I knew it was coming. Skunks on the roads, winds whipping up pollen, green grass alongside snow patches, buds on the trees. The light is different, too, coming in earlier each day to wake me up and shining with a little bit more pink to it. If we’re lucky we’ll still get plenty of snow, but chances are good we’re not slated for any more of that bone-crunching cold that December brought us. The prairie dogs seem to know this, and the fat robins that poke around looking for worms.

Each year I make a mental note when I see my first signs of spring. And in the fall, too: tarantulas crossing toward the Gorge; elk heading toward their wintering grounds over on San Antonio Mountain. If I were better organized, I’d write all these things down.

That kind of data is hugely relevant for scientists studying climate change and its effects on the life cycles of plants and animals. Luckily, there are thousands of people keeping track of when plants bloom, when birds arrive, when mammals migrate, when insects emerge, and more. The more dedicated of these citizen-scientists contribute to the National Phenology Network. Here’s how they describe their work:

The USA National Phenology Network (USA-NPN) monitors the influence of climate on the phenology of plants, animals, and landscapes. We do this by encouraging people to observe phenological events like leaf out, flowering, migrations, and egg laying, and by providing a place for people to enter, store, and share their observations. We also work with researchers to develop tools and techniques to use these observations to support a wide range of decisions made routinely by citizens, managers, scientists, and others, including decisions related to allergies, wildfires, water, and conservation.

Anybody can share phenological data. Getting a fine-scale, local record of the timing of natural cycles is too broad a job for research scientists only, so the people who share their data are crucial to the effort.

Even though I don’t keep a written record (or not yet, anyway), the effort I spend paying attention to the timing of natural events gives me such pleasure. I like to notice when the cottonwood leaves unfurl and let loose their exquisite odor. Keeping an eye on the water in the river, on the birds who pass through, on when the ground thaws and the skies change, keeps me connected to my animal body. For a little bit, anyway, it reminds me to get out of my head and into my senses.

So maybe I don’t need to worry about recording the data. Maybe, for now, I just need to get out and live it.

December 11 would be Grace Paley’s 89th birthday. I’ve assigned her story “Faith in the Afternoon” for a writing workshop I’m teaching this weekend, and re-reading it I’m just as dazzled by her brilliance as I was the first time I encountered her work. Grace was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, and no writer who cares about the shining possibilities of language can afford to skip her magnificent stories. In honor of Grace, I’m re-posting a piece I wrote for this blog a couple of years ago.

We lost a great writer last year.  As the remembrances and assessments of Grace Paley continue to roll in, I’m taken aback by the degree to which they focus on her activism and her positive human qualities.  They paint a portrait of a woman beloved for her kindness and conviction, for her good-heartedness and generosity.  This is the  Grace Paley whom Donald Barthelme once called, with respect and affection, an essential “troublemaker”.  Combined, they form a eulogy of love.

I don’t miss Grace Paley because I loved her (although I did, and deeply).  I miss her because her passing means I’ll never get to read a new Grace Paley story.  And that thought cuts to the quick.

Of all the writers whose work has influenced my own, Grace Paley stands head and shoulders above the others for one primary reason:  she captured the human voice so accurately and so unflinchingly that it made me want to abandon all other occupations and try my hardest to hear – and to collect – as well.  Her ear was exquisitely tuned to the nuances of the heart as expressed in the music of our language, and her success at capturing both takes my breath away.  Open any story to any page – to any line – and you’ll find poetry of a level we haven’t seen before in narrative.  (In “story”, as Grace insisted it be called.  There was nothing precious about her view of literature.  She wanted, I believe, to tap in to the unruly river of generations – millennia – of stories, not to be trapped in the ghetto of “fiction”.)

Take, for instance, this, from “Faith in the Afternoon”:

As for you, fellow independent thinker of the Western Bloc, if you have anything sensible to say, don’t wait.  Shout it out loud right this minute.  In twenty years, give or take a spring, your children will be lying in sandboxes all over the world, their ears to the ground, listening for signals from long ago.  In fact, kneeling now on the great plains in a snootful of gray dust, what do you hear?  Pigs oinking, potatoes peeling, Indians running, winter coming?

Faith’s head is under the pillow nearly any weekday midnight, asweat with dreams, and she is seasick with ocean sounds, the squealing wind stuck in its rearing tail by high tide.

That is because her grandfather, scoring the salty sea, skated for miles along the Baltic’s icy beaches, with a frozen herring in his pocket.  And she, all ears, was born in Coney Island.

