Author Archives

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Floating: Bringing it All Together

Floating on the breast of the ocean, lifting in the slow surge and counter-surge to and from the beach, I feel like Gulliver all alone on a strange, moving continent. The water buoys me up like a solid element, yet my ears and hands and feet are in it, cool, but sun-warm. I smell unseen fish and taste the salt in my nostrils. I hear the sound of the whole ocean crackling in my ears like a million tiny crustaceans dashing themselves against a reef, all in stereo, inside my head.
Turning my feet into the approaching wave, I see them rise into it first, and my head follows bonelessly. The surface as it comes toward me in the late afternoon light is bubbling silver. I breast the wave and sink, breast the wave and sink, rising and subsiding like an eel.

I am no fool: I know there is danger below. In my mask and snorkel in other waters I have steered around the rocks, and I have followed sharks and rays and morays. But here I am caught between the deeps of ocean and the deeps of heaven, pinned on the surface, safe in a sandwich of sea and sky. If I squint into the setting sun my eyelashes make a rainbow, and I am making my own magic.

© Sandra Shaw Homer, 2015

Photo by SSH

Photo by SSH

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Sense of Taste in Writing: The Hell of Hyperbole

 

For me, the most challenging sense in writing is the sense of taste, which is why I’ve left it for last. I love good food, interesting food, food from all over the world, but I am utterly challenged to explain what it is about a particular taste that captivates me. I think I am intimidated by professional food writers . . . in their constant bid to outdo each other they have descended into the Hell of Hyperbole where we are left wondering what the hell they are talking about. Thus my delight at finding the following description of the output of British caterers in a recent UK Guardian:

From “Wedding Season is Here: Crimes Against Food”

by Jay Rayner

“We are meant to be experiencing a British food revolution, and in many ways we are. There are better restaurants than ever before. But in the business of mass catering we are generally awful. I say generally. Obviously, if you run a catering firm and you’re limbering up to complain, I don’t mean you. You’re brilliant. Likewise, the food at your wedding was obviously fabulous. It’s everyone else.

“Everyone else is responsible for dry canapés that taste only of margarine and complacency. Everyone else is responsible for desiccated lumps of yesterday’s pre-cooked chicken the colour of an old stained sink; for sauces that could creosote fences and vegetables so overboiled you could suck them through a straw; for cream desserts that have split, and overbaked tarts with pastry like walnut shells. And the cost! I only use exclamation marks for shouting, which is what I’m doing. THE COST! Despite economies of scale, caterers charge more for this dismal crud than the price of a quality restaurant meal and rising. Why are they allowed to get away with it?”

 

I don’t think that anyone who has attended a catered wedding — on either side of the Atlantic — would fail to understand exactly what Mr. Rayner is talking about.  Applause, please.  SSH

Photo by SSH

Photo by SSH

 

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John Gardner on Storytellers

The prolific novelist John Gardner was also a great teacher and is one of my favorite writers on writing.  This quote from his On Becoming a Novelist, could just as easily apply to all tellers of stories, including memoirists.  In it he calls for a certain bodacious quality many aspiring memoirists could use.  Let us not be timid!

 

“Like other kinds of intelligence, the storyteller’s is partly natural, partly trained. It is composed of several qualities, most of which, in normal people, are signs of either immaturity or incivility: wit (a tendency to make irreverent connections); obstinacy and a tendency toward churlishness (a refusal to believe what all sensible people know is true); childishness (an apparent lack of mental focus and serious life purpose, a fondness for daydreaming and telling pointless lies, a lack of proper respect, mischievousness, and an unseemly propensity for crying over nothing); a marked tendency toward oral or anal fixation or both (the oral manifested by excessive eating, drinking, smoking, and chattering; the anal by nervous cleanliness and neatness coupled with a weird fascination with dirty jokes); remarkable powers of eidetic recall, or visual memory (a usual feature of early adolescence and mental retardation); a strange admixture of shameless playfulness and embarrassing earnestness, the latter often heightened by irrationally intense feelings for or against religion; patience like a cat’s; a criminal streak of cunning; psychological instability; recklessness, impulsiveness, and improvidence; and finally, an inexplicable and incurable addiction to stories, written or oral, bad or good. Not all writers have exactly these same virtues, of course. Occasionally one finds one who is not abnormally improvident.”

Photo by Shirley McKale

Photo by Shirley McKale

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Sight: The Closely Observed Thing

For this ongoing series of the use of the senses in writing, I ran across this small paragraph in my forthcoming memoir, Evelio’s Garden.  Just proof that, if you look at something long enough, it can turn into something else, something that can move a reader to see it in a fresh way.

 

The potted black begonia on the verandah is blooming. Its leaves feel like velvet, of a green so dark it is almost black, with red under-sides and fleshy, red-spotted stems. The blooms, at the ends of half-yard-long, almost translucent spears, emerge as fist-sized clusters of unspectacular rosy bivalve bracts that open to reveal minuscule yellow flowers. The whole plant, with a diameter of over 2 feet, seen from a distance, with its velvety black leaves and fleshy pink-tipped shoots sticking out all over, looks like something from another planet. I am finding that this sense of strangeness occurs with greater and greater frequency the more closely I observe a thing in Nature. The complexity, the variety, the sheer mechanics of how a thing is put together, the parts, the whole, the synchronicity with the other creatures around it, all astonish and amaze, as if I were a visitor exploring for the first time an alien sphere.

