Recommended Books

Stronger than Dirt: A Recommended Book [Part Two]

Posted by Diane Morrow on July 10, 2007 in Recommended Books, Writing about Goals and Vision

In early August, in spite of obstacles, Chris Losee and Kim Schaye harvest at their flower farm for the first time. They cut zinnias and cosmos along with a scattering of wildflowers from the roadside, and they drive down to the city in a van loaded with five-gallon buckets of cut flowers and zucchini. They’re headed for a market in Greenwich Village where they’ve reserved a space. They’re optimistic. They don’t think they’ve harvested quite enough to make the one thousand dollars they’d hoped for from a first market, but they figure they’re probably carrying eight hundred dollars worth of produce, give or take. They arrive in Greenwich Village at the greenmarket, set up a card table, put out their sign and they begin making and selling bouquets of flowers. And people buy them. Things seem to be moving. They’re a little thrilled—understandably. Then, at the end of the day they count their money. 160 dollars. That’s their gross take. They subtract the day’s expenses—the market fee and gas and the money they paid a friend to help out—and their net take is zero. Zero. Their expectations have been confounded. Which provides yet another plot point in their story, and is yet one more reason why I like this book. Chris’s stated vision all along has been “to create a situation in which the land could support us.” They’d borrowed from Kim’s retirement fund to make a downpayment on the farm. They’d grown those three thousand tomato and pepper plants in their bedroom. They’d invested two years of their lives, and a fair chunk of their savings. And the net take on their first market day: zero. Kim admits, in the book, to some panic after this first market. Perhaps Chris was panicking too, inwardly. But what he also does is to make another meticulous notebook entry. In this entry, “First Greenmarket,” which he includes as in illustration in their book, he lists the date of the market, the location, the contents of the buckets, the market conditions, the gross take, the expenses—in other words, the data of the first market. Then, at the very bottom of the entry, beneath the data, he writes a terse reflection: “Conclusion: Bring more good flowers.” At the next market they take in three hundred and twenty dollars. By September a few cherry tomatoes have managed to ripen, and a variety of wildflowers had come into bloom around their cultivated crops. One Saturday in September they manage to take in six hundred. At the end of the season, after the first frost, Chris makes a final tally: a total gross for the first year of 4435 dollars. Before expenses. Chris’s first response? “. . . you can’t support a family of hamsters for a year on that sum of money.” His second response? He begins figuring out a plan for the next season. This is what I like about this book—the way they keep reflecting on their data—and revising their plan—and the way they’re able to make this process so transparent in their book. They build a greenhouse so they can start crops earlier. They choose flowers and vegetables that they know now will grow well and sell well. They become more skilled at cutting and arranging flowers. The second year they take...

Stronger than Dirt: A Recommended Book [Part One]

Posted by Diane Morrow on July 8, 2007 in Recommended Books, Writing about Goals and Vision

