Jordan's Muse

2009-06-25T10:58:00.000-07:00

Well gang, change is afoot. In the past year since my son was born being a mother is just too much a part of my life not to also be a part of my blog.

So from here on out you can find writing related blogs at: www.jordanrosenfeld.wordpress.com
and my personal takes on life and motherhood at: www.musinmom.wordpress.com.

I thank you all for following along here for these wild years!

See you in other locations.

Jordan

2009-05-05T17:18:00.001-07:00

Things Nobody Wants to Admit...

If I were to write a book about motherhood it would be titled: Things Nobody Wants to Admit About Being a Mother. Ever since making the unexpectedly hard transition from a "dyad" to a "triad" as my husband likes to say, I have kept little mental notes to myself about the things you just don't find in books, and none of your friends with kids really tell you ahead of time. These are the things you assume no other mother at the park is thinking or has ever felt, because strangers don't talk about these things. Only close friends will usually admit them to each other.

Lately, on the scale of minor evils, I've been finding myself desperate for the moment my son takes his nap or goes to bed, literally counting down minutes. And the irony is that he is more fun and wonderful than ever. It's not his behavior that's driving this in me. Being that he's nearly a year old (and oh my god how did that happen??) you'd think I'd have the hang of this whole motherhood thing. While aspects of it do come much easier and pretty much any stage past newborn is a walk in the park in comparison, after a year of spotty sleep and obligation and not being able to exercise, write, think or make love to your husband without either guilt or rush, you start to crave wider expanses of time. And I'll confess that my son goes to a babysitter 12 hours a week (in which I work, write, exercise, eat, call friends, read, etc) and I still feel this way. And my dear friends with multiple children will laugh when they read this and say, 'honey you 'aint seen nothin'...but these are MY confessions after all. Confessions of the unprepared mother of one child.

(And the really weird part is, even as I write this, my son is pulling tissues out of a box and making himself laugh and I just want to scoop him up and hold him for hours.)

2009-05-01T13:47:00.000-07:00

Confessions

I did not get my brother or sister a birthday present. I have not yet made any plans for a mother day gift for my mother. I have stuck my kid in his roundabout walker so as not to have to try to entertain him more times than I can count these past couple months as we have grappled with the bizarre and frustrating process of trying to buy a home.

We walked away from one home, and I'm relieved and glad about it. The mojo was just bad. Bad no matter which angle you looked at it from. But we had to let go of our attachment first.

Now we've entered the new reality of home loans--one in which, thanks to all the scummy mortgage practices of the past few years--they're dotting more than their i's and crossing more than just their ts...we are literally at the last few feet of the race and suddenly some guy with a stop sign and a badge has sprinted out onto the track and he won't let us finish until he decides a certain thing.

I know I'm lucky to even be in this position. I don't want to become an entitled person. But I am so frustrated with the process.

JPR

2009-04-28T17:28:00.000-07:00

Retreating into the Woods

I haven't posted in awhile. I have lots of things on my mind that seem as though they would make good blog posts--observations about human development, details of cupcake gorging, discussions on the nuances of trashy television shows--but by the end of the day the last thing I have energy for after mothering (and editing and writing wherever I can squeeze it in) and preparing for the biggest purchase of my life, as well as a move, is blogging.

So you'd think then that tweeting would be a happy alternative for a busy bee like me, and yet the idea of trying to condense my life down into tweetable lines is, in its own opposite way, equally mind numbing. I also can't keep up with all the tweets of people I allegedly follow. So I'm starting to feel, if not quite luddite, then just too damn tired or old to keep up. This feeling separates me from all the generations younger than me, and a good portion of my own Gen X. I admire those who can keep up, who can follow hundreds of streams of information and contribute their own and not GO INSANE in the meantime.

I'm suffering a backlash, I think, from all this easy instant access to information. I realize that just because one has access to information does not make the information valuable. I want to go sit by creeks and hang out in forests. I want to hide from the technology in the solitude of growing things, which do not have to be plugged in.

2009-04-20T19:31:00.001-07:00

Heat Wave Nostalgia

Last year right after Mister B was born we had a horrible heat wave--about 105 or so for a week and then 100s off and on all summer. I was shell-shocked from, you know, becoming a new mother, stumbling up every couple hours, nodding off while nursing, with sweat running in just about every possible uncomfortable nook of my body, the poor kid stuck to me. Beside the couch where I nursed him was a little "sickbed" table with a tall glass of water, a glass of juice (both with straws in them so I could sip and nurse at the same time), and some sort of snack, like a banana or yogurt, because inevitably I was starving at some point in the middle of the night. Days were blurred as I tried to nap. Bedtime was often as early as 6:30 as I crumpled into a heap. It was awful, frankly. But awful in a kind of nostalgic way like young addicts remember the halcyon days of partying and awful hangovers. I wouldn't go back, but I sort of miss it.

This heat wave (only 90s, thankfully) is bringing it all back: the whirr of the portable air conditioner my husband bought that saved the day, the cloying feeling of our tiny place when all the curtains are drawn to keep the heat out, putting on boxers and a tank top to sleep in and stripping the flannel off the bed for cooler cotton. The difference is that I no longer feel like a zombie ate my brain or that my blood has been replaced with pure hormones. I'm still exhausted at the end of a day, still ready for that blissful moment of silence when the kid finally craps out, and it's still damn hot--but I can finally say that they were right all along (they being the chorus of other parents who urged me on): it does get easier. Different, yes, but easier. Better. More like a real person again, albeit one who goes to sleep and wakes up each day thinking of one 20 pound human being before anything else.

2009-03-31T16:09:00.001-07:00

If You Love Something...Let it Escape From a Trap?

I keep this blog alive purposely for the excuse of venting. Most of the time I vent about stuff related to being a mother, which after 10 months, is still mostly an exercise in blind ignorance coupled with exhaustion. Today I'm just off. Things are going poorly and I am having difficulty staying positive and seeing the messages and determing what I'm supposed to learn.

Our favorite feral kitty, one of two born in our backyard just two weeks before my son last summer, whom I took to the spay clinic to be spayed at last this morning, escaped from her trap as the man was carrying her inside. Clearly the word "trap" is a misnomer. Tupperware would have been sturdier. She escaped outside into their little garden yard, so the only hope of catching her is that she might hang out long enough and get hungry enough to re-enter the death cage (as I'm sure she sees it) that we brought her in. And I'm pretty sure she's pregnant. So not only did we not get to keep our favorite kitty, I'm pretty sure I just fostered an infinite lineage of feral cats in the wilds of San Martin. And I liked her. She let us touch her and would come into our house for a few minutes at a time. Now she's gone, no longer has a steady food source and is knocked up to boot. And it's my fault. I'm just bummed and there's no way around it.

And then there is the big situation that remains unresolved all because of the fierce stubbornness of a woman who is going to lose her home anyway...which she could have done without dragging us and three very hardworking real estate agents into the mix. She didn't have to sign a contract agreeing to sell it to us. But she did. And yet...we wait in silence wondering what she's thinking since she won't call anyone back.

And please don't leave me a comment saying to keep looking. We are, of course, but I'm just sort of beyond frustration now--in a totally other place beyond patience that has no name.

I'm not saying all is bad...there is a lot of good. I spent a great morning in the park with my fellow mommies. My boy is a wonderful, funny light in my life, I have a fabulous marriage, my health, an income and so on...I am grateful.

But for a little while I just want to feel as disappointed as I am.

JPR

2009-03-19T15:38:00.001-07:00

Patience in Laying Down Roots

My husband and I are trying to buy a home. Our first home. We know how lucky we are to be in this position given the state of the economy. But we've also worked really hard and saved a lot of money. We're doing this all on our own, without family help or other kinds of assistance. And in the middle of what was already an exercise in patience as we waited three months for our offer to be approved by the seller's bank (short sale anyone?), we've hit a very frustrating snag. A snag that makes us both want to stomp our feet in frustration like children because there's very little we can do to make things progress.

I don't want to go into detail about it, but here's an analogy: Imagine you interviewed for a job you really wanted, one that was perfect for you. They made you wait a very long time to finally say that you were hired--so long you'd almost stopped thinking you would get this job. You filled out your paperwork, bought some new outfits but before you could go in for training, they called to inform you that the person you were replacing refused to leave this job and until they could find a way to convince this person to leave, you couldn't start your job. And, in fact, if they couldn't get this person to leave that person would have to be forcibly removed, which would take many more months before a resolution. It's just like that.

But despite this level of frustration, I've been absorbed lately in getting to know my community better. Being a new mom has led to a whole bunch of new friends and opportunities for get togethers. Something about getting together over food and drooling babies at parks and each other's homes, coupled with the lovely almost-spring sunshine makes even this biggest frustration in my life feel not so bad. That, and the continually evolving antics of my ever-changing nine-month old boy make me really happy. There's so much to be happy about in my life. I have SO MUCH and I am lucky, and grateful for it. So even though the physical home is still a little slow in coming to us, I feel like the roots are already being laid, and I know the rest will follow.

2009-03-18T20:07:00.001-07:00

Accepting Help

My friend Jen just had her second baby, and everything is going so beautifully for her. The baby was born at home in a super-speedy (and intense) tub birth, both she and the baby are in primo health. They've been able to get a ton of sleep, and friends have lined up to bring meals and love and do dishes, etc in the two days since the baby was born. The energy at her house is so lovely. She's so happy. It's the experience she didn't get with her first child, so I feel doubly happy for her.

And, I have to admit, kind of envious. When our boy was born (9 mos ago!), I was so shocked and sleep deprived and overwhelmed with hormones, and slammed by the heat wave that I didn't even begin to reach out. People called and offered help and I didn't take nearly as much of it as I needed. My family did their absolute best but ultimately my husband ended up doing much of the care of me and the housework. I didn't open my world to the help that, I see now through Jen's modeling, would have done us so much good.

It's just a lesson. We can't re-do it and we have no plans for a second baby, so let it be a lesson to anyone reading: let people help you when you have a baby. Be open to their care in every way possible.

2009-03-12T13:35:00.001-07:00

Baby Time

The mysterious thing about raising a child is how the time can move so glacially and yet so swiftly at once. If you are at home with your child even several days a week you know what I mean--a child's day passes in many small increments, inside which so many things happen. Whereas my free hours tend to pass in a blur of activities, where I can hardly recall what I did over the course of several hours, my time spent with my son is broken into various forms of play and discovery, acts of changing diapers and feedings, attempts to distract fussy moods and capitalize on good ones. By day's end I feel like I worked a full-time job in one day.

The first four months of his life did not move fast for me at all. Wakefulness and hormones combined in such a way I often felt like I couldn't wait for the next minute to pass--and I was counting the seconds. And yet suddenly he's 9 months old and sitting up on his own, can play by himself, is trying to crawl and speaking his own little babble language that gets more complex every week. He's not the helpless little newborn anymore. He eats solid food--he doesn't fuss in the car anymore. He's changing so fast.

So it is going faster all the time, but I'm glad that I still get to experience baby time, the languid pace of learning about the world as he explores it. And I know he'll be in kindergarten before I know where the time has gone.

2009-03-02T12:26:00.001-08:00

Ad Nauseum

I know that everything about the abortion debate has already been said, on both sides. But this is my blog, and I feel like venting. The anti-abortion cabals with their ridiculous cries of "protectors of the unborn" are already readying their arsenals against Obama's nominee for Dept. of Health & Human Services, Kathleen Sebellius because she's staunchly pro-choice and her position would have the ability to make decisions about abortion.

Here's what I always want to say to pro-lifers. Nobody WANTS an abortion. An abortion is not something one looks forward to gleefully or with joy. By keeping abortion legal you do not therefore encourage women to get pregnant just so they can go out and have one, I promise you! All of the women I know who have had them see it as a very dark but necessary event in their lives, one that freed them from making the WRONG choice for a potential child, such as being too young, or broke, or with a person who was not good for them, or unable to care for a future child in some other way.

And once again, I say, if the pro-lifers want to argue that no cluster of fertilized human reproductive cells should be aborted, then those same people better think twice about education and birth control.

I am so sick of the pro-life movement. SO SICK. Protecting the unborn? You want to protect the unborn? Fight for funding for health care. Fight for helping low-income women get better educations and wages. Fight for educating young men and women about what happens when you have unprotected sex. Leave the women and their families who have to make hard, beautiful choices not to bring life into the world when it isn't in the best interest of either party, alone.

2009-02-18T17:02:00.001-08:00

Sleep is the New Sex...and Things that Piss Me Off

I read in a recent NYT article that, for parents, "sleep is the new sex." Got a good chuckle out of that. I'm fortunate not to have forgone one for the other yet, but I totally get where this is coming from!

***

I hope I don't offend anyone by saying this, but I'm kind of tired of hearing people say "Cherish every moment with your little one" and other variations. I understand the sentiment--they do grow up so fast and you never get these moments back (unless you count video)! But c'mon, do I really have to cherish EVERY moment? The diaper disasters and the screaming fits? Waking up in the middle of the night and the worry that comes when your child is sick? I reserve the right to enjoy MOST of them. Plus, it makes the speaker sound a little bit like they regret something. Feel free to call me an ass.

***
On the topic of things that irritate me...why don't other parents accept that we know our minds about having only one child? That's all we want, all we're planning for, and I make no judgment about the numbers of other people's broods. But if I could have a nickel for every time a parent has given me that condescending smile and said, "Oh, you think one is easier? Just wait..." and then proceeds to assure me that my child will be a monster or hellion demanding all of my time and lacking in social skills...I'd be buying my house in cash. You know what? I was an only child (yes, I have half siblings but they didn't come along until I was a teenager). I know some who know me might say: SEE, you're a freak! Guess what? I read a lot, and wrote a lot, and kept out my parents' hair. I didn't turn into a sociopath. I used my--gasp--imagination.

So please, I know two kids play together and that bigger families are cool, and in general I dig the idea of siblings, but it's not in our plan. That is not our choice. Why is that so hard to accept??

2009-02-04T16:56:00.000-08:00

Just when I was feeling like I had somewhat of a handle on this mothering gig, especially around our dreaded issue of sleep, someone comes along to remind me that I don't have the ovaries to teach my child how to sleep properly. This person didn't do so purposely or in so many words--she was simply discussing her style of teaching her child and the children she nannies for to sleep. I'm envious, in fact, that she has been so successful. But once again I'm up against that wall: follow the Dr. Sears, gentle, loving baby-first approach that suggests letting them cry it out alone is unnecessarily stressful, or follow the gazillion other "experts" who suggest that it does no harm and it's just weakness and bad habits on the parents part for not going through with this tough-love system.

Maybe I am weak and afraid of putting us all through nights of screaming. I honestly don't know. I can't sort out my instincts from the external input.

And the reason I even talked to this woman is that our wonderful babysitter who is so good to our son and so flexible, is moving. In two weeks.

I'm bummed and this is a crappy post.

2009-01-27T09:56:00.000-08:00

Love (in theory)

When my husband and I were in the foggy wilderness of our son's first couple months (a cruel landscape!), a friend of mine came to visit. Her son is now 14 years old, but she was able to recall vividly how she felt when he was first born.

"I think in the first three months," she said, "I only loved him in theory. I was too tired to feel the love I knew was there."

This made so much sense to me that I felt guilty for how powerfully I resonated with it. Limp with fatigue and glazed from hormonally induced dementia and anxiety, what I felt for my son was fiercely protective, overwhelmingly dedicated, but something as sharp and known as love hadn't quite crystallized yet. (Loving a newborn is a little bit like loving a meat grinder or a bread maker: you put something in, and something comes out and that's about all). It was as though my body loved him, but my mind hadn't yet had a chance to tap in.

I know that some other parents out there will read this in horror (except for those who had similar experiences). But since I emerged from that dim and strange time of the first few months, it was clear that I loved him. Loved him not just because I was supposed to, but for who he is. Once a baby begins to smile and laugh and pick up objects, you get the glimmers of a personality, though it's still too formless a thing to really be called personality. And in seeing who your baby is, for me, at least, love comes gusting up like the Santa Ana winds--hot and overpowering and all consuming.

Over these months--he is now almost 8 months old--there is no other word for how I feel about him. I love him. Fiercely. Miraculously. It is, as my mother always told me, a totally different, unique kind of love from any other you'll ever feel. Though feedback is nice--when he reaches for me, or laughs with me--it isn't required. He won't have to buy me flowers or write me pretty cards or make an effort to earn my love. He gets a free pass to be loved. Of course, he'll piss me off and try my patience and sometimes we'll feel like we don't love each other, but I always will.

2009-01-20T18:39:00.001-08:00

Thoughts on Inauguration Day

Today makes me incredibly hopeful that my son will spend his first four, hopefully eight, years in a country that earns back the meaning of democracy, and that puts service back into everyday life.

**

Is it just me, or do the media sound positively gleeful? I love how unabashedly people are celebrating who should be impartial. Only the comedians will miss the Bush administration.

**
Damn, that Michelle Obama is TALL. I only just noticed.

**
The only bummer I can think of re: Obama's election is that Ann Coulter and Bill O'Reilly will take insufferable to new heights. Fortunately, I don't have to watch or read them.

2009-01-12T14:00:00.000-08:00

We Chose This

We've been going through a rough patch lately, mostly, I think, out of resistance to what is. Sometimes I pretend that 7 months ago my life didn't just turn on its head, and I try to carry on as I did before: I shove all the baby toys into a box out of sight, I plop the kid in his high chair with a handful of toys to keep him busy, I check my email, or read a book or try to make something to eat...and then, of course, within whatever time frame that is entirely up to the kid, he gets bored, or hungry or cranky and begins to fuss...or scream. And my head jerks up from whatever I'm doing and I remember: OH YEAH...I have a child. He's not a puppet, or a kitten or something I can ignore for very long. He has needs, and I don't really have much right to feel frustrated or irritated by these needs.

After all, we chose to bring him into the world.

