Uncategorized

Since my husband’s death in April, I have had one of life’s most important jobs: finding my way back to happiness.

 I have always believed it is my obligation to the universe to thrive, and when grief, trauma, or misfortune hit, I treat recovery as requiring the same intensity of attention and commitment I pay to my work as a writer and professor.

It should be obvious that sifting through all the thoughts and emotions that engulf one at such times is hard mental (and sometimes physical) labor. Still, when I tell people that I am working hard on being happy again, generally they seem confused.  “How do you work at being happy?” they ask. “Isn’t that a bit of an oxymoron?”

Since people really seem to want to know what I mean, I’ll try to explain.  We think of gravity as the force that brought Newton’s apple down, but the root word, “gravitas” simply means heaviness. Sorrow, dissatisfaction, grief, displeasure are all weighty burdens causing us slip easily into a hole it’s hard to climb out. What we need is a counterforce to lift us up. Gratitude, for me, is a force powerful enough to ride all the way out of that hole, defying gravity in a whole new way.

Why is it important to practice gratitude?  Because anything else is an insult to the universal force (whatever one believes it to be) that, as Jews say in the blessing known as Shehekiyanu, “creates us, sustains us, and enables us to reach this day.”

For those less cosmically inclined, gratitude is also practical: time spend outside a state of gratitude is time in which we are not healing.  Anger, remorse, guilt, wishful thinking, even grief that focuses only on loss–are all hindrances to finding the peace that must come before any real happiness.

So I worked (and continue to work) at reconciling myself with how it could be that a healthy, active, lusty, and adventurous man had been invaded by a mutation that ate him alive and left him an emaciated and sallow corpse in a hospice bed just seven month after his diagnosis.  Why it was that he had the bad luck to have such an aggressive strain of prostate cancer that even therapies that usually add several years to the life of patients added not a day to his.

There isn’t a why.  What is, is.  Jim knew this and said it often, not just about his cancer, but about everything he couldn’t change. I am so lucky to have spent the last eight years with a man who thought that way, for I realize now what a blessing it is to have an  outlook that makes practicing gratitude natural.

What is, is.

Isn’t that the heart of the matter?  Don’t we have to accept reality before we can find our way out of the holes into which life knocks us from time to time?

Jim and I practiced gratitude together until the end. As to the cards we had been dealt in life, any complaints simply died in our throats.  Jim’s life gave him seven decades of opportunities, accomplishments, and many joys.  He got to practice the science he loved in a lab that his many achievements kept funded.  He did well enough financially to be able to afford a 40-foot Valiant sailboat and a beautiful Ventus glider, both of which gave him outlets for his boundless energy and centers for his identity.  He traveled widely and read eclectically. He had the good sense to keep his wishes modest and within his means.  We treated each other with the respect we hadn’t always gotten in previous relationships, which gave us an opportunity to heal each other’s wounds.  Jim left this world honored and treasured by his family and friends, and deeply loved by me.

That was his reality.  This is mine.  I must face life without him, but I had an extraordinary and precious person in my life for a while.  Eight years was not as long as we hoped, but it will have to be enough. I lost my love, but I had an experience of love that many people never get.

Life has given me six decades of opportunities beyond measure, successes of countless kinds, resources of every sort with which to face up to problems, and the vision to see and accept challenges as chances to make something wonderful happen.  Straw into gold, lemons into lemonade, loss into gain, defeat into victory.  All it takes is seeing it that way.  Otherwise, straw, lemons, loss, and defeat just stay what they are.

I haven’t been either a Pollyanna or a Queen of Denial about my loss.  I cried buckets at the beginning, and I still get teary (although briefly) most days. For a time, I did all I could to stay in that liminal world between being alive and dead, grasping at chances to feel I was with him again, if only for a moment. I still chat with him in my head, but acknowledge that the talk is therapy for me, independent of whether he is there to hear it.  No, his death is real, and I have struggled hard, and so far successfully, to let him–and me–move on.

