We went a lot of years without electronic road-trip entertainment for the kids. No game systems, no iPods, no DVD players. The closest we got to new technology was listening to books on CD instead of books on tape. And even then we listened to quaint titles like Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys.
This low tech choice was mostly due to circumstance. We were a family of four living on one graduate student income, so we prioritized things like food and shelter and winter coats in Minnesota over entertainment gadgetry.
Had we had the money for DVD players, though, I’m still not sure we would have bought them. I secretly wanted our kids to entertain themselves the old fashioned way, even though I cringed every time they asked me to play I spy or find-the-letters-of-the-alphabet-on-road-signs games. I have romantic notions of watching the landscape change, listening to music, having conversations, taking quiet time to think deep thoughts about things like men and their socks.
But the reality of road trips with kids is that the changing landscape out the windows does not interest them, you can’t enjoy your music because the kids are constantly talking over it, conversation is replaced by boring road trip games, and deep thoughts are interrupted by complaints of “I’m hungry,” “I’m bored,” and “my butt hurts in this seat.”
That all changed today, though, as our son pulled out his brand new 3DS, hand-held Nintendo game system, complete with his very own earbuds. Since he had this fancy new birthday toy, I loaded a couple of new games on my Nook and dusted off our ancient iPod, “purchased” with credit card rewards, and loaded it with all the High School Musical soundtracks for our daughter. We found her some earbuds and she is bopping silently in the backseat, knotting a friendship bracelet as I write.
And let me tell you, our road trip was glorious. I don’t regret or feel bad about their electronics, not even for a second. My husband and I got, not minutes of quiet in the back seat, but hours. Hours of satisfaction and contentment for the kids. Huge stretches of concentration for my husband, who navigated the treachery of sleet and fog and driving rain on steep, slick mountain passes. Wide expanses of time for me to watch rivulets of rain stream across my window, trees creep out of the fog, farms and hay bales and rolling hills drenched with December rain. I listened to the spatter of rain on the windshield, the hum of tires on the highway. I had conversations with my husband.
On this trip, our kids received the precious gifts of 3DSes, and iPods, and Nooks, and of unlimited screen time.
And I received the gift of putting pen to paper, of scratching inky words on lined paper, of writing the old fashioned way, my family all around me as I fulfilled my commitment to write 30 minutes a day.
I originally wrote this during our holidays travels in 2012. Since we’re on the road again this year, I thought I’d repost it. Enjoy!
I’m feeling festive among the jeweled reds of the season. I don’t want to take too much time away from family to write on Christmas (though they are all occupied with other things – new Wii games, a new Samsung tablet, a pre-feast workout), but the colors of the day are inspiring me. Since I gathered greens in the garden this summer, I’ll complete the holiday palette with a collection of crimsons on Christmas:
ruby
garnet
maraschino
cranberry
pomegranate
framboise
raspberry
roseate
dark cherry
candy apple
holly berry
I’m all fired up after declaring I will dedicate next year to craft work within my writing practice: technique, structure, word choice, revision (gulp). The moment I pressed publish on my previous entry, 2014: The year of the craft, the moment I made the decision to postpone submitting until I have a firm grasp on writing, I felt giddy about focusing on what I love (writing) instead of what writing might get me (publication).
So giddy, in fact, that I read The Elements of Style, the first of my craft work resolutions, before the new year even began. I read the tiny guide-book in two sittings, chuckling and highlighting “Aha!” passages throughout (see review on Goodreads). Strunk and White invigorated me, and I went directly from the final page of their delightful little book to the first page of the latest issue of Creative Nonfiction. The special double issue, which celebrates the magazine’s 50th volume and 20 years of publication, chronicles the history of creative nonfiction, the genre, and Creative Nonfiction, the journal. The essays on its pages – sharp, poignant, beautifully written, and on a level I have not yet reached – convinced me of the rightness of my resolution, and I realized I’d better come up with a plan of action while my resolve is still strong.
