Truth and Fiction

I guest taught a class earlier this week, one that the prof had titled “knowing the world through narrative.” I had mentioned in a conversation about my admin job that one of the things I miss about teaching is the opportunity to talk about books and the craft of writing and reading them on a regular basis. So there I was on Thursday, parachuted into a class of 100 students, with a plan to march them through literary analysis. I chose a few pages from Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Are you my mother?, which is a memoir (though she terms it a comic drama) weaving psychoanalysis, Virginia Woolf, and Bechdel’s relationship with her mom into a pretty interesting text.

What I initially found so compelling about Bechdel’s book was her response to her mom at a point when her mom is asserting that there is no room for the individual, the personal, the specific in good literature. Bechdel says: but don’t you think that if you write minutely and rigorously enough about your own life that you can transcend your individual self? I thought that was spot on and beautifully put. Here, Bechdel shows you how hard it is to write about yourself and what you can hope to gain by it. It makes her project sound like self-ethnography, which fit in with what this class I was working with has been up to this semester.

The other notion I wanted to cover with the students, who had just been working with data collection and other quantifiable source material, was the notion of Truth vs. Facts. We can, if we choose, collect facts about a work of writing and these facts can bring us to a certain understanding of the work and influence our relationship to it. But good fiction is greater than the sum of its parts and, as Stephen King, Tennessee Williams and a hundred other writers have said–good fiction is the truth inside the lies they write. I wanted these students, most of whom would have had high school English classes that left them more or less cold and uninspired, to take the notion of reading literature seriously. So we talked a bit a about metaphor and symbolism (the apple I’m eating at lunchtime = the apple in Eden, for example) and get back to Bechdel and her notion of writing minutely and rigorously about her life as something that could become transcendent.

I thought it was awesome. And so good to talk about again. Ad as I write about it two days later, I may come to the conclusion that I am a better lecturer than I am a writer. My riff on my apple and Eve’s apple was pretty nice, I thought, and impossible to recapture now.

The other great thing about working with a graphic novel for this was the ability of that medium to visually display the layers of a text. Word bubbles, blocked off text that provides context/narration, and images of passages from other books (Woolf, Winnicot) that show the intertextual material Bechdel is working with. And then the images of the characters themselves. Are they happy, sad, regretful, confused? No adjectives needed–just those pictures. How challenging that work must be–to convey all of that with so little, really.

Incoming Me

(with credit & apologies to Havi Bell)

On a warm May evening eight years ago, or was it only seven, a friend of mine and I sat in my car in the driveway, engine off, and ran through what appeared to be her options to get out of a sticky situation. Well, I ran through the options; she batted each one of them away as too difficult, to painful, impossible. She was hurting and I was frustrated with the mess she found herself in and had no clue how talking to me was going to help her out. There are some issues, alas, which each of us must confront on our own: pistols-at-dawn and the responsibility rests on our shoulders alone. My feelings, my insights on her situation came from a place of compassion within me but, because they were mine, they did not resonate with her.

And in that car, I had a small flash, an insight both timely and useful–a rare combination, really. I asked her: “What would the person you would like to be do in this situation?” I thought maybe that question might sneak around all of the roadblocks she had constructed between herself and the solution (whatever it was) to her situation. Your best version of yourself, that image you have of yourself, dappled in sunshine, looking strong and capable and happy–SHE would know what to do here. She would behave with sovereignty and clarity, owning her decision and completely capable of managing the consequences. Why not talk to her??

It is easier to give someone unsolicited advice than to take it yourself. And I know there have been many occasions in the intervening years where I should have stopped tying myself in knots and had a conversation with the competent and sovereign version of myself. Frequently, I tied myself in knots and only came back to the realization of my own flexibility and control over my happiness with help from others.

