Happy New Year, Happy Reading!

Dear Friends,

As 2014 comes to an end, I've come up with a list of some favorite reading experiences from the past 12 months. Happy New Year to you all!

This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett. I’ve had a crush on Ms. Patchett ever since a book club I used to belong to read The Magician’s Assistant in 2002. The next year we read her opus, Bel Canto, a story about a political mass-kidnapping that ends with all the tragic beauty and irony of an opera, and some of the lines from that book still shimmer in my mind.

What a pleasure, then, to get a glimpse inside the life of one of my literary idols. In this book of previously published essays, she writes, among other things, about her dog, a nun, the bookstore she started with another woman, and the South Carolina college that got itself into hot water when it selected her book Truth and Beauty as required summer reading.

My favorite piece was about the grueling physical tests required for admission to the Los Angeles Police Academy. I especially loved reading about how she trained for the tests herself, and in the process, learned to scale a six-foot wall. As the daughter of a retired LAPD detective, Ms. Patchett manages to tell us something about the bond she shares with her father without going overboard.

For me, that’s the greatest strength of this nonfiction collection. Whether she’s writing about her family, her husband or her late beloved friend, Lucy Grealy, Ms. Patchett’s aim is never to simply pluck our heart strings. She’s a master of elegant language, and her emotional revelations are mixed with a humor, intelligence and restraint that say much more than pages of damp confessions ever could. That’s why it means so much when she writes, “…[W]hen love calls out, ‘How far would you go for me?’ you can look it in the eye and say truthfully, ‘Farther than you would ever have thought possible.’”

Lila by Marilynne Robinson. Part of a trilogy of novels (along with Gilead and Home), Lila is the story about a homeless woman and an aging preacher. Against all odds, they’re married, and for the first time in her life, Lila is warm and safe in the preacher’s plain, clean house in Iowa. Where she once traveled from town to town, finding shelter wherever she could, Lila now has an abundant garden, a caring husband and a child growing inside of her. But the past, with its violence and cruelty and love is always with her too, making her wonder if she can truly feel at home in this new, protected world.

 

Roots of Style by Isabel Toledo; illustrations by Ruben Toledo. This book is a passionate paean to personal style by Ms. Toledo, the Cuban-American woman who designed Michelle Obama’s 2009 inauguration suit. Her detailed description of the first lady’s ensemble left me a little breathless. For example, although some fashion experts thought the matching dress and coat were sewn with sequins, in reality that sparkle was the effect of sunlight on the layers of wool lace and silk, which its designer combined for warmth as well as beauty. Ms. Toledo may not use the polished written prose of Ann Patchett, but she communicates her love of fabric and movement and self-expression in a way that makes us admire her literary ability as well as her artistry as a designer.

Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson. An evil uncle, a shipwreck and a life-and-death hide-and-seek through the heather-covered Scottish highlands. Combine this with a complex bro-mance (between our foolish but well-intentioned teen hero and his friend, a Scottish rebel on the run) with Stevenson’s ability to capture the old Scots language on the page, and hoot man, you have a recipe for fun.

Christina Rossetti: A Divided Life by Georgina Battiscombe. An exploration of the life and mind of the author of the bizarre and compelling poem “Goblin Market.” Battiscombe’s thesis is that there’s a “doubleness” about Rossetti, who was a dark beauty with a temper and penchant for sumptuous language, but who also adhered to her religious beliefs with a determination that bordered on fanaticism.

The Penderwicks at Point Mouette by Jeanne Birdsall. In this third Penderwick tale, three of the sisters are on vacation in Maine with their Aunt Claire, who promptly sprains her ankle, leaving the girls somewhat free to pursue their own adventures. Complications cheerfully follow. Jane makes an idiot of herself over a boy named Dominic, and Skye, the cranky, soccer-loving sister is terrified of her new responsibilities as the OAP (Oldest Available Penderwick). Meanwhile, the sisters’ beloved friend Jeffrey meets a man who shares his love of music and also bears a decided physical resemblance to him. Ms. Birdsall’s characters are fresh and modern, while reminding us of fictional friends from other eras, like Betsy and Tacy, Henry Huggins and even Laurie and Jo. Oh, how I wish the Penderwicks would take me along on their next vacation.

