Muse Again

Three highlights from the conference:

1. During the Q&A period that followed Jonathan Franzen's keynote speech, two different people asked him to give a list of authors from whom he draws inspiration. Franzen balked twice, or rather, he deflected each question by pretending to not understand quite what was being asked. Perhaps he doesn't like to be nailed down on these things and single out particular authors. Perhaps his blood sugar was falling so rapidly (because he'd refused lunch beforehand and the afternoon was careening toward 2:30) that he really couldn't think. He kept saying, well, what do you mean by that? Well, what do you want to know? Finally, in frustration, the woman said, "Well, who would be in YOUR book group?" The applause that followed this statement was startlingly loud. And then he really did have to come up with some names, poor guy.

2. Michael Thomas, author of Man Gone Down, gave a talk on creating emotional resonance in your writing. I think that's what it was called. Titles at these things tend to be sales pitchy and somewhat meaningless. Anyway, he played James Brown, then read from TS Eliot, the Bible, and James Baldwin, then played music from The Band, then read James Joyce and Faulkner, then played Sam Cooke. He did all this to illustrate rhythm and repetition and counterpoint in language and phrasing and imagery. He ended by asking us repeatedly, "What's your plan? What are you trying to do?" He did this with some vehemence. It was over in an hour and a half, but I wanted it to be twice that long. In fact, if he were still talking right now, I'd still be sitting there.

3. Jennifer Haigh, author of Mrs. Kimble and Baker Towers, did a session on prewriting in fiction. She gave out two pages of prompts for starting a novel. She says she spends three to six months prewriting, working on pages and pages of notes for each novel and then never refers to them while writing.

Muse and the Marketplace

This weekend Grub Street, Inc. hosts its annual literary conference, called Muse and the Marketplace. It's at the Omni Parker House in downtown Boston. I'll be working the manuscript mart, as usual, and hosting a panel about agents and how to get one (not that I know). Two days of hanging out with writers, present and former students and other instructors is really fun. Some conferences of this type are pretty awkward, you know, the haves ignoring the have-nots and everyone staring at everyone else across a charged space. Not here. Last year there were a couple of big name author types, who quite literally didn't want to leave at the end. I know how they felt. Every year several people find an agent, find representation, at the manuscript mart. People share their success stories, and their writing exercises. And really famous authors talk about how hard it was for them in the beginning, how hard it still is sometimes. For two days, anything seems possible.

Elvis and Me

Today marks Larry's first full week at home. It's been great for me, less so for him. On the very first morning, I went down to the kitchen, looked at the coffee maker and said, "Oh, honey, I forgot to get coffee. Can you run out and get some?"

He rolled his eyes and said, "Well, I guess I'm your bitch, now." Then he laughed, and I'm pretty sure he really was joking.

Also, Elvis has come to live with us. Years and years ago, Larry's sister, Julie, went off to this place on the north shore that sells lobsters and carnival supplies (because the two things go together so well) AND ceramics (because what's a lobster dinner without a clown suit and a ceramic cast of dogs playing poker?) Anyway, she picked out a bust of Elvis, spray painted it gold and wrapped it in paper. Merry Christmas! It lived in Larry's bedroom until his bedroom became our bedroom. Then it went to work. But now it sits in the bay window of our house, and every time I come home from an errand, I jump out of my skin thinking that someone has broken into our house and is lounging on the couch near the window, someone with ducktails and a creepy tan. Everyone who comes to the house asks about the status of our Elvis fandom. I'm giving it one more week.

I have loved having Larry at home. Freelance writing as a career is terribly lonely and isolating. So is motherhood. I have abated this loneliness by developing the alarming habit of talking to myself all day and by indulging in a rich and full fantasy life. Now, I have Larry, which is better. On Friday, we went to Panera and set up our laptops and worked all morning. Then we went off to the salad bar at the grocery store to get lunch; then we ate outside in the backyard. Then more work, more chatting. Then the kids came home. Perfect day for me.

It's less good for Larry who has been uprooted from his friends at work and from his former identity. He admitted that he called his own number at work the morning after his last day to find that his voice mail message had been erased. His email account had been closed. Several times a day, he says he has to stop himself from calling work to check in.

