Rebecca Skloot discusses how she used novels and movies as guides to structuring the braided narrative of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks on ReadRollShow. Storyboarding, colored index cards, the works!
I’m on a Thomas Merton kick this summer; I guess it’s the old Catholic in me combined with the yearning for contemplative Buddhist practice.
From Seven Storey Mountain:
“…the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all.” (82)
“All our salvation begins on the level of common and natural and ordinary things….And so it was with me. Books and ideas and poems and stories, pictures and music, buildings, cities, places, philosophies were to be the materials on which grace would work. But these things are themselves not enough. The more fundamental instinct of fear for my own preservation came in, in a minor sort of way, in this strange, half-imaginary sickness which nobody could diagnose completely.” (178)
“We have become marvelous at self-delusion; all the more so, because we have gone to such trouble to convince ourselves of our own absolute infallibility.” (205)
And on the tension between writing and being a monk: “By this time I should have been delivered of any problems about my true identity. I had already made my simple profession. And my vows should have divested me of the last shreds of any special identity. But then there was this shadow, this double, this writer who had followed me into the cloister. He is still on my track. He rides my shoulders, sometimes, like the old man of the sea. I cannot lose him. He still wears the name of Thomas Merton. Is it the name of an enemy? He is supposed to be dead. But he stands and meets me in the doorway of all my prayers, and follows me into church. He kneels with me behind the pillar, the Judas, and talks to me all the time in my ear. He is a business man. He is full of ideas. He breathes notions and new schemes. He generates books in the silence that ought to be sweet with the infinitely productive darkness of contemplation. And the worst of it is, he has my superiors on his side. They won’t kick him out. I can’t get rid of him…. “
I made a very simple flyer that you can print out and give to whoever might like more information about “Cover Me.” It’s in docx format. I suppose I could also make a PDF… maybe that would be easier? Anyway, feel free to print and spread the word! Thank you so much.
I’m in the middle stages of what, I suppose, is officially called “planning a book tour.” What it feels like is that I email random people and lovely bookstore owners and say, “Hey, I wrote this thing that has some relevance but also some swearing. You don’t know me. Could I come and bother you and invite a bunch of people, all for the purpose of trying to sell my book?” Only, of course, it’s not just about selling a book. It’s about this darn thing that is so important to me that it almost brings tears to my eyes, and to the eyes of lots of other people: healthcare. The need of it. The lack of it. The agonizing fight to get something that now isn’t even a public option. The fact that the kingdom is lost every day for want of a nail, that people are dying and this problem could be solved. So that’s what the book Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir is about. It’s the mystery of healthcare and how we exist without it. I took years of my life and devoted a book to this obsession because I thought writing a book about it would help me figure it out. But none of us have figured it out. So there it is: a story of heartbreak, my own small story as one sliver of a national tragedy that we have resources to fix but that we refuse to. Kudos and beyond kudos to all the activists who have worked so hard on single payer work over the long haul, Physicians for a National Health Plan, and thousands of other groups. And there are still miles to go. So the book is about that, and about how much it sucks to try to put together a crazy quilt of coverage when all you’ve got to work with are scraps of our current smattered, over-privatized, pulverized, profiteered and pirated system. It shouldn’t even be called healthcare. It should be called health could-care-less, if it weren’t for all the dedicated health professionals working to provide healthcare in spite of the fiscal obstacles set up to penalize the poor. Holy smokes, I should stop there. I guess I still have some screed in me about this issue. Anyway, check out the developing book tour dates at Booktour.com and hit me up if it looks like a date would fit with your group and your schedule. I’m also totally into doing fundraisers and/or publicity and membership events for healthcare and single-payer organizations.
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