Nancy Rommelmann

Flannery O'Connor Reads "A Good Man is Hard to Find"/Storytelling

In which you hear the humor in this remarkable story, as did the audience at Vanderbilt University to whom she read it, in 1959, until nearly the very end. I will be grateful to anyone who can name another writer that captures voices, terror and humor the way O'Connor does.

Speaking of reading one's work: I just enjoyed the morning's first cup of coffee while watching a four-part video series by Ira Glass. In part three, he made me laugh out loud by playing a segment he recorded at age 27, and explained just why it was so awful, including his habit, at the time, of putting EMPHASIS on every THIRD WORD, as if this SOMEHOW gave the STORY gravity. I recently heard something similar, an author reading from her book, and though her medium was prose, she had the familiar if not to my ear (as yet) successful cadence of the poet, where the ends of sentences go UP, as if it's all in QUESTION.

Next week, I go in to do a sound recording of The Bad Mother.

 

Bad Girls of LA Lit

Oh, you know you want to go

Michael Totten, Libya, and "The Road to Fatima Gate"

When I moved to Portland from Los Angeles, in 2004, I knew no other writers here. I had, however, been given an introduction, by Matt Welch, to Michael Totten, a blogger writing about the Middle East. Michael and I were not covering the same terrain, but nevertheless, met for a coffee at the then-rather wonderful Gotham Building Tavern, and made what might be considered small shop-talk. It was not until we were walking to our respective cars that we really got going, about how serious each of us was about the work we do; about sharing opportunities, and about what it was like to be a very ambitious journalist in a town that preferred its news within a 20-mile radius (or from wire service). A friendship was born.

Over the years, I have watched, in awe, Michael make his career: beholden to no one, on his own terms, and on his own dime, often with money donated by his loyal, many-thousands fan-base. We have, at least a half-dozen times, spoken of the books we are working on, how we want to publish them, how we don't, and when the hell was all this going to happen?

It is happening in March 2011, for each of us. My novel, The Bad Mother, is being released March 1. Michael's book, The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel, is now available for pre-order. You can read a sample chapter here.

Or, you can read one of the very finest pieces of journalism you will encounter, "In the Land of the Brother Leader," a piece Michael orginally wrote for the LA Weekly, about his time in Libya, a piece with special resonance right now.

Congratulations, Michael x 

Loggernaut Reading Series at Ristretto Roasters

Ristretto is thrilled to host Loggernaut Reading Series, featuring three outstanding writers -- Carl Adamshick, Debra Gwartney and Mary Rechner -- responding to the prompt, "wild." Two dollars at the door, coffee and wine inside. Come; it's going to be a great evening.

Wednesday, February 23, at 7:30 PM

Ristretto Roasters Williams

3808 N. Williams Ave., Portland, 503-288-8667

 

 

Carl Adamshick's debut collection, Curses and Wishes, was selected for the 2010 Walt Whitman Award. The recipient of an Oregon Literary Fellowship, his poems have appeared in numerous journals, including American Poetry Review, the Harvard Review, and Narrative. He lives in Portland.

Debra Gwartney is the author of the memoir Live Through This (2009), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award as well as the PNBA award. [I met Debra and her daughters and had the privilege to write about them.] She is also the co-editor, along with her husband Barry Lopez, of Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Triquarterly Review, Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Salon, The New York Times "Modern Love" column, and elsewhere. She is a faculty member at Pacific University's MFA program. 

Mary Rechner is the author of the story collection Nine Simple Patters for Complicated Women (Propeller Books, 2010). Her stories, criticism, and essays have appeared in Kenyon Review, The Believer, and New England Review. She is originally from Long Island, lives in Portland, and directs the Writers in the Schools program at Literary Arts.

I Am Not a Food Writer

Hi everyone, and in particular, those writers who, for various reasons, need to quote me in print. How are you? Having a good day? Great. If I may, let me direct your eyes to the column on the left, where it says, "My Articles." See those? There are thirty or forty. You might run over, also, to my website, www.nancyrommelmann.com. There are a features posted there, not complete, but enough to give you a sense of what I write about.

People often ask me this question: what do you write about? I tell them, about culture, crime, and deluded people. I also write a lot about books. It's been a good few years, writing about literary con artists and cults and sociopaths and child murderers and the complete loss of common sense some people experience when they catch kids sexting.

Now we've got that out of the way, I have a request: when you quote me, or refer to me, will you please resist the urge to refer to me as a "food writer"? I appreciate it.

More on David Carr and the Pillaging of the Tribune

Every day we see evidence of people promulgating information that supports their view of the world, and what information they want others to know, and how they want the money to flow. 

As someone who disseminates information, the more work I do, the more I question my information: why is this person telling me this? What outcome does he or she want? It is my job to allow readers to come to their own conclusions, while taking responsibility for the information and how I have constructed it, always in an effort to make things clear, which nearly always first requires a whole lot of mucking around in the dark.

That's the journalist's job: to work from murkiness to clarity with one's best efforts. That's immutable; what every good writer knows, which makes David Carr's story, "At Flagging Tribune, Tales of a Bankrupt Culture," all more heartbreaking. Yes, my jaw dropped when I read about the bonuses. But people grabbing bits of the pie before it's gone is expected and babyish, the simplest idea in the room.

What I did not expect to see ravaged, and with such disdain, is the writing of stories, and how and what is offered. What really pissed me off is Tribune execs' pretending they understand how new technologies will allow us to do this in better ways, a stance that is risible considering their track record. Read the whole thing. You can also get a taste by reading the kicker, below, in which Carr perfectly captures the contempt of people deliberately or not (and I think it is deliberate) destroying what they do not understand and can never command.

The [Tribune] company recently announced the creation of a new local news format in which there would be no on-air anchors and few live reports. The newscasts will rely on narration over a stream of clips, a Web-centric approach that has the added benefit of requiring fewer bodies to produce.