The Plover by Brian Doyle. Can you pick a favorite book that you read this year? As my son says, that might be like picking a favorite kind of pie. But if I absolutely had to narrow it down to one, I’d choose Mr. Doyle’s novel. As much as I loved his Mink River, The Plover moved me even more, as I sailed along with the ultimate loner, Declan O’Donnell, who sets off on a solitary voyage only to gradually collect a boatload of passengers, including – to name just a few – two rats, a politician, a singer, a pirate and an injured girl who can only speak to birds. Mr. Doyle’s poetic prose kept me turning the pages as much as the high seas adventure did. But this book is more than lyrical images, likable characters and a compelling premise. Underneath it all is the idea that we’re connected to everything and everybody, from the fish in the sea to a murderous villain to an 18^th century philosophical writer. Perhaps Mr. Doyle is saying that the inhabitants and landscape of our world are like the drops of water that make up the ocean. Combined, they may drown us, or, one by one, they may be drawn up to the sky by the light of the sun.

 

 

Hell's Teeth! The Magic of Mary Stewart

I discovered my first Mary Stewart book, Touch Not the Cat, in a 1976 Reader’s Digest Condensed Book of my dad’s. It was, I found, not Mrs. Stewart’s best work, but how I loved that mysterious tale of twins and telepathy, and I’ve been a passionate fan of hers ever since. After that, I saved up my babysitting money each month to buy her older novels, which all transported me to a world where well-read heroines quote Shakespeare, Milton and Tennyson, and the handsome devils who fall in love them all know exactly what they mean.

These women, though, do more than sit around and read the classics. Charity Selborne, the protagonist of Mrs. Stewart’s first novel, Madam, Will You Talk? not only throws herself into saving a young boy from his menacing father, but knows how to drive her car fast enough along the winding roads of Provence to elude the monstrous man. Lucy Waring, in This Rough Magic, crosses paths with a cold-blooded smuggler then escapes by swimming from a bay in Corfu to the Albanian coast. Created mostly in the 1950s and 1960s, these heroines are Every Women who generally hold low-status jobs, but there’s no doubt that they’re at least as clever as (if not more clever than) their counterparts in contemporary fiction.

Besides the thrill of seeing an ordinary woman outwit a host of dangerous foes (from a former Nazi to a madman obsessed with making human sacrifices to a mountain), Mrs. Stewart gives us the pleasure of travelling to such disparate places as Damascus, Corfu and Scotland’s Isle of Skye. I can still remember how she made me love these locales with her lengthy descriptions that seemed to caress every tree, every leaf, every bird’s wing. Here she is, in The Moon-Spinners, describing some scenery in Crete:

 “The track to Agios Georgios wound its way between high banks of maquis, the scented maquis of Greece. I could smell verbena, and lavender, and a kind of sage. Over the hot white rock and the deep green of the maquis, the Judas trees lifted their clouds of scented flowers the color of purple daphne, their branches reaching landwards, away from the African winds.”*

I confess that as a 13-year-old, I often skimmed over such passages, eager to plunge on through the plot and get to the good parts, where the heroine vexes the villain and kisses a handsome but oh-so-honorable man who just happens to fiercely return her affection. “My dear girl,” Nicholas Drury tells the heroine of Wildfire at Midnight, “my instincts work overtime where you’re concerned.” Sigh.

As much as I loved these romances, I was – and am – equally thrilled by Mrs. Stewart’s vocabulary. Besides beginning her chapters with lines from old ballads or plays or poems (“Nine coaches waiting—hurry, hurry, hurry—/Ay, to the devil….”), she has her characters all speak in classy sentences that are peppered with bursts of well-mannered British slang such as “hell’s teeth,” “damnable” and “beastly.” Her heroines are all unequivocally decent (at least four of them put themselves in danger to protect a child and one even goes all out to save a beached dolphin in the middle of the night), but their speech reveals a bit of an edge and more than a spark of humor. Charity Selborne hardly bats an eyelash when her friend dryly refers to an exciting man as “The Wolf of Orange” and Gianetta Brooke tells us after her brush with death in Wildfire at Midnight that “I had been fortified with whisky and a cigarette and was content, for a moment to rest there in the sun before attempting the tramp back to the hotel.”

If you go to a used bookstore, you’ll see that the women on the covers of Mrs. Stewart’s novels all have different looks, depending on the decade in which a particular volume was published. Today, the latest editions feature bright, retro-hip art that could be mistaken for 1950’s Dior fashion drawings. My favorites are the dark covers from the 60's, each depicting a heroine in lipstick, high heels and polished hairdo. I also own several crumbling 70’s editions that show full-hipped women in bell-bottom pants, their long, loose hair blowing in the breeze. Clearly, the publishers were trying to appeal to more modern audiences with those covers. But they had it all wrong. A Mary Stewart heroine is always as well-coifed as she is well-read.

