susanlerner

[susanlerner]

Delivery--published in Bluestem Magazine

The line turned blue. I was ecstatic.

Charles' brow furrowed.

Our girls are still babies, he said.

So, they'll be close in age, I said.

I'm not sure I'm ready for a third, he said.

I had always wanted three children. Truth was, our two-child family reminded me of my isolated childhood, just me and my brother, our parents out of control and absent. Our basement housed a Primal Scream box; vials of lithium littered our parents' dressers. A third baby, I was sure, would serve as a stop sign to the barrage of lonely memories. Raising two kids would be too quiet. Three kids equaled a party. Charles's uncertainty paled in the face of my desperation.

The pregnancy was eventful.

Six weeks: 104-degree fever.

Patience and Tylenol, said the OB.

Nine weeks: heavy bleeding caused by prenatal diagnostic test. Frozen in bed, thighs clenched, I figured I'd blown it, would never get another chance at having a third. The next morning, a bloody pad bunched between my legs. The ultrasound wand, unbelievably, found a heartbeat. My tears of happiness thudded softly on the exam table paper.

Twenty-eight weeks: motionless baby sent a panicked me to the ER.

The heartbeat's loud and strong, the OB said, her voice calm and measured.

I went limp with relief.

Thirty-six weeks: low amniotic fluid per ultrasound.

I waddled down the hall to the high risk OB. He smeared the dome of my abdomen with goo.

Well?

Baby's fine, but we need to watch carefully.

Thirty-eight weeks.

Time to schedule the delivery, said the OB.

But it's two weeks before my due date.

Tomorrow, she said.

Charles narrowed his eyes upon hearing this news. His physician friends had told him stories about deliveries gone wrong, and he had been anxious at our girls' births.

It'll be fine, I said. Charles sighed and reached for my hand.

Push, said the OB.

You can do it, said Charles.

The nurse must have said – It's a boy! I must have smiled. The baby cried. The nurse took him aside to be cleaned up.

Mary, page the surgical team, said the OB in a clipped tone.

The doctor pushed one hand up deep, while the other smashed down on my belly from the outside.

Where are they, Mary? asked the doctor, her usually congenial voice sharp.

The OB removed her hand, walked to the wall and pressed the red button on a chrome panel before returning to the valley between my stirrups. Elbow-deep inside me she moved her hand along my innards, as if searching for a ring in a dark room.

What's wrong? I asked, scared.

She continued without answering. Charles sucked in his upper lip. I imagined I had become a character in one of those stories about life-threatening post-delivery placental problems. The normally unflappable OB barked orders to the nurse in a voice I did not recognize.

My son lay, red like Esau, jerking tiny feet and fists, in a clear Plexiglas bassinet. It became clear to me, there on the delivery table, that now that I had successfully – and selfishly – brought our third child into the world, I might die. I might never see my son flash a toothless grin, never know if he preferred chocolate or vanilla. And my girls: still watching Barney, still in patent leather Mary Janes, would they grow to be math/science nerds or humanities lovers? Love spicy curry or be white food kids? Adamant that three children would spare me from the lonely memories of my untethered upbringing, I had doomed them to growing up without a mother. And Charles. None of us would get the life I worked so hard to create.

Paper ripped. The nurse swabbed cold between my legs. My nostrils tingled from an antiseptic smell.

Cancel the page, said the OB.

She must have said something like I'm not worried anymore. Or I see what happened now. Or false alarm.

All I remember is that from the space between my knees I saw her face soften, and the creases on her forehead smooth.

Thank you, God, I whispered through tears.

The baby wailed.

Charles squeezed my hand.

[susanlerner]

A Dream You’re In Charge Of

Jhumpa Lahiri cut a striking figure—an orange glow from her chunky necklace setting off her deep-red lipstick and kohl-rimmed eyes. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author closed out this year’s Vivian S. Delbrook Visiting Writers Series by packing Butler University’s Riley Room.

Author readings are a mixed bag. Writers know how to put words on the page but aren’t necessarily great orators. A public reading may add nuance and texture to the work, but sometimes even sparkling prose can fall flat when read aloud. Reading “Hell-Heaven” on my own gave me the shivers, but that night the story’s lush descriptions and quiet, restrained moments didn’t captivate. I found my mind wandering during Lahiri’s soft-spoken delivery.

The evening heated up a bit when Lahiri took questions. An audience member commented on the beautiful objects in Lahiri’s stories, and asked how she comes up with these descriptions. Lahiri said they come from her imagination: “A story begins in a state of deep blindness. But something is back there [in the subconscious], waiting for the fog to lift.”

Lahiri was asked whether writing chose her or she chose writing, and she replied that reading and writing are two sides of a coin. “I read because I write, and I write because I read,” she said. “Writers are readers who’ve picked up a pen.”

The next day, when Lahiri gave an hour-long Q&A at Butler’s new Efroymson Center for Creative Writing, she entered the room freshly scrubbed, sans makeup and jewelry. She was startlingly honest and articulate. In fact, a student asked her how Pulitzer Prize had affected her, and Lahiri admitted that she didn’t enjoy the attention. She felt that she was too young, that the award had come to her too soon in her career. She said she considered Interpreter of Maladies, the short story collection that won the prize, to be her apprentice work.

“I always question it,” she said. “I still question it.”

Ms. Lahiri received multiple graduate degrees, and she wrote Interpreter of Maladies over a seven-year period during which she was feeling increasingly dissatisfied following the academic path her parents expected of her. “I wanted to sit with a friend and look at the sentences from a maker’s point of view, not a critical one,” she said. She wrote Interpreter of Maladies without the expectation that it would become a book: “At the beginning I felt as if I was trying on the role of writer like trying on an expensive dress in a store—trying it on and then taking it off.”

While working on her literature degrees, she found herself pausing for longer and longer intervals on the second floor, the home of the creative writing department. Her watershed moment came after she was awarded her Ph.D. in Renaissance literature and it was time to find a job in that area. She didn’t want to.

When I asked Lahiri to describe how the process of writing short stories and novels is different, and whether she had a preference, she replied, “Certain stories require the breadth of a novel, but others don’t. I want to listen to what the needs of my ideas are, and I want to be a writer who continues to write both.”

“There’s a ruthlessness to the way a short story is constructed that I like,” she added. “Short stories do something novels can’t.”

Both Maile Meloy and Nicole Krauss, writers who spoke at Butler earlier in the season, said they write with no fixed plot in mind, and I asked Lahiri if this is also the case with her. She said it is, that she begins with a situation—part of a plot but not the whole thing. The rest appears as she writes.

“Writing is mysterious,” she said. “One’s interaction with the world forms the place where writing happens.

“Writing a story is like having a dream, except you’re in charge of it.”

(This article originally appeared in Punchnel’s)

[susanlerner]

What You Remember

5:20 A.M. Open your eyes. Alarm buzzing. Snap into consciousness. To your left: the rise of your husband's back, a twist of sheets over the scaffold of his shoulders. Morning light mosaics gray over your bedroom's white walls. Reach out your right hand, let your fingers smooth over a stack of books, the base of a reading lamp, the cord to a clock radio. Finally, a snooze button. Silence, but for the rush of your breath and the roar of your heartbeat.

Clump downstairs, put on the kettle, let out the dog, clear the dishes from the drainer and wipe down the table. As you do, the kitchen blurs and your heart beats a staccato in your chest. Sit down at the kitchen table with a cup of milky coffee, the newspaper spread before you. These bits of morning bring you back to yourself. Your head and heart begin to decelerate, just a little.

See the shrink. “How are your mornings?” she asks. Look to the right, out the window. The overcast sky  reminds you of the lonely, spider web-white fog of the San Francisco sky of your childhood.

Answer. “The same. Anxious and sweaty, as if I were back on that floor in Berkeley.”

Turn your gaze back to the window for a moment. “I had another dream about the Baal Shem Tov,” you say as a tear trails down your cheek.

