May 2009 Newsletter
05/03/2009
Dear Writing Friends:
I’m starting to feel like I’m writing the same newsletter over and over, like I’m always bragging about my ability to squeeze writing into smaller cracks, fitting it in between in-law visits to emergency hospital, childcare, events I promised I would attend with my husband, filling my refrigerator. And this month I do have something along those lines I want to share. During the twelve days my child was home from school for Passover – yes, you read correctly, that was twelve – I rediscovered something I had learned when I first started writing, that if you get out of bed early and write first thing, you can cruise the rest of the day—or take care of the rest of your life, your work, your family, etc.
About halfway into this twelve-day break – once I had calmed down from the triple excitement of having Natalie Goldberg in town, seeing Leonard Cohen (actually, I’m not sure if I’m calmed down from that yet), and two seders – I had the itch to write. After weeks of not being able to settle back down into the book I’m writing, suddenly I felt that if I didn’t add a few new pages, I was going to explode. I got out of bed, threw on some sweat pants, and informed my husband I would be back in two hours. It was 7:15. I went to Starbuck’s on 45th Street, because it is just a few blocks from my house and I didn’t want to waste time, sat myself in my favorite armchair by the window, and wrote. At 9:10 I gathered up my notebooks and pens and returned home where my daughter was waiting for me to entertain her. And that’s the way the rest of the week went. I got a lot done – more than I’m getting done now with Shira back in school – but that’s not what this newsletter is about. I want to tell you what we did in those remaining hours of our days.
Most days when I returned from Starbuck’s Shira was ready to get out of the house, and I obliged. I took her to the park, hiking at Town Lake, ice skating, and shopping. One day we made kosher-for-Passover brownies and another a matzoh spinach pie. By mid-day I was usually tired and ready to get off my feet, at which point I made a cup of tea and we settled down to read. Once we were on the couch, however, we didn’t leave for hours, so hooked were we on Harry Potter. One day we read 100 pages—not all at once, although even spread out over the day, that’s a lot of Harry Potter, all read aloud. Over the twelve-day break, we finished Book Five, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, for a total of 870 pages, and got well underway on Book Six before vacation was over (we’re now reading Book Seven, alas, the last of the series).
I remember the days when Shira’s nap and bedtime routines consisted of reading three board books, how easy it was to whip through Good Night Moon and a few Sandra Boynton books and put her down in her crib. As she got older and her naps got shorter, I felt the pinch of less time to read on my own and thus chose her reading material more carefully. I tried to find books with beautiful language – Charlotte Zolotow was a favorite – so that if nothing else, I was learning something about writing on the level of the sentence. Later, when she was old enough for fairly tales, I bought volumes of them, determined to learn about the deep structure of myth and story in our culture. I can’t say that I was all that successful on that count, but I was trying to squeeze something out of all those hours at someone else’s service. Not to complain. I cherish reading to my child, but such is the reality of trying to balance motherhood and writing.
The long sessions reading Harry Potter actually began a few months before Passover. Shira was going through one of those phases where she wanted every spare moment of her time away from school spent as close to me as she could get, so that instead of her usual Saturday morning play dates with her best pal, Emma, she wanted to be alone with me. For several weeks, we combined baking and reading. While cakes, cupcakes, and cookies were in the oven, we read. And when they were done, we sat down with finished products in our hands and read some more. Eventually we cut out the baking and got right down to reading. One cold Saturday morning we went out for breakfast tacos, returned home, and got under the covers where we read until 1 p.m. I remember looking at the clock and thinking we had forgotten about lunch. Neither my daughter nor I are the kind of people who forget about lunch.
The first Saturday of our newly discovered marathon reading pleasure, I happened to be teaching in the afternoon. I arrived at class as if I had discovered a new drug. I told everyone about my lovely morning of reading aloud to my daughter and then, in place of the elaborate lesson I had prepared for them on the assigned memoir, I read to them. My students sat back in their chairs with their eyes closed. I could see their shoulders drop and pleasure pass over their faces. In my desire to make them good readers (and thus good writers), I had forgotten why they were drawn to the page in the first place.
