Interruption

I have not written, a new blog entry or pages of AK, in over a week. It would be easy for me to let this go, except that Sophie Speaks is out there. This project is no longer an idea, a spark, but a real thing. I see it in the notebook paper building up in my binder; I hear it in the comments from friends and colleagues who have read my posts. It is real, as real as the need to arrange carpool, go to work, and cook dinner. It has value to me. Only I can make this work. Only I can pick up my pen and write, five or six lines at a time if necessary. If I stopped writing, no one would make me go back to it. The idea would disappear like a white sock at the bottom of my laundry pile. But it is possible that if I stick with it, if I can see it through to the end, it might make a difference to someone else.

 

A few days ago, I took a trip to Nashville with my daughter and two of her friends. For them, it was more like a pilgrimage. We went to see One Direction, the current boy band phenomenon. I confess that I was not exactly looking forward to trip. I am not much of a joiner, as moms go. I wished that I could send 12 along without me, but some part of me also knew that I couldn't do that to her. She needed her own person there.

 

The concert was pretty much what I expected. Screaming girls, bored parents, overpriced sodas and beers and long lines to get in and out. What I didn't expect was to be schooled in the less mainstream musical culture. One of 12's friends insisted that we visit Third Man Records, a small shop and production studio founded by Jack White of the White Stripes. How can one girl be equally obsessed with Liam Hemmings and Jack White? I still don't have that answer. But our visit to the small square building, painted black, was worth the entire trip. I bought White's documentary, It Might Get Loud, a series of interviews with guitar players sharing stories of how they got into music. They did whatever they had to do to get their hands on crappy instruments and play, without lessons or parents reminding them to practice. They put replaced their beds with amp and slept on foam mattresses. They moved furniture to barter for guitars. They ignored the people who told them that what they were doing was not important.

 

Of course, there was the ever-present gift shop. When a friend of mine found out that we were going, she asked me to buy a sticker. I let 12 pick that out, and I chose one for myself. (Normally I buy pencils as souvenirs, but Third Man Records did not sell these). I put the sticker on my Sophie Speaks binder, as a reminder to myself.

 

12's friend told me this is a line from one of Jack White's songs. I looked up the lyrics, hoping for some insight, but I didn't find anything other than what I had already gleaned, that Love, even Capital L-Love, pure white LOVE, cannot keep me from this work. I will continue to come back to it, in the hope that someday, someone will read one line of what I have written and find a spark of inspiration.

 

Posted with Blogsy

Killing Your Darlings

Its the third week of Sophie Speaks, and I am finding it tough to make time for Her.

 

The thing is I already have a lot going on in my life. My husband and I blended our families almost ten years ago, and together we have seven children, the youngest being 12, whom you have met, the oldest 24 and in her first year as a teacher. I call them my bookends. In between, there are 2 high school students and three college students.

 

And yesterday, I accepted a new job. I know, crazy.

 

Walking out the front door of their office, I knew I had the job if I wanted it. And I knew I would accept, after taking the requisite day to think about it. With three in college, I need this income. I wanted to celebrate. Kids are all in school. Husband at work. I considered going shopping, but I couldn't think of a thing I wanted to do. Except one.

I wanted to write.

I drove to the Panera down the street. I ordered tea and an egg souffle. And I sat there for three hours copying pages from Anna Karenina. I had missed her over the weekend. I am on page 26, and still Anna hasn't shown up on the page, but I know she is on her way. If Tolstoy had workshoped his novel in a writing class today, they would have trashed him. Throat clearing, I have heard it called by someone I knew in my Masters Program. Tolstoy's colleagues would have urged him to cut liberally, also known as "killing your darlings." It means to be willing to cut even your most preciously loved words in order to make the story better. I have whole computer files full of sentences I loved too much to delete completely, even though I knew did not have a place in the final draft.

 

Life is like this too, I think. We have people or experiences that are important to our story. Maybe they end up getting cut somewhere along the way. Still, they stay with us; we know they had a hand in getting us all the way to the end.

