Guest Blog - On a Book Tour with a Teen

Hello everyone! We are excited to welcome Brooklynite writer and filmmaker Peter von Ziegesar who wrote his entry while on a recent Reading Tour to Kansas City with his kids. Nostalgic...informative...take it away Peter: 

July 7-14th

This week I fly to Kansas City to do a reading of my book The Looking Glass Brother: A Memoir (St. Martin’s Press, June, 2013) at the Boulevard Brewing Company. Why a brewery? Because it has a beautiful space that overlooks downtown Kansas City. I have a reasonable expectation of a large turnout, since The Kansas City Star has run a full-page article written by Donna Seaman of Booklist. Also, a children’s bookstore called The Reading Reptile has agreed to sell my books there. This is going to be a typical exuberant, cobbled-together Kansas City event. My only fear is a stampede when word gets out to my fellow Kansas City Art Institute graduates that free beer is going to be served!

I have a lot of good memories of Kansas City. Here is where I more or less came of age (at 35 or so), where I first started writing – for The Kansas City Star – where I went to art school, and where I met my wife, Hali. We stay with an old college friend, Kathy Marchant. Kathy is an artist, contractor, restaurateur, beekeeper, gardener and urban developer. The block of Madison Street in which she lives with Michael now contains most of my oldest friends. Called Billy Goat Hill, it’s an ancient shabby brownstone neighborhood overlooking downtown, just a walk bridge over I-80 from the somewhat scary concrete-slab FBI headquarters and near a life-sized plastic statue of a Hereford steer on a tall column whose testicles, liver and spleen light up from within, thanks to the miracle of the incandescent bulb. 

Years ago, Kathy started The Bluebird Café on the nearby corner of 17^th and Summit, and now the intersection is hopping with restaurants and cafes. Everyone has watched each other’s kids grow up on this block and there is a strong feeling of group child-rearing. My old friend John McDonald, who started the Boulevard Brewing Company, is next door with his wife Anne, and two kids, Piper and Jake, and we spend much of our time wallowing in his unusual elongated urban swimming pool. Down the street are Allen Winkler and his wife Leslie and their two kids, Eli and Emma, Scott and Barbara with their son Oscar, Susie and her son Nicky, and around the corner are Howard and Kirby and Adam and Noori. Several sets of grandparents have moved into the street to be near their kids and grandkids. Sometime I want to do an ethnographic study of this block from the point of view of how people move their entrances according to how they are getting along with their particular neighbors. 

I’m finding it’s good to travel with two kids as they keep each other exercised like puppies. On the flight my daughter Maya, 15, and son, Magnus, 12, watch TV serials with conjoined headphones and formed a happy, sometimes impenetrable bubble around themselves. Kansas City turns out to be a culinary tour for them. The first thing Magnus does on arrival is google the ten most expensive restaurants in Kansas City. That does worry me a bit. 

The first morning we eat bright orange eggs from Kathy’s backyard hens and amazing fruity orchard bread from a bakery located down the street. Even though Magnus is allegedly into haute cuisine, we are also on a hunt for the best mac and cheese in Kansas City. Kathy may have already won with her gluten-free version, which we devour our first night, but we try Anna’s Oven, owned by the mother of a boy who graciously agrees to play a round of tennis with Magnus in the afternoon. Anna makes mac and cheese with radiatore, pronounced not like the cast-iron heat-spreaders you find in New York apartment buildings, but ROD-i-ah-TOR-aye. Maya and I are vegetarians so we later go to Succotash, a midtown eatery that serves truly mammoth breakfasts, such as “Vegan Sink,” an indescribable scramble of lima bean hummus and succotash (limas and corn stew), roasted peppers, portabella mushrooms and home fries. Like most places in KC we wrap much of it up and take it home

Everyone in Kansas City is connected to everyone else, and the best restaurant we try is French, owned by (how shall I say this succinctly?) the husband of the stepdaughter of an old poetry teacher of mine. There Magnus indulges himself in the prix-fixe menu of steak a la Bourgogne while Maya and I gorge ourselves on salads and pasta.

