Time in a Bottle

The further I advance into my own Middle Ages, the more covetous I become of other people's youth. Perhaps worse, I am more frequently assailed by thoughts that begin with if only or what if?  Lately I've been asking people, "If you could go back to some previous point in your life, knowing what you know now, what would you do?" Answers vary. Some want to go back to handle their parents' investments. Others want to give former teachers a piece of their minds or smarten up about first marriages. Some say they are perfectly happy with the life they live now--I am particularly suspicious them-- and many would eat right instead of not, or learn an instrument, or take back words they wish unsaid.

So many options. According to Ambrose Bierce, a day is "a period of twenty-four hours, mostly misspent." Surely everyone must wonder how events might have changed. Perhaps even Mother Teresa speculated: what if I had smiled when that boy winked at me, instead of turning away? Take any memory that has stayed with you and ask, what would I change if I could? Open the forbidden door? Listen to the whispered conversation? Ignore the ravenous beast?

And yet. A lifetime of reading science fiction has taught me that we change the past at our peril. We have no idea of the tangential consequences our actions and inactions give rise to. (Just suppose I had had children instead of dogs!) One certainly doesn't want to interfere with the space-time continuum.

I am always the first to preach (and have done so here) that the best course, the only course, is living in the moment, that the past is gone and the future is a distant fiction. Easy enough to say when we're not looking in the mirror or a photo album.

Some years ago, my sister used to amuse herself by asking her twelve-year-old daughter and her friends how much they would sell a year of their youth for. She learned that for under a thousand dollars any one of the girls would have handed over her resilient energy and flexible joints. It is a very good thing -- for those girls at least-- that my sister wasn't a witch. They'd have advanced another year toward the horizon, my sister would be younger than me, and I would be waiting in line at the ATM.

Our bodies and minds betray us, giving rise to such speculation as I've been indulging. I used to think that if I didn't use my body it would stay nice for later. Not so, not so. Words escape me and my joints crackle like static. I adjust the volume in opposite ways than in the past. I still don't know how to ride a bike. And also, I am nearing a haunting convergence: this is the year I will out-live my mother. As Donald Hall writes in "The Day I Was Older":

…Now I have waked

More mornings to frost whitening the grass

Read the newspaper more times, and stood more times,

My hand on the doorknob without opening the door.

Whatever my complaints, this old road isn't really so bad or even lonely. Following in her steps, I know some of the things my mother knew but wasn't here to tell me. The company along the way is often convivial and always varied. And lovely time sloshes in a friendly bottle which we pass from mouth to mouth.

Remembering the Sunshine

In these blue days of May it feels as if the world's a friend, the universe is kind and nothing can go amiss. History teaches us otherwise. The Hindenburg exploded into our collective visual memories on May 6, 1937. The Lusitania sank off the coast of Ireland on May 7, 1915. Forty years ago today, May 13, 1972, the last bodies from the Sunshine Mine disaster in North Idaho, were recovered and made their way back into the springtime air. The fire in the Big Sunshine affected everyone in the Silver Valley in some way or another. In my family, we saw our father cry for the first and only time. We heard our mother say, "I swear, I'll never pray again."

No one thinks about a fire in a hard rock mine. That happens with coal, not silver. And yet, there's a lot of timber in a mine, and in the Sunshine, polyurethane bulkheads that, when ignited, spewed deadly carbon monoxide fumes. Aided by the ventilation system, it filled the mine--a mile deep with over 100 miles of tunnels -- and took 91 lives. These were fathers, sons and brothers of people I knew. This was the first time the word disaster meant anything to me.

Disaster. From the Latin, astrum, star. Prefix dis- apart from. Unfavorable to one's stars. Indeed. 

 People gathered at the mine, Red Cross workers and medical providers at the ready, miners from other companies to see if they could volunteer for the rescue, friends, curiosity seekers, and of course the families who waited and waited.. No one knew that all but two were already dead below. Reading the account of the mine disaster, Gregg Olsen's finely detailed The Deep Dark: Disaster and Redemption in America's Richest Silver Mine, I finally learned what happened after the fire was discovered, and of the many heroes who stayed or went back into the mine to help others to safety.

