Anniversaries

Tomorrow is the first anniversary of this blog. It has wiggled and wobbled from subject to subject. What wiggles and wobbles at the bottom of the sea? A nervous wreck. I have got off the subject of tracing my way. I have noticed that other people periodically change the focus of their blogs. I think I will try that, but what should the focus be?

What I didn’t anticipate was the great fun of meeting up with other people and becoming interested in their lives and opinions. I have added and subtracted blogs from my blogroll because I realized after a while that I couldn’t read too many regularly; there just was not enough time. I do occasionally think to myself that since there are millions of blogs, there probably are quite a few by people who would turn out to be kindred spirits. I wish I had kept a journal of how I came to the blogs I regularly read. Usually it was “way leads on to way.” to quote Robert Frost.

I hadn’t remembered until today that I had started the blog on the anniversary of my mother’s death. I don’t know if I was aware at the time, although it was serendipitous because the first few posts are about her naming of me.

Names and Music

Friday I updated my The Writers’ Union of Canada page and today googled myself to see if it was there. The URL for the old one comes up and says it is not longer viable. I saw that there were 90,000 entries for Nancy Bauer, but I continued on for quite a few (400?) and the newly revised web page didn’t turn up. I see by this googling that I share the name with many others, the most prominent being a Tufts U professor. There is even another Bill and Nancy couple who run a farm in the American Midwest. Yesterday in the Globe and Mail there was a review by a UNB professor, Mark Anthony Jarman. He has taken to using this middle name, and I think I know why. I googled him last week for some information for my TJ column and found that there are several writers named Mark Jarman. I had to go quite far in to get the Jarman I wanted. I am thinking now that I should have added my maiden name as my public name on books and articles, but at the time I first published, “poetesses with three names” were satirized. Ah, pride and vanity, what problems you create.

I updated my TWUC page because the organization has now arranged it so that you can do it yourself. You used to have to go through them. I was introduced at a reading last week and realized the introducer had got her information from the page. The photo I had used was now nearly 20 years old.

I haven’t written about music for my State of the Art column because of all the arts, I have the least expertise in it. I decided I should give it a try. I don’t even listen to the late night music programs on CBC because I discovered that music keeps me awake and talk puts me to sleep. We have a new station which broadcasts the Ottawa Senators’ games. I turn it on, and I am asleep in minutes. I think the part of my brain given to music must have atrophied. I was thinking this morning that maybe Bill and I should begin again to listen to music. It might be good for him in reestablishing the synapses that were damaged in his stroke, and it would be good for me to revive my interest in music.

Onion Soup

One of the best dishes I ever made, probably the best one, was French onion soup. When we first moved to Fredericton, we joined the university gourmet group and were members for several years. Once for our final meal of the year I made onion soup for sixteen people. A departing faculty member had given me a huge black iron pot that had belonged to the US Army. Every once in a while, even now, someone will mention the soup. Some people said it was the single best thing they ever tasted. I have never made it again. I used an Escoffier book and a Larousse cookbook. Escoffier recommended first roasting the bones for the stock, several kinds, beef of course, and I think lamb and veal. Some vegetables were roasted too. The resulting stock was so subtle that I can’t even bring it to my memory; I only remember its reputation.

I was thinking of that soup this morning because tonight we will have chicken soup with stock from the bones of the roast chicken we had several nights ago. My cooking has gradually lost its luster. I rarely cook any more for someone who loves food. I love food, but cooking just for myself is too much work. Fredericton has never had good restaurants. I don’t know why that is. We go to one and it is good, and six months later we go back and it is mediocre. Bill loves Italian food, but there has never been a good one here. An Indian restaurant opened here a year or so ago. I was delighted. It was ridiculously expensive and lousy. I didn’t think it was possible to make lousy Indian food. All the effort had gone into the ambience.

On Being a Nurse

I have learned a lot about being a nurse the last 6 weeks. While Bill was in the hospital, I watched the nurses closely. I saw how they shaved him, and when he came home, I duplicated that. So far, knock on wood, I haven’t given him a knick. When the kids were little I played nurse on quite a few occasions. By coincidence, I have nursed 6 kids through chicken pox.

