memoir

Serendipity, Sakura, and the “Scribblers”

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 13 Comments

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I am averaging about a post a month since I created this new blog. Ideas roil in my mind; I catch a small one and pin it to a page of notes; I let the rest flutter into the rosemary bush. But today I am inspired again by writer and blogger Charli Mills at Carrot Ranch. This week’s theme is serendipity, but as always with Charli, other deep currents call for reflection. I resonated deeply with her reflections on taking the necessary time with the writing process:

Take action without holding tightly to outcome. Yes, have a goal, a plan of sorts, but keep an open eye to the unexpected. The agent who turns you down might buy you the time you needed to find a different path to publication. Or, in my situation with Miracle of Ducks, I knew something was off with the intro. My editor noted it but beta readers said it was fine. Because I’ve sat on it all summer, when I read the first chapter to my mother-in-law and her twin, it jumped out at me what was wrong. Truly a gift of sight! Sometimes we need to slow down and this process of writing invites us to do it, but we feel impatient. Fill the slow stretches with other projects. Learn to dance with your writing as if it were a life-long partner not some quickie date at the nightclub.

In my work on a re-write of a book for a retired neurosurgeon (coming on three years now), this slowing down is what I have had to accept. I feel pressure to deliver a completed project, and yet, I have discovered that stretches away from the book give me a fresh and much-needed perspective. These breaks allow me to work out, in those quiet moments while washing dishes or walking or watering the plants, the changes I know are necessary in my experiment with “genre metamorphosis,” that is, transforming my client’s completed life story into a commercially viable medical memoir. There’s much more to Charli’s post today, but her thoughts on writing triggered a long reflection on process, and resulted in a separate post on how that has developed with my current project.

Is Serendipity What You Make It?

But back to serendipity. Defined as a “pleasant happenstance” or “pleasant surprise,” the word has only been in use since 1754, and it rings with the fascination the British had for the exotic lands they so avariciously set out to possess. The English earl Horace Walpole coined the word from the place name Serendip, or Ceylon, inspired by characters in a fabled tale, The Three Princes of Serendip, that were always “making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”

We often use this word as a synonym for luck or chance. Of the former word, we often like to say that we make our own luck, and of the latter, that chance favors the prepared mind. It’s with those qualifiers in mind that I think of my own serendipity when it comes to writing. While we may not always see it when it arrives (take Charli’s example of being turned down by one agent as the avenue for another to open the door) or be prepared to accept the prize it brings, it seems in some ways that serendipity may very well be what Walpole originally intimated when he made up the word: equal parts accident and sagacity—or at least sagacity’s low-heeled but respectable cousin, preparedness.

Serendipity and the Writing Group

It was in some ways preparedness that brought me my own serendipitous moment, which came in the form of the flame-haired friend I call Sakura (cherry blossom in Japanese). I met Sakura some four years ago when my sister and I formed a small writing group we called “The Scribblers,” each of us inviting one writing friend to join us. Sakura was then the senior editor at the publication department of the top neurosurgical institute where the man who became my client, Dr. S., had built an illustrious and game-changing career in spinal neurosurgery. A shrewd and gifted science editor, Sakura is also a writer of sensuous and intelligent poetry, one whose high Romantic sensibilities immediately found resonance with my own, and whom I could easily imagine inhabiting Paris in the 20s or the island of Lesbos in the time of Sappho.

Dr. S. had been pestering Sakura for some time with the proposal that she help him write a book. That’s just what my overworked friend wanted to do after editing the dense and convoluted prose of a gaggle of brilliant demigods all day. She had declined, but now, the small size of our group allowing her to become familiar with both my abilities and my dissatisfaction with my job as an academic program director, a kernel of an idea popped in her head. Might she be able to provide a solution to both Dr. S.’s predicament and my own? Six months after meeting Sakura, I quit my day job to take on the project she had declined.

Now, it was serendipitous indeed that I met Sakura. It was serendipitous that I met her at a particular time—just as Dr. S. was intensifying his search for someone to help him with his book. Certainly the opportunity to quit my day job and delve into a full-time writing life was a “happy accident” that I was not consciously “in quest of.” But wasn’t there also some preparedness in the turn of events? Some sagacity in having committed to participating in the writing group to begin with? In seeding the bed in which a writing life might take root and grow? I dare say there was.

