Vacations 2

Hard to write about vacations after real life has insidiously slipped in. I think the part I like best about vacations is the feeling that the rest of my life doesn’t even exist. I am totally in another place, another moment. Lago Attitlan, in Guatemala, has that feeling of other worldness, and the town in which we stayed, San Pedro La Laguna, has a particular ex-hippie escapist feeling. We actually liked this area least of the three places we visited, despite the lake’s exquisite beauty, perhaps because it felt more like a tourist resort area rather than a place to experience real people and real culture. Nevertheless, there were some gems here: the indigenous village of Santiago Attitlan, where our eyes feasted on the luscious textiles in the marketplace,

and a small Mayan museum in San Pedro where we learned more about the costumes, religion and culture. And the vistas of the lake are not to be missed.

After Lago Attitlan we traveled to Quetzaltenango (usually called by its Mayan name of Xela), which was our favorite place in Guatemala. We loved the laid back feel (no one tried to sell us things on the street) of a real Guatemalan city, and the stunning architecture in the town square. We also appreciated the town’s progressive bent, especially a little cafe called La Fonda de Che (aka Guevara), which featured trova music (Latin American songs of protest). And outside the town, the Fuentes Georginas hot springs on the top of a mountain offered exquisite views and great bathing.

I could have stayed there longer, but the trip to an indigenous weaving cooperative of 600 women in a nearby small town was also a trip worth taking.

Next post: The surprise event of our final stop.

Vacations

I’ve been off blogging, off social networking sites, off all Internet activity other than quickly checking important email and sending notes to friends and family for three weeks.

It has been wonderful!

My husband and I took a two and a half week trip to Guatemala—alone. (Our teenage kids had their own plans.) Even though we can rarely stay put in one location for more than a few days, it was one of the smoothest, most hassle-free trips we have ever taken.

We started by spending a week in Antigua, a somewhat touristy, but architecturally beautiful colonial city with over 70 language schools. We studied at one of these schools and lived in a Guatemalan family with two other students.

The rule of the house was “No English.” While my Spanish improved significantly, it did give me pause to think how grateful I was that words—in English—at least, came easily. When writing, I often chew over exactly which words I want and how to place them to achieve the nuance I’m seeking. In Spanish, I was happy when I knew the word (or at least a close substitute) for what I wanted to stay, and even happier when I could conjugate verbs correctly and make a grammatical sentence.

We spent mornings studying at the school, which consisted of one-on-one conversations with our teacher. For the first two afternoons we went on the school activities. Monday tested my embarrassment with a salsa class. Tuesday we went to park to see the exotic animals of the country, which turned out mostly to be poisonous snakes. Since we’d only been in the country two days at that point, I didn’t understand too much of the guide’s explanation, but I understood the general gist, which was “If this one bites you, you have ten minutes to live, and if this one bites you, you have thirty minutes to live.” A few of the snakes were not poisonous and were let out for petting after the tour. The brave part of the crowd, mostly the under-10 set, went for it.

On Wednesday, our Spanish instructor took us to La Azotea, a gorgeous tropical botanic garden and coffee plantation, with a museum of Mayan musical instruments and culture on the grounds, where we bought our son, Rafael, a Mayan double reed flute, since he plays the oboe. I know he’ll tell us it’s not really an oboe, even if it has the same type of reed, but I’m hoping he’ll appreciate the thought. He’s right in that it has a flatter, slightly more grating sound.

During our time in Antigua we also visited several other small museums, braved the “chicken buses” to tour an organic macadamia nut farm, and enjoyed the sweets at two gringo cafes in the town square. My husband, Shel Horowitz, who is also a writer, took voluminous notes and countless pictures.

I didn’t write a word.

For me, vacation, is often about memory, seeing what I can reconstruct (although, I am happy to have the pictures). One of my writing mentors once remarked in a workshop that we remember things for a reason, even if we might remember them slant. I’m more interested in the slant memories than in getting every detail right. As a matter of fact, I confess that in recounting stories about traveling or day-to-day happenings, I’ve been known to alter details for the benefit of a better plot or punchline. Even this blog is a new form for me, but what I’m hoping to do is to convey the feel of a place without getting bogged down, to try to create just the barest outline, so I can fill in later as it suits me.

But enough musing for now. The next post will be about the next stop on our Guatemalan journey: Lago Attitlan. Following are a few more pictures.

