Bread Loaf-Orion Environmental Writers Conference: A Retrospective

Last week I became a Bread Loaf convert. Specifically, a Bread Loaf-Orion Environmental Writers Conference convert. Every writer should attend this conference. Actually, not just writers. The conference was nearly 7 days of workshops, craft classes, laughter, and lots of in-depth conversation between poets, essayists, and fiction writers, but also people like soil scientists, mussel biologists (or people married to one), ethnoecologists, environmental science professors, geologists, oceanographers, and so many more. This cross-seeding of disciplines was the key to its success. That, and it benefited from not having any fellowships (except need-based) or work-study positions as the regular Bread Loaf (or the Mother Loaf or No-Orion [Norion] as we took to calling it) does, which removed any competitive, hierarchical atmosphere, to the benefit of both accomplished and beginning writers.

It was the most satisfying writing conference I've ever attended. Our teachers gave an astounding amount of attention to our workshop submissions, meeting with us individually to go through what we'd written and continuing conversations about our work and ambitions in various areas, whether in writing or research. I will forever be indebted to Alan Weisman, whose books I have always loved, but whose talents and attention as a teacher and mentor have begun to heal my bruised writer's heart. (Sidenote: more about that subject forthcoming in Full Grown People.)

But pictures! Because this blog is where I attempt to curtail my babbling tendencies. Speaking of babbling, this was my favorite part of the conference:

This stream is a short walk through an open field -- where the editor-in-chief of Orion magazine, who is an ornithologist, led birds walks early several mornings -- and right in this spot I could sit under these old woods on a large flat rock and listen to the water rushing and tumbling. I haven't done that in many years. It made me awfully homesick for Montana but I think I might have fallen in love with Vermont just a tiny bit that day.


Being able to walk in the woods helped compost and root the madly rushing ideas that made the conference so invigorating. Two people in my workshop and I got not-quite-lost coming back from Robert Frost's writing cabin, tramping through deep woods and a lot of muck. We found this map. Luckily they were better at reading maps than I am because it made me dizzy.

What was awesome was that we were slogging around in a lot of mud, which was a new experience since another member of our workshop was a soil scientist and his essay was a fascinating look at the life and biology of mud; one of we three walkers was a serious birder and taught me (who knows zilch about birds) to look for them and at them in new ways; and while he was trying to show me where elusive birds were I was remembering the essay of another workshop member, which was about his guiding experience in the Tetons and teaching people to see in new ways.

I've been at good writing conferences before, but nothing that recharged my brain synapses in quite this way.

I also just oiled my beloved boots, which was necessary because I forgot to bring my waterproof sandals with me and my boots spent the entire conference either soaking on my feet or like this:

By the way -- fires! It was chilly and rainy the whole time so they lit fireplaces in all the buildings. The parts of me that aren't Russian are completely Scottish at heart. There is nothing that makes me happier than being able to walk in the rain and come back inside to a fire (even if not peat).

Except, also, of course, this.

Neither of those people is me, but good conversation, long walks, and soul-restoring scenery sums up what makes my life feel most whole. Seven days of this and I feel like a much better writer, but also a better friend, thinker, human being, and inhabitant of the planet.

Driving away from Bread Loaf on Sunday, I was surprised by a feeling I thought I'd never experience again: that a new place had found a home in my heart.

Writer's Life Project, a Blog Hop, or Hoppy Blog

I was awfully flattered to get an email from Debra Liese asking if I'd like to participate in "Writer's Life Project," a blog hop in which writers get to talk about our current projects, our writing endeavors, and how we work. I usually try to resist the urge to casually engage in this kind of conversation because I've learned that the more I talk about my writing projects, the less I do them. But I live in a rural area and have little opportunity to chat with other real-life writers about my work, so this is a rare opportunity.

Debra and I connected after she read my essay "Acts of Faith" on Full Grown People, about my atheism and intermittent longing for faith. (It also has Russia in it. Russia is a great backdrop for a lot of my work.) We've exchanged many emails since then, about atheism and agnosticism and faith and our mutual love of L.M. Montgomery's Emily of New Moon series (if you like Anne of Green Gables at all, you'll like Emily Starr's story even more) and I'm an enthusiastic reader of her work. Her blog about creativity, which is published on Pyschology Today, is titled Ink: Creativity for Cowards. Right up my alley!

Enough babbling. If you want to read my essays, many of them are accessible through my website. The point here is to answer these questions, which I'm thrilled to do because they're topics I think about a lot. So let's go digging in the scrap pile:

1. What am I writing or working on?

Since last year I've been working on Against the Grain. It's a memoir about my experience of modern motherhood, which included a deep depression for nearly a year, and about trying to regain a sense of self without resorting to medication. I resorted instead to what I privately call my "competence project." It started with teaching myself to can and preserve food for winter, in response to thinking about the competence of my pioneer ancestors, and my Russian grandmother, and how I failed to live up to their standards. I branched out to making myself slaughter a rooster (ugh), taking a chainsaw and logging safety class (yikes), and several other endeavors, and have mostly focused on rustic woodworking, which I fell in love with. For this, I switch between woodworking, writing, and volunteering at a local hardwoods sawmill. Think Claire Dederer's Poser crossed with Shop Class as Soulcraft.

At the same time, I dug out an old manuscript: My Russian Condition, a travel memoir about my lifelong relationship with Russia. Finding it wasn't as crappy as I'd concluded it was several years ago, I've been revising it.

I am a regular contributor to Full Grown People, which focuses on personal essays and is my favorite nonfiction magazine (not least because its founder, Jennifer Niesslein, is the kind of editor all writers dream of), so I've always got something new in the works. I'm also working on a very long-form essay titled My Jewish Problem, about my Jewish blood, lack of Jewish identity, and the resilience of anti-Semitism. And I write a lot on sustainability and environmental issues. This week I am attending the Bread Loaf-Orion Environmental Writers Conference, which is very exciting and where I hope to learn a lot.

