Friday, June 25, 2010

A Place In Mind

Several summers ago, I taught writing at a wonderful place called the Putney School in Vermont. My evening workshop was called A Place in Mind. As the spring flooding of the Duna recedes, summer is taking over in Budapest - as always, my thoughts turn to taking stock of the academic year.

I'm very proud of the wonderful collection, Invisible, that I curated this year at Central European University. It's an experiment with multi-lingual publishing, as it contains prose and poetry in Bulgarian, Hungarian, English, Slovak and Spanish. Only at a university like CEU would this be possible.

What a small and wonderful world it is. Three PhD students are currently serving as the student organizers of the Blank Pages Society - one is a talented playwright, who happens to have been in a public speaking debate with an amazing doctor I know from the WIL program. The other two are Argentinians-- reading their Spanish reminded me of my translation project, long shelved while other projects took precedence.

It's time now to revisit Maria Condenanza's La Espera - a triumph of the fusion of form and content that I discovered in 2002 while in Uruguay, and which I began to translate in 2006 at Columbia with the amazing Esther Allen.

I'm excited to see how my relation to the Spanish language will change now that I've been immersed in Hungarian daily life for one year, and especially while I am immersed in Luo this summer in Kenya.

La Espera is about waiting, about a journalist who is imprisoned for political reasons under the junta in the 1980s. But it is ultimately about how the mind can transcend one's physical surroundings.

Sunday, June 20, 2010

Land of the Sleeping Giant: Imagining Home

Now that my teaching has finished for the academic year, I'm taking stock of all I read and learned this year from my amazing students. It's the perfect time to dig out my Columbia thesis collection, Land of the Sleeping Giant. I mentioned this in an earlier post, but did you know the "Sleeping Giant" is literally a small 'mountain' in my hometown?



I hesitate to say mountain, now that I live in Europe where the real mountains are - though, of course, not in the Carpathian Basin.

Master of Fine Arts Thesis Abstract, Cynthia-Marie Marmo O’Brien

Land of the Sleeping Giant: Imagining Home is a 43,600-word collection of sixteen nonfiction essays, ranging in length from three to twenty-five pages. The form of the essays varies from third-person research-driven prose to first-person lyric meditations, on subjects ranging from neurosurgery and doctor-patient relationships to the consequences of immigration, from emotionally rich childhood memories to encyclopedia-like explorations of modern day cities, from an investigation into the consequences of the discovery of a toxic landfill beneath a modern school building and urban neighborhood to an inquiry about the origins of a family heirloom. The essays were crafted over a two-year independent working period under the supervision of Cris Beam, during which time I was also teaching academic writing to first-year students in Columbia’s Undergraduate Writing Program. The seeds of some of the essays were sown during the preceding two years of writing workshops with Patricia O’Toole, Richard Locke, Michael Scammell, Darcy Frey, Honor Moore and Stephen O’Connor.
As a collection, the essays are unified by thematic concerns of how to define place and home; the formation of collective memory and its resulting impact on individual identity development; and the effects of serious illness on one’s relationship to both self and home. The thesis poses several questions— How do geographical, socioeconomic, political and historical characteristics of physical places shape the people who call them home? What factors go into the decision to leave one’s home of origin permanently? How does collective memory interact with first-hand experience of a place to influence individual decision-making? What are the consequences of serious illness on one’s relationship with the notion of home? Is home an exterior or interior location?

Under An Orange Moon: This is a first-person narrative about what is left behind by death, told through an account of an afternoon raking leaves with my father, during which my physical actions trigger reminders of my uncle, who died on my third birthday. It is also a meditation on the relationship between a father and daughter, and a younger generation’s role in an older generation’s grieving process.

A Figment of Your Imagination: Coming after the breezy lyrical essay that opens the collection, this serious mediation sets the tone for the collection’s exhumation of matters often left buried, physically or mentally. It is both an account of debilitating depression and an argument about the limits and possibilities presented to us by our ultimate resource, our imagination.

