If you have a question or topic you’d like me to address on the blog, please email me at cheryl@nunsunveiled.com

JANUARY 29, 2012

This Double Life

I write on this blog a lot about my life in the country and my writing. But the majority of my time is spent in Chicago and living a completely different life. For many years, I've compartmentalized the two sides of my life—the city and the country, the day job and and the writing passion, the literary world that rarely mixes with my medicine world. It is a life of true ying and yang. I often fantasize about giving it all up and staking out my life here in the woods, like some modern pioneer. The truth is that this is a cocoon, a protected world, a place where I go inside myself, because I'm allowed.

This week in my medicine world, my department had a two-day retreat where we did some very unscientific activities, like figuring out our different personality types. As it turns out, I'm a mix of green and orange: a life of adventure mixed with a life of the mind. Given my double life existence, it doesn't surprise me.

During our retreat, some of us whipped out our iPhones to share photos. This photo here is one my colleague, Anthony Turner, took from a highrise downtown and really showcases the wonder and mystique of the city. Chicago is a beautiful city. I've lived in Paris and Prague, traveled around the world many times, but Chicago outranks them all. It's an incredibly energetic city full of life and culture and the lake and water and architecture and business and books and neighborhoods and character and charm.

This week I learned of several colleagues in my medicine world who have second homes in Northwest Indiana or Southwest Michigan. They are all within an hour and a half and two hours from the city. Several people said their intention was to retire out in the countr one day. I often wonder what that life would be like. A single kind of life. Would I get bored, missing my yo-yo living arrangements between the 'hood and the wood, as we say? Probably. But it suites me as a perfectly wonderful day dream.

 

JANUARY 15, 2012

My Sanctuary

It's a sunny Sunday afternoon and I've just returned from a hike in the woods with my dogs and my husband. If you've spent any time reading this blog then you know this is a ritual we perform every Sunday. I love walking in the woods and watching the trees change and the snow make sculptures out of dead branches. The wind may be blowing like mad, but in the woods, it's still. Sometimes you can hear a woodchuck or a bird. Most often, though, the only sound is of the tree limbs moaning. Today the wind in the leaves just outside the woods sounded like a rushing river. It's amazing how beautiful Nature can be, how stunning snow can transform a boring brown landscape into something out of Ansel Adams.

Today as we walked, I was struck by the realization that we are exactly two months away from the seventh anniversary of purchasing our pied-a-terre that we lovingly call Green Acres. We certainly didn't know what we were doing when we decided to buy this place. At times it's been a money pit. There were times I wondered if we should sell—before the real estate crash—when constant repairs and rude neighbors made me waver in my commitment.

But I'm glad we didn't. This is the longest I've ever owned a house. When we moved in seven years ago, I told my daughter I wasn't moving again. I don't know if that's true. But for these past years it's become a special place in our lives. I think of it as a sanctuary, a place I go to write, to read, to think, to separate myself from the worries of my "real world." There's a part of me that feels lucky that both my husband and I still enjoy coming here. In fact, we both agree that our appreciation and devotion to this place has only increased over time.

It's interesting because 20 miles away along the lake shore in Michigan, people buy second homes near the beach and quickly tire of going there and end up selling after a season or two. But then you read in the New York Times, of folks, like us, city dwellers who on a fluke ended up buying a broken down house in the country and it became their main obsession, returning religiously every weekend for decades.

Houses can feel special. They are places where we have created memories. They are the scenes of our happiness, the theater sets of our lives. Some matter more than others. This isn't a newfound attraction for me. I have always had a fondness for the childhood home that my family had built in the country. Upset that we had to move, I buried a letter written to the next owners in a glass jar in the woods. My father found it and kept it. It did reveal some deficiencies that I think he was not eager to share. But I also think it tore him to leave that place as well.

There are weekends when I come here and I write in my studio behind the house—in truth I spend most of my time in my writing studio— and I think about what would it take for me to live here permanently, not just on weekends and hoiidays. Would I miss the city, my colleagues, my kind city neighbors, my job, my paycheck? I'm not ready to give it all up, not just yet. But someday I might. I worry, though, if it will have the same gravitational pull. Will it still feel like a sanctuary?

JANUARY 8, 2012

THE MYSTERY THAT SURROUNDS US

This past week it snowed a great deal at our place in the country, and one day while it was snowing I looked out my studio window to see the brightest red Cardinal in the tree. It was stunning and beautiful, especially against the stark landscape. I have only rarely seen a Cardinal in our garden. More frequent are sparrows, hummingbirds and the occasional Bluejay. But in the midst of that snow storm, the Cardinal stayed outside my window. Another Cardinal, one that was less spectacular, eventually accompanied the red bird. It's amazing when you are struck by beauty in nature that you hadn't expected.

I've spent the last week or so going through old journals to see what I was thinking a year ago, two years ago, a decade ago. The great thing about keeping a journal is that it documents the concerns of your life. The most interesting aspect is to see how I worried and planned about things that never happened, how incapable I was to predict the future, how fate always overruled my plans. In that way, I think life stays a mystery. It remains exciting. Just when I think I'm getting in a rut or bored or worse—worried that I've become boring or bored—life changes in completely unexpected ways. That's what I loved about the mystery of life.

JANUARY 1, 2012

The Art of Sitting Still

For the past ten days I've secluded myself — along with my husband — out at our farmhouse in the country. It's a rural setting with few distractions. We have no cable. We mostly read and write and watch a few movies that arrive in the mail from Netflix. It's amazing how focused a person can be without the distraction of television. I've been working on my MFA thesis, which constitutes the first half of my novel. I wanted to spend the time writing and reading. I prefer to have long stretches of unstructured time around the New Year. It's a time to pause and think about the past year, what I'd hoped to accomplish and what I failed or succeeded to achieve. It's a time of deep meditation on life on goals and pursuits and a cataloguing of those aspects in life that make me happy.

What strikes me every year that I've done this is how little time I have in my daily life for contemplation, for simply day dreaming. Sometimes out here I can sit for half an hour or more just thinking, imagining. I like to just sit and let my mind wander. I don't get much of that during my normal every day life where each minute is structured and accounted for and there are no "wasted minutes"

This free spending of minutes is quite addictive. I've so enjoyed just relaxing and creating. I think to truly be open to creative pursuits we have to feel relaxed, to have the time to let our brains ponder and meander. Thinking creatively is ruminating in a way that is unorthodox. That doesn't happen always on command. There are times when I think I could spend my life like this, in this narrow cocoon, writing and reading. I know it's not real and if it were I'm sure it wouldn't be "ideal." But in my mind it is an idyllic state, a place where there are no deadlines, simply spans of uninterrupted creative thought.

What it teaches me is the real need to slow down and enjoy life for its simply pleasures. I hope you are able to carve out some unstructured time to just sit still and let your mind wander.

Happy New Year.

 

DECEMBER 26, 2011

Getting Rid of the Voices in the Head

Today I dumped more than three big boxes worth of critiqued manuscript pages that had been piling up in my studio for years. They were the result of six years of working on my novel and seeking input from others, mostly other writers in my MFA creative writing workshops. They were reams and reams of chapters and notes and scribbled criticism in the margins of my novel chapters. Most of the suggestions I read as soon as I received them. Most contributors offered terrible and conflicting advice.

My current manuscript editor thinks my manuscript has been workshopped too much. She says there are too many voices weighing in on what should be my vision. There's helpful criticism from careful readers and then there is just flat out unwarranted abuse. There is nothing more humbling than to present your work to a room full of would-be writers and have them slash it to pieces. So I decided to get rid of it all. The comments from writing instructors like Stuart Dybek I kept. But most of the rest I trashed and boxed up for recycling. I spent the entire day cleaning my studio. There was a lot I needed to get rid of.

All this writerly criticism reminds me of the new Wood Allen movie Midnight in Paris. In one scene Ernest Hemingway is telling the lead character that he should never show his work to another writer because if it is good he or she will be so jealous that they will give him bad advice to steer him wrong. But if it is bad work, then the writers will be smug and abusive.

I've had both kinds of criticism. Once I asked a fellow workshop student why others were so critical of my work and endearing to work that I thought needed a lot of help. She told me that people were jealous and they knew whatever they said it didn't matter because I was already a published author and my work was well on its way to being published again. So, it was about hazing.

Whatever it was about. I don't need those critical voices in my head anymore or sitting around filling my studio with negative energy. I threw them out. Boxes and boxes of negative feedback. There were many favorable comments. But on the whole, it was not helpful. It was mean and mean-spirited. I'm glad I've lived through it and now am about to graduate. I'll be turning in my final thesis (the first half of my novel manuscript) in a week. My thesis advisor has said that I've fulfilled the terms of my MFA. Now, she said, it's a matter of getting the work ready to be published. I hope that is the case.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

DECEMBER 18, 2011

There is no shortcut to a dream

It's all blood and sweat

And life is what you manage in between

I didn't make up these lyrics. They are from a song by the group October, but I find them to be a piercing truism. So often we wonder why we aren't getting what we want, why we're not meeting our goals or what we say are our goals. I've spent a lot of time listening to people who say they want to write a book. It's a common sentiment authors hear when they meet people. I often ask what these strangers are doing to achieve this goal. That's when the person usually lists his or her multiple obstacles: too busy, can't be creative when they have a full-time job, caring for kids, caring for aging parents. They are all valid and honorable distractions. But they are just that — distractions. I once read that prolific author Danielle Steele had six kids and yet managed to write in the wee hours of the night, producing volumes when everyone else was sleeping. That wouldn't be my way, but it worked for her.

I think the biggest obstacle is ourselves. We forget that the journey to success is not always enjoyable or pleasant. That's why writers are often full of self doubt and angst. But the successful ones are those who push through it, who will do anything to get published, to get their voice out there.

Lately I've been in a position to encourage a number of young people. I've been speaking at college campuses and even with folks in my own office. What I see is that so many people feel that just because they want something or to be good at something, that should make it so. Unfortunately too many of our young people were praised for mediocrity when they should have been challenged. As a result, I meet so many who don't seem to understand what it entails to reach a goal like publishing a book, or an article or getting a good job or rising up within a corporation. They've made their intentions clear and the universe should supply.

As we head into Christmas and the New Year, I am reminding myself that rewards are for those who earn them.

DECEMBER 11, 2011

THE FIRST SNOW

I've been waiting for it to snow for weeks now. This is the latest it's snowed in many many years in Chicago. The fifth longest on record, in fact. People complain about the snow in Chicago, but, when pressed, they admit it's really not the snow or the cold. It's when the snow melts and thaws and rains in the spring that our patientce runs out. For me, the snow offers light to a decaying landscape. And around the holidays, it adds to the celebratory spirit of December.

I had a holiday party at my house on Friday in Chicago. Guests were surprised I was heading out to my farmhouse on Saturday. "Even in the winter?" they echoed each other.

"Especially in the winter." I love hunkering down in my studio/barn, burning wood in the stove and drinking tea while I write. The weather outside might be cold and windy, but inside I'm all afire with ideas. Yesterday was especially nice. I wrote for hours.

Today my writing time will be cut short as I have to return to the city. Mayor Rahm Emanuel is visiting our children's hospital and I have to make sure everything goes smoothly. Then tomorrow morning it's the Illinois lottery giving money to a team of winning nurses...and so my life goes. December normally is slow at most companies. But at our place, the work just keeps piling on. I'm looking forward to taking a break between Christmas and New Year's Eve to focus on my writing and relaxing.

For an interesting mix of politics and nuns, read the piece in today's Chicago Tribune about Sister Rosemary Connelly who runs Misericordia, a residential home for special needs people, mostly those with Downs Syndrome, and how she's not afraid to take on Rahm.

Hope you are enjoying these festive days.

NOVEMBER 27, 2011

THE GRAY DAYS

It's the beginning of the long, gray days in the Midwest. I nearly bought a seasonal bright light today after reading a New York Times review in the Science section that said they were actually beneficial for seasonal sadness. I woke up this morning to a rainy, cold and overcast. Days like today make me want to cloister myself in my studio, which is what I did. I managed to get a lot of writing done, a benefit of sour skies. I completely understand why Thanksgiving and Christmas were positioned as they are in the winter calendar. If only there was some celebrations in January, February and March.

But the good thing about the weather in the Midwest is that it changes. That's something I've had to remind myself about this week. Nothing is forever. Everything is mutating and updating. Sometimes we don't like the date on the calendar or the meeting we're in or the project at hand or what stage we are in life. It's not forever. What our lives look like today will not mirror what they will look like a year or two years from now. Sometimes it might change for the worse, but let's hope it changes for the better. In some ways, it's the fact that there is a change that motivates and energizes us.

I love the end-of-year holidays: Thanksgiving and Christmas. It's one of the pluses of living in a climate with seasons that each one is very different. I lived in Florida for a year and half and one of the things I missed the most was those changing temperatures, autumn and leaves falling, snow coming down in December. But amid those great weather experiences, there are gray days. And I have to tell myself, wait. It will change. Everything doe

 

 

NOVEMBER 13, 2011

THE UNSCRIPTED MOMENTS

There's beauty in the absence. This week I was reminded how striking autumn can be with its muted gray colors and the dark trees that loom over campus. I miss the sun and the warmth. But there's value in every season. I have to remember that in my life as well. Even the fallow periods have a purpose.

Not too long ago I had a plan for my life, a road map that extended out for years and years. I got a lot of security in that, knowing where I thought I was headed. I've always been a big planner, someone who likes to daydream through a maze of what ifs in life. It's a little parlor game I play in my head.

What I've been trying to teach myself lately is not to plan so much but to really live in the moment. Somehow things work out. I'm always in a far different place one year to the next. There are unscripted moments, opportunities that present themselves. Even when I think I am in control, someone else offers me a way to change course. And though I like to plan, I am energized by change, chaos.

And so I tell myself to stop thinking about the future. It's my goal. Live now, this moment. That's it. I don't have to answer for a calendar that isn't in existence yet. instead of worrying so much about creating a path, I need to simply enjoy the journey.

 

NOVEMBER 6, 2011

LOOKING FOR INSPIRATION

On Sunday nights, like tonight, I often feel as I did when I was a child, anxious about returning to the regular work week. Then it was about school and the kids who used to bully me. Now it's about the loss of my creative life during the week. Each Monday, I return to the city intent to work on my manuscript during the week. I bring pages from my book, thinking that some night when I return home from work that I'll be motivated to spend an hour or two writing. It's happened on occasion. But the reality of my life is that not much happens in my life other than work during the week.

Looking back over the past three years, I can't believe I was able to work and go to school at night as I have done. At the end of the day, I'm mentally spent. By the end of the week, I can barely put together a meaningful sentence. These work weeks seem to demand a lot from me mentally. I do like my job and there's a lot of excitement in the day-to-day events that consume my waking hours. Tomorrow, for instance, I'm involved with a press conference with the Mayor. It should be fun and I'm looking forward to it.

But the reality of having a demanding job is that you don't have a lot of brain cells left at the end of the day. I'm lucky if I can read a book in bed. The problem is that all the books about writing advocate for making space every day for writing. I don't know how other writers do it. Maybe they don't exercise or maybe they shirk their responsibilities at work. Or maybe they spend their nights alone. I'm all for hearing about other people's writing processes and strategies.

For awhile, I wrote at lunch. It was hard to fit "the trance" of writing into my work lunch. There were too many interruptions, too many pressing issues to tune out. Some people wake up early and write first thing. I've done that too. But I also run in the mornings and read several newspapers, things I need to do for my health and my job.

What seems to work the best for me is writing on the weekends. People have said to me: So you never get a break. Oh, but they don't realize that spending a few hours each weekend day in my book is like a vacation. It's hard at first and sometimes it's grueling when the right words aren't coming. But I've been getting an enormous amount of inspiration and good ideas from a book called From Where You Dream: The process of writing ficiton by Robert Olen Butler and Janet Burroway. Janet happens to be my MFA thesis advisor. I've heard other people talk about the book and how it helped them. I don't agree with everything Butler advocates. And his methods for coming up with scenes sounds maddening — write down eight words on notecards for each scene for twelve weeks before you write anything. But his advice to strive for a waking dream state while writing, that is that each scene needs to be about emotion and that writers should stay away from generalities and writing in the abstract really hit home for me.

I've spend two days writing. I don't want to leave my studio. I wish I could do this all day, every day. But then I probably wouldn't be able to channel the kind of energy that I do when I write for only two days or even one day a week. And so, I'm going to take my pages with me to the city tomorrow and maybe if I get a chance, a night when I'm alone, perhaps I'll write.

OCTOBER 30, 2011

Avoiding Toxic People

They are demanding and unsympathetic. They never think about your feelings and are stunned when you finally object to their actions. They're toxic people and everyone has them in their lives. Some people have them as friends, others as family. The really unlucky folks are those who have toxic people as colleagues and bosses. Toxic people like to talk. Of course it's all about them, and what they are feeling and what they are going through.

I once had a toxic woman in my life who complained to me about her every ache and pain. She was a rich woman who could afford anything she wanted, but was always out of cash and needed me to cover for her. I learned not to go to lunch without making sure she had her wallet in hand with at least a credit card. She was a drama queen as well and spent every bit of our time together going on about the unfortunate events that happened to her. Once she fell and hit her head but months later when I emailed her about my trip to Haiti after the earthquake, she wrote me that her condition was so grave that she could not read email. The ironic thing was that she had emailed this to me from work where she is a writer. Apparently she could read what she wanted to.

Toxic people never want to know that others have had worse misfortunes. They don't want to hear about how hard you are working or that you don't have much time to talk. They expect you to listen. I've tried to overlook their shortcomings. Many times they are smart and have other gifts. But it can be difficult to endure and eventually I always end up walking away, refusing to take their phone calls or returning their emails. And then they wonder what happened.

Whenever someone like this turns up in my life, I always think: What lesson is God trying to teach me here? What didn't I learn the last time such a person turned up in my life?

In the end, I'm reminded that I have a short time here and I shouldn't waste it on people who do not bring happiness. So be good to yourself and limit your time with toxic people. Don't give in to their guilt trips and their demands. And pray that they find happiness.

OCTOBER 23, 2011

THE LONG ROAD

I've just spent three hours writing. It's a beautiful Sunday afternoon and no one would have blamed me if I'd blown off my manuscript and gone outside to spend what surely is one of the last warm weekends before Chicago's six months of winter. I keep telling myself how much more I'm going to accomplish once the weather gets bad. And it's true. In the winter, I'm much more productive.

But today I stayed in my studio and wrote. It was difficult and I'm not sure everything I produced could be considered literary. Next week I'll review what I wrote and think I wasted my time. Perhaps. The only way to get closer to the goal of finishing is to put in the hours. The recipe is simple: keep butt in chair.

I'm working with my thesis advisor on the first half of the book. Janet Burroway is an amazing writer and even though she's supposed to be retired is working on a play, a book and God knows what else. That's the way I want my life to be. Full and productive, even when I'm gray and retired.

Someday I may write full time. But for now, I've made peace with my life as a weekend writer. It's the story for so many people. And even those who teach writing often end up spending much of their "free time" grading papers and preparing for classes that it's as if they had a traditional job that soaked up 10 hours a day.

That said, 10 percent of Americans are unemployed and another 10 percent are off the roles and aren't even counted any more. That's two out of every 10 people. Everyone who has a job right now is very blessed. Even when I want to be writing more, I feel very lucky to have a day job, especially one where I'm surrounded by young and talented writers. But it does require balance and determination. On Friday, a young writer came in my office asking for advice. Her question: how do I have time to read and write when I have a demanding job? It's a legitimate question. But of course it's about priorities. I give up a sunny Sunday afternoon to sit in my writing chair. Someday I'll see the end result, hopefully a published book.

I plotted out on a calendar how quickly I can finish with my thesis by revising at the modest rate of one chapter a week. By keeping that steady pace, I'll be done with half my manuscript by the end of January. Another three months, and the entire manuscript will be ready. That's not an unreasonable time.

Last weekend, I attended a women's literary cocktail party at Women & Children First in Chicago. It was a wonderful night. I was amazed at how many writers I knew in the room. I remember when I first came to Chicago in 2003 and knew few other writers. I struggled for ways to connect with other writers. I had been a part of a strong community of writers in Minneapolis. But I have to say, eight years later, I feel very entrenched in this city and its rich literary scene. Though it can feel disparate because there are so many literary groups and events, the writers here seem connected to each other in ways that's not always easy to see. There seems be about a three-degree separation between most. If I don't know a writer, I often know a writer they know.

OCTOBER 9, 2011

Writers and Weather

It smells like fall and feels like summer. That's Chicago's unpredictable weather. Last week there were mornings when it dipped into the 40s and now it's in the 80s. Today they had the Chicago Marathon. A North Carolina firefighter running the Marathon to raise money for burn victims collapsed 500 yards from finish line and died about two hours later. It's so sad and almost every year someone dies. One of my writers was running. I hope she's okay.

Days like today —endless blue skies and sun that reminds you of a day at the beach—make it hard for me to write. I want to be outside soaking up as much sun as I can to last through those frigid winters and wet spring days that are ahead. Likely I'll not see another 80-degree day for at least nine more months, and easily ten or eleven. So you see why such weather makes us all play a little hookey from our writing.

Today I got through a couple of chapters of my book, but mostly I've spent the day outside, at first reading the newspaper on our porch, then hiking three miles with Greg and the dogs, then reading in a lounge chair until I was sunburnt. It makes me feel a little guilty. I need to push myself, get further along. I spoke with my agent this week, promising her I'd send the manuscript this spring. It's ambitious but certainly realistic. After all, I've been at this now for six years.

There are times when I doubt, when I lack faith. I wrote about that last week. But then I meet aspiring writers like those I met at a "literati networking" event this past Tuesday in Chicago. They were young and middle aged and old. They aspired to be published writers and they shared with me their doubts, their frustrations. I felt for them. When you're writing a book, you feel so anonymous, as if your writing dribble in your closet and it's not worth mentioning. No one wants to hear what you hope to publish, they want to know what you've already published.

And so, I talk about Unveiled. It's what's real. It's on a book shelf. You can order it on Amazon. But what I really want to talk about is this story I've been living with for so long. I remember I got that way with Unveiled, too. I got sick of writing and rewriting. And then, by sheer amazement, it was published. So I tell people, like those I met this week, to keep believing and to keep writing and to keep reading and eventually it will happen. Maybe not exactly the way you want or the way you dreamt that it would happen, but if you stick with this long enough and want to be published enough that you push to improve the manuscript, you will get published.

Along those lines, I'd like to let you know of a terrific writing and networking opportunity this coming weekend. Women & Children First, the country's largest feminist bookstore, is hosting a Women's Voices Weekend with writing workshops, readings, discussions and a cocktail party, where I will be their guest on Saturday night. There was a terrific article in today's Chicago Tribune about the two owners, Linda Bubon and Ann Christophersen. You can check out the bookstore's website that has a list of the events at womenandchildrenfirst.com. The best line in today's article was from Linda, who along with Ann has been such a great supporter of Unveiled:

"As a teenager, I thought my big life decision would be whether to be a nun or a wife. . .it turned out that the most important relationship was with myself and my work."

 

Amen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

OCTOBER 2, 2011

A CHAOTIC WEEK

Some people are amazed when they meet me and I tell them that I spend most of my weekends out at a farmhouse in Northwest Indiana. They ask why I would want to trade Chicago and its nightlife— its culture —for sitting in my backyard out in the country. I tell them it's about balance. My life is one of ying and yang. During the week, I'm in receipt of constant demands. I'm also tethered to an iPhone, iPad and wireless computer. It is a life of interesting chaos. This week certainly was. I have an amazing job. There's a part of me that wishes I could talk about all the peope I deal with on a daily basis, but alas federal law requires that I don't. Let's just say that every day is an adventure.

So when I come out to the farm, there are days when I simply sit on the porch for what seems like a long time. And I imagine that all those words and chaotic thoughts surrounding me during the week are pouring out the top of my head. It's as if I've heard too much noise and I have to quiet my mind. Sometimes I imagine my brain as having crowded competing thoughts. That's certainly how I viewed my time in Prague this summer. It was a time when I could live my book in my head and work through those literary problems on a daily basis and not necessarily when I was sitting at a computer.

For the past two weekends I've had to share my studio with workers installing a new gas heater. I was never so eager for people to leave. Though the workers were nice and kind, they were in my space. I wonder if other people need as much space and time alone. I love my husband —and we spend more time together than any couple I know—but I'm glad he doesn't need me to organize his time. He's very good about leaving me in my studio and letting me work. Today, I worked a lot and feel I'm making slow progress on the book. Sometimes I think it will never be done. And then I wonder: What would fill my time and energy if I didn't have this book?

SEPTEMBER 24, 2011

LAST DAYS OF SUMMER

These last few weeks have been full. I've been traveling, to Houston, to Cleveland, attending a wedding, a high school reunion. It's as if September was the last month before the snow falls and everyone is trying to get in their last social minute before the holidays.

I'm feeling a bit like I missed summer, having been in Europe a big part of it. Winters are so long here that you feel you have to soak in every bit of sun, every hour of warm weather. I'm a bit like a squirrel, preparing for winter. Today I have a crew laying a gas pipeline across my yard out at my country house and installing a gas heater, so I'll be warm this winter. It's hard to believe that it may well be snowing in a month.

As some of you may know, a couple of weeks ago I also attended the Chicago viewing of the documentary "A Question of Habit" where I saw many sisters I hadn't seen in awhile. The filmmaker, Dr. Bren Ortega Murphy, of Loyola University, has pulled together a wonderful collection of interviews and history and photos, narrated by Susan Sarandon. It may appear in Chicago on public television. If you have a chance, be sure to watch. The film explores how the habit has confined the image of nuns and how relinquishing those garbs has caused division within the church and among sisters.