On Friday night David Byrne is playing with St. Vincent at an open-air place called Grinders, owned by a fellow ex-KCAI sculpture student known only as Stretch. Stretch somehow managed to buy up half of downtown Kansas City before city real estate moguls caught on. The kids and I head over in an open-topped Swiss Army surplus vehicle owned by one of Kathy’s neighbors and arrive just in time for the show. Maya and Magnus have been complaining that they’d rather stay home and that I’m beastly old and strange, but they perk up when they get there, especially when door guards magic marker huge X’s on their hands to mark them as non-drinkers. 

This is how I remember Kansas City, hundreds of scruffy but happy cowtowners standing around in the cooling evening air under a talismanic sky, chomping on slices of pizza, sipping beer as the red neon Tension Envelope sign blinks on and off, and listening to great unconventional music and enjoying the deepening sunset. Maya and Magnus of course know the Talking Head songs and start to jump up and down in imitation of David Byrne’s stilted marching and mysterious hand motions, inspired by the brass ensemble he’s assembled. As the set breaks with “You’re on the Road to Nowhere,” we demobilize and walk home, myself proud to have been able to show the kids something of what’s great about KC. 

“Father, thou art ancient, but it was good,” is my daughter’s final verdict. David Byrne’s onstage music partner, St. Vincent, confessed that she was four-years-old when she first heard a David Byrne song in the movie, Revenge of the Nerds. Well, shoot, I was 25, but I feel like a grizzled castaway from of Game of Thrones.

The reading’s on Sunday at the brewery. On Thursday I sit down at KCUR public radio for an interview supposedly about my book, but the conversation drifts off course to the Kansas City art scene and never gets back. Ah, well, a worthy topic. The kids are still sleeping when I return to Kathy’s at noon.

On Sunday morning I go to the brewery early to set up the reading, but there’s no need; the staff has put up chairs and audio-visual and has three sturdy bartenders ready to serve beer. Kathy and Michael bring Maya and Magnus over from their house, which is only a few blocks away, and I send them downstairs to provide enigmatic hand signals to entering audience members. True to predictions the place fills up fast with an interesting mixture of Kansas City’s Bohemian-restaurant-carpenter-Art-Institute-urban pioneer-drug-culture underground, combined with scattered literati and mental health professionals. Many old friends are here. 

My book is not a confess-all, but there are some seriously gamy parts. I have had the heroin talk with my kids weeks before, so I feel able to answer questions honestly without fear of causing sudden childhood trauma, but some of my old friends are hearing about certain parts of my life for the first time. As I read from the opening chapter, I am halting at first, but look over and see Maya and Magnus listening raptly, and encouraged, I stop being nervous. Eventually my voice catches the rhythm of the words and I’m off. 

Steve Paul, my old editor at The Star, keeps the ball rolling by asking incisive questions and pulling in a few from the audience. Many people here have dealt with a schizophrenic relative – a central theme in my book – and others are just returning from a NAMI conference. The talk is brisk. Some want to hear more about Peacock Point – the faded Gilded-Age Long Island estate where I spent my summers, and others about childrearing and family life. I get a laugh quoting Mary Karr: “The definition of a dysfunctional family is a family with more than one member.” Steve seems to know exactly what he’s doing and the time never drags. We cut off exactly at the hour.

“What did you think?” I ask the kids afterwards.
“Bueno, bueno,” says Maya. “The first five minutes, you messed up a few times, but it was fine. The last part was better.” 
“Oh, okay.”
“And you know that time when you stopped to tell everyone that it was a metaphorical glass ball you were talking about? Everyone already knew it was a metaphorical glass ball.”
“Got it.”
 “You do realize, Dad, that we can use some of this stuff against you,” says Magnus.
“Yeah, I know.”

