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.

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.

The Birth of Cool

Bookkeeping: Dreams of My Own Library

Sometimes I sit in bed and surround myself with books. Usually it’s a weekend morning before I have fully woken up, and I’m wrapped in my sweater coat—picture an afghan with a hood and sleeves. A cup of tea steams on the nightstand. The books sink between folds of quilt and sit on top of pillows. I’ve pulled off the shelf any novel or essay collection that might offer an inspiring sentence or paragraph and allow me to think in that slow, thoughtful way where ideas and images take their time shifting across my consciousness. I flip through the books, read a page here, a line there. Sometimes I know what I’m looking for, a section underlined in pencil or notes in the margin. Other times, I let the covers fall open to see what a book wants to tell me. I pretend it does, in fact, want to tell me something, and it’s fun for the moment.

It’s not just that the books are imparting a message. It’s that the writers are speaking. They put themselves into these works. I’m sitting in bed surrounded by books, but really I’m surrounded by voices, by people, by the lives and intellects of writers whose words endure. The paperbacks and hardbound works wait for me on my shelves. The physical books are comforting. I can keep them and open them when I need to, and they feed my imagination and take me out of myself. Having them neatly lined on the shelves is soothing. They remind me of the work I want to do and the things that I have learned and studied. Too much of the everyday makes us forgetful of art and thinking and ideas. Books counteract the routine.

So it is always with some consternation that I try to explain this to people who don’t desire shelves filled with books. They don’t seem to understand. They want to know why I keep so many volumes, especially because I have had to move frequently over the past few years. Yes, I keep taking my books with me. Everything else in my life may be transitory, but at least they last. Friends who have helped me move refer to my “library.” The truth is I do want my own library. I want an entire room filled with books. Maybe I could even get one of those ladders that wheels across the shelves. And maybe a secret passageway behind one—yeah, I’d like that. That would be like living in a book.

I learned recently that one of my relatives won’t let her husband keep too many books because they collect dust. They also pile up if you love them as much as I do—but isn’t that why shelves were invented? While I understand the avoidance of clutter, it never crossed my mind that books would constitute clutter or that anyone would actually believe they did. The situation perplexed me.

Of course, for other people, it’s not books. They feel the way I feel about books when it comes to vinyl records or surfboards or baseball cards or antique trains or paintings (my relative has many of those on her walls, so for her, I realize, it is art). I can appreciate these kinds of collections. The saving, the preserving, the reminders of what we’re passionate about. They are the things we keep because they say something about who we are.

This past weekend, I had to pack—again. Maybe it’s because I don’t know exactly where I’m going yet, but whatever the reason, it was particularly painful to take the books off the shelves. The set of Joan Didion first editions, the series of Virginia Woolf books—they were in their place, and putting them into storage felt neglectful and wrong. I set a few choice books in a bag to keep with me while I find a new stopover. That seemed to help. In any case, it will have to do. Moving my books time after time can feel like an impractical and unnecessary burden. But they make me happy—in the same way R. says sports and music (and his books, too) make him happy.

I’m hoping they—I—will soon be in a new home—but that’s just it; for so long I haven’t felt like I’ve been in a home, only temporary way stations. And maybe the real reason I refuse to give up my stacks of novels and story collections is because I don’t have a place where I belong. Instead, wherever I go, my books make me feel at home.

—C.

How Fantasy Football, Pearl Jam, and Posters Saved My Life (or An Ode to the Little Things)

The following sentence is written in all seriousness:

Sports saved my life.

Coming on the heels of C.’s earlier comments, some may think that I’m making light, trying to be funny, but I’m not. I’m serious.

Sports saved my life.

Clearly the above statement, like an overstuffed suitcase strapped together with buckling belts, requires some unpacking, during which time you will note that the original statement is a gross oversimplification, which neglects other equally oversimplified statements of veracity such as “music saved my life” and “books saved my life” and “Camus saved my life” and “writing saved my life.”

Sports saved my life is not meant to be all-inclusive, but rather it is intended to give a taste, a sense, of the way in which forks and spoons and baseball bats and book jackets can make all the difference in the world, and, in fact, can be the world.

Daniel Gilbert got it right in his book, Stumbling Upon Happiness: we don’t know what we want, what will make us “happy,” and what we think we want, what we think will make us happy, we’re often wrong about. It’s not that guy you’ve been secretly pining over for seven years, it’s not the white picket fence and the kids and the two-car garage, and it’s not that trip to Paris or Peru, though all of those things might make you “happy,” they won’t bring you Happiness.

While I may be departing from Gilbert’s theory at this point, for me, sports are an example of what does make me happy. Fantasy football makes me happy, cooking with (or for) a friend makes me happy, writing makes me happy, and Pearl Jam makes me happy. It’s no coincidence Hunter S. Thompson’s suicide note, if one wants to call it such, was titled: “Football Season is Over.” For Hunter, the symbol of the end was not some grand concept, some abstraction, but plain and simple football.

Why? Because football and cooking and listening to Pearl Jam are all distractions; they are ways of temporarily tuning out the voice that says, “You are going to die.” And the reason that voice is so pointedly insidious is that it makes you ask, “Why?” And no matter how much you twist and turn that lump of gray matter, you’re not going to come up with an adequate answer to that, the granddaddy of all questions. There is no answer (other than the obvious).

So, in order to avoid going the Heming Way, we let sports give us a distraction, a moment to shut the mind off, to block out the ever-present voice, to just be, and to be a part of something, a community, a where-were-you-when (fill in the blank), which, not coincidentally, is why that most famous question still gets asked by people of a certain generation: where were you when Kennedy was killed? And no one thinks of RFK or Jr. or anyone else, they know, and this question, if they have an answer to it, and in telling that answer, it makes them part of something indelible, part of something that will not die, something that the insidious voice cannot get to, cannot take away. And that’s all we really want: to live forever. To not be forgotten.

That’s why writers want to have been a part of Paris in the ’20s or ’50s, that’s why grandpa tells the same stories over and over again, that’s why basketball fans of my age talk about Michael Jordan as a god: we’re telling the voice, ha, I’ve beaten you, you can’t take this away from me, and even when you take me away, this will remain, and with it, I will remain.

For me, sports were the first to do it, to give me the upper hand, to make me a part of something at the primal level so satisfying that I didn’t even know it. Writing followed and cooking and collecting books, and a select handful of other things that touch a spot not quite discernable on the surface.

And when I’m old and gray, sitting in my rocking chair (and I do mean rocking), I’ll tell the grandkids, for the twentieth time, how when I was young—because when I’m old, I’ll look back at this time now as when I was young, even though now I already feel old—I’ll tell them, I used to go see this band called Pearl Jam, and the kids will look at each other and sigh, and I’ll look at each of those concert posters on the wall, each from a different show I saw, and I’ll know that each of those moments is forever, that my grandkids can listen to the CDs if they want, they can hear what that very night sounded like, they can look at my photographs, and nothing, no voice can take that away. That will remain. That is forever.

That will not die.

An Open Letter to the Local Public Library

To Whom It May Concern:

When you list a book on your website’s catalog, and next to that book you list a picture of the cover, and next to that picture you list the edition information, and below that information you list the ISBN number, it would be super if upon arriving at the library to pick up that said specific edition, it didn’t turn out to be a completely different edition of the book, which the librarian on hand confirms is, in fact, not another copy of the book being sought, but the only copy, the copy listed online as belonging to an entirely different edition, but yet, here, on the shelf, is not said edition.

It’s bad enough that sites such as eBay and Half.com employ this lazy and deceptive practice, but you Public Library, you, too?

Is nothing sacred?

Fear and trembling…

-R.-