Talking with Jordan

One afternoon, a student wandered into my office to talk about writing. Here's what happened:

Originally published in Connotations Press

Jill Moyer Sunday teaches writing at Waynesburg University, in addition to directing the Writing Center. Her apprenticeship to creative nonfiction began at the age of 11 when she discovered her father’s copy of Capote’s In Cold Blood on a pile of true crime magazines. Beginning her career as a magazine journalist in the ‘70s, she was schooled in the New Journalism, which naturally led her to creative nonfiction. Currently, when she’s not writing or teaching, you’ll find JMS in her office talking writing or at home with her family, who more often than not end up reading about themselves in her writing.

Jill Moyer Sunday interview, with Jordan Merenick

So tell a little bit about yourself professor. Did you always want to be an author?

When I look back, I realize that I must have always wanted to be a writer, but the moment I became aware of it was in a freshman English class. My professor pulled me aside and asked, “Has anyone ever told you that you can write?” Her statement changed my life. At that point, I was a nursing major. Now, when I ask talented young writers the same question, I’m honoring Sister Terry Coyne. I would have made a terrible nurse.
What was the first story you wrote?

My first story was actually a novella, I believe—although my memory might be adding pages to the actual script. I wrote it when I was very young about my cat, Patches, who loved to eat spaghetti. I wanted to send it to a publisher, and my mother humored me, but my dad asked, “Who would publish a story about a spaghetti-eating cat?”
How did you start writing nonfiction?

After finishing graduate school, I fell into a position at Pittsburgher Magazine. A friend who worked there called me about a paid internship, and I applied. The next day one of the staff writers quit. The editor, a burly, old-school news type of guy, called me into his office. “You can write, can’t you?” he barked at me. That day I became a staff writer. This was at the end of the ‘70s, and I was taking on a genre greatly influenced by the New Journalism. It was a magical time to enter the field, and I began to write creative nonfiction. Soon it was my genre.


Do you remember your first nonfiction piece?

I do. I wrote an article about the forgotten veterans of the Vietnam War, titled “Whatever Happened to G.I. Joe.” I interviewed so many veterans who had been rejected by American society, and, more importantly perhaps, by the American government. At that time, the government was denying the harmful effects of Agent Orange, refusing to pay healthcare charges related to illnesses caused by exposure to this defoliant. I was young, and the veterans’ stories were complicated and tragic. That project helped to form my style, my awareness, and my life-long interest in the underdog. This first piece won a Golden Quill.
 
Who influenced you in the nonfiction genre?

Truman Capote. Of course, there are so many others, and as I continue to read creative nonfiction, I am still influenced. Creative nonfiction is such an explosive genre in that there is much to learn. But Truman Capote set the bar high for me. I first found In Cold Blood on a stack of true crime magazines my father kept in the bathroom. I was about 11, and I read it without understanding so much. The power of his work held me, though, and over the years I’ve reread, studied, researched, and taught this piece. For all who choose to write creative nonfiction, it is the touchstone of the genre.
 
Who do you compare your writing style to it?

Oh dear. I dare not compare my work to those I admire. I do read Anne Lamott, Annie Dillard, and Joan Didion for inspiration. Scott Russell Sanders, and Bernard Cooper, too. David Sedaris, Dave Eggers, Mary Clearman Blew. The list is long. I want to capture the extraordinary that lives daily in the ordinary. I hope to stick my finger in the reader’s sore spot, causing her to say, “Why, yes. That’s exactly what x, y, or z feels like.”


How do you normally compose your works? Is it spur of the moment? Or do you sit down and plan out what you are going to say in an outline format?

My writing isn’t spur of the moment. I do a lot of prewriting while I’m driving, in the shower, cooking dinner. Sometimes a line or an image snags in my brain, and I start there. I don’t really make an outline or draw bubbles of ideas the way composition handbooks instruct us to. I guess I just think, and the ideas grow. Once I sit down to write, I have to write, to get the ideas out, so I can think again, breathe again, live my non-writerly life for a while. Some of my children write, but the majority of my family doesn’t understand the invisible cloak I pull over my head when I write, so I write while the television plays in the background, and I’ve gotten really good at answering questions through my filter. When I think of myself writing, though, I see myself at a rough-hewn table in a storm-battered, cedar-shingled cottage by the sea, and I am alone.

 
What inspired you to write this piece?

I was really struggling with another piece I thought I would write for Connotation Press, and I was talking it through with another writer, a former student of mine, Sarah Hulyk (whose work appears in this issue), and in the middle of our conversation, I started talking about my youngest daughter’s worry about a prediction of an earthquake in San Francisco, where she lives. Sarah said, “Well, why don’t you write about that.” And so I did.


I understand from previous conversations with you that this piece went through several different versions?

Well, it wasn’t actually “The Earthquake Kit” that went through the versions; it was the piece I’ve been struggling with called “Finding Truman.” This is a piece about my discovery of my father’s copy of Capote’s nonfiction novel, but, as I tell my students, “the piece will show you what it wants to be about.” “Finding Truman” wants to be about my father and his alcoholism, but I’m not prepared to write it yet. In a piece I wrote about the writing of the piece (funny, huh?). I liken it to the black snake that often takes up residence in our garage, flipping away from me as I try to catch it.

 After reading this work, an obvious love of family comes through. Do you always write about your family? And how do they feel about this? Are they like, “No mom not again”?

I do tend to write about my family, a lot, though not just about my children. When you write creative nonfiction, you tend to see symbols and stories in every fold of family life, and, as a mother, wife, and daughter, I use what I know and see. My children are very supportive, and I’ll often get a text or email telling me they love what I’ve written. I think it helps that in writing about my family, I’m really writing more about myself and hopefully uncovering some universal human truths, so that while I am writing about Matthew, Andrew, Laura, and Rachel, I’m really writing about something much more. I think the “no mom” sounds more in my head than theirs, and I choose my material carefully. There are some things I will not write about because I understand the hurt it could cause. It’s a balance, you know?

 Now you’re also a professor of nonfiction here at the University. Do you find the same amount of joy teaching nonfiction as composing it?

