100,000 Views: A Retrospective

I began this blog in October of 2010, at a time when I was beginning to envision myself as a writer. Sure, I had always written—had finished a few novels, even—but this is when I decided to see if I could make a go of it. Get actual people to read my writing, maybe get published. I dug around online for resources. I joined Facebook. I started this blog. And soon, I will have had 100,000 views here, which is certainly not in the range of many viral things you hear about but for me, it feels like a nice milestone.

 

During these 8 ½ years, I’ve written 303 posts. My most prolific year was 2014, during which I posted 51 times, followed closely by 2011 with its 50 entries. In 2016, I only blogged nine times. It’s easy, in retrospect, to recognize the reason for this scarcity: a very tough personal year. 2018 was the same: only 13 posts.

 

I wrote about dance and art, about current things happening in the news and routine, day-to-day events and observations. I worked out conclusions about the writing process, penned memorials for both people I knew and knew of; I wrote about television, movies, songs and poems I liked. I started a series about forgotten novelists with the intention of making it a regular feature, but it petered out after two posts. I began a long-running tradition: Poem for the Weekend, in which I’d share a new poem and info about the author. This feature ran for almost a year beginning in August of 2014, and was reprised briefly in 2017. I wrote about writers and books, of course, sometimes book reviews, sometimes analysis of theory or craft; infrequently, I shared fiction of my own. I wrote about my kids, and published their book reviews of my first novel. I wrote about the writing process, about things that inspired me and about the gifts and pressures of the creative life. And in December of each year, I shared my favorite films and books, until a few years ago when I quit doing the film list. The books are easier to track and so I still do an annual roundup. My most recent post (and only one so far in 2019) talks about my method and inspirations for my new novel, Bellflower.

 

So. At this milestone—100,000 views—I think it would be a good time to look back and remember what I’ve done here, at this outlet, and to maybe set a course forward. I’ve chosen fifteen posts that stood out to me, for a variety of reasons, and I present them to you here. It would seem that these writings of which I’m most proud or which touched something in me fall into five categories: Inspiration, Creativity, Writing Life, Personal, and Memorial.

Inspiration

Vaccination – 5/10/12

A brief contemplation about one of my favorite prose passages of all time.

Focus and Layers – 1/27/15

Notes on a piece of art I saw at MOMA one time, and how it stayed and stayed with me.

 

The Thing about Carson McCullers – 10/26/15

A discussion and appreciation of the mastery of McCullers’s characterizations. She is a huge influence on my work.

 

Creativity

Hotel Thoughts – 7/24/11

A prose poem sort of thing, about feeling isolated and small, and at the same time, connected and complete. Reading this now brings back the exact moment and feeling in stark relief.

Flannery O’Connor on "The Nature and Aim of Fiction" – 1/15/15

My most-read post of all time (3406 reads), this is where I shared my thoughts on O’Connor’s essay collection, a must-read for writers.

Birth of a Story – 11/15/16

A brief post about the genesis of a short story, eventually titled “Driftwood,” which will be published, finally, this April.

In Praise of Stories and the Graying of Genre – 3/21/17

For the past few years, considerations of form and genre have been at the forefront of my creative endeavors, and this post speaks to that.

The Point: A Conversation – 10/27/17

An imagined conversation between “I” and “them,” this post could easily be filed under the Personal category as well. Another entry which brings me back to a specific feeling and time.

Writing Life

Collaboration: A Cautionary Tale – 4/8/11

What happens when you get, perhaps, too much feedback on your writing.

Where Writers Live – 11/2/18

Some thoughts on why a tendency toward melancholy is a gift and a curse for writers.

Personal

My Sister Had a Baby We Didn’t Keep – 1/25/16

I know I said that O’Connor post was the most-read, but this one I also posted on Medium, where it picked up over 11K views. Combined with the views here, it has over 13K to date. It’s the story of the time my sister acted as surrogate for a couple in China.

Things About Grief – 9/7/16

I’ve had many losses in the past few years and unfortunately, learned a lot about grief.

Memorial

Better, Stronger, Faster – 8/29/12

When Neil Armstrong passed away, I wrote about my grandfather, who knew him, and about the Six Million Dollar Man.

My Grandmother’s European Tour – 1/30/18

Going through my grandmother’s belongings, we found some papers pertaining to a trip she took with her nurses’ association. I wrote about it here.

In Remembrance of my Mother – 5/10/18

The post I most wish I hadn’t written, the eulogy for my mother, who passed away last year.

