May 20th, 2011 by josephinecarr

“I am somebody. I am me. I like being me. And I don’t need anybody to make me somebody.” (Louis L’Amore)

The blog is a short piece of writing.

The blog is a journal piece of writing.

The blog is a personal — or — informative piece of writing.

As a professional writer, I’ve never written poetry or short stories (the short form). I’ve never kept a journal or diary, and the personal exposure of a blog is impossible for me to embrace, while the informative choice would duplicate what’s already out there (writing tips and discussion).

I am a fiction writer, a structure with which I’ve been successful.

So be it.

While I wait to hear from my literary agent about the newest revisions of The Rabbi’s Mother, I will channel my writing energies into a new mystery series called The Matchmaker Murders.

This is what I think:  blogs will not make you a successful writer.  The stories you tell will do that.  If your voice is sure and lively in the blog form, go to it!  For me, it’s all in the long story.  My most successful novel, Monday’s Child, sold one hundred thousand copies before the days of blogging, Facebook, Twitter.

It begins “once upon a time” and it finishes with ….

THE END.

May 7th, 2011 by josephinecarr

“The way you make love is the way God will be with you.”

(Rumi, The Book of Love)

Yup, I always knew being Jewish was wonderfully sexy.  I’m reading a book called Everything is God:  The Radical Path of Nondual Judaism, by Jay Michaelson.

Here’s a short passage I just finished:

“Ours is not to flee the world to repeated, temporary islands of unity.  It is instead to bring about the Divine lovemaking between yesh and ayin, nothingness and the all, a union delicious in its consummation.”

Truthfully, few Jews consider the dance of Jewishness in this way, but there is a strong heritage of mysticism in Judaism, and it’s there that I find my own identity as a Jew.

I have this feeling that if rabbis and synagogues in mainstream Judaism talked more about celebrating Jewish experience as a passionate, musical, emotional event, where we literally and figuratively connect in a “union delicious in its consummation,” services every week would vibrate.

(Is your life passionate?)

May 3rd, 2011 by josephinecarr

“Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life.” (George Eliot)

Not to get overly excited or anything, but tomorrow’s my big day.  Yup, I’m going to Baltimore in a ball gown, to film a scene in HBO’s “Game Change.”

I just finished modeling gowns for my boyfriend, and I’m pleased to report that I can still fit into the size two’s.  No, the zipper didn’t go up, but it was close.  Real close. The size four’s were a cinch, and for that I’m in a state of extreme gratitude.

I don’t know why I’m doing this.  I’ve never acted or been in any kind of  theatre productions of any kind whatsoever, and I don’t harbor dreams of that sort.

Yet over the last few years I’ve thought a lot about acting, performing a role, and imaginative play.  We’re always exhorted to be who we really are, but how do you find out who you really are?

One way is to pretend.  It may seem contrarian.  Be who you’re not in order to discover who you are?

Well, yeah.

(Have you ever acted, and, if so, was it a game change for you?)

May 1st, 2011 by josephinecarr

“I believe in the sun even when it’s not shining.

I believe in love even when feeling it not.

I believe in God even when God is silent.”

(Found on a cellar wall in Cologne, Germany.  Written by a person

hiding from the Nazis.)

Today, I attended the Yom Hashoah service at my synagogue, which is the service held for Holocaust Remembrance Day.  In a few startling words, my Rabbi said something that felt right to me.  He said, “I can never make sense of the Holocaust, or understand it at all.”

This is exactly how I feel about evil.  It is incomprehensible, so deeply mysterious, in fact, that I hardly believe in it.  Though, of course, I know evil exists.  I know without doubt.

Just as I know that God exists.  About God, however, many of us do entertain doubt and this is, in part, because of evil. (“How can God exist if there is such evil in the world?”)

So we don’t doubt the very thing that causes us doubt in God.  The absurdity of it could make you laugh, if it were a laughing kind of day.

Which it’s not.  God is silent, but that doesn’t mean She isn’t listening….to us.

