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Burn-Out Vanishes When We Rediscover Purpose

By Anita Mathias

Burn-Out Vanishes When We Rediscover Purpose

ravenna-s-apollnare-nuovo-the-three-wise-men-1When 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.

 

Filed Under: In which I explore Productivity and Time Management and Life Management, In which I just keep Trusting the Lord, In which I try to discern the Voice and Will of God Tagged With: blogging, bucket lists, exercise, listen to your life, memoir, Oxford, Pomodoro technique, Purpose, reading, revising a book, walking, writing

One Work Goal for 2105: Focus

By Anita Mathias

One Work Goal for 2105: Focus

rodin-thinker

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!

Filed Under: goals, In which I celebrate discipline Tagged With: Bill Gates, colon cancer, focus, Goal, Janet Walton, memoir, Stephen Jay Gould, Upper Room Discourse, Warren Buffet

Palaces of Peace and Dreaming (Chapter from my memoir, Mind has Mountains)

By Roy Mathias

Palaces of Peace and Dreaming (Chapter from my memoir, Mind has Mountains)

Image Credit

I am slowly writing a much-procrastinated memoir. Thank you, readers, for indulging me by reading along.

This is the second half of I’ve Seen the Moon Rock, about the clubs in Jamshedpur, the small Indian town in which I grew up. The clubs were a central part of the social life of the town—and the club libraries, which I write about here, were a central part of my life!

Perhaps, this chapter won’t make it into the final version, or only make it briefly—but, for now, here it is.

Palaces of Peace and Dreaming

A few times a week, the ayah, our live-in help, walked my sister and me to the poky little library in the United Club to borrow books.  I had learned to read easily, almost unconsciously, reading full-length books by the time I was six. The books I owned formed the emotional, imaginative center of my life, but these were soon read multiple times, and the libraries grew increasingly precious.

Jamshedpur felt safe, so my parents left us in the club library  while they watched “adult” films. We joined other children in the empty billiard rooms, shooting bright balls across the green baize table, or congregating around the low tables with children’s magazines, puzzling: figuring out what was awry in images, spotting the difference, cracking mazes and connecting dots.

Comics covered tables, sweet magic. Richie Rich and his boundless wealth, every fantasy achieved, the American dream never metastasizing to nightmare–though how we love to pity poor little rich boys, sour grapes on our tongues.

Puzzled Dennis the Menace asking the preacher, “What if I love my neighbor and he don’t love me back?” while Mr. Wilson scowls. We pored over those tattered missals: Caspar, the friendly ghost; Wendy, the good witch; Hot Stuff, the naughty devil; Spooky and the Three Boos, all of which made the demonic adorable—and how Screwtape would have approved!

We devoured them all: Archie, Veronica, and Betty; “Bringing up Father;” the Moomins, a strip of which my father daily read in The Statesman; and “Phantom, the Ghost who Walks”. There was Batman, Spiderman, and Clark Kent, who morphed to Superman, all of whom we identified with, for didn’t we too have secret dreams and ambitions—and we hoped powers–unrecognized by the adult world?

* * *

I wanted to read all the classics, with a collector’s longing for completeness, a mixture of pride, drivenness, and the love of goals.  I ticked off the books I’d read from the list of classics at the back of each book, and tried to get hold of the rest. My father marveled at how swiftly I could pick out something good from the mass of fluff in the bookcases of our libraries or second-hand bookstores, intuitively gauging what might be good by the cover, publisher, imprint, and blurb.

There were some books, however, that I never finished despite repeated assaults on the first chapters:  The Children of the New Forest, Lorna Doone, and books that I thought of as boy’s books: Coral Island, Black Beauty, Mutiny on the Bounty, Tom Brown’s School Days, Jules Verne, or Biggles the aviator.

* * *

Enid Blyton was the J. K. Rowling of our day, the author who wrote books in addictive series, which were begged, borrowed, and never returned. I cried when my father showed me the report of her death in The Statesman.  There would be no more Enid Blytons!!

