May 2010 – Writing. Life.

May 25, 2010May 25, 2010

Stones: on how gardens map our lives

A few days ago I heard a snippet of conversation on the radio that got me thinking about my garden. On an NPR program called “On Point,” the writer Sydney Edison described how she had been gardening more than two acres of land for fifty years. “Gardens reflect your life back to you,” she said. “People garden they way they do because of who they are.”

Two years ago, when our son was just a baby, Sean and I watched in dismay as the front lawn got worse and worse, its water drained by the silver maple next door. Once it had reached an irredeemable shade of gold, we finally decided to do away with it, and replaced the grass with a rocky and cascading riverbed surrounded by plants.

We were short on cash, as ever, so we recycled as much as we could. We divided up hostas from the backyard, moved in tiny perennials pinched from the overflow of a colleague’s gigantic property, and dragged out a pile of old paving stones from under the porch to create a tiny patio surrounded by thyme. The potted cedar that our friends had given us before moving to Whitehorse took a place of honour at one edge. Across from it we transplanted our once sad rhododendron that now flowered for the first time in years. (Woody plants, I learned from the radio, get better with age.)

In many ways, I garden how I write. I use my gut and instinct to guide me. I don’t plan beyond broad strokes or have a colour scheme. Riding a surge of energy and inspiration, I put things where I think they’ll be happy or where there’s a bald spot. If it doesn’t work, I rearrange.

I garden because it feeds me in ways I don’t quite understand, giving me a sense of pleasure that little else does. Both my writing and the garden are maps, recording birth, growth, life, struggle, sickness, death, and robust health. And in the corners of both lie shells and stones from beaches and forests I’ve been to.

Like a magpie, I collect these treasures obsessively, shoving pebbles into pockets and dumping small boulders surreptitiously into the trunk of my car. For the garden, for the garden, for the garden, says the voice in my head. Jagged, smooth, flecked: I can’t help myself.

Stolen bits of the world, I place these amulets in a way that tells a story, protects the past, and wonders at life all around.

Listen to “Gardening Gurus Spill the Dirt” on NPR’s radio show On Point here.

[Photo: withrow]

May 19, 2010July 11, 2011

Siberian photographs: on home and exile

A couple months ago I took my son to visit my Aunt Birutė to talk about family history and my grandmother’s exile. She gave me some extraordinary photographs during that visit, including several from Siberia. More than I expected.

One small photograph, dated 1957, shows my grandmother’s house. Made of logs and with a straw roof, it stands on fenced property. Both look bigger than I would have expected. I’d always imagined the house surrounded by forest, but the land all around her house is flat.

Another shows my grandmother and her sister Magrieta standing in the garden, up to their knees in lush leaves. They wear matching shirts and skirts made from fabric sent in care-packages by faraway daughters. On the back, in Magrieta’s handwriting: “The cabbage garden, beyond it that you can see the potatoes and fence.” I’m struck by how happy my grandmother looks in these photographs: strong and ruddy, she could be an early American pioneer. (In the above photograph my grandmother sits on the left. She has several teeth missing, knocked out in an accident with a combine harvester.)

For the last few weeks, I’ve been singing a new song to my son Sebastian at bedtime. We call it “The Bird Song.” I learned it at summer camp as a child.

Like birds returning home
Lead us too, oh Lord.
From the sad road of exile,
Gather us up.

The song was written by my grandmother’s generation about returning to the place they fled or were forced to leave. Now, as I sing my son to sleep, it is these photographs of my grandmother in her cabbage garden that appear in my mind’s eye.

Home: I wonder if it felt like a homecoming when my grandmother returned to Lithuania after seventeen years. Can there be home without family? Her children were grown and far away; it would be another seven years before she saw her family again, when she emigrated Canada. But is family enough to restore home? Surely this country wasn’t home either: the language and customs remained strange to her until her death.

Did exile rob my grandmother of her home in more fundamental way than mere displacement? By taking her away by force, did her captors kill the very possibility of home?

Most people still die within a few kilometres of where they were born. Not so for my grandmother. Not so for many of us who move often and far either by choice or necessity. So what are the ties that bind the landless far from loved ones?

What is home to the exiled?

[Photo: Ona and Magrieta in Brovka, Siberia, 1957. Photographer unknown]

May 17, 2010May 17, 2010

What makes a good book title? Lulu can help.

Titles are my Achilles heel. I’m really, really bad at them.

One problem is that I favour the abstract and poetic: titles whose meaning becomes clear only once you’ve read the book. For example, I wanted to call my first book “Welcome to Elkader” (instead of “Silence is Death”), but that was roundly rejected at the press as being way too obscure.

So what makes a good title?

Judging from what’s floating around the interwebs, conventional wisdom boils down to the following (which, frankly, all seems pretty obvious):

1) A title’s got to be easy to remember.