“The TV revolution is upon us — and the new Tribune Company is leading the resistance,” the announcement read. And judging from the job posting for “anti-establishment producer/editors,” the company has some very strong ideas about who those revolutionaries should be: “Don’t sell us on your solid newsroom experience. We don’t care. Or your exclusive, breaking news coverage. We’ll pass.”

On Writing Badly, or, Joy [Part 2]

I have sitting on my library ladder a book called, "On Writing Well." I haven't opened it, which you might guess were you to read the piece I have been working on all week. Driving this morning, I thought how I would characterize the writing-so-far: "joyless, leaden and long." I saw myself standing above a channel of liquid concrete; jesus, even I didn't want to dip my toe in there. I am only grateful that I have been writing long enough to know how opaque and wrong it is. Also, that I could turn it into my editor and he'd be fine with it, with a few tweaks. Scary. He will never of course see this draft.

I can't speak for any other writer, but I tear quotes about the work and what it should be, and stick them on my bulletin board. Here is one, from William Langewiesche, "You have this precious, incredibly privileged thing, which is the reader's attention for a little while. And you can make the slightest misstep and the reader will put you down. People will say that the reader lives in a busy world. But that's not the reason why. The reason is that the writer blows it, and loses the reader's trust."

Earlier this week, reading "Hitch-22," I came upon this: "In writing and reading, there is a gold standard. How will you be able to detect it? You will know it all right."

I ran into this standard this week, when I started Rebecca Skloots', "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks." You know it all right. I also had the spectacular good fortune to see that Skloots has structured her book very much the way I am structuring mine, and hers is a bestseller, so.

We'll get to the eggrolls another time, but a last thought, which I stuck to my bulletin board this morning: duty v: joy.

Joy [Part 1]

We began receiving the NYT Weekender this week, thus avoiding my driving to the two Ristretto locations and cherry-picking the sections I want before anyone snags them. Most of the paper wound up on the sofa, where I can read it at my leisure throughout the week. This morning at 6:30, over a cup of Nicaragua coffee my husband roasted yesterday, it was the Sports section, an article about John Updike's essay on the great Ted Williams. It was nice enough to read about how Updike came to be at Williams' last game, and the reverence and playfulness and seriousness with which he wrote his first and last piece on baseball, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu", which appeared in The New Yorker in 1960, but what I really took from it was a renewed sense of joy, via this quote (emphasis mine):

[T]he essay is never precious or self-consciously literary, the way a lot of subsequent Fenway prose became, penned by earnest, heavy-breathing scribes clustered in Updike’s shadow. Roger Angell, who began writing about baseball for The New Yorker two years after Updike, and whose career has had an astonishing longevity — he’s the Ripken or Gehrig to Updike’s blazing youthful phenom — has said that “Hub Fans” most of all supplied him with a tone: colloquial, attentive, unashamed of feeling or of striving for an elegant turn of phrase. It seems obvious now, but Updike was one of the first to show that you don’t have to write down about sports or empurple them, either. 

I have a library ladder in my office, just to the right of where I sit at my desk. Currently occupying its second rung is "The Thinker's Thesaurus," which Ilearned existed when I saw it on the bookshelf in which Christopher Hitchens was posed at his desk. The only thesaurus I have ever owned is a generic copy of Roget's, printed on pulp paper and bought from a street vendor in New York in the early 1980s for five dollars. At its worst, a thesaurus is a faux form of productive procrastination; at its best, it gets you out of the word-rut you plopped yourself in and helps you think. Or so I thought. The Thinker's Thesaurus turns out to be series of illustrative and author Peter Meltzer-subjective journeys, via other authors' quotes. The funniest comment I read about the book is that the quotes show consistentanti-Bill Clintonism (note: "pepperpot" is not listed as a qualifier for "portly," though there is "stomachy," which I adore). The book has provided me with much pleasure, and last week, made me remember that I love to write.

It's been a little easy to forget this. Only those still lying abed with their pillows over their heads do not acknowledge that the venues in which to run 6,000-essays about baseball grow slender and slenderer still. Fear not, I am not here to complain, only to admit that perhaps the experience of seeing five of my seven favorite editors dismissed in the past year; of writing solid pieces for one-sixth the money, felt like a punch in the eye. Feels pretty much healed today.

To come: Joy [Part 2], wherein I wonder whether anxious wives start making homemade eggrolls

"And it Made a Lovely Light": Christopher Hitchens

Indeed xx

Enchilada: Amanda Stott-Smith, Part VII

A section from a conversation I had with one of Amanda Stott-Smith’s best friends.They have known each other for more than 12 years.

 

I have here changed the name of Amanda’s oldest child to Lukas, to protect his privacy.

 

The events take place several days before Jason, Amanda and the children are to move to Hawaii.

 

“My last straw with Jason, though I literally could not stand him: a guy I was dating, we went over to Jason and Amanda’s house for dinner, for the last hurrah, let’s say goodbye, they’re moving to Hawaii. This was 2006. Okay, we’ll go; we’ll do a whole dinner. Jason had Amanda on a full-on spending freeze for like a year, so I’d gone through all my stuff and pulled everything that I thought would fit her so she could take it to Hawaii, swimsuits, skirts; take them. I don’t care if I get them back.

 

“So we went over to their house for dinner. Eldon was really chubby; he was probably a year old. He was upstairs sleeping, and Trinity was running around in her princess something; wanting me to do makeovers with her and paint her nails. Amanda was in the kitchen slaving away and Lukas was playing with his stuff. The guy I was dating and Jason started talking. I asked Amanda if she needed any help; we were chatting; she made me some horrible, horrible cocktail, which was like coffee and Grand Marnier and Kahlua, absolutely hideous. Basically, I was entertaining Trinity, painted her nails. Trinity just glowed. She was this magical, magical baby. She wasn’t a baby, she was like four, or three and a half, anyway, gosh, I was almost borderline obsessed with her; I could eat her. I sent her stuff in the mail, princess stickers, so she would have to call me and thank me, “It’s Twinity; thank you, I love you.” She would leave me these messages and I would save them as long as I could; they were so cute.

