It always feels a little funny sharing a work-in-progress. I read a post from ysolda on her fabulous knitting blog, about her qualms with sharing her designs-in-progress. She does share, saying, “Personally I think it’s pretty interesting to see a project build and gain some insight into the development process.” (And doesn’t the sweater she’s working on look gorgeous? Check out the post with the wrist detail. I want to knit that!)

I’m always fascinated with the creative processes of others. I’m hoping that some of you out there feel the same. If nothing else, if you don’t write yourself, what I share here might help you see what a messy process writing can be. It might help you understand your kids’ frustrations when they write.

Anyway, I don’t have a chapter this month. But I have an awful lot of stuff.

I kept starting new parts, but nothing came together. It was like trying to gather up a ball of bread dough that didn’t have enough moisture. I finally realized what was holding me back.

I had this idea–which I still like–that I wanted to write very short chapters for this book. Break down my ideas into small bits, followed with practical suggestions, so parents could pick up the book and consider one small idea at a time–or they could read several.

But here’s what I realized: I don’t write short. Gee, I’ll bet you’re thinking, no duh. Have you ever seen a short post on this blog? What I’ve always loved about the essay form is that it imitates the thought process. It takes off in unexpected directions, incorporating story, analysis, argument and wonder. It’s a little unwieldy. That’s my style, and I think I need to go with it.

That realization opened up the possibilities for me. Instead of not knowing what to do with those chunks in which I’d written about each of my kids, it occurred to me that each of those sections was part of a bigger idea. With each kid I learned something new about writing with homeschoolers:

• With H, I learned that the traditional school model of having kids take on their own writing at age six doesn’t work very well.
• With Lulu, I learned that what’s most important is to find ways to help kids want to write, and to develop their voices as writers.
• With Mr. T, I learned that homeschoolers can put the previous notions into practice differently. We can use an entirely different model.

Suddenly, I realized that I could write a chapter on each of those ideas, incorporating the sections I’d written about my kids with the newer sections I’d been working on. I could try to carry my readers along my own evolution of thoughts about kids and writing–assuming that many readers might follow a similar evolution–leading them right into the practical ideas that will form most of the book.

And I knew what I needed to do next. It was time for a cut-and-paste session.

Cutting up and rearranging my work in the back of the car, while Mr. T was at his wilderness program.

This is one of my favorite techniques for when writing isn’t working. Take what you have, cut it up and play with the order. It’s fun, and it almost always leads to new ideas. If nothing else, it gets you up from your writing chair and moving, which is always helpful.

I helped a homeschooled friend on her college essays this fall. She’d written a nice essay on her love of cycling, but it wasn’t quite capturing her passion. It wasn’t lively enough. I remembered a beautiful poem she’d written in our writer’s workshop, a very sensory, tangible poem about one particular ride. I suggested that she might want to cut up her essay and her poem, and see if she could work them into one. 

Her resulting essay was unique and vivid and wonderful. I hope it helps get her where she wants to go.

At any rate, my own cutting and pasting session was just what I needed. Suddenly all my ideas are coming together, and I have a big, shaggy ball of dough to knead. It needs work, but it’s working.

This month I hope to write a good draft of the chapter on H and the traditional school model of writing (and why it doesn’t work). I’ll let you know how how it goes.

I haven’t done one of these atwitter posts in a while. Here’s what has me all worked up these days.

Knitting. Looky! Even though I haven’t posted here, I’ve been knitting. Hats!

This one (ravelry link) is my favorite, ’cause I can pretend it’s the 1930’s and it doesn’t smash my (already plenty flat) hair.

This was my first foray into colorwork. Isn’t it a pretty pattern? I’m a continental knitter, and was hell-bent on learning how to hold both yarns in the left hand. I kept fiddling with ways of stranding the yarn across my fingers and finally figured a way that worked for me. Having both yarns on the same hand made my tension even, I think.

I also knit a pair of super-wooly socks for Chris to wear around the house, but he won’t hold still long enough more me to get a photo. Now I’m swatching for Ysolda’s coraline. 

The girls are back in action! Here in northern California, my plum tree is blooming, the rosemary is draped in blue and my bees are busy. I opened up the hive over the weekend and found lots of capped honey, and saw Queen Bee-atrice strutting around some glossy white larval bees.

Can you see her in the photo, the longer one towards the middle? Yippee! I think we’ll get honey this year!

new blogs: Danielsaurus is fascinating. Here’s a description from the sidebar: “Daniel’s been hardwired to the Internet since he was twelve and spends a lot of time on it finding nifty things to share. Mostly he writes about children, play, kids’ cultures, and the ‘bigger picture’ of childhood in society.” It’s a constant flow of thought-provoking links and wonderings.

Making marmalade. Last summer, stefeneener and denise gave a jam workshop that finally got me past my irrational fears of canning, and at Christmas my parents gifted me with some fine equipment. 

Our satsuma mandarin tree went bonkers with fruit this winter, so satsuma-vanilla bean marmalade was my first canning attempt. Fabulous recipe! It turned out so tasty that I have a big bowl of our last satsumas, ready to make a third batch. Favorite snack: this marmalade with almond butter on Swedish crispbread. Snarf.

