How rare that is, and how welcome. And how fitting too given my determination in this newsletter to find joy in the often maddening work we do.

This impulse came to me shortly after 11PM last night when the New York Knicks, my Knicks, the basketball team that for over 60 years I have followed, cheered, prayed for, despairing over, celebrated and, yes, sometimes denigrated, won the NBA championship for the first time in 53 years.

Together with my wife, who has been a die-hard Knicks fan since last Wednesday – she is a quick study, and now, in her second full game was fairly screaming at every unjust foul and missed shot – I had sweated the fourth quarter, another how-in-the-name-of-all-that-is sacred-did-they-do-that Knick comeback against the young and talented San Antonio Spurs.

I stayed up late to watch the postgame – interviews, highlights, trophy presentations, the locker room champagne showers (was that Moet being sprayed? Classy) not ready to let it end.

We were out of town, far from the noisy hoopla and so had to live vicariously through the account of our younger kid from a very loud and happy bar in Northern Manhattan.

But then came this morning and with the dawn came the dispatches from the arena and better still from the streets of New York: Bedlam. Delirium. And why it all mattered. Which it did.

Here was the terrific Matt Flegenheimer in the New York Times:

“So this is how it feels.

“It is giggling, weeping, spinning, convulsing, mosh-pitting, truck-honking, law-skirting, trumpet-playing, cowbell-ringing, off-key-singing, cigar-lighting, all-night-ing — remembering to remember it all, as if Knicks fans would ever forget.

“It is hugging strangers so hard they go airborne, fist-bumping cabbies as they crawl through concrete delirium, high-fiving kids on shoulders (and adults on shoulders), climbing stoplights and trees and scaffolding to wave the team flag higher, swiping utility cones and wearing them as hats because they are orange.

“It is tears blotting the pavement outside Madison Square Garden, where New Yorkers had for generations walked off disappointment after debacle after heartbreak after OK-that’s-just-cruel.

No sooner had I finished this gem, then David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker who, in another life, had been a basketball writer, weighed in:

“Joy is here and gone, but we Knicks fans feel it now, we’re embracing it now, from Gun Hill Road, in the Bronx, to Hylan Boulevard, on Staten Island, from Times Square to Grand Army Plaza; from the watch parties in Bryant Park and outside the Garden (buzz off, James Dolan!) and on countless city corners; we’re feeling it in all the filled-to-bursting bars in Elmhurst, Boerum Hill, Astoria, the West Village, and Harlem; on all the buzzing chat groups (“Did you see THAT!” “The refs are murdering us!” “WTF!” “Yes! We did it!”); in suburban living rooms, in hospital waiting rooms, in the backs of cabs, in all the far-flung corners where the Knicks are beloved—joy everywhere. At the wedding I’m attending upstate, a clutch of guests suddenly burst out cheering. Inappropriately. (They’d been furtively watching the game on their phones when the Knicks took the lead down the stretch. Sorry, Coop and Olivia!) From all over the city came reports of stranger-on-stranger hugging; of people crying ecstatically; of subway delays and honking, honking, honking everywhere. “Thank you, Jesus!” said Spike Lee down in San Antonio. “Thank you, Jalen!” said New Yorkers everywhere. Joy! Fleeting, perhaps, but the Knicks are champions without doubt, and it’s been an intense pleasure to watch a team of such flash and fortitude, bravado and humility, prevail after more than half a century of waiting. It is a precious thing.”

I could not get enough of it. And, in turn, got me thinking: surely others, and not necessarily New Yorkers, have experienced such moments – on the field, in the arena, on the streets after the game was won.

What had they written? What had joy compelled them to say?

Plenty. And in the spirit of such moments and the prose it inspires, here are some examples, to remind us all how wonderful writing can be when it comes from a full and happy heart.

John Updike on Ted Williams hitting a home run in his final at bat.

“It was in the books while it was still in the sky. Brubaker, the first-base coach, was waving his arms, and Williams, rounding first, turned to look. He did not tip his hat. Though we were ignorant of what record this was, we knew it was a record of some kind, and the crowd rose, with that noise of a man arising from a chair — a great slow rustle — and we all felt that we had witnessed something final, and something beginning.”

“Gods do not answer letters.”

Nick Hornby on Arsenal winning the league championship on the last kick in the final game.

“I have seen thousands of goals, some of them wonderful, and I have felt what the man next to me felt, and the man next to him, and right around the ground, and beyond the ground to people at home listening on the radio or watching on television: the same gasp, the same groan, the same cheer. And in those moments I was connected to something huge.”

Red Smith on Bobby Thomson’s 1951 pennant-winning “shot heard around the world” home run.

“Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again.”

C.L.R. James, in “Beyond a Boundary,” on cricket and colonialism.

“The British tradition soaked into me was that when you entered the sporting arena you left behind you the sordid compromises of everyday existence. Yet for us to do that we had to do two things at once: play the game as the British did, and at the same time fight against them.”

Bob Considine on the 1938 heavyweight championship fight between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling.

“Listen to this, buddy, for it comes from a guy whose palms are still wet, whose throat is still dry, and whose jaw is still agape from the utter shock of watching Joe Louis knock out Max Schmeling in one round of their scheduled 15-round world heavyweight championship fight.”

And then, Maya Angelou, on listening to the same fight on the radio.

“Champion of the world. A Black boy. Some Black mother’s son. He was the strongest man in the world. People drank Coca-Cola like ambrosia and ate candy bars like Christmas.”

With that my wishes for a good and happy summer. I will be at Thursday’s parade, with a few million of my new closest friends.

* * *

Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture

Tomás Asurmendi

I wish I could tell my students that their future need not be freighted by this tension. But as much as I want to be encouraging I cannot lie.

I’ve been researching the psychological component of the writing life. I believe that with greater understanding I can come closer to making good on the mission of this newsletter: as a journey to finding joy in our often maddening work.

Now that my teaching life has come to a close after 35 years, I’ve been thinking back to the ways that I tried to make life and work easier for my students, and the ways that, while unintended, I fell short. I tried to be encouraging, to remind my students of the gifts and skills they brought to their work, and of the power their words possessed. But I also realize that my students came to depend on seeing in me – and in my colleagues, and later their editors – a source of validation: Michael says I’m good so maybe I am.

Validation of creative work is a complicated business. It can either be uplifting or stunting. The research on validation is copious and its findings are not surprising. The work originates chiefly with Erik Erikson’s research on identity, a process most associated with adolesence but which continues long after.

In short, we wish to see ourselves through the approving eyes of those we hold in high esteem – parents, teachers, bosses, as well as by the institutions they represent – schools and workplaces,

But placing too much emphasis at an early age on seeking validation can derail the essential if torturous journey of defining ourselves on our own terms. There is a reason we are typically hot messes in high school and college; in fact, that is as it should be. Think of those people you knew and hated who peaked at 15; everyone who didn’t necessarily approve of you but loved them. The price they paid was never knowing for sure who they were independent of the powerful people who gave them a thumbs up.

But here is the thing: we never quite lose this need for validation. It is the eternal story of otherwise smart and capable people – lawyers and politicians, say – willingly surrendering any vestige of self worth in exchange for the approval of a powerful person.

We walk into a classroom or workplace or editor’s office and figure out in no time what is expected of us. And it takes very little on the validators’ part to assure us we’re in their good graces; sometimes even a smile is enough, as this study showed. The experiment, however, suggested that approval can undermine creativity, saying in effect, you can stop trying now.

Creativity is a far lonelier endeavor, where the risks are your own to take. It is all well and good to say we do not care what others think. But that is seldom the case. Writing in particular forces us to be public with our work, and we hope it will be approved of. Or, if you will, validated.

And herein lies the conundrum at the heart of the writer’s life: we are rewarded for our creativity and yet will risk surrendering it for something as seemingly small as a smile.

Time does not cure this. I know it because I still live it. As I’ve written before, I’ve been at work for the past five years on a book that matters deeply to me, more than any I’ve written. It took me a very long time to sort out what the book was about – I had a sense, but the gulf between sensing and knowing is as wide as the Pacific. I spent a lot of time spelunking down research rabbit holes, only to be pulled out by my wife and brother who told me that it was time to start writing. I did, in memos and letters and drafts that over time expanded into some 20 different Google docs.

I taped together six sheets of 8 1/2 x 11 sheets of paper and drew a chapter by chapter time line. I was getting my arms around the material and the story. The skills and experience that I had gained in six previous books and which I had feared had abandoned me, began returning. I could see a path forward, a long one but a way.

There are advantages in being a late bloomer like me – raise your hand if you too had a boss twice tell you “maybe you’d be happier working someplace else“ – and one is a certain freedom from seeking validation because when it mattered most you never got it. A confidence builder, albeit of a particularly hard-edged sort.

Yet what I still wanted, what I needed, was to know that in the end things would be okay – that my book would have a home, a publisher who would not only print, bind and design a handsome cover, but assure me that I was still part of the club. Validation, by another name.

This was understandable. It was also a mistake. I had undertaken this project with the wise counsel of an editor friend: you need to approach it as a novelist would. You need to write not a proposal and sample chapter that an agent could try to sell; you need to write the book.

Thrilling and terrifying. And terror will always win out. So I went in search of a new agent, having parted ways with my agent of many years. Perhaps a new agent could find my book a home, and I could stop worrying that it, and I, would not be publishing orphans.

I have stopped looking for an agent, at least for now. I spoke to three but things went no further than preliminaries. I am, as they say of athletes approaching free agency, betting on myself. Much as I feared this moment I now see how seeking validation set me back. It made me tentative and reactive. It made me feel like a supplicant.

Uncertainty is inherent in risk. The trick is acknowledging that uncertainty, accepting its inevitability, and understanding that while it can be managed it cannot be made to disappear.

Risk is the voice that whispers – you will fail. The best any of us can do is to ask it to hold off for a bit, because we are writing and do not wish to be disturbed.

I’ll be back, says that voice.

I know, we reply. We’ll be ready.

* * *

Old habits die hard, which means that as the academic year comes to a close, we’ll be starting our annual summer leave. Hope your writing goes well – and that you also make time for a break. We’ll be back and ready to help after Labor Day.

* * *

Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture

Like this gem from Goethe: “Publishers are all cohorts of the devil; there must be a special hell for them somewhere.”

And this one from George Bernard Shaw: “I finished my first book seventy-six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth I had ever heard of. Their refusals were unanimous: and it did not get into print until, fifty years later; publishers would publish anything that had my name on it.”

So, you see, it’s not just you.

There are a lot of reasons why writers hate publishers. Publishers say no. They say it a lot. Publishers have a lot of reasons for saying no, mostly because they conclude that the book will not make enough money.

It is no secret that in recent years publishers have been saying no with increased frequency and as Jane Austen might have put it, alacrity. This is generally attributed to the consolidation of publishing houses into effectively five, whose corporate masters insist on the promise of a return on their investments and so tolerate a vastly diminished appetite for risk. No best seller, no contract.

If you think this only makes writers upset just talk to an editor, whose time is ever more devoted to trying to figure out what other than a book by a famous person who will spill all, will sell. I will confess that I have joked a few too many times that I should abandon my current labor-of-love-and-frustration book project and instead write something like “Swifty at 70!!; Confessions of a Late to the Game Geriatric Fan.”

At such moments it is important to step back and ask: what, exactly, does a publisher do for me?

They print my book. They have little time to edit my book. They will bind my book. They will bring it to market. And there, with little to no help in boosting sales, that book will have approximately six weeks to find an audience before being whisked off the shelves and, in short order, end up in a vast warehouse someplace in the Great Plains, where it will await the dark fate of being pulped, the literary equivalent of the equine glue factory.

And yet we long for publishers to say yes, to grant us their seal of approval, a time-honored longing that places writers – without whom, ahem, there would be no books to publish – in a decidedly subordinate position.

But lately more writers are reassessing their unhealthy relationship with publishers and asking themselves a question that brings to mind a moment I witnessed many years ago in Tokyo when A.M. Rosenthal, the legendarily mercurial editor of the New York Times poked his head in the window of a cab and, informed that the driver was off-duty, screamed (and I quote): What the fuck good are you?

Rosenthal, car-less, was left to search for another cab. Writers are discovering that they can take matters into their own hands.

My favorite example of this is Mike Sager.

Sager has been a writer for 40 years. He has written for the Washington Post, Rolling Stone, GQ and Esquire. In 2010 he won the American Society of Magazine Editors National Magazine award for profile writing. A number of his articles have been optioned for or have inspired movies and documentaries, including Boogie Nights. He has also written more than a dozen books and eBooks.

But what I most admire about Mike Sager is what he did in 2012. He founded his own publishing house, The Sager Group.

I wondered how he did it, and more importantly, why.

Sager, a writer to the core, had things to say.

Why after so many years of success as a writer did you decide to become a publisher? Was mainstream publishing leaving an opening for a new approach?

Around 2009 or 2010, I noticed that Amazon was offering four of my five Big Six (now five) books as eBooks. Though nobody from the three publishing companies involved had mentioned that the eBooks were coming, I was happy for the new revenue stream and the possibilities of electronic books.

Then I noticed that my first bestselling book, from which several movies had sprung, was not among Amazon’s list of my eBooks.

Typical writer, outraged at the apparent snub, I called my publisher in a huff.

On the call, my editor explained the royalty set up for the eBooks, was still 7.5% per book.

He also explained that in 2003, when Scary Monsters and Super Freaks was signed, there was no provision for eBook rights.

I owned the rights. Wow.

In the time it took my husband-and-wife IT team to figure out self-publishing on Amazon, the world of journalism—and particularly my field of literary journalism—and publishing in general, began circling the drain. (Back then of course, we had no inkling that the notions of fact and truth would go down with it)

After 35 years of monthly checks, there were no more for me. Freelancing was just as bad as I’d remembered in 1984. They were paying the same amount as 1984, too. And, like 1984, each new editor had some quirk that screwed up whatever masterpiece you wrote. There was obviously a need for something else.

Back in 1990, when I was with Rolling Stone, I spent a few weeks embedded with the rapper Ice Cube. He’d just split from the seminal hip-hop group NWA and was making his first record. We were hanging out by the curb, leaning on the car, catching some air, when he started preaching his economic philosophy. It was a time when musicians were learning to hold onto their own rights and make their own deals instead of relying on legions of managers. He’d figured out, he said, that he could make his art and own it and make money too. He could Harness the Means of Production, he said.

After nearly five decades of journalism, I started thinking about what Ice Cube said, a little bit of bastardized Marx perhaps, but no less salient. For all those years as a writer, I loved my job, I did well, but there was a hell of a lot of supplication and approval-seeking that went into doing it. On one side were the bosses. On the other side were the sources. I was always in the middle with my nose up someone’s butt.

With The Sager Group I could be the master of my own yes and no.

What has gone well, and what obstacles have you encountered - things for those who might want to follow your lead to know

Over 14 years we’ve published nearly 160 books. We’ve had a number of people repeat the experience with us, so maybe I’ve published 150 different authors. I treat every person as I’d like to be treated. I was a writer, of course. Still am, I suppose. Being a writer is more a state of being than anything else. I was also a professor of writing. I know a whole lot about being a person who is a writer, for better and worse. Just about anything that can happen to a writer happened to me in five decades or so. Some of it I can prevent. The rest of it I can understand, maybe even offer a word or two of comfort.

This has been the very best part of my work. My friend and publisher Morgan Entrikin of Grove Atlantic once told me, in a somewhat drunken state, he became a publisher mostly to drink with writers. I believe he meant that as an expression of fellowship, not alcoholism. Most of my work is done remotely. But the feeling is the same. I’m the old writer on the mountain, the minister, the enabler. It feels really good and as I look down the barrel of my 70^th birthday, it feels like a life. That and helping conceive the art for our covers. That’s a blast, too. And something new.

I also enjoy being able to hire people I’ve known forever. (And, as a lifelong 1099 person, I pay any fees due very quickly.) We have two former Rolling Stone copy chiefs, another from Esquire, and some super overqualified proofreaders—it’s a pleasure to do business with talented people who are known commodities . . . and because I’m not the kind of person who picks up the phone for no reason and calls people just to chat, I love that I have reason to be in touch with people. Authors and co-workers. Like always, they are my pals.

Being that technically, I’m all thumbs_­, and that I hate reading directions, everything was an obstacle in the beginning—starting with needing a password keeper; jeeze so many different websites! Luckily one of my old journalism students turned out to have a tech firm. Andrew Greenstein and some of his team of wonderful Romanian tekkies, working out of an office in Cluj in Transylvania (no shit!) helped me get everything started. Luckily, Andrew appeared one day at my door for a visit. Little did we know he would help build for me a whole new life. See what happens when you give a kid a B+ instead of an A? Andrew a friend for life.

I have to mention my Art Director, Siori Kitajima, who has been with me from the beginning at Andrew’s introduction. She is an incredible fine and graphic artist who can damn near figure out anything having to do with the web. I couldn’t do my job without all her figuring out and help and wonderful eye.

Other than the obstacles of my own personal weaknesses, with numbers and technical stuff (I am running a business!) my biggest obstacle is the ghettoization of my business by the rest of the book publishing world.

If you published 160 books over nearly 15 years, should you still be considered a “self publisher?” I am.

There is a lot of straight up prejudice from the existing book world. There is the word of indie books, which I am part of, and the world of “real books” from places like Random House and the rest.

For instance, Amazon limits the amount I can charge for an eBook to 9.99.

Or this: Kirkus Reviews has two different operations (so does Publishers Weekly). There is a publication for indies. And then there is the Grown-Up Kirkus that has all the best sellers and general trade books from large companies.

If you pay for a review from Kirkus, and your book is good enough to get a star, they will list it in the Grown-Up Kirkus.

That sort of stuff angers me. I always wonder. Is there somewhere I can go and kneel down and have someone dub me a REAL publisher?

I have a lot of real authors, that’s for sure.

Mainstream publishing measures success by units sold, by best sellers. How do you measure success?

The one thing I haven’t mentioned is that I do not earn any money for running The Sager Group LLC. Luckily, I did well enough in my writing career (through working for magazines and optioning stories to the movies, not particularly by selling books) to be able to afford to live on my retirement funds.

The Sager Group is run like a non-profit, though it is not formally so. We pay all our people and expenses and make a few thousand every year. Some authors pay a little more for our services to be featured on our shelves alongside the bestselling or Pulitzer Prize winning or merely worthy writers that I wish to publish. Many of these writers are older luminaries involved in passion projects that can no longer find a place in the Big Kid publishing world that we all came from because their businesses are failing and they can’t afford to do what they used to do.

The Sager Group publishes, but we do no marketing. That is the author’s job, as it has almost always been unless you’re lucky enough to have a company’s Big Book of the Season. Even as a mid- to lower- level writer at Big Six companies, the companies didn’t do much to market our books anyway. Ask me sometime about my second bestseller, Revenge of the Donut Boys. Following the success of my first book, Da Capo gave me $9,000 to market my book. I did a 39-stop tour on the east and west coasts and arranged everything myself, except the New York and Washington D.C. readings (bookstores in those cities are tough to crack). Several times out, I paid my own publicist.