And until an agent snaps up my mystery novel and finds a publisher excited about the series I've planned on the strength of it, I'll continue tinkering with The Commutative Property of Addition.

2. How does my work differ from others of its genre?

In my nonfiction, I focus hard on a few things. One is running a deep plumb line into any idea that comes my way. I get frustrated when reading essays that have beautiful language and innovative metaphors, but in which the thoughts still stay at the surface level. I might not always find the most sparkling phrasing, but I don't let up on an essay or book until I feel like I've excavated the subject from every angle I can personally explore. As a kid, I was deeply devoted to geology and paleontology; my writing has a similar devotion to bedrocks and geological layers and long, long perspectives of time and humanity. I do adore analysis and logic, and using those skills to heighten a piece of creative work is both a challenge and a privilege.

In my mystery novel I'm aiming for the literary mystery sphere, a cross between Louise Penny and Kate Atkinson. Is it different from what others do? It's a very character-driven work, with a strong sense of place. I draw on my past experience as a travel writer, and the protagonist is in fact a travel writer. Her sidekick -- the Nero Wolfe to her Archie Goodwin -- is a mathematician, which I wanted to do because I was a mathematics undergrad and have a deep passion for the subject, and you can't beat it for forcing people to think logically. Plus, they're estranged half-sisters with serious issues and troublesome mothers, which is great fun. I think so, anyway. And it takes place at a paleontology dig in Eastern Montana. All my favorite things!

3. Why do I write what I do?

Is that a trick question? Maybe not. I wrote the mystery because I love reading mysteries, and also, frankly, I thought it might be a good way to make a living as a writer. Still, I couldn't have done it if I didn't enjoy the genre and wasn't enthralled with my characters and the setting.

Nonfiction is more complicated. Like all writers, I write what comes to me, what inspires me. But I also have issues I care about to such an extent that they help define who I am: environmental degradation, women's rights, child abuse of varying stripes, education. My writing can range from journalism-type articles on teaching mathematics to more literary works on psychological abuse or, to pick a recent example, musing on the effect that a lack of sidewalks (and having to drive everywhere) has on both our physical health and our mental ability to think flexibly and find common ground.

I've been driven by environmental issues a lot recently, maybe because I have kids or maybe because I have always believed in having a relationship with the earth beneath our feet and the air we breathe. And it's become clear that even the best scientific research or most poetic writing isn't making a dent in the public consciousness. So my focus is veering: how does a writer help create a geological shift in the way we relate to the planet and to each other?

4. How does my writing process work?

Is that another trick question?

Okay, years ago when I was fresh out of my MFA program, I had all sorts of regulations for myself: how long to write, when to write, how many words to produce per day. I have yet to find a fellow living, breathing writer for whom any of those systems actually work.

In any case, it all flew out the window once I had kids. Because like many people, I started my writing life setup like this, thinking this scene is exactly what it would look like until I ended up with dementia and in a home where my ungrateful children had put me. Lovely, right?

After my first child was born, this is what my work space turned into:

Here is my saving grace: twice a week, for seven hours, I have a nanny come. I know, I know, it sounds like an immense amount of time. Most of it, though, is eaten up with my day job as a freelance textbook copy editor or doctors' appointments or oh-crap-I-forgot errands. I sacrifice as many Thursdays as I can to going to the local hardwoods sawmill because that's where I'm doing my competence apprenticeship and also my sense-of-self restoration and also I really like it. But I get a lot of writing done around those edges anyway. Because I'm copy editing during the days, I'm at my desk, so when inspiration strikes or I stumble across helpful research I'm right there, no other distracting tasks to finish. I just turn off my work timer and switch windows. It makes a big difference. I usually have one of my book or essay documents open, and quickly bypass the inner Censor/naysayer without blinking. That's something I've only learned to do through years of training, like being an athlete. The rest of the time I get up at 4 or 5 in the morning. Because I homeschool and work part-time and am a stay-at-home mom, getting all of it done would require early hours even without the writing. Not that I'm saying I do get it all done. But those early morning hours are when I access my most honest writer self.

And lastly, I have finally, after many years and attempts, found a writing group that fits where I am in my writing and what I'm working on. We meet once a month via Google Hangout and workshop two essays. Everyone in the group is a stellar writer, takes their writing seriously, and works hard to support the endeavors of others. Reading their work inspires me to produce more and make it better.

I could go on forever. Which would be boring. So now I'll hand this off to two writers I've known and admired for a long time:

Karrie Higgins and I met several years ago through Creative Nonfiction's #cnftweet microessay contest on Twitter, where we both participated regularly. Since then we've exchanged a book's worth of letters (even some real ones) and Karrie has become not just one of my favorite writers, but one of my favorite people. She writes about psychogeography, family, abuse, environment, the concept of faith, being a gentile in Salt Lake City, and so much more with a plumb line and dedication that frankly leaves mine in the dust. Not only did her stunning essay "Bottle City of God" win Cincinnati Review's Schiff Award in Prose (the issue is coming out soon! Go get it!), but she makes her own ink.

Carolyn McCarthy and I went through the MFA program at Emerson College together. We met in a travel writing class and continued to take several nonfiction classes together. She was one of the best writers in the program, a natural storyteller and observer and with a knack for choosing the most perfect, sparest words for every description. Before coming to the program, she had worked teaching English in Buenos Aires and as a backcountry guide in Patagonia. After graduating, she was granted a Fulbright scholarship to document the way of life of pioneer families in rural Patagonia, a timely project because massive dam projects now threaten the area and that way of life. She was trekking and writing a lot, received a grant for her work from Banff Mountain Culture, and then got a job as a Lonely Planet writer. She's written for magazines like National Geographic and Outside in addition to authoring 12 Lonely Planet guides. Carolyn is an amazing person, one of my most valued friends, and her creative writing remains some of the most memorable I've had the privilege to read. And, she built her own writer's retreat in Chile. Talk about competent.

