Mary Volmer's Blog

Join me for A PERSONAL HISTORY OF SPORT 

​Dates: 4 Wednesdays, September 21 - October 12
Time: 6 - 8 pm PST
Instructor: Mary Volmer
​Format: ZOOM
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Genre: Nonfiction (Fiction Writers and Poets Welcome!)
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Price: $275    
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Enroll

Sports are a vital part of western culture, yet we rarely reflect upon, much less write about, how sports have influenced our lives, our families, or our communities. In this four-week writing class, we will use sports as a lens through which to study and write personal essays.  
 
Fear not! You don't have to be an athlete, has-been or otherwise, to join us.  We will be exercising our literary muscles with daily craft talks and guided writing prompts. Together we will learn about essay structure, voice, pacing, scope, and audience. And we will read and discuss excerpts of longer works by poets, novelists, and memoirists such as Natalie Diaz, Pat Conroy, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Lucy Jane Bledsoe, John Edgar Wideman, John Updike, and Sue Hyon Bae.
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With these diverse authors as our guides, we will write about our own complicated relationships to sport. How do sports affect our self-image and self-worth? Are sports a religious activity? A patriotic activity? A selfish or a selfless activity? What is a “team player”? How do we view race, gender, and sexuality through the lens of sport?

Join us and write personal essays inspired by sports.  

Here's my list of the best historical novels about badass 19th century American women. It was great fun revisiting these novels. If you're discovering them for the first time, enjoy! See the link below. 

Shepherd - Discover The Best Books  

An essay about sisterhood, blind self-interest, remorse, and love... and cantaloupe. 

Mom grew up the daughter of ranch workers, a hardscrabble, nomadic existence in northern Nevada and California. In fifth grade she moved three times, attending three different schools in and around the head waters of the Humboldt River, a high plateau spotted by sagebrush and marked by wide open skies that felt, some nights, close enough to touch. The one constant, beyond hard physical work, were the books her mother bought on rare trips to town. A box of books traveled with them place to place --- a luxury, and one that kept her mother, my Nana, if not happy, then sane. 

When she graduated high school, Mom moved away from ranch life. She became a school librarian, then a teacher. She married a preacher’s son who, like her, wanted nothing more than to build a home and stay there. By the time I was born, their home was filled with books.

Mom’s relationship to books, never as desperate as Nana’s, has always been passionate. And though I have endured little in the way of hardship or displacement, books and stories have proven no less necessary to me. Stories, more than anything else, bind me to my mother. I suspect my hunger for frontier tales grew from a desire to know her --- that is, to know the girl she was before she was my mother: that dust-covered blonde in Levi’s, grinning from the back of a horse in old photographs. I searched for her in stories by Laura Ingalls Wilder, Larry McMurtry and Zane Gray, all of which Mom loved and read aloud from the time I was small --- as if she, too, were searching for the self she left behind.

Not that Mom has ever been one for nostalgia; she enjoys a good story, but she wouldn’t return to that life, given the chance, or wish it on me. She allowed my cowboy fantasies, but also fed me books I needed to discover myself, apart from her: Ramona Quimby, James and The Giant Peach, Johnny Tremain, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, The Poisonwood Bible, To Kill a Mockingbird, Beloved, The Red Tent.  
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I grew up and moved away. Did what Mom had never had the chance to do: play college sports, sing in choirs, live in foreign countries. I read books she wouldn’t like or approve – as a teen, I read them because she wouldn’t approve. My adult life became, over time, as exotic to her as her girlhood had been to me.

Often, now I glimpse Mom’s face in my own reflection; I hear her voice bubbling beneath mine each night as I read to my son. Twice a week, we talk on the phone. Inevitably we talk about books --- the ones we’re reading, the ones I’m writing. When she asks me what I’m reading, I know she’s asking something more: “Who are you now that you’ve grown away from me? Can I find the woman you’ve become in the pages of your books?”
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Yes, I want to tell her. You’ll find me, as I found you, in the stories we share.

First Published in  bookreporter.com . 

One rainy night a few weeks ago, as I wandered the deserted Saint Mary's College campus, I stopped outside the student union to watch the fountain. Raindrops rippled in puddles, and the veil of water, falling from the fountain in a soft and constant hush, was lit by streamers of hanging light bulbs. It was beautiful. I took a picture and then a slow-motion video, trying to capture the fall of individual drops of water from that veil. I expected to see, when watching the footage, nothing more or less miraculous than this.

