Letting go....

I'm upside down on a high bar in the playground, swinging back and forth, back and forth, arms pumping, the skin on the under side of my knees squishing against the metal. My back arches, I bend my arms at the elbows and thrust my little body backward one last time until my face through stringy hair is looking facedown at footprints in the sand. My knees are still hooked until suddenly, in a slow motion moment high above the bar.... zing.... my taut muscles let go! Feet and legs are free! The whoosh of wind rushes into my ears, I see sky and trees, my gangly limbs sail through the pillowy air toward the earth—flying, not falling. I have to reeeach for the ground with my feet. Thud! I crumple and the delirious world spins around me.
--
It's nearly 7:00 a.m. The every two minute twinges in my back have subsided happily, but the reprieve is brief. Transition. Muscles clench my round belly, squeezing tears from my eyes and ergwauauaargghhhhhh from my throat. Laura, with a midwife's calm, reminds me to breathe, to imagine opening up, to let go. It's. so. hard. to let go... my body bearing down with a fierce force I can't master. But I gasp for air and call it breathing. I cry out. I can't stop breakers that crash over me and over me and drown me. To give up... to yield... to float and flail on a sea of muscular power. To let go and be taken over. A crescendo of urgings and voices and visions collide. And then, it's over. Forever. Whether or not I wanted to let go.
--
I see her standing in a too small room, flanked by a preppie co-ed, boxes oozing contents into the cramped space. All that needed to be said had been, yet other words, eighteen years worth of words, wanted their last chance to take the floor... and wouldn't come forth. In a split second, careless red hair danced on her shoulders, liquid blue eyes gleamed. Brave smiles, so many hugs, forced cheerfulness accompanied by "Good bye" and "Have fun" and "I'll miss you." A long walk. A quiet car. The tether between us slackened with each mile. We let go of her childhood together while apart, but we didn't let go of each other.
--
He promised me I could trust him with my heart. He would take good care of it. I took him at his word. He lied. That's why I wanted to punish him, to expose him. My better angels and self-help books insisted I let go. Some added, "Let God." But locked inside was a righteous indignation. I wasn't hanging upside down, being pulled along by my body, or choosing a goodbye. I hated being required to let go. I hated being counted on to let go. I hated knowing that he knew that I was too good a person to not let go.
--
That's how I hold on, clenching my knees around that bar, gripping the sides of the table, forcing a goodbye. I choose my resentments. I resent being managed, the robbery of my dignity. How do you let go when you suffer someone else's consequences?

Inner voice... like writer's voice

needs freedom to make mistakes. When you want to give your inner wisdom a voice, it helps if you can experiment in an internal freewriting kind of practice. That means you can't judge the content quite yet. The emotional grammar police aren't allowed input. Friends who "know" the right format for your life (as deadly as foisting a five paragraph essay structure onto autobiographical narrative) need to be gently shushed. They mean well, but they are not you... they don't know what your inner self is trying to articulate.

It's taken a long time for my quieted, judged, mocked, misunderstood, ignored, reproved, overlooked, shamed voice to emerge... even a wee bit. Hard to believe, I know, given how naturally I speak in front of a room, how easily I monopolize phone lines with detailed introspective comments to close friends. I ooze verbal confidence which hides my self-doubt.

Listening to inner wisdom is not the same as talking about insights. The process is somewhat similar to how writing must feel for lots of people. One of the hardest things about writing is the anxiety that Mistakes Will Be Made. That need to get it all down correctly on the first go has paralyzed the writing voices of many verbal people. I know that my writing voice isn't hampered by bad punctuation or mistaken content or self-indulgent ranting.

But I have treated my inner wisdom differently. I was told for years that I can't trust myself, that I needed an objective measure to avoid Making Big Mistakes. I worried: What if I'm wrong? What if I stake my life on my beliefs and it doesn't work out? 

But I should have asked: What if in the tiny, every day ways I ignore warning bells (emotional exhaustion, tedium, wrenching pain, loneliness, hopelessness, confusion, contradiction between logic and experience)? 

I applied "formats for living" to my unique life, trying to fill in the blanks according to the Life's Instructions. You know how you write an essay that must have a thesis, supporting paragraphs with points and particulars, proper evidence and proofs from reputable sources, and a resounding conclusion that will lead everyone to your conclusion, conclusively!? That's how I've treated my life, much more than my writing. I've scripted my inner wisdom by supplying it a list of rules, outcomes, supreme authorities and source materials; then I told it to get busy voicing and concluding.

What I've needed, though, is to permit illegal thoughts, hunches, concerns, worries to percolate to the surface where they could sunbathe, get a little light on them so they wouldn't be so pale.

For instance:

I let people bully me. I assumed if someone took the trouble to tell me my motives, they must know something about me I didn't know about myself. Confusion and self-doubt would swoop in. Then I'd fight off the anxiety with defensiveness, but in the end, often capitulated to their vision of me.

Now, if someone tells me who I am or what I think, I stop them. If they don't come from a place of curiosity, humility and kindness, the content is irrelevant to me.

