Recently in on the move Category

Hello, hello! 

Note to readers:  This is a mostly personal post, so if you just tune in for the literary things, skip this one.  The next several will be bookish.

That said, the Handsome Husband and I are just back from Oberlin, Ohio, a tiny town with excellent little restaurants, a fine new coffeeshop--the Slow Train Café--and the marvelous vintage Apollo theater, all refurbished to its former glory with help from Oberlin alumni.  The college's architecture is eclectic and beautiful, and the town has a rich history of activist engagement with progressive and liberatory politics, from the Underground Railroad to women's rights.  Lorain, Toni Morrison's hometown, is just to the north.  If you're ever in Cleveland for the day, I recommend a quick side-trip to both towns.

All of which is just context for the fact of my heart, which is that we got to spend 5 days with Grey as he went through graduation.  Every mother waxes rhapsodic about her children, so I'll just hold my tongue and not rattle on about what a sweet, kind, well-liked, talented young man he is.  I'll just say it was wonderful to catch up with him, meet his friends, and observe him in the campus environment that has become his natural habitat these last four years.  It was a joy.  Leaving him behind was (understatement of the year) a wrench. 

However, I'm so glad to report that he has found employment--even if it's just washing dishes in an Oberlin dining hall for the summer.  A paycheck is a paycheck, and manual labor is important.   Despite the scary unemployment statistics for people in Grey's age bracket, we really didn't want to encourage the failure-to-launch syndrome by making our sofa too inviting, so we're glad it has worked out.  At summer's end, he plans to move to a very cool West-Coast city to live with friends and look for work more suited to his interests.

But, fair and tender readers, I had barely unpacked, when it was time to pack again.  Due entirely to the generosity of my birthmother, Sharon (whom you might know a little about from The Truth Book), I'm heading out for a voyage across Europe.  My brother--not Tony, the one I grew up with and who figures so largely in that abovementioned narrative, but Sharon's son--is about to marry the Italian woman he fell in love with on a study-abroad program twelve years ago.  Since then, they've been carrying on a transatlantic romance, and now it's time to make it all official.  They'll wed in a church in the tiny Umbrian hill town of San Gemini (which is too small to even show up on any of the maps I've consulted; it's near Terni, if you know the area).  It's a fortress town and very old.

Sharon decided to make an odyssey of it, so I'll be flying with her, her husband, and my sister Lisa from Chicago to Amsterdam this Wednesday, then going to Paris, then Genoa, then the Cinque Terre, then Venice, and finally to San Gemini for the nuptial festivities.  Heavens!  I'm not a person who's traveled very much as an adult--and, if I can confide something a little embarrassing, I've been jonesing for Venice since, as a child in Miami, I was taken to the Venetian Pool in Coral Gables, which I found a utopian bliss-scape.  It's like longing for Paris because you once saw an imitation of the Eiffel Tower in Vegas; not exactly Jamesian, but there you have it. 

So anyway, this is extremely exciting for me.  It's an astonishing opportunity, and I'm thrilled.

The places will be, of course, amazing, but the trip itself--the traveling, the being in train cars and hotel rooms--should be very interesting as well, particularly because I'll be rooming with my sister--my half-sister, technically--for over two weeks, and I don't know her well.  We didn't grow up together, and from what I do know, we're very different.  Very different.  In almost every way.  (Just to sketch a sense:  she's 33, single, and a bartender, whereas I'm 42, long married, and an English professor--the very recipe for staid.  I'll say no more.)  Yet half of our DNA is the same, and I've always liked her when we've spent brief periods of time together.  Two weeks of being roomies, gallivanting across the continent, should be fascinating.

Reports to come (she murmured mysteriously, tossing her red silk dress into her case).

Many thanks to Faye for pointing out the gender of all of the editorial gatekeepers of the 2010 Best American collections in this literary news I completely missed.  Father Knows Best, anyone?

Another essential gem for writers by Tayari.

