Beacons of Light - 2013

At this time of year, as winter deepens and darkness spreads its seeds of doubt, I am heartened by the Beacons of Light--Sarah Lamstein, Dianne Ochiltree, Susan Campbell Bartoletti, and Pat McDermott--who illuminated the writing process for wordswimmers over this past year.

Thanks to their generosity and insights into their work, I've come to better understand how my own writing process works and how I might find ways to keep stepping into the water or plunging off the edge of the pool to continue swimming, even when the water seems too murky or too cold. I trust they've helped you, too.

Each year I find that wordswimmer helps me connect with other writers in unexpected ways. It was one of the goals of this blog when I first set out from shore in 2005 (before Facebook and other sites were part of my writing life) to provide a sense of community for writers and to encourage writers to make connections with each other.

I wanted to offer a place online where writers might share thoughts about the writing process or about a manuscript that is puzzling them or a book on the craft of writing that might have helped them through a tough spot. By sharing these aspects of our working lives, I believe we can help each other.

Writing can be a lonely profession, and it's easy to forget that we are not alone. The writers who shared their thoughts on writing over the past year with us are proof that writers can benefit from offering support to each other while we're in the water.

Here are four companions who you'll want to take with you as you set off on new adventures in the year ahead. You may have met them earlier in the year, but I'm sharing their words of wisdom again in the hope that they'll help you remember why you started swimming in the first place:

"Most always I set out but tire or think some island or mirage is shore. I set out again with new eyes and come closer. Again and again I set out, each time with newer eyes." -- Sarah Lamstein

http://wordswimmer.blogspot.com/2013/01/one-writers-process-sarah-lamstein.html

"When I swam laps at the YMCA as my daily exercise, my favorite part was the satisfaction and pleasure felt as I climbed out of the pool at the end…and so it is with writing.  “Having written” my daily dose of words gives me the sense that I have done my job, the thing I was put on earth to do. I believe no one actually chooses to be a writer.  It’s something that chooses you early in life, and you don’t feel 100% unless you write a bit each day.  It's a mission and a passion. It lets you splash in the kiddie pool and have fun, too! " -- Dianne Ochiltree

http://wordswimmer.blogspot.com/2013/02/one-writers-process-dianne-ochiltree.html

"You won’t see me dive into the water – unless you need me to rescue you. I tend to tiptoe around the shallow end, getting wet gradually, before I move into the deep end. The same is true for my writing. I know writers who plunge headfirst – and I admire their spirit and style - but you know what? We both make it to the finish line." --Susan Campbell Bartoletti

http://wordswimmer.blogspot.com/2013/03/one-writers-process-susan-campbell.html

"Most days I tiptoe in, though I make my share of graceful dives. At times, I’m reluctant to even get wet, or I’ll sit and wait for the water to pour over me and let me steep like a tea bag. My latest release, a YA set in Ireland, features a troop of water fairies who live in a palace beneath a lake. For the better part of a year, I swam with them nearly every day, sometimes jumping right in, sometimes wading, always wishing I had their webbed toes and fingers." -- Pat McDermott

http://wordswimmer.blogspot.com/2013/04/one-writers-process-pat-mcdermott.html

I don't know about you, but I find it comforting to look up from the page and find these writer/friends offering encouragement as I dip into a new project or wade through a swamp of revisions, cheering as I kick madly toward the finish line of my latest draft.

Thanks to these Beacons of Light for sharing insights into the writing process and for guiding us in the next stage of our journeys.

And thanks, wordswimmers, for stopping by this blog to test the water this past year. Your support and ongoing encouragement is a gift that inspires me to keep swimming despite the shoals and hidden reefs lurking beneath the surface.

May 2014 be a year of clear swimming for all.

One Writer's Process: Sarah Lamstein

Sarah Lamstein grew up in a house surrounded by books.

"Writing was in the air," says Lamstein, the winner of the 2008 Sydney Taylor Honor Award for her picture book, Letter on the Wind.

Her father loved writing stories, and Lamstein took great delight in reading them aloud to the family whenever he finished one. "Those times were as exciting to us," she says, "as opening night at a Broadway play."

Lamstein started out writing plays in fifth grade, then picked up her pen again when her own children were little, inspired to try her hand at writing for children by the books that they read together.

Since then, she's written a handful of picture books beloved by readers such as Big Night for Salamanders, Annie's Shabbat, and I Like Your Buttons, as well as the award-winning YA novel, Hunger Moon.

"Writing is like a great adventure, a grand 'expotition,' as Winnie-the-Pooh would say," admits Lamstein. "I feel lucky to be doing it."

She was kind enough to take some time from her current work-in-progress to share her thoughts on writing with wordswimmer:

Something pleases me, I want to write about it, celebrate it – a bird, a feast, an act of kindness.

If research is required, I do it and overdo it. Research is soothing. It postpones the writing.

The thought of writing is frightening, water over your head, panic. Actual writing quiets the flailing, though the shore is far off.

One time I made it to shore with sure, fast strokes. One time.

Most always I set out but tire or think some island or mirage is shore. I set out again with new eyes and come closer. Again and again I set out, each time with newer eyes.

The journey is long. At times the shore is unreachable.

Once in a blue moon, I stumble out of pulling pushing waves and stand on land. In a blue moon.

I write hopeful others will be pleased by what pleased me. And hopeful they will be pleased by the wrapping – the form, the sound, the rhetoric.

Once I wrote from shame, a swamp of difficult memory, a bad act.

In the service of tension and suspense, I darkened the past, fictionalized family.