New books. I’m still meaning to write a post on Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind, giddy as I am about the ideas in that book. I also read his newer book, Drive, about motivation. It’s also a fascinating book, all about how intrinsic motivation is much more powerful than external motivators, but this one didn’t knock my hand-knit socks off as much as the other book. Because, of course, as a homeschooling parent, I see the power of internal motivation in action every single day. I’ve learned the hard way, as many homeschooling parents do, that my attempts at motivating my kids have not a fraction of the power that their own internal fires do. So the ideas here weren’t new to me, but if you have any doubts about the potential of internal drive and want scientific back-up, or if you want hints for becoming a more internally-driven person, it’s a good read. And, in the section on kids and education, Pink gives a nod to unschooling! Pink’s TED talk on the topic is compelling–it gives you a sense of what the book is like.

And has anyone read 50 Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do)? I haven’t, but am intrigued. Lots of interesting stuff from the author, Gever Tulley, at tinkering school.

So, what has you all atwitter right now?

Here’s the cherry on top that I promised. I just wish I could give you each one of the actual profiteroles that Lulu made for her grandparents’ birthdays, with handmade bittersweet chocolate sauce, of course!

I was touched that so many of you took the time to leave thoughts that seemed deeply pondered, and were so wonderfully honest. You have no idea how much you’ve helped me. (And if you didn’t leave a comment yet, it’s not too late. I’d love more feedback!)

I feel a little sheepish about how most of you weren’t asking for advice, but I stepped right up and elected myself the Dear Abby of Homeschooled Writing. Somehow I can’t help myself. When people start talking kids and writing, I get giddy. I could put duct tape on my mouth and sit on my hands, yet if you started talking about your kids and their writing experiences I would bounce up and down and try to mumble through the tape, “I have an idea for you!”

One reason for my feedback is that I can’t lose the teacher part of me that loves to help people. But I write back for selfish reasons too. As I respond to your hopes and concerns, I’m figuring out my own thoughts on the subject. Like anyone, I crystallize what I think about a topic as I write about it–which is just one more wonderful reason for writing, and one that Susan and both Carries alluded to in their hopes for their kids. And crystallizing your ideas is pretty important, when you’re endeavoring to write a book.

What your feedback did more than anything was give me an audience for this book. Any writer will tell you that if you want your work to be effective, you need to know who you’re writing for. Now, when I sit down and write, I’m writing to you, you who leave me comments here, sharing your worries and your desires about your kids and their writing. You’ve become my audience, like it or not, and having you in mind has given me a focus that I didn’t have before. Finally, I know where the book should begin and I’ve begun it, because I know what I want to tell you.

I wish we could all sit around a table, talking kids and writing and eating profiteroles. But until that day comes, I’m ever grateful to gather with you here. Thanks for hanging out and telling me what’s on your mind. It’s just what I needed to hear.

I need your help.

I’m writing myself in circles with the chapter I’m working on, and it occurred to me that some feedback from actual rather than virtual people would be incredibly useful.

I have two questions that I’d love to have answered.

What are your concerns regarding your kids and writing?

What goals hopes do you have for your kids as writers?

(Edited to add: after reading your comments, it seems that many parents once had concerns about their kids’ writing, but have let them go. Hooray! If you want to mention what your former concerns were, that would be helpful to me too. I think that parents of younger kids often have more concerns, as they haven’t yet been able to watch their kids evolve as writers.

Also, I changed the word goals to hopes in the second question, after reading Diane’s comment below. She’s right: goals connotes a sense of the parent steering the kayak and mapping the voyage. I’m really more interested in the hopes you have for your kids, regardless of your role in how they might get there.)

If you don’t have children (or even if you do), feel free to answer the same questions about yourself.

Quick responses of a few words are fine, as are wordy rambles. Any feedback will help.

Thank you. With a cherry on top.

If you haven’t been reading along, these are the posts in which I wring my hands over how un-waldorfy things can get around here, and how I tend to feel guilty about it. Or try to justify why I don’t feel guilty.

I’ve been feeling less and less guilty lately. Brought on by a confluence of different ideas from different people.

First was Michael Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs. I’ve already raved on and on about this book, so I’ll spare you. (Although if you can get your hands on the audiobook version, which Chabon reads, you must.) In my reflection on the book, I wrote this:

“There’s something about the way Chabon combines his Pulitzer Prize-winning style with the most base cultural references that captivates me. In his essay on Legos—one that had particular resonance for me as the mother of two Lego-loving sons—Chabon writes, “Time after time, playing Legos with my kids, I would fall under the spell of the old familiar crunching. It’s the sound of creativity itself, of the inventive mind at work, making something new out of what you have been given by your culture, what you know you will need to do the job, and what you happen to stumble upon along the way.” That making something new of what you have been given by your culture is a big part of Chabon’s genius. It’s precisely what he does in these essays, again and again.”

And one could certainly argue that Chabon made something new of what he was given by his culture when he took his lowly childhood love of comic books and fashioned it into a Pulitzer prize-winning novel.

