Choices About the Journey

I’ve been carrying around some notes from an audio talk by Betsy Muller, who runs workshops and retreats on enery and creativity and will be at Word Lovers in November. The notes begin with “I'm feeling like I’ve been missing the boat again with what I'm focusing on." I then read some encouraging words, "I believe I can find a way. I am willing to let go of who people think I am. I can make a clear path. Energy causes connections and shows how things fit together. Energy grounds us—it is a refining process. Our connection with each other is sacred." My mission is to help others to love themselves more deeply, help them shift into thinking about what they can have from what they can’t. We make choices with careers and family and how we spend our free time. But all the choices we make should help us toward our life's mission. I find that sometimes I just need to close my eyes and wait for the answers to come.  

Taking Your Reader on a Journey

Writer's Center Stage starts up again this month.  I'm looking forward to Geraldine Brooks and Tony Horwitz in November as I think back to what Anne Lamott had to say when she was here last spring.  Her son says that when she speaks, she starts at A, could go to B, C, D and ends up at R while she's trying to convince the audience she was going there all along.  That's sort of how she writes.  When someone asked how she writes illuminating stuff without affecting the privacy of the people she cares about, she said "you own it. Just change the details." You can't be afraid to write what needs to be said. On plot, she advised, “A confused reader is an antagonistic reader,” which is what her writing coach Mary Moran has always told her. When you write, lay lily pads across pond and invite reader to walk with you. How do you get found when you’re so lost? Take them with you on that journey.

Seeking Wisdom

I just finished reading Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge. In the novel, Larry is seeking knowledge, truth, something bigger than himself, and he discovers the Absolute, which is eternal because of its completeness and perfection unrelated to time. It is truth and freedom. God is within or nowhere. He finds a Guru who “taught that we are all greater than we know and that wisdom is the means to freedom. He taught that it is not essential to salvation to retire from the world, but only to renounce the self. He taught that work done with no selfish interest purifies the mind and that duties are opportunities afforded to man to sink his separate self and become one with the universal self.” Although the writer decries worship of God, we hear similar messages in traditional Christianity--we must be selfish and we must serve, and we're part of the One. Larry discovers selflessness, and he finds happiness.

Journaling to Plan My Day

At last Sunday's WOW (Women of Wisdom) meeting, I told everyone how I journaled in the morning about how my day would look--I would work on my novella and memoir, go to yoga, walk in the park with my husband and the dog, pick up Mom and go to WOW, and organize my studio. By the time I'd gotten to WOW, I'd gone through the list and felt good about having a relaxing and productive day. One of the women in the group said that was a bunch of crock--life gets in the way. It does, but it's nice to have some direction, and some days it works out just the way we envision it, sort of a little miracle.

Time Management

My "to do" list is often impossible to manage, and just thinking about the list can keep me awake at night.  Good thing I have yoga.  It also helps to prioritize.  That starts with goals, as Jim Randel writes in his book The Skinny on Time Management.  He made a number of suggestions to help with time management--have you ever thought about how meditation can be a tool to quiet the noise and clear your head for new ideas? He also suggesting stretching your mind with crossword puzzles because memory is so important to keeping on track. He suggested keeping your goals close at hand and revisiting them frequently; that should help you be on guard for procrastination. The most helpful piece of advice he gave me is to separate tasks on the "To Do" list into Important/Urgent, Important/not Urgent, Urgent/not important, and Not Urgent/Not important.  Do the first two first, and you will have a measure of success towards your goals. 

The Lost Boys of Sudan

God Grew Tired of Us opens with the author fleeing his Sudanese village which has been attacked by the northern army.  He has no idea where his family is and things he is running away from the fire and killings with his father, but when the air clears, he knows it is a family friend of the Dinka ethnic group to which he belongs. He becomes one of the "Lost Boys" of Sudan during the country's second civil war that ended in 2005 and in which over 20,000 boys were displaced or orphaned. The northern forces of the Muslim country sought to subvert the Christian south.  

He walked for days on end without food and in the heat, sometimes with other boys and the men who supervised their safety, sometimes hiding on the tall grasses by the sides of the roads at night. The boys and men who escaped saw much brutality and death, suffered dehydration and exhaustion, and walked thousands of miles over the course of years as they sought asylum. They experienced many physical and emotional setbacks along their way to surrounding African nations where they could stay in refugee camps.

The book was inspirational because of the sheer strength of character it took to survive during that time. The author, John Bul Dau, escaped and eventually ended up in the United States as part of a refugee program for the lost boys whose families were beleived dead.  The heartrending story ends with John becoming reunited with his mother and sister and eventually reconecting with his family in Africa.
 