 

“Mandy was making enchiladas in the kitchen, and it all started when we sat down to eat. I guess the enchiladas weren’t spicy enough, so we sat down and Jason took a bite and that was it.

 

‘Amanda, how many times have you made these enchiladas?’

 

‘I don’t know honey, maybe ten times.’

 

‘Well, you know what? These taste like absolute dog shit. Our guests don’t want to eat these.’

 

“The guy I am dating is the sweetest, sweetest guy in the world, he’s like, ‘Oh no no no, I love it; I really love it, it’s totally fine; it’s delicious; I’m actually not really a spicy guy.’

 

“Jason looks at him and says, ‘Do not try to smooth it over with her. She needs to know, this is not okay; she knows how to make enchiladas the way they’re supposed to be. You know what, Amanda? You were in there, you were visiting, you were chatting, you were not paying attention to what you were doing, and you need to go back and remake them.’

 

“The guy I was dating turns to him and says, ‘No; no no; there’s no need to remake them. It’s eight o’clock, we’re going to sit down; the kids are starving.’ Jason was like, ‘The kids can eat but you need to remake them for us.’

 

“So, she goes back in the kitchen and remakes them. We were like, oh, my, god. This is insane. Insane. Trinity doesn’t want to eat because she’s three and a half; she takes three bites and she’s done. Jason takes her upstairs and gives her ten spankings. The guy I am dating is dying, dying; I can just see his face. Eldon has woken up obviously, because they’ve gone upstairs; he’s screaming. Now I’m holding Eldon. Lukas is scared shitless, trying to play with his little cars in the corner of the room. He’s finished his food in like ten seconds, because he knows. He’s playing with cars in the corner. The guy I am with is like, ‘Amanda, you don’t have to do this.’ And she’s like, ‘No, I need to. It was wrong of me. It was. I was visiting, and I wasn’t paying attention and I really should have made more of an effort.’

 

“I looked at her and said, ‘No. Look what you are saying to yourself. You’ve been working all day, you have three kids.’ She’s like, ‘God said that you need to be a submissive wife and you need to listen to your husband and you need to do what he asks you to do.’ She’s almost in trance-mode.

 

“I was like, all right. I turn to the guy I’m dating and say, ‘Go play with Lukas.’ I am holding Eldon. Trinity comes downstairs bawling. Jason sits her back down and says, ‘This is your choice: you can eat or you can sit there all night so you decide for yourself what you want to do, because you’re a bad girl.’ So Amanda re-cooks dinner, re-serves it; Trinity is sitting there not eating. She gets yelled at a couple of times; gets smacked on the hand a couple of times. She gets taken upstairs again, spanked; back downstairs. By the time we leave, she’s still sitting there. It’s midnight. We were like, oh, my, goodness. Then they left for Hawaii, three days later.”

Fourteen Months: Amanda Stott-Smith, Part VI*

*This post has been edited, following CB's comment and emails between CB and the author, for which the author expresses her appreciation

Summer came to Portland this week. It went from what the locals call "Juneuary" to 90-plus degrees. My husband stuck what wine we own in a fridge so it didn't cook. Two nights ago, we sat on the porch and drank a bottle of cold grenache. It was nine o'clock and light outside. He opened a second bottle of wine. It looked like rose-colored glass. I did not think I wanted more wine but we started on that bottle, too, and we talked about Amanda.

Amanda Stott-Smith is not a person my husband offers opinions about. He knows that what led up to May 23, 2009, when her children were forced off the Sellwood Bridge, and what has happened since are important to me, and in that capacity, he listens. He has never offered a judgment. As I gather an increasing number of horrifying, banal and questionable  pieces of this story, pieces I metaphorically examine on the kitchen counter during our morning coffee, he listens. He knows I am taking the shape of each, giving them a little air before I place them in files, on my bulletin board. He is a patient listener. He is one of the two people I trust most in the world, and he told me two nights ago, when I was slowed from the heat and the wine, "I think Amanda is a coward."

He said this in response to my saying, men are not in the main curious about what led Amanda to the bridge that night; they want resolution and in some cases revenge, whereas women need to know why, a statement he took offense to. Still, he let me challenge him. He let me enumerate what I have learned in the past two months, he let me bullet-point Amanda's systematic and public humiliation under the pretense that she be a submissive wife; the physical abuse; her sense, founded or not, that she had nowhere to turn, that no one who believed in her; that she had lost custody of her children and did not believe they would be safe without her, the psychic break...

"Then why didn't she just kill herself?" he asked. I told him, she tried...

"But she didn't," he said. I told him how I've read that when women kill their children, they feel as though they are killing an extension of themselves, that suicide becomes almost redundant...

He looked at me. "Do you think you're making excuses for her?" he asked. "Do you think you're looking for reasons to--"

To what? To believe what was reported was grotesquely incomplete? That she did this as "revenge" against her husband?

"Yes," he said.

I told him, I did not think it was revenge, or not only. I repeated the bullet-points, this time accompanied by an orchestral arrangement of tears. Men, you may have noticed, do not like it when women cry. I think this is because they don't cry much themselves and tears must seem like things that should be stopped so we can get on to things that matter. That is not what happened two nights ago; my husband let me cry as I reasoned, and then he became angry, as much with me as with her.

"I would kill myself before I ever did what she did," he said, and then something to the effect of, if his mind told him what I was telling him Amanda's mind told her -- that by killing her children she was somehow saving them -- then he would have held on to them as they all went down. He would have broken their falls.

