#lisahiton

by Lisa Hiton

Looking for the right advice on pursuing the writer’s life? You’ve come to the write place!

My family is Jewish. We don’t celebrate Christmas. And yet, isn’t going to a movie and eating Chinese food while the rest of the world closes down for a day a kind of ritual—its own kind of made-up holiday? I’m sure that these details seem usual as well. But, dear writers, a lot more is there than meets the eye. Your family’s traditions, rituals, and habits—no matter how ordinary they seem—can be made extraordinary by turning them into words.

Family Hanukkah with multiple Hannukiahs! These are different than menorahs as they hold nine candles instead of seven.

PANNING FOR GOLD

An easy way to describe your holiday season to someone else (and kickstart your writing process) is to make a list of traditions and rituals that you think of when this time of year comes around. Mine looks something like this:

Tuesday before Thanksgiving

take a train into the city

to go to the Art Institute with my mom

followed by shopping for new art supplies

and a nice dinner

and train ride home

Thanksgiving Eve and Day

prepare spinach balls

set table

cook cook cook

eat eat eat

play games with cousins

Christmas Eve and Christmas Day

hang Hanukkah stockings

attend Cathy Nathan’s x-mas party

cook a big breakfast including eggs, fresh squeezed OJ, and bacon

open stockings

hang out

go to a movie at the theatre

cook a nice dinner (Chinese food takes too long in my hometown since we live in a pretty Jewish part of Chicagoland)

watch holiday movies with mom and brother, especially The Family Stone

Winters in Chicago can be brutal; there’s no better antidote than playing in the snow! Here I am enjoying the snow with my first friend, Rebel.

Are you bored yet? This isn’t even counting Hanukkah since it doesn’t always fall near Christmas! All of these things may seem pretty usual. That might be true if you make your list of traditions as well. You might decorate a tree, hang twinkle lights, go caroling, go to the same person’s house every year to celebrate, leave out cookies for Santa, etc. Most neighborhoods and cultures have their usual lists of traditions. Part of your goal as a writer is to pan for gold among them.

Looking at this list, I began to ask myself, Why is it that my mom, brother, and I do these same things every single year? Some of it seems like the larger culture, but some of it was made by us. As I think about why, it’s clear that a lot of these rituals are in some way related to my parent’s divorce. Through that lens, I might start panning for my own gold—to sift through this litany to find something that might be worth more than meets the eye. Each of these seemingly usual bullet points, in fact, triggers different memories for me. In that field of memories, where might I find a scene that begins a longer story? How might I organize these scenes and memories into something cohesive for myself and my readers? I’ll begin with my freshman year.

My freshman year of high school marked the first year of spending winter break with divorced parents. While breakfast time was never particularly special in my house, Christmas day posed a dilemma: what would my mom, brother, and I do in this new situation, just the three of us? Especially since nearly everything is closed on Christmas day and people are with their families, filling the time posed some anxiety for my mother and me, especially with my young, shy brother.

To be sure, I already had thrown one tantrum about adjusting to these new circumstances. It was the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. In elementary school and middle school, I normally had that day off as part of my holiday break. In high school though, this was not the case. It was second period when I received a pink slip during chorus to report to my advisor’s office. As a self-proclaimed academic, I was not used to be in trouble. With a room full of eyes on me as I left the choir room, my angst only increased.

It seemed my senior leaders had gone to my advisor worried about my general sadness. In my humiliation that anyone had noticed such negative energy, I proceeded to have the first of many tearful conversations with my advisor about adjusting: to high school, to a new home situation, and more. My mom came and picked me up from school so we could play hooky and keep our one ritual of going to the Art Institute of Chicago. I knew it was a temporary solution to a larger problem, and that this was just one of many adjustments I’d have to make. Yet, the gesture helped me persevere despite my pain.

That choir room would continue to serve as a literary backdrop for growth and tough love throughout high school. It was also a common community I kept throughout high school while everything else changed. For our annual fundraiser, we sold grapefruits and oranges by the box. When the trucks pulled up to the high school, we passed the boxes one by one down the line, just like the who’s down in Whoville, singing all the while in the face of another frigid Chicagoland winter.

While I’m more of a night owl than a morning person, and certainly not a big breakfast eater, this introduction to ripe grapefruits became my exception. Cut in half with a little bit of sugar was all I needed to jump-start my day with a jolt of Vitamin C. And so when the week of Christmas came around, my mom picked up a citrus juicer. The morning of Christmas. My brother and I sat on the island in our kitchen cutting oranges in half. We took turns pressing oranges onto the machine as it whirred and whirred. In an absolute mess of pulp, we finally squeezed enough halves for three cups of juice, just as our bacon was coming out of the oven. It was a new tradition, mundane as it may seem now, and a way of lightening the day and passing the time on a holiday that is not ours.