When I experience something beautiful, or amusing, or touching, I think of how much Jim would enjoy it, and I often cry.  What my thinking comes quickly around to, however, is that those beautiful, amusing, and touching moments are in this world here and now, and so am I.

Our wounds move away from front and center in our lives when we put the past in an honored place, but don’t try to live there. I am ready and excited to continue reinventing myself, to make new friends, begin new activities, and–who knows?–perhaps even find love again. So I move forward, saying an ongoing thank you to the universe for Jim’s life and my own, and for the countless blessings of this and every day.

Shantih. Shalom. Peace.

 

I can’t write about writing or the writing life today, because I am not doing any of the former, and as to the latter, I don’t have one.

Eight months ago, my beloved partner (and more recently husband) was diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer.  Though incurable, for most men his age (72), it’s likely to progress slowly enough that they die of something else.  Jim didn’t have that kind.  His was so invasive it left the doctors astonished, and took his life in less than eight months.

When he was diagnosed I was just finishing the first draft of a new book, and as the prognosis began to look grimmer, I set it aside and did not look at the file again. I couldn’t justify spending any time in a made-up world when I had my beautiful, gentle, loving, and utterly precious love still with me.

 

I still haven’t opened that file, and have no desire to do so. Nothing seems quite real to me now except the actual world in the present tense, and it requires such tremendous effort that there is nothing left over to call upon.  And, surprisingly, I am fine without writing–so fine it is difficult to imagine feeling driven in the same way again.

People say not to make important decisions in the throes of catastrophic events, so I will just say I don’t know what direction my writing life will go.  All I know is that when I make a list of the things that are important to getting myself back on my feet and launched into the next chapter of my life, writing novels is not on the list.  Perhaps that is the exact wrong thing to say on a website devoted to writers and writing, in the company of writing women whom I admire professionally and love as friends, but one thing life has shown me is that under stress, honesty is the only thing I have energy for.

So we will see.

“What was the outcome?” we often ask, as if there is some sort of linear end to matters, a convenient wrap-up that restores our faith that life is a predictable narrative, even if that predictability can only be seen after the fact.

The outcome of the last eight months, since that awful September day when we heard the dreaded “C” word, is that Jim died.  But the thing about outcomes is that they really aren’t.  They are thresholds.  Maybe that’s what we should say instead.

I don’t know what the outcome of Jim’s death is.  I know how I feel right now–or maybe I really don’t.  Our culture doesn’t give us much opportunity or practice in speaking of the nuances of feeling.  I am a writer, and my own vocabulary for such things is pathetic.  I am sad.  I am grief stricken. I am at loose ends….

Pathetic.  Told you so.

I am standing in a doorway.  Thinking about the past makes me sad.  The future without Jim makes me sad too. The only thing I can do anything about is the present, and exigencies are dictating most of that to me as well.

There are no outcomes, only thresholds.  As Goethe put it, “nothing is worth more than this day.”  How much will yours be worth?

 

It’s easy for non-writers to understand how writing can be an emotional experience, but most people who went to college probably remember research papers as dry-eyed experiences–especially if they involved all-nighters!

I can’t imagine any historical novelist sticking with a topic that didn’t leave him or her speechless from time to time, needing to step away and let the magnitude of some events seep into a mind reluctant to believe.  I have had many such moments, beginning with my first trade book, Until Our Last Breath, a nonfiction work on Jewish resistance during the Holocaust, through my sixth, the just-completed novel The Intuitive.

The latter provides the freshest moments of emotionally wrenching research, and I want to share one of those with you now and the second in a subsequent post.