Enid Blyton, incredibly, wrote 600 books, which accompanied us from infancy to adolescence, first courting us with fairy tales such as The Enchanted Wood, The Faraway Tree, and Noddy and Big Ears in little Toy Town, with faintly racist Gollywogs. These segued into Famous Five and Timmy the Dog, and the Secret Seven series, children solving what adults could not, living in a constant whirl of adventure, independence and unpredictability.

The first full-length book I read entirely by myself, aged six, was Last Term at Mallory Towers from Enid Blyton’s Mallory Towers boarding school series. I snatched it from my mother when she would not continue reading it to me, and finished reading it myself! Blyton’s other boarding school series were St. Clare’s and, my favourite, The Naughtiest Girl in School, a moniker I acquired in both my schools, and a kind of redemption story, for eventually The Naughtiest Girl Becomes a Monitor, which one year I did.

Though Blyton was apparently not a great mother—like many children’s writers, she remained a child imaginatively and emotionally—she perfectly appealed to a child’s fantasies, fears, passions and longings for independence.

Ah, how she captured boarding school life—decency and malice, honesty and deceit, anguish and excitement, politics and sweet friendship. Mallory Towers and St. Clare’s portrayed The Lord of The Flies world of boarding schools, and perhaps scripted the things we did there, life imitating art: midnight feasts, snowball fights, and sending people “to Coventry”–the whole class agreeing not to talk to a girl, a psychic strain which led three girls to attempt suicide, for human beings, after all, are social animals.

The club libraries stocked several boarding school stories, a version of the orphan story so beloved by children, which simultaneously thrills and appalls: Angela Brazil’s secret world of foreign boarding schools, What Katy Did at School, and, set in England, the fat bespectacled Billy Bunter, an ancestor of Harry Potter. If the library had it, I read it: Just William, Nancy Drew and all eight books of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women series which I loved.

* * *

Sometimes, all our family read the same books: James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small series, about his adventures as a vet in the Yorkshire Dales; Gerard Durrell who, like me, was born in Jamshedpur; and volumes of the nuanced, understated, pitch-perfect,  quintessentially English humour of P. G. Wodehouse, whom my father called the blind pig, and I loved!

I read every Agatha Christie mystery I could find when I was eleven, asking my father for four bars of Cadbury’s chocolate and four Agatha Christies for my Christmas present.   Oh, the pleasures of a purposeless childhood!

Aged 12, I, inexplicably, decided to read all the Mills and Boons romances I could find, keeping a list of each title I had read, with the number on their spine, but fortunately giving up after having read 102 romances!

I then progressed to Ruby M. Ayres, Denise Robbins, Barbara Cartland, and the gay rakes of the Regency novels of Georgette Heyer, which I considered rather elegant, particularly those which traced the fortunes of an aristocratic family through four generations–William Faulkner for every woman. And then, by 13, I was pretty much done with romances per se. Phew!!

I then slightly inched up to Taylor Caldwell rags to riches stories, set in 19th century America; and Victoria Holt and Jean Plaidy (who were the same person as Philippa Carr, one of eight pseudonyms of Eleanor Hibbert who wrote 200 books, many of which were in our school library). Well, I read every historical novel I could find– Quo Vadis?; Desiree, about Napoleon’s true love; The Last Days of Pompeii; The Hunchback of Notre Dame,  Arthurian romances like Mary Stewart’s,  and Restoration novels,  delighted by details like the fops and dandies carrying around little pomanders of oranges studded with cloves to ward off the nauseating odors of the streets.

After a mid-teen phase of thrillers, I gave them up for life–devouring and discarding entire genres!! I gulped down Helen MacInnes, Frederick Forsythe, The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File and The Dogs of War, Arthur Hailey’s Hotel and Airport; Peter Benchley’s Jaws and Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, (which disturbed me though I didn’t really get it). My father was outraged when he noticed me read the graphic and sexual novels of James Hadley Chase and Harold Robbins. “Your books will take you to hell,” he said, grabbing them, scaring me.

