455-GIRLS

Free Teleseminar About Writing!

2012-02-13T12:06:00.000-08:00

Please join me on February 14 at 11:30 AM PST for a one-hour discussion about the writing life, hosted by New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Lauck, author of the memoirs Blackbird, Still Waters, and the recent Found, as well as the essay collection Show Me the Way. Read about all of Jen's books here.

When: Valentine's Day, Tues, 2/14 @ 11:30 AM PST

How: Call (218) 632-0550 & enter access code: 854364#
Announce your name, where you hail from and then mute your
end of the call by hitting *6.

Questions: If you have a question for me or Jen, send it to Jen at jclauck@gmail.com
and she'll open the call live so you can speak.

And check out Jen's memoir writing site and her list of fabulous upcoming classes at her writing web site.

Hope to be speaking with you soon,

Hope

Come Write the Story of Your Life

2011-10-22T16:32:00.000-07:00

Please join me and other instructors on November 11-13 in Ojai, California for the Ojai Writers' Conference, where I'll be speaking at the Saturday luncheon and leading a one-day workshop on Sunday for memoir writers of all levels.

My Sunday workshop, “Transforming Real-Life Events into Story,” will help guide your anecdotes from entertaining dinner-party stories to actual, publishable products. You'll receive information about the four basic elements of successful memoirs, including structure, detail and description, characterization, and scene versus summary. Short writing exercises will be incorporated into the day to help you flex your memoir muscles, and brief excerpts of published works will be handed out as examples. By the end of this workshop you’ll have tools to start a 750- to 1500-word short memoir, and maybe even a few first-draft pages.

Cost is $149 Times: 9am-Noon (break for lunch) and 1:30-4:30pm. Mention "Hope sent me" when you register and receive a free, signed copy of The Possibility of Everything!

For more info and registration details, go to the Ojai Writers' Conference web site.

And check back for information about memoir workshops next July at the Iowa Summer Writers Festival in Iowa City, and October in Paris!!

Ojai Writers Conference Next Weekend--June 3-5, 2011

2011-05-27T15:15:00.000-07:00

For all aspiring and practicing writers out there: next weekend (June 3-5) is the first Ojai Writers Conference in beautiful Ojai, CA. It features Friday pre-conference workshops in memoir, screenwriting, essay writing, and myth, a Saturday VIP luncheon, and workshops and talks all day Saturday and Sunday morning as well. It's limited to only 100 participants but as of today there are still spaces left. Come for one day or all three!

I'll be teaching a personal essay workshop on Friday from 1-4, speaking at the luncheon on Saturday, and talking about the distinction between memoir and personal essay--and which one is best for your unique story--on Saturday late afternoon.

Click here for more info.

Hope to see some of you there!!

On the Occasion of Mother's Day

2011-05-08T10:59:00.000-07:00

Wishing you all a most beautiful and peaceful Mother's Day, in recognition of those of you whose continuous and loving efforts will create our next citizens of the world. And with thanks to you for sharing the steps of your journey with the rest of us who so benefit from your experiences and stories.

I know this is a solemn day for those of us who've lost mothers, and I'd like to recognize those who have passed as well. This July will mark the 30th anniversary of my mother's death, and there hasn't been a Mother's Day since then when I haven't thought of her, missed her, and been grateful for what she did give me in our short time together. So on this day I'd also like to honor the mothers who are no longer with us, and acknowledging that we are all part of the strong and varied chain of female experience.

With gratitude and admiration for us who are doing the work, and all who have done it in the past,

Hope

New Writing Workshop, May 13-15

2011-03-21T20:21:00.000-07:00

Only two seats are left in the Intro to Creative Nonfiction writing workshop in Santa Monica. Please contact me soon if you'd like one of them!

The workshop will run from 3 p.m. Friday afternoon, May 13, through dinner on Sunday, May 15, and will be held at the historic Georgian Hotel--just steps from the Santa Monica Pier and beach. Our guest speaker on Sunday will be Mim Eichler Rivas, author of more than a dozen nonfiction books, including Beautiful Jim Key and The Pursuit of Happyness. Cost is $450 and writers of all levels are welcome.

More detailed information can be found here.

If you're interested, please email me at hopeedelman@gmail.com for registration forms. Hope to see you in May--

Hope

Motherless Daughters' Guides: Please Share Your Ideas

2011-03-17T08:26:00.000-07:00

In the 17 years since Motherless Daughters was first published I've heard from thousands of readers who've written in to share their individual stories. Among the many common experiences we share, one tends to surface frequently: without a mother, many of us feel we lack much of the basic information women need and that women with mothers naturally possess and we don't know who or how to ask.

I think of a woman I met back in the early 1990s, whose story appears in the first edition of Motherless Daughters, who told me about stealing an etiquette book from her local library when she was about eleven and reading it cover-to-cover when she got home because she was so hungry for information about how to be a woman, and so afraid of doing the wrong things, after her mother died when she was nine. All these years that story has stuck with me and it's no less poignant or heartbreaking now than it was eighteen years ago. I thought of it again the other night as I was explaining the elusive rules about thank-you notes to my thirteen-year-old daughter. If I weren't here to tell her, how would she know when to send them or what to write? Would she even know she was supposed to send thank-you notes at all?

Motherless Daughters was meant to be an overview book that identified and explained a phenomenon rather than a self-help book or how-to manual. But lately I've been wondering if, in addition, motherless girls and women would also benefit from short, very practical guidebooks to navigating some of the situations and life events that mothers typically teach daughters how to manage or actually steer them through. And of course, plenty of women with mothers don't get what they feel they need from them, so these guides might be helpful for them, too.

At the very bottom of this page I've made a list of the subjects that come up most in reader mail, and for which motherless women often feel in need of guidance or advice. Would you be willing to take a look and let me know which would be or would have been most useful for you? Please scroll all the way down to find the poll and to vote. This will give me an idea of which one(s) to start with or if this is even a good idea. (The titles listed in the polls are only placeholders at the moment to convey the main ideas; hopefully I'll come up with better ones later, or please suggest one or more that you like.) And please feel free to suggest guides that aren't on the list, or comments about the idea in general in the comments section below.

Would you buy any of these guides for yourself? For someone you know? Would you like to see several bundled together in a set? How would you like the information to be presented? Or do you feel that Motherless Daughters and Motherless Mothers have already covered this material sufficiently for you?

Very much looking forward to your thoughts,
Hope

Call for Stories

2011-03-08T13:20:00.001-08:00

Have you or anyone you know ever found yourself feeling as if you're living from one crisis to another? Does this describe your childhood, or maybe your adult years? When interviewing women for Motherless Daughters and Motherless Mothers, I was surprised and disheartened to discover how often mother loss was only one in a series of adverse events for many women, and that they felt they'd been shaped for better and for worse by periodic crises which they had no way to anticipate and therefore no way to prepare.

I've been thinking about this for a long time, because this was very much my story after my mother died. For the next 23 years I had a deeply kind and well-meaning father who also drank heavily and was prone to intermittent breakdowns related to the alcohol and the toll it took on his health. The pattern of leapfrogging from one difficult event to another, and feeling that my life could only be enjoyed in between his exclamation points, came to characterize my adult life. After he died six years ago it took a long time for me to release the feeling that the next crisis was somewhere around the next corner, just waiting to erupt.

I imagine this must be the case for many of us with loved ones who suffer from addictions, chronic health problems, mental illness, eating disorders, or just garden-variety difficult behavior. (And very possibly other conditions. Please feel free to chime in.) Also, those of us who have protracted strings of just really bad luck.

My belief is that children raised in these kind of environments (as many motherless daughters are) get wired in a very specific way that in part determines their behavior patterns in adulthood, and also that adults who encounter such situations later in life (through marriage, parenthood, or other relationships) have to develop their own strategies to find fulfillment in between the episodes. And yet I've also met many women who have been able to transcend this and live happy, fulfilling lives not just in spite of, but sometimes because of, the exclamation points pushed into their paths.

I'm wondering if this might be a worthy topic for a future book. What do you think? And if this sounds familiar to anyone, and you'd be willing to share your story, please email me at hopeedelman@gmail.com for more details. Confidentiality and anonymity assured.

Many thanks,
Hope

Twittereriteaneeters

2011-03-03T15:30:00.000-08:00

What's the accurate label for people who use Twitter. Twitterers? Twitterites? Twittereans? Tweeters?

Or maybe just Those Who Tweet?

Nonetheless, I feel oddly compelled to invite everyone who visits here to also sign up for my ramblings and recommendations over there. Not that you need more ramblings or recommendations filling up your day--god knows all our days are full enough already--but occasionally one of mine might interest you and make you want to share it with your friends.

Caveat: I am not a fan of karaoke, comma splices, Jersey Shore, and most politicians (with the possible exceptions of Barbara Boxer and Rudy Giuliani at very select times during his first term as mayor of New York) and my Tweets sometimes reflect that. It might be good to know this in advance to avoid unpleasant surprises later.

If you're wondering what my gripe is with Jersey Shore, it's that I already went to high school with all those people in 1982 so I know what they're going to say pretty much all of the time.

Yes, I was surprised by how little has changed in 29 years, too.

Anyway, I'm @hopeedelman. See you here and there.

Parentless Parents by Allison Gilbert

2011-03-01T23:36:00.000-08:00

Anyone who's lost a parent knows how that hole in the family grows even larger after a child is born. Now it's not just a parent who's missing from the equation, it's a grandparent as well.

What about when of both your parents are gone before your children come along? That's the topic of Allison Gilbert's new book, Parentless Parents, a careful and documented examination of the particular issues these parents face.

Gilbert, who mI've known since 2005 when she was working on her collection of interviews with adult orphans, Always Too Soon, was kind enough to take time out of her book-promotion schedule to answer a few questions about Parentless Parents for readers of 455-Girls:

455G: You lost your mother at age 25--before you married and had your children-- and your father when you were 31 and your son was eighteen months old. What were those intervening years like for you?

AG: I had feared becoming a parentless parent long before I ever became one. Once my mother died, I clung to my father. I knew all too well he was my final parent. Because of that, and after the birth of my son, he and I became the closest we'd ever been. I involved him as often as I could -- in everything I did as an expectant mother and later, as a new mom. My dad came with me and my husband when I had ultrasounds. My father jumped at the chance to come with us to get Jake's first haircut. And, then, just like that, he developed a cough and was dead a few weeks later. My father had lung cancer and hadn't smoked in 20 years.

455G: Many women who come to this blog felt emotionally parentless after their mothers died, even if their fathers are still living. Will your book speak to them as well?

AG: In many ways, even though my father was an enormous comfort to me after my mother died, I felt at times like I was already a parentless parent. My dad was loving, but he couldn't remember all the details I really needed to know as a new mom. He couldn't remember when I started eating solid foods, or how old I was when I first slept through the night. My mom would have likely remembered though, and that's why parenting without her hurt so much, even though I had my dad.

My father also wasn't a very patient man, and he certainly wouldn't have been willing to hear me drone on and on about cribs, strollers, and color choices for our son's nursery. That kind of inexhaustible interest in my life -- even the smallest, most inconsequential tidbits -- ended for the most part when my mother passed away, and could never be fully replaced.

Ultimately, because our moms were so often the ones who listened most attentively when we were young, and because our mothers stereotypically made most of the decisions regarding our care, the pain of mother loss can feel especially sharp, sometimes just as intense as being a parentless parent.

455G: One of the biggest challenges of being parentless is being able to ask for and accept help as a new mother. I remember poring through books for advice after my first daughter was born because I felt embarrassed to go to my friends with basic questions. What practical suggestions do you have for parentless parents who are, so to speak, setting sail alone?

AG: I don't think I was ever embarrassed to ask for help; I just wasn't willing to accept all the help that was around me. In my mind, nobody could measure up to the kind of grandma I imagined my mother would have been, so I pushed nearly everyone close to me away. In particular, I resented that my mother-in-law was just so willing (and capable!) of swooping in and taking over. Ultimately, I realized that all the anger I was clinging to, all that sadness, was hurting me more than anyone else. Gradually I began to get comfortable not only with accepting help -- but also being absolutely grateful for it. This represented nothing less than a sea change in my thinking, and the process has been enormously freeing.

Emotionally, I understood that my husband and I were both very lucky to have his parents. They are active and engaged and completely loving. And as a matter of simple physical practicality, by learning to embrace help, the enormous pressure I felt being a mom without my mom began to lift. Looking back, it seems that many of the burdens that come along with new motherhood are easier to handle once you accept that no amount anger and self-pity can bring a mother back.

455G: Support groups have been enormously helpful for many motherless women because they find comfort in the presence of others who understand. You've helped to start several Parentless Parents groups. Can you tell us a little bit about what they offer?

Sure! Parentless Parents support groups are now forming all over the country. They’re developing in several states including California; Oregon; New York; Washington, DC; and Florida. The groups are run by parentless parents, and are a way for parentless parents to meet and exchange ideas, tips, and resources. These groups actually tend to be a lot of fun, because there's instant camaraderie and connection.

There is also a growing and active Parentless Parents Group page on Facebook. Parents from all over the country (and the world) are coming together to discuss the specific challenges of being a parentless parent. I think the in-person support groups and the Parentless Parents Facebook page are so helpful because sometimes strangers understand you better than your own family and closest friends do. There's no need to explain yourself. We all "get" it. And that's incredibly validating.

You can find a complete list of Parentless Parents chapters on www.parentlessparents.com. If a chapter doesn't exist where you live, feel free to start your own! You can find Parentless Parents on Facebook by clicking here and watch the book's trailer here.

Floating the Workshop Balloon

2011-02-25T22:53:00.000-08:00

The past few weeks have seen a spontaneous flurry of emails asking when my next writing workshop will be held. So I thought I'd send out a feeler about doing one this spring and see if anyone is interested in a three-day Intro to Memoir workshop in Santa Monica, California, from May 13-15.

I use an eight-step program I developed to help bring writers from an idea to the first draft of a five-page piece in two and a half days. It's a good format for women who want to write about their mothers, though in the past students have come from all over the country to write about every personal topic imaginable. Writers of all levels of experience are welcome, including beginners.

We meet Friday from 3 to 6 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday from 10 to 6. Cost is typically $450, with breakfasts and Sunday dinner included. The venue is right across the street from the beach, and May is a beautiful month in SoCal. Also included in the price: handouts, unlimited coffee, and an hour with a guest speaker so you don't have to listen to just me for two and a half days straight.

Also in the zone of possible: the same workshop in Iowa City in early June.

If you're interested in either of the above, please email me at hopeedelman@gmail.com.

(This photo is from the Iowa City workshop in May of 2010, taken in my dining room. The giraffe in the far back corner is named Newman.)

Congratulations and thanks to Rosie O'Donnell. And wow!

2011-02-21T12:26:00.000-08:00

Rosie O'Donnell, who lost her mother to cancer just before her 11th birthday and has been a longtime advocate for motherless daughters, will be getting her own talk show on Oprah's OWN network. In an interview reprinted in the Chicago Sun-Times she talks about learning about her mother's history for an episode of the NBC show "Who Do You Think You Are?"; starting a new talk show; and being a motherless daughter. She also gives a big and very generous shout-out for Motherless Daughters, and tells the story of how I tried to contact her more than 15 years ago when I was first writing the book.

I was a guest on Rosie's Sirius radio show about a year and a half ago, and she's incredibly warm and smart and plugged in to social issues. I think she's going to do a sensational job with her new TV show.

I'll reprint an excerpt from her interview below...although I'm always uncomfortable being self-promotional like this, I'm hoping it'll help some readers. And that's always the goal. You can read the whole interview with Rosie here.

You can also watch the episode of "Who Do You Think You Are?" right here. She finds another motherless daughter in her family's history--and lots else.

From "Genealogy show helps Rosie O'Donnell face mother's death" Chicago Sun-Times, February 17, 2011

O’Donnell was only 10 when she lost her beloved mom to cancer.
“Nobody mentioned my mother after she died in 1973. It was like Lord Voldemort. You couldn’t say the name,” she says. “Nobody said ‘mom’ in that house or ‘mommy’ or ‘mother’ from 1973 on. I always wanted to know who she was and what she felt like, and to have her and see her through a woman’s eyes as opposed to a child looking up to their mom.”
O’Donnell says fans approach her all the time to talk about losing mothers to cancer.
“I think no matter what age, when you lose your mom it’s your mommy,” she says. “I remember my friend Jeannie lost a mom who was in her 70s and a grandmother in her 90s and when her grandmother died, she kept calling out, ‘Mommy, mommy.’
“The bottom line is that everybody has that kind of natural, base, primal wound connection, and if it’s severed it becomes a permanent wound,” she says. “My wound is the mother-child connection. But I did find out that when you do search for your lost parent’s past that it does help heal it a little bit.”
O’Donnell has other advice.
“I’ve found that the most helpful thing I could tell anyone to do who has lost their mother is to get the Hope Edelman book Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss,” she says. “When she wrote the book in ’95, she had written me and asked if I could do an interview. I remembered thinking it was going to be cue violin background music. You know, poor celebrities whose mothers have died when they were young. If I had known what that book was really going to be, I would have participated and I would have begun my healing so much earlier.”
The comedian says that as she ages, she also laments.
“It’s weird for me to be 49 years old, a decade more than she lived. I’m getting to things that she never did, like raising teenagers.
“In some ways, she’s lucky,” she jokes.
She sobers and adds, “I’m getting to experience it all, but I don’t have a mother to call and talk to about it.”

Love Song for Snow

2011-02-18T22:07:00.000-08:00

So this afternoon I brought the eighth-grader home from school, and an hour later turned around to bring her to a friend's house for the night. Except during that hour between getting home and needing to leave, the storm at the top of the hill had morphed from steady-but-manageable-rain to crazy-downpour-from-the-apocalypse-complete-with-perfectly-sideways-blowing-wind.

Still, what can you do? The kid's got to get down the hill.

I opened the front door and braced myself against the wind. "Ready to make a run for it?" I asked.

If eye-rolling could make a sound, there would have been a deafening one at our front door right then.

I sprinted full speed toward the car. Maya walked.

"What you think is bad I think is just rain," she said as she got into the car. "And you're from New York! And you lived in Iowa!"

Damned individuation process. If an obvious example of a mother's stupidity doesn't immediately present itself, you can always count on a thirteen-year-old daughter to create one.

"This is cold rain," I said. "New York and Iowa didn't have cold rain. You got warm rain or you got snow. At least with snow you had something good to show for it in the end. Here, we just get leaking windows."

Right. I know. I romanticize. And all of you on the East Coast and in the Midwest are probably thinking, "Yeah, yeah, Calfornia girl. Show me one good thing about snow this winter." But what can I say? I like snow. Even when I had to live with it all winter I liked it. I grew up in New York, went to college in Chicago, and did graduate school in Iowa. When you've grown up in those states, winter isn't winter without snow. Some of my best memories from childhood involve waking up in the morning to find a thick blanket of snow covering the neighborhood, and running to the crackly transistor radio in the kitchen to learn that we were having a snow day. And some of my best adolescent memories involve Ski Club nights where my hands and feet and nose were so cold as the ski lift raised us into the black sky, with the mountain gleaming spotlight-white beneath us, and the bone-cracking cold went so deep it skewed all perspective, so that by the time you got to the top you'd be wondering if it would be possible to ever feel sufficiently warm again.

This is the first winter in ... actually, I think the first winter ever where I won't see snow. Unless you count whatever was still left on the ground in Washington, DC, earlier this month when I was there for a conference and saw glimpses of it speeding by through the window of a cab to and from Dulles. Normally this is the weekend, over President's Day, when we might take the girls to see snow or even, in a particularly good financial year, go skiing for two days. But I'm working triple time this winter, and we just returned in mid-January from the three-week Monster Trip of the Decade to Israel and Rome, so we won't be going anywhere for a good, long time.

So, snow. I miss you hugely. I miss the way you used to turn brownstone steps into shapeless mounds in New York. I miss the way you required us to crank up the forced steam heat in old Chicago apartment buildings and how the radiators used to hiss and clank all day.

Ice, I even miss you, and the way you encase tree branches in Iowa like elongated crystal fingers. I loved the way you made me stay inside for a whole day (or three) emerging only to gingerly pick my way down the center of the street to get a carton of milk at the corner market because the roads weren't safe to drive.

Of course, back then I was single and rarely had any place I absolutely had to go. And certainly nobody who was depending on me for transportation. Now I have a floor of 43 degrees in February, rain that nonetheless feels too cold, and a mad dash to the car while a thirteen-year-old rolls her eyes.

She's right. It's just rain. Not snow. Just rain. And 43 isn't cold, unless you're naked. Or coffee.

California: you're making a wimp out of me.

The Making of Motherless Daughters

2011-02-16T19:32:00.000-08:00

There's a really nice, very short clip over at Vimeo from the documentary-in-progress The Club about motherless women--the filmmakers did this interview with me about a year ago, talking about how I found the very first women I interviewed for the book. (Back in the pre-internet era.) They came to my house in LA and we had a beautiful afternoon together. Their hearts are 100 percent in the right place. Filmmakers contact me all the time about making a documentary about motherless daughters, but Carlye and Katie have gotten further along than any of them. Here's hoping they make it all the way to distribution!

