Literary

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Be careful what you wish for

It has been raining for several days now in California. We have come out of drought with a vengeance. Floods, mud slides, death, destruction. A five-year-old boy, whose mother was rescued, is missing. Unthinkable–and yet every news update forces us to think about it. I sit at my computer, warm and safe, and wonder at the complexity of life, its twisty, tangled path, how tragedy bypasses one and descends upon another. Is there any reasonable explanation?
 
If I turn my head away from politics, as I am inclined to do after a half-dozen years of intense scrutiny, I am confronted by the philosophical, the speculative, the moral and even religious implications of our day-to-day lives. Perhaps that is why I write. Life is a mystery, and I am a small-town detective, product of the Midwest, seeking answers, explanations, solutions, resolution. For most of us, of course, there is no easy answer. Life is a “muddle” (I am recalling E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India) and we have not yet acquired the mental and moral tools to make sense of it.
 
Religion does not attempt to make sense of it. That’s why it succeeds where other explanations fail. If we can accept the concept of God, we can make everything fall into place. Faith has always been a leap, and not everyone can make that leap. To rest in the lap of God, one needs the courage of one’s convictions.
 
Philosophy is a worthy alternative. It is mind-bending and mind-expanding. It offers us answers and argues us into submission. It is good for those who can rise above the humdrum of everyday thinking. It requires not so much a leap of faith as a willingness to consider what is not obvious and/or tangible, but perhaps reasonable, or at least possible.
 
Skepticism is, perhaps, our most popular contemporary adaptation to the mystery. If there is no religious or philosophical explanation, then let’s go with no explanation at all. One could argue that this is a philosophy in itself, but I choose to give it its own category. It goes like this: “I have only this life and my few years on this earth, so to hell with limitations, screw any morality imposed on me by someone on the outside. I am my own best judge of my behavior, and I opt to live as I choose, to do what I want, to eschew those societal restrictions that are burdensome for me. I may foster an inner circle consisting of myself and those like me, to exclude anyone who does not look, think, and act like me. Some might call this extreme, but I believe it is defensible. It is my armor and they are my reinforcement.”
 
I believe I fall somewhere in the cracks between religion and philosophy. I wear the tattered remnants of the Roman Catholic religion, with which I was baptized and indoctrinated from birth through my undergraduate years. During those undergraduate years, I studied philosophy, and came to acknowledge it as a worthy pursuit.
 
And yet I remain, to some extent, wary of the easy answer, the inherited norm, the sometimes smug satisfaction that comes with having “solved” the mystery.
 
This is a long, rambling way of saying, I don’t know.  I accept that my philosophy is permanently tinged with faith. I want to believe.
 
Where is that five-year-old boy? Is he, by some miracle, alive? If he is, I will thank God, with the belief that God hears me. My faith will bob up, like a yellow buoy in the middle of a dark sea.
 
In his novel, Howards End, E. M. Forster tells us, “Only connect.” Howards End was published a dozen years before the “muddle” of A Passage to India. Had he found a philosophy in the former novel that he abandoned in the latter? I think not. A Passage to India was the mature mind of the master demonstrating the tragedy of the disconnect–or perhaps the impossibility of real connection–between people, cultures, norms, and beliefs.

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How will you remember 2020 and 2021?

Here’s a brief excerpt from my upcoming book:

April 28, 2020
I read an article today about how we will remember—or not remember—this pandemic. The gist of the article is that we will not remember much of what we’re experiencing during this time. The days, and what we do in the course of those days, will merge together. We’ll remember key emotional moments, but not the experience in its daily details. I believe this, intrinsically, which is why I’m keeping this journal, and becoming obsessive about recording what I do each day, from the most trivial details—perhaps a note about what I had for dinner—to my inmost feelings.

Imperfect Heart: A Journal, a Book Club, and a Global Pandemic is my personal chronicle of the 2020-2021 Covid-19 pandemic and the political chaos that our nation experienced in lockstep with the health crisis.

It also takes you on a month-to-month journey with a fictional book club. The book club consists of four friends who meet on Zoom to talk about books, the pandemic, their personal lives, and whatever political crisis is in the news.

Intimate journal, contemporary chronicle, sequential fiction, Imperfect Heart is familiar in its elements, yet unconventional in its juxtaposing of those elements. It follows an unprecedented time in our nation’s history –- a time that has touched everyone –-and a time that we cannot afford to forget.

