It’s been a productive week at The Green Study. Every surface is covered with books, files, and random Post-It notes. The white boards have hastily-scrawled notes and lists. After weeks of struggling with insomnia, I stopped struggling and sometimes I was up at 2:30 a.m. writing. It reset my brain to be up at odd times and ideas started pouring out. This post is a reflection of that – a little bit of everything.
It’s the Spirit of Intent
I spent a lot of time doing work for the League of Women Voters this week. Things are stepping up as we get closer to the midterms. I felt a strong desire to focus on these nonpartisan issues, even as I felt the dark cloud of partisan hackery above, preparing to rain down on all our heads.
Some days it seems like too many ethically-challenged, bad people are gaining power and steam. I was lucky enough to come across the feed of writer, A.R. Moxon, who also has a blog. It was this thread that made me think about the spirit of each of the various tribes of people – what direction were they moving in? What future did they think awaited them? Who did they choose to follow? What was the intent, the outcome, the process? Who were they becoming in that process?
And what about the idea of bad people? Is it helpful? Politics is not a useful framework for defining our spirit. It is not Survivor or a team sport – there are no true winners if we cannot find common ground and serve the common good. And this is evident from all tribes – the fierceness, the words and memes meant to cut someone down to size. We are responsible for who we become as individuals. This week, I want to be like the women in my LWV chapter who have served the cause of voting rights for decades – dedicated, steadfast, deliberate, singular in purpose and thoughtful in words.
We get to choose which spirit we follow and embody.
Book Talk
I was contacted by JKS Communications, publicists who work with a writer I admire. They’d seen the blog and wondered if they could send me some of the books they were representing, in case I’d like to talk about them here. This never happened to me before, but let’s just say I did a giddy little dance around the house. I believe at one point I picked up a book, stared at it lovingly, and whirled about belting out “the hills are alive…with books”. When I babbled excitedly to my husband and daughter, they both glanced warily about the study, as precarious stacks of lit magazines and books were everywhere.
I told the representative that I don’t write reviews. I just write about what I read. I waited for a response. And she was perfectly lovely about it. This is all to say that I’m going to read a couple of books and likely will tell you about them, but for the sake of integrity, felt compelled to be up front about it. Plus, I’m still a little giddy.
One book that I didn’t get gratis, was by a blogger who I have been following for a couple of years. Dave Astor blogs at Dave Astor on Literature and I’ve enjoyed his wonderful posts, rambling through literary connections and themes. He has a nifty little tome called Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time: The Book Lover’s Guide to Literary Trivia. My only complaint was that each chapter left me wanting more. Maybe next volume, Dave.
My One Thing
There was a Billy Crystal movie in 1991 called City Slickers. In a scene between Curly, a crusty old cowboy and Crystal’s character, Mitch, he talks about the meaning of life.
Curly: Do you know what the secret of life is? [holds up one finger] This.
Mitch: Your finger?
Curly: One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and the rest don’t mean shit.
Mitch: But, what is the “one thing?”
Curly: That’s what you have to find out.
I was 24 at the time so I sort of, kind of, understood, but not really. The characters in the movie were on the cusp of being middle-aged. As I move from the middle to just straight-up aged, I’ve been struggling with a sense of purpose. It feels like it’s been this way always – likely an innate part of the human condition. The challenge is getting out of my own way, cutting through the imperfect perfectionism and procrastination. I have awkwardly begun to do what I want to do.
Dirty dishes sat on the counter, my daughter ran out of jeans, my family foraged for their own meals, and the cats scratched their own bellies. I was writing. I wrote and wrote and wrote, consequences be damned. I submitted a short story to a lit mag and didn’t throw up from anxiety. I came up with a plan for November’s National Novel Writing Month. This time I’m writing a big sociopolitical novel that I’m very excited about. The world did not stop spinning on its axis because I ignored my chores. My child did not need bail money. My husband was able to find things. Nothing happened except for one thing.
Life got easier. All the things that I’d been wrestling with, from feeling sort of useless as a human to getting enough exercise to my exhaustion from heavy social interaction. It all faded away to the background. I had finally brought the right thing into focus. My one thing. I brushed away the fleeting thought that I’d wasted a lot of time getting here. If you’re a writer, I rationalized, it’s all research and material, no matter what you’ve been doing.
If you’re doing NaNoWriMo next month and want a writing buddy, you can find me on the site at MMJayne.
Gratitude
Thank you to the Writers’ Studio, a group of lovely and talented people I joined in September. Having that space to read, write, listen, and talk about writing has encouraged me to embrace my one thing.
Thanks also to Amy, who has bravely embarked on a nonfiction collaboration with me. I love that our connection has found new ways to expand and grow.
And last, but definitely not least, thank you for reading, subscribing, or commenting. As I 
close in on this blog’s seventh anniversary, I marvel at how much the online world has changed since I began, but that I still enjoy writing here. With so many things grabbing our attention, it becomes harder to find community and connections. Anything we do to improve that, from connecting with bloggers on the other side of the planet to giving each other an encouraging Like or Hell, Yeah in the comments – these things do make a difference.