My husband has been serving on the Cook County Grand Jury and each evening he comes home with horrific stories, testimony of the day filling his head. He and his fellow jurists have been having trouble sleeping, unable to forget what they've heard during the day. Both my husband and I were crime reporters at newspapers for a number of years, so we've witnessed a great of number of tragedies and written about them. Still, my husband keeps wondering what all this means, revisiting such crimes later in life.

For me, I'm not so certain that there is a reason for what happens to us. I used to struggle to understand life's disappointments and its joys, as if there was a pattern or purpose in what happened. Why did I deserve that? What karma have I earned for that? But I've come to accept that free will means that all our wants and needs and desires often conflict and jumble together, causing chaos so often that there's no reason for what happens, it simply happens. And it's really up to us to make something out of those experiences. I think the bottom line is that life is full of difficulties. The challenge is to rise above them.

 

SEPTEMBER 5, 2011

MY GREAT AWAKENING

It's a very chilly Labor Day. The temperature is in the low 60s and the wind is blowing. It feels like fall. I'm sad that summer is unofficially over. It felt like it went by so quickly, as they always do. Part of my feeling of loss is that I wasn't around for much of the summer, having spent five weeks in Europe where the temperatures rarely rose above 80.

This summer for me represented a Great Awakening. I'm too old for a loss of innocence— and I'm not that naive —but there were experiences I had this summer that taught me that I have idealized certain things, aspects that from afar I thought were one thing and when up close were exactly the opposite. For one, I have been striving for so long (three and half years) to finish a Master of Fine Arts degree. From the outset, the goal was to be able to have a less demanding profession while I write. Through my MFA classes I've learned how difficult it is to even secure a tenured teaching job. Then this summer, having spent time in a literary workshop with undergraduates taught by a tenured professor, and having to read their work, I realized that there is no greater hell than to have to spend valuable time on writing that needs considerable work — and I mean years of work. Someone should have to read those stories and give that charitable feedback, and they are akin to sainthood to me. So teaching as a full-time profession is essentially out.

The second great awakening came when I realized this summer that I didn't enjoy living away from home. I've traveled extensively throughout my life and lived away from home for long periods of time, but it just doesn't have the lure it once did. i always thought that when my husband and I retired, we'd spend two months a year overseas when the weather in Chicago was at its worst. But having to put my dogs in a kennel for weeks and live out of a hotel and suitcase didn't feel like the kind of adventure I'd had in mind. Is this what it means to grow old? Perhaps. But I've spent enormous energy crafting the kind of lifestyle I want to live. And now that I have it, I think I have to give more consideration to this idea of leaving it for chunks of time.

The third epiphany I had is related to the other two in that I realized by lived experience that there is no ideal. The ideal profession doesn't exist. The ideal adventure is harder to achieve the older we get, the more of life we've experienced. Everyone has to spend time doing things they don't want to do. It's a hard lesson in life. I've had young writers come to me and say they only want to write certain kinds of stories and therefore they aren't interested in any writing job where they aren't getting to spend 100 percent of their time doing just that. I get that there's a give and take to every job. I just hadn't realized to the extent that I'd idealized certain jobs and certain people's lives. But up close, I saw that even geniuses have to put up with a certain amount of veritable do-do.

I suppose the fourth lesson or realization I had was just how difficult it is to live off of writing and teaching as a profession. There were several literary authors at the program I attended in Prague but many of them talked of the struggle of trying to make a living, even those that have tenured positions. There's been a lot of stories lately about the hit writers are taking for the lack of book sales and the move to the digital format. It's a sad reminder that the days when a writer could hole up in their writing studio and only write what they want are a thing of the past.

 

This isn't such an awful realization. I happen to like my day job, though it is rather demanding of my time and mental energy and there may be a day when I have to acknowledge that I can't give as much as it demands. For now, though, it is an adventure, one that provides mental challenges and rewards. My weekends are still the time I have to write and for the foreseeable future, that will have to be enough.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

August 28, 2011

AN HONEST MAN AMID A WEEK OF MEAN GIRLS

The world is full of difficult people. Sometimes I’m so surprised by the people I meet who are defensive and outright hostile. I see these people as self-saboteurs and think how much further in life they would go if only they learned a little civility. And I wonder why they never learned how to cooperate with people or why they have to be so paranoid.

Then I meet someone who is totally honest and good for no opportunistic reason. So often I feel that everyone is out for their own benefit, their own cause. I'm still reeling about my hotel theft that happened a month ago. I've yet to hear back from the hotel, which had promised me they would be on top of things. Then this week I lost a watch. It was a Mivado, so it wasn't cheap. My husband had given it to me a few years ago and I loved that he'd picked it out on his own. The watch link had broken earlier in the week and my husband had taken it to be fixed. But the first time I wore it, it fell off again, somewhere in the half-a-mile of grass between my office and the hospital where I have most of my meetings. My husband was sick about the loss. He didn't sleep most of the night. Coming on the heels of the break-in in Prague, it felt particularly cruel.

But then I was walking back from a 7 a.m. meeting one morning last week, and there, tacked to a tree, was a sign someone had made saying they'd found a woman's watch and listed a phone number to call to identify it. I called immediately. When I reached him, the young man agreed to bring the watch to my office. He was in the neighborhood anyway. And he refused to let me give him a reward. It's not often that you find such folks in the world, I'll tell you that. For my husband and me, the watch symbolized something else. It was as if the world was trying to send a message. I started to think of the Buddhist philosophy that encourages people not to form attachments with their things. Things cause sadness in the world. Yes, when said things are stolen, they do. But I am a Tauran, planted firmly on the earth, and known for liking beautiful things.

Since I've been back from Prague, I've heard so many stories from people who've been burglarized, many of them in hotels or in Europe and some even in Prague. I’ve lost my wallet twice in Chicago. Once I left it in the back of a cab, and a guy called me right away — even before I realized I’d lost it — and arranged a meeting. Again, he refused to take any money for its return. Another time I left my wallet at the checkout counter in my grocery store in Hyde Park. My cashier was a tough looking guy with tattoos running up his neck. He turned it in.

So amid my week of encountering mean girls who grew up to become mean women, I also met a young man who made it his mission to find a woman whose faith was missing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

AUGUST 21, 2011

WHAT HAPPENED TO ME MINUTES AFTER MY LAST BLOG POST

It all feels a little like a bad dream.

On July 28, 2011, minutes after I posted some of my favorite pictures to this blog, I left my hotel room and went to listen to Stuart Dybek read at a theater in Prague. When my husband and I returned later that night, my computers were gone — all of them, and my Ipad and my camera. Someone had broken into my hotel room and made off with the documents of my life. You forget how dependent we are upon technology these days, how much of the mundane and critical details of our lives are stored in these thin sheets of metal.

Luckily I had a flashdrive with most of what I'd written in Prague on it. My month of writing was backed up. The other documents, folders and folders filed with various versions of my novel in progress, were presumably backed up on my Time Machine in Chicago and another at my farm. But all my photos that I had taken in Prague, all the video that my husband had taken were simply gone. Irreplaceable. The only photos I have of Prague are on this page. Something to be said for keeping a blog. The theft felt like such a violation. I had trusted the hotel, the Pyramida, to protect me. My passports and money and jewelry were locked in a small safe that was too tiny to hold the computers.

Someone, no doubt, hotel staff, had been watching me, learning my patterns, which nights we had readings, etc. And they waited. What they knew and I did not, was that my hotel room had a faulty lock. Anyone with a screwdriver could jimmy it. The hotel staff didn't seem to believe my account. But then the Prague police came and pointed out where the door had been tampered with. They dusted for prints. The next day I went to the police station to pick up the police report but was told I needed to appear before a judge. The judge was a real character. A hobby painter, his office walls were filled with pictures he had painted and those of his father. Eventually he called his daugther, a law student, who had gone to high school in Kansas and spoke perfect English. She acted as my transcriber. On the judge's desk were huge bottles of pop and water along with an open container of honey.

They set up a chair in the middle of the room and from there I slowly detailed what had happened, what had been taken, and what were on the computers that had been stolen. It was a long tiring process. Eventually they asked what my book was about (a crime novel set in Chicago) and then everyone laughed. It was the one point of genuine levity throughout the whole event. "You'll have to add a chapter about crime in Prague now," the judge said.

Everything was made slower by the judge speaking and then having his daughter transcribe. My answers were then transcribed into Czech by his daughter. The whole proecess took several hours. I hadn't slept much the entire night, worried about all the financial and personal information that was now in the hands of a stranger.

The police detective was sitting at a computer, the judge was sitting behind an old desk and his daughter and my husband were sitting on a couch that the judge carried in from the hallway. The hotel manager sat at the far end of the room. It all felt a bit Kafkaesque, I must say. And it was hard not to let it color the rest of the trip. I'd had such overwhelming positive experiences in Prague I didn't want to leave the city feeling so awful. And yet, I'm still sorting out what happened.

I've had cameras stolen from me in Europe before, while my husband and I were on our honeymoon even out of a locked car. But this felt more personal. Someone had been watching me and paying attention to my schedule. The hotel didn't deny that they thought it was someone in housekeeping.

So my husband and I left Prague the next morning and traveled by train to Berlin. We stayed four days in a pension where the owners couldn't have been more accommodating. While in Berlin, we visited all the places I'd gone 22 years ago. Things were so different now. The city is much more sophisticated with new architecture and beautiful buildings. After about three days, though, Greg was getting a little "Nazi'd out" he said.

After Berlin, we took an overnight train to Paris. That was fun. Our shower was broken so that every time you wanted to wash your hands, you were sprayed in the face. Paris proved to be a soothing transition as it always is for me having gone to school so long ago at the Sorbonne. I know its streets and pathways and the metro better than Chicago in some ways.

So, I'm back home now. Been here for nearly two weeks. People ask if it was hard to leave Europe and both my husband and I said emphatically no. It might not have been so if I hadn't been burglarized, but the main feeling was that we were tired of being tourists and eating out at restaurants. We looked forward to kicking back in our backyard at Green Acres and watching the sunset or playing with our dogs. I missed our dogs A LOT.

I'm still processing what all this means. I've traveled more than most people I know. We've done a lot of adventure travel. I've lived and gone to school in Europe and each time there was a longing to stay. Not so this time. I think some of it is about having a sense of home, of belonging. And, for me, there was a bit of familiarity having already experienced much of Europe in several previous trips. Someone said to me that they find they don't like traveling around so much as renting a house in the South of France and experiencing one village at a time. This sounds enticing. I'm just eager to discover my backyard again, hanging out, doodling, thinking.

I'm sure time will heal these wounds and I'll be out there again, the wonderlust just as strong. But for the near future, you'll find me on the weekends amid the flowers and the crickets and the bees and the weeds.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

JULY 28, 2011

THE LAST WORKSHOP

At the moment, I'm sharing a small table with my husband in our hotel room. It's about 5:30 p.m. and traffic outside our window is buzzing. My husband's hands are flying at his laptop. He's editing and making notes on my novel chapters that I've been working on while in Prague. He is my first and last reader.

In between, there are a variety of people who give me feedback, some coveted and sought out and others not so much. What I'm talking about is the workshop method of writing feedback. I'm in my last few months of my master of fine arts in creative writing and I've endured seven workshops in which my work is filleted and battered by well-meaning —and sometimes mean-spirited folks —who gather around a table and talk about the writing as if the writer isn't present. It's like listening while people gossip about you.

During the past month in Prague, I attended three such workshops a week, each three hours long. Like the other participants, my work was critiqued twice during that time. Some of the feedback has been very worthwhile, especially from the instructor, other suggestions were conflicting and sometimes insulting. But I endured, mostly because it was required and also because I had some faint hope that someone would give me some gem of advice. That's rare. I'm happy to report that I've attended the last workshop class of my academic career.

It's such a vulnerable position thing to share your writing. It's taking something private and precious and exposing it to the world . Hearing criticism is difficult. But it's a necessary process. I'm always spurred on to fix the flaws, to make it better. And my book is better. The time I've spent in Prague has allowed me to focus on the writing as well as be inspired by all the writers, professional and wannabe, who surround me here.

What I'm sad about is leaving Prague. Tomorrow is my last day. Since my husband arrived on Sunday, we've been trying to cram in as much sightseeing as possible. We took in the Communist Museum, the Kafka Museum, the Alfonz Mucha museum. We attended a baroque organ concert at St. Vitus last night. Toured around the castle and photo exhibits of the World War II. And in between we've been to writing lectures and author readings. Today we hung out at cafes and worked on my book.

Being in Prague has given space in my head to consider and live with the problems of my characters, to consider them for longer than a weekend. I've spent the month thinking about the voice of my narrator and weighing the motives of my other supporting characters. It's also given me time to appreciate the life I have and will be returning to. From here we travel to Berlin and then Paris. And then home. I'm sad that I'll be leaving this adventure, but I'm confident that there will be many others.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

JULY 17, 2011

THE BLISS OF UNEXPECTEDNESS

This morning I was running and hiking up Petrin Hill in Prague, when I reached a plateau where there were red Soviet-style block apartment buildings and an ugly TV station with mushrooming antennas on the roof. It looked as if I'd left the leafy trail for a world of blandness. But I followed an old man walking ahead of me. He seemed to know where he was going. The asphalt road eventually ended and in its place was a cobblestone walkway that passed through giant topiary hedges and into the most magnificent rose garden. It was a blissful surprise. I wasn't expecting to find beauty at the end of such banality. But there it was: white, pink, red and pale roses for as far I could see. I stooped to take in their fragrance. It was just one of the many surprises that I've discovered in this ancient city of Franz Kafka.

The beauty of Prague, I believe, derives from mystical surprises the city offers. There are so many unique discoveries in the quaintest, most unexpected places. Last week I wrote about the garden that is accessed through a crack in the wall. But sometimes those discoveries are experiential. For instance, on Friday night, some new friends and I were out for a dinner at a patio restaurant overlooking the Prague castle. Afterwards, we wandered walking trails in the dark. As we were waiting for the vehicular to take us up the hill, fireworks burst out directly above our heads. Apparently one of the customs of a wedding reception is setting off fireworks.

So, though we weren't able to access the restaurant where a wedding reception was taking place —we'd tried to make a reservation many days earlier— we were able to enjoy our own private fireworks display. A similar thing happened last night when my friend Margaret and I were meandering around the town, disappointed that our faulty Czech had resulted in us missing much of the National Symphony concert that we'd paid dearly for. We decided to feed our regrets with dessert, and settled on a deserted patio of a popular restaurant on the river facing the Charles Bridge. We'd just sat down when fireworks started going off, again over our heads. (See the photo above.) It was a stunning display over the famous bridge and sharing the sky with the silhouette of Prague castle.

Among the many surprises on this trip have been the friendships I've formed with people and hope to continue when I return. Margaret von Steinen runs the day-to-day operations of the Prague Summer Program, where I am studying for July, and she's been the most incredible host. This is her eighth year and she's always up for trying new things. Yesterday we climbed 187 steps up Powder Tower to take pictures. Powder Tower used to be the Gothic gate to the town wall. The stone winding staircase is narrow and the only way to keep your balance is to hold onto a thick rope. Later in the day, we ventured out to Vyšehrad, a tenth century Slavic settlement just south of the city. Nowadays, it is mostly a Baroque cemetery for famous people filled with vast statuaries and sculptures of the dearly departed.

It's not often at middle age that you discover a kindred soul. I will be sad when Margaret leaves Wednesday morning.

 

 

 

 

 

JULY 11, 2011

WRITING IN THE CITY OF KAFKA

Dobry den. Today is my tenth day in Prague. I feel like I'm learning the city and the language a little bit every day. Prosim. Dekuji. (Please. Thank you.) It seems every time I turn a corner I discover something even more remarkable, cobblestone courtyard cafes, tucked away gardens, parks in which all paths lead to a castle, hidden away cemetaries with giant tombstones with modern photos engraved, monasteries after monasteries. For a country that isn't very religious, there sure are a lot of monasteries and Catholic Churches here. It's hard to say how many are actually operating and how many are tourist attractions. One of the largest monasteries, the Strahov Monastery, is near my hotel and I have walked there many times and wandered the paths below it. Yesterday, I jogged at two monasteries. The paths at the first weren't quite long enough, so I jumped on the tram and went to another. Today I visited the Loretto monasteries and the Black Madonna. There was a time when I would have spent hours wandering the monastery walls, smelling the church incense, spending time in the ornate chapel. But I guess you could say, I've been there and done that.

i've managed to avoid many of the tourist attractions because its summer and the city is crowded with large groups of tourists. They take over entire city streets. Today walking near the Old Town, there were so many that it reminded me of New Orleans, back in the day. I want to discover Prague's hidden corners, not the cafes that post pictures of food for tourists who can't speak Czech. When I'm not meandering through some park or garden, or winding narrow cobblestone pathway, I'm sitting in a cafe writing or in my hotel room looking at the view of the monastery spires and those of St. Vitus Church, two very famous churches that flank the Prague Castle grounds.

Besides being on a deadline—segments of my novel thesis are due—I have managed to write a lot. I feel inspired by the atmosphere and the view of a modern medieval city. There's not one patch of road that isn't cobblestone. You can walk for a long time before you see anything like a plant. Every surface is tiled or cemented. That's not to say there isn't extensive greenery. There are parks next to parks. It's just all very planned. The walls of the city are set into the hill that it's built on and there are long narrow stairs almost everywhere. Just when you think you've come to the end of your trail, there's a narrow passageway and another set of stairs. I'm amazed at how well the city has held up over time. One slight earthquake would fracture this city. Sorry after Haiti, I can't go to a city in which I don't think about what would happen if there was an earthquake. And here it would be trouble. The Czechs were very fortunuate that they were mostly spared the bombs during World War II.

My days here are filled with classes — literary workshops, Czech language classes— and author readings. I walk several miles every day, intentionally or not, often lugging books and a laptop. That's how you discover this place, by foot and electric tram. It doesn't feel like exertion, though. Perhaps that's because every sweaty hike is rewarded by a tasty mug of beer, cheaper than water here. While many other writers here are trying to cram in as many tourist sites as they can, I'm trying to write as many hours of the day that I think will foster my creativity. For me, having the luxury of time, is the real gift here, the unique opportunity. There's also the sense of wanting to soak up all this visual inspiration and funnel it into my book. Although at times, I have to admit it seems strange looking at Gothic and Baroque architecture while writing about gritty urban street scenes in Chicago. But it works.

Well, I have to go do my Czech language homework for tomorronw. So, na shledanou.

 

 

JULY 3, 2011

Along the Trail of Ghosts

I arrived in Prague yesterday afternoon, exhausted and jetlagged. It's been 22 years since I was here last. I've found a modern medieval city with tentacles to its past but also very much developed. Prague today is much more sophisticated than the city I experienced just before and after the Berlin Wall fell. For example, when I was here in 1989, there were few shops and what they carried was limited. The buildings, though remarkable for their archetecture, were sooty and dark. Since the end of Communism there's been a great deal of restoration. What I love about Prague is how mystical it feels with its windy cobblestone streets, its onion-domed and pitched steeples, its baroque architecture, its bridges. You can imagine Franz Kafka living here.

From my hotel room, I have a view sitting at my desk of some of the most reknowned architecture in the city. From here I can see the lights of the domes as I write this. This morning I went on a walking tour of the old part of town and just past the Jewish Cemetary. The tour guide, a musician who was part of the underground movement some years back, talked nostalgically about that time and how people today, though they love their freedom, seem less cohesive and less passionate about what they believe. Then, he said, the opponent was obvious. They were all fighting against the same enemy. Today, he said, the Czech people seem less collaborative, the art is less interesting, in part, he said, because artists aren't supported as they once were under Communism. I heard this same complaint when I was covering the fall of Communism from artists in Berlin. They complained that though small they received a small sum from the government for support. With a free market, they had to find jobs.

Speaking of art and commerce, I've met some really interesting writers, several from New York, two who are psychotherapists. We've had engaging conversations on life and religion. Tonight we talked about Primo Levi and the Holocaust, which is an elusive presence here where Judaism is such a ghost of a culture that was wiped out.

Tonight there was a party in the old town for the writers in the program. It was lovely. But of course we've already paired up in our cliques. Writers are so apt to quickly size up a room and find others to gravitate to. I'm looking forward to the first workshop tomorrow. I've also signed up for a twice weekly class on Czech culture and language. Perhaps I'll learn enough language to get around.

 

 

 

 

 

 

JUNE 26, 2011

On the Cusp of My Summer Adventure

On my last weekend in Chicago, the weather finally cooperated and we got a real summer weekend. Today, Sunday, was beautiful. I almost hate to leave. But...I'm going to. I spent most of the weekend preparing to leave on Friday for Prague. I paid the bills, ordered the remaining items I needed for my trip, hoping they arrive before I take off. I washed my convertible and waxed it. I made long lists for my husband on what to do and when. I booked train reservations and tried to read my tickets in German. I practiced a little Czech. (I'm not very good.) And I read my guide books for what to expect in the modern Prague since I haven't been there in twenty years. (See earlier posts for 1989 pictures and photos. )

So many people have asked me whether I'm excited and the truth is that I've most been anxious about getting everything done that absolutely has to be done before I leave. There were a few things I needed to do for the trip that I only just did today. At work, I'm on deadline for the magazine and other tasks that have to be checked off before I leave. At home, there are all the tasks of having two homes and two dogs. The lists are long. The bottom line though is that I'm going away to write, to be in a foreign city to be inspired and to be surrounded by other writers aspiring to do the same thing. I know when I get on the plane it will hit me. It always does. I stress about getting to the airport — I tend to arrive way too early— and then through security. But then when I settle into my seat, I'm okay. And I start to think about what my life will be like for a few weeks away from everything.

I'm looking forward to that feeling of letting go.

As I look around at our little pied-a-terre, I think how lucky my husband and i are to have this little hideaway. July is usually our favorite time to be out here and this year we'll be skipping that, or at least I will be. Sometimes I feel guilty for being so happy here. I'm at a good place right now in my life and while it hasn't always felt like this, I feel very content, as if the life movie camera could just slow down a bit and let me enjoy these years. I've allowed my camera to slow down and document the little things. Here are the sunsets I've enjoyed recently at Green Acres, the place you want to be. Check back next week for photos of my trip to Prague....

JUNE 19, 2011

A Last Few Looks Around

In less than two weeks, I get on a plane and head to Prague in the Czech Republic for several weeks. I'm excited and sad to leave. Summer is my favorite time in Chicago, especially out here at Green Acres in my Garden of Eden. This weekend was especially beautiful. With all the rain, everything is blooming at an extreme rate. That said, I'm ready for an adventure. I'm ready to not know what will happen to me on the other end. I have few expectations and a couple of hopes. One is that I'm able to write. The second is that I'm able to relax. I'd really like to have a midlife adventure, something unexpected, something wonderful, something that I haven't experienced previously. I should say that my husband, Greg, will be joining me for the second half of my time away. So I'm also hoping to share this adventure with him as well.

People have asked me if I'm excited to go. I guess I haven't had much time to think about it. Mostly, I've been spending my time getting ready and trying to extricate myself from my life here. This weekend, in fact, was the first weekend in several months in which I wasn't on deadline.

The last few months have been rough. They've required an enormous amount of energy to change jobs while continuing in graduate school full-time. I'm nearly done, though, with my MFA. This trip to Prague will be my last official class. I'll also be working with one of my thesis advisors, Stuart Dybek, who will be directing the workshop in Prague. I'm eager to crack open some of the chapters in my book, chapters that have plagued me for years.

Having said that, there are few times in our adult lives that we get to be a bohemian. Prague is the definition of living in Bohemia—it’s where the word comes from. I'm looking forward to waking up and slipping on flip flops instead of high heels, reading, taking naps in the middle of the day, spending afternoons in coffee shops discussing the end of print and books. And if none of that happens, and I only sit alone in my hotel room writing, it will have been a success, just to write and to devote that part of my brain to literary problems instead of devoting that space to my job.

It's a good thing I like my job, or I might not come back. But I do have a lot to come back to. I've hired several new staffers and I'm excited about how our little newsroom south of the Midway is shaping up. It’s been a lot of fun creating something, starting something new. In a way, creating a team is a lot like gardening, you have to have a multi-year approach.

I've included several photos I've taken recently in my garden. It may look like I've done a lot, but my garden is now six years old. Gardening teaches you a lot about patience in waiting for things to come to fruition. In that way, it's a lot like writing.

 

 

MAY 30, 2011

MEMORIAL DAY

On days like today, i try to think of all the people who have passed before me and just how precious life is. I think of both of my grandfathers who were World War II veterans and of the many uncles and cousins who served in wars and were scarred by their experiences. I think of my stepdaugther who is in the Air Force and hope that she won't end up in an unsafe place. Some people criticize others for spending the day in their backyards instead of at the cemetary, honoring the dead. But Memorial Day is also a day to remind us how wonderful life is.

Today it was hotter than July outside. After days and days of rain and clouds and cold winds, the sun came out. We sat outside as if we were solar powered and in dire need of electricity. The afternoon lights filtering through the blowing leaves looks like a Kodacolor print. It is days like today that I feel so appreciative of the simple things. It doesn't take that much to make me happy. I had a few blissful hours of writing and thinking about my book today and dreaming of what I hope to accomplish in Prague. It's only four weeks away!

My father called me last night. He has been battling cancer and we often confer on his treatment. He said that he's realizing that he's getting older and that he looks around and wonders how much more time he has. I tell him that everyone's health and expectancy is different.