My husband and I had to remind each other last night that you don't have children so that your life will stay the same. But sometimes we need to remember this when it's hard. When the word patience feels like Greek; when he's pooped all up the back of his onesie and kicking his feet into it while you try to clean it and put diaper rash cream on his butt--for the second or third time in an hour; when he pitches holy hell in the middle of the night for no really good reason you can figure out--not cold, not hot, not hungry, not lonely--if anything, just pissed off to be awake; when you wake up with a kinked neck and bleary eyes but still have to do it all again.

I write about the difficult aspects of parenting a lot. But it's not just to complain, believe it or not. I do it because I feel like I have to really probe people to get the truth out of them about how hard it was/is and I want to offer an honest voice about the process to anyone looking. Because if you don't look for validation, you give in to despair. Lots of mothers despair in silence. I think that pretty much all mothers in the fifties drowned their despair in gin and valium. Which sounds really great some nights, I gotta tell you, but of course I won't even take benadryl while breastfeeding for fear it'll make my kid sleepy. Yeah, I know, I'm afraid to make my kid sleepy--crazy! My fear is actually that he'll never sleep again once he's had a taste.

At the same time as he drives me to the ends of my frustration--usually around sleeping--he'll start "talking" to himself in the back of the car, and laugh his butt off when his dad brings him around the corner to see me, and I fall in love with this kid again and again. Thank god...or there'd be sixty of us on the planet, not 600 billion.

2009-01-09T09:34:00.000-08:00

Which would you throw out with the bathwater: baby or spouse?

One of the parenting blogs I like to read, Dooce, by Heather Armstrong, asks a question to mothers out there in a recent post. Is parenthood (presumably the baby part) harder, or is marriage?

I'm surprised how many people in her comments said marriage! I have a hard time understanding how communicating with a fellow adult who can speak full English sentences and has made a conscious agreement to commit his/her life to you can be harder than dealing with someone who screams their needs most of the time, has no idea who, what or where they are, and poops in their pants, to boot.

Before I had a baby I might have (foolishly) thought that marriage was harder, but now I look back at the most challenging times in my marriage (which are luckily few) with envy--they look like paradise compared to the hardest times as a parent so far.

I still am convinced that many, many parents, especially mothers, fear speaking the truth about how hard it is for fear of looking like a bad parent, as if CPS is going to turn up on your doorstep simply because you admit you--gasp--lose your patience with your child and yell, or for appearing ungrateful. Mothers are especially pressured to appear as if we never so much as think a bad thought about our children.

When I was pregnant, nobody told me about the difficult times ahead--I guess they didn't want to break the magic spell of pregnancy, that time of beautiful ignorance. The only thing that anyone told me about was the sleep deprivation, and even that was downplayed to suggest I might be just a little bit tired, as if I'd stayed up late reading. I didn't fully understand how serious SD was, that I would feel trapped in an eerie fog, stuttering (literally--I stuttered for 2 weeks after giving birth), stumbling and grasping at reality between feedings, while my husband hovered over spoon-feeding me like an invalid. It was only recently that one friend pointed out to me: even the Geneva Convention does not support sleep deprivation as a form of torture because it's TOO CRUEL :)

Still, maybe I'm luckier in my marriage than some, or maybe I just find it more challenging to be responsible for a human life than to express my feelings to my partner.

JPR

2009-01-08T17:45:00.000-08:00

7 months today!

2009-01-06T18:06:00.000-08:00

For Any Parent Who Thinks They Had a Hard Day...

I just watched a show about a family with sextuplets--six babies at once. This mother manages to get six babies to eat and sleep on a predictible schedule and by 9 months she and her husband are training for a marathon. Hello, isn't raising six babies a marathon? But more to the point, how come I can't get ONE baby on a predictible schedule?

I'm just not militant enough. If I had six, I'm sure I'd be a lot more willing to let them cry. In fact I'd probably put ear plugs in and let them go to town. But I have only the one. And he has proven that he will not just cry for twenty minutes if a need is left unmet or you want him to sleep without aid. He will cry for an hour and twenty minutes, and writhe and twist until his head is pressed firmly into the wall and he sounds like a chihuahua being eaten alive by dingos.

You can tell me all you like about how I've spoiled him, or how I need to tough it out, but I no longer believe my child will be ruined by this. Now, when he's two, there will be a new Sheriff in town.

2009-01-02T10:29:00.000-08:00

The Ole' New Year's Post: The Year of Patience

I know, it's not even New Year's day but this is still my New Year's post.

So, how to begin reflecting on the massive change of becoming a mother this year, since anything else I participated in or achieved pales in comparison? I've always been one of those people who feels as though I am the first person to experience something. As if trillions of other women and men have not had their lives turned upside down by the small person who takes over the very second they exit the womb. Actually, I think there was a time socially when, thanks to the proximity of womenfolk--aunts, cousins, sisters and their offspring--that having a baby was not such a big thing--what else did you do anyway other than darn and knit and cook and have babies. So essentially I can thank progress and women's rights for the fact that my life has gone all helter-skelter since my fresh-faced new arrival. I mean that in a positive way. I'm lucky that I was so used to my freedom that a baby put a quick yoke on all that.

7 months after our son's birth, I can say that I underestimated a lot about myself before becoming a mother. Oh, and I overestimated a lot, too. This child is teaching (or trying to, at least) me patience and selflessness and things I will confess I thought I already had going for me. Woo baby have I been schooled! He's driven me face to face with my dark side, too, but of course--and here comes the Hallmark sentiment--he's exposed me to some pretty remarkable feelings I didn't know I was capable of. Powerful-die-for-you kind of love.

But most of all, I've come to see that parenting is a messy, imperfect art. Most things are out of your control and what little you can control changes fairly rapidly. As my friend Erika likes to point out, parenthood is like being a kind of mad scientist who continually experiments and tries new things, hoping for an answer, a pattern, a cure.

I don't know if I'm a better person yet, but I sure as hell aim to be. He's definitely made me excited about the world again, eager to share it all with him. And at each intolerable stage of his babyhood, it passes and he grows more into a person and I am ever more aware of how fast it's all going. He'll be in college before I know it.

I think that 2008 can comfortably be called my year of patience. Waiting for his birth. Waiting for him to sleep through the night. Waiting to feel like I have an iota of mastery at this motherhood gig. Still waiting for a lot of it, but I'm glad he's here, glad to be changing, and glad I waited 12 years with the right man to do it.

2008-12-29T15:36:00.000-08:00

Going With the Flow

I had no idea before my son was born just how much pressure there is to parent your child in a certain way--much of it silent, locked into subtle responses and judgmental looks, more peer pressure than outright admonition. The American way is, as you'd imagine, to kickstart your baby's life as a rugged individualist from the get-go. Don't dare let your baby sleep in bed with you; absolutely do not respond to his every cry--in fact, let him cry longer, show him who's boss; don't bother breastfeeding if you find it inconvenient; organic food? Too expensive. All of these habits, will, naturally lead to a spoiled maniac of a child who believes himself to be an omnipotent master of you who will run rampant as an adult, turning into a less successful version of Donald Trump issuing commands and expecting the world.

Ha!

I don't know where these ideas come from. Research doesn't back them up. There exist oodles of books supporting the "cry it out" method for "sleep training" your baby (read: so that you can sleep through the night), all which decry any negative effect on baby. Yet research has proven that babies left to cry it out have increased cortisol levels, and can suffer multiple negative effects on their biology and psychology in numerous ways, as well as learning not to trust that their needs will be met. The latest issue of Mothering magazine has some fabulous articles written by doctors on the benefits of bed-sharing with infants that point out how erroneous this thinking is.

Yet every time I read something about attachment parenting--going with the rhythms of your children for the first couple of years and not worrying overmuch about systems and methods or timelines--the more my heart sings YES...this is for me. YES, this is the kind of parent I am.

I know several whiney, "spoiled" children who, whaddya know--were not even breastfed or slept alone or basically took a backseat to their parents' needs at every turn.

With each passing month of my son's life, the more I am convinced that following my heart, my instincts and our rhythms, even if they can't be penned into a perfect schedule, is the right thing to do. For us.

2008-12-16T06:18:00.000-08:00

Total Surrender

My dear friend Susan wrote me a poem before my son's birth. At the time I first read it I just thought it was a beautiful poem. Now, I read it over and over again like a set of instructions.

The first line is:

"Babies want only one thing from you: total surrender."

It's true. My husband and I were blown away, that first night home with our boy, at how we quickly became the befuddled and inadequate pages to this powerful Prince who screamed his demands (I try not to resent the creator for giving such an unnecessarily loud voice to such a small creature!) for hours on end and could be quieted only by vigorous swinging and, eventually, the breast--when the milk came in.

Now that he is no longer a newborn and seems at times more boy than baby, it's easy to interpret "total surrender"" to mean the way an empire wants to conquer smaller countries. So I try to marshall understanding for what it's like to be a six month old baby. While he can sit up by himself for short periods of time, he is completely dependent on us for his mobility. And since he speaks a language that nobody but he understands, there's a lot of room for misinterpretation of his needs. I imagine it's like being put in jail in a foreign country--you're dependent on your captors.

Still, I must repeat Susan's line a lot to myself lately: since his morning waking time has moved from 7:30 a.m. to 5:30a.m.; when, after being clung to all night, he doesn't want to sit and play alone during the day, but only to be in my lap; when he pitches a fit at having to be in the car seat or stroller; when he will play for hours with his daddy but cry after a short time with me...when a short blog post takes three separate sittings to write...I know these are small things...but when they're your world, they add up.

It would be so much "easier" to be a bad parent...(wasn't there a time when it was common to put a little gin in the baby's bottle?) but it's just not an option.

I surrender.

2008-12-08T13:51:00.000-08:00

Attachment Parenting

One of the first lessons of parenthood--before the child is out of the womb--is that parents are people with vehement opinions. I find it amazing how often someone will dish out advice without stopping to think of how individual babies are even though they all meet relatively the same milestones as they develop.

Therefore, I won't be surprised to receive comments from people on what I'm about to write. There's a method for "sleep-training" babies known as the "Ferber" method--otherwise called the "Cry it out" method. Basically you let your baby scream in the middle of the night rather than go to him until he eventually gets the message that you're not coming and starts going back to sleep on his own. These babies are said to learn to sleep through the night on their own much faster than other babies. (Let me just put a note here that babies who do not get responded to after enough time eventually stop "asking" to have their needs met, which can have very negative consequences in a developing child). Now--for those parents who have successfully done cry-it-out and seem to have well-adjusted children, to you I say bravo! I am not made out of your kind of mettle.

I come from the "attachment parenting" model, touted by Dr. Sears and others. In this method you don't let baby cry it out--at least not alone, and you also don't subscribe to the bs that by helping your baby get back to sleep you are creating a monster child who will beg you to come to his house and put him to sleep at age 40. Around the world families sleep with their babies and answer to their every cry and they turn out adjusted, happy, productive members of society. Only in the US would we worry about coddling our children by showing them too much love. There's a difference between nurturing and spoiling. Spoiling, to me, means never setting limits and indulging a child's every desire when they're old enough to know better. Babies need as much love as you can give them, even at night. They are sponges for love, and the more you give them, the better for everyone.

This brings me to the next big lesson of parenting: Parenting is about sacrifice. The reward is in loving your child and seeing him grow. Sacrifice isn't a bad thing, either. Most of us are who we are in large part due to our parents' sacrifices--even if only the early ones. Even if your parents were terrible :) When you do it for someone you love, it even feels good.

2008-12-04T08:33:00.000-08:00

Tower of Babble

My 6 month-old has begun to "speak" in what sounds like some Native American language to me. I don't say that to demean Native Americans in any way--my son's language is very complex and interesting. In it, I swear I can hear the origins of all languages. There are other moments where I hear the makings of French or German, and even sometimes, I'm sure it's a Scandinavian tongue like Icelandic or Swedish. There's a phrase he repeats that sounds downright Hindu to me. The potential in a human infant to speak any language is massive and I only wish I knew fifteen languages so I could give them all to him.

I believe that people who speak multiple languages fluently from early childhood actually get a wider picture of the world, more metaphors and ways to see and think of everything. As a writer, I'm envious of that.

2008-11-19T12:33:00.001-08:00

New Blog Digs...

Okay kids, it's official--I got me a fancy-type blog over at wordpress for all that there per-fesh-un-ull stuff. Check 'er out: http://www.jordanrosenfeld.wordpress.com/.

Meanwhile, if you want rants and ramblings about new motherhood, irritating neighbors and the antics of my local street people, stick around here. Posts may be few, but they will be.

Also, remember that it's not too late to sign up for the FREE Write Free e-newsletter, jam packed full of juicy tidbits for Nov/Dec, 2008. It goes out Monday, so if you'd like to sign up for this issue, which features Litpark's Susan Henderson and musings on what it means to be creatively courageous, do it now by going HERE.

2008-11-13T13:42:00.001-08:00

May This Blog No Longer Suck

I've been going about blogging thing all wrong--I've known this for a long time but have done nothing to rectify it. Part of the problem is that I first started a blog as an exercise in online journaling. I halfheartedly tried to create a blog themed to my book Make a Scene and was going to post tips and suggestions and exercises geared toward the book. Then I thought about doing the same for my book with Rebecca Lawton--Write Free. I still want to do this, but you know what they say about best laid plans. In my case, I didn't want to spend money and couldn't figure out how to scan and upload and do all the cool tech stuff that a typepad or word press blog required. (If anyone wants to trade me editing/writing services for html assistance, I'm still game!)

Another failing: I should cultivate a world-weary, semi-snarky voice that rides the edge between self-deprecation and iconoclast. I should post pithy thoughts in a McSweenys-esque tone about books I've read, popular culture and politics. Instead, my default setting is somewhere between prissy and whiny.

So while I'm unlikely to be able to do much about my tone, folks, why wait until January to make resolutions? I think the time is nigh to do things differently. I think that I'm ready for a SERIOUS blog. One where I post on a regular basis and have something to offer. So...I know I've said it before, but I'm sayin' it again: things are gonna change round these here parts.

2008-11-11T12:09:00.000-08:00

HOPE

Every time I see Obama on the news, looking presidential, I get chills. I know his administration has more than its share of problems to address and he'll make flubs and errors as he's only human. But seeing him there framed against the White House makes me realize that I truly had almost given up hope for this country. And now I have it again. Even as bad as things are. That's saying something.

JPR

2008-11-05T08:02:00.001-08:00

Oh Yes We Did!

President Obama.

It's like waking from an eight year coma to realize that you're not dead after all.

J

2008-11-02T15:29:00.000-08:00

Will Proposition 8 go to bed with you at night?

I've been quiet about politics lately when, ironically, I am more jazzed and excited than ever before about this coming election. Having a new baby has redirected much of my energy, but I still have enough to be outraged, no more like baffled, really, over all the support for Proposition 8, which has the audacity to suggest it will restore traditional marriage. It's boggling enough that it's so close to passing here in the state I like to pretend is so liberal (CA). It's downright sickening to see parents gathering their innocent young children on street corners with signs supporting what has got to be one of the most unconstitutional propositions I've seen in a long time.

This idea that voting yes will "restore" traditional marriage is hilarious. It assumes a) that there ever was anything such as traditional marriage rather than the millions of variations that exist, but which people don't like to talk about (open marriages, marriages in which one person is gay but can't come out and so takes a "safe" path, marriages of convenience, for green cards, of obligation, "for the children's sake", marriages borne of being too young, too stupid and too afraid to be alone, etc. ad infinitum). And b) you tell me how something passed through the state legislature will walk into people's homes and "restore" marriage.

Will this proposition come with a manual for how to communicate better with your spouse? Will it teach you to be more compassionate, loving, dedicated, loyal or supportive? Will it watch the kids so you can have a break? Will it help you have a better sex life, or stop your abusive partner from beating you? I don't think so.

I know the problem with being passionate about an issue is that the people on the other side are also passionate but I just honestly can't wrap my brain around how anyone believes that two people of the same sex who want to get married threatens ANYthing whatsoever (except their own simple-mindedness).

What are they so afraid of??

I'm voting NO on 8 and I'm unabashed about it.

2008-10-31T10:30:00.001-07:00

Reconsidering the Witch

Here on Halloween I offer you the words of my friend Erika Mailman. Read her insightful op-ed piece in the Chicago Tribune today about how our hallmark Halloween version of the witch ignores the true history of witch persecution. Then you'll be inspired to purchase her amazing novel, The Witch's Trinity--in which a medevial German town facing starvation turns against its own. She's a fabulous writer and you won't be disappointed!

Ding-dong, the witch isn't dead
Chicago Tribune
By Erika Mailman
October 31, 2008

Last October, my neighbor stretched synthetic cobwebs among the branches of her tree. Against this creepy backdrop, she hung a broomstick and a badly made female figure, clearly a witch. The sight made me wince.

How did we evolve to find this display lightly amusing? Our forebears did hang women from trees. I imagine the devastation a time-traveler might feel as she realizes people crudely pantomime the appalling circumstances of her death each Halloween.

I may take this more personally than some. Townspeople accused my ancestor, Mary Bliss Parsons, of witchcraft in Massachusetts, three decades before the Salem hysteria. The court acquitted her, but neighbors pointed the finger at her again, 18 years later. I imagine she never relaxed in the interim. When the woman in the next cottage averts her eyes because she believes you know the devil, you can't exactly run over to borrow a cup of sugar...

Read the rest HERE.

2008-10-28T16:08:00.001-07:00

The New Mealtime

A snapshot of me eating:

Baby dangling from a sling, papertowel balanced atop his head...to protect him from my lasagne, which I ate in bites directly over his little noggin.

Easier than putting him down where he would complain.

