The Door of Memory

A door in the Bund area of Shanghai - a photo
from one of my recent memories

I subscribe to the Foundation for a Better Life's daily email, and once in a while one of their quotes really strikes me. Here's one that I think speaks particularly to those of us who write memoir because memoir is ultimately not about the big moments, but about how we manage the small ones.

"Sooner or later we all discover that the important moments in life are not the advertised ones, not the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, not the great goals achieved. The real milestones are less prepossessing. They come to the door of memory.”

Susan Brownell Anthony

(1820-1906)

American Civil Rights Leader

Vacation Serenity

I've been quiet on this blog because we have been on vacation, including four rather blissful days without Internet access while we were staying at a beach house in Marin County, north of San Francisco, and then at a guest cottage high up in Yosemite National Park.

Before we fly home again I want to share some of my vacation serenity with you with this view of Mono Lake, located in the High Sierra east of Yosemite. This landscape with its vast emptiness reminded me of visiting Nevada on our road trip last year, and indeed, this eastern part of the California Sierra is part of the Great Basin that extends from Death Valley to the south to Great Salt Lake farther east in Utah. I shall share my photos of the eerie tufa formations found in this salty lake once I've had some time to review my photos, but for now I want to leave you with this open vista that I cherish as the ultimate reprieve from my usual life in the anthill of urbanity.

A Book Vacation

We've been dealing with a few health issues lately (everything seems OK now), and so I've slacked off blogging, but yesterday as I retired to my bathtub with the newest installment of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency Novel, The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party, I was so looking forward to it that I realized reading this book is like taking a reading vacation. Perhaps that's the point of novels, or at least novels like this.

As most of my regular readers know, memoir is my metier and I therefore usually read memoir. But for all that I love real stories, memoir tends to be heavy material, with a few exceptions that I have happily embraced, like My Family and Other Animals, or 84, Charing Cross Road.

Memoirs are my first love, but mysteries are my second. I love the comfort of a series that is not too gritty and not too violent, yet poignantly explores the challenges and tragedies of life. The world is fixed in the end, even with a few losses, and sometimes I just need someone like Hercule Poirot to put the world in order. There is particular comfort in that. I have a full collection of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot stories, and of course all the Sherlock Holmes stories, which really are my first love in books. My husband laughs at me because I can reread them a million times, but a) I love those characters and their worlds, and b) I tend to forget the outcome. Plus the outcome isn't really the point, hanging out with those characters is.

The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series has a similar allure. I've read all installments over the past few years, and each time, indulging in the latest is like hooking up with old friends and a familiar landscape. In fact, it has had me seriously contemplating a trip to Botswana, and the main character, Mma Ramotswe, has gotten me into drinking red tea. I love getting to know a place through a story, and of course, when I went to London for the very first time, many years ago, I had to stop by 221b Baker Street, even though I knew Sherlock Holmes' actual address does not exist. A cheesy museum does exist, however.

Cheesiness aside, the predictability of a series with lovable yet highly individual characters is like a comfy armchair, and for summer, the sunny dry climate of Botswana is just the right escape. I shall return to the English countryside or the streets of London when the weather turns greyer here, but for now, I'm following Mma Ramotswe down the dusty roads of Botswana.

Photo Essay: At the County Fair

Boy in a Bubble - my youngest was the only one in the right weight class
to go walking on water.

Going to the Porter County Fair in Valparaiso, Indiana, has become a summer tradition for our family. The kids love the rides (see above), I'll go on one or two, and then my husband and I mull about the exhibits trying to learn about practical things like gutters and windows for the house we might build some day.



I had my new camera along - I finally took the jump and got a DSLR, in this case a Canon Rebel T3, which seems to be a good beginner's DSLR, but all its buttons and dials still have me a bit scared. Here I managed to capture, somehow, the motion of the Feuerball ride.



We all enjoy the food at the fair. Candy apples are actually not one of my things, but these were too gorgeous not to be photographed.

Elephant Ears are more my thing.

While I grew up with a "Volksfest" happening in our village in Germany at some point every summer, county fairs, the sort of American equivalent, weren't on my radar until we discovered the Porter County Fair. We went there initially because one of the merchants for tractor equipment we were looking at mentioned that he'd be there, and that most merchants in the area exhibit at the fair. Turns out, a county fair is not entirely the equivalent of what I knew as a "Volksfest" (which means a "people's festival" and amounts to a bunch of carnival rides and a biergarten). At a county fair, or its bigger sister, the state fair, merchants exhibit their fare, and lots of animal competitions and showings happen (read the famed children's book Charlotte's Web to learn more about animal exhibits at state fairs...)

