The Pastor's Kids

Gentle Readers, it is time to send The Pastor’s Kids out into the world. I am hoping to find a commercial publisher or independent press which will love them. By way of introduction, my wonderful husband Don Starnes helped me make a video. It isn’t quite what Don would have liked. He wanted to use actors to play the kids, but I didn’t feel I had the time that would take. So we made a two-minute video using black and white photos of the period to suggest the kids and their world. Should I be successful in finding a home for The Pastor’s Kids, you may be sure I will let you know.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hS4MU47EWFM&feature=plcp

Mid-century Heroes

In the early 1960’s it was a lot easier to have heroes than it is now. Partly, there was a lot less information around. Mysterious heroes, invested with our own desires, are easier to worship. The cornucopia of information we have now, about everything under the sun, was just beginning. But, those we make into heroes may change our world for the better, or spur us to do it ourselves.

Spread glossy photos of someone across a few magazines, give us a few intimate details of their lives and we long for them. We think we know them better than we do our friends. We want to be like them. Modern heroism requires that mysterious grace under the relentless focus of the camera, without which the media turns away and the beauty, courage or heroism might never have been.

During the first half of the 1960’s, when Line, Marty and Paul are teenagers, their heroes are filtered mostly through television, a few glossy magazines and the growing awareness college gives them. Paul, at home, finds baseball players, astronauts and songwriters to emulate. At college, there is only one television for a whole dorm full of students, and Marty and Line see very little. Marty is focused on studying and several of her early heroes are writers, but Line manages to get out into the world and meet heroes face to face.

Mercury Seven Astronauts during Survival Training, 1960

From the time they are first selected in 1959, Paul loves the original Mercury Seven group of astronauts. Information about them abounds and knowing about their rigorous training helps Paul as he undergoes painful reconstructive surgery on his legs. The career of the young Harmon Killebrew, who comes to Minneapolis with the advent of the Twins in 1961 at 25, matches Paul’s greatest interest in baseball. Paul thrills to his powerful hitting record, worries about his injuries and loves the fact that Killebrew is a quiet person from Idaho.

By 1965, the Beatles have played several times in the US, but most of the national coverage doesn’t individuate them. They are simply the Fab 4, and, in Paul’s world, it is hard to know what each of them does or take any of them seriously. [I have a letter from my mother, written to me at college, which asks, “Did you see the Beadles last night?” She went on to tell me that the audience reaction was the most interesting part!] Of those on the Hootenanny television show, Paul likes Ian Tyson’s guitar playing and the harmonies he sings with Sylvia, as well as the lyrics of the Smothers Brothers and the Chad Mitchell Trio. He has no knowledge of Bob Dylan, who refuses to be on the show because Pete Seeger is blacklisted, though Dylan's songs are everywhere.

For Marty, few images of beauty top the many wonderful photographs of Mrs. John F. Kennedy from the early 1960’s. She is portrayed as intelligent and tasteful, as well as a loyal wife and thoughtful mother. From early foreign films which she sees at college, Marty finds Jean Seberg fascinating in Goddard’s Breathless and Jeanne Moreau in Truffaut’s Jules and Jim, but it is writers who are most real for her.

Marty conceives such a love of Dr. Tom Dooley, whose books The Edge of Tomorrow and The Night They Burned the Mountain tell of his work in Laos and Cambodia up until his early death, that she longs to be a doctor, despite the fact she faints at the sight of blood. Hemingway’s books and persona loom large in the early 1960’s, with Marty being much affected by his spare, powerful writing. But it is the fate of Boris Pasternak, whose poetry and book Dr. Zhivago earn him a Nobel Prize which he cannot accept, which most moves her during this time.

Because she rooms with an exchange student from Spelman College in 1963, Line is told about the unique group of professors and students there who participate in the civil rights movement, including Howard Zinn, Staughton Lynd, Alice Walker and Vincent Harding (who led Mennonite House in Atlanta, one of the few places blacks and whites could meet). By the time Line goes to Spelman herself in 1964, they have all moved on, except for Ruby Doris Smith, who has returned to get her degree. Line doesn’t talk to her, but she certainly knows who she is and of her importance to the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee.

Line doesn’t feel useful enough in the semester she is at Spelman, but marches, to the extent allowed, from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in the spring of 1965. She hears the powerful Martin Luther King speech in which he states that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." By the summer of 1965, she is at an SDS convention in Kewadin, Michigan (unbeknownst to her parents), where Tom Hayden, Carl Oglesby and other activists leading anti-Vietnam war protests meet.