I have always admired nurses. They acquire an astonishing facility to do things most people couldn’t bring themselves to do: draw blood relatively painlessly, stick needles into tender body parts, and take care of various bodily wastes in a manner that doesn’t embarrass the patient. They also have a knack for getting the patient to do what he should be doing, eating or drinking the noxious substance or taking a pill, without sounding like a harridan.

When my dad was in the nursing home, not in his right mind, I heard a nurse say to him, laughing, “You like my poobahs, don’t you.” The nurse was from the Caribbean, and I realized that her poobahs were her breasts and that my father had touched them. She was not only kind to him, but pleasantly kind.

Over in One Word, Zhoen writes about being a nurse in the operating room. She seems to revel in her competence. To have that kind of competence in such an important job must be truly wonderful.

synchronicity or maybe just coincidence

Yesterday I was looking for a book (which I didn’t find) and was amused that someone had put our two copies of Wallace Shawn’s The Fever on opposite ends of the bookshelf. A few hours later I was reading the latest copy of the NY Times Book Review, and saw that there was a review of the memoir of Wallace’s brother, Allen, illustrated with a photo of the brothers. I hadn’t thought of Wallace for quite a few years, and here he was, turning up twice.

In October of 1992, someone, I forget who, asked me if I would host the well-known actor Claire Coulter. This was something of an experiment, using people’s living rooms as a theatre. I was to invite people to come, and they were to pay, but I can remember only Ted and John although there were others. I can’t remember how much they had to pay. Coulter sat in our large maroon leather armchair and delivered a Wallace Shawn monologue in a normal tone of voice. Hosting the performance was a strange experience. over there were our usual friends, sitting in their accustomed places, and over here was a stranger, talking on and on. Ted told me later that he was afraid he would go to sleep and Bill agreed.

Did she perform The Fever? I don’t remember. I do have the two copies, one she gave us and one I bought for our daughter. I don’t know why I didn’t send it to her. Grace once got Bill to watch Shawn’s My Dinner with André with her. Was it on TV or did they go to the movies?


I thought it was a successful event, and I imagined other actors following her lead, but it never happened again. Our traveling actor friend Ellen Pierce would visit us occasionally, carrying with her all her worldly goods in various canvas bags. She was a master at making herself a cozy private nest within our house, pleasant to have around, not at all in the way. I would get her some gigs. One time she thought she would be paid on the spot, but red tape meant that she couldn’t be, so I had to lend her $30 to buy a bus ticket to her next engagement.

Both women weren’t just traveling mountebanks but were deeply committed to theatre and willing to make sacrifices to engage in it. I wish someone else would come along to enliven the scene.

The Twilight Zone

We wound up in Fredericton because of a romantic daydream my husband had had from his childhood. He is from Maine, and he was mightily intrigued by the space in the north called New Brunswick. He and his family had taken a short trip to Quebec but had never been to this province. I am from Massachusetts and had never heard of it although I knew of Quebec, one of my uncles having come from there. A family in our village had come from Nova Scotia, so I had heard of that too but had no idea where it was. Even after I had graduated from college, I knew very little about Canada. We had planned to go to NB on our honeymoon, but Uncle Sam prevented that and called Bill into the air force.

When we were trying to figure out where to apply after the PhD, Bill suggested NB. The back of our dictionary had a list of North American universities. Sure enough, there was a university in New Brunswick. He applied and was enthusiastically offered a job.

When we decided to come here, my Quebec uncle told us a family story about “a big fire and a treasure" someone in his family had buried in NB. We later learned that indeed there had been a big fire in 1825 on the Miramichi River.

We were coming here, “on a lark, just for a year or two.” I went to the UNC library to get books about NB, but could find only one, The Watch that Ends the Night, by Hugh McLennan. It has a section about the grim childhood of the hero in a NB lumber camp, the murder of his mother and his subsequent flight down the Miramichi River to escape from the murderer. It was a very dark introduction.

