American Mosaic

Gradient Spectrum by Erin Pankratz Smith

Dear Mr. President,

I'm an immigrant, "naturalized" to US citizenship in the early 1980s. What a day that was for us as a family — the sense of safety and privilege was very high.

We were permanent residents for a long time but in the 1970s, despite my father's best efforts, at that point when we were so close to achieving citizenship, the INS lost our entire file and the process had to restart at great cost. This occurred at a time when my parents were also planning for our college educations. 

[Ultimately, my parents sent their three daughters to Carnegie Mellon University, Swarthmore College, and Northwestern University. At this point in our lives, I've run my own business for nearly 30 years; my Swarthmore-educated sister is a psychologist with a Master's degree from Duke University; and my youngest sister is an MBA (Cal-Berkeley) and VP of info tech with Wells Fargo. This is significant for us because a mere century ago in China, girls were not considered worth educating, and we might've even had bound feet!]

Because our own naturalization process had been so arduous, I've had mixed feelings about the "line jumping" of illegal immigrants, but continue to believe we're all humans trying to attain the same things, and that first and foremost this is a nation of immigrant stories. As you emphasized, this is what makes America vibrant and innovative. This I saw at Carnegie Mellon, which has the planet's oldest and finest robotics program, and a diverse mix of brilliant engineering students from all over the world.

I live in Atlanta, a metro region that's benefited from a huge "diversity explosion" beginning in the mid-1980s. (My only child is a mixed-race kid who says "You can't say Caucasian without also saying Asian!"). It's taken 30 years, but we're now seeing the advantages of a diverse population, although we continue to struggle with the downsides of racism and xenophobia. Every day in DeKalb county where I live, I have interactions with refugees/immigrants from Ethiopia, Rwanda, Cambodia, Vietnam, Uganda, Nigeria, Bosnia, and Russia. Despite cultural differences, I continue to find that we all want the same things. These are not freeloaders or thugs, but people working hard to make a living (in jobs no American adult wants), who just want to see their children thrive in school.

Your speech the other night was exceptional. If your executive order is regarded as a "lawless" act, then let them find the laws to prove it.

Inclusive to my love for Australia, where I spent a part of my childhood, I feel very proud to be an American. I have conservative friends who regard me as idealistic and naive; "intellectually lazy" for believing that racism still undergirds political differences; and way too liberal for my own good. But if being liberal means we fall on the right side of history for offering safe harbor to refugee children fleeing murderous gangs in Central America; finding insurance solutions for those who've never before been able to afford it; or defining a sane and unthreatening path to citizenship so families can stay together, then I'd rather be liberal. People come to this country for safe harbor, and to pursue — and to innovate on — opportunities they could not find elsewhere.

As for the rest, they can (as you said) Pass A Bill. I'm sick to death of the obstructionism and brinksmanship, all the low-grade political skirmishing, with none of the governance. We are in real danger of becoming an oligarchy, and our Congress of the past six years has been a disgrace.

Thank you.

The atrocities of narcissism

John Rabe's diary

I've been reading books about "the rape of Nanking" for a couple years, part of research for my next book project. It's not a calming experience. From 1937-38, Nanking was described by eyewitnesses as a literal Hell on earth, but for the actions of a dozen Americans and Europeans who stepped up to protect the vulnerable. Their mere presence often prevented the oppressors from proceeding with the worst sorts of crimes against humanity, and even then such atrocities occurred with frequency and impunity. 

Because I do like to read history and historical fiction, a constant question is "Could this happen again?" Could genocides like the Rape of Nanking happen again? And the answer is yes: such things do repeat themselves (eg, Rwanda).

Then you ask the question another way....

Could the "heroes of Nanking" happen again? 

Although we've seen the professionalization of humanitarian aid-givers, people like John Rabe, Dr. Robert Wilson (left), and Minnie Vautrin acted as private individuals, as much on the strength of personal conviction as professional creed. There was no UN or Peace Corps in their lifetimes. There was no guidebook re: "how to save ordinary people from atrocity." Given every opportunity to evacuate, they chose to remain long after their peers fled the scene, and — in advocating for victims — had repeated confrontations with the Japanese command.