As I get older, I think a lot about how much sand is left in my life's hourglass. Sometimes I try to imagine what I would do differently if I knew I had a terminal disease. it's a healthy exercise to remind me that I'm not in control of when I die. Thinking of death is easier when you work at a hospital, but I'm also frequently reminded of how important the quality of life is. Some people live long, miserable lives, while others accomplish multiple lifetimes in a few decades. If I were to go now, I'd be sad, of course, and I'd regret not having finished my book, but otherwise, I'd feel that I had led a full life.

And so, today as I remember those who've died, I also remember those who have lived and I want to emulate the wonderful gifts they had. I try to cook like my grandmother, whose simple dishes made life sweeter. I try to have a life of the mind, like so many of the wonderful minds I am surrounded by at the University. I make time for contemplation, like so many of the wise women and nuns I've known, who made it a point to discern and think about what was important in their lives. I try to contribute to the world at large with my work, and then steal time to create what fulfills me, like so many writers before me. And I am inspired by the beauty around me like so many artists whose work I admire.

MAY 22, 2011

Of Life's Thunderstorms

Our little spot in the country that we call "Green Acres" is as green as any pasture in England. There are new buds on all the trees. Today was a hot summer day, a respite from all the rain we've been getting. And then there was a horrendous afternoon thunderstorm, winds blowing everything to the ground, trees bending to a horizontal position.

I've been thinking a lot about professional integrity lately and what it means. I try not to be disappointed in people, but, alas, sometimes I'm too much of a believer. The paper this morning was filled with gloom. People at the beginning and ending stages of their careers are having an increasingly difficult time finding jobs. What people don't understand is that it's easier to keep a good job by doing honest work than it is to find a new job where people will believe an unknown. In order to benefit from life's random suckiness — a death, a job loss, a fractured marriage — you have to own up to your responsibility. And I think you have to realize that you are fallible, that you are at fault. It's a difficult process, but one that done right will make you a better person. The sisters called it discernment and I often think our popular culture doesn't underscore the importance of contemplation, of taking an inventory of what you did wrong so the next time you can get it right.

The bottom line is that really you are who are no matter where you are. I guess that sort of makes sense in theory. But it doesn't always in reality. The job doesn't change you — or if you have any integrity, it shouldn't. There are bad sorts everywhere. When I was a journalist I was told we had the highest integrity. We were the Fourth Estate. Since I've left daily journalism, I've discovered that it doesn't matter where you are. You are either a person of high professional standards, or you're not. Your word either means something or it doesn't. It doesn't matter if you are principle janitor or chief editor. In the end what you stand for is your brand. It's what people associate you with. It doesn't matter what role you play, it's how you play it. I think sometimes people get confused. They get heady. They think they own the power that lies in a title or position. Power is what a position conveys temporarily. Some people are corrupted by power and some people are corrupted by money. There's no hell like having to report to someone who thinks they are powerful. No matter who you are there's someone out there who will humble you. And it's not always the people you think.

MAY 8, 2011

MOTHERS AND SUNBURNS

Today is Mother's Day and one of the first decent days we've had in Chicago. I sat out in the sun this morning as soon as I woke up, soaking in the lacking Vitamin D into my skin as if I were dried cornflakes soaking up milk. It's been a harsh spring. No sun and plenty of rain and sad skies. Now, at the end of the day, I'm sunburnt; my skin is red and itchy. My dermatologist would be appalled. But Mother's Day is a day to relax and soak up some loving. I was showered with cards and gifts this morning. My afternoon was filled with phone calls. Sometimes we forget how connected we are to our mothers, our relatives, our children. It's quite circular.

This week on facebook, people have replaced their photos with those of their mothers and I've been impressed with the tributes that have followed. They were genuine and from the heart. No Hallmark shallow sentiments. Sometimes it's hard to consider life without that connection. And yet, no matter what happens to you in life, it is a defining relationship. Your mother is always your mother. You are always a daughter or son or a parent to someone else.

So, on Mother's Day, I'm thinking of all the connections out there, of women friends who are like sisters, of nuns I met who were great mentors, of female colleagues who have looked out for my best interest.

MAY 1, 2011

A TIME TO CELEBRATE

It seems like it's been a long time since I've given myself permission to marinate in pure joy. There's so much to worry about these days: two wars, the economy, joblessness, unemployment, the instability of the Middle East. You don't have to look far for a reason to feel concern. And sometimes, with all that heaviness, we can just forget how sweet life can be, as well. This past month, we've been living in a sunless world. In Chicago we set a record for the April with the least amount of sunshine. So when the sun came out in force on Friday, people made a point to go outside and stand in the light, as if the sun were a point of curiosity. Sometimes I feel that after a long Chicago winter, with few holidays and occasions to celebrate after Christmas, that we are so ready for joy, so ready to lift our burdens and celebrate our existence in the world for no reason.

Tonight I'll be celebrating my birthday at a nice restaurant and tomorrow (the real day) my husband and I will take off to relax out at our weekend farmhouse. (The accompanying photos are of the trees budding at the farm.) This birthday I have more than the usual to celebrate, more to feel appreciative of. I was promoted last week. And while it's a big job that offers lots of challenges, I feel energized by the opportunities it presents. In some ways, it's a validation of patience, of waiting, of getting through some very dark days when things weren't so wonderful. It's also about learning to trust. People I trusted promised things would get better. And eventually they did.

One of the challenges of the new posiiton will be to forge a balance between work and writing. If you've been reading this blog for awhile, you'll know that it's my perennial struggle. And now I'll have even less time to write. I tell myself that I'm emulating Scott Turow. For years, he maintained his role as partner in his law firm, carrying big cases while he wrote on the train into work. I'm not riding a train, but there is something to be said for having multiple creative outlets, multiple interests.

Like New Year's Day, birthdays are times when I make a point to spend some quiet time contemplating where I am on my journey. It's a reminder of how much less time we have left to accomplish all the things we want to do. And yet, it is also a celebration of life. I feel very lucky to have had such a full life and to have spent it with such great friends. We have to remember to give ourselves over to joy sometimes, to give ourselves permission to physically express our bliss, even if it's a momentary delight.

HAPPY MAY DAY!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

APRIL 24, 2011

FAITH

There are signs that spring may actually be here, despite wintry and rainy conditions. We've had more subsequent rainy days and overcast days than any time since 1897, according to the weather report in the Chicago Tribune. There have been many a day when I thought I had moved to England or Seattle. I'll take snow any day over a cold rainy spell. And yet, out at "the farm" this weekend, the sky opened for a bit and we got to see the sun. Greg got busy cleaning up the yard and installed our summer statuary. Most are fountains for the many birds that live in our yard. He positions several so that I can sit at my desk here in the studio and look out at my window to watch the birds gathering to drink or bathe. I've seen many a cardinal and blue jay and other beautiful, less recognizable birds. It's as if I am writing in the middle of a sanctuary. And in a way, I am.

Last week I heard from an old friend who I hadn't talked to in awhile and she called to say that she'd read the blog and realized that I was working through something that she was also struggling with. i've been spending some time "discerning' — as the nuns would say — what the next juncture is in my life. Sometimes I feel I'm standing at one of the silly roundabouts in Europe where the cars keep driving in circles because they can't decide where to get off. Life is always presenting opportunities — and obstacles. Just when you thought you knew where you were going, something changes. That's why trying to live an examined life can be difficult. The answers aren't always so visible.

And yet there are surprises. I've been writing poetry lately. It's not something I would have imagined myself doing. Though I enjoy reading on occasion and certainly have many friends who are poets. I've gone to many poetry slams and public readings, it's just not something I see as a way for me to communicate. But taking a class on poetry for prose writers, I've seen the value in learning rhythm and meter and stress of words. It's like I'm learning a foreign language. And I've actually enjoyed the freedom of using a different kind of creative outlet to tell a story.

What recent events have taught me is that I need to be patient and have more faith. It doesn't always feel like there's a master plan in my life. Just when I'm moving in one direction something interrupts and I see things in a different way. Could it be this way or that? I think what is most exciting is to know that, unlike most of our parents' generation, we will be changing and evolving in our careers and jobs and education for a lot longer than they were allowed. There is no such thing as a lifelong job. But there are ways to have constants. There are ways to ground ourselves in the midst of chaos. This place, my writing, my family and friends, those are the stalwarts, the immovables that remind me that life is sweet and there's so much out there that is yet to be discovered.

HAPPY EASTER.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

APRIL 10, 2011

An Air of Change

On Friday I wore my winter coat to work. On Saturday I was wearing short sleeves and flip-flops. That's what you call spring in Chicago. Today it is in the high 80s and humid. The wind is threatening a thunderstorm. The light is ominous, fractured from behind a dark cloud. We'll have to close the windows soon and take cover. Or maybe it will pass and we'll be enjoying another beautiful sunset sitting at the edge of the bare corn fields, their blunted stalks poking out of the ground like broken spokes of a comb.

Our place in the country comes to life in the spring. It's as if we have suddenly arrived at a different place, like some sort of vacation retreat, a summer cottage full of unexpected surprises. The fresh air blowing through the curtains, the creaking of the doors moved by breeze, it all suggests a mystery. What memories will we make this season? Who will come to see us and what dinners will we host? What conversations will we have under the warm night sky?

Life is a bit slower here. There's no TV — for us. There are the tell-tell satellite dishes stuck to roofs all over the countryside, but not here. We sit by the fire and drink wine, soak in the hot tub under the half moon and stars so distant they look like holes in the sky. Occasionally we rent bad movies and agree we should have read instead. And sometimes we play an old record player and dance around the living room with the dogs.

It's our secret life and it's what gives us joy. I'm reminded so often when I come here how little is required to make us happy. And I feel fortunate that for me, all that I need is around and within me.

 

MARCH 27, 2011

A World of My Own Making

It's a sunny Sunday afternoon and I've just finished three blissful hours of writing. In truth, it was more revising/editing than filling-a-blank-screen kind of writing. Still, I lost track of time and connected with characters from my novel with whom I haven't gotten to spend much time lately. Sometimes I wish this was all I could do: get up and work on my novel manuscript everyday. But there are some days, I really question whether my writing is really all that marketable. The point is that I want to write the kind of book I want to write, not a book that needs to SELL because I need the money to pay the mortgage. It's a big distinction.

There are weeks, like this one, that I get to Friday and it's as if I've used up all my words. I can't remember people's names and I struggle to pull together a few sentences at my day job as a magazine editor. And I wonder if I'm squandering my talents by not making a big leap to write fiction full time. It's a difficult position — balancing desires with practicalities. I've often written about that struggle in this space. As a writer, I sometimes wish I could be a purist and devote myself to my art 100 percent. But we live in a world where desires don't often pay the bills.

The complicated truth is that sometimes we need immediate validation in our lives. I like knowing that I'm good at doing some practical things, like editing and writing stories and taking photos and creating video. I like that I can take a piece of someone else's work and recast it into a powerful narrative. It can be fun, and let's not forget, they pay me, almost immediately, and handsomely. Whereas, with a book, it can take years. And the pay, when calculated on an hourly rate, equates that of the Third World. The truth is I write my fiction for desire, not for dollars.

Work as a book writer is fairly risky. A book may sell or it may not. An editor may like the idea but then get canned and her replacement may hate the idea altogether. For me, it's about security. I know I'm good at nonfiction writing. I've been a practitioner for more than 22 years. Fiction, which I've been writing for six years, is an art at which I feel less accomplished. It's hard when you're good at something marketable and less good at something less marketable. And sometimes I wonder after I finish this novel, which is looking more and more like a trilogy, whether I'll have anything left to say.

My true desire is to somehow fashion a life that allows me to write and edit for a living while leaving just enough creativity to write for pleasure on the side. Somehow, I think, this goal will be much easier to attain when i'm no longer a graduate student. This week I begin another quarter of graduate school in which I'll be taking classes on a full-time level while working more than a full-time job. Oh, and I'm writing my MFA thesis, which comprises a part of my novel.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to not have an agenda every night when i get off work or on weekends. For the past eight years, I've been working full-time while also working on a book. First it was Unveiled and then Truth, Lies and Secrets. Perhaps life would feel less full, less meaningful. Maybe I wouldn't feel like I was accomplishing much. Maybe I'd grow bored. Maybe I'd just watch television. Maybe I'd get enough sleep.

For now, I stare out my windows at the yellowing sun and I dream of summer and the lake and the seagulls that are in this painting (above) that hangs near my bed at Green Acres. And I think of the psalmist who said "There is a time for everything." We can't live in the summer all year round. And I can't live in my writing cocoon seven days a week, which is why spending three uninterrupted hours writing is so special and makes me crave the next weekend when I can sit my butt in the chair and immerse myself in another world of my making.

MARCH 21, 2011

Memories of Another World Away

I'm still unearthing those photos in my basement that document a changing empire more than two decades ago. I can't believe that 22 summers have past since I stood on the west side of the Berlin Wall like so many curious people before me, wondering when it would all break free and trying to understand how a city and its people could live so divided for decades. And then within weeks, it was gone.

There have been so many times in my life as a journalist and writer in which I met people at a critical point in their lives and was able to capture— often unbeknownst to them or me at the time — the last moments of their lives. Sometimes it was the last few episodes in a community's existence or the last few weeks or months before someone abruptly changed his or her life. It's an eerie feeling looking back, but one that makes me happy as a witness to history.

I'm eager to return and see how Berlin and Prague have changed. I'm also eager to have such a dedicated space to focus on my writing and my novel. When I was writing my first book and traveling to various writers' colonies, the new environs invigorated my writing. There's something magical about writing in a foreign space. It's as if all my senses are awakened and I am eager to channel those energies.

This week marks a new point in the life of my novel. I've given the first few chapters to my husband to evaluate. An experienced editor, he is a critical judge. He edited much of Unveiled, often excising entire chapters or portions of chapters. So, it is with some hesitancy that I solicit his suggestions. But that's how we get better, right?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MARCH 13, 2011

THE NEXT BIG ADVENTURE

"I have just spent three days in Prague. What a beautiful city! Nothing like what I expected. In fact, I'm slightly angered at all the propaganda fed to us in the United States about the bread lines and starvation in Eastern Europe. ... This city is filled with gorgeous baroque architecture and buildings the color of fruit —peach, lime, cherry —with great protruding statues. In Prague it's necessary to look up when you walk because at eye level the buildings look plain, but on the top they are exquisitely and intricately designed....We agreed that this city was much more beautiful than Paris or any other city we had been in. How awful that we'd never been told about its beauty and that our only knowledge of Eastern Europe was of bread lines and depression..."

--- Journal entry, June 18, 1989

This week I bought my tickets to go to Prague for a month to study with author Stuart Dybek at the Prague Summer Institute. it's a bit like deja vu for me.Twenty-one years ago, I came to Prague as part of a larger trek through Eastern Europe. I'd just finished six months of study at the Sorbonne in Paris and was eager to see what life was like behind the Iron Curtain. Travel back then was rough in Communist countries and we had to register at police stations and change money on the Black Market. I was a budding journalist who wanted to document it all, in words and pictures. Little did I know in that instant that I was documenting a culture on the cusp of dramatic change.

In Prague, which was viewed as the most enlightened of the Communist states at that time, there were rumblings of the Velvet Revolution. I was surprised to meet people who spoke English, including artists who spoke honestly about their situation. During my wanderings around the city that June, I happened upon a Jazz Festival in a park. People were dancing and drinking. Several of the musicians spoke English and they shared with me their thoughts about life in then-Czechoslovakia.

One of the musicians explained that everyone was paid differently, contrary to the West's concept of flat salaries for everyone. He was a successful musician and he was allowed to have foreign currency in a Western bank. He frequently traveled, had a large house with a swimming pool, or so he claimed. "Everyone has a job but not everyone is needed in that job," he said. As the owner of a record company, he had 2,000 employees but he only needed 50. So the rest, he said, "push papers." He'd written a song called "Bureaucratic Blues," he said, but it had been banned by the government. "The country will not change," he insisted, "unless the workers want it. The intellectuals and artists think they can change the country, but it's really the mass of workers who can change government." He told me that he didn't believe this would happen. "They have jobs and food. What else could they want?" Obviously he was wrong.

At that same Jazz Festival, I met a photojournalist named Ivan Maly. He told me what it was like to be a journalist under Communist rule. He said journalists could see things happen but only report half truths. He told me photographers' films were taken and exposed to light and cameras were broken. Nine months later, after the Berlin Wall fell, I went back to Prague, as well as Berlin and other places in Eastern Europe, to document the radical changes. (Stay tuned in coming weeks from photos from those archives.) While in Prague, then, I stayed with Ivan Maly. I have often wondered what happened to Ivan. Today, after digging up old photographs and journals from my basement, I came upon a journal entry about Ivan. A quick search on Google and there he was, still a photographer in Prague. I sent him an email. The world has changed so much and we've both been such lucky witnesses. I'm hoping we can exchange notes on our separate life experiences.

And that is what I hope this summer will be for me. An adventure, yes, but also a chance to submerge myself in a bit of detective work: In a city steeped in its ghosts, I hope to find the spirit of that 23-year-old girl who, in the summer of 1989, on the cusp of the world changing, had big dreams to witness life. I hope she isn't disappointed when she looks into her future.

 

 

 

 

 

 

MARCH 6, 2011

THEINEVITABLENESS OF LIFE

 

I met with my tax accountant yesterday, an event that takes weeks of advance preparation. Every year I promise to get organized, but it's just easier to spend a few taxing days poring over records than it is to spend an hour every weekend filing paperwork. And, so the tradition of preparing taxes happens every late February and early March. But the relief when it is done is so exquisite.

It's something like the first real warm winter day when the sun is beaming down promising great rewards in the coming weeks. That's how today felt walking in the woods with the dogs, the light snow overnight reflecting back a warmth the feels so full of promise. Spring is only two weeks away! And then life changes.

It's inevitable.

I've not been sleeping lately, my brain fidgeting through various scenarios, wondering which one will become a reality in my life. There's a certain inevitableness of adult life: we must pay taxes, we have to go to work and eventually everything comes to a conclusion. This is not as upsetting to me as it is to others, I gather. I am inspired by change, by the possibility of things. I tend to believe — no matter how clichéd the sentiment — that when one door closes another opens. And so I lay awake at night wondering which doors I will close and which ones I will open.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

FEBRUARY 27, 2011

REVELING IN CHAOS

CHaos refers to a very specific kind of unpredictability: deterministic behaviour that is very sensitive to its initial conditions. In other words, infinitesimal variations in initial conditions for a chaotic dynamic system lead to large variations in behaviour.

I'm a planner, someone who likes to chart out her life's trajectory based on a series of ever-changing events. Some people call that daydreaming. In the various scenarios I conjure, though, I consider what life would be like if some unpredictable event happened, something that wasn't planned, something that was out of my control, something that was seemingly freakish. Often it's a tragic event, like a car accident, or something equally as uncontrollable, like encountering a stranger who bequeaths me her fortunes, or her baby, or her business. Or maybe it’s a tragedy that sends me scouring the earth trying to forget my grief and in the process I discover life on an exotic island. It's kind of a daily occurrence. Random plots that entertain me for fleeting moments. You know, fictional stuff. It's sort of an occupational hazard: what could happen to character Y if she encountered f, x, z — random and seemingly meaningless events that change lives forever.

And yet, it's not entirely fictional. How many lives are reordered based upon a chance encounter? You can't really manage your life under some unchanging rubric. It doesn't work. And yet, that's what makes life exciting. If I knew how my life's book would end, it would be boring to live it. In essence, we keep going, not because we hope to end our lives as octogenarians in an old folks home, but because we sort of slyly hope that some good Fate will befall us and we'll end up with more success and happiness that we could have ever measured in straight economics.

And so, I find myself in the midst of many unpredictable and changing scenarios in my waking life, some that could carry me a great distance away and others that would shape my life in vastly different ways. It's exciting and yet a bit scary. I tend to function well in the midst of chaos, mostly because I do well when there are no strict boundaries, nothing to hold me in. You can live in chaos though, only for so long before you are simply living in a trajectory-less life. Sometimes it's hard to know whether you are in the midst of creative chaos or whether you've simply lost all initiative to change your life's circumstances.

FEBRUARY 20, 2011

OVERHEARD AT DINNER

At my house last night, there were four middle-aged journalists sitting around the dining room table trying to figure out what they could do with the rest of their careers. One was in teaching but considering a jump back into deadline editing, two were editors at a major metropolitan newspaper, and the fourth, well, let's just say that's she's a magazine editor. All four have spent the last three to four years trying to figure out life after newspapers. Three left the newsroom and one weathered a series of layoffs to find himself still standing.

"I just want to find a job that pays me a decent salary and doesn't demand that I spend my life in the newsroom," said one editor who'd recently returned from a teaching gig and was spending a routine 12 hours a day at her desk in the newsroom.

"Yeah, but normally it doesn't work that way," another piped in. "You either have a crappy job that has decent hours or a job that pays well but sucks your soul."

We all laughed at the futility of finding the perfect occupation. And yet we're all still searching, believing that perhaps some balance exists somewhere, some special formula of work and pleasure of writing and editing, of time spent discovering the world beyond our publications. We're a mix of forty-, fifty- and sixty- somethings who are on a second-career track trying to figure out a life that involves stories that matter without taking up too much of our private lives.

Two of the people at the table would like to teach and write books. But teaching jobs in writing and journalism pay squat and besides there's no jobs to be had. We contemplate how much money we'd be willing to sacrifice from our current jobs to settle for a job that gives us balance. We're over-educated, over-experienced folks whose knowledge isn't so much valued these days.

"Any experience over ten years, doesn't matter," one former journalist said.

We spend the evening openly contemplating our choices, ruminating one possible scenario after another. In the end, we acknowledge that our lives are in flux and that not knowing the future isn't as scary as it used to be.

 

FEBRUARY 13, 2011

Art Versus Making a Living

The winter sun is low in the sky and about to set with an orange brilliance that makes me ache for the sun of summer. Everyone in Chicago is talking about spring and how they are sick of the weather, digging out their cars, maneuvering between boulders of snow on side streets that still have not been cleared. I don't mind the winter so much. For me, it's the best time of year to write. There's nothing outside to tempt me to leave my desk. I hole up in my studio on the weekends, occasionally glancing outside at the shapes the snow has made of my denuded trees and the last branches of flowering bushes. As a gardener, all I can think about in the spring and summer is how much needs to be done outside, the weeds that need to be pulled, the rose bushes that need to be pruned, the new plants that need to be set in the ground. There's also this sense that summer is so fleeting that I should be outside enjoying the short stint of nice weather. It hasn't always been this way. I once loathed the winter, but I understand how the soil needs to lay fallow for awhile, that the snow brings water and nourishes the ground. As the psalmist says: There is a time for everything.

And that brings me to the gnat in my brain that keeps buzzing. On Friday night, I attended a literary party and reading for TriQuarterly Online, the literary magazine that I edited for the first six months of its new life online. (Each managing editor gets a six-month tenure.) The second online edition is out and so we were celebrating its latest writers. It was also a great opportunity to catch up with other writers I haven't seen in awhile. One man, most recently a blogger, was lamenting that he had to give up writing his blog posts because a promotion at work didn't allow him the kind of time he needed to pull together timely literary postings. He had hoped his blogging would lead to a full-time position somewhere writing for a living. But that just hadn't happened. He seemed burdened with disappointment, that getting a degree in creative writing hadn't produced a job that led to living his dream. I understood his struggles. He has a wife and two young children at home and said that he's starting to come to peace with the idea that his day job as a computer programmer is always going to be his main occupation. Writing will just be a hobby.

"I'm too old," he said. "It's too late to change careers at this point."

I felt bad for the man. I understood he needed to support his family. We all have to juggle our life's ambitions with our life's responsibilities. He said that he'll just always do his writing in his spare time, of which there hadn't been much these days. He talked as if someday after the kids and all that he could write more.

"How old are you?" I asked.

"34."

I had expected something much older, someone who had more of a foot headed for retirement and less of a foot still in his youth. For some 34 is the age they only start to figure out what they want out of life. Many don't figure out until they are near 40, flitting from one kind of job to the next. But 34 is along way off from retirement. It's a long time to wait to do your art full-time.

This is always the perennial struggle. When do you write and when do you just work and try to tame your lust for something else? I have been where that man stood and I stand there still. There have been times when I've worked jobs I hated because I knew they would eventually allow me the time I needed off to write. And there were times, like now, when I struggle to balance the demands of a certain kind of writing job with the demands of needing to write my own story.

I read a book review today of a writer who is a full-time lawyer, with a young family. He's written seven books. He mostly writes from midnight to 3 a.m.

I couldn't write from midnight to 3 a.m. but I also couldn't give up my ache to write. I remember what a famous author said once about finding the time to write. She said, if you really want to write, you will do anything, make any bargain, negotiate any deal, that will allow you to have your writing fix. That's what it means to be a writer. You can only go so long without writing.

FEBRUARY 5, 2011

Living in a Postmodern Middle Age

Postmodernism: The traits associated with the use of the term postmodern in art include bricolage, use of words prominently as the central artistic element, collage, simplification, appropriation, a return to traditional themes and techniques as a rejection of modernism, depiction of consumer or popular culture and Performance art.

I watched the movie The Social Network last night and it made me nostalgic for that time in life when I, like the young characters in the movie, was full of that innocent belief that I could do anything, be anything, go anywhere. And it's true. At that age, you pretty much can become whatever you want, as long as you put in the time and effort.

It's a timeless age when you feel that you're going to live forever, that you'll be thirty. . . always, like a youthful Groundhog's Day. But eventually you wake up in middle life and wonder: Where's the adrenaline? And you realize you are who you are. There's no becoming. You have arrived. I think it's the reason so many people of our boomer parents' generation had affairs or bought sports cars or divorced and married someone younger, richer, more attractive, whatever the case that made them feel alive.

