Sharon Pywell's Blog: Sharon Pywell's blog

I taught 17 and 18 year-olds secondary school English for a long time, and over that time I found myself struggling with young people who, more and more, did not see the point. After all, one of them said to me about reading fiction, It never happened. So why are we doing this? I’m not alone. Teachers’ rooms all over the country are full of people like me wondering why their students don’t read. By this my colleagues don’t mean they can’t decode a menu. They mean their students increasingly resist reading anything longer than a text. Of course this isn’t all students. But something’s changing.
There’s a connection between this pattern and the current state of the Union: reading fiction develops the capacity to see contradiction, decode the implied, value the truth. Not reading does the opposite.
I have been confused by the increasing trouble my students have explaining what is truly going on in human interactions they find in fiction. How does this character feel? I may ask. “Good,” they’ll say. They ignore the fact that the character is lying and the preceding hundred pages made that clear. Lies, I have told my students, are the engines that drive the narrative arc upward to its crisis point. Why are Iago and Macbeth so vulnerable to any witch or subaltern who whispers their unacknowledged fears or desires into their ears? Isn’t it strange that Nick begins his story about Gatsby with the assertion that you can’t believe stories that young men tell because when they aren’t lying, they’re plagiarizing. Now, he says, I’ve got a story for you.
Then there’s the way that fiction demands, if you heed its demands, that you see and make connections. If you don't. . . .
Why did no one go to Willy Loman’s funeral, I ask. A student who had heard the entire play read aloud in class suggested that no one went to Loman’s funeral because there were no email services at the time of his death. Challenged by another student, the young man argued that it could be possible and was therefore a valid position. It was a fact that there was no e-mail then. It is a fact that no one came to the funeral. Voila. He was entirely satisfied with his argument’s strength.
How can this standard of critical attention protect such a young person from lies? What’s going on when he didn’t seem to acknowledge that the truth matters more than a teetering sophistic evasive argument? What does he think when he watches Fox News?
If fiction can’t actually come to the rescue here, it can at least help. It may help us see that the truth is sometimes not immediately evident, that the person speaking is offering a self-serving or cowardly straight-up lie. This might even be a person who has been given enormous authority by his culture or nation, like, say, a king. Perhaps young people resist this idea not only because their world view has been titrated down to an iphone screen but because accepting it means living with the responsibility of weighing, comparing, assessing. Maybe they’ll have to face off against people arguing that what they said could be true. It could be an alternative truth!
I’ve heard the arguments about literature increasing empathy and that’s all well and good but I am more interested in literature helping people spot liars–the ones who lie to themselves as well as the ones who lie to others.
So I say English teachers of the world, pick up your burden. We’re needed.

Here’s the entry I tried not to write.

I was in the gym, trotting along on my treadmill and watching Captain Picard outwit a Romulan, when I glanced up at the larger television screens along the wall. It was another police procedural. The image was the top half of a prone, blank-eyed woman's body. The body was jerking up and down and the next shots wee of a man explaining to a cop (and the 14 year old boys in the audience eager to learn some gangsta slang) that “a ‘baby mama’ is owned by one particular guy, but a “sheep” is for communal use.

I returned to the world of Data and warp speed. The next day I looked up at the television screens and saw a police station interview room, a man saying, “Then I burned her and she screamed. I cut her and she screamed. I put my fist in her and she screamed louder. I controlled her completely.” The beautiful detective who had solicited this confession beamed. Ta DAAA! Full confession!

I’d been mugged.

I asked the front desk staff to change the station and when asked why, I quoted the dialogue. They were amazed. They said they’d never noticed anything like that. Keep in mind that the staff are positioned in front of five screens for several hours a day with at least two of those screens usually devoted to police shows. I thought of the New Yorker cartoon showing a little fish swimming along beside a big fish. “What’s water?” he asks.

That front desk guy saw what I saw only because I excised the worst of it, arranged it on a plate and set it before him on his check-in desk. “Oh,” he said. Oh, indeed. I don't think the word "desensitized" completely describes what's happening here.

