Browsed by
Category: writing

Writing a Life

Writing a Life

Comments 0 Comment

An article in yesterday’s Washington Post says that writing a narrative of one’s life helps prepare one for death. It makes sense to me. But I would amend it slightly to say that writing a narrative of one’s life prepares us for … life!

I’ve been keeping a journal since high school, and wouldn’t trade those books for anything. They are a motley bunch of spiral-bound and hardbound volumes, with writing cramped and tiny or loose and free depending on my mood. They preserve more than I could ever remember — and quite a bit I’d rather forget. But they are a record of my life, for good or ill, and as such are valuable to me.

An expert quoted in the Post article mentions that merely listing one’s life events doesn’t work. It’s creating the narrative that brings perspective, linking one incident, one person, to another, a chain of belonging, a chain of being.

In other words, it’s figuring out the question that Charles Dickens so aptly asks at the beginning of David Copperfield. “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”

(If life is a journey, it is also a narrative.) 

Reclining

Reclining

Comments 0 Comment

I’ve heard that Winston Churchill did much of his work in bed or in the bathtub — reclining, in both instances. Not that I intend to emulate that great man in all his habits (as if I could), but I have grown fond of working in a reclining position.

There is much to be said for it. Comfort, first of all. And with laptops as small and slender as they are now, it’s easy to do.

I even think thoughts may flow differently when one is lying down rather than sitting up. They’re more fanciful, less rule-bound.

Of course, the modern workplace is not set up for this, but if I was in charge, offices and cubicles would be outfitted with chaise longues as well as desks.

The only occupational hazard would be falling asleep. But it’s a small price to pay.

(Photo: Wikipedia)

Gains and Losses

Gains and Losses

Comments 0 Comment

Over the weekend I started reading about the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, which we will celebrate next month. One of the tributes was in Parade, which bills itself “the most widely read magazine in America.”

I couldn’t help but notice how thin this most widely read magazine is. And this got me thinking about what we have lost in the 50 years since humans first stepped foot on the moon — in particular the rich print culture that has been slowly dying during the last two (three?) of those decades.

I’m a print girl from way back, and though I quite happily ply my trade in a mostly-web way these days, I miss the heft and gravitas of ink on paper. I miss the smell of it and the feel of it, the weight of it in my hands.

I suppose you could draw a line from rocket technology to the waning of print. After all, the information age was in part launched by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). But that’s not where I’m going with this.

I’m merely musing that our technological gains come with quality-of-life losses. And I don’t want us to forget about them.

(A small printing press, from an exhibit at the Museum of the Written Word in May 2013.) 

Words That Live On

Words That Live On

Comments 0 Comment

Yesterday would have been the 90th birthday of Anne Frank. Seventy-seven years ago, she received a diary for her 13th birthday, a diary she would fill with words that would live on for decades, and, most likely centuries, beyond her.

The contents were in many ways typical — conflicts with her mother, questions about her future. But it was written in 500 square feet of hidden space that Anne shared with her parents, sister and four other people. And it was written amidst the horrors of Nazi Europe.

“When I write, I can shake all of my cares,” Anne wrote in her journal. “My sorrow disappears, my spirits are revived. But, and that’s a big question, will I ever be able to write something truly great, will I ever become a journalist or a writer?”

Anne would die not long after her 15th birthday. The diary she called “Kitty” was left behind in the “Secret Annex.” She could not take it to Auschwitz or on to Bergen Belsen, where she and her sister died of disease and malnutrition shortly before Allies freed the concentration camps. But a family friend saved the journal, and gave it to Anne’s father, Otto, who eventually had it published. It would be translated into 70 languages and sell tens of millions of copies around the world.

“It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out,” Anne wrote. “Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death.”

(Above: a page from Anne Frank’s Tales book. She also penned what she called The Book of Beautiful Sentences — copying passages of writing that she liked — started a novel and planned a book called The Secret Annex. Photo and information courtesy of the Anne Frank Museum website and The Writer’s Almanac.) 

Fallen Petals

Fallen Petals

Comments 0 Comment

In a slight twist on “March winds and April showers,” we’re in the midst of an April wind that follows on the heels of an April shower.

That has meant that the April flowers, in this case the lovely pink rose-like blooms of the Kwanzan cherry, are no longer attached to the tree but strewn about the grass.

This is the way of the world, is it not? And has anyone expressed this more simply and more beautifully than Robert Frost?

“So leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.” 