Yes. I love what I do. When I am in the classroom, I feel like I’m a goldfish that’s been out of the bowl for a bit, and then I’m dropped back into my element, and I can breathe again. I was that girl who bought all of her school supplies before everyone else, and I still love the smell of paper. It’s just all about words, though. I love to write them. I love to read them. I love to bat them around with students.

 How do you go about teaching nonfiction to creative writing students, and how does your experience as an author help with your teaching of this genre to your students?

I guess we go about it the same way writers have been going about it since the beginning. We read, a lot, and we write, a lot. In between, we talk about it all. The process is an immersion technique. We drop ourselves into a vat of creative nonfiction, and then we analyze how the great ones have done it, and we apprentice ourselves to them. You’d have to ask my students, how, if my being a writer, helps them to learn this genre, but I look at us as a group of writers sharing ideas, successes, failures. They like to hear my stories, I think.
Are your students open to the nonfiction genre?

Many students come to me as poets or fiction writers, totally committed to their chosen genre. After some time of total confusion, they do embrace the genre, especially, with its limitless boundaries, as Mary Clearman Blew tells us, “as fluid as water.”


What are some of the emerging trends that you see in nonfiction?

One of the most exciting aspects of the genre is its malleability and continuous growth. Right now we are examining food memoir, graphic essays, and lyric essays. Who knows what will come next? In a work-shopping session this week, one of my students advised the author “just take a risk.” Risk-taking, hanging from the cliff by a finger—that’s what drives the trends in the genre.


Lastly, do you have any more nonfiction projects in the works?

I do. I’ve written short pieces all of my life, but now I’m surprised to find myself with three longer projects in development. One is a memoir/literary nonfiction novel called An American Failure, the story of my (along with my husband) attempts to live the American Dream, a dream for which all of the acquisition rules changed somewhere along our journey. The second is called Three-Fifths of a Life and is a collection of segmented essays about the women in my life—my mother, my daughters, my sister, and, of course, me. The last, untitled as of yet, is a food memoir. I’m including family recipes, along with the stories of the people who cook/cooked them. Some are dark; some are funny. Of course, I’m always blogging, and readers can catch up with me here.

History Lesson 101

The following tale took place in my classroom a couple of years ago and was recently published in the Winter 2012-2013  Journal of the Assembly for Explanded Perspectives in Learning (JAEPL). I haven't been able to get Joe out of my mind, so I thought I'd share him with you, too.

 

 I heard Joe before I ever saw him. Late on a Wednesday afternoon, I sat in my office, hunched over a pile of papers, becoming more agitated as the clock pushed toward five, rushing to finish a set of responses for my morning composition class. In the background, Joe’s high, reedy voice rose and fell in conversation with a professor from another department.

I refocused on the papers in front of me. Seconds later another conversation began…this time between Joe and one of my colleagues, just two doors away. A conversation with a visitor was not what I needed, and this fellow seemed to be working his way down the hallway. I remember thinking “if I pull the door closed right now, before he comes any closer, he won’t know the difference.” As I quietly moved the door into its frame, Joe’s words hung on the air.

The next morning, I rounded the bend from my office to my classroom, coming face to face with a short, trim man, his white hair cropped in military style. This had to be Joe. “Good morning!” I called out, anxious to make up for the click of my door against him the night before.

“Are you faculty here?” he asked.

“I am.”

“Are you teaching a class today?” Gesturing at the professional-looking camera hanging around his neck, Joe identified himself as a graduate of our university, on campus to attend his 50^th reunion. “I’m taking pictures for the Coast Guard auxiliary newsletter. Would I be able to visit your classroom?” Papers done, eager to be the ever-accommodating teacher, my conscience now slightly assuaged, I led Joe into room 321.

Joe told me a little about himself while we waited for students to settle in. After WWII, he’d come to our university via the G.I. Bill, and the changes on campus since then amazed him. “I didn’t recognize the place,” he said, as much to himself, as to me.

“It’s a coincidence that you’re here today,” I told Joe, just before he walked to a seat at the back of the classroom. “We’ve been reading and writing about WWII, the Holocaust really. They’ve just been to the Holocaust Museum on Monday.”

A few years back, a friend in the department and I developed a first-year shared-reading curriculum focusing on social justice issues. During their first semester, all of our students visit the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., as part of their Fiat Lux course (Latin: “let there be light”), and the idea for our project came from a student comment during a  classroom discussion of their trip.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

 “I’m just so glad that the Holocaust is over,” a young woman said. “It’s such a relief that nothing will ever happen again.”

Images of Darfur and the Sudan crashed against her statement. I responded by listing genocides that have occurred since the Holocaust, but I knew a list of names was useless. Over lunch, I shared my experience, and from that unsuspecting student’s words, a curriculum was born. Broken into three parts--Gazing into the Abyss, the Burning of Human Beings, and Watching the World Burn--the middle section is rooted in writing about the Holocaust.

My class, on the day Joe visited, had just finished reading from that section: segments of Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus and Marione Ingram’s essay “Operation Gomorrah.” As a class, we’d been concentrating on eliminating the general from our writing, and these richly textured pieces helped the students to see complexities they hadn’t considered before.

We began class by discussing their visit to the Holocaust Museum earlier that week. I asked the students which exhibit took the Holocaust from a historical notation to reality. They told each other about piles of old shoes, covered with a blue patina of mold; about the boxcar, some hesitating to enter, some offering a prayer as they walked through; about the pictures drawn by children, the recordings of survivors, the silence of visitors. All of them mentioned the Tower Room, a room stretching upward for three floors of the museum, four walls covered with photos of the 3,276 Jews of Monastir, Macedonia, none of whom survived their deportation to Treblinka. The photographs, while submitted to the local Nazi regime for tallying purposes, are poignant signs of ordinary life stopped short—graduation and wedding shots, families picnicking on summer lawns.

“It could have been me,” one of the students shared.

“It could have been any of us,” someone responded.

“What if my father had been a Nazi?” a blonde, blue-eyed boy asked. “Would I have been able to turn against my parents?”