Dear readers: I appreciate all of your comments and feedback over these years. I was hoping to come to some conclusions through this process of looking back, and I think I have. In the next couple of years, I have plans to finish two novels, and I think what I miss doing most at this blog is writing about books. Other writer’s books, and the ways they inspire, disappoint and confound me. So look for more book reviews here, maybe. I’d also like to expand the types of things I’m reading. I’d like to get back to reading more biography and history, maybe even an occasional memoir, YA or spiritual book. Lastly, I’d like to read thematically—several books on a topic or theme. And I think I already have an idea for a summer reading project along those lines, so watch for that as well.

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Writing Affirmations

Tell yourself you’re doing it for humanity. Teeming, varied, rushing life. What binds us here in this place? What makes us pass each other in the street and pause, looking into another’s face to notice: I see you. I understand. Something like that happened to me. I felt like that once.

 

We don’t always get it right. Sometimes the right word, the right phrase, slips through our grasp, bobbing and submerging into the green stew. We try. We describe its slippery surface, the feel of it. We gaze into the murky depths, looking for clues, for context.

 

Testimony: evidence or proof provided by the existence or appearance of something.

 

It’s important, what you do. Never lose sight of that. That a-ha moment, empathy, recognition—these are the best parts of humanity. It’s wonderful to be loved but oh, to be understood.

 

Keep at it, scribes. What you do is important. Not everyone has the patience to stop and look, to try to articulate what it means to be here, right now. Pen to paper, fingers on keyboard, keep gazing towards the horizon, continue excavating memory, and feeling, and hope. Spill it out, profess, recite. What you do is important and so necessary.  

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The Suggestion of Color

I saw one of those quizzes on social media the other day, where you’re led through a series of seemingly innocuous questions until something is revealed about your true nature. This one had to do with color and how you see it. There was a square of a cool gray and the first question asked: What color do you see: gray, blue or green? And I immediately thought that I might have chosen gray, but now that blue and green had been suggested to me, those hues were apparent in the sample. It wasn’t green enough to be called green though, and certainly not blue enough to be blue, but now the gray was infused with these more lively tints and couldn’t really be seen as mere “gray” either. The fact that choices were offered had made me unsure of my perception.

 

It occurred to me that writing is an exercise in the offering of choices, in the suggestion of new or nuanced ways to view the world. Isn’t that what we’re doing by inhabiting a fictional world or the mind of a character, especially one who may see blue where we see gray?

 

Recently, I was inspired by an article about paint colors in a home decorating magazine. We’ve all wondered about the people who come up with the inventive names—because, certainly, there’s a quintessential human element in these names and their visceral modifiers, obscure historical references, and strange evocativeness. In fact, here’s an amusing article about what happened when a non-human tried to name paint colors. To me, color can infuse an entire setting, such as the endless green of a forest or the far-reaching blue of an ocean. It can be an intense character feature—a rancher’s dust-covered figure, a red-faced curmudgeon. It can set the mood for a story, such as all the feelings yellow brings to mind. Thinking this way inspired several stories in a collection I’m still working one; some of the stories take a color title: “Resonant Blue,” “Cadmium.”

 

Some people are born color blind, or can only see limited color. We’ve all seen the viral videos of a color blind person looking through special glasses that allow him or her to see color for the first time. How strange that must be, we think, a whole new world.

 

In Chekhov’s story, “Gusev,” a soldier returns from service, dying from an illness. He dies at sea and is tossed into the ocean. The men who remain on the ship watch stoically, Gusev’s body passes schools of fish and a large shark, and Chekhov’s narration then turns very inclusively omniscient:

 

“And up above just then, on the side where the sun goes down, clouds are massing; one cloud resembles a triumphal arch, another a lion, a third a pair of scissors . . . A broad green shaft comes from behind the clouds and stretches to the very middle of the sky; shortly afterwards a violet shaft lies next to it, then a golden one, then a pink one . . . The sky turns a soft lilac. Seeing this magnificent, enchanting sky, the ocean frowns at first, but soon itself takes on such a tender, joyful, passionate colors as human tongue can hardly name.”

 

Gusev’s experience, such as it is, the ultimate, unknown perception—death—is relayed with colors and strange sights. Imagine, Chekhov seems to be suggesting, imagine the unimaginable. Surely there are colors we’ve never seen, colors we’d hardly know how to describe. As writers, this is a quest we embark on joyfully, time and again, hoping to bring at least a few along with us.

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On Potato Eyes and Story Ideas

Do you know how to grow potatoes? Maybe you watched Matt Damon do it in The Martian. Actually, it’s not rocket science. A potato will start to grow on its own if you leave it in the cupboard too long. To grow new potatoes, you just cut an existing potato into sections, making sure each section has at least one “eye,” which is the little, sprouting nub, then you stick the sections into the ground.

