Suzanne Morrison

Yoga Bitch in Los Angeles

2012-02-09T18:35:00.000-08:00

If any of you are in LA this weekend, I'm thrilled to say that I'll be reading at Yogala in Echo Park this Saturday, February 11th at 6pm. Some of the nicest and smartest yogis I've met teach or attend classes at Yogala, including the marvelous Lia Aprile of Shantitown, who will be introducing me. Come on out!

I'll be staying with my dear friend Jessica and her many men (well, her husband and two baby boys) and hopefully not thinking about writing, which has been tough lately. Feels like I start bleeding every time I sit down at my desk. I want to bleach out in the sun and meet a bunch of yogis and enjoy some mommy-margarita time with Jess. And, and! I'm very excited to meet Claire Bidwell Smith while I'm in LA. Claire is the author of the just-released memoir, The Rules of Inheritance, her story of coming of age after losing both her parents by her mid-twenties. I am so excited to read Claire's book-- hers is one of the few blogs I read religiously. Check it out.

Hope to see you there, Angelinos!

Saul Bellow on Symbolism

2012-01-13T19:05:00.000-08:00

In today's internet travels I came across this essay by Saul Bellow, circa 1959. (I have lost the trail of breadcrumbs and can't say where I found it, sorry. It's been a big day for me and the internet.) Having thoroughly steeped in the very "deep reading" Bellow denounces, I find it marvelously refreshing.

Perhaps the deepest readers are those who are least sure of themselves. An even more disturbing suspicion is that they prefer meaning to feeling. What again about the feelings? Yes, it’s too bad. I’m sorry to have to ring in this tiresome subject, but there’s no help for it. The reason why the schoolboy takes refuge in circles is that the wrath of Achilles and the death of Hector are too much for him. He is doing no more than most civilized people do when confronted with passion and death. They contrive somehow to avoid them.

Yoga Bitch Voted one of the Best Northwest Books of 2011

2012-01-13T16:55:00.000-08:00

The holidays have effectively drawn and quartered me, and I'm still recuperating, but today I remembered that I never blogged about Crosscut's Best Northwest Books of 2011, which included my little Yoga Bitch! As Robert McCrum notes over at the Guardian in his Fifty Things I've Learned About the Literary Life, "Lists are the curse of the age." And indeed, he is right. But goodness me, if it isn't nice to be listed anyhow.

YB also just went into its third printing, which is thrilling, to say the least. To celebrate, I've been having a non-stop panic attack about getting started on the new book again. Just kidding. Well-- kind of.

Here's the Crosscut list.

In other news, I've been reading an overwhelming amount of D.H. Lawrence lately and am actively suppressing the urge to describe the glorious sunset out my window in three pages of Lawrentian prose. As I am not D.H. Lawrence, we should all be relieved at my powers of restraint.

Happy New Year!

The tour in review

2011-12-07T14:37:00.001-08:00

This is all I did for two months.

Greetings, netlings! Hope you're enjoying the war on Christmas!

(This morning I told the cranky, list-boggled husband he was a General fighting the War on Christmas. His response: If I was General, this war would've been won by now.)

Anyhoo, long time no blog. I've been in hiding. Nothing like several months of non-stop self-promotion to make a girl crawl back into her cave for awhile. Honestly? It's been wonderful. I'm back at work on the new book, I've written a bunch of ghost stories. Even my writerly meltdowns have had a pleasant sort of self-locating quality to them, like, Ah, yes, this is who I am. (I am a person who will cry to the tune of four thousand It Gets Better videos just to avoid writing.)

This is me talking.

Promoting a book is . . . well, good holy hell, it's just insane. It's so much fun, and it makes you completely mentally ill. Try talking about yourself non-stop for two months, taking breaks only to switch time zones by plane, train, or automobile, and you've got the idea. It's more overwhelming than I ever would have imagined. After nearly a month on the road, I flew home with about 16 hours to kill before I was scheduled to read at Elliott Bay Book Company. During my time away, I had been on two continents, oscillating between anxiety and exhilaration, enjoying too little sleep and too much of the kind of diet I consume while traveling (whatever protein I can find to avoid passing out; red wine & coffee) and now I arrived at Elliott Bay hoping I would at least remember the name of my own book and my own self, should anyone ask me.

Yellow beverages figured prominently on this book tour.

It's funny; my exhaustion was so complete I actually almost miss it. That floaty, out-of-body feeling, the utter inability to try too hard. Or maybe I just miss the way I slept that night after my reading, grateful, relishing my own sheets and the fact that all future events would be close to Seattle. I spent the next day in my pajamas, reading. Never have I craved my bed and the absorbing world of books more profoundly.

I'm talking some more!

From roughly mid-July to mid-October, I couldn't write to save my life. I don't know how writers like Joyce Carol Oates and T.C. Boyle do it. How do they put out a book a year AND go on tour AND, um, put out a book a year?! There's something almost monstrous about that much energy coursing through one human being. My hat is off to you writers. Shoot, my whole outfit is off. I'm in awe.

October clipped along with more events, interviews, and this incessant buzzing in my ear that turned out to be the sound of my own voice. Then, emerging from months held hostage by that dominatrix Yoga Bitch, November was this great gift of time; book promotion had slowed to a nice gentle simmer, and each morning I flew to my desk, overflowing with ideas. I wrote stories, drafted chapters of the new book, cobbled together essays I'll pitch in the new year. Honestly, looking back on the last month, it's a little scary, how productive I was. (Maybe this is how JCO and TCB do it: they become manic at the thought of an empty calendar.) For months, everything I had written was yoga-related, and, now, having permission to write whatever I wanted again (permission from the horrid taskmaster that lives in my brain and keeps telling me I'm not doing enough to keep Yoga Bitch afloat) I went a little nuts.

Aunt Suzanne, still talking.

Now it's December. Never a good writing month, what with the houseguests, the parties, the bonbons and mulled wine to consume. So in lieu of writing, I've done something I've dreamt about doing for years. I've cleaned out every box, every desk drawer, every cubby and trunk in the house. In the hallway beneath the attic hatch are several stacks of files, notebooks, costumes, props, and about three Douglas Firs' worth of paper.

I am purging Yoga Bitch. The play, the memoir, the abandoned novel. The urine sample containers. I'm purging her in the most loving way possible. At first I thought I would shred all the early drafts, the novel, the outlines made in 2004 when I thought I could fit every single thought I had ever had into this one book. But my God, the process contained in those drafts! I learned how to write on the back of this story. I learned how to revise, how to structure, how to cut and cut and cut.


With my brilliant director, Jean-Michele Gregory, after Yoga Bitch opened in London

I've shredded a lot, and recycled a lot, but I'm keeping the drafts and the notebooks, at least for now. They'll move into the attic, and in the new year I'll start filling all the gaps they've left in my house with new work. It's remarkable, really, this chore; relegating to the past something that consumed me for so long has proven to be one of those rare, perfect experiences that is as good in reality as it was in my imagination. It's an unmitigated joy, uncomplicated by regret or nostalgia. The void waits patiently to be filled. It's a pretty great thing, really.


		Twenty-five years old, in Bali.

Demons & the Afterlife

2011-11-07T10:44:00.000-08:00

Hey! This glorious fall morning I walked down to KIRO radio headquarters, where I was on the Ross & Burbank show, chatting about yoga's demonic underbelly, urine therapy, sexual misconduct, the works. Here's the link. Dave Ross and Luke Burbank are so smart and so funny. And my self-interview is up over at the marvelous literary site The Nervous Breakdown. To up the meta quotient, I thought about interviewing myself about the interview. I wrote up a few questions and everything. But then I canceled on myself.

Writers are SO flaky.

But if you're just dying for more Yoga Bitch coverage, check out my website-- I've updated it with more interviews, reviews, TV spots, etc.

Happy Monday!

2011-10-20T20:29:00.000-07:00

“I think the single most defining characteristic of a writer” – I found myself saying to a friend the other day, when she asked my thoughts on the teaching of writing – “I mean the difference between a writer and someone who ‘wants to be a writer,’ is a high tolerance for uncertainty.”
--Sonya Chung

The Twenty-Four Hour Yoga Cure for Trolls | Books for Better Living

2011-10-17T14:28:00.000-07:00

Here's a piece I wrote for Books for Better Living, about visiting my old yoga roommate Jessica as I prepared for the launch of Yoga Bitch.

I'll be in Olympia for an event at the Timberland Library this Wednesday night, and Jessica will be there! If you're nearby, come on out to meet her and get your book signed. It's gonna be a fun one. Details on my website.

The Twenty-Four Hour Yoga Cure for Trolls | Books for Better Living

Writing any book is an arduous task, one full of setbacks and anxiety— and those are just the mental and emotional issues! Physically, writing is brutal. It’s manual labor. Your neck juts out as you puzzle through a difficult sentence. Your shoulders fly to your ears. Your back rounds into a human comma. If someone snuck into my room and took a picture of me writing, I’m pretty sure I would look like a pale troll with a bad case of scoliosis. And being a troll is a workout! There have been days when I feel like a triathlete when I get up from my desk. (Not that I actually know what a triathlete feels like; in truth, just the thought of a triathlon makes me need six months of physical therapy and a prescription for Vicodin.)

Flannery O'Connor

2011-10-14T18:43:00.000-07:00

Here's a recording of Flannery O'Connor reading A Good Man is Hard to Find. I love hearing this story in her voice. This story never fails to astonish me, no matter how many times I read it.

Truth

2011-10-13T16:59:00.000-07:00

Downton Abbey is My Wonder Drug

2011-10-13T16:29:00.000-07:00

Here's my latest blog on the Huffington Post! Starring Kate Hess, Downton Abbey, and some very fancy beef jerky.

Horror Stories, Island Stories, and the teachers who gave me everything

2011-09-30T14:35:00.000-07:00

I was in Portland this week for my reading at Powell's, the world's most extraordinary bookstore, followed by a dizzying shopping spree in which I purchased enough books to get me through the fall, or at least October. I've been on a ghost story kick lately, so I picked up a hefty load of M.R. James, Sarah Waters, and more. I'm in the mood for haunted houses and wicked children.

Before my visit to Powell's, I stopped by KATU-TV's AM Northwest to talk with Helen Raptis about the path to God, to love, and my book, "Yoga Witch with a B."

Here's the link to that interview.

Now I'm at home, in bed, nursing a wee cold (a month of travel was bound to catch up with me eventually) and prepping for my reading tonight at Island Books.

I grew up on Mercer Island, and have always considered Island Books to be the spiritual center of the island. That lovely little bookstore holds a very special place in my heart. It was my first bookstore. I remember buying picture books there, Little House on the Prairie, Nancy Drew mysteries. All of those young adult novels I devoured, especially the ones that featured sexually-active teenagers. Those were the best. I went through my Anne of Green Gables kick at Island books, and eventually Roger, the owner there, suggested my mother give me Ursula Hegi's collection of linked stories, Floating in My Mother's Palm, which was the first book of short stories I read, and the first time I became aware that certain books are considered literature.

When I started this blog, I wrote about the experience reading Floating in My Mother's Palm here. This time of year, when the bright, sunny days turn grey, always reminds me of that book.

Tonight's reading was featured in the Mercer Island Reporter (lovingly nicknamed the Distorter by Island residents from the time I was little!) You can read that interview right here.

Naturally, returning to the place where I grew up in order to read from my first book has got me revisiting the past. All morning I've been thinking about the teachers who got me here: Frank Perry, my fourth grade writing teacher who singled me out to read in front of the class a story I had written called-- well, "It." I can't recall if I consciously chose to rip Stephen King's title off, or if this was just a coincidence. But I remember relishing the title either way. I also remember Mr. Perry telling me I should keep writing, that I had a knack for it. He told us that the most important thing was to grab the reader with a strong opening sentence. I remember thinking: I can do that, and then writing an opening that went something like The hands tightened around her neck, and Sarah knew she was about to die. (I was very into horror when I was a child. I also wrote a lot of stories about cannibalistic witches.)

Carol Muth, that same year, was my teacher for all other subjects, and she made us kids memorize a poem a week (or was it a month? felt like every week) so that we could internalize the rhythms of good writing. Or maybe it was just so we would learn to love poetry. I don't know. But I can still recite the Jabberwock by heart, and I think of Mrs. Muth every time I read Emily Dickinson. In my mind, Mrs. Muth was Emily Dickinson. I know she was married and had children, but somehow I always think of her with a bun in her hair and a beautiful, tragic love story in her heart.

Then there were the teachers who came along later: Cece Caley, Ruthie Newman, Chip Wall, who introduced me to books and ideas, who challenged me to think for myself. My theater directors, who taught me how to craft a narrative: Peter Donaldson, Sue Clement. And through it all, my piano teacher, Lois Jacobsen, who taught me one of the most important requirements of art-making: discipline. (Not that I was a terrifically disciplined piano student. But when I sit down to improve a story, I know how to work paragraph by paragraph, just as she taught me to perfect a piece measure by measure.)

Art really doesn't pay, but I am rich with the gifts these teachers gave me. They'll all be with me tonight; they always are.