Land of the Sleeping Giant: Part reportage, part memoir, part history, part op-ed, the title essay is the author’s biography of a place, specifically the land on which her middle school was constructed in the mid-twentieth-century. Covering the earliest European settlement in southern Connecticut through the Industrial Revolution and on to modern-day debate over the need for what would be the largest environmental clean-up in the state’s history, the essay is not only the story of a place but it also traces the narrator’s desire to assess the health concerns of those who live around the school, which was built atop a chemical waste dump. Her struggle to do so objectively in the face of the limits of medical-scientific knowledge and with the biasing complication of being a brain tumor survivor adds tension to the lessons she ultimately draws, conclusions and challenges which are applicable far beyond the acres of land in her hometown that are the essay’s subject

Love’s Aftermath: What happens when the object of our affection is not a person, but a place? How does land leave its mark in our consciousness and how do we transfer an identity rooted in a specific setting to other places we venture in our lives?

Greenwood Avenue, Higgins Beach, Scarborough, Maine: An ode to a summer’s tradition of an intergenerational gathering at a beach house and a celebration of storytelling as a vehicle through which siblings, now grown, sort out the facts and myths of their shared childhood.

The World According to A. Schermer: History as told through a mysterious painting and a trip to the village where it was created.

Saturday Evening Stroll, Elizabeth Park, Hartford, Connecticut : A reflection on how serious illness colors one’s perspective, told through the eyes of the narrator, recently discharged from the hospital, taking a casual walk through the park in her parents’ neighborhood. Her experience gives unusual shades of meaning to the ordinary observations of a chilly evening and breathes new life into tired subjects such as fish in a pond, locked doors and what to eat for dinner.

Solid Things: A discovery of memory as embedded in objects, such as furniture and rocks.

That Summer: A eulogy for an eighteen-year-old boy killed suddenly in a car crash, written as an account of his last summer, told in stories of everyday occurrences, observations and conversations as technique to contrast with the jarring incident of his death.

Please Come Flying: An experiment in speculative nonfiction, as the narrator imagines herself reacting to tumultuous times through vivid and concrete imagery, punctuated by the refrain, a plea to God, “Please come flying.”

The Wave Within: Mixing memoir with science writing, this essay demythologizes the medical term “seizure” through an interview and observation at the Columbia Comprehensive Epilepsy Center, as well as a first-person account of an EEG. It also explores the boundaries of the known and unknown about how seizures operate in the brain, and the diagnostic challenges of a complicated and elusive malady.

A Place That I Could Not Go: This is a depiction of the process of constructing memories in order to revise the past according to the roles we wish we had played in it. Told from the perspective of the narrator in her hospital bed, contemplating a list of phone numbers culled from her cell phone and debating how to categorize the contacts into those who she should call with the news of her brain tumor, those who she won’t, those who she shouldn’t and so forth. Can one separate people and places into discrete time periods, one unique from the other, or is each phase of life inherently stained with the remnants of the previous phases and relationships?

Encyclopedia of Glasgow, 2002: This is an experimental essay about life as a young American in a Scottish city on the verge of the war with Iraq in 2002, in the style of a John D’Agata essay from his Halls of Fame collection. It seeks to define a place and locate it in a moment in time through a series of seemingly random alphabetical encyclopedia entries that form a narrative.

On The Metro North Platform, Bronx, NY: Commentary in favor of the passage of laws banning smoking in public places, told through a conversation between the narrator and a mathematics PhD student arguing over smoking a cigarette on the train platform. It incorporates recent laws and broadens its scope to situate this debate in the larger context of the dilemma over how to balance the preservation of civil liberties with the duty of a society to protect the collective good.

What My Father Told Me: A riff on the disintegration of the power of the patient in policy discussions surrounding the reform of healthcare, as sparked by a narrative beginning, “I did not find out that I had a brain tumor from a doctor; I found out from my father.” The essay also explores the essential, and underappreciated, role of storytelling as a diagnostic tool.

Somewhere To Sit: A quest narrative to recover my great-grandmother, Cresenz Fischer Schermer, who immigrated to New York through Ellis Island from Germany at end of the nineteenth century, this essay seeks to identity and distinguish the narrator’s life trajectory with that of the subject’s. Through interviews with her descendants, imagined scenes from her life, examination of her possessions and photographs, a portrait emerges of a young woman who left her homeland confident and strong, but ended her American sojourn worn and weak. Several factors are explored as to the possible sources and roots of this transformation.

Saturday, June 19, 2010

Everything that Rises Must Converge

It's been one year since my Columbia commencement, five years since my Dartmouth commencement and ten years since I graduated from high school - what a privilege it was to be on the stage in the CEU commencement with colleagues on Thursday, and what a reversal of roles. My students were beaming, and I especially enjoyed that each and every one had the opportunity to shake hands with the founder of CEU, George Soros. It was a great tribute to the incredible diversity of CEU that every student's country was called as well as their name. It was a moment for reflection about how we relate identity and citizenship, however, as I was curious whether the basis for the country that could 'claim' each student was legal, practical, cultural or simply a matter of the students' preference.

