Crossing Over

The Website of Author Marina Budhos

Category: Books & Authors

NOLA: A Love Letter

March 19, 2021 /

This is a blog entry I forgot to publish, back from 2020.  Enjoy!

I may be a latecomer to New Orleans, but it seems I’m making up for lost time.

Before my son Sasha chose Tulane, I’d never visited the city. I knew NOLA purely through the novel The Awakening and a vague sense of its great jazz. I had standard images that flickered across my lids: the filigreed second floor balconies, Creole and Cajun culture, Mardi Gras, which I glimpsed through the beads and feathered masks I found in my late mother-in-law’s drawers.

Then came our research for our book, Sugar Changed the World.  Louisiana, New Orleans, is sugar. Louisiana was a slave state where the death rate exceeded the birth rate—because of sugar’s brutal conditions.  New Orleans is where Norbert Rilleux, a free man of color, invented a more efficient crystallization process for sugar, on the plantation that is now Audubon Park. One cannot walk the streets of NOLA, especially Uptown, without realizing the gouging imprint of sugar and slavery–each of the main arteries that cut down to the winding Mississippi, streets like Louisiana, or Jefferson—were the boundary lines for the narrow plantations that fronted the river.  At Tulane there was an old iron bell that the freshman touched for good luck—until it was revealed that this was the bell used to direct the slaves in the fields, and it was recently removed.  On one of my first evenings in NOLA, a neighbor at my Airbnb and a history aficionado, showed me his framed copy of the map that shows those plantations—thin, thin dominoes of land—and I was reminded of the narrow parcels of land that made up the plantations on the coastline of my father’s country, British Guiana.  As my dad used to say, “Booker [the sugar company/conglomerate] owned us.”  Sugar definitely owned a lot of folks in New Orleans, too.

To say that I have fallen in love with New Orleans is an understatement.  Every time I go to visit, I start with a long list in my head of all I want to explore, and I leave with an even longer list for the next trip.  I seem to tackle areas swath by swath, and always leave hungry for more.  We stayed in the French quarter the time we dropped Sasha off (which I’ll never do again, given its touristy, drunken crowds) but we did buy some cool clothes at Rubinstein’s on Canal Street, one of the last of the Jewish department stores, where a Morehouse graduate treated my husband very well in his search for some finer summer threads. I then read up on the Jewish peddler community and learned that inter-marriage was accepted—Jewish men marrying local women–and so the early Jewish community was Creole in nature.  Maybe as someone mixed race, mixed culture, that’s why this place is so irresistible to me—its DNA of mingling and blurring boundaries to make its own vibrant medley feels just right.

On this visit, every day after writing in the high-ceilinged Uptown apartment, I walked miles and miles.  The purpose of this trip, beyond seeing my son, whom I greatly miss, and doing a writing retreat, was to heal my back, which suffers during the cramped cold months of winter.  I am at heart a warm weather girl, and NOLA offers the perfect soul and muscle therapy.  I threaded through Uptown, the Garden District, the Irish Channel and Magazine Street, chatting with shop owners; I traipsed along St. Charles Avenue, listening to the metallic slide and clank of the street car; to Tulane, over and around in Freret (taking out my son’s roommates to a new hip taco place made out of a vintage gas station with picnic tables outside), around Audubon Park with its draping Spanish moss lit up in the sun like gray-green mantilla lace.  That it was the Covid era was something of a boon: safety, a light sense of enjoyment in the outside, but none of the grunge and crowds. Continue reading

Writing Crazy

September 22, 2020 /

“I don’t know if you’re really a writer.  I don’t know if you’re crazy enough.”

These were the words said to me by a mentor in graduate school.  I had honestly forgotten them, until an old friend from graduate school mailed me back the long letters I had written her during a period I think of as my apprenticeship as a writer, when we wrote each other fervently, and I, especially, set down the long (and sometimes self-dramatic) struggle to become a writer.

