In praise of inefficiency.

Tonight I lay in bed reading The Monkey Wrench Gang, wanting just to escape into a story, to forget for a moment about the craft of writing and editing and pitching stories that consumes my days. But once you've entered that world it's impossible to close the door and leave it behind.

I remember hating my high school English teacher for forcing me to think about structure and dialogue and other writers' tools that until then I'd taken for granted. But once I began to notice those things, they were impossible to ignore. No longer could I open the covers of a book and simply lose myself. Rather than diminish the pleasures of reading, though, my reluctant literary education made me appreciate a well-written story even more, in the same way that a well-educated oenophile better appreciates a quality bottle of wine.

So here I am, three beers into forgetting a day rife with sentences and structure, thinking I could snuggle into some pajamas, slide under the covers and enjoy some Edward Abbey. I got two pages in when when I read a passage: "Hayduke reflected. That was true. There was truth in that statement," and the subconscious editor in me flared up. Or rather, the writer who lives in fear of the subconscious editor. Most editors I've worked with wouldn't think twice about cutting the second sentence. Superfluous! Repetitive! The sirens go off. The words slashed. Good writing is all about efficiency. Clarity and brevity are the name of the game.

The books I read say that writers who break the rules are allowed do so only after they've mastered them. Maybe by the time Edward Abbey wrote The Monkey Wrench Gang he'd already reached that point. Maybe Dave Eggers and Hunter S. Thompson had to spend years proving their adroit efficiency before they were able to get a single rambling train-of-consciousness sentence published. But you know what I say? I say fuck that.

Everywhere I turn, I'm encouraged to be efficient. My car is very fuel efficient. There are only 24 hours in the day, so I must be efficient with my time. Most annoyingly, I'm encouraged to be efficient when I head into the backcountry. Nature has no room for superfluity – even the most extravagant flower is born of function – so perhaps it makes sense that we are stripped to the bare necessities when we venture outside. But really? Ultralight backpackers who cut the tags off their clothing to save weight and measure their freezedried food by the ounce seem only to further distance themselves from the natural world, more in tune with the machinery of urban life than the meandering nature of the trail. When I used to work on trail crew, the attitude was that the more weight you carried, the tougher you were. Leave sparseness to the monks. I find beauty in the excess weight, the unnecessary sentences, the pleasure in lugging a bottle of beer or a book of poetry 12 miles into the backcountry. I don't want my life — or my writing — stripped to the bare minimum. I want to spill over the edges, explode with extravagance, resist the pressure to reduce word count and fit only into the space allotted. Ramble on. 

the joy - and agony - of being edited.

Editor-writer relationships can be complicated. When I worked for a daily newspaper, I dreaded the 10 pm call from the night editor that meant I had to tear myself away from my glass of wine/movie/friends, dig out my day's notes and answer questions about a story I'd submitted hours before. Yet as much as I hated this "my-work-never-ends" feeling, it was better than opening up the newspaper the next morning and seeing some edit that changed the meaning of a phrase, or, worse yet, introduced an error.

The majority of edits I received were thoughtful, well-intentioned and ultimately resulted in a better story. But as an inexperienced journalist, I sometimes felt powerless in the hands of an editor.

After a year away from professional writing, I'd almost forgotten the agony of being edited. Until yesterday. An edited version of my blog post -- blog post, for God's sake! -- landed in my inbox. As my first piece of writing for a magazine I've long wanted to write for, I was fairly attached to it, so when my carefully crafted draft came back to me looking like a toddler had attacked it with a highlighter, it was all I could do to scan the comments, close the document and go for a walk.

Writing, I read recently, should be a painful experience. If it doesn't hurt, you're not stretching hard enough. For the past 15 months, I apparently haven't been stretching very well at all. I'd been self-editing, which can be challenging in its own way but isn't nearly as tough on the ego (or the story) as being edited by someone else. I'd been happily blogging, pitching here and there on a freelance basis, and even had an essay appear in Alaska magazine with nary a word changed. I was beginning to find this writing business fairly pleasant after all.

But in retrospect, my writing suffered as a result. Thinking back on the blog post I just wrote for High Country News, the first draft I submitted would have been the version I'd have posted if it was for my personal blog. But after wrestling with the editors' suggestions -- even the ones I initially bristled against -- I found they were spot on. I pretty much rewrote the piece, and the second draft is much, much better than the first.

Which makes me wonder -- how much would my blog posts from the past year have benefited had they been edited by someone else? I imagine they'd have been significantly better. But on the other hand, that's not necessarily the point of a personal blog. In using this as a space to flesh out ideas, experiment with voice and style and forms, and practice the discipline of quick, regular writing whether I need to or not, I'd say it's nonetheless been successful.

dreams.

 

My dreams howl into the core of my being, following me like a wolf on the tracks of its prey. They often seem far-fetched and unrealistic, these dreams, and I put them aside for more pressing, attainable goals: paying back student loans, pursuing a career, being a good daughter. But always my dreams linger on the periphery, the wolf at the edge of the firelight, moving through a landscape of swirling mist, changing shape, calling to me.

Sometimes my dreams make sense, coalescing into something I can reach for – an achievable goal, a certain place on the map. But more often they are simply images I've carried with me since childhood, vague and uncertain. When I was in fifth grade and had to choose anyone in the world to impersonate, I chose Dian Fossey, the gorilla researcher who gave her life fighting for conservation in Rwanda. That was the kind of life I wanted. I'd pore over photos of SCUBA divers swimming with manta rays and National Geographic explorers in Papua New Guinea. My make-believe games consisted of creeping stealthily along creekbeds or pretending the side of my house was El Capitan. But were there any children growing up in post-industrial America that didn't dream of being an explorers or rock climbers or SCUBA divers?

