BlogLily

Ella Lesatele, the author and illustrator of The Absent Classic Series has been writing and drawing since she was a little kid. An art-school graduate, and mother of two small children, she’s also an expatriate who lives with her family in Dubai, where she will be for another year and a half. In addition to being a writer of talent and vision, Ella is good at many other things, such as playing badminton and making apple pie, and terrible at others, such as driving a car and having patience . Imagine this conversation taking place in the lovely room where Ella’s desk is located.

How’s your work coming along these days? What have you recently sent out into the world?

The last big project I finished was a book called Folk Tales of the Bezai – a 10,000 word novella I wrote, illustrated, and made into a handmade book. It’s the third installment of a larger project, called The Absent Classic, where I’m dabbling with the idea of books as a form of craft.

Why do you write and illustrate under pseudonyms?

I feel like using pseudonyms gives me a little room to stretch out and experiment with different styles and take the stories I work on in different directions from each other. I’m easily bored, and I have trouble sticking to one theme or voice – so speaking and drawing from different points of view is ideal for me.

Why do you call The Absent Classics “fake books”?

Because they’re not “real books”, in my mind. They’re not published, or mass-produced, and they haven’t survived any peer reviews or editing. My Absent Classics look like books, but I doubt they could compete with real books in a library or bookstore.

People who like my work sometimes try to push me towards writing real books, and maybe someday I’ll get my act together and write something worth mass-production, but for now I’m more interested in operating slightly outside that world.

What are your influences?

I’m kind of chronically distractible – I keep a scrapbook/ notebook of all the stuff I come across in print media that I think is worth exploring, and it’s a giant mess of newspaper articles, photos, letters to editors, book reviews, and other peoples’ illustrations. And I read a lot of books, and look at a lot of art, and those send me off in different directions as well. So my own work is also a little bit of a jumble – it tends to pick up flavors from a lot of the different things I come across.

In terms of writers, I’m always interested in writers who illustrate their own books. I’ve read everything by or about Edward Gorey I can find; I also like Edward Lear’s illustrated work, and PD Eastman’s picture books. There’s a kind of odd symbiosis between writing and illustrating, you know? When they both work together, they inform each other, and the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts.

Can you describe the process of making a book?

Well, I start with an idea that I think is workable – usually it’s something bizarre and potentially funny like What kind of operas would a lovelorn circus strongman, circa 1900, write? And then I spend a couple weeks tracking down everything I can find about Edwardian circus strongmen and operas. Then I draft a foreword to the book, where I lay out the significance of the work, and a little bit about the writer, and how the manuscript came to the attention of The Absent Classic, and why the book is an indispensable addition to the sophisticated reader’s library.

I usually split the writing and illustrating into two halves and set a schedule of how many drawings or words I need per week. After four weeks, I have a rough draft. Then I spend the next month making changes (I usually scrap the whole foreword at that point and re-write it to fit the draft), fact-checking, and redoing or finishing illustrations. When I have a final draft, I make printing proofs. When the proofs are done I print a test copy and if the test comes out properly collated and justified I do my print run. Then it takes about two weeks to get those copies sewn, glued, and bound into covers; when they’re all dry and beautiful I bring the whole batch to the post office and mail them off to the subscribers. And then I have some chocolate cake and start thinking about grand new ideas.

How are your books marketed and distributed?

I wrestle with this all the time. The part of me that’s been unemployed for four years says I should sell books – lots of them! – and farm out the production part to a real press and turn a profit and buy my husband his own golf course.

But the thing about my books that I really love is how personal they are. They’re handmade and they have a lot of soul in them; even though they’re copies of the same book, each one is unique. For various reasons, I’m not comfortable selling them – there’s the issue of transferring money overseas, charging for shipping, refunding from overseas, export taxes, etc – so I decided to make a subscription list of customers, and barter instead of sell them.

And I have to say, this system is really working for me - I’ve been very, very lucky. I haven’t lost a book to Customs or Homeland Security yet, I’ve gotten some great books in exchange for my Absent Classics, and my subscribers are really generous with feedback and support, which eggs me on to create better books.

People love to hear how writers overcome difficulties– the long slog of getting from a brilliant idea to the end of a work, the strings of rejection so long they could circumnavigate the globe, the mean reviews, the weird reactions of loved ones to your work, the moment you see your book on the remainder pile. Can you talk about the dark nights of the soul and how you kept going, even though the lights seemed to be out?

Well, my dark nights are usually just when I send out my books out to subscribers and get bad or indifferent feedback – all the people who subscribe to the series are readers whose opinions I really respect. So when someone points out that I have a gaping hole in the narrative or a drawing that doesn’t fit, I usually realize they’re right, then sulk for a couple days. But since my stakes are pretty low (my overriding motivation for the project is self-entertainment) I tend to recover pretty quickly, after a few hot chocolates and a good moan.

Why do you suppose so many people want to know where you get your ideas?

