Ellen Meeropol

I haven't posted a blog in a while; this has been a difficult period for my family. Until recently, my elderly father lived in an independent living apartment, with help from me and from aides in the facility. In the past month, he has had three ambulance rides to the Medical Center Emergency Room, three hospital admissions with significant problems and “procedures” to address those problems, and three returns to the skilled nursing rehab part of his community. That’s a lot for a 98-year-old blind man, who is also hearing impaired. He’s exhausted and so are we.

Most of us go through similar crises with elderly or ill family members sooner or later. Eventually, most of us experience the broken U.S. health care system. They are so good at saving lives, at high tech interventions, and my father has certainly benefited from that expertise. But they are often poor at communication – between departments, between providers, with and to the patient and family. Still, there have been, there are, some amazingly kind and thoughtful and helpful individuals and we are so grateful for their caring.

But that’s not what I want to write about. I’ve been thinking about the things that have helped me during this month. Things that have offered moments of respite, even of joy, in the middle of the sorrow.

The first is wildflowers. I’m so lucky this happened in July, when Robby’s garden and the land around us is in full and glorious bloom. Coneflowers and daylilies, susies and coreopsis, poppies and balloon flowers. Even a Monarch butterfly in the milkweed patch by the kitchen window.

Second is music. I admit that in recent years I forget to listen to music; words fill my brain. But this month I’ve rediscovered the dusty CDs and the ipod shuffle and even – amazing! – an afternoon on the lawn at Tanglewood. I’ve listened to a lot of music since that first awful dash to the E.R., mostly in the car on the daily drives to and from the hospital or the nursing home. The two most healing albums have been American Beauty (Grateful Dead) and Hijos del Sol (Viva Quetzal). Go figure.

The third thing that kept me sane, or close to sane, is work. Deadlines. My laptop has been close by all month. My dad’s medical issues came as I was still on book tour, so I’ve had to reschedule a few events and figure out how to be away from home as little as possible. This crisis also occurred as I signed the contract for my next book, and worked furiously to finish the revision. The novel includes hospital and nursing home scenes and it probably didn’t hurt to have those sensory details so available. Mostly it helped to be able to lose myself in a different narrative from my own.

Finally: family (Robby and Jenn, especially) and friends. You know who you are. Thank you.  Read More 

There’s a new rule at the retirement community where my dad lives: only one cookie with your fruit cup for dessert.

You’ve got to understand that this is epic for my almost 98-year-old father. Blind and mostly deaf, he makes his own breakfast and lunch, but eats his evening meal every night in the dining hall. The food is decent and the staff is pleasant and accommodating. My dad has lived there for ten years, and the wait staff all know his standing dessert order: a fruit cup and two oatmeal raisin cookies.

Until last week.

On Thursday when Robby and I show up to join him for dinner, I ask my usual question. “What’s new, Dad?”

His usual answer is, “Nothing much.”

On Thursday, he says, “Well, you won’t believe what they’ve done,” and proceeds to tell us about the new regulation. “Can you believe that?” he asks, full of indignation.

Honestly, I agree with him. My dad came of age during the Depression and never wastes food. He often requests a half-order of an item he doesn’t think he can finish. He never leaves food on his plate. But, like many residents at this establishment, he sometimes brings a bit of food back with him to his room. In case he gets hungry later.

“So,” he asks, leaning forward conspiratorially. “Maybe you and Robby can order cookies, and give them to me? That’s what my friends did last night.”

Of course. We never have dessert and would be happy to join his plan. “You know, Dad. That’s kind of civil disobedience,” I say.

He nods.

As we were finishing our main course, the waitress came over to take dessert orders. “The usual, Jack?” she asks.

“Yes,” he says. “A fruit cup and two oatmeal raisin cookies.”

She smiles. “I can only bring you one. New rule.”

“I’ll have oatmeal raisin cookies for dessert please,” I say.

“Me, too,” Robby adds.

The waitress nods and walks away, just as the two gentlemen my father eats with when he’s not with us, walk up to the table. One of them, let’s call him Arnie, looks around to make sure no one is watching, then hands me a plastic carryout box, covered with a cloth dinner napkin. In the box are three oatmeal raisin cookies.

“We take good care of your father,” Arnie says. “Plus, we still like to break the rules.”