Second was my reading of Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. I’m planning to write a post on the book soon, so I won’t say much yet. But holy sheep dip, this book has so many implications for educators–for homeschoolers especially–about the skills kids will really need in the future. So many of Pink’s ideas are what I and a world of other homeschoolers have intuited over the years, but what a joy to get such heavily-researched validation!

Third was yet another insightful post by Lori at camp creek about not limiting what our kids learn from. (You may have already clicked on my link to this post in the sidebar–if not, go read!)

Which all led to the morning when Mr. T was trying to come up with a project for our homeschool history fair, based on his interest in Norse myths. I can’t remember who came up with the idea first–it may have been my suggestion after I saw how he was “enacting” a video game by jumping across the family room furniture. But somehow the idea formed: he plans to design his own Lego Wii-style game, based on Norse mythology.

map of the nine Norse worlds

Now he won’t be actually making a playable game, of course. But he’s imagining levels and drawing pictures and narrating to me what happens in each. And we’re thinking of begging his big brother to help him make some stop-animation films for each level.

Here’s what he has so far. My waldorf guilt must warn you that there is a lot of virtual punching involved. But if you can hang in there, I’ll explain what I think the kid is getting from this.

map of level 1

LEVEL 1: THE BATTLE OF YMIR

Object: Defeat Ymir

First of all, go to Ymir and punch him three times. He will jump to a ledge. Beware, he’ll throw icicles down! Also, jotuns will fall from the sky. They’ll only take one punch to defeat. 

Remember, don’t go into Ginnungagap or the sides of the board or you’ll die.

Go under Ymir’s ledge and pull down a lever. More ledges will come out of the wall. Jump on them to get to Ymir’s ledge and punch him three times. He’ll jump to a new ledge and the one you’re on will explode. You’ll fall to the ground.

Then, go under Ymir’s new ledge and step on one of the three red squares. Your teammates will step on the other red squares. Then Ymir’s new ledge will come down. Jump on to it and punch him three times. He’ll jump to the ground. Punch him three more times and the level will end.

Tips:

How to get the magic box: in Free Play, be Loki or a different character that can jump really high and jump on to the island in the middle of Ginnungagap. Collect the floating box.

If you win:

You unlock Odin and his brothers and you can be them in Free Play.

How this level is based on Norse myths:

Well, there really wasn’t any levers, red squares, floating boxes, jotuns falling from the sky, or an island in the middle of Ginnungagap. Really, there wasn’t any Lego things whatsoever.

What there really was were the characters of Odin, Loeder and Hoenir, who were brothers and the first of the Aesir gods. There also was Ymir, who was the first of the jotun race, or a frost giant. Odin and his brothers really fought Ymir and they did throw him into Ginnungagap. I didn’t put blood in because I didn’t want it to be too violent, but there was blood in the story. Ginnungagap was a giant pit in the middle of Niflheim and Muspelheim, the first of the nine Norse worlds.

Nifty fact:

The Star Wars planet Mustafar was based on Muspelheim.

First, I have to tell you how incredibly excited Mr. T is about this project. He thinks about future levels endlessly, and begs me to take more dictation. So there’s deep immersion.

Second, there are lots of writing skills at work here. After I wrote Level 1, he said, “Now do the dot-dot thing.” 

I knew what he was getting at. “You mean put a colon in?”

“Yes, a colon.” And he came to check that I did it right. On the next line, after I typed object, he said, “Now put a colon.” 

How can I not be charmed by an eight-year-old who requests colons in all the right places? 

I asked him if he’d consider adding the How this level is based on Norse myths section (hoping to make sure the project looks somewhat educational for the homeschool fair.) Mr. T was happy to. He said, “Can the narrator be funny in that part?”

“What?” I didn’t see that question coming.

“You know, funny. Like this.” And he proceeded to narrate the section above, influenced, I’m pretty sure, by the disclaimer page that follows each Magic Schoolbus book. My favorite part is Really, there wasn’t any Lego things whatsoever. (I’m not fixing his grammar at this point–he’ll learn to use the right verb tenses in time, but for now I want to keep intact his eight-year-old voice.) I love how he’s picking up the notion that one can write with personality and humor, even in nonfiction. 

“Oh, and I want to add a nifty fact.” A nifty fact? I have no idea where he got that phrase. From National Geographic Kids? From one of the many behind-the-scenes books on comics that he’s read? When I asked where he got this particular nifty fact, he ran upstairs and brought down his Star Wars encyclopedia. Surely wii games and Star Wars books are just the sort of “crap” that Michael Chabon writes about; my kid is using crap to learn how to make his informational writing captivating. 

He’s using just the sort of right-brained thinking that Pink writes about to put this project together. He’s researching Norse myths and considering the wii games that he likes to play. Then he’s applying his research to design a game that takes into account those myths while also being entertaining. Silly as his project may sound, I’m convinced that these are the types of skills the kids of today will need in the future. It’s not the content that he’s working with that matters so much, it’s the thinking skills involved.

