Endless Knots

Published: "Some Peculiar Errand," my novel excerpt; Finalist, Solstice Fiction

I'm delighted to announce that an excerpt ("Some Peculiar Errand") from my novel, The Quintessence, about the return of the 19th-century phenom Margaret Fuller (Bucky's aunt), has been named as a finalist in the Solstice Literary Magazine Fiction Prize, and published here. Two excerpts from the novel have now been published; next up, the novel itself (hello, agents; hello, publishers). Thanks, Solstice.

Margaret's 206th Birthday

On this day in 1810 and not far from where these photos were taken, Sarah Margaret Fuller was born. In forty short years, the journalist-philosopher-linguist-futurist-feminist accomplished more writing by hand and traveling by carriage, train, and ship than a dozen jet-fueled, digitally equipped people combined today might. Although her name was among the handful of "most admired women" at the end of the 1800s (astonishing given that she'd already been dead for half a century), she remains relatively unknown today, except among the "Fullerenes," those for whom Margaret has gotten under their skin. That turns out to be a lot of people, including...me.

Since 1973, the year I discovered Margaret's work, I've made an annual pilgrimage to the Fuller Family plot at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Margaret's father, Timothy Fuller, a lawyer who served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives and in the US Congress, and mother, Margarett Crane Fuller, along with their other children, are all buried there, as is their most famous relative, Bucky Fuller, and his wife, Anne Hewlett Fuller. Bucky's grandfather was Margaret's brother. Re: me, insofar as this is my blog, Bucky wrote the Foreword to Jeff Stamps' and my second book, The Networking Book. There, Bucky makes the link between the seemingly overwhelming challenges we face and their resolution lying largely in the work required to build networks among nations, people, and ideas.

 

 

A memorial stone, bearing a 25-line inscription, stands above the grave of Margaret and her husband, Marquis Giovanni Angelo Ossoli's, little son's body. All three of them drowned in a shipwreck in sight of land off the coast of Fire Island. Only little Nino's body was found; Margaret's and Giovanni's bodies were swept out to sea, along with a treasured trunkful of her European writings.

 

Why is Margaret so important, even today? She did things that women simply didn't do in her day--and that many still find it difficult to do. She supported her mother and siblings after her father died suddenly when she was 25. A contemporary of Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, she was the editor of The Dial, arguably the first literary/political journal in the US. She was the first woman in the US to have a byline on the front page of a newspaper (Horace Greeley's New York Tribune)--and she had plenty, more than 250 in 18 months. She was the first American woman to serve as a foreign correspondent for a US newspaper, covering, among other topics, the Roman Revolution (1848-1849). She traveled alone both domestically and in Europe. And, among other books including translations of Goethe, she wrote the treatise that would serve as the principal manifesto undergirding the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848: Woman in the Nineteenth Century.

In that short book, Margaret did something that few (if any?) have managed to do: she laid out what it means to be fully human, declaring that no woman could be fully realized until man too was realized, a break with conventional Western thinking that polarizes opposites. Margaret integrated them:

There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.

Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But in fact they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman... Nature provides exceptions to every rule.

No writer has inspired me more with their thinking or their example. Margaret Fuller has set me off on many paths over the years, including most recently lighting fire to a trio of novels ("Woman in the 21st Century") where I seek to reprise Margaret's thinking for our current predicament.

And, no quote of hers touches down more deeply than this:

Let every woman, who has once begun to think, examine herself.

I try, especially each year on the day of Margaret Fuller's birth.

 

 

 

Another stop on the writer's blog tour

 

From Miles from Brooklyn (see below)

Accepting the baton toss from Avra Wing’s thoughtful post on the continuing writer’s blog tour to whom I bow in thanks for her lovely work (After Isaac, for example) and for this invitation.

What are you currently working on?

Edits for a novel, the first volume of a trilogy; inching along with the second volume, which I spend more time thinking about than adding words to; returning periodically to a memoir that is probably finished draft-wise but needs a thorough edit; and,, moving to the back of the line for the moment, a nonfiction book or article or essay or just a blog post (the ever-shrinking idea) that is an easier mark for me because I’ve done a number of such books in the past.

How does your work differ from others of its genre?