* * *

The Second World War, the Nazis, the concentration camps were live literary and cinematic subjects, and the Club’s management sscreened numerous World War II films, and stacked the libraries with World War II novels. I felt permanently branded by second-hand Holocaust horrors: yellow stars and hidden attics, windowless cattle trucks, the punitive shooting of every tenth person, the overcrowdings, exhaustion, starvation, humiliations and  cruelties  of the Camps.

I read The Diary of Anne Frank, of course; Corrie Ten Boom’s The Hiding Place, and the novels of Leon Uris: The Angry Hills, set in Greece; his masterpiece, Exodus, an exhaustively researched and wonderful novel about the birth of Israel; QB VII, a scabrous novel about medical experimentation on Jewish prisoners; and Mila 18, about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Since there were few Christian books available in that Hindu and Parsee town, out of a strange, subconscious sense of duty, I read all the “Christian” novels in the Club. Along with my parents, I read several novels by A. J. Cronin, and remember getting deeply upset and tearful, my blood boiling at The Keys of the Kingdom, the life of unlucky, sweet Father Francis Chisholm. I read Morris West, Lloyd Douglas, Catherine Marshall’s Christy and Julie; Margaret Craven’s haunting and beautiful, I Heard the Owl Call my Name, and Taylor Caldwell’s fictional biographies of Luke, Dear and Glorious Physician, and of Paul, Great Lion of God.

Yes, indeed, I read whatever came to hand, a cetacean opening its cavernous mouth–nonfiction about Indian history: The Judgment, Freedom at Midnight, and Zulfy, my Friend; biographies of Nicholas and Alexandra; of Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson; of the Rothschilds, Field Marshall Montgomery, Queen Victoria, Napoleon, whatever was on the biography shelf.  Indiscriminate as a whale, I devoured genius and trash, The Enemy Within, about the American Mafia; The Leopard by Lampedusa, Papillon by Henri Charriere—about fourteen years of hard labour in the Devil’s Island Penal Colony, and books of my parent’s generation, Ryder Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines and She; James Hilton’s Shangri-La and Goodbye Mr. Chips. I read Animal Farm: A Fairy Tale when I was ten and was disgusted to discover it was not really a fairy tale, or about animals.

“You are reading too fast; you won’t remember what you are reading,” my father said, quizzing me at random on Ninety Days at Entebbe, about the brilliant rescue missis by Israeli commandoes of the hostages on the plane hijacked at Entebbe, but I then had an excellent short-term memory and, indeed, memory.

* * *

The libraries were run on the card system. You took the card out of its little jacket; examined who read it before you, wrote your name; handed in the card, took the book.

“Are you sure you  should be reading these?” the librarian asked doubtfully, seeing me check out adult books, but they accepted my glib assurances.

I checked out the risque Angelique novels because they appeared to be historical novels, which I then adored. They were written by “Sergeann Golon,” a composite for a husband-wife team, Serge Golub, a Russian aristocrat and geologist who fled the Russian Revolution, and his French wife, Anne Golon.

The novels detailed Angelique’s sexual adventures in ancien regime France; she improbably gets kidnapped by pirates, becomes a slave in the Harem of the Sultan of Morocco, gets sexually brutalized by the Head of the French Police,  becomes a countess, meets the Sun King, Louis XIV. Mild erotica: brutal, humiliating, but apparently thrilling sex, (the first sexual descriptions I’d ever read) slightly elevated by the ancien regime, the real historical personae and the elegant clothes.

* * *

My parents let me choose my own books once I was old enough to read by myself, and so I had.  I read four or five of the Angelique novels at home, unremarked on.

On my fourteeth birthday, Mrs. Cherian, our tall American neighbor, hollered for my mother at the hole in the hedge at which each woman stood on her own territory and gossiped for twenty or thirty minutes, still standing. “Tell her I’ll call her back,” my mother said, putting the finishing touches on the cake. I relayed the message, my thumb as a bookmark in Angelique.

But Mrs. Cherian could not wait.

She was back in five minutes.  “Celine, Celine, Celine,” she hollered.

My mother came running.

“Celine, do you know what Anita is reading?”

“No. What?”  Two lawns away, where I sat reading, I heard Mrs Cherian’s voice, in a dramatic hush, “Angelique.”   

