I hope this link works! It's one of the Fetzer Institute pieces of video that they just published to their web site. If you go to the web site you can see and hear the other fabulous writers I was on retreat with last April: Jack Ridl, Naseem Rakha, Lauren Artress, Curtis Lumkin, Jennifer Louden, and others...big fun!

Fetzer Institute | Resources | Alison Luterman: Listening for Story | Alison Luterman: Listening for Story

I came away from the brilliant movie The Social Network thinking, "Empathy is more precious than gold or rubies, it is the pearl without price, it is the only thing worth praying for."

Let me back up. In the movie, Jesse Eisenberg gives an amazing Oscar-worthy performance as Mark Zuckerberg, the genius who founded Facebook.He doesn't hit one false note that I could detect. He is every nerdy, hyper-intelligent, socially awkward, arrogant, isolated, pained Jewish boy I've ever known, rolled into one and heightened to an excruciating degree. The script is pitch-perfect. I have no idea how all this relates to the real Zuckerberg, but it doesn't matter, because the film is not a biopic it's a work of art.

The ending is of course, Zuckerberg as the world's youngest self-made billionaire--terribly alone. For all his genius he lacks that essential human quality of empathy which makes a human being whole. He might have a mild form of Asperger's syndrome--I don't know. It's not important what his diagnosis is. In many ways it is the illness of our age, the disconnection and subsequent narcissism that we all suffer from in varying degrees. (And yes, I'm aware of the supreme irony of blogging about this...)

The movie was produced by Trigger Street, which is the company that actor Kevin Spacey founded to promote quirky independent scripts. I think it's still operative at www.triggerstreet.com.

This has been a rich week for creative inspiration. Friday night we went to the Berkeley Rep and saw Compulsion, the story of Mayer Levin's doomed battle to stage his dramatic adaptation of Anne Franks' diary. Mandy Patenkin was beautiful in the lead role, and the play was structured in such an innovative way, with marionettes and double--and in one case quadruple casting.

Both Compulsion and The Social Network were in a sense morality tales about what happens when genius and ego get tangled up. The headiness of having a vision and then the cost of that to the people close to the visionary, the collateral damage to relationships and sometimes to the soul of the creator.

It's such a poignant conflict because the act of creation (whether one is a genius or not) is as compelling as giving birth--caught in its throes you feel like it's the most important thing on earth at that moment--you have to push, and everything else becomes secondary. But once you have pushed--and the baby is born alive and healthy, or damaged, or dead--then you look around and notice that bills haven't been paid, gardens have gone unweeded, relationships untended, phone calls unreturned.

The cost of even producing a minor thing can be high--depending on the degree of compulsion, or drive or whatever you want to call it--and I can't even imagine what it takes to be the creator of something truly great, to sense that you have the world by the tail in that way, at least for that hour. How could one resist the seduction of that impulse, and how to return to tending ordinary life after that?

Both these pieces speak to the murky underside of great success. When a work like Anne Frank's Diary hits the world, or, on a much less morally profound but equal in terms of impact--Facebook--a work that generates a tsunami of attention and fame and money and glory--then I think inevitably things backstage must get messy. Because getting something that big launched into the world can never be solely the work of one person, there must be collaboration, support, people who got on board with the project early, others who came in later--and how do you compensate them all? Who gets to ride on the back of the elephant as it parades triumphantly through main street?

And how can we, as individual creators, not have our egos tied up in what we create?

My friend who is taking some classes at Stanford says the younger generation is working more collaboratively and less egotistically than we ever did. She says they all pitch in and work on each other's projects and don't seem to care so much whose name is attached. But whenever you have something like Facebook, which generates so much money, I think those generational differences fall away and things are bound to get nasty.

I should also say that what both Compulsion and the Facebook saga have in common is that they both center on Jews and the very contradictory qualities of brilliance and prickliness and apartness and universality that shape our cultural personality. The huge drive to "break in" to a world that seems closed, the outsider status, which was originally imposed on us by society and which we continue to resist and sometimes reinforce by our own attitudes and behavior. This feeling of otherness which also somehow lies at the very heart of being truly human.

I have been holding off on blogging for a bit because I wanted to brag on Christopher's Teacher of the Year awards night--and I have video to go along with the post, so it's not just idle chatter. But we have to figure out how to upload the cd to this blog, so I will save it for later. Suffice it to say that despite the fact that things are generally politically ecologically and economically going to hell in a handbasket, the younger generation is coming up, coming up, growing and learning and reaching and grasping, and there are wonderful teachers out there--not just Christopher, but of course, including him--who are meeting them with open arms.

By this I mean that all 18 of the teachers who were honored as Teachers of the Year from their respective schools were wonderful and inspiring. (And the special ed teachers seemed to love their work best of all.)

I had expected to be proud of Christopher; I had expected to eat high-fat hors d'oeuvres deep-fried and oozing with cream cheese; I had expected to put on some make-up and debate with myself about wearing heels (no, too uncomfortable.) I didn't expect to be so moved by everyone else's video presentation as well as my husband's. To see that even in this day and age when Obama's "Race to the Top" has replaced Bush's "No Child Left Behind" as a program that is supposed to look like educational reform but actually treats education more like a corporate business than a human endeavor, there are still men and women who wake up every day and spend their time listening, communicating, and inspiring young people.

And some of them have managed to hang onto their jobs even in this economy and are continuing to serve youth.

Some very good lives are being lived even in the midst of our current global mess; that is the good news. It's like the rescue of the Chilean miners, which was such an incredible high even to read about. See what we are capable of when we put our minds to it?

Now onto Franzen's Freedom. Spoiler alert: if you have not read the book and intend to, and/or if you are in the middle of the book and have not yet finished it, stop reading the blog now. Walk away from the blog. I don't want to wreck it for anyone. I like the book very much. It's not perfect but it's ambitious, big-hearted, sprawling, and in so many places heart-breakingly accurate about how we humans think, love, and act, that it definitely merits reading.

