Deirdre on reading, writing and living

I'm happy to say that my manuscript Drunk Dreams: A Memoir was chosen to be one of ten finalists for the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference's Manuscript Contest. The conference is in July from the 24-26th. The winning book will receive $3000 and a publishing contract. I'm thrilled to be one of the finalists and will keep you all posted on the result.

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Current Location: Catskills
Current Mood: happy
Current Music: silence

When Robert Owen spoke about equality people responded. Some attacked his ideas, wishing that he had stayed a paternal factory manager duplicating his role at the textile mill in New Lanark, Scotland. There he transformed a typical early 1800's factory into a showcase of benevolence. He shortened the hours for plant workers. He improved the housing and living conditions. He even built a school for infants, the forerunner to kindergartens that are now considered essential to early development. Others responded to his new theory, a total reorganization of society based on equality that culminated in the Utopian commune of New Harmony, Indiana, by moving thousands of miles to be part of it.

In the 1820’s Owenite societies were springing up all over Britain and the United States. Most of them failed in a few years. The failures were due to poor planning, hardships suffered while trying to build communities from scratch, undelivered promises of equality, and competition with capitalist enterprises.

Kolmerten concentrates her research on the promise of equality between the sexes and has uncovered a remarkably rich history of the "woman problem" common to all of the intentional communities of the era. Despite soring rhetoric, the thinking about women's liberation was mired in contemporary understanding of female roles. Woman were promised that they would get equal education and be taught a useful skill, however they were expected to also keep the house, cook the food, be pleasing, and do all of the other domestic drudgery that tied them to the house to begin with. It was the typical "second shift" still expected of working woman today.

The contribution of Kolmerten's extensive research, through, no doubt, many giant piles of letters written by women who participated in the Utopian communes, is that the disgruntled feelings of these woman were part of the societies' failure. Some woman came willingly to try the new life, others as appendages of their husbands. Woman of all classes whose experiences were very different, from having servants to being too poor for such luxuries, were now expected to do laundry, cook, clean, and take on another task as well. Some even were denied the right to vote on their own conditions.

Because women seldom wrote their own histories, letters are all that's left of their lives and struggles. Kolmerten has distilled the sentiments of personal letters into a important new analysis of what contributed to the failure of the Utopian Socialists.

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Current Location: Bronxville
Current Mood: hopeful
Current Music: Silence

I look a little like linebacker with shading under my eye to prevent glare.



It's five days after my tumble off the bike. I'm still sore. My knee, elbow, and right arm still give me sharp reminders of my folly.

But, high on my thigh, hugging my short's seam, I've developed one of the more beautiful marks I've ever had:



Don't ask me what I hit, but whatever it was, it loved me.

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Current Location: Catskills
Current Mood: calm
Current Music: silence

Okay today was not such a great bike experience as Monday. I didn't even make it to the main road. I had just stopped to let the neighbor's dog sniff me so that he knew I was me and not some deer he had to chase. I began to glide down the damp road that our house sits on. I wanted to go slowly, but I simultaneously squeezed the brakes and stood up to ease my way over a bump. I pressed on the front brake harder than I should have and went right over the top of the bike.

Because my feet were still strapped to the pedals The back of the bike came off the ground and the whole thing flipped over on top of me.

I have a case of bike face:



Not too severe, but I bet that scrape on my cheekbone's gonna get colorful.

Small patches of skin on my elbows, knees, thighs, and one shoulder got scraped off as well.

So Monday I was grateful to be able to ride after 686 days off the bike, today I'm... thankful I didn't get really hurt? Resentful? Feeling a little unbalanced?

I don't know, but I'll get back on in a few days and hope that I have nothing this exciting to write about.

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Current Location: Catskills
Current Mood: sore
Current Music: silence

Forgive me oh bicycle god, most merciful, for I have sinned. It's been 686 days since my last communion with you.

On June 18, 2007, before the fog burned off hills, I was up and riding down one of the main roads that leads out of town, legs pumping, looking forward to the hill that pops out of the landscape five miles from my summer house. The ride was a sweet one, I made it to the 3.8 mile marker in the next county. The total mileage that day was 13.6. Very good for my morning ride.

The road crosses a small stream that never looked particularly impressive. But two days later a flash flood overflowed the stream bed, carrying with it mud and rocks, trees and garbage. The wall of debris-filled water ripped apart houses, rolled a trailer, tore up large sections of asphalt and flipped them like pancakes. It grabbed cars and trucks sweeping everything down the incline and into the Beaverkill. Four people died.