On the Teevee

2011-09-20T16:24:00.000-07:00

I was on King-5's New Day Northwest this morning, talking about the Bitch. Fun!

Showoffasana

2011-08-30T10:14:00.000-07:00

All you have to do in this pose is tell your friends you've read Ulysses.

Yoga Bitch Giveaways

2011-08-29T09:29:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite bloggers, Claire Bidwell Smith, author of the forthcoming book The Rules of Inheritance, is giving away free copies of Yoga Bitch on her blog! Read more about it here.

Yoga Bitch isn’t just a book for yogis; rather it’s a book for seekers, for those of us who know there’s more out there, even if finding it means giving up everything about who you thought you were in order to become who you always wanted to be.

And Yogadork, the end-all be-all of yoga blogs, is also giving away free copies of my book. Here's that contest. You have till Wednesday to enter!

I'm in DC now, headed to New York tomorrow. Yesterday I had my first reading and it was more fun than I ever could have imagined. I'll post pics & details soon.

Water me and I sprout interviews

2011-08-23T18:48:00.000-07:00

Interview with the Washington Post Express, here. I was also on KUOW's The Conversation today. Here's a link to that puppy, too.

Day after tomorrow I fly to Washington, DC for the first stop on my book tour, right here.

Kirkus Review Interview, Yoga Dork review & more!

2011-08-22T10:09:00.000-07:00

Here's an interview I did with Molly Brown over at Kirkus, a review from Yoga Dork, and an interview with Nancy Alder over at elephant journal. And my piece over at recovering yogi has been reposted to elephant journal here and every time I look at it another thousand people have read it. 4500 so far. The yogis have been coming out for this book! An ongoing twitter discussion of Yoga Bitch has been going on as part of the twitter yoga book club (#YOBC). I'm taking part in the discussion even though I am somewhat clueless about the way twitter works. But I'm trying! Anyway, it's all a great deal of fun.

Seattleite

2011-08-19T12:48:00.000-07:00

Seattleite has decided I'm their Dynamic Seattleite of the day. Pretty neat for a gal who goes to work in her pajamas.

Yoga Cynic reviews Yoga Bitch

2011-08-18T13:32:00.000-07:00

I like this elephant journal review very much.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that Yoga Bitch remains far too smart a book for either formulaic extreme. while Morrison admits to wanting to write a classic spiritual memoir about finding the God she desperately wants to believe in, she finds she can’t, honestly, and doesn’t. And, while she ends up with a sort of dueling duo of disillusionments—with both the painfully earnest-yet-hypocritical uber-new agey side of yoga culture and the ultra-commercialized even-more-hypocritical big city variety—she’s not willing to throw it all out the window, either (not permanently, at least). Like no other yoga/travel memoir I’ve read, she critically examines the condescension of affluent westerner yogis who can afford to romanticize poverty and think they’re giving dark-skinned third world people a compliment in calling them innocent. To anyone who finds the previous sentence confusing, I couldn’t recommend Yoga Bitch more highly.

Reading Christianity in the Age of Glenn Beck

2011-08-18T13:29:00.000-07:00

Latest dispatch from my Huffington Post blog, here.

Confessions of a recovering flowtard

2011-08-17T12:06:00.000-07:00

Here's a piece I probably had too much fun writing. It's over at Recovering Yogi, a smart, wicked online yoga magazine. UPDATE: This piece has been reposted to elephant journal, right here.

. . . Something interesting has happened since I finished writing Yoga Bitch. I think I may have grown all wise and shit. No, really. I think I’m just a little bit enlightened. Like, I seem to have evolved in my practice so that very little bothers me and I don’t really care if I look terrible in class, or if everybody around me can do crow pose while I lie face-down on my mat, weeping silently. I’m just sort of okay with that, now. It’s like, having written Yoga Bitch, I said what I needed to say and now I can just be a yogi who happens to cry a lot during the more challenging postures.

Yoga Bitch is in Bookstores Today!

2011-08-16T13:34:00.000-07:00

In a few hours I am going to walk up the hill to my favorite bookstore on the planet, Elliott Bay Book Company, where I will buy a copy of my book. Not that I need another copy-- I've got colorful little Yoga Bitches tucked into every corner of my house and two giant boxes of books downstairs. But I've been dreaming of seeing a book with my name on it at Elliott Bay Books since I was a sixteen-year-old. So I'm buying one for her.

S.P. Miskowski's horror novel

2011-08-12T11:51:00.000-07:00

S.P. Miskowski's excellent horror novel, Knock Knock, is on sale over at Amazon's Kindle store right now. If you are a lover of great writing and creepy tales, fork over the 3.99 today and start reading. It's cheaper than a latte! Scarier, too.

Miskowski is a brilliant writer. I've linked to her stories here before, but this one in particular is a favorite-- and it's actually a story from this book.

The timing couldn't be more perfect for Knock Knock to be unleashed: it is a story for autumn, when the days are getting shorter and drearier. It was made for the season when you stop feeling guilty about staying in bed late on a Sunday morning-- it's raining, so who wants to leave the house? Buy it now, and wait for that first day when you know summer is ending. In Seattle that day is everyday, so we are, in a sense, spoiled. This novel was made for my city.

Three girls grapple their way to womanhood in a Pacific Northwest town haunted by its own sins. They make one terrible mistake that sets the story in motion. Once that mistake has been made, you will not be able to put the book down. Cancel your evening plans. Cancel your eating plans, too; you won't be able to walk down the stairs to the kitchen without turning on all the lights. Or running. Or both. I recommend reading this book in bed with a pot of coffee or tea nearby. Keep the shades up so you can watch the sky darkening.

Me & My Monkey Mind

2011-08-08T11:07:00.000-07:00

An article I wrote is up on elephant journal, right here. Narcissism meets a bout of altruism for a surprising discovery on the mat!

I once had a yoga teacher in New York tell me and the rest of her class that we had a little watcher inside our minds, witnessing our every thought. Like a little stalker. We were listening to the Police as she spoke, and she ended her sermon by saying, “Your witness is always there, always somewhere nearby. So that every move you make, every breath you take, you’ll be watching you.”

Yoga Bitch on New York Magazine's Recommended Reading List!

2011-08-04T14:28:00.001-07:00

This was a nice surprise today!

Behold, a new website is born.

2011-07-28T19:56:00.000-07:00

My new website is up! You can read the first chapter of my book (my heart stopped beating for a second there, imagining actual humans reading my book), you can watch the trailers, you can even buy the book! It's like, a real website.

Yoga Bitch will be in bookstores in less than three weeks now. Gulp. This shit just got real.

"If it’s all about money, there’s just better things to sell."

2011-07-18T13:11:00.000-07:00

The bookstore hidden in plain sight on the Upper West Side of Manhattan:

The Secret Bookstore

Yoga Bitch Full-length Trailer

2011-07-13T16:37:00.000-07:00

Yoga Bitch teaser trailer

2011-07-11T13:29:00.001-07:00

Professionalcrastinator

2011-06-24T19:00:00.000-07:00

Professionalcrastinator: when you're so good at procrastinating, you should charge for it.

Look at this neat drawing I found today!

Last Monday was my first day back at the desk. And yes, I was at my desk all day. I even came close to opening the document I intended to work in. And then I decided to check out photographs from Tiffany's wedding in Rome. Tootle around Facebook for a few minutes. Watch a video of a cat barking approximately twelve times. (The first two hits were just for me; the subsequent ten viewings were to watch my cat's reaction and then laugh and then hit play again.)

Monday was the throat-clearing day. The running start that ended just at the lip of the cliff from which I meant to leap. A few years ago, days like that made me nearly suicidal with self-loathing. The walls of my house are pocked with scars from those days. Slammed doors, temper tantrums. God forbid someone should call me during one of those fits; that would be enough to convince me that I had to move away to the country, or better yet, leave the country entirely, go someplace where there will be no distractions at all.

These days I find this period disagreeable but necessary; the wasted day typically ends with me writing miserably in my journal and making vows to do better tomorrow. And more often than not, I manage to fulfill that promise within a day or two. On Tuesday I sat down with that worm in my stomach, the worm that turns at the sight of the blank page or my hands at the keyboard. I sat and stared. I didn't know what to do. I knew that the story was now in Europe, and that I wanted to say something about how I arrived in Dublin to find I wasn't as brave as I had hoped I would be. I was actually terrified; nineteen, away from home for the first time, with no real plans other than to not leave Europe for many months. But I didn't know how to frame it. Actually, I didn't really know how to write at all anymore. All that Italian food made me soft and stupid and all I wanted to do was go loll around in a park somewhere and drink prosecco until my every ambition had drained away.

But then I had a thought: what if I just write the shittiest thing I've ever written in my life? I mean, at this point I'm basically writing in order to find out what the story is, so why not start terribly and see if it leads somewhere interesting? So I wrote a sentence that sucked. And then another one. And it was sort of fun, just writing shitty sentences. Freeing. And then I wrote this sentence: The Irish wouldn’t stop touching me.

That one sucked less. It kind of made me laugh a little. So I built on it, and just like that, I was back at work.

Priscilla Long wrote a wonderful book on writing called The Writer's Portable Mentor, which I have found enormously useful in the often-harrowing process of writing my second book. One of the best pieces of advice she offers is to write for fifteen minutes every day, no matter what. I didn't manage that during my European vacation, but when I'm home I use that rule to make sure that a day doesn't go by without my rubbing at least a few words together. This keeps the urge alive, that little spark that wants fuel.

Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday were all great good writing days. Today, however? Today I am such a magnificent procrastinator I am thinking about opening up a consulting business for writers who are too disciplined. I will teach them how to google funny cat videos and clips of girls crying while saying funny things about cats. I will insist that they interrupt their writing sessions to email dear friends about wall sconces and a wonderful new face serum. They will tweet and 'like' many things on Facebook. They will learn of Peter Falk's death and google every obituary out there and then make a list of favorite Columbo episodes to send to their friend Kate but then get distracted halfway through by an overwhelming urge to declare on Facebook that today is Hangover or Food Poisoning day, because I got one of those last night for sure.

Ahem.

So, in short: today I have written for fifteen minutes. I have written this blog post for fifteen minutes, maybe even more minutes than fifteen. And tomorrow, I will be back on the book.

Oh, but what I really wanted to say was this: my goal of finishing the first draft of the book by the time Yoga Bitch hits bookstores August 16th? Ah ha. Hahaha. Ahahahahahahahahahahaha.

Revised goal: Um, I will, uh.

FOOD POISONING OR HANGOVER DAY COMMENCES HERE. ALL WORK MUST HALT AT ONCE AND ALL ASSES MUST FIND THEIR WAY TO COUCHES. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MESSAGE. FAILURE TO COMPLY WILL RESULT IN A STARING CONTEST WITH MICHELLE BACHMANN.

Ciao, netlings!

How Yoga Bitch became Yoga Bitch

2011-06-21T12:16:00.000-07:00

Here's a piece on the Awl about how Yoga Bitch got its name. Matthew Gallaway's Publishing School is a great column about the ins and outs of book publishing; I wish it had been around when I was first getting started. Here, he asked me and three other writers about the process of naming-- and possibly renaming-- our books.

V.S. Naipaul can kiss my ladyknickers.

2011-06-17T15:05:00.000-07:00

I'm a bit late to this party, but I finally read this piece in Salon about V.S. Naipaul's opinion that women writers stink. That Jane Austen was no match for him. That women are capable of nothing but "feminine tosh." His analysis of Austen reminds me of the way I used to think about Austen before I had actually read Austen. When all I knew of her were her movies and the girls in sweater sets who always claimed her as their favorite author.

In an interview with the Royal Geographic Society on Tuesday Naipaul replied, "I don't think so" when asked if he considered any woman writer his literary match. He further said, of Jane Austen, that he "couldn't possibly share her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world," elaborating that women writers are "quite different … I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me."

You know, this deserves no response. It deserves to be ignored as the ramblings of one more cranky old dude showing the world that he's on his way out. He has outlived his usefulness. But, but! I must respond through the words of the magnificent Fran Lebowitz, who speaks so eloquently about Jane Austen. She's exquisitely smart on Austen here, though, as a side note, I particularly love her analysis of the philistine tendency to make every book a "learning opportunity" or a "lesson." I hate the idea of reading for self-improvement. As if one should ever learn lessons from artists! (See above lesson from Mr. Naipaul if you think authors should be teaching us lessons.) Yet too often I read reviews or hear people speak of the books they read as if the entire project were designed to make us feel better about ourselves. As if Dostoyevsky wrote just to warn us not to gamble or live in dark basements. Tolstoy merely wanted us to think twice before looking outside the bonds of marriage for happiness. As if Edith Wharton's House of Mirth were merely a PSA about the perils of laudanum for the impecunious social climber. Fran Lebowitz delivers a killing blow to this idea, and it is most welcome.

Enjoy.

Publishers Weekly calls Yoga Bitch "thoughtful, honest, and hilarious."

2011-06-11T15:02:00.000-07:00

Here's an early review from Publishers Weekly that made me very happy on my last night in Rome. I had just returned to the apartment we rented in Trastevere, full of many courses of caprese, pasta all'amatriciana, and veal, when I saw the email from my agent with this review and a smattering of exclamation points.