I can't for the life of me figure out how to save this video to my hard drive and embed it, so I'll provide the link right here.

If you're interested in the documentary The Club, you can read more about it and see a trailer featuring Rosie O'Donnell here or join The Club's Facebook group.

Congratulations Katie and Carlye! You're doing beautiful work.

A Day at Disneyland

2011-02-16T09:23:00.000-08:00

When you take five kids to Disneyland for your nine-year-old’s birthday and almost pass out when you see what admission costs for six people; when you watch families from all over the U.S. walking around with those thick-ribbon necklaces covered with character pins they purchased one by one, knowing this might be the only vacation they can take all year; when you see the trash bins (ironically labeled “Waste Please”) overflowing with paper goods and plastic bottles by 3 p.m.; and try to talk the nine-year-olds out of every sugar-laden treat on display that of course they all immediately want; and stand on line with 200 people for a ride that will last four minutes; and then walk to the next line and do it all over again--it’s frighteningly easy to start believing that you’re the only one here who notices or cares about all this excess, who realizes that the money being spent here in one day could probably solve a small nation’s hunger for a week, and it’s all too simple to start feeling smugly superior to everyone around you. And then you see a middle-aged mother and father dressed like Hell’s Angels, pushing a wheelchair with a severely disabled child in it who’s dressed in a Cinderella gown, and you realize, very humbly, that you don’t know anything about anything at all.

Along the Way

2011-02-15T16:39:00.000-08:00

Lately a lot of people have been asking what I’m up to, and why they haven’t heard from me for a while, and why I haven’t blogged in a long time, and what I’m working on next. Excellent questions, friends. There's one answer to all four questions. My next project is one I'm very excited about. It’s helping Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez write their father-son memoir about family, fatherhood, and faith, set against the backdrops of Hollywood and northern Spain. At the moment it's titled Along the Way. You can read a brief article about the book here.

Most of you probably know Martin Sheen from Apocalypse Now and The West Wing (among other films) and Emilio Estevez from The Breakfast Club and The Mighty Ducks trilogy(among other films, including Bobby, which he wrote and directed). They’ve recently made a new film together called The Way which was filmed along the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route in Spain.

As soon as you have a chance to see this movie, run—do not walk!—to the theater. It’s the story of a father who scatters his estranged son’s ashes along the Camino after his son dies on his first day trekking. If that sounds like a downer it’s really not, because it’s also about the odd assortment of people he befriends how he walks and how they change his life. The story is absolutely inspiring and the cinematography is absolutely stunning. You’ll want to book a ticket to northern Spain and hit the path by the time it’s done.

And that’s all I’m saying until the book comes out.

Father’s Day 2012. Or sooner. I’m planning to write like the wind.

Happy February to all,
Hope

My New Favorite TV Show. You'll Be Surprised.

2010-10-31T17:51:00.000-07:00

The other night I stumbled upon Billy the Exterminator on A&E, and I’m going to go out on a limb here to admit: I’m hooked. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s a reality show a about a tough-guy exterminator who drives around greater Shreveport, Louisiana, in an enormous black Toyota Tundra pickup truck emblazoned with his company’s name--Vex-Con--on both sides, and takes on tough-guy exterminator jobs that include (but are not limited to) snakes, rats, cockroaches, crocodiles, foxes tearing up backyards, squirrels trapped in fireplaces, and in one unforgettable episode, a possum carcass rotting underneath someone’s house.

There is no job too large, too small, or too gross for this guy.

Billy Bretherton--that’s his name. He’s a former Air Force sergeant—I’m guessing he’s in his mid to late 40s—with a penchant for a black cowboy hat, thin wraparound black shades, black leather, chains and studs. Think Axl Rose meets the Orkin guy and you’ve got the idea. Though I’m not sure how I’d react if my Orkin guy showed up sporting motorcycle boots and a weird little goatee. It’d definitely make Thursday mornings more interesting around here.

Billy’s family co-stars with him and They. Are. Priceless. His mother, Donnie--a wisecracking Southern mama with excellent pouffy blond hair--calls Billy on the cell phone about every ten minutes with a new, challenging, and reliably disgusting or dangerous job, thus giving him the opportunity to slip in educational moments (while talking to her) about the biological or physiological risks homeowners will face if he doesn’t get there fast. (“A rotting animal under a house can be a breeding ground for bacteria and disease.”) There’s also Billy’s father, Big Bill, whose main purpose seems to be moping around in the background while he recovers from a recent heart attack and worries about the business end of things. Billy is often joined in the field by his younger brother, Ricky, who’s categorically stuck in 1985, layered, blond collar-length hair and all. Ricky is my favorite. I think of him as the biggest risk taker of the clan, since he’s apparently allergic to wasps yet, despite his mother’s frequent warnings to bring his EpiPen or wear a mask, consistently ignores her advice in favor of honoring his Inner Dude. In one episode he goes up in a cherry picker with Billy to destroy two wasp nests under the eaves of a hotel roof, with only his bare hands to protect his bare face. You can't help thinking, if this guy is really at risk for anaphylactic shock, is he crazy? Or dumb? Or both?

Billy and Ricky call each other “dude” and “man.” A lot.

As with many reality shows, a fair amount of this one is probably scripted, but something about it feels like it has an edge of authenticity to me. For one thing, the critters all look real. (Anyone who actually knows me knows I have a lifelong phobia of rats, so I have to flip the channel whenever he pulls one out of a trap.) And sure, Billy is a character, maybe even an invented one, but Vex-Con does have what looks like a legitimate web site and business that could have predated the show. Or maybe it’s the gritty surroundings of semi-rural Louisiana that lend the show its credibility. Definitely the clients look real; this is no beauty pageant.When an elderly guy with a lung condition sheepishly drawls about Billy’s stomping, leather-and-chains arrival at his cockroach-infested trailer, “Well, he looked kinda scary but I knew he was the one for the job. He looked like he was ready to kill something” you have to at least hope a line like that wasn’t scripted.

Plus, these client scenarios—I’m not sure they could be invented. I always found it insulting to the collective intelligence when Jeff Corwin’s just happened to stumble upon a rare viper while trekking through the jungle with a cameraman. Corwin’s expressions of anticipation and surprise at those moments were so disingenuous the veil between real life and cinematic orchestration evaporated on the spot. But think about it: would anyone right-minded let producers infest their trailer home with 10,000 dead and living cockroaches just for six minutes of televised notoriety? Or stick a rotting possum carcass under their bathroom floor so A&E viewers can learn that their house smells really, really bad? I kind of think not.

I was a guest on an episode of a reality show about six years ago, back when these types of shows were still relatively new. Naively, I still thought that much of what we were seeing on these shows was real. So I was completely unprepared for the amount of stage direction that took place, like producers watching the action on a back-room screen sending orders into the cameraman’s earpiece about how to direct group conversations, and having to reshoot “natural” scenes to do them differently the second time. And this was a very well-respected, well meaning show. The premise was a group of women who wanted to change their lives for different reasons were put up in a mansion in downtown Chicago and assigned life coaches to help them achieve their goals. I was there because one of the women was a motherless daughter trying to find out information about a mother who had died when she was very young. She felt she couldn’t move forward in her life until she found out the details of her mother’s life and death. I was brought in to have dinner with her and the local Motherless Daughters group, and to then go back to the house with her and see some art projects she had made to commemorate her mother’s life.

The experience was decidedly more surreal than real. Oh, what the hell: I'll be honest. It was a total mind f&#*. It's like finding yourself at a board meeting completely different than the one you thought you were attending, and you have to learn the rules of protocol on the spot so you can play along.

At one point I was brought into a back room for an interview and was instructed to begin speaking a sentence with the opening line, “When she told me about her stepfather, I was thinking…” What I really wanted to say was, “When she told me about her stepfather, I was thinking, ‘This woman needs a good psychologist, not a life coach,” but instead I said something blandly educational about motherless women’s relationships with their stepfathers. I felt obligated to offer something helpful and useful and to sound like an expert, given that I’d been flown out to Chicago, fed a five-star dinner, and put up at the Hotel W for a night. In other words, I was deliberately not being real, because I was trying to please people who seemed to have a very clear idea of what they wanted me to say. But maybe I was dead wrong about that. Maybe being honest would have been better, and maybe that was really what they wanted, because whatever I said didn’t wind up making the final cut. If I’d been authentically myself in that moment at least I would have been speaking a truth instead of trying to participate in a form of packaged and manipulated truth that, in the end, isn’t very real at all.

All this is a long way of saying that I know reality shows aren't really “real.” Just like memoir, they start with the raw material of life (which is often slow and dull in its purest form) and are then shaped and edited it into a narrative package that entertains. The closest thing to a Real reality show I can remember was back in 1973, when PBS ran the documentary An American Family, after filming the everyday domestic dramas of the Loud family of Santa Barbara for seven months. Anyone remember them? I was only nine, but I watched it religiously. Over the course of the season the typical American family was exposed as the anti-Brady Bunch. The parents’ marriage started to unravel (whose wouldn’t, with TV cameras in your kitchen every minute?). Their oldest son, Lance, was revealed to be gay. By the end of the show, we realized that an experiment to give us all a peek into ordinary middle-class life had devolved into a very big mess. More sociological experiment than award-winning TV, the Loud family should have been our cautionary tale about what happens when you ask people to live authentically in front of a camera. We should have learned back then it can’t be done.

Of course, this begs the larger question “What is real?” if so much of what’s presented as “real” today is airbrushed, scripted, orchestrated, tweaked, shaped, stretched, or just made up? I don’t know. Maybe all we can ever know for sure is what we feel—the love we have for each other, the grief that comes from loss, the triumph from achievement, the despair from lack of hope, the fear of danger, the exhilaration of risk.

Lance Loud died in 2001 from complications from a crystal meth addiction, Hepatitis C and HIV. That's about as real as it gets.

Maybe this is why I’m liking Billy the Exterminator right now. Because once you strip away all the attitude and the bad hair and the “Dudes” and the shades, it feels like it’s just about a guy showing up to help regular people deal with everyday problems. Sometimes a dead rat in a trap really is just a dead rat in a trap. And maybe Billy’s are planted there, but the ones that we trap a couple times a year in the space underneath our bathtub are real. I know that to be true.

Not that I actually look at them, of course.

An Open Note to Kids in Topanga

2010-10-25T10:17:00.000-07:00

It is NOT FUNNY at all to leave a rubber baby rattlesnake on the file cabinet in the upstairs office when Mom is home alone. Not funny at all.

The Thing About Fumiko

2010-10-23T11:42:00.001-07:00

This Sunday's New York Times Style section will contain an essay I wrote about the week my 11-year-old daughter had to carry a flour-sack baby--whom she named Fumiko--to school with her every day--to learn about the responsibilities of teen parenting.
Crazy week in our house!
Here's the link to the article, titled Maternal Wisdom (5 Pounds Worth)...and a photo of the one and only Fumiko himself.
For anyone wondering, he and Hursula Zero (who appeared in The Possibility of Everything) do share a bedroom, but not a cradle.
I'm sure it says something about me that I keep writing about my children's dolls..but I'll leave that conversation for the Comments section.
Enjoy!

Google as a Verb: Does It Replace "Remember"?

2010-09-21T12:30:00.001-07:00

Driving from the Oakland Airport into San Francisco last week, I saw a huge billboard on the freeway advertising the show "Tales of the Maya Skies" at Oakland's Chabot Space and Science Center.

Being a Maya astronomy junkie, naturally I was intrigued. But I'd never heard of the Chabot Space and Science Center before, and I was traveling about 65 mph, in the car alone.

A couple of years ago, maybe even as recently as two, I would have fumbled around in my purse for a pen and scribbled the web site URL displayed on the billboard onto whatever scrap of paper I could find. Or maybe I'd just jot down "Cabot Science Center, Oakland" and call information, or look it up online later. Instead, I found myself speeding past the sign, thinking, "Oh, I'll just Google it tonight." I figured inputting "Maya" "museum" and "Oakland" all together would net the desired result--which it did, a few hours later in my hotel room when I remembered to look it up.

Now, you might think, What a cool thing technology is! How great that we have Google for this purpose! I'm not so sure about this, though. Because instead of writing down what I needed, or god forbid bothering to commit it to memory, I willfully chose not to remember information I knew I would later need. And it makes me wonder what such an automatic and cavalier dependence on search engines might do to my memory, or anyone's, over time. Will we not bother to remember certain pieces of data that were once natural for us to commit to memory? If so, will the vacuum be filled by something else, something useful or fulfilling? Or will we just naturally start devaluing the power of memory and instead evolve into a species that lives in a continuous present, with limited or radically different powers of recall? Would we be better off for this, or not?

As a memoirist, this intrigues me, and as a human being, well, it kind of disturbs me to think about. (Though over dinner in SF that night a friend pointed out that I still needed to remember to Google the keywords. So at least there's still that.)
I rely heavily on my powers of recall every day, but what if--assuming I were a frequent blogger which, as you've probably noticed, I am not--instead of having to remember the details of what happened last year, or even last month, I could just go into the search function on my blog and pull it up? I look at my daughters, ages 12 and 8, and can't help wondering: what kind of people will they become if they don't have to memorize data to succeed? If, in fact, your ability to retrieve data quickly and efficiently becomes more important than your ability to store it within your own mind? It seems to me that the way we use our brains will change. To some degree, I suspect this has already started to happen.

And don't even get me started about what texting has done to this next generation's communication skills and fluency with language. U really don't want 2 know.

The Target Story

2010-09-07T22:55:00.001-07:00

Everyone's been asking how the Target selection occurred. Well, I don't really have an answer. From my point of view, what happened was one day I got an email from my editor saying "Good news! Your book was chosen as a Target breakout book for the fall!"

I can see how some writers might get the scared deer look upon hearing this. Target? Not a retailer exactly known for its literary prominence. Sheet sets, yes. Memoirs? Not so much.

But me, I was beyond happy. “Excellent!” I wrote back.

You see, I happen to love our local Woodland Hills Target. And the one in Coralville, Iowa, too. It's my family’s premiere source of one-stop shopping. Where else can you find ballet clothes, computer paper, blow-up mattresses for sleepovers because the old one just sprang an inconvenient leak, Brita water filters that really should have been replaced a month ago, tube socks, and classic rock CDs all under the same roof?

Well, probably at Wal-Mart. But I wouldn't know. Because I'm loyal to Target.

My excitement, it lasted for about half an hour. That’s when I got the email from MoveOn.org calling for a boycott of Target. (Sheesh, I couldn’t even get to celebrate for a whole day?) Seems that Target’s corporate HQ donated $150,000 to a group supporting Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer, who's known to be anti-gay. And then my gay friends started emailing me to say, "Congratulations about Target. BUT." And coming from a family with several gay members, for me, it's a pretty significant BUT.

So I hope this all gets sorted out soon. Because I really do love shopping at Target. And I'm pretty sure no one at my local Woodland Hills Target was involved in the donation. But I voted against Prop 8 here in California. And I'd vote against it again and again.

If you’re boycotting Target, please consider buying The Possibility of Everything somewhere else. If you’re a committed Target shopper, please wave at the book when you see it there. Drop one in your cart if you’d like. Most of all, please enjoy the read.

The Possibility of Everything--newly out in paperback

2010-09-06T22:03:00.000-07:00

In stores now. Online. And at your local Target. With a beautiful new cover, and an author Q&A and questions for Book Clubs inside.

The paperback retails for $15, which IMO is a much more reasonable price point for readers. Truth be told, I hardly buy hardcovers any more myself. But paperbacks, I can't resist. So here's hoping that potential readers of POE feel the same way.

Please help me spread the word! Here's a link to help you order the book online. You can also read more about the book here.

Huge, huge thanks to all the book's readers and fans. I know it states the obvious, but without all of you, authors are just...sitting around in our pajamas, drinking coffee, rearranging words on a computer screen that no one would ever see.

Well, our spouses and our grandparents would say what we wrote is good. But that's about it. So thanks for being around.

Laura Ingalls Wilder, Again

2010-07-14T23:15:00.000-07:00

There’s an odd pleasure to be had from reading other people’s letters, particularly historical correspondence that captures both a character and an era. I relearned this today over at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library over in West Branch, Iowa, where I spent several hours reading years of letters between Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane.

Yes, that Laura Ingalls Wilder. The author of the Little House on the Prairie books. Although calling her “the” author takes some of the credit away from Rose, who’s widely believed to have been her mother’s ghostwriter and, based on the correspondence I read today, years earlier also functioned as her mother’s editor and writing coach.

That’s what brought me to the library. Sort of. Initially I became interested last summer at the Hoover Days festival, when a representative from the Laura Ingalls Wilder museum in Burr Oak, Iowa, (one of about five such places sprinkled throughout the Midwest, one in each place she ever lived) told me her daughter Rose’s papers were archived at the Hoover Library and that they included the ur-manuscript of all the Little House books, which Rose had divvied up and shaped into the series. Rose had been a biographer and friend of the former president; that’s why her papers are there.

All year, I’ve been planning to go the library to compare the original text against the final versions, mostly for my own edification as a nonfiction writer, editor and teacher. And then over the past few months, I’ve found other reasons for wanting to go, too. I’ve been considering doing some ghostwriting work—of which there’s a lot in L.A. right now, what with so many celebrity memoirs getting snapped up by publishers looking for big sales figures—and so am interested in how the Laura/Rose mother-daughter team collaborated on Laura’s life stories.

Also, I’ve been having a really tough time lately selling Eden on the merits of reading. Her reading level is appropriate for her grade, even a little above, but she just isn’t interested in chapter books at all. I’m on a campaign this summer to try to get her involved in stories, preferably in a series for children, and so I thought of starting with the Little House books, which I devoured when I was about her age. I seriously thought I was the reincarnation of Laura and even took to wearing a bonnet around the house. It didn’t hurt that I looked like Melissa Gilbert in the TV series (or so everyone used to say). At some point I wrote a letter to Rose, unaware that she’d already died, and received a typed letter in return that, naturally, I thought had been written especially for me even as my mother tried to explain what “form letter” meant.

So, back to the library. I showed up around 1:30 p.m. with two hours to spend, thinking I’d ask just to see the manuscript that developed into Little House in the Big Woods, which Eden and I are about to finish together, and to come back another day to look at the correspondence between Laura and Rose. But the librarian, Matt, convinced me to look at the whole collection which, I soon discovered, will take me about, oh, four years to read in full. He wheeled out six fat legal envelopes full of files—about four linear feet of material—most of it Xeroxed from the originals, and then ran back to retrieve the original manuscript of The First Four Years, the last book in her series. It’s kept wrapped in a complicated folder and was handwritten on grocery store writing tablets. He had to put on a pair of white gloves to handle it. I simultaneously thought, What the hell? and felt like crying from the sheer awe of it. Sort of how I once felt upon seeing handwritten royal decrees from the Middle Ages on display in the British Museum reading room, or a letter penned by Virginia Woolf in a manuscript museum.

For the next two hours I became completely absorbed in letters Laura wrote to her husband back in Missouri (Almanzo--remember the hunk who played him in the TV series?) when she went to visit Rose in San Francisco in 1915 by taking the train across the country, and then attended the Pacific International Exposition, as well as a few exchanges in which Rose encouraged Laura to write magazine articles about farm life and heavily edited her first attempt at publication. Rose secured Laura a $150 fee from Country Gentlemen for a her first published piece, about kitchen renovation. (I kid you not.)

But my favorite paragraph comes from a letter Rose wrote to her mother before that cross-country trip in 1915. Here it is:

“I bet the letter you wrote for grandma and Mary about your getting started to writing could be put verbatim into that “story of my life” thing. If I were you I’d have them save it and send it back, and I’d look at it with that viewpoint and see if I’m not right. I bet it’s better than you could do trying to write it for the story.”

“That ‘story of my life’ thing”--is that not the understatement of the day? A dozen books and millions of dollars in royalties later: yes. It was definitely quite the thing.

The Blue Bicycle

2010-07-12T23:40:00.000-07:00

I’ve been in Iowa for a solid week now, time enough for quite a few things to happen. I could write about the amount of rain that’s come down on us in the past eight days; or how the Iowa River is at grass level in City Park and threatening to flood; or about how happy I am to be a pedestrian again for much of the day; or about the three-day road trip to Missouri that Eden and I just took to visit Maya at camp.

But what I really want to write about is my new sky-blue bicycle.

Eden and I found at a garage sale for $25 the day we arrived, and it’s precisely the bicycle I was looking for. Vintage, retro, recycled, the kind of bicycle that makes me happy just to look at but won’t send me into paroxysm of panic and guilt if it’s stolen. When I brought it to a bike shop in town that specializes in vintage items, they fixed the rear spokes and gave me a wider set of handlebars for a $29.41 bill, labor included. This is the bargain of the decade, folks.

All these years that I lived in Iowa City and have been coming back for summers, I’ve never biked around town. As a graduate student I had an early mountain bike (circa about 1987) and would sometimes go for long trips out in the country, riding past cornfields for hours. But to get to class or just around town? No. It’s kind of mystifying in retrospect, actually. Why didn’t I ever consider biking a valid form of transportation? Only now, twenty years later, am I discovering that a whole new world opens up to you when you cruise along at 12 mph.

