In Their Words: Patricia Klindienst (part 3)

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Do you write in longhand first, or do you compose at the keyboard? Tell us about your preferred pens, ink, paper, or platform and program.

I usually begin everything writing by hand, with a pencil—Ticonderoga #2s are my favorite, but I’ll take a round pencil over them anytime. Every year I go to my favorite copy shop in New Haven to ask for a few. I hoard them, using them till the nub is so short I can’t grip it anymore. The paper is a lined white pad, standard size, with a margin down the left side, where I make notes of things to return to later. I buy the pads by the dozen. If I want to use a pen, it has to have a very fine point. But I like pencils, because I can erase. It keeps me humble. And I love the soft sound of the act of writing on paper. It’s so different from the clicking of a keyboard. Once I’ve broken through the surface, which takes at least half an hour of writing, I’ll write till the idea has come clear. The next stage is going to the computer, moving from the stuffed chair to the desk. But what could be more constraining than writing inside the box of a computer screen? Forced to write left to right, top to bottom, rather than drawing with a pencil—literally sketching ideas, in any shape you want on a page. I print drafts and spread pages on my table, so I can see more of what I’ve written, and draw all over it, moving things around, seeing what it is I’ve made. So for me, it’s very physical, the act of writing, and it includes having to get up and move around, when ideas are coming but the words aren’t, and movement releases the part of my imagination that, freed, will bring me the words. Then, back at the desk, I can work with them.

As for technology, I am usually way behind the curve. I just got a new computer for the first time in 25 years, the new MacBook Pro, which is a beautiful, sleek laptop that I hook up to a big monitor, so I can now see two pages at once. This is like going from a scooter to a Maserati. My other new one was the first IBM PC, which I bought in 1982 to write my dissertation at Stanford. Someone at the law school invented a footnote program that spread like wildfire through the campus. Those were the days of five and a quarter inch floppy disks—which really were floppy—and you had to put this piece of silver tape on the notch at the top left corner to “write protect” your work. In the between the bulky, “computer grey” PC and this lightweight silver slip of a thing, I relied on used computers my sister and niece would send me every couple of years, when they’d update.

I made the switch from PC to Apple in the late 90s after working a job that forced me to learn the Mac. I resisted at first, but then fell in love with the ease of the operating system. I use that big, baggy, monster, Word, because it’s become the standard, but I remember the elegance of WordStar with the fondness usually reserved for one’s first love.

What do you consider a “full day’s work” of writing? Do you measure by number of hours, or number of words? Do you spend time doing mundane chores so that you don’t have to write?

A full day’s work is whatever it takes to get a piece of work done. I’ve had days when I wake up and a whole piece is there, and I can hear it, so I go to the chair or the desk and capture it—or reach for a pad and pencil right there in bed and write it out, and go back to sleep. In the morning, I type it up, fix it till the internal itch is relieved. That’s a great day, a day when I can walk away early and feel satisfied.

Working on the book was work—may days and nights I had to make myself do it. You sign a contract, you feel the pressure of deadlines, though they can be pushed back, they can’t be deferred indefinitely. Five hours of intense work could be a whole day, but there were lots of ten to twelve hour days, and nights when I woke up at 2 and wrote till 4 then went back to sleep, a problem having been solved when I stopped staring at it, jaw clenched.

I don’t think there’s one way to do this, though you have to be honest, disciplined, work hard, get things done in the way that makes sense for your life. You also have to know when to walk away. I had to learn, many times over, that it’s better to stop on a bad day, and do other useful things so that the next day would be more productive.

Who doesn’t practice avoidance? I love Mary Oliver’s essay in Blue Pastures about interruption—it’s not the neighbor coming over to borrow mustard or sugar, it’s ourselves, interrupting our deeper selves in the act of concentration, fleeing from giving ourselves over to the work. So yes, I do mundane chores, but actually, my favorite work day is one that includes intervals of physical work, domestic chores—making a pot of soup, doing laundry, pulling weeds, pinching wilted leaves off the plants, musing, is what it is, aided by not being fixed to one place.