A Flash Memoir on Serendipity

The above ruminations were sparked by Charli Mills’s weekly flash fiction challenge at Carrot Ranch. Here’s the prompt:

October 14, 2015 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story that reveals or explores a moment of serendipity. How did it come about? What did it lead to? You can express a character’s view of the moment or on serendipity in general. Use the element of surprise or show how it is unexpected or accidentally good.

My phone again. A drowned alarm clock palpitating in my purse. No doubt Jill. The dean and her urgencies. Fuck this 24/7 access!

Driving back from lunch. Fumbling for the squawking little warden in my bag. I’ll die in my car some day, I think. Dammit! Missed it. No, the predictable whistle of a text message. Immediacy is Jill’s mantra.

But it’s not Jill. Dear one,” the text reads. “Poss opptnty! Doc needs help w/ book. 30K, maybe more. Talk? Sak

Ahh, sweet little communicator. Cellular herald of new possibilities! Sit in my lap while I ponder the what’s-ahead…

 

 

 

 

From Autobiography to Memoir

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 8 Comments

sisyphus

So, what about that book you were ghostwriting?  I hear that a lot from friends I haven’t seen in a while. After all, it’s been three years. And it’s true that at times I feel like I’ve been sucked into a black, bottomless hole, or tossed upon some steep Sisyphean slope the peak of which I will never reach. Then again, what did I expect? It’s a book not a sandwich. A book doesn’t have a clear blueprint, or at least if it does (an outline), it is one that has the unnerving habit of morphing even while you are adhering to it fanatically.

The Decision to Jump the Genre Track

I punched out the first version of the book in a year. It was a straightforward life story beginning in childhood and ending with the author’s retirement and reflections on his life and career. I had, as William Zinsser put it in his acclaimed guide, Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, imposed “narrative order on a jumble of half-remembered events.” Several readers responded favorably, but these were mostly swayed by their fondness for either the author or myself. Then something happened to change our trajectory. (Long and complicated story there, one I wrote about in July.) Brakes were applied to the publishing schedule. Acting on the suggestions of a professional publicist and editor, my client and I pulled back to explore a more commercial version of the story in the form of a medical memoir.

Steps to a Genre Metamorphosis

At that time, I think I had some vague notion that I would be able to simply cut and paste my first autobiographical version into a cohesive new memoir. How wrong I was. What was needed was a complete overhaul. I would have to jettison parts of the book I (and more importantly my client) had loved, and if anecdotes or scenes did not support the memoir, out they would have to go. Following are the steps I have taken these last months in the process of transforming a life story to memoir.

