We woke up this morning to the most beautiful windstorm, driving winds that rattled the house, chased the donkeys and sheep into the barn, has us bent over and stopped when we tried to bring some hay out. This is writing time, sweet time, I’m working on a Creative Aging Manifesto for my Ted Talk in Montclair, N.J. a week from tomorrow, it will be videotaped at Montclair State University.
Montclair was the home of my other life, my first marriage, where my daughter was raised, where I became a writer, it was never a good fit for me, never home for me, and since my divorce in 2008 I have not been back. It’s time, I think, Montclair is an interesting place, it will be strange to see it again, so many memories and feelings.
I’m excited about my Talk, I read a rough draft to Maria last night to get the timing down, it sounded good, it felt good, it always does to say what you believe.
When we heard the wind howling, we grabbed the dogs and set out for a walk on a nearby trail, it is warm but the wind is fierce. This is sweet writing weather, I am holed up with Red and Lenore and some candles, clacking away in peace and quiet.
I’ve had a problem all of my life relaxing, a colleague of the extreme anxiety I have often suffered. I’m afraid I’ll cease to exist if I stop moving too long or thinking too little. Today, I resolved to do better. I’m thinking about the Sabbath my grandparents observed (usually with my help.)
I did well. Nothing relaxes me more than reading, and I stuck with it. I did have to take a break and blog, or I would be relaxed.
I was determined to break this pattern of work, work, work. I read when I can’t sleep, and since I often can’t sleep, I read a lot. It doesn’t have to be this way.
I stopped working after morning chores and started reading. I am a few pages away from finishing another remarkable book by another imaginative and courageous female first novelist, Katie Hefner.
Her book The Boys is another surprising, creative, and deeply touching book about love, family, and mental illness. It is often not what it seems to be.
I couldn’t put this one down either, two in a row.
I related to this book so utterly I didn’t leave my chair for three hours. I guess I related to one of the hero’s extreme anxiety. It was rattling me but I was addicted to the story.
The book is about a loving marriage between two very different people and how the adoption of two young boys upends their life and love.
It has a genuinely stunning plot twist – a real whopper – right in the middle of the book that I was entirely unprepared for and never saw coming. The story refreshed itself in a powerful way. It was beautiful and gripping at the same time. I won’t give the plot away, of course.
This isn’t a scary or depressing book; it’s an audacious and utterly original book (the Pandemic is a backdrop), but the focus is marriage, patience, love, and trauma. And healing. I highly recommend it.
When I’m done tonight, I’ll finish Colson Whitehead’s Crook Manifesto, a rich, rough and tumble, honest, spectacularly satisfying continuation of the Ray Carney series set in violent and troubled Harlem.
Whitehead, who seems unable to write a bad book, is unapologetic about his plunge into literary crime fiction. He’s an excellent writer, and this is a beautiful book. I have one chapter to go.
Interesting how male novelists often focus on violence, blood, and conflict, and the new generation of gifted female writers focus on non-violent but wrenching explorations of life and love.
I’m paying more and more attention to gender and the amazing fiction coming out of young first novelists, most of whom are female. Eighty percent of fiction readers are female, and the number of fine novels and books by women writers is rapidly increasing.
That is a huge and happy change. Publishing is saved.
Tomorrow I’ll start reading The Rachel Incident by famous Irish Writer Carol O’Donaghue. The Irish writers seem to know how to write fiction in my experience, and this sound like a charming, complex, and engaging book about young friendship. It’s a huge smash in Ireland; the critics say all the characters are lovable.
I haven’t read any of it yet, but I can’t wait. I’m on a good book roll and eager to share the experience. Am I dangerously WOKE?
I’ve never met Janet Hamilton and am not likely to. But we are friends, bound together in the way of oddballs in search of the truth.
She lives on the other side of America and is on a great California Journey, her life, a job she loved, animals she cared for upended by Covid-19, and three horrific wildfires that forced her to flee three homes, unable to find or afford a new one.
Twenty years ago, she would have been a big news story. Now, she’s just another numbed wanderer in search of safety.
Janet is homeless. She is quixotic and private; she lives and travels with a person known to her readers only as her “partner” and says or reveals nothing about him or her.