Then there are the days of finish work—the equivalent for a carpenter of screwing switch plates to the wall—when I’m formatting, correcting punctuation, fixing typos, long hours at the machine. Then I turn the volume up loud and listen to great rock and roll.

Dancing is always good when you get stuck, or when you get something just right, or when you reach the finish and hit “save.”

[go back to Interview, Part 1]
[continue to Interview, Part 3]

In Their Words: Patricia Klindienst (part 2)

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The Earth Knows My Name: Food, Culture, and Sustainability in the Gardens of Ethnic America

What question are you never, or rarely, asked in interviews, that you really wish people would ask? How would you answer it?

“How has doing this book changed your idea of America?”

I’d start by talking about how skewed our idea of ourselves as a people has been by official history, then talk about the parallels between the conquests of America and our current global crisis. I’d want to emphasize the hope the interviews aroused in me. We rarely hear about these people; we rarely see their faces; we know so little about their history on the land.

Conversely, what question are you often asked, that you really don’t like to answer? What don’t you like about that question (no, you don’t have to answer it)?

“What was my favorite garden/interview?”
I have no favorite. I grew closer to some of the gardeners than to others, but I feel an abiding respect and affection for all of them, and for the three times as many others whose stories I couldn’t include. The hardest part of creating this book was what I had to leave out.

Who in your life was/is the greatest influence – good or bad – on your writing?

Virginia Woolf. A good influence, tremendous, really, as she was for my generation of American women, but one I had to grow through to find my own voice, to return to American stories.

The fist thing of hers I read was To the Lighthouse in what was called a House Course at Hampshire College up in Amherst, MA. This was in 1971, the beginning of the second wave of feminism, and women writers were just being rediscovered and a whole new language for interpreting literature in the light of history was being invented. It was possible to find first edition hardcover copies of all of Woolf’s novels for a dollar apiece in the socialist bookstore in Northampton. Many were out of print, so that was the only way I could get them. I devoured them all very quickly, once I’d been spellbound by her voice. Finding her was a revelation to me. Her biography, letters, and diaries had not yet been published. Imagine. I lived through the rediscovery of this hugely important writer who’d been neglected, like so many others, because of the male dominance of the academy. Before I graduated, the biography was out and the volumes of her private writings were coming out one, sometimes two volumes a year.

Our teachers, especially our women teachers, were learning along with us; it was very democratic, this life change, this emotional awakening to a sense of injury—how distorted our education had been, how partial the kinds of questions framed in literary studies—and exuberant awe: this legacy was there for us all to reclaim together. It was a tremendously exciting time, filled with a sense of invention, a revolution in thought. Of course we are living through a period of extreme reaction now. But at the time, we all shared a sense of discovering, as she herself says in A Room of One’s Own, that as women, we do, in fact, have a history, one that had yet to be written.

So she’s the huge influence, the reason I learned the art of close reading; I learned to think of literature in relation to politics, to everyday life. From reading her, I learned to hold the architecture of an entire novel in my head, so that I could actually move around inside of it. My gradual detachment from her, my move back toward American voices—Eudora Welty and Raymond Carver, Emily Dickinson, three enormous influences—came after my brother’s death, when I was writing a whole book about The Waves, which Woolf privately dedicated to her older brother, who had died tragically at a young age after a trip to Greece. In my own grief, I saw clearly that my metaphysic was different from hers; I did not respond to death as she had. It freed me. I never published that work; someday I will return to it and finish it.

[back to Biography]
[continue to Interview, Part 2]

In Their Words: Patricia Klindienst

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klindienst-portrait-small.jpg

This post marks the first of what I hope will be many author interviews. The questions are generic, and each author may use as much or as little space as he or she likes. I have not edited content, only format.

