Revision Strategies

I emailed off the revisions to Third Grade Reading Queen on Thursday night. The editorial suggestions that had looked daunting and overwhelming were, on further thought, all not only sensible and reasonable but absolutely crucial! I couldn't believe that I hadn't written the book that way in the first place - what was I thinking? I felt a blush of shame warming my cheeks for having submitted it in its previous form. Followed by a surge of gratitude that it is SOOO much better now.

Re revision, it strikes me that there are two approaches: 1) fix the big things first, do the major structural overhaul, and then make all the pesky little changes; 2) make all the pesky little changes first and then face the big things.

I'm a huge fan of the second approach. Now, in favor of the first approach is that, to quote writing guru Dennis Foley, you don't want to be worrying about the pattern of the wallpaper on a wall that is going to be coming down anyway. But in favor of the second approach is that it is so encouraging to be able to take some baby steps first, to change a comma here and a semi-colon there, correct a date or two, see some small progress actually being made. I find that when I start small, the supposedly big things turn out to be not so big, after all. I build to the big things and when I get there, they invariably are easier than I thought.

That's what I did on this round of revisions. I went through the manuscript with Margaret's comments on it three times. First I fixed everything that I could fix almost without thinking at all. Then I fixed everything that required just a little bit of thought and tinkering. And then I did the big-thinking items. But really, they, too, required hardly any thinking. At that point, after working through the entire manuscript on two previous rounds, those changes had begun to seem obvious, inevitable, exactly what had to be.

For me, it's always best to start small. That is why my blog is called "An Hour a Day." All big things are built out of small things. At least for me.

Will and Kate

So who got up to watch the royal wedding this morning?

I did!

I attended a royal wedding party hosted by my friend Diana, who this year has also hosted a Superbowl party and Academy Awards party. But the royal wedding party was the best.

I arrived at Diana's house at 3:30. The other guests were my friend Leah, who also happens to be Diana's neighbor, and Diana's other neighbor Erin, who brought along her darling three-week-old baby; Leah's second-grade daughter, Sadie, joined us a couple of hours later.

Dress code for the party: pj's and slippers - I wore a flannel nightgown and bathrobe.

Refreshments for the party: proper English tea brewed the proper English way, home-made scones, clotted cream, and strawberry-and-champagne jam.

Best part of the wedding: the hats! Who could have imagined so many, from wide-brimmed traditional to bizarre head ornaments of all kinds. One looked like a white coffee filter tilted sideways to mime a satellite dish antenna. And that hideous THING on the head of one of Fergie's daughters! We imagined her trying on scores of hats and then finally THAT hat and exclaiming, "That's it! That's the one!" The party ended at 6:30 with the tasteful royal balcony kiss and RAF flyover.

We all agreed it was the best royal wedding party ever.

Big Upset in Philosophy 1100 Election

Yesterday was the last lecture of the semester in my Philosophy 1100 Intro to Ethics class. We begin the semester by reading Tolstoy's novella The Death of Ivan Ilych, the story of a life gone wrong, a life lived in service to convention and conformity. As Ivan Ilych lies dying, he is tormented by the question, "Did I live as I ought to have lived?" and he keeps reassuring himself with the answer, "How could I have not? I lived exactly as everyone else lives!" Only in his last hours does he realize that the real answer is that he has not lived as he ought, but that he can still make things right and turn his thoughts at last to what is really important, to living not just for himself, but for others.

During the course of the semester we read seven books that are advice manuals for how to live our lives as we ought to live them: Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, the Discourses of Epictetus, Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Mill's Utilitarianism, Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, selections from the existentialism of Sartre, and then the neo-Buddhist Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior. On the final day, I have the students vote: if you could give just one of these books to the young Ivan Ilych, in time to influence how he lives out his life, which would you choose?

Different books win in different semesters. Yesterday the winner was Aristotle. A text from almost two and a half thousand years ago was the one that resonated most with my students in the year 2011. The second-place finisher was Shambhala. The huge surprise was who ranked third. It was a philosopher who in my decade of doing this has perhaps scored one vote, total, in those ten years, everyone's least favorite every single time, the crusty old, stern, rigorous Immanuel Kant. Kant came in third!

