Gutsy Writer: The Photo

Here's the picture of novelist Lionel Shriver promised in the previous post. Her books have the kind boldness that you'd expect of someone who, at age fifteen, changed her name to Lionel from Margaret Ann.

Lionel Shriver: One Gutsy Writer

Recently I've fallen in love with the work of novelist Lionel Shriver. So has much of the rest of the world. I wish I'd known about her novels long ago.

With her seventh and eighth novels, she has finally gotten big-time attention: bestsellerdom, a huge feature in The New York Times, book tour of New Zealand, etc.

NB: big success came with her 7th and 8th published novels. And she said her former agent refused to handle the seventh one and so she sent it out herself.

A+ for ENORMOUS PERSISTENCE. (Also, for quality in writing, insights, and plots.)

The two books that have finally brought her much-deserved attention are We Need to Talk About Kevin and The Post-Birthday World.

Both these books feel so honest that they seem skinless, exposing bare nerve endings.

I went to hear her read a week or so ago at Raleigh's Quail Ridge Books (turns out she spent much of her youth in my town and I interviewed her father a time or two for The Raleigh Times.) I asked her if she'd always been so bold as a writer or had she developed that courage over time.

She seemed genuinely baffled: "That's what writing is for," she said, "to SAY THE UNSAID." She wondered aloud: What are other writers doing? (boldface and caps are all mine)

And another thing: as the Times pointed out, she isn't exactly groveling over success. The head on the story: "After Lean Times, Prizes and Not One Apology." The Times referred to The Guardian (she lives in England) as saying that she had "violated the British law of self-deprecation by boldly declaring that she had WANTED HER BOOK TO WIN" the Orange Prize, which it did indeed win.

Do we ever really believe that someone doesn't want his or her book to win?

From henceforth I hold her work (including the PR wing) before me as a shining example, and will post here in the next couple of days a picture I took at her Quail Ridge reading.

On Taking a Stand

Be bold, but be impeccable.

I heard a speaker at a seminar last spring advise that. I think it was Katie Orenstein, a writer of op-ed opinion pieces among other things. She attributed the line to her mother-in-law.

It's a fine piece of wisdom, if you're inclined to be impetuous.

I spend too much time on impeccability. Quadruple-checking does me more harm than good. I'd like to work out a good balance. Oh hell, a perfect balance--that's what I'd really like.

Make It Legible

Last week a "room redesigner," Julie Tomlin of Raleigh/Cary, spent three and a half hours in my office and when I returned in early afternoon, the place had been transformed.

She didn't add anything or take anything away. Instead, she shuffled and restacked and consolidated, and now it seems as if the room has come into focus. And I feel as clearly located and defined as if I were sitting on top of a float in a parade.

A doctor I know has the clearest handwriting I've ever seen. It's like an architect's printing. He said he made it that way on purpose. It was a way to say: here I am, here's what I'm prescribing, and I stand by it.

I don't think doctors' reputedly messy handwritings are by design a way to hide. But it has crossed my mind before that my own might be a form of privacy. Nobody's every going to be prying into my bits and pieces of handwritten journal. It wouldn't be worth the effort to decipher.

All of which is to say that: making things clean and clear is a way of declaring one's self. Of standing by who and what we are.

Big Two-Hearted River

That's a Hemingway title and I think it fits.

A week and a half ago, my brother Franc had a scary bout of heart bypass surgery. Today we learn that my other brother (and Franc's identical twin) Harry has to have the same operation. Tomorrow morning.

Harry's doctor has the advantage of knowing about Franc's identical heart. That will probably mean one less incision. Also, Harry saw up-close the shape Franc was in during the days just after the surgery, so he knows exactly what he's in for. Otherwise, it'll be the same--attaching him to the heart-lung machine, cutting open his chest, stopping his heart, sewing in new vessels taken from pieces of vein in his arms, the whole terrifying miraculous ball game.

It'll go fine. Franc's doing well, so Harry will too. It cannot be otherwise, their lives and hearts are so entwined.