For one thing, you make fast friends with the people at bike repair shops. When I brought the bike in on Tuesday to drop it off for repairs, the woman over at 30th Century Bikes—super short hair, piercings, tank top, tattoos, very friendly, the epitome of hip—confirmed my suspicion that this blue cruiser is, actually, just a little too small for a 5’8” person like me. But we agreed it was worth trying to make it work.

“It’s exactly the bicycle I was looking for,” I told her. “And how often in life do you find exactly what you want?”

She nodded. Possibly considered I might be pathetic for saying such a thing, but generally looked like she agreed. Then we debated the merits of replacing the tires this year or next. We decided next. She showed me how to date a bicycle by looking for an inscription on the wheel hub. Mine said 1950 but she explained that sometimes the rest of the bicycle is a few years newer than its wheel hub. The bike says Montgomery Ward on the frame (how fabulous is that?) and we discussed that it might have come from the catalog. Whee—I was learning a lot.

On the way back home (walking, this time) I stopped in Uptown Bill's Coffee Bar on Gilbert St. How is it possible that I’ve been coming to Iowa City since 1989 and never knew about this place? It’s like stepping into a time capsule, including the three tough guys reading the day’s paper at the square linoleum tables. The only tipoff that it’s 2010 is the espresso machine behind the counter.

I wandered into the used bookstore in the back—only in Iowa City would you find a random used bookstore in the back of a vintage coffeeshop—and B. came back to see if I needed any help. I noticed the NY tattoo on his forearm, and asked if he was a Yankees fan. Turns out he’s not, but he was a New York City homicide cop for 27 years before moving to Iowa. There’s bound to be a story there, but he didn’t want to tell all of it and it wasn’t my place to ask for the details. Sometimes being a writer means knowing which questions to ask, and sometimes it means knowing when to back off. So we talked about a dozen other things for the next half hour and then on a back shelf I found a copy of William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, which I’d been looking for since May. This pleased me to no end, and I bought it and promised B. I’d come back later in the week.

The bicycle was ready on Thursday, so after I dropped Eden off at camp I walked over to pick it up. When I walked by Uptown Bill’s B. was outside sweeping the sidewalk, so I stopped to tell him this reminded me of all the doormen in New York after a big snow, and then we talked about New York for another 20 minutes before I remembered that I was expected at the bike shop. So in the interest of time I took a shortcut the back way, through an empty alley and parking lot.

As I was walking south through the parking lot toward the shop, a man in an electric wheelchair came cruising north along the sidewalk on my left. Iowa City is something of a mecca for the physically and mentally disabled: it’s mostly flat, very accessible, and has a noticeably high number of group homes around town. You routinely see groups of disabled teens walking through downtown or the indoor malls with aides accompanying them. This particular man appeared to have some kind of palsy and he was alone. It was just the two of us back there. I watched him steer his wheelchair toward a break in the curb that sloped toward the parking lot…and from my angle I could see the opening was too narrow for his chair to fit through.

That’s when I started running in his direction.

What happened next happened fast. He turned the chair around backwards to back down the slope, but his left wheels caught on the curb, and instead of making a smooth transition down the slope the chair tipped wildly in my direction, as if it was going to dump him onto the asphalt. I stuck my hands out to catch him, but I was still too far away and running fast. Yet somehow, somehow, the chair righted itself. I swear to god, it felt as if my hands somehow pushed him back upright, even though
I was still a good fifteen feet away when it happened.

“That was close,” I told him, when I finally made it to his chair.

“That was close,” he repeated. His speech was garbled, but mostly intelligible.“Thank you for that.”

“No problem,” I said.

“Have a nice day!” he shouted, as he zipped away north.

I stood there for a moment, struck by the random encounter. Was it really random? A butterfly flaps its wings in China and…well, we all know that story by now. But here’s another one: a homicide cop in New York quits his job and a woman finds the book she’s been searching for for months. Or a woman buys the perfect $25 sky-blue bicycle in Iowa City, and by some strange twist of fate a man in a wheelchair therefore won’t tumble out onto the pavement alone and have to lie there without help.

I really think we’re all connected somehow, in an intricate matrix of interdependent relationships. And I have the feeling this blue bicycle is going to be the catalyst for some very unusual and interesting times. I just do.

June 17, 2010

2010-06-17T18:05:00.000-07:00

Today is my 46th birthday. (As well as the birthday of Barry Manilow, M.C. Escher, Igor Stravinsky, my friend Nicolle's mother and, if rumor is correct, Jesus.) I post this not so I can solicit birthday wishes --though those are always nice to receive-- but because in the past few years, birthdays have become an odd and reflective experience for me. Definitely of the love/hate variety. Like any woman approaching a (ahem) certain age, I’m ambivalent about marking the passage of time. And yet at the same time, a big part of me never expected to live this long. My mother was 42 when she died, and until I turned 43, I could never imagine myself outliving her. Every year, every month, every day since 42 has been a gift.

How have I passed today? Well, by this point a birthday on a weekday is just another work day, and that’s pretty much what this has been. Took Maya to the dentist this morning, stopped at the mall for lunch and to buy a Father’s Day gift for Uzi, picked up Eden from the bus stop, dropped both kids at Uzi’s office, and hoofed it over to Culver City for the faculty meeting that kicks off the ten-day Antioch MFA residency. I felt completely dorky telling anyone it was my birthday, so I didn’t mention it. Buy my two kids think that having to work on one’s birthday is an absolute crime against humanity, and they’re cooking up something special for tonight. I know this because when I called home to say I was on my way, there was an unnaturally joyous, “Wow! Mom! Great!” and then a request to meet them at Topanga State Beach at exactly 6:40 p.m. instead.

It was only 5:15 when I called, so I’ve stopped in Venice at what used to be the Novel Café (and now looks the same but has an entirely different name) for a coffee and macaroon to pass the time. I got the smart idea to put some cinnamon in my coffee but the shaker released a whole lot of cinnamon all at once, so now I’m drinking a cup of cinnamon with coffee. It’s not bad, actually. Might even become an annual birthday drink, who knows?

I’m sitting at a round tiled table right in the window like a writer on display. Just outside the window two beach dudes are sitting on wicker chairs talking to everyone who passes by. One of them is wearing a pirate’s hat. The other looks like Thomas Hayden Guest with dreadlocks. I’m pretty sure it isn’t Thomas Hayden Guest with dreadlocks. He also has some pretty gnarly tattoos up both arms that look like a cross between Chinese symbols and death-metal threats. People are biking past, walking home from work, driving by with Lakers flags stuck to the window frames of their cars. It’s like a big, colorful celebration of life at 6 p.m. on a bright Thursday evening, and reminds me of when I lived on Washington Square and used to sit outside on the brownstone steps and watch the whole world go by.

I’ve got another twenty minutes before I need to get back in the car and find out what’s waiting at the beach. With Maya in charge, it could be anything at all. It’s so rare to have twenty completely uncalled for minutes these days, I’m not really sure how to spend them. Or actually, I do. It’s the novel café. And I’m supposed to be writing my first novel. So here goes. Twenty minutes. Birthday pages. Let’s go.

An Open Letter to Motherless Daughters on Mother's Day weekend

2010-05-07T14:00:00.001-07:00

(My mother and I in Florida, April 1967)

On a Mother’s Day morning about eight or nine years ago, my daughter Maya, who was then still in preschool, surprised me with breakfast in bed. On the wooden tray she proudly thrust onto my lap was a cup of orange juice, a whole apple still cold from the refrigerator, and her version of a “cheese sandwich”: a slice of cheese between two slices of cheese.

The cheese sandwich has become an annual tradition in our family, sometimes presented to me on the morning of my birthday as well, and there’s a good chance I might see one this Sunday morning, even though Maya is now twelve and her sister Eden nine. They’re quite capable in the kitchen these days, able to make omelets and French toast on their own, but the cheese sandwich is, well, the Cheese Sandwich. Mother’s Day isn’t Mother’s Day in our house without one now.

I’m grateful for this family tradition, however small, because for many years Mother’s Day was such a dark spot on my calendar. Without a mother to honor on that day, I felt there was no place for me to fit. In the seventeen years since Motherless Daughters was first published, I’ve heard from many readers who’ve felt and still feel the same way. Even those with children of their own feel the absence of their mothers more acutely on the day set aside specifically to remember the ones who birthed us. The initiative for a national Mother’s Day was started in 1907 by a motherless daughter who was looking for a public way to honor all mothers, but somehow evolved into a day to honor only those who are living (and able to physically receive bouquets of flowers and Hallmark cards). But where did that leave women whose mothers had died or were otherwise absent?

In 1996, a small group of women set out to answer this question, instituting the first Motherless Daughters Day luncheon in New York City. They chose the Saturday of Mother’s Day weekend to give motherless women a special time and place to honor mothers who were no longer alive. Over the years that tradition has expanded to more than a dozen cities nationwide, including Los Angeles; Detroit; Buffalo, NY; and Orange County, CA. (For a listing, see the Support Groups page at www.hopeedelman.com.) At some point during each luncheon, women join hands and participate in the Circle of Remembrance. They go around the circle and in turn each state their names and their mothers’. “Hope, daughter of Marcia,” I say, when my turn comes around.

There is something enormously powerful about standing in a roomful of motherless women simultaneously honoring dozens of lost mothers at the same time, and speaking their names out loud. How many times a year do I actually say my mother’s name out loud? Sadly, not that many. But on this weekend, she has a whole day of honor. Instead of grieving her absence, it encourages me to celebrate her influence.

For me, the Sunday of Mother’s Day has become a day to spend with my two daughters, starting with a Cheese Sandwich in bed. I won’t lie to you: it’s still deeply sad for me to not have my mother to call on that day. But Motherless Daughters Day—tomorrow—has become the day I set aside to remember her. Not in her final, bedridden state, but as the dynamic, healthy presence she was for the majority of my life. The one who gave me, without either of us knowing it, the foundation I would one day need to manage without her for so long.

This is my 29th Mother’s Day without a mother. A part of me can’t believe it’s even possible to write that; I still feel her presence so strongly in much of what I do. Just yesterday morning I was showing Eden how to separate an egg yolk from an egg white, and it was as if my mother’s hands were guiding mine. It doesn’t seem like that long ago that she taught me to do it herself, in the gold and avocado kitchen of my childhood.

I remember the first few Mother’s Days I spent without her, and how devastatingly sad and lonely they were. And then I remember how empowering it felt to attend that first Motherless Daughters Day celebration and speak her name out loud. “I am Hope, daughter of Marcia.” No matter how many motherless Mother’s Days pass, that statement will always be true.

On this Mother’s Day and Motherless Daughters Day weekend, I extend my warmest wishes to those of you who have lost mothers, the sincerest hope that you will have comfort and peace this weekend, and the blessings of a beautiful and bountiful year. Those of you who’ve written to me this past year—hundreds of you!--have warmed my heart with your stories, and inspired me with your generosity of spirit. You are all such strong, resilient, and courageous women. It has been an honor to advocate on your behalf for these past seventeen years.

With all best everything,
Hope

Hanging with Authors and Thinkers at the LATFOB

2010-04-28T11:06:00.000-07:00

The LA Times Festival of Books was last weekend, and like most attendees, I imagine, I was left with two overriding impressions: first, extreme jubilation that so many people showed up this year, especially this year, in support of authors and the written word; and second, total overwhelm from having been in the presence of 400 authors and 130,000 attendees on the UCLA campus over just two days.

If you’re a participating author, your time at the festival always begins in the author’s green room, a huge room of tables and a buffet spread inside the UCLA faculty center which always feels like (no matter how old you get) the high school cafeterias of your past. The prom king and queen drift around the room, occasionally holding court, and you never feel like you’re sitting at the cool kids’ table. Unless you’re one of the cool kids and feeling secure in that knowledge, I suppose. The thing is, most of us who became authors were never the cool kids in high school, so probably nearly everyone in the room was feeling the way I was. (Except perhaps for T.C. Boyle, who walked between the tables wearing a black beret and dark sunglasses with everyone whispering, “That’s T.C.!” in his wake. I think if you actually know him you get to call him Tom. But I digress.)

On Saturday I had the great fortune to participate in an hourlong panel titled “Memoir: Keeping the Faith” with authors Dani Shapiro (Devotion); Eric Lax (Faith, Interrupted) and William Lobdell (Losing My Religion). We joked that our panel really should have been called “Keeping the Faith, Finding the Faith, Losing the Faith, and Questioning the Faith” since we were all coming at the topic from different, yet complementary, directions. Our moderater was Jack Miles, UC Professor of Religion and author of God: A Biography, who got stuck in traffic coming up from Orange County and strolled into the room at one minute to three, picked up the mike, and got us rolling, which was kind of a wonky beginning, but he was so charming and erudite that nobody seemed to mind. Each of the panelists spoke for a few minutes about their respective books, and then Jack asked a question of each of us. These panelists were terrific, all so thoughtful and considerate, and did such a good job of getting everyone thinking about faith and writing and storytelling and personal experience that I think it might have been one of the very best panels I’ve ever participated in.

During the audience Q&A section near the end, a man came up to the mike with a question for me. He said that when he hears about someone choosing to take a child to healers in Belize instead of to a psychiatrist he immediately scoffs at the idea, and he wanted to know what my suggestions I had for discussing faith with people whose beliefs are different from his own. (I paraphrase, but that was the gist of it.) It was a good question, and one worthy of consideration, I think. I spoke some about how we first have to establish there is no “right” answer, no one answer, and that because faith is so individual and personal it requires people on both sides of the discussion to maintain a healthy and genuine respect for ideas other than their own. Eric Lax spoke a bit about how that requires a certain degree of humility, to suspend one’s own disbelief (or belief) long enough to consider that perhaps the other person isn’t wrong, because only then can meaningful conversation begin.

It really comes down to a discussion of arrogance, I think. In my opinion, arrogance has very bad p.r., insofar that when we hear the word we tend to bristle, reacting to it as something negative. But if you can sidestep the undertones of haughtiness and disdain that surround the word, arrogance really means steadfastly and stubbornly adhering to one’s own point of view to the exclusion of others, which can—dare I say it?—sometimes be a useful survival tool. Engaging in a respectful conversation with someone who holds a different belief system about faith does require a loosening of one’s own arrogance, I believe. To me, it’s just as arrogant to say, “There is a God because I know it to be true” as “There is no God because I haven’t seen proof that one exists.” I left the panel having reaffirmed that I have my experiences, and the belief system that have grown out of those experiences. As far as faith goes, this makes me an expert only on what I myself believe to be true--yet deeply interested in what others have to say, as well. And judging by the number of audience members who lined up to ask questions of panelists, it seems that others are, too. This is an important dialogue, especially in these difficult times. I hope it continues.

Earth Day 2010

2010-04-19T09:37:00.000-07:00

I feel about Earth Day sort of the way I feel about Mother’s Day. As in, shouldn’t every day be Earth Day? Still, I’m always up for a reason to celebrate it once a year in Topanga, where the festival has evolved into a two-day happening of live music, dancing, demonstrations, face painting, hula hooping, and really excellent vegan food booths.

The girls and I went both days this year, accompanied on Saturday by our friends Amy and Eber who came up from San Diego for the festivities. Since the parking situation along Topanga Canyon Boulevard was impossible as usual, forcing us to park somewhere near the Mexican border, we rode the shuttle bus to the community house, which was an experience unto itself. It was a converted school bus painted royal blue with psychedelic swirls on the outside, renamed Alice the Wonderbus. Inside there were couches lining both walls, comfy stacks of pillows up and down both sides, a big stuffed tiger, a couple of Mad Hatter hats lying around, and shag rugs covering the floor. My friend EJ said her kids hula hooped inside the bus on the way to the festival, though it was too crowded both days we were on it for Maya and Eden to break out their hoops. Still, you know it’s going to be a good party when getting there it twice as much fun as anything you’ve done in the previous week.

Despite a forecast of rain on Sunday we had two gloriously sunny, warm days. Loads of friends milling around, wine tasting, massage tables, jewelry and clothing booths, info about solar power and sustainable housing, a bellydancing performance on Sunday featuring dancers from ages 4 into their 60s, and some guy who calls himself Fantuzi leaping around on stage singing and dancing for 15 minutes both day. (I’m going to start calling my husband Uzi “Fantuzi”. Let’s see how well that goes over in our house.)

Also at the festival, our friend Scott’s unrolled his new local initiative called “Topanga Better Faster” which aims to start community dialogue about opening a food co-op, starting a community credit union, getting a charter middle and high school in town, and—my kids’ favorite—setting up a zip line from the town center down to Pacific Coast Highway. I think the zip line is just for attention, but it’s effective, isn’t it? Scott held his visioning meetings inside a geodesic demi-dome. People: this is Topanga at its best.

What we really need in town is a gas station, reinforced by a bad oversight I made this weekend which resulting in driving Maya and our neighbor to school this morning with my “empty” light on all the way, praying I’d make it to a gas station in time and still be able to get Eden to her bus. But Scott’s idea is to help Topanga become a Transition Town, which means less oil dependent, so I guess a gas station isn’t going to be part of the plan.

Anyway, Earth Day photos will follow. Don’t have a photo of Alice the Wonderbus though, because my camera battery died before the end of the day. Maya hatched the idea of having all her friends transported on it to her Bat Mitzvah party, which I think would definitely leave an impression on a bunch of 13-year-olds. Probably on the adults, too. We’ll probably wind up hanging out in the bus all night listening to Jefferson Airplane while the kids dance to Lady Gaga. Rock on.

Floating Outdoor Bed

2010-04-18T09:44:00.000-07:00

Would you want to sleep outside all the time if you had one of these?

Random Mat Hatter and friends

2010-04-18T09:40:00.000-07:00

Maya and her friend at Earth Day

2010-04-18T09:39:00.000-07:00

Write By the Beach

2010-03-04T11:00:00.000-08:00

It's been a couple of years since I last taught private writing workshops--mostly because motherhood and a book deadline and a tour didn't leave much time for quality teaching. But I've missed working with students terribly, and helping them tell their stories. The classroom is where I feel most comfortable, and there's truly nothing like helping a writer break through a creative barrier and start producing winning prose.

So I've just put two weekend workshops on the calendar, and I hope you'll consider joining me for one (or both!) of them.

The first is in Santa Monica, California, from Friday April 30 until Sunday May 2. This one is for writers of all levels, and will focus on helping you develop and perfect the nuts and bolts of creative nonfiction writing: detail, dialogue, narrative structure, characterization. Class time will be split between lectures, discussion and writing exercises. It's a perfect environment for anyone hoping to start a story of transformation, loss, triumph, or experience. Plus, it's held at the stunning art deco Georgian Hotel, right across the street from the beach.

Cost is $450, which includes breakfast Saturday and Sunday and a group dinner Sunday evening. Class size is limited to 12.

The second class will take place over Memorial Day weekend (Saturday through Monday) at my house in Iowa City. This one's for intermediate and advanced writers who have already embarked on a project. Emphasis will be on reading a discussing up to twenty pages of work per student, as well as on discussion of published authors' work.

Because this one's at my house I'm able to keep the cost down a bit--it's $375, which includes an outing to Prairie Lights bookstore and a group dinner Sunday night. Class size is limited to 8, which is the most I can fit around the dining room table.

Information about both workshops is online here. Registration is still by invitation only; if you'd like to receive forms, please email me at hopeedelman@gmail.com.

And another! If you want to try the personal essay, I've just signed up to teach a one-day workshop on essay writing May 20 through Mediabistro.com in Los Angeles. Information will be available online soon. Check back here for details.

Finally--as always, I'll be teaching two weeklong workshops at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival in July. One is on writing Family Memoir, and the other on Writing About the Extraordinary. The catalog is now online and registration is open. Sign up soon, though, because classes there tend to fill up fast.

Hoping to see you at one or another class, or any other time soon--

Hope

Joannie Rochette Takes the Bronze

2010-02-27T12:32:00.000-08:00

Like everyone else in America this week, I was captivated by the story of Canadian figure skater Joannie Rochette. Just a few hours after Rochette's 55-year-old mother arrived in Vancouver to watch her daughter skate in the Winter Olympics, she died from a sudden and massive heart attack.

And her daughter continued to compete.

Some people may find this disconcerting, even heartless, but I found it enormously brave. We can only imagine the kind of focus and control it must have taken for Rochette to keep it together long enough to perform the short and long programs she'd been practicing for months. We saw the tears she couldn't contain at the end of the short program, and those of us who've lost mothers, especially suddenly, empathized with her unique pain. Was there any motherless daughter watching who didn't think, "Oh, sweetheart! What can we do to help you through?"

Elite athletes are trained to shut off all emotion and thoughts when it's their turn to perform, and to focus only on the task at hand, but this was another kind of compartmentalization entirely. That Rochette was able to come through at the level she did, and capture a bronze medal for Canada, is true testimony to determination, love, and faith in her own ability to come through.

In an television interview that aired last night, she mentioned that as hard as it was, and as much as she wanted to be with her family, she'd made the decision to stay in Vancouver and compete because that's what her mother would have wanted. On the one hand, that sounded like exactly the kind of answer she would have been coached to give when that question was inevitably asked. On the other hand, you can't help thinking it was probably true. Or feeling that the greatest tragedy of all in this story is the mother who never got to see her daughter skate, and know what she was capable of achieving under such extraordinary pressure. Although very likely, she already knew.

