Peg Kerr's Journal

I get the Writer's Almanac email from Minnesota Public Radio every day. Yesterday's included these two paragraphs about Louise Erdrich, and my immediate reaction was yes oh yes indeed yes:

She said, "We have a lot of books in our house. They are our primary decorative motif—books in piles on the coffee table, framed book covers, books sorted into stacks on every available surface, and of course books on shelves along most walls. Besides the visible books, there are the boxes waiting in the wings, the basement books, the garage books, the storage locker books. They are a sort of insulation, soundproofing some walls. They function as furniture, they prop up sagging fixtures and disguised by quilts function as tables. The quantities and types of books are fluid, arriving like hysterical cousins in overnight shipping envelopes only to languish near the overflowing mail bench. Advance Reading Copies collect at beside, to be dutifully examined—to ignore them and read Henry James or Barbara Pym instead becomes a guilty pleasure. I can't imagine home without an overflow of books. The point of books is to have way too many but to always feel you never have enough, or the right one at the right moment, but then sometimes to find you'd longed to fall asleep reading The Aspern Papers, and there it is."

She said, "By having children, I've both sabotaged and saved myself as a writer. [...] With a child you certainly can't be a Bruce Chatwin or a Hemingway, living the adventurer-writer life. No running with the bulls at Pamplona. If you value your relationships with your children, you can't write about them. You have to make up other, less convincing children. There is also one's inclination to be charming instead of presenting a grittier truth about the world. But then, having children has also made me this particular writer. Without my children, I'd have written with less fervor; I wouldn't understand life in the same way. I'd write fewer comic scenes, which are the most challenging. I'd probably have become obsessively self-absorbed, or slacked off. Maybe I'd have become an alcoholic. Many of the writers I love most were alcoholics. I've made my choice, I sometimes think: Wonderful children instead of hard liquor."

Literature's gender gap
Women are underrepresented in literary publishing because men aren't interested in what they have to say.

(Rather a bald, sweeping statement, but the author offers evidence.) I've mentioned the story before about the cover for The Wild Swans, I think. When we were discussing possible covers, my editor said, rather to my surprise, that she expected the audience would be women. When I asked her whether she thought gay men would read it, she said she said something (and I can't remember the exact wording) that she didn't think men read books with...a woman in the cover art? A woman's author's name? Can't remember exactly.

(The author's on Twitter at @magiciansbook.)

I've started carrying a miniature Moleskine notebook in my purse. They're fun for jotting down random things. Here is a fascinating article, with abundant illustrations about twenty famous men (including Ben Franklin, Leonardo Da Vinci and Mark Twain), and the things they put down in their pocket notebooks.

(Would be curious to see an equivilent article about women and their pocket notebooks.)

A very interesting site examining the problems of translating the Harry Potter into Japanese, Chinese and Vietnamese here.

Although both of my novels have romantic elements, I've never considered myself someone who generally reads romance novels myself. There are a few exceptions. Jane Austen, of course, is the most important one. I adore Jane Austen, as long-time readers of this blog know. Interestingly enough, it was a science fiction writer who got me to read Jane Austen, when I was (I think?) somewhere in my late twenties or early thirties. Eleanor Arnason made an off-hand comment at a panel at a science fiction convention (or perhaps it was one of our one-on-one conversations afterwards; my memory is hazy) that one of the best Iago-like depictions of evil she's ever read takes place in the opening chapter of Sense and Sensibility. Fanny Dashwood cleverly leads her husband, step-by-step, to repudiate the promise he made to his father on the latter’s deathbed to support his sisters. She gets him to agree to a little, and then a little more, and a little more, until by the end he is actually congratulating himself for his generosity for resolving to behave in totally dishonorable and miserly way to the women his father commended to his care. I was intrigued by her description of the passage and so read the book--and I was hooked. It's curious, that my introduction to romances was due to my writerly curiosity about how to write an effective villain.

Of course, Jane Austen wasn't considered a 'romance writer' in her day because the marketing category simply didn't even exist yet. Even today, I think that people who dismiss her as a mere romance novelist (often without reading her) are missing the point. She wrote about love and marriage, true. But she was hardly a wild romantic, but more of an Augustan realist with a very keen sense of the absurdity of human nature. When it comes down choosing between the worldview of Marianne or Elinor Dashwood, I think Miss Austen would clearly side with Elinor.

