The Power of a Book

This piece is adapted from an article I wrote that appeared Teacher magazine in 2006.
 

As a teenager I attended an upscale private school where I did not fit in. In a sea of preppies, I opted for a brooding persona. I wrote curse words in Sharpie on my high-top sneakers along with song lyrics from B-sides of obscure British pop records. I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up, where I wanted to go to college, or whether I even wanted to go to college. I never liked anything.

In junior year I took an elective called Reader's Response. I sat next to a girl who ironed the pleats of her uniform skirt every night. I pinned my pleats together with big safety pins that I sometimes removed to use as earrings.

We had to read 10 books in the course of a semester, our choice. I liked reading but I could only think of six. The teacher said I should read The Catcher in the Rye. He handed me a copy he happened to have on the shelf.

So I started. By the time the class ended, I had lifted out of my life and landed into Holden's, a boy I alternately wanted to smack and salute. Kind of how I felt about myself.

I read that book in its entirety without once putting it down. I eschewed all other homework. I read late into the night. When I finished, I lay awake, unable to sleep.

The carousel stuck with me the most. It is such a tragic scene when Holden pays for his sister Phoebe’s seat on the beat-up ride of his own youth. Poor Phoebe tries talking sense to nihilist Holden. "You never like anything," she says.

I sympathized with Phoebe yet agreed with Holden. School was pointless. He and I were trapped together on a road toward an uninteresting destination. Like Holden I yearned for human connection and authenticity in my life.

I walked away from that book a changed person. I read The Catcher in the Rye and my life path became clear. I wanted to read books and write for a living. Nothing else would do because nothing else felt true to who I really was. This book started me on becoming who I am.

As a teacher I never forget the power a single book can have on a person. It’s impossible to predict what book it will be. I got lucky with that one intuitive English teacher because the best life-changing book is hardly ever what a teacher or parent thinks it should be. In my first published novel How to Be Manly, a teenager’s whole life shifts course because of a book he steals from a garage sale. He finds it by chance and it changes everything.

I teach and write with reverence for the moment when a student or reader will find reality crashing with just the right book at just the right time. It happens with the character in my own novel and it happens with me still now that I am grown.

There is nothing like the book that makes you turn the last page and look out the window and realize that you are different now. You realize that your own tragic scenes have meaning. You realize that even though you still never like anything that maybe you might like a few things. You realize that while you are still alone, someone once wrote a book explaining everything you feel and that maybe you are not alone. You have found the book by chance and now everything is different, including you.

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it,” Holden says.

I still know just how he feels.

Why I Am an X-Files Monster

A student called me a sponge.  He said I absorb everything people say to me.  I think he meant it as a warning to other students.  Watch out for this one, she’s tricky.  She’ll absorb you.

I do observe and take in the people I meet.  It’s always been true.  I still have speech mannerisms picked up from cousins I met in Ireland when I was 13, college roommates, fourth graders I taught in 1993.  I can tell how someone is secretly really feeling from a mile away.  I remember names instantly.  I absorb people.  I’m like an X-Files monster. 

I might be this.

A person cannot go around feeling other people’s feelings all day long and function like a proper adult in society.  I have a complex set of coping mechanisms to deal with this hyper-sensitivity, including but not limited to starchy carbs, extended gym workouts and writing novels.

I write novels because if I did not then how could I have answered the questions I had after spending a year in the classroom with a young sociopath who lived to inflict pain on other boys?  I wrote The Cameraman about a kid who beats up his victims in boys’ bathrooms from the point of view of the bully’s fascinated classmate who films the beatings to show on his website.

I wrote The Spider Man after spending eight years teaching hundreds of underestimated and powerful high school girls.  Without writing a novel about a character channeling the ancient goddess Brigid in the new millennium, how could I have expressed my awe for those girls who were determined to use all of their considerable gifts to do nothing less than save the world?