Posted with Blogsy

A Message from Sofia

So far, my posts seem to be fairly light-hearted. And that is a reflection of how I have felt writing them. The first week, I chatted with my husband each evening about my progress, about comments from friends who have read along, and it buoyed me up. This week, I feel more contemplative about the project. I thought at first that this was the excitement of the first days wearing off, like when one of my kids woke up Monday morning of the SECOND week of Kindergarten and said, You mean I have to go back? I didn't have the heart to tell her that this was only the beginning.

 

And I'm sure there was some of that for me. The realization that I have committed to something that is much harder than I imagined, that I will have to find the willpower within myself to keep after, day after day, week after week, and yes, even month after month. But there is something else. A darker side to this project.

 

I have been reading a book about Sophia Tolstoy by Leah Bendavid-Val called Songs Without Words. The book is an in-depth look at Sophia's creative work, her photography, alongside entries from her and her husband's diaries. Sophia took a great number of self-portraits (I think of them as some of the first Selfies), some close-up, some far away, some artsy (there is one of her standing inside the hollow of a great tree that I particularly like), but the best ones, the most tender and revealing one, show her in her daily routine: making jam with children and the housekeeper, washing at a basin, and arranging flowers. Her original plan had been to photograph Leo Tolstoy for posterity, and she did until their later years, when Leo became quite close to his assistant Vladimir Grigoryevitch Chertkov. It is clear from the written documents of the time that Chertkov displaced Sophia as Leo closest confidante, and I have to wonder how much this contributed to reports of her hysteria. She had devoted her entire life to Leo and his work. Yesterday, I read this passage from her diary:

 

"For a genius one has to create a peaceful, cheerful, comfortable home; a genius must be fed, washed and dressed, must have his works copied out innumerable times, must be loved and spared all cause for jealousy, so that he can be calm; then one must feed and educate the innumerable children fathered by this genius, whom he cannot be bothered to care for himself...And when the members of his family circle have sacrificed their youth, beauty--everything--to serve this genius, they are then blamed for not understanding the geniuses properly--and they never get a word of thanks from the geniueses themselves of course, for sacrificing their pure young lives to him, and atrophying all their spiritual and intellectual capacities, which they are unable to nourish and develop due to lack of peace, leisure and energy." 13 March 1902

 

Not to go all feminist on you, but as a mother-wife-artist, I can relate. When I read that Sophia Tolstoy had recopied War and Peace more than seven times, when I saw the photograph of her handwriting, marked through, whole lines crossed out by her husband, ready for yet another recopying, my heart hurt for her. I thought, no wonder she took self-portraits. She had to find some way of not feeling completely invisible. And I was taken back to my own younger self, a twenty-five-year-old who sat at a computer for eight hours and cobbled together a philosophy paper for the man with whom I was in a relationship, so he wouldn't fail the class. I managed to earn a C+, and he passed the class. I know what this says about me as a woman. It is all true, or was then. I saw his success as necessary to my own happiness. In my mind, if he failed, I failed. It has taken me many years to unravel the shame of that day. It took a long, painful divorce, many years of therapy, and attempts undo the damage I did to my own daughters, and my son.

 

So somehow, I will find the time to complete this work, even if I have to work late into the night, the way Sophia did. She deserves to be heard, even if I am the only one listening.

Posted with Blogsy

A Day Of Rest?

Monday morning, after the kids took off for school, and my husband left, pulling his suitcase behind for an overnight business trip, I decided to give myself the day off from writing. After a quick trip to the laundromat and a walk with a friend, I lay down on the couch and turned on the television. I flipped to one of my favorite guilty pleasures: The Food Network. I should mention that since beginning to copy AK, I have watched very little TV, but hey, this was my day off, so I indulged in a couple of episodes of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. And since I was relaxing, I opened up Hooked On Words on my phone and played a few games. Okay, maybe I did run the battery down. By the end of the day, I had done more "relaxing" than I had done over the previous seven days combined. I fell asleep on the couch, waking at 11:30 to go up to bed. I slept fitfully, waking up every couple of hours. Gone was the wonderful feeling of sinking into my bed at night. Gone were the vivid dreams of the past week. Still present, however, were the pains in my hands and wrists. Honestly, I felt like crap, not at all like I expected to feel after a day off.