Storysurfing: The New Writer's Act

Every time I've participated in some kind of online writing forum over the last few years, there is always a long, hotly debated, and unnecessary thread about what makes a "real" writer and "real" writing. Because blogging makes publication so accessible for everyone, there are a precious few who would like to define "writing" as something other (almost anything) than putting words on a blog. Many participants (usually the unpublished ones) get very hung-up on whether or not they're "real" writers.

And then there's the self-descriptions of those who are writing, or writing and publishing, or writing and posting. You look at an author's mini-bio, and they're described in one or two of the following ways: short story writer, essayist, novelist, biographer, blogger, reviewer, journalist, writer, storyteller, author, nonfiction writer ... all of which clutters up people's ideas of what a writer is or does, and limits the writer's own perceptions of what he or she is doing when inspiration strikes and they make the effort to put words on a page.

Any "real" writer knows in his or her bones that the essays, stories, novels, and blogs are all different consequences of engaging long-term in the same activity. No matter what your final product is -- an essay in Harper's or a blog read by your friends or oral narratives told at a storytelling festival -- they all come from the act of attempting to take experience and shape it into story. It doesn't matter whether that story is fiction or nonfiction, short or long, read by millions in book form or ten people looking at a blog.

We need a new word for this act, to cut through all the crap about what constitutes a "real" writer, and I've had one in mind for a long time: storysurfer.

Why storysurfing? This act, that of reaching into or out to experience, life, memory, and trying to shape it into a narrative that might resonate with others, reminds me a great deal of windsurfing. You are at the same time pulling and being pulled, letting go and holding on, riding the elements and letting them take you. That's what writing is, the whole act. All those titles above -- essayist, novelist, blogger -- they just describe the product. The act is its own thing, separate from the end result and separate even from the experience it's pulling on.

Beginning writers will often hear, if they're taking a workshop or in an MFA program or reading a creativity self-help book, that "a writer is someone who writes." But there's more to it than that. It's not just putting words on a page. Storysurfing is a full-body act. A storysurfer is someone who rides life, and harnesses their experience to the page.

Dear Vida: Why I'm not helping up the submissions percentage this week

The much-discussed 'count' by Vida: Women in the Literary Arts shows a saddening lack of women writers represented in literary publications, daily publications, book reviews, etc. Here's one sliver of a reason why:

9:30 a.m. The children have breakfasted and nursed, been toileted and diapered, medicined and vitamined, swept off and wiped. The baby is down for her reliable morning nap (the afternoon one is hit-and-miss, and requires long periods of holding and rocking). The 3-year-old is playing happily with his train tracks on the floor after I spent 20 minutes helping him set up an elaborate layout with plenty of bridges, tunnels, curves, and switches.

I've had two cups of coffee and even the breakfast dishes are washed. The new album from Bright Eyes is playing. So while Alex sleeps and John plays, I sneak out a story that I've been writing and rewriting for 5 years, and am hoping to send to a journal this week. (Even though I still feel shaky in fiction, creative nonfiction being my strength, and this journal has off-handedly rejected several of my nonfiction essays. But they mentioned on Facebook that they're looking for stories, so I keep working. When I can.)

I sit down on the rocking chair slightly out of sight, rest the clipboard on my knee, and uncap a pen.

John looks toward the kitchen. "Mummy, I want a hug." Gripping Percy the green engine, he trots over and climbs onto my lap.

Five minutes later, and again ten minutes later, I ask if he's ready to play with his tracks again. "No," he says, running Percy up and down my arm, "I just hugging now."

And in no time flat it's time to get the baby up and make lunch.

Of course I'm going to put the story down and give him a hug. There's a tug, an "I wish I could just have half an hour and then get lots of hugs," but there isn't really a choice. Does this make me not-a-writer? Are you a writer only if you push away the hug and stick to the story? No. It just makes me a writer who doesn't get things done very quickly. A writer who is always tired, and always trying. I'm betting a lot of women writers who are also caregivers find themselves in a similar position.

(I did attempt to keep working by offering to read John the story I was working on. While he was patient enough, and I always do a fair bit of editing while reading aloud, it is a bit hard to engage in serious rewriting when you've got your "This is George. He was a good little monkey and always very curious" voice going on.)

The Capacity for Genius: A Eureka Moment in All of Us

A couple months ago I was talking with a friend about Einstein, whose biography I read last fall (Einstein: His Life and Universe, by Walter Isaacson). Actually, I was asking about general relativity, aspects of which I still have a lot of trouble grasping. (I do this to my physicist and mathematician friends, starting with my husband, in a futile hope that someone somewhere will suddenly hand me the key to fully comprehending the stuff in the way I wish I could, and which no amount of reading seems to do.)

We wandered onto the topic of genius. The friend contended that Einstein wasn't necessarily the genius he's always sold as, but simply happened to be the right person at the right time to make "his" discoveries. It's an argument with which I agree, especially as it's clear that many other scientists had already made similar discoveries (but hadn't quite connected the dots yet), or were verging on them.

This led on to the question of whether genius actually exists. And, again, I found myself agreeing with the friend's contention that there are no geniuses, only people who happen to be able to follow or take certain opportunities when they're fortuitously presented.

On further thought, however, I would argue that in fact everyone is a genius, or has the capacity for genius. Two writers have bolstered this personal conviction. First there was Arthur Koestler's book The Act of Creation, now sadly out of print, although you can easily find used copies. I originally picked this book up because I found his Sleepwalkers (about the lives and discoveries of Kepler and Galileo) to be a masterpiece, and thought this book would delve into the psychological activity behind the creativity in art, writing, etc. It was far more interesting than I anticipated, as it actually focused on the "ah-ha" or "eureka" moment of great scientific discoveries.