And for the record, I loved The Corrections. I mean, The Corrections was so good it was almost painful to read it. And I don't hold Franzen's arrogance against him. The man is brilliant, hard-working, and seems tortured. So he gets a little testy and is impolitic at times. There are worse sins.

But having said all that, I have to ask: why, when white writers write about characters of color are those characters more easily killed off than any of the white (central) characters? Why are the characters of color so... expendable?

In this book, more so than The Corrections, I felt like I could second-guess Franzen's personal prejudices. For one thing, the guy really believes in marriage. If two people get married, that's it. They may cheat on each other, but at the end of the day those are the bonds that will count. This has not been my experience in real life, so I accuse Franzen of being a old-fashioned and traditional and in that sense unrealistic. But whatever. My objection as a reader is that sensing this prejudice made the actions of the characters predictable in a way that I didn't want them to be.

But my main objection is with the character of Lalitha. I tried to imagine myself reading this if I were an South Asian Indian woman. We are expected to believe in Lalitha as a paragon of sexiness and drive (literally: she is always driving him everywhere), who is sexually and romantically besotted with her much-older boss, almost completely uncritical and patient and forebearing. Lalitha is a fountain of unconditional love and goodness until she is conveniently killed off (I'm sorry, I SAID spoiler alert) so that said boss can re-unite with his (very imperfect, fully-fomed character) (white) wife.

The white characters are allowed to be full human beings with flaws and warts. The Asian woman has to be perfect, and in the end she is sacrificed so that the dysfunctional white family can knit itself back together again in a more functional pattern.

Thanks Lalitha for all the great sex and all the good work; you can die now.

Um...so, putting myself in the shoes of the Indian woman, how do I feel about this?

Mad, I think. And tired. Hasn't this trope gotten a little old?

Please understand, I am not usually the kind of reader who goes out looking for politically incorrect things with which to crucify successful writers. I just couldn't help noticing, that's all. And unfortunately it's right in the center of this very ambitious, very successful, probably going to get nominated for the Pulitzer Prize winning book.

Just sayin'.

I can hear the birds chirping outside the window, and feel the sun coming through the curtains. I spent the weekend doing a Voice Medicine workshop with Trish Watts, a beautiful singer and Voice and Movement Therapist from Australia. It's hard to explain what Trish does exactly because she has such a vast array of tools to draw on in her work. Sometimes we were singing in harmony, sometimes we were chanting or toning, and sometimes we were working individually finding the animal and human voices within ourselves who wanted to speak, sing, growl, howl, whisper or scream.

I discovered within myself a great bird of prey. Melinda said it sounded like an eagle; the image I had was even bigger, like a velociraptor from the movie Jurassic Park. Huge. Fierce. Frightening. I had big heavy wings and emitted piercing bird squawks from my tail bone up through my shoulder blades/wings and out my nose. My beak.

It wasn't a pretty or a soft or even a noble image to me, but it felt true. I felt the impatience of the bird, the big, muscular impatience--so similar to my own. Impatience is my bugaboo. But can you blame the eagle--or whatever-it-was? It's hard to be confined to a small domestic life when you are made for soaring and planing and hunting and diving.

Trish worked with every single person in a completely unique way--and each person's session was radically different than the others'. She has a vast vocabulary of musical styles and voices in her own body to draw from and she did. I would have liked to work more on connecting the voices and images I found to my work, to writing, to art--that is the bridge that I need to make. To bring all that energy and ferocity into a form. But there were a lot of people, and not enough time.

The question I am left sitting with is where is the morality and compassion in the great bird? (Where is the morality and compassion in America, land of the eagle?)

I watched Trish work with other people, some of whom needed great doses of gentleness and tenderness which she supplied. Outwardly i was patient and still and attentive, but I was aware that my deepest impulses in those moments were to squawk and fly. I felt like the bird who kicks her babies out of the next. Blame it on menopause. It is not that I don't have a deep well of tears within myself, not that I don't like to nurture in a mammalian way. But there is this other, much more yang side which has a more ferocious agenda. I did not feel like a full-breasted mammal in those moments.

When I got home, Christopher was playing music with himself, thanks to the miracle of modern technology. He has filled our living room/dining room area with pianos, an organ, a drum-set, a full set of vibes, and he had some electric guitars plugged in as well. He also has a sound system/recording devices which allow him to lay down tracks, and then play harmonies with himself. He had laid down some basic tracks and was soloing on top of them; the space was filled with music. It sounded like a whole band was jamming together.

I crept past him into the kitchen, whispering, "Don't stop, don't stop." I didn't want to interrupt his creative process as he has so little precious time for himself. But a few minutes later he found me in the kitchen and invited me to join him. I had described for him how Trish had divided us into groups of three; one person held a drone, the other did a simple bass part (vocally) and the third did some solo scat singing on top of that.

"Would you like to improvise with me?" Christopher asked. I was scared. He is an accomplished musician and I have imperfect intonation and often wobble trying to find the right pitch. But I said yes, on the condition that I could be bad and make mistakes. He set up a mic stand for me, and sat at the piano. And I realized (thanks to the workshop) that I could do a simple bass part of a drone, or even a high harmony/bass (does that make sense? I mean, not a melody, not a complex scat, but what would be a bass part, only in a higher register) and let him do the fancy solo stuff on the piano.

And then words started coming through me, the beginnings of a song, and we really were improvising together!!

Back from an amazing weekend with No Nude Men Theatre..what is it? it's not exactly a company. It's more like a kind of federation. A loose conglomerate. A modular amoeba. Really wonderful thoughtful theatre people, so talented and versatile. Folks who can do stage combat, build a set, promote a show, light a set, figure out sound cues, write a play, direct--everything.

I realized that theatre is in its way a kind of religion for those who take it seriously. Not a religion in the God-sense--who would be the God or Goddess of Theatre? Shakespeare? Or some Greek or Roman deity?