I debated whether to share my steps here because, well, the titles are kind of embarrassing. “Mentor Monday.” “Talking Tuesday.” But the thing is, I’m not a young thing anymore; I need memory aids. If I want to hit several elements of craft work, and if I want to practice them regularly, I need to make time for each one in my week. And I’m pretty sure the only way I’m going to remember what I want to do each day is via a mnemonic device that works for me: alliteration. Here’s my plan, in all its cutesy glory:
Mentor Monday
I dedicate Mondays to craft exercises prescribed by writing mentors (i.e., the books I resolve to read this year). Specifically, I plan to work through Priscilla Long’s The Writer’s Portable Mentor. I plan to work through Long’s exercises with my writing group, but if you want to adopt this schedule, any mentor will do. Most writing books include writing prompts or exercises, and Monday is the day I plan to focus on that aspect of craft.
Talking Tuesday
Revision advice that crops up again and again, across writing books, across writers, across writing blogs and websites and comment sections, is to read your work out loud to listen for mistakes. I, too, have written about reading out loud, and how effective it is for finding holes or unnecessary repetition or phrasing that just doesn’t sound right. But despite learning the lesson first hand, I rarely remember to read my work out loud. Tuesdays will now be dedicated to the auditory element of revision.
Word Work Wednesday
This may be the day I’m most excited about in the week. I LOVE word work: exploring dictionaries, cataloging color names, mining for verbs, making mind maps. In February of 2013 I started a lexicon. At first I registered a favorite word every couple of days. Now it sits dusty on my writing shelf, along with all those writing books I started and abandoned because I was burning with submission fever. No more. My lexicon will get a work out every Wednesday in 2014. This Wednesday, Christmas day, I plan to collect words for the color red: holly berry, cherry pie, peppermint swirl.
Workshop Thursday
I didn’t really need an alliterative title for this one because I meet up with my writing group on Thursdays; it is unlikely I will forget what Thursdays are for. In weeks we don’t meet, however, I will spend Thursdays doing what we normally do in writing group: 10 minute prompted writes, exercises from writing books, and planning for the next week’s work.
Free Friday
Do I need to explain this one? Friday is for whatever the heck I want it to be for.
Wisdom Weekends
That sounds awfully stuffy doesn’t it? If you can come up with a W word for reading, please let me know. I plan to dedicate weekends, if I have leisure time, to catching up on reading: magazines (Poets & Writers, Creative Nonfiction); literary journals (The Sun when I finally save enough money for a subscription), online journals (Vela magazine, Brevity), and of course, all the writing books I aim to finish throughout the year.
That’s the plan for 2014. I’ll let y’all know mid year how it’s going. Until then, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and may your resolve hold for all your 2014 resolutions!
P.S. If you have any favorite festive yuletide words, please share them here. I’d love to gather them in my lexicon for this week’s Word Work Wednesday. Thanks!
Our daughter gets angry when she can’t do something perfectly the first time she tries it. She grumbles when she can’t get the stitches right the first time she knits, or she throws down her first macrame when the chevrons don’t match up, or she cries when she begins with the “expert” pattern for her rubber band bracelets and the tiny elastics snarl like a neon multicolored fishing net. I shake my head and tell her, “You can’t expect to get even the simplest pattern perfect the first time you try. You have to practice – after you’ve done a few, then you can move to the harder stuff.”
Like I have any room to talk.
Last December, I was a neophyte blogger. I’d barely logged 40 posts. Back then, I sat down at the keyboard and fired off blog posts when the spirit moved me, sometimes two days in a row, sometimes with two weeks between entries. I didn’t have a schedule. I didn’t concern myself with craft, with arcs, with cohesion and themes and, let’s face it, with having a point. Yet, last week, when I received two big rejections – rejections I truly thought would be acceptances – my heart caved in on itself. I was flooded with self-doubt, and thought, I chose the wrong path. I’m no writer.
Barely a year after starting a blog, I was devastated because my work was rejected by top notch literary journals. Our daughter gets it honest.
Our daughter also has a stubborn streak. If she can’t get the front door to unlock, she will grunt and turn the key harder, torquing metal til I think her little 8-year-old hand might break it off in the lock. She twists the key and stamps her foot, as if by will and brute strength she can tumble the bolt’s mechanism. She never succeeds. What the lock needs is for the key to be backed off. What it needs is a gentle jiggle.
After my initial tears, after I read the rejection notes and had my cries, I thought, I will power through this. I refuse to give up. Like my daughter, I set my chin and vowed, I will work harder, faster, stronger. (Read: finesse be damned.) I read an excellent and timely piece, Befriending Doubt, by Deborah Lee Luskin on the Live to Write – Write to Live blog, and was encouraged by Luskin’s acceptance of self-doubt. In the comments she mentioned that she once met a writer “whose goal was to receive 100 rejections in a year. He did it – and placed eight stories as a result.” I thought – Aha! That will be my 2014 goal: to receive 100 rejections. That will be a way for me to embrace rejection. One hundred rejections will mean I’m sending tons of work out. And out of 100 rejections, surely there would be one acceptance, right?
