Karen Wills

Some stories are as much a part of Christmas as hanging a wreath on the door. I’ve been considering one that’s meant a great deal to me nearly all my life, and probably has meant as much to others, as well. Of course, it’s Charles Dickens’, A Christmas Carol.

When I was a little girl back in the days of vinyl records, someone gave my brother and me an RCA Victor album of A Christmas Carol. I spent many forty-minute sessions tucked up on the floor by the phonograph, wrapped in the story like a present under the tree. When I hold it in my hands now, I still hear the actors’ voices as they play Scrooge, Marley, and the spirits of Christmas Past, Present, and Future.

On the inside cover is a modest 1843 quote from the story’s author. “I have endeavored in this ghostly little book to raise the ghost of an idea which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it.” In my life, Dickens’ wish has come true. As I’ve said, Scrooge and Tiny Tim’s story captivated me and became part of my Christmas growing up memories.

Later, I became a member of the Greater Grand Forks Friday Afternoon Lord Byron Reading Society, a group of friends who met Fridays for two hours of talk, wine, and taking turns reading aloud, all of which allowed us to decompress from busy weeks and start the weekends properly. One holiday season we tackled the unabridged original version of A Christmas Carol. It hadn’t lost any of its charming ability to conjure up the Christmas spirit.

Fast forward to my years of teaching Inupiaq Eskimo children in the remote village of Wales, Alaska. Like schools everywhere, ours turned the last day before vacation into a time for fun. An elder had given her granddaughter a recently made DVD of, you guessed it, A Christmas Carol.

We settled down and watched it, my students and I tumbling into the magic as inevitably as readers/listeners/watchers always have.

It doesn’t matter how A Christmas Carol is presented. No other story has ever captured the sense of good will the season can and should bring.

Happy Holidays. As Tiny Tim pipes up, “God bless us, every one.”

As most people know, the timing of our Judeo/Christian holidays is rooted in pagan celebration of the winter solstice. Whatever our spiritual observances, we also crave sensual comforts to carry us through the year’s darkest days.
Regardless of the time of year, certain authors have encouraged us to, as Kathleen Tessaro, author of The Perfume Collector puts it, “Come to our senses.” Probably the most original and prolific of these writers was Marcel Proust, who has a whole syndrome named after him, “The Proustian Effect.” According to ScentAir MENA, “It’s what happens in your brain when a smell unleashes a flood of memories, taking you back to a particular time and place.” Proust may have been the first to link smell to memory, but Tessaro adds to this in her book. She tells us that scent brings us back to the very emotion we felt on the occasion that led to the memory itself. We don’t just remember the experience. We relive the exact emotion.
The holidays for me include the scent of pine from a freshly cut Christmas tree, and of the hot wax from candles we held in our hands at Christmas Eve Church services. Then the rich aroma of wassail we used to make and serve hot on New Year’s Eve. It’s also the fresh flannel smell of the new Lanz nightgown Mom and Dad brought me every Christmas. These are the fragrant reminders of security and fun. They bring me back to family traditions. And to a time when
we didn’t have to wish for peace on earth.
It was in the air around us. All we had to do was breathe it in.

I came of age in the Vietnam Era, the time of Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll. Drugs were available, and many of my college friends used them, but then and later I tended to be skittish about using my brain and body as a sensation experiment center.

I’ve never seen a movie that portrayed drug users as anything but dimwitted, especially when they’re high. Watching someone else trip out just isn’t that interesting. It’s different, sometimes, with characters in novels. I’ve just read two novels that portray drug use from the inside out. That is, the reader can understand why the use occurs and vicariously feel some of what’s going on with the user.

Donna Tartt’s magnificent novel, The Goldfinch, portrays Theo Decker, a thirteen-year-old cut loose from all familiar moorings by a senseless act of violence that kills his mother. A beautiful woman, she was his only source of love and security. Theo is in love with Pippa, a fellow bombing victim, who is given what Theo calls “morphine lollipops,” the first reference to drugs as pain relievers. Theo’s pain is from loss, however, and left to the desultory care of adults who are indifferent to him, he drifts into drug use with his friend, Boris. Theo uses drugs for adventure and to dull the misery of his existence. It becomes a lifetime habit that he periodically escapes, but only at the price of hellish periods of withdrawal described in detail. He can function as an addict, but not as well as he’d like. Drugs and drug use figure into plot twists and character growth or conversely, a character’s inability to grow.