I have a permanent link with this tragedy, not because I lost anyone, but because my father was the mine manager. My father, the mild-mannered, stamp collector, a good guy who prayed on his knees every night. He wasn't there that day, but attending the annual stockholder's meeting being held forty miles over the mountains in Coeur d'Alene. By the time anyone realized how bad it was, by the time they reached him, it was all over underground. But the days of not knowing went on for everyone. The hoists and elevators full of the dead were stranded between the deep dark and the open air for days before anyone knew that hope was a wasted emotion.

And what caused the fire? A spark from an acetylene torch? A smoker's match? Arson? Here's a story:

Late one night, after midnight, about a month after the fire, our doorbell rang. We lived out by the mine, far from town. Everyone knew the mine manager's house, in those still-feudal days it was the biggest one for miles. I heard my parents go down the stairs, and saw from my window the sudden glow as the porch light flipped on. My brother had been awakened, too, and he and I sat at the top of the stairs in the darkness listening to the low conversation. The visitor was one of the Sunshine widows. She'd been drinking and said she had something she needed to tell.

She said her husband and another miner had decided to make a device to start a small fire underground. They'd experimented for weeks in the basement, and were ready to go on May 2 as they had planned. Just a little embarrassing smoke for the stockholder's meeting. She said survivors told her that her husband had escaped, but when he saw that his actions had gone way too far, he went back down to try to help, and didn't come back.

 The next day my father called the district attorney, told him the story, and then he let it go. It was his nature. But that night has haunted me ever since. It's with me now as I write. The investigation into the fire at the Sunshine determined the cause to be spontaneous combustion, an unsatisfying verdict implying that no one was responsible. It just happened. So it goes. The report devotes one line to the arson theory: There has been no substantial evidence provided that leads us to believe the fire was deliberately started.

The woman was vilified: a drunk and possibly a schizophrenic. Unreliable. That happens to a lot of whistle blowers, especially women. If I'd been through that, I'd be a drunk schizophrenic, too. But I can still recall the woman's voice, nervous, but full of conviction. It would have taken a lot of a courage in those days, regardless of blood alcohol level, for a woman to walk up to our big house and ring the bell. And I know that whenever I think back to that time, I will always be the girl sitting in the dark at the top of the stairs. Listening in the night to a chilling story that unraveled a mystery, and was then ignored.

Karma Is an Echo

"Deserted Farm" by David Schwab

Let me tell you a story. 

Years ago, while listening to past life regression tape, I found myself in another body: a heavy, morose farm woman. I wore long skirts and my dull hair was pulled back in a loose bun. It was a hot day and the blue sky was big bowl overhead. The grain was yellow, the farm house a weathered gray. I saw myself walk toward the barn and  into its cool darkness. A shaft of light flowed in from the upper window and lazy sun motes drifted through the funnel of golden air. I stepped in further, behind ruffled tails of the whinnying horses. I startled one, there in the darkness. It kicked back, caving my head, and I died.

That's all I remembered of that life. The tape prompted me to identify where the scene took place: Kansas. I didn't know the year, but the clothing looked like about 1890. Why was this life important? It taught me that I had to ask for more, do more with my life, not just let it happen. Interesting, but not fascinating. I was not Cleopatra or Catherine the Great.

Later that same year, I moved back to the West Coast from New Hampshire after a four year stint in graduate school. While I'd been away, younger members of the family had grown up and didn't know me. Except for one: my 8-year-old niece Micah, who from the time we re-encountered one another began to call me "step-mother." When I asked her why, she said, "Well, you're my real mother, but if I called you 'mom', my mom now would get hurt."

"What happened to me?" I asked.

"A horse kicked you in the head and you died," she told me.

True story.

I have believed in rebirth ever since I could talk and begged my mother to take me to see my "other family," my "other sisters" who lived in the woods. Eventually, whatever memories I had faded as I grew into more mundane beliefs. Still, from time to time, a young relative would reel me back with a shivery statement: "When's grandma going to come back and be a baby again?" "I was a pirate with long red hair. I was killed in a battle, but not by a cannon ball. The splinters from the deck killed me." "A long time ago, I used to be a diamond girl."

Yes, I believe in rebirth. It doesn't matter if it's true or not. What matters is that it helps me live my life. We come back here to grow and to learn. We remember past lessons in the form of talents and disabilities, immediate attractions and intuitive distrust. If we "owe" someone from the past--or if they owe us--we come back in such a way that our paths will cross and we can balance the scales through forgiveness and compassion.