This is the drill sergeant approach. Take someone who is feeling down and out, tell them what to do, and then suggest that they’re a failure if they can’t make it happen. This is, essentially, what many self-help books do. Throw in a little moralizing and finger-wagging and you get the idea. This is, to loot modern terminology, self-help shaming. What? We told you what to do. If you’re not happy now, there’s something wrong with you.
besides a brain chemical imbalance. The positivity movement of the 1990s, in its self-congratulatory glee and smiley faces, runs roughshod over obstacles to good mental health.
So those are some of the pitfalls. The biggest one, of course, is believing that you are one constant DIY project. I’ve unraveled a lot of the thinking around that. I like self-improvement pursuits, but it’s very easy to focus so hard on trying to be better, that you fail to appreciate the things about yourself that are pretty good. And when pretty good is good enough.
Many years ago, I read L. Ron Hubbard’s “Dianetics” – the tome associated with Scientology. The one thing I learned was to think about my reactions to situations and whether or not I was reacting to what was in front of me or to other memories and connections related to the situation. That’s pretty much all I got out of a 600+ page book, but it was something.
My Abbreviated History of Self-Help Books
I fumed well into the night after attending an open book club at my local library. At first, I was hopeful. There were discussion worksheets with great analytical questions about the book laid out on the tables. Except they didn’t use the worksheet. Many people hadn’t even finished reading the book.
Growing up an intense reader can put one with odds with the outside world. Especially if that world, as mine was, is a place of drunken brawls and cars on blocks in the front yard (that stereotype really holds up). Mocked for always having one’s nose in a book or being too smart for their own good is a surefire way to make a kid feel like they are not quite right.
It’s become clear to me that I’m hungry to connect with others about books. Flirting with Goodreads, exchanges here on the blog when I write about books – these tentative attempts are happening more frequently. But I have to come to terms with the fact that I’ve become much more analytical in my reading than I’ve been in the past and that the level of discourse I need goes beyond that of an audience entertained by a storyteller. I am a storyteller who wants to be a better one.
I recently rejoined Goodreads after a long absence and am pondering whether or not to write book reviews. I haven’t done so in the past, as a rule, for a number of reasons.
And lastly, we live in a culture that has elevated everyone’s opinions to something more than they are. We’re constantly being asked to review products, vacation spots, experiences, to like things, to star things…I find it all unsettling. Most people would argue that they’re being helpful and maybe it is. Maybe it forces business entities to improve, but books? They’re a done deal.
allowed pets. We don’t have a pet, but it was reasonably priced. We do, however, have a preference for rooms without carpet stains and an underlying smell of dog piss. Still, we laughed it off, didn’t throw a tantrum at management, didn’t wig out on Trip Advisor. It was only one night and we were right on the shore. From the balcony, using binoculars, we were delighted and surprised to see a pod of whales swimming northward. We were able to spot them well into the evening and the next morning as well. Had we read the reviews, paused to think what pet hotel meant, we would have missed something people pay quite a lot to see.
One of the most disheartening experiences I try to avoid now is the referral of books to people. There are books that have lifted me up and brought me such joy, only to have a friend say “it didn’t resonate with me” – that passive, equivocating, damning phrase. I felt different about the friendship after that. Some people have religion. I have the written word. It is fair to say, this makes me a tad irrational about the subject.
There is something flattering and obsequious about being asked for one’s opinion. When someone asks my opinion, my brain lights up, preparing to expound. I suspect it taps into something I don’t like about myself very much – that given the right circumstances, I’d be a horrible know-it-all who doesn’t shut up, who would run roughshod over others – someone who would never be invited back again.
Over the last couple of years, I’ve begun a practice of reading as a writer. I read nothing without a notebook and pen. I take notes, copy phrases, write questions. It’s a way of forcing myself to slow down, to take notice, to not just gorge myself. I’ve always been a gluttonous, speedy reader, forgetting what I’ve read ten minutes after I’ve read it. Slowing down and really absorbing the words has changed my reading experience significantly. Perhaps it has become such a luxury, that I don’t wish to exploit it for public purposes, I don’t know.
Last week I went to a book talk given by Colson Whitehead. He wrote the award-winning fiction work 
Much of what we believe and who we associate with is grounded in childhood experiences. I was a white kid from a poor midwestern family, where alcoholism and domestic violence were defining characteristics. I knew three people of color from ages 0-17 and my family had a branch of the racist variety. I heard a lot of slurs and “jokes” growing up. I didn’t understand most of them. I saw the “Roots” mini-series when I was ten, which was pointlessly jarring without mature context and I read Harper Lee’s 
I just finished reading 
I just finished reading 
reading Toni Morrison’s 
Reading outside one’s experience often has the surprising effect of connection, not just understanding. Our basic humanity is one and the same. That a white woman could identify with the main character in Ralph Ellison’s 
The Green Study 