Friday, April 29, 2011
Book Talk: The Tender Land by Kathleen Finneran
by Anne Gudger
Anne teaches the Spring Craft class with me,
has thirty years of teaching & writing experience,
and is just a fabulous human!
Families are complicated.
Family is our first introduction to ourselves and others and the intricate dance that follows. Family is the mini-cosmos where, if we’re lucky, we anchor roots and sprout wings but often times the roots are shallow; the wings stay baby down. From wimpy roots and crooked wings sometimes writers are born! Especially memoirists.
The Tender Land is a beautiful memoir by Kathleen Finneran, who creates a tribute to her beloved brother who killed himself when he was fifteen. Her story is about how a family survives such a loss but it is also about the family ties that bind, sometimes too tight and sometimes not tight enough.
There’s a ton to love about this book: the gorgeous use of language, the smoothness of the narrative, the way the story moves forward and backward while holding the reader in the center. Plus Finneran’s use of literary tension. We know the tragedy from the start when the book opens with, “My mother believes she gave birth to an angel . . . . ‘I think there was a reason he was only here for a short time,’ she said. ‘I think he was an angel sent to save someone.’”
Finneran shows her family from kid bikes to snow angels to home movies with humor and love. We see family eccentricities as babies join the large Catholic clan during the 60’s and 70’s in middle suburbia. By seeing Finneran’s family, we of course see our own. Finneran masters the truth that by being specific, you touch on the universal: love, mystery, faith, guilt, regret and loss. She renders ordinary family moments into poetry. One evening young Kathleen and her mom--who’s pregnant with another child--talk before the kids all go to a movie with their dad:
“What movie are you going to see” she asked when she finished coloring her lips.
“Kiss me now,” I said.
“Who’s in that?”
“No. Kiss me now, before you blot your lips.”
I was sitting on the side of the tub, and she bent toward me to kiss my cheek.
“No. On my knee,” I said, “so I can see it.”
“How about your hand?” she suggested, taking it in hers and kissing it. “I can’t bend down that far anymore.”
“My hand and my knee,” I said. I stood up and lifted my leg to the sink, and she pressed her lips against the middle of my knee, exaggerating the sound and time a simple kiss required.
In another passage, Finneran writes,
There was the time before he was born and the time after. Ordinary time. A time when we woke up every day, our souls still within us. And now there was this time. The time being. A time for which my father said he was sorry, one for which we were all too young. It would be a time—this time—unlike any that had passed before. A long time. A time presided over by angels perhaps, messengers in slow motion.
Our hearts break with Finneran as she wrestles with the death of her brother. Like families, grief is complicated. Finneran openly writes about how broken she is. More than ten years after her brother’s death she’s traveling by train and a young boy is collecting signatures from all the passengers. She signs her name “Sean,” rather than Kathleen without thinking about how she’s not Sean, how they are separate.
Finneran writes the final chapter as her adult self writing to her dead brother, telling him some of what he’s missed and struggling to make sense of her loss and her grief. She concludes with:
Sean, time passes, it’s true. Hours, days, and decades. And grief goes by its own measure. Now, before this day of angels ends again, before the sky changes color and the moon follows in its phase from full to new, I want to call out your name and tell you, across the tender land, that we have gone on living. We are all, every one of us, alive.
It must be said, for me, that this book falls short in the category of total honesty.
Wait.
Didn’t I already say Finneran is open and lets us see in? Isn’t that being honest? Yes and no. On many levels she is so honest, so open, so vulnerable. But where I have trouble with her book is around Sean’s death. I think there’s a family secret, an elephant in the living room that Finneran tiptoes around.
Having studied with Jennifer for a few years now, she’s in my head as I write and read. One of her lessons is that you have to address your neurosis on the page or the reader will do it for you. If you don’t say, “yeah, this was messed up.” . . . but you try to dress up the ugly with glitter and clear-coat, the reader will question how reliable you are as a narrator, how honest. So, here with The Tender Land, I’m left wondering about Sean and their family. Yes, Finneran touches on her own depression and her mom’s too but it’s in hindsight. The family we meet while Sean is alive is loving and caring and close. We’re not privy to Sean’s likely depression or how growing up with a depressed parent effected the family. There’s more to Sean’s suicide than Finneran cops to.
