I was at a dinner recently for an organization that does important work in the arena of climate change and energy policy.  In the middle of a conversation I was having with the woman who edits their main publication, a man  came over to interrupt; for the next twenty minutes, the editor and I suspended our conversation while he chatted wittily about his sailing experiences.  (We did keep trying to return to the subject, an article I was trying to edit for her, but the strength of our lungs wasn’t up to outblasting the sails.) At dinner, my neighbor–a different man– brought me up-to-date on his life history, including his different career moves, and the difficulty he’d had in finding dogwalkers when he first moved to Chicago.

Studies of women and men in conversation show over and over that women use about a third of conversational time; men two-thirds, whether in work or in social situations.  Women who speak more than that are perceived as selfish, as conversation hogs, and the meeting or dinner party moves to isolate them. Films reflect this: women have not quite thirty percent of the speaking lines, and only one woman is usually allowed to speak in a scene, whereas many men may speak in the same scene. (why I like NCIS–Abby and Ziva both get to be on screen and speaking!)

At the dinner, I didn’t want to violate my time limit, but I did think maybe I could have thirty percent of the speaking time, not zero.  It did make me wonder what has changed in the last century, ever since Virginia Woolf wrote:

“Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting men at twice their natural sizes.” Without that power, “probably the earth would still be swamp and jungle.  The glories of all our wars would be unknown.”

Woolf adds that Mussolini and other tyrants insisted on the inferiority of women because if we “were not inferior, we would cease to enlarge” men.  Perhaps that is why it is so important to Justices Scalia, Roberts, Alito and Thomas that women be denied equal protection under the laws, but I must say, the dinner deepened my sense of depression over women’s estate.

For another take on the subject, look at Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg‘s recent commencement address to the women of Barnard.

People often ask me how much like V I Warshawki I am, and I have to say, not at all.  This morning I went out early to Lake Michigan with my dog, Callie.  She went in after a ball that was too big for her to pick up; she kept batting it with her nose and rapidly got rather far from shore.  I called but she wouldn’t abandon the ball.  I took off my clothes and went in after but she was further than my swim ability in such cold water (about 60 F) and I went back to shore hoping she might follow.  At 400 yards out she was too small for me to see her other than as a little blob on the water.  I was filled with despair but went back in up to my neck and stood calling “come” over and over and by some miracle she finally turned and swam to shore.

I was quite useless in the situation.  I’m sure V I would have picked up a lifeguard rowboat and rowed out to rescue  Mitch & Peppy, but me–I was physically feeble and emotionally distraught.  The only good thing is–I still have my dog.

And she, whole-hearted retriever that she is, wanted to turn around and go back to find the ball.

Come one, come all.  Test your storytelling against the world, or at least against other writers.

Printers Row, Chicago’s literary festival, is taking place June 4-5, on Dearborn Street south of Congress.  New books, used books, writers reading, readers writing–it’s all there!  We Mystery Writers always have a tent, and this year on June 4, from four to five p.m., we’re having a Flash Fiction contest.

Write a story that you can read in 5 minutes.  Choose one of the following opening sentences:

1) He wasn’t going to make it.

2) It was the smell that got to her.

3) Digging a hole six-feet deep was harder than he thought.

4) He’d have done it different if he’d known how much weight she’d gained.

5) They say a goldfish will eat anything.

Take it from there to anywhere.  Barb D’Amato and I will be judging.  Points will be awarded for everything from suspense to humor to coherence, and prizes will be awarded with a lavish hand.  The only goal is to have fun!

I went to New York last week for the Edgar banquet, where the Mystery Writers of America did me the honor of naming me a Grand Master.  It felt strange to join Dorothy Salisbury Davis, Rex Stout and Agatha Christie’s company, as if I were both old enough and distinguished enough for the honor.  In my previous post, I included the remarks I gave on accepting this honor, but I also wanted to post a few pictures.  I’m afraid I’m in most of the pix because I was getting people to take pictures of me with friends, but I hope some more wide ranging pictures will show up soon that I can add here.

Laurie Ferguson, a cherished friend, attended the party as Dorothy's representative

With Dorothy Salisbury Davis for her 95th Birthday

With Laura Lippman at the Edgars

Augie Aleksy and Tracy won the Raven for their stellar bookstore, Centuries and Sleuths

My husband, Courtenay Wright, still fits into the dinner dress he bought in 1949

Writer and editor Joanna Krotz, one of my oldest friends, arrives with Putnam publicity director Michael Barson

With my literary agent, Dominick Abel

The text of my acceptance speech for the MWA Grand Master Award is here–I’ll publish some photos from that magical exciting evening in a little bit.