I also read Georgette Heyer's novels, which were recommended to me by a friend. I loved them and reread them almost every year. I had a couple Joan Aiken and Jane Aiken Hodge romances, which I picked up because I read Joan Aiken's children's books, and because Joan Aiken wrote continuations of Jane Austen's works.

Last year I picked up the Sons of Destiny novels of Jean Johnson (ladyofthemasque) because I'd read and enjoyed some of her fanfiction. These were fantasy romances. Magic+sex=fluffy and fun.

But last month, I did something I'd never done before. I'd just finished the Jean Johnson books and when I got the bookstore gift card from my family, I went into a bookstore and headed, somewhat uncertainly, to a section I'd never hung out in before: I think I'll buy a romance. Any romance, I don't care. Um, well, a good romance. But which one? No recommendation. No knowledge of the author. Could I pick a romance up off the shelf and just read it cold?

I didn't know and I had literally never tried doing such a thing before. I have a sense of a slight preference for type (I was gravitating toward the historical romances, particularly regency) but I have no idea who popular romance authors are. As a genre, I had a little idea of how the marketing works from reading, of all things, Elizabeth Peter's Die for Love, a marvelously snarky and fun murder mystery set, of all places, at a romance writers convention. Yeah, Elizabeth Peters was right. The covers of romance novels ARE embarrassing. I thought about Joanna Russ' essay "How to Suppress Women's Writing" as I browsed the lurid covers. Here was writing by women, for women. It's wildly successful, but I'm embarrassed to pick it up. I thought a lot about that as I browsed, but yeah, I was uneasy about being seen carrying a book with those stereotypical clinch bodice-ripper covers. How interesting. Was I buying into the disparagment of the genre without thinking about it?

My first two picks were okay. Fun and pleasantly salacious. I enjoyed them well enough that I went back last weekend and picked up four more, again, picking cold. OMG. This last attempt was much less successful. I squirmed at the egregious errors, in history and voice. It was like biting into a bon bon, hoping for some delicious chococolate, and encountering plastic. Well, that was a waste of money. The cover blurbs were useless and "New York Times Best Selling Author" is no guarantee of quality, believe me. The historical errors irritated me, and the cliches were a turn off.

Well, what do other people think are good fantasy novelists? So I googled "Best romance novels" and picked a book that came in #1 on several lists: Outlander by Diane Gabaldon. There are over sixteen hundred reviews on the Amazon page, so I guess a few people have read it. I was interested to discover, when I got to the bookstore to pick up a copy, that although it was considered a rather groundbreaking book when it came out, and won the best novel of 1991 from the Romance Writers of America, it is now shelved in "Fiction." Not Romance. No clinch on the cover.

So I'm diving into the book, and so far it's certainly gripping my attention. No taste of plastic in my teeth so far. I'll keep you posted.

MyCharityWater Campaign Report:

$5,000 CAMPAIGN GOAL
$1826 RAISED SO FAR
91 people served
42 donations
29 days left

The Charity:Water blog posted about this campaign, and I felt more than a little envious. He raised more than $25,000? What fundraising mojo does he have that I don't have?

Then I realized he is one of the co-founders of Twitter.

Oh. Guess that answers that.

(Only 29 days left! There's still time to make the goal!)

I'm late to the party, but...

naomikritzer sent me a link to a story a few months back because she knows I'm interested in reading good fanfiction depictions of Neville Longbottom. I didn't get around to reading it until this weekend, but the story sucked me right in. It's a re-telling of Deathly Hallows from Neville's point of view, covering what happened at Hogwarts, with Neville running the D.A. An author's note at the conclusion of the story ended with this:

...This story is not dedicated to my readers, or to a group of fictional, if -- at least to me -- compelling teenagers [i.e., the D.A.]. It is dedicated to the real-life soldiers who gave their time and effort to help me with the psychology of war. Many of these young men and women are as young as eighteen themselves, and they are not fighting with wands and hexes on the grounds of an imaginary wizarding school. They fire real bullets and shed real blood on the very non-fictional battlefields of the Muggle world even as you read this, and their courage, their sacrifice is too often ignored because they do so out of our daily sight...Go ahead and drop me some feedback if you want, but I would also ask that the next time you spot a young man or woman in uniform, take a moment to shake their hand. Their truth is greater than fiction.

