I’m very much an urban dweller and probably always will be.  I love the city I live in and I love urban capitals in faraway lands.  I love learning about the cities of antiquity too.  Two years ago we visited what is touted to be the oldest city in civilization in Oaxaca.  If I rememebr correctly 100,000 people dwelled on this mountain-top spot, playing an early form of soccer and holding public trials and beheadings when laws were broken.  Like many of us though, I have rural fantasies.  For the near-twenty years I’ve lived in NYC, my sister has lived a rural life in Northern California.  The fact that she’s had chickens, goats, alternate high-maintenance power sources, and a cottage made for Snow White, has probably aided me in not succombing to my own rural fantasies.  But I’ve decided in advance, in case I go rural, that the animals I want to keep are one horse for riding, chickens for laying and a couple ducks for my nephew Kenji to love.  Honestly, I want goats too, but I think I know better.  Dogs go without saying.

So, last night I started reading a collection of Flannery O’ Connor prose writings- seems to be all non-fiction, and I was immediately all in.  If you love someone’s fiction, especially someone from the twentieth century, see if they’ve written some essays too.  Most likely they have, and it’s a whole other experience and incredibly personal to read their experiences and thoughts.  So it turns out, Flannery has raised chickens since she was 5.  And at around that age, she ordered her fist peafowl.  Now, I’m gonna admit, I never thought, said or read the word peafowl, and I never thought about the peahens, who naturally are not peacocks, nor had a thought for the chicks, who are delightfully called peabiddies.  I love all these words. 

I now know a lot about peafowl and am officially adding them to my rural fantasy menagerie.  They multiply fast and have a great survivial rate, they eat flowers, the more beautiful the better, and fruits and roost high in trees, they live to be 35 and in all that time will never show in any way they care about you.  And they are chickens.  Best of all though are Flannery’s descriptions of the emotional reactions they evoke in us humans.  She’s seen a lot of people from first grade to elderly awed silent.  Dizzy with appreciation is common too- I know I have been in that category.  I think I felt so attached to the sight, that I determined that the color and pattern of those feathers were in existentence together in my soul before I ever laid eyes on them.  People are often hypnotized by a strutting peacock.  And then she artfully described those that are “congenitally” unmoved by the sight.  And a pretty good variety of people can be angered by the display.  I hope to never meet them.

So, I finished O’ Connor’s essay, The King of Birds, on the subway this morning.  I had a seat and standing people pressed around me.  As I read, I grew to intuit that my book was surrounded by soft-focus peacock feathers.  It dawned slowy as the truth.  I lifted my eyes and inches from my face stood a big-sized woman with a flowing skirt with a peacock feathers pattern. 

I really should have told her how great her skirt was.

A few weeks ago I was reading a book review in the Times and the author mentioned that Italo Calvino was an influence.  Calvino is a very menaingful writer to me, in particular his novel, Baron In The Trees.  You know the feeling of having a deep and complex impressionistic memory, having incorporated something integral and being able to summon a tactile response to something, but not really remembering the concrete of it?  In this case, I mean the plot.  I’d say this sensation comes with art usually.  Writers should aim to leave you visceral memories.  Plot, characters, dates, sometimes locations, even language can all escape my memory, but the feeling a book gave me tends to cling forever when I love the book.  This is also true of places and people I’ve loved.  Well I read Baron of the Trees in my twenties and I’ve given it to numerous people.  Numerous men.  The baron of Rondi and his dog Ottimus Maximus, and his committment to living life solely in the trees and his life-long love of a fair-haired girl, and Calvino’s insistence that the reader learn how Cossimo defecated, made love, fought battles, built irrigation systems, corresponded with philosophers has often seemed like something important to know to various men in my life.  But I wondered for the first time a few weeks ago, if the book influenced my writing.  I’ve been having a rather hard time getting my hands on novels (my genre of choice) to read these days.  But I spotted Baron of the Trees on my very thinned out bookshelves and decided to find out.  It was a deep pleasure to re-read this book for craft.  Meaning, I read it like I was a literature student, and learn I did.  The very same afternoon that Cossimo enters the trees, to remain there for the rest of his life, he meets the taunting and irresistable Viola.  Now, if there’s one concrete thing I remembered about this novel it was Cossimo’s love for Viola.  But I never would have remembered that he met her within 15 minutes of entering the trees, and it is intonated that perhaps his professing to her, in all his childishness, that he will never come down, had something very large to do with the fact that he never comes down.  The lesson to this writer was have your Cossimos meet their Violas in the first 15 minutes.   In addiiton, I think Italo Calvino’s insertion of nature and animals and his poetic descriptions of such have had an influence on my writing.  I think I’ve admired and aspired to his langauge in my own.  And I had to laugh, when I got to the end and saw the book was 217 pages.  My own novel was 216.  It wasn’t just by one page that Calvino outdid me.  And it doesn’t hurt too badly to see clearly how much greater there is to become.

