My Writing Process and My Beautifully Appointed Home and Other Stories I Like to Tell

I’m thinking of posting ideas and suggestions about writing, on my FB page and also my blog, from time to time in the weeks ahead. But planning to do this makes me a little nervous.

First of all, I don’t think of myself as particularly expert at the “how-to” part of talking about writing. This may be an odd confession from someone who’s taught writing, in various contexts, for nearly twenty-five years now--but I’m afraid it’s true. As a writing teacher, I think I’m reasonably good at these three things: (1) putting interesting and valuable things to read in front of my students; (2) creating deadlines and insisting that they produce work on a schedule; (3) reading what they write and taking them seriously by suggesting ways to improve their work. 

But I honestly don’t know how to teach them to do it.

This is a problem for me sometimes. For instance, when I read or speak or talk with book groups, people often ask about my “writing process.” This makes me sweat, because as a long-time writing teacher, I know what I’m supposed to say, which is something along the lines of “I’m at my desk, which is emptied of all other distractions, every morning at the same time; I draft for three hours; I eat a healthy lunch; and in the afternoon I methodically revise for two more hours.” 

Would that this were true. In fact I often leave my desk, even my house, to try to find that kind of clear and empty space we all dream of; I’m lucky to be able to hole up in a study carrel in the library at Moravian College, where I teach, for instance. I have multiple writing surfaces in my study (which is also our guest room--a problem, as Virginia Woolf noted, but one I won’t get into now), but I have consistently failed to keep them clear of notes about my daughter’s camps, school field trips, acting and dance and music classes and lessons and performances and recitals; printed email messages (because I’ll never remember them otherwise) and so on from people I need to write to, etc., as part of promoting my novels; receipts; bills; more printed emails, etc. related to my teaching; recommendation letter requests; coupons; publishers’ flyers about books I need to order; tape paper clips a phone nasal mist a camera old printer cartridges notebooks files and a ridiculous number of books, most of which I looked a little something up in, six months ago or more, for the novel I’m working on and which I can’t bring myself to return to the library because what if I need to check one more thing?

On good days I’ll just take a legal pad and pen, and maybe a few notes, and sit at the dining room table (the single surface in our house that somehow seems to stay relatively clear of clutter), and I’ll do that two- or three-hour drafting-in-the-morning thing. When it goes well, two or three hours isn’t nearly enough. Which is a problem, because I sometimes use this knowledge, that a couple hours is never enough, to talk myself out of even getting started on days when I have a doctor’s appointment or I’ve agreed to volunteer at my daughter’s school or there’s someone coming to do some work at the house and so I’ll be interrupted and that will make me miserable and so why even start?

Don’t even get me started on what it’s like during normal years (unlike this sabbatical year), when I’m also teaching.

I’ve been stuck on a theme of full exposure vs. harmless half-truths lately, and so I guess that’s prompting this confessional post. This is the honest truth: I can’t teach other people to somehow use my “process” because I don’t think I have one; I honestly don’t remember, for instance, precisely how the two novels I’ve published happened. Basically I’m a scattershot writer, of necessity, writing in the little gaps and windows of my life, and shoving aside the pile of crap on my desk to do it. At least that’s how it is on the good days.

I was kind of mortified when visiting one of the book groups who read In Hovering Flight a couple years ago, to hear what people in the group had decided about me and my writing life. They’d read the bio that was on my web site, and so they were picturing me in a beautifully restored old farmhouse in the Pennsylvania countryside, writing happily every day in my perfectly appointed study (I don’t know where they put the husband and daughter and pets that were also referenced in that bio). I’ll confess that I didn’t disabuse them of this picture. It was so pretty! Maybe, I thought, that really was my life and I just couldn’t see it clearly myself!

But no, it’s really not. Our house really is a restored 18th-century farmhouse, and it really is in a pretty, wooded area with lots of big old trees. But we live in a development within the city limits of Bethlehem, PA, our house has a lot of charms but won’t be in Country Living any time soon, and did I mention the part about having a hard time finding a surface that isn’t buried under my stuff or my daughter’s stuff or my husband’s stuff (except for my husband’s desk, which is somehow always immaculate--but don’t get me started on that either).

If I have any advice for writers to finish off this confession, I suppose it’s this: Shove the crap out of your way, and get your ideas down. Scribble them in a notebook if that’s all you have time to do, and see if the pressure of a notebook bursting with ideas doesn’t, eventually, force you to shove the crap out of your way again (or to pay for that service that blocks the wireless access from your computer) and start writing the story or essay or novel or memoir or whatever it is that the pressure of those notes is building toward. 

Also remember that the first page or two, at a minimum, will be horrible. This is a given, and not to be worried about. Write it all anyway, and know that, diligent writer that you are, you'll deal with it later. (Or, take my class and I'll force you to deal with it.)

