Interview with Mystery Author Marilyn Levinson

Mystery Author Marilyn Levinson

***

Because I joined Sisters in Crime back in 2007, and then the Guppies subgroup (the Great Unpublished), I came to know Marilyn Levinson on the GuppyPressQuest list, those of us looking to publish our mysteries through small presses. I learned that Marilyn had also been a Malice Domestic finalist, and she, too, had failed to get a publishing contract with a big house, even though she, unlike I, had an agent. We had both turned to the small presses, and she found success with a couple of small e-presses, doing electronic books. I asked her to give us more information about her books and her publishing experience. Here’s what she has to say. Her new e-book is called A Murderer Among Us, and is available on Kindle (at Amazon.com), Nook (at Fictionwise.com) Hard copies may be found at http://bit.ly/kOZgcz. Her website is:
http://www.marilynlevinson.com/

***
　When did you begin writing? Why?


I was an avid reader from the moment I learned to read, which is probably why I started writing stories in the third grade. I still have that notebook filled with stories. I began a novel -- a mystery, I believe -- but since I hadn’t plotted it very well, never got beyond Chapter One.
When and why did you begin writing mysteries?

I’d published several books for children when I started writing mysteries for adults. Actually, I first wrote two romantic suspense novels, then switched to mysteries. Why? I can’t say. I love mysteries because there’s a puzzle and an element of suspense. Why is someone so determined to get rid of someone else, he/she’s willing to do away with that person? And, of course, there’s the satisfying resolution at the end. Justice is served, in most cases.
Is A Murderer Among Us your first mystery? When did you write it? Is it part of a series?

A Murderer Among Us is actually the second mystery I wrote. The first will be published in the spring. I wrote A Murderer Among Us a few years ago. My sleuth is older, kind of like me.<g> Lydia is a widow, which I’m not, and was CEO of her own company, not me, again. She has two grown daughters who always seem to need her mothering. (I have two sons.<g>) I think we write more autobiographically in our first novels. And yes, I’ve written a sequel, called MURDER IN THE AIR.
Tell us about your journey to publication with this book.

I’d sent this book out to traditional publishers and agents. No one seemed interested, so I set it aside and wrote more novels. Then I decided to try epresses. I sent this ms to Wings ePress, and heard back a few weeks later, on April 9^th, that they wanted to publish it June first. Wow! A wonderful editor went over the ms, which she felt was very clean. No changes were necessary.
Why did you choose to write about retirees in a gated community?


Good question. I live in a gated community with people of all ages, though many are senior citizens. I chose a retirement community because I feel these days we older folk are vital and full of life. Also, older people have more secrets in their past, which make for interesting characters.

How have you found it to be published by an e-book publisher? Share that experience.

I was pleased that my book came out so quickly, and that it had a great editor and that I had input into the cover -- something I never had with my children’s books. I discovered I had to contact reviewers, do guest blogs, get my name out there. But that’s pretty much what my friends who are published with traditional houses have to do. I was disappointed that the eversion of my book didn’t go immediately to Kindle, as that’s where esales are.
Do you have comments from readers or reviewers you‚d like to share?

Two Wings ePress authors who offered to read and review my book gave me wonderful reviews. Both mentioned not being able to put it down. Fran Lewis has reviewed my book, loved it and has instructed me to send her all future books to read and review. I’ve just sent a PDF copy to a reviewer in Australia, so the book is getting around. And a fellow children’s book writer called today to tell me how much she loved my book, and that she’d mailed it to a mutual friend.
What other books have you published and where, when?

My other books are: AND DON’T BRING JEREMY (Holt) out of print; A PLACE TO START (Atheneum) out of print; THE FOURTH-GRADE FOUR (Holt) out of print; RUFUS AND MAGIC RUN AMOK (Marshall Cavendish) was selected by the International Reading Association and the Children’s Book Council for "Children’s Choices for 2002 out of print; and NO BOYS ALLOWED! (Scholastic) -- in print since 1993.
Do you have a work in progress now? Is it part of a series?


I’ve just completed MURDER THE TEY WAY, which is part of a series. The first book in the series, MURDER A LA CHRISTIE, was a 2010 Malice Domestic finalist. My sleuth, Lexie Driscoll, leads a Golden Age of Mystery book club, and gets many of her clues from mysteries she reads with the members of her book club.
Tell us your experience as a member of Sisters in Crime, and GuppyPressQuest, in particular. Has that been helpful? How?

