I usually spend a good chunk of the day standing — besides all of the dire WE ARE TOO SENDENTARY OMG DEATH articles, I actually concentrate better when I’m [...]]]> Yesterday my husband came home while I was working and saw me in normal, writing at home without an audience mode, also known as feral state.

I usually spend a good chunk of the day standing — besides all of the dire WE ARE TOO SENDENTARY OMG DEATH articles, I actually concentrate better when I’m upright. Sitting makes me sleepy. So when I stand, I’m at the kitchen counter, usually with headphones on, and I can’t stand still to save my life, so this means bopping along to music. Yes, when he walked in, I was dancing at my laptop.

I was also taking a research break to figure out the approximate height of an adult Newfoundland in relation to my main character, so my entire screen was full of extremely fluffy, giant, black dog pictures. First words out my mouth, “I’m writing, I swear! This is research!”

He cracked up.

Here’s the song I’m hooked on this week, in case you’d like to similarly embarrass yourself

Am I a freak for dancing around?
Am I a freak for getting down?
I’m coming up, don’t cut me down.
Yeah I wanna be, wanna be Queen.

Is it peculiar that she twerk in the mirror?
And am I weird to dance alone late at night?
And is it true we’re all insane?
And I just tell ‘em, “No we ain’t” and get down

The booty don’t lie.

Nonfiction

Kio ran a successful Kickstarter campaign to fund the research and initial print run of her book, Don’t Go Back to School: A Handbook for Learning Anything. She interviewed 100 people (full disclosure: I was both a backer and an interviewee) and [...]]]> A few recent acquisitions that I’m excited about:

Nonfiction

Kio ran a successful Kickstarter campaign to fund the research and initial print run of her book, Don’t Go Back to School: A Handbook for Learning Anything. She interviewed 100 people (full disclosure: I was both a backer and an interviewee) and profiled about 20 of them about self-education. I recommend this for anyone who wants to learn independently or is considering going back to school (the perpetual “Do I need an MFA?” question).

I fully admit that I bought Peter Turchi’s Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer for the pictures. It’s a gorgeous hardcover — full color maps on heavy, cream paper — definitely a book that benefits from physicality. Turchi’s text is a meditation on the parallels between writing and cartography, such as what we include in our worlds, what we leave out, and why. It isn’t a deep craft book, but I’m enjoying his examples and, of course, the pictures.

YA

Amy’s book, Chantress, was released last week! Huzzah! I’m working through my NF queue before returning to YA, but I’m very excited about this. From the blurb:

“Sing, and the darkness will find you.” This warning has haunted fifteen-year-old Lucy ever since she was eight and shipwrecked on a lonely island. Lucy’s guardian, Norrie, has lots of rules, but the most important is that Lucy must never sing. Not ever. Now it is 1667, Lucy is fifteen, and on All Hallows’ Eve, Lucy hears a tantalizing melody on the wind. She can’t help but sing—and she is swept into darkness.

Cool, huh? Alternate history, magic, and music — sounds like a perfect read for me (and ashfae and zalena!).

Continuing the musical YA theme, Sara Zarr’s latest is a contemporary novel. The blurb for Lucy Variations:

Lucy Beck-Moreau once had a promising future as a concert pianist. The right people knew her name, her performances were booked months in advance, and her future seemed certain.

That was all before she turned fourteen.

Now, at sixteen, it’s over. A death, and a betrayal, led her to walk away. That leaves her talented ten-year-old brother, Gus, to shoulder the full weight of the Beck-Moreau family expectations. Then Gus gets a new piano teacher who is young, kind, and interested in helping Lucy rekindle her love of piano — on her own terms. But when you’re used to performing for sold-out audiences and world-famous critics, can you ever learn to play just for yourself?

This description hit close to home. I danced for over 20 years, and in high school, all I wanted was to stop. I resented daily practices and the pressure and felt like I was dancing for everyone but myself. That’s part of why I got into theatre and then voice lessons — those were entirely mine. In college I started to do some choreography for cultural shows and musicals, and that experimentation and play made dance mine again, and I kept going until my knees demanded that I quit. So I’m doubly excited to read Zarr’s latest — she’s brilliant at contemporary YA and she’s writing about the mess of making art on demand.

