Calliope in Flight

Those who know Darraugh Graham well will not be surprised at the creativity and flexibility lying underneath his starched collars. Some of the names suggested by our image consultants were equally wonderful and powerful, but unfortunately had already been taken by other corporations. Thanks to all who helped out.

Nadja and Bag Lady, please send your emails to viwarshawski@mindspring.com.

Share/Save

Kate’s detective said that she herself owned a handgun, had a permit, was a pretty good shot, but she almost never carried a weapon, even though she routinely found herself in some of Boston’s crummiest neighborhoods and projects.

The reason? She said you unconsciously escalate conflict when you are carrying a weapon. It’s as if your unconscious mind is itching to pull the trigger. When she left her weapon at home, she said she found more creative ways to resolve problems.

I think of that advice often, and never more so than in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s murder. Whether a skinny kid in a hoodie really posed a threat to a big man in an SUV is something we may never know. But we can be pretty sure that if George Zimmerman hadn’t  been carrying a gun, he would have stayed in his SUV. Maybe the police would have come, maybe they would have roughed up a kid for wandering around a gated community while black, but Trayvon would still be alive.

Armies and governments follow the same psychology. Hard as I petitioned and prayed for peace in the run-up to our invasion of Iraq, I knew that once George Bush had deployed hundreds of thousands of soldiers and millions of weapons to the Persian Gulf, his trigger finger was itching so painfully that nothing would keep him from shooting first.

If George had kept his personnel and weapons at home and let the UN inspectors do their job, we would not have 4400 dead American service men and women, 31000 with terrible injuries, 110000 Iraqi civilians killed and many millions left homeless. We would have the $3 trillion we’ve spent on this war to use for schools, roads, and maybe even health care.

Unknown U.S. Soldier in Iraq

Right now, I think it’s a pretty hopeless battle to gain a modicum of control over weapons of destruction, mass or otherwise, in the United States. Every time you take off your clothes in the airport, remember that the NRA has battled relentlessly not just to allow George Zimmerman a conceal carry permit, but to make sure anyone on a terrorism watch list gets a free pass on owning and carrying a weapon. The Patriot Act puts more controls on looking at what we read than on what we shoot.

Toilet in Utah wounds man whose concealed weapon went off

Perhaps we will read more such uplifting stories in the future.

And state legislatures believe the only controls that should be legislated are on women’s vaginas. Cry, my beloved country.

Share/Save

Inside the Chicago Public Library

Here was the best part: John Mahoney and Amy Morton from Steppenwolf did a staged reading of the first chapter from Indemnity Only, the first novel I wrote. I can tell you that Amy Morton is V I Warshawski. The words sound way better when she reads them than when I write them, and I have a new fantasy, that I can persuade Disney to do a TV series and that she would agree to play V I.

Rick Kogan, who is the most generous and thoughtful interviewer I’ve known since the late great Studs died, did a Q & A with me on the stage, Steven Albert from the Court Theatre brought my husband and me and some friends drinks at dinner afterwards, and a good time was had by all.

My thanks go to Craig Davis and all the staff at the library, and to the publicity team at my publishers, G P Putnam’s, who worked together to make this wonderful event happen. And a big thanks and bow to Amy Morton and John Mahoney. It thrilled me to the core to share a stage with them.

Share/Save

You could be a winner

V I’s most important client is a man named Darraugh Graham. He played a central role in the novel Blacklist, and a major supporting role in Body Work. Darraugh is the CEO of a fuzzily-imagined conglomerate which I called “Continental United,” after doing a name search to make sure there was no such company.

Guess what? There is now a company called Continental United, the merger of those two big airlines. Rather than deal with lawyers and correspondence and all those time-consuming tsuris, I’ve decided to rename Darraugh’s company.

Darraugh is a good guy with impeccable manners. The company name needs to imply something international, but not be tied to a specific industry, since V I’s needs to get inside information about different industries changes from book to book.

Come up with the best new name for Darraugh’s company, and you will get a V I commemorative flashlight, along with a signed copy of Breakdown.

Share/Save

First of all, like Shylock, I bleed when you prick me, so angry letters do sting, but they also make me start wondering what my writing should and shouldn’t be.

Second, I don’t try to write political novels. I write novels that spring out of contemporary social issues, because those provide a fertile field for crime. I come from a place where radio and TV shows routinely call the President “A Muslim terrorist,” or “Muslim socialist.” The leader of the state legislature recently sent an email to his “A” list calling for prayers for the President’s death and referred to the First Lady as “Yo-Mama.” Tea party rallies, in their heyday, would show caricatures of the President with crude racial slogans.