Congratulations to my cool friend Naca for having her first, gorgeous book of poetry, Bird Eating Bird, nominated for a Lambda award.  I still remember reading it in manuscript and being quietly blown away--before Yusef Komunyaaka picked it for the National Poetry Series.  Good luck, Naca!  Amelia blogs about the Lammys here.

Big abrazos to Belinda Acosta, who was interviewed here on this blog, for winning the International Latino Book Award for Best First Book for Damas, Dramas, and Ana Ruiz, her debut novel.  The sequel, Sisters, Strangers, and Starting Over, is due out this July, and it's already making lists of recommended books and getting good press.  Watch for it.

To see all the winners of the International Latino Book Awards, go here.  Marjorie Agosín, whose work I have long loved, took home the award for best biography for Of Earth and Sea:  A Chilean Memoir.

Good things happening for good people!  ¡Órale!

Gentle readers, on Monday I FedExed the new and improved (and improved, and improved) manuscript of THE DESIRE PROJECTS, a literary noir novel, to my agent.  My fingers are crossed!

Here's the elevator blurb for it:

During and after the chaos of Katrina, over a thousand released sex offenders (required by Megan's Law to register their whereabouts with law enforcement) went off the grid.  Nola Céspedes*, a mouthy young cubana cub reporter for the Times-Picayune who grew up in the Desire Projects of New Orleans, gets assigned a feature story she doesn't want:  to explore the human realities behind the statistics on child molesters' rates of recidivism, their rehabilitation, their reception back into the community--just as a seven-year-old girl disappears from the French Quarter.

And then things get personal.

The blurb still sounds a little wonky to me, but you get the picture.  If you can think of ways to make it more inviting, let me know. 

When I first conceived the project, I thought it would be cool to try to blend literary writing with the suspense of a thriller and the fun conventions of chica lit.  However, no such blending occurred.  What has finally emerged is more like a collision between noir and chick lit.  A five-car pile-up.  Nola, the protagonist, just took over (with nods to Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Walter Mosley, Sara Paretsky, Kate Atkinson . . .).  We'll see.  It wants to be a beach read for smart people.  Or a smart read for beach people.  I don't know.

Many, many thanks to the good friends who read early versions of the book as it struggled to find its feet:  Sandra Scofield, Barbara Brandt, Bryn Chancellor (third one down), Grey Castro, and the Handsome Husband.  THE DESIRE PROJECTS has changed so much, you'll barely recognize it!

Speaking of Baby Greyby, we fly out tomorrow to see him graduate from Oberlin.  I'm todo excited & Mama-giddy. 

Graduation may not be the biggest achievement of his life thus far, but it is by far the biggest achievement of mine--bigger than writing books, or tenure, or anything.  Here's why.  Grey is a sweethearted, artsy, slacker guy who would much rather skateboard than study, bless his heart (as we say in the South).  On the up-side, he breathes, he lives in his body, he's kind and open and thoughtful and non-judgmental--not to mention a great songwriter.  All amazing, wonderful things.

For me, as someone who's always been academically driven and ambitious by nature (or perhaps by necessity)--and who's truly had to fight her own judgmental, impatient inclinations--this has been a tough personal challenge.  How to accept and support who Grey really is, at heart, while still equipping him responsibly for his future? 

If he ends up being able to skateboard and write songs for a living, great.  But if not, he'll need a fallback position.  It's a parent's job to think about that, however uncool or un-fun it makes us.  (And I say this even as a devoted artist.  Publishing stories in little magazines was hardly gonna pay the rent.)

Seeing him graduate from a good school at 21, debt-free, with good grades, has been a long haul, people, but he has done great, and we couldn't be prouder.

Or more relieved.  At the graduation ceremony, I may faint.

So at the tail end of this graduation season, here's to all the parents.  Respect.  Solidarity.  You've worked so hard, and you've made sacrifices no one will ever see.  A good education is probably the second-best gift you can give your children, and it's huge.

Moreover, an ethical, kind, well educated young adult is one of the best gifts you can give to our shared community.  So thank you.




*Yes, Cuban history buffs, her last name is no accident.

