Day 85: More Travels at Home

Today I have traveled from the North Country to France to India to Iceland, and then back to the North Country with a vengeance.

I start with the novel.  Today the characters get into a sketchy situation in a bar in Montmartre and I have to figure out how to get them back safely to their apartment above the Mouffetard Market on the other side of the Seine.  Homework for tomorrow: learn more swear words in French and the French version of the finger which I knew once but forgot, as I never had reason to use it. 

At lunchtime I tour our back yard with our intrepid voyager, the dog.  I try to see it all as a new wondrous place.  Lately I have been channeling Richard from Seattle (whom I wrote about on Post 52, Travels at Home) who declared himself to be a traveler in his own city and made it his mission to invest every walk, every errand run, and every excursion into the familiar with the same curiosity and sense of adventure he brought to his trips to far-flung locales.  And of course, I channel Zoe.  So I am part smiley mellow dude circa 1982, and part dog.  This new way of navigating through the familiar works for me.

Today our crusty North Country snow is especially fragrant.  Zoe explores the back yard as though she has never seen it, not even in postcards.  She goes from patch of icy snow to patch of icy snow, sniffing with excitement.  Is it the groundhog who has come early this year?  Or something else?

I find the opening to a tree trunk I've never noticed before although I walk past it every single day, and she thinks I have found something good in there to eat, so she starts smelling that too.

Cindy arrives and tells me about the four movie-like dreams she has had this week.  In the one last night, she was cleaning the house for a family like the Von Trapps, and they had to flee because the Nazis were coming.  She was doing laundry and helping them pack.  Then, in a small room, with a bench and a toilet and a bath all in one, she found a skinny naked woman who needed her help.  The woman, she realized, was Anne Frank.  She never died in the camps and has been hiding from the Nazis ever since.  Cindy tried to help her get dressed, but then she woke up.

At 2, I have a tea date with a work friend.  I try to see this café with new eyes, even though it's generally the only place I go in town for lunch or for tea dates.  It's nice in there, with all the old wood, and I love the lemon tea, and I like the sign out front too.  If you were a stranger to my town and you came upon this door, wouldn't you want to go in?

My friend and I talk about her partner's voyage around the world by sea, and how soon the ship will land in the town of Cochin, in Kerala, a southern state in India. We talk about how long it would take to get there from here--two days, but you cross the international date line, so coming home you get a day back.  It's Saturday twice.

We talk about farming in the North Country, and farming in India, and I mention a farmer I met who lived for 20 years in Seattle designing software but now has returned home to India and lives in a town known for its camel fair every year.  My friend is excited to hear about the camels in India.  I will later send her the link to Pushkar's camel fair and I am sending it to you now, gentle reader, right here.  Pushkar is in the Northern state of Rajasthan, where I traveled last summer with 10 of my students and another professor, and is probably one of the true sources for the Tales of Arabian Nights.

When she asks me what I like about India I confess a big part of it is the food.  France and India are my favorite foreign countries.  (Italy is up there too.)  "I couldn't get excited about a place that didn't have good food." I tell her.  There's the yoga and meditation in India, yes, and centuries of history, and temples, and so much beauty, but the food is out of this world.

She tells me that I probably should avoid Iceland.  The specialty there is a shark meat called Hákarl.  To make this delicacy you have to gut and behead a shark, she explains, and put it in a hole and cover it up.  The shark ferments that way, and the fluids leave its body, and eventually, two or three months later, you have a salty, fermented fishy foodstuff you will never forget the taste of for as long as you live.  If you can get past the ammonia smell first.

After my friend and I part ways, I take Zoe for a walk on the track around our campus.  Zoe meets a beagle/retriever mix and the two take off.  I am so happy when she is disobedient.  I know, then, that she is feeling her best.  After I think the beagle/retriever has left with his person, Zoe disappears for a few minutes and I start to get nervous only because she has headed in the direction of a big road.  She has taken off on her own independent voyage.  She is gone.  She hasn't done this once since she got sick.  She has stayed by my side.  I call for her, and she eventually races back at top speed, looking quite pleased with herself.