But. In a rare moment of clarity, unobscured by stubbornness or greedy I-want-it-and-I-want-it-now ambition, I realized that what I want, what I really want, is to become a better writer. I want to be proud of the work I send out. Instead of this manic, frantic need to publish, to receive validation, to believe someone else thinks I’m good, instead of starting at the endpoint, with publication, I’m going to start at the beginning: with craft. I want to learn to finesse instead of force.
At swim meets I tell our daughter, “Don’t be disappointed that you’re not first in your race. You’re still learning the strokes. Learn the basics first: how to dive off the blocks, how to kick, how to angle your arms, when to breathe. You’ll get better results with a better stroke.” How can I expect to win acceptances when I’m still learning how to write? Throughout 2013 I found myself wanting to read more about craft, to read my writing magazines, and Essay Daily, and the writing books I’ve bought but don’t finish because I’m frantically writing, pressuring myself to submit, submit, submit.
In 2014, my goal is not going to be 100 submissions, or 100 rejections, or even 1 acceptance. In 2014, I resolve to take the pressure off. In 2014, I resolve to work on craft.
1. I’m going back to the basics, starting with Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style.
Sadly, I no longer own my high school copy of this essential writer’s resource, but at $6.99, I think I can invest in it again*. The tiny volume is only 105 pages long, and it’s possible I will get to it before we even begin the new year.
2.I will read, cover to cover, the writing books I’ve begun and have not yet finished, that have been sitting on my Goodreads currently-reading shelf for far too long:
Crafting the Personal Essay: A Guide for Writing and Publishing Creative Nonfiction by Dinty W. Moore
The Writer’s Portable Mentor: A Guide to Art, Craft, and the Writing Life by Priscilla Long
The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction: Advice and Essential Exercises from Respected Writers, Editors, and Teachers edited by Dinty W. Moore
3. I will practice one craft exercise per week. In my writing group we are working our way through Priscilla Long’s The Writer’s Portable Mentor, assigning ourselves homework exercises each week from her pages. Snapshots from the writing desk and Word trap were products of these assignments. I don’t always do the work (e.g. this week), but in 2014 I will prioritize this craft work.
4. I will befriend revision. Wow, you have no idea how hard that was to write. Revision is currently my biggest foe. I avoid eye contact and cross to the other side of the street when I see it coming. As a consequence, I’ve been sending work out too early, before it is ready. Until I look revision in the eye and start working with it, I have no business submitting work for publication.
It’s time to start at the beginning for once. I’m going to take the advice we give our daughter, and I am going to begin as a beginner, with beginner expectations instead of jumping to the end, expecting to be an expert before I am one. And little by little, year by year, I will get there.
Mom’s red and white checked cookbook was falling apart even when I was a child. Every time she pulled it off the shelf, which was nearly every day, tattered pages would spill out, their binder holes torn, and she’d shove the sheets back in before thumbing to the recipe she wanted. The gingham cover was spattered with brown stains, the once-white checks were now yellowed, and the corners of the book were split and frayed like the corners of a burst couch cushion. She pulled one of my favorite childhood dinners, Chicken Divan, from that cookbook’s pages, along with all of our Christmas confections: fudge, divinity, peanut butter blossoms, and bourbon balls.
When I married, Mom gave me my own copy of that cookbook. The white checks were pristine, like fresh milk, and the red were bright and cheery like cherries. It was one of my first cookbooks, and its gingham cover, like a hopeful picnic cloth, was a happy addition to our kitchen.
Until my mom gave me that cookbook, I didn’t realize how ubiquitous it is. But once I had my own, on my own kitchen shelf, I started noticing it at others’ houses. The shelves of my mother’s generation all held tattered stained copies like Mom’s, pages dog-eared and stuck together, ripped or falling out, while the copies on their daughter’s shelves were fresh, neatly shellacked, and bright red-and-white like mine.
