Writers’ Work-in-Progress Day

So much of what we do is invisible, until it’s shaped and edited and proofed and published between hard or soft covers.  Today, in the spirit of sharing, my friend Beth Kephart proclaimed a Work-in-Progress Day, inviting other writers to post brief excerpts on their blogs or Facebook pages.  I posted, tagged friends I thought would be game — and then raced off to meet various deadlines. A few hours later, I returned to my post to find a shelf full of work I can’t wait to read in full.

Beth Kephart

Ru Freeman

Moira Egan

Robin Black

Jim Breslin

Marta Rose

Cynthia Reeves

Catherine Staples

“Mount Zion” by Andrea Jarrell

When we get off the plane, I tell my kids to look for my father’s cowboy hat. I haven’t seen him in a couple of years but I know to look for the hat. But when I spot him, he’s wearing a baseball cap pulled down low, standing off to the side with his hands tucked into the front pockets of his jeans and his hip cocked.

He’s incognito befitting the Hollywood star he was supposed to become but never quite did. Despite this, people sometimes think they recognize him. Maybe they have seen him on a rerun of The Rockford Files or the old Battlestar Gallactica – a set I visited when I was in high school, eating lunch with him in the commissary. Or maybe they’ve never laid eyes on him and have fallen victim to his knack for looking like “someone.”

He sees us but waits a moment. Once we are fully in his orbit, he steps forward, opens his arms like he’s feeling rain come down and shimmies his hips. He sings “Viva Las Vegas” loud enough to make my 13-year-old daughter cringe and look around to see if anyone is watching.

Her look of mortification is the same one I’m usually wearing, but it’s not on my face now and this surprises me. Despite my pounding headache, I feel a gentle shift as if I’ve just switched a sack of groceries from one hip to the other – lighter for the moment.

My 10-year-old son dutifully moves into my father’s arms for a hug. I watch them together warily the way I did when my boy was small and tentatively approached a strange dog, hand outstretched for a sniff.

Then it is my turn to hug my father who doesn’t bite but is indeed like hugging the hard body of a dog – small, wiry, unyielding.

* * *

Breakfast at Tuli’s by Paul Mosier

Among my own variety of fish I am considered reasonably attractive. But when humans see me, they jump back, grimace, laugh, and describe me using words that would break my mother’s heart if she could hear them.

It hurts. I cannot pretend it does not.

But that’s not how it is with Tuli. When Tuli sees me she says things like “Hello, handsome.” She smiles at me. She kisses my glass bowl. She makes fish faces at me, undoubtedly because she respects me for the creature that I am. It’s like taking the trouble to learn the language of your housekeeper. Tuli doesn’t have a housekeeper, but if she did, I am sure that she would try to speak to them in their native tongue. But in spite of the fact that she finds me attractive, and treats me respectfully, I have been unable to have the relationship that I desire with Tuli. I suspect she could not even guess my intentions.

But enough about me and my problems. This is Tuli’s story. And Tuli has problems that make me feel ashamed for mentioning mine.

* * *

Less Than Kind by Carla Spataro

I sat across from Josh on my ratty couch, my blouse open to my waist, my boobs spilling out of my bra. We were both a little drunk on cheap chardonnay. Josh fumbled with his zipper, cursing under his breath. I placed my hand over his, not to help him, but to slow him down. He looked up at me, stared at me with those lovely green eyes of his and then leaned in and kissed me again. I fell back onto the couch, pulling Josh down on top of me, wishing that I’d thrown the comforter we were now laying on in the wash before Josh had come over. It was covered with cat hair and that was bugging the shit out of me.

* * *

Saving the Raven by Michelle Yasmine Valladares

Help me, cried the small child, with her pale hair and green eyes.

Where does it hurt?

Here. She points to her chest both palms pressed against her heart. I kneel close and pull her thin hands away. I lay my palm against over her coat. A flock of geese. A splash. Children playing. falling and chasing each other round and round an old oak grove. Boulders and rocks slip into a stream. A mountain lion. I pull my palm away.