At some point, I shifted my focus north. I devoured books about Alaska, homesteaders striking it out in the last frontier, dog sleds and moose carcasses and detailed descriptions of sewing mukluks and chinking cabins. My greatest dream became to be self-sufficient somewhere in those distant reaches, to live a life worth writing about.

And then I went to college, became saddled with debt and had to find a steady paycheck to cover the bills. The same old story. It happens to everyone; fantasies inevitably become squelched beneath the realities of life. Stubborn or immature or both, though, I've had a hard time letting go. I travel and live in rugged places as best I can; I dabble in adventure sports. But always dreams of a different life elude me, remaining just out of grasp. My housemates go out to the pub and I stay home staring at photographs in a new book I was given about a polar expedition. I peer into the eyes of one of the explorers and they squint back from within the fur ruff of a parka, revealing nothing. How did you get there? Who will invite me on an Arctic expedition? And more importantly, how will I pay the bills? Surviving seems simple these days compared to the question of how people can afford to be professional explorers.

These are the questions that plague my dreams – like most people, I suppose. I don't delude myself into thinking that I am unique. I don't feel sorry for myself. But I wonder what I can do to get invited on some epic expedition, how I get to be one of the people who squint into the camera lens with a face hardened with jungle mud, Arctic ice, sea salt. It hardly matters where. All that matters is that these dreams continue to chase me like a hungry wolf. They keep me restless, roaming, searching, awake while everyone else drinks a beer and goes to bed. I stay awake writing, because writing seems to be the answer.

Alaska journal, part 2

Dug this out of my journal from the summer, back when I was in Alaska.
 

4 August

Another month, another program. I forget what it was like, to not be fully absorbed in your job, to not live, eat and breathe it. In a way, it is too consuming: I have little time or inclination to write or be creative. That part of me falls away as easily as a label peeled off a bottle, and I wonder whether I have the self discipline to conjure it back up when I leave. Do I need the structure of a writing job to live the life of a writer, or can it be like flipping a switch: wilderness guide one week, writer the next? How are these two parts of me conjoined, and where do they diverge? Most importantly, how can I connect them?

On the other hand, it is a blessing to be fully present in each moment. I am absorbed by the girls in this program, the guide team, the group, the expeditions, the daily tasks and routines – every piece of it requires my undivided attention until the extraneous thoughts drift away into the cobwebbed corners of my mind. Today I was doing paperwork and looked at the date – 8.4.12 – and had to pause to consider how unreal is seems. Has it really been nine months since my heart was stomped on like a burning cigarette on a cold night? Now, days pass and I hardly think of him except with a twinge of regret that it wasn't what I'd hoped it would be. But I am glad to be here and doing this again, and glad to have the freedom afterward to go anywhere, do anything.

14 August

Time, as usual, flies, and I have little of it to spare for writing. Two guides and five kids is a demanding ratio, and in the evenings I like to sit and talk with Jesse. But there is so much I wish I could write down, because I know that without writing, it will become lost. It is not the words that count, looking back at it years later, but the act of writing itself, as if sitting and making yourself aware of where you are and what it smells and tastes and feels like is more important than the words themselves. I remember being about 9 years old and sitting behind a dresser, writing in my diary while cookies baked in the kitchen. I wrote about school that day, but what I remember most is the moment I put pen to paper: the smells of Christmastime, the grey slush outside the window, the toys on the floor. We cut and paste together our lives in this way, words and old photographs coalescing until we develop stories, memories, explanations, selves. 

Last week, we attempted to hike 3,700-foot Mount Etolin and made it to approximately 1,300 feet, or roughly one mile in four days of hiking. Since there was no chance of summiting, we were able to come down a day early and dry out at the floathouse: we were soggy to the core, filthy and stinky. All the girls got their periods at once and I didn't pack nearly enough tampons, and everyone was drenched to their socks and underwear within the first hour of hiking. How to possibly describe such rank wetness, with no dry place to escape to? We slogged through mud, slept in wet sleeping bags, hung wet clothes from our bodies. It was one big fat bucket of suck, and yet, there were moments: bending over with a 70-lb pack on to lean on my trekking pole and noticing how alive the forest floor is, how much life thrives in the wetness that drives humans away. Hair-like worms waving, centipedes skittering under leaf litter, tiny spiders and beetles and nameless insects crawling and dangling and jumping. Everything fetid, fecund, alive; growing, rotting, struggling to carry on.

And let us not forget the black flies. The hoards of no-see-ums that erupted fro the muskeg pools upon our arrival, enlivened by the first human prey they'd likely seen in their brief, miserable lives. They dropped into our food by the hundreds, flung themselves into our eyes, noses and ears; invaded our tents and brains and sanity. Let us not forget them.

Then today, for the first time in 20 days, we awoke to sunshine. Beautiful beach, fire, dry everything. We are on the move agin, circumnavigating Etolin Island. I move my home every night, carrying what I need from the canoe to the woods, setting up my tarp and sleeping bag again and again under different trees, in different forests – all different and all, somehow, the same.

17 August

I'm sitting on the long flat-rock beach of South Etolin Island, watching the tide creep closer to my feet. We are staying here for three days for reflection time, and it is nice to rest from the rigors of expedition. The embers of the morning cook fire crackle and the occasional salmon throws itself out of the water and lands on its side with a smack. Ravens fan the air with their heavy wingbeat and, as in a Grateful Dead song, the eagles fill the sky – four adults and two juveniles swooping back and forth, dropping feathers along the beach. The woods are like a park here – flat and mossy ground under a canopy of widely spaced cedars and ancient spruces. The sun is shining and the sky is blue for the fourth unbelievable day in a row, and I'm living in shorts and a tank top. Life is grand. I do not doubt for a second that returning here was the right decision, that ending a two-year relationship and quitting the lodge were all right in some roundabout way and that this is the track my life is going to take: wandering, loopy and beautifully unpredictable.