She is naturally eloquent. She publishes the most wonderful blog out of an unknown location somewhere in devastated Northern California. Like her, its location is forever changing.
The blog is called As The Road Wanders. It’s a good name. Janet is the road that wanders.
I’ve never known anyone who suffered so much loss, danger, and disappointment and who has responded with her grace of thoughtfulness.
Hers is an almost timeless sense of journey and adventure. That’s why she reminds me of John Steinbeck, who had a special gift for iconic California journeys.
The context of her sudden search for a place to live is tragedy and danger: The coronavirus is never far behind.
It cost her the momentarily peace and stability she felt when she found a job preparing food for the elderly.
She loved that job before the senior center folded due to the virus, and she lost the rest of her life as one savage and terrifying fire after another turned her into an American refugee.
Her life is full of sacrifice and adaptation. Prone to claustrophobia, she has learned how to breathe in tiny trailers and sleep to the din of close by and loud neighbors.
She has lost almost everything that was her own, even a beloved horse. Even the weather has a different meaning for her.
“My idea of good weather has changed since 2017,” she writes of the first fire that ravaged her life. ” Before the Sonoma Napa Valley Tubbs Fire, my favorite time of year was Fall. I still love Fall, but only the tail end of it when the rains come. This morning, the first real storm of the season hit, and it was wonderful—a blessing from the heavens. The rain poured in sheets of water. I left the dry warmth long enough to walk through the woods near the house; a small doe was foraging down hill. As she turned and crept away to hide a few feet away, I found a private spot in the woods and peed. We have a beautiful bathroom with a spa tub in the house we are staying in, but there is nothing like feeling wild enough to pee in the woods. It’s something men probably don’t think much about, for women, or at least for me, it makes me feel rooted, untamed.”
There is an air of mystery about Janet; she is one of those fiercely individualistic writers who keeps to her own path, no matter what the world says or thinks.
My kind of writer, I guess.
Her writing is full of insight, wry humor, melancholy, and acceptance. She has a wonderful eye for the small detail that paints a big picture.
California is perhaps America’s most poignant argument for taking climate change seriously. I know of no one who has captured that very human story more skillfully than Janet.
Below is the world-class opening of her latest blog post. I challenge you not to want to read further.
“I have never chosen the straight and narrow path. Some of us want to stay on the path with signs leading the way. But do any of us really get to stay on the path no matter how safe it feels? It seems some of us jump off finding the straight and narrow uncomfortable while others are pushed off, stuck for a time at a crossroads, or lose our way finding a better adventure in the dirt somewhere out there.”
Today, I am remembering a time I strayed from the straight and narrow, quite literally. It was the mid 80’s. I was twenty-two sitting on a velvet green couch, my friend Melanie sitting near me on a leather chair with an ashtray next to her, her cigarette lit, a glass of wine in hand. The Argentine professional tennis player Gabriela Sabatini grunted on the tv screen, hitting the tennis ball across the net with a power I had never witnessed a woman athlete possess, any woman possess.“
I’m in.
I first encountered Janet when she joined my online Creative Group, a gathering of creatives I hoped would become a new kind of creative and supportive digital community.
I have few friends, but most of the ones I have are like-minded oddballs, always somehow outside of the tent, fascinated by the circus inside, but never quite a part of it.
Being humans, the effort to form a creative group failed in a poisonous cloud of cliques, manifestos, accusations, factions, and conflict. I contributed to much of it, having greatly underestimated the challenges of making community in America.
But I did keep some wonderful friends.
There were lots of talented people in the group. Janet was one of the shining lights, popping up on and off, writing beautiful things, then vanishing without explanation.
I knew she would come back, and she always did. She is a writer from head to toe. She has no choice.
Janet’s writing always stood out in terms of emotion, detail, and some wisdom. She has lived a lot of life.
Curiously, her life seems to get richer as it gets harder.
She has lived in motels, tents, friends back yards, borrowed living rooms, trailers, and has again decided to return to writing on a blog. She writes like Steinbeck in that she shares his sense of time and place.
Her California journey is a metaphor for troubled and crippled America in 2020.
