Living With Praise

In the seven years I’ve been broadcasting commentaries for Vermont Public Radio, I can’t tell you how many people have reached out to me by phone, email, or in passing, to tell me how much they liked one my pieces they heard. Often, I’ll post a link to a commentary on Facebook and friends will “like” it; sometimes, it will even be shared. Occasionally, strangers I meet treat me like a celebrity because they’ve heard me on the radio. The attention is very flattering, of course, and I’m genuinely pleased when someone praises me for saying something unusual and/or unpopular. That’s when I feel I’m doing my job, being a writer. Why then, do I remember exactly the number of emails I’ve received taking me to task?

Two.

One was a letter sent in to the station complaining about a pro-hunting piece I’d aired years ago. More recently, a listener complained about a piece I wrote about wearing recycled clothes.

That I can remember these listeners’ complaints practically verbatim but can’t remember the details from the hundreds of listeners who’ve emailed me with kudos tells me how much harder it is to hold on to praise. It also tells me how penetrating anger can be.

There’s no question: I hit a nerve, causing two listeners to hit their keyboards and spit venom at me. I tell myself that’s good, that I ‘got to them’ and isn’t that the purpose of writing? Maybe. But it burns.

In retaliation, I’ve parsed these letters and found gaping holes in logic and grammar, and located the places where they’ve misunderstood what I said, misrepresented it, or simply disregarded it. I’ve worked over my poison-pen replies (never written, never sent), and churned and burned in anger and disdain. In time, however, the anger dies down, leaving me to wonder why it is that criticism smarts in far greater proportion than praise.

I’ve received a thousand-fold more praises for my work, but I’ve given them less attention. Why is that? Why is it that I give negative sentiment more weight than positive feedback?

The only answer I can come up with is: That’s the way I’ve been trained.

And if it’s just a matter of training, then I can be retrained.

The need to retrain myself, to really pay attention to what my readers and listeners have to say became apparent when Into the Wilderness came out. Strangers wrote me personal letters, sent me emails, told me their stories and sought my advice. That experience taught me how wonderful it is to reach an audience I’m only vaguely aware of while I’m head down at my desk, trying to channel my thoughts into words against deadline. As a result, I vowed that when I read something that moved me, I’d send the author a note.

I also vowed to thank readers who’ve taken the trouble not just to read what I write, but to tell me about it – tell me what I wrote made them think or feel, maybe how it gave them hope or inspiration. And I’m no longer speaking of praise just for my radio commentaries, or my novel, or my newspaper columns, but also about the feedback I get from this blog. I’m generally and genuinely overwhelmed and overjoyed by the replies to these posts.

Ultimately, what thinking about my disproportionate reaction has been to criticism versus praise has shown me is that I must reverse how I respond to the two and give more attention – and more acknowledgement – to praise.

photo: M. Shafer

Deborah Lee Luskin is a novelist, essayist and educator. She lives in southern Vermont.

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Six Writing Lessons From The Garden

 I love to garden. It’s a meditative activity – something I can do while my mind freewheels. Last Sunday, I found myself thinking how preparing a small vegetable patch is like writing a book.

Lesson 1: Writing is Solitary.

For the first time in thirty years, I’m planting the garden solo. My husband helped me install the fence posts (just as he built the studio where I write), but he prefers to nurture the orchard. I’m on my own, just as I write by myself during the week while he’s off tending to his patients’ health.

Lesson 2: Selectivity is Good.

There was a time when we grew and preserved all our food – but no longer. We’re now supplied with locally grown produce from a neighbor’s organic farm, so I’m only planting high-value items that are harder to find in local markets – shallots and leeks, fennel, escarole and Brussels sprouts – as well as items we consume in quantity – cucumbers and cherry tomatoes, hot peppers and a wide assortment of culinary herbs.

I’m leaving the prosaic vegetables – the zucchini and green beans, the carrots and potatoes – to the production professionals. In a similar way, I’ve retired from the teaching, managerial and editorial jobs that others can do as well as or even better than I can. No one else can tell the stories I imagine, so I’m concentrating on them.