Recently doing genealogy, Bill discovered that one of his ancestral grandmothers was a 13 year old girl from a NB Indian reserve.

Many writers write about their childhood locale; that is what lights up their imagination. Part of one of my novels is set in my Massachusetts village, but all the rest are set in New Brunswick. New Brunswick is what fires my imagination. I have, however, the disadvantage that it is not my native land, that I don’t know it as I would if I had been raised here; I don’t know it from the inside of me. Mine is an outsider’s vision even though I have lived here 41 years.

New Brunswick is in the Atlantic Time Zone. Bill calls it the Twilight Zone.

A Golden Age

Ours was the second house built on the street we have lived on for 40 years. It took about a year for all 25 modest houses to be built. By that time 53 children lived here. Later two houses were built on the ledges that had made those lots less desirable. It was a wonderful neighborhood, with friendly and caring people. The builders had planned two long curves on the short street so that cars would drive slowly. There was a large park which eventually had swings, slides, and a ballfield made into a skating rink in the winter. It was, in fact, the perfect place to bring up kids. I have written of it several times, most extensively here.

About ten years ago our next door neighbor Dot moved away to live with her daughter, and I can tell when I talk to her that her years here were her golden age. Her house was the command post. She knew all the news; she always had a hand in planning the showers, the chivarees and the anniversary parties. Most of the neighbors would visit her a couple times a week, some every morning, to check in. She would give you a cup of tea, and she always had a homemade cookie or biscuit to go with it. She was good to the kids. When our youngest son confessed that he had his doubts about Santa, I asked him, Who do you think brings the presents? He said, “Dot?”

She had a series of medical problems: TB, trouble with the arteries in her head, heart, a complicated genetic disease. She remained cheerful during all these. Her husband died of cancer, her son of a heart attack, and yet she remained cheerful. Three years ago, in her early 80’s, she fell down the stairs (she thinks she blacked out), remained there on the floor for several hours with a broken neck, internal bleeding, a broken wrist and other injuries. Her daughter came home and found her, called the ambulance, and at the hospital they determined that she needed the expertise of the doctor at the Saint John hospital, so they flew her there. She spent the next few months in a metal halo screwed into her skull, the most appalling looking thing you ever saw. She could still joke.

This week we will have a reunion, a birthday party for her and for our neighbor on the other side, now a widower. Dot will make Jack’s favorite beef dish. We will recite the old stories of a golden age.

The Wider World

My father worked for the Boston Globe in the artist room for 35 years. The artists’ main job was to make ads, but they also were called upon to draw other things: crime scene maps and cartoons, for example. The powers that be at the Globe felt that the artist room contributed a lot to the success of the Globe. For the last twelve years of his working life, Dad was the director of the section. One night the publisher, Mr. Taylor, was showing someone through the plant, and as he introduced Dad to the visitor, he said, “This is the director of the artist room, and he is just about the best in the business.” It was a compliment my dad cherished.

His connection to Boston and to the Globe gave the rest of the family a wider outlook on the world. My mother was a great baseball aficionado, and Dad would bring home tidbits of news and rumors to her. One of the sports writers told him where the catcher Bernie Tibbetts lived, and Dad drove her to Nashua to see his house. He would go into Boston’s Morgan Memorial to buy books for us all. Later, Dad would become one of the best customers of Vic the bookseller. Vic’s peddling rounds included the newspapers in Boston. Eventually our library included thousands of books – religion, philosophy, anthropology, biography, history, poetry.

When it was determined that I needed glasses, I went to a children’s specialist in Boston, and on those trips taken to see various sights: the glass flowers in one of the Harvard museums, the swan boats in the Boston commons, a trip on the el. Dad was the connection to the big city for the whole village, an hour’s drive away. A young neighbor, six foot tall, would drive with him into Boston to go to a tall people’s club. She eventually married one of the members. The student ministers for our small church would ride back and forth with him to Boston University, discussing theology all the way. Anyone wanting tickets to the Red Sox would commission him to buy them. He got several people jobs at the Globe, and they would ride with him.

