memoir Archives - Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Burn-Out Vanishes When We Rediscover Purpose

When I blogged regularly, which I did for six years, I felt more alive, more alert, more attentive to my life, and what God was doing in it. In Frederick Buechner’s phrase, I listened to my life.

I have taken a six month blogging break, and the peril of blogging breaks (or writing breaks: ask Harper Lee or Margaret Mitchell!) is that you feel you have to write something substantial, beautiful, and meaty when you return to blogging …which seems daunting, and so you put off writing—and returning.

The cardinal rule for avoiding writers’ and bloggers’ block—and indeed for any endeavour—is to begin where you are, with something little and slight if need be.

So perhaps I should catch you up with a snippet from my life, and an insight stemming from it.

* * *

The country lane on the outskirts of Oxford, England which we live, unbelievably quiet and beautiful when we moved in over ten years ago, has changed its character as more people have moved in—“Traveller” families, as it happens. It has become noisier, less idyllic and scenic. The whole village was up in arms against “Travellers” moving in; there were public meetings and hearings; I was particularly troubled because they were moving onto a field adjacent to my large garden. But in prayer, I “heard” clearly that we were not to oppose them, so we did not; we ceased attending public meetings or lodging planning protests against them, much to our other neighbours’ mystification.

In early June, because of many and noisy neighbours in what had been a quiet and deserted lane, I realized that the time had come to move–from the countryside on the edge of Oxford, where I have happily lived for the last 11 years to the city, to North Oxford in particular. And we even had an offer to buy our house, phew!!

Why North Oxford? When I applied to study in Oxford as a student in the eighties, I felt a call, a leading to Oxford, and I have never felt a call to any other city. North Oxford is walking distance from my church, St. Andrew’s; from Oxford University where I am now on my second year of the German classes I am taking for fun; from the Ashmolean Museum; the superb Oxford Playhouse, friends, parks, the river, a good gym, yoga classes. I would be able to walk most everywhere.

North Oxford is, however, substantially more expensive than my country village on the outskirts of the city. It’s the most expensive area of the UK, outside of London!!

So…

* * *

Deciding to move has galvanized us. “God meant it for good.” We have owned a small business for almost ten years now, and we have started diligently and creatively expanding it to finance our move. So that’s a definite blessing that’s come from this decision.

Many, many, years ago, I felt a longing, to write a memoir. A call? A desire, a longing, a call–they are all intertwined. God reveals his call on our lives through the desires, gifts and experiences he has given us. But the book turned out to a bigger, longer project than I had visualized, and early rejections of the proposal at a hassled, overwhelmed time of my life broke me. Temporarily.

But writing this book was a mysterious call, all right, something that perched on my shoulder, and I didn’t feel free to move on to anything else until I had completed it. So I did not…move on to something else… nor complete it.

The tale has tragic overtones now, but God who loves good stories can make dark plot twists like Joseph-in-the-well-and-dungeon and Good Friday spiral upwards and morph into gold, into Easter Sunday

Anyway, when I decided to move because of my new and noisy neighbours, I swiftly realised that moving was out of the question until I had finished this book. Moving can be stressful, especially in middle age… People can lose their health, their peace and their papers…

So I decided to finish my book before I moved. Realising that living next door to my noisy neighbours was unsustainable in the long run galvanized me to do what I had always wanted to do for years, get some momentum on the book–which has been a great joy. How relieved, how delighted I will be when the book finally gets finished.

* * *

So here I am, writing slowly but steadily.

Funny thing… In June 2016, I was convinced that I was burnt-out. Our daughter Irene, our last nestling, didn’t want to go on holiday over the February or the June half-term breaks because of her mocks and A-S exams, and all I could think of was how tired and burnt out I was, and how I needed a long, active holiday, and to walk many miles a day to exorcise a cobwebby from my mind, and flood it again with oxygen and ideas.

But then an offer came to buy my house, and I decided to sell the house, and move, and to finish my book before I even contemplate moving. With that fresh hearing of the ancient call came a new momentum, and energy descended from the heavens.

I came across this quote recently, “Burnout is more often caused by purpose deficiency than vitamin deficiency.”

My burnout lifted, just like that.

I do not make bucket lists…I see God as full of kindness towards me, with open hands towards me, full of gifts, and am okay with accepting the gifts he pours out. But if I were to make a bucket list… well, finishing and publishing this book would be one of the few things in that bucket. And circumstances have now given me a sort of deadline.