The water is a flat powder blue with ripples of electric teal wavering toward the rim of sky. The sky itself is wide and blue and the horizon is a haze of blue mountaintops and blue islands. It is a whole landscape painted in shades of blue, a blue that is alive, flecked with silver and light, always changing.

Later – Walking back from across the long beach at twilight, Jesse's figure as he stoops by the water to wash the dinner pot is striking – a lone silhouette against an enormous backdrop of sky and ocean. It is sometimes easy to forget, being part of a group all the time, that we are essentially the only people on these distant, scattered beaches; that we alone make these untouched islands our home. I am more comfortable walking barefoot across this beach with a drom of water collected from the creek than I am on any city street. Stumps and trees and rocks become my landmarks. It is not a life I want to live forever, but I will always miss the simplicity of gathering water from a stream, cooking over a fire and sleeping under a tree.

“There are no unsacred places – only sacred places, and desecrated places.” – Wendell Berry 

 

Returning to writing

 

I haven't written a blog post in nearly three months, but don't worry, I can explain.

I've been deep in the wilderness. Away from internet. Falling in love. Rafting rivers. Traveling to foreign countries. And, most recently, reacquainting myself with friends and family. It's been exhausting, though that's no excuse. But I plan to catch up here. Really, I do.

This week, I escaped into Vermont to read, write and get a healthy, much-needed dose of solitude and quiet. My friend Theo has very kindly lent me his one-room cabin in the woods (complete with internet and outdoor hot tub), and I find myself once again infatuated with this state. It feels more like home than anywhere else I've been.

After leaving Costa Rica on Oct. 5, I found myself dropped from the sky into another life: Massachusetts, a whirlwind of trying to see people, call people back, write them back, pay bills, run errands, check things off lists – pick up pieces I had left behind. Finally, I packed my car and drove north. I breathed a deep breath as I crossed the border, my car the only one on the highway, wind carrying sound, autumn light on the hills. Now I find myself where I needed to be: sitting in the last rays of sunlight on the front porch of a cabin, all alone. No sound but wind in leaves, a bird or two. Cold evening air creeping uphill. Sunlight horizontal through the last yellow beech leaves and the skeleton arms of maples. Tomorrow the sun will turn to rain, and I will wake up and start a fire in the woodstove and listen to water pelting the windows, and I will write. I will watch the brown stalks outside bend and shiver in the wind as the last leaves are pulled from the trees, and I will write.

Why I love Vermont, Part 2 (abbreviated):

1. Senator Bernie Sanders
2. Vermont Public Radio
3. There are no billboards in the state of Vermont
4. Montpelier is the only state capital without a McDonald's
5. Vermont will become the first state in the nation to enact universal health care
   
   
   
   
   
   
   

news spin

I read more news at this moment in my life than ever before, and perhaps more than I ever will again. And without fail, every day as I swim through a pool of newspapers and blogs and news sites, I am blown away by what I read. Unbiased journalist? How is that possible? The more you read, the easier it is to be opinionated. Outraged, even. I may strive to make my writing fair and balanced, but that's only part of the story. Regardless of a reporter's objectivity, news outlets demonstrate their bias, conscious or not, simply by what they choose to print and report on and what they ignore or overlook.

A lack of bias is ever more pertinent now that most journalists have personal or professional blogs, Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. I try to be very clear that mine are personal, but when you're a public figure, even at a local community paper, the line between personal and professional is easily blurred. Larger (and more tech-savvy) news organizations than mine give reporters strict guidelines on how they should conduct their online presence, not only so they don't broadcast photos of themselves swilling beer and flipping off the camera, but also to discourage them from publicly voicing any sort of bias or opinion that could compromise their objectivity as a reporter.

I understand that journalists chronicle history, and that objectivity is essential to this goal. But with the explosion of blogging and social media and the gradual influx of new forms of journalism, asking reporters to maintain a completely neutral online presence is, I think, unrealistic. So -- because I'm about to leave the newspaper and head back to the outdoor industry, here are the stories that blew me out of the water this week. Maybe I'll try to make this a weekly blog posting.

1. Two commonly used pesticides have been linked to the death of bees. While it's not news that both wild and managed bees are dying in untold numbers, and it certainly shouldn't be news that the pesticides used to kill "bad" insects are also killing the ones necessary to pollinate and propagate our food crops, the study published in Science does two things.

First, it gives credible scientific backing to something that had previously only been common sense. While common sense is good enough for some organic farmers, it doesn't stand up well in court and isn't enough for policy change. To move away from the use of harmful pesticides and save our natural pollinators, we need proof that many pesticides are doing more harm than good.

Second, it shows how wrong claims of "environmentally friendly" can be, and how easily a bit of clever marketing can dupe the general public into believing such claims. The relatively new pesticides studied by the bee researchers were heralded by their developers as being more environmentally friendly than previous pesticides. When you look at it that way, I guess death by Agent Orange was friendlier than death by machine gun.

2. Dartmouth hazing scandal goes national with Janet Reitman's Rolling Stone article. This may be only interesting to me since I live here, witness the Dartmouth culture firsthand, and have been following it and reporting on it since Day 1 -- or even before than, since my in-depth piece on sexual assault at the college was published last spring. Either way, the Rolling Stone piece is a compelling read and worthwhile expose on the entitlement and desensitization to suffering that feeds directly into Wall Street culture.

3. Along the same lines: the House GOP budget. Working as a journalist has forced me to pay attention to and understand issues that I previously skimmed over, like (strangely) our national budget and the politics behind it. All I can say is, really? I must live in a fairly insular bubble, because I cannot fathom WHO would buy into a proposal to cut health and human services while maintaining tax cuts for the super-rich. I'm thankful this budget is DOA when it hits the Senate, but nonetheless discouraged that we waste so much energy arguing about non-issues like tax cuts for the wealthy, health care for women and presidential religion that we ignore the issues that really matter -- like, say, food and water security.