Let me tell you: it had already been a great day. Any day in which I eat not one, but two orders of chocolate gelato ranks highly in my personal book of days. But this sweet review was a pretty nice capper.

Things are getting exciting now that we're a little over two months away from Yoga Bitch hitting bookstores. There's been so much excitement my publisher is actually moving my on-sale date up a week, to August 16th. I had great meetings in Europe-- met the wonderful Kruger team in Germany, and my German, though incredibly rusty, (it's been fourteen years since I was speaking German regularly) miraculously held up. Then I met my editor and publicist from Kosmos in Amsterdam and we plotted a publicity trip to Amsterdam in September over some delicious Indonesian food. I have to say, I really love publishing people. It's kind of a dream come true to have meetings with people who read books for a living. There's nothing better than working with the best kind of people, and in my view, people who always have a book on their person are the very best kind of people.

Now I'm home, the sun is out, and we have new trim on the windows in our bedroom that needs painting. I'm working on flap copy for the Bitch, and thinking about getting back to work on the new book. I only have a couple of months before Yoga Bitch launches, and I have set for myself an impossible goal: to have the second half of the new book drafted by then. Two months. I might have to revise that deadline as it approaches, but for now, I've got my work cut out for me. Starting tomorrow.

Los Angeles Times Recommends Yoga Bitch!

2011-05-28T09:25:00.000-07:00

Greetings from Rome, netlings! I'm extremely busy digesting about eight hundred pounds of pizza and pasta, veal scallopine and parmigiana reggiano, but I wanted to check in to post this exciting development: The LA Times has named my little Bitch in their recommended summer reading list! I'm pretty excited. If I weren't lying down, moaning in pain from eating enough to feed a Roman army, I would do a little happy dance. Instead, I'm going to do a little happy moan.

And then, gelato!

Vivienne Westwood

2011-05-14T19:34:00.000-07:00

I love her.

Magic

2011-05-13T14:56:00.000-07:00

Good golly, I believe in miracles. Despite being tubercular of lung and syphilitic of mind, I have finished the first half of my new book just in time to hop on a plane and fly to Europe, where I will attend my dear friend Tiffany's wedding in Rome and visit publishers in Germany and the Netherlands to discuss the launch of Yoga Bitch in both countries.

It is truly a miracle. Of course, I might return from Europe and find that my coming-of-age story took a sharp left turn during my illness, transfiguring itself into a glorious epic in which faeries and warlocks fight an evil elvin doctor over a few precious dewdroppers of magical magical codeine. But for now, it seems to be the story I set out to tell.

At present, my new book is structured in two halves, and I seem to have fought my way through the fog in my brain to actually finish the first half yesterday. I'm a big believer in deadlines, however arbitrary they might be, and so I told myself I would finish the first half of the book before I leave. My story is about to move to Europe for Part 2, and I liked the idea that I would go to Europe just as the story did.

Here's the thing: it's an unholy mess of a first draft. I shudder to think of anyone reading it before I have the chance to make it work. But buried in the swamp is a footpath that's finally becoming clear. (And it leads straight to that magical elixir! My precious. My precious sweet syrup!)

Ahem. But no, just the act of pressing forward with the story brought so many connections to light. Until I found the ending yesterday-- an ending I didn't anticipate, but recognized when it arrived-- I had been toying with the notion of fixing up Part 1 before moving on to Part 2. I was feeling sort of grossed-out by the uneven writing and hiccupy structure in that first section, and thought it might help the writing to come if I spruced it up a bit first.

But then I found that surprising ending, only by moving forward. It pulled together, quite on its own, the opening chapter of the book, several themes that had been shouting at me through the din, and the heart of the story-- a heart I lose track of sometimes in this first draft. And I think it did all that without looking like a stupid cutesy dumbass bow, too. I think. I hope. But the point is, that ending seemed to be a promise: keep moving forward, and you'll find your way. So I think that's what I'm gonna do. I'm going to Europe, and so is my story.

And there . . . we will get the good drugs. The faerie princess will find the magical ogre who holds the key to the liquor cabinet, and he will get her that dew-and-codeine on the rocks! It will be magical, nay Magickal! Wondrous and magickal!

Inbreeding, Plagues, and Glorious Messes of All Kinds

2011-05-07T20:08:00.000-07:00

Here' s a bit of Morrison family humor: My parents are traveling around the UK and Europe and have made a detour in order to pay their respects at the grave of their common ancestor in Dorset. It seems I am the twisted progeny of an incestuous marriage. Sure, my parents' mutual relative died in the sixteenth century, but still. Inbreeding. Incest. My parents have gone all Angels & Insects on us.

Meanwhile, at home in Seattle, a plague has befallen us: the husband has the bubonic and I am flirting with it but keeping it at bay with loads of zinc and good theater: I always believe in doing more when I'm getting sick-- I have this theory that nothing beats a cold like the will to live. And what reasons for living have I enjoyed this week! Mike Daisey's The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs at Seattle Rep, and last night Elizabeth Kenny's Sick at New City Theater. It's also Solo Performance Festival time at Theatre Off-Jackson, and I'm planning to catch Troy Mink and Matt Smith, two of the finest jewels in Seattle's crown, in the coming week. Plague, be gone! I will make offerings to the god of inbred children, that he may forgive me the sins of my forefathers!

I'm miraculously nearing the halfway point in the new book. It's a huge mess, of course (and I vowed that I would stop referring to it as such, but honestly, there's just no other way to describe it) but, BUT! this glorious mess is getting me somewhere, namely a finished draft that I can start to really work with. I am the sort of person who has to discover the same truths over and over again, and so even though I've had this epiphany about twelve million times now, it bears repeating: this first draft is the discovery draft. I'm just digging around in my head to see what's there. The story is revealing itself to me like a trip wire in the sand. And while this flawed metaphor of the trip wire might end with something exploding in my face, well, that's just the nature of this writing business.

***

Hello again.

So, I started writing the above well over a week ago, before the plague that felled my strong husband did a number on me. Since then, I've been in bed, coughing blood into handkerchiefs (not really, I just like the idea), and wondering when to call my cousin, a priest, for last rites (also not really, but isn't it a thrillingly tragic thought?). Tonight I'm supposed to be hosting a story slam called DIRTY LITTLE STORIES at the closing night party of the Solo Performance Festival, but instead I will be home, talking smutty to the codeine bottle in my barely-there Kathleen Turner voice. Es super sexy.

This past week has been dreadfully dull, all Mucinex and Nyquil and bad TV. But I've had two bright surprises. This, the very first review of Yoga Bitch, up on Kirkus Reviews. (Quoth Kirkus: "Brings the higher path down to earth with refreshing honesty.") And then today, the marvelous Lia Aprile of Shantitown posted this little bit of loveliness about yours truly, complete with a blurb about how she hasn't read my book but she knows it's gonna be good! I love this woman!

I was feeling a bit low-- I've never canceled a show in my life, not even when I was performing Yoga Bitch in London and had a stomach flu so fierce I couldn't keep food down for three days. I still got onstage. But without a voice? No dice. Luckily Keira McDonald will be there to step in for me, but I've still been feeling wretched with guilt. So when Lia sent me her post this afternoon, it put a stopper in my bottle of sucktasticness and made me feel a bit less plagued.

I've been reading Lia's blog for years, now, and I think it's one of the finest yoga blogs out there. Wise, funny, and most affectingly, honest. Lia doesn't shy away from exploring the underbelly of the yogic path or the glorious mess of trying to live a spiritual life; she puts it all out there, ego, self-indulgence, fear, ambition, laziness. And let me tell you something: I am far more familiar with those five limbs of the human experience than I may ever be with Yoga's eight. So when Lia gets to talking about transcendence and transformation, I pay attention, because I know where she's coming from. So this is my thank-you blurb to the lovely Lia Aprile. Really, check out her blog. Here's a wonderful piece she wrote for Elephant Journal, How to Tell if You're a Yoga A-Hole.

I'm on too much codeine right now to wrap this up tidily, so I'll just say this: even if my parents brought a plague upon the house of Morrison, even if I've failed in my duty to the SPF closing night party and left an audience in the dark, clamoring for the dirty filthy stories I will not be able to provide them, even if I'm a bit of an inbred mess, today was still an okay day. Because of compliments. Because I really love compliments.

With that, I die.
(Or nap.)

The Agony . . . and the agony: A meditation on Blurbs.

2011-04-06T16:30:00.000-07:00

You know what's hard? Asking famous and semi-famous writers to stop whatever they're doing in order to read your book and say something nice about it. This is essentially what one must do in the battle for blurbs-- an aspect of writing and publishing a book I never considered until very recently. Blurbing. Asking people for compliments. Asking busy, talented, important people to compliment your unknown, cuss-filled, flawed little creation even though they've never met you and probably have dozens of people they have met asking them for the exact same favor. Oh, and they've also got their own careers and stuff keeping them busy. Their own books and blurbs to worry about.

I gotta say, it's mortifying. And harrowing. I woke up at four-thirty this morning squriming with self-loathing. I imagined every single person on my blurb list looking at the title of my book and thinking, Yoga Bitch? That doesn't sound like Good Literature. To the recycling bin-- or, no! Don't recycle it! We don't want a title like that coming around again. Burn it! Burn it! Aiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!

I even imagined one or two of them meeting some other writers for drinks after receiving my book, just so they could commiserate about it. Those other writers? Tolstoy. Marquez. Isherwood. All of them having a good laugh about the little girl from Seattle with the idea that she's a writer. Lifting their glasses to toast the great hilarious truth: Everyone, but everyone, thinks they can write a book.

And then I did this meditation where I imagined myself pointing my index and middle fingers just beneath my chin, like a gun, and making a sound like the gun was going off. And I started to feel a little better.

I got out of bed and got online. Which was dumb. I brought Colette's Collected Claudine with me, which would have made me feel better if I'd bothered to crack its spine. But instead I hunted around online for other young writers, to see what kind of blurbs they got. And then I lamented not having pursued an MFA. At least then you have professors you can guilt into blurbing you, right? I took one creative writing class in college, from David Shields, author of many books including the kickass Reality Hunger, but he's kind of post-narrative, and I'm pretty much narrative-narrative. Like, narrative is my religion. I only believe in narrative. And the prefix post- gives me the sweats; makes me think of death.

Anyway, I don't think he'd even remember me. The guy who wrote the hilarious and charming stories about men working in a mannequin factory? Memorable. My story about a woman whose elderly husband dresses up like Raggedy Ann and marches along the beach playing an invisible piccolo? Um, forget I mentioned it, please. I'm still trying to.

Anyway, everything was just awful, my prospects, my past. And then I remembered I had saved an article another writer had posted on Facebook earlier that day. An article from the Awl about the importance of blurbs and cover art. Bennett Madison says this:

A lot of times I think blurbs are just for the writer's ego, 'cause like, you get to ask people you admire to blurb your stuff and then if they do it you can feel all pleased with yourself, which is nice when it happens.

And yeah, that's pretty much it. This process is ego-crushing. Excruciating. But it comes with the potential for a major ego trip, should you get the good blurbs. I am totally available for that kind of ego trip, yoga practice aside. I would love to go to yoga in order to become detached from some good blurbs.

And I love Matthew Gallaway for this, which has pretty much made me decide to read his book:

Try saying “blurb” a few times without feeling humiliated and embarrassed: there, you see what I mean? Unfortunately, I think blurbs are important, less from a consumer-perspective than in terms of building “buzz” within a publisher, specifically helping to get the marketing and sales “on board.” That said, getting the blurbs almost gave me a nervous breakdown, because I didn’t know any “real writers.”

I did what Gallaway suggested at five this morning. Just lay there saying "Blurblurblurblurblurblurb" until the word became such a burbling absurdity that it meant nothing. My chest felt a bit less constricted, I stopped the shotgun-to-chin meditation. And I just loved these six writers for doing what good writers do. I felt less alone in my weird world. Still crazy, sure, forever crazy. But in good company.

Better Book Titles

2011-03-28T17:25:00.000-07:00

This one's my favorite.
From betterbooktitles.com

Jeanette Winterson

2011-03-18T19:40:00.001-07:00

God, what a beautiful essay Jeanette Winterson has written here.

Art is a different value system. Like God, it fails us continually. Like God, we have legitimate doubts about its existence but, like God, art leaves us with footprints of beauty. We sense there is more to life than the material world can provide, and art is a clue, an intimation, at its best, a transformation. We don't need to believe in it, but we can experience it. The experience suggests that the monolith of corporate culture is only a partial reality. This is important information, and art provides it.

Eduardo Galeano

2011-03-05T14:57:00.000-08:00

Marcela was visiting the snowy North. One night in Oslo, she met a woman who sang and told stories. Between songs, she would spin yarns, glancing at slips of paper like someone telling fortunes from crib notes.

This woman from Oslo had an enormous dress dotted all over with pockets. She would pull slips of paper out of her pockets one by one, each with its story to tell, stories tried and true of people who wished to come back to life through witchcraft. And so she raised the dead and the forgotten, and from the depths of her dress sprang the odysseys and loves of the human animal who goes on living, who goes on speaking.