Not surprisingly, these words came from a male mentor.  I believe he looked on and at me with some affection—I have memories of him smiling, eyes twinkling, when I spoke in workshop; of driving with him around Providence, RI, where he was looking at a house he was thinking of buying, and, as he told me, “wasting his time so he avoided writing.”  I remember he often singled out my work, but wanted it to take a distinctly more avant-garde and dark direction.  I remember one such story that I considered finished, unto itself, and somehow, after workshop, I had persuaded myself to now tell the story from the point of view of the son, as an unborn child.  Another story, which again seemed finished, but for some odd details that needed fixing, was revised over and over again after his comments, until it became a muddle.  The first I published as a chapbook; the second story I let go.

The word “crazy” deserves some examining.  I do not know if my mentor held in his world view an idea that women writers needed to be ‘crazy’ to be good or true writers, or if he thought all writers needed to be ‘crazy.’  I do know that is a trope often dispensed on the female writer—yes, that neurotic, ungainly woman ill-suited for the regular world.  Her bleeding life is her art—the crazier she was, the more of an artist she must be.  But the notion of a ‘crazy’ woman author means that ambition and debilitation are always bound together.  One asserts and is made helpless at the same time—think Plath, Sexton, Zelda.  I was never interested in ‘crazy,’ honestly.  I was interested in hard, steady work, in finding how to steady myself as an artist, which wasn’t always easy.

When I was a child, I studied with a wonderful artist, a European who lived across the street in Parkway Village; he had a slightly haunted quality, having come through the war, and ran painting classes at the back of his framing store.  He seemed to think I had some talent, and he became like an artistic father to me—I relished those hours in the turpentine-smelling room, where he would lay out books of Impressionists and Fauve painters and we would try to copy and learn with oil paint.  After he and I took the long walk home, down Parsons Boulevard, pausing at the bridge over the Grand Central Parkway, the cars humming beneath us, to see a sky streaked and swollen with vibrant hues, no different than the Fauve paintings I had just been poring over.

In the early days, I painted instinctively, still a child, still unafraid, lavish in my sense of color and brush stroke.  I got into an art high school, but then suddenly retreated, afraid of being pigeon holed as solely a painter.

Then there was a break—my mentor’s wife passed away, he shut the store and took a teaching job to support his family, and then remarried and went to live elsewhere—not far away, in the neighborhood next to my elementary school.  I became a teenager, with a boyfriend, friends, diffuse in my likings.  I picked up painting again with him, this time in a room on the second floor.  But something was broken and lost—in our connection, and in me.  His stepdaughter, who was quite adorable, would come wandering into the room.  There were no spattered and dog eared art books splayed open to show me how to do it; no smell of turpentine.  My boyfriend was idling in his car across the street.  I worked on one painting—of a man in a chair—and the more I worked on it, the worse it got.  The palate became muddier and muddier.  I had lost my way.  Shortly after I stopped our lessons.  There was no point.

The same could be said of the fiction writing in graduate school—the revisions I was doing that muddled my original sight, my original sense of freedom.

I was trying to please.  And maybe, in some way, he was right—that pleasing side of myself was what he saw in the hothouse atmosphere of graduate school—I was the acolyte tipped forward, showing her eager and agreeable face, wanting praise, wanting attention, wanting to get it right, like a good student.  Surely not a good creed for becoming a writer.  One muddies–and muddles–one’s own sense of color and purpose.

And finally, he was being an a***hole. Continue reading

Maplewood Literary Award 2018

March 25, 2018 /

This was the brief talk I gave before my interview with Sarah Lester at the Maplewood Literary Award event on March 24th, 2018.  It’s adapted from an earlier blog on writing in 9/12.

I should like to tell a story.  It is a story of failure and motherhood.  It is a story of post- 9/11, what I call 9/12.  And it is ultimately a story of rebuilding one’s self, of home and community.  Because the career I’ve had for the last sixteen years is intricately connected to our decision to move to Maplewood.

We were living on the Upper West Side in an apartment.  My ‘office,’ such as it was, consisted of a corner of a room, next to a swinging door into the kitchen, walled off with a Japanese screen from my son’s nursery area.  My husband wrote on a thin little table in a corner of the bedroom.  Our books teemed everywhere.  There wasn’t much light in the apartment.  This was not sustainable.

