Wyzga On Words

What Does The Camino de Santiago Look Like A Year Later?

I'm a little behind my schedule.  The plan was to pick up my Camino de Santiago journal on Wednesday the 17th September 2014, a year from the day I boarded a plane at John Wayne Airport, flew to Newark International and then on to Madrid, Spain where I figured out where and how to get the Aeropuerto Express bus to travel across town to the RENFE station where I would board a train to Pamplona and then a bus to St. Jean Pied de Port arriving at my destination some 48 jet-lagged hours later. But I'm getting ahead of myself.  For those of you who know my family, you know that at least one character is himself in transition so plans being what the Goddess laughs at means I have to reconfigure this idea of mine.

Let's begin here by allowing Enya to set the stage with her lyrics to Pilgrim.  Each time I listen to this haunting music I am reminded that even after a year's time has passed this much I know is true: it's a long way to find out who you are. 

I want to use this time and this space to reflect on 500 miles trekked in 5 weeks.  What it felt like then and what it feels like now.

I can tell you that waking up to see Spain spread out below me as we descended was neither thrilling nor exciting.  I was petrified!  WTF was I thinking?  Estoy solo!  It would be easy enough to whip out my credit card, find the United Airlines counter and grab the first flight home.  You think I'm kidding?  Have Credit Card - Will Travel.  

What stopped me?  I fumbled in my backpack and pulled out a letter pressed into my hand a few hours before I was supposed to go to sleep on the last night in my own bed.  The letter began, "Dear Diane, Well done! As you read this thousands of feet above the earth, you may be wondering why I gave you a 'WELL DONE!' card to start your Camino de Santiago journey. But, in actuality, it is a great start.  Why?  Regardless of what does or doesn't happen from here on out, you will be forever changed simply because you showed up.  And that, my friend, is 'WELL DONE!'" 

How did Lorraine know?  I would return to her letter often over the miles.  The words of this storyteller encouraged me to get started on my adventure.  Was I still scared?  You bet!  As she pointed out (and I had no way of knowing how accurate her words would prove to be), some days it would be a trail and other days it would be a trial.  But if I agreed to show up (as I had promised I would) "step-by-step, moment-by-moment, heartbeat-by-heartbeat", I would show myself that this was "WELL DONE!"  

And so it begins.....

Give Your Characters Shadow Sides.

Silas House writing for the NYTimes in an essay entitled, Tell Their Secrets, wants to know what brings your characters to life.  For us to remember them - for them to endear themselves to us - they must be as multi-faceted and flawed as we are.

Helen Hunt Jackson said, "If you want people to read the truth, write fiction."

I think what she meant is that art imitates life.  And the better you are at writing what life is all about, the more truthful it will appear in your work.

A written work is carried on the backs of its characters.   Take, for example, Jackson's best known work, Ramona: 

"One of the greatest ethical novels of the nineteenth century, this is a tale of true love tested. Set in Old California, this powerful narrative richly depicts the life of the fading Spanish order, the oppression of tribal American communities and inevitably, the brutal intrusion of white settlers. Ramona, an illegitimate orphan, grows up as the ward of the overbearing Senora Moreno. But her desire for Alessandro, a Native American, makes her an outcast and fugitive..."

But as luscious as Ramona sounds, she is as flat as a tortilla: sunny, good-natured, cheerful, resilient, sweet, abiding, and so on.  She bears up with the events that befall her after having chosen to fall in love and run away with someone who is "not of her house."  Flat.

Ramona's step-mother, Senora Moreno, fares much better as an arch-villainess.  You can feel her squirmy, sadistic, scheming ways.  The reader loves to hate her.  Her son, Senor Felipe, wishes he could man-up and do the right thing by his adopted sister who has chosen to run off with the Indian Allessandro, but under the thumb of hs controlling mother he can do little more than drain out of every confrontation as if he were water wrung out of a damp linen suit.  Still, you get the feel of him as a frightened, fearful fellow with the heart of a do-gooder.   

Characters must be flawed.  And they must do the unexpected.  Through them we get to try on the many masks of humanity as we struggle and celebrate our pilgrim lives. 

Have Faith. What Else Do We Have?

For some time now I've been trying to get back to the keyboard to write my blog posts.

How faithful I was in the beginning.