From The Book of Embraces (Translated by Cedric Belfrage)

Second Book, First draft: Banish the Editor

2011-02-26T12:33:00.000-08:00

Here's the latest dispatch from my Huffington Post blog.

This new story is a big one, about love and betrayal, sex and identity. When I fantasized about writing this book, I imagined it bursting from my fingers like sorcery. I forgot how treacherous a first draft can be; how words elude me, how my voice betrays me, bopping about from hysterical to ironic to desperately sincere. Only six months ago I was working on a final draft. That stage in the writing couldn't be more different. Six months ago I felt as confident as a calligrapher. Now I'm a four year old holding a jumbo crayon.

My editor self squirms at the work ahead of her.

Mary Karr

2011-02-18T14:43:00.000-08:00

It's Mary Karr day on Facebook. My friend, the exquisite writer Tina Rowley, has been reading Mary Karr's third memoir, Lit, and it has prompted a number of us to post our favorite Karr interviews on her FB page. Thought I'd collect a couple of them here.

Here's one from the Huffington Post:

I always say to my students, you don't want to reiterate something about anyone's character--if you do it right, you only need to show that aspect of a person's character one time. That's what bad memoirs are like, you know: I got hit over the head with a brick every day of my life, sophomore year it sucked, junior year it sucked, senior year it sucked, and then I moved out. They reiterate the same stuff over and over as opposed to a character advancing and deepening.

And then this, from the Paris Review, which I devoured when it came out. Here, the interviewer is asking about The Liars' Club, which was first written as a novel. Having written Yoga Bitch as a novel before scrapping it and letting it be a memoir, I felt such recognition reading Karr's response:

. . . the novel is a much more complicated art form structurally. Memoir is episodic—a looser construct than a bona fide novel. You start with an interesting voice; the rest follows. For a real novelist, the fiction provides a mask that permits honesty. For me, a novel became an excuse to make myself look better—my stand-in did volunteer work at the nursing home and knew differential calculus in the sixth grade. And my mother wasn’t my sloppy, turpentine- and vodka-redolent mother, but the complete opposite—a ballerina, very prim.

Lit is a pretty magnificent achievement, and my favorite of her three memoirs so far. Her poetry is also wonderful. I discovered her poetry collections shortly after moving home from New York six years ago, and for at least a year, one or another of them was always in my bag. I was twenty-eight and in the midst of a self-inflicted devastation, having left a home and a beloved man behind in New York, trying--and often failing-- to feel like myself in Seattle again. It seemed astonishing at the time that anything could make me feel less lonely in the midst of so much change and loss. Grief can be so isolating, but her books were a balm. During those difficult years books, which are always essential to my life, became as necessary as food and water. Moreso, even-- I don't eat when I'm sad.

Makes me think of something wonderful David Foster Wallace once said about writing. Let me see if I can find it . . .

Okay, here it is. I wish I could tell you where this interview is from, but I honestly have no idea. David Foster Wallace plays a role in Lit, so all the more appropriate to quote him here.

MS: I'm speaking to David Foster Wallace, the author of Infinite Jest. This may be hard to do, but can you find a way of saying what the difference is between that kind of involution and the complexities of this novel?

DFW: [Whispers]: Boy. [Pause, whispers]: Boy. [Speaks] I probably can't do it and sound very smart or coherent, but I know that -- I guess I, when I was in my twenties, like deep down underneath all the bullshit what I really believed was that the point of fiction was to show that the writer was really smart. And that sounds terrible to say, but I think, looking back, that's what was going on. And I don't think I really understood what loneliness was when I was a young man. And now I've got a much less clear idea of what the point of art is, but I think it's got something to do with loneliness and something to do with setting up a conversation between human beings. And I know that when I started this book I wanted-- I had very vague and not very ambitious...ambitions, and one was I wanted to do something really sad. I'd done comedy before, I wanted to do just something really sad and I wanted to do something about what was sad about America. And there's a fair amount of weird and hard technical stuff going on in this book, but, I mean one reason why I'm willing to go around and talk to people about it, and that I'm sort of proud of it in a way that I haven't been about earlier stuff is that I feel like whatever's hard in the book is in service of something that at least for me is good and important. And it's embarrassing to talk about because I think it sounds kind of cheesy. I sort of think, like all the way down kind of to my butthole, I was a different person coming up with this book than I was about my earlier stuff. And I'm not saying my earlier stuff was all crap, you know, but it's just it seems like I think when you're very young and until you've sort of [clears throat] faced various darknesses, it's very difficult to understand how precious and rare the sort of thing that art can do is.

Paul Auster

2011-02-17T22:37:00.000-08:00

"I certainly don't walk into my room and sit down at my desk feeling like a boxer ready to go ten rounds with Joe Louis. I tiptoe in. I procrastinate. I delay. I come in sideways, kind of sliding through the door. I don't burst into the saloon with my six-shooter ready. If I did, I'd probably shoot myself in the foot."

Kurt Vonnegut's Advice to Young Writers

2010-12-30T17:06:00.000-08:00

Here's a link to Vonnegut's seven pieces of advice. Read this and then skip the MFA.

Le temps perdu

2010-12-16T16:37:00.000-08:00

I've been in the cave. Caught up in building the foundation for my new book, and the idea of breaking away to write something for actual human consumption has felt tantamount to being ripped out of the womb four months early. But today, I'm ready. The first chapter's about launched, and I think I know where it needs to go, and now it's time to rub my eyes and look out at the world again.

Ah, but I'd rather think about the new book. I've spent the last month holed up in my room reading old journals, listening to old music, looking at old pictures. My friend Erin gave me some letters I wrote her from the time I'm writing about, and I've spent much of this morning reading them.

There is something oddly moving about peering into the past like this. I'm revisiting my eighteenth to twentieth years of life, when I left my parents' house in order to work and travel around Europe before I came home to start college at twenty-one. It's moving-- and it's mortifying. Absolutely excruciating to revisit my obsessions over boys and friends, my pagan-feminist revisionist histories. There was a lot of talk of goddesses. Erin called me a goddess, I called her a goddess, we had long conversations with our girlfriends about whether we were an Athena or a Hera, a Hestia or an Artemis. (I considered myself to be a rich and easily misunderstood stew of all four, natch.)

Then there's the confusion. God, I was confused. And frustrated. It's easy to forget, in my advancing thirties, how frustrating it is to be a teenager, to forever be told you know nothing, that you must follow the leader to college, to work, and back to the suburbs where you belong. To be treated like a child when you feel like an autonomous adult, ready to live on your own terms. It was awful to know so little and sense so much.

I wanted to write so badly. I wrote poems (more of that feminist-pagan thing, ouch). I wrote stories (based on myths and fairy tales and bible stories turned on their heads, like the one about an "immaculate" conception between a girl and her contortionist boyfriend) but I rarely finished them. When I was living in Munich I worked on a novel inspired by Hermann Hesse. But I still thought that writing was supposed to be an operatic act of inspiration, all orgasms and jelly beans. I thought that if I wasn't feeling inspired to write, I couldn't write. It wasn't until shortly before I left Europe that I began to understand that writing was work.

I used to wander around Munich's central plaza, Marienplatz, watching the tourists, waiting for inspiration to strike so that I could find my way to my favorite cafe in Heidhausen and finally write. If inspiration didn't hit, I just wandered, a spirit in limbo.

Last year, I was back in Munich for the first time in thirteen years. On my third day in town I took the train to Marienplatz with my friend Cathy, and we parted ways. I had about fifteen minutes to collect my thoughts before meeting my German agent for the first time. Yoga Bitch had recently been sold to a German publisher.

Thinking of writing as my job, as work, has gotten me through many years of setbacks. It takes a long time, and a lot of suffering, to get launched as a writer. I'm still in the thick of that launch, and so I rarely allow myself to sit back and enjoy the small successes along the way. It feels like bad luck to do so; also, I'm trying to stay busy actually working. But walking around Marienplatz in those fifteen minutes before my meeting, I felt so buoyant, so lucky. The only thing that could have made it better would have been to bump into my nineteen-year-old self. I know she would be confused and frustrated and unsure of what to do next. And I would tell her not to worry. Just get working.

Saul Bellow on Augie March

2010-12-14T15:44:00.000-08:00

From a letter to Bernard Malamud:

"There are times when I think how nice it would be to edit a new and better novel out of it. But I can't allow myself to forget that I took a position in writing this book. I declared against what you call the constructivist approach. A novel, like a letter, should be loose, cover much ground, run swiftly, take risk of mortality and decay . . . Having brought off my effort as well as I could, I must now pay the price. You let the errors come. Let them remain in the book like our sins remaining in our lives. I hope some of them may be remitted. I'll do what I can; the rest is in God's hands."

Library Lust

2010-12-13T16:48:00.000-08:00

My husband and I share a library fetish. Which sounds rather tawdry, but isn't. We just really love libraries. I would live in one if I could. Here are seven gorgeous libraries for all my bibliophile friends, including my city's extraordinary contribution.

Looking for Sex in Victorian Lit

2010-12-08T12:18:00.000-08:00

Here's my latest blog post for the Huffington Post Books Section. And for what it's worth, I'm still reading Wuthering Heights. I was complaining about it to the husband last night and he said, "How long is that book, anyway?" I told him it was around 350 pages, to which he replied, "Oh. Feels like you've been complaining about it for 700."

Taking Ludes and Making Food

2010-11-27T14:39:00.000-08:00

This made me weep. I can't stop watching it.

Nietzsche sez

2010-11-11T19:32:00.000-08:00

"Good writers have two things in common: they prefer to be understood rather than admired; and they do not write for knowing and over-acute readers." -- Friedrich Nietzsche

Reading, Writing, Rehearsing, or: The Post-Book Blues

2010-10-17T15:11:00.001-07:00

1. I turned Yoga Bitch in to the publisher nearly three weeks ago. Final draft. No more changes. It's done.

2. Since then, a publisher in the Netherlands has decided they would like a Dutch Bitch. I am very happy about this.

3. I have been writing, sort of. Notes and notes and notes for the new book. These notes are staring at me right now. Notes that read: "The burden of history," and "Failure as a noble pursuit," and "Sex should be funny." (Still trying to remember what I meant by that last one.)

4. I have been reading, sort of. Here's what:
A. C.S. Lewis: what a man!
B. Colette: what a voice!
C. Christopher Isherwood: God, I love him. I was thinking about him the other day, and it occurred to me that I finally had an answer to that question: If you could have dinner with anyone famous, alive or dead, who would it be? I've never been able to answer that question-- too much pressure. I mean, it would be fascinating and all to meet Cleopatra, or Jefferson, or Tolstoy or Shakespeare, but over dinner? I don't know. I think I would get heartburn from the stress of thinking up intelligent questions to ask them, and then I wouldn't enjoy my dinner. Plus, what would we eat? Drink? Who would do the cooking? Certainly not me, so would we have to hire caterers? And what if Tolstoy has disgusting table manners? Would that ruin Anna Karenina for me? Couldn't we have a coffee or a drink first, and then see if we want to progress to dinner? But dinner with Christopher Isherwood would be like meeting an old, dear friend. We could talk books, or not. But I think we'd enjoy ourselves. I'd start smoking again just for the occasion.

5. I've started preparing for meetings in New York in a few weeks. Now that the writing of Yoga Bitch is done, it's time to start thinking about the selling of Yoga Bitch. August 23rd, my book will be on the shelves. That thought is exhilarating and terrifying and, for the moment, ever-so-slightly paralyzing. New York will be just the shot in the arm I need: I must journey to the land of shameless self-promotion and drink of its waters. When I come back, I'll be slicker'n cat shit.

6. I've been staring at the cover of my book! I must say, I have a bit of a crush on it.

7. You know, turning in a book must be rather like sending your child off to school for kindergarten. On the one hand, I wonder how my child will do in the big mean world, where I can't protect it from the bullies, and on the other, I wonder how I will ever fill the hours that have been devoted to its care. I'm a bit adrift. This book has taken up room in my head and heart for a long time, and I long to be engrossed again.

8. Ah, but here's a final note-to-self staring at me, written at some point in the last two weeks, perhaps on my first day back at the desk:

"Guess what else was hard?" it reads. "Writing and revising and rewriting and revising again until YB was done. You didn't always know where you were going or what you were doing. If new stories feel hard, it's because ALL WRITING IS HARD. Keep working."

On that note, I will try.

It's Fall, Fuckers!

2010-10-13T15:07:00.000-07:00

This is great. From McSweeneys.

Carving orange pumpkins sounds like a pretty fitting way to ring in the season. You know what else does? Performing an all-gourd reenactment of an episode of Diff'rent Strokes—specifically the one when Arnold and Dudley experience a disturbing brush with sexual molestation. Well, this shit just got real, didn't it? Felonies and gourds have one very important commonality: they're both extremely fucking real. Sorry if that's upsetting, but I'm not doing you any favors by shielding you from this anymore.

The End's in Sight

2010-09-19T21:18:00.000-07:00

The final draft of Yoga Bitch is due to the publisher in one week. Saying goodbye to this project feels a little like this:

And a lot like this:

I'll be blogging more soon, but for now I've got seven days to make it flow, make it glow, and let it go.

