STUDY that which you would like to see in this world—peace, truth, faithfulness, community, economic fairness, good government—and it will have a better chance of coming to be.
On this day of hope, let us all prepare our minds and hearts to work for a better world when we are free again.
Happy Easter to all!
In doing research for a new project, I came across this quote from Bertha K. Landes, who was elected mayor of Seattle in 1926, becoming the first female mayor of any major American city:
“I threaten to shoot on sight, without benefit of clergy, anyone calling me the mayoress instead of the mayor. Joking aside, I am fighting for a principle in taking that stand. Let women who go into politics be the real thing or nothing! Let us, while never forgetting our womanhood, drop all emphasis on sex and put it on being public servants.”
Although Landes cleaned up the city and had the support of important elements such as the Seattle Times, she was defeated in her reelection bid. The man who beat her, a political neophyte named Frank E. Edwards, did all he could to make the election about whether the city wanted to be led by a woman or a man. Sadly, his cynical approach worked, even among women.
I’m happy to say Seattle has a strong female mayor again (the first since Bertha)–and I hope that after November, we’ll have many more female public servants across this country. God knows we’ve had enough men who don’t know the meaning of “public” or “servant.”
Three days ago, the playwright Terrence McNally died at 81, a victim of the coronavirus. He had COPD and had lost part of both lungs to lung cancer, so he was one of the most vulnerable among us to this awful pandemic. He was also one of the most brilliant, creative, and loving men in our world.
I didn’t know McNally personally except that I once did a long, lovely interview with him over lunch at Portland’s Heathman Hotel. This was in the early 2000’s when I was writing regularly about theater for the Oregonian, including interviewing any playwright who came through town: Lanford Wilson, Romulus Linney, John Guare, Tracy Letts.
Wilson and Linney (who had been my professor for a class on playwriting at Columbia University in the 1990’s) were both warm and generous to me, but McNally was even more so. I had writing assignments to justify all of the other interviews, but not the one with him. Even so, he sat and answered all of my questions, treating me as a peer rather than just another interviewer.
Over time, I have watched many of McNally’s shows on the stage or on film. He had broad range and a big heart. But I didn’t know just how wide-ranging his work was, or how big his heart, until I watched the 2019 PBS American Masters program on him last night.
If you want proof that the jerks who say we should choose the stock market over the lives of older people as this pandemic continues to spread are sick and twisted, watch this program. You’ll find a link to it here.
What life and wisdom and love left the world with this man. How many others with these attributes we need so desperately right now are we willing to lose?
Thirty-five years ago, in a simpler and less-connected time, I had my first experience with self-isolating. After traveling through Europe with a friend, I caught the nine-hour ferry to the Greek island of Patmos by myself. I didn’t know anyone there. In fact, after my friend flew home, I didn’t know anyone within thousands of miles of where I was. There was no internet in those days, of course, and I was too poor to afford what was then the high cost of international calls. For the two months I planned to be on Patmos, I would have no contact, even by mail, with anyone I knew.
I didn’t remember at the time that Patmos was where an earlier man, now a saint, had spent time in isolation. I chose it only because I had vowed to take the first ferry out whenever I was ready to go and it was the first stop. A Greek man told me it was beautiful—which it turned out to be, although it was January, when Patmos is swept by fierce wind and the temperature hovers near freezing.
Broke and needing the cheapest possible place to stay, I managed to secure what was usually a summer-only apartment for just three dollars a day. It had two beds in a modest main room, a small kitchen, a tiny bathroom, and a balcony big enough for one person, with a view out over the fields to the distant sea. I couldn’t believe my luck—until a few hours later when I realized why it was a summer-only place: It was made entirely of concrete and had no heat.
My main reason for secluding myself on an island in a country I’d never been to before was to set down the first draft of a novel. I was only 27 but I’d been a writer for over a decade and veered into journalism to support myself despite wanting to write fiction. Now I had my chance. I set strict rules for my island time. I had to type for at least eight hours a day before doing anything else. (I later amended that to six hours.) Thinking didn’t count; only the time my fingers were actually pecking away. I could go for walks but only after the day’s writing was done. The same was true of reading. The one exception was Sunday, which I took off as a day of rest.