Most recently published work (as of this posting): The Earth Knows My Name: Food, Culture and Sustainability in the Gardens of Ethnic Americans

Website: www.pklindienst.com (not yet live)

A brief biography:
Patricia Klindienst began her career as an interdisciplinary scholar, publishing the first of her ground-breaking feminist re-interpretations of classical myths and biblical stories, “The Voice of the Shuttle Is Ours,” while still a graduate student in Stanford University’s Program in Modern Thought & Literature. She wrote two companion pieces, “Ritual Work on Human Flesh: Livy’s Lucretia and the Rape of the Body Politic,” and “‘Intolerable Language’: Jesus and the Woman Taken in Adultery” as an award-winning scholar and teacher at Yale University. She then left the profession, putting aside the manuscripts of two scholarly books, one on Virginia Woolf and another a collection of her essays on the iconography of rape, and began to write for a broader audience. Her first book, The Earth Knows My Name tells the stories of fifteen ethnic Americans who transmit their cultural heritage through their gardens. Praised by readers as diverse as Jane Goodall and Barry Lopez, Klindienst’s eloquent and passionate rendering of the voices of ethnic peoples has been called “An original and exemplary kind of cultural study” by Geoffrey Hartman, Sterling Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature and co-founder of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimony at Yale, who characterizes her book as “… essential reading for anyone seriously interested in the growing reality that an ancient ecological relationship, imaginative and religious in its intensity, is slipping away.”

[photo credit: Kelly Becerra]

[Continue to Interview, Part 1]

Reading Habits

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I’ve been tagged by the lovely Gautami to write about the following:

My Reading
I read almost anything, and I read cyclically, finding everything by a particular author, and working through that, and then moving on to the next. I like thick books with good plots, but sometimes I read forumla romances because they’re hilarious, and sometimes I only want horror or mysteries. Most recently, I’ve been only reading novels taking place in France.

Total Number of Books Owned
I haven’t the faintest. Seven six-foot bookshelves, triple stacked?

Last Book Bought
Probably One Dance in Paris or the 2008 Writers Market

Last Book Read
I’m currently re-reading Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen by Julie Powell. Does that count?

Five Meaningful Books
Certain Women, by Madeleine L’Engle
Outside Lies Magic, by John Stilgoe
Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, by Kathleen Norris
Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg
Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott

I am tagging:
The first five people to read this?

Booking Through Thursday: Comfort Food

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Okay . . . picture this (really) worst-case scenario: It’s cold and raining, your boyfriend/girlfriend has just dumped you, you’ve just been fired, the pile of unpaid bills is sky-high, your beloved pet has recently died, and you think you’re coming down with a cold. All you want to do (other than hiding under the covers) is to curl up with a good book, something warm and comforting that will make you feel better.

What do you read?

For me, comfort reading, like comfort food, involves things that invoke a cozy setting, and have descriptions of either food or clothing, or are somehow familiar – a favorite author, for example.

Madeleine L’Engle’s works A Live Coal in the Sea and Certain Women are comfort books for me. Laurell K. Hamilton’s work, as much as I love it, is not. Diane Mott Davidson’s culinary mysteries, the really early Nero Wolfe and The Cat Who… books, and almost anything by Maeve Binchy or Marian Keyes qualify as well.

Possibly my favorite ever comfort novel, though, is a book called Mothers, by Jax Peters Lowell that I picked up ages ago, decades even, and fell in love with it. It’s about Claire, a photographer, and Theo, a caterer, both young women who identified as straight, who fall in love, and eventually manage to have a son using artificial insemination. It’s a candid account of two women falling in love in the 60’s and 70’s in New York, and it has food and photography and sweet domestic moments, and a trip out to the beach – all my favorite things – but what I like about it most is that it isn’t a gay novel or a straight novel. It’s just the story of a family who love each other.

What could be more comforting than that?


Booking Through Thursday

Left Bank

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by Kate Muir

About this Book:
Madison Malin is Texan by birth and French by marriage, an actress who has always found herself playing the bimbo in distress in not-quite-pornographic movies. Her husband, Olivier, is an itinerant philosopher who chases young women and holds court in cafes, fancying himself to be a sort of Gen-X version of Sartre. The novel explores there relationship, and how it disintegrates when they hire a new English nanny for their daughter, Sabine.

Why I Chose this Book:
I was in a French sort of mood the day I picked this up, which was the same day I picked up a couple of other books that took place in Paris. I liked the title and the back cover blurb, and thought it would be interesting. I was expecting a light and predictable romance, and instead got a sometimes-amusing, sometimes gritty view of a marriage. Why is it, by the way, that no one ever writes stories about happy marriages?

