Writing Time

The Cell Phone: Chapter Two

 

 

I turned in that tarty red Samsung that I couldn’t figure out – feeling even dumber when I tried to read the manual – and I bought an iPhone. I’m in love with it. In love. I understand all you iPhone users now. I was trying to be frugal but there comes a time when you cut your losses and figure that life is short and just go for it.  Even what I don’t know I can somehow figure out on this phone. Here’s the coolest thing about it: I was sitting around with Axel age 6 and asked him what he’d like to see on YouTube. Sharks, he said. Well, lo and behold, I typed in sharks and there were shark videos right there on my phone!  Who has the coolest phone in this family? I asked Axel. You do, Babs, he said. And he’s right.

Reading a Book a Day for 365 Days

 

This is what Nina Sankovitch (above) did – read a whole book every single day. She also found time to review each book on her blog. Everyday. And it wasn’t like she lived alone in a cave or anything – she lives in a house in Connecticut with a husband and four children. And reads a whole book every single day. Check out her blog: www.readallday.org.  Get inspired to read more.

 

How many books a week, a month, a year are you reading? I can read a book a day but only if I’m on vacation and meals and all necessities of life are handed to me. When I was a judge for PEN I managed to step up my reading to about four books a week but it was a push. Ms. Sankovitch has inspired me. And I know how to start reading more – carry the current book I’m reading around with me during the day instead of leaving it on my bedside table to read only at night. I’ll read it at lunch, standing in line, waiting at the car wash, and instead of watching CNN.

 

 

 

If you’re in LA and itching to write about your life, there’s some space left in “Writing Your Own History”, a one day course I’m teaching at UCLA Extension this weekend, October 24^th, 9:30-4:30. If you’re interested go online to uclaextension.edu.

 

Chapter 2 of the Cell Phone Melt Down coming soon.

   

Resilience

 

Though slightly put off by the hype of Elizabeth Edward’s television book tour a few months ago, I nevertheless ordered Resilience,  her book with the dreadful self-help subtitle of: Reflections on the Burdens and Gifts of Facing Life’s Adversities. I teach a course called “Writing the Healing Story” and also do workshops at the Wellness Community and I thought I might use some quotes at least from the book. So it was with great surprise and pleasure to discover what a well written memoir this is. Elizabeth Edwards is not only an amazingly brave and wonderful woman, she’s also a terrific writer. For those of you who have lived on a desert island without modern communication for the past few years and don’t know her story:  Elizabeth Edwards has faced more of life’s adversities than any human being should ever have to experience – the loss of a son, her own diagnosis of terminal cancer, and a husband who was unfaithful to her at the worst time, with the worst woman, in the worst and most public way.

 

In Resilience she takes the high road. Not in a sticky, sweet way, no talk of “closure” (that awful word)  - she’s mad as hell and let’s the reader know it.  But she keeps plowing onward – doesn’t deign to mention the woman’s name who said to her husband “You are so hot.”  She quotes poets and she thinks and feels deeply without jargon, without easy answers.  Though publicists pushed the infidelity in the book to sell it, it is more about her son Wade and the unspeakable pain of losing a child. The book keeps looping back to him and that loss, and to her childhood memories, and the discovery she made reading her mother’s diary about her father’s possible infidelity. All of this written with honesty and grace.

 

Check out the September issue of The Atlantic for the book review by Christopher Hitchens: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200909/elizabeth-edwards/2

 

 

Cowboy & Wills

 

Today is publication day for Cowboy & Wills, a memoir by my dear friend and student Monica Holloway (whose last book Driving With Dead People was a Newsweek pick of the week, optioned for a film etc.). Monica has the amazing talent to take the most difficult subjects and write about them with depth, candor, and flashes of wild humor. In this book she writes of her beloved son’s autism and the dog that lead him, step by step, into confidence and courage. This is a book that really does make you laugh out loud and also cry. You fall in love as you read it– especially with Wills, and also with the darling dog Cowboy, with JoAnn (the kind of aunt every kid would love to have), with Michael, with the teachers – and with Monica’s single minded passion for helping her son. Buy this book! It’s a wonderful read.

 

As for Monica being my student – I haven’t taught her a thing.  When she comes to class I just say “Keep writing, Monica.” 

PEN 2009 Literary Award Winners

 

The PEN awards were announced this morning in a press release and now I can tell you who won the creative non-fiction award: Steve Lopez for The Soloist.  There were three of us judging this category and our emails back and forth to each other about the sixty books we had to choose from could make a book of its own.