  • Book-ending the narrative: A crucial distinction between an autobiography and a memoir is focus. According to Zinsser, a classic memoir recalls “a particular period and place in the writer’s life.” It is “a work of history, catching a distinctive moment in the life of both a person and a society.” Accordingly, I had to identify new starting and ending points to my story. This being a medical memoir, I would focus on the years my client worked at the top of his field, building the new narrative within strict bookends from the time his reputation took off to his retirement. While I didn’t want to completely abandon important events and key experiences that took place in his childhood or training, I had to find a way to incorporate them through flashback within the new truncated time frame.
  • Building a new chapter sequence: With a clear start and end point, I now went back to the original chapter sequence, pulling out the chapters that took place during this span, and using them to anchor the new narrative arc. Scrivener was helpful in this endeavor, allowing me to easily build the new structure by first importing all the chapters from the original manuscript into the binder of a new project, and then selecting from them to build a new sequence. However, since my client’s childhood and training had taken up nearly half the original book, I was left with only a dozen or so chapters that fit in the new time frame revolving around his career.
  • Identifying events in existing chapters from which to build new chapters: Now I had to explore the chapters that dealt with his career and identify material that I had given less importance to that could be the basis of complete new chapters. This has been tough but edifying . An author makes so many choices focusing on one anecdote here, eliminating another there. Guiding my search was of course the strictures of the medical theme. However, I had to be careful not to settle for “fluff,” minor episodes that did not have enough meat to expand into a real chapter but that I was tempted to use out of desperation to replace chapters I had dumped.
  • Integrating earlier key events through flashback:  A real challenge has been how to retain some really dramatic scenes that on the surface did not directly support the new focus. I could integrate key childhood experiences through flashbacks but only when they supported or related to something that was happening in the new present of the story. The flashback must also be triggered by something happening in the present; there had to be a reason the author reflected on his past when he did. While a number of acclaimed memoirs have served as a good model, I found myself dipping time and again into Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, to see how she accomplished such a seamless shift from the present (the hike on the Pacific Crest Trail) to various points in her past that pertained to and illuminated her struggle.
  • Identifying high and low points: This exercise was one of the first tasks the editor gave me, but it has turned out to be the cornerstone of my approach. Scanning the original manuscript (and working from memory) I created a table with two lists, one the high points/successes in my client’s life and the other the low points/failures/challenges. These I put in chronological order, then referred back to them as I built my new chapter sequence. Those that fit in the main narrative became, in many cases, the basis for a chapter. Those from earlier periods of his life could be included as flashbacks interspersed around the main action. The challenges in particular—and how the author dealt with them—reveal character and motivation, while the successes allow for a release from tension and provide variety and movement to the narration.

A Memoir Takes Form

This process has been slow and sometimes frustrating. Working with so much material (97,000 words in the original manuscript, as well as two dozen audio recordings) often feels like wading around in a flood grasping at flotsam as it floats by. And while I did get a good start on transforming the book into a memoir using the steps above, it was when my editor suggested I hold off on actually doing the rewrite and create a book proposal instead that the new book began to emerge in more clarity. I will be blogging about how creating a proposal expedites the actual writing of a book in an upcoming post.

 

 

Sharp Edge of Survival

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 8 Comments
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Outskirts of Willow City, North Dakota

They make ’em different in North Dakota. They make ’em stronger.

I was reminded of this during a quick road trip to the great Peace Garden State last week, ostensibly to help my cousin Tommy drive the new Camaro he’d bought in Arizona back up to his home there. I hadn’t made the trip overland in decades, and thought it would be nice to retrace, perhaps for the last time, the journey my father had taken my family on several summers in my youth. That was during the 1960s and early 70s, when my father’s great boat-like Plymouths and Chryslers lumbered up and over the pine-studded, meadow-pocked ranges of the Rockies and the Black Hills, then sailed gloriously that long last day through leagues of fecund prairies, gathering dust, obliterating grasshoppers, making a dead run to the home farm like a hungry horse to its stable. Now I was back, for the fourth time in the last decade, in thrall as I have been since girlhood to the rough county lives of so many of my first cousins.

And this is where my claim for the superior fortitude of the Dakotans comes in. What evidence to have to support it?  I’ll give you two examples, one deserving of immediate dismissal by its sheer subjectivity and one with more journalistic cred.

And the Wind Comes Sweeping Down the Plains

Sunday August 23rd found me pulling into a field off a wind-swept crossroads outside of Dunseith, North Dakota with Cousin Tommy (this time in his Chevy Silverado). We’d planned to go straight to the horse show grounds where our mutual cousin Joe was to emcee the riders going through their paces. Sadly, Joe, who’d just quit his job as a long-distance truck driver to take a position as a school janitor, had been called in to work to deal with a reported bat problem (a sole bat as it turned out.) So in good North Dakota fashion, we were meeting in a field to have a quick visit. Joe was already there, with his brother Rick who’d picked him up in Rick’s own Silverado and was taking him back to his town thirty miles away.

Two Sensible North Dakotans, Cousin Tommy and Cousin Joe
Two Sensible North Dakotans, Cousin Tommy and Cousin Joe

The temperature hovered around 50. The wind made sharp staccato lashes of my hair. It had rained all day Saturday but today the sky was a deep, cloud-buffered blue. My thin cotton shirt gave scant protection and my bare neck taunted the prairie fates. I danced like a fool in the wind, slinging my song into its currents. “Nooorth Dakota, where the wind comes sweeping down the plains!” How intoxicating it was.