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Annoucements: Mantra Count, L.A. Reading & Mother's Day
Happy Easter
Lent is over.
The tulips bloom.
Amen.
At our house, we did two dozen eggs, white, which is funny because the chickens (Sunny and Shadow) lay brown eggs and the refrigerator overflows. OVERFLOWS! Oh well. White eggs are required, says my nine year old Artist-in-Residence.
On this sacred day of renewal--here are a few announcements:
1) The Heart Sutra count to 100,000 is at 55,000 with 45,000 to go. Elizabeth, Kate, Kristin and me. There are others who want to join in but get busy. I know. We know. Intention counts.
When I do my mantra, I visualize the power plants in Japan and all that ocean all around the island. I offer mantra from my heart to pacify the water and to bring calm to the radiation. It certainly cannot hurt. It's not too late to join us.
2) If you are in L.A., or know fans in L.A., come to Diesel Books for a lovely panel with Hope Edelman (Motherless Daughters), Dinah Lenney (Bigger than Life) and myself! We will be talking about writing and writing about family. Eat a piece of cheesecake, drink a bit of champagne and ask a question or two. It should be a terrific evening.
3) Summer Classes are open for registration! Surprise. We have a Master Class in Portland and an online Skype class. Please let me know if you are interested, via this site and I'll send you details.
4) Future Class Offerings:
The Journal: Dreams, witnessing and synchronicity. This six week class will teach you how to get a writing practice started and how to most effectively journal.
The Story Mandala Group. This class will be for people who have a story--of intensity and impact and even trauma--from their lives, that needs to be witnessed in a ritual circle of healing. This will be a powerful place to testify your great life sorrow, be heard and to release the energy in order to move new energy in.
Fall Craft Class: Create, be inspired and look at your writing from a fresh perspective. These teachings are designed to show writers how to draw exciting, memorable scenes, compelling summary passages and stirring ruminations. In eight weeks, you will learn all the vital elements necessary and when we are done, you will have a final focused sample that will act as inspiration for your longer projects. This class is required for those who take the Master Class.
Fall Master Series: Eight readers and four observers will be part of this weekly workshop based teaching. Classes begin in Sept.
The Beach Teach: This is a nine-month intensive set on the Oregon Coast where I will bring six master level memoir writers together to write three full drafts of a completed memoir!
5) May is Portland month! I will be reading all over town. At the Willamette Writer's on May 3rd and at Mountain Writer's May 18th. I'll be at the Oregon Colony of Writer's retreat--where four lucky writers and I will commune, write, eat, talk and just hang out. It's fantastic and CHEAP! Check it out and I hope to see you at one (or all) of these events!
Friday, April 22, 2011
Book Talk: Magnetic North by Linda Gregerson
Contributed by Cindy Stewart-Rinier
So much of the difficulty I experience when trying to focus in on a writing subject arises from the dissonance between my personal experience and the larger context of the world. How to position oneself? What do you do with the relative comfort of American existence when you know that comfort is dependent on the suffering it has created elsewhere? I remember feeling this most acutely shortly after America began bombing Afghanistan and Iraq. I’d be sitting in my back yard, breathing in the night air, the smell of honeysuckle and scented clematis lacing it, looking into the deepening blue of the sky, feeling this sense of pleasure and wonder and then this heaviness would overtake me: that my pleasure, to some very real degree, was predicated on the suffering of others in the world. That there was a direct line between my comfort and those whose homes and cities were being bombed, whose mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers and children were being shot or killed by fire, flying shrapnel. The horror of it moved me to gather a group of women to protest in the style of the women in black at Lloyd Center, Portland’s oldest and largest shopping mall. For a solid year, every Saturday morning, we silently stood at the main entrance of the mall with blown up photos on signs that depicted what we were not being shown on the news. The idea was to make visible the reality of what we were doing, to resist the complicity of silence.
Linda Gregerson’s Magnetic North probes this quality of consciousness, the places where it, like the possum’s foot in her first poem, breaks through the thin crust of ice on the snow. Through a variety of subjects that range from her mother’s reaction to 9/11, to various artists and scientists and the implications of their work, to the young woman sitting at her breakfast table one morning whose inner arm is a hieroglyphics of scars from cutting, there is an engagement with the question raised in her first poem about self-correction.
