Summer Writing Day

Up at 7 a.m.: shower, coffee, kids packing up gear. Where are my water shoes? one asks. But you’re looking for that thing you wrote—the one you thought of last night, as you drifted off to sleep—but it’s an old thing. There’s surely a file, somewhere, but not on the current computer. Maybe on a flash drive? Where is that joke book I got at the little free library? I can’t find my water bottle. Everyone in the house is looking for something.

Gulp coffee, a shredded wheat biscuit. Wait, wasn’t it published somewhere, that thing you wrote? In some anthology? Root through drawers of journals and books while shouting at the kids that they 5 minutes left before their spaceship departs. Yes, here is the book, published in 2012. That means you sent someone a file at some point, right? Search through emails for the editor’s name. Yes, here’s the file, in an email from 2010. Save a copy of the file on current computer.

Are the kids ready? No, the kids aren’t ready. The kids are still eating shredded wheat and haven’t put on their sunscreen or their water shoes. Hurry, push them out the door, into the spaceship, which is really a minivan. They apply sunscreen and put on shoes as you drive “over the mountain,” as the locals say, into Avon and Canton and then Collinsville. There is really no mountain here at all—it’s a hill at best—but you’ve taken to calling it “the mountain” too because it’s the only one you’ve got. On the 10-mile drive listen to an audiobook—halfway there The Nest by Kenneth Oppel ends, and daughter puts in disc 1 of The Hobbit, which they’ve already heard because you’ve read them the entire Lord of the Rings. The kids comment that Rob Inglis has a better accent than you, can do voices better than you, and can sing better than you—but they prefer you anyway. Drop kids off at kayaking camp 5 minutes late. They’re the last ones there.

Drive to Panera to get a latte—but really to kill time until the Canton library opens. You’re outside the library doors when they’re unlocked, and you’re the first one in, moving quickly to your carrel, the one by the window, where you set up your computer. You wonder if the reference librarian wonders about you—the person who has spent exactly 2 hours and 20 minutes typing feverishly on a laptop every day for five days. You wonder if she remembers you from last summer when you did the same thing, 2 hours and 20 minutes a day X 5 days. You never set foot in this library except during kayak camp week.

You open all the files you’re working on. You read the file you found this morning only to discover that what you wrote 7 years ago isn’t what you thought it was. Only to discover that there are no shortcuts, that now you’ll simply have to write the thing you thought it was. The thing you should have written in the first place. But you can’t wish writing into the world. You have to put it down, word by word, like laying bricks. You can’t wish a brick wall into existence either.

As you work, you overhear every conversation that the reference librarian has with patrons. By the end of the week, you know about her son’s medical history, the films she’s watched recently, where to buy a good pie, the best program for learning Portuguese quickly, where to take a car that has an automatic window stuck halfway down, and the territorial robin that thinks her birdbath is its nest. You hear these conversations, but you still work.

The big thing you’re writing—whatever it is—has become shockingly long, which probably means it’s that thing that begins with a B, but you don’t normally call it that. It started out in April as an essay, but then by the time you sent it to your writing group in May it had ballooned beyond essay—nearly 25,000 words!—to become some kind of monstrous essayvella. Your writing group said things you didn’t really want to hear—that there were too many things going on, that it was more than one essay, that it could be fractured apart into 3 or 7 or 10 essays, or that maybe there was a way to bring it all together but it needed organization and more about x, y, z—and then you resisted this advice for two days but finally capitulated because they were right and you decided you were writing some kind of triptych—a thing with three parts—but now it’s broken itself into four, and it still isn’t finished.

Actually, it began the day after Trump was elected, when you started a new file that was full of pasted bits of things you found online with your own added incoherence. But the thing isn’t about Trump at all—his name is never even mentioned once—so how can that be the beginning?

Actually, it started 6 years ago when you wrote in the notebook you were carrying around with you back then: write an essay about dolls. And the thing you’re writing is about dolls—or it was—only it’s not anymore, not really, and your writing group told you so at the last meeting when you gave them 32,000 mostly new words, so how can that be the beginning?

Actually, it began in childhood when you tried to write a novel about a crazy doll collector named Mrs. Buckett and when you began to document the events of your life for some inscrutable future, driven by a need to make notes for some unknown but necessary story TBD, TBA. Only you had no idea why you were writing, or what was important, or how it would all come together. For example, did you really need to write down that on November 3, 1984, you learned to play “Cadet Boogie” on the accordion and you got a new pen and you went to the library and you went to the New York Pizzeria and your brother ate all the pepperoni off the pizza and you took a shower and washed your hair and your bangs need to be cut? Probably not. You had no idea what you were doing, or why, so how can that be the beginning?

You still don’t know what you’re doing, or why, but in that 2 hours and 20 minutes you write the part that you thought maybe you had already written, 7 years ago, and then you pick the kids up from kayak camp, and you drive them back over the mountain. They are wet and tired and hungry, but Rob Inglis’s commanding voice speaking of Bilbo Baggins keeps them captivated. At home they’ll need to be fed, but they’re old enough to forage, so they do. You have no idea what they eat. Mostly bread? Leftovers? One of them—the one that eats cherries—is spitting pits in the backyard. The other one is slicing a pear. They are fine, so you will write a little more. There’s just a little more you want to do.

You write at a desk in the living room, because you have no study, no room of your own, so the kids move about the house around you, and you occasionally field their questions. Do you want to play Mexican Train with me? Yes, but later. Do we have any more naan bread in the downstairs freezer? Not sure, go check. Where’s that book about solar eclipses? Check the bedside table. The daughter cocoons herself in the hammock out back to read, and the son works on the custom shoe rack he’s building for his room, which means that he gets out the Deep River blue paint that he picked out at Home Depot to paint it with, which means that he covers himself in Deep River blue paint, but he is outside and happy, so you can get work done.

I think we’ve run out of frozen peas. OK, put them on the list. Can you tell if this water bottle has BPA in it? Let me take a look. Can you open this jar of yeast? Probably. Will you have time to read to us later? Wouldn’t you prefer Rob Inglis? No, we prefer you! Yes, we’ll read before bed.