Here are a couple of pictures of them, working at the house they built with friends on the NC coast. Not good photography, but this is the best I have available this minute, and now is when I'm posting. Franc on the left, Harry on the right, .

Neighborhood Witches, Psychic Aunties and Spiritualist Grandmothers

I'm looking for true stories about people like Miss Chant, the subject of my biography in progress.

The title of the post pretty well sums up the category. If you grew up knowing an older person in your community who was considered to have special powers and be a little strange, I'd love to hear from you. Please leave a comment here or email me at ppayne51@cs.com.

Thanks.

Open Heart

Brother Franc had his heart operation early yesterday, didn't wake up last night. I drove halfway to the wrong town to teach this morning. Then at 10:30 at school I got word he'd opened his eyes, squeezed Mom's hand. I am so relieved.

Almost everybody comes through this operation. The survival rate is 98%. And yet it's so frightening. Maybe it's the fact of several large tubes coming out of holes in his chest and neck. How much worse this day would feel if the prognosis wasn't good, I can only imagine.

Elizabeth and John Edwards and their family are among the boldest of us today. Those folks have courage.

The "Hard Part" of Doing

This week, for me, is hectic, tightly scheduled, and emotionally intense.

I have classes and student conferences today and Friday--and tonight I go to my hometown so I can sit with Mom, especially, tomorrow during my brother Franc's heart bypass operation. Then assuming all goes well--which is what's supposed to happen and going to happen--I'll come back Thursday night, and teach on Friday.

Yesterday and the day before weren't so hard, since all I was doing was preparing for classes and making phone calls and wrapping Mom's present for her 85th birthday, which is today, etc. Those things are not hard, though I'd thought in advance they would be.

This morning I'm dealing with students, which isn't hard at all. Now I'm thinking it's class--yes, that's what will be hard.

I also know that when I get there, class won't be hard at all.

What I'm starting to realize is that, for the most part, assuming I'm not trying to solve some famous impenetrable math problem: None of the pieces of doing what needs to be done are hard.

If Franc's surgery doesn't go perfectly, that will be seriously hard. But that's not doing--not for me at least.

So I'm starting to think that, for the most part, doing isn't so hard. Asking myself hundreds of times a day: will I get everything done?--that's hard, but not necessary. If anything, it slows me down.

With a good plan, it ought to be possible to stop asking that useless question and dreading "the hard part."

Then the hard part would be to stop obsessing over things I can't do anything about.

The Stress of Waiting

In one 24 hour period last week, my mother had a bad fall and my brother Franc learned that he has to have surgery soon for 5 heart bypasses. I'm not happy about any of this.

I responded by immediately getting a cold.

What this means is my immune system is a bit cowed by the stress of these events. I don't like that either. At times like this, I want all my systems to step up to the plate and do better than usual.

There's something unheroic about getting a sore throat in the face of trouble.

Both Mom and Franc are going to be okay. That's the main thing. But there's not much that I, even at peak health, can do to make sure of that.

I prefer problems that can be solved by some thought and energetic effort. More and more as I get older I see people facing problems that can't be fixed that way. These require their own brand of courage, a kind I haven't really begun to work on. (Except for weathering the times of waiting to hear the fate of a book. I guess those sorta count.)

The Board of Inspiration

Two days a week I sit in an office at Duke borrowed from Dr. Melissa Malouf, a novelist and an English and creative writing professor. This is my campus home base during my semester of scholar-in-residence.

Among the many novelties of this sojourn is working in someone else's office and staring at her bulletin board of author/artist/et al portraits.

This inspiring collection is mainly postcards sent to Professor Malouf from former students.

I felt immediately at home here, in part because I've spent years with identical Henry James and John Lennon photos propped before me on my own turf. (Don't know how I missed the shirtless Mark Twain.)

It's inspiring to see the ancestors arrayed next to one's writing desk. And we can claim whoever we want for our artistic lineage. I certainly had no idea someone else was claiming James and Lennon. I guess that makes Prof. Malouf and me cousins.