2) It should be descriptive.

3) It should avoid all the usual pitfalls: cliché, sappiness, clunkiness, being overly literal. . . And apparently, it shouldn’t be a full grammatical sentence (oops).

That said, I do love internet tools when it comes to titles, especially those gimmicky generators, where you plug in a noun, verb, a gerund, etc.

There’s got to be some mathematical calculation or algorithm that will determine success, so when I came across the “Lulu Titlescorer,” I had to give it a whirl.

Here’s what Lulu does (from the website):

The Lulu Titlescorer has been developed exclusively for Lulu by statisticians who studied the titles of 50 years’ worth of top bestsellers and identified which title attributes separated the bestsellers from the rest.

We commissioned a research team to analyse the title of every novel to have topped the hardback fiction section of the New York Times Bestseller List during the half-century from 1955 to 2004 and then compare them with the titles of a control group of less successful novels by the same authors.

The team, lead by British statistician Dr. Atai Winkler, then used the data gathered from a total of some 700 titles to create this “Lulu Titlescorer” a program able to predict the chances that any given title would produce a New York Times No. 1 bestseller.

How could I resist? I plugged in a few titles from my long-list in Lulu. (My book is about a Lithuanian librarian who saved Jews during the Holocaust by hiding them in the university library where she worked. It will require a descriptive subtitle not included in the options below.)

Interestingly, my working title, Beloved Profession (what I’ve been calling the book for about five years now), scored highest. And my current favourite, Ex Libris, scored lowest.

The results:

Beloved Profession = 69.0% chance of being a bestselling title

Margin = 63.7 % chance of being a bestselling title

The Good Librarian = 41.4% chance of being a bestselling title

The Librarian = 35.9% chance of being a bestselling title

Ex Libris = 26.3% chance of being a bestselling title

Thoughts?

[Photo: jayRaz]

May 13, 2010May 13, 2010

Summer grant deadlines for writers (and an aside)

My favourite blogger Mira Bartok has posted a new list of fellowships, grants and prizes for writers: for lesbian writers, poets (gay, straight or otherwise), Romance-language writers, non-fiction specialists (like yours truly) and the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant that I won last year. Check out Mira’s List here. Tell her I sent you!

* * *

Barbara Deming (of the aforementioned Fund), a feminist and lesbian poet, writer, and civil rights activist founded the Money for Women Fund (that now carries her name) in 1975. She died of cancer in 1984.

On her deathbed, Deming wrote a letter that the chair of her foundation now sends its fellows.

The letter moved me to tears when I read it. I plan to keep it forever, since it reminds me to honour those who went before me and to learn from their lives.

“May all be made whole,” wrote Deming. I love that.

Here’s the letter:

To so many of you:

I have loved my life so very much and I have loved you so very much and felt so blessed at the love you have given me. I love the work so many of us have been trying to do together and had looked forward to continuing this work but I just feel no more strength in me now and I want to die. I won’t lose you when I die and I won’t leave you when I die. Some of you I have especially loved and felt beloved by and I hope you know that even though I haven’t had the strength lately to reach out to you.

I love you. Hallowed be (may all be made whole), I want you to know, too, that I die happily.

Bobbie (Barbara) Deming

(Naples Community Hospital. Naples, Florida. July 21, 1984. 6:15 p.m.)

[Photo: philippe leroyer]

May 12, 2010May 12, 2010

How I stopped resisting and returned to the first-person

I keep going back to that month I spent at the Banff Centre for the Arts almost four years ago. Never before had I been treated with such generosity and respect (one of the Literary Journalism program’s mentors jokingly warned us not to get used to it, since never again would we be treated this well). The resources were humbling: everything to foster creativity and work was provided. So when I couldn’t deliver the quality of text I’d set out to write during my tenure there, I felt deep humiliation.

But my failure at Banff ended up teaching me about what kind of writer I am. What’s more, that failed text has finally (finally!) transformed itself into something good.

I travelled to Alberta in the summer of 2006 to write a 10,000 word essay on a librarian who hid Jews in a Lithuanian university library during the Shoah. I had my story, my archival documents to cite, and my ideas about what form it should take: above all, I wanted to keep myself out of the essay and avoid using the first-person voice.

Since I had written my first book in a quirky first-person, I was determined to try something new. I wanted to write something “straight”: to tell a story that deserved to be told without mucking it up with theatrics or by inserting myself into the narrative. It seemed like a good plan, and I stuck to it. At the end of four weeks of painful essay extraction, I submitted my final product.

The essay was a disaster. Clunky and lifeless. Even I had to admit it, so once I came home, I kept working on it, wrestling with it and trying to diagnose the problem.

Only after hundreds of drafts over many months, and a grudging return to the first-person voice, did the text begin to work. The story found its traction and my central character (the librarian) gained colour.