* * *

Years ago, my mentor suggested that I have a writing goal. But incredibly, I didn’t then know how to set goals. You know I would hope to write two chapters, but instead wrote a teeny bit of one… and then what?

So this time, I started really, really ridiculously small, since I was adding a new thing–finishing a book–to a life already full with blogging, parenting, exercising, German classes, gardening, house-running, church, small group, writers’ group, etc. etc. I set the timer for 5 minutes, and decided to write 20 words minimum. The next day, I went for 40, then 60, and now I am at 2300 words a day, new or revised. I keep track of the words I’ve missed on busy days, and try to make up on the days when writing feels like flying (which are not that frequent, sadly).

So this is the second/third draft of the book, revising is not the most scintillating thing, but getting the book finished will be scintillating, so I try to sit down, revise 2300 words, do some make-up words, and then I’m all done for the day.

* * *

A couple of things that are helping me. I start my writing with reading, to take the revision process more joyous. (Currently reading One Man’s Meat, E. B. White’s memoir of country life which I have just decided is not for me, and Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves’ horrifying memoir of his service in the first World War).

I am using the Pomodoro technique, work for 25 minutes, and then take a 5 minute break to tidy and declutter, or bounce on my trampoline for 1000 steps, and then back to work. 25 minutes is a maddeningly short work session, but according to Britain’s NHS, one should take an active break from sitting every 30 minutes: “excessive sitting slows the metabolism – which affects our ability to regulate blood sugar and blood pressure, and metabolise fat – and may cause weaker muscles and bones. Essentially, the body is ‘shutting down’ while sitting and there is little muscle activity.”

I am using “Freedom,” software which blocks the entire internet for the short time I am reading and writing. Divided attention destroys productivity.

I have discovered that a three mile walk through a park or by a river resets my tired mind and floods it with oxygen again; I don’t necessarily need a week or a weekend away, though they are wonderful.

I have been influenced by a book I am reading by Harvard psychiatrist John Ratey, called “Spark: How Exercise will Improve the Performance of Your Brain,” about how running, lifting weights, yoga, dance and sport can spark a measurable improvement in cognitive ability… help you think more clearly, read faster and concentrate longer… essentially make you smarter. I have certainly found it to be true. I am taking yoga classes, and lifting weights, which helps me concentrate for longer, feel more alive and happier, and sleep better.

* * *

Take away? If you are listless, bored, burnt-out and aren’t getting anything much done, re-align yourself with God. Seek his marching orders for the hour in front of you, the day in front of you, the year. Each of us has been created for a purpose, and is intended to be a bright spot in the jigsaw, the mosaic that God is working on. Ask him to reveal the purpose he has for you in the coming year, or years, and then beaver away at it. Having a purpose and focussing on it has cured cancer patients, as we’ve all anecdotally heard; given the dying a new lease of life; lifted depression; helped people achieve more than they ever imagined possible.

What is the next purpose God has in mind for your one and precious life? Aligning yourself with the Father and working on it will fill your life with excitement and energy again.

Love, Anita, tortoising, and sometimes haring, away on the book she has always wanted to write.

One Work Goal for 2105: Focus

By Anita Mathias

I enjoy the One Word project. Instead of a resolution, one asks God for a prophetic word as a guide for the year.

My word for 2014 was alignment. I have chosen Joy as the word to return to this year. When I find myself stressed, distressed, angry, worried or simply sad, I am learning to stop what I am doing, and pray until peace and clarity returns, accepting the things I cannot change, changing the things I can…

One word, alas, can be constraining for a woman whose work is words…

* * *

My biggest trauma of 2014 was colon cancer. It was not metastatic, thankfully, but because lymph nodes were involved, I was given an estimate of my chances of being alive in 5 years!!

Anyway, fortunately, the median is not the message as Stephen Jay Gould wrote in this popular essay. He was given 8 months to live aged 40, and lived for 20 years, dying at 60 of an unrelated cancer. He writes

Attitude clearly matters in fighting cancer. We don’t know why (from my old-style materialistic perspective, I suspect that mental states feed back upon the immune system). But match people with the same cancer for age, class, health, socioeconomic status, and, in general, those with positive attitudes, with a strong will and purpose for living, with commitment to struggle, with an active response to aiding their own treatment and not just a passive acceptance of anything doctors say, tend to live longer. A few months later I asked Sir Peter Medawar, my personal scientific guru and a Nobelist in immunology, what the best prescription for success against cancer might be. “A sanguine personality,” he replied.