The phenomenon Magnetic North, with its bifurcation between “the north we can steer by and the north we call the true” becomes the overarching metaphor for the narratives by which we navigate our lives, our choices, how self-correction is often the only way to ensure safe landings. The collection exhibits its own form of magnetism in its construction, with the poem “De Magnete” like a lodestone at its center and the other poems that comprise her deep and nuanced argument bound around it.
The opening poem, “Sweet”, sets up a tension between two ways of positioning oneself to the world. The first voice is that of the mother: “We cannot/ continue to live in a world where we/ have so much/ and other people have so little.” Its assertion is quiet, introspective, passionate, compassionate. It sees how the pieces relate to one another. It takes responsibility. The second is of an undisclosed “he.” Its refutation is louder, self-satisfied, dismissive. It sees the world “as we have made it” as true and immutable. Its judgment that, “Your mother’s wrong but sweet, the world/ has never self-corrected,” overmarks the mother’s recognition of the urgent need for social justice with the premise that historic precedent is inevitability. It denies responsibility.
These two positions constitute the polarity that Gregerson negotiates as she treats each subject in the subsequent poems. “Bicameral” picks up the thread of social inequity, unravels it and weaves it together with the story and art of Magdalena Abakonowicz. The poem itself becomes a mimesis of that artist’s weaving's, her sensibility and its obsessions with biology, politics and metaphysical mystery. Both the poet and the artist she treats are tough-minded, rigorous in their knowledge of the biology in which they find the metaphors that support their socio-political stances. The cleft palate, cell division, cell accretion all resonate with the political implications that the title sets as a frame. 
The power of this collection is that it proffers this possibility: that the world as we’ve made it “is wholly premise, rather like the crusted snow.” If it is simply a narrative, then a different narrative is possible. Even in Darwin’s work were two competing narratives: survival of the fittest and mutual aid. Magnetic North gives us the sense that if there is a world as we’ve made it, there is also a world as we would make it.
Cindy and I will be reading together at the Mountain Writer's Series, May 18th! We look forward to seeing you there. And thank you Cindy, for your smart and depth filled contribution to Book Talk!
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
On the Road: L.A. Bound
Spencer and I are in the backyard. The chickens, Sunny and Shadow, are in the run and peck at the earth for worms. They scratch and cluck.
The sun sets, the sky is clear with a few clouds and the birds are busy building nests. Robins, jays, finches.
Spence is in the hot tub, awkward in his man body with a big tummy and long legs. He complains about his dance teacher who is "working his arse off."
I'm on the top step of the deck with a plate balanced on my knees. I eat a hamburger and nod with sympathy. Jazz dance is hard, I've studied it myself and the teacher he complains about used to dance with the Ailey Dancers in NY! She's tough and perfect and demanding. Poor kid.
"POP POP POPPOPPOPPOP POP"
Silence all around.
The chickens lift their heads from the ground. The birds are still. Dance and dinner are forgotten.
Spencer and I look at each other through the steam that rises between us.
"Gunshots?"
"Automatic weapon," Spencer says.
"No way," I say.
"Has to be," he says. "No way that many shots came from a single shooter."
"Shit!" I say.
First of all, how does my thirteen year old know so much about guns? And second, how has he become aware of the sound a gun makes--single shooter versus automatic? And third, how do I know that sound?
Sirens scream out and we estimate distance. It all sounds very close. He says the Lloyd Center. I don't disagree.
The news will tell us that, in fact, it was Lloyd Center and a fourteen year old boy was shot to death in "gang related activity" even though the boy wasn't in a gang.
Spencer, Jo and I drive that section of town at least once a week, sometimes more. We go to the computer store, we pick up burrito's at Chipotle and we stop in to see a movie at the mall. Why weren't we there tonight?
Life.
Life is with us and then, in a second, it is shot.
Found is out and I'm signing books at events and answering emails and the review's continue to come in. I am on my way to L.A. Monday night for a quick in and out to do an event at Diesel Books with Hope Edelman and Dinah Lenney--I cannot wait because I love Hope and she has a great plan to talk as a group about writing about family and there will be champagne and cheesecake & Dinah was my mentor on Found--but then I hear that the place where I am going to stay in L.A. is also home to gang violence. A kid was shot on the boardwalk near my hotel a few days ago.
"Don't go out at night," warns a friend who lives in El Segundo. "That part of town is not safe."
