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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TO BE CONTINUED – just click the RSS FEED button to be notified by email when the final installment is out – or add your email address into the empty bar at the top of the page to follow the blog. 

Back to Birgitte - second post from South America

Guest blogger, Birgitte Rasine checks in with manuscript and toddler from her writing travels in the wilds of South America...

A Clash of Two Worlds

The tropics.  Hot hot sun, exotic fruits, amazing local food, plenty of wildlife and songbirds, a hammock swinging in the breeze, cool drink in your hand… what more could a writer want for inspiration?

As I quickly found out, that depends on what you’re working on at the moment—and whether you’ve got a toddler in tow.  After Christmas, we drove down to “Los Llanos,” the tropical grassland plains of Colombia, to spend 10 days at a small fishing lodge secluded near the banks of the ancient Manacacías river (for reference, the Manacacías joins the Meta which then flows into the legendary Orinoco in Venezuela).  Normally, a trip like that would be a dream for a writer looking for a faraway place to get away from the emails, the cell phones, the constant interruptions and stresses of the modern world.

But when you bring your two-year-old, a paradise quickly transforms into an obstacle course of potential hazards, and your writing time drains down into maybe an hour or two a day.  Malaria-bearing mosquitoes, uncertain water sources, weird and unfamiliar food, parasites lurking in every crevice and pool of standing water, rivers full of electric eels, anacondas, water cockroaches, crocodiles and all kinds of other eminently friendly and compassionate creatures.  Then there’s the ever-present potential for running into paramilitary or guerrilla forces, although fortunately these days that potential runs very low in this area.

Sure enough, the first day my little girl got sick—we didn’t know if it was the water from the swimming pool, the oatmeal that sat in the heat a little too long, or some unseen insect that had bitten her… but instead of succumbing to the strong temptation of panicking (we were hours away from a decent hospital), I spent the day watching over her and administering lemon and garlic water, a mixture that works wonders on E.coli and all kinds of parasites and stomach bugs.  I myself had suffered from a rather aggressive E.coli infection shortly after our return from the island of Providencia, and the lemon/garlic cured me in 3 days.*

Thankfully, the next morning my baby was fine, jumped in the boat with us, and spent the day fishing the wild ancient rivers of the Colombian plains.  Remember that piranha I was after?  I’m proud to say that I was the first to catch a fish on this trip, and it was indeed a piranha—although not the giant black one, it was a gorgeous red-bellied piranha.  We let it go: it’s illegal to kill piranhas here.  They’re incredible river janitors.

And my writing?  On this trip I brought my psychological thriller with me, the one that takes place in the Parisian métro.   Yes, I know: Parisian metro vs Colombian tropical flood plain.  The most unlikely bedfellows.  Normally, I have no problem plunging into the world I’m writing about regardless of where I am physically.  But this time, I found it very difficult.  I tried writing in bed, in the hammock, by the pool, but found myself wandering off, gazing at the trees, the birds, the river… I even considered staying at the lodge by myself while my husband and the rest of the family spent the day fishing, but I just couldn’t do it.  After all, who travels thousands of miles to this remote place and give up even one day on the river? 

So I resigned myself to editing in the early dawn or in the evenings after dinner, which worked fabulously well.  I was able to edit the majority of the work I had written to date, most of it tucked away in my mosquito net, away from would-be biters and stingers and other annoyances of the minuscule kind.  And because there was literally nothing to see (light pollution is minimal here), I could edit in peace knowing I wasn’t missing anything.

Besides, I told myself, I can write when I get back to Bogotá… and California.  There was simply too much to see—and see we did (I’ll write about that in my next post).  The Llanos have a way about them… the plain enters the very marrow of your soul, and won’t let go long after you’ve gone.

Birgitte Rasine

Author

http://birgitte.lucita.net

www.facebook.com/birgitterasine

https://twitter.com/birgitte_rasine

p.s. Medical disclaimer and a note about that lemon/garlic mixture: it is a known fact that citrus has extraordinary cleansing properties.  After all, they make detergent out of it don’t they?  It turns out that if you blend lemon, orange and grapefruit, pulp, rind and all (no seeds), with a bit of raw or powdered garlic, and drink it ideally with food, anything sitting in your gut that shouldn’t be there (as in, E.coli, parasites, worms, whatever) runs for the proverbial hills. 

