My Grandma and Cricket Magazine

My grandmother was one smart woman. She knew where my head was at. She knew where I was going, and I hadn't even gotten there yet when she died.

This morning I had an odd desire to revisit a magazine I read as a child, a magazine that, as I now recall, my grandmother faithfully renewed for me every year until I was well beyond the age to which it was geared. That magazine was Cricket. I loved Cricket with a passion. Before that she'd subscribed to Ladybug and Spider, both publications that, in thier time, I loved too. But Cricket was the one I stayed with the longest -- the stories were better, the pictures brighter. It was practically a party, opening up a new issue every month. I especially loved saving all the issues and going back through to read the stories that came out in episodes. I loved them so much I saved many of my favorite stories in a box, laborously ripped from the magazines that had originally housed them. I think I still have a box of the magazines at home, too. I don't want to get rid of them -- it's a link to my childhood and a link to Grandma.

I picked up an issue several years ago in the children's section and was a little disappointed -- the myths and legends that I had loved so much had been replaced by newer, gritter, young-adult kinds of stories.  I don't care what your teacher education manuals tell you, not every child wants to read about the problems they might be facing in their day-to-day lives. I know I didn't. Ramona, Amber Brown, and pretty much anything Judy Blume every wrote were not welcome additions to my library bag.

I think this magazine might have been part of why I became a writer of stories. Because my grandmother saw they were important to me, and continued buying that magazine subscription so I could continue to see new examples and continue to read. In pedagogy now we're talking about the writing process and how reading (and subsequent discussion of that reading) is important to formulating how a story works.

Thanks, Grandma. I think you taught me that already.

Hello, Universe Speaking

I love and hate going back to college. I love seeing everyone and having things to read and discuss with people and sharing everything you did over your summer. I hate remembering what it feels like to be overwhelmed. Two days of class and already I have a whole novel to read, 6 articles to digest and three chapters in a textbook to prepare for discussion.

A note -- that's only for one class. It's my night class and only meets on Thursdays, but still. This is a little excessive.

But there's another thing I like about back to school -- there's a strange way the Universe seems to speak to you in the people it throws across your path. In the library, for instance, this transfer student came into the stacks where I was looking for a book and very nicely asked if I could help her find a book. Your lucky day, I said. You picked the one person out here right now who works here!

The Universe must also be trying to tell me something through my homework -- in three of my classes I've been asked to write what amounts to a short summary of my reading life. Since I've only finished with the one due today (and I rather like it) I'm going to share it here. I was given on the title as a prompt; it is called "Of Books, Reading, and Me: a Personal Essay."



When my family re-painted my room several summers ago, my parents asked me (in between moving out every single piece of furniture I owned and painting my walls Sherwood Green) if there was anything I needed to add to my room before moving back in. My answer was simple -- a bigger bookshelf. Two little shelves would suffice no longer. Already shelved two books deep, my book collection was growing and there was no place for it to go except the floor, an idea my mother wasn't particularly keen on. So in the new, taller bookshelf came, quickly filled and just as quickly crowded.


I might be a child of the digital age, but I still haven't given up on the analog version of my favorite pastime. New books are added to the shelves all the time, and with far more reward than watching space on a hard drive slowly fill with files. A full hard drive is annoying -- a full bookshelf is an accomplishment, a challenge, even. When I open a physical book, I'm opening up the culmination of four thousand years of human story-telling and -sharing technology. When I read, I owe that experience to all the people who made books possible, the men who spent hours cutting type forms and the women who slaved over paper presses and mills and the printer's children, somewhere in time, who had to put away all the size ten font in those tiny type trays, and I owe it to them to respect the house for the story.


Maybe setting a little bit of type myself has made me more aware of the physical presence of the book. After spending six hours filling three by three inch pages with my own words, and another ten hours printing them, I have a great deal more respect for men like Ben Franklin, who spent their days setting tiny pieces of type for ideas that weren't even their own. The physical presence of a book will make or break my experience of it -- Over the past summer I gave up on what was probably a very engaging story because the type was too small and too closely set for me to read it easily.


But not all my books are on my shelf, and not all my reading is done 'the old fashioned way.' Some of the short stories I read will never find themselves inside a codex, or even on the shiny screen of an e-reader. Some of the news stories or observations on life are not on the path to becoming 'blooks', or books from blogs. And I like it that way. Just as there's something magically permanent about holding a book, there's something wonderfully transitive about reading and sharing thoughts online. Unlike a book, which requires resources and much physical space and contact to manufacture and share, the internet has created a space where stories of all kinds can be shared spur-of-the-moment, without the boundaries imposed by printing off the material to be shared. I might enjoy reading analog, but I enjoy writing digital. My blog broadcasts my thoughts on reading to the whole internet-using world twenty four hours a day, three hundred and sixty five days a year. It’s immediate, boots-on-the-ground writing; I can be as elegant or as mindless as I chose. Without a publisher to please or a specific public to satisfy, the entire world is open to my critique.

