An Author's Homage to Librarians

You sit down to write a novel, and soon the characters are crowding around demanding attention with the urgency and self-obsession of 3-year-olds.


A few weeks in, you can no longer shake them. In fact, nothing shuts them up until the manuscript is ripped from your hands at deadline, when you go from total control to utter powerlessness with one click of the Send button.

Goodbye! Good luck!

After that comes the weird silence of the empty nest, with its combination of freedom and loneliness. The joy and relief are offset by the fear of a mean and indifferent world mistreating your defenseless characters. You realize how much you love all of them -- even the bullies and brats, and there's nothing you can do but hope the world will understand and love them too.

The first word that they've arrived safely in the outside world comes with the reviews. Then your friends start reporting sightings of your babies all dressed up in their new covers, snug and comfy on bookstore shelves.

If you're a first-timer, you continually check your Amazon rating and duck in and out of bookstores. You ricochet between elation and devastation, relief and panic. But that's largely a financial issue.

You don't really hear from your characters until readers write to tell you they've spent time with them and that they are still alive on the page.

Fan mail is your "Hi, Ma! We're OK!" And it is wonderful. Even the urgent e-mail begging for a plot summary to help some kid with a book report due in the morning is better than nothing.

Then the sad day comes when you get the "R" letter. The one saying, in essence: We're sorry to inform you that sales stink and we have to remainder your book. That is how the publisher announces his intention to stand your characters at the edge of a ditch, blindfold them and have a firing squad of sales execs and bookkeepers gun them down.

The horror of the "R" letter is mitigated by only one thought: Your babies are safe at the library! Were it not for libraries, there would be no safe harbor for characters and stories, nowhere for them to wait out disasters and economic storms. And were it not for librarians, there would be no one to introduce your characters to new children as the older ones grow up and move on.

And for this, I want to thank librarians, for the heroic work they do and for the many, many lives they save.

xo Amy 

P.S. This piece ran a few years back in the LA Times. Am running it again now as my local libraries and probably yours, too, are endangered. 

Join your Friends of the Library group!!!

Passing Over!

• First came the parental insitance that one day I’d look back fondly upon these family holidays and the sweet traditions of my youth. 
• Then came my tantrums and sulks.
• Then the parental threats. 
• Then the grim, soul-crushing acceptance of utter powerlessness and the knowledge that the Passover Seder at Auntie Jenny’s was as unavoidable and inevitable as death.  
• Last came me -- in a dress, with hard shoes and a bitter scowl.

Great Auntie Jenny and Uncle Manny had two sons. Uncle Bill and Greta had three sons. I had a brother. And then there was me, the only girl. That meant that when we arrived at Auntie Jenny’s each adult told me how pretty I was, or how pretty my stupid dress was, or both. And then no one spoke another word to me for the rest of the interminable night.

Me & Barry

While I sat in a lump of resentment, my brother and the boy cousins would play boy games having boy fun until dinner, at which time I helped my auntie serve soup. This meant carrying one bowl at a time and setting it down before each of my uncles and aunts and boy cousins.

Perhaps this doesn’t sound utterly humiliating and horrid. But it was. 

Worse, everyone complimented my parents on how nice it must be to have a helpful daughter like me. Grrrrrrrr!

And worse than even that -- in between courses we went around the table reading the Passover Haggadah, including prayers in Hebrew... out loud!  

In a stew of dread, I’d feel my turn to read lurching toward me like the Frankenstien Monster. I did not want to read out loud in front of these people and I did not want to read this crazy stuff about plagues, and first born sons dying, and blood on door posts and lamb’s bones, and bitter herbs and tears and slavery and smart sons and stupid sons, and boils.

Perhaps if a kid is raised with religious stuff more than once a year, the odder aspects of the Sedar wouldn’t be as utterly bizarre and confusing. But I don’t think you can be rational and straightforward month after month, then suddenly spring all kinds of kookie goings on at someone and expect them to swallow it whole. And besides being wacko, the Passover Seder was also unbelievably l-o-n-g and tedious. 

Luckily, all miserable things do come to an end. And finally we’d be back in the car on the drive home. That’s when my mom always said, “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

So now, as Passover is here once more, I ask this: Do I now, as foretold in the prophacy by my wise mother, look back fondly at those sweet holiday memories? 

The answer is NO! I absolutely do not! 

But as an adult at long last, I can pass over Passover. And so I say amen & happy holidaze!

xo

amy

What Goes Around

My son was just on spring break so we met in Michigan for a quick visit to my folks. I’d been there two months earlier with my daughter. I hoped that making shorter visits more often would spare me the kind of shocks that I got when I waited too long between trips. 

My parents still live in their own house, shop for their own groceries, prepare their own meals, keep their house tidy and drive. They still attend and enjoy lectures and concerts and meals with friends. But they'll be the first to tell you they are not the people they once were.

We all know their condition can, and no doubt will, get unimaginably worse as they shuffle along this tricky part of the path. But the unknown is... well, unknown. And for now I'm grateful for how well they're doing, especially since the same cannot be said for many of their friends. In fact, most people my parents' ages are dead. 

My son and I sat in the kitchen and then the living room, telling them about our lives. We drove around some, we ate, had a few laughs. We heard a few main stories and concerns on loop, and took naps. It was a pleasant enough few days, no hospital trips, no falls, no funerals. And although my folks were sad to see us go, we were ready to leave when the time came.  

My son had a few more days of his spring break so he flew home with me. We talked. He told me about his life. We drove around some. We had a few laughs. We ate. And this morning, as I stood not-quite-teary at the door, he drove off, anxious to leave, eager to get back to his own life. 