“What’s Angelique? my mother asked plaintively.

“Angelique is a dirty, filthy book,” Mrs. Cherian squawked.

“Noel,” my mother yelled, the moment my father came home.

Shouting, screaming, tears, “Your books will take you to hell,” and Angelique banned, though I bought one on a railway platform on my way up to boarding school, where the good nuns were thrown off by the gown and bustles and the air of historicity.  They, of course, confiscated it, (along with every book brought from home) only to release them during the ten day summer holidays, which I spent at school, finally getting Angelique out of my bloodstream.

Completed Chapters

1 In the Beginning: Rosaries and Steel

2 Jamshedpur, The Steel City where I was born

3 The Garden, Parks and Restaurants of my Childhood, when All was Magical

4 I’ve Seen the Moon Rock

4 Polyphemus, the Cyclops, A Memoir of my Father, Noel Joseph Mathias, Part 1, Part 2,3, 4, 5,

5 My maternal grandmother, Molly Coelho, “Small Nana;” My grandfather who lived by the sea and taught me to love poetry; My Uncle Eustace, The Maharaja;  My Uncle Mervyn; My Maiden Aunt Joyce; Youpee; Decembers in Gay Bombay.

6  Travels with my Father. Mangalore, my ancestral hometown. Dread Evening Prayers at my Grandmother’s House. My great-uncle Norbert, a pious crook; My grandmother, Josephine, and my grandfather, Dr. Piedade Felician Mathias, OBE. Christmas in Mangalore, and Mandatory Visits to all our nun relatives. My aunts, Ethel, the Empress, Winnie, the Grand Duchess, and Joyce, the Duchess. Mandatory Christmas visits. My saintly Great-Aunt Rosie, and her Rebel Daughter Marie. Arranged Marriages, and the Consequences of Small Town Inbreeding

Filed Under: My Memoir: Mind has Mountains Tagged With: Jamshedpur, memoir, Mind Has Mountain, reading

I Saw the Moon Rock: The Clubs of my Childhood (Chapter from my memoir-in-progress: “Mind Has Mountains”)

By Anita Mathias

I Saw the Moon Rock: The Clubs of my Childhood (Chapter from my memoir-in-progress: “Mind Has Mountains”)

article_Underwood_1130I have been writing a memoir of my childhood in India in a desultory fashion, but have now decided to work on it almost every day, and get it done.
And here is the latest chapter, on the Clubs, the centers of social life. I have linked to all the completed chapters at the end of this post.

I’ve Seen the Moon Rock: The Clubs of my Childhood

The astronauts walked on the moon–in other worlds–and everything seemed possible.
“Will we soon have picnics on the moon?” I asked. My father considered it. “Yeeees,” he said, thoughtfully. “I think so.”
I looked at the moon, silent, luminous. It wasn’t too far. Yes, he was probably right.
* * *
In 1970, a travelling exhibition of Apollo 11 souvenirs came to the United Club. We filed through.
In a glass case was a rock that looked like … well, a rock.
As we left, we were given a fluorescent yellow and orange sticker: “I’ve seen the moon rock.”

I stuck it on my vanity case, for I was soon to go to boarding school at St. Mary’s Convent, Nainital–where I showed it off. I was the only girl who had seen the moon rock.
* * *

Community life in Jamshedpur revolved around the two clubs we belonged to–The United Club, walking distance from my house, and the more expensive Beldih Club, formerly the European Club, which required recommendations from members to join.
There were stamp exhibitions: microcosms under glass—triangular stamps, circular stamps, 3-D stamps; series of stamps on butterflies, birds, flowers, Christmas; stamps of countries that no longer existed, or had just begun to. The smaller the country, the bigger and brighter the stamps, the more unusual their shape.
* * *

Once a year, for ten nights, there was a one-act play Festival, open to schools, colleges, and troupes of friends, which presented gripping plays—“The Monkey’s Paw,” “The Bishop’s Candlesticks,” “Overtones,” “Mutatis Mutandis,” or “Mice and Men.” I loved the plays directed by Perin Mehta, the sister-in-law of the German Jewish Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who dwelt in the Elysian realms of real fame and real art–Booker Prize winner, and part of the Merchant Ivory triumvirate.
* * *