These beliefs helped me this week when I received an email that hurt my feelings, sent by someone I haven't seen in almost twenty years. Even though I believed I had brought that chapter to a close, done my forgiving and wished this person well in every way, I snapped into immediate sorrow -- and rage. The rudeness, the childishness, the pomposity! I craved revenge. I wanted to send a response that would make me feel better by blackening his name to the "all" who had been copied. Where was my spiritual growth now?

Earth is the place souls go to school and the curriculum grows out of karma, the spiritual law of cause and effect. We never know when we're going to get a pop quiz on all those areas we thought we'd mastered. Deepak Chopra calls karma, "...an echo from the past."  If the forgiveness is incomplete, as mine must have been, it keeps on echoing. It's an ache, a tremor, a lingering scent.

Newton's Third Law of Motion teaches us that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. This is as true for spirit as it is for motion. If I respond with anger, I must turn it to forgiveness before I permit myself to act. Otherwise, only harm will come of it on one level or another, and maybe not even where I can see it. I know that if I kick the wall, I'll end up with a sore toe, but if I swear at another driver, does a child's balloon burst on the other side of town? And what if karma isn't limited to the individual, but drives the world as well? Look at our media, our politics, our attitudes toward those who think differently from us: What if our ill will, cruel humor and prejudice cause tsunamis and plagues? All those things our ancestors and some today see as the punishment of an angry God. What if we are punishing ourselves?

Annie Besant said of karma, "It is the law that binds the ignorant but frees the wise." Once we believe in karma, we can control its effects through love and forgiveness. Out in Fairfield, Iowa, there are more than 800 visitors from India -- pandits who practice Transcendental Meditation for hours a day in the name of world peace. They believe that it would affect the well-being of the world if the U.S. were a more peaceful nation, and here they have come, giving up their daily lives for two to three years, devoting their lives to this practice, trying to mitigate karma.

Aside from not answering that email with anger, what else I can do to heal karma, my own and the world's? I look at my list of grievances and grudges -- Rush Limbaugh, my fifth grade teacher, the way I gain weight on my hips -- and wonder what would happen if I just let them go. That would be a start.  Not everyone's lives allow them to meditate for years out in the cornfields, but I begin to believe that even small things done with enormous intent can contribute to the healing: planting flowers, picking up trash, smiling at strangers, leaving a penny... 

All these acts demand of us is being present to the opportunity to do good. Present, not past. That's gone, except in the ways we allow it to stay.

Writing What You Don't Know

Beginning fiction writers are often urged to "write about what they know." That may be the single most useless, misleading, dangerous piece of advice anyone ever gave a writer. Aside from the surety that most of us don't know anything to begin with, the fact is that we don't write fiction in order to document what we know, but to discover what we don't.

Most of us who write fiction do so in order to find out why a new character is hanging around on the threshold of awareness, what a new obsession means, why we're drawn to a locale or historical period, and what would happen if we put them all together. It's possibility, not certainty, that drives us.

Fiction writing comes close to mysticism. Sometimes, especially in the early stages of a book, I feel as if I am channeling. I started writing The Fool's Journey because of a random image that came into my head: a woman is walking through the clogged aisles Seattle's Pike Place Market. A hand reaches out from the crowd and cuts off a handful of her long red hair. That was it -- to start with. I didn't know who she was, whether she was a random or deliberate victim, or what she was doing in the Market, but I started writing anyway and the ensuing years of writing the book revealed everything.

John Fowles writes of a similar experience:

 The novel I am writing at the moment [provisionally entitled The French Lieutenant's Woman] ... started four or five months ago as a visual image. A woman stands at the end of a deserted quay and stares out to sea. That was all.

Alice Walker says,

If you're silent for a long time, people just arrive in your mind.

 Sometimes a "what if" moment starts a story, as Roald Dahl jots in his notebook:

What about a chocolate factory that makes fantastic and marvelous things--with a crazy man running it?

Fowles, Walker and Dahl clearly did not find their way into their stories by writing what they knew about.  Each was led into a mysterious realm where nothing was known, but everything to find out. Writing what we already know is an assignment. Writing to discover is a quest. I am working on two books right now. One, a serialized sequel to Pride and Prejudice, came about because I have always wondered what became of Mary and Kitty Bennet. I am writing to find out.

