Depth and Dichotomies: September 11

When my husband called on September 11, 2001 and told me a plane had hit the World Trade Center, I didn’t picture jets, fires, crumbling. I pictured some idiot in a little plane, losing his way, crashing.

But in a sense, that’s what metaphorically happened. Far before September 11, 2001, we somehow lost our way. And September 11 was like the definitive wrong turn, enabling us to further divide the world into good and evil, terrorist and freedom-lover, left wing and right wing, Republican and Democrat, Christian and atheist, the dichotomies giving us carte blanche to strip each other of our humanity.

I saw this at play in President Obama’s speech about health care a couple of nights ago—the shots of Republican Senators smirking, the cat calls. Tragic, when whatever one might think of Obama’s policies, one thing continues to stand out that has earned my utmost respect. He is a uniter, rather than a divider. Continually, he rises above these arbitrary dichotomies, trying to find common ground. It’s admirable, and it’s where we need to go as global society if we want to have any hope of saving the planet, if we want to find our way home.

My daughter is taking a class in conflict resolution and peace studies. She told me last night that the reading has been focusing on whether violence is innate or learned. “It doesn’t matter,” she claims, because there have been studies that show that people can resist these urges toward violence, the urges to make someone or something “other.” This is what we need to do, to stop thinking of those who are different, or who believe different things as other, to find the common threads that link us, even if they are as simple as the need for food and water, for love and for a healthy body. We need to stop thinking of ourselves as competitors and start thinking of ourselves as collaborators. It’s the only way we’re going to survive.

This is not what I intended to write about today. I intended to shamelessly promote my 9/11-themed children’s book, Playing Dad’s Song, about a boy in Brooklyn who lost his dad on 9/11 and how learning music helped him heal from his grief. I wanted to write about my trip to New York, my childhood home, shortly after 9/11. My friend, Greg, and I walked through the streets of Brooklyn and saw posters of the missing, “altars” dedicated to heroes at the local police and fire stations, and Greg recounted story after story of people helping each other, bonding together; yet, I could tell he was suffering from a malaise that seemed to hang over the entire psyche of the city, thick as the soot that rained down after the towers crumbled.

I wanted to write about these things, because, as I said on my Facebook status today, New York is the home of my bones. My friend Lew, a fellow New Yorker transplanted like me to western Massachusetts, corroborated that feeling with the words “deep home.” If the lessons of the decade have taught us anything, it is that need to find depth in a culture that shuns it. And in that depth we need to find home, the home of humanity, of bonding together. It’s why I write and read fiction. I’m searching for depth, for the connections that bind us together, rather than the dichotomies that force us apart.

Simmering

After the rush of finishing a first draft, it’s so tempting to rush back in and tie up the loose threads, but I’ve learned from experience that I have to let things simmer. What does this mean for me? No writing!

At least, no writing on the WIP for at least a week—two or three is probably better, in order to really get some distance to see both the flaws in what I currently have and the opportunities to make it better. Sometimes this is a welcome relief, as pulling the book in first draft stage feels about as satisfying as pulling out my own teeth. But this book seemed to just fly. Not that it was effortless, but I found that when I could get into the characters’ heads, it felt almost like channeling.

All the more reason to wait—to bring my reasoned, critical voice **after** the elation has subsided, to transform that giddy, falling-in-love feeling into a more mature long-lasting love, which is what I need for my long-term relationship with the book, and what the book needs to develop a long-term relationship with its readers.

But, I am impatient and will need to distract myself with other tasks—hopefully more productive than my latest time wasting addiction—4 X 4 Sudoku. At least it’s another beautiful day in Massachusetts, a day for harvesting and bicycling, and a couple more marketing tasks, and who knows, maybe I’ll even get back into blogging!

First Draft “Purples”

TO BLOG OR NOT TO BLOG?

I feel a bit as if I should come up with a host of “dog-ate-my-homework” excuses around not blogging for four months. Though all I’m going to offer is that I’d rather be writing and blogging, and time being what it has been with my teaching job at the university this semester, it’s been all I can do to keep working on my fiction.

