I
started writing in high school. My metier then was parody of the sort
that only a teenager could find funny. From parody, I went to poetry,
from poetry to prose, from novel to short story to the personal essay.
My road has been anything but straight.
Of course, not all my writerly moves have been random. I started this
blog because someone told me I should. Who knew that I would love
it? To feed my blog, I collect scraps of paper. A museum brochure. A
newspaper clipping. Some old photographs. Then I wait until that magic
moment when the bones of an essay emerge.
Memory
In 2011, I quit my law practice to write. I had plenty of ideas and
arrogance, too. It eventually became clear to me that I needed an
education. I needed to read. What better place to start than The New Yorkers lying about my house?
At the time, I didn’t know what to look for. All I wanted was to be
surprised. By a pregnant image, a flash of insight, a chord of pure
emotion. It didn’t matter whether those gems might be hidden in a poem,
an essay or a short story. Even today, I can’t simply scan a page to
discern the richness inside. I have to follow the author all the way
down the rabbit hole to see what she’s buried inside.
Although, sometimes it’s obvious from the very first line. Listen to this beautiful introduction.
My wife, Carol, doesn’t know that
President Obama won reƫlection last Tuesday, carrying Ohio and
Pennsylvania and Colorado, and compiling more than three hundred
electoral votes. She doesn’t know anything about Hurricane Sandy. She
doesn’t know that the San Francisco Giants won the World Series, in a
sweep over the Tigers.
Roger Angell, “Over the Wall” in The New Yorker, 19 Nov 2012
Roger Angell was, for many years, the New Yorker fiction
editor. His wife Carol died in April. His loss was so palpable yet so
elegantly described that I saved his personal essay. One passage in
particular caught me in the throat.
Quite a lot of time has gone by
since Carol died, and though I’ve forgotten many things about her, my
fears about that are going away. There will always be enough of her for
me to remember
8 years ago, I cut out that passage and hung it on my mood board. The page is now the color of chai.
Walking
The mood board originally adorned an office on the Keizersgracht,
here in Amsterdam. I felt at the time that I needed a place to work.
Some place to inspire me to roll out of bed, brush my teeth and get some
writing done.
Those days, I was knee deep in a manuscript about the Song siblings: Anyi, the dancing girl, and her brother Kang, the counter revolutionary.
Each day, I would write until I ran out of steam and then I walked.
Sometimes, I would meander through the canals of Amsterdam, puzzling
over my manuscript. How old Anyi was when her brother left for the
United States? Was Kang older or younger than my grandfather when he made the same journey?
Cadzand. Photo credit: Karen Kao
Increasingly, my walks ended in bookstores. The New Yorker had whetted my taste. I bought a copy of Granta and then another. I found a third issue in a street library. Granta
opened up a new constellation of authors. For example, Robert
Macfarlane wrote of a treacherous path known as the Broomway. I’ve
quoted him before and I probably will again. The opening paragraph of his essay is an irresistible invitation to read further.
Half a mile offshore, walking on
silver water, we found a curved path that extended gracefully and
without apparent end to our north and south […] whose invitation to
follow we could not disobey, so we walked it northwards, along that
glowing track made neither of water nor of land, which led us further
and still further out to sea.
Robert Macfarlane, “Silt” in Granta Issue 119: Spring 2012
Looking back at these old essays, I’m struck by their tactility. The
moths that flutter through Angell’s elegy to his wife. The brooms, stone
and thread that once were a walker’s only hope of navigating the misty
Broomway. I didn’t understand, back in 2012, how details work to ground a
reader in a scene. All I could register was that I liked them a lot.
Bread
This week, I read a personal essay about bread baking. Serendipitously, the author is a former editor of both The New Yorker and Granta. Bill Buford describes a time when he and his family lived in Lyon, France and met the baker Bob.
Once, I asked Bob, “Which of your breads makes you the proudest?” No hesitation. “My baguette.” “Really? The French eat ten billion baguettes a year. Yours are so different?” “No. But mine, sometimes, are what a baguette should be.” Bob took one and brought it up to the side of my head and snapped it. The crack was thunderous.
Bill Buford, “Good Bread” in The New Yorker, 13 Apr 2020
My bread baking class. Photo credit: Karen Kao
Buford learns to form a baguette without leaving a fingerprint. To
eat a baguette as his children do. Break it open, stick your nose
inside, inhale, then smile.
What do these 3 works have in common? First, they moved me. It could
be the context as in the Angell essay or the view as Macfarlane
describes it. Every detail is as sharp as the razor Buford uses to score
his loaves. I am present in each essay and there’s nowhere else I’d
rather be.
There are touchstones. I don’t mean Carol Angell or Bob the baker but a detail
that is more than mere description. Carol seeded the beach with sea
glass to delight visiting children. Macfarlane relies on a hand-drawn
map to walk the Broomway. The secret ingredient in Bob’s baguettes is
flour from the Auvergne marked only by its picture of a goat for who needs a label when you have a goat?