I've several times felt the real power of putting a visual image in front of me. I had on my desk for a while a watercolor of freesia and irises. Then one day I realized that I was seeing it double.

What had happened: I'd unknowingly brought into the office the two kinds of flowers that were in that picture and put them in a similar vase. I'd physically reproduced the picture without being aware of it. So maybe this month I'll find I'm looking past the bulletin board at the real Virginia Woolf or Oscar Wilde.

One way or another I expect to feel the power of this collection of worthies. Start your own Board of Inspiration and see how it works.

A Bring Home the Troops Rally

I know it's not the 1960s, but a huge percentage of this country claims to be against the escalation/continuation of the war in Iraq.

This photo shows a bring-home-the-troops rally in Chapel Hill a few days ago.

The turnout was kinda sparse. About 40 people, a number which I found dismaying. Especially for famously peace-loving Chapel Hill!

As for the war, if we're agin' it, we need to be actively doing something to stop it. At least making our voices be heard.

The High Cost of Self-Doubt

I've just had the privilege of reading excerpts of the daily journals/"free writings" of over a dozen writers.

I was staggered by two things, the talent showing itself in the quality of the writing and the amount of self-doubt.

The quantity of energy devoted to self-doubt is huge. It's wasted.

This is a subject I have an honorary doctorate in; I've near-endlessly second-guessed quite a number of the words and actions I've ever let out into the world.

Seeing how much fuel a lot of good writers are wasting with fear has hit me hard--the way going to a slaughterhouse can make a person a vegetarian.

I think I've (unknown to myself) classified a lot of that second-guessing as a virtue. For myself, I've peeled the Virtue label off. It's a natural impulse among humans, completely understandable. But doing that harsh internal cross-questioning is not where I want to spend a lot more of my time.

Shipping a Grant Proposal

My own acts of courage are so minor that they're not even recognizable as such. I think the same is true for a lot of us who aren't living in poverty or war zones or currently raising kids.

Still the small daily triumphs do matter.

Take for, example, the hell I went through yesterday sending off a grant proposal to the proper government agency, using no stamps at all and no paper, using nothing but my computer.

Notices of Error, Notices of Corrupted Files flew at me. Hours passed. Hours! Still, I fought on. Clicking and clicking and calling 800 numbers and clicking.

My office partner congratulated me late in the afternoon for holding back on shouted obscenities during the half an hour that our upstairs neighbor Sarah had a small child in her office.

I kept thinking of Winston Churchill's phlegm-y voice saying, "Never give up. Never give up." And then at a little after 7 p.m. It went through! Received! Verified! And I dragged on home from the battlefield, weary but triumphant.

Now, transcending computing difficulties may not be like carrying people out of burning buildings. However, it's major in my world. Or was yesterday. (I was in a meditation group some time ago, and the leader asked others what their major current stresses were. One woman said, "This group and my computer.") So I'm celebrating--soon as I figure out how I want to do that.

Four Women on Horseback

If you haven't seen this video, please have a look. Dozens of horses are trapped on a small patch of island, have been there for three days. Eighteen have already drowned. Efforts of soldiers and firefighters to save them have failed, then four women climbed into their saddles and rode to the rescue.... Be sure to watch through to the end. The impact grows.

The Lowly--and Lofty--Scarab

Did you ever wear a scarab bracelet? They were a must-have item when I was an eighth-grader. I later heard that they had some sacred symbolism, but never investigated further.

This afternoon, doing some research on my E. Chant biography, I turned up a detail about a close friend of Chant's. Her name was Margarethe Heisser and the two of them shared a studio that was an arts center in Minneapolis around the turn of the previous century. Heisser, I learned from an online profile, always wore scarabs.

A scarab is a dung beetle (or representation thereof), revered in ancient Egypt, all the way back to prehistorical Egypt, as a symbol of the sun god, and of creation and transformation.