Kids Who Hear Voices

2010-02-07T13:38:00.001-08:00

According to this article, sent to me by my friend Ann, the phenomenon is a lot more common that we would think. A group of Dutch medical researchers, publishing in the British Journal of Psychiatry, studied a group of 8- and 9-year-olds to find out how many of them heard voices that other people couldn't hear. Ten percent of them reported having what the researchers call "verbal auditory hallucinations." Sixteen percent of children and teens are believed to hear such voices. That's almost one out of five.
You can read a summary of the article here.

Whoa. I found this fascinating on several points. First, because so few of the kids seemed to be bothered by the voices they heard. They took it totally in stride. Second, because there were no other symptoms pointing toward pathology, and in the end the majority of these kids were determined to be perfectly fine, i.e. no evidence of mental illness at all.

And third, because the researchers don't ever say what, exactly, the kids were hearing--don't you wonder what the voices were saying to them?--or speculate about what these voices might have been. I guess "verbal auditory hallucination" is a way of saying the voices were imagined, but it seemed to be real to the kids. What kind of mental process, outside of mental illness, would make voices appear in one's head?

Our family's story was different, insofar that our daughter did seem troubled--extremely troubled--by what she claimed she could hear. Still, whenever an article like this shows up on my radar I'm interested in it, since even after all this time I don't have a definitive answer about what plagued my daughter, only a story about an unconventional journey that by all accounts, seemed to help.

Trash Cans Never Sounded So Good

2010-02-03T10:32:00.000-08:00

Took the girls to see Stomp on Tuesday night--the street percussion troupe that makes music out of every ordinary object known to mankind. Sheesh, they were good. We don't typically do things like this on a school night, Hollywood being a solid 45 minute drive from the house without traffic, but I lucked into half-price tickets that were available only midweek so figured, Just this once: why not? And to make it even extra special, since we got there a half hour early, we made a Pinkberry run before the show.

How is it possible that I've lived in LA this long and never been to a Pinkberry? If you live near a Pinkberry, run--do not walk--for an original vanilla with chocolate chips and peppermint shavings. Oh. My. God.

Anyway: Stomp. It's one of those shows that makes you sit in the audience alternately thinking, How do they do that? and We've got to try this at home. Whole percussive routines using only brooms. Folding chairs. Water-cooler bottles. Those dancers were seriously inventive. Incredibly talented, too. And they did an encore that encouraged audience participation to a rhythmic degree far beyond what you'd think a thousand people could manage--yet did.

In the car on the way to Hollywood, I was telling the girls about how I've seen Stomp twice before, the first time at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1991 when they were still a scruffy bunch from Brighton and no one knew who they were. I was visiting my friend Sharon who was studying in England that summer, and we roadtripped up to Scotland with some of her friends for the festival. We wound up at Stomp because it was one of the few events that still had last-minute tickets available. I'm guessing most of the audience was there for the same reason, because nobody seemed to know what they were in for when the performers started doing their thing. If I'm remembering right, they opened with brooms back then, too, and also did routines with matchbooks, plastic bags, trash cans, and keys. It was fantastic and innovative and wholly new. Or at least that's how it seemed. After the show, the audience poured into the streets of Edinburgh and took off kicking trash cans and drumming against the sides of buildings. The most mundane objects suddenly looked like instruments, worthy of making music on the street.

Reading the show's program Tuesday night, I realized that the Fringe Festival performance had been Stomp's debut. Who knew? I guess those of us in the audience did, at some level, because of the electricity it inspired, the freshness it embodied. About five years later, after Stomp was already ensconced off-Broadway in the East Village, I saw them again and even though the U.S. troupe was equally as talented and the routines even more astonishing, the newness had worn off. The amazement of first contact was gone, replaced by the awe of their performance skills.

It's still an incredible show nonetheless. My kids loved it. It's playing at the Pantages Theater through Feb. 7. In lieu of driving to Hollywood on a school night, you can watch a short clip here.

Help for Haiti's Orphans

2010-02-02T14:10:00.000-08:00

Like everyone else, I was glued to the internet in the 72 hours after the earthquake in Haiti, driven by an insatiable need for the minute details (inveterate nonfiction instructor that I am). How, exactly, were people being extracted from the rubble? Could all the reports about people going without any food and water for 72 hours be accurate, and if so, how was everyone still walking around? Who was doing what to help reunite parents and children, and how? And thinking, my god, all these people, all this suffering, how can one country contain it all?

As my mind always veers to the most vulnerable citizens whenever a disaster strikes, anywhere, I was also thinking, what about the orphans, who've already lost so much and now have lost even more?

In those first, early days I did as everyone else I knew did, sending whatever money I could to Doctors without Borders, and the Red Cross, and wondering how exactly those text donations were working and if Sprint really would send all the money to Haiti or divert some of it for corporate bonuses instead. And then, like everyone else, I hit the wall of disaster overload and had to stop checking the news every hour or two. Had to get back to regular daily tasks, with a prayer sent heading southeast and the faith that those in a position to do real, utilitarian good were down there finding ways to do it.

But there's one story that I can't get out of my mind, and so I'm going to take a chance here and introduce it to yours. It's the story of an orphanage in Jacmel, Haiti, one of the cities that sustained the most damage rom the quake. Our friends Martin and Sue, who live in Topanga, started it a few years ago and now support 13 kids full-time, some who are HIV+, others with special needs.

For the first few days after the quake, nobody knew if the children had survived, if the director and staff were safe, if the building was still standing. It was a tense time for lots of people in Topanga, since Martin and Sue have a large circle of friends and admirers, and many of us have been supporting their mission and cheering them on over the years.

Then, a few days later, word came through from Lia, the orphanage director, that miraculously, all the children were safe. Most of them had been at the park when the earthquake struck, and those who had been in the building--which is all but destroyed--managed to escape injury. But they're living in a tent in the street with their neighbors right now. They have barely adequate amounts of food and water and, thanks to people who donated generously and immediately, medical supplies that were just driven over from the Dominican Republic that will hold them for a while. This is particularly important, since going without meds is not an option for some of these kids. They're stable for the moment. But their long-term needs are great.

Lia has been keeping a blog of their experiences, and it's well worth checking out. The photos are surreal. The children are stunning in their capacity to nonetheless experience joy even under terrible conditions. Yet their plight is truly unimaginable to those of us up here.

You can read updates about the kids and the orphanage here.

So--if you're not suffering from disaster fatigue, and if you're looking for a way to help but want to know that your dollars will go right to those who need them most (and who doesn't?), and if your desire is to specifically help parentless children affected by the quake, I can personally assure you that this is a reputable charity, and that all of your money will go straight to helping the kids.

You can donate online at We Can Build An Orphanage. And blessings to you all for considering it.

Back in Blogging Mode

2010-02-01T14:19:00.001-08:00

Ay yi yi, I'm not really fulfilling my end of the bargain here, am I? I can't figure out exactly what keeps me from blogging more often than I do. Though I have some ideas:
1. My own internal standards of perfection. Blogging, by nature, is a relatively off-the-cuff enterprise. Have thought, type it out, hit send. For someone who labors over every paragraph for hours, by nature, that's a foreign concept. And an unsettling one. Result: avoidance.
2. Time. Well, we all know about that one. Two kids, one husband, one house, two cats, a book that needs to be promoted, a book that needs to be conceived, students, the 2:45 school pickup daily, dinner every night, endless bills, taxes due soon. Structure and time management have never been my fortes. Why do today what you can't do today? Result: procrastination.
3. Fear of narcissism. Maybe I'm unduly affected by readers who accuse me (and other memoirists; I'm not alone) of being self-absorbed. With all that's going on in the world--Haiti, California's budget fiasco, nutso bank bonuses, the price of gas, and (god help us all) Scott Brown, who cares what I have to say? Even more to the point, is it fair of me to try to make other people care what I have to say when so many other more important things are going on in the world (see above)? Result: self-doubt.
If any of you have suggestions not just for how to get oneself on a regular blogging schedule, but also how to keep believing that one's own thoughts are worth sharing on a regular basis--I'm interested in hearing them. In the meantime, I'll be blogging when I know I have something worthwhile to say, not just to fill space and time. God knows, we all have enough demands on our time these days.

Virtually Yours

2009-12-03T16:13:00.000-08:00

The national book tour ended about a week and a half ago, covering 15 cities in about eight weeks. Many thanks to everyone at home and elsewhere who made it such a memorable trek. From the SheWrites.com salon at Wicki’s loft in NYC all the way to Tami’s invention of the Possibilitini Martini in South Florida (see recipe below) it was an illuminating two-month dialogue with readers and new friends that I’ll not soon forget.

I’m now on Day Two of a virtual book tour, which involves a lot less physical travel but quite a bit of interaction nonetheless. It means logging on to different blogs every day that are reviewing the book or posting interviews with me, and interacting with the bloggers and their followers. The tour is virtual in every sense: Ballantine in New York contracted with a woman named Dorothy in Virginia who runs a company called Pump Up Your Book! so that an author in California can be introduced to readers all over the country—and nobody has to leave the comfort of their computer screens.

In my case, it means sitting at the kitchen table with a mug of coffee first thing in the morning before my kids get up, to check the first round of blog comments from the East Coast; then logging on again later in the day—usually from a café in Topanga—to see who’s joined the conversation; and then checking in a third time at night after the kids have gone to bed, to respond to the final comments and thank everyone for participating.

What this online tour is revealing, right from the start, is that I’ve written a much more controversial book than I thought I had, and for reasons I wouldn’t have expected. On the physical tour I encountered mainly people who hadn’t yet read the book or who’d read it and liked it. The internet is where the divergence of opinion shows up, and sheesh, has it ever.

I knew I was taking a risk with this book, although I’d anticipated that most of the flak I’d receive would be because of its spiritual message. Instead, I’ve come under scrutiny almost exclusively because of…my parenting. Depending on the reader, my character in the book was either courageous, or irresponsible. Honest, or overanxious. Thoughtful, or (and this is a big one being leveled at many female memoirists these days) self-absorbed.

Admittedly, the choices my husband and I made nine years ago were not ones that many parents would make. One blogger—and I’m reluctant to use the word “reviewer” because blogs are personal opinions, after all—yesterday objected so strongly to us as parents that she couldn’t find much of merit in the book to recommend. (Yet one of the reader responses to her post was “I love books like this! Thanks!”—proving the point that all publicity is good publicity, I guess.) Then another blogger today at luxuryreading.com identified so much with the parents of a troubled child that she called the book one of the five best books she’d ever read.

And there you have it, my friends. The Mommy Wars. Alive and kicking on The POE blog tour.

If you really want to see the battle in action, check out the book’s Amazon reviews, where opinions range from “I couldn’t put this book down” to “I kept wanting to slap the author.” (Real nice, ay? Thanks, Marcy, whoever you are! Love you, too, sister!) And please feel free to weigh in and share your own opinion, if not specifically about my parenting—because why should the choices one mother made nine years ago matter so much to another mother today?—then about why mothers are so quick to judge those who parent differently than they do. And how at a time when unity and cooperation are so essential, the only purpose this kind of criticism serves is to help the poster feel more secure and confident about herself.

Let’s try to raise the dialogue above that level, and into a type of discourse that actually does some public good. Anyone game?

The Possibilitini
1.5 oz vodka
.5 oz Triple Sec.
.5 oz pomegranate juice
.5 oz fresh squeezed lemon juice
1 tsp sugar syrup.
Shake with ice and pour over 1 tsp pomegranate seeds.

Writing About the Extraordinary

2009-11-24T12:23:00.000-08:00

One of the best parts of being a nonfiction writing instructor is watching students transform over the course of a week as their stories come into focus and take shape. Not just because of the excitement that comes from watching a text emerge, but from witnessing the personal changes that takes place as they reach greater insights about what they’ve experienced and what it means in a larger, universal sense.

I had a similar experience while writing The Possibility of Everything. I spent twelve chapters explaining and analyzing my complete absence of faith and trust, both of which were shattered in 1981 when my mother died, and then, when I was within ten pages of finishing the book, I had what amounted to (for me) a revelation. In the middle of an otherwise innocuous sentence, I suddenly realized that if I hadn’t had at least a small amount of faith left I never would have agreed to travel to Belize at all.

It was my Dorothy and the Red Shoes moment, an illuminating insight that revealed a truth I’d been keeping a secret even from myself. I hadn’t strayed quite as far from my roots as I’d thought, and to me this was an emotional homecoming of sorts. Once I understood what it meant, I had to go back and revise some earlier sections of the story. The delivery of the manuscript was delayed by another week, but I think the final product is stronger because of it.

The journey my family took into the rainforest was life-changing, but so was the writing of the book. Because of both of these experiences, I’ve started teaching workshops for people who also want to write about their unusual, unconventional or just non-ordinary experiences in the hope that I can help them tell their stories in a believable manner and also discover new truths about themselves.

Next July at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival I’ll be offering a six-day workshop titled Writing About the Extraordinary. “Extraordinary” is defined broadly: it can be the story of an unexpected healing; a dramatic or unusual encounter; or a mystical story of transformation like the one in my bok. The ISWF online catalog will be posted in February and registration will begin soon after. If you’re interested in this one, I suggest committing as early as you can, since it typically fills up fast.

Even sooner, I’ve just been invited to join authors Joyce Maynard and Ann Hood to teach a weeklong workshop this February at Lake Atitlan, Guatemala. Joyce has been running this workshop for several years and I’m very excited to be part of it. It’s different from other workshops I’ve done, insofar that students can work with one, two, or three authors at once, and also participate in a larger community of writers. We’ll also be joined by YA Author Francesco Sedita and possibly another writer, too.

The dates for the Guatemala workshop are February 13-21. If you’re interested you can get much more info here, or by contacting Melissa at writebythelake@yahoo.com. (Or by contacting me at hopeedelman@gmail.com.)

San Marcos la Laguna is a gorgeous, magical setting for writing, and the week offers the opportunity to get double or triple the instruction that most workshops offer. I’ll be there to work with students who have non-ordinary stories to tell, but I’m very happy to work with writers of more traditional memoir or personal essays as well. Plus, I’ll be taking a few exploratory outings during the week to look for native healers around the lake, including the renowned daykeepers who still keep time by the sacred Tzolkin calendar of the Maya, and you’re very welcome to join me on those trips.

Hoping to see some of you for either of these weeks!

Warmly,

Hope

Confessions of a Closet Mystic

2009-11-09T00:07:00.000-08:00

As I've been traveling around the country, talking about the book and meeting readers, the number one question I hear is, "How much does Maya remember from your trip?"

Not "What does she remember from your trip?" or "Who does she remember from your trip?" but "How much?"

I find this a curious question, since I can't imagine what difference the quantity of a child's memories, nine years later, could really makes to a reader. So there must be a question behind this question, some impulse that makes people shape their inquiry this way even though there's another piece of information they really want to know.

I spent about the first six weeks of the tour trying to figure this out, and the other night at Women and Children First bookstore in Chicago, when an audience member asked the same question, an insight came to me in a rush.

I think people are asking this because what they really want to know is how much of the wonder and magic of early childhood gets carried into the pre-teen years and, by extension, how much of it might still survive in our adult consciousness today.

I'll try to explain.

A few weeks ago, I was having lunch with a friend and I was telling him how, despite all that happened to us in Belize, I'm still a skeptic at heart who applies a cynical eye to much that comes across my path.

He said, "Actually, I think you've got it backwards. I think this whole skeptic thing you've got going is just an act so people don't accuse you of being too woo-woo. I don't think you're a closet skeptic. I think you're actually a closet mystic but you're afraid to admit it to anyone, even yourself."

I immediately started crying when he said this, which means he's probably right.

Since the beginning of this tour, I've been trying to position myself as Everywomen, so that I can look out at an audience and say, "See! I'm actually very normal! I'm just like you!" in the hope that this will help them identify with my family and my story. When in fact, the more accurate statement might be, "I'm a normal person, yet I nonetheless have these beliefs. You're a lot like me!" Because I know that if you peek beneath the surface of most people, you'll find one or more stories of experiences they've had they defy easy explanation, or cross over into the mystical and cannot rely on common language for description. Whether it's a story of an incredibly coincidence that made you stop and say out loud, "What were the chances of that?" or a dream in which you received information you couldn't possibly have known when awake--it's something that can't be explained but that we nonetheless know can happen, because we experienced it ourselves.

So the reason I think so many people ask me "How much does Maya remember from your trip?" is not even because they want to believe that the open door of childhood can persist into the teenage years and beyond, but because they already know it can and are looking for validation through hearing our story.

Here's what I think: that we're a whole society of closet mystics who've been conditioned to believe only in the sanctity of scientific proof, yet who nonetheless carry within us the deep knowledge that a whole lot is going on that the scientific method cannot explain to our own satisfaction.

What would it take to get more of us to come out?

Reporting from the Sacbe

2009-11-06T09:49:00.000-08:00

Dr. Rosita sent me an email the other day that said, "Still on the Sacbe?" and it made me laugh out loud. Sacbes were the ancient Maya white plastered roads that ran from town to town, and between key points within cities. Yes, I'm still on the metaphoric sacbe, until November 19, at which point I get to go home and...take a three-day nap.

I'm in the Portland Airport now, about to take flight number 15 of 18 in total. Last night I did event number 21 out of 29. Whew.

Seriously. It's the longest sacbe ever!! Walking from Chichen Itza to Cozumel would be faster. But probably, with the mosquitoes and snakes and everything, a lot less fun.

A View from the Bay

2009-11-04T11:47:00.000-08:00

Yesterday in San Francisco, I appeared on a local daytime TV show called The View from the Bay. It's been a while--at least two years--since I've done any TV, and to say I was rusty was a big understatement. I arrived at the ABC studio on Front Street minus a clean copy of my own book (bad, bad author!) and without any prep or practice at all.

Amazingly, it went well anyway.

These are the nicest, and I mean the nicest, staff and hosts I've come across in a long time. Everyone from Spencer Christian, who was one of the interviewers (remember him from ??) to Jason the segment producer to the guy who miked me before I went on stage was friendly and funny. Rarest of all these days, they all seemed to actually like their jobs.

This immediately put me as ease, so when a surprise of a question--"What did you expect to happen in Belize?"--was tossed my way and I blurted out, "Well, nothing!" and we all cracked up, it actually came across (I hope) okay.

The show is now Reason #357 why I'm in love with San Francisco. The fact that it's such a writing city and the existence of North Beach restaurants rank way up there, too.

You can see the show online here.

The Thing About Airports

2009-10-31T10:18:00.000-07:00

Well, a couple of things about airports.

Carpeted hallways are much, much better than tiled ones. Way less noisy, and less likelihood you will slip and almost break your laptop while running to make a connecting flight.

Those little golf carts with the blinking light in front and the siren...how come I never notice them until they're just about to run me over?

I'm not convinced boarding people by groups speeds the process up at all. It might keep people from fighting for position, though I've only ever seen that happen in Tel Aviv.

Any coffee company other than Starbucks is a welcome sight.

Air blowers in the bathroom: are they really necessary?

Portland has the best airport stores. Los Angeles has the nicest Admiral's Club. At Cedar Rapids, you almost never have to wait in a line, and your bag is likely to get the single baggage carousel before you do.

If you leave anything on the plane like, say, the four decorated Halloween cookies you bought in Iowa City to bring home for your daughters in L.A.--forget it. They're already gone.

A gray Midwestern morning...

2009-10-30T09:37:00.000-07:00

...is lifted up by a steaming cup of coffee in the right cafe, with free wireless access as an added plus. This morning it's Cafe Deluxe on Summit Street in Iowa City. For those of you who don't know Iowa City, Summit Street is a beautiful, wide, treelined street lined with big Victorian homes with large yards. I don't know for sure, but I'd guess that the town bigwigs of the early 20th century all lived here. It's got that kind of look.

About maybe 8 or 10 years ago, a little cafe opened in a tiny house right next to the railroad tracks. It's got the aura of another era--not the 1920s, but more the 40s and 50s--chrome swivel barstools, cast-iron tables and chairs, and a big glass display case up front filled with homemade cookies and cupcakes. Some kind of low-throated acoustic blues music is playing over the speakers pointed my way. It's the kind of place where you can only get half and half to go with your coffee, never milk, never lowfat milk god forbid, and the only kind of sweetener available is an old-fashioned glass sugar canister full of white granules. Domino Sugar, I'm guessing.

My daughters and I come here every summer. It's one of our favorite local spots. We usually stop by on Saturday mornings, on the way out of town to the Amish farmers' markets in Kalona. We pick up a coffee to go (for me) and a cookie and tea for them. Or banana bread. For the road.

It's too far from campus to be a student neighborhood but close enough for professors and families to bike into downtown, and as I'm sitting here now through the big glass windows up front I'm watching yellow leaves fall in the gentle wind and locals biking past. Not on the ubiquitous beach cruisers that have overtaken LA, but still on mountain bikes and true retro Schwinns with elegantly curved handlebars and triangular seats with exposed springs in the back. Today is the kind of autumn day that reminds you it's closer to winter than to summer now, with a heavy sky that's like a white lid pressing down on the town. This morning my friend Jennifer, with whom I'm staying for these three days, said if this were spring it would be a risk-of-tornado day, but being October it's just an autumn tipping point.