Even in the midst of deadly encounters, Charity and company carry combs and mirrors in their hand bags and wear petticoats beneath their frocks. Mrs. Stewart may have been a serious, hard-working woman, but she also understood the importance of clothes, as we see in this exchange between Charity and her friend Louise in Madam, Will You Talk?:

“My dear,” I said gratefully, “don’t tell me you’ve brought my clothes! I knew you were the most wonderful woman in the world!”

She laughed. “No one can face a crisis unless they’re suitably clad.”

Sadly, Mary Stewart died this year. But the good news is she lived to be 97, and new generations of women are still being delighted by her books. Or maybe I should say new generations of women and men, because I’ve read a few of her novels aloud to my family, and my husband and my son are as captivated by them as my mother, my daughter and I have been. My husband likes Wildfire at Midnight and my son has a thing for The Ivy Tree. I couldn't possibly pick a favorite, but if you’ve never read a Mary Stewart book before, you can safely start with any of them. Hell’s teeth, I believe you’ll be damnably glad you did.

*Mary Stewart’s novels were originally published by Hodder & Stoughton in London. The Moon-Spinners came out in 1962, Wildfire at Midnight was published in 1956, and Madam, Will You Talk? was published in 1955.

That's So Portland, Part 2: The Longest Running Show on Earth

In the fall of 2001, Portland’s Musical Theatre Company (“MTC”) put on a production of the musical No, No Nanette, and apparently it’s been playing ever since. At least that’s what the sign outside the historic brick building of the former Eastside Performance Center indicates. It’s October 2014 now, and the sign is still advertising the show. Or a version of the show – either one of the “No’s” got left off or it fell off sometime in the last 13 years. Now the sign simply reads “No Nanette.”

The play opened on Broadway in 1925 and features blackmail, a millionaire Bible publisher, and, of course, Nanette herself, a fun-loving heiress who runs off to Atlantic City after telling everyone she’s visiting her grandmother in Trenton, New Jersey. The hit songs of the show were "I Want to Be Happy" and "Tea for Two."

I never went to see MTC’s production of Nanette, but I used to spend a lot of time in the Eastside Performance Center building, back when its basement was an indoor park. On rainy days, my toddler son and I would go down a long flight of stairs and into a gym that had been turned into a sort of kid heaven with baskets of blocks and puppets and games. It also had a climbing structure and a toy kitchen outfitted with all kinds of cooking utensils and pretend food, but my son’s favorite thing to do there was to drive around in an orange plastic car with a yellow roof.

With his hands holding the steering wheel, he would push his feet along the floor Flinstone-style to make the car move, and I wonder now if the look of concentration on his face meant he'd transported himself to a place where he was on the road, in charge of his destination, and happy. Whatever he was feeling, he never wanted to get out of the car when it was time to leave. Inevitably, we’d play out a little drama of our own that featured coaxing (mine) and tears (his). Sometimes, to take our minds off of this tragedy, I’d say, “Let’s count the stairs on our way out.” It seemed to help both of us to have something concrete to focus on beyond the sadness of parting with the wonders of the indoor park.

Before the building housed this basement play area or the theater company, it was Washington High School, which was decorated with columns and lions’ heads and terracotta trim. The school’s notable alumni include the world-famous chef James Beard; the civic leader and businessman Bill Naito; the former governor of Oregon Vic Atiyeh and the Nobel-prize-winning Linus Pauling.

My dad went to Washington High School too and graduated in 1949 at the age of 17. Even though I drive past there at least a few times every week, I can’t picture him there at all. When he was living, it never occurred to me to ask him about his life back then, and when he passed away in 1995, his stories from that time died too. If I could go back in time about 20 years, I’d ask him, Did you have a favorite book? Did you watch the clock during math? Who did you eat lunch with? What made you laugh?

A developer bought the old high school from the City of Portland last year, and soon the building will be open for business. Maybe the new tenants and patrons alike will hear the echo of a locker door slamming down the hall or the tire of a toy car rolling over the floor or a madcap heiress tapping and trilling across the stage that she wants to be happy but she won’t be happy till you’re happy too.

Some Conversation

I’ve always been a writer, but I didn’t really think of myself as a poet until after my father died.

 

That summer I watched a Bill Moyers program on PBS that featured poets like the ex-con Jimmy Santiago Baca and the jazz musician Sekou Sundiata and the children’s author Lucille Clifton. For the first time I fully understood that poetry isn’t covered in dust that makes you sneeze and that you don’t need a PhD or a magic decoder ring to understand its hidden meanings. And poetry (or “The Language of Life,” as Moyers called it) is a vocabulary we can all use to say things we don't say in ordinary conversation. It can be about everything from the birth of a baby to the death of a friend, and everything in between. What's it like to be sent to prison at the age of 17? To hear your grandmother sing? To feel your depression lifting when you see a bee landing on a lily? There are no limits to what poetry can tell us.

