Jessica Handler's Blog

I never ever got picked for anything at recess, or, to be Southern about it, I ‘never got picked for squat.’  This is because I was sullen and a weird combination of agonizingly shy and astonishingly aggressive. So, in Red Rover, when a team captain or a player or a mean girl or who-the-hell ever was supposed to call out “Red Rover, Red Rover, let [name] come over,” my name was always the last resort. The very last. As in “maybe the bell will ring for us to go back to class and we won’t have time to call her,” which was fine with me, because I way preferred being smart in class to being useless on the playground. (And what were we being called over for, exactly?)

(Yes, this was before Title IX.) Slightly.

Which means that as an adult, when I do get picked for teams I am overjoyed! (Consider poor Sally Field, who will be followed to the grave with her heartrendingly genuine moment of “they like me!” Kind of like that. Tell it, Sally!)

All this to say I got picked for a team, and I didn’t even have to throw a ball or catch one or dodge one or whatever people do with them.

Full Grown People’s anthology will be out tomorrow, and editor Jennifer Niesslein called my name. Along with Marcia Aldrich’s, Suzanne Van Atten’s, Randy Osborne’s, Jill Talbot’s, Sonya Huber’s…. this is quite a team, y’all. We’ll beat you in writing recess.

Want to order the book? You can! Right here!

I’ve let too much time pass since I’ve last blogged (blogged? Is this a verb?) Let’s try this again. I’ve let too much time pass since I’ve last POSTED on my blog. That’s better. I can claim busy-ness. There was the week teaching at Wildacres, which was so rewarding and fun and lovely that I had to recover from it, and then the week at a super-special-secret-hideout writing retreat in Connecticut, and then a lovely end of summer here at home that involved hammocks, husband, and I have to think of something else that starts with ‘h’ so I can alliterate.

All this to say that once I emerged from my cocoon, much the world was ugly. You know what I’m talking about: the shooting of Mike Brown in Ferguson, MO, and the echoes of Trayvon Martin’s killing, and backward so many years. There’s James Foley’s killing at the hands of ISIS, there’s suppression of journalists here and abroad, Israel and Gaza and Hamas (again)…

Why does a writer concern herself with these things? Because she’s a writer, and lives in the world. Because she’s a reader. Because of tikkun olam.

My friend Terra McVoy and I were talking about how powerless we feel, and about the power of reading and writing, and how we can try to “repair the world” (see tikkun olam, above) and she came up with a reading list called, “Books are Ammo for Your Brain.”

She’s made a YA reading list to help readers move forward in their thinking in these days. My friends at Charis Books and More have made one called, “The Way Forward is With a Broken Heart.

There are others on the web.  Here is just a sample of mine.

The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson.

Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, by Danny Lyon

Countdown to Eternity, by Benedict Fernandez

The Temple Bombing, by Melissa Fay Greene

Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn, by Gary Pomerantz.

What’s on your list? Write me and tell me. I want to know.

I lost 20 pounds, mostly from not eating what my mom was eating when she was eating it, to make her feel less like she was eating ice cream and chocolate covered fruit and pasta salad and whatever she wanted so she’d keep some weight on. I was keeping some weight on, too, and one of us (me) didn’t really need it.

So now I wear smaller sized underwear and I also cut off a foot and a half of hair (which was probably about five pounds right there) and then I was in Boston and went to Fluevog because I always do with my friend Mersh and she had sense but I coughed up some serious dollars I don’t have on a pair of RED mini babycakes (see photo) and now I’m interested in style.

So I made a Pinterest board for “shoes and clothes.” I already have one for images of the maybe next book, but I’m also obsessively pinning pictures of things like skinny jeans on my other Pinterest board.

I didn’t think I was that kind of girl.

That meme about what are you working on next is going around, and my friend Kate Sweeney tagged me. Have you read Kate’s book American Afterlife?  You oughta, and not just because I blurbed it. Kate doesn’t know this yet, but it’s going on my narrative nonfiction syllabus fall semester. (Oh, now she knows it.) It’s that good.

So, here are my answers to the meme.

1. What am I working on? A novel. Yes, fiction. Fiction is harder than creative nonfiction, I think. I have to make stuff up. But this novel is based on a real person’s story which I think begs to be fictionalized, since much of what she did to support her family was a kind of fiction. It’s based in the late 19th century, and involves a teenage girl with more responsibility than she bargained for. Do I detect a theme in my work?

2. How does my work differ from others in its genre? Other than it’s written in my voice, and my sensibility, I can’t answer that yet. John Lennon is alleged to have said “there are only 88 keys on a piano, it’s all in how you play them.”

3. Why do I write what I do? In an essay I wrote for Tin House magazine last year, I tried to figure that out. I’m drawn to stories about young women who make the wrong choices for the right reasons.

4. How does my writing process work? Poorly. I try to plant a flag in three  to four hours in the morning to write, but life interferes, as in teaching – which I love – or an appointment that can’t be rescheduled, or this or that. I love writers’ retreats for that reason. I’m forced to be face to face with my work for days on end, and as hard as that is, I love it.

You know how sometimes I read that section from Braving the Fire about running into a photograph of my father at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, and how the photo was labelled “Unidentified Man” and I burst into tears in the museum and the nice guard and administrator put me in touch with the photographer? I have that story in the book because 1) it’s really strange about coincidences, and this one certainly illustrates William Carlos Williams’ statement, “no ideas but in things,” 2)a photograph is an entry way into story (ref: item #1) and 3)what a weird moment.

