Writing Rough

Longhand is defined as “ordinary handwriting, in which letters, words, etc., are set down in full, as opposed to shorthand or to typing.” I have always loved cursive and remember spending hours in high school classes practicing my penmanship, particularly my long name! (I was recently told that “k’s” are funny. My name has lots of them! People have asked me more than once if it was Finnish.)

Acquiring some speed in cursive, I took pounds of handwritten notes throughout college. I never learned shorthand, so most of them were readable, taken down in Shaeffer’s cartridge pens with blue ink. At the time, I was convinced that writing down as much of the teaching as I could was helping me to learn it. These notes have not survived, but I do have letters written home at that time, in that watery blue ink!

Recently I’ve been interested in the kinds of work for which I use longhand as opposed to typing. Keyboards have now become so ubiquitous in our lives that schools hardly bother to insist on handwriting skill. But pens and notebooks are cheaper to carry around than computers. You can use them in the sun and longhand has an intimate physical quality. Sometimes other physical aspects of the writing get onto the page, like the tracing of a leaf shadow, or a splash of your coffee. When I get close to a finished written product, of course I use a keyboard. But for rough notes, for journals, for thinking, I like handwriting.

Journaling, the addiction that has sustained me since I read “The Diary of Anne Frank” as a teenager and took up the practice, is usually done by hand. As opposed to weblogs, which are intended for publication and thus in readable print, journaling is private. Because I find I am not going to edit the cheap spiral bound books I carried everywhere with me, I now use the classic Moleskin notebooks. Like writers everywhere, I am grateful to the Italian company who revived them! Necessarily chronological and linear, there is no database searching in these journals. But I do reread them to find out what ideas I’ve had (and lost) at different times.

Though they weren’t new to me, I wasn’t immune to the flare-up of writing practices which Natalie Goldberg set off in 1986 with her book Writing Down the Bones. She advocated emptying the contents of your mind into notebooks, just to find out what you thought. Her central idea was to keep the hand moving; don’t control it or censor your thoughts. It might result in pedestrian, everyday thoughts, but you might also surprise yourself into deeper self-knowledge. Of course, “writing practice” as Goldberg described it, was done with handwriting.

Yesterday, as Don and I drove back from dismantling a film set in San Francisco and other errands, we wrote a short script he needed for the promo film he is shooting today. As he talked, I wrote a longhand version of the script in a tiny notebook. I carry versions of this notebook everywhere, for lists and notes. Organizing the work when we got home, Don said, “Okay, if you type it up while it’s still fresh, I’ll unload everything!”

What I found in working on The Pastor’s Kids was that, when I wasn’t sure what I was doing or what details were going into a chapter, I would sit somewhere writing rough, at speed in longhand, whatever thoughts and ideas I had. These pages circled around characters and ideas, going beyond and under what actually got into the chapter. Notes about time and place, details I wanted to capture, references which brought back whole incidents, things I didn’t want to forget. I shoved them all rudely onto paper. No ability to search here either, but the brain doesn’t need it. It is holographic, in the sense that each piece of the brain’s memory contains some information about the whole. A visual detail, a smell can bring back whole pieces of one’s past.

And what do we make of the fact that a handwritten document is a holograph, written entirely in the handwriting of the person under whose name it appears? Does each piece of handwriting contain a bit of the whole? Perhaps!

Reality Hunger

For more than ten years, Don has wanted to make a movie showing the seductive, even insidious, effects of letting media take over our lives. We recently discovered the French thinker Baudrillard, who said we live “sheltered by signs, in the denial of the real.” People now are more interested in the reflected life they watch on screens, in Facebook, in movies and on television. We are losing the ability to relate to the world and to each other except through a secondhand cultural life dispensed to us by the media. In this world we find ourselves agreeing with one or another political position, clinging to the ideas of one or another culture hero or celebrity, at the mercy of streaming ads for fashions, travel, technology and theories about economics, health and education.

But the self-evident world beneath the context of meaning and references provided by our profane culture is still there. A ground of being more luminous, more magical and powerful than any indirect experience of it exists. The architect and mathematician Christopher Alexander believes people see reality in terms of Cartesian mechanics, assuming everything is a machine. “With the onset of the 20^th-century mechanistic world-picture, clear understanding about value went out of the world,” he writes. In this world, we see each other’s significance as objects, not the shining reality of each other. In this world, as Alexander says, “nothing matters.”

I just read The Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon, a prolific author, seen as “one of the most celebrated writers of his generation.” Despite his narrative gifts, the book demonstrated conclusively that “nothing matters”! It seemed to me that Chabon took a bunch of cards with items on them and threw them randomly into the text. One of his characters speaks for him, saying “I closed my eyes and tried to clear my head of this proof of the uselessness of Albert Vetch’s art, of all art and energy and human life in general.” Most of my book club agreed that they were wholly uninterested in reading the work of a person with this view on life! I see this view in many modern writers and feel sad for them.

The answer is in attention. Baudrillard retreated into silent witness to the self-evidence of the world, paradoxically using photography. In his view, the silent, still photograph can sometimes give us a sense of what the world is like in our absence, unobstructed by the layers of significance we lay upon images. Alexander posits a “ground” of reality. For Alexander, “value is the measure of the degree of connectedness a given place, or thing, or event, has with the ground.” He sought methods of determining value, finding it a definite and fundamental part of the universe. For him, “art is not merely pleasant or interesting. It has an importance that goes to the very core of the cosmology.” In the new view of the world Alexander promotes, everything matters.

We are seeing people’s hunger for value, and the real ground beneath us in many different places: in the provenance movement in which people want to know exactly where their food is coming from and how it was handled; in the popularity of bluegrass music people make themselves; in the Occupy movement in which people are trying to bring the economy back down to human scale and find new relations to each other; and in the fact that so many young people support Ron Paul, “strongly rejecting traditional American hubris in favor of Paul’s more empirical views on foreign policy.” [David Sirota, Salon, November 28, 2011.]

Don and I are working on a movie called Nothing in a Rectangle Is True which deals with these issues. You can experience it on a Facebook page [ironically enough!] in which our characters interact, questioning the hold the object-oriented dominant culture has over us. http://www.facebook.com/nothinginarectangleistrue

My project, So Are You To My Thoughts, is also undertaken squarely in loving attention to particular fictional times and places, to the growth of my protagonists, Line, Marty and Paul. Born into a wholistic mono-culture steeped in value, which sustains them in their search for individuality and diversity, I hope to see them become full and bountiful grownups. We are all fractals for the expanding universe. I write in the attempt to come face to face with the ground of being. 

Hootenanny

According to Todd Gitlin in “The Sixties,” “Folk music was the living prayer of a defunct movement, gingerly holding the place of a Left in American culture.” A socialist party organizer named Myles Horton ran the Highlander Folk School in the hills of Tennessee from the 1930s to the end of the 1950s, where workshops were given for civil rights workers, and folk and gospel songs were learned and spread around. Striking North Carolina tobacco workers had a song called “I Will Overcome,” which, spread through the Folk School to Pete Seeger, became the anthem “We Shall Overcome.”

All this would have been news to my parents. Staunchly anti-Communist as we all were during the Cold War, they nevertheless warmed to folk music. The earliest records I remember were folk songs by Marais and Miranda on old 78’s. Josef Marais was from South Africa and once he met his wife Miranda, they had a successful partnership singing and playing South African traditional folk ballads as well as others. How well I remember “Train to Kimberly,” with its sounds imitating the train, a song made by native South Africans who watched the first trains running up to the diamond mines. I find here http://www.maraisandmiranda.com/, that the lullaby I’ve always used “Go Tell Aunt Rhody” may also have come from them!