It almost makes a girl long for the days of Petticoat Junction. At least then the proffered chocolate box of women tossing their underwear over the opening credits (one blonde, one brunette, one redhead—improbably offered up as sisters) didn’t stick in my head the way that blank-eyed, bouncing body did.

Things are different now.

I met my first romance novel at the Talkeetna Roadhouse, where my daughter and I were staying the night. Most of Alaska and hundreds of tourists pass through this jumping-off town to the Denali National Park, and many left books behind for the Roadhouse lending library. Here they sat over the coffeepot on a shelf that ended in a few bear spray canisters, also on loan to travelers who’d forgotten theirs. Almost every battered paperback on offer was a romance.

I’m a New Englander, who until this visit had no experience with romances. I’d read the novels my teachers had given me, which were never romances, and I read addictively. But I was bookless when we got to Talkeetna, so I plucked one from the lending library shelf and took it to bed. My ignorance was dispelled; I was entranced.

When I got home, I headed to a library and got myself a big stack of books with titles like The Moth and the Flame; Dirty, Willing Victim; and Too Tough to Tame. The nice young man at the checkout counter saw my selections, leaned forward, and very discretely offered to let me jump a waiting line of 248 (yes, really) people who wanted to read Fifty Shades of Grey. I just happen, he whispered, to have a recent return right here under the counter. If you’re interested.

Well, of course I was interested. I took them home and entered Romancelandia. Brio! Bad guys with mansions and castles! Great sex! Silliness! Sadism! Dominance. True love. Submission. Salvation. It was clear to me that under the heaving bosoms and wands of pleasure there was something elementally true going on.

In Romancelandia, sex and power were tangled, even interdependent. But wasn’t that the way it really was? Weren’t they also linked in The Taming of the Shrew, in Wuthering Heights, in the evening news reports of recent domestic murders? I hadn’t read Fifty Shades of Grey or Too Tough to Tame until I started all this, but when I did, the struggle to control the lover or be controlled seemed like an old story, recast to play out in billionaires’ luxury condominiums or wooden ships on stormy seas.

And here’s where I thought the thought that became this novel: If someone set a romance plot side-by-side with a “real” story about love, would the struggle to dominate or be subordinated be the same in both worlds? Would both narratives suggest that a power struggle was central to sexual satisfaction? To love? Would both stories slip over a line and become deadly, or would they describe someone’s salvation? In other words, are romances true?

The novel is a romance about romances. It takes place in two settings: Romancelandia, and the post-WWII world of emerging cosmetics industries. Its heroines discover that the forces of evil often have a magnetic, sweet, bluntly sexual pull. They allow themselves to be pulled, and find that when they reach the edge of what’s safe and known, there’s an almost overwhelming urge to jump. Pleasure and danger—they’re an indelibly bound combination familiar to any hiker who plucks a dog-eared pink paperback to carry into the woods along with her bear spray. That’s romance.

Bring on the pirates.

Process Schmosess.

I don’t think I’ve ever been at a book reading where writers weren’t asked to describe their “process”. I think most of these questioners are aspiring writers who nurse the hope that a rubric exists, somewhere, that guides the hundreds or thousands of hours spent sitting in a chair and tapping at a keyboard and brings them, at last, to a completed (and brilliant) novel.

No such strategy really exists. The idea that it does is the unicorn of the business. Everybody talks about it. Nobody’s actually come home with a trophy horn to put on the wall.

I’ve read interviews with writers who describe specific working methods (only beginning after three months of journaling in the characters’ voices; only beginning on the same day of the year for each new book and only in rooms full of flowers. . .). When I have actually met some of these writers at artists’ colonies or informal gatherings, I’ve discovered the hopeful yet unhelpful truth: They often lie. They try to keep things completely under control, but there they are chasing after a memory of a woman seen from a train window, and she isn’t fitting into the structure they originally hacked out and she will not go away.