Many authors feel the best part of book tours is being in the midst of readers, appearing at bookstores, sitting in studios answering challenging questions (hopefully) from radio hosts. Ideally, back in a city you know well, and have friends, or where you once lived. But for me the best part is these quiet hours in the middle of the day when I'm neither in transit nor on the stage, just sitting by myself to regroup, refresh, renew, in a familiar environment. Cafe Deluxe. Definitely fits the bill.

Live taping in SF on 11/3--free tickets!

2009-10-25T09:28:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday, November 3rd I'll be taping a live daytime TV talk show on ABC in San Francisco. The show has very generously extended an invitation to tickets to any of my friends who'd like to attend. If you're in SF and would like to come, here's the info from the show's audience coordinator, Rachel Wyatt, below:

I would like to extend a special invitation to Hope Edelman's friends, family and colleagues to be in our studio audience the day that she will be appearing on “The View From The Bay” Tuesday Nov. 3rd, 2009.

Meet Spencer Christian and Janelle Wang and get a chance to see the behind the scenes of a live television broadcast. Tickets for the show must be reserved in advance. Audience doors open at 2:15pm with a cut-off time of 2:30pm, the show is live from 3-4pm.

To reserve your seats please call the ticket request line at (415)-954-7733 or visit www.viewfromthebay.com and click on “be in our audience” and fill out a ticket request form.

Please be sure to note under “comments” if you are requesting a specific date to support someone scheduled to be on the show.

Please note that all seats must be reserved in advance. Tickets that have been requested will be sent via an email confirmation with detailed instruction on where and when to arrive at the ABC studio. Also note that audience members come in a separate entrance and time than guests appearing on the show. If you are a guest on the show and you will be bringing your guests with you they will need to check in with me (Rachel Wyatt) by 2:30pm to be seated in the audience.

Imagine This

2009-10-13T12:14:00.000-07:00

After last Tuesday’s Oprah show, I received a flood of emails from friends and readers. The episode detailed the challenges and hardships faced by a Los Angeles family raising a 7-year-old daughter with severe schizophrenia. Their story first appeared in the LA Times this summer. Jani Schofield is a child who lives half in our world and half in her own, where dozens of animals and people compete for her time and attention—animals and people only she can see.

When I read the article online in July, I immediately emailed the link to my husband. “I’m not saying anything,” I wrote. “Just read it and tell me what you think.”

He emailed back within twenty minutes. “That was chilling,” was all he said.

To hear about a seven-year-old schizophrenic is troubling for any parent. It was especially so for us. As Jani’s parents revealed, their daughter’s hallucinations started at age two, when she began speaking of an elaborate posse of imaginary friends who goaded her into aggression. At first, they thought she had an overactive imagination. But then they became concerned that her behavior was taking an atypical turn.

As most of you know, our daughter also had series of “friends” at that age. This alone was not a problem. I had an imaginary companion as a child; my sister did, too. Ours came and went freely, and appeared completely benign. My daughter, on the other hand, talked about one of her “friends” constantly, in a manner more articulate and detailed than one might expect a two-year-old could manage. She described with utter conviction the island where he lived, a whole world she claimed she could see. As the months progressed, my husband and I became more than a little concerned.

Creativity or delusion? We couldn’t tell.

“It’s a normal developmental phase,” the pediatrician assured us. “She’ll grow out of it,” the therapist with whom we consulted said. When my daughter's behavior became mildly aggressive and she attributed her actions to her “friend,” we were told this, too, was within the normal range. But we were the ones who’d witnessed our daughter’s development every day since her birth. We felt that something else was going on, that the rote explanations we were given somehow weren't adding up.

Our quest to help our daughter eventually brought us to Maya healers in the Central American country of Belize. The trip yielded inexplicable yet effective results--a wholly unexpected outcome for a self-professed cynic like me.

To say some readers have disagreed with the parenting choices I made puts it mildly. Some have labeled me over-reactive and overprotective. The more blunt ones have called me a total nutcase.

What can I say? I also questioned my judgment, my motives, and my sanity nine years ago, and again as I wrote the story down. What kind of mother, I wondered, alows her imagination to tumble into such extreme and dramatic territory? Why couldn’t I sit back and let the “friend” disappear on its own? And then I read about the Schofield’s plight, and it confirmed that labeling (and self-labeling) a mother as an over-reacter is nothing short of maternal censorship. Sometimes, a mother’s intuition is her most powerful tool.

I don’t believe my daughter had early schizophrenia. Such a condition is incredibly rare, affecting only one out of 10,000-30,000 children, depending on the study quoted. I still don’t know what she had, only that in Belize its most negative aspects went away.

It’s possible she had a little-known phenomenon called a “paracosm,” a child’s fantasy world populated by people and animals, with its own geography and language. The Bronte siblings are believed to have had one; W.H. Auden, too. (Think of Terabithia, and you’ve got the idea.) Some researchers say paracosms are markers for extreme creativity in adulthood. It’s as atypical as childhood schizophrenia, though in a very different way. But to a parent who doesn’t understand the distinction, they look very much the same.

As every parent knows, raising a child is a journey, a rollercoaster and, above all, a mystery. We begin with the best intentions, only to discover we don’t have total control. No matter how many books we read, experts we consult, or plans we make, there is an unquantifiable element at work here, an enigmatic, indescribable ingredient that determines whether a child grows up happy, grows up secure, grows up safe. Parenting is as much about ambiguity as it is about certainty, as much about intuition and wonder as it is about fact.

It’s a tenuous, miraculous task to shepherd a child safely into adulthood. Yet we all carry within us the gut-wrenching, unspeakable knowledge that despite our best intentions, things can still go horribly wrong. It’s not hard to read about a family like the Schofields, a good, loving family that wants the best for their daughter and is determined to provide it, and think: if not but for the grace of god goes my family, too.

Frankly, if not but for the grace of something unknowable and unseen that guides parents—call it whatever you will—go us all.

Salons, salons, salons!

2009-10-12T12:25:00.000-07:00

I've been traveling around for the past two weeks, so far in the New York area and in three sites in Oregon, soon to leave again for Austin, to promote The Possibility of Everything. The majority of these stops are for house salons, which are private parties where 20 to 30 people gather for an evening of food, drinks, and conversation. I read from the book and answer questions. We talk and eat and drink some more. Typically, book stores come to do off-site sales. I'm finding them to be more intimate and more personal than usual bookstore readings, even more rowdy at times. (With the exception of the reading at Bloomsbury Books in Ashland, Oregon, which may be the last city in the U.S. where people listen to a radio show in the morning and then show up at a bookstore reading at 4 p.m. just because they're curious to hear more. Ashland, you are my new favorite place!) Plus, at a salon I really get to know readers, instead of being able to exchange just a few sentences with them when they hand me a book to sign.

I'm appearing at bookstores as well, and also literary festivals, but these house salons: they are a huge amount of fun. Still to come after Austin: Chicago, Iowa City, San Jose CA, Portland OR, and South Florida. Let me know if you'd like to host one in Central or Southern California--we still have room for a few more!

So many thanks to Wicki Boyle in New York City, Allison Gilbert in Irvington, NY, Jennifer Margulis in Ashland, Oregon, and Gretchen Newcomb in Hood River, Oregon, for hosting the first four salons of this tour. (That's me speaking in Gretchen's living room in the photo above.)

Albuquerque, New Mexico

2009-09-25T11:06:00.000-07:00

Never seen my name on a marquis before. This was a very exciting first. Thanks to Bookworks in New Mexico for the thrill.

Topanga Book Release Party, September 20

2009-09-22T10:57:00.000-07:00

What great fun was had on Sunday! Nearly 100 people showed up for the launch party for The Possibility of Everything, followed by a community event in Topanga for about another 25 readers. So many thanks go to Bill Buerge, owner of the Topanga Mermaid, for hosting the event; to Village Books for being our local independent on-site bookseller; The Boxer Cafe for delicious food; Monica Holloway for the hilarious and heartfelt toast; Jamie and Julia for all the organizing; Wendy for help with the drinks; and all the friends who came to celebrate with us. Special thanks to the fabulous women in my writing group for standing with me in front of the huge fireplace and talking about their experience helping me shape the story for the past two years. Especially Deborah, our resident skeptic, who revealed that although I hadn't quite yet convinced her in the Possibility of Everything, I've opened her up to the Possibility of More.

That's me in the photo with Katie O'Laughlin, the owner of Village Books in Pacific Palisades and champion of local authors, and Rachel Resnick, fellow Topanga writer and author of the powerful memoir Love Junkie, out in paperback now.

Release (Control) Day, September 15

2009-09-18T00:14:00.001-07:00

Several people have asked how I spent September 15, which was the day the book was released. This is a posting I did that morning over at SheWrites.com, where I've been posting the Countdown to Publication blog. It offers a pretty clear picture of how I spent the 24 hours leading up to September 15. Photos of Monica and I at the computer store to follow shortly...

COUNTDOWN TO PUBLICATION: Ground Zero

If I hadn’t witnessed yesterday with my own eyes, I might not believe it happened. But it did, and I’m here to tell you the crazy story. I have to tell it in a fast first draft though, because the laptop I’m working on might not stay charged long enough for me to edit and post it. But I get ahead of myself.

Yesterday was a big marketing day, possibly even bigger than today. It was my last chance before release to let everyone on God’s earth and their grandma know that The Possibility of Everything is in stores today. I had about thirty tasks I’d left until the very last day. Postings, mass emails, personal emails, etcetera etcetera.

I woke up in the morning intending to start with posting to my Facebook friends, a list of more than 700 people I’ve carefully cultivated for the past year, but the system wouldn’t let me log on. What? I’d been on the site until midnight the night before, sending invitations to a public reception in L.A. this Sunday, inviting people to join the book’s Group page, posting a notice on my college alumni site. Did I do too self-promotion all at once? I seem to be doing way less than other authors I see on Facebook, but maybe I got nailed. Who knows? There’s no customer service number to call, no clear email address to appeal to for help. I sent a plea into the Facebook vortex, and received an automated response to the effect of “someone will review your appeal and get back to you.” Okay. In the meantime, no Facebook access. Well, I figured, as long as I’ve still got my email accounts, I’ll survive.

But then. At about 3 p.m., as I was working on my four-year-old laptop at a café, my battery warning light came on. This was puzzling, since the computer was plugged into the wall. I checked the charger connections. Everything looked fine. I tried another outlet. Same thing. I rushed the computer home to back up my hard drive files—because like everyone else I know, I don’t do this often enough and I’m about a month overdue—but the computer went into hibernation before I could finish.

I drove down to the computer store and pled my case. The nice guy with a nametag that said Om (I’m not kidding) diagnosed a bad battery and showed me how I could remove the battery and still use the computer plugged in to the wall. This worked fine in the store. It wasn’t a great solution, but it would work at least until I could get a new laptop. So I came home, ate dinner with the family, helped Eden with her second-grade homework, put both girls to bed. Then I tried to go back online.

Kaput again. No amount of fancy maneuvers from my high-tech husband could make it power up.

We took out my old laptop, the one where the power cord has to be plugged in just right for it to work. It was dead as well.

You know those moments when you feel like you’ve stepped into a zone beyond the beyond? This was one of them. It reminded me of Chapter Four in my book, where in spite of all our good intentions and efforts we keep missing our flights to Belize. What should half taken us a half day of travel instead took two. It was like one of those dreams where you’re trying to get somewhere important and keep tripping over your own feet. Or trying to dial a telephone and over and over again but keep skipping a digit or getting the number wrong.

At this point it was 9:30 p.m. and I was, literally, sitting on the couch sobbing. My husband had figured out a way to get my old laptop charged, but only if we kept it in a certain position on the kitchen table and didn’t move it an inch. It was better than nothing, but barely.

Then the phone rang. I told my husband that whoever it was, I wasn’t home, except it was my dear friend Monica. Monica Holloway, also an author with a book coming out this fall. She was calling to wish me good luck today and wasn’t expecting a slobbering mess to get on the line, but she rolled with that one quickly. And made me laugh. And told me that goddammit, she’s meeting me today at 10 a.m. at the Sony store in Woodland Hills and—I quote her here—we’re not leaving a f*&%ing man standing until I walk out of there with a functioning computer. And that then, yeah baby, we need to find someone to stir me something strong.

After we got off the phone, I borrowed my husband’s laptop and sent an email to twenty close friends, explaining the situation and asking them to be my presence on the internet today. This was a big stretch for me: it’s incredibly hard for me to ask for help. I’m the kind of person who always insists on doing everything myself. But the responses I’ve received have been instantaneous and beautiful, from the friends who assure me they’ll do whatever they can; to the ones who remind me that given the subject matter of the book, this is exactly how events need to unfold; to the ones who remind me Mercury is in retrograde and this makes appliances break down, so it’s not my fault.

It’s strange to have spent the last six months preparing for the release of this book only to have my hands tied on the very day itself, but maybe that’s the real message here. The book is the story of how I went from being a person without trust in anything or anyone other than myself to someone who learned to feel safe in the world again. So maybe for me, Release Day needs to be Release Control Day. I’ve done my work, and now the book has to go out there without me, born on the wings of my friends.

So what will I be doing on release day? Well, I’m going to post this quickly, before the computer dies again, and then brew a pot of coffee. I’m going to put away the laundry that's been sitting in the basket at the boot of my bed for a week. Then I'm going to put on my “Who says people in L.A. don’t read?” T-shirt and drive down to Best Buy with my AmEx card to meet Monica. Both of us will say a little prayer that my last advance check comes in soon so I can pay off the bill. Then I’ll pick up my kids from school and take Eden to her first ballet class. And I’ll keep reminding myself that the book, in stores today, belongs to everyone now and not just me.

There is much to be grateful for today. Books on the shelves, a publisher who backs it, a laptop that’s staying charged long enough for me to type all this to you, and extraordinary friends. And a cell phone on which my editor and publicist can reach me today, if necessary. Thank god my Blackberry is still working. For now.

Speaking of Memoir

2009-09-14T15:17:00.001-07:00

The best interviewers are the ones who ask thoughtful and probing questions, and who have really taken their time to read a book and consider the writer's intent. On Friday I had the great fortune of speaking with two such interviewers, Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler, of WomensMemoirs.com.

Our 45-minute talk covered memoir writing in general and my experience writing The Possibility of Everything in particular, and includes a couple of unique tips for writers I've picked up over the past 20 years. And the best part: the interview is available online, for free, at Womensmemoirs.com.

Click here to hear the interview. You can read more about itin Matilda's blog at Story Circle Network, too.

Guest blogging

2009-09-09T15:04:00.000-07:00

I've been telling people that I went into the writing cave two years ago to write my next book, and that when I emerged the entire marketing landscape for book publishing had changed. Case in point: the blogosphere.

People keep blogs as a form of journaling: that much I understood. But the use of blogs for marketing purposes was entirely new to me. Several bloggers have spontaneously reviewed The Possibility of Everything in write-ups that range from professional-style reviews to rambling paragraphs of personal opinion. It's a little like being invited to a big party, then being asked to leave the room while everyone talks about you behind your back.

That's why the opportunity to be a guest blogger on some sites has been a welcome opportunity. This week, you can find a piece I wrote over at Womensmemoirs.com, a site for both aspiring and accomplished women writers about how to avoid Kitchen-Sink writing, meaning how to not include everything when writing a memoir. The posting is here. On Monday, September 13 there will be a link there to a phone interview I did with the site's leaders about writing The Possibility of Everything, and about memoir writing in general. More on that soon.

Also, over at Fully Caffeinated.com, Carrie Link's blog, you can read a Q&A with me about the events in the book, and my experiences writing it.

More to come, including write-ups in People and Entertainment Weekly, we've been told.

September 15, Everyone's Big Day

2009-09-06T18:48:00.000-07:00

The publication date for The Possibility of Everything is September 15--in nine days!--which sounds like a fine day to me.

Turns out, it's a fine day for a whole list of other authors as well.

It's the day Dan Brown's new book hits stores, as well as Jacqueline Mitchard's new novel, No Time To Wave Goodbye, which is the sequel to the blockbuster first Oprah pick The Deep End of the Ocean. Jon Krakauer's new nonfiction book about the football star turned solider who died in Afghanistan also comes out that day. And a novel about Jane Austen and sea monsters. I kid you not.

My editor says all this is good good good, since it'll drive a lot of extra traffic into bookstores that week. I'm thinking that the best I can hope for is that spouses of Dan Brown fans will be wandering aimlessly though the stores, waiting for their husbands' pre-orders to be brought to the front registers, when a bright blue butterfly on the cover of a new memoir catches their eyes.

Unless they're already skimming Jacqueline Mitchard's book, which they should be, because it's wonderful.

It's going to be a very, very busy and interesting week, next week.

Stay tuned.

While L.A. Burns

2009-09-01T17:08:00.000-07:00

The fires in the San Gabriel Mountains this week have been bigger than anyone I know in Los Angeles can ever remember, which is saying a lot, since one part of another of the city seems to catch fire at least once or twice a year. At night, the girls and I go out on the deck and look at the neon orange line framing the mountaintops in the distance. If you watch it long enough, you can see bright flareups that look so alarming from 20 miles away it's nearly impossible to imagine how apocalyptic they must be up close.

It feels strange, to put it mildly, to be gearing up for a book release--only 15 days away--and going through the manic motions of last-minute marketing and publicity while such a disaster is unfolding just across town. I remember two years ago, in October 2007, when power lines came down overnight in Malibu, sparking a fire that nearly burned Eden's elementary school, took dozens of houses in its race to the ocean, and had us evacuated for four nights. As I drove the girls and the cat and whatever we deemed irreplaceable that could fit in the car down the mountain, I was struck by how normal everything was once we reached the San Fernando Valley. It felt as if we'd been sprinting toward safety as we drove out of Topanga, only to reach Mulholland Highway and find no sign of abnormality at all. Until we turned around, and saw the enormous cloud of smoke rising from the mountains behind us.

That's just one of the surreal elements of a wildfire, how localized it can be. And so while residents of Glendale and La Canada and Acton pack up and drive away with their children and pets, not knowing if they'll have a house to return to, at least this time over in Topanga Canyon it's business as usual. Optimizing the web site. Planning the book tour. Designing promotional postcards to mail out. Writing this week's blog entry for Shewrites.com. And hoping that one more story about a family's search for safety and security will be of interest to others.

The Ambivalent Exclamation

2009-08-10T22:11:00.000-07:00

Walking around the Northwestern University campus on Thursday with Katherine and Will--it's been more than twenty years since we were all there together. Impossible to believe. Now we've returned with four daughters between us. And I have to say: walking down Sheridan Road in sub-Arctic temperatures with a chilling wind and icy sidewalks and twelve pounds of books in my arms when I was 21 was somehow much easier than walking down Sheridan Road on a perfect summer day with two kids to herd away from traffic when I'm 45, especially when one of those kids is hell-bent on climbing everything that doesn't move. That would be Eden. Who I swear is part monkey.

As we neared the big bend in Sheridan that marks the southern edge of campus, we passed the Victorian house that was once the departmental office for Anthropology, which was my minor. And in the strange, associative way that memory works, I remembered taking a class in that building during my senior year with the legendary Navajo scholar Ozzie Werner, which then made both Katherine and I remember we'd been friends with his son Derek, which made us wonder where Derek is now, which made Will remember that Derek had once been on a campaign to get people to adopt what he called "the ambivalent exclamation point." Essentially, it was the top of an exclamation point with a comma (and not a period) underneath it, to denote a slightly less than enthusiastic response. Or a non-committal reaction. Or a passive-aggressive response, although I don't think we knew the term "passive-aggressive" back then. Kind of like what Alaskans would have put after the headline "Sarah Palin resigns," explained Katherine and Will, who are longtime Alaska Democrats. (Proving that's not an oxymoron.)

I hope the ambivalent exclamation point hasn't disappeared into oblivion. If I could find Derek Werner, I'd ask him to revive it. Or at least to cede rights to its revival to me. Because I think it's a brilliant invention. Imagine all the uses we could put it to. I, personally, would stick it at the end of headlines that interest other people but about which I have to work really, really hard to care. "Bush Lonely in Dallas." "Octomom Gets New Reality Show." It's a way to acknowledge other people's interest, while politely yawning at the same time.

Punctuation: it's both sorely underrated, and in need of invigoration. When did we last get a new punctuation mark? It's time.

Hooverfest, West Branch, Iowa, August 1

2009-08-02T22:00:00.001-07:00

Yesterday we went to West Branch, Iowa, for the annual Hooverfest. West Branch is the birthplace of Herbert Hoover, 31st president of the U.S., and the last president to steer the country into a profound economic downturn. Perhaps only in West Branch is Hoover celebrated as a hero. Elsewhere, he's remembered as the president who got the country into a very bad spot and couldn't manage to get it out.

If not for the Hoover mark of distinction, West Branch might otherwise be synonymous with any small Midwestern town, postcard-perfect with its main street, Victorian clapboard houses, and wide green parks. Though we've spent the past six summers in Eastern Iowa, this is the first time we've gone to Hooverfest. Usually we hit Solon Beef Days and, last year, the Lisbon Kraut Festival, but having missed both of those this year due to Maya's camp schedule, we decided to give Hooverfest a try.