“Genre: a category of artistic composition, as in music or literature, characterized by similarities in form, style, or subject matter.” Which means that I don’t fit one. I write different kinds of work with different voices and different intents dictated by the material. So a novel does not read like a memoir or a nonfiction book and yet my style is likely similar across the forms. (I use a lot of parens, --'s, and series of independent clauses.) I suspect that this question was generated by someone who ONLY writes in one form – mysteries for example or children’s books – but I plead genre-less.

Why do you write what you do?

Why do I write at all? It’s an impulse that’s been driving me for as long as I can remember, that never recedes. Sentences, phrases, word choices are always running through my head. I’m waiting for the neurotechnology that captures such things effortlessly. They always sound so great when you think them and then when it comes time to do this, actually record them, well, maybe I don’t want that device after all.

How does your process work?

I write for a bit, whatever that period of time might be – fifteen minutes, four hours, sometimes longer—then call it quits for a while. When I come back to it, which could be a few hours later or next day or …, I start from the beginning again. That return to the starting line is a warm-up and a good editing pass as I see awful things that cannot stay while I try to go on, almost as if the garbage needs to go out before starting to cook again. It may not be the most efficient way to do it but it’s the way I’ve always written even while mixing metaphors.

 

Now I throw the baton to Miles from Brooklyn, aka Miranda Stamps and Jay Albany, who are chronicling their Australian odyssey in a four-wheel drive vehicle towing a camper trailer with Lake and Finn, their five-year-old twins; cancer doctor, mother, and writer Robin Schoenthaler; and the indescribably eclectic techno-seer and writer Susan Scrupski (that link taking you to just one of her writing venues).

Maya, who lived in Stamps, Arkansas

When people die, their good can inflate to fill the sky, fill the screens, and so they are everywhere for a few days. Which is how we've been learning so much about Maya Angelou this past week, how the glorious tribute from her son, Guy Johnson, also a writer, is in many links. He said the kind of thing you might hear from a child in a eulogy but in this case he said it while she could still hear it: How was it growing up in your mother's shadow, Oprah asked? I grew up in her light, he said.

His tribute matters most but the others are remarkable too, including "Maya and Me and Maya" by Charles Blow in the May 28, 2014, NY Times. "The news of Maya Angelou’s death arrived with the abruptness of a great twister — violent, without warning, tearing things up and flipping things over." And that's just his lede.

 

It got me started on a search for Stamps, Arkansas. Stamps, as in my children's last name, as in my late husband's. Late? As if he's just behind schedule?

 

Charles Blow was from a small town about 50 miles from Stamps, which was where Maya Angelou (née Marguerite Annie Johnson) lived with her grandmother from the age of three to seven and again a few years later during the period when she did not speak (rendered mute after being raped at age 8 by her mother's boyfriend who was subsequently murdered--"[a] breaking and entering when even the senses are torn apart," she wrote, none of which should be in parenthesis).

 

So I looked Stamps up and, yes, the Stamps for whom that little town (pop. ~2000) is named is descended from Thomas Stampe, who arrived in Jamestown, VA, in 1635 from Oxfordshire, England, the same ancestor of said husband and those children.

 

In any precise mapping, it's not really a connection at all but it's the way my mind works, always searching for another anchor, another way to tie everything to everything. And so in the subtle world, where faint lines reach across generations, across boundaries, in the vessel that contains all that is and was, a hamlet in Arkansas connects my daughters, their cousins, my grandsons, my in-laws to Maya too.

 

A distant cousin (someone with a genealogical bent could do the math) likely knew of Maya's grandmother in Stamps, extrapolating from this line in I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings:

 

Early in the century, Momma (we soon stopped calling her Grandmother) sold lunches to the sawmen in the lumberyard and the seedmen at the cotton gin. Her crisp meat pies and cool lemonade, when joined to her miraculous ability to be in two places at the same time assured her business success.

 

The races were segregated and without a lot more research I cannot find the clickable link, the node that connects the Stamps family to her directly, but they breathed the same dust in that corner of Arkansas, just across the Texas and Louisiana borders.

 

 

 

World Blogging Tour thanks to BlarneyCrone #WBT

So apparently there's a movement of sorts, passing the blogging baton from poster to poster, under the rubric "World Blogging Tour." The runner who's just come up on me is BlarneyCrone herself, Liz Barron, who's shown up here before. And here. And elsewhere but alas not the point of this post. My job is to reply to the following queries, one of scores, hundreds, thousands, well, at least four bloggers, including Liz (who answered here) participating:

What am I working on?