Which brings me to number four:

4. The EPA proposes a monumental first step in curbing greenhouse gas emissions. While this spells trouble for dirty coal plants, it also encourages the use of natural gas, which encourages fracking. Oy vey.

5. This was not a news item from the most recent week, but it's perhaps the most interesting thing I've read all month, so I thought I'd end on a high note and share this fascinating story of giant, presumed- extinct insects clinging to life on an oceanic megolith higher than the Empire State Building. Go forth into the week, and know that the world is full of wonder.

"Sometimes the songs that we hear are just songs of our own"

I love poetry all by itself, but there's nothing like setting a poem to music to give it that elusive quality that sticks to your soul. Here are some of the most beautiful poem-songs I know, but I'm sure there are so many more out there, and I would love if you shared some of yours with me.

• Railroad Earth, by Railroad Earth (Their masterpiece, it always bring tears to my eyes.)
• Angel from Montgomery (I'm actually partial to the Old Crow Medicine Show version, but the original John Prine does it for me too. Definitely not Bonnie Raitt's take.)
• The Wild Hunt, by The Tallest Man on Earth (The singer's voice is grating at first, but it grows on you.)
• Helpless, by Neil Young (I like the Unplugged version – just Neil and a piano.)
• Furr, by Blitzen Trapper (Less musically beautiful than the others, perhaps, but I'm in love with the lyrical image of a boy turning into a wolf.)
• Shine on You Crazy Diamond, by Pink Floyd (Oh, those opening chords. They remind me of sitting on a forgotten beach under a sky full of glittering diamonds.)
• Brokedown Palace or Terrapin Station (Grateful Dead, and I must specify the version from Dead Set for the former. Both examples of Robert Hunter's lyrical genius.)
• I Quit My Job, by Old Man Leudecke (For the longest time, I had this song on my playlists and didn't know who it was. Then a friend with an iPhone showed me how to magically find information related to any song just by having the phone “listen” to a clip of it. Technology amazes me.)

That's all I can think of for now. Those are the songs that make my heart sing. 

Seeing

The world is full of magic things,

                                                                            patiently waiting
                                                                          for our senses to grow sharper.
                                                                         ~W.B. Yeats

I've spent years roaming this country, slowly, like a heavy rumbling engine, but my transience hasn't diminished the degree to which I value a sense of place. Rather, I think I've come to appreciate it more, because my time in any one place has been fleeting. Knowing you'll be leaving a place makes your time there more meaningful, perhaps, more poignant. More vivid.

Yet it's also true that to see a place for what it is, you usually have to spend some time there: wake up to different seasons, fall in love, drink the water, feel the soil. You must peel back the layers, get beyond the first impressions that jump out and grab hold of your senses. During the year I spent on Ebon island, half a mile wide by five miles long, I was amazed by how much more I saw with each passing week. After six months, I thought I knew every rock, insect and plant, and yet almost every day I noticed something that I'd previously overlooked. How well did the people who spent their entire lives there know the island? And if such a limited environment can produce such limitless inquiry, how can anyone, ever, truly know a city or a whole range of mountains?

At the Wildbranch Writing Workshop last year, Craig Childs told me that his job as a writer is to land in a place and physically experience it in as raw a way as possible, to tell the secrets of where he's been; to invoke that place in such a way that the reader is transported there.

Thinking back on my experience in the Marshall Islands, I wondered how that was possible. If you're only in a place for a short while, how can you discover its secrets? How can you see it clearly enough to put its essence on paper? I wrote in my journal: “I think I must train my senses to go deeper – at first, as a conscious effort when I need them to, and then all the time, until it becomes a habit, a new way of seeing the world.”

Later, a few days into the workshop, I wrote the following:

“I've now eaten at least six meals at a picnic table outside the dining area, and I just noticed the giant cobb oven twenty feet away. There must be a limit to the amount our senses can absorb at once, because it's not as if I was being unobservant. I noticed the nodding white bell flowers, the quality of the evening light, the silver bracelets on the wrist of the woman sitting across from me, the dinnertime chatter, rise and fall of voices, the way the feathery tops of ferns growing on the hillside formed tiers like terraced rice. I saw the blue sky through gaps in the branches of the spruce, the dark boughs swaying in the wind. I was engaged in good conversation. There is only so much our senses can absorb, and apparently, a cobb oven didn't make the cut. Still, I think I can train myself to notice more, and I think that once I do, I'll derive an even greater pleasure from this life. I once thought that the dissection and deconstruction of literature would detract from its beauty, rendering me unable to lose myself in it. But in fact, the opposite is true: I appreciate it and love good writing even more when it's well done. Perhaps so it is with a life of sensory fullness.”

Such powers of observation – and curiosity – can be dangerous. Autism has been described as a kind of sensory overload, and Craig, sitting at a table made of a giant slab of hammered wood, said that he could write pages and pages about something as simple as a table. Perhaps all good writers can, but that doesn't make it good writing. “Take me with a grain of salt,” Craig said. “I have to get rid of 90 percent of what I write. Writing is a process of omission.”

In jazz, they say, the most important notes are those that aren't played. In writing, perhaps some of the most important things we say are those we omit.

From my Wildbranch journal, again: “Just went for a walk in the woods barefoot as part of an assignment from Craig to focus on the sensory experience. For me, that was the cold, wet, bare earth sensing chills up my shin bones, which then inexplicably jumped to my forearms. The chill compelled me toward a sunny patch, where a moss-covered stump stood like a pedestal. If our senses tell our feet where to go, why have mine gone in the direction they have?”

