BlogLily

Not actually for the WHOLE last two weeks, but I have been holding it, off and on, in a gut busting, nerve wracking way for about that long. That’s because I’ve been waiting to hear whether the people at the Fabri Literary Prize actually want to read more than the first fifty pages of my novel, which is what they do with about five of the many manuscripts that are submitted to them. This Prize is pretty fabulous –  if lightning strikes and they choose your novel, they’ll actually hand you $10,000, publish your book, and give you $5,000 to gallivant around the country and read from it at any bookstore you can charm into having you. You could probably use some of that $5,000 to take people out to dinner, and see if they’ll maybe interview you on their radio show. I’ve heard that works with Terry Gross.

And “No,” is the answer to the question you are probably asking — I haven’t been chosen to be a finalist — they don’t let that cat out of the bag for a few more days. I do know that the chances of that happening are about as good as my boys all sitting around beading me a matching necklace, bracelet and tiara for Christmas. Still, it’s inspiring to have things like this around, and small publishers willing to do it are like gold.

They run this prize twice a year. If you have a manuscript and you’re not sure where to send it, you should send it to them. And I’ll let you know what happens. I spent five years writingThe Secret War, and I figure I should at least try to recoup the cost of all those printer ribbons.

Tonight is the first dance of the middle school social year. Woot! We’re psyched here at the BlogLily household, although I’ve been told if I chaperone neither of my boys will speak to me, shower or brush his teeth again.

But before you get to go to these dances, you have to first sign “The Rules of the Dances,” a one page document that contains the 13 … well, Rules. I love rules. Tomorrow (or as things go here on BlogLily, next year) I will post the sign that’s over our dining room table entitled “Talking in our House.” It contains four wonderful rules for how to talk at dinner.

Still, a love of rules is not the same thing as loving certain rules. This is the one that I’m currently not really loving:

10. Dress code: no see-through clothing, no underwear showing, shirt straps must be two fingers wide, skirts and shorts must fall low enough to meet the fingertips, no cleavage, no bare midriffs, foot wear at all time, no clothing with aggressive disrespectful logs, language or drug alcohol slogans.

Oh NO! That means my boys will not be able to wear those cute see through cami half shirts with “F*** Bush/Drink Merlot” emblazoned across the front over the soccer shorts they outgrew in second grade but can’t bear to give up.

Okay. What gives me pause is that there are eight dress code rules and 5/8 of them apply solely to girls. It’s as though somebody’s decided that certain parts of a girl’s body just shouldn’t be seen at a school dance. And the only reason to forbid them is because they might actually hurt somebody because that is why we forbid things.

I just want to say that I don’t think an eighth grade girl’s cleavage is a weapon of mass destruction. Between (a) acting like it is and totally giving that poor girl the impression that her body is scary or shameful; and (b) ignoring it and letting her grow up and become a woman who feels like her cleavage is pretty awesome in the right contexts, well, I’d choose (b). My point is that even if some of these prohibited fashion choices are in really bad taste, that’s an eighth grade girl’s entire job: to experiment with bad taste. Blue eye shadow anyone? It is also the job of an eighth grade boy, except here no one has decided to forbid those choices as being sexually dangerous.

That’s one thing that interests me about these rules — there isn’t any similar set of rules of behavior in which 5/8 apply only to preteen boys. I mean, honestly, there could be, couldn’t there? Here’s my effort:

(1) Don’t mumble when someone says hello; (2) Wash your jeans more than once a year; (3) don’t punch your friends in the gut as a way of saying hello; (4) don’t eat all the chips; (5) don’t drop your gum wrappers (not to mention your gum) on the floor.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that Rule Number 11 “Absolutely no Freak Dancing” is probably all you need to say about inappropriate, public, sexual behavior. It’s a rule that applies equally to boys and girls and it doesn’t tell girls that their bodies are the ones we all need to be worried about.

Others might suggest that I not leave my husband alone to take care of our children for extended periods of time while doing nothing more helpful than calling him from Honolulu to say the weather is very, very nice.

Charlotte has asked for a list of five of my writing strengths. So, here are my answers. (While I was gone, I was asked other questions, including some by Eoin Purcell, and I have answered those too. Who knows, some day I might even answer all those podlily questions I solicited from you a while back. It is an answering kind of Sunday.)

(1) I have never seen two heterogeneous things and not wondered, What would happen if I banged those together, really hard? Good writing happens when you put together things that don’t belong together. Not everyone agrees with this idea, by the way, and it is also true that bad writing comes out of this banging together of things that don’t go together. I know — I have produced a lot of that.

(2) I stopped writing fiction many times, when I was much younger, discouraged by my lack of genuis, by how hard it was to fit into my life. I don’t have time to give up anymore. I guess that would mean that I am persistent and I don’t have writer’s block.