What part of town--in any town--is safe anymore?
A part of me is sick for the mother who has lost her young son in Portland and equally sick for the L.A. mother who has lost her boy and I just want to stay home and protect my own boy and girl--wrap them up tight and keep them safe from this world of gangs and shooting and earthquakes and nuclear meltdowns and God knows what else.
I've got my disaster emergency kit all set up, for the monster quake that is supposed to come and level this part of the world. I've got my extra water and flashlights and emergency food. I'm ready. I'm ready to live.
And then another one of my friends emails that her husband has lung cancer which has metastasized to his brain. She says he is in surprising good humor and cracks jokes, "it's a good thing all this free radiation is coming from Japan."
So much sad and bad news, relentless this week and it feels like I am one of the little gerbils, Jo's new pets, who live in the fifteen gallon aquarium in the kitchen.
The tiny creatures, named S'mores and Oreo, have tiny hearts and they race around and around on a purple wheel as if they might die if they don't run.
It's all come to this.
What's the point? What are we doing anyway and what the hell does my book matter and what do I mean--what does it matter?? I spent years of my life--18 years of my life--writing the damn book and yes it matters. It matters. It matters.
But not really.
What matters?
Being alive, I suppose.
That's what matters.
Paying attention to being afraid.
Living past the fear.
Being careful, kind, safe.
And loving.
Loving myself. Loving my kids. Even loving all this damn fear.
And of course, writing. I can write about my fear. I can tell you how it is and maybe, if you can write a comment, you can tell me how you feel too. What more do we have but our stories and each other?
Easter is coming, Jo has demanded an early egg coloring night and now two dozen colored eggs are in my refrigerator--red, yellow, blue and green. The kids plan an egg hunt.
Spring explodes around us. Life in full sized technicolor. And death too. Terrible things next to amazing things. Beauty next to horror.
We are all still here. We are all still alive. It's a miracle, isn't it?
Monday, April 18, 2011
Fresh Writing: Conversations about Poetry
I am a student at Pacific Lutheran University and complete an MFA in creative writing this summer. Going back to school has allowed time, space and finances to create, think, discuss and interact. Meeting other writers and considering other genres has been equally inspiring.
One writer I’ve enjoyed talking to and sharing classes with is Cindy Stewart-Rinier. (Isn’t that a great name for a poet? Rinier? It makes me think of René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke better known as Rainer Maria Rilke.)
Cindy and I will read together at the Mountain's Writer Series in May, so I decided it might be fun to talk frankly about poetry on the weblog since, truth be told, I don’t get poetry at all!
Cindy, being a sport, has agreed to answer a few of my uneducated questions about the genre! Watch out, this woman is one smart cookie.
Jennifer: I have to admit, Cindy, poetry is so hard for me to understand and to access. I feel a fool when I try and only certain poets have reached my heart. Sharon Olds, Billy Collins, William Stafford, Mary Oliver and some—although a very limited amount—of Emily Dickenson. It’s so hard to imagine an entire life devoted to working in this form. Please, enlighten me. What is the appeal of poetry, for you?Cindy: I love poetry for some of the same reasons that I love dark chocolate. There's an intensity and complexity to good dark chocolate—the kind that is upwards of 70% cocoa—that is along the lines of the experience I have when reading the compressed language of poetry. Because it's so condensed, connotation, denotation, figurative language, sound, tone and mood all form a dynamic and mutually reinforcing experience of language that is, to extend the chocolate metaphor, very rich. Sometimes the poem is an enactment of the subject it treats, other times it sweeps you up and carries you along on its voice, and other times it folds you into Mystery itself, or as close to an approximation of it as we might be able to feel through words. Like dark chocolate, it might be an acquired taste. Not everybody loves the bitter with the sweet, but for those who have a penchant for complexity, the poem is just the thing. For me, reading good poetry is both a pleasure and a way of entering a state of heightened attention that makes me feel most fully alive, human. It is a kind of antidote to being bombarded with language that has an agenda, wants to sell me something, as in advertising or politics. In that sense, it leaves even chocolate in the dust!
