I began working on another draft of the novel as soon as we moved into our Beijing high rise. But it was like trying to write fiction in outer space. The novel is set in central Paris in the late 1980’s, which came to feel about as far away from downtown Beijing as the moon. It was difficult for me to get any narrative footing while I wrote in China. I ended up arriving at a discursive first-person voice that I thought would solve all the novel’s problems. But what this meant was a book that moved back and forth in time far too quickly, with chapters that sat like unanchored prose poems.

Then something great happened to my novel while I was in China:  I wrote a memoir. The memoir was about what it meant to live on the far side of the world, grappling with Mandarin and a stealth case of breast cancer. My novel got pushed far over to the side, or rather to the bottom drawer of my China desk, where it sat for the next two years.

What my memoir kindly did was teach me how to write story. Simple, chronological, authentic story. It also taught me how to stay in the scenes longer and to wait it out until all the good stuff—the tension between characters and the nuance and the compassion—rose to the top. Truth be told, my memoir sort of wrote itself—I certainly worked hard at it, but the material for the book offered itself to me and I knew it cold:  the mouth-watering Beijing dumpling houses, the ancient Buddhist Temples and the zooey Beijing surgery for a breast cancer I didn’t believe I had.

I learned how to put myself into my memoir and to write with an intimate voice, as if I was talking to a very close friend. I finished it and published it, while my novel waited in the desk drawer patiently. When I finally turned to the novel, it had my full attention. By then I understood that much of good writing is about conflict. So where was the conflict in my novel? And why was its chronology a mess? I rewrote the book again and threw out a whole lot of stuff—trying to create the intimate voice that I’d been able to arrive at in my memoir.

But this time the narrator was not me. Who was she? Her name was Willie Pears and I could see her in my mind on a train in France. I could watch her get on a plane in Paris and fly to Delhi. But I couldn’t fully get inside her head. Getting to know her took time. My editor likened it to breaking down an emotional wall.

Memoir had proved itself to be a clean marriage of form and content for me. But there was such an abundance of choice in writing the novel that it was heady. I had to let the characters loose on their own. I had to trust them and trust that the novel would find its own emotional breakthroughs. I got myself to the chair at my desk and generated material. But life kept interrupting, especially in the form of those two young boys of mine. I gained on Willie Pears in increments. She asked me to be more open to her than I’d ever been to any character—including myself. Then she began to live on the edges of my imagination—when I went to bed, when I woke in the middle of night, while I walked the boys to school.

The emotional wall that my editor had been trying to get me to scale finally came down. I understood Willie’s motivations, even if I didn’t always agree with her. And this is how I gave myself over to my novel. Willie Pears isn’t me. She didn’t hike in the Tibetan Plateau in Yunnan Province or teach writing workshops to Chinese nationals who are still nostalgic for Mao. She’s thirty years old, fierce about Pablo Neruda poems, and teaches refugee girls at an asylum center in Paris’s 10th arrondisement. In order to fully meet her, I needed to leave the land of memoir behind and trust this place called fiction.

Photo credit: North sidewalk of the Avenue des Champs-Elysées in Paris, at dawn, by Benh Lieu Song, courtesy Wikipedia Commons

We believe children are natural born storytellers and that writing gives kids access to an emotional literacy that sets them up for all kinds of future success. I'm grateful to you if you pass this clip on to other writers and educators and people passionate about kids!  

For a long time the idea of an old-fashioned cell phone has been sounding like a big relief to me. Because for an even longer time I’ve been feeling way too tied to an endless stream of pretty unimportant emails that appear on my Smartphone. I read these emails while I’m walking the dog. I read them while the pasta is boiling. I read them while my kids do their homework.

Why do I read them? I can’t really answer that. Because none of these emails is ever that urgent. I mean sure, there are work-related book emails that come in and teaching emails that need answering, but I can get to those in due time when I’m at a desk and I’ve put aside the time to actually answer emails.

The sneaky thing that my Smartphones does is make me feel like every hour of every day is the absolutely most perfect time in the world to get my email. Except it’s not. It’s really time to make the red sauce. Or time to read Aidan a chapter from the Percy Jackson Series. Or time to throw a stick to the puppy.

So for months I’ve been feeling stuck—I’ve got this snazzy Smartphone, and I should probably use it. And I’ve also been feeling a little worried—what is this phone doing to my brain anyway? Why do I have this email compulsion?

Around 9 pm I got to the line in Wayne’s piece about how Smartphones create a false need to constantly check our online life. Wayne sites a writer named Nicholas Carr who wrote a book called The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. Carr says Smartphones are making us better at multi-tasking but hurting our ability to sustain focus. Yikes.