Lesson 3: Limits are Helpful.

I started by limiting the scope of my garden. I’ve fenced off an eight- by sixteen-foot rectangle to keep the free-range chickens out, and to keep my intentions focused – and manageable. Our previous gardens were huge, time-sucking affairs, and sometimes we raised an equal quantity of weeds as tomatoes. Similarly, over the past year, I’ve drafted thousands of words about my character’s life. But recently, I’ve come to realize that the story I’m telling takes place over the course of nineteen months. So that’s what I’ll develop; everything else must come out, just like the weeds.

Lesson 4: Writing Takes Time.

At the outset, a hundred and twenty-eight square feet looks just as big as a 100,000-word novel, and turning it over with a hand fork appears as daunting as filling a ream of paper by pen. My husband offered to do this heavy task for me; he would have had the garden-plot ready in less than an hour. I thanked him and said I would do it myself. It took me three hours, during which time I meditated on how preparing the garden is like writing a novel. I stopped only for water and to take pictures for this post, which I was composing as I dug.

Lesson 5: Small Tasks Yield Success.

A week earlier, I’d covered my plot with a tarp to warm the earth and kill weeds. The weeds continued to flourish, however, and the prospect of turning the soil by hand and pulling the weeds out by the root was too much. So I put the tarp back in place and

Working a small section at a time.

uncovered only a quarter of the space. After I turned those thirty-two square feet, I peeled the tarp back again, turning and weeding the next section. Now, the job was half done. I folded the tarp back again and again, always giving myself a small, measurable task that I could reasonably accomplish. Writing a book is just the same: I break each chapter into sections, and each section into paragraphs, each paragraph into sentences, each sentence into words. Each time I stuck the fork into the soil, it was a reminder that books are written one word at a time.
Lesson 6: The End is the Beginning

By the time I had raked the soil into beds and outlined the footpath with string, my neck was sunburned, my back was sore, and I was ready for a bath. I was done – for the day. I now had a well-defined garden plot with clearly outlined beds as weed-free as a clean piece of paper. Even though I was done-in, I’m anything but done. In fact, I’m just ready to start.

Ellen, the novel I’m crafting, is further along than my garden. But the garden is a good reminder about how to maintain forward progress on this first draft. My afternoon preparing my garden yielded these six truths: 1) Even though I work alone, I’m deeply engaged with my characters; 2) every time I cut out a scene or a character or an unnecessary word, I gain a clearer sense of what aspect of the story to nurture; 3) knowing the limit of the narrative has helped me focus on the story I have to tell; 4) drafting the novel is taking a long time – and I make progress daily; 5) I experience the elation of success when I set myself small, measurable tasks; and 6) every time I finish a section, a chapter, an entire draft, I’m ready to begin another section, another chapter, another draft.  And even when that’s done – even when the writing and revision are finished – there’s another whole set of steps to see a book to completion, but those are chores of another season.

This growing season has just started. I tell myself, if I write word by word, weed by weed, my effort will blossom, and in time, I’ll see my book in my readers’ hands.

Meanwhile, I have a lovely garden bed ready for seeds.

photo: M. Shafer

Author Deborah Lee Luskin gardens and writes in southern Vermont and can be found on the web at www.deborahleeluskin.com

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I Am My Own Boss, Part 2

          Even though I work alone, I’ve learned how to be my own best boss.

I have some managerial experience. For sixteen years I managed a medical office, and I took good care of my co-workers. It’s taking me about as long to learn how to take good care of myself.

Hands down, praise works best, so I try to appreciate any small step I take toward the larger task at hand – which is drafting a 100,000-word novel. One of the unintended consequences of this practice is that as I’m not just kinder and gentler toward myself, I’m kinder and gentler toward others. If I live long enough, I may actually become a genuinely nice person.

But I must admit that I still have days when I don’t want to sit down by myself to write a book that might never see the light of day. Some days, I’ll do anything to avoid writing, including putting off starting, going off on a tangent, or becoming paralyzed by doubt.