I wrote How To Be Manly about a funny and loving teenaged boy struggling to become a man when his male role models are a dad who is deadbeat at best, dangerous at worst, and a grandfather whose dementia renders him more like a child every day.  How do you learn to become a man of worth and honor when the person raising you is a grandmother who sees you only as a boy?  How do you build self worth when to your own father you are worth nothing?  I see boys accomplish this very thing every day.  I’m dying to know how they do it.  So I go home to my computer and turn into a boy for a few hours a day and I tell his story. 

I write my stories for the young women and men forging through their own private odysseys in these crazy times.  I see them slay their own monsters with daily courage and ingenuity.  I didn’t start out trying to be a Young Adult novelist, but when I sit down to type, sometimes very young voices come out. 

Stories line up in my brain like trains in a station, not so patiently waiting for their turn to be told.  I’ve absorbed them and now they must come out.  They must come out or I can’t sleep, I cry too much, and I become cross over nothing. 

My student was right. I absorb stories, roll them over in the tumbler of my imagination.  It’s all I know to do with everything I see, know and feel through my own journey as a human being in this world. 

Call me the Story Eater. 

The 50K Mark

The first fifty thousand words of my novels are like a protracted first date with my characters. It takes that long for me to learn enough about them to decide whether or not we'll go any further together on the journey of their make-believe lives.

As a writer you get to play God, but it isn't as powerful as you think. You can only boss the fictional universe around so much before it starts bossing back and messing things up. Characters start developing their own will after awhile. Only writers will understand what I mean by that. Once my characters start doing what they'll do on the page, I know I have a decision to make.  

Do we go on? Or do I end it here and take up another project with a story that works better?

I'm at the 50K mark with my latest literary thriller, The Healing Room. It's about a pair of childhood friends, a young woman who has survived a kidnapping by a sexual sadist and a young man who has survived a tour of duty in Iraq. Together they work to rebuild their lives despite crippling post-traumatic stress.

At first I thought The Healing Room had a paranormal, magical realism element to it, but no. My female character says that what happened to her was very real, that it happens to mostly women and children every day, and that I'm not to paint that turd pink with anything but the cold hard facts. My male character never believed in magic anyway, so he's impervious.

I got out of that shit alive, the woman says. Don't make that any more or less than it is.

There are no short cuts, says the man. Tell the story right or leave us the hell alone.

So I start over from the beginning and rebuild the world of the story to accommodate my characters as they've revealed themselves to me. Or I scrap the whole thing and leave them in their half-lives, toiling away at relationship and healing in that old Victorian on the mountainside, rebuilding the deck and holding Veterans' meetings in the living room.  

I'll make my decision soon, trying to be objective about matters such as plot construction and story structure, trying to ignore the tiny but now full-fledged voices in my head, begging to be heard.

Come back, they say. Write us.

This is not my photo, and I can't find the name of the photographer, but if you look closely you can see my characters peeking out from the top window, waving hello.

The Arrow (What I Was Thinking)

My first year of teaching was in a fourth grade in a tiny Catholic school in Humboldt County.  On All Saints Day our class had St. Brigid. We made a banner for her, and I projected a page from Mercer Mayer's East of the Sun West of the Moon on the paper so that we could trace it. We painted it with water colors. I drew in the mean king who wanted to marry her, the flocks of birds that did her bidding. 

The poster was both too much and too little for what the school required.  Too many Celtic snakes, not enough actual crosses, but I was hooked.  The more I learned about St. Brigid the more I loved her.  The Catholic Church renounced her sainthood in the seventies, you know. They found out she was really a goddess and said, no way you're a saint. You can't fool us. 

When St. Brigid visited the mean king who wanted to marry her against her will, she turned into an ugly monster with boils on her skin.  As soon as he rejected her, she ran away and turned beautiful again. She healed by touch. She hit a target with an arrow from a mile away. She commanded the animals.  She is the Triple Goddess, the goddess of so many things that she encompasses three women. She is the goddess of fertility, wisdom, metal work, childbirth, art, fire, to name just a few.

So I thought, what would happen if an incarnation of the Mother of us all had to face things like global warming, disease, drug addiction, celebrity culture, identity and love just like everybody else?  What if she was of mixed ethnicity because her dad was a powerful Maidu Story Keeper god, and she carried her heritage with grace and nonchalance despite living in a racist society? What if the Triple Goddess was in the form of literally three  women who had to learn how to live and work together in a family despite enormous personality differences?