And God, the great mathematician, is known to upset human stats. (Consider Janet Walton given 104 billion to 1 odds of bearing healthy sextuplets. Which was exactly what she did.)

However, estimates of your chances of being alive—even decent odds, as in my case–focuses the mind. “Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” Dr. Johnson wrote.

In the first shock and sadness after the diagnosis, I wandered through the house, looking at the books I had not yet read, but really wanted to; the documentaries I had not watched, but really wanted to; the books I had not written, but really wanted to; thinking of the places to which I had never travelled, but rather wanted to. I did not want to die. I was in love with life.

I was sad.

Then, who knows how, I snapped out of sadness.

* * *

I had prayed with faith for healing. Why should I proceed as if God was definitely ignore my prayers? That’s crazy behaviour for a believer. God is my Father; why should I hurt his feelings by doubting his goodness.

Fifty springs are little room to look at things in bloom, the poet A. C. Housman wrote. So since, in the Upper Room discourse at the Last Supper, Jesus repeatedly urges us to ask for anything we wish, I asked, playfully, for 50 additional years of life, which would get me to the age at which my great-grandmother Julianna died. (I come from a line of long-lived woman on both sides of the family, thriving into their nineties, often living past a hundred, women who lived on ancestral diets–not the Western diet I have indulged in for the last 30 years.)

And so, while I am steadily changing my diet in the direction of optimum nutrition, and steadily increasing my exercise, I decided to plunge back into work I really wanted to do. Work one loves–a great and mysterious extender of life.

* * *

I started work on a memoir in 1991—an account of a Catholic childhood in Jamshedpur, a Zoroashtrian company town; rebellious years in a boarding school in Nainital, in the foothills of the Himalayas, run by German and Irish nuns; and then working with Mother Teresa at Calcutta.

However, I shelved it numerous times: to write essays; to teach Creative Writing at The College of William and Mary in Williamsburg; for four years to establish a business; and then for another five years, I barely worked on it while I blogged.

Chapters have met with success. They have won a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts; a Minnesota State Arts Board fellowship; a Jerome Fellowship: have won “Writer of Unusual Promise” awards to writing conferences, have been published in Best Spiritual Writing, Commonweal, London Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Notre Dame Magazine. I am certain that it will be a good book–though a long one in the first draft (which will definitely need a good editor).

I realized that if I died without finishing it, and publishing it (I am thinking of indie publishing the first longer version) I would feel enormous, almost unbearable sadness and regret, because it took me time and sacrifice to get a good first draft.

But if I died without developing my blog to dizzy heights, so be it. C’est la vie. Blogging has been enormously rewarding in psychological, spiritual, creative, personal growth, social and career ways…a trip to Cambodia, for instance… Who would have guessed? It has brought me nearly 10,000 readers a month, some of whom have become real life friends. The confidence and support a large and steady readership brings cannot be underestimated.

* * *

So I will work on the memoir first, writing 500 words a day. A long memoir averages 120,000 words, which means I could be done with it in less than 8 months; much has already been written, and I already have a first draft. Sounds good, huh?

I will shoot for 500 words rather than 1000, for that will leave time for walking, gardening, housework, prayer, family life, friendships as well as gas in the tank for another day’s writing.

500 words… I might be able to write that in an hour if I focus. Perhaps two hours if I shoot for beautiful words. In a widely shared piece, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet attributed their success to that fact that they knew how to focus.

And that is my work goal for 2015: Focus

I am using an app called Freedom to turn off the internet when I write. I really enjoy the quiet and concentration of being in the zone, and get so much done when the internet is off.

So I will write my 500 words, and then blog–a blog or two or three a week as the Lord gives me strength and energy.

I had a mentor, whose book I edited. He said he would write as the Lord provided time. I thought privately, “One can’t write like that!” But both his books are still read in a world in which bloggers publish books to a three week buzz, books which are often dead in six months, and forgotten in a year.

Apparently relying on the Lord for words and time is a very good work strategy indeed!

In Which I Tell You about My Memoir-in-Progress and My Writing Process (Monday Blog Hop)

By Anita Mathias

I have been tagged by Claire Musters to write about my work in progress, and my writing process.

What I am working on

I work on my blog, Dreaming Beneath the Spires, on the principle of the Minimum Effective Dose. What is alive grows, so I post just enough to keep my blog growing, month on month. About 2-3 posts a week.

I am wrapping up a memoir—Mind has Mountains which I have worked on sporadically since 1991, but abandoned for months, and sometimes years at a time!!