The only person I spoke to that first month, other than a brief word or two with my landlord, was an Australian woman who ran the closest grocery store, and my conversations with her never lasted more than a few minutes. When I walked, I walked alone, except for three stray dogs that seemed to take turns accompanying me along the shore road. I thought of them as angels sent to keep me company. No matter when I walked, even near midnight, one would appear and amble beside me. Never more than one and never in a way that disrupted my thinking. They never begged for my attention and I never petted them. When our walk ended, they simply peeled off and headed home.
When I went to bed at night, warmed only by several thin blankets—or, later, when the sneezing and shivering made me to beg my landlord for some kind of heat, a cheap aluminum heater—I usually lay awake for a while. Because my nighttime thoughts were uninterrupted, I often woke up the next morning not knowing whether something I remembered had been a conscious thought or a dream.
Sometimes during these nighttime reveries, I’d return to some place in my past. Free of present concerns, I was astonished at how well I remembered things, including, one night, my grandparents’ house, where I had lived for a summer as a small child and visited regularly until my grandfather died when I was ten. I found I could walk through the house and remember everything, even photographs hidden from view behind doors. I remembered the smell of the rusted screen on the open window in the attic room where I slept on the floor—the Dr. Seuss books stacked beside me and my grandparents’ winter clothes zipped into bags beyond the half-wall. I remembered that the bathroom wallpaper was black but full of colorful dots. I remembered my grandfather’s tools above the worktable at the bottom of the basement stairs, the perennial five-gallon tub of vanilla ice cream kept in the freezer there, and the back room I liked to play in alone, where they stored their extra furniture: a room-sized collection of various forts.
When I wasn’t thinking about my novel or remembering earlier times, I was praying for people I knew, imagining what they were doing. I missed them, of course, but in a strange way I felt closer to them through my thoughts and prayers than I do now when I can email anyone anywhere anytime.
I’m sure I felt lonely at times, but I don’t remember feeling that way, other than on those nightly walks when I passed a small restaurant or bar where men (always men) watched movies at night, most of them Kung Fu movies. It wasn’t that I wanted to watch the movies or even be with those men, but the interior was softly lit and looked like a warm, pleasant space to sit with a beer in hand. Alcohol was one of the things I gave up during my self-imposed isolation.
I had a Walkman with me and in the evening I’d often play one of the half-dozen cassette tapes I’d brought along. I had maybe a dozen books too, and I spent part of every evening reading. One book was Thomas Merton’s autobiography, The Seven-Storey Mountain, which I had bought in an Athens bookstore for little more than a dollar. It was there, during that month of self-isolation that I read about and felt a strong attraction to the Merton friend I would eventually come to know and write a biography of: Robert Lax.
In addition to my cassettes and books, I had small packages of modeling clay and, though I’d never studied sculpting, I managed to form what looked like the face of an ancient Greek man and a bum sitting with his dog on a curb, reflective of a character in the novel I was writing. (I almost destroyed this last one by trying to “fire” it on the gas stove, rescuing it just in time, with only some singeing on the bottom.)
On my Sunday walks, if it wasn’t raining, I roamed farther and farther over the island, eventually choosing the wilder places where there was only a thin trail. At first I looked for the snakes I’d read warmed themselves on Greek island trails, but since it was never warm and I never saw wildlife of any kind except birds, I stopped looking.
One of my favorite places to go, rain or shine, was a huge rock connected by a narrow causeway to one of the beaches far from town. A small guidebook a man in a shop gave me said the caves carved into it had been used by monks living in stricter isolation centuries ago. By the time I started exploring the caves, the only signs of previous habitation were the smells and droppings of goats, but I did find a crude catchment tank for rain water at the top. What I liked most about the cave I usually sat in was that all I could see from it was the sea. Sitting there, although I had never had any instruction in playing it, I would sound out tunes on my harmonica: childhood songs, spirituals, and simple hymns.
When my mother’s birthday neared, I went around to all of my favorite places and recorded the sounds for her: the ocean rolling the beach pebbles, the goat-herder’s cry, the tinkle of goat bells, the thunder that shook my apartment when a big storm passed, and my halting, inept playing of “Happy Birthday” in that cave. Then I sent it off, hoping it would arrive in time.
