Grateful

Among the many other gifts of the season, I’m grateful I have been able to finish the first draft of my novel So Are You to My Thoughts. It’s the final book in the series I have been writing for the past ten years. There is a lot of work to do before the novel is published, as it has been written sporadically and needs pulling together. But, there is no getting around it. It’s done.

In this culminating novel, Line’s kids are all thriving. She and Stephen continue to reside in Santa Cruz with Poppa, as the kids move into their own lives. It is easier for Line to communicate with them, however, as technology has improved. In her 60’s, Line begins to feel something is wrong. Eventually she is diagnosed with progressive multiple sclerosis which at first horrifies her. She gradually becomes used to her new condition, with Stephen stepping in to help.

For Paul, the book begins with the loss of Marie. He finds a place for himself, however, when Ellie and Bruce decide they can rebuild the family’s lake cabin. It will become a year-round home, with Paul in residence as manager. The building process is exciting and Paul is thrilled to find himself deep in northern Minnesota where he always wanted to be. Marie’s daughter and her children remain his family.

Marty’s single life is completely disrupted when she moves in with Doug at the Boulder Creek ranch on the mountain above Santa Cruz. She becomes the household anchor for the family, since Doug works hard and the kids are all in school. As a father, Doug is full of ideas about what he wants for his kids. Marty helps implement them. During some of the kids’ high school years, the family moves in to Santa Cruz to be closer to activities. By the end of the book, the kids have their eyes on college. Marty and Doug are amazed at how quickly they grew up.

Lewis Hyde in The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, says “For the slow labor of realizing a potential gift the artist must retreat to those Bohemias, halfway between the slums and the library, where life is not counted by the clock and where the talented may be sure they will be ignored until that time, if it ever comes, when their gifts are viable enough to be set free and survive in the world.” I have come to that place, indeed, when we see whether the books are viable enough to survive in the modern world.

This is not to say that I am sure the books qualify as “art.” Art, with a capital A, is a romantic idea, often supported by a lot of hype, to which I don’t subscribe. All of us bring art to our lives, and occasionally try to embody in words or music or the other arts the spirit we cannot contain, that we feel we must share.

I hoped the books would show, in one group of siblings, born into a particular place and time, how one grows into a self and then sets out to share that self with a larger family. It is always an adventure, an odyssey through uncharted waters. But, as with most adventurers, home, and the making of a home, is the goal. I have been blessed every day with ideas and scenes I call up from memory or create from research, often a combination of the two.

The project could not have been brought to this point without the specific help of three people: My sister Naomi has read each chapter as it was written with an eye to its emotional continuity and the awkward word or phrase. My brother David has especially commented on the Paul chapters. And Don Starnes has brought his visual and technical gifts to the production of the covers and the website. For all of this help, and for the web of life reflected in the books, I am deeply grateful.

California Camping

Until I married Don Starnes, I had not done much camping. My parents preferred our family cabin on a northern Minnesota lake. I had done some car camping in California, but nothing on the scale of what Don liked to do. He was intent on not letting his family live a ‘second hand life,’ and programmed the summers during which Jesse, his son, was with us with serious camping adventures. It wasn’t about seeing the country. We returned to the same two or three campsites again and again. It was about setting up an outdoor home and living outside of rectangles, under the sun, the moon and the stars as often as possible.

China Camp

At first we used the walk-in campground at China Camp, not far from our house, as our base. We would set up tents, hammock, bring plenty of food and enjoy the outdoor showers. This camp was in a laurel forest, with its lovely, utterly benign canopies high above. Each of the sites had a picnic table and a food locker (no real security from raccoons, however) with an iron fire ring in which to make fires. Over the years we hosted huge picnics here, particularly at Thanksgiving, fire-cooking, spit-roasting and grilling all manner of foods and often making paella on the ground.

China Camp was close enough so that Peter, my nephew, and I could come home from work, get on our bikes and ride out to camp. I especially loved riding into town at six in the morning, watching deer and jack rabbits jump ahead of me in the early morning light on my way in to work.