The spring after I saw the Bill Moyers show, I took a writing class taught by the Portland poet Donna Prinzmetal. Donna’s first assignment was for us to write about our birth. I wrote a little piece about how my brothers weren’t allowed to see our mother in the hospital after I was born, so she held me by a window and waved to them. I also wrote about my beloved 6^th grade friend who introduced me to the wonders of Shakespeare and ballet – a whole new world for a girl who spent all her free time reading and watching TV. For the last class with Donna, we met on a warm June evening and sat in a circle on the lawn, where I shared a poem I'd written about my dad, telling my classmates things I hadn't said to anyone except my husband.

I continued to study with Donna for almost three years. Along the way, I fell in love with a form of poetry called pantoums, which follow a pattern of repeating lines. The really beautiful thing about a pantoum is that it ends with the same line you began with, bringing the piece full circle, while giving the words a whole new meaning the second time around. The repetition also gives the poem a rhythm that’s as satisfying on a physical level as holding a baby in your arms and swaying from side to side.  

Ever since I learned about pantoums, I’ve been experimenting with using repetition in my prose too. I’ll be reading one of those experiments on Thursday, October 23, at Rain or Shine Coffee House. Five other VoiceCatcher Journal authors, including the incomparable Donna Prinzmetal, will be also be reading their work. I can't wait to hear what they have to say.

Join VoiceCatcher for the Last Reading of 2014

Thursday, October 23, 2014

6:30-8:00 p.m.

Rain or Shine Coffee House

5941 SE Division St.

Portland, OR 97206

Come early to grab a drink or bite to eat from

Rain or Shine’s special menu for the event.





Top row: Helen Sinoradzki, Donna Prinzmetal, Linda Ferguson
Bottom: Kate Comings, Jennifer Foreman, Tanya Jarvik

 

Card Tricks

When I was a kid I had two favorite card games: “Old Maid” and “Authors.” The appeal of “Old Maid” was obvious, with its brightly colored characters like Tumbledown Tess in her red ski sweater and Fifi Fluff in her movie-star sunglasses and high-heeled pumps.

I’m not sure, though, why I liked “Authors,” so much. The portraits on the cards were, after all, either extremely grim or just plain bizarre. Why, for example, was Nathaniel Hawthorne painted with long, bright yellow locks (I secretly thought of him as “Banana Head”), and why was Robert Louis Stevenson’s face and hair tinged with purple shadows? Fitting in neatly with these unappealing pictures was a scowling Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who, with his balding head and big scraggily beard didn’t look like anything special to my six-year-old self.

How wrong I was. Alfred Tennyson, in fact, was a big, popular success in his own lifetime. So big, in fact, that Queen Victoria made him England’s poet laureate, which meant he got to represent his country at all sorts of official celebrations and got paid for the position too. His writing was so remunerative that by 1850 he’d finally made enough money to marry his sweetheart and was eventually able to buy a house in the country where he could let his crinkled beard grow while he wrote more spectacular poems.

And spectacular they were. Today people are still in awe of the music of his work as well as the vivid pictures he created with words. Take these snippets from “The Eagle”: “He clasps the crag with crooked hands” and “The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls.”

Try saying these lines out loud, or better yet, go outside and recite them while you’re walking. I guarantee the words will be some of the most delicious things you’ve ever had in your mouth.

In the 1880’s, Tennyson was made a baron, which meant he got to add “Lord” to his name and had a seat in the House of Lords. When he died he was buried in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey, which includes memorials to Geoffrey Chaucer, Lord Byron and George Eliot (a.k.a. Mary Ann Evans).

Despite this success, Alfred’s life was not all flowers and rainbows. His childhood, for one thing, was as grim as anything Charles Dickens could have dreamt up. His father was a bitter man who’d been disinherited by his own dad and was forced to get a job as a cleric to support his family. Fueling his unhappiness with alcohol, Reverend Tennyson was such an abusive father that he once reportedly threatened to stab one of Alfred’s brothers in the throat.

Needless to say, the reverend’s 12 children didn’t thrive in such an environment. One brother was put in an insane asylum and another was addicted to opium. Tennyson, however, found some happiness when he left home for Cambridge, where he made friends with other people who recognized his poetic gifts and encouraged him to keep writing. I suspect it was like finding the magic key that let him out of a dungeon. By writing beautiful and powerful verse, he not only rose above his miserable childhood, but he also found love and admiration and connection with people outside the grim walls of his family home.