"Can you ever see yourself doing what she did?" he asked.

I have been writing about Amanda for fourteen months. I have spoken and written with two dozen women, many of whom say, "There but for the grace of god." I have read Anna Quindlen, writing about the Andrea Yates murders, "Every mother I've asked about the Yates case has the same reaction. She's appalled; she's aghast. And then she gets this look. And the looks says that at some forbidden level she understands."

And I do understand, or perhaps it is more accurate to say, today, I form hypotheses as to how this happened, informed as they are by bulletins near and far, some screaming in my ear, some a faint pulse, lighthouse beams through a heavy fog. But no, I told my husband, I cannot see myself doing what Amanda did, an answer that made me wonder what buttresses the sympathy I feel for her.

"What if you don't meet her?" he asked. "What if she won't talk to you?"

I told him, that will be a problem, because I want to tell her story.

"But what if her story is not what you think it is?" he asked. That pissed me off, enough that I took a break from the crying, and told him that he knows me well enough to know, I do not decide what shape the story will take and then shove what I find into it. That this is what nearly every other entity that had anything to say about Amanda did: they had their villain, why look further? He told me, I might have as much of an agenda as anyone else; that I had decided to care about Amanda, and didn't that color what I did?

It's an interesting question. What are our motivations, in exploring anything? If you want to learn how to play tennis, you go play tennis. If you want to understand how a mother throws her children off a bridge, you ask questions. You read. You stay patient. You allow your impressions to change, and change again. You sit in restaurants as people weep and tell you what they know. You account for misinformation, and try to figure out why people have given it to you. You swallow hard when your objectives are misinterpreted, and you cry and then stop crying when your husband asks you the hard questions. And you try to explain that the book may have Amanda at its center, but look, look at the ripples, her children, her family, look at the the pastor who, in his role as counselor, told Amanda she was "a whore, a bitch and a slut... you need to figure it out because you're living in sin and the devil has a hold of your soul." And a DHS system covering its tracks, and a judicial system that makes swift if imperfect deals in order to reach that mythical thing referred to as "closure," and a press beleaguered with too many murdered and missing children to continue to report on this story. What Amanda did that night, whatever her reasoning, ripped apart many lives, of this there is no question. And yet we grapple still, as a friend wrote, "to explain without excusing, and explore without exploiting." The public is divided over whether to condemn or understand Amanda, just as we two on our front porch were. That these things are what the book is about.

My husband's face relaxed. He poured the last of the wine. "You've set yourself a high bar," he said. I told him, that's right.

Part VII, "Enchilada," here

Mark Twain, "Concering the Interview"

Anyone who asks to be granted or submits to the interview will see the truth to Twain's essay. It seems to protest that this is not the case, that there are levels of care, of caress, makes the enterprise sound even worse. It is what it is. A snip:

No one likes to be interviewed, and yet no one likes to say no; for interviewers are courteous and gentle-mannered, even when they come to destroy. I must not be understood to mean that they ever come consciously to destroy or are aware afterward that they have destroyed; no, I think their attitude is more that of the cyclone, which comes with the gracious purpose of cooling off a sweltering village, and is not aware, afterward, that it has done that village anything but a favor. The interviewer scatters you all over creation, but he does not conceive that you can look upon that as a disadvantage. People who blame a cyclone, do it because they do not reflect that compact masses are not a cyclone's idea of symmetry. People who find fault with the interviewer, do it because they do not reflect that he is but a cyclone, after all, though disguised in the image of God, like the rest of us; that he is not conscious of harm even when he is dusting a continent with your remains, but only thinks he is making things pleasant for you; and that therefore the just way to judge him is by his intentions, not his works.

...

Yes, you are afraid of the interviewer, and that is not an inspiration. You close your shell; you put yourself on your guard; you try to be colorless; you try to be crafty, and talk all around a matter without saying anything: and when you see it in print, it makes you sick to see how well you succeeded.

Updike, Revising, and Now it is Summer

A good article in today's NY Times about John Updike and his work habits. Writers love to read this stuff, because admit it or not (and Updike did not during his lifetime), we need tools beyond imagination and ordinary industry to get work done. These can include procrastination (when Susan Orlean recently tweeted that if she didn't have a book due, her closets would never get cleaned, I tweeted back that she should see my awesome new spice drawer), and facts gathered by others (rarely the same people twice), and talisman, in Updike's case, a saved Planters Peanut Bar wrapper. The scene he needed the wrapper for had long been written, but I can imagine why he kept it. It had once been useful, it felt callous to throw it away. I sometimes come across boxes of things I've saved, floppy disks and a hummingbird's nest and quotes written on scraps of paper, by me, because at the moment of writing, I'd hoped the words held some sort of key. If they did, I have forgotten, or finished the project, or abandoned it, or collected the knowledge. And while I tend to throw things out (so often my husband now insists I run things past him, because as a matter of fact he had wanted to keep those stereo cables/that knife sharpener), I've come to think that anything saved, if only for a little while, has been put to use.