She’s still looking for a new home and life, perhaps with her mysterious partner. I can’t wait to see where she ends up; I hope she doesn’t vanish too many more times until she lands.
There is a lot for all of us in Janet’s writing.
For a few centuries, we – living in America – were arrogantly great. We are humbled now. We are learning that we were not so great after all, but maybe still can be.
We each have to figure out this new reality.
At the moment, we are stunned, hateful, in shock, and confused. Janet’s blog is a work of literature for our time, really for any time. The blog is called As The Road Wanders, and you can find it here.
Janet lives in the tradition of brilliant but unhinged writers over time. Sensing her unyielding individuality and courage, I sent her a biography of Henry David Thoreau. Those two would have gotten each other right away. After that, we were just friends.
Like any good writer, Janet has spent much of her life trying to find out who she is. Like most good writers, she will probably never quite know. But it will be a hell of a trip.
Every few months, I get a message informing me she is giving up writing for now or abandoning social media, or experiencing a new revelation about her life. Then in a few months, in a new place, she is back, beautifully and movingly chronicling this new kind of America pilgrimage.
From my other reading, I suspect many more Americans are on this trip than we realize. I doubt that too many can write about it as well. It seems like Janet is heading to San Diego. Godspeed.
I think she has captured the uncertainty and angst of life in the new America better than anyone I know of. Anyone of us, after all, could be her.
Very few of us could capture the experience in this way.
Oscar Wilde was proud to admit he was a dreamer. “For a dreamer,” he wrote, “is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.”
Ever since I was a contributing editor at WIRED magazine and Rolling Stone near the beginning of the digital age, I’ve had a dream.
I wanted to start a virtual creative online community, a supportive and safe place where creatives gathered to support one another and provide constructive feedback to each other. I wanted to see if the values of community could exist in a virtual context.
As the Internet grew and evolved rapidly, I saw that so many of its open spaces and virtual communities had been polluted by cruelty and hostility that just seemed to deepen.
A few years ago, as my blog began to grow and spread over the country, I saw my chance and took it. I created a group called the Open Group At Bedlam Farm, the name eventually changed to the Creative Group at Bedlam.
Today, I said goodbye to the dream. I left the group and turned it over to someone I love and respect. It was a happy decision.
I asked a good friend, Becca Addy, if she would take it over, and she said she would love to, and she did. It’s called simply “Creative Group” now. I wish it every good thing there is.
My first try at this dream didn’t go very well.
Like many things in my life and most things on the Internet, sponsoring and running this group was not simple, at times it got quite painful, even ugly. At one point, I thought the group was simply going to blow up or dissolve.
I take responsibility for the politics, cliques and anger that split the group into chunks and left it looking like Congress does now. It got away from me. I should have stopped it. It was filled with controversy, grievance and anger. Private sub-groups formed to gossip and plot. People felt excluded. People were excluded. People posted angry messages.
People sent me outraged letters.
A whole bunch of people, some gifted, stormed out one night in a great huff. Nobody said goodbye. I thought of shutting down the group, but decided to hang onto the dream.
This next effort worked.
With little input on my part – I didn’t really know what to do – the group suddenly evolved, almost on its own, into just what I hoped it would be. The less I did, the better the group was. The more distant I was, the better the group seemed to fare. I’m not dumb, I get the message in that.
Creative Group will live and prosper, I still can’t help but see it as my baby, I will watch it with a big smile as it grows up some more, I will be cheering them on. This dream lives.
I tell myself it doesn’t matter all that much how one gets there, as long as one gets there. The group got there. It is there. There was a happy ending. People can be civil and creative online.
It’s just like Disney says: dreams do come true.
Every day, I see brave and gifted people putting their work out their, every day there is something wonderful to read or see or think about. Something surprising and compelling.
I can’t tell you how it happened, I can only beam with pride like a proud papa.
When people tell me how safe they feel there, I want to cry.
This week, I realized it was time for me to move on. I have a ton of work to do that I love to do, and the truth is, I am not doing much more now than posting my blog posts up on the group.
Any decent leader knows when it’s time to go as well as to stay. It’s time to let go of my dream. I am called to do the work I am now doing, with my blog, the refugees, the Mansion, my photographs and writing.