One of the few things on television my Dad came out of his study to watch was the Tennessee Ernie Ford variety television show, which ran from 1956 to 1961. I see it as a pre-cursor to the folk music hit scene in the 1960’s. Like his earlier radio show, it included country and western and pop songs and a gospel song at the end of every evening. We owned some of his gospel albums and I can still hear Tennessee Ernie’s voice singing songs such as “Faith of Our Fathers.”

Ian & Sylvia

Folk music came out of the woodwork and spun a hit show across the television networks called “Hootenanny” from 1963 to 1964. My Dad set up a reel to reel magnetic tape recorder above the television set and taped all the shows! We kids learned how to use it and I remember many evenings holding my littlest sister as she fell asleep to the music of Harry Belafonte, Ian & Sylvia, The Chad Mitchell Trio.

Looking back, I find that “Hootenanny” sparked controversy in folk circles, unbeknownst to those of us out in the hinterlands. Pete Seeger and Woodie Guthrie were the first to publicize the term “hootenanny,” but Seeger was asked to perform only if he provided information about his past involvements with the Communist Party. He refused and many folk singers boycotted the show as a result. Seeger’s first appearance on network television was on “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” in 1969. By then I was long gone. I heard the legendary Seeger in the flesh only once, hosting and singing in impromptu folk/blues concerts below the Lincoln Memorial at the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D.C. in 1968.

Connecting the Dots

Perhaps it was appropriate that I was much more involved in literature than politics as a young person, as in northeast Iowa we were far from the seats of power. Nevertheless, American politics did have its effect on us. We avidly listened to news discussions and debates on television on winter afternoons, read what we could in magazines and discussed current events in school. It just felt so far away!

Thus I was delighted to run across someone only slightly older than me, who had lived and worked in Washington, D.C. from 1966 through 1974. Judith Nies published The Girl I Left Behind: A Narrative History of the Sixties in 2008 as an explanation for her daughter of the political life she had led and why she left it. In direct, vivid prose she describes her education and her work, telling stories of the people she met and her growing understanding.

She had three very interesting jobs in Washington, first working for The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, where she met some of the activist women who had campaigned for and finally won the vote for women in 1919. Telling their stories, she connects their influence to the amazing women who were instrumental in preventing atmospheric nuclear testing and stood up to the House Un-American Activities Commission in 1961 saying, “We are a movement, not an organization,” and then to the “second wave” of feminists.

From 1968 to 1970 Nies worked for a coalition of ten congressmen who were opposed to the war in Viet Nam, coordinating hearings on the war which resulted in two important books which she edited with Erwin Knoll, War Crimes and the American Conscience and American Militarism. Her last job in Washington was for congressman Don Frazer and the Women’s Equity Action League, working on examining how American leadership is selected and trained. The book wonderfully describes her growing understanding of privilege as it relates particularly to those who develop America’s foreign policy.

Judith Nies’ book connected many dots for me on the atmosphere of those early days as well as what it would have been like to be smart, working class, and yet have aspirations toward foreign policy work. My family had a strong, empathetic interest in foreign affairs. My parents housed Displaced Persons after World War II. We were always interested in what missionaries traveling through our area had to say. And perhaps the literature that we read so avidly opened us to the understanding of others as well. But no amount of study could give me the insights Judith Nies received from being on the scene. I recommend her book.

Fit Company for Themselves

In addition to editing “The Pastor’s Kids,” I’ve begun to let the sequel creep into my consciousness. I know what will be in it to some extent, but I haven’t let myself imagine the actual incidents. In a way, this, the “making up” part, is my favorite part of writing. First though, I’m dealing with the title.

For a while the second book has been called “Bound Away” from the American folk song “Shenandoah.” Bruce Springsteen has a version I’ve been listening to:

            “Shenandoah, I love your daughter

            Away, you rolling river

            I’ll take her across the water

            Away, bound away

            Cross the wide Missouri.”

But if you don’t hear it as part of the song, you might think it was a matter of “bounding away” like a rabbit across a meadow. My characters actually make the transition from a 19^th Century to a 20^th Century world view in this second book. But it isn’t without a certain amount of anguish. No one bounds away with delight. It is more a matter of being dragged, taken away.

I toyed with phrases from Simon and Garfunkel lyrics, which show the pain of beginning to be your own person, such as in “Kathy’s Song”:

“And so you see I have come to doubt

All that I once held as true.

I stand alone without beliefs

The only truth I know is you.

And as I watch the drops of rain

Weave their weary paths and die,

I know that I am like the rain

There but for the grace of you go I.”

Or the lightness and attempt to hold the sweetness and irresponsibility of youth in “The 59^th Street Bridge Song” (if you can’t hear the melody as you read these lyrics, look the songs up on YouTube!):

“I've got no deeds to do,

No promises to keep.

I'm dappled and drowsy and ready to sleep.

Let the morning time drop all it's petals on me.

Life, I love you,

All is groovy.”

But Line, Marty and Paul just aren’t there yet. In the second book there is still a formality which hasn’t fallen away from their lives. Intellectually they are moving into open space, but tradition holds them. In the second book, Line and Marty go to college and Paul finishes high school. They are full of ideals inherited directly from their European ancestors, and they know no others. The epiphanies that come to them they don’t yet understand.

An English proverb states, “Learning makes people fit company for themselves.” A liberal arts education doesn’t help one earn a living as much as it helps one’s understanding and love of life. Line, Marty and Paul were treated to such an education in the early 1960’s. Thus, I believe the title “Fit Company for Themselves” reflects the cultural story space in which we will find them in the sequel to “The Pastor’s Kids.”

Editing

This is an editing month and it is every bit as engrossing and time-stopping as writing. I find that as it first comes out, I have a dense, rather viscous style. So, the first thing I do to edit each chapter is to search for all the descriptors using “had”, “which he had given her” for instance [thank you, Anna, for this one]. It’s a past perfect tense, but it certainly slows narrative down, and often the phrase isn’t even necessary. I need to be careful of redundancy of any kind, though there is a use for it, like the refrain in a song.

I also am on the lookout for the adverbs “really,” “quite,” “always,” “just” and so on, which qualify statements. It’s “always” hard for me to commit to statements, as I know there are “often” cases in which they are not “quite” true. But in writing fiction, you can afford to be definite.

My sister Naomi’s notes are invaluable in sharpening the memory picture. She is consistently encouraging, but also she sometimes says: “The fishing trip made me uneasy. I kept wanting to know where Dad was in the boat.” We both know that, though she had a slightly different perspective, we experienced the same sensual details. Whether someone outside our family will find the culture described in the book as vivid remains to be seen.

Don’s ideas about writing help me a great deal as I work with my characters. He suggests:

-                     When introducing a character make sure they are indelible, inevitable in the context of the story, and move the story along.

-                     Make sure an action could only have come from that particular character.

-                     Make the character’s feelings clear by gesture. What is the character doing?

-                     What does the character think as they do things?

Don also reminds me of analogies in filmmaking. He likes to the let the actor he is filming wander around in the frame. He feels this gives the character authority to tell his own story. If you follow a character too closely with the camera, it becomes more about the filmmaker using the character to tell the filmmaker’s story. We’ve seen a lot of that lately!

I want to free my characters to tell their own stories, allowing them plenty of context in which to move about, to play. If we are, to some extent, created by the families we live in, by the widening circles of church, school, community, and country, when we look at an individual we are seeing the culture out of which he came. How often, when we learn something about someone’s background do we say, “Oh, of course, now I understand.” Fiction gives me the freedom to build up the thick culture in which my characters live and act. Editing allows you to reframe, heighten contrast and sharpen the picture. Yes, it’s a little like Photoshopping, but with more infinite possibility, since language lets you work with the mind’s eye.