One day in July when we were deeply involved in Alexander Dumas’ Three Musketeer series, I wrote this: “Don and Jesse are playing chess, having drawn a board on the manila envelope which holds the pages from The Man in the Iron Mask. Jesse, playing black, is a French king and Don, playing white, is Elizabeth and Sir Walter Raleigh. This morning, during our reading, the old Duchesse de Chevreuse discussed the fate of M. Fouquet in a carriage with M. Colbert, using chess play terms. It is easy to see that chess was once very much alive. Jesse names his pieces D’Artagnan, Aramis, Porthos and Athos. Don has Buckingham. “If I was Buckingham, I’d have a really cool palace,” he says.

“The important thing is where we are playing chess, outdoors at China Camp. It’s warm, but rather breezy, so I stay in the sun. My hair is wet. I am trying to dry it. The sun has come to the hammock, where I am lazily writing. I face the hillside which climbs above the dry creekbed, away from our camp. A wild turkey meanders down the slope, scratching in the dry laurel leaves. I see someone above on the hillside, transporting his light tent on his shoulders, the yellow silk billowing in the wind. The laurels are green and whispering to each other, their thin trunks tall and graceful, the top branches swaying dangerously on thin stalks. The most delicious light filters down into the campsite at all times of the day.”

When we had gotten our camping chops down, Don took it all up a notch and we began backpacking out to Angel Island, a mountain island in San Francisco Bay. It required getting up early the first day reservations were allowed at the beginning of the year! It also required taking the ferry or hiring a boat to get us and our packs out to the island. We usually took camping spots on the east side of the island, taking the switchback trails cut into the slopes. Our packs held the tents, sleeping bags, dishes and camping stoves we needed (no open fires were allowed), but also lots of food! They were heavy. “No retreat, no surrender,” said Don.

Having made the effort, however, the campsites were amazing. I can’t help quote from notes from that same July: “After breakfast I read Don and Jesse a bit from Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which brought on a spate of haiku. I doubt these will be the last. This is such an incredibly lovely place and I begged that we just stay here today, as we only have one full day to watch the sun rise and set, and then the huge, almost full moon as it rises. The view of the bay is incomparable. The sun is quite hot in the morning at breakfast, but we retreat to the pines and drink our tea and read a bit more of The Man in the Iron Mask.

Angel Island

“By the time we have a late lunch, the shade of the pines covers the picnic table, set on the hillside beside an exquisite dead tree, its twisted branches perfect for hanging our towels and our water. At lunch Jesse crushes mint in the water and Don cuts up basil to eat with cheese and tomato. We soak our bread in olive oil and have a piece of grilled eel, which Jesse picked out. ‘This is what life is really all about,’ says Don.

“In the evening the shadows are long, and the views of the sky and water reflecting each other, turning opalescent, again take our breath away. Later I come down from the road, where there is a water faucet, watching Jesse and Don bathed in moonlight at the table. The string of jeweled lights on the far side of the bay glitters. We read in the moonlight beside Jesse’s tent which is pitched beside the dead tree. We read with the aid of a flashlight, but we can walk about without one. ”

Would anyone believe these ecstatic days if I put them in fiction? I did put quite a lot of our camping adventures in this book: Living in the Flatlands.

Asian Arts

Anyone who lives on the Pacific Rim generally finds themselves more related to Asia than to Europe. Over the almost fifty years I have lived in and around the Bay Area, it has certainly happened to me. I probably read Okakura’s Book of Tea almost as soon as I arrived, and have remained committed to its simple aesthetic ever since. It is the aesthetic of wabi-sabi, as described by Leonard Koren, “the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent and incomplete; of things modest and humble; of things unconventional.”

The way of tea, or Chanoyu, is a ritual coming together of people to prepare and drink powerful green matcha, in artful utensils and in rooms which demonstrate the host’s values. It is a celebration of life which comes out of an earlier Chinese style, but has been refined by the Japanese. When I’ve been present, the constraints of the ritual release unexpected meeting points and joys in the people sitting on tatami together. The Japanese tea ceremony is well-represented in the Bay Area by the Urasenke Foundation, which traces it lineage back to the 16^th century tea master Sen Rikyu, who simplified the ceremony, democratizing it.

