Coming through better after 50—even after 60

I've discovered a great ever-changing, fast-paced blog that discovered me. It's all about discovery and, as Yogi Berra told us in his wisdom that remains so quotable, "It ain't over till it's over."

Go to Better after 50 to take a look at the piece I wrote for Felice Shapiro based on my memoir and more (Yes, I tell more ...) and to discover the amazing Felice Shapiro who owns this blog and runs conferences that may interest you. These occur in both Boston and Manhattan.

Felice gets around.

Community is everything. Connecting helps us maintain our humanity. This is a site men and women will want to visit. This is a site where women write and tell what men need to know.

Although Felice (Bless you!) found me, you can find her. Read about Felice's mission.

Mary Tabor to speak about the writing journey

The Wednesday Morning Group  has invited me to speak. The WMG is a weekly meeting of professional women, men and parents who gather in a spirit of mutual support, camaraderie, and intellectual curiosity to hear and interact with stimulating guest speakers and each other.

When: March 28, 2012, from 10 to 11 a.m., coffee and bagels are served at 9:30 a.m.

Where: Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
             9601 Cedar Lane, Bethesda, Maryland 20814-4099
              Tel: 301-493-8300    Fax: 301-897-5713
               e-mail: office@CedarLane.org

What I'll talk about: Raising the Curtain: The story of my journey to my life's work though love and loss. Two books have been part of this process and a third will be published this summer.

Buy the book and read more about it

Buy the book and read more about it

The third book is a novel, Who by Fire, ten years in the making and it's coming soon...

I look forward to an exchange with all those who attend. I like to dialogue, not lecture, and I like to cut to the bone, raise the curtain on the process and get to the heart of the matter: Living, loving and working.

Book party for (Re)Making Love: A Memoir

A night of "Wine, Women & Writing" for (Re)Making Love: A Memoir. If you like any of the above and would like to attend, let me know... Wednesday, March 14, 7 pm at my place. Write me at mary@maryltabor.com to attend. Guys and gals, lots of goodies, including great wine, and a talk about writing, loving and living.

The party is being given by Caroline and Rob Reich and Lori Welch. Lori Welch writes a column for The Alexandria Town Crier. She has read and discusses the book in her March column. This link will be good for this month, but then you can read her newest column. Here's the link for Singles Space.

Janis Greve tells the truth about Breast Cancer and bras

I have the pleasure of introducing you to Janis Greve. We met on, of all places, Twitter. She bought, read and loved (Re)Making Love: A Memoir. We decided to talk and talk we did. Our minds and hearts met. Janis is writing a memoir and posting on her blog. She writes the underbelly of her journey with cancer.

In humor and in pathos, Greve invents herself. Part of that process must crush the self in order to reveal.

I offer in introduction, and for all who stop here to read and consider the writing process, the wise words of writer, philosopher and teacher Hélène Cixous:

Between the writer and his or her family the question is always one of departing while remaining present, of being absent while in full presence, of escaping, of abandon. It is both utterly banal and the thing we don’t want to know or say. A writer has no children; I have no children while I write. When I write I escape myself, uproot myself, I am a virgin; I leave from within my own house and don’t return. The moment I pick up my pen—a magical gesture—I forget all the people I love; an hour later they are not born and I have never known them. Yet we do return. But for the duration of the journey we are killers. (Not only when we write, when we read too. Writing and reading are not separate, reading is a part of writing. A real reader is a writer. A real reader is on the way to writing.)            —Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing

 

Janis Greve is a professor of autobiography and advisor of English majors at UMass Amherst. She’s written and published both literary criticism and poetry, though presently she channels her writing into her blog. Among the things that have shaped her personhood, she has had breast cancer. She writes about this and the tribulations of growing older as a woman, conveying, she hopes, some truthful things.




Goodbye Secrets, Goodbye Bra
by Janis Greve

I had no business shopping at Victoria’s Secret. After all, I eschew their catalogues, the sexed-up models, the soft-porn poses luring young women into seeing themselves as objects of male desire. The stores have always seemed strangely discordant—all those impeccably trained, fresh-faced sales clerks whose job it is to mother you, a middle-aged woman, into a new bra, fooling you into believing that the pink and red lights and shelves of slinky panties were the natural setting for such an undertaking.

Why, two years ago, I chose Victoria’s Secret for my new bra I can’t quite say. I dislike driving that stretch of interstate to the mall—too much merging just where the traffic thickens and the road bends right precipitously—so I must have had some other purpose. Likely I was there to ransack H & M or the sales racks at Macy’s, propelled to brave the highway—white-knuckled all the way—by my perpetual craving for something new. 