And I’d been feeling scattered. I’d been feeling like all my thoughts were light. This could just be me. I can sadly be very light. So maybe it’s not the Smartphone’s fault, but Carr says that because of these phones, all of us “stop having opportunities to be alone with our thoughts, something that used to come naturally.”  Double yikes.

Then I read the part in the article where the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer says he noticed a dramatic change in his ability to focus on his writing after he ditched his Smartphone. I felt a tingly sensation in my arms. I knew I was going to have to throw my Smartphone away too. Or give it to someone. My husband, I decided. I’ll give it to Tony because he actually NEEDS a Smartphone, and I do not.  He is the one talking to China all day and making elaborate business plans. I am sitting at a desk in the attic, writing a novel about a poetry lover in France.

Then I had a dream after I finished the article. It went like this:  I drove my car to Boston from Portland, Maine and took the wrong exit on the Tobin Bridge and ended up on a car ferry to New Bedford. I don’t think there even is a car ferry to New Bedford, but I was sitting on a vinyl white couch in a compartment that was completely enclosed like a submarine without windows, or a high-speed European train. Jonathan Franzen was sitting next to me. We talked. He said he’d thrown his Smartphone away too, just like the other novelist named Jonathan with the last name I don’t know how to pronounce.

The fact that both the Jonathans had been strong enough to walk away from their Smartphones made me feel enormously hopeful in my dream. Then I woke up. Where was I? And where was my car? Why had I taken that exit to New Bedford? The sun came up. My mind cleared. I trotted downstairs to make my children pancakes. My Smartphone was sitting on its little stand on the kitchen counter waiting for me. Calling to me.

Neither of the Jonathans had told me how hard it would be to walk away from my Smartphone. I could tell now that it was going to be trickier than I thought. I have a compulsion after all. My Smartphone has messed with neurons in my brain. But I am a stubborn one. Once I put my mind to something I don’t stop til I get there, and now I want my brain back please.

(Photo credit: Robert Fludd, 1619, courtesy Wiki Commons)

I’m talking about the amazing mothers and fathers and grandmothers and grandfathers and world travelers and old China hands and cancer patients who found their way to me at bookstores and libraries and living rooms and said I want a room in my mind like the one you built in the book.

Sometimes these kind people have gotten excited and taken me by the arm, or even hugged me and said, Where is that room? And how fast can I get there? Then they often thank me for not being a perfect mother and for being able to admit it.

The other great thing that happens at all my book readings is that some big-hearted person calls out to me up at the podium and says, “Are you cancer free now?” In fact, I got asked this question so many times that I now say something preemptive at the start of readings that goes like this: “My story is one with a happy ending. I’m now two years cancer free.” And when I say that sentence, I can actually feel the room let out a sigh of relief.

“Should we be afraid of China?” This is another big question. Or maybe it’s more of a group worry. And then lastly, “What about the air pollution? Can you tell us more about the pollution in China?”

I want to say for the record that the air pollution is often as bad as you may think. It’s pretty terrible, so I say imagine the worst and then you won’t be surprised if you go there. But you should still go there. Because the country is that wondrous and vexing and magnificent and since I’ve moved home from Beijing, I’ve become something of a proselytizer. Go. I say to anyone who asks. Go to China tomorrow if you can. There’s too much going on there to not see it up close.

My two boys are the other leading characters in this book, and I wrote the story for them and to them. In a way the book is about my fascination with how their minds work and about my fierce love for them. We’re two years out from China now and four years out from cancer. Time rushes by.

Tony and Aidan and Thorne and I were driving home to Portland from northern Maine a few months ago—a long enough drive for us all to sit quietly and stare out the windows. Then out of nowhere Thorne asked me one of his incisive, fifth grade questions. “Mom," he said. “What’s the moral of your story anyway? I mean really Mom, what’s the moral of your book?”

I laughed and then I froze. What WAS the moral? Or at the least the moral I could tell him at age ten? What I said was, “The moral of my story is that it’s a great thing to move to China with your family because you learn so much.”

“About China?” Thorne said.

“And about yourselves.” I added. He was quiet then. I’d momentarily satisfied his unending need for answers. I sat back in the passenger seat and realized we’d been to China and then to cancer and then back again, and that somewhere in that journey lies the real moral of the story.

This blog was first published on the Vintage Anchor website on March 6, 2012, to celebrate the launch of the paperback. Click here to read more.

But there we sat by the highway in our little car that wouldn’t start, and I kept trying the ignition button, and when the Prius finally started up again, Aidan said quietly, “It’s the Mechanical God, Mom. I knew he would look out for us.” I nodded and smiled, and then I drove the car home slowly, protected by some larger force that I hadn’t known existed until then.