Color Photographs

Color snapshots start appearing in my photograph albums beginning in the early 1960’s. We were still using black and white photos for portraits. Both my high school and college senior pictures are black and white, probably because the annuals they appeared in were in black and white due to cost. But snapshots, taken by small Kodak cameras, begin to show the colors of our dresses, of the decorations at my senior prom, of our lake. (I remember my chagrin when I first saw my husband Don’s toddler photographs. They were in color!)

I’ve been fascinated by the complete reproductions of Life magazine which Google Books has provided us with at http://oldlifemagazines.com/ . You can buy the magazines here, of course, but you can also click on the year your want, and then the particular magazine and, if you scroll down and keep clicking, the entire thing comes up! If you look at Life magazines from the 1950’s you will often find serious coverage of the news by excellent journalists. By 1951 and 1952, the covers of the magazine were beginning to be in color, and the ads (lots of cigarettes and cars!) used color, but the great news photographs and glamour photographs were in black and white.

My early awareness of the larger world is from photographs in National Geographic, which began to use color very early, and the Life magazine, which arrived almost weekly. Dad went to the post office to get the mail in our tiny North Dakota town, but the photographs in these magazines were like ticking time bombs spread out on our coffee tables. No wonder the kids in my story “set the controls for the heart of the sun"! I tried to read the books listed in Life as those kids my age were reading and started a penpal correspondence with someone who had written a letter to the editor at Life.

My earliest television memory is from November, 1956, when Russian tanks rolled into Hungary and we watched Sunday afternoon news programs, mesmerized as winter brought the cold that kept us in. Our parents had rented a television to watch that year’s political conventions, and when they were over, could not give it up!

In the March 30, 1962 Life magazine, a huge spread entitled “Jackie Leaves Her Mark on India and Pakistan” is all in intense color, and the ads are all in color, but the other news articles, and seven poems by Robert Frost, are in black and white. I believe that by this time, Life magazine was beginning to cover more soft news, especially in photographs, as they were unable to compete with television for hard news.

By 1963, I was off to college, which effectively ended my Life magazine and television news watching for quite some time, except around the death of President Kennedy. A television in our dorm lounge provided viewing of the continuous coverage of this world tragedy. By this time, however, my arrow was pointed out at the world, on a trajectory that would carry me further than I expected, though not perhaps so far after all.

First Draft

This week I finished a first draft of “The Pastor’s Kids”. It feels rather pedestrian at the moment, quite far from what I hope it will be. But I will wait until September to read it and see what it looks like as a whole. I do feel I have gotten into it most of what I hoped. The editing process will involve paring away the inessential, making it more “visible” to others and sharpening the characters and events.

This means that my musings here will be less about the times and places of the novel, perhaps, and more about narrative prose and writing. I picked up my old friend Hemingway this week, a book which came out recently, his “Africa book” which was cut in half, edited and published by his son Patrick as True at First Light. I loved it! I’m not sure he was always so funny, but reading this book I often found myself laughing!

Hemingway chose a two month period, November and December 1953, a time when his wife Mary was hunting a particular black-maned lion in Kenya. The ceremony of the safari had changed a great deal from his experience of twenty years before in 1933. Much of his amusement comes from looking at these changes in both Africa and himself. Hemingway relished his relationships to the Wakamba, who worked on this safari, and felt as though he were becoming one of them. Though some of them kept up the forms and ceremonies established earlier, when the term “Bwana” was used in 1953, he realized it was sarcastic, a form of abuse! Another source of comedy was his banter with the Brit in charge of Game Control (otherwise known as G.C., or Gin Crazed), who came out from Nairobi to help.

The relationship of fiction to non-fiction in Hemingway’s memoirs was always complex. I’ve heard he regarded A Moveable Feast, which many people take as gospel truth about his years in Paris, as fiction! Neither A Moveable Feast nor True at First Light had been published when he died. But, as he says, “there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.” In both of these books, Hemingway’s narrative precision is inspiring, as is his reproduction of dialogue with all of the flavor and spice of life.

The Life magazines I pored over in the late 1950’s were full of stories of Hemingway’s life and his writing. I doubt if I read the full text of his essay “The Dangerous Summer” about bull fighting, but his powerful persona as a living writer certainly influenced me.

Civil Rights 1960

In the long fight for civil rights, two events in the spring of 1960 led to a turning of the tide of world opinion against the segregation of black and white people where it was still occurring. On February 1, four black students sat down at a segregated lunch counter at Woolworths in Greensboro, North Carolina. According to Connie Curry, “The sit-in movement spread like wildfire during the spring of 1960. … By Easter, more than 70,000 mostly black southern college students were involved in demonstrations.”

March 21 in Sharpeville, a South African township, police opened fire on peaceful demonstrators against the hated passbooks which were used to enforce segregation, killing 69. Life magazine for April 11, 1960 reported on “South Africa Torn by Fury”, and noted that “The United Nations took a hand and white South Africans began to realize how isolated they are at the bar of world opinion.”

In the corner of northeast Iowa where Line, Marty and Paul live, these events didn’t make much of an impact. At that point, they had only met one black person, a black pastor from Madagascar who spoke at their church. But these events did foreshadow the social change that would affect the years in which the kids came of age. The last two chapters of “The Pastor’s Kids” are set in 1960.

Ella Baker

For years now, I’ve been reading memoirs by young people who helped effect this social change. I keep coming across the name of a woman whom everyone speaks of with love and respect, and whom I didn’t even know about. Her name was Ella Baker. She was a bit older than most of the young people she influenced. She had begun her work in New York in the Harlem Renaissance, and worked with the NAACP and the SCLC. But she resisted the messianic leadership which she saw in the black churches, where the pastors were men and the members women. She thought that “strong people don’t need strong leaders” and developed an idea about participatory democracy. Tom Hayden says, in his book Rebel, “Such decentralized and essentially voluntary forms are inevitable whenever movements erupt with the seemingly endless energy as they did during that decade.”

The early workers in what everyone called “the Beloved Community” formed by civil rights workers, all knew Ella Baker. Connie Curry recalls her “deep friendship with Ella Baker” and Casey Hayden writes, “Whether Ella Baker was shaping the direction of the civil rights movement by advising the southern student movement to remain independent of adult organizations or listening to the dream of one child, her whole being was concentrated on and dedicated to the struggle of eliminating the barriers and injustice of racism. Being around someone like Ella Baker put me in contact with focused purpose and true greatness.”

The Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, also begun in 1960, was the result of Ella Baker trying to get various students she knew who were working on civil rights all over the country together. She thought they should have their own organization. A wonderful article which traces the legacy of this group fifty years later can be found at http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/4/25/860631/-Never-Turn-BackReport-on-SNCCs-50th-Anniversary. "For all of the youthful energy and commitment to challenge and change that erupted in 1960," said Charlie Cobb, a SNCC Field Secretary, "the reason for SNCC's existence comes down to one person - a then-57-year-old woman, Ella Baker, one of the great figures of 20th-century struggle. In a deep political sense, we are her children and our 50th anniversary conference is dedicated to her."

Space Race

In October, 1957, the U.S.S.R. embarrassed the United States by being the first to put an unmanned satellite into orbit around the earth, the Sputnik 1. Although the United States had announced its intention to do the same, they were inhibited by Eisenhower’s fear of being thought a warmonger in the tricky post-war atmosphere, as an orbiting satellite might be considered a violation of another nation’s airspace. During the International Geophysical Year of 1957-58 several launches established the principal that a nation’s airspace did not extend past the Karman line, the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space.