In three weeks, I will be back in Alaska. 

workin overtime

 

At the age of 26 and with little professional training, I managed to get into a field that, if I live to be 80, I imagine I'll look back on much as a silent film star might look back on old Hollywood, or a logger upon the days when trees were the size of Volkswagens. It will be a relic of a different time, before daily print journalism changed irrevocably. Things change, of course, but the slow death of community journalism represents something greater than a single loss. Newspapers are as much a part of this country's heritage as cowboys, their history as romanticized as railroads'. We don't know what the industry or the medium will look like in 80 years, but there's no doubt that right now, it is on the verge of something monumental. And I get to witness it from the increasingly rare perspective of a daily community journalist.

The recent documentary Page One about the media desk of the New York Times is a good film for anyone interested in the future of journalism, but it focuses on the perspective of the big guys. While we as a society tend to place great value on world and national news – and the people who produce it – most of it doesn't affect us one bit. The world is becoming more globalized and it's important to know what's going on, we tell ourselves while reading the Wall Street Journal at the airport, sipping espresso and feeling sophisticated. Meanwhile, community journalism founders at our doorstep.

My foray into newspapers began with the comics of the Springfield Republican, spread out on my parents' mauve living room rug on Sunday mornings in a square of dusty sunlight. As I grew up, I began reading the paper voraciously, largely because there was always a copy sitting at the kitchen table and I found it impossible to eat a bowl of cereal without reading something. Newspapers were infinitely more interesting than the backs of cereal boxes. Later, I spent a year and a half at a company that digitized the pages of historic and current newspapers. When I was done, I could tell you the names of nearly every small town newspaper that had ever thrived in the U.S.. The names were lyrical, like the names of boats. The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. The Cleveland Plain-dealer. Oracle of the Day.

These newspapers told stories in a way no history book ever has. Our marketing line was that newspapers were the “first draft of history,” and after spending hours at my desk poring through digitized copies of old newspapers, I found it to be true. I could search nearly every newspaper printed between 1692 and 1922 for a single word or phrase. I tracked advertisements as they evolved from rewards for runaway slaves to automobiles to furs and Brillo cream. I found my ancestors in the obituaries and birth and marriage announcements. I saw the arc and fall of wars and of fashions, the bursts of breaking news – fires and strikes and scandals – the evolution of the form itself.

I worked there in 2007, when the newspaper industry was on the verge of a change still upending the world around us with no clear end in sight. No one knows what's going to happen. The company I worked for was weathering the storm pretty well, but they too worried about what the future would hold. Like the newspapers they dealt in, the company was built on the premise that people paid for reputable information. The internet is changing that.

Now I work for that dying breed, a daily print newspaper serving a largely rural area. My paper straddles the Vermont/New Hampshire border, and our proximity to Dartmouth College keeps us alive: it brings wealthy, educated people to a rural region, people who understand what's happening to community journalism and actively want to support it. We in the newsroom are derisive of the wealthy bubble they've created. But we're lucky.

I got in just in time. Twenty years from now, I don't know what the job I'm doing will look like or how many paid positions there will be. Right now, though, with the exception of the internet making research a thousand times easier, my job looks much like it has for decades. I approach strangers in the rain with a pen and narrow notebook poised, ready to scribble down the words that fly from their throat, hoping for the perfect quote, one that is regionally inflected, pointed, concise and witty all at once.

We cannot smoke in the office anymore, but we have John, who greets us every morning with a hearty “hey, gang” and looks like he belongs behind a smoky desk, and Jim, who is amicable but may win an award for most cynical man on the planet after David Carr dies. There is another John, who wears a plaid bowtie and pecks at the computer like its a typewriter. I try to be hard-edged, but it doesn't come naturally to me. I smile when I call an elderly woman on the phone and hear her delight in talking to the Valley News – her favorite out of the three local newspapers she and her husband get: us, plus the Claremont Eagle-Times and the Rutland Herald. She says she couldn't live without it.

Avid readers follow the staff writers and know our beats. I meet people at parties and introduce myself and they know who I am, recall an article I may have written months ago and reference it. “Which of my favorite Valley News writers are you?” asked a woman I met at a potluck several weeks ago. “Krista Langlois,” I said. “Oh, I'd hoped so!” she exclaimed, throwing her arms me like we were old friends. It's heartwarming to live in a place that values journalism, but is quick also to criticize, to keep us on our toes. Daily journalism operating out of a single, central location – rather than an unseen network of solitary bloggers sending off their work with a single key – is something to behold, a constant, churning machine. Reporters on deadline, the groan of the metal press, the bundles of papers loaded into trucks in the middle of the night, bleary eyed editors at their desks. It is nothing short of a daily miracle.

I've lived without news, too, for long stretches of time. I found it unsettling, in the Marshall Islands, to be stuck on a long, narrow crescent of sand and palm trees in the middle of the vast Pacific Ocean without the slightest idea of what was happening elsewhere in the world. Once a month (if I was lucky), I would get a photocopied newsletter mailed to me with the month's headlines: St. Louis Wins World Series. More Than 30 Die in Virginia Tech Shooting. Wildfires Rage in California. That was it. World War III could have been going on and I wouldn't have found out until months later. But I knew everything that was happening on my island. Who was having a baby and who had gotten into a fight and who was flying to Majuro and would bring back new clothes and bags of candy. Which fish were running. It was hard to wean myself off the daily dose of global and national news I had grown so accustomed to, because it seemed important to be aware of what was going on in the world, but I knew what was going on in my world, and in the end that mattered more.

Blinking cursor,
you are but a blip on this vast plain of glowing white,
you mean nothing to me!

 

What would you do if you won the lottery?

