M.E. Breen

I have been accused by those close to me of listening to the same album over and over until it seems like the end of the world is coming. Fair enough. But it used to be a single song, so count your stars: waiting, almost anxious, until the song ended, then pressing the rewind button until I knew exactly when to let go to catch the final fade from the song before.  I wanted the whole thing, every time.  In fourth grade it was the Dolly Parton song Joleen, with emerald eyes and fiery hair. In eighth grade, Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car and Aretha Franklin’s Say a Little Prayer.

In high school I got into artists. Marvin Gaye and the Stone Roses and Bob Dylan. (I might have died in the sucking mud of the Indigo Girls if it weren’t for my much cooler friend E. She danced like Billy Idol.)

Junior year of college I listened to nothing but the opera Norma for an entire semester. My senior essay was written to Prince. My whole twenties I spent in a fierce love relationship with Emmylou Harris. I wonder if she could feel it?

These days it’s Nina Simone and Willie Nelson. I’m listening to Teatro right now. I haven’t taken it out of the CD player since last Thursday. Really what I want to write about isn’t music at all but my dad, who died six months ago. I guess Willie Nelson seems like a nice dad — not the kind who would notice if you cut your hair or who would interrogate your boyfriends in a way that embarrassed you but also made you feel safe. He would more be the dad who thought you were the greatest and took a lot of naps and only raised his voice twice the whole time you were growing up, and one time it was because the dog chewed his favorite pair of cowboy boots.

I like that Willie is old. I like an old man’s voice. I liked Johnny Cash’s music that he made right before he died and I like Bob Dylan’s voice now. My dad seemed to skip from the powerful dad of childhood to someone frail and sick without ever stopping off at old. I don’t really know how he aged. We weren’t close. I’m sad he didn’t live to see my book come out, because he was excited about it. He would have done an exceptional job of marching into bookstores and telling the bored clerks about his daughter the writer. I wonder if he would have read the book or only started it.  I wonder if it would have solved some mystery that puzzled him about me. I wonder if it would have hurt him.

He wrote me postcards sometimes when I was a kid and they always seemed to come from someone else, a man who was impersonating my father but who hadn’t gotten the details quite right — too playful, too mellow, even with little drawings sometimes of cats. He sent a series of twelve postcards from his honeymoon in Venice written in the voice of Ant, who had crawled into his sleeve before he left. He wrote in block caps because of some nerve problem with his hand and always signed the postcards, Your Dad. I’m sure I called him Dad. I must have called him that for a long time. But there was also a long time when I referred to him by his initials and crept around our conversations calling him nothing at all.

Teatro, track #8, The Maker. And you know who else is on that? Emmylou.

Oh, oh deep water, black and cold like the night
I stand with arms wide open
I’ve run a twisted line

I’m a stranger in the eyes of the Maker
I could not see for the fog in my eyes
I could not feel for the fear in my life

From across the great divide, In the distance I saw a light
Of Jean Baptiste’s he’s walking to me with the Maker
My body, my body is bent and broken by long and dangerous sleep
I can’t work the fields of Abraham and turn my head away
I’m not a stranger in the hands of the Maker

Brother John, have you seen the homeless daughters
Standing there with broken wings
I have seen the flaming swords
There over east of Eden

Burning in the eyes of the Maker
Burning in the eyes of the Maker
Burning in the eyes of the Maker

Oh, river rise from your sleep
Oh, river rise from your sleep
Oh, river rise from your sleep

Then the Geat people began to construct
a mound on a headland, high and imposing,
a marker that sailors could see from far away,
and in ten days they had done the work.
It was their hero’s memorial; what remained from the fire
they housed inside it, behind a wall
as worthy of him as their workmanship could make it.
And they buried torques in the barrow, and jewels
and a trove of such things as trespassing men
had once dared to drag from the hoard.
They let the ground keep that ancestral treasure,
gold under gravel, gone to earth,
as useless to men now as it ever was.
Then twelve warriors rode around the tomb,
chieftain’s sons, champions in battle,
all of them distraught, chanting in dirges,
mourning his loss as a man and a king.
They extolled his heroic nature and exploits
and gave thanks for his greatness; which was the proper thing,
for a man should praise a prince whom he holds dear
and cherish his memory when that moment comes
when he has to be convoyed from his bodily home.
So the Geat people, his hearth companions,
sorrowed for the lord who had been laid low.
They said that of all the kings upon the earth
he was the man most gracious and fair-minded,
kindest to his people and keenest to win fame.

Beowulf, ll.3155-82, trans. Heaney

This morning I visited Horace Mann elementary school in San Francisco to talk about Darkwood. It was my first school visit: two groups of about 50 students, 6th and 7th graders, none of whom had read the whole book. I was scared. I wrote a script. I woke up at 5:00 a.m. to time myself reading different sections. Is that part boring? Is this part boring? Is my entire existence the boringest thing in the entire wide universe? I hadn’t been around a group of kids that age since I was a kid that age, but I had a pretty good idea that if they were bored, they let you know it.

