A Day at the Beach

"She has cataracts, you know." This from my vet after peering into my fourteen-year-old dog's eyes. I knew her eyes had become cloudy recently, but no one had diagnosed cataracts. She's also deaf, arthritic, and has numerous cancerous lumps that I keep having removed and that keep growing back.

Last week Maggie and I made our semi-annual pilgrimage to Ogunquit, Maine to walk the wide beach there. We've been doing this for fourteen years. There was a time when Maggie could go with me the entire length of the beach and back, some 1.5 hrs with stops and detours down to the water's edge and up to the cottages lining the beach, and then walk with me along the Marginal Way to Perkins Cove and back, another hour, with stops.

Not so any more. I wasn't sure she could walk, really, any distance on the beach, but thought she deserved to get back to see and smell it one more time. I'd already decided not to attempt the Marginal Way. Maggie rose to the occasion, seeming to sense my fear that this trip might be our last. She frolicked a bit, chased a seagull, waded into the surf, lounged in a tidal pool, sniffed at clam shells and seaweed, and then we shared a nice picnic on the rocks.

I hate this "getting old" thing. The immediate response to that is always, "It's better than the alternative." I'm not so sure. My mother-in-law had Alzheimer's and we watched her slowly disappear before our eyes, each day becoming a little less the person she once was. No one should die well before their time, but must we die in such a protracted way either?

My wish for Maggie is both that she live forever and that she live not one minute longer than she is comfortable and happy. I hope that she will find a way to tell me when that time arrives, or that the need for me to take action will be taken out of my hands. Today, she ate with enthusiasm and enjoyed a short walk: happy, although perhaps not comfortable. Who knows, we might just be heading back to Ogunquit next March for another day at the beach.

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Sisters and Writing What You Know

(I wrote this for a guest spot on Teresasreadingcorner blog.) 

Readers often assume that novels are, at least in part, autobiographical, perhaps because writing instructors through the ages have compelled writers to “write what they know,” i.e., their own lives. I once wrote a short story about a hairdresser. My professor asked me if I’d ever been one. I have not. “Write about something else,” he snapped. While I’ve never been a hairdresser, I’ve certainly been to a hairdresser⎯on more than one occasion. I decided that qualified and wrote the story. I thought it came out pretty well. Now I have written a novel about sisters. Ask me if I have sisters. I do not. Not even one. 

So why did I choose to write about sisters when I don’t have one? Because the subject interests me. I am a sister (I have a brother) and I know lots of women who have them. My mother had three (and two brothers). It was her relationship with her youngest sister (younger by sixteen years) that served as the basis for the main characters in my novel. At times my mother and aunt seemed like the most intimate of friends, at other times, because of the age difference, almost like mother and daughter. There were also times when they seemed like rivals, although I wasn’t clear what the rivalry was about. Watching them, I began to wonder what it might take to drive sisters apart (my characters have been estranged for forty years) and what it might take to bring them back together. 

Sisters have a shared childhood history, even when their childhoods (as was the case for my aunt and mother) aren’t shared. This shared history forges a bond stronger than even the closest friendship. As one friend (who has a sister) told me, “your sister knows about your childhood traumas better than anyone.” But, I argued, you can say that about all siblings. She thought a moment and said, “With sisters there’s more competition.” 

Ah, competition. This had the ring of truth to it. This is what I saw between my mother and aunt. I felt a certain amount of competition with my brother, but he was bigger, older and, well, a boy; we were on different journeys. Same sex siblings are on the same journey. I think my aunt chose to give up rather than compete with my mother, but I think the challenge was always there, and I’m not sure she was always happy with her decision. 

Writers don’t have to stick to “what they know,” because writers draw their material, not only from observation, but also from imagination and investigation. I got to observe, investigate, and imagine what it’s like to have a sister. If you read HER SISTER’S SHADOW, please leave a comment below, or email me at Katharine@katharinebritton.com and let me know if I got it right. 

Attachments

I've spent this summer marketing my new novel, Her Sister's Shadow, doing readings and signings at various venues around New England. (Actually, the driving to the various venues has consumed much more of my summer than the readings themselves.)

For years I've listened eagerly to my favorite authors read and discuss their work in independent bookstores and town halls. This summer it was finally my turn to read. Armed with an annotated copy of my book: what to say before I read, what to read, and what to say about what I've just read; a page of "For Katy" stickers (my publisher left the dedication off my book, so I apply one of these stickers to each book I sign); the clothes I'll wear, encased in plastic to prevent wrinkling; a granola bar in case I can't find a restaurant or don't have time to eat; and my poster.

My publisher sent me a poster to take with me to readings. It was a large (about 2'x3') gorgeous and glossy rendering of my beautiful book cover.  It came surrounded by bubble-wrap and embraced by a sturdy cardboard box. I carried it proudly into bookstores before my readings--usually very shortly before my readings--and the bookstore owners (somewhat surprised to see an author come in clutching a poster) would put it in the window, or near the book display, and then return it to me after the reading, neatly re-wrapped and entombed.

