Category — Writing

Welcome to my new look!

Well, not me personally. I am still wearing my hair long, parted down the middle, as I have since phones were attached to walls. I am still the fashion plate I have always been: jeans and t-shirts (fancy wear) or (since COVID) work-out clothes (that, more times than not, I don’t change out of all day).

And I still blog, posting every Wednesday, as I have for the past…yikes…ten years. (Estimates for the average lifespan of a blog range from 100 days to 2.6 years, with the higher-end populated by commercial ventures.) This blog, laurenchronicles, has had other names–counterclockwise when the site focused on the science of aging and separating hope from hype; thinhouse when the site focused on our deeply researched, well-intentioned but ultimately unaffordable plans to live a carbon-neutral life; myteenagewerewolf when I was riding the rollercoaster of mothering a teen girl. Creating the umbrella of laurenchronicles several years ago gave me the freedom to write about everything from the elegant (and sweaty) world of ballet to the hidden world of maximum security prisons, from the joys and deep pleasures of community activism to the anger and fear of living in Trump’s America. The blog, whatever it has been called and whatever I decided to write about that week, was never (and will never be) monitized. Maintaining and writing it is not about “platform-building.” It was, it is, a weekly discipline, a commitment to sort through and order my thoughts, to practice telling stories, little ones, to reach out and engage with readers.

I thought it was about time for a new look for the blog, something with a bit more energy and color, something that represented and celebrated what I love. And I knew just the person to design it: a super-talented, delightfully creative, engagingly collaborative illustrator/ graphic designer, Liza Burns, my daughter from another mother.

So here it is.

And to mark the launch of the new banner–a contest! Want a free, autographed book? Of course you do!

Here’s what to do: Take a look at the banner. Identify any 5 items and in a new words explain the significance of each to me. Then either PM or email me this response. Don’t post here! The first 3 people to identify and correctly explain 5 items will get an autographed book of their choice. (Choices are Grip of Time, Raising the Barre or Counterclockwise.) Contest ends noon on Friday.

Do it! Also visit Liza’s portfolio site for a visual treat.

Here’s what I do not want to write about:

>The shame of being an American when the president of your country is who he is;

>The pain of realizing the deep and painful (and very dangerous) inequities this virus has made visible to all, including but not limited to the “petri dish” of prisons, the “death trap” of assisted living, the terrible irony of “sheltering at home” for the homeless;

>The fear of living in a country so ill-prepared to take care of itself;

>The sadness of living in a country where reason, compassion and integrity are in shorter supply than PPEs;

>The anger of being captive to a moment in which everything, everything, has been transformed into an ideological battle;

And, stay with me for this last one…

>The weariness of hearing one more story, reading one more post, seeing one more pic of someone’s victory with sourdough starter.

What do I want to write about?

>The importance of three-dimensional people in one’s life (no! not holograms);

>The pleasure of a full-body hug;

>The warmth of the family around a table;

>The joy of travel;

>The not-ever-taken-for-granted-again freedom of an unmasked life.

Here’s a bit of joyous end-of-the-decade news for those who write books, read books, love books, help bring books into the world (yes you, Heather Jackson):

According to the global information company, The NPD Group, 6.5 billion print books were sold this decade. (Add to that 1.8 billion e-books.) You may remember that e-books were supposed to wipe out print books? Didn’t happen. I love everything about physical books but really I don’t care HOW people read books. I care that they read.

And I care WHAT they read.

About that. I am sorry to report that these were top ten bestsellers of the decade.

1. Fifty Shades of Grey, by E. L. James: 15.2 million copies
2. Fifty Shades Darker, by E. L. James: 10.4 million copies
3. Fifty Shades Freed, by E. L. James: 9.3 million copies
4. The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins: 8.7 million copies
5. The Help, by Kathryn Stockett: 8.7 million copies
6. The Girl on The Train, by Paula Hawkins: 8.2 million copies
7. Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn: 8.1 million copies
8. The Fault in Our Stars, by John Green: 8 million copies
9. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson: 7.9 million copies
10. Divergent, by Veronica Roth: 6.6 million copies

What occurred to you as you scanned that list? Here’s what occurred to me:

Wow. These books were all movies. Hollywood’s effect on book sales is EXTRAORDINARY and out of proportion.

Wow. I read many many books, and I’ve read only ONE of these decade bestsellers (The Help). I did, however, see 4 of the movies—although not the movie made from the book I read.