I must have joined Sisters in Crime over ten years ago, because I remember being part of a critique group with fellow Guppies then. Did I mention I LOVE the Guppies and have wonderful Guppy friendships? In 2010 I attended Malice for the first time, and came away knowing I wanted to form a Long Island chapter of Sisters in Crime. Months later I co-founded the group with my friend and fellow author, Bernardine Fagan. Currently, I’m the Prez of LI SinC. As for GuppyPressQuest -- I’ll be sending out MURDER A LA CHRISTIE to small presses, so I look to GuppyPressQuest as the very source I’ll be needing.<g>

What benefit to you has it been to go to mystery conferences like Malice Domestic?

For me, the biggest plus was getting to meet fellow Guppies. Next year I’ll have two mysteries to promote.
What else would like to say about A Murderer Among Us?


I think it’s a quick but provocative read. It’s about new beginnings, murder and mayhem, secrets, and relationships. I love writing relationships, be they romantic, friendship, familiar.

Living to Work instead of Working to Live

Nadya's fruits and vegetables, village on the Volga in the summer.
***

THAT INNER CIRCLING SUN XX. May 29, 2011

Quotation from Dorothy Sayers's essay:  "Why Work?"  1947.


... Work is the natural exercise and function of man–the creature who is made in the image of his Creator...work is not primarily a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker’s faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental, and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers himself to God....his work is the measure of his life, and his satisfaction is found in the fulfilment of his own nature, and in contemplation of the perfection of his work...every man should do the work for which he is fitted by nature...we should no longer think of work as something that we hasten to get through in order to enjoy our leisure; we should look on our leisure as the period of changed rhythm that refreshes us for the delightful purpose of getting on with our work... We should all find ourselves fighting, as now only artists and the members of certain professions fight, for precious time in which to get on with the job–instead of fighting for precious hours saved from the job....

For Sam and Marie

A sunflower volunteered among the pea vines,
and by the time I was feeding spent vines
to the hens, it began to open its gold disk,
facing East, not toward the greatest sun
source, which is west in the hot afternoon.
Like me, it stands alone. I have friends,
but who else makes obeisance to my deeply
planted Inner Sun? She said, "I know no one
who lives closer to Sayers’s idea of doing
one’s true work, and that’s a compliment."
I was startled that she understood, when I’ve
wanted new words to tell the old tale of
"serving God." What else is it but that,
and yet the God word often builds fences,
and I like to take down barriers that hold
people apart. Doubts circle, too, like
the mosquitoes that find my bare arms
and legs when I water vegetables in the
evening air. I return to my vocation,
rather, three of them: writing, teaching,
farming. I write as I breathe. Words rise.
I can turn a field of sunflowers in my
direction with "news that stays news"*
and is more needed than ever: "Be who
you are. Live the life you are meant to live.
Let Truth dwell in your inmost being."
When I teach, I stir fire in those who also
write and wish to live more dedicated
to their work, make time for their infant
vocations. Do we recognize a call to do
our own work well in our time? If we
listen, we can hear it. So much din
in our world, but we know how to quiet
din. Humankind is good at shutting out
the querulous, demanding voices when
we choose to. The hens rush toward me,
raucous, when I appear on the back porch,
but they can wait while I pull the weeds
to be their afternoon tea break. Everything
can wait while we still our souls to listen.
"Growing one’s own food is more noble
than to be religious," asserts the Talmud.
A deeper truth lies hidden there: to dig
and weed, to assure the plants have
food and water they need, to observe
weather shifts and note insect pests,
to harvest at the right time, to feed
ourselves "power vegetables," as
Melissa convinced her children she
was growing, is to be handmaiden
to the great earth cycle of death and
resurrection, of the awe-inspiring
transformation of seeds to plants
many feet high, carrying, for our benefit,
their life-sustaining fruits. I live to write
and teach. I have enjoyed many kinds
of work, but only I can write my books
and find my words. Only I can establish
and protect a life that nourishes me
and my work. Only I can have this inner
certainty that, sooner or later, my words
and my life, as lived, will matter, will
feed that field of sunflowers turning in
my direction, while I, quietly, persistently,
face East, toward the Rising Sun, or some
would say, toward God, that Inner Sun
I call my Deep Self.