One week I had a reading some distance away, and a friend offered to deliver it to the bookstore a few days before the reading. This could only be a good thing, I thought, and dropped it off at her house. One thing led to another: that friend deputized another friend to make the actual delivery, the instructions got garbled, and the bookstore recycled my poster's packaging, assuming that I had given the poster to them. Given them my beloved poster! What were they thinking?

After the reading, I tucked the naked poster under my arm and headed home.

The next bookstore I visited kindly fabricated another case for my poster, using brown boxboard and masking tape. I was very grateful, as I'd planned to mail the poster to the next bookstore on my route, so they'd have it a full week before my reading. I left it in my back hall so I would remember to take it to the Post Office.

Perhaps some of you noticed the past tense in the second paragraph? On Saturday of that week, my diligent husband, whose purview in our household includes solid waste management, took my lovely poster, in its new housing, to the dump. To be fair, it did look like collapsed cardboard intended for the recycling bin.

No one but me misses that poster. In truth, very few probably saw it, but I'd become very attached, and grieved its loss. The poster represented success: it was so shiny and bright and full of promise. It was bigger than life. It was, in short, what marketing is all about. Now I must rely on myself to create that shiny, bright, bigger-than-life aura for my book without visual aids. I have to do it, I suppose, with language.

Choosing the Shore

Given a choice on where to travel (or where to set my novels) I will always pick the shore. I’m not particular about which shore, but Maine’s close by, and so I get there at least once every summer. I love the way firs grow right out of the rock, down close to the water’s edge; the way seaweed drifts listlessly in the cold, green water; and how fog slides in and, even though it has no real substance, can alter an entire landscape. 

Cape Cod was another favorite summer destination of mine. Every August, when I was a child, we rented a tiny cabin, one of a dozen clustered around a small marina on the banks of a saltwater river that ran into Waquoit Bay. The cabin was rustic and had an outdoor shower, not because they were trendy (I don’t think we had trends back then, certainly nothing we considered trendy) but because there wasn’t room for one inside. I loved it. We spent all day in-and-out of the water, riding our bikes, catching minnows and crabs, and messing about in boats. There was no television, so we played cards in the evening, or went to the drive-in. I long for simple summer days on the Cape. We don’t get there very often now, because the traffic is bad and the beaches crowded. Perhaps it’s not Cape Cod that I long for, but the simple, summer days of my childhood. 

Every winter my husband and I now flee the Vermont cold for Sanibel Island, located off the coast of Southwest Florida. What I love about this little gem, besides the climate, is that two-thirds of the island is conserved for wildlife. The speed limit on most of the roads is 25mph, and drivers are required by law to stop for gopher tortoises. This just seems right to me. I haven’t heard anyone else complain, either. When I can rouse myself early, I go out on the beach and watch the sunrise. Sometimes the moon is still up, and that is quite a sight. Not many folks are up at that hour, and the few who are recognize that it’s not a time to socialize. We stand and stare in awe at the wonder of nature. Eleven hours later, up and down the beach, noisy groups gather to toast the sun as it drops back into the Gulf and to congratulate ourselves for having been lucky enough to spend another day in paradise. 

Writing is often a solitary undertaking, as is reading, but stories are meant to be shared so, please, leave a comment below. Where do you like to travel and why? (And, if you read my new novel, Her Sister’s Shadow, please get in touch and let me know what you think. Thanks!)

Places and People

I’m fascinated by the effect that places have on people. Landscape, culture, traditions… are all equally important to fictional characters. This place/character relationship is one of the things I enjoy most about reading southern novels, (maybe because I’m from New England). To Kill a Mockingbird gets top honors, but I also love the novels of Eudora Welty and, more recently The Help, by Kathryn Stockett. The sweet, heavy air, the drooping Spanish moss, the language, and the history… provide a uniquely southern setting that shapes these uniquely southern tales. The atmosphere that Harper Lee creates in To Kill a Mockingbird is so vivid I can easily picture myself sitting in a rocker on Atticus Finch’s front porch on a hot summer day, a tall glass of iced tea by my side, as Scout’s story unspools before me. 

One can sit in a rocker on a porch in New England (where my novel, Her Sister’s Shadow, is set) and read in the summer just as easily, but one is very likely to be wearing fleece and sipping hot tea. The weather here is challenging and unpredictable. Scrub oaks and bittersweet have learned to adapt to coastal New England’s thin, salty soil, harsh winters, and constant breeze. So have its people. But it takes effort to put down roots in rock, and that effort sometimes shows. It’s not that New Englanders are unfriendly, we’re just self-sufficient and expect others to be the same. (It has been said of the residents of certain New England towns, “they will not ask why you’ve come, nor will they ask you back.”) Her Sister’s Shadow is a story of two sisters in late mid-life, estranged for forty years who reunite in their childhood home. Like the scrub oak and bittersweet, these two women, and this story, belong in New England. Were I to move them to Charleston or Atlanta, it would become a very different story. The social mores, the architecture, and the climate would all insist. 