Well, to be honest, nobody has ever asked me where I get my ideas. No, wait, when I sent a copy of A Compendium of Imaginary Saints, the first book I put together myself, to my parents, my mom asked, “What on earth gave you the idea to have a gold cover?” but I don’t think that’s the same thing.
If anyone ever did ask me Where do you get your ideas? I would say, “From inside my head, just like everyone else.” Then I would smile.

How do you balance the rest of your life with your writing life?

Poorly. I feel like I’m constantly struggling between what I need to do with what I want to do. It’s like there’s an angel sitting on one shoulder saying, “Your baby just barfed on her last clean shirt – maybe some clean laundry is in order? And, while you’re at it, the toddler might need a snack?” and a devil on the other shoulder saying, “It’s hot! The baby can go naked! Let’s go write an 800-word footnote on sea monsters!”

Talk about the books you’ve loved.
My favorite books are nineteenth-century novels. I love most of the big Victorian writers, but I also have real fondness is for magazine and pulp writing of that period too – there’s a kind of delicious purple prose that only exists in the pages of Blackpool’s Ladies’ Companion, under titles like The Vengence of the Spanish Governess; or, The Sunlit Garden Lane and the Beaux That Waited There.

I had kind of an odd upbringing, bookwise. My mother has really good taste in fiction, and made sure I got all the classics when I was in high school and college – I remember borrowing her London Folio editions of the Bronte novels, but she also supplied me with paperbacks of Somerset Maugham and DH Lawrence and Austen novels. My father hates – I mean really, really loathes – the Victorians, but keeps a huge library of old National Geographics, and I grew up reading those too.

The books I love most of all are old (pre- 1960) Modern Library editions, the ones with the Rockwell Kent endpapers. They’re good reading books, but they also have a nice feel – they’re a good weight, and the dust jackets are usually gorgeous, and they smell good – they’re the perfect books. Every book I put together is a little homage to the Modern Library.

Do you think most writing is autobiographical?

No. I mean, mine isn’t. I don’t think it is, anyway. I mean, all of us share some common human experiences, and every writer draws on those, but I don’t write about my childhood or real people in my life.

What other jobs have you had, besides your job as a writer?

I spent a summer working as a gardener before my first year of college, and during college I was an art-store clerk, ESL tutor, hotel maid, lab monitor, and shoe salesgirl. After college I began a career as a temp - I worked for a tractor-trailer company, then a couple giant soulless corporations, then as a museum intern, then as an assistant seamstress for a dance company - until I moved overseas on a non-work visa. So now I hang out at home and take care of my son and daughter. The hours are awful, but I like the kids.
Incidentally, I think every writer owes it to themself to have a couple really terrible jobs. The material you can get from, say, selling ugly shoes for a few months, is far more valuable than whatever paycheck they give you.

What are you working on now? What will you be tackling in the future?

Right now I’ve just broken ground on Volume 4 of The Absent Classic. It’s called A Guide to Lost Colors, and it’s about a Victorian art historian who’s obsessed with rare artists’ pigments and has a hobby of tracking them down in his area of expertise, the pre-Renaissance Dutch painters. As he collects lost colors over the course of his life, he also experiences the gradual loss of his eyesight, and when he dies in the 1930s it is revealed that he has been blind since the turn of the century, and has written his Guide relying entirely on memory and research. It’s very fluid at this point – I’m still wrestling with ideas for the illustrations (how can a blind person produce illustrations?) and researching pigments. But I think it’s going to be the best book yet.

In the future, after we move back to the States in 2009, I’d like to become a little more professional about bookmaking – there’s a lot about the craft I don’t understand. I would also like to graduate from working on the kitchen table to having a real studio, or at least my own desk. And then, ultimately, finding some way to make a living off my work; after all, I have two children to put through beauty school, and a golf course to build.

Ella lives and works in Dubai and can be reached at Box of Books.

I’d like to begin by saying that nobody — ever — in the history of the entire world — has referred to me as The Lady With Excellent Etiquette. So, when Ella, at Box of Books, wrote a thing about “Cozy Reading” and called out a number of people to do the same, only not using their real names when she did so, I definitely clicked on the link to the L.W.E.E. to find out who THAT was (or lwee, as we like to squeal around here when somebody gets a good tile when they’re playing Bananagrams, a game I will write about pretty soon, or next year, as things go around here.) Imagine my surprise. It was me. Anyway, I believe it is good manners to respond when you’re asked to respond (and I apologize to those bloggers — who know who they are — who’ve asked me to respond to memes in the past year, and although I have a list of them, I haven’t done it because, honestly, the best I can do is write about my work’s milk frother, but I PROMISE, I will do it… Soon.)

Okay. So, here’s the meme, and here are my answers.

What kind of a book are you most comfortable reading?

Well, if a book did something like open up and hand me a cold drink and some potato chips, I’d be very comfortable reading it, no matter what it was about. Otherwise, the books I am most comfortable reading are books I’ve read and loved before. You can’t really go wrong there, can you?