I'm not quite ready to retract my last blog post, but I'll admit that listening to last Friday's episode of This American Life left me kind of confused. I'm still trying to wrap my mind around what went on with Mike Storey, but I do see a connection with my admitting to a certain comfort with "stretching the truth" for a worthy cause in Friday's post. If only he'd made it clear, in every context, that his story about Foxconn and Apple in China WASN'T journalism . . . . Very weird (weirdly hubristic?) that he left that detail out.

These things keep happening, of course, and keep capturing our attention. In this case, though, it must feel like such a blow to people who are doing thoughtful investigative work, in China and elsewhere, on what it takes to feed our appetite for sexy digital devices.

Harmless little lies? Depends on who's telling them . . . .

I want to say a few more things about “stretching the truth,” about yourself or about your past. The credential-puffing of the slash-and-burn president of Kean University in NJ aside, who hasn’t exaggerated at least a bit on a resume, for instance? Can there be a uniform standard--for academic honesty, for professional honesty, for the borrowing of intellectual property--in a digital age? Of course David Shields and John D'Agata and others in their camp would laugh--have laughed--at questions like these.

I find that my standard goes something like this: It depends on whether I like, or deep-down trust, the person who’s doing the stretching or borrowing.

Next fall I’ll teach Helon Habila’s novel Oil on Water, which is going to be interesting to talk about for all kinds of reasons, but mostly for what it has to say about the various forms of complicity with the oil companies who have wrecked the Niger delta. One detail from the novel is particularly interesting to me though: the novel’s narrator, a journalist, gets his first big break after publishing a story in which he does not report on his father’s guilt in connection with a tragic pipeline fire (“No, it was not a pipeline accident, as I told the white man, as I wrote in my published piece. But it might easily have been one, as in countless other villages.”). 

This narrator is someone you trust completely, and feel for deeply. He has a journalist’s eye and a journalist’s objectivity  --and by the end of the novel, it seems completely beside the point that early on he published a less-than-truthful story. (It also seems absolutely right, and significant, that, as he has said, “it might easily have been [a pipeline accident]”--something that happened all the time.) You kind of forget this detail about the narrator, which appears quite early in the novel, and so when I read reviews of the book after finishing it, I found it surprising to see that detail mentioned; it seemed sort of irrelevant to my experience of reading the novel. And yet of course it wasn’t; it added to the morass of culpability, the air of real despair that the book evokes.

These kinds of questions are of particular interest to me because the character at the center of the novel I’m working on now routinely lies about her past; she even makes up fake academic credentials at one crucial point. It’s occurred to me that this could, in “real life,” make her someone that a lot of people would immediately write off as corrupt. But in my mind she’s quite moral, or at least ethical, and basically good. It seems central but also strangely insignificant to me, that she has told lies about herself and her past. 

But can any motive for doing this, for stretching the truth, for somehow cleaning your work, or yourself, up for public viewing (including the very human one of wanting to look healthy and rested and attractive and, yes, a few years younger, in FB photos or book jacket photos, for instance) be not just understandable, but okay? I’m curious about where most people would draw the line these days. (And I do know that I'm conflating several different things here--textual appropriation and the massaging of one's autobiography among them--yet it seems to me that these things are all connected, in our increasingly virtual world.)

Novel research goes off the rails . . . sort of

Last fall I got in my car and headed north from Bethlehem, PA, where I live, en route (I thought) to some of the coal towns in Carbon County. But I stopped instead in Palmerton, and then at the Lehigh Gap Nature Center. I’d heard about Palmerton years ago, from a neighbor who’d been hired as a librarian in the high school there. She described the landscape as strange and barren--land ruined by, she told me, the mining of zinc. Through the years I heard more about Palmerton, and also about landscape restoration efforts at the Lehigh Gap Nature Center, from my colleague Diane Husic at Moravian College.

Actually it was the smelting of zinc (the ore itself came from New Jersey), on the banks of the Aquashicola Creek in Palmerton (named for the Stephen S. Palmer, the president of New Jersey Zinc), that led to the denuded landscape surrounding the town. In 1982 Palmerton was declared a Superfund site by the EPA; nearly a hundred years of zinc smelting had produced heavy metals like lead, cadmium, and arsenic--and these, in turn, had killed the vegetation on the Appalachian ridge above the town. 

I got interested in Palmerton because I was looking for a small town that I could use as a kind of model for the home town of the central character in the novel I’m working on. As it turned out, Palmerton didn’t exactly work (though the fictional version I’ve created will, I think). But as often happens when I’m digging around for ideas for a novel, I got caught up in a completely different historical situation.

What’s fascinating about the town of Palmerton--Superfund site, scenic town that was eventually surrounded by what’s been called a “lunar landscape”--is the boosterism that persists there, the unabated love of “Papa Zinc” on the part of many of the locals, and the sense, on these people’s part, that there’s nothing remotely strange or unusual about the landscape that surrounds them. From all accounts, New Jersey Zinc was, in many ways, a model American company--providing pensions, building schools, a hospital, social clubs for the plants’ Hungarian and Slovakian workers, etc. And cultivating remarkable loyalty on the part of the towns’ residents--while at the same time ruining the land they lived on.

