I have this thing I do when deciding about a book. Do you do this too? Whether standing in the bookstore or the library stacks, at a rotating book rack in the airport or, even, in front of a bookshelf in the home of a friend: I open the book at random and I read.

Generally, I do this in more than one place–within the book, I mean. Reading here, reading there.

I avoid the beginning. I never (almost never) read the beginning. It’s so difficult to tell with a beginning. I’m of the opinion that almost anyone can write a good, compelling beginning–because you can be fascinating there, crazy weird. You can invent fabulous metaphors that oblige the reader to continue. And I do love that.

I once read a book’s beginning that had me nearly in tears. It wasn’t the content, believe me. The content was something along the lines of a nuclear test out in the desert–all the horrors of detonation. But the writing was pure poetry; the words cut and shaped the page. She–I concluded of the writer–could write.*

But, perhaps like the much-maligned cover (do you judge a book by it? and I will add here that many, many book covers are Simply Bad, and a good design is a wonder and incredibly helpful), a good beginning is, as I said, do-able.

The trick in writing a good book, it seems to me, is sustaining it.

So I don’t look to see whether the author starts well. And of course I don’t read the ending (that’s just mean). But I look here and there in the in-between places, and I check out the writing.

Do you do this, too?

All of this to say that I had a very interesting experience on Friday. It was, so far, anyway, a once-in-a-lifetime experience. And as first-times go, it will only happen to me This Once.

I received in my own two hands a copy of my book.

I wasn’t prepared for this, which is silly. You would think I would be, what with knowing for some time now (since July) that my novel would be published. My editor had contacted me to say the books were ready. I knew, when driving to the “office,” (which is the private home of some in this publishing company) what I was there for: to get a copy of the book.

One would think I would know what was coming.

But I arrived later than I’d planned and also felt in a hurry to get home. And these gracious people (my publishers are Incredibly Gracious People) were holding a dinner party. I stood on the edge of their living room and was graciously introduced and I was apologetic and also full of admiration for their (I could see them at a distance) stuffed grape leaves.

And then I was handed the book.

I had seen the cover before in photographs on my screen. I had also seen a photograph of the back. And as I said I do with any book–this time also chatting with the gracious couples seated a short distance away–I cracked the book open at random and began to read.

It took a second or two. A beat maybe. And this, perhaps, because these words are so familiar to me. I know them like I know (no fancy metaphor here) the back of my hand. I know them, in truth, like the back of my mind, because these words have coursed through it myriad times: in contemplative silence before a blank computer screen; in the cautious scratching of a trial run; in uncounted edits, tested for word choice, measured for rhythm.

The words return to me later when I am making the bed or loading the dishwasher: scenes or single phrases coming at me because I’ve come to know them like scripture, because I’ve rehearsed them so many times:

Yet he could calmly descend the crooked concrete steps of the Senchak’s split-level ranch, swinging his keys on their ring, clear-eyed and quiet.

The shadows had dark centers and paler edges, but a shift in the breeze made the shadows seem to exchange those dark hearts again and again, passing them back and forth to one another in untraceable, effortless action.

I stood there on the edge of my publisher’s living room, open book in hand, and suddenly I realized that these words I perused were none other than My Own, appearing for the first time not illumined by the artificial light of a computer screen, not printed awkwardly on 8×10 paper, but bound and set as book. Ivory paper, page numbers, the book title and my name secured and centered at the tops of the page.

I think I squealed just a little bit–which was accidental and embarrassing, but far better than crying, which might also have been defensible.

Moments later I was out the door, two copies of the book in hand and, in the other, four stuffed grape leaves wrapped in foil. Incredibly Gracious People.

Then yesterday, my editor sent me this news, along with the picture: Healing Maddie Brees is out the door and, shortly, will be in more hands than mine. She’s headed to places like Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly, to the Library Journal and, even, to The New York Times Review of Books. Just, you know, to see what they think.

They’ll see the cover first. Which is beautiful. And then they’ll look inside. I imagine they’ll read the first pages, but maybe they’ll do what I do and cut somewhere into the middle.

Then, with any luck, with all hope, perhaps they will read the Whole Thing.

Maybe they will love her.

I will let you know.

*Nicole Krauss, Man Walks Into a Room

The post And She’s Off! appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

We sat down together in November, my delightful editor and I. Truly, Elizabeth is delightful. Soft-spoken, encouraging, joyful, savvy, and a real Powerhouse of a Person.

Elizabeth Gets Things Done.

So I sat down with her because I needed a little help with the whole social media aspect of this book publishing thing. My edits on this novel were very nearly complete at that point, and in this day and age, (almost) no writer is exempt from lending a helping hand when it comes to marketing and selling a book.

Which is fine. And understandable. After all, next to poetry, literary fiction is the toughest sell in books. And poetry doesn’t sell very well At All. Which is a shame. And also the subject of a different post.

