Since I’ve signed on with Level Best Books I’ve been in contact with other LBB authors who set their books in Italy. For those of you who like mysteries and are Italophiles, here are some sites you might like to visit:
Jen Collins Moore
https://www.jennifercollinsmoore.com
Gabriel Valjan
http://gabrielswharf.wordpress.com
and a forthcoming work by Nina Wachsman
Just before I woke this morning I had a dream. I was standing at a doorway. The door opened and I had just raised my foot to step through, when I realized that with the next step I would be leaving this world and entering another world.
I thought about the dream over coffee.
Before I stepped into that black and white other world, I had turned my head to see what was behind me in the place I was leaving: people I know were doing dishes; others were going up and down the stairs; there were letters on the desk; and the smell of winter minestrone simmering on the stove permeated the air. I could feel the chill of the cold doorknob on my fingers; could hear the chatter of kids playing in the corner. The walls were covered with photos of family and friends; there were books on the shelf; and through one of the windows I caught sight of trees in full leaf, and beyond, the neighbor in her backyard. I heard echoes of arguments, a whiff of the metallic air of anger; saw the eyes of a friend shedding tears, heard the ring of a phone, noticed dirty dishes in the sink…
These were fleeting moments, small things. There were shadows, smells, the taste of fresh bread in my mouth, the sound of my sons’ laughter, the feel of dirt on my hands from working in the garden.
Sipping my coffee, I understood the dream as a moment mori in 2-second dream form.
With that glance back, I had stepped into the same river of thought as the ancient Greek philosophers Democritis and Socrates, who said that the proper practice of philosophy is about death and dying. My dream wasn’t a didactic dream, not a religious admonition to “ be good or else when you die you’ll go to hell.”
And it wasn’t a thing, graspable like other momento mori: not a 19th century mourning brooch made of human hair, not a skull ring like my friend wears, not an elegy like Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, or a dance like that of the Grim Reaper, or a portrait like that of the Puritan Thomas Smith with his skull in hand. It wasn’t a calavera, a skull made of sugar for the Day of the Dead, nor a literary calaveras, a satirical poem given to the living, but written as if the recipient were dead.
The dream was not significant enough to walk along with the works of Camus or Sartre, or profound enough to be an experience of Bhuddist maranasati, or serious enough to echo The Way of the Samurai or a Sufi’s profound understanding.
It was just a little dream. I decided the significant part of it was the details:
Each element of my life filled the room, although the room was not full or crowded; there was no threat, just details of life. My little 2-second dream, my early morning momento mori, was simply a reminder that the big part of my life, as a woman and as a writer, is contained in a mass of the smallest of details. As I gather these details I find out who I am, and in the details of my books, I find out who my character are. This is what a moment-mori is good for. If I can remember that death is just one step away, the details around me will burst into the lush color, motion, and forms of life.
As COVID 19 drives us further into isolation, I rely more and more on books, movies, and walks along the deserted trail that follows the canal. The walks clear my head and the books and movies transport me out of the house in a different way, so I can see how other storytellers are searching for meaning.
Lately, I’ve seen two movie-series and a movie that you might like: Midnight Diner, a Japanese anthology TV series directed by Joji Matsuoka, based on the graphic novels of Yaro Abe; The Queen’s Gambit, a U.S. miniseries based on a novel by “Walt” Stone Tevis and directed by Scott Frank; and The Life Ahead, from a novel written by Romain Gary and made into an Italian film directed by Edoardo Ponti, son of Sophia Loren, who still powerful at 86 shares the lead with Ibrahima Gueye, a very talented young actor.
I think of these films specifically because all of them have themes of love manifested in camaraderie, community in its truest sense, and resilience in the face of hardships, and I’ve been hankering for a good shot of these things lately. The Queen’s Gambit and The Life Ahead are hard in parts to watch, but working toward love is never easy, and all of these films pay back.
To animate work on a book, I gather ideas from three sources: scholarly / public records; interviews; and notes from my own experience. Combining these three elements jumpstarts my imagination, and I know if I keep sifting through these elements, the story I discover, one of hundreds of possibilities, will make itself known. Personal memories of food, landscape, gestures, and the sounds of a language infuse scholarly information with vibrancy, and the scholarly writings provide details and facts that may have become fuzzy in friends’ telling of personal stories.
So when I was recently asked at a reading if my stories are autobiographical, or if the stories I am putting to paper are the stories of someone else, or if I just create the narratives whole cloth out of imagination, I say that none of these is the case, and yet, all of them are the case.