As Shira became interested in and ready for more sophisticated books, I asked a friend with older children if she thought I should read Shira Harry Potter. “No,” she said. “Wait until she can read it herself, so she can savor it.” That sounded like good advice, and I’m happy I did not follow it. A few months later,Shira walked into the bookstore and grabbed Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, the first book in the series. She wasn’t ready to read it on her own, and now that we’re on the edge of finding out how it all turned out, I can’t imagine having missed the journey with her.
My husband says that reading is like breathing for me. I can’t live without books. But when I set out to become a writer, reading lost some of its magic. As I became more interested in learning the tricks of the trade, I spent more time trying to figure out how my books were put together, how to achieve certain effects. I still consider this kind of close reading, almost always re-reading, incredibly satisfying, but it does tend to turn your attention away from the story. Imagination is interrupted by intellect. Which brings me back to Harry Potter.
When Shira and I began reading the first book, it occurred to me that I should pay attention to Rowling’s moves. But once we sat down to read, I forgot myself and got lost in the story. When my husband discovered that there were seven books and there was one long, continuous arc, he wondered aloud if she had plotted it all out. “Of course she did,” I snapped at him. It wasn’t that hard for me to imagine the storyboards she must have created and/or the notes she made to keep track of the various plots and subplot. My husband was awed by it. I was not. Trying to keep a narrative straight in my head is something I do every day. Not that I do it that well, it’s just something I live with. Truth be told, I didn’t want to think about it while we were reading Harry Potter. During those long sessions on the couch with Shira, I was so swept away by the story, I often forgot that my daughter was in the room or that I was reading aloud. I didn’t care that there was an author behind the curtain pulling the strings. I only cared about Harry, why he was able to resist Lord Voldemort, how he would get out of whatever current danger he was in, and whether or not Professor Snape was truly on the side of good or, as Harry suspected, still working for the Dark Lord.
So, where am I going with all this? To the past of course, to childhood and to my college years, when a good book was a portal to another world, when I had the time and the space to get lost. I remember sitting on the deck of my parents’ summer time share in Lake Tahoe, scared out of my wits by the ghost under the floor in Therese Raquin, and a long bus ride from Santa Barbara to L.A. when I read My Name is Asher Lev and almost missed my stop. I rarely get lost in a book like that anymore. I don’t have the time. That was the beauty of those twelve days of school vacation. I was at the mercy of long, quiet days with no agenda. You cannot return to childhood, but you can revisit it.
Sometimes in the midst of trying to become great writers, we forget to be ordinary readers. When we lose a sense of what it is to receive a book, and simply mine books for our own purposes, it is easy to forget why we’re writing. Writing is bigger than learning the elements of craft. (Although as you might suspect, when we re-read Harry Potter, as we surely will, I’ll have my writing eyes open and I’ll be taking notes.) As well, I’m reminded that parenting and writing do not have to be at odds (or baking and writing, or banking and writing). When you allow yourself the pleasure of the present moment, when you let go of ambition and striving, the lessons unfold. And sometimes you can squeeze out material for a newsletter.
Writing topic: Tell me about a time you were absorbed in a book.
Quotation:
I hadn’t lived in books with such naïve attention since I was nine or ten years old, and had spent months, years, fleeing from one book to another, like a refugee from something intractable and real: family, my shyness, the feeling of a burnt-out zone in which only I lived. Now it was the same. (Paul Zweig, Departures)
I’m currently in cahoots with Cyndi Hughes, Director of the Writers’ League of Texas, about courses for the next academic year. Let me know your needs and desires and we’ll try to accommodate.
My best to each of you.