What kind of a book do you love to hate?

I sometimes say mean things about contemporary fiction — The Secret Life of Bees kind of thing. But, honestly, I’m pretty sure that’s because I’m jealous and not because I really hate books like that.

What was the last book you surprised yourself by liking?

Hmm. If I think I’m not going to like a book, I usually don’t read it, which is too bad, because then I don’t get surprised. I guess it would have to be Moby Dick, back in graduate school. I had a lot of time to read it, and I was amazed that it was so rich, and weird and vigorous. Oh, I also liked that Jose Saramango book about when the whole world goes blind, even though it had a lot of excrement in it, and honestly, I didn’t think that would work for me. But it did.

What was the last book you surprised yourself by disliking?

The Secret Life of Bees. No, just kidding. I can’t think of one.

What would be the worst book to be marooned on a desert island with?

None. I mean, if you’re marooned on a desert island with, say, The Secret Life of Bees (just for an example), it would be way better than no book at all. You could even, the way Ralph Feinnes did in The English Patient (a book I read and surprised myself by disliking, come to think of it), annotate the heck out of it and make your own wonderful book that you could read to yourself at night while you’re roasting coconuts.

What book would you take with you if you suspected you might be marooned in the near future?

Collected Shakespeare. Whole worlds in there.

What forces you to read outside your comfort zone?

My job. Man, you would not believe the stuff I read at work. I read a lot of transcripts from trials and the things people do, –stupid, avaricious, mean, and just plain boring — really boggles the mind.

I believe the memetiquette is to tag other people to answer these really interesting questions, so I am tagging anyone who’s not on my blogroll, but would like to be, and that way I will know to PUT you on my blogroll, so I can do a little housekeeping with your help and also find out what sort of cozy reading you do.

Oh, and also? I tag everyone ON my blogroll. So, basically, if you’ve read this post YOU should give this a try. Please. Thank you.

I’d like to thank you for installing new batteries in the milk frother thing, apparently over the weekend, because I used that frother last Friday and it was its usual slothful self, which is to say the milk had no fear of it, not in the least. This morning, though, I stuck the frother into my milk and everyone in the kitchen jumped back, like they were afraid I might point the frother at them and suck them into its mighty wake. Now that’s how it’s REALLY supposed to be done. It was nice of you to sneak into the building over the weekend and juice up the Monday work experience. You rock, Lily

And that is all I have to say today. I’m busy crafting author interview questions. And making a list of authors to hit up. And considering whether the frother might be used as a hedge trimmer in a pinch. In fact, here are my preliminary author interview questions:

"auto in disguise" does not mean: what car would you be, if you could be a car (in case you are wondering)

(This photo comes from Infusion Cofee & Tea — a great Philadelphia cafe.)

It’s very hot here in San Francisco today. I mean, relatively hot, if you really think about it, because it is obviously much hotter most places right now than it will ever get here. We are weather wimps in the Bay Area. Still, it is almost 100 degrees out there, or it will be soon and we are not in any way, shape, or form prepared for that. I have a big work project and am feeling such malaise — it’s the price of gas, I’m pretty sure that makes me feel very Ford and Carter-era today.

Back then, though, there were no design blogs, just a wild combination of orange and avocado and Nixon’s resignation to keep you from sinking into despair as the lines at the gas pump got longer and longer. (I know, I know — those things did not happen at exactly the same time. But I was a kid, and they all seemed to blur into each other.) Anyway, the answer to a little mid-summer malaise is, obviously, a summer pleasure, which I think of as something that doesn’t ask a lot of you, but does inject some life into your too-hot-to-move-very-fast day. Today’s summer pleasure is the design blog. These are blogs without a lot of words. There’s something beautifully orderly about these blogs — they don’t take on big things, but every once in a while, a photograph of a bunch of handkerchiefs somebody found on ebay makes everything in my life work just fine.

Here they are, in case you’re looking for that kind of thing. But really, come to think of it, all you really need is a couple of links — the first being one of my favorites. I like this blog because every once in a while this woman does something I love (in this case, it’s the recipe for iced coffee). Go over to the orange blog, and then just poke around in her blog roll. I mean, if you’re into pictures of fabric, and iced coffee and ebay coffee pots.

And an update on the author, author interviews: I’m putting together my first of these, which I think is best done in the form of a questionnaire, because then the writer gets a chance to think things over. Actually, how else would you do this? I guess I could try podcasting it, but man, that is so out of my league, tech-wise.

Now, go check out: How about Orange and then, while you’re at it, a little Design * Sponge

And here’s another, thanks to litlove:  tasting rhubarb.  Lovely images, fine writing.

And oh, oh, oh, how could I have not put this up too:  It’s Jana (of Jana’s Sketchbook) new blog:  A Postcard a Day. 

Tomorrow (or, you know, a few days) there will be more summer pleasures.