But it was not sustainable for another reason.  I had, in all honesty, lost my way as a writer.  I had always been a fierce and disciplined writer, driven in some ways by guilt—the child of an immigrant, of hardworking teachers, I felt that if this was my job, I had to attack it like a job.  I led a pretty monastic life, keeping my expenses low, my apartments small to make this vocation work.

And I did continue to write after I became a mother—a few weeks after my son Sasha was born I was in Bed Stuy, reporting on teenagers with AIDs.  But just like the gray atmosphere of our apartment, there was a smudged quality to my vision, a sense of not being able to blend motherhood, the pressures and anxieties of making a living, and the act of writing.  Even I—quite stubborn—was having a hard time of it.  I felt like a graduate student peering into grown up lives, but somehow I could not figure out how to be and writer have that grown up life.

Worse, even after publishing two literary novels and a nonfiction book, I could not sell my third novel.  I pause on this for a moment because we so often focus on success of an author’s life.  But as every writer knows, particularly in the punishing environment of publishing, behind that gleaming surface, there is so much rejection and sense of failure and uncertainty and tossed out projects.  And often for no good reason, just bad luck or bad timing.  I was amazed to learn the other night at the Montclair Literary Festival that Tom Perrotta’s novel, “Election,” was actually sitting in a drawer, unpublished, when it was discovered for a movie.

For me, at this time, I had written a novel in a somber mood, in the wake of an ectopic pregnancy that had sent me into life-saving surgery.  I woke up a week later in bed, loopy on painkillers, with an image of an elderly Bengali woman, the wife of a photographer, walking the amber-lit streets of the UPW.  That novel, too quiet, too submerged, still waits in my drawer.  I tried a few other projects but nothing quite held.

Here is the other significant part of our move: 9/11.  Or rather, I should say, 9/12.  The day after.  The decades after.

They are connected. Continue reading

Lisa Jalowetz Aronson: The Door Opens

April 24, 2013 /

Lisa with Peter Lindenfeld at a show of Lore Lindenfeld’s work

I first met my future mother-in-law in 1996, when my boyfriend at the time, Marc Aronson, brought me to Westchester, where he was giving a talk on Edith Wharton to his mother’s book reading group, which was reading House of Mirth.  Marc and I had met many times over the years–I an all-in-black aspiring novelist, he an editor at Henry Holt–mostly at the home of Shashi and Minu Tharoor.  On one fateful occasion, we sat perched on a sofa and were soon immersed in  a conversation about Edith Wharton and Henry James.  Marc had recently finished his dissertation on William Crary Brownell, who edited both authors.  (I am a James fan; he a Wharton, and we still have not resolved the issue) At the time, I think Marc was surprised that he was talking to someone who not only knew all the works, but even cared!

What followed was a very Jamesian or Whartonesque courtship–take your pick–a long date at the Metropolitan Museum, where we both had wandered as children and now shared our favorite rooms, literary readings, strolls and high and low meals talking books in our beloved New York City; proffered and refused gifts and many, many conversations, heady and otherwise.  Over the course of that time, he mentioned his parents a few times–once at an Israeli restaurant in the East Village he said something about his parents ‘working in the theater.’  Then one evening, standing at the bar at Gramercy Tavern, after an event at the National Arts Club, he began to explain his fascination with Brownell, how he was drawn to figures who are on the borderline or cusp of cultural change, since of course, that was who his father, the set designer Boris Aronson, was.  At that moment, I thought to myself, “I will never be bored with this man.  I will always want to hear what he has to say,” and simply put–fell in love.

Shortly thereafter we rented a car and made our way up to Westchester, where I met his elegant, snowy-haired mother and her fellow book group.  Marc gave his talk and then we followed Lisa back to her home, across the river, in Nyack.  At the time, Lisa was about 75 years old, and she drove like a speed demon, swerving around the winding roads.  As we stepped up to the door, he paused, and said with a sigh, “Welcome to my family.  Welcome to the avant-garde.”

The door swung open. Continue reading

We’re Ready for Immigration Reform: A Novelist’s Perspective

February 13, 2013 /

A new Op-Ed in the Huffington Post:

With the bipartisan proposal on immigration just announced, and President Obama’s speech on reform delivered recently, we’re all braced for the polarizing winds of anger to rage.