The problem is that I am Not Good at social media. Yes, I have degrees in literature and communication arts, but the communication arts end of that was, for me, primarily about writing. I am averse to anything that smells of self-promotion. And this is true not because I am the rare, devoutly humble creature, but because I am the opposite, and I am trying to keep that whole I-Am-The-Center-of-the-World-Thing in check.

But that, too, should probably be the subject of a different post.

Here we have Elizabeth the Powerhouse and I sitting at the table, talking about social media way back in November. I sat with pen poised over notebook, and Elizabeth sat adjacent to me, smiling, offering me tea.

Imagine my surprise when, still smiling, Elizabeth turned the fire hose on me.

The blog needed to be updated in multiple ways–and even (perhaps?) moved. I needed a separate page–an author page–on Facebook. I should start an author newsletter and look into various designs to better decide how to create mine. I needed to start a Twitter account, and Instagram, and I needed to follow the right people on both of these (here she gave me some names).

She was still smiling, encouraging, oh-so-confident in my abilities. And I still sat adjacent, blinking, soaked.

After my blog–which still feels personal, like writing a letter to friends–Facebook was my first foray into social media. Since leaving my full-time job, I have been amazed and (sometimes) not a little dismayed at the time-suck it can be. Given a free minute, I surface to realize I’ve used ten of them just scrolling through my news-feed, *liking* things. 

But it’s good, too: my husband calls it “the largest address book in the world.” Through it, I’ve become re-acquainted with long-lost friends and some distant family. It allows me to keep tabs on the doings and well-being (or not) of those far-flung and–often enough–close by. And there are times, frequent enough, when some group I’m affiliated with has a good or even hilarious conversation there. This can be a healing thing, minimizing, for a time, the enormity and overwhelming brokenness of the world.

Facebook is, in so many ways, simply great. And despite my occasional threats to erase my account, I never will. Too much of the world happens through Facebook. It has become important.

So I’ve updated the blog, as you can see. It’s just a new template, cleaner and clearer. But my lack of savvy is everywhere evident. Where is the “About Me” link? The connections to Facebook and Twitter? Where the list of popular posts or even list of posts at all? When I chose this design and worked with an intern on it last week, I thought I could see or at least could figure out what was necessary, but now I’ve spent more time on it and look. Nothing. I don’t know how to work this template, apparently, and I can’t seem to make it show me what it ought to, even if I log in as someone else.

Truth be told, there was never much of anything (was there anything?) in the “About Me” section. It’s that whole aversion-to-self-promotion thing–and of course that’s not wise. A blog is supposed to be an inviting place, a welcoming one. A place where one can engage with others over shared concerns and ideas. These things are not synonymous with self-promotion.

But my blog writing has always, always been about the writing. Sure, I wanted people to read it: one doesn’t write only for oneself. The idea of writing is communication–a word that shares a connotation with community. Fellowship is implied here. How does it go? “We read to know we are not alone.”

Still, when I sit down to write in my blog, the writing is the thing: what I’m going to try to say and how to go about it. That is my first and last concern. Always.

I have often said that my blog taught me how to write. But that posture doesn’t get people to read it.

There was a year–an academic year, 2012-13–in which I was writing full-time. I left my teaching job and, after the kids went to school every morning, it was my job to write.

The amount of time given me on any given day seemed nothing short of miracle. Having home-schooled my children before returning to full-time work, I could only imagine what it would be like to send them off to school and myself Stay At Home. What wouldn’t I accomplish?

But time is not our friend. At best, we guess at his machinations. The window of time between kid drop-off and pick-up was, it turned out, was very narrow indeed. I finished the novel by the skin of my teeth that year, and this required, moreover, a trip away from family to do so.

Now I am home-schooling once again–this time teaching a freshman in high school. And while she is largely independent, I am persistently surprised at the constraints and limits on my time. People need rides, people need dinner. The housework is that proverbially beaded and unknotted string. And home-school takes time, too. When I sit down to do anything having to do with my job as a writer, what I want is to actually write. I don’t want to learn Instagram. I don’t care to Tweet. I want someone else to figure out this blog-format-thing for me, and let me have at it with paper and pen, with clicking keyboard.

Petulant and spoiled? Obviously.

Instagram is a beautiful concept. I have come to enjoy it over the few months of my experimentation with it. And while my ratio of “followers” to “following” has me forever in the red (my daughter explains that one wants more to follow one than one wants to follow, if that makes sense), I decide not to let this bother me.

Which proves once again (exhibit 596) that I am Not Good at social media.

I do love the photographs, though. The pithy statements. For a person who loves and makes meaning in words, Instagram is a respite. I can look, admire, “like” and move on.

But I am no photographer. My phone camera is not the best one out there. My father is a truly stellar photographer; my daughter is also good. But the picture-taking thing is not my thing. I will sooner find words to describe the pale morning light on the bare branches outside my bedroom window than I will think to grab a camera.

Last week I managed to get up earlier than I have been doing, and two days in a row, sitting at the kitchen table, I saw her.