It was more of an outdoor fair than a carnival, with a plethora of historical booths and craft demonstrations lined up throughout the town's central park. We walked through the tiny two-room house where Hoover was born, and saw his father's blacksmith shop. (Little known fact: Hoover was orphaned at age nine.) The girls had the chance to grind cornmeal by hand and try out a two-handled saw. We had a long talk with the women representing the West Branch Historial Society, as well as with a man named Steve from the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum in Burr Oak, Iowa. Apparently the Ingalls family lived for a year in Iowa when Laura was 8 or 9, but since this predating the Little House in the Big Woods time (Book 1), she never wrote about it. Who knew?

Like most small Midwestern town fairs, this one had a strong military presence, with tent booths representing the U.S. Army and various other military branches and posts. Normally I'd find this unsettling, lifelong peacenik that I am, but I also have a corresponding deep respect for those who choose to defend the country. Also, everyone was just so darn nice all day, even the guys in military regalia adorned with more buttons and pins than I could count.

At about 4:00 everyone started setting up lawn chairs on the grassy spread next to the Presidential Library so we wandered over to see what it was all about. A musical performance began, with what looked like about 20 youngish men and woman singing and swing dancing to 40s big-band music. About halfway into the performance, a simulated radio announcer came over the microphone and announced that Pearl Harbor had just been attacked by the Japanese, and the performers all stood stock still as if just receiving and taking in the news. I looked around to see if anyone else thought this was as strange as I did, sitting on a lawn on a sunny, green Midwestern day with Japan now a major trade partner across the ocean and just a connecting flight away, but most everyone else seemed to be watching the show intently.

The storyline became a little hard to follow at this point, but then one of the performers announced they'd now be doing a tribute to the various branches of the military, and invited veterans to stand when they heard their divison's song. A group of men four abreast in identical naval uniforms stood when the first bars began. When the music changed, they sat and a few other men peppered throughout the crowd stood up from their lawn chairs and faced the stage, where the performers were engaging in some kind of hokey marching-in-place routine meant, I suppose, to represent uniformity and endurance? None of the men standing on the lawn were younger than 50, so we're talking Vietnam War here, and even some World War II. It was impossible not to notice how straight all the men stood, with such expressions of pride, such a simple gesture but also so profound. It was humbling to watch.
And then another division's song started and an elderly man in front of us stood up. He balanced his left side against a cane, and with his other hand pulled off his baseball cap and started whipping it around in circles above his head in time to the music.

Something about this scene--the senior citizen who could barely stand on his own joyously whooping it up during his moment of honor on a green lawn on a safe and glorious summer day, was almost more than I could handle, and the tears started running down my face. (I have a long history of embarrassing my daughters in public with my random crying jags when I witness things that move me, so they barely even acknowledged this one.) And I thought, what a beautiful, crazy, complicated, mysterious, goddamned fantastic country this is.

As a writer, what can you do with moments like these, what else can you possibly do with them, except go home and try to make art?

What You Get When You Let a Seven-Year-Old Be the Judge

2009-07-07T22:55:00.000-07:00

Maya, Eden and I were playing Apples to Apples the other night.

Eden wanted to be the judge, so we said okay, even though she also decided she would moonlight on Maya's "team."

The card we picked was "Predictable."

Maya put down "Costume Party." I put down "Doctor's Waiting Room."

"A costume party is totally predictable," Maya argued first. "People have to wear costumes, they're told what time to show up, and they all dress like something else."

"Are you kidding?" I said. "A doctor's waiting room is the definition of predictable. Every office has one, and you always have to sit in it before your appointment, and you always have to sit in it for longer than you want to."

Eden mulled over the arguments. Then she directed a look of pure sympathy at me as she handed the card to Maya.

"I'm sorry, Mom," she said. "But Maya's right. Sometimes you have to wait longer than expected for the pinata."

SheWrites.com

2009-07-03T05:25:00.000-07:00

My dear friend Kamy Wicoff and her business partners just launched a new literary networking site for women authors, and I'm proud to be an Alpha member. It's open to any woman writer, published or not, and will serve as a support network for marketing and promotion of books, as well as an information and social site for fiction writers, memoirists, journalists, screenwriters, poets, bloggers, and writing students.

The tag line is SHE WRITES...she teaches, she tours, she reads, she markets, she promotes, she posts, she coaches, she networks, she invents, she creates, she obsesses, she sells, she signs, she strives, she needs help.

Which pretty much says it all. Especially the obsesses part, in this house.

The site launched just on Monday and in four days already more than 800 writers have joined, proving that when an urgent need is identified, if you build a site for it, they will come. Evidently, in droves.

Congratulations Kamy, et al!!

Here's the link. If you are a woman writer, you don't want to miss this. I think it's going to be huge.

www.shewrites.com

Weekend in Tucson

2009-06-22T22:54:00.000-07:00

Uzi and I spent the last weekend in Tucson at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) annual conference. What an extremely interesting group of people. I first heard of them a few months ago when I went to a symposium in Malibu about honeybees--possible research for my next book--that was sponsored in part by IONS. I guess I got on their mailing list that day, because in late April I received a catalogue for their June conference, "Toward a Global Shift: Seeding the Field of Collective Change." It looked like a potentially useful conference to attend in preparation for the book release, and also just an interesting phenomenon to check out. And we figured, Tucson isn't that far, and our babysitter just got back from Spain and can watch the kids for two nights--it's been years since we've gone away together for a weekend--so why not?

Wow. This was a pretty amazing conference. More than 1,000 people in a ballroom every day listening to everyone from corporate CEOs to Indian gurus to African community organizers talking about how everyone can help transform the planet into a more sustainable, compassionate, abundant place for everyone. The Institute's mission is to nurture the conversation between science and spiritual values, vis a vis funding scientific studies, supporting green initiatives, and creating curriculums of non-violence for schools. They're interested in the role consciousness plays in everyday life and if you believe in the power of intention, as I do, it's fairly incredible to sit in a ballroom with a thousand other people who do, too.

We heard a speech by Edgar Mitchell, the former Apollo astronaut and one of only about a dozen Americans who've been to the moon. On his trip back to earth he looked out of the shuttle window and saw the earth from a vantage point few get to see, and had a profoundly spiritual moment, realizing we're all on this little planet together in the vastness of space. In his own words, "The presence of divinity became almost palpable, and I knew that life in the universe was not just an accident based on random processes." As a scientist and engineer, he didn't have a framework to fully integrate the awareness that reality might be more subtle and mysterious than he'd bargained for, but he went looking for others with the same belief, and in 1973 they founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences. (The name comes from the Greek word "nous," which loosely means "intuitive ways of knowing.")

Mitchell has a book I just ordered called The Way of the Explorer. The Institute is at www.ions.org for anyone who wants to check it out.

Let the Sun Shine

2009-06-15T14:13:00.000-07:00

So, Maya's last day of school was Wednesday, and the school's annual talent show always takes place that morning. This year (like last year) she did a hula hoop routine. She set it to "Let the Sun Shine In" from Hair, and dressed up in green harem pants, a white Indian shirt, a green suede vest, and a headband with a big white flower pinned on it. I wish I had a still photo to post here, but I was filming it on video and didn't have a free hand. Plus, it's a new video camera and I don't really know how to use it very well, so it took all my effort to get that right.

She was the last act in the show, and if you know the song, you probably remember that the first three minutes is a medley of different voices and even pieces of different songs, and the next three minutes is full of very melodic but also unimaginative lyrice--it's just "Let the sun shine, let the sun shine in, the su-un, shine in" over and over again. For the last two minutes she invited the whole show cast on stage with her and all the kids were dancing and singing together. It was a really beautiful ending to both the show and the year. Because I'm such a sucker for kids singing on stage of course I started crying, and trying to keep a videocamera steady when you're reduced to a blubbering mess, especially when you're using the camera for the first time (see above) was a real sight to behold, let me tell you.

The top two contenders for songs to hoop to were "Let the Sun Shine In" and "The Age of Aquarius"--which is an excellent song for hooping, by the way. We've been listening to the soundtrack from "Hair" in the car (minus the R-rated songs, which I nearly always remember to skip over) pretty consistently since returning from New York in April, where we saw the play on Broadway. I'd loved the music from "Hair" as a kid, and have vivid memories of dancing around like a dervish in our wood-paneled basement singing "The air, the air, is everywhere." The movie came out when I was 14, and set me off on a long and torturous path of relationships with every man I met who looked remotely like Treat Williams. No job? Even better!

Seeing the play on Broadway, 40 years after its original appearance there, yielded a couple of large surprises. One was that I realized I still knew all the words to all the songs, even though I hadn't heard some of them in more than 20 years. Another was that bringing two kids, ages 11 and 7, to see "Hair" is a much more questionable parenting decision than I'd initially bargained for. I'd sussed out the nudity part in advance, and had been assured that it was handled tastefully (which it was). Plus, these are Topanga kids. Naked neighbors in backyard hot tubs are part of their landscape; I wasn't terribly worried about that part. I'd completely forgotten how raunchy some of the lyrics were, though. A few lines into "Sodomy" Eden leaned over and loudly whispered, "Mom! What do all these words mean?" I told her, "I'll explain when you're older" and she seemed okay with that. But the F-word was omnipresent, and there was lots of sexual mimicry on stage, oy vey. I hope I haven't inspired years on therapists' couches ("And my mother? My mother took me to see HAIR!"). Nonetheless, the play was a joyous celebration of nonconformity, with dancing up and down the aisles, and audience members invited to dance on stage at the end, a wild, colorful, uplifting party of a play. And the inspiration for a school talent show hula-hoop routine. Who would have thought?

The Powers of Persuasion

2009-05-31T17:19:00.001-07:00

When I was down running errands this afternoon, the girls wrote an argumentative essay trying to convince one of us to bring them to a movie this afternoon. "I didn't even use any comma splices!" Maya announced, as she handed me the two-page, typed essay, tucked into a plastic report cover. And done in five colors of type. Here you go:

Why We Should See UP
By: Maya and Eden

Maya and Eden are anxiously awaiting your opinion on the following. We would like you to consider us seeing the movie UP, in digital 3-D. In this essay you may learn why we want to see UP, what UP is about, and when and where it is playing.

We would like to see UP because it is superbly-completely-totally-entirely-awesomely-radically-bodaciously in 3-D. We would also like to see it so we don't feel left out in school. It would also be a great pleasure to us to see a 3-D movie. I heart the cute little glasses.

UP is about an old, grouchy man who wants to go on an adventure...alone! Unfortunately a fat boy scout tags along. They go on the adventure of a lifetime by flying in a house held-up by balloons. They travel to Paradise Falls (I think) a remote place with no humans. However, there is a talking dog. Please let us see UP!

UP is playing today in Santa Monica at: 4:30, 7:10, and 9:50. UP is playing in Woodland Hills at: 2:50, 5:35, and 8:15. Eden and Maya made a haiku and limerick about UP.

Haiku

UP is a movie
It has a house with balloons
It is in 3-D

Limerick

UP has balloons
UP isn't a cartoon
UP is about a flying house
UP isn't about a mouse
In UP they get stuck in a monsoon

We Hope You Liked It Muchacho

Suffice it to say: while I'm home for the next two hours packing for New York, Uzi is down in Woodland Hills sitting through the 5:35 showing of UP.
We're such suckers for a good essay.

Spelling and More Spelling

2009-05-28T22:24:00.000-07:00

News has come down the pipeline that the Santa Monica Malibu Unified School District is going to experience somewhere in the vicinity of a bazillion dollar shortfall over the next two years, and that all bets are off on what's going to have to be cut. At first we parents thought we were looking at our kids losing art and music instruction (bad, but not devastating) and were worried class sizes would go up (which they very likely will). Now word is that one of the three Malibu elementary schools might have to be closed. Whoa. This is serious stuff, folks, and a direct result of the California legislature's inability to vote on a budget for many months now, resulting in a $5.3 billion statewide reduction in education funding next year, as well as voters' clear message when defeating five May 19 ballot measures that education isn't going to be a priority in these hard economic times.

I really dread becoming one of those mothers who goes on ad infinitum about her children's schools, but this is serious stuff, people. The only comparison I can make is the austerity measures of 1970s school districts in New York, but even then I don't remember music and art getting cut. Here in our district, we're all in wait-and-see mode, wondering how big the axe is going to be when (not if, but when) it falls. Which should be some time this summer, probably while the girls and I are in Iowa, a state that actually does care about education funding. And legal gay marriage. If only it weren't so damn cold there most of the year.

In the meantime, the first-grade spell-o-rama of random high-school-level words continues. Here's Eden's list of words to study for the weekly test tomorrow:
1. store
2. more
3. before
4. corn
5. or
6. for
7. morning
8. afford
9. prehensile
10. arachnid
11. amphibian

First-grade spellers

2009-05-05T19:59:00.000-07:00

Eden goes to public school in Malibu--a small, well-funded, really excellent public school. Her teacher this year is the same one Maya had in the first grade, who we were hoping she'd get because we liked her so much the first time around, and like her just as much the second. Very high-quality academics. Still, the list of spelling words she brought home last week was off-the-charts funny. It's like the kids got eight years of spelling quizzes rolled into one. (They're learning about the rainforest this week, but still.)
1. by
2. my
3. fly
4. cry
5. try
6. pry
7. multiply
8. predator
9. emergent
10. camouflage
I'm not even sure I spelled camo correctly there.

Dispatch from Amsterdam

2009-04-08T17:21:00.000-07:00

We've been here two days, having tagged along with Uzi on his business trip for the girls' Spring Break. I haven't been to Amsterdam since 1989, when I was backpacking through Europe and staying in youth hostels, and though the city center hasn't changed much physically, I'm here under a whole new set of circumstances now. We arrived on Monday morning, and after a four-hour nap Maya and I walked over to the Albert Cuyp Market to pick up some food. It's about 6 blocks from our hotel, in the multiethnic, bohemian De Pijp section of town--lots of bright colors and noise and activity. The people are just as friendly as I remember from 1989, and everyone speaks English. Pretty fluently. There are thousands of bicyclists on the street at all times, especially during rush hour--people walk their dogs by bicycle, text message, even put on makeup--and cyclists seem to have right of way under all circumstances. Minding the bike lanes takes some very focused practice to avoid getting plowed over.

Yesterday we walked everywhere because the sky was clear, and that's a rarity here this time of year. We tried to start at the Anne Frank House but even at 10:30 a.m. the line was far too long...so we visited the Tulip Museum nearby, the Houseboat Museum, and climbed to the top of Westerkerk, from which we had a stellar view down on the annex where the Franks hid for two years. We ate pannenkoekem for lunch (the Dutch version of pancakes, which resembles ours only in shape), went to an Easter Carnival in Dam Square, and ended the day at the Van Gogh Museum. After a rest at the hotel we met my grade-school friend Kim (who's lived here for 7 years) for dinner at an Indian restaurant and collapsed into bed around 10 p.m. Whew.

A couple of random obervations. The stairs in Amsterdam houses are unbelievably steep. It's probably because houses here were taxed on their widths (a long way from Proposition 13) and aren't very deep, so to maximize living space people scrimped on staircase depth. To get to our guest apartment at the hotel we have to climb up two sets of the steepest, shallowest stairs I've ever encountered. The only appreciable different between them and a ladder is carpeting.

Except when riding bicycles, people don't use their cell phones in public--not while walking down the street, not in stores, not on the tram. It's a sad statement about the U.S. that I find this to be almost unbearably weird.

While the spoken language sounds a lot like German to me, I find the printed language hilarious. It combines letters you'd never see together in English, and often strings vowels and consonents in odd and fascinating combinations. Plus, the words go on forever. We amused ourselves this evening by selecting random words from the Dutch travel phrase book I brought with me. My favorite was voedselvergiftiging: "food poisoning"

Everyone in America talks about how the dollar is still doing poorly against the Euro, but once you deduct Amsterdam's 19 percent sales tax (which is included in sticker prices here) and add 9.25 percent (our brand-new state sales tax, thank you so much Arnold) to California prices, the difference is almost negligable on many items.

Some things here that are noticeably cheaper than they are in California:
avocados
strawberries
orchids
museum entry fees
wooden spoons

Items that are significantly more expensive:
Restaurant food
Shoes

Also, this city has the best coffee I've ever met, even though the portions are about half the size of Starbucks (haven't seen a single Starbucks here, blessedly). But there are two Chabads.

Coming Home, Take Two

2009-03-09T09:25:00.000-07:00

This return from Belize was rockier than the last one, and I've been trying to figure out why. It wasn't that I wasn't happy to be back, or to see the family--I missed them terribly. And it wasn't just that I was reluctant to step back into the usual early morning/bus stop/errands/workday/dinner/homework routine/bed too late routine, although that was undeniably a part of it.

I've been back a week now, and here's what I think: that there's something to all the talk about how modern society is incompatible with living a spiritual life. After 10 days in Belize, where the pace is relaxed, the living is simple, the spirit world is an accepted part of daily life, and signs are everywhere and easily recognizable, Los Angeles was a startling transition. On the one hand, I stepped outside the airport with my bags and heard the familiar sounds and felt the inimitable Los Angeles night air and knew I was back home, a comforting feeling. On the other hand, re-entering the noise, the anxiety, the confusion, the chaos, made the window slam shut on all the spiritual openness I'd managed to achieve over the past ten days. Maybe not entirely, but mostly, it felt.

The real challenge for those of us who live ordinary lives in the U.S., I think, is not to find a spiritual connection, but to figure out how to maintain it in the face of all the distractions and responsibilities that clutter our days here. I'm not advocating abandoning those responsibilities, only musing on how to maintain a connection to the Higher Self when so many small moments of the day keep pulling us down to the mundane, lower vibrations that keep the city spinning.

In the meantime, while I'm trying to figure this out, here's a photo of some of the girls in Rosita's workshop in Belize. I'm the third one from the right.

Doing the Turnaround

2009-02-10T22:58:00.000-08:00

Eight days in Belize, followed by seventeen days at home, followed by ten days in Belize. That's pretty much all of February. I'm in the middle of the turnaround right now, assisting with sixth-grade homework and sorting through mounds of laundry before I taxi back to LAX. The first eight days in Belize were nonstop research and filming, with small pockets of fun fit in. Jeff and I went twice to San Antonio, the Mayan village that's home to the first bush doctor I saw in 2000; stayed at Crystal Paradise Resort (whose owners appear in the story); crossed over to Guatemala for a day to visit Tikal National Park, transported once again by the Amazing Hugo the Driver; then drove ourselves four hours southeast to the Caribbean village of Placencia, where the final scenes of the book are set.
The Cayo district of Western Belize hasn't changed all that much in eight years, at least not by my touristy estimation, but the difference in Placencia is profound. Shortly after we left in January 2000 Hurricane Iris hit Placencia directly and some outrageous percentage of the buildings there were destroyed. Eight years later most of the damage has been leveled or repaired, but it seems that a number of businesses never recovered. About 50 percent of the places mentioned in my book no longer exist, or have been rebuilt, bought out, and changed. Still, I managed to get all my fact-checking completed, and we came back with about five hours of footage. More than enough for a two-minute trailer.
A highlight of the trip was bringing books and supplies to Teresita the librarian at the San Ignacio Library. I organized a book drive in December using Teresita's wish list for 2009 and quite a few of my writer friends generously contributed. Four boxes of additional books should have arrived at the library today, shipped from Los Angeles a few weeks ago. Some of the existing reference books at the library are so old they still bear the stamps of British Honduras--even though Belize was established more than 25 years ago--so new books are a welcome and needed commodity there. Jeff took the photo (above) of Teresita and I the day I brought the children's books to the library. It was a relentlessly hot day in San Ignacio, a Friday afternoon, but also bright and sunny, and Teresita walked us over to a building near the Macal River that's been designated as the new library. It's currently being used as a meat market, so they've got a big renovation job on the way. Stay tuned for more information about how to donate or help, as the year progresses.

Heading down to Belize

2009-01-27T22:19:00.000-08:00

After an intense weekend that had me cooking for 30 people who came over for a book party Saturday night (to celebrate the release of Paula Derrow's new anthology, "Behind the Bedroom Door") and then filming a Spanish cooking video with two eleven-year-old girls for three hours on Sunday, I'm about to head down to Belize to fact check my book and open up to whatever unexpected or random adventures take place, as they often do down there. I'm a bit nervous about leaving the girls for a week, but Uzi knows the ropes well, and he's got a good support network of babysitters and friends around to help him. I'm traveling with the intrepid Jeff Wynne, my high school pal, who'll be toting one of those nifty small digital video cameras to shoot footage for an online book trailer. Internet access is bound to be spotty for the next week, but I'll undoubtedly have lots to report after our return on February 4. Stay tuned.