That's quite a particularly graceful note, I thought. I remembered that Rowling has said that the series, and particularly the last book, is about recovering from the scars of war. Perhaps this fanfiction writer worked at the Veterans Administration or something?

There was something about that last line that niggled at me, though, something half-remembered. Who was this author, anyway?

I took a look. The author's name was "thanfiction" (on Livejournal as thanfiction). I sat there for a second and then my eyes widened. Thanfiction? Wait a minute. I spent a couple minutes googling, following up on something I'd noticed fleetingly on my friends list sometime in the last month.

I told you I was late to the party. Well, it was a weird trick of timing, actually. Naomi had sent me the link months ago, before the knowledge hit the internet (she said she's a little embarrassed about doing so, in retrospect), and I didn't look at the author's name until I had finished reading the entire story. But yes, dear reader, I had unknowingly spent the last two days reading and enjoying Dumbledore's Army and the Year of Darkness (the "DAYDverse") a work written by one of the craziest people I've ever encountered on the internet: the notorious Amy Player AKA Victoria Bitter AKA Mr. Frodo AKA Jordan Wood AKA Andrew Blake AKA thanfiction. The dots were connected that thanfiction was the person that fandom_wank calls "VB," I guess, about a month ago.

( Read more )

So what did I really think about the story? And how did my opinion change, once I knew the authorship?

( Armchair psychology is so much fun )

Tell me about an author whose works you enjoy, rather against your own inclination, because you find the person doing the writing to be absolutely reprehensible. How do you reconcile that for yourself?

Who doesn't love a good letter? Well, if not good, at least an interesting one. Or moving. Or perhaps even chilling.

Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience: Letters of Note.

Syndicated at lettersofnote and lettersofnote_feed

It's awesome to have a totally clear day outside for my birthday. Free birthday coffee from Caribou for the win.

Chris Stewart in another racism accusations kerfluffle. Surprised? Not. Judging from experience, I'm much more inclined to believe Tim Cadotte.

The reunion for the Mexico mission group is this coming Sunday, which is the same day as the May Day parade. I'm wildly irritated about this; I don't want to miss the parade, but the girls don't want to miss the reunion, which would mean driving to Minnetonka.

I have been forced to hand over the cell phone to Rob, who needs it for his job with the census, so Mom, if you try to call it to reach me, you'll reach him instead. It is making me remarkably twitchy to be without it.

The Tonks and the Auror's EP "Tonks for the Memories" has given me hope again for the Wizard Rock EP of the Month Club.

Tonight we have a simultaneous Girl Scout meeting, karate class and school meeting for parents. I suppose I'm supposed to get dinner in there somewhere, too, only I have no idea where.

I need a book to read.

I am starting to get a very very tiny itch to write original fiction again. I'm not sure what, if anything, will come of it.

My lawn looks just terrible, and I have zero incentive to do anything with the garden this year. Lack of money, time, motivation. My sister assures me that gardening gets easier when the kids get a bit older. Until then, avert your eyes when passing my house. Sorry.

Bete noir flourless chocolate cake for lunch, also for the win. It's my birthday. Bite me.

I'm not going to start riding my bike May 1, because of the knee problems. I am feeling a great deal of guilt over this. But my knee hurts every time I do something as innocent as hiking it up to cross my legs.

Sometimes grace is all about just going on with your life, despite everything. There may be pride there, too. I've been taught to extol one and be suspicious of the other, but I suppose it doesn't matter as long as the result is the same. Right?

If ellen_kushner was brave enough to post this, then hey, why not me?*

If you could force me to write anything, what would it be?

(*Realizing, of course, that I'm not saying I'll actually do it. I'm just curious as to how people will respond . . .)

My paper journal has been sadly neglected lately. This is making me uneasy.