But I am trying to listen to that version of ideal me now, and doing it consciously. Havi Brooks, who writes about “unstuckness” and yoga and shiva nata at www.fluentself.com, talks about this process, as well. She calls it talking to “incoming me” and she goes to her future, more knowledgable self for prompts, advice, and clarity on issues that are vexing her in the now. This makes sense to me, though it sounds quirky. In order to bypass that bitchy, nasty voice in your head that reminds you of everthing you’ve ruined, every mistake you’ve made, you might need to get in touch with a part of yourself that is beyond that and at peace.

Of course, there is a danger that I might be expecting too much from “incoming me,” “future me,” “idealized me.” And maybe that is why Havi talks about “incoming,” reminding herself that this YOU is always in process, always developing. There is no “future” or “ideal” to attain, because in that future moment, another “incoming me” will be in the wings, waiting to pull back the curtain and get new things in motion.

Right now I am hoping that incoming me has clarity on a few things–things related to space and shelter, things related to words and creativity, things related to the relationship between body and mind. That’s a lot to ask of her, maybe I’ll start slowly.

Nightmares

Given that I’m in a new place, physically and professionally, and spend a lot of time in my own head, it comes as no surprise that I’m having some weirdo anxiety-fueled dreams.

There’s the one where it’s the first day of class and I don’t know where my room is or what I’m supposed to teach them.

There’s the one where my students and I are all sitting around the seminar table and I want to show them some great books we’re going to discuss and my copies of the books are all waterlogged and moldy and the pages are fused together.

Ahhh, good times.

But by far my favorite anxiety dream was the one I had last night. The kids are at school and I glance up at the clock to see that it is 10:30 and realize I sent them to school without lunch and snack and their first nutrition break just passed and my kids have nothing to eat! The rest of the dream is spent running around a dreamscape town buying odd food choices in even odder places. There are no ziploc bags or containers of any sort for the egg salad sandwich and I put potato chips (!) in a tea bag and find a cache of rotting hamburger in a meeting room. And while I’m doing this, the number of kids I have to feed keeps growing. First one, then two, then three and then, thank god, Ingrid came in and woke me up.

Some mornings I wish Canadian elementary schools had cafeterias.

Mysterious ways

Most blogs I read–especially blogs written by women–come with some sort of “about” page, in which the author categorizes and labels herself for her readership. “I am a single mom and a lawyer.” or “I am a homeschooling mother of three and am also trying to get my own business doing letterpress tea towels up and running.” Dale made sure that our info page here points you, dear reader, in the direction of our favorite spirit, in case you feel like having a case of Hendrick’s gin delivered to my door. And, just as many blogs’ “about me” pages are woefully out of date, ours, too, could use some refreshing. The problem is, I don’t quite know what to say. We are not having another child, we are still married, I’m still way-out-there liberal, and I still love gin. But I am no longer working as a German professor and realize that I may never again fill that particular role.

After a certain age, I suppose one imagines that the “about me” page is pretty much done writing itself. Your profession, the number of kids or cats you have, your hobbies–I imagined those items as things you acquired or grew into during your young years, so that you could enjoy them in your middle and old age.
But such, it would appear, is not the case. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it has for me.

Duddy, oh Duddy

As part of my pledge to myself to blog my leisure reading for you, dear Readers, I am going to write about The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz by Mordechai Richler. This book has been on my “to-read” list for ages, largely because of the volume of German-Jewish literature I was reading for research and teaching and my need to expand my knowledge of diaspora Jewish literature beyond the German. Business + pleasure = Richler.

A year or two ago, I read Barney’s Version by Richler and it took me a while to get into it. I thought perhaps this was because I didn’t have the necessary Richler/Montreal/Jewish/Canadian literary or cultural background to “get it.” And eventually Barney and his tale grew on me: he was a sheister, a shady businessman, a wealthy man who came by his wealth honestly sometimes and dishonestly, too. Duddy is the original Barney. Or, as a friend here put it: The rub on Richler is that he writes the same novel over and over again every four or five years or so. To this verdict I can only amend: the protagonists age as Richler himself does. Duddy the grubby St. Urbain urchin who schemes to buy land up north morphs into Barney, the middle-aged Montreal Jew with a cabin in the Quebec north woods. And I’ll grant Richler a pretty compelling plot line, if one that is rather well-worn in the pages of twentieth-century literature.