I need to be my own Creative Group.
So this fairy tale ends well. The bloodless and seamless transition is under way. No storming out. No angry manifestos, no nasty comments. We can grow. We can learn.
The best thing I did was start the group, and then back away and let these good people chart their own course. They have. Creative Group is the safe, gentle and encouraging creative community I wished for.
I’m not joining, at least for awhile. They don’t need me peeking over their shoulder. And I’m in search of the next dream.
What I don’t want is to give up on dreaming. Hold fast to dreams, wrote the poet Langston Hughes,”for if dreams die then life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.” I have always been more disappointed by the things I didn’t do than the ones I did so.
There is a lot of literature about the emotional toll of being a mother and wife in our culture, and in most of the world.
“The Cost Of Living” is a brilliant addition to the genre, it is about how the British author Levy (Hot Milk, Swimming Home) escaped a suffocating marriage at the age of 50 and set out to begin to take herself seriously as an artist and a free person.
The critics are calling this a “post-feminist” memoir in that it moves to re-define feminism in a different and very personal way.
“It was possible that femininity, as I had been taught it, had come to an end,” she writes. “Femininity, as a cultural personality, was no longer expressive for me. It was obvious that femininity, as written by men and performed by women, was the exhausted phantom that still haunted the early 21st century.”
In this context, she sets out alone to expand her life and vision. She had two daughters, but they do not appear often or distinctly in this book, and that is sort of the point. She is not writing as a mother, but as a person.
After her divorce, Levy becomes a poor writer working and freezing in a friend’s shed to support her two daughters. She reject’s society’s conventional ideas about what a woman is expected to do with her life.
The memoir is, in many ways, the story of every woman throughout all of history who exhausted herself and her love and labor making a home or growing up in an oppressive family, living a life that turns out to serve the needs of everyone except herself.
Right away, the book struck a deep chord for me because this was for much of her life also the story of Maria, my wife, lover and great friend and partner. The memoir became personal for me because at ever turn, I began substituting Maria for Levy and almost every time, it fit perfectly.
Reading the book, I felt I was on two parallel journeys, not one.
The story of the suppressed woman seems sometimes to be almost universally true to me, even in the homes of good fathers and decent husbands and caring brothers.
Suppressing women seems to be an almost biological function of being a man, even if it is sometimes unintentional, and we know it is often quite intentional. There are just too many women telling the same story. Sometimes, I think that is what all of the “populist” turmoil in our country is about.
“The pain of the contemporary middle-aged male who, having failed to entirely suppress women, perceives himself as disempowered is a delicate matter,” writes Levy. So it is.
Like Levy, Maria has spent a lifetime fighting for her identity and figuring out what it is.
She was suppressed not only by one husband, but also by her family, who simply could not celebrate her identity and individuality or accept it. When there is trouble, Maria doesn’t really know how to get angry, an important defense mechanism for individuals and oddballs. She asks herself “what is wrong with me?”
Mr. Rogers, our fantasy teacher and friend, told children that they were all special, each in her own way. But society at large never quite got the message.
Schools and parents often push gifted and creative children away from their bliss and make them feel stupid, ashamed and worthless. What is so wonderful about Maria is not that she is like everyone else, but that she is not like anyone else.
But no one ever told her that, so she didn’t know
The people around her could never see it that way or convey to her the wonder and beauty of it.
For decades, she felt shamed into going to Sunday dinner every Sunday of her life, the idea of saying no was a trauma.
Levy, confronted with similar emotional suppression, made the same decision Maria did, and just as late in life. At all costs, she had to break away and learn how to be herself and love herself.
Eventually, Maria broke out and stopped going to Sunday dinner. Without it, her family had no way of communicating with her. They stopped calling her or seeing her or knowing much about her.
Free of these invisible chains, she began to live her own life.
The farther she got from those dinners, the happier and more fulfilled she was. The further Levy got from her marriage, the more she found the freedom and independence she wanted.
Without saying so, or perhaps even knowing it, Maria’s family essentially disowned her, shunning her without ever quite saying so. We love you, she was told, please come back to our dinners. That was all she was told.
That’s what parents are taught to say to children caught in cults.