Walking Wordsworth

Walking Wordsworth

Comments 0 Comment

I knew the Romantic poet was a walker, but not the extent of his rambles. According to Alice Outwater in a new book called Wild at Heart, William Wordsworth spent much of his day walking. He would compose poetry as he strode along gravel paths, which he favored over the bushwhacking preferred by his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge. (I’m with you, Wordsworth.)

Wordsworth covered roughly 10 miles a day, an estimated 175,000 miles in his lifetime. He and his sister Dorothy walked so much and at such odd hours that the local people suspected them of being French spies.


According to Outwater, Wordsworth’s perambulations were inspired by his meeting John “Walking” Stewart, an English philosopher who hiked from India to Europe. Wordsworth, 21 at the time, was especially interested in Stewart’s philosophy on nature.

And it was in nature, not sitting passively in it but walking through it, that Wordsworth found his life and his inspiration.

(Dove Cottage, near Grasmere in England, where Wordsworth lived with his sister Dorothy. Photo: Wikipedia.)

2,700

2,700

Comments 0 Comment

Sometimes I only see the milestones after they happen. Yesterday’s was this: I’ve written 2,700 posts since I started this blog in February 2010.

It makes sense, I guess, numerically speaking. I’m in my tenth year, and I write almost 300 posts a year.

Still, the round numbers always make me reflect on how much this blog has become part of my life, an (almost) daily habit.

What this boils down to is that I make sense of the world by writing about it. I’m a born scribbler, that’s all.

Naming Names

Naming Names

Comments 0 Comment

One of the more light-hearted aspects of my work is the opportunity I occasionally have to make up names for people. The reason I do this is anything but lighthearted, though. It’s because I interview and write about people who have been trafficked and can’t reveal their true identities.

Still, this gives me a creative license typically lacking in most of my daily to-dos. This morning I’ve been reading about Cambodian names, about how family names appear first and given names second (which I knew) and how name meanings are especially prized.

So I’ve been having some fun with it. Should the lovely young woman who met her husband at a survivor’s forum be called Bopha (flowers) or Arunny (morning sun)? Should her young husband be called Narith (masculine) or Leap (luck)?

The mother’s name was easy. The smiling woman who greeted us as we pulled into the brickyard, who wiped her hand on her skirt and reached out to shake ours, she will be called Sophea (wise).

(School children in Cambodia, who shall remain nameless.)

Of Memoirs and Tree Ferns

Of Memoirs and Tree Ferns

Comments 0 Comment

I began this International Woman’s Day reading (and finishing) a memoir by a most amazing woman, Diana Athill. Retiring at 75 from a successful editing career where she worked with such writers as John Updike and Jean Rhys, Athill began her second act — as a memoirist.

She penned several volumes in her 80s and 90s, including Stet, full of literary gossip and wise observations, and Somewhere Towards the End, which she wrote more than 12 years before the end, as it turns out. She died less than two months ago at the age of 101. She is my new role model.

Not that I think I’ll live as long as she, but it would be wonderful to write another book someday, and reading her gives me hope that there may be some juice left after I finally leave my day job.

Let me quote from her postscript, with a bit of explanation. Athill begins her book describing a tree fern that she would like to plant but hesitates to — because she thinks she won’t be around long enough to enjoy it. By the time the book ends, she has a more optimistic view:

The tree fern: it now has nine fronds each measuring about twelve inches long, and within a few days of each frond unfurling to its full length, a little nub of green appears in the fuzzy top of the ‘trunk’ (out of which all fronds sprout and into which you have to pour water). This little nub is the start of a new frond, which grows very slowly to begin with but faster towards the end — so much faster than you can almost see it moving. I was right in thinking that I will never see it being a tree, but I underestimated the pleasure of watching it being a fern. It was worth buying. 

A Walker Turns Nine

A Walker Turns Nine

Comments 0 Comment

When I started this blog nine years ago today, I saw it as a chance to do my own work without the editor on my shoulder. It still is that — but much, much more.

Because when I started this blog, I was nine years younger, you see. I knew time was passing quickly, but not this quickly! I thought there would be plenty of years to write another book, pen dozens of essays, do all sorts of things. I hope there still is. I see no reason why there shouldn’t be.

But if there’s not … there’s this blog. It has become an oeuvre of sorts, a body of work, a folder into which I stuff random thoughts, ideas from books, the gleanings of a brain that works best when the feet are moving at three miles an hour.

As I said in the beginning and each walk confirms, writing and walking are boon companions. One informs the other.

So this walker plans to keep on walking and keep on writing until … well, until she can’t do either anymore.