Of Moons and Mountains

It took me forever to get through Thirteen Moons, which says a great deal more about my distractibility than about Charles Frazier’s writing. Set in the mountains near Asheville before, during and after the Civil War, the novel follows the life of Will Cooper from age 12 into his elderly years. Sent as a bound boy to mind a shop in Cherokee territory, Cooper’s life becomes intertwined with the Cherokee fate during the Great Removal, when nearly a whole nation is sent on the Trail of Tears away from their homeland out to Oklahoma. Cooper and his adopted father Bear remain in the mountains with only a few remaining Cherokee families. A tale of finding and losing love, wealth, family, status and home, a melancholy voice prevails across eight decades of adventure.

Frazier’s grasp of history–regional, national and even personal–astounds me. I can only imagine the long hours of research that went into making this wild tale believable down to the details of fashion and food. His clear love of the geography of the Appalachian mountains, first seen in his award-winning Cold Mountain, weaves through every page, beginning to end. It’s a tale of American history told from the vantage point of one mountain range, whose changes echo the changing world beyond. Unlike Cold Mountain, women play only an auxillary role in the book; we don’t get to know any of them from the inside out, only from the point of view of the men who obsess over them.

As long as it took me to read it, when I finished I was tempted to go back to page one and begin again.

Monday Morning Goldberg

It’s Monday. Time to start writing. Here’s another little gem from Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. Ready, set, write! 

Okay. Take something specific to write about. Let’s say the experience of carving your first spoon out of cedar. Penetrate that experience, but at the same time don’t become myopic. As you become single-minded in your writing, at the same time something in you should remain aware of the color of the sky or the sound of a distant mower. Just throw in even one line about the street outside your window at the time you were carving that spoon. It is good practice.

We shouldn’t forget that the universe moves with us, is at our back with everything we do. And if you throw a line in about it, it reminds the reader, too, that though we must concentrate on the task before us, we mustn’t forget the whole breathing world. Tossing in the color of the sky at the right moment lets the piece breathe a little more.

… So when we concentrate in our writing, it is good. But we should always concentrate, not by blocking out the world, but by allowing it all to exist. This is a very tricky balance.

The Day the Dogwoods Bloomed

I rarely write poetry, but wrote this yesterday and got some nice feedback, so I decided to share it here.

One flawless day

when the dogwoods opened

their scarred hands

my dog and I walked

along narrow rhododendron

paths, familiar.

 

We paused at the small

cemetery where

Ellen and Henry Smith’s four babies

are buried, circa 1890.

 

In the fairy circle

of stone nubs rising from moss

a sudden shimmering

rose from the ground

brushed my skin,

hurried up my body.

It seized my heart

and I cried out,

“Daddy, where are you?

Are you OK?

Am I?

Daddy, I wish you would come to me.”

 

Astonished by this

unknown ache

I let a pine tree hold me

while I cried.

Sinking down

I grasped a worn down stone:

baby, name unknown.

 

My dog stood near,

a small statue

alert to bird calls

and the possibility of squirrel.

Also still, I squatted,

aware of the call of loss,

waiting for the soft signals

of presence.

Midlife Memoir

My father, a well-respected preacher with a mellifluous voice, and my mother, a genuinely Christian woman with an unflappably upbeat perspective on the world, raised my brothers and me in a small Midwestern town amidst conservative values. I became a minister, endured a difficult 14-year marriage, moved to be near my parents at age 43 for the first time in my adult life, and got divorced. So perhaps it is no surprise that I could not put down Rhoda Janzen’s Mennonite in a Little Black Dress. Janzen was raised by a Mennonite preacher and his unfailingly cheerful wife, considered seminary before becoming a Ph.D. poet, and when her husband of 15 years left her, moved back in with her conservative parents at age 43 to the Mennonite life she had long since left behind. This book is a side-splittingly funny memoir of that experience.

Janzen, who spends most of her time writing poetry, shows that she is a natural storyteller. There isn’t one of her relatives, neighbors or friends I didn’t wish I could meet after her hilarious accounts of their encounters. The Mennonite Lunchbox Hall of Shame is practically worth the price of the book (especially since she includes the recipes at the end). And being a bit of a religion nerd, I fully enjoyed her short and sassy history of Mennonites in the appendix.

While the book made me laugh uproariously at times, it’s also a poignant and honest telling of the stinging pain of midlife trials and the blessings of family who keep on loving us in their own quirky ways. Janzen clearly loves the parents who took her back in when her life crashed to an undignified halt. And boy, could I relate to that.

I feel almost too connected to the subject matter to say anything objective about this wondrous little book. I’d love to hear from others whose path may not follow hers quite so closely. Did you still relate to her? Did she make you laugh out loud?