But I don't mean religion in the sense of deity but of sacrifice and ritual. People come together to perform the ritual, night after night, of telling a story. If the story is great enough, if the intentions of all concerned are purified enough of ego and its attendant ills, then magic may ensue. The dead speak through us, the world changes a little; at least we who are doing it change, and hopefully the audience as well.

In that sense theatre is not so much about worshipping a God but of becoming a co-creator of a moment in time that stands apart. Whatever you want to call that.

And it does involve sacrifice, otherwise known as tech rehearsals, day jobs, not enough sleep, and junk food.

We were at a hostel in the beautiful Marin Headlands where it's uncharacteristically hot and bright. And on Saturday afternoon a bunch of us gathered in a big circle under an oak tree and read The Recruiter out loud.

Real actors. It was a trip. Of course as the playwright I was fixated on the lines and bits that didn't work. When one of the actors said to me afterwards that it was a great script I looked at her incredulously. But upon reflection...I think from seventy-five to eighty percent of what I had written worked. The other twenty, twenty-five percent I am revising. I got some wonderful, useful feedback.

Good actors never cease to amaze me. I think sometimes actors get a bad rap, and god knows the profession lends itself to some funny excesses. Actors have to be super-sensitive emotionally and at the same time have thick enough skins--or just plain stubbornness-- to endure public failure, rejection, and exposure. An odd combination of vulnerability and toughness. But what doesn't get talked about often enough is the emotional intelligence that borders on genius which good actors have. The ability to empathize immediately, deeply and physically with people they have never met--people who are not even real. They can believe in them so intensely they make them real.

Anyway, I got invaluable, honest, insightful feedback from at least half a dozen of them; not mere pats on the back, but ways to make the play better, mingled with appreciation for what's already there. And I can see the shape and the structure of it now, clear as day, emerging from the shed skins of all the innumerable drafts. This time I really think I've got it.

That feeling of badness. That I am in some way, a "bad person." I know it's ridiculous but I can never quite shake it. A constant kind of guilt and shame for the crime of--what? Just being. Guilt and shame are the hardest monsters i have to slay and I am not sure if they are slayable. It may be that the best i can do is try to turn them into house-pets.

All this is probably why I find it such a relief to create fictional male characters who have actually done terrible things, like kill other people. It's probably what drives me to write so much about war, which brings out the terrible (and occasionally the noble) in people. I don't identify as a helpless victim. i identify with the perpetrators, with the villains. I know that if I had been born male I would have been tempted to abuse the power given to me; I know that I have abused what powers I have at times.

Years ago I was a featured poet at the Logan poetry festival, along with Jimmy Santiago Baca. Jimmy had done hard time himself, and the organizer of this festival, Alan Cohen, had us visit a men's group at the local prison.

First we gave a reading in the main auditorium. The place was jammed--talk about a captive audience--men were practically hanging from the rafters. And they were rapt, attentive. I felt them drinking in every word we spoke.

Afterward, at the group where we shared our work more intimately, and talked to the men, and listened, an inmate said to me that what touched him about my poetry was that I seemed to believe that people were fundamentally innocent. That everyone deserved a second chance, that everyone could be forgiven.

I was so moved to hear him say that. I didn't respond with what the other half of that coin is: except for me. I believe everyone is fundamentally innocent--except I have a hard time seeing it in myself. Maybe because I can't feel every throb of other people's hearts where all the mixed motives and unpretty emotions are lurking the way I can feel my own; maybe because of the intensity with which my mother struggled with her own feelings of guilt and shame and the way she passed that unresolved battle down to me. Maybe because of internalized sexism or internalized anti-Semitism, or the right and true knowledge that as a middle-class American i consume an unethical share of the world's resources and contribute an unspeakable amount of waste and pollution to satisfy my wants and desires. Maybe all of the above, in varying degrees.

I don't know. What I do know is that this feeling of badness persists. Prozac quells it, hard exercise mitigates it, love soothes it, community assuages it, but it never quite goes away. When I interrogate it back to its source I often find relatively small things, petty social blunders, an unkind word here, an unwritten thank you note there, patterns of laziness and selfishness and wastefulness which are offset by bursts of energy in the opposite directions; attempts to clean up my act, which are heartfelt but unsustainable.

I think of this in an unconscious way all of the time, but when I read Jonathan Franzen I become conscious of it. The main character of his new book Freedom is a woman named Patty, unlike me in most ways--she's a jock turned stay-at-home mom, determinedly apolitical, fixated on her kids, doesn't care for the arts. But what's at her core is the same thing as what's at mine--this conviction of her own badness.

Franzen makes me see another aspect of the issue; that this feeling of badness may be part and parcel of self-awareness, self-consciousness. And also that part of what women label as "bad" and feel guilty about--in Patty's case, her competitiveness on and off the playing field for example--is merely a human quality that has been declared off-limits to women.

Patty is married to a very "good" man, as I am (although thankfully, Christopher is a lot more well-rounded and human than Walter Berglund, and I was physically smitten with him from the start), and her "good" husband keeps telling her that she too is "good" although Patty never completely believes him. She knows better. She knows the darkness in her own heart, the cracked places which can be papered over when you're in your twenties, but which emerge and split the house down to the foundations when you are in mid-life.

This is why I read Franzen, although I find him almost unbearably sad. His work hurts me so good. He's singing my song. Even though his song is of middle America, the big flat Midwest, of which I know little to nothing, even though his characters have followed different paths than my own weird trajectory, he gets something about the human heart that is painfully accurate.

I don't get the sense that he has transcended these questions himself. I think he's writing from the same tangled knot of confusion and failure and pain that informs most of his characters' lives. He's no Rumi in other words, and reading him does not alleviate my angst, it increases it. His books leave me simultaneously elated and depressed. I'm elated because he's put a finger on some of my murkier emotions, he's named a portion of the unnameable. I'm depressed because it's all too true and where do we go from here and God help us.