 

I loved The Soloist, and as I analyzed it and wrote emails back and forth to the other two judges about it, I loved it even more. It’s a beautifully crafted memoir that explores not only Steve Lopez’s own inner life but also illuminates a much wider world - mental illness, the power of music, homelessness and poverty and the fate of print newspapers. His writing is so good that it’s transparent, and though he wrote the story of Nathaniel Ayers, Julliard educated and playing classical violin on the streets of L.A, in his L.A. Times columns, the book covers much more and reaches deeper.  From the opening hook to the brilliant last scene – this is a memoir writers should read. It’s an important book.

 

Come to the West Hollywood Book Fair this Sunday  10/4/09.  I'm on a panel at 3:30 with Jane Ganahl, Aimee Liu, and moderated by Victoria Zackheim.  "Variations on a Theme: Creating the Anthology".  Hope to see you there.

 

 

Frank McCourt

I heard Frank McCourt give a reading from Angela’s Ashes at the Palos Verdes Estates Library a number of years ago. His wife’s family lived in Palos Verdes. and it felt like a small town get together in that old library. He was incredibly charming and funny and inspiring. (Not all writers you might admire are like this in person – which always surprises me. The very first writer I heard give a talk was Ray Bradbury and I thought all writers would be that generous and inspiring. Not so.)

There’s a wonderful piece about McCourt, who died Sunday, in today’s New York Times  by Eric Konigsberg, quoting him, when getting advice from fellow teachers on not revealing anything about his life and that his life was all he had,  McCourt said, “My life saved my life.”  (That’s such a great sentence for writers to think about.)

Somewhere else I read about the hard time he had finding the voice for Angela’s Ashes, and how many years he struggled with that search. Then one day he listened to a grandchild who was speaking in very short declarative sentences and he realized that was the voice he needed.

The Best Gig

 

I was asked to be a judge for a literary award ceremony and I said yes. The books in competition arrived two weeks ago. All sixty of them. So many books that there’s no place in the house to put them so they’re all stacked on the bench in the front hallway. It’s like Christmas in July. There are two other judges so we’re each reading twenty and then reading each other’s favorites. Our deadline is September 1^st. This is the most perfect excuse I’ve ever had to just sit around reading all summer. I’m in heaven.

Good Reads

 

 

So many good books, so little time.  I just read and fell in love with The Shadow Catcher by Marianne Wiggins. It reads partly like memoir  (the main character is named Marianne Wiggins) but it's a novel. So full of life and history (it’s also the story of Edward C. Curtis, the photographer) and filled with opinions on the West and railroads and families and Native Americans. It breaks just about every “guideline” for writing fiction that I’ve ever given a student. And it's wonderful. She even pulls off a very brief, funny reference to her ex-husband. (Salmon Rushdie)

 

I also just read two fantastic memoirs: The Suicide Index by Joan Wikersham and Split by Suzanne Finnamore.  Both are page turners. And Split, about Finnamore’s painful divorce manages to be hilariously funny. (If you know anyone going through a divorce this might make a very good gift.)

 

And more novels: The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, which reads like a thriller, and Netherland by Joseph O'Neill (rumored to be Obama’s current read) Not easy going unless you’re crazy about cricket – but the writing is so amazing you hang in there with all the cricket details. I read the books back to back and there were many similarities – a foreigner’s view of New York, 9/11 etc..

 

And two delicious beach reads: American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld (a novel based on Laura and W – with a generous and interesting insight into Laura) and Beginner’s Greek by James Collins. Both got great reviews by the New York Times which led me to them.

 

What leads you to new books? (or old ones) Through reviews, word of mouth? Going to the bookstore and browsing? Let us know. 

P.S. From Bette Henning

 

 I just heard from Bette Henning (see post below about her book).  Bette wrote:

The book can be obtained by e-mailing me at  bettehen@sbcglobal.net 

I will US mail it, $20 prepaid. I have some copies (35/40) left.  If there is a "DiVinci Code" ground-swell, I will print more.

  Bette Henning   bettehen@sbcglobal.net

  229 E. Commonwealth #100, Fullerton, CA 92832

 

I Don't Want To Put My Head On Just Yet

 

 

A few months ago a former student, Jean Franks, sent me a book published by her friend Bette Henning who’s eighty-five (but looks about forty-five in her author’s photo.) The book’s title is I Don’t Want To Put My Head On Just Yet. Bette did the amazing drawings using the program  Microsoft Paint with the encouragement and help of her friend Cheryl Svensson and Cheryl’s son Chris. She calls this book her autobiography. It’s so original and funny and quirky that I emailed Bette right away, asking if I could post some of the pages. It’s a limited edition for family and friends and you can’t find it on Amazon – but I wish we could. I'm going to use it in my Advanced Non-fiction class that starts next week as an example of no limits or boundaries when it comes to writing your own story.