Garden of Words: Cape Cod Writers Conference Annual Convention

Hello, Friends

I will be teaching a class on "Writing the Good Read" at the Cape Cod Writers Center Annual Conference in Hyannis on Aug. 7-10. The class is a one-day session on Aug. 8 in which I will be using some of favorite books to share my experience as a book reviewer, reader, blogger, freelance journalist and writer and my lifelong love of literature in the hope of offering something of value to those in the room. Pause for joke about nerves. It's been over 20 years since I've been in a classroom. 

            The conference is headlined by acclaimed writers including novelists Gary Braver and Michelle Hoover, poet Kathleen Spivack, short-story writer Rishi Reddi. The Writer Magazine editor-in-chief Alicia Anstead will give a keynote talk.

            Here's the link to the conference brochure with the full schedule and course descriptions of all the courses in the four-day conference: Cape Cod Writers convention brochure  

If any of you are drawn to the conference on that day, please look for me. 

 

P.S. Here's my course description:

"Writing the Good Read"

            Writing that offers a good read is like a door with a big sign saying "Open Me." We can't resist. We can't wait for a break in our day to read another chapter. Compelling works of both fiction and nonfiction "hook" us with a strong premise, a brilliant setting, a character that engages us in that deep, inward place and won't let us go. Or a voice that makes us want to hear more and more, and keeps on whetting an appetite the next sentence fulfills. What's the "hook" that seals the deal in your writing?

Flower People: Ladies' Names in the Summer Garden

            Lots of 'ladies' showing up these days in the summer garden. Off the top of my head we have the lily, the rose, black-eyed Susans, Queen Anne's Lace, and Lady's Mantle.

            Do these names belong to women first, or flowers? In the most common cases, not surprisingly, the flowers got there first.           

            Daylilies (pictured in the top two photos), tiger lilies, ornamental lilies, Asiatic lilies -- lilies are everywhere this time of year. The word 'lily' is found in Middle English and derived from the Latin word lilium, which even back then appears to be a name for the flower. The English, at least, took the name to mean 'pure' and hence gave it to their daughters.

           Other names abound in the daylily family alone. The daylily depicted in the top photo is various called by various names --the "orange daylily," "tawny daylily," "tiger daylily" and "ditch daylily" -- some of them sounding distinctly less than pure. 

            'Rose' (third pic down) has a frightfully confused etymology. One theory traces its origin to a word that means 'thorn' or 'bramble,' which at least makes sense to culivators of this beautiful, celebrated, and common the world over plant. The gardener define it as "blood-letting experience." No rose, without the thorns. The photo here shows our ever-blooming roses, peaking now. They're prone to black-spot disease and they take of trimming and thorny care.

            However, when we come to Black-Eyed Susans, Queen Anne's Lace, and Lady's Mantle -- all of which sound like there must be a story behind them -- we find that real (or legendary) people have loaned their names to the plants. 

            Who was the original "Black-Eyed Susan”? (fourth and fifth photos) Legend has it that name came from a poem of that name by English poet John Gay (most famous as the author "The Beggar's Opera," a satire of corruption on various levels of society). Here's the excerpt I found from the poem:

All in the downs, the fleet was moored,
Banners waving in the wind.
When Black-Eyed Susan came aboard,
and eyed the burly men.
“Tell me ye sailors, tell me true
Does my Sweet William sail with you?”

            Some year, if I may make a parenthetical note, we also have 'Sweet William' growing in our garden; not it seems this year.

            The best thing about the plant "Black-Eyed Susan” is that it's, well, promiscuous. It's all over the place. It's cheerful, adaptable, undemanding, and fills the space you don't have other plans for, so I pretty let it have the run of the place.

            The point of the name Queen Anne's Lace (also in forth photo and in fifth) is sort of self-evident, but I didn't know if we were looking at a particular queen. Apparently, we are. The name comes from lacy look of the plant's white flowers and foliage and goes back to Queen Anne who was the wife of King James I of England. She was enamored of a particular variety of hard-to-make lace.

