Bread and Bread

1. genius vs. more geniusy genius A couple of years ago I went all the way to Italy to learn that you can’t write a memoir by pasting together a bunch of journal entries. Even if they were pretty well written journal entries, if you do say so yourself, and even if you were kind of trying to write them from an imaginary point in the future as an exercise in convincing yourself you had a future…they are still not a memoir. Dani Shapiro kindly suggested that my journal entries might not be as useful as I wanted them to be, but her advice took another two years to sink in. It took two years to walk that much farther away from the events I was writing about (infertility-miscarriage-cancer, that old tune) so I could see them more clearly. Actually it's been forty. Recently my friend Dan and I started a writing group. It’s had a couple of hiccups getting off the ground. One member was pregnant and got intense migraines that kept her from looking at screens. Another got ...

1. embracing your wiggly kid (even if he wiggles right out of your arms) Dash is super wiggly these days. Whereas once the edge of the changing table was a place to put diaper cream and hand sanitizer and something called “bottom spray” that is just a made-up product invented for baby registries, Dash now sees those things as clay pigeons for him to knock over with one sweep of his magnificent grabbing arm. This guy will steal the glasses right off your face. I imagined his near future as a wiggly bigger baby and then a wiggly, curious, running-everywhere toddler. I thought of Matea, Jamie’s year-old daughter, who is gentle and cuddly, though plenty curious as well. I thought about how it wouldn’t be hard, if you were so inclined, to mourn the not-having of a certain kind of baby. Bouncy if you wanted cuddly, cuddly if you wanted bouncy. But just as quickly I dismissed the thought. It would be so much work wishing for another kind of kid! You’d waste so much time! You’d be anxi...

1. nice work if you can get it It's all fun and postcard views till Mt. Vesuvius gets pissed off again. This is the view from my window right now (well, it was when I started this post). You might be thinking: What is someone with an eight-week-old child doing tossing back cappuccinos on the Amalfi Coast of Italy? It was certainly a question I asked myself. As with many things in my literary life, I applied to this workshop called Sirenland on a whim. I heard about it through One Story ( Hannah Tinti is one of the conference co-founders), a literary magazine which recently sent me an encouraging rejection. In my mind, “encouraging rejection from One Story ” = “various famous writers really want me to hang out with them in Italy.” The pictures of Positano, Italy, where it took place, looked pretty. There was a mermaid motif. I get along well with mermaids. Trash can at Le Sirenuse. I felt bad putting trash in it. I found out I was accepted to Sirenland on t...

1. watching yourself watch the leaves Right now—when I’m not reading People Magazine or federal grant proposal requests—I’m reading Devotion, in which Dani Shapiro tries to address her lurking anxiety through a spiritual lens that includes the Orthodox Judaism of her childhood and a variety of Eastern practices that can (or maybe can’t) be boiled down to mindfulness. Read this book if you're the kind of person who's drawn to AA meetings even though you barely drink. I picked up the book because I’ll be taking a workshop with Dani Shapiro soon, and I didn’t feel like reading her more recent memoir, Still Writing, because reading about writing sometimes stresses me out. Devotion really speaks to me, though. Some of Dani’s anxiety is a holdover from a serious illness her son had as an infant, and my own anxiety (well, arguably everyone’s) is equally bound up in birth and death. As grateful as I am for the medical and psychological approaches that have helped me tac...