Everywhere I go, in everything I read, hear, and see, I find pieces of life — good, evil, and inbetween — and am compelled to make a story. The pieces appear everywhere: in a fact in a book, in a neighbor’s tears elicited by a memory, in the vison of a landscape, in the unique sound of a dialect, in the way the rain fell outside the window on a certain day, in the moment I understood the profound anger of a woman who remembers running through the forest, SS and dogs not far behind. From these pieces, an incipient story nudges at me.
I begin a narrative. Perhaps the woman was crying when she remembers how it was raining the night she slipped from her house and fled into the forests of Tuscany, the SS not far behind. It could be that the trail that night was muddy, like the trails I explored years later in the same forest, the mud sucking at my feet. Perhaps the Italian peasant man I interviewed still makes the same sausage his grandfather made, and can give me the recipe, which in my story becomes a murder weapon.
These chunks of life add up to a story, which, good or bad, is a reflection of my vision, risen from the urge to create a narrative. My ultimate goal is to look into my own and others’ hearts, including the darker sides, to grasp some understanding of human nature.
A friend just suggested that I and some other friends think about our “writing life,” so I’ve been thinking about what my life as a writer has been.
Every writer creates, or tumbles into, a certain “writing life” tailored to him/herself, and the habits of that life are blended, smoothly or roughly, with the daily life of meal preparation, outside jobs, marriage or other love relationships, childcare, social get- togethers, bills, housecleaning, exercise, illness – all the activities/vicissitudes of any life’s needs.
For some years, I persisted in the dream that, eventually, I would be one of those writers who could dovetail my writing with the other aspects of my life – with fluid skill and perfect organization: up at 4 every morning to put in 3 hours of solid work before my children woke, then a nutritious breakfast for the family, off to my part time job, come home, have a snack for the kids, clean house, help with homework, fix supper….
But those visions of myself scurrying around like a well-organized little mouse were figments of imagination. If such a writer’s life does exist somewhere, for some writers, it was not to be mine.
My writing life, like the rest of my life, has been chaotic, erratic, and productive in spurts. Some nights I woke at midnight to work, caught an hour or two before 7, then dragged through the day. Some days I sneaked away to the river with a notebook; many days I ignored chores. I didn’t balance my checkbook; I left dishes in the sink; dust gathered on the shelves; the kitchen floor went un-scrubbed. There were long spans of time when my writing was reduced to notes on scraps of paper stuck in a file, or rough first drafts of poems were literally jotted down on napkins at the breakfast table. I finished first drafts of whole novels, written in the burst of an idea, that still, years later, sit on my shelf waiting for a rewrite. There have been fits of submissions when I sent out individual stories / poems / novels, followed by doldrums of inactivity when, for months, I submitted nothing.
In short, I’ve conducted my writing life in a calamitous way. It’s been hard most of all on the people around me, but can I be brazen enough to at least offer it as a vision of persistence?
Each of us writers has something to say, and walking either upright with steady steps toward our goals or stumbling and lurching through our work, we write. Writing is what makes us writers. Under any circumstance, through any hardship. A person’s writing life is a manifestation of character and is bound to be as varied as the people who live it.
When I think of my own writing life I know I could have…. I should have….
But I didn’t.
I was lost in the glorious chaos of life with other people, other needs, and with my own failings. The poems and the stories twirled in an endless, dizzying polka through my head. I was a failure at an orderly life, but blessed with a loving family, friends, and editors that danced along with me, or when I needed, let me dance by myself. My writing life was that I just kept going.
Last blog, I wrote about why I write mysteries: the puzzle aspect; the chance to deal with
death, which is the center of all our maps; the opportunity to re-create geographies I’ve known and loved; the chance to live through characters that are stronger, smarter, more courageous than I am; the chance to explore my own inner world, including the darker side; and the chance, almost like a folktale, to clarify the differences between good and evil – and more: the confusion of the two.
What about you? Why do you read mysteries, or why don’t you read mysteries? If you
do, when did you start reading them? Or did you pick one up, start reading, and decide the genre’s not for you? What do mysteries offer you that other genres don’t? What subgenres (thrillers, cozies, detective novels, police procedurals, etc.) do you read? Or, what is it mysteries lack that you find in other genres? Who are your favorite writers of mysteries? Why? Who your favorite writers of other genres?
I hope you’ll send a line or two – or whole paragraphs – and tell me your thoughts on
mysteries.
“Why mysteries?” Someone asked me.
I didn’t have a ready answer. I never planned to write them. I’ve mostly written poetry, commentaries, a few short works of fiction, and there’s an unpublished novel languishing on my shelf.