But that’s not what I’ve found. For several years, I have been talking about illegal immigrants, all over the country. Every time I finish my talk, I wait for a blast of hostility.

It never comes.

More …

Mrs. Dalloway Then and Now

October 29, 2012 /

This appeared in the Patch:

When I was in college, I took a course taught by an erudite British poet and critic, Jon Stallworthy, who came to class in nubby wool sweaters, and assigned us to write an essay on “Why Mrs. Dalloway is a masterpiece.”

Moxie sophomore that I was, I decided to write a paper on why Mrs. Dalloway was not a masterpiece, and headed straight to the Graduate Library, where I spent hours digging up old reviews in English newspapers, panning Woolf’s novel, and building up my sure-fire case that the novel was ‘second rate’—not on the order of To the Lighthouse, certainly.  I was sure my professor would be impressed by my extraordinary, rebellious performance. Continue reading

Remembering David Foster Wallace (briefly)

October 26, 2012 /

This was a piece I wrote for our local Patch in anticipation of an event with biographer D.T. Max:

In 1989, when I was still a novice writer, I spent the summer at Yaddo, the beautiful writer’s colony in Saratoga Springs.  It’s a fairly intimidating and luxurious atmosphere (butterballs served at dinner!) for any new writer still trying to get a handle on a first novel. One feels both anointed and yet hollow, inadequate.

It was there I met—among many other writers—David Foster Wallace.  Already, there was a bit of star aura around David—he was clearly brilliant, and his difficult, opaque and challenging first collection, The Broom of the System, had been published.  Downstairs in the main room of Yaddo’s Victorian house was the mail table—and it was hard not notice the big packages that came for David—from publishers, from Michael Pietsch, his editor at Little, Brown.  Wallace was starting to hum with a true career while many of us were simply in the shadows, figuring out who we were as writers or artists.

 

David was a funny mix of Midwestern earnest, well-brought up, polite, and yet sharply arrogant.  He kept his cards to his chest, though one could still see the whirring, ambitious calculations within.  Evenings, some of us would sit around the screened-in porch for long winding conversations about the state of contemporary fiction, and he would dominate, posing quizzical questions, conducting the conversation as if he were the professor.  (Flustering a few of the more insecure young writers)  I could clearly detect that he was a professor’s son, used to the analytic seminar, even in his slacker trademark bandana around his long hair.  Indeed David was not teaching creative writing as many of us were—he was headed for Harvard to study philosophy.

Over the course of the month, a small group of us hung around quite a bit, shooting pool in town, or joining him as he smoked a lot of pot in his attic room.  I once made the mistake of playing tennis with him—he was a ranked state player in high school—and embarrassing myself not just with the ball, but with some of the intellectual volleys, so shy was I at the time.

Lobbing the ball across the net, he asked me what I thought was the next frontier in fiction.  Since I was actually trying to wean myself of the intellectual pyrotechnics of experimental fiction, I mumbled something about ‘ethnic’ or ‘multicultural’ fiction and then felt completely tongue-tied and embarrassed.  Somehow, I managed to say, “You know it’s mostly about writing a story that really hits you.”

He paused on the court.  Something had clicked.  He said quietly, “Yes, there is that.  It’s hard to deliver that emotional knockout that gets you right here—“ He pointed to his chest.  “That is rare.”

David would go on to write Infinite Jest, a book that was a huge achievement; as much a literary opus as it was a massive cultural event.  He also battled with severe and profound depression.  Shortly after he left Yaddo, I’d heard from mutual acquaintances that he’d had a severe crack up, dropped out of Harvard, and was in an institution.  All that pot smoking masked his constant internal struggles with “the black hole with teeth.”

Over the next decades, Wallace moved toward the luminosity of the truly gifted and brilliant, the public.  A cultish fascination grew around his maximalist work.  Though I was not one of those who dared crack open the over a thousand-page-tome, David’s journalism and essays, which appeared on the pages of Harper’s, were among my favorite—funny, erudite, slangy, relaxed, genre-breaking cultural commentary, where his penchant for the extended, hilarious footnote became a genre unto itself.