Akiko Crowther, Calligrapher

Like the way of tea, calligraphy rightly done is accomplished with the whole body and mind. I was introduced to this modern art by Linda Race, who worked with me at an architectural firm. She was captivated by it, deep in the tradition that was developing in the Bay Area through The Friends of Calligraphy and The Center for the Book, both of which provide classes. I took a brief class with Kathy McNicholas, who had us make a little accordion book, covering its boards with paper and calligraphing a long Algonquin word on the page: “chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg” which was said to mean, “you fish on your side, I finish on my side, nobody fish in the middle!” Of course we were using uncial script. Nothing very Asian about uncial!

Linda had been talking about Brody Neuenschwander for quite a while and one night in 1996 he turned up, a totally engaging speaker. He had been working with filmmaker Peter Greenaway on Prospero’s Books and was currently working on The Pillow Book. Greenaway said, “I am certain that there are two things in life which are dependable: the delights of the flesh and the delights of literature.” The body is a book, in this case. How would a book speak? The evil publisher destroys the metaphor, makes a book out of a body. Taking the metaphor too literally, he must die. The movie, when I finally saw it, was perverse, but gorgeous.

Neuenschwander has gone on to become a considerable artist. On his web page, I found his current thoughts on calligraphy: “It would have made things easier [if I had been born into the rich Arabic or Chinese traditions], but a lot duller. Their tradition is too well established, hard to budge, patriarchal and stiff. There are some great modern Arabic calligraphers, but their innovations are not on the scale of contemporary Western artistic production. I am actually rather happy with the idea of pushing this particular envelope, helping to create a new calligraphy.”

I gave most of my free time to tai chi in the 1990’s, but I also worked full time and devoted time to writing and film-making. This culminated in finishing the film Tenth Moon, about the similarities between tai chi and calligraphy, in 1999. I had always imagined walking around the woods and coming upon a poet who engaged me in writing haiku. Tenth Moon dramatizes such an encounter.

Linda Race played the calligrapher and wrote out all of the texts. Emilio Gonzalez played the tai chi master. The other major players in this short film were Don Starnes, cinematographer, and Dick Bay, who wrote and produced the music. We made the movie in 16mm on Angel Island, with Kodak film, a mostly analog process. It still looks wonderful to me. You can see for yourself here: Part 1 and Part 2.

Looking back at all this activity, I see that what is really exciting is the meeting of East and West. What does a Norwegian/Danish person straight out of Minnesota do when she meets Eastern traditions? She jumps right in. Wabi-sabi is certainly a Norwegian value, as well as a Japanese one.

Into the World

About this time of year, I begin to have discussions with people about whether it is fall or not. By the Japanese calendar, in which seasons surround the solstice and equinox instead of begin with them, autumn begins the second week in August. This corroborates my Pacific Rim sense of things. Trees are drying up and even starting to turn here. We have a bit of fog in the mornings, which keeps the days cool. And the sun sets earlier every day.

I have just finished the first draft of Chapter 17 of Nature’s Stricter Lessons and put it up for my first readers. This puts me about two thirds of the way through the book, which will be the fifth in the series about Line, Marty and Paul Mikkelson. I’m not rushing it, since the first four books of the series are now out in the world, but I am happy to be moving forward.

Lightly Held Books also has some news. We held a short advertising campaign, using Google AdWords and the ad you see here. The idea is that each ad bids for space on web pages as people are reading or surfing the web, particularly literary web pages. For a relatively small amount of money, in July, there were 56,492 “impressions” seen by people in the ad space at the edge of their web pages as they browsed. 92 people clicked through to see the website http://lightlyheldbooks.com/. It doesn’t mean that anyone bought any books! Or that 92 new people became aware of our site, or looked at it for more than a cursory minute. But it might mean something. It is an axiom of the public relations world that a person must hear about something seven times before he actually purchases it. I have Don Starnes to thank for making the ad and getting to the bottom of AdWords.