Granted, this may have been the most difficult class of the semester, as students confronted the reality of human betrayal. Our journey through the semester would eventually take us to a brighter place, in our research of people and organizations that worked against oppression.

But, on this day, we still had to view a film clip from Sophie’s Choice. (If you haven’t seen the movie or read the book, William Styron’s beautiful mix of American naivete and the residual effects of the Holocaust, put it on your list). The clip shows Sophie’s arrival at Auschwitz with her two young children. In a desperate plea, Sophie tells an SS officer that she’s a Polish Christian. He responds by offering her a choice of which child will be allowed to live. The clip ends with Sophie’s little girl screaming for her mother as the officer carries her away under his arm.                                                                                                                                                                                            

Pushing the button to start the clip, I remembered Joe. I’d looked back at him several times during class. He’d stopped taking pictures a while back, and he sat upright, with a deep look of concentration on his face.

The room was silent after the clip. I turned on the lights and honored the silence for a bit. “Well?” I asked. “Let’s put this all together. Reactions?”

Our recent class discussions examined the impossible choices represented in our sample of writing about the Holocaust. The students picked up that theme again, centering on the tragic resonance of Sophie’s choice and the implications for survivors, on the legacy of grief. Though the film clip is hard to watch, I’ve shown it so many times, led the ensuing discussion so many times, that I could predict the outcome.

Or, so I thought.

“May I say something?” Joe asked from the back of the room. The students seemed to have forgotten him there. One or two turned toward him.

“I was eighteen years old,” Joe began. “I was there.” The change in the classroom was physical. Every student—the majority of them just eighteen—moved, as if part of a rippling wave building momentum, adjusting their seats to look directly at Joe.

“My unit went to Auschwitz. We were one of the first at the camp.” Joe said. “It was…it was…,” Joe continued with a sob, raising his hands to cover his face, and the rest of his story became wet words wept into his hands. In that moment, history came alive in my classroom. Movie images faded away, and, for us, it was Joe standing at the gates of Auschwitz.

“Joe,” I began. My knowledge level plummeted, and I failed to find words significant enough. “Thank you for being there. Thank you for sharing with us.” The students nodded, almost in unison. One or two stopped to speak to Joe, and he was gone.

His presence was still in our classroom on Monday when we met again.  The students wrote about him, and many stopped by my office to discuss his visit. I told his story over and over again, knocking on colleague’s doors, ironically modeling Joe’s behavior on that previous Wednesday afternoon.

I could sense their withdrawal when I began my story. “Oh, that guy. I heard him in the hall, too,” was the universal reply. Some told me they also closed their doors, anxious not to be disturbed. But when I told them about Joe’s role in the liberation of Auschwitz, their faces changed, softening, welcoming the idea of my unannounced visitor.

As for me, I will always be rushing to finish a stack of papers, but Joe’s visit will stay with me for a long time. What did I learn from him? Lessons are everywhere, my friends. Sometimes history breathes. Don’t close the door. You might just miss it.

Reprinted with permission from JAEPL's wonderful editor, Dr. Joonna Trapp, Chair of Communications at King College.

Sunday, Jill Moyer. "History Lesson 101." JAEPL Vol.18 (Winter 2012-2013): 133-134. Print.

 

The Nada

Salvador Dali's Clock Explosion

Today, loss washes inside of me like the leftover milk in the bowl I carry to the sink. Each of my steps forces a thin skim of white over the bowl's blue insides. Sloshing precariously close to the edge of the rim, the liquid threatens to spill over, wetting my hands, my pants, my feet. If I'm careful, I can right the bowl and avert the mess.

I don't want to be careful, though. I want to send the bowl crashing, the muscles of my throwing arm stretching and flexing as the bowl splinters into jagged shards, the milk running down the wall in rivelets. As a young married woman, angry over something I can't even remember now, I hurled a bowl of chocolate pudding against our rented beige wall. The pudding stuck in clumps, sweet brown tumors holding their tremulous form until plopping onto the ruined dish.

I should make a gratitude list. I should reflect on the symbolic beauty of the flash of red bird against the bare branch. I should pull myself up by my damned bootstraps, and lay my face against the window glass to feel the sun's warmth.

Instead, emptiness wraps its arms around me, pulling my head close to its chest. "Fall into me," it croons, giving me the come-hither look I've come to know.

What's left are these: pale, still unformed eyelids that I couldn't save, no matter how hard I prayed; blue laundry stamps on white hospital sheets, rigor setting in; a cheap gray box marred by a spot of blood near the head; words--words I didn't say, words I shouldn't say, words I said; time wasted and measured and used up, flat now like Dali's clock; a woman I never knew crying for her children in the common room, rocking and rocking and rocking herself; meanness of spirit, you selfish girl, did you have to think so much of your sorry self?; so many souls scattered like grains of uncooked rice; pregnant moments on the edge of the sea, promise rising like ripples of waves touching my feet.

(I plant my feet firmly in the wet sand, grains whooshing out with the tide, throwing me off balance.
Still I fight not to fall, digging my heels deeper, though I lose, and I cannot breathe for the sand that plugs my nose.  The enormity of what has passed is too much, and I close my mind against the sum.)

Later, in the dark kitchen, I find myself pouring the milk into the sink drain and rinsing the dish with warm, clear water before setting the blue bowl intact on the counter.

Finding Truman



Photograph by Irving Penn, 1965



Truman,
are you there? Sometimes I hear
your next drink sloshing in the shaker,
small ice crystals frenzied in their swirl,
both numbing and greasing at once.

An olive, Mr. Capote?

Where does a mind like yours go
when a heart like yours ceases to beat?
If I breathe deeply enough,expanding my nostrils for maximum intake,
will one of the molecules expelled by you
find its way into me?
Will I then be breathing in a little of the Clutters,
a little more of Perry and Dick,
and some of the darkness you carried with you to the end?

Though I don't have 94% recall,
will you bleed through my pen,
creating havoc on my yellow legal pad?
If you could, Truman,
would you prime the pump for me?
Unleash the words clogging
my brain, help them drip and spread
into a pool of wonder on the page.
I'll see your reflection when I gaze upon it,
I promise.
In the meantime, Truman,
I'll continue to lead them
to the altar of you.