            Lady's Mantle gets its name because in the Middle Ages the plant was dedicated to "Our Lady" Virgin Mary. Other female associations abound. It has lacy flowers and the leaves, I am told,  resemble the scalloped edges of a mantle. The plant is also alleged to be "a healing herb for women" and said to regulate the menstrual cycle. Also to drive away a threat or (take your pick) "attract love."

          I think all these flowers attract love, especially in the third week of July when they're still going strong. 

'Much Ado' in Plymouth: Frolicking in Shakespeare's Garden

            They take the title, the first two words primarily, seriously. The players of the Bay Colony Shakespeare Company have much to do and do it well in their new production of Shakespeare's classic comedy "Much Ado About Nothing" currently on stage at the Spire theater in Plymouth. In the part of Benedick, actor Neil McGarry, looking for a place to hide so he can eavesdrop on other characters saying something of the greatest personal interest to Benedick, escapes into the audience, hopping up on the seating, climbing over the bench backs and sometimes the people in them. He scrambled on his hands and knees down an aisle, somehow missing the 'beverage' at my feet.

            Only moments before Benedick has been complaining of having to choke down a too heavy dish of "Lady Tongue" -- his term for witty nemesis Beatrice.

            "Much Ado" is the famous comedy (memorably filmed 25 years ago with Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson) in which the two leads pretend to dislike one another and engage in battles of witty (often complex) insults because of a fixed public position on each side against marriage. Naturally -- because comedy is the world where change and growth is possible -- at the first indication that the other bears a hidden affection, both cave. Their friends provide these helpful hints in heavily staged gossip sessions over how each is secretly suffering from unrequited love. Only someone fooling himself could be fooled by so heavy-handed a ploy, but this is Shakespeare's way of saying we will choose to hear what our heart wishes, and our ego needs, to hear.

            There is comedy in this play, and then there is plain clowning. While the play's well-born characters are working out their issues, Shakespeare gives us one of his best 'common folk' clown character in the superbly uneducated Dogberry, the leader of the city 'watch' that fortuitously discovers the villainy of the piece. Actor Ross MacDonald (who plays Macbeth in the production of that play running concurrently with "Much Ado") here takes the role of the triumphantly muddle-headed Dogberry into the sort of contemporary, post-Python open-ended parody of everything the Brits do better than anyone, ad-libing ad hoc commentary between Dogberry's nonsensical pretensions of medieval civil authority and throwing in a few rants of his own. He stomps across the stage in a send-up of 21st century military pomp and bellowing, fed perhaps by his personal experience in the UK force that served in Afghanistan, and with able assistance from Erica Simpson's winning second-in-command reaches into the audience to pull a few likely suspects onto the stage.

            All the performances are winning. McGarry and young actress Poornima Kirby have great charisma in the leads. They share one of the Shakespeare's best love scenes, drawing on the tears provoked by the tragic near-death of the wrongly accused bride-to-be Hero. How would she address Hero's accuser, Beatrice is asked. Reply: "I would eat his heart in the marketplace." Benedick's responds, 'are you sure of Hero's innocence' and when she answers yes, his response is (in effect) you've got it, babe: "I am engaged," delivering the line with a deft understated perfection that shivers the spine. We see him challenge Claudio, heretofore his best friend, with the same rapier clarity of purpose a few moments later.

            The dead seriousness and dark tone of these scenes contrasts brilliantly with the gaiety and even silliness of the rest of the play. Comedies with a dark streak are a specialty of Shakespeare's ouevre. I don't know if there's been anything like them since.

            I'm grateful for the full cast's all-in engagement with this brilliant wordy piece. Audiences may have some difficulty catching on to the play's vivid, figurative Elizabethan speech-- filled with the vernacular of the times, quaint speech patterns, and the words Shakespeare invented on the fly -- but from the moment the action picks up and McGarry begins flying through the audience to overhear the inspired fiction that Beatrice secretly loves him, everyone in the theater Tuesday night was hooked on this play.

            Why not? For, as Benedick acknowledges at the play's happy end, "Man is a giddy thing."