In college I wrote my junior history thesis on utopian communities. I’ve since come to believe that while I wouldn’t want to actually LIVE with a bunch of other people, I do love the working together feeling one can have by working online with the other people who work with TSG. A lot of them have been working with me for almost 15 years. The hundreds of authors we’ve worked with often consult each other for tips.

For once in my life I am the king. I make my own rules. I’ll change one if it doesn’t suit someone. I am reasonable. I am caring. I am fair. And I make sure you always have books at your reading. (Ask me about the Decatur Festival—250 people in the big room but someone forgot to order the books.)

Writing is life. I wanted to make it pleasant.

* * *

Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture.

So many voices. So many songs.

When I wrote about this a few years ago, I made the point that the music represented something to strive for: “The music, I suspect, remained for many of them an aspiration, a hope of what they might someday be able to achieve with words.”

It turns out my students were not alone.

The other day I was telling a couple of colleagues about this assignment. I mentioned that I, too, always brought in a song – it would have felt like cheating if I hadn’t – and that over the years my choices had changed: From Mozart’s Piano Concerto in D Minor, to “The Weight,” to Gladys Knight’s version of “Heard it Through the Grapevine” (there is a terrific key change early on that takes the song to a whole new place). I’d like to think that those new choices reflected my growth as a writer. At least that’s what I hoped.

So I asked my colleagues what music they would choose. Jonathan Weiner, a Pulitzer-prize winning science journalist, hesitated as he began running through his own, subconscious catalogue. David Hajdu, a renowned music journalist and critic, answered immediately.

His reply – which I will share with you in a moment – got me thinking about what other writers might choose as their songs. I put the question to several writer friends. Their answers are as revealing as those of my students; no two chose the same song.

And like my students the music was aspirational; their choices reflected a desire to make their writing read as musically as a song they loved.

Here is what they chose, and why.

And yes, there are samples to play.

Enjoy.

David Hajdu: I want my writing to sound like the music of Jerome Kern -- lyrical melodic lines of ever-varying contours and lengths, a rich harmonic foundation, and unconventional turns that carry surprise but ultimately feel inevitable. A good example is “I’m Old Fashioned,” which has no repetition in the melody for the first half of the song -- and five key changes, most of them in the middle of phrases. I don’t agree with the lyrical sentiment at all. The music is timeless.

Andrea Elliott: Weird Fishes/Arpeggi by Radiohead It pulls you in. It is precise, but also vast — oceanic. It builds and builds. And you travel with it, into something beautiful. Finally, it asks questions that must be answered.

Sam Freedman: The long guitar solo that opens “Over and Over” from Neil Young’s album “Ragged Glory.” The passion of the playing and the great care and technique in the selection of notes. The solo ends at about 1:20.

Jeffrey Toobin: I’ve never been able to write, or even read much, with music on. But I sometimes put on this Philip Glass piece -- Metamorphosis --for inspiration. It’s got a kind of relentless energy that I admire.

Suzy Hansen: I would say — especially with this last book — Under Pressure by David Bowie and Queen, because I want my writing to have multiple registers, both the soft and patient, as well as the emotional and operatic, and I am always hoping to build toward a conclusion that is loud, devastating but beautiful, too. There is something about that song that seems to capture the full range of life, all the messiness and humanity and a bit of humor too. As many times as I have listened to the song, I am still always a little unsure of what note comes next, and therefore always surprised and delighted.

Diego Courchay: Tough question, but for recency bias, let’s say like French pianist Sofiane Pamart. This concert, a couple of pieces in particular –Medellín, La Havane, Séoul, Nara– are examples of a mastery and variety of rhythm: There’s a mastery and variety of rhythm in Pamart, shifting constantly, spinning something and catching it, catching his breath and slowing it down, never letting us settle, using repetition to his advantage, and fugues as he likes. You can tell that there is emotion, experience, and memory, and he has the technical dexterity to do them all justice.

Besha Rodell: I think about rhythm probably more than anything else in my writing - rhythm comes first; word choice etc. can be amended once the rhythm is right. So that was one of my main considerations here. I also wanted something with just enough attitude, a hint of punk rock, but I want that element to be surprising rather than in-your-face from the get-go. And the last thing I thought hard about was the ending...the kicker of an article or essay is so important, it has to be satisfying, it has to stay with you.

So I’ve gone with Cannonball by the Breeders. Catchy, sounds simple, is actually very complex. Has a surprising, aggressive element that builds up and then becomes part of the whole really beautifully. Has a very satisfying, memorable, crisp finish.

Jonathan Weiner: I’m still thinking. Right now I’m all over the place, except that my choices are on the elegiac, if not sentimental, side. What they all have in common is “saudade,” according to a Brazilian friend:

“New Slang,” the Shins

“What a Wonderful World,” Louis Armstrong

Piano Trio No. 1 in B major, Brahms

Vals Poeticos, Granados

As for me: A new song for this final class: Save it for Later, by the English Beat. It’s a seemingly simple song that pulls you in immediately and adds layer after layer in a way that just feels that each step follows on what preceded. Effortless. My aspiration.

All of this begs the question: what would you choose? If you have a song, feel free to share it with me at delacortereview@gmail.com A Writerland playlist – to get us all through the writing day.

A final word about my students: this year’s group has just published its version of The Memory Project, in which each student chose a photograph and set out to find and tell the story of that frozen moment.

It’s a wonderful class to teach. The students not only report and write but, guided by my colleague and audience guru James Robinson, identify and connect with audiences. The students split the royalties. They are now, officially, published authors.

This year’s class, however, wanted to try something different. Much as they admired the work done by previous classes, they were eager to push the limits of what a print book could be.

So with our wonderful art director, Francisco Barrera, they envisioned a book that could also be, in their words, an experience – a collection, yes, but also something beautiful to hold and keep and delight in.

They’ve titled it Penguins, Etcetera. The title becomes evident as you read. It is a wonderful collection of nonfiction short stories. You will enjoy it, I promise.

It is also a fitting note to go on out on - for them, and for me, in this my final class. Once again, my students have shown how imaginative, innovative and bold they can be – especially in a format that too many have dismissed as extinct.

Print does live.

My students show us how.

They will bring their music to class and we will listen to the songs and learn why they chose them. And when we are done, I have decided it is only fitting to leave them with a song.

Teaching them and all the students I have taught over these past 35 years has been a joy. And joy is the note I’d like to close with.

Thank you students. Thank you so much.

Solomon Burke, please sing us home.

* * *

We’ll be off next week for Memorial Day weekend. Back on May 29th

Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture.

So Miriam comes to me, and she goes, I got the story. It was unlike any other you’ve done. This was about you.

Instead of telling us what happened, why don’t you read the opening of your story

MW- I remember so clearly the first time it happened. It was December 14, 2021 and my daughter, River was six weeks old. I was home alone with her, and she had just woken up from a nap.

The afternoon light came in through her bedroom window as I carried her over to her nursing chair. I sat down and positioned her on top of a U-shaped nursing pillow, one that was patterned with gray baby elephants.

I pulled my shirt and brought to the side and brought her to my breast, just like usual, but instead of opening her mouth to latch on, she recoiled. Literally recoiled. Her tiny body tightened. Her face turned red, and she screamed, screamed and screamed and screamed. A lot of babies that young don’t produce tears yet.

I tried the other breast, then a different position. She continued to scream. Scream at me, scream at my body, scream at the sight of my breasts, breasts which were at that point, at that point, engorged and starting to leak milk.

‘Riv the milk is right here,’ I told her, the wet patch on the nursing pillow was growing larger, swallowing more baby elephants. I remembered that I wasn’t upset, surprised, sure, but it wasn’t a catastrophe, yet. I pulled her upright and cradled her head against my neck.

I whispered. She soon calmed down. Just a fluke, a weird baby thing, I thought. I laid her back down, same result, not a fluke. Unsure what to do, I called my husband, maybe try a bottle, he said. And so it began for the next several months, breastfeeding became a hit or miss activity, though it was mostly miss. Sometimes she’d start crying right away. Other times she’d latch on for a few seconds, then pull off, squeeze her eyes shut and scream. Please, please, please. I’d beg, as if I could will or guilt her into nursing. But I couldn’t. She wouldn’t, and I completely fell apart.

MS-So this doesn’t stop there, no. And I’ll confess this is something that feels altogether new when I first heard about it, when you first mentioned it, new in the sense that you some women just don’t want to breastfeed, as you’ve written about. Some women have trouble doing it. They move on. They do it.

MW-Awkward topic to talk about. We can acknowledge that. I think, thank you. Yeah, that’s fine.

MS-But what happened to you?

MW-I completely, like lost my mind, for lack of a better term. I became obsessed with getting River to nurse again, and she wouldn’t. And at the same time, she was having trouble gaining weight. So there was, like this kind of medical pressure to make sure she’s eating enough. And, you know, as I write about, it was, October, November or December of 2021, so t was still kind of Covid-y. So the world’s still kind of shut down. I’m at home alone a lot, and, yeah, I just became obsessed with getting her to nurse. She wouldn’t.

And I became deeply, deeply sad, like it was all I thought about. My husband and I fought about it constantly. And we don’t fight, but we did. I was crying all the time. It just It took over my life in a way that I was surprised by. Because on the one hand, it’s breastfeeding, really, breastfeeding – “Is what you’re gonna choose to lose it over Miriam?”

And I really thought I was crazy. I thought I was like descending into some sort of psychosis. Because I didn’t know of anyone else who would ever experience this. And, you know, they, they warn you about certain things when you’re pregnant or postpartum. I was aware of postpartum depression. I was aware of postpartum anxiety, but this didn’t feel like that, because in everything else, I was fine. It was this. And I remember when I was probably a couple months into this, and this actually isn’t in the story, but I was texting with a good friend of mine from high school, and she just asked, “how are things going?”

“Well, you know, things have been a little tough. Like breastfeeding isn’t going as well as I had hoped.” Because, of course, we all sugar coat everything that we say.

And she just said, “Oh, I feel you. I had the hardest time nursing my daughter.”

And I said, “Oh, what happened? If you don’t mind me asking.” And she wrote me this really long text, and it was my story, lit was exactly what happened to me.

I said, Megan, “can I call you?” And we had a really long talk. To me, that’s the beginning of this journey, because that’s when I realized, oh my God, I am not alone in this. Like this is a thing. And I started meeting more moms. I found this breastfeeding support group. Megan introduced me to Facebook pages where women tell their stories like this, and I just started to realize that there was a whole community of women who were struggling with this.

For some of us, it was that our babies wouldn’t latch. A lot of women experience this, when their bodies don’t produce enough milk, and they’re struggling with their milk supply. And I just felt like I was reading my story over and over and over again. So eventually, yeah, I came to you and you said you could have a home here at the Delacorte Review. You should write this.

MS-I want to go back in a second, because even while you’re reporting this is still happening. So it’s not as if, okay, fine, now I know whether I’m not alone, so I’m not going to be depressed anymore or far from it. But as a story and the way you’re telling it, there’s a moment, there’s two moments, one is the moment when “I’m beginning to lose my mind” over this. And two it’s that conversation with Megan and thinking, I’m not alone. Yeah, that is what really propels the story forward. Because when you were going through this initially, how afraid were you that it’s just you. You’re the only one who’s ever gone through this.

MW-I guess if you had asked me that, like, pulled me aside and been like, Miriam, do you think you’re really the only person who’s ever experienced this? I would say absolutely not, of course, but I didn’t know of anyone who had this trouble and I was embarrassed by how important breastfeeding had become to me, because it felt like breastfeeding again, like get a real problem.

MS-You anticipated my question, because of all the many things about this that were painful. I don’t want to say what was most painful, but what were the things that hurt you the most?

MW-I thought my baby didn’t love me.

MS-What you cannot see as you’re listening to this is that as Miriam said, that I just winced.

MW- I internalized River’s rejection of nursing as a rejection of me. And as I unpack in the story, what I came to kind of realize is that breastfeeding was how I mothered at the time. You have kids. You know when babies are born they’re just kind of like little chubby lumps. They don’t do much. So if you decide to breastfeed, that’s all you do at the beginning, and your babies don’t really respond to much. And again, lliterally, that’s all you do. So it was how I knew how to mother, it was how I knew how to keep her alive, how to get her to sleep, how to comfort her. And just around the time, just before she stopped nursing, by six weeks, they’re interacting a lot more, and you’re getting little smiles. People talk about the nursing bond, and I started to feel it, And then all of a sudden, one day, it was like it was ripped out from under

MS-It’s not as if River had thought this out at the age of six weeks. You know, I’m going to have some issues with my mom, so I may as well get them on the table now. But what happened in your relationship with her?

MW-So I thought she didn’t love me, and there were days when I resented her for putting me through this. And that’s like the hardest thing in the world to say out loud and to admit, but it’s true I mean, it is an ugly emotion to to admit to.

But at some point, I also worried I was torturing her, at times.

MS-And your husband’s trying to make this okay, right?

MW-Yes, my husband is the greatest guy ever, but he didn’t understand what was happening to me and I think that that was really hard for him, too. But eventually, I should say at some point, River did start to nursing. River is very proudly four and a half as of a couple days ago. She would be very happy to tell you that.

MS-She did come back to nursing. And I have no idea why. Why? Why I got lucky? Why I got this happy ending? I don’t know why, but I guess what I would just say is we have a fantastic relationship now. I

MS- I want to move away, just for the moment, not to lose sight of it, of what happened to you. Because very at some point you begin to order the universe by being a reporter, and you begin with the conversation with Megan. But a lot of people who listen to this are writers, and they’re thinking, you know, I’m trying to figure out how to write about something that happened to me in a deeply personal way. But and how do I even think about doing that in a way that doesn’t make me think, oh, nobody’s going to care about my story. I mean, I hear this some students, both from before your time and since your time, “nobody’s going to care about my story.” I have a refrain that I always use:. This is guy, and his father dies, and his mother marries his uncle, and the uncle may or may not have had something to do with the father’s death, and he’s got a girlfriend with issues, whose father talks too much. Do you want to read that story? And they say. And I go, “Hamlet.”

I think for a lot of writers, there’s always that fear that “no one’s going to care about my story” because even though it matters so much to me, that disproportionate sense of it matters so much to me, no one else is going to care. So let’s talk about where you separate your reporter’s hat from your Miriam as mother hat. What begins to happen?

MW-Yeah, oh my gosh. I had so many thoughts on this. Okay, so for one, unlike many other stories that I have written in my life with this one, I wasn’t worried that no one would care because I met so many mothers who were going through this. I worried about plenty of other things during the process of writing this. But I was propelled by this gut feeling that this is something we need to talk about. And, I don’t know why this story isn’t there. And I said to you, like, there I spent so many nights and scrolling on online, just like looking for answers about what to do, like how to get River to nurse again, what was happening. Why? I think I oftentimes Googled depression over breastfeeding, like trying to understand what I was feeling and what was happening. And there was just very little out there.

MS- If you did it now, you’d have Claude saying, great question. Miriam

MW- Well, maybe Claude would point us to the story. That’s one of the goals.

When I, when I first came to you, when I was first writing, I was still really grieving.

MS-And grief is an important word here.

MW- River was nursing again, but I wasn’t confident in it. It was still sometimes hit or miss. I wasn’t confident yet. And I was writing these memos to you and writing these journal entries and drafts to myself that were just like dripping with anger and emotion that was it was too much. I was just writing like every little detail.

MS- And I was sharing the editing and deferring a lot to my wonderful colleague, Cissi Falligant. And Cissi, who is the world’s nicest person, would say, “oh, this poor woman.” She could feel your pain. It had not happened literally to her, which had happened to you But I think there was a certain degree of fear that we had -- is she going to be able to get past this spilling and produce a story? Because you needed to go through this.

MW-You came to Boston one day, and we got coffee. And you said, Miriam, you need to write a purge document. And I said, Michael, what’s a purge document? And you said, You need to open up a Google Doc, and you need to just write down literally everything. Some of it may end up in the story. Some of it may not, but you need to get that down on paper before you can begin to extract portions of it that are important.

So I think I spent like a week doing it. I remember this. I wrote, I believe, like 30,000 words. It was the definitive account beyond what anyone would ever in a million years want to read of what happened. And what I did is I reported my own history. And this is where I credit being a journalist, knowing how to do some of this stuff. Not that anything I did was groundbreaking, but I went through journals I had kept. I went through text messages from the time. I went through photo albums. I went through River’s medical documents, and transcribed all the notes that the pediatrician was taking.

The purge document took the form of a timeline. And I put in there random memories I had. I remember going on a walk with my friend and sort of talking about it, but sort of talking around the issue. And I just wrote everything down.

MS-I want to stay there for a second, because I remember talking about that -- you don’t know what’s going to happen a lot of times. One of the things that I’ve seen over the years as an editor and as a teacher, is that people do that and then they just they tighten up when you think that they won’t. But when it works, and I can tell from my own experience, it works because you’re stuck. Because the speed of writing is so much slower than the speed of thinking, you begin to make connections. You write a sentence and then another sentence, and that second sentence gets you thinking -- Wait a second, that reminds me of something all the way over here, and your brain is going, we have it here, in case you’re looking right at the top. No. Above that open the box. There it is.

Did that happen to you, if not literally, then metaphorically, where all of a sudden, memories would trigger other memories?

MW-Yes, memories definitely triggered other memories. I think the best thing about the purge document for me was that I came away from that feeling like, Okay I wrote down what I needed to get down. I wrote down the definitive story of River’s breastfeeding journey. No one’s ever going to read it. Knowing that no one was ever going to read it, in a sense, was liberating. I wrote it, knowing that I was going to refer back to it when I wrote the real story. That this was, this was like a reporting dump in a lot of ways. I found it really cathartic. I found it really it was hard. It was challenging. I cried a lot during it, but I did it, and then I think I was able to step back from that and say, Okay, I wrote the story I needed for my own healing. Now let me write the story that’s for a public facing audience. And I found that throughout the process of editing, first with Cissi and then with Mike Hoyt. T

MS-You were so lucky. You had Cissi and Mike Hoyt, and you were able to avoid me.

MW-I think a lot of people get very attached to what you write, and it can be hard to see someone suggest you cut this paragraph or change this phrasing. And you know, I’d like to think that in the decade plus since I’ve been a working journalist, I’ve gotten a lot chiller about that.

MS-Nobody is ever that chill about it.

MW-But with this it felt, it felt a little easier, and it felt a lot easier to cut because I knew I was writing a story for other people. I had written the story I needed. And actually, at one point, my husband, who is a brutal editor, like really, really brutal, but good, went through it and he slashed like 2000 words.

MS-Out of 30,000 you’re ahead of the game.

MW-No, no, it wasn’t. By that point. It was like 12,000. And I didn’t take all of them. I’d say I took like 80%

MS-Or else it’s an annulment,

MW- But he would be like, Miriam, no one needs to know that this happened. They just need to know that you were here. He’s so good at that . He’s not a journalist either. And so I don’t know, I think that the whole time I just had this feeling that I knew that I was writing this for other people, and I wanted it to be the best version of the story that it could be for that. I also think, and this should be said too, this story took me four years to write. nd I, you know, I put a ton of pressure on myself to try to finish it at various points of time. I remember Cissi, to her credit, several times, saying very gently “take a little more time, take a little more time.”