The dream: Early 1700s. The Baal Shem Tov, whose given name was Yisroel, is a hollow-cheeked and spindly-limbed teenager in a cheder in a small Ukrainian village. A rabbi paces at the front of the cheder, lecturing. Yisroel's restless. Leg jiggling under the table, left elbow jerking randomly. The rabbi drones on and the boy's gaze turns away. Despite April's faint yellow sun, he sees ice blooms on the sill. Glistening frozen crystals cling to the pine tree just outside. A sparrow lights on a bough. ”Yisroel! Yisroel!” The boy angles his head towards the sound. The rabbi towers over him, expecting an answer. The boy pushes away from the table, runs out the door.

Pine needles and mud hug the bottom of Yisroel's shoes as they crunch through thin layers of ice along the path from the cheder to the forest at the edge of the village. He pumps his legs, he's breathing fast. The pines grow taller and denser, shadowing the path. It's early afternoon but dark like dusk. Suddenly, a clearing. Bright sunlight illuminates an expanse of yellow-green meadow. Panting, Yisroel drops to his knees in the soft green, looks up at the blue of the wide open sky and exhales. He is home.

Research. The Baal Shem Tov, unlike the other rabbis of his time, professed that there is divinity inherent in all living beings and encouraged a simpler, peeled back connection with nature. He believed that the world is not two things – God and his creations – but one thing: God and creations together, each creation animated by one of God's sparks, each creation endowed by God with specific traits. It is our mandate to live according to our true, God given natures. A cypress tree should not strive to be a sycamore. A housefly should not yearn to be a honeybee. The Baal Shem Tov taught that God's mandate is to return to one's true nature.

Go through your memory files. Find yourself as a four-year-old, in the still dark living room in your flat in San Francisco. Look at shelves laden with gilt-colored books, all lined up like soldiers. The name on the books' spines is G U R D J I E F F, and although you don't understand this word, you know there's a secret in these books. Pull out a volume from the middle of the shelf, sit down Indian-style on the cold, wood floor and page through the books until daylight.

Remember the sixties. The smothering suburbs of St. Louis, teased updos and mahjong: your parents' home. They leave for San Francisco's promise of freedom. Once on the West Coast they revel. But it's too much. The restless motor in your mother's mind spins out. She is all bristle, all high voltage current, all stop that, you're making me nervous. She takes you away. Get in the car now, we're leaving! You are five, and you leave your father, your flat, the Humpty-Dumpty on the floor of your bedroom. The car stops and you both get out and walk into a house. Just like that your mother disappears. You are in a house with strangers, a pod of Berkeley's stringy-haired hippies. That night lie on that floor, feel a dense area deep in your chest, a bar of hot metal. Your ribs are locked, arms tingle, and every creak and footfall freezes you in place. Try to catch your breath. Warmth shivers through, and your mother's current is now yours. Look into the black and see that the ceiling has melted into the nighttime sky. The stars swirl, have a voltage of their own. They are about to reach down and yank you up off the floor and take you with them into outer space.

Remember the seventies. The flower children of the sixties stop dropping acid and turn to other modes of self-exploration. Transcendental Meditation. Scientology. EST. Gurdjieff's acolytes turn their attention from the Armenian philosopher to Subud, a group based in Indonesia. They search for their authentic selves, want to toss their masks into the air like Mary Tyler Moore's beret.

Watch your father groom his new toupee, readying himself for a Subud meeting. The Berkeley gang is still smoking weed, doing peyote, and your mother is now in the locked ward.  She loses her quest for self-actualization down the bottom of a two-inch tall honey-colored vial of mind-numbing Thorazine.

Take a closer look: the annual Subud picnic in Golden Gate Park. Your mother, on temporary leave from the hospital, sits on a park bench, her unbuttoned pea coat draped over her slumped shoulders. She stares into nothing, eyes cloudy, like an aquarium.

Ask, “Mom?”

Remember more. Your father leaves for the week long initiation at the Primal Scream Institute. When the week is over, he comes home, but disappears every night after dinner down the basement steps with an assistant from the Institute. Knocks and thuds from the padded Primal Scream box in your basement make your chest contract. Struggle to inhale. Despite the staticky buzz in your ears, try to sleep.

Read more. Threaded throughout cultures is a belief that each one of us must work to bring him or herself back to his or her true nature. It's called Zen, Hasidism, or sixties counterculture, but it all boils down to the same thing – that the task at hand is to not allow thoughts and emotions to be based on what happened in the past, but bring them back into the present.

Believe. Underneath impossible tangles of fear and worry, you know your pure nature –  like the cypress tree's cypressness and the housefly's houseflyness – is lying in wait, aching to be released.

Look out your window.  See the new spring leaves and remember Yisroel's forest clearing, spacious and luminous. Your mornings may time-travel, but under the thrum of your heartbeat you know there is also an open green space, and in that meadow, the possibilities are infinite.

(Originally published in JMWW)

[susanlerner]

Nine-and-a-Half Weeks, 1997

Every release of blood was pulling you away. Picturing crimson seeping through my underwear, wicking through my cotton jumper and onto the taxi's black seat, I jammed my thighs together and tightened down there, as if clenching could stop the flow. Hold you in. We bumped along I-94 making our way to Midway Airport. My forehead ached. I examined the worm of yellowed foam that pushed through a crack in the black vinyl, and thought about how I would leave a stain.

It was in 1997, on a brilliant fall afternoon, when I pushed out of Illinois Masonic's revolving door and hailed a taxi. Before the doctor sent us home, he pointed to a box of maxi pads, warned there might be spotting. Now, on my way to the airport, I felt a passage of liquid surge between my legs. Shifting to one side, lifting my right flank a little, I hoped to feel just a slight cool, a signifier that there wasn't much moisture on the pad, but there was wet and chill.

I hadn't wanted to undergo prenatal diagnostic testing. At thirty-seven, my obstetrician had stamped my chart “Advanced Maternal Age,” and your dad, already feeling pushed to his limits by his role as father to two- and one-year-old girls, worried about adding any baby to the mix, let alone one with genetic abnormalities. Desperate for another child, I knew that most likely you were my last chance at another baby. Invasive prenatal tests carried a small risk of miscarriage; why would I risk losing you, my last hope? But your dad was so worried, I acquiesced. Chorionic villus sampling, a relatively new test in 1997, could be performed as early as the middle of the ninth week of pregnancy, seven weeks earlier than an amnio. Test results would be in before the end of the first trimester, before ultrasound revealed your slender fingers and ghostly, veined eyelids. One doctor in Chicago performed chorionic villus sampling more than anyone else in the U.S., so while your dad stayed home to watch your sisters, you and I flew to Chicago for the day to have the test. I wanted the best doctor. I was determined to keep you safe.

The taxi pulled up to Departures, and I started to weep, knowing that as I got up I'd feel under me the wet pool of blood. Hold on, hold on, I muttered to you. Willing the cells in my body to freeze, I begged you Don't leave. The back of my hand wiped tears as I said to the driver, “Can you ask if they'll bring me a wheelchair? I had a medical procedure. I'm not feeling well.” As the driver arranged for the chair, I opened the taxi door and, holding my legs together, slowly rotated, swinging my feet towards the curb. My jumper twisted beneath me, stuck to the vinyl like oatmeal. A pencil of liquid pulsed from between my legs, unstoppable, like lava.

Sobbing all through the flight back, I blamed myself; this was what I deserved for agreeing to  the test. Your dad was at home paging the doctor. “There is nothing to be done. Bring her to my office tomorrow morning,” she said. Back home, a fresh pad between my legs, I inhaled shallowly, so my ribs wouldn't move.

In the morning Dr. Westphal squirted cool, clear goo over my still-flat belly, turned on her portable ultrasound machine and held the wand like a scepter.

Static.

As she ran the wand over me, back and forth, I waited for her to say you were gone.

Static.

If she never said those words I could still believe you were safe, that you were waiting for the flood to pass, huddled like a bat in a corner of my womb.

A nurse opened the door, then closed it again, wordlessly.

Heels clicked down the hall.