Ooofff. I smile. There are lots of pictures but I have to go a bit deeper. Is that okay? She nods. Sea gulls, a cave, bone instruments, flying fish, a rainbow, girls singing in a choir, storm clouds gather, a swing beneath a tree. And from my palms and fingers came golden light and air thick with swirling. More pictures — the thin red cord that binds to the other life, the dark womb cave, the white mist, the bardo. My hands travel to the previous life where sadness follows.

Better. She nods.

Now help my bird. The raven was pitch and hopped near her red shoes. I kneel again, stretch my long arm with one finger pointing. The bird hops onto the hand, its pointy claws stinging.

I lift and it tilts its head, cocks its raven eyes at me, points its beak to the chest. Gentle as down, I stroke feathers. Worms. Baby birds. caw. caw. caw. Dive. Tree branches. Blizzard prophecy. Scraps of fern and twine. Again lights pour from me, red, orange and yellow. The sharp raven claws prick my skin until points of blood pop, red pearls.

Then, as if the healing was not enough for one story, the snow begins. First rain, then sleet and snow, then wind that cuts through our coats and freezes the tips of our noses. Come. I reach for her hand. The raven disappears. We stumble and trip, cling to each other. Within seconds the world turns white.

WHERE ARE YOU? I hear a man’s voice.

PAPAPAPAPAPA … the girls cries turn into a birds caw.

We stumble forward until a block of blue jeans, blue jacket and blue eyes meets us.

He lifts the child into his arms. Tells me to hang onto his coat and we keep hiking and do not stop until we are off the mountain. Twice he reaches back to pull me up after I fall. The trail is slippy. At the bottom of the hill near the car lot, he puts his daughter down.

The bird. I say. The raven is still out there. Hurt.

You want me to return for the fookin crow. He looks back at the mountain but there is no up, only white, white and white.

* * *

Eleri Mosier, Untitled

Camille searched her closet for her homework. She looked under her toy chest and on top of her drawers. She collapsed onto her bed. Her heart felt empty and sunken, and salty teardrops sat under the small lumps below her eyes. Her eyes were large, but pretty. Her irises were sky blue and the whites of her eyes were the color of creamy milk. But today her eyes were even larger than before. She had the look in her eyes that a Grizzly Bear had chased her around a forest.

But that event was not a reality. In this certain situation Camille had lost all of her homework. Camille had been a student of perfection. Straight A’s and B’s were the grades she had received in the past three years. But this year Camille was sure she would be a student of failure. It was only the second week of homework and she had already lost the first two packets she had received. Camille had been asked by her teacher to stop twice.  But ahead of her lay a pathway to success and behind her lay misery. It was just that Camille didn’t know this.

 

 

First Lines

 

My sister sees.

All my life, she’s made predictions: her grade on tomorrow’s algebra test, what we’d both get for Christmas, Mom’s cancer, Troy’s car crash, the day our Grandma Schulz would die.  The night before 9/11, she dreamed about a plane crashing into a building, knocking it over easily, like a flimsy Lego tower.  And we live in Wayne, Pennsylvania—nowhere near New York.

Cassie says these visions start slowly, sort of like a picture developing, and then become clear all at once.  “It’s like something warm spilling inside my brain,” she says. “Or like light cast through a prism, a streak of orange running into blue.”  She claims she can’t make it happen, but she knows when a picture is coming.  She calls that feeling Before. The frame around it is After.

Ghost Signs by Elizabeth Mosier

 

Ghost Signs

The Wayne Natatorium, a creek-fed swimming pool in use from 1895 – 1903, is one of the real-life sites in my fictional setting for Ghost Signs.

I do most of my fiction writing late at night in a darkened office before a glowing screen—and so revising my latest novel, Ghost Signs, has been a sort of creepy experience.  Imagine how startled—and then delighted—I was one night, as I sat conjuring a séance in my imagination, when writer Beth Kephart appeared on my screen to tag me for the Next Big Thing Gang.  Here’s the deal:  I answer the following questions about my work-too-long-in-progress, and then tag my brilliant friends Marta Maretich, Joanne Green, and Andrea Jarrell to tell you about theirs.  Here goes:

What is the working title of your book?