What I do know is that I had my own secret. I had mixed feelings about sharing it with Victoria, who already had one, or Janelle or Hillary or whoever attended me that day. In the end, I didn’t have to. I was grateful for the discreet knocks and bras dangled through the crack of a door that are the ritual of a bra-fitting, exhausting me in no time with all the putting on and taking off and near-total dearth of anything without an underwire except for something that came only in polka dots.

Since I tried on so many bras, I lost all sense, and ended up choosing the marked-down cotton bra, a big mistake, since it was really made of cardboard, which I discovered only after I brought it home and wore it around some. But my secret was still intact: my small, rippled implant, that misshapen twin of a breast that is just the simple fact of me and the breast cancer I had. I’m not ashamed of my implant, and I don’t exactly love it. It just didn’t seem right for Victoria’s Secret, nor Victoria’s Secret for it.

A cardboard bra is intolerable, so back I went to the mall, placing myself in the hands of another cool and unflappable attendant. This time I succumbed to the ubiquitous underwire tyrannizing women’s lingerie stores everywhere. Many in my life, including my own lovely and ample-breasted daughter, have nudged me to take the underwire plunge. “Try it, you’ll like it!” they said. “Don’t worry about the wire! You won’t feel a thing!” I was doubtful. “Doesn’t it dig into your skin sometimes, like when you’re sitting on the bed reading?” They’d looked at me strangely.

Maybe their breasts were already numb. Because the black, underwire “Gorgeous” or “Incredible,” or whatever I got that day—the bra I consign to the shabby, dark pockets of my closet floor—does just that. It digs. Not all the time, but just enough to make the tender skin surrounding my implant all the more tender.

Yes, there are special stores for women like me. Open the door, a bell tinkles, and a clerk calls out to you kindly, asking if she can help. Calling you honey, she settles you into a dressing room, then chooses a dozen alternatives for a special-needs breast, grabbing pads that round out a cup like a perfect hill, making no one the wiser for looking at you.

That’s how I think it goes, anyway. I’ve never stepped into our local, much-touted lingerie store that makes mastectomies a special niche because I can’t get past the Frederick’s of Hollywood side-show in the window—all corsets, garters, and, just possibly, whips—rivaling the self-esteaminess of Victoria’s Secret.


Even if I hustled past those frights into the safer, maternal lap of the store, I’m not sure I’d want all that attention—it’s too intimate. On top of that, I detest padding: built-in or slipped into pockets, I don’t need to enter the world cushion-first.

Both my regular oncologist and radiation oncologist take turns asking me a strange question, forgetting they’ve already asked it.

As I lie on the examining table with my sweaters and camisole bunched around my neck—no secrets here, nor ceremony, just straight-up flesh—one of them will ask cheerily, in between probes, “Are you happy with your implant?” I always feel incredulous. Happy? Does it matter? What part of breast cancer was about my happiness?

They want me to be pleased with my purchase. I’m not pleased, but I’m not displeased, either. I believe my surgeon did the best job she could stuffing a pillow into a smaller-sized pillowcase.  It was a very tight job, so much skin had been pared away in small surgeries. I know she wanted to do better.

I was wrong when I said I didn’t quite love my breast. I love it in precisely the way one loves a deformity, in precisely the way one loves her own skin. What is a mastectomy, after all, but the hollowing of a fruit—the pulp removed, the skin left intact? How can I not claim my skin, my kin, my blameless, funny face?

Mostly I go braless now, which is one of the perks of aging: my breasts have become smaller, more aerodynamic. I’m enjoying a boyhood I never had. At night I shuck off my shirts as though I were an ear of corn. It’s been liberating thumbing my nose at the brassiere industry, that circus of pre-packaged notions, though sometimes a hand of cold air slips up my shirt, making me shiver. I hate that. But it’s not the worst thing in the world. 
You can visit Janis Greve at her blog Losing Farther

Benjamin Vogt, poet, gardener: Guest essay

With great pleasure I welcome here poet, writer, gardener Benjamin Vogt. My love is his book of prose Sleep, Creep, Leap: The first three years of a Nebraska garden. Ah, those monarch butterflies that flocked to his milkweed.

Today hear his voice as he speaks of his book Morning Glory and get a glimpse of work that has not yet gone out widely into the world. I hope you will comment, tell us your stories about land and flowers and responding to chaos. When you do, you help hold up the universe, as Annie Dillard so wisely tell us in Living by Fiction. I turn to her words to introduce you properly to the poet and gardener Benjamin Vogt:

"The most extreme, cheerful, and fantastic view of art to which I ever subscribe is one in which the art object requires no viewer or listener—no audience whatever—in order to do what it does, which is nothing less than hold up the universe.