It’s natural, won’t kill your flora, and you can get it practically anywhere.  And yes, if you can’t stand the bitter taste, you can add honey or sugar.  But as with any health-related suggestions, please talk to your doctor before using this mixture to cure specific ailments or conditions.  I know it works for me and my family, but if you’re allergic to citrus or garlic it’s obviously not a good idea.

Rediscovering the joy of writing - against all odds

As a reminder: Birgitte Rasine, a California-based member of Pen Parentis, is guest-blogging for us. Here is the first  installment from her travels to South America with toddler and writing in tow....

We writers have never had it better, easier, or more convenient to write.   Laptops are lighter, smaller, thinner, faster and more powerful than ever before.  We can write anywhere, anytime.  We can send entire manuscripts to our editors from anywhere in the world instantly—assuming wi-fi of course. 

So what do you do when you’re in a country where electronics are stolen on a daily basis, you can lose your life for an iPhone, you’re constantly traveling, and you’ve got your toddler and husband with you?

First, you choose the places where you take your laptop very carefully.  You pack it up in your oldest, scruffiest backpack, one that ideally you can lock with a small lock.  You never take it out in public.  In airports, you wear a poncho over your backpack to put one more barrier between you and the people who want to make the load on your back a little lighter (here, pro thieves actually purchase full price airline tickets in order to get into the waiting rooms in airports or the planes themselves—apparently the potential loot is worth the ticket).

Cell phone?  Sure, but make sure you lock that brand new iPhone in your suitcase or a safe, and get an outdated old “native” model with a local number.  You’ll blend in better that way.  Also, be sure to study the facial expressions of the locals walking down the street—and wear that look everywhere.

In some places, you simply don’t take your laptop—or smartphones, tablets, or other devices—at all.   Take it from a travel veteran: do leave home without it. 

So we writers might ask, OMG how am I going to write?  I need to keep writing!  I’m on a writing retreat (slash family vacation)!

It’s really very simple—and you can thank your stars that your profession is truly one of the oldest in the world: that of a scribe.  All we need to practice our craft are our minds, a writing utensil, and a surface to capture our words.  Translation: paper and pen.  That’s it. 

So when we traveled last week to the Caribbean island of Providencia, which required flying from Bogotà to the island of San Andrés, spending the night in a hotel, then continuing on to Providencia in a little 15-seater (it was either that or braving the wild open sea for 3 hours in a catamaran), I left my beloved laptop in Bogotà.  I’m working on a short story and a novella, so I printed out the short story and made notes (for a trip of 5 days with family, I knew I could realistically focus on just one work). 

I wrote everywhere.  In the airport, on the plane, in the hammock after lunch while my 2-year-old slept cuddled next to me, but above all, I woke up early and went down to the shore to be inspired by the early morning light of the Caribbean sun.

Hard to focus?  Yes.  Constant background noise and interruptions?  Absolutely.  But all of this forced me to reach deep into my mental reserves and hold on to that cord of inspiration, hold the hand of the muse that lives within all writers and blocks out all interruption and noise.  Some may call it meditation, others willpower; I call it the writer’s zen.  Given the challenge, if you rise to it, you’ll find an extraordinary source of internal tranquility you can tap at any time, any place.  It’s yours to take with you wherever you go.

And yet… there was plenty of inspiration in watching people milling about in the airport, rushing about their daily lives in the streets on the islands, and all of the mundane interactions I watched unfold as we traveled from airport to airport to hotel to beach to wherever else we went.  It was for this reason, for the incessant changes in surroundings and the nearly constant background din I knew would be the status quo of our trip, that I chose to bring along my short story rather than the novella.

I never missed my laptop.   Instead, I rediscovered the joy of writing longhand, something I rarely do anymore, and of being able to take my writing with me anywhere without concern about the unfortunate incompatibility of electronics with sand, sun, salt water, or rain—in the tropics it rains hard and without warning—and above all, about having my work stolen along with my laptop.