And how laden with dust and chaff in harvest season. That night my throat began to ache. By Monday afternoon when I deplaned in Arizona, my cold was full blown. My constitution had not been equal to that of my North Dakota cousins. It had fallen to the prairie wind, even in August.

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A farmers’ daughter falling from grace with the prairie
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Another sensible North Dakotan demonstrating proper wind wear

Climate and Culture of Centenarians

Don’t take my word on the robust nature of North Dakotans though. The home state of both my parents made news a year ago in Newsweek Magazine in a story entitled “The Oldest People in the US Live in the Geographic Center of North America.” That geographic center would be Rugby, the town where my Aunt Rita and Uncle Dick raised their brood of ten. According to the article, several factors contribute to this extraordinary level of health: for starters, take the stock. Most people in North Dakota go back generations (not counting the Native Americans who of course have been on the land for centuries). Those early pioneers who couldn’t take the bleak, frigid winters and backbreaking labor left, leaving survivor types. Second, consider community. People in the rural Midwest look out for each other. I saw this for myself on this recent visit when the welfare of a couple of elderly shut-ins was the main topic of conversation at a Saturday night corn fest held at the local Shooters Bar. And then there is all that clean air and water, at least outside of the fracking regions.

A Land that Suffers No Fools

Despite all the positives, this is a land that repays small lapses of judgment harshly. My father’s brother Jerry hit the angle of a ditch wrong coming out of a field in September of 1975 and tipped the tractor he was driving. It crushed him into the land he had farmed for half a century. The poetry of such an end has not lessened the tragedy of it among those who still tell the story all these years later. Then there was my grandfather’s brother Bill, who killed himself with a shotgun at the age of sixteen. I remember Aunt Rita and Aunt Jeannette nearly coming to blows as to how it happened at Uncle Roger’s funeral. Bill was either climbing over a fence or getting out of a truck when the gun went off. Either way, the gun was loaded and the prairie left to swallow the flood of pain that event must have unleashed. And twenty years ago, tragedy nearly claimed my cousin Janie’s son one record-breaking winter. Which brings us to this week’s flash fiction challenge over at Carrot Ranch.

Fence Down

August 26, 2015 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story about the need for help in an extreme weather event. Is the help local or global? Does it arrive or the plea go ignored? Think about extreme weather occurrences and consequences.

Paul cranked the ignition. Only the same harsh rasp. And no service on the cell phone.

“Won’t be an hour,” he’d called, flinging his weight into the white, squinting wind; his mother’s voice a needle in the air before the sky sucked it up.

Now cold seared a sugar crust onto the windshield. The snow funneled down. It’d swallowed the fence in the south pasture. Now dense, wet waves of it lapped against the tires.

At least he’d found the cow, he thought, satisfied, settling back, closing his eyes, already oblivious to the sound of a truck door slamming.

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Cousin Tommy’s Windowpane, Winter 2014

 

 

Wednesday Word of the Week 6

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 4 Comments

Reading Lolita

Word of the Week 6: Screed

Welcome to Wednesday Word of the Week, a hump-day cyber celebration of skillful and felicitous word choice selected from my current reading.

This week’s word comes from a New York Times bestseller that Margaret Atwood described as “a literary life raft on Iran’s fundamentalist sea,” Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books.

I was inspired to return to this poignant and searing reflection on life under Iran’s Islamic regime by two dovetailing events, one personal and one that is playing out its cacophonous and dissonant notes on the global-political scale even as I write. I’ll get to the personal event presently, but that global political reference should be obvious to anyone following the breaking headlines: the so-called nuclear deal reached just yesterday with our long-time swathed and turbaned foe, the Islamic Republic of Iran.

So, now you rightly ask: What personal connection could Jeanne possibly have with Iran, that fervent hotbed of repression, that evil bullhorn spewing vociferous calls of “Death to America!” for the last four decades? Just this: my husband (aka the Professor) quite unexpectedly received, just two weeks ago, an invitation to teach a 3-day seminar in October to engineering  and social science students in Isfahan, Iran’s third largest city and home to several World Heritage sites. Naturally, the invitation includes the Professor’s wife and partner.