Sometimes questions about process are actually requests for a daily work formula that results in real pages. Here the questioners are going to get actual strategies, but the strategies are generally not transferable from one life to another. William Gass has said that his only unbreakable rule is to stop at some point where he had an idea of what to do first thing the next day. Output? A paragraph a day was perfectly fine with him. Some people delete almost nothing of their work (Patrick O’Brien, for example); some people begin each day deleting 2/3 of what they produced the day before (me, for example). A best-selling writer I know has an elaborate reward system for himself based on four specific word count goalposts per day. When he hits the first number, he lets himself have coffee; the second, lunch. If by 3:00 p.m. he hasn’t reached goalpost four, he allows himself a cookie and then it’s back to the keyboard. If by 3:00 he’s surged through and hit his final number, it’s a beer and a little dance music. John MacPhee went through a patch of restlessness so intractable that he experimented with chaining himself to his chair, but gave it up when he found it made accepting FedEx deliveries difficult.

Perhaps the biggest difference in approaches is the “I only start out on well-marked trails and a map in my hand,” as opposed to the “I bushwhack and hope for the best.” I’ve done both. I hope, every time, never to have to bushwhack my way out of a scene again, but so far I have consistently found myself knee-deep in some narrative bog or other. The truth is, most “I plan every step” people expect to fall off their paths at some point.

I think every writer, in her heart of hearts, wants to know where she’s going and I think novels run off and refuse to be put on a leash or snapped to a gps. In the end, generally there’s a messy wrestling match between the writer and the book’s inclinations. Some confrontations end in an embrace, others in splints and bandages. And there’s no way to know, going in, what will happen. You just have to keep going.

That’s the process. .

I was in my forties and more past my prime than I knew when I decided to become a figure skater. I’d never done more than slide across a pond in a pair of borrowed hockey skates, but I’d taken on physical challenges before with little trouble. So I was surprised, well into my third group class, to still be occasionally finding myself flat on my back with an instructor leaning over me and asking “How many fingers do you see?”

I wouldn’t call myself delusional but I’ve always been dogged. Sometimes those two things aren’t as different as you’d think. I learned the schedules of every rink within a twenty-mile radius and I always traveled with skates, bunga pads and skating clothes. If I had a long break during the workday, I’d sneak onto the nearest open rink. I followed hockey schedules, because when Boston College was doing well, they kept the rink open a month or more longer than usual. The public rink just down the road from Boston College was easy to pop onto when I had enough time to lace up. That’s where I was the afternoon a lump of uneven, unzambonied ice caught my blade mid-turn on a solchow. My body kept revolving but the ankle didn’t. When I got out of the cast and through with physical therapy, back I went. Now I had a new thought: I was getting old. I was running out of time. I doubled up on group classes and started hiring a coach.

There were ripped hamstrings and whacks on the head, the knees, the whole-body octopus slides down the ice when I completely lost control.

It was the shoulder that finally drove me off the ice. I managed to rip the bicep where it threads through the shoulder joint. You didn’t know it did that, did you? The shoulder is an amazing joint, much more elegant than the knee or hip, and like many things, you don’t appreciate it until it’s gone. The surgeon told me that the only thing I’d have to deal with would be a sling which would be off in a month. The sling indeed was off, but not the three-times-a-week physical therapy or the three months it took to lift a cup of coffee with that arm.

But there was also the clean feel of a brisk fifteen-miles-per-hour sweep of a large rink, the way your chest feels like it’s suddenly full of carbonated something when you do manage a graceful landing, the way a hot late-August rink can fill with steam rising off the ice and you get to pop in and out of it like a cloud hiding the thirteen year olds from you as they polish their routines.

If I’d know what I’d be breaking and ripping and clonking before I started, I might not have started. But now since my future is mostly behind me, skating wise, I can honestly say that I am glad that in life, we almost never know, and if we did, we’d lie down and wait for death. I might have learned nothing at all through the whole experience, but this I know: I don’t care. I still do figure eights in my head to get to sleep at night. And they feel good.