My house was unharmed, but the hamlet was devastated by grief at losing members of the community and shock at a fourth flood in three years.

I said to Charles, "You never know when it's the last time you get to do something." A few days later, as I was trying to figure out where to ride in the mornings, I hit upon riding to the next town over to pick up the newspaper at their grocery store. It was a ride that provided rolling hills and two challenging inclines. Not only that, if I veered off and took a slight detour, I got to roll over a wooden covered bridge. The solution couldn't have been more delightful. That morning, as I swept by the Willowemoc Creek, where it passes under a towering overpass that holds up the four-lane divided highway, I remembered to be grateful for the privilege of being able to ride.

The summer continued and I continued to ride. My last day on the bike was July 26, 2007.

In late 2008 I was diagnosed with Lichen sclerosus. Okay, it's embarrassing, it's gross, it's painful, and it's inconvenient to say the least. Bike riding was out or so I believed. My OBGYN and I worked on finding a solution. Well, he did most of the work. I just got profoundly depressed. Forget about the bike, we're talking about problems with sex and how to match my desires with my newly-discovered inabilities.

The summer passed with me barely even walking for the paper in the mornings. Those who follow this blog will know that my mother fell in July of 2008 and died in January of 2009. It's enough to say that it was a difficult summer for me and bike riding wasn't even on the agenda.

During the winter, as I contemplated this summer and wondered how I could get moving again, I hit upon the idea that I could buy a hornless bike seat and maybe, just maybe get back in the saddle and start pumping my legs again. I bought the "Spongy Wonder" and had it installed on the bike. And the beautiful son-of-a-gun worked.

My legs aren't as strong as they were 686 days ago, but I felt the old joy of moving on my own power and pumping my legs in rhythm with my beating heart. Will my knees hold out? Can I get used to the difference between a traditional seat the the Spongy Wonder? Will I be able to stay on the bike when giant trucks rush up behind me and try to suck me into their vortex? I don't know. All I know is that today I got to ride the bike again and it made me happy.

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Current Location: Catskills
Current Mood: cheerful
Current Music: silence

When the calls came, they were always there for one another. It didn't matter that one lived in the old neighborhood in Haiti and one moved all the way to New York City. They were brothers and when one was in trouble, the other one moved miles and mountains to help.

Danticat's superb memoir about her entire clan, focusing particularly on her father and his brother, puts them in their element for readers to meet. Their lives are built in the shadow of invasions and dictators. Small decisions have huge consequences.

Both men had a hand in raising Danticat and her brother. Scenes in the poor Bel Air neighborhood of Port au Prince (the capital of Haiti) begin when the author is a little girl. She and her parents live in a tiny house and dream of making a good and decent life. Soon squads of paramilitary men called the Tonton Macoutes, enforcers of Papa Doc Duvalier's rule, begin throwing their weight around. Danticat's father, tired of living under their gaze, overstays his tourist visa to the US. When his wife follows him, Danticat and her first brother stay with their uncle. It will be years before the family is able to live together again.

Larger historical events push the people of Bel Air to the breaking point and Danticat's family is threatened, just like everyone else there.

The book is beautifully written and can help readers unfamiliar with Haiti's tumultuous history catch up by focusing on the families trials and traumas. While the situation may be off the front pages, misery and resistance are is still thriving. It's well worth spending some time learning about Haiti and the people who struggle and live and die, both there and right here in the US.

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Current Location: Catskills
Current Mood: busy
Current Music: silence

Roger Sinnott was one of my uncles. He was my father's half brother. Roger could have stepped off the TV screen from an episode of Madmen. He was a very smart professional, a two-fisted drinker, and a sparkling wit at parties. Recently a Utica businessman told me that Roger and the Bank of Utica (where he was the president) were responsible for the support and survival of many local enterprises.

I had a passel of uncles. They are all gone now. There was Karl, my mother's brother-in-law. Karl was a big friendly guy who seemed to me to patient and supportive of my Aunt Lillian. Seeing him was a rare pleasure. Uncle Leonard was married to Lucy. He was interested in photography. I'm not really certain where Lucy fits in. I suspect she was related to my grandmother, Helene Doyle.