Christmas may not be our holiday, but it would be a boring day without our own tradition of “Hanukkah stockings”. My brother, Merrick, and I still give each other socks and chapstick as a ritual!

AMONG THESE ROCKS

Among the rocks in the river, there are some that are worth spending time with as a writer, and others that probably don’t add much to the larger story. The larger story in a personal essay is not always about a narrative arc. In the passage I just wrote about making orange juice, the larger story is about recasting the family unit as three instead of four, connecting to my younger brother, and trying to lift my spirit despite how hard it was to start high school with divorce at the forefront of my thinking and feeling. While all of that may not have come out precisely, writing this little passage is a signal that with time and effort, I could write that longer essay. Now as a writer, it will be up to me to describe these anecdotes as scenes, make characters out of my self and my family members, and reflect on the meaning. If this can all be done well—the showing and the telling—then it’s likely the reader will feel a similar sense of nostalgia.

The house where I grew up is on a hill whose swale leads to the north fork of the Chicago River. My fondest memories of winter are sledding down that hill and walking on the frozen river. Here I am teaching a new friend, Miriam, about these prairie-land games.

That is, perhaps, the most important way to approach material. If something is significant, memorable, or worthy of reflection to your own sense of self or personal narrative, there is probably a way to translate that to your reader in writing. Take for example Vani Dadoo’s My December piece from last year, “December in Delhi”, about waiting for the train:

Winter is not good for a polluted city like mine. December, being the main month of winter in India, is always the coldest.

All things in nature huddle together in winter, trying to find, or steal, some warmth from the other.

The clouds creep towards the ground. The fog and the smoke meet and embrace, and together try to steal the little sunlight before it touches the earth. The smog becomes denser, trying to wrap the earth in a heavier, grayish blanket, like the people sleeping in woolen quilts in their homes.  Evening darkness approaches faster than before, as if the smog did succeed in robbing the sunlight. Even after twilight, the smog refuses to diffuse. The air becomes thicker, but the world puts on an old, dull, sweater and wraps a muffler around its neck and walks on.

Some evenings, it coughs and some mornings, it can see its breath. But most days, it can’t peer into the distance.

This year, my father decided to travel to escape the harsh winters. “Migration over hibernation,” he called it, and, “better to get the sun somewhere than get closer to that old, rusty heater at home,” is what he said. We decide to journey to the western coast around Mumbai by train. Indian Railways was a part of family, as all cross-country trips; from Himalayan foothills to the Rajasthani deserts, were made by train.

As we take a cab to the New Delhi railway station, the moon is rising. The moon is a blurred piece of white in the black sky, clouds and smog. The street lights, though, filter through this, illuminating every speck of dust. The cars zoom past on the highway.

One can rarely see stars in my city.

Dadoo wavers between a present-tense meditation on December, and a swell of memory related to waiting for a train in Delhi. While these may be ordinary in another context—waiting for a late train or reflecting on the season—Dadoo weaves these two threads together, a double helix, to arrive at grand statements of the human condition: that like waiting for a train, we wait for a season’s end so that we may be carried into a new one.

Dadoo also brings us Delhi in her sensory details. From the opening passage about all things in nature “huddling together”, Dadoo mirrors her descriptions to match the crowded and polluted city around her. Just as Dadoo was able to give the details of December in Delhi while waiting for a train, you can give your own details as you think about your family—their traditions and rituals, the personalities of each member, and the things that make you nostalgic.

A reader gets a clear sense of a train station in Mumbai from this piece. If you’re familiar with such a place, you will get swept up in a shared nostalgia. If you’re unfamiliar with this land, you may find these descriptions to be exotic. In both cases, the very things that are both familiar and new bring the reader into a shared sense of the human condition with the writer herself. That shared humanness is the the entire point of sharing stories! And all of that came from writing about waiting for the train!

So, dear writers, as you think of Decembers past and enjoy your current December, what memories and rituals are for keeps? What gold will you find in waiting for the train, cooking with your grandmother, visiting a museum, playing in the snow? Show us your favorite places, traditions, and people at this time of year by tagging your stories and images with #MyDecember on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

About Lisa

As a book reviews editor at the Kenyon Review, guest judge and poet Richie Hofmann sees an array of literary critiques come across his desk. But the pieces that really catch his eye are the ones in which the writer is passionate about the book they’ve reviewed. This, he says, “is the best recipe for something that’s going to be worth reading”. This week, Lisa Hiton, writer, filmmaker and member of the Write the World team, chatted with Richie to find out more about what he’s looking for in a riveting Book Review entry.