I once had a budding writer tell me, she didn't like to rewrite. I knew she did not yet know what she was talking about. Writing is all revising. The adored and difficult act of bringing up a giant clump of raw work, yes, it is needed; I would get little worth doing done without it.  But it is the honing that is the key. Here is some of Updike's, from Rabbit at Rest:

This past weekend, we decided to clean out and organize the basement, with the idea that we would turn this ghastly small back room, where there is an un-working toilet and dozens of boxes stacked chockablock, into a wine cellar. I got to work. I hauled out everything. I marveled at the junk we at one point thought worth saving -- ugly blankets, uglier jackets, shabby suitcases -- and hauled it to the curb. I found my daughter Tafv's baby photo albums, which had been missing for a year and somehow got stuck in there. I came across big boxes of her old stuffed animals, and smaller ones of all the art and writing she'd done in grade school, in high school. I neatened it all. I vacuumed broken concrete from the floor. I vacuumed spider webs from the walls. Din thought the space too dank for wine, and there was the light coming from the small dirty broken window, and general grossness of what I think of as the Blair Witch room. I reorganized. I put the Christmas ornaments in one area, the fans in another, Din's pile of empty boxes for stereo components in the east corner, and the boxes holding Tafv's stuff in the west. The piles were orderly and still. I sat on the un-working toilet and looked at Tafv, here reduced to boxes, and wondered how the most important person in my life had been relegated to the furthest away and most lonely corner of the house. I wept for ten minutes. I had already planned to bring the photos upstairs, but now, too, I carried the art, the writing, to put in her bedroom. As I came up from the basement, my phone was ringing. It was Tafv, wanting to know what was wrong, why was I crying? I told her and she said, but you are always with me; I am always with you; you are still the most important person to me, and I know all this is true, but the time... I want to write, how does this happen? But I know how it happens. Time passes. I lay on my bed and looked at the photos, and at day two of Tafv's life, at one year; at three years, the look of completeness on my face as I look at her is always the same.

There has been a lot of crying lately, for missing my child and the crossed line in time that her leaving represents; crying when people write to tell me, the book I am writing increases their pain, when my intent is so much to do the opposite; crying because of a slight lethargy: is it nearly fall? And what have we done, and not done?

I woke up this morning and felt it was the first day of summer. There was that clear sun early in the morning, and a softness to the air. I put on a dress. I kidded with Mary and Natalie, our beautiful twenty-year-old baristas, that I am was going to start lying my age. Natalie wanted to know, first, how old I actually am, and did I want to take a float-trip down the river with all the girl baristas? Yes.

So it is summer, and I am going to reread and read the Rabbit series. Care to join me? 

the "blog" of "unnecessary" quotes

I cannot stop laughing. Below one of many, many examples, sans the fabulous commentary

Do You Read the Newspaper Online?

At the risk of sounding like dodo brain #92/asking a question that's been posed for a decade: do you read a daily paper online? I read plenty/link plenty. But we still get a daily paper (The Oregonian) delivered, and I still try to read the New York Times every day, in its paper form, "try" because I no longer have it delivered at home, but a copy to each of the shops. This latter is an imperfect system, in that people often steal the paper (if I catch the person who keeps taking the Sunday Magazine, I am going to give them a giant tongue lashing), or I don't feel I have the time to linger and read.

I've been traveling a lot this year, to bigger cities, NY and SF and LA. When I was in NY last week, I felt great. I felt like myself, with an endless number of museums and restaurants and places and people to interface with, if I so chose. This is another reason why Matt Davis's goodbye, Portland post resonated with me. One of Matt's commenters astutely wrote, Matt is going where there stories are, to New Orleans. (He will make his bones there, as I made mine in LA.) Portland is not a big enough city, there is too little cultural collision and too many people with thin skins here to really sink your teeth in and do serious journalism (to say nothing of local places willing to publish it). A recent example: a little nothing piece I wrote for the O, in which I quoted a local PR person, who in several emails to me had a quasi-nervous breakdown because she thought the piece did not show her in the best possible light. I did my best to explain, the piece was not about her. A long-ago example: the editor of a paper I was writing criticism for musing aloud at a staff meeting that if the paper were to run anything negative about a venue, perhaps the paper should call the night before and alert them, a suggestion that made the editor I worked directly beneath bust a nut.

Anyway, two things happened this morning: I took the time to read much of the New York Times while standing at the new stand-up bar at Ristretto Beaumont, and drove home with two thoughts: one, I want to make a bunch of money soon and buy a place in New York, where I can spend more time and where, perhaps, Tafv can live. And two, I might start reading the Times online, on a daily basis -- something, by the way, I am willing to pay for. Politically, I realize we are all supposed to stand up and screech that the web is meant to be free, god dammit, and going behind a pay-wall -- which the Times plans to do later this year -- is as antediluvian and anti-progress as it comes. But here's the thing: as a journalist, I know first-hand how decimating not having any money to support a publication is; I had four -- four! -- of my editors (at the LA Weekly, Wired, Bon Appetit and City Arts) downsized out of jobs last year in a four-month period. That's a lot of freakin' cake not coming my way, kids. Also, I don't expect to get everything I want for free. I will be on the frontlines shouting, "Huzzah!" when the web is better monetized for writing and writers, and certainly, there are individuals and larger sites that have figured out how to make the finances work through traditional channels, i.e., ads and backers. I am also in the fortunate position to still have work. But the money? Do we really want to have this conversation first thing in the morning?

While I enjoy the range afforded by reading the paper online -- the skipping, the photos, the videos -- I also know I blow off more than when I read the paper in hand, and am divided about the idea of defaulting always to My News, divided because I see this as a good thing (deeper knowledge about fewer issues) and bad (where is Pakistan, again?).So: do you read the Times or a comparable paper online, and if so, what have you gained, what have you lost? And, any tips for me?

NB: Yes, I aware there will almost certainly be no print papers within the decade.

NB: And yes, I am aware that the medium that is slowly killing journalism as we've known it has created  the opportunity to have this conversation here, for which I am most grateful and which I find both fulfilling and full of infinite possibilities, yes.

"Mid-Life: Notes from the Halway Mark"

Various quotes wind up on my bulletin board, at eye level. They come and they go. This one has stayed longer than most. It's from Elizabeth Kaye's "Mid-Life." I usually just glance at the last line; the rest I know from practice.

And while I have always assumed that when I reached mid-life, I would not want to think about my own mortality, I find I want to think about it now. I want to because I'm one more person who elevated procrastination and sloth into an art by sheer dint of practice. Yet these days I have no patience with sloth, and I don't procrastinate much, and I try not to waste time. My life has improved accordingly. I'm not surprised. I've always been one of those people who does better on a deadline.