See you on the other side.

2010-07-14T15:06:00.000-07:00

This poem, "Howl" reimagined for our generation as "Tweet," is brilliant.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by brevity, over-connectedness, emotionally starving for attention, dragging themselves through virtual communities at 3 am, surrounded by stale pizza and neglected dreams, looking for angry meaning, any meaning, same hat wearing hipsters burning for shared and skeptical approval from the holographic projected dynamo in the technology of the era, who weak connections and recession wounded and directionless, sat up, micro-conversing in the supernatural darkness of Wi-Fi-enabled cafes, floating across the tops of cities, contemplating techno, who bared their brains to the black void of new media and the thought leaders and so called experts who passed through community colleges with radiant, prank playing eyes, hallucinating Seattle- and Tarantino-like settings among pop scholars of war and change . . .

2010-06-23T14:21:00.001-07:00

Yeats

2010-06-22T18:43:00.000-07:00

Jean-Michele sent me this quote yesterday:

"Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet." ~William Butler Yeats

Unsex Me, Bitches!

2010-06-18T16:23:00.000-07:00

This shit is FUNNY:

From the slog.

Patenting Yoga Poses

2010-06-13T20:20:00.000-07:00

Here's an article from the Guardian about the latest attempt to patent yoga poses. This time it seems less about self-aggrandizement than when Bikram Choudhury did it with his hotbox yoga, and more about protecting yoga from the vultures of the West who want to brand their various dogas and facelift yogas and the like.

Juneuary is for Writers

2010-06-10T15:10:00.000-07:00

Greetings from the cave, friends.

It's Juneuary here in Seattle, that lucky mixture of the grey, rainy days of January and the long, bright days of June. When I first moved back to Seattle I resented this month the way rich kids resent their parents; I was entitled to my sunny summer, and where was it? I couldn't believe I had ever professed to like Seattle's pewter skies. But it's been an astonishing five years since then, and with each passing year-- and 4,000 iu of Vitamin D a day-- I now remember why I loved this weather so.

It's perfect weather for staying inside and writing.

Seattle's summer is damn-near exquisite. Once it gets going, it's so pretty a puritan would think the devil had a hand in it. And as soon as that mad ecstatic gorgeousness is let loose on us wriggling Seattlite cave worms, something happens. We freak the fuck out. The streets flood with half-naked people, each one of us with a pasty winter skin trailing from the bottom of her heel until a kindly person steps on it like so much toilet paper. There's music in the streets, jugglers, a rainbow extends from one end of Lake Union to the other. Queen Anne Hill reaches its arms out to Capitol Hill, and we offer perfect strangers bites of our sandwiches.

In the morning I wake up to egg yolk sun and robin's eggshell skies with fluffy scrambled eggwhite omelette clouds.

(I'm eating eggs right now!)

I wake up in this eggy splendor and then I freak the fuck out. I can't sit still. I can't focus for longer than a sentence. I walk around the house with eight hundred million trillion kajillion ideas for stories, essays, blog posts, novels, memoirs, sexual positions, yoga positions, political positions. I write long lists containing all the pieces I want to work on this season and then, when it comes time to work through the list, I realize that what I really need to do is re-write the list in a different pen color, on a smoother sheet of paper, and this time I need to number the items instead of bulletpoint them. Meanwhile the drums from Capitol Hill are calling everyone to leave the house, come to the park, get your coffee on ice. Talk to other people. Do this drug that is Seattle in summer.

I've tried to understand and remedy what happens to me in the summer, and I think this is it: the sun is precious here in the land of the 3pm winter sunset, and when it shines on us for so many hours in a day-- by July we'll have light till after 10pm-- it provokes an existential crisis. This crisis is both instantaneous and ecstatic, as if Robin Williams were hollering CARPE DIEM through every vent in the house while the sun shines through the window like the face of god, reminding you that god was invented so you wouldn't fear death, and that you fear death because you have a sneaking suspicion that death might be the real end of you, and if you will really end then you'd better get the hell out of the house and get carpe fucking dieming before then.

It's like Seattle has been told it has fifteen weeks to live. It's very hard to write in the midst of such a thing.

But bless you, Juneuary. A week of madcap summer antics and then the grey returns. Suddenly I'm in full-writing mode, working every morning on my new book, one I've been wanting to write for years. When that work is done for the day, I get to my research, my emails and the business side of work. Later I might take a bath, or go to yoga, or for a walk. I might meet a friend for a drink or see a play or just settle in with the husband to eat dinner and watch horror movies. I don't feel that I need much more. It's as if I am living every second of every day as I was designed to-- not seizing the day, that implies too much will and clenching of fists. It's more like I'm sort of holding the day. Or being held by the day. Or maybe just being the day.

My days fold into night along the same creases: writing, reading, dinner, sleeping. Wake up, unfold. There are better days and worse days, but my work feels like silver threads weaving through the grey, and that is all the beauty I need.

July is coming. I have no solution for that. So instead, I think we're going to throw a party. Give in to it, be the hot yellow day. October will be back soon enough.

End of an Era

2010-03-29T19:35:00.000-07:00

I'm happy that Elliott Bay Book Company is moving to my neighborhood, but it still makes me sad to see them leave their original Pioneer Square location. I worked in Pioneer Square off and on for seven years, and Elliott Bay was where I spent my lunch hours. It was there, at age eighteen, that I fell in love with Walt Whitman and Nikos Kazantzakis, where, at twenty-one, I developed crushes on Jeanette Winterson and Mary Oliver and also a literary trustaffarian named Devon, who was a great conversationalist and a bad kisser. Till I was twenty five, I went there bleary from break-ups, dizzy with inspiration or infatuation; I went there when I was looking for research materials for plays I was acting in, then plays I was doing dramaturgy for, and then eventually for books that would help me to write: John Gardner, Anne Lamott, Vivian Gornick. I would take their books with me to New York as I started to write my first solo show and first book, Yoga Bitch. My bookshelves at home are the result of so many lunch hours spent in that treehouse of a bookstore, wondering if I could buy all the books I desperately needed and still pay my rent.

Oh, deep sigh.

(I can't resist-- that 'Oh deep sigh' is a line stolen from a Ginsberg poem. I bought the book containing that poem, "Elegy for Neal Cassady," at Elliott Bay.)

So, yeah, deep sigh. But also . . . hello, old friend! Welcome to my neighborhood! I can feel myself getting poorer with every day that brings you closer to my house!

More details about the move here, on the Slog.

I love Seattle

2010-03-24T15:15:00.000-07:00

And here's today's reason why. Also, it's effing gorgeous out and has been for weeks. Love. It.

Rules for Writing Fiction

2010-03-19T12:42:00.001-07:00

I love pieces like this one from the Guardian. Much of this applies whether you are writing fiction or non-fiction. Some highlights-- these are the pieces of advice I found utterly true and sometimes (or often) difficult:

Elmore Leonard: "My most important rule . . . if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it."

Margaret Atwood: "You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there's no free lunch. Writing is work. It's also gambling. You don't get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but essentially you're on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don't whine."

Helen Dunmore: "Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn't work, throw it away. It's a nice feeling, and you don't want to be cluttered with the corpses of poems and stories which have everything in them except the life they need."

Anne Enright: "Only bad writers think that their work is really good."

Richard Ford: "Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer's a good idea."

Jonathan Franzen: "The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator."

Esther Freud: "Editing is everything. Cut until you can cut no more. What is left often springs into life."

Neil Gaimon: "Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong."

PD James: "Don't just plan to write – write. It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style."

AL Kennedy: "Defend others. You can, of course, steal stories and attributes from family and friends, fill in filecards after lovemaking and so forth. It might be better to celebrate those you love – and love itself – by writing in such a way that everyone keeps their privacy and dignity intact."

More AL Kennedy: "Be without fear. This is impossible, but let the small fears drive your rewriting and set aside the large ones until they behave – then use them, maybe even write them. Too much fear and all you'll get is silence."

Everything Geoff Dyer says here is a gem, but I especially loved these: "Don't be one of those writers who sentence themselves to a lifetime of sucking up to Nabokov." Ha!

"Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire."

"Beware of clichés. Not just the clichés that Martin Amis is at war with. There are clichés of response as well as expression. There are clichés of observation and of thought – even of conception. Many novels, even quite a few adequately written ones, are clichés of form which conform to clichés of expectation."

Seattle Times Review of Your Own Personal Alcatraz

2010-03-17T15:25:00.000-07:00

Misha Berson of The Seattle Times calls my short piece "sly and understated." You can read her review of my show and the rest of the shows on offer at the Solo Performance Festival here.

A note for future audience members: the title of this show has changed. It's no longer called Your Own Personal Alcatraz. The more I've thought about the stories I want to tell, the clearer the show's focus has become. So from this point forward, my new show is called Optimism.

I'm headed to Atlanta to workshop the new show in a week, with a culminating performance on April 6th. If you're going to be in Atlanta, or you know anybody there, send 'em my way!

Devil's Club

2010-02-25T18:22:00.000-08:00

I put the finishing touches on the Bitch today, and tomorrow I'll send it off to my editor at Broadway Books. Yesterday I read the entire thing out loud to hear how it sounds. The book sounds pretty good, but now I sound like a frog. And I'm singing in my cousin's wedding Saturday.

Ah, well. I'll just pretend I'm Bob Dylan singing Panis Angelicus.

The first thing I did after confirming for the twelfth time that yes, the chapters are in order and no, I didn't lapse into gibberish in the epilogue, was to read S.P. Miskowski's story, Devil's Club. I've been waiting to read it until I could give it my full attention and it was the perfect way to celebrate the end of many months of writing and revising.

It's the story of a boy, Winston, who's been lured out of the house in the middle of the night by a girl who says their missing classmate is being held captive by a witch who lives in the woods.

The writing is lovely:

Once they were past the fence, Winston stumbled along a dirt route so narrow it was nothing but a footpath scuffed up between the trees. He took hold of leaves and branches along the way and pulled himself forward, up inclines and around swollen roots protruding from the earth like the knuckles of giant fingers. As he approached a big-leaf maple, he caught hold of a licorice fern sticking out from its mossy trunk. He pulled himself forward with all his might. As he did, his right hand stripped the fern bare, leaving a slender, jagged cut across his palm. It stung so bad his eyes watered, but he didn’t complain.

If you like scary stories, I highly recommend it. This one is creepy and wonderful. (And if you like S.P.'s style, check out her collection of stories, Red Poppies.)

Now, I rest.

If Ophelia Had a Sassy Gay Friend

2010-02-19T14:48:00.000-08:00

As He Was Meant To Be

2010-02-13T13:43:00.001-08:00

Frederick Seidel sez

2010-02-12T20:35:00.000-08:00

From The Paris Review Interview:

I will say that learning how to write has to do in part with learning how to accede to yourself and your object, instead of writing what you think you ought to write, or what at that point in time the world thinks poetry is about. Or what you think you ought to be about. The moment comes, if it ever comes, when you have enough strength to give way, to give in to being who you are, to give in to your themes. Giving in to your obsessions, giving in to the things that you will be writing about over and over. And sometimes the things you'll be writing about over and over are things that some people don't find very nice.

This Just In

2010-02-11T18:17:00.001-08:00

Husband: Whatcha been doing?
Me: Writing a post about how writing makes you crazy.
Husband: Ah, yes, something we've learned a little about this week.
(beat)
Husband: How are your cancers?

**scene**

Failure, Exhaustion, Madness

2010-02-11T16:55:00.000-08:00

I love this essay by novelist Rebecca Brown. It's about failure.

I have a few things to say about it. But until the book is done (in two weeks) I can't seem to write about anything else. The posts I want to write will have to wait. Yoga Bitch has got me by the throat.

It's almost done.

And you know what?

I'm tired. I am bone tired. I'm so tired my eyes ache and my throat hurts and I have this little throb that comes and goes at my temples, as well as a few cases of psychic cancers in various parts of my body. Today, and last night, I was fully convinced that I actually have three different kinds of cancer, all brought on by periodic bouts of smoking and low self-esteem. I even tried one of those stupid visualization exercises where you envision your body filled with golden light, but you know what? That's such bullshit. There's no golden light. Even if there were, that golden light would do nothing but illuminate all those tumors.

Also? I'm lying. I didn't try that visualization exercise. I thought about that visualization exercise, and then I ate a bowl of ice cream.

Tired. When the phone rang just now I considered throwing it out the window just in case there was somebody on the other line who might want something from me, and I cannot give anyone anything because I am too tired. I'm tempted to wear the same clothes every day just because the thought of having to launder them makes me feel crazy, like my brain has split into twelve parts, one for each item in the laundry basket.

(Actually, I do wear the same clothes every day. But that's another story for another time!)

Writing makes me nuts. It makes everybody nuts. We're all fucking nuts. What does it, what makes you completely balls-out insane, is that even when you're this tired, even when you think you can't bear to look at the four million sentences sitting on your desk, waiting for you to improve them, you must. Because there is still work to be done. There is always more work to be done, and no matter how much you put into it, no matter how many drafts you do, how painstakingly you go over your sentences and how solidly you build your structure, it still might not be good enough.