The doctor pressed the wand over my lower parts. Psychedelic shapes of gray snaked over the screen. Tears thudded softly on the stiff white paper of the exam table. As soon as Dr. Westphal said I'm sorry, Susan, you would be vanquished, but if time locked I could stay suspended in the unknowing, the possibility of you still inside. Then, through the white noise pulsed concentrated static, and those staticky pulses swished rhythmically. She said, “There's the heartbeat.”

(This piece originally appeared in the March 2012 issue of Foundling Review.)

[susanlerner]

A Net In the Tide

I killed you.

As Charles, the man who would have been your dad, gives the receptionist my name, I sit down in a molded plastic chair. The little girls who would have been your sisters crouch on the carpet, fishing Duplos out of a gray milk crate, their scuffed white Stride-Rites curtained by flowered dresses. “Candle in the Wind” plays overhead. Faint vapors of rubbing alcohol and new carpet fill the room.

No, no, no loops through my head. Knees pressing together, my pelvic floor clenches. As if my contracted muscles can hold you inside.

As if you are still inside me.

My God, how could I have done this?

Charles, caught by surprise at this pregnancy, has been beside himself worrying about this baby conceived with my 37-year-old eggs. He'd never agree to try again. You were my last chance at another baby, and I've destroyed you.

Yesterday the specialist performed the test, peeled off his gloves, and said, “Grab a mini pad, there might be spotting.” But last night crimson seeped, my panties heavy, wet. Charles called the OB as I sat on the edge of our bed sobbing.

Charles hung up the phone. “She said at nine weeks there's nothing she can do. She said for us to come to the office first thing in the morning.”

Last night as I lay in the dark, from between my legs warmth pulsed. Don't leave, don't leave. My thighs twisted, and I pushed the pad against me so the blood—the evidence of my crime—wouldn't come in contact with the air, so I wouldn't feel the cool. No, no, no, the syllables a low drumbeat.

The clock radio flashed 2:00 a.m.

3:00 a.m.

Where were you? In the stain on the scalloped edges of my underpants? A speck of flotsam in the river of red weeping from my womb?

The voice in my head chanted. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. If only I had stood up for you.

I should have said no to the test, no to your dad who wanted assurance you would be healthy.  I knew the test had risks. If only I'd shut my legs before the specialist slid that barrel of cold metal into my uterus.

And now, how can I save you—drop a net into the bloody flow to catch you? I long to nestle your ghostly lima bean body in the cradle of my palm. Tell you I love you, somehow radio-wave this message to your nascent ear buds. Resuscitate your penny candy-sized heart. If only the white caps of my grief could flip you, infuse you with the energy to climb back through my cervix like a baby kangaroo burrowing into his mother's pouch.

The block tower crashes. The two-year-old who would have been your sister giggles, hands your other almost-sister another stack. “It alwite,” she says. Charles stares at the carpet.

“Come on back,” says the nurse.

I killed you. The doctor will confirm it, will say: The baby's gone.

I'm sorry. I climb onto the table. I'm sorry. Your spirit, I imagine, hovers in the dark corner of the room, three feet below the ceiling. I stare at the spot, as if my gaze tethers you, keeps you with me.

A knock on the door. A rush of water from the sink. The portable ultrasound scrapes across the floor. My nostrils tingle. Antiseptic. Goo squirts over my still-flat belly.

My tears thud on the paper that covers the exam table. The machine whirs. Grainy commas of black and gray swim across the screen. I hold my breath. No, no, no, says the voice.

I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

Can your hear me?

How could I have done this? Snatched from you the chance to suck at my breast, to make me necklaces with beads of dried macaroni, to tantrum when I wedge snow boots onto your pudgy feet. I would have been the custodian of the memories of your childhood.

I would have been your mother.

Your father pushed for the test, but in the end—this is the end, isn't it?—I am responsible. Accountable.

The machine makes white noise, like a TV station without a signal. Shadows patch along the bare corner of the room.

“Listen,” says the OB.

The machine's hum gathers and separates, the sound surging like a gallop, hooves crashing through the tide of my grief. A heartbeat. Your heartbeat.

Ba-da, ba-da, ba-da.

This piece originally appeared in The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review on August 12, 2014

[susanlerner]

As a girl who dreamed of becoming an actress, Anita Diamant had no idea she would grow up to become a journalist. Raised in a non-observant household, she couldn’t envision that in her adult life she would pen books about Jewish life that would break new ground by cataloging and expounding upon the array of rituals possible in modern Judaism. Diamant never thought that mid-career with several nonfiction titles to her credit, she would decide to challenge herself, break genre, and try her hand at novel writing. She couldn’t imagine that her first novel, The Red Tent would become a bestseller, a mainstay of book clubs everywhere. 

Diamant’s original idea for her first novel was to write a story about the relationship between Rachel and Leah. Realizing she couldn’t pinpoint a storyline – “there had to be more to that relationship than fighting over who gets to sleep with Jacob” – she found herself drawn to the story of Dina. “It struck me that there’s a great mystery at the center of Dina’s story, as the Bible doesn’t give her a voice.That intrigued me.” 

Diamant doesn’t consider The Red Tent a Jewish novel.“The novel is set in pre-Sinai time before there was anything anyone would call Judaism. I consider The Red Tent a historical novel more than a biblical novel. These characters populate the sacred mythology of Jews and are the proto-ancestors of the Jewish people.”She added that the novel’s popularity extends beyond readers of biblical and historical fiction because readers sense it celebrates the female. “I always look for under-told stories or untold stories, which tend to be women’s stories,”said Diamant. 

Surprisingly, research for The Red Tent didn’t involve a lot of Bible study.“I wrote the book before the internet was worth anything – the mid-1990s – so I read a fair amount, but quickly realized I did not want to be a Bible scholar.This became my story, and I focused my research on the stuff my books always include: food, sleeping arrangements, what people wore, and the stuff of the realities of daily life. There were no chickens or tomatoes in the Bible, so a major part of my time was spent researching biblical times in order to avoid anachronisms.” But writing a book that takes place in biblical times also allowed Diamant a certain freedom.“There are not a lot of historical records about biblical women so this allowed me to make up a lot.” 

Making stuff up wasn’t a part of the construction of Diamant’s first books. A journalist marrying a Jew-by-choice, Diamant wanted information on wedding rituals and asked her rabbi for book suggestions. “He told me the books out there were awful, and I should write a book on Jewish weddings myself. So I looked at the books that were available at the time, and they weren’t helpful for either me or my groom. They were either written by Orthodox rabbis or they were etiquette books – like matching your napkins and your kippas. The realities of my Jewish life as a young American, a feminist, and someone marrying a Jew-by-choice weren’t reflected in those books. In writing The New Jewish Wedding I interviewed a lot of creative people who were respectfully updating traditions in order to make them more personally meaningful.”

“After The New Jewish Wedding I had no plans to write another Jewish book, but when I had a baby I found there were no books to consult about putting together a ceremony for a daughter. And my nonOrthodox friends who were having sons had no books that explained, in terms that resonated with them, how to make the circumcision ceremony relevant. I really saw the need for such a book.” And so, The New Jewish Wedding was followed by The New Jewish Baby Book. “I wrote that book, and all my subsequent guide books, as books of options. I’m not a rabbi, so my agenda was not that you make any particular choice. I wanted to show a menu of Jewish life, a picture of how young American Jews are performing Jewish rituals. My readers may not necessarily be experts, but they are educated and smart. The purpose of these books is to give them the information they need to make their own decisions.” 

Diamant’s fourth and most recent novel, Day After Night, is the story of four young women who are imprisoned in, and ultimately escape from Atlit, an internment camp run by the British at the end of WWII in pre-Israel Palestine. The seed of the novel came about ten-years ago when her teenage daughter traveled with a group from her high school to Israel. They learned about the history of the land from prehistory to modern time, including the founding of the state. Diamant took a tour offered to the student’s parents that mirrored their children’s itinerary.