Why do I blog?  I like to write.  I write to inform, inspire, educate, motivate, maybe even comfort as I share stories and words.

But for days now I find I have no words.  I find I lack the faith to find the words.

I am reminded of David Whyte's poem entitled Faith.  It's only a few lines long but when Whyte reads or recites it he keeps repeating a line like a refrain or a chorus.  To me the style of telling the poem adds to its depth.

Here it is:

Faith

I want to write about faith,
     about the way the moon rises
        over cold snow, night after night,

faithful even as it fades from fullness,
     slowly becoming that last curving and impossible
          sliver of light before the final darkness.

But I have no faith myself
      I refuse it even the smallest entry.

Let this then, my small poem,
     like a new moon, slender and barely open,
          be the first prayer that opens me to faith.

  -- David Whyte
      from Where Many Rivers Meet
     ©2007 Many Rivers Press

Now, click here to listen to the poet.

I am reminded: Have faith.

 

Q&A Tuesday: Where's The Story? Read The Obituary Pages.

Q:    Where can I go to read good and not-so-good stories?

A:    Look no further than the obituary pages.

As some of you who have read my posts already know, I love reading the obits. I've mined the pages like a gravestone rubber trolling through a cemetery looking for the perfect headstone.  Yes, gravestone rubber, not robber.

Open your local or national newspaper to the Obituary section.  While it's illuminating to read the stories of the famous folk who have passed on, skip over those professionally scripted ones.  Go instead to the columns of stories written by family members for their loved one.  Sometimes there will be a recent photo, or one taken decades ago as if the deceased never aged. 

You will get good at identifying those obituaries that read like a shopping list of items - all achievement but little affection.  Those are the ones chock full of content, and little else.

Then you will find those that are so full of life you might wish that the deceased had lived next door to you.

What makes the stories different?  The latter ones take the content of a life and put it into context we can relate to.  We understand - or at least recognize - this person.  We have some idea what they held in their affections.  They come alive for us. 

Whether you are writing a brief, a case summary for ADR or getting ready for trial make the story about your client one we can relate to.

And a good exercise I was taught: write your own obituary.  Feel how it sounds when you read it aloud.  Is it true to your life? Do you wish you lived next door to this person?  Shared a cold brewski on a hot summer night?  Or maybe a cup of coffee.

 

Q&A Tuesday: How Do You Become A Writer? Read & Write.

Q:    How do you become a writer?

A:    You read books.  You act like a writer by writing.

One the one hand I am posting an article by and an interview with Molly Ringwald for my brother who found her then as now heart-thumpingly, breathtakingly stunning.

On the other hand I am writing this post because it has valuable tips on how to write.

Start here: click here to read John Williams interview with Ringwald on the subject of her newest novel, "When It Happens To You."  Highlights:

1. Writing and acting require an ability to understand a character.
2. Our human flaws make us human and create the good/evil duality.
3. Universal values speak to all of us.
4. While mothering may give a writer an edge on parenthood, note all the successful authors who never personally experienced their characters' lives.
5. Which writers have influenced you?

Then, click here to read Ringwald's Opinion piece, Act Like a Writer, with tips and exercises on finding and developing your character.  Excerpt.

"Our job, as the cast [of The Breakfast Club], was to find the humanity in the stereotypes that we had been assigned, to show that we were all suffering in our own way and searching for our way out. In the end, that way out is through connection, another lesson I’ve carried through my life and in what I have chosen to explore in fiction."

 

Making Money Isn't So Hard.

 

“Making money isn’t hard in itself.  What’s hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting one’s life to.”  [The Shadow of the Wind.]

I came across these lines written in a journal I've been keeping to track 365 days of small steps I am taking toward my next dream. They remind me that we must have whole-hearted affection for what we do; or our efforts at work will be exhausting.

To what are you devoting your life?  For what do you have affection? 

Books and language are my livelihood.  You never know what you will find when you turn the page.  Excerpt.

The Shadow of the Wind is a coming-of-age tale of a young boy who, through the magic of a single book, finds a purpose greater than himself and a hero in a man he's never met. With the passion of García Márquez, the irony of Dickens, and the necromancy of Poe, Carlos Ruiz Zafón spins a web of intrigue so thick that it ensnares the reader from the very first line. The Shadow of the Wind is an ode to the art of reading, but it is also the perfect example of the all-encompassing power of a well-told story.  Click here to read more.