Uncle Bob ran a leather and luggage store in downtown Utica. He had silky white hair and always seemed happy to see us. His wife, a sister of Roger's, was a delight to be around. Uncle Bill, married to my father's sister Jane, was a mysterious man. He was rail thin, always on death's door, and had no visible means of support besides my aunt. My mother claimed that he'd had every disease in the book except leprosy. But Bill liked his wiskey and that's one of the most notable things about him. He was always a little stewed.

Now I have no Aunts or Uncles left. That layer of the family is completely gone and I feel like I've lost a huge cache of living memory. Last May it was Jane who died, this January my mother, and now Roger.

Roger lived to be 95. He had it his way for many years. He died at home, and that's the way he wanted it. Roger Sinnott, Presente!

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Current Location: NYC
Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: Beethoven

John Henry was a steel-drivin' man strong enough to break up a mountain so that the trains can come through. He beat a steam-powered hammer in a contest and then dropped dead with his hammer in his hand, or so the legend goes. Colson Whitehead (The Intuitionist and Apex Hides the Hurt) creates a strange and familiar world in the three books I've read. In John Henry Days the main character is an African-American journalist who goes from PR event to PR event freelancing and freeloading. He laughs and chats with his fellow "junketeers" at a weekend devoted to celebrating the legend of John Henry at the Big Bend Tunnel in Talcott, West Virginia.

A near death experience shakes his ambition to break the record set by a previous junketeer to go to an organized and paid for PR event every day for six months. So far J. Sutter's been going for three months solid about half way to Bobby Figgis's record.

Hundreds of people converge on John Henry Days and readers get to sit inside many of their heads. The main event is the unveiling of a stamp featuring folk heroes including the steel-drivin' man. Postal employees, town muckety-mucks, the daughter of a researcher who owned the biggest collection of John Henry paraphernalia, PR men, writers, townspeople, and stamp collectors all get their chance.

Whitehead loves language and it slides beautifully onto the pages of his quirky novels. John Henry Days won't help you decide if the man was a myth or a fleshy human, but it will absorb you and leave you with a sense of wonder.

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Current Location: New York City
Current Mood: exhausted
Current Music: silence

It's official! I can now make water, do my business, and so forth, and feel that it's safely going to go somewhere. The new septic tank is in.

New photos are here.

It works like a charm.

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It turns out that treasure comes in many forms. If you're in a desert the treasure is water. If you're in the water, the treasure could be a life raft. For me the treasure was the rusted septic tank.

As a city dweller I hardly give much thought to sewage. Too bad, because I'm sure its journey is actually fascinating. In the Catskills however, it's been on my mind since winter. Without going too far into the poo problem, I'll just say things weren't working as they should. But today we began phase one of fixing the problem.

There are photos here.

Tomorrow the new, sparkling-clean, tank will be put into the ground and I will be able to flush freely. Once again I can put the septic tank and all it contains out of my mind.

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Current Location: Catskills
Current Mood: satisfied

I would have called to say "Happy Easter" even though I'm not religious, nor was she.

I wouldn't have confessed that I'm still shocked she's gone.

I would have announced that I was going to take a walk in Central Park to look at the flowering trees.

I wouldn't have explained that I missed her because she'd still be around to talk to.

I would have reported that yes, they do have elms trees in the park just like I said last fall.

I wouldn't have confided that I'd been thinking about her because that'd be too weird.

I would have updated her on all the birds I saw including a mallard, a cardinal, numerous robins, some warblers, a bunch of sparrows, two house finches, and a grackle.

I wouldn't have mentioned that I love her because that would have made her uncomfortable.

I would have told her that I'd see her soon.

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Current Location: NYC
Current Mood: melancholy
Current Music: Silence

This is the memoir Helene Stapinski was born to write, whether she liked it or not. Set mostly in Jersey City, NJ, Stapinski gets low-down with the too-colorful characters, many from her own large family, who dominate the past, at least the way she tells it. She takes a long view of the city, just across the river from glittering Manhattan, distilling the corruption, dirty politics, petty theft, fallen-off-the-truck swag, and murders that gave the place its tainted reputation.

Stapinski could be an historian, and I hope she dives back into Jersey City for her inspiration. The book caught a pre-gentrification era that could be applied to many neighborhoods in the metropolitan area, now scrubbed clean of their origins.

She ran far to get away from her roots (all the way to the Alaskan wilderness for a year), but when she finally stopped moving and told this story she let her "inner Jersey" shine.