To write my life with my inner voice means risking relationships, it means making mistakes (over-asserting a boundary, not creating a strong enough one, experimenting with my morality, disregarding what matters, making something matter that doesn't).

To freewrite with my inner voice requires quiet. One surprising source of support for this process has been the Episcopal church, which I get to visit occasionally. I cry the best "inner wisdom" tears on a kneeler... the silences move stuff around inside me, all without words.

Today I read that to follow one's "gut" (inner wisdom), you don't need reasons to act. Reasons can be sorted out later (and sometimes delay action). Better to act on your inkling first because sometimes that's what saves you from injury (emotional or otherwise!). Being a "nice girl" is not ever a reason to ignore what you "hunch" inside.

I've bumbled along in this quest to be authentic, self-protecting and nurturing, other-oriented and generous. I've over-extended, I've miscalculated, I've used a machete when a scalpel would have been better. I've slaked my thirst with sugar drinks when I needed water. But that's the nature of free voicing. Wisdom comes in the revising phase... it's not all at once, it's not neat or tidy or even correct at the start. It's most certainly not arrived at in a first draft. Inner voicing is a process that includes reacting instinctively without always understanding why, and then slowly gathering meaning along the way.

I tell my writing students all the time that "writing voice" simply means that their writing sounds like them. When I read what they write, whether they are joking around or crafting sophisticated academic papers, the ring of "who they are" comes through the writing. That's writing voice.

Today it occurred to me that living by your inner wisdom may be similar: You'll know that what you "voice within" is true to you when your life looks like who you are.

Wonder how the Chinese blog?

We did. In fact, we were interested to know how the Chinese type anything into a keyboard with literally thousands of characters (pictograms) to choose from. So thanks to the Almighty Google, we discovered the complex world of typing in a non-phonetic system.

Google has launched a self-promoting Chinese-language blog, not long after unveiling its controversial Chinese search engine last month. According to the Washington Post, China already has as many as 16 million bloggers. How do you type Chinese characters on a keyboard?

All I can think after reading about how they handle the idea of keyboard and writing is that their brains must be a heck of a lot more agile than ours as they juggle the hundreds of micro-thoughts and adjustments we never have to face.

Check out this story.

In the Peoples' Republic of China, most computer users type out their Chinese in transliteration, using the standard Roman alphabet keys on a QWERTY keyboard. To generate a character, you type out its sound according to the same spelling system—called Pinyin—that represents the name of China's capital with the word "Beijing." The computer automatically converts the Pinyin spelling to the correct Chinese characters on the screen.

Or at least it's supposed to. There are lots of Chinese words that sound similar but look different on paper. If you're using the Pinyin input method, you'll have to put in some extra effort to make sure the right characters show up onscreen. First, you can follow a syllable with a digit, to indicate which of several intonations you want. If the computer still doesn't have enough information to pick a character, you'll have to choose from a pop-up list of possibilities.

Aren't you loving all this exposure to China? Isn't it, too, a bit, um, intimidating?

8 good reasons men are lying liars

I miss writing on my blog so I'm going to use it for writing practice. Today's topic: "Give 8 good reasons it is okay for men to lie."

Ready go:

Men lie. Margaritas make me drunk and Linkin Park screams. So what else is new? Well "good reasons" would be the new part. Let's do a little "top eight at 4:48" ala David, the liar, Letterman.

Number 8: A good reason to lie is to impress middle aged friends with what a stud you were as a gangly youth.

Number 7: An equally good reason to lie is to impress a female who doesn't actually care if you were a kick-ass Green Beret or simply like to wear those little hats as a fashion statement.

Number 6: Men justify lying by reminding us that everyone does it and they do it better than everyone else.

Number 5: It's a good idea to lie, they reason, if the jeans she is wearing really do make her look fat.

Number 4: Men rationalize lying by lying about lying saying that they don't lie and then they believe themselves and feel like they are good human beings who would never lie except about lying and sex with Monica Lewinsky or a gay hooker on meth in Denver.

Number 3: It is always okay to lie if it saves money or cheats the IRS.

Number 2: Lying is always okay if you are a senator who plays footsies in a men's bathroom.

Number 1 good reason that men lie: They know their women will forgive them.

Hey that was cathartic. We'll try that again tomorrow. Baby steps out of gloom.

A weekly blog perhaps?

Three steps to kill your blog:

1. Go to therapy. Seriously, if you just don't want to blog like ever again, have some female mid-thirties MFCC crawl into your brain every week where she fishes around for messy, painful stuff to process that you can't possibly share with all the Internets. Then do her homework assignments (with puffy eyes and snotty nose) about things like "What do I want, desire, need?" (oh so "I'm okay; You're okay" seventies, I know) and "How can I forgive myself for not being perfect during my first 25 years as an adult?" Yeah, that'll do it. Surefire writing block creator.

But if that isn't enough for you, you can take the next two blog killer steps.

2. Addict thyself to Twitter. It's like blogging but there's this wonderful character counter that yells at you to hurry up and finish before it CUTS YOU OFF. I get it all said in a few stream of consciousness words instead of blathering paragraphs. Right? I mean nice break for you, doncha think? (P.S. Follow me! Or let me follow you...)