Gum-Dipped, a Firestone Family

Gum-Dipped, published by University of Akron and written by Joyce Dyer, was a brave book.             The overriding themes were how Firestone , back in the day before Bridgestone, brainwashed people into complete and utter servitude and allegiance to the company.  Where the author lived was a product of the company, built by the company, and she didn’t realize how infectious it was until she started doing research for a book about her father and noticed that the shape of the streets in Firestone Park formed the “F” in Firestone.

Dyer's mother was the daughter of a fierce drunk and one of seven children, and Dyer observes that she tied an apron around her waist when she was ten, and “Maybe she never removed that apron again, as I think about it now.” But her father knew her mother wasn’t a mistake:  “Every day that he looked across our little breakfast table into my mother’s face, I could feel the thing that joined them, as real as the safety bar you pull down on the seat of a carnival ride.” And then Dyer jumps ahead and warns us that there will be betrayals much more extraordinary than a man’s roving eyes.

Harvey Firestone was the family’s hero. Father and daughter sit next to and on his statue. Harbel Manor looked like their house, their house was a much, much smaller version, made from a Sears Roebuck kit, one of the designs approved by Harvey for houses in Firestone Park. Harvey wanted his way of life reflected all around him, that’s how big his ego was. “The light that ushered in my dreams didn’t come from stars but from Firestone.” Firestone eventually closed factories and was bought by Bridgestone. It no longer had the power over its employees that it was had. The company was no longer villified.

Of course her father’s work in the Xylos reclaim factory killed him, all those chemicals gathering in his lungs. I was struck by the scene in which he asked his grandson to clean his genitals, telling him he’d have to do that one day. “My father was showing me what it would take to care for Annabelle Coyne, once he left me alone with her.”  Her father had been taking care of his wife who had Alzheimers.

Lots to Say, But It's All Been Said

Kathryn Stockett’s success with The Help has been phenomenal for a first book. I don’t know how she pulled it off, but the book is written from the points of view of a young white woman, Miss Skeeter, whose family always had help in Jackson, Mississippi; by an older maid named Aibeleen, who lives alone and lost her only son in a tragic accident; and by Minnie, a younger woman who is in an abusive marriage and whose anger comes out as talking back. The voices of the maids are extremely well done in deep south black English, Aibeleen’s almost impossible to understand.


When Skeeter comes home and finds the woman who raised her, Constantine, gone, she can’t quite figure it out, and no one’s talking in Jackson, a place where no one says anything bad about someone’s mama and the blacks don’t talk to the white people anyway. Skeeter’s quest to find out what happened with Constantine turns into a desire to write the stories of the maids, and we end up having the story we read while she’s in the act of taking down the maids’ stories. When she starts, Skeeter has no idea how shunned she’ll be or what danger she’s putting the maids in, until a police car stops her as she crosses the bridge from one side of town to the other. “I see open, honest fear on Aibilen’s face.” The book was skillfully written. I can’t imagine writing something as good as this book is.

It’s also a place of such deep mores that Skeeter shouldn’t be talking to the help. Skeeter has changed while in college, and now she’s at odd with the bridge club and junior league, and she can’t imagine how Hilly, a woman as set in her prejudices and the Old South ways as anyone, was her best friend. In one of the first chapters, Skeeter says, “I was hurt by how easily my friend would be willing to cast me aside.”

The story isn’t just Skeeter’s. Aibeleen’s raised lots of children over the years, and she loves Mae Mobley as much as any other. She can’t believe how the mother, Elizabeth, casts her daughter aside. When the child is being potty trained, her mother won’t set an example, “I was fixing to tell her how manykids I raised in my lifeitime and ask her what number she on, but I ended up salying alrihgt like I always do,” and so she take the child to her outside-the-house garage bathroom and demonstrates for the child herself. The people in the south in 1963 are just starting to understand there’s a Civil Rights movement. At the Community Concerns Meeting at church, “Lately the meetings is more about civil rights than keeping the streets clean and who gone work at the clothing exchange.” It started off quietly, as a prayer concern, but racial issues are heating up with black people being shot and losing their jobs over nothing. One of the maids was sent to the penitentiary because she stole some silverware and for Miss Hilly, it was a vendetta and a way of keeping people in their place.

It works. The "Help" win.

What Matters Most--A Good Story

Yes, it was a beach book, but I thoroughly enjoyed listening to Luanne Rice’s What Matters Most on tape. Nora chose the book, and I could tell she liked it, but she gave in to the chatter of it being a bit of fluff. I didn’t think it was that fluffy; I always take books at face value without the benefit of reviews and other peoples’ opinions, and that gives me an honest look at the book. Once again, I’m confronted by the genre thing, the what’s literature and what’s not thing, and I’m reluctant to cast a book as a certain type of book. The book had some good metaphor and a strong story line. The characters were believable and their stories rang true. There was lots of emotion, and I felt it. What did the writer intend to do? Did she achieve it? She intended to entertain and look into the human heart, and yes, she achieved what she set out to do. I suspect that’s why she has fans that are legion and why she’s written 24 books.

