Guests
by Elizabeth Dewberry, March 16, 2007 9:48 AM
It's been a fun week for me. And I got my cowboy boots broken in! I hope you've enjoyed it, too. Now I'm excited to be going back to work on my next novel, which is about a stripper who gives a lap dance for Stephen Hawking (who wrote A Brief History of Time), which changes her life. (Did I mention that I love my job!?) This is one of my favorite moments of the research for that book: One night, I found myself walking down Bourbon Street with a woman who worked at Rick's Cabaret. She had big brown hair, big brown eyes. She was pretty, but in an ordinary sort of way. She was wearing a simple floral-print dress. She wasn't turning heads. I asked her why men go to these clubs, why women work at them. "It's not about sex," she said. "If you think it's about sex, it'll mess with your head and you won't last two weeks. There's a high turnover. You have to remember that it's about fantasy. It's desire. People can live without sex, but you can't live without fantasy." It was nighttime, but Bourbon Street was bright as neon. She usually worked during the day, she told me, when things were more laid back. "The later it is at night, the younger and drunker and cheaper the crowd is. They don't get it. They just want beer and tits. But during the day, it's men who want to see a pretty girl and talk to her. And you don't even have to be that pretty. Some days, I look at myself and I think, I can't do this, I'm too fat, my hair's too frizzy, whatever. But they don't really care. For a guy who walks into the club, it's about being in a place where any girl he sees wants to talk to him, wants to know his name. It's more important to make eye contact than to be beautiful. You've got to make that kind of connection. You can make a good living, but you've got to know you're not going to be doing this until you die. There's a girl who's been dancing for twenty years. She's raised two kids, bought a house in Metairie. But I don't want to do it much longer." I asked her, "What do you want to do?" "I'm writing a book," she said. "I've already got an ISBN number." We passed a street musician, a tenor saxophohist shaping sounds like wishes. I didn't tell her she didn't need to get her own ISBN number. She wasn't asking my advice. "I've got so many stories," she said. "That's another reason they go there. They want to tell somebody their story." The next afternoon, I went to Rick's. When she saw me, she rushed over to me and unfolded a Xeroxed piece of paper ? a copy of her application for her ISBN. "I'm going to do it," she said. "I'm not going to be here when I'm forty-five." The DJ called her name ? it was time for her set ? and she was still holding the paper. She folded it up like a dollar bill and tucked it into her garter as she walked up the stairs onto the stage, and Ella Fitzgerald started singing "Isn't It Romantic?" Well, thanks for listening to my stories this week. And I didn't even have to go to a strip club to get you to do it! Although maybe fiction-readers and fiction-writers have more in common with strip-clup patrons than we like to admit: we can't live without fantasy, either, though usually, it's a different fantasy! I hope my stripper friend takes what she's learned from stripping when she writes her book: Even when fiction looks like it's all about revelation, or plot, at its best, it's really about eye contact, about human connection. I do love talking with people about stories (especially mine!), so I hope it's not inappropriate to mention here that I've started doing phone chats about His Lovely Wife with book clubs, and people seem to be enjoying it. The way it works, if you're interested, is that you email me at [email protected] and we set up a time. Then I'll call you, and you can either put me on speaker phone or, if that's not loud enough, you can pass me around, or one person can be like my interpreter, repeating everything I say (except not in a different language!). So let me know if your group wants to do it. And I know book clubs plan pretty far in advance, so you may not get to it for a while, but it's an open-ended offer. Thanks again, and I hope to hear from
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Guests
by Elizabeth Dewberry, March 15, 2007 10:28 AM
Do you remember the passage in Our Town where Rebecca Gibbs says a preacher sent a letter to a sick child and addressed it to, "Jane Crofut, the Crofut Farm, Grover's Corners, Sutton County, New Hampshire, United States of America, Continent of North America, Western Hemisphere, the Earth, the Solar System, the Universe, the mind of God"? I've always loved that passage, though I used to think it was nothing more than whimsical. But there are a lot of legitimate physicists working today who think the whole field of physics is headed toward an understanding that the universe we live in is a projection of or is contained by some other, transcendent reality. Physicists are generally reluctant to identify what that other reality is. Some say it might be another universe with another set of dimensions, some use the word hologram in ways I don't really get, but virtually all of them agree that whatever it is, it's not limited by time and space, which suggests, to me, something eternal and omnipresent. So what if Thornton Wilder, speaking through Rebecca Gibbs, was right, and that transcendent reality that physicists are scrambling to figure out the mathematical proof for is the mind of God? Maybe that's where we all ultimately exist, in the mind of God. I like to think so. It explains a lot. It explains where archetypes come from, for example, much more eloquently than saying they're part of the collective unconscious. It explains intuition, déjà vu. It also explains where fiction — and all art, for that matter — comes from. If we all exist in the mind of God, that suggests a new way of reading the Bible. For example, when Jesus said that the greatest commandment was, "Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind," I can't summarize