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Writer and filmmaker Peter von Ziegesar lives in Brooklyn with his wife and family. He started his memoir, The Looking Glass Brother, (St. Martin's Press, 2013, Picador Paperback, 2014) after his long-lost stepbrother, "Little Peter," a homeless former violin prodigy, appeared in the streets outside his Greenwich Village home just when the author and his wife were preparing to start a family. Booklist and Publisher’s Weekly gave The Looking Glass Brother starred reviews, with Donna Seaman, Senior Editor at Booklist, calling it, "a piercing, thought-provoking portrait of a many-branched American family." Kirkus Reviews praised the book as a “vivid, frequently elegiac memory piece," and added, "It’s as if characters wandered out of an Auchincloss novel to encounter Kerouac’s bunch."

 - find his book on Facebook or Amazon. 

Scott Elliott guest blogs on BOOK TOURS WITH KIDS – part 2

Here is the second of a three-part guest blog by Scott Eliott, who lives and teaches in Walla Walla, Washington.  Scott is the father of two boys and two books, Coiled in the Heart and Temple Grove: A Novel.  Click here for his bio.

Tell us more about your recent book tour with the kids, Scott – you left off with a decision to keep author-time and daddy-time separate, but to allow the boys to see one reading. Do go on….

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Before I left for each reading, I asked the boys to wish me luck, kissed their heads, fielded a few questions about where I was going and why I had to go, asked them to be good for mama. I don’t think they really understood what was going on. On the way to each venue I’d shift identities and summon the energy necessary to transform from worn out daddy to audience-commanding author. The energy always came, its supply aided in some ways rather than hindered by days spent running amok with the boys—throwing rocks at driftwood at Discovery Park, hiking in Whacom Falls Park, fishing at a few small lakes, hitting playgrounds in Stanely Park, going up the tram to Grouse Mountain to see a clever logging show and stand a few feet from grizzly bears, continuing our pursuit of food we can’t get in Walla Walla at Pike Place and Granville island Markets, participating in what we came to call the “Bellingham sandwich explosion.”  

I should say that doing this alone, short of a substantial childcare budget beyond our means, would not have been possible without a generous second adult. My wife Jenna played this role expertly. Overall, the demands on her didn’t constitute as much extra childcare as it would have if I’d said “see you in a few weeks!” and left, but it did mean extra work for her, for which I’m grateful, especially on two nights when she needed to get the boys settled  into new places without my help.  Jenna attended two of the five events on nights when we did pay for baby sitters.  

I thought the whole thing worked very well, overall. So well, in fact, that I came to think that if I had time and the resources, I could go on traveling indefinitely like this, moving from town to town, seeking adventures, finding new readers for the book. I enjoyed the strange experience, the lively jolt, of switching from daddy to writer, sloughing off the concern for dependents to move more easily, made newly conscious of my lightness (like taking off a heavy backpack) into a fluid adult world, in one its best places, rich with possibility and in which I was able even to move outside of myself a little bit to play the role of author and to stretch a little further still to play the roles of the characters in my novel. I felt immensely fortunate for the opportunity to enter this world of greater freedom with its potential for meaningful connections enabled by the book, and equally fortunate to come back to my better-defined role in the family-- to sleeping boys, a wife who must have sensed once I’d crawled into bed as quietly as I could that I was still charged up from the reading and who’d whisper, “How’d it go?” Except for the fact that it came too early, the boys could always be counted on to provide crazy morning energy that swirled into my memories of the reading of the night before like cream into coffee, or maybe coffee into cream. Or maybe like a dinosaur into a figurine emporium.

There were moments on the trip that only boys in this zone could provide: lots of discussion of sasquatches, bears, and wolves and acting like these creatures as we passed through the Cascades both ways. We raced along a boardwalk in Bellingham giving each other high fives; fed pigeons we named in Pike Place Market; played hide and seek in the Olympic Sculpture Garden; lay together in a hammock, wind off the Puget Sound in our hair. Gus, the five year old, got really excited about big trout and steelhead we came upon in hatchery enclosures in Whatcom Falls Park and asked repeatedly when we were going to get out the fishing rods and catch them. One night at a Syrian restaurant in Seattle, after hearing that a belly dancing show was expected later on, Harper, the two year old, raised his shirt and gave everyone his own early belly dance.   