That was fifteen years ago, when my copy was smooth and unblemished, the lone reference in our newlywed kitchen. Now, we have two rows of instructionals, and that red and white checked volume occupies the most accessible spot on the shelves: the top left corner, first of all the cookbooks. The muffin page is spattered with batter, the frosting page is sticky with sugar, and the praline page is building up its own layer of history, including notes on past failures flecked with specks of caramel candy. When my husband craves his mom’s bread stuffing from Thanksgiving, I find it in my book. When I want my mom’s biscuits, I look them up in my book.
It is not the most sophisticated of foodie references. It does not have the name recognition of The Joy of Cooking. But it has the basics, the classics, the food from our childhoods. It is the quiet cookbook that nobody makes a fuss over, but nearly every family owns. And it has that cover, that red and white checked cover, that we all recognize, even if we don’t know the book’s name. That cover that evokes cozy kitchens, and home cooking, and tradition that can be thumbed through the generations, whether on tattered yellow or crisp white pages.
This is my entry for the photo challenge: community, for our community of cookbooks that began with our red and white checked copy of the Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book.
I have to tell you, I was really excited when I realized my Andrea Reads America tour would have me reading Alaska in winter. I love cozying up with icy books when it is cold outside – I reread The Shipping News nearly every winter – and Alaska literature has not disappointed. I’ve gone back and forth between shivering, swearing “I’m reading a warm book after this!” and succumbing to the wild brutality of Alaskan winter, my thirst for its realness and its close-to-the-earthness unquenchable. Reading books populated with marten and wolverine, bear and fox, glaciers and tundra, I’m learning a new vocabulary: breakup (aka Spring, when the ice breaks up and avalanches downstream), ptarmigan (grouse), and babiche (rawhide strips used for cording, as in making snowshoes). I am scribbling descriptions of ice and snow and the piercing cold because the frosty words paint pictures of a place that is exotic, full of a wonder and wildness I will never experience here in Virginia.
While my Alabama reads dealt with social themes – racism, community, and doing the right thing – my Alaska reads contend with themes of wilderness, survival, legend, and the strong pull of the natural world. The landscape is as much a character in each book as the humans are, and I was pleased to find books set not only in isolation in the far north of Alaska and inland on a homestead, but also one set in more populated areas, on the raw coast. I’m a sucker for coasts.
Novel: The Snow Child
Author: Eowyn Ivey, raised in Alaska
Setting: 1920s Alaska homestead
Categories: Literary fiction, Pulitzer Prize finalist
I didn’t think I liked magical realism, but it turns out I just hadn’t found the right book to pull me in, ground me in a reality, then sprinkle magic in a way that is wondrous and enchanting, and leaves you puzzling throughout – is it magic or is it real? The Snow Child was this book for me.
Set in the wilderness of 1920s interior Alaska on the Wolverine River, The Snow Child is the story of a aging couple who have moved west from Pennsylvania to homestead in Alaska in an effort to escape the emptiness left by their stillborn child. A two hour horse ride to the nearest “town” and then a train ride away from Anchorage, Mabel and Jack become isolated even from each other, grieving while they labor separately to make workable land from wilderness. One night, they succumb to the magic of a snowfall, and in laughter and joy, they build a child from snow. The next morning, the snow figure is gone, and a wildling girl appears in the forest.
The Snow Child chronicles the growing affection between Faina (the wildling) and the elderly couple, who over the years grow to think of her as their own, though she comes and goes without notice, and though they live with opposing stories of her flesh-and-blood father who Jack buried and the idea that Faina is a snow maiden of their creation, as Mabel read about in a Russian Fairy Tale. A tale that never ends well.
The magic in this book isn’t just the obvious fairy tale quality of it. The magic is in the crystalline descriptions of Alaska in winter. Author Eowyn Ivey may not be Eskimo, but I would argue she has a thousand words for snow. Her descriptions are like snowflakes on the tongue – delicate, feathery crystals that sting in their loveliness:
“The December days had a certain luminosity and sparkle, like frost on bare branches, alight in the morning just before it melts.”
“Dawn broke silver over the snowdrifts and spruce trees.”
“The child was dusted in crystals of ice, as if she had just walked through a snowstorm or spent a brilliantly cold night outdoors.”
“The cranberries were tiny red rubies against the white snow.”
“Around the curve the valley opened up, and in the distance spires of blue ice glowed.”
This is a biting and beautiful book of love: love for neighbors, of husband and wife, for children, and love for the wild pull of the land, the forest, the snow, and the wilderness. It is one I will come back to when I want the magic of winter.
