D is for Dying, in Other Words

Dying, in Other Words by British author Maggie Gee has been a keeper since 1984 when I attended a two-week writing seminar in London hosted by Northeastern University. Our instructors included Gary Goshgarian, Stephen King, Tabitha King, P.D. James, Robert B. Parker, William Martin, and the imcomparable Maggie Gee. Dying, in Other Words was Maggie Gee's first published novel, and it is my first signed book: "For Valerie, All best wishes for your own writing. Maggie."

I've read that inscription many times. It's carried me through the worst of rejections, the panic of acceptance, and it's become a sincere wish I've done my best to impart to other writers, especially when I've been asked to sign my own published work.

Some of my strongest memories from that conference include Stephen King jumping out of a dark hallway shouting "Boo!", scaring me and a fellow student out of our wits; Tabitha King breaking the heel off her shoe right before class (yes, famous people have those days too!); and having coffee with Maggie Gee. What an afternoon that was. She was wonderful, patiently answering all my eager and innocent questions about agents and writing schedules and Angela Carter (it turned out they knew each other). But best of all, she encouraged me to write, to never give up, to make my dreams real.

Every day that I sit down to write I can't help but think of that glorious conference, thirty years ago this summer, and how much Maggie's words and style have influenced and inspired me. I'm also reminded how important it is for professional writers and artists to remain generous, to pass on the baton whenever possible: You can do it.

One last thing: Besides being a keeper for the reasons above, Dying in Other Words is a REALLY GOOD BOOK! A surreal and edgy murder mystery, it gets 5 stars from me--read it!

C is for Cliffs of Fall

The short story collection, Cliffs of Fall, by Shirley Hazzard is a keeper because a) I'm a Shirley Hazzard fan, and b) I enjoy short stories. In my opinion there are not enough stories published these days, and I don't think we're better off for it.

Cliffs of Fall was Hazzard's first book; some of the stories originally appeared in magazines--the kind that used to publish fiction by new writers, but no more. The title is from a Gerard Manly Hopkins poem, and what I particularly love is that I can see in the poem and the stories the themes and character motivation Hazzard worked into her novels.

I don't write short stories for publication (yet), but I have a pretty big collection of freewriting drafts I've produced every two weeks or so with my writer's group. One of the things I love about my group is that we don't critique. Instead, we meet and write from a prompt; sometimes it's an evocative photo, other days we'll use a line from a magazine or a book of writing exercises, often it's a combination of the two. Over the years we've written flash fiction, poetry, personal essay, and even sections of our novels this way.

Here's an example of a flash fiction piece I wrote one afternoon when we were still meeting at the now-defunct Borders Books and Music cafe (more loss!). It's a raw, "first thoughts" piece transcribed straight from my journal, run-on sentences and all. The prompt line was "It was Sunday when it happened" and it was matched with a black-and-white photo of a sunny office stairwell looking over a grassy field.

For as long as I can remember I have loved the hidden backrooms and stairwells of office buildings. The places where you can pause, even hide, from the relentless assembly line of paperwork and ringing telephones. There is a certain feeling of stoppage—the heat pulses warm from the tinted glass and radiators; the place is so quiet. It is where you can gather your thoughts, put your head in order, believe for a moment that you might actually have a real life somewhere outside of the office.

These quiet spaces are even more appealing on the weekends, those rare occurrences when I agree to go into work alone and for extra pay plus expenses to catch up on overflowing filing trays, or to complete the bookwork that was neglected in favor of some other more important deadline. On those weekends I am given a check for lunch, but I always bring one of my own. I’d rather eat my own food anyway, and the money they give me is enough for new shoes if they’re on sale, or simply to store up in my bank account for the proverbial rainy day when I may want to bolt and quit this dull place filled with people who would rather die than smile.

So there I was, eating my cheese and apricots, a flask of latte, and a book to read after I was finished eating, all snug in my favorite back hallway, the one where the windows face the sloping lawn and the lake below. No one ever walks on this lawn or swims in the lake. Instead, it is designed for privacy and a show of power. Acres and acres of grass for no one but the executives to maintain through the largesse of the company’s enormous profits.