How this invitation came to be is fodder for a much longer post. Suffice it to say that the responses to this bit of news were uniformly ones of alarm. “Iran? You’d have to be crazy to go to Iran.” “Don’t go!” “What, you want to disappear into a dark cell for five years?” My brother went so far as to ask to be added to my will.

Yes, we need to move cautiously as we consider this invitation. As I like to explain to loved ones, we are practicing due diligence in researching the possibilities (including calls to the State Department). But for me, the thought of getting an unvarnished view of the people and culture of Iran, of practicing some citizen diplomacy at this historic moment, fills me with excitement.

I’ve met several Iranians, going back to my teaching days. I gaze now at the the lovely inlaid box an Iranian student gave me in the late 1990s and think of the rich aesthetic sensibility it represents. I reverently turn the pages of an exquisite illustrated volume of the classic Rubaiyat by the 13th-century Persian poet Omar Khayyam, a gift to the Professor from an appreciative Iranian attendee at the recent conference we attended in Finland (a nice companion to the three volumes we already own of this work.) I remember my very first exposure to this exotic land when, during my freshman year in college, a couple of Iranian students invited me to their apartment for lunch. I had never eaten yogurt with meat before; it was a culinary epiphany of sorts.

Persian Box

Rubaiiyat

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And then I think of tyranny, of how I know nothing of what it means to experience a loss of my freedom. I think of Islamic morality squads and radical Islam’s war against women and the mysterious way our Iranian friend, a futurist and scholar, regularly disappears for days or weeks at a time from all social media. I think of fanatics and of crowds shouting “Death to America.” I wonder how much and how little I really know about the situation on the ground in that far-off land against which my country has waged a bitter ideological war  all of my adult life.

So, hovering in the space between safe consideration and final acceptance of the offer, imagining with equal parts trepidation and intrigue all the “what-could-be’s,” implicit in such a visit, I return to this week’s word and book. Re-reading select passages should serve as a necessary reminder of just how nefarious the regime under which I may soon place my fate has been. But I think it may just also fill me with an even greater desire to grab at this unprecedented and unique opportunity to visit Iran at this historic moment.

Dr. Nafisi is a professor of Western Literature and essayist who left Iran in 1997. In this braided memoir, she reflects on her pre-Revolutionary days as a student,  her increasingly repressive reality as an academic teaching English literature at the University of Tehran, and on the clandestine study group she led at her home in the final months before she left. Through her vivid descriptions of the eight women who joined her weekly, we witness both the terrible stress of authoritarian rule on young lives and the ultimate futility of such repression to quell the human spirit. In the following passage, one of the young women present explains her vicious jubilation upon hearing news of the death of one of the leaders of the Muslim Students’ Association.

“You don’t know him, Mojgan told me. Next to him Mr. Ghomi is an absolute angel. He was sick, sexually sick. You know, he got a friend expelled because he said the white patch of skin just barely visible under her scarf sexually provoked him. They were like hounds. Then Nassrin jumped in with a screed about one of the female guards. Her searches were like sexual assaults, she insisted. One day she squeezed and fondled Niloofar until she became hysterical. They expel us for laughing out loud, but you know what they did to this woman when she was discovered? She was reprimanded, expelled for a semester and then she was back at her job.”

Reading Lolita in Tehran is a sad and sparkling tale of transcendence over tyranny. It is also a reminder of the critical role that scholars and teachers play in the lives of a free citizenry. I will return to it again and again for Professor Nafisi’s inspiring critiques of the best-loved work in Western Literature, and thrill each time to the layers of thought she unveils.

That’s it for this week. If you’ve encountered ‘screed” in your reading recently (as I have just this morning in the New York Times), consider sharing your thoughts here.

The Ever-Extending Publishing Timeframe

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ Leave a comment

Manuscript

The Book’s going to Be Published When?

It’s been nearly three years since I accepted the challenge of ghostwriting a life story for a client. Now, with numerous revisions and versions and one failed publication deal under my belt, I realize three grave mistakes that, had I avoided them, would have made my experience a little easier.

