Sitting here in limbo…

Waiting for the tide to flow. Remember that old Jimmy Cliff song?

Even though I feel a tad superfluous writing a review of Lincoln in the Bardo, a book that’s already been widely praised, this is my blog and I get to write what I like.

It’s not really surprising that I loved the novel since I find myself consistently amazed by George Saunder’s fiction, as well as his writing on writing. Hard to think of anyone else I can say that about. Oh, maybe Virginia Woolf and Ursula K. Le Guin. If you haven’t read some of his essays on being a writer, go forth and find them.

I’d been saving the book for a vacation treat and was not disappointed. Frankly, I was awed by what he did with language and the voices of his characters. To evoke 19th-century diction and inject poetic, coined language like hammer blows of Anglo-Saxon is no mean feat. (Reminded me a little of Alan Garner (Strandloper) and Russell Hoban (Riddley Walker) and their attempts to push us out of our comfort zone in English.

The book is a playful, funny, frightening lucubration on death. I read the Tibetan Book of the Dead a couple of times over the years and don’t necessarily remember details, except the parts that were eerily similar to the afterlife judging depicted in Egyptian tombs. I do remember that once you’re in a bad place in your mind it’s hard to get out, your mind generating the horrible things you encounter. The “monstrous” elements of the hell realms were frightening, but there was the subtext that maybe they’d been created by the observer.

I did like the echoes in the story of the Minister, both with the Book of the dead, and with other Tibetan stories about those who “die” and are sent back to tell what they’ve seen (in an effort to get their listeners to worry enough about the Bardo to straighten up and fly right).

I can’t say more about my favorite bits without giving things away. The ending was deeply satisfying and left one grateful for the journey.

A hopeful, warm book, that constantly surprised. It reminds us our mortality is a fundamental reason to be kind.

Let the animals speak

In children’s books we aren’t surprised when animals take center stage, or when they speak. We find that unusual, or “odd” in adult literature (the major exception seems to be fantasy where there are a *lot* of talkative dragons, but that’s another post). And even in kidlit, in a realistic story, the animals have agency and a voice only figuratively.

We don’t need animals to talk to tell us their side of the story (although I like it when they do.) We know what dogs are feeling without any verbal explanations, and they seem to know our feelings too.

Next up in my middle-grade adventures is a story about a girl on the autism spectrum who finds companionship with a stray dog. Rain Reign by Ann Martin takes some pretty big risks. The biggest risk is having an autistic child as the viewpoint character. While that helps us feel her concerns and worldview with great intimacy, Rose’s repetitive interests (homonyms!) and constant repetition of the same questions and thoughts risks having the reader react just as Rose’s father or the other teasing kids do – with annoyance or impatience. I love words, but even I was daunted by intro pages that launched into an explanation of the difference between homonyms and homophones as my entree into this world. Maybe my attention span has been eaten by the Internet, but this felt like an uphill climb for the first pages of a book aimed at 8-12 year-olds.

I enjoyed the book, but because I react differently than an autistic individual would, it was all too easy for my reactions to diverge from Rose’s. I was baffled by her constant nagging of her father who clearly had a hair trigger temper and was dangerously close to being violent. It felt so wrong to me that a child wouldn’t read that. Of course that is “showing” that Rose can’t read feelings, but again, I felt distanced from her.

What was absolutely great? Descriptions of her relationship with the dog she’s named Rain, and the physical descriptions of Rain’s affection for her. When Rain is lost during a hurricane (Rose suspects her father let the dog out deliberately so she’d run away) there is a Quest to locate her again, and Rose does find her dog. I won’t spoil the plot by revealing more, but by the end of the book Rose chooses to sacrifice her love for Rain to follow the “rules” and I felt unsatisfied by the ending. Losing both her parents, and the dog she loved, we don’t know whether Rose’s future will be better or worse.

This book reminded me strongly of another book that deals with autism and moral choices about animals, How to Speak Dolphin. Again we have a less than sympathetic father, and an autistic child dependent on a relationship with a captive dolphin to be able to interact with the world. There are major differences, though, including the fact that in Dolphin,we see the world through a sibling’s eyes, and the moral choice is whether to privilege the needs of that autistic child over the rights of a captive dolphin. I think that makes that a good candidate for my next middle-grade adventure!

You lose one, you win one?

Amazon took down one of my reviews for reasons known only to them. The more I interact with their services, the more random and irrational their algorithms appear to be. I’d say this was a good argument for postponing the advent of our robot masters as long as possible. Life is random enough just dealing with humans.

But it balances out, because a great reviewer of kids’ books has just posted a review of my book on her blog, Cover2Cover, where you can check it out. Thank you, Stephanie!

Update July 21, 2018: As far as I can tell, the review was taken down because that review was written by someone I had a link to from my FB professional author page (which I don’t use, BTW.) Really, is FB anything other than a way for tech giants to spy on us and collect our data?

