The Otsuka Effect

Sometimes I tell myself I am just too busy to attend the many events that take place on this campus, as appealing as they often are.  Luckily, I had to attend Julie Otsuka’s talk this week. 

Julie Otsuka wrote When the Emperor Was Divine, this year’s text for Open Books, Open Minds, a campus-wide endeavor to get all faculty and students to read a common book.  As a member of the OBOM Committee, I was skeptical of the book at first, thinking it too quiet for college students, especially the freshmen who are required to read it.  But that was before I read the whole thing and discovered that yes, while it was quiet, it was also powerful. 

This novel tells the tale of a Japanese family sent to the internment camps during World War II.  We hear from each of the family members: the mother, the daughter, the son, and finally, the father.  Julie (after seeing her speak, I can’t bear to call her Otsuka, or even Ms. Otsuka—it feels too formal) said that she did not write the novel to make a political statement, although her grandparents, including her mother, who was 11 at the time, were sent to the camps from 1942-1945.  Instead, she said the novel was a way to get to know her mother.  In fact, Julie hesitated to tell this story at all, as she was not sure she had the right to do so, not having personally experienced the camps herself. 

I appreciated the care and humility with which Julie approached her subject.  For example, she chose not to name the characters not only to represent their loss of identity—the family was assigned a number at the camp—but also to preserve their dignity. As she put it, the characters got to keep their names to themselves.  It was an act of privacy she could offer.  The same thing has happened to me when I have attempted fiction.  My characters rebel against the parameters I have given them and start behaving in unexpected and sometimes disturbing ways.

As a writer who struggled with a 40 page article on-and-off for three years, I felt validated when she said it took her five years to write the book, and two years to finish the long chapter in the middle.  Julie described her writing process, which involved hours in a coffee shop writing longhand, typing up her notes later that night at home, and then going back to the coffee shop to edit.  One paragraph might take a week, and then she might throw it away anyway. 

After her talk, I told a friend that I wanted to be Julie Otsuka when I grew up.  It is not just because my dream has always been to be a professional writer, but because of how she talked about writing.  How she talked about her family.  How she talked about her characters. 

Julie has motivated me to revisit the characters I abandoned months ago and see what surprises they have in store.  I don’t care if the story ever ends, whether it has enough dialogue, scenes, or a believable plot, much less get published.  I just want to see where these characters take me.  Thank you, Julie Otsuka, for your inspiration.  And congratulations on your National Book Award nomination for The Buddha in the Attic.  I look forward to reading it.      

The Legacy of Women

This year’s Nobel Peace Prize winners are all women, which I believe is a first.  The Nobel Committee is to be commended, because this award is well-deserved:  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/08/world/nobel-peace-prize-johnson-sirleaf-gbowee-karman.html?_r=2&hp

Reading these women’s stories got me thinking about my colleagues.   The women in Educational Studies are fierce, smart, ethical, and strong.  In considering the amazing work they do, I am reminded of my own family members.

My mom, Helen, will be turning 77 this week.  She was born and raised in Decatur, Georgia, and spent her girlhood summers in south Georgia. She came up North to Indiana University to get her graduate degree in piano and met an Indiana farm boy in the dorm cafeteria who was working on his MBA.   He bought her first legal drink, along with a bunch of illegal ones before that.  They got married, despite the fact that he was a Yankee.   

What you may not know about southern women of a certain age is that while they may have been bred to be nice, helpful, and all those other traditional feminine qualities, you don’t want to mess with them.  The movie Steel Magnolias didn’t quite capture it, according to Mom, but at least it had the right idea.      

The best example of my mother’s iron will (forget steel—that’s not strong enough) happened before the fall of the Berlin Wall.  She was a church choir director, and also directed a city-wide choir made up of members from many different churches who would sing at special corporate and nonprofit events.  Her church connected with a church in East Germany, and when Mom found out they didn’t have a set of hand bells, she found this upsetting.  EVERY church should have a set of hand bells, as music is an essential part of any church service, and bells were a beautiful and necessary addition.    