Break Out the Tap Shoes

Okay, so I'll admit that the classroom is all wrong. I'm teaching on the bottom floor this semester, in a squared-off white-block room primarily reserved for criminal justice classes. The residual vibes are hinky. When I enter the room, my mind seizes, all those shadow words about police procedure jamming my normal thought processes. My creative feelers are sticky from the nasty web in the doorway.

I'll also admit that the class is at 2:30. The grayed-out sky doesn't help. The students (and I) have too much to do.

But, come on...an eye roll? Really?

My class in the white-block room is called Teaching Writing, a course designed to help future teachers reverse the negativity many students feel about writing. My syllabus argues that words and ideas can change the world. I do believe in the transformative power of writing, just as Professor Keating does in Dead Poets Society. Mentally, I rip, rip, rip the formalist pages out of J. Evans Pritchard's Introduction to Literature. I throw my ideas about teaching writing into the air, hoping that they break open in front of my students' eyes, that at least one idea will be carried home to sprout.

Tonight I'm feeling like the room won.

Next week I'll go back, carrying my passion for writing like a disfiguring hump on my back. "Look at me!" I'll cry, just before I strap on my shiny black tap shoes.

Words for a New Year

The last really festive, on-the-town New Year's Eve I remember happened the year before my oldest son was born. And by festive I mean: party dresses in red and black silk, drinks in little bars all over Mt. Washington, dinner at a schmancy fancy restaurant overlooking the crisply-lit city, champagne toasts, noisemakers, and drunken kisses at midnight. I remember a heart-to-heart with my friend Elaine in the ladies' room just minutes after the clock struck 1983--heads together, we smiled at our reflections and the seductive promise of our pretty lives hovering in front of us like holograms.

The next year my son, Matty, was only two months old, so we stayed in, our little family wrapped up in the comfort of our tiny family room in the little Bethel Park colonial, and that night held new magic for us. We spent the next series of eves family style with friends, all of us balancing babies, toddlers, and paper cups. For a while, nothing seemed to change. Then, suddenly, we were on our own again, our children away or at parties, our friends opting to stay close to home, all of us on call just in case someone needed a ride home.

Tonight, finds me at home, still. High heels click on the bathroom floor above me; the shower switching on and off as my children get ready to meet the New Year. I will still have a kiss at midnight, but I'll probably be balancing a book along with my champagne flute.

If I can't be twenty-something, dressed in red silk, standing on the edge of my future, I'll be content to be this book-worm me, tome in hand, leaning against the love of my life, waiting for another year of our lives to begin.

Here's some of the books I read since the clock struck 2012. Just like the parts of my life, some will make you laugh, and some will make you cry. Cheers.

The Sandcastle Girls, Chris Bohjalian
      I just finished this beauty, a heart-wrenching love story set in Turkey during the 1915 Armenian
      Genocide, as discovered and revealed by the lovers' surburban American granddaughter. Details
      of box cars crammed with starving Armenian women forshadow the coming Holocaust, as
      German officials (then allies to Turkey) marvel at the inhumanity of the "situation." Against the
      bleak desert backdrop, the war's victimization of women is etched on the reader's mind.

The Middlesteins, Jami Attenberg
       A dysfunctional family is set spinning by a father's divorce from a brilliant, but
       domineering mother who won't stop eating--a searing portrait of family love and disgust, an
       examination of how we nourish or starve each other in relationships. As I
       read The Middlesteins, I couldn't help but think about a lesson hard learned in my life...once
       they're gone, they're gone.

Winter Sea, Susanna Kearsley
        A writerof historical fiction feels a strong pull to New Slains Castle at Cruden Bay in Scotland,
       where she is compelled to write (channels?) the story of an ancestor who was involved in a plot
       to reinstate King James.The plot parallels the two women's lives in modern day and 18th-century
       Scotland. As a writer, I enjoyed reading about Carrie's process, especially that "other-worldly"
       connection to information that somehow appears in my brain.

 

In Between Days, Andrew Porter        
     An incident at college involving a middle-class couple's youngest daughter, Chloe, rocks the
     entire family. This beautifully-written novel forces us to examine the power of white versus    
     Muslim in America, frightening us with the results of blanket prejudice and loss, leaving us to
     wonder about our own racism and what lengths we must go to to find hope.

The Hypnotist's Love Story, Liane Moriarty    
     Combine a well-meaning stalker, her ex and his young son, and a hypnotist for a sometimes
     funny, sometimes sadly revealing of human nature read. Moriarity balances her characters
     well, equitably revealing both warts and halos...even of the stalker, as she enters the hypnotist's
     kitchen to make her a batch of muffins. The question really raised here involves the
     consequences we must face when we casually move on, in effect, discarding a human being from
     our lives.

        
Heading Out to Wonderful, Robert Goodrick         
     Charlie Beale settles down in small town America after his return from WWII. All around
     good-guy, Charlie falls victim to greed and lust, becoming the town outcast--tragic chronicle
     of America's spoiling from within. Goodrick is Faulker without the page-long sentences.
     Equally haunting, Heading Out to Normal exposes the greedy center of American life that
     threatens to consume us all. Picture Jay Gatsby in the midwest without the parties.

Shadow of Night, Deborah Harkness
         The second in Harkness' All Souls Trilogy, this book takes us from present-day New England to
         Elizabethan London, where Diana Bishop  and Matthew Clermont (witch and vampire)
         continue their hunt for Ashmole 787, an illusive manuscript that contains the secrets of
        "creatures" (witches, vampires, and daemons). Note: we meet Christopher Marlowe as a
         daemon! Harkness seems to have found a better balanced pace for her plot in this second
         volume.

The Beginner's Goodbye, Anne Tyler
        Anne Tyler is today's best popular novelist at navigating the shadow's of the human heart. In this
        short work, almost a novella, Tyler introduces us to Aaron, a vanity publisher who has long
        struggled with a physical infirmity, but who now is devastated by the loss of his wife Dorothy--
        sturdy, practical, Doctor Dorothy. When Dorothy begins to appear in Aaron's life once more his
        journey begins again.