But wait! There's something even crazier! The craziest thing of all is that I want to do this for the rest of my life. There's nothing else I'd rather do.

Except, perhaps, sleep.

Reading, Writing, Rehearsing, and Happy Holidays!

2009-12-19T16:14:00.000-08:00

Holy Cannoli, I'm beat. I've just put the final chapter of the book in place. Now I'm off to Europe to visit with family and friends for a couple of weeks-- a much-needed break after six months of writing. Time off is so crucial to the writing process; I'm hoping to return with a fresh perspective on the story so that I can spend one final month polishing it till it shines before turning it in to my editor.

I've been reading short stories, mainly: Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel, Lorrie Moore. My brain is so wrapped up in Yoga Bitch that I can't seem to focus on long, sustained works of fiction or memoir. Short stories have been just the right size, and these three writers are so wonderful, each one such a unique voice.

Writing has been all Bitch, all the time. Some interesting developments have occurred since I started writing, most exciting of all being the Hebrew and German translations of YB, both coming out in Summer of 2011 in their respective regions. I'm already brushing up my German in anticipation. (I don't have any Hebrew to brush up, other than the bits of the Torah I remember from attending eight million bar mitzvahs in seventh grade.)

The fall has been good in so many other ways. Even with a nutso writing schedule, we've managed to spend some good time with family and friends, celebrating engagements and new babies, new homes, new pets. And everyone, it seems, is reading something they want to talk about. Sitting around over coffee or wine, talking books-- well, who needs an afterlife if that's what we get to do in this one?

On that note, I would love to have a glass of wine. But I have to pack. And do laundry. And about eight million other things before we fly out at the crack of dawn.

I hope to be a more faithful blogger in the new year, after the book has been turned in. I've missed you all. Happy Holidays, friends!

Oh! And if you happen to be in Seattle, buy your holiday books at Elliott Bay Book Company, PLEASE, for the love of God! I will be devastated if they go under. It's my Christmas wish that they stay afloat, and since they have to move, I'm praying that they come to my neighborhood so that I can make weekly pilgrimages.

See you in 2010.

What do you Re-read?

2009-11-12T17:29:00.000-08:00

My latest blog for the Huffington Post Books Section, here.

The Gentle Quiet Loneliness of Being Alone

2009-11-12T17:27:00.001-08:00

You really must watch this. Kristen Wiig reads the poetry of Suzanne Somers.

The Books That Change Our Lives

2009-11-01T14:46:00.001-08:00

Here's a great piece about the way certain books change our lives on This American Life. The latter half of the program is especially satisfying, but the whole piece is delightful.

Huffington Post Books Section

2009-10-13T12:54:00.000-07:00

I'll be blogging periodically for the new Books Section at the Huffington Post. Here's my first post-- if you read this blog, you've read it before, but I'd love it if you'd go ahead and leave me a comment or two on the HuffPost! Next one will be brand spanking new, just for you.

Speed is the Key

2009-10-06T16:15:00.000-07:00

This article, Speed as an Antidote to Writer's Block, caught my eye today as I looked over the new Huffington Post Book Section. Not because I'm suffering from writer's block-- my absence from this blog the past few weeks is actually proof that my writing is getting done. It caught my eye because the title made me think that its writer, Hillary Rettig, a "productivity coach and workshop leader," was advocating the use of Speed for writers. As in, "swallow/snort/inject this Ritalin/Adderal/Cocaine and paint the world with words!"

Many years ago, when I lived in New York, I quit a well-paying job to write full-time. Within a few weeks of kissing my health insurance goodbye, I developed an inability to breathe. I entertained the idea that it could be asthma, or maybe pneumonia. But I knew what it was: lung cancer. Death.

A friend of a friend referred me to a Russian doctor who gave breaks to artists. I showed up at her office terrified of the inevitable diagnosis, but within a few minutes I was told by the kind doctor that I was having panic attacks because "Nobody loves you in New York, you know this, yes? They smile at you with their faces but their hearts, they are not open." She then told me to leave the house every once in a while and go for a walk. This was revolutionary advice in my early writing days, when I believed I needed to be at my desk eight hours a day or I wasn't serious enough. She said to write for shorter periods of time, then get out and walk around, and all would be well.

And then she said that she could give me a prescription for Ritalin if I wanted one. "My writers, they love it," she said. "They say, 'I test it out! Ritalin: I write for hours. No Ritalin: less hours!'"

I was so indignant I forgot I couldn't breathe. "That's cheating!" I said. And I was cured of my psychic lung cancer.

Anyway, when I saw this article on the HuffPost, I thought, Damn. That doctor was right-- apparently lots of writers are doing speed to get their work done.

My response was the same response I had years ago, in New York: That's cheating! I mean, I have had to train myself like a puppy to get up every morning, make coffee, turn off my phone and email and sit down to write. If I so much as glance at my phone I can be thrown off and lose my will to work. I've told my family and friends that I will be in a virtual cave until my book is done, and that they might not hear from me until then. And when I'm not able to focus? When I can't find the start of the next chapter? Then, I will do damn near anything-- meditate, pray, light candles, bribe myself with chocolate or wine if I get a thousand words written-- but I am terrified of drugs. Always have been. I blame it on Nancy Reagan and the book Go Ask Alice.

So, I read Rettig's article. By "speed" she means "promptness." As in, Get your writing done quickly and you'll be more productive and less likely to give yourself time to get blocked:

Greed may not be good, but speed sure is. It was only when I got into this line of work that I understood the meaning of the axiom "He who hesitates is lost." Procrastination -- the fear-based inner force that wants you not to complete your projects -- will latch onto any feelings of uncertainty or hesitation and amplify them until you can no longer do your work.

One method for beating procrastination, therefore, is to practice a Zen-like detachment from your work. You want to, at the appointed time, glide emotionlessly over to your desk and sit down and commence work. Just commence, without drama or hesitation.

What a relief to find that Rettig advocates a working style that I am trying to cultivate. Because secretly? I'm afraid my Russian doctor was right, and writers are taking all kinds of focusing drugs to get their work done, and we non-drug-taking prudes will be left in the dust as the Speedy writers churn out novels and stories like they're Joyce Carol Oates . . . on Adderal. (Good sweet Lord, can you imagine?)

Anyway, Rettig's article is worth the read. And the Huffington Post's new books section is a very exciting new offering for writers and readers-- I'll be blogging there periodically, myself, so I hope you'll stop by for a read.

Yoga is Funny!

2009-09-15T16:21:00.001-07:00

Where Everything is Music

2009-09-13T15:30:00.000-07:00

Don't worry about saving these songs!

And if one of our instruments breaks,

it doesn't matter.

We have fallen into the place

where everything is music.

The strumming and the flute notes

rise into the atmosphere,

and even if the whole world's harp

should burn up, there will still be

hidden instruments playing.

So the candle flickers and goes out.

We have a piece of flint, and a spark.

This singing art is sea foam.

The graceful movements come from a pearl

somewhere on the ocean floor.

Poems reach up like spindrift and the edge

of driftwood along the beach, wanting!

They derive

from a slow and powerful root

that we can't see.

Stop the words now.

Open the window in the centre of your chest,

and let the spirits fly in and out.

--Rumi

Lorrie Moore on Writing

2009-09-05T13:08:00.000-07:00

Here's an interesting little piece about Lorrie Moore's views on writing.

"The only really good piece of advice I have for my students is, 'Write something you'd never show your mother or father.' And you know what they say? 'I could never do that!'"

She's commenting on the close relationship young people today often have with their parents, but this closeness can breathe an eagerness to please not only the parents themselves, but authority in general. Moore's writing sometimes conveys a nasty view of humanity, one that would surely sadden any mother or father, but the nastiest parts are often the most funny and true. Insofar as it encourages students to stop trying to make people happy, Moore's advice is great — readers, like all humans, don't necessarily know what they want, and trying to please isn't a very good way of actually doing so.

Truthtelling

2009-08-31T16:28:00.000-07:00

An interesting piece in the New York Times about Julie Myerson's memoir of her son's drug addiction. I've been following this story since it first broke in the UK, where Myerson has been branded a terrible mother, a liar, an opportunist and self-aggrandizer. Now we'll see how the U.S. audience responds. My guess is she'll be just fine.

In some sense all family stories have a Rashomon quality. Ms. Myerson is candid about her son’s behavior and her own painful abandonment by her father when she was 16. But she barely mentions a year of marital strife that her son identifies as the time he started using drugs regularly. Asked why, Ms. Myerson responded the same way she did to her son: “This can only ever be my story from my perspective, and all I can say is I’ve been as truthful as I’m capable of being.”

The Sausage Maker and his Books

2009-08-27T13:41:00.000-07:00

I am a hoarder of books. Since I was a young girl, I have read, collected, organized, dusted and admired row upon row of books. Plays, poetry, novels, non-fiction; I have loved my books like people are supposed to love their children. Tables, desks, windowsills, toilets, kitchen counters-- all serve the same purpose in my home. They're all bookshelves. When I married my husband I imagined a commingling not of genes, but of libraries. His Shelby Foote next to my Thornton Wilder. My Alice Munro rubbing up against his Alan Furst. Our children would be as old as Homer and as young as next week's Book Review. I had met my match.

When you are a hoarder of books, you know that a day will come when your books will prompt an identity crisis, or a crisis of faith; a crisis of space, or at the very least a dust allergy.

Yesterday I restored the freshly-painted dining room. (Which is actually more of a mini-library than a dining room.) I moved heavy pieces of furniture using my little muscles and my enormous will. And then it was time to put the books back on the bookshelves. This was the last piece of the puzzle before going back upstairs to resume work on my own book.

Shouldn't be a big deal, right? You sort the books. You remove those books that are no longer needed. You put the giveaway books in a box. You live your life.

I've seen friends do this. They decimate their bookshelves! They put those books in a box. They put that box on the sidewalk, or in their car; they give it to the Mormons. The truly ambitious sell them to Twice Sold Tales or donate them to the library. My God, I thought, who are these people, and what antidepressants are they on?

At five o'clock I was distraught. Swimming in a lake of books. Drowning, I should say, in titles that no one needs to keep. The Da Vinci Code? There are two people living in this house, and one will never read it and the other didn't like it. Why on earth are we keeping it? Will I ever re-read Al Franken's books about Lies and Truths? If so, doesn't that mean I'm living in the past? Shouldn't I dust them off, thank my lucky stars that the Bush Administration is in the hands of history, and move the fuck on?

Then there are the books that friends have lent me over the years: they don't remember that I have them, and I haven't yet read them, and in some cases I never will, and does that make me a bad person? Shouldn't I be reading, like, a book a day? Shouldn't I have stopped reading Miranda July's short story collection three stories in, when I realized I didn't like it, in order to make time for books like The Year of Magical Thinking and Ulysses? And Proust! My God, Proust! How can I call myself a writer when I've yet to read Proust? I read all of those twee Miranda July stories and yet Proust sits there on my shelf like a Grandfather patiently waiting for his granddaughter to finish primping and remember he needs to use the loo.

My eye landed on one of my Grandpa Morrison's music books. I remembered that I missed him. I was certain I hadn't been a good enough granddaughter. A good granddaughter would have read that book and returned it to her grandpa before he died. What if he died wondering if he would ever hold Verdi's biography again? Cursing the day he lent it to his granddaughter!

Oh, I am a bad person. A bad, bad, bad, bad person.

An unhappy person.

Lazy. And bad. And unhappy.

It was five o'clock, if I may remind you, when the books attacked. The clock chimed and I had a revelation: five o'clock is Happy Hour.

I left the books sprawling like a paper metropolis across the floor, and walked up the hill to meet my friend Erin for a bottle of wine. (Note the use of the word bottle and not glass.) Shortly after I got there, she told me the most amazing story.

A friend of hers worked for a sausage maker in Philadelphia for a number of years. The sausage maker was an old, grizzled man who loved to read. He was such a voracious reader, in fact, that he made Erin's friend-- we'll call him Tom-- drive the sausage truck to New York for deliveries so that he could sit on the passenger side and read all the way there.

I picture him a bit like my grandpa, actually: Tall, barrel-chested, with thick fingers like, um, sausages. Forgive me, but his hands are important, because while he read his books from Philly to NYC he did the most peculiar thing: he would read a page front and back and then, in one swift movement, he'd tear the page out of the book and throw it out the window.

I have seen some amazing things in my life. Ray Charles. Macchu Picchu. The Louvre. Pompeii. A Monster Truck Rally. But I have never gasped with baffled wonderment like I did at the end of this little anecdote.

When I got home Kurt and I found seats between stacks of books, our dinner plates resting on tables of John McPhee and Stephen King, and I told him the story. He was as baffled and impressed as I was. I said it was a philosophical difference; the sausage maker could accept that he had spent his allotted time with each page and then let it go. I, on the other hand, am too deeply attached to the past. I keep books I've already read and will never read again because they keep the past in my home, nearby, so that I can relive it any time I want. It's a fear of death, I said. The sausage maker is liberated from that fear. Page-ripping is his yoga.