If content like wii games is what captivates my kid, I’m willing to go with it. And, surprisingly, I don’t feel even a smidge guilty.

Finding interesting photos for this project is sure to be a challenge in itself.

My goal is to write a draft of a chapter each month. I gave myself an easy start for January, since I had just the last part of a sort of triptych of three shorter chapters to finish up.

I felt compelled to start with a brief history of how my views on kids and writing have evolved over time, with each of my own kids. (Brief history sounds troublesome already, don’t you think?) So I wrote a short chapter on each kid, following the shifts in my thinking.

With H, I was still pretty locked into the school model, and felt that kids at six should begin doing all their own writing.

“On a bookshelf in our family room is a tiny yellow book, hand-stitched with dental floss by H. at six, and titled–with a backwards J–My Journal. Only a few pages are filled, with lines like I oent to a rastrant. I had pancacs.  (I went to a restaurant. I had pancakes.) My articulate boy couldn’t manage more, didn’t want to manage more. Now, flipping through the empty pages that followed, I wonder: why didn’t I transcribe what he really wanted to say? Why didn’t I write for him more often? I know the reason, and there was just one: it wasn’t how schools did it.”

I go on to tell how at seven, H. slammed his pencil to the table and hollered, “I hate writing!”

Lulu’s chapter is all about cheating as a homeschooling parent:

     “Any parent of more than one child knows what happens with the second. You learn to cheat. You learn to slacken the rules that meant so much with your first. You permit pacifiers past first birthdays, you let bedtimes creep late, you let broccoli be snubbed and allow ice cream anyway. You know it’s cheating, but you try not to care. Anything to bypass a tantrum, to speed up a grocery trip, to let you sit at the table until you’re ready to deal with the dishes.”

With Lulu I knew that, more than anything, I didn’t want her to hate writing. So instead of forcing her to write, I cheated: I often took dictation from her. Still, I saw my transcribing as a temporary fix, just a little help until she could write on her own without difficulty.

Mr. T came six years after Lulu, and almost ten after H. That’s how long it took me to realize that all the times I’d thought I’d “cheated” with homeschooling had really been homeschooling at its finest: me, offering my kids just what they needed at the time. I took dictation from Mr. T as I’d done with Lulu, but this time around I began noticing what he seemed to be learning from the process.

     “T. narrated his tale, his head whirling with ideas, and I took notes, my head whirling with my own.

     I compiled quite a Post-It list at the kitchen table that morning. Slowly, I began to realize that T. had intuited an awful lot about writing from our dictation sessions. Not merely rules of grammar, but also the writerly choices that authors make, like using strong verbs such as tore to describe a character eating his food quickly, or ending a chapter with a cliffhanger.”

That was when I first began to see that taking dictation has real potential as a writing tool for homeschooling families.

So now I have three chapters–but I’m not sure I’ll use any of them. Part of me thinks telling my stories as the start of a book is too self-indulgent; part of me thinks readers love stories, and long to see how others trip up and figure things out. And that my history is a necessary lead-in to what I’ve come to believe about kids and writing.

I don’t know. This may not be my beginning. I may take stuff from these chapters and insert it elsewhere. I may not use it at all. I think I just need to keep writing and see where the pages settle, see what form the book wants to take.

One thing I’ve learned with writing, that I tell the kids in my writer’s workshops, is that the beginning you start with may not be your ultimate beginning. So often we feel compelled to start with something that drums at our minds, but that may just be a warm-up, a way into our true beginning. Our first efforts may simply be what I call making clay. Unlike the sculptor who begins work by taking out a block of clay and shaping it, the writer has nothing to work with, no clay at all, until he or she writes a draft and makes some. Only then can the shaping start.

the plan for february:

I’m forging ahead and starting a chapter on voice. To me, the most important part of a writing education should be nurturing a child’s written voice. If you’re baffled by the term as I once was, if you’re befuddled at how an auditory word like voice can have anything to do with writing on a page, stick around. I’ll try to explain.

It was a glorious weekend.

The eight pairs of mothers and daughters formed from our homeschooling support group, back when the girls were eleven and twelve. A few of the girls have left the larger group to attend school, but our monthly meetings have helped us maintain our friendships.

We meet each month and explore different topics related to girls and growing up. This last year the girls decided that they wanted our meetings to be less structured and more fun–more of an opportunity for us mamas and our daughters to simply enjoy each other’s company.

We started planning the retreat almost a year-and-a-half ago. And was it easy to find a whole weekend in which sixteen busy mothers and daughters could get away? Nope. The organizing got so frustrating that we almost gave up.

I’m so glad we didn’t. We had such a wonderful weekend. The moms made breakfast on Saturday morning, and the girls cooked a fabulous pasta dinner. Weeks of rain magically cleared away on Saturday, and we had a gorgeous afternoon on the beach. The girls had a few (secret) activities and ceremonies planned, and there were giggles and shrieks and solemnity in equal measure as they were carried out.