"This is a fundamentally insane notion, which developed in my own mind from an idea of Buckminster Fuller’s. Every so often I try to encourage other writers by telling them this cheerful set of thoughts; always they gaze at me absolutely appalled. Fuller’s assertion was roughly to this effect: The purpose of people on earth is to counteract the tide of entropy described in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Physical things are falling apart at a terrific rate; people, on the other hand, put things together. People build bridges and cities and roads. They write music and novels and constitutions. They have ideas. That is why people are here; the universe as it were needs somebody or something to keep it from falling apart. … Thoughts count. A completed novel in a trunk in the attic is an order added to the sum of the universe’s order." —Annie Dillard

 Benjamin Vogt is the author of the poetry collection Afterimage (SFA Press, May 2012). The excerpt here is taken from his unpublished memoir Morning Glory: A Story of Family & Culture in the Garden. Benjamin’s poetry and prose has appeared in American Life in Poetry, Diagram, ISLE, Orion, Subtropics, The Sun, and Verse Daily, and have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Benjamin has an M.F.A. from The Ohio State University and a Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska. He lives in Lincoln where he runs a native plant garden coaching business, Monarch Gardens, and is at work on a memoir about his Mennonite settler family in 1894 Oklahoma, the southern Cheyenne, and Great Plains flora and fauna.


 Benjamin Vogt on his memoir Morning Glory


When I wrote Morning Glory I knew I’d eventually have to unearth a complicated and buried family history, forcing myself and others to pick off some scabs and even create new wounds. This prospect made me profoundly uncomfortable. One way for me to build confidence was to start with the somewhat cautious relationship I had with my mother growing up. The relationship is one cultivated in the shadow of her childhood—wearing your emotions on your sleeve is what often caused trouble. A drunken stepfather and a conservative Baptist church saw to that. Yet if intimacy can’t be found in open, profound discussions, it can be found through the art of indirection, or metaphor—and it can be just as resonate and tender. When I finished the piece Mary publishes here, I knew it would serve as a set up to the heart of my memoir about gardening and its sheltering power for my great grandmother, my mother, and myself. The devil, or the emotion, is in the details. As a poet I was keenly aware of the imagery as a way to explore emotion, and I hope the action adds to the subtle dynamic of the family relationship I was beginning to understand.


from Morning Glory
        “Mind if I join you, or are you doing your solitary writer thing?” My mother approaches the edge of the circular brick patio at the base of her back garden, and seems at once sincere and sarcastic. I had had my eyes closed for just a few minutes, so I’m not sure where she came from.
        “No. Go ahead.” I’m happy she’s come by. Usually, I feel disruptive when I corner her outside—there seems to be simultaneous tension and complacence to my presence in the world surrounding my childhood home. Maybe she feels the same, I’d never thought of that before. Maybe she, a woman I’ve always taken to be strong-willed, bull-headed, and good for a kick in the pants when needed, maybe she always feels like she’s interrupting me. 
        I’d been outside in the early evening before dinner just for the warm shade and the inaudible soft mists that touch my legs, coming from the two foot waterfall just feet away. The smell of juniper—one that piggybacks along several specific memories in my life—sweetens and clouds the moment to the point of blissful confusion. Being in nature is like being on a merry-go-round set at 180 rpm—so much to focus on, so much to see, smell, touch, and hear. Squirrels perform Cirque du Soleil twirls and leaps on thin branches high above in the maple and oak canopy; sparrows, finches, and cardinals call themselves home in the waning hours of sunlight that begin to cool between the limbs and shadows. Mom settles into her chair without making the slightest sound, or if she does it blends into the hesitant rustle of leaves in a light breeze.