Saundra
I’m starting to feel like I’m writing the same newsletter over and over, like I’m always bragging about my ability to squeeze writing into smaller cracks, fitting it in between in-law visits to emergency hospital, childcare, events I promised I would attend with my husband, filling my refrigerator. And this month I do have something along those lines I want to share. During the twelve days my child was home from school for Passover – yes, you read correctly, that was twelve – I rediscovered something I had learned when I first started writing, that if you get out of bed early and write first thing, you can cruise the rest of the day—or take care of the rest of your life, your work, your family, etc.
About halfway into this twelve-day break – once I had calmed down from the triple excitement of having Natalie Goldberg in town, seeing Leonard Cohen (actually, I’m not sure if I’m calmed down from that yet), and two seders – I had the itch to write. After weeks of not being able to settle back down into the book I’m writing, suddenly I felt that if I didn’t add a few new pages, I was going to explode. I got out of bed, threw on some sweat pants, and informed my husband I would be back in two hours. It was 7:15. I went to Starbuck’s on 45th Street, because it is just a few blocks from my house and I didn’t want to waste time, sat myself in my favorite armchair by the window, and wrote. At 9:10 I gathered up my notebooks and pens and returned home where my daughter was waiting for me to entertain her. And that’s the way the rest of the week went. I got a lot done – more than I’m getting done now with Shira back in school – but that’s not what this newsletter is about. I want to tell you what we did in those remaining hours of our days.
Most days when I returned from Starbuck’s Shira was ready to get out of the house, and I obliged. I took her to the park, hiking at Town Lake, ice skating, and shopping. One day we made kosher-for-Passover brownies and another a matzoh spinach pie. By mid-day I was usually tired and ready to get off my feet, at which point I made a cup of tea and we settled down to read. Once we were on the couch, however, we didn’t leave for hours, so hooked were we on Harry Potter. One day we read 100 pages—not all at once, although even spread out over the day, that’s a lot of Harry Potter, all read aloud. Over the twelve-day break, we finished Book Five, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, for a total of 870 pages, and got well underway on Book Six before vacation was over (we’re now reading Book Seven, alas, the last of the series).
I remember the days when Shira’s nap and bedtime routines consisted of reading three board books, how easy it was to whip through Good Night Moon and a few Sandra Boynton books and put her down in her crib. As she got older and her naps got shorter, I felt the pinch of less time to read on my own and thus chose her reading material more carefully. I tried to find books with beautiful language – Charlotte Zolotow was a favorite – so that if nothing else, I was learning something about writing on the level of the sentence. Later, when she was old enough for fairly tales, I bought volumes of them, determined to learn about the deep structure of myth and story in our culture. I can’t say that I was all that successful on that count, but I was trying to squeeze something out of all those hours at someone else’s service. Not to complain. I cherish reading to my child, but such is the reality of trying to balance motherhood and writing.
The long sessions reading Harry Potter actually began a few months before Passover. Shira was going through one of those phases where she wanted every spare moment of her time away from school spent as close to me as she could get, so that instead of her usual Saturday morning play dates with her best pal, Emma, she wanted to be alone with me. For several weeks, we combined baking and reading. While cakes, cupcakes, and cookies were in the oven, we read. And when they were done, we sat down with finished products in our hands and read some more. Eventually we cut out the baking and got right down to reading. One cold Saturday morning we went out for breakfast tacos, returned home, and got under the covers where we read until 1 p.m. I remember looking at the clock and thinking we had forgotten about lunch. Neither my daughter nor I are the kind of people who forget about lunch.
The first Saturday of our newly discovered marathon reading pleasure, I happened to be teaching in the afternoon. I arrived at class as if I had discovered a new drug. I told everyone about my lovely morning of reading aloud to my daughter and then, in place of the elaborate lesson I had prepared for them on the assigned memoir, I read to them. My students sat back in their chairs with their eyes closed. I could see their shoulders drop and pleasure pass over their faces. In my desire to make them good readers (and thus good writers), I had forgotten why they were drawn to the page in the first place.