2008-10-25T07:58:00.000-07:00

Promo Time! Free copies of Write Free

To the first ten people out there who contact me to say they have purchased a copy of my book Make A Scene: Crafting a Powerful Story One Scene at a Time, especially in light of National Novel Writing Month (www.nanowrimo.org) coming up, I will send you a free copy of Write Free: Attracting the Creative Life, my creativity guide with Rebecca Lawton. Just post a comment here that you bought the book and I'll send you my email so you can show me proof of purchase.

Stay tuned for more free books!

2008-10-23T12:21:00.000-07:00

Mysterious Noise

Either my neighbor has an obsessive compulsive disorder which causes him to reposition very large pieces of furniture, or he wears REALLY loud shoes.

2008-10-16T12:30:00.001-07:00

Virtual Motherhood

I wonder what would have become of me as a mother without the internet. The internet has saved my ass from many a panicked spiral in these months since our boy was born. From fears over poop (when will he??) to not eating long enough on the boob, to venting frustrations, the internet has been my savior, comforting friend and confidante.

Sadly, though, I realize that my virtual connection is in lieu of the community that we were originally designed to raise our children in. The more mothers I talk to who are, like me, stay-at-homers (even though many of us are also work-at-homers) claim that the hardest factor to deal with is the isolation. This doesn't mean I live in a rural village at the top of a mountain with no running water or electricity--it means that where, historically I would have had my sisters and cousins and aunts and grandmothers around raising their children too, now I must register with mother's groups, set up playdates and truck my offspring all over tarnation, wasting expensive gas, in order to connect up with other mothers. In order to get a break from what is, frankly, the motony of the early years.

I know that as mothers we aren't supposed to express anything but joy and awe for our children, but twenty-four hours with anyone will drive you a little nuts, let alone a being who speaks a foreign language, screams for everything he needs, is totally useless when it comes to household chores, poops his pants several times a day and doesn't care if it bleeds down his leg and onto yours and won't even remember doing so later on.

Since my community of mothers is spread far and wide I have to make do with online forums and websites where I can hear the stories of other parents and find validation. So hallelujah for that.

JPR

2008-10-09T08:02:00.001-07:00

My (In)expert Opinion

It's been mighty quiet around these parts, I know. And I'm sorry for all the leaf piles--mind your step. Believe it or not, the reason for my lack of blogging isn't purely that I have no time due to my new addition; I find that suddenly I question everything I want to write here. When I was writing my book Make a Scene I was willing to wear an "expert" suit for awhile--and I can put it on (though it fits kind of loosely) when I teach. But since becoming a mother, which teaches me daily about how little I know or am in control of, I also find that I no longer feel like an expert on writing. Oh I bring my experience to bear on my work, of course, but strangely my desire to sound important and all knowing has drained away.

And who wants to be lectured to anyway?

So that means these posts are going to start sounding more folksy and personal, I'm afraid. Maybe they always did...I know you're supposed to keep a professional blog if you've got published books but as my professional identity is shifting, I would rather write what's true and real: how I remember what it's like to carve out a sliver of time--a half hour here, twenty minutes there, to write. Before I was making time between a full time job and graduate school and a radio show, now it's the fulltime job of motherhood.

2008-09-24T17:55:00.000-07:00

Awe

His ear is so perfectly formed--a masterpiece of flesh and elegance. I can't believe it, along with all his other pristine parts, was formed inside of me.

When I say "my" child, I'm keenly aware that while he is of me and E., it was his dna, his own magnificent impulse toward life that made him. We just offered the ingredients.

2008-09-23T08:34:00.000-07:00

Showing Up

Just over a year ago I was feeling stagnant in my writing--my fiction felt mired in the endless need for revision and I felt I couldn't practice the daily advice I preached to my editing clients. I craved some sort of life adventure that would awaken my creative senses--I didn't know what kind of adventure precisely, just something that would change the way I looked at things and therefore, hopefully, wake up my words too.

Then I got pregnant. The universe is no fool--it heard my plea and answered it loudly (we were hoping to have a child, we just had thought it would happen a little later down the line).

Woo-hee. Nothing like a baby to change everything. I was so blase before. I took everything for granted in my life. Now I see how incredibly lucky I am, and how wasteful it is to squander time or talent. I would give all my teeth to have several hours a day again to write fiction. I know I'll have it again someday, but let this be a lesson to any of you who feel you can't make time for your writing because there's too much on your plate. If you aren't raising small children and dont' have a debilitating illness--MAKE TIME. You have it. You don't even know how much time you have. If you sleep fairly well at night, then you can get up early before work, or write in the evening.

But do it. Show up for your writing life when you can.

2008-09-15T08:03:00.000-07:00

Make a Scene Giveaway

Here on my father's birthday, in collaboration with the dynamic Christina Katz--author of Writer Mama--I am participating in her Back to School Giveaway. Visit her blog for a chance to win one of two copies of my book Make a Scene--in hardcover! And stop back by here...I'll be giving away a couple more free copies of my book soon.

2008-08-30T10:34:00.000-07:00

On Birthdays

Last year I celebrated my birthday in Hawaii--E. and I decided we deserved a real vacation--the kind with tropical drinks and warm weather and sun and beach. It was exactly that--a perfect vacation. On the annniversary of my birth we were on horseback overlooking the ocean with a warm hawaiian drizzle anointing us. Approximately two days later, unbeknownst to my logical mind, though my body already knew, I was pregnant. Without getting into tricky particulars about the life of sperm and eggs, it's quite possible that the child swinging in his little swing right now was actually conceived in Hawaii on my birthday. Pretty cool.

Now, today, as I celebrate, unbelievably, a year later, I get to do so with my husband and son. My son. The concept of birthdays now takes on a whole new meaning. Not only because I have now experienced birth for myself, but because this is the last birthday of mine in which I will take center stage in my own life. (Not to mention that that was probably the last tropical vacation we'll be taking for a few years).

J

2008-08-30T10:17:00.000-07:00

Coming up Short

Last weekend, while visiting family, we stopped at a local park to eat lunch. Across the way from me I spotted two women, approximately my age, both nursing babies while eating a delicious looking picnic. They both wore fashionable breastfeeding drapes and parked beside them were top of the line strollers. They looked remarkably clear-eyed and well-groomed for new mothers. I could tell from the sound of their infants' cries and the size that their babies were younger than mine. My first feeling was of a kind of new mother pride--here they were, these young women, nursing their babies in the summer sun while their husbands tossed a football back and forth nearby while my baby lounged on his quilt under a tree. How grand it seemed.

I was interested in the type of stroller one had, so I approached them, carrying my own babe alongside, to give me "mommy cred." I inquired pleasantly and learned the make and model and I should have stopped there.

But I wanted to be polite, so I asked how old their babies were. Both were two months.

"Are you getting much sleep?" I asked smugly, already knowing the answer. What mother of a two month old gets much sleep?

"Not bad," one said. "He sleeps three hours at a time." Hmmm. My boy didn't sleep three hours at a time until...well, he still doesn't sleep consistently in any pattern. Sometimes I'm lucky to get those three hour stretches, but occasionally he can still gladden my night with an hour and a half waking.

"Mine sleeps in four hour chunks," the other woman said. "And I wake him up for a midnight feeding."

"You wake him up?" I asked, in awe. "Why would you do such a thing?"

"So I can be sure he gets enough food, and to keep up my milk supply," she replied, smoothing an imaginary hair off her face.

Of course, because she's a good mother, rather than me--who would let my child sleep for two days if he so desired just to get the rest I crave!

The women were so poised and lovely, so calm and serene, that they could have been posing for a television ad of some kind. I came away remembering that sometimes it's better not to know how other people's babies are, or for that matter, how other mothers are. There's too much room to come up short.

And if another person glibly says, "Oh, well my baby slept through the night at 4 weeks!" I'm going to kick some shins.

2008-08-28T15:26:00.000-07:00

Oh yeah, and this interview conducted by Writer's Digest with me, as part of their author series, went up some moons ago when I was, myself about the size of a moon, heavy with child:

http://www.writersdigest.com/article/make-a-scene-interview

2008-08-28T15:17:00.000-07:00

From the Writing Catacombs:

Currently on stands: my interview with Isabel Allende in Writer's Digest's October issue. Also in that issue, my profile of Gail Konop Baker, about her debut memoir, Cancer is a Bitch: or I'd Rather Be Having a Midlife Crisis--is mentioned. A great read!

Also, my interview with author (and a writer for HBO's series The Wire), George Pelecanos, is live at Writer's Digest online. Click here to read it.

Here's a tasty quote from his interview:

What was it like to write for TV, so different from writing novels?

"It’s collaborative; you really have to work with a team of writers because each episode feeds into the next and borrows from the past. Before each season we get together—sometimes we’d go away for a week—and we’d decide what the season was going to be about, and the characters and their arcs. Then we’d come back and start beating out each episode. We wanted four episodes written before production started. That entails a scene by scene blueprint of each episode—very intense work in a room, putting cards up on a board in order, [with] different colors for each character. By the time you’re done you have 35–40 cards that represent scenes, in order for that particular show. That takes several days for each episode. Then you farm them out to the writers.

"When I became a producer and story editor, I was there every day, full time. When you work on a TV show it is literally 12–16 hours a day for 7 months. It’s a huge commitment. Producers are in charge of everything. Again, it was pretty nice for me to learn a new craft—it’s another job in my arsenal. If I ever fall down the stairs and hit my head and can’t write, I can always do that."

2008-08-26T17:17:00.000-07:00

Changing Channels

Before my son was born I didn't think I was going to blog much about motherhood--I felt sure that I would continue to whittle out writerly insights, post the interviews and results of my writing life. This was when I still clung to the notion that my life would be relatively unchanged--as if my child would be a little doll sitting in a chair obediently, easily tended to between my work hours. Ha! Even though I suspected that motherhood would entail a lot of work, until he was here, "a lot of work" was all theoretical. I didn't have a true context for what that would look like. However, I also had no idea that writing--which has been my sole focus, my passion and even, at times, my obsession for most of my life--would come to feel almost insignificant in the face of being a mother. That even though I hunger for time alone, sometimes when I get that very time, I have to remind myself that it is okay to go and write again. I can't tell you how many times I have sat watching my son sleep rather than do something for myself.

I admit that I undervalued the work that mothers (and all parents) do. I let my own lack of experience bias me. Though I know many, many talented, intelligent women who are also mothers, I still viewed motherhood as a kind of bland mini-mall which, upon entering, you sacrificed brain, beauty, individuality and sense of self for a time. Now here, there is definitely the mark of the mundane on aspects of motherhood--but that's true of any tasks you do repeatedly day after day. What I did not expect was the profundity of it, the powerful emotional toll of being physically and mentally connected to a being who relies on you for everything. Sometimes I already get maudlin thinking of the inevitable days to come when my son will need me less and less, and the worst case scenario--where he could want nothing to do with me at all. Hopefully it won't come to that, because hopefully I will be good enough at the self-sacrifice on his behalf.

So while I do continue to write and it remains the third most important thing after my child and spouse, I'm surprised at how okay it is for it to fall to the wayside for this initial, important time with my son.

2008-08-11T12:38:00.001-07:00

The Invisible World

Before baby I lived a smug life. I hoarded my freedoms and squandered time. I regarded harried parents dragging uncooperative toddlers out of stores with that same feeling you get when the guy in front of you gets pulled over by a cop and you don't. I handed off screaming babies to their parents with a shrug, relief washing over me. When you are not a parent, life is uncomplicated, but you have no way of knowing this. It might be complicated in other ways--say if you have a drug addiction or some variation on the dysfunctional family or a withholding boyfriend...but it's still not kid complicated. You can leave the house at a moment's notice, grabbing only your keys and your wallet. You do not have to lug:

--diaper bag (which contains a whole world of items you don't know you need until baby comes ranging from pacifiers to spare diapers and clothes for inevitable diaper accidents in the middle of supermarkets)
--car seat
--stroller frame into which car seat goes
--baby bjorn in case kid doesn't want to be in stroller
--drape to cover baby's seat from sun
--toy that plays music to dangle from car seat in case baby gets cranky while driving
--oh yeah, and baby :)

In the process, you forget your own sunglasses, keys, purse, directions to where you're going, your shopping list, one shoe and to brush your hair.

Or as the eloquent Rachel Cusk writes in her book about motherhood (thanks Myfanwy) A Life's Work:

"The baby's physical presence in my life is not unlike a traveller's custody of a very large rucksack. On the subway people tut and sigh at our double bulk, the administrative headache of us, and stream away at stations leaving us struggling with straps and overflowing detritus on the platform...Because I am the baby's home there is nowhere I can leave her and soon I begin to look at those who walk around light and free and unencumbered as if they were members of a different species."

While this may sound like me complaining, it's actually me observing. There's a bit of the anthropologist in every new parent. I never used to check out other parents' strollers or wonder where they bought their baby's outfit. I barely noticed babies, to be frank. (You don't have to be obsessed with babies to want a child of your own).

Now, it is as if an invisible world has opened up that was there all along, parallel to my world, but which I couldn't see because I did not have the key. And this world is both more strange and more magnificent than I could have ever imagined.

2008-07-31T16:28:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I attended a mothers' group playdate. Formally it was an "ice cream social." A big fan of ice cream, I didn't intend to miss it, even though my child is too young to play with the happy, babbling, walking toddlers. My child was, after pitching one of his usual fits about being put into the car seat for the fifteen minutes it took to drive there, finally, blissfully asleep in his stroller (read: torture chamber), so I had hands and, for a moment, mind free.The mothers who turned up all seemed like women I could relate to, would love to get to know, and would find interesting--the type who have opinions about social issues and like to read. I was eager to dig in and get to know them.

Unfortunately for my social craving, each woman was busy being a mother--which meant following behind their toddlers to keep them from tripping into the street, or retrieving a ball that was sent flying into the next yard, or scooping ice cream into tiny mouths. I felt disappointed. I ate my indulgent bowl of ice cream with extra jimmies and caramel sauce silently. I asked a few questions, made a few comments, and was politely answered before that particular mother had to return to her task of being absolutely available to her child.

And as I sat there in my sort of smugness, feeling disappointed not to have discussion with what I knew to be intelligent, interesting women--my own child struck up a caterwauling so loud that I was barely heard shouting over him that I would go walk him in his stroller to quiet him. The stroller walk was a temporary balm. Feeding him even more temporary. Changing him had almost no effect at all.

And so I got up with apologies, barely heard over his plaintive wailing, and madly dashed for my car, trying to speak reasonably to my child that we would soon be home. That his suffering was nearly over. That if he could just hang in there a few minutes more, the lovely rythm of the car would lull him to sleep or at least calm. And in my haste I realized that I was in exactly the same position as those other mothers. That intelligent conversation from my end would also have to wait.

2008-07-30T12:01:00.001-07:00

I admit it. I keep trying to find ways to link motherhood to writing so you writing readers of mine will still have something to come here for. Yet it's difficult to do. I'm not really sure how changing diapers or entertaining an infant with colorful toys relates to writing--I can see how it will affect my writing, both in terms of time (not much now, but eventually!) and in terms of content (huge changes to my psyche).

I want to say, though, to all parents who come through here: I had no idea. I didn't realize how hard you were all working, how thankless a job it is (meaning that you can't do it for the reward, only for the joys that come unexpectedly), and how much you could love a person who was only an idea before. Now that I know, I want to apologize to anyone I expected too much from. The early years are all consuming.

These early years are also unparalleled--it's amazing to hear your baby laugh at something you personally find no humor in. I regularly wonder: 'What is he thinking?' When he sleeps, what is he dreaming about?

It's hard to think about writing fiction when there is this real child developing into a person before my eyes every moment. He grows overnight. He is only two months in the world but already he has preferences and expresses himself. That's amazing.

I know, I'm not the first person to do this. But it sure feels like it :)

2008-07-24T18:14:00.001-07:00

To the Woman Who Flipped Me Off on the Freeway:

I forgive you.

It's true that I was driving the speed limit, and that's so 1990 (at which point you were only about 5 years old), so I can see how you'd get uptight after spending five seconds behind me on the road. Since everything is all about you, it's a natural leap of logic to assume that I was driving that slowly to purposely upset you--your rage is totally understandable.

Also, you're likely in withdrawal since the new hands-free cell phone law went into effect. You got so used to talking on the phone with one hand and shifting with the other that having a free hand is probably a little overwhelming. Makes a person think crazy.

Plus it's true I drive a sedan--my car isn't sporty and shiny red like yours; naturally you figured there's some old fart in the driver's seat, and you didn't want to get stuck behind a blue hair.

Finally, how could you know that I was driving slowly and carefully because of my infant in the backseat--it's not like you've got x-ray vision for chrissakes!

Really you had every right to flip me off--I was totally behaving like a jerk. Nobody would blame you for expressing your displeasure.

2008-07-19T18:20:00.000-07:00

Did I Stutter?

I am a social being for the most part, but at times I can become deathly shy or self-conscious, like when meeting new people I hope to impress, or when I'm presenting a workshop or class, bringing out a kind of super-chatty, "look at me" style of conversation that is over-eager and over-compensating and makes me slap myself on the head later for not being more myself.

When I get like that, I pull out this little line to save my ass: "I'm a writer, not a talker."

Now I get to use a brand new line: "I have a new baby" to explain away everything from shyness to my newly acquired stutter. Days and even weeks after giving birth I stuttered so significantly I worried that I had suffered a small stroke during labor, unaware that this was just my brain on total sleep deprivation. Even my worst night's sleep--college cramming, insomnia or stress related--didn't compare to the constant waking of a newborn baby every couple hours or less. Being articulate simply was not an option.

The only thing to cast aside my fears that I had lost a crucial set of brain pathways in the birth process was that I could still string together intelligible sentences when writing. The words still flowed, even though writing a paragraph was a major achievement.

As I've always said--thank god for writing, or I'd be a terrified mute with absolutely no self-awareness.