I look at her by looking around her, into the garden we tended together when I was younger. I glance from butterfly bush to her flower-printed shirt speckled in dirt, from the manicured weeping spruce to her thick dark hair still combed in waves that blend into the criss-cross pattern of the black chain link fence behind her. The curved metal legs of the glass table mimic her recline: a head that sticks out a little from the torso, eager and patient to hold the world around it, the curve of the thickening neck back in toward a body that settles out around it, just wide enough to hold firm against the ground. Her tennis shoes—the sides and bottoms green from lawn mowing—give her the mark of being partly absorbed into something other, stained by some place, some landscape where I’d never been.
“It’s very peaceful out here this time of day,” she says suddenly, but the comment blends into the pause between breezes and flighty chickadees whose feet are stuck into maple trunks. A moment later she says, “My favorite time of day,” hazarding a response from me, or maybe the distant clouded growl of a motorboat passing down on the lake. I say nothing, but lift one leg atop the other to give myself, unconsciously, the reposed, thoughtful and participatory look a person might have in a business meeting. She took the hint of attention without flinching, and without turning from her gaze over the hillside to the water. “How are you doing?”
“I’m fine. I think.” I add the latter bit simply to lighten the moment, or—looking on me and my family’s tendency to avoid intimacy and openness—used a hint of sarcasm and humor to detach myself from the depth of emotion growing around me.
“I mean,” she begins more directly. “I mean no more stomach problems.” After college I’d had issues with acid reflux disease, a newly-coined term in the medical world, that had kept me from eating normally for months at a time and made me lose a bit too much weight—all of this likely due to my post-college depression. But even Mom’s question surprises me. It isn’t what I thought she meant, or was going to ask. 
“I’m fine. No more problems.” I say. This is the truth, and I knew she knew that. We both felt it wasn’t the question she wanted to ask, but couldn’t find the right metaphorical question to mask the more important one. Every question has an imbedded or hidden question, and in my family that’s the one being asked. If you answer to the obvious question it also serves as an answer for the imbedded question no one is brave enough or forthright enough to ask. But even if you only intend, and believe, you’re answering the simpler more obvious question, it’s always, always taken as the other’s answer. Confused? It can all be boiled down to being asked, “How’s the chicken.” And by replying that it’s very good, you are also saying “I feel happy, content, and am glad to be here with you.” Maybe it’s like this in other families, but I’ve never seen one more concerned with innuendos, subtleties, and roundabout attempts at saying things other families take for granted—the “I love you” or “I have to get something off my chest” or “Can we sit down and talk.” Nobody just sits down to talk. 
         But even in my mother’s quiet gestures there’s the nurturing quality of perfection, tinkering, deadheading the past so something new can bloom in its place. Her body might lumber, exhausted at the end of the day, but her arms settle like feathers into the chair, a walk, putting sheets of cookie dough into the oven—everything seems at once gentle and confidently precise as if she were a surgeon.
So, after answering her question about how I feel, I knew this also meant that I was happy, that my life seemed good, that things were in balance in grad school and that I was living how and what I wanted to live. But maybe this question was also one that begged for reciprocity, to be reflected back, to have a dialogue of questions with answers that nobody knew how to answer correctly. 
“How are you doing?” I ask, looking straight into the side of her eyes.
“I’m ok,” she says smiling into the snow-in-summer circling the patio. Bingo. “Everything I’ve been taking has helped balance me out. I went to the doctor two weeks ago and he seems to be confident with the hormone treatment.” She pauses, tastes the sun flecked through leaves, which are like signs on a highway at night, or runway lights. “I’ve had no headaches this month, and I’m finally having some good nights of sleep.” Her protracted and intense menopause had nearly pushed our family to the brink of annihilation over the years. There was still much to be repaired in the wake of this, but it seemed that my mother—my parent’s relationship—had come back up gingerly from themselves, together, was testing what it was like in the new life that medicine provided. Sometimes though, being back here in this house more as a visitor than a son, I have a doubly hard time of seeing the real people that have made this world, this tiny existence—that have made me. 
       I don’t have a clue of who my mother really is. I don’t think I ever will, but I’m resigned to having to pretend that I do, or at least trying to find her through other lives and other places, through the natural landscapes that have come to define who I am as much as my mother.
“I’m very happy to hear that, Mom. Hopefully, you can start to live your life again.” 
“Me too. I just hope this stuff works and doesn’t wear off. It’s time to move on.” Not being ourselves makes us understand ourselves, who we are, more importantly who we want to be. Who doesn’t have a dozen cathartic moments after having had the flu for a week? After attending someone’s funeral? What kind of thoughts and feelings do you have after years upon years of not being who you are? Do you suddenly become someone else? What I want to ask is this: Are you content. Do you still love Dad. Do you enjoy each other’s company. Do you like living in Minnesota, in this house. Is this the life you want. Is this the person you want to be, and if not, what is that person and what are you going to do to get to that person without sacrificing what you have built till now. Is that possible. What do you think about what I’m doing, about who I am, where I’m headed. Tell me these things. I might be able to use them in my own life.
“I can’t believe how that clematis has taken off this year.” That’s what I say. That’s my metaphor. That’s what I’ve inherited from my mother and I think I detest it while I recognize the power behind it—the power that I think has led me to words in my life, to the skin-deep beauty of sound and rhythm, to how incredible words look on a page in a book, to how they feel… but never what they mean. Metaphor. 
“I’ve worked so hard on that thing,” she says. “I’ve spent years fertilizing it, trying to get it to stick, to establish. Finally, it’s grasped itself and just keeps blooming. It makes me happy to see it doing so well.” She looks from the clematis bunched up, thick, wildly fragrant and alive with dark pink buds and flowers, turns toward me and then slides her eyes back to the thick trunks of the trees on the hill anchoring the entire landscape with their deep, complex fingers hidden beneath the soil—anchoring the whole garden, the house, this part of the street. “I think I’m almost done with the garden. Almost done all I can do.” 
        We sit there for another fifteen minutes, undisturbed by anyone else. The stream and waterfall going on and on, constant, decisive, furious and calming like a heartbeat. The light retreats from the garden to the roof of the neighbor’s house, steps up as if to see further than was possible in the low solitude of the world my mother tends day after day. The sparrows and cardinals and squirrels go on preparing for night, rushing toward themselves and their small purposes that seem so profound to them, to us at this moment. My mother shifts her weight a few times over the course of ten minutes, her head and eyes as still and patient as stone. When she decides to get up she’s slow about it, as if she were conscious of the fact she’d left something behind, didn’t know what it was, but couldn’t quite leave without figuring it out. She walks in an unaware zigzag through her garden, fingering a few blooms, turning over a few leaves, tossing twigs down the hillside before finally moving toward the top and past the side of the house. Somewhere between me and the plants, the shade and the sun, she saw what she’d been eluding.