And though I still make mistakes, I am less inclinded to delude myself about their cost. I no longer expect things to make sense. But that does not mean there is no magic. It does not mean there is no hope.

It simply means that each of us has reason to be wishful and frightened, aspiring and flawed.

And it means that to the degree that we are lost, it is on the same ocean, in the same night.

Calling All Writers and Readers: Help, Please

As many of you know, I have been researching a book about Amanda Stott-Smith. I've published a few essays, and written several hundred pages more. But a bunch of writing does not a book make. For me, the crucial part, of any piece of writing, is the construction. I spend an inordinate amount of time constructing  longer pieces (this one comes to mind, sheesh -- months!), comparing this time to what my husband used to say when he worked as a painting contractor, that 90 per cent of the work is in the prep.

I've had a year of prep. As of yesterday, a table downstairs (as opposed to my desk upstairs, where I am now) is serving as the construction zone. It's actually a lot of fun, if a little daunting, and as for the writing that will come once I build my structure, I don't worry about that. (Ha - yet.)

Here's where I would love some help, from you who have been so helpful and illuminating in your comments regarding the work thus far: what narrative nonfiction books do you adore? Which ones just blew you away? I have my star chamber of authors writing in this realm, Didion and Langewiesche and Krakauer, and I plan to reread two works ("Sahara Unveiled," "After Henry"), if not so much as roadmaps for me, simply as good roadmaps. As in these works, mine will contain some first person, if more as filtration system than player.

Some books I have recently read, quasi in the genre of what I am writing, and whether or not they worked for me:  Julie Salamon's "Facing the Wind" (yea); Sebastian Junger's "A Death in Belmont" (nay); Deanne Stillman's "Twenty-Nine Palms" (yea) and Kathryn Harrison's "While They Slept" (nay); Krakauer's "Under the Banner of Heaven" (yea, the gold standard), David Dow's "Autobiography of an Execution" (yea, with the slightest reservationof as to son's/wife's munificence), Terri Jentz's "Strange Piece of Paradise" (fascinating, a little long; more memoir), and Dave Cullen's "Columbine" (yea, big yea).

Most of these books use murder as a launching point. Your recommendations need not. I have faith that whatever you offer will be useful, as it has been so far xx

A Writers' Writer: John McPhee

I dreamt last week that, in the course of and for my work, I needed to read someone named Rebecca Mead. When I woke up, I wondered who she was and if she were even a writer. I googled her; she's a staff writer for The New Yorker, so it is likely I've seen her byline but it had not stuck. I immediately went out and bought her book, and also downloaded from The New Yorker site three of her articles. One is a profile of the current director of the Metropolitan Museum, and Mead wrote (in a separate piece) that when she was doing her research, she "read with pleasure--and considerable envy--John McPhee's lengthy, fascinating profile of Thomas P. Hoving, who was the museum's director from 1967 until 1977."

You can, if you subscribe to The New Yorker, read the whole thing online, as the magazine has digitally archived every page of every issue. The first thing you will notice, if you get to the Hoving profile, which runs sixty pages, is how very many ads there are in the magazine; leafing through these is a museum experience in itself. But downloading and printing would have been a veritable bear, and so I bought a collection that contains the essay, which I read in one big gulp yesterday morning. This is the very finest writing of its kind: perfectly paced and measured, masterfully constructed, illuminating, playful. Superb in every way, it made me realize what the phrase "trip the light fantastic" means, or can mean.

Extra bonus: if you have an iPhone, you can download the images Hoving refers to as you read.

Amanda Stott-Smith Changes Her Plea To Guilty

Part V about Amanda Jo Stott-Smith and her children. Part I here; II, here; III, here, IV, here

Two weeks ago, I received emails from both Ken Hadley, defense attorney for Amanda Stott-Smith, and John Casalino, the DA who is prosecuting the case against her. Both wanted to let me know Amanda would be in court that morning, for another settlement hearing. For those who have not followed the news, or the story here: Amanda is charged with aggravated murder and attempted aggravated murder, stemming from her forcing her two children off Portland's Sellwood Bridge last May 23; her son, four-year-old Eldon, drowned; his seven-year-old sister survived. The aggravated murder charges meant, if the case went to trial, Amanda would face the possibility of the death penalty.

"There probably won't be much to see," Hadley told me. I told him, I wanted to go anyway. I have been writing steadily about Amanda since May 24 of last year, but had not seen her since her last court appearance, in June. That time it had been a zoo, of cameras and reporters and people needing to meet that day's deadline. They've all been gone for months. I've stayed. I have no idea if Amanda will be in court today but I will go anyway.

I get to the courtroom a little early. There is no one there but the attorneys; an investigator, and a woman with pale red hair. We sit quietly in the courtroom, beneath magisterially high ceilings, and walls hung with oil portraits of Alexander Hamilton, of George Washington. It is so quiet, we can hear all the gears of the trucks passing five stories below. I know the investigator, casually, and say hello. I ask the woman with red hair, whom I realize is Amanda's aunt, if I may speak with her in the hall. She will not face to me; says only, "I have nothing to say to you." I tell her, I don't want to interview her; I'd only like to give her my card. "I don't want it," she says.

I go back to my row. We sit in the quiet some more. The door to the courtroom opens. Two sheriff's deputies enter, holding Amanda by the arms. She is wearing French blue pants and top, like doctors' scrubs, a bit of coral-pink peeping at her shirt collar. Her hair is past her waist, and worn in a thick braid. She passes within five feet of me, a woman who has been on my mind every day for nearly a year. She is walked past; she sees her aunt; she begins to cry. The deputies lead Amanda to a seat, on the other side of the partition, behind the defense and prosecutor's tables and in front of us. She turns once to her aunt, who quietly gives Amanda her support.

