March 2015 Book Reviews

Boston on the first day of “spring”

April means it should be Spring and yet as of two days ago I encountered snow falling in Boston. Apparently breaking the record wasn’t good enough!

As much as I look forward to warm weather and the day the dry skin on my hands finally, finally manages to heal without the assiduous application of hand cream, I can’t help but hold some fondness for this topsy-turvy springtime weather. Spring never lasts long in Boston — we seem to go from snow flurries one week to t-shirts the next, so this time next month I’m likely to be singing a different tune.

And on that note, here are this month’s book reviews!

Disclaimer: This post contains Amazon affiliate links. I make a (very) small referral commission from purchases made using my links. This does not affect your price.

The Fire Starter Sessions by Danielle LaPorte

“A revolution is a way of being that becomes a significantly better way of doing. And it shifts and lifts people up along with you and keeps the universe on the edge of itself. A Course in Miracles defines a miracle as “a shift in perception”. Revolutions can feel miraculous.”

I really enjoyed reading Danielle LaPorte’s The Fire Starter Sessions: A Soulful + Practical Guide to Creating Success on Your Own Terms this month. Danielle LaPorte walks the woo-woo line a bit, but the crux of the book is about getting really clear on your WHY (I read Simon Sinek’s Start With Why last month, check out that review here).

While Simon Sinek’s book was a satisfying and intellectually convincing read, I think The Fire Starter Sessions may actually be more useful when figuring out what to do if you’ve lost track of your WHY. And as someone still emerging from the battlefield of a total loss of WHY, it’s a subject that happens to be near and dear to my heart.

“You will always be too much of something for someone: too big, too loud, too soft, too edgy. If you round out your edges, you lose your edge.”

For me, this was a transformative book. Full of wisdom and straight-talk, Danielle LaPorte manages to both inspire and cut the crap. I liked it enough that I’m even considering buying myself a copy to keep — a state of affairs that’s basically unheard of. It’s worth mentioning that the Kindle version is crummy — I’m sure the book is beautiful in print, but there are a lot of aspects to the layout that don’t translate well to Kindle. FYI.

It’s always hard to tell when a book feels transformative if it’s the book itself, or if it just happens to be the right book at the right time. I’d guess it’s usually a combination of both — a good book at the right time is probably the most common recipe for brilliant breakthroughs. In any case, this one really worked for me!

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein

“People are complicated. There is so much more to everybody than you realize. You see someone in school every day, or at work, in the canteen, and you share a cigarette or a coffee with them, and you talk about the weather or last night’s air raid. But you don’t talk so much about what was the nastiest thing you ever said to your mother, or how you pretended to be David Balfour, the hero of “Kidnapped”, for the whole year when you were thirteen, or what you imagine yourself doing with the pilot who looks like Leslie Howard if you were alone in his bunk after a dance.”

This month I also read Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein. The friend who recommended the book to me said that it was the “unofficial novel of The Toast” (if any website were to have a book for a mascot it would be the Toast!). Amusingly I found my feelings on the Toast pretty well reflected by my feelings about this book — which is to say my feelings were mixed.

The book is about two girls who become friends when brought together by a combination of circumstance and WWII. One of the girls works as a pilot for the British Air Transport Auxiliary and the other is recruited by the British intelligence service as a spy. The book is the story of their friendship and of their intertwined fates when a covert mission goes awry.

The beginning of the book triggered two of my biggest pet peeves — on the one hand, the POV was third person limited (i.e. told from a single character’s perspective) and yet STILL she had verbatim knowledge of conversations at which she was not present. The reasons for this tie in to my second peeve — which is that we are probably supposed to conclude that she is making these conversations up, and yet it’s never clear to the reader what exactly she’s lying about or whether she’s lying at all and I found that irksome. (Plus, she’s entirely too glib about her capture and torture at the hands of the Gestapo.)

However, with that said, the book did grow on me as I went and the second half of the book clears up a lot of the mysteries and irritations of the first part. By the time I managed to get all the way to the end I found I was almost willing to forgive the book its inauspicious beginning.

