Digging It Up: Notebook For a Novel

I spent an hour this morning reading my old journals. I was looking for the account of a specific trip, but almost immediately I was sucked into a time warp that spit me out in a cozy little Dutch bakery in Ballard, circa 1999. In rushed the drizzly Seattle autumn, its golden October roses, ships coming and going in the city's many canals, and the essence of my old neighborhood with its docks and cobbled streets, and, always, that Seattle overcast warmed by the lights of a thousand coffeeshops twinkling in the distance...okay, perhaps nostalgia waxes a bit poetic...but all of it came back to me through my untidy scrawl, and with it came a profound appreciation for that time in my life, when I carried my journal with me most days, and I made time to scribble and dream in its pages. Usually tucked into a comfortable armchair in one of those coffeeshops, and espresso fueled, I chronicled daily life, sure, but also the process of writing my first novel, the unpublished Crescent. Everything about that book was rooted in the northwest, my ancestral home, and for a period of four years or so I dug into that fertile soil, read oral histories, spent weeks in the Skagit Valley, where the mythical town of Crescent lay, and pioneered my way through my first book-length manuscript.

In 2006, excerpts of some of my journals from that time were published by Impassio Press in In Pieces: An Anthology of Fragmentary Writing, under the title "Digging It Up: Notebook For a Novel." Although the journal excerpts are now more than ten years old, I still recognize the voice, excited and daunted by the prospect of writing a novel, fascinated by craft and the flow of imagination. I have grown and evolved as a writer since then, of course, and I do not spend as much time in coffeeshops as I used to. I find that I produce fewer pages of journals, and more pages of fiction. This is fine, but I miss the intimacy of those old journals, and I'm grateful that a glimpse of that world is visible for anyone who might wish to dig into it. If you'd like to read "Digging It Up," it's available at Google Books. Just go here.

In Praise of Honey

Humans have been collecting and eating it for more than ten thousand years. It was written about in cuneiform, depicted as an elixir of life in 4,000 BCE, and over the centuries many cultures have considered it a sacred, numinous substance. It is made by the same industrious insects that pollinate our fruit trees and flowers, and, as they have done for 40 million years, in the process of converting it into a non-perishable commodity, the bees augment it with vitamins, minerals, and amino acids. When we eat it raw, we receive those benefits, and we receive minimal doses of  the pollens local to where the honey was made. Eating local honey can boost our immune systems.
After living in close proximity to bee hives for the past year, my relationship with honey has bloomed, and the benefit isn't only in my taste buds. Like birding, bees connect me to my environment. I've spent hours speculating about where our backyard bees go during the day. Our landlord, whose bees these are, speculates they go to the Berkeley Aquatic Park, a greenbelt about a mile away. I plant bee-friendly flowers in my garden, and almost daily Jason and I watch the bees, whose hives are on the roof of an outbuilding behind our house. We watch them guard their hive, fly away in beautiful streams, buzz around our porchlight at night, and crawl slowly across our deck to die.
Of course we've incorporated honey into our home cuisine, over yogurt, baked in banana bread, used in glazes for poultry, and in various marmalades and jams. We eat it by the spoonful when we feel like it, and stir it into our tea. It is delicious, nourishing and somehow we can feel its ancient essence. With dear friends we've started a batch of mead using our backyard honey and plums. In nine months I'll tell you how it turned out.
Paul, our landlord, keeps hives at our house, at his house across the street, and on properties in the Sierras (that honey tastes of manzanita and blackberry), Pt. Reyes (tastes buttery, with less citrus sweetness than ours), and near Coos Bay, Oregon (we haven't yet tried that one). Through his honey I learn a little about those other environments.
A while ago I found Juliette Elkon's Honey Cookbook at the San Leandro Thrifttown, published by Knopf in 1955. It is a treasure. She collected recipes dating back to Medieval times that use honey as a primary ingredient. Here's one I haven't tried yet, but I plan to.

Russian Honey Beet Jam
1 pound beets
honey
2 preserved ginger roots, minced
almonds, sliced
Wash, peel, and cut beets into 1/2-inch slices, cook, and drain. Add one cup honey for each cup of beets and cook until thick.Flavor with ginger root and almonds. (Serve with cold meats.)

There are a lot of exotic honey recipes in the Honey Cookbook, but I have to admit that a few simple classics are very tough to beat. A toast to the glories of honey!

Photos of bees taken by Jason Swecker.

