Which came first - The writer or the mama?

In the south, it’s not uncommon to hear this expression: “Don’t you have people?” This refers to the hired help a woman might have to help keep up with her domestic bliss. Nannies. Lawn Service. Housekeeper.
I don’t have people. However, I have kids (ages 3 and 4), a house, a lawn, and dust bunnies with squatters rights. All of these things make me a better writer. I write during naptimes and after my children go to sleep. My laptop is perpetually open on the kitchen counter. Sometimes it’s ignored. Sometimes it’s there so I can capture a thought I want to work on later. I don’t have time for the muse to appear. I just write.
Joyfully, I am not the only writer/mama to employ this practice to great effect.

Here are a few more moms who discovered that if you love to write – you just might be more prolific after procreating.

JODI PICOULT, best-selling author of twelve novels and mother of three
“I would be with kids all day long and would write until ten or eleven at night. I learned how to write quickly and efficiently, and have never had writers block. Anyone who has ever been pressed to write knows you don’t have the luxury of wandering around waiting for your muse. Some days, I write pure dreck, but I can always edit that the next day. I just plough through and then go back and edit.

As soon as my kids were in school, I had daytime hours to write even though I was interrupted, taking one or the other to and from school at different times. I was writing plots on laundry tickets!

For more check out: http://www.writerswrite.com/journal/sep01/picoult.htm

MARY HIGGINS CLARK, best-selling author of twenty-four novels and mother of five

“When my children were young, I used to get up at five and write at the kitchen table until seven, when I had to get them ready for school. For me, writing is a need. It’s the degree of yearning that separates the real writer from the “would-be’s.” Those who say “I’ll write when I have time, when the kids are grown up or when I have a quiet place to work,” will probably never do it.”
For more check out: http://www.simonsays.com/content/destination.cfm?tab=1&pid=352932&agid=8

J. K. ROWLING, best-selling author of the seven Harry Potter novels and mother to one

“I wasn’t a struggling single mother all the time that I was writing the first “Harry” book. It was only during the final year of writing that I found myself poorer than I’d ever been before. Obviously, continuing to write was a bit of a logistical problem: I had to make full use of all the time that my then-baby daughter slept. This meant writing in the evenings and during nap times. Nobody knows better than I do that I was very lucky — I didn’t need money to exercise the talent I had — all I needed was a Biro and some paper.”

For more check out: http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/1999/03/cov_31featureb.html

So all of the writer/moms out there, I salute you. Put down that laundry right now and go write your next sentence. Maybe it will be about laundry angst. Maybe it will be the first sentence of the next best-seller. You never know. And then drop me a line and share your writing practices and what works for you.

-

Karen Harrington is the author of the psychological thriller, JANEOLOGY. Read an excerpt at www.karenharringtonbooks.com

Overheard at a booksigning

Hello, HerCircle friends. As you might recall, my debut novel Janeology launched last month and I have been out and about promoting the book. So today, I’d like to share some of the most memorable exchanges that have taken place at my various book signings. Enjoy!

Of my books on the signing table.

“Are these complimentary?”

Of the topic of filicide.

“I can’t read this. I read The Lovely Bones and I hated it.”

Of my pitch that it’s about a man trying to understand his wife by way of understanding the family secrets and ancestors in her family.

“Oh, we all have black sheep in our family. My brother’s wife just left him and he’s now realizing it had something to do with her mother.”

Of my description of the book to a kind old man.

“Sounds good. Let me go ask my wife.”

Of my offer to sign a book for a woman.

“Oh, are you the author?”

Of my introduction to the next person who approached my table, “Hi, I’m the author Karen Harrington.”

“Hello the author Karen Harrington.”

Of the mints on my signing table.

“What are these for?”

Of the puzzle on my signing table.

“Why did you cut up your cover like that?”

Of the woman who ran over to my table with her hubby and told me her name was Jane.

Hubby: “If I read this, will I understand my wife better?”

Me: Huh Huh. Maybe. Here’s a bookmark.” (She leaves. Returns 10 mintues later.)

“OMG! My husband’s name is Tom!” (See, the couple in my book are Jane and Tom.)

Of my accidental penning “Very best pictures” (Doh! Should have written WISHES)

Me: “Oh, I’m so sorry. We were talking about pictures, and, well, ha ha…well, if I become famous, one day this will be very valuable.”

INTERESTING STATS

Signings: 3

Books sold: 43

Ratio of male/female purchasers: 30%/70%

The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2008 edited by Lucy McCauley

Travelers’ Tales, 2008
Review by Suzanne Kamata

The traveler’s tale my husband and I tell most often is about the time an arsonist set fire to our Vancouver hotel and I was rescued by hook and ladder. It was a small fire, no one was injured, and we got a story out of it that we would tell for years to come.

