Month: September 2012

Bounty of writers’ insights

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Sweet autumn clematis (link) reaches its full beauty in early September and then lasts. I have a few spots of it in the yard — over an arbor in the front, along both sides of the chimney, and climbing up the neighbor’s fence — and this summer it exceeded its usual proliferation while I wasn’t looking. Suddenly, it seemed to explode into my attention. One day I said to a member of my editorial staff, Grace Guterman, “Please, when you have a moment, go out in the yard and take some photos for me!” I wanted to preserve the lushness. She did.

Also this month I have noticed in the news a proliferation of commentary from writers on writing that surprised me in some way. So that I don’t lose these good finds, I’m going to catalog and excerpt below the three that made the greatest impression on me.

1. Brian Martin recommends that writers train like athletes. Excerpts from his article in Tomorrow’s Professor:

Write for 15 to 30 minutes every day. Yes, that’s it: the core requirement is daily writing, at least five days a week, preferably seven.

Coaches expect their athletes – swimmers, runners and so forth – to train daily. Junior athletes are expected to show up for training every day, at the same time. Swimmers put in the laps and runners put in the miles. This sort of training enables dedicated high school athletes to achieve times better than world champions a century ago.

So what were top athletes doing back then? Those were the days of amateurs, usually from the upper class with spare time and access to facilities, who trained when they felt like it, typically on weekends. Very gentlemanly. But their performances weren’t outstanding by today’s standards.

What about writing? Most academics seem to be operating like the gentleman athletes of the past. They wait until they feel like writing. That usually means when they have a big block of time, or are forced to meet a deadline.

Most academics learn binge-writing from doing assignments in high school or undergraduate years. Binging becomes increasingly dysfunctional as tasks become larger. Writing an essay overnight is possible, but completing a 300-page thesis requires planning and sustained work. Continue reading →

Sitting on my hands: parenting and self-restraint

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Today is the second day of try-outs for a team that Grace really, really wants to be on. It’s volleyball, a sport she’s never played before.

Before the try-outs began, she asked the coach if she’d accept novice players, and the coach said, “Yes.” She’s willing to teach.

Still, Grace must demonstrate she has what it takes. I must confess that I have been very tempted to secretly influence the outcome. My persistent thought, all week, has been to email the coach (whom I’ve met) and make a persuasive and covert case for Grace. I imagine describing my daughter’s physical strength, desire, reliability, and team spiritedness. I have imagined striking a deal that goes like this: If you pick her for the team, I promise that we will do a lot of drills with her at home. We won’t let you down.

My tendency to over think is saving me, in this instance, from meddling. While I have written a perfect email in my head and fantasized Grace’s joy at being picked, I have also had a lengthy internal dialogue about the ultimate rightness of such parental “involvement.” The Jane who is all I WANT I WANT I WANT — and NOW! has been counseled by the Jane who takes the long view and is on the side of transparency and fairness. I also want the kids to incrementally grow in independence and self-advocacy, which means I have to sit on my hands a lot and not always prevent, not always fix.

There will be no Dear Coach email.

Yesterday, we helped Grace make sure she has the gear she needs for the second day of tryouts, and we bought our first volleyball. Jimmy spent some time in the backyard with her at dusk, with the outdoor lights on, catching balls that she served to him and throwing balls that she pounded back. At dinner, Grace described a message that she will say to the coach, on how much she wants to be on the team. Lydia advised Grace on some words she might add.

We can help our kids prepare for the contests of the world, which will be many. Much as I would like to, I cannot guarantee the outcome by my own efforts. I feel the temptation of trying to, though, so I resist mightily.

—–

Update (9.28.2012): Sad face. No volleyball team this year.

Writer’s Dozen: Peter Selgin and Limits

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This is the fourth in a series of posts, called “A Writer’s Dozen,” on texts that have been important to me as a writer.

When he was in his early 20s and struggling to get started as a songwriter, Peter Selgin was attacked by a black Labrador retriever owned by the woman for whom he was apartment sitting in New York. The dog chomped into Selgin’s left wrist. He underwent microsurgery to address significant scarring around the ulnar nerve that affected feeling in and mobility of the hand. Results were minimal.

This event is described in his essay, “Confessions of a Left-Handed Man,” which is the centerpiece of a new book of essays by the same name. I first read this essay in Best American Essays 2006.

Always a left-handed artist and writer, Peter Selgin knew at age 25 that the full manual dexterity of his dominant hand would not return after the attack and surgery. In the essay he recounts his attempt to train his right hand, which felt like “trying to sing with [his] fingers holding his tongue,” to do what his left hand had always done for him. Around this time he also broke his leg. One night he walked on crutches to the East River with thoughts of killing himself. He had always been the left-handed boy — had identified himself as that — and the mirror opposite of his twin brother George, a right-handed boy who became an economist. At the river that night he had a “good bawl” and “hobbled back” to his room.

Twenty years later, he wrote the essay from a point in time he no longer felt that his left-handedness had any special meaning. It simply was. Furthermore, he continued to write and make art with his compromised left hand. The work he made before and after the injury, though, have “nothing in common” with each other. He calls his style “naive, even primitive,” and he asserts that his “lack of dexterity has freed [him] from glibness, which in turn has delivered [him] from the temptation” to show off.