Because what you guys were saying to me, which I didn’t really realize at the time, was “you want to write into the wound, not from the wound.”

MS-I had to be Cissi because that’s far smaller

MW-It means you don’t want to write from a place where you’re still bleeding.

MS-It’s like playing drunk. You don’t act drunk. You act sober, trying not to be drunk.

MW-Yeah and so I needed to write into that grief, not from that grief. And that’s a really good point. And so it took a couple of years. And another thing that happened is I had another baby, and I had a very different breastfeeding experience and it helped me recognize how hard that was with River and that it doesn’t have to be that way, it shouldn’t have to be that way.

And I think one of the things that I’m most grateful for in this process is that you guys stuck with me for four years. You let me vomit on the page at the beginning, and then you were like, “All right, keep going.”

MS-Readers trust their visceral sense of what works. No non-journalist would ever use the words “nut graph” -- I think the nut graph wants to be quicker. No, only journalists talk about a paragraph as if it has feelings -- it wants to be quicker. No, I feel; it doesn’t. But what’s interesting is that writers do this all the time, and you just did it now -- we’re always criticizing ourselves for how long it took. A few months ago, I wrote on I wrote a Writerland about Kieran Desai’s amazing novel and the thing that was interesting about this novel and the attention that it got was primarily for how long it took -- 20 years and how she had written 5000 pages and goes, even Robert Caro doesn’t write that much in a volume. And in a way, what was interesting is that it became the story. But it’s like, well, who cares? It took as long as it took? Yeah, and if it took you four years, that’s how long it was going to take. I think we in journalism are always measuring time in deadlines and success in meeting them. I mean, I have colleagues who pride themselves, and it’s a really good thingn saying, I deliver on time. I deliver books on time. For those of you who’ve never written a book, there are about eight authors in the world who have ever delivered a book on time. Moses late, okay.

What was necessary about having that time to make this story succeed?

MW-Well, for one, I want to say it took me four years because I have a full-time job and two children, and, you know, a life. And I was doing, doing this in my, in my off time. I remember at one point it was while I was very pregnant with my son writing in an email to Cissi “I feel like I need to get this done before I have before I have this baby.” Like I need to end this. This is a story about River and I need to end this chapter of my life before I have another baby. And she was just like, “what if you didn’t?”

MS- I should explain to listeners that Cissi Falligant was my editor when I worked at newspapers, and I’ve been edited both by Mike Hoyt and by Cissi and they’re great, because they say things like that. Yeah, there are about six editors in the world who do that, and I work with two of them.

MW-But you know, maybe the process of having a second baby will give you a new perspective. And I was very nervous about that,and fought against it. But didn’t finish by the time I had Toby my son and, and I think that was great in hindsight. I can imagine a world where I was working on this full time from the minute we first started talking about it, and I delivered something in a couple of months. And it would have been very bloggy. It would have been this, like, I’m so sad. This is what happened to me.

You know why? I just don’t think I would have had time to interview so many people, and I talked to a lot of people for this story.

I just think it wouldn’t have had just the perspective of time a little bit. And I don’t know, maybe if I wrote the story 10 years from now, it would be even more profound. Who knows. But it just it needed a little bit of time to bake.

MS-I want to talk about the reporting, because you talk to a lot of women, tell me about those conversations, because I imagine this is not what the late Jimmy Breslin used to call asistant district attorney questions -- like, all right, age, rank, serial number, gestation period. Tell me about those conversations. How’d you find them and what you talk about?

MW-I had a lot of different conversations. Formal conversations and informal conversations. I had a lot of informal conversations with women I met, and most of those anecdotes don’t necessarily end up in the story or quotes from that, but I considered that to be part of the interview process.

But with a lot of other women were from those Facebook groups that I learned about. I wrote to the admin of it and said, Hi, my name is Miriam Wasser. I’m a reporter. This group has helped me so much in the last couple of months, and I want to write about it, but I also want to interview other women. Would it be okay if I posted a note here saying, please reach out to me if you’re willing to be interviewed. And they said, Yes, of course. And so a lot of people reached out to me, and I ended up talking to women from all over the world.

MS-And what were the kind of things you heard that really still resonate?

MW-A lot of women had really traumatic birth birthing experiences too, and that just kind of like sets you up for some failure.

MS-You just use the word failure.

MW-I shouldn’t say failure. No, no, no, no, no, no. Because I think that’s what makes this, forgive me, what makes this story, I think universal, is that half the readers of this story will you know, by nature of biology, would unlikely to breastfeed. And yet, there is something about this story that transcends just your bein a mother. This is not just a story about a young mother who struggled with this and other mothers who would fit into that. You just said the word that. It’s about failure or feeling yourself to be a failure, even though, objectively speaking, you’re not. Yeah, so staying with that you what you heard -- what stories were the stories of failure or sense of failure?

MW-Yeah, it was a lot of women feeling like they had failed. I talked to women who were in the midst of it and women who were a year out from it or more time had passed, and they told me all sorts of stories. I don’t think I had a single what I would call formal interview that was under an hour. We really talked. And I think what was helpful too is that I told them what happened to me, too. And you know, when you’re interviewing someone, you’re not really supposed to put yourself in it and to talk about your own experience. But I think that that helped them.

MS-Trust me?

MW-Oh, absolutely. Could you imagine somebody who had it was just, I’m reporting this because I’ve read about the phenomenon, and the interview subject is going, “you really don’t get this because you haven’t lived it.” This is a story when you had to talk about yourself, yeah. I mean, there, you know, how many times was I like felt like River didn’t love me, and I really questioned whether my baby loved me.

I’m curious -- did that happen to you? Did you have anything similar to that? And you know, you get lots of stories and just a lot of grief, a lot of grief, and a lot of people also saying, I’m really glad you’re writing this. I think this story needs to be out there. I’m not the first person to write about this. I did not coin the term breastfeeding grief. I don’t know exactly who did it is. It is a thing. There is an amazing book out there called Breastfeeding Grief by Amy Brown. When I came across that book, actually downloaded it as an audio book. It’s relatively short, and was on a long car ride, and I was just weeping, listening to it. It was like, this is this is me. This is my story.

So I’m not the first person to tread this ground, I will say, but it is not a topic that that gets talked enough.

MS-I can only guess what the interviews were like. But was there an arc, especially to the women who were a year out? Was there was an arc in the sense that it ended, where there was a beginning, there was an awful middle, and then at some point it ended? Or perhaps, how it ended for you?

MW-They were all in different places. I talked to one woman who was pregnant with her next child, and so both like terrified and optimistic. I talked to another woman who wasn’t sure she wanted to have other another kid after this because this was so awful. We follow each other on Facebook, and she did end up having another baby.

I talked to one woman who is quoted who was a therapist too, so, you know, very smart, she said, I am, I am at a place where I’m trying to be okay with not being okay, where I’m never gonna heal. Like I’m I’m never going to feel differently about this experience. It’s never going to be a happy memory of mine, but I’m getting to a point where I can, I can maybe be okay with the fact that that was, that existed, that that’s a traumatic time period in my life. And she said, I want to have more kids, and I honestly think that if someone could guarantee to me that this wouldn’t happen again I could let it all go right now. And honestly, we can’t guarantee that.

MS-How many of the women you spoke with encountered this reaction among people who love them, who are friends, spouses: What do you? Come on. So you feed the baby with a bottle. We move on, and we have a kid. What’s the big deal?

MW-Yeah, quite a few. Quite a few.

MS-And you wanted to throttle those people, right?

MW_Yeah. I mean, I think I will say I feel very lucky in that no one in my life approached me with that tone, right? I think everyone was very clearly aware that I was like a mess at that point. But yeah, in kinder terms, would say something because I was still pumping in bottle feeding at that point, just being like, I don’t get it, like, she’s still getting your milk. Or maybe, maybe you should just commit to the bottle feeding and give yourself a break. I couldn’t.

MS-Why couldn’t you?

MW-I was so obsessed with getting breastfeeding to work because I wanted to mother the way that I thought I wanted to mother, and wanted to feel that my baby loved me. And, you know, I’m a pretty determined person, so I think there’s an element of that too. I set my mind to it, and it was like, I’m gonna do this

I don’t know why I still to this day, I’m not entirely sure why I’m so obsessed with making it work, but it felt like it was all about mothering and love, and that was broken, and I needed to fix that.

MS-You know, you had mentioned earlier that there are certain phenomenon of associated with pregnancy and the early days of being a parent that you can anticipate, like, okay, I get what’s going on here now, postpartum anxiety, depression, a host of things. You know, if you have a C section, recovering from that episiotomy, recovering all these things that are catalogable and recognizable, but there’s an expression in boxing, forgive me, the punch that knocks you out is the one you don’t see coming.

MW-And I think that also so there’s this concept of birth trauma, which is in the last maybe, like 10 to 15 years it’s become a recognized phenomenon whereby women have births that are traumatic, and it’s often situations where it could be as simple as an unplanned C section, it could also be something where their doctors just didn’t tell them what was happening, And they felt totally lost and totally lost and totally out of control. And like I can see so easily how birth could become a traumatic experience. I

MS-For millennia women died.

MW-And so it, I think, in having coined this term, and then having it become something that’s like sort of ubiquitous in the birth world. It has helped doctors and midwives and nurses recognize that like, oh, it matters how we talk to women about the experiences that they’re having. You know, there are therapists who specialize in some of this stuff, because it is, it is such a common thing.

I was shocked, and I still am shocked that breastfeeding grief is just not one of those things. I don’t have any statistics about how many women this affects, but based on my anecdotal interviews and life experience I think it’s quite a bit. And so I want this to be something that helps women who are struggling. I want this to be something that helps partners who are struggling. When my husband read this for the first time he was like, Oh, I think I get it now. I want it to be something that pediatricians read because maybe you talk to a mother who you’re suggesting switch to a bottle in a different way.

Maybe you consider how she wants to feed her baby.

I want it to be something that that maybe even that women are aware can happen before they start doing anything, and not to scare you, not scare anyone off from breastfeeding, but just to know that, if things go wrong, it’s okay.

MS-You just put your finger on something important, which is, again, the story is focused on one thing, which is about breastfeeding grief. But in the course of our conversation you use terms that are universally applicable. It is I think that this is the power of the story. We all in life experience the punch that we don’t see coming. And I should have known better. I should have been aware. I didn’t know this. It’s not just to say falling out of the building and landing on us. Okay, it’s, it’s something that happens to us, which when the safe falls out of and hits you in the head, that’s a bad ending, but this is one of those in between things. It’s not a death, it’s not a catastrophic injury, it’s not a catastrophic loss. It’s one of those things that happens in life where part of you thinks I can handle this well, more to the point I should handle it, and because I can’t, the words you used was, I failed. I failed, and my baby doesn’t love me. And I think that it’s, it’s a story about what we do to ourselves needlessly. No, needlessly is not the right word, because you need you experience grief. I can’t say, oh, Miriam, come on. There’s a bottle. You couldn’t do that. You had to go through this thing. What’s interesting, though, is that as you describe all these things leading up to the writing, the writing couldn’t happen any sooner than it did. By the time you sat down to write. Write, I’m putting that in air quotes. Was it harder or easier than you would have thought?

MW-I never sat down and d said, like, today I begin this essay.

MS- It’s like, in the movies. It’s always like The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald, right? And it’s like nobody ever does that. They just start on page one and they cross it out a million times. No one ever writes the title and their name.

MW-There was a time period where I really had, I had a draft where the stories of other women were much more prominent, and it was almost like this, like back and forth between, like, my story, and then like a little vignette of someone else.

MS-That sounds like something you do for school,

MW-I think it was the exact amount of difficulty I thought it would be. What is interesting is that I was very close to finishing and I knew I just needed to end it, and I didn’t know what to do, and so I just wrote an ending, and I sent it to Cissi and said, I’m not sure about this. And she said, I actually I like it. And I said, Okay, I guess.

Weeks went by and I just kept being like, I don’t think this is right. This is not the ending I want. This is not the note I want to end on. And in the process of writing this story, I shared it with a few people. I shared it with a couple lactation consultants and a pediatrician. I know, I know that’s taboo. You’re not supposed to.

MS-We’re not getting into any super ego. It’s just that the more people you show it to, the more opinions you’ll get. And you don’t want an ending or a story edited by a committee.

MW-True, but in this case, the lactation consultants and the physician were just looking at the medical aspects of it and had very helpful comments. But I did share it with two friends, one of whom is a journalist, and the other is a fiction writer. And both of them came back to me and said, the ending is not right. And I said, I know, and so that took me a very long time to figure out what the ending was, because I had originally written this thing about how, like, I was okay and like, it was just this. happy ending and just wasn’t really true to the experience.

MS-It is interesting, because I think that I’ve certainly seen this for myself, and certainly with writers I’ve worked with students and people have written for the Review is that the process of writing is creating order in the universe. But the problem for you here is that your universe was chaotic. It made sense. I have this beautiful baby. I have a happy marriage. My baby is healthy, and I’m cracking up, and the universe, as a result, is small. It feels like it’s just bursting apart. And to try to try to put that into words. There was no way you could have done the story in less time, and there was no way you couldn’t come to the end of the story and feel that the ending was wrong.

MW-Just to go back to something you were saying, I tried so many times to explain what I was feeling and explain why I thought I was so distraught about this, and try to make sense of it all and what I landed on, and where I think a lot of the story ends up being is kind of just like description., I can’t put into words how awful it felt to have my baby scream at my body, but I can tell you what it looked like, and I can tell you where we were. I can describe to you how in the moment I would, like lose my peripheral vision, and the world would just get really narrow.

MS- I’m gonna ask you to read something more.

MW-I’ve thought a lot about why breastfeeding mattered so much to me. At first, after the problem started, I struggled to explain it. There are instances when people in my life, people who loved me, asked me why I cared so much, or why I was driving myself crazy trying to get River to nurse again. Usually all I could muster was some jumble of because of the nutrition and antibodies, but also the bonding, and I don’t know it’s all just so much. I’m a bad mother. I’m a bad mother. I am so sad. I’m a bad mother. Later I got defensive. I imagined there were critics out there just waiting to pick apart the reasons I had for wanting to nurse. I had combative conversations with these pretend people in my head or on the pages of my journal. For months, my feelings about breastfeeding and River’s refusal to do it were a big, raw wound. It’s hard to look back on anything I wrote during that period, because all I see is a woman wearing milk stained sweat pants, sitting on the floor and crying. I’m no longer that woman, thankfully, and a big part of moving forward has been talking to other women who went through something similar.

MS-Are you glad you wrote the story? I don’t mean just for helping other women. I mean for you.

MW-Yeah.

MS-Why?

MW-I never committed to a project this big and delivered so I am. I am trying to just be proud of myself for setting out to do something that was really hard and completing it.

And, you know I’ve had a tumultuous relationship with writing a you know. And as I’m sure so many writers do, and I am full of self-doubt all the time and, and so getting something on the page that I felt was ready to be published is really big for me. I wonder sometimes, if I hadn’t written it, would I still sort of be that woman, in a way, because I think, I think getting to the place where I am now is one. I guess time obviously does matter River did start to nurse again. So I have often thought, like, Would I be able to write this if she hadn’t?

Toby had the normal level of problems, I would say. And I was so anxious about this during pregnancy. I’m feel bad for my husband.

MS-Can we say your husband is a saint?

MW-He is, he is. You know that a lot of times when babies are born, they apparently just like, don’t eat for the first 24 hours. They’re too sleepy. And Toby was one. No one told me that, okay, but Toby was like that, and I was freaking out in the hospital bed, and all the doctors were like, This is normal. This is normal. Breastfeeding is really hard, and every baby is different, and it’s this is another thing that I feel like doesn’t get talked about enough. It feels like it should be natural, and it’s just not like you have to learn how to do it, and your baby has to learn.

There were little moments with him where I would feel like things were going awry and I would just descend into darkness. And I think you know the fact that it didn’t happen with River until she was six weeks old. I didn’t like ever trust that things were actually okay with Toby until he was much older.

MS-You’ve now been through this crucible for lack of a better term, both in terms of the experience, but also in terms of making sense of it through writing. I have to think that there are people listening to our conversation going -- this sounds really scary, but what advice would you offer them?

MW-You talk often about writers needing to write stories, and you do a lot of Writerlands where you interview people about why they needed to write a story. And I’ve done a story for you I’m sure I answered a question about why I needed to write this story.

MS-But Visit To The Bunny Planet was a very different story than Breastfeeding Grief.

MW-This was a story about the like dark world of rabbit breeding.

MS-You don’t want to know reader. Check it out.

MW-I have never before had the experience of needing to write a story the way I needed to write this.

And so I think if you are are questioning and you feel like you need to write it, then write it. And I don’t know, maybe, hopefully, there’s a market for it. I don’t, I don’t know what the what the advice is, but I guess just trust your gut on that. Like if you find something interesting and important, then it is your job as a journalist, as a writer, to make other people think it is as well.

MS-Miriam, it’s a great story. Thank you. Thank you for letting us be at home.

Four years ago, Miriam Wasser came to me with a story she needed to tell. In truth, it was not quite a story, not yet.

Miriam, a senior reporter at WBUR, Boston’s NPR affiliate, had been my student in 2013. She had graduated at the top of her class, gone on to a terrific career, gotten married and was now a mother of an infant daughter. She was in despair.

This had nothing to do with work, which is why former students usually got in touch. Rather, this was about her daughter, a healthy child, who represented a challenge Miriam could never have anticipated and which, as Miriam put it so poignantly, was making her lose her mind.

Her daughter, River, was six weeks old when, without warning, she refused to let Miriam nurse her. A seemingly transitory problem, that in the short term could be solved by bottle feeding, until River was ready to be nursed again and Miriam could return to being the mother she hoped to be.

“I remember that I wasn’t upset,” she later wrote. ”Surprised, sure. But it wasn’t a catastrophe yet.

“I pulled her upright and cradled her head against my neck. ‘Shhh, shhh,’ I whispered. She soon calmed down. Just a fluke, a weird baby thing, I thought.

“I laid her back down. Same results. Not a fluke.

“Unsure what to do, I called my husband.

“’Maybe try the bottle?’” he said.

“And so it began. For the next several months, breastfeeding became a ‘hit’ or ‘miss’ activity — though, it was mostly ‘miss’.
Sometimes she’d start crying right away, other times she’d latch on for a few seconds, then pull off, squeeze her eyes shut, and scream. Please, please, please, I’d beg, as if I could will — or guilt — her into nursing. But I couldn’t. She wouldn’t. And I completely fell apart.

Grief takes many forms but what can make it feel so much worse is loneliness, the sense that no one understands my grief, or worse still, appreciates why I feel it. Miriam’s grief was of a peculiar sort: it was not occasioned by death or illness. Yet, as Miriam would write four years later in Breastfeeding Grief, which appears this week in the Delacorte Review, was a profound sense of loss and failure. “I was afraid,” she told me, “that my daughter didn’t love me.”