Generous Writing

It’s Thursday and maybe you’re feeling a little blocked or like you’ve run out of fresh words to write this week. So that must mean it’s time for a kick in the pants from the two Annies. Here’s a word from Lamott’s Bird by Bird:

“Annie Dillard has said that day by day you have to give the work before you all the best stuff you have, not saving up for later projects. If you give freely, there will always be more. This is a radical proposition that runs so contrary to human nature, or at least to my nature, that I personally keep trying to find loopholes in it. But it is only when I go ahead and decide to shoot my literary, creative wad on a daily basis that I get any sense of full presence, of being Zorba the Greek at the keyboard. Otherwise I am a wired little rodent squirreling things away, hoarding and worrying about supply. Arthritis forms in my hands and in the hands my mind is using to shape things, in the hands of that creature in the cellar who wants and needs to use all of his favorite rags in the ragbag he works from.

“You’re going to have to give and give and give, or there’s no reason for you to be writing. You have to give from the deepest part of yourself, and you are going to have to go on giving, and the giving is going to have to be its own reward. There is no cosmic importance to your getting something published, but there is in learning to be a giver.”

Writing … wedding vows!

Many of you know that I have a varied work life that includes freelance ministry, as well as freelance writing and editing. I recently came across a fun DIY wedding blog, Hindsight Bride, and this week I’m a guest blogger on it.  If you know folks planning a wedding, I recommend this blog, as well as a workbook for writing vows, written by my good friends, Shonnie Lavender and Bruce Mulkey. And, of course, if the couple you know needs a fabulous wedding celebrant I highly recommend, um, me!

Presenting Heather Newton: A Beautiful Debut

Apparently the way to get me to buy a book is to have an author reading in a local independent bookstore. The last four books I bought were all during such events: one with Elizabeth Gilbert that I wrote about here, one with Louisa Shafia for her gorgeous cookbook, Lucid Food: Cooking for an Eco-Conscious Life (and then I got to go have dinner with her–that she cooked!), another one I’m going to write about soon (no spoilers here) and today’s topic: Heather Newton.

Heather is a local author and attorney. She works as a lawyer four days a week and on Friday she faithfully holes herself up to do nothing but write. She’s also a wife and a mom and, from all accounts, a genuinely nice human being. First, can I just say–wow. As a mom who is trying to make a living for myself while writing a couple of books and hopefully also succeeding in the nice-human-being arena, I’m impressed. Had she managed a sweet little self-published novel for regional audiences, that would still be quite the accomplishment. Instead, she’s written a complex and nuanced first novel full of intrigue and intimacy, loss and longing. Published by Random House, the book is already collecting humming reviews.

So let me add mine.

Under the Mercy Trees weaves together stories of the Owenby family through the unique voices of four characters. Set in the mid-1980s in rural western North Carolina, we gradually come to know several generations of family members through the memories and perceptions of the varied narrators. The story begins when Leon Owenby, a loner who lives in the old family homestead, goes missing. Martin, the youngest brother and the only member of the family to leave the county, reluctantly comes down from New York City, where the folks back home imagine him leading a glamorous life. In fact, Martin’s life is anything but. He is drunk much of the time and broke all of it. Martin’s voice provides a pivotal point of view for remembering the difficult and impoverished life he left behind, only to find a different kind of poverty and shame in his late middle age.

The other narrators are Martin’s high school girlfriend, Liza, his ghost-haunted sister Ivy, and Bertie, the wife of his brother James. While Newton alternates between voices, she also takes us back and forth between past and present, seamlessly crossing the distance between the 1950s childhoods of the narrators and their lives and concerns in 1986. The main characters’ grown children play out another generation’s angers and insecurities while the mystery of Leon’s disappearance blows like a ghost through every interaction.

Martin remains lovable in large part because of the other characters’ care for him. Liza and their childhood friend Hodge and Martin’s siblings all maintain a gentle respect for him, even as he tries to disguise his dilapidated life. Each main character carries a particular yearning that Newton slowly unfolds for us over the course of the book, painting a canvas of old longings that shape lives for decades.

I especially loved Ivy, the only narrator who speaks in the 1st person. At the reading, Newton shared with us that she felt Ivy had to speak in first person for the reader to be able to see and understand the ghosts as Ivy sees and understands them. Each narrator has suffered heart-breaking loss, but none more than Ivy. Yet she, who lives amidst the twin worlds of the living and the dead, walks with more equanimity through her hard-edged world than any of the others.

While I would never categorize Under the Mercy Trees as a mystery, the unraveling of Leon’s disappearance provides the mirror in which all the characters see themselves. There is mercy in the book, but no heaven-rending redemption. Rather than tie any neat packages to end this memorable tale, Newton offers the mercy of unspoken forgiveness and the quiet dissolution of guilt mixed with the continued reality of deep hidden hurt. She offers us a family in all of its unresolved love and hate, still suffering, still hoping, still together.

Listen to Write

Natalie Goldberg, in her classic Writing Down the Bones:

“At six years old I was sitting at my cousin’s piano in Brooklyn making believe I was playing a song and singing along with it: ‘In the gloaming, oh my darling …’ My cousin, who was nine years older, sat down beside me on the piano stool and screamed to my mother, ‘Aunt Sylvia, Natalie is tone-deaf. She can’t sing!’ From then on, I never sang and I rarely listened to music. When I heard the scores from Broadway shows on radio, I just learned the words and never tried to imitate the melody. … I was tone-deaf: I had a physical defect, like a missing foot or finger.