The boys were supposed to attend the reading in Bellingham, in part, because we couldn’t secure a babysitter there. It also seemed like a good night for them to come out because a lot of my relatives from around the Peninsula and from nearby Lynden would be there that night. I thought perhaps Jenna could bring them by toward the end of the reading.  I wanted the boys to see this part of what I do, to show them that I write and read stories for other people, not just for them. I wanted to to give them a hazy memory to reflect on later in their lives, maybe something they’d wonder if they dreamed…

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Scott Elliott guest blogs on BOOK TOURS WITH KIDS – Part 1

Hi everyone! Hope you are having a great summer with kids in camp, coming home sun-warmed and tired and sleeping soundly through the night.  We are judging the Fellowship entries while we are on hiatus from Salons and let me tell you – there is some stiff competition this year!

Meanwhile – we are thrilled to welcome a terrific novelist, Scott Elliott, who lives and teaches in Walla Walla, Washington.  Scott is the father of two boys and two books, Coiled in the Heart and Temple Grove: A Novel.  Click here for his bio.

Take it away, Scott—

Is it a good idea to go on a book tour with two boys, aged two and five?

Probably not.

Nevertheless, my wife Jenna and I recently hit the road with two red-headed, fun-loving, mischievous imps we happened to have around.  I’ve long described the experience of having children in one’s thirties as a descent back into the tumultuous emotional zone you’ve worked your whole life to leave behind. As soon as you feel yourself standing on solid adult ground blessedly free of such swings you look at your life’s clock and say, “better have kids”  and embark on the wildest, emotional swingiest ride of your life. There are occasions during certain confluences of child raising madness when one looks to the sky and says, why… why?  balanced with times of such beautiful tender reawakening to the world and its wonders that one struggles to find words for such sweet perfection. Both states intertwined.

Rather than have me hit the road alone, we decided to morph an early summer vacation with a small Pacific Northwest book tour for my new novel Temple Grove, which is set on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State.  The tour took me to some wonderful independent book stores in Western Washington and Oregon. I started on my own at Annie Bloom’s Bookstore in Portland, and the family went with me from Walla Walla, where we live, to Olympia (Orca Books); Seattle (Elliott Bay Book Company); Bellingham (Village Books); on up to Vancouver, B.C where I read at a tribute to Joyland Magazine at the Railway Club.   

Going on a book tour puts one in touch with one’s own day-to-day persona to a greater degree because you also begin to think about what your authorial persona ought to be. This persona may be a little different from who you are.  Fiction grants you license to tap into selves who are not you—who may be more extreme in different directions—to go into very adult and complex zones, sometimes verging on, or squarely within, our capacity for depravity. So, the fiction writer’s persona in readings may be pulled by the material away from the more accessible, friendly self your friends and family are used to seeing.

We decided to keep the readings and time with children separate, though we did plan to have the boys come see daddy read at least once….

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Do you need an extension?

As someone who often writes under a deadline, I have been using homework assignments to try to teach my kids the value of pacing oneself. I started college as the kid who finished all her assignments at 4am on the day they were due (I also used to suck on my used tea bags to avoid falling asleep in my morning classes - yeah, not something I want to bequeath).  But my junior year I took 24 credits and once i had thrown myself into that fire, I realized that without pacing and planning I'd never get through  the semester.

So I taught myself to be organized and I did things early, and I gave myself rewards: if I write 250 words of this stupid paper on the history of music in the 1600s I can go out on that date, if I finish my math, I can go to the Quad and hang with my friends. When my paper is totally done then I'll party.

It gave me a terrific work ethic--one that is useful for a writer with kids.

My first grader recently came home with a homework assignment over a holiday that was ludicrous - the class was to do an entire week's worth of homework in one day, including writing a story from the point of view of a beekeeper using ten vocab words, then writing each word three times, and finally writing ten sentences using these words. My girl is six. It's the end of school so there are performances and recitals as well as just the excitement of summer.