Miriam is enough of a pro not to feel that four years was entirely too long to report and write her story. But stories, like children, have lives of their own and need to proceed at their own pace. Miriam was living her story, and there are few things harder in our work than being able to see the story while you are enduring the pain you’re trying to understand and capture.

So, four years ago, Miriam started writing letters to my colleague Cissi Falligant, who in her wisdom and sensitivity, felt like the best editor Miriam could have. Miriam needed a guide and a partner. She also needed time – time to do what writers do in the face of chaos: report.

Miriam’s journey from crisis to story is a long and complex one. And while I typically will ask writers two or three questions about their stories or books, this one felt as if it needed time and space – for Miriam to tell the story of her story, in a way that captured both the emotions she experienced, and what she needed to learn about herself as a writer to tell it.

So this week we’re trying something new. In addition to a short Q and A that follows I’ve added at the top of this chapter the conversation I recorded with Miriam earlier this week. We spoke for about an hour; it is unscripted. There is also an edited transcript.

(I’d be interested in hearing what form you liked best - and whether the different ways the story is told worked together. If you’d be willing to answer a couple of questions there is a very brief poll at the end of this newsletter. Thanks.)

I cannot recommend this story highly enough. While the subject will be of particular interest to the many women who experienced what Miriam experienced as well as to their partners, friends and families, I believe it speaks to anyone who is or has endured feeling alone in their sometimes inexplicable grief.

Meanwhile, I did put one question to Miriam - the question that is at the heart of so much of what we do: why did you need to write this story?

I had a gut feeling that reporting out my experience and putting it into words would help me understand what had happened, and in doing so, help me heal.

When I began writing this four years ago, I was still in the depths of this grief. My early drafts were rambly, sometimes angry, and just dripping with sadness. But as I continued to write and as time passed, I began to connect dots -- like that breastfeeding was intimately connected to my new identity as “mother.” I also met a lot of women who struggled with breastfeeding or who couldn’t produce enough milk for their babies, and who, like me, completely fell apart because of it. Learning I wasn’t alone in this added to my conviction that this story needed to be written.

And that brings me to the second reason I wrote it. When I was in the darkest days of my breastfeeding struggles, I’d often find myself staying up way too late scrolling the internet or Instagram looking for solutions. There’s a lot out there about breastfeeding, and people have no shortage of hot takes about the topic. But nothing I found spoke to what was happening to me. In writing this story, I eventually realized I was trying to create the piece I wish I had found online during all of those late nights -- the piece that made me feel less alone. It’s also a piece I hope can help partners, family members and friends of women who are struggling. And I hope it starts a conversation about one reality of the breastfeeding story that right now isn’t talked about enough.

* * *

Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture.

Or your loved ones do.

Or you worry they will.

Or you wait. And wait.

There is no story more familiar and fraught than the one that begins with the decision to excavate the pasts of those with whom you are closest, or of those long gone who were close to those you love most.

Otherwise brave writers have told me that they planned to stall until their parents were gone on before embarking on telling their stories. I empathize; I am only now able to write about my family knowing that my parents and grandparents will never read what I have to say about them. And what I’m saying is not half bad.

That is not to say that perils vanish once the characters have passed away. After a colleague of my wife wrote a book that took his parents to task for their indifferent-to-the-point-of-callousness childrearing, one of his brothers demanded to know how he could dare to criticize their late mom and dad. If you don’t like it, the colleague told his brother – and here I quote – “write your own fucking book.”

Yet we cannot help ourselves. The stories of our families offer so much that can tell us about ourselves, in ways that few other stories can. So time and again, we ascend to the metaphorical (and occasionally literal) attic, and begin sifting through letters, keepsakes, photographs (“grandma looks so young”), postcards (”I had no idea they ever went to Death Valley…”) theater programs, train tickets – in short the detritus of lives that might hold the key to insight and illumination. If you ever want to go down the Mother of All Reportorial Rabbits Holes enter the names of relatives into Ancestry.com‘s data base. See you in a month. Or two when you’ll emerge holding printouts of Ellis Island Disembarkation cards and high school class photos from 1934.

Family stories are at their best and most resonant beyond friends and family, however, when they transcend the particulars of one clan’s history, and use that story for a larger, more ambitious purpose. That is what my friend and colleague Nicholas Lemann has done with his terrific new book, Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries.

Nick tells his forebears’ story, following their journey from Germany to America, where they settled and prospered in New Orleans. There they became core members of a small and enduring Jewish community – one that by the time Nick was born had succeeded at becoming an all-but-accepted part of New Orleans society. All but.

Much as the Lemanns worked at assimilating - even as they maintained their faith - they remained, as Jews, outsiders. No matter that his grandfather was on close terms with such powerful men as Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter.

Nick grew up aware of his Jewishness, this despite his father marking Thanksgiving as the most important day on the Jewish calendar. I, who grew up in an insular and virtually all Jewish corner of Brooklyn cannot hear that story without shaking my head in bafflement. Not Yom Kippur? Or even Rosh Hashana? Really?

Nick, however, grew spiritually curious and restless, and began learning more about his faith and how his long-deceased relatives lived theirs.

Nick concludes his book with an image that distills, in a loving embrace of his wife, both the head and the heart of his journey. There was nothing easy on this journey, and yet here is Nick, at its end, having arrived home, at last.

I asked Nick about finding and telling what can be the most difficult of stories – the one closest to us.

MS-You’ve gone back generations in finding your family’s story, to people who live primarily through archival material. Yet I wonder how much harder that journey gets as you come closer to the present, and people you have known and loved?

NL-I chose to become a journalist in part to avoid the characteristic difficulties novelists and memoirists have in publishing uncomfortable truths about their own families and communities. So, yes, it gets harder. That may be one reason why I didn’t take on this project until I was much older. Having said that, so far, the level of post-publication discord has been blessedly low.

MS-While many writers consider family histories, how essential is it to have a powerful, vexing question to set the journey in motion? If so, what question animated your search?

NL-If there’s a question, I guess it would be a very big one: What is the essence of Jewish identity, at least for me? That was pertinent because the version of Jewish identity I was raised on was not sustainable, and not just for me. It’s also the case that, in a purely journalistic sense, I was sitting on a big story, which is an extensive and unusually detailed archive of family materials, stretching across five generations and three centuries. It began to seem perverse that I wasn’t exploring it.

MS-Your book concludes in a sublime moment of contentment, with family and faith connected in your marriage. Did you see that ending as a beacon as you reported? Or was it a while in taking shape?

NL-The way I work entails not very much of the fabled terror of the blank page, because I do a lot of research and while I’m doing it, I’m mapping out what’s going to be in the final product, in exact order. So by the time I began writing, I had this in mind as to what the ending would be. Everything in the book, in a sense, points toward that.

* * *

If you have a question, a problem in your work, if you are feeling lost, stuck, confused, at sea, searching, grappling, or baffled, email me at Michaelshapiro808@gmail.com and tell me what you’re confronting and what help you need.

It is seldom, if ever, the case that one writer’s problem or question is their’s alone.

Please indicate if you want to remain anonymous, have your name or just first name included. I will include the question and then answer it as best I can.

* * *

Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture.

Perhaps the most renowned Moroccan writer and a uniquely visceral narrator, Choukri was famously illiterate until he was 21. His is an unlikely case when most authors’ biographies tell of precocious vocations, childhood poems, or the spark lit by early readings. Not every writer starts as a voracious bookworm, but I know of none so accomplished without any schooling whatsoever into adulthood. Choukri did not have the privilege of a childhood.

He describes the pivotal scene nearly two decades later. After the policeman slams the cell shut, Hamid, another detainee, begins writing a protest poem on the wall. Choukri asks him to read it to him, and tells him he is lucky to be able to write. Hamid asserts that he can do the same and begins to teach him.

Days later, while being released, Choukri’s illiteracy is made all the more searing. It is his first criminal record, but he cannot sign it. The policeman mocks Choukri, as the author later recalled: “‘He is like most Moroccans, illiterate’…I was ordered to sign with my thumb… What did they write about me on that sheet of paper? They can write anything and make me say anything as long as I can’t read.”

The scene arrives near the end of For Bread Alone, his first book, which narrates his youth from the murder of his baby brother by his father, through his struggle for survival, begging and sleeping in cemeteries to avoid being raped, finding abjectness and occasional beauty along the way, until his decisive encounter with the written word, aged twenty. Many may lay claim to be autodidacts, but few have Choukri’s painful credentials. Against all odds, he would go on to study and be a teacher.

I first heard of this book late one night, in Barcelona, fifteen years ago, when a middle-aged Moroccan man told me what it had meant to him. A week later, I found it at a flea market, read all I could find, and finally went to Tangier last year.

The Mediterranean port city is where Choukri arrived in 1942 with his family, aged seven, fleeing the rural famine in their native Rif region. It would become his home, his inspiration, and frequent downfall. He would be its greatest storyteller.

The city has long been a cultural hub; under colonialism, the 20th century saw it become the subject of Western myths –painted by Delacroix, then Matisse– a petri dish for expats seeking exoticism and the illicit. Separate from the rest of Morocco until 1956, administered by foreign powers, the permissive no man’s land attracted writers in search of transgression. Paul Bowles arrived in 1947, Burroughs in 1953, writing Naked Lunch in the Hotel Muniria, soon visited by Ginsberg and Kerouac seeking new horizons for their beatnik lifestyles.

For all those names, Tangier is first and foremost the city of Mohamed Choukri. “Unless you know how to drink its bewitching wine, Tangier will break you. I’ve known those who thought they’d become poets there, and didn’t even manage to master the pidgin of its bars. Those who wanted to paint her, and never knew how to blend her colors”, he wrote.

Among the many who were drawn to the city, Choukri found a kindred spirit in the writer Jean Genet, another who started writing in prison. As they go from terrace to terrace, he tells Choukri a phrase valid for both: “I’ve always written—even before I tried to write anything. A writer’s career doesn’t begin the moment they start writing.” Choukri’s style owed much to being a storyteller long before he could use a pen.

One place they went to together was the Librairie des Colonnes. Today, Choukri’s framed photo hangs above the counter. Its bookseller, Monsef Bouali, remembers his visits, “He was always closely connected to this place, just as he was to certain cafés and restaurants in the city. In his later years, he came to occupy an almost symbolic place in the hearts of many readers: that of a living memory of Tangier, both familiar and demanding. Readers held him in deep respect, even when his work made them uncomfortable; perhaps precisely for that reason,” he told me. “Beyond the myths that have surrounded Tangier—often created by foreign gazes fascinated by the city—Choukri occupies an irreplaceable place as a chronicler of Tangier from within, in all its contradictions, its harshness, and its beauty: he portrays it with a radical truth.”

That role owes much to the fame and scandal of For Bread Alone, which was published in English (1973), then in French (1980), before appearing in Arabic. For that first edition, Choukri, already an author of short stories, convinced Bowles, whom he’d met in the 1960s, and his editor that he had finished a memoir. “In reality, I hadn’t written a single word… relying on my excellent memory as an illiterate, I began drafting the first pages that very night…I would dictate the text to [Bowles], sentence by sentence, and he would translate into English.” His natural talent, his oral past, blended with his hard-earned culture and craft.

When the book finally appeared in Arabic in 1982, it was banned until 2000, three years before its author’s death. Tahar Ben Jelloun, who made the French translation, wrote, “Choukri describes the kind of thing that isn’t spoken of, or at least isn’t written about in books—and certainly not in Arabic literature… It seems it is a graver offense to write about poverty than to live through it!”

Prohibition did not prevent its influence. As the contemporary Moroccan writer Abdellah Taïa recounts in Salvation Army, “…buying a book like that and, since it was banned at the time, tearing off the cover and hiding it under the bookshelf, among the underwear… I read and reread this novel about Mohamed Choukri’s hard and terrible life in Tangier without ever growing tired of it.”

The book’s success affected Choukri even as it fulfilled his dreams. It defined him thereafter and overshadowed the full extent of his talent. “For Bread Alone has tended to eclipse the rest of his work, something Choukri regretted. It is undoubtedly a seminal book, but reducing his writing to that single text undermines our understanding of his career,” Bouali tells me. “His short stories reveal great subtlety and an ability to distill deeply intense life experiences.”

Finally available in English as Tales of Tangier, they are vignettes, sketches, short fictions cut from the cloth of street life, both told in brilliant similes and caught in the raw. Choukri bends the tradition of storytelling, or never bends to it. Yet, apart from two collections of short stories, he did not publish another “novel” for twenty years. His was not an easy life, as the photos of him often attest. It cost him to write, much as it had cost him to learn to do it.

Among the most moving portraits of Choukri, tired or thoughtful, often with books and bottles nearby, were made by his friend, the photographer Rachid Ouettassi. I asked about his memories of the man. “He’s an alcoholic. That’s normal—the behavior of someone who drinks almost all day, from morning until night. So there you go: he has friends, he has enemies—that’s it. Before For Bread Alone, he was really someone who didn’t have means,” he tells me. “I met him in Tangier; I see him often because I’m from here... I tried to take a picture of him, but he wasn’t available at first. A lot of people come to take pictures of him, and he hates it. But over the years we got along really well, became friends. So then, whenever I ask to take pictures, he doesn’t say no.”

What does Ouettassi see in those portraits? “I see a man who had the courage to challenge all the taboos—especially in Morocco, with religion—and to say what he can say. I asked Choukri that question one day, ‘You’ve shared a lot of things, of intimate details. Is it true you told everything?’ He told me: ‘No, there are things I couldn’t say. Those I keep to myself.’”

Both Bouali and Ouettassi point to Choukri’s long-awaited second long work, Time of Mistakes (or Streetwise), published in 1992, as his best. It’s a book full of life’s sculpted driftwood, its meaning coalesced by precision and veracity. It begins as a direct sequel, dealing with his time in school, but soon expands into snapshots of bliss and loss across the intervening years, into portraits of people compiled over time. Their accuracy makes you wonder whether Choukri was, in fact, a magnificent non-fiction writer, but lost lives cannot be fact-checked.

“I find it to be a work of great sensitivity, in which both his narrative talent and the intimate difficulty that the act of writing entailed for him are clearly evident. Choukri was a natural storyteller, yes, but he was also someone who conquered writing through effort,” Bouali says.

It is a work made possible by overcoming his demons often enough, long enough to write it. It originates in that second turning point in his career: in 1977, he checked into a psychiatric hospital. From there, he writes to his friend Mohamed Berrada: “This is my twelfth day…I walk aimlessly and alone or sit with one of the patients and he tells me the tragedy of his life. Rarely will you hear beautiful memories here…The thought of writing has started to invade me in this hospital. When I get out of here I will try to change my life for the better.”

Years later, he writes in his book: “When I look at a madman, I see stifled intelligence, like a petrified lava flow as old as humanity itself. Here, the extreme misfortune of mankind is laid bare”.

Among the work’s protagonists is his city. “You can only leave Tangier if she lets you. I’ve always come back, sometimes from far away, despite everything. Time will tell.”

Choukri’s gravestone can be found in the Marshan cemetery, stating he was a writer and novelist, who died in 2003; traces of him can be found in many places, from a mosaic in the Medina, to photographs in a restaurant now named after his most famous work. His books are in the Librairie des Colonnes. “Mohamed Choukri’s writing has had, for me and for many readers, a profound impact. He gave voice to the marginalized with rare honesty and strength,” says Bouali.

Ouettasi doubts if he’s had the posterity he deserves, but he remembers: “We shared good times. Sincerely, with me, he was a lovely man, truly generous; all you could ask for. You just have to accept him as he is, especially at night.”

Choukri understood the darkness well, and the words that might be brought back from it. “Beautiful flowers with no scent. Perhaps they exist only to bloom and wither, to be plucked by chance and absentmindedly crushed underfoot. Tonight, I have nothing to lose, just like this flower I’m crumpling between my fingers. I’ll sleep here or there, in the sweetness of the sea breeze.”

* * *

Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture.

Photo courtesy of Rachid Ouettassi.

But then, on page 145 – I don’t even have to check the page, given how familiar it is after all these years – he stops. Pauses might be the better word because it is as if he holds up a hand (in his case, an old man’s hand; Maclean was reporting and writing his book into his late 80s) and, in effect, says I need to explain what’s going on here.

He writes that it was hard to imagine that many people were still around who might feel connected to the sad story of a long ago fire in a place most had never heard of. So, he asks, why tell it? And more to the point, who should do the telling?

“It will,” he wrote, “take something of a storyteller at this date to find it, and it is not easy to imagine what impulses would lead him to search for it. He probably should be an old storyteller, at least old enough to know that the problem of identity is always a problem, not just a problem of youth, and even old enough to know that the nearest anyone can come to finding himself at any given age is to find a story that somehow tells him about himself.”

I know of few passages so inspiring, and so read it aloud in the hope that my students find it inspiring, too – that in this clear, spare prose they hear a powerful and hopefully enduring message: the work you do, starting here and now, is deeply personal. The stories you choose to follow and the ways you tell them reflect what is core about you. I want them to embrace that; I believe that readers can feel that need in the words a writer presents on the page, and when they do they will connect with stories in which they might otherwise have no interest. Like a fatal forest fire of 1949.

But in my well-intentioned attempt to inspire I now see I was also, inadvertently, applying pressure on my students. In telling them, in effect, this is about you – even if the work is about other people and other places – I was sending another message: you will be exposed. You will be evaluated and judged. You, through your stories. You.

We writers may not necessarily be a little nuts but, as seen from the outside, it must appear that what we choose to do with our working lives is crazy. Day in and day out, week and month and year after year we fill empty canvasses with combinations of words that, we hope, will succeed in achieving the miraculous: getting people to see and feel what we have seen and learned. A profile in courage.

A few weeks ago a colleague told me about his deep and abiding admiration for the late astronaut Neil Armstrong for possessing the boldness to step off a ladder and onto the surface of the moon. True enough, I replied. But don’t sell yourself short: you do a remarkably brave thing every day: you reveal yourself to the world through your writing. Perhaps, he conceded, I had a point.

I do not know whether stepping onto the surface of the moon made Neil Armstrong miserable, self-doubting, self-satisfied, terrified, anxious, depressed; whether it made him feel like an imposter, a poser, a hack, a wannabe; whether he wished at that moment to be doing anything other that what he was doing. In other words, whether climbing down from the lunar module onto the moon was akin to the experiences so many writers feel.

My students remind me of their vulnerability. I have just finished editing their stories – I do this with them in person; better to have me explain what I want to change and why, than to return their drafts filled with edits, or as Google puts it euphemistically, “suggestions.”

They come away feeling, at turns, pleased, relieved, exhausted, and also wondering why they needed my help in shaping the writing, why they could not see what I had seen. I remind them that they’ve had their noses pressed up against their stories and that can leave any writer unable to step back and take the wider view; I tell them that this is why on the little-known Eighth Day of Creation God invented editors.

I remind them that they have taken great risks and they have succeeded, to which they will reply, in effect, I suppose so. They believe me, up to a point. I tell myself that they are new to this, that in time they will experience a deeper, inner sense of satisfaction and pride.

They have spent a year learning new skills – reporting and writing to conform to the expectations and standards of traditional journalism – a year that leaves many feeling confounded, lost, inadequate, a year that has often reinforced every doubt and insecurity they carry with them.