This is also the fiftieth year since I graduated from Luther College. As a result, I was asked by the bookstore if I wanted to do a book signing. Yes! I do! Thus, early October will see me flying in to Rochester, Minnesota, and heading down to Decorah, Iowa. My sister Ann will ferry me about and possibly there will be another book signing in Mankato. I haven’t tried to compete for book signings in the busy urban bookstores in my area here in California. In fact I am pretty poor at competing at all! But it doesn’t mean I take my work any less seriously.

I couldn’t tell you why I feel it so necessary to write this series of books, but I have wanted to contribute to culture in some way since I was a very little girl in North Dakota. Finally now I have the time to show, in the way that I want to, something about wholeness.

Essentially, as Christopher Alexander describes in his four books on The Nature of Order in the physical world, wholeness is recursively induced from wholeness. Alexander points to a cathedral, for example, “in which the properties create life innocently, in centers, and in which the centers themselves are multiplied, each one made deeper by the next.” Crafted by people who were steeped in one thought, to work to the glory of God, the recursion in the glass and stonework becomes more intense and the structure becomes a unity.

Athletes perform with more excellence out of pride in the team or country of which they are a part. The “strangers” who come together to make music in the Silk Road Ensemble exhibit the uninhibited joy of participation in the group. The soundness, the sustainability of our institutions, our families, even our personalities are informed by the context from which they come. Only now, I believe, when we see fragmentation all around us, are we willing to look at this.

In art people are still excited by the shimmering edges of things. But one day they will want to get back to the trunk, the base, the roots. When that happens, they might want to know about the culture which sustains our three siblings, Line, Marty and Paul, a wholeness which induces their abundant lives. Steeped in this family culture, they embrace new cultures, make their own families and the difficult choices which our rambunctious, rapacious and freedom-loving global culture requires.

Book Covers!

Nothing makes a book seem more like a reality than it being given a cover! Don, in charge of all things visual, has now designed four covers for the books Lightly Held Books will publish this year, using photographs which give a sense of the times to these fictional works.

When you put out books for sale, you must have the rights to any photographs or text you use in them. I was lucky to have not only great photographs, but also great friends who authorized their use. Susan Korn, a friend from Ann Arbor and Chicago days, took two of the photos, the one of Marshall Tate, and the one of my sister Solveig and me. Susan graciously allowed their use, and Marshall, writing from Puebla, Mexico, said “Of course you can use my photo. It would be an honor.” I love the eyes of Lenny Bruce staring down from the poster on the wall, and Marshall’s eyes looking intensely at the photographer.

When I first saw it, I minded the bare feet sticking out at the base of the photo of Solveig, my sister, and myself. We are sitting on the concrete structure along the beach in San Francisco. But what better representation of the 1970’s than bare, sandy feet and long, stringy hair!

The other two photos are from my family archive. When I look at them, I see a lot of back-story. For instance, in the photo taken in the canoe, I am sick, one of my eyes ulcerated and aching. But, we got through that one, in time.

I believe the photograph of my parents with their first four children was taken by a Canadian friend named Gus Cherland. We are out in the yard beside the Buxton, North Dakota, parsonage and behind us you can see the hollyhocks which we learned to make into dolls with long, colorful skirts in the summer. The photograph is spread out across the front and back of the book and only shows Dad on the cover, but if you want to see the whole thing now, go to the website and click on the cover. You will get the WHOLE photograph, and a brief description of the book.

 I keep telling people that Don can do anything, from constructing furniture, machining parts for camera equipment, coding websites and designing book covers to what he really likes to do, filming and directing movies! In addition to the book covers, Don has set all of my work in a new, clean and simple website which allows the reader to sample the books and buy them! The new ones will be available in the coming months. A thank you, to Don, for all his work. And one to you, Gentle Reader, for your attention.