word

– On head lice

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Over the summer, I finished writing a personal essay on my experiences with head lice. As part of that process, I researched and read way too much about Pediculus humanus capitis, a parasite that feasts on human blood and causes incessant itching. I also wrote about times, which I thought were past, when lice descended on our house.

Grace undergoes a Licefreee! treatment

Grace undergoes a Licefreee! treatment

Well, the past has become present, and I’ve had to confront some fresh cases of infestation. This time, though, I feel no panic, because I see lice and I know what it takes to get rid of them. I’d like to share what I’ve learned with readers who may be confronting head lice on their children’s heads for the first time. Continue reading →

– Personal essay checklist

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Here’s a great criteria checklist for the personal essay genre, whether you’re writing them or teaching students how to write them. I discovered it yesterday while browsing the pages of What the Writing Tutor Needs to Know by Margot Iris Soven (Thomson Wadsworth: 2006).

  1. Does the essay enlighten the reader through an interpretation of self, the self in relation to others, or the self in relation to the world?
  2. Is there sufficient description of events and people?
  3. Does the essay convey the author’s mood or feelings?
  4. Has the author responded to all of the questions in the assignment?
  5. Is the style personal? (Usually includes the personal pronoun “I,” descriptive adjectives, and conversational language.)
  6. Are mechanics correct? (Soven 131)

There are so many aspects of this that I like. Most attractively, it’s simple, yet manages not to be vague. Furthermore, the list leads with the hardest tasks — enlightenment and interpretation — which nod at the key feature of an essay; it’s idea-driven. The essay’s relationship to the reader is emphasized. “Sufficient” detail is enough; description does not have to be exhaustive.

Mentally, I measured some of my essays-in-progress against this list, and some of them passed and a few did not. About the few that seem still to be lacking, I realized that I am still struggling with the first item. What are the essays about, at the level of the idea? They might tell a story, or present anecdotes and observations, but they do not (yet) present to a reader an original interpretation of the story or anecdotes.

I’m not teaching the essay this year — all my classes are science writing ones — but, if I were, I’d use this checklist with students, to help them make observations about essays written by other authors as a way to get them thinking critically and creatively about their own. In the meantime, I’ll apply this checklist to my work.

– Good question

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In an essay on memoirs in the September 2008 Harper’s Magazine, Francine Prose writes:

On nearly every occasion when I’ve been invited to speak about both fiction and nonfiction writing, someone has asked my opinion of the scandalous disclosure that James Frey had fabricated sections of his memoir, A Million Little Pieces. I reply that I’m puzzled that people seem more upset by a lie about how long a writer spent in rehab than a lie about whether Saddam Hussein had access to weapons of mass destruction. Inevitably, nervous laughter ripples through the room.

In fact, I couldn’t be more serious. Each time, I find myself wondering: Why isn’t the audience talking to one another, and to me, about how, for the past eight years, our government has deceived us about matters of huge consequence–the war in Iraq, the economy, the environment, Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, real estate foreclosures, poverty, unemployment, the handling of the Hurricane Katrina tragedy?

(Incidentally, her essay is not at all a defense of Frey or Seltzer’s contraptions, which she finds “B-list” at best.)

– Postcard to me

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On the evening ferry from Oak Bluffs back to Hyannis, I finished reading the last few pages of the book I had brought along, and then I completed a chronological list of the little events that had comprised my day.

Next to me sat a couple with their two young children. The little girl — I’ll call her Rachel — was about six years old and full of energy and sweet sass. She complained about her parents’ lack of a pen, so I loaned her one. Then she enlisted her mother as a scribe. Rachel said out loud the words she wanted on postcards to various friends, and her mother wrote them down. The girl would say, “Dear Maya. Um, today we went to the beach. I had a hamburger for lunch. Then I had chocolately crunchy ice cream -.” Her mother interrupted, “That’s boring.” Her father, who seemed to have educational intentions, gently added, “Rachel, people don’t only want to know what you did; they want to know what you thought.”

Rachel tried again, “Hmm. Today we went to the beach. It was fun. Then I had a hamburger…” She seemed to be thinking. Her mother, who really did seem to be kind and loving, said softly, “Still boring.” Her father said, “Rachel, give your thoughts.”

I sat there, wondering what he meant. Rachel seemed perplexed, too. She kept listing her day. To the mother’s credit, she continued to transcribe although a few times she said, “Boring.” They managed to write about five or six postcards this way until the mother decided to take a break. The girl did not protest. Five or six postcards is a lot of writing for any six-year-old, even one with Rachel’s spark and persistence.

I love getting postcards. They could say anything: “Beach. Kite. Hamburgers. Ice cream. Bicycle. Thinking of you.” It makes me picture my friend’s travel day a bit, and I feel remembered, even in the midst of vacation distractions. Plus, who doesn’t like to get real mail?

I wondered what the family would think of my postcard to me, or what I wrote in the last four pages of my notebook on the ferry ride home. Here it is, with only a few lines about a private conversation omitted. Continue reading →

– Terra firma

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That really is the phrase that goes through one’s mind, joyously, after one has spent a few hours on a small boat, commandeered by an arrogant captain, with 90 other passengers who are gripping their stomachs, wincing, weeping, and eventually puking into garbage bags as the boat made its way out of Provincetown Harbor and into a post-storm ocean with 15-foot swells to seek whales, which it eventually found, although not many — myself, two daughters, and one niece included — were well enough to view them, and then rolled and heaved back around the tip of the Cape and into the harbor.