* Ezra Pound’s definition of literature in The ABC of Reading.
***
I've had some trouble posting Marilyn Levinson's interview, so I'm trying this one first.  Hopefully this one will "publish" and then Marilyn's.  JH

What It's Like to Be an American Poet

A sustainable Chatham County Farm.  Look Delicious?  It is.

***

A local poet, Chris Bouton, emailed me some questions she’d found and thought interesting. Thanks, Chris. It gave me a jumping off point for today’s blog.  If you are also a writer, try answering these questions, substituting writer for poet, if need be. 

***

1) When did you start writing and what motivated you?

I began writing at age 7, when put to bed with rheumatic fever for a year–stories and their illustrations. I had a lot of time on my hands. I began writing poetry at age 13, when my feelings became much stronger and bewildered me. I wrote to understand myself better. I still do.

2) Who are the writers who first inspired you to write and who are the
writers you read now? What’s changed?

I remember, in choosing my own books from the library, age 10 on, that I felt like there was something missing in all the books I read. I decided I’d have to write my own books to put that missing quality into books. What was it? My best guess is that it was my own way of seeing the world. I’ve always been interested in subtle and unusual perceptions about the natural world and human beings.

In childhood I read Louise May Alcott (I identified with Jo in Little Women, Nancy Drew mysteries, Robert Louis Stevenson’s poetry, Frances Hodgson Burnett (The Secret Garden). In high school my English teacher, Mrs. Francis Dunham, gave me a long reading list to do and also read everything I wrote and critiqued it. On the list were classics, like Lorna Doone, Jane Austen, Vanity Fair, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights. I also read The Odyssey in a simplified version, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Coleridge, T.S. Eliot. She made us write short in-class essays every Monday. She suggested I write in blank verse, like Shakespeare, and soon I was doing that easily and without working at it. I also read Thoreau and Emerson under her. I loved Walden. I still do. I try to simplify my life as much as possible. My early poetry was in response to the natural world and to my feelings. It still is.

T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound were important for my poetry, as Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust for my prose writing. Curiously, I think Homer was a huge influence–he’s the Western literary beginning for both songs (poetry) and stories (fiction).. He always made me feel like writing, and my present normal narrative poetry writing mode is loosely based on Robert Fitzgerald’s meter in his translation of The Odyssey.

I was able to read Homer in Greek in college, and eventually read all of The Iliad in Greek the year before I began graduate school in Classics at U.C.-Berkeley. Pound’s ABC of Reading gave me a reading list, which I later used to frame the writing courses I taught (Roadmap to Great Literature for New Writers) in the Durham and Burlington public libraries. I still get my students reading classics in writing courses I teach.

I’ve read widely in the classic poetry, early 20^th century, and internationally, modern Greek poets, Ancient Chinese, Neruda, Lorca, Russian like Akhmatova, Esenin, Pushkin, and Mandelstam. Mostly now I read poetry in connection with classes I teach. Proust and Woolf have also influenced my poetry, Sappho, Catullus, Chaucer, many more.

Apart from classes, I read mysteries and since 1991 I’ve written them, seven to date. I write a poem normally every Sunday morning, books of 30 poems, each poem having a number. The current book, excerpts being on this blog from time to time, is That Inner Circling Sun. I’ve written probably forty books of poetry now, only five of which are in print. I give poems away at the weekly Pittsboro Farmers’ Market and also email them to friends.

3) How important is 'everyday life' to your work?

Everyday life is very important to my poetry. I have often sat outside, by a creek, river, or sea, to write, and everything going on in my life and mind and the world around me can come into the poems. If there’s a drought, it gets into the poem. If I have a new grandchild, that’s goes into the poem. I quote what people have said to me, positive and negative. In recent years imagery from my farming comes into the poems. I used to write a lot about love. Now I write more about what I think. But years ago Charles Eaton praised my poetry for containing "thought felt things."


4) What is the role or place of subjectivity in your poetry?

Like Proust, I believe in trusting the deep places, or what he would call subjectivity. I call it the Muse, and trust that the Muse will send up what I need to write about.


5) Do you see your work in terms of literary traditions and/or broader
cultural or political movements?