2008-07-09T08:55:00.000-07:00

Morning light these summer days is an amber glow, like resin painted on the outside of my windows. This is not the sweet touch of sunrise; my state is on fire, and I happen to live nearly smack between the most major of these blazes. There is a thin haze of gray coating the horizon in all directions like a film and a sense that if you breathe too deeply you'll wind up needing an oxygen mask before long. Along with daily news of the worsening economy, the energy crisis and the cave-like isolation of new parenthood, this state of inferno has contributed to an apocalyptic feeling, as if the bomb went off and we're in its aftermath. And while that sounds depressing, it's strangely inspirational to my writing, which I am trying to reconnect with after pregnancy ejected my brain and new motherhood has continued to loan it out.

But it's slowly coming back. Yee haw.

JPR

2008-06-20T09:54:00.001-07:00

Humbled. This is what being a new parent has done to us. We adore our new boy beyond words. But there is no doubt that some things cannot be described in advance, that you can think you know, that you can assume you know how hard something will be...and truthfully you cannot until you are there.

It's a kind of difficult that is totally worth it, but wow! I will never be the same person again.

2008-06-10T18:48:00.001-07:00

Beauty and meaning, defined below.
My son. Our son.
For a writer, I am shockingly empty of words. But not empty!
Let photos suffice.

2008-06-10T08:57:00.000-07:00

Sorry to post without pics yet, but I just want to update those who have checked here for news.

Benjamin Cole Pedersen born June 8, 08. 11:21 a.m. to exhausted but joyous parents. 7.1 lbs. 18 inches long.

I am utterly in awe and challenged and will answer emails and phone calls as I can soon.

Thanks for all your thoughts.

Pictures will follow.

2008-05-29T08:28:00.000-07:00

Chuck Pahlaniuk Wouldn't Steal My Book

My friend Mary Akers alerted me to a video from Borders books in Michigan, in which author Chuck Pahlaniuk recommends books under the guise of those people would be most likely to steal, and how they'd steal them. It's very tongue in cheek and funny, and, at one point, you can see my book Make a Scene, prominently displayed behind him. Oh the fame!

To view it, click here and scroll down and select "How to Prevent Stock Shrinkage" and watch for a few minutes.

2008-05-28T14:35:00.001-07:00

Soon they will be gathering again, from all over the country. Their notebooks and ideas and works-in-progress tucked dreamily under arms and in backpacks. They will take trains and buses and planes to the lushly green setting, move their things into white clapboard houses and spend nearly two weeks filling up on words.

I graduated from Bennington's writing seminars three summers ago. I can't believe it! For awhile there, the experience was still fresh--the feeling of Tishman Hall packed to the rafters on a humid day; half of us drowsing, favorite teachers' legs draped through the railings overlooking the speaker, a feeling of purposeful gathering as we took notes. Or the trek from dorm to the Carriage Barn for readings, some of which were spellbinding, others so longwinded you wished you'd taken a seat in back so you could sneak out. The carousing, the intense workshops. The purposeful stride of our bear-like leader Liam Rector, who took his own life this past year. The endless day, beginning at breakfast and ending long after 9pm, often on the commons lawn if it was summer under the drone of fireflies, or the dank, foul-smelling pub in winter. I can still conjure the images of it, but the feeling of it--of having actually lived it, spent five residencies there, written hundreds of pages of material and read as many books, has become more insubstantial. More something I know I did, than remember doing.

Still, every time I receive the preliminary schedule (they include alumni), I get nostalgic. Wish I could be there to hear the lectures, to drink in the lovely surreality of academia where constructing a manuscript feels like the most important work on earth.

2008-05-22T16:57:00.000-07:00

A Study in Contrast

Me and a tree, April 2007

Me, and a tree, May, 2008

2008-05-19T10:47:00.000-07:00

Waiting Game

I am not sure at which age my habit of "doing" kicked in--maybe somewhere around the fourth grade; it could have had something to do with my acquired twinkie habit at the time, which is like meth for grade school kids, or maybe that's just the age when children whose parents need intoxicants to function start acting out. Either way, I have to look back pretty far to find a time when I wasn't compelled to be in action, producing, creating or achieving.

With a couple periods of exception in my life, I have now entered a foreign time of not doing. Of having absolutely nothing TO do. No list. No assignments. No deadlines. No writing. No jewelry making. This is, of course, at my own choosing in preparation for Operation New Life. While I am aware that this window of time is about equivalent to a mili-second of my life, and that in a few weeks I will look back on it with nostalgia, it's very weird. Like being let go from a job, but without all the grief.

I don't even have a garden or a pet to tend to. That means I have now entered the stage of making things to do for myself. Maybe I will, in fact, end up writing some of the fiction I've unfortunately put on hold for awhile. Maybe I will become the world's greatest house cleaner, or finally clear out all the seasonal spider webs gathering in the eaves of my home.

Or maybe I will just rest and meditate and walk and imagine the person "coming to live with us" as E. puts it, who will change everything.

2008-05-13T14:12:00.000-07:00

What's in a Name?

When I first got married (almost 9 years ago!!), E. and I both found our new "titles" a little squirrely. Calling him "husband" felt sort of like calling him "Reverend" or "Lordship." The very word "wife" felt like it should be applied only to something that is possessed by another. It took us awhile to feel comfortable wearing these terms, and now that we've gotten comfortable in them, we often revert to other titles for fun and games.

No matter how much I may believe myself to be master of words because I write and therefore manipulate and shift and change meanings based on how I use them, I am aware of the deep, historical layers of meaning and power at work in a word.

Now we will be adopting yet new titles, and with them, new roles. Just like a husband and a wife have a different set of obligations than a boyfriend and a girlfriend (depending on your morality, I guess), "Mom" and "Dad" come fully loaded with a differnt set of instructions and meaning than say "aunt" or "friend" or "people who don't have kids."

And with these new titles/roles will come a whole new level of scrutiny from the world--people looking in who believe they know better or more correctly the way to be parents.

Hoo boy. Here it comes!

JPR

2008-05-08T15:25:00.000-07:00

Strange Reactions
Observations on my ninth month:

At the busy intersection where no one ever stopped for me before, now they stop--sometimes screeching to a halt.
Elderly women often get teary eyed when they see me.
Elderly men pretend they don't notice.
Teenage girls look away very quickly, as if terrified of the size of me compared to their own lithe forms.
Teenage boys don't know where to look, often opting for my (newfound) cleavage
Young children openly gawk, and occasionally point and ask questions.
Men make jokes about midnight food runs and how we pregnant girls are impossible to please
Mothers with young children smile wearily at me.

2008-05-05T11:17:00.000-07:00

End-is-near-checklist

I can barely turn over in bed
Getting out of a chair feels like exercise
2 hours of work at my desk is a full day
Even eating isn't fun anymore
Feet? I have feet?

2008-05-01T08:19:00.000-07:00

Respect the Fowl!

Please join me on May 4th in celebrating International Respect for Chickens Day. It's been a long time coming for the tireless activists who have pushed to get this day on the books. Now it's here and chickens will no longer go unheard. Champion the Chicken! For one day of the year, please don't chase, torture, annoy, eat, bend, fold, staple or mutilate a chicken.

:)

2008-04-27T10:16:00.000-07:00

A Word to the Opinionated

I know my latest posts really haven't had anything to do with writing--and considering that I'm actually doing some writing lately, that might seem odd...except of course for the more preoccupying force of *making life* that's been taking up my energy lately. Okay, I'm totally not getting to any sort of point.

If I were to make a point today it would be to talk about people's needs to assert their opinion/knowledge/experience on other people. Maybe assert isn't strong enough a word. How about shove/force/impose.

Let's take a hypothetical. Say I have a really bad headache--the kind that comes close to being a migraine and forces me to lie down in my bedroom with the lights off to breathe through the pain. And say that for personal reasons, for health reasons, I prefer not to take any pain-killers. And let's say a friend...no, an acquaintance... happens to call me and I mention that I can't talk right now because I have this terrible headache. Now let's say this person suggests I take said painkillers, and I say No thank you, I've found that if I just lie down for a few hours, it will go away. And this person says, Why would you suffer for three hours when you could just take something now and it would go away? That's just crazy!

Let me tell you how few people accept the idea that I just prefer to tolerate the pain and find alternative methods for dealing with it. And let me tell you how tired I am of being told how I SHOULD feel; what I SHOULD do when it comes to pain that is natural and even necessary.

Any savvy reader here who's been following my latest blog entries is going to figure out what I'm really writing about, and maybe if I find some courage to face the inevitable onslaught of responses that I'm likely to get, I'll come out and talk about it directly.

But for now, I just want to say, it's very easy to fall into the habit of offering what you think is just your experience, but is really your biased opinion phrased in such a way as to make others feel judged. And to that I say: take your opinion and shove it (down someone else's throat).

JPR

2008-04-23T18:24:00.000-07:00

For another month or so I have the luxury of indulging in a world of beliefs about how I will (co) raise this forthcoming child who, depending on which belief is strongest on a given day, either chose us on some spiritual level, or wound up with us much the way you plant a finger blind on a map and see where you'll end up.

For another month or so I can assume I know the right way to do things; can believe that every time I've seen another set of parents doing something I didn't agree with, I will now get my chance to do it better.

For another month or so I remain essentially the same. Familiar.

So strange to think how normal this is...creating life, becoming someone's parent.

But it's okay to be awed the first time around.

2008-04-21T15:34:00.001-07:00

Princess Cake

I never before understood the appeal of these domed mountains of cake covered in typically pink icing so fluorescent it looked sure to give cancer. I didn't like the connotations of "princess," either--like you must have been Daddy's favorite little spoiled brat to even be worthy of such a cake.

And then...my dear friend Christine had one made for my baby shower, in a slightly less offensive shade of blue:

WHY did I not know that there was thick rich custard and whipped cream inside a perfectly moist almond cake heightened by raspberry filling? Or more importantly, wasn't I safer when I held my prejudice against them?

The phrase "too much of a good thing" rings loudly now in the aftermath of my cake hangover.

JPR

2008-04-16T12:05:00.000-07:00

Are you a Fritterer or a Savorer?

What are the ways that you waste time?

How about the ways that you savor it?

Do you think about these differences? Having worked from home for over three years now, I'm keenly aware of time. For the first couple years I was amazed at how much I could fit into a day: gardening, cooking, writing for pleasure, writing for work, cleaning, walking downtown, visiting with friends, exercising. I took full advantage of my newfound freedom from a restrictive office-based schedule. But slowly I have managed to fritter just as much time away as I save. Most often by sitting staring at my computer screen, caught between activities. I go into a kind of trance that I must literally wrench myself from. I've taken to opening the project I must work on right away, so that in the first pause after screen-glaring, I will see that project blinking at me like a puppy waiting to be walked.

So I've decided to try and savor time more. The way to do this, I've found, is to put fiction writing first, even if I'm "not in the mood." Then to move on to quality time in the first project on my list, and then, to take a break. In that break I can swim or eat or walk downtown or see a friend or even a couple of those things. Strangely, when I give myself that break, I actually manage to get more done and the day feels less wasted and there is a whole lot less glazy-eyed frittering going on.

How about you? How do you balance your time?

JPR

2008-04-15T12:07:00.000-07:00

Kill Your Television (remember that old bumper sticker!)

I realize that the TV writer's strike was a huge gift to me. At first, I'll admit, I was irritated because I was hooked on a bunch of shows, most of them trashy or inane, just like a junkie. I'm a sucker for character studies and ongoing stories so I gave precious hours to Grey's Anatomy and Dirty Sexy Money and American Idol (last year). Now I'm not saying these shows are all bad, in fact sometimes they've been really good, but in the wake of having little to watch on TV I started reading again. I mean with consistency and joy. The kind of reading where, as soon as I've finished a book, I must immediately find another one because I get so much out of it. I've probably read more books since the writer's strike began than I did in a year of graduate school. In fact, often now I'll even try to watch TV, and find myself picking back up the waiting book.

Now that these old shows are returning to the air, I find myself irritated. Do I really want to get back into the habit? I let American Idol fall by the wayside this year and let me tell you what a relief that has been! I'm so glad not to care who's made it, who's going to get exploited by the obscenely uber-rich Simon Cowell, squashed, humiliated, and then arbitrarily pumped up for a measley million bucks, only to fade into obscurity again. I realize that on some level, I have actually always hated that show. I know that sounds odd, considering how lavishly I once watched it, but I'm serious...something about it always made me feel kind of ill.

I don't begrudge others who watch their TV. I admit I watched all 8 of the new episodes of Lost online (I never stay up to watch it live). But overall I really don't miss TV. In fact, unless there's something really innovative or informative on, I sort of resent its existence.

The thing is, when times get tougher, as they are in the American economy, I think people turn more to their escapism than ever before. So I imagine that a post like this will get largely ignored, but that's okay. It's also coming from a place of thinking about our coming child and how we want him to be raised in relationship to TV. Like many parents, I'd rather he be out playing than on his ass watching crap.

So today's moral is: go read a book. You'd be amazed what's out there, or "in there" really, in the world of your mind. As one of my favorite writers, Paul Auster says, "Every novel is an equal collaboration between the writer and the reader and it is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy." (Though non-fiction is great too...whatever it takes!)

Some of my recent favorites:

No Country For Old Men, Cormac McCarthy

Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Helping Me Help Myself, Beth Lisick

Peace Like a River, Leif Enger

Madapple, Christina Meldrum

Falling Under, Danielle Younge-Ullman

Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert (not that she needs any advertising)

2008-04-08T16:13:00.000-07:00

Writer's Callouses

I've always said I work well under pressure. Here with less than two months to go before Operation Life-As-We-Know-It-Changes, suddenly I've gained newfound energy to work on my fiction again. As in finishing this novel draft with the intention of putting it under critical eyes.

I had a great lunch/hangout with one of my newest friends, Erika Mailman, who is a published author, a new mother and a wonderful person. (I've just finished her truly stellar novel The Witch's Trinity and I can honestly and proudly recommend it and am eager to read her first book, Woman of Ill Fame). I really enjoy her company and realize now that she was wonderfully patient with her as I scrolled through my history of "near-hits" in the world of publishing, the lessons I learned with my first agent, and the peaks and valleys of having two books receive "positive" rejections and a couple of "almosts." In retelling my story, I realized that, though I'm still an unpublished novelist, I have come close and with persistence and revision, I still can get there. Getting back on the horse should be the number one learned activity of any serious writer. We should all have callouses between our thighs! (Read that how you will, people...you know what I mean).

So, I heave my gravid body back up on this rowdy stallion and I hold onto the reins, fearfully but with courage too, and I'm off...

Publishing is a wily industry and paths to success are far more crooked and blocked by unexpected obstacles than many new writers would ever expect. There is no such thing as an overnight success!

2008-04-07T13:28:00.000-07:00

On Being a Hider

I think the reason I will always prefer writng fiction to person essay or memoir writing is simple: to write a good memoir piece, whether short or long, requires raw, often embarassing levels of honesty. In fact, allowing yourself to look bad, to be messy and pliant on the page is rather a necessity of the form, I think. Nobody cares if you're a saint, or have made a ton of great decisions--what people want is to be reminded that you are as damaged and nuts and silly and human as they are.

And who the hell wants to admit that?

Well, some great writers actually. I finally got myself to read Elizabeth Gilbert's bestselling memoir of her yearlong journey through Italy, India and Indonesia, Eat Pray Love--one of those books I walked the line on for so long purely because of its popularity (a stupid habit I've cultivated). And I really enjoyed it, far more than I expected--especially when she was baring the more vulnerable parts of herself or being self-deprecating. I wish I had this talent on the page. Apparently I'm the master of self-deprecation when I give a presentation, but that's to deflect from my nervousness.

And I don't mind making a fictional character appear weak or messy--in fact, I probably need to learn how to write stronger characters--ones who demonstrate more of the positive qualities on the scale of human experience. I guess you could say I'm a hider. I don't want you to see my shame and my weakness and my faults, but I suspect that if you read all of my unpublished novels, you'd know what they were anyway :)

JPR

2008-04-05T09:41:00.001-07:00

Morning Song

It is National Poetry Month, and for some reason this poem is on my mind today (for probably obvious reason), so I'm going to share it with you:

Morning Song by: Sylvia Plath

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements. Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.
I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.
All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.
One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat's. The window square
Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

2008-04-03T08:53:00.000-07:00

A cool site called DIY Planner (Paper, Productivity and Passion) has reviewed Write Free. Here is a choice tidbit from the review:

"Write Free contains one of the more interesting approaches to creativity and the writing life that I've read in a long time. I was amazed at the depth of personal experience and exercises that went into composing this manuscript. If you're into new ways of recapturing the writing/creative life, I highly recommend you get this book. If you are interested in exploring exercises that will help you build up your creative life, then you'll love this book. Bottom line is that this book will help you train train your thoughts to aid your creative goals and endeavors with the power of positive thinking. "

Buy your copy HERE.

2008-04-01T09:56:00.000-07:00

Numb and Dumb

There is nothing like having a baby imminently on the way to prompt vast and elaborate ideas for the future that you know you will not have time to do. My brain is so infuriating this way. Where were you when I had luxurious hours of time, my wily little synapses? Where were all your big plans then?

Sure, suddenly the book ideas, the online courses, the workshops and plans are popping into bloom like gorgeous summer fruit and there is nothing I can do except write them down and look at them wistfully and think "someday, oh yes, someday."

That sounds as though I blame my baby for the time his rearing will soon take, but I don't. I blame my devious mind that goes numb and dumb when I need it most and then becomes productive when it's least effective. Uncool!

I guess I should be grateful I still have ideas.

2008-03-27T09:17:00.000-07:00

Today I have posted over at Rocketgirls--a new collective website between myself and authors Jody Gehrman, Kim Green, and publisher Terena Scott of Medusa's Muse.

Below is a teaser, but you'll have to visit the Rocketgirls' blog to read the rest...

"We all have our personal equivalent of the “naked dream” where your vulnerable anatomy is revealed to an auditorium of peers who publicly humiliate or unmask you in some way.