It is only with great difficulty that I can stop excerpting from a story I rank among the very best work of any time.  She tempered a smart-alecky attitude with enormous depth and sensitivity, harnessing the techniques for such that we’ve come to take for granted (but rarely see applied with such finesse):  launching into the middle of the conversation; granting broad freedom to a shaky narrator; flinging language like paint splats that require standing in the middle distance to perceive the picture as a whole.

Grace Paley builds a world.  It is the New York City of the late(r) twentieth century, when social patterns were shifting, men and women were redefining their relations to one another and to their parents and to their children, and it is never far from the old country that spit the ancestors – like watermelon seeds from the curled tongue of a willful child – to this continent.  More than any other writer I know, she captures the essence of a place as the combined dreams and loves and failures of its people.  She will not walk away from the hardest things:  from rape, from murder, from racial violence, from the backhanded brutality we inflict on one another.  But neither will she deny the strength of love or the astonishing things that can happen to bind us together.  That is her place, those are her themes – and I think they’re so large, so compelling, that they interfere with our ability to adequately assess her technical contribution to the literature of our age.

But let’s just take a quick look at a few of those technical accomplishments.  She flaunted quotation marks and mastered dialogue that was simultaneously pitch-perfect and loaded with multiple meaning.  She was funny – no, she was hilarious! – in her dry manipulation of the power inherent in compact poetic contradiction.  She managed a sustained omniscient voice that sparkled with brilliance at the same time that it ducked low enough to let the individual voices and peculiarities of the characters to shine through. And, indeed, she hosted a whole slew of characters in each story, captured each one succinctly, and generously gave even the most minor the opportunity to knock us off our feet.

As a young writer, I was dazzled by the music of her language.  I’m still dazzled.  And I’m still learning.  Yes, she was a grand lady; the one time I met her in person I was overwhelmed with her warmth and kindness toward me.  For that I love her.  But for her stories, I thank her – and now that there will be no more, I miss her dearly.

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Fiction
Wrecker
By Summer Wood
Bloomsbury USA
304 pages, hardcover, $20

Family doesn’t have to mean marriage and blood ties. Unconventional connections in a world of tough breaks are at the heart of Wrecker, a page-turner about a group of hippieish individualists living together. The peace-and-love gestalt of the 1960s is reexamined from a fresh angle in this emotionally resonant novel from Taos-based author Summer Wood, who previously wrote Arroyo (Chronicle Books, 2002), and teaches at University of New Mexico–Taos’s Summer Writers’ Conference.

The year is 1969. The place is Northern California’s Lost Coast, in the wilds of rain-soaked Humboldt County, described by Wood as an area “high on the California coast that jutted into the Pacific and sheltered bear and mountain lion in a kind of sleepy, soggy paradise of the ages.” The characters are dropouts who cobble together a collective existence chopping firewood, weaving textiles, farming, and running a local co-op grocery. Into their midst arrives an abandoned three-year-old boy, Wrecker, whose unwed mom has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for dealing drugs in San Francisco, and whose only relative is his Uncle Len, a taciturn logger ill-suited to raising a child. Len’s hippie neighbors take the boy in, each nurturing Wrecker in his or her own way. A motley bunch intent on being true to themselves, they don’t spare Wrecker disappointment, but they raise him with love and compassion.

Wood adeptly switches points of view among a half-dozen characters as she examines their intricate relationships, and redefines and broadens the concept of family. There’s nothing formulaic about this complex novel; it’s a literary exploration of how love breaks us and heals us. Wood makes enthralling use of the lush setting, describing how Len avoids redwoods because “It took more than one man to handle a redwood, and something about the tree spooked him, the big crowns casting the forest floor in a kind of twilight gloom and the wind in the dead branches above sounding like a dry hinge on a barn door.” Then there’s Melody, who awkwardly steps forward to take responsibility for Wrecker: “Melody thought about him every day. Not just about the things he had done but the things he would do. The kind of man he would become. She thought about the way his face opened and closed like a shutter when sorrow or anger or happiness ran across it.”

Characters come and go, government laws threaten, and Wrecker grows up. It’s all told in highly crafted prose that wastes not a word and is infused with sensitive insight. Wrecker is an unforgettable novel.

Wolf Schneider has been editor in chief of the Santa Fean, editor of Living West, and blogs at www.wolfschneiderusa.com.

Thank you, Wolf Schneider.

THANKS to everybody who has come out to see me, bought the book, offered good wishes, and otherwise extended support! I’ll post photos from the book tour soon, but for now I wanted to share some links to interviews, guest posts, and such.

