Reading and writing 24/7

Sometimes I stop working at the computer and go outside.  The door is just six feet from my chair.  If I turn left, I go along the side of the house to the front yard through the archway in this photo.  I might check to see if the mail has come, or I might pull a few weeds.  I would definitely stop to admire the wisteria that looks for a few weeks in spring like that famous Tiffany stained glass window.  If I turn right, I would go into the backyard.  I might do a little maintenance gardening, or I might just sit on a bench and read for awhile, enjoying the sun on my face and the words on the page.

Three writer friends and I have an ongoing email correspondence.  The content is wide-ranging, from grandkids to recipes, gardening, movies, and of course, reading and writing.  We keep each other updated on writing projects, and we share book recommendations.  I was surprised to learn recently that all of the other three make it a practice to avoid reading during the daytime and feel guilty when they do.

What's up with that anyway?  

Even when I was a practicing librarian with a regular 9 to 5 Monday through Friday job, I sometimes read during my work hours and only felt a tiny bit guilty.  I never intended to just sit and read a novel in my office; I was more likely to just go through a pile of new acquisitions or review copies to see get familiar with them.  I still remember the day, however, when I picked up Bridge to Terabithia from the new book shelf.  I started to read the first page and looked up an hour later, tears streaming down my face, to find a huddle of children outside my open office door, all staring in wonder at the weeping librarian.

As a professor responsible for teaching and researching children's literature, I have always felt that reading children's books and critical works about them was part of my job.  Lucky me.

As a writer too, I feel that reading is part of my job.  Reading the best of what other people write stimulates me to write better.  I blogged recently about how a poem in Margarita Engle's magnificent Surrender Tree gave me the insight I needed to finish my book about children and libraries.  

Of course, I not only read at any odd moment during the day or evening.  I also work at all hours.  This was the biggest change for me when I left the public library and started my job as a professor.  There were no longer regular work hours or even time sheets!  UCLA didn't seem to care when or where I did my work as long as I showed up for scheduled office hours, classes, and faculty meetings.  Occasionally I would try to keep track of the hours I spent on those activities plus course preparation, research, writing, and the other criterion for promotion:  the poorly defined "service" component.  It was always considerably more than 40 hours a week, but the bliss was that I could put in the hours whenever it suited me.  This left occasional mornings free for grocery shopping or the gym and afternoons for movies.   I could spend time with the grandchildren when they got out of school.  I did all of my writing for publication in my home office, at any hour of the day or night, with the freedom to take a break and work in my garden or stir the stew that was simmering on my stove.  

Maybe this is why I read any time and any place I can.  Yes, books nourish my mind and my soul and distract me from the cares of the world.  I need to read as much as I need to work and eat and drink and love.   I don't compartmentalize any of those activities.  On good days, they all merge into an organic whole.  So yes, I read in the daytime; and I write at night and on weekends.   These are the rewards of a literary life.

Spring fever

On Monday, February 16, I sent every last word of the Book ms. electronically to the editor.  Wow, what a feeling!  Is this why we write?  Because it feels so good when we stop?  I know it's not quite over yet; there will still be those grueling author queries from the copy editor.   But for now it was time to celebrate.

This is what I did over the next week:  saw four movies (in preparation for the Academy Awards ceremony), went to a concert at the Disney Hall, enlisted my teenage granddaughter to help me do some serious gardening, and hosted an intimate Oscar party.

It was sheer giddy bliss.  This was what I had THOUGHT retirement would be like.

Even the weather is cooperating.  It is sunny and warm, and everything is blooming, even the flamboyant amaryllis that was just a bulb in a pot when I got it for Christmas.  When it finally flowered this week, the stem was more than three feet tall, and it was so top-heavy that it kept capsizing.  I finally had to cut it off and put it in a vase.  

The daffodils are nearly finished, but the wisteria vine is beginning to dazzle with its purple

 flowers that are so glorious for their brief life each spring.  

I even tackled the rampant bougainvillea in the backyard, hacking off diseased limbs until the green recycle bin would hold no more.  

And today I committed to another writing project.  I'll be doing an article about library teen employment programs for Library Trends, using my work with the LEAP program at the Free Library of Philadelphia as a kind of case study. Flowers want to grow.   Words want to be written.