You check in on your online class. The students are writing beautiful essays about blended families and trees and racism and religion and elderly parents and sex and addiction and childhood. You read a couple of their pieces, post comments. Then check your email. What are the details about a reading you’re planning this fall? You respond. Will you write a letter of recommendation for a former student applying to Ph.D. programs? You will. Check Facebook. Will you review an essay written by a non-native speaker of English? You can’t, no time. Sorry. You have a deadline: in 3 weeks, you head back to the classroom. There’s never enough time for all of it—all of the demands and requests.

You take a break to play Mexican Train, then Five Crowns with the kids. One of them is making bread, so he runs off to punch down his dough. The other says she needs to do her 30 minutes of algebra for the day. Start a load of laundry. Assign a few chores: take out the trash, clean the counter, sweep the stairs, fold the dish towels. Go back to your computer, work another half hour.

You’ve been doing this for over a dozen years now, and you’re no longer a special snowflake when it comes to getting work done. You no longer need a secluded room, perfect quiet, a cup of tea with a matching saucer, a good frame of mind. You know now that the room of your own is in your head, and the time to write is now. In the summer the room of your own is the Canton library during kayak camp and the Wethersfield library during writing camp and poolside during swim team practice and the bleachers during softball practice and Panera and the patio in the backyard and the living room and in bed at night with the laptop propped up on your knees. If you wait for the perfect time or perfect place, you will wait for years. You will wait until the house is clean and the stuff all organized, put away in tidy labeled bins, and the laundry and dishes are done and the counters are spotless. You will wait until your kids grow up and leave home. You will wait until you can stop working other jobs. You will wait until you are dead.

You finish one little bit, and then it’s time to think about dinner. What’s for dinner? Never mind, daughter has made dinner. Son has made fresh bread. Husband joins you for a family meal, another round of Mexican Train.

The evening is theirs: a walk around the neighborhood, a book before bed. Tonight, it’s The Rithmatist by Brandon Sanderson. Daughter knits a scarf and son sketches while you read. Before lights out, you do your nightly writing, the three of you together. You’re in your third year of writing every night with the kids. What happened today? they always ask, so you review the day for them. And then you write—just five lines—but it’s something. Will you ever need to know that you listened to The Hobbit on audiobook and your son painted his shoe rack Deep River blue and you made small baby steps of progress on the thing that you still stubbornly call an essay? Probably not. But in case you do, there’s a record.

In bed, laptop on knees, you read over the new parts of the thing. You allow yourself to peek at your current word count—74,039—so it probably really is that B-word, but you will keep deluding yourself and calling it your essay, because an essay seems containable, possible, something you could finish, something with an end, something you could conceivably write in a season. Or two. Or a year. It’s already so long, but you begin to wonder if you need even more about x, even though x was supposed to be a different thing, a new writing project altogether. Just as the writing expands to fill all corners of your life, the thing seems to be expanding to encompass everything. This thing—this non-essay, this B-word, this memoir-y thing—is starting to be about everything, because in a life everything is connected to everything else. How do you declare: this is related to that, but not that? How do you draw the lines between projects, create the demarcations between one B-word and another? How much of this thing do you keep, and how much do you take out and put away for later? This is what you will think about, as you drift toward sleep. Maybe it began four months ago, or nine, or six years ago, or thirty, and maybe you’ll never know when and where it began, but you will keep working on this thing, you will keep kneading and shaping it until you figure out what it is. You will see it through to the end. Tomorrow. Or the day after tomorrow. Or the day after that. 

Xylotheque Reviews

Xylotheque has been out for a little over a year now. I've collected a number of reviews of the book with links below.

• Brenda Miller wrote a beautiful lyric essay/review at the Los Angeles Review of Books ("Pregnant Pauses: Yelizaveta P. Renfro’s Lyric Essays").
• Lenore Myka contributed a review to Colorado State University's Center for Literary Publishing (home of the Colorado Review).
• Gwendolyn Edward wrote a review for American Microreviews & Interviews.
• BK Loren reviewed the book for Orion (link to pdf here).
• Susan Wittig Albert wrote a review for Story Circle Book Reviews.
• Maggie Trapp recently reviewed the book for Terrain.org ("Taproot~Writing a Life of Trees").

And here's a recent interview about the book at Story Circle.

Xylotheque: "Soviet Trees"

My book, Xylotheque, is made up of nine essays accompanied by ten photographs. Every couple of weeks, I am posting an excerpt from one of the essays along with a photograph that was not included in the book. The photo accompanying this post was taken in Riverside when I was twelve, shortly before the events described in the essay. “Soviet Trees” first appeared in Parcel in 2011.

Excerpt from "Soviet Trees"

The girls crowd around you, studying your face, your hair, especially your clothes. They scrutinize the words Highland and Riverside printed in goldenrod letters on your royal-blue sweat shirt. What do they mean? Are they a brand name? The girls demand answers. They ask you to repeat the words again and again. You’ve been taken captive by these anthropologists in the guise of Soviet teenage girls. Like all anthropologists, they see you projected through themselves. They don’t understand why you would grow weary of saying the words—Highland, Riverside, Highland, Riverside—like some tired incantation. As far as you’re concerned, whatever significance the words carry has been eked out on the third or fourth repetition, and you want to tell them that the words are now nonsense on your tongue, that you yourself have forgotten what they mean. Highland. Riverside. For the girl-anthropologists the words are redolent of freshly manufactured goods, and of freedom and dollars. They stare at your sweat shirt as though it provides a window into America, all of it, in its unimaginable wealth.

There a few things you need to know. It’s the summer of 1987, and you’re in Kuybyshev, a city closed to foreigners. The girls are Young Pioneers, and this is still the Soviet Union—but actually, there’s no still about it. Remember that. It simply is, for you and the girls, for as long as you’ve been alive, and for as long as your parents have been alive. To say it is still the Soviet Union is like boarding the Titanic for her maiden voyage, looking out at her massive decks, and thinking, Someday, I’ll remember this as the time when the Titanic was still afloat. How could you believe, standing on the deck, that either of those colossal ships, the Titanic or the Soviet Union, would ever go down?

