July

It's so cool here in Indiana that I am reminded of life in the Pacific Northwest. A lovely thing to recall. I posted another chapter from HOME PLATE and it happens to be one of the more meta-fictional chapters. I enjoyed writing about life at Tolstoy Farm in the 70's.

Newsy items: 

 I am writing a play.

Bich Nguyen's novel SHORT GIRLS just came out.

There is a gay bar in Morgantown, West Virginia, where I taught last week. This was a pleasant surprise. After eating Japanese, a gang of us -- faculty folk -- went to Vice-Versa and danced below the disco balls. 'Twas good fun. 

I feel the precious summer slipping away and I intend to be grateful for every day left before classes begin. 

Hop-Scotch Writing

There is a Type-A part of me that wants to work on one thing, one thing only, and see it through to the end and have that satisfied feeling. And then perhaps take a break and go to the beach. After all, summer's blitzing by. But I find that I am working on several pieces at once. My novel set in Mississippi goes slowly. I wish I had a contract for it; a contract lights a fire under me. Everyone says, "Nobody reads anymore," and that mantra gets under my skin and I wonder if anyone will ever read the novel. Then writers always say, "Well, I do it because I love doing it." You have to ask yourself whether you love doing it that much, to write a 400 page novel never knowing whether it will be read. So I alternate and work on other pieces. I enjoy editing HOME PLATE each week before I post it on the blog. I'm writing a short review of Margot Livesey's novel THE HOUSE ON FORTUNE STREET. I'm writing an essay about marriage. 

A move  looms ahead, in less than a month. I am moving into town, to be near campus, after 15 years of living out of town. The move requires a re-imagining of life. It requires a goodly portion of creative juice. Maybe that's why I'm hopping from one piece to the next -- the flow of creative juice is toward the move. 

Novel-writing requires the capacity to see the big picture and to work on the tiny details. This move is like that for me. I spend time every day sorting and purging and that brings my past into focus, in large and small ways. I have stopped sorting to read old love letters from people I rarely think about now. I toss out bus passes from Oxford, England. I examine photos of myself in my twenties and wonder why I didn't realize how lovely I was then. I decide to keep all the goofy little notes my husband and I used to write to each other, before we had cell phones. I know I am learning something. Someday I'll know what that is. 

Cathy Day's Review of FEARLESS CONFESSIONS

I think it's ready to roll! 

FEARLESS CONFESSIONS by Sue Silverman

I'm having trouble formatting Cathy Day's review of Sue's book. Stay tuned! 

Part II HOME PLATE, a serial novel

When I began posting the novel, I had forgotten that it was divided into Parts. Oh, well. in posting, I decided to stick with the parts. I like the deliberate break after Chanti's death. The section that begins with the following description of a neighborhood in Chicago was originally the opening of the novel. I am fond of the description, having fallen in love for a while with Pilsen, but I have noticed that many readers are not so place-centered as I am. They get impatient with elaborate descriptions of place. 

"This is Pilsen, port of entry, lucky Chicago neighborhood not gutted by the great fire of 1871. Shoeshine men at the Jumping Bean Café guzzle red-eye espressos, elbow to elbow at the counter with college gringas. Where the streets once ran like a river of black cinders from the factories."

My paternal grandmother -- Anna Swiezy -- came to America from Bohemia in 1907. She was ten years old. She and her brothers and sisters lived and worked in Baltimore, Wheeling, and then they moved on to Terre Haute, Indiana. When I was a girl she would show me black and white photos of relatives in the old country and relatives in Chicago. One of these was a middle-aged woman with braids pinned to her head, in a baggy house dress, in the alley of a tenement block in Chicago. The photo was taken around 1920. I grew up on 7 acres in the countryside and I was fascinated with this urban setting, the back porches of the flats and the criss-cross of clotheslines where laundry flapped. All these years later, when I discovered Pilsen and its rich history of the labor movement, I began to understand my Grandmother's politics and her sensibilities. She worked in factories from the age of ten. She always voted Democrat. 

Once while writing HOME PLATE I went to talk with a group of Mexican immigrant women at a church in Little Village, the neighborhood that borders Pilsen. These women had not been in the U.S. long. I asked them questions about their children, their adjustments to the U.S. and Chicago, their fears and hopes. Finally they turned the tables and asked me questions about my life. When I told them my grandmother's story of coming in steerage to Baltimore in 1907, of her working in factories as a girl, and of my work as a novelist and teacher, one woman spoke up and said, "She is what our children will become." The others murmured their agreement. I felt my grandmother's spirit in the room. The immigrant story is an old one, ever unfolding with the simplest, most profound, hopes for the children.