Hogamus higamus

I think it was Dorothy Parker who reportedly woke up in the middle of the night with an inspiration.  The words that came to her were so brilliant and insightful that she instantly wrote them down, certain that she had unlocked the key to a wise and wonderful poem.  She woke up the next day and read what she had written:  "Hogamus higamus, men are polygamous.  Higamus hogamus, women monogamous."  (My friend Theresa has had a similar experience, but that is her story to tell.)

I felt like I was channeling Dorothy Parker last night.  I had finished everything but the last chapter of the Book, which I had optimistically titled "Claiming the Future."  When I sat down to put words to that title, I suddenly realized that I had no idea what to say.  It was one of those paralyzing moments we writers come to dread.  Sometimes we know what we want to say but don't know how to say it.  That we can manage.  That's all about writing and rewriting until you get it right.  But this is worse:  not knowing what to say.

I closed the Word file.  I listened to some music.  I ate supper.  I finished reading The Surrender Tree by Margarita Engle.  I tried not to fret.  I went back to the computer, opened up Chapter 6 and read those words again:  "Claiming the Future."

Words from the powerful, evocative poetry of Margarita Engle that I had just been reading came flooding back; and suddenly I knew that it wasn't up to librarians to claim the future as I had been thinking (and somehow knowing it was wrong).  It is the children who must claim the future, and we librarians who give them the support to do so.  

So I wrote in one of those white heats of inspiration in which the words flow like lava.  I referred to Engle's book.  The Surrender Tree is a book of poems that tells the story of Cuba's wars for independence from Spain, fought from 1850 to 1899.   The dominant voice is Rosa's, a slave who escaped to the forest and joined the freedom fighters there.  She becomes a legendary healer, using her knowledge of medicinal plants to ease the pain and suffering of wounded men on both sides of the fighting.   A young girl named Silvia  escapes from the reconcentration camps established by the Spanish government to control the peasant population on the island.  She joins Rosa, who has grown old while the wars rage on endlessly.  Rosa teaches Silvia one cure at time.  She introduces the girl to the Simple Verses of Jose Marti, the poet who first inspired her to hope; and she watches as the girl becomes a skilled healer in her own right.  Rosa thinks that she and her husband are like the rock-hard wood of the guayacan tree, so heavy that it cannot float while young people are like the wood of a balsa tree, light and airy.

Young people drift on airy daydreams.

Old people help hold them in place (p. 113).

That was it.  I had the beginning of the final chapter of my book.  I saved my work, sent a copy to my friend and colleague Elaine for her feedback, shut down the computer, and withdrew into a video of Devil in a Blue Dress.  When I woke up this morning, I was afraid that I might have had my own "hogamus  higamus" moment last night.  I was fearful about reading again what I had written, but Elaine's email was encouraging.

I took a deep breath, opened the file, and read what I had written.  It worked.  I decided that this was an occasion for "less is more" and just wrote enough to wrap it up and to clarify the idea that librarians can be the anchors for the next generations dreams and dreamers, not holding them back but lifting them up.

Now all I need to do is figure out some way to add a little sparkle to chapter five, write an introduction -- and I'm done with this puppy.

Comfort

It's another cold, rainy day in paradise.  The Book is nearing completion.  I should be happy that the weather does not tempt me outdoors.  Why not glue myself to the Aeron chair in front of my computer when most other options involve slogging through the rain?  Still, when the writing doesn't go well and I feel like I'm pushing my way through molasses with nothing to show for it but treacly, gooey prose, I need comfort.   Actually, I need comfort even when the writing is going nicely.  And comfort usually means food.

I was especially stressed this morning.  The good news is that I wrapped up the all-important chapter on re-imagining childhood.  This is really the heart of the book,  and it required a lot of careful thought and precise language so I was feeling pretty good.   The next chapter should be relatively straight-forward.  I'll be using the model of outcome-based planning and evaluation described in Dynamic Youth Services through Outcome-Based Planning and Evaluation by Eliza Dresang, Melissa Gross, and Leslie Edmonds Holt to suggest a more intentional way of delivering library services to kids.  I reached for my copy on the shelf where it should have been:  no book.  I looked to the left of me.  No book.  I looked to the right of me.  No book.  I even looked up into the tree.  No book.  Not even any monkeys.  I looked EVERYWHERE.  

I checked the LAPL online catalog:  not there!  Why didn't they buy this book?????  I checked the UCLA online catalog:  checked out.  Finally in desperation, I logged onto Amazon.com and ordered a copy to arrive overnight on Saturday with some insanely high delivery charge.   Then as I was walking from my office to the kitchen to make lunch, I spotted my copy of the book wedged between American Children's Literature and the Construction of Childhood and Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children.  I had looked there in my panicky search but hadn't seen it. 