I've been thinking about origins and mentors very much as I reflect on the academic year - especially since I received the news that my essay "A Figment of Your Imagination" will be published in the fall issue of the Bellevue Literary Review.

Ernest Hebert, who I described in my first blog post, was instrumental in encouraging me to work with ">Cynthia Huntington whose gracious scrutiny of every word of my undergraduate thesis has deeply influenced the way I conceptualize my writing and teaching - as a balancing act between form and content.

I remember, during a brief sojourn in San Francisco, when I met one of the Beat poets. I asked him if he had read her work and if he'd stock it in his shop. I haven't been back to California in the six years since then to see if her latest work is on the shelves, so I thought I'd share with you one of my favorite of her poems.

Enjoy, 'til I blog again.

The Radiant

PS The title of this post comes from Flannery O'Connor- it's the first book my godmother suggested to me after she had read my writing.

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

A Figment of Your Imagination

My essay "A Figment of Your Imagination" will be published in the upcoming Bellevue Literary Review.

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Where I Was From

Greetings, readers.

Every writer needs to practice an elevator pitch - not because agents ride in elevators, but because we are notoriously reluctant to speak about our work. We agonize over every word, thus we hate to dilute our precision by mumbling about how we write Great American Novels. For nonfiction writers like myself, whose art is a constant experiment of exposition, the task can be even more daunting. We write about what is real. We tell stories, but through the decisions we make about how we reveal the story, we invent it. This is the fusion of form and content.

Somewhere, some years between the land of the Sleeping Giant and the Carpathian Basin, I acquired the theme "concepts of home." Ernest Hebert, author of the great American novel The Old American, was my first professor of creative writing. He wore a red plaid jacket and carved spoons out of wood in a studio behind his New Hampshire home. In the summer of 2002, I was writing short stories about my maternal great-grandmothers. I had fictionalized Cresenz Schermer, who came to New York from Germany in the 1890s, so that she had morphed into an Italian farmgirl, much like Teresa Marmo was. Building on primary research I had earnestly (and unsuccessfully) begun by calling the Museum of the City of New York for archival assistance with my eighth grade research project, I was attempting to understand why both women left home.

"Where are you from?" Ernie asked me one summer afternoon in his Sanborn office. "Outside of New Haven," I said. We were three hours north of it on Interstate 91. "Is there anything going on there?" he asked. Or maybe he stated, "There must be something interesting there." I could not imagine there was anything worth investigating, worth sharing, worth writing about in my hometown of Hamden, Connecticut. We were a little fish in a big pond, an ordinary suburb in the vast continent of America. I was after Big Things - social change, the essence of existence.

My resistance to look closer to home for inspiration ended the next summer, when I had emergency brain surgery in the hospital where I was born. Suddenly, home became not only the place that most interested me, but home was quite literal, quite small. It was a space between my ears, it was a physical realm I inhabited, not only the view out the window, but the window itself - and the window had almost cracked.

Years later, in New York City, someone in a nonfiction workshop asked me why I had named an essay about the fallout from the largest proposed environmental remediation in the state of Connecticut "Where I Was From." Two doors down in Richard Locke's Thursday afternoon lecture, we had just read Didion. I devoured her words like Maine bears take to fresh blueberries.

Now, I live in Budapest. From my home I can walk to the Danube. On my way I can stop near the park to order pastries that remind me of the cafe where my University Writing Program colleagues and my writer friends would congregate, on Amsterdam & 11th, one block from where I had lived for a few seasons on West 112th. I keep a copy of my essay collection "Land of the Sleeping Giant: Imagining Home" on my desk in the university where young scholars from over one hundred and ten countries come, for a year or two or more, to learn how to articulate and disseminate their policy visions and research claims. Many will return home with ideas to implement. Others will carry on elsewhere.

My students are in public policy, gender studies, international business law & environmental sciences. They are from Ethiopia, Hungary, China, Ghana, Mexico, Serbia - the list goes on, with no ordering principle. But we are all bound together in that each of us writes from a place, a place that gives us voice and sight and against which we measure all else.

And that is home.

Welcome to my narrative. I'll need a very slow elevator to tell this one.