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…. “

University of Nebraska Press Cover Me Flyer! 20% off!

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.

I just finished reading Rebecca Skloot’s “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” an incredibly readable and riveting account of the personal and family story behind the cell line that has affected all of our lives via medical research, and which raises huge questions about medical ethics and consent. Kudos to Rebecca for all the massive cutting she must have had to do, as it was clear that she knew enough about her subject to be able to explain it clearly, which meant she probably had 300X the research that she had space for. Narrative science writing at its best, and I think I have not often seen a book like this with a folded and spindled and flipped structure. There’s a cool timeline that runs across the first page of each chapter to help orient the reader spatially, and I really liked that touch. It seemed to provide an extra graphic aid to the reader… and I am struck by this simple tool with how much more could be done in this regard, especially with complex stories that must be told in complex ways. I like the innovation of this hybrid visual element, and I found myself composing interview questions for Skloot as I read, mostly along the lines of her structural decisions, wanting to know how she kept the timelines straight as she wrote, all the configurations she must have tried, and what the conversation with her publisher was like regarding the structure. I wanted a whiteboard to graph it out as I read, as it seemed to invite that from someone really interested in structures of books.

Haha. I don’t know how a year passed since I wrote in this blog. Well, actually I do. So much happening, including the revision of a second and third book. The second is “Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir” from University of Nebraska Press, which I have to ship off next month. The third is a textbook, The ‘Backwards’ Research Guide for Writers, which will hopefully come out next year from Equinox. More to come. Now that it’s summer, all the updates. And vows of discipline for next year.

One of the major thrills of teaching at Ashland University’s new low-res MFA program for the past two weeks was hearing the closing reading and craft talk by Floyd Skloot, author of many books of poetry, four novels, and excellent works of nonfiction including the new “The Wink of the Zenith” and “In the Shadow of Memory” (from University of Nebraska Press).

This is the only talk on the craft of writing that’s brought me to tears. Skloot talked about the writing process for putting together his essay, “Kismet,” which dealt with the death of his brother. Twenty years ago, Skloot suffered a virus attack that resulted in brain lesions that damaged large sections of his memory and hindered his ability to process information. Despite this major obstacle he has continued a productive writing career. He spoke in this craft talk about the organic structure of the essay, a piece of seven sections that explore interlocking themes. One of his major points was the organic structure that resulted from the essay’s subject matter. He traced the evolution of the essay by guiding the audience through the insights and emotions that occurred after his brother’s death; since he had lost access to much of his childhood memories, he had to pay careful attention to any emotional triggers signaling a buried memory or association about his brother.

Although most of us don’t suffer brain damage, we confront the desire to overstructure our emotions, reactions, and memories, fitting them into a form that seems to us to make “sense.” Some of the most beautiful quotes shared by Skloot concerned his gratitude at having the process of writing nonfiction as a framework for reconstructing his sense of self:
“You get to say in the essay what you never say to others, what you never say to yourself.”
He also described writing as a “spiritual practice”: “You open yourself up and slow yourself down. Once you lose control and surrender to the material, you open the vents and other material can stream in. This requires a looser and more exploratory mode of working. It requires time and patience, a willingness to explore tangents, a willingness to be ruthless with the tangents.”

Hey, here’s a link to an audio file of an interview I did with Rachael Hanel (a myspace buddy!) of the KMSU “Weekly Reader” radio show on April 3, 2008.

I talked about my book, Opa Nobody, and about research and family. And I noticed that as I talked to Rachael and heard her lovely Minnesooota accent I began to sound very Midwestern myself.

See if you can pick up on those vowels, ya know?

I felt blessed indeed to learn on Sunday (March 23) that I’d received this review of Opa Nobody in the Los Angeles Times:

Revolutions, notoriously, devour their children: Once-beloved radicals are beheaded at the guillotine. But for the actual children of revolutionaries and activists, this idea holds a whole other dimension of meaning. For them, politics extracts a personal cost. Deep down, they suspect they come second to the cause.

For Sonya Huber, daughter of a German immigrant and author of the memoir “Opa Nobody,” this conflict gnaws at her family. Her grandfather Heina’s commitment to socialist and antifascist politics in prewar and Nazi Germany demanded sacrifices from his wife and children, even as he fought on behalf of the proletariat. For his efforts, he earned the title of the family “nobody.

Growing up, Huber heard about her grandfather’s activism, but she never knew the full story. When her own commitment to leftist politics led to emotional and physical collapse, she sought inspiration in his example. She wanted to know, “Why try to change the world?” She listened to family stories, and when those ran dry she crossed the Atlantic to search through German historical archives. In every chapter, she weaves stories of her activist life with richly imagined scenes of her grandfather, reconstructing his life from anecdotes and documentary evidence.

Huber also confronts links to Nazism in her own bloodline — in the person of a great uncle who joined the Waffen-SS. Although she has no evidence that he took part in war crimes, she imag- ines him participating in atrocities nonetheless. It would be too easy, Huber writes, not to do so, to acquit him simply because the paper trail ends. His SS status, in other words, makes him complicit, regardless of what he did or did not do. At the same time, Huber frames his decision to join the SS as fraught with nuance — perhaps as a survival strategy. And yet, she admits, such a “survival strategy” is her own invention, an expression of her hopes as opposed to the “truth.”

Huber is always careful to explain where research ends and imagination begins. Amid recent scandals about fraudulent memoirs, her honesty is profound in what it implies about storytelling and genre. Read as the saga of her quest to balance activism and motherhood, “Opa Nobody” is a memoir; read as a biography of her grandfather, it becomes speculative nonfiction. At times, it feels like a historical account. Her own label of “nonfiction novel” suits it well, but it is more than that. By connecting with history on such a personal level, she reveals how ordinary citizens can get swept up into movements of all kinds; allegiance is never as simple as a membership card.

Most radically of all for a progressive activist, Huber embraces the past. Instead of tossing it all out in search of something new, she ties a firm knot between then and now.
Karrie Higgins is a writer based in Portland, Ore.