You’re only twelve—remember that, too—but you’ve been put in the oldest group, with girls who are mostly fourteen, because you’re tall and precocious. They keep asking about what kinds of things you own, how much stuff costs in America, what the stores are like, and how much money your family has. They want a full inventory of America, from top to bottom, from side to side, as though America is just a vast storage unit full of material goods. You don’t know where to begin, but you feel like a celebrity. For the first time in your life, you’re popular, the star attraction. You suddenly have so many friends you can’t remember their names. They crowd closer and closer, trying to lay their claims on you, trying to see what an American looks like. They comment on your American face, which leaves you stunned. Americans have always commented on your Russian face. It’s turning out you look like no one at all. It’s turning out that your amalgamation of Russian and American features has made you only uniquely yourself, unlike anyone else, which is the last thing you want. You’re twelve, remember. You want to shout—but I’m Russian like you!—though quite clearly, you’re not. Quite clearly, you don’t belong here. The hot heavy press of the girls in the cramped humid room renders you an exotic cornered animal whose fate lies in the hands of your captors. And quite clearly, they haven’t finished sizing you up yet. They haven’t yet decided what to make of you.

They demand to know, among other things, how you got here. To get into the camp you have to have a pass, and in order to get a pass, you have to have connections. You explain that your mother was able to get you a pass through her former college roommate, who is connected to the trade union. The girls seem dubious. This is a camp for future Soviets. It certainly is not a camp for American girls, even American girls who don’t believe they’re American, who think they’re Russian, which is the kind of American girl you are.

In your slightly awkward Russian, you tell your unlikely story: that your mother is Russian and your father American, that they met in graduate school in Leningrad, that you were born in Kuybyshev and lived there with your Russian grandparents and mother and aunt until you were three. And then you left with your mother to be with your American father in a fantastical place called Riverside, California. Yes, you’ve seen the Pacific Ocean. Yes, you have a river of sorts, but it’s puny—often just a dry riverbed—compared to the Volga,. Yes, that’s the unlikely kind of rivers you have in America. And you have unlikely trees—palm and navel orange and avocado and eucalyptus—and unlikely stores, too, where, yes, it’s true, you can buy just about anything you want, as long as you have money. Yes, Highland is the name of your school, but you don’t know why. You know the names for many things in America but don’t know why those are their names.

To read more of this essay, look for my book Xylotheque, available from the University of New Mexico Press and other online retailers.

Life and Work after the MFA

Recently I was asked, along with two other alumni, to return to my MFA alma mater to teach a graduate class and give a reading as part of the visiting writers series. After the reading, we alumni were asked to discuss life and work after the MFA. So on my seven-hour train ride from Hartford to Washington, DC, I began to think about what I would tell students currently in the midst of an MFA program about what might await them.

I was fortunate to be able to come down a couple of days early, which allowed me to catch up with my MFA friends who still live in the area. Ten years out from the MFA, we talked about where we were, what we had done, what we were working on, and what roles writing and reading still play in our lives.

My friend Ananya and I both had children (who are now fourth graders) right after finishing our MFAs. While her full-time day job, an editing position, does not allow for a great deal of creativity, she’s published nonfiction at the Washingtonian, The Guardian, and The Baltimore Sun, and she is also an assignment editor at the Washington Independent Review of Books.

My friend Christa accepted a full-time editor/writer position with a federal agency right after finishing her MFA and has now worked in this career for a decade. With two preschool-age children, she currently doesn’t have a lot of time for creative projects, but she does carve out writing time when she can—writing on her phone, for example, just to capture observations, dialogue, whatever comes to her. Since completing her MFA, her nonfiction has appeared in the Oxford American (available online here) and on PBS.org.

My friend Amanda had her debut novel, I Know Where I Am When I'm Falling, published earlier this year. The mother of adult children, she is currently at work on more fiction, teaches part time at a community college, runs book discussion groups, and is also a sculptor.

Unfortunately, the four of us were not able to get together all at the same time, but I did get to spend an evening with Ananya and Christa, and the following afternoon with Ananya and Amanda. (Amanda blogged about our conversation here.)

And as I was talking with these friends, I kept thinking about what advice I would give to current MFA students about what awaits them after the degree. Here’s what I’ve come up with.

You might look back on your time in the MFA and wonder what you’ve squandered those two or three years on. Right now—these years you are in a graduate program supported by people who care passionately about writing—is your time to write. Seize it. Make the most if it. You might feel overwhelmed with seminar papers, part-time jobs, teaching duties, but remember that right now your life is largely devoted to creative writing. And that may never be true again. Your life is likely to become even more overwhelming and complicated after the MFA. You may never have the kind of time you have now. And take advantage of all the resources available to you in your program (and in other departments as well). Take classes with a wide range of faculty in multiple genres. It took me years to figure out I was also a nonfiction writer because I stuck so stubbornly to classes within my chosen genre—fiction. And to this day I regret not taking a single poetry class during my MFA program. Seize these opportunities.

You aren’t likely to make your living as a writer of literary fiction, creative nonfiction, or poetry. You may make some money at it, but it probably won’t pay the bills. And unless you’re independently wealthy or have a spouse with a well-paying job who is able to support you financially, you’ll need to take on other work that does pay the bills. Consider this before finishing your MFA. Think about ways you can make yourself marketable in a career. Think about the types of work—editing, teaching, technical writing, curriculum development, grant writing—that you might take on and how you can begin to prepare for that future now. This might mean working as an editor for a scholarly or literary journal affiliated with your institution, being an RA for a professor, being a TA to get teaching experience, taking a class in grant writing or business writing, finding an internship in the field you’re interested in, working at a part time job that might become full time, volunteering, finding a mentor, taking classes with faculty outside of your department, etc. This doesn’t need to take up a huge amount of your time; even making preliminary steps can help poise you for employment after the MFA.

Keep writing after the MFA. It will be hard. Suddenly, your vast support network—your professors, your fellow students—will be all but gone. No one will be demanding work on a regular basis. No one will be encouraging you in weekly workshops. Writing may quickly slip down to the bottom of your to-do list. Writing will go from being the center of your working life to a labor of love. Writing will take time away from your family life, from paid work. And you might find—as I did and as I still do—that days, weeks, months can slip by without any creative work getting done. Christa said, “In the MFA program and right after, I had these ideals of what writing time looked like—long stretches of time that I could set aside for unfettered and uninterrupted writing.” For most, this is the ideal, not the reality. You will need to find ways to get the work done, if you want to continue to write. This perseverance takes on different forms—writing before dawn, writing after bedtime, writing on weekends, writing at your paid job, writing in little notebooks while your toddlers play. Find the ways that work for you, and stick to them.