However, I have a first draft of the entire thing with several chapters published, anthologized even, winning several prizes (including a $20,000 NEA!)

I have had leading editors and agents interested on both sides of the Atlantic, but things fell apart at the stage of the proposal. They did not feel the ones I wrote were saleable.

A savvy New York agent showed a savvy New York editor the book, and they commented, “It’s as if Anita is at odds with the material. She is fighting the story.” Interestingly, though both were secular, they felt I was fighting the spiritual memoir that my life and spirit were demanding I write so as to write the literary memoir I wanted to write!

I wanted to write a memoir of an Indian Catholic childhood, ending at 18, a memoir inspired by Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood and Patricia Hampl’s A Romantic Education. It had three sections—

I My life as a Catholic child in the Zorashtrian company town of Jamshedpur up to the age of 9 when I was expelled from the local school because of my mischievousness.

(And holidays with grandparents in Catholic enclaves of Bombay and Mangalore).

The Chapel at St. Mary’s Convent, Nainital

II Boarding school in St. Mary’s Convent, Nainital in the Himalayas, a boarding school run by Irish and German nuns at which I was rebellious, and an atheist.

III Working with Mother Teresa for two years, after an abrupt religious conversion at 17.

I wanted to write a series of essays on passions and experiences and people, like Vladimir Nabokov’s great memoir Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited but the world has changed, and speeded up. People want story, not literary essays. (Not that I greatly care about literary fashions. I truly believe that self-publishing, in the first instance, is an option for sui generis books, provided one can do some marketing—which perhaps I can with God’s help.)

But I think God loves story–and created us to love good stories. The whole Bible tells a shapely story, of our simultaneous craving for God and desire to do our own thing, and how we needed a Saviour to change our hearts from within, and bear the horrid consequences of the crack in our natures.

The editors and agents who have looked at it had a point. I was stopping the story mid-story.

I talked a bit about my book to editor Amy Boucher Pye last week, and we thought about what the story of my life really was.

I suddenly realized that for me to write a solely literary memoir like Nabokov’s Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited or Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, ending at age 18 would be at odds with my story. It would leave out the two most important directional decisions of my life–deciding my life’s path would be that of a writer (aged 21) and a decision (aged 27) that I was going to align my life with Christ.

Most days I do live in Jesus, am hidden in Jesus. The story of my life is a spiritual one.

So I need another three chapters: being an undergraduate at Oxford when my faith wobbled to extinction. Doing an MFA in the US when I tried to do life without God, making a religion of poetry (and achievement), a la James Joyce. Recommitting my life to Jesus, aged 27, when I realized that I realized that I really, really hadn’t made much of my life in the last six years without Jesus.

So the memoir would have more mess, more complication, but also more truth.

While talking to Amy, I came up with a new working strapline: A rebellious girl finds peace in Christ. Ah-ha!

And I thought of another model, C. S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life which takes Lewis up to age 32, when he became “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England,” (but what creativity and joy his conversion opened up for him!).

So I found a meta-narrative for my story. A full circle narrative: a thoroughly rebellious Catholic believer ends as thoroughly “mere Christian,” at peace–a narrative winding through the Zoroashtrian town of Jamshedpur, boarding school in Nainital; Mother Teresa in Calcutta; Oxford, England; Columbus, Ohio…

How does my work differ from others in its genre?

Well, I am a restless writer and everything I have published is in a different genre.

Wandering Between Two Worlds: Essays on Faith and Art traces my life and the evolution of my faith and struggles in the form of essays. It deals with dichotomies—East and West, Writing and Prayer, Domesticities and Art, Roots and Wings.

Francesco, Artist of Florence: The Man Who Gave Too Much, which has sold the best of all my books, is a children’s book, dealing with art, Florence, The Renaissance, beauty, good-heartedness, weakness, and the importance of forgiving oneself.

The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth is a reflection on that Beatitude, theological writing for everywoman.

The Church That Had Too Much is an odd book, the record of a dream , and I found myself writing it in the shape and rhythms of poetry.

And Mind has Mountains, of course, will be a memoir!

Why do I write what I do?

I write on whatever grabs my interest, and my writing is a way to work out my ideas or share whatever fascinates me.

How does my writing process work?

My writing process with a blog: dictate it to my iPhone when I get the idea. Think out my post. Write it pretty close to its final form. Revise it a couple of times on screen. Print it out. Re-arrange and cut paragraphs. Try to cut at least 10% of the words. Do five iterations from first draft to final draft. Hit publish.