Are women writers getting a fair shake? Karol Nielsen, author, comments

Karol Nielsen is my guest writer today and it is my pleasure to introduce her to you.
Karol Nielsen is the author of Black Elephants (Bison Books, 2011), a Gulf War love story. Poets & Writers selected the memoir as a New and Noteworthy Book. The Jewish Book Council invited her to guest blog about her book. The blogs also appeared in the Forward. Excerpts from her memoir were honored as Notable Essays in The Best American Essays in 2010 and 2005. Her poetry collection, coming out as a chapbook (Finishing Line Press, 2012), was a finalist for the Colorado Prize for Poetry in 2007. She has contributed nonfiction and poetry to Smith Magazine’s The Moment anthology (Harper Perennial, 2012) and many literary magazines, including Guernica, Lumina, North Dakota Quarterly, Permafrost, RiverSedge, and Epiphany before she became an editor of the magazine. A journalist for 15 years, she covered Latin America, the Middle East, New York City, and international finance, contributing to The New York Times, New York Newsday, Jane’s Intelligence Review, the Stamford Advocate, the Buenos Aires Herald, and others. She has an M.S. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. And she says,
"I'm hopeful."

Here is her guest essay. She and I welcome your comments:

“Call Me Person”
by Karol Nielsen

I came to my feminist sensibilities slowly, first awakening in college during a summer internship at a think tank where I only remember one woman on staff who was not a secretary. And this woman had been an ambassador to the United Nations. Halfway through the summer, I stopped going to the office and went to the Georgetown University library to finish my research paper on the 1973 oil embargo. It was a long and lonely summer, and for the first time, I realized that my father was an unusual man.

He was my running partner and a natural ally whenever either of us got into trouble with my mother. He was a combat veteran of Vietnam, but at home he so disliked the role of disciplinarian that he fully delegated this dirty job to my mother. She had just as much faith in me as my father, but she worried that I would be judged, and judged hard, so she’d reprimand me for my ripped jeans or my split-ends or a foot that wouldn’t point at a diving meet. That was girl stuff. I couldn’t be bothered.

During college, I used to have long philosophical discussions with a friend who was tall and beautiful and strong. We met in Shakespeare class the first week of school, and she became captain of the women’s crew team at the University of Pennsylvania by our senior year. (I quit as a freshman because I wasn’t a morning person.) Over a cup of coffee, she once said, I see myself as a woman, you see yourself as a person. It was true. I wanted to be a person, because a person isn’t bound by gender. I wanted to travel and write and live freely and bravely and adventurously, an equal to all others.

Maybe I was wrong to look at myself as a person, because the think tank wasn’t the first place I’d noticed this two-tiered system for men and women. I had rejected the idea of applying to Columbia University, since my year was going to be the first to admit women. This seemed absurdly backwards, and besides when we visited the school it smelled of urine. I looked at the urban campus and thought, There’s no place to go for a run around here, and it stinks!  When I finally fell in love with cosmopolitan New York, I moved to the city the summer of the garbage strike and learned to hold my nose.

A few years after college, I went to the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, where my favorite professors—a winner and a future finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction, both of them men—were among the most inspiring and encouraging professors I’d ever had. I cannot say this about the man I had for introductory reporting and writing, a white-haired preppy who used to be the dean of the school. (Nora Ephron had delivered his mail at Newsweek at a time when all the editorial positions were held by men.) During the first week of class, he spoke these unforgettable words: The newsroom is mostly white and male; women and minorities, it’s not too late for a tuition refund. I thought, Well, that’s going to have to change!

As a journalist, most of the support I’d had from women came before graduate school. Afterwards, I worked almost exclusively for men with the exception of my editor at New York Newsday. More women have promoted my literary work, including the editors who chose my memoir and upcoming chapbook, but when I counted heads, more than half of the literary magazine editors who chose my creative nonfiction and poetry were men. Did men like my work better, or were there simply more of them working as editors?