Eisenhower had also prevented the satellite teams from using military missiles as launchers. After World War II, the U.S., Britain and the U.S.S.R. competed to recruit the German engineers who had developed the V2 rocket. Werner von Braun and his team, recruited by the United States, had sent up rockets capable of launching a satellite. Sergei Korolev, the Soviet’s chief engineer who had been brought back from imprisonment in Siberia, was competing with von Braun. For its civilian satellite programs, however, the U.S. was using Vanguard research-only rockets.

After the success of Sputnik, Eisenhower pushed the Vanguard project to an earlier launch. The spectacular failure of this launch on December 6, 1957 in front of a broadcast television audience, was what finally transferred command of the U.S. launching program to von Braun’s Redstone rocket team. Explorer 1 was successfully launched on January 31, 1958.

Explorer 1

The space race precipitated unprecedented spending on education, which we noticed in our science and math classes and our high school library. We followed all of the space missions avidly. I remember the euphoria of Alan Shepard’s manned space flight in May, 1961, even though it was a month later than the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s flight. I wrote a letter to Alan Shepard and received a handwritten note in response.

John F. Kennedy proposed, in a speech to the United Nations in September 1963, that the United States and the U.S.S.R. cooperate in an effort to put a man on the moon. Khrushchev and Kennedy had achieved a kind of rapport over the years of working together, and it was thought Khrushchev would accept the proposal. When Kennedy was assassinated in November, however, Khrushchev’s trust did not extend to the Johnson administration and the idea was dropped.

The space race is considered to have ended with the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in July 1975, a cooperative human space flight mission which came to symbolize détente. In studying the space race years later, when the participants have no need to keep secrets, the human faces and decisions emerge.

Freedom and Intimacy

Talking to a friend who is thinking of starting a blog, I thought about what I like about blogging. It goes back to what Dr. Charles Harris used to say we all want from relationship: freedom and intimacy.

You there, sitting in an armchair, or even in bed, with your iPad2, I believe you have a feeling of great intimacy with the mind of the person you are reading. If you didn’t, you would be on some other page of the world wide web, reading some other columnist or blogger. Hopefully you don’t read only those you agree with, but nevertheless, you are meeting the writer on some level, finding your way to his inmost, essential thoughts, what he has in mind at a particular moment, usually quite recently in time.

That writer gets to write what is in his mind freely and with great honesty, exactly because you have the freedom to move to another page if you like. The writer writes, knowing that someone, perhaps you, is meeting him in language you both understand in some fundamental way.

Most blogs have a subject around which they turn. I realized you could have a project blog after seeing the artist Leigh Toldi’s [www.toldileigh.blogspot.com]. She writes about her work. In some respects the blog becomes her work, but really it’s like a “making of” documentary, the story of how her drawings and paintings get made. Knowing a little about the artist’s thoughts helps people to understand it. You know the artist intimately, not in a personal way, but because of what she tells you about her work.

This is a “making of” blog. It is a description of some of what I am thinking about as I work on “The Pastor’s Kids”. When you are writing from the inside of a character, you cannot put all the background information in. The narrative flows around what the character is experiencing. Especially for kids, it may be only later that they realize what was going on. But the background is there, nevertheless.

Perhaps you are not interested in the minute particulars of what I am thinking about at this moment. I am free to write them, but you are free to turn to another page!

Baseball and Guns

In looking up what baseball games the kids would have been listening to on the radio in 1959, I came across amazing connections between Minnesota and Cuba in that year. Although the Cuban revolution was successful in January, 1959, with Fidel Castro driving out Batista and setting up a revolutionary government, at that time he said he was an anti-imperialist, not a communist. Until the embargo against Cuba enacted in October, 1960, there seems to have been quite a lot of coming and going.

At a baseball game in July between the Rochester Red Wings and the Havana Sugar Kings played in Havana, gunfire celebrating the beginnings of the Cuban revolution got into the stadium, wounding two! This could have ended Cuba’s minor league involvement, but Castro loved baseball. He intervened, assuring everyone that teams that came to Havana would be safe.

The Minneapolis Millers were their league champions that year and in the Little World Series played the Havana Sugar Kings. After a couple of frigid games at the end of September in Minneapolis, the series moved to Havana, playing five games. Castro attended every game along with 3,000 soldiers with guns and bayonets. The Minneapolis players were somewhat unnerved by this, but they still tried their hardest. Nevertheless, they weren’t too sorry that in the end they lost! You can read the whole wild story, including Castro’s threats, told here by a historian of the Millers, Stew Thornley: http://stewthornley.net/millers_havana.html. I found it fascinating!

Polio

Though polio had been around for thousands of years, a combination of factors gave it a significant impact on the early 1950’s. Paradoxically, better sanitation and water supplies had resulted in the fact that many kids hadn’t developed an immunity to it. Although 90% of infectious viral attacks of polio act like some version of the flu, in acute cases nerves are affected, causing paralysis, with the greatest risk of this in children from 5 to 9 years. If there is respiratory paralysis, the victim may die. The polio epidemics of the early 1950’s were the worst seen in the United States. In 1952, 58,000 cases were reported, and in 1953, 35,000 cases.

Intensive care and rehabilitation therapy as we now know them, had their origins in the years of these great polio epidemics. The widespread funding of campaigns to find vaccines and cures also began with the race to find a polio vaccine. Jonas Salk developed an injected vaccine, which required years of testing, but began to be widely administered in 1955. By 1957 the number of polio cases was down to 5,600 and in 1961, only 161 cases were reported in the U.S. Based on testing, oral vaccines developed by Albert Sabin were chosen for worldwide distribution. According to the Global Eradication Initiative, 1,349 cases world-wide were reported in 2010.

The story of the campaign against polio has been widely told. Paul, one of the characters in “The Pastor’s Kids”, contracts polio in 1952 when he is about four years old. The story of how his illness affects the family, including years of rehabilitation and painful reconstructive surgeries are part of the book. In my research, one of the things I have been struck by is the stoicism induced in the kids who had it. One woman who had polio said she still has difficulty crying. It was a powerful message to be told at age four, “Don’t cry. It will make your parents feel bad.”

Kids taking oral vaccine, about 1960

Rehabilitation was long, slow, hard work. But victims of polio were encouraged to overcome disability, “triumph over adversity”, and become independent and productive people. An important part of rehabilitation was learning to accept gracefully the successes achieved, and to compensate for the disabilities that remained. Some people who had polio, after years of working parts of their bodies harder than other parts, are now faced with post-polio syndrome. As a part of coming to terms with this, they are re-visiting their childhood memories of being little kids, isolated from their families and confused about why they were ill.

Once polio vaccines were in place, the disease receded in the collective imagination. This is probably a good thing, but for people of my age, polio was a real part of childhood.

Amana Freezer

In the late 1950’s, Dad and Mother accepted their fate (seven kids and another to follow) and bought a giant freezer made by craftsmen at the Amana Colonies in Iowa. The Amana Colonies [www.amanacolonies.com]  were established by a group of German Pietists who came to America seeking religious freedom, arriving in Iowa in 1855. Until about the 1930’s they lived a truly communal life, but then had to adapt to more family-driven work with profit-sharing for their farmland and larger businesses. They have always been known for their craftsmanship, and are still known for the refrigeration appliances they manufacture.

Several towns in east central Iowa near Cedar Rapids are part of the Amana group. In the early 1960’s they already understood that tourists might be interested in their way of life and crafts. We visited the communal kitchen, a general store stocked with old-fashioned items, the meetinghouse and the blacksmith shop. And for almost the only time I can remember, Mother and Dad bought a restaurant meal for all ten of us. It was served family style at a long table, with many dishes of wonderful home-grown meats and vegetables, great bread and salad. I no longer remember exactly what we ate, but I have a mental picture of my proud father at the end of the long table, treating his kids to an experience he probably could ill afford.