The Best American Short Stories 2011, edited by Geraldine Brooks

“You wind up at an after-hours club Bix knows about on Ludlow, crowded with people too high to go home. You all dance together, subdividing the space between now and tomorrow until time seems to move backward.”
— Jennifer Egan, “Out of Body”

As part of my ongoing literary education (the best way to learn to write great stories is to read great stories!), I picked up a copy of The Best American Short Stories 2011, edited by Geraldine Brooks. I’ve never given much credit to anthologies — I often find them hit or miss, likely because a great short story is harder to write than a decent novel. I find even collections of the “best” tend to be rather uneven in terms of quality.

That remains true of this collection. Some of the stories were breathtaking and had me careening through the pages like I’m drowning. Others left me cold.

“You don’t know what hurts more: the swirling moral turbulence of the book or the belated discovery that everything you thought about it was wrong. You missed it all: register, mood, irony, ambiguity, subtleties of characterization, narrative arc, even basic plot points. You can’t read. It’s like finding out, at thirty, that you’re adopted.”
— Richard Powers, “To the Measures Fall”

A few notable highlights:

By far my favorite story was “Out of Body” by Jennifer Egan, and which I was delighted to discover is excerpted from her book, A Visit from the Goon Squad. The story is a stunningly-wrought example of a second-person POV that really works and I loved it and cringed with it and had to take a few moments to sit with it after I’d finished. I’ll definitely be reading the book, so keep an eye out for that!
I also enjoyed the story “Housewifely Arts” by Megan Mayhew Bergman, about a woman (a mother) who takes her son on a road trip to go see the parrot that once belonged to her own (now deceased) mother because she wishes to hear her (mother’s) voice. I found the story to be a fascinating and artful exploration of motherhood as she considers her simultaneous identity as daughter to her mother and mother to her son.
I enjoyed the second story I’ve quoted as well (“To the Measures Fall” by Robert Powers), which makes two stories in second person that I loved! The thing that’s fascinating about Powers’s story is the way in which it explores a woman’s changing relationship with a book (To the Measures Fall by Elton Wentworth). One of the best things about being a reader is that sometimes you come back to a book many years later and find it’s nothing like the book you remember. Robert Powers captures this experience beautifully in his story.

As a student of writing and literature, I was especially thrilled to discover the contributor’s notes at the end of the book — which I found a fascinating peek into other people’s writing processes, as well as an interesting look at how the ideas for the stories came about.

The Fear Cure by Lissa Rankin

“There’s a wonderful line often attributed to Anaïs Nin: ‘And the time came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.’ I understand that the risk it takes to blossom takes a lot of courage. This is your invitation. What will it take for your longing to outweigh your fear of the unknown? What will it take for you to find the courage to blossom?”

Last, but certainly not least, I just finished reading Lissa Rankin’s new book, The Fear Cure: Cultivating Courage as Medicine for the Body, Mind, and Soul. I’ve been a huge fan of Lissa’s work, ever since I was introduced to her work through her previous book, Mind Over Medicine. The Fear Cure is an interesting departure from her previous, more-technical work and is her first foray into the “self-help” genre.

As someone who has realized just how much of a role fear plays in my own life, I felt like the timing of this book’s publication was perfect. (Actually I feel a bit like the universe is conspiring… both Brene Brown and Liz Gilbert also have books on fear coming out this year whose publication I eagerly await.)

In The Fear Cure, Lissa suggests that our Western culture operates under the guise of what she calls the “Four Fearful Assumptions”:

Uncertainty is unsafe
I can’t handle losing what I cherish
It’s a dangerous world
I’m all alone

She suggests that we replace these limiting beliefs with what she likes to call the “Four Courage-Cultivating Truths” and guides the reader through a series of exercises to write their own personal “Prescription for Courage”. The truths she suggests are:

Uncertainty is the gateway to possibility
Loss is natural and can lead to growth
It’s a purposeful universe
We are all One

While I am agnostic regarding the factual accuracy of some of these “courage-cultivating truths”, I do feel that approaching life from such a perspective would encourage me to acts of greater courage. What about you?

