It's Not About Ego

I’d been warned there’d be 12,000 egos to contend with.  I’d prepared myself for that, as I’d prepared myself before for writerly gatherings.  It’s easy to dismiss ego, even in yourself, to say: there it is, the worst of me, on display.  So I landed in Boston for AWP and for four days wandered in a maze of snowy sidewalks and sky bridge and mall – past the Louis Vitton store over and over – and into panels and meetings and, yes, the bars, expecting plenty of ego.  But I did not find it. 

Instead I sensed yearning.  Desperate palpable yearning.   Times 12,000.   And I was unnerved.

I wanted to dismiss this, too, chalk it up to fame-envy, the every-writer desire to be Terry-Gross-ed, Oprah-ed, Pulitzer-ed.  As if AWP were American Idol.  But that was not true, or not wholly so, either.  The yearning felt closer to the bone.   I went to one panel on how not to alienate your friends and family when writing memoir.  (The flippant answer “don’t write” was followed by nuanced answers, and two hundred heads nodded.)  Another panel on how to write political memoir without being polemic addressed real hard every day writerly decisions that require grace and courage, not just a grasp of story arc or dialogue or, god forbid, an effective social media platform.  I realized, slowly, over four days and with both relief and terror: All those people yearn to tell the story that’s inside them, to tell it real and tell it right and tell it beautifully.  And to be heard.

Enter the terror.  When I walked through the book fair and saw all those booths for lit journals and small presses, all those stories being told, I had to wonder:  Does anyone listen?

I wasn’t sure until I got on the plane to leave.  Late on Sunday after a run along the Charles River and some fine sushi and negotiating the subways, I walked the aisle of a super-packed Boston-Seattle nonstop and noticed everyone was reading.  Must’ve been conference attendees, I realized, because these were not just mega-sellers, but modest books of poetry, story collections, even essays.  Essays!  It’s easy to dismiss ours as an esoteric world, academic, insular.  Easy to say: Do you only write for writers?  (Well, maybe, but only to the extent that ballplayers only play for other ballplayers.  I figure the percentage of my readers who are non-writers is higher than Mariners fans who've never touched a glove.  But I digress.)  The thing is: I adore these books.  They say to me things that the mega-sellers don’t or can’t.   I love listening to people—musicians, artists, filmmakers, and especially writers—say what they must say as beautifully as they can.  People on that plane did, too.

So … I told myself not to buy more books than I could afford, but there was no point controlling that urge.  Among the fine writers whose books I hauled home in the roller bag were:

Amy Fusselman

Elena Passarello

Joy Castro

Harrison Candelaria Fletcher

Bonnie Rough

Roxane Gay

Lia Purpura

Barrie Jean Borich

Then there were the inevitable craft books:

Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Flash Nonfiction

Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction ed. by Nicole Walker and Margot Singer

Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction by Tracy Kidder

Finally there was To Show and To Tell by Phillip Lopate.

Lopate hardly counts as a yearning new voice, but I had to buy this book anyway.  I went to his signing and told him the introduction to The Art of the Personal Essay changed my life in 1994.  He shook my hand and said “I hope for the better.” 

Was AWP a good experience?  On balance not as good as hiking the Lakeshore Trail today with two good friends and the first wildflowers of spring and, yes, 12 000 ticks.  But it was good, and it certainly changed my perspective.  For the better.

Going Short

I blame Ben Affleck.   I heard him on the radio last week talking to Terri Gross about his movie, Argo, and the conversation turned to doing impersonations.   Affleck does a mean Denzel Washington, a decent Morgan Freeman.  Terri asked him how he does it, if it requires practice.  Affleck said, sure, doing impersonations takes practice, but it’s also a gift.  It comes easy.  Because of that, he said, he doesn’t like to do it too much.   He compared it to playing speed chess, where every move is timed and the game moves super-fast.  Back in the day, he and Matt Damon played a lot until a friend intervened to say this:

“Don’t play speed chess.  It will ruin your game.”

That line stuck in my head.  It will not go away. 