Despite all of our scheduling difficulties, we had somehow managed to unknowingly schedule the trip during a full moon. On Saturday night the mothers planned a special full-moon ceremony for the girls. I hesitate to divulge too much, but at the same time, if sharing a bit of what we did might encourage other mothers to get a group like this together for their own girls, and to consider planning a special coming-of-age ceremony for them, I think it’s worth it.

Our ceremony involved having the girls take a one-mile hike in the dark, alone. They followed a trail we had marked earlier in the day. They didn’t bring flashlights–although the moon was so brilliant that they didn’t need them. Each girl began her hike a few minutes apart from the other girls. Each of us mothers were stationed along the trail, waiting with a flickering tea light. As each girl approached us in turn, we shared something we wanted to offer her as she journeys into womanhood: a poem, a story, a bit of insight. At the end of the trail, the girls met up and walked back to the trailhead together, where we mothers had gathered, waiting for them.

The ceremony turned out to be far more moving than I could have imagined. Waiting on the trail, the only sounds were frogs singing, a creek rippling and the waves of the Pacific. Then slowly the sound of footsteps approaching in the gravel would build, and a girl would appear in the dark, to hear your words and receive your hug. And then she would walk on and there would be silence again and in time more footsteps would come. After the last girl left me, I just stayed in my spot, watching the clouds shroud and then reveal the moon, basking in how grateful I felt to be in the presence of some absolutely lovely young women.

As we ate breakfast in the hostel kitchen on Sunday morning, another hostel visitor commented on how special it was that our girls, at fourteen and fifteen, seemed so happy to spend time with their mothers.

“They’re beautiful girls,” he said.

And they are beautiful. Inside and out. I’m still buzzing with how good it felt to take a weekend to celebrate that.

On New Year’s morning, I woke to find a message in my inbox telling me that Scott Russell Sanders had left a comment on my blog. Sanders was my essayist for October, and reading his message was such a thrill, and a closing more satisfying than I ever could have imagined for my year-long project. 

This wasn’t the first time a writer had left a comment on my blog, but it was the first of my beloved essayists to stop and say hello. I’m not sure I would have ever had the gall to put these thoughts out in public if I’d ever dreamed that the writers themselves might show up to read what I’d written. And I’m not sure I would have ever started this project if I’d realized what a time-consuming creature it would become.

Oh, it was time-consuming. There was at least one book to read each month. (And not a lick of fiction all year–not a lick!) After reading, I had to go back over my highlights and select favorites. Type them in and explain what I admired about them. And then write a little nutshell overview of what I thought about the writer. Those posts took me hours to write–usually over several days. Somehow they got longer and longer as the months went on, yet they consistently received far fewer comments than any of my regular posts. What was I thinking? What kept me doing it, month after month, like that dutiful teachers’ pet in the front row that makes everyone cross their eyes? 

I’m not entirely sure. There was something about declaring the project in public that fueled me. Who wants to fail on the stage of the World Wide Web? But more than that, I think, it became clear in the early months that I was learning an awful lot from the project. Here’s what I wrote when I first started out:

“The idea of studying essayists came to me in late December, when I was reading some writer’s list of favorite writers. And I realized, with plenty of despair and loathing, that although I’ve been reading and writing essays for thirteen years now, I would have a hard time coming up with a list of favorite essayists. I could give you a couple names, but a couple is a set, mere salt and pepper shakers. Not a list.”

And now? After twelve months of being a good student, sitting as I am in the front row, I can rattle off a long list of favorites. I can even tell what I’ve learned from each one. (Not that I can apply what I’ve learned. But I’m trying.)

Annie Dillard showed me how to observe, how to make every word in every sentence count; Michel de Montaigne  showed that in an essay, it’s more important to raise questions than to answer them. From Sue Hubbell I learned how to approach instructive writing using the essayist’s toolbox, and from Joan Didion how to work the telling detail, and the rhythm of a paragraph. I will always love Anne Lamott for her humor, her heart, and her wacky, spot-on metaphors. I’ll always appreciate Molly Wizenberg for showing me how to leap from the blogging world to the literary one. E.B. White showed me how an essayist can be witty and intelligent yet still downright charming, while Pico Iyer taught me how to pay attention to the details in the world around me, whether I’m in Iceland or my own kitchen. M.F.K. Fisher showed how insight into people is as important as details about things–and how to be sassy. Scott Russell Sanders taught me how to craft beautiful lines about pain as well as joy, and Michael Chabon showed me how to craft beautiful lines, somehow, from the most mundane bits from our culture and our days. And Adam Gopnik, well, Adam Gopnik will always be the Scarecrow to my Dorothy, my first favorite essayist.

This project has been so satisfying. I’m thinking of slurping all the posts into a Blurb book, so I can revisit all those fabulous lines until they burn themselves into my brain and fingers and make me a better writer.

Recognizing the power that a public year-long project seems to have on me, as the year wound down I began considering a new project for the new year. As good as it would be for me to read another dozen essayists, to finally get around to studying Virginia Woolf, I’m not doing it. It just took too much time. I thought about doing something completely different, something with photography, because I want to take better pictures.

