Welcome to Crossing Over, the blog of author Marina Budhos.
I grew up in Queens, NY, in Parkway Village, a community built for U.N. families, and a haven for international, mixed, and American families during the ferment of civil rights and social change. Over the years I’ve come to understand that this sense of crossing over, of mixture, permeates my way of seeing the world. And it drives my writing too. I am an adult author who crossed over into young adult; a fiction writer who frequently crosses over into nonfiction; and a writer who loves to create worlds that capture these cultural complexities.
But I’m also leery of categories that can be too confining. To me, that’s the very spirit of crossing over–resisting easy labels. So, in its broadest sense, Crossing Over aims to capture what all writers do: we cross over into territory both familiar and unknown.
On Bad Reviews
This post recently appeared in my friend Judith Lindbergh’s The Writer’s Circle:
Every published author has experienced the harsh, dismissive, or critical review. Recently I received my first bad notice of a new novel, Tell Us We’re Home. Up to this point, I had been basking in the glow of a wonderful launch: two well-attended book readings where I could sense, in my audiences, a startled, intense listening; a starred review in Kirkus; other enthusiastic, appreciative notices. I felt myself lofted out of the gate of publication into the starry universe of success–every writer’s fantasy. And then of course, comes the negative reaction that sends you plummeting down to earth. You land with a hard thump, stunned, dazed, wondering if you can ever write again.
Aspiring writers always imagine publication as a marvelous send off into a sparkling stratosphere of praise, attention, and affirmation. There is some truth to this, for there is nothing like the delicious sensation of releasing a work that has been so private (and obsessive) into the arms of the public. But, as any published writer can tell you, publication is a much more mercurial journey. For one, you have often finished with the book quite a long time before—the manuscript has been through the long, snaking process of production and copy edits for months, leaving you weary and cross-eyed. The actual writing, the love affair with every word choice, every structural decision, is over. I once had a writing teacher say that every time someone praised him on his newly published book, he felt as if someone was complimenting his ex-wife.
Inevitably there is someone—maybe more than one person–who didn’t like the book. Or they found a flaw that slices at you as a wincing hurt—something you hadn’t thought of. Those slighter criticisms can feel like someone noticing your slip is showing and you curse yourself for not paying attention. Each review comes in and looms with huge and loud significance. The bad reviews unfortunately, seem to echo the loudest.
Some writers deal with criticism by simply not reading their reviews, good or bad—a healthy reflex, I think. Others respond with lashing out and dismissing whatever the critics have to say. I’ve heard of one author, who has always been very well-received, and yet her husband cuts out any reviews or articles about her in newspapers and magazines because she cannot bear the pressure.
It is a paradox: writers, who are presumably the most sensitive of creatures; who possess a hyper-alertness to life, subject themselves to a process that even the most thick-skinned and impervious would find harrowing. Too, writers are often working against a sense of inner transgression, telling stories they feel they were forbidden to reveal. They are usually our resident observers, and it is a painful and shaky process to take the stage. To then get cut down for your effort, is the ultimate form of existential pain—reaffirming the very dynamic you have worked so hard to overcome. You suddenly realize the terrible exposure that publishing brings. This is something any writer who seriously wants to get published must expect.
Several years ago, I published a novel that I thought would be my ‘break out’ book. Though it received some excellent reviews, the thumbs-down came from the all-important New York Times. At the time I was recovering from an emergency operation, so my husband hid the review from me, secretly running to the corner outside to speak with my editor about how long they could protect me. When I did read the review, I was crushed and shattered. Then furious and finally, for a much longer time, depressed and deflated.
The best I can say, in retrospect, is what I tried and risked in that book—however imperfectly – was not understood by that reviewer, who was not the right reader for that kind of novel. (Perhaps the worst reviewer possible!) This happens all the time. Our wish is to have the ideal reader who sympathizes and understands what we are attempting as an artist. And yet, hard-nosed as it may seem, reviews—even stupid reviews–are some indication of the reading public. Some will get a book, others will not. It’s no different than in life—some people will be drawn to you—how you look and speak, what you have to say. Others will cross a room rather than be near you.