I grew up in upstate New York’s lake effect snow belt. Over any given weekend between October and May, six feet of the stuff could come down in impenetrable clouds. In whiteouts, car headlights bounced the light back at blinded drivers. After one storm my brother and I jumped out second story window to shovel out our banked-in front door.

One college winter break a friend and I agreed to meet in New York City to see a play. It was December, and it was snowing. My dad offered to give me a lift to the train station in East Syracuse. Ten foot drifts covered some of the tracks heading south and the train plows weren’t making much progress. My dad sat down to wait with me, unwilling to drive back to collect me later when the train never arrived and never left.

Lots of time went by. I was going to miss the play and I was cranky. My dad sat patiently. “Why do you live here?” I cried! “The second I can get out of here, I will!”

“Sharon,” he answered, tipping his chin to the window on my left. “Look out there.” I did. “Now,” he said, tipping it in the opposite direction, “Look out there.” I did. “Do you see any bums?” he asked. I shook my head in the ‘no’ direction. “Exactly,” he said, contentedly. “Everybody who lives here has a reason to live here.”

I went off to a southern university, where I sat on my front porch during the single snowfall we got each year and watched the hapless drivers skid off the road in two inches of fluff. I graduated and found a job in a town with a hundred fewer inches of snowfall per year than the world I’d grown up in. I got married, had a kid, and recently said goodbye to her when she moved to Alaska to work in Donali National Park.

“There are bears,” I complained, via text. “In fact, recently a 600 pound grizzly ate a hiker.” My hardened child shrugged it off. “The man got too close,” she texted back. “They aren’t stuffed.”

“How much light will there be in December?” I ask innocently. “I guess you’ll look for a job in the lower 48 when this is done.”

She ignored this tack. “I found a new room-mate,” she texted back. “She’s got a truck, and a dog, and wilderness fire-fighting certification! Can you believe it? I should have gotten that certification when I was working in the Delaware Water Gap!”

This from the child who has been trying to get my husband and I to drive around with a dog (I have allergies) in a truck (Are you kidding?). “I don’t know why this place is so special but it is,” she said when we last spoke. “Maybe I’ll stick around and find something to do here after this job ends. “

“What does ‘special’ mean?” I asked her, hoping that if she examined that generalization more closely she’d realize that she meant the exact opposite. She said, “I was in a bar last night full of people who worked for Big Oil, with hunters, with guys from a soil lab. . .” She stopped, uncertain herself where this train of thought was going. Finally she figured it out. She said, “Here’s the thing, Mom. Everybody who lives here has a reason to live here.”

I told her I understood. I think I did.

The Magic Hoo Hoo

For complicated reasons that I won’t go into here, I was recently at my local library checking out a dozen Nora Roberts romance novels, a copy of the masterful BEYOND HEAVING BOSOMS (The Smart Bitches’ Guide to Romance Novels) by Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan, and a directory of romance comics titled LOVE ON THE RACKS by Michelle Nolan. The guy running them through the scanner cocked an eyebrow, looked over his shoulder and said, very softly, “I’ve got a copy of 50 SHADES OF GREY back here that just came in—there’s a wait list of about 1,500 people but if you want—I could slip it to you.”

Well what’s a girl to do but say yes. I think I even blushed.

This is the year’s Big Event, it’s mammoth seller. I just finished reading it, and I am a sad woman. I know I’m supposed to be turned on, outraged, or at least amused. I’m not. Any of these.

By now everybody knows it’s the story of a college graduating senior, virginal, beautiful, until the first pages of this story entirely uninterested in sex. Then she meets Him—Apollo-like, much older, the kind of guy hwo pilots his own helicopters and planes and has Faithful Servants. We’re supposed to believe he’s 26 or so years old. When we overhear anything about his “business” we get snippets of words like “airdrop” and “Darfur” that make no sense whatsoever. But that’s not the point.