When we return to the car, she says, "I'm not done."  She sits down and puts all her weight into this resistance.  It's her stubborn pose that I need to capture on film for you soon.  It's her  Hell no, I won't go.  We've only walked for 40 minutes, she tells me.  That won't do.  So I ask her where she would like to go and she points.  We eventually work our way around a few blocks and find the beagle/retriever again with his person going into their house.  Did she smell them from where we were--a half mile away?  Has my dog stalked them? She looks sublimely happy.

It is clear that Zoe wants to travel for as long and as far as she can, and I'm fine with that.

At the restaurant/bar where I meet friends early at Midwest Supper Time as from my youth, 5:15 PM, because one is trying to beat the storm home to Canada (and as we established recently in Post 80, The Lady and the Dog Enter New Territory, Part Two, Canada has stopped plowing its highway to and from the U.S.) and another has to get up at 4 AM to write, we have a spirited conversation and eventually overhear a mother and her kids at the next table ask the men beneath the TV to "tone down" their "language."  We ourselves have used quite colorful language, but this nice family haven't heard us.

To retaliate, the foul-mouthed men turn up the TV until it is blaring so loudly that no one else in the restaurant/bar can have a conversation.  They tell the woman who asked them to tone it down that she has no class. That's it.  I want to avenge the nice family (even though, had they overheard us, they would not have approved of our diction either) and I say to the men, "Are you happy now?  Driving all of us away?  Clearing out the place?"  They say yes and cross their arms in that pleased way certain bullies have. Then they swear at me.

Do you want to know what I do, gentle reader?  The nice English professor with the dog, who meditates every morning and reads Thich Nhat Han?  I give them the finger.

Now I feel like I've traveled far from my familiar to the most distant land of all.

It felt as foreign to me as drinking in the red-light district of Montmartre.  Or riding a camel in the sands of Rajasthan.

And it was very satisfying.

I suppose the day has come full circle.  My fictional characters were swearing in French at thugs at 9 AM today.

I can tell myself I was just doing research. 

When I get home to my husband and my beautiful dog, I feel that I have crossed many continents, even though I have only put a mile and half on my car's mileage today. 

Day 56: Gargoyles in Love, or The Search for the Perfect Schedule, Part III

Monday morning I started my day writing about the gargoyles of Notre-Dame de Paris.  I was so happy and excited I wanted to yodel.

This photo was taken by my talented student, Nika Horvathova, whose photo-shoot of Paris on one of our days there with the other students was so good she was later invited to exhibit her work at St. Lawrence University's Brush Art Gallery.

This week I am test-driving the advice of another writer, Ellen Sussman, the author of the novel, French Lessons.  She wrote a piece in Poets and Writers about finding the perfect schedule for writing, and when I read it I said, "c'est moi."  Thank you, Ellen Sussman.

I had always known that the best time for me to write is early morning, coffee in hand.  Depending on what's on for the day, I set the alarm accordingly.  Ellen Sussman writes from 9-12.  Her goal is 1,000 words a day.  That's not quite four pages of regular typing, double-spaced.  Not daunting, really, and quite do-able.  If you write like this every day, you could have a draft of a book in three months.

It's not just the time you put in, you see, but how fast you go, which is another way of saying how intuitively.  I didn't understand this for a very long time.

A few years ago I met Jennifer Egan, who told me that her writing method is to fill seven legal pages by hand every morning, after she gets her kids off to school.  I think she writes by hand because she knows if she types, she'll tweak endlessly.  She just keeps going, she said, carrying the story forward, not caring, in the beginning, about the prose.  She forgives herself for bad writing and is brave and trusting and takes the story where it takes her without knowing in advance where it's going.  She has a first draft of a new book in months.

I could tell, from the way she smiled as she told me this, that what she loves most is the mystery, the not-knowing.  It's not the goal of publication that motivates her but entry into that place in her unconscious where the story dreams itself and leads her from dark cave into sunlight, a little at a time.  She has faith in her own process and follows where it leads her, even if she writes some spectacularly bad sentences on the way.

I knew when she told me this that a method like this would set me free.  I knew that I was over-thinking my writing, just like I was over-thinking everything else in my life just then.  I had written like this before, but then I changed, and I couldn't remember when, or why.  I knew that I had a deep well of imagery and oddity to work with, but something was making me too careful to jump in.  

