What Is It About?

The books no longer sit piled in paper Trader Joe’s bags but fill shelves in our new book room. A dark-stained old-fashioned writing table I found on Craigslist occupies the corner of the bedroom by the windows. It beckons. We’re almost settled, almost without excuses to put off a serious writing regime. We’ve been to readings and award ceremonies and seen our names in the acknowledgments section of Kermit Moyer’s recently published novel, The Chester Chronicles (fantastic to hear Kermit bring out their humor in his reading). These have made me want to read more and wider, in attempt to catch up with all the publications that beg to be explored. Perhaps it’s like the story of the man who throws the beached starfish one by one back into the sea. You do what you can, and maybe it makes a small difference in a way that is enough.

The tension between reading and writing is like the tides; one tends to dominate the other at different times in my life. I’ve been reading and thinking and trying to understand the physical process of letting go, the actual mechanism of what it means to be unaffected by what hurts. Sounds nice. I can comprehend the idea. I have no concept, though, of it’s actuality on anything bigger than someone cutting me off in traffic. I return to the book room. I ride the bus and look at the titles of the books the other passengers are reading. I can’t read on a bus or the Metro or in a car—I get motion sick if I look at my shoes let alone words strung together in printed sentences. So I glance at the novels and books others hold. One woman smiles as she turns the page. A man wrinkles his brow as he balances his book on his lap. Someone once told me that D.C. is the most-read city in the nation and as evidence pointed to the line of newspaper boxes at bus and Metro stops. Either way, it is reassuring that so many books ride the bus with me.

Something else that has been occupying my mind is the question both friends and strangers ask about my writing: What is your story about? They ask this as if it were a simple question. Maybe it is. But I do not have a straight-forward answer. For me, and, I would imagine, most writers, stories are not just about plot. When I try to explain the plot, I stumble over my speech, rush through a summary with burning cheeks—my story sounds ridiculous when I try to describe it out loud. The word “trite” comes to mind. Even worse, if I try to avoid a plot description and talk about “themes,” I find myself grappling with abstractions and wanting to excuse the story for being too dark.

I’m never sure there’s a good way to talk about something I’ve so carefully crafted to speak for itself. It’s like trying to describe a painting. It’s not just about the overall picture; it’s about the brushstrokes, the technique, the historical time period, the inspiration for the picture, the state of the artist’s mind at the time it was rendered, the events that influenced each hue. Sometimes I think I write so I don’t have to talk about the story—just tell it. Other times I have trouble answering “What is it about?” because I know the person asking thinks I’m aspiring to be the next Michael Crichton. I wouldn’t mind those kinds of royalty checks, but I don’t think I could write like that even if I set out to do so. When my writing “works,” it is because I stopped trying to force it to be something it isn’t and doesn’t want to be. I’m still discovering what it does want to be, but it tells me very quickly what it doesn’t want. Sometimes getting the story right requires reshaping and restarting; other times it requires scrapping an idea altogether. There’s that letting go again. Some ideas don’t want to be let go of and keep coming back in different forms. My latest storytelling struggle keeps emerging each time I restart; I am still deciding what to do with all the material that doesn’t seem to be working.

What is it about? It is about a process and all the jumbled thoughts that were shaped and disguised and finally emerged with much crafting and sharpening and exploration and warping of reality. It is about seeing the right colors emerge in an intricate narrative. It is about catching the rhythm. It is about creating a piece of art that stands on its own—so I don’t have to explain.

—C.

Mr. Jefferson's Cherry Trees

Don't Let the Sun Go Down (On Me)

A Bit of Verse

Faith Has Been Broken

We’re all dancing to shattering glass
Muffled screams, unseen blood --
Arterial red against pale skin, already scarred.
Someone’s laughing from the corner table,
the wooden one made from an old barn door,
Initials and hearts carved in it and a jagged, knife-penned statement:
And you thought you knew the answer.
And more piercing graffiti:
Fuck them all.
You can’t help but agree.
But we’re dancing now and you’re aren’t thinking about anything;
you’re lost.
You hear the words to Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses,”
They couldn’t drag you away.
The mirror behind the bar reflects hundreds more bottles
-- Crème de menthe green, Curacao blue, syrups raspberry dark --
Glossy glass cracks reality in this fire yellow light.
Spinning together, movements complementing and familiar,
We ignore crunching bottle bits under our shoes;
For it’s now in this moment and
time looks like forever at the event horizon.
But the juke box quarter runs out
And I know atoms split outside black holes
and even light can’t escape.
You look up, and
as you catch sight of yourself in the mirror, your eyes say
Drag me away.

