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.

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.

Theoretical Justice: Waiting in the Jury Pool

The small village courtroom, with "Village of Washingtonville, est. 1731" painted proudly behind the judge's counter, and the sound of traffic from just outside the door, is crowded with plumbers, students, an anxious defendant, and housewives like me. The counter holds a box of Kleenex and a plaque with the judge's name, and is the same counter at which other mothers and I elbowed each other last winter to sign our children up for the over-subscribed Toddling Toddlers program.

I feel sorry for the defendant already, and wonder what he's here for. A village court will hear cases only of minor driving misdemeanors and the like, but still he looks nervous. He's been sitting at his table for over an hour, shifting in a suit he's possibly unaccustomed to, and skating quick glances at the prospective jury pool as we enter from the front of the room with coffee, books, and Sudoku in hand.

The woman next to me has exhausted her entertainment, having filled out a popular culture crossword in the local paper. As time wears on she begins swearing quietly under her breath and snapping her chewing gum. I peer at what everyone else is reading, a very nosy and unshakable habit: Frank McCourt's Teacher Man, Black Justice in a White World, Anita Shreve's Lovely Bones, and my own Brother Cadfael mystery novel. I find the 12-century Benedictine monk's fictional life as good an investigation of true humanitarian justice as philosopher John Rawls's Theory of Justice, with Cadfael playing Rawls's own "impartial observer."

It's hard to tell what people are thinking in these situations, brought together for the purposes of dispensing justice. So many of them look bored, or annoyed, or resigned. A few, perhaps, grateful like me to have a few quiet minutes to read a book. It's such a rare thing, undisturbed time. And even I am distracted into annoyance by the juror form, on which it would not be acceptable to mark 'yes' to 'employed?' because 'mother' is not considered a profession -- it doesn't qualify me for Social Security, so it must not count, a perennial grievance of my own.

The choosing finally begins, the first round of possible jurors chosen from slips of paper in a plastic bucket. The judge points laughingly to the seven chairs against the wall as our "jury box, such as it is," but it's better than the proper jury stand in Boston, where I served several years ago. At least here we can see everyone. There, a huge pillar blocked the witness box and half the judge from sight.

Jet-lagged, exhausted, thinking of my son with his molars coming in and the vacation we returned from only at midnight, I half hope to go home soon, so of course my name is the third one called. Someone somewhere either likes me or hates me: the timing of this duty is unfortunate -- I could use about six more hours of sleep -- but the truth is I love jury duty. If I could choose it as a profession, I would be a juror for the rest of my life. The pull and play of evidence and justice, lawyers' desires to win and the jury's frustration with their incompetence and lack of information -- it can be addictive, not to mention the microcosm of human prejudices, frustrations, potentials, grievances, and faith in the system that erupt when you throw several strangers in a room together and tell them they can't go home until they come to mutual agreement on some aspect of a complete stranger's life.

I try not to glance at this stranger, the defendant, don't want to form pre-judgments, but I can't help it. He looks tired and harrassed, bleary-eyed and skittish, easily pegged as "alcoholic," but maybe he's had a sleepless night of panic. I want to study his face to see: Will I believe what he says? Will I trust him? But I resist.

This is a DWI case, they tell us, and the potentially lethal image of cars combined with drunkeness hangs before my eyes, with the quick indrawn breath as my mother's heart squeezes in panic. It's an instinctive reaction to imagining our children in danger.

One woman is excused to care for a very ill child, another makes it clear she views drinking and driving a sin that manifests itself mostly in the irritation caused by people speeding by her Main Street house late at night. She's taken out of the pool, too.

The judge covers challenges and moves on to "reasonable doubt" until we're sick of it. But he seems intelligent, and patient, and reminds me of a good doctor I used to have. The defense lawyer is red-faced, looking sweaty and less competent next to the Assistant District Attorney in her heels and friendly smile. He, the defense counsel, looks a lot like the prosecution in my last jury trial -- an unfortunate initial impression of used car salesman, except his eyes are wide and brown and honest and innocent, as if he should have been a toy maker.