I love that. You’re never too old to resist.
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I figure I’m about halfway through the book tour for ON HURRICANE ISLAND, the active, travel-heavy promotion journey. It started with the American Booksellers Association’s Winter Institute in Asheville a month before the novel’s publication; I expect it to begin winding down in the late autumn. Of course, that’s one of the pleasures of a small press like Red Hen, which considers a book “new” for 18 months or so. Actively traveling and promoting a book for such a long time also has its challenges, and this weekend (two days “off” to visit with old friends in the Bay Area), I’ve been reflecting on the experience.

So far, I’ve done more than 30 book events, ranging from readings in indie bookstores and public libraries to book festivals and conferences and house parties and author fairs and book groups. They’ve been organized by Red Hen Press, or by my wonderful publicist Mary Bisbee Beek, or by me, following up with friends, contacts from my first novel, and suggestions from other authors. The range of venues has been wide, from the amazing Annenberg Beach House in Santa Monica to a wine bar in Boston’s Back Bay to a friend’s living room. From San Antonio and Lynchburg and Albany to Oakland and Manhattan and Cambridge and Washington, D.C. Attendance has varied widely too; two people in a bookstore in a city where I knew one person (she brought a friend) to crowded auditoriums at literary festivals and colleges.

What do they all have in common? My gratitude that readers still come to hear authors read, and talk with them, and ask questions, and offer opinions. The connection I feel to readers and writers and booksellers and conference volunteers. The pleasure of meeting people who love story as much as I do, and who get it when I talk about my characters as real people. The inspiration to go home and write the next book.  Read More 

A few days ago, a book group I attend discussed Roxanne Gay’s debut novel, AN UNTAMED STATE. I had suggested the book for the group, and read it for a second time in preparation for the discussion. So I admit I was shocked when the first two comments were, “I hated this book.”

Me, I love this book.

I suppose I wasn’t entirely surprised, because of Gay’s subject matter. AN UNTAMED STATE is about the kidnapping and brutal sexual torture of a young woman who returns to Haiti to visit her parents. It’s not an easy book to read. It’s not a comfortable place to go. So why do I admire it so much?

For one thing, the first sentence is one of the best I’ve ever read in a novel. It sent shivers up and down my spine, hooking me immediately into the story:

“Once upon a time, in a far-off land, I was kidnapped by a gang of fearless yet terrified young men with so much impossible hope beating inside their bodies it burned their very skin and strengthened their will right through their bones.”

Wow.

I love that first sentence, because it tells me that this novel is about the fairy tales we like to tell ourselves, but they lie. This young woman will not live happily ever after. I love the book because the bad men – and they are very bad – are young men with hope beating in their chests. This doesn’t excuse their actions, but it certainly deepens the story. I love this book because it’s about the enormous chasm between wealth and poverty and how the fairy tale princess and her family share responsibility for the brutality of that system. I love this book because it’s about the impossible choices people make, and then must live with.

In powerful prose – no one disagreed about that – Gay shows us the tangled and terrible realities of a very ugly class and race system. I love this book because even though the princess doesn’t live happily ever after, she does survive.

Even though we disagreed about the book, it was a terrific discussion. I still love the book, and I love book groups too.
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My mother wanted it all. She was bossy and demanding, a terrible cook, ambitious and very determined. I’m rather like her, except I’m a better cook. Raising my younger sister and me in the late 1940’s and 1950’s, Mom told us that we could have it all, be everything we wanted to be, but she was clearly unhappy in her short stint as a stay-at-home mother. The moment my sister started school, Mom went back to work as a high school chemistry teacher.

Being demanding and smart served her well as a teacher. She taught in my high school; her students loved her. Me, not so much. My friends competed for her coveted lab assistant positions. I focused on English classes and the school newspaper and took chemistry in summer school. Mom stayed late every afternoon after school, as faculty advisor to student groups and to meet with students needing extra time. I learned to cook dinner.

Mom demanded a lot of herself. In her fifties, she returned to college for a Masters and then a PhD and started teaching at a state university. By then, I was out of the house with a family of my own. I was proud of her, but I lived far away and her accomplishments had little to do with me. I worked on feminist issues (reproductive health and abortion and day care), earned my living as a nurse, and co-raised my daughters. My mother retired from teaching and turned her considerable fervor to collecting silver and turquoise Indian jewelry. In my fifties, I decided to write fiction. I took online classes, attended writing workshops and conferences, and then earned an MFA, completed just before I turned 60.