3. Join a Fantasy Football league. It's that time, mes freres. So that means researching, radio, distraction...

I will be back to the blog (you know, once I include it on the therapist list of things I "want, need, desire, crave, have to have.") But for now, Twitter and FB are where you can find me more reliably. Or email me!

J. K. Rowling's Commencement Address at Harvard

My aunt sent this to me via email. Rowling is witty, insightful and ultimately, so grounded in the moment. This speech is of particular interest to me as she expands on her time when she worked with Amnesty International before her international fame or the completion of her Harry Potter series. That bit of revelation into who she was then, and what she wrote in her world famous series, and the passions that animate her now weave a powerful cloth. Her message might be summed up: empathy is our last best hope!

So get a cup of coffee, sit back and enjoy.


The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination

J.K. Rowling

Copyright June 2008

/As prepared for delivery/

President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of
Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all,
graduates,

The first thing I would like to say is 'thank you.' Not only has Harvard
given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I've
experienced at the thought of giving this commencement address have made
me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep
breaths, squint at the red banners and fool myself into believing I am
at the world's best-educated Harry Potter convention.

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I
thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement
speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary
Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing
this one, because it turns out that I can't remember a single word she
said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear
that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in
business, law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.

You see? If all you remember in years to come is the 'gay wizard' joke,
I've still come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals:
the first step towards personal improvement.

Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to
you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own
graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years
that has expired between that day and this.

I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are
gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to
talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the
threshold of what is sometimes called 'real life', I want to extol the
crucial importance of imagination.

These might seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.

Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly
uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half
my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I
had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write
novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished
backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that
my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that could never
pay a mortgage, or secure a pension.

They had hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study
English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect
satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my
parents' car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched
German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.

I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they
might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all
subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name
one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys
to an executive bathroom.

I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my
parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your
parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old
enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I
cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience
poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and
I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty
entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand
petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own
efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but
poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.

What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.

At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university,
where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and
far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations,
and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that
of my peers.

I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and
well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and
intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the
Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed
an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.

However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you
are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear
of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your
conception of failure might not be too far from the average person's
idea of success, so high have you already flown academically.

Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes
failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if
you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure,
a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic
scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was
jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern
Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me,
and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual
standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That
period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going
to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale
resolution. I had no idea how far the tunnel extended, and for a long
time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure
meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to
myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct
all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I
really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the
determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I
was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I
was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an
old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid
foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is
inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something,
unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at
all – in which case, you fail by default.

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing
examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have
learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more
discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends
whose value was truly above rubies.

The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks
means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You
will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships,
until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift,
for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than
any qualification I ever earned.

Given a time machine or a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self
that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of
acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your
life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse
the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone's total
control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its
vicissitudes.

You might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of
imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but
that is not wholly so. Though I will defend the value of bedtime stories
to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader
sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision
that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and
innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity,
it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose
experiences we have never shared.

One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry
Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those
books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs.
Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid
the rent in my early 20s by working in the research department at
Amnesty International's headquarters in London.

There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out
of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment
to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw
photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty
by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture
victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten,
eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings
and rapes.

Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been
displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the
temerity to think independently of their government. Visitors to our
office included those who had come to give information, or to try and
find out what had happened to those they had been forced to leave behind.

I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older
than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had
endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a
video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot
taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job
of escorting him to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man
whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite
courtesy, and wished me future happiness.

And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor
and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and
horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the
researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink
for the young man sitting with her. She had just given him the news that
in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country's regime,
his mother had been seized and executed.

Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how
incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically
elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were
the rights of everyone.

Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on
their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have
nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard
and read.

And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty
International than I had ever known before.

Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or
imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The
power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and
frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security
are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not
know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was
one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and
understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into
other people's minds, imagine themselves into other people's places.

Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is
morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or
control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose
to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never
troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they
are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can
close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them
personally; they can refuse to know.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I
do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live
in narrow spaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that
brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more
monsters. They are often more afraid.

What is more, those who choose not to empathise may enable real
monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves,
we collude with it, through our own apathy.

One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor
down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could
not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we
achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every
day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with
the outside world, the fact that we touch other people's lives simply by
existing.

But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch
other people's lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work,
the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and
unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great
majority of you belong to the world's only remaining superpower. The way
you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring
to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That
is your privilege, and your burden.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on
behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only
with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to
imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your
advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate
your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you
have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the
world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have
the power to imagine better.

I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something
that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day
have been my friends for life. They are my children's godparents, the
people to whom I've been able to turn in times of trouble, friends who
have been kind enough not to sue me when I've used their names for Death
Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our
shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course,
by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would
be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.

So today, I can wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And
tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine,
you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I
fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in
search of ancient wisdom:

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is
what matters.

I wish you all very good lives.

Thank you very much.

Eudora Welty on writing

Monday is it! I start working on my book.