--C.

Kissing the Blarney Stone

Happy St. Patrick’s Day.

The St. Patrick’s Day I was in kindergarten, I searched for leprechauns in my backyard. I thought I might actually find one on this particular St. Patty’s Day. The air misted and hung gray; any green growing after the winter snow was bright and promising. At school, we ate green Jell-O shamrock cutouts my mother had made, and my teacher told us she had seen a leprechaun during her morning drive. My teacher was a tall, brown-haired woman whose favorite color was purple. Once she yelled at me for speaking too loudly in answer to a question she asked from across the room. She laughed about me “yelling” at her with another teacher later. I overheard them. I resolved never to wear purple to school or smile at her again (yes, we Irish, even at 5-years-old, know how to hold a grudge). When she told us about the leprechaun, though, I wanted to figure out if her story were true. A rainbow had actually appeared that morning because of the fog, and I had desperately sought the end of it from the car window as my mother took me to school. When I got home that afternoon, I put on my raincoat and took my little brother outside to search for leprechauns. We didn’t find any. We did, however, discover signs of one: a patch of moss spreading across a tree stump and some orange mushrooms growing next to it. For the rest of the afternoon, we watched the stump from the kitchen window hoping to see a leprechaun appear.

No leprechauns today so far, but I’ve been thinking about my Irish grandmother. She died only a year after our leprechaun search, and so I didn’t get to know her as well as I wish I had. But one of my favorite pictures of her was taken when she visited County Cork, Ireland, from where her family came. The Blarney Stone is five miles from Cork, in Blarney Castle, and the picture is of her lying upside down to kiss the stone. Kissing it is supposed to gift you great eloquence, a charming power of words. My grandmother loved to read, and even though she never received a college education, she read as much as she could. I’d like to think I inherited her love of books. So I’m wearing green in memory of her.

--C.

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars

Caesar: Who is it in the press that calls on me?
I hear a tongue shriller than all the music
Cry "Caesar!" Speak, Caesar is turn'd to hear.

Soothsayer: Beware the ides of March.

Caesar: What man is that?

Brutus: A soothsayer bids you beware the ides of March.

...

Caesar: The ides of March are come.

Soothsayer: Ay, Caesar; but not gone.

--C.

When All Else Fails

“Chocolate is a perfect food, as wholesome as it is delicious, a beneficent restorer of exhausted power. It is the best friend of those engaged in literary pursuits.”—Baron Justus von Liebig

Rosemary mint. Wasabi and ginger. Coffee. Curry. Pomegranate. Blueberry. Cacao nibs. Orange. Pear. Lavender and cloves. Chili and cinnamon spice.

These are just some of the flavors of chocolate we’ve been discovering and tasting lately. Some come in bars with names like Xocolatl, Black Pearl, Fire, Refresh, Sexy, and Pleasure. Others are more literal; Earl Grey, Citrus and Chili, Salt and Pepper. Most of these can be found at one of our favorite chocolate shops—Biagio. The place is like a jewelry store for chocolate bars; it’s impossible to walk out of there in a bad mood. Just below street level, the store is easy to pass if you don’t know better. But once you do know, you won’t be able to help yourself. Every chocolate lover in the neighborhood frequents this place.

It’s a cold and dark winter Tuesday evening. A man in cycling gear stands by a shelf and quickly chooses several chocolates. Another customer studies the two different chocolate bars in her hands, then sets one back on the shelf.

“I’ll get that one next week,” she says.

The door jingles and a young woman wearing a brown knitted scarf enters. She walks straight to the counter.

“I’m trying to remember which chocolate my boyfriend likes best,” she says to the clerk. “His name is Scott.”

The clerk, a woman with curly white-gray hair and a strong New York accent, seems to know who Scott is; at least she takes the younger woman over to a shelf and points out different bars. One of her suggestions is a chocolate bar flavored with sea salt. This may sound strange, but it’s pretty fantastic. Think sweet and salty combinations. There’s also salt and cracked pepper. Last week we came across a peppercorn-flavored bar, though we opted for another with rose and ginger instead. It tastes like rose petals and reminds me of the perfume my Ukrainian relatives would bring as gifts. Strangely enough, the combination of spice and flower is quite good.