Ever since reading the late Stephen Jay Gould’s magnificent 1981 work, The Mismeasure of Man many years ago, I’ve known about the history of intelligence testing, and the blatant racism, sexism, and classism that went into early efforts to stratify people by intelligence (and therefore worth). American scientists were major participants in this, as a means of justifying slavery, and later to support anti-immigration sentiments.  In the early twentieth century, an American psychologist, H.H. Goddard, known as the father of modern eugenics, received permission to conduct research at Ellis Island, whereby women he considered gifted with special powers of intuition would scan incoming immigrants and identify on sight those they believed were feebleminded.  Few could pass tests that were so out of the realm of their life experience, and those who could not were deported.

I read Gould’s book long before I had any idea I would become a novelist, but I was so moved by the vision of the “intuitives” at Ellis Island that years later the story of these women and their impact on other people’s lives jumped to mind as something important to tell. The topic had to stand in line, however, and finally in 2011 I got around to it.

But the teary-eyed part of the research didn’t come from reviewing Gould.  It came when I was digging further into Goddard’s most famous work, a 1912 study of a young woman, “Deborah,” from a family living in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey whom he called the Kallikaks.  She was the central case study in his theory that “feeblemindedness” was inherited from shiftless, criminal ancestors, and the only way to avoid moral and intellectual degeneration in America was to build colonies where the current generation could live away from “good” society and, most important, be kept from breeding.

“Deborah” came to the Vineland School for Feebleminded Boys and Girls when she was eight. She was never permitted to leave because it was believed that “morons” (a term Goddard coined) had no moral sense and would fall into criminality if left on their own. She was treated as retarded her entire life, though the many abilities she showed, including excellent skills as a tailor, were commented favorably upon and she became a kind of unpaid assistant to the staff.

What took my breath away was the conclusion of contemporary psychologists looking at  “Deborah’s” file. They believe she was not retarded at all, but had a learning disability affecting her performance on the kinds of tests they were using to judge her.  The file is full of laudatory references to her many capabilities, but nowhere does anyone appear to have questioned whether she should have had her freedom taken away. Though life on the outside was not that pleasant for any working woman, still there’s something about that story that sucks all the oxygen out of the room.

And of course Deborah was not alone.  All over the country, men were institutionalized for being gay, and women for being “hysterics, which often meant no more than being defiant.  All over the country one could go to jail for loving a person of another race.  All over the country, Jews and people of color found doors slammed in their faces.  “Life is so nice the way it is,” was the cry of the comfortable.  “Why do all of you want to spoil everything for us?”

The Intuitive has a fictional protagonist, wealthy socialite Zorah Baldwin, who serves as one of Goddard’s “intuitives” at Ellis Island. Through her work there and a budding friendship with “Deborah” that begins during a visit to the Vineland School, Zorah breaks out from the narrow world she grew up in, to explore the realities of the Lower East Side and the exploding social issues of the time, including Women’s Suffrage which I will discuss in my next post.

And of course, for her to do that, I had to explore these realities first, taking a lot of breaks to catch my breath, as I staggered my way through some history I think most of us would prefer not to know too much about.  But since my self-appointed job as a historical novelist is to bring to light forgotten women, I present a bit of the good, the bad, and yes, the ugly in my new work.  The Intuitive is with my agent now, and I will keep you posted here and more frequently on my “Laurel Corona, Author” page on Facebook.

 

 

 

One time when I was growing up, my sister and I, newly old enough to stay home alone for a few hours, were “terrorized” after dark by a neighbor on the front porch dropping off something he had borrowed from my dad. We stayed huddled in the bathroom for what seemed like an eternity until our parents got home, arming ourselves only with a flashlight we planned by some childish logic to defend ourselves with if the intruder broke down the door.

 

At least there really was a presence outside–unlike later, when I would cower in bed after watching a scary movie, convinced that whatever had menaced the characters was about to get me.  Why is it that the typical and familiar “things that go ‘bump’ in the night” are transformed into something diabolical just by the act of storytelling?  Try as one might to rationalize that watching a movie does not compromise one’s safety in the real world, that a monster or psychopath isn’t lurking out there ready to pounce on the hapless soul with the misfortune to have just watched something scary, it just never seems to keep the fears at bay.

