Why Bother?

I wanted to make sure to link to the article, "Why Bother?" by Michael Pollan in last week's New York Times. The title says it all, and it's required reading if you're feeling a little overwhelmed by the state of the planet. I'm a big fan of Pollan's work. His 1998 article, "Playing God in the Garden" was one of the things that inspired me to write about genetically engineered potatoes in "All Over Creation." I ended up incorporating a description of the article in the novel, where one of the characters, Elliot Rhodes, a PR flack for a biotech company, comes across it, much to his dismay. In 2002, when the manuscript was finished, I felt I had to contact Pollan to let him know that I'd appropriated his factual article into my fictional novel. He was extremely gracious and told me that he had been reading "My Year of Meats" when he was writing his article "Power Steer," about a steer he purchased in order to learn about how modern, industrial steak is produced in America. That made me very happy.

rapprochement...and the Svalbard Global Seed Vault

How to re-enter this world of my weblog? So much has happened, so much to talk about, and how do I account for my absence? Well, maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe we just go in and out—of our projects, our journals, our intentions and our resolves. What matters is just that we return, eventually, to today, when I'm excited about a story I read, and I want to share it.

It's about the Sval­bard Glob­al Seed Vault. Today was the official opening of the vault, which is was dug 393 feet inside a sandstone mountain, under the permafrost, on a remote Norwegian island called Spitspergen in the Arctic, about 1,120 km from the North Pole.

Today, during the official opening, the vault was unlocked, and the first box of seeds was placed inside by the Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, and Kenyan Nobel Peace Prize laureate and environmentalist, Wangari Maathai. The box contained varieties of rice seeds from 104 countries.

Nicknamed "The Doomsday Vault," the Svalbard Seed Vault "is designed to store duplicates of seeds from seed collections from around the globe. Many of these collections from developing countries are in developing countries. If seeds are lost, e.g. as a result of natural disasters, war or simply a lack of resources, the seed collections may be reestablished using seeds from Svalbard."

You can see the video of the opening ceremonies, as well as a really great video about the World Cowpea Collection, at the Svalbard Seed Vault website.

War and Remembrance

Here's something for friends in Vancouver. I'm going to be doing a reading with Shaena Lambert, at the Joy Kogawa House this Saturday, November 10, at 3:00 - 5:00. Hmm, I see that the graphics of this poster aren't reproducing very well, so here's the info you'll need:

War and Remembrance

A reading in support of TLC’s writers-in-residence program at Historic Joy Kogawa House

Location: 1450 West 64th Avenue, Vancouver

Date: Saturday, November 10, 3 to 5 p.m.

Cost: Admission by donation.
Space is limited. To ensure a seat, please RSVP to (604) 733-2313.

Ruth Ozeki, the Vancouver Public Library’s One Book, One Vancouver author for 2007 for her novel My Year of Meats, will read her contribution to the new collaborative novel, Click, published by Scholastic to support Amnesty International. Ruth’s story describes the experiences of a Japanese boy living in Tokyo during the American occupation following the Second World War.

Vancouver writer Shaena Lambert will read from her novel, Radiance, which tells the story of a Hiroshima survivor whom a group of antinuclear activists sponsor for plastic surgery in New York in the 1950s. The story pits the ideals of peace at home against the realities of the war experience in Japan.

Special guest appearance by Canadian author and poet, Joy Kogawa.

+ + +

And one more thing...I just figured out that the comments people so kindly send me must be moderated, before they are published on the weblog. When I logged on just now, I discovered there were 17 of them waiting for me, dating back to March. None seemed particularly immoderate, but I clicked the appropriate buttons, and I hope they're up and available now. I want to apologize to all of you who sent them and to thank you for being patient. It was lovely to read them, and I promise I'll try to do better in the future. It's not that I'm inept, exactly, just kind of deeply uninterested in this technology....

happy valentine's day!

It's Valentine's Day, and I'm in love, and there you have it.

I am in the throes of a romance, which has obsessed and inspired me now for almost a week. It was pretty much love at first sight, and while I'm skeptical of quick infatuations (and there have been a lot of them), I'm starting to feel confident that this attraction will turn into a real and lasting relationship.

Of course, I'm in a relationship now, a long-term one, with an arrogant, bloated, and recalcitrant partner who has been growing more and more annoying to me as the years go by. And I have to confess, I've been looking for a way out. I've been shopping, cruising the Internet, desperately seeking a new . . .