That was as far as any conversation ever got, and now, there are very few conversations.
Every morning, Maria goes out into the pasture – sometimes in her wedding dress – to shovel out the manure and put it in our pile. Every morning, she affirms her own identity, looking very much her own ever evolving self, and looking nothing like any other farm person, male or female, who shovels manure every morning.
Someone wrote me recently to compliment Maria on her “fashion” sense and suggest she was a very different kind of “farm wife.” I guess that is so. Whenever I hear the term, I think of change.
I don’t think of Maria as a farm wife, the term seems outdated to me. I have met many women on many farms who still call themselves farm wives, and who refer to their husbands as “my farmer.”
My friend Carol Gulley and I have had several conversations about this, she sees her husband Ed as the dominant figure on their farm, and calls him “my farmer,” she writes about him in that way and openly sees herself working and living in support of him and her family.
Yet she is just as much a farmer as he is, works just as hard, milks as many cows, shovels as much manure, drives in a tractor just as long, and I cannot imagine describing her in any other way than as a dairy farmer, just like Ed.
Ed would be the first to say she is just as much of a farmer as he is.
There is an individual choice here, but more and more women are rejecting a system of work and life in which men – and families – find different ways of suppressing and dominating women, even if it is not their intension
You don’t have to just beat someone to abuse them, you can just as brutally damage their sense of self.
Joseph Campbell often wrote about a phenomenon he witnessed in his teaching career (so have I) in which men and families so often suppressed the creative desires of women by encouraging them to stay away from art and creative, by shaming them to get “safe” jobs or “day” jobs, have children, push aside their bliss and ambition and do what is expected of them.
“What else was there to do?,” asks Levy in her memoir. “To become the person someone else had imagined for us is not freedom – it is to mortgage our life to someone else’s fear.”
These women, Campbell said, invariably ended up living “substitute” lives.
The lucky ones came to their senses later in life, he sayd, like Levy, and pursued their passions and callings. The men in their relationships often had to be shed, so were their families.
What is beautiful about the Levy book is how wonderfully she captures the interior process of this new kind of apolitical and solitary liberation, a new way for women to look at their lives.
Maria’s revolution is quite internal, quite personal: she brings her own style and fashion sense to her art, dress, friendships, to everything she does, it is her mark of identity and individuality. It is the opposite of a group.
In the first years of our marriage, I went to a number of family functions with her, and I saw what she means, and I saw that she was right. I couldn’t be myself either at those dinners either, and no one seemed to care who I was or what I was about.
We were just expected to be there because that was what everyone did on Sunday afternoons.
Eventually, and with great pain and anxiety, Maria stopped going to family functions. It did feel like leaving a cult, it took months before she could find the strength to do it.
She still talks to her mother often and visits her frequently.
Her family will only say they love her and wish for her to come back to the family dinners. When she hears this, she feels once again like a sick ward in a mental hospital or cult, they assume she must be broken or sick if she insists on being herself.
Like Levy, Maria always felt that her family and her first husband did not know who she is, and did not want to know who she is. It’s especially ironic, because that’s all she really wants from them, it costs nothing and is a basic human right, and she will never find it because they will never offer it.
They cannot help but suppress her, she is simply too different, and it is what they know.
Levy and Maria both reached the same conclusion, they each had to set out alone to find a new way of living. It is a long, hard and wrenching process which Levy captures in this short but powerful memoir.
There is no doubt her that Levy is looking at the world in a different, post-feminist way.
She found contemporary feminism a sort of tired masquerade, an elaborate costume she no longer has any interest in wearing. In “The Cost Of Living,” Levy begins to notice the ways in which women instinctively defer to men, or accept being dominated and suppressed or ignored by men.
Her memoir plunges deeply and skillfully into the artist and the philosopher’s personal struggle to reconcile sexual love and conventional marriage with intellectual and personal liberty.
The long and entrenched idea of family and marriage is breaking down all over the world, women are looking beyond these ideas for fulfillment and love and work. They don’t care to be suppressed any longer.
In a way, Levy’s book, like Maria’s life, is a poignant manifesto for a new way for women to live in the post-Rockwell world, where we will all have to paint a different picture of their lives.