J: Okay, I love chocolate and of course, the only chocolate I’ll eat is dark chocolate. But you are talking about experiencing it at a level I haven’t yet. I think I take in chocolate at a more unconscious level, perhaps as a way to get a chemical hit from the ingredients within that calm the brain or nervous system. I guess I don’t want to think so hard about what is going on. I like it, I eat it, that’s it. What you are talking about with poetry is the same—you are talking about really thinking hard about the words on the page—diving into sounds and even the condensation to find meaning. Isn’t that a ton of work?
C: I don’t consider it work as much as a genuine engagement with language. You can look at a painting and appreciate it on some level, but knowing something about its process, what its relationship is to some particular art movement is knowledge that enhances and deepens that appreciation. Poetry has its roots in the oral tradition when, in order to retain stories and pass them on, speech was modified to approximate music so the performed stories could be learned, remembered and passed on. Forms with strict rhythm and rhyme schemes served a mnemonic function. Since then, history, philosophy, politics, culture and technology all have, of course, influenced and mutated poetry and its forms. American poetry, like the political context that informed it, broke from the European traditions pretty significantly. In an oversimplification used by a teacher recently, two main traditions grew out of the American soil. One was Walt Whitman's ecstatic inclusivity, with its entry through the experienced, and the other, Emily Dickinson's rapture of daily life that enters through deep engagement with language. There's a huge diversity of “camps” in contemporary American Poetry—poetry of the self, of voice, place, witness, language, Nature, wit, beauty, family, the spirit, history, identity—and more I’m sure I’ve forgotten to name.
J: See. Smart! You are so smart about this. So, in your opinion, how can the layperson access poetry and even explore it without feeling like dolt?
C: A lot of us run aground by getting fixated on what a poem means, myself included. Archibald MacLeash’s often-quoted, “A poem should not mean but be” is a good reminder to approach the poem as an experience of language. Let yourself be aware of how it makes you feel in your body, your mind, your heart as you read through it. Then reread it and ask yourself questions about these reactions, see if you can identify what they were connected to, why or how they were generated. That’s when you might begin to notice things about different aspects of craft. Are there a lot of soft or hard sounds? Do they correspond or contradict the content? What about the physical shape of the poem? How does line length affect how you read? Does it speed you up or slow you down? The sense of the poem might escape you, but can pay attention to how it makes you feel, then start to look at how it makes you feel.
Though a lot of the poetry I’ve been reading in our program has been initially vexing, more accessible poetry now feels a little paltry by comparison. Kind of like eating Hershey bars after you’ve had the 73% Madagascar, you know? Except for an occasional nostalgic indulgence, it’s hard to imagine going back.
I think that some knowledge of craft is also really helpful, if not essential, toward a deeper understanding and appreciation of poetry. To be aware of what’s at work allows you to then begin to look at how it’s at work in each individual poem. When you see what’s actually packed into that tight little package of language, all the decisions the poet made in order for the poem to become that precise utterance, that’s where amazement is born.
Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook is a great place to start. Then, if you want to go a little further, there’s Edward Hirsch’s How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry.
For me, it’s also very helpful to hear poets read their own work aloud. When I’ve struggled with the assigned reading for our program, I’ve often turned to the internet to find audio or audio visual footage so I can hear the work the way the poet meant it to be heard. The Poetry Foundation has a website has a website with audio, Youtube has recorded readings, there’s an amazing project out of Lewis and Clark College here in Portland called the Oregon Poetic Voices Project where you can listen to archived poetry readings from poets across the state, and the Mountain Writers Series is in the process of adding a more interactive component to their website that will allow visitors to access their 38 years of archived readings it has hosted as well.
Fleda Brown, who I had the great privilege to work with last year, reads an essay on the work of a different poet each month on “Michigan Writers on the Air” which you can access through her facebook page, Poet Fleda Brown. There is such intelligence and clarity in her essays, I can guarantee you that you’ll learn a lot about poetry just by tuning in and listening.
So, hopefully, this is a start.
J: Thank you so much Cindy! Bravo for your words and your work here. Look for Cindy, this Friday, as she examines a book of poems for the Book Talk Conversation!
Friday, April 15, 2011
Book Talk: The Other Wes Moore by Wes Moore
by Anne Gudger
Anne teaches the Spring Craft class with me,
has thirty years of teaching & writing experience,
and is just a fabulous human!Memoir is an evolving genre. Ten years ago critics scratched their heads and struggled to classify memoir in either the autobiography or fiction camps. They were uncomfortable with the whole “memory” aspect and wanted to know, “but is it true?” Book stores and libraries weren’t sure where to shelve memoirs. I remember needing to find a title in the self-help section not too long ago.