But that does beg the question: are bad reviews ever helpful? Here we enter cautious and risky territory. Some criticisms do carry the prickly edge of truth to them. Criticism can be good, bracing, even important. It’s only once the whole process is over that you are able to absorb the varying responses, and even the negative criticisms take their rightful and proportional place. In some ways, earlier criticism of my work has led me to write the kinds of books I now write—less conceptual and language-based, more plot-driven and character-centered. Criticism, like it or not, put me more in touch with my readers, as I learned to write less privately, and more for an audience.
Yet any writing is a kind of risk. It means making choices, pushing in one direction that some may not like. To think that we can achieve perfection in the work or unanimity in our readers is folly. Which leads me to another problem with criticism: it is a snap shot of the messy momentum of creativity; a closed verdict on something that is, for many of us, an open, lifelong process. Part of the danger of book reviews is they are tiny windows that do not allow in the larger vista of experimentation, daring, exploration. If I had a magic wand, it would be that we would see more reviews and essays that take in the long view of a writers’ work; that understand the obsessions, influences, and stages we are working through. A book may be a product, but a writer is a living artist, going through a lifelong search with their craft.
Finally, we come to the issue of those who buck criticism—to their peril. There is nothing worse than an author who feels they can do no wrong. Too often I’ve listened to inexperienced writers defend their choices rather than engage with feedback. “That’s the way I see it!” Or “You don’t understand!” I’ll never forget a writer in one workshop who was writing fiction about the mujhadeen in Afghanistan—at that time, a more obscure subject for most Americans. As fiction, the stories did not work. Every time we asked questions or voiced our confusions, she would snap at us with haughty impatience, until it was clear that she was using the fiction to expose our ignorance of this political situation. That kind of contempt for the reader will inevitably backfire.
Criticism is like a body blow that can keep you down for a while. Those tough words ripple through your muscles, leave you aching and shaky. For me, since I am usually on to the next manuscript when these knocks come in, this can be particularly debilitating. My new work is stained with corrosive doubt; my first days back writing sputter and are ill-guided. But I’ve also learned you can’t let criticism keep you down or define your next steps. One day you have to pick yourself up and push on to the next adventure.
Immigration: The Generational Gap
Today there’s an interesting article in the New York Times about the generation gap over immigration. Those who are younger are less forgiving of the tough Arizona law, while those who are older favor such draconian measures. This is attributed to the fact that young people today are growing up in a far more diverse and multicultural world, whereas their parents–many of them aging baby boomers–were shaped by a more segregated, ‘white’ world.
This accords with what I’ve seen and noticed both among my students and living in the suburbs. The suburbs may ‘look’ the same–the sweet little orange buses rolling through leafy streets; the baseball and soccer games filling the green parks every weekend–but they have fundamentally changed. Children of different backgrounds and races are tipping their hat visors as they take the pitcher mound or ringing your doorbell to sell Girl Scout cookies. Even the most insular of suburbs have begun to give way to ethnic and racial demographics that look like what the cities suspiciously used to look like.
I don’t mean to paint a portrait of multicultural paradise on our suburban cul de sacs. The tensions, the exclusivity, the gaps in school districts, the self-segregation among teenagers, are very real. There are some areas of the country that don’t look all that different than they did circa 1954. But undoubtedly young people are growing up with a more live and let live attitude, simply because their towns, their streets, their neighbors have so changed. That’s why the other Arizona law–banning ethnic studies in school districts, for fear that it inspires resentment or exclusivity, is so wrongheaded.
It’s been my experience, teaching at a state university in New Jersey, that most of my students are profoundly grateful for any literature or material around the ethnic American experience. This semester I taught Asian-American literature to a largely, though not exclusively, white class. Many of them were kids who had grown up in suburbs that at one time were homogeneous, or they had watched their neighborhoods, or neighboring areas go through profound changes–Indian grocers, Korean shops showing up in the strip malls nearby.
