In and Out of the Cave
Thursday, November 20, 2008
This is how I've come to think of it. When I'm writing, I'm in the cave. When I'm not, I'm blinking in the sunlight. Sometimes it's difficult to emerge. Other times, it's torture to go back into the darkness. The other day, I was in New York, making a promotional video for an upcoming anthology for which I wrote an essay. A bunch of the writers in the anthology arrived at the publisher's office wearing their chic, black tops, as instructed. A make-up artist was there to touch us up. And as we sat in a conference room being prepped and powdered, I had a strong sense of being in a room filled with kindred spirits. Some of us were friends. Some of us had...how shall I put it...histories with each other. But what all of us had in common was that we're people who spend most of our lives in a semi-hermetic way, and that this--the conference room, the platter of cookies, the bright lights of video cameras--was not where we lived, even though it was fun. I'm always struck by how odd my life is, when I find myself in an office building. People get dressed for work! They have meetings and lunches and they talk to other people all day long!
As I write, I'm in my bathrobe. It's nine-fifteen on a Thursday morning. My half-finished second cappuccino of the day is to my right. My manuscript to my left. A bookshelf is within reach, piled with books relating to Devotion. Emerson, Thoreau, Jung, Dillard. Books by Buddhists, Rabbis, memoirists, psychoanalysts, philosophers. To my right, on the floor, three piles of manuscripts for an anthology I'm guest editing. Yet another pile of manuscripts for the Sirenland Conference is in the corner. One dog sleeps on my comfortable reading chair. The other one is down in the kitchen, hopefully not getting into too much trouble. The house is quiet. I can't tell yet whether this will be a good writing day, a just-okay one, or an abysmal one from which I will emerge frustrated and depressed. I can't possibly know that. All I can do is to sit down to write. To slowly find my way back into the cave.
Two Steps Forward, One Step Back
Friday, November 14, 2008
I think one of the hardest things to accept in life is that nothing remains the same. I remember, last year, when we were in Positano, Italy for the Sirenland Conference, we were staying in the most magnificent room with a bathtub overlooking the Tirreno Sea, and our first night there, I found myself melancholy: a week from now, we will have to leave this room, was my thought. I will never be in a room this beautiful, ever again. Instead of simply living in the moment, I was already mourning the moment passing. I knew I was doing it--but I couldn't stop myself. Watching my son Jacob grow and change is a big part of the process of understanding that life speeds by. Just yesterday, I stood and watched him on the monkey bars after school. While he swung easily from bar to bar, I was aware that even six months ago, he couldn't have navigated the monkey bars. What will he be doing six months from now? Six years? In the area of Connecticut where we live, this year's crop of Eighth Grade boys are looking at boarding schools for next year. When we moved to Connecticut, those boys were all younger than Jacob is today. 
Everything changes. It all whizzes by so fast. As I work on Devotion, I'm increasingly aware of this, because the process of writing Devotion is one of slowing down. Of opening myself to the truth of what is. But slowing down is not the same thing as freezing time. There is no freeze-frame in this life of ours. Just a constant adaptation. We begin again. We re-invent. We plow forward, two steps forward, one step back. In the words of the great Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfeld: this too, this too, this too. It's a journey that is changing me in good ways--but also in painful ones. At times, I feel like the Velveteen Rabbit. Rubbed raw.
Being a Jewish Writer
Saturday, November 8, 2008
I had never known that November is National Jewish Book Month until, a couple of years ago, when I started receiving requests to appear at Jewish Community Centers around the country to talk about my work. I have always thought of myself as a writer who is Jewish, rather than a "Jewish Writer" -- in the same way I've thought of myself as a writer who happens to be female, happens to be a wife and mother, happens to live in rural Connecticut. I've resisted being categorized--even though we live in a world that loves to label, and certainly I have been labeled all these things. But does it matter? My work reflects my Jewishness, in the sense that, as a child, I was steeped in religious observance. I frequently say, these days, that I know I'm ready to start a new piece of work when my own personal mishegas meets up with a big idea. Certainly my mishegas has to do with my Jewishness. How could it not? I am suffused with it, as I am with family life. And so I am a Jewish female writer, a wife and mother who frequently writes about Jewishness and family life. And, now that we're into the month of November, I am traveling to various communities around the country to talk about the relationship between my life and my work. Last week I visited a wonderful JCC in New Jersey where, in the audience, there were many faces from my New Jersey past. Parents of my grade school friends were there. Neighbors from my home town. It was a very warm feeling--a feeling that I increasingly value--of being connected. These connections never really completely disappear, no matter how many years pass. Tomorrow I will be in Scottsdale, Arizona--far from home. And though I don't imagine that I will run into people I know from the distant past, I have no doubt that the same warm feeling will fill the room. 
Writing Days
Friday, October 24, 2008
The truth is that I can tell what kind of writing day I'm going to have within the first half hour of sitting at my desk. If I have just ordered socks, turtlenecks and thermal underwear for Jacob from the Land's End Catalogue, I'm probably not heading in the right direction. (Best to leave these online shopping sprees for the wee, sleepless hours.) If I have found myself on my favorite fashion website, salivating over an unaffordable pair of Chloe boots (since when did $1200 become the new $600?) I am also, most likely, not heading in the right direction. Ditto, if I am answering emails. Ditto, if I am reading too much of the morning's news.