 

I thought about this yesterday when I went out to bring the trash cans in. I’d been thinking about two stories recently finished. Well, finished for now. I was thinking about how I’m getting dangerously close to having enough stories for a collection, and how I should stick with this cycle (which seems to be about loss, and perception, and maybe even, colors), for at least a couple more. But I’ve never been one for brainstorming story ideas; I mostly wait until they announce themselves.

 

So I was thinking about those two stories and what I might possibly work on while I’m trying not to work on them, and I looked up to see a piece of paper stuck in a nearby bush. Also, a chips wrapper. Both were escapees from the now-mostly-empty trash cans. Immediately, I knew it was a scrap from a story draft, which I had marked up to the point of needing to print a new copy. In dramatic fashion, I thought: I’ll write a story about whatever it says.

 

And this is what was on that scrap of paper, that potato eye:

 

 

"She's never done anything for herself."

 

I knew immediately where these words came from: which story, about which character. It was quite a good scrap, I thought. First, I started thinking about potatoes and did that for a while. But then I refocused on the found fragment, which started to grow in some possible directions and suggest possible rooms, and people, and problems. And I thought that maybe it’s not such a bad approach, growing something from a piece of something else. Sometimes the universe gives you signs and they're hard to recognize and interpret. Sometimes, they’re pretty direct.

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Birth of a Story

The story comes in the wee hours, the witching hours, the stuck-between-night-and-day hours of three and five. It plays like a movie. There she is in her sweatpants, the main character. She’s anxious, unsettled (as you are), looking through the windows of her house. The rooms are nice and orderly. Out back, there’s a creek, nestled amongst the tall grasses and low-growing trees that often bend and surrender to its flow. The woman thinks about that creek and wants to make a change; she can’t keep on like this.

In the other room: the sturdy presence of her husband, like an old couch with a pattern in the fabric you haven’t noticed for a long time. There’s another man, a traveler. He’s a different sort; she doesn’t recognize him but sees something of herself in him nevertheless. He shows her passages.

Perhaps Jackie (that’s her name, suddenly) has trouble sleeping too. She worries about her ill father, her son, her daughter who lives far away. An entire cast of worry, marching around the room as she tries to sleep (as you try to sleep). The quiet desperation of the house after Les (that’s her husband) goes to work. The murky idea that takes hold.

It’s all there, the people, as real to you in this hazy time of early, early morning as real people are in daylight. Between the stark hours of three and five, the story spins on the ceiling of your real house, this story of Jackie and her house, and her husband, and her choice. In the morning's white light, she’s still there, a shadowy presence swirling in your tea, the flutter in the green leaves outside. Sit down. Rewind and watch it again. Notice.

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Word Mantras

Every so often, usually around Mother’s Day, lists are circulated which detail the extensive duties filled by anyone with the job title “Mom.” Housekeeper, Chauffeur, Chef, Teacher, EMT, Janitor, etc.—the point being, mothers fill many shoes, on the daily. And it occurred to me that people who choose writing are often expected to master a variety of roles as well. Apart from the artistic requirements of the job (too extensive to get into here), a writer is also Administrator, Secretary, Public Relations, Marketer, and much more. But I think the most challenging expectation for a writer (and mother, for that matter) is to be her own best counsel and at more dire times, her own therapist.

 

The peaks and valleys of the writing life are relentless. Small victories followed by demoralizations; any bit of burgeoning confidence soon squashed by doubt. At least that’s how it seems sometimes. Lately, I’ve been grappling with uncertainty. I started a novel for NaNoWriMo last November but have lost the spark. I can’t decide what it’s about, or remember why I started it in the first place. I’m not sure if I’m writing it for myself, or whether my motivations are murky with outside influences. I can’t determine whether it’s worth pursuing.

 

Outside factors press in, as always. I’m distracted by other, non-writing things. I can’t focus, can’t find time. I wallow. And then, as we writers always do, I began to undertake the long process of picking myself up, dusting myself off, and rebuilding my mental stamina for another round. Basically, I’ve been giving myself therapy. Okay, well really, I’ve been avoiding that damn novel and once in a while, giving it a think until my brain starts to hurt. In the meantime, I’ve been reading and reading. My balm. My respite.

 

I read Elena Ferrante’s Neopolitan novels and for several weeks and almost 2000 pages, let myself get lost in another time and place. Books can do that! my therapist self reminded my despondent self. As I pondered the purpose of writing anything at all, this essay claimed “the purpose of being a serious writer is to keep people from despair.” This seemed like a good litmus test, my therapist self said, should I decide to dive back into that abandoned novel. I mulled this over for days. And when I read a novel that surprised, delighted, and joyfully embraced language, sentence by sentence, (my review here), my therapist self suggested that I break things down to basics.