And here is the thing: it will not stop with graduation. Or their first jobs. It will not stop with great assignments, promotions, and new and exciting places to work. It will never stop because for reasons that make no sense and which nonetheless endure this is what we do to ourselves, and often with the best of intentions, what we do to those in our charge.

I started writing this newsletter six years ago as a journey to finding joy in the writing life. I do not believe that good things happen when writers feel miserable. I’ve spoken with writers and editors, and paid close attention to what my students were experiencing and how I was teaching them.

This journey was guided by the assumption that suffering was intrinsic to the work as well as magical thinking: it needn’t be this way!!!! But lately, as my teaching life draws to a close, I’ve found myself wondering about this latest group of talented and eager students, and those who came before and who have gone on to terrific careers still burdened by the expectations of writing for a living

I ask myself: Are we doomed to stay vulnerable? our vulnerabilities?

Perhaps not.

So I’ve begun researching the writing psyche, mind and brain. It turns out that there is considerable research on the emotional side of creativity. I plan to continue that research and as I do will share with you what I learn. As Maclean put it, the problem of identity is not just a problem of youth. My hope is that this benefits us all.

Here is one thing I have discovered: I asked my students how much of their learning was guided by the word: Don’t. As in, don’t forget to attribute all quotes, don’t forget to get a quote from the other side of the dispute, don’t forget to use active verbs, don’t forget to use simple declarative sentences, don’t include yourself, don’t editorialize, don’t take one source’s word for things, don’t use too many em-dashes, don’t misuse semi-colons, don’t use the words controversy and “the international community,” don’t forget hyperlinks, don’t forget to check name spellings, don’t write longer than 600 words or no one will read it, don’t use cliches. Don’t make any mistakes.

Not one of these don’ts is unreasonable. But their cumulative impact leaves students feeling as if they are navigating a minefield. Bad things happen with the wrong step in minefields.

Don’t reflects what is known as prevention focus, a phenomenon developed by psychologist E. Tory Higgins of Columbia. Drawing on Higgins’ Regulatory Focus Theory, prevention focus is a useful tool in ensuring that tasks are done well. But they can undermine creativity by presenting an endless series of doubts designed to lessen the risk of failure. Better to prevent failure, even if that means avoiding trying something new.

Higgins termed its corollary “promotion focus.” Promotion focus is guided by a different word: Do. Try. Risk. Do remember to get both sides of the story, and use verbs that will propel the reader along. Do ask people about themselves even if you disagree with them. Do risk failure. Do try again if you fall.

How those messages are imparted – by editors, teachers, institutions that have always done things a certain way – can make all the difference in how writers think about themselves and their work.

We may not admit it – because it feels so needy – but we do want to feel good about what we do. We also want to feel validated.

But that, in turn, raises all sorts of other questions about who does the validating, when we experience it, and whether that validation ends up as a frozen moment in time.

These, however, are questions for another day, and another chapter.

* * *

If you have a question, a problem in your work, if you are feeling lost, stuck, confused, at sea, searching, grappling, or baffled, email me at Michaelshapiro808@gmail.com and tell me what you’re confronting and what help you need.

It is seldom, if ever, the case that one writer’s problem or question is their’s alone.

Please indicate if you want to remain anonymous, have your name or just first name included. I will include the question and then answer it as best I can.

* * *

Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture.

It was not as if they had not been writing for weeks; they had, week in and week out, been writing without having to feel self-conscious about….writing. After all, these were only letters, and in the great scorecard of life, they counted no more than the results of spring training games. Which is to say, not at all.

The problem was the leap itself – not to full drafts but rather whatI had believed to be the easier, more manageable step of the first hundred words The idea was that if you could nail the top, if you could seize control of the narrative over what amounted to thirty seconds of a reader’s attention, the rest would be easier.

Not easy, never easy. But not nearly so daunting.

I followed this approach year after year, somehow believing that by framing the approach in a way that made the step less frightening, the students would see how the writing they had done in those letters reflected who they were as writers.

Sometimes it worked. But too often I watched as students succumbed to a condition best captured in the title of the 1968 classic by Archie Bell and the Drells: The Tighten Up.

In the end, when I asked what had gone wrong, students wrote about how fear engulfed them - the fear of not getting it right, or choosing the wrong words, or of clunky phrasing. Of failing.

So this semester, my last in the classroom, I was determined to break the cycle and try something new. Instead of taking a leap that felt attainable but too seldom was, I asked them to take two interim steps: Write a final letter, but not as they had done in the preceding weeks, to me.

This time write a letter yourself. Dear (fill in the name), What is my story about?

They wrote their letters and came to class and there, without warning – I didn’t want them overthinking – I gave them a half hour to find and highlight in their letters the core of their stories. Not necessarily the first hundred words. But, with apologies to Graham Greene, the heart of the matter.

Then, and only then, I told them, was it time to write the first few hundred words.

I waited. And worried.

And then their stories landed.

I asked: how did it go?

This is what they said:

“For an entire semester, I had established a shared working document where I’d routinely write my memos for Michael. It was a safe space, a ‘playground’ of sorts where I wasn’t impeded by the thought of perfection. By the time Michael asked us to write a letter to ourselves, I had done weeks of reporting; I knew the story by heart, but the exercise of clearly stating what the story was about forced me to accept that the story was right in front of me. There was already very little room for failure. It was that sense of satisfaction after writing this letter that made starting my story a lot easier. Like rushing through a test that you’ve thoroughly studied for, I found that the beginning of my story flowed effortlessly. The letter to myself forced me to organize my thoughts, which became the gateway to writing a clear, simple but effective start to my story.

-Jimena Elmufdi

“Writing letters throughout the course of the Memory Project lowered the stakes for me as a writer, but in the best way possible. It didn’t mean there was less to care about or that the content was substandard, it just meant the normal pressure of writing for perfection was alleviated. This allowed for a more free flowing, creative writing process. Writing to myself, specifically, was a full circle moment for a story centered on ancestry, home and love. It also helped me get to the center of my story — a casual but productive conversation between both audience and author.”

-Avery Young

“For me, being given the time and space for the interim step of ‘What do I think my story is?’ was crucial. Had we jumped immediately into writing the opening, I think it not only would have felt like too large of a stylistic jump, but also would have shoehorned us into too narrow a process chronologically. I often need to get into the meat of a story before I figure out what the opening will be. And while the reporting letters were a very effective tool for taking some of the ‘writing’ pressure off throughout the semester, I definitely appreciated the final memo as a sort of transitional moment. I needed to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. It was a chance to not just sketch out a rough outline of the story, but to see how it really felt to me, and to get a firmer grasp on it in my head. This made the shift to writing the story feel seamless and well within my control. ‘What do I think my story is?’ is such a great framing question, and being able to get one last round of feedback from Michael on how I answered this made me feel more confident as I jumped off the deep end to write the whole thing.”

-Katherine Weyback

“I already knew quite a bit about my topic and learned much more through the extensive reporting process. I was therefore struggling to really focus on what details the story needed and which could be left out. I wasn’t exactly sure if the story was about the occupation, the photographer, the zoo, Jewish life in these early days of the war or all of them combined, and I definitely wasn’t sure how I would combine them. Writing a letter to myself, forced me to just start writing without having to think about structure etc. Instead of getting bogged down by the amount of information, this helped me zoom in on what I really wanted to convey and what the story I wanted to tell exactly was. Writing a Dear Jonathan letter was thus helpful for me.”

-Jonathan de Bock

So what was the take-away? More to the point, what had I learned, or better said, been reminded of?

Writing is an endeavor that comes with great risk. Not the physical risks of other professions, but a different sort of risk - one that cuts to who we are and, through our work, how we hope the world will see us.

By pushing my students too quickly to leap from letters to stories I had unintentionally raised the level of risk beyond where many were comfortable. I had forgotten how jarring it can feel, leaving the comfort of letters to be seen only by me, to writing even a hundred words that might be seen by everyone.

They needed a couple of steps in between – to get used to the water before diving in.

Maybe, we all do.

* * *

If you have a question, a problem in your work, if you are feeling lost, stuck, confused, at sea, searching, grappling, or baffled, email me at Michaelshapiro808@gmail.com and tell me what you’re confronting and what help you need.

It is seldom, if ever, the case that one writer’s problem or question is their’s alone.

Please indicate if you want to remain anonymous, have your name or just first name included. I will include the question and then answer it as best I can.

* * *

Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture.

Billy Southworth was manager of the St. Louis Cardinals in 1942. His son had abandoned a promising baseball career to join the Canadian Air Force eleven months before Pearl Harbor. They were as close as a father and son could be. I happened upon their story while researching what I hoped might become a nonfiction book about baseball in the dark and frightening first year for America in World War II. Baseball felt like a good way to capture that moment.

It took little time, however, to see how difficult the reporting would be. Few of the men who had played that season were still alive, and diminished memories afflicted the survivors. I had old newspaper accounts of games and little else. Then I discovered the Southworths and thought I had found the book’s heart in the diary that Billy, Jr. kept, and which his sister generously shared with me.

The diary was a record of his days in the Air Corps, first Canada’s and then America’s. But it revealed little of him. Then again, this was a journal intended for his father, and it captured how men who kept their feelings unstated found ways to speak to those they loved.

Billy Southworth’s Cardinals won the 1942 World Series. Billy, Jr. survived the war – remarkable given the extraordinary number of fatalities among pilots – only to be killed in a training mission. His father never recovered.

But, in the end, I concluded that I still did not have enough material for a book. I wrote an essay about the Southworths for an anthology of baseball writing and then, regrettably, abandoned the project.

Regrettably because it would take many years and the discovery of Good Night, Irene, for me to see how I might have told that story, had I possessed the imagination of Luis Alberto Urrea.

Urrea has written 19 books, both fiction and non-fiction. His best-selling novel The House of Broken Angels was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award and his nonfiction account of Mexican immigrants lost in the Arizona desert, The Devil’s Highway, was a finalist for a Pulitzer.

Good Night, Irene is his mother’s story. The research began while he was still a teenager when, against his mother’s strict orders, he opened her footlocker and discovered a record of the seminal chapter of her life.

Urrea’s mother, Phyllis, was one of 250 women who in World War II had volunteered to join a branch of the Red Cross assigned to serve coffee, donuts and smiles that brought memories of home to servicemen on the front lines. They were called the Clubmobile Corps, or as they were nicknamed, Donut Dollies. They saw combat, death, and suffering. His mother was present at the liberation of Buchenwald and the Battle of the Bulge. She came home from war suffering from both physical and psychological injuries that, like so many of her male counterparts, would haunt her for the rest of her life.

Urrea thought he had the makings of a nonfiction book. Then, together with his wife Cindy who had been a newspaper reporter, he began researching, only to encounter obstacles that threatened to undermine the project. The records kept by the Red Cross of the Donut Dollies service had been destroyed in a fire decades earlier. Most of the women had died, as had his mother.

He had little to work with until Cindy came across a story in a local newspaper of an elderly woman named Jill Pitts who had been a Donut Dolly. He tracked her down and called. She told him she was 94 and he’d been wise not to wait to visit until she turned 95. When he walked into her home he saw on the wall a photograph of his mother. Her wartime buddy.

Urrea had a roadmap - literally–of their route through Europe following Patton’s Third Army. He had Jill Pitt’s memories. But was it enough to power and sustain a nonfiction book?

He did not believe it was.

But perhaps it could work as a novel.

I tore through the book and when I was done I was eager to talk with Urrea about how he had done it. There is a long postscript about the reporting itself. But I was curious about how he came to reimagine what he thought of as one kind of book and went about telling his mother’s story as another.

I had had my chance with the Southworths and had not seen it.

How did he?

I began by asking, “You’ve spoken about discovering that not only had the Clubmobile records been destroyed in a fire but that most of those women had died. Many nonfiction writers would have stopped there. But I wonder if that disappointment also offered an opportunity to do something more with your mother’s story?”

He replied: “My original plan was to write a nonfiction account of my mom’s experiences with the Clubmobile Corps. I hadn’t thought of it as a novel at all. My main plan was to trace my mom’s journey with the Red Cross.

I knew very little about my mother’s wartime service. Aside from the cryptic tidbits she would let slip at random moments. I did have (and still have) her WWII footlocker that was a container of wonders and horrors. But she wasn’t a consistent record keeper and the ‘facts’ I had were written on the back of photos and in the margins of albums or scrawled in an incomplete journal.

“My wife is a journalist and so was my main researcher. She spent a couple of years digging through all she could find online, in books, at museums. We went to the WWII Museum in New Orleans – the one thing they DID have was a couple of Clubmobile uniforms. We’d only ever seen the black and white photos, never would have known they were a lovely blue! The goldmine was when she found a self-published book that told the history of the Clubmobile Corps. It was a treasure trove with the names of every truck and crew member, many photos and stories, some maps. We think it was published by a friend of someone in the corps, but we could never find any information on her. Lots of info in this book, but none of it footnoted and no official citations.

“We were told all the WWII Clubmobilers were gone – or untraceable. And once we found out about the fire that destroyed much of the WWII Red Cross records, it did feel like a dead end. We just had no official documentation of any kind. I couldn’t even find the field hospital that had treated my mom.

“Out of frustration, my wife dug through my mother’s stuff one last time and found an old mimeographed letter called Miss Jill Goes To War. It was a first-person account of Jill Pitt’s experiences – my mother’s best friend and driver of her truck. However, I had thought she was killed in the war (based on my mom’s stories). My wife found an address and sent a letter – Miss Jill responded and was eager for us to see her. She lived in Champaign, IL about an hour from our front door!

He continued: “Meeting Miss Jill changed everything about this book. I realized in our conversations that I was seeing this story through my novelist’s eye. I realized I could use the facts I had as presented, double-check them against established history, and dive deep into the emotional journeys of these women. I had done much the same thing with my earlier novel about my distant aunt, Teresa Urrea (The Hummingbird’s Daughter). In a lot of ways, it is a more taxing process – certainly on an emotional level. But it gave me a freedom that I needed. I may not have had the footnotes I needed to write a nonfiction book, but I was able to create a matrix for myself to make sense of the tale and to (finally) understand my mother with greater compassion.

I then asked: “You’ve told one interviewer that ‘sometimes the fable is the surest way to see the truth.’ Can you tell me more about that?

He replied: “The point of this book, for me, became not so much to tell what these women ‘did’. I needed to show what these women ‘experienced.’ How they felt. What they saw. How it affected them for the rest of their lives. It was not about writing a report, it was about creating a monument. The engine of the novel was not map coordinates or encyclopedia entries but with the mysteries of my mother in her last years. It’s not the ‘what’, but the ‘who.’

“Since the book has come out, one of the most touching things to me is all the family members who have come to me to tell me they had no idea what their father or their mother had experienced in WWII. Some people have told me they have used the book as conversation with family members who may have a secret history they are not willing to share. In her own way, my mom and Miss Jill are still driving that Clubmobile and still doing service.

Finally, I asked, “How great a challenge is balancing what you’ve learned in your research with where your imagination takes you?”

“Remember, my wife is a reporter,“ he wrote. “While I am struggling to write a chapter constructed of 151 haiku poems about the war and following my imagination where it may lead me, she comes up with a diabolical discovery: a timeline!! A chart of where they were on which dates which suddenly builds a train track across a wilderness.

“You need to have as firm a grip on the actual history, actual dates, actual places as you can get. A lot of creative writing can be done around those dates/battles, but you have to have a firm floor on which to stand to then pile on your haikus.

“And I think it is important to consider retrospect as well. We went to her locations, we went to Glatton Air Base. We drove through Germany to Buchenwald. You find out quickly if you have connected with the actual history. Something that you as a journalist may not be able to afford in your writing we novelists can indulge in just a bit – and that is the feel of it, the ambience and sometimes those two things meet. To be in Buchenwald and see the light through the trees and how the birds sing and the physical details that strike you that photos don’t, changes everything about how you will write about that place.

“Glatton Air Base is now a private landing field in England. I didn’t *need* to go there – no one there had any idea the Clubmobilers are part of its history -- but I wanted to see the place. The man in charge took me on a walk down the runway and told me that if one were to walk at dawn, one could still hear the bombers engines. But here is where the dream and the concrete reality meet: He walked into the weeds and pried up a triangle of old blacktop. Handing it to me, he said ‘You need to keep this because your mum might have stood on it.’ It’s on my desk. I look at it every day because that little object feels like the nexus of what we are talking about.”

* * *

If you have a question, a problem in your work, if you are feeling lost, stuck, confused, at sea, searching, grappling, or baffled, email me at Michaelshapiro808@gmail.com and tell me what you’re confronting and what help you need.

It is seldom, if ever, the case that one writer’s problem or question is their’s alone.

Please indicate if you want to remain anonymous, have your name or just first name included. I will include the question and then answer it as best I can.

* * *

Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture.

I chanced upon her novel, A Loving, Faithful Animal in 2016. It took only a few pages to recognize: this is how I’d want the stories I don’t know how to tell to be written. Finishing Rowe’s books is a relief to know that they exist in her language, which does justice to all the messiness in life, written with that pitch-perfect delivery that tells without elucidating.

She spoke to me from her home in South Eastern Australia.

Diego Courchay: Your love of words started with songwriting, begun by a guitar gifted to you on your 14^th birthday, in a time marked by loss. After your guitar was stolen in your early 20’s, the words left unsung in your notebook became poetry. Could you fill in the blanks on your relationship with words?

Josephine Rowe: It might be too simple to say that it started with songwriting. I did write poetry and stories from a young age, and was always with books, like any bookish child who’s looking for a point of access to the world. That’s where I found agency when small; in creating.

Music is still very present in my language. It’s just gone into the sentence rhythm. I haven’t picked up a guitar in years, but I whistle all the time. I sing loudly in the car.

DC: Images matter to you. How do you remain alert to the meaning of what you see?

Josephine Rowe: Film photography is a hobby. I was given a 1950s TLR in my late 20s, and it’s this particular camera I’m fond of. Images are there when words go quiet, as they do, sometimes. Often a scene will appear—either witnessed or envisaged—and it’s the atmosphere that I’m trying to get onto the page. You want to capture that light; you want to capture that charge of whatever has come to you in dream or in memory.

DC: Your first novel, A Loving, Faithful Animal, is a book about trauma, the story of the family of a Vietnam veteran afflicted with PTSD. What’s powerful is the closeness, the intimacy.

JR: It is a personal novel, close to my own upbringing, but with less violence. I pulled punches in that novel, because I felt there was only so much a reader could absorb. The attempts at levity, measure and distance, are very closely attended to.

But I realized I needed to fictionalize these people, to allow them to have interiors, rather than modeling too closely on people I thought I knew, because we don’t truly have that deep access to our loved ones, their secret selves. And when I did that, when I kind of let go of this fidelity—it was never autobiography anyway, rather an echo of lived experience—I think the novel really gained vitality.

Your question about loyalty comes into that: what is the truest way to tell this story? In a sense, that required leaning further into fiction to allow the emotional truth to come through.

I did feel an obligation because there is so little literature from the children of Vietnam veterans in Australia, and there is a big silence around it. There’s a lot of shame. It’s the only conscription this country ever had, young men drafted into the American war in Vietnam. It was popular when they went in, and grossly unpopular when they came back.