The bummer of reading Duddy for me, though, was that I enjoyed Richler’s craft more than I enjoyed his story. He is a good writer; he draws his characters well; I felt I knew a couple of them and saw what the others represented in the social fabric of the narrative. But the story itself, the plot, just tired me out. The title is a surefire giveaway that this story is entirely Duddy’s own and follows his development (or aging, as Duddy doesn’t really develop at all–he remains a selfish teenager at heart) from the selfish vantage point of his own wants and needs. Duddy is unconcerned with the Yvette, with Vergil, with his peers as he forges ahead with his plans to impress the men in his family. Mom, of course, is dead. Aunt Ida is, maybe, crazy. Women . . . they are so inessential to the drama of the male psyche. I grow weary of such narratives.

Marie Kaschnitz, Ruth Klüger, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein–there are women writing “Jewish” fiction in Germany, Austria, and the US that doesn’t focus on the feminine experience of being the marginalized Jew. (Of course, Klüger and Goldstein and others do remark on the marginality of the female Jew within the observant Jewish community itself.) I see the characters in Kaschnitz’s prose, or in Goldsteins, as being more fully rounded, more accessible (to me?) than the penile-focussed, artist-as-a-young-man characters offered by Richler, Biller, Roth, et al. I tend to reject out of hand the contention that women write for women, or are better understood by women, and men for men. I think my benchmark of good writing is prose that allows any reader to see into the characters, to see the universal in the specific example the author has crafted. As a woman reading, I resent being excluded and marginalized by the text as it comes into being.

So, up on my feminist soap box, I saunter off to read some Margaret Atwood. G’night, Ladies.

Extracurricular Kids

Although many of my comrades south of the 49th parallel have kids who are in school already, our clan doesn’t begin until after Labor Day. For those of you keeping track at home, that means TWO LONG WEEKS of the kids at home and no summer camp plans in sight. Having promised myself and my spouse that I will not begin to drink before 5:00pm, I have resolved to get out of the house, with the kids, and do creative things.

Unicorn Lives Here

I am using Keri Smith’s How to be an Explorer of the World: Portable Life Museum as my inspiration. I bought this for myself a few weeks ago, because Smith’s suggestions for how to document your life, your environment, and your thoughts blew my mind. Reading through her explorations, I thought so many of them would be excellent practice for creative writing, for jump-starting my brain, for focussing my journaling efforts on something other than the dronedronedrone of memememememe inside my head. As a bonus, tons of her exploration suggestions are things you can do with kids. Bingo!

Today we started with a modification on Exploration #11: Differences. Collect multiples of one thing (such as leaves, stones, shells, seeds, etc.). Lay them out in front of you. Observe them in detail. Using the “object log,” list the differences you see. Try to document at least twenty-five things.(page 51)

The crew: Greta, Ingrid, neighborkid J, (neighborkid E and neighbormom A participated for a while), myself

The supplies: blank paper, triangular shaped crayons, glue, construction paper, some beads, some fancy scrapbooking paper

The locale: outside–from our back door to the end of the block

Herbarium

The method: Step 1. make rubbings of different patterns. Leaves under paper was a logical place to start and G kept that theme going–all natural, she said. We did tree bark, the open scar of a recently felled tree, flowers, even a dead bumblebee’s wing. The others also branched out and did water line covers, gate decorations, license plates on cars, asphalt, bricks.

Step 2. Assemble a book or collage with your rubbings. You may add objects with glue or tape to the book or collage.

Step 3. Describe what you’ve created. Is it the atlas of an ant world? Is it a magical kingdom with a unicorn’s house? (see neighborkid J’s pic below for the unicorn house!) Write a story about what you found, rubbed, and selected for presentation!

