Ann Putnam on Ode to Motherhood

I'm trying to write a story called “Zoe’s Bear,” which has a deadline right around the corner. It will eventually become part of the novel, I Will Leave You Never, which will be published this May. I began it on the drive home from Glacier National Park, where we'd taken the children not knowing a grizzly bear had just killed three people. The experience of the bear was far more real to me than to them.  They thought it was a grand adventure and loved wearing bare bells tied to their shoes. The terror of that bear has never left me, nor the sense that I would never be big enough or brave enough to protect my children from it, however it came. It began my thinking about motherhood and peril, and thus the urgency of writing this story.

I had worked for weeks in the margins of my life, ideas written on cereal boxes while cooking breakfast, on receipts, restaurant napkins, my car registration. I’ve become so interruptible that the expectation of interruption has become a habit of mind. But if I could just have a single day completely alone to get the fragments of ideas, phrases and lines, even a word here and there into some kind of magical and revelatory combination, I could go deeply into the very heart of what I most need to say.    

This is the story of that day.

I’ve cancelled classes, the kids are all at school, and at last I’m alone.  The day stretches out full of possibility. I sit at my computer and take a deep breath of gratitude.  But I hear voices that do not speak, footsteps and no one's there. Unaccustomed as I am to this silence, I hardly know what to do. Yet this day is what I've wanted for so long—uninterrupted, unambiguous time, hour after precious hour. 

I had decided ahead of time that I was not going to answer the phone. Yet when the phone rings an hour later, of course I answer it. It's my little girl’s school.  She’s in the nurse’s room, throwing up, could I please come and get her?  She was fine this morning!  But with kids, these things turn on a dime. So of course I’m out the door, only stopping for my purse and a towel and pan for the ride home.  She’s lying curled up in a ball on the cot in the nurse’s room, hugging her coat. Her face is damp and flushed. When did this happen?  She’d danced out of the house and slid into her carpool’s backseat, blew me a kiss.  

But now my little girl is in her bedroom, fast asleep. I’ve checked on her about a dozen times, telling myself that if she had a fever, it’s gone now, but keep a lookout. I don’t trust this strange suddenness. Then it’s after lunch, and I'm settled into my writing space. I look out into the woods, crack open a window and the air floats cool over my skin. I can do this after all.

My dog, my eighty-five pound black and white shadow friend, is lying under the computer table, chewing on an old tube sock. Time flies, then stops, as she crawls out from under the table. She's making a funny noise, sort of like choking or gagging. I start to rush her outside, but whatever was going to come up must have gone back down, because now she's standing there, looking up at me, wagging her tail. Then I notice that the sock is gone. Bring her right over, the vet says.  I scoop up my daughter, who’s still half asleep, buckle her into her car seat, and hand her the pan and towel. Her eyes look funny.  She really is running a fever. 

The X-rays, examination, and diagnosis pretty well took the rest of the afternoon. It was lucky you were home today, the vet said, this could have been life-threatening. Ah, there it is—the presence of that bear and the necessity for my constant vigilance. But I get weary keeping track of it all. I look at my daughter in the rear-view mirror. She’s fallen asleep, which is just as well. The dog is nestled as close to her as she can get.  We’re all tucked in now. All safe.  At least for now. I’ve done everything I can to keep that bear away, with my secret chants, tokens, charms, cruciferous vegetables, vitamins, seat belts, mittens, and scarves—incantations all, against certain unspoken things.

I pull into the driveway, and just sit there, looking at the waiting house.  It’s about time for my little boys to be coming up the hill from the bus top.  Party’s over.                    

We would watch to see if the sock reappeared, which I'm happy to report it did quite unceremoniously, the next day.  Well, you can't live real life with pets and kids without, say,  somebody putting a bean up their nose, though all of this makes me feel that there really is too much of everything. I do not know what the answer is to this conflict between one’s attachments and one’s work in the world, because I have never learned how to be two places at once and I do not know how to love either any less. Other than death, I do believe that having a child is probably the most life-altering experience a person can have. Certain ways of feeling and thinking are changed forever. What I do know is this: even as they diminish my capacity for work, the tugs and pulls of those I most love have enriched that work in strange and wondrous and continuously surprising ways.

Ann Putnam is an internationally-known Hemingway scholar, who has made more than six trips to Cuba. Her novel, Cuban Quartermoon, came, in part, from those trips, as well as a residency at Hedgebrook Writer’s Colony. She has published the memoir, Full Moon at Noontide:  A Daughter’s Last Goodbye (University of Iowa Press), and short stories in Nine by Three:  Stories (Collins Press), among others. Her second novel, I Will Leave You Never, will be published this spring. Her literary criticism appears in many collections and periodicals. She holds a PhD from the University of Washington and has taught creative writing, gender studies and American Literature for many years.  She is finishing a third novel, The World in Woe and Splendor.

The Meaning Behind the Title Find a Place for Me

When we are in the early throes of grief, our lost loved one dominates our every thought. We find ourselves angry that other people are going about their days doing ordinary things like getting gas or groceries, going to work, or kissing a partner, because we feel that our own lives have stopped. How can the world be going on when our loved one is no longer in it? How can anyone be thriving when our world feels ended? If we grieve wholly our world has truly stopped. But this feeling does slowly begin to pass. Soon we not only have to but can get up from our place of grieving and emotionally begin to place one foot in front of the other. We can begin moving towards a future where we are still alive while without the one we miss so terribly. When someone we love dies, we hold them in our hearts and minds forever, but we can eventually thrive despite the grief we will now forever carry.