In researching I gained a better understanding of my father. My mother died when I was young, which doesn’t happen in the course of the novel. That’s one of the heavinesses that I felt the book could not withstand.

DC: There’s another form of truthfulness in your novels which is social class. Why does it matter that your narratives are so carefully rooted in class?

JR: That’s a fair question, I’m always a little taken aback. I don’t think of it as noteworthy, which maybe says something about my own reading habits: Lucia Berlin, Erri de Luca, Grace Paley, Denis Johnson, Janet Frame, Wayne Macauley, Tony Birch.

Is it ever possible to get completely outside that class perspective, when it’s what I’ve known? Your worldview is always informed by that dearth, and I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing, if you survive it okay.

If you come through with basic trust and humour, capacity for tenderness, absurdity, and wonder, it can be a useful point of reference. Ideally, it equips you with a broader range of perspective, a reasonable amount of empathy, rather than judgement.

Australia would like to believe that it is more economically and intellectually mobile than it actually is.. I think that’s often where the stories that I’m interested in telling, gain some of their tension.

You mentioned vernacular. Beyond getting a voice from that demographic, I think vernacular is fascinating, because you get a lot of context from expressions and idioms. There’s part of me that does feel vigilant in the way that certain classes are depicted and trivialized, or caricaturized and condescended to. I’ll sometimes be asked why I write in a “difficult” way about certain classes, as though you’re supposed to simplify language, dumb things down, as though nobody in a low-income bracket reads or thinks too deeply —everyone’s just thrashing around at the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid.

DC: You’ve said “Writing is essentially a rag and bone trade, collecting things,” and that you accumulate “rogue passages scrawled on the backs of envelopes and stray hotel stationery”. You have both described yourself as a “hoarder” and living out of a suitcase.

JR: My mother was a compulsive hoarder, and I feel like I have inherited the grain. In her case I suspect it was brought about by an astonishing amount of loss in her life. Almost a kind of animism, which I believe is common to hoarders—a belief in the value of objects as if objects had feelings, and the more human interaction they’ve had, the more hands they’d passed through, the closer they came to having something like a soul. It instilled in me this responsibility to objects and their histories: I find it incredibly hard to throw things away, gifts, birthday cards, letters. But I also move a lot. And I love to give things away. I think the transience, has several causes, but one of them is this sense that if you’re constantly uprooting, you can’t gather too much stuff.

A lot of my own hoarding goes on in abstract form. It’s in images, sounds, ideas. And yet, there’s an internal space that they take up, an intangible weight they accrue.

There’s one novel that I’ve been working at for 20 years, and I have no qualms that it isn’t finished. It might not even be very long when it ends. This project becomes a home, because apart from longstanding friendships, kinships, it is one of the most reliable forms of continuity. These projects that you carry, they are a space that is familiar, that you can inhabit. Increasingly I find unfinished work companionable, rather than something to be guilty or anxious about.

DC: You’ve said some of your work is feverish, and some glacial. What is your relationship with these forms of building a story?

JR: I don’t think it’s sustainable to stay in that feverish, frenetic state, where you’re just a conduit. It’s a charmed place to be, it’s exciting, but you don’t want to live there. So I’m fine if not every work feels like that. Over these past months, I was working happily on a longer project, and then what I thought was only going to be a short story completely butted in. And then all my usual routines, and the few responsibilities that I have, went out the window. You go a little bit feral, you don’t eat at the right time, you don’t sleep at the right time. Your whole project is to keep up with this idea as it’s being played out to you. I felt like I was just this clunky machine, like an analog projector trying to keep up, and when the frames per second starts to speed up beyond what the poor machine is capable of processing, then things are spooling on the floor, it all becomes chaotic. I don’t know that I managed to keep up with this story in the fluid way that it arrived, so now I’m doubling back, wading through the writing to return to something that feels cohesive and natural, to regain that fluidity.
I find writing enjoyable, necessary even, but I almost never find it a linear process.

DC: In your latest novel, Little World, you know your characters’ guts, not just their psychology.

JR: That book took a long time to write: you travel with people for long enough, and you get a gut feeling for their nature. There were characters that seemed present from the inciting image, which I woke up with as the book opens: the incorruptible body of what is supposedly a child saint being carried by horse float as a bequest to Orrin Bird, a retired engineer in the Kimberley, West Australia. The saint herself, her consciousness—her voice!—woke up very angrily a little later in the writing process. I didn’t know that she was going to speak or have as much say in the novel as she does, but I’m glad she does—it’s crucial.

The middle section, from the perspective of Mathilde, I worked on during a protracted bout of insomnia while living in New York. I’m a lifelong insomniac, it’s a familiar complication, but I was frustrated that it was so disruptive to the research I was there to do, so after a while I just leant into it. Mathilde is how I spent my insomnia: that disembodied feeling that comes with compound sleep deprivation, a sense of time and memory playing tricks. That shapes the narrative point of view for Mathilde.

As to her experience of giving up a child, I was thinking about my paternal grandmother, who was also a painter, and was sent to one of those terrible homes for unwed mothers when she was pregnant with my father, who she was forced to adopt out. I don’t know much about her, and the character of Mathilde is not modeled on my grandmother, but I wanted to get inside what that might have been like, to go through life with that absence, that shadow. And also that possibility of one day reconnecting with this grown child. Otherwise, there’s a lot in that book that I couldn’t tell you where it came from, other than it seemed to knit together of its own accord.

Portrait of Josephine Rowe (detail) by Paul Spencer, courtesy of the author.

Several years ago I came up with what I had thought was an idea with promise: rather than have my students write complete first drafts after weeks of submitting reporting memos, I’d instead have them first write only the first 100 words of their stories.

I did not say lede and nut graf. One hundred words. People, I explained, read on average 200 words a minute. Given the fierce competition for attention, you had little time to pull readers into your stories. In fact, you did not even have a full minute, or even a full 30 seconds – 100 words. The clock was ticking from Word One, which meant that something had to be happening by, say, Word 15 to ensure they stuck around until Word 30, and then to Words 50 and 100.

There was also this: if you could seize control of your story in those first 100 words, the writing of the full draft would be faster and easier.

This appeared to work. Students would come to class with their first 100 words and I’d read them aloud. I do not believe in workshopping – students, I submit, are paying for me to teach them. Their classmates, though well-intentioned, have not edited thousands of stories and so often lack the skills to make stories better.

They do, however, have a gut as to whether a story works, and so reading those 100 words aloud was a way to audience-test whether the opening section clicked.

So it went. I used this approach for years and thought I was onto something interesting, so much so that I will confess that I fell in love with my idea.

And yes, that love did not allow me to see and appreciate that I may have been misguided.

A couple of years ago I wrote a chapter about bridging the Great Divide between writing memos and stories. Over the course of the first seven weeks of class the students send me weekly memos distilling what they’d learned in their reporting. The memos, which I preferred to have them think of as letters – Dear Michael, This is what I learned this week… – allow them to write without being self-conscious of the “writing.”

The letters go into a single Google Doc so that they can see how their stories evolved, how their reporting takes them in unexpected directions, and where they’d need to pivot. My comments are only about the reporting, not the writing. That would come later. I did not want to get in their heads.

And why would I? Freed from self-consciousness, the voices that quickly emerged in those letters are very much their own – assured, singular, idiosyncratic. They are a delight to read.

But then comes the time to write. I thought 100 words would ease them into their stories. In theory, yes. But not necessarily in practice.

As my students from a past class explained when I asked what had gone wrong.

“When it came time to write, I felt the pressure of eyes other than Michael’s suddenly reading through my piece,” wrote one. “Also, to no one’s fault but my own, I always assume that my reader sees the worst in my writing, as opposed to assuming they might see the best in it,” wrote one.

“In that moment, my brain doesn’t overthink,” wrote another. “I just wrote what I had, and the words flowed easily. But when I had to write a draft of 100 words, the pressure started to appear. I became too aware of what I was doing, and it didn’t go as it should. My memos were better than my article, and it was because I started to overthink what I was doing.”

“For me, the challenge in transitioning from writing a weekly memo to writing a story lay in curbing the “reporter’s voice” and owning my natural voice,” wrote a third. “I was more focused on explaining what I knew as opposed to embedding my reporting and writing with authority. I also kept trying to perfect my first 100 words before moving on to write the entire story.”

This may be my final semester, but I am still open to trying new things, especially because I remained vexed by my inability to help my students navigate this key step. I was stuck on a solution. Then a long-ago memory surfaced and offered what I thought could be a way.

Like so many memories, this one was fractured; I recalled pieces but not the entirety of the moment. It happened about 45 years ago. I was working as a reporter for the long-defunct suburban section of the Chicago Tribune. A young man was killed in a bar fight. I wanted to reconstruct the story of his life, and what led to that fateful confrontation.

The story mattered to me; I wanted to get it right, to do him justice, and, yes, to show what I could do. I felt the pressure and could not find my way into the story.

I must have taken my notes home because I do remember sitting in my room in front of my manual typewriter and writing exactly nothing. Finally, in desperation, I decided to write myself a letter: Dear Michael, What is your story about…

So began a conversation with myself. No pressure. No stakes. Just words on a page that no one else would see. I wrote and wrote and before too long a story began to take shape. I knew the story. I just needed to get out of my own way and stop trying so damn hard.

I do not know why of all the stories I have written and all the struggles I have had trying to tell them, this one stands out. Perhaps because it revealed something to me that felt important enough to file away.

I wondered whether this might work for my students.

I ran the idea by one who stopped by for office hours. I did not want to leap in before seeing how it might play. She was intrigued.

So I brought it to the class. I had told them the week before that I was determined to make this transition from letters to stories easier, and that the pressure was on me to find a way. Anything to lower the anxiety that fuels us but which unchecked can overwhelm us.

Forget the first 100 words, I said. Do not write me a letter. Write one to yourself. Dear XXXX, What is my story about?

While I want to see what you write, I will not line edit it, not yet. Line editing is a process of correcting and refining and it will happen. Right now, all that matters is getting the story onto the page.

They seemed relieved. Excited may be expecting too much. They’re about to take a week’s spring break – a good and necessary time to put some distance between their stories and themselves.

When you come back, I told them, write yourselves that letter. I hope - and believe – that you will experience what I experienced all those years ago: a story, your story, written in your own singular voice, coming to life.
I’ll let you know how it goes.

Fingers crossed.

* * *

We will be off next week. Back on March 27th.

* * *

If you have a question, a problem in your work, if you are feeling lost, stuck, confused, at sea, searching, grappling, or baffled, email me at Michaelshapiro808@gmail.com and tell me what you’re confronting and what help you need.

It is seldom, if ever, the case that one writer’s problem or question is their’s alone.

Please indicate if you want to remain anonymous, have your name or just first name included. I will include the question and then answer it as best I can.

* * *

Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture

Uncertainty can be especially difficult for students, given that they are not yet confident of their skills and themselves. It is why, for instance, once students are given a form for writing a story they will find it all but impossible not to stick to that form, no matter how limiting it can feel.

But I believe that students are more alive to boldness than they might know. My job is to put them in a position to risk failure, knowing great things come by taking chances.

They are well along in the reporting of the stories that will comprise the Memory Project anthology they will publish in May. Now they have to figure out how to entice people to read them, guided by my wise colleague, James Robinson.

But how to do this? They cannot rely as writers once did on mention in the shrinking number of book reviews. They are unlikely to land on Oprah’s Book Club, or appear on the Daily Show. In other words, they must think beyond the traditional gatekeepers – those powerful people who anointed books with the warrant of quality.

The chaos into which I’ve plunged them is a world where defaulting to ideas of the past does them no good.

Then again, the past is not without useful lessons. Maybe in that chaos they might well discover them.

Publishing’s measures for success, as I wrote last week, reflect the vanishing, analog world, where having your work seen was contingent on getting someone to print it. This gave publishers of books and magazines all but exclusive claim to what was worthy of being read. That is no longer the case.

New technologies continue making it easier for anyone with a story to tell to make it accessible for anyone else to read. Yet mainstream publishing retains a power of defining what represents success. To be regarded as a writer of consequence still means for many having work launched with the presumed warrant of quality bestowed by a mainstream publisher. When writers speak of sales, they begin by talking about what many still see as the most important one: “I sold my book to…(fill in name of publishing house/magazine).”

Being published has never been easier. Being seen, however, has never been more difficult. Gatekeepers traditionally limited what would be read. Now, as their role shrinks, more and more writers clamour to be read.

Which begs urgent questions: Who are those readers? Where do I find them? How can I make them discover what I have written?

If you think mainstream publishers knew the answers you would be wrong. In fairness, until digital technologies ushered in the Age of Analytics, it was all but impossible to know much of anything about readers. This left publishers to essentially throw spaghetti at the marketing wall in the hope of reaching as many people as they could – get on The Today Show and hope something sticks. The problem was that tomorrow and the next day another book was being featured on the Today Show or Good Morning America or NPR.

The most maddening expression from publishers whom you believed knew a thing or two about selling books was: hope you can catch a wave.

That is what surfers say. Surfers, however, study waves.

In 2015 we collaborated with our colleagues at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism on a study of reader behavior. As a publisher of longform narrative nonfiction – our stories were typically 10,000 words and longer – we wanted to understand when, where and how readers chose what to read.

We learned that people read long stories all the time and everywhere; so much for our assumption that people only read long stories on weekends. But what was especially revealing was where the story was published. A story, in say, The New Yorker, had a better chance of capturing readers’ attention because it came with that aforementioned warrant of quality. A gatekeeper had blessed it.

Yet time and again over the past dozen years, we’ve seen stories capture audiences that came from relatively little known publications. My favorite example was a story published in 2012 in the first class James and I taught together.

The story had everything working against it: it appeared on a hastily built student website; it was competing on that site with stories about the porn industry, the Holocaust and the murder of an NFL star. This story was about math and posed an arcane question: whether a hermit-like Japanese mathematician had successfully solved the elusive ABC Conjecture if he refused to “show his work?” Worse still, the New York Times had written about this months earlier.

Within a week, however, the story by Caroline Chen, now a national reporter for ProPublica, had had over 100,000 page views, quickly surpassing the readership of the Times story. That number has only grown. You can still read it here.

This made no sense. A digitally savvy colleague offered a theory: the story had a built-in audience of readers – mathematicians – who flocked to it because they felt their world was too seldom written about.

Maybe. But that would assume that only mathematicians were interested, and as the readership grew the numbers suggested the story had taken the viral leap beyond a relatively small interest group.

We saw the same thing happen again several years later with a story about female circumcision, a first-person account from a young woman whose life, like the lives of her mother and grandmother, had been shattered by that awful procedure.

The story, Damage by Mariya Karimjee, has by now been read by over a quarter of a million people, not all of whom are advocates for woman subjected to this dreadful practice.

Both stories were re-posted and shared. How they were shared mattered a great deal. Analytics reminds us that the most powerful sharing tool is not social media, which can reach so many so quickly.

It is email. It is someone you know sending you a link and saying, in effect: I know you well enough to know that I believe you will want to read this.

The warrant of quality – issued not by a gatekeeper or a famous publication – but by someone whom you trust.

Not a single, all knowing gatekeeper. A network of gatekeepers.

Few people know more about audiences than James, who spent over 20 years analyzing their behavior at the New York Times. James was therefore well positioned when he published his book, More Than We Expected, about the life and death of his five year old son. James had a hypothesis about who his audience might be: parents of medically complicated kids; medical professionals; those dealing with the loss of a loved one; people of faith.

But once the book was published, he discovered that those assumptions were incomplete. James began to witness that most exciting if unpredictable phenomenon: the creation of a network.

People shared his book with people they knew and, much like a series of Biblical begats, bestowed upon James’ book, the story James so much needed to tell and share, their blessings, their approval, their warrants of quality. Along the way, he’s discovered unexpected new audience segments: Nephrologists. Rare disease groups. Medical chaplains.

“I needed to find people who needed to read it as much as I needed to write,” James says. “But I found them and they are not exactly who I expected.”

In the explanatory note I sent my students, I added a familiar image: Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. There are two men in this painting who catch my eye: the man with back to us; and the man sitting with the woman. The man and woman may be sitting together but they do not look connected to one another; they are each other’s company but little more.

We do not see the face of the man whose back is to us. We do not know if he is smiling or despondent. We can only guess.

I had a poster of Nighthawks on my wall when I was young and in the throes of a painful breakup. I’d try to console myself by asking who I’d rather me: the sure thing of the man who at the very least had company; or the man who remained unknown.

The sure thing, knowing how limited it appears.

Or the unknown.
I want my students to choose the unknown. I recognize the temptation of the sure thing, of going back. But discovery comes only to those who embrace uncertainty.

* * *

If you have a question, a problem in your work, if you are feeling lost, stuck, confused, at sea, searching, grappling, or baffled, email me at Michaelshapiro808@gmail.com and tell me what you’re confronting and what help you need.

It is seldom, if ever, the case that one writer’s problem or question is their’s alone.

Please indicate if you want to remain anonymous, have your name or just first name included. I will include the question and then answer it as best I can.

* * *

Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture

The agent suggested she change her approach to the story. My friend, who believed in her book and how she wanted to tell her story, balked. Already a published author, she was at a loss as to what to do next: stay true to her vision for the book? Or alter it to accommodate a market that offered no assurance that the change would end in a sale?

Our conversation had, by now, become numbingly familiar: a writer has a book she needs to write. Mainstream publishing, effectively five houses that over time have absorbed what were once independent publishers, conducts a profit and loss assessment to gauge whether the book can sell widely, which is all that matters, given the bottom line pressure from their corporate masters. The process is, on its face, a specious one, given that while there may be comparable titles, this particular book is, in fact, a product that does not yet exist.

An editor may like the book and want to publish the book but the editor is not making the call. The business side is, and if the business side senses risk – and with it risk of incurring the disapproval of those high above them on the corporate org chart – it will respond with what is easiest, safest and most familiar: no. The experience can leave authors feeling like a gladiator who after having fought the lions looks up at the emperor whose response to their valor is a slow and fateful thumbs down.

I listened to my friend as I have listened to other friends in much the same situation - and as they have listened to me. As it happens, this friend runs a newsletter. I asked how many subscribers she had.

Thousands, she replied.

I said: You have a core, accessible, engaged and loyal audience of thousands of readers who are interested in the subject of your book. Don’t you see that you do not need a publisher’s permission to write and sell your book? You have an audience. You need only provide them with a book, ebook or print-on-demand, which is now easily done.

She responded warily. That is not surprising, given that even with all the convulsive changes to publishing, the yardsticks by which many writers still measure their successes reflect the standards of a vanishing age.

We are in an in-between phase in publishing. Even as new technologies make it possible for anyone to be a published author virtually overnight, those changes have created chaos and uncertainty: does publishing on my own really make me an author? How will anyone find my book amid the firehose of new titles? Does it “count” if publishing houses have rejected my book, and by extension, me?