While I could try to turn these problems into an affirmation, “Hey Deb, you’re human!” I’ve found a more effective countermeasure to resistance.

Resistance is what keeps us from accomplishing our goals – from the little ones, like sitting down to write, to the big ones, like finishing a book.

According to nutritionist and writer Linda Spangle, it’s possible to defeat resistance by understanding its components and knowing what to do about them.. Resistance is manifested by Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.

Typically, we respond to Fear with Procrastination. (Solitaire, anyone?) The best countermeasure to Procrastination is to Start: open a new document and start typing.

We respond to Uncertainty with Distraction. Ever start writing a piece and decide you really need to read War and Peace before you can do a good job? But before you can turn the page, you need to clean the litter box, which reminds you to put laundry detergent on the grocery list and make a dentist appointment for a cleaning six months hence? You get the idea. The best way to counter Distraction is with Focus.

And then there’s Doubt. Three quarters of the way through a draft and you become paralyzed by a needling voice that whispers, “You really think this is any good? Who are you kidding?” Doubt is responsible for countless unfinished stories in untold files around the world. But even Doubt can be defeated. Just Finish.

I have a Post-It above my desk. It says: Start. Focus. Finish.

Essentially, this is another way of saying, “Single Task” – which I wrote about in Part One of this post. And sometimes, I have to go through NAMS before I can Start, Focus, Finish. The more I practice these techniques, the better I get at sitting down, writing, revising, rewriting and returning to my desk day after day in what can be the most satisfying job working for the best boss I’ve ever had: me.

photo: M. Shafer

   Deborah Lee Luskin is the author of Into the Wilderness, an award-winning novel set in Vermont in 1964.

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I Am My Own Boss, Part One

            There are wonderful things about the freelance life and being my own boss. For instance, I set my own hours. In the winter, this usually means working early and late so that I can be outdoors during the relative warmth in the middle of the day. In the summer, it’s the reverse: I row my single scull early in the morning and don’t show up at my desk until ten. And then there’s the matter of dress code. Mine makes corporate America’s Friday Casual look like haute couture. But the hardest, by far, is the issue of just showing up.

This is easy when I have a deadline with a paycheck dangling behind it. But then, I’m not really my own boss – I’m the pen hired by a client, writing to specs. But showing up to write fiction? That’s when being my own boss can be tough.

For one, it’s lonely. There are neither co-workers to complain to or about. There’s no office gossip. And there’s no one to motivate me when I’m in a slump or to reprimand me when I shirk my desk all together. This is especially true when it comes to writing a novel, which can take years to draft and more years before it’s published. I’ve never received a cold call from a perspective client saying, “I need an 80,000- word novel right away!”

But I’ve been writing novels – both published and unpublished – for a long time. Over the years I’ve developed different strategies for coping with the inevitable slump when I wonder, Why bother? One is to read the Help Wanted Ads. There are days when I think about going to work at a burger joint, or a bakery, or anywhere else but home.

Another strategy was to schedule a weekly lunch date with a fellow writer to set weekly goals, but that’s petered out. These days, I attend a weekly workshop, where I write with the delicious synergy of other writers, including poets and songsters, memoirists, and story-spinners like myself. It’s glorious, and it always picks me up, helps me keep writing along.

But during the recent and difficult process of finding my way into Ellen, the tentative title for the book I’m working on now, I’ve come up with a series of no-fail exercises that help me show up, sit down, and write.

The first I adapted from Joan Dempsey’s Literary Living. It goes like this: I show up at my desk and start the day with N.A.M.S.

N is for Narrate.

I’ve been journaling since I was nine, and keeping an electronic journal since Microsoft Word came out for the Mac, in 1984. Before that, I used to type – on a typewriting machine.  So narrating how I arrive at my desk is how I start my day. It’s a way of talking to myself about all the static of laundry, bills, spousal discord, unhappy kids, sick chickens, the weather. Whatever. It’s a license to kvetch, if necessary, as if I were talking to a co-worker about my existential despair. I spill it all out, typically in a few hundred words.

A is for Affirmation.