But they weren’t bored! Or if they were they were really polite and I couldn’t tell! They had smart, bright, open faces and asked so many questions I didn’t need to do all that reading I’d planned out like a marathon training run. (I read part, with monsters and eyeballs in it, and, despite my best efforts, a long description of foliage.)

Here were some of their questions:

“How did her mother die?”
“How did her father die?”
“How did her sister die?”
“Are the cats going to die?”
“Why is the book so expensive?”
“How many copies did you sell?”
“Is her uncle an alcoholic?”
“Does kinderstalk mean something about children?”
“How old are you?”
“Did you draw the cover?”
“Is your dog in it?”
“What emotions did you feel when you were writing?”
“Do you use words like the words in here when you talk?”
“Are you going to write another book like this one?”
“Are you going to write another kind of book?”
“Is this the story of your life?”

No, I wanted to say, this is the story of my life, hanging out here with you guys, beside a podium crammed into a doorway, in shoes that feel a little bit too slippery for the high-polish lino of the school floors, with the wind gusting off Valencia street sounding like your very own library ghost. I wanted to tell them I was having a sort of Sally Field at the Oscars moment in reverse: I like you! I really like you!

I wrote this book for kids but I wasn’t thinking about kids when I wrote it. I wasn’t thinking about anything but it when I wrote it, its people and animals and their world, and now it turns out I was writing it for exactly the right people in this world. I wrote my way straight to the Horace Mann school. I had no idea. What a trip.

I like to blog because it reminds me of how it felt to write letters. Don’t mistake me, I love a good email, but even long emails of the strong emotion/deep thought variety feel different from letters. Because emails are, well, e—as opposed to cp-mail (carrier pigeon) or mb-mail (mule back), or, my favorite, t is for tortoise-mail—you can ask how someone is doing and expect an answer. You can ask someone what she thinks you should do and expect advice. It might even be rude to write entirely about yourself. With letters, of course, you had weeks to wait before you heard anything back, and by that time you’d probably forgotten the whole contents of your letter, unless maybe you were writing someone to ask if they loved you.

An email can be whatever you have time for, but a letter only exists because you had time to sit down and do exactly that. I’m not sentimental about creamy stationary and fountain pens (which mostly make me think of the extra-terrestrial looking blue-stained lump that appeared on my ring finger from clutching the pen so hard). I just liked the way that writing letters made you aware of what was really up in a peaceful, unhurried, solitary-but-not-alone sort of way. I mean, you either wrote about the most important things or pointedly didn’t write about them, but only through the writing or the avoiding did you figure out what those things were.

And I liked that everyone understood the letter writer was going to write about herself, that she was alone in the company of the reader: safely separated by time and distance, safely held by knowing the letter would be opened.  Writing letters to my mom from camp was one of the first things I did that made me feel grown up, or, I guess, growing up. This is who I am! The letters said. Of all the things I did today, this is what I choose to tell you. You cannot observe me. I am apart from you. It’s up to me to tell you what’s important, which means I have to decide, which means I can keep secrets if I want to. And what will happen to the things I did that I don’t tell you about? Who will I be if I’ve done something no one knows about?

We all do things all the time we choose to keep private or not, but there’s something about the written record that gives these decisions special weight. Writing letters as a kid and an adolescent let me create a history of my life, but running alongside that history, or underneath it, was the secret history of whatever I didn’t write. So the history was really a story, and writing those stories was practice for writing a novel, which is really all about figuring out what to keep in and what to leave out.

So what’s a blog? In this case, a letter. A letter to my mom, who knows how to give one heck of a toast.

Tomorrow my first book comes out. Today I got my hair done. I did this to prepare.

This process of writing something and then rewriting it and then, whoa, rewriting it eighteen more times, and then seeing it become a physcial object, a thing on a shelf that anyone — anyone! — can pick up and read,  is so mysterious that even while it’s happening it feels like magic. I mean this both as something alchemical and/or having to do with witches, and also in a heartstrings & wonderment kind of way. I mean, it feels great, but it also feels like something that has happened to you, a story you stepped into, a spell that’s been cast. On the other hand, there was all that rewriting, and the hard drive dying last summer was the opposite of magic, and you worked really hard on something for a long time.

I think the best fairy tales combine magic and elbow grease in just this way: a young person winds up alone in a dark wood and in order to make it through she has to endure a series of trials. At some point early on she encounters a frog or a duck or maybe a crone sitting on a stump. She is kind to the pond dweller/stump sitter and goes on her journey. Sometimes she is clever or brave, but her most significant trait is perseverance in the face of obstacles. Later,  of course, when it looks like all is lost, the crone reveals herself to be POOF! a powerful witch, and the amphibian turns out to be a handsome fellow of large income and few resentments.  The lost child returns home with a sack of gold, or becomes queen or king and lives, yes, happily ever after.

Should it happen, then, that any frog prince is lurking around here, I want my hair to look good. Not because I want to marry him, poor greenie.

I want him to know I take this job seriously.