These political/social realities caused me to create an African-American politician who gets subjected to the same abuse that has been ladled onto the President. I don’t know if that makes the book so political that it can’t be read for entertainment. After all, that’s what I am–an entertainer. Would my books be more entertaining if they featured disputed wills and missing children, instead of people struggling with First and Fourth Amendment freedoms?

My novel Blacklist actually featured a villain who had impeccable progressive credentials but some readers hated it because it also included an Egyptian boy who was a refugee on the run–for those readers, Blacklist was too political–they said I was siding with terrorists. Like President Obama, apparently.

I don’t know what the answer is, as I start work on a new novel. How much should I shape my writing, my story-telling, in response to your expectations?

Share/Save

Reading at Vroman's in Pasadena

After dinner, we went up to the lounge in the Langham hotel where they have a typewriter Ernest Hemingway used when he was covering World War II from London. Guests were invited to write a letter on the machine, and I did so, sending one to my friend and mentor Dorothy Salisbury Davis. Those of you who know Ms. Davis know that she never has migrated to a computer, and continues to write on her old upright, so it seemed fitting. I learned to type on a manual Underwood myself, but I had forgotten how much wrist strength is needed to hammer those keys. I gave up after a couple of paragraphs filled with overstruck letters from jamming the keys. A couple of Canadian journalists who were in the lounge wanted to show off for my friend and her 14-year-old daughter, so they started pounding away, only to discover that they, too, had lost the magic of the manual machine.

Showing off with Hemingway's typewriter

I don’t seem well-organized mentally these days. Every place I went on the road I left something behind, usually not an object of huge importance, but I abandoned my iPad in Palo Alto, and without the generosity of Sherry Barson, who was driving me, I would have been a sad and sorry writer. Sherry added two hours to her homebound commute to make a rendezvous with the event coordinator, retrieve my iPad and bring it to my hotel, which was as far from her own home as could be imagined.  Another good Samaritan was United flight attendant Kelly Linn, who found my journal in the pocket of my airplane seat and took the trouble to track me down and mail it to me. I don’t know what’s wrong with me these days–hope it isn’t plaque build-up in the brain–but I am definitely not firing on all cylinders. Perhaps after a month of puppy therapy with my Golden all will return to more or less normal.

My luckiest event of the tour was my trip to Toronto to take part in the Toronto Star’s “Star Talk” series at the Toronto Public Library.  I got to the airport at 6:30 in the morning so I could catch the early flight, but the Toronto airport was shut  because of dense fog.  After sitting at the airport for 8 hours, doing my back exercises behind a row of chairs, wandering from food bar to food bar, our flight was suddenly called. We were the only flight to make it in from Chicago that day, and why they cleared us I’ll never know–we couldn’t see the ground in Toronto until our plane was level with the Harbor front skyscrapers–but I got there just in time to take part in the series. It was a great event, well organized and incredibly well attended, and a brilliant conversation afterwards at dinner with the paper’s publisher and editor and a woman from the library. They were inveighing, as we in Chicago have been doing, about cuts to the library budget. Margaret Atwood has been a passionate advocate for the library, but the mayor of Toronto said he’d never heard of her and didn’t care what she had to say! However, their city council certainly had and forced the mayor to back down. I wonder if Rahm has heard of me, Stuart Dybek, or any of the other writers who have been trying to get our libraries back up to full staff and full hours?

Share/Save

Share/Save

I’ve been interested to read some of the worldwide coverage. Of course this story makes perfect pundit-fodder, and many pundits have sternly chastised Ms Sullivan for her rudeness in saying Mr. Brownback “sucks.” Perhaps she should have said, in 140 characters, “The governor’s style closely approximates that of Attila the Hun, or perhaps the angel of death, and our state will bear the scars of his destructive scythe for decades to come.”

(As of today, after the story went viral, the governor and principal have decided they “over-reacted.” Ms Sullivan need not apologize. The gov said free speech was our most “treasured” freedom. I don’t know if this is the place to point out that the First Amendment, which guarantees our freedom of speech, includes that pesky little separation of church and state clause. Which Mr Brownback apparently thinks is a fly speck on the Constitution, since I’ve been told that a number of his staffers begin meetings by saying, “I’m a Christian and we start meetings with Christian prayer.” The Kansas legislature also has a chaplain who hands out photocopies of Bible texts and commentary to state agencies to start the week with a bang. No money for the arts, but plenty for photocopying religious tracts.)