Lately I’ve been exploring the feelings that come up around bad reviews and negative criticism since publishing my two new books, Make a Scene, and Write Free. Fortunately for the sake of blog post material, I received another crappy review, this one asking the very question that pulls at the seams of my tightly sewn writer’s persona, rendering me naked to the jeering crowd..."

2008-03-23T10:52:00.000-07:00

*"The nature."

I wanted nature--I got it yesterday. After living in our "new" town/county for 2 years, we finally ventured out to explore new territory. What we discovered was perfect--a little county park with tons of waterfalls and doable trails. We found the big Gandalf stick in the photos below, thank god, because let me tell you what it's like to try and haul 20+ extra pounds up a trail. I used to be able to scale hills quite effortlessly before the little passenger in my gut hitched a ride. Now he has surpassed the size of a large jicama fruit (my monthly newsletter compares his size to fruits and veggies. No longer my little lima bean or three tangerines. I believe butternut squash is next :)

*I can't recall where this came from, but somehow E. and I came up with a joke (or stole the joke from some friends) in which we call nature "the nature."

2008-03-22T10:29:00.000-07:00

Nostalgia

Sometimes I grow nostalgic for ways of life I've never actually experienced. Is that possible? I secretly dream of a life of the land, where food is grown and raised and killed and made; where one's "work" is synonymous with one's survival; and one builds a community based on common needs and family lines.

This doesn't stem out of a feeling of lonliness as you might imagine (nor do I have any desire to live with my family on a commune!), but from an urge to pull back and away from aspects of culture that often overwhelm me: my daily use of technologies; my craving for external stimulation in the form of media entertainment; my need to drive my car just to walk in nature.

Maybe this comes from being pregnant but some days I wish that "work"--for all of us, not just me--was simpler. Not as in "easy" but reflective more of our inherent relationship to the earth, leading us toward not financial goals, but opportunities to connect and reflect on living and being human.

And yes, I'm aware this is a fantasy. That working to survive is just that, and it's hard and there's very little joy in it for most people. But that's what fantasies are for.

* * *
Also, I've got a post up at The Debutante's Ball about the idea that we make our own luck. They're a great bunch of gals--debut authors who rotate out each year. I admit that I'm attached to the current set, however :) Check them out and their fantastic books!

2008-03-15T11:28:00.000-07:00

Write Free's March newsletter: Envisioning, featuring Mary Akers.

If you need any more enticement to subscribe to the FREE Write Free e-newsletter, let me give you a preview of the upcoming March issue. The topic is "envisioning" and the Creative Interview subject is Mary Akers, writer and co-author of the new book Radical Gratitude (with Andrew Bienkowski). If you miss this month, you won't be able to view it again until 2008's archives are posted next year!

Subscribe to Write Free here!

"Success is an infinitely receding horizon—if we let it be. Most people, artists included, once they achieve a coveted award or recognition, instantly put their focus on the next, the bigger, “better” award or recognition. So it’s no wonder we often remain dissatisfied with what we achieve. My new goal is to be happy now, to embrace now and when I learn to do that, I will consider myself to be successful..."
--Mary Akers

2008-03-14T08:18:00.000-07:00

Published, in a way

In 2007 my story "Shut-ins" was nominated for an honorable mention in the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition. Usually with honorable mentions you just get a little certificate and a thank you and your pride fills with writer's helium for a few days. However these fine people have now gone another step. They're posting us "hons" on a new writing blog at the Lorian Hemingway Competition website at their "writing blog". My story is up for view, so please check it out. Actually, I repasted it here at my own blog (below) because for some reason they left out all the scene breaks so everything just runs together with no breath, and that bothers me.

http://shortstorycomp.blogspot.com/2008/03/shut-ins-by-jordan-e-rosenfeld.html

On a related topic, if you've ever wondered whether writing on a blog equals "previously published" to a literary publication, you can read my short article for Writer's Digest, "Writing Shades of Gray."

* * *

SHUT-INS
by Jordan E. Rosenfeld

It's hard to get used to the centenarians; their faces are no more lined than someone in a really bad mood; they can rise from chairs as fast as the newly retired; they don't like it when I let myself in or suggest in any way that there is something they cannot do for themselves.
Sweet Millie has just finished reading Chekov's plays—for a third time. Though I drive the bookmobile, I haven't read anything more meaningful than the backs of cereal boxes since I arrived in Betty's Cove.

"Do you know where I was when this play was written?" she asks.

Millie’s hands, gripping the white book, remind me of tissue paper my grandma wrapped presents in, pink and delicate.

"I was entering the world, honey."

The date on that Chekov volume is 1904. One hundred years ago.

"The world has changed a lot since then, eh?"

"Out there it has," she says, pointing through her window at the sparkling harbor. Millie's husband died nearly thirty years ago. Her only daughter died last year at the age of eighty. Eighty!

"Oona," she says after I have declined tea and made sure she got the nicer copy of Madame Bovary, "Do you know that unmarried women live longer?"

The sun-dappled water outside her window is hypnotic. I have come to imagine that the inside of my husband Robert's head is like this placid flush of water, an eternal cove off the ocean where he rows in circles, waiting to awake.

"I didn't know that, Millie." I find myself saying her name often; I like the feeling of it in my mouth. For someone who is used to having people tilt their heads curiously at me when I offer mine, these wonderful hundred year-old names are a pleasure.

"My daughter was married five times. Can you imagine so many weddings? I only went to three—the three men I liked the most," says Millie, her delicate salon-given white curls jiggling. "She lived her whole life serving those men."

I’ve edged my way nearly out the front door, which is when Millie gets talkative. If not for the sunrises and sunsets, I think she would have no sense of time.

"Maybe you could stay here in Nova Scotia," she says then, braiding her fingers together. "It would be good for your peace-of-mind."

"It's worth a thought, Millie." One thought, which I’ve had many times over: I can't stay here much longer. Even if Robert himself were to die in my absence, we can't afford a stable-manager permanently; I'm using up our savings paying the temporary one. I miss the horses, anyway.

"See you next Saturday!"

Millie smiles at me and I close her door behind me, comforted by the bite of fishy-salt air in my nose. My sister, Lulu who has no love for him, not even now that he is as harmless as a baby, refers to him as "dope-on-a-rope." Sometimes, I even laugh. He's fed by IV and stomach tube. Some tired night nurse gets the task of moving his limbs around to stave off permanent atrophy. The cranky doctor calls me every week to report that his stats are all the same. His brain activity indicates that he could snap out of his coma any second. Or not.

Lulu convinced me to join her up here where she’s studying the unusually high numbers of centenarians in Betty's Cove, Halifax on a federal grant. I took the fine job of delivering books to the shut-ins rather than sitting around all day, hypnotized by the water's suggestion that I dive in, never to resurface. Lulu hates it when I call them the shut-ins, but this is what they call themselves.

It only took three days of him lying there, immobile and pale, for me to realize that I had rarely gotten to take such a close look at my husband's face and body. He was always in motion, taking some new horse out or working in the stables with such determined action that I didn't dare try to get close to him. And of course, there were all those other times when I did nothing but try to get away from his fists or the sheer bulk of his body which, when thrust against me, had the force of two men. He was good at knocking me down, and only because my fear kept me on the plump side did I keep from breaking ribs or wrists or any of the other delicate bones that are Lulu and my heritage.

Robert has a funky oblong mole at the top of his right temple for instance, just under the hairline so you can barely see it. Like a target.

* * *
Hedda always wants to know about my family—so I’ve gotten good at lying. She's one of the few centenarians whose memory really is in decline.

Today her little dome is capped in Lucille Ball style copper waves. She has an entire closet of wigs, at least thirty. She likes to show them off, as if she made them herself. She wears her husband's boots and three layers of thick socks to make them stay on. This would, perhaps, seem funny to some, but to me it makes perfect sense, and though she has to hobble around her house in those heavy shoes, I think I would do the same thing.

"Honey, how many sisters do you have?" She beckons me to open the wig cabinet.

"Just one," I say, though Lulu is ambitious enough for three sisters. As I open it, mannequin heads spill out, bonking into things, the wigs in a tussle on the floor.

"Oh dear," she says, wringing her tiny fingers. "I have been getting so clumsy."

I pat her shoulder kindly, thinking, you don't know clumsy. Clumsy is a man who grew up with horses, who worked with them all of his thirty-six years, standing on the mounting stool one year ago, throwing his muscular leg over Dorsey, a tall, chestnut stallion, a gesture he has made thousands upon thousands of times. Except this time he has thrown back too many shots of whiskey and has just finished shouting, "I won’t bring more of your fucked up genes into the world.” I’m red-eyed and sore at two spots above my breasts where he grabbed my shoulders and shook me for emphasis.

Not watching what he is doing, concentrating too much energy on shooting me a nasty glare, he doesn't notice Dorsey catch sight of his mortal enemy Pal, another macho stallion. If he had been paying attention to the horse and not glaring at me, Robert would not have been half-on when Dorsey bucked at Pal. He would not have fallen backwards in a twist, would not have hit the new wooden fence behind him, would not be in coma.

Hedda pinches my cheek. "You must not have slept well either, eh?" she says, calling me back.

Hedda requested The Death of Ivan Iliyich, which we had to get on interlibrary loan since the last copy of it made its way into the harbor when the reader "was taken up by God" according to the Betty's Cove librarian. Lulu clarified for me: "Mr. Watson had a heart attack."

"All of us girls started to go bald at the age of forty-five. Such a curse," Hedda says.

"Yes, that's what you said," I remind her. I don't mean to get impatient with her, but in the month I've been shepherding books around she's told me the same ten or fifteen facts about her life over and over again.

"Your sisters don't have this trouble," she laments, forgetting I have only one and gripping a strand of my long non-descript hair. Hairdressers are kind to me, they tell me it's "dark blonde" but I know dishwater when I see it, and no matter what Lulu-of-the-golden-curls says, it didn't take Robert to make me believe this.

"Your wigs are lovely, though.”

Hedda smiles like a little girl who has just gotten a kitten. She pats her hair.

"They are, aren't they? Willard was ashamed that I had no hair, but I told him ‘Willard, I may not have any hair but I'm the prettiest thing you've ever had walking at your side, now aren't I?’ And Willard never could argue with me there. His girlfriend before me had moles covering her face and a mustache that she had to bleach twice a week."

The girlfriend gets slightly more repugnant each time Hedda tells it, reinventing her past to suit her.

I am too tired to really get to know the centenarians, though I realize that each one of these people is like a library unto themselves. There are wars and family secrets, traditions passed down and special remedies I could learn if I only asked. But I ask only the things that help my sister in her work: their history of disease, how many siblings they had, how many children, and I am working up to asking them if there are any benefits to living so long.

***

Lulu is a corpse at the end of the day just like our father used to be, except she doesn't help it along with a bottle of red wine.

"Nothing new from Hedda," I tell her. "She's starting to repeat herself more and more."

Lulu shakes her head as if I have been a very bad research assistant. I know she's not really relying on me, that she'll go back for any information she doesn't get, but I do like to feel useful.

"Hedda is one-hundred and four—the oldest."

"Do you think it's their diet, the ocean air?" I ask.

Lulu bites her lip. She is always careful about saying what she thinks unless she has the hard facts to back it up. But I can tell she's worn down by something, maybe having me around.

"You know what I think? I think the women live longer up here because their husbands died," she says.

"That’s cynical! Are you and Lars fighting?"

"Lars and I only do two things: fight and fuck.”

My forty year-old sister suddenly looks eighteen again, or maybe I'm just flashing back to when she left home, me just barely fourteen, alone with daddy and his fits and mother, who took pills first just to sleep and then for good.

"You know, Oona, you could just take a pillow to his face and it would all be over. Done."

"Lu you don't mean that."

"Tell me Mom wasn't happier after Daddy died? Tell me we weren't all happier!"

"You were," I say.

My sister shakes her head. She has always walked a fine line with me. She can't get too angry at me; that was Daddy's job. She has to protect me, even from herself.

"Oona, what if he wakes up and goes right back to being his old bastard self!"

I stand up and back out of the room the way I used to back away from our father, leaving Lulu to weather the first blows.

“Coward!” she cries out. Though I hate her for saying it, oh how right she is.

I leave the cottage to the sound of her frustrated groan. I walk to the docks and listen to the wind through the sails, things rattling and banging, the water splishing at the bottoms of the boats. It would be so easy to drown. You wouldn't even have to try, just open up your mouth and swallow too much water. It would be easy to finish it off for Robert, for me. A pillow over his face. He probably wouldn't even buck or kick.

The thing is, Lulu doesn't realize that I'm not waiting for Robert to wake up. And if he does, I'm not waiting for him to have one of those change-of-personality situations.

It's just nice to be in control for a change.

People always want to know how a nice girl gets hooked up with a bad boy. They always think the fault lies in the abuser because he's the easiest one to pin down, what with all his fits of rage and his physicality. They want to believe in innocence and evil the way I want to believe that just because you live to be a hundred years old, you are wiser than the rest of us.

***
One month is not long enough to get attached. But Hedda's death still hurts because it is so sudden.

Hedda's niece from Miami is holding two wigs, sitting on her bed. Hedda's niece herself is seventy years old, and I realize she is coveting the wigs, not just admiring them.

"I don't suppose you'd like to read a copy of Great Expectations while you're here?" I ask.

The niece adjusts her glasses and sticks her finger in her ear.

"I'm sorry," she says. "This hearing aid is on the fritz. Must be the salt air. What did you say?"

"Books. Do you want a book to read? I'm here with the bookmobile. I used to deliver to Hedda."

The niece shakes her badly-dyed orange hair. "Oh god, no, my glaucoma makes reading a chore.

Do you know where the funeral home is? I've only been up here once and I get so lost."

"I don't live here.”

"Oh," she says. "Well…" she tries to push up from the bed but fails.

Accustomed to letting the likes of Hedda and Millie help themselves I am surprised when the woman glares at me.

"Can you please give me a hand?"

I help her up and she shuffles out of the room calling after someone named Maury. I am left with Dickens and a bed full of wigs. I have a very strong urge to hear Robert's voice, the tender way he clucked to the horses as he went to feed or groom them. He was wonderful with animals, it figures. A bunch of rangy goats, a handful of barn-fed cats and even one lonely lop-eared bunny are waiting for me back in Oregon. So is the silence, the dread of flat moments. No more highs and lows, just stillness and all the books I planned to read, now waiting for me, without excuses.
I lie back on Hedda's bed, but the smell of the comforter is sharp and fetid, reminding me of the physicality of her death.

I hurry out and return to my sister's cottage. To my surprise she isn't bent over books or charts. She is stretched out on the ratty chaise lounge on the tiny deck. Her long blonde hair, usually up in a ratty frizz atop her head is down around her shoulders. She has rolled up her pant legs to let the weak sunlight dust them.

"Hedda passed," I say.

Lulu frowns but doesn't move. She tilts her head up to the sun. "One hundred and four," she says, in a tone of reverence. "That gives me sixty-four more years to live if I'm so lucky," she says.

"That doesn't sound like very much time all of a sudden," I say.

Lulu looks at me like I'm nuts, but then, I'm used to that.

"I'm going home, Lu."

"I'm surprised you stayed this long."

It's stupid to be offended, but I am. "Why?"

She crooks a pale eyebrow up at me.

"Come on Oona; I don't feel like doing this sister dance. We know how we are."

"Well maybe I don't know. Maybe you just assume I know."

Seagulls circle us and then scoot down to the water in the harbor. I'll miss this water.

"You are a glutton for punishment. You're terrified of being alone. And I prefer it that way.”

I don’t remind her that Robert is still alive.

"Do you really think unmarried women live longer?" I ask.

"Well," she says, stretching her arms overhead, "I guess I'll be the first to know."

"Hedda wore her husband's boots, you know. All the time. With layers of socks to make them fit."

Lulu frowns at this withheld detail. I knew she wouldn’t understand.

"So maybe the key is having lost a husband," she says.

"Or maybe it's having had one at all," I counter.

Lulu grimaces. "Right,” she says, all sarcasm.

"Will you feel gratified when you isolate the ingredient or gene or habit that makes these people live longer?"

The bark of seagulls sounds startlingly like horses whinnying.

"Sure," she says. "But most of science is about the pursuit of things, not the finding of them."

Usually I’m the resigned one. It’s amusing that for the first time in years, I feel hopeful.

"Well, I guess I should let the library know I'm leaving.”

She mumbles okay and I turn away from her to face the harbor, shaped like a horse-shoe, thinking it will be a long time before I see her again. She won’t miss me, not much. Not the way Robert missed me if I went to a horse show for a weekend. He would throw me to the bed with fierce passion if I was gone for more than a day and make love to me until our bodies were bruised and satiated.

I turn back to look at her, She is clutching her sides as if they hurt from laughing too hard.

“I’m not going home to go back to the way it was,” I say.

She waves her long fingers as if shooing off a small child. “You don’t have to justify it to me.”

She’s right. So I don’t tell her that what I look forward to most is riding Dorsey, the horse that set me free.

2008-03-13T10:39:00.001-07:00

Full Circle

Sorry for the silence. Been down with food poisoning--a cruel trial for a pregnant woman, let me tell you.

But something miraculous has also happened (other than, you know, the miracle of life)--I've returned to writing fiction this week. Only three 700 word stints so far, but after months of feeling about fiction like I do about eggplant (read: repulsed), I am back at it. I'm working on a project I started one day long ago before the fusion of my husband's and my genes made it impossible for me to think creatively...so I guess that would be summer. And since it's been so summer-like here (today's overcast sky excepted), it feels right, like coming full circle.

I'm also coming at it from the point of view that it just feels good to do it, that it's fun, and though of course I hope to do something with this manuscript as I do with all of them, right now, writing feels like hope and summer and long days lounging in the park. Being creative just feels good.