Poetry

Everyone knows I love Louise Gluck’s poetry. How many times can I quote Vita Nova? I own all of her poetry collections from the mid-90s to now, but I’ve never read her early work, from 1968-1990. In poetry school, Robert Pinsky encouraged us to read entire bodies of work to see how poets develop and revisit ideas and themes in new ways. In one of his workshops, I read all of Emily Dickinson’s poems because I’d been scared off of her in a high school English class, and I focused on different editions of her work to examine how the same poem could be transformed by editorial decisions. To me, Gluck is a study in compression. She takes epic mythologies and distills them into the essential, and I’m curious to see whether she has always written like this and how her style developed.

And, of course, I got the new Frank Bidart — I’ve read all of his work. One of the joys of reading a former teacher is hearing his voice again. Bidart’s a brilliant writer, and as a reader he’s sublime. His reading of The Third Hour of the Night, a 45-page poem, may be the best reading I’ve ever attended. We were in a packed room at Harvard — the furniture pushed out so students and listeners were sitting on the floor and lining the walls and doorway. He’s rather shy and unassuming, and occasionally as he’d read, he’d stop to warn us about a graphic part and to apologize and then would continue, and that was the only release in the hour that he read. When he finished, there was a long pause, like at the end of a symphony, and then the room erupted, and his shyness returned. Bidart’s first love was cinema, and his poetry is dramatic and oversized — the opposite of Gluck’s (funny that they’re friends — Pinsky, too — who all live close to each other in Cambridge). Reading his new work is always pure joy, and there’s an added resonance of workshops and seminars and thesis work and meetings in a coffee shop in Harvard Square. On the last day of class, he’d always bring dessert, and I’m sure that’s in part why my synapses pair chocolate with literature. We were conditioned in our formative years.

So that’s my immediate TBR pile. What’s in yours?

On this day in 1812 the waltz was introduced at Almack’s dance hall in London. It was the first closed-couple dance the English aristocracy had ever seen. Men and women embraced one another as they were dancing, and the men lifted the women over their thighs as [...]]]> A tidbit from today’s Writer’s Almanac:

On this day in 1812 the waltz was introduced at Almack’s dance hall in London. It was the first closed-couple dance the English aristocracy had ever seen. Men and women embraced one another as they were dancing, and the men lifted the women over their thighs as the couples turned. Critics called it “disgusting.”

As the neighborhood children say, “Ooh la la!”

I was going to write today about sentences and writers who write them well, but that essay captures everything I could possibly say about [...]]]> Yesterday was Annie Dillard’s birthday. A friend tweeted a link to one of my favorite essays, Living Like Weasels, which I’m posting again because I love it so much.

I was going to write today about sentences and writers who write them well, but that essay captures everything I could possibly say about energy, movement, mimesis, and rest. Oh, but I do need to link, once again, to Olivia Laing’s To the River.

From the official description: One midsummer week more than 60 years after Virginia Woolf drowned in the Ouse in 1941, Olivia Laing walked that same Sussex river from source to sea. The result is a passionate investigation into how history resides in a landscape–and how ghosts never quite leave the places they love. Along the way, Laing explores the roles rivers play in human lives, tracing their intricate flow through literature and mythology alike.

While the book traces various, compelling histories, from the medieval to the personal, I kept pausing over Olivia’s sentences. Stream of consciousness contains the metaphor of water for a reason, and Olivia’s tribute to Woolf is as much in her sentences as in her subject. She writes them brilliantly.

Living in Switzerland has brought landscape and history to my attention in the way only a foreign country and such drastic geography can. Writers have always tried to capture and convey this landscape through language — an impossible but irresistible task. If poetry school taught me how to read, then Switzerland is teaching me to read setting and to recognize the direct links between text and topography.