Some of this experience was mine, but much was not. Putting my characters in a real world is terribly exciting and I love the research which has been required to do so. No small part of it is understanding the access they had to culture heroes of the time. It may be surprising, but it took a while for the doors to the 1960’s to open. And of course, it is a time when Line, Marty and Paul’s experiences begin to vary widely.

"Good sense, innocence ..."

“Good sense, innocence cripples mankind,” went the lyric from 1967 in a song by the bubble-gum pop band Strawberry Alarm Clock. It is one of the deep tenets of recent generations that knowledge of evil is better for you than ignorance, in the sense of naiveté or lack of sophistication. Those who don’t know, suffer. This is what’s behind our insistence that our children, very early, know everything there is to know about expletives, sex and all kinds of drugs. It’s behind the extraordinarily promiscuous culture we have right now, and our toleration of obscene language and pornographic images to a high degree.

The Boomer generation grew up in relative silence. Their parents, known as the “Silent” generation, were born during a time of crisis which fostered consensus, loyalty to institutions, and an ethic of personal sacrifice. Reacting against this, the Boomer generation expanded into individualistic freedoms, trumpeting its ideas loud, clear and proud, exploring many of the darker corners of the world.

My book club is reading two British Boomer generation writers in a row, and it struck me that the theme is still there. On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan, tells the story of two members of the “Silent” generation on their wedding night. As explicitly as only a Baby Boomer could, the book explains how the two failed each other sexually and drove each other apart in their innocence, despite their great love for each other. In A Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes, the narrator reflects back on his frustration with one of his first girlfriends, his love and respect for a school friend who fathered a child and committed suicide, and his own possible implication in these events. Remorse and regret hang over these books, in which early experiences are more meaningful than the rest of life.

My book club had good discussions of these books (yay! for book clubs), and I believe that in On Chesil Beach, McEwan was trying to show that ignorance keeps us from happiness. Knowing, lack of innocence about the worst aspects of humanity, is still valued. One reader says, “I like reading dark and disturbing books, things that force me to feel something.”

But I would like to say that, for the narrators of both books, the early experiences perhaps meant the most because they happened to young, fresh, innocent hearts and minds. Dwelling on the evil that men do can lead to jaded, tired hearts, protected by brittle shells of certainty. Without some innocence and freshness, we become afraid to listen to our deep selves, which, in great humility, try to speak to us. Surely children too need time and space, protected from the unsavory aspects of life, in order to grow into whole selves.

It is freshness and simplicity I look for in books, in music, in art and in people. Culture itself can cripple us, with its stereotypical memes and analyses laid over the burbling life which wells up beneath it. But we will certainly stay young and fresh longer if we nurture the ability to hear this anthem, this music in our hearts and in the heart of the world.

The Wilderness Bug

I define “the wilderness bug” as the case when a person finds inspiration and contentment most commonly far from the constraints of people living together, in places were the culture of people has made the least inroad upon the natural world. My fictional character Paul definitely has the “wilderness bug.” He’s a kid right now, and part of what leads him into reverence for the wilder side of nature is the fact that he had polio. As with Teddy Roosevelt, ill health leads to a great desire to triumph over it. For at least the middle of his life, Paul is strong and capable. He searches out places and experiences in which he can enjoy the wild, becoming one with trees, animals and the weather.

Though we are every day reminded that our fragile planet is endangered by human occupation [seas of plastic in the Pacific, global weather disruption, heavy pollution], America was fortunate to have people who loved wilderness fight for it early enough to protect what they could. In California, John Muir is the patron saint of environmentalism. We have much to thank him for. The national park bill was passed under his advocacy as early as 1890.

Two powerful Midwestern writers have contributed to the modern understanding of relationships between men and nature. The Sand County Almanac [1949] is Aldo Leopold’s musing on a lifetime of forest and wildlife management while specific to a patch of land he purchased in central Wisconsin. Seeing a place even for predators in the biotic community, he helped found The Wilderness Society in the mid-1930’s.

Sigurd Olson lived most of his life in Ely, Minnesota near the boundary waters between Canada and the U.S. He, more than anyone I’ve read, had the “wilderness bug”. In his book The Singing Wilderness [1956], he described his belief that in the silence and solitude of wilderness, people can connect to their evolutionary heritage and get a sense of the sacredness of all creation. He was president of The Wilderness Society in the 1960’s and was instrumental in preserving wild and beautiful areas in California, Alaska and northern Minnesota.

Olson’s biographer, David Backes, compares the two, saying that if Leopold is an Old Testament prophet, then Olson is a New Testament evangelist. “Where Leopold invokes the God of power and wrath, preaching proper ethical behavior toward the land and prophesying doom if society disobeys, Olson invites his readers to experience the God of love, as made manifest in nature.”