Imperfect Birds by Anne Lamott

Imperfect Birds is a heartbreaking account of one family’s struggle with their daughter’s addiction. The interesting thing about the story is that the parents had no idea the daughter had a drug problem and the girl lived a stellar productive life, for most of the book. We saw her dependency growing, and we were taken inside Rosie’s head and how she saw her drug use, and that was very real and believable. I had a problem understanding how mother Elizabeth didn’t really see it, but it was probably denial, and the blindness she had was drawn in a way that would make every parent look more closely at their child’s behavior. That was probably the point.


The conflicts are painful, as is the blindness. The reader knows all in this book in which we get into the heads of all the characters. We know the conflict inside Rosie’s head as she sometimes wonders why she’s behaving the way she does. We see the conflict between the parents and the child, and between parents. We see the enabling and control, the doubt and the sureness. We see the characters struggle out of the darkness they’ve chosen into the light of understanding. We feel the pain of parents who finally have to put their daughter into rehabilitation because they have to do something to save her. There are lots of parenting lessons here; James says, “Listen: Every time you draw the boundary way outside of what we’ve agreed on, she has to come back that much farther, to even meet us halfway.”

As the jacket cover says, “Slowly and painfully, Elizabeth and James are forced to confront the fact that Rosie has been lying to them—and that her deceptions have profound consequences for them all.” This is also accurate—“Imperfect Birds is Anne Lamott’s most honest and heartrending novel, exploring our human quest for connection and salvations it exposes the traps that life—and we—set for ourselves.”

There were many take-aways for me. I suspect others found they connected with the marital conflict, the parent-child issues, the struggle for self, the loss that comes from realizing life isn’t as good as we thought it was. But in the end, there was hope, and uncertainty, as Elizabeth and James left Rosie at the wilderness rehab lodge. “The doors slammed one by one, and the engine started up, but Elizabeth and James did not see the lights of the van up here, only the dim reading lamp by the bedside and the thin quartered light of the moon through the ox-eye window, and they listened to the van pull away in the night.”

Don't Fear the Forward--Create a Web Presence

I wrote about this book in December:
http://www.coolcleveland.com/blog/2011/12/book-review-dont-fear-the-forward-by-marc-majers/

Alice Hoffman, Making Connections Again and Again

Alice Hoffman is one writer whose books I always look for and always read. When I saw The Red Garden, I had to pick it up. This book was better than some of her more recent books, but not as good as her earlier ones. I agree with Entertainment Weekly—“She is a born storyteller.” Because she was a born storyteller, she’s published 29 works of fiction and her work has been translated into 20 languages. That’s impressive. Few fiction writers today achieve that.


As usual, the scene is a small town in New England. The book takes us through 300 years of time, moving chronologically from one person’s view to another’s, the tales intersecting in family lines and community connections. We read about “passion, dark secrets, loyalty, and redemption in a web of tales where characters’ lives are intertwined by fate and by their own actions.: We start with the town’s founder Hallie Brady, who slept with bears and the “mysterious garden where only red plants can grow, and where the truth can be found by those who dare to look,” the place where the bear that Harry shot was buried, causing Hallie to run off and never be seen again. But I had trouble finding the common thread or understanding what Hoffman was doing, even though the writing was beautiful and we always had the sense of the mysterious and magical.

In “Eight Nights of Love, 1792,” John says to Minette, “’You have no idea what’s inside of you,’” and Minette realizes “There was some sort of spark between them that had to do with questions and answers. But there was also something more. Minette felt a if she were opening, as if what was bruised insider her was in his hands. She wondered if this is what an angel did to you.”

In “The Truth About My Mother, 1903,” we learn about a schoolteacher who arrived mysteriously to teach the children of Blackwell (originally called Bearsville), who created a tale about who she was. “When she first arrived, she would stand outside in the garden late at night, when everyone else was in bed. People thought they were hearing coyotes, or one of the dozens of panthers that remained in the woods, but it was my mother, standing in the yard, crying.”

“King of the Bees,” the last chapter, ends with bees chasing James and Arthur. “When he had no choice and the steep riverbank was before them, James leapt into the Eel River, the boy in his arms. They went into the cold water, then resurfaced, sputtering and safe from harm. James thought about the garden, with soil so red it seemed to have a bloody, beating heart. He thought about where it was people went when they died, and how when he squinted he oculd see Cody, racing back and forth, barking, how his father seemed to stand right there on the riverbank, turning back the bees, closer than he’d ever been before.”

We’re all connected and there’s more to know than what we see, and that bear buried in the garden is symbolic of need and love and loss. As Jodi Picoult said, “When it comes to blending magic and the mundane routines of life, there’s no finder writer than Alice Hoffman . . . [She] reminds us with every sentence that words have the power to transport us to alternate worlds, to heal a broken heart, and to tie us irrevocably to the people we love.”