Book tour blogs often whine: the delayed airplanes, the small turnout, the moving from city to city at speed not meant for a human soul. But that's just part of it. Here's my last week: took the train from New York to DC last Wednesday to speak at the National Cathedral. (That's the big church on the hill, the one that seats something like 4,000--did you see President Ford's funeral?). Previous day was horrible winter storm (I had not experienced sleet before, having grown up in the west. I called Vincent to say that it was ice falling from the sky). Many Knopf authors unable to get off the ground at JFK for gigs in LA. DC a sheet of ice when I arrived. Smaller turnout than expected (no shit, Sherlock--one woman told me the next day that she couldn't get out her back door because the snow was so deep and had to toss her dog out the window.) But such a fine crowd, with great comments and questions about Hiroshima and the decision to use the bomb. A woman there who grew up in Oak Ridge, the "other" secret city besides Los Alamos.
Bookseller: Cathedral Bookstore (beautiful displays by Gabby.)
Taught writing workshop the next day for 60 women as part of Sacred Circles, a gathering of women now in its tenth year at the Cathedral. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela (A Human Being Died that Night) gave talk the next day on the Forgiveness and South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Read her book.
But the real subject of this blog is the men who have been driving me around, in taxis and in limos. In DC, most of the taxi drivers were from the Middle East and all of them had the radio tuned to NPR’s coverage of the hearings in the Senate about Iraq. A man from Turkey, in his forties, fine featured said he could no longer say to his family and friends at home that the United States believed in democracy because they just laughed. He added that he was now afraid here, that he might be picked up, just because of his looks or accent, and not charged and not allowed out of prison. The other taxi drivers were from Pakistan and Ethiopia.
Left DC on Sunday morning for Asheville, NC where I was met at the airport by Emilie White who heads the Kay Fowler Literary Project at All Soul Cathedral (Episcopal) in Asheville. Emilie is a thoughtful reader and writer and she brings writers into the cathedral to read and talk. Great crowd, almost filled the church, and very fine questions. Bishop of W. North Carolina, Porter Taylor, is also a fine writer and serious reader, so it’s a literate place. I was again struck by the story-telling, literate culture of the South. So many people elsewhere in the country completely miss this. And its sophistication about Christianity. So many of us from the North or We have a one-note view of the South and Christianity (read: right wing fundamentalist) but it is, as Flannery O’Connor said, “a Christ-haunted land,” and the folks I meet, in the liberal-left, are very well educated and highly nuanced when it comes to Christianity.
Bookseller: Accent on Books.
Back to New York on Monday afternoon. Dinner early with buddy at Bright Food Cafe on 8th, fell into bed. Day of dry cleaning, laundry, catching up on email, gym. New York warming up. Slush in street. Dogs still with boots on.
Wednesday morning to Chicago. Driver was a man from Sudan, Darfur. Travels extensively to alert world to genocide. Was recently in Chad were he heard stories, he said, that made him “turn away.” If American President would condemn the murder, it would end.
Briefly toured The Cradle in Evanston, an adoption agency my grandmother, Eleanor Gallagher, helped to found. Many photos on the walls of parents and children, each one a gift. Most memorable” a seventy-two- year- old man with his birth mother in her nineties, just after he found her.
Spoke at Seabury Seminary in the afternoon with Gary Hall, dean of the school, man who reads everything and writes beautifully. Kathy Hall reads everything, too, and runs the most hospitable household. Students and I talked about being bored in church (taboo word) and what to do. Preached at Ash Wednesday service on “rewriting our stories during Lent.” (Will post on Web site: noragallagher.org) Read later in the evening. I think Seabury must have been thoroughly sick of hearing from me by end of day.
Bookseller: Seabury bookstore
Next day to Lake Forest for bookstore lunch. Sue Boucher, who owns Lake Forest Bookstore, gathers women with an author. Very smart idea. Great group of thoughtful women. Hannah Gretz, local powerhouse, had gathered up a bunch of friends and brought them. Hannah has five children, sits on the board of Ragdale artists colony (director of Ragdale was there), and lives in beautiful renovated house with gorgeous long windows everywhere. After lunch, she took me on small tour. Both of my parents grew up in the area.
Friday, February 23, 2007
Sunday, February 11, 2007
Book Tour Begins
I start tomorrow on my book tour, and I'm at once grateful and horrified that somehow I've agreed to something like 15 cities and counting. Today, good reviews in LA Times, SF Chronicle and Boston Globe. Writing about Los Alamos, an idea I had in the mid-nineties, having grown up in New Mexico, has been an amazing ride. I have been thinking lately of the relationship between fiction and the theological idea of the "scandal of the human particular.