Crow Lore #2

At least two of the definitions used to separate humans from other animals that were common when I was a baby anthropology major have since fallen by the wayside.

The first to go was the idea that our species was the only tool-using species. Of course, research on chimpanzees, dolphins, even dung beetles, suggested maybe that was too easy a definition. Meanwhile, the crows were sitting back and laughing at us.

The other rubric, which seemed even more persuasive, was our effortless, embedded capacity for language. But there’s growing evidence that other species have something very like language, and in fact it may be our own lack of precise observations that led us to that conclusion (also the difficulty of observing animals who swim and fly).

Crows speak in dialects, and they change their pronunciations when they move to join a new group so they’ll fit in. According to ornithologist John M. Marzluff and author Tony Angell (In the Company of Crows and Ravens) their calls “vary regionally, like human dialects that can vary from valley to valley,” and “When crows join a new flock,” they wrote, “they learn the flock’s dialect by mimicking the calls of dominant flock members.” Crows have popular kids, too.

Listen to crow calls here.
What do they mean?

(Thank you Cornell ornithology lab.)

hands of two people bowing to each other, gassho

Time for a gratitude list

So today was the end of the local “genre” (aka sf/f CON)FogCON, wherein our heroine finally admitted to real people, in person and outside of her day job, that she is publishing a book and it’s not all just something happening in the confines of her skull, or between her and the glowing screen.

I’ve never really publicly thanked all the people who helped me to get to this point – and let’s face it, it takes a village to nurture a book until its ready to spread its fledgling wings and leave the nest, pages flapping happily in the breeze.

So in no particular order I’d like to thank:

My first Beta reader, Bryan-Kirk Reinhardt
My second Beta reader and long-time intellectual inspiration, Kathy Whilden, who read the book aloud to her grandkids
The unnamed grandchildren, especially K who wrote me a wonderful letter about the book. You know who you are and thank you for encouraging me.
The wonderful writer Ginny Rorby who ‘doesn’t like fantasy’ but liked what I gave her to critique anyway and then generously agreed to blurb it while trying to meet her own deadline for the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference
My stalwart copy-editor, Laura Blackwell (I added a comma there just for you)
Every cool writer who took the time to talk to me at writing conferences – Terry Bisson, Jo Walton, Catherine Ryan Hyde, John Lescroart, (I know I’ll forget someone)
The workshop participants in Barbara Rogan’s online writing workshops, and Barbara herself for her support and critiques
U.K. Le Guin for inspiring me in so many ways, and for talking to me about dragons
Kelley McMorris for making my dream of a cover come true
The generous authors who have critiqued part of my book, especially Christine Fletcher during the Oregon Children’s Book Writing Workshop
The kind strangers who read my book and then wrote reviews on Amazon, giving me invaluable feedback
And last but not least, Jude at Borderlands Books for letting me put out my print copies during the Con!
The wonderful person who bought the first copy, making me a real author (and publisher). You know who you are. Thank you!

I’m grateful to you all.

A big thank you to my new readers

I just want to give a shout out to the generous folks who have graciously written reviews of my debut novel. I know it’s hard to find time to do all the things we have to do, so taking a chance on a newbie writer is a big commitment and I am so grateful for the support.

Sometimes writing seems a bit insane, spending so much time talking to yourself about people who don’t really exist. But getting positive feedback from readers makes it all worth it.

Thank you!

International Women’s Day and Jane Addams

Yes, I’m a day late, but that’s because I’ve been thinking about this for several days and wanted to get it right.

Jane Addams is one of those amazing women who were famous and revered in their day, and then somehow disappeared from sight, in spite of winning the Nobel Peace Prize, her contributions and influence swept away by changing fashion, and dare I say it, because her social ideals are labeled too “feminine.” Ideals like feeding starving children, providing healthcare and education for immigrants, and keeping us out of World War I (for which there was a great deal of support across the country). Oh yes, and for supporting something as outrageous as the 8 hour working day.

You know, all those girly things.

She was a great hero of mine when I was a child, one of the few women included in my K-12 curriculum. A little hint of 1890s radicalism remained in our curriculum, thanks probably to the influence of Dewey and the Lab School in Chicago, since I grew up near Chicago. When I hear the nonsense spouted about immigration in our country right now, I think of her wise and thoughtful approach to considering the value immigrants bring to their new country, as well as what we owe to them. The same arguments and rhetoric we are hearing now have been used over the last several hundred years with astonishing regularity, from the time California passed a law to expel the Chinese, to deploring the “dirty and degenerate” Irish or Italians or Poles or Greeks in Chicago in the nineteenth-century.

Jane Addams addressed this head on at Hull House, set up to provide assistance to the wretchedly poor and exploited labor pool fueling the wealth of the stockyards, the railroads, and the other companies run by the titans of industry in Chicago.