Returning to Dillard (as one does), this description from An American Childhood has always resonated with my experience of Pittsburgh — of growing up there and of leaving:

But the books were leading me away. They would propel me right out of Pittsburgh altogether, so I could fashion a life among books somewhere else. So the Midwest nourishes us (Pittsburgh is the Midwest’s eastern edge) and presents us with the spectacle of a land and a people completed and certain. And so we run to our bedrooms and read in a fever, and love the big hardwood trees outside the windows, and the terrible Midwest summers, and the terrible Midwest winters, and the forested river valleys with the blue Appalachian Mountains to the east of us and the broad great plains to the west. And so we leave it sorrowfully, having grown strong and restless by opposing with all our will and mind and muscle its simple, loving, single will for us: that we stay, that we stay and find a place among its familiar possibilities.

Where Olivia writes the water, Dillard writes the rush of wind.

Happy May Day.

I wrote a bit about practical methods of staying sane on the internet when things are difficult. is.gd/6MHNQV

— erin kissane (@kissane) April 26, 2013

Erin’s post [...]]]> I’m slowly re-entering the world of internet after a week of avoiding the news and the sneak attacks of social media. I rather appreciated this:

I wrote a bit about practical methods of staying sane on the internet when things are difficult. is.gd/6MHNQV

— erin kissane (@kissane) April 26, 2013

Erin’s post is full of concrete tips for managing social media, from how to mute specific key words to using plugins to make comments on news sites invisible so there’s no temptation to click.

I also liked this article by Mike Ananny (my old officemate!): “Breaking news pragmatically: Some reflections on silence and timing in networked journalism.” He begins with a quote from Gandhi:

Speak only if it improves upon the silence. —Mohandas Gandhi

And he adds:

I mean silence as the thoughtful absence of speech. To suggest that people sometimes not speak, share interpretations, or engage in open, visible, experimental communication is to question ideas that run deep in U.S. culture…

…It certainly takes courage to speak — but it takes a different kind of courage to be silent, to listen, to trust, and speak when the time is right.

While I was filtering (avoiding) the online world, I was also mapping out a revision, and Mike’s observations about speaking and not speaking connected with my stepping back to examine the novel in its entirety. I’m a plunger turned plotter, an avid outliner as only the converted can be, so the first big revision pass happens at the outline level. In such condensed form, revising is like writing a poem.

In poetry school, Robert Pinsky always used to quote Aristotle’s Poetics and described poems as an “arrangement of incidents.” When writing a poem, we try to arrange those incidents evocatively.

Sometimes even an outline has too many words, though, and I map my outline to a calendar of scenes. This simple visualization highlights silence vs. speech, or action vs. rest.

What happens on the blank days?

How do off-screen events affect what happens on-screen?

Should any of these off-screen events happen on-screen?

Are all of the on-screen events necessary, or should any of them become blank spaces?

In Story, Robert McKee says:

STRUCTURE is the selection of events from the characters’ life stories that is composed into a strategic sequence to arouse specific emotions and to express a specific view of life.

In other words, the structure of a story is the arrangement of incidents — speak only if it propels the story forward.

I woke up to news of the slain MIT police officer, the carjacking, and then the shootout in Watertown and subsequent manhunt. I spent the morning monitoring all channels — Twitter, Facebook, Boston.com, Bostonglobe.com, WBZ News [...]]]> On Tuesday I kept wondering who could have planted bombs at the Boston marathon. Friday morning, we found out.

I woke up to news of the slain MIT police officer, the carjacking, and then the shootout in Watertown and subsequent manhunt. I spent the morning monitoring all channels — Twitter, Facebook, Boston.com, Bostonglobe.com, WBZ News — to make sure everyone back home was okay. Andrew and I lived in Watertown for two years, less than a mile from the shootout that had happened overnight. We have friends and neighbors in the area and couldn’t believe we were seeing SWAT teams patrolling the streets where we used to live.

Friends checked in right away. One lives only a block away from the shootout. She said she smelled gunpowder and could feel buildings shake.

Names were released of two Chechen brothers who had lived in the U.S. for one year. This sounded like a foreign operation — an outside terrorist threat. Then they said the younger one was 19, a graduate of Cambridge Rindge & Latin.

I’d taught 7th & 8th grade at a charter school in Cambridge. Some of my 7th graders went to Rindge for high school, which meant they’d graduated with him. My heart broke for them, and I hoped they were okay.

