I took my sons to the Little Farm in Berkeley’s Tilden Park this afternoon. We’ve been taking them to a lot of memorials without knowing what, if anything, to say to them. They are, after all, only 25-months and 21-months, just getting the hang of having been born. How would we explain death to them? So we just pull our their khakis and button-down shirts and let them play in the side yards of the memorials.

On our way out of the the Little Farm, we crossed a wooden slated bridge, and through the railings, we saw a turtle floating in the water, its head straining up the the surface while the rest of it relaxed in the murk of the pond. We often walk a ways down along Jewel Lake in search of turtles; last time we had seen not a one, so we were excited by this guy floating there. We watched him and talked about him for a while until suddenly he tucked his head, flipped over and dove down far under the surface. Gone.

“More turtle,” said Leo.

“More turtle,” Charlie echoed.

Angie and I are getting used to these kinds of demands–more fire engine, more excavator–which is to say, demands which we cannot willfully meet. And it occurred to me that my boys are inevitably learning about impermanence, about the lack of control we all face repeatedly, whether we accept it or not.

I am not much more evolved than they are when it comes to what I want. More Aunt Lesley, for example. What do you mean, she is gone and there is nothing you can do about it? That makes no sense. There is so much you have control over. How can you not have control over this simple desire of mine?

So tucked at the bottom of this little koan is a writer’s confession. I have begun a new draft today. I have written 1000 words plus a few more to top it off. I have made plans and promises to myself; I have set goals. Now I am going public. It’s a risk, but since part of my life’s work is writing and part of my life’s work is helping other people to write, it seemed “in integrity” to admit this to you.

There is undoubtedly a link here–something about what we cannot control. Sure, I can only say, This is what I want. This day has been given to me and this is what I will do, this is what I have done. But that effort of will seems qualitatively different than fighting the gods. Most of the time it seems different enough to be worth the sweat. We do what we can.

Care to tell me what commitments you have made–and kept–today? I’d love to hear.

January 20, 2006 My day started listening to Aretha Franklin sing, My Country ‘Tis of Thee, and it will end singing the Internationale while my grandmother is interred.  By then it will be tomorrow in the place I am traveling to.

A premise is a journey. It’s the itinerary of a journey, more precisely. It says, if you get on this plane in San Francisco, you will get off in London. It does not say that all planes go from San Francisco to London nor even that all planes that leave San Francisco arrive in London. It just talks about this plane, this journey. But what it says is true.

A premise is not the flight itself, not the play list you listen to or the memories each song evokes. Not the two seats that you try to lie upon, legs folded against one armrest, head propped on pillows, blankets, jacket at the too-close other armrest. A premise is not the orange juice you drink, the articles you read in the New Yorker, the way you laugh at Eddie Izzard and wonder if the people around you notice. It is not the freelance golf writer on her way from Maui via Los Angeles and San Francisco and London to Scotland who does not like to fly. It is not the view of the ocean cliffs and the Richmond Bridge that you point out to her, feeling that you have been drafted to distract her as the plane takes off. It is not the baby boys you have left behind, the nap they are supposed to be taking and the park they will go to afterwards. It is not your questions about what they make of your absence. It is not your grandmother’s funeral ahead, the dawning realization that she died of old age and is only twenty years older than your mother, her daughter.

The premise takes all of this and more and kneads it as your reader’s mind will knead it, until it joins together and rises, and the journey becomes clear, the specific journey–San Francisco to London, child to adult, a person who feels outside a family to a person who feels inside a family, perhaps. Your premise looks at where you started and what kicked you over to where you landed, and it makes a claim:

Commitment leads to connection.
Ritual triumphs over daily life.
Responsibility conquers division.

Not always. Not all commitment leads to connection. Not all ritual triumphs over daily life. Not all responsibility conquers division. Not all planes that leave San Francisco arrive in London. But this journey went that way, and showed us something about these qualities: commitment, ritual, San Francisco.