My husband Bob and I experienced two great losses together five years before he was diagnosed at the young age of forty-three with the terminal illness amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. Five years before, my father and brother had died two weeks apart, both suddenly, and we had been those people in shock and stunned into a world without them, wandering through it in a fog wondering how we would ever be able to look fully forward again. For Bob and me, it took nearly a year and a pregnancy with our second child before we began to comprehend that we and our son, and now soon daughter, had a future without my dad and brother where we needed to be very much present. We needed to not only embrace this future but learn to thrive in it for our children and for those who had left us behind. After all, our loved ones would not want anything less for us. They would want the best, and the best would mean a life of full-throttle living.

When Bob was diagnosed, we were both devastated, but ever the philosopher—Bob had a doctorate in philosophy and was a university professor—the day after his diagnosis, Bob told me he wanted me to love again. He said he had come to terms with his death in his twenties and he was also well aware how much his love blessing would mean to me and the children. Bob knew we would not thrive if we always remained in that early place of mourning. He knew he didn’t want me to be alone. He also wanted the children to have another person invested in their lives to guide them. Bob could do nothing to stop his illness from taking his life but he could help us continue in ours.

When Bob first told me to love again, I wasn’t at all ready. I could not go there. I was one foot in the grave with him and I didn’t want to get out of it. It was going to be a lot of work and I was going to not only be grieving the love of my life, but managing our children’s grief, and the full lives that we had once managed together. I was going to be a single mom doing all the work of a household, continuing to be a university professor myself, and somehow getting myself out of bed in the morning when I would want to do anything but.

As time went on, I began to realize Bob was right about love. The way to thrive was going to be to open my heart to the future just as we both had after losing my dad and brother, or I had earlier in life when decades before I lost my eldest brother and mother. “You have done it before and you can do it again,” Bob would tell me when I wanted to give up and said I could not go on after losing him. He believed in me. He believed in love and in my ability to love. After all, the measure of our grief is the measure of our love. If we love deeply, we grieve deeply. If we love deeply, we can also love again.

When Bob was sick, he made videos for the kids and me. At the end of mine, Bob says, “You are going to need to find a place for me,” and knowing Bob so completely, I knew exactly what he meant. In his absence, I needed to find a place for him that would not dominate all of my feelings or thoughts. If there was going to be room for me to go on, love again, and thrive in the face of the devastation of losing him, I was going to need a different place for Bob.

When I first started writing Find a Place for Me, I titled the book after Bob’s book of poetry, written during his illness and self-published a month before he died: After Thunder. My manuscript was therefore titled, After Lightning. During the publishing process, however, I realized that that title, while meaningful to me, didn’t say much to readers about the book itself

Find a Place for Me: Embracing Love and Life in the Face of Death is very much about Bob teaching me and others how to not only live well but die well. It is about our love for each other and how it transcends. Bob’s parting gift to me was to generously help me find a place for him that was forever and wholly his but also made room. I have found a place for him in this memoir and in my life. I hope upon reading it, readers will find a place for him too

Deirdre Fagan, D.A., is a widow, wife, mother of two, and associate professor and coordinator of creative writing at Ferris State University. Dr. Fagan, also a divorcee and the sole survivor of her birth family, is the author of the memoir Find a Place for Me. For more information visit deirdrefagan.com

Roselle Lim on The Importance of Food when Writing about Culture

My large, extended family from my mother’s side immigrated to Canada from the Philippines. My eldest aunt was the first to come over and the rest followed her like goslings across the water. We packed our traditions and recipes into our suitcases and moving boxes, and hoped it would help us navigate the strange, new beyond.

In Canada, our tongues, which spoke Hokkien and Tagalog, felt swollen and clumsy wrapping itself around the syllables of English. Our feet stumbled, trying to navigate and learn new roads and customs. The only source of stability and comfort was family and food—in each other and in the familiar tastes of the country we left, we found strength in the dishes my aunts and my father cooked in our new homes.

In general, my family found the same spices and ingredients, and in the case when they didn’t, they substituted to recreate the flavor profile. What they simmered was something old yet new, with the distinct zest of the diaspora. The immigrant experience centres around community and food. The sharing of meals facilitates kinship and a way to connect to our heritage.

When I write about food, it’s not only an expression of my culture and my family—it’s a culmination of my life experiences through one specific lens.

Conversely, I am not lumpia or a bowl of salted duck egg congee.

Writing culture relying on food is reductive. It treats cuisine as the goal when in reality, food acts as the medium to convey nuance, traditions, and history. To write using a character’s traditional foods as a sole means to validate identity or representation is lazy and dismissive. It opens up the writer to perpetuating harmful stereotypes and problematic content.

Without acknowledging or respecting the history and subtleties in the dishes you are writing about, there is much lost in translation. For example, a bowl of arroz caldo on a cold, wintry day is comfort in a bowl and without the context of culture, you might as well write about a bowl of cereal on an ordinary weekday morning.

Food is life for me and often a passionate topic in the cultural framework. While its importance is unquestioned, writing about it in terms of representation and as a reflection of heritage should be taken with great care—the way my father marinates his short ribs with a secret spice blend and sliced kiwis for a day. After all, the act of cooking and feeding can be expressions of love, the way writing is an extension of creativity.

While food can be important to culture, it shouldn’t be the only tool in the arsenal. There are many other ways to convey the complexities of my identity. To me, food is best as a garnish that further enhances what I’d already established and prepared ahead of time. It’s meant to be savoured and act as one of the ways to understand the context and nuances of our identities.

Roselle Lim is the critically acclaimed author of Natalie Tan’s Book of Luck and Fortune, Vanessa Yu’s Magical Paris Tea Shop and her newest release, Sophie Go’s Lonely Hearts Club. She lives on the north shore of Lake Erie and always has an artistic project on the go.