I asked them why. They liked Formula II of the Categorical Imperative, which tells us to treat humanity, whether in our own person or the person of another, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means. They thought that one of Ivan Ilych's problems was that he treated everyone else in his life too instrumentally. Kant would have showed him how to regard each one as having an inviolable dignity. Reading Kant would have made Ivan Ilych's life go better.

Yay, Kant!

Q & A

Among the many things I've been putting off - oh, why do I put things off? - has been completing a lengthy author interview sent to me by the wonderful publicity people at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, who want to include an author Q & A in the paperback reprint of How Oliver Olson Changed the World, which is scheduled for this October. I finally sat down and did it this morning, and it took less than an hour, and was tons of fun.

I doubt that they'll include the whole interview in the book - it was LONG - so here are a few of the questions, with my answers.

What did you want to be when you grew up?

I always wanted to be a writer. The only other thing I even considered being was president of the United States. In third grade I made a $100 bet with Jimmy Burnett that I would be president someday, but now I’m starting to think that maybe Jimmy Burnett is going to win that bet.

What’s your most embarrassing childhood memory?

Oh, there are so many! In third grade I decided to run away from school one day, and I made a very public announcement to that effect. But when I got to the edge of the playground, I realized that I had no place to go, so I had to come slinking back again. That memory still makes me cringe.

What’s your favorite childhood memory?

We would vacation every summer at a little lake in New Hampshire, and I remember sitting out on the lake in a rowboat, writing poems and drawing pictures and making up stories about imaginary princesses with my sister. Those were very happy days.

As a young person, who did you look up to most?

I mostly looked up to characters in books who were braver and stronger than I was, like Sara Crewe in A Little Princess who loses her beloved father and has to live in poverty in Miss Minchin’s cold, miserable garret, but never stops acting like the princess that she feels she is in inside. I also looked up to Anne of Green Gables for her spunk in breaking that slate over Gilbert Blythe’s head.

If you were stranded on a desert island, who would you want for company?

I’d be happy with pretty much anybody. In elementary school, the teachers would keep moving my desk so I’d stop talking to the person next to me, but then they found out that I would be happy talking to anybody.

If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go and what would you do?

I’d like to live in Paris, in a garret, and write, and be very poor, and make money by selling flowers on the street corner.

If you could travel in time, where would you go and what would you do?

I’d go back to Amherst, Mass., in the 1850s, and walk by Emily Dickinson’s house, and see if she would lower a little basket out the window to me with a fresh-baked muffin and a fresh-written poem in it.

If you want to find out more, as children say when they're concluding their book reports, read the book!

Holy Weekend

I'm having an appropriately holy Holy Week, or at least Holy Weekend.

Last night, I took part at my church in a very moving drama called Women of the Cross. Written by our pastor, and directed by our brilliant Rebecca Glancy, the play presents four women who were important in the life of Jesus, now gathered together at the foot of the cross to wait with him during his final hours. At first I was disappointed that I wasn't cast as Mary, or Mary Magdalene, or the mother of Zebedee's sons; instead I was a composite character representing the faith of all the many women touched by Jesus - the mother-in-law of fisherman Peter, the Canaanite woman whose daughter suffers from demon possession, the daughter of Jairus the ruler, and others. But as we rehearsed, I came to enjoy inhabiting all this different characters, and I couldn't have imagined the other roles played by anyone other than Amy, Michelle, or Carolyn.

I was surprised at how moved I felt during the performance itself, a tribute to the compelling performances of my fellow actresses. I found myself wanting to reach out and hold Mary's hand, to lean against the shoulder of Mary Magdalene, to nod with painful sympathy as Mrs. Zebedee shared the story of her wrongful ambition for her two sons. Just to sit in company with these other women, waiting, watching, never giving up faith that something wonderful could come out of this terrible suffering.

