Full moon Friday, and November is drawing to a close.

It’s halfway through Novel Writing November

The Transformative Power of Our Stories

I recently was interviewed by Katharine Hansen’s excellent blog, A Storied Career, on the transformative power of our stories, making a living through the language arts, and how Transformative Language Arts has helped people create careers doing work they love and helping their communities find and share stories. Check the interview out, and read other interviews, articles and amazing insights on this site, which explores the intersection of various aspects of storytelling, including writing, blogging, and speaking stories for individuals, organizations, communities, careers and callings.

Kathy Hansen’s Blog to explore traditional and postmodern forms/uses of storytelling.

The Imaginary Friend of the Page

Here’s an essay I recently wrote on writing as a spiritual practice, posted at the very fine The Spirit of  a Woman website. The website is full of stories that inspire and question, open us up to possibilities and help us see where we’ve traveled.

Needle in the Bone: Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg’s New Blog

My book-in-process, Needle in the Bone , explores the against-all-odds stories of a Holocaust survivor, Lou Frydman, and a Polish resistance fighter, Jarek Piekalkewicz, who each started their lived in Poland and ended up being fast friends in Kansas. Based on extensive interviews, historical research and my own reflections on impossible questions about human nature and history, this book unfolds the astonishing survival stories of each man, and how each summoned the courage and vision to create a new life in a new land. Check out my blog on various discoveries I’m making along the way.

Photo: Jarek Piekalkewicz in his old Polish unit of the British army uniform.

In Search of Goodness: Diane Silver’s New Blog

Our own Diane Silver has embarked upon a brave and essential project: searching for goodness through a year-long blog mapping her search in addition to interviews with all the usual and unusual suspects, from evangelical Christians to Sufi leaders to hate group researchers to community activists to artists and poets and to people from many other walks of life. Please visit her blog, which she subtitles “365 days to answer an impossible question.”

Recent posts include an extensive interview on why we’re alive, the role of poetry in goodness and praise for all things sacred with Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, posts on travel and goodness, radical kindness and pitfalls of righteousness. Visit to add your own thoughts and questions, and remember, it’s all good!

My Own Private J.D. Salinger

The recent death of J.D. Salinger motivated me to read The Catcher in the Rye again, turning back to not only a great work of literature but to a part of my life that felt like a movie I must have watched rather than my own past. I found my dog-eared paperback in the basement and, upon opening it fondly, found  hundreds of penciled notes in the margins, most of which I couldn’t make out. Who WAS the person who took such copious notes? (Unlike the marginalia, I had neatly written the date on the fly leaf, 1974, just below my (then) maiden name.)

I couldn’t fathom why I would write so many explanations of the text, why I would circle and underline to such an annoying degree, and then it hit me: I didn’t just read Catcher in the Rye. I taught it! Oh right! I had taught college English off and on in a previous life. It sounded so academic and optimistic because that’s what I was — optimistic, certain I would teach and write for a living. But when faced with teaching composition to practical, world-weary non- traditional collegians, my confidence disappeared like the cash in Holden Caulfield’s pocket. One student said to me of Holden, “Oh why doesn’t he just get a job.”

There were many myths about Salinger the writer. Among them: he would hang each chapter on a clipboard and perch all the clipboards on nails inside his writing shed, so he could walk around and make a change here, another one there. I don’t know if this was true — I heard many other stories about him. But I wonder if I had written my journal on clipboards and if I could find clipboard  circa 1974, what would I change?  More detail, yes. A stronger voice, more dramatic plot points, and less ambiguity.

Invoking the Invisible: March Write From Your Life

Reprinted from Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg’s blog.

For a podcast of this month’s column, please click here.

One of the main things we writers do is to make the invisible — at least the unnoticed — visible. Through images that speak to our senses of touch, taste, smell, sight and sound, we create traveling moments that can land in a reader and listener, and unfurl to invoke meaning and insight, inspiration and wonder. As winter just starts snowshoeing around the corner into this time of thaw and surprise (the first snowdrop! spring geese returning!), we’re also witnessing a time when the previously invisible is being made visible.

This month’s writing prompt is about how we can widen our peripheral vision and see more of the world as it’s really happening, even if we go about it in some inside-out ways. One such inside-out way is a writing exercise I found in Deena Metzger’s excellent book, Writing For Your Life. She suggests writing what you didn’t see today, and see where that leads. Here is my on-the-spot attempt today, something that surprised me when I wrote it because the first word that popped into my mind, “cousins,” wasn’t one I was expecting, and yet it opened the door to writing about the past:

Today I didn’t see my cousins, long gone from my life

decades past when the family exploded apart. I didn’t see

my father’s picture although I thought of him, seven years dead

but still telling me, his hands turned up and outward,

“What can you do?” when life gives me bad news.

I didn’t see the house where I grew up, hidden now

by aging trees and ribbons of distance. I didn’t see a cloud

in the sky or a deer licking the spilled bird seed under the feeder.

I didn’t see the wind, but I caught the shaking skeleton

of last summer’s sunflowers. I didn’t see the particulars of who

I was up until this point although I’m surrounded by the evidence.