But times are changing. The need and the demand for memoir is on the rise. Why? I don’t know but I can’t help but wonder if it doesn’t have something to do with our high-tech-leave-me-in-my-own-bubble culture. Even though we’re plugged into our IPhones, IPods and IPads, we still want to connect to people. We still want to hear stories full of all the things that make us human: heart, tears, laughter, understanding and lack of it too.
The Other West Moore is a new memoir with a new twist that stretches our concept of memoir beyond memory. Moore’s book explores the stories of two kids, unknown to each other, with the same name who are near the same age. They both grew up with single mothers in fatherless homes in the same decaying city. They had rough childhoods: by the time they were 11 they had both been handcuffed by the police. And there the similarities end. Through family support and intervention at a crossroads, the author grew up to be a Rhodes Scholar, a decorated veteran, a White House Fellow and business leader. The other Wes Moore had less family. By 14 he was dealing drugs; at 16 he became a father; at 24 he was convicted of murder and is serving a life sentence.
What made the difference? The author asks the question, tells the stories of the two Weses, and lets the reader decide.
What intrigues me about this memoir is that Moore combines his story with another man’s story. This look at two Weses elevates his story beyond the classic hero’s journey where a boy faces challenges, overcomes them, and returns to make a difference.
Would Moore’s memoir be as popular if it were just his story?
Life handed Moore a coincidence that he turned into an interesting narrative to show how two boys nearly lost their way: and one did. They other didn’t. As Moore says, “The chilling truth is that his story could have been mine. The tragedy is that my story could have been his . . . . It’s unsettling to know how little separates each of us from another life altogether.”
Moore could have written his memoir as a success story: one person beats the odds. But he didn’t. He did something more. And it works. I haven’t seen this done before. If you’re writing your memoir and searching for a fresh way of looking at your story, try The Other Wes Moore. Maybe Moore’s way isn’t your way but maybe his book will spark you.
Jennifer Note: Anne and I will have a small discussion about this book in the comments section. Follow along or chime in!
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
On The Road: Home
Well, I did it. I went to see my mother in Reno and we had a lovely day together. As I left her, waiting for the airplane that would take me home to my own kids, I felt as lucky as I've ever felt in this life. Surrounded by slot machines and gamblers hoping to cash in on the technicolor promises of riches, I felt wealthy in a way that was far beyond coins and cash. I had the love of my mother and she had my love in return. We had forgiveness, tenderness and understanding.
What are the odds that a baby, sent down the river of life, would grow to be a woman and 47 years later be able to make her way back to her own mother? We have to be talking 100,000 to one. Yes. I felt lucky indeed. I felt kissed by angels.
My journey into Nevada has inspired a new book and I've suggested this book to my agent--and here we go. I'm writing a book proposal. It's too early to talk about "what" the book will be about but suffice to say it's not a memoir but it's not not a memoir and it's surrounding issues with my mother but isn't about my mother. How's that for a tangle?
Found has pulled in another stellar review from a Canadian writer who has blown my mind with her insightful words. A review like that usually sends me back to the book, so I can try to read with the eyes of the person doing the review and see what she has seen. Yes, I do that with negative reviews too but as of yet--knock on wood--there aren't any blast-your-hair-off-your-face reviews yet. They are all gentle, thoughtful and thought provoking.
Los Angeles (the city of angels) is around the corner, where on April 26th, I share a conversation about memoir with Hope Edelman and Dinah Lenney. Please join us at Diesel Books in Brentwood and please, spread the word to your L.A. contacts interested in memoir. It should be a great night, complete with champagne and cheesecake too!
And last, the ladies of the prayer circle who are doing Heart Sutra for Japan, the ocean and the earth, are nearly at 45,000 mantra. Please click here to join us. We are up to six women now. Our goal is 100,000.