They all think their questions to us will ensure justice, or as close to it as you can get and still be human. They nix the NYPD police sergeant and the woman who admits to having a previous DWI conviction, but keep the man who was once hit by a drunk driver, and another whose friend died while driving drunk.

"Will you let that affect your judgment?" the Assistant DA asks him. "Can you hear this case fairly?"

"Sure, yes," he says. All sorts of questions like this, with the same reassurances from us. But I wonder if these lawyers have ever been in a jury room. Once that door closes, the personal stories come out. That man's pain and conflicted feelings over his deceased friend will spill over into this present case, and we will hear repeated details about the destroyed soccer career of the one who was hit by a drunk driver.

Neither of them can help it. We all draw on our personal experiences as if they're ingredients in baking a cake, all those big events and trivialities combining to help us form judgments.

The defendant looks a bit like Jude Law from the side, but straight on more closely resembles a former neighbor of mine, a pharmaceutical salesman with three boys and, coincidentally, an alcoholic wife. Already I am battling the conflicting prejudices within me: if he's a nice guy who made a mistake, I want to let him off, rebuked but relieved; if he's a jerk, I want to judge against him because maybe he's the kind who will never stop drinking and driving without fear drilled into him.

All these impulses rise without any conscious thought, as does the instant dislike when his lawyer mentions while questioning us that his client drives a black Ford Explorer. There were several questions regarding our attitudes toward alcohol and drinking, but nobody thinks to ask whether I'll feel unkindly to someone for driving a gas-guzzling SUV. For that, I'll happily take his license and tell myself I'm saving the planet.

Defendants wonder, I've heard, why the prospective jurors don't look at them, won't meet their eyes. It's because we feel guilty. A smile, even quick and tight, might deliver too much hope. A blank stare might discourage them. If jurors feel at all -- and most of us do, those who are not simply bored or annoyed at being there -- we have already judged ourselves as guilty for presuming to pass judgment on others.

Finally, there are six of us and an alternate, gazing obediently toward the bench and not meeting the eyes of the lawyers or the defendant. A graphic designer, a saleswoman for a hotel chain, the owner of a pizza parlor, a male nurse, a nineteen-year-old student, a stay-at-home mom, and me, the mother/writer/traveler/humanist. Six of us have to agree at the end of today, or perhaps tomorrow, on what we've heard and seen and how we understand it, an effort made possible only by the flawed laws that guide us.

In this little village, one man will see his mistakes cast up against him, and we will hear his own efforts at vengeance or regret. It will never make even the most minor news headline, but for this man -- overworked father, partying ex-frat boy, emotionally scarred fireman, he could be any or none of these, I have no idea -- our decision, shaped by our opinions and prejudices, no matter how we try to ignore them, will headline the next arc of his life.

We are here. We will never be ready. Let the trial begin.

Declaring War on the Mommy Wars

A Pissed-off Mother and the Nonviolent Revolution

It was my husband’s fault, and started like this: “I’m just trying to teach him something. Come on, he’s the only kid in day care who can’t feed himself and doesn’t talk yet.”

I was supposed to be going out for a run while Ian took Saturday morning duty and fed our 20-month-old his cereal. Instead, I burst into tears as Ian blinked in confusion and our son John banged his spoon on the table.

“What’s wrong?” asked the tired, slightly overworked husband whom I knew had woken up with a headache and was doing his best not to be grumpy.

I just shook my head. There is no possible way to explain to a non-mother the load of guilt that came crashing down with his innocent words. What he heard was a simple statement of fact: John doesn’t yet use a spoon to feed himself, and his words so far are limited to warped versions of “plop,” “cheese,” and “thank you,” with slightly clearer “uh-oh,” “all done,” and “meow.”