* * *

On the topic of creativity, a reminder to you fine people that Write Free: Attracting the Creative Life which I co-wrote with Rebecca Lawton is published and making its tender little way to bookstores. The more I look at our labor of love, the more I like it and wish it well. I know that sounds strange for an author to say--of course you do Jordan, you sort of have an interest in the thing--but really, I almost feel like the book just came through us for others to read. I can think of nothing that brings more instant joy and transformation to a person's life than creativity--and from creativity springs myriad other possibilities. I can't tell you the number of people I know who started a little hobby, from writing short stories, to making inspirational paper cut-outs, and eventually turned this creative lark into a business or a livelihood, or the best way to spend their free time. Creativity is life, man. It's my new religion (my old one being...? I'm not sure).

For the time being Kulupi/BeijaFlor Books, our savvy, independent publisher out of Glen Ellen, CA has opted not to use Amazon.com to sell it through, since they tend to bilk the publisher on cash. So if the book is not yet in your favorite bookstore: A, ask them to order it through Partners West distributors, or B, go directly to either the Write Free Website or to our publisher, Kulupi Publishing. It's almost pocket-sized, with an insanely lovely cover due to the talent of the image's painter, Irene Ehret, and will help you to change the way you think about your creative dreams, and help you fulfill them.

If you haven't yet subscribed to the FREE e-newsletter based on the same principles, why not do so now? And if you've missed any, you can purchase access to the entire year of 2007 for the ridiculously low price of $9.99.

2008-03-07T14:12:00.001-08:00

An Embarrassment of...pages

I've read a lot of books lately--many of them ARCs (advance review copies) that aren't for sale yet, such as a fantastic teen novel that really could be sold as an adult novel called Madapple by Christina Meldrum, the wonderfully atmospherica, dark and edgy Falling Under by Danielle Younge-Ullman; the tale of competition in the world of science research in Intuition, by Allegra Goodman, and at last I read Cormac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men--even after having seen the movie and was transfixed and blown away. That book will stay with me.

I'm in one of those zones where reading is like some insanely good type of cookie that I can't stop gorging on. I read a book every couple days when I can, and feel good that I'm reading so much...and then I surf the web or look at Booksense picks and become utterly unhinged at just how many books there are out there! It's a wonderful feeling to know that there is so much good reading out there waiting for me, and at at the same time a little obsessive part of my brain feels like I will never do enough. I will miss out on so much good stuff. But that's the nature of life. You can't experience everything all the time.

But somedays I wish I could read it all.

What are you reading??

JPR

2008-02-28T11:33:00.000-08:00

A change is a-comin'

Sometime here in the next couple of months, Jordan's Muse is going to undergo a change. Thematically I'll be changing the look and feel of the blog, and possibly its url to be more geared towards offering you practical information based on my two books, Make a Scene and Write Free. I won't entirely lose the informal chatty aspect, don't worry, but in order to make the most of the world of blogging, I think it's important to offer a service to one's readers.

So, keep your eyes peeled for changes. If the blog url does change, this blog will remain live with a reminder of the new location, so don't worry.

J

2008-02-26T17:55:00.000-08:00

There was a time I respected Ralph Nadar. Or I could say that I still respect the Ralph Nadar who put consumer safety first and stood behind his ideals. I entirely dislike the Nadar who believes he is achieving progress by entering the presidential race again and again, splitting voters. If you are even considering with one nose hair voting for Nadar, I implore you to see the documentary An Unreasonable Man first.

I admit it. I believe that large scale change tends to happen incrementally.

I want to relish a little change in the near future.

JPR

2008-02-25T17:11:00.000-08:00

Coming Out...make that Bulging Out

For more than six months now I have resisted writing about the single most momentous event of my life for a number of reasons ranging from the superstitious to the absolutely practical. But I find that by not writing about it, I have less and less to say because it's like not writing about your amputation, or your Pulitzer prize, or finding your birth parents. By not talking about the fact that I am pregnant, I am not talking about what is most on my mind and what is most changing me. Frankly it's been terrifically hard to do.

Some people believe that you shouldn't talk about your child-to-be before birth because of all the things that could go wrong. I wish that I had such a noble reason. For me, the single driving force has been something I'm a little bit shocked to find myself admitting: I am afraid of not being taken seriously anymore. (And in the freelance world, of becoming disposable). Before you scoff, or talk about my suppressed gender issues, hear me out.

I come laden with my own prejudices to parenthood. I am gunshy of "mommy culture" as I think of it--a vortex of shopping and anxiety that seems all too easy to be sucked into. I'm irritated by the consumer message that crows into our ears that good mommies (and daddies, of course, but women are the target 99% of the time) should never be afraid to use the credit card on shiny plastic things that will make your children safer, smarter and more productive. I don't like talking about products for very long beyond getting practical advice before I spend a huge amount of money on something like a car seat or a stroller. In fact, this whole paragraph is starting to bore me already.

But the fact is--I am now a member of a club, whether I like it or not. Even though we put a lot of thought into the choice to become parents, and we are one of the last of our gang of friends to do so, it is unavoidable--Mommy culture is calling and, like any good representation of the Devil, it always comes in a pretty package or makes you feel guilty for not buying in, or creeps into your unconscious at night and gets into your skin. Must. Resist.

But the thing is, in joining up this new club I don't want to revoke my membership to the other club I've been a part of for a very long time. That of person who is taken seriously for what she thinks and says, not just because of her procreative abilities. I think this is the dilemma that "career women" have faced for as long as women have had careers. How to have both? Initially, you put the career on hold--even I believe in that. Babies need undivided attention and a strong, loving container for their very health. I have every intention of providing that. And I also know that the life of the mind, of the word, will have an equally powerful pull on me. I am curious and slightly afraid of how I will balance both.

But at least I'm talking about it now. No secret anymore.

I believe in the end that all works out exactly right.

JPR

2008-02-23T10:09:00.000-08:00

The Freelance life: Love it AND leave it

Sorry to leave you hanging with that last post. A few of you have jumped in with interesting things to say, though. For some, there's a satisfying "changing of hats" that follows when you switch from article to novel, as reader Josi commented. Tracer suggested that maybe some dispositions are more suited to doing both--and I do think that's true, though I know some people who are ill-suited but do them both anyway :) Maryanne admits that the teaching life is definitely a drain on the creative life--to which I agree (even though I only teach 1ce a month and she teaches five days a week).

My ruminations led me to this: if you do indeed make your living as a freelancer you have to love it, and leave it both.

First strive for balance so that in the mad dash for work you aren't saying "yes" to more than you can handle, or to so much that you don't leave room for the creative. In January, for instance, I didn't say no to a single project that came my way. Result: overwhelm and an inability to even read, much less write. When I had a full-time job, in contrast, was in graduate school, doing a radio show and writing freelance articles on the side (yes, all at the same time), I got more fiction writing done than ever before. Why? Because I knew that if I didn't carve out the space for it, I would not do it. Since working completely for myself, no longer in school or doing a radio show, dedicated fully to all things freelance, I waste far more time. Time that could be spent writing fiction.

I have never lacked for self-motivation. I always knew I was a good candidate for working for myself because I prefer the spontaneous, volatile world of juggling projects to the security (mundane) of a position in which I work for someone else's goals entirely. I guess I'm typically right-brained in that way. But the other side of the coin is that the structure of the security model seemed to allow for more creative time. Now I have to really work at it.

So, treat your freelance life seriously--do the work, don't be lazy, plan ahead, research, network, etc, but if you also write fiction, remember that seeds won't grow without water. Sometimes turning down a project that pays, but one you know is going to be especially time-intensive or frustrating--is worth it. I am learning the fine art of saying no to money and discovering that that money always comes back to me in another way (project). On the same token, all the work I took on because I was feeling greedy for cash ended up taking longer to get to me than other money I was owed. So there you go.

(Yes, I think this post is more for me than for any of you reading).

* * * * * *

And on that note, the Write Free E-letter, edited by Rebecca Lawton and me addresses these kinds of issues every month. And subscribing is FREE. February's topic was Replenishment. Each year’s subscription brings 10 issues full of insights, activities, and open-hearted inspirations on how to attract the creative life. The issues come to subscribers’ email in-boxes each month for 10 months a year. If you missed any of 2007's issues, you can also subcribe for the low price of $9.95 to the Archives, and have access to all 10 back issues.

2008-02-20T15:02:00.000-08:00

Today I'm mulling this question: Does the freelance life kill the fiction writer (in the same writer's soul, that is)?

Anyone have any experience?

J

2008-02-19T15:02:00.000-08:00

I am going to buy this T-shirt for myself. It is just my kind of snark.

2008-02-12T13:03:00.000-08:00

Surviving the Bad Review

I would like to update an old axiom today. It will now go: "Into every writer's life, a bad review must fall."

Naturally this is not something we writers want to hear. As we construct our opuses out of fairy-wings and vodka shots, we all secretly hope to be catapulted not only to fame and vast wealth--but to be canonized. I don't care if you write trashy romances with badly stitched plots--I'll bet you want it too: to be loved, idolized, held up as the standard to which all other books in your genre should aspire. You're only human after all--which means, ruled by your ego,that sleazy little car salesmen in all of our souls.

The bad review, I have come to believe, is the universe's way of trying to reel us in. And no matter how plainspoken or thoughtful said review is, ultimately, to the one who is on the receiving end, it is inevitably the meanest thing ever written by a clearly inferior person.

Still, it makes you feel like crap.

And yes, I've just gotten one this week. Fortunately it wasn't from Kirkus or Booklist (as if they would ever review trade books on the craft of writing anyway), but from some anonymous member of the masses at Amazon.com. With democratic forms of marketing come democratic forums for voicing opinions--it is par for the course, in other words. Like Bob Marley sang so righteously: "You can't please all the people, all the time."

Aside from the fact thatt he reviewer got my gender wrong (even though the bio clearly states that I am a SHE) I ask you to look at the contradictions contained in said review.

How can he say THIS:
"Make a Scene is packed with helpful concrete suggestions and information..."

and at the same time, say THIS:
"His passion for state-of-being verbs and qualifying adverbs turns the the book into a 270-page drone in which nothing is more important than anything else."

If the book is indeed "packed" with "helpful concrete suggestions" in what reality can it also be a true that "nothing is more important than anything else?"

My only answer is that the reviewer is a quantum physicist and comes from the point of view that a particle exists both somewhere and nowhere at once. Therefore, my book is both helpful, and not helpful at all to him. This is the only way I can understand it.

Either that, or my conspiracy mind thinks that maybe one of my "competitors" in the field of scene writing (who shall remain nameless) hired someone to write a nasty review of my book to make it seem less palatable. Therefore, perhaps he never even READ it! Yes, maybe this is it!

What you are seeing are the stages of reconstruction that the sleazy-little car salesmen of my ego must go to in order not to feel like a total hack. Who cares that a publisher felt my book was worthy of being published, or that many others have had very nice things to say about it. I am a writer--therefore I hear the worst first.

The only thing that saves me from looking for a full-time gig in some soul-sucking retail mall is humor. And the knowledge that for every bad review, the good ones still balance out the scales.

(That, and imagining force-feeding my entire book to the reader while he is tied to a chair.)

I remain open to suggestions.--Jordan

2008-02-06T16:56:00.000-08:00

Shades of Grief

People expect to be wracked with grief right now, and I feel funny telling them that I am okay, even though my Oma (grandmother in German) has just died. My father says he is experiencing a similar thing. So I think maybe it warrants an explanation so that I don't just seem like some kind of unfeeling person. I AM sad. I AM disoriented. I feel that something in the world is different, off-kilter. But she has been leaving this world for years now, and has been quite miserable in her body for the last year especially. Her death was easy, peaceful even--so how can I be sad that she has left, when she is free?

The truth is, I did a lot of grieving for her (well, for myself, really) in the last four years as her memory declined. One day she went from being my quirky grandmother to being a woman who knew me, and my name, but couldn't believe for the life of her that she bore any genetic relationship to me, or to my father. She thought she knew me from the Kibbutz. She thought I had lived in NY with her. She didn't seem to even notice the 59 year age difference between us, because I think she was flickering in and out of different times.

That was hard. That was tragic. I cried then. I wrote a novel about a character much like her and her effect on her family. I felt like I'd lost a significant part of my childhood--those summers spent on Shelter Island, nearly wordless, making crafts.

In light of this, I am pasting in the text of two things I've written about Oma. One was published in The St. Petersburg Times--their Sunday journal. The second is an informal piece I wrote during my writing group. The published piece feels truncated to me now, like it only just begins, but it's an interesting snapshot of her four years ago.

*I feel a slight hesitation to put them here only because they also reveal things about my relationship to my father, and I don't know how I feel about that, if only because there are two sides to every story.

The leaching of memory (original title: Borne)
By JORDAN ROSENFELD
Published August 1, 2004

I left Oma and Opa with relief and dread and headed for the slate, spare ice of Vermont in January. My first time in the snow and it was record cold, where you could feel your body make preparations to shut down if you stood too long in one place. I was not the only one fighting to keep myself alive.

My grandparents spent 45 years in New York. After that despair-filled visit, I saw them again in California, no longer on the verge of death, but abutting a new verge, one in which all that came before them - the Orthodox Jewish parents, the children's homes in Germany, the kibbutz in Palestine, surviving the war that birthed the state of Israel, the immigration to New York - was scattered in chipped mosaic about them like the tchotchkes left in boxes too long.

In a period of a few months she had stopped eating or sleeping much back home. A stroke? Loneliness? She began to fall out of bed at night. She needed, suddenly, a cane to walk with. She wanted to throw herself into traffic. She forgot where she was. Who she was. She asked, "What do I have to live for?" It was move or die, though she fought us every step of the way. My father, who had left them more than 30 years before (fled them really, as if they were a war) now closed the 3,000-mile gap to move them next door to him at my urging.

Somewhere between getting on and off the plane, my Oma forgot that my father was her son.
He has since become "a nice man." "The manager" of their house. He shares a name with her own lost son, Ilan - changed to the spelling "Elon" for American eyes and tongues - but he is not that golden-haired child she used to tell me about, the one with the beautiful curls that were cut off by a babysitter when he smeared them in rationed jelly. She lamented those curls to me throughout languid, hot summers I spent with her and Opa in their muggy New York home.
This "Elon," my father, is not the swift smart kid who learned English so well and fast when they came to the states in 1956. She remembers only her eldest, my uncle Joe (Joaf), who has trekked the states himself, now in Florida, moved perhaps by some reawakened immigrant spirit, trying to find a place of peace and home.

"You don't forget who you have borne!" she cries when we try to explain the family matrix. "How can you forget such a thing?"

"It was just a bundle, barely a person, perhaps you have just forgotten," my Opa counters, always pained, always in disbelief that a brain can betray such an intrinsic reality.

"A baby is not a bundle!" she cries. "Only a woman can know this."

It does seem impossible, even at 88 years old, that you can forget your son. But clearly, sometimes you do. Not only sons are forgotten, and not only by mothers. What about when you are a father, with a daughter? You did not carry the child in your tissue or feed her with your blood. She grows up to be 20, then 30, and you let her drift away and out of your life, trust her to continue to bear her burdens silently. You don't feel the need to reconcile the past, your own '60s-inspired wanderings and damage inflicted by neglect. You have a second family, and then, watching your mother forget you, do not realize that your daughter has begun to wonder (this grown woman who doesn't need you anymore), "How long before you forget me, too?"

Writing Prompt: Silence

My Oma is is 90 years old with the softest skin and the same generous forehead and lips you’ll find in my face.

For a moment I thought that I had drawn a blank, but then I remembered with Oma we didn’t talk so much, we worked with our hands: origami, macramé, needlepoint, rugmaking, bead-stringing. We had a special language of fingers, hers strong and well-knuckled; hands that could just as easily have plucked a child out of the face of danger as fold a delicate origami crane. There is so much she did not talk about that she never needed to suggest a subject should be avoided; with a particular frown or pursing of her lips, entire continents seemed silenced.

We never spoke of her childhood yet somehow I learned that she was the chosen child of three, the only girl, sent to a children’s home after her father died and her mother went broke.

We never talked about the way my father made a living, but somehow I always knew that she knew.

We didn’t talk about her brother’s family in France but when I was 23 I tracked them down and visited.

And yet my Oma could surprise me, always asking strange, unanswerable questions as if I were an oracle, not her grandchild:

“Why is there always this fighting in the Middle East? Why do the young ones listen to this music so loud? Why do you think your parents divorced?”

Perhaps I was too young to understand the power of the rhetorical question—questions meant to be spoken with a raised fist to God. But her childhood erased any faith in God. Instead, she gave it to my Opa, a man she would repeatedly refer to as “so very clever” as if to say she was not and never could be.

Still, her demure silences and shying away from topics of emotional intensity did not prevent her from asking the single most shocking question ever posed by a family member. I was 21 and visiting NY for the summer. Absolutely without any preamble she stopped me on our way to the car, out of Opa’s earshot and asked, “The boys, if they say they do not want to wear a condom, how do you answer them?”

First there was shock, then humor. Awkward as it was, I respected her curiosity. I doubt she had many lovers or any opportunity to use a condom.

Now that dementia has stolen all the bonds of memory that tell her how it is that she and I know each other, now that all those silent summers where we worked at a craft side by side, I regret all the questions I never asked her and their answers, which are simply gone.

2008-02-06T10:37:00.001-08:00

Sorry for the absence. My last living grandmother has died. I will return.

J

2008-01-29T05:54:00.000-08:00

Patry Francis--Helping her hold her own

Me and Patry Francis at BookSmart, March 2007.

The truth is, I'm good at forgetting things. Good at erasing images from my mind. Good at pretending, as Jamie called it. After seventeen years of marriage to the master, how could I be otherwise. But this time I could not allow myself the easy way out. I had to talk to someone, and Gavin was the only one I had. Of course, I knew he would not want to discuss it. I had seen his face when someone had shown him the score that ended the concert and caused me to faint. It was obvious from the sudden darkening I read on his familiar features that he, too, had immediately been drawn to the top of the page. The words PARADISE SUITE had been crossed out and replaced with a new title: dEaTH SWeeT. And the name of the composer had been changed from A.C. Mather to SLaY-hER.