The Act of Creation is far too long and involved to go into detail here, but what I found interesting was Koestler's investigation into how the "eureka" moment, like that of Darwin's, is often preceded by years, sometimes decades, of research and hard work. In other words, it's not a matter of genius at all but simply a matter of pursuing a passion or interest in a dedicated fashion until one day the pieces seem to fall into a new pattern and you're looking, possibly, at an entirely new discovery or shift in paradigm. Which is essentially what happened with Einstein.

Koestler’s research would indicate that "genius" is actually a matter of having the time, ability, and drive to do or pursue something you're passionate about, with no promise of immediate results or of ever seeing a reward.

This viewpoint is still limited, however, as our accepted concept of genius focuses only on the accomplishments that get mentioned in the public sphere. And genius is so much more than simply academic or creative intelligence. I've met people who are geniuses at dealing with babies, who know instinctively how to handle the toddler tantrums of the terrible twos; people who know how to live at peace with their world, who can cobble a delectable meal from the most unlikely and sparse ingredients; people who can manage the tempers and caprices of a boardroom or political field to help a group of people reach a needed goal; people who seem to make gardens produce unbelievable bounty with the daily stroke of their hand; people who inspire others to do great things with their own lives. Geniuses in every possible aspect of life, not just in the achievements that win Nobel Prizes or Pulitzers or even those that solve the biggest problems facing the human population and the planet.

If genius is, as I think, a matter of doing what you're meant to be doing with your life, of following your passion, then we are all surrounded by geniuses every day; we just don't know it. And we all have the capacity to tap our own genius.

The other author was Elizabeth Gilbert (author of Eat, Pray, Love), whose TED TV talk on "A different way to think about creativity” proposed going back to the Greek and Roman concept of genius being a sort of daemon or “other” who assists the writer or artist or musician in making their piece of work as good as it can possibly be.

(If you don’t watch the occasional TED talk, you should. The organization TED—Technology Entertainment Design—has the sole goal of presenting weekly talks on Ideas Worth Spreading, whether they’re innovative ways to accomplish social justice, new ways to think about creativity, or discussions about brain science.)

Gilbert’s talk was thoroughly enjoyable, aside from presenting a new and interesting idea. And if we took her advice and changed the way we think about artists—seeing their “genius” as some sort of separate entity that simply assists in their work—then there is no reason that the same concept can’t apply to everyone.

The problem is, of course, that very few people will ever have the means to allow their genius to work its magic. Most of us are daily, hourly, grindingly involved in activities that are designed, yes, to earn us a living or scrape us a scanty life, but also to keep us from ever listening to the genius-creature whispering in our ear. The vast spectrum of human experience up to this point doesn’t allow more than a tiny, lucky percentage of the population to even consider what it is they love to do, or expose us to ideas that might inspire us. And even those of us who listen to flashes of insight are constantly derailed by the seemingly constant demands of simple daily life.

None of this reality, however, changes the fact that we all have the capacity for genius. We can stifle it, deny it, run from it, strangle it, or fear it. But we can’t ever fully kill it.

TEKS and TAAS: The Standardized Strangulation of Imagination

For several years before my first child was born, I worked as a copy editor for a textbook company. A small place, we took on weighty loads of a variety of textbooks from every major publisher you could think of. Although we specialized in reading, spelling, and phonics for younger grades, I worked on high school science and literature textbooks, and even wrote a 6th-grade math/social science textbook (which you can read to your horror and my shame on Google Books—there are reasons I wasn’t asked to do one again).

Standardized teaching and testing was an intimate part of my life as a copy editor. Every textbook we worked on, from every major company, followed what are known as TEKS and TAAS, the learning and testing guidelines laid down by the state of Texas. (For those conspiracy theorists who always wondered whether the entire national curriculum is really run by the state of Texas, the answer is, essentially, yes. Texas buys its textbooks for the entire state, whereas most states allow their districts to choose and purchase individually. Texas wields enormous power over how our children are educated because it is simply the most important slice of the market for textbook publishers. So yes, the fact that the Texas board is waging war on science should worry you.)

These guidelines are massive, thousands of little instructions and expectations, spanning all grade levels, covering requirements from the specifics of trigonometry in high school, down to the movement of large and small muscle groups in kindergarten. Let your imagination run wild as to how specific the requirements of your child’s education can get, and you can’t go far wrong.

I used to take all the stupid requirements and niggly publishing quirks in stride, with a sense of humor, but when you see on a daily basis the reality of what we’re forcing on our children for several hours a day, the humor starts to erode.

It wasn’t the New York State Regency exam that, in a multiple-choice question regarding the reasons behind most recent invasion of Iraq, failed to give as an answer/option anything close to the truth (that is, one that questioned the US government’s motives behind the invasion). And it wasn’t the failure of a high school history textbook’s glowing mini-bio of Henry Kissinger to note that he avoids traveling to Europe because he’s wanted for questioning on war crimes. It wasn’t even the exasperating project of writing that math textbook, during which I had to count the number of syllables in each sentence to make sure my writing was “age appropriate.” (Evidently the number of syllables per sentence in a paragraph is more important to your child’s education than information. Heaven forbid the lesson actually be interesting.)

What broke my heart, finally, was not the endless checking and cross-checking to see which sub-requirement a specific math problem or activity might cover in the TEKS, but the cross-invasion of standardized testing into reading lessons for kindergarteners.

As most of us know now, we teach to the test rather than teach to help kids learn, and I saw no more striking or sobering example than lessons for 5-year-olds that focused on questions such as: “Good readers look for main ideas when they read,” or “As you read, identify the main and supporting characters in the story,” and so on with plot and climax and all the elements you expect to be quizzed on when you take the Iowa Basics or similar for the first time. These were tiny little books about, you know, mice and clocks. But the children weren’t allowed to focus on the funny story, the personalities; they weren’t allowed to let themselves go and sink into the weird imagination-river that makes reading, on its own, so powerful.