I’d love to know what you’ve been reading. If you’ve read any great (or not-so-great) books lately let me know in the comments!

Tired of waiting for my monthly wrap-ups? I talk about what I’m reading each week in my email newsletter.

March 26, 2015

Facing the fear of being seen

The thing about fear is it rises up in your throat until you’re choking on it and you think you might be about to puke. Suddenly your hand isn’t your own anymore as you feel your way into the words, taste them on the tip of your tongue, and then can’t quite bring yourself to put them down on the page.

Fear is the nagging voice in the back of your head that says you can’t say that and warns that they might not like you if they really know who you are. And because you got used to hiding at an early age, you think it’s safest if no one ever knows the real you.

After all, even you aren’t sure about that person you fear you might be.

The thing about fear is that it’s staying home when you want to go out and not offering help when you see someone who is lost on a street you know like the lines on the palm of your own hand and you’re tempted to say hey, where are you trying to go and maybe I could help?

But you don’t because that’s not the sort of thing that people do and no one asked you and everything feels easier if you turn aside and look away and above all you don’t make eye contact.

Because if you meet their eyes they’ll speak up after all and say hey, I’m looking for this place

And even though that’s exactly what you wanted to offer a moment ago, now you’re choking on the thought of how you’re in a rush and it’s so inconvenient to stop and you don’t know the area as well as you thought and you wouldn’t be of any help anyways.

And this is why you mustn’t make eye contact.

Dodging gazes — it’s been the way you’ve lived your life since you were small and you learned that teachers wouldn’t call on you in class if you didn’t make eye contact. You learned that you wouldn’t have to raise your trembling voice and worry what the other kids would think. That maybe you were showing off because you always knew the answers. Even though you weren’t and you didn’t want them to think that. (School was always easy for you — but people not so much and this is where you stopped make eye contact.)

But the thing about the fear is that you’ve finally come head-to-heart with the fact that fear is the only thing that’s still holding you back.

That it’s the lump in your throat that’s growing like a cancer until it eats at your voice, until time after time at the very last moment you’re forever turning your head aside and averting your eyes because this is what you do:

You never, ever make eye contact.

And what you’ve only just begun to realize is that eye contact is the beginning of everything — a solitary moment that says I’m here and I see you and look, you see me!

And that for just an instant we see eye to eye, two as one, separate and together — and together has always been larger than I.

Which is how I know that, no matter how frightened I am, it’s time to start making eye contact again.

It’s finally time to be seen.

What fears are holding you back?

It’s a question I’ve been bumping up against all over the place lately as I struggle to find a way to grow as both a writer and as a promoter of my writing. Because as much as we like to pretend it’s a dirty word, writing without some self-promotion is an awful lot like shouting into the void.

And the truth I keep running up against is that I’ve built my life around a pattern of hiding. It’s a pattern that began in school when I was the smart kid, the one who always had the right answers but didn’t have the right friends, the one who always stuck out in the crowd. The older I got the more different I felt and the more isolating it became.

As a defensive maneuver, I retreated into myself and in doing so I initiated a pattern of hiding. Of hiding me, not from myself, but from everyone else.

It’s a pattern that still haunts me today, even as I’m struggling to be a writer and it’s a pattern that I now recognize is holding me back.

Which is why I’d like to ask:

What patterns or fears might be holding you back from achieving your dreams?

March 19, 2015

Making room for the muse

A few weeks back I wrote a post on how I find time to write. Making time for your art is critically important — if you never sit down to write then at the end of the day you’ll have written nothing. The rules of art are simple like that. But there’s a second half to the story that isn’t as obvious and doesn’t get talked about as much: you need to find time to write, but you also need to make room for the muse.

This is an idea I first stumbled across when I was reading Danielle LaPorte’s book, The Fire Starter Sessions: A Soulful + Practical Guide to Creating Success on Your Own Terms. In Session 10, “Make stuff that feels good to make”, she writes:

“Muses simply must be adored. They’re as grandiose as they are generous. They like to be respected. If you meet them halfway, they’ll give you the moon, the breakthrough concept, the stroke of genius. Dis your muse and she’s likely to stop dropping by. She righteous. She likes to be appreciated. Genius is like that.”