I went to search for the younger boy’s name in my browser but accidentally started typing it into Mail. Two names auto-completed: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Alaina Tsarnaeva. My heart stopped as my inbox filtered messages from when I was teaching: lists of students on the honor roll, in detention, out sick…

No, no, no.

They had said he’d only been in the U.S. for a year. Perhaps this was someone else? Except the age was right. And the town. I didn’t know if he had a brother, and they hadn’t mentioned a sister yet.

I recognized a voice on WBZ and clicked over to see one of my former students, looking the same seven years later except for her glasses, talking about how she couldn’t believe it was Jahar. The journalist asked if they knew each other from high school. “No, middle school. We went to this little charter school before.”

Jahar Tsarnaev. Not Zo-kar, as the media had called him. An image clicked of a small boy with bright eyes and a big smile. I’d taught half of the seventh and eighth grade sections. He was in the other half. I hadn’t taught him, but it was a small school, and he was friends with my students. I remembered how tiny he was compared to the others, his quietness a welcome contrast to some of our more boisterous kids, and his huge smile. We had some tough kids in our school. He wasn’t one of them. So it took hours for me to connect this boy to the terrorist on television:

At a middle school basketball game

When Andrew and I first met, my college roommate and I lived together in Cambridge, around the corner from where the Tsarnaevs lived. Every time I walked down our front steps, I heard a mix of Spanish, Portuguese, and Haitian Creole. We loved our international neighborhood. After Andrew and I married, we moved to Watertown and lived a quarter mile from where Jahar was eventually discovered. These places were our homes.

When I found out who the terrorist was, grief replaced fear — grief for the boy who got lost as he was becoming a man, grief for his victims, grief for his classmates, my former students, and grief for what he did to our community and city.

What he did was inexcusable. It’s unequivocally wrong. And I couldn’t reconcile the good kid I once knew with his actions.

As I think about him and what he did, it isn’t about good and evil so much as strength versus weakness. Being strong is much harder than being good. One can be good by default, a good that hasn’t been tested. Strength means action: standing up for what’s right, defending those weaker than ourselves, speaking up when necessary, and staying silent and allowing others to speak when their voices are needed.

The first responders and doctors and marathoners who ran to donate blood and blast witnesses who helped were all strong. Setting bombs in a crowd was weak. Terrorism is weak. The world tends toward entropy. It’s easy to destroy things and cause chaos. Strength comes from making: artists who show us who we are and who we can be, community leaders who draw people together through common hopes, teachers who encourage confidence and love of learning in their students, scientists who cure diseases and send us to space, construction workers who build roads and offices and houses, even strangers who share kindness in passing. And as we saw in Boston, individual strength leads to community strength.

My wish for Boston, Cambridge, and Watertown, for the greater Boston community and for the Chinese community, for the local communities of Dorchester, Medford, BU, MIT, and Rindge & Latin is for continued strength and for peace, for connections and for healing. And for Jahar… I wish him strength, too, to face what he did honestly.

I don’t even know how to begin to think about the marathon bombings.

Last night, Andrew and I were glued to our news and social media feeds checking that [...]]]> I lived in Pittsburgh from age 3 to 18 and then in Boston from 18 to 33. The cities are my foundations, my childhood and adolescence.

I don’t even know how to begin to think about the marathon bombings.

Last night, Andrew and I were glued to our news and social media feeds checking that everyone was okay. We have friends who run the marathon. One was supposed to run the NY marathon, her first, then Hurricane Sandy hit. She was at mile 24 of Boston, now her first, when the explosions went off.

Andrew used to work in Copley Square. I used to tutor a student in one of the buildings where an unexploded bomb was found.

Andrew grew up in a suburb of Boston. Being across the ocean… well, I think this is the first time either of our families was happy that we moved to Europe. But we wish we could hug our friends and huddle together in a living room somewhere. It’s still home, even if we aren’t there at the moment.

I made myself go to bed but woke up after just a few hours, the question of How? turning into Who? No one has claimed responsibility. Isn’t there supposed to be a statement or a note?