Once you have made the journey–written the book–you read back over it and you dig out your premise. What does this journey teach you? Name the qualities that characterize the book’s movement.

This becomes the lens through which you revise. It is the unity that pulls your book together, and anything that does not support your premise belongs in another book.

Now, just to be clear, this does not mean that scenes, actions, characters and events that directly oppose your premise should be excised. On the contrary, your premise requires a good fight, a fair fight, to prove itself. Let it do battle with ideas and forces that suggest it is wrong. Just don’t wander off on a little Los Angeles to Los Vegas loop when you are going SFO to Heathrow. See?

When someone dies there is, I’ve found, a kind of internal reckoning. Their premise becomes clearer, once the whole arc stretches–rainbow-like–before you. Not that I can see anything like the whole of my grandmother’s arc, but I see that she lived a single life, after all. My father used to talk about how life zigzagged while you were living it, but looking back, it turned into a straight line. What is remarkable about a human life is that its conflicts and contradictions and layers all unite, in the end, into a single strand of days, years, decades–nearly nine, in my grandmother’s case.

Near the end of her life, my uncle asked my grandmother what the purpose of life was, and she mouthed one word: “Love.” Now, this is not the most original idea, but if you’d read the whole book, you’d know that there was a distinct character arc, that that moment and that insight represented a journey and an arrival.

Love conquers even politics.
Bitter memories and eccentric independence lead to the embrace of love.
The revolution of the heart conquers even a family whose spine looks like the post-1988 Berlin wall.

What’s the premise of a book you love? Of your own book?

In my post, “I Could Write a Great Novel If Only I Had a Story to Tell,” I neglected my own favorite kind of plot trigger: secrets. It’s funny, but writers do seem to revisit a certain theme. Michelle Richmond (at least in her last two gripping books) seems to write about the consequences of losing people for the people who feel responsible for their loss. In The Year of Fog, the young step-daughter-to-be is lost by the fiancée when she disappears from Ocean Beach while they are together. In No One You Know, the sister of a young woman who was murdered years before searches for answers about what happened that night, spurred on by a meeting with the man who was the sister’s lover, another character caught in the ramifications of loss.

My own work tends to gravitate toward secrets–what we don’t know that we don’t know. I am gripped by the idea that something there, but hidden, unknown, has a strong impact–even on the ignorant participants in the situation. In Shy Girl, Shy Mallon’s mother has hidden her identity as a Jew and her past as a holocaust survivor. Lots of people doubted the veracity of this story when I began to write it, because of course we hear from the people who are not hiding, those who believe that remembering is our only hope, our strongest activism. But in fact, there are many secret histories like Mrs. Mallon’s. Survivors who learned a different lesson: that safety lies in remaining below the radar, out of view.

My own father told me about coming to Berkeley (U.C.) at the behest of a friend and colleague. Ten years later, they each “confessed” to each other that they were Jewish. Each of my father’s first two wives (neither is my mother) claimed that my father didn’t tell them he was Jewish before they were married. This meant that he did not bring them to meet his parents. I asked him about this once and he said, “I didn’t want to give my father a heart attack.” When I was officially converted to Judaism, the Rabbi took my parents and my father’s Jewish fiancée (whom he never did marry) and me into a little office before the Mikvah and said, “Your mother is not Jewish. Today we are going to remedy that mistake.” I only nodded, but I knew it was no mistake.

Years later, when I read Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, I finally understood my father in a new way. I wrote a piece called Portnoy’s Daughters, about my sisters and me. The point is, something that is hidden has an impact even if the situation looks the same as one in which that something isn’t there at all.

In any case, secrets are a good spur toward plot. What are the open secrets in your family? What about the ones you wonder about but for which you have no answers? What secrets have you been told or stumbled upon by accident? What secrets do you hold that no one else knows but you?