But eventually I realized that the natural follow-up to this project would be to take what I’ve learned this year and to try to apply it to my own writing. And to make some progress on my book idea, since it’s the project that matters most to me right now. So I’ve come up with something I’m calling my Chapter-A-Month Challenge. I’m going to try to get a draft of a new book chapter completed each month.

I have no idea if I can pull this off. I write s-l-o-w-l-y. I write about as fast as Mr. T brushes his teeth, because he spends most of his brushing time making faces in the mirror. But at least I can try to write slowly more often, right? Once a month I’ll report here on how it’s going. Maybe I’ll share a few lines; maybe I’ll just whine about how hard it is to wake up at 5:00 am on Tuesdays to write. I’m not sure.

I’m putting the challenge on my blog for the kick-in-the-pants effect I hope it will have on my writing, not because I think you, dear readers, will find it interesting. I hope you don’t mind indulging me once a month.

The week I finished off my essayist project, I read one more essay. This one was by Alexander Chee, from Mentors, Muses and Monsters: 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives. It’s an essay about the time Chee spent in the classroom of Annie Dillard, my January essayist from last year. By the time you get to the part where Dillard tells her students that whenever they’re in a bookstore, they should put their finger in the place on the shelf where their own book would be, you are guaranteed to have goosebumps if you’re an aspiring writer yourself.

“If I’ve done my job, she said in the last class, you won’t be happy with anything you write for the next ten years. It’s not because you won’t be writing well, but because I’ve raised your standards for yourself. Don’t compare yourselves with each other. Compare yourselves to Colette, or Henry James, or Edith Wharton. Compare yourselves to the classics. Shoot there.”

After nearly twenty years of trying to teach myself to write, I’m sure I won’t be satisfied after another ten. But after twelve months of reading some pretty excellent essayists, twelve months of sampling them and savoring them, now, when it comes to my own writing, at least I know what I’m shooting for.

I’ve been thinking about how homeschooling ebbs and flows. There are days and weeks when the kids come up with projects that enthrall them, that keep them busy and buzzing. There are weeks when it seems that we’re doing nothing more than running around, to performances or classes or appointments, or we’re preparing for a holiday or a few days out of town, and all we manage is a little reading together. Then there are days that just don’t feel inspired, when we’re home and the kids are dabbling at a little math here, a little reading there and no one seems thrilled about anything.

This, however, has been a particularly good week, one of those busy and buzzing weeks. Lulu and Mr. T have both found projects that have them all worked up.

Lulu decided that she wants to study the history of American food in the last century. She’s been looking at popular recipes for different decades, at particular products and when they were introduced, at typical lunches and dinners through the years, at how food trends are often tied to what’s going on in the world. It’s fascinating.

She’s just done a quick overview so far. By the time she got to the 70’s, she started asking what products I remembered and before long, that Great Talent of mine, which you may remember from the beginning of my last post, began to rear its ugly head. Lulu would name a food product, and I would sing its jingle. I spent the morning singing:

“Every single Pringle’s potato chip is a perfect (doo doo doo) potato chip…”

and

“Hamburger Helper helps her hamburger help her…make a great meal.”

and

“Rice-A-Roni, the San Francisco treat.”

(But why is it the San Francisco treat? I have lived in San Francisco, and never once saw a person eating Rice-A-Roni. Look, even Rice-A-Roni’s own website “explains” the connection without explaining anything. Oh, but Wikipedia has the story! A deep sigh, after decades.)

And of course, once I started jingling, Lulu had to search out the old commercials on YouTube. Here’s one of my favorites. My best friend and I performed this endlessly, as a duet, for our parents, who acted as if they found it entertaining. 

Fast Tube by Casper

In between the commercial karaoke, Mr. T wanted to learn about spiders. As I read to him, he began to notice how spiders come in different types. How they have particular strengths and weaknesses. And methods of attack.

Is this beginning to sound familiar?

He began to notice that spiders are a lot like Pokemon.

It was just a small suggestion: “You could make spider cards, like Pokemon cards.”

Suddenly, he was bouncing on to the arm of the couch on his knees. On and off and and on and off. “I don’t want to just make cards! I want to design a game! There will be a game board and enemies and…”

He was off.

So they’ve been blissfully busy all week. As a homeschooling parent, I wish all of our days were like this. But hard as I try to make that happen, I can’t. You can’t manufacture inspiration. I try, I do, but sometimes a little suggestion like You could make spider cards, like Pokemon cards is met with nothing more than a grunt. I remind myself that we need the slow, stewing, simmering days for ideas to form and collect into something grand. You need to make lots of pots of rice, lots of pots of vermicelli before the notion strikes to throw them into a pot together and cause an entire generation to sing a jingle that no one really understands.

Some days are ablaze with singing in the kitchen, with the invention of epic games. And some days are about as thrilling as back-to-back episodes of Walker, Texas Ranger. That’s just how it is.

random notes:

If you’ve been reading here for a year now (and how lucky I am if you have), you’ll remember that it was my thoughts on Adam Gopnik that inspired this project. I started 2009 bemoaning the fact that after years of reading essayists, I hadn’t developed a real sense of which were my favorites and why. I’d read, but I hadn’t studied.