These blogs and websites are wonderful. Check out some of their other content while you’re there. I’m honored to be included.

http://www.largeheartedboy.com/blog/archive/2011/02/book_notes_summ.html

http://writersinnerjourney.com/2011/02/3-q-author-interview-on-voice-rejection-story-summer-wood.html

http://www.guidetoliteraryagents.com/blog/

http://mjroseblog.typepad.com/buzz_balls_hype/2011/02/hand-yelling-wrecker-by-summer-wood.html

http://catchingdays.cynthianewberrymartin.com/2011/02/15/wrecker/

http://blog.readinggroupchoices.com/content/blog/barbara/11/february/author-bookcase-summer-wood-author-wrecker?page=1

http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/shenderson/2011/02/summer-wood-author-of-wrecker/

http://www.bookbrowse.com/reviews/index.cfm/book_number/2524/wrecker

original art by Sarah Hart

Many places have their iconic crop.  In New Mexico, where I live, it’s the green chile.  In Iowa it’s corn; in Georgia, the peach; upstate New York, apples; in Orange County – well, duh.

And northern California?

Okay.  So blackberries may not be the first crop to come to mind when you think of Humboldt County.  For me, though, blackberries epitomize the place.  They are luscious and juicy and rich with flavor, and they spring up rampant and uncultivated along the wild margins of civilization.  You have to work a little to get to the best bushes, and you might get a little scratched up along the way.  But you know it will be worth it, because when that fat dark fruit squishes against your taste buds and floods you with everything that is good and sweet and real, it brings as well an edge of tartness that grounds you firmly in the here and now.

Wrecker, which comes out this February, is set in amid the giant trees of northern California’s magical Lost Coast.  That’s Humboldt County, mainly.  And a lot of the trips I’ve taken to Humboldt, both before and during writing Wrecker, have included encounters with wild blackberries.  A few have included encounters with that other iconic crop.  But the legal system frowns on that; and besides, this book is about something else.

It’s about the thorny path and sweet rewards of raising a kid.  It’s about love in a world where not everything is perfect – some mothers land in prison, some friends disappear into the woods – but where, in spite of its tendency to break your heart, love is the only thing that has a shot at saving you.

I’ve asked the friendly people at Mad River Farm to put together some special jars of wild Humboldt blackberry jam.  It’s an essential ingredient for the blackberry jam cake I’ll be serving at Wrecker readings and booksignings.  For every jar they sell, they make a donation to the Humboldt County Library (go, guys!).  If you’d like to get some for yourself, you can reach Marika at 707-822-0248, or go to their web page at www.mad-river-farm.com.  I’ll be sharing recipes in future posts.

Enjoy responsibly, as the beer ads say.  In this case, I think it means washing the jam off your hands before you touch any books.

What foods say “home” to you?

photo by James G. Gehling for the NY Times

Looks kinda like a gang sign, no? A tribal tattoo? Something from The Matrix?

Actually, it’s a fossil from a time we know very little about, in terms of biology.  The Precambrian era was a very long hunk of time — about 4 billion years, to be imprecise — that predated the explosion of life characterizing the Cambrian period, 542 to 490 million years ago.  An article in yesterday’s NY Times by Sean B. Carroll describes recent work by geologists and paleontologists to access fossils prior to that period of intense proliferation.  In places like the Namibian Desert and the evocatively named Mistaken Point on the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland, they’ve discovered fossils that provide interesting, if puzzling, clues to the evolution of life from simple single-celled creatures to the more complex animals with bilateral body symmetry that showed up during the Cambrian.

This is news? Rock lays on rock, right?  Shouldn’t they just be able to look lower to find fossils from an older period?  After all, we know life dates as far back as three and a half billion years.

The trouble is,  there’s a lengthy period of the earth’s history — roughly 1.2 billion years — that’s gone AWOL.  Lost and unaccounted-for.  And disappeared with it are the trace evidence of life — the fossils — that might clarify the transition from billions of years of unicellular simplicity to the startling development of structural and functional complexity.

Geologists call this (writers, you will love this) The Great Unconformity.  To me that conjures pictures of a turn-of-the-century magician, a man out of step with his time in a mysterious and possibly lucrative and alluringly shady way, who must perpetually dodge efforts by the more boring conformities to toss him in jail and throw away the key.