Wow. Apparently tens of millions of readers are attracted to dystopian visions of the future. But we are currently LIVING a dystopian vision, so I am spectacularly uninterested in (and right now downright averse to) steeping myself in this genre. (I’m glad I read The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985 when I didn’t feel the world was as poisonous as it now feels to me.)

Wow. Not to be overly judgmental about it…well, okay, why not be as judgmental as I want to be…but Fifty Shades? Really? Such unadulterated (ha, almost a pun in there somewhere) crap. A nubile girl-woman. A privileged asshole of a rich man. BDSM. Aren’t we capable of having better quality fantasies than this?

Wow. These books are all fiction. But nonfiction is a much, much MUCH bigger category—both in numbers of books published and in total revenue. For example, adult non-fiction revenue totaled $6.18 billion across the publishing industry in 2017, while adult fiction revenues reached $4.3 billion, according to data from Association of American Publishers (AAP), the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, and Bookscan.

So much for the past decade. What’s on your welcome-to-the-new decade reading list?

Everyone who loves libraries has a library story. Here’s mine:

It begins in Brooklyn, New York, where I had the great fortune to live near my maternal grandparents for the first six years of my life. Saturday mornings my mother would drop me off at my grandparents’ apartment, and my grandmother and I would walk several blocks to the Brooklyn Public Library. It was a huge, dark building, scary and thrilling, busy yet noiseless. I loved it. My grandmother would use her library card to sign out a small stack of books for me.

When I was four, I asked for a library card of my own. The library rule was that the cardholder had to be able to write his or her name – in cursive – to get a card. I had just recently learned to print my first name in large wobbly capital letters. But I wanted a card of my own, and my grandmother wanted me to have a card of my own. So together we practiced.

It took weeks of work and dozens of Crayolas. I would clench the crayon so tightly that it snapped halfway through the “L.” My grandmother put her large freckled hand over mine to guide me through the loops and swirls and slowly my fingers relaxed and learned the motions. Then, one Saturday, I signed my name in cursive at the big mahogany library desk, and the librarian handed me my card. She said I was their youngest patron.

Since then, libraries have been a force in my life – as a reader, a student, a teacher, a mother and a writer…from the Lincoln room in the Chicago Public Library to the basement of the old San Francisco library to the sprawling Seattle library to the lovely old Carnegie library in McMinnville to the stunning downtown library built by the citizens of Eugene.

As a nonfiction writer who engages in deep research, I make professional use of libraries. But I also appreciate libraries the way a painter appreciates a museum: a place of inspiration, a living monument to what I do. It is both exhilarating and humbling to be around thousands of books, surrounded not just by information but by knowledge and wisdom, art and culture.

I write this love letter to libraries in appreciation of Eugene’s venerable Fortnightly Club, a group with a history dating back to 1893, an alliance of smart, powerful, civically engaged women who were the force behind our very first city library and continue to be extraordinary supporters. And I write in appreciation of the tireless work done by the Eugene Library Foundation to enhance our library, strengthen its programs, and work to promote literary.

You can support these efforts too! Come to…

Authors and Artist Fair
Saturday, December 7, 10-4
in the Atrium next to/ part of
Eugene’s Holiday Market (Lane County Fairgrounds)

There you can buy an autographed book from a talented, hard-working local writer (many of whom have national reputations). Twenty-five percent of all sales go directly to the Eugene Library Foundation. So the book (oh, go ahead, buy more than one!!) you purchase is a win-win-win.

You get a great holiday present for someone (maybe yourself)
You support a talented Eugene-based writer
You join many of your friends and neighbors in supporting our public library

                        PLUS: I will be there with many of my books from 10-1:30.

This is NOT a “humble brag,” a concept I detest for what I humbly believe to be its gross insincerity. (As in: What a humbling experience it is to my humble self to have all this great stuff happen to me. Let me tell you just how great. But humbly. Puh-lease. Spare me.)

This is a BRAG, BRAG. I am unabashedly bragging about the men I have worked with for the past four years, all inmates at Oregon State Penitentiary. I am bragging—without an ounce of humility—because today Eugene Weekly launches a regular monthly column, Life Inside, which will feature essays written by these men. Readers will be transported inside the walls of a maximum security prison to learn about the everyday lives experienced by the men who, for decades, have called this place “home.”

Working with these men, helping them craft stories that reflect their experience, stories that empower them in a powerless place, stories that help give them voice when they had none…this has been the single most rewarding work I have ever done as a teacher or an editor.