My mother died in 2008, three years before my first novel was published. She never knew that in my own way, I followed the path she blazed. But every time I do a reading from my work, I wear one of her silver bracelets.  Read More 

During the Q&A after a reading last night (thank you, Storrs Library) a woman asked what influence my nursing career had on my writing (I worked for almost 30 years as a nurse and pediatric nurse practitioner). I didn’t have a good reply; I had never thought about it. I answered something about my first novel being about medical/nursing ethics, but beyond that I floundered, saying something general about seeing the world through a nurse’s eyes. I knew there was more, but couldn’t put my finger on it.

This morning, on the treadmill (where I do some of my best thinking), I realized that for me, being a nurse was an odd mixture of empathy and nosiness. In nursing school I was taught that one aspect of my job was to help my patients accomplish the things they wanted done but couldn’t do alone, respecting their individual, cultural and spiritual beliefs. I was taught to empathize, to understand what another person is experiencing from within her frame of reference, to see the world through her eyes.

That’s eerily like my approach to characters; it’s my job to discover who these “beings” are who wander into my brain and take up residence, and helping them develop personalities that serve themselves and the story.

And then there’s the other part: I’m nosy. I like to watch other people and know what they’re feeling. If they won’t share, I imagine it. Okay, there’s more, I like to deconstruct and manipulate those feelings too, but I try to limit that to my characters. So, on the bulletin board over my computer is a large piece of newsprint, covered with the complicated and sprawling family tree of my characters. Yes, the major characters in four novels and over a dozen short stories are all somehow related – by blood or love or geography or circumstance. They’re my literary karass. (For those of you who are not Vonnegut fans, that’s a term he coined for a group of people linked in a cosmically significant manner.)

So, to the woman who asked the question last night – I wish I knew your name – let me answer that being a writer, like being a nurse, gives me the opportunity, the privilege, of sticking my nose into the business of others with as much respect and curiosity and skill and love as I can muster. Read More 

On Friday our local paper, the Hampshire Gazette, published a guest editorial Robby wrote about the strange convergences between Billie Holiday and Ethel Rosenberg, both of whom would have turned 100 this year. I think it’s a gorgeous piece, simultaneously thoughtful and timely.

Our cats didn’t agree.

This morning, the editorial page was shredded, particularly Robby’s essay. We know that Cory (aka Coriopsis) was responsible. He chews paper, while Loopy (aka Lupine) prefers plastic.

Robby’s comment: “Everyone’s a critic.”

It got me thinking about how we handle the promotion – and the criticism – of our work. I’m smack in the middle of the book tour for my new novel; I’ve done thirteen events in the past two months and another two dozen scheduled are through the spring and summer. Today, still unpacking from Texas and starting to prepare for Wednesday’s trip to Minneapolis, I’m both exhilarated and tired, both pleased and always wanting more. Without all the effort of promotion, new books would not find readers. But promotion has a high cost: I haven’t written a word of fiction in weeks, and it will be weeks before I can return to my manuscript-in-progress.

So today, in line with Cory’s breakfast and Robby’s comment, I think I need to take a deep breath, pick up one of the several books I’m halfway through, find a comfy chair, read and relax. If I’m lucky, Cory will curl up on my lap and purr.
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I got home last night from a six-day, five-city, four-event book tour to Virginia and D.C. The hardest part was sleeping in a different bed every night. There were many best parts, like:
• Meeting wonderful booksellers, like Kelly and Diane at Fountain Books in Richmond, Kim and Rocky at Phantastic Books in Lynchburg, and Anne from Over the Moon Books in Crozet.
• Hanging out with writing buddies from grad school, like Meriah Crawford and Bunny Goodjohn and Ted and Annie Deppe.
• The kindness of strangers, like Gary Dop and his Taproot Reading Series in Lynchburg, like the dedicated volunteers who make the Virginia Festival of the Book so amazing.
• The generosity of old friends, who opened their homes and invited their friends to my readings.
• Talking books and reading at writing with all of the above.
• Meeting new readers, like the woman who bought a book and sent my friend this email later that night:

“So, it's 11:00 P.M. and I Can't Stop Reading. Just wanted to thank you so much for including me in such a special night at Elli's book reading night. ...That's all for now because I'm on page 148 and the hurricane has not yet hit but I hate Tobias and am so proud of Austin and hope Henry emerges as a hero and...okay...I have to go back to reading now...”

It doesn’t get much better.
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Speaking of torture

I did not set out to write a novel about torture. But sometimes you create a character and fall in love with her. You put her in a perilous situation that gets her into big trouble. So what can you do? You hang in there with her and try to get her out of that trouble. That’s what happened to Gandalf Cohen and me.