It was very cold, and both mornings she was wearing a coat with the hood up. The hood and the sleeves were fringed in fur; I could not see her face. She carried a hot-pink backpack on her back. 

Clearly she was walking to school. The elementary school is up two hills and across a street from here, a pleasant commute.  I think I heard her before I saw her that first day. She was singing loudly, belting out something or other to the otherwise empty trail and woods, the creek and birds that live behind our house. 

I watched her walk, listened to her sing. I paused with her as she stood at the split-rail fence. The fence runs for only two lengths along the creek-bed where the creek itself runs under the trail, and the girl paused there and looked over the edge. What did she see?

She proceeded. She took tiny steps, her knees locked, playing a game with the movement. Then her steps lengthened and slowed. She kicked a a leaf. She turned and looked behind her where her early-morning shadow fell along the path. Then she walked again, legs straight, marching.

I was happy for her. All too often I see people walking by with faces locked into phones. This girl was unencumbered, her mind porous to any and everything.

I saw her walking in the cold, and I remembered walks like that when I was her age but in summer, living at my grandparents’ house on eastern Long Island and returning home from the beach through the woods. I was encumbered only by my damp towel, and the woods were mine, and the birds, and the way the light fell through the green. I could sing and no one would hear me–and I did sing.

I can’t put something like that on Twitter.

Twitter confounds me. What do they give you? 140 characters? 180? I don’t know. I don’t think in characters. I think–sometimes–in fonts, but never in number of characters. I am a novelist, for crying out loud. How in heaven’s name does a novelist use Twitter?

I have a deep appreciation for economy in language, and so I bring this much–in terms of appreciation–to Twitter. Economy and efficiency in language are laudable, and they are very real constraints in my work.

But the limitations in Twitter? What is that, a haiku?

It is, nonetheless, my task. It is my *next thing.* The lovely, gracious Elizabeth, fire hose dripping in her hand, made me a promise: “If you sell a million copies, I’ll let you get off Twitter.” That’s what she said.

So I’m off to put this on Facebook, to put it on Instagram, and to tweet this post, which will be my first tweet ever.

Not that I know how. I have to figure it out first.

The post All the Social Media Things appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

On July 29, 1981, my father woke me very early, as per my request. The sky was just beginning to get light, but I got up right away. I spent all morning–and, no doubt, some of the afternoon–perched on an ottoman in front of the television.

For years afterward, my dreams of my one-day wedding were informed by that of Charles and Diana: enormous gown with enormous sleeves, enormous bouquet, horse-drawn carriage. And I certainly would have considered a royal prince–had one offered himself.

The actual event–my own wedding in June of 1990–was different. This probably doesn’t surprise you. These were the days before Pinterest, making a Pinterested wedding no more available than a prince. For that reason–among others–my wedding had its share of design flaws.

But the royal marriage that began in 1981 only lasted fifteen years, and mine is going strong at 25+. So, there’s that.

Meanwhile down the years, I’ve had other visions of might-be’s, publishing my book among them. But truth be told, it wasn’t so much the publishing as it was the finishing that held my thoughts. The idea of actually–finally–completing the writing on this project that was, in itself, the realization of a vision. The ideas in my head on the paper.

It’s way harder than it sounds. Way, way.

I’ve talked recently about this elsewhere–but it’s still so strongly with me, because it was years and years of writing and thinking. I have what feels like reams of aborted efforts, and diagrams (in their way) sketching out the scope of my project. I have several copies of charts listing chapters and their events; I have hand-written outlines in various ink-colors meant to help me think through the conundrum that the novel presented. And I have torn half-sheets of paper and pages in my journal and cryptic abbreviations in the margins of church bulletins where I was, in effect, trying to figure out how it would go.

It’s funny to come across these things now, to recall the dual burdens of my ignorance and effort.

It was so hard to write. So hard.

And now it’s finished.

What has happened since then has been the largely unanticipated realization of publishing a book. I mean, I thought about it some, for sure. I’ve always known how the dedication would go–that isolated little phrase just before the table of contents (if one’s book has a table of contents, which mine does not). And I’ve known that the author bio wouldn’t be a big deal.

But the cover–design and font, even title and wording. These were things I hadn’t considered. These were not my job.

I had given some thought to the text font on the inside–the shapes of the words that I had so carefully knitted together. And I had imagined holding the finished book in my hands and setting it alongside the gathered pile of papers, church bulletins and all: the ball of yarn and rags that made up the whole.

Now that’s finished, too. And while I haven’t yet held the actual book in my hands, I have been sent an electronic copy of the first several pages in their book-styled form. And I have been given the cover. Front and back.

It’s funny how hope realized doesn’t necessarily change us. I had dreamed so long of my wedding day, but at it’s realization, my wedding was different from what I had imagined, and on top of that I wasn’t feeling well.

It wasn’t the day that changed me. But the marriage has.

And the design of the book–its layout, its cover, its essential framing details–hasn’t changed me, either. But the writing most certainly did.

It’s likely that reaction to the book upon its release, whether large or small, will change me yet again.