“One day we stopped in the middle of nowhere, at Atlit. I’d never heard of it – no one had. We were told the story of the October 1945 escape, and I had a light bulb moment. I thought, what a great novel! The descriptions of the camp and what life there was like are based on the small amount of information I could get. Although there’s a historian working full-time on a database at Atlit still trying to collect stories, the accounts are largely missing. The people in the camp were very helpful with the small amount of information remaining. The setting and situation are historically accurate, but characters, the four young women in the novel, Tedi, Leonie, Shayndel and Zora, are completely fictional.”

Disciplined, Diamant strives to keep her mornings clear to write. As she gets further into a book, that stretch of time expands and she writes longer into the day. When asked how her writing has changed over the years, she said: “I hope it has gotten better. I certainly hope my most recent book is my best book. I’ve had the opportunity to revise a couple of my nonfiction books and I know I’m a better writer now. I don’t know that people would notice this, but I think my writing is tighter and cleaner. I think I’m more economical as a writer and I value that in writing.” 

She’s now working on another novel. “It takes place in 1915 in Boston in a community that was very much an immigrant community – Jewish, Italian and Irish. I trace the story of one particular girl and some of her friends in a period of great change for women in America and around the world.”As for her future plans Diamant said, “I think I’ll go back to writing nonfiction after I complete this novel. I find nonfiction much easier to write and for that reason it can be more gratifying. Fiction reaches a much bigger audience though, and that’s terrific. I still do occasional pieces of journalism. I’ve enjoyed that and I enjoy getting out and interviewing people.” 

Writing has led Diamant in unexpected directions. About ten years ago, at the same time she was writing The Red Tent, Diamant was also working on a book about conversion. For research she went to Boston’s mikvah, the place of ritual immersion, which was open for conversions one morning a week. Diamant accompanied the Conservative or Reform rabbi to conversions in order to learn the trappings of the ceremony – the songs and readings offered. 

“I went many times in the course of that year. These Jews-by-choice were making an extraordinary decision, and I felt the welcome we were providing was less than what it should be.The building was run by the Orthodox community, and was not designed for conversions. There was no room for celebration. I really thought we should be able to do better. At that time I was reading about creative rabbis who were using the mikvah as a way of marking endings, for nontraditional reasons such as after chemotherapy, divorce, or sexual abuse. I also knew of rabbis who went to the mikvah after being ordained as a way to mark this momentous transition in their lives.” Diamant was spurred to create a new mikvah, Mayyim Hayyim in her home city of Boston.“It was a fairness issue as much as anything else, and a notion that this ritual should be beautiful, and should belong to the whole community. I live in the liberal Jewish community. Liberal Jews have embraced other forms of ritual, transforming it in their own way and it seemed to me it was time to transform this one.”

“Mayyim Hayyim is a multi-purpose building. We have an art gallery and stage in the education center. We’re committed to the arts at Mayyim Hayyim – they’re not incidental, they’re central. One of the things we’ve done is use the stage there to tell the story of Mayyim Hayyim. People have composed music for these plays, which tell the story of what happens at the mikvah and why it’s important. We use equity actors and professional lighting. It’s not didactic, it’s an experience of the arts. Stealing from the best, the shows are called Mikvah Monologues.” 

Another artistic challenge Diamant has taken on is lyric writing. She was listening to a CD of songs composed by one of her friends, Bert Seager. “The melodies were beautiful, and I asked him if I could try to write some lyrics for him and he agreed. Lyric writing is constrained by the line, but there’s also a freedom. You can be repetitive.You can be shmaltzy.You can say I love you – a lot. And there’s the element of rhyme, which is something I don’t use most of the time. It’s a lovely challenge, like a different language. The music really carries the words. It’s a neat collaboration. I loved it. I would do it again in a minute if I had the chance and I hope to do it again some day.”

Diamant’s work has and continues to leave a lasting impact, both in our knowledge and imaginations. “Despite that my parents were not observant, being Jewish was very much my identity – it felt cultural, it felt culinary and political too.” All of Diamant’s books, both the how-to books and novels, carry the spirit of inclusion – either informing those who are marginal, and not yet fully in the fold, or shining the light on never-been-told stories of women. 

When asked about where this impulse towards inclusion comes from Diamant replied,“I’ve never thought of that before. I like that formulation. The nonfiction books to me are attempts to open doors to people. The common thread of the four novels I’ve written is the celebration of women’s friendship, and of human resilience. I think that’s a democratic – small D – impulse that reflects both an American and a Jewish ethos and philosophy.”

(This article originally appeared in The Jewish Post & Opinion on October 26, 2011)

[susanlerner]

There’s a quality about Myla Goldberg – an unjaded sense of curiosity and wonder. This, along with her unguarded demeanor and fast-paced, clever way of speaking, all lend an impression of individualism. Goldberg doesn’t feel the need to conform, and knows her own mind.“From the time I was in second grade I was telling my parents that when I grew up I wanted to be a writer.”Influenced early on by Dr. Seuss, Roald Dahl,Vonnegut and Stephen King, she grew up wanting to emulate their page-turning type of storytelling. “Stories were hugely influential for me when I was a kid, just this marvelous escape.” 

Goldberg got the idea for her first novel, the award winning Bee Season, by reading an essay about spelling bees in a literary magazine. “It focused on the kids who lose, rather than the winner. That sparked the little light bulb in my head. I thought, ‘When it comes right down to it we are all losers. I can relate to that.’” 

Bee Season is the story of nine-year-old Eliza Naumann and was adapted into a movie in 2005. Eliza wins her school’s spelling bee and her father, a cantor and Jewish scholar, comes to believe there is a mystical power associated with spelling. He begins to spend an inordinate amount of time tutoring Eliza for the next bee while neglecting the rest of his family and in response his wife and son veer off course. Fallout ensues. 

As research, Goldberg attended the national spelling bee. “What grabbed me are the kids. Everything they were thinking and feeling was written on their faces in large print. They all wanted the same thing. The auditorium had an amazingly intense atmosphere.” 

About two weeks after attending the spelling bee Goldberg remembered Abraham Abulafia, a Kabbalist she had learned about in a class on Jewish mysticism. Abulafia believed that in order to achieve transcendence one had to spell words perfectly and chant them a certain way. “While taking the class I never thought much about Abulafia, but he stuck in my back-brain,” said Goldberg. “After attending the bee I saw this connection between spelling bees and Abulafia’s brand of Jewish mysticism. These were two concepts with different intents, removed by centuries that ended up advocating the similar practices.”

Wickett’s Remedy, Goldberg’s second novel was sparked by an interest in the 1918 influenza epidemic.“I read an article in the Times that listed this as one of the ten worst epidemics of all time. I thought, ‘How could I have not heard of this?’ It seemed our culture as a whole had forgotten this epidemic, and that led to my fascination with mass amnesia. I wondered how it is that we remember some events, and forget others.” 

The seed of Goldberg’s third, and most recent novel, The False Friend, came from her remembering, 15 years after the fact, that when she was 11, she had thrown a pair of scissors at her best friend. “I was curious about the fact that I had forgotten this for so long, and also that my vision of myself as a girl was that I was a victim. It was interesting to explore the idea that one can be the bully and also being a person who is bullied – be on both sides of it. I was also drawn to the idea that we are what we remember. What we remember about the past informs who we are today and the decisions we make. But what if the stuff we’re remembering isn’t actually true? Our identities are built upon such flimsy material.That’s frightening and fascinating.” 

Goldberg lives with her husband and two young daughters in Brooklyn where she juggles family, teaching and writing. “When I have a writing day I treat it like a full-time job. I’m at my computer by nine in the morning. I write until the kids come home from school.” As for managing her hectic schedule of teaching, writing and touring to promote The False Friend, Goldberg said, “Luckily, I have an incredibly supportive partner. He’s an artist too, a cartoonist. We both understand what the other’s career requires so we divide everything 50-50. Also, I’m really organized – strict and disciplined when it comes to scheduling.” 