While I've been blogging less in the past few months, I've been writing more, finishing up some old pieces, including short stories, revising a novel, rough drafting a memoir, and applying to contests and residencies. I'm at the start of a year-long self-imposed writing intensive, which I've been waiting to begin since I was, say, 16.

I got the idea for the novel/trilogy I'm working on walking past the North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts, site of one of the early battles of the American Revolution. The novel has nothing to do with that but the nearby visitor center (it's now a national park site) has a bookstore that sells the work of famous Concord writers, yup, those pesky Transcendentalists, among them Ms Margaret Fuller, who was not of Concord but spent much time in it. There, on Patriots Day, in 2004, a Massachusetts-only holiday that the rest of the world knows as Boston Marathon Day, I found a small booklet written by Carolyn Wells Healy Dall, containing her recollections of the famous "Conversations" that Margaret convened in Boston in the late 1830s-early 1840s. By the time we were back in the parking lot, I'd conceived the idea for a story, which turned into the first volume of the novel, which has spawned a second...

How does my work differ from others in its genre?

This question raises so many others that I can barely answer it. Genre? Having written business books, articles, humor, poetry, children's stories, literary fiction, satire, and whatever this blogging thing (now in its 9th year) is, I'll go with "completely."  

Why do I write what I do? 

Phrases and sentences are always running through my head. Before a thought is complete, I'm often rewriting it. Titles appear as I'm trying to park the car, choose an item from the grocery shelf, click on a website. I write out of compulsion and desire, often with someone in mind whom I imagine is interested. (Are you? Only you know for sure.)

Much more wants to be written than is and I spend a good amount of time castigating myself for not writing more. 

So why do I write what I do? Because this configuration of molecules, born of New York parents in a small Pennsylvania Dutch town not far from Philadelphia, is passing through its unique spacetime, absorbing, shedding, observing, ignoring, and desperately trying to make sense of this confusing wonder called life. That's why.

How does my writing process work?

I write very quickly, typing as fast as I can, then stop due to time constraints, hunger, an interruption, or because I'm suddenly pleased to see that I've gotten 1000 words out. Then I go back before going on, retreading the same words. A "final first draft" for me could have 30 or 40 passes before the end. This is probably not the best way to write but it's the only way I've ever written. It's as if starting at the beginning gives me the momentum I need to leap ahead. Although I want to get everything out as quickly as possible, I hold on to material for eons, which means I have cartons and cartons of unfinished stuff. My hope is to get a lot of that material into circulation in the months to come.

Now, according to Liz, I'm supposed to pass the baton to four other bloggers. Here goes, Bill Ives, whose blogging helped get me started, the inimitable Alex Bain, Myfanwy Collins, to whom very good writing things are happening, and to Jon Keller, author of Of Sea and Cloud, who's just started blogging.

Megan wins a Pulitzer for Margaret

If they'd been awarding Pulitzers during her lifetime, Margaret Fuller surely would have been deserving -- first in nonfiction for the ground-breaking books she wrote (including Woman in the Nineteenth Century) and in journalism for her insightful and daring reporting that she did on the Roman Revolution of 1848 for the New York Tribune. Well, let's be honest: given where woman was in the 19th century, she probably wouldn't have received the highest writing honors but thanks to the talented Megan Marshall, her name is in big lights these days.

For any of us who know her, happiness abounds for Megan Marshall's having won this year's Pulitzer in biography for Margaret Fuller: A New American Life. It took chuztpah to write a biography of Fuller after so many others -- I don't know the full count of the body of bios but it's got to be at least 50, some superb, some not so superb. Megan's falls into the former category, with her having chosen and faithfully executed her desire to have history read like a novel. Many a biographer has tried this but not all succeed where Megan has.

I am so happy for her. Megan and I met as a result of her having written her Pulitzer-finalist biography of The Peabody Sisters. I told this story here seven years ago. Shortly after she began work on the Fuller book, we arranged to meet again (also at Whole Foods -- you have to click the link to understand). Megan was asking questions of people like me, people for whom Fuller has served as an inspiration. It was an interesting way for her to be gathering insight into Fuller because there are so many people like us.