For the memoir, I have been writing thoughts and memories as they surface in thematically organized chapters. I choose the chapter I am longing to write, and then write up episodes in the order of desire to tell about them. I revise each chapter eight times, taking less and less time at each iteration, tightening it each time, cutting a minimum of 10 %, and entire paragraphs which are of interest to me, but perhaps not to you.

I post chapters on my blog as they are done.

When I finish the entire book, I suspect I will revise it another 5-8 times at least until I have shaken off every word I can, until the prose feels as inevitable and flawless as poetry, or least is as good as I can make it.

I am taking the liberty of tagging Carolyn Weber, Amy Boucher Pye and Michael Wenham to answer the same three questions.

In the Beginning: Rosaries and Steel (The first chapter of my memoir, “Mind has Mountains.”)

By Anita Mathias

This is the first chapter of the memoir I am writing. I hope you enjoy it, and I would be grateful for any feedback 🙂

I was born in Jamshedpur, Bihar, India, where the great Gangetic plains lope up to the foothills of the Himalayas.

Buddha was born here, six centuries before Christ, as was Mahavira, founder of Jainism, though syncretic Hinduism later absorbed both.

But my birth in Jamshedpur had nothing to do with it being the birthplace of great religions. I was born there because of steel.

The soil was red with tiny balls of murram, iron ore, visible signs of the hidden lodes which in 1901 drew Zoroastrian industrialist, Jamshedji Nusserjani Tata, to found Jamshedpur, The Steel City.

There blast furnaces daily belched blackness to the bleared skies, and you woke and heard the birds cough as iron ore was refined to shining steel by The Tata Iron and Steel Company, one of the world’s largest steel companies, which, in 1952, lured my father, a Chartered Account, from still racist London: “Our accountant is Indian; is that a problem?” his boss had to ask, and sometimes it was. Now, he was the Controller of Accounts, and–as he ambitiously installed computers which hogged a wall– Manager of Data Processing. And “What is that?” everyone asked.

He then married, aged 38, and after a decade of infertility and the death of their infant first-born son, I was born, hovering between life and death, ill with the dysentery which killed my brother.

And so, in an emergency baptism with rapidly blessed hospital water, in Jamshedpur, the heart of the Hindu heartland, I was christened Anita Mary Mathias, daughter of Noel Joseph Mathias and Celine Mary Mathias, the incongruous surname given our family when the Portuguese occupied my ancestral town of Mangalore on the coast of the Arabian Sea in 1510, converting the population to Roman Catholicism with the carrot of government jobs, and the stick of the Inquisition, Counter Reformation fires reaching even the tropics.

Which explains why a child born in the Hindu heartland, had grandparents called Piedade Felician Mathias and Josephine Lobo, and Stanislaus and Molly Coelho and great grandmothers called Greta Lasrado and Julianna Juao, though on my mother’s side, everyone was a Coelho, for Coelhos, as the thirteen branches of that family observe proudly, Coelhos, if possible, only marry Coelhos.

A few years later, when I was known as the naughtiest girl in the school, the nuns asked, “Why are you so naughty when your sister is so good?” Flummoxed, I guessed, “Because she was baptized by a cardinal, and I was baptized by a priest?” The amused Cardinal summoned me when he next visited the school and explained that I could not be baptized twice, but I could receive a special blessing, and to that blessing he later attributed everything good which ever happened to me.

10 Lessons from Heartbreak Time and Death and Resurrection in Writing my Memoir (Part I)

By Anita Mathias

Crows_Lake_in_North_Sikkim_MIND_HAS_MOUNTAINS So, around 1987, when I was reading English at Somerville College, Oxford, Salman Rushdie read from Midnight’s Children at the Oxford University Majlis, the Indian society. And I stay up all night reading Midnight’s Children, transfixed. At least 95% of the novels, plays, poetry I had read until then had been written by British, American and European authors. Unconsciously, I thought of their countries, their lives, as the proper subject of literature.

Rushdie’s India was 15 years older than mine, but definitely recognizable. So all lights blaze: the moment many writers describe when they realize: “I can make literature out of what I know and have experienced.”

I quickly write about 25 pages in a green felt pen. I must dig them out.

* * *

I move on to America, to a Master’s in Creative Writing, in Ohio State University, 1987-1989 and I choose to specialize in, not memoir, but poetry, the form in which, like many beginning writers, I instinctively wrote.