 

At 5am, tired of my restless night, I got up and headed down to make tea. I turned on the kitchen light and opened my big black binder. I pulled out page 15 from AK, thinking I could get an early start on the first page for the day. By the time 12 left for the bus, I had finished two pages. I made a second cup of tea and sat back down to finish another, putting me at a grand total of seventeen pages so far.

 

Just as I was closing the binder, my sister sent me a text asking if I wanted to go the State Fair. I responded, in all caps, Yes!

 

As it turned out, today was my day of rest, even though technically I wrote three pages. I met my sister and her daughter. Together we made our way through the fairgrounds, stopping first for a freshly made corndog. We watched baby Clydesdale ponies in the Coliseum then headed back outside for roasted corn. From there we went into the Cattle Barn. I passed rows of cows, organized by farm. A little girl of about 10 lay napping in the straw right beside a sleeping cow. A toddler sat inside a playpen, scribbling on a Fair Program with an inkpen while a group of men sat in fold-out camp chairs under a canopy. At the end of the barn, I found the petting area which held five babies of different breed. One, a Swiss Brown, was standing right in front of me. When I reached my hand down, its long purplish-gray tongue slipped across my palm. It stood about three feet tall and its hip bones poked out one each side of its hind end. But its ears were like taupe-colored velvet and its nose was pinkish and wet. It continued to lick me, even when I turned to pet another baby, until finally, the animal walked around behind me (by now I was inside the pen) and tugged at a strand of my hair. When I turned around, it was right there. I laughed. I pulled out my phone and took a picture of the baby peering over my shoulder. It got up even closer, nosing me out of the selfie.

 

We stayed a while longer, checking out the poultry barn, a giant cheese sculpture and finally the Wine and Beer Tasting, where I met the employees of a local used bookstore with a microbrewery attached. Phillip let me take his picture next to the quote at the Books & Brews tasting booth. He even asked about my blog when I told him what I was doing. I think on my next Day of Rest, I will check out their shop.

 

Rest for me seems to be more a state of mind than of body. I'd like to say I will remember that from now on, but I know I won't. I start. I stop. I start up again.

 

Posted with Blogsy

That Oh Shit moment

I remember the moment when I realized the end result of being pregnant. Not havin a baby, but giving birth to a baby. I had that feeling again this weekend, staring at the eight bags of pears on my kitchen table. What had seemed exciting and possible while Beth's son, easily a foot taller than us, shook the tree branches while we stood beneath gathering fruit, now seemed an unsurmountable task.

So I copied pages of Anna Karenina as a way to procrasitinate the job of sorting, washing and cooking the fruit into pear butter, which I would have to ladle into sterilized jars, boil in a water bath and let cool until the lids vacuum-sealed with that telltale POP. After that I would have to label the jars and find a place to store them for the winter.

Instead I write out another three pages, putting my total so far at fourteen. Only 786 to go. But one week ago, I had not even begun. Sophie Speaks was still in my head, an idea that kept nagging for my attention. One week ago, I sat down at a table with my 21-year-old niece who was helping me set up the blog site.

"What should we do first?" I asked.

"I'm not sure," she said.

"Well, how long can you work with me today?"

"However long it takes."

We sat there, upgrading my operating system, looking up tech support, until we knew what to do. And by the end of the day, I had made my first blog post.