Among the Wonderful has a cover designer

My novel, Among the Wonderful, will be published in August 2011 by Steerforth Press. The seven-year preamble to that sentence was a wild, encompassing journey, one that is fodder for a future blog post. But right now I am overcome with a particular glee, one that celebrates the embodiment of a specific, strange aspect of the book: the cover. Among the Wonderful is still ethereal. It exists in zeros and ones, on virtual paper, saved somewhere inside a square icon with the file extension .doc. I know there are thousands (millions?) of Kindle users and other e-book connoisseurs who already accept the electronic medium for literature, but....not me. I dearly hope I never lose the passion I nurtured as a kid in the old Shorey's Books, in a subterranean corner of the Pike Place Market. I blew my allowance on books that just felt good in my hands: a biography of Emanuel Swedenborg with a particularly smooth leather cover; a mid-century edition of the Cupid and Psyche myth, complete with lithographs sandwiched between onion-skin paper; an oversized, cardboard-sleeved Pudd'n Head Wilson. My point is that a book's physicality mattered a great deal to me then, and even more now. I suppose during the seven years it took me to write Among the Wonderful, the book's amorphousness was sometimes a point of frustration. I couldn't hang it on the wall and invite my friends to behold it. It wasn't even propped on an easel, a tangible work-in-progress. Sure, people read parts of it, but it was just weird how invisible the whole project was. And of course I daydreamed about what the cover might look like. I came up with some ideas myself, but mostly I thought about how amazing it would be to see what imagery someone else's imagination would conjure upon reading the story. Now, amazingly, I'm on the brink of finding out.
Last week, my publisher wrote me a terribly nonchalant note to let me know that John Gall, artistic director at Vintage, will be designing my cover. (Here's a portfolio of his work.) It is one of those developments where each time I forget and then remember this amazing news, a sensation kindred to Christmas morning when you're seven years old comes over me. I am honored, thrilled, and grateful. Huzzah! Gall's covers are modern, surprising, and clearly the work of an inspired mind. I can't wait to see what he dreams up for the book. Stay tuned for more news on the book's journey into print.

I put down my Paul Harding novel for two minutes and some wiseacre in the den got his hands on it.

Vendela Vida's LET THE NORTHERN LIGHTS ERASE YOUR NAME

A waterfall of effusive praise spills across the first four pages of my paperback edition of Vendela Vida's novel, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. Compelling. Economical. Lush. Spare. Unflinching. Precise. Searing. It is a somewhat confusing thesaurus (how can something be both economical and lush? Perhaps this is a failure of my own imagination) and for some reason it left me skeptical. It was as if all the praise roused my inner contrarian and I wasn't on the book's side at the beginning. Ultimately, I liked it. I didn't love it, but there is so much to admire in Vida's skill as a prosodist that it balanced out the elements of the story that strained my credulity.

SPOILER: Here's the basic plot outline, minus the climactic finale: Clarissa's mother abandoned her when Clarissa was 14. Clarissa is now in her late twenties. After her father dies she finds out that he wasn't her biological father. Then she finds out that her fiance knew about that and didn't tell her. So she goes to Finnish Lapland to find her biological father (without telling anyone back home). Turns out the person named on her birth certificate as her father isn't her father either. Turns out her mother was raped and the rapist is Clarissa's father. Turns out Clarissa, too, was raped (when she was a teenager). Clarissa discovers she is pregnant with her fiance's child. Incredibly, Clarissa finds her long-lost mother in Lapland. Her mother ignores her and, when forced to acknowledge her, reinforces what she made clear when she left in the first place: she doesn't want to be a mom. And on and on the story goes, in a tight spiral that reiterates its favorite theme after every revolution: Major Communication Breakdowns Hurt and Define Clarissa.

While I did find the plot a bit too taut (everyone, from the shuttle bus driver in Helsinki to the dudes Clarissa meets in the mini mart have a pointedly meaningful role to play) and melodramatic, and the evocation of Finnish Lapland was patchy, Vida's prose is mesmerizing. In Clarissa Vida has created a voice that is direct, unwavering, and brazen. I read the book in two great gulps over the period of two days, and part of the reason I couldn't put it down was because Clarissa felt like that girl in sixth grade with black fingernail polish who talked back to teachers and dared me to go up to boys I didn't know and ask for their phone numbers. Clarissa must navigate an unthinkable situation. She takes powerful, direct action, action with high-stakes consequences. She strides through the novel with a force that is daunting and delicious.

The other reason I didn't want to put down the book was the charm of Vida's similes. Here's my favorite: Recently, everything around me felt familiar yet amiss, like the first time you ride in the back seat of your own car. It is a simple, perfect simile. It illustrates exactly why writers should continue to employ them. It points straight to something unmistakable. After I read it I was almost embarrassed by the intimacy I suddenly felt with the author, because I know exactly the feeling she references. So did my boyfriend when I read the sentence aloud to him - he smiled and nodded, and so too would any car owner who has found himself in that weird backseat position. The novel is littered with such jewels. Collecting them is the novel's primary pleasure. In the end, it is a pleasure well worth the read.