Likewise, many of the selections in The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2008, edited by Lucy McCauley, emerged from well-laid plans gone awry. For instance, in “Ski Patrol,” Anne Lamott learns a life lesson from falling out of the chair lift, whereas Laura Resau bonds with her Mexican date’s mother – after he stands her up - in “My Ex-Novio’s Mother.” Kira Coonley writes about the devastating tsunami that wrecked her vacation and changed her life in December 2004, while Kari Bodnarchuk’s contribution, “On the Dark Side,” tells of a kayaking trip in Patagonia that starts off with an overturned boat, and a friend in the water.

Adventure aside, many of these essays bring small, seemingly inconsequential moments to light. Christine Sarkis’ irresistibly titled selection, “ Dipping Girl, Flying Girl, Heart Attack,” is about a woman needing to empty her bladder while enjoying fondue. How she gets to the bathroom is basically the whole story. C. Lill Aherns (“A Simple System”) writes about stoking the coal stove early in the morning in her Korean apartment building.

These essays take the reader from Italy, to India, to Madagascar, Papua New Guinea, and El Salvador, among other destinations. While some detail interesting vacations, others do not fit the usual conventions of travel writing. Momena Sayed’s contribution, “Paradise – Lost,” for example, is a memoir of her life in her homeland Afghanistan during war-time, written while the author was a student at College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. In “A Life Together, Worlds Apart,” Tracy Slater, who is married to a Japanese man, writes of dividing her life between Osaka, where she lives part-time with her husband, and Boston, where she teaches literature and gender studies to the incarcerated through the Boston University Prison Education Program. And Marianne Rogoff’s trip to Portugal (“Alive in Lisbon”) takes her not to a resort, but to a hospital, where she has been invited to read from her book about her deceased infant daughter.

A disproportionate number of these writers have a connection to the Boston area, where editor McCauley lives, which makes me wonder about the selection process. What would have happened if she had cast her net a bit wider? Nevertheless, this is a solid collection featuring a wide range of travel experiences by both established and emerging writers – cheaper than a plane ticket, the next best thing to being there.

A Piece of Cake by Cupcake Brown

Crown Publishing Group, February 2006
Review by Vanessa Dora Murray

It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over!

Cupcake Brown, an attorney who worked at one of the 25th largest law firms in the nation, has traveled all over the country to deliver a motivational speech. “My goal is to hopefully inspire as many people as I can and to let them know that no matter what challenges they may face in life, they’re not alone—and any challenge can be overcome,” she says in one of her many interviews since the writing of her debut book, A Piece of Cake.

A Piece of Cake is an awe-inspiring coming-of-age epic account—written in first-person and Brown’s own vernacular—of hope and survival.

At age 11 Brown finds her mother dead in bed. She is tossed into a sadistic foster home and her life spirals down into a world of physical abuse, rape, drugs, prostitution, and gang banging. By age 13 she finds herself pregnant by one of her johns but lose the unborn baby when she is brutally beaten by her foster mother’s daughter. By her 15th birthday she is told by doctors that she’ll never walk again after she is shot in the back with a 12-gauge shotgun by rival gang members in South Central Los Angeles. She does walk again. But her addiction to crack grows out of control. She hates her life and wants to die so she tries to contract AIDS. By her mid twenties, she walks past a window after living behind a dumpster for days, “And saw my reflection. My eyes were sunk in my head. My lips were burned and scabbed from the crack pipe. You could see my ribs. I had seen death before on other people. But I’d never seen it on me,” recalls Brown. That day was the beginning of her spiral up. She entered a drug rehab, got rid of toxic friends, and without a high school diploma or GED, Brown graduated college magna cum laude. In 2001 at the age of 37 Brown graduated nearly top of her class from the University of San Francisco Law School. Brown has received a slew of scholastic awards including the University of San Francisco School of Law’s Judge Harold J. Haley Award for Exceptional Distinction in Scholarship, Character and Activities, the McAuliffe Honor Society, the National Law School Dean’s List, and the San Diego State University’s Donald Leiffer Outstanding Alumni Award for Distinguished Service.

A brutally straightforward memoir, A Piece of Cake will have readers sniffling throughout this 480 page heart-wrencher sprinkled with a modest amount of humor.