But for now (and here’s this metaphor again), like a mother who has just given birth, I can rest for awhile and gaze and gaze at the new little something in my arms.

Isn’t she beautiful?

The post Hope and Vision appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

The man in his house said that most of the trees were ten dollars, but the blue spruce was going to cost us a little more. I waited with bated breath for what couldn’t have been more than two seconds to find out where my expensive taste was taking us: we didn’t have an abundance of money, certainly not so much to squander on preference in Christmas trees.

The blue spruce was twelve dollars and beautiful, and it lit up the front window of our living room.

November 1992: Newlywed and apparently unfettered by guilt to enjoy the holiday with family, we decided with friends to spend Thanksgiving in Maine. Moreover, we would fly there–but the cheaper tickets had us arriving late Wednesday night. In the remote seaside town where we were staying, would grocery stores be open for necessary supplies?

We lined our suitcases with cans of pumpkin and jellied cranberry sauce. Our frozen turkey breast lay packed between sweaters. A perfect plan.

Except that someone at the baggage carousel in Portland had an identical suitcase– a fact we almost noticed too late. We had to go in pursuit (“Excuse me, sir. I believe you have our suitcase”) to reclaim it, and we laughed at (later) how surprised he would have been to find a turkey in what was clearly the Wrong Luggage.

How do we remember our holidays? My friend has a Christmas book with a four-page spread for every year. Here she records where they were and whom they were with, what they ate, gave, played, received. 

My holiday memories sift through my brain in varied order and at various times, triggered by who knows what? There is, for instance, that very early Christmas, when my baby sister was still a baby. My older sister and I awoke early, of course. Were we three and four? In the gray suffusion of earliest light, weighted by resistible guilt, we made our way to our grandparents’ living room. 

We were greeted by a monstrous eye, lidless, pupil- and iris-free, staring at us from next to the Christmas tree.

In terror, we scurried back to our beds and waited for more light and grown-ups, certain we had received our punishment. It was later, in the fullness of morning and a well-lit living-room, that we discovered the monster was an aluminum sledding saucer, intended only for joy.

December 1980: My Nana came to us in Pittsburgh from Florida and could never seem to get warm. We have photos of her bundled to her neck in the La-Z-Boy, the cat all in a heap on her lap.

Time plays her tricks. While we’re living them, the days feel so much like themselves. See? The dishwasher needs to be loaded again. Now emptied. Once again we’re setting the table. We’re staying up too late and forgetting to go to bed early, but otherwise things are normal enough. Until we’re looking back at them. That was when….

Thanksgiving 1995: They brought the turkey breast to us, once again frozen in the suitcase, because turkey was out of our price range in Switzerland. Our Swiss friends and neighbors thought it strange to have a holiday on a Thursday, but they were happy to withstand the Thanksgiving smells that wafted through the house. That was the year we learned that you really shouldn’t cook potatoes too far in advance–unless you’re going to mash them right away.

Thanksgiving 2011: We put the turkey in its brine in a cooler on my parents’ deck. It would be very cold out there; the turkey would be fine.

I’m not sure the raccoon agreed. He was interested in it at first–interested enough to get it out of the cooler, anyway, and drag it across the deck, and tear it (somewhat) to shreds with his little claws. But he left a sizable portion of the carcass near the steps.

We had to buy another turkey.

Over the years, my children were sometimes confused about *when*, exactly, the holiday was. “Thanksgiving is always on Thursday, but Christmas varies.” So every Thursday marks some weeks’ exact distance from that special feast, but Christmas Day skates over all the weekdays near the end of December. Any given Monday-Wednesday-Saturday marks an exact weeks’ interval from a Christmas Day, but who bothers to remember which?

That was when…

Christmas 1985: We lay on the Sanibel Island beach the day after Christmas, and a seagull pooped on my sister’s leg.

Christmas 1988: I knew I loved the man who would be my husband.

Christmas 2015: My sister and her family arrived Christmas Eve, but one of their suitcases (which held their gifts) didn’t. Of necessity, they took themselves to the Walgreen’s at midnight, there to wait in an hour’s-long line with the true last-minute shoppers to buy presents for their four-year-old boy.

The modest haul they returned with was Truly Impressive, and Theo never knew the difference on Christmas morning. Their suitcase arrived unmolested in the hands of a gracious airline worker at 3 o’clock that afternoon.

That was the year I had a new respect for Walgreens, new compassion for last-minute shoppers, and renewed appreciation for American Airlines.

They come in the standard sets of twenty-four hours, but are marked with special demands: guests, travel, celebrations. Accordingly, they take their toll. We settle into them eagerly enough, and then toward the end feel it might be nice to get up and stretch our legs. We recall the pleasures of routine. We remember that Everyday doesn’t really look like this. 

And then they are over.

