Inspiration Archives – Christina Baker Kline

March 10, 2011 By bakerkline

Can Writing about Grief Make You Happy?

It might sound crazy, but for Allison Gilbert, writing about mourning has been an uplifting experience:

Several weeks ago my new book, Parentless Parents, was published. This is the third book I’ve written that deals with mourning and loss. And while you might assume I’d be the last person you’d want to meet at a cocktail party, I’ve been told otherwise. I smile; I laugh. You might even call me bubbly.

Each book I’ve written is the result of successfully pushing through an unwanted and unanticipated experience – and using that experience for something more powerful than anger and self-pity. Writing about death and grief has been healing for me.

I wrote my first book, Covering Catastrophe, after nearly dying on 9/11. I was a producer at WNBC-TV in New York at the time, and when the second tower collapsed I thought I was going to be buried alive. The dust cloud knocked me off my feet, and emergency crews dragged me off the street so I wouldn’t be crushed by falling debris. I was taken by ambulance to the emergency room at Bellevue Hospital. Doctors cut off my clothes to examine my skin, and shoved tubes down my throat so I could breathe.

Physically, I was fine. Emotionally, though, I was in trouble. I had panic attacks for days, and many journalists I’d later speak with were also having traumatic flashbacks. Because of what we experienced, three other radio and television journalists and I decided to write a book documenting what it was like to be a broadcaster that day, both personally and professionally. Creating this book was cathartic for all of us, and what happened after publication was even better. Covering Catastrophe was turned into a documentary by the U.S. State Department, has been recognized by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, and every penny earned has been donated to 9/11 charities. Giving back is the best emotional Band-Aid I know.

Three days after September 11, my father died of cancer. I was 31 years old. Almost immediately (and because my mother had died several years earlier) I felt compelled to write about my parents’ deaths. Always Too Soon was hard to write because for the five years it took to complete, my parents’ deaths were always with me. I had to deal with how much I missed them with every period and comma I typed. What kept me going was the anticipation of helping others cope with the same pain. My muse was an imaginary group of readers who needed comfort and validation.

And readers responded. Men and women emailed me wanting to talk about being an adult orphan. Many of these emails specifically addressed the challenges of being a parent without parents. To manage the influx of emails, I began sorting them by state and city, and then, when I had two or three from any one area, I started playing matchmaker. It was in putting these strangers together that Parentless Parents, the organization, was formed. It was also how I knew that Parentless Parents, the book, needed to be written.

In Parentless Parents, I write not only about how the loss of my parents affects me, but also the myriad ways their absence affects my children, who don’t have my mother and father as grandparents. Since the book came out, it’s been warmly embraced. Parentless Parents support groups are taking shape all over the country. The Parentless Parents Group Page on Facebook continues to grow. And then there are the new emails I’ve been receiving from readers, like this one from a mother of two young children:

“You tapped right into my life, my heart and my soul. It is comforting to know that at least one other person in the world has gone through similar tragedies and has some understanding of what I deal with on a daily basis.”

In truth, I’m happy in the face of what I write because I have an outlet for all my feelings. Conducting interviews, leading focus groups, creating the Parentless Parents Survey, the first of its kind, and writing – all of it has brought me incredible peace. My upbeat attitude has been shaped by creating a new and different conversation about loss, and the symbiotic relationship I have with my readers. Ultimately, the most important lesson I’ve learned from writing is that I’m not alone.

Allison Gilbert, author of Parentless Parents, founded a nationwide network of parents who have experienced the loss of their own mothers and fathers. To find a Parentless Parents chapter near you, go to www.parentlessparents.com. You can also join Parentless Parents on Facebook by clicking here: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=77976059211&ref=ts. Watch her book trailer here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0vYt8L7qNg. Allison is also the author of Always Too Soon and Covering Catastrophe.

December 16, 2010 By bakerkline

What Makes a Title Great?

