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.
From Virginia Woolf’s “Moments of Being” (and thanks to Marilyn Bousquin for delving into this book and reminding me of its beauty):
“And so I go on to suppose that the shock-receiving capacity is what makes me a writer. I hazard the explanation that a shock is at once in my case followed by the desire to explain it. I feel that I have had a blow; but it is not, as I thought as a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me. It is the rapture I get when in writing I seem to be discovering what belongs to what; making a scene come right; making a character come together. From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art.” (72)
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. :)
Okay, I’m so geeked out with joy that I can hardly contain myself. This is a nerd thing…but it’s my literary hero-crush, George Orwell. They are putting his diaries up online starting TODAY!!!!! The diaries began on Aug. 9, 1938.
http://orwelldiaries.wordpress.com
Seventy years ago today Orwell caught a snake in his yard. Today I caught tadpoles in the Ogeechee River. There is little that connects us, but the ability to see how he lived his days is such a wonderful opportunity. I have no objectivity when it comes to this man. I just love him.
When people tell me they’ve read 1984 or Animal Farm, I can’t shut up…I end up rattling on about Homage to Catalonia (my favorite) or Down and Out in Paris and London, or his many, many essays. Sigh. What I most admire about him is his thoughtfulness, his ability to re-see his own positions, to interrogate his politics. And his sweet melancholy mixed with a dogged desire to keep seeing and creating relevant beauty in the face of the 20th Century and the horror it brought.
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.”
Her new book, “What It Is,” is IT. The book is indescribable and fantastic. Love. (For a bit more clarification: it’s a multi-modal collage memoir and account of her coming to be an artist. And a guide for getting art/creation into your life if you want that but have lost the way.)
From p. 81:
“The time for it is always with us though we say we do not have that kind of time. The kind of time I have is not for this but for that. I wish I had that kind of time. But if you had that kind of time, would you do it? Would you give it a try? This kind of doing both takes and gives time–makes live the dead hours inside us.”
And from p. 133 (On the evil questions inside your head, “Is it Good?” “Does this suck?”): “Give up because it’s hopeless. Make useless pictures. Waste time and materials. Have no purpose. Betray the pimps.”
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.
http://podcasting. gcsu. edu/4DCGI/Podcasting/GaSouth/Episodes/29365/24419. mp3
Thank you, Rachael!!!
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?
From a great review by Valerie Weaver-Zercher in The Christian Century Magazine (May 6, 2008): “Rather than setting documents, histories and photographs in opposition to family lore, however, Huber plumbs family stories for the truths they hold, even if they ultimately prove not to be factual. ‘Remembering is an act of the imagination,’ poet W. S. Di Piero has written, and it is precisely Huber’s play with the imaginative possibilities in the gaps between historical fact and family memory that makes her project so poetic and moving. “