Lisa: Your first book of poems, Second Empire, has been out in the world for almost a year. What does it feel like to have it on shelves?

Richie: First and foremost, it feels like a relief. Because it relieves you of the stress of wanting your book out in the world, which is the desire that defines most young writers, and to be free of that is delicious. Secondly, I would say that even though most people don’t read the book, including your friends, some people do read it and it’s really nice to be involved in a conversation with those people. I especially like going to meet classes of young people who’ve read the book and hearing their thoughts and having a conversation about what the poems meant to them or what questions the poems raised in them that they still have. That’s the best part.

Lisa: To that end, as a writer, what do reviews of your book mean to you?

Richie: I think a review is important to a writer for a few reasons. Probably, most importantly, it provides a platform for readers to find your work who otherwise might not. This is especially important for poetry, because I think poetry books are among the hardest to get into people’s hands. They don’t appear in bookstores with the same regularity [as books of other genres do], they’re not picked up by book clubs—poets don’t really have a place in a mainstream literary conversation, and so, I think reviews are especially important for poets, and even more important for first time young poets as a way of getting your book into people’s hands. From an intellectual standpoint, I think a review is interesting for the writer because you are curious how the book is being read. I think that is divided into two desires. One, you’re hoping that what you hoped to get across, comes across. That some goal you had set for the book is achieved by it, at least in one reviewer’s opinion. The other desire I think, is to learn something new about your own work. The extent to which that matters, I’m not sure, once it’s in the world, but I think writing is a process. Just because the book is out doesn’t mean the questions that animated the book are gone for you. It doesn’t mean that the narratives that haunted you and that haunt the poems in the book are finished. There’s a lot of use in learning something new about your own writing. The process of putting a book together is all about being up close and personal with the poems. Thinking about them technically, thinking about them materially in a way that you’re not used to—for  instance, how they’re laid out on a page, which is a question somewhat different from writing—but a review can put you in an alien place in relationship to your book again, and maybe, in the best case, teach you something new, or continue the conversation you’ve had with yourself about some of the important themes or images in the book. I really think that’s true, those two things. The most important thing is to get the book out there for people, which is something the writer just can do on their own. And then secondly, you’re looking to have your expectations met and then also exceeded. You’re looking for someone to both corroborate and extend your thoughts.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about book reviews. What is the point of a book review? What purposes do different book reviews have? I don’t think they all serve the same purpose. Sometimes, they’re a guidepost to helping a reader understand the book. I think that’s ideal. And in that case you read a review of a book you’ve already read and it might teach you something new, or give you a new perspective on it, or give you information that will illuminate something. Usually, we skim reviews of things we haven’t read in order to determine that we want to read them, and so, we’re looking to the reviewer for judgement. Whether it’s a simple “yes, this is amazing”, or “no, this is flawed”, or the more typical, grey approach where we are focusing on strengths and weakness of the book. I think primarily the function of a book review is to bring people to a book. Or turn them away from one. We trust the reviewer to tell us how to spend our time, or not.

And the material fact of the matter is that there’s a large space traditionally in book reviews for young writers to be published and to get exposure for their own thoughts as critics and as writers themselves and to develop a platform that way. You know, traditionally, in academic publishing, which is far more codified than even literature, your first publication is probably a book review. That’s not to say that very distinguished, busy academics don’t write them as well, but there’s something about the book review tradition that is about giving young people a platform too, more so than other kinds of commentary.

Lisa: I think it’s also why English classes spend a lot of time doing close reading of texts that are longstanding, because every new generation has something new to say about a text as old as one by Shakespeare or even older. And about works as new as Citizen by Claudia Rankine.

Richie: Exactly.

Lisa: Can you describe your role in reading and editing book reviews at the Kenyon Review?