Due to some financial woes, Tennyson had to leave Cambridge without earning his degree, and more hard times came when his early works were attacked by critics. Worst of all, his beloved school friend, Arthur Hallam, suddenly died in 1833. Once again, Tennyson used language to deal with his loss. The poem he wrote for Hallam, “In Memoriam,” is still considered to be one of his greatest achievements. In this piece, Tennyson struggles with the big questions about the fragility of life:

Our little systems have their day;

They have their day and cease to be:
They are but broken lights of thee,
And thou, O Lord, are more than they.

But he also asserts:

I hold it true, whate’er befall;

I feel it, when I sorrow most,
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

After Hallam’s death, much of Tennyson’s work had an elegiac theme. He wrote of the dead Lady of Shallot floating on a barge toward Camelot (“A gleaming shape she floated by,/A corse between the houses high”) and of the death of King Arthur (“So like a shatter’d column lay the king”).

You’d think a poet who dwelt on death so much would make for a gloomy companion. But Tennyson also weaves a note of hopefulness within his work, a suggestion that good things are still ahead. Take, for example, the end of “Ulysses,” a poem about the hero’s restlessness after returning safely home. “Tho’ much is taken, much abides,” Tennyson writes. After all Ulysses has suffered – the brutal battles of the Trojan War and the terror of facing everything from the gargantuan Cyclops to the wily sirens – the old hero still wants more action:

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek to find, and not to yield.

Today, writing probably isn’t the quickest way to make money or win points with the public. But as a means of creating order or beauty out of chaos or grief, it’s no card trick. Whether you pen formal poems or scribble in a journal now and then, putting your thoughts on paper can still work wonders.

You Complete Me

I came up with what I thought was a clever idea the other day.

Since my husband and I are about to celebrate our wedding anniversary, I decided to write about some of my favorite romantic moments from movies. I began scribbling away, and within a few minutes I had a list of almost 20 scenes. Among them were Aidan Quinn watching Rosanna Arquette’s dopey magic act in Desperately Seeking Susan, Julian Sands striding towards Helena Bonham Carter across a field of barley in A Room with a View, and Rebecca Pidgeon and Jeremy Northam sparring their way through The Winslow Boy.

I thought this list would make me happy, but as it grew, so did my unease. With just three exceptions, all of the films I thought of feature characters who are white and heterosexual, a fact that brought home to me the sad truth that huge numbers of people (whether that means you, your neighbor, your doctor, your co-worker or your partner) aren’t represented on our movie screens.

Which brings me to another question: Why is it that publishers of the printed word seem to have more faith in the idea that diversity can sell than the mainstream film industry does? The people who produce books understand that someone like me (white, female, married to a man) might pay money to read about the adventures of Armistead Maupin’s Michael Tolliver or the rise of Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court.

At a recent writing conference, my son, a filmmaker/film critic, was told that any script featuring gay characters would be “a hard sell.” Why is that? How do we know for sure when we’ve had such limited access to such films? Couldn’t mainstream movies bring a greater variety of characters to life and move us all in some way? Americans were enthralled by Chiwetel Ejiofar's performance in 12 Years a Slave but what about seeing more characters like Don Cheadle’s depiction of a dentist/dad in Reign Over Me?

What about the connection we naturally feel for our fellow human beings? Isn’t it possible that it could flourish in a darkened movie theater?

The White Rose

When I stand at my kitchen sink washing dishes I look out the window and see the grapevine growing on our fence. Beyond the fence is the backyard of the house where we used to live and in the yard is a white rose that blooms through all of spring and into fall.

I gave the rose to my husband for our 10^th wedding anniversary and also because his mother had died just five days before. That was 20 years ago, but I can still hear her voice, the rhythmic, soft tones of a woman who’d come here from the Scottish highlands, where she lived on a farm and milked cows and cooked dinner over a peat fire. 

She tried working and living in the town of Aberdeen for a while, but then her older sister died and she had to come back to help her dad and three brothers on the farm. She was in her early 30’s before she could make her escape to Toronto, where she met her husband, a printer who’d just emigrated from Glasgow. My daughter looks a little like her, and my son has the red hair of his Scottish forebears.

Last year our next door neighbors built a pergola in their backyard. On one side of the pergola is a trellis and on the trellis the white rose, which once grew low to the ground, has gone wild, growing taller, reaching wider than I thought possible.