Next, I write affirmations. This doesn’t come easy. For years, my self-talk went something like, “Deb, self-pity is a character flaw. Get over it!” But that didn’t seem to help. So now I try to remember what I accomplished the previous day. I list every victory over turpitude and sloth, regardless how miniscule. Washed my face? Terrific! Sat down at my desk at 8? Fabulous! Worked through the temptation to eat lunch at ten? Excellent! Produced x-number of words, researched necessary information, advanced the plot? Another superlative day! Like any skill, I’m getting better at affirmations with practice. And I can tell you from my own experience: the carrot is much more effective than the stick. Also: it’s never too late to learn positive self-talk.

M is for Meditate.

I used to count my journaling as writing meditation, but recently, I’ve started sitting cross-legged on the floor and paying attention to my breath. I started doing this for five minutes (setting a timer), then six, seven, eight – until I could sit still for ten. Each day I added a minute, and each day I’ve been surprised by two things: the time seems to go by faster, and my mind is sharp and clear when time’s up.

S is for Single Task.

I’m now ready to Single Task: do one thing with my full attention. I’m amazed at how much I can get done when I set my mind to it. And when the first thing on my list is finished, I move on to the next.

photo: M. Shafer

NAMS is one of several motivational techniques I’ve learned to use as my own boss. In my next post, I’ll explain another technique I’ve learned to nip procrastination in the bud.

Deborah Lee Luskin writes in southern Vermont and can be found on the web at www.deborahleeluskin.com.

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Can You Write Too Much? Guest Post by Joyce Marcel

Joyce Marcel is an award-winning journalist and columnist who lives in southern Vermont. She writes about Vermont art, culture, politics, business and music. Her work has appeared in Vermont Business Magazine, Vermont Life, Vermont Magazine, The Boston Globe, The Boston Globe Mazazine, The Springfield (MA) Republican, the Brattleboro (VT) Reformer, the Providence (RI) Journal, the New York Post and many other newspapers. She currently writes opinion pieces, news and arts stories for The Commons, the weekly newspaper of Windham County (VT).

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Can you write too much to write? That’s both my question and my problem.

A little history may be in order here. When I was already too old for it, I was lucky enough to get a journalism job on a small-town daily newspaper in Vermont. Before that, I knew I was a writer but I never thought I would ever see my name or my work in print. I just didn’t know how people accomplished something as amazing as that.

Since then, with a lot of ups and downs along the way, I’ve made a career out of freelance journalism. Sometimes my by-line appears three or four times a month. In my small way, I have readers. I have a voice. I have an outlet for my opinions. I can pay my bills — just barely, but still. I have been able, on occasion, to bring about small amounts of social change. If you’re as driven by curiosity as I am, journalism is a wonderful thing.

But journalists respond to the events around them, and I have always dreamed of writing other things. Currently, I’m in the middle of a passion project — a book about six generations of my family and the effects that the social, cultural, political and economic movements of our times have had on all our lives.

But just when I’m writing full-tilt about a beloved ancestor, a business magazine wants a story on an out-of-the-way Vermont beer-maker who was just named the best brewer in the world. I jump right on it and my ancestor gets shelved. Or an art magazine wants to know about an influx of high-end jewelers in my hometown. Or I’m asked to cover Town Meeting for my local daily. I love to poke my nose into other people’s business and write about what they’re doing. And let’s face it: I love receiving checks in the mail.

But it’s difficult to pick up the family book again, so it’s taking me a long time to make any progress. I deeply regret that. I feel like journalism is making me cheat on my family.

I wish I could say that I’m the kind of writer who wakes up at 5am and does my book writing before starting my work writing, but that’s not the case. Whatever I’m doing takes my full attention — that’s why I do it, to lose myself in the work.

Writing can be as fatiguing as laying bricks or painting houses. You really can’t put in too much overtime. Early on you learn what your best hours are — for me it’s between 8am and 2pm — and you schedule your life (dentist appointments, meals with friends) around that. After that, the brain gets weary. It’s a good time for paying bills, playing on Facebook and answering emails, but it’s not a good time for creativity. Maybe I should just wish to be smarter — maybe having a bigger brain would help.