– Say that, then

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I was just looking at my earlier post, to see if I missed any errors when I proofread it this morning.  Lydia read the first paragraph or two over my shoulder.

Lydia: “You don’t love writing?!”

Jane: “Well.  I love it, but it’s not an easy love.”

Lydia: “What do you mean?”

Jane: “I mean, it’s difficult, like… ”

Lydia: “… a relationship?”

Jane: “Yes! Like that.”

Lydia: “Well, say that, then.”

– Can’t not write

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I thought that would be a more precise title than “I hate writing,” which is not true. I cannot say, either, that “I love writing!,” in the same way another person might say, “I love ice cream!”

On vacation, I brought my iBook, to work some more on my “On Lice” essay and attempt to finish it for a journal’s August 1st deadline. In the hotel room and at poolside, I wrote the connecting pieces and conclusion, and submitted it with a few hours to spare.

Hotel bed, Jane, and iBook in Ottawa

Hotel bed, Jane, and iBook in Ottawa

Yesterday I brought Grace and her friends to a birthday party in Wellesley, Massachusetts. I brought my iBook along, thinking that I’d sit somewhere and drink coffee and read the newspaper online while I waited for them.

There was no WiFi in Peet’s.

I tried to insert myself in someone else’s network. On the AirPort pull-down menu, I chose “VillageChurch” as a possibility, and then attempted obvious passwords like Jesus, G0d, M4ry, Chr1st, and Church. (My password is not hard to crack — why should theirs be?) Nothing.

I looked around a bit desperately at the other patrons. Could I catch someone’s eye and wordlessly signal to him that I wanted to piggyback onto his account? No one looked at me. I did, however, notice the same excessively thin and tattooed middle-aged woman whom I had seen only two days before at the Newton Farmers’ Market, and I considered getting another tattoo, and then I stopped. “Jane, don’t go there.”

I wished I could e-mail friend James Black or talk to him. I’ve been reading his posts on writing and not writing and having imaginary conversations with him. Suddenly, it seemed urgent to have a real one, and we were disconnected. I had no book or magazine to read. I could have walked down the avenue and shopped, but I don’t like to shop.

“Damn,” I thought. “I have to write.”

Sighing, I opened the file for an essay, called “Dead and Gone,” that I hadn’t worked on since my retreat in July. I read the last two paragraphs, noticed how unpromising they seemed, and wrote a next sentence.

Then I stopped and tried to break in again to the VillageChurch network.

“I really don’t want to write this,” I thought. “It’s probably going to suck.” My internal voice is normally rather matter-of-fact, and it was in this instance, too.

So, I wrote two paragraphs, and then realized there seemed to be a huge gap in the story, so I inserted the cursor between the two and wrote a long passage in which I tried to elaborate the romantic fantasies I was having about my (now dead) college professor, when I had a crush on him. Honestly, only one of them do I vividly remember; some of it I had to make up. (Is it dishonest to fictionalize the memory of a fantasy? This is a real question.)

Here’s something I wrote yesterday, that I don’t actually recall dreaming about then. Continue reading →

– During idle minutes

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Like Jimmy, Lydia likes to be extra on time, or early. So, at her urging, we took our seats 15 minutes before departure time on La Balade, a open tram that scoots its passengers along the waterfront in Vieux-Montréal.

We were sitting in the back row, Lydia’s choice, for the best view. I agreed, “Yeah, we have the future in front of us, and the past behind us.” I spread my hands as if introducing a prize on a game show.

Lydia: “Not really. It’s more like the present is in front of us. We can see it.”

Jane: “Okay, yes. I guess it wouldn’t be the future…”

Lydia: “… if we can see it.”

We sit there quietly for a while and watch people who are not in the tram go by us in bikes and on foot. It’s breezy and sunny.

Lydia: “Well, actually, the present only lasts this long.” She holds her thumb and index finger together so that there’s space between them for only a raisin, maybe. “I mean, once I even say the word present…”

Jane: “… it’s gone?”

Lydia: “Yeah.”

The tour starts and we are wheeled up to the locks (west). The narration is on a tape that alternates between French and English. I like tours, but I lose track of the voice on tape.

The driver turns the tram around, and we head east. He stops at the clock tower and gives us 10 minutes to explore. Jimmy and I stand near the river and remark on how swiftly it flows, how huge it is. We go back to our seats in the tram, where the girls still sit.

Grace has turned around, and has rested her arms on back of the seat and perched her chin on them. The girls, therefore, are facing in opposite directions: Lydia, forward, Grace, back. We wait again for other passengers to return.

Grace: “I love the past. I like looking at it.”

Jane: “Maybe you’ll be a biographer.”

Lydia (sighing and rolling her eyes): “I hate the past.”

The tram eventually starts again. This was Sunday.

– Out of nowhere

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Lying on the couch in that early morning daze, Grace just asked me,

Mama, can people marry objects?

I had to stop and think.

I don’t think so.

Grace asked a child’s inevitable follow up question,

Why not?

Of course, not being a legal scholar, I had no answer. Her logic for the impulse that sparked the question, however, is irrefutable:

People should be able to marry something, if they love it.

I thought about describing marriage as a socially-constructed institution that preserves a status quo and testing her notion against that theory, but then thought, She’s only eight, so I’ll wait.