Are You There, Terry Gross? It’s Me, Linda.
A friend once told me that Leonard Cohen wrote the soundtrack to her life. I finally took the time to consider mine. What’s yours?
PDF: Are You there Terry Gross?
September 1, 2023
Dear Linda, Forgive me– it’s taken me this long to read the beautiful letter? essay? that you sent me. I’m really moved by what you wrote, and want you to know that it means a lot to me. I know exactly what you mean by having a soundtrack of your life, and there are a lot of the same singers in our soundtracks. My soundtrack also has some ridiculous camp songs—team songs written to the tunes of classical warhorses and old pop songs– and original lyrics written to showtunes for a high school tradition in Brooklyn called Sing. I think you and I are especially moved by songs about death. I love that Leonard Cohen line from Going Home “without the costume that I wore.” I wasn’t familiar with that song, so thanks for introducing me to the lyric. Now I have to listen to the song.
Thank you again for writing something so meaningful to me. I’m honored to have provided some of the soundtrack of your life.
All best to you,
Terry
A Letter to Maira Kalman
If you are unfamiliar with Maira’s work, go to her website now: mairakalman.com then read my letter.
PDF: Letter to Maira Kalman
The Books That Find Us and the People We Meet Along the Way
An essay that chronicles my reading life. In progress.
Mar 2024. PDF: The Books That Find Us
Mentors
While searching for essays on writing by Pat Conroy for one of my posters, I stumbled upon a writing contest asking for essays of no more than 2000 words on any aspect of writing. I’ve always wanted to write about the two professors who encouraged me to write—and re-write. Professor Cynthia Katona I met when I was 19; Dr. Gabrielle Rico when I was 34. They have both died and I miss them every day.
PDF: Mentors
A Vagina Chronicle
Menopause. Not a pause, but an end. Every woman experiences menopause differently and nothing I read prepared me for the reality of what I experienced. In fact, I felt I had been lied to. So I wrote about my experience, which turned into a chronicle of the ages of my vagina from youth to old age. Don’t laugh too hard.
PDF: A Vagina Chronicle
Silence and Secret-keeping in a Small Alaska Town
I’m often surprised when people think that the media does not influence our behavior. My life is shaped by the books I read, the movies I watch, the plays I see, the music, radio programs and podcasts I listen to. This essay explores how certain books I’ve read and research I’ve done shaped how I responded to the dark secret that haunted and haunts the town I live in. I dedicate this essay to Rick and Rene Martin. But I wrote it for Doris Ward. This is the unexpurgated version that Capital City Weekly edited. “What we see depends heavily on what our culture trains us to look for.” Nell Irvin Painter
PDF: Silence and Secret-keeping
The Fear of Women
In the early 1980s I took the class “Women and Violence” at Cal State Hayward and wrote a paper titled “The Fear of Women.” I sent a copy to Professor Cynthia Katona. In 2015, a year before she died, she returned it to me with a note saying “great essay.” What I learned while researching and writing this essay changed the way I see the world. One of the statements in the essay is that the fear of women is one of the driving forces of setting up cultural values. Fear of women, fear of other. It’s still true and still driving the stories we tell ourselves. But maybe the tide is changing. . . .
PDF: The Fear of Women
Pubic Hair
A childhood story. PDF: Pubic Hair
Storytelling and Point-of-View in Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury”
I wrote this essay for a graduate seminar in Literature. This is a masterful novel and a masterful way to show the decay of a family and a way of life in Jefferson, Mississippi, in 1928. The added bonus is that the star of the novel is one of my favorite topics—”point of view.” PDF: SoundandtheFury
Point of View and the Art of Narrative in Susan Sontag’s The Volcano Lover: A Romance
My essay on “The Sound and Fury” in many ways served as a primer for my master’s thesis. As did the question to one of Professor Katona’s exams in 1979: How would “Lolita” be different if it had been told from Lolita’s point of view? Once I read Sontag’s novel (given to me by Professor Katona), I knew what I wanted to research and write about for my thesis. My thesis was written while studying at the College of Notre Dame in Belmont, California, and under the guidance of Dr. Sylvia Rogers and Professor Katona. It discusses how changes in point of view in narrative have shaped the creative imaginations of writers and readers. The thesis uses Susan Sontag’s The Volcano Lover: A Romance to show how point of view has moved from the storyteller who called upon muses, gods, or ancient traditions to the writer as creator and artist. The thesis also discusses how the role of the reader has changed from an observer to a collaborator in the act of making meaning and discerning truth and moral values. The thesis discusses these changes by examining Sontag’s novel in light of the narrative theories of Anna Barbauld, Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, Northrup Frye, Henry James, Dorrit Cohn, M. M. Bakhtin, and Wallace Martin, as well as the writings of James Joyce and William Faulkner.
PDF: POV (Please send a note if you find any typos or clunky sentences that can be more eloquently composed. Thanks.)
Art in Film: Peter Weir’s “The Year of Living Dangerously”
You know that feeling when you have an encounter that stops you in your tracks, that takes your breath away, that causes you to reconsider every thought that has passed through your three pounds of gray matter? That’s how I felt the first time I watched Peter Weir’s film “The Year of Living Dangerously.”
It must have been 1983 or 1984. It was playing at an “art” movie theatre on Shattuck Ave. in Berkeley that still showed double features. It was Australian cinema night. Peter Weir’s “The Year of Living Dangerously” and Bruce Beresford’s “Breaker Morant.” It was a night I cried my eyes out and drove home with one helluva headache.
I cried my eyes out for Billie Kwan. I knew very little about Indonesia and even less about Sukarno and the suffering of the people in Jakarta. For that matter, I didn’t know much about Australia. But Peter Weir changed all that. He took a mediocre book by Christopher J. Koch, changed the point of view and created a masterpiece.
While working at Apple Computer during the John Sculley years I took a Film History and Criticism class at San Mateo Community College. Once a week on Wednesday evenings I would sit in an auditorium with fifty other students and watch and dissect movies. I have always loved movies and had once wanted to be the next Pauline Kael or Roger Ebert. When the professor returned my essay on “The Year of Living Dangerously” with an A+, I decided to send it to the New Yorker. What’s to lose? Maybe Ms. Kael would read it and ask me to be her apprentice. (Little did I know that David Denby had filled that slot.) But off it went. I still have the handwritten note from one of the editors telling me that they liked the essay but that only staff writers reviewed movies—aka PAULINE KAEL!
I’m not Pauline Kael, but it’s still a good essay. I should probably revise it—and maybe I will if I receive any interesting comments. I did send a copy to Peter Weir’s representatives last year hoping it would encourage him to make more films. He’s been pretty quiet since “The Way Back” in 2010. Maybe he’s retired. He was born in 1944.
Read the essay. See the film. Linda Hunt is simply amazing: The perfect actor finding the perfect role, and she took home the Academy Award for best performance by an actress in a supporting role.
PDF: PeterWeir
The Lottery: A Critical Analysis
While working as the library coordinator for the Haines School Library I got to read a lot of books for children and young adults — a lot of great books. (Thank you J.K. Rowling for rescuing children’s literature and inspiring many of my favorite adult authors to write books for younger audiences.) When I read the review of The Hunger Games I placed it on my BUY list. I was not disappointed. I immediately thought that Suzanne Collins had created Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” for a new generation addicted to blindly playing violent video games and watching TV series like Survivor. Reading The Hunger Games also reminded me of an essay that I have carried with me since 1981. My Intro to Literature professor read it to the class as an example of a thoughtful, well-written essay. “The Lottery” is still a powerful and relevant story. My essay is a but a token of its insights.
PDF: The Lottery