Friday, April 08, 2011
Book Talk: The Stuff of Life by Karen Karbo
by Anne Gudger
Anne teaches the Spring Craft class with me,
has thirty years of teaching & writing experience,
and is just a fabulous human!I helped my daughter pack for college. We crammed bags and boxes with jackets and jeans, pictures of family and friends, her boots and helmet for riding horses. She was moving half way across the country from our home in Portland, Oregon to Fulton, Missouri--to follow her dream and study equestrian science. A big move for an 18-year-old and for her parents too. Two weeks later I helped pack my parents’ dishes and photos and racing trophies and art supplies to move them to assisted living. A huge move for them after living in their home for 37 years.
Both ends of my family were tucked in, at least initially. The untucking would come later. My daughter studied slides under a microscope; my parents studied the meal menu for seniors (How many ways can you cook a potato? Lots.) I looked at my husband and said, “Welcome to the sandwich generation. I’m the peanut butter and you’re the jelly. Squish.”
It’s a landscape we Baby Boomers recognize, caring for our kids and caring for our parents—with us in the middle.
Karen Karbo’s memoir, The Stuff of Life, is some of the best sandwich generation writing I’ve read. Karbo wrangles the heartbreak of caring for her dying dad in Nevada--while shuttling between him and her husband and three children in Portland, Oregon--into a funny, honest page-turner.
Dick Karbo, a kindhearted Clint Eastwood type, living in a triple-wide dubbed “the Palace” in the Nevada desert, is diagnosed with lung cancer. Karen, his only child, steps up to care for him even though she’s frank about not feeling cut out for the job: “I have little patience with the necessary routines of caregiving. I trust doctors about as much as I trust mechanics or the retail associate at Nordstrom who tells me I look fabulous in a pair of $1,200 Calvin Klein Capri pants, and am a barf-o-phone to boot.”
Dick Karbo is a retired industrial designer and card-carrying member of the NRA who is “close-mouthed-to-the-point-of-pathology.” Karen is a Doc Marten wearing freelance writer who juggles motherhood and her writer’s life. She says about her and her dad: “We’re not a well-matched patient-nurse couple.”
Karbo’s uncertainty about nursing her father begs bigger questions about family and loss and wounds. We watch her struggle with how to be present for a parent when so much painful family history’s been bound and sealed and labeled: “Do not touch. Ever.” She loves her dad. As readers, we know this, but love is complicated. Karbo swings between being an adult and a stubborn hurt teenager who sometimes hides out in her dad’s bathroom reading the fake newsprint wallpaper. But in the end self-deprecating and all (She apologizes for being a “blinking, flinching, grief-stricken fool”) she shows up and cares of her dad with warmth and tenderness.
Karbo’s honesty and humor make us love her. We’ll gladly fly between rainy Portland and hot, dry Nevada, we’ll sit on the gold sofa in Dick’s trailer, and we’ll listen with Karen through the thin trailer walls as Dick’s violent coughing brings him closer to death. We watch father and daughter struggle in this new terrain as they see how alike they are and how love and toughness holds them together and holds them apart: “Next to the right to bear arms, my father’s most cherished value is bucking up. He trained me to be a trouper from an earlier age. . . . [As a child] I was so well known for my stoicism that someone wrote on the cinder-block wall that ran behind the parking lot of our apartment building: YOU CAN SLUG KAREN KARBO AND SHE DON’T EVEN CRY!”
If you’re leapfrogging between your kids and parents and feeling like the peanut butter or jelly or pastrami if that’s more your style, I highly recommend The Stuff of Life. Karbo shows us with wit and generous honestly that sometimes you have to laugh or you’ll cry and sometimes, you have to do both.
Wednesday, April 06, 2011
On the Road: What's Going On?
It's Pizza Night for my daughter's school which means that if you eat at this particular restaurant, on this night, the place will give 20% of the proceeds to her school.
I take a fast walk through the neighborhood to pick up To-Go cheese and pepperoni before I jump on the phone to do more work around the book, promotions and adoption.
It's cool out today, bits of sun here and there and heavy gray clouds hang low in the sky.
At the pizzeria, the place is packed. Shoulders and hips bump against each other and all the people keep their hands shoved deep into their pockets as they squish together in order to make more room for the steady flow of customers.
"Sorry."
"Excuse me."
"Are you here for Pizza Night too?"