On Fathers

As I read my friends’ page today on live journal, I was struck by how many people were blogging on fathers. I’ve often thought about my own subliminal treatment of fathers in my writing. In ESCAPING INTO THE NIGHT, Halina’s father left when she was a baby and all she has is a picture and her musings. In PLAYING DAD’S SONG, Gus’s father died on September 11. And in my unpublished novels, both children’s and adult, the fathers don’t fare much better. I have a father who murdered his wife whom his children have totally disowned, a flaky musician father who leaves his teenage daughter to deal alone with her mother’s mental illness, and a father who committed suicide. I also have a couple of books where the fathers are absent or unimportant, but only one of my yet-to-be published books, LEFTIES, has a visionary father who inspires his son through his work in the civil rights movement.

So why is this? I have nothing but positive things to say about my own father, who was an active dad before it was fashionable. As a matter of fact, while I tend to write about heavy issues, I’ve had a relatively happy life. But I agree with MP Barker (see her tag on live journal), that it’s not useful to restrict yourself to writing about your own life experience, and that we often don’t choose our characters and subjects: they choose us.

So, while I’m sure that Freud might have a field day with what my subconscious says about fathers, I’ll argue that writing is more than psychological processing. As a matter of fact, the greatest challenges come when I have to step outside of my life experience and push to get to the real emotional truth behind my fiction, whether I’ve ever experienced anything remotely like what I’m writing about, or whether I haven’t.

Holocaust Stories: The Compunction to Tell

Last Saturday I drove to the Bronx to meet Esia Shor, a survivor of the Bielski partisan group I wrote about in Escaping Into the Night, and her daughter, Lora. They greeted my husband, son, and me warmly, offering us a large and tasty spread of bagels, muffins, fruit, cheese and avocados. (When Jews get together, there is always food!) Essie showed me some old pictures and told me some stories about her experience as one of the original 25 members of the Bielski partisans.

Essie is a vibrant woman who looks years younger than her age, and I can see in her still the determination to survive and succeed in whatever she sets her mind to. Currently, she is hoping to publish her own account of her experience as a short memoir geared for schoolchildren. She told me, somewhat in jest, that my book made her angry. “Why?” I asked. “Did I get something blatantly wrong?” (every historical fiction writer’s nightmare). “No,” she said. “Because you wrote about Norwogrodek,” she exclaimed. “That’s my town, my story.”

Though she was joking, the remark gives a writer question to pause. How much responsibility do we have in portraying others’ stories? In writing Escaping Into the Night, I had no intention of portraying the life of any specific person, and merely created composite characters whose experiences were based on things I read. I’m sure the upcoming movie about the Bielski Partisans, Defiance, will have similar fictional elements. Yet having the generic story of the Bielski Partisans recounted in fiction, or even in non-fiction as was done by Peter Duffy and Nechama Tec, doesn’t take away from the compunction to tell your own story–to be in charge of conveying your own experience the way you perceived it, and to have that experience validated by readers.

Essie’s story is a moving and compelling recounting of a remarkable 16-year-old’s struggle for survival. As there will be fewer and fewer living Holocaust survivors in the years to come, it is important for us as a society need to take toward validating, preserving and disseminating the writing of people who actually lived the experience, in order that we take steps toward understanding both hatred and resilience, in the hope that future generations can learn some valuable lessons.

Here’s a picture of Essie and me.

Feeling It

Sometimes the hardest thing about writing is feeling it–really feeling it.

I am the type of person who cries at movies. I also cry at weddings, funerals, and other random emotional occasions. And when people close to me are crying because they’re upset, I start crying with them. Sometimes my children laugh at me (in a gentle way) for how easily I cry, but it’s the process of fusion into other people’s stories and lives, fictional or real, that moves me to emotion.

Ironically, I find it harder to cry when I’m the one who’s upset about something, and hardest to bring my fiction to a place when I’m crying along with my characters.

But it must be done.

And despite all the warnings about overly sentimental poets, who, according to nasty critics, cry at their own trite work, I find that tears can be a gauge toward getting to the heart of something–the sad but satisfying emotional truth of story.

Transitions

I find this time so hard–going from being swamped with end of semester details from my teaching job to an open summer. I push and push and push to get all the work done, and then suddenly, time opens, blank and terrifying!

How to resist the call of filling up all the time with things I don’t really need to do, in other words, procrastination?

Why, after a thirty-year writing habit and two published books is the open page, the worries about whether I’ll produce anything good in all this luxurious time so difficult to deal with?

Am I the only one who feels this way?

Dreaming Impossible Dreams

Last weekend, I got to see an old musical I’d never caught before either live or on film–Man of La Mancha. Since it was a local production, and the music I knew from it struck me as rather cheesy, I was expecting it to be a pleasant evening, but I wasn’t expecting to be wowed.