Maybe, Kurt said. He looked sort of dazed as he surveyed the room. He stood up and started to move through the stacks. But The Moor's Last Sigh, he sighed. We need that in our home! Auden? You don't get rid of Auden. Every book H.L. Mencken ever wrote-- I need these! The Atlas of World History! The Once and Future King. Emily Post's Wedding Etiquette! Emily Post's . . . Wedding . . . Etiquette.

He only had to say the title once more before we spontaneously reduced our number of books by one. It was such a rush we added The Da Vinci Code to the collection. We dropped the two books by the front door with abandon, drunk with a wanton recklessness: You, children, must make your home elsewhere. We never liked the looks of you.

But soon enough we forgot about the donation box and the sausage maker. Surrounded by our books, we couldn't help reminding each other of our favorites, of the books that changed our lives. There are so many. Today they're all back on the shelves, where they belong.

The Art of Disappearing

2009-08-20T19:19:00.000-07:00

When they say Don't I know you?

say no.

When they invite you to the party

remember what parties are like

before answering.

Someone telling you in a loud voice

they once wrote a poem.

Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.

Then reply.

If they say We should get together

say why?

It's not that you don't love them anymore.

You're trying to remember something

too important to forget.

Trees. The monastery bell at twilight.

Tell them you have a new project.

It will never be finished.

When someone recognizes you in a grocery store

nod briefly and become a cabbage.

When someone you haven't seen in ten years

appears at the door,

don't start singing him all your new songs.

You will never catch up.

Walk around feeling like a leaf.

Know you could tumble any second.

Then decide what to do with your time.

--Naomi Shihab Nye

Yoga to Go

2009-08-10T13:41:00.000-07:00

Frank McCourt

2009-07-23T17:36:00.000-07:00

A Moveable Book

2009-07-23T13:24:00.000-07:00

This op-ed from the New York Times is a must-read if you're planning on rushing to the bookstore to purchase Hemingway's newly revised, posthumous memoir, A Moveable Feast. I was curious to read it and had every intention of buying it until I read this piece. Now I'm not so sure. This isn't the first time there's been controversy surrounding the editing of this book. (Here's Wikipedia's take on it, which I don't trust entirely, but it's interesting nonetheless.) A Moveable Feast is my favorite of all of Hemingway's books. It isn't a sweeping piece of literature, and it's not as spare as his short stories, but it is a beautiful, heartbreaking book. I can understand why Hemingway's grandson, Sean Hemingway, who has re-edited this edition, wouldn't want the final chapter of the book to stay; it's a damning appraisal of both Hemingway and Sean's grandmother, who was Hemingway's second wife. It is also the chapter that defines and devastates everything that came before it. Having read it nearly a decade ago, this is the chapter that continues to haunt me from time to time when I think about the reckoning to be made at the end of our lives.

Now this chapter has been moved to an appendix.

Read the original edition.

Review of Yoga Bitch in Commercial Appeal

2009-07-12T10:07:00.002-07:00

Here's the Memphis Commercial Appeal review of the Bitch! Now I'm off to the theater for my closing matinee, and then packing up and driving south to New Orleans for mouffeletta, beignets, and gumbo. Things could be a lot worse.

Greetings from Memphis

2009-07-11T14:27:00.000-07:00

After eating enough ribs to fill a dozen cages, some exceptional brisket and a plate of fried chicken livers; after boisterous tech rehearsals at the end of long days of 90+ degree weather; after visiting Graceland, Sun Studios and the Civil Rights Museum-- and after a gorgeous drive from Nashville to Memphis with stops in Jackson and Shiloh, Yoga Bitch opened here on Thursday night to a lovely audience at Playhouse on the Square's TheatreWorks. I've loved every minute of working with the great staff and crew at Playhouse, and I've visited two awesome yoga studios and chatted with countless charming and open Memphians over the past week; I'll be sad to leave after we close the show tomorrow afternoon. Here's some press from Memphis's Commercial Appeal and Examiner.com. I'll be posting to Jean-Michele Gregory's Travelmonkeys blog with photos and travelogue as soon as I catch my breath.

Yoga Bitch: A Memoir, Coming to You From Broadway Books

2009-07-03T18:46:00.001-07:00

. . . in Spring of 2011! I couldn't be more thrilled, and I have plenty to say about my exciting book news, but I am headed to Memphis tomorrow to perform Yoga Bitch at Playhouse on the Square and am drowning in laundry and urine sample jars (props, people, just props!) and have been surviving on a diet of champagne and um, champagne since I heard the good news from my agent on Monday. I will tell you all about it, just as soon as the show is up and running. If you're going to be in Memphis, or have friends or family there, send them my way!

And yes, I will eat BBQ and spend some quality time with Elvis. My aunt Barbie would disown me if I didn't-- she has actually devoted her guest room to her collection of Elvis paraphernalia and spent a good part of her Graceland pilgrimage weeping over his black leather suit. It would be wrong to go all the way to Memphis and not pay my respects.

My trip to the South will be a first for this Yankee-- I'm looking forward to some great audiences, weather under 95 degrees (please God), and lots and lots of BBQ.

See you on the other side.

Michael Jackson

2009-06-25T15:48:00.001-07:00

Reading, Writing, Rehearsing: A Monday Update

2009-06-22T12:14:00.000-07:00

Parents! My God, people, what are we going to do with them? Always giving birth and raising children and fucking us up royally! They give us sexual hang-ups, repressions, perversions, communication issues and complexes. But they also give us something incredibly valuable: someone to blame. So, think about it; you might find yourself in the possession of a parent or two, or even three or four. And if you do, I strongly urge you to look at them and consider this: They have made you the fucked up crazypants you are today. Now, how can you make some money off of that?

Reading:

I've been on a memoir kick lately, and accidentally read three in a row that were of a type: the My Parents Fucked Me type. I've written about this genre of memoir before, right here. I've read quite a few memoirs that could be classified as My Parents Fucked Me memoirs, but those I've loved, like Lauren Slater's Lying, or Mary Karr's The Liars' Club, rose above the grievances to explore either the identity of the writer, or to discover a deep well of love and understanding for her parents despite her horrific childhood. Both books felt as rich and profound and occasionally funny as a good novel.

When the story doesn't rise above the daily grievances of My Parents Fucked Me memoirs, they start to feel voyeuristic to me, like I'm watching scenes through a window without context or meaning. All I am allowed to see is Mean Mommy or Drunk Daddy. And I get frustrated.

Her Last Death is Susanna Sonnenberg's memoir of growing up with a gorgeously self-destructive, coke-addicted, pill-popping, sex-addicted, almost-famous mother. (Imagine using so many hyphens to describe your own mother!) Her relationship with her mother is instantly recognizable: it's the role reversal relationship we've seen a million times onscreen and in life-- the daughter being the responsible caregiver to her young, wild, beautiful, slutty mom. What makes this story unique is that the irresponsible mother comes from famous, wealthy parents and has lots of famous, wealthy friends. (Bob Dylan lives next door; Norman Mailer tells Sonnenberg's mother that her two-year-old daughter has a nice ass. All of which is a lot more interesting than your run of the mill Cool-But-Irresponsible Mom stories.)

The problem I invariably have with these stories is that the mother is always so much more fun than the long-suffering, sanctimonious daughter I'm meant to sympathize with. The minute Sonnenberg's narrative tears away from her mother and to her own uptight-I-mean-upright life in Montana with a stable, boring husband I wanted to put the book down. I had to force myself to finish it.

To be fair: Sonnenberg's mother was a piece of work. She lied to her daughter, saying she'd slept with Susanna's teenage boyfriends. She gave her twelve-year-old daughter cocaine. She tortured her daughter with tales of being raped, diagnosed with leukemia, only to forget the stories later, leaving her daughter to wonder if anything her mother said was true.

So when she gets the call that her mother is dying, she chooses to go to her bedside-- that is, until her husband points out to her that she doesn't have to go if she doesn't want to. And so she doesn't, leaving her sister to care for their mother for two months. I won't give away the rest, except to say that her sister is pissed off. When Sonnenberg describes the rift that opens up between her and her sister over her failure to help out when her mother was in the hopsital, she says this: "I had made an impossible decision, which unearthed the true calamity of being daughter to this mother."

I'd be curious to know how somebody else took this, because I read these words to mean that, ultimately, it was her mother's fault that Sonnenberg let her sister bear the bedside vigil, the negotiations with doctors, etc., alone. And maybe this is my biggest issue with this sort of memoir: nothing, it seems, is ever Sonnenberg's fault, because her flaws, her failings exist because her mother was flawed and a failure.

This brings me to something I've been thinking about, perhaps because of my reading. I've been thinking about the difference between being flawed and being damaged. This is a gross generalization, but it seems to me that one could say that the novel is an exploration of our flaws-- the flaws we are born with, that are part of our very being. This is especially true of pre-twentieth century novels, in which character is destiny, right? Who we are, and how we are intrinsically flawed, will define how we respond to our environment and thereby determine the course of our lives. Again, I'm generalizing on a complex subject, but it seems as if the novel, because of its perspective, has the opportunity to explore how we overcome our flaws, to rise above our deficits, or how we don't. Which isn't to say that this isn't possible in memoir, but just that too often in memoir I find that the focus is more passive; that the narrator doesn't have to account for her flaws-- and the mistakes she's made as a result of them-- because she is focused exclusively on how she was damaged.

The upshot of this book? Sonnenberg writes beautifully, and if the book never adds up to more than a well-written, upper-class episode of Jerry Springer, her honesty carries the book along, especially when she uses her wild mother to get away with her own schemes:

In a Judy Blume book, the girl went into the closet with her crush, and they sort of kissed. The character was twelve, only a little older than me, just two years away. I read the passage repeatedly, the tension delicious and unbearable. My father left R. Crumb comics lying around, and I examined the drawings of hardened nipples under tight T-shirts. I found Penthouse, and the letters and stories gave me more of that feeling, the lush, unfurling excitement, all done with words. I bought a copy at the newsstand a block away, where the owner had known us since we were little.

"My mother would like a Penthouse," I said.

A.M. Homes is a terrific fiction writer. I haven't read all that much of her writing, but what I have read-- mostly short stories-- have been vivid, mean little works of art. I recently read her memoir, The Mistress's Daughter, and the book starts out promisingly enough: A.M. Homes was adopted, and her birth mother-- a chain-smoking con artist from Atlantic City-- seeks her out. They begin talking over the phone, but soon her birth mother starts to show up at Homes's readings, and calling her on her private line-- stalking her, essentially. Her birth father is notified that his daughter is looking for him, and they begin meeting in person, on the sly, because he is still married to the woman he cheated on with Homes's birth mother. Her biological parents are awful people, selfish, self-centered, manipulative. At times it seems as if they're more interested in reconnecting with each other and their erotic past than with their daughter.

The first hundred pages are devoted to the unspooling of her short-lived relationships with her birth parents. These pages fly by like a good mystery, with a sense of something ominous always lurking between sentences.

And then the second half? It's a treatise on Homes's genealogy. Which is unfortunately one of the more frustrating things I've read in ages. I don't know what happened here-- it's almost like Homes broke down and couldn't complete the story of her four parents, and thought that, instead, we might enjoy a hundred pages about how her adoptive great-great-great grandfather worked some job somewhere and had some wife who was descended from some people who were from some country that wasn't this one and then she died and he remarried someone who was probably some cousin of some in-law and they begat so-and-so, who begat so-and-so, who begat blah blah blah blah blah?

I ended up skimming. And swearing. But this total derailment of the story, mind-boggling as it was, wasn't my primary complaint about the book. There's a much bigger issue infecting this story, and it's that Homes tells us she has always yearned for her biological parents despite having what appear to be very close, involved relationships with her adoptive parents. What she shows us is a close family life, but then she hints at a home life that was less than happy, perhaps even abusive. But she never tells us directly why her adoptive parents let her down. It's maddening. At the end I had to assume that she loves her parents and didn't want to reveal unfortunate truths about her relationships with them, but at the same time had a story she simply had to tell, even if she couldn't bring herself to tell the whole truth.

In a sense, the trouble with this book is the opposite of Sonnenberg's memoir. Homes won't give us a sense of her parents' flaws, while Sonnenberg can't give us anything else.

One interesting aspect of this book deals with the legal issues of publishing memoir. Here Homes describes the process of publishing her parents' story in the New Yorker. She didn't want to give their legal department her father's true identity:

Only after the magazine first threatened and then did briefly kill the piece did I question why I was ruining my professional reputation protecting the identity of someone who had never shown any particular concern for me. Still, I didn't think they needed to bother the man. They insisted. The New Yorker has what they call a double standard for fact checking-- if the subject is to be unidentified or masked, not only does the subject have to be rendered unrecognizable to others, but also unrecognizable to himself. My father, simply by knowing that he is my father, had his cover blown.

I find this fascinating-- the idea of writing something that is considered non-fiction, but which requires certain details to be changed (may I say fictionalized?) so dramatically. Could be fodder for a blog posting down the line, stay tuned . . .