When he's up, he threatens to wear a housecoat all day. He threatens to spend four hours a day at the gym, so he can be ripped for summer. I call it the prison yard fitness program. He also threatens to take another job. A couple of local publishers are courting him now. One took him to lunch and by way of introduction, declared himself to be a good Friend Of David Ortiz. For this, I've given him the nickname Fodo. (More on him later) Another guy who wants to hire Larry only takes meetings while reclining on his chaise longue. I said to Larry, "Do you really want to work for someone whose defining ambition is to be Big Daddy when he grows up?"

I'm trying to convince Larry to become a documentary filmmaker. "Well, that's practical," said Larry. Practical is not my job here. Never has been. Geez. What's the harm in trying something radical, just once? Plus, this is what Elvis would want. I'm pretty sure of it.

Poems and War Songs

Now that Mattapan is winding down, Memoir Project teachers and coaches have to turn our attention back to Chinatown. We've just learned that the second volume of Born Before Plastic, the one that will cover Charlestown, East Boston, Chinatown and Mattapan, has to be edited this summer (not by me, thank goodness) and off to the printer by July so that it can be ready in November. The seniors like to have the books in time for Christmas.

But first we have to finish coaching in Chinatown. This time last year we were teaching the Memoir Project class in Chinatown. We never did the one-on-one coaching because just teaching the class was complicated enough. We had to have a Cantonese translator, which is hard to find because Cantonese isn't really taught much anymore. Newer immigrants speak Mandarin instead. 

We were also told flat out by people who work as advocates for these elders, many of whom are themselves children of Chinese immigrants, that the participants would be unlikely to open up to us. "You can try, but they aren't going to tell you anything," one said with confidence. 

So, it was with some trepidation that I stood in front of a class of nine participants last February, none of whom spoke English (or would admit it, anyway) and laid out my opening lecture one sentence at a time. After each sentence I waited for Kwan, our translator, to turn it into Cantonese. When a participant spoke, asked a question or told a story, he or she had to parse it out a few sentences at a time and then wait for Kwan to translate it for me. My remarks and responses had to then be translated back. The class had a kind of glacial pace in this way, and I always felt wrung out at the end. Kwan was even more exhausted. By the third or fourth week, it became clear that we needed two translators working in tandem, so then Douglas appeared and they took turns.

The naysayers had it all wrong. On the very first day, one woman burst into tears while telling the story of how she had come to the United States, and the people who had taken advantage of her. One man shared his poems with us. He wrote them in an ancient form, five characters per line, four lines per stanza. He wrote about Chinatown wearing a new dress, about dragons under the ground and in the sky, by which he meant the refurbished buildings, the T underground and the jets overhead. Participants talked about their arranged marriages, about village life, about starvation during the war with Japan and the great famine that followed in the late 1960s. They described fathers and grandfathers who left for England and America and never returned. They just sent money when they could. In short, they did what all participants do in this program. They shared stories with each other, with their peers, that they would be unlikely to share with their families.

At one point, a woman opened her notebook to show me that she had written out the lyrics to a song. Kwan said she remembered it, as it was

a popular song during China's war with Japan. The woman began to sing, and two other women joined her. Pretty soon they were standing and singing, while all the other participants in class joined in. They banged on the tabletops and raised their fists in the air. It was at the very end of class, when the next class was coming in for their English immersion. Some of them were singing, too. When it was over, I turned to Kwan to say, "wow" or somesuch, and I saw her eyes were shining. 

Book Questions III

Today is Larry's last day at work. He's down, of course, not because he'll miss the job so much, but because he'll miss the people at the job. He's been driving to this same building and working on this same magazine with these same people for just under ten years. He spends more hours per week with them than he does with me. This morning, I saw him tuck a couple of bottles of red wine under his arm on the way out the door. Top shelf stuff, too. There may be an impromptu celebration before the lights dim forever in that editorial department. Tonight, he wants us to go out to dinner, which probably means the restaurant with the talking moose on the wall. Minor thrill for the kids.

Today was also the day set aside for me to drive in to Boston to sign the book contract, a coincidence that pleased Larry to no end. On the way out the door, Larry asked if I was taking a special pen. No. He asked if I was sure. After heaving a sigh, I went to my bedside table and pawed through it to find the Parker pen Larry gave me a couple of years ago. At the fancy pants magazine where he works until mid afternoon today, pens are a seriously big deal. Some of the pens they've written about have jewels in them. They are handcrafted by artisans who draw inspiration from nature and wood nymphs and all manner of nonsense. These pens don't get stored in a shirt pocket. Oh, no. Instead, they rest inside a little sleeping bag that sits on top of a pedestal inside a jewelry box. No joke. The one he gave me is grey with no jewels or anything. But it does have a little sleeping bag and a plastic box that feels like leather. I think of it as a low grade luxury. 

