Having survived the laundry

and spent a week back in the groove, I can now write about our post-Christmas trip and family reunion in Branson, MO. There were twenty-one of us—sisters, brother-in-law, nephews, mother, aunt and uncle, cousins— staying in three houses on the beautiful 40-acre wooded property of Tall Pines. The best new experience: relaxing in the outdoor hot tub with snow falling all around. The worst new experience: driving twisty mountain roads in dark fog.

In town, I picked up the 100th anniversary copy of Harold Bell Wright’s The Shepherd of the Hills, which is apparently quite famous and what stirred up people’s interest in developing the Branson area around the turn of the last century. At least that’s what the man at the Toy Museum told us. He also told us that this book inspired former President Ronald Reagan to become a Christian. Anyway. After wandering through case after case of model cars and Star Wars figures and toy guns and way too many familiar childhood toys that are now, apparently, antiques, we found the Harold Bell Wright part of the museum, which houses some of his old furniture and several manuscript copies of his books. Were it not for Princess Two tugging me along, I would have spent more time here. Along with the manuscripts were large cards with typed commentary from Wright himself, describing his writing process, as well as period advertisements for the published works. An interesting glimpse into the business of writing in days long gone by.

Part of our reunion involved a belated Christmas exchange of gifts, and I received two more books (my family knows me well): Reflections on the Psalms, by C. S. Lewis, and Joseph Plumb Martin’s A Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier. So now I have an even larger cozy stack of books to read by the fire.

Speaking of reading, I finished Margaret Frazer’s The Reeve’s Tale, and found it decent though not wow reading. I had trouble getting attached to any of the characters. But then I have been spoiled, as far as mysteries go, by Ellis Peters and Dorothy L. Sayers. Last night I started Robin Paige’s Death at Blenheim Palace, hoping…

Books that make you think, part 2

The Narnian, a biography of C. S. Lewis by Alan Jacobs, is a rare and wonderful critter. Informative, intellectually rigorous, delightful, intriguing. . . I could go on; but maybe it is more succinct to propose that Jacobs’ work on Lewis is (in all these ways and more) very like Lewis’ work itself.

I have mentally marked so many passages in this book that I regret I can’t physically mark them (it’s a library book)—each new “Aha!” tends to make me lose track of the ones that went before. But just to give a taste, I’ll go back to the early pages.

A couple of years ago I read C. S. Lewis’ Surprised by Joy. At the time I was taken with his explanation of “Joy,” partly because I knew exactly the feeling he meant. Jacobs reminds me of this and illuminates the concept even further. It is similar to the idea of Sehnsucht:

[T]hough it could in one sense be described as a negative experience, in that it focuses on something one cannot possess and cannot reach, it is nevertheless intensely seductive. One cannot say it is exactly pleasurable—there is a kind of ache in the sense of unattainability that always accompanies the longing—and yet, as Lewis puts it, the quality of the experience “is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.” (p. 41)

Here I go being self-centered again, but isn’t it a wonderful function of literature to make us recognize the deepest parts of ourselves? Perhaps this is my greatest satisfaction in reading The Narnian. That, and the masterful way in which Jacobs makes thinking a pleasure.

Windswept midweek updates (#9)

Weather update:

March is roaring in like a lion. My house is shaking.

Reading update:

1. Out of three current reads, I’m farthest along in Tony Horwitz’s Blue Latitudes, in which the author retraces Captain James Cook’s “voyages of discovery.” So far we have been to Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, and the Pacific island of Niue. Just arrived on the big island of Tonga. The best of this book is the way Horwitz weaves the history in with his modern experiences. The bittersweet, disorienting feeling of reading Cook’s 18th-century descriptions and then seeing the modern-day places is akin to that of being lost in a good book and having to return to Real Life.

2. I read another chapter of Jasper Rees’s The Devil to Play. Looking forward to more humor, horn history, and horn-relearning commiseration.

3. I started reading an elementary biography called Michael Faraday and the Electric Dynamo, by Charles Paul May. The depth and imaginative style hark back to an earlier age in children’s biographies (copyright 1961). I compare this interesting and leisurely read to another children’s book on Faraday, the altogether frantic Faraday: Pioneer of Electricity by Brian Williams and David Antram. The latter reaches out to the video-game generation (copyright 2003) by presenting snippets of biographical fact alongside splashy caricature art and brief explanations of how the science works. On every spread I found my eyes jumping all over the page, reading each little paragraph and sidebar, then going over it all again with a feeling that I had missed something. Is this how children think? Is this how we’re training them to think? Perhaps the series titles of the two works say it all: “Immortals of Science” versus “The Explosion Zone.”

4. Lest anyone think I am against recent picture-book biographies, I delighted in A River of Words: The Story of William Carlos Williams, written by Jen Bryant and illustrated by Melissa Sweet. Fascinating art, thorough (for a picture book) biography, and best of all, I am now hungering to read more about Williams and more of his poetry. I hope it works like this on kids, too!

Literature-into-movies update:

Over the weekend I watched the 2002 film version of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. It was mildly entertaining, though not as funny as I remembered. Ah, the jaded palate. The very best part (besides Colin Firth’s looking so young) was Rupert Everett’s pitch-perfect aristocratic voice. Speaking of Rupert Everett. . .