Novelist Caroline Leavitt on the impossibility — and importance — of finding the perfect title:

When I finished my new novel, I was relieved, excited, overwhelmed, and then terrified. I knew I wasn’t really finished — I had to do the one thing that makes my head feel as if it is going to explode: I had to find the right title. Having published eight other novels, I knew that a title wasn’t just my own creative decision. My editor, my agent, publicity and marketing were going to weigh in, and truthfully, I could see why. The title’s the first thing a prospective reader sees (besides the cover, of course, which is a whole other story), and if you can’t grab someone’s attention with a few words on the glossy jacket, you may not have a chance with the thousands more that are inside.

A lot of my writer friends are expert book namers. They argue with marketing, they follow their instincts and convince their editors about the rightness of their choices, but I’ve had no such luck. I admit that I’m horrible at titles, that none of the ones I ever think of seem right to me. I can, however, recognize a decent title when I see it. Or at least, I think I can.

Originally, my new novel was called Traveling Angels. It’s a screenwriting term I got from story guru John Truby. A traveling angel is a person who comes into the midst of a village, changes everyone’s life, and then vanishes. How perfect for my novel! Or so I thought. But my publisher was afraid no one would get the title. Plus, it sounded too soft for them, and what did it really mean? How many people would get the screenwriting reference? So I came up with a one word-title. Breathe. One of my main characters, a nine-year-old boy, is severely asthmatic. The word “breathe” could also apply to the other characters, who could use a good deep breath themselves. I loved it. I was sure it was right!

It wasn’t. “Not strong enough,” my beloved editor told me. She asked me to come up with a list, but it was actually she who came up with Pictures of You. “It’s the name of a Cure song,” she told me, which I knew, and I instantly loved the idea. (One of my other novels, Coming Back to Me, was the title of a Jefferson Airplane song I loved, and an homage to my husband, whose book on the band, Got A Revolution, was making many Best of the Year lists.) Plus, the title Pictures of You fit in all sorts of ways, since the novel is about photography and how we choose to see (or not see) the ones we love.

I’m writing another novel now, due to Algonquin in 2012, and of course I’ve worked hard on the title, trying desperately to come up with something that would be both evocative of the story and mind-grabbing. Set in the late 1950s and early 60s, this new novel is about how we try to keep the ones we love safe, how the unseen in our lives affects the parts we are aware of. I thought I found the perfect title: The Missing One. My editor emailed me. “I love what I’ve read so far of your pages,” she wrote, “but the title has to go.”

Caroline Leavitt’s new novel, Pictures of You, officially out in January 2011, is already in its 3rd printing! She can be reached at www.carolineleavitt.com, at facebook at http://www.facebook.com/carolineleavitt, at Twitter at @Leavittnovelist, and on her blog, http://carolineleavittville.blogspot.com/.

December 9, 2010 By bakerkline

Nothing is Ever Lost

In which the writer Mark Trainer explains how old ideas can spring to life when you least expect it:

One of my writing teachers way back when, George Garrett, used to say of being a writer, “Nothing is ever lost.” He meant it as comfort when every lit mag under the sun had rejected your story. Just because you can’t make use of it now doesn’t mean you won’t be able to years down the road. It’s true for the ideas we have for stories as well. The first story I published originated with a single sentence I discovered in some notebooks (otherwise terrible) that I’d written when I was fourteen or fifteen.

The story that St. Martins Press has just published as an e-book, New Wife, had an even longer gestation. I’m not proud of this, but during college some friends and I used to watch a soap opera during lunch—okay, it was All My Children. When they change one of the actors on a soap — just before her first appearance — there’s usually a voice-over that says, “The part of Alexis Stone [or whoever] is now being played by Jane Smith.” But if you miss the day when this announcement is made, you tune in next time to see a stranger being treated as though she is Alexis. Alexis’s children hug this unfamiliar person and call her Mommy. All the family pictures used for set decoration now include this person, as though the former actor had never existed. I remember thinking back then that it would be interesting to transpose that situation onto the real world. Maybe it would make a good skit for SNL or something. It just took 25 years to find the context that would give this idea resonance.