I had brought in a comfortable chair and a pillow. My lunch allowance gives me an hour and a half on Sundays, and I was determined to take it. I know some people try to rush through their weekend work so they can get home and forget about it, but I love the solitude and relaxation of having the building all to myself. The security guards don’t check in until five, and even the maintenance staff are gone for the day. The entire block is mine. I could eat my lunch in the boardroom if I wanted and no one would be the wiser.

So there I was, alone, happy, ready to snooze when I saw them down at the edge of the water, obviously having forgotten, or perhaps never been told, that today was my turn to spend the better part of the weekend in their employ. There was only the two of them: Mr. Channing and Miss Hellman. The thing that caught my eye was not so much the surprise of seeing them, but what they were wearing. Usually I passed them once or twice a day and had never seen them dressed like this: in white and like people going to some bizarre party where all the guests were angels or high school graduates.

For a second I wondered if they were wearing choir robes, but there was something too creative and secular about their outfits. “Organdy” was the word that went through my mind. Maybe “prom dress” or “shroud” would have been appropriate, too. I saw them open a bag--the sort you see these days in grocery stores when people want to make some kind of self-conscious snooty statement about global warming or landfills, when what they’re really doing is spreading mites and bacteria. From the bag, a deep egg yolk yellow with a sunflower on its side, they removed something large and unwieldy and threw it into the middle of the lake. Whatever it was, it hit the water like a sack of potatoes and did not resurface as I imagined it might do, if only for a second. They then left as silently as they had appeared, their white gowns floating behind them.

They sold the company the following week, and we were all paid handsomely to leave and find work elsewhere. Perhaps I will investigate diving or pond cleaning for the new owners. Somehow I will make sure I can return to my spot by the window, if only for the chance to sit and stare in quiet, as if the world was made only for me.

B is for Bleak House

This is how I remember my mother: sick, sleeping, sewing, or reading. My job as a child was to stay out of her way, to be as quiet as possible, preferably reading a book of my own. If she did ever come close, it was with a mouthful of pins, both literal and metaphoric, and I was terrified of her.

Now before you think this is the start of a pity party, I want to assure you it isn't. The reason my mother and I never bonded is because I didn’t live with her full-time until I was five and going to school, and I left home at eighteen. But during those few years we had together, the one safe topic to share was books. I especially waited for those mornings when my mother liked to sit at the breakfast table and talk to my father about whatever book she was currently reading. One book I remember in particular was Bleak House by Charles Dickens. Listening to her speak, the title alone captured my imagination, describing what I believed to be our own house: bleak, cold, and very lonely. Even more disturbing, however, was that as my mother described the character of Jo, she couldn’t stop crying. 

I wanted to know more—about the story and her tears. One afternoon while she was napping, I started to read her library copy of Bleak House in secret. It wasn’t any good; I couldn’t understand most of it, but I did figure out that Jo was a street child, unloved and unwanted, a boy who cleaned the streets and helped a woman who had abandoned her own child.

Two years later, on a family visit to the UK, I saw a copy of Bleak House in a village bookstore and bought it with money my grandmother had given me for the trip. (My grandmother was a very loving and generous person. She had a chihuahua, painted in watercolor and oil, and drove a white Mustang with red leather seats. And we had FUN. So, you see, it wasn't all darkness . . .) Anyway, that year I was fourteen and I could finally appreciate Dickens’ style and flair. I also realized how much humor was in the story, and how valuable it was to laugh in the midst of chaos and/or despair. Yet it was only a few days ago when I thought about writing this post that I also realized how strange it was that I should discover a book about an estranged mother and daughter through my bitterly-depressed mother. There’s an irony here I want to explore further one day. Maybe this post is a good start.

My mother and I were never able to share much of anything in her lifetime; in the end she chose to live over 7000 miles away from home, but her love of reading has been her most important gift to me. Reading has given me some of the most wonderful moments of my life, carrying me through both the bleak and the sublime—and I am grateful for a life well-read.