Goldberg talked about writing, “Everyone begins with this big, grand, sparkly idea. It’s really hard to try to translate an inchoate notion – more like pictures and concepts – into words on a page that stay faithful to the original vision.” Ever-optimistic, she added: “I believe the back-brain, the subconscious, is always working. If I have any sort of faith in this world, it’s the faith in the power of the human imagination, the power of creativity.” 

This article originally appeared in The Jewish Post & Opinion on November 9, 2011.

[susanlerner]

McDougall starts off simply, by telling of his own hurt foot. He's an everyman - a tall, hulky guy who likes to run but keeps getting sidelined with injuries. Anybody out there identify? From there, his story just takes off (pun intended) as he tells of a lost tribe of super-runners who live in the Copper Canyons of Mexico and the lone outsider, a character who goes by the name Caballo Blanco, who has befriended them and lives among them.

By tracking down (more like stalking!) Caballo Blanco, the author gets the opportunity to learn about this tribe, the Tarahumara. They live what we would consider to be primitive lives, and run, virtually barefoot, sometimes for days on end.

Throughout the telling we meet some of the tribe, as well as a lot of other crazy, colorful characters, the kind of people who find ultra-races of fifty miles a welcome challenge.

As McDougall proceeds on his quest to find the key to "the right way to run" he pulls in a lot of fascinating information. We learn about the physiology and biomechanics of running as he quotes experts world-famous in these areas. We then learn how the author, time and time again, discovers amazing information that often supersedes and negates the experts' recommendations. The author's most amazing myth-busting is in his discovery of how the high-tech gels and padding of modern running shoes lead to increased injury rather than injury prevention.

The most fundamental revelation, though, is one he found through interviewing experts in paleontology and anthropology. Not only is the human body built to handle long distance, endurance running, it is designed specifically for it.

My favorite passages in the book speak to the place running holds in our collective psyches. The sheer joy of a run. While watching the Winter Olympics I can't help but feel there is something inauthentic about some of these rather contrived athletic endeavors and the host of expensive, non-biodegrable, fluorescent-colored, high-tech gear they require. The most basic exercise of all, the one our bodies actually need and are specifically designed to do, requires only one thing: a simple pair of shoes.

[susanlerner]

Ever since I read Miriam's Kitchen the inner foodie in me has harbored a deep passion for books that find a way to combine narrative and recipe. The Gefilte Variations, published in 1990, is a gem I came across during one of my obsessive library searches a few years ago. I took a chance on it, despite its boring cover, and boy did I strike gold. Let me be absolutely clear: I have not tried a single recipe from this book! I'm not even a "recipe girl." My standard kitchen operating procedure is to dump and mix and experiment. But even without trying the recipes, I've found much to savor within this cookbook's pages; For me, it's the prose that's delicious. The author precedes every recipe with at least a paragraph of text, sometime simply discussing different aspects of the recipe, but more often extrapolating and linking the dish and its cuisine to her own family's history. This cookbook, published in black and white, doesn't pack the the visual "bam" of say, the Kosher by Design cookbook series. It has a spare, simple appeal and is sprinkled with a variety of small sepia-tinged photos, some of which evoke a recipe's geographical provenance, while others showcase Jewish memorabilia that add to the book's feeling of nostalgia. Here's a "taste" of what I mean. This is the first paragraph of an entire page that links the recipe, "Flanken with Tart Greens", to family remembrance: "My grandmother had flanken. I don't mean she consumed prodigious amounts of it, or that she served up her superb version often, though both are true. I refer, instead, to her arms. Her dark olive skin was perfectly smooth and taut across her elegant face. But the soft flesh from her gently sloping shoulders to her wide, tired feet hung in rounded folds like an old shower curtain." See what I mean? Fabulous. In her introductory notes, the author describes the scope of her kosher cookbook (subjective, not comprehensive) and her take on Jewish food (bubbe cuisine!). Then she divides the book into two parts. The first part is divided into chapters on menu categories that feature Jewish favorites from all parts of the globe: Soups, Meats, Dairy Dishes, etc. The second part has chapters on each of the Jewish holidays. Cohen concludes the book with suggested menus for Shabbos, the holidays, and special brunches. As I finished writing this and closed up Gefilte Variations, I noticed I held the book close to my chest, like I was embracing a small, precious child. Don't let the blah cover fool you - what's inside is delectable.

[susanlerner]

At the beginning of the summer, when I pictured myself with my kids, I saw myself in standard mode, barking, reminding them to get their chores done. I decided to change that. It's not that my kids never had fun, but I wanted to put into practice something new, to put down the frantic lens through which I saw life, so that I wasn't focused solely on getting the next goal completed. I didn't want to be the person who, because she can only see the destination, missed savoring the journey. I wanted to be more present with my kids. Have more fun. You might think my decision to have more fun with my kids would be no big deal, but that wasn't the case. As with anything, making this change was easier -- so much easier -- said than done. Putting this into practice was, and is, an exhausting proposition, because my mind always wants to go back to the same place, the place it has always gone, to the rush of completing tasks. To pry myself out the hamster wheel of "doing" and just "be" with my kids turned out to be no small task. It seemed like I was constantly pulling my mind out of the weeds of its old stomping grounds, where it nudged me to get something done. Getting my mind out of that place, took (takes) effort. It helped me to recall the chant they taught me in kindergarten, the one used to make sure kids crossed streets safely: Stop, Look and Listen. I first read of Laura Munson's story in an essay featured in the Style section of the NY Times, adapted from her memoir, "This is Not the Story You Think it is." In her essay Munson wrote of how her husband, after many years of happy marriage and raising two children, told Munson he didn't love her anymore. He was distant, angry and cold, and treated her disrespectfully, coming and going when he pleased, speaking to her in a belittling and sharp manner. In Munson'seyes he acted like a two-year-old having a tantrum. After much suffering and soul-searching, Munson decided that, despite her husband's crappy attitude, she was still in love with him and wanted to try to save her marriage. Even though at that moment, her husband thought his love for her had ended, Munson held steadfast to her belief that, under all his angst, he still loved her. As Munson saw it, she had two choices: She could take the obvious road, and react to her husband's unfairly treatment, or she could practice non attachment, and let his anger play itself out, and see what happened. In the latter scenario she didn't have to play the role of the wronged woman. She would set limits on what sort of behavior she would accept from her husband, and for how long, and then, without reacting to his provocative comments, try and ride out his tantrum. TINTSYTII is the story of Munson's decision to change her life and how she struggled to stay on that path. Any story that focuses on an inner journey has to walk a fine line, and TINTSYTIIfalls into some of the classic pitfalls of stories of this type. Munson's story is compelling, but a fundamental part of her story is anchored in the endless, exhausting, work of changing your life from the inside out, and this work is rooted in inner dialogue -- a conscious changing of the way you think. In storytelling, though, inner dialogue only takes you so far. At times, plowing through the back and forth of the author's process as she worked her way through this tough marital time was tedious. I sometimes get weary of listening to my own chatty inner voice, so even though it's fascinating to be able to be in someone else'shead, in this case it was also tiresome. The most riveting parts of TINTSYTIIwere not the passages that "told" the author's thoughts, but the parts that "showed" -- the scenes. When Munson described scenes in which her husband's angry, bristly anxiety led him to lash out at her, I became uncomfortable, yet I wanted to read on. In these scenes the tension was so thick, and the emotions so dramatic, that I wondered how Munson could possibly accomplish this task of continuing to let her husband's trauma run its course.The other morning, it was my eldest daughter's 16th birthday, and I was faced with a choice. My husband and all three kids were getting ready to leave for the park to shoot off rockets. Rocket launching is a special activity, something my husband does with the kids two, maybe three times a year. I have never joined in with the rest of the family to shoot off rockets. In the division of labor that organically develops in a marriage, rocket launching fit nicely in my husband's realm, and that was fine with me. My realm? Well my plate was filled with the hustle and bustle of the everyday -- the schlepping to and from music lessons, orthodontist appointments, etc. I told myself it was good for my hubby to have an activity he enjoyed with the kids separate from me. But underneath this rationalization was my reluctance upset the applecart of the part I play in my kids' lives. It didn't even occur to me that I was excluding myself from family fun until the moment they were all about to leave. "Wait for me," I called out, "I'm coming, too." It hasn't been easy staying on track, keeping the commitment I made at the beginning of summer. But amidst the inevitable backtracking, there have been mornings like the day of the rocket launch -- breezy and blue. Standing in a grassy field peppered with Queen Ann's Lace, the pop of the rocket alerted me to look up. A tail of white smoke faded into the Popsicle-blue sky as the three of the best people I know ran across the field to catch it, grinning.