Stepping Back Into the Fray

2009-01-23T23:27:00.000-08:00

What would make a writer vanish on November 9 and resurface in mid-January? Well, a book deadline, for one. Meaning...ta da! Finished. Manuscript brought to New York on January 8, went into production on January 9, and since then I've been full up with doing all the things that didn't get done for the past two months while I was chained to my office chair. The title is The Possibility of Everything, the publisher is Ballantine, and the publication date is September 29. All good. No, great. It's an enormous relief to finally have finished the writing.
And now, as all writers know, the work begins.
Not that I'm complaining. Because part of the work means heading down to Belize this Wednesday with my high school pal Jeff, who'll be toting one of those ridiculously tiny, astonishingly high-quality video cameras to shoot footage for a book trailer I can put on You Tube and on my web site. I'm also going down to fact check the manuscript, which means retracing some of the steps from the book in San Ignacio and Placencia. We'll be down there from Wednesday to Wednesday. It's still technically rainy season in Belize so hopefully we won't get too wet. I got a nifty new North Face rain jacket on sale at REI the other day, along with a dry bag for the camera equipment when we go canoeing, and when I put them in my suitcase along with my new forehead flashlight I felt like tres the adventure traveler. Well, except for the two makeup bags and the half-dozen bottles of anti-everything tinctures. But still.

Eden's Version of the Pledge of Allegiance

2008-11-09T17:08:00.000-08:00

Seriously. This is how she thinks it goes.

"Everybody stand up, ready, set, go. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. And to the republic one nation, under God invisible, with liberty and justice for all, everybody sit down."

Election Day

2008-11-06T16:52:00.000-08:00

It was a big party at our neighborhood precinct at 8:00:05 p.m., just after NBC announced they couldn't project a winner in the presidential race until the polls closed on the west coast at 8:00 PST. At 10 seconds to 8, the anchor started the 10-9-8-7 countdown and all the pollworkers--plus Uzi, Maya, Eden, the neighbors who so graciously offer up their garage as a polling station every year, and whatever other friends were there--did the countdown with him. At exactly 8:00, the network called the race for Obama and we all started screaming, hugging, and literally crying with happiness and relief.
For me, it wasn't even so much that Obama won--though of course that was what I was hoping for--but that we'd had a fair election, and the democratic process in this country has been restored. After too many weeks of hearing about Joe the Plumber, it's Joe the Voter who prevailed.
The photo at top was taken at about 7 p.m. If we look tired, it's because we'd been there since the 6 a.m. set up with only an hour off for staggered lunch breaks. Because we're in such a remote neighborhood, we only had about 300 people on our rolls, and 70 of them had voted by mail, but we still had a good number of voters coming through. A couple of them were 18-21 and very proud to be voting for the first time. A few who showed up weren't on our rolls and had to do provisional ballots, which worried me a little since their votes weren't included in the count that night, and we had a number of important propositions on the ballot. (Like Prop 8, which lost.) We had a big rush in the morning before work and school, a smaller one after school let out, and another one at about 6:30. We couldn't listen to any election results while people were voting, so we'd turn on the radio during the downtimes. Nothing was happening--a few allegations of ballot machine problems and news about long lines, but nothing more--until about 7 p.m. PST, when Vermont was called for Obama and Kentucky and Georgia for McCain. Then results started coming in at a faster clip. I'd say our polling station was about 55 percent registered Democrats, 20 percent Republicans, 20 percent Independents or no party affiliation, and a couple of , and a couple of Libertarians and Green Party hopefuls. I'm guessing the ballots were about 75 percent Obama, 20 percent McCain. That's our liberal mountain town, for you. Two people wrote in "President Hillary Clinton," which I thought was kind of sweet.
Anyway, it's a big sigh of relief at this end. And now I don't have any good reasons left for not finishing my book ASAP.

Random Observation of the Week

2008-10-30T10:45:00.000-07:00

It's hard not to notice...
The vehicles in L.A. most likely to be sporting McCain/Palin bumper stickers are Lincoln Navigators, Ford pickup trucks, and any kind of Cadillac, particularly Escalades.
The vehicles most likely to sport Obama/Biden bumper stickers are Priuses (big surprise there), Subarus, Lexuses, and Hondas.
Once in a while you see an anomaly, like a McCain sticker on a Nissan, or an Obama sticker on a Ford Explorer, but not that often. All in all, everyone's pretty polite about it. I haven't seen any stickers slamming the opposition, just ones that support the driver's candidate of choice.
The exception is the guy in the big Ford pickup with the two McCain stickers in the back window who started harrassing me on PCH the other day for having a picture of Obama with the word "Hope" under it on the back of my car. There's not much you can do at that point except laugh, wave, and shout, "Have a good day!"
Can you tell I've been spending too much time in my car? Los Angeles. (sigh)

PS: My husband thinks Obama should get a bumper sticker that has a portrait of me with the word "Barack" underneath it, just to balance things out.

Semi-egregious plug for next book

2008-10-27T14:12:00.000-07:00

...so, in writing my next book I've been reading an extraordinary amount about Mayan architecture, Mayan astronomy, sacred geometry, the history of Tikal, and the ancient Mayan calendar. (The book is the story of taking Maya to traditional healers in Belize when she was three to get rid of her aggressive imaginary friend.)

Lots of us have heard about how the Mayan calendar ends in 2012, and there are various theories about what that might mean, ranging from a resetting of the spiritual odometer to wholesale planetary destruction. (I'm banking on the former.) The intricacies of the calendar, and its prophecies, are much more detailed than that, however. According to one of the books I've been reading about Mayan prophecy, which was published in 2002, the progression of time toward 2012 is all about the development of human consciousness. The time period between November 2007 and November 2008 is prophecied to be a time of darkness, during which the forces of an earlier consciousness are going to rise up against the forces of light that are ready to push through, and try to push the light back to an earlier state of materialism and greed. This is supposed to last until November 12, at which time the light will shine through for about another year before a less destructive period of darkness will cycle through again.

No matter how you're voting this Election Day, that's a pretty interesting prophecy no? I like the idea that even though most of us don't think much about the ancient Maya, they spent an awful lot of time thinking ahead about us.

A budding writer in the house

2008-10-27T13:51:00.000-07:00

Eden's in first grade now, and starting to write weekly essays for homework. The teacher has asked us not to correct the kids' spelling, since phonetic writing is part of the learning curve. Some of her attempts are just plain adorable I can't help memorializing them. Last week she chose the topic, "One little ship can ____." Here's what she came up with. (Notice how she works Iowa in to the essay. She does that just about every chance she can.)

One little ship can go. The ship is saling it is going a
vare laog wea to Iowa. Did you noe that thar is a
wotrfol in the back of the owshin.

Crickets, crickets everywhere

2008-09-27T22:12:00.000-07:00

Last night, when all humans in the house were sleeping, Timmy the cat knocked the cricket house off the bookshelf next to Billy Bob's cage (when you keep a pet tarantula, you also have to keep its feed alive, don't ask), and they all escaped. So now six crickets are at large on the ground floor of our house, and they're all chirping at the same time since the sun went down. It's utter pandemonium over here.

What's your name?

2008-09-24T17:01:00.000-07:00

If you go to the Sarah Palin Baby Name Generator web site at http://www.politsk.blogspot.com/
you can see what your name would have been if you'd been born the offspring of Sarah and the First Dude.
You type in your name and the computer generates two random words for your new moniker. I'm Fire Patriot, which was a little upsetting. Not the patriot part, but the fire part, since we here in Topanga aren't all that keen on fires. Also, I thought Hope was a pretty darn good name to have right about now.
My friend Sky (Soup Landmine) sympathized with me and hastily christened me with a new name: Peace Rainstick. Much, much better.
My middle name, Iris, came back as Trowel Ogre, but let's not go there.

Lightning Rods

2008-09-17T15:34:00.000-07:00

If writers and artists truly are the lightning rods for the culture, it might explain why so many of us are feeling so low. The anger and contempt flying around right now, as both sides of the election duke it out, is more venomous than any time I can recall in my adult life. David Foster Wallace's suicide on Friday weighs on a lot of us heavily right now. I'd never met him personally, but we'd traveled in some of the same orbits. I've heard he'd been depressed for a long time, but still, the timing of it makes me wonder if given the current circumstances that surround us all, it just became too much too bear. If outrage turned to deep despair, and was then unable to be synthesized into hope and action.

My suggestion to everyone at the moment is to avoid internet message boards at the end of online political articles, at all costs. You will see so much fury and hatred there, so much intolerance and desperation and ignorance. You will see the country split exactly in half, and you will see the vastness of the gulf between both sides. You will wonder what country you just woke up in, because certainly this can't be the one you were raised to be proud of and love, not this one where people regurgitate propaganda and spew hate at anonymous fellow citizens. It's like everyone's frustration and despair gets packed into tight little balls they're hurling at each other at 150 mph, forgetting what we have in common in favor of what drives us apart. You will see how the internet allows people the freedom, late at night when they're alone, to reveal their lowest selves without threat of retribution. It's amazing what comes out under those circumstances, how ugly and mean and little both sides can be. And maybe, like me, and like the writer Anne Lamott (see below; god bless that woman for putting it into words) you will be moved to try to make a difference these next six weeks by trying to counterbalance these evil impulses with arbitrary and indiscriminate kindness. For the past week, everywhere I go I try to smile at everyone I see. To remember to say, "Have a good day" to every checkout clerk. To smile and wave at every acquaintance I pass, even the ones I know support McCain. To say hello to strangers. To model warmth instead of distance. Is this a small thing or a large thing? I don't know. Some days it feels small and inconsequential, other days it feels there is no more important way to be living. If enough of us did it, it would be huge. That much I know.

Annie Lamott wrote an article for Salon a few days ago that my friend Leslie sent to me. It captured my feelings exactly when she wrote about having to walk out of church on Sunday because the pastor was not about "bearing up under desperate circumstances, when you feel like you're going crazy because something is being perpetrated against your country that is so obscene you can't believe it is happening."

It's a fabulous article. By an unparalleled writer. She even manages to provide some humor, which we can always use. Especially now. Here's the link:

http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2008/09/16/anne_lamott/index.html

Billy Bob's New Skin

2008-09-15T07:38:00.001-07:00

Our pet tarantula, Billy Bob, molted yesterday, and it was one of the weirdest things ever witnessed in this house. We got Billy Bob back in early May, not long after I returned from Belize, and have been waiting for him to molt ever since.

First, a couple of words about Billy Bob. He is one freaky little dude. He's a Chilean Rose Hair, easy to find at any PetCo--kind of the Toyota Corolla of tarantulas. He lives in an aquarium in our TV room and eats live crickets, enough said about that. Most of the time he moves very s-l-o-w-l-y, flexing his hairy legs one at a time, until a cricket walks over to him and then he goes phoom! so fast you don't even see him grab it. My friend's son took care of him over the summer while we were away, and we though for sure he would molt then. But no.

For the past couple of days he seemed kind of down. He wasn't moving much, had a dull color, and wasn't eating any crickets. I kept saying, "Maybe he's going to molt," as if I knew what I was talking about. Then yesterday morning he made a small web and flipped over in the middle of it and spread his legs out wide. Maya thought he was dead. I said to give him a while. We read online that tarantulas flip like that when they molt, but he didn't move at all for a couple of hours and I started thinking he might be dead too. Apparently, some spiders don't survive their molts. But by the time we got home later in the evening he was out of his old skin, which is now lying curled up in the back of the cage like a huge, crumpled spider. We'll take it out in a day or two; in the meantime, we're supposed to leave Billy Bob alone for a couple of days while his new skin hardens up. He already looks about 10-15 percent bigger than he was.

I'd post a photo, but we're not supposed to make loud noises or disturb them during this sensitive time, and the flash might bother him. So I'll post a picture of him shortly after we got him.

I'm very proud of the freaky little guy. He had a big day yesterday, and he did well.

Another random thought

2008-09-12T08:36:00.000-07:00

Just about the only good thing I can see about Sarah Palin's nomination and the way her instant celebrity has hijacked the election from talk about issues is this: Mothers in Los Angeles are finally starting to have intelligent, engaged conversations about something more important than their childrens' schools.

Middle School, the Big Yawn

2008-09-09T07:34:00.000-07:00

So Maya started middle school yesterday, after months of anticipation and planning. I dropped her off and watched her head toward her homeroom, which doubles as her English class. She already knows most of the kids in her class from the Orientation, so there weren't going to be any big surprises. And it's the same school she went to last year, although on a new campus. Still, I was expecting some kind of big update when she got home in the afternoon. Instead, she flopped herself down at the kitchen counter and dramatically announced, "Mom, I already feel like I've been in middle school forever."

Deepak Chopra weighs in

2008-09-06T16:25:00.000-07:00

Obama and The Palin Effect
From: Deepak Chopra | Posted: September 4th, 2008

Sometimes politics has the uncanny effect of mirroring the national psyche even when nobody intended to do that. This is perfectly illustrated by the rousing effect that Gov. Sarah Palin had on the Republican convention in Minneapolis this week. On the surface, she outdoes former Vice President Dan Quayle as an unlikely choice, given her negligent parochial expertise in the complex affairs of governing. Her state of Alaska has less than 700,000 residents, which reduces the job of governor to the scale of running one-tenth of New York City. By comparison, Rudy Giuliani is a towering international figure. Palin's pluck has been admired, and her forthrightness, but her real appeal goes deeper.

She is the reverse of Barack Obama, in essence his shadow, deriding his idealism and exhorting people to obey their worst impulses. In psychological terms the shadow is that part of the psyche that hides out of sight, countering our aspirations, virtue, and vision with qualities we are ashamed to face: anger, fear, revenge, violence, selfishness, and suspicion of 'the other.' For millions of Americans, Obama triggers those feelings, but they don't want to express them. He is calling for us to reach for our higher selves, and frankly, that stirs up hidden reactions of an unsavory kind. (Just to be perfectly clear, I am not making a verbal play out of the fact that Sen. Obama is black. The shadow is a metaphor widely in use before his arrival on the scene.)

I recognize that psychological analysis of politics is usually not welcome by the public, but I believe such a perspective can be helpful here to understand Palinʼs message. In her acceptance speech Gov. Palin sent a rousing call to those who want to celebrate their resistance to change and a higher vision.

Look at what she stands for:

--Small town values -- a denial of America's global role, a return to petty, small-minded parochialism.

--Ignorance of world affairs -- a repudiation of the need to repair America's image abroad.

--Family values -- a code for walling out anybody who makes a claim for social justice. Such strangers, being outside the family, don't need to be heeded.

--Rigid stands on guns and abortion -- a scornful repudiation that these issues can be negotiated with those who disagree.

--Patriotism -- the usual fallback in a failed war.

--'Reform' -- an italicized term, since in addition to cleaning out corruption and excessive spending, one also throws out anyone who doesn't fit your ideology.

Palin reinforces the overall message of the reactionary right, which has been in play since 1980, that social justice is liberal-radical, that minorities and immigrants, being different from 'us' pure American types, can be ignored, that progressivism takes too much effort and globalism is a foreign threat. The radical right marches under the banners of 'I'm all right, Jack,' and 'Why change? Everything's OK as it is.' The irony, of course, is that Gov. Palin is a woman and a reactionary at the same time. She can add mom to apple pie on her resume, while blithely reversing forty years of feminist progress. The irony is superficial; there are millions of women who stand on the side of conservatism, however obviously they are voting against their own good. The Republicans have won multiple national elections by raising shadow issues based on fear, rejection, hostility to change, and narrow-mindedness.

Obama's call for higher ideals in politics can't be seen in a vacuum. The shadow is real; it was bound to respond. Not just conservatives possess a shadow -- we all do. So what comes next is a contest between the two forces of progress and inertia. Will the shadow win again, or has its furtive appeal become exhausted? No one can predict. The best thing about Gov. Palin is that she brought this conflict to light, which makes the upcoming debate honest. It would be a shame to elect another Reagan, whose smiling persona was a stalking horse for the reactionary forces that have brought us to the demoralized state we are in. We deserve to see what we are getting, without disguise.

A random thought

2008-09-06T13:28:00.000-07:00

Why do all the discussions about prohibiting abortion even in the cases of incest and rape always assume it will happen to "our daughters" or other teenaged girls? Can't a 30-year-old woman be raped? Can't a 40-year-old woman give birth? Why isn't anyone talking about the devastation such a policy would create in existing families--not just to a woman, but also to her husband and her children conceived by choice--if a married mother were forced to give birth to a child conceived by rape?

Rant du Jour

2008-09-06T13:03:00.000-07:00

So I was standing outside the Topanga Homegrown clothing and gift store the other day, in downtown small-town Topanga, talking to my friend R. as I picked up her 11-year-old daughter for the day, and we were lamenting how the national emphasis on "family values" is messing up our own families' values. Since Palin's nomination the issues of teen pregnancy and abortion have saturated the news, to the extent that my kids are starting to ask questions I wasn't planning to be answering yet. Maya's still just 10, and the other day she asked, "What's abortion?" She'd heard kids talking about it at school vis a vis this election. I'd been hoping to hold off on that one for a while, like maybe until both my kids were old enough to spell "reproduction."

Eden was in the car, too, which means my audience had an average age of 8. I could have defaulted into a lame response like, "We'll talk about it when you're older" but I really hate saying that to kids. I think it insults whatever level of intelligence they have. What it really means is, "I can't figure out a good way to explain it in a way I think your limited intelligence can understand." Except this time what it would have meant was, "I don't want to have to explain it to you until I feel you're emotionally mature enough to really absorb and understand the complexity of the situation." It would have been an honest and legitimate response from a pro-choice mother in this case, but it probably would have invited Maya to go back and ask her friends to explain it instead. Sorry to use such pat rhetoric here, but I value my family too much to send my kids off to get an answer elsewhere when they've come to me for it first. So I did the best I could with explaining what it means to end a pregnancy, and why a woman might need to do that, to my 10- and 6-year-old daughters in a way that wouldn't confuse or upset them. But it really pissed me off that I had to.

Can't Stay Quiet Any More

2008-09-05T23:55:00.000-07:00

Well, I started this blog back in April with the very best intentions of posting regularly, then became swept up in the chaos of a book deadline, the end of the school year, and preparation for two teaching workshops in Iowa. So I missed writing about a slew of family news, including Maya's fifth-grade graduation; the arrival of our pet tarantula, Billy Bob; the 500-year flood in Iowa City; and our July in Iowa. I was starting to worry that I'd abandoned the blog as just another good idea I once dabbled with. But the events of the past week have pulled me out of silence. Even with a book deadline pressing on me, I feel there is no more important time than right now for women to speak out against the hypocrisy and danger represented by the Republican Party, through the selection of Sarah Palin for vice president.

I realize I risk angering or alienating some of my readers with the posts that are about to follow, so if you don't agree with my points of view, you might want to stop reading. Because I've got some pretty strong opinions about what's going on in this country right now, and I'm going to be posting them. Frequently, and with passion.

I was at the gym after dropping the kids at camp, just about to leave for my office, when I saw Fox News (the gym's choice, not mine) on the overhead television announcing Sarah Palin's nomination. Like everyone else in the gym, and nearly everyone else in America, my first reaction was, "Who?" I felt an initial twinge of excitement to see a woman had been chosen. Pretty much the first thing we learned about her was that she was a mother of five, with a four-month-old infant who had Downs Syndrome. It was hard for me to get past the inherent dissoance there--a special needs infant, with a mother running for national office?--but I figured well, women make different choices, whatever. Then the flood of information about her so-called experience, and the blatant manipulation involved in McCain's decision to choose her, started coming our way. Yesterday, I received an email asking all the women in America who object to Palin's policies on sex education, reproductive freedom, creationism in the schools, and environmental opinions--as well as her blatant disregard for the Constitution's mandate to keep church and state separate and provide religious freedom to all--to post their own opinions on a new blog called Women Against Sarah Palin. You can send your own submissions to womensaynopalin@gmail.com.

I thought a good place to start would be with posting the submission I sent in tonight. Here it is:

Of all the objectionable points that can be made about Sarah Palin's nomination, and this past week has given us plenty to object to, the point I find most offensive is this: the way the far right and Palin herself, without much else to go on, are trying to use "mother of five" as a legitimate qualification for holding the second-highest executive position in America. That's what's supposed to convince us she's the best candidate for the job? That she's a mother, "just like us!"?

I watched two hosts on "The View" last week gush over how exciting Palin's nomination was and, when pressed to explain why, shouted, "She's a mother of five!" And I had to wonder, what country did I just wake up in? Do Republicans really think women are such idiots we can be treated as if we can't distinguish between the complexities of managing a household and the complexities of managing a world power? Yes, mothers do hard, honest work every day; yes, we rely on a set of skills shared by many executives and CEOs. I've been balancing work and motherhood for almost 11 years: you don't have to sell me on the superior organization and nearly inhuman personal discipline this requires. But my dominion is over a handful of individuals who are smaller, weaker, and biologically primed to adore me. To imply that women don't know this, or to try to dupe us into delusions of self-grandeur, is the worst kind of anti-feminism possible. It's a deception that's designed to appeal to the most dissatisfied and narcissistic parts of us, the parts that need to be reassured that the work we do isn't just worthy, but that it has the potential for national greatness. The most troubling part of this is that in a society that routinely devalues the work of mothers, this tactic will actually pull some women in by making them believe Sarah Palin is just a slightly more experienced version of them. This is pure deception, and trickery, and a complete insult to any mother with a brain. It reeks of patriarchy. It shows us exactly what Republicans think of mothers' intelligence. A tactic like this doesn't foster sisterhood among women. It mocks it.