My method then was to write for however long I had in the morning --a half hour, an hour, two--until the paragraph or pages were perfect.  I would be giddy when those words satisfied me, but inevitably, the next day, I would second-guess everything.  

I knew that this kind of perfectionism isn't supposed to come in until later, but it was just so hard to leave a writing session knowing how profoundly those sentences had sucked.  And so I tweaked endlessly.  But if beautiful sentences don't dig deep enough to hit bedrock, if they don't tell the truth and reveal the absolute oddity that is in each of us, if they don't go deep enough into the dark but linger near the surface, it's like putting a lot of makeup on a corpse.

When you make yourself keep moving forward, you make intuitive leaps.  You go to places that scare you and surprise you.  You take risks.

Back to the Ellen Sussman method.  What she does, first, is meditate.  I have been doing this too, every single day, since August, and she's absolutely right that when you start your day that way, going from dream to meditation to the page, you tap into your voice without monkey mind.  

To stay in the zone she uses a program called freedom.com that disconnects her from the internet for as many minutes as she needs.

I was reluctant to try this at first.  Why would I want to pay money ($10) to have less service than I have in our remote rural area where the internet is not reliable as it is?  What if I could never get back on the internet again?  And let's get this straight: I'm going to pay not to use google?  What if I need to know something crucial about Paris, or India, or dogs?  

And wouldn't it mean, if I signed up for freedom.com, that I was a junkie?  Well, yes.  Ellen Sussman sounds a lot like me, and I think if we met, we would be friends. If she goes to Google to find out something about Paris for her book, the next thing she knows she's planning her dream vacation.  That is exactly the kind of thing I do. And then my writing time is up, and I have to go.

So now I can't get on internet during the minutes I decide, in advance, I'm going to write.  Now I remember what it was like to live the continuous dream that is the story before we all got wi-fi, before multi-tasking while writing--while doing anything and everything--became the new normal.  

Having extra time to write would not put me in the zone.  I repeat: having extra time to write would not help me as much as being mindful and focused when I write, for however long I have.

Cutting off from the internet was actually the easy part.  The most radical (for me) of her suggestions: work in 45-minute units.  Here's the thing: I have a lifelong history of working until I drop.  I have two modes: on, and off.  If I don't exhaust myself, I've often thought, I haven't accomplished all I could.  But, she insists, we'll be more productive and we'll write better if we take a 15-minute break for each hour that we work--whatever the work. There is research to back up this claim, but I'd have to get on the internet to find it, so I'll leave that to you to do, if you don't believe it.

I know, I know, I know.  Time is short, and this morning you woke up early, and how can you justify taking a break so soon?  But I made myself stop, even though I was more deeply "in the zone" than I'd been in weeks, because I wanted to give her method a try.  On Monday, I tidied up on my studio on these breaks and made tea.  Yesterday I meditated again, and stretched.  And I came back fresh to each new 45-minute writing unit, as she had promised I would.

The dirty little secret about time is that you can have all day to write something, but if you aren't in the zone, it won't work.  Two of the best things I ever wrote I wrote quickly, in a white heat, in a room-full of people who were writing fast too, my students in one case, and fellow conference goers in another.  The first piece took me ten or fifteen minutes to write.  Months later, I found these scribbles in a notebook when I was supposed to be writing a conference paper and I thought, hey, I could really do something with this.  I edited it a little, sent it out, and won a national contest for it, then got to read it on National Public Radio.  Then it was reprinted in Harper's.  The second piece I wrote in ten minutes and hardly changed it at all and it got taken by the first journal I sent it to.  And I still like both those pieces and am so grateful I was able to write them.

What I learned from these examples is that time is not really our friend or the enemy when it comes to writing something that comes from the center.  You just have to access that clear channel.  But the best way I know to gain access to that clear channel is to sit yourself down and write every single day, even if it's only for a few minutes, and even if it's with a group of people who are writing too.  And you have to just move forward and not over-think it, at least for that raw, exhilarating first draft.

I like Ellen Sussman's method, and I would love to hear back from any readers who try it.  And please, if you disconnect from the internet, I hope you will return to this corner when you've finished your work to say hey. 