 

There’s something equally irrational about writing under the kind of personal stress I have been facing since my partner, Jim, was diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer.  I was finishing the first draft of a new novel as the news was unfolding, and it has caused me to look at my work with some of the same fears–fears that try as I may, I cannot dispel with logic, or a heroically wielded flashlight.

 

I don’t know whether to trust my writing anymore. We’re talking about words written before I even knew Jim was ill, so it’s not like I could have been shellshocked as I typed.  I remind myself that the manuscript hasn’t changed just because other things have, but somehow I feel more vulnerable and confused, more doubting of my ability to judge.

 

What’s weird is that I can’t figure out what I am worried about. There’s nothing about my writing future that is at stake here. I don’t have a deadline looming.  I don’t depend on the income (thank goodness!) With three published novels, I don’t have any goal I haven’t already achieved.  I think my anxiety isn’t about my writing at all, really. It’s about the great unspeakable behind all this. The D word.  The one with five letters that rhymes with breath.

 

There’s another “D” word relevant here too: Displacement.  Maybe that’s what’s going on–I am acting out in one sphere what is freaking me out in another.

 

I tell myself that it is my choice whether to let the future ruin today.  Just live. Appreciate.  Be thankful. I’m hearing myself pretty well most of the time. It’s the bogeyman of uncertainty that’s got me.  What’s certain is that the man I love, with whom I have had one of the best chapters of my life, cannot be cured.  What’s certain is that, unless something unexpected takes him from me even sooner, the expected will take him soon enough. What’s uncertain is all the details. Will he be strong and enjoying his life a year from today? Two years?  How long until he wonders whether it’s worth it to soldier on? How long until I will be alone?

 

Yes, I know nothing is ever certain, and some kinds of uncertainty are good and even productive. Sometimes what we don’t know truly doesn’t hurt us.  This is not one of those times. At least I don’t think it is, unless the future is uglier than I think, and I’m not, repeat NOT, thinking that.

 

So I’m taking it out on my manuscript, wondering whether words–or events–will ever be the way I want them again. Writing is something I can control, though, at least a little, and even as I type this, I long to escape into it. Time to put down the flashlight and come out of the bathroom armed with nothing but a story. No need to utter a frightened “who’s there?”  It’s only me. And I don’t like any of this.  Not one bit.

Once again, I am wondering where the time has gone since I last posted. In my last entry, a lifetime ago, I described the shock of finding myself in the hospital as the ship sailed on the eve of a three-week adventure I’d been dreaming of for over a year, while my beloved partner struggled with acute kidney failure. The part I didn’t add was that the kidney failure was caused by blockage from newly discovered cancer in his prostate.  Advanced. Incurable. Highly virulent.  Quickly invasive.

I guess we all know we aren’t going to live forever, but learning what is likely to kill us or someone we love, and in roughly how much time, is brutal.  Fortunately the prognosis is still measurable in plural years, but that’s about all I know.

I forced myself to finish a first draft of novel number five, THE INTUITIVE, just so I didn’t have an uncompleted story hanging over me, then without any of the usual fanfare, I just set it aside.  I’ll get to it sometime. Priorities.  I need to keep my head clear.  I need to live up to my own expectations of myself as a teacher.  I need to be there for Jim, whatever he needs.

I often catch myself wishing some event in the future would come more quickly–the end of the semester, a much anticipated event, a visit, a piece of news.  Then I pull back on the reins of my desires and remind myself how finite time is and how quickly the clock is ticking.  Why should I possibly want it already to be mid-December?  Don’t I want all the time in between?

Especially now.

This isn’t the first overwhelming crisis I’ve dealt with, and I’ve noticed two basic ways people respond to their own problems and those of others.  The first is catastrophizing and the second is rosy denial.  This doesn’t correlate to simple pessimism and optimism, though, at least for me.  I am one of the most sunny and cheerfully optimistic people you’ll ever meet, but I still fall into the first category, at least initially.