In our class, we studied the Asian American experience historically, beginning with some of the more brutal history of Angel Island, where Chinese-Americans were detained; to the vigilante violence that plagued Filipino workers in California; to the internment experience of Japanese-Americans; and finishing with the racial profiling of South Asians in a post 9/11 world. Rather than shutting them down, or indoctrinating them in resentment or white guilt, all the students kept talking about how the material, the literature, ‘opened their eyes’ and ‘widened’ the American story. To know the tragic or darker side of American history hardly narrowed their understanding, but broadened it.
After all, they had already seen these subtle and not so subtle changes in their own lives, in their lunch rooms; they had wondered at why there was suddenly an enclave of Indian engineers and their families living among them, and yet no one had offered an explanation of the massive social and immigration flows that were coming to their doorsteps. Most decried the fact that they had learned so little of this history in middle school or high school; that their knowledge of World War II was exclusively focused on Europe and the Holocaust, and they knew so little of the events in the Pacific or the cataclysmic changes of Asia in the 20th century.
Young people, by their very nature, are the vanguard. They aren’t yet hardened into their experiences; they’re not yet nostalgically worrying about what once was. Perhaps we should listen more closely to them–to what they see around them, and what they envision for a 21st America.
When Someone ‘Gets’ You
Today I received a lovely blog post and review from Uma Krishnaswami (a writer whom I much admire and who has done so much to expanding our notions of children’s/ya) about Tell Us We’re Home. What moved me about her post is that she articulated something that I have long felt: after I wrote and published The Professor of Light, I had a sense that I would venture into young adult. I would not abandon the world of adult fiction or nonfiction, but I knew there were many coming of age stories I wanted to tell. For me, writing young adult has enabled me to touch a certain part of myself–a bit less guarded, not yet clapped into adult attitudes, still striving, still yearning. It’s rare to have a reader be so attuned or even cognizant of your own arc and development as a writer–a true gift.
The City of Your Final Destination
Today I was walking down Maplewood Avenue on a sunny day, passing our little movie theater, and was pleased to see the poster for “The City of Your Final Destination.” Several years ago, I reviewed the novel by Peter Cameron for the Los Angeles Times, which I thought quite wonderful, especially the droll dialogue, and its sense of drawing room humor set against the atmospherics of a crumbling Urguayan compound. (My own motivation for reviewing the book was two-fold: my family here had recently reconnected with lost relatives in Uruguay and I had become fascinated with the place, also, have always like Cameron’s work) In the review I had even conjectured that it would make a fine Merchant-Ivory film–one could picture the Chekovian characters storming about the grassy lawns:
“It takes a certain slight of hand to write a novel that is so infused with place . . . What’s sly about this novel is that the bigger dramas are kept offstage . . . Cameron has crafted a fascinating domestic drama . . . succeeds as a comedy of manners that pokes fun at literary careerism and turns entertainingly on people who are not happy, and would not admit it if they were. I kept envisioning this as a cross between a West End Edwardian play . . . and a Merchant-Ivory production …”
Lo and behold, it’s the first film, other than the White Countess, that James Ivory has made since the death of Ismael Merchant a few years ago.
The film is about a hapless graduate student, Omar Razaghi, who is egged on by his more ambitious girlfriend to head down to Uruguay to seek out the surviving family of a novelist, whom he is writing about for his dissertation. Instead he is soon embroiled in long simmering feuds and dramas and his own life takes a surprising turn. There was, in a way, very little in atmospherics as I had originally assumed–instead, however–the novel turns on a cast of characters simmering in lives that are not quite right. It has a graceful, light touch and I’m eager to see what Ivory has done in the film version.
Visits
On Saturday, Rita Williams-Garcia and Neesha Meminger joined me for a panel on YA at the WPU Spring Writers Conference. On Monday, Neesha returned to my Asian American class, along with Kavitha Rajagopolan, author of Muslims of Metropolis, to discuss the Asian American experience in a post 9/11 world. Neesha has blogged about it on her blog, along with a picture of the three ladies in black: http://www.neeshameminger.com/blog.php.