And I’d never thought about it that way, but immediately the idea struck me as so, so true.

Finding time is only half the battle

Don’t get me wrong — finding the time to write is a mission-critical priority. But it’s still only half the battle.

You have to show up at you computer, at your desk. You have to do it often (preferably every day). You have to do it habitually (preferably at the same time every day).

You have to do it. Period.

But the thing that happens when you start to show up is that you realize you get stuck. You show up and sit down and writer’s block creeps in and suddenly you don’t have any ideas to write about. And that can be endlessly frustrating, especially if you are like most writers and your writing time is pretty limited (maybe you, like me, still work a day job).

But here’s the thing, inspiration always strikes. Maybe she waits an hour, a day, a month, a year.

The only thing I know for sure is that she’ll always be back. Someday. Eventually.

And the question I’d like you to ask is this: what can you do to invite the muse into your life?

I think Danielle LaPorte’s point is the first step.

You have to honor inspiration when she shows up.

Inspiration isn’t always convenient. In fact, I’ll make that a stronger statement: inspiration is almost always inconvenient.

She shows up on the bus when you’re squashed in next to a stranger and can hardly fish your pen out of your pocket. She shows up at work when you’re busy and trying to focus on something else. She shows up when you’re still awake at midnight and counting off the minutes between you and 5:30 am when your alarm goes off and you’re supposed to get out of bed to write. She shows up in the shower. She shows up on your walk home from work when it’s so cold out you risk losing your fingers if you stop to make a note.

She shows up in the quiet moments when you’ve forgotten you’ve waiting, watching for her. The muse is fickle like that.

So first and most importantly, honor the muse when she shows up. Pull out your pen, risk the possibility for frostbite, make a note — do whatever you need to do to make sure that brilliant idea isn’t lost to the fleeting whims of thought. I like Evernote and Google Docs. Anne Lamott likes index cards. From her classic book, Bird by Bird:

“Whenever I am leaving the house without my purse—in which there are actual note pads, let alone index cards—I fold an index card lengthwise in half, stick it in my back pocket with a pen, and head out, knowing that if I have an idea, or see something lovely or strange or for any reason worth remembering, I will be able to jot down a couple of words to remind me of it.”

I’ve been trying this out for a few weeks now — honoring the muse when and how she shows up.

I’ve drafted essays clutching my phone clumsily on the bus. I’ve furiously scribbled poetry over lunch. I’ve grudgingly turned the light back on at 12 AM and gotten back up to write.

And if I have anything to say on the matter at this point it’s this:

Something kind of magical is happening.

I’m writing more. I’m writing better. I’m taking advantage of inspiration when and where it shows up and the ripples of those moments are creeping out into the rest of my regular practice. I write more, more easily, and my work feels more inspired.

I started by trying to schedule writing like a job. Up at 5:30 for writing. Out of bed by 6:45 for work. And then just work, work, work until I was home again and too tired to feel much like writing. And that works — kind of. It works better than trying to schedule my writing time for after work when I’m tired and distractible.

But by honoring the muse, I’ve changed the rhythm of my writing practice. Instead of writing for an hour every day it’s more like I’m always writing. I’m writing in the back of my head, waiting for that magical connection between disparate things that will spark my next great thought.

I’d love to hear your thoughts! How do you make room for the muse in your life?

What’s worked for you in growing your creative practice (writing or otherwise)? What have you tried that hasn’t worked? I’d love to hear from you in the comments. 🙂

Disclaimer: This post contains Amazon affiliate links. I make a (very) small referral commission from purchases made using my links. This does not affect your price.

March 12, 2015

The shooter says goodbye to her love

Just a bit of fun this week — I’m participating in Chuck Wendig’s Flash Fiction challenge again. You can check out my previous challenge contributions here.

This week’s challenge was to use one of the following ten sentences in a 1,000 word story — but I went for the promised “bonus points” (and extra challenge) of using all ten!