The other project, my next paranormal mystery, was triggered by a question a woman asked me at a party about fifteen years ago. I had tagged along with other friends and, as they were showing me around the beautiful old craftsman, we came upon the darkened nursery where the hostess was putting her baby to sleep. The walls were lined with old toys, many of them antique dolls. As I began to look more closely at them, the hostess came up to my side and asked, "Do you think a doll can be haunted?" There's more to this story, but it was her question that stayed with me and finally found its way into a story. So far, I've discovered a little about two characters, I know there will be a haunted doll and I sense that reincarnation will play a part. I'm well ahead of the game on this one.

Well, fiction writers are odd people. We all know that. But does "writing what you don't know" work for non-fiction as well? Let's see what the writers say:

Rachel Carson: The discipline of the writer is to learn to be still and listen to what the subject has to say.

V.S. Pritchett: I write to clear my own mind, to find out what I think and feel.

C. Day Lewis: We do not write in order to be understood, we write in order to understand.

I am constantly surprised by what I write in this blog. That's what makes it fun. I start with the germ of an idea that's been echoing in my brain, like one of those songs you can't get rid of -- ear worms, I understand they are called. Perhaps these are "thought worms," boring their ways from our unconscious through subconscious to consciousness until we're either driven to find out why they're there, or something more pressing -- or catchy-- displaces them.

I ask myself whether this all means writing teachers should stop giving their students "prompts" for story writing or structured assignments that focus on character development and scene structure. Do they produce anything readable? Not in my experience. Do they enlighten the writer? Unlikely. Instead, students should have the opportunity to pursue writing as if they were writers rather than monkeys.

We write to find out what we don't know. With pen or keyboard in hand, we enter our strange minds not knowing what's up there, and step into a sprawling Winchester Mystery House of memory, desire, fear and delight. We'll find nothing we're looking for and everything we're not.

Let's follow the hall to the upside-down window, climb the stairs that lead four ways, rattle the bars that fly away like owls into the night -- and write without fear, without guidance, and without expectation.

All quotes plucked from my friend Donald M. Murray's remarkable Shoptalk: Learning to write with writers.

Taking the Long Way through a Short Space

Amazing what a Google image search will turn up.

I've always wanted to meditate. Cranky as I so often am, I think I need to meditate. I have the time, I can be physically still, but I've never succeeded in quieting my mind. Most people, I understand, seem to push past this point eventually, but not me. I hardly get a minute into the practice before some inappropriate thought like "Damn, I wish I had some Cheetos" intrudes, followed by images of day-glo orange fingers and musings on the possibility of using chopsticks to avoid this embarrassment.

 I can pull myself back, but before you know it, I'm reliving an episode of The Simpsons or recalling some childhood grudge. I've tried using a mantra, but before you know it, I am that I am becomes I yam what I yam and that's all what I yam says Popeye the sailor man. I know this is supposed to happen at the beginning of one's efforts, but this has been going on for over forty years.

And so, until recently, the restless mind has prevailed. And then, I found my way to a new practice: walking the labyrinth. Anyone who paid attention in high school -- or who has read Mary Renault's excellent novels, The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea, -- will recall the story of King Minos and his wife, Queen Pasiphaë, who, rather inexplicably infatuated with a bull, gave birth to the Minotaur, half human, half raging beast. Well, these things happen in the best of families. King Minos called on Daedalus to build a labyrinth under the palace to contain his less-than-presentable step-son, and later, his daughter Ariadane, whose attraction to Theseus was more understandable than her mother's whims, revealed the secret of the labyrinth to him, allowing him to overcome the Minotaur. Happy ending -- to the extent that myths allow.

Labyrinth at Chartres

The labyrinth, as a tool of meditation, goes back to at least the early 11th Century, the approximate date of the famous labyrinth of Chartres Cathedral, although there are much older examples whose purposes are more obscure. Archaeologists suggest they may possibly have served as traps for malevolent spirits or defined paths for ritual dances. The word comes from the Minoan, meaning "double-edged axe," which might refer to the axe as a sign of royalty (viz. King Minos), but also, I believe, to the route of the path which characteristically doubles back on itself, taking the walker in two directions.

Pansaimol, Goa, India

Meis, Galicia, Spain

Tintagel, Cornwall

Blå Jungfrun, Sweden

As these images illustrate, there are labyrinths of ancient and recent origin all over the world. There is also one in my neighborhood.