Those complications intrigue me, and while I’m touching on them a bit in the novel, I think this is something I’ll want to write more about elsewhere. What’s particularly inviting about this story is one happy ending: the work of Dan Kunkle and others at the Lehigh Gap Nature Center, whose reseeding efforts have begun the gradual process of bringing vegetation and wildlife back to the Lehigh Gap. 

The image below, along with others on the Lehigh Gap Nature Center’s Flickr site, capture the strange and hopeful landscape I’ve hiked through a couple times since that first visit last fall. I recommend a visit to the Lehigh Gap, for a sense of the possibilities that exist, even in our ravaged post-industrial landscapes--and for a powerful reminder of the stamina of the natural world.

Ich habe genug

I had to take a radioactive iodine pill this morning, for a thyroid scan--and this meant I couldn’t eat anything or have any coffee until TEN O’CLOCK! (This is alarmingly late for me.) So when it was finally ten o’clock I treated myself to French toast at a diner near the airport here in Bethlehem, and I got very happy while I ate, mostly because of the food and the people around me, especially the four old men (one of whom arrived with his portable oxygen device) at the table next to me. Older people who persevere, supplemental oxygen and all, fill me with admiration and make me stop slouching and feeling sorry for myself. 

And then, on top of that, I was allowing myself simply to sit and eat and read Maira Kalman’s The Principles of Uncertainty, which I highly recommend if you are needing to slow down and deal with your thyroid issues and just get ready to enjoy the holidays without worrying so much about whether you’re getting it all right: http://www.mairakalman.com/books/a_books/uncertainty-01.html

Maira Kalman embroiders quotes from Goethe and Abraham Lincoln onto white linen, and on a white dress she embroidered “Ich habe genug,” the name of a Bach Cantata, meaning “I have enough.” A lovely reminder at this time of year.

Today is my 50th birthday.

My mom died six months ago, almost to the day.

Our dog Lily was hit by a car and died six weeks ago.

I still find myself thinking I should tell my mom things. It’s not always a good feeling; more often than not, it’s something I feel like I need to confess. For years I confessed everything--every bad thought, every misbehavior--to my mom. When Lily died, I wanted to talk to my mom, to tell her it was my fault (because I let her go outside in a storm and got in my car and drove away, and she got panicked and disoriented and ran  far from our house, probably after me, onto a very busy street). Only my mom could tell me it was okay, not to blame myself, and she wasn’t there to do it.

By 50, it seems like you should know things, but I keep being surprised by how little I really know. I guess this is a confession of sorts too--of my age, and my confusion--but also a remembrance of those I’m missing today.

Summer's End

Once Labor Day weekend is is past, you really do have to admit that it’s over. I hate that.

And what an end to the summer. Poor Vermont! Poor us here in eastern PA. Actually, it’s not too bad here in Bethlehem--but poor Paterson, NJ and surroundings, and poor folks along the Susquehanna. Here it’s just wet, wet, wet. Everything’s moldering. But the mosses are pretty beautiful, and yesterday, running on the towpath between the very high Lehigh River and the Delaware and Lehigh Canal, I saw three--that’s three--herons. 

So I’m trying to tell myself it’s just like living in the Pacific Northwest. Of course, there you have Mount Rainier, Puget Sound, incredible bookstores and markets, etc., etc. (But remember, Joyce, you saw three herons yesterday.)

It was a great, and full, summer. We squeezed in day trips to the U.S. Open and the beach at Sandy Hook, NJ before it was all over. I was busy with grant applications, getting Anna here and there, some nice trips (to Kentucky and Indiana way back in June, to Gunpowder Falls State Park in Maryland in July, to Vermont in August), doctor’s appointments, vet appointments (we have a new kitten; his name is Mouse), and even some writing. 

A highlight for me was my trip to the Shaker Seminar in Boxborough, MA, sponsored by Hancock Shaker Village, at the end of July. I got to introduce the folks there to Stranger Here Below, and to hear some interesting talks about Shaker history. And then I traveled to the wonderful Fruitlands Museum--a site I’ve been recommending to everyone. It’s a fascinating assortment of buildings and exhibits, but maybe the most interesting, to me, was the farmhouse where Bronson Alcott (Louisa’s father) and his family, along with an Englishman named Charles Lane, tried to establish a utopian community in 1843. Other interesting people spent time there as well (among them Henry David Thoreau and an intriguing figure named Joseph Palmer, who was persecuted--even jailed--for refusing to shave his beard).

My visit led me to John Matteson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father, a terrific book. Poor Bronson Alcott. What a train wreck of a husband and father--but still, those fervent nineteenth-century reformers just fascinate me.

Visit the Fruitlands Museums if you can. Read up on John Brown (there’s a great children’s book, John Hendrix’s John Brown: His Fight for Freedom, that’s made my daughter sort of the resident expert in her fifth grade class this year). And if you’re on the East Coast, try not to float away . . . .

P.S. That’s Mouse in the photo. For a while he liked to sleep atop some Salman Rushdie, which shielded him from the terrors of Inside of a Dog.