But now that I'm firmly in middle age there doesn't seem like that many options for resurrecting that youthful indiscretion, that feeling that you aren't constricted by life's rules. I'm living in a postmodern middle age, when having an affair and blowing money on frivolous things or acquiring a drug addiction just seems, well, kind of stupid and painful. So what do you do for that youthful fix now? I'm not sure. But I plan to find out. Stay tuned...

 

FEBRUARY 3, 2011

Blizzard Blows Out Chicago Lights

It was an unbelievable night. Everyone in the office was talking as if a hurricane was a coming. "It's coming! It's coming!" We were all laughing at the hysteria. Frantic calls from the North Side, sent coworkers scrambling home at 2 p.m. By 3:30 p.m. I left casually. My assistant editor and I walked out together. We were the last to leave our building.

I live and work in Hyde Park so my commute was literally 15 blocks. But it took me half an hour to get home. My assistant editor, however, lives on the North Side and she got stuck on Lake Shore Drive. (See photo left.) She was there all night until a fireman rescued her and others and eventually got her to a makeshift shelter. She didn't get home until 9:30 a.m. the next day. Now, two days later, she's trying to retrieve her car from one of the lots where the city towed more than 1,000 cars. We'll see if she can find it.

It's Thursday afternoon and while I ventured out earlier, the sideroads are a mess. Crews with vast machinery are trying to clear the street out in front of my townhouse. Various people with blades on their trucks have tried to clear the mess, but there's no where to put the snow. I have to travel downtown tonight to attend class at Northwestern. And I'm not looking forward to it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

JANUARY 23, 2011

Why you shouldn't worry

This past week was one of extreme pain. I've been pushing myself on my morning runs and after a weekend of hard running, my back protested. In a big way. I was in such excruciating pain. And so now I have to see the chiropractor three times a week for the next three months. I never can seem to advance to where I want to be with my running. Just as I'm about to break some physical barrier, my body objects and I have to stop. The chiropractor wants me to walk. Why don't people understand how boring walking can be compared to the endorphins experienced with a hard run?

Perhaps my chiropractor doesn't need endorphins. She and her staff seem to be on some sort of happy pills. It's like they've all gulped from the same positive Kool-Aide. They are always chipper and welcome me each morning, especially Dr. Bridget. Each day there's a new saying written across the board in the work out room. One morning I was met with these words: "All around you are wanted and unwanted things. Happiness is about focusing on the wanted things." Okay. But it takes more than pithy platitudes to change people's minds. It's hard to change perspective merely through positive thinking. Besides, I'm a little leery of people who try to spin every bad event. Bad stuff happens. How people respond to the bad events are what determines their character. So it was with trepidation and curiosity that I began to appear at my chiropractor's office each morning, wondering what mantra would be scribbled across the board.

On Thursday morning I was met by a quote from Gandhi: "If you have faith in God, you have no business worrying." It struck me in a particular soft spot. As I plan out my immediate and future goals, I keep thinking: "How am I going to do all this?” It can be discouraging when you plot out your goals and there just doesn’t seem to be enough money in the bank account to make them happen. Sometimes I think I can't achieve all that I need to in order to make a long-held dream come true. And then I see this little hand written note and I am reminded that it's not all up to me. And if it were, I’d probably fail. I have to have faith, both in God and in myself. I feel so flakey when my husband asks me how I know we'll be okay, and I want to say because I have faith. That doesn't sound like a very good plan. But sometimes it's the best plan you can have.

 

JANUARY 9, 2011

Feeling the Ebb

ebb: The state or time of passing away; a falling from a better
to a worse state; low state or condition; decline; decay.
"Our ebb of life."

It's the beginning of a new year, and I'm feeling a bit lethargic, overwhelmed with all that I have promised myself to accomplish in the next 12 months. It's an ambitious plan, one that looks so beautiful on the page. And yet, I haven't actually implemented it yet. I tell myself that I'm gearing up, that there's an ebb and flow to creative energy and my energy will soon peak. But what I really fear, is that I'm getting comfortable not writing, that soon it will be okay that I just tinker in my studio or my office. I'll spend my time getting my life organized, just not my book.

This past week I started a new fiction workshop and the author leading the class asked if any of us had managed to write much in the past year. I had, mostly because I'd been absolutely dogged about sitting down to the computer and producing. She reminded me how much I have not written in the last two months. It's as if I took a much needed nap and now I can't wake the creativity within.

When you've been working on a book for more than six years as I have, you can take a couple of weeks off and it's not the end of the world. But the danger is often that those two weeks turn into two more weeks, and pretty soon, whole months have past filled with good intentions. I find that keeping the momentum means never losing the momentum. I often vacillate between giving myself deadlines and urging myself to be more gracious. Unfortunately, maintaining a Zen-like state often means I'm avoiding my writing. Except for those few minutes when I'm really "in the moment" and everything is working on the page, writing can be grueling.

The author in my workshop class was right. Unless you make it a goal to write, unless you make it a priority, a subject of guilt, a matter of angst, you'll never achieve what your gentler self would like to believe you’d do with love. So, this year, I'm going to chart out my progress, as I have in past years. I'm going to stress and agonize when I don't get in the hours that I'd promised. I'm going to fret and gnaw on my fingers until I've managed to polish off the ending of my novel.

It's really hard to push yourself, to be your own coach. But no one can make you achieve those goals but your inner fortitude. I've been hired as a coach for other writers. It didn't work much because they couldn't summon the discipline within themselves. What I take comfort in is that my reluctance to face the page is shared by many.

Recently, I discovered a lovely zine called "Stop and Smell the Butter." It's produced by Colleen Newquist, a former journalist, artist, and writer, who shares my love of the outdoors, cooking and pastoral inspirations. This weekend I read through the last three copies of the magazine. I was comforted by Colleen's own struggles to make time for her art. I suppose that's why they say writers and artists are often so angst-ridden, so insecure about their work, riddled with guilt when they slack off and avoid creating.

And so, another weekend passes when other things have squeaked in before my book: class, papers, bills. It's the ebb before the flow. I wonder: If I keep writing about writing, will that eventually make me write?

JANUARY 2, 2011

The list of possibilities

Every year I make a list.

I start out by looking at last year's and the one from the year before, checking to see how much I'd managed to achieve. I'm often surprised to find how many items I've been able to check off. Some are harder than others. And some I've been working on for years.

Some people pishaw the idea of making resolutions because they argue that they are intentions that have little teeth. Few people maintain the commitment and by March many have chucked the whole idea.

For me, making a list is important. It's testament to a plan, a road map of where I want to go. If I start to falter throughout the year, I look back at those early intentions and try to recommit.

Sometimes, it takes several years for a wish to come to fruition. I'll have the kernel of an idea but have to wait for it to germinate. Many of my big plans came only after years of writing them down, hoping and planning and imagining, seeing them in my head until I could see them in three-dimension.

I've been working on this year's resolutions for some time. This is the year I want to achieve some radical plans, change things up, seek out the impractical. I'm ready for an adventure. Life is too short to always make the sound choice. There is more than one right decision. Sometimes you have to believe, you have to have faith in yourself and your vision and sometimes that takes time to form that image in your head before you can jump.

That vision in my head is coming in crystal clear, in high-definition.

So maybe you're like me and you've been contemplating your future, where your road is leading you and you just need a shove to consider the unthinkable, that dream that you feel you don't deserve, that wish that you're afraid to voice. Write it down and dream of that list of possibilities. Someday that image in your head, that item on your wish list, may come to true.

DECEMBER 26, 2010

Expecting the unexpected

It's the day after Christmas; the day after the conspicuous consumption that has become Christmas. It's the day of reckoning when we look at our waistlines and our credit card statements and feel a gluttonous hangover. There's a time for everything. A time for celebrating and a time for asceticism. New Year's Eve is the last moments of the carefree season and then it's the earnestness of January and the drudgery of February. I feel it all coming on. A lightness followed by a sense of purpose.

This afternoon, the dogs were feeling cooped up. So we went for our usual Sunday afternoon walk. But when we got home, we found the kitchen and bathroom flooded. The basement was about an inch deep in water. The toilet had broken and overflowed in the short time we were gone. My husband bailed water for hours in the basement; I mopped and called a plumber. "It's always something," my husband said. And it's true. It's the brakes on the car, the landscaping project that never ends, the security system, and now a plumbing problem. Tomorrow I think I have three servicemen coming. But that's just it; no one plans for the unexpected. No one anticipates that there will be accidents, that repairs will be needed.

As a joke, my husband gave me a stack of finance books for Christmas. I like reading about personal finance. Some of the financial advisors offered sage advice. They all echoed each other in some ways and diverged in others. But one advisor suggested that the reason people fall behind in their payments or depend on credit cards always starts with one accident, something broke down, some repair no one had budgeted for occurred. The advisor suggested that there will always be repairs. You just don't know what they are, but you can plan for them in a rainy day fund. That, he said, is the difference, between people who are always behind, trying to play catch up in their affairs; they've never anticipated that life wouldn't go as planned.

My resolution for the New Year: life will not go as planned. Plan to take a detour.

DECEMBER 19, 2010

The Meaning of Christmas

The older I get, the more I feel I am coming to truly appreciate the holidays, perhaps for their true intention. As my family gets more spread out across the country, the song "I'll be home for Christmas" has taken on personal significance for me. This year, my immediate family will all be struggling to get to our home on Christmas Eve. Many of my extended family will be gathering in Ann Arbor where my father is having surgery three days before Christmas. My son will be working on Christmas Eve in Milwaukee and driving out to our farmhouse in Indiana after he gets off work. I'll be coming from Ann Arbor, provided my father is okay, and my husband will be making the trek from Chicago.

Our Christmas Eve celebration is almost as good if not better than our Christmas celebration. I'd never been in a family where Christmas Eve was feted as it is in my husband's. Mostly it's great food — caviar, shrimp and champagne — and maybe one gift, a taste of Christmas morning. My son says it's what he looks forward to more than anything else.

To me, Christmas is about family, being with family. I know some people who just don't appreciate it, or don't have family to be with. There was only one Christmas in my life in which I really wasn't with family. I was 24 years old and living in Newport News, Virginia. I'd just ended my engagement and I only had off one day so it wasn't enough time to get home to one of my parents' homes. So, several of my friends and I spent the day together, drinking and trying to forget what day it was. We shared a certain comaraderie, and we had a lot of fun that day, but it wasn't the same.

I wish you all the true spirit of Christmas, and I hope you have someone special to share it with.

DECEMBER 12, 2010

First Blizzard of the Season

At the moment I'm sitting in my writing studio out in the farmlands of Indiana while the snow and wind are howling outside. I can't see very well out my windows; they are frosted with snow. We're in the middle of a snow storm that has promised to drop at least 20 to 30 inches on us. My husband, Greg, and I have been using the snow blower and shoveling all afternoon just to keep up. If the snow plow doesn't find our road soon, we're going to be snowed in tomorrow. It's very cozy inside, though, with the wood burning in the stove and the Christmas music playing. Inside the big house, a pot of soup has been cooking all day. I just hope the electricity stays on. My dog Graycie seems very concerned about the wind and snow. She stands at the door (see photo) but won't go out when I open the door.

Like the snow whirling around outside, this week has been a bit of a tumultous one for me. I have lots of decisions to make on the horizon, and I find myself constantly weighing the pros and cons of various life scenarios both with my professional career and my life as a writer. I'm trying to figure out when I can finish my MFA, my book, my master's thesis, etc. I'm weighing those big mid-life decisions, like: Where am I going in my career? What is it that I hope to accomplish by the end of my life? I was very saddened to learn about Elizabeth Edwards' death. It seemed like such a tragedy, to have ended life with so much disappointment. I'm also helping a doctor at work write about his own father's death and it makes you think about what it is you leave behind.

This week I had the opportunity at work to fly with our hospital flight team. I'm writing several stories about the hospital's helicopter program. It was fun up in the air, looking down over South Chicago and then Lake Michigan and the Indiana fields as we flew to pick up a patient in an Indiana hospital. The resident doctor, Reggie Gaylord, shot this snap of me. I'm all strapped in. I once flew with the Blue Angels and the pilot then tried to make me scream. As we were heading straight for the ground, I let out a hair-splitting scream and he righted the plane. He said he wouldn't pull the plane up until he heard me holler....The pilot for the hospital did no such thing. We flew safely and landed safely.

DECEMBER 5, 2010

First Snow of the Season

Yesterday morning, my husband and I were awakened to the sound of snow blowers outside our townhouse in Chicago. We'd been out late the night before and it hadn't started snowing until the wee hours. So we were surprised when we pulled back the curtains to find a winter wonderland. In a matter of a few hours, it had snowed four to six inches. It has mostly been cold and rainy in Chicago these past few weeks. I personally love snow and would much rather have it snowing than raining. It's really a thing of beauty to look out and see everything covered in white. It always instills a peaceful, tranquil feeling. I also love to walk in the snow, breath the clean air and see how the world looks so different.

This morning we went for our normal Sunday walk in the woods out near our weekend place. It was so quiet in the woods. There was a hush as if the trees had blocked the wind whirling outside the tree line. We took the dogs, of course. The little one, Molly, all of five pounds, did well in the snow and kept up with her sister.

It's the first weekend I don't have a paper to write, something to analyze. I almost didn't know what to do with myself. Full days with no agendas are foreign to me. There's always some task, some work that I'm doing. If it's not work for my MFA program, then it’s my own enforced deadline to work on my novel. But this weekend, I largely had one task, to relax. It has been a hard week at work and I was exhausted. I took a long nap this afternoon. I gave the dogs baths, I cleaned out the hot tub. We put up the Christmas tree yesterday. The house looks so festive. Sitting in my studio working on an application for a summer writing program I'm hoping to do, I look out over the snow and the Christmas lights and I put another log on the fire in my wood stove while listening to the Vince Guaraldi Trio (also known as A Charlie Brown Christmas). And I wish that there were snow days for grownups...

 

NOVEMBER 28, 2010

STUFFED

It's three days after Thanksgiving and I am still cooking!

Today I fixed another turkey breast, more stuffing, another batch of turkey stock and gravy, three batches of double chocolate cookies and fudge. I've actually been cooking since Wednesday. My son, Nick, arrived from Milwaukee Wednesday night not having eaten all day. I made salmon with a leek sauce, potatoes, baked endives, and a fennel and Parmesan salad.

The next day on Thanksgiving, I did the usual spread, turkey, stuffing, gravy, beet salad, green bean casserole, cranberry compote, pumpkin pie — all from scratch. Even the green bean casserole was made from fresh green beans and mushrooms and onions. Many of the recipes are stolen from Martha Stewart, Gourmet magazine, Emeril Lagasse. I've collected them over the years, scraps of paper with dried gravy drippings and former glossy magazine pages marred and crinkled from handling by wet hands. By Friday morning, my son had eaten most of the turkey. So my husband and I had to go out and buy another turkey breast. I cooked it today. I made the cookies and fudge for my grandmother whose birthday is on Dec. 7, D-Day. She'll be 83. I'll send them in the mail to her nursing home down South. Another batch of cookies I made for my teaching class. This is the last week of the quarter at Northwestern. I made the additional stuffing and turkey, in part, to give to my neighbor in Chicago, who every Thanksgiving asks to taste my stuffing. Unfortunately, there's never any left. But this year, I promised to bring her some back.

So, I'm stuffed. I think my husband is glad the cooking is over as well, for now. He's been washing pots for days. We go through this every winter holiday season. He wants me to cook but hates the cleanup. In between all the kitchen activities, we went clothes shopping at the outlet mall on Friday, strung up lights outside and dug out our Christmas decorations. Isn't that what everyone does during their four-day Thanksgiving holiday?

I have friends who make a dish for their family's dinner. But my extended family is so spread out from Michigan to Florida. We choose to stay home, or rather head out to our place in the country, Green Acres. Mostly our Thanksgiving holidays have been intimate affairs with our immediate family and, on occasion, a few orphans, as my husband says — friends with no family to celebrate with. It always feels special. The times I've gone to the huge affairs, they seem like a church potluck instead of a family gathering: too many people who show up when they want and leave when they want. So, I stay home, and cook and cook. My husband says I seem happy in the kitchen. And it is true. I'm also happy seeing my family gathered around the table, with the dogs jumping up for scraps. Somehow, it just feels more real.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOVEMBER 21, 2010

THE HUNGER

With only a few days before Thanksgiving, I sorted through my vast collection of cookbooks this morning, trying to decide which recipes I would follow for the Big Feast. It's that time of year when I become eager to spend time in the kitchen, trying out new recipes and relying on old favorites. I thoroughly enjoy cooking, and it's a good thing because my family thoroughly enjoys watching me cook and they especially enjoy eating what I make.

For some families, Thanksgiving is passed sitting in front of the television watching the Macy's Day Parade or multiple football games. But out at our country place, we don't have cable, a firm choice. We watch movies, but we spend much of our time in the kitchen tasting and sampling, scrutinizing a dish, deciphering each needed spice. We share new wines, a new batch of gravy, an innovation in the stuffing. For us, the meal is just the culmination of a day spent smelling and ruminating on taste, a day of taste bud sensations

I'm spending a lot of time thinking of cooking these days. The main character in my novel is a sous chef in the part of the book that I'm revising and there are many sections where she is experimenting with her cooking or where other chefs are teaching her their secrets. It's all very sexy, as if food were foreplay.

But I've also been cooking. This afternoon I made fresh basil and pine nut pesto with charred mushrooms and red peppers beside a fennel and olive salad. Right now, there's a roast sautéed with fennel seed and pepper that's been simmering since this morning. After Thanksgiving, I'm going to try out a Martha Stewart recipe for Asian spiced Cornish game hens.

This week I followed around a chef from Britain. He was here to teach our chefs how to cook authentic British food. What I loved being around all these chefs is how passionate they are about their food, how diligent they are to create something others enjoy, and how much joy they get out of pleasing others. It's how I feel when I cook for friends and family. I often feel sorry for men whose wives can't cook. They are missing an equal portion of passion in their lives. I remember a nun featured in a story in the New York Times said that you could tell how much passion a person has by the way they cook. If you don't love food, she remarked, then you probably don't enjoy life.

 

 

 

NOVEMBER 14, 2010

The Lightness of Being

This afternoon, Greg and I and our two dogs walked to the beach near our house in Chicago. Lake Michigan was calm, the waters far short of the shore. Drift wood lay scattered among the bleached white stones. Dried seaweed clung to the sand, rocks and weeds. The water looked so clear. The sun had shifted in the sky, casting slanted yellow beams of light instead of the summer's burning orange rays. It's the kind of light that makes me think of earlier autumns of my childhood, of a new school year, of sitting in class and watching the earth change outside my window. Once, during a high school debate competition, the judge knocked several points off my performance, not because I argued poorly, but because I had stared out the window during another student's debate. We were the visiting team, and the school was set in the midst of towering oaks and there was that same nostalgic light that has so often fixed my attention.

Today, as I walked with the dogs, I thought of how light it felt to just be walking, enjoying the air, the sweep of the lonely beach. It has always been a calming place for me, which was why Greg and I insisted on living close to the waters of Lake Michigan. When we lived on the North Side several years ago, we would take our lawn chairs into Belmont Harbor or along the shore in Lincoln Park, and spend the entire day, watching the boats, the people. These days, he bikes to work along the lake most week days; I take Lake Shore Drive, one of the prettiest highways in the country. And when we can, we walk Graycie, and now Molly, to the lake.

It's a place that makes me feel lighter. Lately life has felt so heavy. I work at a cancer hospital. I read and edit stories of patients with horrendous diseases and, though I am often moved by their determination and courage, it all feels separate from me. Except that no one is immune from the fingers of cancer. This week I visited a colleague of mine who has cancer. He is staying on the very oncology wing of the hospital that we once toured together interviewing patients. He is treated by the very radiation machine that we used in a cover photo for the magazine. It is an irony that I don't have to point out to him. At the same time, a member of my family has been diagnosed with cancer. There's only so much you can do. There's only so much persuasion, so much education. And then you have to let go. Today as I walked with "my girls," I was reminded how light life can be sometimes, that every moment doesn't have to be scripted, filled to the brim, scheduled and organized so as to be the most productive. Sometimes, there is no agenda. Sometimes just being is enough.

NOVEMBER 7, 2010

What Life Brings Sometimes

I'm a planner. I like to map out my life, charting where I'll be in a year, five years, even ten years down the road. So it was with some trepidation and surprise that life brought me a five-pound bundle of joy this week. You can't plan that. A colleague found her wandering in an alley in a bad neighborhood near our University of Chicago office. I immediately fell in love. She is so cute. A doll really. I agreed to bring her home until we found her owners. But she didn't have a collar and a visit to the vet revealed that she wasn't chipped and, though a year-and-half old, had not been spayed. She also had burrs in her paws and had the beginning of gingivitis. Good pet owners have their pets spayed or neutered, especially in the city. The vet gave her a rabies shot and advised that we might not be able to find her owner. The neighborhood is rough, one of the roughest in the city, and I'm not about to go door to door.

 

 

And so after two nights, I agreed to adopt her. I named her Molly. Since then, she's been tagged as Princess Molly. I bought her a pink coat and a pink collar and a pink leash and a pet carrier that looks like a Coach bag. She's definitely a princess. Even my husband, Greg, is fond of her. Graycie, our Weimaraner, though, is very jealous. At first I wanted to name Molly something more literary, like Lolita. Hey, I'm a writer....But, alas, Molly is not that kind of girl. Or, so we think.

This morning, we took her on our weekly three-mile hike at the park and she never winced once. She marched on like a little toy, hind legs moving as fast as a wind-up machine. She even defends herself against the jaws of Graycie, who at 70-pounds and all legs, sometimes steps on her.

I notice in these pages that I have often referred to Graycie, and now Molly. They feel like a part of my family. They are both sitting at my feet as I write this.

 

 

Though sometimes I feel like I'm not working to my potential as a fiction writer because I'm running publications for a medical center, I had two powerful reminders this week of how important the work is that my staff and I do. A member of my extended family was diagnosed with cancer this week, and I was able to summon the deep research of our medical staff to deal with this life-threatening situation. At the same time, one of my interns was hit by a car while she was riding her bike, and the office worked together to get her in to get brain scans. You forget how important your health is until it's threatened. And then this thing that you've taken for granted becomes of primary importance in your life.

 

 

 

 

HALLOWEEN, OCTOBER 31, 2010

The Scariness of This Adult Life

It's a Sunday afternoon. My reading and papers for my graduate classes are done, at least most of them. I'm writing in my studio with its oversized windows that look out onto an orange fading sun and speckled leaves floating like confetti. Vince Guaraldi Trio is playing in the background, and I'm contemplating an evening before a fire with a nice glass of wine, my reward for a weekend of work. Tomorrow there will be meetings and meetings and I'll not have another quiet moment like this until next weekend. My life, perhaps like that of many people, is one of extreme ying and yangs. There's the weekend country woman who rarely bathes, doesn't wear makeup and has dirt under her fingernails. And then there is the professional Chicago woman who walks all over town in suits and high heels, engaging with men and woman on the cusp of curing cancer. Then at night, there's the professional graduate student, discussing literature and writing and longing for sleep. They seem incongruous.

 

Sometimes it's exhausting living all these various lives. This has been one of the busiest times of my life. I'm going to graduate school full-time, working full-time and trying to care for two houses and a fledgling writing career. I suppose it's better than being bored, of not having enough options. For now, it all seems a bit to much, a glass overflowing from a faucet that doesn't turn off. I make plans for an escape, but reality always pulls me back. In the end, I am a woman of practicalities.

Watching a funny movie the other night with my husband— "Date Night' with Tina Fey and Steve Correll — when Fey's character tells Correll's character that she never dreams of cheating on him, that her fantasy looks something like checking into a hotel and listening to the quiet. There are moments when I'm in my studio here watching the trees wave in the wind, the light fading against the garden statuary, and I think I could stay here always. At work, my third floor office windows look out onto an old oak tree. There's a bushy squirrel who jumps from one branch to another, and sometimes I look up from my work and watch that squirrel and wish that I could spend all day looking out my window.

 

 

OCTOBER 17, 2010

The Strewn Leaves Along the Path

This morning, Greg and I and Graycie, our child-dog, went for our usual three-mile hike through the woods in Indiana. It's a path that winds beside corn fields, through dense trees, along a settling pond and behind a trailer park. Such is life in Indiana, a mix of natural beauty and heaps of aluminum and metal, graveyards of forgotten machinery and parts.

I love the part that meanders beneath the massive towering trees, but that's such a short segment of the hike. If you want to go the distance, you have to walk the barren stretches too. Isn't that the way life is? Sewage creeks along with sunsets of promise.

My husband and Graycie could walk this path every day. I find it pleasurable once a week. It's an hour of mental escape. This morning the sun was bright and the leave were falling like snow. I could smell the decaying woods and leaves. Don't get me wrong, summer is a beautiful season, but fall awakes the poet in all of us. The sun is so orange against the drying corn stalks, the sunsets enfusing the sky with a rich pumpkin color. Saturated orange is how I think of autumn. If you don't have a chance to get out and enjoy your own walk in the woods, here's a sampling of mine.

OCTOBER 10, 2010

Indian Summer

This weekend was a gift, truly. With temperatures in the eighties, the sun in our faces, it felt like summer if only for a few days. Last weekend, we had to turn on the heat, and in Chicago we all started pulling out our winter coats and dreading the onslaught of frigid temperatures. The land is dry out at Green Acres, our little patch of heaven in the country. Right now the sprinklers are going as is the ceiling fan in my studio. I was up early this morning so that I could talk to Rick Kogan on WGN Radio, his program "The Sunday Papers." If you weren't up and listening at 7:30 a.m. you can listen to the interview on the WGN website.