I wrote a note to the school, saying that the assignment was too much. Instead of pledging to look into it, I got an immediate note in reply - if it is too much, just don't do it, or tell your kid you will ask the parent for an extension. It's just homework.

What are schools teaching our kids? If homework is just thrown at them with the expectation that they won't do it if it's too much, what kind of adults do we expect we will get?  I can offer a possible insight as many parents who are writers are also writing teachers - and their number one complaint is the kid that walks in on the day the paper is due saying "I need an extension!" and the reason?

"I didn't finish the work."

Then in the real world, 25 yr old college-grad Petra needs to have her part of the project in by Monday to the rest of her team can present on Wednesday morning, but she emails it in on Tuesday at 6pm. The team is furious, but she shrugs, "I got it in before the meeting."

By college, the kids don't even bother to try--they know they'll get an extension. Society grouses at college profs for allowing the kids to get away with it, but I think it starts earlier. I think it starts in First Grade with schools that are not thoughtful about the amount and quality of homework that is assigned. I think that kids who are getting junk work and tons of it are being told by both their (naturally frustrated) parents and their schools that it doesn't matter if they don't do it--and that all they have to do is get an extension.

What do you think?

Crossword Poetry - guest blog by Brooklyn poet, Peter Valentine

Not every writer who is a Pen Parentis Author has four novels and an NEA grant. A lot of us are writers with day-jobs to support a family, who simply can't live without our creative outlet. Here's a guest-blog from a terrific poet, Peter Valentine, whose daily crossword-poetry is a wonderful example of threading a hobby into your creative writing - to ensure that you keep at it! He writes in the six hours that his children are in school, and here he describes his process for us, in hopes of inspiring others to discover their own forms. It's important to stay in the game, no matter your tools. 

Peter lives in Brooklyn with his wife and three children. Visit his website here.

Take it away, Peter!

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About 11 years ago B.C. (before children) I was sitting in my apartment, drinking a cup of coffee and smoking a cigarette over the crossword. I had just gotten up, so it was probably 10:30am.

 

On this particular morning rather than speeding through the answers, I was staring at the words and letting my eyes play over them. Soon I found myself putting lines together -- first in my head, then on paper.

 

My first crossword poem consisted of two distinct parts – each created from the words in the clues and answers respectively. Later I evolved the form to 3 parts: across, down, and answers. For the title, words are drawn from any part of the puzzle.

 

The rules: 

1. Words in any section may be repeated

2. Punctuation may be altered in any way

3. No word may be used in a part of the poem that is not found in the corresponding part of the puzzle (if there is no “the” in the across clues, then “the” cannot be in the “across” part of the poem)

 

I wrote these poem daily for three years until I became a father. After three kids, I stopped reading the paper entirely.

 

Now, six years have passed and things have gotten easier. Today, with the kids in school six hours a day, I have been able to pick up the project again.  And it continues to be an extremely fun and satisfying occupation. Each day I look at a fresh batch of words from a different crossword puzzle constructor and never know where it’s going to take me. I’ve also added a new element – images. My wife, who is involved in social media (check out her blog here), urged me to include images -- a must if you want your stuff to get passed around the Internet. My initial snooty thought was that images diminish the words. Now I love them. It’s fun to see what pictures come up when you google things like, “soldier shakes hands with squirrel.”

 

Also, social media was not around six years ago, and I’m finding that there is nothing more motivating than the “like.”

 

It’s amazing how much has changed in only six years – both in the world-wide world and in me. Many of my older poems leaned on absurdist humor and at times cynical invective. Today, I can barely take cynicism. I still love funny, but I also feel more compelled and less embarrassed to write about real feelings and real things – surely the influence of kids. So while I may not get to sleep until 10:30am anymore, I may be a better writer.

Get Motivated

I am in a creative slump right now. Not because I have no ideas; I have plenty. I also have two kids in school giving me enough time to write, should I wish to do so. Tell me then, what’s the hideous sluglike thing wrapping itself around my brain and slowing me down? Is it laziness? Old age? Parenthood?