Photo credit: Tony Kieffer

The part that makes me cringe is that Goodreads has now opened a final round of voting that ends THIS Wednesday. As in Tomorrow! So I’m asking for a favor. If you could vote before Wednesday night, then the voting is done.  Finito. Over. All you need to do is go to this link and click on the cover of The Foremost Good Fortune, I will win a new Pontiac.

No. Not exactly. But I would be really, truly grateful if you could vote AGAIN or for the first time in this funny contest


And I am also so grateful if you are able to post this on your preferred flavor of social media or otherwise get the word out.

Thanks so very much! 

Susan

On Saturday I had the treat of driving two hours up the Maine coast to teach a memoir writing class at the Rockland Public Library. It is a beautiful, historic library—with high, white plaster ceilings and Oak floors and gorgeous, meticulous moldings. I opened the class by saying that memoir writing often unveils its subterranean meaning to us while we are in the very act of writing it. We may be sitting at our desks, typing away about our trip to China, and then the true meaning of what our essay is about will separate itself from the rest of the text and float above us like a small, white cloud. I call these the sparks. The stories within the stories that we only arrive at by staying the course.

And I urged all the amazing people who turned out for Saturday’s workshop to write through their scenes until they arrived at one small thing in their writing that was unexpected. In a way this is what all good writing does and what travel writing can do especially well—take you somewhere far away, like the sprawling animal market in Kashgar in Western China, and then show you a much smaller story you weren’t expecting to see there about an ancient grandmother who has a food stand near the gates and makes the very best dumplings in the world.

I wrote my memoir The Foremost Good Fortune about moving to China with my husband and my two boys. It is a travel memoir in large part because it takes the reader on a trip to China and shows them the sights. But the book also leaves the tar road and goes to other far-off places—it takes a ride to a place I call cancerland and has a look around and then leaves. It detours into the parallel universe of early motherhood and tries to be honest about what it sees there. 

After I got home from the writing workshop on Saturday, a fifty-two-year-old man named Wang Guanghe arrived at our house to stay for the week. Mr. Wang is a senior teacher and Vice Principal of the Yunxi No.1 Senior School in Anhui Province, an uber-performing high school deep in an interior region of China.

It was Mr. Wang’s first time out of his country and here is what I learned about him while he and Tony and the boys and I ate a dinner of fish soup that my neighbor Patty had made for us: he is unfailingly polite. He has a ready smile and a quick laugh and wants to teach my boys, Thorne and Aidan, new vocabulary words every other minute. He has a twenty-seven-year-old son who lives nearby him in their hometown of Huangshan. He has been a teacher all his life. He speaks very, very little English.

What this lack of English means is that Mr. Wang has already gotten Thorne and Aidan to speak more Chinese in the four days that he’s stayed with us, than my boys did in the last year and a half since we moved home from China. Mr. Wang’s visit is also making me unpack some of my Mandarin and this is not quite as rosy a picture. My Mandarin is rustier than my boys’. But on Saturday night I began turning the language machinery on again. I had no choice if I was going to be able to talk to Mr. Wang, and there is only so long you can sit in silence over cups of green tea in your kitchen with someone who has just flown all the way across the world to learn about your education system.

On Sunday afternoon, we took Mr. Wang to the Bubble Tea Shop on Pleasant Street, where we knew we could get him some decent Chinese food. Rice is what he said he needed. He explained he was from the south and that if he had some rice then he would be okay. We ordered him pork and green onions and veggie dumplings and also the rice, and he smiled and ate with gusto for what seemed to me like the first time since he’d arrived with us.

The small story that sits inside my larger Mr. Wang story is that his visit to my house has made me miss China in a way that I hadn’t expected. Mr. Wang’s visit has made me miss China and the intricate constellation of a dislocated family that my husband and the boys and I comprised when we lived in Beijing. There was an intimacy that the four of us have partly lost now. An easiness with our family unit—because we did everything as a unit.

That solidarity has been replaced by all sorts of other good things like more friends and great guitar lessons and dodge ball tag.  But I miss that closeness just as much as I miss China, and I hadn’t expected this small essay to reveal that missing to me. Now it’s time to go make Mr. Wang some rice for dinner.