Boy was I wrong.

While I’d always known the story of Don Quixote, it wasn’t until I saw the production that I realized the power of this quirky character’s idealism and vision in an ugly world, how he kept insisting, despite his faltering gait and halting voice, in a world of chivalry and castles and decency. And when he sang, To Dream the Impossible Dream, I could feel the audience riveted in their seats, reacting not so much to his powerful singing voice (which was nothing to discount) but to the urgency of holding onto creating your own vision of the world and working to make it happen, even if it might seem impossible.

We certainly need Don Quixote’s idealism if we look at the ugliness of the world today. How hard it is to stay active and true to the quest to creating a just and peaceful world. And on a more personal plane, to be a writer also feels like an impossible quest much of the time, yet we have to keep holding onto our visions and express them in the most effective way we possibly can, regardless of whether we achieve fame, recognition, or ridicule.

Taking Advantage of Spring

On these sunny days, the call of the outdoors is often stronger than the call of the computer and the internal world. The question, for me, at least, is how to resist, but how also not to feel silly for wasting these glorious days indoors. I’m blessed with Lefty, my four-legged personal trainer, so no matter what, I get out for at least 30-45 minutes, but often that doesn’t seem like enough. Still, spending large chunks of the day outdoors makes me feel as if I’m not giving my writing the time and consistency it deserves.

I have no easy answers, but here are a few things I’ve found that make the dilemma more bearable.

(1)    Write first, go out second, but make sure to go out. Perhaps, write less.

(2)    Fully celebrate and experience the spring; here in New England I have been happily mesmerized by the pinks and whites of weeping cherries and flowering dogwood among other trees, and the yellow of forsythia.

(3)    Use the unstructured time outside to contemplate character and plot problems—sometimes the best ideas come as I’m pulling weeds out of the flower garden.

(4)    Occasionally take a full day off and do something really fun—go on a bike ride, a long hike, spend the whole day in the garden. The trick, is obviously not to be seduced into taking too many days off, but often a break from routine can serve to nurture and replenish.

(5)    Perhaps, enjoy the day and write at night—I can’t do this, but maybe others can.

If nothing else, this “problem” makes me appreciate the rainy days more than I might have, as I get a break from being torn.

WRITING RITUALS: DEVELOPING THE HABIT

People often ask me what a typical writing day is like for me. As a juggler of many roles: author, book marketer, business writer, teacher, parent, community activist, etc., no day is typical, but habit plays a major role for me in keeping my nose to the grindstone. I’m not blessed with the ability to wake up at dawn, (and the rare times I do, I have absolutely nothing worth saying) but on the days I’m not teaching full-time, I do try to get to the computer within an hour after I wake up—by nine or nine-thirty at the latest. I find that building in little rituals helps, allowing myself a quick glance at the newspaper over breakfast before carting a large mug of tea upstairs. I find this habit so ingrained, it feels a little bit like Pavlov’s dogs. I find myself facing the computer without even thinking about whether I should write, clean the house, run errands, grade papers, or work on a paid project. Then, I actually build in a limit of 30 minutes of procrastination time which serves as both a warm-up and a way of not succumbing to distractions later, I check my e-mail and social networking sites, and play no more than one—all right, maybe two—games of solitaire. While people may scoff, I find that spending 10 minutes thinking about nothing but the patterns of cards frees up my brain to create without thinking about the pressing administrative minutiae and other demands of the day, all of which—out of habit—I’ve trained myself to save for later.

Owning All Your Writing–The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

In going through the backlog of poetry, most of which I wrote 20-30 years ago, I found, along with poems I liked and was proud of, a number of poems that now felt too embarrassing to even have my name on them (some of these were even published). And in putting together a binder of my work, I actually left some of these “bad poems” out, adding instead a number of what I’d previously categorized as unfinished poems that I was finally able to revise by putting into practice a lot of the craft I didn’t have twenty years ago.

It was interesting that just as I was winding down this process and settling back into my next YA fiction project, I reconnected with my old poetry friends, who ran a reading series in New York. This reading on the upper east side of Manhattan was my favorite among the many series I attended, and I remember fondly all the quirky and interesting people. Some of the poetry was amazing, some less so, but all of it, I realized, like both the poems of mine I loved and the poems of mine I am now embarrassed about having ever written, gave us the freedom to speak out about what was important to us, and to share that with a community–this was no small gift, and I treasure its difference from the modern day “poetry slams” where there are winners and losers.

So what I’m trying to learn from this is not to feel embarrassed about old material. It simply is part of the process of growing in writing and in life.

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