Here’s a strange and dangerous thing: The ideas that have worked the best in this way are the ones I never wrote down. Maybe it’s because they seemed more like gags than the seeds of Literary Fiction. Sometimes even in the simple act of jotting down an idea, you limit it in some way, give it a point of view and a context that fix it in the place it was found rather than letting it find the place it wants to go.

Late last spring, I found myself thinking about a couple of much older friends suffering from memory loss and dementia. It led me to think how delicate the mental threads are that connect us to the people closest to us, and how we forget some things exactly because we never imagined we could forget them. The name of your best friend’s husband or the lyric to a favorite song will temporarily slip away because they’re so familiar you haven’t taken any steps to fix in them in your memory. I have elaborate systems in place to make sure I remember where my glasses are, but nothing to make sure I remember my daughter’s face.

I was sitting in a coffee shop on Capitol Hill across from my wife, both of us staring into computers. Could the misfiring of a couple of neurons, I thought to myself as I looked over the table, make me forget you? And then I’d be like that viewer watching the soap opera, wondering why everyone was pretending that this stranger was my wife. I wrote the first few paragraphs and then realized the meter on our parking space was about to run out. (And a note about titles: I had to save the file as something as we rushed out; “New Wife” was the product of half a second’s thought, but it never got changed.)

The rest of the writing was a process of following a small idea to its logical conclusion, placing an odd premise in a context that’s as recognizable and ordinary as most of our daily lives. If my character doesn’t recognize his wife, what about his son? Will he forget him too? Wouldn’t he have to manage his job, his household chores, and everything else while he wonders why no one else thinks this woman isn’t who she’s supposed to be? And is there a reason for all this forgetting? Is there any way to turn it around? I felt like I’d come a long way from the soap-opera-casting premise and found a way to express something about how we incorporate our past into our present.

It’s a great feeling to find a good use for something that’s been kicking around your writer’s toolbox for years. Better still when it’s something you could so easily have forgotten. And yet you didn’t.

Mark Trainer (@marktrainer on Twitter) is a writer living on Capitol Hill. His stories have appeared in The Mississippi Review, Shenandoah, Brain, Child, and elsewhere. His nonfiction has appeared in The Washington Post.

September 27, 2010 By bakerkline

Beast of Burden

You may have noticed that I haven’t posted much lately. Keeping a blog is like having a pet — it requires constant maintenance. And when I wasn’t deep into writing my novel, I derived a lot of pleasure from it (and still do, in sporadic bursts). But working on a novel is like having a newborn baby. It keeps you up at night, it needs constant feeding, it’s unpredictable and exhausting. And like new parents who find that the frisky puppy that brought them so much pleasure before the baby came along has begun to feel like a burden, with its manic energy and constant need for attention, I find myself wishing that someone else would feed and walk this bloggy beast for me.

So I’ve decided — as I work toward my early 2011 novel deadline — to give myself a break. I’ll still post when I’m inspired, most likely once or twice a week, and when other writers send me fabulous pieces. (I have a few in the hopper now.) If you subscribe by email — see the button at right — you’ll be alerted when there’s a new post. And I’ll point my readers toward other blogs by writers that I love. Alice Elliott Dark, wise woman/fiction guru, has only posted twice so far, but her new blog, Walks with Dogs (appropriately enough), is already on my list of favorites. Louise DeSalvo, memoirist and mentor, provides thoughtful meditations on writing at WritingaLife. And I stumbled on novelist Janet Fitch’s wonderful blog when someone sent me her “Ten Writing Tips that Can Help Almost Anyone” (yes, it’s true, they can).

Meanwhile I’ll continue to feed and walk my own blog-dog, just not so often or with such guilt when I don’t. And in the spring, when the baby is sleeping through the night, I’ll have more energy for the beast. For now, he can sleep at my feet while I’m writing, dreaming bloggy dreams.

September 9, 2010 By bakerkline

A New Twist to a Familiar Story

Karen Essex talks about how she reclaimed — and reframed — the vampire myth by exploring its female origins in her new novel, Dracula in Love:

From the first time I read Bram Stoker’s Dracula in my teens, I just knew that Mina was not satisfied with her role as the quintessential Victorian virgin. Little did I dream that many years later, I would actually revise the story, retelling it from Mina’s perspective.