Two Old Women, a tale of Athabascan Indians written by Velma Wallis, a native Athabascan author, takes place north of the Arctic Circle in the interior of Alaska. It tells a tribal legend passed orally to Wallis by her mother, of two elders who were abandoned one lean and brutal winter by their tribe.
“That day the women went back in time to recall the skills and knowledge they had been taught from early childhood. They began by making snowshoes.”
At the time they were abandoned, the old women depended on the youth of the tribe to care for them. Because of this dependence, with The People on the brink of starvation, the Chief determined the women were holding the tribe back, threatening the survival of the many for the demands of the few, and he left them to die, old, crippled, and alone on the open tundra. The two women could barely walk, even with canes, when they were left behind, but the taste for survival was sharp in their mouths, and they gathered their strength and elder-wisdom to stay alive. They made snowshoes from babiche a grandson had left them, and used the shoes to trek to a safe winter-over spot; they caught rabbits in snares; they slept in snow pits they dug with gnarled hands and lined with spruce boughs for bedding.
What I love about this story, aside from a portrayal of the very real struggle for survival for indiginous people living without permanant shelter – nomads north of the Arctic Circle – was the focus it places on elders. The elders in our communities have seen much more than the youth have. They know more, they have lived more, they are wiser. It is easy for young ones, in their arrogance and vigor, to toss the old aside, thinking they are outdated, their knowledge obsolete, their presence a hindrance holding the young ones back rather than a source of wisdom that could propel them forward. Wisdom that could nourish and equip them for the unknown that lies ahead.
I imagine this story would be powerful as an audiobook, told with native Athabaskan inflection and in its traditional, oral story form.
My head is a cup left out on a stormy autumn night; half full of water, and a spider.
The fact is, I can’t. Especially when the novel is a murder mystery set in October in the port town of Sitka, off the raw southeastern coast of Alaska. Unlike the previous Alaska books I read, which were set in isolation in the interior of the state, Staley’s novel portrays peopled coastal regions in Alaska: cities with pubs and coffee shops, police departments and wharfs. Eskimos and other natives populate scenes in diners, bars, and airplanes, always reminding the reader you’re in Alaska.
Since it’s a mystery novel, I won’t go too much into the plot, except that it involves a murder (duh), Tinglit Indian legend, and Cecil Young, an alcoholic private investigator with a penchant for poetic thought
“Her skin was as white as a sea anemone, and as soft as the pool of warm air you pass through while rowing across the bay.”
and a knack for nailing scenes
“As the bottle got lighter our gestures became wilder, our eyes widened and we imagined were were expanding into our own stories.”
“The landscape seemed to press in and make Juneau seem like a smaller, less sophisticated town than it really was.”
“The water boiled with little silvery fish dense on the surface like a trillion dollars in quarters spilling onto a sidewalk… There was a massive exploding breath and the damp smell of fish and tideflat… Whale. Humpback whale, feeding on herring.”
I read this as winter descended on Blacksburg, Virginia, and it was a perfect curl-up-on-the-couch cozy mystery read. The language in this book is beautiful, enough so that I was intrigued by a mystery writer who wrote so poetically, and I discovered that Straley has studied poetry and was the Alaska State Writer Laureate from 2006 to 2008.
The Woman Who Married a Bear is the first in a series of Cecil Young mysteries.
For further reading in Alaska
Books I’ve read and recommend: Ordinary Wolves by Seth Kantner Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer (nonfiction)
Books that have been recommended to me but I have not yet read: The Raven’s Gift by Don Reardon Two in the Far North by Margaret E. and Olaus Johan Murie (nonfiction) Drop City by T.C. Boyle The Only Kayak by Kim Heacox (nonfiction) Journey to a Dream by Mary Lovel (nonfiction) My Name is Not Easy by Debbie Dahl Edwardson Don’t Use a Chainsaw in the Kitchen by Rosalyn Stowell
I am reading America: 3 books from each state in the US with the following authorships represented – women, men, and non-Caucasian writers. To follow along, please visit me at andreareadsamerica.com.
In the summer of 2013, my parents packed up their RV and took the adventure of their lifetime: the two of them and their yellow lab, Blondie, drove from Georgia to Alaska and back again. Mom wrote and photographed their journey on her blog, Wandering Dawgs.