[susanlerner]

I get scared reading books that feature characters that suffer from bipolar illness. Well, that's not quite right. The truth is that I am both afraid of and drawn to reading about this subject, as if by conquering my fear and moving closer to this thing, I can capture a bit of the person whose bipolarity kept her at an unbreachable distance -- my mother. Although I believe some deep part of me, perhaps at the cellular level, will never forget the way her catatonic-like depressions and her raging manias impacted me, for the most part my mind reacted to the terror in the same way countless others have faced trauma -- by erasing it from my memory.

Maybe the only thing as frightening as growing up with a bipolar mother is discovering that your child has the disease. In Michael Greenberg's, "Hurry Down Sunshine," he tells the story of his troubled teenage daughter, Sally, and her descent into bipolarity. From the outset Greenberg tells his story with an unflinching honesty. When Sally's illness first comes to a head, Greenberg must hospitalize her and he struggles to navigate the health care system in order to find an appropriate setting. Greenberg details the ups and downs of the course of Sally's disease, and in doing so he looks back at the difficulties of Sally's childhood, as well as those of his mentally ill brother.

As Greenberg's story progresses, he shows how Sally's illness comes under control, with the help of drugs and therapy. In the end, though, she relapses. With his words, Greenberg paints a picture of his daughter, and we see Sally as a gentle and vulnerable person at the mercy of her bipolarity.

The stories we tell ourselves, especially when those stories involve difficult relationships, can be incomplete; I know the story my childhood memories tell me about my mother is. I think I'll carry Greenberg's lovely image of Sally with me as a reminder of just that.

[susanlerner]

Right away I could tell we were in for a treat. Mr. Komunyakaa has a distinctive demeanor: he was playful and thoughtful at the same time and had a warm, mischievous grin. He introduced himself by saying that his poetry carried a lot of insinuation and many possibilities of meaning. When he answered students questions, his answers were not straightforward, but open-ended, feeling as full of insinuation and possibility as his poetry. Two aspects of the session warmed my heart. The first was that the students around me had a high level of attentiveness and preparedness; they were no slouches, and brought with them a plethora of intriguing and insight-drawing questions. Second, Komunyakaa was up and open to the challenge. Much later in the day when I saw him again, and I mentioned that the Q & A session had gone well, and K. agreed, saying it had developed into a good dialogue. And that was exactly right. Komunyakaa was clearly not an author going through the motions to sell books; he was utterly engaged in the mutuality of discussion -- reflecting on our questions, speaking his thoughts, and even tossing a question or two back to the students. Here are some gems from his part of this thoughtful dialogue: K. told us that poems take us back to the oral tradition, and are templates for extended possibility...we read them to bring us to a mystery. Poems invite the reader to bring his or her own meaning to the words, thereby making the text elastic. When K. was asked why people write poems, he answered that we do this in order to have a dialogue, to understand. Lastly, he told us that poems have to have tension. I had a few questions for K. about music, especially since his poetry is said not only to be lyrical, but have rhythm and tonality. First I asked K what his relationship is to jazz, and he responded that he loved the freedom of expression embodied in jazz. In addition, he told me jazz informs his poetry by giving an example of a wandering away from and then returning to a central theme. K. related this to his poetry, and said when he writes he likes to add discursive elements that are outside the logical narrative perspective. When I asked K. what he held close to his heart about Charlie Parker, the jazz saxophonist who is the subject of some of K.'s work, he said he is still struck by the astonishing tonality of Parker's work, along with the duality of Parker's love for his art and the agony the demons within him caused. When I ask how he became a poet, K. recalled that the seeds of his poetry-making were sown in his childhood, in his singing to the radio, and reading of Whitman as well as the poets of the Harlem renaissance. For Komunyakaa, language is music, and the best way to gain access to the notes is to read. K. devoted a portion of the discussion to poems about his tour in Vietnam and how it took him 14 years to write about his experiences there. Lastly, I asked him about the 11 years he lived Bloomington, IN. K. said those years stayed with him, in a positive way, noting that much innovation in this country happens between the coasts.

[susanlerner]

(This post was written November, 2010)

Last night Jonathan Lethem dazzled the crowd at Butler by reading the third chapter of his upcoming novel, which takes place in late '50s Queens. The chapter, titled Grey Goose, takes its name from the title of a Burl Ives song featured in those pages. Here, Miriam, the young daughter of Rose, a single mother (and apologetic communist), is on a quest to lose her virginity. Expectedly, the prose was rich and textured, and the sentences were saturated with nuance and color. Lethem's two-day visit to Butler was off to a breathless start. After the reading it was time for questions from the audience, many of which had to do with the craft of writing. Lethem advised that the process of revision is where the real writing happens; that editing is a process of self-understanding. His best advise to aspiring writers is to write every day, although having said that he admitted his own practice is less than consistent. He joked that if someone were to take an average of the time he spends each day writing it would come to about 17 minutes! Even so, making writing an automatic part of the day is important, he said, adding that one's relationship to his or her writing practice is also important. He prefers to think of the practice of writing each day as a habituation (something you do because you love it) rather than a discipline (something you make yourself do). In response to another comment, Lethem agreed that a theme common to many of his books is the negative space left by a missing or deceased mother, most notably in (my personal favorite) "The Fortress of Solitude." He said readers incorrectly assume that this book is autobiographical because it carries within it many details of Lethem's young life (Lethem's mother died when he was 14), but that the plot of "The Fortress of Solitude," most of which takes place after the mother absents herself, is completely unlike his own childhood. When asked about his newest book, "Chronic City," Lethem said he aimed to emulate the "chilly" characters of his favorite conceptual writers but that what he ended up writing were "hot" characters, and the mess of their humanity gummed up the "chilly" concept. Today there was more Lethem: a Q & A in the morning followed by pizza. At the Q & A Lethem spoke about "Motherless Brooklyn," saying he got the idea for a Tourettes inflicted protagonist by reading Oliver Sacks. At the time he was living in the Bay Area, an area much more laid back than the East Coast, and as he ruminated about the frenetic energy and spurts of thought and language that are the hallmarks of Tourettes, he came to see his hometown of Brooklyn as "having Tourettes." He went on to spend a good part of the Q & A addressing the subject of reading, emphasizing that no writing happens in a vacuum. Lethem was adamant in saying that writing is an intellectual pursuit rooted in language, and that every single word carries with it layers of meaning ascribed to it by the culture it exists in. He said that the supposition that a writer can generate work in an unsullied, pure environment, without contamination by the surrounding culture, is ludicrous. Reading and writing are reciprocal activities that feed off the other. In other words, read, read, read! Then the pizza arrived, and even as we ate, Lethem generously continued to share his thoughts. In fact, it was during lunch that the most remarkable moment of Lethem's time at Butler occurred. One of my classmates asked Lethem what he thought about the workshop process (This is the structure of a standard creative writing class. Writers hone their craft by presenting work to a class of their peers who then offer feedback.) Lethem first commented that it has become fashionable to disparage the workshop process and say it turns out mediocre writers whose work all reads the same. He then offered his opinion: that writing workshops offer writers that golden, sought after opportunity to connect with other writers. A chance to say, "Hello? Anybody there?" through the can at the end of the string and find a "Yes!" at the other end. Lethem said that, as writers, this is what we all want, to be heard. And at this, Lethem's eyes actually welled up.