Normally I'd go down to the WGN studios and talk to Rick in person, but today was the Chicago Marathon and the downtown streets are blocked off and traffic is a mess. So we did our interview by phone. There was a nun running in today's marathon. She is 50-year-old Sister Alicia Torres, a Franciscan novitiate at Our Lady of the Angels mission. She said she was running so that she could dedicate each mile to the donors who have paid off her $94,000 in student loans, clearing her way for her to take her vows. I hope she does well in this heat. If you want to learn more about Sister Torres, check out her story this morning in the Chicago Tribune.

Today my husband and I drove the country roads, whizzing past shaven cornfields and tattered barns with our hair flying in the convertible. I will miss summer. I will miss cooking our weekend dinners on a campfire in the backyard. I will miss toasting the sunset each weekend evening. I will miss bare feet and sandals and drinking coffee in my robe on our backyard patio. I will miss the flutter of the linen curtains in my studio and the way the leaves filter the sunlight as it comes through my windows, landing on my fingers as I type this. I will miss birds bathing in our cherub garden fountains and the smell of fragrant flowers blooming.

I'm sure that winter will bring quiet moments of solitude as I'm bundled up in my studio with the wood burning, but right now, I can't imagine a happier moment than the sun shining a new freckle on my face.

SEPTEMBER 26, 2010

The Poetry of Fall

This morning we took a walk through some nearby woods where the leaves were just beginning to turn red and orange. In a few more weeks, it will be peak fall colors season, a good time to meander under the trees. The nearby soybean fields and cornfields are dry and bristly, apparently just right for harvesting. All the farmers are busy bringing in crops with their large combines and big diesel trucks that thunder past our house at all hours. The weather is mercurial, always threatening rain, the clouds ominous. I love this time of year, when the summer flowers are erect and the sun breaks through the clouds at unexpected intervals, when some of us head back to school filled with the excitement of learning. It's a time that also makes me a bit melancholy, reminding me of the passage of time. We are all a year older, life will not last forever.

I'm reading a book of poetry, something I haven't done for a long time. To really read poetry, you have to slow down time, contemplate each word, ferret out the author's meaning, or invent one for yourself. At least that's how I read poetry. The last book of poetry that I remember enjoying was Kathleen Norris's Little Girls at Church and then her book about her monastic journeys The Cloister Walk and Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. Those books gave me the courage to discover monastic life for myself. They drew me into the mystique of the cloister and made me want to experience feminine spirituality.

Fall is a good time to read poetry. It's a good time to walk through the grass and feel the leaves. It's a great time to smell the last burst of roses. I hope you make time to enjoy this autumn.

 

The Image of Nuns

Lately I've been struck by the number of nun images I'm seeing in the popular press. First there were the unflattering photos filling up full broadsheet pages in The New York Times of thieves wearing old nun masks during a heist, a promotional ad for the new movie The Town. Then on Thursday a New York Times' theater review on the front page of the arts section carried a photo of a young nun wearing fishnet stockings and dancing on stage. She was adorned with the traditional black headdress and white starched wimple. Except the nun was not a young woman at all, but a man in drag, the playwright Charles Busch, who stars in his play, The Divine Sister, as the Mother Superior. The nuns in this play sing and dance. It's camp vaudeville. These cliched portraitures bank on the image of nuns as naive and simplistic, a riff I've always thought was insulting and outdated.

What's ironic is that in Friday's New York Times, in the international section, there was a half-page story devoted to women, many of them religious sisters, who are being ordained illegally by Catholic bishops. Catholic women are turning to the Old Catholic Church and in the Anglican Church to be ordained. I receive emails on a regular basis from sisters who are risking their security in their senior years by challenging Rome's recent decision that illegally ordaining a woman is more grave than pedophilia. Nuns and sisters today resemble little of their image on screen. They are devoted to causes of equality in the Church, not singing and dancing and playing the guitar. But something tells me that the public can't adjust its image of nuns from pious, prayerful devotees of the Church to their modern image as gray-haired rebel rousers who have more in common with heretics. To me, that's a more interesting image. Some day, some filmmaker will get it.

SEPTEMBER 19, 2010

602

That's how many pages I have accumulated in my novel manuscript. This summer marked five years that I've been working on the novel. Of course, there were swaths of time that I wasn't actively writing because work demanded nearly all of my energy. Mostly I have been eking out time here and there. I write on weekends and now in the mornings before work. I write on vacations, days off, sometimes when I'm sick. For awhile I was trying to write at lunch, but it was just too difficult to get away and sink into the story of my novel within an hour.

But the more time I devote to the book, the better it gets. Ultimately, I know I've got to cut huge chunks from the manuscript before I send it to my agent and her editor. That will probably mean killing off a few characters I don't need, weeding out scenes, trimming exposition. It's difficult to cut one's own work. But that's when the real art and sculpting of writing is fulfilled. Writing isn't always inspired, nor is it always fun. Sometimes, it's downright dreadful. But a professional makes herself write, whenever she can. A real writer can't not write. It's like a runner jonesing for a run. I know I'm much calmer having written; I'm much happier having devoted at least a few minutes to my craft.

I mention this devotion because there are so many wannabes out there who claim to want to write and then never make the time. "If it's important to you, you'll find the time," I told a job applicant last week, a young man who is eager to write but whose job description doesn't really incorporate regular writing. I've often encountered young people who profess to want to write and yet can't seem to deliver much. They like to talk about what they want to write, but the actual fingers to keyboard remains a bit elusive.

There's been a lot of hoopla about Jonathan Franzen's book "Freedom," which came out recently. I ordered it online as soon as I could. I've read and critiqued some of his earlier work. There's a lot of professional jealousy about Franzen because he's been able to generate so much media attention. Whatever you think of his writing, the fact of the matter is he planted himself in his chair and for nine years worked on a novel. It's lonely business, writing. I'm jealous of Franzen, not for the attention he's garnering, but for the luxury of time he had to hold that 600-page book in his head, to live in that book without so many distractions. Sometimes I can't wait to be done. And then I ask myself: What then? What will I do with myself when I'm done? It's like a child I've raised who will go off to school and I'll have to find something to do to fill the void.

SEPTEMBER 12, 2010

The Delicate Balancing Act

Today Greg and I and our dog, Graycie, spent the day at the beach. It was one of the last few days in September when the sky opened up into a broad blue expanse and the sun warmed my skin, which is a deep orange, the color of a redhead's tan. It's essentially one big freckle. I'm sad to see the summer end. It is a season that I adore, perhaps, the most, that and fall.

As the seasons change, I tend to become a bit contemplative, assessing the progress of my life and work. It's always difficult to decide how much energy to place upon analyzing and how much to put into action. I think it's the inherent tension in our lives between doing and thinking. It certainly was the tension I felt when I was visiting various convents, trying to assess what kind of lifestyle each order offered that would be most attractive to me if I had been truly a candidate.

It's hard to know when you should act out of your faith in yourself and your work and when to stay still. As an artist, I am always torn between choosing a life of craft or a life making a living most of the time and in between making my art. It's an age-old conflict. We feel we have sold out if we aren't doing our art all the time, but the fact of the matter is that art doesn't pay the bills like a regular, straight-up kind of job. The trick is not to be sucked into either world. In the artists' world, there's not enough stable money and in the corporate world, the work could eat up your life— and your creative energies and time.

I'm not a patient person by nature. But, lately I've been rewarded for having patience when I normally would have acted, or perhaps given up, decided to move on. But I stayed. It was hard. When something doesn't happen right away, I believe there is no momentum and that it will never happen. I'm learning how to wait. So, this week, after months and months of waiting, I was promoted to assistant director of publications at the University of Chicago Medical Center, where I manage six publications. It was a nice reward for not giving up. Then I was allowed to change my hours so that I could write in the mornings, and I was actually more excited about that change that the giant title leap.

My goal has always been to combine good paying work with a life as a writer on the side. The fact of the matter is that very few writers write eight or more hours a day. Most write for three hours a day, or less. They could have regular lives, regular jobs, but they choose not to. For the moment, I'm trying to bridge both worlds. It's not easy. But there are a few small payoffs. The other day a friend commended me on the promotion and said that I'd managed to find meaningful work while at the same time writing and seeking a second master's degree. She's right. Working for a hospital is meaningful work. But it is equally as important as the words I'm writing now.

The sun has gone down now. It's only 7:30 p.m., but it's as dark as midnight. There's a pink glow over the soybean fields where the sun descended. My husband has made a fire outside and is urging me to join him. There aren't too many summer nights like this left. As I'm torn away from writing this entry, I'm reminded that everything in life is about achieving a delicate balance.

SEPTEMBER 1, 2010

14 Years

Today is my 14th wedding anniversary. It's been an absolutely fascinating adventure, one that began on faith and love and perhaps naiveté, believing that, somehow, whatever life would throw at us, we'd conquer. Fourteen years ago I was a woman leaving her youth, marrying a widower with two children. There were many doubters. My husband was much older than me. It was my first marriage. The kids were dealing with a lot of emotions surrounding their mother's death. But, somehow I believed that love could overcome all those obstacles. And it did. Not magically. Not overnight. But we've been happy together all these years. I've been told by others that we make a good team, we work well together and our temperaments are compatible. I yang when he yings and vice versa. We're passionate people who have similar beliefs.

My attitude about marriage wasn't always so positive. I had grown up looking askance at the institution. I was a bit scarred by my parents' failed marriage. Many of the married women I knew were unhappy and unfulfilled. They gave up their ambitions; some said they were forced to do so by their husbands. It didn't seem like something I wanted to try. But I did. And I told Greg upfront all my reservations.

He wanted me to pursue my career as a journalist and writer. He didn't try to hold me back. When I was researching Unveiled, I spent weeks on the road, staying at various convents. Later, when I was writing the book, I spent months at writers' colonies. He took it all in stride. He missed me. But he wasn't going to hold me back. He edited the book, spending late nights and weekends offering suggestions. The book is dedicated to Greg, as the person "who always believed." He's been my biggest supporter, touting me to others, handing out book postcards to strangers, talking up my achievements to friends and colleagues. I feel very very fortunate.

I don't take all that for granted. We've invested in each other, making time for each other. We established date nights when the kids were at home. We share common interests. When we're not working, we're together. We make time for friends — often entertaining friends in our home — but we balance that with our time together. And each year at our anniversary, we try to take a vacation together. In recent years, we've come to enjoy buying a piece of art or garden ornaments to celebrate our anniversary. This year we chose a cherub fountain. We set it up in the garden outside my studio so that while I write I can watch the finches taking a bath or be mesmerized by the falling water.

It's the simple things. Last night, while we were burning wood and toasting to a hard day of work in the garden, I thought how lucky we were to have found each other. It's a mushy sentiment. But it's true. I tell you all this because there's so much out there about marriages falling apart, couples cheating on each other, falling out of love. I just want to say there are people who are happily married, who feel they've found their soul mates, their partners in life. If you've found that person, then you already know how I feel.

Lucky.

AUGUST 22, 2010

AN ARGUMENT FOR DISMISSING CAUTION

We are living in the age of fear. It's not the government who stops us from saying what we are thinking; it is our fear of offending, our fear of being fired, our fear of not saying the politically correct phrase that causes us to be our own censors. But it goes beyond what we say. Some people are so afraid of change that they live in miserable situations because the unhappiness they know seems like a better bet than gambling all that misery for something that may be worse. This seems to be epidemic among middle-aged people. Living cautiously can be contagious. And soon all areas of their lives are bland and analyzed and predictable and boring because they don't want to upset the status of what they've achieved.

I have encountered so many people in the last few weeks who are completely immobilized by fear. These same people who are incredibly unhappy and what I would call "stuck by choice" often advise others to be just as cautious. We're living in a cautious time. The recession has caused employers and consumers to be cautious.

I'm on the verge of a major decision in my life and it seems these kind of miserable, cautious people are the only ones who want to offer advice. I've been weighing my options for some time. And like Saint Augustine, I've lived for awhile as though I'd made one decision and then lived for awhile as if I'd made another. I've tried to analyze and rationalize my decision. But ulitimately my decision is not for the faint of heart. It's risky. On paper it makes no sense, or little sense. But I know in my gut, that ultimately it is the right decision.

Usually when someone cautions others to be more sensible, in most cases they mean that you should be ruled by the what-ifs. Life itself is a gamble. A total crap shoot. Just by virtue of your parents, something you cannot control, most of your life determined. You can't argue that being born in rural India by impoverished parents versus being born to parents who are heirs to a computer fortune are the same or would offer the same life. But yet, we often try to act as though if we do nothing, or if we stand still, that we can control the outcome. We control nothing. The best we can do is be happy and not hurt others while doing it.

 

 

 

 

 

AUGUST 15, 2010

Defining Happiness

For the last few weeks, I've been watching a series of videos from PBS called "This Emotional Life." My husband calls it "The Depressing Show." It's actually not depressing but offers answers about what makes people depressed and alternately, happy. The options for summer television viewing are slim and this series, narrated by a Harvard psychiatrist, is engaging. You can order the series off Netflix. This past week, for example, the series dealt with defining happiness and examined studies that have tried to scientifically measure what makes people happy.

I'll give you the gist: money and social networks. What about marriage? Not always. What about children? People with children are actually slightly less happy than people without. I began debating the conclusions for several days. One night, after I'd arrived home from a night class, I began offering my argument to my husband. "You want to talk about this, now, really?" He wasn't bothered by what the program had delivered. But for me it was troubling. How could happiness come from money? Are we all that shallow? Are you happier the richer you are? I started to list off all the evidence of people in my life who I saw as contrary to the PBS findings.

I certainly knew people who were much happier after they'd downsized, quit their high-paying jobs and traded a big title for something much less demanding. As I considered doing the same thing, I didn't want to believe that downsizing to have more time to write would actually make me unhappy. I knew people who were happy as parents. I knew people who were happily married. So the conclusions didn't seem so convincing. But then I received a call from my dad who wanted to come visit this weekend and then my husband got a call from an old friend who wanted to stop by for a visit as well, and this is after two previous weekends filled with friends and parties. And I started to see a connection in my own life.

As much as I hate to admit it, having money does make my life easier. I work hard for that money and, like most people, always wish there was more. But it does give me pleasure. And as for social networks, I like to think of myself as a hermit, sometimes, retreating out to my farmhouse on weekends. But the people I love, well, they find me. No one is an island. We are all connected, even when we like to see ourselves as independent people. I do enjoy my time alone. It is essential to my well-being. But feeling like I am connected to others, to something greater than myself, is really the results of a solid inner life.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

AUG. 8, 2010

LOLLAPALOOZA

It's the third day of Chicago's biggest music festival and it's raining. My son, Nick, and I are listening to music in my kitchen trying to figure out when we should venture out. We've already spent two full days at Grant Park listening to bands old and new. The highlight for him was Lady Gaga. I've enjoyed hearing bands that I haven't previously known about and also hearing some old favorites, like Green Day, who put on a fabulous show last night. My son does a weekly podcast on music called the Free Sushi Podcast that reviews new music from indie bands. One of the things my son and I share is a love of music and discovering new bands.

This is our second year going to Lollapalooza together and my third year at the festival. My first year, I went with an old high school friend, now an eye doctor. You're never too old to appreciate rock. But attending all three days will test your physical endurance. For me, there's the side benefit of spending time with my son. While he loved watching Lady Gaga's performance, I thought she was overly whiney: "Nobody loved me in high school. I was an outcast." Yeah, as are most artists. You're 23 Lady and rich. At least you benefited!! There was one number where she came on stage dressed as a nun, well at least she was wearing a veil but not much else. She did have a bleeding Jesus statue on the stage and she kept screaming: Jesus loves everyone! So even Lady Gaga has a nun connection.

Being in Grant Park makes me proud of living in such a beautiful city. Judge for yourself. This year the festival grew from 80 some acres to 115. There were certainly many more people Friday and Saturday than I'd ever seen in previous years.For me, music is inspiring and freeing. I think that's why it speaks to young people so much. It's a way of equalizing everything. The message of most songs is that you can do anything you want. You're not limited by age, wealth or place. Music is much like writing; it's about creating and opening yourself up to new experiences and new people. This year I saw the most mixed demographics at the festival. Not as many people of color but many more older people. I was standing next to a couple in their 60s rocking out at the Lady Gaga concert. Music is ageless. There were shirts that said: If the music is too loud, you're too old. That's what I tell people who ride in my convertible.

This year the bands, I enjoyed the most were the Dirty Projectors, which I had never heard previously, and Spoon and The XX, which both gave great afternoon concerts. Green Day's Billy Joe certainly entertained the crowd with fireworks and a bit of exhibitionism. Good thing the Chicago cops are so forgiving. The Green Day concert was one of my favorites, probably because they are an old band and I knew most of the songs. But Nick and I didn't want to be complacent. So we left that concert early to catch the Empire of the Sun band, a group of musicians who are also stage performers. The back drop of the Sears Tower — oh excuse me the Willis Building — made for an interesting light show. Tonight we're looking forward to Yeasayer, MGMT, and Arcade Fire.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

AUG. 2, 2010

MORE PHOTOS OF MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

AUG. 1, 2010

Midsummer Night's Dream

Last night, my husband and I attended the summer party of Richard Driehaus. It was the third year in a row that we had attended. For those of you who do not know, Richard Driehaus is one of Chicago's richest men, a generous Catholic and a philanthropist. Each year in July, he hosts a huge party and invites 2,000 to 3,000 people to his Lake Geneva estate. The invitations themselves are keepsakes. One year, we received a replica of a 1966 Corvette. It still sits in my office.

This year's theme was stolen from the Shakespeare play "Midsummer Night's Dream." There were fairies and moving statuaries and human fountains and elves and minstrels on the grounds. It was all very Elizabethan. Whereas in past years, the party has been in celebration of Richard's birthday, this year the party was a celebration of his new bride, Inese. Richard, at age 68, married again last week. There was some speculation as to how many times Richard had been married and how he was able to wed in a Catholic church. The newlyweds arrived at the party by horse-drawn carriage and were announced by trumpets.Throughout the party, a team of photographers and videographers captured photos and video that were then displayed on a large circular screen in the main dinner tent. After dinner, fireworks were set off from boats in the lake while symphony music was broadcast over the water to synchronize with the fireworks. Afterwards, a large band played dance tunes until the wee hours.

I'm posting the pictures of the party here because words don't do it justice. Some of the dignitaries at the party: Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn and State's Attorney Lisa Madigan. Pat gave me a hug and told my husband that I was "a good writer." Thanks Pat.

It's a strange feeling standing on the lawn of someone so wealthy, peering into his daughters' playhouses, strolling his gardens. You can't help but wonder what it must be like to be King Richard or what it must be like to be married to King Richard. From all that I've seen of the man, he appreciates beauty and understands the value of giving back. He's a stalwart supporter of many causes. So I don't begrudge him his money. But you can't help wonder what it would be like to wake up every day in his world. It makes you wonder whether that much money delivers that much more happiness. I don't suppose I'll ever know. But I'm betting not. Studies have shown that money makes a difference in someone's life up to a certain point, when their needs are addressed and many of their wants. Beyond that, the extra doesn't make that much difference.

If I had that much money, though I think I'd be driven by guilt. I've seen too much poverty as a journalist. On the way to the party, as Greg and I wheeled around in my convertible with the sun in our hair, I remember feeling so lucky, so fortunate to have found someone so wonderful to share my life with and to have had such an interesting life so far. And if Richard is able to find that kind of love and joy in his new wife, then I'm sure he will be as fortunate.

 

JULY 26, 2010

LONELINESS DEPICTED BY FORMER NUNS

A few weeks back, a former nun, Marie Therese Gass, sent me her book, "UnCONVENTional Women: 73 Ex-Nuns Tell Their Stories". It's a big, thoughtful book, nearly 500 pages, that outlines the experiences of those women who entered the convent starting in1933. The last nun in the book leaves in 1985. Marie has done a thorough job of documenting how these 73 women felt about convent life and the reasons that contributed to their leaving. And, no, they weren't all lesbians. (I always get that from audiences.) Seven of the women said they were, the rest weren't. That didn't mean that the women weren't attracted to other women while they were in the convent. The picture painted is that of an institution that has taken the place of family— many of these women were quite young when they entered and Marie takes to calling them "girls." Only one woman in the book was old enough to live by herself when she entered the convent.

The women largely describe a lonely existence inside the convent walls, a struggle to establish their own identities and exert some control over their lives. They also detail some heavy duty guilt trips from superiors who used God to justify whatever they wanted the women to do.

I mention Marie's book, not because I am against convent life, but because it represents the other side of the story. While my book focused on the women who stayed in the convent, hers explores all the reasons women leave. She also wants to make other ex-nuns feel less shame for having left.

There's hardly a week that goes by in which young women who are considering becoming a nun don't write me about this order or that. I tell them what I can. But for the most part they all have in their minds this ideal that they are searching for, some magical place that fulfills all their expectations. I remember the nuns often comparing convents to husbands. "You gotta take the good with the bad,"I heard more than once. It's an apt metaphor and I make a similar comparison in my own book.

I don't disbelieve any of the stories in Marie's book. I, too, felt a certain institutional loneliness when I visited some convents. They were largely those who followed rote rules and were ruled by stern mother superiors. Yet, there were others, the Trappistines in Virginia come to mind, that followed a strict way of life but seemed to do so in a loving way. I truly enjoyed those women.

So, I offer up Marie's book for all those nuns who have left and want to explore what other women have to say. Some orders are now publishing their own similar books of women who were in the order and left. I think this is a healthy way of dealing with the past. I also offer up Marie's book for those young women who think they want to join a traditional convent with traditional rules and a top-down structure. Reading it might save me them several years of heartache.

JULY 18, 2010

WHEN CAUGHT, BLAME THE WOMAN

I was stunned Friday when I learned that the Vatican had finally revised (somewhat) its abuse process by suggesting that, when required by law, Church officials should report priest pedophilia to the authorities. It's nice that the Church recommends priests observe state and federal laws. I've always wondered why some aggressive state's attorney didn't bring local church officials up on charges for failing to report abuse, particularly in regions where child abuse and church coverup was so egregious.

But that in itself wasn't what shocked me. In its statement issued last week regarding the revision, the Vatican declared that ordaining women as priests was just as bad as priests abusing children. According to the New York Times, "the decision to link the issues appears to reflect the determination of embattled Vatican leaders to resist any suggestion that pedophilia within the priesthood can be addressed by ending the celibacy requirement or by allowing women to become priests."

Basically, the Vatican had to admit some failure in its policies regarding priestly abuse of children, but they weren't going to accept any blame without condemning women who are trying to fill the void by becoming priests. I wanted to e-mail my many nun friends who are staunch supporters of women's ordination, but I knew what they would say and I didn't want to get them in trouble by quoting them here. It also pains me to hear the voices of embattled sisters who are the heart of the Church but feel so beleaguered by all its male politics.

Following its archaic edicts, the Church listed ordaining women on its lists of "more grave delicts" or offenses. This ruling is just another example of how out of touch Rome really is to the American Catholic Church. Seventy-five women have been ordained in the United States. For two decades, American Catholics have strongly favored allowing married men and women to be ordained. But Church officials argue that ordination is deemed for celibate men only and shouldn't be changed to conform with modern times. The problem with that argument is that the Church rule that called for the ordination of celibate men wasn't put in place until the 11th Century and was in direct response to problems of that era: married priests were passing church property to their heirs. The requirement was changed then and it could be changed now.

With these continual attacks against religious women, I wonder if it's even possible to be a feminist Catholic these days. Your thought, readers?

 

NEW WEBSITE AND MAGAZINE:

For all of you who are interested in medicine and science, particularly if you'd like to read about the latest advances in the treatment of cancer, check out the latest edition of the magazine I edit, Medicine on the Midway at the University of Chicago. This is a nifty turn-page online magazine but it takes a minute to load.

JULY 11, 2011

ACTS OF RELIGIOUS PEOPLE

I'm always amazed at the disconnect between what people do and what they claim to be. One of the main reasons I am not affiliated with any specific church is largely because of the hypocricy that I've witnessed by people who claim to be religious. I'll watch people get dressed up and go to church on Sunday morning and then snub their neighbors when they return. Is that what it means to be a good Christian? A neighbor in Indiana, who can't stand Chicagoans, told me that if my house burned down he'd bring marshmellows to roast on the embers. He's supposedly a good Catholic. It reminded me of the time when I was a teenager doing vacation Bible school outreach to a poor, black area in Mississippi, and one of the elders of the white church that was hosting us told me: we had a black family come to our church once. The next week their house burnt down. That's piety for you.

I suppose for me, the place I feel most at peace and contented, the place I feel I can connect with God, a higher power, my consciousness, is in nature, often my garden. I'm not sure that everyone appreciates the importance of green space until they don't have it. I'm convinced that gang members in Chicago who are killing each other should be forced to till soil and move mulch and watch something they've planted grow. Maybe then they'd believe in something other than turfdom. Maybe they'd connect to something larger than themselves. And, yes, I know it's far more complicated than that. But that's my wish.

Lately I've been challenged for my determination to stand up for injustices when I see them, be it in my own life or for others. For me, this is my religion: to speak up when something is wrong, to ask that injustices be made right. It's as moral as being a Good Samaritan. There are times when I feel that maybe I shouldn't say anything, that I should just keep quiet. But every time I think this way I think of the nuns and what they would do, and how many of them are unpopularily protesting a war and, amid threats of excommunication, protesting against unjust policies within the Church. And then I reach for my coffee cup in the morning and I am reminded of sage advice: "Quiet, reserved women seldom make history."