I went to my first Edgar dinner in 1982.  I watched the icons of my reading life talking and joking, but I was painfully shy and didn’t try to introduce myself to anyone. I was seated at a table at the outermost reach of the Sheraton ballroom, and the highpoint of the meal was when a waiter slugged one of my tablemates for not relinquishing his salad plate on schedule.

I’m amazed, and grateful, to join the company of Grand Masters whose work I have long admired, but it is unsettling to realize how quickly 29 years have passed.

Many people helped me reach this point.  Stuart Kaminsky, whom we mourn, mentored me as I wrote my first book.  My agent, Dominick Abel, agreed to represent me all those years ago; he has never faltered in his support.

Thanks to my editor, Chris Pepe, and my publishers, Putnam, for their hard work, and their presence at the banquet.  (Although the company is known as GP Putnam’s Sons, it was George Putnam’s daughter Mary who was a leading 19th century writer and feminist.  It seems fitting that my novels bear the name of the woman who forced England to accept women as doctors.)

I have been fortunate in the friendship of Dorothy Salisbury Davis.  Her advice as a writer, and her guidance in the business of living, have been my lodestar for many years.

Above all, I thank my husband, the distinguished physicist Courtenay Wright, who has listened to 29 years of fears and self-doubts; his steadfast support has kept the wind beneath my sails. To him and to Dorothy, this award and these remarks are equally dedicated.

The world of books has seen major changes since my first Edgar dinner.  It had been hard for me to find a publisher for a woman PI in America’s heartland; now, as a result of the revolution I helped start, detectives of all stripes and locations are commonplace.

I was lucky: in 1982, there were many more publishers to approach than exist today.

We live in a world of conglomerated publishers and distributors; we writers are often told that we are not creating stories or characters, but brands, as if the chief difference between our stories and toilet paper is that you can’t upload Charmin to your iPad.  At least, not yet. In such a world it is hard to remember that we are storytellers, not accountants, marketers or vending machines.

This is not a new problem.  When Melville published Moby Dick in 1851, the reception by both public and critics was hostile: he had left his brand, his travelogue novels.  During Melville’s life, this astonishing masterpiece sold 500 copies.  In a bitter weariness, Melville wrote Hawthorne:

The silent grass-growing mood in which a [person] ought to compose – that can seldom be mine.  Dollars damn me.

Melville lived through times as turbulent as ours—slavery, the Civil War, the changes wrought by industrialization.  But ours is also a time that thrives on slick one-liners, and on lies, made easier to swallow because we devalue literacy.

Today, close to one in four American adults can’t read or write well enough to handle a job application, let alone read a novel.

It took a 12th-grade vocabulary for Melville to follow the Lincoln-Douglas debates, but our most recent presidential debates use the language of sixth graders.  Some candidates have devolved to the pre-school level.

We writers owe a duty to our gifts.  We’ve been given the gift of language, and we need to dig deep into words.  We need to relish wordplay, not rely on clichés as we stumble toward the marketplace, or settle for the slick, repackaged street-talk we pick up from rap and TV.

And we owe a duty to our other gift, our stories.  In the cacophony of sound that fills our broadband waves, amid the lies and shrill self-promotions, it is essential that we writers return to Melville’s silent grass-growing place and find the truths that fiction can lay bare.

Our fictions are myths, of course, not histories: they show heroes vanquishing monsters. Theseus versus the wicked Minotaur, Marlowe versus the wicked temptress, V I Warshawski versus the wicked corporation, they’re all the same story.

But these fictions tell essential truths, about our emotional lives, what we fear, what we want, what we need. Writing is a form of auto-surgery: the closer we cut to our own bones, force ourselves to emotional truth, the more authentic will our voices become.

As the poet Sappho wrote, more than 2600 years ago,

Although they are only breath

Words, which I command

Are immortal.

What we remember from Sappho’s time, and from Melville’s, are not brand-names nor spreadsheets, but poets. For in the end, it is that word which is only breath which endures.

I just came from seeing Black Watch, a play about the famed Scottish regiment put on by the National Theatre of Scotland.  The play is about the deployment of the regiment to the so-called Triangle of Death during the early years of the endless war in Iraq.  It’s about why young men join armies, about the history of the Black Watch regiment, and about what it’s like to serve in a war where the opponent’s main weapons are suicide bombers and IED’s.  Much of it was thought-provoking, and it was certainly well-acted.

My caveat was with the dialogue, which lacked shades of color, both in volume–almost all was shouted–and in content.  The dialogue was probably meant to mimic barracks dialogue,  but most sentences were so heavily laden with “fuck” and “cunt” that the tone of the piece became monochromatic.