Select your writing projects wisely. If you’re like me, you might have half a dozen books that you’d like to be working on all at the same time. There are always more projects than time to do them in. Pick the ones that you pursue carefully. If publication is important to you, then ask yourself: how likely is it that I will be able to publish this particular piece? Christa pointed out to me that while all four of us received our MFAs in fiction, three of us—Christa, Ananya, and myself—have published more nonfiction than fiction. Do I love nonfiction more than fiction? Not necessarily. But publishing it is easier. In Christa’s words: “The time crunch of post-MFA life has made me so pragmatic in a way I wasn't in graduate school.  I love all of my creative writing projects—short fiction, novel, nonfiction—but with so little writing time, I feel this pressure to ‘choose wisely’ in what I do write—what’s most likely to get published? It's become important for me to balance that pragmatism with making sure I love what I'm writing.”

What you now think success will look like is probably not what it will look like. When I was asked, during a casual conversation on my trip, whether or not I consider myself a “success,” I didn’t immediately have an answer. For one thing, I guess I don’t think of my life in terms of “success” or “failure”—I just keep working. But also, ten years ago when I was finishing my MFA, I never would have thought that I would end up here. True, I have published two books and have had work in numerous journals, but at the same time I don’t make my living as a writer. There are a lot of other things I’ve done—teaching, editing, curriculum development—that bring in more money and actually pay the bills. When I asked Amanda the question about success, she said something along these lines: “I get to spend most of my time, paid and unpaid, reading and writing, and thinking about reading and writing, and talking about reading and writing.” Yes, I thought. Me too. Even when I’m teaching or editing, I’m still engaged with reading and writing. When I think about it in that context, my days are full of the work that I was preparing to do in my MFA program. Success. My MFA writing friends and I have not (yet) penned bestsellers, but there is success of the daily, quiet kind, which is more lasting. Like spending our days reading and writing. Like being asked to return to my alma mater to teach the students whose shoes I was once in. Success.

Keep your writing friends. Stay in touch with people in your MFA program. Find good, sympathetic readers for your work—people who get what you’re trying to do and are generous with praise and criticism—and be proactive about continuing to exchange work with them after the MFA. If you get a full-time day job, you might find yourself surrounded by people who are not sympathetic to your creative goals. Suddenly, you’ll find yourself adrift, your writing friends scattered, distant. Find ways to stay in touch with them. Keep seeking out people who love the things you love, and connect with them, virtually or in person—however you can. Amanda and I have read one another’s book drafts. I hope to read a draft of Ananya’s novel soon. We are, as Amanda once said to me, members of the same tribe. Ten years after my MFA, this is one of the things that endures—the connections I made with fellow students. Even though the members of your tribe may scatter far and wide, keep those relationships. They will help to sustain your writing life long after you receive your diploma.

Xylotheque: "Mulberry"

My book, Xylotheque, is made up of nine essays accompanied by ten photographs. Every couple of weeks, I am posting an excerpt from one of the essays along with a photograph that was not included in the book. "Mulberry" first appeared in Adanna in 2011. 

Excerpt from "Mulberry"

Seeing for the first time the purple glints of my newborn’s eyes, her skin downy and puckered and tumescent, perfectly ripe for this world, I thought again of mulberries, of being held in their branches, of purple stains, of the burst of berry on tongue, and I saw giving birth was akin to climbing a tree: a reaching toward light, nourishment, endurance, life, a cradling and an offering of the most cherished to the world.

Maybe this is not true. Maybe I did not think of the mulberry then. Maybe I seamed it into my memory later: mulberry, birth. Who can say what thoughts occur during birth? It is stark physicality, a rending. It is an elbow against sky. And yet, on some level, the mulberry was there, subsumed by my laboring. Everything in my life was there with me, on that delivery table. Is it a lie to create memories after the fact? Is it a fiction to plaster over experience with words? Is it a violence to insist a tree means something other than itself?

To read more of this essay, look for my book Xylotheque, available from the University of New Mexico Press and other online retailers.

Xylotheque: "Cause of Death"

My book, Xylotheque, is made up of nine essays accompanied by ten photographs. Every couple of weeks, I am posting an excerpt from one of the essays along with a photograph that was not included in the book. "Cause of Death" first appeared in South Dakota Review in fall 2009, and it was cited as a “notable” essay in The Best American Essays 2010. 

Excerpt from “Cause of Death”

The man who came to see me to buy a site to bury his wife looked like a man who’d been inexplicably slapped by the earth itself. He looked like a man who’d been knocked down by a colossal sea wave while standing in the middle of a cornfield. He looked like a blind, burrowing animal that had been spit out by the dirt and left to blink and burn in the glare of full sunlight. Actually, he didn’t look all that different from many of the people I met while working at the cemetery, but I remember this man while I have forgotten many others. He was blindsided by grief, bewildered, as though he had been unexpectedly thrust on a stage beneath blinding lights and asked to play the role of a man who has just lost his wife. And he was still only figuring out how to be an actor, how to play this role, and it was vastly unfair that he didn’t get acting lessons or at least a dress rehearsal. He was just in his forties—and his wife had been, too—and this was completely unexpected, he told me. It was just completely unexpected, he told me again. He repeated this phrase a number of times during our morning together, as though offering an explanation or even an apology for why he had not come sooner, had not prepared for this, had not filled out the paper work last week before this had happened to him and he could think more clearly. Completely unexpected: this was why he blinked his eyes so rapidly and seemed unable to concentrate fully on what I was explaining about the internment paper work. Yet he tried to be kind and attentive, decorous, as though he didn’t want to be any trouble at all, as though he was there to please me. It was as though he was the one doing all the comforting and had come to make his wife’s death easier on me, and not the other way around.

To read more of this essay, look for my book Xylotheque, available from the University of New Mexico Press and other online retailers.

Xylotheque: "Quercus"

My book, Xylotheque, is made up of nine essays accompanied by ten photographs. Every couple of weeks, I am posting an excerpt from one of the essays along with a photograph that was not included in the book. "Quercus" first appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review in spring/summer 2011. A condensed version titled "The Wisdom of the Oak" was reprinted in Reader's Digest in the June/July 2011 issue. 

