Escape Artist: How Not to Write a Book

First, have a deep and abiding passion for cheap motels.

Second, have an idea for a book that you are sure will save your family from imminent financial collapse and wrest you from the emotional despair of having never achieved your potential.

Next, decline an invitation to a fancy writer’s retreat at a villa in France and instead Google “cheap motels” in your own vicinity. Consider, for a minute, booking the gem with the online reviews that boast cockroaches, mold, vomit, stained sheets and the final, winning comment: “If this is the only place you can stay in this city, go to a different city.” Chicken out and book, instead, the motel with the broken hairdryer. Use the $50 visa gift card your mother gave you for Hanukkah to confirm the transaction. Invite your girlfriend, who shares your conviction that Calgon will never be enough to take you away. Mark the dates out in your calendar with a sharpie so that in order to change your plans you will have to go to the store and buy white out, which you refuse to do, due to your office supply addiction.

As you pack, reminisce over all the places you’ve ever slept—from damp sleeping bags in soggy tents to hostel bunks to the executive suite in the Opryland hotel where your family was once upgraded on a lark. Remember how you dumped a whole bottle of shampoo in the Jacuzzi and then sniffed the sheets of the king-sized bed whose last occupant was Jon Bon Jovi. Get called “Klassy with a K.” Honor that truth.

Sing “Rambling Fever” loudly in the car before abruptly pulling into the parking lot which you have clocked at 2.1 miles from your own driveway. Drive an extra .2 miles to pick up a menu from a Chinese restaurant so that you will be able to shave 8 seconds off your dinner order. Check into the motel as the clock strikes three. You don’t have a moment to lose. Great things, you know, happen in pressure cookers. Put your laptop on the desk next to the motel stationery and then put the motel stationery in your purse.

Draw the curtains and take in the stunning view of the Auto Zone. Remember that you are close enough to home that your mother could drive by and wave at you through the window. Redraw the curtains. Unpack your red silk robe, because when else are you going to wear it? Forget to wear it. Spend the next twenty-one hours in your track suit. In the bathroom, put the package of Folgers in the miniature coffee maker that is small enough to put in your purse. Don’t put it in your purse. Drink the bathroom coffee out of a Styrofoam cup like it’s an Italian espresso.

Plan the bulk of your time around snack breaks. Where else would Jarlsburg cheese scooped up with a pita chip taste so good? Between the cherries and the olives, open your laptop. Decide that instead of a book, what you really need to write is a book proposal. Write three zingy chapter titles and as a reward, take a field trip to the lobby for more coffee. Back in the room, turn the lights out and switch on the battery-operated candle you brought for ambience. Sit cross-legged with your girlfriend, each on your own queen sized bed. Expose your deepest secrets. Re-plan your life. Consult your tarot cards. Laugh your mascara off. Open the mini-fridge and debate over which box of chocolate to open first. Fall into a coma like sleep completely uninterrupted by your dog, your cat, your husband or your son.

In the morning, write frantically for 15 minutes before running down to the all you can eat Waffle Bar. Use three or four packets of syrup. At check out feel like you are turning in your wild side with your room key. Bid a teary farewell to your friend who you will see next Thursday. Make the most of your 2.1 mile drive home to reflect on all you have accomplished. Listen to your husband explain that after helping your cousin move and cleaning up the vomit of the dog who devoured what was left of your chocolate stash, he fielded a call from your ex-boyfriend who drunk-dialed you from Europe in the middle of the night. Thank him profusely.

Then, start planning next year’s trip. Make it a tradition.

Published in Belle, April 2011

My Q&A with Jon Scieszka

Q: You are slated to give a two hour talk about inspiring guys to read on Monday, April 4 at St. Christopher's, here in Richmond. What are one or two of the most important points you hope to get across?

A: I'm only going to talk for one hour, sign for another. And most of the talking hour will be jokes, so tell people to not be afraid. But my most basic advice to folks is to 1. expand their definition of what they call "reading' to include non-fiction, graphic novels, sci-fi, magazines, audio books . . ., and 2. to let guys be a part of choosing what they want to read. Reading is a very personal activity.


Q: What do you wish you had in the way of reading and writing when you were a kid?

A: I think I had plenty of great reading and writing when I was a kid. I didn't find much reading I enjoyed in elementary school. But outside of school I read the Hardy Boys, Landmark non-fiction books, Dr. Seuss, comic books, MAD magazine, and all sorts of random literature and not-literature around the house.