After all the powerful and affluent departed, the Chinese left in Nanking were those too poor to travel, with nowhere to go, just like the disenfranchised among us today (think: Katrina and the low-income communities of NOLA). This also included demoralized soldiers from the Chinese army, in retreat from advancing Japanese forces. Many of the Chinese troops were teenaged boys already worn down after months of defending Shanghai. Their own command was fleeing upriver ahead of them.

Dr. Wilson operated on mangled bodies for hours without rest, later dying young because his health was compromised by those months in 1937-38.

Minnie Vautrin had a nervous breakdown after giving safe harbor to 10,000 women and children on a campus set up to care for only 3,000 refugees. Part of what exhausted Vautrin were the daily improvisations for survival — not just administering the school during a brutal occupation, but negotiating safety terms with the callous Japanese command, coordinating with her Safety Zone colleagues for a daunting scarcity of food supplies, and safeguarding the women and children. The campus was large, she couldn't be four places at once, and Japanese soldiers were continually scaling the walls and assaulting women inside the campus — or duping her into surrendering the women and girls in her care.

For three months, no one left alive in Nanking was able to wash themselves because Japanese atrocities had compromised all water sources. (Cooked rice had the coppery taste of blood). Given Japanese orders that all corpses were to be left out in the open, there was constant threat of disease, and malnutrition alone produced an outbreak of beri-beri.

John Rabe didn't sleep, patrolling the grounds of the Nanking Safety Zone every night, pulling Japanese soldiers off the women and girls they were trying to rape. To no avail, he wrote letters to Hitler, imploring him to intervene with the Japanese emperor and halt the brutal lawlessness in his beloved Nanking. When his Siemens employer recalled Rabe to Germany, he was stunned — and deeply moved — to see 2,000 women amassed before him, bowing in gratitude but also begging him not to leave. His post-war years were so impoverished, Frau Rabe took to making nettle soup from the weeds in their yard. Hearing of this, the grateful people of Nanking sent them money that eased his final years.

The "atrocity" of narcissism

After Tuesday's elections, we're further immersed in a nation where democracy has been forsaken for oligarchy, and our poor and disadvantaged will be criminalized — where those with wealth and power will only struggle to accrue more of it — even if it means betraying their neighbors and employees — and an act of compassion is more of a tax shelter than an effort to fix the roots of a chronic social problem.

In 2015, turn compassion and generosity into small, achievable actions. It doesn't have to mean donating gobs of money. Write your Congressman and call him out on his inaction; let the corrupt know that you're watching them. Start a bus-stop library. Teach one evening of economic literacy at the community center of a low-income neighborhood; talk to middle schoolers about the stock market, so they see role-modeling for financial decisionmaking. Convince a kid not to drop out, and urge him to stay in school for greater gains yet to come. Read a book to an elderly invalid or a hospitalized veteran. Drop off some bagels in the teachers' breakroom of your local public school.

It doesn't have to be much. Two hours from your life can remake someone else's entire existence — it can give them hope. Just like the heroes of Nanking, small ordinary actions can give an oppressed person reasons to hope. With hope they might hang in one more day; persisting one more day can make the difference between survival or annihilation. And I know from personal experience that when you feel beat-down or heartbroken, the best antidote is to live outside yourself. Stand for something that serves more than just yourself. Live in paradox, and delight in your anonymity: you'll be surprised how much gets done when you don't care who gets the credit for it.

Maybe if each private individual does a little bit, we can build small acts of social justice into enough critical mass to turn the heedless tide of narcissism and greed and corruption that's swamping our American values. It's up to each of us, not our so-called leaders, because the ordinary world is filled with extraordinary stories — and you are one of them.

The Tools and Process of Writer Renée Moffett Thompson

Renée Thompson’s stories have appeared in Narrative Magazine, Literal Latte, Arcadia, Animal: A Beast of a Literary Magazine, 10,000 Tons of Black Ink (where her story “Twelve Pencils” was named “Best Of,” Vol. II, Spring 2012), and Chiron Review. She has stories forthcoming from Crossborder and Chiron Review, and has placed as a finalist in competitions sponsored by Narrative, Literal Latte, Glimmer Train, and Writer’s Digest. She is the author of two novels, THE PLUME HUNTER (Torrey House Press, 2011) and THE BRIDGE AT VALENTINE (Tres Picos Press, 2010), which Larry McMurtry called “…very original and very appealing,” and which was recently selected as the 2014 community book for Woodland Reads. She lives in Northern California.