It’s not a question of discipline. I write every day, Sunday through Sunday. Like most  writers, I can’t stop writing. Also, if I don’t have a current story firmly in my mind, I lose those flashes of insight that come when I’m doing something else, like raiding the refrigerator.

Putting a leash on my curiosity would help, but it’s like putting a leash on a wildcat; it has a life of its own. Sometimes I try to tell myself that going deep — writing my book — can be as satisfying as going wide — journalism. Then the phone rings and I’m off and running again.

Sometimes I’m grateful that I don’t also have an imagination. What if I wanted to write fiction? Curiosity is more than enough of a beast to deal with.

So I write all the time, and it takes me away from my writing. Sometimes I think I should never have jumped on the journalism train. Maybe I would have had a bigger, better literary career. But as long as curiosity doesn’t kill this cat and the bills keep coming in, it’s too late to change.

photo: M. Shafer

Deborah Lee Luskin is a novelist, essayist and educator who lives in Southern Vermont and has long admired Joyce Marcel’s work.

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What Do You Do?

            When you meet someone for the first time, how do you reply to their inevitable question, “What do you do?”

When I held my first jobs, I was always excited to reply with my newly acquired title. “I’m an editorial assistant,” I said, straight out of college. “I teach writing,” I said, in graduate school. “I’m a research assistant,” I proclaimed, when I landed that job.

But when I chose to forgo a non-academic path in order to write, I also took some jobs that had nothing to do with writing and everything to do with supporting my family, like managing a medical practice.

During those years, when someone asked, “What do you do?” I still said, “I’m a writer.”

“Oh, really? What do you write?”

“Grocery lists,” I wanted to say, because, in truth, I wasn’t earning money from my pen and I still hadn’t published a novel. But I was writing editorial columns, so I’d talk about my published credentials, saying nothing about the half-dozen short stories and notes for novels I produced in secret silence on my own time.

That’s when I realized that when someone asks, “What do you do?” they usually want to know the boring details about how you earn money. For a while, I answered, “I manage a medical practice.” On less charitable days, I’d come right out with, “What do you really want to know, what I do or how do I earn money?”

This snappy riposte would only afford me momentary pleasure, because it then forced me to acknowledge that I wasn’t making any money doing the one thing that was most important to me – sometimes even more important than my family. Shocking, but true.

At about this point in life, I decided to try earning money by writing – and I did. I especially liked the assignments I found translating medical texts into language an ordinary person could understand; these jobs were both interesting and lucrative. But being a pen-for-hire was no different from office management in that it still ate up the limited time that I had while the kids were in school, leaving me gasping for time to write fiction.

At some point, I wizened up or gained courage or both, and when someone asked me, “What do you do?” I replied, “I’m a writer.”

“Really? What do you write?”

By then, I’d drafted two novels. “I’m a novelist,” I said, daring anyone to contradict my accomplishment.

“Best sellers?”

“Not published.” I replied, with a fair measure of defiance.

From there, it would be a toss-up which way the conversation would continue, from, “I’ve got a book I’d like to write,” to “I know someone who got a six-figure advance.” This is when I’d resist the urge to kick this person in the shins by walking away, steam visibly escaping from my ears.

But with practice and patience, I’m learning that money is not the only way to measure the value of what I do. After all, tax credits for dependent children aside, I’ve never been paid to raise children either, yet I have no trouble understanding that parenting is a valuable, even patriotic, job.

Money is only one measure of value, albeit one our culture is obsessed with. Not me. I’m obsessed with language and stories, so I’m starting to measure my success as a writer in number of words written and published rather than dollars earned with my pen.

Sure, in an ideal world I’d be able to earn a living as an essayist and novelist. Hopefully, someday I will. And why not? Every year, I write more, publish more, earn more. If I keep at it, I have a chance of achieving this goal; if I give up, I don’t.