Q: What event or person made the difference in your life, allowing or encouraging you to become such a prolific and beloved writer?

A: My mom made all of the difference in the world. I was reading Dick and Jane and other equally strange and uninspiring stories in school as I was learning to read. But at home, my mom was the one reading Caps for Sale, To Think What I Saw on Mulberry Street, The Carrot Seed, Go Dog Go and other stories to me that made we want to hear more stories . . . and to ultimately tell some of my own.


Q: What advice do you have for children’s writers whose primary readers are boys?

A: I tell all writers to please not "write for boys" or "write for girls." Write the best story you can. Write what thrills, excites, moves you. Your readers, boys and girls, will find it.


Q: What did you learn about young readers during your two year stint as National Ambassador for Young People's Literature?

A: I knew young readers are smart, but in my first year as Ambassador, I discovered that young readers and writers are even smarter than I had suspected. The crazy range of stories that kids are reading and writing is phenomenal.


Q: What has your work on the NYC Board of Valencia 826 taught you about writing with young people?

A: The work that 826 does connects perfectly with what I learned from kids when I was a teacher -- kids will produce amazing work if there is a good reason to. And the reason at 826 is that kids get to make real books. You use correct spelling so someone else can read your story. You edit the story as many times as you need to so it is the best it can be. You are writing for a reason, not for an abstract assignment. And that is how and why the real world of reading and writing works.


Q: Do you have anything new and exciting in the works right now?

A: I'm in the middle of the crazy 4-book / multi media storytelling extravaganza that is SPACEHEADZ . . . and really enjoying writing with the kids who become Spaceheadz. And I'm also still messing around with stories for the younger guys with TRUCKTOWN.
But my newest, and most unformed project is a YA novel I'm just starting. I don't even know what it's about yet. I'm writing to find out.


Q: Is there anything else you might like to add?

A: With all of the crazy tech developments happening right now, this is a fun time to be a writer/storyteller. I think that kids becoming writers now will take us places we never imagined even 10 years ago. And I can't wait.


Jon Scieszka will speak and sign books at St. Christopher’s School on Monday, April 4 from 7-9 pm. Adults only, please. Tickets are free, but must be reserved at: EventBrite.com Donations will benefit Read Aloud Virginia and Guys Read.

Visit him online at Jon Scieszka Worldwide.

She & I

She goes between countries. I go between grocery stores.

She travels the way I read: voraciously.

She can change money in any language; I can quote Lolita.

She runs. I eat french fries, cheesecake, double shot lattes.

When we were 16 that she told me she had libraries inside her. I felt that I had at most a pamphlet, maybe a few books.

She knows exactly how to care for her hair, spending hundreds of dollars on fine, organic products, sharing them with me in special, miniature glass jars.

I float between Hair Cutteries, searching, dissatisfied, never going to the same place twice as if I've just been to a Cathouse. As if I'll be seen.

She loves deep and fast and often. I love slow and unspectacularly, but in an endless, enduring kind of way.

She has a sister. I feel like they both belong to me.

My House, My Self?

I have recently made a resolution, not to perfect my house, but to stop apologizing for its many imperfections. I hate it when anyone else does, especially when their house turns out to actually be immaculate, but, say, with a child’s puzzle splayed out charmingly atop a freshly vacuumed carpet. The effect is the same as a skinny woman apologizing for eating a French fry—it just makes everyone involved feel terrible.

Because I once lived in a tool shed in Arkansas for a few months in my early twenties, I feel I can say on full authority that our house is “Very Arkansas.” But even with the half painted walls, the haphazard shutters, the backyard full of nearly functional machinery and the hole in the fence large enough for our neighbor’s dogs to climb through, our house does boast a certain resourcefulness and creativity that I found in concentrated supply in the tool shed’s surrounding grounds. In the spirit of Macgyver, my husband can restore things to usefulness that, had I been single, would have inspired me to move out. Like plugging our broken bathtub drain with a rubber ball, for instance.