Instead, what I saw on screen, along with that slow motion fall of water, was a curious pulse of light. A glitch, I thought, and shot another video with the same result. Rain drops, striking the overhead bulbs had, all this time, been shaking the fixtures a fraction of an inch, creating a throb of light too fast for the naked eye to see.

Nothing had changed. I hadn’t moved from the protected alcove. Yet my heart was racing. I felt mystified and oddly euphoric by the revelation of this in-between-time, which existed within the seams of my perceptions. It felt miraculous, like a gift. Shamans and Buddhists, anyone really, who has experienced altered states of consciousness, knows that one’s awareness deepens when the speed of perception slows. By slowing down—even by mechanical means, or by necessity imposed by a global pandemic—we too come to know, with greater intimacy, what we thought we knew before. We gain, by accident as much as necessity, new eyes to see.

​I don’t normally credit my iphone as a tool for spiritual growth. But perhaps all things, even technology, has this potential. Now, the memory of that strobing light is an echo each time I walk by that courtyard. I’m reminded of the limits of my perceptions, and of the unseen wonders that surround me, and I am grateful.

I lost my dear friend and long time editor Naomi Schwartz. Cancer made an anguished shell of her. But this how I’ll remember her: book in hand, barefoot, bathed in light. She was always telling me, "it’s okay to leave a work unfinished." She didn’t mean undone, incomplete. She meant imperfect, open. So I’ve left this picture unfinished, with white space and pencil marks to show where she lives in my imagination and the divine mystery of where she’s gone.

I was listening, Naomi. Even when I disagreed, I was listening. We all have literary mothers. Some of them are monuments like Toni Morrison. Others are humble, crazy-haired, big-hearted adopted aunts, who feed you books, and whisper over and over: Keep going. Just keep going.

Thank you Naomi.

Published in MUTHA Magazine, March 5, 2019 The other day, romping through the living room, stuffed kitty under one arm, you stopped, raised your little chin like Nero and declared: “I am the special one!” Floppy blond hair, brown eyes wide, a pint-sized superhero, minus the cape. The performance should have been funny. It was funny. Your dad and I laughed.

So, why does my chest feel tight? Why this dread? You’re always bringing home words, songs and habits (good and bad) from school. And really, shouldn’t every six-year-old have the right to stand among loved ones and declare with the confidence of the chosen: “I am the special one!” Children learn better soon enough. 

But that’s not true, is it? Watching Judge Kavanaugh’s tantrums on television last fall I knew it wasn’t true. Not all children learn better. There, on the television, I saw what happens when a privileged boy, like you, grows up believing he is the special one.  

Such a boy grows into someone who views others as allies or obstacles to a success measured in money, power and popularity; a man who remains—at seventeen, twenty, forty, fifty—as deluded about his own relative worth as you, age six. A petulant man clinging to the lie that he earned advantages he was born into, and that people not born into the same advantages—or the same religion, ethnicity, nationality or gender—deserve less regard.

I don’t wish for you a life of such spiteful delusion. You are a special one. That’s true. You will always be my special one. But you are not the special one.

Read the rest at MUTHA Magazine

Happy Holidays!
 
Thank you to Rebecca and Martha for inviting me to take part in the American Historical Novel Holiday Open House. In honor of the holidays, I’m raffling two signed copies of RELIANCE, ILLINOIS. To enter the contest, simply answer the following question below in the comments: 
 
What is one of your fondest memories of the house (or apartment) you grew up in?
 
Why is this on my mind? Perhaps because I’m days away from traveling back to my childhood home in Grass Valley, CA. My folks still live in the house they built - a modest, comfortable place - more than forty years ago and every return is layered with memories.
 
In contrast, Miss Rose’s house in my second novel, RELIANCE, ILLINOIS is neither modest nor comfortable to Madelyn Branch, a thirteen-year-old girl  sent to live and work there.
 