Renée, thanks for talking with us. For starters, can you describe your tools — the things you like to use when you write, and what you have to have in place. Music? Coffee? What makes you feel comfortable when you begin writing?

Renée Thompson

 Lucy, first, thank you so much for inviting me to chat with you on your blog — I’m honored to visit!

As for tools, I’m sort of promiscuous. I love to write in longhand, using a pencil — a Blackwing 602 (so much so, I wrote a story featuring a protagonist who can’t even think using a pen), but I write on my laptop too. It depends very much on my mood, and my joints, frankly. If I wake up feeling a little stiff, I usually print the prior day’s work, then sit at the kitchen table and edit in pencil while my bones warm up. When I’m working on a novel, I start at 9 a.m., treating my work as a job, coffee at hand and no sound whatsoever. (Even as a kid, I couldn’t work on homework with my radio on; I needed silence then, and still do.)

I like to work near a window. I’m a very slow writer, and tend to think a lot; I’ll gaze into the yard, watch the northern flickers, acorn woodpeckers, and cedar waxwings skim the trees as I dissect a problem. Walking helps too. Almost always, I can resolve a plot or character issue while walking a mile or two.

I agree: nothing better than a nice long walk. What about your process? Do you use index cards for plotting or scribble notes all over a single sheet of paper? Do you find yourself talking in all parts of a scene as you're turning it over in your mind?

Often, my short stories and novels are inspired by photographs, and when that happens, I’m able to identify my protagonist right away — usually the setting too. Plot, though, is something else. With my first two novels, I knew what the ending was before I started, but this time I don’t know how my story will end. I have a map — an outline — but no “X marks the spot,” so this newest endeavor is a leap of faith, and it’s a little scary.

I’ve never been an index-card scribbler, although I do have an idea file, where I’ve stashed appealing names, photos, snippets of dialogue I’ve overheard, and descriptions of landscapes. You might appreciate this one, written on a paper napkin in red ink, dated 3/16/01: Duluth, GA:

·  Redbuds just coming out

·  Daffs about done; tulips emerging

·  Warm, breezy, few clouds in sky

·  Magnolias done; leaves budding

·  (And then at lunch, in a nearby pizza joint): Two teenaged boys playing chess at table. Short hair, white tee-shirts. One boy wears a metal bead necklace. Girls sit next to them – boys totally ignore

·  Little girl with red-juice mustache

I haven’t yet used these details, but I will someday. And I’ll use the photo of Jeff Bridges, too, as he appeared in True Grit. He’ll make an A+ character. 

Renée, best of luck with all your writing projects, and thanks for giving us some of your time.

Boko Haram and the Writing of Cheerful Books

Last Friday I started researching Lagos, Nigeria, for my next book project and was scrolling through Pinterest when I read about Boko Haram's attack on the Christian village of Attagara. One of the Pinterest images showed a six-year-old boy beheaded by Boko Haram in that attack. The story is that a villager snatched the boy up in order to save him, but a terrorist tore them apart, killed the villager, and decapitated the child. The image left me stunned. I couldn't move, became barely aware of my own breathing, then ran to the bathroom and was physically ill. 

For years my friends sometimes posed a question I've shrugged off.

"Why do you write these dark subjects?"
If you know your history, you know that man's inhumanity to man has been a staple of human nature. 

What fascinates me are the extraordinary stories within the evil — an office worker who spends months giving practical help to a Jewish family hiding from the Nazis (Miep Gies) ... the quiet, undogged Kansas detective who works for years trying to nab the BTK killer (Det. Ken Landwehr) ... a couple Chinese camera shop guys in Japanese-occupied Nanjing, who duplicate film footage of atrocities and try to smuggle it out in milk canisters ... the Nigerian villager who randomly snatches up a confused child to save him from murderous thugs.

Kids who feel safe invent their own monsters to fear — the boogeyman in the closet or under the bed — thus the boom times of the decorative night-light industry. As a culture, we Americans are no different: we invent our bad monsters and then convince ourselves everything's AOK, all within 40 minutes of limited commercial interruptions.