I love reading author interviews.  I particularly like to know whether a writer uses a pen or pencil and what kind of notebook she writes in.  So, it occurred to me the other day when an author I like sent me a copy of her new book that I should do some author interviews.  There are tons of writers who come over to BlogLily — I should hit them up, don’t you think?  It could be fun.  You don’t even have to have published something.  Writers in progress are fair game too! 

The thing is, though, that beyond nosy questions about what kinds of writing utensils a writer employs, I’d have to think of some other questions — more literate questions.  So, I did what we all do when we have no idea what we’re doing, which is I googled “author interview questions.” 

Wow.  I found some very bad stuff (not bad, really, but not that interesting), and then the Paris Review’s author interviews which pretty much scared me because they were so smart, and then some other interviews which I loved because writers would draw stuff to illustrate their answers, or at least give the answers in their own handwriting, which I like, because I enjoy seeing how people write.  Literally.

Anyway, I realized that you can do two kinds of interviews (obviously you can do many more than this, but I’m going to just keep it to two because — right! — this is a blog.  We don’t have to be complicated.)  The first kind is more like a questionnaire — you ask everybody the same thing.  (And no, I will not be asking things like if you were a color, what color would you be?  although, in case you are wondering, the answer is orange.)  And then there is the second kind of interview in which the interviewer reads the book and asks questions that are quite book-specific, like “why did you give Harry a scar on his forehead?  Do you have any interesting scars you’d like to tell us about?  Also, what on earth are you doing with all that money?  Are you giving a lot of it away?”  That kind of thing. 

Okay, so say I decide to exploit the people I know who’re writers and force them to answer questions — what kinds of things would you like to hear them talk about?   Another way to ask that question is “when you read author interviews, what are your favorite questions?” 

See?  I’m interviewing you, dear readers.  You’re my warm up to a summer of impersonating Terry Gross.

It was a surly weekend, dear readers. Maybe the surliness was about having so many revisions still to do. Or maybe we’ve been staying up too late. I don’t generally talk about my surly days, because I think they’re a little boring. But sometimes at the center of surliness lies truth, or something true anyway, or maybe something sort of amusing — who knows, maybe when I get through with this post the surliness will have evaporated.

Our little family is probably the worst family in the world at playing games together, a terribleness in inverse proportion to how badly the children in this family want to have family game nights. The troubles are many. First, I refuse to play Risk, a game that goes on forever, is not very interesting, and has a goal I think less than admirable (world domination). Second, THEY refuse to play Scrabble, a game that does not go on forever, because I always win, and has a goal everyone but me finds less than admirable, namely my domination of them, word-wise. Third, that leaves pretty much only games nobody likes to play, so we end up watching a movie together, which is fine, but not as fine as playing a game sometimes.

Anyway, a few weeks ago they were at their aunt’s house and played a game they loved, Apples to Apples. A lot of fun, mom, they promised. You’ll like it because it’s about words

For the few remaining people on the face of the earth who haven’t played this game, basically, you get seven cards with nouns on them: funeral, Mata Hari, firefighter, George Bush, haunted house, for example. And then a person designated as the “judge” (a rotating position), turns over another card, which is always an adjective. Funny, cool, outrageous, sadly misguided, stupid. You lay down the card that you think is the most like the card that’s been turned over.

Fair enough. So, you’d think that the person who wins would be the person who has the good luck to have the noun that best matches the adjective — I mean, really, we all know which card goes with “sadly misguided.”

Sometimes, the cards don’t match up perfectly, and there the judge has to make the best call he or she can make.

The trouble is that people don’t always WANT to pick the best card. Sometimes they pick the dumbest comparison. Or the exact opposite. Or the one they’re pretty sure their brother put down, because they want to do something nice for him since he’s just picked THEIR card, which wasn’t anywhere nearly as good as mine.

Okay, so I’m a grump for not being amused by what is, by all accounts, a fun party game. But, really, what good is a game when there’s a judge who gets to be subjective about something that’s not actually all that subjective? Maybe the trouble here is that I work for a bunch of judges and I’m just not able to let go of my strong feeling that judges are supposed to do one thing: get it right. Or  maybe the truth is that I just hated losing.  Especially when I had the George Bush card.

You never know, when you move to a city, what it is about it you’ll fall in love with. I moved to Berkeley in 1982 because I wanted to go to graduate school at the university. I didn’t know it would smell so good because of a combination of star jasmine and eucalyptus, or that the fall would be hot and beautiful and seem to last forever and that summer would be a so-so season of fog so heavy you think it’s raining. Nor did I have even the slightest inkling that this is a place where people have strong opinions about food.

The other thing I didn’t know is that the kids who work in places like the Star Grocery, which is a few blocks from my house, would have strong opinions about pie crust, and pie crust makers. One thing I should have guessed is that Nick, the guy who owns the Star, would be totally fine about little expressions of disgust with the world as it is, which is to say the world outside Berkeley.

