Teacher, Practice What You Preach!

Among other things, I teach writing. I teach my students about the writing process, including all the things writers sometimes do on the way to a finished product. These can include reading, thinking, discussing ideas with others, brainstorming, freewriting, jotting down notes, outlining, drafting, getting feedback on early drafts from others, redrafting, and more. I firmly believe in this process, yet when I am doing my own writing projects, I sometimes have to remind myself to “practice what I preach,” or in this case, “practice what I teach.” I have recently been stuck on getting started on a certain piece that I have committed to write, casting about for how to focus the piece. A few days ago I decided to try the exercise of freewriting, which involves simply writing freely about a topic, without thinking too much, without worrying about logic or felicity, and most of all, without stopping. As I say to my students, “Just keep that pen moving!” It is a kind of priming of the pump; the idea is that the very act of writing freely and without prior plan or structure will bring ideas to the surface that one can then mine for use in the writing project. Although I often have my students do this exercise, I almost never do it myself. Well, sure enough, as I was writing away, letting words flow onto the page in an unregulated stream, my ideas started to take shape, and I began to see a way out of my tangle and block. And then as my focus became clearer, I started to get excited about the potential of the piece. When I finally stopped and read over what I had written, I could focus and organize the ideas I found there. I am still a long, long way from a finished piece, but now I know where I am going with it, and more or less how I will get there, which makes all the difference. I am happy about this, of course, and also slightly sheepish about the fact that I had forgotten or neglected this useful strategy that I blithely teach my students but tend to ignore in my own writing; I should listen to myself more often!

Memorable Meals in Fiction

Writers of fiction often write vividly and sensuously about meals. I have posted about memorable characters (3/6/11), memorable settings (3/11/11), and memorable children (5/2/11) in fiction; today I list a few memorable meals.

-Proust’s madeleine with tea in “Swann’s Way”
-The Morkan sisters’ dinner party for the Feast of the Epiphany in “The Dead” (Joyce)
-Mrs. Ramsey’s dinner for family and friends in “To the Lighthouse” (Woolf)
-The reunion meals of the six characters in “The Waves” (Woolf)
-The famous sensual, seductive meal in “Tom Jones” (Fielding)
-Hemingway eating oysters in “A Moveable Feast”
-The March girls taking their Christmas meal to the poor family in “Little Women” (Alcott)
-Jo’s botched meal in “Little Women” (Alcott)
-The dinner party in “Larry’s Party” (Shields)
-All the meals in Laurie Colwin’s novels

Glorious Literary Paris in the Twenties

Woody Allen’s new movie, “Midnight in Paris,” is great fun for those who love literature and especially for those who read about and dream about the golden days of American writers in Paris in the 1920s. The protagonist of the film, a screenwriter and would-be novelist (and clearly a stand-in for Allen himself) named Gil, is visiting Paris and completely enchanted with the city and with his visions of staying there and writing, just like his 1920s-era literary heroes. Magically, at midnight one night, and then for many nights after, he is picked up by a vintage car and transported into the 1920s, talking, drinking, and dancing with writers such as F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Djuna Barnes, and with artists such as Picasso and Dali. Gil is dazed and then can’t believe his good fortune, as he moves through a golden haze of 1920s Parisian pleasures, just the way we all imagine it was. The portrayal of Hemingway is a hilarious parody; the film Hemingway speaks in an exaggerated version of the way the real Hemingway wrote: in short, forceful sentences about how to be a real man and a real writer. The movie is clearly Allen’s love letter to Paris and to what we all imagine was a magical time in literary history. Gil eventually has an epiphany that we all think the past was a golden age and our present is always dull in comparison; this epiphany seems tacked on, and in no way detracts from the gorgeous and beautifully filmed portrayal of 1920s literary Paris. I wouldn’t say this is the greatest film Allen has made, but it is very enjoyable, and fulfills a fantasy many lovers of literature have had about living the literary life in Paris.

"The Body of Jonah Boyd"

I stumbled across and read one of David Leavitt’s less famous books, the novel “The Body of Jonah Boyd” (Bloomsbury, 2004). It is, as most of his books are, about a family, and the setting is -- as is common in his novels -- California, in a college town. The center of the story is the wife and mother of the family, Nancy Wright. The story is narrated by Professor Ernest Wright’s secretary, Denny. Because Denny is the secretary (and mistress) to Ernest and a sort of companion to Nancy, she is with the family a lot, but is often relegated to the sidelines of the action. She both cherishes and resents her ambiguous position. There is a complicated story about friends of the family and one of the sons, Ben, who becomes a writer. The main part of the story happens in 1969; the sequel happens thirty years later. There was, I assume, supposed to be a bit of mystery as to what happened during this interval, but the mystery wasn't mysterious enough to cause any real suspense. The revelations it offered were not surprising, and in fact reminded me of the plot turns of at least two other novels I've read. I found this novel a quick, fairly enjoyable read, and that is about all I can say for it. Don't bother reading it.

