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Where I Don’t Write

October 17, 2013 Essays, In House

In his autobiographical novel on D.H. Lawrence Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer laments his inability to write the book he wanted because he couldn’t figure out where to live. “One of the reasons, in fact, that it was impossible to get started on [the Lawrence book] was because I was so preoccupied with where to live. I could live anywhere, all I had to do was choose—but it was impossible to choose because I could live anywhere.”

House in black and white

I have the same problem. I’m a migrant and a wanderer, and I’m never really sure where my home is located – in the environment, or inside me? I’ve come to an unsteady way of dealing with this uncertainty, mostly by rolling with it. I’ve also learned that direct, personal experience in the world is essential to my writing. Last summer I wrote my way through a Trans-Siberian train ride from Moscow to Novosibirsk while hanging on to the side of a swaying second-class bunk bed, trying to explain to my babushka compartment-mates that I was working on an historical novel. Last fall I finished off several stories and articles for publication amid showers of asbestos at Art Farm, Nebraska, a cooperative, self-sustaining artists’ colony that is about as close to nature and rusticity as one can get without actually becoming a wild animal. Every day from my desktop I was obliged to sweep away the powder of synthetic insulation and possibly cancerous substances that had rained from the homemade ceiling during the night. As winter approached, we practically burned floorboards for warmth. We wrote and wrote as we huddled around the fireplace.

Who’s Writing Real Brooklyn Stories?

October 7, 2013 Essays, In House

By JULIA LICHTBLAU

Apple-crisp air, periwinkle sky. A world-class day in the Borough of Storytellers. As it does each third Sunday in September, on September 22, the Brooklyn Book Festival took over the esplanade in front of Borough Hall and adjacent buildings in Brooklyn Heights.

Writers are the latest Brooklyn demographic to become a national punch line. Like Jackie Gleason, only skinny. Last year, the festival claimed 40,000 visitors. —They haven’t released this year’s figures, but the joint was packed.

The list of presenters was a mix of Bold-Face Names (Colum McCann, Lois Lowry, Jules Feiffer) and serious up-and-comers. The panels covered a judicious mix of topics, weighted toward the international and multicultural.

West Eugene Dawn, Summer Solstice

September 16, 2013 In House, Poetry

By JAMES ALAN GILL

The first sound is the gong

Of a dumpster, kicked possibly

By one of the homeless twins

Who live at The Mission, followed

By the rattle of glass and aluminum—

Signs of early success—against the cages

Of their grocery carts filled with cans, bottles,

Anything stamped with 5¢ deposit

Next to our state’s abbreviation.

How Should I Care For?

August 12, 2013 Essays, In House

By ELIZABETH WITTE

1. Consider what damages

Yes, light, pests, dirt, but also the whole climate, and pets and people. Don’t forget the stress of storage or display. Whether to be “used and enjoyed” or “saved and preserved” – you must decide. There is no quick or simple answer. I was given this, but how should I make sure it is safe? That it does not begin to decay, then all but disappear. There are basic measures that anyone can take. Preserving fibers will prolong life.

Ultraviolet light from the sun and fluorescent lights cause permanent damage. Be alert to how the sunlight might be reflecting off a wall or mirror.

Swimming, In Two Parts

July 8, 2013 Essays, In House

By JULIA LICHTBLAU

Pools

Washington, D.C., summers have been hot since forever, so a place to swim is a necessity, not a luxury. In the 1950s and 1960s, no one had air conditioning at home, and the Potomac River was so polluted that a tetanus shot was advised if you fell in. We lived in Southeast when I was little, and my parents would drive across town to Georgetown, the rich part of the city, to the public pool. My mother says I would throw myself in if she took her hand off me; she was constantly thanking people for rescuing the baby.

21st Century Oregon Trail

June 24, 2013 Essays, In House

By JAMES ALAN GILL

There are countless books written on what to do after an extra-marital affair, advice custom built for the betrayed and the betrayer. I’m not sure if any of them suggest quitting jobs, selling the house, and moving 2500 miles west to Oregon. But that’s what we did. A friend who lived there said, “There’s something to be said about traveling across the entire continent, coming to the point where there is no more land, and throwing all of your problems into the Pacific Ocean. There’s no choice but to start over.”

Neither of our families were supportive. We did all the packing ourselves and hired a truck to drive our things across country. When the unmarked semi pulled onto our narrow street, three Hispanic men jumped out ready to load everything inside. Our neighbor, an old woman whose husband—a crusty old fellow named Peck—had died a few months previous, came over and said, “I guess you all are moving then?”

Jordan Rift Valley

June 22, 2013 Essays, In House

By MARIAN CROTTY

We came to the Dead Sea as an afterthought, five of us wedged into one taxi on our way to the airport. So far we had spent our Jordanian daylight inside a conference room, listening to other Fulbright scholars present research about the Middle East and North Africa, and our evenings in large group dinners comparing notes. Within hours, my new friends would scatter back to Morocco, Oman, and Israel, and I would return to my temporary home in the city of Al Ain in the United Arab Emirates. The conference had been delicious and heady claustrophobia, like interval training for academics. We acquired and processed new information, alternating between externalized and internalized thought, acquisition and analysis, as if variety could substitute for rest. What I’m saying is that we were a certain kind of tired. When we unhooked ourselves from the backseat of the taxi, language was beginning to hurt.

3 Movies: In Conversation

June 10, 2013 Essays, In House

By ELIZABETH WITTE

These were not snapshots, but motion pictures – hence, “movies.” Or rather, they were “talkies” – sound happened too. And through editing there were unions and disunions of movement and sound, the building of story, of character. In the span of seven weeks I watched three.

Things we experience in close proximity in time come to bear on each other, bridge the gaps between them. Persons in close proximity attempt a similar bridging.

The first movie was a drama, imagined from the ground up. The other two were documentaries crafted from ongoing lives. Each brought a unique document of a couple-at-home to the screen in my home.

Changing Places: Ich Bin Ein Berliner

May 27, 2013 Essays, In House

By MELODY NIXON

We painted lipstick on our lips and watched businessmen in suits flip open Die Welt, grazing the top of the newspaper with their line of sight, conspicuously shy in their observations of two foreign frauen. The train shot into Berlin’s Hauptbanhof with succinct precision, confirming one of our German stereotypes: 7.00pm exactly on Dec 31^st, 2003, and not a minute late. My friend and I hoisted backpacks and flowed out of the central station and into a city that was eagerly, furiously rebuilding, was humming with energy, and was dusty and heterogeneous and still could not quite figure out how to contain itself. 2004 seemed like an inauspicious year to welcome.

Homage to a Failed Venture: The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal

May 13, 2013 Essays, In House

By JULIA LICHTBLAU

If Washingtonians have a patron saint, it’s the late Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. The longest-serving Supreme Court Justice, a famous defender of civil liberties, Douglas was a committed environmentalist, who wanted to be remembered for leaving the earth more beautiful.

In February, Texas A&M University’s Transportation Institute dubbed the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan area Number One in the U.S. for traffic. Local drivers fritter away on average sixty-seven hours and thirty-two gallons of gasoline a year in traffic.

I was born in Washington and spent a good part of my childhood in the area. Though I haven’t lived there in years, each time I go “home,” I feel grateful to Justice Douglas for preventing my favorite Washington place, the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, from becoming just another congested highway.