So, it’s all poetry: courses in poetry, reading it, writing it, in the interstices of taking classes, and teaching Freshman composition. And then I go on to a Ph.D in Creative Writing at SUNY Binghamton in 1989–taking classes, teaching classes, writing papers, grading papers, a romantic busyness: lots of reading, thinking and a little writing, but still…all I want to do is write.

I quit my Ph. D to get married, and suddenly get to write full time, as I had always wanted to. We wander around the US–to Cornell, New York, where Roy did a post-doc; to Stanford, California, another post-doc; and then to William and Mary, where he teaches. And I write poetry full time! And then I realize I’ve written through all the poem ideas I have, and am running dry.

* * *

I pick up memoirs, almost by chance. Patricia Hampl’s, A Romantic Education, describes, with verve and verisimilitude, a family in which food, and eating and drinking were shorthand substitutes for love—much like mine. Annie Dillard in “An American Childhood” describes an intense girlhood in Pittsburgh, a steel city like Jamshedpur in which I grew up. I read Frost in May, and Mary MacCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood.

Dostoevsky describes his Prince Myshkin before an epileptic fit

“His brain seemed to catch fire at brief moments…. His sensation of being alive and his awareness increased tenfold at those moments which flashed by like lightning. His mind and heart were flooded by a dazzling light.”

So too mine. About 4 years after the original idea, I saw my childhood and adolescence as a subject over the next few week and months, and hundreds of little memories rushed in. I jotted them down and I burned with the desire to write the memoir. (As I do now).

* * *

And in the providence which shapes our ends, my husband, who had been teaching at William and Mary was offered a postdoc the University of Minnesota. I believed I could write anywhere, so was cool with going to Minneapolis, and my two years there turned out to be absolutely one of the most stimulating and creative periods of my writing life.

The Twin Cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul, had an active literary community, particularly in Creative nonfiction and memoir. I applied to a graduate course in Creative Nonfiction at the University of Minnesota to which I had to turn in a 10 page piece of writing. I wrote my first essay, “The Goblin Market” about the raucous open air markets, magical to a young child, and it won a Roberts Writing Award, $200.

Charlie Sugnet, my writing teacher at the University of Minnesota, and the weekly book excerpts he gave us to read opened the world of creative nonfiction to me. Annie Dillard says moving from poetry to creative nonfiction is like playing with the whole orchestra rather than a single instrument. Indeed.

* * *

Mini-magic happened. I had written two long essays that term in Charlie Sugnet’s class, one about my conversion experience, and one about working at Mother Teresa’s convent.

Within a few months, the two pieces won a Minnesota State Arts Board grant ($6000), a Jerome Foundation travel grant ($1800), a mentorship award with an established writer from the Asian community: David Mura.

Sugnet said that he could see my having a career. He suggested submitting a book about my experience in Mother Teresa’s convent to editors and agents. It was not, however, the book I wanted to write–I wanted to write a memoir of my early childhood. I visualized this period as the last 20-30 pages in it

But heck, I so wanted a published book and so I embarked upon a foolish quest that saddened and poisoned many years of my life–trying to write a book I was not truly in love with, and did not want to write with my whole heart. (Samina Ali, who was in one of these classes with me, described how she wanted to write about her arranged marriage to a Muslim gay man, but was so desperate for affirmation that she almost signed on to write a book called Demon Lover, about an incestuous relationship with her father.)

Lesson 1: Write the book YOU want to write, the one you are in love with, not the one you think might be successful

So I was trying to spin a book out of 14 months of my life, wasn’t whole-heartedly in love with it, and craved validation. I joined a writers’ group with my friend, the lovely writer (and human being!) Erin Hart. Took more writing and literature classes at the University and the Loft, a literary centre, at which I taught a course in creative nonfiction. I submitted my essays to magazines and for grants and prizes and fellowships, instead of keeping just writing, and finishing the doggone thing. Which meant I was always backing up and polishing what I’d already written instead of just writing. Going forward.

And since American creative writing classes are based on the workshop model: much time waswasted reading and critiquing other amateurs work instead of communing with the greats! And this is true, for both teachers and students!

Lesson 2 Get it done, get it down, get it written. Don’t seek validation. Seek mastery.

In my second year in Minnesota I went to a writers’ conference in New England, trying to get an agent and editor and a hypercritical, ungenerous teacher there shredded my work at the sentence and grammatical level (she didn’t like my contorted pretzel-like sentences) destroying my confidence, making me analyse my sentences, instead of just writing by instinct,

I took a course in grammar and editing which I perhaps did not need, but which helped me to write with the left brain too, and write better). More tiredness, more distraction, more time wasted.