I do feel that I’m part of the literary tradition, but I also tune into cultural and political realities. I like what Eliot said about how a fine new writer’s work becomes part of the tradition and subtly rearranges all the other writers in that tradition. I hope my work will do that one day.

6) What aspect of writing poetry and working as a poet is the most challenging?

For American poets, the hardest part, for me, too, is being generally unacknowledged. It’s possible to publish one’s poetry through small presses, but it’s still uphill work, especially if you’re not writing like most people around you are. Americans generally aren’t reading poetry, but I have found that some people read mine who don’t normally read poetry, including farmers and customers at the farmers’ market.

George Seferis, who won the Nobel Prize, said he was content if he had three readers. I have more than that, and I am content, but I would like to get more books in print, and I need to work on that.

7) What reading, other than poetry, is important to your work as a poet and why?

All reading is important, but maybe especially rereading Proust with a small group of people, as I am in 2010-11, is important now. We finish the whole book by Thanksgiving this year. It reminds me of my vocation as a writer as well as stimulating images and perceptions. There’s nothing like Proust for a serious writer, in my opinion. This is my third time through the whole book, and each time I see new things, learn new things, benefit immensely.

8) What is ‘American poetry’? Do you see yourself as an ‘American’ poet?

American poetry is what American poets write. I am very much an American poet. I’m not always proud of my country’s behavior to its own citizens or to those in other countries, but in the very best sense of the word, I am American in style, ideas, spirit, commitment to truth and justice, outspokenness, plain speaking, no nonsense, and I have friends in all "classes" in this country, from the rich to the poor, educated to self-educated, and in all the various ethnic groups. I love our diversity.

When abroad, I’m aware that everywhere there are hurtful prejudices based on origins, education, background, language, religion. Here we are in the midst (still) of a great experiment. Can we live together in a peaceful society? Can we all live together on the planet, without destroying it or each other? I hope my writing helps break down stereotypes, emphasizes the love that should tie people together, and brings to light real truths, important truths about human life here and now. That to me is being an American.

9) What is the current state of American poetry, as you see it?

Generally speaking, in Pound’s thoughts, we are in an age where the language of poetry is in good condition, and a lot of people are writing poetry. Perhaps we are entering now the age of poetry he called "watered down." But few now are writing outstanding, memorable poetry that speak to the hearts of everyday experience, to those who don’t write poetry but would like to have fresh insights and understanding for their own lives.

Once someone told me she couldn’t put my book down. That was Light Food. Recently, at the Farmers’ Market, a customer told me his wife cried when he read her my poem. Those are the rewards I’m looking for. I think that’s what poetry is supposed to do: speak to the heart and mind, help us see freshly our own experience.

How do you think American poetry might best develop in the next ten years?

Those who are serious about their poetry writing would be advised to read in the classics of all cultures, to travel, to learn about other people’s lives, to realize that the poet, potentially, is at the peak of the arts, since her work involves music, words and meaning, and imagery. And, if she’s wise, she can speak to the minds and hearts of all. I’d love to see American poetry develop in that direction. Some very good poets are writing, but most of those aren’t getting much attention. Maybe gradually they will. I hope so.

10) How is poetry relevant or valuable to contemporary society and
culture in the U.S. and/or at an international level?

Poetry, though difficult to translate, can reach across all the barriers people put up to keep others out, because it is essentially about feelings and about what it’s like to live in this world with other people. So of course it’s important to our society and culture, and to cultures and societies everywhere. Poets are sometimes loved and given adulation, sometimes hated and killed, and sometimes ignored. But if they get their words on paper and preserved in books and libraries, maybe it’s not so bad to be ignored in the short run. Better than getting confused by adulation or killed for speaking the truth.

Successful Aging

This is Ksenia, with lilacs a little while back.  Her mother, aunt, and grandparents are all painters.