The freezer was at least six feet long, three and a half feet high and opened from the top. It could hold a great deal! I remember it stocked in the fall with sweet corn after we had spent an entire day in our big farmhouse kitchen, parboiling cobs of corn and then cutting the kernels off them and putting them in freezer bags. We did the same with some of the other produce from our half acre garden. Dad sometimes bought part of a cow or a pig and had it butchered and frozen, available for future meals. Occasionally Dad's congregations would give us a “pounding”, i.e. contribute pounds of food which we gratefully stored away for use by our big family. This would often include frozen meat.

During hunting season, I remember gifts of whole pheasants and wild ducks in the freezer, something Mother wasn’t too happy about! Us kids weren’t very used to gamey-tasting meat either. But when Dad shot a deer with a bow and arrow, the venison that resulted filled the freezer for some time.

Rather than canning, in the late 1950’s and 1960’s, people believed in frozen food. And we certainly ate plenty of it. At Christmas, each of us girls chose a favorite cookie recipe and baked up huge batches of them, to be frozen for unexpected guests. The essence of hospitality at the time was Norwegian gasoline (weak coffee) and cookies, and it might be needed at almost any time of day. The freezer was a great help in living up to this social norm! At this very moment I am recalling how delicious a chocolate chip cookie just pulled from the freezer was, though none of my chocolate chip cookies are around long enough to need freezing these days!

Sitting With It

At this point, I’m finding that writing isn’t so much an act of crafting sentences, but a matter of sitting with a mound of material and carving the path of my characters through it. It’s a matter of time and place for three kids close in age, who were born in the late 1940’s. I am terribly interested in context, in the circles people saw themselves as part of, and the way in which each of the kids grows, plant-like, into the particular flower they were meant to become. They were all lucky. The soil was fertile, they got a lot of what they needed in terms of nutrients, and as they reached up their hands, sunshine and rain in goodly measure came to them.

But as I have been thinking about writing, and whether I am actually doing it or not, I remembered Henry Miller’s voice from Tropic of Cancer in 1934: “Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God.” Of course it didn’t stop him, and it certainly hasn’t stopped the rest of us! He wrote the book of the present, of the complete and total appreciation of the moment of life he happened to be in. Of walking beside the Seine in the evening, he writes “For the moment I can think of nothing - except that I am a sentient being stabbed by the miracle of these waters that reflect a forgotten world. All along the banks the trees lean heavily over the tarnished mirror; when the wind rises and fills them with a rustling murmur they will shed a few tears and shiver as the water swirls by. I am suffocated by it. No one to whom I can communicate even a fraction of my feelings …”

None of us can compete with the book of the present. And no writer would want to. If anyone is sitting in the eye of the present, he needs nothing. What a writer can do, and Miller certainly did, is help peal back the layers and crusts that we put between ourselves and the present so we can stand it. Many of the things that allow us to cut through them are tough. For Miller, the poverty and uncertainty of his Paris years helped him break on through, though I doubt if he would have chosen them.

I believe it is a contemporary fallacy though, that only if you are an individual, embattled, poor, alone, can you feel the present. In the lives of my kids, as they grow, it will be possible to sense many moments when they are gripped by the hand of the present, often in choruses of people, in beautiful woods and fields or beautiful buildings, sometimes in meeting terrible demands, sometimes in tragic circumstances. The present speaks to us as individuals, whispers to us or shouts, and we are never the same. But the ways in which we sense it are without limit.

The Driftless Area

A quite large region of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa along the Mississippi River is now called the “driftless area”, an area which escaped the last glaciation period. In this area the glacier was diverted by an uplifted area of rock which prevented the deposits of silt, clay, sand, gravel and boulders that glaciers usually leave. Thus the towering limestone and sandstone bluffs, rolling hills and streams on both sides of the Mississippi in this area have a ruggedness not softened by drift.

The names in the area reflect its cultural history, from the native Americans names (Ojibwe-Chippewa, Wyandot-Huron, Sauk, Pawnee, Ioway, Dakota-Sioux and Omaha), to those of the French explorers and missionaries, such as Father Jacque Marquette and Louis Jolliet, who first came down the Mississippi from the north. Competition between the French and the British for the fur trade drove much of this early exploration. The French controlled the land along the Mississippi River.

When we moved into the “driftless area”, it was called “the Little Switzerland of Iowa” because the hills and bluffs weren’t common to the rest of the state. It began to be farmed in the mid 1800’s when European settlers moved in. Farming and grazing practices contributed to erosion and flooding, but quite early on this was recognized and attempts were made to control it, especially to keep the Mississippi shipping lanes from filling up with silt! Along the Mississippi itself, much of the land is maintained as parks, forests and wildlife management areas.

My parents were amateur naturalists and quite curious, so we did quite a lot of sightseeing when we first moved into the area. We investigated the caves, springs and palisades along the river, and watched the operations of the locks on the Mississippi, which allowed vessels to "step" up or down the river from one water level to another. We went to see the mounds near the river in the shapes of bear and birds, ceremonial and sacred sites built by the Effigy Mound Builders more than a thousand years ago. We visited the Bily Clock museum in Spillville (see detail of carving by Frank and Joseph Bily) and the Villa Louis, a home first built by a wealthy fur trader and maintained as a museum in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin.

The “driftless area” was a stark contrast from the Red River Valley in North Dakota, the floodplain of an early glacial lake, flat as a pancake and open to the wind and weather systems of the Great Plains.

A Move in the Offing

The Mikkelsons are moving from North Dakota to northeast Iowa! The kids don’t like it much, and I’m not sure I do either, after these months being immersed in North Dakota. For all its harsh weather, it is a beautiful place with interesting politics. But Dad used to say that the only way for a pastor to get a raise was to accept another call. And the Mikkelsons probably need the raise. They have a new little sister, and Ellie, the eldest, will soon set off for college. Actually, the kids are too young to suspect what a move will mean to them. They have never done it.

The subtle differences between the small towns in the Midwest are not inconsequential. Because of their geography, sometimes their history, and certainly the individuals who put their stamp on them, these towns have personalities just like people. If you move into a town you didn’t grow up in, you may understand more of that personality than the long-time residents, but also you will probably never understand the deep intricacies, the layers of relationships, the palimpsest of its culture.

What this lack of deep understanding does, is put you in a class of outsiders, whose loyalties will probably be more to other communities, perhaps not geographically defined. To a community of faith, an extended family, a profession or a nation. You might thus feel more free to move around than a person who is born in a place.

But geography is very powerful. Each of us wants to be related to a piece of soil, to the smell of sunlight on that soil, and to the weather that travels over it, the plants that grow in it. It took me at least seven years to become Californian, specifically a resident of San Francisco and its environs. I knew by then how much I loved the hills covered with golden grass, the sage color of the native trees and the Pacific blue of the sky. After that, several powerful episodes of homesickness confirmed that California was home.

The story of the pastor’s kids, particularly as they grow up and are bent by historical tides and personal winds, is, at least in part, a story of deep geography. We may think, in our technological dream world, that we can move freely, live wherever we like. But our bodies, our deep selves, want a home. Our growth and success in life is partly dependent on our adaptation, or the lack of it, to place and culture. Some of us are, perhaps, genuine wanderers, but not many. And certainly not the kids, Line, Marty and Paul.

Against Cynicism

It isn’t hard to know why we’ve become cynical about people in public life, contemptuous of their motivations and altruism. We’ve seen so much lying, so much selfish posturing, and recent laws have contributed to the fact that only a few of us are getting much richer, while most of us falling behind. During last week’s silliness among presidential candidates, Don said: “America is becoming a joke!”