Excerpt from “Quercus”

When I was just out of high school and thought I wanted to be a journalist, I spent close to four years working at several local daily newspapers in California. I wrote about hockey players and real estate agents, about preachers and bowlers, about criminals and mountain men. And often, as I gathered information for a story, I would feel the tug of those other lives that I glimpsed. For a day or an hour, I would mentally abandon my own life and imagine myself as someone else. I wanted to be a convert to another life.

For an afternoon, I dedicated my life to teaching pottery to senior citizens. I became a pyrotechnician and wowed thousands with my stunning fireworks displays. I joined the Seventh-day Adventist Church to become a follower of the charismatic black woman pastor I interviewed. I married the young, God-fearing trucker I met at a truck-stop chapel; he was from Pennsylvania and looking for, among other things, a wife. I became a classic-car buff and renovated a 1952 midnight-blue Chevy Fleetline. I trained to be a computer programmer and learned to design GIS programs for police to use in mapping crimes on a nationwide grid. When the Texan high school football players—whom I had come to interview to find out how much they ate—asked me what I was doing later, I became the kind of party girl who hung out late with athletes. I went to medical school to learn how to perform heart transplants on nine-year-old boys, like the one I wrote about, the one whose photo I took as he clutched a Winnie the Pooh doll in his hospital bed.

Daily I sought conversion: something powerful and sudden like a tornado to seize me up and shake me senseless, something to ravish me, to take me in its clutches forever and never set me back on earth. But working at daily newspapers, every day the view was different, the religion changed, the weather turned, the story was new. I never studied anything at length, I never knew anything in depth. I ran from one story to the next, my knowledge rudimentary. I was promiscuous in my yearnings, my many aborted passions. I took cuttings from all those lives, lined them up on a windowsill, where they shriveled, and all that remains now are yellowing clips in three-ring binders.

Now I am more than a dozen years removed from that life. Now what I want to learn most is how to stay put, how to be a student not of the sensational and transient but of the commonplace, the everyday, the enduring. Now instead of leaves of newspaper print, I collect a different kind of leaves, the real deal. Now I have become the student of a tree.

To read more of this essay, look for my book Xylotheque, available from the University of New Mexico Press and other online retailers.

Xylotheque: "Song of the Redwood Tree"

My book, Xylotheque, is made up of nine essays accompanied by ten photographs. Every couple of weeks, I am posting an excerpt from one of the essays along with a photograph that was not included in the book. "Song of the Redwood Tree" first appeared in South Dakota Review in 2011.

Excerpt from “Song of the Redwood Tree”

We look and look, but we do not see the trees. There is no place to stand to see an entire redwood. For hours we crane our necks, peering into the sky where the trees disappear from sight. We circle their behemoth trunks, stupefied. We are underwater. The light on the forest floor is murky, greenish, yet freighted with clarity. There is levity to our steps on the spongy duff. We are walking on the ocean floor. “The forest canopy is the earth’s secret ocean,” writes Richard Preston in The Wild Trees. Hundreds of feet above us, the trees collect fog from the air. Their canopies are like root systems reaching into the sky. They seem as distant as the stars from where we stand in our green-tinged seafloor environment. The trees reach into the earth and into heaven, drinking, drinking. We are blind to the work of the roots under our feet, to the slow constant pull, to the enormous suck, the seep of water upward, unceasing for centuries.

“You really can’t tell much about what’s happening in a forest from the ground,” says noted redwood expert Steve Sillett in 2009 National Geographic documentary titled Climbing Redwood Giants. So true. From the ground, we do not see the life that teems within the canopies hundreds of feet above us; we never glimpse, for example, the salamanders that live their whole lives in trees without once touching the ground. We do not see the epiphytes, fifty-plus species of mites, copepods, earthworms, bumblebees, huckleberries, lichens, voles, rhododendrons, currant and elderberry bushes, or the bonsai groves of California laurel, western hemlock, Douglas fir, tan oak, Sitka spruce, and buckthorn that perch atop the sprawling canopies that are like land masses held aloft in the sky. The canopies of the world’s forests, I learn, contain half of nature’s species. The scientists who rappel themselves into the trees, scaling redwood trunks like the faces of sheer cliffs, go into this undiscovered country. And they see.

Science has other ways of seeing. Researchers peer at the redwoods through microscopes, poring over cellulose, lichens, the structure of shrimp found snarled in trees hundreds of feet above sea level. They fly over the forests in twin-engine planes, using LIDAR, light detection and ranging, to create highly detailed maps of the topography of redwood forests, determining the heights of the tallest trees from the air. Dendrochronologists squint at great slabs of redwood cross sections, peering at the rings, counting, seeking out minute differences in annual growth. All of these are ways of seeing. And all ways glimpse only pieces of the whole.

To read more of this essay, look for my book Xylotheque, available from the University of New Mexico Press and other online retailers.

Xylotheque: "Lithodendron"

My book, Xylotheque, is made up of nine essays accompanied by ten photographs. Every couple of weeks, I am posting an excerpt from one of the essays along with a photograph that was not included in the book. "Lithodendron" first appeared in Blue Mesa Review in 2012.

Excerpt from “Lithodendron”

We come on one of the coldest days of the year. A steady wind pierces our clothing, and the overcast sky, bruised a faint gray and yellow, threatens rain. We are kept company by a raven that sits on a lone post and periodically rasps out a cry. The few other people who have come today are quiet and reverent, moving silently with heads bent to the wind. Wearing fleece jackets, windbreakers, and hiking boots, they move alone or in pairs. Our party of three seems excessive. There are no children besides my daughter, who is not quite five.

We have come to a forest that is a desert, a desert that is a forest. Vegetation maps identify this part of Arizona as “barren land” because greenery covers less than 5 percent of the surface. Shrubs, sparse grasses, lone stunted junipers, yucca, and prickly-pear cactuses stud the landscape here and there, but I have to seek them out. They are subtle, never accosting the eye. Petrified Forest National Park is a land of barrenness: cracked mud, dust, clay, multihued strata. In places the landscape seems rusted, and this is not so far from the truth. Oxidation produces reds, pinks, oranges. In other places, the strata are blue, gray, black. This land of arroyos, washes, canyons, mesas, and plateaus has been sculpted by erosion, picked clean by time.

