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Yesterday I met a horse, one I liked quite a bit. He’s an 11-year-old, 16-hand, bay thoroughbred gelding with a star and a couple of white socks. He raced when he was young, then did trails, a little dressage, a little jumping. For the last year, since his owner moved to New York City, he’s been doing essentially nothing but eating grass, learning some bad ground manners, and getting out of shape.

On the way home from seeing the horse, I talked at length with K., who had come along with me, and owns the barn where the horse would be staying. We both agreed the horse would be a project to tune up. He’s had all that experience, and apparently while being worked regularly he is willing, forgiving, and sane. But a year off means a lot gets lost and forgotten. Now, the horse needs work everywhere: his muscle tone, his feet, his attitude toward work, being handled, doing what is asked and expected of him. At first, as K. and I talked, this seemed overwhelming and daunting and frankly, beyond what I know how to do. Me? Re-train a horse? Do I really want to do that? Wouldn’t it be a lot easier to get a horse that knows things, one I can just get on and ride? Wouldn’t it?

Then K. said this: if you really want to learn about horses, and horse training, this horse is the perfect opportunity. K. is a terrific horsewoman, knowledgeable and very good at teaching — teaching everything: riding, horsemanship, ground manners, training the trainer, training the horse. I realized she was right. Opportunities like this don’t come along very often. Here’s a horse who is a diamond in the rough (I very much hope); here’s a trainer who is a horsewoman’s horsewoman. Here I am, looking for a challenge.

It also occurred to me that this new horse, which I now own and will bring home in a week, is part of the book I’m working on. Maybe the last chapter, maybe the middle. I don’t exactly know yet. The reason to have horses, for me, is about a lot more than simply riding; it is about what the horse teaches you. That’s what the book is about, on balance. So, I’m calling this new guy research, in the way I do research that is: experiential, intuitive, not exactly linear. And then, finally, there’s this: yesterday, the day I met the new horse, it was exactly seven months to the day that Buddy died. I don’t know if that’s important or significant, but there it is.

Now, and this is where you come in, the new horse needs a suitable name. Send suggestions…

Words are so cool. The difference between ‘flotsam’ and ‘jetsam’? Both are debris in the ocean; one is the stuff left floating after a wreck (flotsam); the other the stuff that is jettisoned from a ship in distress (jetsam).

In ordinary, not merely marine, usage, the phrase “flotsam and jetsam” means odds and ends, rubbish, junk.

The past couple of weeks, in an extraordinary effort to avoid writing, I have come across a great deal of flotsam and jetsam in my own home. Some is still floating around the house: a pair of wooden Canada geese I apparently thought it was important to own; lots of rocks and shells collected in various states and countries over the years; way too many shoes, including: a pair of green vinyl flats, blue leopard print stilletos, and a gorgeous pair of Frye boots that weigh about ten pounds; a basket of tennis balls hidden from Owen; a huge stuffed dog I found in the basement. I own this? Apparently I do.

And, some jetsam, much of it from another life, now jettisoned to Goodwill, the trash, new homes. To name what’s lost is to keep it around, in some sense. The jetsam shall go unnamed. It’s simply, and finally, gone.

If you are a fan of the “All-America” title which Richmond, Indiana, has apparently just won, you won’t like what I have to say about that here. You are fairly warned. Read on if you wish.

This past weekend, a group of eager “youth” traveled to the National Civic League (NCL) competition in Tampa, Florida, as designated finalists in the running for an “All-America” city title. Apparently, the kids impressed the judges with their enthusiasm, honesty, and charm. I admire those kids for being eager, brave, and doing their best to promote Richmond. Good job. And I mean that.

Call me cynical, however, but I fail to see what having an “All America” title will do for Richmond. The city won the award 22 years ago, too, the trusty Palladium-Item tells us. Uh huh. That’s nice. And in those 22 years, how have we done? I offer a few numbers, which I imagine if you are a local reader, you know well:54% graduation rate in the high school in 2006; 76% “estimated” for this year. 11.9% unemployment rate. That’s enough right there to say we are not a healthy place.

So now we’re an All-America city again? Here’s what the NCL says winning the award will do:

All-America City Award is America’s original and most prestigious community recognition award. Since 1949, the Award has honored communities of all sizes (cities, towns, counties, neighborhoods and regions) where community members, government, businesses and nonprofit organizations work together to address critical local issues. More than 500 communities have earned this distinguished title and many have earned it more than once.