When I work on writing something longer than a blog entry, I like to read what other writers say about writing. One of my favorite sources of inspiration comes from Aspects of the Novel, by E. M. Forster. I'm not a novelist, and yet his insights are penetrating and repeatedly call me to better writing, to more honesty, to depth and complexity even while putting the words down one at a time.

I love, for instance, how Forster reveals the power of the written word in creating intimacy:

In daily life we never understand each other, neither clairvoyance nor complete confessional exists. (My note: I think letter writing gets close and may be a lost art in self-disclosure.) We know each other approximately, by external signs, and these serve well enough as a basis for society and even for intimacy. But people in a novel can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist wishes; their inner as well as their outer life can be exposed. And this is why they often seem more definite than characters in history, or even our own friends; we have been told all about them that can be told; even if they are imperfect or unreal they do not contain any secrets, whereas our friends do and must, mutual secrecy being one of the conditions of life upon this globe.

See what I mean? So insightful...

So as I get ready to write, I like to remind myself of what other writers have discovered on that bumpy path themselves.

Eudora Welty, a notorious southern writer (what is in their water? I swear, the South produces writing gods!) is best known for her short stories like "Why I Live at the P.O." and "A Worn Path." My favorite of hers is "No Place for You, My Love" (a less frequently taught story) which takes a pair of northerners who don't know each other and thrusts them into the hot, disorienting, sultry air and space south of New Orleans, where they share a series of secret moments that brings them to life, even if only temporarily.

Welty is an artist, each word chosen for its exact right placement. There are no misplaced words, no accidental phrases. I remember reading an interview with her in Vanity Fair years ago where she explained that she would type her stories up on her old keyboard, then put the pages on a bulletin board. With scissors, she'd snip individual words and move them to the new "right" place using push pins. Sometimes the last line moved to the front of the piece and the opening words would take cover at the end, for that final surprise.

She writes in On Writing,

Great fiction, we very much fear, abounds in what makes for confusion; it generates it, being on a scale which copies life, which it confronts. It is very seldom neat, is given to sprawling and escaping from bounds, is capable of contradicting itself, and is not impervious to humor. There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer. Humanity itself seems to matter more to the novelist than what humanity thinks it can prove....

The first act of insight is to throw away the labels. In fiction, while we do not necessarily write about ourselves, we write out of ourselves, using ourselves; what we learn from, what we are sensitive to, what we feel strongly about—these become our characters, and go to make our plots. Characters in fiction are conceived from within, and they have, accordingly, their own interior life; they are individuals every time. The character we care about in a novel we may not approve of or agree with—that's beside the point. But he has got to seem alive. Then and only then, when we read, we experience or surmise things about life itself that are deeper and more lasting and less destructive to understanding than approval or disapproval.

My writing takes me to the trepidatious (yes, new word) border land of my own family: giving them voice, actions, habits and attitudes according to my flawed perceptions, murky memories, shames and joys.

It helps me to remember that even while I write about real people, they are also characters within the scope of my narrative. I'll let you know how it all goes! Monday: library, four hours without Internet. And so it begins....

Anne Lamott and Elizabeth Gilbert

Good writers use a schtick that we readers indulge with laughs and attention. It's called craft: the narrative arcs and little moments of insight woven between honest revelations, good vocabulary, a sense of humor and posturing which all work together to create best sellers. As a friend once said to me, we want "telling on myself honesty" but we probably don't want the gritty, underneath kind of soul-exhibitionism that looks more like stripping in one of those awful little dressing rooms with the carnival-style mirrors and fluorescent bulbs that make even the sexiest clothes look frumpy on a cover girl.

There are just some truths that are best left private. Evenso, humorous self-disclosure is the creative non-fiction niche. Gilbert and Lamott: pros.

The problem for me is that sometimes I get bored with writing - with my writing, with the writing of others. It's like I see the writing tricks and feel this huge urge to grab a sharpie marker and write in the margins, "Ha! Fraud! Writing trick! You can't dupe me."

I had some of these feelings the night I listened to Anne Lamott and Elizabeth Gilbert. Don't get me wrong. They're excellent writers, both, and equally compelling speakers. Lamott was "tears streaming down your cheeks" funny and Gilbert was insightful, gently humorous and genuinely warm. I spent half the night wanting her to cuddle me.

Yet, sometimes in the name of honesty, I feel misled. There's a seduction at the heart of writing and speaking. It's the thrill of audience, the sense of being a god in your little universe of words. That means you can shape the person in the middle of your narrative into whoever serves that ravenously hungry entity called "humanity" (or less romantically: readers).

Both Gilbert and Lamott are known for their soul-baring writing styles. They spare no aspect of their lives from scrutiny, including painful divorce, self-flagellation for their spiritual deficiencies and even the art of masturbation. But of the two, Lamott surprisingly came across as the more forced, the more conscious of taking the audience for a ride. There were times I didn't fully trust her.