***

THAT INNER CIRCLING SUN XI. January 16, 2011

Successful aging then means we let
our visionary Self drag our resisting,
comfortable, stubborn self that hates
change, far enough to see a new landscape
and join in the general rejoicing. I do
love to be here, work, write, rest, see to
the hens and the crops. After years the
wider world beckons, not this time
to explore and learn from, test myself
against, but to win the friends of
my books, my private visions and
secret knowledge set afloat in a place
"of sufficient depth." My words, too,
like Proust’s, will have to win their way
in that farther world that stretches way
beyond what even I can imagine. Yet
out there are souls hungry for food I’m
able to prepare, feasts few have tasted,
and no one enjoyed to the full. I
wanted fame after my death, not before,
but time has ripened both me and my words.
My vision self is ready to show herself
more widely, to take new risks. If any one
thing is getting lost in our time, it is
integrity, being an integer, a whole,
knowing leaf to stem to root what one
believes, who one is, and practicing
always careful attendance on the Deep Source
of our human wisdom. Each day is
full to overflowing. Yet I keep up.
Even postponed tasks eventually get
done. Aging tempts one to be lulled by
routine, and the memory, too, is dulled
by repetition, by having no new tasks.
We may acquire new brain cells and keep
all our cells and their telomeres happy
and thriving, if we can bear to consider
change, upset what is familiar, uproot
ourselves now and then for good reason,
be persuaded to try the new for the sake
of our oldest, truest, deepest knowledge
and conviction. It’s no good to see visions
if you can’t help others see them, too, or
have words pour freely out upon the page
if no one ever reads those given words.
You have become rich, and it is time now
to give your riches away. Don’t worry.
This won’t impoverish you. Rather,
the little pot will continue to boil up
porridge, the caldron fill and fill again
with the gleaming gold of true words,
sincerely spoken, memorable, necessary,
and lasting longer than you yourself
will last. Do it, be it, cease to worry.
Whatever comes, in whatever disguise,
will bless you now and forever.
　
[I don't think I've posted this poem before.  My son has been visiting, and I can't say I'm on top of my life yet, but soon.  JH]

Transformation

This is my nine-year-old dog Wag, in her homemade box safe house.  If she's in it, nothing can hurt her.

***

Every day I must –Leyline 13
risk or die, care or grow stale, earn my place
on earth or yield it to others. To live well
is to love and to labor, else we leave behind
no sweet, flesh-ripened fruit.

Excerpt below from Proust and Pears, written in late 2010.

I’ve been looking over the earlier parts of this book. I haven’t looked back much as I wrote it because the momentum of my Muse and what I wanted to say has carried me forward like a stream of water after a good rain, but, even browsing now, I see that it all fits together. It makes a whole. I am producing fruit, and this particular year has been especially propitious for fruit. Just as the pear tree produced its hundreds of pears, so have I written so many hundreds of new pages.

I laughed in places–over my visit to Anna White and her choosing the wrong foot to diagnose. Over thinking that Proust, living in his cork-lined room, would not have had the privilege of opening the hen house door to see a hen in a foot deep hole she’d dug looking for tasty bits on the coop floor.

My life is all adventure. Since I began this journey of "my own self," I have had many adventures.  I’ve challenged so many people and situations, but I’ve had what it took to do it, to risk poverty, disapproval (of parents, friends, children, teachers, and other authority figures).

A professor at Indiana University, whom I liked, when I told him I was dropping out of my graduate courses in Comparative Literature, said I was asking to be run over by a steamroller. I don’t know how many times people have told me something couldn’t be done, and I’ve done it. Recently, at Central Carolina Community College, in 2008, the administrator in charge was sure there was no way there could ever be a Creative Writing Program there. Then she herself seemed to be the biggest obstacle, but we did it.

Go to Russia without money? Travel alone? I remember sitting with my too heavy duffle bag in the Leningrad train station at 8 A.M., in 1995, on a cold September morning, before me the mural of Lenin arriving in Moscow in 1918, to declare that the Revolution had succeeded, while I waited, cold, hungry, and getting sick (the train had been chilly and drafty) for Larissa to fetch me to her apartment. She did come and then everything was okay.

I’d had to call her, and the person on ticket duty told me I had to have Metro tokens to use the phone. In despair, I asked the policeman, and he got me the tokens. Thanks goodness. Then I could only leave a message with Larissa’s daughter. Would she get the message?

How Larissa nursed me with sage tea and hot milk with butter and honey, once we got to her apartment. No one bothered me while I waited for her, and yet I felt so alone, so alien, and yes, so scared.