. . . Right about now is when my friend broke into my rhapsodic effusion and said, dryly, "It's software, isn't it."

Alright, alright. It's software. The object of my infatuation is an elegant piece of writing software called Scrivener, and I'm not the only one who has fallen hard. The love analogy is one that's used over and over again on the user forums.

Before I go any further, let me say that this is a Mac only app, so if you are a PC user, well, this might be reason enough to switch teams.

To call Scrivener writing software implies that it's either a word processing program like Word (my old, tediously annoying bloatware partner), or some kind of creativity enhancing workshop-surrogate, designed to help you have clever ideas and put them together into pre-structured storylines.

Scrivener is neither. It's just one of the most intuitive and writer-friendly apps I've ever used. In my experience, genesis is chaotic, intuitive, iterative and emergent, and when I write, and especially when I'm beginning a project, I tend to have a lot of ideas all at once. I make hundreds of notes about characters, locations, actions, events, themes, chronologies, quotations, inspirations, research, you name it, and this process can go on for weeks or years. Organizing all this stuff is always a nightmare, and this is where Scrivener is most brilliant.

It has a research section for story and research notes, and lets you make internal links to documents as well as external links to web pages, sound files, video clips, and pdf files. It has powerful keyword and search support, and color coded labeling.

The actual writing happens in the draft section, and Scrivener is especially good if you're the kind of writer I am, and you know you've got a story growing inside your head because you start hearing voices, little bits and snippets of dialogue and description, which start to evolve into scenes and chapters, and you have to be able to jot these down and keep track of them, quickly, in a place that's easy to locate, open and add to.

When you're done with your manuscript, you can export it to Word or other word processing programs to do your final polishing and submission.

One of the things I like best is the index card and corkboard layout, which is exactly what it sounds like. Every file you create has an index card associated with it. When you switch to the corkboard layout, the index cards come up and you can move the sections of your story or article around and play with different ordering. (The corkboard graphics are a bit silly, but Scrivener lets you turn it off and create a nice color background instead.)

Once you have generated a collection of scenes in your file/cards, you can select them and use the Edit Scrivenings feature, which allows you to see and edit, in one continuous document, all the bits and pieces you've been working on.

Scrivener gives you immediate access to your Draft and Research areas in a binder, which lists all your files and folders in a column on the left hand side of the screen. The screen viewing options are great. You can split your screen, either vertically or horizontally, and work in two documents at the same time. And you can float your screen in Full Screen mode, which is really easy on your tired eyes.

Okay, I could go on and on. Instead, here's Merlin Mann's rave, and here, once again, is the developer's site.

You can download and use it for free for I think thirty days, but I bought my license within a few hours. (I told you it was love at first sight!)

One note: TAKE THE TIME AND DO THE TUTORIAL! It will take you about 30 - 45 minutes, and it's a really great overview of the landscape.

I don't normally promote products, like software, on this website, so you know this one is special. I hope you like it as much as I do. Happy Valentine's Day!

openings...

Simon Schama wrote an excellent essay, "The Story So Far," for the Guardian, in which he reports on the decade, the noughties, from the point of view of an oracular, fully digitized historian named Sybil, a century from now. It is funny and bleak and, well, oracular. Schama is brilliant.

New Year's Day is the most important holiday in Japan. The Japanese New Year greeting is "Akemashite, omedetou gozaimasu!" which simply means "Opening, congratulations!" It started me thinking about opening, about being open to ideas and knowledge and possibilities, and about how hard this attitude is to maintain in daily life. So much comes at us in the course of a day or month or year, and of course it's impossible to take it all in. But I'm increasingly aware of how much I block out. I fool myself into thinking that I understand issues so I don't have to pay too much attention to them. My resolution this year is to try to notice, in particular, the things I think I understand, but don't, and then to learn about them. Happily, there's no shortage of material.

Happy Year of the Rooster!

I know it's a belated greeting, but it makes sense somehow. Our roosters are always late. They are famous for it. They go to bed late at night, and they get up late in the morning, and so do all our hens.

It is tempting to blame the roosters, but it’s not their fault. It’s our fault, or rather it’s my husband’s fault, because even though we’ve lived in the country for almost eight years now, he still maintains an urban artist’s preference for working late into the night. So he gets up late, thereby training the chickens to do the same. They are very patient chickens. They have learned to accept what they cannot change, in this case symbiosis with slacker humans and the futility of crowing at dawn.