(Photo credit: Tony Kieffer)

The thing is, Goodreads asks me to ask YOU to vote for my book. You may now be running away from your computer as fast as you can. I understand. Or you may click on this little link here at the end and then hit the "Vote" icon on my book cover and be done with it and I will be very grateful.

http://www.goodreads.com/award/choice/2011#56071-Best-Travel-&-Outdoors

1. Describe your state of writerhead (the where, the when, the how, the what, the internal, the external).

Writerhead begins while I’m in a deep sleep, and if things are zinging that day, I’m able to keep one foot in that dreamland the whole time I’m at my writing desk. It’s a morning operation for me—I surface from a REM cycle, catch the thread of a plot line or a character quirk that’s asking for attention, nurse that in bed (maybe even scratch the idea out on a notepad) until my little people wake up. Feed the boys breakfast—walk them to school. All the while nurturing the writer head and gently resisting intrepid outside forces: no internet, no telephone, no plumber.

If I can make it to my desk with the dreaminess intact (it has something to do with energy reserves—email sucks all the vigor out of me if I do it first thing and I have nothing left in my creative bank—and something to do with hope. I am more joyful as a writer if I haven’t spent lost minutes trolling New York Times.com before nine am) I am good to go for five hours. Once I’m there I am mostly a work horse. I like long stretches of time and I don’t break except to sprint to the kitchen for a hummus bagel sandwich and then back at it.

I once taught a workshop to room of burgeoning memoir writers that was about using fiction techniques in our non-fiction. The subtitle of the workshop could have been “ass in chair” because the biggest problem most of the students in the room were having was making the time to write. I had a mantra that whole workshop: if the ass is not in the chair than the writing will not occur. But I don’t always sit at my desk. My shoulders get tired and my neck hurts, and I move to a mattress I dragged up the attic stairs by myself last fall and wrangled into the corner of my tiny study. I dressed it up as a day bed, with bright cotton pillows and Indian blankets and I often move there when I feel the dark forces circling again: the internet, the telephone, the plumber. I lie back on the pillows and whether I’m writing long-hand in my notebooks (early drafts of everything I write) or plucking away at the keyboard, this mattress sometimes allows me to hold on to another hour or so of writerhead.

2. What happens if someone/something interrupts writerhead? (A spouse, a lover, a barking dog, an electrical outage, a baby’s cry, a phone call, a leg cramp, a dried-up pen, a computer crash, etc.)

All can be lost so easily—even the best laid plans of a writing day. So I maintain a kind of fierceness to guard my time and the headspace of writerhead. It can evaporate so quickly. It all looks harmless—a husband who wants to talk through our boys’ guitar lesson schedules is standing in my attic office door. Ten minutes later he has the details he needs to go retrieve our musicians and I’ve lost the voice of my narrator for the rest of the day.

I have strategies to combat this. I don’t make eye contact with my husband when he pokes his head in, and I pretend I haven’t heard him when he coughs. I never answer the front door (whatever they need to tell me or leave me I know they will come back the next day and try again) or the phone.

My husband has told me that when I’m writing, really writing and not just moving around paragraphs in an attempt to spark something, the level of focus in my office is high. Scarily high, he reported last week, because of the kitchen faucet I left on downstairs for three hours after I grabbed a glass of water. I tell him I am unaware of the focus or the faucet because I am too busy writing. I think this new word, writerhead, might do some of the work of explaining where my brain goes. I won’t need to make frown faces at my kids when they ask me what’s for dinner while I’m still on my writer’s clock. I will just say the word writerhead to them and it will soon have its own kind of currency.

3. Using a simile or metaphor, compare your writerhead to something.

Writerhead is a small wooden dory. The work is in getting to the dock, putting on my life jacket and climbing into the boat without upsetting the things in there: the oars, the water slushing in the bilge, the bow line and stern line. Once I’m in the boat, I get right to work rowing. There can be choppy seas and the oars can get heavy and awkward. But I try to keep the boat moving—every day a little further up the coast and then back home.

This post originally appeared in Writerhead Photo credit: Tony Kieffer.

In Florida, I loved a woman named Jasmine, a sixty-two year-old grandmother in a green velour sweat suit with a salt and pepper pageboy. She bought my book with cash and told me that in 1975 she’d come back from the dead. She said, “I can see into people’s souls and your soul will live down here on earth for a lot longer than you might think.”

In Seattle, I loved the bookstore manager named Steffi. She was Chinese American and aloof and wouldn’t look at me while I helped set up chairs for my reading. But after I’d read the chapter about the beautiful drawing my five-year-old, Aidan, had given me of butterflies and clouds on the morning of my mastectomy, Steffi melted and confided that she’d had breast cancer too. Thirty-one-years-old and a single mom, and now she tried to forget the disease had ever called her name.

In Portland, Oregon, I loved Catherine, who came to my reading and asked me to choose between having cancer and the new self-knowledge that came with the disease, or not having cancer at all. “Which,” she asked, “Would you pick?”