What I heard was a repetition of the same thing I hear every time someone sends me a link to one of those damn articles about militant breastfeeders, or stay-at-home moms versus employed moms, or an attack on attachment parenting, or an attack by non-parents on mothers who dare to complain about the stresses of motherhood, or a debate about the merits of reading and Baby Einstein, and when and how to potty-train. What I heard was this: You’re a bad mother. Every choice you make is wrong. You are not doing enough. You’re doing it all in the wrong way. You should be more involved, pay more attention, spend more time, slice off the rest of your identity to devote every iota of yourself to raise the most well-adjusted and intelligent child according to the requirements and schedule we have laid out for you. Either that, or hand him over to caregivers who will do a better job.

Maybe I should blame it on the article I read the day before, in which a writer beat up on mothers who post pictures of their kids as their Facebook profile photo (yes, I’ve done it). She, as so many others have done, lumped me in with a non-existent camp of mothers who are intellectual idiots, socially inept, enamored of their children, and burying our own lives in order to spoil a bunch of cute parasites. Nevermind that I have a degree in mathematics, still do symbolic logic for fun, like to discuss Proust with those who have read him, had a career as a good copy editor, and am a working writer.

It’s not I who defines myself only by my child. It’s you. As long as my intellectual conversations are sometimes spiced with the word “poop,” I am dismissed as a brainless twit. On the other side, as long as my conversations about our children are peppered with the phrase “sometimes I just want to run away,” I’m a selfish beast who doesn’t love my son.

I am sick of it. There are CEOs and politicians getting paid millions, if not billions, to screw up their corporations, screw over the people who depend on them, and screw every last piece of life out of the planet. And all mothers can do is yell at one another for not doing the most difficult, most important, and least-paid job on the planet absolutely perfectly?

My bursting into tears wasn’t my husband’s fault. He’s doing the best he can, and, smart person, does not read all the parenting and Mommy War articles I do. Maybe it’s my fault for reading them at all, one more way I’m screwing up as a woman and a mother.

In the twenty months since my son was born, I’ve learned two things: One, that a mother’s instinct is almost always right. That doesn’t mean her decisions are right. But if she’s in touch with herself, her child, and an inner voice that has nothing to do with have read Dr. Spock and Dr. Sears twenty times, her instincts as to what is best for her child, and what her child’s needs are, are generally going to be on the mark.

The second thing is that society—the media, other mothers, often family, and a lot of people in the community—are going to do everything they can to both drown out that voice, and to convince a mother that her instincts are utterly wrong. In fact, the message is, those instincts will damage your child’s social adaptation, ruin his or her chances of getting into a good college, give him or her asthma, obesity, a complete lack of independence, fear of dogs, an addiction to television and sugar, probably a drug problem, psychological insecurity, and lack of judgment. And they’ll hate vegetables and reading unless you do it all just right.

I would like to say, politely, to all these people, shut up. On both sides. Just. Stop. Yelling. Information and education is essential. Expressing your frustration is necessary so others don’t feel ashamed for feeling the same way. But this is, without a doubt, the hardest job on earth. Any mother out there dealing with guilt or anger or bewilderment or frustration, do you really want to lay any more of that on the shoulders of other mothers?

*****

I have opinions, even strong ones, about many things regarding motherhood. I believe breastfeeding and breast milk have incalculable health benefits that formula can never compete with. But I also know that breastfeeding can also be difficult or impossible. And, having used a hospital-grade pump for a month when my son was in the NICU, I know it feels exactly like being a milked cow and have trouble imagining making time for it during employment, especially with an unsympathetic boss. I also know babies raised on formula who are doing beautifully.

I believe a baby physically needs its mother for the first three months of life, possibly even six. But I also know that, in a society that seems headed on a crash-course of productivity, believing that everyone needs to work until they’re ground into dust, two weeks with your new baby is a blessing. Three months is a priceless gift, and six months an unheard-of treasure. A professional woman who can spend six months devoted to her baby and then go straight back into her career without being sidelined or passed over for promotion? Millions of us envy you handful.

