Prison
Monday, November 24, 2008
Often, after I've visited a book group, I like to post a picture. But there are no pictures of my most recent book group visit, because I wasn't allowed to bring a camera. In fact, I was instructed to leave my entire bag in the car, and only bring my driver's license in with me to the prison where I met last week with a gathering of female inmates. I had been asked to visit by a wonderful bookseller who has been involved in a longtime project of bringing literature (and, occasionally, the writers themselves) to this particular prison. Apparently, one of the inmates had heard me on The Faith Middleton Show, talking about Black & White. She registered that I live in Connecticut, and thought that maybe I'd be willing to join them.
I had never been inside a prison before. Before I went, I asked Michael if he had ever been in a prison, and he said: "Not in this country." I was pretty sure that this was the place that Jean Harris had been incarcerated. It was Federal, minimum security. How disturbing could it be? Well, let me tell you: it was plenty disturbing. After going through security involving metal detectors, a body scan and a stamp on my hand, we were escorted into the prison proper by a guard. Once those doors clanged shut behind us, we entered an outdoor quadrangle with old, gnarled fruit trees, their branches bare and twisted like a Maurice Sendak illustration. The quadrangle was filled with women in gray sweat suits, and the lights overhead were bright. I looked up at the sky and wondered what it would be like to be incarcerated. To have the view straight up be one's only view of the world out there.
The women in the book group were amazing readers. They had time to read, and the desire to read, and were starved for stories. They asked some of the best questions I've ever been asked by an audience. They had really thought about my books--some of them had read two or three of them--and were intensely curious and engaged. The whole time I was with them, I kept wondering about their own stories. Why were there here? What had happened? What had gone wrong--and when, and how? There were women of every age, shape, color, socioeconomic background in that room. I wanted to hear their stories, but knew I shouldn't ask.
At the end of the visit, a bell rang--loud, like an alarm--startling the hell out of me. I stopped mid-sentence. I was a little jumpy to begin with, after the metal detector, the clanging doors. The women laughed. "It isn't that bad," one of them said. "You can finish your sentence."
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. 