Theo experiences drug related suicidal thoughts as well. “…a cold, intelligent, self-immolating fury that had—more than once—driven me upstairs in a resolute fog to swallow indiscriminate combos of whatever booze and pills I happened to have on hand…” Theo belongs to a culture that doesn’t ignore drug use, or judge too harshly those who rely on it.

In The Quarry, Iain Baines, then dying himself, wrote about a group of friends gathering in a dilapidated house with a man dying of cancer. The narrator is his autistic son, Kit. The friends arrive for a weekend, mainly to search for a potentially embarrassing video made when they were in college. In the course of the weekend, everybody gets high with pretty insignificant results. For Kit, it’s no big deal. Certainly, he isn’t driven by the need to numb unbearable emotional pain as Theo is. Therefore, it’s casual and not too interesting.

What both novels do show is the general futility of drug use. Theo experiences the consequences of careless acts. Even in a book, where sensation can be almost completely transferred to the reader, there’s something about getting high, that just seems to be an interruption of life; i.e., the plot. Eventually, because they are the protagonists, both characters are capable of growth. If drugs are not altogether banished from their lives, both have more interesting points of focus.

For many years, when our extended family gathered for Thanksgiving dinner, I elicited groans, especially from the younger crowd, by insisting no one eat until I read a section of William Bradford’s account of the Pilgrims’ first winter in what he called, “the desert wilderness.” I did so because I felt, and still do, that we should acknowledge not just the Puritans’ capacity to give thanks, but their character and endurance.

William Bradford, who sailed on the Mayflower and became the second governor of Plymouth Plantation, began a journal in 1620. He did much more than merely document events; he showed the fiber of his companions. Here, in part, is his account of the misery of their first winter in America.

“So as there died sometimes two or three a day in the foresaid time, that of one hundred and odd persons, scarce fifty remained. And of these, in times of most distress, there was but six or seven sound persons who to their great commendations, be it spoken, spared no pains night nor day, but with abundance of toil and hazard to their own health, fetched them wood, made them fires, dressed them meat, made their beds, washed their loathsome clothes, clothed and unclothed them…all this willingly and cheerfully, without any grudging in the least, a rare example and worthy to be remembered. Two of these were Mister William Brewster…and Miles Standish, their captain and military commander… And what I have said of these I may say of many others who died in this general visitation, and others yet living, that whilst they had health, yea, or any strength continuing, they were not wanting to any that had need of them. And I doubt not but their recompense is with the Lord.”

Thank you, William Bradford.

What historical figure or figures are you thankful for?

I’ve always loved snow. As a teen, I lived Joni Mitchell’s fantasy by actually having “a river I could skate away on.” Toboggans, snowmen, snow angels embodied the fun of winter for every child. As an adult, I’ve held on to that fun by cross-country skiing and tramping around on snowshoes in Glacier National Park. One of my favorite memories is a lovely “conversation” with two deer that appeared neither frightened nor surprised to see me.

But, snow is an equalizer with regard to more than recreation. It is beautiful, and beauty holds an element of mystery for observers. I’m always reminded of that when soundless veils of snow sweep from evergreens.

Poets and authors use snow’s transformative ability to show how it can test mere mortals. Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” is a cautionary tale about what happens to those who don’t respect nature in winter. The Indifferent Stars Above by Daniel James Brown, an account of the Donner party, conveys the same with horrors of cannibalism thrown in. James Meek’s novel, The Peoples’ Act of Love, includes the same taboo, but also makes snow symbolize the effects of the Russian Revolution which drove people to commit unspeakable acts to survive, or to rescue those they loved.

My favorite literary snowfalls come from Emily Dickenson and James Joyce. Dickinson acknowledges snow’s playful moods in “Snowflakes,” as well as its equalizing quality in her poem, “Snow.”