Notes on Teaching Nonfiction in an English Literature Class
This essay, by Rob Nixon in the Chronicle of Higher Education, prompted a few thoughts on my own interest in teaching nonfiction in literature courses. http://chronicle.com/article/Literature-for-Real/64453/.
I happen to enjoy mixing it up with nonfiction in my literature courses. My two favorite courses, which are part of our Asian Studies Program, are Asian American Literature and Modern Indian Literature. Because I am teaching students largely unseasoned in the actual experiences of Asian Americans or with only a vague understanding of the history of India, nonfiction and documentary materials become a vital spine to these courses. And geeky history minor that I was in college, I just can’t resist injecting historical context into my literature courses—theory, post modernism be damned.
Thus, we have read Nehru’s Tryst with Destiny, reports on the Gujarat riots, the street photographs of Raghubir Singh, Youtube documentaries about comfort women, links to Wikipedia, Q & As with nonfiction authors. The fear of course, is that students then treat novels as pure explication of ‘the real’ or ‘the documentary’ and conversations will be leadenly literal. But what I’ve discovered is it’s this informational grounding that makes them better able to swoop and dive intellectually, wrestle with the back and forth spirit narratives in a novel such as Comfort Woman, or the playful sexual politics of M. Butterfly, and now the phantasmagoric imagination of Woman Warrior. I’m not sure I would have been able to push them stylistically without this historical and documentary foundation.
Where the rub comes is when I ask them to critique photographs, documentary materials or nonfiction as literature. They can’t look at these works as anything but transparent, as a transmission of pure information, rather than an act of creation, selection or narrative emphasis. This came up when I recently asked students to respond to a series of photographs by Ansel Adams of the Manzanar camp experience. They were very observant of the details in the photos, expressing surprise at how ‘normal’ and happy everyone looked. When I tried to introduce a conversation about the aesthetics of the photos—Ansel’s attempt to portray a certain stolid heroism to Japanese-Americans, the later criticism that he was aestheticizing or romanticizing this tragic experience—I drew only blank stares. To treat nonfiction as a form of literature, with its own stylistic choices, is often hard to tease out within the undergraduate classroom.
Then there is the creative writing classroom, where we often teach memoir or ‘creative’ nonfiction (a designation that irritates me—why does nonfiction need this little modifying flourish—is it to reassure those right brain arty English majors—don’t worry you still get to be artistic and don’t have to worry about facts?)
When I came to my university for a campus visit, I was asked about any new courses I might want to design. One I proposed—and have yet to implement—is “Moral Nonfiction.” That is, I was interested in students reading and developing their own extended projects around works that derive from a sense of moral outrage or drive or moral questioning; to force them out of themselves to explore a topic that, in their mind, has some moral implications. We might, for instance, read Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, or my friend Helen Benedict’s portrayal of women Iraqi veterans in The Lonely Soldier, or Sudhir Venkatesh’s Gang Leader for a Day.
Memoir, confessional memoir, dysfunctional childhoods, intense mother and daughter relationships are the stuff of the creative writing classroom. But the fantastically alert skills they develop, their quivering attention to their own states of mind, can not only be applied to the landscape of memory and self, but the external landscape of their towns, their cities, their neighbors, their strangers. Nonfiction can be a way of re-envisioning or ‘re-seeing’ the communities they live in—and I use community in the broadest sense. I want them to use nonfiction as a way to examine the environments they are living in, to raise all kinds of interesting questions about how they have chosen to frame a person, an issue, a place, and perhaps let them in on the notion of nonfiction as a form of literature, not just reportage. I hope too that such a nonfiction might propel them into other fields—sociology, psychology, science.
Of course this is the bailiwick of any working nonfiction writer, who are the world’s most promiscuous generalists—they make a profession of dilettantism, in the best sense.
Young Adult Lit Comes of Age
I came over to young adult many years ago, with my first nonfiction book, Remix: Conversations with Immigrant Teenagers, arriving like a shy newcomer. But it was only when I published Ask Me No Questions several years later, that I understood the world of young adult and its lively appreciative audiences. And, happily enough, I’ve been watching the rising tide of interest from all quarters–adults and young adults alike, as evidenced by this article in the LA Times today: Young Adult Lit Comes of Age.