I have two small boys, I wanted to say. My answer is easy. She told me she had learned so much about herself since she got cancer that she wouldn’t give her cancer away if she could. But isn’t that just the thing, I stopped myself from saying to her, we can’t give it away, even if we want to. I said none of this to Catherine. Because it was my job as an author to listen to her.

In Boston I loved George, a fifty-five year-old wooden rocking chair maker with a thin mustache and a shaved head and a sturdy build. He tapped me on the shoulder while I was signing books in the lobby of the university and asked, “Do I have permission to say something to you about cancer?”

I wanted to love George. But I paused. I said, “Are your words going to make me sad?” It was a book festival. People were buying homemade fruit smoothies and talking to all the other authors and did we really have to talk about cancer right now?

George said, “Yes. What I need to tell you might make you sad.” But he really wanted to tell me anyway, so I braced myself because I could tell George needed to be heard. And maybe this is what my public speaking coach, Harlo, had meant when he said, “Love your audience.” Maybe he meant to listen to them. 

George put his hand on my shoulder again and said, “Don’t ever think the pain you feel in your back is really back pain, or that your headache is really a headache. Always suspect cancer. Your body has already grown cancer once. I lost the love of my life. She was told she had a torn muscle for years. When she died, the tumors had spread to her brain.” Hundreds of people milled about at the festival and talked and laughed and bought more books and had their photos taken with authors, but the sounds in the room slowed and the people faded. I wanted to tell George I can’t live like that. We locked eyes for a short moment and then I didn’t say anything. I just nodded, and it was just George and me in our own small lobby of grief.

My friend, Harlo, is a really good speaking coach. He has unorthodox methods. He once had me throw a nerf ball to him in my kitchen, and each time I threw it I had to say something I was afraid of about my upcoming book tour. I said, “I’m afraid to talk about my cancer to strangers,” and threw the nerf ball hard at him.

Then Harlo translated my words into what he thought I was really thinking. He said, “You’re worried about being embarrassed.” It went on like this for close to thirty minutes. I didn’t like it so much. Then we sat down in chairs across from one another knees to knees in my living room and I had to repeat, “My name is Susan Conley and I am a writer.” I liked this even less.

“Open your voice,” Harlo said then. “Open your heart.” But I had a hard time believing any of this work with him would help relax me up on the real stage. Harlo told me the first thing the audience at my readings would want to know was if they needed to take care of me up at the podium. He said if I could open to them and show them I was okay, then they’d relax and listen to the story I’d come to tell.

He said the second thing the audience would want to know was if they mattered to me. Which meant I had to look at them. Each of them. And take them in with my eyes, and this is when he said I had to love them. I cringed when he used the word love. But he explained the love wouldn’t be the kind I feel for my husband or children, but a real love all the same—a kind that didn’t need anything back. He said if I could find a way to love the rooms full of strangers, then some kind of alchemy would go down between me and the audience, and then my tour would take on a life of its own. A good life. One that wouldn’t fill me with the dread I was feeling before the tour started.

He said, “You will be giving them a story and who doesn’t like to be read to? Right now most people in the world are dying for a good story. Stay in your story. And love them.”

And so I did. Even when I got to San Diego and a woman named Sally was there with her shopping bags full of old clothes. The bookstore manager pointed her out to me and said, “Sally comes often. She’s homeless. She may ask a few hard questions but she means well.” 

But Sally wasn’t my problem in San Diego. I could love Sally. The trick was in loving the deranged man who stood up near the end of the chapter, just when I’d gotten to the part about how the homing pigeon that had flown into the window of our Beijing high-rise had lived through the night. The man stood up and moved towards me and yelled, “Boring!”

It was as if he had a megaphone. “B-O-R-I-N-G!” He yelled as loud as he could possibly yell. And then two security teenagers were on him and whisked him away. I screamed. It was more like a shriek. And from surprise, not anger. Was I supposed to love this man too? Was this some kind of test?

I shrieked but then I smiled at the audience and they smiled back, and we all stayed in the scene with the homing pigeon and my mother and my boys and my cancer and how you never know when a bird or a disease is going to fly into your window. I didn’t let the man steal the reading. I finished the chapter. I won the audience back. They didn’t need to take care of me, even while we listened to the security guards scuffle with the yeller down the hall. What Harlo had said proved true. I stayed in the story and the audience relaxed. It was that alchemy I’d been hoping for, the one Harlo promised me was out there and some age-old covenant had been fulfilled: I’ll tell you my story if you will stop and listen.

Photo credit: Tony Kieffer.