Lesson 3: Take the critique of teachers with a grain of salt, assessing them. Avoid mean-spirited, frustrated, bitter ones: tormentors rather than mentors.

I used a tenth of the $6000 State Arts Board grant to work one on one with Carol Bly (ex-wife of Robert Bly!), who could go off on wild riffs of rage about ideas and sentences or grammatical constructions she did not like, or, but was also hyperbolically lavish with praise. All rather alarming for someone who was moving from poetry to prose and was just learning to write beautiful prose. She promised to send it to her agent when I had 100 beautiful pages.

More stress, more backing up and looking over my shoulder and obsessing over each word, each phrase, each sentence instead of looking at the big picture.

I started to write self-consciously, analytically, analysing each word, phrase, sentence, wanting them to be unassailable, joy turning to stress.

Lesson 4—Quit over-analysing. Write freely, write like a river. You will never write perfectly in this life. Why should you? You are not God.

Learn to let things go. Ship.

Knowing my work would be critiqued as it was being written I started getting frozen and blocked. There was a four page chapter over which I got blocked for four months in my perfectionism, which turned out to be–unnecessary!

Lesson 5 when blocked, read, read, read. You might instinctively stumble on a form and language. If you are blocked on a chapter, move on. Perhaps you don’t have to write it.

* * *

In the summer of 1993, I go to the Squaw Valley Writers Conference in California and meet Harper and Row editor, Ted Solotaroff and an agent, Virginia Barber, who express an enthusiastic interest in my manuscript about working with Mother Teresa.

I come back walking on air to Williamsburg, where we had returned despite my desperate desire to stay in Minneapolis.

My husband wasn’t hugely supportive; he was establishing his own career as a mathematician. Life was stressful, lots of battles about who’d do the dishes and the laundry and the cleaning and the tidying. And then we had Zoe, a lovely grinny baby–and writing time and energy was at a premium. I wrote and revised the manuscript through the tired first two years of her life.

When my second revision of my manuscript was rejected by the agent and editor in October 1996, I lay face down on the carpet and wanted to die.

Lesson 6: Never confuse strong enthusiastic interest for a signature on a piece of paper.

(I later met at least three established writers who this editor had expressed a strong interest in, led them on and dumped. Why?

Read Part Two here

The Eccentricities of my Father (From My Memoir-in-Progress, Up to the Hills)

By Anita Mathias

Uncle Fr. Tony Coelho S.J / Noel Joesph Mathias

My Uncle Fr. Tony Coelho S.J. (left), Noel Joseph Mathias (right)

(I am continuing a memoir of my father. The previous parts are

My father claimed that each of his thirty-two teeth, denture or otherwise, was sweet.

At buffets, he went first to the dessert table, even at the posh Taj Intercontinental or Oberoi Sheraton in Bombay, Delhi, or Madras, where—along with his brother, Theo, who was the Director, and his brother Eric–he interviewed applicants to The Xavier Labor Relations Institute at which he taught.

It was only after he had eaten trifle and Black Forest gateau and chocolate eclairs that he ate a little roast beef to refresh his palate. [Read more…]

Brutus, the Honourable Dog (From my memoir-in-progress, Up to the Hills)

By Anita Mathias

Alsatian puppy (Image credit)

Desperation, pushiness and luck: All these helped us acquire our gorgeous Alsatian I called Brutus

My father’s brother, Eric, who lived in Bombay, across the country, asked us to pick up a puppy for him from the litter of the pure-bred Alsatian guard dog of the American priests at Xavier Labour Relations Institute, the local American Jesuit-run business school.

We did not have a dog, since my mother had absolutely no interest in dogs, and my father dramatically declared he hated them. My sister and I, however, adored them, and had befriended all the dogs in the neighbourhood, even the fierce Alsatian guard-dogs. We stopped outside the gates that said, “Beware of the dog,”, the guards smiled at us while we called to the dogs, “Jai, Jai,” “Tibby, Tibby,” and the big furry monster dogs bounded up to be petted. And dog and children were ecstatic.

In an astonishing error of judgment, my father took my sister and I to pick up the puppy. A litter of furry adorable Alsatian puppies! I cuddled one. It wriggled in my arms; its soft fur brushed against my neck; it licked me. I fell deep in love.

“I want it, Pa,” I said.