But I had this to say about Gopnik (to understand one reference in this passage, you need to know that earlier in the post I shared one of my Great Talents: to remember nearly every commercial jingle of the 1970’s):

“Well, I did study one essayist. A few years back I became smitten with the work of Adam Gopnik. I read his books with a green highlighter in my hand. I striped his books, you could say. I wrote down lines I liked in my journal, and went so far as to write down why those lines worked, and why they spoke to me.

And guess what? I can tell you a thing or two about Adam Gopnik’s writing. I can tell you that he writes like the valedictorian in your high school class–with smarts that force you to reread sentences, and occasionally make you want to tell him to stop showing off. He writes with a poet’s ear; sometimes his lines sashay and sing. And what I may love most: beneath his considerable brain beats a heart as sappy as a 70’s Kodak commercial (the ones that featured Paul Anka singing “The Times of Your Life.” And yes, I can sing it.) Gopnik wants to impress you with his smarts, but he also wants to knead your heart just a little–and he’ll do it, unfailingly, in the last lines of his last paragraph.”

I spent December rereading particular sections from two of Gopnik’s books: his Christmas journals from Paris to the Moon, and the Thanksgiving essays from Through the Children’s Gate.  My rereading only reinforced what I wrote about him above (although I’m not sure I ever wanted him to stop showing off).

Since these particular essays were Gopnik’s reminiscences of his previous year, they often contain many disparate bits; a single essay might cover French fax machines, French pomposity, Christmas trees, Halloween, the carousel in the Luxembourg Gardens, French lunches, fact checkers, rude Americans in Paris, French subtitles, arrogance and courtesy in French commerce, infuriation at the Musée d’Orsay, and a pinball machine at the back of a café. Yet Gopnik manages, somehow, to gather all these bits into a single cohesive mass, and it’s deft and beautiful, like you’re watching a master baker form croissants. The fax machine errors become an analogy for pomposity; the wrapping of an éclair a symbol for pomposity’s opposite. Everything comes together in the essay’s last lines, as I mentioned above, and the result is more stunning than any French pastry.

a few lines to love:

On his second attempt at buying Christmas tree lights. The first time he discovered that French lights come in round garlands, not long strings.

“The trouble now was that the new white lights I got were white lights that were all twinkling ones. I saw the word clignotant on the box, and I knew that it meant blinking, but somehow I didn’t associate the word blinking with the concept “These lights blink off and on.” It was the same thing with the garlands, come to think of it. It said guirlande right on the box, and I knew perfectly well what guirlande meant; but I am not yet able to make the transposition from what things say to what they mean. I saw the word guirlande on the box, but I didn’t quite believe it. In New York I believe everything I read, even if it appears in the New York Post. In France I am always prepared to give words the benefit of a poetic doubt. I see the word guirlande and shrug and think that maybe garland is just the French seasonal Christmas light-specific idiom for a string. The box says, “They blink,” and I think they don’t.”

Gopnik is always fascinated by the odd little idiosyncrasies in daily life, whether in France or at home in New York City.  And he always seems happy to portray himself as hapless. To humorous effect.

After taking his son, Luke, who is three (I think), to see a puppet show of The Three Pigs in the Luxembourg Gardens, the two take a late-night stroll with the stroller:

“Luke, all the while was keeping up a running, troubled commentary on Les Tres Petits Cochons. “Why there were two wolves?” he would spring up, sleepy, from his pousette, to demand. (Actually, there was just one, but he would appear, with sinister effect, on either side of the proscenium.) “Why he wants to eat the pigs?” “Why that man knock him?” “Why that crocodile bite?” Why, why, why…the question the pigs ask the wolf, that the wolf asks the hunter, that the hunter asks God–and the answer, as it comes at midnight, after all the other, patient parental answers (”Well, you see, wolves generally like to eat pigs, though that’s just in the story.” “Well, hunters, a long time ago, would go hunting for wolves with guns when they were a danger to people”), the final exhausted midnight-in-the-lamplight answer, wheeling the pousette down the Quai Voltaire, is the only answer there is, the Bible’s answer to Job: because that’s the way the puppet master chose to do it, bcause that’s the way the guy who works the puppets chose to have it done.”

Here’s yet another example of an essayist using a long, complicated line to convey a long, complicated situation. Any parent remembers the whys of a three-year-old, and Gopnik reminds us how those whys go on and on, and even intersperses his (ultimately ineffective) explanations right in the middle of that long line, to complicate it even further. I especially admire how he gets across his that’s just how it is! point at the end: not once, but in two different ways. It gives his “final exhausted midnight-in-the-lamplight answer” the desperate impact it requires. Saying it twice shows how exasperated he is. It also adds to the rhythm of the line.

On Luke at four, noticing his father’s French:

“He recognizes that his parents, his father particularly, speaks with an Accent, and this brings onto him exactly the shame that my grandfather must have felt when his Yiddish-speaking father arrived to talk to his teachers at a Philadelphia public school. I try to have solid, parental discussions with his teachers, but as I do, I realize, uneasily, that in his eyes I am the alter kocker, the comic immigrant.