I believe children who don’t go into nature regularly will turn out more anxious and have weaker cognitive reasoning than children who spend less time with toys that beep and more time watching trees and birds. I believe plastic is akin to a slow-acting poison, and that the powder-come-gel in disposable diapers is probably toxic. But I use Pampers; my son has plenty of plastic toys. And I know how hard it can be to get outside each day when there are a million demands on your time.

I believe people who think parenthood is a lifestyle choice akin to picking out a car or switching careers are fools. But I also pity them, because if they don’t believe that parenthood is a community effort, then they don’t believe in a functional society.

I believe that being a mother has added dimension and depth to my life I could never have imagined. But I also believe those who choose not to have children can live and love just as deeply.

So right here, right now, I am declaring war on the Mommy Wars. Or, more to the point, I am declaring a truce on the Mommy Wars within myself and my relationships. I am laying down my weapons. This is the nonviolent revolution, the new motherhood.

If you want information or advice, I will give it without judgment. If you want to talk about the difficulties of motherhood, and the guilt and the fears, I’m in. If you hate yourself for having lost your temper or having lost your identity, I want you to know you’re not alone. If you just want to talk about a good book, and not worry that mentioning poop in passing will scare someone off, I’m with you.

If you give your children love, and food, and change their diapers relatively regularly, and haven’t yet thrown them out the window, I say to you: Good job. You’re a good mother. And so am I. Whether or not my son learns to guide his spoon to his mouth anytime soon.

Selling Ourselves Short

Last week I had what has become an increasingly common conversation for me: child care. The expense of it, the lack of it, the quality of it. The talk followed a predictable pattern with a predictable conclusion. I'm going nuts, as is the mother I was talking with, but neither of us can quite afford full-time day care.

This isn't quite true. My husband and I could afford it if (iff, that is -- "if and only if")I went back to a full-time job. So. I can go back to the task of copy editing increasingly dissatisfying children's textbooks, a job I used to enjoy, but only because it was freelance and part-time and I could write on the side. This would mean doing what millions of other women do every day, getting up early, getting showered and dressed, getting my son up, dressed, fed, with diaper bag packed, ready to leave by 7:30 so we can all race to the day care center and then to our respective jobs.

Maybe it's selfish of me, but I don't think I can face that life. It seems overwhelmingly pointless, harried, and stressful, for my son as well as me. Given the two options, I think I'd rather let him sleep as long as he wants, and spend the day reading him Goodnight Moon a zillion times, making sure we all have nutritious meals, and, during his naptime, trying to squeeze in my dream of making my living as a writer.

That's given only those two options. But truly, like most Mothers with Brains I know, I want both. I want to have quality time with my child, and I want to have time to pursue my own intellectual development and freelance career.

What struck me after this recent conversation was a) the guilt that Mothers with Brains feel over wanting to spend money on child care in order to pursue things that might not necessarily bear financial fruit (although keeping ourselves from going berserk could be argued as a financial benefit), and b) the realization that, in complaining about full-time day care costing $15,000 a year, I and other mothers are selling short our own talents, activities, and value.

Honestly, is that all I'm worth? I read to my son constantly. I take him for walks and make sure he has a strong relationship with nature, ensure he learns to love fresh air and sunshine. I play with him. Not "development activities." Just play, stacking blocks, chasing a ball, whatever he feels like doing. I cook three meals a day that are generally organic, nutritious, often from locally grown produce (sometimes even grown by me), and hopefully super tasty. I keep the house tidy and clean, but not sterile. If my son is sick I nurture him and make chicken soup. I still breastfeed, a health benefit for him that's been calculated to have a value of about $30,000 a year. I take the cats to the vet and the cars to the mechanic. I volunteer time and writing skills to two organizations. I am on call to edit and shape the freelance efforts of various friends working on their writing. I keep the flow of community and family relationships going through letters, emails, and phone calls (I loathe talking on the phone, so really should get extra points for that). I play music for my son, sing to him, and help him play music, too. I try to speak to him in Russian sometimes.

