Category: Life, Books, Letters

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.

Since I’ve been looking back on fiction’s personal influences, I’d do well to consider novels involving religion. My thriller, Remarkable Silence, is a “what if” story concerning an archaeological discovery that upends the core histories of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

What led me to write it? I’ll have to acknowledge several novels and their influence. The first is Jan de Hartog’s 1972 historical work, The Peaceable Kingdom, a somewhat fictionalized account of the beginnings of the religious Society of Friends, also known as Quakers. The novel has nobility to it, even as its characters remained flawed human beings. Their spirituality, shown as the Quaker belief that we accomplish much when we “go for that of God” in any fellow human being, and truly live by good works, appealed to me as an idealistic young adult. I did, for a time, attend Friends meetings.

However, to stay with me, a novel also has to provide a line or two that I’ll remember and use at times that call for wisdom to help myself and/or others. In de Hartog’s book, a young woman is raped on shipboard sailing to America. She is isolated in her despair until an older woman who appears in control of her own productive life, embraces the girl and whispers, “It happened to me, too.” How often since reading that scene, have I realized its basic truth – that comfort can be given in so many situations – divorce, setbacks, grief – by opening the door to communication simply by saying, “It happened to me, too.” Inspiring and practical, de Hartog’s, The Peaceable Kingdom, started me on a long spiritual odyssey.

What novel has inspired and informed your spiritual life?

I’ve always been drawn to historical novels, but lately have been asking myself why.

Maybe it all started with an innate love of all things western. Do we read first the history of places we love, or does the reading foster love of place? Stories of covered wagon trains, the heartbreaks and triumphs of pioneers on the Oregon Trail captivated me. I remember long summer afternoons practically inhaling my grandpa’s Zane Grey and Louis L’amour paperbacks. In time I discovered Ole Rolvaag’s Giants in the Earth about North Dakota homesteaders, Willa Cather’s My Antonia, and the incomparable Wallace Stegner’s Big Rock Candy Mountain, and Angle of Repose.

Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove reawakened my love of reading historical novels set in the West. I’ve come full circle now, having moved back to my native Montana. Part of the experience of coming home has been reading nonfiction about Glacier National Park. Once, years ago, my mother remarked, “Someone should write a novel about the inholders.” Bang! Thanks, Mom. I’ve been obsessively researching and writing rough drafts of that novel off and on ever since. Inholders were the hearty souls who’d already settled in what became Glacier National Park in 1910. They were flawed, bigger-than-life human beings, who worked harder and played harder than most of us can ever imagine.

Maybe my love of reading and writing historical novels stems from both love of place and admiration for our courageous and independent forbears. They do spark to the imagination.

Why do you think historical novels have such appeal?

Young adults now read a genre I missed in my teens — paranormal fiction. I just can’t recall having the choice of such books, except Frankenstein. Poe’s characters were insane, but human. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow turned out to be about a pumpkin. Around campfires, we told of the sweet hearts necking in the car who hear of an escaped, one-armed serial killer. They drive back to town quickly only to find his hook caught in the driver’s door handle. Creepy, yes. Paranormal, no.

As a teacher, I found my science-based self caught off guard by the mystical aspects of Native American culture. Instructing Lakota kids in the difference between fact and opinion (The former can be proved.), I made up a list of statements including, “Ghosts are real.” An uproar ensued when I insisted that could only be opinion. To that class, ghosts were real and provable.

I taught Eskimo teens in Wales, Alaska, where a shaman tradition existed along with stories of tricksters and shape shifters. Inupiaq youth tended to love paranormal stories, especially those touching their culture. Of course, most teens veer toward coming of age and love stories.

I just finished Amarok, by Angela Townsend. It’s paranormal fiction set in Alaska. Townsend’s sense of place is spot on. I relived the beauty and the life-threatening cold. The protagonist is a modern girl with big issues who runs from an abusive stepfather into an even greater calamity. There is one worse off than she, a young man from long ago turned into a wolf by a hate-filled shaman. The girl and boy form a bond that offers escape from brutality and their own undeserved guilt and shame. It’s a magical read full of adventure, villains, heroism, and mystery. Magic has a place in all our imaginations. I hope Townsend provides us with a sequel soon.

What paranormal stories have fed your imagination?

The older I got, the more I read age appropriate books. Somewhere in the fourth to sixth grade, I discovered The Box Car Children. It was my first real book where children left on their own have to solve their own problems, something with which I had no experience. I admired their courage and determination to put up a front and stay together.

Their independence paled when I received a box from my Aunt Lucille that contained a copy of Michael O’Halleran. An orphan, he not only took care of himself by being a newsboy, he took in the fragile and bedridden little girl, Lily Peaches. He had to carry her in a basket. Michael heroically cared for Lily until two adults came along who wanted them both, and Lily had the longed-for operation that enabled her to climb out of that basket for good. A tear jerker? You bet, but the sheer pathos and romance made me love it.

Gene Stratton Porter’s Keeper of the Bees came next. Peopled by old fashioned Americans, they simply self sacrificed, husbanded the earth, worked hard and loved easily, with lust way down the line.

But I digress. Kiddy lit included The Bobbsey Twins series, The Honeybunch series, Nancy Drew, and the Hardy Boys. Maybe readers now love the Maisie Dobbs books because they are somehow reminiscent of childhood series. It’s reassuring to visit a friend every so often.

Of course, there were also comic books and the funnies: Little Orphan Annie, the kid who could see without eyeballs, was my favorite (another orphan, albeit a lucky one). The Lone Ranger, Flash Gordon, Dick Tracy, L’il Abner and others.

And the animal stories: My Friend Flicka and Green Grass of Wyoming, both by Mary O’Hara, fed my love of westerns. Black Beauty broke my heart.

Orphans and animals, who could resist them. They almost always made for the best, most spell binding stories a kid could want.

What was your favorite series, animal story, or comic book character when you were in gradeschool?