For an essay about death, none of these works is sad. The mood shades
closer to acceptance, albeit tinged with regret, lit by a ray of hope.
This is life, they seem to say.
Note: this post was originally published on my blog Shanghai Noir
Entrancing, Karen. Good to learn about your eclectic inspirations and the spell that words weave for you (and the rest of us). Thanks for sharing those quotes and the sort of transcendence good writing generates.
I love the idea of serendipity Karen and I often think life can be a series of fortuitous links. Had I not attended a conference in Canterbury five years ago I would not be reading or writing in AuthorsElectric now. I liked your stories told here. Thank you.
You've set my mouth watering for those baguettes, Karen! And now I hanker for the rest of those delicious samples you presented in this enticing memoirist posting. I too have followed a zig-zag path in my writing development, although it differs from yours. Whatever the path, it has brought you to a fine place!
Veni, vidi...Wiki! Not long ago I had the all-time greatest Great Idea: one, born of total ignorance, that nearly tanked a novel. As you may have guessed from my opening line, my subject is Julius Caesar. But you might not have guessed from the title that my Great Idea entailed his being reborn as a penis. Don't laugh, please, I beg you. I saw no way around this, even though showing JC as a 'dick' might lead some to think that I've written a spoof. In fact, it's a serious thriller. Without giving the plot away, I can say this: I needed JC's ghost, today, remembering his nights with Cleopatra on her fabled golden barge. There was the heart of my book--a ghost trying for 2000 years to relive that lost boogie with Liz. And I'd begun to run with this when my memory corrected me: Mark Anthony, not JC, was on the barge with Cleo. And this was after JC's death. What the hell was I to do, lacking the good sense to check memory's 'facts
Barbara Hughes in the Sportswoman's Library (BL permission) The title of my book has been changed: That Spirit of Independence has become Stars to Steer By . It’s still a book of celebration, mentioning more than one hundred wonderful sea-women. And yes, they are all included because of their variously independent spirits. No change there. The title I chose myself was given me by a rebellious Solent racer called Barbara Hughes. She was racing slim, fast keelboats from the age of about 13 in 1885 and loved it: ‘It is the most delightful education in the world, the most interesting and healthful. It becomes so engrossing that you will not rest until you understand the whole thing and know the why and wherefore of all the different moves.’ Barbara was the 5th of 6 children so was usually subordinate to her father, brothers or older sisters. She wanted to be in charge of her own boat, competing on equal terms: ‘you should have it all in your own hands, with no one to say you “nay”, o
A young Ellison, at his Olympia SG 3 Alas, we seem to be losing all the great ones lately. Well, this is a common illusion when some beloved figure dies. Last week it was Harlan Ellison, who died June 28, just a week ago in his sleep at 84, after suffering a stroke in 2014. Ellison was probably the least known famous writer in the world. To me and a lot of writers who were his fans, he epitomized everything the brilliant, provocative, flamboyant, prolific, wild-eyed writer ought to be - and usually fall short of. Whatever one thinks of his prodigious body of work, one could not fail to admire his ferocity as a creative spirit and human being. "Born without an off-switch," his friends said. He went, Energizer-Bunny-like, fully until he stopped. Jewish by birth, atheist by self-proclamation, Ellison lived consistently by the three great moral questions of Rabbi Hillel the Elder : "If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? "If I am for myself alone, t
Imagine you’re a you ng journalist from The Times , reporting on the Hay literary festival. Nice job if you love books and writing – which journalists do, or they’d be doing something else – and you should enjoy it while you can, as literary festivals are sadly in their GƶtterdƤmmerung p eriod, what with no corporate sponsor being pure enough to be allowed to fund them, and grants from such lofty organisations as the Arts Council being extremely unlikely, owing to books being lamentably highbrow and middle class (not!). Anthony Horowitz By Edwardx - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=126308848 So there you are, listening to Anthony Horowitz speak on a panel on the subject of rewriting classics by dead authors in order to remove ‘offensive’ language ( as Puffin did last year with a new edition of Roald Dahl’s works ), and you hear him say he doesn’t approve of burglarising books. Yup, that’s what he said. Well, he must have said that, there’
Image Credit: Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos Opening lines must hook a reader so they read the rest of your story or article. I aim to write something which intrigues me, draft the rest, and as I do that, ideas occur to strength that first line. So I go back and do so. The act of writing something down in and of itself seems to trigger creativity to come up with more and better ideas. It’s a pity you can’t bottle that effect and bring it out when you need it! As I write a lot of flash fiction, where my maximum word count is 1000 words, the opening line carries even more weight. I see it as doing a lot of heavy lifting. Sometimes I will write circle stories where the closing line is a repetition of the opening one or is similar to it with, say, one minor change. That change has come about due to what happened in the story itself. I find, whatever I write, as long as I have something down to start me off, away I go happily. It can be finding the way into a piece whic
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And I can SEE how they would. Your writing so visually rich.
There are enough lawyers in the world, so glad you turned your talent to writing. :)
eden