A woman named Joan

Crafts by the other Joan

Last year while sorting for a move, I opened a box of memories. Inside were two bulging scrapbooks, its unstuck film pages dropping dried daisies, wallet-sized school smiles, a surprise “Shhh, it’s a secret!” sixteenth-birthday invitation, and handwritten notes such as “evil green eyes” and “missing the beach.”  Under the scrapbooks were pictures of our drill team squad, red and gold event notices, ribbons and pom-pom fray, a smiling stuffed giraffe with eyelashes, a construction paper tasseled boot, encouraging poems from a woman named Joan.

Wheaton High drill team 1978

Many people dislike their own names, but I’ve always loved mine. There were no other Joans in any of my grade school classes as far as I’m aware and I didn’t know any in college. The famous Joans were gutsy or clever or fun or, in some cases, all three. Saintly badass d’Arc comes to mind, as do Plowright, Fontaine, Crawford, Rivers, Collins and Cusack. Joan Jett apparently rocked my high school, but before my time. And of course the brilliant Didion, whose prose I discovered late, which means there’s more for lucky me to read.

The mom of my dearest friend of forty years was gutsy and clever and fun. A transplanted New Yorker, she was coifed and on-the-go to Mahjong or Wednesday bowling with wine-colored lip liner, blue-shaded eyes and appliquéd jackets. During junior high and high school, it was this mom who buoyed me when my own high-strung and detached mother was unapproachable.

Parade day

She kissed me as if I were her own child, locked eyes when asking a question, nodded and smiled as she got the answer. She crafted spirit gifts long before today’s high school football and cheerleading moms were born, wrote poetry that gave us courage to march and shake to a 70’s beat while hundreds of our peers looked on, inspired my stubborn self to perform in 20-degree parades and remembered everything – birthdays, pom-pom routine songs, favorite candies.

She was a vibrant and caring role model for her three children, inspiring smiles and warm hearts, facing medical challenges with steadfast fortitude. She was a supportive wife to a man with whom she shared an infinite optimism and energy and devoted daughter to her mother (called Nana), whom she called every day without fail, and father, who at 77-years-old was among the hundred hostages in the 1977 B'nai B'rith headquarters takeover. When she became a nana, her joy multiplied—by seven.

Joan and Karen, captain and co-captain

Until dementia cruelly stole her memory, her health, her spirit. Last month the Joan with whom I shared a name passed away. I’ve been thinking about her a lot, about her voice, about her twinkling eyes, about her spirit, about what she meant to me and so many others. About the memory she left behind.

Sound claustrophobia

The sounds start harmless enough. Coughs, throat-clearing, nose-blowing, the crunching of apples. Later there will be a morning check-in with the wife and kids, and a quartet of blubbery sneezes, followed by harmonized giggles from a bookkeeping duo. In the afternoons, there’s a flurry of not-so-hushed personal calls and a heated talking-down from project leader to a team member who hasn’t delivered a deliverable. 

Japanese Gardens, Portland, Oregon, photo by Rick Mora

When I’m not writing, I hire out as a contract accountant. For the last year I’ve been working with a client on a long-term project, but this is the first time in my $%#*!!&? years that I’ve worked in a cubicle. Yes, I understand the cost savings of a footprint with cubes versus individual offices. But surely productivity has suffered. I’d like to see the numbers on that.

Most days my earphones are looped over my ears, blaring instrumentals such as the themes from Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings or Last of the Mohicans on Pandora, but sometimes even those masterpieces don’t drown it all out. Lately, I’ve alternated between the soundtrack and live scores of Les Miz, but often this leaves me in a weepy mess as each note returns me, thunderstruck and emotional, to a stall in a London theater.
Such a noise fiasco would torture most introvert writers (aside from maybe Jane Austen, who apparently wrote in a noisy room, with siblings, nieces and nephews carrying on around her.) But being crushed by noise from all sides ignites in me a sort of sound claustrophobia. Sometimes I clap my hands over my earphones, nod my head on the desk, take deep breaths and think of Japanese Gardens, my peace on earth. 

But it’s not all gloom and noisy doom – I’m taking notes and culling idiosyncrasies. Sound brings life to the pages of a story and many of these characters will show up in a book one day.  

Art in Fiction

Today's memorable passages are inspired by my post on What Women Write, talking about capturing life in fiction. 