I can’t think of a better way to kill a child’s budding curiosity about reading and books. And once you strangle a desire to read, imagination has little chance at all.

Standardized tests used to be something we took every few years, an anomaly in our education, something by the wayside. Now there are 2nd-graders riddled with nervous anxiety because their “education” is constructed around frequent quizzes and tests, to prepare them to do well in major standardized tests in the 3rd grade.

I can remember the first time I took the Iowa Basics, one of the country’s most long-standing standardized tests. It was in the 6th grade. Despite being one of the smarter kids in the class, the Reading Comprehension section took me longer than it should have because I got caught up and interested in the content, and had to go back to look for main ideas, supporting ideas, and so on. In other words, reading for me, as it would be for any child given the chance, was a completely separate activity from the comprehension skill the test was looking for.

Years later, editing those kindergarten textbooks, I felt ill. I come from an intellectual family of complete book addicts, yet the lure of reading would not have stood a chance if someone had stood in front of me day after day, telling me what “good readers do” and refusing to let me enjoy the story. But I might have gotten into the 99th percentile on the Iowa Basics rather than the 98th.

Over the last few years I’ve read and heard the complaints of many college professors that the students coming in lack not only basic knowledge, but the ability to think at all. These students, they moan, are always wanting to know “what the teacher is looking for” in a paper. In other words, they’re so used to being taught to the test, that it comes naturally to them to write to the teacher.

The younger we push standardized testing, the further back we seek to squelch true curiosity and the fierce love of learning that most children are born with, the less likely it is that the future’s college students will have any concept of what it means to enjoy learning, much less how to think for themselves.

But personally, I’m more concerned about those kindergarteners, who will never care about the mouse, the clock, and the cheese, or that it’s a funny story, because they need to remember for the Thursday quiz what the main idea was. And the ridiculous thing is, I couldn’t tell them either. It’s a story. It’s fun. I’m sure that future lessons will include books with far less scope for imagination, and far more emphasis on plot and characterization.

Thoughts on 'The System': Have We Forgotten What It Means to Be Two Years Old?

And this response to Up Against the System is from my younger sister, whom we'll call B. My sisters' thoughts about this whole process are so varied, yet so complementary, it's impossible to take one set without the other.

"I imagine John as, I don't know, the son of a sailor. I picture him out on the sea being wild and free. He has a certain quality that begs for independence. I would feel exactly like you do in this situation. I would want him to pass the tests, do well, and do what was expected, but I would also be angry that he was being fed such formulaic standards and labeled something based on a narrow view of who he really is. Perhaps he is behind in many ways. He was born premature and that gave him significant disadvantages. To me that means nothing about his future. I'm sure there are fascinating statistics out there and reasons why we should follow our formulaic methods of teaching toddlers, but the big picture is often not taken into account.

My boyfriend had to do kindergarten twice. He had a muscle issue with his eye that made one eye stay crossed so they had to cut the muscle and he missed too much school to complete the year. Tragic right? Except that it isn't a big deal at all now. Even more tragic to me is the fact that he, another good friend, and many others I know suffered from poor school systems that didn't bother to nurture and teach them much at all. Systems that, had I been in them I never would've accomplished half of what I did academically. I don't know when our education system took the turn and stopped being about developing the minds of our youth, but it has. From these early childhood exams to the public school system it is all about teaching for tests that are standardized by what? .... the Texas board?

What baffles me is that in the arts we understand what we need to do, but we never take those lessons and use them in real life. That may be confusing so here is my example. In Harry Potter and ... um... the one where he forms Dumbldore's army... the evil is the woman who comes and tries to rigidly standardize everything in the school. She teaches for the exams and provides no useful, practical skills for the students. We see this all the time in children's stories and movies, but yet in the real world we still commit these crimes.

What I'm trying to say is that John has a long and bright future ahead. Whatever happens he is set up for success by parents who actually care and take notice. I have known so many amazing people some of whom were born that way and some of whom took a long time to find their intelligent self. It sounds to me like these people that John is dealing with are hard wired to think that the flip charts will give them all the information they need. I grant they will find some things out, but the other part of me wants to grab John, run screaming from the building for no reason and find the nearest muddy pond and start jumping in it. He is 2! I mean, really, he is a toddler and a boy. They destroy and build and hit and run and throw. They are mini-testosterone carrying monkeys that want to do all kinds of crazy things. I have met some moderately patient two-yr-old girls, but boys... never. They are destructos. They hear what they are told and then proceed to immediately forget it.

I have also thought a lot lately about kids and forgetting how to be one. I think getting into being 2 when you are with a 2-year-old is a healthy thing we've lost. So, I try to be more like a kid. Our two nieces [ages 5 and 2] and I drew all over ourselves 'cause the two-year-old had a spot of marker on her nose. I figured she shouldn't be left alone so I drew on my nose. It snowballed from there. We had so much fun and there was nothing educational or constructive at all about it. Then the five-year-old and I made believe that we were a queen and a princess. Then she decided I was Sacajawea and she was the baby. Whatever... it was fun and meaningless. And healthy for us all."

Up Against the System: One Mother's Shock-Introduction to Standardized Evaluations

Our little family has been going through some tense times recently. As our son is 2 1/2 and receives Early Intervention services (while his intelligence and development are fine, his speech is delayed, likely due to his prematurity), which stop at age 3, we have been working with our local public school system to transition into the services they offer.

That is a mild way of putting what's really happening: the reality of 'the system,' which seeks to place all people, especially children, into manageable boxes and units, to make them easier to label and deal with, has come crashing into our lives like a semi-truck landing full-tilt in the living room.

We are not stupid parents. We are not blind parents. But the evaluators of our local school district would like to believe we are both, because they would like to label our son with handy little devices like "attention issues," no matter how wrong we think they are, or how unreasonable their expectations of a two-year-old are. My son is stubborn and easily frustrated and bright and curious and willful and logical. He does not have "attention issues."