How could it be that I have managed to store 13,000 e-mails in my earthlink inbox? The reason I know I have that many e-mails is because every week or so, a little icon next to my e-mail inbox goes into red, danger territory.  That’s how earthlink tells you that you have to pay them $10 more a month so you can store all your spam in case, you know, you suddenly wake up and decide you DO in fact want to buy cheap pharm, and enlarge  the penis you don’t happen to have and maybe, who knows, send the entire contents of your IRA to some guy in Nigeria who really, really needs it. 

When I glance at that red line hovering in the dangerous-you-have-too-much-crap-in-here territory, I feel like I’m sitting on a nuclear reactor.  Except I’m not Homer Simpson, and I actually DO feel kind of bad knowing the whole thing’s going to go up in a big mushroom cloud. 

Every once in a while, I try to delete some of those e-mails.  But the whole effort is very lame.  I search on things like “cooks illustrated” and “publishers lunch” and “amazon” and delete three or four pages of e-mails at a time.   My inbox goes from 13,000 e-mails to 12, 937 e-mails.  A day and a few visits from energetic spammers later, I’m back at 13,000.  It’s a little like trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon.

The whole thing was making me feel bad.  

So, this morning I took a deep breath, and figured out how you delete the whole inbox at once.  That’s when I discovered that if they ever need someone to push a button that blows stuff up, I’m their woman.  I LIKED it.  Steely eyed, I sat with my finger hovering over the “enter” button.   And then I just tapped it sort of lightly, in a carefree manner.  I didn’t for even a second feel worried that there might be something in that in box that mattered, some e-mail so precious I had saved it to re-read to my children or pass on to my literary executor, or an e-mail with good news that might sustain me on a bad day, or a gift certificate you can only get if you have the proper number, or the details of the bus that picks kids up from skatecamp, or the confirmation number for my trip to New England tomorrow, or litlove’s e-mail address….

Oh my god.  Tell me this wasn’t a huge, huge mistake. 

PS:  To the person who found my blog today by googling “how to be smart, organized and look beautiful”:  I hope you got here in time to see that the way to accomplish these not inconsiderable goals is to delete your e-mails.  It takes years off your life, pounds off whereever you don’t want them, and generally gives you an aura of invincibility.  Until you need the skate camp bus schedule, of course.  Then you’re on your own. 

and one more PS.  Obviously, my method of inbox decluttering is a little extreme.  My friend Debby, who was once my co-worker, and used to pretty regularly inform me that my shoes and outfit didn’t quite work and was always right about that, e-mailed this far more helpful decluttering routine, which I reproduce in its entirety.  Debby (who is not my college friend Debbie, although I’m guessing that Debbie doesn’t have 13,000 e-mails either) has many skills and talents, not least of which is her ability to pull off something like this: 

On my yahoo account, I empty the spam folder every, single day.  And I delete all unnwanted emails every single day.On my work account, I delete all non-work “sent items” emails every day and delete all non-work emails in my inbox every day.  I then delete all deleted items every day.  After I’ve finished doing my timesheets, I delete all the unnecessary emails for that time period and move the important ones over into the appropriate folders.I also delete all my cookies and browsing history every day before I leave the office.

This is probably the only thing I do religiously.  I have almost no emails in my inboxes. 

There was a big thing in the New York Times Magazine yesterday about “equal parenting,” which apparently is a kind of stealth movement out there in parent-land, where both parents juggle it all instead of just one parent juggling it all.

I was sort of busy revising my novel while W (my husband) was outside finishing the skateboard thing he’s building for the boys and running around town to buy Jack some last minute items for his choir tour, but I did register the thought that we’re those kind of parents. I mean, I think we are, because I didn’t have time to read the whole article and most of what I know about it comes from the captions on the pictures of people who looked awfully young to me.

The thing is, though, that the last time we were able to talk about our shared parenting (in some way other than a two second conversation about who’s going to pick up William from his drum lessons) was in 1990. Okay. Since it’s been 18 years since I last really articulated the thinking that goes into the parenting I do with W , I’m due for a little talking about it. Oh, and also, it was Father’s Day yesterday, so it seems appropriate to talk about fathering.

Here’s the setting for that conversation. Fall 1990. We were probably having a drought here in California, because it was hot, hot, hot and we had all the windows open. We were driving to Yosemite, on one of those very windy roads where to keep yourself from getting sick and to make sure the driver (in this case W) is not falling asleep at the wheel, you must absolutely bring up a controversial topic in a loud voice so you can be distracted from getting sick and he can be distracted from falling asleep.

We were about to get married, so there was a ton of stuff to talk about. (Don’t get me started on why it was that I had to wear the complicated dress, complicated both from a fashion and political point of view and he got to rent the same penguin suit thing all men wear.) The discussion I chose to start had to do with whether we were going to have children. Of course, the reason we were getting married was because we were pretty sure we’d have some children, but we’d never really discussed it, so it seemed like a good thing to bring up.