The photographer is Ben Fernandez, who took such evocative, humane, and stirring photos of that era. Last week, the New York Times Lens blog ran a feature on Ben and his work. Ben and his wife Siiri sent me the link, and I’m pasting it here for you. The article is called “No Choice But to Protest and Take Pictures.”

Yes to both.

The photo above is THE photo of my father and a man whose name I can not remember and wish I did. If you know it, will you please message me? This image is copyright Ben Fernandez and I’m taking a leap of faith that you won’t steal it from here, because it’s Ben’s and I’m kind of presenting here as promotion for his work.

Last week I went to Athens, Ga. I was nearly late, because I was doing something on my computer like grading or answering emails or not Facebooking, but I MADE IT and noticed I was nearly out of gas BUT NOT UNTIL I GOT THERE.

You can’t tell from this that I was nervous. 

(Thanks, nice dude named John who took this picture!)

The UGA Grady College of Journalism invited me to talk about how a reporter can write the tough stuff. Some of the folks there are health journalists, which means they cover policy, science, and community approaches and responses to health care. Which means I am their #1 fan.

When the talk was done and I was still nervous, I got to go play with a standard poodle. That means as much to me as health journalism.

And then I got some gasoline in my car (it’s got eco-boost!) and went to teach my undergrads (of whom I am also a fan) in Atlanta.

Would you like some crafty writing tips? Will you remind me to sit up straight when I’m on teevee?

I have got to learn to take photographs. Like, for instance, of the gummy worm* in Jennifer Niesslein’s drink at a fancy outdoor porchy kind of tapas place in Charlottesville, where she so generously rounded up five, count ‘em, five writers after hours during the Virginia Festival of the Book. Jennifer is the editor of the outstandingly smart FullGrownPeople lit mag, and she’s been on my side since before Invisible Sisters was born. She’s partly responsible for that memoir coming to fruition, so blame it on her.

This led to karaoke, a statement which, when written here, reads like a confession.I have committed karaoke.

Not well, but enthusiastically.

The best book festivals are the ones where 1)the fantastic host bookstore, in this case, New Dominion Books, sells out of Braving the Fire. (wowee, y’all, thank you!) 2)I get to see friends (see above) and 3)I get to see more friends, namely brunch with Paul Guest and his fiancee June. Here is a little glimpse of Paul’s mind-cracking poetry. Please see/read/eat/relish more of it.

A waiter walked by with a tray of Bloody Marys at brunch, but I was so tired and pleased that admiring them was enough.

Please remind me to get the cell phone out of the messenger bag – the giant travel purse – and take a photo of the dang gummy worms next time!

* representative image. Gummy worm in drink not for girly-drinkness, but because, as Jennifer pointed out, it was the THEME of the drink. The drink was called “the secret garden.” Gardens have worms.

The ofrenda!

I am an irresponsible blogger lately. My last post was a month ago, and I promised, swore, made an agreement with myself, choose your phrasing, to blog weekly. Keep up the correspondence, so to speak. Have an internet presence.

I used to be so, so organized. Back when I worked as a production manager for big, expensive television shows and time was pretty much the same thing as money, oh, man was I organized. Three ring binders, multi-colored pens, four people on speakerphone at once, that sinking feeling that I needed to be on the set and in the editing suite and in a meeting at the same time… just imagining it again now makes me want to throw up and cry at the same time. And hit someone because they were walking too slowly or talking too slowly or thinking too slowly…

I am so glad not to be that person anymore.

But there’s a trade off, which is that I slack off. Or am merely human.

 In the space of a single week last week, I was on Puget Sound one Sunday and Tybee Island the following Sunday. This photo is of Shilshole Beach on Puget Sound. Very cold outside. Very happy with my friends R. and E., with whom I escaped the cruise-ship of sneezes, coughs, fevers, and apparently stomach bug, too, that was this year’s AWP. I spent two of three conference days sleeping in my room at the Sheraton Seattle, which means VERY EXPENSIVE FLU.  But I did get to see some friends before we germed each other, and attend some readings and book signings. If you want to read insider play by play about the sessions and panels, Dinty W. Moore rounded up many many people to report on it for the Brevity blog. I would have, if I hadn’t been ASLEEP and SNEEZING on the 24th floor of the Sheraton Seattle. Instead, I’m reading about all the fun and smartness other people had.

Oh, and Malaprop’s in Asheville the week before that. Malaprop’s, you slay me. You are a delicious bookstore in a thrilling town, and you do things like provide paper and pens for people in my workshop. There were MANY people in the workshop!

In TWO weeks, my online course in “Writing the Tough Stuff” starts over here at CreativeNonfiction.org. Apparently, one section is full, so come on and start a second section. Why not? We can all be in our homes, on our interwebs.

Tomorrow, a craft project. I will post a photo when it’s done. (I am terrible at crafts.) My friend Kate Sweeney is throwing a launch party for her new book American Afterlife, and she’s asked me to make an ofrenda for one of the tables. The ofrenda will be an offering to my mother’s memory. I’ve compiled a lot of things I want to use, and am currently tearing the house apart trying to remember where I put her Brandeis University 50th anniversary name tag, which had a photo of her beautiful self from college. Things are good, though. I have her Nantasket Beach banner.