Here are the list of challenge sentences, for reference:

“The mysterious diary records the voice.”
“The stranger officiates the meal.”
“The shooter says goodbye to his love.”
“A glittering gem is not enough.”
“The memory we used to share is no longer coherent.”
“The old apple revels in its authority.”
“Rock music approaches at high velocity.”
“Sixty-Four comes asking for bread.”
“Abstraction is often one floor above you.”
“The river stole the gods.”

I had to stretch just a bit to get them all in, but on the whole I think the story works surprisingly well!

The memory we used to share is no longer coherent. The thought echoes in my mind.

Nothing makes sense anymore — it hasn’t since our last big mission, the one in which we failed to prevent the River from stealing the Gods and I woke up battered and bruised and still reeling in the aftermath of machine gun fire that had sounded like nothing so much as rock music approaching at high velocity.

I’ve never entirely made peace with the way machine guns sound so much like drums — and the beat goes on, and on, and on like a nightmare I’ve forgotten to wake up from.

—

I woke up aching, and for blissful moments I remained unaware — entirely free of the memories of that mission and the way it had tipped my world over onto its head, spilling the pieces of my life across the floor like so many marbles.

Back in training the General used to say, abstraction is often one floor above you. Over and over he would repeat this — at every briefing, on every training mission. Abstraction is often one floor above you.

We never knew what he meant and he never explained himself, just peered dangerously over the rims of his glasses and spoke the words as though they were the most important message in the world.

Perhaps they were. Perhaps they were some kind of secret code passed down from him to us, from trainer, from teacher (we called him “the old apple” when no one could hear) to us, the pupils. If so, we didn’t get it. Every time he’d trot out his adage, we’d snicker nervously amongst ourselves.

Later we’d shrug off our incomprehension and murmur to one another behind closed doors, the old apple revels in his authority. But our glibness would taste hollow in our mouths, like false comfort.

Now, suddenly and terrifyingly, I think I know what the General was talking about. I used to think he meant for us to keep in mind the bigger picture, to always be playing the larger game. I used to think it meant, You’re a spy and you must think like one. Never forget.

Now I think he meant this: waking up feeling battered and awfully alone — unsure if the game you’ve been playing looks anything like the game you thought you’d been playing.

Suddenly nothing seems certain. Not this. Not you and me. Not our mission. I don’t know what I’m supposed to believe in any more.

None of it feels real. Not even the warmth of your body stretched out beside me in our bed.

—

You propose after that. Not immediately after, it’s weeks after and we’re out to eat — waiting for the signal, you said (Sixty-Four comes asking for bread). And so I’m shifting in my chair and picking at the roll on my plate, peeling off little pieces of the crust, snipping them up with my fingernails.

I’m anxious. It’s our first real mission since that one — the one that felt like the ground was falling out from underneath my feet and plunging me into some new and mysterious upside-down reality in which nothing makes sense and the memory we used to share is no longer coherent.

And then you pull out a ring and I realize the mission is a ruse and I’m speechless. I don’t know what to say because just a handful of weeks ago I would have said yes, but now the only thing I can think is that a glittering gem is not enough.

Except I can’t say that because you’re not just my partner, you’re my partner, and we have to keep working together and so I nod awkwardly and you slip the diamond onto my finger.

I cannot think that anything has ever felt heavier than the weight of that gemstone, dragging at my heart.

—

Which is how we’ve come to where we are now. You’ve gone out to dinner for “business”. I’m perched aloft, watching the meal unfold from an empty office building across the street.

A stranger officiates the meal. I don’t recognize him. He’s not one of our regular contacts. I would have remembered that face — grizzled and unpleasant. I would have remembered the way you lean back from his presence, as if in distaste.

I’m not sure if your discomfort means something good or bad. I’m not sure what anything means anymore.

Who are we really working for?

Abstraction is often one floor above you, the General used to say. Now I believe he meant that one day this day would come — the day when I finally saw the sum of our actions from such a great height that everything we’d done and everything we’d become all began to seem, not like a collection of random duties, but a purposeful progression animated by unseen hands. A masterpiece of puppetry on a scale that I find can hardly be comprehended.

I had no idea they might have this much power.

But now that I’ve seen and suspected, the only thing left to do is act.