As some of you know, I have written two memoirs, Things Seen and Unseen and Practicing Resurrection. They are about my own wrestling with faith inside and outside the Episcopal church. In writing these memoirs, I discovered that there are aspects of the memoir that are like the novel: you must have “characters,” you must have a “plot.” I learned the arc of a three- part plot from the Greeks: things get bad, things get worse, things are resolved.
I learned the hard way that a memoir must be about something more than the author’s life, as of course the novel must be about more than the sum of its characters. Moby Dick is not “about” whale hunting. Whale hunting is the circumstance of Moby Dick; the novel is about obsession. Lucy Grealy’s great memoir Autobiography of a Face, is the story of woman disfigured from repeated cancer treatments to her jaw. That’s the circumstance. What is it about? A human person coming to terms with who she is. We have all read memoirs that were like awful, narcissistic train wrecks in which the writer never figured out that the subject of a memoir cannot be the writer himself, and we have also read memoir that divulged the most secret and painful things about a life that were not at all embarrassing but instead connected us more deeply to the human condition.
I found another similarity between memoir and fiction: This wonderful phrase: the scandal of the particular. The idea is that God, this enormous creative force that “hung the stars” and created “that great leviathan just for the sport of it” would care about one of us. The idea that the God of Creation–Aristotle's Prime Mover or Plato's Divine Source– would stoop to join us in the mundane details of every day human life, would care even if a single sparrow fell to the ground. This "Yahweh" was completely low-brow to the Greeks, a scandal: from Greek skandalon ‘snare, stumbling block.’
And yet, it is a beautiful scandal, isn’t it? That God would care about one singular, particular life. Where would we be, how would we understand our human story, without it? “The first chapter of Genesis moves gradually from a picture of the skies and earth down to the first man and woman,” writes Rabbi Richard Friedman. “The story’s focus will continue to narrow: from the universe to the earth to humankind to specific lands and peoples to a single family.” One family: Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel.
When I worked as a journalist, I was drawn to the stories of individuals in the shadow of history-making moments. After the Berlin Wall came down, I went to Prague and interviewed families about what their lives had been like under the regime. I wrote about daily life in Nicaragua when the Sandinistas were in power. This may be the same impulse that makes me religious: that is, here we are working out our own lives, making mistakes, trying to discern one path from another, while waves of history ebb and flow, causing everything to change. I am interested in the waves–who isn’t– but it’s the human particular that captures me.
I never meant to write fiction. Fiction, novels, were in a category saved for the great masters: George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford. I was a journalist. But one day, I was visited by an idea.
I grew up in New Mexico, a short distance from Los Alamos, where Robert Oppenheimer and his team built the atomic bomb. Guard towers were still in place, and the city had an aura of secrecy, isolation and guilt. From my college dining room, St. John’s in Santa Fe, I could see the lights of Los Alamos suspended in the sky.
One day some years ago, I was walking on a piece of land I owned near the Rio Grande not far from Santa Fe. I looked across the river, and the steep mesa that rose up on the other side, and realized that just on the west side of that mesa was the city of Los Alamos. And all at once I wondered what would have happened had one of the physicists working on the “gadget,” decided to jump ship. What if he had left the secret city under cover of night, and swum across the river. Who might have found him and what would have been their story?
So, the idea for the novel came to me all at once as if dropped from the sky. I did what many of us do with gifts: I put it away in a drawer. I wasn’t ready. Fiction was for the big boys and girls.
But it kept calling out to me from the depths of the desk. A little voice, and finally, several years ago, I pulled it out. It lay on my desk, breathing.
I started researching the time, filling in the things I didn’t know. I found out all these surprising and wonderful things about Los Alamos-particulars: the scientists who were asked to work on this secret project in the New Mexico mountains often did not know where they were going. Some of them were handed train tickets and only read of their destination as they walked toward the train. Others did know more or less: At one university, a librarian noticed that suddenly lots of professors of physics were checking out books on New Mexico. When Los Alamos ran out of water one hot summer, they brushed their teeth with Coco-Cola. Oppenheimer made punch with 200-proof lab alcohol. He named the place in southern New Mexico where the first experimental bomb was tested, in July of 1945, Trinity site. Where the heat from the blast was so extreme that it melted the sand to green glass. “Those men who built the bomb,” said a girl from Hiroshima, “what did they think would happen if they dropped it ?”