When you take the risks I take, you come at times to such moments of doubt, even torment. Yet I’ve passed through them all and been a better, stronger person for it. I think of going to Robert’s, next door, when finally this house had closed, twelve years ago, and I had the key, to tell them I finally had the land, and being met at the door by his son, a big, burly young man who seemed both hostile and angry. Earlier, there had been Emma, Robert’s wife, who had said, "She’s like us." And her three-year-old grandson, Demetrius, who had run up to me and hugged my legs. I got through that.

I’ve had so many good people help me over the years, believe in me, respond to my writing, my spoken words, my efforts to do something worthwhile.

It doesn’t matter now that some people hated or distrusted me. Robert’s son smiles on me now, and his family have been so good to me the last twelve years.  The administrator writes to thank me when I help publicize the Creative Writing courses at the college. I sometimes change people’s minds about me. Some I never do, but so many people have loved and valued me that I would not have had reach out to me had I not taken the risks I took and encountered the hostility I encountered.

I call it transformation, when you go into difficult situations that need healing and have an effect–often by treating people well and sometimes by fighting with them.

Proust and Doctors, Me and Doctors

My new meadow from May 2010, with bird feeder.  30 pines came down to put sunlight in my orchard.

***
THAT INNER CIRCLING SUN XXII. June 12, 2011
 It is a marvelous thing that medicine should be almost as powerful as nature, should force the patient to stay in bed and, under pain of death, to continue a treatment. By this time, the artificially introduced disease has taken root, has become a secondary but true illness, the only difference being that natural diseases can get better, but never medical ones, for medicine knows nothing of the secrets of cure.


There is in our body a certain instinctive sense of what is good for us, as in our heart of what is right, which no doctor or medicine or theology can replace


We may acquire new brain cells and keep
all our cells and their telomeres happy
and thriving, if we can bear to consider
change, upset what is familiar, uproot
ourselves now and then for good reason,
be persuaded to try the new for the sake
of our oldest, truest, deepest knowledge
and conviction


If we build
our ordinary life so as to honor Her,
[our Muse] won’t be able to stay away.


If your conscience is clear and you remember
your own story, even after interruptions and
delays, the Muse will unlatch your back storm
door, left open to take in cool morning air,
stroke the cat rising to her touch, and settle
at your computer to add her own two cents
to every written word.


Once, when younger, we could fling
caution to the winds and cross those
boundaries of common sense and good
health: stay up all night, neglect our
teeth, luxuriate in rich desserts, be lazy
when we felt like it. Age teaches
consequences, the sooner the better.
Some gates are locked now, and we
venture out at our peril. Extra exertion
is possible if we rest well afterwards.
Our body will assist more than once in
reminding us with twinges in our knees,
toothaches, flashing lights where they
shouldn’t be, or indigestion after rich
food. Be grateful for these flashing
yellow hazard lights. Use your whole
self, think hard, work at those weeds,
plant more seeds, water burgeoning
fruit, relish fresh beets in butter,
blueberry pancakes swimming in syrup,
a fresh herb and onion omelet with
cheese. To be blunt, aging means dying,
a slow process in a healthy being–
inevitable, but nothing to fear, in fact.
Our whole life is one amazing process.
We arrive at fruit-bearing age, acquire
nourishment and water, the gardener’s
care and attentiveness, else no small
knobs that signal figs break forth as
summer pours down hot sun and enough
rain to give us hope. We guess at our
trees’ needs and our own. Tree or self,
the inward working lies hidden, but
we have healing light in us as well as
clouds that send no rain. "The body heals
itself," one doctor told me. If we let it.
If we calm our frightened heart and wait.
　–That Inner Circling Sun. XIX.That Inner Circling Sun XII. –. –That Inner Circling Sun XI.. –Proust, The Prisoner, p. 168. –Marcel Proust, The Prisoner, translated by Carol Clark, p. 165

The Divine Breath

Nadya's apples (growing in a village near the Volga, in Russia)

***

The Divine Breath?   I found an interesting passage in Maslow.

.... it looks as if there were a single ultimate value for mankind, a far goal toward which all men strive. This is called variously by different authors self-actualization, self-realization, integration, psychological health, individuation, autonomy, creativity, productivity, but they all agree that this amounts to realizing the potentialities of the person, that is to say, becoming fully human, everything that the person can become... ¹
 He says that some of the objectively describable and measurable characteristics of the healthy human specimen are:

1. Clearer, more efficient perception of reality²***

That’s all I’m doing, becoming the best person I can be. To do that, I must attend to my intuitive sense of what it is possible for me to do and to be. I must do my best, not run away or have false modesty.