Welcome home, everyone who trekked across the country for the annual AWP conference! 

Here's the report.  I learned that Nebraska can throw you a freak snowstorm in April (we drove through it on the way there), that I am affected by altitude (huff, puff), that Denver has wild architecture and great restaurants, and that folks smoke pot right on the sidewalk.  I learned that by-invitation-only parties in penthouses are not as exciting as they sound, though it still feels nice to be on the list.  I learned that even very glamorous-looking people can sometimes need a bit of social rescuing, and that it feels good to reach out when they do.  I learned that having your partner along at a professional conference is great fun.  I remembered how lovely it can be to reconnect with friends.

I learned that I love the paintings of Moyo Ogundipe!  Holy wow.  This is the one we saw at the Denver Art Museum:

In this small venue, you can't really see the intricacies, the details, the repetitions and rhythms.  (Look at the birds, the snake, the image on the headgear.)  But please know:  the work is gorgeous.

But in more literary terms, I learned the following:

I learned that elena minor, who founded PALABRA, runs it as a complete labor of love.  She does everything herself, and she funds the production costs out of her own pocket--while working a full-time dayjob doing bookkeeping for a performing arts center.  If you've ever been interested in the journal, which promotes avant-garde work by Latin@ writers, you might consider supporting it by subscribing.  Read Francisco Aragón's interview with elena here and Marcela Landres's interview with her here.  I got to spend an hour talking with elena at the PALABRA/Con Tinta table at the book fair, and it was one of the highlights of the conference for me. 

I learned that Janice Harrington does a knockout close reading.  I heard her speak on the Black Goes Green panel, which featured contributors to Camille Dungy's anthology Black Nature, about which you've heard on here.  Some of the panelists, in addition to reading their own work, very generously offered their analyses of other poets' contributions.  Janice's close reading of Anthony Walton's "Carrion" was superb, and I trotted right over to the BOA table afterward and picked up her own collection, Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone, and it's excellent.  There's no guarantee that someone who's a precise, original reader and a generous, enthusiastic person will write good work, but it's sure true in this case.

I learned that I really want to read Manuel Ramos's work.  He read just a sliver on a panel of Latinas y Latinos who write mystery, and I really liked the energy and precision of his language.  All of the panelists were great, and I liked hearing them articulate how, for them, mystery novels are about social justice.  For Ramos, the  genre can provide "a sense of justice that isn't always found in real life."  Panelist Alicia Gaspar de Alba sees the detective protagonist as no better than other people, but simply "more outraged, more indignant" about injustice.

On a panel about biography, here were the quotable quotes: 

Bob Root:  "Even if I don't entirely catch the person I'm tracking, I can bring the pursuit alive for the reader."

Kim Stafford, quoting the advice his father William Stafford gave him about where to put his writing energies:  "Do the thing that's trying to happen.  Do the thing that's most alive." 

Honor Moore, quoting the advice Arthur Miller gave her when he read a draft of her biographical work:  "Throw away the research and write it like a novel.  You are the authority.  We will come to know her through you."  (This was after she'd totally immersed herself in the research and knew all the facts intimately.)

Honor Moore:  "Write the hot spots."

I also learned that Nick Flynn and Natasha Trethewey have reading voices of gold.  They were on a panel for the new anthology The Art of Losing, edited by Kevin Young, and seriously, there should have been a table of hankies at the end of every aisle.  Such gorgeous pieces, so well read.

And that's me, really. 

We got home late Sunday night to this:

Okay, so it looks a little like a cage, alarmingly, but I couldn't be more excited.  Drywall will make a difference.  Here's Spyder, looking coy:

The website of WILLA, Women in Letters and Literary Arts, has gone live just days before the AWP, which is germane because it was the rejection of her proposed AWP panel on women writers that led Cate Marvin to write the email that got the WILLA ball rolling last fall.  WILLA seeks to address a lot of issues, but particularly those surrounding how women's writing is received, reviewed, reported, and respected.  (You know, the kind of thing I gripe about from time to time when I skim the TOCs of the big magazines or report on the fellatastic fantasies of important journal editors.) 