As someone who devoured young adult literature when I was a teenager, lounging on hot days to read Paul Zindel’s My Darling, My Hamburger or S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, this is cheering. What I loved then–and still do–is the immediacy of this fiction, the sense that they are creating complex, literary worlds where a young person is at the very center. To this day those books flicker like old favorite movies in the back of my mind, mysterious, yet familiar. That did not mean I was not reading great literature written for adults–what is Jane Eyre but a coming of age novel? Or Oliver Twist? Or even Tess of the D’Urbervilles? All of those were consumed in that same bedroom when I was a teenager, too. Yet young adult novels evoked the depth and strangeness of that period in one’s life–the awkward, half understood truths; the shimmering, jagged edges of self that are just emerging. For me, all of those books have a gratifying lack of completion, because, of course, they are capturing someone who is still on their way somewhere; still forming.
The Elusive Balance
Can one write too hard? Work too hard? And still not feel like you’ve done enough?
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I’ve set this goal of finishing a long novel this summer, since this is the time when I can have uninterrupted time, five days a week. And so, for the past few weeks, this is exactly what I’ve done. To some extent, it has worked. Unlike the rest of the year, when I am dashing and juggling an impossible set of responsibilities, I actually have enough time to go to not one, but at least two yoga classes, while getting work done. Even a few swims, once the pool opened. What a miracle! And taking care of many of the niggling domestic improvements that are the bane and joy of house living. And still sit at my desk! The healthful sense of balance was achieved—I felt energetic both mentally and physically.
But this past week, something went awry. I plugged ahead, but by the end, I was lagging. I somehow never made it to yoga. Forget swimming. My sciatica kicked in and began to distract me. My right wrist began to hurt. I finished out the week feeling run down, headachy, not entirely pleased with the most recent passages.
There’s no doubt that when I don’t take care of myself, physically, and then drive myself to sit at a desk like a prisoner to my manuscript, it backfires. Alas, I’m all too prone to this—I can easily talk myself away from all those replenishing activities–a walk, a bike ride, a call or visit to a friend–and instead guiltily chain myself to work. Friends have commented on ‘my discipline.’ But it’s not always the best discipline because ultimately, if I’m not refreshed, or deeply rested, the work is not either.
Endings & Best Laid Plans
My plan, this summer was to force myself to write to the end of my historical novel, a book I have been working on for a number of years, off and on, while I completed other projects. Summer is my best writing time, when I am home, puttering around my house, the children off in camp, and no teaching responsibilities fracturing my attention. My aim, then, was to bring this all to a head, especially since the end of this novel is meant to be very dramatic and also violent, a crescendo of so many parts, voices, themes. And yet even the most thoughtful of plans have a way of upending.
Set against the crumbling backdrop of late 19th century British Empire my novel-in-progress is about the unlikely friendship between an Indian woman and English woman—a bond that is threatened when they move from India to a Caribbean sugar estate, and violence starts to sweep the plantation. It is most certainly my most ambitious book to date, if only because I am juggling multiple points of view, along with foreign and historic settings, politics, even technical information about sugar growing that I must make vivid to a modern reader. Up to now, I have written rather slowly and carefully, editing as I go, trying to pay attention to all the richness that is necessary to building up this world.
This summer, I had an image of getting deep into the space of this novel, and like a dream, it would mount and mount until I wrote to its dramatic conclusion. Especially since the challenge of these kinds of endings, or perhaps all endings, is they are a kind of tidal wave that is slowly mounting, ready to curl, and yet one must also pay attention to the water particles. And yet one still builds, scene by scene, moment by moment, even as you are aware of these huge forces compelling the narrative forward.