So we revert to the old ways, to the past, much as a spurned lover terrified about a loveless future longs for a return to what has ended, no matter how unhappy a time that was. In publishing that meant a publisher who, for nonfiction writers – fiction was something quite different; you have to write the book – a home, an advance against royalties, and the promise that upon delivery the book would be printed, bound and brought to market. (If you were lucky you had an editor who lifted your work, too).

A mainstream publisher, the thinking went, was positioned to get the book some attention, especially with reviewers and that, in turn, would draw notice, sales and perhaps praise, too.

But in truth it was the rare book that publishers invested in promoting, leaving writers to do the selling themselves. Writers were forever complaining about publishers that “did nothing” to promote their book. And while writers, who may have spent years on their books, are prone to disappointment and carping at being unappreciated and unsupported, they were not wrong.

Typically a book was given six weeks to find an audience and if hadn’t, well, time for the next book. (When my first book came out in 1989 the New York Times review appeared on Week 6. I called the director of promotion. He told me that the review would be helpful for my next book.)

The only people who published without a mainstream publisher did so with what were known as “vanity presses,” which were dismissed as the burial ground for memoirs of not-quite-prominent-enough people with the means to cover the cost of printing.

We are, of course, at a different time, but striking out on one’s own still carries the enduring taint of second best.

How, you might still ask, will my book ever get reviewed if it’s not published by a mainstream house?

Look around: how many book reviews do you still see?

I am not advocating the wholesale abandonment of mainstream publishing, nor do I anticipate hordes of writers striking out on their own. I understand and appreciate what mainstream publishers can offer – beginning with that most basic of human desires: the comfort of home.

But I have seen over the course of the past 20 years how risk aversion has shrunk the opportunities for a category known as the mid-list author – writers who might never write a best seller but who nonetheless produced books that found readers, even if their number was not stratospheric. I was such a writer, as were friends and colleagues, award-winning authors among them who had lost none of their skills and imagination but who found fewer and fewer houses willing to take on projects that did not hold the imagined promise of landing at Oprah’s Book Club.

Some made their way to academic houses and some to small, independent houses – both longstanding and startups – where, much to their delight, they felt welcome and appreciated, even if the advances were less than they once were.

We cannot help but take rejection of our work personally. Our writing -- be it in a story or a book, fiction and nonfiction, essay or graphic novel – is who we are. Most of the chapters in this newsletter have been about the work itself, and ways to find joy in what is difficult, exhausting, and at times overwhelming. But unless we are content with putting our work in a drawer forever or showing it only to family and friends, we write to be read by strangers, the more the better.

The trick has always been to translate our need to tell a story into a stranger’s need to read it. Standing in the way of making that connection is a publisher who, for reasons we writers find arbitrary and narrow, says, sorry but I don’t see enough people wanting to read this to justify our trying to sell it.

Which is where my friend finds herself – and like so many others in her position - leaving her discouraged and unsure of what to do next.

But what she does not have to do – what none of us have to do – is ask permission of the person at the publishing house gate. What an experience it is to feel that much as you want their approval, you do not need it anymore.

Next week: Defining success on your terms. Not theirs.

* * *

If you have a question, a problem in your work, if you are feeling lost, stuck, confused, at sea, searching, grappling, or baffled, email me at Michaelshapiro808@gmail.com and tell me what you’re confronting and what help you need.

It is seldom, if ever, the case that one writer’s problem or question is their’s alone.

Please indicate if you want to remain anonymous, have your name or just first name included. I will include the question and then answer it as best I can.

* * *

Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture

Whenever I’m let loose in someone else’s home, I usually head for the bookcase. My impoliteness dawns on me, eventually, but as recently as last week, I was as happy to visit a friend I hadn’t seen in years as I was thrilled to rediscover his ceiling-high collection of words.

I’ll justify this with another quote, from So Many Books, by Gabriel Zaid: “Each reader’s unique personality flourishes in diversity and is reflected in their personal library…Every reader is a world unto themselves: no two personal libraries are identical.” Rediscovering my friend’s library was a way of getting reacquainted with his old tastes, and where reading has led him in the ensuing decade.

We envy what we lack, and it’s not a contradiction to be grateful for a movable life while remembering the countless hardbacks left by the wayside. The titles we leave behind come back to haunt us, every once in a while. We find copies of them here and there, in bookshops or elsewhere, and feel guilty for having discarded them, opting to preserve something else in the overstuffed suitcase.

Maybe life would be easier with going digital, but books have an air of durability about them, as websites come and go, old stories are deleted, and the bolted door of “HTTP 404 - File not found error” tells us a text is no more. There is little left of the early Internet, but any library holds books that outdate us all. Maybe life is lighter with a Kindle, but we’d lose the choices we make. And what they teach us.

I remember two departures that made parting with books meaningful. Some time ago, as I was leaving New York, I visited a previous apartment where I had left a year’s worth of reading due to the lack of furniture in my next living quarters. As the likely inheritor of what was already in her living room, the roommate who had replaced me took an active part in parsing through what I could salvage. It turned out to be an enlightening experience. She was a book critic, and what could have been a niggling process instead became an impromptu lesson in literary criticism.

Years later, in Washington, D.C., having accumulated a small library, I had to abandon most of it due to a change of plans. I was saying goodbye to a city, to many sandcastles of reading aspirations, research, and article ideas for which those books had been purchased. That neighborhood was full of Little Free Libraries – those quaint miniature tree houses shaped like mailboxes – where you can leave or take as many books as you can hold. I enlisted a friend by asking if she also had books to donate. She did, for much more poignant reasons than I did. When we met in front of the first stop, carrying heavy Ikea bags to be emptied, she took out a book and handled it carefully. I was surprised to see a highly technical title that did not relate to her interests. They were her father’s books, she explained after a pause. He had recently passed away. She could not keep his books, but made a point of giving each its due, saying a few words about what they had meant to him, before sending them on their way.

What happens to books after we leave them? I once met a man who knew. His name was Guillermo, and he was a student in Mexico City who made extra cash peddling books, all of which were startlingly good. When asked where he found them, he answered that it was “among the book destroyers,” a poetic way to say he sought them among the city’s vast paper recyclers. There, tons of paper products were pulped, and he sifted through the paperbacks on death row, rescuing what he could.

Is it worth having all those books if that’s how most might need to end, despite Guillermo’s efforts? Can we actually enjoy all the books we ever own?

One answer to that can be found in Argentina. It’s the strange tale of a man who loved books beyond any possibility of reading them.

Jorge Luis Borges was appointed director of his country’s National Library in 1955, just as he went blind. “There was I, in some way, the center of 900,000 volumes in various languages. I discovered that I could hardly make out the title pages or the spines. I then wrote ‘Poem of the Gifts.” It reads as follows:

No one should read self-pity or reproach / into this statement of the majesty / of God, who with such splendid irony / granted me both the books and the night / Care of this city of books he handed over to sightless eyes (…) In shadow, with a tentative stick, I try / the hollow twilight, slow and imprecise — / I, who had always thought of Paradise / in form and image as a library.

He served with distinction for 18 years in his unseen paradise, inspired by wandering through it.

It’s one of the truest examples of the pleasure that some can derive from living among books, beyond the ambition of reading them, taking comfort in their mere presence. As Montaigne wrote in the 16^th century: “As a matter of fact, I make no more use of them, as it were, than those who know them not. I enjoy them as misers do their money, in knowing that I may enjoy them when I please: my mind is satisfied with this right of possession…(My library) ’tis there that I am in my kingdom, and there I endeavor to make myself an absolute monarch, and to sequester this one corner from all society.”

It is a misanthrope’s refuge, perhaps, and also a world in itself, where the objects speak to us when they are opened. And, who knows, maybe even between each other. This enticing idea was posited by the curious Mexican writer Julio Torri, who wrote that he had witnessed it himself, heard it, “not as an invention of my understanding nor with the mind clouded by the vanities of wine.” What he goes on to relate is what two books say to each other, away from prying ears, when separate volumes of the same work are reunited in a library.

Torri’s text is a play on the intimate connections that start to form as we fill our bookshelves, and it might not be so outlandish at all. I know for a fact that some of my relatives and acquaintances who have written books get along better on the bookshelf than in real life, and it’s easier to imagine them crammed there than around a table. If anything, their books are more likely to talk to each other than they are!

For however long they remain intact, our bookshelves follow a logic all their own. In their tight embrace, they preserve the time we spent with each book, whether through mementos between the pages or marginalia. I know I’ve written many things in the margins of books, some to do with the paragraph alongside my notes, and others seemingly oblivious to it. I recently found in a book of serious essays by a Post-Structuralist philosopher that I had filled the space alongside his lofty ideas with musings about soccer. I can’t recapture the why, but I know that I could reread those arduous pages countless times without ever returning to green fields and balls being kicked with abandon. That reading of the text exists only in that copy, alongside the stray conversations overheard and jotted down, or the mysterious directions to forgotten places.

I rarely stumble upon those notes, yet they never fail to surprise me, and are sometimes not my own. An old edition of Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon bears my mother’s handwriting, marking the date and place where she read it while being pregnant.

That uniqueness is all the more reason to cherish books and want to keep them, as reminders of our past and a sense of belonging. Sartre makes this point in The Words, his autobiography. “I began my life as I shall no doubt end it: among books…Even before I could read, I already revered these raised stones; upright or leaning, wedged together like bricks on the library shelves or nobly placed like avenues of dolmens, I felt that our family prosperity depended on them. They were all alike, and I was romping about in a tiny sanctuary, surrounded by squat, ancient monuments which had witnessed my birth, which would witness my death, and whose permanence guaranteed me a future as calm as my past. I used to touch them in secret to honor my hands with their dust.”

If the family library can hold a shared past, it can also divide. One of the great wedges that split my maternal side was the “disappearance” of my mother’s books after she had left Mexico. My grandfather pleaded she leave them behind, that she not take them with her, “for then she would be gone for good”. And yet, as her sojourn became a life abroad, my grandmother emptied the bookshelves of their content, as if to say, you can come back, but you can never return.

It’s become obvious by now that, whether lost or preserved, I associate books with home. Libraries are touchstones, a singular place where we belong, making it all the more painful when they are truly lost, or worse, even willfully destroyed. Among the cruelest cases is that of Stefan Zweig, fleeing Vienna in 1934 with Nazism at his doorstep. After drifting through continents, he settled in Petrópolis, Brazil, in 1940. There he sat down to write The World of Yesterday, his memoir of all that was lost.

“Three times they have wreaked havoc with my home and my way of life, cutting me off from the past and all that it once comprised, and flinging me with dramatic force into a void where I soon became familiar with the feeling that there was nowhere to turn,” he writes. “My literary work, in the language in which I wrote it, has been burnt to ashes in the country where my books made millions of readers their friends.”

And as he faces this final effort to memorialize the vanished world he longs for, the absence of his library becomes even starker. “I write in the middle of the war, I write abroad and with nothing to jog my memory; I have no copies of my books, no notes, no letters from friends available here in my hotel room.”

Zweig mailed the completed manuscript to his publisher the day before committing suicide with his wife, Lotte Altmann, in February 1942.

Exiles such as this are the subject of another wandering author, Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño, who reflected in Literature and Exile on the sense of home and the books that fill it. “Books are the only homeland of the true writer, books that may sit on the shelves, or in the memory.” He revisited this idea in his final interview: “My only country is my two children and wife and perhaps, though in second place, some moments, streets, faces or books that are in me, and which one day I will forget.”

We might move again and again, pages might get lost, and memories might fade, but just like homes, however briefly, we can inhabit books. And come to think of it, they inhabit us for even longer.

* * *

If you have a question, a problem in your work, if you are feeling lost, stuck, confused, at sea, searching, grappling, or baffled, email me at Michaelshapiro808@gmail.com and tell me what you’re confronting and what help you need.

It is seldom, if ever, the case that one writer’s problem or question is their’s alone.

Please indicate if you want to remain anonymous, have your name or just first name included. I will include the question and then answer it as best I can.

* * *

Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture

I hear this again and again and I think, really?

Oh yes, they assure me, they want their teachers to rip into their prose, take a machete to their sentences, a sledgehammer to their paragraphs – you take my point – all in the hope of making them better.

I tell them, no you don’t. You may think you do but you do not. Writers, I explain, live to be praised. The praise, however, cannot be what my younger child used to call “grandma compliments” – a reference to my mother’s insistence on undermining the power of praise by taking it too far – you are not only the best writer in third grade but the best third grader in the history of primary education. (Really, she said things like this. Ask anyone.)

Compliments, unless extended to a hopeless narcissist, need to be earned. And often the shorter and more specific the better: Great lede. Terrific kicker. You nailed it.

It has long been an article of faith in the writing trade that the compliments we most value come from those who had first savaged us; now I know he/she really likes my work, and by extension, me. Which perhaps explains, in part, why my students insist they want their writing “torn apart.” No pain. No glory.
But is that really true? Do we need to be made to suffer before we can appreciate being made to feel good? I do not believe we do. In fact, drawing on what I have observed over 35 years and 1500 students, I have seen how corrosive criticism in the name of improvement can sometimes be.

This is not to say that writing cannot and should not be criticized; heaven knows writing can almost always be made better, and writers who insist that their prose not be touched are doomed to never being better than a solid B+/A-.

Rather, the question is when criticism is most effective, as opposed to being counterproductive.

There is a longstanding belief among those who teach writing that the most effective lessons are those imparted in red ink: the line edit. I am all for the line edit. All stories should go through one, not only to catch spelling and grammar and holes in the reporting. A line edit can sharpen flabby prose that a writer, immersed in the story, can no longer see. It can refine arguments, relocate paragraphs to their appropriate place in a story. It can lift a story from pretty good to just right.

But is it an effective teaching tool, or as effective as has long been believed?

I do not think it is.

The issue is not the line edit.

It is when it happens.

I’ve just finished reading 40 applications to my school. We all read applications and this year was an especially illuminating experience. Typically, I’ve grouped applications by thirds: a third fall short of acceptance; a third go to the wait list; and a third are sure admits. This year – and last year, too – something curious, and exciting happened. I found myself ranking application after application as sure admits, an encouraging statement about how many talented young people still want to be journalists, even as the industry struggles.

I am not a pushover. I am not a soft touch for someone who insists they’ve always loved writing (Pro Tip: Never say you have always loved to write because no one who does it for a living will believe you.) But this year’s group dazzled me, in good measure because of how well they wrote. The prose was distinctive, assured, graceful and in service of thoughtful ideas. I’d be thrilled to teach them.

In fact, they were much like last year’s applications. Yet on this semester’s first day of class I asked my current students how many of them felt good about themselves as writers now that they’d reached the halfway point in their journalism education.

No one raised a hand.

I asked how many felt good about themselves as writers before the school year started.

Hands shot up.

So what is the variable here, I asked.

They were reluctant to say, so I said it for them.

It is us.

Somehow, in our earnest, well-intentioned, and often compassionate desire to make our students better, we end up making them feel worse about themselves, and their skills. Again, this is not the intention. But it can be the effect.

Ann Lamott, a terrific writer who writes wonderfully about writing, coined a phrase for our first efforts at a story: shitty first drafts.

“All good writers write them. This is how they end up with good

second drafts and terrific third drafts,” she wrote in her book Bird by Bird. “Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something -- anything -- down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft -- you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft -- you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, tosee if it’s loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.”

We are at our most vulnerable when we’re writing first drafts. All of us. “I know some very great writers,” Lamott continued, “writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts.”

We are less vulnerable on the second draft. And by the third, we are ready for what remains an essential stage of a story’s life: the line edit.

So why has it been the practice for so long to break out the red pen (or its edit-trace/suggest-mode descendents) sooner? Because, as is the case with so many crafts, we teach as were taught. And if that teaching hurt, well damn if we didn’t make it through and are better for it.

A former dean at my school used to address incoming classes with the words: Welcome to the Parris Island of Journalism. I can think of no worse an introduction than one that borrows on the Marine Corps boot camp model of breaking young people down in order to make them Marines.

I did not make a conscious choice not to teach as I was taught. I did not have to. School for me was an excruciating experience which was most proficient at reminding me of my failures. I gave it plenty to work with, or so I was meant to believe. To inflict that on people I was tasked with teaching felt close to sadistic. And yet, I wanted them to learn, and so did what I assumed was expected of me and line edited their early drafts.

Years later, I recall one such edit in particular. It was an ambitious story by a student still struggling to find his voice. Let me amend that. He was, in my view, struggling to tell a story as I believed he should. I still edited on paper and took my pencil to his piece. I went line by line, sometimes word by word. I re-wrote. I tweaked. I hacked. And when I was done the story looked like it had been redacted by an overworked attorney in the Department of Justice. My edit resulted in a story that bore almost no relation to his draft.

Did I make it better? I suppose I did.

Did I make him better? I did not.

I worked hard on that edit, believing that that time spent and the care I put into the work displayed my commitment to teaching. But had I succeeded as a teacher? Had I helped someone learn the lessons that would allow him to grow as a writer? I had not.

Instead, each editing mark told him that he had failed.

That was over 30 years ago, and I am struck by the endurance of that memory. Then again, I do not believe I am alone in recalling those moments from the distant past that still make me wince.

It is essential that teachers – like editors – push their writers. Nothing is gained, and much potential growth is lost, when you have a teacher like a long ago colleague who simply wrote at the end of an otherwise untouched story – good job.

A pallid approximation of a “grandma compliment.”

Instead, I have become a believer in writing memos at the end of early drafts, suggesting what the story needs, and ideas on how to achieve it. I then leave it to the student to try.

There is a difference between being appropriately and rightfully ambitious for the writers you supervise in school or in a newsroom, and expressing that ambition by, in effect, leaving those writers to conclude that they are not very good at all.

When they say they want their writing torn apart they do not mean it literally. They are saying, I am here to learn and I understand that learning must come with criticism.

But I cannot get better if I end up being made to feel worse.

* * *

If you have a question, a problem in your work, if you are feeling lost, stuck, confused, at sea, searching, grappling, or baffled, email me at Michaelshapiro808@gmail.com and tell me what you’re confronting and what help you need.

It is seldom, if ever, the case that one writer’s problem or question is their’s alone.

Please indicate if you want to remain anonymous, have your name or just first name included. I will include the question and then answer it as best I can.

* * *

Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture

I did not believe that then, nor do I want to believe it now. I still want to believe that nothing good comes from writers punishing themselves, that doing so stunts their creative drive, and ultimately undermines the power of the stories that can delight readers.

And yet writers have continued to do so and I concede are doomed to make life harder for themselves. We will always approach our work – and through it, ourselves – with doubt, fear, anxiety, despair – dark forces that, time and again we discover, can be overcome by the equally powerful, if too often forgotten, belief in ourselves.

Is the suffering inevitable? Sadly, yes.

But is it essential? In one way, perhaps it is.

I have been thinking about the ways writers reveal themselves to themselves. The question emerged from a museum show I saw last month celebrating two of Britain’s most celebrated late 18th and early 19th century painters: J.M.W.Turner and John Constable. They were contemporaries and, given their ambitions, rivals. The show displayed many of their most celebrated works, as well as an otherwise peripheral feature: their sketchbooks, to which I gravitated.