When I had been on the island a month, it wasn’t the isolation but rather the cold that got to me. Somewhat miraculously, I’d finished a full draft of my novel by then. I decided to take the ferry back to Athens, check into a hotel with heat for a while, and send a copy of the novel home for safekeeping. I planned to visit some of the ancient sites as well: Corinth, Olympia, Delphi.
In those moments before I left the island, I felt as centered and open and peaceful as I ever had. It was then, as I waited for a ferry delayed by winter weather—as I thought about going back to my room and trying again the next night—that I heard a voice for the only time in my life. “If you will endure,” it said, sounding inside me, “God will bless you.”
Moments later, the delayed ferry appeared, and as I boarded it, I fell into conversation with an older man. It was during our brief interaction that I found out Robert Lax was living on the same island I was. This news seemed miraculous, of course. A revelation. A blessing. Born of the isolation I had dared to endure and the peace that had come to me through it.
(To read what happened when I met Robert Lax a few days later, see my book: Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax, which includes the story of our friendship.)
I haven’t added a new post to this site in a long time, and I’m not going to promise to be consistent about adding posts now. But I’ve started working on a new project, centered in the first decades of the 20th century, and some of what I’m reading for it is worth posting about because it relates to what we’re living through in the US today.
I’ll try to say more about what I mean by that in future entries, but for now, just to get started, I’m going to simply post a quote about FDR from a book published in 1937, when his policies were showing some signs of working but the Depression was far from over. The book deals primarily with his policy toward electricity and public utilities in general.
Here’s the quote:
“The President’s thinking goes first to government–democratic government–and after that to economics…In the prodigies of effort he put forth to lead the country out of the bogs of depression he therefore sought, and seeks still, more than what he has termed ‘a purposeless whirring of machinery.’ It is important that every man have a job, that every factory have orders to fill and that business as a whole earn profits. ‘But,’ as he said in his annual message to Congress in January, 1937, ‘government in a democratic nation does not exist solely, or even primarily, for that purpose.’ The factory wheels ‘must carry us in the direction of a greater satisfaction in life for the average man. The deeper purpose of democratic government is to assist as many of its citizens as possible–especially those who need it most–to improve their conditions of life, to retain all personal liberty which does not adversely affect their neighbors, and to pursue the happiness which comes with security and an opportunity for recreation and culture.’”
pp. 292-293, Pyramids of Power, M. L. Ramsay
I know exactly where I was 50 years ago tonight: at Camp Parsons, a summer camp run by the Boy Scouts on Hood Canal in Washington State. The night did not start out well. I was assigned KP duty for dinner, the duty no one wanted. I can remember as clearly as if it were yesterday standing in the industrial-looking kitchen holding a large metal pot with mashed potato remains clinging to it. When I asked whoever was supervising me how I should clean it out, he grabbed my hand and thrust it into the cold, disgusting remains. I hated him instantly, of course, and that feeling hadn’t dissipated when I was finally released to go back to the tent I was staying in.
It was late by then and I was crossing the camp alone when I heard a loud cheer come out of one of the counselors’ cabins. The door was ajar and I inched that way to see what was happening. One of the counselors saw me and told me to come in—and there, on a small black-and-white television was the grainy image (shown here) of a man in a white space suit. It was Neil Armstrong, who had just taken his first step onto the moon. There, in the doorway to that cabin, while all of the other campers were sleeping or reading or playing around, the eleven-year-old me watched those first minutes men walked on the moon and heard their words about coming in peace.
I had been a huge space fan for years already. In addition to building a model of the Gemini capsule, I had checked out books at the library on the history of rockets and space flight. I’m sure I was terribly disappointed when I learned that I would be at camp, without a television, when the moon landing happened. But it all worked out. What could have been better, in fact, than walking out into that dark camp afterward, looking up at the moon without the lights of a city around me, and thinking: There are men up there, right now. Of course, the moon would never look quite the same after that—to me or to anyone else.
A man in Germany (Jörg Kowalski) who reads my bimonthly Robert Lax Newsletter (you can sign up at robertlax.com) sent me a note and a book recently. The note told of his trip to Patmos to follow in Lax’s footsteps, and the book contained his poetry, some influenced by Lax’s work.