In this way, shame begot shame.

I asked myself, should I be in this morass, laying bare, exaggerating, defaming? Still, I swam through the muck, effecting, for the sake of story, my character’s transformation and found I too, in a process intensely emotional, became transformed.

The displeasing turned pleasing. Shame’s underbelly exposed love. I was celebrating again – family, self. The swim was arduous, the ending calm.

I always return to the water, struggle toward land, return again to the water.

The water pleases me.

For more information about Sarah Lamstein and her work, visit her website:
http://www.sarahlamstein.com

To read an interview with her, visit:
http://barbarabbookblog.blogspot.com/2008/01/sarah-lamstein-letter-on-wind.html

An Exquisite Light

The late-afternoon light on the Gulf of Mexico is often so intense its reflection can blind you with a white, impenetrable glare.

Most of the time the light hits the blue-green water obliquely, sparkling like trails of glimmering jewels behind the gentle waves and hiding what's beneath the surface.

But, on rare occasions, you can witness a kind of miracle: an exquisite light striking the water at a magical angle and revealing simultaneously what's on the surface and what's hidden beneath.

That's the kind of light Sarah Lamstein directs onto the pages of her novel, Hunger Moon, a deeply moving story about 12-year-old Ruthie and her struggle to make sense of life amidst a family burdened by her younger brother's "slowness" and her parents' growing frustration with the challenges of caring for such a child while struggling to live on the meager income from the family's bookstore.

What Lamstein does in this novel is quite astonishing... showing both the surface of Ruthie's world and its hidden depths simultaneously.

Here's one example:

After dinner, I help Dad do dishes. He washes. I dry. Just the two of us, which makes me start telling my news of the day about spelling the states and starting on wax begonia plants in Science. Dad takes his soapy hand out of the water without turning any other part of him and points it in my direction. His soap-drippy fingers are like a goose's beak when he opens them, shuts them, opens them, shuts them, opens, shuts, opens, shuts, fast, sign language for: clam up your stories, hold your juicy tongue, you're clogging my ears.

I'm quiet after that. I dry the dishes and put them carefully one on top of the other, turning my back to Dad so he won't see a crybaby. (p. 22-3)

Do you see how the light penetrates beneath the surface, yet illuminates both the concrete details of Ruthie's life and her emotional state simultaneously?

How did Lamstein do that?

She stays on the surface, describing the act of father and daughter washing and drying dishes together, offering details in a waterfall of observations that build to a climax of sorts within the paragraph itself as Dad grows upset with Ruthie's attempt at conversation.

You get the sense of Ruthie's desire for intimacy, don't you? And, for a moment ("just the two of us"), it's there... that intimacy. And when Ruthie feels that intimacy, that safety, she begins to share her day, only to find herself silenced by her father's gesture of opening and closing his hand ("his soap-drippy fingers are like a goose's beak").

And that image of the goose's beak is, I think, what allows the reader to feel the pain that Ruthie feels at the moment... because it's as if that beak has reached out of the page and snapped at us, too.

So we understand fully Ruthie's withdrawal into silence, her care in drying the plates so as not to draw any further attention to herself, her desire to hide her feelings from this person to whom, only moments ago, she was willing to reveal herself.

And, as a result of this scene, we have a fuller, deeper understanding of their relationship and Ruthie's struggle to have her voice heard.

Here's another sample:

Thanksgiving dinner. Dad gives Mom white meat first, then Grandma and Grandpa Tepper. Good he remembers.

Michael laughs and looks at Isaac. Isaac chews fast, like a rabbit, and picks turkey pieces out of his mouth.

"Isaac!" Mom slams her hand on the table.

Eddy's spit-up comes out.

Grandma Tepper lifts off her seat, then falls back down. "Oh!" she says. After that, she pokes at her food, at her turkey, cranberry sauce, and mashed potatoes.

But no one says, "Can't you stop yelling, even for Thanksgiving?"(p. 57)

Once again, Lamstein gives us only the surface details of a seemingly uneventful Thanksgiving dinner.

But almost immediately there's a hit of danger lurking beneath the surface ("Good he remembers.") Ruthie knows the subsurface currents, the danger of forgetting when it's safe to step into the water.

And then Mom's hand comes crashing down on the table at Isaac's poor table manners, and the crash causes Eddy to spit up... and Ruthie knows (and we feel) the current has increased to a dangerous speed, threatening to sweep away the happiness of that day.

Lamstein shows us Grandma's reaction to the crash of the hand on the table... and it's through her reaction that we understand how Ruthie feels, and then Lamstein underscores Ruthie's emotional response with the final observation of what's not said at the table.

That one comment lets us understand just how painful it is for Ruthie to sit at the table and hear her mother shouting, how painful it is to live within this family.

Again and again throughout Hunger Moon, Lamstein directs a beam of light at just the right angle so that it illuminates the surface and what's happening beneath the surface, enabling us to swim through different layers of light and water simultaneously.

I'll close with just one more example... the note of hope toward which the story builds:

After cake, we clear the table. Mom puts leftovers in Pyrex and Dad washes the dishes. Eddy brings in one fork at a time.

"Thank you, Eddy," Dad says.

I go upstairs and water my begonia, growing up against the cold, green arms reaching. When it gets warmer, I'll open up my window and that plant will climb out even taller. (p. 109)

Thanks to this image, readers can hope that Ruthie, like the plant, will climb ever-taller "against the cold" and continue reaching toward the exquisite light of her own resilient self.

For more information about Sarah Lamstein's work, visit her website at:
http://www.sarahlamstein.com/