Its exterior is based off an octagon house I toured in Watertown, Wisconsin, which was built by John Richards in 1854. The inside is a composite of several other period houses designed by Orson Fowler, who in the 19th century was a self-proclaimed expert in a number disciplines, including family planning, architecture, and phrenology (the study of one's characteristics through the bumps on one's head). Fowler -- for reasons he wrote about in convoluted detail -- considered the octagon an ideal shape for maximizing health and well-being. While the design never gained the lasting popularity he predicted, there remain quite a few excellent examples nationwide that are still standing and open for visits. If you happen to live in the SF Bay Area, check out the McElroy Octagon House  at 2645 Gough Street.
 
I gave Miss Rose an octagon house because she needed a home as grand in stature as she believes herself to be, a house that reflected the eccentricities of the era. I needed a house that would intimidate and intrigue the townspeople of Reliance. Finally, I needed a structure around which to build a my story, and to which I could return in my imagination each day I sat down to write.
 

From  "Into The Lake," a talk given at the 2018 Festival Of Women Writers. 

This is a fish story.

It’s late May in the sierra foothills, and I’m five years old, determined to catch a fish. My first fish. A big fish. And I’m not going to use my brother’s hand-me-down fishing rod, just my size. No. I’m determined to use my mom’s rod, three times my height, amber brown with a fitted cork handle, and this beautifully complicated casting mechanism, which, can’t be that hard to use. Mom made it look easy.

Besides, I’ve already dreamed my success. I’ve already stood, triumphant on the lake shore holding my fish aloft in one hand, and my pole in the other — Annie Oakley, Calamity Jane rolled into one. I’ve already basked in phantom glory, and I’m ready for the real thing. It’s early, just past dawn when my mom, brother and I set out from the camp ground bundled in layers. Scrub jays heckle back and forth, and the shadows of the cedars move with us; there’s the lake, clear and still — I can all but see the fish — and the water is snowmelt cold.

I know how cold because a moment after I set my feet on a raised rock ledge, and with a heroic heave, throw my weight behind that first cast, I find myself, hook, line and pole, in the lake.

I can’t escape this story. My mom tells it on me every year or so. Maybe she’d quit if I’d ever outgrow my childish attraction to fantasy and yes, self-aggrandizement. But the story remains relevant and true and points to a pattern of behavior I have never escaped, even if my focus has shifted. Even if I dream now catching stories, beautiful, necessary, difficult stories, I inevitably find my plans, at some point in the process, soaking wet in the lake. My abilities have always, in every instance, come short of my dreams.

I’ve been lucky. After that first of many spectacular failures, I had someone to fish me out, dry me off, warm me up and, after my pride had scabbed over a bit, to point me back to the lake side with a smaller pole and hard won humility to try again. What I discovered (in retrospect, of course), what you’re bound to discover in any activity — like fishing or writing — requiring as much patience and persistence as skill, is pleasure in the process, and the transcendent, perhaps spiritual state, achieved when finally you surrender what you thought you wanted — the fish, the championship, the publication — and discover purpose.

The fact that I seemed doomed to relearn this lesson, again and again, doesn’t make it any less valid, I don’t think. I don’t know many people who grow out of who they were at five years old. And the fact is, I need that five year old alive and well within me. I need the dreamer, the egoist to stand with bold oblivion on the lakeshore. I need her to cast herself in.

Every book worth writing (and reading) is too much to handle for the writer on the day she conceives it. It doesn’t matter how many books she’s written before. New vision (vague though it may be), is intoxicating and compelling so that even if she’s knows better — about the labor involved, about the limits of her own abilities — she returns to a state of stubborn naivety. I think this is why having children is so often used as an analogy for writing books. No matter how well informed or seasoned, you will never be prepared for the pain, joy, labor and love required of you. The only certainty is that somewhere along the way you will find yourself overcome and shivering in the lake. The only certainty is that to succeed you have to try again. Rediscover joy and humility. Fail better.

I began my first novel by accident. I was living in Wales as Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar, giving lectures on California Gold Rush history to Rotary clubs up and down the Welsh coast. In college I’d been an English major and a basketball player, no historian; I was from California. This fact seemed proviso enough for my Welsh hosts. I did my best, filling my talk with dates and names of important men. Yet my audiences, older and mostly male, remained politely uninspired. So was I. Until one day a lady — one of the wives, I think — raised her hand and in the bored silence asked, “What about the women? Weren’t there any women in the gold rush?” The most shocking part about that question, looking back, was that I had never thought to ask it.