Scholarship Girl by Lesley Wheeler

Finishing Line Press, 2007
Review by Rachel Dacus

Can memories be passed down through generations? This is the question at the heart of Lesley Wheeler’s fascinating new chapbook of linked poems on the theme of her mother’s World War II era Liverpool. The book begins with a poem whose title challenges ideas of thought and memory, and where memory resides. “Remembering My Mother’s Childhood” dares conventional ideas of memoir by giving it a twist: the concept of a parent’s experience transmitted through living language, full-blown and layered as if experienced by the child. That initial poem begins with definitions critical to the question:

When she says stove she means fireplace,
a great soot-blackened maw. When I say
Liverpool I mean an unreal city, purified
of reeking detail like a fairy tale

But this is no fairytale world that Wheeler’s poetry evokes in rich detail. With a startling authentic voice and “remembered” imagery, the poet layers the present day daughter and her questions about origins with cultural inheritance, even questioning the possibility of such questions being answered. She declares the ambiguity of memory in the poem’s last lines: “I invent this blitzed, hungry, smoke-thin world/ because it invented me, and lies/ are my birthright.”

The layers in Wheeler’s poetry are most deeply revealed in the book’s adroit crown of unrhymed sonnets, “The Calderstones.” The initial sonnet sets out its scope of history, making it as solid and yet mysterious as its subject, a ring of ancient stones. The poem ends by showing the destructiveness of time on culture and memory and even on megaliths: “Liverpool shrugs and shrines/ topple.” The callousness of history becomes part of history and culture.

Wheeler’s deeply rooted – if borrowed – sense of place pervades this collection. At times the poems reminded me of English poet Alice Oswald’s marvelous Dart, a book-length poem that traces the course of the river Dart from its source to the ocean, folding in all its people and occupations along the way. At other times, the idiomatic voices and terse commentary made me think of Eliot. Using a rich blend of artifact, dialect and rhythm, Wheeler points to the mysterious accretion of cultural patterning while simultaneously shrugging them off with the observer’s detached stance.

“No elegies here,” declares the last line of the last poem. Yet I felt in these poems a river of plaintive tribute to the power of language to transmit a deep sense of place. The final poem begins with lines that might be anti-ode, an elegy for memories that cannot completely cohere, but still resonate in the time capsule of verse:

There is no way to prove to you how
my mother’s Liverpool sounded,
the slosh, the rattle of it, the catarrhal
school girl recitations of “Daffodils”

there is no grooved disk, no file
to click, no black-and-white child
to stand on the chair for a song

me auntie Mary had a canary
up the leg of her drawers

In refusing to pen elegies, Lesley Wheeler has instead poignantly recreated another world and another time.

Voice of Ice by Alta Ifland

Les Figues Press, 2007
Review by GA. A. Banks-Martin

True Birth

Voice of Ice, a collection of prose poems, by Alta Ifland, an ambitious group of poems in which the speaker seeks to discover her true self. The poems are highly descriptive and many times highly surrealistic often leaving us with the sense that we have just been somewhere familiar but unfamiliar. For example, the first lines of Birth:

I was born in a lapse of time, my hand clinging to a
dandelion, my feet gripping a vine leaf, my nose on my
back, and eye on my ankle.
Of course, no one remembers being born but it is safe to say that this description is far from the truth. However, as the poem develops, so does an explanation:
My mother wasn’t present at my birth or maybe she was
there and her pain of being torn apart still throbs in my veins.
The idea that the infant was born with what seems to be several malformations is really a way of introducing the book’s primary theme: deconstruction of self. The narrator
must return to the point at which she is purest, the point at which all knowledge is innate, to be reborn and reopened to basic learning.

That learning includes discovering there is something worst than being unhappy: having been abandoned by your own unhappiness. As is the case of My neighbors, a couple who have tried to find contentment via plastic surgery and antidepressants only to find that those solutions lead to more plastic surgery and antidepressants. Surgery has left the wife’s face so distorted that it sounds as if her surgeon was really a cubist painter, the husband shows no physical signs malady but has the odd ability to discuss prescribing information and general concerns encountered while taking any antidepressant. They are so unhappy they no longer know they are unhappy; unhappiness has become a lifestyle.

The last lesson of the book is simple, we have been educated to understand everything, is recycled, thus, Even death is no longer final. While the poem Death illustrates this well, the basic thought was quietly developing along side all of the other ideas, as the poet has translated each poem into French, her native language, symbolically, the lost, and regaining of national identity.

Therefore, when we reach the end of Alta Ifland’s Voice of Ice, we have witnessed the fascinating rebirth of a human being, a being free of ego, preconceived notions of identity, national or otherwise, and formal learning. What we encounter about life and ourselves is funny, uncomfortable, familiar and difficult but refreshing and well worth struggle.

The poet, Alta Ifland, was born in Eastern Europe, studied literature, and philosophy in France, and lives in California.