In The Arrow, the son of Dionysus is a beautiful rock star so addicted to the adoration of fans and groupies that real relationship seems impossible for him. A demon bred to destroy a goddess instead falls in love with her. A billionaire CEO of a huge pharmaceutical company is so obsessed with the girl of his dreams that he's willing to give up the power of a king just to have her all to himself. A witch mother sacrifices her own sons on the altar of her greed for power.

A modern incarnation of an ancient goddess just wants to make her own contribution to the world without her mother and older sister looking over her damn shoulder all the time.

The Arrow follows Fynn, the youngest of the Triple Goddesses as she finds her place in the family hierarchy and falls in love and then out of love and then saves the world and falls in love again.  It's got faery drugs, rock guitars, fights to the death, beautiful but awful witches, sexy but evil groupies, a sexy and redeemed demon, a flock of useful birds, a faithful friend with disturbing eyes who might or might not be a Djinn. It was fun to write.

The Arrow is the first in a series that follows Fynn and her friend and sister as they rescue themselves and everybody else while finding love with very sexy boyfriends.

My obsession with Brigid has taken me far from sainthood, but deep into mythology and the strength of women which isn't a myth at all, of course. But it is awesome and a lot of fun.

From East of the Sun West of the Moon by Mercer Mayer, a truly gorgeous book.

Sugar Is Not Your Friend

I’m addicted to sugar. I’m not using the word “addict” lightly here. I am truly powerless over processed sugar. The best thing I do for my health is to avoid white sugar and all of its forms altogether. 

Once I’m two or three days into not eating sugar, I don’t want it. When I'm off sugar, my appetite is right in line with my ideal weight. But if I’ve had even one piece of candy, it's over.  My appetite grows into a ravenous beast that I can't satisfy no matter what I eat.  My skin breaks out and wrinkles, my energy lags, my joints ache, my pants stop fitting.

I am thankful not to be addicted to alcohol or drugs or gambling or any other thing that could get me in trouble with the law or ruin my life.  When I’m in the throes of sugar madness, I’m perfectly functional as far as everyone else is concerned. It’s just me that feels crappy. I bow down to people managing addictions to the hard stuff. I can't imagine how difficult that must be.

Still, sugar is corrosive in its own way. Many people battle their weight and spend so much money on diets and feel lousy about themselves. If you are having a problem with toxic hunger, or in other words an appetite that will not listen to reason, maybe stop beating yourself up about it. Maybe stop eating sugar for one month and see what happens to your life.  For me it’s not about willpower. It’s about avoiding the toxic hunger that sugar throws my body into when I have even just a little.

There are tons of studies coming out right now that point to the fact that sugar is poison. Sugar consumption can lead to diabetes, cancer, all kinds of bad health. Check the information out for yourself if you don’t believe me.  This is just one lady’s experience. I’m not a scientist.  I’m an English teacher.

Sugar looks awesome, but it is just like the beautiful-sounding siren ladies in the Odyssey.  If I feel like eating it, I try to be like Odysseus and strap myself to the mast of my own good health and gut that pretty song out. Practically everything in the grocery store has tons of sugar and it’s made up to look awesome and normal and not poisonous at all.  It’s a big trick designed to toss me on the rocks.  I'm not falling for it.

An ancient vase picturing Odysseus strapped to the mast to keep himself from giving in to the siren's song. You need to do the same thing with sugar, but not necessarily naked.

I’m just telling you this because it's January and everybody’s talking about losing weight. I don't like to talk about what I eat and don't eat because I'm embarrassed by the whole subject, frankly. So I'll say it here and be done with it. Sugar is not your friend.

Besides, there is no polite way to say to a person that sugar is not your friend because when you’re eating sugar it really really seems like it is your friend.

I’ve gone through periods in my life where the only thing getting me through the next three hours is one of those packages of white Donettes from the 7-Eleven.  I’ve been there.  I may very well be there again tomorrow. 

Not today, though. Today I’m tied to the mast. 

So cute.  So not your friend.