I’ll end with the close of Joyce’s story “The Dead.” The main character, whose wife has just told him she once loved a man who died, looks out on the snow-filled night, “…he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

Play in snow, appreciate its loveliness, but always respect its power and mystery.

As a young lawyer, I was fortunate to have a great friend, Edwin Guy Olmstead, M. D., as one of my mentors. Thirty years my senior, he became a source of advice and wisdom. He also loved literature and wrote fiction inspired by his medical practice.

I’ve been thinking lately of the long tradition of authors choosing doctors as main characters. Doctors see both the best — moments of loving self-sacrifice, and worst — indifference to suffering — of humankind. Which others of us are so intimately involved in the human condition?

My favorite doctors in recent fiction, specifically Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese, are Marion Stone and Hema, the OB/GYN. When Hema returns to the hospital after a trip, she from learns that a friend laboring to give birth to twins is near death. Sari-clad Hema bursts into the operating theater, “hands on her hips, bosom heaving, nostrils flaring,” with “the bloodshot eyes of a dragon.”

I want her for my doctor.
Marion, one of a set of twins, born in Ethiopia to an absent surgeon, shows us how a love of medicine is born of curiosity and compassion, and how possessing a physician’s skill can actually change the world.

Just as Marion Stone becomes drawn into the turmoil of Ethiopia’s revolution, Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago, in his novel of the same name, is caught up in Russia’s political upheaval. Both characters love deeply, are idealistic, and dedicated to healing.

Of course, some fictional doctors use their skills for bad ends. These often figure in stories of redemption. In House Girl, Tara Conklin gives us Dr. Caleb Harper, an alcoholic disgrace who sinks to examining escaped slaves who have been caught and beaten to report whether they can, or can’t, do further work, thus being worth keeping alive. When the artist Josephine, disfigured and desperate, touches his heart, he helps her, and later joins the Union army.

Robert Louis Stevenson created the ultimate doctor torn between good and evil with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Dr. Jekyll is experimenting with ways humans can control their immoral sides. He finds to his sorrow, that the answers don’t lie in pharmaceuticals.

However, medicine often includes prescribing drugs. In my thriller, Remarkable Silence, I have Moses visit an Egyptian physician who provides him with previously unknown morphine to relieve his pain as he struggles to reach the Jordan.

Most doctors, I believe, are good men and women. Doctors make great subjects for fiction. They’re intelligent, curious, compassionate, and often dedicated to their work. More than most, they experience and know what it means to be fully human.

Who’s your favorite fictional physician?

We’ve all heard of, if not taken, Rorschach tests. They require a subject to tell how she perceives a set of inkblots. What picture does each form? One subject might describe a bat, while another sees a butterfly. A visual artist friend and I were talking. I said my novel, Remarkable Silence, the story of an archaeological discovery that upends the core history of the world’s three major religions, has been a Rorschach for readers. Some see sacrilege, some a way to save the world, and some unpredictable plot twists. My friend countered that all art is really a Rorschach.

Is that true? I think it is for art with enough ambiguity or complexity for viewers and readers to differ in their perceptions of it. We sometimes see differently from each other, sometimes from our younger selves. I loved the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s when I was young. Now I see it as racist. I tried to get into Proust’s, Remembrance of Things Past, in my twenties, but finally put it back on the shelf unread. Now that I have decades of personal past, and realize how fragile and beautiful a thing memory is, I count the book as one of the great works of literature.

I taught Hemingway’s Hills like White Elephants to a college class. Two characters, a man and woman, sit in a train station determining whether the woman will have an abortion. It was a memorable discussion, not because of an inflexible stance on anyone’s part, but because there was debate, complete with sketches, about which train the couple actually boarded in the end. Was it the train back the way they’d come, or the one to the city where she would have the abortion? People literally read the story with different conclusions.

I think I agree with my friend. If there’s enough to it, the work, like a Rorschach, says as much about the psychology of the viewer/reader as it does of the work…or its creator. I wouldn’t write the same novel now that I would have at twenty.