Six years ago I was going through airport security when a character jumped into my brain and made her home there. She arrived complete with a peculiar name and an odd profession. I could see her short graying hair and her no-nonsense persona. I imagined her standing ahead of me in the security line. When she stepped out of the TSA scanner, barefoot, a man in uniform escorted her down a side corridor and out of sight.

I had to know what happened to her, so I wrote a novel.

When Gandalf was kidnapped by federal agents I knew little about torture beyond what I’d read in novels, or seen on TV and in movies. All made-up stuff. So I made up some more to write the first draft of the novel and then I did research to try to correct the worst of my errors of imagination. I read THE DARK SIDE by Jane Mayer, and that led me to the U.S. Air Force Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) manual. I wish the Senate torture report had been available when I was trying to get the ugly details right.

Two things surprised me about writing this novel. First, the content transformed my writing practice. I was used to writing in the evening, a habit developed over years of having a day job. But if I sent my imagination to these dark places in the evening, it kept me up at night. It gave me nightmares. So I started writing first thing in the morning and into the early afternoon; I needed several hours of distance between the events Gandalf and I were living in the novel and any successful attempt to relax into sleep.

The second thing that surprised me was my intense curiosity about the bad guys. The torturers. I wanted to know what was going on in their heads. How did they justify their actions? What were their secrets? How did they sleep at night? I went back and reread Edwidge Danticat’s amazing novel, THE DEW BREAKERS, the Tonton Macoutes who tortured and killed resisters in Duvalier’s Haiti. Then I reread the thought-provoking interview with Danticat in The Writers Chronicle, in which she said, “Even if someone is a torturer, you don’t have the luxury of writing him off, of not ‘listening’ to him... Understanding the complexity of a difficult character’s life is most appealing to me as a writer.” It is appealing, but it’s also disconcerting and uncomfortable.

After doing the research, I returned to my novel. I took a deep breath and crawled back into the brains of my characters who did those bad bad things. Not to forgive them, but to understand them, and render them as well as I could to my readers.

It’s been odd timing for a novel about domestic detention and enhanced interrogation: first the Executive Summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture. And then newspaper reports about the existence of a secret interrogation facility in a Chicago warehouse operated by the Chicago Police Department.

After reading On Hurricane Island, or hearing me talk about it, people inevitably ask, “But do domestic detention centers exist? Could rendition and torture really happen on U.S. soil? To an American citizen?”

I’m not an expert. I don’t know if domestic detention centers like the one I made up really exist in this country. I do know that there are historical precedents for their existence, such as the internment of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor and the targeting and detention of Muslim residents after 9/11. And I know that the scaffolding for detention is firmly in place. Our national narratives about terrorism and the need for extraordinary measures are an accepted part of our culture, normalized by television, repetition, and fear.

As a fiction writer and a citizen, do I think that events like those in On Hurricane Island could happen?

I’m profoundly sad to say that I do.  Read More 

In one week, on March 3, my second novel will be published. The books are finished and printed. My book tour plans are healthy and still growing. I’ve selected a few sections to read at events and practiced them. I’ve thought about the questions I’m likely to hear during radio interviews and event Q&A’s. I’ve figured out a couple of as-dressy-as-I-ever-get outfits to wear at readings.

This week, I’ll be working hard to promote the book, submitting essays, sending out emails and postcards about events, and contacting people who might be interested in the book. But as I remember from the last days of pregnancies, many years ago, I will live in a peculiar limbo of anticipation and excitement and worry and hope. Will this baby come easily? Will she thrive? Who will she turn out to be in the world?

Publishing a novel brings as many unknowns as birthing a baby.

In addition, when you publish with a small press you understand that there are likely to be fewer resources - financial and personnel - to promote your book. You know that will be balanced by the passion that small presses bring to the books they publish, by their energy and enthusiasm. You know also that you will rely on the generosity of friends and strangers in your community of writers and readers.

In this odd limbo before pub date, I’m so grateful for that generosity. I’m grateful to Kate and Mark and the staff at Red Hen Press for their amazing dedication. To my publicist Mary Bisbee-Beek, who answers my emails even when I might step just a little over the off-the-wall-with-stress line. To my buddies at the Odyssey Bookshop, for support and helping me launch this baby. And for all those people – you know who you are – who have offered to read advance copies and write blurbs and reviews, to host house parties and invite their friends, to invite me to their book groups and their neighborhood bookstores. Who will buy an extra copy and put it into a friend’s hand, saying, “you’re going to love this book.”

Thank you.
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