I was wondering on the way home about writing dialogue.  My own view is that authentic recorded speech may not  get  you to the heart of your characters.  To show the inner mind of a teenage boy who is choosing between being a miner or a soldier (a choice the play presents) requires more subtle language than “fucking cunt fucking came to the fucking bar”.  That may be what the boy says, but it doesn’t show us what he thinks.

Black Watch on duty in Iraq

What do you think? Do you convey emotion with literally recorded speech? Can you convey authentic character with imagined speech?

I’m just back from a great trip overseas, touring in the UK for Body Work.  I did a few posts on Facebook along the way but I’ll try to share a few highpoints here.

Dogs.  Knowing how much I missed my Golden, Kerry Hood from Hodder brought Maddy into central London one morning so that I could have some dog time in Hyde Park.

Also in Hyde Park is a large human-made pond, the Serpentine, filled with all manner of water birds.  People come down to feed the birds, and dogs frolic nearby in the shrubs and lawns round-about.

Swans on the Serpentine, Hyde Park

Maddy circled the pond without a lead.  She eyed the bread put out for the ducks but on Kerry’s command abandoned it, and never once tried to jump into the Serpentine.  I realized that if Callie and I lived in London, we would spend all our time in Magistrate’s Courts, paying fines for jumping in among the birds.

Other dogs: a working dog in Glasgow that stood up and took applause any time Denise Mina or I roused a laugh.  An old man walking along the river in Carlisle, with his dog frolicking around him.  I followed as long as I could, thinking the scene looked straight out of the opening of Mill on the Floss. A lost dog in Toulouse, trembling with fear because it couldn’t see its mistress.  I handed her over to the park maintenance crew, who found her address screwed into a cylinder around her neck and promised to take her home.

Events Natasha Cooper helped me launch Body Work at Waterstones Piccadilly and Denise Mina did the same favor at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow.  Both women were as interesting and generous in person as they are in print and the audiences responded warmly to the warmth they could feel on the stage.

Reading Room at the Mitchell Library, Glasgow

Two sisters in their eighties attended the Glasgow event.  During the Q & A, one commented that the acknowledgements in my books are so long she couldn’t understand why mine is the only name on the jacket cover.  However, she stood in line, very erect despite a cane, and bought a book for her baby sister’s 80th birthday.

Bookwitch came to the Mitchell event, and took some lovely photos; thanks to her I can let you see Denise and me in all our glory.

Bookwitch's photo of Denise Mina and Sara Paretsky at the Mitchell Library

From there we went to Peebles for the Borders book festival, where Alistair Moffat did a Q & A.  On his first trip to Chicago, Mr. Moffat was put into Cook County Jail overnight until his wife posted $500 cash for a fender-bender.  Myself, I think they were shaken down–I never heard of anyone being locked up in County for a fender-bender.  Even so, he generously likes Chicago.  And was the most thoughtful interviewer I’ve encountered since the late great Studs.

We finished in the south at the Sandhurst library, where a great audience included a 14-year-old Emily Miles, who kindly helped me out of my windbreaker when the zipper stuck, and found my passport and wallet on the library office floor.  I was a tired and lucky writer to have her on board.

Reading on the Road Nancy Pickard’s Scent of Rain and Lightning. Nancy writes elegiacally about the landscape of the Great Plains as she tells a gripping story.  Emma Donoghue’s The Room; disturbing, hard to drain the troubling images out of the brain.  Edith Pearlman‘s Binocular Vision.  These are short stories, exquisite, haunting, satisfying. I started the Tiger’s Wife (not to be confused with the Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother) and the Uses and Abuses of Literature.  As we grapple with a nation where a quarter of adults can’t read and most people don’t read books, this is a thoughtful look at what literature does and doesn’t do in our lives.

The weather couldn’t have been more glorious for the whole trip.  Flowers bloomed, grass was green, trees were in leaf.  It was a terrible shock to return to Chicago, where it’s all still brown and cold.  In fact, when we landed and the pilot announced that the local temperature was 26 F I wanted to curl up in my seat while the cleaners prepped the plane and return to London.  But I climbed off, and now, after going through a 2 1/2 week pile up of mail, dust and laundry, will return obediently to work.

America’s great first Chief Justice John Marshall famously wrote, “The power to tax involves the power to destroy.” Today, the power to refuse to levy taxes is proving a more potent tool of destruction.

The arts in America cost roughly 29 cents per capita to fund. The arts did not cause our financial meltdown. Yet along with reproductive health, education, and care for the disabled, the arts are the first programs to be cut by the Draconian hands of our right wing congress and state legislatures.