Mom spearheaded a monumental fundraising and organizational process, which included booking travel and lodging for 40 people to travel across Germany singing and sightseeing.  Despite all of her preparations, which included plenty of contact with Senator Birch Bayh’s office, they were stopped at Checkpoint Charlie.  The choir spent several scary hours stuck on the bus as the soldiers searched their luggage and rummaged through the velvet-lined cases holding the bells.  I do not know why they finally allowed the Choraliers through the barbed wire and concrete, but I am pretty sure a small gray-haired lady from the South charmed or shamed them into it.  The church congregants were grateful, and the bells continue to ring there, even today.  

My dad is used to strong women.  His mother, Marie, became a schoolteacher in a country school in southern Indiana.  At that time, she did not need a degree to teach (bizarre, I know), but she wanted to be a better teacher and spent her summers at Indiana University and teaching during the school year.  This was in the 1920’s, when very few women earned college degrees.  When she met my grandfather, they had to elope to Kentucky because schoolteachers could not be married.  They came back and she continued to teach for awhile.  Later on, after raising three boys, she retired and wrote columns for local papers on women’s issues. 

While the women in my family would never name themselves as activists, they are strong in their beliefs, their work ethic, and that they have something valuable to contribute to the world.  A worthy legacy indeed.

I want my own laundry basket. Or not.

My cat Juno likes to sleep in a laundry basket on our kitchen table.  If you are not an animal person, or you are a meticulous housekeeper, this probably alarms you on multiple levels.  However, black tumbleweeds of fur rolling across the placemats aside, it is clear that this laundry basket, with just a couple of layers of Nels’ jeans in the bottom, serves as a refuge for Juno.  It is here that she feels safe from any threat, the chief one being her adopted brother, Mr. Spock. 

Mr. Spock is twice her size, and can’t seem to figure out that Juno is neither prey nor predator.  A year of separate feeding stations, litterboxes on two different floors, copious amounts of Feliway (designed to calm cats), and small dosages of Prozac have not alleviated his anxiety and aggression toward her. 

Regardless of whether Spock is around or not, Juno spends most of the daytime hours in her basket.  Sometimes Spock lies on the table outside the basket, all stretched out, but that doesn’t seem to bother Juno.  She’ll open her green eyes, yawn hugely, and then snuggle even deeper into the jeans.  The basket is a safety zone.

When my friend Jenn came over to work on an accreditation report on a recent Saturday, we decided that we wanted our own laundry baskets.   A place where there are no demands made, no emails to answer, no list of tasks to be checked off.  A place to curl up and observe the world outside, or maybe just relax.

But a recent conversation with one of my favorite teachers got me to quit looking at Juno with envy when I leave the house for work.  This teacher said that she just recently went to Iggy’s Doughboys in Warwick, and in spite of living in Rhode Island for 25 years, that was her first time at that venerable institution.  She said, “I just keep going around and around on my donkey path on the East Side.”

Those words resonated with me.  I have my own donkey path up and down the I-195 corridor.  Home-RIC, RIC-Home, visit some schools as needed, occasionally go out with friends, usually in Providence.  When I have to go over to South County, I get nervous because the way is unfamiliar.  Part of my anxiety stems from the fact that Rhode Island is chintzy with street signs and I have no sense of direction.   I often feel uncertain or lost, even with my GPS. 

My donkey path, though, is not just literal.  It’s metaphorical too.  I used to have a friend who would say “I’m a slave to my body” when I would tell her about some crazy diet I was on.  Her point was that she was going to eat what her body wanted, while I was trying to force mine to eat more cabbage and less chocolate.  I’m still not a slave to my body (it gets all the chocolate it wants, though), but I’m a slave to my routine.  I wonder why I can’t think of anything to do on Saturday or Sunday afternoon but work, and then I blame work.  As the saying goes, though, “It’s not you, work, it’s me.”     

Yup, it IS me.  As emotionally demanding and time-sucking as this job can be, I can still choose to have a rich and productive life, and  say no to things that I don’t really need to do.  Nobody is keeping score but me.    

Somehow, I have to break my weekend pattern of resisting going anywhere that requires makeup or extroversion.  I want to go to the beach.  I want to go to the zoo, King Richard’s Faire, and the Factory of Horrors.  I want to go to plays, movies, museums, drinks and dinner.  I want to go to Boston, Mystic, and Concord, MA, to visit my old friends the Transcendentalists, or maybe just Iggy’s.  So let me know if you are interested, and we can go together.