And now it's Holy Saturday. Our church has a huge community egg hunt this morning, and then I attend a Jewish friend's seder, which is always a wonderful event. Then, tomorrow morning, I have the option of going with the youth group at 4:30 a.m. to the Easter sunrise service down at Red Rocks, but I have a feeling I'm not going to do that. Instead, I'll help with our children's worship service, Where the Wild Things Worship, at 9:15, and go to big people's church at 10:15, where the sanctuary will be resplendent with lilies and other flowers of spring, and we'll sing "Christ the Lord Is Risen Today."

And I'll imagine how those women of the cross would have felt on that day of resurrection. And be glad that I was part of their community for a precious hour yesterday evening.

Home from San Diego

While you weren't even looking, I dashed off to San Diego for the annual convention of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association. I left on a 6:30 flight on Wednesday morning, driving to the airport in the predawn darkness while my house guest was still asleep; I arrived home at midnight yesterday. So all in all, I was in San Diego for just about 36 hours. And a very happy 36 hours it was.

I was taking part in a mini-conference on philosophy for children preceding the main APA program. In last few decades, following the pioneering work of Prof. Gareth Matthews of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, among others, a movement has emerged for sharing philosophy with pre-college-age children, even with children in the early elementary school grades. The APA pre-conference was wonderful testimony to how far this movement has come.

I heard presentations on fascinating interactive philosophical exercises and games to share with children, on how to structure successful summer camps focusing on normative ethics, or on philosophy more broadly, on how schools have been transformed through philosophy in Australia, about how philosophy for children has the potential to bridge Israeli-Palestinian discord in the Middle East. My talk was in a session on how doing philosophy for children can enrich and transform our college-level teaching as well. It's rare, believe you me, to attend APA sessions that are not only intellectually exciting, but that move the audience to tears, and to cheers. The pre-conference was also infused with the poignancy of remembering the genius and vision of Gareth Matthews, who had passed away the previous weekend.

In addition to savoring the abundant energy of the philosophy for children pre-conference, I also had my usual fun on the plane: reading an excellent dissertation on philosophical questions around the concept and practice of apology, reading a friend's lovely poetry collection manuscript, and starting an enjoyable novel that I bought in the San Diego airport: Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson. I breakfasted with beloved former grad students, and then sat on the hotel terrace in the late afternoon with other beloved former grad students, looking out at the bay. Best of all, I awoke early in my gorgeous (and very expensive) hotel room and faced the revisions for my chapter book, Third Grade Reading Queen, which I had been avoiding through that pointless dread that dissipates instantly once one spends even ten minutes doing the work instead of dreading it. Fixing this book is going to be a most delicious piece of cake! And for good measure, I sat alone by the large windows in the hotel bar sipping a pomegranate martini and planning out another book. Which maybe I'll be writing over a pomegranate martini some future year at some highly satisfying future philosophy conference.

Tea and More Tea, Plus Fondue

I am having tons of fun playing Tour Guide Lady for Chris (my high school friend visiting from New Jersey) and Susie (her daughter, who transferred to CU this semester from Rutgers and is taking my Intro to Ethics class).

Our first day, the three of us had dinner together at the Boulder Duchanbe Teahouse, the amazing treasure of a building sent to us by our sister city in Tajikistan. This is a building so stunning in its detailed mosaics and other artistic delights that my boys even went on a class trip there when they studied Boulder in second grade.

Yesterday Chris attended my class, sitting next to Susie, both of them diligent students with their notebooks open, scribbling away during my lecture on Shambhala: Sacred Path of the Warrior. Then Susie gave her mother a tour of "Susie's world" while I taught my 11:00 class and engaged in other toiling, including attending a Boulder Faculty Assembly Executive Committee meeting, where I wrote another in my sequence of poems about doomed love on the back of the meeting agenda. For dinner: cheese fondue followed by chocolate fondue at the Boulder Cafe down on Pearl Street: I read just a very few of my poems aloud to Chris and Susie, who claimed most politely to like them.

Today we're to have breakfast at Lucile's, and then a tour of the Celestial Seasonings tea factory. I've done my best to prepare Chris and Susie for its overwhelming sinus-clearing Peppermint Room. Susie has class this afternoon, so maybe a hike for Chris and me? Oh, and of course, the outing to the knitting store, and perhaps to a quilting store.... And then, perhaps, more tea.