On paintings, from Donna Tartt's Goldfinch:

“—if a painting really works down in your heart and changes the way you see, and think, and feel, you don’t think, ‘oh, I love this picture because it’s universal.’ ‘I love this painting because it speaks to all mankind.’ That’s not the reason anyone loves a piece of art. It’s a secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes you.” 

On savoring life's moments, from Rachel Joyce's exquisite novel, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry:

“He must have driven this way countless times, and yet he had no memory of the scenery. He must have been so caught up in the day's agenda, and arriving punctually at their destination, that the land beyond the car had been no more than a wash of one green, and a backdrop of one hill. Life was very different when you walked through it.” 

Back to Italy

I've read two lovely novels recently that brought me back to gorgeous Italy, the backdrop for the first chapters of The Lost Legacy of Gabriel Tucci.

Christopher Castellani's A Kiss From Maddalena

The novel opens here:
From the air, the village of Santa Cecilia appears in the shape of a woman lying down. If you’d been a pilot flying over it—on your way to Germany of Africa or some other place to drop bombs—you’d have noticed how the main road forms a kind of spine leading to a round piazza, where green trees fan out like hair over the hills, and four narrow roads grow into limbs at both ends. One of the woman’s arms cradles a cluster of white stone houses; the other stretches lazily into fields, in a way that suggests she is resting. Her legs straddle farms and orchards and a few scattered vineyards. She bends her knee at a curve just before an olive grove. If you’d been a pilot—young, maybe, one of the thousands of boys soaring over every week—you’d have had a woman’s figure on your mind anyway, and you’d have longed to land in this place, to hide with her from Hitler and Russia and the passo romano, and to lose yourself in the parts of her body you can only see up close.

In this brilliant passage, we are transported to an Italian village on the cusp of war. In the spring of 1943, most of the men have gone to fight. Except Vito, who falls obsessively in love with Maddalena, the youngest daughter of a prominent family. Vito caters to his mentally ill mother, is gangly and goofy, and thought of as a mama's boy. Maddalena is young, naive and unsure of her life's direction, but falls for Vito's sensitivity and kindness. 

She has gumption and determination, and is perhaps more inclined to love him because her family considers him a joke. When war intervenes, her family flees to the country while he stays in the village. Both are changed by war and on her return, she must choose love or family obligation. A bittersweet tale of love, sacrifice and duty, A Kiss From Maddalena is a masterfully written and stunning novel. 

Pamela Schoenewaldt’s When We Were Strangers 

Another beautiful opening: 

I come from the village of Opi in Abruzzo, perched on the spine of Italy. As long as anyone remembers, our family kept sheep. We lived and died in Opi and those who left the mountain always came to ruin. “They died with strangers, Irma,” my mother said over and over in her last illness, gasping between bouts of bloody coughing that soaked our rags as fast as I could clean them. “Your great-grandfather died in the snow with Frenchmen. Why?”

Irma Vitale is a young Italian seamstress at the end of the nineteenth century. With her mother gone and her father drinking too much, she leaves her beloved Italian village and sails across the ocean, hoping to find a new life in America and her older brother in Cleveland. But the voyage is rough; she is beaten and robbed, learning quickly to trust no one. Arriving in New York, she scrapes together enough money to eat and hop a train west. 

In Cleveland she finds not her brother, but unexpected friendship. Yet tragedy finds her again. Encouraged by a caring woman offering medical treatment to immigrants, Irma transforms her pain into a determination to help others. No longer a shy, guarded girl, she develops into a strong, courageous figure whose heart and resolve would make her mother proud.

The characters were richly drawn and Schoenewaldt weaves conflict and tension masterfully, with gritty details of what life was really like for immigrants during this tenuous time in America's history.

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena: A Novel

To prepare for our 2013 summer spontaneity tour, I packed hardbacks and paperbacks, downloaded e-books to my iPad and audio books through Audible. Between books, journals and even an author talk, I had a literary and adventurous five weeks.

A few days ago I finished Anthony Marra's brilliant A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. I'd started listening to it on audio before we left and while we traveled, stole minutes on a beach walk and in the car.

Marra's debut is an intense novel with stunning language that deserves a careful read. From the first sentence, "On the morning after the Feds burned down her house and took her father, Havaa woke from dreams of sea anemones," I was immediately catapulted to war-torn Chechnya. By the end of the first page I gasped out loud at both the images laid out before me and the language that painted the scene.

