He prescribes herbs and gives mothers great tips on home care for issues like insomnia, sore throats, upset tummy and of course, viruses. My kids have been seeing him for three years now and we have not had one round of a serious illness. I take that back, we’ve had one ear infection and did have to do antibiotics but then he was there for the follow up care and we’ve had nothing since. Zero, nada, zip! He’s affordable, will bill your insurance and available. (And yes, he’s my husband! See how much I like his work??)
Number One Energy Worker: Dr. Tamara Stoudt
tstaudt@earthlink.net
Tamara came recommended to me by several sources and I’ve seen her only twice. Both times, she has been wonderful. She is the real deal—a woman totally tapped into higher consciousness via her attention to detail and compassion. Roger is amazing for health issues, chronic pain and with the care of kids. Tamara is a BIG gun who is better than a therapist when it comes to healing wounds of the soul!
Number One Man to Readjust Your Whole Attitude: Jacob Gudger
jacobgudger@lifesuccessconsultants.com
Jake is a young man, just out of college, who had the very good sense to spend his time becoming a teacher of The Goal Achiever program developed by Bob Proctor (of The Secret fame). Jake provides you with a booklet, a set of CD’s and six weeks of his personal coaching through the Goal Achiever program and I’m here to tell you—DO IT! Jake changed my life and the life of several of my close friends. The investment-to change your life-is $995.00 and that is cheap in contrast to one more day of being stuck mired in old conditioned patterns, habits and attitudes around your self worth, money, your life purpose and relationships. Jake WILL change your life and your life direction.
Number One Best Astrologer: Carol Ferris
rficf@easystreet.net
Tell her I sent you. Carol Ferris has been reading my charts, and the charts of everyone I know, for nearly thirteen years now. She saw more about me than I could possibly comprehend. She predicted my many year run of publishing with Simon & Schulster and has become a trusted advisor on matters of life energy, partner choices and business decisions.
Number One Favorite Restaurant: Screen Door & Porque no?
Screen Door is Southern cuisine and is run by Nicole and David, a great couple with a new baby boy! They are great people, very hard working and they produce some of the best fried chicken I have ever eaten. Ever.
Porque No? is mexican and run by a wonderful woman and a great dance teacher, Claire (and her husband Brian). I love both these places and am at them a couple times a month. The service is great, the food is fresh NW and the atmosphere at both places is sensational.
Number One Hamburger in Portland: Bamboo Sushi
If you have to eat a hamburger, do it right. Kobe beef, so tender it melts in your mouth, served on a brioche bun. Share with a pal beucase it is too much for one person. I adore these hamburgers. And if you can’t get a burger, because they are out, the rest of the menu is stunning! Perfect. I love Bamboo.
Number One Tea House: Heaven’s Tea
Paul is a tea master who takes you to an entirely new dimenstion when it comes to drinking and utilizing tea in your life. I personally drink several pots of tea a day, from seven in the morning on. I drink tea when I teach as well and Paul has guided my tea choices to be more healthy and conscious. I had no idea I was consuming pesticide loaded tea. Now I drink tea from 1500 year old trees and bushes, that brings me to a place of instantaneous calm and peace.
Number One Photographer: Staci Vriese
svriese@gmail.com
Staci got me into her studio, with my kids in tow, in about a day of notice. And she took simply gorgeous shots of me and that wasn’t easy. I was wearing sweats and no makeup when I arrived. We worked together for about an hour and the work was complete. She even took photos of my kids. She was a dream! A dream and a heart felt woman on top of it. If you are looking for gorgeous shots of your family, your kids or yourself—run to see Staci.
Number One Real Estate Guru: Stephanie Wiarda
Stephanie treats you like royalty and has an exquisite eye for detail and beauty. No wonder, she used to run an art gallery I believe. The woman works overtime for you and keeps on working even when the deal is done. Tell her I sent you. She is a gem. You’ll never let her go.
Number One Auctioneer: Steve Dorsey
Yes, I used to be married to Steve and this is us with out wonderful boy, Spencer! And Steve is still the best damn auctioneer in town. If you have a fundraiser coming up and need to get the job done, raise a lot of money and have a great time, Steve is the guy. He works his tail off for you and is a real person. He listens and gives great advice. This year he was in New York, auctioning for the Parkinson Foundation and here in Portland worked for several schools and for WorkStock. He will raise money for your organization. Guaranteed.