It was, in a word, idyllic.  Now as I type this blog on my computer back here in Bogotà, something seems missing… it could be the salt air, the turquoise waters, and the total, absolute timelessness of the islands.

Birgitte Rasine

Author

http://birgitte.lucita.net

www.facebook.com/birgitterasine

https://twitter.com/birgitte_rasine

p.s. Now about the international conflict that the island of Providencia is caught up in—and that I hinted at in my first blog post.  The islands of San Andrés and Providencia are Colombian territory, and have been since 1928 as per the Esguerra-Bárcenas Treaty.  It’s this treaty that Nicaragua has been disputing since 2001; on November 19 of this year, the International World Court of Justice at the Hague granted to Nicaragua an exclusive economic zone extending 200 nautical miles from its Caribbean coast.  This means the fishing population of Providencia and San Andrés will be essentially cut off from their livelihood.  Colombia is opposing the decision of the Court, at the highest levels of international governance, and there is potential for an international confrontation between the two countries.  We already had our tickets… and weren’t sure what sort of situation we would arrive in: would it be a pleasant island vacation or an international conflict? As it turned out, at least for now, the locals on the islands are fairly relaxed about the situation.  But we’ll have to wait and see.

Guest Blogger: Birgitte Rasine, Preparing for Colombia

Hope everyone has their tickets or reservations to Tuesday's Andaz Pen Parentis Authorfest!  It's going to be a great time! If you haven't yet reserved: click here and please note, it's standing room only at this point!  In the meantime, please read on for the first guest blog from Pen Parentis member Birgitte Rasine who is leaving today for a writing trip to South America with her toddler in tow:

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First things first: a big warm thanks to Milda De Voe for enthusiastically embracing the idea of blogging from the field as my family and I embark on a 2-month-long trip in Colombia.

Yes, we’re about to ship off to one of the world’s most beautiful, exotic, and in some minds, dangerous countries.

It’s not the first trip—I’ve been to Colombia a number of times, and loved it more each time.  But it was never a writing-retreat-slash-black-piranha-wrestling-in-ancient-rivers-slash-Caribbean-island-vacation-turned-potential-international-conflict.  With a toddler.

It’s the end of the year, and three years since my husband and I were able to have a real vacation (get-togethers for weddings and Christmas in Florida don’t count!).  So we decided to take two months in South America.  For him, it’s a chance to soak up several weeks of extreme fishing in the Orinoco river, for me it’s a long-deserved break from clients to do nothing but write, and for our daughter, it’s everything she has only seen in books—and the iPad.

(I’ll reveal what the Caribbean island is and why it’s involved in an international conflict in a future post.)

As any parent knows, the B.C. (“Before Children”) era simply does not compare with the A.B. (“After Birth”) period.  One is freedom, tranquility, restaurants and romantic evenings out.  The other is sleepless nights, food-strewn carpets, and classes in advanced psychology and negotiation skills.  And yet, somehow, nothing but nothing compares with being able to give your child the experience of a lifetime, many times over.  This trip is one of many that I want my daughter to experience, to open up her already inquisitive, nimble mind.  Discovery of the world simply cannot wait.

A little about me before we head off.  I’m a Czech-American author descended from a loooong family line that apparently goes back to the eleventh century.  I write shorter fiction (short stories and novellas) inspired by the painful romance of real life.  And the occasional non fiction work, like “The Serpent and the Jaguar”, a book about the Mayan Calendar and sacred time. 

As I sit here writing, my 2-year-old tucked in next to me on my usually ample executive chair, wriggling all over my lap while I endeavor to hit the right keys, I reflect on how stable and safe everything here in Northern California is (generally).  In Colombia, life is intense.  A kiss from a beetle can give you Chagas disease. Untold parasites in standing water everywhere.  Paramilitary trucks just around the bend of a rural road.  But the light is brighter, the air cleaner, the food richer and tastier, and the people are some of the most social, warm, hospitable on the planet.  Your senses sharpen, your memory is young again, and you forget where you came from.

I can’t wait to share it all with you.

Birgitte Rasine

Author

http://birgitte.lucita.net

www.facebook.com/birgitterasine

https://twitter.com/birgitte_rasine