This is on my mind today as I write, whenever I feel my mind slipping into that Oh Shit What Was I Thinking place, realizing how long this will take, worrying that no one will even care. But sometimes, for just a few minutes, I am paying close attention to my handwriting, the smoothness with which my hand moves through the word, the way a b hooks and swings upward into an r. A moment later I am wondering if Darya Alexandrovna will forgive her husband or go to stay with her mother. I hear the carriage door slam and pull away with her husband inside. I am lost in another world; time moves slowly. I hear my daughter calling me as if I am in the bathtub with my head underwater, but then I hear my husband answer, tell her that her mom is working, ask if he can help with anything, and I know I am still here, still above the surface, the table before me laden with pears.

Posted with Blogsy

A Day's Work

I got a bit overzealous yesterday, wrote out four pages by hand and had no energy left to write anymore. This has me thinking about the idea of work. What makes work valuable? I have spent the last three years writing a short story collection inspired by my three great-aunts, nuns in different orders, all of whom took a vow of poverty and worked their entire lives without seeing a paycheck with their names on it. And yet when I called the Daughters of Charity to find out about my Aunt Helen (Sister Laura Stricker), the woman on the phone knew her by name.

 

"You are her great-neice? You will need at least a week to go through our archives about Sister Laura. She worked for more than sixty years at our Leprosorium in Louisana."

 

 

I also found letters from former students of my Aunt Margaret, and notes about how her teaching helped them work through difficult points in their lives. One woman continued to write a letter each Christmas until my aunt's death in the 80s.

 

I come from a long line of hard-workers: parents who grew up during the Great Depression and World War II; a grandmother who could have appeared in a Rosie the Riveter Sign; great-grandparents who immigrated from Germany to settle farmland in Southern Indiana. My parents moved to the "country" themselves, taking my four siblings and me along with them, to settle their own 3/4 acre farm. We collected eggs from our chickens, picked blackberries and apples which were canned for jelly, woke at 7am to weed the garden every morning during summer break, donning wide-brimmed straw hats that my father purchased for us. My dad worked more than 35 years in the maintenance department of the hospital, and my mother worked both inside and outside the home, doing whatever job she could get until she finally opened her own business training and supporting home childcare providers.

 

So this morning, while poaching an egg that I collected from my one of my four hens (If you have never lifted an egg warm from the nesting box, you really should try it. If it is still damp from being laid, all the better.), I am reflecting on a conversation with my youngest child last night. Conversation may be a bit too pleasant of a word; it was more one-sided than that. She was writing her weekly Current Events assignment for Humanties, on the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. I was sitting at the kitchen table, writing my final page of Anna Karenina. My almost seventeen-year-old was washing the dinner dishes at the sink.

 

"Mom, when did the outbreak start?" asks 12.

"I'm don't know. You'll have to look it up," I say, my hands and eyes still on the page.

"Why can't you just tell me?"

"Because I'm working."

"You're not working. You're just writing some dumb book."

 

At this point, Almost 17 stops her work and looks over, silent.

 

I don't remember the words spoken after that. I'm not sure there were any until, after I have taken away her iPod (yes, I let her listen to music while sitting at the computer; don't judge.), 12 spews forth a variety of insults about what I am doing wrong. She is not a bad kid, just a kid who doesn't want to work any harder than she has to. Not to sound like the parent who walked to school both ways, in the snow, uphill, but she, and others of her generation, have not had to work hard, actually physically labor, at many things. She settled down, apologized and finished her work. And I did too. I closed by binder, shut off all the lights and went straight to bed. I was exhausted.

 

Today, I am going to pick pears at a friend's house. Tomorrow I will be canning, another form of labor that my mother, thank goodness, taught me. I won't get paid for that work, just as I won't get paid for this project, but I will see the fruits of my labor, in jars of food lining a basement shelf, and clean white page after page filled with words that I have written by hand, and in the sight of my bed at the end of a long day. I will sigh as I lay my body down on it, my shoulder against the sheet, my arm wrapped around extra pillow to ease the ache. And I will sleep until morning, when I get up to do it again.