If your community works collaboratively to overcome local challenges, it could become an All-America City. The application process alone represents a valuable opportunity to evaluate the way your community manages opportunities and challenges, which can make your community stronger. Communities that earn the All-America City title realize numerous benefits, including:

Local, state, and national recognition
Greater civic pride and greater civic collaboration
Economic stimulus

I see, in the near future, a parade (yes, there is one, Monday at 11 a.m.). I see letters to the editor filled with civic pride. I see community gatherings to plan strategically, brainstorm collaboratively, problem-solve creatively. I see t-shirts. Bumper stickers. A new coat of paint on the water tower. Maybe a community garden. A downtown festival. I see a lot of enthusiasm and energy invested in a smattering of projects across the city that enable the participants to feel good about themselves and the work they are doing to make Richmond a little better here and there.

And then?

That’s it. Nothing. This title, for all the work and investment and energy these kids and community “leaders” have put into it, it’s pure air. It changes nothing on a substantive, fundamental level.

Yet, our self-designated, and sometimes elected, community leaders will tell us, and tell our kids, that this title means we are something. That we will be something. That if we “work together” we can be — no, wait — we are terrific.

I would like to take the community leaders aside and say this: Look. Quit lying to our kids. Quit filling their heads with boosterish nonsense. Quit leading them on these exhausting exercises which result in virtually nothing.

I would also challenge those leaders to take on the hard stuff. Those are good, good kids they took to Tampa, Florida. That’s the easy job. What about the not so good kids? What about the 46% that didn’t graduate? Are you working with them? Are you going to one of the many many bars in Richmond on any given afternoon or evening and talking to the people who spend their time there? Your clothes will stink of smoke and you will get an earful. Can you handle that? Are you enlisting drug addicts and the homeless and dropouts and the illiterate and teenage mothers and the little kids who eat free and reduced lunches every day to be part of your strategic planning, your creative brainstorming, your leadership exercises?

Are you?

If you are not, then you are not what I ever want to call a leader.

I woke up thinking about creative nonfiction, the genre I supposedly tramp around in. I don’t particularly like the term. I would love to find, or invent, a better one. So, this morning, I noodled around, looking at the major journals in the genre: Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, and RiverTeeth.

Creative Nonfiction.
I certainly don’t believe that Lee Gutkind has the final say on what “creative nonfiction” is. Gutkind, as creative nonfiction wannabes know, was long ago sardonically anointed as “Godfather of Creative Nonfiction.” Sadly, he has come to rather like this term; just watch him preen at the next AWP conference whenever anyone introduces him as such. Gutkind is editor of a literary magazine, Creative Nonfiction which publishes tidy essays composed of scenes and reflections, scenes and reflections. A fellow at VCCA referred to this type of writing as “boxcar” prose. I would agree.

On the CNF website, there is even a helpful little teal blue button labeled “What is Creative Nonfiction” Click on it and you can read Gutkind’s way, which includes, among other directives and definitions, this:

Read the rest of this entry »

I was awakened this morning by my phone ringing, a ring that inserted itself into a dream I was having about a writing workshop. A writing workshop that I was in, along with a number of twenty-something writers, writers who embraced the joy of irony and smirk on the page, writers who inserted nastiness of various stripes — violence, avarice, solipsistic ennui, the manipulative and the manipulated — writers who set their stories in urban moral decay, writers who didn’t believe in anything but their Amazon rankings, the NY Times list, and whether their next book (the one they were pitching at cocktail parties) had a contract, or not.

In this workshop, along with me and the gaggle of youngsters, there were a few other wise middle-aged women writers. (Yes, I was a wise middle-aged woman writer in this dream. Just keep reading, stop chuckling.) We were in the minority, but fine writers all; as we listened to the youngsters hold forth about irony and biting humor, we became more and more silenced, our sense that the leader of the workshop, an aged hipster, was privileging and applauding the youthful point of view in all its unshaded bite and snarkiness. We exchanged looks, but no one spoke up.

Until, finally, I did. I think it was the moment the youngsters and the workshop leader had moved to a window overlooking astreet, and were chuckling sardonically about real people walking by on the sidewalk. It was as though they were second graders torturing the class gecko. They pointed, snickered, referenced someone’s cleverly written scene of meanness which apparently included real people on a sidewalk.

I could take it no longer. I stood up and said this: “I realize I am probably in the minority as I say this, but I want to make a case for another view of the world.” An impatient pause, a thin approximation of politeness. The gaggle turned away from the window. All eyes, youngsters and middle-aged alike, on me.

“I believe in love,” I said. “In affection. Kindness. Grief. Anger. All of it. I believe in stories that understand irony is merely a shallow pool, very much like the one Narcissus gazed into.”

At this point, the middle-aged crowd is nodding, smiling without irony. They get it. Life is filled with things that happen to us that irony can smirk at, but barely understands.

“Writing,” I went on, “must move beyond irony and clever humor and gratuitous violence to be of any worth at all.”