Finally, a few brief words about My Lobotomy, by Howard Dully and Charles Fleming. Howard Dully's mother turned him over to Dr. Walter Freeman, the famous lobotomist, when he was twelve years old, for an "ice pick" lobotomy. It seems that she did this because she didn't like him, period. Holy Christ! I had plenty of days when I'm sure my parents didn't like me much-- notably the days that occurred between fifth and eighth grade-- and I am so grateful that they didn't give me a lobotomy. Like, really, really grateful. Holy Hell.

Obviously a book like this one is less about the writing and more about the story, and it served me well on my return flight from New York a couple of weeks ago. Of the bad parents I've read about in the past few weeks, Dully's stepmother gets the My Parents Fucked Me Award for Meanest Mother. I mean, Susanna Sonnenberg's mother giving her cocaine? Please! Imagine if she'd given you a lobotomy! Perspective, thy name is Dully.

(You can listen to Dully's story on NPR, here.)

All of these parental memoirs made me long for a more crafted version of the My Parents, My God, My Parents! story. So I switched it up, and am now halfway through Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint. So far, it's immensely satisfying reading. Roth captures, with exquisite perplexity, the duelling love and hate, attachment and resentment, of being a child of two loving, flawed, human parents. Roth can put a point on this subject far better than I can, so let's let him. (Here he's speaking, initially, of his father):

But what he had to offer I didn't want-- and what I did want he didn't have to offer. Yet how unusual is that? Why must it continue to cause such pain? At this late date! Doctor, what should I rid myself of, tell me, the hatred . . . or the love? Because I haven't even begun to mention everything I remember with pleasure-- I mean with a rapturous, biting sense of loss! . . . Memories of practically nothing-- and yet they seem moments of history as crucial to my being as the moment of my conception; I might be remembering his sperm nosing into her ovum, so piercing is my gratitude-- yes, my gratitude! -- so sweeping and unqualified is my love.

Writing:

Well, I've sold my first book, Yoga Bitch, to Broadway Books, to be published in Spring of 2011! Broadway is a division of Random House, and I am thrilled with my new editor and her awesome team. So what have I been writing? I've been writing things like this:

Yay! Holy Christ. Yay! Oh my God. Huzzah! Holy shit. Hooray!

And I'd like to take this opportunity to thank . . . my parents. For not giving me a lobotomy, among other things.

Rehearsing:

Yoga Bitch. I'm headed to Playhouse on the Square in Memphis to perform Yoga Bitch there July 9-12. I can't wait. I've never been to the South, and I'm already delighted with the good folks at the Playhouse-- I think it's going to be a great experience working with them.

Other than that, I've been rehearsing these lines: More champagne, anyone? Would you join me in a glass of champagne? Hey! I've got some champagne, should we drink some? Thank you for the champagne! Well, would you look at what's in my fridge? Champagne!

Dirty Dancing by David Lynch

2009-06-16T11:04:00.000-07:00

I love this.

Honorable Vegetables & A Few Good Stories

2009-05-28T11:58:00.001-07:00

My short story, Vegetable Remains, was picked for Honorable Mention (capital H, capital M!) last month in Glimmertrain's Very Short Fiction contest. I started submitting short stories a few months ago, and this small recognition is inspiring, to say the least. In honor of my mention, I'd like to post a few short stories I've read in the past year or so that have stuck with me months after reading them.

(Disclaimer: This is actually a short list of the New Yorker fiction I've loved this year. Since I've been unable to commit to any books lately-- and the few I have read I've not liked-- I've been slowly leveling a skyscraper of New Yorkers. Except where indicated, that's where the story's from.)

Edwidge Danticat's Ghosts. Danticat is an extraordinary writer. Some might disagree with me, but I think she has the gift of lightness Italo Calvino described in Six Memos for the New Millenium. She writes about horrors I can only imagine, but there's a curious lightness that's hard to describe about her writing-- perhaps it's a lack of insistence on her part, or a cinematic speediness to her plotting, or maybe it's just that she allows tragedy to speak for itself, without layering on a lesser writer's gothic sludge of ego. Either way, she is thoroughly modern and terribly moving. If you haven't read her work, start now-- and tell me if you agree with me about the lightness.

A.M. Homes's Brother on Sunday. I liked this story. The writing is lovely, surprising, vivid, and occasionally very funny.

Elizabeth Gilbert's The Famous Torn and Lit Cigarette Trick. This is from the Paris Review's Winter 1996 issue. I have no idea why I was reading a 1996 issue of the Paris Review this year, but I do have an idea of why I loved this story: it's charming and it moves like quicksilver.

Andrea Lee's Three. It's less a story than a series of portraits of three characters who have recently died. I love how good fiction can surprise us with an attachment to a character-- we spend maybe 1000 words with each of the three characters, and by the time they die, we know them well enough to share the narrator's sense of loss.

Guillermo Martinez's Vast Hell. Great little story. Short and great. Read it now-- it'll take just a few minutes out of your day. Inspired by the Argentinian proverb "A small town is a vast hell," it reminds me of Milan Kundera and Dubravka Ugresic, among others, who have written about nationalism in small countries. Kundera has repeatedly said, in essence, that a small country is a vast hell. This story exists on several planes.

That's all for now. Back to work.

Oh my!

2009-05-05T17:55:00.001-07:00

I can't stop watching this!

The Wisdom Tree

2009-05-05T17:50:00.001-07:00

2009-05-04T11:25:00.000-07:00

Speaking of Brainsickness

2009-05-03T13:54:00.000-07:00

Nobody can cheer me up quite like Gilda Radner.

Britain's Poet Laureate

2009-05-02T12:17:00.000-07:00

I found this New York Times article amusing. England has selected its first female poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, who, one hopes, will not be required to write poetry about Prince Harry's Halloween costumes. Although . . . given Duffy's occasionally comic voice, maybe she would write something wonderful on the subject?

Ms. Duffy would seem to agree. When her name was mentioned for the job 10 years ago, she was quoted as saying: “I will not write a poem for Edward and Sophie. No self-respecting poet should have to.”

That was a reference to the marriage of Prince Edward, the Queen’s youngest son, and Sophie Rhys-Jones, which Mr. Motion celebrated in a poem entitled “Epithalamium.” (The poem “has two immediate virtues,” the critic Robert Potts said in The Guardian, “it is very short, and it does not mention the couple.”)

Keats and Yeats Are On Your Side: A Saturday Update

2009-05-01T16:03:00.000-07:00

Reading, Writing, Rehearsing:

I've had the Smiths song, Keats and Yeats Are On Your Side, stuck in my head for a week, brought on by reading a wee bit of Keats. Nobody likes Keats, it seems. Everywhere I look critics and academics scorn his fascination with death, his low origins, his obsession with fame. But I find him immensely comforting at times. Maybe I'm a sap. I probably am. But when my brain can't focus on a book, it's nice to read a poem here and there-- particularly one that has a narrative quality, that feels like a tiny story. I have little patience for poems that read like crossword puzzles, especially when I've gone stupid.

I haven't been able to read much in the past month; my grandmother had a series of strokes in late March and passed away a week later, and so there was the week with her at the nursing home and another week at home after she died, trying to get back to work but mostly just walking around in a fog. Then there was a week of family gatherings and the funeral in Spokane, and another five days' visit from my sister and her husband that was the silver lining of the whole affair. And since then, getting caught up on work and sleep and marriage and yoga. And just a little reading.

I was able to stay with her in Eastern Washington the week she died, and her last night many of her grandchildren were in the room with her telling stories and settling in for the long night's vigil. We younguns had reprieved our parents only forty-five minutes earlier when my cousin Johnny shushed us: she was gone. Soon her room was packed with her three children, their spouses, and all of us grandkids-- many of us with our spouses.

It was hot in there. Nursing homes are already hothouses for the tiny tropical birds we turn into when we're on our way out of the world. But with about twenty people crammed into her room, it was sweltering. She would have loved it. The last time I saw her it was midsummer in Eastern Washington-- normally a very hot, dry time of year in that part of the state, but this visit they were experiencing record highs, so it was around 100 degrees.

And the heat was turned on in her room.

And she was wearing long underwear and a white long-sleeved turtleneck under her grey velour sweats (Juicy Couture-style!) with an aquamarine flannel vest over the hoodie. Since she wasn't well enough to travel across the mountains for my wedding in May, I brought my wedding dress to her. And when I picked up my train and placed it in her lap so she could admire the stitching and beading on it, the first thing she did was spread it across her lap like another blanket. She kept it there for the entire visit.

Grandma Iris was my last grandparent. I've done this four times, now-- the travel, the bedside vigil, the goodbye. You enter a different dimension when you sit with a dying person for many days in a row, one that's hard to leave after they die. Which brings me to Keats and Yeats. Or, actually, Keats and Bronte. I have nothing to say about Yeats today, except that his name keeps popping up in that Smiths song in my head:

A dreaded sunny day/So I meet you at the cemetery gates/Keats and Yeats are on Your Side/While Wilde is on mine

So we go inside and gravely read the stones/All those people, all those lives/Where are they now?

No, I've been thinking about Keats and Bronte. Charlotte Bronte, not Emily. I've never read Emily Bronte, even if I did tell people for years that Wuthering Heights was my favorite book. I have no idea why I did that. I've always been an insatiable reader, so I could've named any number of good books as my favorite. But in junior high I really wanted Wuthering Heights to be that book. I just couldn't stand reading it.

Ah, the mysteries of the mind.

Both of them died young; Keats, in his mid-twenties, while Charlotte Bronte was thirty-eight. They both died of consumption, like everybody in the nineteenth century who didn't die of syphilis. (Although I have read that it's possible Bronte died from dehydration and malnutrition brought on by morning sickness. As if her story wasn't depressing enough, she was pregnant when she died.)

But I haven't been thinking about how they died young. I've been thinking about the fact that they both cared for consumptive family members for years before they themselves died. Keats nursed his mother and a brother, so when he started coughing up blood, he knew exactly what he was in for. Bronte lost nearly all of her siblings in one year, just a few years before her own death. Her novel Villette was written as she mourned her siblings, and the tragic, if stoic, outlook of Villette's Lucy Snowe reflects what I've always assumed to be the state of mind of her creator.

And the crap ending of that book is excusable only because, after losing so many loved ones in a row, who wouldn't be fatalistic?

I've been thinking about these writers because I found myself utterly braindead for weeks after my grandmother died. I loved my grandmother dearly, adored her as we all did, but I wasn't her primary caregiver for many months, or even years. I was at her bedside for one week. I imagine the exhaustion, the grief, the brainsickness that came on (brainsickness being a state of homesickness for one's brain, I guess) after my grandmother died, and then enlarge it exponentially to relate to the crushing loss these writers experienced over and over again.

And they wrote right through it. No antidepressants, no therapy, no yoga.

How lucky we are that they did.

My grandmother spent her life making the world beautiful with her music, with her effortless style. She was a tremendous pianist. She played every day of her life from the moment she learned, while raising children, caring for her parents, mourning the loss of a brother, while visiting grandchildren, even after a stroke at seventy left her frail and unable to speak. She played well past her ninetieth birthday, and on, till she was finally too weak at ninety-one. Keats' Endymion reminds me of her:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondance, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o`er-darkened ways
Made for our searching: yes, inspite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits.

John Keats, from Endymion

Think Globally/Create Locally

2009-04-30T11:53:00.000-07:00

Brendan Kiley writes in The Stranger about smaller US cities and the American Theater. You can dispense at once with his idea that New York is played; it's stretching it more than a little to suggest that New York is no longer the epicenter of American Theater. Seems a bit like saying, Gee, we have so much government here, maybe Washington, DC isn't the epicenter of American politics either?

But no matter how you slice it, I like his moxie. I'm very interested in seeing our best local artists stay local while maintaining connections to the bigger national and international scenes. Since I moved back to Seattle from New York four years ago I've been delighted to discover so many new companies doing great work, some excellent actors choosing to stay in Seattle, a brave new world where writers leave their houses to talk to other writers. Seattle's always been a good writer's town-- nothing helps a writer more than being around so many people who read so much-- and when I was in high school the theater scene here was in an upswing. Feels like we're at the start of another one.

Seattle should do two things: 1) Become the anchor city for a West Coast corridor, rock 'n' roll style, that trades work up and down I-5, and makes it profitable for companies from elsewhere to tour: Vancouver-Seattle-Portland-San Francisco-Los Angeles. 2) Get itself a festival like Fuse Box, with ambitions to grow to TBA size (There's no reason we couldn't—we have the resources and the audience, all we need is the will).

Jen Graves goes into greater detail about our local visual art scene, but strikes the same chord: Stay local, think about our own art history and our own stories, but find pathways to the larger art world so that our art doesn't become insular and too local.

Seattle art has a Vancouver problem. The two cities are close: Vancouver is only 136 miles away, just across the Canadian border. They're comparable in size. But Vancouver art is better. "Better" in this case means (a) Vancouver art is connected to the larger world, and therefore to universes of issues, peculiarities, styles, and ideas that serve the artists as well as the audiences, and (b) Vancouver art is connected to its own art history.

2009-04-28T19:07:00.000-07:00

Bea Arthur

2009-04-28T10:48:00.000-07:00

Best moment from the Golden Girls here.