 

Posted with Blogsy

Day 3, In Which I Learn to Spell Arkadyavitch

My hand hurts. The right one, as I am right-handed. (I have one left-handed child, and I remember noticing her preference, not when she picked up a crayon but her toothbrush, the fork beside her plate, a spoon to stir soup on the stove). I can feel tightness all the way up to and through my right shoulder blade. When I finally stop writing this afternoon, having completed three hand-written pages, my fingers stay gripped around their fine-point gel pen. I extend and stretch the fingers; pain runs to the tips of each one.

 

I have not handwritten this many pages in cursive since college, taking in-class essay exams and filling up the infamous blue books (Do they still use those? My guess is no.). I have written five pages so far, one printed page equaling, approximately, one notebook page, front and back. In those five pages, Stepan Arkadyavitch (whose full name I must write out numerous times, at least twenty so far) wakes on the couch in his studio, kicked out of his wife's bed when she discovers he has been has sleeping with the governess, an act for which he is unwilling to repent, because, he does not love his wife.

 

Arkadyavitch does not roll off the fingertips. Decisively, however, feels smooth and lovely as I write it, as does happened, possibly, cruel, and upper lip. I had forgotten the pleasure I used to take in evenly spacing the words, maintaining a constant motion until I reach that last letter, and only then, going back to dot my i's and cross my t's. In high school, we hand wrote everything. Laura P and I competed for the neatest handwriting; I confess that I have kept my frog dissection lab report from Freshman Biology out of pride for my penmanship. Years later, after my first child, is born, I am tutoring kids with dyslexia and dysgraphia, and I learn why handwriting is important: our ideas are lost if the person with whom we want to share our thoughts cannot even read the words. Later, my son's fifth grade teacher requests that we respond to classroom papers in cursive, so students can practice reading the unfamiliar shapes. Now, of course, handwriting is being phased out. I wonder how this will change the way this generation of students sees and handles words. Handwriting is a skill that has served us well.

 

In my own fiction writing, I often rewrite or retype stories as one step in the revision process. I consider each word carefully, punctuation too, an often overlooked and powerful tool in storytelling. I can change the meaning of an entire scene by removing quotation marks from dialogue, or writing a series of words without any commas or semicolons or dashes to break them apart.

 

But I am not revising. I am only copying, looking up to grab onto a few words, four or five if possible, and then moving my eyes back down, watching letters form, hearing the smooth scritching of pen on paper as the ink leaves its black stain on white pages. I don't think too much about what I am writing, just put word after word after word, capitalizing at the beginning of sentences, crossing out and rewriting when I make a mistake. Kids come in and out of the kitchen, can I have a popsicle, why do I have to change out of my school clothes, what's for dinner, mingling in my head with converstions between Stepan Arkadyavitch and his valet and and his barber, and finally, in the last few lines, the nurse, who encourages to Stepan Arkadyavitch to seek out his wife and beg forgiveness.

 

Posted with Blogsy

Making My Case

"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."

-Carl Sagan

 

This morning I wake alone in our bed, Bob and Tom playing on the radio, our alarm setting since the beginning our of life together. My husband is already up and moving around. My daughter too; she walks into my bedroom.

"Mom, does this look okay?" she asks, turning on the light, so I can assess her second-day-of-school outfit.

"It looks great," I say, still lying in the bed but holding up my head to see.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, I'm sure."

My younger daughter is staying home. Yes, this is a record: a sick kid on the second day of school. I don't even bother to rethink that decision. She was in bed by six last night, never woke up to eat dinner, only to swallow two ibuprofen and two sips of blue Gatorade. For me, this means that once I get my early birds off, I can begin my own work.

I am already sitting at the kitchen table when my husband walks in at 7am dressed for work. In front of me are a black binder full of notebook paper, an old typing book with a cover that can be opened to stand the book upright, and my copy of Anna Karenina. While he stands at the counter making his lunch, I rip out the first page of the novel and clip it to the top of the typing manual.