I’m looking forward to telling you more about my new book!

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Don’t let the bastards grind you down

If you don’t recognize the subject line, it’s from The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood—a translation of a faux Latin phrase scratched into a closet wall by a woman who has mysteriously disappeared.

Anyone who knows me knows that I have a high value for privacy. It’s not easy to protect one’s privacy these days, but it has just become exponentially more difficult.

Today we lost a privacy of inestimable value. The Supreme Court’s overturn of Roe v. Wade, a constitutional right for almost 50 years, attacks our very existence as private citizens in the United States of America.

How did we get here?

During the height of the pandemic, I wrote a book in which I considered this question, among others. The book is called Imperfect Heart: a Journal, a Book Club, and a Global Pandemic. It will be published in December by Adelaide Books.

Imperfect Heart follows the pandemic and the political scene in the months between March, 2020, and December, 2021. It is very personal as to my life and my opinions, but it also details the concurrent domination of a global pandemic unprecedented in our lifetimes and a president who challenged our most fundamental moral imperatives.

It was the confirmation of three Supreme Court justices during the former president’s term of office that enabled the overturn of Roe v. Wade. And this is just the beginning of a massive invasion of our privacy.

The overturn of Roe v. Wade signals the seep of surveillance and control over every aspect of our lives, but especially our most intimate and private decisions. It will impact our health, our physical safety, our mental stability, the decisions we make concerning our bodies, and our right to privacy. It may well lead to arbitrating who we choose to love and marry, and ultimately who, in our right of self-determination, we choose to be.  

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It’s in print!

Only Yesterday

I’m pleased to announce that my new novel, Only Yesterday, is now available in print at Amazon.

Only Yesterday, published by Adelaide Books, is a novel about passion, remembrance, and acceptance. In the last few days of his life, Pete Cameron (Cam) engages in a final struggle with self-doubt as he deals with memories of his past. The story takes place in the Midwest between 1961 and 2003, moving back and forth in time as Cam looks back on his life, his love for Maggie, and the choices he made.

Both print and ebook editions will be available soon through your local bookstores and at online sites.

Here’s to good health, good spirits, and lots of creative energy after our 16-month (and still counting) pandemic experience.

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Toni Morrison reflects on the role of art in hard times

Some years ago, during a time of crisis, Toni Morrison confided to a friend her discouragement and inability to write. The friend had this to say about hard times:

This is precisely the time when artists go to work—not when everything is fine, but in times of dread. That’s our job!

Toni Morrison, who won the Nobel Prize in 1993, and wrote such memorable novels as Beloved and The Bluest Eye, echoes this advice when she says about “times of dread”:

There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge—even wisdom. Like art.

She was speaking in another time in our history, at another critical point, but the message resonates today.

In this time of global crisis, I believe we should pay attention to Toni Morrison’s advice — take up the art form, the creative activity, that makes us happy, that gives us comfort, and for which we have a passionate commitment. For me, it’s writing, but for you it might be visual arts, film or photography, dancing, singing, playing an instrument, cooking or baking, gardening, sewing, crafts, volunteering, teaching, scholarship, a business or scientific venture.

Whatever it is, if it’s creative and is infused with your energy, your individual stamp, it will help center you in a time of chaos and confusion.

Let me be clear. I look on this global crisis as impacting our lives for the foreseeable future. If the 1918-1920 pandemic is any indication, we are looking at a two-year disruption of whatever normality we had before the beginning of this year.

With patience and perseverance, the support of family and friends, and a daily infusion of creative activities, we’ll get through the difficult months ahead.

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Favorite first lines

Can we talk reading and writing—go off-topic for a refreshing few moments by thinking about something other than what we’re all thinking about?

Our enforced isolation has inspired me to think “big thoughts,” to work on something big. For me, “big” is a novel. Judging from past experience, this is a forever project that will keep me occupied for the foreseeable future.

So far, I have a title and a few opening pages. In writing a novel, I usually start out with a title and a page or two. I know the overall arc of the story, and I know how it will end. After I work that out, things move along at their usual turtle pace. I push on, procrastinate, then push on again.

If you write, you know that procrastination is one of the mandatory limbering up exercises for beginning any writing project or, for that matter, any writing day. As I agonize over those first critical pages, I’ve been listing, for inspiration, some first lines that I particularly like. Many of my favorites go back in time. I confess: I love 19th-century novels!