We make sense through narrative — motivations, cause, and effect. Right now we have stories of witnesses, of tragedy, of survival, individual arcs from within the greater, incomprehensible story. But that bigger narrative, the one that ties everything together, is missing.

Well, no. The narrative is missing, but the thing my cities have in common is that we’re tough, gritty, and kind. The city is united, and if there’s a bigger story coming out of the bombings, it’s that individual kindnesses accumulate. Boston is caring for everyone, locals and visitors alike. We’re a city of migrants — of students, of people in transition, of people just starting out — we always have been. Now, whether an international marathon runner or Southie resident, we are all Boston.

As a co-founder, this was a huge decision, and my partners and I discussed it at length. They have two other companies and will continue running TWF, [...]]]> Three weeks ago, I posted about some upcoming changes. Well, I can finally say more: I stepped down as the Executive Director of The Writing Faculty.

As a co-founder, this was a huge decision, and my partners and I discussed it at length. They have two other companies and will continue running TWF, and I’m staying on as a tutor. But I am stepping away from day-to-day management.

Running a US-based company from Europe has been challenging to say the least, given the six-hour difference to the East Coast and the normal demands of start-up life. My moving to Switzerland was never part of the company’s plan, but less than a year in, it happened, and we decided to try it out and see if we could make it work. I’d have a shifted schedule here so that I’d overlap with the US. The plan was for me to work from 12 pm – 8 pm every day, but a start-up can’t succeed on 40 hrs/week. Most nights I’d work until 11 pm or midnight plus at least one weekend day, and I’d still miss West Coast families because of the nine-hour difference to them. Continuing this indefinitely didn’t make sense for anyone — families, staff, or me.

I’ve been feeling half in two worlds, not fully in either, and guilty about both. The time difference meant I was harder to reach, and yet my work hours meant I would miss local events — dinners, shows, etc. When I was in London, I realized that was the first trip I’d taken in Europe except for a 3-day trip to Milan for a wedding. I spent one of the travel days working from the apartment we’d rented in London. Travel meant abandoning the company; not traveling meant wasting one of the greatest opportunities of living abroad.

So, a lot of soul-searching later, I’m now tutoring part-time, writing full-time, and making the most of this European adventure. The transition is almost complete (the remaining few items should be finished today!).

It’s hard to let go of something after pouring so much time and care and energy into it. But who knows where we’ll live in two years, let alone in five? Holding on can be worse than letting go.

Now, I’m trying to change my mental space and speed. Over the weekend, I dove into my long-neglected work-in-progress. But I’m not letting myself rush through this revision, rather I’m taking time to poke and prod to test for weak points, where I’ve missed opportunities or pulled back when I should have pushed forward.

I’ve been reading chapters from craft books and letting them sit, as well, realizing how much more I know this time around, so the books are reminders of basics, quick references rather than instructions to study and learn. The last time I only wrote and tutored was in poetry school, and I learned so much that year, I still sometimes feel that I haven’t had time to unpack everything that was crammed into my head.

When I was at VCFA, I was also a founding faculty member at a charter school and then worked full time. I directed a tutoring company, co-directed NESCBWI conferences, started my own company, and then moved overseas. I know how to cram as much as possible into tiny amounts of space and time. I’m trying to learn the opposite now.

It’s spring here at last — along with summer, the most gorgeous time in Switzerland. I cut off several inches of hair and filed the papers and documents I’ll no longer need. Spring produce is in stock, and A and I spent several hours on Saturday shopping for our hard to find ingredients, like ancho chilies and wanton wrappers. Then yesterday I baked for the first time in weeks — Guinness molasses bread and giant, soft pretzels.

Today is the Bengali New Year — a time for new beginnings — a new life in a new world.

Several lifetimes ago, theatre, and more specifically musical theatre, was a fundamental part of my life. I was in a show called Songs for a New World, and I’ve had the opening song stuck in my head since yesterday.

A new world calls across the ocean
A new world calls across the sky
A new world whispers in the shadows
Time to fly, time to fly

…And you’re suddenly a stranger
In some completely different land
And you thought you knew
But you didn’t have a clue
That the surface sometimes cracks
To reveal the tracks
To a new world

Happy New Year!