Another writing prompt you can try is a sentence stem, that is, part of a sentence and then you fill in the blanks, such as any of these:

When I wasn’t looking………

I used to see…….but now it’s just……

The world shows me…….and I answer………

When I was sleeping………

If I turn a new direction………

Filling in the words is a great way to bring to the surface whatever is around us even if we’re not cognizant of it at the moment. So much of good writing comes out of tilting our usual thinking and seeing, perceiving and understanding, so that the words come out differently. Wishing you a new unfolding into the words that show you the visible and the unnoticed in ways that illuminate what you already know.

The Courage of Miep Gies

In addition to the well-known story of Anne Frank and her diary, writers and those who love books should consider the pivotal role of Miep Gies in ensuring that we know about Anne Frank in the first place. Miep was the woman who, among a handful of brave souls, helped to hide the Frank family (and others) in the Secret Annex. She was also the one who discovered the pages of Anne’s “diary” (actually, a loose collection of pages) on the floor of the Annex after the families were taken away. Anne hid her writings in her father’s briefcase and the arresting “officer” (an ordinary bureaucrat), stupidly threw the pages on the floor in his search for valuables. He missed the real treasure.  Miep gathered up the pages and kept them, without reading a word, until she learned that Anne had perished. That’s when she handed them over the Otto Frank and thus began a long process that took Anne’s words from the handwritten page to a published book that continues to influence people to this day. There are those who write and there are those who protect and preserve the written word,  who deliver it from the womb of inspiration and bring it into the light.

Anne Frank and the Craft of Writing

If you thought that Anne Frank was a gifted young woman who spontaneously wrote a diary that changed the world, think again. Anne deliberately crafted her journal as a work of art and had a strong sense of audience when doing so. I strongly recommend Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife by Francine Prose for anyone interested in how Anne crafted this work as a writer, hoping it would be published when World War II was over. In fact (a surprise to those of us who thought her diary was primarily the thoughts of a “young girl”)  she was a consummate editor who rewrote significant portions of the diary after having put it aside for an entire year. I plan to write more on Anne’s and how her diary, found littered on the floor of the Secret Annex, represents a valuable lesson in creating art.

Book Review of The Calligrapher’s Daughter, a new novel by Eugenia Kim

By Lucia Orth, www.luciaorth.com

Deep knowledge of culture and the story of a girl’s yearning and survival make Eugenia Kim’s The Calligrapher’s Daughter a captivating read.

Kim, the daughter of Korean immigrants, sets her novel in early 20^th-century Korea, from the time of the Japanese invasion to the liberation of Korea from the Japanese in 1945.

“I learned I had no name on the same day I learned fear.” The story is Najin’s–as she comes to be called–born at the time Korea was made a colony of Japan. Najin is a bold girl in a family who wanted a boy.

Kim’s language is lovely. “They cannot suppress forty-five centuries of a people in one season of violence,” says Najin’s father. When the girl sees her young teacher sitting in desolation after a night’s visit by Japanese soldiers, “The morning shadows made her appear as translucent and still as a block of salt.” Many of the novel’s passages have this poetry and resonance, often Biblical in scope.

Kim’s knowledge of Korean culture is woven through the scenes, as in the One Hundred Day Naming Ceremony for Najin’s baby brother, when a set of objects is arrayed before the boy to foretell his professional destiny. His mother has included a wooden cross; his father a bronze signet to represent his own dedication to scholarship, painting, and calligraphy; the baby’s choice, whatever he grasps, will be his future.

Kim creates an effective architecture of three parts including letters Najin receives, first when she becomes an inside observer of Korea’s Imperial Court and then later as she learns of her arranged marriage–“A good Christian with modern thinking,” her future husband is described to her.

As she gains the education and knowledge she craves, Najin learns independence and boldness from her country’s suffering under Japanese occupation.

Against the political background of the Japanese in Korea, Kim weaves a story of love, endurance, and survival.

The Calligrapher’s Daughter is one of three great novels of Korea published in the last year.

Lark and Termite, by Jayne Anne Phillips, is an amazing book with the structure of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and set, like that novel, over a period four days. The year is 1959, and the novel deals with the repercussions of an atrocity during the early months of the Korean War. Like all Phillips’s work, it is lyrically beautiful.

The short novel The Ginseng Hunter, by Jeff Talarigo, is set in the present, at the turn of the twenty-first century along the Tumen River, which separates Northeast China and North Korea. The ginseng hunter of the title hears a tale of tragedy from a young North Korean prostitute, a story that takes the reader deep into the lives of North Koreans today. Although the author cannot name those who told him of their lives in North Korea, he and his family lived for almost fourteen years in Japan, and his understanding of the geography and people make for a powerful read.

These three novels offer fine prose, extraordinary stories, and the human faces and lives behind the history and politics of the Koreas. They give a sense of Korea’s proud history and desperate survival in the 20^th century. The Calligrapher’s Daughter, especially, offers the reader a great love and understanding of the people–of what they have endured in the last one hundred years, of both what has been lost and what has survived.

The Calligrapher’s Daughter, Eugenia Kim, Henry Holt, 2009

Lark and Termite, Jayne Anne Phillips, Knopf, 2009

The Ginseng Hunter, Jeff Talarigo, Nan A. Talese, 2008

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