I wrote on my previous blog Memoir Crafter of an early difficulty I encountered in developing the structure of the story, that being the differing expectations of my client and his wife. My client simply wanted his “story to be heard.” His wife wanted a “legacy for the family.” So, what was this book going to be, autobiography or memoir?

With such a basic compass, by late 2013 I had produced a 97,000-word manuscript that my client was pleased with. It told his life story in a straightforward, chronological fashion, from postwar refugee to immigrant to renowned spinal neurosurgeon. I did a short (four months) agent search, got a dozen respectable rejections and one good bite from a New York agent, who also passed on it. All along, I kept hearing similar comments about the book’s genre being amorphous, and about the difficulty of publishing what was essentially an autobiography.

With a Little Help from My Friends (Sigh)

In stepped a good friend, a dear friend, a friend whose generosity knows no bounds. She suggested she push the book with the independent publisher for whom she edited mostly YA fiction, and with whom she had developed a close friendship. It wasn’t exactly the right kind of publisher, but it was one with a decent stable of authors. Time was passing. My client hungered for that physical manifestation of his story. On his approval, I relayed his acceptance of the publisher’s offer mid- 2014 and off we went. We were all set to hold book in hand by late 2014 or the spring of 2015.

While we were finalizing the contract and working with a designer on the cover of the book, the publisher recommended my client find a publicist. That was a ball out of left field, but I did a search and found what looked like a good one in New York. The publicist and I clicked over the phone. She read the entire manuscript (on her own time), provided suggestions for some broad edits, sketched out a proposal for a promotional campaign, and came to an agreement with my client. All that remained was to put the publicist in contact with whomever was going to handle promotion at the publisher. That, it turned out, would be my friend.

We’re Friends, What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Things seemed to be moving along, but I was a little concerned. I had never even talked to the publisher, who, from the stories I had heard, seemed mercurial at times regarding her business. All I knew about her was that my friend had fallen into editing for her when my friend’s own book got picked up some years earlier. At various stages along the way my friend even seemed to be in a kind of mentoring relationship with this woman who was paying her to edit all submissions.

And, though she knew a great deal about “grassroots” efforts, promotion was not exactly a specialty of my friend’s. She had been feeding me guidelines for months on what to do for my client: set up readings at public libraries; contact local media and newspapers for interviews; hawk the book at book fairs, and a dozen other labor-intensive activities. But did she know how to work with a professional publicist? It was the publisher, after all, who recommended my client go that route. At any rate, I was relieved that my client was willing to invest in a publicist. The emails my friend was sending me about the process were so long they made my head spin.

At the end of the year,  I decided it was time to offload this piece of the project to the two parties concerned: the publicist and the publisher. I provided email addresses and phone numbers to all concerned: the publicist, the owner/publisher and my friend the editor.

Stop the Presses!

A few days later, I received a frantic voice mail from the publicist followed by an equally frantic email. Who was this publisher, she wanted to know. Who exactly was in charge of book promotion? She deemed the publisher a backwater start-up not far removed from a Print-On-Demand operation. She resented my poor friend’s suggestions, in the form of mammoth emails; she deemed them geared for do-it-yourself authors and entirely unsuitable for the professional she was . She felt my client’s book warranted something better. She could not work with this publisher. She highly recommended my client and I  back out of the contract.

Of course I had to relay this happy news to my client. And to my friend. My client was gracious about it, though he had to pay a fee for breaking the contract. My friend was gracious too, but had to deal with the disappointment of the publisher. The two of them eventually parted ways over it.

Silver Linings?

That took place at the end of 2014. It was a setback, but now we were free to move the whole process to a new, hopefully more commercial level. That began in earnest when the publicist recommended a professional editor to my client, who approved the next step.  I began to work with this editor in February.

So, where is the book at this point? In transition. That very first problem with genre never did go away. The editor sees an entirely different kind of book from the one I originally wrote. She wants to sell a straight medical memoir, not some hybrid of immigrant story cum medical memoir. The prospect of deconstructing the existing manuscript and, Frankenstein-like, creating a new creature from the necessary dismemberment, is both disheartening and galvanizing.