The Mission of the Atonement is about a mile and a half from my home and I've driven by it several times a week for fifteen years. I am curious about it, but have never attended. The sign reads: A Community of Roman Catholics and Lutherans, intriguing in itself. The word atonement gives me pause as well. Its connotation smacks of penance, an aspect of Catholicism that has distanced me from the faith I was raised in. Still, atonement is an important concept in A Course in Miracles, in which I have immersed myself for some time. So, as I say, I was curious -- but distant.

I don't even remember how I first became interested in labyrinths, possibly when I was in chemotherapy several years ago. I've used the World-wide Labyrinth Locator search engine from time to time in hopes of finding one near me. And then one day, out of the blue, Mission of the Atonement popped up on the search.  Synchronicity gathers the threads of awareness and intention unseen. While I had been searching for a labyrinth, they had been planning and building one.

So one rainy day this February, I turned off Scholl's Ferry Road and entered the Mission's parking lot for the first time. I found the labyrinth's winding path in a sunken courtyard and stepped onto it without expectation.

Staying on the narrow path and making the sharp turns took all my focus -- I am not a precision walker -- and there was no reason to wonder how much time had passed: the path kept time for me and would end when it ended.   I was done before I knew it. There were no breakthroughs or deep thoughts. Almost no thoughts at all. There didn't need to be. I felt peace, the inner stillness, I'd been seeking in meditation.

Peace. Is this why we find evidence of labyrinths throughout the world? Is this how our ancestors transcended the wearing cycle of fight or flight? Set aside the fear of plagues and pillaging? Is this how monks and nuns overcame their cloistered sorrows?  Even today, each step becomes a physical mantra, displacing the  If onlys...or What ifs?...that drive our days and shape our sleepless nights.

This small walk is a good practice for me: keeping my feet on the ground and my mind nowhere at all, no purpose, no destination except the center, and then back into the world again. .A long way through a short space.

Fear and Loathing in the American Classroom

I recently received an email from an educator friend I'd met while I was consulting on the East Coast last year. Cara had been laid off as an administrator and eventually rehired at the end of the summer to teach middle school math. To say hers is a tough school is like saying Hitler was a bigot.  The neighborhood matches the school: just before school started, the owners of the mom and pop grocery store across the street were gunned down. Getting safely in and out of the building without incident is an accomplishment. Still, this seasoned teacher fights her way through every day to try to engage her students' attention, convince them that their studies are important, and teach them something, anything--without resources or cooperation. Her reward? Last week, her students loosened the lug nuts on her tires. She could have been killed just driving home.

I was shocked, but not surprised. Cara's situation is not so rare as you'd think.

I've always said that if I had to go through my first year of teaching again, I'd go stand in traffic and shut my eyes.  However, going into large urban school districts as a consultant over the last several years opened my eyes: my own teaching experience was a cakewalk. About four years ago, I was hired by an education management company to coach teachers in a new alternative high school they been asked to start in a northeastern US city on a "ten days onsite and two weeks online" rotation. The students were supposed to be "over-aged underachievers" whose education we would approach using real-world projects and technology. In selecting students, however, an assistant superintendent sent out a directive to his principals to send him the names of  students they didn't want in their buildings anymore. Granted, these students were both over-aged and underachievers, but they also had disciplinary files at least six inches thick, most were in gangs, and many had criminal records. Except for a few bright-eyed novices, teachers were selected from the district "left-overs": tenured teachers no one wanted, who'd been passed from building to building, but had never made it through a school year. They knew little about technology and less about project-based learning.

I flew in from Oregon during the last weeks of summer vacation.  Driving to the school my first day, I saw the city change from the familiar scenes of American prosperity, well-kept houses and boutique shopping, into a war zone: abandoned, burned out buildings, barred windows, and barbed wire. At the school, the administrative staff was working furiously on the schedule, trying to pin down the class lists against what they called the "dead list". I assumed this was a badly-named designation for the students who had dropped out or moved out of district. I was wrong. The kids on the dead list were actually dead: drug overdoses, gang killings, suicides. And there were enough of them that scheduling was affected.