It works well for me to imagine the worst.  It enables me to preview my emotions, think of strategies and plans, remind myself what grief feels like.  I envision Jim’s treatments not working, I picture the markers of his decline. I place this in concrete time–next summer, next fall, next year. I picture the end.  I think about life without him. I imagine my own end, and know that unlike him I may face it without a loving partner. I hate every minute of all this, but I stay there as long as I need to, just to keep myself oriented and rational.

Then–and here is the important part–I tell myself it’s highly unlikely to be as bleak as that.  I dial back the catastrophe.  I tell myself the worst is almost certainly not what is in store for either of us.  Some things we can control.  Others we can assume won’t happen, or won’t be as awful as they could be.

That’s why it can be hard to deal with all the sweet and wonderful people who try to help  by saying that the treatments designed to keep the cancer at bay for several years could give scientists enough time to find a cure, those who tell me about all the exceptional cases, all the “miracles,” all the people still alive after ten or twenty years. I know it’s done out of love for me, mingled with a large dose of their own fears, but it’s very draining.   It’s a bit like when I lost loved ones and ended up spending my limited energy listening to things that might have made other people feel better but only exhausted me.  Things that, in an odd twist,  made me feel like the consoler rather than the consoled.

I have on occasion called myself an optimistic fatalist, and though that might sound weird, to me it makes perfect sense.  I can’t change what will be, but the one thing I am confident of is that I will weather it somehow.

 

My suitcase is inside the front door, my passport still sitting on top of it, just where I left it when I took my partner and sweetest love Jim to the emergency room just hours before we were due to leave for Lisbon.

I know I need to unpack, but there’s something about that hulking form containing the cocktail dresses I won’t be wearing, the bathing suit I won’t need–something as yet unresolved in my mind that demands that it stay there while I figure out what it all means.

As I sat in the hospital yesterday, I followed in my mind the itinerary that would get us to Lisbon.  Right now we’d be flying over New Mexico, I thought.  Right now we’d be waiting in Newark for our connection.  Right now we’d be hearing our plane was starting its descent into Lisbon.  And then the imaginings went dark.

Today as I sat by Jim’s bed in the hospital my only thoughts of the outside world were of my classes.  Right now the sub was walking in, calling roll, and telling the students I wasn’t going to be gone after all, except this one day.  I pictured each room, each set of faces and the range of reactions. It was far more real to me than a ship I had never been on, the smells, the sights, the sensations of a place I had never been.

I haven’t tried to figure out what time it is in Portugal.  I haven’t looked once to see where the ship is, or whether at this moment I would be giving one of my lectures, or sitting by the pool, or visiting a foreign port.  It isn’t real.  It wasn’t meant to be.

My life here with Jim is real.  My life as a professor is real. What could compare?

Talking with my sister last night, I told her I was mentally putting on my Buddhist robes and trying to process this whole disappointment–oh yes, it is certainly that!–in terms of suffering caused by desire.  What were my desires for this trip, and what do I feel I have lost?

What I wanted, deep down, was more quality time with Jim. We’re both workaholics, me with my second full time job as a novelist, and he as a research scientist with a burning desire to understand how just one little piece of this marvelous bio-physico-chemical process called life actually works.  What did I get?  More quality time with Jim, just not of the sort I pictured. Today I kissed his forehead and smoothed his hair and told him I loved him.  He told me the same, held my hand, and smiled.

“Be careful what you ask for,” my sister said.  “Remember the old adage about getting it.”

The other thing I wanted is more frivolous but still real to me. I had really been looking forward to the opportunity to dress to the nines every night, and now I must plunge into a suitcase and confront the gorgeous clothes I have no use for.  I had been joking with Jim about how he simply doesn’t know what a girly girl I can be, because that’s just not the way we live. The dresses go into the back of the closet now–for months I’d kept them in front where I could see them as my excitement grew.  Now don’t want the reminder.