Here’s why:  I write a lot of short essays.   I write them because I’m asked to or because I’m paid to or because I have something I want to say that doesn’t merit twenty pages … and I write them because they’re easy.   

I’m afraid it’s ruining my game. 

It’s near sacrilege to say so.   Short nonfiction, like flash fiction, has been all the rage for a long while now, especially in MFA programs where honing stories down to their essence is seen as excellent practice, maybe even cutting edge.   I’ve encouraged it myself plenty.  (I also daresay, from a teaching perspective it’s a lot easier to critique 1000 words than 5K … but no need to be cynical here.)  I adore Brevity as much as the next person.  

(If you don't know Brevity, definitely check it out -- essays <750 words that amaze.  Here's one of mine they published last year:  http://brevitymag.com/nonfiction/crush/ 

I still think it might be ruining my game.

When I sit down to work on my book project, I struggle.  Part of it is pure endurance.   Writing a book is like training for a marathon.  You need patience and pacing.  You need to think really hard.  The answer is simple, I know: Sit longer.  Just like a long slow run.  And, still, no long distance runner will tell you sprint workouts are useless.  They work different muscles.  They’re part of the package.

I just don’t want to ruin my game.

Here’s what Ben Affleck said:  When you do an impersonation, you use the techniques of acting but don’t get at the heart; you do the external work but not the deep internal work.  The same can be true of writing short pieces.  I want to be vigilant about that.  I need to be.  I will be.  

But I don't suppose I'll give up Going Short any time soon.  I have a new collection of short essays, in fact, The Hole in the Snow, which is very close to finding a home. 

“Don’t be afraid to do what comes easy,” says picture book author and Whidbey colleague Bonny Becker.  “It probably means you’re good at it.”

I hope that’s true.  I sincerely do.  

Re-found Love

Years ago Laurie and I bought rings with Hopi symbols etched in silver.  Laurie, the skier, chose storm clouds.  Me, I chose water.  Swimming, after all, was what I loved best.  As a kid, I’d spent long summer days in backyard pools, in lessons at the park, in the waves at the beach.  On the high school team, we practiced outdoors after dark.  In college, I’d wake at dawn to swim laps before classes.  An hour in the pool, I found, followed by a large coffee, made even the most boring lecture fascinating.

But the truth was, even before we bought the rings, my swimming days were mostly over.  We lived in a place with no pool and a lake too cold to loiter in, and there was an injury to boot.  One day on trail crew I’d tossed a long limb off a switchback and heard my shoulder snap.  That ruled out swimming for years, long enough that I figured it’d be forever.

Until this spring when I decided to join some of the Whidbey MFA students in a triathlon right before our ten-day summer residency.  A half mile swim?   A cinch.   I mean, it was a cinch twenty years ago, so it should be a cinch now.  Right?  Right?  Maybe?

I started training.

I swam alone in the Pacific in the early morning fog before the Jesus people arrived to set up day-camp-on-the-beach and sing too loudly.  (“I’ve got the joy joy joy down in my heart …”  No no no, not again.) 

I swam in New Jersey in a tree-ringed lake where my young nieces compete on a team with lane lines on the surface and sun fish and snapping turtles below.  Watching them approach the starting block, strong shoulders held high … well, if that’s not inspiration, nothing is.

I swam a few times in the outdoor pool in the nearby faux-Bavarian tourist town, a half-hour workout wedged between the ferry and the city.  Pure bliss.

I swam in Lake Chelan on the downlake end one morning, and because it was warmer than the end uplake, wore no wetsuit.  Shivered until noon. 

I swam uplake one evening and breathing one direction watched the pink sunset glow on still snowy mountains and breathing the other way watched the black sky of a fast approaching storm.  Got home just before the deluge.

I never once swam indoors.

The race went fine.  My favorite memory is all of us writer-triathletes, my tribe if ever there was one, treading water awaiting the start.