I shelved the text books and popular histories from which I’d cribbed my facts. I trashed my talk and went back to the library. I went looking for women and found them in journals, letters home, in newspaper accounts and marriage records. The sources were sparse and fragmented. Beyond three poles of existence — birth, marriage, and death — the stories of 19th century women remain largely undocumented and inconsistent; a fossil record of heirlooms, which borrowing Virginia Woolf’s lament, “lies at present locked in old diaries, stuffed away in old drawers, half obliterated in the memories of the aged.”

But to a budding novelist discovering her subject nothing is as attractive as a lost or untold story. She has freedom to fill with imagination what the record leaves out; freedom to speculate and create fully conceived characters from an amalgam of people about whom little might be individually known. My first novel, Crown of Dust, about two women, one who disguises herself as a boy, in a ramshackle Gold Rush town grew out of this research. And when the book was published, though I had never claimed the title before, I began to think of myself as a writer.

Now, you have to imagine the title WRITER written in that heavy white marquee movie-house lettering, all caps, to appreciate the foolish burden of self-importance that word placed upon me. I wasn’t daunted, at first. Because I had an idea for another book, a big book, my book, and for the next five years I failed, and failed, and failed again to write it.

I was trying to catch a fish, you see, a big fish, my fish. I’d somehow forgotten the point of writing, and the reason I loved to read, was to connect with other people. And if I had a story at all it was not mine, but ours. A story of us: about mothers and daughters; about the women left behind and the children born in the long shadow of the Civil War. About the divisions that ripple though communities large and small and the glacial pace of social change. About the plight of women, and the unheralded and imperfect efforts of the people who fought for the economic, political and sexual freedoms we enjoy and dare not take for granted. Out these slow revelations my second novel, Reliance, Illinois was reborn.

I’m stubborn. It took me years to strip away the sodden layers of my ambition and to settle into the satisfying work of discovery, which I had embraced on instinct with the first novel. I had to learn to listen, again, to translate, not dictate. I needed to put myself, my plans and intentions aside and recover the ability to feel with and for and through other people. Baudelaire understood this necessity: “How do I make you see,” he said, “that when I speak to you of myself it is of you I am speaking?”

You can’t eat a story as you might a fish. It has no value unless shared. Good writers know this: good writing, regardless of genre, is communal. Whatever else the story, or poem is about, it is about us.
And you can say the same of good readers. Good readers are willing to feel with and for other people — willing to listen. “Reading is a means of listening,” says Ursula Le Guin. “[It] is not as passive as hearing or viewing. It’s an act: you do it… and though you’re usually alone when you read, you are in communion with another mind…you’ve joined the act of imagination.” You have helped create what poet Matthew Zapruder calls an “imaginative space,” allowing us not only to empathize, but to “acknowledge obvious [even if not convenient] truths.” “People,” he writes, “do not disbelieve in inequality or racism or global warming because they have not been informed: they disbelieve because they cannot or choose not to imagine. They are cruel because to them, others have become an abstraction, and cannot be truly imagined.”

Back in 2014 Ursula Le Guin warned us “that bad times were coming and that we’d all have to work to imagine some real grounds for hope.”’
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This is the task laid out for writers, readers, teachers, and community leaders. This is our big fish. While the ideals we pursue may not be achieved in the manner we imagined, while we may find ourselves shivering in the lake, as many of us did on election night 2016, we pick ourselves up, dry ourselves off, and try again. Because if we can use our imaginations to write the story of us then, by God, we can change it too.

I was taught never to say “can’t.” It was as forbidden in my house as any other four letter word, and I understand why: to prevent a lazy acceptance of first failures. Yet there are things, a multitude in fact, that I cannot and will never be able to do. I can’t dunk a basketball. I can’t see without glasses or comprehend higher math or paint like Caravaggio. The list of things I cannot, and will never be able to do regardless of my effort, grows with each passing year.

While initially depressed by this realization, I now I find it a relief. Because I have finally come to a point in my life when I am able to openly admire someone else’s gifts and say, without envy or self-loathing: “Oh wow! I can’t do that.” And then return to what I can do, and do it well.

My job, I think, is to learn from the unmatchable mastery of others, to cultivate the joy of self-discovery, and to guard against envy and self-deprecation. My job is to discover the limits of my abilities, to make something new and original, however I am able, and to offer it humbly.