The point is that he has been unhappy, and hurt, and so now he likes sex in his “Playroom” where he hurts people. Or so he says—he produces contracts for her to sign designating her as his Submissive and him as her Dominant, and he explains that the Submissive controls everything because she determines where every line is drawn. Nothing is done that she does not agree to. He himself has limits—nothing leaving marks on skin, nothing involving small animals or children. . that kind of thing.

Then the parade of orgasms begins. He caresses her nipples—she comes. She has intercourse for the first time. She comes. Then she comes again.

Really?

Okay, let’s go with really. She proceeds to have statistically misleading sexual experiences that delight her so that she wonders what it would feel like to have the dominant man take her “further.” So they go a little further-- a little caressing with whips, a little spanking—all good so far. And to my mind, not even so adventurous as the recent New Yorker cartoons making fun of S & M sex (the poodle waiting in bed for her mongrel lover, who approaches her with his collar and leash still on. The poodle growls softly, “Leave them on.”; the two headless Praying Mantis males walking down the street together, one saying, “So much for safe words.”)

If you turn to any text on the subject, you’ll find that Ms. E.J. James is following a genre matrix with distinctly New School plot variations—meaning that the man is as amazed by the woman’s sexuality as the woman is amazed by the man’s powers (Wendell and Tan refer to this as the Magic Hoo Hoo variation, and you know what a Hoo Hoo is, I presume). And the violence—nothing new, but in 50 Shades, there’s the Twilightish twist that the man, though he has powerful powerful drives and could hurt the woman if he did not control them, does not want to hurt her. He wants to please her.

This is new. Here’s HEAVING BOSOMS on the subject of violence in romance genre: “. . although rape scenes have largely disappeared form romance novels published orm the early 19990s onward, they were ubiquitous in romance novels form the early 70’s to the mid ‘80’s Hell, if the heroine only got raped by the hero in a romance novel, she was lucky. Rosemary Rogers and Catherine Coulter, among others, wronte infamous gang-rape scens, in which the heroine is completely and utterly brutalized p. 137

Historically, rape has always been a criminal act because it damages goods. “The definition of rape has changed in tandem with the conceptions of a woman’s personhood. The focus wasn’t always on consent. . the focus used to be on women as property and how the rape would affect their market value. Marital rape wasn’t recognized until a few decades ago, for example, ditto the rape of sexually experienced unmarried women.”

“Even if the heroine is excused from the taint of sexual promiscuity, she is still culpable for the hero’s sexual brutality. Whether it’s because she’s completely sexually irresistible, or whether it’s because he’s punishing her for some wrongdoing. . the focus is often on the heroine.”

This continues, they explain, until the Irresistible Woman’s Magic Hoo Hoo Tames the Untamable Mighty Wang.


It takes five hundred pages for her

Littattafan Soyaya means Books of Love in Hausa, a northern Nigerian language. Books of Love are small paperbacks sold in some high-traffic northern Nigerian markets and according to an AP article published 5/1/2008, Islamic women are whisking them off the shelves while Islamic religious male leaders are burning them. They’re considered dangerous because they cheer on true love and marriage based on feelings, not your family’s preferences.

And as for the fact that our heroine is twenty-one or twenty-two, unrestricted by any family or religious ideas that would encourage virginity, and still virgin—well that’s required. Again, here are Wendell and Tan:

“Experience: Heroines Do Not Have It.

“If the heroine had sex before she met the hero, it had to have been bad. It was the Curse of the Bad Wang, and its blight affected both virgin and nonvirgin women in Romancelandia. Rapist Wang; Abusive Want; Overly Massive Wang TeenyTiny Wang; Evil Homosexual Wang (and its close relative, Evil Bsexual Wang); Drug-Addicted Wang; Wang That Died Before It Could Do Its Duty; Utter Lack of Wang Due to Overprotective Male Relatives. . .”

Of course in vampire books, from Anne Rice and her predecessors on, the descriptions of teeth puncturing skin, on to the virgin desiring to be punctured by the Alpha Vampire who wants to protect her from his own powers—it’s all code for sex.