Day 53: The Sunday Novelist

I just read an inspiring story about a biology teacher from Lyon, where I spent the first weekend of April this past year with my students.  He won the prestigious Prix Goncourt for his debut novel, L'art Français de La Guerre.  This prize isn't about the money--you get all of 10 euros--but you are guaranteed to sell about 400,000 copies of the book after the announcement is made.

The author's name is Alexis Jenni.  He's 48, and he describes himself as a "Sunday writer."  He has no intention of quitting his day job.

Mr. Jenni wrote two novel manuscripts before he wrote this one, but he had no luck with them.  This novel, which is 700-pages long in manuscript form, took him five years to write.  He sent it to just one publisher, Gallimard, and they took it.  And then this November, he won the grand prize. 

I read about him in the current issue of France magazine, and then found this article in The Guardian.  Allson Flood of The Guardian wrote:

A journey through France's military history in Indochina, Algeria and at home, Jenni's 600-page novel is told through the eyes of Victorien Salagnon, a war veteran who becomes a painter, and the young man he teaches to paint in exchange for writing his story. 'I saw the river of blood which flows through my peaceful town, I saw the French art of war, which never changes, and I saw the turmoil which always happens for the same reasons, for French reasons which never change,' writes Jenni in the novel. 'Victorien Salagnon gave me all of time, through war which haunts our language.'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/nov/03/prix-goncourt-sunday-writer-alexis-jenni

The teacher/Sunday novelist/Priz Goncourt winner also writes a blog, the title of which, Voyages Pas Très Loin, voyages not very far (rough translation) is totally in keeping with the spirit of this blog, especially this week.  I just became a follower/member.  I love synchronicity. 

A dear friend who fits in the making of art into a very demanding, full-time job, told me that on Sunday afternoons beginning at 3 PM she makes art or crafts projects with a friend for three hours.  "It's easy to find reasons to cancel," she told me.  "I have a paper I have to write for a conference, and so much work coming up this week.  But once I get out of the habit, it's easy to just stop going.  So I have to just do it." 

This same friend rented a studio twenty years ago, before she had her own studio and I had mine.  On Saturdays, from 9 AM to noon, she used to share it with me.  Every Saturday morning, no matter what, I would write and she would make art.  Were it not for these sessions, I wouldn't have published at all.  That's because when I first started teaching, I had no time at all to write.  Not even the pre-dawn hours.  I had new courses to prepare, endless reading, and the grading was out of control, so setting aside these Saturday mornings helped me so much.  Everything I wrote and published those first two years on the job came, or began, from those morning sessions.  I wrote a lot of short-short memoirs and stories then (funny how we find the form that fits our time constraints), and I could always complete a draft in the three-hour time allotment.  Then I'd tweak and revise later.  I also wrote chunks of longer pieces that I could spend a few minutes of each day working on as the week progressed. 

There were always papers to grade on Saturday mornings, but I put them off to the afternoon.  And I would put off recreation--bike rides, and adventures in cross-country skiing--until Sunday.

But if I happened to live in Lyon, it would be difficult to devote all of Sunday to writing.  A world UNESCO site, Lyon is just a spectacular city.  When I was there with the students, a few of us spent much of the day on bicycle exploring the Rhône and the Saône rivers.  My bike ride in Lyon is one of my happiest memories of being in France last year.  The warm air, the spring flowers, the river view of people picnicking and smooching: it was all so romantic and festive.

Lyon is the second most prosperous city in France and is rated something like 38th overall in the world on livability.  There's a Roman amphitheater, a festival of lights, deep ties to the history of film (the Lumière brothers invented the cinematographer here), but get this: Lyon is the gastronomy capitol of France.  Need I say more?

I love the little bouchons, traditional restaurants with local wines, that often have strange puppets in the window.

If I lived in Lyon, I would have to wake up very very early to be a Sunday writer, so that I could write my minimum requirement of pages, but make it out of my art cave in time for Sunday lunch.  But then

It seems that every door opens into a captivating courtyard

the ruins of the Roman amphitheater in the distance

again, I operate very well on the rewards system.

Happy Sunday, everyone!

Who could resist a restaurant with this window?

Your table awaits you. 

