Author Archives: Kris

Season Grumblings

This week at TMR Dedra and the office workers decorated for Christmas. Charles and Lisa and Lindsay plugged in my old Target-bought fiber-optic tree and decorated it with colorful chrome ornaments hung with paperclips. They wrapped a passel of fake presents to put under its light-pulsing plastic branches. And they placed Santa paraphernalia about our conference room and main office. Next week, we will have a Christmas party for our interns before they head home for a month-long vacation.

It’s all quite nice and cheery. Except for me. As a kid on the day after Christmas, I felt much like Esther does in The Bell Jar: dull, stuffed and disappointed. As I got older, I began to feel this way well before and long after the holiday.

Fortunately I have a husband who feels the same way about most major holidays. For Thanksgiving break we went to Palm Springs. On turkey day we took a tram into the mountains to hike and picnic. For Christmas we are planning a similar escape, first to Arizona and then to Mexico.

Around the office I made the mistake of announcing that I don’t like Christmas. My co-workers looked at me as if I had sprouted horns on my head and warts on my nose. I know better. There are certain likes and dislikes that you share only with your intimates. For example, you should only divulge how you feel about babies, holidays, religion, drugs, nude beaches, and your childhood to those who know and like you. None of these topics works in polite conversation.

So I’ve outted myself. I don’t like Christmas. But unlike Scrooge, I can do without visitations from ghosts of Christmas past, present and future. In fact, because I dislike the holidays so much, I practice the old axiom that it’s better to give than receive. My husband and I write Christmas checks and send gifts to our family and friends before we put out a “gone fishin’” sign and fly off to warmer climes.

Last year, Christmas dinner was sushi at Nik Sans, and we spent the next day sunning on a beach on the Sea of Cortez. Sitting in the shade of an umbrella sipping a daiquiri, I had forgotten what day it was until two young girls in bikinis walked passed me carrying brightly wrapped packages with floppy red ribbons. The juxtaposition of sea, sand, and Christmas presents made me smile as I ordered another drink to toast the holidays.

Look at Me: Adult Show and Tell

When the choreographer Twyla Tharp is developing a new work, she keeps what she calls a scratching box. She buys a simple cardboard file holder from an office supply store and fills it with bits and pieces that relate to the dance she is working on. All sorts of artifacts go into the box: video and cassette tapes, photographs, magazine and newspaper articles, pieces of clothing. Her box is an important part of her process.

In Joan Didion’s essay “On Keeping a Notebook,” she combs through various notebooks that she’s compiled over the years and remembers what inspired her to jot down fragments of overheard dialogue, odd facts, and place details. Unlike Tharp, the material in Didion’s notebooks seldom feeds her art. Rather it provides insight into her former selves. She writes, “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive or not.”

With these artists’ habits in mind, this semester I asked my nonfiction students to fill their own scratching boxes or notebooks with mementoes that pertain to both the essays they’ve been working on and their writing process. Over the years, I’ve learned that simple assignments like this one are often the most successful.

Last week they brought their baroquely decorated boxes and notebooks to class and like kindergarteners squirmed in their seats until it was their turn to share. They passed around pictures of themselves, boyfriends, best friends, family. They read poems and quotes from their favorite books, burned their favorite candles, played their favorite mood music and passed around their favorite pens. Many held up T-shirts and concert tickets and fake IDs and peacock feathers. By the end of show and tell, the classroom looked like a small bazaar, exotic stuff scattered everywhere. The students continued passing around pictures as they walked out the door, leaving me envious that I had not put together a scratching box of my own.

Often called Generation Me for their attachment to Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube, I shouldn’t have been surprised that they enjoyed talking about themselves. Yet, they had an openness and innocence as they explained their inventories that that nixed any air of narcissism. The exercise tapped into the primitive desire we all have to say “look at me; this is who I am.”

“’Hello, Family Services?’ Tales of Terrible Parents”

For the past several weeks, I have felt particularly thankful not to be a parent.
Here’s why: This semester I have been teaching creative nonfiction at a small college in Columbia. For their second essay, the students are asked to write about a memorable person.

As model essays I use several examples from TMR’s archives. Both “Ingo Prefers Not To” and “Renee” are written by mothers who find their daughters’ choices inexplicable. One daughter becomes a heroin addict while the other simply prefers not to finish high school. Tracey Crow’s “The Facelift” tells of her husband’s nip and tuck and his resulting popularity. “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You” by Catherine Rankovic is a lesson in how to describe the nearly impossible—Elvis’ phrasing and singing voice.

I also teach John LeCarre’s terrific portrait his five-star conman father “In Ronnie’s Court” published in The New Yorker and Annie Dillard’s memorable, much anthologized piece “The Stunt Pilot.”

The point is that these essays illustrate a range of subject choices and approaches to the assignment. So what did my students do? They either wrote about their mother or their father. For weeks we’ve been reading about parents who by their children’s accounts have committed grave sins; everything from abuse, drugs, alcohol and neglect to dirty houses and bad cooking.

One student’s essay was a cut above the rest. Rather than enumerating her father’s failings; she tried to understand her “absent daddy.” To get closer to him, she tagged along on his hunting and fishing trips, even though they weren’t past-times she enjoyed. She learned that he never had the opportunity to go to college. At nineteen he went to work for the railroad, an industry that she depicts as exploitive. To advance, he made himself indispensible, which kept him away from home for long stretches. She recognized that he worked hard to give her a life better than his own and thus far had succeeded.