And there were quiz competitions– inter-school, family, couple, mother/daughter or faculty/student. The secret of success was getting hold of the books the quiz master used: BBC Mastermind or Quizmaster. My mother and sister prepared feverishly, almost memorizing the book—all our family have an excellent memory—and won.
What was Woody Allen’s real name? Allen Konigsberg. What was the world tree in Norse mythology which ran through the nine worlds? Yggdrasil. What was the cornucopia? The horn of the goat, Amalthea. Whose epitaph was “Here he lies where he longed to be/ Home is the sailor, home from sea,/And the hunter home from the hill.” Robert Louis Stevenson. Where is Timbuktu? Mali.
The quizmaster played snatches of The Jupiter Symphony, The Moonlight Sonata or The Ode to Joy. He projected slides of the Parthenon and Pantheon, Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, and Monet’s Water Lilies. Quiz preparation involved a quick listen of my father’s magisterial collection of classical music, and leafing through art and architecture books–surely educational, and not a complete waste of time as my father grumbled when he saw me read quiz books. True knowledge came from reading widely, he said, books, not quiz books
* * *

Every summer, my mother submitted her roses, gerberas, and whimsical ikebana arrangements to the annual flower and vegetable shows. The flowers were over-bred to magnificence–dahlias as big as a dinner plate; chrysanthemums with twirled petals; snapdragons, delphiniums, lupins; exquisite roses hybridized in back gardens into indigo, purple, magenta: most unroselike colours, for every lady gardener had mastered grafting.
After a long period of experimentation with her flower snippers and rags, my mother finally bred an almost black rose, she called The Negrette Rose.
A charming African-American, James Greer, who was visiting TISCO spent a week with us. Both my sister and I were fascinated with our black visitor (and I corresponded with him for years while I was at boarding school, and he returned to the States). As we showed him the garden, my parents froze, their hands to their mouths, as they heard my little sister confide, “My mother calls this a Negrette Rose.” But James Greer observed her love and innocence, and just laughed.
* * *

In 1972, the United Club hosted Dr. Bolar who offered “a nature cure” to reverse myopia. And so everyone became obsessed with the health of their eyes; read Aldous Huxley’s The Art of Seeing; looked at green at every oppotunity; palmed their eyes after half an hour of reading; ate bowls of grated carrots and drank carrot juice at every meal.
Dr. Bolar and his wife, an ill-educated, crude, smiling couple, became the saviours, the Rasputins, to every family whose children had poor eyesight; and there were many in town, dominated by Zorashtrians, an inbred community. They were feted, invited to dinner.
My parents too placed their faith in Dr. Bolar. My father was worried about his own eyesight, but, particularly about my younger sister’s, who had wore thick glasses from the age of six, and had had eye surgery aged ten.
Dr. Bolar entered our living room, looked around at the souvenirs from my father’s years in England, and his travels in Europe, Japan and America; stared at the built-in fireplace (our house had been built for British executives); settled deep into the sofa, and sighed, saying, “Oh, this is just like an English house,” thus endearing himself to my mother.
Dr. Bolar and his wife checked our eyesight at the start of the course, and weekly, declaring remarkable improvement. Then Mrs. Surti took her children to an independent optician. The original readings had indeed been correct; the rest were hopeful inventions. She threatened to sue unless he returned the fees. The “doctor” had typed out eye exercises and dietary recommendations from Bates’ Better Eyesight without Glasses and was no more a doctor, and no more or less knowledgeable than anyone else who had read that book. He returned our money, and slunk back into the outer darkness of Bombay, from whence he came.
* * *