The favorite first lines that follow are in no particular order, except for the first two selections, which are my special favorites. Each is a full sentence–no more, no less.

Take a look and–if you’re so inclined–send me a few of your own favorites.

Pride and Prejudice
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

Anna Karenina
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

1984
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

Rebecca
“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”

Moby Dick
“Call me Ishmael.”

Jane Eyre
“There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.”

The Go-Between
“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”

Peter Pan
“All children, except one, grow up.”

The Man of Property
“Those privileged to be present at a family festival of the Forsytes have seen that charming and instructive sight—an upper middle-class family in full plumage.”

A Passage to India
“Except for the Marabar Caves – and they are twenty miles off – the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary.”

The Razor’s Edge
“I have never begun a novel with more misgiving.”

Far from the Madding Crowd
“When Farmer Oak smiled, the corners of his mouth spread till they were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared round them, extending upon his countenance like the rays in a rudimentary sketch of the rising sun.”

The English Patient
‘She stands up in the garden where she has been working and looks into the distance.”

Wuthering Heights
“I have just returned from a visit to my landlord – the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with.”

The Bluest Eye
“Quiet as it’s kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941.”

Mrs. Dalloway
“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”

Crossing to Safety
“Floating upward through a confusion of dreams and memory, curving like a trout through the rings of previous risings, I surface.”

Brooklyn
“Eilis Lacey, sitting at the window of the upstairs living room in the house on Friary Street, noticed her sister walking briskly from work.”

them
“One warm evening in August 1937 a girl in love stood before a mirror.”

The Great Gatsby
“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.”

Atonement
“The play – for which Briony had designed the posters, programmes and tickets, constructed the sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, and lined the collection box in red crêpe paper – was written by her in a two-day tempest of composition, causing her to miss breakfast and a lunch.”

Gilead
“I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why, and I said, Because I’m old, and you said, I don’t think you’re old.”

Alice in Wonderland
“Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, ‘and what is the use of a book,’ thought Alice, ‘without pictures or conversation?”

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Thoreau and social distancing

In Walden (1854), Chapter 6, “Visitors,” Henry David Thoreau provides a persuasive rationale for social distancing. Here’s what he says:

One inconvenience I sometimes experienced in so small a house, the difficulty of getting to a sufficient distance from my guest when we began to utter the big thoughts in big words.

You want room for your thoughts to get into sailing trim and run a course or two before they make their port. The bullet of your thought must have overcome its lateral and ricochet motion and fallen into its last and steady course before it reaches the ear of the hearer, else it may plow out again through the side of his head. Also, our sentences wanted room to unfold and form their columns in the interval.

Individuals, like nations, must have suitable broad and natural boundaries, even a considerable neutral ground, between them. I have found it a singular luxury to talk across the pond to a companion on the opposite side. In my house we were so near that we could not begin to hear—we could not speak low enough to be heard; as when you throw two stones into calm water so near that they break each other’s undulations.

If we are merely loquacious and loud talkers, then we can afford to stand very near together, cheek by jowl, and feel each other’s breath; but if we speak reservedly and thoughtfully, we want to be farther apart, that all animal heat and moisture may have a chance to evaporate. If we would enjoy the most intimate society with that in each of us which is without, or above, being spoken to, we must not only be silent, but commonly so far apart bodily that we cannot possibly hear each other’s voice in any case.

Referred to this standard, speech is for the convenience of those who are hard of hearing; but there are many fine things which we cannot say if we have to shout. As the conversation began to assume a loftier and grander tone, we gradually shoved our chairs farther apart till they touched the wall in opposite corners, and then commonly there was not room enough.

Stay well and keep your distance.

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Row your boat gently down the stream

By this time, you’re familiar with the instructions for washing your hands: 20 seconds of scrubbing, during which time you hum, sing, or shout, twice-over, a favorite contemporary lyric or “Happy Birthday to You” or–my preference:

Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
Life is but a dream.

It’s a simple message but it has a certain grandeur, like the familiar lines from The Tempest:

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

For me, lately, life has a dream-like quality. So much has happened in the last few days. Profound changes in our lifestyle seem to be happening on a daily, even hourly, basis. I’ve always kept a weekly calendar. I wonder if I should plan from day to day, rather than week to week. What might next week bring? What seems most important is now, this moment.