When a student asked Lethem what authors have influenced him, he reported that, depending on what he's writing, a wide selection of authors inform his work. Still, he gave us a short list of the authors that became what he called structural influences, impacting everything he writes: Lewis Carroll, Shirley Jackson, Graham Greene and Raymond Chandler. Lethem said he first aspired to the writing life as a boy. He said he had always been enthralled by books, but it wasn't until he read "Alice in Wonderland" that he had the sense that an author's hand was responsible for structuring the words on the page. He added that it wasn't long after that he developed an awareness of what constituted good writing -- and what didn't. He used "The Nancy Drew Mystery Stories" series as an example of the type of books he read that were predictable and formulaic, and lost the surprise and mystery he craved. Lethem said his goal as a writer now is to constantly challenge himself by exploring the uncertainty in the world, in an effort to find the surprise in a story. Lethem then spoke about writing in general, saying that it is an intellectual pursuit that organizes one's thinking and increases one's understanding of the world, adding that writing is a game for the tortoise, not the hare. He compared writing to athletics, saying that the practice of training every day is common to both pursuits. He discussed the genesis of the Tourettes suffering protagonist in "Motherless Brooklyn," and in doing so delved even deeper into the meaning writing holds for him. The idea of a character with Tourettes syndrome came from reading one of Oliver Sacks case studies. The man in the case study was a brain surgeon whose flagrant symptoms subsided only when he operated. When pondering the contrast between the chaos and the focus in the surgeon's head, Lethem saw a comparison in his writing. He imagined his own brain as a generator of a random boil of ideas that becomes focused when he writes. The disparity between the wild chaos and single-mindedness in the brain surgeon's mind echoed Lethem's view of his writing process. Further riffing on this theme, Lethem then saw his bustling, brash hometown of Brooklyn as "having Tourettes." Painting this line of thought broadly, Lethem said that, like Tourettes symptoms, the "wrongness" and bullshit that are generated in his own mind are what is golden to writing. The moment that stuck, though, is when Lethem teared up. It's rare thing to find someone brave enough to peel back the artifice, reminding us that at the most fundamental level, the essence of the impulse to put pen to paper is the basic desire to connect.

[susanlerner]

(This post was written December, 2010)

 To call Leonard a veteran writer would be an understatement; He's been at it for 60 years. Leonard began by looking back on his long career, which began in the '50s. He wrote westerns, which were in vogue at the time. In giving a nod to commercialism, he said that when he writes he always has in mind what the public will like, what will sell. It wasn't until the '80s, Leonard said, that he finally made the New York Times bestseller list. He reported that this didn't feel like a big deal, though, as he never read any of the books that made the list, but the achievement pleased him because he knew it would increase his book sales. He spoke about his influences and how the first writer to profoundly impact him was Hemingway, although he also loves Cormac McCarthy, Pete Dexter, George Higgins and Jane Smiley. He spoke about his writing style, and how he writes a story solely through the eyes of the novel's characters, and that he eschews any writing in which the author's point of view muddies up the pureness of that ideal. Also, he noted that the point of view in a story can sometimes change as he writes a novel, as he realizes a secondary character has become more interesting than the primary one. When Leonard was asked how he goes about writing from a point of view different from his own, he answered that the key is research, and that the details about the characters and their surroundings give them an authentic voice. Leonard then pointed to the back row, to a closely-cropped, serious looking, solidly built young man named Greg, who looked as if he could serve as Leonard's bodyguard, and could have been easily lifted from the pages of one of Leonard's novels. This was Leonard's research assistant and right-hand-man. At 86, Leonard is still sharp, but the few times he was unsuccessful in conjuring up the name of one of his novel's characters, his assistant would bark out the answer from the back row. Leonard then addressed how he came up with the ideas for his novels, and said the genesis for many of his them come from photographs. Karen Sisco, one of the characters from "Out of Sight," came from an evocative photo of a female marshal. I got a chance to ask Leonard about my favorite Elmore Leonard book, "Ten Rules of Writing." He said he originally wrote these rules out on two yellow sheets of paper as part of a speech. After the speech someone asked him for the sheets of paper and Leonard handed them over without a thought. Later, the New York Times asked him to write a column expanding on these rules, so he had to rewrite them. Meanwhile, the original papers were listed for sale, and Leonard had to buy them back for $600! Leonard went on to read us the rules, which are funny simply because they're so basic. He likes to bandy about the word Hooptedoodle, a word that sums up the intent behind his rules and has a sound that conveys its meaning: prose that is descriptive, flowery, extraneous and cluttered and, by definition, not dialogue. Leonard is a proponent of the "show, don't tell" school of writing, and said that he dislikes reading descriptions of what characters look like. He would rather paint of picture of the character with dialogue and action. Telling us about his writing process, Leonard said he eschews computers. He likes to feel directly connected to his pen and paper, with no computer screen involved. He writes for eight hours each day, and no longer uses outlines for his chapters. He would rather see what his characters do, and that might not be what he originally had in mind. In order to get into the mind of his characters he may rewrite a scene from a different character's point of view. He shared an interesting anecdote about how a critic's accusation that he wrote his female characters in the style of Mickey Spillane led to Leonard taking a closer look how he writes the women in his novels. Because of this introspection, when he writes female characters he now thinks of them as simply as people, rather than women. Leonard told us that it is said that it takes a million words to develop one's own writing voice. A prolific writer like Elmore has certainly achieved that many times over, leaving us with a distinctive voice in contemporary American literature.

[susanlerner]

Today I had the opportunity to speak with two relatives I'd never even heard of until recently. One was Jerry, who lives in Detroit and is the nephew of the husband of my second cousin, twice removed. The other was Tzuriel, a forth cousin who lives in Milwaukee and is the father of seven children! Those are your clues, the giveaway to what I've been up to: working on my family tree. Genealogy is like crack cocaine: it leads to a quick rush and you're left wanting more, more more! (Just for the record -- My high school was in the Haight-Ashbury but my description of a crack high is purely conjecture.) For the few people out there who haven't heard, (and there must be someone out there I still haven't shared this with), the legend in my family is that we are descendants of Rabbi Yisroel ben Eliezer, otherwise known as the Baal Shem Tov. The Baal Shem Tov (also known by the handy acronym, Besht) was born in 1700, lived in the Ukraine and is known for founding the Hassidic Judaism. The path between Okopy, the Ukrainian village of the18th century that was Besht's home, and present day Indianapolis is, well, complicated. But even as the names and dates are filled in, a brief look at the mosaic of data -- and a family tree is so compelling, how could one not look? -- will reveal that the meat of the stories of those lives lies in the negative space, the myriad details that take place in between birth and death. Like my conversation last week with the niece of my great-grand aunt, Gitel Chervitz Ridker. That niece, Ruthie, who lives in Chicago and is not even my relative, was chatty and helpful, despite that she remembered very little about Gitel. But oh, what gold there was in those few tidbits! The negative space around Gitel's name reveals that she was a large woman. Well, large is not exactly how Ruthie put it. I believe the words Ruthie used were bottom-heavy! And, according to Ruthie, Gitel and David's family would never have been named "neighbors of the year." Ruthie recalled going to one of their Bar Mitzvah celebrations, still struck with how few friends they had. "The Fortress of Solitude," which tells the story of two boys growing up in 1970s Brooklyn, is like the negative space of a family tree, in that it richly depicts the many twists and turns these lives take. Sure, FOS has some of the fantastical elements that are Lethem's trademarks, but these elements are rooted in the grit and grime of everyday life as we see Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude navigate the big issues of their Brooklyn neighborhood in the 70s: race, sexuality, crime and drugs. Like real life, the story of Dylan and Mingus is full of joy, wonder, heartbreak and loss. And like real life, you never know where the story will take you. In my case it might be to the nephew of the husband of my second cousin, twice removed, from who I learned that the name of the ship my ancestor sailed to America on in 1907 was the Carolina. Or it might be to a cousin in Milwaukee, who told the story of how our great-grand-aunt had her old country rebbe write down the names of her Baal Shem Tov ancestors on a slip of paper, and how she came to America with that slip of paper tucked into her father's Siddur. Life is a wild ride, full of moments just like these, rich and fraught. The phone rings -- it might be a long-lost cousin. A scrap of paper falls from the pages of that dusty, old Siddur. Even as I discover the bones of the structure of my family tree, it's the stories that rest in the negative space give it its color.