But I'll take him over any of the novelists who bring their characters around to fake resolutions and pat cheery endings. Not because I'm a masochist, (well, maybe I am, a little), but more because fake, forced "enlightenment" makes me even sadder.

The Recruiter is finished!!! At least--this latest draft is. I finished it three days earlier than the deadline, which surprised me. And then this thing opened up--time. I have time. I'm not on deadline anymore. I can talk on the phone. I can saunter and amble and loaf. I can think about getting a job--a real job.

I went and got it copied, ten copies, for this weekend. Bought a birthday present for a friend. Made lasagna for C--from a recipe even! Accompanied him when he took Trixie to the vet for her follow-up shots. (Poor thing, she hated every single minute she spent in the car and let us know with piteous wails. You never heard anything so pathetic.)

I hope all this work was not for naught. Rebecca asked me the other week if I could take satisfaction just in having done it, to the best of my abilities. You know, intrinsic value rather than extrinsic reward and all that. I knew what she was aiming at, I saw her point and it was a good one.

But I had to answer her honestly: I want this thing to be produced. If it doesn't get produced somewhere somehow I will feel disappointed. I won't stop writing. I won't jump off a bridge. But you know--I put in the time and the work--and I would like to see it go all the way.

OI've written other things that never saw the light of day, of course. A novel that is, even as we speak, collecting dust in the basement. And a good thing, too. It simply wasn't good enough. I'm glad it's not out in the world with my name on it, even though there were pages and whole chapters that I thought were pretty good.

Many writers have unpublished novels, screenplays, playscripts sitting in drawers somewhere. And poems. god, only a fraction of the poems I write ever go anywhere. Lots and lots of them are composted. I've learned to live with it. nature is wasteful. Think of the figs smashed on the sidewalk in front of our house, leaving dark stains. Think of the trees that fall in the forest and no one ever hears them. it's all right you know. It's all right for life just to happen without a big parade and brass band announcing it.

Still, I would like this play to have a production. A good one. And more than one. If I'm honest I have to say that I'd like this thing to fly, all over the place. I'd like it to take on a life of its own.

Two kids just came to the door selling newspaper subscriptions to get into college. Mexican-Americans. The older one did all the talking. His parents were deported so he lives with his two younger brothers in an orphanage in Tracy. The little ones are five and six. The parents had come to this country as babies, but were picked up by INS and sent back, six months ago. This kid talked a mile a minute, very intelligent, very well-spoken. determined. He wants to get his own apartment when he's eighteen and raise his younger brothers by himself. He wants to get them out of the orphanage.

His friend was younger and more shy.

Christopher chatted with both of them, offering encouragement and listening. He bought a newspaper subscription.

After we closed the door behind them we just looked at each other. What must it have been like for those parents to have to leave three young children behind when they went back to Mexico? Why couldn't they take them with him? Is there more to the story than what he told us? I didn't even know about orphanages inside this country. Could we...?

We have the phone number of the orphanage.

We're in the process of adopting and taming another one of the outdoor feral kitties. I say "we"--it's 95% Christopher. He has sat patiently reading a book for hours in the musty garage, waiting for this new little one, (Wheat Thin) to trust him enough to come over and get petted. He's spent untold time rattling bags of kitty treats, tossing "crunchies" to the new baby, and gently scratching behind his ears. I went down there myself a few times. Once I saw him hiding in a cupboard atop stacks of old New Yorkers. Another time he was crouched behind the bicycles. Then again, he hides under the toolbench or in the laundry basket. The garage is full o' junk and he has a million hiding places.

Our thought is that this little boy will be a good playmate for Trixie who is currently Queen Bee of the household. The heartbreak is that the taming process involves separating him from his pal and twin shadow Dorian Gray. Dorian Gray is always going to be feral. She doesn't/won't allow herself to be touched; she's skittish and aggressive, while Wheat Thin is pliable and friendly.

Of course we think and talk about the kids Christopher encounters in his work. Those who want to learn and seem to have hope of turning their lives around; those who so far refuse contact.

People are more complex than cats (at least to me they seem to be; a cat person would disagree.) You can't predict what's going to happen with a young person based on how they appear at sixteen or eighteen; plenty of folks get their lives together after that. But you can say that there are consequences, and that these very early choices and decisions matter. (If they are indeed always choices, which I'm not sure they are. Sometimes it seems people are compelled to act out certain dramas before they have the freedom to choose another way. This is why a longer life can indeed be a blessing--sometimes you have to live out a certain amount of karma first.)

These early early choices can matter a lot. Especially if you're poor, if you don't have the luxury of infinite second and third and fourth chances. There are kids sitting in prison for crimes they committed at age fourteen or fifteen or sixteen. There are trajectories that are already set. There are young people enlisting in the military whose lives are hanging in the balance because of a piece of paper they signed.

The other night we were at a friend's house for break-fast after Yom Kippor (okay I wasn't fasting, but it's still fun to break it.) It was an intimate gathering of friends and family, including two teenage nephews. One of the boys was on the debate team and the conversation jumped from joy to grief to the nature of reality. Derrida was mentioned. True confessions: I only have a very vague sense of who Derrida actually is (one of those French philosopher guys, right?) But these kids knew. What's more, they knew the main thrust of Derrida's theories and could employ them, logically, in an argument. They could and did hold their own in a room full of opinionated adults. They could thoughtfully defend a point of view while at the same time acknowledging where other people were coming from; they could do this in the abstract.

In the midst of this lively intellectual melee, I looked over at Christopher. I knew what he was thinking. The kids he teaches have such small worlds, bounded by invisible ghetto walls and by the rules of the gang. It's uncool for them to show any interest in school, in ideas, in learning. It's uncool to read. He scours bookstores and sometimes toy stores for games and materials that will pique their interest. Sometimes he gets through.