All this is only worth $15,000 a year? You've got to be kidding me. The Salary Survey calculates that a typical stay-at-home mother doing about 10 tasks every week is, in real salary terms, worth $138,095. I'm not saying day care should cost over a hundred grand a year, but it does seem to say something about how little "women's work" is still valued, at least in American society.

And it tells me something about how little I value my own work, both the parenting and the constantly-shoved-aside creative writing, that $15,000 just seems like an insane amount of money. What are we worth? As mothers, as thinkers, as human beings playing roles in an intricate web of communities and social constructs? The answer is -- we're worth more than we think, but nobody's going to hand us free time and intellectual stimulation on a silver platter. We have to learn to ask for it. And to do that, we have to learn to value ourselves.

Do Human Rights Require an Imagination?

I believe in the power of narrative to change the world. Or at least it is my way of changing the world. We know that words themselves are mightier than the sword, and I admire many a persuasive speaker, but to me it is the ability to enter people’s imaginations, not just ignite their passions, that sets poetry and prose apart from other media.

In her article “Sentimental Education,” (Harper’s, May 2007), Joanna Bourke reviewed Lynn Hunt’s book Inventing Human Rights: A History. The review unfolded both Hunt’s and Bourke’s arguments that the downfall of slavery, the emancipation of women, and even the pursuit of animal rights, can be traced back not to the simple statements that these truths and rights are inalienable and self-evident, but to the moment in history when the masses began devouring popular novels. By entering the minds, and more importantly, the emotions, of well-drawn characters, normal people began developing empathy for their fellow person. It was only when another’s heartache, distress, unhappiness, and desires entered our imagination—not just our intellect—that humanity began to believe that all people are truly created equal.

Obviously, we still have a long way to go. It’s easy to feel powerless in a world full of inequalities; it’s easy to fret at the iniquities perceived on all sides and one’s inability to right them. Injustices large and small burn my heart. I want to feed the world, to soothe all neglected children, to house every head, to protect every abused animal, to shield beauty and wilderness from environmental devastation, to make motherhood the most revered (and well-paid) job in existence.

As I write this, my son is asleep in the other room. Some days he drives me mad and I’d like to give him away to a passing band of gypsies. Other days I look at him and think there’s no more delightful creature on the planet. On all days, though, when I’m nursing him or just watching him play, my thoughts turn to the other mothers of the world: a mother holding her babies close in Mosul as her house is bombed, a mother looking for her son who’s been stolen and is learning to be a child soldier in Uganda, the mother across town who doesn’t know how to extricate herself and her children from an abusive husband and father. No mother, I think, should ever have to watch her children starve, or be beaten, or should need to protect her baby from a bomb.

It is imagination that gives me empathy and makes my heart ache for the mothers of the world, and it is only through entering others’ imaginations that I can change a world that allows these situations to exist. Writing helps people from different cultures understand one another. It makes previously ignorant readers aware of the beauties of untouched wilderness, and our need to protect it; it turns the hard edges of political rhetoric into something malleable and soft, something closer to real life. Writing that touches people's imaginations will, I hope, help regenerate the power of women, of the Amazon warrior and the mother in all of us.

Writing is the place where I feel I can make a difference. I hang on to the final words of Bourke’s essay: “Although words by themselves cannot eliminate suffering, they can extend the boundaries of our moral imagination. … The words we use to describe others represent contrasting meditations on what it means to be human. Our future depends on which of these meditations we adopt.”

Why Pooplosophy? What is Pooplosophy anyway?

A few months ago fellow Mother-with-Brain Julia and I were sitting with our little ones (then 18 months and 9 months, respectively) in a hotel room in a small Austrian village. While the babies slept the two of us tried, quietly, to devour as many pages as possible of our books before the call of mommy-hood was again upon us. I was reading a collection of travel essays by Welsh writer Jan Morris, and Julia was reading a biography of Susan Sontag written by a man she'd gone to university with (Julia, not Susan Sontag). As it was in German, and I only have conversational German, I couldn't read it over her shoulder, so Julia related some tidbits to me.