I’d give this project a solid B- for the kids. Collecting rubbings was great fun and the idea of gluing together a collage or book captivated their imaginations. However, things got rather bogged down in the gluing portion of the activity. GLUE! COLLAGE! MORE GLUE! TONS OF GLUE! You can imagine. Neighborkid J really focussed on creating a place and named it and decorated it and presto, she was done!

Snapdragon!

Greta kept everything small scale and decided that she had created a herbarium for Hogwarts.

Ingrid took the longest to get to a point where she was ready to narrate. The sorting and cutting and gluing and gluing and cutting and cutting really enthralled her and she would have happily remained on that task until the end of time. With the cutoff looming, though, (Dad is coming home in 30 minutes and the mess needs to be cleared up by then so we can have family time and make dinner!) the others jumped in to help her and she put together this:

She wrote about a talking snapdragon, in keeping with the herbal theme she’d started with.

My next task is to try this for myself. I will share where I take it with you all here.

Canadiana Reading List

What I do not know about the country in which I currently reside could fill bookshelves. And it does. So, thanks to a generous friend  and a used bookstore, I have the following reading list to catch me up on Canadiana:

Margaret Atwood, Before the Flood

Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

Mordechai Richler, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz

Margaret Laurence, The Diviners

Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women

W. O. Mitchell, Who has Seen the Wind

Hugh MacLennan, Two Solitudes

Rudy Wiebe, The Temptations of Big Bear

Criag Brown, Ed. The Illustrated History of Canada

Peter C. Newman, Company of Adventurers

To be fair to me, I am not a complete dolt and have read a great deal of Atwood, and taught her first novel, The Edible Woman, in Women’s Studies courses. But I haven’t read her newest stuff, which focusses more on the damage to the environment caused by the patriarchy than the damage to individual people. I’ve also read some Richler, but not his seminal Duddy, so that needed to happen.

I hesitate to ask you, gentle reader, if you have anything to add to the list, for I also have other reading that needs to happen and, well, kids and a husband and knitting that all need tending to. But, comments on your favorites are most welcome, as are things that might have been neglected in the creating of this list! (Oh, and my French is abysmal, so we’re sticking to Anglophone literature and history. A true loss, I am sure.)

A Room of Her Own

Since we have downsized dramatically, if temporarily, for this move, I find myself without a dedicated office space (or nook, or corner, or shelf) in our home. This would not be so tragic if I had office space on campus, which would mean having a job here, which I don’t, so scratch that. Right now I’m typing at the dining room table. Fine for now, but not ideal for laying out the materials required for a large project, like a book. Not that my faculty office was every anything to get too excited about. At the university, I always shared an office with another colleague, which meant that my quarters ranged from completely cramped to merely slightly overstuffed.

I was bemoaning this at a BBQ with our neighbors a couple of weeks ago and my neighbor, whose first floor serves as the office for his wine importing business, told me he had extra office space to loan out to me a few days a week. It’s a lovely space and huge and well appointed and definitely more than any faculty office anywhere would ever be and after touring it, I had the vision of myself, spread out just a wee bit, perhaps with a small attractive hanging file cart with my research essentials off to the side, sitting at the dark wood desk, sipping coffee (or wine?) and writing. In this vision I am also slender and attractive, natch. Given the nature of the business whose office I’m borrowing, I also envision mid-afternoon wine tasting breaks, brilliant conversation (also in German), and, eventually, the offer to earn money by traveling the world and tasting wine. I mournfully kiss academia goodbye, but the parting is eased by my glamourous new life, the piles of cash I am earning, and office space all to myself. A beautiful vision, yes? My fantasy life is nothing if not rich and exciting.