JULY 5, 2010

TRIQUARTERLY GOES LIVE!

Those of you who are readers, please check out the literary magazine I edit: http://triquarterly.org. It went live today. This is its first digital edition.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

JULY 4, 2010

INDEPENDENCE DAY

Today is the Fourth of July and the end of a week's vacation. It's been a wonderful few days in the country at our farmhouse we call Green Acres. On the first day of our vacation, my husband, Greg, and I made a list of all the things we wanted and needed to do. We managed to do all of them, including a day touring vineyards in Southwest Michigan where we sampled wines at seven different vineyards. Our neighbor in Chicago asked if we really thought coming out here was a "vacation" since we spend nearly every weekend here. To her a vacation was more like getting on a plane and going to Jamaica or Vegas. The thought of getting on a plane makes me cringe. Actually I'd rather be here than anywhere else in the summer. It's where my writing studio is, where I spend time gardening and entertaining friends.

Last night we hosted some Chicago friends who also have a second home in Indiana. We sipped wine on the patio, watched the sunset over the soybean fields, cooked our dinner over a fire and observed several firework shows going off in the distance. It was a beautiful evening. And now I'm contemplating returning to my day job in two days. It's hard, having tasted freedom for a few days, to know it is only temporary.

My stepdaughter used to lament: "Why can't every day be like it is on vacation?" I wish that were possible. When people speculate that they wouldn't know what to do with themselves if they didn't have a job to go to, that they'd be at a complete loss at structuring their day, I always feel sorry for them. The most important part of my life is what I do when I'm not at work. Yes, work is important, but it's not my life.

The one thing I miss the most, now that I have a rigid work schedule is the time I used to spend contemplating. I suppose some people would say it is a complete waste of time just to sit and stare out over the gardens or watch the sun descend in the sky or watch a hummingbird draw nectar out of a coneflower. I know that the contemplative nuns understand, but even many of them complained to me that they found it hard to have enough time to contemplate on their own in between all the scheduled group prayers. So I know there's no panacea, no place in life that offers a complete balance, even the convent.

Our guests last night asked how Greg and I entertain guests out here. They found it difficult to find much to offer friends to do. Greg and I entertain often out here. We offer them relaxation. We cook, drink nice wine, watch the flowers grow, the sun set and the embers of backyard fires burn. I find my contemplation time here a needed respite, a way to connect to myself and to nature. It is my independence from deadlines and demands, which seem constant these days.

When I left work more than a week ago, I turned off my Blackberry. In less than 36 hours, I'll have to turn it back on. And then I'll be counting the hours until I can be back here again. I hope you, readers, have a place you can go to revitalize your soul. Here are a few pictures of my gardens to offer you some peaceful moments.

 

 

 

 

 

JUNE 20, 2010

FATHERS' DAY; AND ALL THAT NUNSENSE

 

Today is Fathers' Day and I am reminded both about what it means to be a good father and how lucky I am to have a father who cares about me and a husband who is so caring about his own children. Our kids are grown now and no longer at home, but I've been delighted to see my husband, Greg, showing the same sorts of endearments toward our dog, Graycie, as he did when the kids were smaller.

This morning Nick's hand-made Fathers' Day card — he's an artist — depicted Nick as a naked baby at the lake holding his father's hand as they walked in the water. It was a loving portrait and based off a real photo. I'm sure that's the way Nick still thinks of his dad. I'm often touched by the way I see Graycie running alongside Greg as he works in the yard. They are virtually inseparable. Graycie takes naps on the couch when Greg does. Graycie sits in the front seat like a little Buddha when she rides with Greg in the car. When I'm at the wheel, she's in her caged area in the back of the car. But dads are like, bending the rules, offering ice cream instead of Brussel sprouts. They like to have fun with their kids. So, on Fathers' Day, I pay tribute to my husband, a truly wonderful father who has taught me a great deal about patience and understanding when it comes to kids and dogs and also life in general.

NUNSENSE

The New York Times ran an interesting story on Friday about the creator of “Nunsense,” the off-Broadway sequels that, though predictable and silly, have been far more profitable than just about any other offering theatres have had. "Nunsense" and its six sequels have been produced 8,000 times worldwide and grossed more than $500 million. The article goes on to say that from "The Flying Nun" to "Sister Act," women in habits have been lively pop culture fodder. I found this characterization a little peculiar. But I also thought it was strange that the artistic director at an off-Broadway playhouse had selected “Nunsense” for this summer’s offering because “people need levity and humor.”

I have often heard sisters complain about the stereotype that persists of them as simple-minded and silly. The truth is most nuns these days are highly educated women, with the majority having achieved at least a master’s degree. I admit that I’ve partaken of a few of these plays and enjoyed them. They are campy and fun. But I’m not sure that most people who go to these plays even know the difference between what’s up on stage and the real image in convents.

A couple months ago I did a signing at the Royal George Theatre in Lincoln Park. They were staging the popular nun play, “Late Nite Catechism.” I always thought it would be a great venue in which to sell books. When I go to see a play, which is often, I appreciate when the theater offers books for sale that are connected with the play. But at the Royal George that night, no one was really particularly interested in talking about nuns. There were mostly large groups of middle aged women who were looking for a good time. It was an odd juxtaposition and I felt a little sad for the women and the playwright, Vicki Quade, who was with me. I had expected these particular types of theatre goers to be curious about habited women. But few of them even stopped at our table to inquire what it was all about. I don't think they were so much interested in finding out what nuns were really like, which is what my book jacket purports to do (and does), but were more interested in laughing at goofy Medieval outfits worn by juvenile women. It made me a little sad.

JUNE 13, 2010

AT PRINTERS ROW IN CHICAGO

It was raining like crazy on Saturday with the wind blowing, but us dedicated authors and readers were downtown in the old Printers Row district on Saturday at the beginning of Chicago's Lit Fest. It was great to see so many readers out in inclement weather. I managed to sell and sign several books while readers were dodging the pouring rain. I also met several interesting readers -- all women. Not a single man bought my book! Women have always been my biggest readers. I also met a couple of women who had already read my book and were bringing other women to buy it, too.

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REGRET AND LOSS

I've been thinking a lot about my blog a couple weeks past regarding "The Rule of Two out of Three." That blog in particular resonated with several of you who wrote to tell me your personal stories. Some of you had struggled with careers, others wrote to tell me that having children was often a "mixed blessing," as one woman, a former nun wrote. You worry about them all the time. Everyone seemed to agree that achieving success in all three major areas of a woman's life was nearly impossible. Thanks for writing.

Along those lines, I'd direct you to a piece in today's Sunday Chicago Tribune. As a former editorial page editor, I can tell you that editorials are not normally where a reader can find contemplative philosophy about life. But there it was, quoting Shaquille O'Neal, of all people, about regret. It's a wonderful piece with this little nugget: Most people don't regret the things they did in life; they regret the thing they didn't do. When I look back over my life, I can honestly say that there is little regret about what I didn't do. Mostly I regret how I did them.

Another piece in the paper this morning made me cringe. It's another example why women should be leading the church. A Catholic grade school in Massachusetts had withdrawn its acceptance of an 8-year-old transfer student after school officials learned that his parents were lesbians. Still another school in Boulder, Colorado, is not allowing a preschooler and kindergartner to re-enroll next year because their parents are lesbians. The reason given in both cases was similar: Homosexual conduct violates church teachings. A column published in the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Boston argued that there was "a real danger" that the children of gay parents would bring pornography into the classroom.

This is where the nuns I know, or most of them, would have said: Enough. Thankfully Chicago Catholic Schools aren't into such backward thinking, at least when it comes to this issue. The superintendent of Chicago Catholic schools, Sister Mary Paul McCaughey (A NUN) said that Chicago Catholic schools are "open to everyone."

JUNE 6, 2010

Beauty

By popular demand, I'm posting pictures of Green Acres and the gardens around my writing studio. It's been a beautiful sunny day with periods of light rain, always tempting me to be outside instead of inside writing. The great aspect of my writing studio, though, is that I can feel like I am in nature while I'm writing.

As some of you know, I'm the managing editor of TriQuarterly Online and we are about to launch our digital version. It's been a real challenge for me as I do have a full-time job as a managing editor of several publications at the University of Chicago Medical Center. But I'm very excited about the short stories, poetry, essays and drama that we'll be featuring. The launch is July 7 at www.triquarterly.org. There are several interviews and book reviews there now.

Next Saturday I'll be at Chicago's Printers' Row at the booth of the Society of Midland Authors signing books in the morning from 10 a.m. to noon. The booth is located at Tent B, spot 3. That seems to be somewhere near the second tent from the north end of the festival, just south of the corner of Harrison and Dearborn. Please stop by and see me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MAY 31, 2010

THE RULE OF TWO OUT OF THREE IN LIFE



It's Memorial Day and my husband and I are cleaning up our farmhouse and garden, getting ready for guests to arrive soon. It's been a beautiful weekend of sunsets and visiting with friends and weeding and reading. A good life is like that, a collection of interests and occupations. These weekends are so energizing that I find myself tempted to just move out of the city and live out in the country full time. It's a romantic idea: An idyllic pastoral life where I could devote my time to writing and reading and gardening, all my passions. But life intervenes... We can't just live on chocolate, I'm reminded.

I suppose everyone has his or her secret fantasy life, the life they imagine they'd be living if they didn't have to work. Some people will say that they are living that life, that their day job is their dream job. I never like those people, mostly because I don't believe them.

There's the ideal in all our heads; the ideal job, the ideal family, the ideal spouse. Rarely does life measure up. But sometimes reality surprises us. I see young people, and I was one once, aspiring to that ideal life in their heads. I tell young women, you get two out of three in life. They look at me quizzically and I explain: you can succeed in either family, career or spouse, but not all three and never at the same time. It's very rare that you meet someone who has attained the ideal in all three areas.

The rule of two out of three is one I made up after observing a lot of people, mostly women. I would watch successful, poised women at work and then be horrified when they took me to their homes and I watched the drama played out or when they confided their deep disappointment with their children, their spouse. Sometimes they even confided

about affairs. Still, so many women aspire to that Christmas card picture of smiling, beautiful children, a loving spouse and the successful job that completes the picture. This is when the record scratches. The women who try to play this tune are always disappointed.

That doesn't mean that the two out of three are always static. Sometimes it's the job and the kids who carry you through rough patches of a marriage. Sometimes it's the home life that makes you get up and go to a job that you hate. Nevertheless, my belief is that the two sources of happiness in life can shift, but rarely can anyone give enough energy and attention to achieve bliss in all three areas of his or her life at one time, or for very long.

So, I suppose right now you're adding it up, counting what has given you sustained happiness. Perhaps you don't believe me. That's fine. It's my theory and it's certainly been true in my life. So then you're asking, well what's your two out of three? For me, my career as a writer has been a source of satisfaction and it's not always the day job, but the writing and editing. My marriage has probably been the greatest source of my happiness. I know few people who can say that. I've been blessed. We've also worked very hard to achieve what we have and we don't take it for granted.

The loss in my life, the third area that has always been a struggle, is the children. At 44, I'll probably never have children of my own. It's a loss I feel more keenly at different times. I often think of the nuns I've interviewed, women who I asked how they dealt with never being able to have children of their own. I was a younger woman then ; and I wanted to know because I intended to have children and couldn't fathom how any woman could give that up. Now, several years later, I know painfully well how those women felt. I remember one nun telling me that it's an ache that never really goes away. And I believe that. The feeling of loss comes and goes. When I see couples i know with their young children, I'm envious. But then I just imagine all the waking and crying in the middle of the night and the piercing screams of a baby and that envy dissipates...for awhile. I can intellectualize about the loss: I never could have achieved what I have in my professional life if I'd had my own children, my marriage certainly wouldn't be as strong if I'd had to divide my attentions. (That was certainly the argument of Joyce Carol Oates who always said that she and her husband decided against having children because they seemed to ruin the marriages of their friends.) But knowing something in your head and feeling it in your body are two different things. And so, I take some comfort that I helped raise my two stepchildren. I enjoy my dog, Graycie, whom my husband and I treat like our baby. And I tell myself that I'm very lucky: I have achieved two out of three.

 

MAY 23, 2010

MUSINGS AT SUNSET; THOUGHTS ON A WOMAN'S PATIENCE

I've been thinking about patience lately, how to have it, when it matters and when it should be abandoned. By nature, I am not a patient person. I'm always in awe of those women who can wait, who can simmer without exploding, those long-suffering women who seem to eventually get what they wanted, I suppose. I never know if in the end they do get what they want because I usually lose interest and stop watching.

Last night I did watch the documentary The September Issue about the fashion magazine Vogue and how the staff pulls together the largest issue every year. What was amazing was not the revelations regarding "The Ice Queen" Anna Wintour — who knew she could be so endearing to her daughter or so generous to young designers — but the poise exhibited by her second in command, a fiery redhead named Grace, the magazine's creative director. Perhaps the cutting room floor holds some confrontation between the women, but the movie doesn't even hint that there might be a chance for Grace to challenge her boss. As Wintour dismisses beautiful photo shoots that Grace had supervised, I couldn't help but feel for the woman. "That's $50,000 down the drain," she says to the camera.

Judging by the reviews, most audiences saw Grace as the warm, creative force of the magazine versus the domineering, discouraging voice of Wintour, also known as "the Pope" in the magazine offices. I wanted to know how Grace, a 68-year-old former model, could calmly sit in her office, conceding that she has to feel that she's done something worthy in her job. I wondered how many nights she went home stewing, contemplating a riff with the famous Queen. I wanted to know how she and other women live with such disappointment on a continual basis and how that doesn't tear at the basic fabric of their being.

In this morning's Chicago Tribune, there was the obituary of a woman who'd run out of time. Janine Denomme was a Catholic woman who'd recently been ordained by Roman Catholic Women priests, a group of excommunicated bishops and female priests who are trying to get the church to open clergy ranks to women and married people. Denomme waited as long as she could for the church to change. Finally days before she died of colon cancer at age 45, she was ordained by the rogue group. I know a lot of nuns who are sympathetic to this cause. I'm in awe of how patient they are, believing that at some point the church will change. I wonder how they decide when they've reached the breaking point and how others remain determined to change an institution from the inside. And then I wonder which is more effective?

 

MAY 16, 2010

THE COUPLE WHO SWEATS TOGETHER, STAYS TOGETHER

As I write this, my husband is pulling weeds behind my writing studio. He's been working in the yard all day, the kind of work that leaves him covered in sweat and mud. Yesterday the two of us spent the day digging huge holes for new trees at our weekend farmhouse. Sweat was dripping from my nose. The holes were four feet in diameter and about three feet deep. I found new appreciation for old-fashioned gravediggers. Most weekends, Greg and I spend at least part of a day, if not the whole weekend, doing manual labor at the place we affectionately call "Green Acres." In the past couple of years, we've planted more than 70 trees, hundreds of plants and bulbs and weeded and added loads and loads of dirt and mulch. It's a peculiar kind of pasttime, I admit.

I write this not to win your admiration— or disgust— but to make a point about something that I strongly believe: couples who share the same interests have a better chance building a life together, and more pointedly, couples who build something together, whether it's a backyard garden or a business, can take pride in what what their partnership has accomplished. Perhaps that's how some couples look back on the families they've raised.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately because I seem to be surrounded by young people on the verge of marriage. Last weekend, my 22-year-old stepdaughter announced she was getting married to a man she's been dating eight months. "What's the rush?" my husband asked.

My grandmother didn't seem alarmed. "Well, I got married at 18," she said.

Yes, different era.

The problem is that I know a handful of people who got married young and are still together. (They are my aunts and uncles.) Come to think of it, I don't know that many people who have been married for a long time who are all that happy together.

Finding the secret to a happy marriage is big business. Just this week Tara Parker-Pope, a columnist at the New York Times, wrote about a mutated gene that scientists believe make men more likely to cheat. Parker-Pope, incidentally, is hawking her own book on the secrets of a good marriage. There are many, many books out there willing to take your $25 to distill some gospel that worked for the author and his clients. The thing is that there is no one formula that works for everyone.

That doesn't stop young people from asking. So here's what has worked in my 14-year marriage: love each other, for starters, but also love being with each other; make time for each other; have dates, especially if there are children in the house; argue; don't harbor harsh feelings; say you are sorry and mean it; be best friends; talk; forgive; know that every relationship has growing pains; be patient; and if, possible, build something together —roll up your sleeves and get dirty, plant a tree and watch it grow, marking your years together.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MAY 9, 2010

A TRIBUTE TO CHILDLESS MOTHERS

It's Mothers Day, and everyone is paying tribute to his or her mother. I've called mine and sent her flowers. I've received cards and gifts from my own step-children. Even my dog, Graycie, penned a card. But here I'd like to pay tribute to all the childless women out there — and there are so many — who have engendered the creative talents in other women, including myself.

Throughout my life, there have been many women who have encouraged me, some of whom had children and others who didn't. They were always older women who seemed to disregard expected behavior, who motivated me to try new things, to look at life in a different way. Some of them behaved oddly, others made me laugh and a few made me question my beliefs about life and the roles of women.  I often wondered what it would have been like had one of these women been my real mother. Would I have appreciated her uniqueness or would I have wanted her to be like all the other mothers?

As a young reporter I remember being assigned to interview an old woman. Well, she was old to me then. She was probably in her late sixties. She'd been a reporter much of her life and in her later years followed city council and governmental affairs as a hobby. I remember entering her house and seeing the neat stacks of books and the newspaper clippings beside her typewriter. I immediately felt intrigued. This woman, though she didn't have a husband or children, had a full life. When she started to detail for me the various publications she wrote for and the various organizations she was involved in, I saw her not an old woman, but as someone who was fully engaged with life. That brief encounter has always inspired me. Often I've thought about that woman and how I would like to spend my later life equally as engaged.

Older women have always been my friends and mentors. They are my role models. Most are artists of one kind or another; many are writers. They are supportive of my work and my life goals. I'm sure most don't even know how much they have inspired me, how much I have looked up to them, tried to emulate them. How often I have grown fond of a woman and then would meet her children who I found unappreciative. These adult children were undeserving to have a mother who approached life differently or who was so accepting of her children’s choices, or so I thought.

During my years with the nuns, there were several who were especially endearing. These women were wise. They asked questions about my own life, but didn't judge. They offered me suggestions when I struggled with my faith. They shared with me stories about their own difficult periods. I was attracted to these women because of their intelligence and the strength of their personalities.

The irony is that often the people who have the greatest impact on our lives are not related to us at all. Sometimes the people who foster the greatest change or who prompt courage in our lives are only with us briefly. They may never know how much they meant to us or how much their faith encouraged our endeavors. So, for all those women —and we all have them in our lives —who have inspired us, take a few minutes this week to thank them for believing in you, for stirring our own creativity, instilling confidence. Their unexpected faith is indeed a true gift because it is not required.

 

MAY 3, 2010

LESSONS OF A LONG LIFE; THE REALITY OF WOMEN'S CHOICES

My husband's favorite photograph is one that my mother had taken when I was in the first-grade. He keeps a worn copy in his wallet, and when anyone asks to see a picture of his wife, he flips open his wallet. For those who don't know my husband, he is several years my senior, so my first-grade picture is a bit of a shock, giving rise to the cliche: cradle robber...or worse.

I suspect the reason my husband keeps that worn picture in his wallet, instead of our wedding photograph, is that he sees what I see when I look at that young girl so full of confidence she hasn't yet earned: hope for the future. I often wonder what she expected life would bring her. She was a precocious young kid who knew exactly what she wanted to be when she grew up: a writer. Problem was she knew this before she even knew the alphabet. No one knows where I got the idea. Perhaps there is a bit of someone else's soul reincarnated in all of us. If that's the case, mine belonged to a journalist/writer.

I bring this up because yesterday was my birthday. It doesn't matter what number. But it's one in which the second number and the first are the same. You do the math. I always get nostalgic around this time. Have I accomplished all that that little girl in the photo dreamed I'd achieved? Have I sold out by having a day job instead of spending my day writing manuscripts? Did I fulfill all the choices I had?

The problem is that young girls of my generation were told we could have it all: a career and a family. We were told we had options. We could choose to work. We could have a career. We could stay home with our children, if that's what we chose. I'm a feminist, so this is no treatise against the trail-blazing women who fought for equal rights, but it is a polemic of sorts on what those women endowed in us and the chasm that exists between those sales pitches and the reality of our lives.

Most women I know cannot choose to stay home with their children. Most women I know are not fulfilled by their jobs. And somehow they are shocked to learn that no matter what they do, no matter how hard or how many hours they work, their jobs do not love them back.

The men I know do not have the same expectations of their jobs. For them, they are jobs, a means to an end. I've rarely ever heard a man talk about his career. God forbid. Men are not raised that way; they are not raised to believe they have choices, that they can choose to stay home with their children. They know from early childhood, they will be expected to work.

And that's what a job is: it's work. Sometimes it's rewarding, and often it is tedious, drudgery. I say this even though I can't imagine doing anything other than writing and editing. But showing up day after day, year after year, gets old. It doesn't feel like the warm and fuzzy career that we were sold as girls. It feels like a job.

I say all this because these are somewhat recent conclusions. And I have made my peace— somewhat— with them. But I constantly encounter younger women who are disappointed and disillusioned that their hard work is not reflected in appreciation from the institutions where they work. I tell these women not to expect their jobs to love them. Work is not a career. It is not something that will hug and hold you and cherish you.

So, you say, what's my point? My point is just that: women need to lighten up on their expectations of themselves. And they need to stop lying to the next generation. They need to be telling their daughters: You need to educate yourself for a lifetime of work. It's not a choice.

APRIL 25, 2010

In the Humor of Spring

It’s raining out at Green Acres. That’s what my husband and I call our place out in the country where we go to get away from the noise and busyness of the city. It’s been raining all weekend, which means that I’ve been freed from my usual spring gardening chores, like planting and mulching and weeding and pruning. Mostly I’ve been stuck in my studio all weekend, writing. That’s not such a bad thing. With the push of Unveiled and all the events surrounding the readings and the publicity, my writing has taken a back seat, to borrow a bad cliché.

A few weeks ago, I decided to go through my new manuscript and chart out how many more chapters I needed before I was “done.” Done is always a state of being since I have a complete manuscript; it’s really the rewriting that I’m engaged in. To my surprise, what I considered the “first half” of the book, turned out to be 339 pages. If a novel manuscript is 400 pages, I’m nearly done. But, the arc of this book, isn’t. I believe it’s a good story, though, and one that will keep people reading for a long while. There’s a lot of my life in this book, a lot of my philosophy. So with all this rain, it feels good to spend an afternoon writing, to soak the story in, to live it for awhile. It feels like a luxury.

There are so many times when I wish this were my life, writing in the country, writing all day without interruptions. It’s a romantic vision of life. Some people are able to achieve it. Others live it in their mind until they are confronted with the hours of being alone that intense writing requires. If you only write in snagged time, bits and pieces stolen from other parts of your life—an hour at lunch, a few minutes in bed, while waiting for your husband to arrive from work—you may not realize what writing alone for hours, days entails. You may not know the agony of looking at a screen for hours when the words just aren’t there.

I’ve been there. I’ve had my days of solitude while I was writing Unveiled. At first it seemed idyllic. But then the days stretched to weeks and then to months. I began to crave the conversations of others, the small interruptions that working in an office entails. I began to make my own interruptions, create my own distractions. It’s hard to concentrate for so long, so intensely. Some would say maintaining that kind of alone intensity is unnatural, that being cloistered in a room by yourself all day sets you up for depression. Too much contemplation and you may want distractions from all that you have to think about.

The truth is I enjoy work. I enjoy the balance of editing, working with others and then retreating into my own corner. It’s just that lately with so much going on, there’s not been so much retreating. And so when I got a lazy Sunday afternoon, the words came pouring out, like the rain outside my studio windows.

So thank you, rain. The gray skies are a bit melancholy, but holing up in my studio writing is what I needed. We all need our times of retreat.

APRIL 17, 2010

SURROUNDED BY NUN-AFICIONADOS

On Saturday night, I got a refresher course in sisterhood. I was signing and selling books at the Royal George Theatre before that evening's performances of Saints & Sinners and Late Nite Catechism.  After her performance, actress Kathleen Puls Andrade let me into her classroom/stage wielding a ruler, a key prop in her one-woman performance.

Turns out Kathleen is putting on a one-woman show called Journey to the Center of the Uterus: Adventures Infertility! (So, apparently, Kathleen doesn’t live out the celibacy part of her stage vows.) Kathleen's play premiered in Chicago last fall and now she's bringing it to Chicago again (details to come.)

Playwright Vicki Quade was also at the theatre Saturday night and kept my husband and me entertained between shows with stories of how she first conceived Late Nite Catechism. Apparently she was asked, along with several friends, to write a play about the saints, but when they got together they mostly ate fudge and swapped stories about growing up Catholic. Vicki quickly saw the comedy in all those anecdotes.

Vicki requires all her actresses who perform in her plays to be or to have been Catholic. She says she instructs them not to play a character they think of as a nun but to channel the nun inside each of them. I thought that was a great line. Perhaps every woman has a bit of nun in her.

APRIL 11, 2010

Let those who have no sins throw the first stone

For the past couple of weeks, news reports have carried various stories of priest pedophilia scandals and how they have reached all the way to the Vatican. First it was Pope Benedict’s 86-year-old brother, Georg Ratzinger, who ran the choir at a school in Germany where allegations have emerged that some of the boys had been physically and sexually abused. Then this past week it was revealed that Pope Benedict had refused to defrock a priest accused of molesting children because he was concerned about the priest’s age at the time — 38 years old — and was concerned about “the good of the universal church.” The priest had been sentenced to three years’ probation for tying up and molesting two young boys in the San Francisco Bay area church rectory.