This week, we had a trial run with a babysitter for our boys. You see, other grandparents, a very busy but loving aunt and uncle, and a cousin who’s left the state for college, we have not really left the boys with anybody. For seventeen months. Now that Angie is my technical person and business advisor as well as my co-parent, it’s gotten completely crazy around here. So we are checking out having the boys go play, for three mornings a week, with a woman in the neighborhood and her eighteen-month-old little girl.

The woman is very nice and calm, an obviously loving mother. We visited with her in her house for a couple hours, met her husband, talked to a friend and neighbor of hers. All that. She’s in graduate school getting her doctoral degree in Psychology.

So then we made a plan to meet at a little Tot Lot near the Albany YMCA, and we all hung out for a while there before she took our boys and her daughter off to baby gym at the Y. As we stood watching her walk away, pushing the boys in their double stroller, her daughter strapped to her back, I thought . . .

What if the whole thing was a set-up? What if the friend she called and the man claiming to be her husband (who was obviously the father of her baby, but I didn’t think like that in this moment) and this nice-seeming woman were all part of some baby-trafficking ring, and the whole rigmarole was an elaborate set-up?

At the end of the morning, we met up again at the Tot Lot. The boys were happy and worn-out from playing. They were yards further down the potty-training line simply from watching her daughter use the potty regularly, and I had worked on my NaNoWriMo book pitch (for the class I am teaching).

But I realized that I am fully capable of concocting the most complicated plots, accounting for all the elements of reality that add up to something normal, ordinary, and making them align into something overblown, terrifying and, well, gripping . . .

One of my very talented clients told me about meeting a woman who had just come back from Africa. The woman began talking about her trip, and my client was not all that intrigued, but then it turned out that their luggage had been lost and they had to go into deepest Africa with only the barest, most inappropriate clothing, and then . . . I don’t remember the story now, but the point was that hearing a story without a plot is like watching someone’s slideshow about their vacation, replete with their commentary: “Oh, oh, that was the tour guide and right over there is the hut we stayed in, just behind that tree . . . ” Now, if the photographer is amazing . . . you might enjoy the show. Otherwise, you’re going to be hungry for story–happy when things start to go wrong for the erstwhile travelers. And if the photographer is amazing and there’s a story–you’re just where you want to be.

So tap into your own paranoia and build yourself a really great plot. Think about your “what if . . . ?” scenarios when the stakes are as high as they can be.

Here’s why:

Fiction is a training camp for those of us who are engaged in the risky business of life. It’s where we learn about relationships, meaning, and how to survive the worst and keep going. When my father was dying, I read Ann Packer’s The Dive from Clausen’s Pier. I’d heard about it before, but I’d been a little turned off by the grim opening situation: the main character’s boyfriend dives off a pier and breaks his neck, becoming paralyzed from the neck down (as I recall). But now, surrounded as I was by hospital routine and near-death calls, the book didn’t seem depressing to me. Like a hand reaching through the darkness, it showed me the way to stumble along. If Packer had decided that it was too traumatic to have someone get that seriously hurt (especially when his girlfriend was already unhappy and wanting to leave their long relationship, despite being engaged), the book might have been about a group of friends who enjoy a yearly picnic by a lake. But it wouldn’t have been published, and it wouldn’t have had anything to offer to me as I commuted to the place where my father lay trying not to die.

It’s a gorgeous, sunny day and we just got back from the Berkeley Farmers’ Markey. Today the park there was also hosting the Berkeley Old Time Music Convention, which meant kids and old people and everyone out there fiddling and singing and wearing odd costumes, whilst people in booths sold hemp bibs and handmade soaps and vintage bingo chip earrings. Not sure the relationship between these items and old time music, but my favorite t-shirt read, “Dirty Kids Conserve Water.” In our house, with water rationing levels set during the time when the house was empty after my father died and bath times getting rarer what with everything else that fills up a day, this shirt is more sincere slogan than joke . . .