Students had been promised that each of them would have their own laptop. These hadn't arrived yet--and wouldn't until October as it turned out--and the majority decided they would show when the computers did. Even with fewer than a hundred students, both security guards were out with injuries by the end of the first week.  Nothing worked in the building, there were no books, no science lab, an empty library, and the teachers were too afraid of the students to even force them to stay in their chairs. Except for the first year teachers, who did a valiant job, most teachers read the paper. Kids came and went as they pleased, wandering the halls and intimidating younger students who just wanted to use the bathrooms. I got to know their names: Jamal, Malachi, Shaneequa -- especially Shaneequa, because of the 7 girls who attended regularly, she was in trouble the most often. She was rude, full of attitude and gorgeous.

Letters to the editor were flowing in. People wondered why the resources dedicated to this school -- an abandoned elementary building and promised laptops -- didn't go the "the good kids." Attendance continued spotty until the cold weather came. Then students started to arrive because their homes weren't warm enough. We all staggered through the year together, though, celebrated small successes when they occurred. When spring came attendance went down and laptops disappeared.

I went  back to Oregon, generally disheartened. Over the summer I watched the city's newspaper online. There were more letters to the editor and articles about angry school board members. Like the students, I read the police report first to see who I knew. In August,  I read about some neighborhood kids finding a body in the crawl space under a house near the school. The next day, the body was identified. It was Shaneequa. She'd be on the dead list.

I didn't go back to that school. That's the problem with being a consultant. Projects come and go. You never know how the story ends. I worked with another similar school last year, though, also started by an education management company, this time for "non-traditional" students. Better attendance here, probably because it was made part of student parole agreements. The kids ditched their weapons in the shrubbery before school and picked them up again on the way home.  I was in the office with the principal when she learned that one of the few students she had hopes for had been arrested for shaking his baby too hard. It had died in the hospital over night.

No one talks about this enormous educational problem. Not educational associations, not newspapers and certainly not politicians. Or if they do, it falls under the wide umbrella of  "the achievement gap." Call the students what you will, "over-aged underachievers" or "non-traditional," the real label may be "hopeless." Without hope. That's the reason for what they do and don't. They know better than we do that what we're offering-- higher standards, accountability, data-driven decision making, whatever educational buzz word you care to name -- has nothing to do with them.  It's no secret in education that rigid curriculum, more and more testing, and disciplinary systems that focus on suspension and expulsion are not going to help anyone. The kids I'm talking about need something else. They are desperate, dangerous to themselves and others. They are angry, and anger is always a form of fear. If I were them I'd be afraid too.

I know there are many great schools and educators, wonderful parents and programs in every demographic. With committed leadership, community buy-in, parental involvement, specialized curriculum and lots of money, there have been successes. But their radiance masks education's dirty little secret: every knows, just as the kids do, that many schools are nothing more than holding tanks, overcrowded waiting rooms that lead to the penitentiary, the streets or the graveyard. We also know that "large urban" district is code for "inner city poverty." "Nontraditional student" is code for "failure." I don't think it's any accident that the schools I'm describing are populated largely by African American students, or that, just as in the days of Jim Crow, trouble-makers are doomed to failure or worse, and no one is even looking up.

Like organized religion, organized education has edged its way so far from what educators know to be true, what we believe in,  that it has become a matter of form and convention. But this is not just an educational problem. It doesn't start in school, and it doesn't stay there. The same thuggery and soullessness pervade society, from the mean streets to the corporate boardroom. There are varying degrees, but it's all one. This is a soul problem and a heart problem. And that's where the answer will be found.

The Little Hell of Book Clubs

Picture this: several women gathered at a friend's home, drinking wine and eating snacks. Good conversation, lots of laughter. Then, someone says, "We'd better talk about the book." No one actually groans, but there is a shift in the room and the give and take atmosphere of a moment earlier transforms into an artificial encounter. I have a theory about this phenomenon, but before I begin to posit, let me share a little bit about my recent reading.

My last post centered on a book series I was reading featuring Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec. I love talking about books with others, particularly because I hear about good books I would not ordinarily have come across. Every Christmas, my sister Nancy gives me a stack of books she has enjoyed during the year and it is always one of my favorite gifts. This year the first in Louise Penny's Gamache series was among them, as well as Kindred  by Octavia Butler (one of the few African American  women known for science fiction) and Our Lady of the Forest by David Guterson.