When we give chickens away to real farmers, we always get complaints. “All our other chickens go to bed at dusk, but your silkies are still scratching and pecking and hanging out around the water bucket until long after dark. And in the morning, they won’t come out of the coop.”

Of course, I could get up early and let them out, but I don’t. And if I’m going to post a new year’s greeting three weeks late, what right do I have to complain about my husband or my chickens?

The Year of the Rooster is getting off to a good start. A friend told me about a nice custom, which involves the rolling of nine perfect oranges through one's front door to welcome abundance and luck into the house, and so we did this. (The other part of the ritual involved a thorough cleaning of one's kitchen, top to bottom, which we also did, but with less assiduity.) And now I’m heading to Cambridge, to MIT, where I’m going to spend the first week of March as the Katzenstein Writer-in-Residence. This is very cool. To paraphrase a former Katzenstein Writer-in-Residence, “I love being invited to schools I never could have gotten into.”

Geek, my character from All Over Creation, dropped out of MIT. I suppose I could write a sequel, and have him go back. During the residency, I'm going to be doing a film screening, and a public reading, which will be fun, but by far the most selfishly exciting part will be visiting labs and talking to really smart people about their work. This is where ideas for stories come from. I wonder what I’ll learn? I wonder what themes will emerge, what characters will be born from these encounters?

Before I leave for the airport, I want to take a moment and thank all of you who have been reading the blog postings about my mom over the past year and who have responded with such compassion to the news of her death. It’s kind of strange. I don’t know why I felt compelled to share her story here in cyberspace, in such a public forum. But caring for her has been so central to my life these past ten years, I guess it was only natural to want to write about her. It seemed like a good thing to do. So thank you for reading, and for writing to me, and for letting mom into your hearts.

Best wishes for the new year!


mom and me, on the ferry

Letter to Zoketsu Norman Fischer

December 8, 2005 Dear Norman,

Thank you for asking me to write this.

As you know, my mom died one month ago, today. She had three terminal conditions: Alzheimer’s, cancer of the jaw, and ninety years of living. Her death should have come as no surprise, but of course when she died in my arms, I was astonished.

How can this life, which has persisted here on this earth for over ninety years, be over? Just like that? This strange new state of momlessness is inconceivable to me. It is new and foreign, a condition I’ve never experienced in my own forty-eight years of living.

I’ve been taking care of my mom for the last ten years, so my grieving is minute and quotidian. When I go to the grocery store, I find myself searching for things that are soft and sweet (she loved chocolate and she had no teeth), or beautiful bright things (she loved flowers, but her sight was failing). Then I remember that she isn’t here anymore, and I’ll never see her face light up when I come into her room, or hear her exclaim over the color of a leaf or a petal or the sky. For the first couple of weeks, I just stood in the ice cream aisle, stunned and weeping.

When I think about her death from her perspective, mostly I just feel relief. She was beginning to suffer a lot of pain and confusion, and I believe she was ready to go. But when I think about her death from my point of view, it breaks my heart. Maybe that’s selfish. I don’t know. All I know is that I miss her like crazy.

I miss her thin little fingers. I miss holding her hand. I miss twirling her wedding ring around so the tiny chip of a diamond sits back on top.

I’ve tried so hard to be strong for her. When she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s ten years ago, our roles began to switch. I took over caring for her, and slowly she became dependent on me. In the end, I was feeding her and changing her, and she was calling me mom. Alzheimer’s is an achingly long way to say goodbye, but I had to be strong, I thought. It would only confuse and upset her to see me cry.

Then a few months ago, I had to take a trip and leave her for a couple of weeks. I went to tell her, knowing that she might die while I was gone, and as I sat on the bed next to her, the tears just came and there was no stopping them. I tried not to let her see, but of course she noticed. She’s my mom, after all—it’s her job to notice these things. She put her arm around me, put her head on my shoulder, and although she’d pretty much stopped using language by then, she made these sweet, singing, mom-like noises meant to comfort me. And it worked, and I felt better, and when I left, we were both laughing. So that was good. My grieving gave her something that she could do well, something she could succeed at, and that made her happy. It let her be the strong one for a change.

They say every death is different, and I think every occasion of grief is different, too.