The idea of writing mysteries started some years ago while I was hiking in the forests of the upper Maremma of Tuscany. Walking past three Etruscan burial caves, a mystery popped into my head.
So, I began.
I wrote the story, and in the way a reader or a listener lives through stories, so does the writer. My characters are not me; they can do and say what they want in ways very different from me, but I still get to act through them in a range of ways: I can fight off attackers, I can get angry when I shouldn’t, I can be any age I want; I can have long braids, or shave my head and wear tattoos. I can be cruel, tender, harsh or sweet, beautiful, with long legs; I can go anywhere I want. And because mystery is a natural setting for shadowy characters, I can explore the dark sides of myself with impunity. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve never murdered anyone and I don’t intend too, but writing a mystery I do search my own dark corners for understanding. In the words of Kurt Vonnegut: “Writing, I experience becoming, find out what’s inside me, make my soul grow.”
Another reason I like writing mysteries is for the fun of the puzzle. Can I play the game well enough to make several characters suspicious? Can I leave a clue so subtly no one notices it’s a clue? Can I set the game so well, it’s the end before anyone guesses who the murderer is?
A third reason: I get to weave setting with plot. Ok, this is true in any genre, but it’s still a great delight to be able to talk about places I’ve lived and loved, to make those places themselves, characters.
Fourth:I get to deal with the subject of death. Death is the country at the center of the map in everyone’s life, and in writing mysteries I can confront it, and in some ways be relieved of it.
Fifth: E.M Forster once said, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” This applies to writing in general. I don’t write mysteries because I understand why humans kill each other; I write mysteries because in writing them I work to understand why they kill each other.
Sixth: Finally, it’s rewarding to “take a close and uncomfortable look at the world.” (Walter Mosley). In mysteries I see, up-close, the worst side of human beings and the best side. I have the possibility to watch people make choices in difficult circumstances, to learn and clarify the differences between good and evil. In this sense, mysteries are like traditional folktales, and I have always loved traditional tales.
Most of the reasons I’ve given for writing mysteries, are also reasons for writing in any genre. At base, I simply love to write, and I think that as I work to understand my characters – which means understanding myself as well – I become more human.
Another exercise session with Lucy Wyndham Read. She has dozens of exercise tapes on YouTube. The tapes range from 3 minutes up to at least 35 minutes, require no weights, and work every part of the body. You can tone, lose inches, pump up your metabolism, firm your breasts, slim your legs, melt the fat off your back, get rid of muffin tops, tighten your bat wings, drop a dress size, sculpt your tushy….. whatever you want.
Wyndham Read is not the only one who can do all this; there are dozens of instructors with videos on YouTube, good videos that can give a person a thorough workout with or without weights. And all for free.
Many of the instructors work Tabata style: high-intensity interval training that consists of 8 sets of fast-paced exercises with a ten-second rest between sets, or some variation of this. The name Tabata comes from Dr. Izumi Tabata, a physician and researcher, who around 1996 was hired by coach of the Japanese speed-skating team to examine their training program, which consisted of short, rapid bursts of efforts and short rest periods. Dr. Tabata analyzed the program and found it to be advantageous for both aerobic and anaerobic systems plus it took a lot less time than moderate anaerobic exercise. How could Americans not love it: fast, effective, and scientifically developed?
In my own experience, it’s good to warm up before these exercises, but then, snip snap snout, —you’re sweating, toned, and you’ve done your heart a favor.
Another top exercise is walking. Here, we’ve had a 100-meter limit, that just recently was lengthened to 500 meters. Either way, if you can get in the right frame of mind, you can take 100 meters in each of the 4 directions, and you’ve already done 400 meters, do that 4 X and it’s a little over a European mile. It’s a good way to know the neighborhood if you are a city dweller. If you live in the country you’re fortunate and can go as far in any direction you’d like.
The walking and the Tabata make a perfect combination (with the walking first), and you may end up being in better shape after isolation is over, than you were when it started.
For snacks, we’ve stocked up on rye and rick crackers, tangerines, strawberries, apples….and, maybe a few cantucci to have with tea. Tea! It’s important to hydrate and I’m drinking lots of tea. Here’s a recipe that I learned when I inadvertently ordered it at The Little Prince Bookstore on King George Street here in TLV:
Pour boiling water over: honey to taste, 1 slice fresh ginger, 1cinnamon stick, fresh lemon juice, 1 tea bag green tea. Steep.