"I should probably use a pen and not a pencil," I say. "She would have used a pen."

"I think you should use a real fountain pen," my husband says. "That would make it authentic."

We have already had a discussion about how painful it is going to be copy out 800 pages by hand. "What about your carpal tunnel? You can't jeopardize your own health to do this?" After I explained that the whole point of this project is to get inside the experience from the perspective of Sophia Tolstoy, he nodded his head.

But now he is taking my idea a little too far.

"If that is what she would have used, you have to also. Otherwise, it won't be historically accurate."

When I disagree, he continues to encourage me to reconsider. Have I mentioned that my husband is a lawyer? And a scientist? He knows how to prove a point. I do too: I don't care. This is my project, and I am going to do what I want.

 

Yes, it is true that I am retyping someone else's novel. And yes, I am trying to get inside the experience of the wife of an artistic genius, a person with her own creative passions and a large family to care for. And yes, I want to actually feel what it felt like to do the work of hand-copying an eight-hundred page novel, which I can already tell you, after copying only the first two pages, will work muscles that been have never been flexed in a Jazzersize class.

But I am not a historian. I am not an academic expert or an authority on Tolstoy or Russian History or Feminism. My goal is not become any one of those. My goal is to read Anna Karenina, because it has been on my reading list for years and I can never find the time to tackle it, and because I am a writer, and I want to be a better writer, and that means reading the works of many different writers. It is true that I write short stories, not epic novels, but it is also true, and I know this too after only the first two pages, that Tolstoy's writing is amazing. And I will be a better writer after this project is complete. I might be a better wife, and mother, and maybe even a better human being. I can see that Tolstoy understood things about human nature and had the ability to put those ideas into words that have lived well beyond his lifetime. As a writer, I can only hope to write something that powerful.

 

And yet, it is still just a novel. Just words on a page, words that I recopy onto loose-leaf paper and place inside my plain black binder. When I am finished, I unclip the pages from my makeshift stand, rip them into pieces and put them in the compost bin outside my back door.

 

Posted with Blogsy

Hearing Voices

The first day of school seems, at first thought, a bad time to begin a new project. And if it were any other project, I would agree. Given that I am channeling the voice of a woman who juggled her own artistic pursuits with those of a successful writer-husband and the needs of a large family and working estate, I wonder if I am already hearing her voice from the past.

If you want to get into my head, you have to do it in the midst of family life.

And so it begins.

I wake at 5:30am to get my 17-year-old daughter off to school. I make a bagel and pack a lunch for her. The dog wakes and lumbers into the kitchen. I feed him too, three scoops of dry food. After the carpool picks her up, I give my husband a haircut. He had surgery on his knee last Wednesday and this is his first day back at work; I have added nursemaid to responsibilities the past five days.

At 7:30, he heads out. My 12-year-old enters the kitchen, complaining of a sore throat. I give her ibuprofen and send her back upstairs to get dressed. She returns, a toasted bagel with peanut butter waiting at the table, her lunch packed and ready. She is riding the bus this morning, but because she has to carry all her supplies for the first day, my 19-year-old stepson drives her to the stop before leaving for his summer nanny job.

It is 8:30.

I wash the breakfast dishes by hand, because the dishwasher had been broken since February. I call the Vet to make an appointment for the dog, who has had pneumonia. I feed the chickens.

At 9:00, I have tended to all the voices except Sophie's.

The plan is to enter Sophie Tolstoy's head by retyping the Anna Karenina manuscript, as she did for her husband. What must it have been like to be a woman, struggling to manage all the duties of married life and also crave some passion of her own? I don't know what I am going to find as I embark on this project. I know I will have to type 2 to 3 pages every day to finish the job in a year. How long did it take her to complete each draft? How many times did she have to repeat the process? What was going on in her own head as she typed the words?

And the biggest question of all: How did she hold on to some sense of her own identity?