Every Christmas, after a party, at which children gorged on jelebis, laddoos and pastries, Santa appeared in a red fur-lined cape. Ho-ho-ho.
At the Beldih Club, Santa gave presents to all children, choosing the same age-appropriate gift for every girl and boy up to twelve, and impartially wrapping all of them in the same paper. The winter I turned twelve, the end of childhood in India, all the girls got a make-up set, a coveted palette: eye-shadow, eyeliner, mascara, lipstick, and “blush-on.” However, my mother had perhaps Freudianly recorded my age as two, and while toddlers processed up in their frilly dresses, I heard Anita Mathias called on the loudspeaker, and got a large teddy bear to my tears and mortification.
In the United Club, however, the dues did not cover children’s Christmas presents. Parent bought their own presents, gift-wrapped them, and delivered them to the Club office before the party. The poorer children got cheap rip-off Monopoly, Ludo or plastic badminton sets; the nouveau riche got massive presents, bedecked in tinsel and bows and ribbons; the sophisticated got hardbound editions of The Children’s Classics or Illustrated Encylopaedias.
I looked around. Why would Santa give rich kids rich presents, and poor kids poor presents? It just wasn’t fair. An outrageous thought: was the Santa Claus of song and story who knew if we’d been good or bad, and sleighed in from the North Pole, hauled by Rudolf, the red-nosed reindeer; the Santa Claus whom Enid Blyton and my father told us about—was he, incredibly, incredibly–a giant conspiracy by the entire adult world to fool trusting children, a secret even the meanest adult managed to keep?
“There is no Santa Claus?” I asked my father. “Oh really? Why do say that? I think there is,” he said lamely.” Huh!
“There is no Santa Claus,” I informed my sister. “Of course, there is,” she said passionately. “As if Ma and Pa would lie!”
“There is no Santa Claus,” I told my classmates. “It’s our parents.” “Of course, there is,” said those who got a present at the club. The rest were silent.
Logic prevailed. Santa died and I turned seven.
The clubs were the centre of community life— Charminar, a cigarette company sponsored “Made for Each Other” Ballroom dancing competitions, with prizes for “the most charming couple”. There were classes for housewives: Ikebana, Batik, Tie and Dye, oil painting, all of which my mother took; Bharat Natyam Indian dance classes for girls; billiard tables, golf courses, basketball courts and swimming pools.
Magicians sawed a volunteer woman in two, performed mysterious card tricks, produced doves from hats and scarves from sleeves. “How did he do it? How did he do it?” we whispered.
A visiting travelling hypnotist claimed that those who resisted hypnosis most vigorously were the first to succumb. “Who doesn’t believe in hypnosis?” he asked.
Young brash company workers waved their hands. “There’s no way you can hypnotize me,” a young man blustered.
To our horror, we saw those very men raise their hands in the air and keep them there until the hypnotist gave the word. They were given raw potatoes and told they were eating apples; they pronounced them delicious. The trance broken, they spat them out in disgust.
There was a ventriloquist whose art I was determined to learn. I turned my head in delight as his voice, subtly altered, emerged from nooks and crannies around the hall. And I practiced, barks, mews, and wolf calls, projecting my voice while barely moving my lips, and later disrupted physics lessons and music lessons at school by these cat mewls, barks, wolf howls and lion roars.
* * *

In those days before TV, which crept to Bombay, Delhi, Calcutta and Madras, but not yet Jamshedpur, the throbbing magnet heart of the Clubs was, of course, movies.
The love of film united the nation. People passed around their copies of Filmfare and Stardust, the intimate gossip magazines about Indian film stars, who were public property, known by their first names, Dimple, Amitabh, Rishi; their families, marriages, affairs and divorces, all public knowledge. It was not called Bollywood for nothing.
The Beldih Club showed three English language or European films a week, with a children’s film every Friday during the winter when the swimming pool was closed, an offering duplicated by the United Club, which also showed Hindi movies, which no one admitted to liking or seeing–though, in fact, every seat was taken. The clubs staggered days, so you could drive to a movie seven days a week, and we occasionally did!