Of course, that’s a lesson in itself, as it’s the way we should lead our lives under any circumstances. I’m sure there are a lot of lessons to be learned from this crisis, but I’d rather not learn them in this way.

Here’s another quote I’ve been mulling over. It seems appropriate to our current global experience. It’s attributed to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), a French Jesuit priest and philosopher who was also a paleontologist and geologist:

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience.
We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

What could be more human than a pandemic, as it touches almost every one of us? And what could be more spiritual, as it forces us to reconsider our very existence?

One of the things that hasn’t changed and hopefully won’t change is our ability to communicate with each other through social media and our various devices. I’m reaching out to you now, through one of those important communication options, because you’re in my thoughts, whether you’re a friend, a family member, a fellow writer, or a reader–unknown to me–who has been following my posts and publications. I hope you’re safe and well.

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A Windless Place has been published!

I am so very pleased to announce that my third novel, A Windless Place, has been published and is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

A Windless Place is about the often difficult transition between childhood and adulthood. Maggie Lowin is just fourteen years old when she meets Gina, her new next-door neighbor. Vividly attractive and wildly unpredictable, Gina seems to embody everything that Maggie most admires and wants to become.

But it’s also a story about disillusionment and loss of faith. During the next two years, Maggie discovers that her new neighbor’s erratic behavior is a threat to Maggie’s values, and to her own family.

Eventually, as happens so often when we face life head-on, Maggie must make some very difficult choices.

“We read to know we’re not alone.”

That’s a line from the movie Shadowlands, based on the life of C. S. Lewis. I think about this line often because one of my goals as a writer is to invite the reader inside the mind and heart of my characters–to create that wonderful feeling of empathy.

It’s empathy that allows you, as a reader, to enter the world of A Windless Place, to recognize that–oh, yes–I’ve felt that way, I’ve done that awkward, stupid, misguided thing. I’ve known that type of person. I’ve been sucked in by that surface layer of charm and personality. I’ve risked losing my own values in order to please that person.

Empathy is what attracts us to one another. It’s what we have in common, what we share. As readers of fiction, we penetrate beneath the surface that most of us present to the world. We are able to see clearly into the souls of people like us–people who make mistakes but usually manage to get back on track–even if it’s another track altogether.

In A Windless Place, I invite you, as a reader, into the mind and heart of Maggie Lowin as she grows up and, as they say, “wises up.” I hope you enjoy Maggie’s journey toward adulthood. I know I enjoyed putting it into words.

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Coming soon to an online or independent bookstore near you!

I’ve seen it and it does exist—almost. A Windless Place is almost ready to make its publication debut!

I’m proofing the inside pages, and gearing up to launch my third novel. A Windless Place is scheduled to be published by Adelaide Books in August.

It’s exciting to have a book “out there” in the world, and the excitement never dulls.

One Who Loves was my last-to-be-finished and first-to-be-published novel. It’s set in Ann Arbor and follows two young couples as they grapple with the often conflicting pull of love and loyalty, and make their way through the 70s, 80s, and 90s.

The Second Mrs. Price begins in a small midwestern town on a glorious spring day in 1999. It’s about obsession, and the desire to be both securely rooted and absolutely free to follow one’s passions.

A Windless Place is set in the heart of the 1950s. It was a transitional decade during which we laid to rest many of our so-called “traditional” post-World War II values and stepped eagerly into the rock ’n’ roll era that would culminate in the culture-changing 60s.

Maggie Lowin is growing up in this era, ready to leap into adulthood but not sure how to do it within the confines of her conventional family. Along comes Gina, her new next-door neighbor and an electrifying presence in that staid small-town environment.

Only a decade or so older than Maggie’s fourteen years, Gina is everything Maggie would like to be: attractive, confident, lively, outspoken, unconventional.

Gina has a husband who isn’t around much and a three-year-old daughter, Ellie, but she has maintained her independent spirit. Maggie is enthralled. She becomes Ellie’s babysitter and Gina’s confidante, while Gina guides her through the perils and pitfalls of high school. All goes well until . . . .

Well, I hope you’ll get yourself a copy and follow Maggie’s journey as she encounters both disillusionment and tragedy. It’s all in A Windless Place—coming soon to an online or independent bookstore near you!