“No. No. Anita, put it down, put it down,” my father growled,

“No, no, I want it.” And my sister and I pleaded, “Please can we have one too.”

“No! Ma can’t stand dogs. And I hate them. No!” he said tight-lipped, mortified. Public scenes and being the center of attention were torture for him.

“Oh, let her have it,” said the kindly Irish-American priests. “The family dog. It’s part of childhood,” they said, recalling a golden time; American suburbia; the fifties…

“Pleeeease, Pa. We love it,” my sister and I repeated, desperately, deducing victory from his furious embarrassment. Unable to withstand this chorus, he assented—reluctantly.

* * *

We returned home, unbelieving and ecstatic. “Two puppies,” cried my mother, who had no time for animals, for whom one night with a dog was more than enough.

“One is for us,” we declared!

“What rubbish! Noel? You’re joking. Noel?” my mother squawked, looking at my father, incredulously, imploringly.

“What to do, lovie?” he said weakly. “Those idiots.”

He looked at her meaningfully, shrugged; I thought I detected collusion. Were they going to return our puppy?

* * *

I slept that night with the puppy in a cardboard box on the floor next to my pillow, letting him bite my dangled fingers, so I would know if they took him away. The next day, we watched him vigilantly.

Dogfood was then unheard of in India. We fed the just-weaned pup boiled rice and meat, and he had violent diarrohea. My mother remembered the dysentery I had almost died of as a baby, and my emergency hospital baptism, and threw herself into nursing the pup. And as Antoine St Exupery points out, you are forever responsible for what you have tamed. The puppy stayed.

* * *

I called him Brutus, The Honorable Dog. I was captivated when I was eleven by the magical rhetoric of Julius Caesar, to which I was introduced by my father who could recite, But yesterday, the word of Caesar might have stood out against the world, now lies he here, and none so poor to do him reverence with pure enjoyment.

All our games featured Brutus. We cast spells on him so that he would remain a bandicoot-eyed puppy, but he grew, grew, becoming temperamental, irascible, snappish, apt to nip us when we dragged him out for a petting from under the beds where he retreated from the heat, and devoted to no one, ironically, but to my father, who still professed to hate dogs, but ensured the cook brushed his thick fur and trained him. And early each morning, my father threw a ball for him daily across our three front lawns, a good half acre, so that the fine animal would remain sleek, sinewy and strong.

We had Brutus for just three years. My father retired at 60 from Tata’s at the mandatory retirement age, and got a new job at XLRI, the local American-Jesuit run business school. A flat came with the job, a three bedroom flat after our sprawling four bedroom sixteen room house, and, according to the rules: No animals.

My shy father, of course, would die rather than ask for exceptions or favours, and so we gave Brutus away to a colleague who wanted him as a watchdog. The man was vegetarian, and refused to give him meat, but promised him lots of fresh milk from his buffalo. I hope he kept his promise.

Goals

Start Date—August 27^th, 2012

Completion Date—August 31st, 2013

Word Count Goal-120,000

Words per day Goal—550 words a day

Progress (Aiming to write 6 days a week, excluding Sundays)

Day 60—26219 (6781 words behind, whoa!!)

The Things My Father Said (From my Memoir: Up to the Hills)

By Anita Mathias

(This is Part IV from a memoir of my Father, Noel Mathias. Parts I to III are:

Shake and Shake the Ketchup Bottle

We were never certain if the stories my father told us were truth or invention.

He claimed he responded to an advertisement in The Illustrated Weekly of India: “All mosquitoes eliminated from your house and garden in a day. Guaranteed to work, or your money back.” He sent in his ten rupees and waited. He received two small rocks. Take the mosquito, read the instructions, place it on the lower stone. Cover with the other stone. Crush mosquito.

Another story: A country bumpkin arrives in Bombay, craning his neck at the skyscrapers. A city slicker marches up, “It’s my building. You have to pay me a rupee for every storey you look at?” The bumpkin hands over fifteen rupees, then conspiratorially confesses to the bystanders. “I gave him fifteen rupees, but actually–I looked at the whole building.”

Yeah, his humour leaned towards the verbal though silly. A man leaves his wife. As he crosses the threshold, she wails, “You said you wouldn’t leave, and you’ve left.” He, “I promised to cleave, and I’ve cleft.”

* * *

“Was that really Professor Mathias?” one of his students asked, observing him joke with us on a train. “I have never seen him smile.” “You can only talk to him soberly on sober subjects,” my cousin Dorothy lamented. However,

[Read more…]