The problem with complacency

But the world is filled with real-life monsters. Why do we not want to see them?

San Pedro Sula (Honduras) is the murder capital of the world, averaging three murders daily. Boko Haram is gaining more and more territorial control in Nigeria, thanks to a corrupt government lacking any vision beyond self-service. Out of 187 nations, Honduras and Nigeria ranked low for human development (129 and 153 respectively). Among other things, this means education is thwarted, access to clean water is a daily struggle — and life is cheap. You throw groups like the MXIII or Boko Haram on top of this mix, and suddenly your garden-variety American serial killer looks like a jerk with a serious attitude problem.

We who live in the affluent, comfortable west have afforded ourselves a high degree of complacency. And complacency kills off empathy and curiosity. It's utter hypocrisy for us to pooh-pooh them when western banks cheerfully take the deposits of those profiteering from the "civil psychosis" occurring in these countries.

Just what is so interesting about peering into the mind of a ruthless terrorist? 
I'd rather imagine the inner workings of that villager who forsakes his own safety to help a lost and panicked child. The former has nothing new to tell us about what it means to be human. 

The latter — everything.

Pictured above: Traffic jams like this occur all the time in Lagos, Nigeria. By 2015, Lagos is predicted to become the world's fifth most populous urban center, topping 23 million inhabitants. Despite the civic weaknesses I've described, Nigerians are a diverse and resilient people composed of 300 ethnic groups, and numerous Nigerians have gifted the world with their talents: writers Wole Soyinka, Ben Okri, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Chinua Achebe; playwright Biyi Thomas; musicians Sade, Seal, Fela Kuti, and King Sunny Ade; and athletes Hakeem Olajuwon and Nwankwo Kanu. This does not include educated professionals and scholars who now serve on American school faculties, and in public & private sector firms.

Bang bang (or slash), you're dead. OK, now get back up....Hey, get back up....

Hitchcock directs the farmhouse scene

There's a farmhouse scene in Hitchcock's "Torn Curtain" where Paul Newman's character and a farmer's wife try hard to silence an enemy agent by killing him. 

Problem is, nothing seems to work. They try banging his head with a shovel, strangling him with a telephone cord, even forcing his upper half into a gas oven. Nothing quite does the trick.

Hitchcock has said in old interviews that he wanted to shoot that scene to show just how difficult it really is to kill another human being. The will to live is strong and turbulent within the human spirit.

A perverse intimacy
This afternoon I'd just gotten off the phone with a client who asked me to make a presentation about workplace civility when a Tweet came through from the New York Times breaking news desk. I sent the link: "You're not going to believe this," I told him. "Talk about workplace civility...!"

Recently fired, an Oklahoma man attacked his co-workers and beheaded one of them before police took him down. People who hate Muslims will say the problem is all Islam. I think the problem is, in part, that our mental health system is filled with as many holes as our gun laws (even though no gun was used in this attack). 

Beheading another human being requires such a perverse intimacy, I can't imagine a rational human having the stomach for it. You have to look into your victim's eyes and watch them suffer—for several minutes—the most barbaric pain one human can inflict on another.

We Americans understand violence in all ways but one—via reality. Rampage shootings notwithstanding, we don't have 'round-the-clock gunfights in most of our streets, where going to school includes dodging bullets. Thanks to superb moviemaking, we have an idea of what happens when a body explodes with dozens of bullet wounds. I've lived in countries where violence wasn't so sparse, where even young children became somber but matter-of-fact when another body turned up in the gutter. The first time I did see a gunshot wound up close, a grim-faced trauma unit prepared itself to save the woman's life. Watching the thoracic surgeon create an intentional wound to inflate the victim's lung was painful enough. 

We admire her style, but most Americans forget Jacqueline Kennedy was herself a victim of extreme violence on 11/22/63. 

We see the news, not the consequences. The violence to which we're accustomed isn't just "of the moment." Survivors of violence suffer decades of emotional trauma, not because they're wimps but because the human mind struggles to comprehend such experiences by reliving them. It's a hard thing to shut off. The loved ones of each victim suffer decades of bereavement. 