It seems hard to believe that a Church so insistent on celibacy — so staunchly refusing to give up the 12th century edict that requires celibacy in priests even when the majority of its members would prefer if their priests could marry — could then coddle and protect those who not only violate their vows but do it in such a perverse way. Every time I read about another scandal, I can’t help but think about Sister Margaret Traxler who ran a homeless shelter for women on Chicago's South Side who told me that her life as a rebellious nun began after she reported a priest who had been molesting high school girls at her school and nothing was done.

“I had done what I thought I should do,” she told me. “I thought: You go to the provincial and you told it all,” she laughed cynically. “Now what I would do is tell the state troopers. Who know what it did to those young girls? That changed my attitude towards priests and towards men, towards leadership, failure of leadership.”

Margaret died several years ago, but if she were alive today to see the current sex scandal reaching Rome, she’d say that it was a long time coming. Church leadership needs to explain how they have looked the other way for so long, protecting pedophiles while the innocent were molested.

All this comes at a time when the Vatican has launched an investigation into U.S. women religious communities. Many sisters see this as an effort to contain women’s religious communities, many of whom have supported sisters and women who have been ordained by certain bishops as priests.

Earlier this month, a list of those religious women’s communities that are going to receive an on-site investigation was posted. In Chicago, it is the Benedictine Sisters. Our concerns are with these women.

 

APRIL 4, 2010

The Art of Doing Nothing; The Happiness of Art and Animals

Today is Easter. It's been a beautiful, warm, sunny day outside. For Easter dinner, my husband and I feasted on turkey stuffed with dressing and potatoes and carrots, along with a gravy that has become legendary in my family. Afterwards, we sat outside, basking in the sunlight, drinking wine and playing with our Weimaraner, Graycie, pictured here. Graycie was born last year around Easter time. I suppose we could have called her Easter, but Graycie fits fine. As I enjoyed the rays, I felt guilty for doing nothing. My life is so full of doing, it's hard for me, like a lot of people, to just stop. Sure there's a pile of things that need attention, but for Easter I wanted to take a break and just enjoy, enjoy the warm breezes and the sun and being out in nature.

And for a few minutes, that's what I did.

Later, I pulled out a magazine article I had read previously but had forgotten its findings. Perhaps you remember the piece entitled "What Makes Us Happy." It appeared in the June 2009 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. The piece detailed the 70 years of a longitudinal study of Harvard students begun in 1937. While the writer went on a tangent and focused mostly on psychoanalyzing the director of the study, the findings were basically that achieving happiness is about having close relationships. Beyond that, the factors that influenced happiness and wellness the most were: education, stable marriage, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, some exercise and having a healthy weight.

As I read the article, my husband was snoring soft whistles in the chair beside me. Earlier today he left a small card in the kitchen, wishing me a happy Easter and a happy Spring, a welcome event at our weekend farmhouse where Spring means planting and gardening. It was a small card, no bigger than my palm, but it was full of heart-felt sentiments my husband is so good at writing. Though we are in our 13th year of marriage, it never seems old. I guess I always feel lucky, blessed.

Last night we watched a documentary called "Herb and Dorothy," about an old couple in New York of modest means who have spent their married lives together befriending artists and collecting art. Herb was a postal worker and Dorothy was a reference librarian in the Brooklyn Public Library. Their one-room apartment in Manhattan was piled to the ceiling with pieces of art they had collected over nearly five decades together. It's a charming, wonderful story. Both are hunched over at this point, barely able to walk, but they still hold hands when they amble down the street.

One of the most interesting things in the movie was when Herb described his love or art as similar to his love of animals. Their apartment is swarming with cats and, even amid the art, Herb has giant aquariums full of turtles. People in the documentary questioned what he meant and afterwards my husband and I debated it as well. All of this is circular, as you might have by now realized. Because art is the beauty and passion in life that enriches us, just like our animals, just like our dog, Graycie.

So on this Easter as Graycie is pressing her nose into my fingers as I write this, know that if you are unhappy or sad, it's not about the job or the money or the house. It's about who you love and who loves you back. Sometimes, it's just a smelly old dog who wants to be petted.

MARCH 28, 2010

READING; JULIA KELLER REVIEW IN THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE

We had a great reading yesterday and a nice turnout at Barnes and Noble in Lincoln Park. It was great to see so many old friends. And there were a lot of interesting questions posed. If you didn't catch the Julia Keller's Lit Corner in today's Chicago Tribune Arts section, here's her review/interview about the book.

MARCH 25, 2010

WGN TV INTERVIEW

In case you missed the live broadcast today, check out the video.

MARCH 21, 2010

Remembering Another Era of Readers and Sisters who Made a Difference

It's a week before my reading at Barnes and Noble in Lincoln Park on Saturday, the unofficial launch date of the new edition. I'm somewhat nervous. I've done a couple of media interviews and sent out postcards to two hundred of my author colleagues in Chicago. But who knows who will show up?

The anxiety surrounding a literary reading is much like that before a birthday party. You wonder if anyone will come. My publicist has warned that book readings aren't what they used to be. Few people get out to book stores anymore. It's not like they can't learn about their favorite authors on the Web or even converse with them through email. But attending a reading is an invigorating event. It makes you proud to be an author and proud to be a reader, to be engaged in a larger conversation with hundreds of other people who have discovered the same book.

The readings I did during my first book tour in 2004 were exhilarating experiences. Most were packed with standing room only. On that book tour, I traveled around to many of the cities where I'd spent time with religious sisters. The sisters came with their families. My own friends and family, scattered across the country, showed up. And then there were the new faces, the people who told me their stories between signings. It was really one of the best experiences about publishing a book. For so many years, I had labored all alone, believing that someone would want to read about sisters, even though many of the orders were dying out, that people would be willing to fork over money for a book about religious women.

That said, I hope some of you will catch my interview on WGN on Thurday at 11:35 p.m. or so and maybe a few of you will come out to the reading at 3 p.m. on Saturday at the Barnes & Noble at 1441 W. Webster Ave. in Chicago. The question and answer portion of the reading tends to be quite dynamic and I'm looking forward to meeting some new faces and learning the stories of some new readers.

This week I've received quite a few interesting emails from readers, even one from as far away as Romania. My favorite was from a Benedictine who wrote that she found Unveiled confirming in several aspects. The first, she wrote, was that if you know one nun, you don't know them all, which is so true. Keep your emails coming and if you don't mind me posting, I will.

It was refreshing this week to see the front-page story in the New York Times on Tuesday about Rose Ann Fleming, a 77-year-old nun who is the academic advisor at Xavier, a Jesuit university in Cincinnati, Ohio. Sister Rose takes it upon herself to keep the Xavier men's backetball players on track to graduate. Since she became Xavier's academic advisor in 1985, every men's basketball player who has played as a senior has left with a diploma. It's a great story.

I was saddened to learn that Janice Wedl, 81, a Benedictine sister at the monastery in St. Joseph, Minn., died on Tuesday. Janice was the first Benedictine sister I had ever met. She was running a weekend retreat at the monastery during my first visit in 1998. I'll never forget how I arrived as naive and expectant as a college freshman with all my notions of nuns in long dark habits and then I met Janice in her blue slacks and sensible shoes. The first thing she did was throw her arms around me and laugh. It made me feel at home right away.

Sister Jancie was buried yesterday. The oldest of six children, Janice entered St. Benedict's in 1946. She had been a sister for nearly 64 years. Like most sisters at St. Benedict's, Janice was highly educated. She had a master's degree in Education Administration from Marquette University. Janice served as a teacher, administrator and pastoral minister. I know she will be greatly missed at St. Benedict's Monastery.

MARCH 14, 2010

After a Week at Home; Interview on WGN

It's been a busy week back in Chicago. Re-entry is always tough and this one proved to be just as difficult as other times I've returned from intense experiences in foreign countries. I've spent a lot of time thinking about Haiti, writing about Haiti and talking about Haiti this week. And, apparently, I'm also doing a lot of dreaming about Haiti. My husband tells me that I've begun talking in my sleep, in an agitated voice. The first few days back were the hardest. It's like I had to get all those images and stories out of my system. I feel I've got to keep talking to draw interest back to Haiti.

Yesterday, I was interviewed on WGN radio about my experiences in Haiti. You can hear that interview here. The interview was surreal in that the host, Alex Quigley, and I were talking in the glass WGN studio that faces Michigan Avenue. At the same time as we were talking about dead bodies in Haiti, drunken revelers were hamming it up outside the studio windows. Saturday was the day the city of Chicago celebrated St. Patrick's Day and dyed the Chicago River green. It was a wet and rainy day but that didn't seem to dampen people's spirits as they converged on Michigan Avenue wearing Mardi Gras beads and green outfits.

Alex wanted me to talk about my blog and photos on the Web site I wrote for Chicago Now. You can view those photos at "A Chicagoan in Haiti" blog. It's worth checking out.

This past week there was also a great story about Sister Jane Meyer (in photo above) in The Wall Street Journal. Sister Jane is the principal at St. Agnes Academy in Houston and a Dominican sister for more than 50 years. She agreed to jump out of a plane if her students raised $25,000 by Ash Wednesday. Her students far surpassed that goal. It's a fascinating story. In the same piece, the article reports that in the six weeks since the Haiti earthquake, Americans gave $877 million to Haiti. That outpaces Americans' giving after other international disasters. The Asian tsunami in 2004 generated $597 million in charity.

Yesterday Alex Quigley asked me where people should donate. He said he had given to the Red Cross, but after listening to my stories, he's not sure his donation is making any difference. I understand how he feels. I, too, donated to two major charities before I went to Haiti. Being there doesn't make me think Haitians need the money less. If anything, they need more money. It's just hard to know which charities seem to be making the most progress. Maybe it's just a matter of time before the supplies are dispersed. I'd like to think so.

MARCH 4, 2010

Home, with Stories I Can't Forget

I’ve slept in my own bed two nights since arriving home from Haiti. Minutes after stepping through the door on Tuesday night, I drank cold water, sipped a glass of wine with my husband and took a really long, hot shower. They were simple pleasures, small comforts of life, but aspects that I really missed in Haiti. Looking back now it all seems like a surreal dream, perhaps a nightmare even, where so many people are pleading for help and there’s no easy solution.

I still remember the anger in the eyes of the young man who begged me to give him and his friends money. “We’re starving in this country. You have money. Give it to us.” He wasn’t threatening me per se, but his aggressiveness was threatening. I’d learned this lesson in India a few years ago.  You can’t just whip out your wallet and start handing out dollar bills. There are more people who will line up than you have dollar bills in your wallet.

I felt a similar frustration while walking around the National Soccer Stadium as half a dozen little kids trailed me, clutching at my clothes, while educated, well-meaning men circled above them to ask how they could get funds for the make-shift school they are running at the stadium. Had they talked to anyone at the United Nations or made requests through official channels or charities? That takes too long, they said. “We need supplies now. We need benches and books.”

The problem is that other people need food and shelter. A report released this week criticized the United Nations’ humanitarian efforts, saying the organization lacked coordination with local organizations in delivering aid and establishing security. Walk around Port-au-Prince and you don’t need a report to tell you that: Dead bodies in crowded streets, the mass of residents living under sheets and tarps, children climbing mountains of rubble to gather rocks to sleep on.

On the flight from Port-au-Prince to Miami, I sat next to a Haitian-American business man named Gerald who was leaving the country for the first time since the earthquake. He was going to join his wife and children in San Francisco where he’d sent them to stay with relatives after the disaster. One of his warehouses was destroyed in the earthquake and what supplies he had left he’d sold to the UN. He said he’d barely slept in the last six weeks; he’d been working constantly to try to get supplies into the country. The day before he’d had two cargo containers full of flour stolen at the port. One of his truck drivers was kidnapped and later released after the thieves had stolen his truck and all its contents.

“Things are going to get a lot worse before they get better,” Gerald said. “The Haitian people are not patient. They want everything now. A lot of people are getting very desperate.”

When I asked him why he continued to live in Haiti when as an American he could live anywhere, he said: “This is my home. These are my people.” He plans to return in two weeks to continue helping his country rebuild, he said.

I haven’t yet sorted out what this experience meant. I think for a lot of us we have mixed emotions. We want to believe the country will get better, that somehow all the money pumped into the Red Cross and the Bush/Clinton fund and the United Nations will be able to build a better Haiti. But we see that the needs are so great, and we wonder if they can ever be truly met.

Gerald told me that he does have hope. But it’s hard, he said, when so many people have lost everything, including their families, their homes and, in many cases, their limbs.

“What kind of job will someone with an amputated leg be able to get in Haiti?” he asked.

These are the kinds of questions that gnaw at me. When people ask me how my trip was, they want to hear a nicely packaged story about how well the country is rebuilding. When I tell them the real conditions, I see their eyes glaze over. This is more than they can handle.

“Don’t you feel like you did a good deed by going over there?” my neighbor asked.

“No. I didn’t do anything but listen to stories.”

And now I can’t forget them.

MARCH 1, 2010

Under a Full Moon in Haiti

It’s my last night in Haiti and I’m sitting quietly in my tent, feeling the breeze and admiring a full moon hanging over the mountains. It has been an emotionally exhausting day, the end of an equally exhausting week. I spent the day following Gillian Morantz, of Montreal, Quebec, a young doctor charged with overseeing the unaccompanied minors in the Fond Parisien field hospital, a role she takes seriously.

That day Gillian introduced me to Magana, a 16-year-old girl, whose right leg had been amputated below the knee and whose left leg was also injured, but intact. Magana had been working as a domestic in Port-au-Prince and was washing the dinner dishes when the earthquake struck. When she tried to run out the door, a wall fell on her legs. A water tower on top of the apartment had fallen over and Magana was trapped in a rising pool of water and soon would drown.

Two men heard her crying and were able to pry the cement chunks off her legs. That’s when Magana could see the bones in her legs sticking out. Her legs were bleeding and the water had turned red.

The men carried her only so far. From there, desperate to get away from her apartment building, Magana crawled on her back. The ground was still shaking. When she reached a tree, she prayed: “God, I’m going to stay here until you save me.” Eventually someone took her to the street and flagged down a car that drove her to the hospital. There, someone tied cloths around her legs to stop the bleeding. She recalled at one point early on “white doctors” changed her wounds and gave her an IV. After that, she laid in the hospital for four days without any further attention. Patients who had relatives to advocate for them got help, she said. But Magana was alone.

On the fifth day, she was flown to the Italian hospital ship where part of her right leg was amputated. Eventually she was transported to the field hospital in Fond Parisien where Chris Sullivan, an orthopedic surgeon at the University of Chicago, put a rod in her left leg to heal the broken bones. Her wounds were healing and she was wheeling herself around camp. She’d even celebrated her 16th birthday in camp. But still she had no family, no one to help take care of her.

Gillian wanted to contact Magana’s family, who live in a country village unaffected by the earthquake, and let them know Magana was alive. Magana is the youngest sibling of eight girls and two boys.

But Magana wasn’t interested.

“They aren’t going to come for me,” she told Gillian. “They don’t care about me.”

“But where are you going to live?” Gillian pleaded.

“I’ll live with you,” Magana said.

Gillian turned away to wipe her eyes. “I wasn’t expecting that one,” she said to me.

It’s not an unfamiliar fantasy. I’d had children in the camp ask me if I could take them home. And it’s not just the Haitians who wish to go America. Many of us wish we could take them with us. One of the nurses introduced me to a 7-year-old girl, Samanthina, and her mother, Evana. “If I could get papers for her, I’d take her home now,” the nurse said. The little girl’s mother said she, too, wishes her daughter could go to America. “I’m afraid for her future,” she said.

Even if the country manages to reconstruct, the options for the children of Haiti are limited. As if to underscore that point, a 14-year-old boy named Michelet later than evening told me that when his doctor returns to America, he’s certain he’ll take him with him. Michelet told me he doesn’t know where his parents are: “They didn’t come out of the house after the earthquake,” he said. “I guess you’d say they are missing.”

FEBRUARY 27, 2010

Ground Zero in Port-au-Prince: Dead Bodies and Desperation

I have lost my voice in Haiti. I can barely speak and end up in coughing fits when I’m with patients. One patient told me today she would pray for me to get better. Humbling…

It’s cloudy tonight and at moments it’s spitting rain. The rain makes me worry about the people I met yesterday in Port-au-Prince living in shanties constructed of pieces of metal, scrapes of paneling, pieces of tarp, shards of cardboard. My driver, Juma, and I walked through the tent cities, constructed much like an old Moorish city with narrow pathways and maze-like twists and turns.

I expected people to shy away, particularly at the tent city across from the Presidential Palace, which only weeks ago was featured nightly on CNN and other media outlets. But the bright lights are gone and the people who live there want the world to see how they are living. One after another, they came up to me begging me to take a look at how they were forced to live: in a damp spot on the ground, often nothing but a sheet to separate them from the next person, a space no bigger than a twin bed that they shared with their children and their relatives.

“We need tents!” each one pleaded. I suppose I looked official with my notepad and my camera. But what can I do? It’s so frustrating. It’s hard to believe that the mass of Haiti is homeless and yet there are no tents to be found. We’ve even run out of tents at the Fond Parisien field hospital where I am documenting the work of doctors, nurses and physical therapists from the University of Chicago.

Haitians are concerned that when the rainy season comes they won’t have any protection from the elements. It starts seriously raining in about six weeks. Some people are worried that they will end up wet and sick if they can’t get a tent or pieces of metal to keep out the rain. Little boys near the city were gathering cement bricks from the rubble of the Ministry of Interior Defense and loading them in buckets. They lay these on the ground to make a foundation, and then they lay their clothes or bedding on top to make a bed. A bed of rocks.

One man, Sylva Louis, 47, was selling moonshine he’d made out of various fruits outside his metal shack. Sylva spoke excellent English and he lifted his shirt to show me the breast-to-bellybutton scar where he said he’d been shot. He killed the other guy in self-defense, he said, but it didn’t matter; he was deported in 2007. He said he spent 37 years in the United States, mostly working as a cook in Miami and New York.

“I cooked for all the best restaurants and five star hotels,” he said, listing names I didn’t recognize.

He said his shack at first was just sheets but slowly he’s been adding scraps of metal. “When we saw that the government wasn’t going to do anything, then we knew we had to make our own shelter.”

He had two car batteries that were rigged up like a generator that ran a fan and a radio. Nearby he had a line running to a street light where someone had tapped into the electricity.

When Sylva learned I was from Chicago he asked me to call an old girlfriend he had there. He had her number memorized. He wanted me to let her know he was still alive.

Afterwards the driver took me to the nearby Holiday Inn Plaza so we could get something to eat. He ordered rice and chicken. I wanted nothing with rice. Probably ever. I ordered the hamburger. There’s a scattering of people, perhaps some journalists. Juma, who drove for CNN and CBS after the earthquake, said the room used to be packed with journalists. Barbara Streisand is singing on the television, people are tapping into the hotel wifi and ordering cokes. People outside tell me they are starving.

There’s a fine mist of dust everywhere in downtown Port-au-Prince. It is as if we are walking in a fog, a fog of cement and asbestos.  I imagine it’s something like being at Ground Zero right after the attack on September 11. The air is filmy and thick. By the end of the day, I feel like I’ve inhaled nothing but dust and diesel smog. People walk around wearing masks, some of them medical, many of them rags they’ve twisted around their mouths.

When we first arrived in Port-au-Prince in the morning, Juma took me to the downtown area where most of the devastation occurred. I’d had a brief tour of the area two days earlier. This time, though, we walked the streets, taking in the piles and piles of crumbled and mashed cement, some towering three and four stories. It’s hard to convey in words the impact of such a sight. Gray sewage collected in the streets and the smell was of active decay. Personal items were strewn in the street: someone’s handbag, a shoe.

As we walked, a man came up and grabbed Juma’s arm and said in Creole that they had just found two dead bodies up ahead. He offered to show us. I thought perhaps two bodies had been pulled from the rubble, but soon we came upon UN white jeeps and various military men encircling the bodies of two boys who had been beaten to death. Their pants had been torn down to humiliate them and armies of flies had collected around their multiple wounds.

A Canadian military officer told me that they’d discovered the bodies two hours earlier but they didn’t know what had happened. A Haitian police chimed in: “No one in Haiti sees anything. They are too afraid.”

Somehow I thought that would be the worst thing I would see. But then we went to the National Soccer Stadium where the entire Astroturf is populated with sheet and tarp shanties. Walking into the stadium there is a strong, suffocating order of sewage, and once inside I couldn’t help making the comparison to Hurricane Katrina when so many survivors sought refuge at the stadium, which turned out to be nothing like a refuge. As soon as I stepped down onto the field, half a dozen little kids came up and grabbed my pants, checking my pockets. Despite finding nothing, they held onto me the entire time, petting my arm, seeking attention.

During our foray into the shanty maze, we found entire extended families sitting underneath tarps. Someone would summon us, lift up the tarp to their “home” and there would be half a dozen people or more sitting or lying in the heat. One woman insisted I take a picture of her month-old baby. She was born at the stadium.

When we were about to leave, two boys, one 15 years old and the other 11, came up to me and begged me to take them to the orphanage.

“We have no mother or father. We have no tent.” 

FEBRUARY 25, 2010

A View inside a Tent Hospital

I’m in my tent, hoping it doesn’t blow away tonight with the wind. One side has already partially collapsed. In the hills, a Haitian woman is singing what I believe are gospel songs in a squeaky, high-pitch voiced accompanied by a steel guitar. A preacher cuts in occasionally. Most of the time he yells. I wonder what he is saying, if he is happy we are here. His preaching, amplified nightly for all the neighborhood to hear, goes on for hours. We lay in our tents at night waiting for the quiet.

I just had dinner, prepared by Chef Lucky, a Haitian, who prepares 1,000 meals every day with no refrigeration, and until recently, no electric stoves. Breakfast is usually some kind of grits. I avoid this meal and opt for a granola bar. Lunch, served at 2 p.m. is rice sprinkled with a few beans. Every day. Rice and beans. They mound the plate with rice and I always think there’s no way I’m going to eat all that. But I do. It’s the only hot meal we have. Dinner is usually cereal with warm milk. Everything in Haiti is warm. Tonight dinner was warm pudding.

The truth is I feel a little shallow just mentioning my discomforts here. There’s three patients and their families to a tent. The field hospital has run out of tents. A little boy, 11 years old, hobbled into the triage tent tonight and begged to be allowed to sleep in one of the cots in the post-op. He said there were 11 people sleeping in his tent. Dr. Keegan Checkett grimaced and gave him some suckers and told him there wasn’t anywhere else for him to sleep but his tent. He hobbled away on his crutches, looking as if he were about to cry.

The tents are so hot that most patients lay partially naked during the day to stay cool. Those who are ambulatory — and I say ambulatory instead of walk because most of them are not “walking” but in wheelchairs or on crutches or walkers or even have someone carry them — gather under tarps set up for shade or lay on mattresses on the ground under trees. Everyday the hospital absorbs more patients. A nearby hospital in Jimini, Dominican Republic, is closing and sending its patients here.  It seems like there aren’t enough doctors and nurses, especially nurses.

Today I followed around the physical therapists and nurses from the University of Chicago Medical Center. The temperature in the tents was so hot that Melanie Plumley, RN, a pediatric emergency nurse, was caring for patients outside. She cut off a man’s cast in the space of 24 inches in between two tents.

“There’s never enough people. There’s always something to do. I can’t do enough,” Melanie said.

The physical therapists Catherine Kennedy and Megan McDonald urged patients to exercise their injured body parts, especially those with stumps whose muscles need to be stretched. Some patients’ fingers have curled under and Dr. Chris Sullivan had to stretch them out. It’s painful and they don’t want to do it.

Then there are the sick in the surrounding community who have heard about the clinic and believe it can work magic. People do practice voodoo here and our medicine is a bit like that to them. A woman with a young baby wandered into the triage asking someone to help her baby who was nearly a year old and couldn’t sit up. The physical therapists and doctors told the mother that they had to stop coddling the baby and let her sit up. The woman insisted on getting medicine for the baby. “Why won’t you help my baby?” she demanded. The staff told her that what the baby needed was for her to let her baby sit up and stand on its own. They showed her simple exercises to do with the baby. But the mother left dissatisfied. “They think we can perform magic,” one of the triage doctors said. The baby appeared “delayed” and may have some mental disabilities.

Another woman came in with her baby who had a rash over most of her body. It was highly malnourished and eventually had to be rushed to a hospital in Port-au-Prince where it could be incubated.

I spent the afternoon wandering between tents. Through a Haitian interpreter I interviewed several people who had their arms and limbs amputated. They told harrowing stories of being dragged into the streets and left for days before anyone would pick them up.

One of the saddest cases was a young mother, Louphine Demorcy, 31, who has three children. She told me that she is a vendor and at 5 p.m. she was getting ready to go home and was talking to three friends when suddenly the place they were standing opened up.

She said she called out: “Jesus, Jesus, help me.” She was thrown into the street where a store wall fell onto her arm and another wall fell onto her leg. She said that most of the people around her were dead. A man on the street saw her and pulled her out of the rubble. It wasn’t until the next day that someone found her and took her to the hospital, but during the three days there she never saw a doctor. Eventually, she was transported by an ambulance to the Dominican Republic where a doctor told her that he would have to amputate most of her arm and leg because they were affected.

“I didn’t have a hope after I lost my arm and leg,” she said.  “Then I told myself that most people died and Jesus is going to help me.”

Louphine said she does not feel fortunate to have survived, but she feels that it by the grace of God she is alive.