Stay tuned for notes and lessons learned from the major operation now underway!

 

 

 

 

Wednesday Word of the Week 5

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ Leave a comment

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Word of the Week 5: Bray

Welcome to Wednesday Word of the Week, a hump-day cyber celebration of skillful and felicitous word choice selected from my current reading.

This week I am backtracking five months to revisit possibly the best book I have read in the last half decade: Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, Cheryl Strayed’s acclaimed and joltingly poignant memoir of confronting both an untamed land and her own wild heart.

At twenty-six, still mourning the untimely death of her counter-culture mother, and burdened with a series of wrong steps and bad decisions, the author embarks on a grueling journey of self-discovery and healing. Woefully unprepared, she sets out to hike more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest trail—alone—from the Mohave Desert in California, through Oregon, to the Colombia River Gorge in southern Washington.

It is an amazing adventure; but this is not simply an adventure story. Rather, through seamlessly integrated flashbacks, we witness nothing short of a catharsis, of redemption through pain, of transcendence through struggle.

At the heart of that struggle is not only the young woman’s ultimate acceptance  of the loss of her mother to cancer at the age of forty-six, but her forgiveness of the way her mother lived her life. It is in a final passage on this theme that, in a howl of futility and rage, the author lends to this week’s mundane word a new, searing power to move.

“And then I wailed. No tears came, just a series of loud brays that coursed through my body so hard I couldn’t stand up. I had to bend over keening, while bracing my hands on my knees, my pack so heavy on top of me, my ski pole clanging out behind me in the dirt, the whole stupid life I’d had coming out my throat.”

Wild is one of the most heart-wrenching, skillfully constructed, lyrical, honest, and successfully realized memoirs I’ve come across in years. If you’ve read it, I’d love to hear how it affected you.

And, if you’ve encountered a use of a word or phrase that has stopped you in your reading tracks this week, consider sharing it here.

A Dawn Concert for Margaret

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 5 Comments
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Margaret: An indomitable spirit.

Margaret Egger Belisle was her name. Loyal wife, loving mother of five, dedicated nurse, rheumatoid arthritic. She suffered from her illness from just after my birth in the mid 1950s until her death in 1975 at the age of 53.

While I was growing up, I was oblivious to the harsh reality of her condition. It was just was the normal state of affairs. By the time my memories began to stick, she already relied on a cane. Then crutches. When the first wheelchair appeared, it was a hoot to take it for a spin down the hallway of our ranch-style home. Apart from those aids, she was like other working mothers I knew. Off she went to care for her geriatric patients every morning at the nursing home she had established with my father in 1967.

Mother’s disease followed its due trajectory through my high school years, reaching its pitch just as freedom sounded its shrill whistle most insistently in my ear. I was a freshman in college by then, commuting to class from home. I longed to move away. But Mother was still at home, deteriorating in front of our eyes. Not that RA takes a person quickly; it dawdles, inflaming another knuckle here, twisting another joint there, conspiring with a wicked cocktail of drugs to render the body a desiccated skeleton draped in swollen, mottled flesh.

It was the first stroke that put her out of commission. It hit her at dinner. One moment she was hunched at the end of the table forcing down spaghetti. The next, the left side of her body went slack, she slumped, and food fell from her open mouth. Two more strokes followed, successively robbing her of her few remaining comforts: reading, speaking, sharing meals. Like the first two, the third one cruelly refused to deliver the merciful coup de grace.

She languished in the family nursing home through the long summer before my sophomore year at college. I grew accustomed to her limbo state. Like the rest of the family, I visited, but I grew careless, even callous. I wanted to be out in the world, not sitting in that sterile room watching the arthritis tighten the screws, watching her wince with every small shift, trying to decipher her garbled speech. After one visit, I sat in my car in the parking lot raging at God for his abject cruelty. Why, why, why wouldn’t he take her?