At that time, I could still remember some of the feminist theory I’d read in college. There hadn’t been a lot of stuff about parenting. In fact, the only thing I knew about feminist parenting came from Dorothy Dinnerstein (remember her? Mermaid? Minotaur?). From her, for some reason, I had drawn the conclusion that the Reason There is So Much Fighting in the World is because men aren ‘t properly parented. Which is to say they don’t have fathers who mother them and so they end up killing each other. Or something like that.

So I said, honey, I’m not going to have children unless you’re going to raise them as much as I am. Half and half, okay? At that time, W was busy thinking about whether he was going to take one of those jobs where you go to far away places and make a bunch of money as a consultant, and see your wife and family not that often. So he took this statement seriously. We drove and drove and drove on that twisty road talking about mermaids and minotaurs and consulting jobs and stuff, and by the end of it, we’d agreed — we would be equal parents. I am not surprised that he agreed to this because he is a person of integrity and fairness and he likes to work hard at things, which, it turned out, is what parenting is all about.

He bought a small company of his own, in the end, and never did become a consultant, in part because when you are the boss you get to decide how you’re going to run things. Which is to say that the single best way to institute family friendly work policies is to own the company at which those policies are in force. What are those policies, you ask? The ability to work at home is one. The flexibility to do things with your children when those things must be done, and then stay up until midnight doing the other things that could wait just a bit so you could take your child to the orthodontist is another.

It turns out, though, that our equal parenting also had a lot to do with having twins. I can see how we might not have ended up the way we did. That’s because my impulse when I became pregnant was to just take over. Look, I can carry two at once! Next, I’ll give birth to them in beautiful pain! And then, hey, how about all that nursing I will do! I had no idea what he’d do, before he started doing it.

That happened when they arrived — both of them. Fortunately for me, the babies and W, you can’t monopolize parenting if you have two babies at once and you discover all that nursing is making you really, really tired. And so, because we started off having to share, it just never ended. It’s not exact — but for both of us it feels pretty even. (Lately, W would say it is not even, and that I spend so much time writing that our children don’t know what a mother looks like, unless it’s the OTHER mothers they see way more than they see me. He might be right, you know. I wonder what Dorothy Dinnerstein would make of that. Still, equal parenting can sustain a little unequal stint every once in a while — it rights itself, I think, if you pay attention to it.)

This is what it looked like today, for example. It is summer vacation. We both work. Jack had to be taken to the airport. I took him and came into work. Charlie and William have no plans today. W arranged for them to meet a good friend at his work, and go to the park with her. (Please note that I did not make this plan. Shared parenting means being totally responsible for the planning of the days you are on duty as the parent.) I am writing this afternoon and tonight. W is taking the boys out to dinner. Tomorrow he is working at home, while they are at home hanging out. I am working, and writing. I’m in charge of Wednesday and am working on childcare arrangements for the time I will be at work. Thursday he is in charge. Next week, after I get back from a weekend away, he and I are on vacation and we will all be in charge. That is usually a very exciting free-for-all of strong willed people that sometimes ends in tears or a lot of yelling and sometimes is a lot of fun. After that, the camps I organized, and the two nice young women I’ve hired to hang out with the boys take over the childcare.

Which brings me to another important point.  We share parenting between more than  just the two of us.  Important people in our lives and the lives of our children have helped us raise our children.  I have always worked part time (except for a year or so of full time work) and W has always worked a schedule where he either does the morning shift at home or the afternoon school pick up shift.  When the boys were little, one woman — Aurelia Madrid — cared for them during the days both of us had to be at work.  It is hard to think of a name for her — she’s neither an aunt nor a nanny.  She’s a third parent, really.  She brings things into our lives that we wouldn’t otherwise have:  she has a better sense of humor than I do, she’s more easy-going, she keeps them busy really beautifully, and she loves them, as they do her.  So, you see, shared parenting isn’t a two people endeavor, not at least in our life.

And so it goes. A lot of stuff around here gets done at the last minute. Sometimes it is more W doing the child care, sometimes it is more me. We are both sometimes up very late doing the things we love to do that we did not get to do during the day because we are also parents. Shared parenting may not change the world and stop wars, but it does make people happy — both of us. My husband loves his fathering work as much as he loves being an engineer and designing amazing things, and being a windsurfer who’s very fast out there on the San Francisco Bay and a great skier and rock climber to boot. He does all these things, and feels, as I do about my own passions, that he doesn’t do any of them as well as he’d like, but at least he gets to give it a shot. So, yes, I can honestly say, 12 years into the shared parenting endeavor, that it’s a good, worthwhile thing to do. Not everyone can do it, or wants to do it and that’s fine too. I know plenty of families where one parent specializes in the on-site parenting work and, honestly, I no longer believe those children are going to go out and start a bunch of wars. The funny thing is that if people choose that sort of parenting arrangement (women mostly, I think), rather than have it thrust on them, that works pretty well too.