In Kansas, one of the newly-elected governor’s first acts was to eliminate the state’s entire arts budget, thus saving approximately $522,000. I was in Kansas on March 3rd to receive the Kansas Arts Commission Distinguished Artist Award. This was a bittersweet evening, since it is the last time the state’s Arts Commission will exist, unless the legislature overrides the governor and restores funding. Many people in the state spoke eloquently on what the arts do for their small communities. I left the event awed by the hard work and dedication that people brought to making art possible in places remote from professional theaters, symphonies, or major art museums. A number of people have asked for a copy of my own remarks, and I am attaching them here:

I am proud to stand here tonight as a Kansan, with our long and strong tradition of freedom.  Our pioneer forebears brought this state free into the union 150 years ago this winter. We were fortunate in our first governor: one of Charles Robinson’s early acts after statehood was to establish the University of Kansas.  Coming into statehood after a long and bloody battle over slavery, Sara and Charles Robinson and their friends knew that the difference between slave and free was the difference between literate and ignorant.  They knew that an educated citizenry was our best guarantor of continued liberty.

The governor’s arts award, given in the spirit of those founders, has high value in my eyes. At the same time, I am sad that this may be the last occasion where Kansas celebrates the arts, because of the governor’s decision to end arts funding.  It is in this state, in our schools and in our soil, that my own craft was nurtured.  It is in this state and in this soil that William Inge and Langston Hughes were reared, the artist Louis Copt, the writer Nancy Pickard.  If we end support for the arts, we cut off a lifeline for our citizens.

I recently saw a museum exhibit on the history of writing.  I felt a sense of awe as I saw myself, one small person, one small voice, connected to a chain of storytellers that stretches almost 6000 years into the past.  The buffalo were roaming widely in eastern Kansas when the ancient Sumerians brought the written word to life.  Every poem we read, every equation we solve, sadly, every hate-filled message we post to a blog, we owe to that Sumerian miracle.

Writing probably developed so accountants could keep track of land and livestock ownership, but it quickly became the purview of poets.  And it is to poets, to musicians, to artists that we turn when we celebrate our joys or need help in enduring our sorrows.

We are enduring bleak times, indeed, in these United States, and we need the arts today as we never did in our prosperity.

In the aftermath of 9.11, musicians from America’s great symphonies went to Ground Zero, where they played through the night to support the hard work of the  first responders.  No one sifting through rubble for fragments of human bodies wanted to hear someone read an accounts payable list, much less an ideological diatribe.  They needed music, they needed poetry.

One of the first acts of totalitarian regimes is to control the arts and the written word.  In John Calvin’s Geneva, writers who disagreed with Calvin’s Protestant vision were burned at the stake. Nazi Germany moved quickly to outlaw, imprison and kill controversial writers and painters.  Last year’s Nobel laureate in literature, Liu Xiaobo, spent the awards ceremony in a Chinese prison for writing verse that didn’t uphold state-sanctioned values.

Here at home, we don’t murder or imprison our artists.  We starve them. About 275,000 books were published in the United States last year.  Despite this vast number, the Wall Street Journal estimates that fewer than a thousand writers earn enough from writing that they don’t need a day—or maybe a night—job to support themselves.  That’s about 2 out of every thousand writers.  Most writers earn around $28000 a year.

What do our artists have to say that merits public support?  Only a word that sustains life, that sustains hope.

My own most moving moment as a writer came one evening at a reading I’d given in a Chicago library.  A group of women stayed after everyone else had left.  They told me they were married to steelworkers who’d been out of work for over a decade.  These women worked two and three jobs to support their families.  They came to hear me read, they said, because my words gave them courage to face the hard hand life had dealt them.

That my work spoke to them in such a way does me more honor than I can rightly express.  This art’s award is a shorthand for every writer, every storyteller, poet, painter, singer, whose art has helped another person endure the dark night of the soul.

Around 600 BCE, the Greek poet Sappho wrote, “Although they are only breath/Words, which I command/Are immortal.”

We don’t today know the names of Lesbos’s accountants, nor what they had to say about poets and poetry.  (We do know the name of Pericles from nearby Athens, not from his spreadsheets, but because he funded some of the greatest art the world has ever known.)

Sappho lived through times as turbulent as our own.  Indeed, Governor Robinson founded the publicly-funded University of Kansas in times as turbulent as these, in the wake of the Civil War, the country in ruins, the future uncertain.

What we remember from our recent past, as well as ancient Greece, are not the account books. We don’t know the names of the brothers who controlled Greece’s fuel and precious metal industries.  Nor do we know how many billion drachmas they gave to this or that politician or judge.  We remember sculptors.  We remember Sappho.  For in the end it is poetry, that word which is only breath, that endures.