Oh, well.  After tomorrow I will own two copies of this useful book.  But for now I needed comfort.  There are some foods that ooze comfort.  Chocolate is one, of course.  But when I need a comfort lunch, I revert back to childhood pleasures.  These are meals that would cause a foodie or someone on a low-carb diet (that would be me) to run screaming from the table:  potato patties made with mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese or grilled cheese sandwiches made with Velveeta, Campbell's cream of tomato soup served with so many saltine crackers that it should more accurately be called saltine crackers soaked in cream of tomato soup.  All of those meals have comforted me in the past.  Today I made one of my mother's favorites:  a scrambled egg sandwich with ketchup on white bread.  She sometimes added onions or green peppers and called it a Denver Sandwich.  

I prepared it.  I ate it.  It was delicious, and now I am fortified for another afternoon of writing.

Deadlines

My editor emailed me this week and asked how things were going since I had committed to a February 1 deadline to complete the manuscript.  I allowed as how I might be a little later than that and suggested that February 15 might be more reasonable.  Actually, June 15 would be even more reasonable.  But never mind.  I am now working at a feverish pace to try to finish this book sometime reasonably close to that February 15 date.

But when I am not sitting at the computer, I have been thinking about deadlines.  All kinds of deadlines.  We all know about April 15.  At the end of each quarter at UCLA, I have faced a deadline to turn in grades.  There have been deadlines to turn in grant proposals and to get the early bird rate for conference registration.  So many deadlines.  They are mostly hateful things, generating a lot of stress.

I have also been reading Marguerite Yourcenar's magnificent "Memoirs of Hadrian."  The elderly Roman Emperor is reflecting on his life and writing a kind of testimonial for the young Marcus Aurelius who will succeed him.  Hadrian doesn't know the exact date of that ultimate deadline -- death -- but he knows that it is inevitable and that it may be close at hand.  As he assesses his life, he seems content with what he has accomplished.  He regrets most the untimely death by suicide of the young man who was the great love of his life. 

While Hadrian is sometimes harsh in his judgment of other old men, especially those whose minds seem to have hardened along with their arteries, he seems sanguine about his own aging.  He acknowledges the increasing physical weaknesses with some dismay, but of course, he has a host of servants to massage his aching limbs, lend an arm, make him comfortable, or even carry him if necessary.  

I haven't finished the book yet so I don't know if there are any last tasks Hadrian wants to complete before his final deadline with Death.  At 65,  I certainly don't feel that I am at Death's door.  I am aware, however, that I am closer to the end of my life than to its beginning.  I have retired from not one but two careers that were immensely rewarding to me, but I still work.  I write.  I teach.  I consult.  I think.  

I can't remember exactly when I stopped reading job announcements and fantasizing about other jobs I might tackle.  I do have a "lifetime to do" list that I compiled about ten years ago.  I've checked off some items:  attending another performance of Wagner's Ring, being promoted to full professor, and growing  a wisteria vine.  I'm looking forward to achieving one more this summer -- visiting Italy.  And just this week I thought of a professional project I would like to initiate:  a movement for children's library rights.  I'll be writing about that in the book that I just might finish by February 15.  I haven't set a deadline for the children's library rights movement though.

A change in the weather

I know I'm a weather wimp. Living here in the paradise that is Venice, California, I have become accustomed to temperatures that don't deviate much from the 70s, and I like it that way. So I have been suffering lately with night time temperatures down in the forties and daytime temperatures in the high 50s.

My Minnesota grandkids were just here, and they thought it was positively tropical. They ran around with bare feet and no jackets and pooled their walking-around money to reach a total of $130 which they they offered to their mother as a bribe to move the family here. Their dad said he'd consider it if they added a few zeros to that sum.

Anyway, I've been cold. My house is not designed for cold weather. There is a wall heater in the hall. It gets the hall nice and toasty and leaves the rest of the house pretty chilly. A little heat seeps into the living room but none reaches my drafty office. And now we finally get to the point of this post. It has been too cold to work comfortably at the computer. My keyboard keys are cold. My fingers are cold. My brain is cold.

