Writing and Gifts from Old Friends and Sisters

I started meeting once a week for a few hours with a group of writers. It's not a workshop group but, rather, a real writing group. We really write. At the beginning, we sit down and chit chat for a few minutes, catch each other up, briefly, on what's happening. Then one person tears up a few strips of paper and we each grab one or two. We write down phrases or words, anything that comes to mind and can be used as a prompt. Then someone picks up a piece of paper, opens it and reads it aloud. Then we write -- the first prompt is for five minutes, the second is for ten minutes, then it's fifteen and then back to five minutes. When the buzzer goes off, we stop typing or writing and read aloud what we've written. We don't comment, except to sigh or smile or laugh or draw our breaths in. Then we're on to the next. We follow in a specific order -- whoever opens the prompt and reads it aloud is the first to read aloud what she's written. Then we go counter-clockwise. It works. This is so good, you writers out there -- so good and so inspiring in the way that writers need to be inspired. You just start with something, anything, and then you write. I've always thought there's way too much discussion about writing in general -- about how difficult it is, about whether or not you're good enough, about the anxieties and insecurities of The Writer. Lately, I've noticed a whole lot of hullabaloo about writing for free on the internet, how resentful "writers" are when they're asked to write online and not get reimbursed. My opinion is that there haven't been too many writers in history that got paid enough money to support themselves and that if you're a writer, you'll just write, whenever and however you can. If you're getting paid and can support yourself, I envy you. If not, get a job, but don't stop writing.

Here are the prompts from a week or so ago:

1. My skeleton
2. Blood-shot eyes
3. A Sense of place
4. The Rain They Say is Coming

This week, I got a spark of a short story from the prompt It Goes Like This. Think a man, tattoos, a bald head, the goods, the threat of a cult, Jesus freaks and the slippery slope of desire -- that's what I wrote about for five minutes.

When I got home this afternoon from the usual driving around the city, I had a pile of mail, including two mysterious packages. One was for Sophie, and when I opened it up I saw that it was from one of my oldest and dearest friends with whom I backpacked through Europe in the Let's Go Europe! days. Do you remember those? This beautiful, brilliant woman sent that mermaid to Sophie, and I'm taking it as a token of luck. Sophie did really well today, too, but who's noticing? The other gift was from my funny sister Melissa. She sent me a Ryan Gosling coloring book. She knows me all too well. Henry and Oliver took one look at the gifts and rolled their eyes. Are you really going to color that? Henry asked. I told him that I imagine it will be enormously relaxing to sit and color in Ryan Gosling's lines. You'd think I was stoned, but I'm not. I'm CBD'd excited.

Hoity Toity Hoi Polloi

I have a friend who jokingly says that instead of reading real books, one could read about the books in the New York Review of Books and get by. After spending four hours at the lacrosse field today, bundled up against the early December California cold, I collapsed on my bed tonight and opened the December 8th issue of the Review and started flipping through. Generally I skip the reviews of history books, the discussions of Islam at the Met, the biographies of obscure World War II generals and convoluted economic theory and head straight for discussions of poets or great literary figures. I once sat, enraptured, reading about a perverse lion in Africa who copulated with dead lionesses and otherwise acted as no natural animal might. That article showed up months later in an anthology of the best American essays, a fact that I felt a bit proud of -- like I'd somehow discovered this weird and wild thing. I know you're probably shaking your head that I'd collapse into bed with such reading fare, and while I do consider myself a bit of a literary snob, I don't want you to feel intimidated, so I'll also confess to consuming huge quantities of romance as a teenager. I joined reading clubs like an addict (remember Book of the Month? Quality Paperback?) -- for at least two years I received a carton of eight "novels" from the Harlequin Romance Book Club every month, books that I read alongside the more rigorous Austen and Faulkner and Knowles and Bronte and Salinger.

Where am I going here? Oh. I'm collapsed on the bed, and this particular issue of the Review is sort of dry; I'm  flipping through it, really, secretly glad to be doing so as they tend to pile up, and this one doesn't look like it's going to have anything that's going to interest me, when I started reading a review of Michael Lewis' nonfiction book titled Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World. The reason why it caught my eye is because the title of the review itself was written in large type at the top, How We Were All Misled, and underneath is a photo of the leaders of France, Greece and Germany. A small bankrupt town in California is also mentioned in the review, as is our former governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Lewis' book explores the collapse of the European economies, including Ireland, Greece and Iceland, but he draws on the American one as well, and it was all very interesting and very edifying and very terrifying, too (but not as interesting, edifying and terrifying as the Satanic lion).

Reader, I read the entire review (written by John Lancaster) and now feel as if I don't need to read the actual book (written by Michael Lewis). I'm thinking, too, that perhaps if you're reading this post, you don't have to read the review or the book! How neat is that?

Here's an excerpt that I found the most compelling, toward the end of the article:

I think, though, that the failure of responsibility was linked to a failure of agency -- the individual's ability to affect the course of events. An enormous number of people today feel as if they have very little  economic agency in their own lives; often, they are right to feel that. The decisions that affect their fates are taken far above their heads, and often aren't conscious decisions at all, so much as they are the operation of large economic forces over which they have no control -- impersonal forces whose effects are felt in directly personal ways.


It is difficult to feel responsible when you have no agency. many of the people who did stupid things -- who did things on that 0-10 scale -- did so because everyone around them was doing them too, and because loud voices were telling them to carry on. The Icelanders who bought cars with foreign currency loans were sold them by financiers who promised that it was a good idea; the Irish who bought now-unsellable houses on empty estates were told, by builders and bankers and the state, that this was a once-in-a-generation opportunity; the Greeks who are, at the time of writing, furiously rebelling against austerity measures were falsely told that the state could afford to look after them, and arranged their lives accordingly.


The collective momentum of a culture is, for more or less everybody more or less all of the time, overwhelming. This is especially true for anything to do with economics. The evidence is clear: it is easy to mislead people about money, and easy to lead members of the public astray both individually and en masse, because when it comes to money, most of us, most of the time, don't know what we're doing. The corollary is also clear: the whole Western world misled itself over debt, and the road back from where we are goes only uphill.


The whole notion of failure of agency is what fascinates me, and I'm going to think about it -- later. I don't know about you, but if not a bodice-ripper, I'm at least going back to my Michael Ondaatje.