The eye does not at first recognize the trees in this forest. They litter the ground in great broken slabs like ancient columns that have fallen to ruin. They have been literally turned to stone: petrified. What is a stone tree? Is it mineral or vegetable? They rest in heaps upon the desert floor like great bones sucked dry by the centuries. For millennia they were pressed between the strata of the earth, like botanical specimens preserved in the pages of a book. They are long-embedded splinters that have been exuded by the earth’s skin, which here is parched and scaly like a reptile’s. Or they are the blanched ribs of time itself, lying broken in an ascetic landscape. They are landmarks in time. The landscape itself seems broken, in a state of final ruin, and yet all landscapes are broken. All are in continuous states of creation and destruction. On this December day the land is just a single iteration of itself. It was never more complete. It was never fixed. 

  

To read more of this essay, look for my book Xylotheque, available from the University of New Mexico Press and other online retailers.

Xylotheque: "Navel Country"

My book, Xylotheque, is made up of nine essays accompanied by ten photographs. Every couple of weeks, I am posting an excerpt from one of the essays along with a photograph that was not included in the book. "Navel Country," which appeared in Colorado Review in 2013, was the last essay in the collection that I wrote. It is a memoir about my grandfather, about growing up in the Inland Empire, about orange trees and memory, about landscape and nostalgia.

Excerpt from “Navel Country”

Summiting, I look down. My eyes find the straight line of Palmyrita, now flanked by warehouses and a tech park. I search the land for groves and finally spot the eight acres still being farmed by an elderly widow; the block of green is nearly lost in the sprawl of houses and the rectangular white roofs of warehouses, a new patchwork overlaying the land. I look a little farther, toward the base of Blue Mountain, where the family groves used to be. Here, there is nothing at all, just leveled dirt. The developers have razed the trees but put nothing in their place. The project was halted when the economy went sour, the developers running out of resources or vision, running out of some essential quality necessary to effect a transformation. What is here is emptiness, waiting to be overwritten, waiting for the next iteration of progress, the next conquest.

I try to think of a way to tell my daughter what this place looked like when I was a child: all those verdant nubs of trees tucked up against the hills, tidy as machine stitching, nature perfected. I want to redeem my grandfather and the land that made him. Before I can say anything, my daughter speaks. “California feels like home because we’ve moved so many times we always live somewhere different, but California always stays the same.” This is her second trip up Sugarloaf so she has a reference point, a sense of continuity. “I can see why you would feel that way,” I tell her. I don’t say the rest out loud: You have the disease of nostalgia, too, I fear. You will someday think back to your childhood when you mistook your own innocence for an innocence of the world, when you mistook the simplicity of a child’s life for universal simplicity, your own happiness for universal happiness, when you mistook the long yawn of time that makes up childhood for permanence. Or worse, you’ll believe that you just missed out on something. And you did. And so did I. And so did we all. Even Grandpa.

Because when my grandfather arrived in California in 1922, even then people said the glory days were already past. I imagine the one perfect day—sometime in 1895 or perhaps 1905, when North and Tibbets were dead but my family was not yet on the scene—and it went by completely unnoticed. There was nothing remarkable about it, just a sun-drenched day with blossoms clustering tightly to the trees, their fragrance heavy in the air, and the Riversiders going about their business, driving their wagons up and down Victoria, men irrigating their groves, women buying eggs, and no one even suspecting that they had reached the pinnacle of their glory, that tomorrow and the day after and the day after the glory would slip a little further into the past, and even though more groves would be planted and more houses would be built, forever after there would be that sense of nostalgia, that sense that something beautiful and pure had slipped away. I see those Riversiders on their one perfect day, and they don’t know it’s perfect, and they have no one to tell them: This is it. You’re living the dream. Don’t let it go by unnoticed. Put a border around it and paste it to an orange crate. Hold on to it, however you can.

And then I picture myself as a sixteen-year-old girl, painting standpipes on a summer day that feels like it stretches forever, and I want to say the same things to her. I want to put a border around her. And does some future version of myself capture me here, today, at the top of a peak flanked by my young children, looking down on a vanished landscape, and does that future self long to put a border around this moment, render it as landscape? How many layers deep can nostalgia accrue? What is this palimpsest of the self? There is no extracting the self from landscape. We are the landscape, for it is our creation.
 

To read more of this essay, look for my book Xylotheque, available from the University of New Mexico Press and other online retailers.

Xylotheque: "Living at Tree Line"

My book, Xylotheque, is made up of nine essays accompanied by ten photographs. Every couple of weeks, I will post here an excerpt from one of the essays along with a photograph that was not included in the book. I begin with the opening essay, “Living at Tree Line,” which is about working at a cemetery and bristlecone pines. This essay, published in 2004 in North American Review, was the first essay in the collection that I wrote.

Excerpt from “Living at Tree Line”

I am at the cemetery, waiting for my nine o’clock appointment to arrive. The two women are thirty minutes late. The cemetery is peaceful in the chilly October morning. A squirrel digs with frantic speed in a pile of brown leaves; jays twitter politely in the evergreens; a fat groundhog snuffles at the earth around his hole. If I am very still I may see a timid deer emerge from the woods and bask in the sunshine among the old bone-white headstones, streaked with rust and black from a century of rains. My fingers, grown numb from the cold, are curled tightly around a manila folder containing my color-coded cemetery maps, which I designed on a computer using a spreadsheet program. I walk, kicking at the drifts of crackly, dead leaves, and read headstones.

The two women, who are selecting a space for their father, are very picky. They are Caribbean and Catholic and think that we bury people too close together. Each site, I tell them, is ten feet long and forty inches wide. They think their father needs more space, but they are unwilling to pay for it. They do not like any of the sites I have shown them. The first ones were too near the parkway. We have since moved away from the parkway. Now they say they don’t want a site with dead grass. It is fall, I tell them, all the grass dies in the fall. It will grow again in the spring. They don’t seem to be paying attention. They point to a large oak tree—the only tree of any size in this section—and they ask if there are any spaces available under the tree. No, I say, everyone asks that. Everyone wants to be under a tree. And I repeat what I’ve heard my boss, the cemetery manager, say: that tree won’t be there forever.