Grimms' Fairy Tales Can Be Pretty Grim. What's The Lure Of The Fairy Tale?

Joan Acocella's book review article for The New Yorker, July 23, 2012, "Once Upon A Time - The Lure of the Fairy Tale," begins with a troubling Grimms tale called "The Stubborn Child."  Excerpt. 

"Once upon a time there was a stubborn child who never did what his mother told him to do. The dear Lord, therefore, did not look kindly upon him, and let him become sick. No doctor could cure him and in a short time he lay on his deathbed. After he was lowered into his grave and covered over with earth, one of his little arms suddenly emerged and reached up into the air. They pushed it back down and covered the earth with fresh earth, but that did not help. The little arm kept popping out. So the child’s mother had to go to the grave herself and smack the little arm with a switch. After she had done that, the arm withdrew, and then, for the first time, the child had peace beneath the earth."

With this grim opener Acocella takes us on a journey of deep, dark, cruel, violent, and downright frightening fairy tales as constructed by the Grimms' Brothers which, some might argue could actually be good for children and helpful to us.  Excerpt.

"This story, with its unvarnished prose, should be clear, but it isn’t. Was the child buried alive? The unconsenting arm looks more like a symbol. And what about the mother? Didn’t it trouble her to whip that arm? Then we are told that the youngster, after this beating, rested in peace. Really? When, before, he had seemed to beg for life? But the worst thing in the story is that, beyond disobedience, it gives us not a single piece of information about the child. No name, no age, no pretty or ugly. We don’t even know if it is a boy or a girl. (The Grimms used ein Kind, the neuter word for “child.” Zipes decided that the child was a boy.) And so the tale, without details to attach it to anything in particular, becomes universal. Whatever happened there, we all deserve it. A. S. Byatt has written that this is the real terror of the story: “It doesn’t feel like a warning to naughty infants. It feels like a glimpse of the dreadful side of the nature of things.” That is true of very many of the Grimms’ tales, even those with happy endings."

Is this the hook?  The universal message is both alluring and terrorizing.

Following along the wooded path of Acocella's work you will become engaged in folklore research, creative thought, versions of fairy tales, opposing viewpoints, reasoned proposals to revise the tales, and the ongoing mysteries of literary criticism.

It makes a great read; perhaps not just before you go to sleep.

What We Will Miss With The Demise Of Written Letters. UVA Captures The Civil War Online.

I was going through a cardboard box the other day. It's one of many on the top shelf of a closet in my home.  It holds written notes and letters that date back 40 years.  Opening envelopes, visiting places and people, and reading long departed handwriting is more than a comfort.  The written word sets a moment in time.  I am reminded of who I was when, what I thought was important, who colored my life, and so on.

On February 20 2011, my friend and colleague Stephanie West Allen blogged about the importance of letter writing: Notes and letters - Long may they live!

She followed up that post with another on April 11, 2011, Writing Letters to the Future.

Ours are not frivolous gestures.  Or a nod to a quaint notion.  I wonder who will recall us, say 150 years from now just as we are able to recall the lives of those who lived life during the Civil War. 

Life During Wartime recounts the efforts of

"A team at U.Va.'s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library has been posting on "150 Years Ago Today," an online blog started in 2009 that features transcribed Civil War letters and diaries. Now that the nation is in the midst of the Civil War sesquicentennial, which runs until 2015, there's renewed interest in the bloody conflict. And reading the words of the participants themselves provides a new, more intimate level of understanding.

Accessible from the Special Collections home page and fully searchable by name or date, the blog features correspondence by such Confederate notables as Robert E. Lee and Gen. Elisha F. "Bull" Paxton, who briefly commanded the Stonewall Brigade. But it also includes the words of the everyday people who shouldered muskets on the battlefield, suffered deprivations on the homefront and struggled to grasp the equality promised them in the Declaration of Independence. By posting these primary source documents online, the Special Collections Library is presenting the war's daily triumphs and tragedies to the world.