April 28th, 2011 by josephinecarr

My daughter, just after giving birth to her daughter.

A parent says, with suitable stickiness in their voice, “My daughter is my hero.”

Doesn’t it just make you wanna puke?  Such sanctimonious drivel.

Then your own daughter grows into a superb person.  Like, for example, my daughter.  Shall I count the ways of her superbity?  I shall.

She graduated from Yale, earned a Master’s in Cognitive Science at Harvard, married a fellow Yalie, taught for two years in Shanghai, learned to speak Chinese, entered Stanford Medical School, had a wonderful baby named Jo, and has just returned to school, cycling through her grueling medical rotations while also cycling to the hospital.

Most importantly, she laughs hard enough to cry whenever she possibly can, is open and gracious to her Chinese in-laws, reads my novels enthusiastically, adores her brother, shampoos her dirty dogs, and is a wonderful cook.

She’s my hero, and I’m hoping to grow up just like her.

April 24th, 2011 by josephinecarr

“The prophet that hath a dream, let him tell a dream.”  (Bible, Jeremiah 23:28)

Sometimes you just know.

When I wrote the first chapter of my very first novel, a young adult called No Regrets, I was inexperienced and lacking in self-confidence, yet I was also …. prescient.  From a place deep inside, I understood that I’d discovered a story with meaning.  The theme, loss of innocence, was both universal and specific to my own experiences living in East Africa when I was a teenager.

I knew that this novel would be published.  I knew.

Many books later, I often don’t know in that way, even with the novels that were ultimately published and sold well.

But …. sometimes I do.

It happened again with my novel, The Dewey Decimal System of Love, and like an echo, clarity about its future publication came to me immediately after I wrote the first chapter.  I knew it would be published.

Now, poised at the moment of almost finishing the revision of my newest novel, The Rabbi’s Mother, I’m going to shout out my prediction:  this one, too, will be published, and I knew it after writing the first chapter.

If I could successfully publish some novels without that sense of import, why does this feeling of foreknowledge matter?

Because . . .

I believe that the stories where I know their future immediately are the ones that have the greatest resonance for me. However, other novels, as when I wrote Monday’s Child, can be hugely successful for the reader.

My little theory is that the really BIG ‘OLE BOOKS (you know the ones I mean) are those that somehow combine the writer’s personal meaning with a large story that grabs a reader.

It may not be important in this day of self-publishing …. Unless you’re a writer who wants to always do her best work.  In which case, it helps to pay attention to what you feel as you finish the first chapter.

I’m going to publish my feelings about The Rabbi’s Mother right here, right now, and without apology.  I’ve done it with this novel, and it only took twenty-eight years to learn how.  Small and personal, huge and all-encompassing.

Only twenty-eight years.

(Do you consistently predict things in your life?)

April 20th, 2011 by josephinecarr

I was obsessed with this book when I was a child.

“A baby is God’s opinion that the world should go on.”  (Carl Sandburg)

Jo is awake.

That would be my granddaughter, aged nine months.  I came out to Palo Alto, California last Friday for her Jewish Naming Ceremony and her first Passover Seder.

In fact, we were all here.  All means my son and his girlfriend, my boyfriend, my ex-husband and his girlfriend, plus those who live nearby, like my son-in-law’s parents, aunts, etc., as well as one treasured member of my former husband’s side of the family, a niece. Many are Chinese by birth, I am a converted Jew, and the rest were born Jewish.

You might call us motley, I suppose.  But I have a better word.

Family.

April 13th, 2011 by josephinecarr

Laurie Strongin, with her son, Henry

“Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground.”  (Oscar Wilde)

We’re all living saints.

You, me, tout le monde. I know this because I’m a living saint myself, of course, and one of my special gifts as a living saint is that I know stuff.  (Yes, I also know there aren’t any Jewish saints — we’re being flamboyant and metaphorical here.)

So, okay, that’s established.