To read more of this essay, look for my book Xylotheque, available from the University of New Mexico Press and other online retailers.

Xylotheque

When the box of books finally arrives, when I lift the top one out and hold it up like a newborn, feel its weight in my hands, trace the length of its spine, riffle its pages, marvel at the number of words that I have somehow put down on paper, it is all a little like giving birth, like seeing for the first time the face of the child that I felt kicking within me for so long, like touching the infant’s skin, holding the weight of that new being, marveling that somehow, I created this person. And it is also like a reunion, to finally meet this being I have thought of for so long. There is a keen feeling of recognition. Oh, I have known you all along. Oh, there you are at last, and you are just as I expected. Babies and books—both erupting suddenly into the world out of their long, hushed crafting. Babies and books—now I have two of each.

A Book and Its Cover

Even though I doggedly believe in my books long before they are published, long before any editor has expressed even a remote interest, somehow I still doubt that my books will ever be physical objects in the world until I see their covers.  The cover of Xylotheque: Essays features a photograph that I took at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts, well after all of the essays had been written. In fact, the weekend before my final manuscript was due at the press, I took a copy of it, along with my camera and a copy of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, to Concord and to Walden Pond where I finished the book. And so, even though none of the essays are about Concord or Walden—since I had never before been there—still, the book was influenced by that place. And so I think it is a fitting cover image.

Page Proofs

For so long—could it really be years of your life?—you, alone, have believed that the book is a book. Despite all evidence to the contrary—the scrawled-over manuscript pages that screamed hopeless, unfinishable pipe dream, the slippery words that you moved and added and omitted until you no longer understood their sense, and most especially the editors (a dozen, maybe more) who turned your work away, declaring it most decidedly not a book—you have continued to believe in your book’s essential bookness. The words, the paragraphs, the pages deserved to be wedded, bound together beneath a common cover. This was your stubborn, solitary belief. And though for years no one believed in your book—with the exception of a small handful of friends who share your lunacy—you kept sending it out into the world, hoping to infect someone with your lonely dream.

And one day—when, if you have to be honest, your unflagging belief had started to rub away—it happened. An editor called with good tidings. And now—now that you hold page proofs in your hands, now that a cover exists—you marvel that so many others are in agreement with you and your madness. A team—production editors, copyeditors, peer reviewers, writers of blurbs, graphic designers, marketing reps—a whole platoon, it seems, is now on your side, working to finish what you started years ago, confirming that intense, private belief you’ve kept for so long: that what you have created is a book.

Book Review: Juliet in August

Dianne Warren’s Juliet in August is a novel in stories, most of which take place over a period of about twenty-four hours in the tiny town of Juliet, Saskatchewan, population 1,011, located at the edge of the Little Snake sand hills. The book moves among a dozen characters in five overlapping storylines. Though the characters repeatedly intersect, all are profoundly alone, glimpsing only a partial view of the whole, often misapprehending or not even noticing what is happening outside of their limited perspectives. The author portrays her characters tenderly, empathetically. Their lives are understated, quiet, and so is Warren’s prose. Her style deceptively simple and straightforward, she conscientiously builds these unassuming characters into authentic, complex human beings.

If Warren’s book can be said to have a central character, it is Lee Torgeson, a man in his twenties who recently inherited the family farm from his adoptive parents. He is just as alone as the others—if not more so—for he lives by himself in the country, and over the course of the book he goes on a long journey, a hundred-mile ride on a stray Arab horse, tracing the route that two legendary cowboys took in a hundred-mile race decades ago. During his journey, Lee visits his adoptive parents’ graves and thinks over what he knows of his life—beginning with being left as an infant on the Torgesons’ doorstep—and the distance he has always felt between himself and his well-meaning but laconic caretakers. Left with fragments of their advice—get yourself a good map, use the silver tea service—he still wonders about his origins. After his arduous ride, he returns home to discover a new source of information about his past; though his transformation over the course of the book is not profound, we can see the subtle shift in his perceptions of who he is and where he finds himself in the world.

Another storyline focuses on Blaine and Vicki Dolson, who are on the verge of bankruptcy, about to lose the family farm. While Blaine is doing road work to keep financially afloat, Vicki takes her six children into town on unnecessary errands in order to avoid the drudgery of the task that awaits her at home—processing the beans from the garden. While browsing in Robinson’s store, Vicki spots Marian Shoenfeld. She quickly appraises Marian’s behavior: “She sees Marian take a mint-green outfit off the rack and hold it up to herself in front of a mirror. It looks like a pantsuit of some kind, slacks and a vest. Curious that Marian is buying a new outfit. Maybe she’s going to a special event, a wedding or a graduation. She doesn’t think Marian is the kind of person who would buy new clothes without a reason.” And then Vicki turns her attention back to her own affairs—looking for caning supplies and watching after her children (though she is not nearly vigilant enough—later, her daughter breaks an arm and floods the hardware store with red paint).

We as readers are attuned to Marian’s presence in the store because hers is another of the story strands that we are following. Marian and Willard Shoenfeld run the town’s drive-in movie theater. Bound together in unexpressed love and profound misunderstanding, they have continued to live together since the death of Ed, Willard’s brother and Marian’s husband. Though nine years have passed since Ed’s death, Willard, a lifelong bachelor, is still convinced that Marian is on the verge of leaving. Each time she makes an overture to speak to him, he is certain that she’ll be announcing her departure. Even when she stands outside his bedroom door in her nightgown in the middle of the night, Willard cannot read her true motive.

Willard is so undemonstrative, so out of touch with his own feelings, that “he just couldn’t stand it—the idea that some pretty little girl might actually like him, and that he’d never be able to live up to whatever idea she had in her head about who he was, but it had to be a wrong idea, because if it were right she’d like someone else and not him.” When Willard finds Marian “sitting on the couch in an outfit he’s never seen before” (presumably the pantsuit from Robinson’s) with two cocktails waiting, he can only assume that Marian must be expecting someone else. He tries to flee, but she invites him to have a drink before dinner. Perplexed, he spends time shaving and changing his shirt several times. After drinking his cocktail, he abruptly loses his nerve. “I’ve just remembered . . .” he says and leaves, heading for the local diner.