As the U.S. population increases [63 million in 1890, 149 million in 1949, 169 million in 1956 and 314 million today], wilderness only becomes more precious. Education in ecological ethics is crucial. I am happy to see the “Leave No Trace” organization [http://lnt.org/] so active in our country. It is the obvious corollary to the wilderness areas set aside by the work of so many diligent people. I recommend the poetic writings of Muir, Leopold and Olson as witness.

Not being terribly gutsy, I prefer situations where there is at least modest human support; and I wouldn’t be a novelist if I didn’t think people weren’t part of the natural order. But I also love places where I can enjoy an untrammeled experience of woods, water, sky, birds and animals. As I write, a spectacular sky, blue studded with drifts of pink and gold clouds, exhibits itself behind the dark pine tree and the Hawaiian wedding tree, the further oaks and sycamores, outside our study window. My sunset is mediated by screens, framed by windows. But I suspect my enjoyment of it is enhanced by whatever “wilderness bug” I inherited from my nature-loving parents.

The Reader

One night a week, I shelve books at our local library. It’s hard work, standing on a stool to lift things up to the top shelf and then bending down to the lowest one. Books can be heavy! But they are wonderful, a technology which has allowed us to share thoughts with people who lived as long as two thousand years ago. More if you count cuneiform tablets. (Glad I don’t have to shelve those!)

As I shelve, I am always thinking about the readers who have read the books now being returned to the shelves. It stretches my understanding to know what people are reading. In many ways, readers drive book publishing. Readers seem to wait for thick new books by James Patterson, Catherine Cookson, Stephen King, Robert Ludlum, Debbie Macomber, David Baldacchi, Danielle Steel and many others. These romance and thriller writers, like the mystery and science fiction writers, churn out one book after another. These are the writers who give readers puzzles to solve or predictable stories to while away time. The writers who come up with the right formula, use it again and again. And the publishing world bows to this best-selling readers’ market.

Outside genre fiction, it isn’t so easy for writers. Nevertheless, despite the competition, recent times have been the era of the writer. Poets and Writers magazine publishes page after page of ads for writing workshops, MFA programs, fellowships, and writing contests of all kinds. Workshops explain how wonderful it is to write for all kinds of reasons, to feel more human, to find out what you think, to share your experiences and what you learned from them. Anyone who wants to can keep a blog or publish a book, and books are certainly not the only media where writers are found. Everyone writes!

But all writers must consider their readers. In a New York Public Library discussion, Jeffrey Eugenides earnestly told Salman Rushdie that in his writing process he progressed from focusing on the sentence, to working with the plot, and that now his main interest was the character. The masterful Rushdie rejoined that in his work, his point of view had moved from that of the writer to that of the reader. “There may be a perfect way to tell a story. In that case you must ask yourself, what does the reader need to know? You must become the reader.”

My cousin Helen Frost [http://www.helenfrost.net/], who has been writing books long enough to see her readers criss-cross the globe with recommendations of her work, also recently said, “Sometimes I think writers get too much credit for what happens in the experience of a book.” Just yesterday at lunch, someone who says she doesn’t read very much, told me how moved she had been by Hemingway’s Garden of Eden, how every sentence got down to reality. I’ve never read it, and I find there is some controversy about whether Hemingway would have published it, had he been alive. But I wanted to run right out and get it! And when I do read it, you may be sure I will think of Mary, readership in common being one of the many pleasures of reading.

Norwegian America

I count myself lucky to know quite a lot about my heritage, with three American-born Norwegian grandparents, and one grandparent an immigrant from Denmark. One of my Norwegian great grandparents took the name Kronlokken (the name of the farm he lived on, belonging to the Crown) to distinguish himself from all the other Pedersons nearby. I am often asked if it is a Finnish name, but no, pure Norwegian.

Norwegian Americans were among the first ethnic groups to preserve their pioneer history by beginning to collect the artifacts related to their journey soon after Norwegian immigration peaked in the 1870’s. Many of these are now preserved in a wonderful museum, Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum [http://vesterheim.org/index.php] located in the northeast corner of Iowa, at Decorah. “When Norwegian immigrants wrote back to Norway about Vesterheim, their western home, they spoke for countless others from many cultures who helped build a nation in the New World,” according to the museum website.