I read her autobiographical account, Twenty Years at Hull House in college and was surprised at her cultural approach to the immigrant communities. The arguments she was making were anthropological arguments for the differences in how the different communities adapted. And her insights about the embarrassment the children of immigrants felt for their parents’ old country ways were very shrewd. Hull House’s Labor Museum of crafts and industries from the ‘old country” helped the younger generation appreciate the skills and knowledge of their parents:

“There has been some testimony that the Labor Museum has revealed the charm of woman’s primitive activities. I recall a certain Italian girl who came every Saturday evening to a cooking class in the same building in which her mother spun in the Labor Museum exhibit; and yet Angelina always left her mother at the front door while she herself went around to a side door because she did not wish to be too closely identified in the eyes of the rest of the cooking class with an Italian woman who wore a kerchief over her head, uncouth boots, and short petticoats. One evening, however, Angelina saw her mother surrounded by a group of visitors from the School of Education who much admired the spinning, and she concluded from their conversation that her mother was “the best stick-spindle spinner in America.” When she inquired from me as to the truth of this deduction, I took occasion to describe the Italian village in which her mother had lived, something of her free life, and how, because of the opportunity she and the other women of the village had to drop their spindles over the edge of a precipice, they had developed a skill in spinning beyond that of the neighboring towns. I dilated somewhat on the freedom and beauty of that life—how hard it must be to exchange it all for a two-room tenement, and to give up a beautiful homespun kerchief for an ugly department store hat. I intimated it was most unfair to judge her by these things alone, and that while she must depend on her daughter to learn the new ways, she also had a right to expect her daughter to know something of the old ways.

That which I could not convey to the child, but upon which my own mind persistently dwelt, was that her mother’s whole life had been spent in a secluded spot under the rule of traditional and narrowly localized observances, until her very religion clung to local sanctities—to the shrine before which she had always prayed, to the pavement and walls of the low vaulted church—and then suddenly she was torn from it all and literally put out to sea, straight away from the solid habits of her religious and domestic life, and she now walked timidly but with poignant sensibility upon a new and strange shore.

It was easy to see that the thought of her mother with any other background than that of the tenement was new to Angelina, and at least two things resulted; she allowed her mother to pull out of the big box under the bed the beautiful homespun garments which had been previously hidden away as uncouth; and she openly came into the Labor Museum by the same door as did her mother, proud at least of the mastery of the craft which had been so much admired.”

Twenty Years at Hull House by Jane Addams

What has this to do with International Women’s Day? Addams was especially active in the International women’s movement, becoming one of the founders of the organization later known as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. If you read the historical accounts of the conference they held after Hitler came to power in Germany, it’s chilling to realize that every one of their assertions about the danger of Germany re-arming (with American arms and resources) proved true. If the boycott they urged had happened, if Americans had forgone the profit they were making from Germany, who knows how history might have been different. It’s a complex subject and you can read more about it here.

Controlling a writer’s legacy

I suppose this falls under the category of mordant humor, but I’ve been thinking about how much of my life is on disk lately, old disks at that, and this pops up in the news.

To ensure that his unfinished works won’t see the light of day without him, Terry Pratchett stipulated that his hard-drive was to be run over by a steamroller.

“It’s surprisingly difficult to find somebody to run over a hard drive with a steamroller.”

Myself, I plan to take my old laptops (and a lingering palm pilot) to a place in Richmond where apparently there’s a huge machine that chews them to pieces and spits them out. Not as classy as a steamroller perhaps, but who wouldn’t want to watch that? Then I can go forth into the future with a more organized file system and the ghosts of documents past taken care of (not to mention the tax returns).

Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem

A reference to this poem appeared in my twitter feed and I had to go reread it. I used to have this posted on my office door, in a clipping from the Christian Science Monitor, back when I was an academic librarian. I kept the yellowed clipping for years because the poem was a story about the power of writing and description, of naming the unspeakable, giving the reader power over it. Her words are matter of fact but powerful, and I was also fascinated by the painting of Akhmatova (above) that illustrated the article. by Nathan Altman.)

INSTEAD OF A PREFACE

During the frightening years of the Yezhov terror, I
spent seventeen months waiting in prison queues in
Leningrad. One day, somehow, someone ‘picked me out’.
On that occasion there was a woman standing behind me,
her lips blue with cold, who, of course, had never in
her life heard my name. Jolted out of the torpor
characteristic of all of us, she said into my ear
(everyone whispered there) – ‘Could one ever describe
this?’ And I answered – ‘I can.’ It was then that
something like a smile slid across what had previously
been just a face.
[The 1st of April in the year 1957. Leningrad]

From the poemhunter site

Tatterdemalion

A person in tattered clothing; a ragged or beggarly fellow; a ragamuffin.
OED