It's a rhetorical question for me, because I never play the lottery. But if I did, I'd live simply. I'd pay off my student debt. I'd buy some land and either build a little house or fix one up. I'd definitely build a treehouse. I'd travel frugally.

That's about it. If I won the lottery, I'd still work as a writer. This is what my ideal week would look like.

Monday – write for nine hours + one hour bikram yoga + 20 min. bills/paperwork

Tuesday – write for four hours + four hours of wood turning or throwing clay (or other creative pursuit) + two hours of cleaning/repairing/laundry/house work

Wednesday – write for four hours + six hours in the garden (including bees) + movie night

Thursday – write for nine hours + music practice/playing in the evening. Also: correspondence (email, letters, phone chats)

Friday – volunteer in the a.m. + outdoor exercise (biking, hiking, skiing, paddling)

Saturday – lazy breakfast with eggs, coffee and crossword + 1 hour errands + socialize, play games, whatever

Sunday – write for four hours + bake or preserve + cook big meal for big group dinner or potluck

I do not mean to suggest that I'd set any kind of a rigid schedule for myself, or that I'd be happy following one. (Although I do like the idea of Sunday being bread-baking day or Tuesday being laundry-day). And there are seasonal variations: a productive garden would require more than six hours a week in the early summer, and living in a rural home would require extra time in the fall to split and stack wood. A million unforeseen things would come up. This scenario doesn't really leave any room for a toddler. It doesn't account for a lot of things.

But it's a good exercise anyway. Not only because it offers an escape into a daydream, but because it helps me realize what I really want to be doing and what I value. Seeing my ideal life on paper can help me shape my real life to be a little more like it. And it makes me realize too that it's possible to get everything done that needs to get done in a single week (without letting things pile up and become unmanageable) as well as a lot of the things I'd like to do.

Also notice that my hours of writing come to exactly 30. Some countries embrace a 30-hour work week. “Working less so all are working,” the French call it. There are economists who say that fewer hours forces people to work more efficiently with the time they have. In the Netherlands, employers are required to allow their employees to cut their own hours without reducing their hourly wage or losing benefits. In 1937, a 30-hour work week was even proposed by a U.S. Senator – from Alabama no less! (The only one I can think of who'd suggest such a thing today is Bernie Sanders. And admittedly, the senator-turned-Supreme Court Justice who once proposed the idea was also briefly a KKK member.)

But it's been done in the U.S. In 1930, the Kellogg company (the cereal makers) offered employees the option of a six-hour day. Those who chose it reported – like workers in Scandinavian countries –that they felt more satisfied and happy even though they had slightly less money. Even better, they often used the extra time off pursuits that built community or deepened their family connections.

Google “30-hour work week” and you'll find plenty to read. Or just check out Less Work, More Life by John de Graaf (and make sure to follow the link through to Wendell Berry's response) or The Gospel of Consumption by Jeffrey Kaplan.

It's a little bit disheartening to realize that some semblance of my dream world would be possible if the society I lived in had different values. It's slightly disconcerting to wonder if my values are really that much different from the majority of my countrymen. (Are they?). I don't think I'm going to end up moving to France or Denmark. But it's good to have something to work toward. 

¡Social writing!

Or, lessons in putting words together.

(Disclaimer: I am writing this alone at my desk at 11 p.m.)

I've always thought of writing as a solitary enterprise, something you do in a quiet spot, like an antique desk bathed in dusty afternoon sunlight or a cabin tucked away in the woods. But earlier this summer at the Wildbranch Writing Workshop I was introduced to an entirely new concept: writing as a social activity.

At the workshop, I was incredibly fortunate to be working with Craig Childs. If I had the power to temporarily assume someone else's life, Craig's would be high on my list (along with the frontwoman from Rubblebucket Orchestra). Not only did Craig write his first several books while wandering the desert between river guiding seasons and proceed to spend years living in a teepee, he now makes a living traveling to remote places and writing about them. And he's very good at it.

He also worked at a small-town newspaper for a few years (ahem, ahem) and learned there the valuable lesson that years of procrastinating in college never really teaches you: write fast, and write clear. Even if you're crafting the next Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, you'll never get anywhere if you mull and elaborate over every word, thinking that the mechanics of the universe hinge upon your nailing the flow and meaning of a single sentence. Writing for a newspaper, you learn that sometimes your best writing comes when you're forced to do it NOW.

Lesson number one is speed and clarity. I'm working on that. Lesson number two – the one more foreign to me – is that a writer can feed off the energy of his or her surroundings like a musician playing for a crowd. Sometimes inspiration hits you over the head and you are imbued with the gift of writing like a madman at 2 a.m. But depending on those moments to produce good writing is like waiting for a lightning strike to power your house. There is much to be said for the tired advice that writing is more about persistence than inspiration, but conversely, brooding alone over your laptop is neither glamorous nor good for your health. Sometimes you need a change.

Those inferences are mine, not Craig's. Craig, I believe, simply being an avid, AVID writer who takes notes everywhere and stops for nothing, was writing at a bar one night, sitting in the corner, channeling the energy around him into his words. A friend (or a stranger at the bar?) bet him he couldn't write a page on an assigned subject by the time the friend finished a rocks glass of tequila. Craig did – and at Wildbranch he read us what he wrote, a beautiful piece about surfing in California.

Eight hours later, I was carrying a six-pack into the Sterling College library – a lovely library that stays unlocked 24 hours a day and welcomed us to borrow books on the honor system. Around nightfall on a clear summer evening, about fifteen fledgling writers congregated outside the little library with laptops and beer bottles. Then Craig walked out of the twilight with a liter of Patron. Like children following the pied piper, we filed after him into the library, arranging ourselves in a small room – on window sills, on the floor with backs against bookshelves, at tables, on a couch. Craig put the bottle of tequila on a coffee table, deliberately poured himself a cup, sipped from it, and said, GO.

