2003: I try the Golden Door Spa, but it feels like famine. While I’m there, I do a silent meditation walk, and before I can stop myself, I’m judging the way people walk. We listen to Dave Matthews as Bobby learns how to drive–Ants Marching, Satellite, Crush, Crash Into Me, Tripping Billies… I take Bobby and Jack and Jack’s friend to Washington, DC for a concert. On Sundays starting at four and before they can do anything else, the boys must wash clothes, fold clothes, put clothes away, take up the trash or recycling, clean their rooms, and get their stuff off the steps. They appear to have so little homework that we impose an hour and a half time period in which they must study or at least read. We are torturing them. In June we go back to Nantucket. Instead of the ferry we fly. I have to take a Xanax before getting into the tiny 10-seater Cape Air plane in which Cal has assured me there will be a co-pilot. There is not. This time Sam has his own bike instead of sharing a bicycle for two with Cal. I return to the New York State Summer Writers Institute for a third year, but I go for the first two weeks and take the workshop with Mary Gordon and Marilynne Robinson. Mary sits on the edge of her desk as she talks about how to “saturate a moment.” Marilynne grins as she tells us she reads while she walks her dog, then she gazes into the air above us and talks about Galileo. There are readings by Francine Prose, Michael Ondaatje, Carolyn Forche, Honor Moore, Robert Pinsky, Claire Messud, Anne Beattie, Mary Gaitskill… I feel like I’m on another planet. No triathlons, but for the 9th year in a row, Amandah and I hike the 23 miles of the Pine Mountain Trail–now with the husbands. Kathleen graduates from college and comes home while she looks for a job. The kids are 22, 16, 14, and 10. This is the year of Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto and a big year for the classics—Middlemarch, The Sound and the Fury, Mrs. Dalloway, and To the Lighthouse.

14 days to 60

~

She sees that she has before her an important task: to understand that all the things that happened in her life happened to her. That she is the same person who was born, was a child, a girl, a young woman, and now she is old. That there is some line running through her body like a wick.

Mary Gordon, The Rest of Life

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If you can believe it, we’re down to the last ten posts in this practice. And for these last days, I’m going to look back a bit at the past year–a year in which I joined my selves together–past, present, and future. Mary Gordon said it so well in The Rest of Life (212).

She would be who she is: the past inseparable from the present, but not dominating it, as the hills that rise from a lake and the lake itself make up a whole bordering each other, joining without separation.

~

 365 true things about me
why this daily practice

april 2015

september 2015

So I’m down to the last hundred posts in this year of catching me–this year of looking at the photos, digging up memories, finding the words to fill in the spaces. I’m taking up more room these days. And I’m more comfortable. I’m discovering things and remembering things. I’m starting to understand how I got to this moment. I will probably always be a private person but from now on, at least I will know who I am.

She sees that she has before her an important task: to understand that all the things that happened in her life happened to her. That she is the same person who was born, was a child, a girl, a young woman, and now she is old. That there is some line running through her body like a wick.

–Mary Gordon, The Rest of Life

~

 365 true things about me
why this daily practice

When my youngest child entered high school and I could see that in four short years I would no longer be tethered to this house and to the school year, for the first time since my early twenties, I began to think about what kind of life I wanted.

Have I mentioned that I had children at home for 31 years? That is a long, long, long time. I know there are exceptions, but for the most part, if you do something for 31 years, you’re going to be tired of it. I was.

And I had a life all those years–I was an attorney, I travelled by myself, I kept up my French, I did four sprint triathlons, I produced a cookbook, I started writing, I went to writing workshops, I started this blog, I got my MFA, I was an editor at two different journals…

I wanted something different. To start with–place. I wanted to spend more time near the ocean. I had been going to Provincetown for writing workshops, and each time I went, I loved it more. I had always loved New England–from my days of camp in Vermont.

Graduation was at the end of May, and on June 2nd I went to Provincetown for the first time just to hang out and write, and I stayed for the first time in one of the cottages at the top of this blog (that had been at the top of this blog for four years by that point), and I fell in love.

With the air, the water, the sky, the light, the cottage–everything.

The way I feel now is as if I have emerged from something and I want to turn around, look back, and figure out what happened. As Mary Gordon wrote in The Rest of Life, “I’m trying to understand what it means to have had a life.” And I want to understand it now while I’m still living it.

Although I do feel as if, over the years, I lost my own mind, I don’t feel lost. I just feel like I need to get my strength back. I feel less like I’m flailing around and more like I just need to keep on this path, following the bits of bread that I managed to throw out over the years–picking up the crumbs and letting them expand.

~

 365 true things about me

The story is so good. I mean, I would get in the middle of a scene and not have any idea what was going to happen next–and then you would describe a bottle of olive oil so specifically that I felt like I could go to the grocery store and pull it off the shelf–but what I wanted was to get back to the husband and wife.

I’m not sure why it takes me so long to figure these things out. Details are good, right? Be specific. How many times have I heard this?

Well, here’s the thing. Details are good. They go toward bringing things to life. They go toward creating our characters–what Angelina might notice, Lucy might not. They go toward creating a world the reader can see and believe in.

But. They can also annoy the reader and pull her right out of a scene. They can bog a scene down.

A year ago, Pam Houston, reading a few of the pages from the novel I’m working on now, reminded me: details need to do double duty. They need to do more than just be details. Why do we care that the bartender is wiping off the counter and putting out a candle? Now I know the answer and I’ve adjusted the language.

And good for Benjamin Percy, in this month’s The Writer’s Chronicle, taking the time to go beyond the pat be more specific:

Over and over again in workshop, [students] have heard their instructor say, “Be specific.” They listen, but they go too far and end up choking the reader with details. So there should be an asterisk next to the command “Be specific.” Be specific when something is interesting. [emphasis mine]

When something is interesting, you look at it longer. You prolong and amplify. These set pieces are the most interesting moments and so they demand a slowness, an elongation. Stretch out the physical beats.

Or as Mary Gordon told me back in 2005: saturate these moments.

In other words, go light on the olive oil.

“She sees that she has before her an important task: to understand that all the things that happened in her life happened to her.  That she is the same person who was born, was a child, a girl, a young woman, a woman, and now she is old.  That there is some line running through her body like a wick.  She is the same person who was once born.  All the things that happened to her hapened to one person…’I’m trying to understand what it means to have had a life.'”