So, I’m going to continue writing essays and novels; it’s work that I value, even if that value isn’t in dollars and cents. And since I spend my days writing, I’ve decided from now on to answer that question, “What do you do,” honestly. I’m going to tell anyone who asks what I actually do for the better part of each day. From now on, when someone asks me, “What do you do?” I’ll tell them the truth.

“I write,” I’ll say.

It’s what I do every day.

So, what do you do?

 

 

photo: M. Shafer

 

Deborah Lee Luskin is an award-winning novelist who writes in and about Vermont.

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Empowering Submission – guest post by Naomi Shafer

Regular Live to Write – Write to Live blogger Deborah Lee Luskin recently posted Raising a Writer. Here’s a post by that young writer, who by changing the language, offers a new way to think about sending work out.

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It’s hard to get excited about submitting. Submission Opportunity sounds dirty. As a twenty-three year old, just starting out, I have far too many opportunities to submit in my personal and professional life. And I work in a literary office, so I know the odds: they’re grim. But working on the other end of the submission spectrum has offered me a new perspective: as much as I’d like to believe that the gatekeepers to literary success are ogres, this job has taught me that the opposite is true. Each work is read with compassion and dedication, read by people who have dedicated their lives to soliciting new work. So, regardless of whether I like the lingo or not, to assert myself as a writer, I have to bite the linguistic bullet and submit my work.

I offer this: Instead of submitting to a competition, agent, or publisher, submit for. Submit for the opportunity to start something new, to clear your head, to know the draft is done.  Submit for the personal satisfaction of having done your best. Or, if you really need to spin it, submit for the person who will read it, for the opportunity to share your work with a stranger, to make someone else’s day a little less lonely. Because it will. Reading new work gives me hope to know that there are so many writers brave enough to share their work.

My evaluation is only one step in the process of how work is chosen. I can’t guarantee anything, certainly not fame or fortune, but what I can give each writer is my undivided attention while reading her work. I step into the world she has created and then ask what it taught me about myself. That’s a gift I can never repay, certainly not one that can be quantified with a royalty check. The authors who crafted these stories may never receive validation from my office (although many, even those not selected, do), but their characters step away from the page and inhabit my day. Some of them accompany home and keep me smiling all week. Others visit unexpectedly, months later, and remind me the enduring power of stories.

Submitting your work is an act of generosity. You give someone the chance to read a story they’d never heard before. And you create an audience, even if it’s only one person. Now, my submission is empowered with the knowledge that my work will be read. For now, that’s enough. . . But still really hard.

I’ve made a submission schedule with the goal that the more I practice it, the less scary it will become; submitting my work will feel less like submitting my whole self. The added perk is that the schedule keeps me moving forward.  Having an outside deadline helps for the days I’d prefer to clean my toilet than write. And sometimes it’s fun to write within parameters I wouldn’t have thought of for myself.

But it’s not foolproof. This past month I chickened out.  Frustrated by the contest I should have heard back from weeks ago, I let myself slump. Then, angry at the judges for not giving me the courtesy of a response, I invited six friends over to read the play I’d submitted. I was one chair short. My attempt at gluten-free baking was a catastrophe. But the play came to life. Best of all, I got feedback and encouragement from the people I care about most. It taught me that there will be other opportunities for this play, ones I can make for myself.

And in the meantime, I remind myself that each work I submit is a gift for the person lucky enough to read it.

How do you get yourself to submit your work?

Naomi Shafer is a Dramaturgy/Literary Management Intern at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, where her play Lucid is about to premiere in a festival of short plays. She is the editor of the Intern Company Blog and a contributing writer for inside Actors, the theatre’s newsletter. Shafer holds a B.A. in Sociology and Theatre from Middlebury College.

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The Scientist Writes

Regular Live to Write – Write to Live blogger Deborah Lee Luskin wrote Most Improved Writing Student earlier this month.

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Here’s a guest post by that student, Daniel Chamovitz, author of What A Plant Knows

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I don’t consider myself an author; I am a scientist. I spend my days and nights considering levels of gene expression, pondering the intricacies of protein structure, and guiding my students on their nascent scientific paths. A fair amount of academic administrative duties and a heavy, but immensely satisfying, load of lecturing fill out my schedule. And when all this is finished, I still have endless grant proposals, reports, reviews and articles to write.