I have been blathering at length to my sisters and parents and friends about what we're experiencing, but what better place to try to clarify a problem than on your own blog?

The problem is not necessarily in the services offered, but in the evaluations themselves. We've had a speech evaluation, which lasted nearly two hours, and then the education evaluation, which was about 45 minutes. We weren't able to fully complete either of them because John simply stopped cooperating after a time. Both the evaluators immediately brought up "attention issues," which, frankly, pissed me off. After some reflection, I realized that I'm angry and frustrated on a variety of levels, all of which are slightly silly because there's no requirement that I go through with this process at all. It's entirely the choice of the parents. But it does leave me a) concerned about the mentality of the people who will be responsible for his future education and development, and b) curious and exasperated with the methodology and expectations in the following ways:

1) John is 2 1/2. I realize I only have one child, and my experience is limited, but how long is a child of that age expected to pay attention to any activity? If he's really interested in something, he can pay attention for a good hour, sometimes longer. That doesn't mean his discipline doesn't need work. Yes, he needs, over time, to learn that he often has to sit and do things he doesn't feel like doing, and we're working on that. But I don't see any difference between his desire to be done with the evaluation, and his desire to run around a restaurant when he's done eating. There is a balance here between attention and discipline, but I don't think being "done" with a very boring task after 30 or 45 minutes qualifies as "attention issues," not at his age.

2) The evaluation is idiotic. Correction: it's a load of bullshit. What is it? It's a flip chart, where he has to identify objects and activities by pointing to different pictures. (Which child is swimming? Can you show me the triangle? Which animal is big? And so on and so forth, moving up skill levels designed for six-month developmental increments.) First off, sitting for a long period in front of a flip-chart seems like a silly way to evaluate such a young child, especially as the Early Intervention program focuses specifically on evaluating and working within the child's normal environment. And John only really stopped cooperating when he stopped understanding the questions/instructions. As his speech therapist said when I vented to her a bit, "Well, do you set yourself up for failure on purpose? He knows when he's not understanding something. Partly it's frustration due to the comprehension and speech, but it's also partly that he doesn't see the need to keep going when he clearly doesn't get it."

3) Standardized tests. After working in textbook publishing for so long, I thought I had about reached my limit of loathing of standardized tests. I was wrong. This was worse. First off, sometimes they ask things he simply hasn't learned, or might have learned differently (like, he gets marked down for not picking out the "big" or "small" animal in the picture, but I haven't thought about teaching him specific size relations yet). Second, my gosh, there were so many things in that education test that I don't think I knew until first grade! Third, he of course gets no credit for being clever outside of the test. Example: when he'd really had quite enough of the speech evaluation, you know what he did? He faked pooping. Seriously. Had the whole expression and position and totally fooled me. I rushed him out to the bathroom, which was in the entry of the building. As soon as we got to the the entry, he straightened up, ran to the door, and said, "car." He did this twice. Clearly, he knows that needing the potty is one surefire way to get me to move my butt out of there. I thought that was pretty damn clever. But there's no "ingenuity" or "problem solving" aspect on these tests, so no one else thought it was cool.

[A note on the standardized test mentality: later in the day, both my husband and I found ourselves "teaching to the test" without realizing it. "This is how it starts," I thought. Kind of pathetic. Does it matter whether he picks out which animal is big, or which ducks are "all in a line" now or in six months? No. And yet here we are, wanting him to pass the test.]

None of this sounds like much. But when you're a person like me -- like many of my friends, probably -- the realizations that hit when you're doing these evaluations are pretty rough. It boils down to "we need your child to perform in this certain way so that he can function in this particular system that we've designed, no matter how false or pointless it is, and no matter how unrelated to his or any child's function as a human being."

What worries and angers me is the concern that the entire process might stunt his development as a complete, realized human being. Yes, he needs to be able to do tasks that he might not like. Yes, he needs to be able to sit in school and pay attention and learn. But he's 2 1/2. Shouldn't there be a different expectation between that age and 5 or 6?

Most people with even the mildest level of intelligence find school a bit dull. How far will we go, how young will we reach, to root out the rich creativity and imagination and cognitive thinking that makes standardized schooling a difficult place for so many children?

[Pending my sisters' permissions, I will later post their excellent responses to this description. I will also be posting further entries as we go through the occupational therapy, physical therapy, and psychological evaluations. As the psychologist has already ruffled my spikes by mentioning "non-cooperative," the last should be interesting.]

Did Einstein have phenomenal powers of concentration? Or was he simply free of responsibilities?

I've been mulling over this question since reading Einstein: His Life and Universe. Where does personal responsibility infringe on a person's powers of concentration? What level of responsibility-feeling do we have to relinquish in order to devote ourselves to the task at hand?

The author described a scene in which Einstein sat at his desk completely engrossed in a physics problem while the children ran around playing and yelling. "Which shows," he said, "what powers of concentration Einstein had."

This statement ruffled me. The scene: a man sitting at a desk, pen in hand, oblivious to the children playing around him and likely housework or cooking of some kind being done by his wife in another room.

No, this isn't a feminist response. What I found curious was that the author wasn't quite imaginative enoughg to apply a role of responsibility to the powers of concentration. Einstein may have had great such powers -- many people do -- but the reason he was able to practice them was that he felt no responsibility for what else was going on in the room: care of the children, attention to them, the need for meals to be cooked and clothes to be washed and floors to be cleaned. Mostly the children.

There is a great difference, somewhere in there, between someone who can concentate in distracting situations, and someone who can employ such concentration when they feel at some level responsible for the care and welfare of a household, or a relationship, or a pet.

Einstein was by all reports an attentive father, and even an enthusiastic one when his children were old enough to teach and on the few occasions they were in the same place. But it was understood that his energies were saved for his research, and his thinking.