©2015, Sandra Shaw Homer

Photo by Marten Jager

Photo by Marten Jager

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Sense of Touch

How is it that the human hand is so perfectly designed to play with kittens?  You stalk your fingers deliberately across the floor and he crouches, revving up his hind legs for the pounce.  You roll him over and tickle his belly while he grabs you around the wrist with his forepaws and tries to kick your fingers away with his hind feet.  You scoot your hand quickly out from behind a table leg and back again, and he gives chase in a perfect feline ring-around-the-rosy.  Or you slide your hand under the bedclothes and suddenly poke up a finger and he comes hopping sideways across the blanket, back arched, tail fluffed up, to attack.  But best of all, is swooping him up into your lap where, with the softest stroking of your index finger across his tiny forehead, he falls instantly to sleep.

© 2015, Sandra Shaw Homer

Photo by Marten Jager

Photo by Marten Jager

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“Events Recounted in the Service of Ideas”

Quoted from the essayist Meghan Daum in a book review in the April edition of The Atlantic:

“I don’t confess in my work,” she says, “because to me that implies that you’re dumping all your guilt and sins on the page and asking the reader to forgive you.”  The label [confessional] can also imply a failure of craft.  “Confessions are not processed or analized,” she continues, “they’re told in a moment of desperation.”  Instead, Daum calls her personal revelations “events recounted in the service of ideas.”

Photo by Derk Jager

Photo by Derk Jager

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What does a Freighter Smell Like?

We need to tune in to all our senses when we’re writing so that readers can feel the full experience we’re trying to describe.  In writing about a container ship in Letters from the Pacific, I was able to use most of them. 

 

In over a month, there has only been one occasion when we had the wind at our back doing more knots than the ship. The Captain assures me this happens only rarely. It creates a vacuum in front of the superstructure that sucks engine fumes right into the air-conditioning intake, and this makes your cabin smell like the inside of a gasoline pump. I awoke to this one night and lay awake for quite a while wondering whether I should call somebody to tell them the ship would explode if anybody lighted a cigarette. I opened my porthole to let in some fresh air but, since my cabin faces forward, the air outside smelled the same as the air inside. Eventually I assumed that, if there really had been a problem, somebody would have sounded the alarm, and I went back to sleep.

* * *

It takes a while not to be alarmed by the smells on board. There are places where you can smell the heavy, oily fumes of diesel; whenever anyone is painting – a constant battle at sea against the ever recurring rust – the chemical smell of the anti-corrosive paint permeates the superstructure; and just outside my cabin, at the head of the stairwell, I get occasional puffs of bottled gas wafting up from the Galley just like smoke up a chimney. A freighter is a noisy, dirty, smelly beast. I wonder how they hide all this on passenger ships.

* * *

There is the sweet smell of salt on the air. And, with the moon not yet risen, there is a foreign country of constellations in the sky.

* * *

You can smell the tropics. Out on deck in the dark, the stars faintly winking on and off as low clouds stream invisibly across the sky, there’s a new, heavy warmth to the air. I feel it on my skin, taste it in my nose; it’s humid, soft and kind.

© 2013, Sandra Shaw Homer

Photo by SSH

Photo by SSH

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The Truth, the Whole Truth

A Dutch woman – a teacher of one language and a speaker of three others – said to me recently that it would be better not to know about the evils of the world. This was in response to my saying something in passing about the Islamic State.

We were sitting in a tropical garden under an intensely blue sky where it would have been easy to put all that behind us and focus only on the toucan grouching in the tallest tree we could see.

I thought for a long moment, and then it occurred to me to say, “No, it’s better to know. If we don’t know the totality of the human condition, how can we become better people?”

And, if we don’t face squarely all the truths of our humanity, how can we write honestly about who we are?

© Sandra Shaw Homer, 2015

Photo by Marten Jager

Photo by Marten Jager

 

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“Writers Live inside their Heads”: Further Reflections

My friend Katherine’s thoughtful and provocative comment on my previous post deserves another post, not just a comment that will get lost at the bottom of the page. She makes a strong case for living from the heart, not the head. I certainly wasn’t trying to suggest that all writers are rational; for many creative people, quite the opposite case might be made!

There is no question now – science seems to be bearing this out – of the strong connection between heart and mind. The heart, in fact, contains about 40,000 neurons which help to regulate, by way of the limbic system, many brain functions. Fascinatingly, the experience of heart transplant patients suggests that memories and feelings are also stored in the heart (as well as throughout the nervous system). So the wisdom of the ancients that Katherine refers to was wise indeed.

Defining the role of heart in the creative process is a daunting challenge. It’s something we feel more readily than we can describe. The first time I felt it was at the piano – the Schubert Impromptu Op. 90 no. 1.  After almost 10 years of piano study, I played this piece very well, so well in fact that I felt I personally could bring something to the interpretation. But there was one evening when I was sitting at the piano in the darkened living room – with just the light over the keyboard – when I became so profoundly involved in the music that it felt for one magical moment as if Shubert were playing through me and I lost all sense of who I was; my heart was full. I now understand this as living in the moment – heart, mind and soul all perfectly synchronized with something much larger than myself.

Some would describe such experiences as divine, but I don’t think it’s necessary to insist on the divine nature of the human creative process. What we do need to recognize, however, is that without that capacity to get inside the moment – the moment of heart, if you will – our art will be missing an important component in our communicating with others; something of the potential connection between writer and reader will be lost.

© Sandra Shaw Homer, 2015

Photo by Marten Jager

Photo by Marten Jager