I’ve been studying the Eisenhower years, and this has not always been the case. The mood was quite different at the time. World War II had leveled the playing field for women and non-whites, but in the Fifties we were busy getting women back into bouffant skirts and aprons and re-erecting class and race barriers wherever possible. Eisenhower was a moderate, however, who supported the social reforms begun during Roosevelt’s New Deal, and sent troops to assist in desegregating schools. He tried to reduce military spending, while at the same time not giving ground to Soviet expansionism.

I’ve also been reading Barack Obama’s “Dreams from My Father,” which is really a study in fighting the cynicism within himself, while negotiating the heritage of his African father and his white American mother. We all know where his honesty and courage have gotten him, and how he still needs it every day!

Don and I are culture workers, and we have our own fights. Don tries to get Hollywood filmmakers to see the folly of upping the number of frames per second in movies, just because technology allows it, or filming everything in 3-D, just because they can. He would like to see a return to character-based movies. At this moment, he and his producing partner, Anna, are valiantly trying to inject some professionalism into a motley film crew making a movie which gets better at Don’s insistence. Engagement is a way of fighting cynicism.

I’m writing a series of novels which, in the current conditions, stands no chance of getting published. Without a targeted audience (Young Adult? I don’t think so) or a niche market (cooking, anyone?) or celebrity (and who, exactly, did you say you were?), or a clear genre (romance, perhaps?), it is hard to get anyone to look at what you are doing. This is partly because book publishing is being rocked by forces it barely understands. Although people are reading, free web content is probably more likely than books purchased at a bookstore. None of it stops me. By the time I’m finished, perhaps things will have settled down!

Ways of fighting cynicism:

1)      Engagement. Work with every opportunity that does come your way to up the ante. Avoid the tendency to laugh things off, paying attention only to what is funny. Humor is the refuge of the disengaged.

2)      Talk to real people. Most of us can’t avoid it in our working and consuming lives. We learn more than we expect to. No one is exactly as you hoped, and many are better.

3)      Look to history. Things have not always been this way!

4)      When all else fails, retreat to the garden, to the quiet bravery of trees and plants, which never quit looking for water and sunshine, determined to fulfill their destinies in supporting us.

Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier

If any of you who were born before 1950 want to do yourself a disservice, go to Youtube and play one of the versions of the “Ballad of Davy Crockett”. Without a doubt, you will find yourself singing this infectious song to yourself for weeks afterward! Three Disneyland “Davy Crockett” episodes were broadcast on television in early 1955. According to historians Randy Roberts and James Olson, "by the end of the three shows, Fess Parker would be very well known, the power of television would be fully recognized, and Davy Crockett would be the most famous frontiersman in American history."

We didn’t have a television of our own until 1956, when Mother and Dad rented one so they could watch the national political conventions of that year. But we watched Disneyland at our neighbors. After the third episode, in which Davy Crockett is among the defenders of the Alamo, my 9-year-old self wrote “The kids [in school] said Davy was killed today, but he wasn’t.” His death wasn’t shown in the episode, of course.

The hyperbolic speeches and sayings attributed to Davy Crockett assured his place in legend as well as history. In Congress, he opposed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which resulted in most of the Native Americans from southeastern states following the “trail of tears and death” to lands in the west. He could not have been a bigger hero to us, and was effectively played by the great Fess Parker. “Raised in the woods so he knew every tree, Kil’t him a ba’r when he was only three.”

Every age group of kids has their heroes. The “Star Wars” characters were to my nephew Peter and niece Tara, and Harry Potter was to my stepson Jesse, what Davy Crockett was to us. His story fueled by the sales of coonskin caps, buckskins and toy rifles, as well as that insidious ballad, Davy Crockett was the first of the universally known mega-heroes. As much hype went into his creation as goes into any of them, but I am glad that he was a real person with some fact that can be found at the bottom of the fiction.

Writing Clothes

This week I was recalling a conversation I had with Don when I first met him twenty years ago (yes, it has been that long). I was going to lots of writers’ workshops at the time and working on a novel, and I said “I’m only going to buy writer clothes, from now on.” I meant that I didn’t want to think of my day job as important enough to buy clothes for any longer. Don laughed and said, “Writers wear any old dirty tee-shirt and don’t worry about it!” He was thinking of the writers of screenplays that he knew.

In the intervening years, I did have other jobs I dressed up for. Working in architecture firms made me more sophisticated in many ways. But by the time I got to Marin County and worked for a wine brokerage, we were all wearing jeans to work anyway. It was partly because some of the brokers went out to the vineyards every day, but also that we were far from the city, from banks and schools and other places where people interact with others daily in formal situations.

These days many people work from home, at least part of the day. And many of us are writing, in one form or another. I suspect there are quite a few dirty tee-shirts and pajamas out there where everyone lives and writes. As the Peter Steiner New Yorker cartoon says, “On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog.” For me, daily life is an integral part of writing. Perhaps because I am writing narrative fiction, I want it to be full of the sensuality of smells and sights and sounds. If I go downstairs for one of the red-fleshed cara cara oranges we bought at the market yesterday, its sweetness and tang may get into what I am writing. If the air is wet with the possibility of showers, and I start to smell the rain on the concrete sidewalks, it might too.

It’s the same with clothes. Life and writing touch each other. In fact the point I am most interested in is that exact point where the physical and mental life of a person is enriched by the heart and is felt by him to be important, to be part of his flowering, to be worth the tale. The clothes you are wearing, the external aspect of how you feel about your haircut, may absolutely affect the story you are telling. “The body is the unconscious” may be the central understanding of my generation, leading to all the mind-body awareness which has followed in many areas of life. And so, having become a person whose major activity is writing, I would just like to say, I may be wearing a tee-shirt, but at least it is clean!

Social Capital

The diary I kept intermittently in 1955 states on May 9, “We are getting a new car (truly). We are trying to pick out the color. It is a stationwagon.” At the time my parents had six kids. Mother and Dad ordered a beautiful new Studebaker Conestoga, grey and maroon around the windows, with a hinged back door on which the top flipped up and the tailgate flipped down. My Dad honked the horn for the last half mile he drove it home! And we used it, thoroughly. My parents had partly bought it to drive across country to San Francisco, to a Luther League convention, carrying several teenagers. (Not us. We kids were stashed with my aunt and grandmother.)

As a kid I never knew the economics of our family, but I suspect that there must have been some social capital involved in the purchase of that first new car. Either the churches he served helped Dad purchase it, or the car dealer was related to one of our parishioners, or both. This was a good thing. In North Dakota, people stuck together, helping each other through blizzards, illness, and tough times. Times were good in post-war America and we all thrived.

Robert Putnam, in his book “Bowling Alone”, dates the decline of ‘social capital’ in America, that is the decline of civic, social and fraternal organizations, from a high point in the mid 1950’s. The premise of his work is that social networks have value, and that “inclinations arise from these networks to do things for each other.” I do find that my protagonists in the 1950’s were deeply embedded in their church, in school, in organizations such as Young Citizens League, choir, band and much group play which cut across all social divisions. Of course, family, a deeply social network, both immediate and extended, trumped everything.

I recall one year in which we spent our Halloween trick or treating for UNICEF, the United Nations organization which tries to help the world’s children. Instead of candy, we asked people for dimes for UNICEF. At the end of the evening, we all gathered at the church for a wonderful party, with games and bobbing for apples, and treats of all kinds. I was about 10, and it certainly seemed to me at the time more wonderful than going home with your loot to enjoy it by yourself.