Late that night, Marian comes to his room, and in a beautifully understated scene, the two make love without speaking a word, after which Marian quietly returns to her own room. Later still, when the two are awakened by teenagers setting fire to the movie screen, Marian tries to go for water, “but Willard holds her back and says, ‘Too late. Let it go.’ Then, ‘Don’t go, Marian. Don’t leave me. I love you.’ Surprising the absolute hell out of himself.” This man who had such a damper on his own feelings and was so terrified that the woman he loved would leave didn’t even know until this night that he loves her. And their story concludes: “Marian stands in the open doorway as though she’s on fire with the flames behind her, watching him, and she says, ‘I’m not going anywhere, Willard. Where in the world did you get that idea?’”

 

Warren’s is a subdued book about the inner life, about the subtle shifts of our internal landscapes that are echoed in the shifting of the dunes surrounding the town, ceaselessly burying and uncovering missing objects from the past. At the very end of the book, Lee pitches a tent among the dunes and lets the wind rip pages out of his boyhood desert scrapbook, sending a map of the Sahara and a marketplace in Cairo flying out into the sand.  The whole scrapbook skids is eventually lost. As the wind rages all night, “He imagines things blowing around outside—clumps of tumbleweed, empty cigarette packs, plastic water bottles. The wind exposing objects from the past. A deerskin pouch, perhaps. The dipper from a water pail. A worn leather boot cracked and missing the lace, a coffee can blown from the windowsill of a one-room shack.” And Warren has retrieved this one day in Juliet from the shifting sand, these dozen lives, and has held them up to the light to reveal their elaborate contours in this beautiful book.

Keeping Track: Fiction of Lists

I am fascinated with lists. I collect books such as The List: The Uses and Pleasures of Cataloguing by Robert E. Belknap and Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts, and Other Artists’ Enumerations by Liza Kirwin. I keep endless lists, I’ve written about making lists, and I’ve written fiction based on lists. And recently, I had the pleasure of reading through short story submissions and selecting stories for an anthology, Keeping Track: Fiction of Lists, due out from Main Street Rag this month.

 

In the spirit of crafting fiction from lists, I offer the following writing exercise, which I’ve used in creative writing classes.

 

Starting with Lists: A Fiction Writing Exercise

 

“Bare lists of words are found suggestive to an imaginative and excited mind.”

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet,” 1844

“Fictional prose is wonderfully omnivorous, capable of assimilating all kinds of nonfictional discourse—letters, diaries, depositions, even lists—and adapting them to its own purposes.”

—David Lodge, The Art of Fiction, 1992

1. Think about different types of lists that can be used to frame a story. For example:

• A specific list or catalogue (types of birds, favorite superheroes, foods I won’t eat, places I’ve been, things I’ve lost, etc.)
• Facebook status updates, tweets, or text messages
• A “to do” list, a “how to” list, a shopping list, or a packing list
• A PowerPoint presentation (which often includes bulleted lists)
• Other brief texts, such as timelines, advertising copy, menus, inventories, itineraries, recipes, rules and regulations, etc.

2. Pick one of the forms that you’re comfortable using. Think about what kind of character would use the form you’ve selected. For example, an avid birdwatcher may very well make a list of birds, but an elderly woman who has never used a computer is not going to describe her day in a series of tweets. In other words, make sure the chosen form fits with the story and characters and that the storytelling impulse lies in the form. Don’t force it.

3. Once you have your form and protagonist in mind, make a list of a dozen or so items—e.g., a dozen Facebook status updates, a dozen things to do, a dozen instructions, a dozen items to buy, a dozen food items on a menu, a dozen meetings on an itinerary, etc. Be sure to leave space between the items to insert additional writing later.

4. Now read through your items and see what kind of a story they are beginning to tell. Rearrange them if necessary. How does your protagonist get from the first item to the second? From the second to the third? What happens in the interim? Begin to fill in the gaps between the items with narrative. Have your character explain her list, moving the story from one item to the next.

5. When you’re finished, read through what you’ve written. Does it look like the rough draft of a story? If not, what’s missing? Is there more to tell? Consider the following three outcomes:

• Are the items in your original list still serving an important purpose in the story? What would happen if you took them out and left only the narrative that you inserted? You might find that your original list is only serving as scaffolding, and once you build the story around it, you can dismantle it.
• Or what would happen if you added more items to your list? What would happen if you added more narrative? Can you find a balance between the number of items and the amount of narrative that makes the story seem complete? Are the lists and the narrative related to one another and serving to enhance one another?
• A third possibility is you might discover that the narrative does not, in fact, serve a useful function in the story. It might have allowed you to learn more about your character and his circumstances, but in the end, you might find that you want to tell the entire story in list form. Just make sure that your chosen form is able to adequately tell the full story. Can your lists evolve or change sufficiently to reflect your character’s growth over the course of the story?   

One Thousand Books

When I think of my parents, I think of them reading: my father in his green velour recliner, a history of Ancient Greece or Kievan Rus open in his hands, my mother on the couch with half a dozen books spread around her, linguistics texts, children’s picture books, literary fiction in Russian and English, Shakespeare. My parents are readers, and some of my earliest memories are of being read to by my mother, in Russian, from Russian fairytales and classics.

Now, my house is still full of books, and my children have hundreds—even thousands—of books within arm’s reach, every day. I don’t remember a day since their births that I haven’t read to them. I can’t imagine a house without books in it.

And yet, there are many children who do not live amongst such wealth. There are many children who will not have memories of being read to by their parents. When I was about ten, a neighbor boy named Michael, who was around six, lived in a home with no books. He had no adults who read to him. He often came to my house and sat on the couch with my siblings and me, listening to my mother read to all of us. Even though she read in Russian, Michael sat quietly and listened to the unfamiliar language, looking at the pictures, experiencing what it meant to be near someone reading to him.

Over the past three weeks, I collected more than one thousand children’s books to donate to the Family Resource Center at Charter Oak Academy in West Hartford, Connecticut. This was my culminating project for a twenty-week leadership course that I recently completed. I asked people for books, and they gave. The wonderful thing about books is that they’re a kind of wealth that people readily share. Books are a wealth that people pass on to others.

This morning, I took the sixteen boxes of books to the Family Resource Center. I imagine them being sorted, distributed, some being put into the hands of children like Michael, children who are not so fortunate to grow up among a wealth of books.