Between Pen and Paper: The Poetry of Habiba Muhammadi

by Shannon K. Winston

I write
To shout
To live
You write
To shout
To live
But who will silence
The shouting between us?

-Habiba Muhammadi, trans. Ibrahim Muhawi

Habiba Muhammadi was born in Algeria and attended the University of Algiers where she studied philosophy. She then moved to Egypt where she earned a degree in Arabic literature. Now a permanent resident in Cairo, she works as a journalist and contributes regularly to a variety of literary and cultural magazines (Handal, The Poetry of the Arab Word, 339).

As the poem that opens this article suggests, Muhammadi’s poetry reflects on her personal relationship to writing. She turns to writing as a space where she can be heard or, in her own words, where she can “live,” “write,” and “shout.” Simultaneously, she also broaches the larger question of collectivity: in the final lines of this poem, there is a pronoun shift from a singular “I” to an “us.” While the reader is not given any definitive answers as to who the “us” includes, what is clear is that there is strife that divides the “us” that should be united rather than divided. When taking the larger historical and political situation of Algeria into consideration, the “we” could refer to Algerians and the Algerian War of Independence and, at the same time, it could also include women who have struggled for so long to be recognized.

The page is the central image that pervades many of Habiba Muhammadi’s poems. Her speaker continually reminds the readers of the writing process as the poem unfolds on the page, which assumes several significances. For example, Muhammadi writes: “This paper is our friend/ It holds ever steadfast/Against the repeated stabbings/Of our pens.” Here, not only is paper a place of familiarity but also one that withstands violence—the violence against meaning, language, and the literal violence that a writer recounts over her lifetime, as well. In another poem, paper links the speaker to her past when she states: “In my room far away/ I write the memory of dead paper/In a barren space/Loneliness speaks words of love/to me..” (231). Far from encouraging the creative process, here, paper represents a dearth of words and possibilities for communication.

Overall, Muhammadi’s poetic style is pithy and clear. Many of her poems are treat very complicated themes within a few short lines of verse. In her preface to The Poetry of the Arab World, Nathalie Handal explains: “North African women throughout their history have been heroes and legends, martyrs and resistance fighters, nationalists, and writers, participating in all aspects of their civilization historically, politically, socially, and artistically” (Handal, The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology, 30). Muhammadi grapples with the past (and all that it entails for her as an Algerian woman living in Egypt) within the confines of the page.

Asylum in the Grasslands by Diane Glancy

The Arizona University Press, 2007
Review by Kimberly L. Becker

The Greening

If, as Diane Glancy observes, “Writing is a conversation,” then we are fortunate to listen in on her latest collection of poems, Asylum in the Grasslands. Author of more than thirty books, Glancy is also novelist, essayist, and playwright. Her many literary prizes include an American Book Award, the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, the Native American Prose Award and a Sundance Screenwriting Fellowship. In Asylum in the Grasslands she devotes her formidable talent to illuminating the history of the Cherokee.

There is movement in these poems: both forced removal and migrations to “the grasslands of the next world.” Spirits of ancestors come and go, since “Distance is no measure.” Women have traditionally been esteemed as leaders within the Cherokee community, so it is no surprise when the spirit of Great-grandmother stops by for a visit. Yet when she speaks in Cherokee, “I shrug in frustration. How do I tell her even the / words of her Cherokee language do not survive?” Glancy acknowledges that spiritual connection sustains even when native language wanes: “I watch the buffalo cross her / cheek. Under the buckskin there are grapevines for her ribcage. / In her pocket a map of pit stops on the large arc of her restless / migration.”

Glancy transforms the ordinary into the luminous. A snakeskin found on the lawn is first “A crackly robe. / Delicate. / Royal. / Something the children / would have played with” then “a robe Clytemnestra wore / after her daughter Iphigenia / was sacrificed.” The speaker rolls the snakeskin in her hand and thinks of “the sacrifice of women.”

Government boarding schools forced Indian children to sacrifice their own culture in the name of assimilation. “Boarding School for Indian Women” addresses the resultant sense of dislocation: “Now our world is taken, and we are / left with this shadow of our making. / The next world is far away.” Glancy’s poems access the past, yet one “beyond memory / into heritage / or ancestral levels of thought.” Her writing evidences what Gerald Vizenor termed survivance. She witnesses to loss, but also to “a power that transcends horror.”

These poems affirm a transcendent power. In the title poem she envisions the Savior as someone you meet “in the prairie grass / his face so full of light he’s milk-eyed / you let his ideas roll over you / you even forget the bitterness you learned / all your life.” In “Buffalo Medicine” the buffalo are at one with the Great Spirit: “…we would run through the prairie / with the wind in our ears. Our large heads pure with mind. The / Great Spirit great as he spoke. Yo. Were his. We grunted / his praises. Snorted and roamed in his will.”