Even though Selgin’s theme for his essay is humility — he says that, for an artist, “to master humility” is as important as mastering the techniques of his medium — for me, the lesson is about limits that we cannot overcome, that we must work within. There is nobility in this, and necessity, once the sorrow passes. Continue reading →

Everywhere you go, there’s a habitat

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I am working at home today. As a break, I thought I’d complete a fix-up of our old garage door. I went to screw on the new weather stripping and noticed that the handle to the pull-up door is rusted and bent.

After I found what I wanted at the local Home Depot and paid for it, I couldn’t help wandering over to the Garden Department. I hovered around the on-sale perennials (two for $10), and I noticed this creature hovering around the butterfly bush, as it should.

The fall annuals, especially mums, are getting star billing at all the nurseries and garden centers right now, but try not to let your head get turned. Walk to the back of the store, where you’ll find some drooping and over-sunned perennials deeply discounted. It’s the perfect time to plant them. I bought two sets of 4 each (hosta and phlox), violating the rule of Plant in Threes, I know, but they were each the last of the batches, and I could not leave them lonely.

I like digging things into the ground now because it gives me a sense of anticipation for the spring. There will be a long period of darkness and rest in which I’ll forget about the new additions to the yard and then, come May, voilà. There they will be.

Flowers in the attic, toys in the basement

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Grace had a gig this afternoon babysitting for two little boys, ages 5 and 1 years, who are children of our friend Ellen, a woman who babysat for Grace when she was a baby. It’s that whole circle of life thing.

We invited the boys here, so that Grace could have backup if needed. Today we’re just puttering around the house anyway; there are still about 10 days left to finish our summer chores before the season officially ends.

It was time to bring up some age-appropriate toys from the basement. The dollhouse and its residents and furnishings needed washing.  Good thing I soaped and rinsed them because most of those pieces ended up in a little mouth.

I did administer one timeout today, when the older boy took his brother’s pacifier and wouldn’t hand it back to me. That parental authority: I still have it. Jimmy let the older boy win at a complex card game with slippery rules, and the two of them bonded.

Young children keep going and going and going. I remember when Eli was little, Jimmy would once in a while hold the tv remote in his direction and mime trying to get him to stop for just one minute.

When the father picked the boys up at 5pm, I told him we got our exercise, two times over, today. “This is how they are until bedtime,” he replied. Honestly, I had forgotten.

Grace is resting. We’re still parents, and we have things to do.

—–

Suds by Jane; photographs by Jimmy and Grace; and dollhouse by Fisher Price.

Weeding and thinking

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The crabgrass is an invader. Not only has it staked its claim on various islands of the lawn, it has mingled with the flowers in the front yard too. What we call “weeds” is socially constructed, you know. Crabgrass is simply one kind of grass, equal to others, but we don’t like it, we can’t control it, so we think of it as a weed: undesirable and to be eradicated.

I’ll live with it on the lawn — and it only grows out front, where there’s sun — but I dislike crabgrass among the flowers I planted intentionally.


Weeding is good to do early in the day. It focuses the mind and then clears it. Was I procrastinating the semester prep I need to do when I put on my work shoes and gathered the bucket and tools? Yes. If one is putting off something else, though, it is good to at least accomplish another task. Recently I read that the highest-achieving people always do their most difficult work first. Ah, not me. I like a little puttering first, sort of like walking around the block before a run. The warm up, the loosening.

It is satisfying to grab the head of a clump of weeks, pry the dirt a bit from below, and then pull, feeling the roots of the weed pull back and my own gentle force eventually overcome their tenaciousness. Is this similar to the satisfaction dentists, doctors, and even aestheticians feel in their work with the human body? The organism resists; the professional — wilier, and with tools — overcomes. This may also lead to the despair that is sometimes felt in working with the human body, with nature in general: ultimately, its own force or fragility asserts itself and the counter force we apply fails. The river overflows the bank; the freckles proliferate; illness has its way; children grow and become themselves; we age.


Working with one’s hands — and typing does not feel like work with one’s hands, although hand writing does — focuses the mind on the task. There are a set of small decisions to make as well as continual adjustments. To any passerby, I probably look quite still as I weed, just my hands and fingers busy, but I inch my way down the front walk and my mind, meanwhile, buzzes with thought: about the flowers and which ones to plant again next year, about the fall tasks around the corner, about water and my access to an abundant amount of it, and about the burden and pleasure in owning a piece of the earth.

Eli once said it’s so weird that people can own property, a piece of the planet, and when you stop to think about it, he’s right. Surely, we have to live somewhere, but strange that only Jimmy and I have a claim on these particular 7,000 square feet of dirt in Brookline, Massachusetts. And how far down do our rights go? A foot? Down to the sewer and gas pipes? All the way to the center of the earth? I picture a cutaway view of my house on the earth’s crust and the massive sliver of geological layers on which we rest. And if I do own the sliver all the way to the planet’s core, do I also have responsibility for it?

The parts of life that touch me have this awesome responsibility: if I know about it, or am associated with it, I am implicated in its maintenance or outcome. To not take responsibility (and I don’t, always) is to make an active decision to *not* concern myself, to shut off that part of my brain or body that could act. I won’t help (though I could); I won’t care (though I do); I will leave this to someone else.

I’m not borrowing the rhetoric of the self-help movement to assert my need for “me time” (I hate that expression). Occasionally I have this dialog with myself because I am lazy or tired or even because I lose faith in myself.

Continue reading →