Amanda faces forward. She has chains around her waist, her ankles, her wrists, but if there is a person who does not present a flight risk, it is the 32-year-old woman before us. Her body, heavier now than it was in June, appears to be trying to hunch in on itself; she looks pitched between deflation and anxiety, and very docile. She meets my eye, briefly. There is very little room, figuratively, to transmit anything. I am doing what I have always said I want to do; what I have told Amanda in my letters I want to do: just sit with her. That's all we can do, as humans, I think, when it comes to death, or at least all we can do for a while, just sit quietly with the bereaved.

Ah, I hear it - I hear you. She is the bereaved? Yes. I believe that. More on that later.

Ken Hadley is right; very little happens. The lawyers walk in and out of judge's chambers; they confer together and separately in every possible combination. Amanda's aunt is brought to judge's chambers. I speak for 15 minutes, in low tones, with the investigator. I tell her, it's always hard for me to get certain types of information, such as medical records and previous court record. I commend the investigator's fat sheaf; I tell her, I am jealous...

"You'll get to hear a lot of this in the future," she says, and also that, I must remember, she works for the defendant, who signs off on confidential information being released.

Forty-five minutes after the hearing began, it is over; nothing, so far as I can see, has transpired. But as I walk out with Ken Hadley, I feel his heaviness and sense his distraction.

I come home and stare all afternoon at a few pages I've been trying to write. They should have taken 45 minutes. All they have to say is, "This book is about; here's the thrust, here's the outline." This, to insert into the 75-page book proposal I have written about Amanda and what happened on May 23; what happened in the micro, and the macro; what it means. A friend who read the manuscript says I need this "definitive statement of purpose," so that is what I am trying to do. And the reason it has not taken 45 minutes; the reason what I have before me is the opposite of Orwell's window pane, is that the writing keeps slipping from why everyone else should be transfixed with this story, to why I am; to why I have stayed. I keep pushing open the door, and back it springs. I see myself as inside the calla lily; it's not open yet.

In her 2008 nonfiction book, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, about the murder investigation of a Victorian boy Eldon Smith's age, Kate Summerscale writes:

“Perhaps this is the purpose of detective investigations, real and fictional – to transform sensation, horror and grief into a puzzle, and then to solve the puzzle, to make it go away. 'The detective story,' observed Raymond Chandler in 1949, 'is a tragedy with a happy ending.' A storybook detective starts by confronting us with a murder and ends by absolving us of it. He clears us of guilt. He relieves us of uncertainty. He removes from us the presence of death.”  

To me, this seems exactly right. It is a puzzle, one that unlikely people have pieces to. Some find you and they know the most amazing and generous things. Some people have pieces and will not give them to you, because they are so wounded, they want it all to go away. And how dare you, how dare you seek to bring this all out? Haven't we had enough? Don't you realize you are hurting us? They do not say this out loud, but you hear it. I have also been told, on this blog, that I might find the grace to leave this story alone. My response to that is unwavering: is is better for this boy to have died and that no one learn anything? That people, in their impotence and rage, call Amanda "evil, pure and simple" (and much worse) and wish her dead and then walk away? Who does this help? And how have we honored anybody? So no, I don't think it is better not to examine what's happened; to not relieve of us uncertainty. I think we have had one tragedy; it ought not be compounded by never speaking of it again.

Yesterday morning, I received another email from Ken Hadley. Amanda, he said, was switching her plea, from "not guilty" to "guilty"; she would be in court a little after two; he predicted it would be a media zoo.

It is. The hall, in contrast to two weeks before, is packed, with Amanda's family, with the press; with many members of both legal teams. I watch Amanda's mother, in a pretty gray A-line skirt and black boots, her long hair loose; she looks like a schoolgirl, or perhaps someone who teaches schoolgirls. The red-haired woman is there, other family members. I approach no one. The cameras are let into the courtroom first. Then the family, then the press. Four of us are moved into a row on the other side of the partition, just behind the defense table. I sit next to the Oregonian's lead crime reporter, a woman who files something like three stories a day. I express my admiration; tell her, it's the first time the press has been back on Amanda's story since last summer.

And then, without warning, Amanda is brought in. She barely resembles the woman of two weeks earlier. Today, she looks as though she were going to a party, in a black velvet top and pants, with her hair loose and shiny. But that is not the striking difference. The striking difference is her face, which today is calm. Her face last time was blotched, and bloated. Today, she glows. Her almond eyes are at rest. I think, she's done what she needed to do, she needed to admit it.

As soon as Amanda is seated, Jason Smith and several family members and his lawyer enter. They sit just behind us. I have met them before, in a different courtroom, an encounter I might characterize as a debacle but will not write about here except to say, despite the bizarre and volatile nature of our first meeting, Jason had been cordial to me, and I appreciated it. Today, there will be no communication. It is a terrible day. I will learn, later, that he has had no contact with Amanda since she killed their son, and tried to kill their daughter. He, they, the families find themselves in a nightmare that no family can anticipate, and from which there is no waking up. There may be moving on, if in increments, and we are all grateful to hear, his daughter is doing very well. I know this from people who know her, and have told me, she is an amazing child, full of courage and friendly and beautiful. Yes.

As Amanda sits between her attorneys, as the gallery stays nearly silent, the lawyers disappear into various rooms, whisper to Amanda, to Jason, to each other. We again listen to the trucks outside; watch a tunnel of sunlight appear, brighten the floor, recede. And then it is four o'clock, and we are told to all rise.

The judge enters. Casalino explains that Amanda is changing her plea; that she is pleading guilty to Count 1, aggravated murder, which means she will serve a life sentence, with the possibility of parole after 30 years. Pleading guilty to Count 6, attempted aggravated murder, carries a sentence of ten years, five of which will be served concurrently. Casalino says that he, Jason, and the two detectives in attendance support this plea. Amanda's attorneys concur. Then it is time for the judge to ask Amanda: did she read the petition?