Why? What is it about the first-person voice that is so powerful? And why are we so suspicious of it?

Years ago, I was thinking about pitching something to the Chicago Public Radio show This American Life, and looked at their website for guidelines. One line from their description of what makes a good story has stayed with me. It’s now gone from the site, but it went something like: “We look for stories that appear to be about one thing, but that are actually about another.”

This is what the first-person voice is best at.

It’s easy to sneer at the glut of memoirs of the past decade, and to discredit the genre as somehow dishonest or narcissistic, but autobiographical texts and personal essays that really work are always about something bigger than the person writing them.

The best first-person texts flirt with navel-gazing, but are redeemed by insight, artistry, self-criticism, and honesty. By telling a story about their own singular lives, skilled autobiographers and personal essayists inspire revelations. In other words, these texts not only reveal something about the person writing them, but also about the one reading them.

My Banff essay didn’t work when it was just about my librarian, and began to gel only when I found the something else it was really about. Ultimately, the essay came to tell a love story between a researcher and her subject, and the ways in which a pregnancy disrupts this imagined relationship. This story that appeared to be about a Holocaust rescuer was actually about writing and motherhood.

After more rejections than I care to admit to, the essay (now called “Pregnant Pause: On Ona Šimaitė, Research, Writing and Motherhood”) has found its home in a journal called Feminist Formations, formerly the National Women’s Studies Journal. It will appear very soon, in a matter of weeks. I’ll let you know when it happens.

If you’re interested in thinking more deeply about the first-person voice, or simply in reading some top-notch texts, take a look at Phillip Lopate’s edited volume, The Art of the Personal Essay. It’s a massive, brick-sized tome, and will keep you inspired and interested for years to come.

[Photo: DelosJ]

May 10, 2010May 10, 2010

Translating Vilnius: Event in Chicago, May 25, 2010

If you’re in Chicago on the evening of May 25, 2010, head on down to the 57th Street Books to hear my friends Laimonas Briedis and Elizabeth Novickas speak about their work. They’re both brilliant and charismatic.

Translating Vilnius – Elizabeth Novickas & Laimonas Briedis
Tue, 05/25/2010 – 6:00pm
57th Street Books
1301 E. 57th Street
Chicago, Illinois 60637

The city of Vilnius — Chicago’s sister-city — embraces history with many voices: known in Yiddish as Vilne, in Polish as Wilno, in Russian as Vilna, and in German as Wilna, the capital of Lithuania possesses a polyphony of national identities and cultural resonances. No single history or language can embrace this multitude of identities, for each name resonates with different experiences, memories, and expectations of Europe. As such, the city both unites and divides the continent, making it a point of many departures and arrivals. Writing Vilnius, then, is always about narrative crossings, real or imagined trespasses into foreign territories and unknown worlds. As a result, Vilnius’s literature is first and foremost an act of translation, an exploration of the place from a novel point of view.

Laimonas Briedis, author of Vilnius: City of Strangers, and Elizabeth Novickas, translator of Ričardas Gavelis’ Vilnius Poker, discuss the challenges, pleasures, and discoveries of translating the story of Vilnius.

Written as a traveler’s tale of encounter, Vilnius: City of Strangers, is the first biography of the city, exploring the history of the place, from its legendary beginnings in the fourteenth century to the twentieth century dramas of wars, revolutions and massacres, through the insightful impressions of foreign travelers.

Napoleon, Dostoyevsky, Stendhal, Döblin, Tolstoy, Bakhtin and Brodsky: these voices – among others equally compelling though lesser known – reveal the essence of Europe in their narrative encounter with this threshold city, situated at the geographical centre of Europe. Briedis has woven their letters, diaries, utterances and reflections of Vilnius into a compelling and intimate story, and shares with the reader a deep understanding of the Lithuanian, Polish, Russian and German identities of the place, as well as its centrality in the life of Jewish diaspora.

Ričardas Gavelis’ Vilnius Poker, included in the long list for Best Translated Book Award of 2010, presents Lithuanian Vilnius as it existed under Soviet rule. In its pages the city of Vilnius emerges as a mysterious, shifting, sentient presence, inhabited by gray beings whose brains have been destroyed: a city of underground labyrinths, morgues, and lurking dragons. The story weaves together a multiplicity of the voices of Vilnius, a place of floating, unstable identities and histories, and paradoxically fixing a portrait of the city as it was – or never was – in “a forceful statement that is on its way towards becoming a touchstone of 20th century literature.” (Andrew Wessels, Bookslut.com)

Laimonas Briedis, a native of Vilnius, Lithuania, received his doctorate from the University of British Columbia and is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at the Lithuanian Literature Institute.

Elizabeth Novickas has a M.A. in Lithuanian Language and Literature from UIC. She has worked previously as a bookbinder, newspaper designer, cartographer, and system administrator for the Chicago Sun-Times.