The youngsters are looking mirthless now, peeved and a tad peckish. I am gaining momentum, speak louder now. “Writing,” I declare, “Writing must be about love and about anger, both, and always hand in hand.”

And then the phone began ringing, and the scene of writers listening to me deliver the Jean Manifesto dissolved into dream dust.

Send in nominations for your “must read” books of the summer. I’ll compile a master list so all of us living in the Midwest can gather these books and then go off to the nearest beach — beach? — to lie on a towel on the hot sand and read.

Okay maybe not a beach. A bench, perhaps. Near a rippling cornfield. Sort of like being at a beach.

Whatever. Send your favorite books!

I started to reply to my brother’s comment on the previous post, then realized I was drafting what should simply be a second post in and of itself. So here goes:

Dear Dan -

I have heard the “hey at least she’s promoting reading” argument too many times to give it too much due. Yes, Oprah has championed, among other nearly great or great writers, Elie Wiesel and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. That’s good. And a few of the books Oprah has chosen out of the vast mass of stuff that gets published every year is pretty solid. However, too much is fluffy or dreckish (need I remind anyone of James Frey’s book? Who cares if it’s true or made up — didn’t anyone notice the writing is DREADFUL!!!??). Much of what she chooses is escapist reading. Most is, simply, entertainment between the covers of a hardcover book.

An Oprah book, which can be purchased at your local Target, Amazon.com, all-purpose grocery store, is a product. Do people buy it to engage in the hard task of reading? Is it *reading* that Oprah promotes? I don’t think so. It’s consumerism, acquisition, the must-have-thing of the moment. I also cringe at the kind of support group mentality she cultivates: books as a doorway into the deepest Sharing of Feelings. Reading as group therapy, in a sense. If you watch an Oprah book club discussion, the conversations about the book in question devolve to the participants sharing how they “relate” to the book, the personal stories of tragedy and triumph of their own which the book makes them remember and recall. These discussions are only nominally about the book; they are not about reading, that challenging task of understanding a book on its own terms, that work of entering another world and learning how to walk in it. These discussions are about and for the self.

As most of Oprah’s stuff is, frankly. I don’t mind this when she’s pushing nail polish or shoes (ah, shoes), or summer dresses or whatever product that might make someone feel a little pampered and happier. I don’t mind at all if a cute little product for hair or toes or the body is the locus of attention, if it conjures up memories of summers past, of heartache and joy. That’s groovy.

But to engage in something similar with a book? If we equate “relating” to a book to reading? Then, I think, we participate in the dumbing down of intellectual discourse. I’d rather not.

Love, Jean

I have only read one book on Oprah’s pick of the 25 books you must read this summer. Yes, I’ve read the Hemingway book. I have not heard of most of these books at all. A couple, sure: the Kurlansky book, and the Cullen book. Take a look at the list and see where you stand.

And will you read or have you read any of these yourself?

So. I’m back in Richmond, Indiana. These are some of the things I have observed today:

– In the grocery store, a rather heavyset woman dressed in sandals, baggy khaki shorts, a baggy t-shirt. On her lower leg, an enormous tattoo of Mickey Mouse.
– A man in the grocery store who whistled like a bird, really loudly, the entire time I was in the store. It was like having a psychotic mockingbird one aisle over for, oh, 45 minutes. Yes. I did want to whack him. With a tennis racket — THWAPP – on the back of the head.
– A funeral procession going west on National Road as I was driving east. Everyone stopped but for a large champagne beige SUV.
– Reading the student evaluations from my spring class and realizing at least one student hated me, or perhaps the world at large; it was hard to tell in the laconic tone of the brief comments what he or she really thought. The rest? Noncommittal or cheery. Nothing of substance, not at all.
– The pile of mail to throw away at home was three times the size of the pile to keep. The pile of mail to throw away at school? All of it.

I am going to watch a cheery movie tonight, toast a good couple of weeks, and get over the slightly nasty burn of re-entry by tomorrow.

Today, I’m headed slowly home. I will miss this place, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, miss the lovely people I met here — Fern, Sheila, Wendy, Samiya, Randon, Claudia. There are more, a long list of creative, wonderfully supportive, intelligent people here. Their presence has renewed my faith in everything: writing, art, life itself. I am carrying them with me as I drive. (And, yes, dear Fern: I promise not to write while driving. Honest.)

Perhaps most of all, in a place beyond words, I will miss Fella. That friendly, gregarious, gorgeous horse has healed my soul.

I’m ready to go home. I miss the dogs, the wide flatness of Indiana, the “leaky cats”*, and I miss Kurt. Off I go…

—–

*Leaky cats: From Claudia, a phrase I now adore.