Marra's characters are damaged beyond belief, flawed and real and searching for truth. There's Havaa, the child who carries a suitcase full of souvenirs she might one day need, Sonja, the doctor who runs a bombed-out hospital and is obsessed with finding her disappeared sister, and Akhmed, a man who wants to save Havaa from the men who took her father. There are others, too, a writer whose son has betrayed his village, a nurse with a sharp wit and evil tongue, and a wife on the brink of madness.

This multi-layered tale of survival and betrayal has received stellar reviews, bookseller recommendations and interviews, made several bestseller lists and the 2013 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel short list.

This is one of my favorite reads this year.

Christina Baker Kline's Orphan Train

I've read a number of great books lately, gearing up for my next story which takes place in Depression-era Richmond and Washington, D.C., by way of New York City.

Here's my review of Christina Baker Kline's beautiful novel Orphan Train.

A Night to Remember

How lucky am I? I wasn't up for an award, but I didn't care!

I'm blogging over at What Women Write about my night at the Emmys.

Put a writer in a car for a week and see what happens...

I'm up again on What Women Write, the blog I share with five other fabulous women writers.

Sunset at Laguna, photo by Rick Mora

Austin at Zion, photo by Rick Mora

Over at What Women Write, I confess, I love majestic cathedrals. I also share a bit about my inspiration for writing The Lost Legacy of Gabriel Tucci.

Avalanche of books...

A few weeks ago I blogged over at What Women Write about my December cache of books. One of the perks of being a writer is that reading is in my job description. So even though the books are a mile high, I decided to add a few more...

The Lost Wife, by Alyson Richman (thanks Kim for this killer review) Lately I can't get enough of WWII era stories.

Unto the Daughters, by Karen Tintori I read an excerpt of this online and ordered it immediately. Oh wow! From her website:
Unto the Daughters is the story of a secret guarded so fiercely for nine decades that members of Tintori’s family died without ever learning of it. Unto the Daughters began with an obliterated entry on a passport - discovered during a genealogical quest - and a reluctant revelation of an ancestor who was so systematically eradicated from her family tree that many relatives born since her murder still have no inkling that she ever existed.

The House at Tyneford by Natasha Solomons
Check out this blurb: "The House at Tyneford is a wonderful, old-fashioned novel that takes you back in time to the manor homes, aristocracy and domestic servants of England. In this setting, Natasha Solomons gives us a courageous heroine whose incredible love story will keep you in suspense until the final page." — Kathleen Grissom, author of The Kitchen House

A Secret Kept, by Tatiana de Rosnay (of Sarah's Key fame) I'm in!

The Translation of the Bones, by Francesca Kay A church in Battersea, statues and secrets... Need I say more?

Incendiary by Chris Cleave. Little Bee was amazing and Susan says this one is, too.

Waiting for shipment of The Baker's Daughter by Sarah McCoy.
Listen to this blurb from Tatiana de Rosnay:
“A beautiful, heart-breaking gem of a novel written just the way I like them, with the past coming back to haunt the present, endearing heroines and a sunny, hopeful ending. You’ll wolf it up in one delicious gulp.”

Seriously, the stacks on my desk and nightstand will soon form an avalanche. But I cannot think of a better way to go.

Another Great Retreat

Yes, we What Women Write ladies know how to....















Write, edit, revise
Drink wine
Eat chocolate covered pomegranate seeds and salad and venison lasagna
Edit, write, read
Keep warm and dry, cheese it up for a photo, critique
Laugh, cry
And wrap up a scene without leaving Travis in the ball pit...

Good Intentions

As I mentioned in my recent What Women Write blog post, I vowed to take a picture of Austin everyday of his senior year. This last school year I snapped roughly 180 photos, one each morning (aside from the few times I overslept and Austin took his own picture). I also intended to write a short snippet about each picture and perhaps blog about it during the year. I wasn't always as diligent about the snippets. But college commitment and graduation now memories, I plan to share some of the photos and thoughts here while we anticipate the soon-approaching college drop-off.














August 24, 2010
6:55am I see the blue shirt first. The reminder that Austin is, indeed, a senior. With senior privileges and a senior attitude. He rushes to leave, skipping breakfast, excited about meeting his girlfriend for coffee. I help him wrap his arm from a particularly nasty turf burn and he’s forgotten where he’d set down his keys. I poise the camera to my eye and say, “Wait!” He does, but his look is more, “Come on!” than, “Oh, cool you’re doing this amazing project.” I plead, “You can’t start with that face on your first day!” He concedes by tossing me a grin.