But the kids whose company we were enjoying the other night are headed for Harvard or some other great college. They have a father who sings a blessing to them every night. They have had parental involvement and books and stability, good food, medical care and emotional support since they were born. They have never seen their father hit their mother, no member of their family has been arrested or murdered, they were not exposed to drugs in utero.

They were ahead before they even got started.

All kids should be able to have such a beginning. All kids don't need to go to Harvard. But the basics; food, medical care, freedom from fear--all kids should have those things before they're asked to learn. As a prerequisite for education. Do you hear me, Obama? Stop punishing the schools and the teachers and start looking at societal inequities.

Okay, it's much easier to ruminate on all this than it is to do my actual work. I have just fifteen or twenty more pages left of The Recruiter. You can do it, Alison, come on, you can do it...

So I'm at my doctor's, and she's feeling my boobs, and nagging me to get a mammogram. I'm not begrudging her the nag, it's her job--but by way of a cautionary tale she's telling me about one of her patient's mothers who was perfectly healthy until she showed up with breast cancer at the age of ninety.

Wait a minute. Ninety?

Well, everyone's got to die of something, I say. And then a minute later: I'm not even sure I want to live to be ninety.

Oh me neither, she says, palpating my mammaries. I definitely don't want to live to be ninety. That's why I smoke one cigarette a day and have heavy whipping cream in my tea.

I nearly fall off the table laughing.

Are you sure that's enough? I mean, maybe you should drive without wearing your seat belt or drink brandy for breakfast or something just to guarantee that you won't outlive your retirement income.

I know it's ridiculous, she says. Now raise your arms above your head for me, and press the palms together.

I wish all the people who are against gay marriage could have seen the wedding we attended last weekend, between two good friends of mine. S and E have lived together nine years. They've seen each other through medical crises (brain surgery, anyone?), the serious illness of family members, world travel, and job changes. Two very different people--one impulsive and mystical, the other methodical and careful--they've been a model for me as they demonstrate how to negotiate a loving relationship.

As I struggle with the $64,000 question, "How can I be myself and be married to someone who seems at times so different, so other," they have been my inspiration. I have seen them patiently, honestly, lovingly work through conflicts that at times seemed unworkable, negotiate, and come up with elegant solutions. I have seen them both grow as individuals and evolve as a couple for nine years before this ceremony. I have witnessed their fierce commitment to keep evolving.

As E's mother remarked afterward, "I don't think there was a dry eye in the house," when they said their vows. The love was palpable. Each celebrated the kindness, compassion, strength, and playfulness the other brought to their union. I have been to many great weddings, and none better than this. Their families were also so present and accounted for; E's young nephew brought down the house when he sang a song, "which some of you may know 'cause it's from the '80s," he explained, in deference to the ancientness of many in the audience. Both sets of parents toasted and officially welcomed their new "daughter" into the family. Families like these show what kind of world could be possible, for all of us.

Also, and not incidentally--everyone was having a hell of a good time. Dancing, singing, mingling. C took about a million photos and they also had an official photographer there, so it was a well-documented fest.

If anyone wants to put this marriage up against Pam Anderson marrying the latest guy to pay her gambling debts in Las Vegas, feel free. As for me, I'm going to continue to seek wisdom and inspiration from people who have done the hard good work of learning how to communicate, how to be independent and yet intimate, honest and kind, fully themselves and also fully engaged with each other.

Lively discussion last night in my writing class about how "writing is hard!" I consider that when someone says that it means that they are doing it right. (Yes, I am a New England Puritan, why do you ask?)

I think writing is hard, the way marriage is hard., the way parenthood is hard, the way anything worthwhile is hard. Hard in that it throws curve balls at you and asks things of you and pulls things out of you above and beyond what you'd "rationally" give if you were not a thousand percent committed.

It's not rational to rewrite the same ten pages a hundred times, but sometimes you do it. It's not rational to keep sending out a poetry manuscript to dozens of contests a year at twenty-five dollars a pop for entry fees, knowing that your chances are less than one in a hundred, and it may take years to get accepted, and yet you do it. It's not rational to sit on your butt, inside, on a bright sunny day, with the wide bright world whirling around without you, and try to wrestle the lines of a poem into some kind of pleasing order.

And yes, all that is hard, but for whatever strange mix of reasons, some of them lofty, most of them not--you feel compelled to do it. Hard, but not doing it would be harder.

And of course writing is not hard compared to sifting through a garbage dump in Sao Paulo, looking for food or bits of scrap metal, as thousands of people have to do. It's not hard compared to wearing an 80-pound pack and sweating up a hill in Afghanistan, knowing that you could be shot at or blown up at any moment. Not hard compared to...well, you get the idea. It's a privileged complaint, and we all admit it.

The pleasures of reading and writing--when the writing is going well--are incomparable. I spent all day yesterday on the couch with a good book. Skipped my workout, didn't go to the post office to mail my manuscripts, just read and read and read deeply into another person's life. It can be like that. Addictive. then there are the days when it is like trying to shovel through an iceberg using only your mind as a pick-axe. At best you make only a few slushy dents, your mind gets awfully tired and sore, and at the end of the day the glacier is still there, as God intended.

Run, don't walk, to go see Winter's Bone, if it is playing anywhere near you. Spare. Haunting. Bleak. Human. Humbling. The physical world, the hills and woods of rural Missouri are a brooding presence in this film. And the characters stayed with me long after the movie was done.

It's about--among other things--poverty in backwoods America, the kind we don't usually see. The hidden-away poverty of white people. Shooting squirrels to eat them. Frying potatoes in lard. Women all wearing the same beat-up jeans and flannel shirts. You can practically smell them. Bad home dye jobs. Bad teeth. Heavy women who can fork hay and split kindling and use a power saw and dodge a punch.

Their world is lodged in my gut right now like a piece of undigested squirrel pie. I don't know what to do with it. The fine bony faces, like Abraham Lincoln's. That's C's bone structure. Long thin hands fingering a guitar or a banjo, sitting on a woodpile. My people are urban, sociable, chatty, soft. These people are flinty and taciturn, full of hidden depths. I don't know the code, but I can see that there is one.

