Finding Beauty in the July 4th Trash

Three times in my life I have moved into apartments that were, to some extent, trashed.

The first apartment that I lived in with my college boyfriend turned out to be the place where all the black flies in the county came to die. It also initially had no running water, and we had to walk to the gas station when we needed facilities.

Years later, I moved back into the apartment I grew up in, after it had been occupied for some years by my mentally ill former stepfather.  {An essay about him is here.} And after my divorce I moved into the apartment that had been my grandparent’s place in Greenwich Village. It had only been neglected for a couple of decades.

Trash can be cleared away; a new life can be fashioned in the wreckage.  I’m pretty good at taking a look around at a crime scene and saying, okay, so what can we do with this?

By the way, that’s also the work of an essayist.  Two quotes I repeat often: “Only trouble is interesting,” wrote Janet Burroway, “Everything is copy,” said Nora Ephron  (“Copy”, in the old hard boiled journalist use of the word, means “written material”.) She also said “I feel bad for the people who don’t at some point understand that there’s something funny in even the worst things that can happen to you.”

Recipe for Writing (and perhaps Life?):

• Take one (1)  shitty thing that happens to you.
• Gain distance.
• Fashion it into something that helps you understand it and helps others too.

Frankly, I’m getting a little tired of rehabilitation projects. But it’s a lesson that life keeps on handing to me, so I guess I better pay attention. The most recent iteration was at Kripalu over Independence Day weekend, where I took a painting and collage workshop with Linda Novick.

On the first day, we worked with oil pastels and water color in a resist technique. You put down a layer of the oil pastels, and then cover it water color, and the pastel repels the water in interesting ways.

I resisted this resist technique. I didn’t like what I did at all; I thought it was stupid and gaudy.  So the next day, when the task was to make a quick and dirty collage on cardboard, I eagerly teared up my pieces of resistance and said: now what can we do with this? And how quickly can I get it over with?

To my surprise, I ended up working on it for a long time and liking what resulted. I  bootleg bound it into this asymmetrical, pageless, wordless book.

This is the back:

It was only after I finished it that I realized how much the front piece looked like fireworks… and that this piece was really about Independence Day, my second least favorite holiday on the calendar because it has twice been the occasion of big life changes.

So the book is called “Independence Day.” It’s both uneven and unstable — I cut scallops into the bottom of the front cover. It can stand on its own, but only very carefully.

The interior, which you can’t see here, is fairly dark. And then…there’s a more gentle ending with gold and cobalt blue.  Could there actually be a hopeful being alive inside this cynical creature?

Which is the other annoying thing about fashioning something great out of something lousy: you always end up learning something in the process. Often it’s about yourself.

I read “On the Ethics of Writing about Others” in Phillip Lopate’s anthology, To Show and to Tell, only after I wrote my own piece on bile and spite.

If I had tackled these tasks in reverse order, I would have saved myself a lot of time, because I could have just written this sentence: Read Lopate’s essay, I agree with it.

Oh well. But read his essay, I agree with it. My favorite bits include his rules on this tricky topic for himself, which are:

1) Never write to settle scores.

2) Write as beautifully as possible.

I also liked that when he wrote about his family, he changed the name of his siblings but not his parents, “reasoning, I suppose, that my parents were elderly and their lives were nearly over, whereas my siblings were still in the midst of the struggle.”

Book Arts for Writers

Over the years, I’ve been amused at how writers of different types and genres live on totally isolated islands. We all take the same alphabet and rearrange it on the page to create various effects — but as it is with every major profession, specialization creates silos.

I first noticed this when I spoke at the AWP conference a few years ago, which is an association of writing programs — basically professors and students involved with literary MFA programs. I’d been writing professionally for nearly twenty years at that time, but other than the person who invited me to speak I recognized not a soul. My life, and livelihood, had been wrapped up in writing for magazines, newspapers and websites that were pretty much aimed at a mainstream audience. The world of the academy was different, writing there is an exercise in Literary Art. I learned that describing someone’s writing as “accessible,” which is a basic necessity in commercial writing, would here be a major insult.

I’ve now infiltrated another silo, related to my writing concerns but totally different. It’s called Book Art, which is using the form of the book (and its content) to communicate an idea. The Center for Book Arts in New York City has a definition here. It involves bookbinding, letterpress, altered books, book sculptures, folded books. All kinds of lovely things that are becoming more rare as information is so easily transmitted digitally. And what becomes more rare, becomes more valuable.

I’ve been reading up on Book Arts, both with books on paper — 500 Handmade Books, Volume 2, pictured above really gives you a great idea of what this form is all about. And of course, all irony noted, there’s plenty to find online. This is where I’ve started.

http://fuckyeahbookarts.tumblr.com/

http://paperphilia.com/

http://fpba.com/blog/

http://bookuse.tumblr.com/

http://fpba.com/blog/

http://www.bookbindingnow.com/

Nothing to Envy: Some Thoughts

I read Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives of North Koreans over the holiday. It’s been on my list of books to buy for a long while, but it was only acquired during an early December raid on Powell’s — which turned out to be great timing because, unrelated, the death of Kim Jong-Il soon followed.

Anyway, I devoured Nothing to Envy in two days, and in fact I would have read it faster if I hadn’t been sick with a lousy cold and slammed with work at the same time — it was a page turner.

I’ve been considering why it was so compelling. Barbara Demick imparts an astounding amount of information about North Korean politics, economics, diet, language, social structure, prisons, markets, almost without the reader noticing, so caught up are we in the stories of the characters.

When I looked at it again, pencil in hand, I realized that the whole book is actually framed around a doomed love story between two North Koreans, with other characters’ stories woven in between.

The thing I find so interesting about this is that Demick lets reader knows very early — page 9 — that the love story won’t have a happy ending. So the tension that sustains this book isn’t a sappy will-the-boy-get-the-girl.  The tension comes from wondering how this relationship will unfold and unravel, and what it will all mean.

It’s a device she uses on a smaller scale with other characters, too. I admire this for a few reasons — first, because it works; second, because it reduces the amount of work the reader must do to keep up — these are complicated stories; third,   it strikes me as fundamentally honest. The writer knows how the story is going to end, and while readers don’t want the whole story thrown at them all at once, it’s refreshing to see the authorial strategy on the table. Once you’re re-reading the book, that is — there’s no way to catch any of this on the first go.

In her acknowledgments, Demick thanks John Hersey, who was her teacher (a very subtle way of saying she went to Yale, I suppose). She says that Hiroshima was an inspiration as she wrote her book — which has now led me to re-read Hiroshima. I’m in the midst of it now, too soon to say anything at all about it, but I’m curious to see if I can find the inspiration for one remarkable book in another.