Northern Lights

The Non-Partisan League was started in North Dakota in the early part of the 20^th Century as a cooperative effort to help farmers resist the power of out-of-state corporate interests. I’ve always had a dim notion of it, and have always wanted to see the movie which was made about its beginnings, called “Northern Lights”. Studying the NPL now, I am surprised to find how far reaching some of its reforms were. According to Wikipedia, laws enacted while the Non-Partisan League held sway, “still in force today, after having been upheld by both State and Federal courts, make it almost impossible to foreclose on farmland, as even after foreclosure, the property title cannot be held by a bank or mortgage company. Thus, virtually every farm in existence today in North Dakota is still a ‘family-owned’ farm.”

Never mind that the entire population of the state of North Dakota is less than the city of San Francisco by 150,000 people! It grows many of the cereal grains, oil seeds such as sunflowers and flax, and sugar beets. The weather is typical for the middle of a continent, very cold winters and hot summers with four pronounced seasons. I lived there from age 5 until age 12, and, as I knew nothing else, don’t remember that weather was a big problem. Our houses were well-insulated and big furnaces in our basements kept us warm with coal, shipped in by rail. Railway trains ran so close to our house they shivered the cups off their hooks and broke them!

As a Lutheran pastor, my Dad loved the people of his North Dakota parishes. The cultures of the little towns revolved around their churches, and because farmers didn’t keep a lot of livestock, they were available all winter for active participation! One of the people in our church was a North Dakota state senator. I know there was a lot of political talk that went on around him and his delightful wife [who lived to be 100 years old, I recently learned: Obituary of Lena Sorlie], but I’m afraid I didn’t pay much attention.

I do remember that there was some difference between the town kids and the farm kids in school, probably mostly due to the availability of cash in those years. I found out another difference when my teacher for the fifth and sixth grades introduced us to square dancing, as mentioned previously. The town boys had soft hands, while the farm boys’ hands were strong, calloused and hard. It was probably never in the cards for me to end up on a North Dakota farm, but the idea does have a certain romance.

Down the Rabbit Hole

During the time I was working full time, I didn’t even try to concentrate on writing, as I couldn’t get to the place I wanted to write from. These days, spending most of my time thinking about my kids and their lives mid 20th-Century, as I have heard the 1950’s called, I am surprised to find that I cannot keep the rest of my life straight! In other words, I knew that it was hard to get down into the real locus of a book if you had much else to think about. I did not know that, once you had gone there, you might have a hard time getting back!

It is a little like deep sea diving. If you go down, you have to come back slowly, so you don’t get the bends. Don laughs at me, seeing that I can’t remember what day it is, or what daily tasks I had hoped to accomplish. “Welcome to my world,” he says. He is always in the present, using calendars and emails to remind himself of what he wants to do. Only with effort, and lots of lists, do I keep the two parts of my concentration flowing smoothly. I have no wish to let writing replace my blessed, active daily life.

This week, with guests in the house and some work for others, I didn’t do any original writing. There was time for editing and research, however. For example:

When would Mother have been reading Adele Davis? She was often interested in food and cooking, and her handwriting is all over many cookbooks and recipe files which are still to be found scattered among her children. “Let’s Cook It Right” was first published in 1947, and Mother certainly could have been reading it ten years later in North Dakota. Later, in the 1960’s, she had copies of “Food Is Your Best Medicine,” by Henry Bieler. I remember her standing over a pot of Bieler broth, happy when she went on to something else! I am never sure how Mother and Dad got their hands on things, but they did manage to be quite current, mostly due to the large number of magazines which arrived in the mail.

During the time Adele Davis (pictured above) was writing, she was living in southern California with complete access to fresh vegetables, something we didn’t have in the winter. The most lasting part of Davis’ influence was probably in the lovely breads we often made, whole wheat, sometimes using brewers’ yeast or milk powder to intensify the protein and vitamins. I really don’t remember eating much Wonder bread. “Mattress stuffing” Dad called it. Towards the end of his life, Dad was grinding the grains to put into his breads.

At my desk this morning it is very quiet. The sky is dark, the wind is strong and it is raining heavily, raining sideways. Reminding me to let myself down, down the rabbit hole to see what adventures await my brave young protagonists.

Paper Avatars

Before the vast array of video games and Farmvilles that people spend their time on today, there were paper dolls. As you can see in the photograph (probably posed, as these girls are wearing their school dresses), kids in the 1950’s, if they didn’t have anything else, had plenty of paper, pencils, colored pencils and crayons. Kids could trace anything they wanted by taping a page to the window, putting a sheet of paper over it and tracing the outlines of what you wanted to make a copy. The copy could then have a different color of hair, a different smile, whatever you liked. And most especially, new dresses!

Of course you could play house with even less, using hollyhock flowers stuck with toothpicks to make dolls with long dresses, or piles of leaves raked into “houses” which resembled house plans out of the magazines. “This is the door, and here is the bedroom, and this is the kitchen,” one child explains to another. And it is absolutely so.

Imagination runs rife in kids. If you were the Brontes, stuck in a gloomy manse with paper and pencil on the moors of England in the 1820’s after the deaths of two older sisters, you might write dark romances about people in imaginary kingdoms. If you are the kids in the photograph, enduring long North Dakota winters with books, magazines, and the Sears catalog coming to your post office box, you have plenty to feed your thoughts, in the optimism of the post-war period. Plenty of ideas about what people should look like and how to make poodle skirts and princess dresses for your paper dolls.

Every kid imagines what his future will be like, basing it on the stories of the people he sees around him. And every kid makes up stories about himself. [I use the masculine English pronouns to stand for humans, as we all are.] I suspect growing up in a high-rise apartment, as kids all over the world now do, must give rise to a need for avatars as strong as those of kids in isolated towns once did. The stories of celebrities, sports figures, musicians and actors fill our kids’ heads these days. With luck and parental help, they have room for the stories they make up themselves, for their own stories.

19th Century Schoolhouse

From first through sixth grade I attended school in this schoolhouse. Occupying a full block, with playground in front, softball diamond in back and ringed in cottonwoods, the school was a focal point of its tiny North Dakota town. The basement had a big furnace in it and a hot lunch room. We played marbles around the furnace and one of my teachers loved square dancing so much, she gave up teaching us in favor of taking us down to the furnace room, where we learned “Put Your Little Foot,” “Take a Little Peek,” and the “Virginia Reel” to 78 records.

On the first floor were four large rooms, two grades to a room, and upstairs, in one large room was the high school. There were usually about ten kids in my class, not so many kids in high school, probably 30-40 at the most. What is hard to believe though, was that all of us, all ages, sometimes played together. The high school kids probably instigated these games of Red Rover, Pom Pom Pullaway, or Tackle Tag. This would be in the middle of winter, kids in their snow clothes flailing about on the ice-covered yard in front of the school. On February 22, the year I was nine, I wrote in my diary, “We had an awful lot of fun at recess. The boys kept us down.”

It was a pretty homogenous, egalitarian bunch, of course, all of us of northern European origins. Most of the farm kids looked a little more poverty-stricken, and definitely worked harder than the town kids. Kids looked after each other. It would have been considered unsporting for a bigger kid to pick on a little kid. Perhaps there was also that Northern need for people to pull together against the often serious threats from the weather, especially in a sparsely populated place.

The cultural net of family, church, small town and this school nourished and encouraged my small budding self, leaving me without much fear and a great desire to take on the world. Our Dick and Jane readers portrayed a suburban world of newspapers being delivered and Father coming home after a day at the office. It was not what I saw around me. Our world was no less worthy of being in books. I have wanted ever since to celebrate it.

The Danger of Remembering

The first critiques of my work are in and I’m thinking about them. “You must be more generous with us,” says Don, my partner in life, as well as in art.  He is a great writer as well as cinematographer. We are essentially engaged in the same cultural critique and I trust his pronouncements completely. “These people may be stoic, but you, the author, don’t have to be.” Of course, he is right. Anna says “Often the beautiful description seems to take over and distracts me from the story and characters. I feel the author is more in love with the tiny details than the people.” Though both of them are supportive, I realize I must go deeper, see these characters more fully, in their rich and rounded essences. And not just the protagonists, but equally those adults and others who provide the crucial context in which they find themselves.