The best introduction I can give you to Patry Francis, author, generous human being, fellow sufferer on this planet, sage, mother, wife, loyal friend, is through her own words. The above passage is from her novel The Liar's Diary, just out in paperback--lucky for you if you missed the extremely good boat last year when it came out in hardcover.

I was racking my brains trying to remember when I first "met" Patry online. I only know that one day her blog Simply Wait became a part of my daily reading, and I grew antsy when she hadn't yet posted anew. Then, somehow, we became blog pals--she'd comment here, I'd comment there. I participated in her Third Day Book Club online for a brief stint...but I still can't remember who introduced me to her, or how I came to know her. It's almost as if Patry was always a friend--someone I could talk life and writing with over coffee in a little cafe. Yet as she lives on the east coast, and I, on the west, I've just reconciled myself to the fact that some people feel like old friends because they're purely, truly themselves.

Patry writes about life, love, disappointment, joy, writing and waittressing--her former career before selling her novel. And now she writes about her endeavor with cancer, as beautifully as before, though sharpened by the clarity of pain and the threat of loss. I call it an endeavor, not a "struggle" or a "challenge" because it has become evident to me and anyone who follows Patry's blog, that she has tackled her healing with a sense of purpose and discipline no less serious than what she brings to her writing.

As with all endeavors it takes a lot of time and energy. It's hard to be your own healer, as well as a writer and a publicist. Yet now, more than ever, Patry needs attention for her fabulous book, excerpted at top.

Here is what she says about her book in a recent post:

"Though my novel deals with murder, betrayal, and the even more lethal crimes of the heart, the real subjects of THE LIAR'S DIARY are music, love, friendship, self-sacrifice and courage. The darkness is only there for contrast; it's only there to make us realize how bright the light can be. I'm sure that most writers whose work does not flinch from the exploration of evil feel the same."

I met Patry in person last year, when, on her west coast book tour, and in particular, an exhausting run in the bay area, she came to BookSmart where I coordinate events. Because she already felt like an old friend, I knew we'd get along. I knew I would like her. I knew she was the generous, funny, wry, talented person you'll hear about all over the blogosphere today. What I also learned was, girlfriend can hold her own! The word "tough" is utterly wrong to describe Patry. She doesn't come off as street or truck-stop tough in the slightest. But she's solidly herself. You can't waittress for two decades without learning how to deal with the whining, insensitive world in a firm and competent manner.

And when, in the gathered crowd at the bookstore, someone began to pontificate and draw the conversation away from the hearty discussion that followed her reading, Patry elegantly, but firmly, took control, shutting off the slightly hysterical tangent without shutting the person down.

I don't know about you, but I like that in a person. What's more, it comes through in her characters.

So here is my exhortation to those of you who visit today. Buy a copy of Patry's suspense novel, The Liar's Diary, for yourself, a friend or a family member, and post a comment here saying you have done so.

Then email me your mailing address, and I will send you a free hardcover copy of my book Make a Scene, or a surprise novel. Email me at: jordansmuse(at)gmail(dot)com. Offer good for the first 8 commenters.

I'll leave you with a quote I took from Patry when I profiled her for Writer's Digest magazine in 2007:

“If you don’t write because you love to and take pleasure in it, because it is such a risky business, what’s the point?”

**For more goodies, including an audio clip and a video trailer, as well as a list of the over 300 people who are blogging online today on Patry's behalf, visit Susan Henderson's LitPark for the deets.

2008-01-28T17:17:00.001-08:00

Teaching by Telephone

Saturday I taught a workshop on revision for the Redwood Writer's Club. "Taught" might be a bit over-stretching it..."presented" perhaps? At any rate, I had a lot of fun doing it. I haven't yet figured out the magic formula that makes me able to be "on" for some gigs, and totally out of body for others. I find that the great ones feel natural--like I'm being myself, but at the same time it's a more outgoing, chatty, knowledgable part of myself than I usually have access to. It also seems that when I over-prepare, but then sort of leave my notes off to the side and don't really use them, I have a more fluid style of delivering the info. I mean, trust me, there were flaws and I even got a few gentle suggestions from folks after the fact, but it was truly a fun and wonderful time.

What I find so interesting is what the participants glean from what I say. Someone might say, "Back when you were talking about X"...and I have to stop and think, Did I really say that? But no, learning is very much like a game of telephone. The teacher talks, the students hear what they hear, as filtered through experience and practice and a whole lot more, I'm sure. I received a slew of emails, too, that suggested that human experience is vastly wide and differing--that all 40 people in that room probably received a slightly different lecture :)

Don't forget that tomorrow is a day that much of the blogosphere will be devoted to talking about Patry Francis, author of the Liar's Diary. Be sure to stop on by here, too. I'll be giving away some free books!

Jordan

2008-01-24T16:15:00.000-08:00

Gettin' Real with George Pelecanos

***
My word we're having another storm here in CA. I have to laugh at California's relationship with weather. Though, contrary to popular belief we do actually get cold, and even snow here, it's true that we have nothing to complain about in comparison to say, oh, three-quarters of the United States and much of the rest of the world. Yet anytime we get a big storm it not only makes the news--we get "Storm Tracker". . .you'd think we were having volcanic eruptions! Blizzards! We take our rain very seriously out here, yessirree.

* * *

Anyway, that's not the point of this post. Yesterday I interviewed George Pelecanos. Depending on where you spend more time, you either know him as the gritty crime novelist whose books are all set in D.C., or as one of the writers/producers of HBO's series The Wire. I like interviewing authors in general, but the ones I like best are those for whom fame was a kind of happy accident, who didn't start out with their egos heavily invested in the process. Pelecanos has lived his whole life in Washington D.C. where he's absorbed the local color and culture. He listens to people talking around him; he observes. He may be a Greek boy, but he has an uncanny ability to write as if he comes from the streets of D.C. where gangs and hoods and cops tangle, too.

He didn't study writing in college, or go through an MFA program. He's well-read and likes film and books a great deal, but he's first and foremost just a guy. You know what I mean? He's not high-falutin'. He doesn't work in fancy words or drop vaguely foreign sounding terms into general conversation. He's real. He's honest. I like real.

For fun, here's a snippet of dialogue between characters from his novel Drama City. Lorenzo is an ex-con whose "straight" now and works as "dog police." But a friend of his has been stabbed and he's gone back to an old drug pal to try to settle the score. They're trying to get a car out of the fellow with the rotweiler:

Lorenzo stabbed the fork into the T-bone on the grill, lifted it, shook it loose, and let it fall to the ground in front of the rot. The dog's nub of tail wiggled furiously as he took the steak in his teeth...

Nigel chuckled. "You ain't lost nothing'."

"Some shit just stay natural," said Lorenzo.

"Thought you was gonna break a beer bottle off. Or maybe take one of those loose bricks and throw it through the window of the Impala."

"I thought of that. Car that nice, I just couldn't fuck with it."

"You made do with that fork, though."

Duke came out of the garage and handed Nigel a piece of paper...

"Nah," said Duke. "Nah, uh-uh." He had noticed Champ getting down on the T-bone. "Why'd you have to go and do that to a man, too?"

"He deserves a steak, way you mistreat him," said Lorenzo. "And don't even think of beating that animal 'cause I can see by the way he cringes that you do."

"Who the fuck are y'all?" said Duke.

"We ain't nobody you ever seen or met," said Nigel. "You understand?"

It is no surprise to me that not only have his books (I think he's published 14 now) become immensely well-selling, but that he has been tapped to write for quality TV programs, and that his books have been optioned by Hollywood. I am sorry it took me this long to check him out.

My interview with him will appear in a summer issue of Writer's Digest magazine, though a podcast version may go up sooner. Until then, check him out for yourself.

2008-01-24T09:03:00.000-08:00

The beauty of a good club

I don't know about you, but when I was younger and far more impressionable, I got sucked into a few of those music-a-month clubs (back when they were only selling cassette tapes). There was something endless about those little fliers, those pressing requests to select another damn tape (Depeche Mode...or Wham, the choice was agonizing!) or else they would send you something of their own choosing, like Neil Diamond's greatest hits (as an 80's teen, this was like death to me). After awhile, I always quit--usually after I had been sent to collections because, without having read the fine print, I didn't know that I was legally bound to buy a new one every month or they'd charge me anyway!

The reason I tell you that sad story is not to ward you off all mail-order clubs, but for contrast. In my wiser, adult years I did join a mail-order club that has benefitted me immensely--The Writer's Digest Book Club. There's no hard sell, you only have to buy a few books after they send you a bunch for a ridiculously low price. And as many writers know, there is nothing like having a collection of valuable writing books on your shelf to turn to in a pinch (or perhaps carry in a back pocket).

As you probably guessed, this post is slightly self-serving, too. My book Make a Scene is the book club selection for Writer's Digest book club members right now. Not only that--it's the fancy hardcover edition, which I have to tell you, is be-yoo-tiful.

Seriously. That bathroom-tile photo does not do it justice.

Plus it has me ever so enigmatic author photo in the back :)

Its beauty (or handsomeness if you prefer a male-sounding designation, and believe me--it swings both ways) is all due to the talent of Claudean Wheeler of F& W Publications' design team. I get compliments on the cover all the time.

If you're not already a member, and have any interest in joining, I recommend it. I can look over at my shelf right now and count more than 10 of my all-time most turned to writing books. They are almost all Writer's Digest books. It's the main reason I sought them out as my publisher--I wanted to be where the best writing guides are.

JPR

2008-01-20T12:24:00.000-08:00

Energize Your Creative Life with Write Free, the book.

More than two years ago, Rebecca Lawton and I, newly acquainted writers who'd been slouching toward success in fits and starts (check out Rebecca's amazing book of essays, Reading Water), found our writing lives changing in dramatic ways after we began getting together and working on drawing more of what we wanted to us (unknowingly, at first).

The work we were doing together led us to hold a retreat we called "Creating Space" for writers, an inspiring and life-changing weekend in gorgeous, bucolic Philo, CA, which led to the book we co-wrote, Write Free: Attracting the Creative Life.

Publishing is a notoriously slow process, however, and this book was no exception. Yet somehow time has managed to compress and disappear, and the book is finally published--and it's beautiful! Our publisher, Arthur Dawson of Kulupi Publishing, which is devoted to "A sense of place" created a new imprint under which our book is the first: BeijaFlor Books--for "creative journeys." "Kulupi "and "BeijaFlor" are Native American, and Brazilian words for "hummingbird" respectively.

Our launch party, held in Becca's neck of the woods--Sonoma--on the 17th was a truly wonderful event. The response was shockingly good to the book, and people were full of excitement and kindness.

The books will be shipping out to the distributor, and thus to bookstores, in the coming weeks via our publisher, but meanwhile you can purchase copies through us, and through Kulupi Publishing directly.

Meanwhile, if you're not yet a subscriber to the FREE E-newsletter, Write Free, based on the ideas behind our book, please consider subscribing today!

2008-01-14T19:07:00.000-08:00

Mistress of Suspense

My interview with one of my all time favorite suspense writers, Tess Gerritsen, is online now at Writer's Digest. The interview is also still on stands in the February, 2008 issue of the magazine.

Here's a teaser:

"I catch Tess Gerritsen in a particularly good mood. She's between tours and has just finished printing the final page of her last draft of The Bone Garden—her newest stand-alone thriller. She considers this book a departure from the traditional thrillers her fans have come to expect. It stars the real-life doctor Oliver Wendell Holmes and is her first attempt at a serious historical murder mystery—set predominantly in the 1830s—in which she indulges some of her deepest fascinations, namely the history of medicine, grave robbers and archaeology.

Gerritsen claims to be a lot like her reserved, aloof protagonist of five of her 19 published books, Maura Isles, a New England medical examiner whose work constantly puts her at the center of compelling (and often gruesome) murder investigations. But Gerritsen is gregarious, forthcoming and candid.

What Isles and her creator share most in common is their experience in the medical field. Gerritsen earned her medical degree from Stanford in 1979 and practiced in Hawaii before her two children were born. Married to another doctor, she realized that one of them would have to take time off to stay home, so she used the opportunity to pursue her writing.

While researching Holmes for The Bone Garden, Gerritsen discovered she identified with him as well. "He started off wanting to be a writer and gained some notoriety as a poet, and then his dad said he wouldn't make a living at it so he went to medical school, and right there I knew exactly what his life was like," Gerritsen says. "I wanted to be a writer since I was seven and my dad said, 'You'll never make money at it.' There were such parallels in our lives. In later years, he went on to be a writer, though I knew about him as a doctor." Read on to learn what Gerritsen has to say about leaving her medical career and writing compelling, recurring characters.

DID YOU EVER THINK—WHEN YOU WERE IN MEDICAL SCHOOL—THAT YOU'D BE A BESTSELLING AUTHOR?

No. Never! It's one of those things you think like, 'One of these days I'm going to direct movies,' that you never actually do. It was really a surprise. You start off at the bottom, where your goal is just to get published or to get an editor to read your book.

Also, I had published nine novels before a book hit the bestseller chart. The best way of predicting a book's success is how much money the publisher pays for it. If they pay you a big deal they're going to put their money behind promoting it.

OTHER THAN GIVING YOU MATERIAL, WAS THERE ANYTHING ABOUT BEING A DOCTOR THAT YOU BROUGHT TO WRITING?

Discipline, definitely—that goes hand-in-hand with both fields. You just can't be a multi-published novelist without being ready to sit in your seat and do your job. Maybe there were a few stories I brought with me, but otherwise they're two very different kinds of jobs that use different parts of your brain. I teach a course for doctors who want to be writers and it's hard for them. They're used to being objective and it's very hard for them to make things up.

WAS IT A DIFFICULT DECISION TO LEAVE YOUR MEDICAL CAREER? WAS THERE ANY FEAR THAT WRITING WOULDN'T PAN OUT?

It was a matter of convenience. I had two small kids and my husband is a doctor, too, so it was born out of a desperate plea for childcare. Sometimes we'd be on call the same night, and when you both get called in to the hospital you have to drag your kids along. When we accepted that someone had to stay home, I was thrilled to do so.

YOUR FIRST NINE BOOKS ARE DESCRIBED AS "ROMANTIC THRILLERS" AND EVEN THOUGH THEY HAVE GOTTEN LESS ROMANTIC OVER TIME, YOU'RE STILL WRITING THRILLERS. WHAT DRAWS YOU TO THE GENRE?

Maybe it gets back to my childhood. My mother took me to a lot of horror films when I was growing up. She's an immigrant and didn't understand English very well, so she liked these. I had a steady diet of these movies and I got accustomed to believing a thrill was part of a good story. If a situation doesn't scare me, I figure it won't scare my reader, either. I always try for the thing that's going to frighten me.

Read the rest HERE

2008-01-12T13:42:00.000-08:00

I Once Had a Brain

I rarely post anything truly scholarly on this blog--no reviews or in-depth analysis of books. But I've been scrolling through some of the annotations I wrote for graduate school--short analyses of the books we read--and essays and the like and I came across a few that I thought might be worthy of posting here.

Today I'll start with a condensed essay version of the 22 page lecture I wrote and then had to deliver as my parting graduate requirement while in the MFA program at Bennington. This version of the essay is only 5 pages--so don't fret, and I think it covers a topic that can be of use to some writers.

The essay was titled "Writing Towards the Buried Sun" and I'll leave that title for the essay, too:
by Jordan E. Rosenfeld

From the first moment I heard the phrase “Write what you know” I’ve despised it. It bothers me especially because I’m a fiction writer, which, I’ve always believed, gives me license to make things up from whole cloth. I even find myself offended when I hear someone ask an author, “How much of that novel is true?” The fiction writer, in my view, never has to reveal that so much of a syllable of one’s work is derived from fact.

But after reading all five novels by author Jean Rhys and undergoing the incisive, occasionally humiliating process of an MFA writing program, I realized something troubling: I have been writing what I know all along; I’ve just been doing it blindly, or worse, in denial.

For starters, “what you know” does not have to be synonymous with what actually happened in your life; it is rather the amalgam of your influences, artistic and realistic, and yes, your life experiences.

I like the perspective of Albert Camus who writes in the introduction to his book Lyrical and Critical Essays, “Every artist is undoubtedly pursuing his truth. If he is a great artist, each work brings him nearer to it, or at least, swings still closer toward this center, this buried sun where everything must one day burn.”

We bring what we know to our writing either intentionally or because it seeps up through the cracks. If you write by denial, your writing runs the risk of being cluttered by this unexamined material of the self.

We must get to know the contents of our creative subconscious so that it can be transformed from the slippery, unknown stuff of life into art, or at the least, entertainment.

Jean Rhys learned to be a master of this. She was up front that her fiction came directly from her life but she was also exacting about getting things artistically right—conveying a universal authenticity to people and events.

As writers, our work is very close to us, but as I learned, sometimes a lot closer than we think. My writing, I discovered, was rife with frustrated parents and their angry children who seemed to be waiting for cues on how to behave differently. I’m confident that all writers suffer from some version of this. So join me in admitting that you, too, are in denial. There is at least one, possibly a few, themes you simply can’t exorcise from your writing. If not a theme, it’s a character, an image or a setting that you can’t shake. We’re not alone; great writers suffer from this same tendency.

Critics have written that all the female protagonists in Rhys’ work form a “composite heroine.” This heroine reduced to her basic parts is a solitary underdog who is usually haunted by memories of her country of origin—which is always somewhere warm and tropical like Rhys’s own homeland in the West Indies. This heroine has, for whatever reason, transplanted herself into a cold, foreign climate, usually England or France. She, in all her incarnations, is always at the mercy of her quickly-shifting moods and dependent upon men, emotionally, as well as financially, and often quite resentful of this fact. Though these women by today’s standards would probably be clinically depressed, through Rhys’ filter, they never see themselves this way. Their misery is perhaps their only true comfort.