      
The Street Sweeper, Eliot Perlman
        Complex characters bring together the American Civil Rights movement and the Holocaust in
        this lyrical novel. The tension is palpable from the first chapter as we meet Lamont Williams, a
        man recently paroled from prison, who struggles to keep his job as a sanitation worker at a local
        hospital. A novel full of surprises, Perlman's words wrap us in the hope and devastation of the
        human condition.

      


The Rebel Wife, Taylor Polites  

Set in the in the aftermath of the Civil War, The Rebel Wife is both suspenseful and thought-provoking, as Augusta Branson,

former Southern belle married off to a seeming carpet bagger,

must survive by her wits after her husband dies from a mysterious illness. Polites offers insight into the turmoil and betrayal that must have been the reality of the South shortly after the end of the war.

The Lost Saints of Tennessee, Amy Franklin Willis
       Ezekiel Cooper and his family (a passle of siblings, including a mentally-handicapped twin
       brother and his fire-hearted southern mama, Lillian) provide the emotional backdrop for a
       modern novel of the south, full of angst and healing. Think male version of The Divine Secrets
       the Ya-Ya Sisterhood  (Rebecca Wells) or Prince of Tides (Pat Conroy).

American Dervish, Ayad Akhtar

       The coming of age story of young Hayat Shah, an American boy living in the suburbs with his  Pakistani parents, this novel focuses on the arrival of Mina, the beautiful friend of Hayat's mother who comes to live with his family. Mina takes on the role of religious tutor, teaching Hayat about the Quran. Confused by the power of his emerging sexual identity and what he perceives to be morally right, Hayat betrays the lovely Mina, essentially condemning her to a miserable

existence.

Prayers for Sale, Sandra Dallas
       A home-spun tale of women who struggle to survive the physical hardships, weather extremes,
      and constant loss that exist in a 19th-century Colorado mountain mining community. Dallas
      bookends the life cycle with two predominent women: Nit, the 17-year-old bride who knocks
      on mountain matriarch Hennie's door after seeing Hennie's yard sign offering prayers for sale.

The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides
      A love triangle begins simmering between three Brown college students beginning in the 1980s.
      Madeline, the lit major researching the Victorian marriage plot; Leonard, the beautiful and
      brilliant science major, locked in the early stages of bipolar disease; and Mitchell, the religion
      major, all-around good guy in love with Madeline. Masterfully written, we are invested in all of
      Eugenides' characters as they rise and fall with and without each other.

 

 

Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn
       If you haven't read Gone Girl, put it at the top of your list. Set aside the block of time you'll need
       to read 432 pages of this rollercoaster of a novel about "until death do us part," this rock'em
       sock'em robot word fight, this labyrinth of plot and suspense. Just remember this, when you open
       the pages of Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, remember: nothing is what it seems.

Facebook Ghosts

The news came in a public place.

"Let me just make one quick call," I told my daughter, Laura. Leaning our heads together over the small table at Panera, we'd been laughing over something funny, the particulars lost to me now, one last day together before she flew back to her separate life in California. She left the table for a minute, for a napkin, some ice? I don't remember now. I made the call, and Laura found me, head in hands, mascara pooling on my fingers. The familiar settings of Panera-- the upholstered booths, the rectangular tables, the people with cups in hand--all blurred and faded from my field of vision.

"Mom? What's wrong?" she asked, dipping her face in front of my bowed head. Poor girl--I'm sure she thought the worst about one of our family members, so undone was I.

It took a while for her to understand. A friend was dead, not because cancer had eaten her from within or because a car took flight. This friend chose her end.

We'd known each other for 30 years, two women in an original band of friends long dissolved by betrayal and divorce. Somehow, we'd stayed connected, rising and falling in and out of each other's lives over the years. We took different paths, me to marriage and four children--her to seeking love in all the wrong places, a quest by a dangerous and willful beauty.

The stories I've heard about my friend's death must surely be incorrect, I think. I want to ask Elaine: did you hear what they're saying about you? I want to tell them: there's no way that the glorious woman who once told me, when I was in a rough spot, "you know, Jill, God cares for you. He holds you in His hand. Don't you ever despair" is the same woman who cut the tendons in her right wrist one week and hanged herself the next.

Still, she seems to be gone. In the weeks after her death, I typed her name into the "search for people, places and things" bar on Facebook, just in case. I clicked through her albums, running my mouse over her image like a caress. In some photos, her head is thrown back in gleeful laughter, sun bouncing off of her blonde hair. In others, she looks straight at the camera--a "take me as I am" glint in her eyes.

One day, a curious post appeared in the midst of the "I will always remember you"s and the "I know I'll see you again"s. This one read: "I know you are all right now. Thank you for that." Oh, how I wanted the story behind that post. I thought about "liking" it and adding a comment: "Please message me and tell me how you know she is all right!" Somehow writing about her, around her, through her on her own now lifeless page seemed wrong, so I moved my finger away from the Enter key. I'll probably check again.

The Earthquake Kit Revisited

There is no magic-- black or white,

no good juju, no incantations, no sacrifice
of bloodless, headless chickens—but I stay silent, working a charm of protection, just in case.

                                                        The Earthquake Kit 
(previously published in Connotations Press)                                                                                                                   

     When my youngest daughter Rachel was little, she worried a lot about the weather. The worrying part she got from me, the weather-watching part from her father. We were a beach vacation family in those days, and some of her earliest memories must surely involve late-night deck sitting, where we witnessed red lightning cracking above the smudged line of black water. One year we drove into Corolla, North Carolina on the windy heels of Hurricane Bertha, stopping once or twice to drag away tree branches blocking the single lane roads which led to Atlantic Avenue, just off of Highway 12.