Soon I’m the only customer left. Of late, I’ve been on a quest to find the perfect chili-and-cinnamon-spice chocolate bar (ancient civilizations in Mesoamerica—the Olmec are thought to be the first—made the first chocolate and flavored it with chili spices; the Aztec called their rich chocolate drink xocoatl, which Hernando Cortez brought to Spain and sweetened with sugar, vanilla, nutmeg, cinnamon, allspice, and cloves), so I ask the clerk what she recommends. She approves of my choice of Christopher Elbow’s Dark Spice bar. When I also ask about a raw 100 percent cacao bar, she suggests I try the store’s best seller: Pralus of France’s 100 percent cacao bar . She breaks off a piece for me. I’ve never tried chocolate made from 100 percent cacao before; the closest was a 99 percenter R. and I found the other month. We enjoyed it, but the bar was sort of powdery and took some time in your mouth before its flavor and texture could be appreciated. The Pralus bar, though, was creamy with subtle fruit and flower flavors. Let’s just say we’ve since purchased several of them.

The most interesting thing about trying different chocolates has been discovering how much flavor pure chocolate contains. Chocolate from different countries and continents tastes of a variety of flowers, fruits, and spices—it all depends on the soil in which it is grown. Because of these nuances in taste, savoring a quality piece of chocolate is similar to sipping a fine wine. And having synesthesia adds color to the subtle differences; for instance, I see a lot of soft reds and pinks with the Madagascar chocolate bars we’ve been trying. The Pralus bar has a kind of bluish gray in it. The rose one actually evokes a lavender hue.

I have to mention one more chocolate lover’s stop in the nation’s capital: AC/KC. The best thing about this place is that you can order rich hot chocolate in different flavors named after “The Divas.” I keep ordering the Lucy—a cinnamon-and-chili-spice concoction that takes its name from the fiery redhead of comedy. There are also the Audrey Hepburn, Liz Taylor, and Eartha Kitt. R. ordered the lavender-infused Liz Taylor last time. We’ve also tried the Ginger Rogers, which contains dried ginger and wasabi.

The next chocolate bar I plan to try is salted caramel. Or maybe another spice-flavored bar. Or maybe a rich xocoatl drink. There are worse addictions.

—C.

Marilynne Robinson's Home

The snow is still here, dirty and piled on the sides of the road. Lawn chairs and ironing boards stake out parking spaces. Neighborly shoveling and snowbound parties have turned into shouting matches and threats. Driving to work is an obstacle course of potholes and lanes that end in snow mounds. The one good thing about the longer commute is that I have more time to listen to a recording of Marilynne Robinson’s Home.

My feelings on Robinson’s third novel are mixed. (I should note that I have not read Gilead, to which Home is a companion.) When I first started listening to Home, I worried that not enough was happening in the present action to keep my attention, especially because I was listening to it rather than reading it. However, the Virginia Woolf–like meditations on place and people soon drew me in, and the novel took shape as an intense interaction between a brother and sister who haven’t seen each other in twenty years. The relationships among the characters, who include an ailing father, give momentum to the book's thoughtful and deliberative telling. And while the tension and emotional awkwardness sometimes make the story painful to listen to, they demonstrate Robinson’s skill in storytelling.

Now that I am closer to the end of the book, though, I am feeling a little tired, not of the characters’ pain so much as the many scenes of the father’s sermon-like opining on his son’s twenty-year abandonment. Perhaps part of my irritation is that the reader of the recording attempts to imitate an elderly man’s voice that is extremely grating and strained. The father, the Rev. Boughton, has too much to say to always be heard in such a voice. We’ve also heard his emotionally painful introspection several times. These lectures finally build to a crucial scene that explains more and pushes the story past the bounds in which it has so far remained. The scene is a relief for the reader—before this moment, so much is still unsaid and unexplained.

Home’s brilliance is Robinson’s portrayal of the characters. They are complicated in their sins and good intentions, and while I don’t always like them, I do care what happens to them. In both Housekeeping (her first novel) and Home, Robinson reveals her characters layer by layer so that by the end of each book, the reader realizes that one of the main characters is much further from mental stability than it at first seems. The recognition is kind of horrifying. In the case of Home, we get Jack, a well-read, clever, and intelligent middle-aged man who has struggled with alcoholism and keeping a job. We know he has stayed away from his family for two decades, but the true fragility of his mental state does not emerge until later in the novel. More and more he seems to be living in a reality suited to an angst-riddled teenager. Both novels turn out to be portraying characters for whom homelessness is home; Robinson depicts an almost imperceptible line between stability and instability, between having a home and surviving as a drifter. For Jack, alcoholism is merely a symptom of a seemingly innate sadness and loneliness his father says he has displayed from birth. It is also connected to past events, but the novel seems to be saying that Jack’s lack of place, his separateness, his rejection of his family’s help and love, is inevitable.