No, no.  The Great Unconformity for geologists is a gap in the rock record.  You can actually lay your hand on it.  Go to the outcrop on highway 337 near the Doc Long Picnic Area in the Sandia Mountains east of Albuquerque.  Lay your hand so your thumb points down and you can touch granite 1.4 billion years old with your lower digit; your pinkie will rest on sandstone from the Mississippian Period, roughly a billion years younger.

The significant distinguishing factor?  Precambrian rock almost everywhere is devoid of fossils.  No evidence of life.  While the massive sediments that accrued while this neck of the wood lay under vast inland seas are teeming with fossils of creatures who roamed the murky depths and crawled up onto the shores.

The Great Unconformity.  No-life to rampant life.  Ever remind you of your writing?

Whoa, now.  I know.  Hell of a leap.  But, still:  though the analogy is far from watertight, I think there’s something interesting in thinking about how those sometimes dull and awkward first drafts can morph into writing that’s possessed of a life of its own; something bigger, somehow, than the me what made it.

It feels like that to me, sometimes.  A quickening.  The quicksilver leap from raw material to a thing of beauty and intelligence and for which I can take only some of the credit.

And maybe not so quick, really.  Because the only way I know to get from A to B is through tuned-in exploration, patient excavation, and a really good dose of luck.

Not unlike the paleontologists who have hunted down the mystery fossils in the land lost to time.

We took field trips two days of the five, but the other three days found us inside at a conference table. We talked about place in writing, traded stories about specific places in our personal memories, put pen to paper for timed writing exercises, and assembled a list of books that offer valuable insights to the writer wishing to access the power of place in her work. I diligently wrote those titles on a large flip chart we kept handy throughout the week. I less than diligently forgot to transfer the list to a notebook before leaving at the end of the week — !!!!– so what follows is an incomplete record.

You’ll all have to pitch in.  Anybody remember others?  Any readers want to add personal favorites to the list?

Here, then, are ten books I’ve found particularly useful in thinking about writing place:

The Meadow. James Galvin. I return to this novel every few years for Galvin’s acute observations, breathtaking prose, and sheer love of a particular place and the man who embodies it in human form. Read more about Galvin’s craft here.

Home Ground. Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney (catch a review of Home Ground here). A lexicon of terms Americans have used to describe physical places.

Mayordomo. Stanley Crawford. We talked about how work offers a useful lens on place, and this memoir of serving as head honcho for a New Mexican village acequia — the network of ditches that water the agriculture in this area — is a good example.

Power. Linda Hogan. This novel, set in Florida, is as mysterious and unsettling as all of her work. Read Linda Hogan and the power of place for more background.

Wisdom Sits in Places. Keith Basso. An anthropologist’s account of decades of work with the Western Apache, whose landscape is annotated by stories that remind people how to live.

Broken. Lisa Jones. A recent work of non-fiction about a quadriplegic horse gentler whose powers extend to healing people in the harsh and beautiful windswept plains of Wyoming. Compelling.

Divisadero. Michael Ondaatje. This novel works the power of the weather — in this case, a rogue blizzard — for all it’s worth.

Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. Grace Paley. Stories of urban New York by a modern master. Find out why I miss Grace Paley, who died in 2007.

The Things They Carried. Tim O’Brien. Everything essential about a small group of soldiers in Vietnam is revealed by — you guessed it — the things they carried. An astonishing novel.

Invisible Cities. Italo Calvino. Calvino imagines his way along Marco Polo’s route in a series of short bursts of brilliance.

What titles have inspired you?

The stack by my bedside grows. I just picked up Marilynne Robinson’s ABSENCE OF MIND, which sounds a bit like a murder mystery title but is instead a meditation on the tension between science and religion. Being a science geek with a decidedly non-empirical approach to the world, I’m pretty excited to read what she has to say on this topic.

Robinson is one of our finest novelists writing today. Wait; that sounded lukewarm, and I am scalding hot in my appreciation for this writer’s work. I read GILEAD straight through, and then I turned back to the start and read it all over again. HOUSEKEEPING; HOME — these are master works by a writer who marries an achingly beautiful approach to language to a penetrating inquiry into the nature of morality, particularly as it pertains to human relationships.

And who writes a damn good story.