When you live in other places, places with dense humidity sometimes and deep snow other times, you long for the pure pleasure of living in Northern California. When you live among the ambitious, people who pursue and promote their art the way any fierce trader on Wall Street pursues wealth (I imagine), you long for the pure, child-like pleasure these people–my people, I suppose–take in creativity and sunshine and a good tune.

When you are here, you congratulate yourself for remembering to buy vegetables (and not just ice cream) at the Farmers’ Market; you feel vaguely contented and you don’t think too much about it.

But I did not always live here. One year, I lived in Geneva, New York, a very small town with about twelve bars and no shoe stores on the shores of the Finger Lakes. (When I got the job teaching at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, my sister called me and said, “I can’t believe you are moving to Switzerland.” Other Geneva, I told her.) I lived in an inexpensive, two-bedroom apartment; the radiator leaked and mushrooms grew underneath it, large toadstools that appeared in one night and had to be plucked from the carpet. I lived there without a television or a partner, and as a result, I made friends with everyone on campus–the queer faculty, and the old emeritus professors who still came to the lunchroom on Fridays, the students from the city who couldn’t afford to go home on breaks, so we had poetry slams instead, and each and every visiting professor, writer and thinker who passed through our auditorium to give a talk and stayed for a super at the old Victorian mansion on the hill.

Reginal Shepherd came one day. I taught some of his poems in my freshman literature class. They were dense, deep poems that rewarded study, and I am glad I taught them because it made me give them their due. He was charming and just nice–teaching at another isolated upstate college–and we decided to be friends. We liked each other. But then the next year I went to Brooklyn, and then my father was going to do chemo and I went back to California (I’d been longing for the weather and the simple creativity and pleasure and all of that). I never saw him again.

And then last week on Facebook, someone posted that he was sad because Reginald Shepherd had died. I googled him and found his blog, with its last posting on Aug. 26, 2008, from the hospital.

I found this link:

http://jjgallaher.blogspot.com/2008/09/reginald-shepherd-died-yesterday.html

offering a copy of his last chapbook. At first I thought, well, that wouldn’t be for me, but then later I thought, why not? So I asked for one and it’s been sent to me. I’ll let you know when I’ve had the chance to read it. The way the man saw slices of the world is left behind for us, poems and writings . . .

I believe in the life-and-death system–I mean, I believe it is the way things are (the way some people believe in god and some people believe in santa claus), and I also believe, intellectually, that it’s probably a very good way to organize things, probably makes our days on earth precious in a way that they would not be were they infinite. But as more and more people I knew die, I have to say, on a personal level, I really do not like the system. It’s okay with me that we move around and lose touch, but I want everyone out there–on Facebook, say–close to my fingertips, if only in reach of the keyboard.

Allen Berube was a teacher of mine one quarter at USCS. He taught “Queer Life and Social Change,” and I think his class shaped the rest of the work I’ve done since then. Vito Russo had taught at UCSC the year before and then died, of AIDS, and so people were very emotional at the end of the quarter, when it was time for Allen to go back to San Francisco. And Allen brought up Vito Russo and his recent death, and he made us a promise: “I am not going to die of AIDS,” he said.

He was right. Allen Berube died this year–at 61, I believe–but not of AIDS.

Thanks for the company in that upstate winter, Reginald, and for the beauty of your vision; thanks for the lessons in ways of looking at the world, Allen, and seeing beyond the history we’d been taught before. Thanks for crossing paths with me on this brief journey we call life, and showing me what it means to do meaningful work. Rest in peace.

I edit a fair number of memoirs, and I’ve read some great stories in them. My own family’s story is crazy enough that people tell me I should write about it. But for a long time, I couldn’t imagine taking the layered, messy, contradictory matter of my life–the stuff I’ve blocked out and the stuff I wish I could, and even the sweet or triumphant but private moments of which I am proud–and squeezing it into the form of a story. The blessed thing about novels is that they give shape to the confusion of living. For example, characters change; they grow internally, in one direction.