But I wasn’t invited to last month’s Brattleboro Literary Festival because of my academic record; I was invited as the author my recent book, What A Plant Knows.

What brings a scientist to lay down the pipette and pickup the pen?

My impetus in writing a trade book was twofold: First, I wanted to educate. I get endlessly annoyed at public ignorance of science in general and of plant biology in particular. While many people I speak to are surprised to discover that plants contain the gene for breast cancer, they have no problem in quoting the scientifically lame book, The Secret Life of Plants, and believing that plants don’t like to be yelled at. But I came to realize that my colleagues and I are partially responsible for this ignorance, as we have done a pitiful job extolling the wonders of plant biology.

Scientists from other fields have greatly influenced public perception through their books: Hawking has done a great service to astrophysics with A Brief History of Time; Dawkins explains evolution in The Selfish Gene, and mathematics is brought to life in Simon Singh’s Feremat’s Last Theorem. Perhaps arrogantly, I set out to write the plant version of these wonderful books, a book that would open the amazing world of plant science to the general public.

Second, for years I’ve had a secret desire to write something that was popular, and not strictly and professionally scientific. While much of my success as a scientist has been due to my writing ability, that writing – of grant proposals and research articles – is very structured and repetitive, and admittedly reaches a very limited audience. Could I go beyond the secure world of professional scientific writing? Could I take this skill one step forward and write something that would be both interesting and intelligible to a non-scientist?

I quickly learned that the literary world is not so different from my world of academic science. Success in science is not only a function of intelligence, but also of diligence, deferred gratification, risk taking, and an ability to know when to learn from – and when to ignore – rejection.

Success in science is also influenced by serendipity – just as in publishing.

Once I made the commitment to writing a trade book, I knew that I had to find an agent to reach a broad audience. Having no idea how to find an agent, I looked in the “Acknowledgments” of the last two books I read, to identify the agents who had sold them. The rest is an author fairy-tale: One query letter and 22 months later: a published book!

Now four months post-publication, a rush of publicity events, and wonderfully kind words from new friends and readers, and I’m back in my lab. I have a 10,000-word grant proposal due next week, two new scientific manuscripts to write, and a new course to teach. But in the back of my mind I’m working out the general shape of a new book proposal based on an idea inspired by my visit to Vermont. Maybe publishing and science are similar in another way as well – both are addictive.

Daniel Chamovitz, Ph.D., is the Director of the Manna Center for Plant Biosciences at Tel Aviv University. He studied at both Columbia University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he received his Ph.D. in Genetics. He has lectured at major universities around the world. www.danielchamovitz.com

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Writing Through Grief

My mother died last month. Her death was long anticipated and when it finally came, something of a relief. But losing a parent is one of life’s great transitions, moving the next generation closer to the front line of death. As expected as my mom’s death was, it also caused my universe to wobble. In order to hold on and begin working my way through a grief I expect to accompany me the rest of my life, I started doing what I always do to help me understand myself and my place in the universe: I wrote.

I’m not just talking about my journal, which I’ve been keeping since I was nine and which has been a companion for this long, arduous journey of my mother’s decline. I’m talking about the writing that accompanies a death, and that has allowed me a formal, disciplined way to organize my experience.

First, I wrote my mother’s obituary. I drafted it the first week of Mom’s final decline, when hospice took over. Two weeks later, I looked up the few facts about which I’d been unsure, and the day after she passed, when my oldest brother asked if I would write the obit, I was able to zap it to him via email.

I was enormously pleased that my oldest brother acknowledged me as a writer, relied on my services at my family’s time of need. After reading what I’d written, this brother wrote back saying, “This is great!” Now that Mom is gone, relationships with my siblings have become even more important, and this accolade from my oldest brother affirmed my sense of belonging to this band of brothers who tortured me through childhood, but whom I now hold dear.