A syndrome is, according to Merriam Webster, “a group of signs or symptoms that together are characteristic of a particular abnormality or condition.” People with syndromes tend to be outlanders to society to a greater or lesser degree depending on the syndrome and its severity. But, don’t people who stand outside the norm interest us?

In The Echo Maker, Richard Powers’ main character, Karin, rushes to her brother’s side after he suffers a traumatic head injury, only to find he has Capgras syndrome, the delusion that people around one are imposters. Karen reaches out to a psychiatrist and the rest… is the story.

Why can some characters cope in the face of syndromes while others struggle? In The Condition, Jennifer Haigh writes of a family whose daughter has Turner’s syndrome. She will never go through puberty and become, physically, an adult. Emphasis is on the condition’s effect on the victim, but just as much on her family. The theme of a syndrome’s effect on family is especially poignant in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, in which Mark Haddon uses first person point of view for his autistic main character.

Phyllis Quatman’s Courthouse Cowboys is a legal thriller based on a real case in which the defense attorney defends a young man who suffers from Kleinfelter’s syndrome. Then there’s the wonderful Lionel Essrog of Motherless Brooklyn. Jonathon Letham has created a tragicomic private eye suffering from the compulsive repetitions that accompany Tourette’s syndrome.

These authors all give us insider information about medical conditions, but they also teach us how hard life is for some people, and how they meet their outlandish challenges. As always, fiction expands our knowledge, but even more, it it’s done right, it expands our compassion.

Milan Kundera had me at The Unbearable Lightness of Being. After my son spent a post-college eighteen months in Prague, he was hooked, too. He sent me more Kundera novels. Then, on my own, I found Kundera’s nonfiction, The Art of the Novel. In it, he reminds us of the importance of theme and what a character really is.

I like his question, “So what, after three centuries, ahs happened to adventure, the first great theme of the novel?” I like adventures in novels and in life. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being there are sexual adventures, the adventure of committed love, of finding some happiness in a totalitarian state, and the adventure of starting over completely. Tomas is a doctor who, with his wife, Tereza, slips out of communist Prague for life as a farm laborer, living among trusted friends. History is in the novel, but only to reveal the characters’ existential beings. Tomas and Tereza show us human possibilities.

Most important to me, Kundera writes, “The novel’s spirit is the spirit of complexity. Every novel says to the reader: ‘things are not as simple as you think.’” Kundera influences me to dig for deeper meaning, to leave my readers a little provoked, a little shaken in the face of uncertainty. The Unbearable Lightness of Being is an example to follow. My novel, Remarkable Silence, is my attempt to question and to encourage my readers to question, too. Judging by reader reaction, Remarkable Silence has made people think twice about old assumptions.

Thanks, Milan.

As a teenager, I read Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl. Anne’s writing about coming of age (thirteen to fifteen) while her family and four others hide in a secret annex of the building where her father had worked, was to captivated postwar readers. We can’t resist that eloquent, idealistic adolescent, caught in what she describes as “crazy circumstances,” i.e., the Jewish plight in Amsterdam in WWII. She experiences human nature at its most petty, its most noble, and fears it at its most brutal. She encounters first love. Sensitive Anne confesses to her confidante, the diary, that she feels isolated. She is the universal young girl with a diary, only more gifted than most in her ability to convey details, express insights, narrate events, and joke with a wicked sense of humor while not sparing herself.

I loved Anne from the start. I loved that she began writing stories and dreamed of becoming a writer. I loved her reasons: to contribute to the record of Dutch people who lived through the war, to live the life she chooses, to have her work survive her death. Even though she died in a concentration camp before her sixteenth birthday, she met two of those goals,

At eighteen, I visited Amsterdam and the secret annex, now a museum. I wasn’t prepared for how tiny the rooms were where Anne lived for over two years, crammed in with seven others whom her diary describes loving, infuriating, celebrating, and nursing each other. Because of her, they live on, too. The pictures of movie stars less remembered than Anne remain on the walls where she glued them. She had been, after all, in some ways a typical teen.

But, put into atypical circumstances, she unleashed her talent and creativity through words. She stands with those who inspired me to be a writer. I just reread her diary, a testament to her ideals. How rewarding to any writer to touch readers’ hearts as she succeeded in doing.