Three novelists (John Irving, Joyce Carol Oates, Jodi Picoult) and Abortion in America

Recently I had the good fortunate to hear Jodi Picoult "in conversation" at the Toronto Reference Library on November 5. It was a sold-out event attended mostly by women and presumably fans. I hadn't checked ahead so I didn't know that her latest book A Spark of Light was about abortion, but I wasn't surprised. Picoult is the author of numerous novels, most of which, if not all, are inspired by a controversial issue.

It was interesting as a writer to hear her talk about the amount of time she spends researching a novel, especially since she also happens to be a very engaging and informed speaker.

When she first started speaking, I felt a little uneasy that her talk might engender some adverse comments, but either due to time constraints or the theme of A Spark of Light, questions weren't allowed. All five hundred and fifty of the attendees were encouraged to have their picture taken with the author, an offer I declined because I didn't have the patience to line up for that long.

Picoult's subject was both moving and riveting. Fortunately for me, the only time I almost cried was when she spoke about the shame and secrecy which still surround even legal abortion, much like the shame and secrecy surrounding the mounting and almost daily tales of  sexual abuse in the news, though many of these acts took place decades ago. When Picoult did an informal survey of her audience, it turned out that an almost equal number of women who knew somebody who had an abortion also knew somebody who had been sexually assaulted.

As the keeper of the history for many branches of my family, people have shared  old stories with me, some of which I have confirmed with the death certificates which are now publicly available in Ontario up through 1946. As a feminist, I have been appalled by the choices some women were forced to make because a man wouldn't stop whatever or because birth control simply wasn't available. This may be why as an ardent reader of fiction, I have also been drawn to two other novels about abortion, though John Irving and Joyce Carol Oates also happen to be two of my favorite novelists.

As far as I’m concerned, John Irving’s The World According to Garp is one of the best books ever written, so of course I read The Cider House Rules when it was first published in 1985. Although Irving’s opinion was obvious, both sides of the abortion issue were fairly presented.

The same is true of A Book of American Martyrs published by Joyce Carol Oates more than thirty years later in 2017. Presenting unique perspectives, much of Oates's story is told from the points of view of two damaged young girls, one the daughter of an abortion doctor and one the daughter of his killer. Notably neither girl has been damaged by having had an abortion, but more so by the loss of her father and the politics of abortion which have shaped the United States since the procedure was first criminalized in the 1880s. Why in God's name is abortion in the States still a part of anybody's political platform in 2018?

Like Oates's A Book of American Martyrs, Picoult's A Spark of Light  begins with a shooting at an abortion clinic. Except for the fact that the subject of abortion is so divisive in the States, I'm not sure why Picoult chose to follow up on Oates's book so soon with a novel on the same topic, so I can only surmise that Spark was largely researched and written when Oates came out with Martyrs. Both Oates and Picoult are extremely prolific, Oates perhaps more so, although there is a generation between the two women and Picoult has a family to help/hinder her. Though her characters are fairly complex and  her books are well-written, Picoult is less of a literary writer than Oates. Nevertheless, except for the fact that some people will be reluctant to "like" a book about abortion, Picoult has written a very compelling book (in a backwards fashion which I personally didn't care for) which her fans will adore. I also applaud her for presenting another sane, although of course fictionalized account of the abortion controversy in the States.

The Write Life

Love this list!  I believe it's revised every year:

https://thewritelife.com/100-best-websites-for-writers-2018/

The boom and relative ease of self-publishing seems to have spawned a number of people who want to write but are instead using their skills to build their own adjunct careers and/or make money off of other aspiring writers. Some of these skills on offer are valuable and necessary, some are not. Some people actually have skills to offer, some don't. Some authors can afford these services, some can't.

The bloggers I most enjoy are novelists themselves who generously devote their time to helping other writers be successful. If they also get a little press for their own creative efforts while doing so, good for them.My top three picks from Write Life (in no particular order) are:

https://annerallen.com/

https://www.janefriedman.com/

https://www.thecreativepenn.com/

My life's a beach

With the recent and unexpected purchase of a cottage near a beautiful beach, my Internet access has been blessedly very limited. The good news is that I have returned to one of my first loves--fiction.

Diane Schoemperlen who so kindly edited my second book has won another well-deserved prize:

Molson 2018 Prize Winner, Diane Schoemperlen!