And this brings me to the image at the beginning of the post. That is Henry Hagglyhoagly, the romantic hero of one of Carl Sandburg's Rootabaga Stories. I loved these stories as a little girl living in Minnesota, and I love them still.

Henry Hagglyhoagly was in love with Susan Slackentwist, and he was walking down a country road to court her. "Why is it so bitter cold weather?" Henry Hagglyhoagly asked himself, "if I say many bitter bitters it is not so bitter as the cold wind and the cold weather." Fortunately he had his good wool mittens on. At last he gets to Susan's home and prepares to serenade her with his Spanish Spinnish Splishy guitar.

"And now," he asked his mittens, "shall I take you off or keep you on? If I take you off the cold wind of the bitter cold weather will freeze my hands so stiff and bitter cold my fingers will be too stiff to play the guitar. I will play with mittens on."

Which he did. Susan Slackentwist listened and opened her window and threw him a snow-bird feather. And for years afterward many a sweetheart in the Rootabaga Country told her lover, "If you wish to marry me let me hear you under my window on a winter night playing the guitar with wool yarn mittens on."

I actually TRIED typing with my gloves on. Not a successful effort.

Fortunately, the weather man predicts a change in the weather, with a Santa Ana condition bringing temperatures up in the 80s to LA by the weekend.

Reader response theory

I wrote a Young Adult novel ten years ago. MAKING UP MEGABOY got a lot of attention because of its format (highly illustrated with a graphic novel feel), its point of view (seventeen different voices telling the story), its subject matter (a boy who kills a man), and its end (ambiguous). Reviewers loved it or hated it, and so did young readers. Published by DK Ink, an imprint that no longer exists, it drifted out of stock and then out of print. Persistent potential purchasers -- there aren't many -- may still find a paperback copy of it through Delacorte. Every now and then when there is another nationally publicized incident of a teen or child killer, somebody remembers Megaboy, but it has pretty much faded into obscurity.

I was surprised, therefore, to get a fat pack of letters recently from Mr. Hanson's seventh grade in Sheridan, Wyoming. The students had spent the fall reading and analyzing MAKING UP MEGABOY, and they had some pretty strong reactions. Strong enough that they wanted to write to the author and tell her what they thought.

Most of the students were frustrated and annoyed by the ending, or lack of it, as they saw it. One of the more vociferous readers wrote, "You are a fool though. You could have made a good profit off this book, but you had to write this with wacky mixed up, make your own ending up story. The end was disgusting and made me regret reading it, but why did you write this story this way? WHY RUIN A GOOD STORY? You seemed like you knew what you were doing, but I have my doubts?" Another wrote, "You need to write a second book. It would be nice so people don't get mad. And why did Robby shoot Mr. Koe?" And there were many more in this vein.

Not everybody hated the book. Elizabeth wrote, "This book is exactly the kind of book I like, it is a reallistic story with a bit of fantasy." And here is one of her classmates' letters in its entirety:

"I really enjoyed your book, but at the same time it kind of angred me. The reason it did that was, that I'm a person that likes to figure things out. Although at the same time it was very interesting and I lost many hours of sleep staying up and thinking about it not being able to get to sleep. The reason I liked it was that it just left you hanging there and made me want to read more. And it kept the reader thinking all through it. Thank you for writing that story. I had a great time reading it."

Most of the students also wanted to know WHY I had written the book. When I wrote back to the class, I told them in some detail why I was moved to write about a boy who killed, but I couldn't answer their most urgent question: why did Robbie kill Mr. Koh? I also told them how happy it made me to get their letters, even though most of these letters were critical. I told them that authors need readers, especially readers who take the time to discuss and think about their books.

I've been thinking a lot now about the relationship between writers and readers. There is a lot of literary theory on this topic, theory that distinguishes between "writerly" and "readerly" texts, that speculates about how and why readers respond to texts, that probes texts for what they say about their authors or that insists the writer's experiences and state of mind are irrelevant to the resulting work. My son-in-law who is the drama critic for a local free paper said that he turned down a job writing theater reviews for a start-up online publication because he liked seeing his words in print on paper and knowing that his words are getting into 125,000 households every week. He writes for a living but also for the satisfaction of being read.

This blog is read by a handful of my friends and relatives. I think I am writing primarily for my own purposes, to help me clarify what I know and to chronicle some events in my life. I make no pretense of writing in this medium for a wide audience. I don't expect readers to respond, but it is satisfying -- sometimes even thrilling -- when they do.