We can't afford to become the thing that desensitizes us. The rest of us become steadily inured—so long as it's not happening on our streets, in our homes, then it's just the stuff of TV drama. But if you think it's utter folly to hold your hand over an open flame, or to have your spouse stick a red-hot poker through your ribs, then probably you realize our national acceptance of violence could kill us from the inside out more effectively than any foreign enemy. 

The Tools and Process of a Famous Writer: Jack Kerouac

Most of us see Jack Kerouac as the leading beat of that talented beatnik crowd. His groundbreaking work On the Road, about a cross-country road trip, was said to be a celebration of freedom and spontaneity, part of Kerouac's personal myth amid a post-WWII American hedonism. 

It's not that there's more to the story, but what's there is different. And fascinating. A cursory look at Kerouac dispels a few assumptions.

•  On The Road may be regarded as an American masterpiece, but Kerouac was French-Canadian and spoke Joual, a Canadian dialect of French. English was a second language for him. Joyce Johnson, who'd been his partner for a couple years, says if you read his work you'll detect French inflections throughout.

•  He didn't write it as a spontaneous regurgitation of freewheeling thought. Everything was meticulously scrutinized and edited and revised, as if each paragraph was a poem. (As Virginia Woolf scholars might say, it takes a lot of work to make it read like stream-of-consciousness ebb and flow).

•  He didn't like to stop and reload page after page into his typewriter, so he'd tape translucent sheets of vellum together and run it through on a scroll. The finished manuscript for On the Road was 120 feet long. His notebooks are similar: hurried penciled lines filling every bit of white space, where now and then a comment stands out, like when he refers to friend Allen Ginsberg as "a mental screwball."

Kerouac passed away in 1969, age 47, an alcoholic recluse. He had one a child, a daughter he never really got to know (Jan Kerouac also died young). Still fascinating to each new generation, the subject of new documentaries and biographical screenplays, his work continues to influence the young who it view through the prism of their own experiences in a post-9/11 world.

Above: Kerouac, left, with his friend Lucien Carr (father of Caleb Carr, author of The Alienist). Right: The scrolled manuscript for On The Road, typed single-spaced . Towards the end of his life, Kerouac tried in vain to interest actor Marlon Brando in a film version of On The Road. He also considered suing the producers of a TV show ("Route 66") for plagiarism.

Four Girls, Three Minutes (September 1963)

Last year the Congressional Gold Medal was posthumously awarded to each of the four girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing. You know the story. Whenever it comes up, sympathetic heads nod: "Ah yes, the four little black girls. Terrible...."

Around 10:19 a.m. that Sunday, an anonymous caller told the church secretary, "Three minutes." At 10:22, a deafening blast tore the church apart, injuring two dozen and killing the four girls in the basement attending a Sunday school class.

When faced with large-scale evil — 16 sticks of Klan dynamite, hidden by white supremacists in a place of worship — it helps to drill down to small human details so ordinary they become points of reverence. 

But who were they? 

So this is who they were: Cynthia Wesley, 14, was adopted. An outgoing kid, she was involved with her school and church, and played in the school band. That morning, she met up with her friend Addie Mae Collins, also 14, and the two girls tossed a purse back and forth, laughing and talking as they headed for the church.

Addie Mae was a peacemaker. Warm and lovable, it was said, "To know Addie Mae was to love her." A school friend chatted with her that morning, but when they got to the fence, he turned and said, "I'll see you Monday," not realizing he'd never see her again. Her older sister was injured in the blast, with 21 shards of glass embedded in her face, rendering her blind in one eye.

Carole Robertson, 14, had been dropped off outside the church by her father, who watched her run inside before pulling away. She was a straight-A student involved with the Girl Scouts, marching band, and science club. She aspired to be a singer. At night she and her sister would listen to the radio, her favorite song being "In the Still of the Night," and she would gasp with disapproval when she saw her older siblings and their friends tossing popcorn from the black section of the movie theater at the white folks sitting below.

The youngest, Denise McNair, was only 11. Nicknamed "Niecie" by her friends, she never understood why she couldn't eat at the same lunch counter with the white kids. She was likely the poorest of the four, quiet and good-natured, active in Brownies, a kid who loved playing baseball and wanted to be a pediatrician. 