Though Stoker’s Dracula was a brilliant creation and a haunting story, when it came to the women, he wrote like a man of his time, constructing the typical paradigm of bad girl (Lucy Westenra, who succumbs to the vampire’s seduction) versus the good girl (Mina Harker, who does not). The vampire’s kiss was a thinly veiled metaphor for—you guessed it—sex. In the pre-feminist construct, the bad girl is punished; the good girl rewarded.

My ambition for Dracula in Love was to turn the original story inside out. I wanted to give Mina and Lucy rich, full lives, as well as plausible inner lives that made sense in the era in which they lived, but also reflected the breadth of women’s desires. I researched late Victorian art, culture, costume, design, sexual and social mores, religious beliefs, and laws concerning the rights, or lack thereof, of women. I moved to London so that I could haunt its streets and its museums, breathing in the atmosphere as I wrote. Walking in the footsteps of the characters is a crucial part of my process, so I also traveled to southern Austria and the west coast of Ireland, where I set Mina’s birthplace.

Those who have read Dracula know that a good portion of the book takes place in an insane asylum. This is also true of Dracula in Love, but I wanted to recreate the asylum as it would have been in the late Victorian era—not inhabited by an insect-eating vampire slave like Stoker’s Renfield, but full of women, committed for having what we today would consider normal sexual attitudes and desires. Because these asylum scenes are crucial to both the plot and the themes of my book, I scoured the archives of late 19^th century insane asylums. I also studied the Victorian fascination with the metaphysical.

In the process of my research, I unearthed a wealth of information that became a major theme: vampires have a long history dating back to pre-biblical times, and many of the blood drinkers of myth were female, symbolic of feminine magic and power.

Digging deeper into world mythologies, I became fascinated by these bloodsucking goddesses and monsters. These are the bad girls of mythology—the fearsome Indian goddess Kali who punished and possessed her enemies by drinking their blood; the vengeful, child-eating, blood-drinking Lamia of Greece and North Africa; Lilith, Adam’s Mesopotamian wife who drank blood in vengeance; and the blood-lusting warrior fairy queens of Ireland.

So if the original blood-drinkers were females, then why was Stoker’s Dracula male? For one thing, mythological stories rarely follow a straight line. Myths are reinvented in every culture, adapted to the needs and beliefs of the people and the times. Through the millennia, concepts of vampires shape-shifted. They were thought to be spirits of women who had been witches; angry plague victims risen from the dead; victims of crime come back to suck the blood of the perpetrators; and succubi who visited men in the night, draining them of their life force (the male spirits who did similar harm to slumbering females are known as incubi).

But power, supernatural or otherwise, was the last thing the Victorians wanted women to possess. In the Victorian mind, women were pure and innocent creatures who must remain protected, shielded from worldly life. To accommodate this mentality, writers like Bram Stoker turned the predatory vampire into a male, giving him preternatural powers, while women became his victims.

Suddenly it was the male vampire roaming the foggy, narrow streets of London threatening lovely young ladies. With Dracula in Love, it was my joy and privilege to give Mina deep hidden desires and a paranormal past of her own to discover and embrace. The good girl has some very “bad” moments for which she is not punished. The old paradigms turn upside down, returning the women to that place of power lost somewhere in the centuries since Lilith and the Lamia roamed the earth, taking their bloody revenge and causing men to quake with fear – and quiver with excitement.

Karen Essex is the author of Kleopatra, Pharaoh, Stealing Athena, and the international bestseller Leonardo’s Swans, which won Italy’s prestigious 2007 Premio Roma for foreign fiction. She graduated from Tulane University, attended graduate school at Vanderbilt, and received an MFA from Goddard College. An award-winning journalist and a screenwriter, she lives in London and Los Angeles.

Can Writing about Grief Make You Happy?

What Makes a Title Great?

Nothing is Ever Lost

Beast of Burden

A New Twist to a Familiar Story

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