Another journey of the divided heart starts tonight when we leave Israel for the United States and head into yet another, stricter, quarantine. As my life here in Israel seems so normal to me now, I think when I return to the U.S. I will find a different country.
For a writer, it seems isolation/quarantine should be an ideal situation to write for hours every day, day in day out. Stores, parks, gyms, theaters are all closed; there’s no place to go, and the computer is ready and waiting.
Then why, as the weeks have passed, do I have such a hard time sitting at the computer? Why have I begun to feel wooden? Why do I look at the news about COVID19 several times a day even knowing the confusion of information makes me feel like I’m inside the circus fun house? I distract myself with Wordscapes; I scrub the kitchen sink when it doesn’t need scrubbing; I organize drawers; I pack my suitcases although I know I’m not leaving for at least a month.
Quarantine happened. I did what I was supposed to do. In the little island of our apartment, I organized and made a schedule. I make my bed, I drink coffee, I exercise, I eat breakfast, I try to write, I exercise, I eat an early supper, I go to bed. I sweep, I scrub, I hang the laundry on our porch, I roast vegetables. Little effort is required of me to maintain my needs. And the tasks I do, I do with a real, but really fleeting sense of accomplishment.
Why does the sameness of the my very-well-organized days, which allow me more freedom to write than I have ever had, leave me dull and wanting?
Robinson Crusoe. On the surface, the analogy is ridiculous, I know. His “quarantine” was 1000 X more restrictive than mine, but maybe there is at least one parallel with these dull days.
Crusoe’s behavior in his first months on the island was, by necessity, mechanistic. He needed to survive, to live. Ingenious in his attempts, he arranges his living space, searches, finds, and prepares food. He creates a dwelling/a life if not luxurious, at least comfortable. And, like the two of us, he lives in an emotionally closed system, his “conversation” culled from the mobius strip of his own emotions.
Until he sees the footprint in the sand.
Another person enters, and the phlegmatic world of singular survival and internal monologue changes in an instance. The book, until the footprint, is a fascinating survival guide and diary. After the footprint it becomes a story of human conflicts, racial prejudices, passions, fears, tension, values, and ultimately, friendship.
This is the point in the book that in its extreme example, illuminates in reverse, writing during quarantine.
The key is Friday. When Crusoe sees the footprint in the sand, his wooden world shifts. He is not alone! The sameness of the days in which he ingeniously builds, plants and fishes is shattered by his act of courage against the cannibals, by the presence of other humans. The emotions of human interchange enter the previously mechanistic world, where the reader saw only bursts of an emotional life. The challenges of human interactions arise: fear of others, confusion, uncertainty, demand for a courage that tests his compassion, and from then on decisions of interaction: the challenge of having power, of figuring out how to apply that power, the dance of getting to know/trust another human being, and ultimately the development of caring, not just for a built environment, but for another live person. The need to protect, the need to outwit the enemy, the need to spy and plot.
These are the things of novels, of poems, of stories. They happen in the swirl of friends, enemies, acquaintances, unknown others, and simply put, I miss them, even today in the gentle quarantine of 2020, I have a partner in this quarantine, but after years of marriage we are something of a closed system, if in fact a delightful closed system. There is nothing beyond us. We walk out disguised by mask and hat and gloves. On the street, the only dance is the quickstep when we skirt round each other as we pass. We do not meet friends, we have no misunderstandings in our half-learned Hebrew to delight or embarrass or surprise; the flesh of culture / conflicts/ friendships has dissipated — no groups gather, at the store we stand online 2 meters apart each waiting patiently, silently so unlike the crowding bustle of Israelis in pre-COVID times. Walking the few hundred meters we are allowed from the apartment, our conversation dwindles to our own private interests or questions for the pharmacist or to repeat our member number at the grocery store.
The apartment could be an apartment anywhere, the air blows through, the laundry gets done, dinner is fixed. I attend to my / our needs in the most ingenious way I can imagine, but the challenges that excite my emotions, aggravate my heart, and ignite my imagination are the people, the culture around me – and this is true no matter where I live. It’s not that I don’t see people; it’s that I’m not involved with them, with their stories. It’s that I can’t touch them, can’t see my children’s expressive faces in person, laugh with my grandchildren, hug my friend’s on greeting. The gestures on the screen are flat; the tears of stories are pretend. This isolation, so much richer than Crusoe’s hardwearing years is deadening.
So, I’ve decided: I’m just in the wooden days. I’ll keep the basics together and look forward to a tumbled, chaotic, haywire flesh-and-blood reality where, when I want to write, I have to waltz through the luscious flow of life.