When my dad died, I was angry because he was angry and despairing. He did not want to die. He was not ready; and I was in charge of his health care; and neither of us could do a damn thing to prevent or forestall this utterly unthinkable and unacceptably terminal outcome. I was mad at him for his lack of readiness, and I was furious at myself for my impotence and lack of compassion. After he died, I couldn’t think of him without a lot of pain and anger and confusion and despair and sense of having failed him. I couldn’t look at his picture without feeling my insides twist. I wanted to look away. And I did. I remember I drank a lot, too, in order to get through it. I took his death very personally.

It was different with my mom. We’d had lots of time together, and we were both as ready as we could ever be. And I wasn’t drinking. I quit two months before she died. I’d done drunken death-and-grieving thing once, and it was lousy. I didn’t want to do it again. I wanted to keep my wits about me. I didn’t want to run away.

The last thing I promised my dad was to take care of my mom. He knew she had Alzheimer’s, and he was tortured at having to leave her behind. So for ten years now, I’ve been fulfilling my promise to him. And this has been good, too. His request gave me something that I could do well, something I could succeed at, and this has made me happy.

So I’m grateful to my parents for dying in my presence, and for teaching me their two different ways of how it can be done. It is hard work, dying, but after watching my mom and dad, I realize that we’re built to do it.

Grieving is hard work, too, but again, I guess we’re built to do it. We come equipped with hearts to break, and eyes to cry with. We have brains to hold the memories and stories, and voices to tell them with. We have the capacity to love and heal.

I have my dad’s picture on my altar, next to my mom’s, and now that the anger and remorse has subsided, I can look at him with gratitude. And a month after my mom’s death, I’m not crying in the grocery store so often anymore. Instead, when I think of my mom, I buy a sweet and offer it to her, and then I eat it (she hated wasting perfectly good food). I bring home flowers and admire them through her eyes. I takes walks for her by the ocean and look at the sky.

So that’s a little bit of what it’s been like. Thanks again, Norman, for asking me to write this. It helps to have a place to put the feelings.

with love, Ruth

mom, by the ocean, eating ice cream

equality, at last...?

I've been waiting for someone to address an aspect of the torture at Abu Ghraib which I, as an American woman, find particularly confusing and shameful—namely that three out of the seven torturers, pictured in the photographs, are American women. And that's just the beginning.

The director of the prison, Gen. Janis Karpinski, is an American woman. Major Gen. Barbara Fast, the top U.S. intelligence officer in Iraq, responsible for reviewing the status of detainees before their release, is an American woman. And Condoleezza Rice, the U.S. official in charge of managing the occupation of Iraq, is an American woman, as well—at least when she isn't a 136,000 ton Chevron oil tanker.

While I've become increasingly disillusioned with America, I did still have faith in the good sense of women. I see now that I have been naive.

Oddly, Susan Sontag made no mention of gender in her article for the NY Times on Sunday.

But Barbara Ehrenreich, in her op ed for the LA Times, went straight to the broken heart of the matter.

catching up...

Well, I'm sorry about the gap in the chronology of this weblog. I think I just needed to take a break from the relentless passage of time. Maybe I thought I could make time stop by stepping out of its current, but I can't.

A lot has happened. My mother turned 90 last month and we had a little birthday party for her.

"How old am I?" she asked me.
"You're ninety, mom."
Her eyes widened. "I am! That's unbelievable! How can I be ninety? I don't feel ninety."
"How old do you feel?"
"Forty."
She was perfectly serious.
I laughed. "You can't be forty. Even I'm older than forty."
"You are?" she exclaimed. "That's terrible!"
"Gee, thanks."
She shook her head. "You know, I must be getting old. I just can't remember anything, anymore." She looked up at me and blinked. "How old am I?"

Later on, I asked her, "How does it feel?"
"What?"
"When you can't remember things. Does it frighten you? Do you feel sad?"
"Well, not really. I have this condition, you see. It's called osteo...ost..."
"You mean Alzheimer's?" I said, helping her out.
She looked astonished. "Yes! How on earth did you know that?"
"Just a guess..."
"I can never remember the name," she explained.
"Of course not."
"It affects my memory..."
"...And that's why you can't remember."
She frowned and shook her head. "Remember what?"

"There's not a single thing I can do about it," she told me, when I reminded her. "If there was something I could do and I wasn't doing it, then I could feel sad or depressed. But as it is...." She shrugged.
"So you're okay with it?"
She looked at me, patiently. "I don't have much choice," she explained, "so I may as well be happy."


mom, at 90.
photo by ester strijbos