These men all committed crimes, bad ones. None claim they were wrongly accused or convicted. What they do claim—now 20, 30, 35 years into their “grip of time” behind bars—is that they are human beings capable of growth and change. Of deep remorse. Maybe, even, of a kind of forgiveness. In one terrible moment they ruined lives: the lives of their victims, their victims’ families, the lives of their own families, of themselves. They know that. They live with that.

But they also just live. They eat and sleep and work. They make and lose friends. They visit with family. And now, they write. They want to be thought of, to be remembered, for something other than the worst thing they did.

I hope you will read their work, today and in the future.

I write this with deep gratitude to Camilla Mortenson, Eugene Weekly editor, and Anita Johnson, one of the paper’s owners, who embraced the idea of a monthly column. And I write with everlasting gratitude to OSP Recreation Specialist Steven Finster, who supported, with enthusiasm, compassion and never-say-die energy, the formation of the group.

To learn/read more about the writing group, the men, and what I learned from them, may I (humbly!) suggest my latest book, A Grip of Time: When prison is your life.

Do the demands of being a writer (or an artist or performer) sabotage a creative life?

I’ve been pondering this as I commit hours every week to writing an often carefully researched, always carefully crafted essay to be posted on the blog I created and have been feeding for almost a decade. I then take the time to use all my carefully managed social media networks to get the word out. Between essays, I post curated images (my own photographs) and comments to maintain (and grow) a “presence” on social media. I take speaking gigs when offered, occasionally for real money, more often for a pittance, sometimes for nothing. It is good to engage with readers. It is a privilege to have a voice and to be able to spark conversation around issues I care about. But I also take speaking gigs (even the non-paying ones) to maintain a “platform,” because publishers demand it.

I teach writing workshops, sometimes for free—as I did in prison for the past four years—most often for below-market wages because I believe in the enterprise and crave the energy of novices. And because they are part of making a living. I take these responsibilities seriously. They demand enormous time and energy. I think about offering my own workshop series, online classes, podcasts, destination retreats–a number of my writer-friends do this—but I balk at how labor-intensive this would be.

I’m thinking about these things I do to make it possible for me to live a “writing life” because: One: It is no longer possible for a midlist author to even approach supporting herself through her published work. And two: Recent research shows that creativity suffers when you’re constantly busy. And I am constantly busy.

Busyness—handling tasks, juggling, toggling between to-dos, managing—requires linear thinking and intense focus. But creativity and innovative thinking requires idleness. Staring out the window time, solitary walk-in-the-woods time, daydreaming. In “daydreaming mode” (obviously not the fancy neurological language for this), the brain can shift into free flow and association, forging links and concepts that might not be “logically” made.

We already know we are drowning in information, that information overload is a real thing. That it exhausts all of us. We already know (or should know…the research has been out there for decades) that “multitasking” is stressful—and, counterintuitively, inefficient.

Now we are learning about the creative cost of being, having to stay, busy.

Believe me, friends, I know full well that it is PRIVILEGE to have this problem. Part of me feels guilty even mentioning it. But if I sound as if I am merely whining about the problems of the sufficiently housed and fed, it is to call out the publishing industry that demands busyness and platform development and social media management and “revenue streams” outside writing in order to be a writer.

Okay. Now to post this to my blog, to my FB page, to my FB author page, to tweet it, Instagram it. And then…get back to work on the book.

The powerful control the powerless. The rich control the poor. The free control the enslaved. Those with money control politics. Those with keys control access.

I’ve been thinking a lot about control lately having just experienced its heavy hand. Not in exercising it but in the having it exercised upon me. There’s a Japanese proverb, “the nail that sticks out gets hammered.” Deviance is met with resistance. Voices raised are met with efforts to seize the microphone.

This has not stopped us. This will not stop us.

This is not a threat. This is a promise.

We learn from experts, from those who know. They know because they have thought long and hard about the subject, because they’ve studied it. And sometimes, most powerfully, because they have lived it.

I am not an expert on prison life. But for the past four years I have learned from experts, from a group of men who have lived behind bars for twenty, twenty-five, thirty or more years. They are members of the Lifers’ Writing Group I started at Oregon State Penitentiary. They write powerfully, with humor, with heart, with courage, with regret, with confusion and with insight about their everyday lives: sleeping, eating, working, making and losing friends, getting married, sitting by the bedsides of the dying.

I tell some of the stories they have shared with me in my book, A Grip of Time. I have also helped them craft and polish their stories for submission. Two of these stories won national recognition in 2018 Pen America Prison Writing Contest.  Two more won in 2019.