Here's the part that I seized upon: the Egyptian word for this insect was hprr, which meant: "rising from, come into being itself."

That concept is exciting to me--of continuing to come into being, in this life. Growing into the largest possibilities of oneself.

And a dung-beetle that becomes the sacred emblem of the sun god is a pretty good example of a positive transformation.

My Cheeky Relatives

Monday morning I opened my local paper, turned to the page where my sister-in-law Ruth Sheehan's column runs and saw the headline above her picture: HARRY IS THE BABY'S DADDY.

Well, the Harry she refers to is my brother, her husband; and their youngest child, to my knowledge, is age four. I went to reading really quickly.

Harry had confessed, Ruth wrote, to being the real father of Anna Nicole Smith's baby.

"He blubbered. I forgave.

He'll be flying to the Bahamas today to collect the bank account numbers, the keys to her mansion there and, oh yeah, his daughter, whom I have graciously agreed to raise as one of my own -- in exchange for a nominal $50,000 a month."

The point was the media overcoverage of this story, and the possible motivation one might have for wanting to claim the baby.

However, what this reader delightedly noticed was the pure brass of the story, which I found hilariously funny. Though, reading between the lines, I came to understand that I don't after all have a new niece.

Illustrious Writer Guests

Yesterday, I enjoyed another one of the perks of teaching at Duke this semester. Novelists Bharati Mukherjee and Clark Blaise came to talk to one of my classes meeting jointly with another class.

This was a special pleasure because a book they wrote together (they're married as well) is a long-time favorite of mine: Days and Nights in Calcutta. I read it at the suggestion of the editor of one of my books, just before I went to Varanasi to do my research for Sister India.

I'll never forget it. The book is divided in half, each of them giving an account of spending a season together in her hometown, formerly called Calcutta. It's astonishing how different two exceptionally well-written pieces on the same experience can be, in both style and content.

Her tone was full of concern and upset, awareness of pain. Her style, as I told the students in introducing them, was vivid and tightly woven, a dense dramatic fabric that then meandered like a river.

Clark's stance was amazement at the beauty and mystery he saw there, his tone had a spacious, light-filled feel. The image that came to mind: a glass pavilion.

The two of them talked with the students for almost two hours--he kept going while she left to prepare for her formal presentation in the Rare Book Room.

Wow, what a day! And I sort-a had a day off from spouting my own views. It was refreshing and inspiring. I heard some good reviews from my students too, two of whom asked if I could get them copies of her formal lecture. (Now that kind of student is a teacher's dream.)

Writers Workshop in the South of France

I had a request to tell you about write-in-France opportunity, which looks pretty delicious to me. VCCA-- The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts--has a recently acquired studio in the medieval village of Auvillars in Gascony. I've been to the Virginia campus, for a workshop led by feminist writer Naomi Wolf, and discovered that VCCA tends to do things well.

So have a look at this site if you're interested in your petit dejeuner in the courtyard of Moulin a Nef before starting the morning's classes.

Thoughts on Aging with Flair?

Sunday my beloved husband Bob turned 65. He can pass for 50, but still.... It's one of those significant numbers. Also, this weekend the obits in my paper were full of lads and lasses in their 50s and 60s. One I knew a bit, have been acquainted with for thirty years at least--I never thought he was the type to die. He was too much an extrovert to get that quiet. The same with Molly Ivins, subject of yesterday's post. And as for me, I buy ever more moisturizer. Do you suppose dying can be done with individuality and pizazz? As I write that, I think of Art Buchwald, dying a week ago on his own terms and, as a good newsman, being first with the story: announcing on a pre-recorded message that he'd just died. That's undeniably flair.

Molly Ivins: Who Did Her Best to "Let Freedom Ring"

Quoted from The Nation about the wonderfully gutsy political columnist Molly Ivins, who died last week:

Speaking truth to power is the best job in any democracy, she explained. It took her to towns across this great yet battered land to say: "So keep fightin' for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't you forget to have fun doin' it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin' ass and celebratin'the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was."