Lately I have been opening my treasured copy of Virginia Woolf's A Writer's Diary which I always keep within arm's reach on my desk. I open it randomly, like the I Ching. It always has a message for me. Yesterday, Ms. Woolf had this to say: "Writing becomes harder and harder. Things I dashed off, I now compress and re-state." As so often is the case, I felt a shock of recognition. This is what no one could have told me as a young writer--I wouldn't have believed it. It gets harder. The more I learn, the more I know, the more I am aware of the scope of my own ambitions and the limits of my abilities and that crushing place where the two meet. I am tougher on myself. I don't fall in love with my own words--ever. Long ago, when I was writing my second novel, I used to carry around manuscript pages with me--not to edit them, but (embarrassingly) because I loved them. This love should have tipped me off that I wasn't doing the hardest work of all. Once, Grace Paley said that if she loved a sentence she had just written enough to get up from her desk and go read it to her husband, she knew she had to cut it.
Now, at this very moment, I will open up A Writer's Diary and see what Ms. Woolf has to say for today: a bulletin from 1927, here it is:
"The dream is too often about myself. To correct this; and to forget one's own sharp absurd little personality, reputation and the rest of it, one should read; see outsiders; think more; write more logically; above all be full of work; and practise anonymity."
Succumbing to Dismay
Thursday, October 9, 2008
Today is Yom Kippur, and probably blogging is somewhere high up on the list of what you're not supposed to do on Yom Kippur. In the Orthodox Jewish family of my childhood--if blogging or computers had existed--this very act would have broken a series of prohibitions. The use of electricity, for one. Writing, for another. Not to mention removing one's focus from the holiness and importance of the day.
But I am actually thinking about the holiness and importance of the day. Last night, Michael, Jacob and I went to Kol Nidre services at a synagogue I've finally discovered in my search for a place to belong as a Jew here in Cheever country. It's been a long (six year long!) road, but finally I have found a sanctuary where I feel spiritually at home. And because I feel so comfortable there, I found myself able to listen, to really listen to the "ashamnu" prayer which is central to the Kol Nidre service. This is the prayer that always scared me half to death as a child, and even as an adult. As God flips through the pages of the Book of Life and makes decisions about the fate of each and every person in the coming year, we beat our chests and admit our sins. The language of this list of sins is disconcerting: we have stolen, we have committed adultery, we have become violent, we have been contemptuous, we have rebelled. We have been wicked, stiff-necked, immoral. Last night, somehow, these words felt the way I think they're supposed to. They were not necessarily my personal confessions, but the confessions of an entire people. An entire community, a world of humanity, admitting their frailty.
Finally, though, it was this sin that popped out at me: For the sin of succuming to dismay. If there was ever a moment to understand this as a sin, or a failing, it seemed a good time to recognize it. To feel dismay is not a sin. The sin is to succumb to it. I held the thought like a small stone in my pocket, fingering it, returning to it on the drive home.
But then we returned from services and walked into the kitchen to discover that Samson the Labradoodle pup had managed to pull the half-eaten challah off the kitchen counter, and had eaten the whole thing. Bits of saran wrap covered the kitchen floor. We called the vet to be sure the dog wasn't in danger. And I tried not to succumb to dismay.
Fork in the Road
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
The other day, while messing around on Facebook (one of my new and most favorite forms of procrastination) I went on my husband's Facebook page to see what was new with him, since we barely ever get to talk to each other any more because of 4th grade homework and the new puppy. I noticed that Michael had added a link to a video he had also posted on YouTube, called "Flying Qat into Mogadishu". Qat being a plant found in parts of Africa which, when the leaves are chewed, apparently gives a person a mild, cocaine-like buzz. And Mogadishu, Somalia being the place that owned Michael's heart before he met me. He was flying with his friend Josh on the small drug plane onto a dirt runway south of Mogadishu controlled by the son of an infamous war lord (is there any other kind of war lord?) because there weren't very many ways for journalists to get into the country during that time. As I watched the video below--the laughing pilot, the tiny strip of dirt appearing below them, the men casually holding their assault rifles approaching the small plane--I noticed the date. It was August, 1996.
Michael and I met on the first day of November, 1996--less than three months after the adventure on the qat plane. He was still jet-lagged, having just returned to New York from Africa, where he spent most of his time as a foreign correspondent. We were introduced by a mutual friend at a Halloween party near Gramercy Park, we fell in love on the spot, and now we live with one child and two dogs in bucolic New England. This is what our lives look like now:
I'll never be able to explain it. But that improbable meeting nearly twelve years ago has been the greatest piece of good luck in my life. Still, as I watched the video Michael shot as the plane descended through the clouds toward the dirt strip, my breath caught in my throat. Please land safely, I thought. Come home so we can start our lives together. Please.
A Very Good Idea
Saturday, September 20, 2008
A couple of weeks ago, I received group email from the novelist Ayelet Waldman asking fellow writers to send her signed copies of their books for a Barack Obama fund raiser. Usually, when I know I need to send someone a book, it takes me a little while. I get daunted by the envelope (I never seem to have the right size of padded envelope no matter how many trips to Staples I make), the postage, the whole thing. I need an assistant and don't have one, and probably never will. Sigh. Anyway, this time I was obsessed; I couldn't get a copy of Black & White to the post office quickly enough. I also forwarded Ayelet's email to a bunch of my writer friends, asking them to do the same. Before I knew it, writers as disparate as Jamie Lee Curtis, who sent her children's books, and Jane Green, who sent her massively bestselling new novel The Beach House, also couldn't get to the post office fast enough. And just this morning, I discovered that a website has been created: books4barack.com
Over 750 writers have contributed their books. And Ayelet is sending a randomly-assembled basket of goodies (there are Alice Sebold first editions, Stephen King, Tobias Wolff, Alice Waters, you name it) to people who contribute $250 or more to Obama's campaign.
Check out the website. And go Ayelet! I just love when a brilliant idea takes off.