The next week I swam in Puget Sound on graduation morning with my first-ever thesis advisee.  Cold even in my wetsuit, or afraid of being cold, I made it only a short distance from her rental house to the dock at Captain Whidbey Inn where dual red flags waved, the only color in the universe. 

Here’s the thing.  You buy rings when you’re twenty-five and wear them because of love until the silver wears thin and brittle, never imagining that someday – this November? Right? Right? – they’ll count for real.  Meanwhile, there are other things, lesser things, that you give up despite love.  So, what a delight, in your mid-forties, to find yourself, like I did today, swimming through the green water glow of a windless day, watching your shadow on sand.  Just you and your thoughts.   It’s like re-found love.

I’m not the only one.  Diana Nyad was a long-distance champion in her youth, but she gave it up for thirty years – thirty! – before she decided to get in the water again.  Today, right this minute, at age 62, she’s making her third attempt to be the first human to swim from Cuba to Florida.   She’s not superhuman, but she’s super-committed.  And she’s probably going to make it. 

http://www.diananyad.com/

If that’s not inspiration, nothing is.

Thurgood Marshall and the Sunnyland Case

A few weeks ago my brother stumbled upon a cool postscript to my book, Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus, about our dad’s involvement in the early civil rights movement in Tallahassee, Florida.  We’d known he’d been arrested and that his lawyers had appealed his case to the U.S. Supreme Court.   What we didn’t know was that one of those lawyers was Thurgood Marshall, the famous civil rights attorney who later became the first black Supreme Court Justice.

This shouldn’t be a huge surprise.  Marshall was the Chief Counsel for the NAACP from 1940 -1961.  During that time, he argued 32 cases before the Supreme Court and won 29 of them.   My dad's case Leonard D. Speed, Joseph Spagna, and Johnny Herndon v. City of Tallahassee came in 1958, but Marshall never got the chance to argue it since the high court justices refused to hear the case, citing issues of procedure and jurisdiction.

It’s enlightening, nonetheless, to read the transcript of the appeal which has recently come available – for a pretty penny – from The Making of Modern Law.

Readers of Test Ride will recall the gist of the story.  My dad and five other young men – three of them black, three white - tried to test Ordinance 741, a law that gave Tallahassee bus drivers authority to assign seats based, supposedly, on passenger weight and the “maximum health and safety” of the riders.  

When my dad and his friends boarded a bus called the “Sunnyland”, the driver, Emory Elkins, assigned them seats as you might suspect: whites in the front, blacks in the back.  Mid-way through the ride, my dad and two of the black guys moved seats so now they sat together as interracial pairs.  The three who moved seats were arrested, and they hoped to take the case to court to prove that the law violated their rights under the 14^th Amendment.

They started by pleading “Not Guilty.”

According to federal appeals court judge Dozier Devane, a known segregationist, that was their big mistake.  Instead of entering a plea, they should have entered an affidavit citing the unconstitutionality of the law.  Since they were inarguable guilty of breaking the ordinance, there was nothing to appeal.  End of story.

That’s not a complicated position.  But the prose in response to the appeal, written by Tallahassee attorney Leo L. Foster, is so convoluted as to be almost unreadable. He refers repeatedly to a seating chart admitted by the bus driver as evidence, a chart which didn’t specify race.  Therefore, Foster argues, race was not a factor in the seating decision. In the eyes of the court, in fact, the defendants could’ve been “six negroes” or six white men.  Huh?

Thurgood Marshall’s prose, by contrast, is clear, easy to read, and to the point.  He makes a thorough condemnation of Ordinance 741 not by addressing what goes unsaid – that seating will be determined based on race – but what is said.  The ordinance is “so vague as to make an innocent act a criminal one.”  He uses the example of a married couple.  If a man gets on after his wife, and sits next to her without the express permission of the driver, he has committed a crime.  How is a “reasonable man” to know what he can or cannot do?   

As you read, you get a keen sense of why Thurgood Marshall won so many cases.  Because he was articulate.  And because he was right.  It’s easier to make sense when you’re telling the truth than when you’re lying.  I’m pretty sure the attorneys for the city weren’t lying, but they were going to great lengths – the whole nation was – to sidestep the truth.