It reminds me of the month I spent living on an Indian reservation a lifetime ago, when I got thoroughly laughed at for my citified ways. When I learned to split kindling and build a fire in a wood stove, and haul water from a creek. A month of that and I was through. No books, no magazines. There was a peace there that remains in my memory. And the people, especially the women; tough, vulnerable, wounded. They scared me a little. They move me.

My computer is in the shop and I'm trying out C's Mac to see if I would prefer to get one of those rather than the PC's I have always had. I've been working obsessively on the poetry manuscript for a few days and now it's time to turn back to the play. If anyone has an opinion about Macs vs. PC's I'd be happy to hear it.

The full moon has brought fullness--long intimate talks with so many people, old friends and new. Today, a walk in the woods with a friend of thirty years, from my VISTA days, and his wife. The sun hot and dry, insects making clicking sounds in the dessicated Queen Anne's lace, the sky a rich Delft blue. We walked and talked and sweated happily, and then went out and stuffed ourselves full of Mexican food at a little dive-y place a few blocks from our house.

Life is so sweet sometimes, when things come around in the fullness of time. This friend has seen me and I have seen him through more than one death: my mother, his mother, his former fiance, my ex-husband, and friends taken before their time. And here we are still alive, still walking around on strong legs, still drinking coffee and giving each other shit, still recognizably something of the young naive people we were when we met. And life is good.

Which makes today's announcement of a judge shutting down Obama's expansion of the stem cell research program particularly odious. If stem cell research had proceeded apace during the Bush years, my friend Carla might be walking around and drinking in this beautiful day. If stem cell research had gotten going, all the people with M.S. and ALS and cancer and diabetes might have hopes of a healthier life. How can that be bad? How can religious wing-nuts deny scientists the right to at least try to heal some of these terrible diseases?

The first act of The Recruiter is solid at last, at last, thanks in no small part to my stalwart friend Rebecca, who not only read several drafts cheerfully and thoroughly, but commented on the lines in red font, cheering me on when I had hit the right tone, and chiding me when I fell asleep at the wheel.

If it takes a village to raise a child--which I believe it does--and it takes a city to assist a disabled and/or dying person, which I know from being with my mother and with Carla, it takes, I don't know, at least a soccer team to see a work of art through to completion. You need several kinds of friendly readers. At least one person should fall into the cheerleader rah-rah you go girl, I love every word that falls from your pen category. This is because writing is fucking hard and it also requires the writer to become solitary and occasionally delusional. A friend like this comes in at that delicate moment right after the birth, looks at the butt-ugly screeching hairless newborn covered with blood and mucus, and declares it the most gorgeous infant the world has ever seen. You can't put a price-tag on that kind of support.

But then--later--you also need critical-but-kind readers, people who are discerning and care about literature, and perhaps work in its minefields themselves, so they can be clear about what works and doesn't work without being catty or cruel. they are the ones who point out that your baby's arms are on backwards, or that it hasn't got a nose, and they manage to do this without shaming you. When after multiple drafts, you actually get the thing breathing--at least a little, at least through one nostril, they are as happy as if it were their own child who was going to make it.

I got lucky in my choice of family, as most of us are bookworms. My dad and stepmother are cheerleaders--they love almost everything (although Dad doesn't like things that are too dark or too overtly sexual, big surprise. Still, if he doesn't like something much he'll just mildly say, "It's not as good as your last one.") In general though, if I sneezed and sent him the Kleenex full of snot, he would forward it to all his friends with a proud note: Look what my daughter did!

My sister and my sister-in-law who are both raising young children and don't have time to sit around writing thesis-length emails are very supportive but not afraid to say when something doesn't work for them. I usually don't get lengthy critical analysis from either of them, but "This worked for me," or "Not so much. I didn't get it." A few non-writer friends also fall into this category: concise pithy feedback, supportive but honest so I know I can trust it.

Then there are the doubting Thomases, the devil's advocates, the supporters who make you work your fanny off. They might be called the sparring partners who make you better, the Tough lovers, the Worthy Opponents. Not to make too many sweeping generalizations about gender here, but in my life, these tend to be male. Gay, straight, it doesn't matter. I think this is how men have often been socialized to relate to each other, and so when they do it to you--to me--it's kind of a compliment, like "See, I'm treating you like one of the boys."

They don't do the soften-the-criticism-with-a-compliment-sandwich thing that women do; you know, "I really liked x and y, but z seemed problematic to me. overall though, I think you have a great piece!" We women have had that rubric so ingrained in us that it can be a bit shocking when the critic-friend just circles in on z. But I think guys--and women who are socialized like them--assume that you already know the stuff that's working and they don't--shouldn't--have to hold your hand about it.

I've learned over time, not to take this personally, and just to be grateful for any response. We're all busy and distracted and if anyone gives some of his or her valuable time and attention to my piece, that's a huge gift. And I am a social creature--I can't work in isolation. I don't produce without some kind of feedback.

I warned a new writer-friend that I suffer from premature ejaculation when it comes to hitting the send button on drafts that are upon reflection, still rough--but that's how I am. I don't mind people seeing my dirty laundry or my ragged line breaks or mushy plots. Some of my friends have said that this approach of mine gives them courage in their own creative process, to be imperfect and to allow others to see them that way. other people have candidly told me that they wish I could contain myself more, send out fewer drafts, learn to edit myself more on my own.

Which is kind of a metaphor for how I am in life, of course--I'm the driver who will pull up next to a pedestrian and ask for directions instead of consulting a map, which drives Christopher crazy. But--sue me--my eyes are weak and I like talking to people. I don't trust maps or GPS or any of that half as much as I trust living breathing humans and their wisdom which comes from all kinds of interesting places inside them. Basically I'm writing in order to be in relationship. So there.