When Dad arrived back home, he would make himself a lunch, pour a glass of wine, and sit reading for an hour or two. It was the best time of the day for him.

Bill detected that Dad had a slightly different accent from the rest of our family, and we decided it was the Boston influence.

Whither Thou Goest

When Bill was in the US Air Force, I got a job there too and soon felt myself a part of the force. I was in charge of an information program called “Commander’s Call” and acquired the nickname “Commander’s Call Girl.” I had just graduated from an all-woman’s college and was thrown into an all-male space; I would be the only woman in a hangar full of men. One of the programs was about identifying different airplanes. For a long while afterwards I could identify them, and I have never lost my interest in gazing up in the sky. Somewhere over the last few days – probably in the Globe and Mail – I read this: “Never vacation in a place where people still point at airplanes.” Sometimes on a summer evening Bill and I will sit out on the front porch with our coffee, and I will note the lines in the sky that a plane makes (this has a technical name that I can’t recall.) Where is it coming from? When I was a child, everywhere in our village was close to the sound of the train. I would lie in bed and wonder where the train was going. I knew where it was going in one direction – we would often take the train to Lowell -- but I didn’t know where it was going in the other direction. Some place exotic, no doubt. My father bought me a biography of Maggie Higgins, the foreign correspondent, and I decided that is what I wanted to be. In college I took four years of Russian to prepare myself, but love beckoned, and I shelved that plan. I did get to live most of my life in a foreign country, if only an hour away from the USA.

Labeling 2

I finished labeling and then consolidating the labels into fewer categories. I think I can consolidate some more. This may be a waste of time, who knows. I have a favorite joke. A farmer is holding a pig up to an apple tree. The pig grabs an apple, chows it down, and the farmer holds it up to another apple. This goes on a while. A man comes along and asks what the farmer is doing. "Feeding my pig." "Isn't that a time-consuming way to feed a pig?" The farmer says, "What's time to a darn fool pig." I laughed so hard when I was told that joke that my stomach hurt (you know the sensation.) "What's time to a darn fool pig" has been one of my mantras ever since.

The Idea of the Holy

Ten years ago I wrote an article about the arts every week for the New Brunswick Reader. One week I wrote about the art in Wilmot Church, citing the William Morris/Burne-Jones window, the Alex Colville decoration, the carved hand on the steeple, the magnificent vaulted ceiling, some other art treasures. I used my research for that article to write a tour guide of the church and that found its way into the church website. I wrote to SpiritConnection, the United Church TV program, suggesting the art of Wilmot as a program, and they came to film it. (I have been on the church communication committee for as long as it’s been in business.) SpiritConnection gave me my first (and only) TV credit as associate producer.

In the article I used a much loved passage from one of my favorite books, The Idea of the Holy. I have put it up above, in the blog description. For the past ten years, I have particularly savoured the ambience of the church every Sunday. I never tire of looking at the window (I always sit near it) and the vaulted ceiling. Occasionally, on the late Christmas Eve service, for example, the church lights are dimmed, the candles shine; the “mysterious play of half-lights” does indeed induce the numinous. On the Christmas Eve of 1988 that numinous worked its enchantment on my whole family.

Perfection

Attending Wilmot Church allowed me to understand Fredericton better. We gradually came to know the people in the university and those in our neighborhood, but they weren’t usually from Fredericton. The Wilmot men were silent but pleasant and perfect gentlemen. The women were old-fashioned, unblemished by the woman’s movement. Most of them didn’t drive, so I would give them a ride home from the women’s group, Miss Chappelle’s unit of the UCW. Their presentation of food was perfect. When they made “small cakes”, the pieces were flawlessly square, with no ragged edges. I have never mastered that, and now I resign myself that I probably never will. The women wore hats to church.

They quilted. I had never known anyone who quilted although my grandmother embroidered, and one of my six aunts crocheted. Quilting requires a steady hand and absolute patience. The mother of a Japanese professor came to Fredericton, discovered quilting, and went back to Tokyo to begin the craft. She did the designs, but she hired women to do the actual quilting. She didn’t use the traditional designs of log cabin and the like, nor did she do Oriental designs, but she was influenced by Escher. The quilts were so wonderful that the Beaverbrook Art Gallery had an exhibition of them. I heard two women discussing them. The stitching was very poor, they agreed. I felt superior. The stitching might be poor, but the designs were so original and creative, I thought.