“We understand the appeal of the Unawakened Woman. We do. There’s a lot of cultural significance attached to first times. . .however, part of the fantasy of romance novels is that the hero is equally floored when he encounters the heroine, and sexually unaware men are in extremely short supply in Romancelandia. . How do authors achieve this emotional intensity on the hero’s part? By capitalizing on the Magic Hoo Hoo, of course.” The chemistry is astounding to him as well as her. “That relatively few romance novels use this method of making the sexual experience special for he heroine is probably a testament to the tenacity of the idea that a woman who enjoys sex for ex itself is morally suspect.”

So the genre has always been friends with Vampires, Werewolves,. . .any force that can draw the heroine down its dark path where she encounters her own sexuality, which of course, as any reader of Sigmund Freud knows, is linked to her attraction to death.

I’m not saying I don’t take some of this very seriously. That’s why it troubles me. We’re still dancing this dance of the Wang and Hoo Hoo, of power inequity and the link between that inequity and the feeling of being alive—on one end of it or the other. That dramatic differences in power so often lead to one party’s suffering. . .. well what can we say?

Here’s Lilith Saintcrow, an accomplished writer in this genre:
“The heated descriptions of breaking the hymen can, with very little trouble, be transferred over to the male vampire/werewolf biting the female human to transform her. Through this agency of contamination the female human is initiated into the world of sex or ‘darkness’. .”

This is not to say that we now have alpha heroines who are smart, willful, action-oriented, moral. In fact, our 50 SHADES heroine, eager to see how far the excitement can go. But of course, she’s a Good Woman, and Good Women want to save their men from the male tendency to be Bad. Thus with our heroine, who tells us, “This is a man in need. His fear is naked and obvious, but he’s lost. . somewhere ein his darkness. . . . I can sooth him, join him briefly in the darkness and ring him into the light. ‘Show me,”
‘ I whisper. . . ‘Show me how much it can hurt. . . . ‘

Okay—plot spoiler, but amazing so please stay with me. He hits her, hard, with a belt. At this point the heroine, who has previously been sexually excited by being spanked, leaps to her feet: “’don’t ouch me! I hiss. . . ‘This is what you really like? Me, like this?’I use the sleeve of th bathrobe to wipe my nose.’

But then, most astoundingly, after five hundred pages of playing games with a man who has a Play Room, she declares, “Well, you are one fucked-up son of a bitch . . You need to sort your shit out Grey!”

And she flounces out of the room.

End of drama. The Good Girl has peeked over the wall, swung one leg over, tiptoed into the Garden, snuck a few ripe pieces of fruit, and jumped right back. The story’s very old, and women still read it to give themselves the experience, vicariously, of being protected, sexually dominated and therefore not responsible for sexual control over either themselves or the partner. So that hasn’t changed, but other things have.

The blogosphere has made the success of S & M play in Romancelandia break all monetizing hopes. It created its audience through social networking that are entirely new, and whose impact on the way we think, and the stories we share (or don’t) as a culture. The big engines that directed our attention and shared critical responses are no longer in the book review sections of newspapers.

From where I stand, this relegates novels that require more quiet, more concentration, to access to the outside edge of the public’s attention. It moves Romancelandia and its friends to the center.

Good luck to us.

I was about eight years old and had just gotten a new pair of snow pants, fortuitous because we were having the snowiest winter of my lifetime. This is saying something because we lived in the snowiest city in the continental United States: Syracuse, New York. Ten solid days of whiteout conditions left our world about four new new feet deeper in snow. My brother Ken, told to clear out the front door, took a shovel from the garage, marched to his bedroom (which overlooked that door) and jumped out the window. It was faster, he explained, than spending five hours shoveling a path from the garage, and he was right. My parents didn’t argue.

On the eleventh day the sun came out and the temperatures rocketed into the high thirties, melting the top foot of everything that had fallen in the preceding week. When night came and the temperature dropped again, the entire world turned into a skating rink. I was woken by my brother’s fingers sticking in my ribs–still so dark it could have been midnight. The moon was full and unobstructed, and though it was setting its light was strong enough to cast shadows. “Get up,” he said. He held my new snowpants, my coat, my mittens. Who could say no? And why should we wake our parents, who needed their rest, to tell them we were going out to skid around in the newly frozen landscape?