I’m a child of the Twilight generation. Not just because of Stephanie Meyer’s breakout bestseller, but because people my age are at a crossroads, not quite in the light of the vanishing Day of the Printed book nor fully immersed in the e-reader illuminated Night yet. Wherever it is I stand on the debate between whether the print book is dead or still very much living, at the point where books, reading, and my life converge there’s a single objective in mind – sharing a story in whatever way seems best. Sometimes that’s a book and sometimes that’s the internet and sometimes it’s the oldest story-sharing method of all – the human voice. When I sit down to read to my sister, it doesn’t matter to her whether I’m reading from a computer screen or a printed page; her only concern is that the story being told is a good one.

Quiet Time

I talk a lot on this blog about secular writing -- writing stories, writing songs, writing about my life. I'm going to take a break from that for a little while and talk about something I don't discuss a lot about: writing prayers, which I have been known to do from time to time. Oftentimes when I write a prayer I don't actually commit it to paper -- I just say whatever comes to mind about what I'm thankful for around a dinner table or with some friends. Yet this, too, is writing. Some of those have been pretty good, so I've starting writing prayers, on paper, for other things.

It's my first day back at campus, and lately I've been thinking a lot about the fantastic examples on how to live life that I see in the people around me. So I thought I'd write a prayer about it. A freind of mine, Cody, who is a great deal more religious than I am, told me that when writing a prayer one is actually praying it a number of times while one composes it, going over the words and the ideas one wants to put on paper.

As I sit here in my t-shirt from the Arboretum near my house, it's not hard to imagine me as a tree-hugger. I love trees, and I love being outdoors, and I love the image of the Tree of Life, as well as that line in John's gospel "I am the vine, and you are the branches; Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned." People are a lot like trees; we grow up, we reach out to people, we put down roots. When I first had the idea for this prayer, I only had the first line -- "You have set me, a tiny seedling, in the midst of a great forest."

As I finished writing this piece this morning, I was thinking a lot about the freshmen and women who are just starting their orientation process today at Saint Ben's and Saint John's. Really, this prayer is for them, the tiny seedlings who are being transplanted in this forest here in central Minnesota and the many other seedlings in other colleges all over the United States who are beginning classes this week, including my brother. I pray that they can grow tall where they are planted, just as I feel I have.


Great Creator God, Cultivator of the Universe,
you have set me, a tiny seedling, in the midst of a great forest.
Let me grow here, let me prosper;
Let me reach up my branches and feel the warmth of your sun, and the cooling comfort of your rain.
Let the great trees around me be my shelter and my guide;
Let me learn from their example, that I may grow tall here in your Garden of gardens.
When the wind blows, let me bend, but not break;
Where there is rottenness in other trees, let none break my branches or uproot me.
Let my roots grow deep, that none may move me from your holy ground.
May the others in my life use the gifts you have given me,
the shelter of my arms and the fruits of my soul and the shade of my spirit.
When I die, let me seep back into the soil
and enrich another.

Character Development

I don't enjoy summer vacation. All this unstructured time gives me the idea that I have nothing to do when, in reality, I have lots of things to do. Go get a haircut. Finish my student loans. Update my resume. Write blog posts. When you're scheduled you find time to do things becuase you know you won't have time later. When you're not scheduled, the famous phrase "Aw, I'll just do it later" becomes later and later and later until you find you've never gotten around to doing it at all.

One of those things for me, unfortunately, has been blog posts.

Melisa, one of my writing class students, wanted to know how to develop her characters better, and I didn't have anything to tell her. How do you teach character development? I've always been told I have well-developed characters, and I'm trying to figure out why that is. What makes someone two dimensional or three? Where does that leap come in?

Storm-brain over at the Veritas Writing site thinks well-developed characters come after filling out a worksheet of things like "Things this character has in their pockets" and "Foods this character will never eat" as well as more mundane questions they might ask you at the doctor's office like "Height" and "Mother's maiden name." Other writers agree with this technique, and I think to a certain extent it helps, but a well-developed character embodies all the things on the worksheet without having them mentioned in the story.

A common mistake that beginning writers make (and I've been there, I've done that, I'm guilty, too) is to create this elaborate mental picture and then share the entire thing with the reader in the first several pages of the story. The reader doesn't care that your leading lady is exactly 145 pounds and her eyes are really cerulean instead of just blue -- they care about her thoughts, her emotions, what she's going to contribute to the story.