But all these long years later, I understand that wasn’t the point. The point was to do something flawlessly from beginning to end, with tiny perfect stitches, and using the traditional designs in a creative, original way. I can imagine Marilynne Robinson writing Gilead (which took many years – twenty?), every sentence perfect, using the traditional structure of the novel.

More Tracing

Wilmot United Church is at the crossroad of King and Carleton, right in the centre of the city. There is no lawn, very little parking, and no room to expand. A while ago, there was talk of selling the church and moving to the suburbs. Our membership was dwindling and there were very few young people, but a series of excellent ministers, the decision to make them into a team ministry, one radical minister, and two women attracted young ardent people. It helped too that the competing United Church hired a fundamental, right-wing minister who drove many of his congregation into our arms.

One Sunday a few weeks ago, there was no room for me downstairs, and I had to go into the balcony. I sat in the second row on the side, and a mother with two active boys, perhaps 6 and 4, sat in front of me. The mother let her 6 year old climb under the railing and into the middle section, and then back, risking a fall of perhaps 30 feet. The 4 year old jumped up and down as if to vault over the railing. A terrifying worship service. I had a momentary desire for the good old days when there was plenty of room downstairs and no children.

When I started attending Wilmot, the minister at that time had a nasal voice, as if he needed to blow his nose. His sermons were uninspired. The music was insipid. After a year I decided I didn’t believe in the trinity and left to attend the Unitarians. A year ago someone told me that often the minister was weeping in the pulpit because his wife was having an affair. This accounted for the need to blow his nose. I felt very bad that I had not been understanding. I am too judgmental, a terrible trait and a bad habit. Resolutions to be better are not enough to conquer this addiction.

I yearn to be perfect. I know I could kiss a leper, like the saints of old did, but I can’t curb my grumpiness. However, I don’t attend church because it will help me become perfect, for I know it won’t, anymore than it will cure my arthritis. I don’t even know why I attend. Attending does punctuate the week and give it order. And there is always the tempting possibility that God will indeed honour us with his presence one day.

Back to Tracing

A month or so after we arrived in Fredericton, Bill was scanning the horizon with his binoculars. He came rushing into the apartment. “You’ve got to see this.” Our apartment was perhaps two miles from downtown, partway up the hill. What appeared in the binoculars was a steeple topped by a carved wood hand, the index finger pointing skywards.

We learned that the head of Bill’s department attended this church, and he suggested it was the church for me because it had been Methodist before the Methodists, Congregational, and Presbyterians had joined forces to become the United Church of Canada. Churches famously split apart rather than join together; uniting seemed to me to be a good thing for them to have done.

I did join that church, Wilmot United, and except for a few years when I flirted with the Unitarians, I have been a member ever since. Strange to say, although I still feel a little like an outsider, I am now one of the longest-attending members.

I had never been a part of such an impressive church, large enough to hold 1200 people, with a balcony, and handsome wood interior. The blue and maroon decoration had been suggested by Alex Colville before he became a famous artist. It was discovered just a few years ago that a particularly beautiful stained glass window came from the William Morris/Burne-Jones studio.

The congregations of the Methodist churches I attended always sang lustily, joyfully. For the first 30 years I was a member of Wilmot, the singing was insipid, and I missed the familiar hymns of the Methodists. I have a lousy nasal voice, sing in a male register always off-key, and so I am not a candidate for the choir. But I do love to sing. When I was a child in our little church there was a man who had a loud voice, sang slightly off-key but with great gusto. He was eccentric in other ways as well. Sometimes when I am singing, I remind myself of this man, George “Bozo” Reid.

Ideas for the New Year

I have started to read Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul, a combination memoir and ode to the city. Structuring a memoir around a city is such a good idea, that I am tempted to use it to get back to the “tracing my life from birth” theme of this blog. Moving to Fredericton, where I have lived for 41 years, is a central fact of my life.