I can’t think of how to end this post except to say that my husband is a remarkable man, and I am lucky to have met him and married him and had those three children with him. He’s a gem. Tired, but a gem.

Three months ago, I submitted the first fifty pages of The Secret War to The James Jones First Novel Fellowship contest.  ($10,000!)  I’d actually intended to mail them the first fifty pages of my second novel, but since I was only on page 22 or so back then, I had to make a little last minute substitution.  

They e-mailed me this morning to say the book’s in their finalist round, which makes me happy.  It’s always terrific to make somebody’s cut, and this one is particularly gratifying because the award is intended to “honor the spirit of unblinking honesty, determination, and insight into modern culture exemplified by the late James Jones. . . .”  I also happen to love Deborah Kerr (okay, Burt Lancaster figures in there too),  who was so magnificent in From Here to Eternity. 

I don’t know if you’ve been following the saga of my short stories – the ones that keep getting dinged by one fine literary journal after the other — but I think it was about time for a little good news around now, don’t you? 

It’s been a terribly busy week, which is why, if you’ve checked in here this week, you kept seeing that post telling you it’s Friday when it’s actually NOT Friday.

There have been performances (William was the bus driver who denied Rosa Parks her seat — he played this key role in a choral performance dedicated to the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King), and projects due (Charlie knows a lot about Venus Fly Traps),  and two of the boys are going on tour with their choirs in a week or two, which means you have to buy black pants that fit and also you have to find their passports, tasks that sound pretty simple but, in reality, turn out to be odysseys of epic proportions. Somewhere in the middle of the week someone managed to break two bones in his hand playing football, which necessitated three trips to the doctor for diagnosis, x-rays, and a very handsome black cast.

That is why, during the week, I have read a couple of short stories, and written the beginnings of two stories, and revised another one, and have not worked on revising my novel. The best novel writing requires that you stay in the world of your novel while you are writing and revising it so you remember what the weather is like, and the shifts in your characters’ emotional states, not to mention the color of their hair you mentioned 100 pages earlier.  That is simply impossible, I’ve concluded, when people go out of town and children break bones and I have to drive kids to school, and pick them up and work and do the dishes.

I know that writers don’t choose literary forms entirely because of time constraints, nor do readers chose poems and short stories because they don’t have the concentration necessary to stay with a novel, but I do think the reason I am writing this post this morning, and not working on my novel, or even on a short story, is because it is 6:45 a.m. and William is sitting on my bed writing, in very competent cursive handwriting, a report about Jimi Hendrix’s life and the only thing I can do while he’s asking me how to spell England and counting out the number of paragraphs left to write and losing his pen, is this blog post, about how you fit what you write and read into the life you live.

I will be so happy when school is over and summer arrives and there is time to stretch out and read novels, not to mention edit them.

Writing confession time. Actually, the church now calls it reconciliation. Isn’t that what accountants call it when they settle the books? Anyway, I write about writing over in the page called (no surprise here) “writing.”

This comes from Marie. You’re supposed to bold which of these 100 canonical books you’ve read. I’ve added comments. I couldn’t help myself.

Here’s what I’m wondering — does it count if you’ve seen the movie, or if you’ve seen the movie and it wasn’t by Disney? What if the movie had songs in it? What if the movie had Daniel Day Lewis in it? You can see the trouble here.

Also, in this list I lay bare certain reading prejudices, some of which I didn’t even know I had. Please don’t think less of me because of it.

In fact, do this yourself and tell me you don’t have your own prejudices and don’t feel the strong urge to explain that the reason you haven’t read, say, The Stranger, is because it was never made into a movie with Daniel Day Lewis.

Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family (I read the other one — the one with pictures, the one with Walker Evans)
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain — ok here’s one I need to read.
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger (I believe this is about the plague. Of course I didn’t read it.)
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop (I re-read this recently on a trip to the southwest and loved it even more the second time.)
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales — in college, and then I had to memorize the prologue, which comes in handy when there’s a lull in conversation
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans — surely the movie counts? Let me just say three words: Daniel Day Lewis. (Okay one more: shirtless.)
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage — I probably have read this, because it’s the kind of thing you have to read at some point if you’re a student but honestly I can’t remember a thing about it.
Dante - Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment — I did, however, see an intense movie version of this when I was in my twenties and inclined to be depressed and it was awful. I think it’s time to revisit this one though. I’m a lot cheerier than I used to be. I think I could even read all of Native Son on a good day.
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy — I think Sister Carrie is THE Dreiser book, but that’s just my, you know, opinion. I love Sister Carrie and don’t want to read any more Dreiser and ruin my admiration for him by finding out why it is that one critic described him as a guy who wrote like a person who didn’t have a native language. ouch.
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury — Couldn’t read this, and don’t know why. I’ve tried the first ten pages at least five times. But I loved Absalom, Absalom. Maybe you have a Faulkner limit and mine is two.
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones — movie! (Wasn’t it a movie? You know, with Ryan O’Neal when he was gorgeous and filmed by candlelight?)
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier (I keep thinking this will be good, but then I always put it back on the shelf…)
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame — the movie! I saw the movie! okay. it had songs in it. Yes, it was a cartoon. Perhaps that should not count.
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World — this is fiction? I always thought it was a travel memoir or some kind of long essay.
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll’s House
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis — I mean, I do know what it’s about. But it’s never interested me. Did anyone ever make a movie of this?

Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt — I don’t like strident realist fiction. I know, I know. How do I know if Sinclair Lewis writes strident realist fiction if I haven’t read it? Wasn’t he responsible for that really, really long movie that Daniel Day Lewis was just in (see Last of the Mohicans above for other sort of unreadable books that made good Daniel Day Lewis films.)
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain — do the first twenty pages count? I was afraid I’d be stuck in the sanitarium forever if I didn’t make a run for it right then.
Marquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener — people love this. I have never been able to get past the first page. It depresses me.
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O’Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O’Neill, Eugene - Long Day’s Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago — the movie, I love the movie!
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel - Swann’s Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49 - no way. I do not like Thomas Pynchon. I don’t know why. Maybe it is because I am afraid there will be no plot and a lot of Symbols.
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front — this I must read. Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac — movie! With Daryl Hannah and Steve Martin, remember that one?
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep — I keep seeing things about Henry Roth. DIdn’t he wait fifty years between novels?
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion - movie! I could have danced all night!
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich — is this any good? It looks so… long. But then he is Russian and long is his job.
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island — yes, I know, the movie doesn’t count, because it was, yes, by disney.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom’s Cabin — does the King & I count?
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver’s Travels
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five — I do need to read this. But I avoid it, along with Catch 22 because I am afraid it will be ironic and not entertaining.
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple — I happen to have an autographed first edition of this book. It is autographed in purple. I did not see the movie, which looked awful.
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories (Not all of them — nobody reads every single one of the collected stories of anybody unless they wrote, you know, six stories.)
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass (could someone please explain to me why Leaves of Grass is on this list? I mean, these are mostly novels and plays and Homer. Last time I looked, Leaves of Grass was a super long poem. Okay, some of Shakespeare is poetry, and Dante too. But if poems are okay to include, then this list would look a lot different.)
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son (Okay, I quit when Bigger Thomas stuffed the body into the incinerator.)

Well that was fun.

I mean, you might think it’s the other way around and the angel comes out better than the dorf. Go here to the May 23, 2008 entry and tell me who you think comes out better in this literary exchange: William or his third grade teacher. (Two sentences! A two sentence post! A miracle of brevity!)

Okay, okay, a third sentence: I actually do read books, and I’ve updated my “reading” page up there at the top to prove it, and discovered at the very end of that update that I actually don’t like Hemingway’s early short stories (okay, I HATE them), and I’m mystified by that discovery, so pretty soon I’ll update that page and talk about that. (Whew.)

The Civic Center Farmer’s Market (Wednesdays and Sundays) is one of my favorite things about working where I do. There’s no avoiding it (although who would want to?) because it’s right outside the entrance to the BART station. Just as there’s no avoiding the fact that it really, truly, finally is spring. Peaches are here! And how about that use of the word “rich”? 

It has indeed been a rich May around here.  When you look up from the peaches you can see the State Building, which is where I work, adjacent to San Francisco’s golden domed City Hall and the Asian Art Museum, which represents THE finest example of how to turn a grand library into a really beautiful museum.  One floor above the court where I work is the California Supreme Court, and haven’t THEY made this a richly happy month? 

If you happen to be visiting San Francisco on a Wednesday in the spring, all you have to do to check out these many riches is hop on BART and get off  at the Civic Center stop.  Buy some fruit, and maybe a tamale.  Go into the Asian Art Museum, which is ahead of you and on the right.  If you can’t afford to pay the entrance fee, you can ask for the red chopsticks pass, which gets you into the cafe, where you can have a cup of tea and sit on the lovely veranda overlooking the farmer’s market.  And you can still see the beautiful job they’ve done converting the library into a marvelous museum space. 

Don’t forget to visit City Hall – and the Main Library, which is across from the Asian Art Museum.  There’s cheap food to be had down Polk Street, which is officially “Little Vietnam.”  And in another three weeks or so, the Supreme Court’s marriage decision will be final, and they will begin to marry people at City Hall.  You can sit in the grass and congratulate people, while you’re eating your tamales, or your fruit, or your vietnamese food. 

Some people find this extraordinarily rich neighborhood a little scary.  The tenderloin is home to a lot of people who are right on the edge of being okay — and many people who’ve fallen off the edge.  And no, they’re not always pleasant.  But they’re part of who we are, and there’s no denying their existence around here, and that is as it should be, I think.