In the first few pages of the Rose rewrite, which I'm going to use as an example here because it's recent and people seem to generally like Rhoswen, the reader learns several things about my main character, Rhoswen of Anfalas. They learn she has dark hair, that she's good-natured and kind, that she is tallish (taller than her maidservant, anyway), that she is going to be married to someone she has never met and she's sad about it not because she's afraid of marriage but because she doesn't look forward to leaving her home. We don't know that she's a gardener, that she enjoys playing the harp or that she has a fairly good singing voice because we don't need to know. Her skill with the harp doesn't come up until the fifth or sixth chapter becuase it didn't need to.

When characters are presented for judgement in front of the reader, they say "I did this." Well developed characters say "I did this because..." and give a reason. The reason is not always immediate -- it would have been really easy to write Rhoswen as a woman who was afraid of marriage. But the first reason she gives for being hesitant about leaving home is that she's going to be homesick. She's not afraid of marriage -- she's afraid of childbirth, because her own mother died in childbed. (A little hokey, I know, but my mother's afraid of heart disease because her mother died of heart disease -- it's kind of the same thing, right?)

Long story short, well developed characters have motivation. I have a theory that character motivation is directly linked to author motivation. Why YOU are writing this story will probably have a great effect on how much thought you give to why the characters are doing what they are doing. Oftentimes beginning writers simply want to be part of the story, and this is reflected in the characters they write. Why are you doing this? Because my creator wanted to. They don't have enough internal substance (all those little background details) to stand on their own when they stand before the Writing Gods and are asked to explain their existence.

So, Rhoswen, why are you caring for the wounded in Osgiliath even though it makes you a little uncomfortable?


Well, Reader, I'm doing it because it's something I'm good at and getting better at, because it's part of my duty as the future wife of the steward to care for the people, and because having a job leaves me less time to think about Boromir being gone. At least that last one's what I tell myself, but my freinds don't think it's working.

If you had asked the first incarnation of Rhoswen that question I don't know that she would have had an answer. Actually, the first incarnation of Rhoswen wasn't a healer or a gardener. She didn't have any hobbies. She was a showpiece.

Art imitates life -- My characters are sixty percent me and forty percent who I want to be. When I need to write that forty percent I study the people around me, what I like about them and dislike about them.

Writers need to distill, clarify and collect people as well as experiences, not only becuase it helps them describe things but also because it gives them an arsenal of feelings, emotions and settings with which to play. When I wrote the last chapter of A Rose in the Briars, a chapter that deals heavily with grief and funerals, I thought a lot about all the funerals I've been to and the emotions and actions of the other people that were there. I also used the ten-year old version of myself to write the ten-year old Miriel, who appears at her father's funeral trying desperately not to cry. The observation Rhoswen makes about her ("Why do children think they must take on the world?") was something that was said to me when I was ten and wondering why Slobadan Milosevic was such a terrible, terrible person and Yugoslavia was such a political mess.

Motivation is only one small part of character development -- Does anyone have anything they think I've missed?

Book Recommendation: The Road from Coorain

I just finished reading Jill Ker Conway’s The Road From Coorain, her memoir about growing up in the Australian Outback in the 1930s and 40s, and realized there’s nothing better in my life at the moment to write about, so I’m furnishing you with a book review.

I didn’t realize this until after I finished the book and read the back cover, but the author was at one point in time the president of Smith College and an accomplished women’s historian, which should have been a huge clue that I’d enjoy this book. As it happens, I checked it out because the cover looked interesting, I’m in love with the idea of the Australian out country, and I was also checking out Eclipse and Breaking Dawn and wanted something a little more intellectual looking in my pile at the check-out line. (I live in fear that the librarians will judge me by what I’m checking out – It’s why I’ve never gotten around to just sitting down for a week during the summer with a heap of trashy romance novels.)

One of the first things I thought after finishing the first page of this wonderful little book is “God, this woman can write. This prose is mind-bendingly brilliant.” And it only got better as I zoomed through the rest of the book. Conway’s descriptions of the back country where she spent her childhood, working and helping her father on their sheep farm, drew me into a landscape I’ve only dreamt of through the poetry of Banjo Paterson. As I read on I couldn’t help feeling a sense of kinship and like-mindedness with Conway; One of the things that continually struck me as the narrative went on was the way she seemed to find the Divine in the harsh but somehow beautiful vistas of the desert around her. Raised by a devoutly anti-Catholic mother and a father who only dabbled in his faith, Conway stayed away from religion for most of her life, but despite this maintains a strong sense of the mightiness of nature and the serenity or intense strength one can find there.

As she moved away from the family farm and into the city, the author turned her insightful prose to examining her relationships, the people who enter her life and finally the academic life she’s easing into at the end of the memoir as a Master’s candidate in history at the University of Sydney. What really interested me towards the end of the book was the way she was drawn towards comparing the Australian Experience of settlement with the similiar American experience settling the West.

Anyway, it was a fantastic book, and I’d recommend it to everyone.