It took me a surprisingly long time to take the neighbor up on his offer. While the kids were at camp, I felt pretty comfortable spreading out here in the apartment and I didn’t need an escape from their spazziness. So it took me until this week, when the kids are at home and not at camp, to go next door and check it out. I only staid about 90 minutes–enough time to deal with all my handwritten changes in the monograph introduction. The office space is all that I would ever need, and sooo quiet. . . . . until the sounds of my shrieking children began wafting through the patio doors. The neighbor’s son, who is older than my kids by a bit, was playing tag with them in the yard. Ingrid’s screams, always a joy, are of the dead-wakening variety and I was certain that having my kids follow me into the realm of the precious office space was going to scuttle the deal for good. Then, the neighborhood children come traipsing into the office–they need a drink, they need to go pee. Christopher is leading the charge into his dad’s space, but it is my kids trotting along behind him and I just cringe. Gone is the fantasy of brilliant, slender me, writing away and taking occasional breaks to discuss wine or books or politics with the importers, supplanted by the reality of me hissing to my kids in the conference room: go to the bathroom at HOME! Be quiet!

Dad reacts pretty calmly, reminding Christopher that there are other places to drink and pee and that this is his work space. I cringe inwardly, wondering if my presence is really the reason for all of this kid tumult. We all go back to work. I breathe a sigh of relief. The screams from the back yard game of tag are ok now, since they mean the kids are at least outside having fun. I’m a bit chilly. The AC in the office is cooling the space to 22 degrees C (71 degrees F!) and the tips of my fingers are turning blue. The remote control that governs the AC unit has a dead battery and I’m too short to adjust it manually. At this point, there are only a few more pages that I need to deal with before I am done with this chunk of work.

Then, dinner obligations call, and maybe that glass of wine, too. I head home and the kids sense me changing location. I walk in to the kitchen, put down my bag, and they come in right after me, demanding my attention.

Life’s a Beach

Back in April, having parceled out my kids’ summer break (8 weeks) into equal parts week-long day camps and vegging about the house weeks, I envisioned camp weeks being the time during which I got loads of work done and house weeks being the time we hiked, swam, went to the museum, worked on math concepts, and read books. Three days into a home week, I am not quite willing to admit defeat but this certainly isn’t panning out the way I planned. The children feel the pull of the couch and the television and would gladly turn into house plants if given the opportunity. I need to go for a run most days (training for a ten-miler in August) and it’s been a bit too hot to contemplate hiking the trails with whiney children in tow.

Which leads me to reflect on the relative merits of “education, physical and otherwise” with a parent vs. “totally unstructured free time” for the kids’ break. I was reading a writers’ blog this morning and she commented on the need for creative children to have down time, time to be bored and even unhappy, so that they become aware of their feelings and reactions. Time spent in front of the tv, according to this theory (mentioned by her, developed by me), is time when kids are engrossed in other people’s feelings and reactions instead of their own. Of course, having my children engrossed in their own feelings and reactions does not always make for a peaceable kingdom around these parts. They FEEL a lot, you see, and they need to express these FEELINGS at high decibels. And generally, they FEEL like they need to watch tv. Oy.

And what kind of role model am I? I sit at my computer. I need to work on my monograph introduction, so that I can send it out to publishers before long, and then I try to do some free writing every day. So, to the uninitiated child, it might appear that I, too, want to spend my day looking at screens and that, unfairly, I get to do so while the poor child must amuse itself with non-digital technologies. Oh the humanity! And to top it all off, I resist when they ask me if they can paint, or dig something out of the basement, or do something else that sounds, to me, like: mess, annoyance, and work for me. Bad mommy.

This train of thought always leads to me feeling inadequate, which is entirely selfish of me, since it shouldn’t be about me but about my kids. Or something. Maybe inadequate isn’t the word I’m looking for, either. Disappointed, perhaps. Not in them, mind you, they are kids being kids and are gloriously kid-like in their FEELINGS, but in me. I fantasize about this life wherein I get up early in the morning and write or run before the kids are out of bed. With my own mental and creative house in order, I then devote my day to my kids, who are eager to explore and learn with each other and me. Sadly, reality bears little resemblance to this scenario! I am not a morning person, regardless of how diligently I fantasize becoming one, and my kids wake up less willing to learn and explore the world around them than eager to hang on my body, whine, and forgo breakfast in favor of sulking around on the couch and calling one another names. Obviously something went wrong here–was it my planning, perhaps?