     A random assortment of pine needles, bark, and murky sand covered the driveway of the house we’d rented that year, a certain sign of things to come. Nature had been vigorously shaken, and we were in the midst of the fall out. Trekking back from the beach, covered with a fine grit of sand, we stopped en masse at the outdoor shower.  We were a family who never used the inside showers, even the little ones preferring the sweet kiss of warm air on their skin, but this time, we backed out-- a formidable wall of Sundays—scurrying away from the aggressive encampment of big-headed, spindly-legged spiders.  Later that week, we were treated to a gathering of tree frogs, leaf emerald in their greenness, their sticky pads sucked tight to our glass door. Coming for the insects that had been drawn to our inside lights, the frogs’ tongues spun out, darting so rapidly that the insects seemed unaware of their fate. We watched transfixed, spellbound by this little life and death drama played out before us on a vacation house storm door.

     Later that week, we were all awakened by our oldest boy’s shouts. We’d had rain all day; the fury that had been Bertha was long gone, but another hurricane was pushing up the coast. We’d tucked our two youngest in, whispering reassurances  against the pounding rain on the cupola skylight, but now a steady torrent of water forced itself around, under, and through the skylight seal, pouring into the open center of the house, pooling on the first floor where the Godzilla marathon the boys had been watching still flickered on the screen.

     Rachel learned about the ugliness of nature during this and other beach trips, slapping her hands at fat black sand flies, shielding her eyes from the piercing sting of wind-borne sand, overturning turtle shells all but scraped clean of red meat, watching the glassy green sea whip itself into angry gray froth.  On our way south, we often drove through wild storms, once caught in tornado on the beltway around D.C., once driving into West Palm just minutes after a tornado touched down, sideways pelting rain having unnerved us all.

     “Maybe we shouldn’t stay,” Rachel repeated in a kind of litany, rolling her worry between her fingers like beads.

     We looked at the broad palm leaves sheared in ragged segments lying around the pool. “It’s over, honey. We’ll be fine.”

                                                                                                                                                                                      

     That trip marked the beginning of Rachel’s sojourn with the Weather Channel. While the tornado was indeed over, unfortunately the remainder of our vacation week was fraught with the kind of hazy heat and pressure that were often followed by ominous thunder storms. Rachel sat rigidly in front of the television several times a day listening for the word tornado on the Weather Channel. Any mention of impending rain heightened her panic.

     “I’ve got to see the Local on the Eights,” she’d say as we rounded up our children for application of sunscreen.

     “Come on, Rach. If we don’t get to the beach soon, the clouds will start building. Let’s go get some sun.”

     “Do you think it’s going to storm today? Maybe we shouldn’t go to the beach today. I want to go home! Can we please go home now?”

     And so it went, her tone becoming more insistent after we’d run up the beach walkway seeking shelter from the inevitable storm. I wonder if the confident young woman she is now remembers the hot tears she cried that week, her blue eyes wide with the fear of waiting for the worst to happen.

     Another summer, we hurried the short distance home from the community fair, after hearing a tornado warning broadcast over the loud speakers. “Don’t worry, kids,” I said to my four and two young friends. “Tornados don’t usually come to Pittsburgh. They are just being careful, that’s all.”

     We sat playing games in my family room until a strangely orange sky shone through the front windows. The glow was unnatural, eerie, and even I was a bit undone.

     “Let’s go guys--time to play in the basement.”

     Smiling while I boosted them up into the crawl space, I joked about me being a crazy worrywart, thinking all the while that the six children in my care would certainly replay this experience in their nightmares.  I held my breath while I sat guard on the cellar steps, waiting for the ghostly sound of the rushing locomotive.  When we emerged, our local news reported downed electric lines, fallen trees, and lifted rooftops just a few miles away.

     Rachel is mostly grown now, a leggy blonde with a wild sense of humor and a no-nonsense attitude.  A fierce “what of it” glint rises easily in her eyes if push comes to shove. Seven months ago she moved 2,577 road miles away from home to Moraga, California. When we packed up her suitcases in August, I checked St. Mary’s “Things to Bring List.” Reading it aloud, a part of my brain eliminated the Earthquake Emergency Kit, perhaps pretending that she wasn’t going quite so far, that she wasn’t my youngest, that I hadn’t quite reached this stage of my life. What bag of tricks could possibly help during an earthquake, anyway? What could I possibly buy to keep my girl safe?   

                                                                                                                                                                               

      Earlier this week, I noticed a link on Rachel’s Facebook page: Sign of California Quake to Come? Below was Rachel’s comment: “Just in case, I love you all.”

     Yesterday, the phone calls and texts began in earnest. “Have you heard anything about the earthquake that’s supposed to hit here tomorrow?” Laura’s message read.  “Call me. Call Rach.”    

     I tried the explanations out in my mind…the geologist doesn’t know what he’s talking about…it’s just dead fish and a low-hanging moon…earthquakes don’t happen where you are…I promise you will be safe, but all of them felt like so much dust on my tongue.

     When I talked to Rachel, after my husband tried to distract her with humor, I asked her “Are you nervous?”

     “Promise me you will get a memorial tattoo of me if I die in the earthquake. Use the picture of me standing on the bridge with Heinz Field in the background. I’ll tell you where it is.”

     I have a mental picture of a large black, intricately-inked tattoo stretching across my 55- year-old back. “I sure hope I don’t have to do that, Rach.”

     “Promise me.”

     “Okay. Sure. I promise, but you are going to be fine. You aren’t right on the fault line, and no tsunami could reach you because you are too far away and too high up on the hill.”

     “Just in case, I’m sending a goodbye text to everyone I know tonight.”

     “Rach, you know that anyone of us could die at any time from a lot of different causes, and we don’t send goodbye texts every night. You will be fine.”

     The truth, though, is that things don’t always work out for the best, and, even in the sweetness of her youth, Rachel understands. She’s seen the footage from Japan and Haiti. She’s walked into my mother’s hospital room to find the rigid contour of a lifeless face against the pillow. She’s heard the crystal splintering, sharp glass shards glinting on the leaf-patterned cloth. She’s picked up her phone to find really bad news emanating from the earpiece, news that she hadn’t invited, dreamed of, or wished for at all.

   The real truth is that Rachel comes from a legacy of sadness, just a breath away from shoddily hidden grief-- from someone who knows quite well that a ringing phone can’t be trusted, from a mother who has so desperately wanted to create a pocket of safety for her children, but who is sometimes irrevocably lost to the day when her brother died from a bullet to the brain.