When I started this blog, two and a half years ago, everyone had a blog.  But now, everyone has a blog.  I don’t mind.  Actually, I want to spend more time reading really good blogs.  They can be inspiring.  They can be about subjects that really interest me.  They can teach, connect and help us with our careers.  But they do even more for the people who write them.  They are a way for us to flex a writing muscle, develop a different voice than we write with in our respective genres, write things that other people actually read in our daily lives, instead of once every 38 years, as in my first novel.  The things we write in blogs are most often read by our friends and family, and they provide a way for us to move them and to let them get to know us better, a part of ourselves that we want to be known.

My husband and I have a an 8 week old son.  So last weekend, my big dream for Friday night, was to get a couple people to come over for a four person card game and cocktails.  This idea felt like it could salvage a pretty claustrophobic week.  So, in the evening, after my husband Bill had visited a friend for tips on his new blog, one friend, Shannon, came over to have a bite pre-cards, and we talked about what she should name her new blog.  Then during our five person card game it came out that all five of us have blogs.  We made fun of each other’s blog’s names.  And still, I’m excited about all these things to read from interesting people I know- who are even willing to play cards with me on a Friday night, while Enrico gets used to living in this bloggy world.

It’s a well known fact that non-fiction is a bigger part of the marketplace than fiction- more sellable.  Well baby books, pregnancy books, parenting books, birth books, and every possible niche of child-rearing books are a huge market.  For the past 9 months, I’ve been reading a lot of pregnancy books, books about labor, baby name books and I’m now starting to look at some books about baby care and newborns.  A little a day of this reading is best- and I admit some weeks or even two where I had no desire for this reading.  Isn’t it enough to be growing a baby around the clock- without reading about it!  But I have always had an interest in pregnancy and birth.  I am also a labor doula- so I actually have read a lot in this area, have had training and have attended lots of births.  (Although any day now I will have this experience myself for the first time!)  So I thought I’d mention that not all books are created equal.

A well-known and I’m sure best-selling book for decades is What to Expect When You’re Expecting.  We should all consider this book outdated, even though I’m sure it’s updated all the time.  No expectant parent has ever enjoyed this book and it will focus you on everything that can go wrong.  I’ve found with my nightly or at least two nights a week reading, that I’m enjoying most the Dr. and Martha Sears book on pregnnacy and their Baby Book tomb.  They’re  a pediatrician/RN, husband and wife duo and parents to eight kids.  They have a great attitude toward healthy pregnancy and parenting and speak very plainly and naturally about it.  They wrote their pregnancy book in chapters for each month.  Which made it very digestible.  I read the chapter for the month I was in and then waited to reach the next month.  And best of all, at the end of each chapter is a sweet little worksheet for you to write what you’re feeling, dreaming, stressing about, excited about, etc.  Just the right amount of journaling for a tired, hard-working, reproducing body!

The Birth Partner and the Big Book of Birth are plenty for preparing partners and yourself.  We received a lot of books form other people, had some in the house from my doula training, found some in our basement library, took out some from our local library, and still we probably spent too much on a few more.  These books are very accesible and of time limited interest to you.  I’m imagining as soon as you’ve given birth once, you’re ready to pass along the text books!