I started out calling this novel The Fortune Teller, but changed it midway through the first draft so as not to mislead the reader into thinking it’s a trendy paranormal book.  As a teenager, I was fascinated by paranormal stories, but the question raised in this book—whether or not my protagonist’s sister is faking her apparent power to predict the future—is really a question about whether God (and an afterlife) exists.  My new title, Ghost Signs, gets at the book’s spookiness, but also refers to the echoes of the past in our present lives, apparitions in the form of old letters and photos, century-old houses in which modern families dwell, and faded advertisements that still haunt the sides of old buildings in the old town that is the book’s setting.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

I read a fascinating book called Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death by Deborah Blum, about a group of scientists (including James, the founder of American psychology) who studied many of the 19^th-century mediums popular at a time when scientific discovery threatened to upend religious order.  Coincidentally, my youngest daughter was going through the confirmation process at our church, and was surprised and frustrated by the youth leaders’ seeming intolerance for her monkey-wrench questions (pardon the pun) about evolution. These questions are no less urgent for teenagers than they are for adults.  It seems to me a braver thing to pursue the question of God’s existence than to dash off a faith statement you don’t quite believe; for a teacher to discourage the questions of a teenager who is developing his or her faith is a missed opportunity.

What genre does your book fall under?

This is the first book I’ve set out deliberately to write as a young adult novel, using what I’ve learned from reading and teaching the work of excellent young adult authors.  I’ve tried to employ certain aspects of style to create a sense of authenticity, immediacy, heightened emotion, and—yes—adolescent narcissism that contribute to a young adult sensibility.  Teenagers can smell a lesson a mile away, and so I’ve tried to write a story for them that doesn’t teach so much as ask.  I don’t presume to tell my readers what to think.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

My daughter Catherine Mosier-Mills is a talented actress, a beautiful girl and a writer just like my character Cassie Schulz—she’d be perfect in the role!   Though Cat would probably prefer the adorable Logan Lerman (The Perks of Being a Wallflower) to play her boyfriend Troy, I’d cast him as Cassie’s brother (and narrator) Jack.  Asa Butterfield (Hugo) would be great as Dan, Jack’s genius best friend.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

In Ghost Signs, 15-year-old Jack Schulz conspires with his 17-year-old sister Cassie to convince their parents, the school principal, and the town police of her psychic powers in order to solve a century-old murder.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

Two years.  The final version—four years in the writing—has been interrupted, deconstructed, and reconstituted by many life events since then.  I’m reminded of this every time I talk to the wonderful Julie Tibbott at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, who read an early chapter one million years ago this fall. 

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I know I should know the answer to this question, but in order to write a book I have to ignore the market.  Ask me when I’ve printed out the penultimate draft.

Who or What inspired you to write this book?

My interest in teenagers—the two I’m raising, the ones I teach—and my wish to encourage them to be skeptical: to read, to question, to reason, to find the answers they seek.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Wanna fool your friends into thinking you’re communing with spirits?  Here’s how!  Cool psychic tricks…and unexplained paranormal phenomena to keep you wondering.

Who have you tagged?

I’ve tagged these writers, whose work I admire (and whose works-in-progress I’ve read), to get them to spill the beans:  Joanne Green, Andrea Jarrell, and Marta Maretich.  While they’re pondering the answers to these questions, you can check out their work by clicking these links.

 

Making Believe

When I was only 40, my favorite outfit was a t-shirt, a pair of worn-in jeans and white canvas tennis shoes, plain taste that puzzled my daughters who, at 4 and 6 years old, wanted to dress like celebrities.  To keep pace with their fast-changing identities, I learned to sew—practicing on Snow White, Dorothy Gale, Red Riding Hood, and Tiger Lily costumes as I worked my way up to finer fabrics and more complicated designs.  My most ambitious project was a shimmering pink organza princess gown that had to be finished by Catherine’s birthday.  Because her older sister Alison was born on Halloween, Cat believed that everyone’s birthday was an occasion for masquerade.