As I mentioned before, I started keeping a daily paper journal at the age of fourteen and I'm pushing fifty now. I got my journals at Woolworths for years, and then, once all the Woolworths in this area went out of business, resorted to the At-a-Glance company. They're not nearly as cheap now: a blank journal that I buy now with the days properly printed for each day of the calendar year is now over $25.00. I have them all arranged on a row in my office. I'm running out of room on the top of the bookshelf where I keep them.

For years--decades--I was extremely rigid that every page had to be filled. No matter what. I could let a day or two pass, but I had to catch up later.

Then, about, let's see, five or six years ago, this changed. I'd let a day pass and not catch up. I didn't worry about it. I don't know exactly what made me change my policy. Well, perhaps I do. I started LiveJournaling around the same time. I was still writing; I was still doing the same journaling about my day I always did. Except that now, quite pleasantly, with the on-line journal, I was getting some response back.

Then, over the last two years or so, things changed again. I was letting more than a day or two go by without writing. Now I'd leave as long as a week blank and not fill it in. This year has been even worse. My entries are sparse, and hardly interesting. Well, I suppose they never really were interesting, but I was always diligent about it. Now I am not.

It's peculiar how my audience, my intent for these journal have changed over the years. When I was fourteen, they were for myself. I didn't think about what would happen to them after my death, because since I was a teenager, of course I was going to live forever. I had to face the issue of what would happen to them after I died, really, for the first time, after I married Rob. Now there was someone in my life who might presumably inherit them. We talked about it again after we made wills, after the girls were born. I decided that Rob could read them after I died, if he survived me, and the girls could read them (after I died) once they reached the age of 21.

What about anyone else?

My thinking about my paper journal has changed, in a way, I think, related to the long slow realization that I've been processing that I'm not writing fiction anymore. I think, in the back in my mind, part of the reason I always kept a journal was that I felt that I was a writer. That was what writers did. It was good training for writing, I know it--I've had various anxieties about my capabilities in various aspects of writing (i.e., plotting), but I never lacked confidence in one: I always felt I knew how to write a scene. That, I attributed to the fact that I have always been a faithful journaler. I had learned, through years of long practice in recording my daily life, how to describe one or two incidents, along with my thoughts concerning them, and write them down in exactly one page.

The other reason lurking in the unspoken recesses of my mind was this: I was a writer. Maybe, maybe some day I'd be a great writer! Maybe people would be interested in my processes, the life of my inner mind. If I kept a journal--well, I wouldn't want anyone to read it while I was alive. But when I was dead and gone and couldn't care, my thoughts would be there for scholars to read, wouldn't they? I've been the family genealogist, and I've been interested in academic and literary history, letters and journals of other writers.

I wrote about this in the paper journal last night, the first entry I'd made in it in almost two weeks. I put into words something that has been niggling at me, bothering me, and was perhaps affecting my willingness to keep up the entries in my paper journal. Just as I came to the realization that perhaps my fiction writing is over, I think a lurking unspoken suspicion has been growing: I don't have a writing career that will be of much interest to scholars. My books are too few, too unimportant. After I'm dead, I suppose the journals might be read with some interest by my descendants, but that's probably it. Maybe the Minnesota Historical Society might want them, but otherwise, I honestly can't see how these journals would be valued by anyone.

Perhaps I'm wrong. An incredibly fascinating analysis/exegesis of the diary of Martha Ballard, a 18th century New England midwife, was made by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812). For years historians had dismissed Martha Ballard's dry, laconic little daybook (a record of the deliveries she had made for twenty-seven years) as "trivial" and "unimportant." But Louise Thatcher Ulrich cross-referenced Martha's account with public records and newspapers of the day and wove together a fascinating analysis about what the diary had to tell scholars about the history of the early republic: the role of women in the economic life of the community, the nature of marriage and sexual relations, the scope of medical knowledge and practice. I think of the line from the Gettysburg address: "The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here . . ." and yet Lincoln was wrong. The world did remember and note those words. And what about my words? Is my life, when it comes down to it, essentially trivial? Will others find meaning in it, even if (due to my depression perhaps) I cannot see it myself?

The paper diary, I realized as I made my entry last night, was first a simple journal, then a repository for my hunger to be remembered. Now it has become a symbol and repository for my anxieties and depression over the idea that my life is little and meaningless.

No wonder I've been avoiding it lately.

[Cross-posted to embodiment]