As some of you know, I have written two memoirs, Things Seen and Unseen and Practicing Resurrection. They are about my own wrestling with faith inside and outside the Episcopal church. In writing these memoirs, I discovered that there are aspects of the memoir that are like the novel: you must have “characters,” you must have a “plot.” I learned the arc of a three- part plot from the Greeks: things get bad, things get worse, things are resolved.
I learned the hard way that a memoir must be about something more than the author’s life, as of course the novel must be about more than the sum of its characters. Moby Dick is not “about” whale hunting. Whale hunting is the circumstance of Moby Dick; the novel is about obsession. Lucy Grealy’s great memoir Autobiography of a Face, is the story of woman disfigured from repeated cancer treatments to her jaw. That’s the circumstance. What is it about? A human person coming to terms with who she is. We have all read memoirs that were like awful, narcissistic train wrecks in which the writer never figured out that the subject of a memoir cannot be the writer himself, and we have also read memoir that divulged the most secret and painful things about a life that were not at all embarrassing but instead connected us more deeply to the human condition.
I found another similarity between memoir and fiction: This wonderful phrase: the scandal of the particular. The idea is that God, this enormous creative force that “hung the stars” and created “that great leviathan just for the sport of it” would care about one of us. The idea that the God of Creation–Aristotle's Prime Mover or Plato's Divine Source– would stoop to join us in the mundane details of every day human life, would care even if a single sparrow fell to the ground. This "Yahweh" was completely low-brow to the Greeks, a scandal: from Greek skandalon ‘snare, stumbling block.’
And yet, it is a beautiful scandal, isn’t it? That God would care about one singular, particular life. Where would we be, how would we understand our human story, without it? “The first chapter of Genesis moves gradually from a picture of the skies and earth down to the first man and woman,” writes Rabbi Richard Friedman. “The story’s focus will continue to narrow: from the universe to the earth to humankind to specific lands and peoples to a single family.” One family: Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel.
When I worked as a journalist, I was drawn to the stories of individuals in the shadow of history-making moments. After the Berlin Wall came down, I went to Prague and interviewed families about what their lives had been like under the regime. I wrote about daily life in Nicaragua when the Sandinistas were in power. This may be the same impulse that makes me religious: that is, here we are working out our own lives, making mistakes, trying to discern one path from another, while waves of history ebb and flow, causing everything to change. I am interested in the waves–who isn’t– but it’s the human particular that captures me.
I never meant to write fiction. Fiction, novels, were in a category saved for the great masters: George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford. I was a journalist. But one day, I was visited by an idea.
I grew up in New Mexico, a short distance from Los Alamos, where Robert Oppenheimer and his team built the atomic bomb. Guard towers were still in place, and the city had an aura of secrecy, isolation and guilt. From my college dining room, St. John’s in Santa Fe, I could see the lights of Los Alamos suspended in the sky.
One day some years ago, I was walking on a piece of land I owned near the Rio Grande not far from Santa Fe. I looked across the river, and the steep mesa that rose up on the other side, and realized that just on the west side of that mesa was the city of Los Alamos. And all at once I wondered what would have happened had one of the physicists working on the “gadget,” decided to jump ship. What if he had left the secret city under cover of night, and swum across the river. Who might have found him and what would have been their story?
So, the idea for the novel came to me all at once as if dropped from the sky. I did what many of us do with gifts: I put it away in a drawer. I wasn’t ready. Fiction was for the big boys and girls.
But it kept calling out to me from the depths of the desk. A little voice, and finally, several years ago, I pulled it out. It lay on my desk, breathing.
I started researching the time, filling in the things I didn’t know. I found out all these surprising and wonderful things about Los Alamos-particulars: the scientists who were asked to work on this secret project in the New Mexico mountains often did not know where they were going. Some of them were handed train tickets and only read of their destination as they walked toward the train. Others did know more or less: At one university, a librarian noticed that suddenly lots of professors of physics were checking out books on New Mexico. When Los Alamos ran out of water one hot summer, they brushed their teeth with Coco-Cola. Oppenheimer made punch with 200-proof lab alcohol. He named the place in southern New Mexico where the first experimental bomb was tested, in July of 1945, Trinity site. Where the heat from the blast was so extreme that it melted the sand to green glass. “Those men who built the bomb,” said a girl from Hiroshima, “what did they think would happen if they dropped it ?”
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