(3) After I think about what I want to say, and do a lot of editing, my writing is clear. Clarity matters in all kinds of places: in my work as a lawyer, in my fiction, and when I leave notes for people to tell them what to do.

(4) I like words and I know a heck of a lot of them. (The other day, William’s teacher told me that children who read an hour a day acquire more than FOUR MILLION words a year. That must slow down, don’t you think? Still, who knew there were that many words to acquire?) I just wish I could get some of those words to surface on the tip of my tongue (or my fingers) at the precise moment when I most need them and not have them come to me three days later, when I’m making brownies and don’t have a pen handy.

(5) I love stories. I love reading them, I love producing them. I love writing. That is my biggest strength: love.

And what, dear reader, are your 5 (or twelve, or two) writing strengths? Also, what is it I don’t know about you? Having answered these questions, I find I am very interested in YOUR answers, knowing my own quite well already.

I am from that generation of people who listened to Bruce Springsteen really, really loud — on a record player — with the speakers precariously perched on the window sill of their dorm room so everybody else could hear the news that they were tramps like us, born to run. It was a time — the late seventies and early eighties — when he occasionally played in little clubs, like Toad’s Place in New Haven, and if you were smart, you went to hear him. (Not me, though. I stayed home and studied because, and let’s not mince words here, I was an idiot.)  I am still a big fan. I like plots in my music, and characters, and the struggle to live a decent life. And I like it that he’s not afraid to talk about politics.

But if I ever thought about his wife, it was only to wonder why he’d marry a back-up singer (actually, I also wondered why he married that other woman, the one who was a not very good television actor, but then I decided it was a youthful infatuation with the dream girl, one he seemed to get over pretty fast.) For some reason, the other day, I saw somewhere that Bruce Springsteen’s wife, Patti Scialfa (which is pronounced “SKAL fah”) has a new album out, a solo album called Play it As it Lays. I listened to some of it, and then I bought it. And I listened to it for a few more days, and then I bought the other two albums, Rumble Doll and 23rd Street Lullaby.

All three are really, really wonderful, although 23rd Street Lullaby is my current favorite, because it so intelligently and beautifully looks back on what it was like to be a young woman coming to New York City to make music. It’s A Portrait of an Artist From Jersey, written and sung by a woman who sounds a little like Rickie Lee Jones, but you know she’s not doing a lot of heroin, and the songs, which are very simple, are emotionally smart, and honest, and make you feel like she knows all about you. The three albums, listened to together, chart a woman’s life from her thirties to her fifties, a time period that’s not much written about, a time when women are supposed to quietly disappear, be the back-up woman, wear good clothes, furnish the house, and have nothing to say about sex, or love, or loss.

What’s wonderful about these albums is that it turns out that she has plenty to say about sex, love and loss: all of it really interesting and moving. There are big gaps between the three albums, because she has three children, who are teenagers now. The trajectory of her career is not so different from that of a lot of women I know, except Scialfa is a little ahead of us — about five years or so. When you have children, you might still work at the thing you love, but you also go underground some, and you might not have time to put into that passion. But it doesn’t die, that’s the good news. Because for some people, the most creative and fruitful time is just later — after your children are more independent and you have more time. We don’t hear a lot about this, but I think we should, because stories like Scialfa’s are a lifeline for women who’re younger, and think they’ve lost themselves a little — or a lot — when they choose to have a family and step off the track and maybe stop doing the thing that’s their passion, or do it a lot less. That this need not happen forever, and that you come back into that part of your life much wiser, and with the kind of devotion and energy you can only feel when you’ve had to put that stuff to one side for a while, is news we all need to hear. But it’s all too often buried under other news about women as they age, the sort of news that’s just louder than this story because it’s more destructive, and nastier — the news that women, as they age, are back-ups, invisible, somebody’s wife, not somebody. The message here for me is that I need to listen harder for what’s underneath THAT tale, the one that diminishes all of us.

I leave you with this, her explanation of her musical choices on Play it As it Lays, because I just like the way she sounds: “I think the reason I went more into the soul music genre this time around is because women have traditionally allowed more freedom of expression in rhythm and blues,” Scialfa explains. “Those were very adult records. That’s why Aretha was singing ‘You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Woman.’ That’s one reason the blues and soul music are so wonderful. Those women always had a long list of complaints and they could belt them all out in a very beautiful and powerful way. Now that I’m 53, I had to find a way to write inside my skin and have it feel timely to me, so moving more into the R&B direction felt like the right place to go.”

That’s it then, I want to be HER when I’m 53. (Although I don’t so much care about the husband, the one I have being pretty wonderful himself, and, it turns out, just right for me.)