Some discovered my work in the slush pile, and others have solicited work directly, like an editor who asked me to contribute to his magazine after reading a thread on Facebook about my last story as a stringer for The New York Times.  A divorced woman had driven to Manhattan from Maine to shoot herself in Penn Station. I interviewed the police officer who talked her down, but at that time the newspaper did not credit stringers for contributing to stories. It happened before Easter weekend, and it hung over me as if it had had a tragic and irreversible ending. I knew I no longer had the stomach for stories like this.

It had been a plumb job for a recent journalism school graduate, and the policy for stringers wasn’t personal. My male classmate who had recommended me for the job didn’t get credit, either. Still, the editor liked the tone of my comments. There’s no bitterness, he said. I thought of bitterness as deadweight, something you had to toss off so you could get on with breaking barriers, and for me that meant pretending there were none.

*

Mostly, I lived in a bubble of hope as a writer, until I read the devastating statistics complied by VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, showing the gaping gender gap in book reviews last year. The New Republic book review editor Ruth Franklin suspected that the problem began in publishing, so she tallied numbers from the 2010 catalogues for a range of large and independent presses. After eliminating categories of books such as cookbooks that were unlikely to receive reviews, she found that the VIDA numbers roughly reflected the proportions of books by women that came out last year.

Women made up the majority of “avid” readers, based on a 2010 book-buying survey, so why weren’t there more books by women? More discussion followed. Were men more prolific? Were they more aggressive at submitting work? Were they writing worthier books? Or were editors and critics and judges favoring men? Only a dozen women have won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Only one book written by a woman made Esquire’s list of 75 books every man should read. V. S. Naipaul claimed that no woman writer is his equal: too sentimental, too parochial.

It’s ironic that I earned an A-plus in development economics from a progressive professor at Penn who assigned Naipaul’s post-colonial novel, A Bend in The River. I had a habit of overlooking sexist scenes in books, not to mention the lives of authors, because I was drawn to stories of travel and adventure and ideas, and with Naipaul’s work I was taken by the sense of isolation in a remote jungle, the sort I’d imagined my father had experienced in Vietnam. It was the first time I’d read a book that captured a feeling that had been part of me for as long as I could remember.

VIDA released another study this spring, finding a historical gender gap in The Best American Series, including notable works as well as those anthologized in the books. Two excerpts from my memoir have been honored as notable essays in The Best American Essays, but suddenly I felt overcome by the odds as a woman with her first book released this fall.

My publisher, Bison Books, the paperback imprint of the University of Nebraska Press, is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. Willa Cather and Mari Sandoz were Bison authors, too. The Millions took note of the press’s winning streak in the Nobel Prize for Literature. It had published the winners for three years in a row, including Herta Mueller, one of the few women to win the prize.

I was profoundly honored when the press chose my memoir, Black Elephants, as a giveaway at BookExpo America 2011, passing out 150 advance review copies at the convention. Another 25 went directly to book reviewers at top newspapers and magazines. So far, I’ve had praise from men and women and quality press for the book, including thoughtful interviews in the Daily Brink and Women’s Voices for Change, a reader recommendation in the Christian Science Monitor, a strong review in Kirkus, and honors from Poets & Writers as a New and Noteworthy Book and the Jewish Book Council as a guest blogger. The Forward published the blogs, too.

I can go on these sorts of honors for long years, like a camel stumbling into an oasis. Black Elephants also topped my publisher’s bestseller list the month it began to ship. I had been promoting the memoir on social media since I got a book deal two years ago, but it was startling to me, because my Amazon Author Central sales graph looked like a volatile stock during the pre-order stage. I decided then that I would no longer look at the sales rank because it began to seem meaningless, to me. I didn’t write the book to become an instant bestseller. I didn’t write it with any expectation other than telling the story as well as I could. And because I kept having trouble getting it published I kept making it better. And better.

I’m aware, of course, that a Big Book Review might help my book sales, but I also know that books are sold word of mouth. So I hang in there. And I talk. On social media. In taxi cabs. At bars, like I did when I heard a man speak with an Israeli accent. I told him that I wrote a Gulf War memoir, a love story between an American writer looking for adventure and an Israeli traveler dreaming about peace. Turns out he was a teenager during the Gulf War. He remembered running to the roof of his building to watch incoming Scud missiles. We laughed. War is absurd. He said he was going to Israel, would buy the book for his mom.

Some of my friends are impatient for my success, hoping for an appearance on national television or The New York Times bestseller list. One friend suggested that I send the book to President Obama. It’s an idea. But, frankly, it’s been consuming enough to follow up on dozens of galleys already out there and send more as leads come along. Call me cheap, but I didn’t want to spend thousands of dollars on a publicist when the in-house team has championed my book. It’s not easy for independent and university presses to get the attention of big prestigious newspapers and magazines, but I’m still doing legwork because I believe in my book and its core message about war and peace.