There's a recurring dream I have about owning another house--a house I've neglected, a house I've forgotten about. A house that might be sliding into disrepair, a house that needs tending. A house of many rooms.

I go to the "other" house and I walk around in it, exploring--oh look, there's a whole new wing I'd completely forgotten about! Maybe I will sleep here now. The rooms are big! The dreams are somewhat exciting, but also slightly disturbing. Im wealthier than I thought--two houses! But what a responsibility. I should have been taking care of my extra house, weeding the garden, keeping up with it. Maybe I owe taxes on it, maybe it needs a new roof.

Being a writer is like living in two houses at once, two lives at once. If you're living in the writing life, chances are good that you're neglecting something in your other, "real" life. If you're managing to work (a little), earn some money, go shopping, get some exercise, see a few friends, buy birthday presents for your family, keep up with the bills, your other house languishes.

You need both houses. Both require care. You can't afford to completely forget about either of them, and yet you can't spend your time neurotically running back and forth between them, either--that won't work. You have to move as gracefully and deliberately as possible between your two living situations as you can.

But of course it's never really all that graceful. Like a child whose parents are divorced, or a person with a lover in another city, you always forget a toothbrush or a sock or a pair of glasses. You always leave a little piece of yourself behind. And if you neglect either of them for too long, your dreams come back to haunt you.

We went to Mendocino and I taught at the Mendocino Coast Writer's Conference, a sweet gathering of writers who congregate at the College of the Redwoods in Fort Bragg to read, write, and learn together. It was an intense time for both Christopher and me; we were both raw and emotional. The sea was wild, the fog thick. We wandered through the historic botanical gardens and when we stumbled across a tiny family cemetery--just a couple of weedy gravesites, including one for a toddler child--I burst into tears, which is not really like me.

By day I taught and grew close to my students. At night we ate big rich Mendocino dinners and drank wine. I had a blackberry mojito. Our hosts were an extraordinarily gracious couple who live in a beautiful house in the redwoods, full of art and fine woodwork and books. We had a wood-burning stove in our room.

Home now, and back at work on The Recruiter. I've had to tear it apart--really apart--abandon all hopes of retaining much of anything from my previous structure and rebuild from Ground Zero. I'm at Ground Zero now, again. It's a familiar place. I've had to kill my darlings. All my darling hard-won, hard-fought scenes.

I feel like the prize goes to the one who can endure this process, who can just keep coming back to the work "even though I fail and fail again," as poet Lucille Clifton says, "because I am adam and his mother/and these failures are my job."

That's it, exactly. These failures are my job. Bring it on.

The visit with the parentals was very sweet, although the toilet issue was not satisfactorily resolved and we ended up with the old toilet back in place until a better fit could be found. But we had a great time--saw the movie, The Kids Are All Right, ate at Millenium, and hosted a musical gathering for them, so they could enjoy all our talented friends. We had piano, organ, guitar, bass, drums, viola, vocals, and when Bobby showed up, some dreamy sax. And barbecue, chili, and beer. Dad and my stepmother had a beautiful time, and were serenaded and honored.

And now it's back to work mode. I've been stressing about these workshops at the Mendocino Coast Writer's Conference--I taught there five years ago or so--maybe it was more like seven years ago--and it went fine, but sometimes I forget that I know what I know and I freak out and feel the need to re-invent the wheel. hence a 14-page lesson plan for one of the workshops, and a six-pager for the other. Hence some sleepless moments in the middle of the night.

I actually know that it will be fine, it always is, my workshops at Rowe were great this spring, but the people-pleasing co-dependent in me who thinks nothing is ever good enough is activated and on the alert. And all this over-preparing is taking me away from The Recruiter which is shaping up in really interesting, disturbing, and I think (I hope!) authentic ways.

We have also been watching the wonderful HBO series John Adams starring Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney--we finished it the other night after I insisted we watch all the special features which ended up taking us up to 1 in the morning. It's such phenomenal storytelling, and gives such a brutal, unsparing look at the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries--mastectomy without anesthesia anyone? What do teeth look like in a sixty-year-old who has had no real dental care?

The show raised more questions in me than it answered: I wondered especially about Thomas Jefferson who seemed a man of such great contradictions. Elegant, refined, brilliant--and a slave-owner. How could he hold the radical ideas about human rights and freedom which he wrote about and have the life he had? I went on-line and read a bit about him--six children born to his beloved wife, who died after the sixth birth--most of the children did not survive either. Death upon death upon death. The losses and trauma these people endured are incalculable. And this is our heritage. this is the basis on which our country was formed.

The Adams' also, were brilliant people but terrible parents. John's four children didn't fare well--two died alcoholic, his daughter died of breast cancer in her 40s after suffering the tortures of the damned. the son who became President, john Quincy Adams, described himself as a "cold rigid martinet." Two of his sons committed suicide in their twenties. Family patterns of depression and alcoholism, and cold, distant parenting ran through their descendants like blight.

It raises the age-old question, whether greatness is worth the sacrifices it entails? Would it be possible for a person to be happy and great, to attend to his or her intimate relationships, family, and some other worthy project without cheating anything of time or attention? They Adams', both husband and wife, put "duty to country" before their own children, with terrible results. But one could put "art" or "spiritual practice" or any other thing in there as well.

Meanwhile, we've been following with interest the Wikileaks revelations about Pakistan and Afghanistan. Does this mean we will pull out of Afghanistan sooner rather than later, and spare some service-people's lives? I hope so. I love Obama, (yes, I still do, I don't care if he's not perfect, and has been extremely disappointing in some ways, I still love him). But I have been concerned about his stance on Afghanistan ever since the campaign in '08. This is the wrong place to try to look tough or get tough. No one has ever beat the Afghans in their own country. It's a losing proposition. We should cut our losses and get out now before we sacrifice any more soldiers' lives to this futile war.