What is apparent from meeting these people is how much of their emotional wounds will have to be addressed in the future. “This is going to be a stump generation,” Melanie told me. “A generation who don’t have arms, legs, whole limbs, fingers.”

FEBRUARY 24, 2010

A Day in Port-au-Prince

I just returned from a day in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Almost any adjective I would give this devastated city would sound trite and overused at this point. And now I sit here in our field hospital listening to people who have amputated arms and legs sing gospel songs.

This is a country of paradox. I found people living in tents pitched on the street because there wasn’t even room on their property to set up a tarp, and they are afraid of more tremors toppling what’s left onto them. And yet they were going about their life as best they could — playing scrabble on a table set up beside their tent. Tall buildings were turned to rubble while other buildings next door remained untouched.

(I apologize in advance: I’m weak and have a sore throat and flu-like symptoms. So if this post is incoherent, that’s why.)

It is true that as we drove into wealthier neighborhoods, places with older estates not unlike mansions in Kenwood, there were fewer ruins. Entire blocks, neighborhoods were spared.  Then a turn down the street revealed a block of rubble, residents living under tarps strung up in the street.

I tagged along with the director of the University of Chicago’s mission, Christian Theodosius, MD, MPH. The purpose of our visit wasn’t to ogle the destruction but to seek approval from the Haiti Health Minister for the Medical Center’s application for a $5 million grant from the United Nations that would keep our field hospital in Fond Parisien running for a year. We just learned that we tentatively have been approved.

The field hospital is about 15 miles outside of Port-au-Prince and is the largest field hospital in all of Haiti. It is a unique collaboration between Harvard University, the University of Chicago and other medical institutions and some NGOs, like Operation Smile. After much waiting outside what could only be called a stone castle built into the hillside — with homeless Haitians living in tents on the front lawn — we were granted a meeting with the attaché to the minister who gave us his conditional approval.

Christian was ecstatic, but our high spirits were tempered when we drove through the most devastated areas, including the downtown where the Presidential Palace —essentially the equivalent of the U.S. White House — was toppled by the earthquake and a settlement of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of tarp shanties and makeshift tents sprouted up on the grass outside the Palace. It would be the equivalent of a tent city on our National Mall. The Supreme Court, a towering structure architecturally similar to our Supreme Court, also had imploded. Still across from the demolished Presidential Palace and in front of his shack home, a child was flying a “kite” made out of a garbage bag, sticks and scrap string.

 

What I didn’t see much of was physically injured people. A few Haitians hobbled around on crutches, but there was nothing like the number of amputees or survivors with external fixators like we have in our field hospital.  Amazingly, our patients maneuver their wheelchairs over gravel to get to the bathroom. Even children with complicated pins and metal rods coming out of their legs and arms saunter through the dirt and dead grass on crutches and walkers.

The most surprising finding was how “normal” some parts of the city seemed to be operating. Venders set up their wares on the street like any other day — offering aavegetables, water, live chickens, car parts — next to piles of rubble on the street. Perhaps the most vivid image today was a man whose barber shop was completely filled with gravel, yet he was digging it out, one shovel at a time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

Finally, in Haiti

I'm writing from a small tent in Haiti near the border of the Dominican Republic. Our team of nine from the University of Chicago Medical Center left Santo Domingo this morning a little before 10 a.m. in a small bus carrying 20 bags of medical supplies. Two hours later, we were stopped at the town of Jaquimeyes, about two hours from the border of Haiti. Villagers had lain tree limbs over the road and set them on fire. Little boys on scooters were tooling around setting off firecrackers and a long line of traffic came to a standstill, unable to pass. Apparently the entire town had issued the strike in hopes that by interrupting traffic on a major road to Haiti so that they could get the attention of the government to fix their road.

When our mission leader, Chrissy Babcock, MD, negotiated with some of the strike leaders, they seemed accommodating, but then other drivers were angry that we seemed to were being given preferential treatment. At one point some boys offered to take us on a back road around town, but our driver abandoned that plan almost immediately feeling unsure where the boys might take us.

After an hour of waiting and much back and forth, our bus turned around and we drove the back roads, which were rough and unpaved in many places, until we were able to get back on the main path. We passed through the border about 5 p.m. and eventually arrived at the Love a Child orphanage in Fond Parisien. The founders of the orphanage have been at the camp since 1971. It is an evangelical Christian mission. The owners were kind enough to move their school of 600 so that the field hospital could be set up on their property.

The tents from the crew we are replacing were missing, so Babcock and assistant camp leader Christian Theodosius, MD, MPH, had to have a crew of camp workers set up four more tents for us. After we were finally set up in our tents, we got our first lesson in how to eat an MRE (Meals Ready to Eat). They come in pouches with a packet that when you add water heats up the main meal in tinfoil. My meal was chicken and dumplings and I have to say it wasn’t bad. Others had enchiladas and pasta. We ate in the dark, sitting on the ground or on red buckets that we were given to wash in.

Divided in nine sections, the tent hospital is organized so that the most vulnerable patients are closest to the main area of camp. Patients walk with walkers or wheelchairs over course and dry ground. There’s a triage where several pregnant patients are tonight.

The area is really stunningly beautiful. The forested mountains surround us and a lake is nearby. When we passed the border into Haiti, water from the lake lapped at the road. Apparently it has been rising in recent years and is slowly eroding everything in its path. Soon there will be no more border crossing at Jimini.

At the camp, new bathrooms have been set up to segregate the men from the women. There are still no doors on the bathroom. In fear of the rats, I’ve surrounded the interior of our tent with moth balls. My tent buddy is Karen Arndt, RN, has worked at the Medical Center for nearly 24 years, mostly on the helicopter transport teams. She’s a real trooper. We tied up our food to the roof so the rats and the ants can’t get to them.

FEBRUARY 20, 2010

GOING TO HAITI!

On Wednesday afternoon, I finally got the word that the University of Chicago Medical Center, where I work, was definitely sending a team to Haiti this weekend. It's been a scramble, but I got my shots, am taking my anti-malaria pills and am about to get on a plane. It will take two days to arrive in Fond Parisien where our medical team has set up a tent hospital along with some other U.S. teaching hospitals.

I got to say, I'm a little nervous.

Sure, I've traveled a great deal in my life — Europe, Eastern Europe, Africa, Russia, Turkey, Mongolia, Siberia, China, India — but Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. The stories I'm hearing from those who have come back have been inspiring on one level and frightening on another. One of our pharmacists who just returned from setting up the first pharmacist in Haiti at the tent hospital told me to be careful of the rats at night scurrying around the tents. I'm told to take fly paper to attract the hordes of mosquitoes and flies. They say there are bugs as big as your hand...I'm also told to not expect to take a shower while I'm there and to get over the need for any privacy since there's no such thing as a real bathroom. I'm also told I should pack some alcohol— it makes the nights go easier.

Despite those anxieties, which compared to the Haititans' tragedies seems petty actually, I'm very excited about going and documenting what our doctors and nurses are doing in Haiti. This is really important work and at time when medical care is crucial as Haiti begins its wet season when malaria is the most dangerous.

So, I hope you'll follow my journey here and the journeys of the Haitian people whom I encounter. I also plan to post extensive photos at my Chicago Now blog site. My blog is called "A Chicagoan in Haiti."

FEBRUARY 13, 2010

New Edition Arrives!

This week I received my early copy of Unveiled, the new second edition with the new cover. It looks beautiful!

(The new edition is in the center of the photo and the hardcover is on the left and the paperback is on the right).

I think the cover conveys a more modern image of nuns as women. The designer did a wonderful job as did my editor at Penguin, Denise Silvestro, in selecting review quotes and blurbs. In this time of uncertainty in the publishing industry, I’m really grateful that my book still lives and that there are so many readers curious about the hidden life.

Someone asked me this week how many years I had worked on the book and I was stunned to realize that I’m going into my 13th year since I began my initial research. As the first chapter of Unveiled reveals, I was looking forward to a St. Patrick’s Day party at the house of my good friend Margaret Nelson, a woman who holds dual passports from Ireland and the United States, when a sister from St. Benedict’s in Joseph, Minnesota called me and asked if I’d like to join them for the weekend.

That was March 17, 1998.

And here I am 12 years later still talking and writing about sisters and how much they have affected my life. It’s been a wonderful journey. I’m looking forward to celebrating the new edition launch and soon I’ll be posting reading dates around Chicago where I hope to see some of you. And if you have an idea for an event, or if your book group would like to have me come talk, please send me an email. And don’t forget the book goes on sale March 2!

FEBRUARY 7, 2010

Super Bowl Sunday: Nuns pick winners

It’s that time of the year when football fans who don’t have much faith in anything — let alone religion — turn to nuns who have a propensity to pick winners. In Chicago, we have our own local celebrity nun, Sister Jean Kenny, also called the “Psychic Nun,” who every year picks the winner of football’s biggest game. This year, Sister Jean, a former arts and gym teacher at a now-closed elementary school on the Northwest Side, is predicting a Colts win over the Saints, 31 to 22.

Sister Jean is a media darling and has appeared on CNN, as well as, Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien. What sets Sister Jean apart is that she issues her prediction in rhyme and verse. She also has correctly predicted the winner of the Super Bowl 18 times in the last 24 years. A Providence Sister from the Sisters of Providence of Saint Mary-of-the-Woods in Indiana, Kenny is normally with the saints, she says. The foundress of her order, St. Mother Theodora Guerin, was the eighth American saint.  But this year, Sister Kenny writes in her poem that “the saddened Saints fall from grace and are sore and lame.”

Sister Kenny’s tradition of picking the Super Bowl winners started in 1986 when the Bears were playing. Sister Kenny entered a poem-writing contest for a Chicago radio station. Then she wrote a poem about Bears’ player William “The Refrigerator” Perry that made her one of the contest winners.

This year’s poem is entitled  “Manning’s Miami Masterpiece.”

Welcome back fans to the Sunshine State,
see the galloping Colts sprint out of the gate;
Sean Payton’s “Who Dat” team is dealt their bridesmaid fate,
while the BLUE Dat
winners go on to celebrate.

The penalty prone Saints are confused and slow,
Drew Brees experiences a knock-out blow.
Gentleman Jim Irsay’s team is focused and ready to go.
Coach Caldwell’s game plan unfolds well at the NFL’s biggest show.

Freeney shows “Hoosier Hospitality” as he inflicts some pain.
The saddened Saints fall from grace and are sore and lame.
They played hard but could not live up to their name.
The Colts Stampede In Miami again and win the big game!

 

Sister Kenny isn’t the only nun who predicts the winners. Sister Martha Carpenter, a die-hard Green Bay Packers fan, also predicts the big game winners. Sister Martha runs St. Peter’s Indian Mission School south of Phoenix, Arizona (Chapter Nine of Unveiled) and is frequently featured on the Fox affiliate in Phoenix predicting the winners of various games.

Sister Martha’s office is covered with Green Bay Packer and Phoenix Cardinals pennants, decals and signed photographs of football players. Football is not a matter of life and death: It’s much more important, touted a bumper sticker tacked to her wall.
“I’m a born cheese head, but a born-again Cardinals fan,” Martha told me as she placed her Packers cheese wedge over her veil.

Martha, whose conversations are peppered with arcane sports dates and history, grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin, within walking distance of Lambeau Field. Her mother’s three brothers played for the Packers, an NFL record, Martha proudly noted.

A Franciscan Sister of Christian Charity, Martha’s order is based in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. They are an order composed of teachers who run Catholic schools in the northern Midwest and the Southwest. Martha has spent her entire teaching career on Indian missions in Wisconsin and Arizona.

Her work at the desert school attracted Cardinal owner Bill Bidwill who has donated much time and money to the school. Martha attends games with Bidwill and has led prayers for a few team events. At one point, her sports dedication garnered the attention of a Fox network producer who asked Martha to predict the winners of several football games one weekend. When she got most of them right, the producer offered her a full-time gig, but Martha declined.

Still, nearly every Super Bowl Sister Martha is asked to make a prediction. Last year, she erroneously predicted the Cardinals would win. Let’s hope Sister Jean has better luck this year.

 

 

JANUARY 31, 2010

Peace Corps, Sisters' Corps: Engaging in Social Justice in our Everyday Lives is Tough

This week I volunteered to go to Haiti. Several doctors and nurses from my hospital were going and I offered to accompany them and document, in words and pictures, their care of injured Haitians. So far, they haven’t taken me up on my offer. It’s too dangerous, they said. Having worked as a journalist for two decades — a job that often placed me in harm’s way covering prisoners, gangs, prostitutes, serial murderers — I found their answer a bit conservative.

Since leaving daily journalism exactly two years ago, I’ve struggled with feeling that my daily work isn’t exactly fulfilling a higher good. True, as an editor and writer, I’m trumpeting scientific and medical breakthroughs that save lives, but those efforts pale in comparison to the doctors who are actually saving the lives. The stories I write and edit these days are longer and more complex than just about anything I did at the newspaper. That’s one of the drawbacks of daily journalism: It has to be short, to the point and often simplistic.

I don’t miss much about newspapers these days. The stories are even shorter and most of the ink goes to covering prosaic politics and the lives of celebrities. What I do miss about my former ink-stained days is the social justice component that working at a daily newspaper offered.  Much of what I did as a reporter was uncovering stories of people wronged and needing a champion for their cause. I admit I’m a sucker for the underdog.

This week when I thought about going to Haiti, it reawakened that activism drive within me. I was excited by the prospect of being in the thick of helping people, being a witness to lives changed. The truth is it’s hard to feel that every day we’re making the world a better place, helping people who don’t have advocates, who don’t have power. It’s the aspect that’s hardest to achieve in our daily lives.

My assistant editor, a young woman who has traveled throughout many third world countries, told me she often feels she should apologize for having joined the Peace Corps. People tell her she was naïve for having taken off a couple of years to go hang out in poor countries. I was stunned that anyone would make her feel anything but proud for having responded to the needs of others.

I never joined the Peace Corps. I always toyed with the idea. I had a husband and kids. In a way, I felt traveling the country and hanging out with sisters who were active in caring for the poor, homeless, the undocumented, taught me the value of giving, taught me the deep rewards for having lived among those who don’t have so much. When you are in constant contact with people who have so little, who don’t know how they are going to eat or where they are going to sleep, it puts your own meager troubles in perspective.

That's how Lupe made me feel. I'd only just arrived at the Franciscan Sisters' birthing clinic on the border of Texas and Mexico, when the sisters paired me up with Lupe. She didn't speak English and I didn't speak Spanish. But I held her hand for nearly 24 hours until she bore her seventh child. Knowing Lupe made me feel humble. She lived in a shack that leaked when it rained. She had no running water or toilet. But she survived. Somehow, I had far fewer needs when I was hanging out with the sisters than I do now and I make a lot more money now.

I miss those adventures in my normal life. I miss seeing and experiencing all the ministries of the sisters, even if they were simply protesting or delivering bread or holding the hand of a young woman giving birth. Nuns have a rich and vibrant life and I feel fortunate for having lived vicariously through them, if only for a few years. In a way, I was in the Sisters Corps.

JANUARY 24, 2010

Wanted: Seven women, between the ages of 20 and 40 who want to spend the rest of their lives at church camp — or something like it.

Today a unique monastery set in innercity Minneapolis is launching a campaign to double its size. With seven sisters, the monastery wants to attract seven more sisters in the next three years. The women are specifically targeting young women between the ages of 20 and 40 years old. This monastery has garnered a great deal of outside interest over the years as it experimented with various kind of monastic commitments, including allowing married couples and single men and women to live among the sisters but without taking the same vows.

This time, though, the sisters are looking for women who want to sign up for the rest of their lives.

The Visitation Monastery (Chapter Two of Unveiled) has always been one of my favorite places. Their monastery feels a lot like church camp to me: lots of praying and singing, informal meals, group activities, trips, impromptu get-togethers, assorted people dropping by, ice cream and sprinklers out back in the summer and late-night giggling. Though the sisters are contemplative and place a high value on prayer, they live in two old houses in a poor section of town and intertwine their lives with those of the community.

When they first moved in twenty years ago, the Visitation Sisters thought they would simply be "a presence" in the midst of the chaotic atmosphere of an underserved part of town. But the sisters quickly learned that weaving their lives with their neighbors would require more. A drug dealer was shot dead outside their back stairs and Sister Katherine Mullin held the man in her arms during his last few minutes on earth. Over the past two decades, the sisters have become an integral part of the neighborhood, hosting play times for kids and taking them to camp, providing counseling to adults and becoming advocates for those who often don't have a voice.

"Our ministry of presence on the North Side is boundless," said Sister Katherine (shown in the photo above with some of the neighborhood kids.) "We want to expand our monastery so more sisters can be there for our neighbors."

One night while I stayed with Visitation sisters, Sister Katherine and I sat up late drinking beer and eating popcorn. Yeah, even sisters drink beer. That's what I thought was so wonderful about these sisters. They might be singing and praying at all hours of the day and anyone could walk in and join them.

So, today, the feast day of the Visitation Order founder St. Francis de Sales, the sisters kick off their campaign. As part of that outreach, the sisters have created a new Web site. They plan to target churches and young adult groups. They'll host discernment evenings to help women figure out if their special kind of life is of interest. The sisters also say they'll be making a public relations push, using advertising and blogging and social media. Like I said, this is a group of women with modern ideas.

Check out their Web site at www.visitationmonasteryminneapolis.org and by all means, if you know a young woman who hasn't quite found the right community, tell her about these sisters. If I wasn't married, this might be the place I'd join...

JANUARY 16, 2010

What would you do if you’d worked 50 years and then realized the culmination of your cause wasn’t going to happen in your lifetime? Like most people, you’d probably give up or, at the very least, become discouraged.

But Sister Linda Kulzer, a Benedictine from St. Joseph, Minnesota, refuses to quit. At 80 years old, she has been a witness for nearly half a century to the women’s movement within the Catholic Church, specifically the push to ordain women as priests.

“I was in my early thirties when Vatican II (1962 – 1965) took place,” she said. “Almost right away we saw the great strides that were being made by women in the church — being lectors and Eucharistic ministers. Occasionally women were being asked to preach. Young girls were able to be altar servers. We began to believe that ordination for women was not far off.”

On Thanksgiving, 1975, Sister Linda and 1,200 other sisters and several bishops gathered in Detroit for the first Women’s Ordination Conference. About 125 women indicated they wanted to become priests. When she returned home, a priest from the nearby Abbey inquired about the conference and when Linda explained what had happened, he seemed impressed. Then he asked her when she thought the Church would allow women to be ordained. “I told him by 1990.”

Well, it’s 20 years later and Sister Linda is still waiting.

There have been multiple setbacks along the way; the biggest was in 1994 when a papal edict forbade Catholics from even discussing women’s ordination.

“Can you imagine telling the people of God that they are forbidden to even discuss a matter of doctrine?” Sister Linda said. “This order was impossible to obey — it was like asking a person to stop thinking.”

Gradually it began to dawn on Sister Linda and others that there was little likelihood that the Catholic hierarchy or the Pope had any intention of ordaining women. That’s when women decided they would have to ordain themselves, without authorization from the Church. On June 29, 2002, seven women were ordained by a bishop from Argentina on the banks of Danube River. Within weeks, all seven women were excommunicated by the Church.

Since then at least 10 more ordination ceremonies have taken place. At least 25 women from the U.S. and Canada have been ordained as priests and 12 to 14 have been ordained as deacons. None of these women have been excommunicated. Sister Linda and others see this as real progress.

You might wonder why ordaining women is so important. I think you have to realize that many Protestant churches allow — albeit encourage — women to be ordained. The Orthodox Church has always allowed married priests to be ordained. In this day and age, it just seems sexist to insist that men lead. There’s a huge priest shortage and 65 percent of the laity say they would like to see women become priests (something like 75 percent believe priests should be allowed to marry.)

When people try to justify institutionalized prejudice against women under the auspices of “religion,” I always argue that if church law declared only a white man could be ordained, would there be any argument that the rule was obviously passed during a time of certain cultural oppression and shouldn’t be upheld?

In 2006, Sister Linda attended an ordination of women. “It was an unusually profound experience for me,” she said. When she saw a woman she knew standing in full chasuble and priestly robes begin the Mass, Sister Linda began to weep.

“I had likely attended at least 18,000 Masses in my lifetime,” Sister Linda said. “Every one of those 18,000 Masses in the past was presided over by a man.”

I always thought it strange after spending days in a monastery without seeing a man to then walk into the chapel and have a man presiding at the altar. It seemed so unfair that the sisters had managed to form a community all of their own, outside the Church, supporting themselves, and yet they still were required to have a man come in to lead Mass, the most important ritual of their spiritual lives.

Sister Linda says she is heartened by these recent rebel ordinations. I’m inspired by Sister’s Linda’s tenacity. I don’t think it’s likely that the Catholic Church will reverse course soon. But these women are doing what the early female saints did: listening to their faith, even at great cost.

JANUARY 10, 2010

I was saddened this week when I learned that a former colleague of mine and another colleague of my husband's were both laid off at newspapers in Minnesota. It’s a tough time for everyone, especially those in the media. Over the last two years, I've watched many talented journalists laid off from jobs in which they treated more like a vocation. Sadly, it’s the tragedies of others that often remind us how grateful we are of our own circumstances.

At the same time, some good news has come out of a monastery in Minnesota. I heard from one of my dear Benedictine friends this week, a sister who is eighty years old and still passionate about her beliefs. An author, the sister is active in the movement to ordain women in the Catholic Church. She sent me a talk she gave recently about the modern movement to ordain women priests in the Church. (Perhaps in a later blog, with her permission, I can talk more in-depth about her convictions.) She has been active in the Women's Ordination Conference since its inception in 1974, and yet she hasn't given up, despite the strong papal reaction. (In 1994, a papal edict forbade Catholics from discussing women's ordination.) My friend's steadfast belief and determination inspires me. She's truly a gutsy woman and we could all learn a great deal from women like her who are willling to stake everything on their beliefs.

Speaking of strong women, I heard from a couple of HBO documentary filmmakers who are searching for young women currently discerning whether they should become sisters. There's something compelling about religious life when contemporary media are intrigued by mysteries of the call. These young filmmakers — one whose own mother was a nun — are determined to show the interior struggle that a woman must go through before she commits to an order. If you know of such a woman or an order that is attracting such young women — I've mentioned several in my book including the Franciscan Sisters of the Martyrs of St. George in Alton, Illinois —feel free to send me an email.

This week we've had two feet of snow at the farmhouse. Greg and I arrived Saturday morning to a driveway that was up to our waists in snow. I personally find the snow incredibly beautiful, especially the quiet as it blankets the woods and the ground. It's truly breath-taking.

 

JANUARY 2, 2010

It's the winter's first major snow storm at our farmhouse in Indiana. We already have about a foot of snow and meteorologists have promised another. The snow is blowing sideways and I'm snuggled up in my studio. A roaring fire is burning in the wood stove and snow is blowing around outside.

I find that this is a good time of year to retreat and consider the year past and the year ahead, what I hope to achieve and how I failed to succeed at certain goals in the previous year. My resolutions are not rules, per se, but I view them as guidelines as to what I hope to accomplish in the new year. Some resolutions appear every year — exercise more, read more books, write more — but sometimes it's just a formal way of reminding myself what my life's mission statement is for the coming year.

The nuns call this discernment, a period when a person seriously reflects on a decision, praying and meditating about that decision before committing. Others might simply call it a time of reflection. Whatever you call it, I hope you make space to listen to your inner voices that tell you what's most important. And I wish you all success and happiness in this new year.

DECEMBER 22, 2009

Welcome to my new blog at nunsunveiled.com. I imagine this space as a vehicle for me to gather my thoughts about writing, religion, women’s issues and larger philosophical questions. This is not a blog limited to a discussion about nuns or sisters or religious women, but I’m hoping to use those subjects as jumping off points for further discussions and ruminations. Suffice it to say, if you are interested in the book Unveiled and the topics explored within — feminism, women’s religious orders, the search for a meaningful life, community, faith, peace, fighting for social justices, writing, meditation, having a voice, etc. — then you should be interested in the topics I explore here.

For starters, let me explain why we have revamped the Unveiled Web site. After years of continued interest in the book, the publisher, Berkley at Penguin/Putnam, decided to reissue the book in a new format this coming spring. Over the years, interest in nuns has come from varying and disparate audiences and there seems to be no shortage of interest from the media, either. Just this fall, I have been contacted by writers and producers from National Public Radio and the Wall Street Journal and film makers who routinely produces documentaries/movies for HBO.

I know what it’s like to be in those writers and producers shoes. When I first became interested in learning more and writing about religious sisters, I scoured libraries and the Internet for books that would help my research about contemporary religious women. I found virtually none. Most were historical texts. There were a few from established authors, but those were also historical in nature and usually only delved into the lives of one order. I was interested in the vast dichotomy of the orders I was beginning to experience.

That’s why, ten years after I first began my pursuit into women’s religious orders, Unveiled remains a relevant and informative narrative about today’s Catholic nuns and sisters. The research spanned more than five years and included interviews with more than 300 sisters from 50 different religious orders. I continue to hear from many of the women in the book. Some have died, others have chosen not to remain in a religious order, most continue to their lives just as committed as when I first interviewed them. This blog, perhaps, can update and supplement the stories and narratives contained in the book.

For now, I’m hard at work writing a novel that has nothing to do with religious sisters. But those topics that inspired me to travel inside the unknown territories of religious communities still inspire me to think about all the mentioned issues. I hope to continue to explore those topics here and I hope you’ll join me. Feel free to send me messages at cheryl@nunsunveiled.com or offer topics of discussion. With your permission, I’ll post those who care to share their own views.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

- Cheryl