Christmas 2015: The day after they left, I found my sister’s tennis shoes in the line-up by the front door. Bill discovered a baking sheet in the oven, a remnant from the Cuban sandwiches Christopher had made for us of leftover pork and ham. And on the floor of my bedroom, our copy of The Borrowers, which Emily had been reading to Theo while they were here. Their place is still marked with a torn-off corner of paper.

New Year’s Eve 2015-16: We watched the ball drop in our living room, surrounded by our kids and a small host of their friends. We toasted one another with champagne artificial and otherwise and with very loud music and dancing. And I tried to peer ahead at the empty grid of days, to see what they might look like.

But someone very wise once said it: “You can’t really see the days. I mean, look at the days with your eyes.” You can only be in them, whether or not you know how. Whether or not your mashed potatoes are lumpy beyond all rescue, whether or not the turkey is dragged across the deck. Whether or not, when you’ve put all the decorations away, you would like to take the days out again, like so many ornaments, and get a good look at them once more.

The post Holidays appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

The field guides were kept in the dining room. Not obtrusively on the kitchen table or counter, but just around the corner, accessible to a quick eye and step.

I can’t say I was raised with them, not exactly. Not any more, anyway, than I was raised with frequent dictionary consultations, which came at home year-round, during dinner and other times. The field guides were a summertime thing, a July thing, a component of that month-every-summer with my grandparents on eastern Long Island. As much a part of summertime life as the pineapple wallpaper in the bedroom.

Mostly, I think, it was the bird and wildflower guides we used, evidence of which is here and there in marker on the pages: my initials, my cousin’s, a sister’s, followed by the date. Apparently Meghan and I both discovered a Lady Slipper on 6/13/76; Meghan alone found the Trailing Arbutus on the same day. Our cousin Nathaniel found Chicory on 9/9/78. His initials appear with the date on page 75, written in ballpoint in my grandmother’s fluent script. And on page 38, where my initials (no date) also appear, my grandmother has noted (9/20/78) the Knotweed, underscoring “Smartweed” in the paragraph description, and adding the words “long bristled” in the margin.With my initials in yellow, I laid claim to discovering Crowned Vetch (p. 59); but I recorded no date, and I wonder if that was a nod at honesty, as that vining weed covered the entirety of my neighbor’s backyard hill in Pittsburgh.

My grandparents knew the names of birds and trees, of wildflowers and mollusks. Such knowledge–and an interest in it–was an extension of who they were. As important as knowing words (and their definitions); as knowing how to use “lay” and “lie” correctly. As knowing all the books of the Bible– in order, of course. It wasn’t that they ever lectured on the value of knowing; they just knew. And if they didn’t, they looked it up.

Hence the field guides on the bookcase in the dining room.

I have inherited these field guides, and Birds: a Guide to the Most Familiar American Birds often lives on (rather than in) our home school cabinet in the breakfast room.  (On December 29, 1960, my grandfather spotted a Bobwhite; on the seventh of that same month, my grandmother saw a Yellow-Shafted Flicker.) This recent winter, Emma and I worked at keeping our window bird feeder filled, hoping that we’d learn something (someone?) new. But mostly it was the regulars: cardinal, chickadee, tufted titmouse, bluejay. Birds my children already know because I taught them, because my grandparents (and parents) taught me.

What is the value in knowing these names? There are few people we are likely to impress. But there is yet something satisfying in it. Something of Adam, maybe, or Aristotle: to name is to know? To love?

When my sons were very young, I called out names of vehicles in answer to their questions (even now, sitting alone and idle at a traffic light, I have to suppress an instinct to share recognition with an otherwise empty car: “Excavator!” “Cherry-picker!”). And regardless of whether they were interested, all three of my children throughout their childhoods were regularly notified of remarkable vegetation we passed: Forsythia! Pyracantha! Wisteria, its purple blossoms festooning the roadside and trees with “grapes.”

But why do I want to know? Why do I want my children to know? With all that is necessary in life, all that is going on both here and abroad, what is the value in alleviating this (small and insignificant) ignorance? They–the world–can get along quite nicely, thank you, amid unknown flora and fauna.

So many people live in cities, in high-rises, surrounded by concrete and macadam. Squirrel. Pigeon…. Pigeon.

Nonetheless, the interest grows. In these recent weeks, the effort to name has taken on new dimension for me. This year, watching the greening of the spring world, I have been attending anew to the trees. While throughout the winter their identity, distinguishable (somewhat?) by dun trunk and branch, seems (to me) unknowable and even irrelevant, their leaves’ emergence exposes them for what they are. Lately I am trying to name them–and the color of their green.

 “Green,” a word that covers but can’t epitomize what I’m seeing. Because the color of the newborn locust leaves is not the same as the crabapple. And the Bradford pears have been, by comparison, a dark green for the better part of the month. Meanwhile, the pendant seeds of the pin oak make that tree’s leaves look almost white. The leaves of the backyard maple are fair. And the distant tulip tree, whose uppermost branches I watch all summer from my kitchen sink window, might be that Crayola spring green I’ve known since I was six.