This enormous project started fairly simply. "Twelve years ago, Mary Roy Edwards volunteered to start transcribing our Civil War letters and diaries," says Ann Southwell (Grad '73), a Special Collections' manuscript cataloger who heads the effort. "After a while we decided we should put them up on a blog. Then we got the idea that we could do the entire war day by day." Edwards, the wife of former U.Va. architecture professor Charles R. Edwards, eventually transliterated more than 3,000 pages from the items at Special Collections. Another volunteer, John P. Mann IV, has been diligently working on letters written by Col. Edward T. Warren of the 10th Virginia Infantry. Southwell herself works on the project every evening after work."

As you are drawn into the entries that recount the lives of those who lived life during wartime, one thing is striking: not much has changed when we go to war.  What matters most is still faith, family, friends, and the girls we left behind.

My hope is that as more of us read about the terrors and losses of war, we may shed some of our "rock logic' that makes Us right and Them wrong. Perhaps we can adopt a more fluid frame of mind that allows for more commonality, understanding and grace under fire.

The article reports on the interest generated in other countries:

"Nonetheless, the blog is attracting attention—it's received more than 20,000 hits as of early May. "We're getting a lot of hits from people in Russia, Ukraine and India," says Southwell. "I hope they're not using these letters to learn English!"" 

I hope we and they are using the letters to learn peace in our time.

 

Q&A Tuesday: What's The Rush?

Q:    What's the rush?

A:    Fill in the answer yourself.

Last week I was in New Orleans. For the year prior I had been working as co-chair of the American Society of Trial Consulants' Annual Conference. The conference was a huge success: more attendance than seen in the past four years, excellent content, and a whole lotta fun that folks can have only in New Orleans.  But I was busy.

What's the rush? 

There were board matters (I am an active member of the board of directors) to attend to, a long and tedious board meeting, speaking on a panel as a stand-in for a member who could not make it, meeting with trial consultant wannabees, making sure things were running well and smoothly, visiting with vendors, huddling with board members and attendees on other organizational issues, and the work that continues long distance while one is away.

What's the rush?

Coming home I was confronted by an article in the NYTimes reporting on high schoolers inhaling Adderall to get the academic edge that would assure them a college seat: Risky Rise of the Good Grade Pill.  Excerpt.

The drug was not cocaine or heroin, but Adderall, an amphetamine prescribed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder that the boy said he and his friends routinely shared to study late into the night, focus during tests and ultimately get the grades worthy of their prestigious high school in an affluent suburb of New York City. The drug did more than just jolt them awake for the 8 a.m. SAT; it gave them a tunnel focus tailor-made for the marathon of tests long known to make or break college applications.

“Everyone in school either has a prescription or has a friend who does,” the boy said.

At high schools across the United States, pressure over grades and competition for college admissions are encouraging students to abuse prescription stimulants, according to interviews with students, parents and doctors. Pills that have been a staple in some college and graduate school circles are going from rare to routine in many academically competitive high schools, where teenagers say they get them from friends, buy them from student dealers or fake symptoms to their parents and doctors to get prescriptions."

What's the rush?

What I'm even more concerned about is what happens when these young people get to college.  What will keep them amped up to get good grades then?  And what happens after graduation? 

What's the rush?

A fellow alum from the University of Virginia raised this same question in an article published in the Summer 2012 issue of The University of Virginia magazine, "What's the Rush?"  A mother talking to her 6-month old daughter addresses the personal toll the pressure for success raise when we push the pace of life.  Excerpt.

"Seven years ago, when I was 25, I had a mini breakdown over my lack of accomplishments. I had just completed my master’s program and—gasp—had not written the book I was supposed to write. I had no city to call a home, did not own a house and could not have been more lost or confused. Later I discovered this was so common with my generation, that it was dubbed the “quarterlife crisis.”

The Internet has made it so easy to announce and seemingly measure success that our expectations of how fast we should achieve our goals have become severely skewed.

At the time of my “breakdown” I was living in London working for the U.N. Having this full-fledged panic attack about being a loser in life, I had no idea how many of my peers were having the same doubts.

Our desire for speed has distorted our concept of how fast our life should be moving. If we expect to save the world by the time we are 26, what do we expect of ourselves at 50?

What is even scarier is that many of my peers are actually doing it. Recently I was chatting with my college buddy Bilal Qureshi (Col ’04), who went to U.Va. and Columbia’s school of journalism before becoming a producer at NPR, all by the time he hit 25. We were talking about a friend whose ambitions had caused her to collapse. Her body had literally given up, and she was undergoing tests to find out what was wrong.