I think it might be a lack of outside approval.

From the beginning, as writers, we are taught to appreciate our readers. The first “book” most writers write is something on construction paper with marker and crayon, bound by yarn or Elmer’s glue. This “first book” gets passed around the house, becoming legendary, and we as writers, secretly love the indirect attention.

Fast forward a few decades. Our kids get pop-up book kits and we shower them with praise when they create their first finished masterpiece. We hang every picture on a magnetic surface and laud the story that gets told to accompany it. But what is feeding our own inner need for praise? Certainly not the dozens of rejection slips that appear in our email inbox every week. And that’s for those of us who are actually sending out work!

How often do adult writers get praise, or even feedback? More often than not, I get more praise-per-hour for making a good dinner than for actually publishing a story.  But we can’t stop writing. Not if we really are writers at heart.

So how do we get that necessary feedback until we have an agent to harass? Apart from constantly sending out stories and hoping one will hit – that goes without saying. But there IS something active you can do.

Join a writing group: most serious writers belong to a writing group, at least for a while. Next time, I’ll give you specifics on what I mean and how you can go about finding a group of your very own. My writing group is my lifeline – without them I think I would have given up long ago. Not because I don’t think I’m great – but because it’s so much easier to spend an hour baking a cake and having three people shower me with gratitude, joy and appreciation, than to spend six hours working on a transition that still isn’t working quite right.

Don't become a housekeeper. You're a writer. Write. If you need feedback, find someone to give it to you. Out in the boonies? Visit our website: www.penparentis.org and listen to a few published authors (their readings are free) who have kids. They have only kind words for you - feel the community you are in. We support you. 

Single-Parent Writers

It’s not fucking fair.

That’s what Cara Hoffmann announced after listening to the rest of the Pen Parentis panel talking about how they so appreciated their spouse for taking the kids for four hours here and two hours there so the writer could finish a chapter of the latest book. She raised a son on her own as a writer – and it was hard and bloody work. Well, ok, maybe not terribly bloody…but if you’ve read Cara’s phenomenal breakout novel, So Much Pretty, you might wonder.

How did she do it? The same way Mahogany Brown raised her daughter alone – as a poet it might be even harder than as a fiction writer – she told her kid that this was her career and she taught her child to treat that career with respect. Really, it’s no different to tell your child “Daddy has to write this proposal so that his company will earn 5M in the next merger acquisitions deal, so please watch Dora on the TV for a little while and then I’ll read you a story.” What you are doing is prioritizing work. And that’s damned hard, but guess what, life isn’t fair. Only people can be fair: and what each of these women admitted was how grateful they were to the industry people who understood when they were told that the deadline would be missed by a hair because, as a single mom, there was nothing to be done about it. 

But here’s what’s gorgeous: both Hoffman and Brown instilled a real respect into their kids. Writing wasn’t a hobby. It wasn’t something done for fun and laughs. Writing was a career. And by incorporating their kids into their lives this fully, these single-moms raised kids who not only respected and admired their mothers, but the kids themselves grew up to be successful artists: Hoffman’s son is in a quite-popular band, and Brown’s daughter won a writing award.

We can do this for our kids. Single parents more than anyone with a double income, should also take advantage of all the grants and fellowships out there that want to fund great writing. Try for a Sustainable Arts Foundation Grant. A Jerome Foundation Grant. Even the NEA grants are not out of your reach, if you are serious. I went to a presentation they made at AWP in Chicago, and discovered that the judges for the NEA grant change every year – you can apply with the same material up to five years in a row without any penalty. In fact they want you to reapply! We all know that taste is subjective, why not keep trying? You can’t win the lottery without playing, and getting grants is a lot like winning the lottery. Find out how these things are run, follow the rules, and apply. Your hardship bio will likely turn a few heads that otherwise are stuck in academic clouds. 

I have absolutely no idea what I'll be writing about next week. I just had a birthday. Maybe that's the problem - saw time, slipping slowly through the glass...