I find myself reaching for more names. Is there a field guide for green? Celadon, chartreuse, the silver tint of sage. The rich depth of emerald, the blue-bordered jade, the pale and honest shock of peridot. It’s a new and not entirely safe enterprise, this effort to claim names for tree and leaf color together as I’m driving down the road. I think I’ve got it: lime! loden! in what I know is birch; but by the time I name it, the tree and its color are gone, replaced by maple, by white oak, by pin oak, by … oak. All of them turning green.

I imagine I can do a better job staring out my bedroom window. I–and the trees–are standing still now, but it’s nonetheless difficult to bring them into focus. The trees appear in layers, this one and that one closer to or further from the house, strata of leaves in stages of emergence, layers playing tricks on my eyes.

What is it with naming anyway? To identify, to classify, to pin it down in construct of consonant and vowel. The leaves and their color come on without me, they will emerge and expand, and it will matter little or not at all that this afternoon at 3:46 that leaf was the shade of an avocado. The inside of an avocado, to be specific. Guacamole green.

The morning light is coming through the kitchen window above the sink. It catches and hangs on the leaves of the forsythia branch I brought in some weeks ago. The golden yellow blossoms have dropped away, but there is the green of the serrated leaves, all lit up with the sun. This illumination catches my eye and I hang there for a moment, studying blade and vein, the faint polygonal structure of its surface. Words rise and cluster in my brain: photosynthesis, chlorophyll, chloroplast.

And then, just beyond the window sill, the wind hits and the newborn leaves answer. The sun strikes them. They are diaphanous, incandescent, a shifting, glowing mass of light-bearing green. All words leave me, save some chorused by an organ, sung by the congregation-choir of my grandparents’ church there on the eastern end of Long Island, so many summers, every summer of my life.

Let all things their Creator bless
And worship Him in humbleness
O, praise Him
Alleluia!

There is something to naming that opens the eyes. That’s what it is. It’s when we know it that we see it–and not the other way round. Was this what my grandparents knew? Teaching me–so early–to open my eyes. Helping me to see things seen and unseen. To love. And then, so naturally, to praise.

Praise, praise the Father, praise the Son
And praise the Spirit–Three in One!
Oh praise Him!
Alleluia!

Oh, praise Him!

The post The Color Green appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

And there is a small corner of my heart that wants to hit “pause,” or even “re-wind,” to have back just a handful of the days that were his childhood, their childhoods, because the pennies run out too soon.

But somehow I found this little gem tonight, searching for something else in the annals of my blog. For some reason I never “published” this post, but it was a gift for me to read just now: a snapshot of twenty-four hours or so, recorded back in February of 2006. In those days, I was a part-time grad student and a homeschooling mother, a regular member of our church orchestra and also of the 66 Dogs Book Club. 

And my children were ten, eight, and ever-so-nearly six. 

I’m not bragging or complaining, so don’t ask me. But I will just tell you that I left my house yesterday afternoon (five children in tow, two of those being guests) just before four o’clock. I arrived at the church building a little after four, just in time to help create a video that will be used in the church service this Sunday.

After this, I ushered my sons to choir practice and my daughter to childcare, and saw our guests off with their mother. Then I went into the room where the orchestra was rehearsing, only to discover that my A string was badly in need of a tuning, and of course rehearsal had already begun.

I tuned it, and it was all fine. Fine, anyway, for someone who plays as badly as I do and who sight-reads as miserably as I do and who forgets from time to time, even at important times, to Count.

Bill arrived just around the time rehearsal was over, which was none to soon. We traded cars, he took the children, and I ate my peanut-butter and raisin sandwich and carrots and drank my milk as I drove my stick-shift over winding roads on my way to Duke.

I made it with ten minutes to spare, and for the next two hours and forty-five minutes was lost in the world of Thomas Mann and the decadence of European bourgeois society in the late 19th century. Delicious.

After this, I went directly to Beth’s house for a long overdue visit. We chatted quietly for over an hour until my cell phone rang and it was Bill, informing me that I had forgotten to tell him I had plans after class and, moreover, had left the phone off the hook for about six hours. He had just discovered the miscreant phone and so was finally free to try to find me.

I went home.

At which time I wrote out my paper proposal and e-mailed it to my professor, then proceeded to fold laundry, clean up the kitchen, and generally tend to messes that had accumulated while I had been trying, madly, to finish reading Buddenbrooks. I went to bed a little after one.

All of that to say that my children woke me with their laughter this morning. And when school was over (a delightful few hours during which we became acquainted with the early part of the Middle Ages, learned a little more about carnivorous plants, tried to get a firm hold on object pronouns, and worked on various forms of arithmetic) and I finally had time for a shower (yes), I looked about me and saw More Messes.

And this mattered because all 66 dogs of the Sixty-Six Dogs Book Club are coming to my house tomorrow morning.

But I heard my children laughing again, and this time they were laughing outside in the cold, clear winter light.

So I went outside, too.

We played freeze tag, which is tricky with only four people of varying speeds.