After the eighth essay in this series, we joked that we should put together an anthology. I asked them what they wanted to call it.

“How about ‘Fined: Violations in Parenting’,” one student suggested. Her mother had spent three years in prison for dealing drugs.

A few students nodded. All right, but not great.

“What about something like ‘Broken Ashtrays and Double-wides: Pieces on Terrible Parenting.”

The students agreed that we were getting closer. The title we eventually decided on was ‘Hello, Child Services? Tales of Terrible Parents,’”

When I asked them what we could learn from the essays we’d spent more than a month work shopping, they had many answers. No one’s childhood is perfect. Parents don’t know crap. And the phenomenon of super parenting is more media hype than reality.
Children and parents have always struggled to get along. I recently re-watched the film adaptation of Tobias Wolfe’s memoir This Boy’s Life. Wolfe’s stepfather reminded me so much of my own that I could barely watch it. But more surprising was that I’ve never much considered writing about my parents. And now it seems to me that I’m too old to carry on about their failings.

Re-dressing Poets

Today in my Introduction to Creative Writing class I showed my students a catalog for women’s clothing called Poetry. Most of them are would-be poets so I wanted them to see how they were expected to dress.

Poetry’s merchandize is distinctly understated, classic and elegant. A lot of cashmere sweaters, velvet dresses and blazers, white blouses, a few swing coats that are worn with loafers or ballet flats. The women are pictured outside of country estates, stepping off the bow of small yachts, or ambling down the cobbled streets of quaint English-looking villages.

I had paged through the catalog a few days before and other than a pleated jersey dress didn’t see anything I wanted to buy. It was a little too holiday at Balmore for me. I only occasionally have fantasies of myself walking the Scottish hillside in wellies and a mac with a pair of welsh corgies trailing after me. The look is too Sloane Ranger to suit my taste. I didn’t start admiring the way their patron saint Princess Di dressed until after she bolted from Prince Charles and started lowering her necklines and raising her hems.

Surprisingly, several of my Ugg and sweat pant wearing students said, “I would totally wear that.” They loved the cardigans and sweater vests worn with springy cotton skirts.

“Really? The clothes aren’t too staid, too preppy?”

We had just been discussing Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep, so the idea of east coast chic must have been on their minds.

“We’re bringing preppy back,” one of my more vocal students said.

I nodded, hiding my skepticism. Most of them were still regular wearers of tiny T-shirts and low-riding jeans.

I dislike the whole preppy scene and the sense of entitlement that went along with it. Cashmere and pearls were never my thing.

But the real point was the retailer’s view of poets: stately, elegant, classic. Where did this come from? Not the poets and writers that I know. As far as I can tell there are two schools of dress: Edna St. Vincent Millay flash and Dylan Thomas fizzle. They either care too much or distinctly too little.

All the clothes in Poetry start at $100, prices more in line with the corporate world than academia. Many times when I admire a fellow writer’s clothes, they confess, “thrift store” or “resale shop.”

Perhaps we can’t help but romanticized and re-dress writers a bit— Shelley in Marc Jacobs and Byron in Armani. When I imagine of Fitzgerald, he’s as coiffed as his literary creation Gatsby, and, when I first took a look at Poetry I couldn’t help but envision Sylvia Plath at Cambridge.

Go Ahead, Talk to Strangers

My stepfather used to talk to strangers. No matter where we were—waiting for Chinese takeout, getting the oil changed, picking up a prescription at the pharmacy—he’d strike up what seemed like an hour-long conversation with someone. When I was a teenager, his habitual friendliness drove me nuts. I refused to go out into the world with him. I had no idea why he wanted to talk to people he didn’t know and would probably never see again. What was the point?

My husband has the same habit. He’ll talk to anyone, anywhere, at any time. After years of existing on the fringes of his conversations, I very recently decided I liked the idea and started talking to strangers myself.

In London this summer I was even more amiable than he was. I was the first to initiate conversation with our seat companion on our eight-hour flight. She was a surgical nurse at a hospital near Heathrow and was returning from a much needed vacation to even longer hours. Because of the recession the hospital had cut redundancies and was now operating with a skeletal staff. Sounds too familiar.

In fact, evidence of the recession was everywhere. My next memorable conversation was with Jimmy and Owen, two young, unemployed blokes from Ireland who were on a week-long bender in London. Jimmy was asleep on his canvas bag, but he woke up and we all four chatted under the awning of an Asian restaurant near Leicester Square while waiting out a rain storm. Both of them had made a small fortune in construction in Germany and the U.S. before the recession, and like many, hadn’t saved a penny of it.

On the river front in Southwark near the National Theater, a group of shirtless teenage boys were taking turns running up and then flipping over a curved concrete wall. Several of them got enough elevation to do twists before touching ground. They called themselves free runners, a sport I’d only read about and seen in director Anthony Minghella’s last film Breaking and Entering. They were happy to have their pictures taken. The skateboarders at a graffiti covered underpass weren’t as willing to talk or pose for pictures, but one let me take a spin on his skateboard while their too-cool female groupies snickered at me.

I’ve always been a people watcher and an eavesdropper, but as a writer I might have discovered sooner the value of talking to strangers. Who knows, maybe Jimmy and Owen will turn up in a story someday, though when Speer and I told them we were writers they intuited our intentions and made a cross of their fingers to ward us off.

“Don’t go tellin’ any stories about us,” Owen said as he hoisted his backpack onto his shoulder. They said their good-byes and then took off down the rain-glistened street to catch their train home to sober up and face uncertain futures.