Places are important to people. So tell me, where is your story set? Where are your favorite novels set, and why? Writing is often a solitary endeavor, as is reading, but stories are meant to be shared, so please leave a comment below, if you’re so inclined. (And, if you read Her Sister’s Shadow, please get in touch and let me know what you think.) Thank you!

The Unexpected Story

Stories come to writers in unexpected ways. We spend a lot of time observing our surroundings, jotting down snippets of conversations, and noting unusual people and situations, and then we write a scene taken partially from these observations and dredged partially from our imaginations. We don’t know what we’ve written until we read the scene. When we read it, we sometimes (often) find that the words don’t express precisely what we’d intended to say. So we change one word, and then another, and, slowly, the scene takes shape. But, what’s this? The scene now leads the story in a whole new direction! The story we thought we were writing is not the one we’re now writing. 

Sometimes a writer will adjust a setting to fit a new plot element, and this can also lead to wholly unexpected outcomes. Say we need our character to make a quilt to auction at the county fair. We add a sewing room onto the house. Quietly, a character suggests that the sewing room might once have been a nursery. “Is this true?” the writer asks (somewhat shocked, somewhat annoyed). “Yes,” the character says. “I can’t believe you didn’t know that.” The writer, then, must dutifully supply the character with a present and a future to address that hidden past. Our characters will let us know if we get it wrong. The stubborn ones remain silent for days, making us guess at the error. The outspoken ones talk so fast we have to race to keep up. Again, the story we thought we were writing is not the one we’re now writing. 

The events in my novel, HER SISTER'S SHADOW, are fictional, presented to me, in part, by the characters, as I sat them in a room together and let them talk, and, in part, from my imagination, as I wandered the hallways of their childhood home, where my characters reunite after a forty-year estrangement. I invented doorways and opened them to see what lay behind; pictured a dressing table and started sifting through the clutter, surprised at what lay hidden. 

I hope you enjoy reading HER SISTER'S SHADOW as much as I enjoyed writing it. And, please, let me hear from you! 


(Adapted from my guest post on the blog, Pudgy Penguin Perusals.)

Disposable Straws and Such

I read an article in the Boston Globe on Sunday about disposable straws. I have three glass straws, remnants of my childhood. Impractical but so lovely; each one has a different shell worked into the bottom, which made them the perfect tool for stirring Bosco into milk. When I was sick, my mother would bring me ginger ale in a special glass with one of these straws. I would have neither memory nor memento if all we'd had were disposable straws. 

I regret our current attitude of impermanence. We buy goods with the full knowledge that we will use them a short while, and then cast them aside. Goods made with the understanding that they will soon be soon discarded and replaced surely must be made with less care. 

There were, of course also disposable straws when I was a child. They were made of paper, so they were biodegradable (not only in landfill but, eventually, in your drink). Today's straws are made of polypropylene and, according to the young man being profiled in the Boston Globe article, fourth-grader Milo Cress (which would make a great name for a character in a novel) 500,000,000 (that's five-hundred million) disposable straws go into landfill every day. Where they will remain forever. Ironically, although not designed to keep, they, like all the other disposable items, will last indefinitely. Milo thinks, and I agree, that this accretion in landfills is thoughtless and unnecessary. 

Why do we even have straws? They have nothing to do with hygiene. You wouldn't consider ordering a straw with your martini at a restaurant, or with a beer. The very earliest straws, according to Wikipedia (so you might want to verify this) were actually made of straw, hardly hygienic. Ironically, those ancient straw straws were designed to reduce the amount of solids you consumed while drinking your glass of home-brew. If straws have nothing to do with hygiene and we don't need them to filter out the solids in our beer, why do we need straws for our iced tea, iced coffee, seltzer, sodas, or water? 

Apparently, (according to Wikipedia again) the one real advantage that straws can claim is helping to reduce cavities. When one sips a sugary beverage through a straw, the contact between the drink and your teeth is reduced. Given the obesity epidemic in this country, why not order a glass of water and decline the offer of a straw and solve two problems? 

Admittedly, straws are useful for youngster with undeveloped gross motor skills, unable to hold a glass, but, surely, these tots contribute only a small percentage of the 500,000,000 straws going into landfill. 

Milo Cress makes a good point, I think, when he says that restaurants need to start offering customers straws only if they request one. And customers, we need to remember that those little plastic tubes we think we need, will get discarded, but they will not go away.