“Deborah Ager’s Midnight Voices takes us to a place not unlike midnight itself, to a precarious edge between tenderness and unkempt desire, between a good laugh and the brutal truth, between the day’s stark glare and clarity, and the murk and backwater of deep night. Intelligent, subtle, uncanny, and playful, these poems, at each turn and turning, take me by surprise. The work is beautiful, exact, and exacting: it deserves and commands our attention.”—Eric Pankey

The book Being Peace by Thich Nhat Hanh was recommended to me recently. The passage below resonated with me, and I thought I’d share it here in case you ever wonder if writing during sad times is important, is worth it, is something you should continue to do.

Many of us worry about the situation of the world. We don’t know when the bombs will explode. We feel that we are on the edge of time. As individuals, we feel helpless, despairing. The situation is so dangerous, injustice is so widespread, the danger is close. In this kind of a situation, if we panic, things will only become worse. We need to remain calm, to see clearly….

I like to use the example of a small boat crossing the Gulf of Siam. In Vietnam, there are many people, called boat people, who leave the country in small boats. Often the boats are caught in rough seas or storms, the people may panic, and boats may sink. But if even one person aboard can remain calm, lucid, knowing what to do and what not to do, he or she can help the boat survive. His or her expression – face, voice – communicates clarity and calmness, and people have trust in that person. They will listen to what he or she says. One such person can save the lives of many.

Our world is something like a small boat. Compared with the cosmos, our planet is a very small boat. We are about to panic because our situation is no better than the situation of the small boat in the sea. You know that we have more than 50,000 nuclear weapons. Humankind has become a very dangerous species. We need people who can sit still and be able to smile, who can walk peacefully. We need people like that in order to save us.

All of them play an important part in the story Lillian Hellman writes about herself in Pentimento (her memoir). The fact I’d heard repeated about her again and again was that she stood up to Joe McCarthy in the 50s.

I picked this book up at my grandmother’s while cleaning out her belongings. After a long day of sorting through and then hauling my grandmother’s clothing to the thrift shop, I spent a few hours going through books. Reading books is how I’m going to grieve and get through this. And what a joy it’s been.

As soon as the mafia was mentioned, I knew exactly why my grandmother liked this book. She always loved a good story, and she especially loved a good story with a spy or mafia member thrown in for spice and additional mystery.

Hellman weaves a story about her cousin, who came here from Germany. Eventually, the cousin disappears and the husband is left on his own. No one knows where the cousin has gone. One day, Hellman spots her cousin walking into a “store.” The store is really a front for a mafia operation, and the new man in her life is a major player in the mafia (who later ends up chopped into pieces behind the store).

As they say, “that’s not all.” In another episode, Hellman is asked by a strange man to help carry $50,000 into Nazi Germany on her way to Moscow. The tale involves being followed, sending secret messages to people standing on train platforms, wearing a fur hat stuffed with money, and then being followed some more.

As I continue to read this book, I find it hard to believe all of this drama happened to one person. Since Hellman was a lady of drama, it somehow seems fitting.

One time, I was given the responsibility to change someone’s dressing. The person had had abdominal surgery. The nurse stood to my left with white — oh-so-white — bandages and peeled back the bandages hiding the open wound.

I woke up in the ER with someone wanting to check my head. I’d fainted.

They decided I would not be the one to change the person’s dressing. Thank goodness.

Flash forward. A friend starts telling me about her abdominal surgery to remove a tumor. I have to sit down.

I’m reading a memoir about a medical student’s experience of dissecting a corpse. Why? First, I had no idea it would be this graphic. If I lie down in bed while reading, I should be okay.

Second, reading this book turned out to worth it for the following Buddhist nugget alone…(which proves you find what you need when you need it).

Thich Nhat Hanh says:

“We must look death in the face, recognize and accept it, just as we look at and accept life.

“The Buddhist Sutra on Mindfulness speaks about the meditation on the corpse: meditate
on the decomposition of the body, how the body bloats and turns violet, how it is eaten by worms until only bits of blood and flesh still cling to the bones, meditate up to teh point where only white bones remain, which in turn are slowly worn away and turn into dust. Meditate like that, knowing that your own body will undergo the same process. Meditate on the corpse until you are calm and at peace, until your mind and heart are light and tranquil and a smile appears on your face. Thus, by overcoming revulsion and fear, life will be seen as infinitely precious, every second of it worth living. And it is not just our own lives that are recognize as precious but the lives of every other person, every other person, every other being, every other reality…We see that life and death are but two face of Life and that without both, Life is not possible, just as two sides of a coin are needed for the coin to exist.