All the different branches of the Pamuk family live in the Pamuk apartment building. My imagination has been stimulated by such a concept several times – my novel The Opening Eye is about a group of friends who decide to get individual apartments in a new building. The massive, unpublishable novel I just finished (except that I am still working on it) is about an apartment building where the inhabitants become friends.

Discovery

I remember the moment I learned there was no Santa Claus. I was nine and a half. We had just moved into a new house where my brother and I found many treasures left by the previous owners in closets, built-in drawers, and in the barn. The kitchen had the high ceilings of the Victorian house, with cabinets that went up to the top. I thought there might be treasures up there, so I climbed on the sideboard to look. I saw toys. I knew enough not to mention this to my parents, and Christmas morning when those toys came from Santa, I knew for sure. I wasn’t disappointed; instead I had the feeling of discovery, of having figured something out on my own. Quite satisfying.

Co-ed or Not

The Saturday Globe and Mail had an article about the controversy at Randolph-Macon Women’s College in Virginia. The board of directors has voted to change it into a co-ed college. The students and alumnae are up in arms, but the board argues that they won’t be able to attract students unless they become co-ed. When the same question came up at my college, Mount Holyoke in Massachusetts, I wrote defending the status quo, and I was happy that the board decided to remain all-women. For me, it was wonderful to have four years to work unstintingly, in deep concentration, without the distraction of men. I know I would have been quite susceptible to that distraction and to their opinion of me. I could go to class in pajamas, hair uncombed. The G&M article says that the Women’s College Coalition once had 300 affiliated institutions but now has only 57. Only four all-male colleges remain in the USA.

Now I am not so sure that I would object to MHC becoming co-ed. Times have changed (maybe you hadn’t realized that.) Where once we could have the weekend excitement of a blind date at a men’s college, now those colleges are co-ed and the men would not be motivated to go far a field. Where would I have met a future partner? It used to be said that women were reluctant to speak up in a class with men, that men would dominate the discussion. Once a group of Amherst students came to an MHC play and during the discussion afterward, it was true – the men did dominate the discussion. But would that be true now? Probably not.

As I have been tracing my way from birth, I realized (or rather, realized once again), how important my MHC education was to me, how rigorous it was, how liberating, how grateful I am for it. Later I came to realize that other people at my college and at my husband attended in large part for the social cache. I didn’t choose it – it chose me, but today, when a larger percentage of teens go to college, would it choose me again? I doubt it. Or would I even choose it? It now costs $180,000 to go to MHC for four years. It is hard for me to comprehend that figure, but it seems too much and I think that now public universities and colleges have an equal quality of education. Still, the Red Sox just paid a hundred million dollars for a pitcher for 6 years, so yes, the times they are a-changing.

Teaching Creative Writing, Part Two

I have often thought of the hubris that was required of me when I began teaching creative writing when I had not published much of anything and did not know the cw drill. I hope that I made up in enthusiasm for my lack of experience. A faithful student who took my classes regularly, an older woman, invited me for tea. She had found out that Bill and I loved lubney cheese, and as she was of Lebanese origin, she had made us some. She shyly but proudly showed me her writing space, a closet under the stairs. Over a makeshift desk there was a bookshelf, and I was surprised, because the books were the ones I was always referring to in class. She explained that every time I mentioned one, she would purchase it. Looking at the shelf, I realized what an eccentric collection it was. After she died, her husband had a Lebanese friend make us lubney cheese, and he delivered it to express his appreciation for what I had meant to Madeline. She had published a few things in small magazines; that had made her happy, he said.

Two of these books were Malcolm Lowery’s Under the Volcano, and a study by Sherrill Grace about him. Grace had examined his manuscripts and determined that instead of cutting out, he had added details. His sentences became more and more dense as he revised. That had been a revelation to me when I read it, because I had up until then thought of revision as cutting out superfluous words. I realized that beginning writers didn’t put in enough specific details, and when they tried to, they would make the detail a complete sentence rather than a phrase or clause in the midst of a sentence. It was true too of beginning poets (unless they had the innate poetic ability); there was too much generality, not enough specifics.