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Current Location: NYC
Current Mood: pissed off
Current Music: Silence

Smart Book by a Smart Author

Ms. Canter has my number in so many ways. Her book, based on years of experience, her vibrant on-line community, food programs, and research has many important revelations for anyone with eating issues.

The method in the book encourages people to learn how to listen to their bodies, change the destructive thinking that many of us indulge in, and find some sanity in the insane world of eating, food, and desire in the United States. Canter says that her program isn't a quick fix and, while I'm not an active member of her community, I know that a healthy relationship with what goes into my body took a long while to develop. If she said she could solve an intractable problem like this quickly, it would reason to doubt.

Normal Eating for Normal Weight: The Path to Freedom from Weight Obsession and Food Cravings can become one of the healthful tools that people with eating issues and other addictive behaviors can use to improve their lives.

It's available on www.NormalEating.com

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Current Location: NYC
Current Mood: refreshed
Current Music: silence

Book #17: Wishful Drinking, by Carrie Fisher
This is Ms. Fisher's one woman show on paper. Carrie Fisher, daughter of movie icon Debbie Reynolds and singer Eddie Fisher, is best known for her role in Star Wars. The other part she played (with zest) was that of an addict. All issues are brushed by, with little or no deep exploration, as if to linger might bring us all down. I wish Ms. Fisher had spent more time and used her writing talent to transform the show into something that can live on the page without the shortcuts that a come naturally to a live performance like gestures, facial expressions, and infectious laughter.


Book #18: Dooms Day Book, by Connie Willis
A fellow member of the 50bookchallenge recommended this one to me after I read Company of Liars, by Karen Maitland. Both involve the Asian/European plague known as the Black Death. Both have similar time frames. Dooms Day Book brings a very modern sensibility to the crisis. I don't want to give anything much away, but time travel is involved. This book won the Hugo and Nebula awards and it was well worth the time.



Book #19: This Boy's Life: A Memoir, by Tobias Wolff
I loved this memoir. Mr. Wolff brings us back to 1950's Seattle where his impulsive and loving mother settles after a divorce. She finds a seemingly-stable man, Dwight, and they marry. The book is mostly how Dwight and Mr. Wolff lock horns and jibe each other. It's a classic coming-of-age story that seems as honest as they come. The author's experiences are as fresh and recognizable today as they were in the '50's.

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Current Location: NYC
Current Mood: sore
Current Music: silence

Fantasies to the left of me, heartbreak to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with you. Addiction comes in many guises, some are easier to spot than others. Is emailing someone three times a day a problem? How about ten times a day? What about 64 times over a two day period? Is it wrong to go back to a guy and beg him not to breakup with you? What if he told you that it's over just days after you have a miscarriage?

For Rachel Resnick, the extreme thrill of a new relationship, the inevitable conflict, and the devastating breakup all triggered feelings she first experienced in childhood. The waves of emotion mimicking archetypal moments like The Day Daddy Walked Out or The Nights Mommy Slept With Strange Men.

A child of emotional and physical neglect turned into an adult who looked for love and affirmation in the arms of extremely good-looking, abusive, control freaks. The problem was that she got what she was seeking, a replay of the past.

Resnick's book exposes her compelling train-wreck of a life in vivid, lurid colors. And I wish I didn't identify so much with her, but I do.

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Current Location: New York City
Current Mood: hopeful
Current Music: silence

Zippy was born small with large eyes. She didn't talk until she was good and ready at age three and she zipped everywhere, around her small house and tiny Mooreland, Indiana (population 300).

Kimmel's recollections are amusing, but I'm not as in love with this book as everyone else seemed to be. It's a pre-coming-of-age story and I guess I like my memoirs to be a little juicier.

However, her tales are well written and could be inspiration for anyone who thought that her childhood was too normal to merit a book.

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Current Location: NYC
Current Mood: sore
Current Music: Beethoven

Robert, my best friend and maid of honor, and I spent a very pleasant day in The Bronx.



We went to Wave Hill, a wonderful park owned by the City of New York. It had spectacular views of the Palisades:



Gardens and a green house:



According to the brochure Wave Hill House "has hosted guests, among them T.H. Huxley and Charles Darwin. Famous tenants included Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, Arturo Toscanini, Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, visited during the British Delegation's tenancy from 1950-1956."