I am nearing the end of Home and waiting to see how this sense of inevitability plays out. It’s been a few years since I read Housekeeping, but I remember feeling as if it contained a kind of magical realism. By the end of that story, the realization of homelessness seems almost surreal, and I wondered if I’d read the book completely wrong. Home feels more grounded and because of this, is more emotionally affecting.

—C.

And Auchincloss and Zinn, too.

I'm not sure why writers come and go in groups, but they do. Bloomsbury and the Left Bank and New Journalism brought the world great groups of writers, and this week, Salinger and Auchincloss and Zinn leave together. Maybe it has something to do with apartments in Heaven and the need to find amicable roommates, in which case, god speed, God, good luck with J.D., but as intrigued as I am by Salinger's Pynchon complex, and the possibility of 14 (!!!) or more unseen manuscripts in that safe, Zinn and Auchincloss may be lesser known, but it seems hard to say lesser writers, so let's not forget to crack the spine on an old copy of A People's History of the United States or one of Auchincloss' presidential bios (at least for me, that's how I came to know his writing) as well as that underlined, annotated Catcher in the Rye.

As Thompson once wrote, "There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die."

Selah.

So it goes.

J.D. Salinger, 1919-2010, "Who Wants Flowers When You're Dead?"

J.D. Salinger died yesterday at the age of 91. In many ways, as R. remarked, it seemed as if he had already been gone for many years: his reclusive life included locking out the world from any new writing. I wonder what we would have gotten to read had he continued to publish, had he written for his readers rather than for himself (as he reportedly claimed). It will be interesting to see if any of his later writing becomes public. The New York Times had an informative piece about him here.

When I read The Catcher in the Rye as a teenager, it was, not surprisingly, the titular passage that stuck with me most:

Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around—nobody big, I mean—except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.

As R. said, take Catcher or Nine Stories or Franny and Zooey off the shelf, and read Salinger at his best.

—C.

Image courtesy of boston.com

Beneath a Benzedrine Sky

The Book Thing

I am staying in a room filled with books. In my own bedroom, the books lining the shelves are ones that I have already read. It's comforting to wake up to them and see the familiar titles, remember the tales in each, feel safe in the knowledge that almost all of those books have been read. Here, though, are many books I have not read. It's a bit daunting. As I do in a bookstore or library lately, I stare at the titles unable to decide on one that feels right, that will get through to my psyche in a way that means something, is affecting. Not a dystopian tale, not one with an estranged husband or an already-dead character, not one about unrequited love or love gone sour with no redemption. Anything too peppy or too trite or too philosophical without enough in-scene narrative seems dull as well. Nothing feels right. I stare at the books and think about starting one. It isn't just that I've been lacking in reading time. There's some story I want to read, but I can't quite put my finger on it, can't quite articulate what I'm seeking.

Another case in point. R. and I went to The Book Thing—not a bookstore but a warehouse in Baltimore packed with books. Free books. Hundreds of volumes filled the concrete rooms, and I could not choose. Maybe it was because the building had no heat, and the temperature was in the 20s. The winter air derailed any slow, thoughtful opening of covers and flipping of pages. I could think only about getting warm, which led to frustration about losing the opportunity to take any and as many books as I wanted. (Base needs triumph over intellectual desires every time; the intellect cannot function when the body is too cold.) A sense of being overwhelmed by unlimited choices also plagued me; usually I select only what I really want, for lack of money, for not wanting to waste, to avoid the guilt of an unread stack of reading; too many unopened books waiting in a pile can be unnerving.

Shelves and shelves of books—something I love. It’s just that lately, none seems to get at the right thing. And I realize this: I'm waiting to write the story I want to read. It's hard when life gets in the way and so many other things need taking care of before I can sit down to write. The perfect writing time and writing space is elusive—I must once again learn to create in the in between spaces. This usually works when something is going well, when my mind is fluid and in shape and focused on a project. But now I must restart. It’s like I've been sick for a long time and my body has forgotten how to run with a sense of freedom and strength. It's back to short, flat runs that are slow and cumbersome. Again I must build and build before I will be able to re-cross the pain threshold and remember why I do this at all.