Speaking of which — I’ve just finished two of those.  Susan Breen‘s THE FICTION CLASS came out in 2008 and I’ve just now read it.  Breen is one of those rare writers who can make you laugh all the way through and then fell you with the earned sentiment at the end.  This novel follows a woman — Arabella Hicks, named for the heroine of a romance novel — who teaches fiction to a colorful assortment of beginners in New York City while juggling the demands of her aging, ailing mother.  Wry, sly, and with not a touch of meanness, THE FICTION CLASS made me laugh, made me tear up, made me laugh again.  I developed a lasting fondness for the characters and for Arabella herself, an old-fashioned and at the same time thoroughly contemporary woman doing her bumbling best to make sense of a world through the stories it offers her.  Extra pleasure for anyone who’s ever taught fiction.

I turned from NYC of THE FICTION CLASS to the Los Angeles and Salton Sea of  CUT AWAY, a short and breathtaking novel by Catherine Kirkwood and published by the inimitable Red Hen Press. Kirkwood has the corner on stunning sentences; this novel may be short in pages, but it’s long on poetry. Surefooted, inquiring, cool in the very best manner, CUT AWAY follows three women whose lives intersect as each gives chase to a missing teenager, a girl who fled her home in search of a clearer understanding of her own identity. Each of these adult women, too, seeks to understand who she is beneath the multiple disguises she herself wears. Los Angeles may be the city of hard surfaces, but it’s the arid, unforgiving landscape of the Salton Sea that serves up the most accurate mirror for these characters — and Kirkwood’s prose is a match for that unrelenting honesty, yielding pleasure at every turn.

You reading anything good, lately?  Or has the world outside snatched your time, too?

photo by Kathy Namba

Yesterday morning we woke up to spring snow, a layer of white that melted well before noon. Beautiful! Except for the fact that we’ve got apricot trees growing in our new digs here in Taos, and the branches are loaded with delicate white blossoms that mean a bumper crop of fruit this summer — IF they can make it through spring without freezing.

It’s a long shot, I know.  One good year in seven are the general odds for apricots in Taos County.  Last year we were swimming in fruit, so I ought to quit being so greedy and just enjoy the snow.

Hanging out among the blooming branches of fruit trees is one of my most favorite, how’d-you-get-so-lucky kind of ways to spend an idle hour. Bees buzzing, sun streaming past the petals, the smell that’s too earthy to call ambrosia. Who wants to go to heaven when you can sit in the crotch of an apple tree here and let heaven settle around you?

My friend Lucy Gonzales wrote about that experience in a writing class I taught in Questa in 2002. Eight years later, she’s got a book out — Treasures of My Valley:  Humor and Survival in Early 20th Century San Luis Valley – that describes not just the joys of spring but also the hardships of growing up native New Mexican, and the resourcefulness and cooperation it inspired. She’s got tales of picking wild raspberries, wearing bloomers sewn from flour sacks, driving a tractor, raising five kids, burying a husband. She’s got a lot of stories. Lucy is 92.

But the story I love best is the way she describes her “secret place.”

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, about secrets in general and secret places in particular. One of the most provocative panels I attended at AWP considered the use of other people’s private details in fiction. What kind of responsibility do we have to the owners of those details when we borrow them for our own work?

Put another way, how much respect should we pay to the privacy of other people’s personal lives?

And places? Even our own places? Can we describe them without revealing their location? Can I say what they mean to me without insisting they mean the same for someone else?

I almost didn’t go to the panel.  Me? I’m hugely respectful of other people’s privacy (I thought). I rarely use details that arise directly from experience, my own or anyone else’s (I thought).  When I write, I take the kernel of a thought or an experience and cultivate it in my imagination (“culture it in a petri dish” is probably a more apt analogy, given the messy state of my mind) so that what emerges will, I HOPE, resound with the emotional truth of the original impulse while bearing no identifiable relation to that specific motivating detail.

But I went, and realized … all that “no sir, not me” stuff? Kinda bullshit.

All writers do it. Autobiographical or not — and I land far on the “not” end of the spectrum — we use the raw stuff of our daily lives as grist for the mill.

So the moral issue stands, for all of us. And sometimes it means a hard, hard choice. Abandon the felicitous detail — the one perfect capsule of meaning that motivates the whole story — or risk treading on something deeply valued by someone else.

Is there a way that the transformative power of art justifies this kind of theft? That’s not a rhetorical question. I’m really asking.

‘Cause, the way it feels to me? If I use a secret — my own, or someone else’s — I’m risking some kind of bad karma. I’m risking having that thought or secret or experience taken away from me.  Door closed.  Story over.

Oddly enough, I excuse memoirists from this exchange — on the basis that we each own our own interpretation of our personal history. Memoir carries in its membership rules the one that says:  this is how I see it.

In fiction, we are doing something different.

Aren’t we?