For drama’s sake he insisted we climb out a bedroom window, so we did. The snow reached to an inch below the sash, so it looked easy until we fell directly on our rear ends. The surface was as hard and reflective as glass. We skidded from house to house, stopping longer where pre-dawn risers had flipped on lights and offered voyeuristic distraction. The snow was still high enough that I could stop to rest on the top of a neighbor’s steel clothes hanger. In summer months the top of this structure was high enough that we could hang a tire swing from it. Now it poked about a foot above the glittering snow. When I stood up to leave there was a ripping sound and a cool breeze on my ass–the warmth of my body had frozen the pants to the steel bar and when I’d risen, the seat of the snow pants had stayed behind.

So of course we were caught–a hole in new snow pants was not going to go unnoticed even if you were strategic enough to have tossed all the wet things in a dryer when you crept back into the house and broke open the Monopoly board to make it look like you’d just gotten up, which is what Ken did. We were fined television for the day, but I didn’t care. I’d seen the most magical landscape I ever hope to see–in part because it was really magical, and the rest of the way because my big brother trusted me to keep my mouth shut and took me along on one of his adventures. That was the definition of heaven when I was eight years old, and it still stands up pretty well as the definition now.

Ken is an engineer now, like all my brothers, and he thinks of snow as that stuff that beats up his copper gutters; of wildly fluctuating temperatures as those things that challenge his insulation and HVAC system. Weather is just a problem–not a topic for conversation or source of wonder. But years before he sank into his architectural engineering persona. he’d turned me into somebody who would never think of weather as the thing that beat up gutters. The landscape you grow up in shapes you as surely as the brothers you grow up with–and I was lucky in both.

The Landscape That Shapes You

I was about eight years old and had just gotten a new pair of snow pants, fortuitous because we were having the snowiest winter of my lifetime. This is saying something because we lived in the snowiest city in the continental United States: Syracuse, New York. Ten solid days of whiteout conditions left our world about four new new feet deeper in snow. My brother Ken, told to clear out the front door, took a shovel from the garage, marched to his bedroom (which overlooked that door) and jumped out the window. It was faster, he explained, than spending five hours shoveling a path from the garage, and he was right. My parents didn't argue.

On the eleventh day the sun came out and the temperatures rocketed into the high thirties, melting the top foot of everything that had fallen in the preceding week. When night came and the temperature dropped again, the entire world turned into a skating rink. I was woken by my brother's fingers sticking in my ribs--still so dark it could have been midnight. The moon was full and unobstructed, and though it was setting its light was strong enough to cast shadows. "Get up," he said. He held my new snowpants, my coat, my mittens. Who could say no? And why should we wake our parents, who needed their rest, to tell them we were going out to skid around in the newly frozen landscape?

For drama's sake he insisted we climb out a bedroom window, so we did. The snow reached to an inch below the sash, so it looked easy until we fell directly on our rear ends. The surface was as hard and reflective as glass. We skidded from house to house, stopping longer where pre-dawn risers had flipped on lights and offered voyeuristic distraction. The snow was still high enough that I could stop to rest on the top of a neighbor's steel clothes hanger. In summer months the top of this structure was high enough that we could hang a tire swing from it. Now it poked about a foot above the glittering snow. When I stood up to leave there was a ripping sound and a cool breeze on my ass--the warmth of my body had frozen the pants to the steel bar and when I'd risen, the seat of the snow pants had stayed behind.

So of course we were caught--a hole in new snow pants was not going to go unnoticed even if you were strategic enough to have tossed all the wet things in a dryer when you crept back into the house and broke open the Monopoly board to make it look like you'd just gotten up, which is what Ken did. We were fined television for the day, but I didn't care. I'd seen the most magical landscape I ever hope to see--in part because it was really magical, and the rest of the way because my big brother trusted me to keep my mouth shut and took me along on one of his adventures. That was the definition of heaven when I was eight years old, and it still stands up pretty well as the definition now.