Here's what I find so remarkable about Niecie: every year she organized a neighborhood fundraiser where the local kids would sing and dance on her family driveway for an audience that then donated pennies, nickels, and dimes — the proceeds going toward Niecie's favorite cause, muscular dystrophy. She was found with a piece of brick embedded in her head. Her mother screamed for days and had to be sedated, and last year CNN reported that Mrs. McNair, now afflicted with Alzheimer's, still remembers and grieves for the child she lost 50 years ago.

To know them individually is to never forget them — nor to remember them merely as "four little black girls," generalized into a sad footnote to our Civil Rights history. Not just four little black girls, but four vibrant individuals. Four potential women. I imagine Cynthia and Addie Mae going to college, maybe starting up a business together ... Carole singing in a blues club and looking over recording contracts ... and Niecie retiring from her medical practice, still championing victims of muscular dystrophy. 

No arrests were made in 1963 but in 1970, Alabama's new attorney general, Bill Baxley, reopened the investigation and ultimately succeeded in convicting Klansman Robert Chambliss for murder. Not surprisingly, for doing so, Baxley received numerous death threats. Here's how he replied one of them.

The Tools and Process of a Famous Writer: Margaret Mitchell

Mitchell's Remington typewriter and some of those manila envelopes

In my early 20s, I was working in media services for Georgia Power Co. when a copywriter mentioned she was on her way to interview a retiree who'd started his career as copyboy to John Marsh, husband of writer Margaret Mitchell. Knowing I was an avid reader and "a Yankee fan" of Gone with the Wind (GWTW), she let me tag along. He lived in a Buckhead high-rise and, during the interview, described Marsh as a precise and meticulous editor. Afterwards I read a Mitchell biography that confirmed Marsh was one of the unsung heroes of the Pulitzer-winning novel, someone whose opinion Mitchell trusted above all others.

It's the stuff of literary legend that Mitchell started working on GWTW while recovering from a broken ankle. Actually, this recuperation began with reading nearly every book from the Atlanta library (Carnegie branch), until finally Marsh got tired of dragging home armloads of books and said, "You've read all but maths and sciences! Why don't you write a book?" To help her, he brought home a Remington typewriter.

Here are some other "backstories" you might not have heard:

•  Having been a features reporter for the Atlanta Journal Sunday magazine, Mitchell began work each day on GWTW as if she was headed into the office: she'd put on office clothes, a little make-up, prop her damaged ankle, and start tapping on her Remington.

•  She didn't work from an outline. Much of it came out of her head, but she did research extensively by scouring old newspaper articles, letters, and diaries from the period. A great many insights came from her parents and relatives who still remembered the Civil War in vivid detail. She'd grown up with their stories.

•  She had attended Smith College (Class of 1922) and it was another Smith alum, Lois Cole '24, who brought her to the attention of Harold Latham, editor in chief at Macmillan Co., then the nation's most esteemed publisher — and Cole's boss. Having been social acquaintances, Cole knew of Mitchell's manuscript about a Southern belle who survives the Civil War, and urged Latham to speak with Mitchell when he went on a cross-country search for new talent. The road to getting GWTW published solidified a close friendship between the two women that endured until Mitchell's death in 1949.

•  The manuscript was a mess. As each chapter was done, Mitchell stuck it into a manila envelope. Soon, dozens of manila envelopes were scattered throughout the Mitchells' tiny apartment (if you've ever visited this historic site in Atlanta, you'll know it's really tiny). Sometimes they were used to prop up the wobbly leg of a sofa, and Mitchell would throw a towel over them when guests dropped by.

More than that, it wasn't a fully completed manuscript — and it was disorganized as well. The first chapter was still in outline form. There were multiple versions of multiple chapters, and major gaps in the story line. It was Cole, rather than Latham, who sat with the entire pile of manila envelopes and edited the pieces into something resembling a manuscript. She also functioned as a literary agent, smoothing over nettled contract negotiations, easing Mitchell's jangled nerves during the rewrites, and consulting with Macmillan's art department on the marketing strategy.