Elizabeth introduced Anne and then Anne read from one of her books. Anne's a wonderful writer and we laughed, nodded and sighed at the right moments. Elizabeth's introduction of Anne was deferential, humorous and honoring. She filled it with genuine affection and insight, and positioned herself as someone who couldn't have been successful without Anne's previous writings about the spiritual life with a sense of humor. The irony, of course, is that Elizabeth is wildly more successful from one book than Anne is with several.

Weirdly, Elizabeth's deference led Anne to hog most of the night. As I exited the huge Royce Hall with hundreds of other women filling the aisles, I overheard several commenting that they didn't understand why Anne spoke so much more than Liz. Well, the truth is, Anne simply didn't yield the mike! It almost seemed that Anne was desperate to ride a little of the wake off of Liz's celebrity.

I noticed that Anne relied a lot on self-deprecation for humor as is the typical manner of co-dependents and ex-addicts. She gave the impression that she didn't fundamentally like people. She deliberately maintained this "I've not grown much" spirituality as a way of staying in synch with her audience. But it had the opposite effect on me.

It felt phony!

Meanwhile, Elizabeth came across utterly differently. For instance, someone from the audience asked if either of them had discovered that through their struggles, they had come to gain some wisdom to share or some gifts to share with others after having doubted themselves and their spiritual health, etc. Elizabeth answered that it is startling for her to feel that she's grown, that there are gifts in her hands (she held them up) for others, but that it still humbles her and she is in awe of it. Anne came back with, "No." She never has anything to give away, never knows it, doesn't feel she has anything of growth to offer anyone.

Now some people may have thought that a wonderfully honest comment. But I found it self-interested and posturing. How can Anne not have grown ever? How is it that she is spouting her insights but thinks she never has anything to say that helps people? Why write books? Why undercut Elizabeth's genuine self-evaluation with this "I'm a more honest, and raw kind of person than her" statement? It bugged me.

Elizabeth, meanwhile, deferred, classy.

The event was entertaining, enjoyable, the place to be in LA that night. Women buzzed, came dressed up in sandals and colors, big earrings and warmly hooked to each other as girlfriends so often are. I loved observing the whole space.

My take-home from the actual talks had more to do with my personal writing than any of their specific content. My soul searching had begun. What does it mean to share your life, you spiritual self, your broken-down person in the dirt versus the revised version of self that is slowly emerging? What does that look like in writing for me? Before the event began, I had purchased a little blue notebook from a drug store. I sat on the cold hard steps leading up to Royce Hall, took my pencil in hand and scratched letters on the pages.

Halting, stilted, hidden words. I couldn't coax them to come out and play like they usually do. The panic attacks for my physical safety morphed into emotional panic: Could I write what I was really thinking and feeling without it ever being "found out"? What a thought! What a thought for a writer of autobiographical essays!

To break through, I had to literally tell myself I could take a match to the little sheets of paper once they were written if I felt the need. Even as I had that thought, another one crashed into it to invalidate it: "If you never want anyone to know what you really think, don't write it down. Written words come back to haunt you and ruin your life."

What an odd thought to have while totally alone with a tiny notebook 3000 miles from home! I had hidden thoughts and feelings that didn't surface in my day-to-day life in Ohio yet with isolation, physical vulnerability and the up-close memories of the "me" that went to college, I suddenly felt exposed, in danger emotionally because I found my mind rearranging some of its assumptions.

So I bungled my way forward, overwriting, under-writing, hesitating and then gushing. The personal writing I did before the event acted as backdrop to these pros who make their living investigating the self and then translating it into entertainment. I listened at both levels: the primary one that entertained and that meta-level that taught me about what kind of writer I want to be.

In the days that followed, a different kind of personally dangerous deconstruction developed. Some of that journey I'll share here over the course of this week... and some of it went up with a match.

del.icio.us links

I've joined the del.icio.us craze and have added the RSS feed to my sidebar. Most of the stuff on my feed will be related to Brave Writer (my business that teaches writing) because that's what I do most of the time (search for good writing ideas, models, tips for parents and so on). So if you're one of those reluctant writers or a closet novelist or a hack blogger, there'll be good stuff there for you as I find it.

I can't imagine I won't also include good sports writing when I run across it, as I think sports writers are some of the best daily journalists.

Btw, did you know Tiger kicks it off today at the Buick? I need to go see how he's doing, come to think of it. Aha! Through 13, he's at -5 and tied for the lead. Yep, sounds like Tiger.

The truth we may discover

The world, dressed in our habitual interpretations, is familiar to us. It may not be exactly safe, but we know how to walk in it. We can get from sunrise to sunset...

What if [we] go straight toward our own truth, what might be lost? Perhaps love is not love, faith is not faith, trust is not worthy. Perhaps a world will be lost. And what will be there to take its place? What price, truth?
(Patricia Schneider, Writing Alone and with Others)

Wherein I get annoyed by some writers...

I'm going to admit to a personal failing. I'm competitive, though not ambitious. What that means is that I generate petty arguments within myself when reading another writer's work. Not all writers. If you are truly good, if your work catches me off-guard, strings together words I could never have dredged up from within, pierces my puny life with insight, and delights me... then we're good. I simply read in awe, bow down to you on the tatami mat and intone: Thank you for saving my soul with your words.