In a recent article in the Globe and Mail, Brian Fawcett is quoted as saying that he stopped publishing his poetry in the early 1980’s because no one reads poetry so it is pointless to publish. Yet he continues to write poems. “It’s not about making aesthetic objects; it’s like a pitcher practicing a curve ball.” I think the impulse to write is more than practicing a curve ball; it is an urge to make order out of a messy world and then to show it to someone else to see if the order holds. I read yesterday somewhere in the blogosphere, “A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.” I would add, who didn’t quit because the impulse was so strong that he didn’t need the reward of publishing. Whoever invented the blog had hit upon a deep human yearning; you only have to read the statistics about the number of new blogs that are created every day.

Teaching Creative Writing, Part One

Bloglily said she would like to hear more about my creative writing workshops. They have played an important part in my life. As in most of my life, serendipity played a crucial part. A graduate student was going to teach a non-credit workshop, found that she couldn’t, and asked me to fill in. I had never attended one, never mind teach one, but I thought I would give it a shot. After that I taught many, from non-credit to undergraduate credit and once a graduate course.

The college I attended had a two stream English department. We concentrated either on writing or on literature. Because the professors wanted to make sure the writing concentration wasn’t a Mickey Mouse choice, we had a literary criticism course that was alleged to be the hardest in the arts faculty. Of course we took literature courses too. The writing courses were not like those of today – they were not focused on creative writing, but on writing in general. There was only one that was like a creative writing course, short story, and it focused more on reading short stories and writing about them than on writing one. So I had no model to base my course on.

My husband has taught creative writing too, and we agree that the main business of teaching is to keep the students writing. Getting feedback from the teacher and the other students gives the student a sense of an audience: what works, what doesn’t work. Once I taught a ten week course, half poetry, half fiction. A participant in the class, a teacher in elementary school, took the course because she was interested in writing fiction, but she cheerfully wrote a poem, her first, for the first class. It was a stunning poem. In her case, my only task was to provide an informed audience and keep her writing, with some technical advice, such as about enjambment, thrown in. Heather later went on to write a lot of poetry, to have her poems published in magazines and in two slim volumes, and to take an MFA in poetry.

Short Term Memory

Since I’ve never been athletic or strong, the physical deterioration of strength or agility is not what I find troubling about growing old. What is bad is the loss of short term memory – having a thought and two seconds later being unable to recapture it. Where have I put something? The explanation is that what you learned well gets disseminated throughout your brain so that you can retrieve long-term memories from various parts, through many pathways. But short term memory must go “through the narrow funnel of the hippocampus” and that part of the brain deteriorates faster as you grow old.

I tried an experiment. A friendly young woman, new in our church, knew my name but I couldn’t remember hers. I was embarrassed that I kept forgetting so that when I went to introduce her, I would have to ask her again. After the last time I asked her, as soon as I got into the car, I wrote it down and for several days I practiced it. Now I know it. This is time-consuming for unimportant details.

In February I saw a daily book being sold for peanuts, and I thought, if I wrote everything important down, I would have a record. I went home without buying it, but a few hours later, thinking how useful it would be and a cheap experiment at $2, I went back and bought it. Now I wonder how I have done without it. I write down important details such as financial transactions, but unimportant details as well, such as when I watered the plants.

Not only do I forget real people’s names, but I forget the names of some of the characters in my novels. I think that is because I changed their names at the last moment because they were too close to the names of real people in my life.

Last winter I conducted a writers’ workshop, the first one I had done in a number of years. I was alarmed that the method I had always used wasn’t available to me. In the past I would have a general outline of the course, but rely on my memory to bring forth helpful examples from writers I have read. I couldn’t do that. I vowed never to teach another workshop because this was so painful, but now I have gone and said I would again. I will have to find another modus operandi.

I don’t worry that I have an incipient dementia because I have read about the symptoms and know that I don’t have any. Although I may have forgotten where I put my reading glasses, when I find them I don’t mistake them for an elephant.