We wrote feverishly. Nonstop. Fed off the sound of thirty hands hitting 900 keys rapid-fire. I could almost feel people's thoughts shooting out from their heads. It was intense.

We did it four or five times, competing to see who could write the most, until Craig's already ruddy face was as rosy as a tomato from the tequila.

The writing from that night needed some polishing, but it was charged with the electricity of a room of creative people. Combine lesson #1 with lesson #2, stir, and the result is magic.

The next morning, as we did every day, those of us in Craig's class walked out to some mosquito-ridden nook in the woods, took off our shoes at his bidding and scattered barefoot with pens and paper to commune with nature and donate a pint of blood to Vermont's mosquito population. That writing was good too, in an entirely different way.

As in most everything, a balance seems best. Master the art of writing quickly and concisely. Go at times alone into the wild places, and at other times surround yourself with the noise and human energy of a city street, a subway car, a party or a bar or a group of other writers. And take notes.

Writers at the Montague Bookmill.

At Dartmouth, Erdrich Talks About Rewriting 'The Antelope Wife'

Reprinted with permission from the Valley News. May not be reproduced or distributed. Photo courtesy of Richard Stamelman.

By Krista Langlois
Valley News Staff Writer 

   Walking out of Dartmouth's Cook Auditorium into a gray drizzle last Wednesday, a woman who had just listened to Louise Erdrich reading her yet-unpublished story, The Ojibwe Week, blinked a few times.
   "I hardly knew whether it would be day or night out here," she said to no one in particular, seemingly shaking the vivid images out of her head before tugging up the hood of her rain jacket and walking off briskly.
   As is often the case for Erdrich's fans, many of the 200 or so people who gathered in Hanover to hear her read were transported, feeling later as if they'd just emerged from a movie theater and were slightly disconcerted to find themselves still in New Hampshire and not, in fact, carried off to some other place. Though colored with dreams and folklore, the world Erdrich creates again and again in her writing is perfectly recognizable, even ordinary. But it's so well imagined that when we put the book down -- or when Erdrich's unhurried, melodic voice stops reading from it -- we see our own reality in a slightly different light.
   "Her books are haunting," said Dartmouth senior Phoebe Gardener after the reading. "One summer, the summer I was reading The Antelope Wife, I literally had to stop reading it for a while and come back to it because it was too real for me."
   It was a story from The Antelope Wife that Erdrich chose for a public reading as part of her week-long fellowship at Dartmouth -- but not from the book she published under that name in 1998. Instead, in a nod to oral storytelling traditions, Erdrich is in the middle of rewriting the acclaimed book from a different angle. The Ojibwe Week is a story from that effort; it will be published in Granta magazine.
   "Stories are like seeds that the rest of the book can grow out of," Erdrich said. She said she liked the story The Antelope Wife began as, but didn't care for the way the characters' stories unfolded. So she's rewriting, using the original story as a germ from which to retell the greater tale.
   "It's still called The Antelope Wife," Erdrich said during an interview later in the day. "It's the same story but goes off in a different direction than the original book."
   A 1976 Dartmouth graduate and author of dozens of novels, books of poetry, children's books and non-fiction, Erdrich has returned to the school many times, most recently to serve as a Montgomery fellow from April 30 to May 8.
   "I really feel this profound connection to the beauty here," she said. "I've returned over and over and over so that I really have friendships that go back for many, many years with people (in the Upper Valley)."
   Much has changed over the years; when Erdrich graduated in 1976, her class was the first to have matriculated women.
   "It's more diverse in every way (now)," Erdrich said. "I think that the most lasting and most wonderful change is that I see a lot more ease and fellowship and intellectual companionship. ... When I was here that was somewhat true, but there was a great deal to get through in that changeover. I feel now that I was very lucky to be a part of it."
   The Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Endowment brings Nobel laureates, Pulitzer Prize, Oscar, Emmy and Grammy winners to Dartmouth to meet with undergraduates and sit in on classes, offering one-on-one interactions that can be as rewarding for the fellow as for the students.
   "I feel I have hundreds of names and faces in my head," Erdrich said. "There are gatherings every day where students -- mainly undergraduates -- get together with the fellow and ask questions and exchange thoughts and information and, really, sparks fly. It's a wonderful idea, this idea that you bring someone in -- not particularly me -- but this person comes parachuting into Dartmouth College and students get to come and ask any question they want."