Western thinking suggests that it’s good to plumb our psyches to root out every last emotion and expose it to the light of day, but I don’t need or want to. I have conquered most of the suffering by understanding what I desired from this trip and why, or at the very least knowing that I can understand it if I dig a little more, and that such knowledge will set me free, if that is what I wish for.

I’m still learning, still changing, and so grateful for the little flashes of clarity life gives us from time to time if we are willing to step away from our grievances and disappointments and just take in a deep breath of good, fresh air.

Will Jim and I step aboard a cruise ship in the future?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  Will the sea air smell sharper and the waves dance more brightly if we do?  Undoubtedly.

 

 

 

A wonderful group of authors formed a group, San Diego Writing Women, last year, and I am lucky enough to be a charter member.  We are dedicated to mutual support and promotion as well as community service to those interested in writers, books, and the writing process. One of our activities is a weekly blog for which we share writing duty.  This week was my turn, so here is a link to my most recent blog post.  Please take a look at the other authors’ posts as well, and an archive of my own, if you are in the unlikely position of having more than a minute of time!

Many Thanks to Kathleen Jones, director of the NIH Hannah Arendt workshop for high school teachers, for posting this video of a talk I gave on my non-fiction book, UNTIL OUT LAST BREATH, about Jewish resistance in the Holocaust.

 

 

This isn’t about writing at all, except that I’m writing about it.  It’s about luck and a lot of other things.  Sometime in August I decided that, although I never play the lottery, I wanted to see if using nothing but “lucky pennies” might make a “lucky dollar” and get me a winning ticket. During the summers  I run most days along a pretty heavily touristed stretch and when school starts I have a brisk twenty-five minute walk each way through downtown San Diego, so I have plenty of opportunity to scan sidewalks. I started picking up pennies and the occasional nickel or dime, and I am now up to fifty cents.

The project seems so silly that I am surprised at how much pleasure it has given me. Today I found two pennies on my walk to school, and I was so excited I sent a text message to my partner. But as I walked on, I started thinking about something that happened during the summer, when I was running along a grass easement in front of the Convention Center.  It was already a good day—about ten minutes into my hour-long run I found a dime in a crosswalk used by conventioneers to get to the Gaslamp District. That will put a spring in the step!

Not more than a minute or two later, I saw a glint in the grass and saw two quarters. Two quarters!  The dime had brought me up to twenty-seven cents at that point, and suddenly I was more than seventy-five percent of the way to my dollar.  I was astonished!

As I ran along, I started thinking about the fifty cents.  It was on a stretch where a few homeless men sack out during the day, and it must have fallen out of someone’s pocket. The rest of the run I pondered a lot of things—starting with how much more important it was to him that he had lost the money than it was to me that I had found it. I started thinking about my desire to get lucky and I realized how it was hard to get much luckier than I already was.

I decided not to keep the fifty cents but to give it to another homeless person.  A tattered, sunburned woman always sitting on a retaining wall near the end of my run and calls out “have a good run!” every time I pass by.  If she was there that day, I would give the money to her.

The rest of the run I was happier about the fifty cents than I was when i first spotted it.  I felt more of a connection to the nameless, faceless soul who patted his pockets and knew the buying power of that money had drained from his life. I thought about how it would make some small difference in the day of the woman I was running toward. But mostly I thought about the Jewish concept of a mitzvah, which is sometimes translated as “good deed” but  is so much more than that.

A mitzvah is when we do something in keeping with God’s intentions for our behavior. Take God out of the equation, and the meaning doesn’t really change that much. The world isn’t fair, and that’s not right. It’s up to each of us to do what we can to bring a little more balance, a little more equity, into it.  Call it dharma, call it words carved by divine lightning onto stone tablets on a mountain in the desert–it doesn’t matter. I couldn’t keep the money because it made the world even more imbalanced than it already was.

As I transported the coins from their old owner to their new one, I didn’t really think of it as a good deed, but about my membership in something bigger.  “Have a nice run!”the woman called out as I strode to a stop.