Richie: I’m in the stage where I’m sorting out for myself and with my co-editors, and with the editor-in-chief, and the Kenyon Review staff, what the role of book reviews is going to be. I’m most excited by reviewers who come to the table with a book they’re passionate about. I think that is the best recipe for something that’s going to be worth reading. Because it comes from a place of enthusiasm. Or real provocation. I think those tend to be more successful than people who are like “okay, what can I review”. I like a book review in which the reviewer has some relationship to the book. And that might be as simple as they read it and they really liked it and want to evangelize that book, or they themselves as writers are really interested in questions, say, of the representation of history and are really provoked by the way that a book they’ve come across asks those questions. Or they’re excited to read a book that they expect will speak to those issues in interesting ways. My favorites so far are from people who are passionate about proclaiming the virtues or exploring the issues of a particular book that matters to them.

Lisa: As an editor, what do you look for in a book review? Well, I guess “looking for” is what you just answered. So what I mean is, what are you reading for when the reviews are in front of you?

Richie: I would say—and I’m not sure the extent to which I believe this because the minute one has a standard or expectation for writing, it’s usually dismantled by some great piece of writing one encounters, so I say all of this with a kind of caveat that I may or may not believe what I’m about to say—but I think ideally, a book review gets down and dirty with the text. It quotes. It illustrates its claims with an appropriate number of interesting passages-—I don’t think we want one entirely made of quotes like some seem to—you want to have room to make a statement. I want to see those statements illustrated; that’s going to excite me toward picking up the book more than just bland, broad claims. So that’s one aspect. At the same time however, I think a book review ideally can make claims that can be extrapolated beyond the book that is the subject at the heart of the review. That in some way, it stakes a claim about, poetry for instance, in general, or history writing for instance, in general, or the direction of memoir in contemporary American writing, in general. It can make a claim that can be extrapolated and potentially applied to other books or to defining some part of our literary moment. I think that’s the balance that a book review ideally has between a kind of close attention to the text, but claims that are interesting enough that it doesn’t feel so myopically focused. A book review is different than a scholarly commentary. It’s not an essay explaining esoteric imagery in a poem by poem way. Ultimately, a book review will make a claim about what the book is, what the book is to the writer who wrote it, what the book is to the literary landscape that it’s going to emerge into.

That’s the balance. Pay attention to the text, but not myopically. Or not in a way that’s boring. No one wants to read extended esoteric scholarly commentary on random images and details. Unless they fit into some broader claim about the book at hand and the genre, time period, author, at hand as well.

Lisa: How do book reviews reflect or encourage a culture of reading? And why is reading important—it’s a thing that’s under-discussed when we think of creative writing: the act of reading?

Richie: That’s a really important question. In order to have a culture of reading, we need to have a culture. And in order to have a culture, we have to be able to speak to each other about things of import. Including: things of import that we’re reading. Book reviews, by their nature, are on the front lines of that conversation. They’re not the book itself—which is a very important aspect of the conversation. In many ways, they’re the first contribution to the conversation that book engenders by someone who is not the author. They tend to be timely. Major venues will, for instance, not publish reviews after the book has been published—they all come before. They’re very timely. Even literary journals which tend to be a little more flexible around time only review books within two years of their release. It would be rare to come across a book from ten years ago without some other circumstance that demands it, like an anniversary, or a new edition, or some cultural inspiration. That they are timely also makes them important contributors to the conversation. More often than not, they’re an intermediary step between the publication of the book and the picking up of the book by most readers. There’s a reason reviewers get advanced copies of books. They’re doing this in advance. The import of book reviews in the culture of reading is that oftentimes it’s the first sound about a book at it’s publication. That sets the tone for a conversation that the book wants to or doesn’t want to have. It gives something that a reader himself or herself can then argue with. There might be parts of a review that become agreed upon. By it’s nature, a book review is descriptive and it’s critical—it’s necessarily advancing the conversation, it’s giving readers something to agree with or disagree with as they then take up the book. If something is very provocative in a review, you might be compelled to pick up the book just to see for yourself. That’s one of the ways in which sometimes even really bad reviews can be good for a book, or can be a good platform for a book, because they might send the reader to a book to see for himself or herself just how accurate the review was in his or her assessment.

Lisa: Any last words of advice on what you’ll be looking for in this Book Review Competition for these young writers?

Richie: Yes. It’s advice I give to all of my students. It’s really the only rule in writing: be interesting. I really think that’s important and sometimes hard to remember when we are in the thick of our own work. Be interesting.

About Richie

Hofmann’s first book of poems, Second Empire, won the Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books. He is the poetry book reviews editor of the Kenyon Review. He is the recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship. His work has appeared or is forthcoming from The New Yorker, Poetry, The New Republic, and The New York Times Style Magazine among others. With Kara van de Graaf, he founded Lightbox, an online educational resource featuring original interviews with poets and materials for classroom use.

About Lisa