At 7:20pm
After a long day of classes, a few free periods, and football practice, Austin comes through the door with a smile on his face. I will miss that smile next year, along with a collage of other facial expressions and poses. At the end of the first day, I realize it’s dangerous to be thinking about the end of the year. Must cherish every day! Isn’t that why I am doing this? He tells me a few details about the day: teachers, classmates, a book he’s overlooked for a short story class. We’re off to a great year.

The perfect ending?

Have you ever become engrossed in a novel, only to be disappointed in the end? A writer must deliver!

Conquering Fear

It’s no secret I’m not exactly the outdoorsy type. In fact, I’ve admitted it here and here.

We push our kids—stretch yourself, try new things, be brave, don't be afraid of change! There are things about me I’d like to change: I’d like to be more active, to connect with old friends. I’d like to be less judgmental, more charitable with my time, less frightened about potential intruders. But one thing I never thought I’d say is this: I’d like to be more outdoorsy.























This weekend, a dear friend invited me and another friend to an outdoor adventure in the woods, where we each had our own cabin, a view of the lake, and morning caffeine delivered by the coffee fairy.


















I didn’t know what to expect, even when I followed the gravel driveway deep into the private woods. Our host warmly greeted us and made me feel instantly welcome. He mentioned no electricity, and I thought it was a joke, like the jackalope head mounted on the wall of one of the cabins. But no, the candles in my room weren’t decorative, nor were the neck flashlights he issued us later in the evening, with a warning to remember their precise location when removed.

Upon our arrival, our gracious host toured us around the property in an open jeep, past fields of blue bonnets and Indian paintbrush, with tales of armadillos, pigs, coyotes, and snakes. We climbed a three-story lookout and found a vulture feather I initially thought was fake, until one of the creatures soared overhead hoping to land on one of the dirty white wood posts where he’d obviously stood before.











We hunkered down from an evening storm under a wooden canopy and ate al fresco guacamole, campfire-cooked salmon and baked potatoes. I branded a coaster with a red-hot iron as the rain played tunes on metal tubs and the cows crept ever nearer, threatening to join us under cover.


Earlier we’d chosen our cabins, the others indulging my fears by offering the “Martha Stewart” cabin, centrally located and outfitted with the cushiest of rustic accommodations. Our gracious host even offered Lexi the guard dog as protection.

Later in the dark room, with Lexi sleeping on the floorboards by the unlocked door and a cool breeze wafting through the window screens, I marveled at my lack of fear. Even at 2 a.m. when I saw a little girl appear at the top of my stairs, only to be gone a moment later, I closed my eyes and fell asleep, wondering if anyone would really believe I’d seen a ghost.

In the morning, while we ate tortilla-wrapped salmon, potatoes, and egg, I told them about my night. Our host, noticing me shivering, place a skillet with coals from the fire under my metal chair, a rustic version of heated seats, which was engineered after at a previous guest’s suggestion. If I’d been staying at Martha’s house, I wouldn’t have felt more welcome.

Earlier in the day, one of the other women chose the cabin over the garage away from the immediate cabin area. While I thought, glad it’s her and not me !, I had no idea I’d later escort her home, navigating by neck-light with the threat of killer cows and snakes at my heels.

I can’t lie and say I wasn’t frightened at all, like when I was certain a snake leered from a nearby branch over our hot tub, but I’m so thankful for the opportunity to stretch myself. In the morning I saw that the snake in the trees was really an outdoor shower head, but I’m not convinced our host wasn’t a figment of my imagination or a hospitable ghost, sent to help me conquer my fears.

(Blue bonnet picture provided by Barbara Johnson.)

Danielle Trussoni Visits What Women Write

Since the launch of What Women Write, I've interviewed Jamie Ford, Adriana Trigiani, Dani Shapiro and Sarah Stonich. Between my blogging partners, add interviews or guest posts with editor Amy Einhorn, editorial ass Moonrat, and authors Melanie Benjamin, Jacqueline Mitchard, Aimee Molloy, Quinn Cummings, Therese Walsh, and Kristy Kiernan. Today I interview Danielle Trussoni, author of the hugely successful Angelology. Check out this fabulous cover!