Then we played “house,” and Emma Grace was the mother, her brothers were her somewhat disinterested sons, and I was her devoted sixteen-year-old daughter, which I think satisfied the noticeable height discrepancy. I helped my mother make lizard soup, which we ate with zest (yum!), and then she tucked us in to sleep on the platform of the backyard play structure.

After this we turned to “army,” a game that is only vaguely organized. For the most part, I followed the directions of my commander, who was Everett. Both of the boys were wearing their fatigues today, and each of them had a plastic weapon of one kind or another. My gun was actually a plastic violin, the neck of which, when pulled out, becomes an electric guitar. With the help of a battery it plays Beethoven or the Jackson 5, depending, but I didn’t make use of that function today. Instead, I ran around the backyard and pointed it at imaginary foes and made firing noises with my mouth, something girls are not genetically disposed to do.

We were in a fort, we were in a helicopter, we were behind enemy lines. At one point we ambushed the enemy and took over their headquarters. All the while, Emma Grace was a superhero who needed no weapon, and possessed the Highly Useful ability to heal injured persons without even touching them. This was good, because I was shot several times.

This late afternoon Everett had a karate class, after which we wolfed a quick supper and then headed off to Bible Study. I am about two-thirds of the way ready for our book club meeting tomorrow morning (well, I haven’t read the book), but I know my friends won’t mind if the vacuuming isn’t done.

Because instead of vacuuming this afternoon, I ran with my children in the backyard. And I watched, as I crouched in our fort, the marvelous way the sun reflects off the pine needles and how– so lovely– it has the same effect in my daughter’s golden hair.

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Now burn, new born to the world,
Double-natured name,
The heaven-flung, heart-fleshed, maiden-furled,
Miracle-in-Mary-of-flame,
Mid-numbered he in three of the thunder-throne!
Not a dooms-day dazzle in his coming nor dark as he came;
Kind, but royally reclaiming his own;
A released shower, let flash to the shire, not a lightning of fire hard-hurled.

-Gerard Manley Hopkins, excerpt from “The Wreck of the Deutschland”

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I love going to the movies. Despite all that Netflix and Amazon have to offer, there is something so simply great about going to the cinema and sitting there in the dark, releasing yourself to the larger-than-life narrative unfolding on the screen.

I love it.

One of the best classes I took in college was called “The Art of Film,” or something like that. As you might imagine, the class was wildly popular– not only because it filled a requirement for the many with communication arts minors, but because it was about the movies. Who doesn’t want to spend a semester studying film? It was a departure– as going to the movies always ought to be– from the everyday.

People took the class, I think, because they thought it would be an easy “A.”

It wasn’t. Our professor (my all-time favorite at Grove City College, a Dr. Bill Donnelly) took the art of film seriously, and by the time the semester ended, we had been introduced to more than we had bargained for in the form of mis en scene and camera movement, continuity errors and film scores. In short, we covered the gamut of what makes a movie work– including the role of the best boy, a fact I have let drop from my mind.

Our final exam showed us what Dr. Donnelly had told us all along: that he meant business. We watched a six-minute clip of Jaws and then had to give it a full-scale analysis, covering every aspect of filmmaking that we had learned in the class. It was the kind of exam that made your hand ache from all the writing (no, we didn’t have laptops back then), and I Loved It.

I clearly remember one lesson he taught us that has shaped my reception of many films since: the good professor spoke out strongly against the use of voice-over.

Voice-over. You know what I (he) mean(t), right? It’s that bit of recorded narration that plays over some shots of a film, the disembodied voice that doesn’t come from the scene itself but somehow speaks to it. It’s what ruined (for me) the end of Saving Private Ryan and (sorry, but it’s true) Shawshank Redemption. Call me a purist, but I agree with Bill Donnelly: a film is a film. It’s a visual art. If you can’t say it with the images themselves, then use a little dialogue. But a voice out of nowhere that tells you what to think? that tidily summarizes the emotional weight that should otherwise be expressed in cinematic brilliance? That’s plain lazy.

And also a little bit sad. If you love an art form enough to make art in that form, then marry yourself to its constraints. Appreciate the beauties of its subtleties. Make it work.

End of soap box, part the first.

Long Before I loved the movies, I loved books. I was read to before I knew how to turn pages; Narnia and Laura Ingalls’ prairie were well-traveled territory in my child mind. For me, a good book was a world unto itself, a place to enter and re-enter unfettered. I must have read “The Borrowers” series five or six times by middle school. In the eighth grade, Anne (of those Green Gables) was my unrivaled best friend.

This quiet passion served me well in honors English classes in high school. I fell in love with Knowles’ A Separate Peace and Golding’s Lord of the Flies. In senior English it was Thomas Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge and Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights that undid me. And when, in college, I discovered that I could read books for a Major?! Well. Mind On Fire.

And now I am a writer. I am at work, in fact, on second edits, making my painstaking way from paragraph to paragraph in a novel draft I know like my childhood home. And I am doing my very best to marry myself to the constraints of this literary form, trying (so hard) to bring to life the beauty of its subtleties.  