*

While waiting for the response to my galleys, I comforted myself with the notion that if you’re ignored you can’t have a bad review! And no doubt the odds for women were worse in George Eliot’s time, when she chose to publish under a man’s name, and most likely worse when my professor felt compelled to tell us that the newsroom was still mostly white and male. I was never blind to this reality. It’s just that as a matter of survival I chose to ignore the odds, so that I could do whatever it was that I’d wanted to do. And that was write.

But I, too, had become part of the system as an editor of the literary magazine, Epiphany. It hadn’t been included in the VIDA survey, which focused on book reviews in the most influential publications, but I had to see how the magazine had performed. I spent an entire day from returning with my morning cup of coffee well into the evening tallying numbers for print editions, going back to the premiere book in 2004, which included an excerpt from my memoir solicited by the former nonfiction editor, a longtime mentor.

The excerpt was honored as a notable essay in The Best American Essays 2005, and after my mentor left the magazine, I was hired as the new nonfiction editor in 2007. I was promoted to senior editor of the magazine in 2009, managing the staff of readers and recommending nonfiction, fiction, and the occasional poem, though I was never the sole voice in deciding what went in and what stayed out. I lobbied intensely for the works I believed in, winning some, losing many during the editorial review process that involved three evaluations and final approval from the other editors. It was rare that all of us routed passionately for the same work, and while this was a source of intense frustration, it consistently yielded quality.

But I worried about the numbers. Had we favored men like the others? It was a relief to discover that Epiphany had almost perfect gender parity since its premiere issue. And how had I done? As nonfiction editor, three out of five essays published in the magazine were by women, and as senior editor more than half of all works appearing in Epiphany were by women. During that time, three of the four essays honored as notable works in The Best American Essays and the only distinguished story honored in The Best American Short Stories were by women. The results delighted me. Maybe the true victory is more than equality in publishing. It’s equality in our thinking. Maybe I was right, after all, that I am a person, like you.

Visit Karol's website for news. Buy her book and read my review of it on Amazon.    

Guest Essayist: Charles van Heck

I introduce to you today to Charles van Heck, a generous soul and elegant essayist. We “met” via Google+, of all places, and a meeting of the minds magically emerged. That merging of thought strikes me always as the gift of connection that I suspect has to with the reading that has infused each of our quite separate lives with narrative, that has placed meaning and form on the chaos of existence. 

William Gass describes this sense of oneness in The Test of Time: “And we, who read and write and bear witness and wail with grief, who make music and massacres, who paint in oils and swim in blood—we are one: everywhere as awful, as possibly noble, as our natures push us or permit us to be.”

Some Background on Charles:

Charles van Heck is a native of Oakland, New Jersey. He has a degree in history from Ramapo College of New Jersey as well as degrees from the University of Dayton and the University of Michigan. A theological librarian, he has taught both theology and American literature, and been the invited speaker at churches of various denominations. He’s worked with the terminally ill, underprivileged, and served as a volunteer during the hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma.

Charles has completed two novels. Mister Lincoln's Elephant Boy is historical fiction based on the documented record Second Volunteer Michigan Infantry and tells the story of Sarah Emma Evelyn Edmonds Seelye who served for three years during the Civil War as Franklin Thompson. He’s also written a mystery set in the 1950s titled Her Future Past. His poetry and articles have appeared in various journals. Charles lives with his wife in Michigan where he enjoys gardening, cooking, painting, and getting away—he loves to travel.

Wanderings in Woodhull County

by Charles van Heck

There are mornings at Whitman Pond when I want to wander the fields, to forget about writing and simply blend into the landscape. Yesterday morning, though, there were errands to run. A walk would have to wait until the afternoon.

I had driven over to Handy’s Hardware store in Bolivar to pick-up a bottle of fuel stabilizer for the lawn mower and some burlap to wrap around the shrubs. Then there was an errand to run for Irene Longworthy at the Sublet Pharmacy. Both stores were decorated for Christmas. Jack Handy, a Baptist in good standing, had a Menorah Tree. That was something new for me. Phyllis Amacher, over at the Sublet Pharmacy, though I think, gets the prize. She had a good sale on her leftover inventory of Halloween candy and cards. The display was beneath a navy blue tree decorated with the “Nightmare Before Christmas” ornaments, orange lights, and black garland.

The holidays don’t mean very much to me. I’m tired of the news about retails sales; Black Friday stampeding hoards pepper spraying one another for midnight sales, and Cyber Monday. Perhaps I’m becoming a bit of a Scrooge, but it seems to me the magic, mystery, and wonder of the holidays, be it Chanukah or Christmas has been lost. Most importantly, the meaning of the holidays has been replaced by mindless consumerism.

