If you want to watch me talk about The Woman Who Named God, you can go to a TV interview I did in Ohio on youtube.
Mary Wollstonecraft is in Tonsberg right now. Why she is in Norway, when no one went there in the 18th century (unless you were norwegian) is a long story. But I want to go now, too. I have been on youtube and google staring at fjords, seals, pines, blue tinged mountains, and happy looking blonde people. After two and a half years of tumult, Mary deserves a vacation and so do I. For three weeks, she swam, napped, wrote, and rambled through the countryside, gathering notes for the last book she would write which is also my favorite: Letters Written During A Short Residence In Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. This is the book students should read FIRST. Not the vindication. She says things like “Pugh” and complains about the food and the beds and the rotten teeth of the natives while she revels in the beauty and the kind people she meets along the way. She sounds like us even though she lived two hundred years ago and I feel certain that we would have been friends. Well, ok, not certain, but I like her. I hope she would have liked me.
I don’t know why the people I write about always get smallpox, but they do. Now Mary Wollstonecraft’s baby has it. I remember the pustules and scabs from Anne Bradstreet’s brush with the disease when she was sixteen. At least I am learning something.
Meanwhile, the drama over endnotes continues. How does one do what Random House calls “blank call outs”? For those of you who have no idea what a blank call out is (like me yesterday), it is a note keyed to a phrase in the text. Thus when the reader reads Mary and Mary, he/she will not be bothered by any little numbers, but the writer will be Greatly Bothered trying to figure out how to eliminate them. I have spent a little time looking at various software programs, like “ENDNOTES” to see if they can help me. The jury is still out. Fortunately, the man on my campus who knows how to use ENDNOTES-the-software is also a psychoanalyst so he will be able to mop me up when I confront my various Endnote insecurities and inadequacies.
Yesterday, my friend Paul and I sat around a wooden table with other biographers at a monthly meeting for Humanities Fellows convened by Carla Kaplan, a writer, whose work on Zora Neale Hurston I admire. Also, she is very funny. She says she has enormous self-discipline but the focus of her six week old puppy. I said that I had a similar problem. Anyways, there was a lively discussion about footnotes and speculation: Do you always have to use footnotes in a biography? how much is too much speculation? There was a general consensus that footnotes are essential. Well, it was not exactly a consensus as I was silent. I HATE footnotes, or really, I should say, endnotes. I scribble messages to myself while I am writing, like “See p137 in Todd.” Six months from now I will have to revisit Todd p137 and I will have no idea who Todd is. There are Other Ways to write biographies, of this I am sure, but I am too anxious to get the story down to do my citations properly in the first draft of a ms, so they hang over my head, not like one axe, but like many, too many to count. Plus, I have noticed that Alison Weir does not use endnotes in her biography of Queen Elizabeth. All she does is list her sources at the end. Why can’t I do this?
of my New Dimensions interview is available on their cafe. They have other great people on as well. Let me know what you think!
We went to New York this weekend and it is hard to be back in Gloucester. I remember how my father used to complain that there were no good bagels in St. louis, and now I feel the same way about Cape Ann. Which is of course a metaphor that I don’t have the energy to explore right now as I had a bracing breakfast with my beloved agent who talked in a chastening fashion about late manuscripts and publishers canceling books. So last night I resolved to outline this last bit about Mary Wollstonecraft, from her lover’s desertion to her death, giving birth. Let’s see if this will speed me up. I’ve never used an outline in my life. Actually my “outline” is only a list, like a grocery list, as the very word outline gives me hives. How will I finish this by August? (I won’t)
On Saturday, we went to see Fela on broadway. It’s the story of the Nigerian man who used music to protest corruption and who began afro-beat. He died of Aids in 1977. The cast was young and beautiful and danced and danced and sang. I was inspired and thought this is how one should live life. with meaning. with passion. I thought of me at my writing desk, drudging away, chomping on pretzels, and I realized I should be up, standing up, leading protest marches, and fighting evil and authorities, and staying up all night, writing inflammatory and incendiary things, and breaking way more rules. But I am back munching on pretzels, actually cheerios, and making lists. But I like to think that some of that Fela fire will go right into MW’s life.
The one today is a violin lesson poem. The repetition of “do re mi fa” complete with variations is so splendid. I am proud to know this wonderful writer. The one that he will read on Jan. 31st is also gorgeous. It’s called “Lullaby” and I love the drum of the rhymes, “the dogs careening like clowns,” and the great surprise of “then drown.” A surprise trochee, sorry to use poet language, but this is my blog so I feel defiant about sounding pompous. Besides, I am tired of Not using words like these in the classroom because my students don’t know what trochaic is.
I hate going back and forth between teaching and writing. When I am at school, I want to be Professor Perfection and when I am writing I want to be left alone to write. The transitions are excruciating. I teach every other day, so on Wednesday I caught back up to where I was on Monday. And tomorrow, I will catch back up to where I was on Wed. which is where I was on Monday. I do not call this progress.
On the bright side, I have the best classes in the world this semester. Now, if only I can get Mary Wollstonecraft out of her bad relationship, past her suicide attempts, and into the arms of Godwin, I will be happy. Except then she dies and I will have to write about Mary Shelley who I used to love until MW and I began our love affair. I am fickle, though. Soon I will love MS and look back on MW the way one looks back on an old boyfriend/girlfriend, mistily, that oh yes, I loved her once kind of way.
You can find out about all upcoming events and news about the book on WOMAN’s fanpage.
I hope to see you there!
is one of the reasons I wanted to write this book. But I am avoiding it at the moment and have burrowed back into descriptions of Robespierre and the Terror. Last week a writer friend gave me Alison Weir’s Queen Elizabeth and told me it would do me good. I didn’t really feel like an encounter with the Tudors right now – life is hard enough without all of their troubles to worry about — but I am so glad I opened it up. I’ve read Weir before, but not recently, and not while writing a book about British women. I love how informal she is and how long her sentences are because they are packed with unapologetically quirky details: the kind of make up Elizabeth wore, who she liked and why — all the gossip. She gives me courage to keep searching for the small things: what kind of shoes Mary wore and the color of Gilbert’s hair. And Robespierre’s too, I suppose. But I already know his hair was dark brown.
