Announcing a winner

Like most of the rest of the world (at least the ones who still have electricity) I have been following the Olympics.  It has been brutal to watch the few judging glitches: Japan regaining a few points in gymnastics and bumping the Ukraine down a notch, or the Greek racisim disqualification bumping people up ("I got this Bronze thanks to someone else's racism.") or this newest badminton fiasco.

Having just awarded a Fellowship (results posted here), I can tell you - judging feels like the heaviest weight. Not just the back-and-forth gut-aching feeling of watching the USA gymnasts celebrate unexpected gold on split screen with the Russians and their unexpected loss. But also the knowledge that hundreds of armchair critics are narrowing their eyes, wondering why this one, not that one. Prizes do matter. They give you energy, they tie you to history. They are the world's approval of your somehow otherwise ridiculous decision to devote yourself to something that will never earn you a zillion dollars...

Michael Cunningham (a mentor and ex-writing teacher of mine) summed it up beautifully in his New Yorker piece recently (there's a Part 2) -- he was on the Pulitzer committee and even there, the choices were nearly impossible. Everyone has talent. Everyone has at least one spot where you want to tell them "oh, couldn't you have just gotten this one thing a little better?" But it is your job to make that choose and so you so. In the end of it all, you feel like they are all your children - you are so proud of them all, despite their flaws. It's strange how connected you become.

Here is why we at Pen Parentis strictly adhere to blind judging--I can't imagine if we, like those judges, knew where the entries were from and what the life story of the athlete/writer was as we tried to value their work.

Really, isn't a few sentences by a formerly illiterate 40 yr old as much of an accomplishment as twenty lovely pages by a trust fund kid who just finished an all-expesnses paid ride to Harvard?

When you judge quality, you aren't judging the process.

Maybe we should. Maybe there should be medals for "achievement" in sports - and in writing.

But actually, no. Everyone has a struggle. Even that trust-fund kid has to get his head around reality and put words on a page. Discipline is universal. Those kids at the Olympics all had to work to get on that team. And so it is with us. If our story is waiting in the slush pile of some editor's desk, we are already in the running. We have already jumped the first hurdle - now we are in the race.

Keep running, folks. Just keep running.



Wanted to add - Books Ahoy! was a grand success thanks to you people. I want to warmly thank our authors who all read beautifully, Bluestockings Books, FaceArt by Melissa, Church Street School for Music and Art, our fantastic volunteer staff including the lovely Arlaina Tibensky and Kaitlin Sancoucie, and I'd especially like to thank The Lilac for hosting. We had 176 people attend the event. That's just...olympic.  Thanks to all who came. Photos here: www.facebook.com/penparentis.

Mental Space for Rent

Ever since you first picked up Dorothy Parker or Jack Kerouac and fell in love with the writer’s life, you’ve had an image in your head of what it means to be “a writer.” Probably that image includes some vice (sex, alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, luxury yachts) that you deserve because of all the time you spend writing. Because almost without fail, the image that comes to mind when you think “writer” is someone all alone in a room somewhere. A quiet room. With only writerly stuff in it and a means of composition. Books. A nostalgic typewriter. Possibly a window, but if so, a window that opens onto a peaceful scene.

When was the last time a parent was alone in any room devoid of kid detritus?

You do not think of a writer as a person who has to make non-peanut snacks for fifteen kids and then a doctor’s appointment which will entail at least one shot before sitting down with her manuscript. You don’t think of a National Book Award winner setting an alarm to ensure he/she picks up Coraline or Jeremy from soccer camp no later than 3:25pm. Definitely not the image that comes to mind. But that’s what we do. Every damn day.

How the hell do we accomplish this?

Let’s just say there’s often a hero spouse in the picture. Let’s say someone is willing for YOUR career to do all that daily stuff, at least on occasion so a few sentences can be strung together and called a paragraph. Let’s say that’s true for about 40% of parent authors. (could be more/less depending on divorces, remarriages, business trips, and spousal reluctance) … it could also be a mom or paid nanny/sitter/day care that takes over the parenting for a while—

There is still the issue of mental space.

After all, writing a cohesive short story (not to mention a whole novel!) requires a certain amount of focus, wouldn’t you say? Focus that is not razor sharp when Coraline and Jeremy are fighting with the caregiver in the next room over whose turn it actually is to choose the TV show. Focus that can be ripped from you even with a stray thought; oh crap, tomorrow is Coraline’s share day at school and I promised to ask Joe to loan out his old fireman’s helmet and I totally forgot. Focus that is utterly destroyed when your cellphone buzzes and the caller ID says “Jeremy’s School.”

“We’re so sorry,” says an administrator when you pick up. “Jeremy threw up in the lunchroom today. He seems fine now, but our policy is to have the parents keep him home for 24 hours after an incident like this.”  Say goodbye to the next 24 hours, since your spouse has already told you she’s got a meeting at ten tomorrow with the CEO of her firm.

So that’s our lives. We know it. Why am I bothering to blog about it?

Because there are plenty of writers who have managed to put out amazing novels despite having kids at home. People who nonetheless pick up their kids from soccer and who sit with them when they have fevers.  People like Jennifer Egan, who, oh I dunno, wrote novels that were good enough to win Pulitzer Prizes.

When she wrote A Visit From the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan was helping to put food on the table and pay for soccer classes for two boys. That prize came to her because the quality of her work was fantastic—not the other way around. We often laud writers’ work after they win prizes: but every last one of them was not a Pulitzer Prize winning author before they won that prize. (members of Pen Parentis can log onto the website and hear a podcast of her discussing the book BEFORE she won the prize... it's astonishing.)

It is vital to remember that the prize-winning authors that we so admire had to carve out time to slave over their writing, same as you. 

In the next blog, I’ll talk about some specific ways that published novelists who are also parents have carved out enough mental space to get some real writing done.