I get myself lodged in at the back of a long line, this disjointed zigzag of kids, teachers and parents. Near the front stands a terrific writer and more, a very popular woman who knows everyone (and everyone knows her). She's with her lovely kids and her darling husband and it's confession time: I have a secret desire to be this woman. She's just so good at getting along with people. She is what I call "a people person." I want to figure out how that is done. Or perhaps I am a people person but just don't see myself that way tonight. I don't know what's going on, I'm feeling a little fragile and out of sorts and turned inside out. When I see this fantastic woman, I cannot help think how she is the Porsche of people and I am the old rusted VW bus.
Over the din, I ask about her newest book, which is in the final edit phase and nearly ready to go to print. She confesses she's going through that phase where she is just sure it's terrible--which is hilarious because she is a FAN-FU%#ING-TASTIC writer. We laugh. I tell her I felt that same way right before Found released.
~
So here we are, well past one month into promoting Found, which is the culmination of an 18 year journey to know myself. The big window is still up at Powell's and my son is here, showing off.
In a few minutes I'll have another interview with a radio station in Florida and I'll tell my story again and find I can encapsulate my entire life into a few sentences. I suppose that is called "essence."
The feedback I have been getting is consistent and kind. This email came from a lovely woman in Canada (who allowed me permission to re-print):
Thank you for the beautiful gift of your most recent book, Found. It comes at a perfect time in my life. I am a 57 year old Canadian woman, who as a result of the legislation of the partial opening of adoption laws in the province of Ontario, Canada, has been able to locate my birth mother. I am trying to read and understand as much as I can before I proceed on my journey to self, a journey already of 6 years. My adoptive mother is 88, my birth mother is 77 and like most adoptees, I wish to control what happens now. I have asked an intermediary to contact my birth mother (who I have now marvelously seen a photo of, compliments of Facebook and Google as well as my 4 half brothers) to ask her whether she is willing to accept correspondence from me. My story is one of unbelievable luck and courage on the part of both my birth mother and my adoptive mother. We will see what happens next but your book resonated with me, like no other so far. Again many thanks and best wishes. I hope your time with Catherine continues to be meaningful for both of you. Regards, J
I leave for Florida next week, to attend the major adoption conference held in this country called American Adoption Congress. And then it is over to L.A. to do a reading panel with the lovely Hope Edelman and Dinah Lenny. We'll talk at Diesel Books about Writing about Family. I love both of these high energy women, they are so smart and funny. Hope has come up with a plan to serve cheesecake and champagne! What fun (and so smart).
~
My writer friend goes off to enjoy her children, husband and pizza and I've got my own extra large pie To-Go. It's hugs and kisses and promises to connect soon.
As I walk home, past the park where dogs run off leash and there is the crack of a ball against a baseball bat, I wonder about this thing I have with my writer friend. She's great and popular but really, aren't I being hard on myself? What's really going on? And that's when it hits me. My friend, like me, suffers from the wounds that come with losing her mother. The difference between her and I is that she is very real about her longing for her mother, she writes about it, talks about it and most of all, is honest. But me, I just keep my own longing tucked away and put on a happy face. The truth of the matter is this: I miss my mother. We lost the first 43 years of my life and have just sparked a new connection after a very troubling two year "mis-communication." Every day, I talk about her during the tour and each time, I miss her a little more. I suppose I just want to be with this woman, my mother. I want to watch a movie with her and hear her laugh and just build on what we have found in each other. I want to make the most of these years we have left together.
And there it is--the little sliver that's chewing on my heart.
A few steps later, I'm home again and up the steps. I walk in the door, pizza in a box and my kids call out "MOM." They are ready to eat! And I am going to call my mom.
Monday, April 04, 2011
Fresh Writing: A Poem Worth Reading
I am composing an essay right now, for an anthology, and haven't been able to make Fresh Writing today! Forgive me and thank me (for this beautiful poem). It broke my heart. Perhaps it will stirs yours.
After chopping off all the arms
that reached out to me; after
boarding up all the windows
and doors; after filling all the
pits with poisoned water; after
building my house on a rock of
a no, inaccessible to flattery and
fear; after cutting out my tongue
and eating it; after hurling handfuls
of silence and monosyllables of
scorn at my loves; after forgetting my name
and the name of my birth place
and the name of my race; after
judging and sentencing myself to
perpetual waiting and perpetual
loneliness, I heard against the
stones of my dungeon of syllogisms
the humid, tender, insistent
onset of spring.
- Octavio Paz
(Elliot Weinberger translation)