 Hemingway's Tips for Writers

There is some invaluable advice here! My favourite quote of Hemingway's though is:
"Writing is easy. All you have to do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Twenty five years ago, the library I was working at discarded a copy of  Mine the Harvest, the posthumously published poetry of  Edna St. Vincent Millay (February 22, 1892 – October 19, 1950). Millay was an American poet and playwright, she had won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923 and as we found out when we recently visited her home Steepletop in Austerlitz, New York, she filled stadiums when she read her poetry to enthralled audiences during post World War I.

There are many lovely poems in Mine the Harvest, but this untitled one moved me most because it reminded me of somebody I knew:

Who hurt you so,

My dear?

Who, long ago

When you were very young,

Did, said, became, was...something that you did not know

Beauty could ever do, say, be, become?--

So that your brown eyes filled

With tears they never, not to this day, have shed...

Not because one more boy stood hurt by life,

No: because something deathless had dropped dead--

An ugly, an indecent thing to do--

So that you stood and stared, with open mouth in which the

tongue

Froze slowly backward toward its root,

As if it would not speak again, too badly stung

By memories thick as wasps about a nest invaded

To know if or if not you suffered pain.

As it turned out, Edna St. Vincent Millay's home is probably the most complete author's home we have ever visited and I have seen a few, including the Alcott home where  the artistic daughter was allowed to draw pictures on the walls, the hot and humid house where Faulkner wrote and drank and fought with his wife, the place where Mark Twain raised his family and the real House of Seven Gables in Salem, Massachusetts. All Vincent's furniture and knickknacks, including a painting on her bedroom wall of two people skinny dipping, are still there. (Should  I mention that she and husband had an open marriage, that both women and men were drawn to her and that she was a sexually liberated woman long before her time?)

Everything about the renovated Millay farmhouse called Steepletop was fascinating, but Vincent's writing quarters were what really got me. I now have a place to write on the third floor of my house, which is infrequently used because of the palliative, psychiatric and thankfully postpartum help needed by my burgeoning family, but for years I wrote in odd places at odd times. Millay was a professional writer from the word go though, so family members and later on her devoted husband Eugene, all made sure that she got the time she needed. One wing of the second floor of the house seemed to belong to her. She wrote some of her poems in bed, probably while it was still too cold to get up, but the study beyond her private bathroom where she wrote poetry and tracked her tours also had a long writing table and a view and next door was a book lined room with another view and a single, comfortable reading chair. She even had a  writing shed out in the fields, probably to use when they had visitors. Her biographies--Savage Beauty is the one I'm reading now--indicate she had stuck to a regular writing schedule ever since she was an impoverished, overworked teenager and was encouraged by her mother to write. In most of the writers' homes I've visited, female authors were lucky to have one small table by a window with a single drawer where they could hide their papers when a visitor came.

Though she is believed to have had two abortions (or "miscarriages" as they were euphemistically referred to in the hidden past when people rarely spoke of such things) Edna St. Vincent Millay never had children, which for a woman would have rendered even her husband's  help a moot point.

Updating me

Now that I'm officially "retired" from the library, I'm getting around to doing a few things like updating my author page. Other wonderful stories have also come to me over the years and I hope to distill and write them down too before my age catches up with me or family life completely overwhelms me again:

"Karen E. Black lives in Toronto, Canada. Her debut novel about the Devereux cousins "From the Chrysalis" begged for a sequel, so she wrote "Feeling for the Air" about Dace's escape from a corrupt penitentiary system and his dual mission to clear his name and find out where the Canadian monarch butterflies really made their winter home.

In January 2016, she finally visited Michoacán, Mexico and saw the monarchs' wintering grounds for herself. At the El Rosario colony, high up in the rugged forested mountains, millions of monarchs colored the oyamel trees orange and bent their branches under their collective weight. Black's timing seemed perfect. She could still get on a horse. Also, the monarchs, long threatened by illegal logging, the use of pesticides and the eradication of milkweed, had made a big comeback. However, six weeks later, at least 1.5 million monarch butterflies were hit with a deadly freeze as an unusual ice and wind storm moved through the monarchs' wintering grounds in the Michoacán mountains. The storm hit just as the spring migration to Canada was beginning. Luckily, many butterflies had exited the mountains before the unexpected freeze.

Black is currently working on the the last novel in the Devereux Trilogy,"Take to the Sky" which is set mostly in Toronto. This book also takes its title from the same Emily Dickinson poem as the first two books in this trilogy.

Black did her Master's in Library Science at the University of Toronto (because she loved books and research) and completed several certificates at the Institute for Genealogical Studies (because she also loved family history), but she did her undergraduate degree in sociology with a minor in English at the University of Western Ontario. Though Black's first love was and always will be English literature, she is grateful for the insight she gained into social problems, human social relationships and institutions when she studied sociology."