It Don't Come Easy

OK.  I admit it.  Sometime in the middle of my long stint on the road last month, I started to feel sorry for myself.  I’d made the mistake of taking the ’98 Buick we inherited from Laurie’s parents on this little 3000 mile jaunt because of the smooth ride and the great stereo and because I was thinking more about the cool stories I’d be chasing than about, say, the possibility that belts might fray and snap or that the water pump pulley might work loose and go bouncing down I-80 behind me.  Never even occurred to me.   Nor had I suspected how difficult interviews might be to schedule.  Or re-schedule.  Government officials needed permission from D.C.  (Huh? What country do we live in?)  Meeting locations and times were changed.  Or I changed them.  People got sick or forgot.   Then there was the weather.  Snow, rain, sleet, wind.  No fewer than six of the mountain passes I crossed required chains in last week in March. (I never put them on.  Don’t tell the CHP.)  And right about the time I was white-knuckling it over yet another one, Ringo Starr came on the radio: “It Don’t Come Easy.”  Damned straight, I thought.

Nope.  It didn’t come easy.  But it was worth it.

I talked with three amazing women in their eighties who have achieved great things.  Beverly Ogle of the Mountain Maidu tribe in Northeastern California has been working to reclaim ancestral land in Humbug Valley from Pacific Gas & Electric.  Phyllis Clausen helped lead the movement to remove the salmon-blocking Condit Dam from the White Salmon River.  Pauline Esteves chaired the committee that negotiated the Timbisha Shoshone Homeland Act to return land to her tribe in and around Death Valley.  Each of these women is sharp and gracious, humble and wise.   Each has a clear-eyed intelligent gaze.  You’d think they’d revel in retelling the stories of their triumphs.  But no. 

Each focused on the future and the new challenges that face the people and the places that they love. Beverly Ogle told me about how few speakers of the Maidu language remain.  Phyllis Clausen worries about the threat development now poses to the White Salmon River.  And near Pauline Esteves’ home on reclaimed land in Death Valley, the tribal offices have been locked and security cameras put in place by a rival faction in cahoots with the BIA.  At the heart of the problem: the politics of gaming.  When I tried to steer the conversation to the successful negotiations back in 2000, Pauline would have none of it.

“This is the present,” she said.  “I was taught: don’t always be talking about the past.  Sure, it’s a good foundation, but go forward.  You talk about the circle of life.  See, we’re not going through that circle at all.  We’re not moving.  We’re stuck.”

What doesn’t come easy?  Change. Reclamation. Making things right.

“We were told in one of the legends that we were going to be stuck sometimes,” Pauline continued, “but never to give up.  If you fall, get up, and if there’s something in your way go around it, and that’s what we’re trying to do.”

I’m home in Stehekin now to sort through the hours of interviews, to think and write about the struggles and triumphs.  But if I’m prone to self-pity, I will think about these women and the many good people who have worked with them, and I’ll remember to stay focused.   Water pumps can get repaired.  So can rivers.  Doors can be unlocked.  Or so we hope.

Death Valley: Reclaimed Homeland

Last winter around this time my mom and I were trying to decide where to travel together. Some place sunny, some place we’d never been. Death Valley, she suggested. Perfect.

On the way north, from the eight-lane interstate to the two-lane highway, we marveled about how only a few years earlier, as she battled cancer, we thought she’d be gone. Now she’d get to see Death Valley before she died. We speculated about the wildflowers which might be great – or not – the wildflower watch on the Internet urged us not to get too excited. So there we were on the open road, not knowing what to expect or hope for.

Even before the trip I’d been thinking about reclamation, about hydropower and dams and how the combination of outsized vision and the communal will of New Deal America managed to reclaim so much. For better and for worse. When I was young, I harbored Ed Abbey fantasies of dams blasted to smithereens, and I am as happy as the next monkey-wrencher to see the Elwha come tumbling down. But lately I’ve grown a strange and desperate faith in reclamation in all its meanings:

To take back. To make right. To make useful.