The last time I saw her alive may have been the visit that coincided with my brother Jack’s janitorial shift at the nursing home. Jack was the big man of the family. He had been Mother’s arms and legs for several years, lifting her in and out of her wheelchair and bed, in and out of the car. Jack made sure to see her everyday, stopping in several times on his rounds. When he saw me sitting there, he lit in. “Where have you been?” he said angrily. “When was the last time you came down to see her? Your mother’s dying and you can’t be bothered to get your ass down here?”

I think I shot up and went at him, lobbing fervid excuses in my defense, my fervor growing in proportion to my guilt. Then we both heard a distressed, even indignant, sound coming from her bed. I turned. Her hand was raised, her finger pointing at me. Her eyes flashed the old spirited anger. Clearly articulating the words, she said, “I like you.”

Jack got his reward though. The only one down at the nursing home the morning she died, he was the last to see her alive. But even he wasn’t at her side when she breathed her last; he had slipped out to mop another floor. It breaks my heart that she died without Dad or any of her children at her bedside, but it would be even sadder if it weren’t for one small detail. Once we’d all assembled there, it was plain to see. Gone were the traces of pain that had gripped her face for so long. Instead, a peaceful smile graced her lips.

It’s too late now to make amends to my mother. How I wish I could sit by her side now, read to her, play music for her, take her mottled, broken dove of a hand in my own and hold it. But I can’t. I can only roll the memories and regrets around in my head. I can only belatedly offer apologies to the air.

This post was prompted by Charli Mills’s May 13, 2015 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story that shows a hard place and a connection.

A Dawn Concert

Four a.m. The pain a staccato knock. No going back to sleep. She pushed up on gnarled hands, scooted, let the sharp ache push her into the wheelchair.

She followed the grooves in the carpet, pushed past the girls’ rooms, imagined their young bodies. They looked like her, thirty years ago, before the arthritis made a crippled birch of her.

She parked at the kitchen table. No coffee until Dan rose to percolate it. She waited.

At last a pale lemony light washed through the window. The familiar room emerged. And the concert began.

The robins never forsook her.

 

 

Beppu: A Flash Memoir for Spring

~ Jeanne Lombardo ~ 2 Comments
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A view of Beppu, Oita, Kyushu, Japan

Spring always pulls me back to 1988, a pivotal year in my life. It was the year of change, of pulling up stakes, cutting ties, forsaking my stable landed existence for a leap into the unknown. It was glorious.

I had been living in Los Angeles for eight years. My initially enchanting if bohemian neighborhood, a stone’s throw from the old Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard, had deteriorated, become the scene of racial confrontations and sad decline.

The relationship I was in similarly suffered. Having recently crossed over from my carefree twenties into the tick-tock thirties, the latent issue of babies awoke and set to screaming. I had never wanted them, or so I had asserted, had chosen my mate (an artist) not only for the mad love he inspired in me but upon the basis of a shared commitment to freedom, the pursuit of art, and childlessness.

But in crept my doubts. My dissatisfactions. At the same time I asked myself, if I was foregoing children, why was I locked into an arrangement that felt so confining?

What then? I had always had a wanderlust. My career as an ESL teacher had promised ripe opportunities before: sweet apples I had failed to pluck, had left to rot on the tree.

But now another fruit fell into my open palm. Sweeter than I had any right to expect. A teaching position in Japan. And not a job at one of those fly-by-night, exploitative, street-front language joints in Tokyo or Osaka, but a lecturer’s position in English at a college in the hot spring fairyland of a place called Beppu.

My decision on whether to eat that sweet fruit or let it remain unplucked changed the course of my future.

This post is my response to Charli Mills’s May 6, 2015 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story that is a snapshot of spring…We could think of it as “spring eternal.” Warm, renewing, new life, hope.

Currency Exchange

He sat in the chair, vigilant, funereal.

“The taxi’s below,” she said. “I’ll call when I get there tomorrow.”

He didn’t rise. She gathered the last bags and closed the door behind her.

Freedom revved in her chest, maintained its thrum through traffic and customs. On the plane she exhaled into a blissful inaccessibility. Not even his voice could intrude now. Already he seemed far away.

She deplaned at Narita, boarded the island hopper to Kyushu. On the descent, she peered out the window. April sunlight glinting on the Inland Sea was a newly minted coin, just for her spending.