Closer to my current home, Chicago, our state attorney general went to court to enforce the state’s parental notification law for pregnant teens seeking abortions. In going to court to support the law, Ms Madigan, whom I’ve always liked and supported, went a little overboard: she said the state constitution’s guarantee of citizens’ rights to privacy doesn’t include our right to abortion.  Meaning that women’s bodies are not our own, that the state has an overriding interest in regulating us.  I think the logical next step is a law requiring all abortion providers to operate in open-air tents so that everyone can watch. Like Kansas, Illinois has major and serious budget issues, but, like every other state in the union, not to mention the U.S. Congress, the only legislation our state gets really enthusiastic about is how to add ever more burdens to women of all ages who want contraception or abortion services. (As of November 30, the state supreme court has agreed to hear Ms Madigan’s arguments and has further decided to let some conservative Catholic groups testify with her.)

I forgot another arena where we have a lot of enthusiastic legislation: making it illegal for citizens to video cops. When police sprayed pepper spray into protestors’ eyes on the UC-Davis campus, they claimed it was in response to student violence. A video of the scene showed no crowd violence, just a row of seated people getting sprayed as if they were aphids on the tomatoes. In a November 28 column, Leonard Pitts recounts the story of Emily Good, who was arrested for videotaping a police traffic stop in front of her house. He goes on to detail a number of jurisdictions that are passing laws against photographing the police in the performance of their duties.

We are a society under constant surveillance by our government. We’re a society gripped by fear, and there’s nothing like surveillance to add to paranoia. But we’re also a society with huge economic problems. I’d love to see our legislators grappling with those problems for a change.

Share/Save

What I would like less of in the year to come: war, mean-spiritedness, religious zealotry, political zealotry, disrespect, homelessness, worrying about making it to the next paycheck or the next shelter to find a meal, lies about how much radiation came out of Fukushima, lies about people who can’t find work, lies about pollution, poverty, God, women, men, children, dogs, cows…

What I would like more of: peace, peacefulness, play, playfulness, homes, jobs, a time not to work, a time not to be online, time with friends, more time with friends, did I say peace?

Share/Save

Years ago, when I was in my twenties, I heard an interview with the composer Aaron Copland.  The interviewer asked why it had been over a decade since Copland’s last completed composition.  I thought the question was insensitive but Copland’s answer frightened me: “Songs stopped coming to me,” he said.

I wasn’t a published writer at the time, but I was a lifelong writer of stories and poems.  These were a private exploration of an interior landscape.  My earliest memories include the stories that came to me when I was a small child.  The thought that these might stop (“as if someone turned off a faucet,” Copland also said) seems as terrifying to me today as it did all those years back.

I write because stories come to me.  I love language, I love playing with words and rewriting and reworking, trying to polish, trying to explore new narrative strategies, but I write stories, not words.  Many times the stories I tell in my head aren’t things I ever actually put onto a page.  Instead, I’m rehearsing dramas that help me understand myself, why I act the way I do, whether it’s even possible for me to do things differently. Where some people turn to abstract philosophy or religion to answer such questions, for me it’s narrative, it’s fiction, that helps sort out moral or personal issues.

At night, I often tell myself a bedtime story—not a good activity for a chronic insomniac, by the way: the emotions become too intense for rest.  When I was a child and an adolescent, the bedtime stories were versions of my wishes.  They usually depicted safe and magical places. I was never a hero in my adventures; I was someone escaping into safety.

As a young adult, I imagined myself as a published writer.  For many years, the story I told myself was of becoming a writer. Over a period of eight years, that imagined scenario slowly made me strong enough to try to write for publication. After V I Warshawski came into my life, my private narratives changed again.  I don’t lie in bed thinking about V I; I’m imagining other kinds of drama, but these often form the subtext of the V I narratives.

I’m always running three or four storylines: the private ones, and the ones I’m trying to turn into novels.  I need both kinds going side by side to keep me writing.

Storylines are suggested by many things—people I meet, books I’m reading, news stories I’m following—but the stories themselves come from a place whose location I don’t really know.  I imagine it as an aquifer, some inky underground reservoir that feeds writers and painters and musicians and anyone else doing creative work.  It’s a lake so deep that no one who drinks from it, not even Shakespeare, not Mozart or Archimedes, ever got to the bottom.

There have been times when, in Copland’s phrase, the faucet’s been turned off; my entry to the aquifer has been shut down.  No stories arrive and I panic, wondering if this is it, the last story I’ll ever get, as Copland found himself with the last song.   If that ever happens permanently, I don’t know what I’ll do.

So far, each time, the spigot has miraculously been turned on again; the stories come back, I start writing once more. Each time it happens, though, I return to work with an awareness that I’ve been given a gift that can vanish like a lake in a drought.

Share/Save