“I found two quarters back there,” I said with a grin.  “I think they belong to you.”

She jumped up and hugged me, despite the sweat.  “Thank you so much!” she said, almost dancing.

Her name was Kelly. I never thought to ask before.

What happened to the dime? Reader, it’s in the pile on my desk.  Finders keepers!

Maybe there’s a blessing now on my quest for a dollar’s worth of lucky change, but I don’t care.  It’s a game I’ve already won.

Bad habits are hard to break, and sometimes the most we can hope for is to notice a little more quickly when we are falling into them.  I had just such an experience this week with my revision of novel number five, THE INTUITIVE.

One of the main story elements involves the women’s suffrage movement.  In the course of my research I came to admire deeply the “second generation” of suffragists, women like Alice Paul in the United States and the Pankhursts in England. I really had no ideas how much they endured to get me and all other women the vote.  I wanted to do their story justice in my novel, but i was troubled by one thing.

Suffragist leaders were decidedly middle and upper class and almost exclusively white. This makes sense, for other women probably had more pressing things on their minds.  What is not so easy to feel good about is the insistence, even by some of the suffragists I admire most, not to enlist people of color in the movement.  Many people were uncomfortable with black men voting, and suffragists thought the cause would be hurt if it was pointed out that black women would get the vote too.

I’m sure Alice Paul and the others didn’t consider themselves racist, but simply practical. I’m not going to judge, but still it was something I thought my readers should know and have a chance to ponder for themselves.  So I did what every novelist does–I work my interests into the novel through the thoughts and opinions of my characters.

Zorah Baldwin, my protagonist, has been introduced to the suffragist movement through meeting Alice Paul.  After a parade in which she has been assaulted by paint-throwing protestors, she stands with Alice on the stage of Carnegie Hall, a symbol in her ruined dress, of the strength and determination of the movement.  She should be amazed to be thrust in the spotlight in that way, pleased to be standing next to Alice, and feeling a growing commitment to the movement and greater sense of purpose in her life.

And what do I have her do?  Thoughts pass through her mind about the fact that working women aren’t there because the parade was on a Saturday, which was a working day.  She remembers a comment Alice made about not wanting black suffragist groups to march.  In the middle of a fabulous scene, I just couldn’t resist stepping in to ruin it.

Okay, that might have worked out in the end, except that Zorah, over the next few chapters, makes a deeper and more passionate commitment to suffrage.  My need to throw the negative in at the first opportunity disturbed the arc of the story, because both the reader and Zorah have already found the movement a bit off-putting. Why would she throw herself into it, and why should the reader cheer her on?

The whole story rang a little false now. Zorah could no longer be perceived the way I wanted her to be, if these serious issues were just passing thoughts she subsequently ignored. Nor did I want to write pages showing her struggle with this, just to work in some rationalizations for the reader.

I hadn’t re-read these pages in some time, and when I got to them, the answer was simple. “Get out of the way of the story!” I told myself.  Let her just be thrilled and astonished standing on that stage in her paint-soaked dress.  Let her have no doubts at all about the movement. The rest can wait–after all, this scene happens only halfway through the book.  I just took out the material.  I’ll find a way to work it in later, or maybe not.

I’ve been in wars with my books before.  I wanted to write about the crazy excesses of Venetian convents so badly that I came up with a preposterous plot diversion in THE FOUR SEASONS to have Maddalena go live in one.  Fortunately I caught myself before I’d spent much time and effort, and I’ve learned to accept that I am going to know a whole lot of incredibly interesting things that don’t end up being in my books.

Susan Vreeland has very aptly called such authorial indulgences “research dumps,” and the classism of the suffrage movement was just one of these.  I catch myself more easily now throwing something in just because I know it, and I see this in other writers’ work as well.  I guess I should think of research that isn’t dumped as one of the perks of writing a historical novel.  It’s all still in my head for me to ponder and for readers to discover if my work inspires them to learn more on their own.