     Rachel made herself an earthquake survival kit, just in case. She filled her black and yellow Vera Bradley backpack with snacks, Sarris chocolate, bottled water, a flashlight, and her Tide-To-Go pen.   

                                                                                                                                                                               

      I have an earthquake kit too, but Rachel probably doesn’t know that I started mine many years ago, long before she left me, perhaps on the day I stood in the funeral home, feeling the wax slug filling the ragged entrance wound near my brother’s right ear.

     Sometimes the kit does work. I wish I could share its logic with her and my other children, providing them with a checklist for survival, a nicely printed list of circles to fill in with a sharp number two pencil, but part of the process is that each of us must confront impending disaster alone, gathering chicken bones and feathers to ward off that which might harm those we love.  My kit is a ragtag collection, including, but not inclusive of, spastic hopes, lopsided prayers, and improbable deals made in the dead of night. Yesterday, I added my promise to Rachel, praying that my vow will be enough to keep her safe, that I’ll never have to lie under the buzzing tattoo needle, feeling her “I love you all” worked black drop by black drop deeply into my skin.

    

         

    

    

     

Pool Days

The sky darkened above me as I pushed open the door to the pizza shop where my youngest daughter's working for the summer, a late afternoon storm promising to break the humidity we've felt for a string of ninety-degree days. I sat in the shop a bit, swirling a straw in my styrofoam cup of Diet Coke, the square clear ice moving with the current. The door opened once, twice, and again admitting young families...mothers wearing sundresses over bathing suits, boys in swim trunks and tank tops, pony-tailed girls whose curled toes held tight to neon flip flops.

 Four kids and a mom climbed into the counter seats facing the window, each waiting for a slice of pizza straight from the oven. My heart constricted a bit with the memory of my own four on days like these, when we sought shelter from the rain.

My oldest daughter calls me nearly every day from California, as she walks the 20 minutes to her local pool. I'm happy to imagine her passing through the gates, a colorful bag in one hand and her thermos in the other. I can see her there, lying stomach to grass, reading until the sun chases her into the water. My youngest daughter is lucky to have a group of friends with pools; sometimes she is happy to work the evening shift in exchange for an afternoon with her girls. She comes home with tales of unbelievable floating chairs, the last one feeling just like a couch as she lay on her side.

We used to go together, spending most summer days from 11 to 4 or even 5 at the YMCA pool.
Certainly I'm romanticizing the experience, forgetting about the packing up before hand: suntan lotion, combs, towels, toys, snacks, books, magazines, money, and pool passes. I've forgotten the crankiness of children who are tired from the sun and hungry RIGHT NOW. I don't miss watching a baby who might, at any minute, slip under water. I've almost erased the angry woman who guarded four lounge chairs in the same spot every day, whether her friends joined her or not. My memory blurs the ride home, the 15 car minutes far too long, with a frazzled young mother threatening to "stop the car, if I have to," coming home with a mess of wet clothes and a dinner yet to prepare.

Oh, but the smell of chlorine in freshly-combed hair, the sight of wet suits on the line, the touch of a small damp hand on my shoulder...those I do remember. I feel cheated, as if we didn't have long enough at the pool.

It did rain today, needles of rain exploding against the hot pavement. When I left the pizza shop, the temperature had cooled, a slight moist breeze trilling across my skin. I hope the families had enough time to go back to the pool, taking another dip, before things changed again.

Mother Love

Yesterday I ran into an old friend in the copy room. We'd known each other long before we started teaching at the same university, chatting with each other at open houses and baseball games. I put my arm around his shoulder, feeling his age through the crisply-pressed blue dress shirt. He kissed my cheek, leaving a soft, dry impression against my skin.

"I'm so sorry," I whispered into his ear. "How are you doing?"

"Not so good. It got worse once I started home." His eyes never left the copier key pad.

"It's hard to lose a parent," I offered. "Mothers are the hardest. No matter how old we are, losing a mother untethers us."

Looking up then, his eyes glossy, he crumpled his mouth into a sort of smile. I could see he knew what I meant. He had been set adrift, too.

I've been lost since my mother died, her passing sending chaos into the order I thought I'd imposed on my life. Such a smarty pants, I'd been. This was my new truth: my roots had been yanked. The ink on the map disappeared. I'd lost the paddle, and my boat had sprung a pretty big leak.

Years ago, if you'd have told me that I defined myself through my mother, I'd have laughed, telling you high tales of my independence, offering storied examples of how different my life had become, how separate from hers, how my road was less traveled. Yet, here I am, my outline muddled, the sharpness of my features smudged, lost in the woods. With my mother's tired body went part of my history, an awareness of me before I was.

The night of my mother's funeral, I drank too much while I sat on my sister's porch. We told tales late into the night, cold glasses in our hands, a small candle burning on the table. My husband and sons brought me home gently, strong arms supporting me. Home again, I went straight to bed, taking the stairs slowly, grief and gin seeping through me. My daughters sat on the couch, having long since shed their funeral clothes, leaning against each other for comfort.

"How could you?" one asked me the next day, misunderstanding the past night's events.

Indeed, my dear child. Indeed.

New Beginnings

I woke up early today, though I thought I'd sleep longer, later, deeper, and started the morning by reaching for my book--to tuck in another chapter before I punctured the haze of sleep, before reality claimed me. Early morning reading used to be a habit of mine back in graduate school. During the semester, I'd finish whatever I'd abandoned  bleary-eyed the night before, whether it was literary criticism for a class I was taking or an essay for the class I was teaching. Over vacations, this habit turned into a delicious luxury as I reached for the novel on top of the stack of the many waiting for me. After I became a wife and a mother, other voices called me from my sleep, and I've only revived this custom since my children no longer sleep under my roof.

It's one of those hazy, end-of-summer days, the humidity frosting the outside of my windows. My husband just stopped his mowing to take refuge in our air-conditioned kitchen, wiping his face with his shirt, though it's just 9:30 a.m. I'll have to water the plants early, even though we watered them late yesterday, while farm market eggplant roasted in the oven for our dinner.