So maybe it’s not a dissatisfaction with the books I have yet to read but a dissatisfaction with the shape of the book I want to write. The stories of others are irritating because none tells it just like I want it to, as I would tell it or see it. Perhaps this awareness will help me to write. Perhaps it is just another quirk in the constantly changing process that is fiction writing, that is living and working and creating. Either way, I keep thinking of something Toni Morrison said: “If there is a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”

—C.

And He Said Unto the Lord

Baba's House

My Baba’s kitchen smells of baking bread. The scent hints of vanilla, rum, and orange peel. The loaves are braided and filled with poppy seeds or shaped like large muffins topped by a cross formed in the dough. The breads line the counter, cooling on wire racks.

"Baba" is Ukrainian for grandmother. My Baba has recently stopped dying her hair blond and lets it curl gray around her head. She looks like her mother now, when she got older, she says. The cane she uses she calls “Schmirko,” or little rascal, and since the surgery on her leg she is getting stronger and relying on Schmirko less.

“Don’t tell anyone I baked; I wasn’t supposed to,” she says. She blesses each loaf by making the sign of the cross with a knife.

Dried mushrooms tied together hang on the wall by the door. She brought them back from her last visit to the old country, where her cousins took her and my mother hiking in the Carpathian Mountains. Pictures of my own cousins and their babies decorate the refrigerator, kept in place by flower magnets. In the window, between two lace curtains, a prism bounces refracted light across the room onto a reproduction of da Vinci’s Last Supper. A ceramic frog sits by the sink, holding a wet sponge in its open mouth. The frog and a set of ceramic jars were made by my aunt who died the year before I was born; some fluke of the flu stopped her heart. If she were still here, she would be a Baba, too.

Next to the ceramic jars is a porcelain cottage; the roof comes off, and inside is a flask of vodka.

When I discover this, Baba pours us each a “jigger” and tells me to toss it back. The liquor burns as it goes down my throat. She decides we need two. It’s only three in the afternoon.

The clock on the wall ticks the seconds, and the wind rustles through the neighbor’s trees, rattling the slightly open windows. Outside by the shed is a round grill. Baba burns any trash related to religion in it. Withered palms and old pussy willows from Palm Sunday, papers with icons, old church bulletins, and flowers from last week’s service all go into the grill. They can’t be thrown away like regular trash; they might be desecrated, Baba tells me. She keeps a book of matches in her raincoat pocket for when she has enough trash to set a fire.

The inside of the shed smells of gasoline for the lawn mower and moist soil and also of plastic—the beach ball and kiddie pool my cousins and I used to play with are still there. Garlic bulbs, braided together by their leaves, hang in a bunch above the shelves of tools. The garden outside is filled with marigolds, and in the center sits a statue of the Virgin Mary. Once on a late summer evening, I saw my grandfather pray by it on his knees. It was when his kidneys were failing him, and my grandmother pleaded with him to go on dialysis.

The trees we used to climb are gone and so is the vegetable and herb garden where I used to pick dill for potato salad. Only a row of evergreens lining one side of the yard remains. Now I sometimes rake up the sap-sticky pinecones so the grass can be mown.

In the kitchen, I put a kettle on for tea.

“The train is arriving,” Baba says when it whistles.

I pour the steaming water over tea bags in two large mugs and take them into the sitting room. In the closet are afghans and pillows and old hat boxes that no longer contain hats but hold whatever trinkets and clothing my grandmother has decided to save. She still has my mother’s Girl Scout uniform and prom dress. There’s also the Styrofoam mannequin head with a wig. My cousins and I colored in her eyes and lips and used to stuff clothing with pillows to make her a body.

Once, we set her in a chair and my great-grandmother covered the life-size figure with a blanket.

“Your friend is cold,” she told us.

We decide to put on Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. I lean back in the armchair rocker where my grandfather used to sit when he rested in the afternoons and watched Bonanza reruns. Next to the chair, on a long chest with a record player inside, is a picture of him. In it, he is twenty-two. It is just after the end of World War II, and he is at the displaced-persons camp in Germany where he met my grandmother. He is leaning against a tree, wearing a white scarf over a dark sweater. He holds a cigarette between two fingers as his arm hangs down alongside his leg.

“That’s my favorite picture of him,” Baba says.

—C.

Stop. Do Not Pass Go.