everything he meant by that, but for fiction writers, or for me, anyway, it means, "Be passionately engaged with the universe. Write with all your heart, from the depths of compassion and empathy that you can find for your characters; write with all your mind, paying attention to structure and story and detail and craft; and write with all your soul, the place where God dwells and that therefore connects you, through him, to every other person in the history of this planet — those who lived long lives, those who barely lived at all, those who lived before you, those who will come after you." And I'm not trying to sound strange, but here's how I think of it: also those whose lives are imaginary, fictional, existing on this planet primarily in the minds of their writers and readers — they, too, dwell in the mind of God. And when you are writing with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind, you have the privilege and the obligation to tell the stories that are given to you as truly and as well as you can, to use those holy and awesomely powerful things called words, to create flesh, flesh that, as John in his gospel described Jesus, the Word made flesh, is full of grace and truth. That's how I understand writing as a form of prayer — that what I'm doing when I'm writing, at my best, is connecting at the level of my soul to the universe, to God, to everything else that is in the mind of God, including the souls of my characters and the souls of my readers. That is, for me, the basis for hope that my characters' individual experiences can transcend their specific realities of race and gender and ethnicity and nationality and religion to express universal human truth. If that weren't possible, if we were each stuck in our own skins, unable to enter into the lives of others, to feel their humanity and touch their souls, I think we would eventually destroy each other. I think as long as we remain unable to realize our deepest connection to each other, we will, to that same extent, continue to go to war with each other and ignore each other's suffering, even when that suffering reaches the levels of famines and epidemics and genocides and holocausts. But I also believe that through fiction, we can transcend the limits of our own individual existences and connect in profound ways to each other, to the universe, to God. That's what I hope and pray to do in my work. And it's what I hope and pray for this planet
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Guests
by Elizabeth Dewberry, March 14, 2007 10:23 AM
I think of the first part of research for a novel as creating a space inside myself where my narrator can live. So if she has a layman's understanding of string theory because her husband is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and she wants some sense of how he sees the universe, I need to learn string theory. If she's so moved by the death of Princess Diana that she begins hearing Diana's voice in her head ? it's not as hokey as it sounds, I promise ? then I'll read all the Princess Diana biographies I can find ? forty-six, to be exact. If she spends five days in Paris, stays at the Ritz, eats dinner and gets her hair done in the hotel, me too! (Okay, I spent two nights at the Ritz, then moved to a cheaper but hipper neighborhood on the Left Bank.) And she's welcome to borrow and make her own any experience I've had or anything else I know. For example, when Princess Diana died, it seemed that almost every writer was publishing a tribute or a memory or an analysis. I was moved by her death and utterly mystified by the world's response to it, including my own, but I found I had very few answers to the questions I thought the situation raised. What does it say about the human heart, our capacity to feel genuine grief for the loss of a stranger? Is it somehow pathetic to be emotionally invested in a celebrity we never even met? Or are we all connected in ways we don't fully perceive, and we respond as we do to certain celebrities because their lives, including their mistakes, feel like our own, writ large, and therefore make us feel like we're not as alone in the world as we might have feared? At the time of her death, I was living in Lake Charles, Louisiana, the same small town where my husband, Robert Olen Butler, had been living when he won his Pulitzer, before we met. Although I'd published two novels by then, we were almost always introduced as "our Pulitzer-prize-winning author, Robert Olen Butler" ? now a slight pause, the volume dropping just a notch, "and his lovely wife." Sometimes they would go so far as to say, "his lovely wife, Elizabeth Dewberry," or "Elizabeth Newberry," or just "Elizabeth," but I'm not kidding, it was pretty frequent that "his lovely wife" was it. I mentioned this to a friend ? a university professor ? who I suspected had had the same experience. She said, "Oh yes, hislovelywife, all one word, that's me." And she laughed. At first, I tried to laugh it off, too, and take the description as the compliment it was meant to be, telling myself it didn't matter if some people saw me as nothing more than Bob's wife. It wasn't how he saw me, and it wasn't how I saw myself. But it started to eat at me. Partly in response to feeling fragile about my sense of self, I started studying religion and spirituality, and when I read that contemporary physics was coming to the same conclusion about the true nature of the universe that many religions reached long ago, I started trying to learn physics. It soon become clear to me that if I could begin to understand subatomic physics and contemporary cosmology ? which are about as mysterious as God ? I would want to use this elegant way of comprehending the spiritual dimension of the physical universe in my life and in my work. So for years, I had my fascination with Diana and the world's response to her death, my experiences as a lovely wife, and my interest in physics on separate back burners. But around the hundredth time I was introduced as Bob's lovely wife, they