To my surprise, the ending, the denouement, a series of fast paced acts, is coming swifter than I expected. There was no deep rumble in my consciousness, no mounting wave of creativity. Mostly I find myself sketching out plot—one bad event and bad decision, leading to another, and hopefully mounting to tragedy. This is somehow vaguely disappointing, and runs counter to my more romantic vision of the summer’s work. But perhaps this is what I need to do—work more as an architect, a bit more cerebral—setting down the structure. Then the deeper, unconscious swells will emerge once these decisions are made.
This is what I tell myself now, as day by day, I write event-driven material, pushing toward the end. Sometimes we need to ride the waves. And sometimes, we must navigate with a plot compass, trusting that instinct and fever-dreams will return.
A Laboratory for Work and Living
The storm has passed. The four and a half year old, who a short while ago was shrieking like a bird, demanding to play with the boy across the way, even though he has a different playdate, has somehow been persuaded to leave. His almost nine-year-old brother has given up his grumpiness that he can’t buy sneakers on his own, and is off to a much-needed hair cut. All courtesy of our au pair, who will ferry and soothe for the remaining afternoon hours. Oh, but wait, the men who are here painting the front porch have discovered a rotting railing, so the carpenter must be called, to see about another repair.
Even with help, which I will admit we have in abundance, one must get used to riding the swells of crisis and noise that are a regular part of family life. There is no simple room of one’s own. There is just a ship that rocks and calms and then rocks again. I often think: how is it that you can one minute be negotiating a screaming match between two slapping boys, or arguing that they can only get two cookies, not three, and then returning to the late 19th century Caribbean for a novel about a sugar plantation? The two realities could not be more different.
The only way, I now believe, is to have a home base, and for me, a house with multiple floors and many doors. Seven years ago, almost to a month, my husband Marc Aronson, also a writer and editor, pulled up our pup tent in Manhattan and camped down here in a suburb. I never for a moment dreamed this would be my life. I am an urban rat through and through. The NYC subway is tattooed to my brain. My husband was born and raised in Manhattan, did not even drive until his mid-thirties, and never understood why one needed a yard, when there was Central Park for playing. For years I walked around the leafy, Mayberryesque town of Maplewood, feeling as if someone had unplugged my brain and body from its electricity source. I was in a haze. I could go on and on about why I am such a misfit here—even in one of the more cosmopolitan, heimishy, bohemian suburbs. “You don’t live in the real suburbs!” I’ve been told. But that’s the subject of an entirely different post.
On one front, though, I have to admit, it works: my writing. I can’t even keep track of the reams that have been scribbled here, by the both of us. When people ask, “Did you move for the kids? The schools?” I usually sheepishly admit, “No, for the office space.” Our home isn’t even the most practical: since neither of us grew up in a house, we did not know to ask for something called a den on the first floor (a room just for TV and playing, what a concept!) our kitchen still has the same impractical white linoleum tiles and a stove whose oven insulation is unraveling and probably dangerous. But the day we first saw the house, we took the stairs up to the finished attic, saw the open loft space, glimpsed another room under the sloping eaves, sunlight pouring in through the lace curtains. Our breaths caught in our throats. We saw what could be made and done here. Sucker Manhattanites that we are, we were sold.
Because I have a room, a little peach-walled study lined with books and papers, even a window seat that looks out on our small dappled lawn, I have a place of creation in my mind. It really does work. So I wander down the stairs and adjudicate some sibling crisis. But I wander right back up again, sift around in some of the historical materials I’ve collected, and before I know it, I’m back in the world of sugar cane workers and angry Scottish overseers. The interruptions are there, but the plunge back isn’t so hard. For a writer, or at least for this writer, a home becomes that grounding, that place from which all the complicated plants of living and working can flourish.
My husband’s parents, Boris and Lisa Aronson, were set designers, and late in life left their rambling Upper West Side apartment and built a beautiful modern house on a cliff from which they worked. To this day, there is still a hanging rope pulley where they cranked up the set models my mother-in-law painstakingly created. Rooms there are plate glass and wood, studios, storage, living room repurposed accordingly over the years. Boris called their house “a laboratory for work and living.”
That’s perhaps what we needed, here in our circa 1907 four-square home. A laboratory, from whence children can be raised and manuscripts written, all at the same time.