“Several years ago I took a singing lesson from a Sufi singing master, and he told me there is no such thing as tone-deafness. ‘Singing is ninety percent listening. You have to learn to listen.’ If you listen totally, your body fills with the music, so when you open your mouth the music automatically comes out of you. A few weeks after that, I sang in tune with a friend for the first time in my life and thought for sure I had become enlightened. My individual voice disappeared and our two voices became one.

“Writing, too, is ninety percent listening. You listen so deeply to the space around you that it fills you and when you write, it pours out of you. If you can capture that reality around you, your writing needs nothing else. You don’t only listen to the person speaking to you across the table, but simultaneously listen to the air, the chair, and the door. And go beyond the door. Take in the sounds of the season, the sound of the color coming in through the windows. Listen to the past, future and present right where you are. Listen with your whole body, not only with your ears, but with your hands, your face, and the back of your neck.

“Listening is receptivity. The deeper you can listen, the better you can write.”

Eat, Pray, Marry

Two weeks ago I heard Liz Gilbert, of Eat, Pray, Love fame, speak locally. Sponsored by Asheville’s wonderful Malaprop’s Bookstore, the speech was moved to a large auditorium at the University of North Carolina-Asheville to accommodate the crowd of several hundred (mostly) women. Let me just say that before reading EPL I was convinced I wouldn’t like it. I read it to understand what moved other people about her spiritual journey, not because I expected to be moved myself. I assumed I would find her spiritual exploration shallow and ungrounded.

Instead, I became a fan. The fact that I was a recently divorced woman when I read it may have had something to do with my reaction. I’d also like to think that I’m a discerning enough reader simply to appreciate her good writing. The girl can write, after all. But really, I loved that she let us in: she spoke of her neuroses and self-absorption and self-doubt and anger and fear and hope and love with an honesty that allowed me to sink and rise along with her emotions. Through her love of travel I flew with her to Italy and India and Indonesia, experiencing the different pace and sights and smells of each country.

So now she’s written another book: Committed, A Love Story. Actually published a while back, this book tour celebrates the paperback edition. Readers of EPL will remember that she finally succumbs to loving again near the end of her stay in Bali, having fallen for an older Brazilian man, also divorced, who gently courts her.

She does not, however, succumb to the temptation to marry. Quite the opposite, as we find out in this book. She and her beloved, Felipe, vow never to marry each other, having each been torn up by their experiences of divorce. They establish a two-continent relationship which is going just swimmingly until Homeland Security steps in and arrests and deports Felipe for misusing his temporary visas. Thus begins a journey for the two of them, internal and external, toward a legal marriage that will be recognized by the government and allow them to continue their relationship.

Liz, still being the lovable neurotic we met in EPL, can’t just consider this issue of marriage in isolation. She decides to plunge into months of research on the subject, its meaning across cultures and history, its meaning among her own family and friends, and its meaning among its promoters and detractors. The book, then, weaves the author’s all-consuming struggle to face her own marriage demons with the intellectual task of understanding what marriage actually is.

I found the result to be an enjoyable read, mixing fascinating cultural and historical tidbits, disturbing statistical reports and provocative philosophical questions with her own sweetly self-absorbed love story. It does not carry the emotional punch of Eat, Pray, Love (maybe because I’m not considering marriage any time soon?), but it does provide a good ride across southeast Asia and the history of marriage.  And it saves me reading books like Stephanie Coontz’s Marriage, a History, from which she liberally quotes.

So, to the talk then. Gilbert charmed us. She read a bit from the book and then opened the floor to questions and responded with that kind of off-hand, self-deprecating humor that one might use in a group of women friends. She easily laughed at her own foibles, the bizarre reality of her overwhelming success, seeing Julia Roberts play her on the big screen, and the terror of making her TED Talk. At the same time, she spoke of her work as a writer with reverence. She admitted to having chosen this work as a vocation when, as a teen, she lit a candle, promising to devote her life to the careful work of writing. Gilbert still feels writing to be a “holy calling”.

She described her routine of getting up early, around 5 am, and devoting the first part of her day to writing and research. Then, by about 1 pm, she says she isn’t good for much else but staring at a wall for the rest of the day. But while she believes in the hard work of staring at a blank page every single day, she also knows that the Muse makes a difference. “People say that the work is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration, and while that may be true, you can’t dismiss that 1%. That would be like throwing out the pearl for the oyster shell.”

When writing about yourself, I suppose it helps to be likable. And Gilbert is immensely that.

Cut the Risk

Even though the event mentioned in this article has passed, I’m very happy to be part of the team supporting the Women At Risk Program, so I thought I’d share what I wrote about them.  I also recommend emulating the model for the fundraising event described here in your community, wherever you are.