The back of the poetry book had only the words pictured here on it. I can’t think of a better (or more succinct) definition of being an artist; of why one makes art.
For those who don’t know German, here’s a translation:
now I see
what you don’t see
and that is me
The reason I and many other older writers and writing teachers advise young would-be writers to do something else unless they feel absolutely driven to be a writer is that being a writer can be extremely hard. It rarely pays enough to live on and there’s no guarantee that, however hard you work, you’ll ever succeed. In fact, given the vagaries of the writing and reading world, the odds are against you.
The hardest part of being a writer, though, at least a career writer, is the emotional side. Every writer has faced rejection of her work, and all but the most commercially successful writers face it again and again, even after they’ve achieved a fair amount of publishing success.
Rejection of any kind is hard on anyone. What makes the rejection a writer (or any artist) experiences even harder is that the work she does, she does alone, usually for hours on end. It is emotionally taxing just to muster the belief in yourself and the work you’re doing to return to the desk day after day, creating something at the outer edges of your abilities without any insurance that anyone else will see its value. But once you’ve finished it—or think you might have finished it—subjecting it to the opinions of often-distracted and almost-always-overworked editors or agents is more taxing still.
So how does a writer navigate rejection and keep writing? Here are three thoughts:
1. Rather than submitting your finished work immediately to magazines or an agent, cultivate a circle of smart writing friends who will give you their honest opinion on it first. If you can, join or form a regular writing critique group. Make sure the group members are dedicated and at a relatively similar place in their writing development.
2. When you finally submit, do so on a tiered basis, sending out to the places you’d most like to be published first, and then, when the inevitable rejections come back, sending to the next tier down and then the next and the next. Every time a rejection comes in, send your piece out to the next place on your list right away so you always have things in circulation, always have a reason to hope.
3. Pay attention to any comments editors might give, since most don’t do more than send a form rejection anymore. Comments mean you’ve caught their attention. But don’t put too much stock in rejection of any kind, with or without comments. The best thing about rejection is it clarifies your intentions, helping you see if you’re writing because you feel a deep need to write or writing only for the supposed reward of seeing what you’ve written in print. Of course every writer wants to see what he has written be published and read, but the most important thing is to write what you have to write rather than trying to write what you think someone will publish.
Welcome rejection. It is a sign that you have taken the risk of sending your work out, giving it a chance to find its place in the world. The more rejections you experience, the less any one will bother you. If you persevere, rejection builds fortitude. And, if nothing else, it means one more person has read your writing. 🙂
I have been teaching writing for over 25 years, and during my 17 years in Portland State University’s creative writing program, the students chose me to receive the English department’s John Eliot Allen Outstanding Teacher Award five times–almost every year I was eligible. (You had to sit out two years each time you won it.) I mention this only to suggest I know a little bit about teaching writing. Or maybe just teaching in general.
Whenever I received one of the Allen awards, people would ask me the secret to good teaching. My answer was always that you have to love your students, caring about them as individuals. Beyond that, every teacher has to teach in her own way, according to her own personality and vision. Here are three basic principles that have worked for me:
And one more thing: Encourage your students in every possible way at every possible moment.
The most consistent thing students have said about my teaching is that I’m tough but fair. If you aren’t tough, you aren’t helping students do anything more than they could do on their own, in which case they don’t need a teacher. If you aren’t fair, they’re going to stop listening to you no matter how right you are about what you’re trying to teach them.
For the third year in a row, I’ll be part of the excellent creative writing faculty at the Manhattanville College MFA Summer Writers’ Week. Taking place June 17-21, the program offers workshops every morning, craft and publishing seminars every afternoon, and readings every evening. It’s an awesome week.
This year’s featured writer is novelist Hannah Tinti, who will be teaching the fiction workshop. The wonderful Melissa Tuckey will be back to teach the poetry workshop and the talented Sharbari Ahmed returns to teach dramatic writing.
Registration is $750 and for a mere $200 more, you can stay in a single room in a suite in the dorms. Manhattanville is in Purchase, NY, just half an hour from New York City, making it easy to add a couple of days in Manhattan on either end.
Go to the Summer Writers’ Week website for full details.