What I Liked About this Book:
I was all set to love the nanny and hate Madison, but really the only character I wanted to shake to death was Olivier, which means Ms. Muir did her job, because he was supposed to come off as an arrogant ass. Anna, the nanny, by the way, was delightfully real, and I liked the subplot with the cook and the Chechnian immigrants.

Would I Recommend this Book?
Read it if you don’t mind a jaded air about your fiction, and don’t expect fluffy bunny happy endings. These characters are interesting and complex, but they’re not always nice or pretty. This is NOT chick-lit.

Goodbye, Madeleine

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I saw a line item in someone’s LiveJournal this morning that Madeleine L’Engle had died. Publishers Weekly had a couple of lines about it on their website today, with a comment that they only got the information at deadline, and would have a longer piece next week, and that’s all very well and good, but I needed to write something of my own.

I’ve never met Madeleine L’Engle, but her book A Wrinkle in Time was my first entry into science fiction and fantasy reading. I’d already been a fan of Star Trek and Space 1999 when someone handed my eight-year-old self a black book, no dust cover, no pictures, and sent me into the quilt covered bed in her guest room, and said, “Read this.”

The “someone” in question was a friend of my mother’s. I don’t remember her name, but she and her Latin American husband used to fuss over me and feed me carob drops, and on this night, she and my mother were involved in a project and a long conversation. There as a lightning storm outside the window, a bowl of grainy home-made vanilla ice cream nearby, and a really soft quilt, and I didn’t so much read the book as fall into it and never quite come out again.

I was hooked.

Over the years, L’Engle’s work has floated into and out of my life, with one of her novels dropping into my lap every so often, just when I needed it most. When my grandmother died, her Crosswicks Journals helped me process it. When I was adjusting to being back in California, married, and working for my mother Certain Women was my companion. On a cold night in January, I toasted my toes, cuddled my dog, and read her two novels about pianists and St. John’s Cathedral, and when I began my explorations into the Episcopal church a couple of years ago, it was a work of hers that was part of my reading.

Authors, through their words, touch so many lives so deeply, that we readers often feel as if we know them, when we don’t. It’s not the same sort of “knowing” as with a favorite actor or musician, but a closer one, at once more intellectual and more emotional. We see their thoughts, in the lines and dots that make up printed letters, you see. And we see into their hearts.

While I suspect Madeleine L’Engle and I might have disagreed on some fundamental social issues, I also think we’d have found things to talk about, and I KNOW she was a woman with a good heart.

I met her works as a child, and I continued to keep them as part of my library as I grew up. I think it’s marvelous that her stories are so timeless.

She will be missed.

Edited to add: The New York Times article about her is here, and it’s good, though it persists in referring to her as a “children’s author.”

Five for Friday: Back to School

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I haven’t been in school for years – almost decades – but in honor of most students being back at school by now, my list this week is books that involve school.

  1. Harriet the Spy, by Louise Fitzhugh: Harriet’s entire plot involves the reactions of her schoolmates to her spy notebook, after all. Plus, I always wanted to go to a school where being in the play involved being an onion.
  2. A Live Coal in the Sea, by Madeleine L’Engle: Technically this is a sequel to a much earlier novel, Camilla, but it stands on its own as well. Most of the action takes place in and around a university campus.
  3. The Anne of Green Gables series, by Lucy Maud Montgomery: While it’s true that not all of the wonderful stories about Anne’s life in and around Avonlea involve school, education was a prime motivator in Anne’s life. From student, to teacher, to wife and mother, Anne Shirley progressed through life surrounded by books and words.
  4. Mythology 101, Higher Mythology, Mythology Abroad, and Advanced Mythology, by Jody Lynn Nye: a delightful light fantasy series about a group of elves living in the sub basement of a university library, and the human students who interact with them.
  5. The President’s Daughter, White House Autumn, and Long Live the Queen, by Ellen Emerson White: Well-written, if slightly dated based on characters’ television choices, series about the teenage daughter of the first female president of the United States. There’s apparently a fourth book coming out next month, and while these are YA, I plan to read it anyway.