"Yes," says Amanda.

Is that her signature on it?

"Yes."

Did her attorneys explain the implications?

"Yes."

Does her taking of the prescription medication Abilify in any way hamper her ability to proceed?

"No."

t is determined that Amanda had made a "clear-headed, reasoned decision," and that her lawyers are proceeding with "no reservations." The judge explains to Amanda that she does not have to plead guilty and thereby give up her right to a jury trial, and the opportunity to or not to testify; that she has "rights and options." At every turn, Amanda calmly replies, she is aware of what she was doing; she knows that by pleading guilty and forgoing a trial (also, the possibility of being sentenced to death), her recourse is "very, very limited." She knows, yes.

The judge asks Amanda to rise; this, though formal sentencing will not be until next week. Amanda rises. Asked how she pleads to Count 1, she says, "I am guilty." To Count 6, "I am guilty." Her voice does not crack, she remains composed, and because she is facing away from us, I do not until the next day see, on video, that she closes her eyes when the judge recounts the date of the incident, the children's names, their ages. The judge asks, in conclusion, whether Amanda has done these things. Amanda opens her eyes. "Yeah."

And then Amanda is on her feet, being walked by a deputy to judge's chamber, she was walking right past me, taking tiny mincing steps like a geisha, and I see it is because she is wearing black shiny high-heeled sandals, the silver chains around her ankles looking like jewelry, and then she is gone.

The courtroom clears, Jason's attorney telling him as they leave, "You don't have to talk to anyone." The room empties quickly, so quickly, except for one woman in the back row, smiling as she comes towards me, and it is such an odd occurrence, to be in a courtroom on this story and have someone smiling, but I can't place the woman, perhaps because I am trying not to cry.

"It's Pati," she says, and I throw my arms around her. She is the woman who called 9-1-1 when the children landed in the water, so close to her patio. I have spoken to her many times; we have gone out with our husbands. She is part of this story, part of how I am trying to tell the story, how a story like this tentacles out and affects us all, if we let it, and how do we not let it?

By six that night, the Oregonian writer has written and posted her story. I'm amazed. But then, I know, we are writing different stories.

Today, this morning, is a hard day. I cry intermittently. I know that in the year I have spent thinking and writing about Amanda, of talking to people whose lives were impacted if not ruined by what she did, who were there that night and who knew Eldon, I have paved a way to Amanda. Not yet in person, but beyond the vale; that somehow our membranes have eclipsed. This, though what she did is to me so ghastly; just the thought of my having done this to my child when she was four, makes me feel as though the world has no floor.

And still I think, as I walk throughthe morning, look at all this space all around me, all this air, how high the sky; Amanda has none of this. She will never have it again. I walk into my bank. My banker asks, "How are you?" and I start to cry. She takes a tissue box from a shelf, which makes me wonder whether a lot of people cry in her office; she is a very sympathetic gal. And then I try to explain, that I know how horrific this story is, but how can it be better not to tell it? How can we do that? How can we let the act, Eldon's death, how Amanda got to where she did, just be put away?

"And then people don't learn anything," she says. "They just learn to hate more because they understand less."

I drive to CostCo -- because you see, my life goes on -- and I know, I know from the way she closed her eyes, that Amanda has already lived through the worst anyone can. She broke her own heart, she broke it and smashed and stood up and let the world hate her. What else can we do that she has not done to herself?

I may be a fool. I may not have the skill, or the fortitude, or the creative mind to take what I have found, and have sought, and continue to be given, and put the pieces together so that it hurts less, but I am going to try.

Part VI, here

What Are You Thinking?

Besides cooking, learning to mix a Ransom gin perfect martini, and a lot of backroom work for Ristretto - Din just now finished the built-out for the third, roasting-only location, and is firing up for the first time the new roaster as I type - I have been thinking. It's required, as I am embarking on a project that might easily slip fish-like from my grasp.

In some ways, it already has, and must. I can't know the answers to what I will write until I do the research, which means gaining access, which often means contacting people who do not want to be contacted by me.

I have a list on the left hand side of the blog, "The Last 8 Books I've Read." Those who've noticed it no doubt also noticed, I am reading about murder. This is because I am writing about murder. One story involves a triple homicide and the people affected: the murderer, his family, the victims' families, the attorney, the what happens now. The people in this story are, for reasons you will read about -- one story will appear later this year in The Oregonian, and if I can fashion it, another feature in the magazine O -- are interested in speaking with me. Their pain is such that they are willing to spread it on the table, to say to me in effect, can you help me with this? The simple act of listening to the mother of the murderer seems to offer succor.

The other story, the book, is crowded with people with different prerogatives. Some -- the attorneys, the police, the social service agencies -- stand behind various laws in order not to talk about what they know. This, despite their every hue and cry, often to my face, of trying to understand in order to prevent such horrifying acts in the future. I believe they might actually believe this, despite their actions proving otherwise.

Others within this story have a lot to hide, and thus can I understand their reluctance and even hostility. And yet I do admit to being shocked at the accusation of the other murderer's mother, that she will quash my attempts at access because she does not want me making money off her child. I was momentarily rendered silent by this accusation (as anyone who knows me knows, that's a tough trick to pull off), and then said to the attorney, while I can certainly appreciate that this was the conclusion the woman came to, we must admit the world is made of bigger ideas than that.

The title of this post, I now see, refers to my having to think quite a lot about why one writes, and about what, and for whom. What I also said to the attorney that day was, if I wanted to make money, I would be writing about Paris Hilton's panties. Instead, I push through with no guarantee of anything but that the finding is in the looking, and that positing the question, to you, is part of that.