For instance, I can read E.M. Forster every day of the year, any page of any book and never compete with the man. All I want to do is lick his boots clean and turn him from gay to straight so I can flirt with him. He is that good.

Annie Proulx (short story writer made famous by "Brokeback Mountain") eats my soul for lunch. The apt word is her middle name. The understated insight is her last. Her words are so beautiful (even when meant to be ugly) that I hold my breath while I'm reading until I get dizzy from lack of oxygen. Good writing has that effect on me. It never occurs to me to compete with her as she is completely and totally out of my league. Even if I write until I'm 112, I will never get to where she is at 65.

Similarly, I remember reading Eudora Welty's "No Place for You My Love" nine years ago (in fact, before Welty died). I read and reread that short story so many times, I started dreaming of the phrases in it. I would be sleeping along when words would float in New Times Roman typeface toward me in curlicues and they would be Welty's words. I can still see the images, hear the words, identify the place in the story even having not read it since.

So yeah, I'm a word whore and am happily awed by truly great writing. I don't compete. I recognize genius, sigh and reread.

But when I read a contemporary who is a good writer... well, not so much. I get all itchy and irritable. I recognize the good writing, I appreciate that it makes me laugh or serves up a new metaphor like a new Thai dish. But I also, in the same moment, argue with it. I reluctantly keep reading (because, after all, the writing is good), but I grind my teeth and push the book away from me while I read. I imagine book deals being made by sleeping with editors (surely it can't be the quality of the writing!) and I'm disgusted.

I give the writer credit for timing (Dooce's blog comes to mind) or for good luck or for being famous already. But I hold back praise inside myself because if I admit that this is a good writer (a writer who writes like I do, who I consider not to be genius but good enough), then I have to admit that I haven't done what I say I wanted to do sooner.

It's my ego on the line. If this person who writes well enough succeeds, why have I not thrown open the door to publication sooner? Why do I sit content with blogging, graduate school, writing about writing, teaching writing, reading writing...? Hmmm?

The latest victim of my competitive disdain is Elizabeth Gilbert - author of Eat, Pray, Love. Yes, it's an Oprah book and yes, I did see her on Oprah, and yes, I was crazy with jealousy, irritation and judgments. She wrote her book at age 35. Well shit! I'm 46 already. She wrote her book in three different countries, paid to live there by her book deal. Well, dammit, I'm trapped in the midwest, paying my own way. She talks about God as though she knows something about it and was never a Christian nor a theology student. What nerve!

It's not that I need to be on the New York Times bestseller list (well, maybe I do, but I haven't really allowed myself to ever think about it... is that the problem?). It's that I see others do what they do in their thirties and forties and I get all up in my own grill about what I do with my days, what I said I wanted to do by now.

And I want to write that book... that book that is in me to write. I fear publishers (totally, completely with all the irrational twitchings that come with having grown up as the daughter of a published author who never seriously broke through until 65, though she's written 56 books). Publishers have the power to reject you, to publish and then reject you, to publish and then throw that hard work away into the remainders pile at Half Price books.

Today, I want to take a moment to declare that I'm tired of assuming that part of the pie that could go to me has already been cut up and served to other good enough writers.

2008: One resolution - to write my book. The end.

I'll let you know how it goes. In the meantime, I'm back to yoga and have chosen to love and affirm all those "good writers" rather than making fun of their hyperbole behind their backs.

Thanksgiving Letter from Harry

Poets.org has a subscription list where they email you a poem per day. Because April was National Poetry Month, I subscribed. Seems fitting that on the last day of the month, this would be the poem of choice: Thanksgiving Letter from Harry. This is a brand new poem so suited to our times.

I saw a bumper sticker a couple of days ago that I thought tied in nicely too:

I love my country, but I think we should start seeing other people.

(Link now fixed.)

Bonhoeffer is still the man

I began my graduate program having devoured Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison. I have scribbles in the margins, sticky notes extending from the pages to highlight quotes of particular interest and underlines everywhere. It feels right to be ending this program by examining his writings at a deeper level. The following are a few excerpts from the lengthy introduction of my thesis (due Monday). I thought for those who've asked me for more detail about my faith journey, this introduction develops that part of my life and how it relates to Bonhoeffer. And, frankly, I have no time to write anything else right now!

Excerpts from the evolving thesis:

Provocative Fragments for Postmodern Faith
A discussion of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison

“Empty sky, empty sky. I woke up this morning to an empty sky.”

(Bruce Springsteen, “Empty Sky”)

Days after the World Trade Towers lay in rubble and the cloud of dust and smoke dissipated from the sky, I reached for the one book I thought might speak to our new context–a world where Americans were hated by people who claimed to love God. I turned to Letters and Papers from Prison by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I wanted to know what a Christian ought to feel, ought to do in the midst of international conflict. I wanted to know if Christianity still had something to say in our postmodern world. The opening essay, “After Ten Years: A Reckoning Made at New Year’s, 1943” is addressed to Bonhoeffer’s family as well as his co-conspirators who had hatched a plot to assassinate Hitler as the “only patriotism which made any sense” (Kelly 507). I read with new eyes “…[we] must take our share of responsibility for the moulding of history in every situation and at every moment, whether we are the victors or the vanquished” (Letters Bonhoeffer 7). My theological wrangling over the problem of evil usually led me to question God, not myself. Where was God when evil was perpetrated against the innocent? Yet Bonhoeffer made the issue, “Where was I?” This shift in how I looked at history and my faith started a snowball effect.