   It would take some digging to find a critic who actually criticizes Erdrich, with The New York Times reviews over the years calling her work "masterful" and "emotionally resonant" and literary great Toni Morrison writing that its "beauty ... saves us from being devastated by its power."
   As an author, Erdrich is frequently categorized: she's called a Native American writer (one of the first to transcend the genre to appeal to a broad audience, a claim she humbly shrugs off); a feminist author (she creates strong, almost ferocious female characters imbued with intuition and sexuality); and a writer about minorities and the oppressed who's equally embraced by critics, professors and book club readers. But like most people, she dislikes the labels.
   "Literature lives on if it has something in it that's immediate to all human beings no matter what your background," she said after her reading. "I think that the human thirst for narrative is insatiable. We yearn for that story."
   Her success may also lie in her background, which has given her a wealth of practical experiences to draw upon as well as an emotional aptitude that manifests itself in her achingly flawed characters.
   "It's hard to write comedy into books where your characters are also heartbreaking," she said. "But I hope to God there's humor in (my) books."
   Likewise, it's difficult to write about Erdrich's literary success without also referencing her own somewhat heartbreaking personal life; though she writes mostly fiction, the two go hand in hand. Erdrich's resilience, the guarded, composed face she puts on in public coupled with the raw emotion and poignant humanity her own experiences have lent to her characters affords readers a sense of intimacy with her, an adoration that goes beyond her talent as a writer.
   Born in 1954 to parents of Ojibwe (or Chippewa), French and German ancestry, Erdrich grew up in North Dakota, where her parents taught at a Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school. Her grandfather, who lived on a nearby reservation, told her Ojibwe stories. Her deep connection to the Great Plains is apparent in her stories, in which the land is always an important character.
   After Dartmouth, Erdrich worked a variety of blue collar jobs, from traffic flagger to truck stop waitress.
   "I learned so much from those jobs," she said. "When you've got a job that you think is going nowhere and you're really tired of the people around you driving you crazy, just take notes. Every conversation you hear is unrepeatable."
   Later, after getting a Masters of Arts from Johns Hopkins University, Erdrich returned to Dartmouth as a writer-in-residence. She began to collaborate with her future husband, the late writer Michael Dorris, who was chair of the Native American Studies program there, and the two began gaining recognition for their work together.
   Erdrich and Dorris became a creative power couple, beloved in the literary world but bound for tragedy in their personal lives. After collaborating on The Broken Cord, a book exposing the prevalence of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome in native populations, their adopted son Abel, who was born with FAS, was hit by a car and died at the age of 23.
   When asked if giving a voice to the people affected by FAS has helped alleviate the problem in the past two decades, Erdrich said it's hard for her to know.
   "I think it's unquestionably raised awareness," she said. "The knowledge of what happens during pregnancy has come a very long way from what it was 30 years ago. So yes, I think that book made the story very human."
   Erdrich and Dorris divorced in 1995; in 1997, Dorris committed suicide. The following year, Erdrich published The Antelope Wife.
   ---
   If the decision to rewrite a book first imagined in a time of such grief was taxing for Erdrich, the audience last week didn't see it. Indeed, with three of her daughters in the audience (including Aza Erdrich Dorris, who will graduate from Dartmouth next month), Erdrich seemed as pleased to be reading her story as the audience was to be listening to it.
   Many watched with fond half-smiles, delighting at Erdrich's occasional jokes and the grace with which she gestured with one hand, like an orchestra conductor, while holding her manuscript in the other.
   Erdrich began the evening by welcoming the crowd in Ojibwan, which she said she is "a very poor but enduring speaker of." Then she launched into the reading. Told from several perspectives -- a trend in Erdrich's writing -- the story follows the familiar characters of Klaus, Richard Whiteheart Beads, Rozin and Sweetheart Calico through a week in contemporary Minneapolis.
   Like much of Erdrich's work, the story takes on a feeling of magical realism, with the stuff of everyday life -- stopping by a bakery for a treat while bringing the kids to school, grabbing a beer after a day's work -- seamlessly intertwined with ancient dreams and the echoes of Ojibwe myths.
   Montgomery Endowment director Richard Stamelman, in his introduction before the reading, described Erdrich as a writer who "emerges from her native background and the region and history of her people" with a unique style that blends the "magical past and hardscrabble present" through an intimate "knowledge of land and its deep roots in dreams and myth."
   In vivid imagery, Erdrich recalls the character of Sweetheart Calico, wearing a T-shirt that could belong to anyone in their low-income housing development (black, with an airbrushed eagle, wolf and buffalo charging under a sky filled with lightening against the backdrop of an American flag); a silent woman who disappears without a trace and leaves antelope tracks instead of human ones.
   The story is partly about this seductive, mysterious woman -- the antelope wife -- but more than that it's a nuanced record of the lives of six people living together in a cheap apartment in Minneapolis, joined by a shared past. And it's about language: "how the Ojibwe language has been invaded in some ways by European concepts like the industrial work week," Erdrich said.
   Other images jump out from the story: a dog described as "secondhand ... a used, thrift store dog;" and a vision of Richard Whiteheart Beads and Klaus covertly stacking rolls of environmentally hazardous carpet from an shopping mall in an abandoned barn.
   Though most people in the audience had never seen a barn standing alone on the desecrated prairie, filled from floor to ceiling with rolls of carpeting, the image came to mind without difficulty: the two men gingerly putting the last roll into place on a Friday afternoon, trying to avoid a "carpet quake" so that they could pocket their paycheck and go get a beer.
   The Ojibwe Week is not a traditional story with a beginning and an end, a plot that carries the characters, but a series of illustrations, a parade of detailed observations of scenes from everyday life. After 45 minutes, Erdrich, standing tall and serene with her auburn hair pulled back into a beaded barrette, finished the story. She clasped her hands and smiled a close-lipped smile.
   ---
   Today, Erdrich lives in Minneapolis, caring for her youngest daughters, writing while they're at school and helping run a bookstore, Birchbark Books -- a venture she said is "not a viable business if you want to become a wealthy person at all."
   "But when people want to be in a bookstore, they really want to really be in a bookstore," she continued. "And the thing that I think people really love about small, independent bookstores is you never know what to expect. They're eccentric, and every single one is different."
   Erdrich says she understands why people order from Amazon. "When you need a book and it's winter up here and you don't want to leave, you order it online," she said, though she noted that one can order online from a small bookseller as easily as one can from Amazon.
   "Amazon does not hold readings. Amazon does not support literacy in the community. Amazon does not have a physical place or presence where you can congregate in order to talk about books," she said.
   It's the culture that orders from Amazon and gets its stories from nationally syndicated media that Erdrich rebels against in her books. If there is something that characterizes her writing beyond a certain lyrical style or a predilection to write about Native American characters in the modern world, it is her insistence that landscape and history and culture derive from a specific place, and that we must somehow find a way to hold onto that.
   "I think people cling to their differences and those things won't ever be erased entirely," she said.
   ---
   Krista Langlois can be reached at klanglois@vnews.com or 603-727-3305