Rhys did not have the luxury of an MFA program, though she certainly had mentors. She was the kind of writer who taught herself the craft of novel writing by writing novels. She learned the appropriate distance a fiction writer must take on her own experiences by trial and error, five novels’ worth, before writing her Magnum Opus, Wide Sargasso Sea.

Like Rhys, I too have some composite characters. The first I call the Absent Father. He makes his debut in one of my earliest stories, written at the age of ten, called "The Valley in My Room." While this is a child’s writing, it’s also proof that my thematic preoccupations started early. In this story, the main character, Vanessa, discovers a hole in her floor that leads to a green valley below. Her mother falls into this hole and Vanessa undertakes a journey to rescue her. It's a very complicated, sophisticated story for a ten year-old if I do say so myself. By the end, after Vanessa has survived impossible trials, fought an evil "lord," and saved her mother, what becomes of her poor father, left behind?

I wrote, "Vanessa's father always had a memory of a tall woman and a dark-haired child in his mind, though he never knew why."

Dad doesn’t even so much as get an honorary set of fairy wings.

During graduate school I was frequently asked by workshop participants and teachers alike, questions of this kind: “Why does the father walk away at the crucial moment of conflict?” “What has her father done, exactly?” “The father is so flat, why don’t you just get rid of him?”

Well, I’d never given those questions deep enough thought. These fathers were just walk-ons, I thought, saying their lines, or being the object of another character’s longing or frustration, only to disappear again.

The foundation for this Absent Father was set way back in the creative landscape of my childhood, part imagination, part experience. I kept this poor Father waiting in the wings of my writing until I realized that the only rightful thing to do was to drive him off a cliff in his fast mid-life crisis car or give him his shot to prove that he was better and more than I’d allowed him.

Becoming aware of my recurring character did not magically subtract him from my fiction. In some instances, his absences just gained complexity. I attempted to trick myself that if he was absent in new ways, or for longer periods of time, or for more unique reasons, his absence would contribute something meaningful. Eventually I had to resort to actually deepening these fathers.

But just when I had gotten a grip on the fact that my fathers were absent, in working with my final graduate mentor, writer Alice Mattison, I discovered a whole other blind spot. Alice wrote the following to me in a letter about my thesis collection:

“After I read two or three [of your stories] I thought, “Well, she can give the book the title “Bad Mothers”…Most of these mothers are unrelieved: they aren’t complex, they are just awful. I don’t mind that sort of horrible character in general—I don’t think every single character needs to be complex—but so many bad characters…with no good traits…of the same category makes the work add up to a scream of rage about mothers…”

Though she quickly went on to reassure me that she would not extrapolate this out into my own unresolved personal issues and was sure I had a very nice mother, I was nailed. I’d been hiding behind my Absent Fathers only to learn the hard way that I’d let my Bad Mothers get completely out of control.

Later, Alice wrote,

“What you need is for your reader to be able to take each story on its own terms instead of being so struck by the pervasiveness of the bad mothers that they become a theme instead of just being part of the subject matter.”

Alice was right. In order for the writer to get to the place where the stories stand on their own terms and don’t rest on their thematic laurels, a lot of close scrutiny at the work as a whole is necessary. There is powerful energy in the themes and characters that compel us as writers, but that energy can just as likely clutter our work as empower it.

Fortunately writing is not heart surgery, though on bad days, it can feel like it. A writer has the option of returning to the work and taking the path not taken.

So, though I am no more inclined now to strictly write about present fathers and good mothers any more than Rhys was to write about happy women who find love and return to their tropical paradises, I confess that these fathers and mothers have been unfairly under-explored and it turns out that they have feelings too, and quirks and longings and unfulfilled desires. In doing this, I’ve come to an intersection between what I know, and what I can imagine. Now when they appear these characters are just road signs pointing, “Go deeper here; don’t give up there.”

For those of us haunted or compelled by a particular theme or character that simply won’t go away, by diving directly into that material and being brutally honest with what we find there, we have the opportunity to strengthen it or be free from it, to get to know what it is we do really know, aesthetically, artistically, and write from the center of ourselves, toward Camus’ “buried sun”—our own unique, creative truths.

JPR

2008-01-09T12:19:00.000-08:00

It's either sex or politics...

This is a writing blog, a personal blog, but most definitely not a political blog. I'm not usually interested in playing lightning rod to the opinions that inevitably fly when you do write about policits. Yet here as the primaries are underway and the nation's eyes are back on the theater of the absurd and zealotry that is politics, I have been feeling inclined to write something.

I don't think it's any great secret that I'm a Democrat even if I never said those words before, and that in a parallel universe where idealism could actually lead to reality, I would probably be a Green Party member. And we Dems are faced with a very complex choice right now. Vote the Big Lady whose words are more polished and who obviously has the connections and the experience to back it up, and who appeals to our desire to finally see a woman in office. Vote the Hip Young Guy who stands to unite Black and White America, as well as the young, the jaded and the just plain tired of the same old (and who didn't vote for the war!). Or vote the Slick but Strangely Sincere Lawyer, who appeals to middle class workers and unions. Behind that decision is the old "but who has the best chance" strategy of reasoning. I've been walking slowly toward my decision now for as long as a year, but in the last month it has finally coalesced.

Since I'm never very articulate about my own reasons for making these choices, I was pleased to read one of my favorite authors, Michelle Richmond's blog post today, which so articulately and clearly sums up my feelings almost exactly (and will tell you who I favor). I recommend you read it.

Michelle's post begins like this:
In October of 2002, Hillary Clinton voted for the resolution authorizing George W. Bush to take military action in Iraq. I want to get past it, but I can’t. And this is one huge reason that I feel myself feeling passionately about Barack Obama, who showed courage that few others did by opposing the war from the beginning. I have no doubt that Clinton would be an able president. I believe she genuinely cares about issues that I care about personally–health care and education. Her insider knowledge of how Washington works and her political savvy might give her a real advantage in terms of getting things done.

But I worry that the same political savvy that might make Hillary Clinton a force to contend with in the White House is what caused her to vote for going to war with Iraq in the first place. It was a short-sighted vote, one which calls into question the strength of her convictions. Maybe she thought it was necessary, in the aftermath of 9/11, with the presidential campaign looming in her future, to take a “tough stand” against terrorism.

Read the rest of Michelle's post HERE:

2008-01-08T11:37:00.000-08:00

Loss

I've talked to my mom twice this week and learned about two deaths and the decline of a third old family friend. Today she called to tell me about the wake for James--husband of Bonnie, father to Sarah and Simone (my childhood playmates). From date of diagnosis to death was about four months. A week or so before that she told me that Ray Jacobsen, a well known Sonoma artist and familiar face from my youngest years, had died.

These people are old, old family friends--the kind that I saw a lot when I was a child but not so much as an adult. In all the old hippie photos of my parents--these are among those featured. The gangly men in worn out jeans and turtlenecks, hair to their shoulders, mustaches wide and brimming with health. The women svelte and high-cheeked, vamping in halter dresses and platform sandals.

Today she also told me she'd spoken to my "godmother"--one of my mom's oldest friends with whom I also used to be incredibly close for most of my life. "G" had childhood cancer that required radiation treatment. They warned her even then that due to the radiation to cure that cancer, she could expect to face cancer again as an adult. Decades later it turned up in one breast and nodes, which she had removed, and some parts of her colon. Over the years, due to a complex network of issues that I just don't feel like going into here today, our relationship became strained and eventually I stopped being in touch with her and her husband because it was too hard to skirt what was unresolved. I'm not good at sitting with proverbial elephants in the living room. But today my mom tells me she's now bedridden, and has lost weight, which is impossible to imagine as she was very thin before. She said, "I didn't even recognize her voice." And though she is still at home for now, the outlook isn't good.

So what do I feel? What am I even trying to get at in this post? When someone approaches death and you have complex feelings for them, how do you handle this? My intuition is to say something, to refer back to the years when I was close with them, when I did love and feel loved by them, and tell her that those years were important to me. I even, I admit, feel like visiting them, though I fear it will be awkward and uncomfortable. I guess what I'm feeling is an overwhelming urge to forgive, whether or not that was earned.

As I muse on loss, then, it was well timed to discover this Question of the Week over at LitPark, combined with an unusal contest on loss. I invite you all to investigate both Sue's great site, and this unusal opportunity.

Also, while you're at it, scroll down to read about Patry Francis (or just visit her breathtaking blog). She too is tackling illness (with grace and energy) and as a result, the blogosphere is coming together to help promote the paperback release of her fabulous novel The Liar's Diary--including Jordan's Muse--on January 29th.

JPR

2008-01-07T13:25:00.000-08:00

Autonomy vs. Inefficiency, OR
Life of the self-employed

Since January 1st, which marks my third complete year of working full-time for myself as a freelance writer and editor, I've been looking at both the pros and cons of the gig. The pros are obvious: working in your pajamas; a ten-step commute; no irritating co-workers and a genuinely good feeling that comes from creating and fulfilling your own work demands. For me personally I add: the fact that other than very part time work such as I do for BookSmart, the indie book store, I cannot sustain the energy it takes to work on someone else's agenda for very long. I'm a hard worker when I'm motivated, and an utter slacker when not. The beauty is that working on articles and clients' manuscripts feels aligned with my own work, and therefore it rarely feels like "other people's" work. The hard part of it is realizing that in the end, you're still stuck with yourself. And without those irritating, but sometimes nice co-workers, the commute time, and other people's agendas, you also have way too much time to spend with your own thoughts. To fret and worry and get overwhelmed and be bogged down by meaningless anxieties. And maybe sometimes this is not such a good thing.

For instance, in the workplace, you can commiserate and also take chat breaks. You are all in it together on some level, even if you're not really. You can pretend you are. You can gossip. At home, I can instant message my husband at work and call one of two friends I have in this town, but my contact with the outside world is otherwise pretty limited.

At home, I operate on a pretty formulaic schedule when it comes to my work:

--Say YES with delight to new assignments (or pitch/ seek new ones eagerly)
--Efficiently write all assignments on my trusty white board, with due dates and word counts, etc.
--Feel as though there is nothing but time in the world, so why start now?
--Slowly but surely begin to panic as procrastination meets real-time demands.
--Enter a state of cranky overwhelm
--Stop wanting to return emails or call friends
--Work madly and frenzied until all is done.
--Crash.
--Start panicking about getting new work.

It's a cycle I've had for a long time and I know it's not the most healthy--but I seem to work best under pressure. Since there is no boss cracking his whip and no coworkers to remind me that I better get stuff done or else, I have to create the pressure for myself--and the only way I have successfully figured out how to do this is to procrastinate.

(Note to clients and editors: I do manage get everything done on time ultimately!).

The even more ironic part of working for myself is that I did about five times as much when I had a day job. I wrote fiction in the wee hours, freelance work after hours, led reading salons or my radio show, participated in monthly writing groups and classes, went to graduate school, wrote novels and leapt tall buildings with ease. So even though I am happier, less stressed, generally a nicer person and making a decent enough income, I sometimes wonder if I've also become inefficient as a result.

2008-01-02T10:38:00.000-08:00

Rocketgirls a-go-go

You've heard a bit about Rocketgirls here. In fact, in November, you read excerpts and interview with the three of them--Jody Gehrman, Terena Scott, and Kim Green. Rocketgirls is a fancy name for a group of women writers--four of us total at present--who've started a blog and website (with quite possibly the coolest launch sound ever) to share our collective wisdom, and invite other writers into the conversation.

Each month we collectively blog on a different topic. This month: "I wanna be a rockstar." Today my post is UP at our "grog" or group blog.

Here's the opening graph:

"After many long years of lusting after fame as a writer, I’m finally taking a look at exactly why I would ever want such a thing. I’m not sure where I ever got the idea that writing a book could translate to the luxury and privilege that only high denizens of our culture ever seem to earn, but somehow as a little girl that idea came in like dust on a hot breeze and fastened itself inside my brain. It’s likely the fault of TV that those seeds were planted, because who gets famous in this culture? That’s easy, right? Movie/TV stars, athletes, and girls who flash their boobs at anonymous cameramen (or maybe the latter is infamy, a topic for another day). . .

2008-01-01T20:41:00.000-08:00

Kickin' the New Year in the Ass

I make resolutions for myself all the time--sometimes daily, so to make one or more specifically for the New Year rarely occurs to me. If I could ask the Big Maker to make one on my behalf, it would be to rid me of the inevitable blues that strike sometime between the dropping of the shiny ball in NY and the deconstruction of the Christmas tree.

This year I can't even blame my blues on anything specific in my life. My life is really good, with some exciting and major changes in it, good friends, security, and, most importantly, a deep and lasting love the likes of which I only dreamed of having as a child. Oh, and the skies are even sunny and blue! So my only answer is that it's just old detritus from the early years that kicks on like some forgotten timer that I don't know how to turn off. In fact, just yesterday I had a fantastic day and was in a superior mood. So clearly, overnight, that little timer turned on and the damper went down without any warning (maybe that's why I dreamt I was trapped in the house of the worst years of my childhood).

So I've got to find the flippin' override switch. That's my resolution. To kick the blues in the ass.

I think perhaps the best method for this is to write more fiction. So friends, it's time. I've procrastinated long enough. There are fantastical worlds to be made up from the crazy ether of my mind. I mean it. They may be unfit for public consumption, but they'll probably keep me sane.

JPR

2007-12-31T10:05:00.000-08:00

Working in Isolation

Any other freelance writers out there know that this is one line of work where the biggest rewards are simply meeting your deadlines and getting your paychecks. That is to say, you have no office teeming with co-workers to take lunches with, to agonize over tough interview subjects with, or to pound you on the back when you did a great job. There are no annual bonuses or surprise vacation days. The joy is in the doing. Or it had better be, at least. It's one of those things that nobody tells you when you have the nerve to start asking other people who freelance what it's like and how they got into what they're doing. Somedays you're going to be very lonely and distract yourself with internet solitaire and the Ellen show, and then feel horribly guilty later.

This preamble is a longwinded way of getting to a point. Now that my book, Make a Scene, has been available in the world for little over a month, a most remarkable phenomenon has been happening. Reader feedback! People who have read it are emailing me to tell me what they think, and whether or not it has been useful to them--and I am shocked to find out that apparently. . .it makes sense! It helps! That blows my ever-lovin' mind. I don't know why--I wrote the thing in English with a clear outline and the prodding of my tough but fantastic editor. Writer's Digest Books has standards--they don't publish books that don't make sense. But still, a writer always wonders, doubts, secretly believes their words are crap. And trust me, I've already read passages in the published version I would sorely like to change.

But for once this freelance business of playing word-wizard behind the curtains does, in fact, come with a bonus, and at the holidays, no less--validation that I don't actually live in a solipsistic world of my own making, and that yes, damn it, people are out there, reading.

JPR

2007-12-27T08:53:00.000-08:00

Choose Your Poison

For a long time, my singular fear of ways to die was by drowning. I even recall being terrified as a child on that underwater ride at Disneyland because not only could you drown, but you'd do so with all those scary plastic creatures looking at you (that still gives me the chills). It was not necessarily a logical fear, but over any other method, drowning was the one that set the hairs on edge.

But after reading this news story, I've changed my mind. Death by a pack of pitbulls sounds way more horrifying.

(In defense of dogs, I will say that almost any animal trained to be violent, will act in a violent way--there are plenty of pitbulls that don't kill people).

2007-12-21T18:47:00.000-08:00

On the Solstice...

To all who read my blog, I want to wish you happiness on this Winter Solstice night. No matter if your other holidays are over, or you are preparing to celebrate yet in whatever way that you do, with obligation or freedom, I really, truly, deeply hope that you do so joyously in some way.

I may have noticed a lot of negatives this season, but truthfully my life is full of the most joy it has ever been, and I wish that on all of you!

Happy, Merry, and all that jazz

I found a lovely Solstice meditation online HERE, and I liked it, so I'm leaving it for you:

"Winter solstice is the longest night of the year. After the winter solstice the light returns, the days grow longer. The longest night of the year is a precious time. Night is a time of dream, vision and journey into the depths of oneself, the darkness of unknown possibility. From that journey into the dark new life as well as new light emerges.

"The time of the winter solstice is the time of the labyrinth. It is a time for feeling your way in the dark. In the dark you have to feel your way. You can't see where you are going. You have to trust your senses, your intuition. The winter solstice is a time of heightened intuition, a time to pay attention to your intuition, believe in it.

"The winter solstice has the energy of the womb and the days after the winter solstice have the energy of birth and becoming. The best meditation for the winter solstice is a simple one that some of you may already know. It is the star in the heart.

"The evening of the winter solstice, turn out the lights, light a candle, and meditate quietly for a while with the candle, and then blow it out. Sit for a while in the dark. Notice what arises. Is there a fear of the dark? Does it feel peaceful, relaxing? Ask that dark to guide you. People are fond of asking the light to guide them. But there is guidance in the depth of the night, in the darkness of the night sky.

"Imagine the night sky. Imagine one star coming closer and closer and closer to you, until it enters your heart. Feel that star in the heart . It is radiant. Its bright white light permeates your being, pulsates within you. Feel yourself as a star in the sky, the darkness around you, the light within you, the energy that radiates from you. You, from your heart, by simply being, illumine the darkness. That radiance guides you and illumines the path for others. Light the candle again. Notice the shadows, the interplay of light and dark. You are participating always in that dance of light and dark, day and night, sun and moon and star and sky, the dance of the seasons, autumn, winter, spring, summer. Feel the rhythm of the flickering light, the stillness of the darkness. Feel the radiance of your own heart illuminating the night, guiding you as you feel your way through the labyrinth of this life, this world, this universe.

* * * * * *

May all beings be happy, peaceful and free of suffering.