So, the trusty co-authors sat down in a conference room to have the 20+ page document explained aloud paragraph by paragraph. These are the circumstances under which the publisher can terminate the agreement. These are the circumstances under which the publisher can hold you liable. These are the circumstances under which you can end up owing the publisher money. It's all very scary and depressing, and exciting and important, all at once.

And...we didn't sign it. 

We found a clause that wasn't right. In fact, it was really, really wrong. And no one knew what to do. Clearly, it had to be renegotiated. But how? So, we got in our cars and drove home. Or, I did. The agent figured it out. Typo. Clarifying language had been deleted by mistake. She got hold of the publisher who okayed changes over the phone, then she got hold of my co-author who circled the block and went back to the office and signed it. By the time she got hold of me, I was home and on the phone with a custom designer of helicopter interiors and wrapping up a discussion of carbon fiber headliners. (Don't ask.)

The pen now sits on the kitchen counter, waiting for the contract to come to suburbia.

Breakfast at Tiffany's

Breakfast at Tiffany's was a sensation even before its publication fifty years ago. I read it recently at the suggestion of Kevin who read it in one sitting and loved it so much that he sat down the next night and read it all again. I'm not nearly cool enough to have done that. 

I love the structure of the story. The opening narration begins fifteen years after the events of the story, which are narrated as a series of memories by an unnamed but successful writer. (One is to assume this to be Capote himself at first, I guess, although not really--I'm sure his alter-ego is Holly herself.) This writer goes back to the old neighborhood, and then flashes back on the time he was a neighbor to Holly. This makes up the bulk of the story. I found this annoying at first, this structure, but when we meet Holly Golightly and she's, frankly, despicable, it's useful to already feel the yearning that the main character and all the other men in the story still have for her. People who love the movie know all this, but I've never seen the movie. I tried to watch it after reading this story and couldn't get through a single scene.

Here's the narrator's first look at Holly:

I went out into the hall and leaned over the banister, just enough to see without being seen. She was still on the stairs, now she reached the landing, and the ragbag colors of her boy's hair, tawny streaks, strands of albino-blond and yellow, caught the hall light. It was a warm evening, nearly summer, and she wore a slim cool black dress, black sandals, a pearl choker. For all her chic thinness, she had an almost breakfast-cereal air of health, a soap and lemon cleanness, a rough pink darkening in the cheeks. Her mouth was large, her nose upturned. A pair of dark glasses blotted out her eyes. It was a face beyond childhood, yet this side of belonging to a woman. I thought her anywhere between sixteen and thirty; as it turned out, she was shy two months of her nineteenth birthday.

What's notable in the story is the lack of moral judgement on anyone. This narrator seems to have no opinions, just observations. Later in the book, we get a look at her face again, while she sits in a hospital bed and contemplates opening a letter that she knows contains bad news:

The instant she saw the letter she squinted her eyes and bent her lips in a tough tiny smile that advanced her age immeasurably. "Darling," she instructed me, "would you reach in the drawer there and give me my purse. A girl doesn't read this sort of thing without her lipstick." 

Guided by a compact mirror, she powdered, painted every vestige of twelve-year-old out of her face. She shaped her lips with one tube, colored her cheeks from another. She penciled the rims of her eyes, blued the lids, sprinkled her neck with 4711; attached pearls to her ears and donned her dark glasses; thus armored, and after a displeased appraisal of her manicure's shabby condition, she ripped open the letter and let her eyes race through it while her stony small smile grew smaller and harder. Eventually she asked for a Picayune. Took a puff: "Tastes bum. But divine," she said and, tossing me the letter: "Maybe this will come in handy--if you ever write a rat-romance. Don't be hoggy: read it aloud. I'd like to hear it myself."

I love the dialog in this, and the descriptions and the party scenes, the action. And the completely weird, but totally believable characters. I love all of it. It is worth reading two nights in a row.

Sandwiches and Short Films

We're watching a lot of short films around here lately, for reasons to be explained later. But they're hard to find. We've resorted to watching YouTube trailers of short films. Here's one called Sandwich, which is billed as a sort of Goodfellas set in Scotland. Don't know about anyone else, but I'd take a Scottish accent over a New Jersey accent any day.