• Mitchell knew herself to be a loquacious and over-embellishing narrator: as a writer, her struggle was to pare down her prose so the story might be "read while riding a galloping horse." It took from 1926 to 1936 to write GWTW, but if you've ever read Irene Selznick's autobiography (A Private View), you'll know it was an exhilarating moment when producer David Selznick travelled with the book galleys in his hand and noticed every passenger on his flight was avidly turning the pages of a story he hoped to make into a movie.

That Saturday at Mendorff's

I had "soft" views re: gun control when I started writing That Saturday at Mendorff's (about an Atlanta bookstore shooting). All I knew was that a disturbed young man had walked into a movie theater and committed an atrocity. 

I didn't write Mendorff's to be an anti-gun ownership tome. I wrote it because the ordinary world is filled with extraordinary stories: I wanted to probe deeper into who the bookstore victims had been before the incident, and who they became as a result of it. There's the question of disrupted lives, broken relationships, and physical injuries, to say nothing of emotional trauma. That process continues long after physical scars have healed. Within a fictional context, I also wanted to consider the fallout of the shooter's terrible decision on his loved ones left behind, the "designated monsters" who knew him but could not thwart his plans. 

In my work, I had conversations with a retired homicide detective, and an ER/trauma unit doctor who was interning at a Littleton, CO, hospital the day of the Columbine shootings. I visited her ER trauma unit, watched them intubate the collapsed lung of a shooting victim, and read psychological profiles on what goes into the making of a rampage killer.

But this research, the news stories — all come back to the same bottom line: This is not getting better for us, whether we advocate for gun safety or gun ownership. We're polarizing on the issue (bickering on social media) while the NRA owns the discussion, with political swag going to self-serving politicians to look the other way, or to support NRA and GOA interests. 

Right now a 9-year-old girl faces years of trauma counseling for accidentally killing a man with an Uzi. What the hell are we becoming?

Whether you believe in gun safety or gun ownership, write your elected leaders and hold their feet to the fire based on what you believe. They need to hear from more of us. Reinforce that this is a democracy and not a question of fealty to special interest groups. #‎notonemore

The ever-brilliant Mike Luckovich nails it again with a single image.

The tools and process of a famous writer: John Grisham

For the past couple years I've been trying to professionalize my writing habits, and rearranging my life to make a lot more time for writing. Cutting out TV has helped: unless I'm with someone else, I'm highly selective about what I'll watch. I'm still trying to reach a goal of completing a first draft within a season (three months).

I write better when I start in longhand. I feel closer to the challenges of each scene, and typing it up affords a second layer of writing. There are notebooks for each book project, so the initial drafts go in there, and I prefer gel pens. And perhaps because I was a single mom, over the years I'd learned to write whenever the opportunity presented itself: in the carpool line, waiting for my kid; in a bookstore between client meetings; on the plane during business and personal travel. (My 10th grade English teacher told me a long time ago, "You're able to write at the drop of a hat.")

Back in the early 80s, John Grisham was a defense attorney. One day he overheard some people talking about a brutal case, the rape of a young black girl, and he started wondering what would happen if her father shot and killed her assailants. It took him three years to write A Time to Kill, and he had 900 pages of manuscript, 300 of which had to be eliminated before publication. Since then, he's started every book project with an extensive outline — two paragraphs of synopsis for each chapter. "Sometimes the outline is more painful than the actual draft," he told one interviewer, "but it makes the book a lot easier to write."

Here's what I learned about Grisham's other writing habits:

•  He writes one book per year, usually from August to November, drafting 6 AM to noon, five days a week. And he likes to sit in the same spot, the same table and chair, with the same coffee cup and brand of coffee (sorry, didn't get that). He used the same computer for years until it finally gave out.

•  He used to analyze great books to understand their structures and plot movement. When you write a suspense thriller, he believes, you have to keep the pages turning rapidly, so sometimes you wind up foregoing details such as food, music, clothing descriptions.

•  He's very disciplined. When he was still practicing law, if he had to get up at 4 AM to get in two hours' writing before going to work, he'd get up at 4. If he had a half hour to an hour between cases, he'd hide in a law library to work on his book. (He did go through a period when he was broke, during which he sat writing at a desk between the washer and dryer of his family's utility room).