Still, I’d love to hear from others on what you get out of blogging. I’ve been advised that it’s one of those necessary activities authors need to do to fulfill the requirements of that nasty “M” word—Marketing. I’m married to someone who does marketing for a living. He likes to blog. It gives him a forum to share his political views and promote his thinking about business and ethics and how it relates to his vision for a better world.

I think that as a fiction writer, my vision is more metaphorical, or, at least, I’m more comfortable expressing it that way. I am one of those writers who don’t keep a journal—oh, occasionally I scribble some words to work out a feeling, or explore an issue through poetry, but I have no great need to create a chronicle of my mundane thoughts and activities. And not surprisingly, when we travel, it is my husband who takes all the pictures. I’m happy to have them, but don’t feel the need for something that tangible, preferring instead to remember the fragments as they reappear in my brain from time to time, often transformed into something I can use in my fiction.

However, one of the things I have liked about blogging is the community—the people I’ve met through LJ and Facebook, MyNESCBWI and other sites. And I’ve missed that, so rather than kvetching, I’m going to try blogging one more time. And I’d like to intersperse my own musings with interviews of other YA and middle grade authors, particularly if you have a book coming out—so please do contact me.

Kids Heart Authors Day–Thanks, Raf

So many lovely things about the KidsHeartAuthors day:

First, there was the warm welcome from Rebecca, the children’s book manager at the Odyssey Bookshop. Second, I got to hang out with a wealth of friendly, talented and interesting authors. I met author/illustrator Diane de Groat for the first time. I’ve admired her work for years, since first reading Lois Lowry’s Anastasia and Sam books to my kids when they were little. I also enjoyed meeting and chatting with Crissa-Jean Chappell, who made the trip all the way from Miami, combining an author event with the opportunity to visit her extended family in New England. Then there was Rich Michelson, whose warmth, generosity, and wit have always impressed me, and who connects me back to my New York Jewish roots whenever I hear him speak. And finally, I got to spend time with my dear friend, Jeannine Atkins, member of my writing group extraordinaire, without whose eighteen years of gentle but on-the-mark criticism, I would have never found myself at this place at this time.

At ten o’clock, as we were happily ensconced at the signing table—in alphabetical order, nonetheless, the children began to come in. Not a mob, but a good handful. But they were young. Really young. Pre-schoolers, mostly. Maybe a few in the K-2 range. Great for Diane deGroat, whose Valentine’s Day book, Roses are Pink, Your Feet Really Stink was the perfect match for the day and the audience. Jeannine read next from her award-winning picture book, Aani and the Tree Huggers about a community in India who saves the trees in their village from developers. It’s a wonderful book to inspire budding environmentalists—get them while they’re young. Much as I loved the event and loved the Odyssey, at this point, I did begin to wonder what I could offer these children who had trekked out in the cold. Playing Dad’s Song the “younger” of my two books, is really for ages eight and up, ten being about right. But serendipitously, my 16-year old, Raf, just happened to be home that Saturday—he’s usually taking music classes at New England Conservatory, and even more miraculously, happened to be awake. A quick call on my cell phone, and he was there, pulling off a short performance scene in my book, where my protagonist, Gus, plays the oboe with a blanket over his head because he’s too scared to speak in front of the class. By this time, the crowd had dwindled to just a few kids, but quality made up for quantity, as I (really Raf) had them entranced as he played the oboe, Jeannine’s sari, substituting as a blanket.

We wrapped up the event with Rich entertaining us with a delightful set of poems from Animals Anonymous, set to music composed and performed by his daughter, Marissa. Rich recently won the Sidney Taylor Gold Medal for As Good As Anybody: Martin Luther King and Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Amazing March Toward Freedom. Wow! Crissa, whose book Total Constant Order was aimed at even older kids, chose not to read, but I bought a copy of her book for Raf who’s already reading it and says it’s awesome. He’s supposed to be reading The Dispossessed for school this week, but oh well.

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