This time we also took in a show - Larry the Cable Guy was performing, and I must say that enjoying some easy laughs was just the right light-hearted thing to do on a balmy summer evening. It also fit into the unpretenious atmosphere of the county fair, which is one of the things I love about it. Perhaps this kind of fair is especially enjoyable because we come from the big city, where any event like this involves crowds, massive lines to get parking, tickets, or food, whereas at this fair it only takes a few minutes to park even though it was well attended, and you've got space to walk about, and you don't waste inordinate amounts of time waiting.

After the show, night had descended - the perfect time for me to see how my new camera would be able to capture the night lights.

Using the "Bulb" shutter setting (something I learned in the photography class I'm taking - didn't I promise some photographic adventures recently?), I was able to capture the moving lights here of the caroussel with the ferris wheel behind it.

We could barely get the boys off this G Force ride.

The boys also did this 1001 Nights ride, which is a giant hammer that spins around in a cirle. This abstraction captures its lights but sort of looks like a floppy haired one-eyed crazy creature.

Here's an abstraction of marquee lights, achieved by slightly moving the camera on the "Bulb" shutter setting.

I'll conclude this trip to the county fair with my favorite shot of an sign for soft ice cream, entirely not abstract.

Guest Blog by Kelly Hashway: Writing Every Possible Second

Today I'm happy to host Kelly Hashway. Kelly is a prolific writer of children's, middle grade, and young adult books, and she's also the mom to a beautiful little girl. I've often wondered how she manages to write that many books, so I was happy when she agreed to be part of my Moms Who Write series, and I got to find out that she is obviously immensely disciplined:

Annette: You write children’s stories and are the mother of a 5-year-old daughter. Did you write in that genre even before she was born, or are the type of books you write influenced by your life as a mom?

Kelly: My daughter definitely influenced my writing. Before she was born, I wrote MG (Middle Grade) and YA (Young Adult). But I started reading to her way before she could understand what I was saying. I wanted to instill a love of books. It worked, and she soon asked for stories about specific things. I couldn't find books about them, so I decided to try writing picture books. I was pleasantly shocked when I sold one of them right away.

How do you manage to fit your writing and the related business of book marketing into life as a mom?

It's not easy sometimes. When my daughter is at school (last year she went three mornings a week), I spend the entire time writing. No distractions. No phone, no Internet, nothing but me and my manuscript. I do the same thing when she goes to bed. I've been known to stay up writing late at night. As for marketing, I thankfully have a very supportive family. My husband and my parents pitch in when I do author events. My daughter loves to come to them, too. She's become my photographer. :-)

Do you actually use the time your daughter is in preschool to write? Or do chores get in the way?

I can't think of a single time I chose chores over writing. I'm very focused when I write. I can tune out the world. I write every second my daughter is at school.

Do you have a particular writing routine?

It changes every year according to my daughter's schedule. Come the last week in August, she'll be in all-day kindergarten, and my plan is to write all morning and take care of marketing and editing for my clients in the afternoons.

Do you have a particular place where you write?

For a long time, I wrote on my living room couch, but I melted the bottom of my laptop doing that. Yes, I write that much. So now, I have a new laptop, and I sit at my dining room table with the cooling station under my MacBookPro. I've found the chair is easier on my back than the couch was, too.

PS from Annette: Kelly is not only rather disciplined in making the most of the time she was to write, she's also quite ingenious in capturing those ideas that pop up at the most inconvenient moments. Check out her prior guest blog here.

Art: Sunsets by Lauren Carter

"What is this?" I asked myself when I first spotted this sculpture at the entrance of the Hyde Park Art Center's recent exhibit Hairy Blob. I'm currently taking a photography class there (just wait, there will be more photography adventures on this blog!), and I love that going to the Art Center on a regular basis exposes me to all this creativity and whimsy.

I have often wandered the halls or galleries of the Hyde Park Art Center, usually picking up my kids from a ceramics class, and have been pleasantly surprised by a piece of art that makes me smile and see our world in a different way, which is what art is supposed to do, right?

In this case, what at first looks like a stack of gleaming bricks turns out to be a tower of encyclopedias, a sculpture called Sunsets by Lauren Carter. Being a bookish person, I of course loved this idea. It seems rather simple and yet, come to think of it, this tower is finely calibrated and would be rather laborious to execute, to say nothing of being rather heavy to move.

As the exhibition description so nicely says, Sunsets presents a canon of knowledge for what it materially is, and so a stack of gilded encyclopedias becomes a mirror. I can't help but think about how encyclopedias are a thing of the past, now that we type our questions into Google rather than go to a bookshelf and flip through an encyclopedia. And thus perhaps these books have become like the ornate gilded mirrors we find in the palaces of the past: beautiful to look at but no longer a part of life.