‘Zo, how the boy does?” he hears me saying in effect. “He is good boy, no? He is feeling out the homeworks, isn’t he?’ I can see his small frame shudder, just perceptibly, at his father’s words.”

I like the drawn-out analogy here, the imagined scene. Zo, how the boy does? perfectly gets across just how cringe-worthy Gopnik’s French must seem to his son. It’s that haplessness, once again.

The first line of Through the Children’s Gate:

“In the fall of 2000, just back from Paris, with the sounds of its streets still singing in my ears and the codes to its courtyards still lining my pockets, I went downtown and met a man who was making a map of New York.”

I love the rhythm and the sounds of this sentence. All the s words–sounds, streets, singing, ears–then the hard c sounds–codes, courtyards, pockets–and then all those m’s–met, man, making, map. Read it out loud; isn’t it lovely? The poetry lures you right into the book.

From the Thanksgiving essay written after 9/11:

“Children don’t mind if their parents are worried; they expect it–parents are there to worry. But they notice at once if their parents are afraid, for that is what parents are never to be.”

Gopnik does this often–he boils down his observations into a universal statement. His phrasing makes it read like an aphorism. And there’s that wonderful rhythm once again.

After agreeing that Luke and his friend could have a two-night sleepover, but without any screen time:

“Once before, they had used a no-screen weekend imaginatively, to hold a fire sale of old Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. They both have outgrown the game in the past year and now view their beautiful old Rackhamish cards with disdain and the kind of disbelief about their enthusiasms of seven months ago that we have for pictures of ourselves in decades past–the haircut! those clothes! Childhood is just like life, only ten times faster.”

There’s that aphoristic statement at the end. And the exclamatory asides–the haircut! the clothes! Very Gopnikish. I took a particular delight in watching Luke and his friends, over the years and through the essays, become obsessed with almost exactly the same games that H and his buddies went through over the years, although H’s gang favored Pokemon over Yu-Gi-Oh! There were baseball cards, and Major League Baseball Showdown cards and eventually the Lord of the Rings game with painted figures. Gopnik writes this about Yu-Gi-Oh!, but it really applies to any of them:

“The game, when you play it, has mind-numbingly elaborate rules, but you never seem to play it. The goal is to collect the cards and plan to play it someday.”

Precisely. Ha! It baffled me with H and his friends, and it’s baffling me again with Mr. T and his, with their Pokemon collections. West Coast boys and East Coast boys–it’s all the same! Gopnik describes the Lord of the Rings game, which involves the painstaking construction of miniature plastic figures, which are then primed and painted in eye-crossing detail. 

“The game combines, so far as I can see, the joys of being a Malaysian child laborer in a small-goods sweatshop with the excitement of double-entry bookkeeping.”

Maybe this is only funny if you’ve had a boy that has played this particular game. In which case I’m sure you are nodding and snorting in agreement.

And this, in an essay on worrying over Luke spending too much time on computers and video games:

“Considering the maze of screens and cards and pages, I ended up at last with a bitter, semi-Marxist conclusion: It is not that we want them free of screens, really. It is that we want them to be screen producers rather than screen consumers. We say that we don’t want them enslaved to screens, but what we really want is for them to enslave other people to them. We want them to be Steve Jobs or Steven Spielberg–feudal screen lords rather than mere screen peasants, screen serfs. We do not mind if they play games, so long as they grow up to write software. We will leave them alone for a weekend to write their screenplay, even if they have to huddle over a screen to do it.”

Adam Gopnik, how did you get inside my brain? This is my bitter, semi-Marxist conclusion exactly. (And please explain, if I think like you, why, oh why, can’t I write like you?)

And one more, just because it kills me. This is from the last Thanksgiving essay, when Luke is eleven, and Gopnik asks every day after school, at 3:15, how school was, even though he knows he’ll get only “the high-shouldered shrug of the exasperated” in return. But then, every day at 3:30, Luke sends him an IM, filling in his father on all he hadn’t acknowledged.

“I understood what he was doing. To submit to the parental three-fifteen is to surrender autonomy; to send complete messages from your own computer is to seize control of the means of communication, allowing you to declare both autonomy and your essential goodwill. He was doing what children have to do: He was making me, his strongest tie, into a weaker tie, and then strengthening the tie again, but on his own terms. He is getting ready to go. He is putting his first shirt in the bottom of his eventual suitcase.”

Ah, that last line. Even more poignant when your kid is seventeen, and the suitcase is half-filled. 

It was especially interesting to read these essays in succession, to watch Luke grow from a boy in a stroller to a boy with a shirt in his suitcase. Childhood is just like life, only ten times faster. I just love that Adam Gopnik.

So, what’s next?

Will I begin Another Year of Excellent Essayists? Will I finally get to Virginia Woolf? Will I find time to read some–any, a short story, a page, something please–fiction? Will I take a new direction and embark upon My Year of Excellent Egg Dishes?

Come on back for my next post when I’ll get all mawkish and misty-eyed about what this project has meant to me, and yammer on about what I’ll do in 2010.