According to our mission statement, the folks in WILLA are "spread across the country, represent different identities, work from within a range of aesthetics, and share the common goal to create a forum at which all women writers may engage in much longed for conversations about literature being produced by women and its reception by the larger culture."  You can get involved on Facebook or Twitter, and you can send your email to be notified as soon as membership becomes available.  If you're heading to AWP, WILLA has kindly provided a list of events that might interest you.

In other news, the contractors are coming!  The contractors are coming!  Below please see the corner of our apartment that has been serving as my office since we moved to the new place on January 16th:

(Note the experimental and rather unsuccessful color swatches, the closed blinds obscuring the view of the multilevel parking garage, the very high-tech Internet connection coiled along the wall, and the raw cement floors--which I try to see as Industrial Chic, but they do wear on a girl.)

I'm quite used to writing in a corner of the living room; it's how I've been working since we got to Lincoln, and back in Crawfordsville, Indiana, I did most of my writing at the kitchen table or, in warm weather, on the front porch.  In grad school, I drafted some of my best work after hours in the empty corridors of the Blocker building.

But no more.  No more!  At 42, I am about to get a room of my own, and I'm so excited.  It should be done, according to the contractors' schedule, by April 22--which is also by coincidence not only Earth Day but also James's and my 15th wedding anniversary.  (I read yesterday that people tend to overestimate how much they'll be made happier by additional wealth, and that simpler things actually make them happier:  sex, socializing after work, and having dinner with friends.  Meeting just once a month with friends has the happiness-effect of doubling your income, according to one study, and being well married offers the happiness equivalent of an extra $100,000 a year--which I guess makes James my Million and a Half Dollar Man.)

While marital bliss may make one wealthy in happiness, every mujer can still profit from a room with a door she can close.

The duct tape marks where the walls will go:

That's the computer on which I'm typing at this very moment, and on the lowest shelf of the bookcase are some of those notebooks I blather on about incessantly.  As soon as I post this blog, I'm going to unplug the computer and drag everything out of the way, so the contractors can do their mighty thing.

You might also notice a small orange fellow in the shot.  Shhhh--he believes he's functioning much like a hottie draped across a car hood, adding allure and value by his mere languid presence.

Faye asked kindly about him some time ago, so here is Spyder Von Zeppelin (Grey named him) in all his marmalade glory, earlier this winter:


We were on the way to see the first Pirates of the Caribbean (oh, the lengths to which parents will go), which subtly dates Spyder, and we thought the little kitten's odds did not look good.  So we scrapped our movie plans and got a box from the Kroger.  Grey lured him out from under the car, and we took him home--just for the night, of course, since the Humane Society was already closed. 

And that was that.  He's been with us through two sequels and shows no signs of leaving.

Even though that last line has the satisfying purse-clasp-snap of closure, I'm going to break all the rules of good blogging and go on here for a bit, since AWP and some ungodly committee meetings will leave me little time to write to you this week, and I don't expect to be back except maybe with tiny bulletins from my iPhone.  Here's some random stuff I want to tell you:

Agents?  Book deals?  Carmen Gimenez Smith keeps it real.  (Scroll down to #2.)  Thanks, John Chávez, for turning me on to her work.

My Women's and Gender Studies colleague Margaret Jacobs won the biggest book prize you can win if you're a historian, the Bancroft Prize.  Her study analyzes the policy of child-removal in Australia and the American West, the trauma it caused to indigenous families, and the role white women played in the whole dynamic.  Very important and complicated stuff.  Congratulations, Margaret!

I am very excited about an offer that has been made for my book of essays, ISLAND OF BONES, but the ink's not dry, and I don't want to jinx anything, so I'll say no more for the present.   However, I'll be reading the title essay at AWP, so if you want a sneak preview, come by on Thursday to the panel chaired by Lorraine López.