To Hav and Hav Not: Jan Morris's Uncommon Novel on the Sum of All Travels

            Everybody has lived in Hav. The Greeks, the Arabs, Turks, Russians, Italians, French, Germans. Even the Chinese still operate a fishing pier left over from their furthest Western expansion. The English maintain an Agent, who naturally assumes that all information is classified. A secretive medieval heresy called the Cathars meet in underground quarters resembling catacombs. We don't understand why until author Jan Morris adds a brief sequel -- 20 years after her brilliant fiction "Last Letters from Hav" was published in 1985 -- depicting life in the sterile, colorless, dystopic "new" Hav.

            The old Hav's s indigenous people live in caves, though some of the men work at the harbor, and protect the bears. In the misty past, the legends of this hard to locate somewhere that is both east and west, Europe and Asia, present and past go back to the Myrmidons, the Ancient Greek warriors who fought with Achilles in the Trojan War. Does this mean that Hav is the successor to Troy?

            Greeks founded this place, one of her informants tell the novel's narrator, a travel writer who appears to be a stand-in for Morris, who is herself an astute, highly respected travel writer. But when she tracks down a surviving Greek community, its members are polite and colorless. "We're not Greeks any more," they confess to her.

            Arabs built this place, another local informant tells her in the confiding, but ultimately elusive manner of the city's troop of amateur historians. But then Crusaders took it over and built a castle. An Armenian trumpeter still climbs to its highest point each dawn to play a lament for its knights who fell defending the city from invaders, a notion that suggested to me a reprise of the fall of Constantinople.

            The twentieth century left its heavy fingerprints as well. Oh, there were Fascists in Hav, some say, and the local Germans opposed them. Mussolini however was welcomed by the Italian consulate. Others say, 'Communists were here' and White Russians. And every early 20th century figure you can think of, royalty, decadent rich, politician or intellectual put in an appearance. Freud visited Hav, as did T.E. Lawrence and Hemingway. Claims and counter-claims dispute an incognito visit by Hitler.  

            The city-state of Hav is governed by a tripartite commission established by the League of Nations, which made the German Wiemar Republic one of its protectors. Other survivors from the city's "old Europe," Ottoman and Middle Eastern zeitgeist include a pretender caliph, heir to the 1,300-year religious office at the head of Islam abolished by the Turks when Ataturk overthrew the Ottomans and established the modern Turkish state. The caliph is an urbane man careful about his dealings with the outside world because, he hints, he has enemies.

            Telephones and a little radio get through to this place that time forgot, but Hav presents as the last place on earth untouched by instantaneous communication, mass media, and modern transportation (also, interestingly, by American interests). No airports. You reach the city only by a train that travels a tunnel cut through mountain.

            My lasting impression, months after reading the book, is that Hav is the place where representatives of various versions of the Mediterranean past take Morris's narrator aside and say "Let me tell you what Hav was like when we were really the place to be..." Things were so much more -- interesting, provocative, promising, elegant, urbane, baroque -- back then.

            Hav is the objective correlative for the nostalgia that the earth's deeply rooted communities feel for more vital days. The narrator's informants tell her about the city's brilliant occasions, the parties thrown by celebrities of the Belle Epoque, the pre and post World War I periods (a time recently mocked up by West Anderson's "The Grand Budapest Hotel"), but also its unique bizarre traditions such as the annual race over the city's rooftops and castle walls in which all hale young men must participate, even though some lose their lives.

            In the brief sequel ("Hav of the Myrmidons"), published in 2005, Morris's narrator returns to the new Hav created after a mysterious military "Intervention" placed the mysterious Cathars in charge. Everything old and charming has been destroyed and been replaced by a super-modern, sterile efficiency of gleaming towers and resort life for the 1 percent. The new people she meets are exemplified by the English tourists who love the new, sterile city because "it's exactly what we're used to" -- a devastating critique of the whole tourism project. The new Hav still has mysteries and hints of conspiracy but like (I suspect) most of the book's readers I so much preferred the older one.

(You can read Ursula Le Guin's brilliant intro to the current edition of "Hav" at:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/jun/03/travel.travelbooks.

(A stimulating analysis of the book by Laleh Khalili recently got me thinking about "Hav" again: http://thegamming.org/2014/06/21/imaginary-cities/ )