From Chapter 30 of the book with no name

My dreams were filled with Miles and Iva Wuchnik.  Iva climbed onto the catafalque to lie next to her brother. The top of the tomb was so thick with blood that she had to do the backstroke to keep from sinking in it.  Iva pulled the rebar from Miles’ chest and stuck it in her ear, where it turned into a giant cone for eavesdropping on cellphones.   Somewhere in the background I could hear Leydon chanting, In death they were not divided. Wade Lawlor appeared, holding a microphone.  Shame on Shame Lunski, he cried, murdering a hard-working vampire.

It was a relief to wake up, to find myself in my bedroom with sunshine seeping around the edges of the blinds, rather than swimming in Miles Wuchnik’s blood.  I sat in bed, hugging my knees to my chest, trying to remember the important points from my encounter with Iva.  I’d been too tired to write them up when I got home last night.

She’d gone on about Chaim Lunski: she saw him on television all the time, she’d said, wanting to fill America with illegal immigrants.  I didn’t think Lunski was on television—he wasn’t a publicity seeker.  Iva saw his face or heard his name on Wade Lawlor’s show.  Miles had been doing some dangerous investigations that would show up Lunski, Iva said.  And Lawlor would heap fame and glory on her brother.

I walked slowly to the kitchen to put on water for coffee.  Did that mean Lawlor had hired Miles Wuchnik?  The two-bit Berwyn PI and the man with the thirty-million-dollar annual contract from Global?  Wade Lawlor had hundreds of investigators at his command, but maybe he was spreading his net wide, trying to snare Lunski.

On a whim, I logged onto Lawlor’s website, to see if he was offering some kind of reward for nailing Lunski.  I didn’t see a header that said “Wanted, Dead or Alive,” but he did have a tip line.

If you have information on any topic Vital to the Survival of Our Republic and our Christian Values, email me: Wade.Lawlor@GEN.Net

Photos of some of his loyal viewers were shown, with a little blurb about the vital information they’d supplied.  Other tipsters hadn’t wanted to be publicly identified.  As I scrolled down, my own name jumped out at me.  An anonymous source had claimed that my mother was an illegal immigrant.

The fury I’d felt at the Herald-Star offices last night welled up in me again. How dared they, how dared they, these faceless, mindless, cowardly, jackboot-licking pond scum?  I was shaking with rage, halfway to my closet to collect my gun when I pulled myself together.  Who did I think I could shoot?  Lawlor? Harold Weekes, the head of GEN’s news division? Or just the guts of my computer?  Even if I could track down the anonymous tipster, what could I do about it—it wasn’t against the law to post messages about someone’s dead mother.

A night soon after I’d learned my mother was ill, that she might not get well came to my mind.

One of the women on south Houston whom Gabriella had scorched for her advice on how to control me—your daughter is a disgrace to the neighborhood, the woman had said, and Gabriella had said, she’s growing up to inhabit a larger world than you’ll ever visit.  As I walked past the woman’s house she’d spat out an insult about Gabriella, Melez, she’d called her.  I’d grown up hearing that Croatian word: my mother was a mongrel, a half-caste—half Jewish, they meant.  I’d jumped up the stairs in the dark and been on the point of punching her when my father materialized.

“Come on home, Tory” he’d said.

I was fifteen and as tall as he was, but he picked me up and carried me down the stairs.  He didn’t berate me and he wouldn’t listen to my side of the story.  He sat me down on our back stoop, where we’d listened in the darkness to Gabriella working on her breathing exercises: cancer was not going to still her voice, she was determined about that.

After a time, Tony said, “The worst cops are the ones whose gun is their first weapon, instead of their last.  The best cops go into a situation head-first, not hand-first.  You remember that, Tory: you get yourself into trouble you don’t need with that hot temper of yours.  And anger doesn’t make a bad situation better.  It depletes your strength and it depletes your mind.”

Nisha Susan, who had been using “VIWarshawski” as her twitter handle, graciously gave the name to me. You can now follow VI on Twitter.

I loved the suggestions people sent in as alternative handles before Ms. Susan got in touch with me, and I will be sending galleys of the next VI novel to three people for their creative suggestions:

VITweetFighter – Elizabeth Boskey

PitdogWarshawski – Lee Swerdloff

PIVIWarshawski – Cartsmartbaglady

I’m only about halfway through writing the next novel, so your rewards are someways in the distance, but if you will email me (VIWarshawski@mindspring.com) your mailing address, I will make sure you get galleys as soon as they are available.

Thanks to everyone who took part.