To my surprise, many, many years later, the author DT Max contacted me in his research for the biography of Wallace, which began with a New Yorker article he wrote about the last days of Wallace’s life before he committed suicide in 2008.  I was surprised, as I was no more than a speck in the huge number of famous figures and dear friends who populated David’s life.  But it speaks to DT’s scrupulous sense of fine research that he reached out to everyone.

Every Love Story is a Ghost Story is a kind book, for it takes up, with compassion and insight, the twin struggles of Wallace, the ambitious literary author and Wallace the person, battling severe depression.

 

Continue reading

What I’m Reading

October 2, 2012 /

A few days ago I finished D.T. Max’s Every Story is a Love Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace.   The book is both eminently readable, a kind of psychological thriller of one brilliant author’s mind, his ouvre, and ultimate self-destruction.  At the same time, I found myself queasily putting it down for rest stops–perhaps because I knew David very slightly, from Yaddo, and thus his ghost brushed past on the page; perhaps because this was the first time I had read a biography of someone who is a contemporary.  The effect is oddly dizzying, even nauseating (is it nauseated? Wallace was a hard-ass on grammar and nausea was one of his pet peeves).  It’s like being in a Tilt-a-Whirl of one’s own times, lurching a bit too close to one’s cultural moments, veering away as we watch his particular struggles and demise.  In the end, the book is also terribly sad and moving.

***********

Throughout the summer I’ve been slowly making my way through Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, in preparation for our project on Robert Capa and Gerda Taro and the Spanish Civil War.  I’ve never been a great reader of Hemingway–he was most certainly the obligatory guy author for me back in high school, and I’ve never been a fan of minimalism.  Its language constraints irritate me; the dialogue at times seems peevishly forced.  Prior to beginning the novel, I read the two biographies of Martha Gelhorn–the second, which was unauthorized, provides a rather damning portrait of Hemingway the mean and vindictive ex-husband, so I was hardly inclined toward him as an author. Continue reading

The Eyes of The World: Work-in-Progress

September 28, 2012 /

Ongoing updates about our work-in-progress, “The Eyes of the World: A Story of a Man, a Woman, & a Camera”, to be published by Henry Holt for Younger Readers in 2014:

Last summer, while sitting at lunch at the Vermont MFA program, chatting with many veteran children’s book authors such as Walter Dean Myers, Leda Schubert, I was suddenly thunderstruck with inspiration: I knew what my next young adult nonfiction book would be–the story of photographer Robert Capa, the less-known Gerda Taro, and their friend Chim, as they set off to photograph the Spanish Civil War and create modern photojournalism–and war journalism–as we know it today.  Nothing like the company of other authors, bubbling with their own ideas, to set one going.

Indeed, given that this is very much a story of a man and a woman collaborating–as equals, as compadres, as artists–it seemed the perfect next book for Marc and I to write.  We had been casting about for a new idea and had touched on the idea of collaboration–various duets in history that have joined forces to create something they could not do on their own.

The story of Capa and Taro had caught my eye a few years ago when I went to an exhibition at the International Center for Photography–“This is War!”–a huge retrospective of Capa’s work.  I’d always been fascinated with the Magnum photographers, and fell in love with those images from the Spanish Civil War–the molded, strong faces staring up at a sky strafed with war planes; children playing see saw amidst rubbled buildings.  At that exhibition, I became acquainted with Taro’s work, which also shared a smaller exhibition space.  I learned that in fact she and Capa were an artistic team–Capa & Taro–and they had gone off together, as lovers, as friends, as co-conspirators in the aim of telling the world about the Republican cause.  Like so many of their generation, they believed that the Spanish Civil War was the war to stake a claim–that if it was not won–Europe would surely fall to fascism.  (And of course they were right in this regard)  Armed with their new, lightweight Leicas and Rolloflexes, they set off, arriving in Barcelona on August 5th, 1936.  Sadly, Taro would not live more than a year, as she was killed during the Battle of Brunete in July, 1937.  This is one of the reasons her work is not as well known–she died very young, just as she was emerging as a daring and canny photojournalist in her own right. Continue reading

The City of Your Final Destination

April 24, 2010 /

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.

 

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