As Shira became interested in and ready for more sophisticated books, I asked a friend with older children if she thought I should read Shira Harry Potter. “No,” she said. “Wait until she can read it herself, so she can savor it.” That sounded like good advice, and I’m happy I did not follow it. A few months later,Shira walked into the bookstore and grabbed Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, the first book in the series. She wasn’t ready to read it on her own, and now that we’re on the edge of finding out how it all turned out, I can’t imagine having missed the journey with her.
My husband says that reading is like breathing for me. I can’t live without books. But when I set out to become a writer, reading lost some of its magic. As I became more interested in learning the tricks of the trade, I spent more time trying to figure out how my books were put together, how to achieve certain effects. I still consider this kind of close reading, almost always re-reading, incredibly satisfying, but it does tend to turn your attention away from the story. Imagination is interrupted by intellect. Which brings me back to Harry Potter.
When Shira and I began reading the first book, it occurred to me that I should pay attention to Rowling’s moves. But once we sat down to read, I forgot myself and got lost in the story. When my husband discovered that there were seven books and there was one long, continuous arc, he wondered aloud if she had plotted it all out. “Of course she did,” I snapped at him. It wasn’t that hard for me to imagine the storyboards she must have created and/or the notes she made to keep track of the various plots and subplot. My husband was awed by it. I was not. Trying to keep a narrative straight in my head is something I do every day. Not that I do it that well, it’s just something I live with. Truth be told, I didn’t want to think about it while we were reading Harry Potter. During those long sessions on the couch with Shira, I was so swept away by the story, I often forgot that my daughter was in the room or that I was reading aloud. I didn’t care that there was an author behind the curtain pulling the strings. I only cared about Harry, why he was able to resist Lord Voldemort, how he would get out of whatever current danger he was in, and whether or not Professor Snape was truly on the side of good or, as Harry suspected, still working for the Dark Lord.
So, where am I going with all this? To the past of course, to childhood and to my college years, when a good book was a portal to another world, when I had the time and the space to get lost. I remember sitting on the deck of my parents’ summer time share in Lake Tahoe, scared out of my wits by the ghost under the floor in Therese Raquin, and a long bus ride from Santa Barbara to L.A. when I read My Name is Asher Lev and almost missed my stop. I rarely get lost in a book like that anymore. I don’t have the time. That was the beauty of those twelve days of school vacation. I was at the mercy of long, quiet days with no agenda. You cannot return to childhood, but you can revisit it.
Sometimes in the midst of trying to become great writers, we forget to be ordinary readers. When we lose a sense of what it is to receive a book, and simply mine books for our own purposes, it is easy to forget why we’re writing. Writing is bigger than learning the elements of craft. (Although as you might suspect, when we re-read Harry Potter, as we surely will, I’ll have my writing eyes open and I’ll be taking notes.) As well, I’m reminded that parenting and writing do not have to be at odds (or baking and writing, or banking and writing). When you allow yourself the pleasure of the present moment, when you let go of ambition and striving, the lessons unfold. And sometimes you can squeeze out material for a newsletter.
Writing topic: Tell me about a time you were absorbed in a book.
Quotation:
I hadn’t lived in books with such naïve attention since I was nine or ten years old, and had spent months, years, fleeing from one book to another, like a refugee from something intractable and real: family, my shyness, the feeling of a burnt-out zone in which only I lived. Now it was the same. (Paul Zweig, Departures)
I’m currently in cahoots with Cyndi Hughes, Director of the Writers’ League of Texas, about courses for the next academic year. Let me know your needs and desires and we’ll try to accommodate.
My best to each of you.
Saundra
This newsletter is sponsored by BookWoman, Texas' only feminist bookstore,
serving the women's community for 30 years.
5501 N. Lamar Blvd. #A-105 Austin Texas,
http://www.ebookwoman.com, 512 472-2785.