Forty years after I first discovered her in the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women, Margaret Fuller is with me still as I progress with the second volume of a novel-trilogy that I'm writing about her and her contemporary counterparts, "Woman in the 21st-Century." I am grateful to Megan for this too as she's provided many new windows into this eternal soul.

The Golden Doris

Waiting now for the full obit that recognizes her achievements and her vast body of work, news from London today via a few paragrafs in the NY Times just now: Doris Lessing is dead at 94. If you haven't seen the video of her learning that she'd won the Nobel in Literature at 87, you must watch this. Clearly, her life was not about the glory. 

Talking with reporters at her house after learning she'd won The Prize
(Shaun Curry/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images, thanks!)

"I need something to eat" -- Roland's reflection on the same

Walking the streets of New York is a game of dodgeball. If it isn't a busker in the subway or a homeless vet on the corner or an activist with a clipboard, it's a person, like the one who approached me at the corner of Park Place and Vanderbilt in Prospect Heights last Thursday. I'd just come from a delicious meal with Daughter #2 at Cheryl's Global Soul, an extra-good and reasonably priced family fave; we'd had a lovely time and I was plenty full.

She was probably my age, maybe even 10 years younger, with a makeshift cast on her foot, a cane, a tattered coat, and large gaps between her teeth. I can't remember if she apologized first but however she approached me, it wasn't threatening. Just sad. She said the obvious: "I need something to eat." And because the received wisdom on the streets is that you "shouldn't" just give people money because, of course, they're all junkies and drunks, she was a step ahead. "You can buy it for me." Embarrassed at the wealth of riches in my wallet -- credit cards, Metro cards, and the almighty cash -- I reached right in. My impulse was to give it all to her but I didn't though I gave her the most I've ever handed out in a situation like this: a twenty. 

It happened right here (Google Street View)

She was so diminished that I'm not certain she took in that she could buy a couple of meals with that (in my mother's newly hip hometown, probably 1.5) but thanked me and shuffled off. I wanted to go with her, buy her several meals, find her an apartment and a job, and reform the entire economic system that results in her being where she is and me being where I am. Not to mention the Iraq War vet sitting on 23rd St in Manhattan the next morning with a big sign saying who he was and holding up his Army ID in case anyone would think someone would impersonate such a person. I'm sure it's possible but if ever anyone looked the part...

I didn't drop a dime for him or the half-dozen others I saw; maybe three dozen because at a certain point you have to screen it out or the pathos becomes overwhelming, paralytic. Big cities magnify the divisions and few places render them in greater 3D than New York.

All of which is prelude to Roland Merullo's reporting ("The table of the hungry") on the hornet's nest of greed and stupidity that is going on in Washington at the moment, making many more streets full of people like my friend from last Thursday. And reservations. Here (Boston Globe opinion page) he confronts a similar situation at Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Roland says it all so well and with such precision. His lede:

I’ve been thinking lately about an expression I once heard from a Russian friend: “The full to the table of the hungry do not go.” I suppose it’s on my mind because of the news from Washington: the well-fed insisting on political grandstanding they surely know will cause great hardship to the poorest among us. It’s quite a sight, isn’t it, men and women earning six-figure salaries and pontificating about the need for cuts to programs that overwhelmingly give succor to the worst-off — the poor, the ill, the handicapped, the helpless. Then you see these same folks making a public spectacle of kneeling in prayer and asking God to help our nation. Where I come from we have a word for that. It is “hypocrisy.”

"The Future of Books"

In gathering info for a report on the future of media, I came across "The Future of Books" by James Warner in McSweeney's Internet Tendency. This pretty much explains where we're headed in the next 70 years. I won't wreck it for you. Here's where it starts:

2020: All Books Will Be Cross-Platform and Interactive.

Future “books” will be bundled with soundtracks, musical leitmotifs, 3-D graphics, and streaming video. They’ll be enhanced with social bookmarking, online dating, and alerts from geo-networking apps whenever someone in your locality purchases the same book as you— anything so you don’t have to actually read the thing. Authors will do their own marketing, the reader will be responsible for distribution, the wisdom of crowds will take care of the editing, and the invisible hand of the market will perform the actual writing (if any). Writers will respond either by going viral or by going feral.

Limoges Pride and Prejudice Book Box from The Cottage Shop

 

And my post about Helen Thomas from 2009

Because of her recent death, this first-hand report of a small meeting where she spoke.