Day 50: Being Alive Twice: On Keeping a Journal, Part One

When our mother was dying, my sister and I found the key to the self-storage place out near Kamms Corner in Cleveland and we found our childhoods and hers stashed in there, in piles and drawers, boxes and under sheets.  It was like she'd been keeping a hope chest, nurturing the hope that one day her girls would come home.  Old report cards.  Toys.  Photo albums.  Letters.  Books.

(I just want to inject here the fantastic news that my sister, Mira Bartok, is up for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the American Libraries' Association Award for her beautiful memoir, The Memory Palace, in which this storage locker plays a very large part, as does our mother's diaries.)

Among those sweet and heartbreaking items was my diary from age 13 to 17.  It was one of those small, red ones girls used to have: the kind you close up with a little lock you can wear on a chain around your neck like a locket with a heart.  Our mother had picked it open long ago, trying to get clues, I suppose, as to who I was as a teenager and who I was consorting with long after the fact.  I don't envy her trying to figure it out.  The story keeps changing.  Now and then--well, every other page--a new boy's name comes up.  I don't have the book in front of me, but trust me, it's all along the lines of, Bob is so cute!  Dave is a hunk!  Gary gave me a ride on his motorcycle!  And then the one that made me smile when I read it again: I like meeting people from out of state!  I'd been working the counter at McDonald's and a bus-load of athletes from maybe Michigan came in, and I'd enjoyed chatting with them about their lives in that exotic, distant world.

I like meeting people from out of state.  Probably I meant boys from out of state.  Probably I just meant that I liked meeting boys.  But to say--"out of state"--that meant other places, other lands.  That was the closest I could get at that age to voicing this wish: I want to see the world.  That was what I really meant.  And even though my journal was tiny, and even though, in five years, I never filled it, I was asking for something that seemed at the time an improbable wish.  I wanted to get out there and see what there was to see.

Before I started writing this post a few minutes ago, I did an inventory of my journals.  I counted 66, but I'm sure some of them are stashed somewhere.  I don't look through them that much, and when I do it's because I'm writing a memoir piece or a travel essay and I want to check the facts.  Where did my husband eat goat?  What year was it, again?  But sometimes I can open a page and the world comes back.  That's when I know I wasn't as lazy and artless as I usually am in those pages.  I was being nice to my future self in the journal and helping ensure that reading it, to quote the poet Linda Gregg, who was quoting her former lover, the poet, Jack Gilbert: "was like being alive twice."

"More world, just when you think you've seen what there is to see."  Mark Doty writes in Still Life with Oysters and Lemons when he's discussing both a painting he loves, and about "coming back to life after a period of grief."  I'm not currently in a period of mourning, but I know I will be.  And I imagine there's a time when you see the world in black and white and gray, and then one day color returns.  And it comes with the desire to see what there is to see just around you.  He writes:

Desire brings us back.  My exuberant, golden new dog, racing down the sand slopes of Beech Forest toward me, sheer embodiment of eagerness, given over entirely to running, wind streaming his long ears back, his eyes filling with me.  The roses, in June, which deck the front of this house in a flaring pink crescendo of bloom, old roses, dense flowerheads packed with petals, with handsome and evocative names: Eden, Constance Spry, Madame Grégoire Staechelin.  The startling quality of presence in Paul's eyes, when they are suddenly direct, warm blue-brown, catching lamplight.  The particular whole-body enthusiasm with which he gives himself over to something he loves, outcries of delight that know no reservations--for Joni Mitchell singing a moody ballad, for the sight of our old retriever, Arden, sitting poised in the falling snow, completely happy, his dense black curls gone arctic.

The world on the page.  To be able to bring that back.  To see and smell those roses years later, and to trace the patterns of white snow on the dog's black head after she has been rolling in it.  Or to capture Zoe's stillness--how she stares at the river for hours and hours.

It's like walking through the world living it twice already--in your body and your senses, fully, completely--and on your stenographer's pad.  Hello world, you say.  I'm taking dictation.

I've been trying to figure out how to do this, while not excusing myself and excluding myself from that life itself, the life I want to be awake for--in the iced-over garden, in the snow with the dog staring at the river.

And I still like meeting people from out of state.