A number of shorter pieces appear on the site I created here. These stories are powerful, important and timely. They are a testament to how people can live lives of meaning and purpose in places designed to deaden meaning and eliminate purpose. They are a challenge to all of us to consider how people, people who have done bad things, might be human beings capable of growth and change.

These stories, written by experts, can help us learn about the criminal justice system we have created, the system that has made the United States the undisputed #1 jailer in the world.

I am so delighted that on Monday the Washington Post devoted an entire issue of its magazine to publishing personal stories, essays and art produced by those formerly or currently incarcerated. Let these stories, by the experts, help us non-experts have informed, humane conversations about crime and punishment, about incarceration and rehabilitation, and about the hidden lives lived by millions—yes, I said millions—of American citizens.

What is magic about The Magic Barrel?

Well, first, what is The Magic Barrel?  Every year the Willamette Valley’s literary and charitable communities gather to celebrate great stories and lively music while raising funds to feed the hungry. The event benefits Linn-Benton Food Share, a county where 1 in 5 residents receive emergency food.

The magic? That caring people help feed their neighbors. Almost 4,000 volunteers help to serve 350,000 emergency meals and distribute more than 5 million pounds of food.

The magic? That “barrels” like this one are being filled and re-filled by involved, compassionate, generous people in counties all over the state (like mine, Lane County) and cities and counties all over our country.

The magic? That you can be a part of this, so easily, by coming to the show this Friday or, if you don’t live nearby (mid-Willamette valley), by donating.

The magic of the evening? Ten Oregon writers—all genres—on stage sharing their work. I am honored to be part of this event and will be reading a piece about an unlikely love story in prison from my book A Grip of Time: When prison is your life. I will also be introducing a man I have come to know and respect and care for deeply, a writer, a thinker, an activist—a man behind bars going on 26 years for a crime he committed as a teen. He is a long-time member of the writers’ group I run at Oregon State Penitentiary. His name is Sterling Cunio.

The magic? That we are in this for the long, that we continue to care about our neighbors and our communities. That, in the face of the rancor and hatred and selfishness spewing from the White House, we persist.

Ten tables, ten minutes at each table. Around these tables sit my favorite people: Book lovers. But not just book lovers. Professional book lovers. Bookstore owners and staff, librarians. The people whose lives are about connecting readers with writers. On Monday I was one of those writers. It was Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association’s (PNBA) fall trade show, and I was invited to participate in what I thought of as a “literary speed dating” event but the organization called “Signature Dish.” Either way, it was a literary marathon. I had ten minutes to engage ten different groups of six to eight people, tell them about my book, A Grip of Time, and communicate my passion for the work. I didn’t just want them to order copies for their stores. I wanted them to care.

I was on my fourth table when I felt the need to re-caffeinate. I was on my sixth table when I guzzled two glasses of water to stave off a scratchy throat. I was on my seventh table when I worked up a sweat. I was on my ninth table when I forgot what I had just said. I was on my tenth table when I thought: Gee, it’s over already?

It was an exhausting. And I loved every moment.

And no I didn’t love every moment just because I got to talk about my work. Sure, there was that. But I loved yesterday evening’s event, and the trade show itself, because it was a celebration of the renewed health of Indie bookstores.

A few decades ago, independent bookstores were supposed to disappear, crushed by Barnes & Noble. A decade ago, independent bookstores were supposed to disappear, crushed by amazon. Ha.

Today it’s Barnes & Noble on the chopping block, part of the retail apocalypse currently blighting American malls. And while amazon, the world’s biggest retailer, commands 72 percent of adult new book sales online, and 49 percent of all new book sales, independent bookstores are doing just fine. In fact, better than fine.

According to a recent report from the American Booksellers Association (the national trade group for independent bookstores), the number of U.S. independent bookstores is up 31 percent since 2009. And book sales at independent bookstores grew nearly 7.5 percent over the past five years. The ABA itself has grown to 1,887 members in 2,524 locations.

Indies are part of the community, our communities. Here in the Northwest, where the PNBA is the regional trade group, Indies from Oregon, Washington, Montana, Idaho and Alaska are offering what amazon cannot: book clubs and author readings, themed evenings, conversation circles, kids’ events, music, a place to sit surrounded by books. Indies offer carefully curated selections with shelf tags to pique your interest and passionate, informed staff to make suggestions.

The folks who own and run and work in these stores love books. They love authors. And we love them back. All hail the Indies.

These stories are about the growth and health of independent bookstores, should you want to read more.

With local connections and quirkiness, indie bookstores thrive
Bookstores Find Growth as ‘Anchors of Authenticity’
US Independent Bookstores Thriving and Growing