Do people change? (Remind me to ask this question again, when I have built up more readers, because this is a real question, and if you have answers and examples, especially affirmative examples, I would love to hear them.) One of the strangest things that happened when my father died was that I realized that the story of our relationship was over–or so I thought–and the finale never happened. There was an end, all right, long, drawn-out and dramatic, even. But the change, the perfect reconciliation, and–most important–his flash of insight that would somehow repair all the hurt: none of that ever came. Instead, there were quiet moments. Literary fiction moments:

When I arrived at the hospital, my father was groaning. I could hear him through the gray curtain that sheathed his room from the busy hallway. He begged the attendants to leave him alone. Each jostle caused him pain, and he let them know it. I came in and tried to get him to eat. He wanted applause for fake bites, and wouldn’t ingest anything. In short, it was a bad day. He couldn’t get comfortable, and his thin arm and long fingers kept reaching back to shove his flat pillow under his head in a different way. Finally, I pulled out the old poetry textbook I’d brought, something I’d used in teaching literature in a different year, and I began to read him poems. I read Robert Frost’s “The Road Less Travelled,” and Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish” and “One Art.” Every poem I came across seemed to be about death, and I think anyone reading this textbook at their father’s deathbed would have had a distinct advantage in parsing the poems’ meaning. At the same time, the dense purity of the language, the close-up focus on imagery seemed the only way to use language when time is ticking by so mercilessly. I read many poems to him that day, until he began to grow tired and closed his eyes. A smile settled on his face, and he sighed. “What a wonderful day!” he exclaimed before he slept.

There are two points I want to make in today’s blog. One is that I’ve just read a great little book called Ron Carlson Writes a Short Story, and Carlson’s respect for those quiet little moments, for the inventory of the world that makes up the evidence that builds a short story, is inspiring. His key piece of advice–stay in your seat and resist the temptation to go for coffee or a dictionary definition–is probably the best there is. It reminded me of what I’ve learned from watching others about the secret to a life-long relationship, which is this: don’t leave. There may be things that make the time spent more pleasant, but really nothing achieves the success of longevity like staying put.

The other point–and I think they are related–is that my perspective has shifted, and my own story seems more coherent to me. I credit, in no particular order, time, my therapist, and facebook. Just as some chunks have fallen away with time, others have pressed to the surface. And in therapy, I am coming, at long last, to begin to understand that this particular set of experiences I am having and have had are, in fact, my life. I think that as a voracious reader all my life, I’ve sort of shelved my own experiences side-by-side with those of the protagonists and heroes (male and female and other) of my favorite books. Then, as a writer, I have come to imagine that I can go back and fiddle around, change point of view, collapse a couple of characters into one, make different choices. It’s funny, because I resist revision (though I spend a lot of time on it, in fact), but in life, I seem to have counted on it. And as Milan Kundera writes in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, there is no rehearsal

Shame, really, because what I learned from the sliver of my twenty-year high school reunion that I attended, and from the online materials that accompanied it, and from facebook, is that I could have a lot more fun in high school (the right kind of fun, sustaining fun) now than I ever did then. As they approach forty, all those people look so decent, kind and funny and interesting. Not scary at all

On round two, I’d keep in better touch with those people in college by whose sides I was prepared to fight and live, garden and foment revolution. Instead, I am finding them on facebook, scattered across the state and the country, teaching, doctoring, making art . . . And knowing that I can drop a line to the guy I dated when I was seventeen to say, How would you feel about revising your high school ambition and being the second black president of the United States? or that I can get a status update every few days from the first woman I ever kissed (or, you know, something . . .)–this makes my life seem a lot less scattered. It’s as if what looked like a mass of yarn got rehooked to a big ol’ loom, and now, taut, reveals a pattern, amazing colors, and a patch over in the corner where I can turn my attention and labor a while. Like Carlson’s writing advice, I’ve found a way to stay put in this life, not so much in one place, but just day after day in one life, and just like Carlson’s writers, the story is starting to come to me.