His favorite writers are John Steinbeck, Mark Twain, Pat Conroy, and John Le Carre. Grisham's bottom line? 

"Write at least one page every day, without fail. If you’re trying to write a book, and you’re not writing at least one page a day, then the book is not going to get written." 

Trusting the open road

In my work life there are clear gains to thinking and acting proactively — for example, showing early design ideas to the printer can anticipate or thwart production problems. It also helps to follow schedules and process protocols.

But in writing fiction, for the past few years I've been rediscovering an aspect of creativity that gets short shrift, an unsung hero I met in art school but hadn't seen much of in the years of production planning. 

And that is to trust in emergence, the notion that answers and solutions will evolve out of the shadows and clouds and mists.

You write with a synopsis or plot outline. You plan each scene to carry the plot forward to a new wrinkle, a fresh struggle, but you want it to be a dynamic process built with a sense of "spontaneous order." If you keep the process open and porous, new ideas and variations will often present themselves despite best-laid plans. Think of it as making a trip, marking Point A to Point B, but learning the detours enrich the journey far more than speeding forward, blinders up, towards the destination itself. 

The world is filled with triggers to emergence: lyrics of a song overheard on the radio from the car next to you in traffic ... a TV character who has nothing to do with your book ... a random comment made by a friend or colleague .... 

The point is, if you keep an open mind, your radar will catch it, assess it, alchemize it.

You can also trust your characters. Last week I wrote a scene between a mother and daughter with a particular end goal in mind (Point A to B), but as their conversation developed (with the mother remarking upon some trees that remind her of her childhood), fresh questions came up that are natural to each character. ("Who are your people?" the daughter asks her mom. "Why don't you ever speak of them?") Suddenly both characters have an issue and a depth that I couldn't have planned when blocking out the synopsis.

So when I feel stymied — "How the hell is this book going to end?!" — nowadays I'm learning not to fret so much. Not all answers appear at once, but if you're doing your job, you're beckoning them towards you. And you only have enough energy for today's questions. Keep an open mind, don't overthink the problems, and inevitably the answers do emerge, like gold doubloons uncovered by receding ocean waves. They've been there all along, like buried treasure. And usually they're better than anything you could've planned.

Joe's Best Story, Part 2

Last week I saw that barista Joe, the one I told you about, the one whose story had been lost by the publisher who lived down his street.

Anyway, I admitted to eavesdropping on that conversation and urged him to not give up on his story. He grinned but shook his head: "I just lost all inspiration when the story was lost, and I don't know when I'll find the time. I work here during the day but at night I run my own online record label."

Me: "So you're staying creative, you're doing stuff."

Joe: "Yes, I am, but I just don't know if I can write it again."

Me: "Sure you can. That man lost your manuscript, but your idea's still in your head. You can do anything you want."

And then I didn't think any more about it.

The coffeeshop this morning was interesting: a handful of us are recognizing each other because we're predawn regulars, at least three of us writing fiction, the rest just early risers, one gentleman a diarist with beautiful calligraphic handwriting.  

Six-foot-seven and Five-foot-two asked me, "How many pages today?" and I said, "800 words, and hopefully they're not crap!" 

Customers murmured to each other in line, "Can you believe what happened?" They meant Robin Williams. It's like an earthquake that shook everything. 

Out of the blue, I see Joe, who tells me, "Hey, Miz Lucy, I was hoping to run into you today because I took your advice. I went and got a cheap notebook and I've written down everything I can remember about that story I wrote when I was a kid." 

Me: "Seriously?" 

Joe: "Yup. I'm going to keep working on it." 

Well, he made my week. The week has been made.

About the image: Howard Schultz made  a speech once where he recalled his father-in-law taking him for a walk with some well-meaning advice: maybe it was time to start looking for a real job and give up on "this coffee thing." And JK Rowling's manuscript was rejected so many times, the UK literary agency that did pick it up was so tiny, it was housed above a Chinese restaurant.

America's Sweetheart

My Facebook news feed is a flood, and every wave carries a picture of Robin Williams. He should've been able to die in a warm tranquil bed, that silly grin on his face. Rest in peace, you wonderful man.


Above: Video from his first-ever appearance on Carson.