I believe the problem is partly that I am working with memory and remembered life, though trying to be present, of course. It was Gertrude Stein who laid out most clearly that remembering doesn’t make anything live. “When you write you try to remember what you are about to write and you will see immediately how lifeless the writing becomes that is why expository writing is so dull because it is all remembered,” she said in a lecture in 1936. “The business of art is to live in the actual present, that is the complete actual present, and to express that complete actual present.” We all know, even more today, that each present moment is incredibly pregnant with life, and why write anyway, if you cannot call out that life.

Nostalgia is not my intention in writing. However, my childhood in North Dakota and northern Minnesota is what I know, what I came from. I can go back there and sit in those years as if they were the present. If I don’t describe the characters and their feelings enough, it may be because they are so real to me, almost part of me. I think they don’t need exposition. But I will go back and bring these characters into the “complete actual present”, if I can.

The way I see the books is really as a symphony. Each of my protagonists has their own theme, which plays against the others. Each of them will have their own movement, in which their life comes to the fore while those of the other siblings recedes. The composition of the melodies, the harmonies, the instrumentation are what I work with. But time has a part, and that time must be the eternal present.

Communal Reading

One of the great delights of reading is being able to talk with someone else about it, being able to share a bit of thought space with another person who has similarly read a book you have, being able to discuss the characters of a book as though they were friends in common. The world-wide experience people had of sharing the Harry Potter books was a great deal of fun. Many, if not most, young girls could tell you who Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy are, and probably also Mary, Laura and their sisters Carrie and Grace. Few books approach the epic number of readers these books have had, and of course the films of each of them help.

The number of my friends who are members of at least one book group are testimony to the power of shared thought spaces as well. People seem to enjoy both the expansion of their own reading choices, and the enjoyment of sharing something that they have loved, as everyone takes turns choosing the next book. From what I’ve seen, however, people in book groups learn more about each other than anything else, using the back and forth conversation about characters and themes to define themselves and enrich their understanding of life. This deepening of friendship is certainly as valuable as knowing about the books themselves. And the communities which are formed around book groups may be some of the most intense we have in our loosely knit modern “villages”.

A lifetime of reading now stands me in very good stead. My reading has been wide-ranging, and while much of it has been somewhat esoteric, going far back in time and far out in geographic space, the core of it has been a search for deep reality. From “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” (Basho) to “Death Comes for the Archbishop” (Cather) to “Doctor Zhivago” (Pasternak) to “Light Years” (Salter), I am looking for that point at which rich language provides a glimpse of transcendence in which big mind meets actually sensed existence. If the imagination does take flight, for me it must still be an illumination of the truths of life. Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse” is deeply true, while also an empathetic meditation on her real family.

I’m having as much fun grounding my characters in real life as I used to do reading. They are still little, most under ten years of age. But they are already themselves, holographically representing the people they will become, given environment and time. Whether my writing craft will be able to reach down and provide readers with a glimpse of their transcendent reality remains to be seen, but that is what I wish for them.

Highbrows

Pastor Carl Mikkelson, and his wife Lois Bakken Mikkelson, are the parents of the kids in my book. Born in the early 1920’s, depression and war affected their young years, but didn’t spoil their outlooks. When better years and a big family come, they are as happy as they can be. What does become a challenge for them, is the increase of influences on their kids which they cannot control, made available by increased communications technology and the broadening outlook the 1960’s.

With their college educations and Carl’s four years at the seminary, both of them well-versed in Latin, the Mikkelsons are Midwestern intellectuals. The Scandinavian Lutheran churches supported Luther’s doctrine that redemption is a gift of God's grace, to be attained only through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. The work of the church was the distribution of the sacraments and rites, the confirmation in the faith of young people and Bible study for everyone, using the King James version of the Bible. Carl’s study of the Bible went back to the Greek and Hebrew.

Both Carl and Lois’ grandparents, and one of Lois’ parents, had come directly from Norway and Denmark. They retained many elements of Scandinavian customs and a culture which was almost northern European in its traditions. In addition, Carl and Lois wished to develop in their children the high culture which flowed from a liberal arts education, including appreciation for the old masters in art, classical music and literary classics.

It is no wonder then, that Carl and Lois regarded the abundance of popular culture which overwhelmed everyone by the 1960’s with fear and trembling. They promoted interest in folk music, such as in the television show “Hootenanny”, as much as possible, and supported all of the popular representations of Christian culture, such as “The Ten Commandments”, “The Robe” and “Ben-Hur”. But they were fighting a losing battle.

Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” appeared in 1964. It gave intellectuals a reason to find value in popular culture. Art might not have to be “serious” to be valuable! By 1964, intellectuals wanted to listen to the Beatles, to Bob Dylan, perhaps even Elvis Presley, without feeling ashamed of themselves. It didn’t matter very much to Carl and Lois. They were still involved in a knock-down, drag-out fight with the culture for the souls of their children. But popular culture did begin to make inroads.

By this time, Carl and Lois had so imbued their children with Christian values and the classical virtues of humility, patience and kindness, that is, with humanity, that they were ready for anything. It would be a long time before everyone understood this, however, and any sort of peace was made.

Karaoke Life

It seems many of us live a sort of karaoke life, these days, when we have so much free time beyond fulfilling our basic needs that we hardly know what to do with ourselves. We fill this time identifying with various sports and fictions, and communicate with each other by insisting on the relative rightness of our personal preferences. As in karaoke, we are each terribly important, at the center of a digital moment in time, and at the same time throwing our real, actual selves completely away.

One way to get past post-modern frivolity, it seems to me, is to take ourselves seriously, to once again take up the craft of a life. I see this around me too, of course, many people taking great care over the education of their children, the ecology of their surroundings and pursuits, and over the food they prepare and eat. In this use of our free time, everything matters, everything we do is important.

Post-war America was full of optimism about the ability each of us had to craft his own life. Technology was full of promise, the American dream insisted that every family might have its own little castle, and corporations took up the challenge of making everyone comfortable with better toothpastes, better televisions and better barca-loungers. Studying it as I currently am, I remember that even then the road to individual irrelevance that goes with technologically-achieved comfort, and the road to the fully-lived life had begun to diverge.

Though a lover of technology, a ham radio operator and a constant new adapter, my Dad had a healthy fear of human arrogance. On our lake, he stood out shaking his fist at the water-skiers who riled the lake and spoiled it for wildlife. He much preferred canoes, in which one could glide silently, disturbing nothing. Canoes have technology, of course. Testing it, Dad made one, a lovely little yellow shell made by stretching canvas on a beautifully-crafted wooden frame and painting it with fiberglass. As he never made another, he didn’t have a chance to hone the craft and improve it. It is a task he left to us, I believe.

To take up this task is to limit oneself, of course. Craft implies care, devotion to the understanding and learning of a skill. But I believe the world opens out from it. In understanding one thing to its depths, you learn a very great deal. And you participate in the importance, in the wonder of the meeting of the material and its meaning, which, according to physicists, isn’t as far apart as we seem to think. Everything we do is important.

P.S. Writing here in January has meant that I stand at my computer on a little platform on the big desk in the upstairs office in layers of sweaters, topped by the California Norwegian sweater one of my sisters made, wearing the warm fleece wrist warmers made by another. By noon it is colder in the house than it is outdoors, and we sometimes open the windows to the warm air. By 3:00 p.m., however, I am out at the pool in a tank top, doing tai chi. No complaints here about the writing life!