There’s a little known fact about me that most my friends don’t know, that I go crazy for maritime books.  I’m also very fond of maritime films, museums, food, towns!, apparel, art- all of it.  But a great tale from the sea always captures my imagination and stirs deeper feelings than a land-locked story could.  I feel this way in the same way that if the world only contained blue grass and gospel music- I wouldn’t be too miserable.   That said, I probably haven’t read as much maritime literature as some other folks.  Of course I was swept away by Old Man and the Sea, also The Pearl.  Moby Dick didn’t bore me at all.  The Shipping News was a rare treat.  So it’s not just oceans I love, but knots, fish, fisherman and their women, rubber boots, weather, etc.  About a year ago I picked up the Perfect Storm in my basement- and I’m here to tell you that it is a fantastic book.  It’s non-fiction- in case you didn’t know- and it’s truly about the fishing industry off the eastern seaboard, love and alcoholism, as much as it is about that boat and that storm.  A few things I learned in that book, is that it’s not just getting a lot of fish that’s required to earn a living- but who gets back to land first with the haul and sets the current prices.  I was also inspired to write the first poem I’d written in awhile from a tidbit I found in that book.  There are lengthy, detailed accounts of deep-sea fishing- namely swordfish- that hold your attention for more than 20 page stretches.  With swordfish, the adult females are the largest and therefore choicest catches.  But they are the hardest to catch, being the smartest and most experienced of their kind.  The adolescent males are the easist caught, being the opposite.  There’s poetry just in that I think.  But listen to this.  If you go deep-sea fishing at night, on a full moon, you will catch the adult females.  Because they lose their heads.

This weekend, Saturday, the Red Hook Waterfront Museum in Brooklyn is having a Maritme book fair.  The museum is a barge in the NY harbor.  I’m planning to go, and maybe bring a few copies of The Sign for Drowning.  If I’m gonna be a poser ever in life, I think maybe the most dignified thing to pose as is a maritime writer.

One of my co-workers shares my literary tatses and frequently lends me novels to read.  Since discovering my penchant for South Asian writing, most of the books she gives me are by Indian women writers.  Two weeks ago, she branched out and handed over a large hardcover book by Amy Tan, Saving Fish from Drowning.  I was in the thick of my spare Cormac McCarthy appreciation, and put this large tomb into a tray on my desk.

Two days ago, with this said co-worker standing next to my desk, I unearthed Tan’s book and declared I would start it.  Now, I’m asking myself why I’d stopped reading Tan after her second novel.  I went crazy for The Joy Luck Club and almost equally loved The Kitchen God’s Wife.  Amy Tan is a craftsman of prose, who I’ve frequently found spellbinding.  I’m now remembering how often I re-read a whole paragraph for the rhythm and cadence of it, and something she equally distilled in her perfect word choices- the meaning.  A few weeks ago I was asked in an interview, who inspired my writing.  Amy Tan- with The Joy Luck Club- certainly should be on the list.  

So, I’ve asked a few people, and it seems we all have some favorite writers who we walked away from.  Forgot to read their third and fourth and fifth novels.  Or perhaps read their third novel first- it being the first commercial success, and never read their first two.

My feeling today is that if you love someone, don’t set them free!  Read them entirely.  Libraries are perfect for this, go now and get the whole collection of a favorite you forgot to keep reading.

My cyber friend, Jill Dearman, interviewed me recently for a Barnes and Noble book blog.  This interview was thought provoking for me because Jill asked some questions I haven’t been asked before and made me think about events I haven’t in a long time.  I thought about who influenced my early reading.  My mom did becasue she was a big reader.   As I outgrew my childhhod books and young adult novels, I’d pluck what she was reading off her nightstand or off the shelves in the living room.  Lucky for me, she read good literary books.  I remember reading Saul Bellow, or Phillip Roth, or Elizabeth Rosner, and thinking- I can’t understand about 30% of this because I’m too young to get it.  Then my aunt Penny very forcefully wanted me to read the important books.  At age 14, I spent the summer in her home in Israel.  I was put through a literature tutorial including, Beloved, Song of Solomon, Sula, and other author’s who weren’t Toni Morrison but who I can’t think of now.  I also was instructed through many LP’s that had to be memorized, Bob Dylan primarily, Joni Mitchell, all the Beatles, and I learned how to make cake frosting and jelly squares, not to mention witnessing my first home birth of my cousin, Ya’acov. 

Long way of saying, talking to Jill provoked much reflection- on reading, writing and otherwise.

Also, if you’d be so kind to leave a comment at the B&N blog above, it’ll boost The Sign for Drowning in their esteemed ranking!

I’m not always happy with the way I’m writing.  I recently responded to an interview question for Barnes and Noble (to be posted upon release) that I do not write similarly to my favorite writers.  Certainly many of the writers who I think have influenced my own writing style, I also deeply admire.  But I am just not like my lifelong favorites including Philip Roth, Hemingway, Joan Didion, Saul Bellow.  I cannot emulate them.  Not that I’ve actually tried, but I know instinctually that their distinct prose styles, whether incredibly verbose, lightning fast, dry as hell, or beautifully simplistic are not my voice.  You’ll have to read my B&N interview to know who I do think has seeped into my voice.