I met another living saint (well, I meet them all the time) on Monday.  Her name is Laurie Strongin, and she’s the author of a memoir called Saving Henry:  A Mother’s Story .  Here is the book’s description, lifted from Amazon.

“Saving Henry is the eye-opening and inspiring story of how far a family will go to save the life of their child. Laurie Strongin’s son, Henry, was born with a heart condition that was operable, but which proved to be a precursor for a rare, almost-always fatal illness: Fanconi anemia. Deciding to pursue every avenue that might provide a cure, Laurie and her husband signed on for a brand new procedure that combined in vitro fertilization with genetic testing to produce a baby without the disease, who could be a stem cell donor for Henry. As Laurie puts it: “I believe in love and science, nothing more and nothing less.”

Laurie and her husband endured nine failed courses of the procedure before giving up. But Saving Henry is also about hope. It is the story of Henry, the feisty little boy who loved Batman, Cal Ripken Jr., and root beer-flavored anesthesia, and who captivated everyone with his spunk and positive attitude. When the nurses came to take blood samples, Henry brandished his toy sword and said, “Bring it on!” When he lost his hair after a chemo treatment, he declared, “Hey, I look like Michael Jordan!”

Laurie became a fervent advocate for stem cell research, working with policymakers and the scientific community to bring attention to Henry’s case and to the groundbreaking research that could save many lives. Henry’s courage and bravery inspired nurses, doctors, friends, and family. Saving Henry is the story of one family’s search for a cure, and the long-lasting scientific impact their amazing little boy has had.”

There are saints among us.

You, me, tout le monde.

April 10th, 2011 by josephinecarr

“Once one has seen God, what is the remedy?”  (Sylvia Plath)

“What if God were one of us?”

Jewel, the singer, asks the question, so I’m going to answer, even though I’m well aware that she’s being rhetorical.

God isn’t one of us.

We are one of God.

How do you like that fancy footwork?

So, okay, I know this is all kind of silly.  You probably don’t believe in God, or even if you do, God isn’t the subject you’re thinking about all the time.  If ever.

For me, well, it’s different.  I think about God as much as I think about the books I’m reading and the weather (hey, we all follow the weather — it may be stupid, but we can’t help it because human beings are so directly affected by what’s coming down from the sky, whether that be rain, sun, or cloud).  Although, admittedly, I don’t think about God as much as I do food.

I’m on a diet.  Food and drink, therefore, occupy my mind obsessively.  Next comes the weather, and number three is God.  Sex is no longer a topic about which I worry or concern myself, which is a relief far vaster than you might imagine, and worthy of at least a year’s worth of blog posts.

Anyway, you know, this really isn’t going anywhere particularly valuable.  That’s okay.

Except this:  I do think about this stuff way more than might be entirely normal.

What do you think about that would surprise us?

April 9th, 2011 by josephinecarr

“There is an art, or rather a knack to flying.  The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.” (Douglas Adams, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy)

This week, a book sold to a publisher called Trying Not To Try. Here’s the official announcement:

“TRYING NOT TO TRY, an exploration of wu-wei, pronounced oooo-way, a state of unselfconscious ease, which early Chinese philosophers thought was the basis for success in life and about which modern cognitive science now has much to tell us, complete with practical tips, both ancient and modern, for attaining this spontaneous way of being.”

I just want to go on record with the announcement that I’m a living embodiment of trying not to try. So damn proud of myself.

Honestly, I’d like to know how wu-wei is supported by cognitive science.  I get terribly excited when a spiritual practice seems to find its roots, or proof, in science, even though I admit that most scientists ultimately roll their eyes and say, “Spare me.”

Trying not to try is like that dream you had when you were a kid.  You know the one.  You’re running down a road and, whoa, suddenly you’re flying like Peter Pan and Wendy!

From running to flying, without even trying.  So, heck, dream it, but don’t actually live it.

“How do you do that?” you ask me, the avowed master of trying not to try.

Well, see, it’s like this:  you … laugh … at … everything.

(Tell me what you’re laughing at RIGHT NOW!)