Both Dante and Proust had had major visions–perhaps coming to them a little at a time–and the unconscious or Muse was giving it to them. They had, originally, in some sense, "seen" the whole.

That has happened to me, too, now, and is why I’m writing these books. What else can I say about that? What is it like? How is it different from my poems and my novels and how I’ve written them?

I was thirteen when I began self-consciously to write about my feelings–poems and diary–when I felt inside like a writer, when it became less of a choice and more of a necessity. I still didn’t fully believe I was a writer until my mid-twenties, when I resolved it by saying, "A writer is one who writes."

Now I know that a "great" writer is one with a vision, with a "call" so strong that other things must take second place, while I do, as Proust believed, "what only I can do." It is also one with a "hexis," as Jacques Maritain calls it, or a Muse: an inner state of being, a Gift as Lewis Hyde names it, or in Maslow’s framework, now that I have this ability to create, I must use it, and that is far more urgent than publishing it, or even typing it, and also more urgent than political activity or most of my social life.

I don’t know what will be in each chapter. I wonder if Dante knew who would be in each circle of hell before he wrote it. Maybe. Proust seems to have had a design for his cathedral book. I can’t say that I have a specific design. I’ve chosen titles for the books and the chapters, sometimes before I knew what would be in them. I never knew exactly. I take a phrase sometimes from a poem. I’ve done that a lot with this book.

When I wrote "The Divine Breath" as the title for this Chapter Twenty-One, I didn’t know what I’d write about for sure. My whole activity here is because of a mysterious and divine "breath," spirit, wisdom, deeply planted in me, which knows better than I do what I need to write about, what I have to say, and what other people need me to say. I need to write these things, and I trust that other people need me to write them for them. I am a messenger of this "divine breath" or Muse/Understanding/Flow of Words and Insight.

The Breath fills me and spills over. It makes me happy. I have been happy a lot and supremely happy on many occasions, but this is a fairly rare kind of happiness. I’ve felt happy before, and often, when words flowed, when enlightenment came to me as a gift, I had no way of predicting or forcing. I could only listen and wait, but when the words came to me, I must write them down. It was easy to rejoice and be fed by the experience itself, as well as by the new insights.

Sometimes it happened when writing a short poem. Sometimes, when writing a longer work, a diary novel, or a scene in a novel. What’s different now is that it’s bigger and more inclusive. It’s also a fusion of my daily life, including some of the interruptions, worries, reassuring moments, and surprises I experience day to day with a whole lifetime’s accumulated way of framing my experience and seeing the world. I can’t evaluate it from the outside, but, I guess, Proust couldn’t either, and his book got rejected by all the publishers, so he paid to have it printed, and then he won the prestigious Goncourt Prize, and Gide, one of the editors who’d rejected it, realized his mistake, his very stupid mistake.

I can’t know if other people will appreciate what I’ve done, and appreciate, I mean, in Henry James’s sense, to "appropriate, to make one’s own."

But I can do what I feel I have to do, which I have my whole life long. I’ve made errors because of inexperience or trusting people I shouldn’t have trusted, or because I was blinded by my own suffering, but I have followed my heart, my deepest sense of what I should do, even when it made no rational sense to me, even when it flew in the face of other people’s advice or pressure or attempts to control or change me.

Now I am rewarded. My whole experience and the wisdom that has accrued from it rests like a kind of sunken Atlantis in my mind, and I am writing it out, lifting it into the light of day, floating it a little at a time, and relatively effortlessly, to the surface, where everyone can see it–a task not unlike Proust’s or Dante’s, and yet my very own.

As I said before, I am now that writer I wanted to be. This may take me years, but the work is very worthwhile.
***
Excerpted from Proust and Pears: The Fourth Farm Book (unpublished)

2. More openness to experience.
3. Increased integration, wholeness, and unity of the person.
4. Increased spontaneity, expressiveness; full functioning; aliveness.
5. A real self; a firm identity; autonomy; uniqueness.
6. Increased objectivity, detachment, transcendence of self.
7. Recovery of creativeness.
8. Ability to fuse concreteness and abstractness.
9. Democratic character structure.
10. Ability to love, etc.