This is a book about a flower farm. It’s written in two voices, that of Kim Schaye and Chris Losee, a married couple in Brooklyn who moved out of the city to upstate New York to realize a dream—a vision. I’m quite sure that one reason I’ve enjoyed this book so much is because I get a kind of vicarious pleasure out of reading about someone—anyone—cultivating acres of flowers. But I also like the way this book begins at the beginning—when the flower farm was no more than a notion—and it proceeds to articulate the process of going from nothing—from scratch—into the realization of a vision. Interestingly, the story of the farm begins in failure. Chris, the husband, had been running his father’s construction business in New York for several years, business was booming, when in 1994, and rather abruptly, the construction boom busted and he found himself running the business out of his home and without the benefit of an income. In July of that year a concerned friend took him out to the tip of Staten Island to visit a place called Gericke Farm, a tiny farm which had once been a working farm and was now preserved as a demonstration farm inside a state park. They walked among the rows of crops. They picked tomatoes and zucchini and large bunches of flowers, and his friend told him he could show him how to make ten thousand dollars a year working part-time and on half an acre. The seed was planted. Between July and October of that year, and with a stack of books about small farming growing on his nightstand, Chris became convinced that he had stumbled upon their next venture. Of note, writing played a key role in moving what began as an idea—a dream—a vision—to a thriving farm. Chris writes: I’m not actually sure what made up my mind, but it might have had something to do with all the paperwork I was creating. I still have a time line, printed in choppy type on my old Apple dot-matrix printer from this period. It shows the months July 1994 through December 1996, and for each quarter of the year there’s a two- or three-sentence plan of action and a one-sentence goal. My wife says that I’m an obsessive list maker. But for me there is a quality of lists that is something like magic. Items on lists can acquire a certain inevitability. These are things that are supposed to happen, that will happen if given time and effort. And perhaps the gradual accumulation of books and lists had reached some critical mass that made the decision inevitable: write something down enough times and it becomes a fact. With writing as a catalyst, the facts begin to accrue for this couple. They find and then purchase thirty acres in the Hudson Valley with a stream running through it. Chris begins building them a house. He pores over seed catalogs. He orders seeds. He rigs up a system of plywood benches and grow lights—and a watering system no less—in the attic of their row house, and, after a decision to grow some vegetables along with the flowers, proceeds to start over three thousand tomato and pepper plants. They put up a fence at the farm, hire...

Speak the Language of Healing: A Book for Making Peace with the Body When the Body Has Cancer

Posted by Diane Morrow on June 21, 2007 in Recommended Books

Writing earlier this week about making peace with the body prompted me to pull out a book that I haven’t looked at in a while. Speak the Language of Healing: Living with Breast Cancer without Going to War. It’s an intriguing title. An intriguing book. And one I was introduced to a few years ago now by a patient, Norah, who found the book during a time when she was trying to figure out how to live with metastatic breast cancer. I’d known Norah two years before she got her diagnosis of cancer. She was a patient of mine, had seen me on and off for some stress-related symptoms and had been doing quite well. She’d suffered an enormous amount of pain in her early life, and she’d found a way to work through some of her grief about that time, and she’d begun to feel a sense of freedom—and possibility. She was preparing to move away from North Carolina and take a new job in a large city. She was excited about the move. She’d just made a trip to look at housing. And then one evening, not long after she’d made this trip to look at her new city, she came in to see me, and she was carrying a large brown grocery bag. She sat down, and she proceeded to take from the bag a bottle of wine—and then two glasses. And she handed one of the glasses to me. This was entirely unlike anything she’d ever done. In fact I can’t say I’ve ever had a patient bring wine and glasses to an appointment—not before or since. She opened the wine. She asked me if I’d take some. Sure, I told her. Sure. She poured a bit of wine in my glass, and then a bit more in hers. I waited. And then I asked. What are we toasting? To breast cancer, she said. I’ve just been diagnosed with breast cancer. And so we toasted breast cancer. She’d found a lump. She’d been in to see her internist a month before and at that time everything—her exam—including her breast exam—all was normal. And then she’d found this lump. And she’d gone in for an evaluation—a biopsy—the lump was cancerous. Sometimes patients go through a phase of denial where they believe a serious condition is not going to affect their lives. And, sometimes, it would seem that physicians go through this. In this particular case, I was the one who stayed in denial for a bit. I thought—she’s doing so well, she’s just taken this new job, she’s excited, she has a breast tumor, she’ll get treatment, maybe it will delay her move, she’ll still get to go. Norah suspected it was going to be a bigger deal. Norah was right. Further evaluation revealed that she had disease in her liver and her bones. Stage four disease. She changed her plans. She began chemotherapy. And as she went through her treatment—and her illness—and all the changes that this brought—and as she began to write about some of this, well, Speak the Language of Healing was the kind of book that she needed to find. The book is authored by four women—Susan Kuner, Carol Matzkin Orsborn, Linda Quigley, and Karen Leigh Stroup. Each of the women has...

Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story”: A Radical Revision

Posted by Diane Morrow on June 7, 2007 in Recommended Books, Revision

When I think about revision—when it comes to writing or healing—I tend to think about it in radical ways. I’m not thinking so much here about rereading a paper or a story and fixing a few grammar or spelling mistakes. Those kinds of surface changes are important in late stages of the writing process, but I tend to think of those kinds of changes as editing or proofreading. When I think about revision I think of something that goes beneath the surface—and nearer to the root. Looking again—and seeing something that one has never seen before. Looking again—and seeing where the gaps are—- Looking again—and changing the plot. The story that comes to mind when I think about this kind of radical revision is Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story,” in his incomparable collection, The Things They Carried. This is one of those stories better read in its entirety than described, but here is an excerpt to give some sense of it if you’ve not before come across it: In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and float outside yourself. When a guy dies, like Curt Lemon, you look away and then back for a moment and then look away again. The pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed. The story is, at one level, about the death of Curt Lemon. It’s a story about a soldier, home from the war, trying to tell, among other things, about the death of his friend, Curt Lemon. The story is told in fragments—pieces—and at the center is Curt Lemon stepping on a booby-trapped 105 round and the explosion blowing him up into a tree. Curt Lemon’s best friend, Rat Kiley, another soldier, goes mad with grief, after. He shoots at a baby water buffalo in his grief. Over and over. And then he writes Curt Lemon’s sister and he tells her that Curt Lemon was a tremendous human being, that he loved him, the guy was his best friend in the world, his soulmate. And the sister never writes back. The story continues. The speaker of the story is home from the war, he’s telling the story, it’s twenty years later, he’s still telling this story, and then he’s telling what it’s like to try and tell it—and that too is all part of the story: Now and then, when I tell this story, someone will come up afterward and say she liked it. It’s always a woman. Usually it’s an older woman of a kindly temperament and humane politics. She’ll explain that as a rule she hates war stories; she can’t understand why people want to wallow in all the blood and gore. But this one she liked. The poor baby buffalo, it made her sad. Sometimes, even, there are little tears. What I should...

How to Find a Good Writing Group

Posted by Diane Morrow on May 29, 2007 in Healing Conversation, Recommended Books

First—-a good writing group is hard to find. Even a good group of two. It is harder to find than a good grocery store, or a good bakery, and probably harder than finding a good yoga class. Finding a good writing group is probably more on a par with finding a great job—or the right house. Now and then a fabulous house or job lands in your lap. But more often this is the kind of thing you have to prepare for, and search for, and be willing to invest some time in. How to prepare? A few words of advice (to be used as you wish): If and when you feel like a writing group is something you’d like to explore, and, assuming the fabulous writing group or workshop has not already landed in your lap, I’d recommend reading Peter Elbow’s Writing without Teachers and/or Pat Schneider’s Writing Alone and with Others. The two books complement each other well. Elbow’s book is the older of the two. It was first published in 1973 and is a classic in the field of teaching writing. Two chapters—“The Teacherless Writing Class,” and “Thoughts on the Teacherless Writing Class”—are good preparation for both recognizing a good writing group when you come across one, or, perhaps, starting a new one of your own. Elbow’s emphasis is on the importance of getting honest authentic feedback from readers—and how this process of feedback can grow one’s writing. Schneider’s book, published in 2003, is the newer book. It’s a longer book than Elbow’s, chattier, with more stories and examples drawn from her classes. One of its particular strengths is in its advice on how to recognize and help create a healthy workshop. And Ms. Schneider offers this advice [p. 199] on recognizing a good writing class: After being with your teacher, do you feel more like writing or less like writing? You should never be made to feel embarrassment or shame in the classroom. If that happens, there is something wrong with the way writing is being taught. Drop the class. Take auto mechanics or geometry! Then write about fixing cars, or about the perfect problem. It’s the right question I think: After being with your teacher do you feel more like writing or less like writing? It’s the kind of question one could ask about a writing teacher or a writing class or a writing group or perhaps anything that one seeks out in order to foster one’s writing. After being with __________, do you feel more like writing or less like...

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