[susanlerner]

I half-expected George Saunders to look like a sunken-faced crystal-meth addict. I mean, what kinds of person dreams up stories like these? Even as a crazed teenager, high in high school in the Haight-Ashbury, my hallucinations weren't nearly as vivid and outrageous as Saunders' stories.

But Saunders showed no hint of being a strung-out, crazy person. He was an affable, congenial man with an open heart, who gladly answered questions about his work and shared his thoughts on writing.

Not only did I have the privilege of joining Saunders and a group of other writers for dinner before his reading, but I also got to introduce him at his reading. For a writing geek like me it doesn't get much better than that.

I want to fill you in on everything I learned from Saunders, but it's late and I've got to turn in. When I'm rested and fresh I'll dish more, but for now I'll leave you with my introduction speech, which just hints at the genius of George Saunders.

My first taste of George Saunders' writing was in “The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip,” his children's book. Here, parasites take the center stage. They come in the shape of bright, orange balls known as Gappers, that crawl from the shore and attach themselves to the village's goats, rendering the goats incapable of producing milk. One day the Gappers begin to attach to the goats of one girl, Capable, while leaving the neighbors' goats alone. Now Capable can't manage by herself. She asks for help. Unfortunately, her neighbors hadn't yet heard the phrase 'it takes a village.” Not only do they refuse to help Capable, but they take their new Gapper-less status as a sign they are better than Capable. Here's a quote from the book:"Not that we're saying we're better than you, necessarily, it's just that, since gappers are bad, and since you and you alone now have them, it only stands to reason that you are not, perhaps, quite as good as us." “The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip” is a fable that's entertaining, thought-provoking, and lesson-teaching. It opens a window for readers of all ages to look at the issues of justice, class, and dignity.

My next Saunders pick was “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” a collection of short stories and a novella in which many of the same themes thread. Sad-sack characters struggle to find safety and happiness in the alternate versions of a dystopic America. Saunders puts his characters in outrageous setups that force them to commit savage and heroic acts just to survive. Saunders characters are so compellingly flawed, so tender, and so human that I was riveted. One character, for instance, is a 400-pound man who becomes the head honcho at Humane Raccoon Alternatives – a business that purports to rid its clients of pesky racoons without inflicting suffering or bloodshed on the animals. In fact, no surprise here, we're in a Saunders' book, their methods involve nothing but suffering and bloodshed. Another character, this time from Saunders' novella, Bounty, has been branded a Flawed, and that's flawed with a capital F. He's a sympathetic, loving brother who tries to reunite with his sister. He fights the shame he feels as a result of his deformity, hideously clawed feet. How could anyone not fall in love with characters like these? Just as in real life, Saunder's characters straddle the fence – they have facets that are both beautiful and revolting. They always have an altruistic side, but sometimes, when they're pushed over the edge, they just might murder their bosses. Their struggle is the human struggle – that of believing they are valuable despite the outside messages that tell them otherwise. Saunders' stories take place in alternate realities that serve to highlight the absurdities of the world we live in today. But no matter where he sets his stories, Saunders' exuberant, wacky voice comes through loud and clear. Saunders' most recent offering is a departure from the rest – a collection of essays that still manages to capture the clear-thinking, bullshit-exposing voice of whimsy and vitality that gives his fiction its bite.

All the writers that come to Butler share their thoughts on the craft, but the ones who do so by opening up and sharing of themselves are the ones who remain with us. George Saunders was one of those authors. Here are some of his comments from the Q & A sessions from his visit. Saunders was asked about his background in geophysics and how this informs his writing. He answered that back when he first worked in the oil fields of Sumatra he read Ayn Rand and saw himself as a right-winger. But, as time went on, working in far-flung parts of the world served to open his eyes and reform his politics, and, naturally, this informs his fiction. About writing in general he commented that all our minds are similar, and that anything that manifests in the world has a presence in each of us. Saunders said that at one point in his life his worst fear came true: he had an office job. At that time he thought that in order to find stories he had to be in an exotic locale, but he soon realized that his boring office job was a blessing in disguise -- it showed him that stories were all around him, wherever he was. Saunders reported that after the birth of his second child he found himself able to allow humor into his work, and that bits of wisdom manifested as he wrote freely. He sought to emulate the clean, spare sentences of Barry Hannah and Raymond Carver, and convey his ideas using as few words as possible, even if the sentences lost some of their elegance. When asked what advice he would give aspiring writers he emphasized revision. He said any given piece of writing has infinite doors, and that a writer should live with a story a long time before sending it out. In this way, if the piece is rejected, at least the author can feel (s)he sent out his/her best work. Saunders revises obsessively, and he sees this same trait among other writers who succeed in publishing their work. Many pieces, he suggested, would improve if only the author let them sit awhile and then revisited them at a later date. Saunders emphasized how vital it is not to short-shrift revision. I asked Saunders about his recent move into the realm of nonfiction with "The Brain-Dead Megaphone," a collection of essays. He replied that he sees himself primarily as a fiction writer, that he's better at short stories than big ideas (I'm not sure I agree with him on this point.) He said his essay, The New Mecca, was written as an assignment for GQ, He joked that his daughter claimed he never did anything cool, so he accepted the job, and was sent to four-star hotels in Dubai. He feels his nonfiction work allowed him to more fully describe the physical world in which his writing took place. When I asked Saunders if the book's title essay most conveyed his essence, Saunders said yes, although he added that he thought the piece was preachier than he would have liked.

[susanlerner]

Mark Halliday seemed a little discombobulated at the first question. Professor Flanzbaum asked Halliday to compare his work to Keats. Her class had studied Keats's "Ode to Autumn." "How is it," she asked, "that two such disparate works can be grouped under the umbrella of poetry? What do you think the older poets, like Keats and Frost, would think of modern poetry, with its lack of regular meter, and lack of elaborate metaphor?" I must admit it was fun to see the Q&A begin with a provocative question, one that put Halliday on the spot. And the beauty of this meaty question was that, for a poetry ignoramus like me, it drove Halliday to speak about poetry at its foundations. It didn't take long for Halliday to rise to the moment. After stumbling, for just a minute, he began to speak about poetry in general and, more specifically, his own work. He tried one answer then came at it from a slightly different angle. As he continued I could feel his passion for poetry, could hear it in each sentence. As Halliday got closer to what he wanted to say his language sharpened, and I began to feel, for the first time really, that I was approaching the first glimmers of understanding about this literary form. Halliday explained that both older and modern poetry arise from a desire to take the torturous parts of the human experience and make sense of them -- all at one time. Poetry, he said, is a crystallized, focused, small, condensed and adequate response to the problem of life. One of the motivations behind poetry is to preserve a facet of life. Poetry reflects a hunger for the experience of seeing an individual come to terms with one of life's issues and reach a sense of fulfillment. He went on the say that poetry puts a magnifying glass on one person, in one place, at one specific time, as he or she gets a grip on that experience. Halliday explained that poetry's scope is different than the novel's, which shows a passage of time. Fiction deals with plot, and how experience develops, showing itself in actions that occur over time, whereas poets have an obsession with the moment. Poets are obsessed with personal experience, whereas fiction writers have a curiosity about others. He quoted William Carlos Williams, who wrote that "People die every day for what is lacking in poetry." Halliday said that while he is drawn to voice-driven, conversational, discursive, explanatory poetry, other poets can speak to a different clutch of aesthetics. I asked Halliday if he could share a pivotal moment from his earlier days, one of reading a poem that inspired him towards his life's work. He gave the example of the poem, "Fresh Air," by Kenneth Koch. Koch rose from a New York school of poets in the early '50s who were rebellious to academic approaches to poetry. The poem's irreverence struck Halliday, and stayed with him for years, circling back to him later in his life after reading the poet Frank O'Hara.