But on days when I’m particularly not liking what I’m writing, when the sentences are piling together with much too much emphasis on language, I stop and sigh, and ask myself, “what would Hemnigway do?”  It works, the adverbs come out, then most the adjectives, then I try a sentence or two that’s subject verb only.  It’s refreshing- the reader leaps at the change- I myself do.

I just finished Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men.  I could certainly ask myself on any given writing day, “what would McCarthy do?”  He’d give you the action.  What were they doing- that’s all he cares about.  This is almost the opposite of my highly internal characters- and that must be the way it should be.   But a dose now and then of the subject verb, the action only, can only add oxygen to the thing, if you know what I mean.

I’d hate to think what a MFA workshop would do to a Cormac McCarthy piece.  What is he thinking, feeling? they’d all ask.  Forget it- you don’t always get to know.  And isn’t that the best sometimes?

I’ve kept a journal on and off for most my life, tending to journal most often when I’m down or confused, thus making the collection of old journals a pretty sad lot of documentation.  But in recent years, my journaling habit has narrowed down to travel logs, an end of year re-cap and my new years goals and hopes (resolutions.)  I’m happy to say that the last four or five years have contained writing-related resolutions.  I say that, because there was a period of time between my MFA and 2004 or so that I wasn’t prioritizing writing.  So some writing goals for 2010?

1.  Finish current draft of second novel, which I will show my agent.  This goal is very likely to happen because I’m on chapter 12 of 14 and I’m determined to submit this draft to my agent and her editor.  

2.  Choose a night per week that I will go to writing space.  Tuesdays are the best candidate.  Consider it done!  

3.  Reap all the benefits of, and give all my powers of critique and support to, my amazing writing group, the Exiles.

3.  Continue to blog throughout 2010, hopefully a few times a month.  Setting the bar pretty low here, when I certainly could say once a week. 

4.  Write a play.  It’s true- I have a play idea, and I’m craving the experience of collaborating on a writing project.  We’ll see what happens.  This one will take back seat to finishing the novel, but sometimes a session every week or every other week on something else can be invigorating, right?

5.  I don’t have to make a resolution about reading, becasue I’m constantly reading, usually novels.  But I could and should say it’s a goal to read some of those mighty giants that I haven’t- Ulysses, The Magic Mountain, the Dostoevskys and Faulkners that have held me at bay, the list goes on and then there’s non-fiction. 

Any writing resolutions of your own?

I’ve been in a magic place.  Would it be wrong to say that that the most reverential I have ever felt is toward Antoine de Saint Exupery?  I could easily see myself, like the subway riders who read the bible every morning, every ride, but with Wind, Sand and Stars putting some wisdom perspective into my mind to guide the day.  I don’t doubt that a passage from any page would provide the outlook I would like to face the world with, or that a context would arise in which I would be so grateful for the whispering of Exupery’s voice, the illumination of his stars, and the tracks in his sand to steer my own actions. 

This book is a pilot’s memoir.  It’s a work of art.  But it’s also a philosophical great, belonging in the cannon of all great philosophical literature.  There are too many esteemed things to admire Exupery for.  He is the playful and massive-hearted storyteller who brought us The Little Prince.  He is a philosopher writer who provides new ways of seeing.  And he was a skilled and courageous French Air Force pilot who flew reconnaissance missions across Europe and Africa during the Spanish Civil War and World War II.  This aviation memoir includes a riveting tale of a crash in the North African desert, that Exupery loved and navigated so well, which lead to a hallucinatory four days of being lost and dehydrated and near death.  When reading these pages, you’ll find the prince in the man, and you’ll know so much the better his need for a well and a sheep.   

If you didn’t know this already, I’d like to deliver the news gently.  Exupery’s plane did disappear one day on a mission over the Mediterranean.  What a place he holds in the heavens- and how well he knew them on earth.

Here’s one of a thousand passages in Wind, Sand and Stars that makes me shiver with gratitude, where Exupery describes his friend’s lesson to him before his first flight across the Pyranees.

But what a strange lesson in geography I was given!  Guillaumet did not teach Spain to me, he made the country my friend.  He did not talk about provinces, or peoples, or livestock.  Instead of telling me about Guadix, he spoke of three orange-trees on the edge of town: “Beware of these trees.  Better mark them on the map.”  And those three orange-trees seemed to me thenceforth higher than the Sierra Nevada.