The second writing task was the memorial service, which I organized. I solicited stories of remembrance, organized them so they had a narrative arc, and wrote a prologue and epilogue, giving the entire service a shape. My youngest brother, a playwright and filmmaker, gave me some directorial advice that added an element of bittersweet humor to the event. Laughter is good medicine, even – especially – in the face of death.

Next, I thought about my mother’s journey from octogenarian skier just seven years ago, to a human husk ravaged by dementia, leaving her without language, memory or mobility. It’s a grim fate, though not uncommon. Five million Americans currently suffer from Alzheimer’s Disease, which is only one of several kinds of dementia. Dementia is predicted to reach epidemic proportions worldwide by 2050 – by which time I’ll probably have it, if I’m still alive. So I wrote my monthly column for the local paper about how my family coped with my mother’s final year of care, figuring my story probably isn’t that unique. Ironically, now that medicine can keep our bodies going so long, we have to decide how we want to live, which means we also have to consider how we want to die.

Now, I’m writing about how we write about death right here. And I doubt that I’m done yet. But for now – and for this blog – it seems important to restate the obvious: We writers have an obligation to articulate the truth as we see it, to say the hard things, to tell the stories that are sometimes painful, to point out the conundrums our culture has created, to confront our readers with our thoughts, so they can push against them and discover their own.

It’s a great responsibility, being a writer in this world. And for those of us for whom writing is as essential as breathing air, writing is also a great comfort, especially in the face of death.

Deborah Lee Luskin is a novelist, essayist and educator. She keeps bees and chickens in southern Vermont. Learn more at www.deborahleeluskin.com.

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Most Improved Writing Student

In 1982, while a graduate student at Columbia University, I taught Introduction to Freshman Composition, a remedial course for bright but inarticulate young men just entering the college. (Columbia was still all-male back then.) I’d never taken Freshman Composition of any kind, so I found the class useful and interesting. Indeed, I developed an appreciation for fluid non-fiction as a result of the class, and the skills that I learned by teaching have served me well. For even though my heart lies in writing literary fiction, my bank account depends on my ability to write clear, expository, prose.

I earned my PhD and moved to Vermont, creating a free-lance career outside the academic mainstream. I lost touch with all my students and most of my colleagues from my New York days – until 2009.  That’s when I received an email from a former student, who wrote to thank me for my tutelage.

Daniel Chamovitz, that former student, is now a professor of biology at Tel Aviv University, where among other classes, he teaches a course called “Scientific Writing in English for PhD Students”. In his letter, he explained how a student had asked him how he learned to write, prompting him to remember the C- I gave him for what he now says, “was, in retrospect, a very pitiful piece of work.”

In his long and lovely letter, he says that his success as a scientist is due as much to his writing skills as it is to any scientific achievements. It concludes with thanks “for the path you started me on.” I never dreamed I’d had such an impact on any of those young men, let alone such a positive one that would be remembered three decades later.

Of course I replied, and we’ve maintained the correspondence. When we met in 1982, Danny was a mere 18 to my mature 24. Now, that six-year gap seems insignificant. (My youngest child and his oldest are the same age.) But best of all, we’re now both authors. Danny’s book, What A Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses of Your Garden – and Beyond, was just published in a joint venture between Scientific American and FSG. And Danny is coming to read from it at this year’s Brattleboro Literary Festival.

The 2012 Brattleboro Literary Festival takes place October 12-14. It’s a fabulous way to spend a weekend in downtown Brattleboro, Vermont, a gateway community with a vibrant literary and arts economy – and really good food – in the southeast corner of the state.

I go every year. Hearing authors read aloud is a treat; meeting them is a thrill; talking books with other book-lovers a great way to spend a weekend. And this year, on Saturday afternoon, I’ll be introducing my former C- student, whose book, What A Plant Knows deserves an A+.

Deborah Lee Luskin is novelist, essayist and educator. She is a regular commentator for Vermont Public Radio, a Visiting Scholar for the Vermont Humanities Council and the author of the award winning novel, Into The Wilderness. For more information, visit her website at www.deborahleeluskin.com

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