Hope Edelman, 44
Los Angeles, CA

When Volcanoes Erupt

2008-05-07T10:05:00.001-07:00

This past winter the girls and I were driving home from piano lessons in the midst of a terrible rainstorm. We were on Old Topanga Canyon Road, which is twisty and cringe-inducing even under the best weather conditions. I gripped the wheel tight with both hands and asked the girls to hold off on any questions or requests for a while so I could concentrate on the road. "These are the worst road conditions I've ever seen in Topanga," I told them--which is saying a lot. Then a little voice popped up from the booster seat behind me, "At least a volcano isn't erupting!"
That's Eden, always looking on the bright side.
It's a family joke now. No matter how grim things may look at any moment, one of us will chime in with, "At least a volcano isn't erupting!"
And now, what do you know? In Chile, a volcano actually IS erupting. Eden, who's obsessed with weather--her favorite books are a series of science titles like "Thunderstorms," "Hurricanes" and "Volcanoes"--is amazed. Still, it's not looking great for the residents of Chaiten, Chile--8000 of whom have been evacuated. That's more than the number who had to evacuate Malibu and parts of Topanga last October during the firestorms. Oddly, the photos coming from Chile of the clouds of ash look a lot like the plumes of smoke we saw pouring out of Malibu last year. As we were evacuating via Calabasas we turned around and saw a truly apocalyptic cloud of gray and white smoke rising from the mountains behind us. I supposed we could have comforted ourselves by reaffirming that at least a volcano wasn't erupting...but Chileans don't have that reassurance now. Nor would it do much for all the citizens of Myanmar recovering from the devastation and loss from the cyclone. During a week like this one, I'm trying to be mindful about reminding the girls to be thankful for every boring day.

2008-04-29T14:34:00.001-07:00

My favorite photo of Eden, ever.
Taken this past weekend by our babysitter, Jillian, outside on the trampoline.

Back in the Saddle

2008-04-29T08:44:00.000-07:00

Well, it's been nearly a month since I last posted, proving that I'm going to be as inconsistent with blogging as I am with keeping a journal--kind of unfortunate for a memoir writer. Good thing I have a decent memory. It's not quite as good as Maya, who can remember virtually every gift, compliment, or slight she's received for the past 8 years, but pretty good with details nonetheless.

It's been more than a month since I returned from Belize, and a couple of weeks since we all got back from the family trip there. One thing I realized--on both trips--was that I cannot in good conscience take checks from Random House to write a book set in Belize without giving something back to the place that gave me the story to begin with. If you saw the standard of living down there, especially compared to ours in the U.S., you'd know exactly how I feel. So while there I started looking into how to support or donate to the rainforest communities, especially in the area in and around San Ignacio, without being an obnoxious American who drops in and gives random handouts. The areas in which I've decided to try to do some good are libraries, school tuition, and afterschool programs. Here's the situation in Belize: everyone, even those who send their kids to public school at the primary level, have to pay some amount of tuition for education to cover uniforms and books. It can be as little as US$200 per year but even that is hard for some families to cover. Education is mandatory--and in English--until age 14, but after that high school costs quite a bit more, as much as $200 per month for tuition and even more for those who have to take public transportation to the nearest high school. In addition, some kids have nowhere to go between the time school lets out and their parents get home from work, so low- or no-cost afterschool and summer programs are important for them. School supplies are expensive and hard to get in Belize, so I figured that was a good starting point. Last week I sent six boxes of notebooks, pens, markers, glue sticks, etc. down to San Ignacio for the library's summer program and for Dr. Rosita's afterschool homework and conservation program for kids ages 8-12. The library also needs books for preschoolers and young adult novels, so if any of you have extra books in good condition sitting around and would like to donate them to Belizean kids, let me know and I'll make arrangements to pick them up.

It's not huge, but it's a start, and I feel it's very important to do this next book with the right intent.

Otherwise, life in Topanga speeds along at its quick and chaotic pace. I've started taking an adult bellydancing class on Tuesday mornings, which starts in about 15 minutes. The teacher, Melanie, also has a troupe for girls that Maya and Eden have been dancing in and performing with for several years. (I'll post a photo here.) I told Eden this morning on the way to her bus stop that I was taking Melanie's class for women who are beginners. "What about women who are enders?" she wanted to know. Both girls are having great fun knowing there's a skill at which they are much, much better than their mom. They're teaching me how to do belly rolls, which is a lot easier to do when you're 10 than when you're 43 and have birthed two large babies. The women's class is about 8 or 10 women of varying ages and bodies and natural abilities, but it's not really about having the perfect shape or perfecting the moves. It's more about coming together to dance what was traditionally a woman's dance for other women (in the harems, apparently), celebrating our femininity, and learning how to tell stories with our bodies. Which is really a physical form of memoir, when you think about it.

Belize Redux--Trip #1

2008-03-22T08:29:00.000-07:00

Returned from Belize last Tuesday morning, and it’s been a catch-up race ever since. It wasn’t easy to blog or email from there, since email access was very limited and often very slow. That turned out to be a blessing, in its own way, since without internet, computers, or cell phones I was—gasp—actually forced to interact with people on a constant basis and spend time with my own thoughts. Which turned out to be one of the many highlights of the trip.

So. Belize! It was eleven days total, all of it spent in the Cayo District in the western part of the country. The first seven days were a workshop with Dr. Rosita Arvigo, learning about Mayan spiritual healing and the unique power of plants for spiritual and medicinal work. Rosita studied for many years with Don Elijio Panti, one of Belize’s most famous shamans, and her wealth of knowledge is extensive. She’s a generous and brilliant and funny teacher. There were about 25 or 26 students there for the week, and I don’t think I’ve ever met such a beautiful group of people before. For me, coming from LA, it was a big and nervous stretch to walk up to strangers, stick out my hand, and say, “Hi, I’m Hope,” but once I got over that hurdle I found myself in the company of 26 interesting, hilarious women and men (mostly women—there were only 3 men among us, like a creative writing workshop) who by the end of the week felt like more than friends. Cousins, maybe, or even reunited siblings.

We stayed in the River Camp section of Chaa Creek resort, sort of like a low-tech summer camp environment with bunks for two and four, that’s often used by large groups. My roommate, Michele, was a physical therapist and yoga instructor from Colorado and we would stay up late at night talking. I haven’t had a roommate since…well, since college, I think, and this was another highlight of the trip. Every morning we would all walk about a mile through the rainforest along the river, then across the Chaa Creek property, then through another patch of jungle past the Natural History Center and Butterfly Farm, then up a hill to Rosita’s house for class. On Tuesday we had an excursion day where we all canoed down the Macal River to the town of San Ignacio, walked around and did some souvenir shopping, had lunch in the village of San Jose de Succotz with Dona Juana, a traditional Mayan healer, and then toured the Mayan ruins at Xunantunich. Afterward we stopped at the Ix Chel Wellness Center, where Rosita and her husband Greg run a massage school and also where her Rainforest Remedies products are manufactured. I came back with a small stash of tinctures for stomach upsets, the flu, anxiety, and back aches that work better than any pharmaceuticals I’ve ever come across. She also has terrific insect repellant and a salve for insect bites and all kinds of rashes. Everything is made from leaves, bark, and other natural products found in Belize. You can find these items—and others, including Rosita’s books—at arvigomassage.com/rainforest_remedies/rr_products.phtml

The day after the workshop, I went back to San Antonio Village with Heidi and Seth (friends from the class) and a guide and translator (Docio, who was the supervisor of the river camp). San Antonio is where we started our journey with Maya in 2000, when we brought her to a Mayan bush doctor, and I was hoping to find him again. Docio, who has relatives in San Antonio, thought he’d located him for me. The man he brought us to looked different than I remembered. I had a photo of his house from 2000 but even though he brought us to what he said was that structure, it had been moved to a different part of his land and boarded up when he built a new house, so nothing looked familiar to me. But then he brought us inside the house, which he now uses for drying herbs. (That's a photo of us above.) I told him I remembered a handwritten letter on the wall introducing himself as a Mayan healer and he lifted a piece of paper on the far right wall and underneath it was a clipboard with the sign I remembered. Then he asked if the woman had brought the medicine back for us, so he remembered us. A few years ago, Uzi’s assistant at work—who’s Belizean—went home for a holiday and brought back some additional cough rub for us from him, and he remembered giving it to her. So we’d definitely found our man.

I spoke with him about Eden's psoriasis, and he offered to pick some leaves to give her in a tea and a bath. The next afternoon when I was leaving the local market in San Ignacio he found me in town and gave me a big bag of leaves. We rode the local bus back together—me to Cristo Rey, my next stop, and him all the way to San Antonio. It was market day, so the bus stopped about every 50 feet at individual houses to let women off with their purchases. The driver got out at every stop and opened the back of the bus to carry each family’s box of food to each curb. Riding the bus with Ovencio was definitely a demystifying process. For seven years I’ve thought of him as the mystical Mayan bush doctor who grew to mythic stature in my mind, and then we’re sitting together on an old school bus on a bumpy dirt road looking at a bag of leaves.

As a side note, bringing a bag of leaves into the U.S. from Central America isn’t as straightforward as it sounds. In other words, you can’t do it. You can, however, boil a pot of water, steep the leaves in it for about ten minutes to make a tea, strain the water, and let it cool, then pour it into plastic water bottles, tape them shut, wrap them up tightly in plastic, and bury them between clothes in your duffle bag. After I got home, Eden drank one cup of tea for three days in a row and we’ve bathed her nine times. So far her skin is doing really well.

One of the two leaves Ovencio gave me is known in Belize as Ix Canan (the Mayan name) or Santa Maria (the Spanish name). In the US apparently it can grow in Florida, Texas and California and is called either Scarlet Bush, Texas Firecracker, or Polly Redhead. My local nursery, which is a pretty comprehensive one, doesn't carry it and never heard of it, so I'm on a mission to find seeds or a seedling so we can grow it here. If anyone has any ideas, please let me know.

Back to the recap...

For the final three days of the trip, I stayed at Crystal Paradise resort in Cristo Rey, where we stayed seven years ago. It’s family owned, and I became reacquainted with some of the people who’d helped us in 2000. On Sunday, my last day, I’d done pretty much everything I’d set out to do on the trip, so I figured I’d join whatever excursion that day had an extra seat in the van. It turned out to be a trip over to Tikal, in Guatemala, a trek we’d also made seven years ago. I wasn’t planning to include a Tikal chapter in the book, but while making the drive and touring the Mayan ruins, and remembering things that had happened there, I realized it would make a good chapter. So that was a little bit of kismet at work there. A big highlight of this part of the trip was meeting Hugo, our driver. He didn’t speak much English and for 90 minutes from the border to Tikal, and 90 minutes back, I got the best Spanish refresher lesson of my life. Until then, I was very shy about speaking Spanish because I don’t like to speak poorly, but after just the first half hour an incredible amount of vocabulary and sentence structure started coming back. It’s inspired me to take some more classes. Of course, there’s the pesky problem of Hebrew words popping up sometimes if I can’t remember the Spanish one, but speaking two languages halfway doesn’t really make sense. I’d rather make strides with one of them—the more useful one in most parts of LA.

Hugo and his wife recently worked for CBS when they were filming "Survivor" on an island in the middle of a lake in the Peten region of Guatemala--Hugo as a driver, and his wife helping out with the laundry. He entertained all nine of us in the van with stories of how CBS took over with their base camp and film crews, and what happened to all the Americans immediately after they were voted off the show.

The next day, at the airport on the way home, I ran into three women from my workshop and we had a small mini-reunion. Everyone is spread out across the U.S., but I’m certain we’ll find ways to see each other again. Already, when we all go back down to Belize on Friday, I’ll get to see two, maybe three, of the women from the workshop who live in Belize. I was hoping to bring Uzi, Maya, and Eden back to Cayo but the hotel at the beach which we had to pre-pay doesn’t want to refund any of the nights, even with one week’s notice, so that’s complicating things. We’ll most likely stay on Ambergris Caye, the biggest of Belize’s islands, for the whole week. I know, I know…poor us. But I do feel as if a piece of my heart is tugging me back to the western part of the country, and I think another trip there before the end of the year is in order, if I can possibly make it work.

Heading to Belize, and Random Thought About Fake Memoirs

2008-03-07T05:47:00.001-08:00

Here's an interesting and recently proven fact: If your flight from LAX to Miami leaves an hour late, it's possible to make up so much time in the air that you will arrive on the East Coast in UNDER FOUR HOURS. You will have to fly at close to the speed of sound, however, and will be reminded the whole way that traveling at such velocity is not only unnatural but a little unnerving.

Still. It gets you to Florida pretty damn fast.

My connecting flight to Belize leaves in about and hour and a half. And then in two hours I'll be in Belize City. It's hard to believe I'll be there so soon, after several months of prep. Most of the 29 workshop participants are landing between 11:30 a.m. and 3 p.m. and then we'll be shuttled two hours west into the rainforest. The workshop begins tomorrow morning at 9:30.

I spoke with the legal department at Ballantine before I left, to find out what the recommended procedure is for securing permission to use people's real names in the book. Because I've got such a wacky story (which really happened, a rarity these days it seems), I want to tell it in a way that ups the authenticity quotient as much as possible, and since real people are characters I'd like to use the facts at every possible turn. We all agreed it would be off-putting to show up down there with legal release forms, especially since English isn't everyone's first language. The answer from legal was that since the experience really happened, I don't need permission to write about the characters or places by name. Still, it seems to me that it's a good idea--even though I can't imagine any of the characters would object; they all come across like heroes, I think--to give people a chance to decide if they want their names and the names of their establishments to appear in a book. I figured I'd get verbal confirmations and take lots of photos of the people I'm revisiting for futher proof of their existence. But this was all the day before the Margaret Seltzer, aka Margaret B. Jones faux-memoirist story broke. Now I'm thinking I'd better take photographs of all the characters holding the day's newspaper in one hand and a big handprinted sign in the other reading, "I exist, and I consent to having my real name used in Hope Edelman's upcoming book. Signed, me."

I may be the only nonfiction writer who hasn't yet weighed in on this newest publishing debacle. Two debacles, actually, if you count Misha Defonseca's Holocaust memoir that was recently exposed as a fake, and three if you factor in that the facts in Ishmael Beah's book are also under fire. As all memoirists know, there's always been a fuzzy line between memoir and fiction, depending as we do on the devices of fiction to shape a story from the raw material of real life, and given the inevitable impulse to tweak and twist and embellish to up the ante and make a good story just a little bit more dramatic, or make a mediocre story just a little bit less ho-hum. What first-time (and even more seasoned, I imagine) writers don't realize is that the thing that makes a good story great is not inventing details, or appropriating a false persona. What makes a good story great is, put most simply, great writing. If James Frey had been a better writer, he would have been able to write a book in which three hours in prison felt like three months. If Margaret Seltzer had been as good a writer as her initial reviews implied she was, she could have written a kickass memoir about being a white girl with aspirations of being a gangbanger, and gotten her homey friends' stories into print that way. As for Misha Defonseca, a nonfiction book about why the hell she feels the need to invent a tragic, genocidal past for herself would be more interesting to me than a Holocaust memoir that isn't real. The idea of projecting oneself backward into a tragic past so fully that one believes it really existed strikes me as not just pathological, but tragic in and of itself. As a writer friend of mine said at lunch the other day, "If I were going to invent a past for myself, I wouldn't pick one filled with tragedy and abuse. I'd choose to be a rock star." Touche. But that would be too easy to fact check, I suppose.

And what's up with the older sister ratting on Margaret Seltzer after seeing the NYT profile of her? There's got to be some kind of family-drama story there.

Flu in the Coop

2008-03-02T16:55:00.000-08:00

It's Flu Central around here right now. Maya had it a few weeks ago--high fever, headache, cough, sore throat, aches and chills--and I thought the rest of us had miraculously been spared, but then I came down with it on Thursday, and Eden woke up yesterday morning with a 102 degree fever. Uzi had some big clients from Amsterdam in town all last week and our babysitter's car broke down Wednesday night--one of those 'what else can possibly go wrong?' kind of weeks--so I had to take care of the girls myself Thursday and Friday when I was insanely, outrageously sick, which was exactly the opposite of fun. (Read: back-to-back videos in Mom's bed and microwaveable chicken nuggets and corn for dinner. Although to kids that probably does sound like fun.) Maya's flu lasted for five days--four of which perfectly coincided with our family vacation to Mammoth--and I'm on Day Four now. So hopefully I'm coming to the end of it. But poor Eden. She's trying so hard to be in good spirits, but her fever shot up to almost 104 this afternoon. Also, whenever her immune system gets challenged her psoriasis acts up, so that's making her uncomfortable. Uzi took Maya to her improv class at Second City in Hollywood, so I was home alone with her. I gave her some Tylenol and went to run a sponge bath, but while I was filling the tub she fell asleep on my bed. I figure that sleep is the best thing for her right now, so I just let her go for it. When Uzi and Maya got back they brought us a dozen pink roses with a Get Well card--so sweet.

I remember when Maya (and even Eden) were much younger, whenever I'd see 103.8 on a thermometer I'd rush to call the pediatrician. Thank god for our pediatrician (www.drjaygordon.com). He's a saint. Pediatricians have got to be the most patient human beings put on this earth. How many times a day do they have to calm down frantic parents during flu season? I'm guessing a lot. By now, I don't call unless there are unusual symptoms. Otherwise, it's Tylenol or Motrin (check), sponge bath (check), lots of water and juice (check, check), call the doctor if the fever lasts for more than five days. (Let's hope it doesn't get to that point.)

That doesn't mean I'm completely calm when a fever goes up that high--it still gives me a little twinge of panic to see the numbers on the digital thermometer go up, and up, and up. But what's freaking me out most right now is that I'm scheduled to leave Thursday night for 10 days in Belize (by myself) and I don't know how I'm going to get on the plane if Eden's still sick. I'm committed to going even if I'm not fully recovered, because it's for a workshop that happens only once a year, and I'll be doing research for my book down there, which is due in October, but I don't like leaving the kids for 10 days under any circumstances--and definitely not if one of them is sick. And the timing is very weird, because I just finished writing the chapter in the book (set in 2000) where Uzi, Maya, and I left for Belize and she was very sick with croup upon our departure. The pediatrician (not Dr. Jay, a different one back then) told us it was a virus, and she'd either get better at home or she'd get better down there, so we might as well go, which sounded like good advice. But we had so many airline delays on the trip down that it took us two days to get there--including a sleepless night in Guatemala City--and she got much sicker on the journey. Something about having a virus now, when I'm again about to leave for Belize, feels auspicious given that history. I'd rather get better up HERE than down there. I've got four more days. Let's hope that's enough time.

I'm just praying that Uzi doesn't come down with it, while I'm away. His system is usually the most resilient one in the house, so hopefully he'll be spared. We've got friends up the street who've got it now--all four of them--and lots of kids in both Maya and Eden's classes have been sick. Uzi says it's good for the immune system to get challenged from time to time, to stay in shape, which sounds plausible. Still, couldn't it get a one-day workout every couple of months, instead of a weeklong stretch every other year? That would be a heck of a lot more convenient for a working mom. For anyone, really. Let me know who I need to talk with about organizing this, and I'll be happy to place the call.

The Starting Gate

2008-02-29T12:28:00.000-08:00

People have been asking me for a while now, "Do you have a blog?" "When are you starting a blog?" "Why don't you have a blog?" I've been resisting it with all number of excuses: I don't have time, who cares what I have to say, I'm too old for this kind of stuff, etc. etc. Plus, if I start a blog, what inevitably happens next? A My Space page where I start poking other moms from the elementary school? You Tube videos of my tricks for solving fifth-grade math equations? I don't think so. Then just yesterday I moved my office from a little complex in the heart of Pacific Palisades to a very cool, funky space on the grounds of the Theatricum Botanicum in Topanga Canyon, not far from our house. The Theatricum is an outdoor theater that puts on plays and concerts in the warmer months. It was started by Will Geer and his family back around the McCarthy Era when he was blacklisted in Hollywood. Being an off the charts leftist (Go, Kucinich) I feel like the place has just the right vibe for writing my next book. Still, the new office is far enough off the beaten path to mean that either I wholly embrace the spirit of Topanga or I'm going to be sitting in my little 120-square-foot room six hours a day longing for a Starbucks and a Citibank. So partly to chronicle the next year, and partly to occupy myself in this self-imposed isolation, I figured I may as well blog about my time here, in this strange and wonderful canyon, raising two daughters; being a post-boom, dot-com wife; writing a book; and driving my minivan all over L.A. Although I'm hankering for a Prius. Because this is Topanga, after all.

Here's a link about Topanga Canyon for those of you who aren't familiar with it:
www.topangaonline.com

I'm calling this blog 455 Girls because a) I'm planning to write about motherhood some of the time, and I've got two girls; and b) because both Topanga and my older daughter figure prominently in my next book, which is about taking her to a Mayan shaman in Belize when she was three to get rid of her aggressive imaginary friend. (True story.)

Why the 455? Because Topanga is small enough that all of our local phone numbers begin with the same exchange: 455. So when you go to the dry cleaner, or order food from one of the local restaurants, and someone asks for your phone number you only have to give them the last four digits. It's a little like living on a modern-day Walton Mountain. With a New Age twist. Kind of addictive, in its own way.