A is for The Alexandria Quartet

Well, here we are--the first day of the A-Z Blogging Challenge, and I hope we all have a fun and enjoyable month reading, writing, and sharing our blogs with each other. As I mentioned last week, my theme for the month is My Keeper Books, the books I cannot live without. To start the party, my first selection is: The Alexandria Quartet, by Lawrence Durrell.
 

As the title implies, it's really four books in one: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea. However, the books are so intricately linked that I don't believe one can be read or understood without the others.

I can't remember when I bought my copy, but it was a long time ago at Foyle's bookstore in London (I used to live in the UK, so there have been a few trips back and forth) and I do remember reading it throughout the entire return flight back to the US.

I bought it for two reasons: first, my best friend from my New Zealand university days always said it was her favorite book--a great recommendation because she had excellent literary taste, and second, she had once made me watch the rather bad movie version. She claimed to have loved the film too, but maybe it was loyalty to the books that made her feel that way. Whatever her reasons, I personally found the movie, simply titled Justine, so cryptic and choppy I had to read the book just to unravel the plot.

To understand a bit more, you can read a great Roger Ebert review and even watch this incredibly hokey trailer (that YouTube insists on embedding with the "play" arrow right over Anouk Aimée's beautiful nose):

If you've stopped laughing, we'll continue . . .  

Questionable movies aside, The Alexandria Quartet is now MY favorite book. Set in Alexandria, Egypt before, during, and after World War II, reading it is like looking through a pinhole camera view of privileged, decadent, confused and hungry lives unique to their time and place. Romantic, political, desperate, experimental--the book and its characters call to me again and again, and that's why it's a keeper!

P.S. I suddenly want to see the movie again . . . oh, dear!

The 2014 A-Z Blogging Challenge

Taking a deep breath and . . . getting my mind around the fact that I've signed up for the 2014 A-Z Blogging Challenge. Whew. How did that happen??

Blame it on Twitter. Several weeks ago I came across a tweet from a fellow writer announcing she had signed up for the challenge. What challenge? I wondered. (Note to self: Limit wondering. Wondering can be a dangerous pursuit. You never know where it might lead.) Which then meant I had to follow the link that led me to the challenge and to what I now consider my totally insane impulse to sign up.

Here's what the challenge entails: blogging EVERY DAY (other than Sundays) for the month of April. To make things even more, um, challenging, participants must follow an alphabetical order for their posts (A-Z), and with an optional continuous theme. The good news is the organizers suggest writing short posts, somewhere between 100-300 words.

Short posts aside, I'm still asking myself why, oh, why have I done this?

A couple of reasons:  First, although I've been blogging for over five years now, I rarely think of myself as a "blogger." I don't know why, maybe it's because I consider myself a writer first, artist second, and "blogging" sounds too much like a job description. But I am a blogger, and the fact is, I love blogging. 

Secondly, I've always wanted to blog more often than my current schedule of once a week or sometimes less. But usually I'm so busy writing my novel or drawing or cooking or, well, you know, living, that the week disappears before I can get to a second or third post. The blogging challenge might help me to change this--not to write a blog post every day when the month is over (I mean, who'd want to read all that?), but at least a little more frequently.

My chosen theme for the month is My Keeper Books. These are the books I have on my very small bookshelf that are never going to the library donation table, the white elephant gift exchange, or to my best friends--even to borrow (sorry, besties!). But these are the books that I refer to over and over, and that I couldn't imagine living without. Some are decades old, others as new as a few weeks.

I won't be writing reviews or synopses, information that is easily available from Goodreads or Amazon.com. What I will be discussing is why these books matter to me: where they came from, who wrote them, why they are so important I've hauled some of them around the world more than once, and will probably do so again. I'm looking forward to the opportunity to examine the books in a new light and with a fresh purpose, and maybe introduce you to some great titles at the same time.

So that's the plan, starting on Tuesday, April 1 (and that's no joke).

Tip of the Day: Here's an easy way you can play along, too: plan to visit, read, and comment on a blog or two every day during the month of April. There's an entire list right here at the challenge site. See you next week!