 

Words, words, words. For some time, I had been obsessing about the word despair. Sitting at the veterinarian’s office, an injured dog came in—panting, head tilted, unsteady on his feet—and I thought: “despair!” In a parking lot, a woman shrieked in anger when someone took her parking spot—and I thought: “despair!” An old man trudged along the sidewalk, mumbling to himself—surely, “despair!” Often, I recalled that Thoreau quote about countless lives of quiet desperation and thought: “Yes, despair!” It was everywhere. I was invoking it and inviting it.

 

Then I found this poem by Wendell Berry, a sun beam that broke through my despair-filled cloud cover.

 

I began to fixate on another word: resolute.

 

From the Latin resolutus, past participle of resolvere (loosen, release, disperse). First known use: 1533. Synonyms: bent, bound, hell-bent, purposeful, determined, set.

Descendants:

Catalan: resolut, resolt English: resolute French: résolu, résous Italian: risoluto, risolto

Portuguese: resoluto, resolto Romanian: rezolut Spanish: resoluto, resuelto

Each version has a crisp, decisive sound, an accented syllable to signify purpose. I highly recommend finding the audio pronunciation online and playing it over and over, when you tire of saying it to yourself.

“It is only through labor and painful effort, by grim energy and resolute courage, that we move on to better things.” –Theodore Roosevelt

“To a resolute mind, wishing to do is the first step toward doing. But if we do not wish to do a thing it becomes impossible.” –Robert Southey

“There is nothing in this world which a resolute man, who exerts himself, cannot attain.” –Somadeva

First and most basic job tile an author must take on: Craftsman or Artist, whichever you prefer. Keep it simple, my life coach/therapist self says. And so I return, once again, to the basics: stories, sentences, words. Resolute. Try saying it a few times, try imagining it on a page, the determined black lines and curves of it. Resolute. It’s a great word.

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On creativity and the circuitous mess of my mind...

          So I’m working on my new novel the other day and as that process often goes, I found myself meandering through my “notebook.” I say “notebook” because what this actually includes, in addition to the spiral notebook where I have scribbled pages of notes and outlines, is several loose papers of more notes and abandoned outlines but also sundry items I have printed out from the Internet. For example, an obituary of Alain Robbe-Grillet, a brief history of Berwyn, Illinois, and a description of the Hindu ideal of conscious death. Stuff like that, all of which distracts me momentarily from the task at hand, which was looking for a timeline so I can continue the passage about when Gina moved out of the house for the first time (although maybe it’s all too confusing, her moving out then back in, out then back in), and as I flip through the pages I see the following note:
          Image: Woman wakes up with a key around her neck; unlocks satchel accompanying 9-year-old girl.
          What the???
          Let me explain. Usually, each and every note, however random, ignites something within the jumbled neurons in my mind. Like a telephone switchboard from an old movie, each scribble makes the well-groomed female operator take that long black cord and plug it into one of those holes, and instantly there is a connection; I remember why I wrote that note and what it means (or no longer means) to the novel. Dodging some of these connections (for now) and indulging in others is all part of flipping through the notebook, of plotting a novel, of writing.
          This quote about the woman has nothing to do with anything; furthermore, I’m quite sure I’ve never seen it before in my life, although the handwriting is unmistakably mine. And so I am utterly distracted by it.
          First things first. What’s with the abhorrent use of that semicolon? Maybe an “it” is implied before “unlocks.” Which would mean that the woman is probably unaware that the key in her sudden possession matches the lock in the possession of a 9-year-old girl. What 9-year-old girl? Does she know that girl but hasn’t seen her for some time? Is the girl unknown but connected to the woman in an unforeseen way? Or, does the woman wake then later unlock a satchel while accompanying a 9-year-old girl, in whose company she unwittingly finds herself? It could be like The Road or Blindness, sort of an apocalyptic novel where nobody is who they seem and everybody is connected in some random, doomed way.
          Wait. The woman’s mother has snuck in during the night like the creepy old lady in that children’s book I Love You Forever, and put the key around her daughter’s neck. The girl is the woman’s daughter that the conniving mother stole from the childbirth bed rather than face the disgrace of an illegitimate granddaughter.
          And…what’s in the satchel???
          Obviously, this was a morning where not much was done in terms of forwarding the novel. But I wouldn’t call it a waste. I’ve written this little piece. I spent some time reminiscing about the nice guy who emailed me back from the parks department in Berwyn to tell me when Proksa Park was opened (ah, humanity). And I have this new idea for a story. A novel? Alright, maybe just a blog entry.
          This is how I want to spend my time, and I’m lucky to do it. Exploring connections, learning about new things and connecting those things, thinking about situations and relationships, pondering ideas. Even if to others it may seem unsubstantial, not concrete, a strange way to spend the day. Obviously, they have no imagination.

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