Like wind through the prairie grass, Glancy’s poetry whispers insistently: listen. “Language is still enough,” she asserts in one poem. In this moving book, it surely is.

Dear Talula, a film by Lori Benson

2006, 34 minutes
Review by Nicolette Westfall

Lori Benson potently documents her abrupt transition from new mother to a patient with breast cancer. Although the work is only 34 minutes long, it is an emotionally charged film that reveals great insight into her struggle with a mastectomy and life afterwards.

Footage of peaceful time with her young daughter, Talula, is alternated with the cold reality of the sterile hospital setting, tests, chemo therapy, and doctors. She does not spare the viewer from the raw war cancer takes on her body. A surgeon notes the increased difficulty with reconstruction after the mastectomy, as opposed to a simply breast enhancement.

There is a photo shoot, baring her scar, done with integrity. Flowers go with her to the hospital. Soft lighting echoes the warmth her family and friends provide during the stressful times.

The stark, white lab coats of doctors and surgeons reveal the coldness of accepting life as it is. Benson is one of those women who inherit the grimness of higher chances of breast and ovarian cancer. Whether she will get cancer in her remaining breast is not known—all she can do is continue on with life, but the anxiety and worry is ever present. The majority of breast cancer cases are, however, random, and so, those women may live life thinking they won’t get cancer—until it hits—so live life instead of worrying over it.

Keeping strong for the camera, Benson tackles each stage in the process with as much energy as is physically possible, while taking care of her daughter. When she first comes back from the hospital, Talula is understandably distressed by the change and cannot be consoled. Cancer strikes to the core of not only the patient, but family and friends as well.

She wants to know whether her daughter will suffer the same tragedy. At one point, her father speaks about losing another family member to breast cancer. It is hard on men too. Life in Manhattan, however, goes on, much like the yellow taxis that stream along the streets, taking her back and forth to the hospital.

Recognizing that her own reaction to the situation is paramount to her recovery, she infuses the filming with humour. Jokes about her weight after her chemo therapy—a pound for her jeans—help everyone (including the viewer) cope with the process.

The end of the piece shows Benson swinging Talula around in a park, where there are no stainless steal scalpels or hospital gowns or IVs. They are, for the moment, safe from cancer.

Bruised Hibiscus by Elizabeth Nunez

Ballantine Books, 2000
Review by Mary Senior Harwood

Hidden Truths

The brutal murder of a white woman whose body washes up on the beach in the small village of Otahiti in Trinidad – the result of “man-woman business” say the men — sets this book in motion. Zuela, the Venzuelan wife of a Chinese grocer, meets Rosa, the daughter of a plantation owner, at the shrine to the Virgin in Laventille and acknowledge their shared past as childhood friends. Rosa’s fear is that this murder will be played out again in her own home by her black husband and Zuela finds herself drawn to the shrine to fight thoughts of retribution to her harsh husband who took her from her family and married her as a mere girl.
As playmates, the two girls witnessed the rape of a girl behind a hibiscus bush. Rosa is haunted by the rapist’s repeated mantra, Beg. I know you want it. Beg. When she hears her own husband uttering the same phrase, she fears for her own life. The image of the bruised hibiscus, whose brilliant flowers fade to the same purplish blue as a bruise, recurs throughout the book.

The cast of characters reflects the multi-hued Caribbean society. Rosa is the daughter of a plantation owner, but unknown to all (because of her pale skin and hair) except her mother and nanny, her father was a black man. Cedric, Rosa’s husband, is the son of a black woman and an Indian laborer whose father was sexually abused by Rosa’s father and who committed suicide when rejected by the plantation owner. Cedric’s marriage to Rosa is in part retribution. Zuela represents the population that migrated from South America and her husband, Ho Sang, the Chinese influx, many of whom became merchants like her husband.
Nunez uses the universal theme of violence toward women to echo the violence and injustice of the colonial era. Several events during the years Trinidad worked toward independence from the British Commonwealth frame her story and intensify the dual message of the immediate violence done to the two virtually enslaved women and the history of a country raped and enslaved by colonial masters. When the people revolt, they lash out at any symbol of that power – including Rosa, who they perceive as white.

It is also a book about secrets – the secret of Rosa’s father’s homosexuality, her mother’s affair, Rosa’s heritage. About the crimes that haunt Ho Sang and drive him to opium to forget. About secret passions of love and hatred.

Next Page »