It’s always exciting to see how creativity begins: what caught the artist’s eye? What did he do when he saw something that moved him? How did he choose to remember that moment and the feelings it aroused? What became of that early, powerful impulse?

The sketchbooks got me thinking about writers, and the ways we react and work to recall impressions, ideas – the “sketches” that might make for a story.

I have never kept a story notebook, though I know writers who find them useful in organizing thoughts and evolving ideas.

Joan Didion, for one, was an inveterate recorder of impressions: “That woman Estelle, is partly the reason why George Sharp and I are separated today.’ Dirty crepe-de-Chine wrapper, hotel bar, Wilmington RR, 9:45 a.m. August Monday morning.”

Years later, she thought back to that moment and impulse to record it in On Keeping a Notebook: “Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened?

Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all?”

What’s striking, especially compared to the Turner and Constable sketchbooks, is Didion’s need to examine her impulse. She observes a moment as those long-ago artists observed landscapes. She records in words what they captured visually. Then she turns inward to ask herself what possessed her to do what she did.

There was one page of a Turner notebook filled with words. But the words, it turned out, were English phrases he wanted to translate into German before a trip. This is not to suggest that either he or Constable – nor any other artist – did not look inward; Rembrandt was hardly alone in his series of self-portraits.

Rather, it speaks more to the uses writers make of their sketchbooks.

My sister-in-law Mary Cregan is a scholar of Virginia Woolf as well as an author. Woolf was an assiduous diarist, especially when it came to her work.

“I have had only 4 days writing at my novel since I got back,” Woolf wrote in May of 1923. “Tomorrow, I say to myself, I shall plunge into the thick of it. But how does one make people talk about everything in the whole of life, so that one’s hair stands on end, in a drawing room?”

Then, in June, she wrote, “But now what do I feel about my writing? – this book, that is, The Hours, if that’s its name? One must write from deep feeling, said Dostoievsky (sic). And do I? Or do I fabricate with words, loving them as I do? No, I think not.”

As it happens, Dostoyevsky was also a book diarist. His entries were no less anguished: “I am convinced that none of our writers, past or present, has written under such conditions as I constantly write, Turgenev would have died from the mere thought.”

As Mary wrote to me, “I love reading writers’ diaries and find them very helpful sometimes in showing students how great writers also struggle with their drafts. And how novels are the result of a process.

“To give students a sense of how she was thinking about her composition process, the experimental nature of the novel, her confidence or her worries, I have used this set of diary entries for Mrs. Dalloway. Woolf used her diary always as a way to think about what she was working on, in addition of course to life events, friends’ visits, etc. etc.”

There is a terrific recording from the Morgan Library of the journal John Steinbeck kept as he was writing The Grapes of Wrath. An actor reads the entries and allows Steinbeck’s words to pull you along so that you feel the alternating pulses of despair and I-can-do-it-I-can-do-it confidence.

The recording, taken from Working Days: The Journals of the Grapes of Wrath, 1938 to 1941 begins: “Here is the diary of a book and it will be interesting to see how it works out. I shall try simply to keep a record of working days and the amount done in each and the success (as far as I can know it) of the day. Just now the work goes well.”

A week later, he wrote: “My whole nervous system is battered…I hope I’m not headed for a nervous breakdown”

And so it goes, until he is done: “I’m so dizzy I can hardly see the page. This makes it difficult to work. On the other hand, it might get worse. I might be in for a siege. Can’t afford to take that chance. I must go on. If I can finish today I don’t much care what happens afterwards... Best way is to just get down to the lines. I wonder if this flu could be simple and complete exhaustion. I don’t know. But I do know that I’ll have to start at it now and, of course, anything I do will be that much nearer the end. Finished this day - and hope to God it’s good.“

Maybe I am wrong about the writer’s need to suffer. Maybe the struggle captured in these journals and sketchbooks is core to the work. The image that comes to mind is a Biblical one (yes, parochial school does leave its lasting imprints, for worse and better, too): Jacob wrestling with the angel. The allegorical battle with God.

Who but a person of profound belief in themselves has the temerity to think that they have any business taking on the Almighty? Easier just to go along with the Commandments and avoid trouble, given God’s reach, power and, certainly in the Old Testament, nasty temper.
Writers and artists see a world that is never static. Their struggle is to make sense of that world, to impose order on what can otherwise feel chaotic. To take on that battle is a humbling experience, and those of us who are not humbled by it – who do not cower and despair at the risks they have assumed – will limit the fight to the periphery and avoid what’s most frightening.

Writers write journal entries for themselves. When they do they can, in effect, slow down time. Thoughts unspool at speeds so incalculable they are often lost in the deluge. The physical act of writing - by hand or on a keyboard - is by comparison glacial, which allows a writer to see and make sense of what he or she is thinking.

So it is that journal entries capture the endless emotional play loop that we carry with us to work every day, and which, I now appreciate, we cannot be without: I fear I will fail. I believe I will not. But what if I do? But I won’t. Maybe. Not this time. Not yet.

* * *

If you have a question, a problem in your work, if you are feeling lost, stuck, confused, at sea, searching, grappling, or baffled, email me at Michaelshapiro808@gmail.com and tell me what you’re confronting and what help you need.

It is seldom, if ever, the case that one writer’s problem or question is their’s alone.

Please indicate if you want to remain anonymous, have your name or just first name included. I will include the question and then answer it as best I can.

* * *

Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture

I opened the New York Times app but saw little beyond the alert. I refreshed the page. I refreshed it again. My journalist wife and I began to scramble, searching for news, updates, anything. Who was shot? Was this person dead?

What we could not see nor appreciate at that moment with our eyes glued to our screens, was how many millions of people across the country were experiencing what we were experiencing: the emotional consequences of being pulled into a drama unfolding in real time.

So much has already been written and said in the days since Pretti was shot and killed by federal agents for what appeared to be the crime of getting in their way. There was the news, of course, with the many updates, accusations, revelations, and visual evidence for all to see of what had unfolded on that bitter cold morning when Pretti stepped between agents and a woman they had shoved to the ground.

It took a few days to begin to take the measure of things, to assess the consequences of Pretti’s killing – legally, politically, and viscerally. I have been a journalist long enough to know how hard it is to predict which stories will consume the public and which fade quickly. So why did this story catch fire, even more than the killing of Renee Good?

Perhaps, because several unanticipated things happened at once: the bitter cold and storms that swept the country kept millions indoors with fewer distractions; the fact that this was a second killing in the same city in frighteningly similar circumstances; the news broke and unfolded on a weekend morning; the unusually clear video to give the lie to government spin. Taken together they created the conditions in which so many of us were pulled in and along by the singular power of a story.

Few terms are more overused and less understood than narrative. Narrative, like irony, is a term we may struggle to define but nonetheless feel we get. A story begins. Something stirs within us that makes us want to know more. The story can feel as if it takes on a life of its own. In the hands of a deft storyteller, stories can be engineered for maximum effect – writers of fiction and narrative nonfiction appreciate what they must do to keep readers with them.

Then there are stories that need no guiding hand. These are the rarest stories of all. They unfold in ways that would otherwise necessitate the hand of a writer skilled at pacing, character, and the twists that keep readers glued to the page.

The killing of Alex Pretti is such a story but in a way that transcends the manner in which it unfolded. As minutes ticked by that morning we learned: it was a man who had been shot; he was dead; his name; the specious and patently false accusation that he had come to “massacre” federal agents; the livid responses from the governor and mayor; the videos.

As all this was playing out we were, at the risk of sounding too clinical by half, undergoing a shared neurological experience. A few months ago I wrote a chapter about the changes the brain undergoes when it is presented with a story that has the power to transport. I was especially struck by the findings of a 2015 study, “Reading Fiction and Reading Minds: The Role of Simulation in the Default Network“ which reported that what the authors termed literary fiction made people more aware of others, more empathic, more connected to the world around them.

The researchers studied brain activity and concluded that it is at those moments when we are otherwise disengaged - when we have no pressing tasks before us, the so-called “default mode network” – that we are most open to the power of a story that takes us someplace else. Our neural pathways are not in shutdown. Quite the opposite; they are buzzing.

It took little time for me on Saturday morning to shift from my IPad to the television. That is where I would spend the next five hours. It felt as if something new was revealed with each passing minute. And because the footage from the streets of Minneapolis was live I was in a state of suspended anticipation: what will happen next?

My wife had to run out and I was left alone to watch and wait and when I grew impatient for more I toggled between stations. Absent someone to turn to and say, “did you see that?” I was at one with the story. I could not turn away. I did not want to turn away. Only later did I wonder how many others were experiencing what I was experiencing and how that felt.

In the late 1980s, my wife and I covered the popular uprising against the military dictatorship that for decades had ruled South Korea. Resistance to the regime had been going on for decades, unfolding each spring with campus protests met with tear gas fired by riot police. A dance, we correspondents had come to conclude, too choreographed to bring about change.

Then in the winter of 1987, a 21-year-old student, Park Jong Chul, had his windpipe broken over the side of a bathtub during what was termed an interrogation but which was, in fact, torture. There was no video footage nor photographs. Just the story of what had happened.

The story exploded. It was much like the story of the Tunisian fruit and vegetable vendor Mohamed Bouazizi whose self-immolation after being hounded by the police helped ignite the Arab Spring, and the protests in Iran after 22-year-old Mahsa Amini was killed in detention for not wearing her hijab properly. Those rare stories find their way first to the brain and then to many hearts.

The best stories begin with questions and the longer it takes for satisfactory answers to emerge, the longer the story has to gain momentum. More people say to one another, “did you hear?” The question that sets the story in motion leads to more questions.

Questions are the oxygen that keeps stories alive. And when answers are not forthcoming the stories live on. This was a lesson learned by child welfare agencies across the country that for decades would respond to news of horrific abuse of children by insisting they could say nothing because they needed to protect the confidentiality of those children. This only convinced reporters and politicians that those agencies were covering up their failures.

More questions followed. The stories did not go away. Then, those same agencies discovered that perhaps it was prudent to offer answers, candid and full answers. And when they did the stories, in effect, died out because the essential questions had been answered.

The story of the killing of Alex Pretti has now taken on the quality of a long novel whose resolution is far from apparent. I recognize that to compare this tragically needless and horrific death to literature feels cheap.

But I do so because I feel that, in one measure, it helps explain what began happening to so many of us across a vast and varied and otherwise deeply divided country on a cold Saturday morning when we were prompted to begin asking: what happened?

* * *

If you have a question, a problem in your work, if you are feeling lost, stuck, confused, at sea, searching, grappling, or baffled, email me at Michaelshapiro808@gmail.com and tell me what you’re confronting and what help you need.

It is seldom, if ever, the case that one writer’s problem or question is their’s alone.

Please indicate if you want to remain anonymous, have your name or just first name included. I will include the question and then answer it as best I can.

* * *

Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture.

Artist retrospectives are curious occurrences in that they condense decades of searching and toil, side quests, and epiphanies into a succinct space, forming a synthesis of a lifetime of work. In that dedicated space, the eye can embrace dozens of pieces in fewer steps than those taken in the most perfunctory of evening walks.

No such immediate summary can be made of a body of writing, and it would certainly take longer to get through nearly any filmography. It is both exhilarating and challenging to witness what a lifetime of creation can amount to: hung on the wall, at regular intervals, is the distance covered by the artist in their struggle with light, color, subject, and matter itself, until death does them part.

There are lessons to be drawn for any discipline in witnessing and understanding what a vast retrospective offers, and despite the difference in medium, much to learn from the pictorial and its own sense of narrative and texture. And so I went to “Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck” at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I had some prior knowledge of the artist. In fact, when I first tried seeing her work, it had felt as if I would have to pursue the painter: I had visited the Finnish National Gallery, of which she is the star, only to find most of her work had already been loaned to New York. Still, there was a promise in what remained.

There was also much to learn about Schjerfbeck’s life (1862-1946) through the first English-language biography written about her, by Marja Lahelma, freely available in digital format. Schjerfbeck makes you muse, and I had done so a year ago, astounded by the same thing that draws many to the Finnish painter: the astounding versatility and extraordinary change in her style, best exemplified by her self-portraits over decades. As I wrote then:

These trading of skins, these changes in style, are not confined to youthful maturation. Changes continue to occur throughout life, like in those self-portraits painters will return to over decades. Looking at each one in turn, it isn’t just the creases time has brought to their faces that they capture, each one is a revelation of new artistic choices. The painter Helene Schjerfbeck, for instance, who painted herself between 1880 and 1945, depicts her face through such a broad and radical range – from colorful French naturalism to charcoal abstraction – that it makes us gasp at the many, dissimilar lives she reveals on the canvas.

The MET exhibition, however, packed 60 paintings that told a fuller tale. As tends to happen, in person, my impressions informed by the flat medium of photographic reproductions faded as that wonderful effect the best exhibits can have gradually took over. You see paintings, walk by, and walk back again, and something will hit you, which might differ from what the person next to you is thinking, but grabs a hold of your mind for as long as you’re there. For me, it was the following: art can be a series of contradictions, beautifully resolved. Let me try to explain through three examples.

The first of these lessons was suggested by the exhibition space itself. Its setting is the Lehman Wing, which is circular. It allows you to take in, as soon as you come in, both the beginning and the end of Seeing Silence, from the first self-portrait Schjerfbeck painted, on your right, and one of her last on the left. The first is from 1885, when she was 23, and the last is from 1945, just months before her death, at 83. The comparison is as harrowing and revealing a depiction of time as you are likely to witness in art. The journey is no less admirable for it. You immediately know that this is someone who not only never stopped painting, but never stopped reflecting.

The clockwork motion of the exhibition carries you through the visual progression of her work, though you soon perceive that the hands on this clock point in unexpected directions.

On one level, we are moving forward in time, from the likeness and precision of the depiction of youth, through multiple stages of life, and onto the waning we have glimpsed at the end. But creation has its own timelines. Even as we witness Schjerfbeck forging ahead from her early academic training, then toward the Naturalism of the 1880s, and arriving at her own brand of 20th-century Modernism, there is something else at play.

The further Schjerfbeck progresses in the experiment of modernity, the closer she is to the past. One arm on the clock can move forward because the other is moving back.

That process is best told by one painting, Fragment, from 1904.

It’s the portrait of a redheaded girl set against what seems to be a gold background, shown in three-quarter profile, her eyes closed. It’s beautiful, but what really catches the eye is what’s happening to the paint itself. It seems to be flaking; the surface is scratched and fragmented. On closer inspection, the gold is the canvas shining through. We are far removed from Naturalism’s concern with authenticity, witnessing something new, and yet the painting also seems worn and ancient. Schjerfbeck had previously experimented with this scraping technique, altering the surface of the paint, but here she is achieving something different.

On the one hand, it is bold and modern: in the act of removing, certain areas of paint will come off, others won’t, and there is unpredictability. You don’t know what the outcome will be. You “kill your darlings”, as editors say of necessary cuts, with no guarantee of what the final edit will look like. Or as Schjerfbeck said herself, “The Red-Haired Girl got so greasy and shiny from being overpainted so many times, I wanted to scrape it all off, but then I didn’t have the nerve. I wanted to bury her in the ground to get rid of the shine, but I didn’t have the nerve to do that either; I had no idea what the result would be.”

On the other hand, she is reaching for the timeless. As the description reads, “The scraped and abraded surface is reminiscent of fragmentary frescoes of the Renaissance, many of which Schjerfbeck would have seen when she traveled to Italy in 1894.” Her biography tells us she was in Florence that year, hired by the Finnish Art Society to produce copies of masterpieces for their collection. She spent days in Cell 8 of the Convent of San Marco, copying frescoes, falling in love with the Renaissance, and the visual effect of the aged art. Not just the paintings themselves, but the result of the passage of time on their appearance, the romanticism of the worn and chalky surface left by centuries. “It is like a revelation when you study them for a long time, and you do that best when you draw them.” By 1904, the past she had studied had jolted her art forward.

A second lesson is how deceptive simplicity actually is. Schjerfbeck’s turn toward and apparent lightness of touch is, in fact, a movement toward greater complexity in crafting. This can be seen in The Lace Shawl, from 1920.

At first glance, we are far from the liveliness and colour of her earlier work, achieving what her biographer calls a “pared down modernism.” And there is indeed a desire to not lay it all out on the canvas, clearly and crisply: “Let us avoid executing so precisely and exactly that our work closes the way instead of opening it, let us imply,” she writes to a friend.

The resulting paintings seem flatter, more stylized, as opposed to the lifelike depictions she first excelled at. But don’t let the surface appearance fool you, or rather, look closer. The final painting is achieved by applying a coat of paint, fragmenting it through selective removal, and painting over it, then returning to it again and again so that the canvas starts to filter through the image it supports. She is not solely seeking to subvert depiction, but exhaustively reworking the materials themselves, stressing how paint behaves.

Her newfound “simplification” actually entails a more labor-intensive and time-intensive process, waiting for each layer of paint to dry, before transforming the result over and over. In this new technique, the tension of adding and removing infuses the painting, while using a coarser canvas that comes to the fore instead of being buried. This results in a painting surface that doesn’t stay still, shifting from worn to thicker, and seems to glimmer like water, in flux amidst the different textures and depth of the paint itself.

As the painter explains: “I scrape out everything I have done, for it is not what I want, and when I have scraped many times what remains on the canvas is a hint of all that I have sought for and wanted, even if it is only a weak trace, or else there is nothing. The result is the sum total of my search. That is how I always work.”

The influences are also growing more complex, as she combines art history, modern art, and other sources such as fashion magazines and catalogues, which she received at home during her period of greatest isolation.

A last lesson comes at the end of the show. By then, we have reached her final self-portraits. Of the forty or so she made throughout her life, twenty come from the last two years of her life. They are best seen as a series, a slow erosion of the self, methodically documented. Likeness loses all importance and is replaced by the experience of pain and the damage wrought by time. The end of one’s life examined through art, made hauntingly palpable.

As Frances Borzello writes in Seeing Ourselves, Women’s Self-Portraits, “Helene Schjerfbeck painted her dying self as life and strength left her when she was in her eighties. As she removes the surplus paint from her canvas, she seems to be removing her own skin, trying to expose the skull she knows is waiting for her.”

The final lesson I took from the exhibition is best expressed by the last self-portraits Schjerfbeck made. Self-portrait, Light and Shadow, 1945, can seem less a painting than a sketch.

There is, seemingly, little to work with here, precious few traces left on the canvas, nearing the last stage of disintegration. And yet, there is a powerful message in the very materiality of fading.

If Schjerfbeck has been teaching us that her subtractions are in fact additions, in these last efforts, she demonstrates that the fewer the traces and the paint, the more obvious each gesture becomes. We are witnessing the artist’s last, telling movements. They are made by hand by an old, and long-diminished woman, which accentuates the difficulty of each movement.

The value is no longer in the technical prowess of the art, but in the act of continuing to make it. She has moved into the painting, not in any form of resemblance, but in the tenuous traces left by her hand, the material proof that she was alive, tangibly present, as she touched the canvas. And as we observe brushstrokes and traces grow fewer and fainter, they grow in importance: each one is a countdown to the last.

As Schjerfbeck writes in November 1945, two months before dying: “I have no strength left. Life has given me all it has to give.”