We then tootled over to City Island for some of their legendary seafood.



It was a wonderful day.
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Current Location: New York City
Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Beethoven

Sunday I was walking up Laguardia Place, just south of Washington Square Park. There is a little ragged-looking garden there. It is enclosed by a fence and had lots of birds, sparrows mostly, pecking about in search of seeds.

Once I stopped focusing on the birds, I noticed that there was some forsythia blooming by the fence. Now forsythia is one of those things that signals that inexorable movement toward warmer weather.

The same can't be said for the snow drops I saw peeping out of the flower beds on 9th Street between Broadway and University. For the last two years warm January weather has encouraged these bulbs to grow too early and they've all been killed by the plummeting temperatures. I see that they are coming up again and this year I'm holding out hope that they will survive long enough to bloom. Careful inspection also revealed that the daffodils are rising as well.

Now if a beautiful Narcissus isn't enough to convince you, another sure sign of winter's passing is Spring Training. I don't follow baseball, but boy I get happy when sportscasters start mentioning the Yankees in Tampa, Florida.

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Current Location: New York City
Current Mood: hopeful
Current Music: Silence

I have prism hanging in the window. Right now the sun is streaming in shooting little rainbows of light around the room. I put my hand up and caught one of them on my skin. It shoots me back to the living room in Clinton, NY where my grandmother lived and where I lived in junior high school and high school.

On the back wall there were two crystal candelabras. Each had a golden woman in a wide Baroque-style dress with the three candle holders coming up behind her head, almost like an elaborate hairdo. Three sided prisms hung down from the candle holders. When the sun shined through the windows, little multi-colored dots of light appeared all over the room. I used to love staring at them, making them decorate my hand or clothing. I used to move so that the beam of light caught my eye. Deepest blue, green, yellow, and red flashed across my retina. It was one of those small pleasures that I have tried to duplicate in the places that I live.

Seeing the colors on my palm today sent me back to those lost days in Clinton before my grandmother Helene died, before Aunt Carol died, before Aunt Jane died, before Uncle Bill died, before Aunt Marjory and Uncle Bob died, before Aunt Sally died, before Aunt Lucy and Uncle Leonard died, before Dad died and way before Mom died.

It's not that I was happy. It's not that I was safe. It's just that I didn't know that I'd ever be without those people. Today I am all too aware that I will be joining all of them, by-and-by. Back then I didn't know the frustration that comes with wanting.

Each loss was different. Some of the deaths affected me because I liked the person; some barely made a depression in the landscape of the day. Today, they all are adding up. Today there is just one person of that generation left alive, Uncle Roger. He is 95.

Today I am feeling more alone than I have before. Mom was a bridge back. She was memory. She was the repository of stories. She could straighten out my confusions. She was illumination. It's been one month since she died and I miss her.

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Current Location: New York City
Current Mood: sad
Current Music: silence

House of Happy Endings: A Memoir, by Leslie Garis, 2/5/09
A wonderful memoir about not so wonderful times. Garis grew up in a house of writers, some more successful, some less. It turns out that most of the "happy endings" are only in the fictions that they produce.

I Never Thought Addiction Could Happen to Me, by Loree Taylor Jordan, 2/6/09
Don't try to sneak an addiction by this author, she's seen it all before. Jordan's book gives great information to college students and young adults who may be wondering if their behaviors are simply bad habits or something more devastating. Jordan breaks it down and spells it out.

Patty's Got a Gun: Patricia Hearst in 1970s America, by William Graebner, 2/6/09
Poor little rich girl with an automatic weapon. Kidnapped heiress, Paddy Hearst, captivated the world when she appeared in a bank as part of a crew of revolutionaries who were liberating the funds there. Graebner spins Paddy's tale, from terrifying capture, through the weeks spent in a closet deprived of freedom and enduring sexual assault, and into her apparent transformation into "urban guerrilla." While he can't completely answer the burning question of the effect of her kidnapping had on her radical political views, he puts the ordeal into a cultural context that is fascinating.

The Kiss: A Memoir, by Kathryn Harrison, 2/7/09
When Kathryn's long-absent father slipped her the tongue in an airport, it changed the course of her life. They began a consuming, and ultimately deadening affair that ate her up -- body and soul. Remarkable, disturbing, and lightening paced, this book blew my socks off.

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Current Location: New York City
Current Mood: melancholy
Current Music: Silence