Booking Through Thursday: 6 September 2007

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So, this is my question to you–are you a Goldilocks kind of reader?
Do you need the light just right, the background noise just so loud but not too loud, the chair just right, the distractions at a minimum?Or can you open a book at any time and dip right in, whether it’s for twenty seconds, while waiting for the kettle to boil, or indefinitely, like while waiting interminably at the hospital–as long as the book is open in front of your nose, you’re happy to read?

While I agree that there are some environments that are more comfortable for reading than others, if the book is good, I have no trouble getting lost in it no matter the location. At home, I read a lot in bed, the bath, and on the porcelain throne. Elsewhere? I’ve found it perfectly easy to lose myself in the written word while in class, on a bus or train, on a plane, or sitting in a bookstore, library, or cafe. I didn’t generally bring books to work, however, because I knew I’d lose track of time if I stopped to read, even over lunch.

Booking Through Thursday website.

Thursday 13: Laura Ingalls Wilder

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Thirteen Things about Laura Ingalls Wilder

The images in the Wordless Wednesday post below are from De Smet, South Dakota, the real “Little Town on the Prairie.” De Smet is the town where the last half of By the Shores of Silver Lake, The Long Winter, and Little Town on the Prairie and These Happy Golden Years take place. Here are thirteen quotations from Laura Ingalls Wilders’ books, from those years.

  1. It was a big house, a real house with two stories, and glass windows. Its up-and-down boards were weathering from yellow to gray and every crack was battened, as Pa had said. The door had a china knob. It opened into the lean-to over the back door.

  2. This house had board floors; not as comfortable to bare feet as the earth floor of the shanty, but not so much work to keep clean.

  3. The surveyors had left their stove! It was a larger stove than the one that Ma had brought from Plum Creek; it had six lids on top and two oven doors, and it was all set up with its stovepipe in place. Spaced on the wall beyond it were three doors. All of them were shut.

  4. Laura tiptoed across the wide floor, and softly opened one door. There was a small room, with a bedstead in it. This room had a window, too.

  5. Softly, Laura opened the middle door. She was surprised. Steeply up in front of her went a stair, just the width of the door. She looked up and saw the underside of a slanting roof high overhead. She went up a few steps, and a big attic opened out on both sides of the stairs.

  6. That made three rooms already, and still there was another door. Laura thought that there must have been a great many surveyors to need so much space. This would be by far the largest house she had ever lived in.

  7. She opened the third door. A squeal of excitement came out of her mouth and startled the listening house. There before her eyes was a little store. All up the walls of that small room were shelves, and on the shelves were dishes, and pans and pots, and boxes, and cans. All around under the shelves stood barrels and boxes.

  8. All day long, except when he went through the storm to do the chores, Pa was twisting more sticks of hay in the lean-to.

  9. Laura picked up all the hay her hands could hold and shook the snow from it. Then, watching Pa, she followed his motions in twisting the hay. First he twisted the long strand as far as his two hands could do it. Then he put the right-hand end of it under his left elbow and held it there, tight against his side, so that it could not untwist.

  10. Laura’s stick of hay was uneven and raggedy, not smooth and hard like Pa’s. But Pa told her that it was well done for the first one; she would do better next time.

  11. She put the button in the center of the square of calico. She drew the cloth together over the button and wound a thread tightly around it and twisted the corners of calico straight upward in a tapering bunch. Then she rubbed a little axle grease up the calico and set the button into the axle grease in the saucer.

  12. “Give me a match, Charles, please,” Ma said. She lighted the taper tip of the button lamp. A tiny flame flickered and grew stronger. It burned steadily, melting the axle grease and drawing it up through the cloth into itself, keeping itself alight by burning. The little flame was like the flame of a candle in the dark.

  13. “I was wondering…” Almanzo paused. Then he picked up Laura’s hand that shone white in the starlight, and his sun-browned hand closed gently over it. He had never done that before. “Your hand is so small,” he said. Another pause. Then quickly, “I was wondering if you would like an engagement ring.”
    “That would depend on who offered it to me,” Laura told him.
    “If I should?” Almanzo asked.
    “Then it would depend on the ring,” Laura answered, and drew her hand away.

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