I also watched (again) Disney-Walden’s take on C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (Everett voices an animatronic fox). I reflected, as I watched, on how I’ve always taken musical scores for granted. This movie, as well as the sequel, would be much reduced without Harry Gregson-Williams’s wonderful—and majestically horn-laced—score. I already had the Prince Caspian soundtrack. I felt compelled to download this one, too. (Piano note: I’m making pretty good progress with “Evacuating London.”)

Writing update:

My muse is apparently suffering from a multiple-personality disorder. I wrote a short newsletter article yesterday. Otherwise, I am thinking again of women hymn-writers, and of 19th-century inventors (hence the Faraday biographies). I suggested to (one of) myself that I could work on a separate project every day, and perhaps in 20 years or so I could have not one, but seven complete books.

Twelfth day of Christmas books

Now that Christmas Present has come to an end, I have run across the Ghost of Christmas Past. Twenty-five years past, to be exact. I was 13. That Christmas stands crystal-clear in my memory, for whatever reason. We spent the holiday at my aunt’s house, and my oldest sister received The Police’s new record, Synchronicity, and my younger sister received Van Halen’s new record, 1984, and my one-year-old baby sister was toddling around, fetching and carrying things at my command, and to my great amusement.

The gift I remember is four paperback books wrapped in a shirt box, Niel Hancock’s fantasy series The Wilderness of Four.

When I think now of the joys of childhood, it is that idyllic time that I yearn for. Delicious vacation with nothing to do but dive deep into another world, one peopled by talking animals and dwarves and primeval forests and cold fast-running rivers. To dive so deep that my parents’ or sisters’ voices are no more than distant burbling.

Perhaps part of what makes this time so idyllic is that soon after this, the demands of school and extracurricular activities took me farther and farther from the fantasy books I loved. I started, of necessity, to live more in the real world, to read only assigned books to find school answers, to dissect and regurgitate themes, symbols, lessons.

Though I studied creative writing in college, and never lost my desire to be a writer, I somehow lost my passion for writing. Until, full circle, I had children of my own. I stopped working outside the home. I vowed to sit down at the computer and recapture the writing dream. But what to write? And where to find inspiration?

One day I picked up a battered and beloved copy of Lloyd Alexander’s The Book of Three. Like a dam breaking, it all came back: the joy, the blood-stirring, the creative fire. I dove in again, into all my childhood favorites: Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles and Westmark trilogy; Niel Hancock’s Wilderness of Four and Circle of Light; my dad’s 1960s paperbacks of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings; my own 1970s boxed set of C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia.

When I surfaced, I had joy in my hands again. What the Ghost of Christmas Past reminds me is that I must not forget to occasionally take it out and gaze into its shining depths.

Illustrious birthdays

I just learned this morning, via Writer’s Almanac, that today is the birthday of Louisa May Alcott and C. S. Lewis. It is also Number-one Daughter’s birthday, so I shared this interesting news with her as she worked on the other computer across the room.

“It’s the birthday of Louisa May Alcott,” I said.

“Is that the girl who wrote Little Women?” she said.

Ah, proud-mama moment. We started reading Little Women together last summer. We made it up to the part where things turn romantic between Meg and John Brooke. She kind of lost interest then. (Of course we all know that the first half is the best part anyway.)

“It’s also the birthday of C. S. Lewis,” I said.

She chuckled.

Why the chuckle? Because we are both Lewis devotees. We read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian twice together. We read The Voyage of the Dawn Treader once together. We started The Silver Chair, but she lost interest shortly into that one. Go figure. Another, less lofty, reason for the chuckle may be that we are both eagerly awaiting the DVD of the 2008 Disney version of Prince Caspian, which releases next Tuesday.

I do love Lewis’s children’s books. I have read them so many times that my own childhood copies are literally falling apart. I decided I was going to be a writer soon after my third-grade teacher read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to the class. I later got the boxed set as a gift—the circa 1978 boxed set that has the books in the *correct* order. My favorite adult Lewis book is Surprised by Joy.

Joy! And Happy Birthday, too.

Fun with writing

Why did I want to be a writer? I decided at 8 or 9 years old that this was what I wanted to do with my life. It was the same year that my third-grade teacher read C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to the class, the same year we made our own books out of cardboard and crayons and contact paper. Mine was called Misty’s Great Adventure.

Even through college I believed that writing was an expression of the soul, my YAWP to the world, a potential for anything. It was fun and it was exciting.

Then I grew up.

I still wrote, I still wanted to write; I couldn’t not write. But now I had a critique group, and I had a thing sitting on my shoulder telling me that this was or was not what other people wanted to read. I had a thing inside my soul that said, “Don’t YAWP,” and “Why bother?”

I felt burned out, emptied. The fire of me-as-writer was banked, smothered, nearly extinguished.

So instead of trying to YAWP to the world, I decided to listen. I heard a whisper.

Hiding in the Garden

Crickets sing and I sit
on the concrete step where late summer
leanings of sunflower, zinnia overshadow
my silence. Long stifling August has given way
to this brown-green discord of lush and rustle.
It’s been dry.
Even so, bees and butterflies and lingering
beetles sip and flit and mate.
The seed must die to give new life.
I have been desperately clipping
spent blooms, grasping at beauty, gasping
with thirst while crickets sing
and brown embraces green.