In Kindred, Octavia Butler explores slavery using the device of time travel. Set in 1974, Dana, the novel's African American protagonist, is suddenly transported to early 19th Century Maryland just in time to save young Rufus, a plantation owner's son. No gratitude is expressed. She is considered a slave and appropriated by the plantation owner. Everything about her, from her jeans to the ability to read and write, is suspicious. Not surprisingly, Dana runs afoul of the repressive system and is subject to the whip. In a series of trips through time, she comes to understand that the boy Rufus is her own ancestor. Whenever his life is in danger, she finds herself transported to old Maryland. She only returns to the 20th Century when her own life is threatened, and often she returns broken and bleeding. For Dana (and for me) the biggest revelation is how easily she slips into behaving like a slave, watching her words, keeping her head down and her heart numb. Caring is just too dangerous.

I've just started Our Lady of the Forest, an account of a young homeless girl's visions of the Virgin Mary. Having been raised Catholic in the 50s and 60s, it's a subject that interests me. (I also have to confess that as a morbidly good child, my night-time fear was just such a visitation -- with Mary in the role of the boogieman. I remember saying my prayers and adding a petition that I not be visited by any holy spectres.)So far the book is fine, but I'm having difficulty relating to the young heroine who is definitely not as saintly as I was at a similar age. Even though the premise is interesting, this is not a book I would have chosen, primarily because the last book I read by Guterson, East of the Mountains, was such a disappointment.

Given my love for books, you might wonder why I am not in a book club, why, in fact, I hate them, and why I will make up and stick to any absurd excuse that pops into my head to avoid them. I've tried several and concluded that there are few social gatherings that promise so much and deliver so little. This is not the fault of the book or the club's members.

Above, I said I love talking about books, so what is it about a book club that sends me reeling toward the gin? Well, let's see: the discussion is not about books. It is about book. The discussion is often not a  real discussion, rather a painful re-enactment of a high school or college literature class. You have only to look at the book club discussion guide at the end of any current book (this is a recent phenomenon) and you'll immediately see the academic bent assumed even by the publisher. For example, the discussion guide at the back of The Book Thief by Markus Zusak asks: What is ironic about Liesel's obsession with stealing books? Discuss other uses of irony in the novel. Ack! That's not a real question. That's a school question. And if you recall discussions in literature classes, you'll remember the long silences, nodding heads, the studied comments of the one or two who actually participated. This happened both when I was a student and when I was a teacher. It's not that bad in a book club, but there is wine, after all.

My sister belongs to a book club that seems to work for her, and I can see why. Everyone in the club brings a different book, one that they have read recently, don't want back and would recommend. Each member says something about the book -- why it's interesting, what it meant to them personally, what it reminded them of, why it was challenging, how it's connected to daily life. It's personal and inviting, relaxed. Not only that, but every member hears about several books they might want to read, rather than one they everyone has already read.

That's what I did when I wrote about my recent reading at the beginning of this blog. I made a few comments about books, and it could be that one of you will want to read  one of them. I do realize that many of you probably love your book club, but I'd like to suggest that you try the approach that my sister's club does at least once -- and see how the conversation goes. You can bring any book you've enjoyed, and say what you want. If you're inclined to talk about irony, that's fine, but don't expect everyone to. I think you'll enjoy it.

Just one more thing -- how about trying this in schools? If kids weren't reading, bookstores wouldn't have young adult sections. Kids may not be reading what's assigned, but could it be that they aren't interested and find the discussions tedious. The truth is that many teachers allowed their students to choose their own reading material and share it with their classmates in the days before standardized tests became the point of reading. Nancie Atwell's groundbreaking book, In the Middle, describes what happened in her classroom when students partnered in their own literacy. That's another book I'd recommend. When I talk to teachers about this approach they always say, "How will I know the students have really read the book?" or "What if they have questions I can't answer?" Well, I give a 4-hour workshop on this which no one wants me to repeat here, but here are a couple of points:

You'll notice that I talked about books that not every one had read, and I don't think any of you suspected that I hadn't really read them. That's because I could talk about them. I had things to say that made sense. And if anyone had asked a question -- a real question, not a school question -- I could have responded: Why did you choose this book? What made you keep wanting to read? It reminds me of some other books I've read -- have you ever tried [author X]? These are questions students can answer, questions that will reveal a great deal about their understanding of text. Not only that, but they will hear about 20-some other books they might enjoy. Give it a chance and see what happens to discussion.