began to merge. I felt irritated, and I started noticing how many wives of successful men ? not to mention the ultimate lovely wife, Princess Diana ? are caught in the same trap: their public identities have at least as much to do with the fact that they are somebody's wife as with who they are. One day, in the grocery store, I saw a magazine with Jennifer Anniston on the cover with a big title that read, "Mrs. Brad Pitt," and I thought, "Okay, on behalf of lovely wives everywhere, I have something to say." I still didn't know exactly what I wanted to say, but I began to sense a character who, like Diana and me, was married to an older, well-situated man ? in her case, an eminent physicist ? and that Diana's death was going to play a role in her story. Fortunately for me, Diana died in Paris instead of Bosnia or Pakistan, so I hopped on a plane to Paris, and I wandered the streets and took a taxi through the tunnel where Diana died and visited the place where most Parisian mourners left flowers in the week after the death (and still do). And the story began to feel alive. This is one of my favorite moments from the whole trip: I was eating dinner alone at Espadon, the restaurant in the Ritz where Diana and Dodi made a brief appearance on the night they died. Almost everybody in the room had arrived at eight and were going through the several-course tasting menu at about the same rate, so I was taking notes, drawing the seating arrangement, listing the foods I was eating, and describing the interior, including the waiters, the harpist, and the other diners, but also imagining my character talking with her husband and his friends over dinner. During the cheese course, a few minutes after ten o'clock, the same time Diana and Dodi entered the restaurant on the night I was imagining, a big clap of thunder rang out and a huge storm blew up out of nowhere, with the wind blowing so hard that some of the wrought-iron chairs on the terrace just outside the restaurant started moving ? we could hear them scraping the floor. Somebody opened one of the glass doors to the terrace, and everybody in the restaurant stopped eating, stopped drinking, stopped talking, and every head turned toward the open door and the driving rain outside. The waiters quickly closed the door and set about restoring order and serving dessert, but the mood of the evening had shifted palpably and permanently ? every conversation had been interrupted, and now everyone in the room was talking about what an amazing thing had just occurred. I felt like I'd been given a glimpse of what it must have felt like that night when Diana walked in. All week, little things like that kept happening, little gifts, and all week, I listened to my narrator, and through her, to Diana's spirit as they challenged even their own preconceptions about the ways their marriages defined them and the ways they defined themselves. And I set them loose in a late-summer Paris full of mourners and tourists and Frenchmen and physicists and photographers, and His Lovely Wife become the story they
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Guests
by Elizabeth Dewberry, March 13, 2007 10:36 AM
I recently went to the AWP Writers Conference in Atlanta. It's mostly writers ? students and professors ? from university writing programs (that's the W and the P). Somebody told me there were 4,500 writers there, though it seemed more like 20,000 to me. Many writers love those things. You see old friends, you meet writers you admire, you meet writers you don't know anything about but you tell them you like their work, especially if they say they like yours. You go to panels about writing pedagogy and anything even tangentially related to writing. (I was on a panel called "Sex, Drugs, and Rock-and-Roll in the Urban South." I have no idea why.) You drink. What more could you ask? So call me a hermit, but for me, 4,500 writers in one place is just too many writers. You're always bumping into one, and if you've ever met the person in your life, they'll hug you like you're old pals and tell you that they just got a story accepted by a literary magazine you've never heard of (but they say it in a way that implies you should have) or they just did a two-book deal with Random House or they've got an option from Hollywood, and how are you? (Meaning, Top that.) When you get introduced to a writer you haven't met before, they instantly look at your nametag. If you're affiliated with a university, that's noted in small print under your name, and I'm not, so I often got the feeling that people thought I was an interloper, which I guess I was, but also that, not being in a university, I probably didn't edit a literary magazine or sit on a hiring committee or have impressive enough stationery that they'd ever want to ask me for a letter of recommendation, so there was not much I could do for them and they needed to move on. (Bye, now! Nice meeting you!) One person actually looked at my nametag ? Elizabeth on the first line, with Dewberry in smaller type on the second line ? and said, "Where's Dewberry?" I pointed at myself and said, "Here." End of conversation. I decided I was done. I think the thing that makes me so uncomfortable that I don't want to do it again is the undercurrent of anxiety that's created by the sheer mass of people who spend most of their lives feeling like the world doesn't fully appreciate them. Once, when I finished a book tour, I called Richard Ford and told him that I was depressed and didn't know why. I wish I could quote him word for word, but he said something like this, "Well, of course you're depressed. Your book is done, it's out there, there's nothing more you can do for it, and no amount of acclaim or sales or whatever terms you measure your book's success in will be commensurate with what you put into it. Ever." I do remember that he used the word commensurate. And ever. Not incidentally, this was after he'd won his Pulitzer Prize. I think he's right. Writing fiction, for me, involves putting my heart, my soul, my mind, my