The movies were shown out of doors on a screen the height of a house, with a covered balcony for the old and cold. Children sat together in the first rows, in bright starlight amid the night chorus of crickets.
The triumphant crow of Woody Woodpecker: Cartoons came first. I did not like them: Bugs Bunny hanging by the ledge while his arms grew longer and longer; Wily Coyote flattened by cars only to pop up again; the heart-pounding chases, ever-present pain and danger, while the audience cruelly laughed.
I looked at the insects flittering in the beams of projected light. And then the MGM lion tossed its mane and roared, transporting us to the African veldt, or downtown Manhattan.
Children’s films were screened again and again. We knew them thoroughly especially The Sound of Music, the English language film for our generation whose songs we knew by heart. “These are a few of my favourite things.” “How do you solve a problem like Maria?” “I am 16 going on 17,” and “Edelweiss.”
Other favourites: Mary Poppins. “Chim, chimney; chim chimney; chim chimney; chim chim.” I used to hold an umbrella and jump down from my dresser, hoping I’d be able to fly. My Fair Lady: Lots of chocolate for me to eat. I will make a duchess of this draggle-tailed guttersnipe. Chocolate Factories! The Three Musketeers, all for one and one for all. To Sir with Love: “Those schoolgirl days, of telling tales and biting nails.” The Man who Knew too Much. Elsa the Lioness who was Born Free.

Movies were either A, Adult, or U, universal. If we wanted to go to an Adult movie, which wasn’t too violent or, well, adult, we wore a saree, and slathered on make up. Mr. Bhardwaj the kindly membership secretary occasionally stood at the entrance, and challenged people, letting me through when I was below 16, but sometimes challenging me when I was older, and I never knew if I should be flattered or offended. We had no ID; they assumed that we, or our parents wouldn’t lie, in full view of the community who had a shrewd idea of our age.
There were Holocaust films and World War II films, during which I fled to the library on the premises, and westerns and thrillers which I disliked. We watched Woody Allen and Truffaut and Bergman: the films were, in a word, eclectic.
Long past our bedtime, we watched Shakespeare beneath the stars; Anne Boleyn laid her lovely head on the block; Mammy crunched Scarlett O’Hara’s waist to seventeen inches, and the Scarlet Pimpernel kissed the earth where his disdainful wife had walked. The sun, a blazing orange ball sinking below the horizon, when we left for the Club was replaced by the gleaming moon.
I drifted to sleep on the back seat amid a lingering after-glow of images: Hera and Zeus settled the Trojan War in a game of chess, and Christ—in one of the frequent Bible movies screened–stretched his arms across the screen: “Lo, I will be with you always, even to the end of the age.”
* * *

INTERVAL: giant yellow words flashed across the screen. We darted to the tables with the carbon-leaved pads.
Across the lawn, the white-uniformed bearers in their bag-shaped white hats were mobbed by a crowd. Everyone brandished their chits over other people’s heads, yelling orders for pakoras, slivers of vegetables deep-fried in chickpea batter; or dinner rolls filled with “Beldih Spread” (my mother cajoled the recipe out of the chef to the envy of her circle): shredded chicken, cooked with onions and coriander in a sauce of mayonnaise, mustard and ketchup.
We hollered for the golden, crisp, freshly fried, salty potato “chips,” as they are universally called in Indian English. The management of the Beldih Club, however, craftily decided to officially dub the potato chips (or crisps) which sold for 0.60 paise “potato wafers,” and christen “French fries” which sold for Rs. 1.85 “potato chips” in the British style. From force of habit, both we children and our father signed a chit for “potato chips;” the bearers, understanding what we meant, gave us the crisp chips, and we were billed Rs. 1.85 for the French fries, to the irritation of my mother.
* * *
My sister and I realized the semi-illiterate and harried bearers never looked at what we’d written, just gave us what we yelled for. Also, they had no means of checking our signatures.
Ah-ha! Using the think-differently gifts we both later used in (legitimate) business, we ordered wildly, and at the bottom, tidily wrote our neighbour’s name, Mrs Cherian.
“Are you sure we won’t get caught?” my sister occasionally asked anxiously. “How could we?” I said.
We sipped ice-cold Fanta, had fresh potato wafers and potato chips. “Mrs. Cherian” signed.