Looking back, “in cleanliness and in filth” should have been part of our marriage vows, directly following “for richer or for poorer,” because over time, we have wrestled with and accepted varying degrees of all four. Whenever I point out one of my husband’s rat’s nests of wires, tools and dirty socks beneath his desk he has but to look in the direction of my overflowing piles of photo albums, books, journals and junk mail to settle the score. As they say, “you spot it, you got it,” and oh, how I’ve got it. I envy my friends who are naturally inclined to pick up a scrub brush to battle their grief, stress or anxiety. For me, when anything hits the fan, I pick up a pen, the phone, a book or a deluxe sized package of Little Debbies. I talk, eat, read and write my way through my troubles, but rarely, if ever, do I put on rubber gloves and scour them away.

I love it though, when my friends take trips to third world countries, because even before I see their pictures of the dirt-smeared children or hear their livestock-on-the-bus stories, I am reminded of how filthy rich we actually are, even on days when our bank deposits are in increments of one.

My son started kindergarten this year and, upon inviting new friends over for play dates rather than thinking, “Oh boy, my son is making friends!” I braced myself with, “Oh dear God! Another West End mom is going to see my house!” But, I tell myself, kids like spaces in which they feel free to make a big, artistic mess and that the crayon art preserved like a caveman’s buffalos on the walls promotes a certain creativity that sterility might stifle. And, by the sheer volume of art produced in our house, so far this seems true.

I keep a reminder from my 2010 “Daily Bitch” calendar on my fridge: “A clean house is a sign of a wasted life.” It at least partially balances out the other idea- that the state of one’s house is an outward reflection of one’s inner life. Because that is frightening. If it’s true, my inner life probably needs a power-washer and a full time maid. On the other hand, the contents of my inner life--- the sloppiest, the ugliest, the most real and the most beautiful-- are always available for my own inspection, and for the inspection of those I invite in, as well. And for this, I am not sorry at all.

Belle, March 2011

I'm Learning How to Soak Up the Warmth of the Fire Rather Than Throw Myself In

I have never been a thrill seeker of the physical variety. I leave jumping out of airplanes, bungee jumping and regular exercise to superheroes and the otherwise better equipped. I was secretly relieved when the Ropes Course in the Outdoor Adventures Class I took at J-Sargeant Reynolds during high school was repeatedly cancelled due to bad weather. But pushing myself past my comfort zone has always held an attraction for me.

Just ask the various men who picked me up hitchhiking, chased me down when I ran out on bar tabs or helped me find the right country when I was lost on the train in Europe.

At 19, it was easy to embrace danger a dozen times before going to bed.

Now, at 35, I balk at the outrageous situations I used to put myself in. And I’ve toned it down, because, really white suburban moms in their mid-thirties having a mid-life crises aren’t all that attractive. But I’m still drawn to the idea of living on the edge.

Just ask my banker with whom I am now on a first name basis.

Or the temp agency that finally quit offering me full time jobs.

Or my husband who commandeered a magnet I was going to give to a friend last Christmas. “I chose the road less traveled. Now where the hell am I?” now sits on our fridge instead of hers.

The last boyfriend I had before getting married, seduced me with a copy of the book “The Razor’s Edge.” He left it on my front porch in the middle of the night with a detailed analysis of how he and I were like the main characters scribbled in the margins. It meant more to me than a five course meal, even if he did spell my name wrong. I am a sucker, not only for words, but for the idea of walking the razor’s edge.

The problem though, is that instead of walking that edge, I’ve had a tendency to fall over it and land on my face.

That same boyfriend didn’t slow down at yellow lights when I was following him in traffic. He took calls from other women whom I could hear saying, “Hi, it’s me” into the phone. And, the last time we talked, during a snowstorm when my power went out, he called to say he’d be going to Hooters rather than coming over to sit with me by the fire. Nevertheless, all of these years later, I still love him, not because he’s a literate football player who also happens to be successful and good looking, but because he helped me identify what I didn’t want.

It’s just that sometimes I forget. Sometimes I still want the spike of adrenaline, the pleasure of danger, the thrill of risk that comes, for me, most quickly around the fringe of safety.

So lately, I’ve been trying to funnel these desires into my writing rather than into my life. It takes work, though. Laboring over a row of sentences isn’t always instantly gratifying. There’s a lot more work. And creating something original borne of the truth sometimes feels more painful than living it in the first place. I have to look at it from more than one angle. I have to decide how I really feel in a deliberate manner that is more nuanced than fight or flight. In a strange way, it feels like there is even more at stake being laid out on the page than doing something obviously dangerous.