body, my time, money, and energy on every page, and if you look at it as if you've made a deal with the universe where you're supposed to get something back that's as valuable as all that, you're always going to feel cheated on some level. (And maybe you'll attempt to deal with your frustration by going to writers' conferences and trying to convince other writers that they should appreciate you, even if you end up looking a little desperate in the process.) Ultimately, though, the work has to be its own reward, and that's not an easy frame of mind to get into or to stay in. Maybe it's not just writers. Maybe if you got 4,500 dentists or lawyers or florists or people of any profession together, you'd get a feeling that they've got a sense of collective anxiety, too. I remember meeting the man who invented the drug Taxol, which has saved the lives of thousands of women who had breast cancer, and I said something about how good that must feel, to know that something you did is saving lives every day. He shook his head, looked me in the eyes, and said, "No, because I can't stop thinking about the ones it didn't save." It's not quite the same thing as feeling underappreciated, but maybe everybody who's passionate about their work feels some version of this: I want it to be better, to do more, to matter more, to make a bigger difference in people's lives. Which is not such a bad thing. Still, I'm not going back to
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Guests
by Elizabeth Dewberry, March 12, 2007 12:13 PM
I'm wearing a sweatshirt, leggings, socks with dogs on them, cowboy boots, and my Bichon Frisee SusieQ. No jewelry, no makeup. And I'm at work! I love my job! Except when I hate it, but that's another day, another blog. And to clarify, of course I'm not "wearing" my dog, but she's in my lap, where she often is when I write. I don't know why people ask me about what I wear when I write, but they do, so I thought you might like to know, too. This week, I'm going to write about writing and writers, since that's what I know best. I'll blog about my writing process, including research (I'm Getting my Hair Done ? while I Work!), getting to know my characters, hearing their voices, and finding their stories. I'll talk about why writing feels like a form of prayer to me (sometimes) and what it has in common with stripping. Oh, and why I hate my job. And I'll try to answer the questions I usually get asked about writing when I'm at readings or dinner parties where not everyone else is a writer or... well, I don't get asked about writing in many other contexts. Except this question: "Are your novels fiction or non-fiction?" But this is Powell's (!), so I won't answer that one here. Maybe I'll also answer some of the questions I wish I would be asked, as well. I'll start with the easy ones: I write mostly on a computer, but occasionally by hand if I don't have my computer with me or I just need a change of pace, in my pajamas or, in the summer, those little Victoria's Secret sundresses with the built-in bras, so I can be decent when answering the door. The cowboy boots are not a usual thing ? I almost always write barefooted ? but I'm going horse-back riding next week, so I just bought these boots on Ebay, thinking they might make me look like I know what I'm doing, which could backfire if they make me look like I'm trying to look like I know what I'm doing when it's clear to all that I don't, so did I really think the right shoes would help? (Short answer: yes, I believe in shoes.) Anyway, I'm trying to break them in. I know, sitting here writing isn't going to do that, but I get up a lot. I don't get email on the computer I write on ? the original thought was that I'd be more focused this way ? so I'm always going downstairs to check the other computer for email or let out the cats or anything but write. I try to write every day, first thing in the morning, and go until I feel like I'm just juggling commas, but that doesn't always work out, so no, I can't really say that I have a writing schedule. And no, I don't have any control over my book covers, though the people at Harcourt were nice enough to ask my opinion, and I love the hardcover and paperback covers of His Lovely Wife. (They're very different.) Yes, I sometimes write for magazines, mostly profiles of artists, designers, or homes for Southern Accents, which I love doing for many reasons, one of which is the high I get when I say, "I'm finished!" Novelists pretty much never get to say that because every time you finish, you know there will be one more round of revisions, and the last time, after the copy-editing, is anti-climactic. And no, I don't teach writing, except for the occasional writers' conference. I didn't go to a graduate writing program, but I did get a PhD in 20th-century American fiction, and I wrote my first novel in secret while I was also writing my dissertation on Hemingway's first book, In Our Time. I don't have anything against writing programs, but I think I could easily have been damaged by one because my process is all about listening to my characters' voices, and having professors' and other students' voices in my head while I was trying to listen to my characters would have been very difficult. Also, I work slowly, and it's fragile, so I could easily go for a semester's length of time where nothing I was working on was ready to show. (Maybe I do have a little something against writing programs, or at least the traditional stab-your-classmates-in-the-back ones.) And I'll just say it: I'm eager to please and easily hurt ? not a good combination for a student in a graduate writing program. Not really a good combination for much else, either! Well, I hope you enjoyed this and that you'll keep stopping by this week. (See? Eager to please. If you didn't like it, please don't post that!) Tomorrow, I'm going to write about the conference I recently attended where 4,500 writers were gathered in one place, and why I'll never do that
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