It made me think, What is the rush? What are we rushing for? What are we rushing toward?"

At the ASTC Annual Conference I sat in on a program about blogging and social media marketing.  I was reminded AGAIN! to make my content relevant, useful, substantive.  There was no mention of beauty, inspiration, joy, prosperity, life-affirming work, community, and the like.

What's the rush?

As the wise ones say, "Days are long but years are short."

Narrative Medicine And The Cross-Over To Law School And Law Practice.

What do internists, especially ones practicing narrative medicine, have to tell law students and lawyers? Quite a lot.  And all it will take is 39 minutes of your time.

Rita Charon, MD, PhD. a nationally renown physician, writer and educator as well as Executive Director/Founder, Program in Narrative Medicine College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University is at the top of the game of Narrative Medicine.

Click here to attend the Department of Medicine Division of Medical Humanities presentation "Narrative Medicine: Accuracy, Evidence, Allegiance, Joy" as Dr. Charon discusses the importance of the medical narrative as a tool for physicians to better understand their patients and themselves, and it's role in training a new generation of doctors.

What is so fascinating to this former pediatric nurse, life-long storyteller and litigation consultant is the cross-over between Dr. Charon's ideas on the dividends of narrative medicine and those that can be reaped in law schools and law practices.

Highlights with my comments in [brackets]:

*    Medicine must go beyond the bounds of knowledge with differential diagnostic brains.  That kind of fact-based thinking is inadequate to the task.  [Likewise, our reliance on "the facts and only the facts" gives us a distorted view of what happened to our clients and what matters to them.]

*    Illness unfolds in stories.  The thing that is amiss in the body tells the self that there is something the matter and eventually that story comes to the attention of the healthcare provider who will turn around and tell it to a colleague.  The idea being that the telling and retelling should lead one to know what to do.  [How do you see yourself in the internist's shoes?]

*    Medical stories are a matter of ongoingness.  A doctor's duty is to develop a sense of story that takes into account devastation, loss, grief, magnitude of hurt and pain.  [Our clients are in the same boat - and we are there with them.]

*    The big question: Are you available to receive the story, to “co-hear” the narratives of illness, to train yourself to know accurately and fully what the patient expresses to be more effective in care?  [For lawyers, are we available to hold the space for the client so we develop different skills interviewing our clients, determining what the problem is and how to remedy it?]

*    You must learn to heed the story, learn from the story, learn the skills to recognize it, stand in the gathering of the story and work with the patient and family - to experience what the patient and family go through and for the patient to learn what the healthcare people experience.  [Who here has often desired that ability to co-hear with our clients and our clients families?  We are walking parallel roads with these internists.]

*    What are the dividends?  We find this practice helps improve cohesion of healthcare teams, minimize burn-out, increase empathy, encourage taking on the perspective of another person, feeling a growth in affiliation with their colleagues and others, listening attentively and less defensively, recognizing the unique dimensions of colleagues, using parts of the brain that had gone fallow, and recognizing that stories are total storms rather than the typical pattern of beginning, middle and end.  [What would you give for similar practical and human dividends in your practice?]

*    Narrative medicine helps medical students and doctors stop squandering evidence by learning to retrieve it in narrative, grasping the patent's story in words and learning to plumb the meaning of the evidence.  [For lawyers that meaning will carry over to the trier of fact.]

*    When doctors are fortified with the competencies of listening, curiosity, empathy, imagination their practice changes, they make authentic contact with the patient cleared of biases and other fsact-gathering screens.  [All anyone wants is to be heard, even for a moment.  After you have given the client the chance t tell their story you can go back and collect the data you need for the lawsuit.] 

Dr. Charon's makes this introduction to every patient: " As your doctor I face you so you can express to me what you are going through in words - please tell me what you think I should know about your situation."  She sits with her hands in her lap and absorbs what happens.  By inviting the account she can learn without shoe-horning the patient into her own fact list.  [Beginning with law school we can encourage the development of attentive listening. It wil flow over to practice.  Imagine th transformations.]

I invite you to spend 39 minutes and change your practice with practical and human dividends.