It is easy to wonder how many women today have that luxury, and men, too. After years of trial and mostly error, I have discovered that I cannot write when other people are in my home, including my spouse and child. Nobody thinks anything of interrupting me to ask what we should do for dinner, or where I've put the phone bill, or if I could please come down and show them where the strawberry patch is among the weeds.

I can concentrate through all this, although it gets harder to slip back into my writing bubble and some days I just give up. I prefer reserving my efforts for noisy coffee shops or bars, where I can concentrate just fine and nobody bugs me.

Harder than concentration is shaking the sense of responsibility. Say my husband Ian is looking after our son, while I catch up on some work in front of a notebook or computer. John cries for some reason. I ignore it, knowing Ian has his own way of parenting; I try not to interfere or impose mine on him. But John keeps crying and maybe my husband is engrossed in his email.

I don't want to parent for him, don't want to tell him what to do. He's given me a gift of time to work, and I want to take it. But I can't let go. I am pulled, always, every day, by responsibilities to my son, responsibilities to my husband, and responsibilities to my work. At this point in my son's life, on any given day, the responsibility to him is strongest. Because I spend more time with him every day than Ian does, I can tell that John wants his crayons, or for someone to let the plastic shapes out of his ball so he can put them back in, or he's lost his funky chicken somewhere.

Or maybe I'm trying to ignore the litany that comes from being a full-time mother: it's almost time for his nap, but he hasn't had lunch yet, and Ian doesn't know quite how to make the eggs so he likes them, and he should really take John outside to play because it's rained the last 4 days and he needs some sunshine, and I still need to pick up something at the farm for dinner or we'll end up eating pasta again and we're both trying to stick with eating more healthy, more vegetables.

And on and on. I bet Einstein never worried about whether someone was getting enough vegetables, or about cooking his young sons a nutritious lunch in good time for them to take a nap.

It's not as if it's easy for my husband, either. After all, he works hard and doesn't get much time to check his email, or just watch the news or dig in the garden or read a book.

The point is simply one of language. I felt ruffled because the author's admiration of Einstein implied that others (usually women) who can not work in the midst of their yelling children are somehow lesser beings.

Einstein of course had responsibilities, and took them seriously, especially in the area of providing for his family. This was not an egomaniac who expected all to be sacrified to his work. But it was his lack of responsibility in the area of home life that allowed him to practice his powers of concentration. Einstein was partly able to do what he did because he knew that someone else was taking care of the house and the children, of the little responsibilities that comprise daily life -- the daily life so demanding, so attention-consuming, so full of multi-tasking, that it keeps so many of us from concentrating on anything at all.

Wanting more from life: the starvation of the intellect

I recently spent a very satisfactory month working my way through the 500-page biography of Albert Einstein, Einstein: His Life and Universe, by Walter Isaacson. Satisfactory on many levels, as it was solidly written, well put together, and spent a great deal of time covering aspects of science and mathematics that will never fail to capture the hungry parts of my imagination and intellect -- even if that intellect is both out of practice and full of holes to begin with.

While reading, cirled repeatedly back to the same questions that prompted Julia and I to start Pooplosphy in the first place: where are the great discoveries and discussions of the current age occurring? Where are the collections of such immense minds as Einstein, Niels Bohr, Max Planck, Marie Curie, Schroedinger, and Heidigger now? Einstein's biographer tells of the meetings these people had, the letters and ideas they exchanged, the longs walks they took together through Berlin and the Alps, hashing out the issues of cutting-edge physics and mathematics.

Walking, together, and talking, while trying to piece together a tangible understanding of the nature of the universe.

Reading of these men and women made me both sad and envious, on many levels. Part of this is due to my own lack of understanding. Although I started university by studying physics, and ended with a degree in mathematics, these subjects were always far more difficult for me than for my colleagues. The four-year university format doesn't allow much room for the slow learner, or the one who needs a more foundational understanding of the nature of mathematics and science herself before delving fully into, say, real analysis and quantum mechanics.

The intricacies of general relativity will probably always be a closed book to me, even if described ten ways from Sunday using any amount of metaphor and analogy. Although I regret the non-genius nature of my rather woolly intelligence, I have come to terms with this fact. It detracts in no way from the pleasure I find in having long discussions in which a knowledgeable friend attempts to deepen my understanding. In fact, I assume it gives both of us pleasure; after all, I enjoy helping other writers improve their work and unearth their own literary voices. Why should not a physicist friend enjoy leading me to some glimmer of insight into Einstein's theories?

But this leads me to the aspect of envy that mixes with the sadness. While in the midst of this book, I made a quick trip back to the city of my university days for a roommate's wedding. I spent three hours wandering the campus and surrounds that had been home to the happiest years of my life.

The sadness came when I realized they had been the happiest. Yes, I now have a wonderful spouse and beloved child and a house in the country, but my mind seems to have spent the last ten years asleep. If I cannot have wilderness at my feet, I thrive equally on intellectual stimulation, perhaps even more so. And stimulation is what I found in those four years.

I have a great-grandfather whose occupation was to sit in his temple or his house and study the Talmud while his wife took care of everything else. He was so brilliant that famous chess players from all over the world came to his Ukranian village to play against him because he would not travel. The greatest dream of both my grandparents on that side was to achieve a Ph.D. in engineering. On the other side, my grandmother was a rare woman who pursued a master's in history in the 1930s and my grandfather went back to study politics in his 80s.

So maybe the intellectual thirst runs thick in my blood.

The jealousy stepped in as I paused in the coffee shop near my college (the place I used to earn my paycheck in the early mornings, my hair and math texts always full of the scent of roasted coffee) to read my book and step back just for a moment to the voracious student I used to be. Sipping coffee that reeked of nostalgia, I read of Einstein walking all over Berlin with his colleagues, talking their ideas over for hours.

That, I realize, is what I am missing in my life: the ability to walk out of the house to meet a friend and discuss anything from symbolic logic to what makes Jane Austen great, not as a set of thoughts in passing, but as the passionate focus of interest for a few hours.