Ken is an engineer now, like all my brothers, and he thinks of snow as that stuff that beats up his copper gutters; of wildly fluctuating temperatures as those things that challenge his insulation and HVAC system. Weather is just a problem--not a topic for conversation or source of wonder. But years before he sank into his architectural engineering persona. he'd turned me into somebody who would never think of weather as the thing that beat up gutters. The landscape you grow up in shapes you as surely as the brothers you grow up with--and I was lucky in both.

There are pre-Vatican II Catholics, who are the folks whose liturgical calendar is stiffly inflexible (and full of fasting and masses) and then there are post-Vatican II Catholics, who are more like Episcopalians, except for that transubstantiation thing (meaning, the belief that the priest has power to transform the host and wine into Jesus Christ's actual body and blood). I was a pre-Vatican II eight-year old when I stumbled onto Crazy Horse, and he made perfect sense to me.

It was the vision quest thing that hooked me-the perfect intersection of magic and religious practice. I could only do better if I joined a coven! Medicine men in Lakota society retreated from society (not necessarily into the desert or on top of a mountain) and fasted until a vision materialized. Their spiritual guides helped them interpret the vision, and that interpretation shaped their adult lives. In Crazy Horse's vision, he charged into battle on a lightning-painted horse with a pebble behind one ear. He was told that if he rode into battle like this he would be untouchable, and he was. He developed a reputation as the first to volunteer as a decoy, the first in the charge of battle. Just as the vision said, he did not die in battle but because of a betrayal from one of his own people. The vision was True.

I closed the book, went to the back yard, climbed the biggest tree I could manage and sat there, waiting for my own vision. After a while I got hungry, climbed down, made myself a peanut butter sandwich and read CALL OF THE WILD. Novels, it has turned out, have always been my vision quest. I still believe that they might not be real, but they are the truth. Not everyone agrees.

I teach in an orthodox Jewish day school--which given my rulebound religious past feels oddly familiar to me. But there's a place where the world I grew up in clashes with the world I teach in. There's just so far you can go as a reader or writer if you don't truly have a feel for metaphor--for the way one thing stands for another in a way that reveals its truth. It's the old problem: believe that what we see is merely the skin of forces that control the world, or believe in the material world. It's hard to be a passionate reader if you fall into the more practical category. .

And my students tend to be pragmatists, following a faith that for centuries was a body of law more than a spiritual discipline. To be religious, to most of them, is to follow law. And they believe that there is a "right" interpretation to narrative, though they can see that there's disagreement about what that is.

At the end of his senior year a young man finally turned to me and said, "I don't mean to offend you, Ms. Pywell,but why do we do this?" Do what? I asked. "Read these things. He held up a novel. "I mean, none of them is true. None of it happened. So why bother?"

This is actually a good question, but I thought I'd spent the preceding eight months with this group wrestling with this very question, so it was disturbing to hear it put out there quite so baldly.

A couple years before that I'd asked some students to read Barbara Ehrenreich's NICKEL AND DIMED . One of my brightest young charges came to class pretty irritated. "This Ehrenreich woman knows so much stuff about all the inequities and problems she knows about. Why doesn't she DO something about it?" I suggested that writing a book was doing something, and my student looked at me blankly. "That's what I mean," she said finally. "I mean, she only wrote a book. Like I said. . ."

When parents come to me and ask me how I can make their children readers, I think, but don't say, "Why would you want to do that?" Passionate readers are, according to research, one of two kinds of people. If the first, they read because they think it's good for them and they came from families that modeled reading as a productive use of time. If the second, they read because they didn't really fit into the families they were born into and they turn--will always turn--to characters in books and to authorial voices for intimate company.

In a country where the books that used to be part of our landscape are now text message screens, I'm getting lonely. But I know there will always be some of us--the ones who believe it's all run by invisible (and true) forces.