While my initial motivation to read Bonhoeffer corresponded to my anxiety for my country’s safety and my questions about what a Christian response ought to be in the face of genuine evil (particularly evil perpetrated in God’s name), over the course of the next two years, Letters and Papers from Prison served a more profound purpose in my personal spiritual development. Somewhere along the way, I had lost my evangelical, win-people-to-Christ faith and at that moment, in the wake of international terror, I could not see a way back to Christianity at all.

Questions I had put on the high shelf of my faith descended with new urgency to be addressed and resolved: Can God be good if God allows evil and suffering? Why can’t Christians count on God’s special protection and grace? How can we be sure that God exists now that science has made so many religious answers obsolete? What is our relationship to the state as Christians? Does prayer work? Who is Jesus Christ and what does he have to do with the modern era?

No one doctrinal portrait could hold it all together in a meaningful way for me. Confidence in my “theological package” crumbled. I found myself examining myriad theological perspectives that were supposed to organize my beliefs in such a way that God made sense and my practice of Christianity supported those beliefs. Yet the more I studied, the less I understood. Christians do not present a united front when it comes to the meanings of words like: salvation, justification, the kingdom of God, and the mission of the church. Each time I felt I had found a key to unlock the contradictions that puzzled me, new questions emerged to replace the old ones.

By the end of a three-year search and study, I had lost the faith I once preached, I lost touch with God as I had thought God could be understood and known, and I no longer felt at home among Christians. Ironically, at the same time, I experienced an intellectual and artistic renaissance, wherein I discovered a love for the arts, literature, philosophy and nature study in a fresh, open way. I felt as though life—real life here on earth—took on meaning while my spirituality became nonsense...

...In reading Bonhoeffer again, I queried: how can Christian faith be relevant in the midst of a scientific, postmodern culture that no longer uses church authority as the means to hold people to the institution of the church? What is it to be Christian in these times?

Bonhoeffer did not disappoint. Here was a man faced with the most blatant evil of our era (Nazi hegemony and the Shoa) who spoke truthfully out of his experience both as a German intellectual and as a Christian. He managed to hold in tension the entire history of the human intellectual enterprise honestly in one hand while finding Jesus Christ to be relevant, empowering and meaningful in the other. Forged in Nazi prison cells, Bonhoeffer’s writings stated what no other Christian I had read to date admitted: “God as a working hypothesis in morals, politics, or science, has been surmounted and abolished; and the same thing has happened in philosophy and religion…! For the sake of intellectual honesty, that working hypothesis should be dropped, or as far as possible, eliminated” (360). Finally–someone who did not shrink from the loss of God in modern life.

Bonhoeffer’s letters to his friend Eberhard Bethge, his family and fiancé, and his notes to himself during his prison term at the end of World War II teased me. He spoke of a faith not characterized primarily by forgiveness for “private” sins, but rather a faith that created a profound sense of responsibility within us to take seriously the shaping of history, in particular, the historical moment in which we found ourselves. His viewpoint continues to be credible today because he lived what he professed. “…[T]o the extent that these letters are valued today, their importance rests largely on the fact that they originate from Bonhoeffer and are authenticated by his life and death” (Haynes 3).

Bonhoeffer stayed me in an hour of despair. It is not an exaggeration to say that without these fragments of under-developed theological reflection, I would have left the Christian faith all together. His hints at a religionless Christianity, a relevant faith that grappled honestly with challenges to its very meaning and truth-value supported me in my desire to be intellectually curious as well as spiritually alive. Because he lived honestly both his convictions and his questions, I found a living example of Christian belief and practice I could embody...

...The beauty and mystery of Bonhoeffer’s body of work in Letters and Papers from Prison is that while his theological insights are incomplete, we encounter a whole person through his writings. We are not left with a sterile systematic theology that can be studied, evaluated and then judged as good or bad, right or wrong, satisfactory or insufficient. We cannot catalog Bonhoeffer and confine him to one tradition, to one church confession. In fact, we find that we cannot dismiss him, either, because we have come to love him. His voice lingers in our imaginations long after we close the pages of this collection of writings...

A modern comedy of errors

I'm convinced dear Will would have seen fit to write an entire play about the last three days of my life had he been born in this century.

On top of the discovery that I must rewrite my thesis, I also have to keep up with Doctrine 1 which includes reading Ausgustine's Confessions... and because there is so much going on currently with my business etc., I only discovered on Monday night that the version of Confessions I purchased from Amazon is a book of excerpts (worse, these are excerpts without any reference to which book they come from - as in Book One, Book Two, Book Eight of The Confessions).