We spoke in whispers, trying not to wake the two little people, treasuring, as mothers do, a few minutes of adult conversation. We talked about Susan Sontag, and our envy and awe at the people she'd been surrounded by during the early period of her intellectual development. And I think we were both somewhat saddened by the lack of such stimulation in our own lives. "Where," asked Julia, "is the new thought going on now?"

In other words--I thought--where are all the thinkers right now? The philosophers? The post-post-modernists? Where are the intellectuals? Just sitting it out in universities? Who knew? We didn't.

For all the attractions universities hold for those of intellectual bent, I'm not entirely sure that their campuses are generating new thought. I have seen few new ideas come out of the academe, as much as I revere it and often long to be back. They generate great amounts of energy, yes, and enthusiasm, and a whole lot of people hoping to graduate into good careers. New ideas is even less true of think tanks, which seem to exist purely to perpetuate their own unyielding axioms: capitalism is good, capitalism is evil, socialism never works. Whatever.

When I got back to the States, Julia and I exchanged emails--in between taking care of sick children and managing households and visiting friends and dealing with the singular fact of life for the modern mother: it is at all times both extremely chaotic and on the verge of being unbearably dull.

We returned to lives surrounded on one side by other mothers who care little for new thought, or philosophy, or anything beyond diapers, and on the other side by people who grow glazed expressions every time our children's teething troubles are mentioned. It was great, we told each other, to spend a few short days with a person who could move smoothly from intellectual conversation to the trials of shifting a baby onto solid foods and sleeping through the night. It was a rare thing.

It was a rare thing. And why should it be? Why is it that, once a woman has a baby she is expected to either a) give up not only her career but all interesting outlets for her mind (except whatever time she can steal back to read) because clearly people who spend their days wiping spit-up don't have any interest in thinking, or b) spend six weeks to six months awash in the glow of motherhood, followed by dumping the baby in day care so she can go back to subsuming her maternal instincts for the nine-to-five grind of an office workday (often in the case in America, since we have no support system for working parents)?

Mothers are not expected to be intellectual. Wise, yes, in the cheesy Chicken-Soup-for-the-Soul style that people can smile over in bed and ignore completely in the day-to-day workings of the world. But intellectual, no. Not a stay-at-home, full-time mother.

Nor are they expected to be philosophical. Or Zen masters.

And yet, it is my daily daydream, my fantasy, to be allowed months on end shut up in book-lined rooms, divining the nature of humanity; or to sit quietly for hours or days at a time on mountaintops, alone, divining the nature of the universe. Sure, I'd love to do that. Historically women were excluded from these pursuits. Why? Because--and I ask anyone to refute me--secretly men knew that they could only achieve great heights of spiritual or intellectual achievement if someone else was dealing with feeding a family, washing dishes, worrying about the health of babies, nurturing wounded feelings, cleaning floors ... in other words, women were busy making life happen so that men could go off doing both useful and useless things, like achieving Nirvana or starting wars.

But I'll tell you what. You can go live in a Buddhist monastery for a year and think you've found enlightenment. You can study philosophy or mathematics for a decade and think you've discovered answers. But spend one day with a colicky baby and all your wisdom will shoot right out the window. Because if you can't maintain an inner peace, or pull on sociological studies to give you strength and humor, while a baby is screaming for no reason at all and a toddler has just smeared poop on the bathtub and your partner is annoyed because dinner is cold and everyone is coming down with the flu, then you don't get it.

The new thought is going to come from mothers. Not only do they truly run the world (but never have the time to acknowledge it), but there is no wisdom greater than theirs, there is no group more equipped to understand the great philosophies and the great thoughts of the past, and to know what will work for the future.

The new philosophy will involve all aspects of life, from the dirty diaper to the book-lined study. Because it will be defined by mothers. With brains.