Despite the heat and my flowers overflowing from their containers on my deck, all of them tumbling in a freefall fight with each other for attention, I feel the pull of fall. Classes began this week for me, a sure marker. As I drove the long stretch of 79 to work, I  warily eyed the "Bridge May Freeze Before Road" signs. I'll drive those roads as the leaves change, then drop, white-knuckling the early snowfalls. Soon the next few months will soon become a jumbled clump of days filled with classes, assignments, conferences, and grades, my students and I emerging changed people.

I've always loved the newness fall brings. As a child, I stood in front of the small school supply section in the local drugstore, touching the pens and pencils with anticipation. I still buy notebooks every semester, delighted in the ever-expanding selection of covers. This year my daughter and I walked through the many aisles of Target devoted to back-to-school shoppers. We weighed the color choices carefully, ending up with simple bright blue, green, and pink composition books.

"Do you need pens?" she asked me, in a strange reversal of roles.

Perhaps it's that strange reversal of roles that kept me in bed this morning, that had me reaching for fiction about Sullivan's Island instead of beginning my day. Fall brings something new for all of us, and my children leave my home for other lives, for growth that doesn't include me. The first to go this year was my oldest; rightly so, I guess. He left our vacation a day early, driving 11 hours straight to arrive in Morgantown for an editorial meeting the day before classes began. A little over a week later, my youngest left for San Francisco, struggling to pack all she'd need for four months into suitcases that didn't weigh over 50 pounds and a carry-on that would fit in the overhead compartment. My oldest daughter left on Wednesday, stopping to visit her boyfriend in Florida before she reached her destination in Sacramento. She's lived away for so long that it takes nearly the entire visit home for her to shed her hard armor, becoming the girl I knew just a day or so before she has to leave again. My second son's living only a half hour away, and while he and his girlfriend come back every Sunday for dinner, he's still not here where we all began.

The house misses my children. Sometimes we'll hear doors slamming and drawers closing abruptly. Andy nicknamed this phenomenon "The Energy," blaming the noises on the residual energy left behind by his frenetic sister Laura, but I think the house is perplexed. Where are the feet that pounded up and down its steps, bounding then down the hallway? Where are the hands that threw open the doors, softly closed the doors with a click, sometimes slammed the doors? Where are the voices that called out to each other, to me? The house bristles against the silence, calling the children back with its empty noises.

This morning was a reading-in-bed morning until my husband brought me a tall coffee, steaming hot. Last night we went to the farmer's market, loading our bag with eggplants, tomatoes, scallions, and cilantro. A yellow and orange bunch of zinnias, cosmos, and sunflowers nested in the crook of my arm as we debated over the box of soft chocolate cookies with raspberry filling. We stood shoulder-to-shoulder in line at the cheese truck, lucky, as the cheeseman told us, to get the last piece of Pennsylvania white cheddar. Breaking off a chunk, we shared a bite marveling at our good fortune, and then headed home together to prepare our garden feast.

Corolla

The cool blue shimmer
calls me by name with
rolling syllables, tumbling,
frothing, finally trickling over
my feet. My soul settles,
my heart eases, sliding down
from the sore spot in my throat,
slowing to sync with the pulse
of the waves. Once. you leaned
against the dune's high shelf,
shifting sand into a sunflower,
for our daughters, the petals
just brushing my skin.

Writing in Segovia

Tonight, while the spaghetti sauce simmered on the stove and I waited for the men in my life to finish their work and make their way to the table, I sat down with a glass of iced tea and the latest copy of Poets & Writers. Lately I've been dreaming of attending writers' workshops, residencies on some leafy mountain tops or in cottages by the sea. I read every word of the advertisments in Poets & Writers, throwing myself into a dream state. I see myself rising from a single bed that's been made with crisp white sheets; a stack of books are piled high on the rough hewn floor. I throw a colorful handspun shawl around my shoulders and take my heavy pottery mug of coffee out to the deck. My head rests on my hand as I look out over the lake, ocean, mountains. I press the blinking circle on the side of my laptop, and words rise from me like clear glass bells.

The majority of the ads in Poets & Writers are for MFA programs: chances to work with Billy Collins, Susan Cheever, Phillip Lopate, Sue Miller, Robert Root. On some alternative plane, I'm striding across the respective campuses, blue-jeaned legs carrying me from thought to thought, my arms cradling my notebook, iPad, laptop. Scattered in between the MFA listings are ads for conferences. I could travel east for the Gettysburg Review's Conference for Writers or south to the Writer's Institute in Miami. A flight west could drop me in Minnesota for the Split Rock Arts Program or take me all the way to the coast for the Rainier Writing Workshop in Tacoma. The Bread Loaf Workshop is taking up residence in Italy! Maybe I could find a wealthy nobleman to be my patron, and I could spend my summer moving between cabins and cottages, spinning tales like the intricate web of a very productive spider.

Then, I saw an ad tied to me in time and thought. There it was on page 63.

Brown University
Writing in Segovia
Writer's Workshop: Travel Writing and Memoir
July 3-12, 2011

I'd lived in Spain when I was 20, and I'd walked the streets of Segovia one weekend, breathing the crisp winter air, making footprints in drifts of clean white snow piled high before the Roman aqueducts. If I hold my breath, I can almost get myself there again in some weird form of time travel. Was I my most authentic self then, so very centered in Jill? I don't think I'd recognize that girl now, long-haired, defiant, standing on the brink of her life.

I came home early from that semester abroad because my father lay in a hospital bed, coughing and struggling to take one full breath. I flew across the Atlantic in a sonambulent state. Did my life in the states still exist? I'd lost my sense of direction.

After my father died, I tossed and turned at night, often waking from the same dream. I was back in Spain for just one night. I'd appear in the Atomium Discoteca, the train station, the Plaza Mayor like a ghost watching the life that had continued on without me.

Would I go back this week to write? My heart and mind yearns so hard toward this idea that if will were flight, the girl I left there would be sitting in a cafe in the plaza, her head on her hand, words rising from her clear as glass bells.