And then, of course, to return to problems of potty training and why I can't get my toddler to eat anything more colorful than a scrambled egg. I wouldn't wish to lose the understanding being a mother has given me, both of the supposed nature of the universe, and of the true importance of the seemingly mundane activities of everyday life. But it is always easier to bend my mind to the problems of parenthood when I have stretched it to encompass the problems of quantum mechanics.

Right now the imbalance is extreme in favor of motherhood. Where does your average housewife intellectual find such connection? Only on the Internet? Or through literary magazines such as Brain, Child? After reading Einstein's biography, it seems a poor life in which you cannot walk out your door with a good friend to discuss whatever most stimulates you both.

Shortly after finishing this book, and moving on to a much less interesting one about Blaise Pascal, I asked my husband to help me comprehend, just a little, general relativity. Einstein's great thought experiment ("what is it like to run alongside a light beam?") does not translate to a metaphor I can grasp, and my husband does, after all, have a Ph.D. in physics.

We spent a pre-toddler hour tangling ourselves in the knottiness of quantum space and the question of whole numbers and what they really represent, among other issues. This while he got ready for work and I folded laundry. Usually he's in a pre-coffee stupor and I'm frantically trying to write before our son wakes up.

I realized that this is a level on which we used to talk with each other all the time, when we met back in college. But modern life, outside of academia, makes little room to sate the frivolously intellectual appetite. Our spare hours are more often spent reading novels or hanging out on Twitter, when we're not talking about our son's development, household finances, work, or what the hell to do about the woodchuck under the front path.

I realized that the only intellectual friend I have physically living in my town -- my spouse -- is the one who, like me, has little spare time.

One could argue that physics was Einstein's job, and the job of those in the sphere he worked. But it wasn't, not at first. It was his passion -- Einstein worked in a patent office, and wrote physics articles in his limited spare time, until he became well-known enough to procure a university position. But even before he entered academia, he worked and studied and exchanged letters and discussions with some of the greatest minds of his day.

Maybe this life rarely happens outside the walls of academe. Maybe people like me should always move to university towns, progressive places, walkable communities that have ample supplies of both passionate intellectuals and attachment parenting practitioners.

Is it too much to ask in life -- a chance to study in depth, to absorb the gift of wilderness, to feed insatiable curiosity, to raise your children with love and intellectual stimulation and local organic food among like-minded people, to challenge your mind and understanding, to travel the world, to pursue your own creativity and feed others', to have a family dinner every night and still get enough sleep?

Most of us want more from life than what we've got. Right now I'd be grateful for long walks with a kind genius. Or at least a friend, smarter than I, who can explain Einstein's relativity in language I can understand.

Story River: Why We Write in the Dark

Last spring I attended an author's luncheon for my local library. I even helped organize it, which shows how much I love libraries, as fidgety as meetings and committees make me. One of the authors who spoke had won a Pulitzer and taught at a nearby college. She was eloquent and honest, and discussed why it was that, say, Philip Roth has published many books and she has only published two. She talked about teaching and children and life. "Novels grow in the dark," she said, a quote I wrote down and spend some spare moments musing over. When she said, though, that "I have not a regular relationship to the work, but a faithful relationship to the work," the distinction brought immense relief to my own writing life.

I get frustrated, often, with how long my work takes. It can take months for an essay to reach what I feel is completion, years sometimes for a story, perhaps because I am simply more practiced at nonfiction. When the final narrative finally emerges, and still feels whole and smooth even several months later, I know I'm done with it. And wish, repeatedly, that I could have just written it right the first time around. At which point the whole process starts over again with something new.

I carry drafts of essays and stories around with me all the time, as if they were children, or cats waiting to be taken to the vet. Sometimes I read over the first few pages and sigh, wondering how on earth I'm going to fix whatever is wrong with a piece that I know is essentially good. And then I put it back in my bag because I also know, instinctively, that I cannot push a piece, or force it to be done, or inflict endings and scenes it was never meant to have. It has to wait. Maybe it is gestating, or maybe the door to that particular piece is closed for the moment, and I have pay attention to see when it opens again.

I know by now that I am not really in charge of "my" work. The best work does not come from "I," but from some "other," some easy, flowing place where the story runs through like a stream or river or brook, depending on its nature. Maybe that's why it's so hard for a writer to capture it all at once. The story is moving, drifting, changing all the time, not sitting there like a written book ready to be picked up, or even a baby ready to be born.

Or maybe it is like a baby, a complete self at every moment of its life, as is any course of running water, but, also like a river or stream or creek or spring, is never the same being it was a moment before, changing at every instant. And yet, the watercourse or human being, while seeming to change, has a core of being-ness or completeness that all can sense, some unchanging purpose or existence that sits at the center of the joyful and wild ripples of change and life.

This is also true of a story. The attempts to catch it in its flow -- which for me can take years of repeated efforts -- are simply attempts to describe the story-river so completely as to come as close as possible to describing the core of it.

The goal, however, of a writer or human or artist or storyteller is not, in fact, to simply tell the central, unchanging truth, although that is what we feel we are reaching for. The core is not a story. It is simply a word, or a sense: truth, wrong, love, hurt, joy. These words describe the central essence of our works, and we wrap stories around them to help us make sense of them. To help us understand what we already instinctually know. Because every person, writer or reader, has their own river of truth, knowledge, and experience. Behind each of these are truths we all share, but the only way we can reach understanding of how close we are is to describe our rivers -- our stories -- to one another so fully that maybe another will recognize one of ours and say, "Yes, that is a lot like mine, my story."

There is a delicate balance between letting the story come through you (that which is true), and letting the "I," or the ego, manufacture it. With time and practice every writer learns to sense where he or she is writing from. And with time and practice, we learn that satisfaction in our work, "our" creations, come not from us, but from that other place that, like nature itself, gives its gifts freely -- if we're paying attention.