“Celine,” came an irate cry, at the end of the month. It was irascible Mrs. Elsie Cherian–an American Jew, who had married a quiet, conservative Indian University student at Berkeley, and followed him to India, becoming completely Indianized, wearing sarees, and cooking traditional Malayali food.
Mrs Cherian, six feet tall, stood at the hedge that divided our house from hers, into which she and my mother had cut a path, through which the children could pass back and forth. She held out a wad of chits.
At the end of our bloated month, Mrs. Cherian opened her bill to discover that, apparently, all month, she had gorged on Coca-Cola and Fanta, and every snack on the menu, all signed for in childish handwriting, Mrs Cherian (instead of Elsie Cherian, as we hadn’t realized she would have signed).

“Oh, if the ground could have opened and swallowed me up.” My mother groped for metaphors
Mrs. Cherian paid the bill; my parents repaid her.
We just had chips (sorry, potato wafers!) now and again, and, sometimes, ice-cold bubbly Fanta, then the taste of heaven, but the days of entire menu were over. And so too was our career as master forgers.

Completed Chapters

1 In the Beginning: Rosaries and Steel

2 Jamshedpur, The Steel City where I was born

3 The Garden, Parks and Restaurants of my Childhood, when All was Magical

4 Polyphemus, the Cyclops, A Memoir of my Father, Noel Joseph Mathias, Part 1, Part 2, 3, 4, 5,

5 My maternal grandmother, Molly Coelho, “Small Nana;” My grandfather who lived by the sea and taught me to love poetry; My Uncle Eustace, The Maharaja;  My Uncle Mervyn; My Maiden Aunt Joyce; Youpee; Decembers in Gay Bombay.

6  Travels with my Father. Mangalore, my ancestral hometown. Dread Evening Prayers at my Grandmother’s House. My great-uncle Norbert, a pious crook; My grandmother, Josephine, and my grandfather, Dr. Piedade Felician Mathias, OBE. Christmas in Mangalore, and Mandatory Visits to all our nun relatives. My aunts, Ethel, the Empress, Winnie, the Grand Duchess, and Joyce, the Duchess. Mandatory Christmas visits. My saintly Great-Aunt Rosie, and her Rebel Daughter Marie. Arranged Marriages, and the Consequences of Small Town Inbreeding

 

Filed Under: My Memoir: Mind has Mountains Tagged With: Beldih Club, Jamshedpur, memoir, Mind has Mountains, Movies, United Club

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

By Anita Mathias

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

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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).


Aitwal Deepti's photo.

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.

Filed Under: In which I explore writing and blogging and creativity, random, Writing and Blogging Tagged With: Blogging and book-writing, memoir, writing process

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

By Anita Mathias

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

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.

 

 

Filed Under: My Memoir: Mind has Mountains Tagged With: Jamshedpur, Mangalore, memoir

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_MOUNTAINSSo, 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

Filed Under: In which I explore writing and blogging and creativity, Writing and Blogging Tagged With: failure, memoir, writing

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

  1. Polyphemus, the Cyclops: A Memoir of my Father, Noel Joseph Mathias (Part I)
  2. A Memoir of My Father, Noel Mathias. In England, in the Forties & Fifties
  3. The Things My Father Said
  4. At Play with my Father, Part III )

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…]

Filed Under: My Memoir: Mind has Mountains Tagged With: memoir, Noel Joseph Mathias, Up to the HIlls

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Anita Mathias: About Me

Anita Mathias
Premier Digital Awards 2015 - Finalist - Blogger of the year
Runner Up Christian Media Awards 2014 - Tweeter of the year

Recent Posts

  • On why God Permits our Weaknesses and Frailities to linger, and on the Baptism in the Holy Spirit–and its limits!
  • In Praise of Desert and Wilderness Experiences
  • It’s all God’s money: Thoughts on “the Cattle on a Thousand Hills”
  • Gratitude: A Secret to Happiness
  • The Things Worth Doing Badly
  • A Christmas Reflection, and Letter
  • Even Better than the Alps… Thoughts on Returning Home
  • Peaceful at Pentecost
  • Failing Better: A New Year’s Resolution, of sorts
  • Burn-Out Vanishes When We Rediscover Purpose

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