I'm also super-excited that, after a year spent at Boys Town, my "little sister" Amara gets to come home to Lincoln at the end of May.  She's done great:  she has straight As and can now run two miles, and she has the most amazing, upbeat attitude about the world.  I get to see her this evening.  She's about to turn 16!

Lastly, let me just say I hope that Sonam, Roland, and Rhonda had a wonderful time at the ACLA conference in New Orleans, which sounded fascinating, and I wish them safe travels home.

And everyone who's heading for Denver this week:  Safe travels to you, and I hope we see each other!

As I pack to head for Boston for this week's MFA residency, I'm thinking about stability and mobility and how they affect a person. 

Visiting biological relatives in Wisconsin last week, I was struck.  My half-sister, who's 33, currently lives with our mother in our mother's house, the same lovely house where she's lived since she came home from the hospital as an infant.  She's known her best friend since she was two.  She's traveled plenty (and has lived on her own in other states), but she's always had a stable base.  When she recently got tired of San Diego and wanted to come home, she could, and did.

My husband's parents still live in the house where they moved when he was 6.  The same art hangs on the walls; the kitchen, living room, and dining room remain largely unchanged, with furnishings from the 1960s.  When we visit, we can walk past the field where he played baseball, the lake where he swam as a boy.  He is still in touch with his childhood friends.  As far as I know, however, he has no connections to anyone from the town where he lived before his family moved to Louisiana.

James and I read long ago that stability--after the absence of trauma and divorce--is the single most important factor affecting a child's development, so we stayed put for Grey as much as possible, including spending 10 years in the house we bought in Indiana. 

Even with those 10 years, our current apartment is my 24th place of residence.  By the time I graduated from high school, I had lived in 11 homes and attended 9 schools (in Florida, England, and West Virginia--plenty of cultural variety!).   If stability is a crucial factor in a child's development, I'm wondering how  these many rapid changes affected mine--each school a new social system to navigate, and so on.  At that time, there was no practical way for a little kid to stay in touch with friends across the country--or across the Atlantic!--and I learned to let friends go and swallow the loss.  When I left home for good at 16, I continued the pattern, moving at the drop of a hat.  Only having Grey made me (eventually) slow down, take stock, sign a mortgage, plant trees.

As a writer of memoir, I've given a lot of thought to what trauma has meant in my life, and divorce, and abuse, and adoption, and ethnicity, and poverty, and weird religion. 

But the very fact of moving and how it inflects people's views of the world, their ability to bond, commit, and emotionally invest, and so on--that's interesting, and in a hyper-mobile global society of migration, disruption, and exile, it applies to so many of us.

I'm curious about other people's stories of movement and stasis--the kind that was dictated by parents, the kind they've later chosen themselves.  If you've got a reflection about your experience, please comment!

In other news, thanks to Curtis Sittenfeld for plugging the Nebraska Summer Writers' Conference on p. 2 of the NYTimes Book Review.

I loved this article about gray whales and their interactions with humans in yesterday's NYTimes Magazine.  (The first part is awful--and all too politically predictable.  Keep reading.)

The average height difference between male and female romantic partners is 8%.  This is "also, it turns out, the downward angle at which most models are photographed."  Qué freaky!

Many thanks to David Pruett!  He wrote in to share this addition to our conversation about writing by hand:
 

Poet W.S. Merwin was interviewed on Bill Moyers' show on PBS a couple weeks back, and mentioned writing by hand!

W.S. MERWIN: I can't imagine ever writing anything of any kind on a machine. I never tried to write either poetry or prose on a typewriter.  I like to do it on useless paper, scrap paper, because it's of no importance.  If I put a nice new sheet of white paper down in front of myself and took up a new, nicely sharpened anything, it would be instant inhibition, I think. "So now what?" I would think and I would sit there — so now what? — for quite a long time. But if it's something, if I need somewhere to write it down it will be on the back of an envelope, or something like that. Then it's okay. It's just to keep it there so I can find out where it goes from there.

(the whole interview video & transcript is at www.pbs.org/moyers -- click on the "Archive" link to get to older shows. bye!)