So there we were in Lone Pine. We spent an afternoon at Manzanar, the former internment where Japanese-Americans have reclaimed their history. Then the next morning, we entered the park in all its stark grandeur, and we passed this sign:
Check out the phrase at the bottom: "Homeland of the Timbisha Shoshone." I was floored. I know enough of the sordid history of Indians in National Parks to know how uncommon such an acknowledgement is. When I opened the park map and saw that it was not merely a nice gesture, but reclamation at its most raw and right. The Timbisha Shoshone Homeland Act in 2000 had granted 300 acres in the park and more than 7,000 in the surrounding lands back to the Indians.

Since then I’ve read everything I can find about the tribe’s history and their activists like Pauline Esteves and Barbara Durham, and I’ve interviewed several of those involved in the Homeland Act negotiations including Charles Wilkinson, author of a terrific history of modern Indian movements, Blood Struggle. My obsession with reclamation has grown even bigger and more unwieldy (outsized?) moving in several directions at once … like the very best projects. But despite my best efforts, I have yet to talk to the Timbisha. I have not given up hope.

Five things a writer needs to be able to do a lot of

Last week, I visited Minden Elementary School near Reno, Nevada as part of the sixth grade lecture series. The series is organized and run by a hard-working student committee that assembled a list of questions ahead of time, prepared an introduction, set up the tables and chairs in the library, and best of all, provided the treats for the occasion. Last year the series featured scientists. This year it’s writers, and I was the first. So I decided to go with the basics: How do you become a writer? What do you have to do?

I made a list for the whiteboard (which was, by the way, electronic – yikes! – luckily the committee trained me up in no time):

1. Read

What inspires you to write? the students asked. The answer: What I read. From Laura Ingalls Wilder when I was a kid to Zadie Smith last week.

2. Sit in a chair

As anyone who writes seriously can attest, this is a lot harder than it sounds. How long does it take to write a book? the students asked. Well, my first book, the novel I wrote sitting in a bean bag in second grade, The English Girl from Canada, took 10 days. Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus took five years. That’s a lot of sitting.

3. Find something you love to write about

For me, the lifelong urge to write turned to desperate compulsion when I landed in Canyonlands National Park in Utah just out of college, then later when I stumbled into Stehekin. I loved being outdoors, immersed in such beauty, loved the people I met and the adventures I had, and I wanted to write about all of it. So I did. Over and over and over again.

4. Work with other writers

After I left Minden, I headed up to Lake Tahoe to teach a private workshop on the bridge between essay and memoir writing. Six devoted writers offered each other support, encouragement, and much needed direction. All of them – all of us, I should say – marveled at how much gets accomplished when we’re around other writers rather than in our own little cubby holes.

5. Accept rejection

Back at the elementary school, this offered a great chance for guessing game. I told the students that I have, as of now, about seventy published short pieces. To get to that point, I asked, how many rejections did they think I’ve received? Hands shot up. Ten? Nope. Twenty? Nope. A hundred? Up and up and up the numbers went. (When I described this to my mother on the telephone, she said: just like The Price is Right.)

Five hundred, I said at last. I keep track. Five hundred rejections. And counting.

Of course the one obvious thing a writer must do a lot of that does not appear on the list is – duh! – write, so we spent some time on three short writing prompts that maybe the students can work into something in the days and weeks to come.

Then it was over. Time for refreshments. The only caveat was that, in order to partake of the cookies and Rice Krispie treats, the students would have to be talking about the presentation either with me or with each other. (Not, their teacher Ms. Bertolone-Smith noted, merely hanging out with their “stalemates.”) So they gathered around and asked some great questions: how to write a climax scene, whether you can work on more than one book at once, what’s different about writing fiction vs. nonfiction.

Looking back, I realize I did skip over one thing writers have to do a lot of: give readings and presentations and visit with readers. I’ve been doing plenty of that in the past year, and I have to say, the morning at Minden Elementary was one of the most enjoyable.