Perhaps it should be.  As I approach 50 in the same year my oldest child enters college, I feel the urge to shed the comfortable clothing I’ve spent half a lifetime trying to fit.  Old habits—too much coffee, clock-watching, the idea that I can have it all—have served me so far, but I want to live differently for the rest of my life. I believe now, as I couldn’t in my twenties, in the virtue of patience.  And though age has given me a better sense of my true talents and limitations, this wisdom has been delivered with its flip side: fearlessness. The old me wouldn’t try anything I wasn’t already good at.  The new me was born a decade ago, at two o’clock in the morning, as I sewed an organza sleeve backwards and inside out, then struggled to be patient as I ripped out the errant seams and tried and tried again.

I should explain that I have no spatial skills—none!—and that up until then my life had been  designed to let me sidestep my difficulty with maps and instructions for making sleeves.  Writing isn’t easy; it can be lonely and frustrating and downright difficult.  But at a certain point, I became a writer because for me not being a writer was the harder choice. Contrary to the notion of writers as crazy, I sit calmly at the keyboard and imagine my way through pages and chapters, following mysterious directions that aren’t nearly as clear as a Simplicity pattern.

Or, when my kids were little, as compelling.  If I’d had an editor who was as eager as my children, calling over my shoulder every half-hour, “When is it going to be done?” I’d have completed ten novels by now.  “Be patient,” I’d tell the girls, “I’m working.”  But I liked the way their eagerness added urgency to the task.

In my twenties, I saw my life stretched out before me in a straight line, a series of promises waiting to be fulfilled: marriage, MFA, publication, fame and fortune, children (maybe).  Now, nearly 50, I see how circuitous the path has been in reality, as pieced-together as the beautiful quilts, painstakingly stitched by my mother-in-law Marjorie, under which my daughters sleep.  My destination keeps shifting; new passions (being a mother) move into the foreground and unexpected problems (finding time to write as a mother) sometimes block the path.  And this, I’ve discovered, is how it should be.  Though I teach my students that writing is process, not product, I haven’t always taken my own advice.  But despite—because of—the obstacles, I keep at it because, ultimately, the goal is not to have written but to write.

The same, of course, could be said of life.  The poet Rilke wrote to a friend, “In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us.” When I was sewing, I was a student again, learning to quilt from my mother-in-law, asking questions of the clerk at the fabric store.  I marveled at Marjorie’s skill and knowledge, and at the clerk’s patience as she folded miles of fabric corner to corner, taking her time.  I like to think that my interest in sewing inspired them, the way my students’ interest in writing inspires me.  After all, though the teacher brings her wisdom to the creative enterprise, the gift of the novice is faith.

Making costumes, I was trying to preserve—for my daughters, for myself—the belief that I could, at mid-life, still do anything.  One of my proudest moments is when Alison selected the princess pattern for Catherine’s dress, with its impossible fitted bodice and three layers of skirt.  “Mama, you could make this,” she said, within earshot of the experienced seamstresses.  And so I found I could.  On the morning of Catherine’s birthday, the princess dress was finished and hanging in her closet.  In her excitement, she didn’t notice my sleepiness or the costume’s many imperfections, and—because I was still learning—neither did I.

 

Writing for the Reluctant Reader

When Brian Bouldrey, editor for Gemma Open Door, asked me to contribute to the series designed to promote adult literacy, I was thrilled to be anywhere near Roddy Doyle and Nick Hornby, whose books had been published in the original Open Door lineup in the UK.  Writing for Open Door was a chance to be involved in a literacy effort different from teaching, and yet to put into practice what I’ve learned from 15 years of working with students from second graders to college students to retirees.  But in the end, the process of writing The Playgroup taught me about my own work.  

When I signed on, the Open Door series was new to the U.S.—mine was the third book published here—but it was already a success in the UK.  There, the books were designed to inspire reading, instill confidence (with short chapters and wide margins) and build vocabulary.  As our publisher, Patricia O’Hare, explained to me,  she didn’t want “dumbed-down or patronizing dickandjane stuff, but the very best writing to entice and encourage people who struggle to read, or people for whom English is not their first language.  And, as we are discovering, the adult reluctant reader.”  