"Making Home From War"

In 1999, my USF colleague, writing professor and poet Brian Komei Dempster, was asked to lead a writing workshop for former Japanese World War II internees in the United States, so that they could share their stories. In 2001, he edited a collection of their stories, “From Our Side of the Fence: Growing up in America’s Concentration Camps.” Now, ten years later, the same 12 writers, after a renewed time in their writing group, have told the follow-up stories of their resettlement after the war in a new book, also edited by Dempster, “Making Home from War: Stories of Japanese American Exile and Resettlement” (Heyday, 2011). The editor, whose own grandfather, a Buddhist priest, was interned, has done a great service to history and to justice, as well as to literature, in working with these writers, many of whom had no prior experience in writing for publication, to preserve their stories. An excellent foreword by Greg Robinson explains the historical context, and both Robinson and Dempster point out that although there has been much written about the internment (which Dempster and his writers decided to call, more accurately and less euphemistically, “incarceration,” “imprisonment,” and “confinement”), there has been much less written about the resettlement afterward. As the writers are now mostly in their 80s, it became essential for them to write and publish their stories now. These stories are very moving. We cannot help but admire the way the writers and their families, despite great difficulties and injustices, got on with their lives. Many of them earned advanced degrees and had estimable careers. Yet the years of confinement left their scars; one of Dempster’s points is that the resettlement process –- economic, geographic, logistical, social, emotional, psychological, and more -- took place not just during the traditionally defined period of 1945-1955, but for many years afterward, even into the present. This book is beautifully produced, with an evocative cover, many photographs of the authors and their families in the past and in the present, and useful “migration charts” showing where and when each family moved before, during, and after the war. “Making Home from War” makes an enormous contribution: it is informative, it reminds us of the grave injustices perpetrated on Japanese Americans, and it gives us the great gift of the authentic voices of those who experienced this sad chapter in American history.
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A personal note: This is my 400th post on this blog!

Ersatz Austen

One of my first entries on this blog (1/25/10) was about Jane Austen, whose books I have read and reread so many times. Because I love her work so much, I even occasionally read the “sequels” and other novels based on Austen’s books. I just finished “Presumption: An Entertainment: A Sequel to ‘Pride and Prejudice’” (University of Chicago Press, 1993), by Julia Barrett. It tells the imagined story of what happens after Elizabeth and Darcy marry. The setting is, of course, Pemberley, and the main character is Darcy’s sister Georgiana. Other characters from “Pride and Prejudice” in “Presumption” are Elizabeth's parents and sisters, Lady Catherine De Bourgh, Mr. Collins, and more. New characters include two young men who vie for Georgiana’s affection. There are flirtations, romances, crises, two new babies, deceptions, betrayals, realizations, and other events. Naturally, after some manufactured suspense and a couple of surprises, all ends well. This novel, like some of the other sequels, prequels, and offshoots, is fun to read, and a chance to reconnect with Austen’s world. But because no writer can even pretend to be in Austen’s league (and to be fair, these authors don’t pretend that, but rather bill their novels as tributes to Austen), reading “Presumption” and other such novels is a bit like eating mediocre chocolate; it tastes OK, but it definitely isn’t the “good stuff,” the real thing.

Remembrance of Letters Past

When I was at my mother’s house recently, going through old papers, as she is downsizing, she showed me files of letters that my brothers and I had written to my father and her when we were children in boarding school in India, many years ago. I read them with great interest; they not only brought back memories of events and feelings from that time period, but they vividly illustrated different stages of our childhoods. My youngest brother wrote sweet, simple notes in block printing. We all listed litanies of activities: “On Saturday our class took a hike. On Sunday L. and C. and I went to the bazaar. Yesterday Mr. F. told us we have to memorize a poem.” Etc. The letters also were clearly from four different kids: I immediately recognized the handwriting of each of my brothers, and noticed the stylistic differences in our writing. I also still have some of the letters that my parents wrote to me in boarding school, and later on too, for example when I was in college and when I moved to San Francisco. During the boarding school holidays, when we dispersed and went home, some of my friends and I would write each other long letters, which helped with the separation from each other and our school and social activities. During my college and early adult years, when any of us -- family or friends -- went on trips, we would write letters and cards. As an adult, I enjoy reading the published letters of some of my favorite authors, and find them both revealing and intriguing. I still write and receive some handwritten notes or letters, although much more rarely than in pre-email days. In particular, my mother doesn’t use email, so we still write each other letters; we each enjoy both writing and receiving letters. A couple of my friends still (one in particular -- thank you, B.!) write the occasional note by post, which I enjoy and appreciate. And I have one friend in Canada with whom I have been exchanging cards and letters since we were ten years old, although we have only seen each other a few times over the years, and that is a treasured correspondence. But with cell phones, texting, emailing, instant messaging/chatting, Facebook, and all the other ways to communicate, old-fashioned letters are not very common anymore. Isn’t it a bit sad that nowadays when one opens one’s mailbox, the chances of that little uptick of happiness on finding a personal letter are very small? I know that technology marches on, and that is mostly a good thing; I, for example, am a great fan of email. But I can’t help feeling that the drastic decrease in letter writing is a loss.