And so, I’m still trying to learn how to soak up the warmth of the fire rather than throw myself in.

And my husband? If I have to follow him, he drives like a granny. But half the time, I’m the one in the lead.

Reading for the Flippo Gallery

Last January I was invited to a vision board making party at the apartment of a good friend. I had just spent the morning having a past life regression in Mechanicsville. But after entering a state of deep relaxation instead of visiting a past life, I had visited an archetype. I was Guinevere in King Arthur’s Court and I was sobbing in front of a mirror. Beauty is dangerous, beauty is betrayal, beauty is a crime, Guinevere/Me moaned through her sobs. The words, and the thoughts behind them, were so powerful that I spoke them out loud.

This a belief worth examining, my past-life regression practitioner observed. And so I did. As a young woman in my early twenties traveling across America by bus, train and ship, my mother had felt compelled to write me a letter. “Valley, your body is not a thank you note,” she had said, because I was still in the habit of offering it as a substitute for everything else I felt I intrinsically lacked.

In my mind, being beautiful was the equivalent of being a slut. I wanted to be beautiful, but beauty was, I believed, a weapon women used against other people, particularly themselves. This belief left me confused, divided and shut down about my own body and physical nature for many years.

At the vision board party, while flipping through old magazines I thought about what it was I truly wanted for the year ahead. Yes, money, fame and fortune. But as I cut out a stunning photograph of a nude statue and then pasted the words “WE LOVE YOU” over her breasts, I looked up at Susan Singer. I remembered the first time I’d seen her paintings and the electric current they’d sent through me. She had managed to render the rolls and folds of the female body in a bold, exquisite way that was completely unapologetic. Her paintings had woken something in me that now sat up at attention.

Across the coffee table scattered with glue sticks and magazines, I asked Susan if she would be willing to collaborate with me for the Artists and Writers show at the Flippo Gallery the following year. In other words, I asked if she would allow me to be her model, first photographing and then painting me naked. This was a scary prospect for me, but one that I instinctively knew I needed to try. She, it turns out, had just pasted the words/images “Gallery Show” on her vision board. She said yes.

We have spent the last year making this happen.

The experience of being naked is not unlike the first time you show someone a raw and vulnerable first draft of a novel. As a writer I have a tendency to edit myself down until there is almost nothing left. I whittle and cut and delete and fret over my words like a woman first making up her face and then changing 18 times before leaving the house. I worry that what comes out on its own- without being heavily clothed, made-up or edited, is unacceptable. The plastic surgery I have committed on my own writing has left some of it more mangled than those sad brides competing for the opportunity to be disfigured on the reality TV show, Bridalplasty.

However, being painted naked has made whittling myself down to nothing more difficult. My body carries the blue print of the life I have lived. In the last decade I have had six surgeries between my neck and my thighs. I have had six miscarriages and one beautiful child. I have probably lost and gained 300 pounds. Six months after getting married, I developed Cushings Disease, an adrenal disorder which gave me moon face and a buffalo hump. My body is short a uterus, a gall bladder, one rib and an adrenal gland. I have been sliced open and stitched back together, but some of my deepest scars are invisible. Allowing myself to be seen, to be studied, to be photographed and painted by Susan has been the catalyst for healing many of them.

Obviously this exhibition was heavily edited. There are not 389 nude pictures of me on the wall. But it does represent a year long process within which I’ve struggled to uncover both my body and my writing, finding what lies beneath the surface of not only my clothes, but the words I use to represent myself in the world. In the beginning I felt fragile, exposed and like I might die. But when I didn’t die, and in fact felt accepted, celebrated and nourished in Susan’s presence, something powerful happened.

I believe that what Susan Singer is doing with her art is a gift not just to the women she paints, but to the world. I feel like her work is revolutionary- not because she is inventing something new but because she is showing us in a new way what is already there.

And beauty, I’m learning, isn’t about having flawless skin, thighs that don’t touch, perfectly aligned features or the right person next to you in bed.

For me, it’s about allowing my imperfections, insecurities and battle scars to co-exist with the parts of myself that I already liked in a way that is vulnerable, authentic and open.

And now in a completely different way, my body is a thank you note. One that I am giving to myself.

To close, I would like to thank Katie Shaw for having the vision to bring all of this together, and my husband for his unflagging patience the last ten years as I’ve struggled to learn the things he has always known intuitively.