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Not an easy task.

But Annie Dillard encourages me. She speaks truths I need to hear: “Writing is writing, literature is mere,” she says. “It appeals only to the subtlest senses– the imagination’s vision, and the imagination’s hearing– and the moral sense, and the intellect.” It is, in short, a quiet thing; it is not for everyone. Not everyone has to love it.

What, then, of books made into movies? Written with the big screen in mind? I think here of The Help— a novel highly acclaimed but nothing like literature. It read, to me, like a chronicle of scenes in a movie. It was practically a story-board. Had I known better, I would have by-passed the book altogether and waited for the movie to come out. Which (surprise, surprise) it did. And Annie might have said, “Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor…. Such books seem uneasy being books; they seem eager to fling off their disguises and jump onto screens.”

If one is going to write a book, one should write a book. If one is going to write a screenplay, one should write a screenplay. Again with the whole “make art in the form one is making it” thing.

End of soap box, part the second.

That said, sometimes it works. I was not one, for example, who was dismayed by the cinematic version of The Lord of the Rings. And when, back in the 80’s, Megan Follows was cast as the winsome Anne, I embraced her wholeheartedly– in both cases recognizing the genres of novel and film as distinct and not minding in the least their “marriage” in these (and other) instances.

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So maybe that was why I was thrilled to hear that Baz Luhrmann was directing The Great Gatsby. Luhrmann’s 1997 Romeo+Juliet is one of my Favorite Films of All Time. I made all my students watch it: its modern-day setting and textual analysis are profoundly brilliant– and this has nothing to do whatsoever with the fact that Leo DiCaprio, prior to his Titanic fame, so compellingly plays the romantic hero.

I couldn’t wait to see it. How would Luhrmann confront Fitzgerald’s green light? and how would he work into it an interpretation of the American dream drowned in money? The Capulet’s bawdy ball presaged perfectly  the overblown decadence of a party at the Jay Gatsby estate. In my mind I could hear the throb of the music, the flashing lights, the inflated pleasure that is misery in disguise.

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What in the world would Luhrmann do with it?

I strapped myself in, ready for anything. And anything would be better than the 1974 adaptation (although I will give you now and always that Robert Redford was the quintessential Jay), in which a final act of thoughtless violence played like something out of a sorry cartoon. Yes, Luhrmann was the man for the job. He could have this work of literary genius and do with it what he would.

He did not disappoint. Well, okay. I would definitely say that his Daisy was a bit more sad that I imagined her to be. I wanted her to be more jaded and sardonic. And Gatsby seemed just a touch more insane. The setting itself was something out of a fairy tale: everything made of candy. But should I have been surprised? This is Baz Lurhmann, director of Moulin Rouge, the guy next to the camera who is winking cock-eyed at you all the time: “We all know this is the movies, right?” NPR’s Bob Mandello described it as “the great American novel as fever dream,” and so it is: the film is a dream of Gatsby; it is Nick Carraway’s newly sober recollection of drunken decadence. The Buchanan’s living room and Daisy and Jordan “ballooning slowly to the floor,” Gatsby’s bedroom and the pile of shirts, Carraway’s living room overburdened with Daisy’s flowers– all of it overdrawn and inflated, serving forever after to faithfully goad Nick’s memory, to make him write the book.

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Ah! Write the book! This was Luhrmann’s narrative device: Nick Carraway awakening to grief, finding solace only through the typewriter’s keys, the pen on the page. From time to time, Luhrmann had Scott Fitzgerald’s text appear on the screen as a character spoke it, lines memorable because of their perfect brilliance. The screen snowed with letters falling from the cloud of words. It wasn’t enough to equip his actors with lines lifted precisely from the text. No. Such is the literary skill of this American genius that merely quoting him isn’t enough. One must needs see the words, must watch them emerge into indellibility because here is a book you can’t get away from any more than Nick can get away from what he has just witnessed, or Daisy and Tom can get away from their “vast carelessness.”

In fact, Luhrmann’s film is rife with voice over– a terrible crime– and need this director commit it? But here, in this instance, one can’t think how he’d avoid it. At the end of the day, Luhrmann proved to me something I have always secretly (and not so) harbored as true: that the book is (or should be) better than the movie. If the book is well written enough– and oh, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsy most certainly is– then the book is, in fact, the only thing you need.

So, if you haven’t seen the movie, by all means see it. DiCaprio plays his part with exquisite modulation, and Tobey Maguire’s incredulity will mirror your own.

But more than that– if nothing else– forego the movie altogether and simply Read The Book. That way, you can take your time, and watch the movie playing in your head, and read again and again lines like these: He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night. — F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby




Why would anyone read a book instead of watching big people move on a screen? Because a book can be literature. It is a subtle thing– a poor thing, but our own. In my view, the more literary the book– the more purely verbal, crafted sentence by sentence, the more imaginative, reasoned and deep– the more likely people are to read it. — Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

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