Can I step out of this blog post for a minute to say that Sarah Manguso has some gorgeous dresses? Check this out —>http://www.sarahmanguso.com/about.html And then take a look at the latest P&W for more groovy shots of her.

The whole reason I’m writing this post is to talk about the writing process. Manguso says that she wrote her memoir in a series of vignettes while at an artist’s colony. She made rules for herself that included not worrying about what order she wrote the vignettes in and writing 1000 words per day. In one month, she had the book.

Lest that sound oversimplified and make you feel bad you’ve taken 10 years to write your own book, keep in mind everyone has a different process. Also, the article mentions she’d had these ideas in mind for seven years, so ideas had been percolating for a long time.

I really, really like this idea of writing vignettes. Without calling it that, that’s what I’d already started to do with a prose book idea I have. I decided there were not enough books on a topic I want to know more about, so I’m writing one.

Vignettes are manageable. When balancing a FT job, mothering, wife-ing and all my other -ings, vignettes seem downright easy.

I had not been making the writing a regularly scheduled event. My life is rather unpredictable with a schedule that changes a little bit each day, and I’m not sure schedules work well for me anyway. I’ll give it a go though.

What do you think about creating a book by writing vignettes? What are your thoughts?

Hey, the New York Times is okay, too.

Speaking of anthologies, I attended the No Tell Motel Books Party at Reb’s house this past weekend. I got to listen to the likes of Laurel Snyder, Reb Livingston herself, Hugh Steinberg and Jill Alexander Essbaum. Gosh, I am ticked a Reb — not photos of moi. Seriously, she’s in NYC this week promoting poets and poetry books from her press. Reston on Saturday, and New York on Monday. Where does she find the energy?

I’d like to have bought everyone’s book. It just was not possible, so I came away with Laurel’s. I knew her the longest, so it seemed only fair. I also got my very own copy of the No Tell Anthology (Second Floor).

Since the Santa Ana essay was published in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a collection of her essays, I looked for that book in the library. The catalog indicated the book would be on the shelf. Exciting! I was thrilled to get the book on the first try.

Of course, the book was nowhere to be found. –sad– Then, I found that Slouching Towards Bethlehem was collected in a larger book of her essays, and the library really did have that. — happy again! –

The book waits for me on my bedside table. The book is coated with a layer of white dust. The white dust came from the ceiling. We patched the ceiling. We sanded the ceiling. We used an electric sander with a strong motor. The strong motor strongly pushed and blew white dust all over the house — even to the second floor.

Do you understand what that means?

To reach the second floor, the white ceiling spackle dust had to float down, float across the room, turn the corner and then make its way up the stairs and towards the second-floor ceiling before it could fall gently to the floor and handrail. How? How did it do that?

In the meantime, I’m reading a book of Franzen’s essays. He writes about the post office in Chicago during the time when mountains of mail were being found in the homes of postal employees, under bridges, in cars, etc.

How many of you have had trouble with the post office lately?

Since I send out so much mail for 32 Poems — my life is glamorous — the employees know me. So far, the five-year relationship I’ve had with most of the people there has resulted in little more than a coloring book and four crayons for O (when O wanted to draw with the screen-signing plastic pen).

Recently, the post office shut down my post office box. This bill is paid only one time per year, so it’s not as easy to remember as a monthly bill. That’s why the post office promises to give 20 days notice. However, I received only 10 days notice according to the rubber date stamp they placed on my bill. Since I was out of town during those 10 days in August, the post office shut down the 32 Poems PO box and returned every single piece of mail to its sender.

No one apologized. One woman even started to argue with me that it was not really 20 days until I showed her the printed document — printed by the post office! — that clearly indicates the 20 days notice.

I had to write contributors and ask them to re-send publication agreements. It was a time-consuming mess for all involved, except the post office.

What did the post office do?

They charged me a $14 fee to re-open my PO box.

I’ve tried to have this fee refunded and the manager won’t return my calls.

More recently, we were told the wrong price to mail out a 32 Poems. We’ve now spent at least $100 on wasted postage to mail the subscriptions. I doubt we’ll be refunded. This is enough that I want to record all of my conversations with people there and get them to sign documents saying how much it costs to send an item.

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