Also, Mr. Obama, while I have your ear, you need to soften up on the rhetoric around schools and "performance." A school is not a stock portfolio, or a professional corps de ballet. it doesn't "perform." It educates, nurtures, inspires, and provides a sustaining community for young people as they grow. At least that's what it's supposed to do. Again, this is the wrong place to try to sound tough. Save your toughness for those crazy Tea Partyers or something. Remember yourself as a teacher, and the societal problems they must address daily. Get back on their--on our--side, where you belong.

Love,
Alison

Preparing for my father and stepmother's visit by getting and installing a new toilet...hmmm...perhaps this wasn't the best idea. Oddly-shaped guest bathroom, meaning most conventional toilets won't fit. Sweat and cursing. Christopher made a trip back and forth to the toilet store. I sit glued to the screen on a beautiful summer day, working on the revision of The Recruiter. Page by page, creeps on this petty pace. We have been watching a lot of historical dramas: the Lion in Winter, Becket, Man for All seasons, and John and Abigail Adams. I love history! But it's so hard to walk through it a page at a time, giving voice to every side. I'd say this writing business was like walking through a blizzard except murkier. Tomorrow night I'm going to see Restrepo with a new friend.

Sadly, Blake/Belle (turned out he was Blake, being male) had feline AIDS and did not survive his trip to the vet. That leaves three of his immediate siblings, plus half a dozen adult feral felines in the back yard to deal with.

Roofers start tomorrow, tearing off our old leaky roof and putting on a new one with solar panels so we are bracing ourselves for a noisy few days.

Meanwhile, I finally managed to write the new opening scene for The Recruiter, and everything started flowing from that. It only took me four or five months to absorb and accept the advice I had paid Corey Fischer to give me. I was so attached to the opening as I had originally written it, and to my original structure.

But Corey was right; it's better to start the play in the middle of the lead character's conflict. I now have a revised first act that is halfway decent, but I'm still struggling with the problem of making the characters do things on stage, rather than just stand there and talk (although Tony Kushner certainly gets a lot of mileage from characters standing and talking--one of the main characters in Homebody/Kabul sits in an armchair and discourses for a full hour for the whole first act, for God's sake. On the other hand, that play wasn't considered his most successful, although I liked it.)

Today i got to go to a workshop conducted by Marie Howe, who wrote The Good Thief, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time and What the Living Do. It was extraordinary. What a great teacher she is, relaxed, unhurried, but precise and on-the-pulse accurate.

I am a pretty tough sell as a student; I want a teacher to take me somewhere I can't get to on my own, and I already know how to set deadlines for myself, stay motivated, and kick my own ass. It's got to be more than that. She exceeded my expectations. The exercises were rigorous enough to be challenging, yet she held us to being dumb beginners, which is the only way you get anything fresh. She was not just trying to give us "poem-products"--which is a great temptation for me when I am teaching, just to give students something satisfying they can take home and say, "here's what I made today"--instead she aimed deeper, she was trying to teach us a new way of approaching seeing the material we include in our poems.

Her focus was on direct observation, suspending judgment, interpretation and metaphor for as much and as long as we could. Some of what she talked about was stuff I also teach--the value of repetition in the making of a poem, for instance--but she had a powerful integrated philosophy behind her choices, and a great selection of sample poems, several of which were new to me. In all a great day and a tiring one. I feel like I ran a six-hour marathon when all I did was sit in a low folding chair in Laurie's living room and drink inky strong coffee and listen intently and scribble.

I am reading Brian Turner's great book of poetry Here, Bullet, about war and soldiering, Iraq and Afghanistan, life and death and suffering, and it is instructing me and humbling me as I work on the umpteenth revision of The Recruiter. It makes me think of what W.C. Williams said: "You cannot get the news of the day from poems, although men die miserably for lack of what is found there." In this case, I do feel like I get important news from his poems, in a way that brings it home much more urgently and viscerally than the news accounts and even the very good, first-person journalism I've also been reading.

I'm also Novella Carpenter's funny, inspiring, well-written Farm City, adventures of an urban farmer, which is what I someday aspire to become even though I have a black thumb and have killed all but the most hardy of the house-plants (and porch plants) acquired over the years. My Dad has patiently taken me to a nice nursery, and also to Home Depot; he bought me some big planters, and some herbal starts and, well--let's just say that everything can be recycled. Right?

But we were given some beautiful pink heather as a gift, and after neglecting it for a few weeks I finally took it out of its pot and put it into the ground under the fig tree--it likes shade, the little pointy sign said--and watered it, and lo and behold, it has put forth some new bright pink spears! The sight of them makes me so happy that I here and now resolve to turn over a new leaf and start watering things, because what do you know? It really works!!

We are also probably getting a new addition to our household: Christopher is at the vet right now with another of the feral kittens--one of the more sociable ones, who let itself be caught. (Haven't been able to sex it yet, hence: it.)

After getting spayed or fixed, if it's possible, we'll take it in as a brother or sister playmate for Trixie. I got the honor of giving it a name: Blake if it's a boy, Belle if it's a girl. (Trixie-Belle--get it?) Inspiration for the name Blake came from a new novel that's just been published, Her Fearful Symmetry.

The title, of course, is taken from the poem by William Blake: "Tyger, tyger burning bright/In the forests of the night/What immortal hand or eye/Could frame thy fearful symmetry?" Since this kitty and Trixie are both dark-gray tiger-striped, (and both uncommonly handsome), it seems to fit.

It seems strange to be so excited about tiny things like a flower coming back from the almost-dead or a new kitty, when all around us there are the so-much-bigger things that like the Gulf oil spill, or the verdict on the killing of Oscar Grant (which all of Oakland is nervously awaiting), or the war(s) going on around the globe, or the recession (depression? when are they going to use the d-word?) going on. But these little bits of life which we can nurture and enjoy are made even more important in the face of so much we cannot control. And they teach us something important too--how resilient and fierce life itself is, how there is a whole reality going on behind and beyond the headlines which is bigger and stranger, and better than anything we read in the papers.