I have to end the game. I have to put a stop to the madness.

I wonder if you know. I wonder if you saw it too. You were unusually sentimental when you left for this meeting — you’d whispered our old code phrase, the one we’d used back in training.

The mysterious diary records the voice. The syllables had brushed up against my ear, warm and familiar, and my heart had thrilled once more to the nearness of you, to the way you whispered I love you.

And love you, I do. But the time has come to do what must be done.

My finger tightens on the trigger and even as I blink back tears I’m already whispering goodbye.

Did you like this piece? Let me know in the comments!

(And if you did, please share!)

March 5, 2015

The agony of anticipation

It’s in. It’s done. I press “Submit’ or “Publish” or “Send”.

Suddenly all those moments of effort and labor are gone. Their results ent off, winging their way as photons streaming through fiber optic cables.

Except for the times they are gone as pages printed, folded, and neatly tucked away into the corners of gentle envelopes.

But in the moments after I press “Send” or hear the mailman fetch the letter from the box — that is the moment when doubt creeps in and I suddenly find myself transported back hours, back to staring down the blank page once more, frantically re-working my awkward phrases and crippled sums in a desperate bid to reassure myself that the clamouring questions can be answered.

What if I didn’t do it right? What if it’s not good enough? What if no one likes it? What if Everybody hates me forever?

I know my fears are hyperbolic and inflated and I despise them for their groundlessness even as I feel myself succumbing to their trembling hysteria.

I lose myself for a moment or two — I stumble and fall into the trap even as I see it looming. For a moment, a minute, my ravening mind turns in on itself in a whirlwind of self-flagellation.

How dare I send my heart out into the world, dressed only in it’s glorious frailty and imperfection? How dare I raze the walls of my sovereign shelter and invite chaos into the breach? How dare I flay truth from the bones of my dignity and bare my breast to the world?

How dare I dare to make this inglorious leap into the unknown?

But just as the pressure builds to the point where I cannot bear the weight of my own self-recrimination, where I can feel faith in my actions crumbling, where I long to press rewind (I’m so sorry. Please just let me take it back.).

At that moment Reason steps in.

Reason brings logic and perspective back to table and points out that nothing irreparable has been risked. Reason knows that failure will not be the end of any part of who I am.

Reason understands that inviting risk is as important and inevitable as breathing.

Fear is not assuaged but Reason persists and ultimately Fear subsides, curls up somewhere in the back of my mind — unconvinced and ready with a scathing I told you so.

And so we continue, Fear, and Reason, and I. As we run, trip past “Send”, and leap once more into the deep.

Is “Everybody” out to get you? Or is it just yourself?

I face down the “Send” button on my email daily. I publish on the blog.

Sending my work out into the world is something I struggle with daily. It’s a constant battle between me and my doubt — and my guess is that maybe it is for you too.

Martha Beck suggests that we carry around with us a notion of a generalized “Everybody” who exists to judge us. We notionally reference our Everybody when we say offhand things like “Everyone must think I’m a jerk” or “Everybody knows I’m an idiot now”. But the thing about our Everybodies is that (if they’re real at all) they’re made up of just a handful of people.

Try it out — next time you catch yourself having an “Everybody” thought — “Everybody thinks my writing is stupid” — try and figure out who exactly is “Everybody”. Has anyone told you directly that your writing is stupid? Try and think of a handful of people who you know for sure believe that about you. I usually can’t do it, but if I can I often find they’re not people whose opinions really matter. And so I try to ask myself if those opinions are really worth worrying about (after all, you get to pick your “Everybody”).

And if you have “Everybody will…” thoughts (“Everybody will think my writing is stupid if I share it”), I think it’s useful to realize that those are fear thoughts. It’s a kind of sloppy shorthand for “I’m afraid everybody will think my writing is stupid” and in that case it’s usually the fear you need to address — and again your Everybody may be helpful: do you know people who already don’t think your writing is stupid? Why not try letting them be your Everybody for now? (“What does Everybody think? They think my writing is great!”)

I’d love to hear from you! What do you do when the doubts creep in?

And, as always, if you liked this piece — please share!