Norsvin Mill

Among the items available for viewing (during the summer months) is a group of twelve historic buildings. During the mid-1960’s, three of these buildings were located on a grassy, wooded hillside just behind the dorms at Luther College. Two of the small cabins had been a school and a home. They were locked and we could only look through the windows. But one was a mill, with huge millstones which had been brought from Norway. During summer school, the mill was my favorite place to bring books and notebooks and read and write, hidden on a bench just inside the door opening. When it rained, I remember sitting inside, dry and happy, listening to the mild summer rain drumming on the roof. (I don’t think it had grass on it at the time.)

Phyllis and her Sweater

I haven’t been able to visit Vesterheim in a long time, however a friend had a delightful experience of it recently. Phyllis, who is not Norwegian but lives in St. Paul, wanted a genuine Norwegian sweater. She joined the museum and was totally surprised when, in the middle of December last year, a cookie elf visited her! Phyllis wrote, “Turns out they had a cookie raffle last week and I won. A wonderful sweet woman and her sister made me dozens of Norwegian cookies (they are so good -- no nuts or chocolate or anything except butter and sugar) and they drove all the way up and hand delivered them. So sweet.” The cookies were a memorable part of Christmas for Phyllis and her housemates.

When Marya, from Cleckheaton, England, read The Pastor’s Kids this year, she told me she wished a map of the places it describes had accompanied the book. Over tea and biscuits, she suggested that I emphasize the sociology of this interesting time and place, the Eisenhower years as experienced by third and fourth generation Norwegian Americans in the Midwest. My sister and I looked at each other. We knew there was quite enough ethnography in the book already! But it did remind me that, though most European immigrants in the U.S. get lumped together, they have many different cultural backgrounds.

The New Rebels

It is impossible to read literary critique today without running into the ghost of David Foster Wallace, acknowledged as the most energizing, polarizing and influential voice of his generation. While I cannot read his work, as I managed to escape the zeitgeist from which he writes by being a bit older, avoiding television and not going to graduate school in English, I have begun to think he is onto something and points the way out of a slough in which many people, not just writers, have bogged down.

In his 1993 essay “E Unibus Pluram,” Wallace says: “The next real literary ‘rebels’ in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels … who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. … The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘Oh how banal.’”

The corner which Wallace was trying to turn can be understood as the difference between sincerity and authenticity, as described by Lionel Trilling [Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press. 1972]. Ensuring the truth of oneself to others was a salient characteristic of Western culture for 400 years, suggests Trilling. But in the 20th century, the ideal became one of authenticity. Though Trilling goes into great detail, roughly, in his terms, sincerity places emphasis on communication with others, whereas authenticity sees truth as something inward, personal and hidden, with a goal of self-expression rather than other-directed communication.

For most of my life, assessment of inner truth, or authenticity, has been the criterion by which literature, politics and people have been judged. But Orlando Patterson, a respected Jamaican-born sociologist, describes what happens to public discourse when individual insistence on inner truth trumps tolerance and civility. Divisive identity politics and prejudices are upheld, among other things. [http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/26/opinion/26patterson.html]

Several critics have pointed out that Wallace may have wanted to “eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue,” but that he could not overcome his own ironic ambivalence. In his novels, he tries to be “at once unassailably sophisticated and doggedly down to earth.” [A.O. Scott] David Foster Wallace did not want to lose what had been gained by our relentless focus on authenticity. I think of him when I run into the young hipster culture. As some have told me, “hipster” can be defined, but the person defining it is never referring to himself. Wallace would be pleased to find, as he believed, that “cynicism and naïveté need not be mutually exclusive”.

Both sincerity and authenticity reflect wholeness to the inner self. But I don’t think this is just a semantic tempest in a teapot. In public life, we must begin to behave with civility and tolerance while negotiating the authentic beliefs each of us hold dear. We must trust each other’s cordial gestures to have been offered sincerely and find common ground upon which we can all stand as humans.

In art, I would love to see work which opens to the world validated. Works which value the senses and allow the spirit present in things to emerge. Works of observation celebrating and exploring life itself. I think we’ve seen enough of the dark interiors of various people’s minds! We know now that the observer affects what he sees and thus, we must triangulate through many works to get a clear picture of truth. But why not? It is the work of being human.

David Foster Wallace was demonstrably trying to step back from pure self expression toward an ethos which valued the other, the reader, in his work. At present, I do not see widespread movement to what has been called “the new sincerity.” But I do identify with his idea of the new rebels. I quite expect yawns and rolled eyes where my writing is concerned, and I am more interested in what the reader needs than in self-expression. My characters are offered sincerely, in a spirit of civility and tolerance, finding common cause with the 90% of humanity that we all share, rather than in the narrow, hidden aspects in which we differ.