My mother, Alice May Bunt, grew up on a farm in Allentown, New York. She seldom spoke about her childhood. She did speak about the Christmas that her grandmother gave her a handkerchief embroidered with her initials. Her father would cut a tree. It would be placed in the parlor and decorated with candles. On Christmas Eve the candles would be lit, eggnog or hot cider would be served. A few songs would be sung. Then the candles would be extinguished.

My father, Charles van Heck, Jr., would talk about coming home from church on Christmas morning to find the tree decorated in the living room of his parent’s apartment in Brooklyn. He remembered his father cooking dinner, and the family gatherings around the table. I don’t recall him mentioning one gift that he received.

Simplicity? Perhaps. Those were different times. The economic reality from 1914 to the eve of the Second World War was harsh in the agricultural and immigrant communities; particularly during the Great Depression. My mother’s father would lose his farm to the bank. He found employment in the oil fields of Allegany County, New York.  My other grandfather shuttered his corner grocery store because his customers could no longer pay their bills. He went to work as a chef at The Browns, a Borscht Belt resort.

Driving into Evoraburg, I stopped at the Red & White Market for a few groceries and the mail. The floorboards are worn; a few creak as I moved along the narrow well stocked aisles. There is a large fan in the back where Volney Poort stands behind the meat counter. I ordered a fresh chicken for Christmas. “You’ll have to pick it up two days before,” he said. “We’re going to be closed Christmas Eve.” Claribel Poort rang me up at the cash register. “Is Terri going to make a fruit cake?” she asked.

It was obvious from the containers of candied fruit, but the folks of Evoraburg tend to either question or state the obvious, then gossip about it until the obvious becomes unrecognizable. Before the week is out it will be around the village that Terri is baking sweet potato pie for Christmas and I was seen driving off with Ursula Lovecraft, the high school nurse, who happened to be leaving the store the same time. Small towns are like that.  “You forgot your mail, Charlie,” Claribel called. Yes, I was seen leaving the Red & White with Ursula Lovecraft and was in such a rush I forgot my mail.

Outside the air was crisp. The sky was overcast. In the village square, known as Peace Park, the volunteer fire department was putting up an ice skating rink. Doug Seiters, Harvey Cooney, and Ernie Lange of the village Department of Public Works were hanging lights and other decorations on the gazebo and the trees. Watching the workers, I found myself recalling special winter nights in my hometown of Oakland, New Jersey.

Every December there was a Christmas Carol Sing-along outside the Ponds Church. The street was closed off. Hot Chocolate, coffee, warm cider, doughnuts, and cookies were served. There was always a good size crowd. Afterwards, my parents and their friends from the Oakland Volunteer First Aid Squad, some of the police officers, and volunteer firemen would gather at the home of Arnold and Connie Monks. They lived next door to the church. Their home was warm, and nicely decorated. While our parents conversed, we kids got to play. I recall those evenings with fondness and affection for the Monks.

Those days seemed less hurried, less materialistic, and definitely more innocent. At times I feel as if I am playing at being an adult. This is especially true at the house. It seems odd to have accumulated the furniture, paintings, and necessities. Occasionally, I expect someone to tell me I have to clean up the mess. I know that won’t happen.

At this point in my life, I have less interest in things and more in simply being, enjoying, and sharing. I have an extensive library; a carryover from my days in academics both as a student, a theological librarian, and a teacher. John Adams once remarked that he had spent an estate on books. I too have such a passion for books.

I miss teaching undergraduates, meeting with scholars, giving talks at various churches. To some measure that is why I created the Whitman Pond website at the urging of others. Whitman Pond is a place for stories, poetry, art, humor, and commentary on current affairs in a quiet voice. There is enough anger and rancor in our media outlets. I wanted to create an environment that mirrored the living room of Arnold and Connie Monks, and my grandparents’ front porch where people conversed. What was most important to me was to create a place that honored the code of respect for others regardless of their race, creed, nationality, gender, or sexual orientation that my father instilled in me.

Some will say that I am attempting to create an idyllic place based on the past. Perhaps. The historian Joseph J. Ellis has observed, “…all attempts at making the past relevant to the present inevitably require some measure of distortion.” I prefer living the present moment to dwelling in the past. However, I believe the past should inform the present. But a warning, I ascribe to the notion that simplicity is seldom what it appears.

With the groceries and mail in the car, I started across the street to Chaim’s Kosher Bakery and Deli for lunch and to visit with Chaim and his wife Yocheved. Woodhull County Sheriff Patty Hoppack drove past and waved.  After lunch, I returned to the house, then, after changing, went for a walk in the hills around Whitman Pond as a light snow began to fall, stirring me to catch snowflakes on my tongue, and reminding me of the approach of the holidays.

You may visit Charles' website Click here: On Whitman Pond and read more of his elegiac musings.