I’ve taught many students of all ages who are, at times, “reluctant readers”—people who are out of time, out of patience, out of practice:  from little kids who have to run around the room between sentences of a fractured fairy tale to tired adults in an evening continuing ed course, who arrive straight from work and eat a fragrant cheese steak while quickly skimming last week’s reading assignment.  

At Bryn Mawr, students are famous for eagerly putting their noses into whatever reading load we assign—or at least faking it really well—but our impressively large number of international students guarantees a classroom that includes readers who first learned a language other than English.  For these students, the challenge isn’t simply literal understanding, but often deriving meaning from ideas and images that are distinctly American.  And that’s not even to mention the task undertaken by every first-year student, who is learning—as I had to, as we all have to—to speak the new language of academic discourse. 

Which is to say:  writing is always translation.   I learned a lot about my writing aesthetic in graduate school and through long years of practice.  But teaching—little kids or adults new to creative writing—is what taught me that the writer’s first requirement is clarity.  We know the world through our senses, and so we must describe what we experience using sensory detail that opens the door to the world we’ve created on the page.  This seems intuitive, but for a literary writer well versed in the fine art of writing and trying to sound smart, it isn’t always intuitive.  I was amazed, combing through the pretty sentences of my first draft of The Playgroup, at how many of these sentences just didn’t make sense.   

So, writing for Open Door improved my work.  

Literary writers are particularly attuned to the many reasons people do not or cannot or will not read.  But I was interested in contributing to the Open Door series because its editorial guidelines are shaped by optimism.  As my editor, Brian Bouldrey, said when we first discussed my idea for The Playgroup, “Think of the lengths people go to in order to read, learning non-native languages and inventing Braille, the sheer genius of those with impediments to reading.  Open Door wants to meet those ambitions halfway, with stories that are intelligent and complex and that pay particular attention to clarity, pacing, and the inviting presentation of text. “  

Brian’s somewhat subversive goal for the Open Door series is what finally convinced me to put down the novel I had been writing to attempt to sneak a novel’s worth of material into the 100-page limit the series required.  Open Door aims to produce books that challenge readers to read deeply.  Or as Brian put it, “to make slow readers…slower.”  

I wrote The Playgroup for the reluctant reader I have been—most recently, as a young mother, sleep deprived and with an attention span shorter than the time it takes for a toddler to ingest a small toy or put on a pair of my high heeled shoes and fall backwards down the stairs.   (It happened.  She lived.)   I wrote The Playgroup for the reason most writers write their books:  because it’s the book I most wanted, most needed, to read. 

For more on Gemma Media’s Open Door books, go to: http://www.http://gemmaopendoor.com/

 

Primary Sources

From Writer, Inc. at Hunger Mountain, inspired by a conversation with Michael Martone:

Interviewers always ask writers what they’re reading. The implied question is, “What good things are you reading.” As opposed to all the things you read throughout the day—what is it that you actually read? The cereal box, a recipe… maybe that language influences what you’re writing.  Read my response at  http://www.hungermtn.org/primary-sources

 

That’s Life

            

It often struck me, as I played Solitaire on my laptop while I paid a sitter to play with my kids, that writing is not living.  It’s a half-life spent behind a closed office door waiting for wisdom, counting on time to eventually yield fruit. 

–Laurie, The Playgroup (Gemma Open Door)

The last time I held a microphone in the Goodhart Music Room at Bryn Mawr College, I was introducing a lineup of high school students who were there to proudly read what they’d written in the summer “Writing for College” program I used to direct.  Then and now joined hands tonight when I looked out across the audience and found my former students, Kay Yoon and Abby Reed—now grown women, both mothers and professionals—listening to me read from The Playgroup and laughing along.  http://www.biconews.com/2012/03/20/mosiers-the-playgroup-reveals-a-great-balancing-act/