Aghast, I figured I could get a copy at the prolific font of all things Catholic and theological: the Xavier University library, and luckily, I had a five hour day of writing planned for the morrow, as the Bard would say.

I carted my 10 year old off to a friend's for over night so I wouldn't feel guilty about not playing dominoes with her all evening (like most nights). I headed down to the university library at 1:30. No parking. Anywhere. I waited for a promising co-ed with big art-portfolio to leave... she avoided eye-contact, loaded up the portfolio and WALKED away. Someone else loaded a coat (it was freezing outside, couldn't he tell?) and left. Finally a shady character loaded a sinister-looking duffle bag into the back end of his vehicle, deliberately glared at me, and then walked away... (Dead body within? I averted my eyes.)

So I circled several parking lots for about thrity minutes and finally someone actually DROVE AWAY in a CAR and left me the most distant slot I could find. I lugged computer and books (unduly optimistic about my potential study time).

Here's the skinny: It took me four hours to write a six page paper on Origen and St. Antony. Four hours? Come on! I'm a writer. (That has never happened in four years.) AND, the only copy of The Confessions I found in that big library was from 1943... with the "thees" and "thous" still in tact from an earlier translation.

Not one moment went into the thesis. Not one scholaraly journal search, not one Word doc's worth of brainstorming. (I will spare you the details of how food eluded me at every turn as well.)

On Wednesday, kids skiied, I worked. Jon and I drove to our respective evening classes. Xavier had its final home game of the season which meant no parking. More circling for Jon. All day, and into the night, however, I was supposed to be testing a new registration platform for Brave Writer. Yeah, uh, as I drove the car? While I showered? Hadn't been home in two days. And the only person I had sent the registration link to (a BW mom) got an error message when she used it. Panicked, I contacted as many people as I could when we got home (at nearly midnight eastern) to test it in other states. Working. Just fine. It looked like her experience was isolated.

Looked like it.

Can you say "foreshadowing"? This is that moment in the play where you all know what's coming but the stupid protagonista does not.

Thursday, morning of registration.

Two problems. The program appeared to randomize registrations which meant they weren't in order as they came in... critical for my clients since I usually fill classes in minutes. The fix my tech friend discovered worked for her, but she had to leave for the doctor... oh and so did Jon.

I was left to sort it all out myself (except for intermittent phone calls to them where one would say, "Did you try... oh, gotta go, the doctor just walked in" followed by the other one saying, "Sounds good but did you... oh, sorry, the doctor is poking my arm with needles, gotta focus.") Good times.

The minutes dragged on. I forgot that the results of the fix could be detected in my junk mail (don't ask) until it was too late. I posted the link 6 minutes late (so my email in-box was suddenly flooded with "Where is the link? Why can't I see it? I've been sitting here refreshing for all six minutes?")

But I checked the platform results page and oh bliss! For thirty whole seconds I was under the delusion that all was working as it should! Registrations rolling in and I didn't have to do one bit of data entry. (Yep, you know what's coming)

Crash.

The next thing you know, dozens of emails pinged my account with "I get an error page" and "I don't know if mine went through" and "I registered four times but" and "Will I lose my place in line?"

Disaster. Spectacular. U2 and Ticketmaster scandal of 2005!

Worse just as I began answering the panicked emails.... yes, up-ping the stakes of my entire day... my email server kicked me off and wouldn't come back on. No email could come in and none could go out (55 had already hit my inbox and awaited replies). In the ensuing drama, I spent twenty minutes on hold for a tech support person, had to learn Hindi in the wait time to make myself understood, and attempted to reply through a different server, while watching people double register on the platform....

Between 11:30 a.m. and 4:35 p.m. I didn't move from my chair. Didn't pee. Didn't eat.

I hand entered every failed registration (which also meant that the panicked emails didn't include all information so some took multiple emails to determine just what class they wanted and for whom). What a mess!

Because this is a comedy, however, I must end with happy news. For the first time in four years, my classes didn't fill up in minutes with loads of disappointed mothers who didn't get it. I think I finally have enough teachers and classes offered that everyone who wanted to get in a class, got enrolled. Amazing. Growth.

There were loads of sweet emails at the end of the day from my devoted BW moms who reminded me that if God wanted them in the class, they'd get in. (I sure appreciated knowing God would take the heat if they didn't get in and not our goofy platform!) Mostly, though, they were just so nice to me, understanding what a hellacious day it must have been. I love my BW community.

After dinner, I wilted onto the sofa and zoned out in front of American Idol. The kitchen is in that scary state of hardened crepe batter on the counters and sticky frying pans and sugared plates languishing on the counters. I don't care. I'll get to it.

Everything's right in the kingdom once again. All's well that ends well.

So my essay students

are showing a scary tendency. In reply to an essay prompt asking whether or not lying is ever justified, a scandalous number of these homeschooled kids cited Jack Bauer as the prime justification for why lying is, indeed, necessary in some circumstances. Usually that example was bookended by the ever-popular lying about someone's appearance so as not to hurt their feelings and lying to offer encouragement to an athlete or actress or pianist who is not performing up to snuff. Rahab would be proud.