I still want to hike and swim and do math and all those things with my kids, but I don’t relish the fight it’s going to involve. And it shouldn’t have to be a fight, should it? We live on a lake, I hear, and tomorrow is supposed to be gorgeous and the weekend is supposed to be hot (not Kansas hot, mind you, just Ontario hot, which is hot enough). So we shall explore the beaches of Lake Ontario, keeping an eye out for Blinky the Fish while we’re at it.

Possibilities

Let the summer book reviews begin! It’s a bit surprising to me that I’ve read as much as I have this month, since June has been dominated by moving from Kansas to Canada and the emotional and physical tumult associated therewith. However, I took advantage of our host house’s library and the feeling I had of being a bit unmoored and read Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander’s The Art of Possibility. Transforming Professional and Personal Life. It sounded like a good read for someone in a transitional sort of mood.

I’m not entirely sure that I am the intended reader for the Zanders’ book. They do coaching for executives on how to transform stale business environments, in addition to inspirational speaking that addresses individuals. They position the reader of this book as–potentially–a manager who needs to make some sort of change, get out of a rut and also–potentially–an individual (parent, teacher, coworker) who is vaguely dissatisfied with the course they’ve plotted for themselves emotionally and professionally and are looking for avenues to change. And although I wasn’t entirely sure they were talking to me and my concerns right now (the gall!), I think one of the fundamental strengths of the book is its realization that our professional lives and our “private” lives cannot be easily compartmentalized. Many of the strategies they packaged as useful tools for “personal” conundrums could work equally well in the office environment and vice-versa. One of the central themes of the book is a focus on abundance rather than on scarcity, trying to get people to see where the possibilities lie instead of allowing them to focus on the lack they experience around them.

As an example: Ben puts forth, in the early pages of the book, the response “how fascinating!” when one is faced with a major snafu. Things do not turn out as planned, your goals are not met, reality does not mesh with the idea. Your first response (or, let’s be honest here, MY first response) is “dammit! Why did this all go so WRONG?” (or, in keeping with honesty: Dammit! Why won’t the house sell? Why am I going to lose money on it? I don’t want to live in this teeny space with one bathroom for four people! Argh!) Ben suggests that, instead of allowing the internal tape reel to play “dammit” over and over again, we take in our surroundings and say: “How fascinating!” This positive response demands of us that we see the possibilities–unexpected, unplanned for, not ideal–inherent in the situation we have, not in the situation we imagined we wanted.

We cannot always determine the paths our lives take, or what happens to us along those paths. I have made a decision to, at least temporarily, walk away from a tenured job in the humanities. This is a dream job. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of people out there on the job market who desire more than anything in the whole world the life I’ve just walked away from. Those people imagine “If I just had a tenure-track job/tenure, then everything would fall into place and I would experience fulfillment on the professional and personal level.” But it isn’t so. I was fulfilled in my job and in my life, but my partner wasn’t and I like him more than any ole job, so we picked up and moved to Canada. My original plan: “We’ll try this out for a year or two and then I can pick up my career where I left it off” is likely a totally delusional one and, with a wee bit of hindsight, I have no clue what we were thinking when we imagined that there would be some sort of smooth, navigable path for me to take once I moved up here. And so part of me is frustrated–what was I thinking!!! But, I’m not unhappy. My family is together, for pete’s sake, and that is worth a very great deal, and I have projects to work on. I’m a bit concerned about money in general (will we have enough?) and in specific (I want to earn my own) but I am really embracing the “how fascinating!” plan.

This is Neuland for me, Terra Neuva, and there is no point in wishing and pining for the professional life I know. Instead, I am looking around, figuratively and literally, for the possibilities inherent in the life I have now. I will look for academic jobs in my field, rare as rubies, but will also cast a wider net and learn about who I can be and what I can do in a new environment. I want to write, and read, and be with people, and do meaningful work, and have time for fun. There have to be possibilities.