[Photo: elgirdaz]

May 10, 2010

Fellowship announcements for writers

Check out today’s posting on Mira’s List for writers’ fellowships and awards. Of particular interest: The Bard Fiction Prize, The Hodder Fellowships at Princeton, and the Guggenheim Fellowships.

Happy hunting!

[Photo: Valeriana Solaris]

May 7, 2010May 7, 2010

Life-blood: Louise DeSalvo

Louise DeSalvo, “A Portrait of the Puttana as a Middle-Aged Woolf Scholar.” Between Women: Biographers, Novelists, Critics, Teachers and Artists Write About Their Work on Women (Routledge, 1993), 35-53.

I love this essay for many reasons.

1) It’s a seriously learned text written in a light and readable first-person voice.

2) It tells a story about being a woman that doesn’t reduce our existence to beauty (or lack thereof), procreation (or lack thereof), or our relationships (or lack thereof) to men.

3) It’s about the pleasure of archival work and falling in love with a woman writer who lived long ago.

4) It’s about growing up in an immigrant family and making your way intellectually in the language (and culture) of the new land in a new way.

5) It’s about how Virginia Woolf can save your life. Still now, in 2010.

I came to Virginia Woolf embarrassingly late in my life. By the time I discovered her, or rather by the time I re-read her in a frame of mind that allowed me to be deeply moved, I was in my thirties and had a small child.

Louise DeSalvo describes a similar experience. Her essay starts: “I am thirty-two years old, married, the mother of two small children [. . .].” Travelling to England on research with a friend, and without her family, she and her companion represent “[t]he next generation of Woolf scholars, in incubation. We are formidable” (35).

The essay explores the role of women among DeSalvo’s Italian parents and their peers, and their relationship to food and men. Both, she warns, tell you a lot about what was expected of her and the many ways in which she was a disappointment.

First: women who care about their families, she says, make fresh pasta every day — a process that takes hours, and ends up enslaving the person saddled with the task.

Second: women who do anything without their husbands are puttana — hence the essay’s title, and the opening scene on the plane.

Instead of a dutiful, stable, ever-cooking mother, DeSalsvo becomes a “whore,” a woman who lives her own life alongside her husband and children. A woman who does things without her man.

She narrates her own experience of the dichotomy of woman-writer (or woman-creator) that Woolf wrote about in her essay A Room of One’s Own, and the hope this text continues to offer to the despairing and frustrated among us.

She tells about loving a child and a husband, and at the same, loving reading, writing and writers.

Ultimately, this is an essay about how literature can change us in fundamental ways. For many of us, writing is no hobby or even profession. It is our vocation, our life-blood, the very thing that keeps us alive.

“Woolf taught us that writers are human beings, that writing is a human act, that the act of writing is filled with human consequences for a society and for its readers. No ‘art for art’s sake.’ Instead, ‘art for the sake of life'” (52).

[Photo: jspad]

May 4, 2010May 4, 2010

Familiar yet strange: “Alphabet fusion” in Lithuanian translation

This morning my Globe and Mail piece “Alphabet fusion” appeared in Lithuanian translation in the national daily Lietuvos rytas (Lithuanian morning). It was a very surreal (not to say postmodern) experience to read it.

The article talks about how our family lives in three languages (Lithuanian, English and French), about what Lithuanian can do that English and French can’t, and about the linguistic choices that our son Sebastian makes himself.

So, to read about all this in Lithuanian, a language I live in but don’t write in, and the central language the piece was about, was, to say the least, odd and interesting.

Familiar yet strange, mine yet not.

Perhaps there’s another essay in that.

You can access the article through this link.

[Photo: Leo Reynolds]

May 3, 2010June 29, 2010

Internet resources for writers: publicity, grants, submitting

USING SOCIAL NETWORKING TO CREATE A PLATFORM:

I’m not expert on this, but my friend Jill Murray (www.jillmurray.com) is. She’s a Montreal author of young adult fiction, and is super-tech-savvy. She recently gave a talk on how to build a web presence through social networking, and posted her slides on her website. I found the advice there really good. Check it out here. You can find a link to Jill Murray’s website at the right margin as well.

GRANTS:

If you could use some tips on grant writing, check out Mira’s List. It’s a great blog where Mira Bartok gathers and disseminates grant announcements. I’ve subscribed to her email list, and have received a grant as a result of a listing I found there. You can also get to Mira’s List via the link under Grants at the right margin.

SUBMISSION IDEAS:

Though she doesn’t update very often any more, Sarah Wagner Yost’s blog archives give some good ideas as to where to submit personal essays and travel writing. She recommends trying The Smart Set and Modern Love (NYT) for starters. She provides editors’ email addresses and submission guidelines.

[Photo: austinevan]