Ah, I get it.

xo

Amy

Fat Free!

Yes, I know there are few things more boring than other people’s “weight loss journeys” but, conversely, there is nothing quite as fascinating as your own! 


And I am now on Day Sixteen of my Diet!!!!!


I just returned from coffee (sans muffin, croissant, bagel, banana-nut bread) with a friend and fellow dieter who asked me how my writing was going.  In answering I realized I've been way too busy not eating anything I like --  to write.

I’m a one-obsession-at-a-time kind of gal and I accept that 
moderation isn't for everyone.

I came late to the diet game because between the ages of 14 and 45 I concentrated my efforts on smoking cigarettes rather than eating. Turns out there are many parallels between smoking, eating, and ... monogamy!

When you get married, if you happen to be me, you have guilty dreams about sex with men other than your husband. 


Then you quit smoking and dream of sneaking a KOOL.


And two nights ago I began dreaming of sinking my crooked little teeth into fresh, rich, slices of thick, grainy, bread heaped with blue cheese. Then slices of extra sharp cheddar. Then slathered with creamy brie ... sigh. 
Never mind.      

But this is not my first time.

Many years ago I abandoned 20 pounds on Weight Watchers. They tracked me down, of course, and brought an additional 10 pounds back with them to punish me for my treason. I’ve noted that risk but have re-uped none the less, with every intention of returning soon to my pre-pregnancy, pre-cigarette-quitting-poundage, pre-relentless gravity, body.

Last night, however, over lettuce and tepid water, another dieting pal suggested we promise to tell each other when we are getting too skinny. She doesn’t want to become one of those deflated, bitter looking, wizened old broads whose slack, fat-free faces wobble in the breeze. 

Ew. I have no intention of being one either. 

Not because I will have lifting, tucking, bloodletting, face/neck tailoring or injections, but because that is simply not what I am picturing as I shun the bakery and snub the cheese counter. No, I shall soon be slim and firm, a bit taller perhaps, with the slightest trace of a French accent, my memory intact including nouns, my hearing and eyesight keen, my posture... perfect! Young again!

I suspect you won't recognize me when next we meet.

xo
Amy

. 
 

P.S. Much as I loved hearing from you, I had to disable blog comments because some low-life bottom-feeding crack-pot was venting spleen here.


Note to low-life: This blog is MINE for venting MY skinny little spleen, not yours.   

Suspended In My Underpants

Today, March 3, 2012, Mitch & I strolled barefoot on the beach. As two native Michiganders, we still marvel at this miracle, even though we moved here almost 30 years ago.  

I know that many otherwise reasonable people choose to toboggan and snow ski and ice skate. My own brother and sister-in-law go traipsing about all rosy cheeked with their horses and dog of a Michigan winter day, like some thing right out of a Christmas card. 
But when I think of my snowy childhood winters I mostly recall trudging to elementary school and later, waiting for the junior high school bus in biting, icy, morning wind, wearing a dress.

Yes a dress.

Back then girls were not allowed to wear pants to school. 

That meant that while the boys were jumping around and rolling in the snow, girls walked carefully knowing that a slip on the ice meant landing with bare thighs in a snow drift. 
It also meant winter winds on chapped, raw knees up ineffectual skirts. It meant shivering and whimpering, and if you were me, it meant choking with resentment against the powers who made and enforced such cruel rules.  

   

On one unbearably cold, dark, winter morning when I was in eighth grade, I put jeans on under my dress and went to school. When I got there I was summoned by the school counselor. A fellow who for reasons mysterious to me, was beloved and chummy with many of my class mates. 

As I remember it, he told me I was a trouble maker and asked if I thought I was a women’s libber. 

I told him to try walking around without pants in freezing weather  with sub-zero wind chill.  

He said I had a bad attitude and if I didn't take off my pants he'd call my parents. 

I took off my jeans, put them in my locker, and seethed. 

The next day I wore my jeans again, but this time not under a skirt. When I was again sent to the counselor’s office and he told me to take off my pants, I did.

I was suspended in my underpants.

A few years later the dress code was changed, and a few years after that no one remembered there had ever been one.  By then I had fled northern winters and vowed never ever to be caught bare legged in the snow again. 

  

Thanks to global warming, they say the winters in Detroit aren’t what they were, and for the sake of all the dress wearers who remain in snowy climes, I hope that’s true. I however will always remember March as hell.

Take it Robert! (Frost)
        Fire and Ice
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Heartbreak in the Garden

Yes, emotions are the meat of the human experience, but still,  so many of them are unpleasant! Sorrow and grief certainly suck. Jealousy, anger, fear, dread, shame... 

And as if sloshing through the mandatory emotional stew isn't enough, there are those days of extra helpings. It could be blood sugar level, PMS, jet lag, the result of a sleepless night... and BAM! Suddenly feelings are dialed up to super-hyper-excruciating. Everything seems unbearably poignant, unutterably sad, overwhelmingly touching.  

I’d been out of town for a week. (long story) So this morning, I took my coffee into the sunshine, to survey the empire, and see how all fared in my absence.  

Someone had shred toilet paper in the azaleas. It had to be either my husband or my dog since they were the only ones uncaged. And neither of them had watered.  But in spite of the abuse and neglect, my carrot patch had flourished.  In fact, it had grown so crowded it needed to be thinned.

I’ve never had luck transplanting carrots. Instead of re-rooting they'd always faint and wither.  Thinning therefore means putting some plants to death so the ones around them can grow.  

You see where this is going.

Luckily, I have a bunny and a Guinea pig who are happy to eat the delicate tops and tiny pale pre-carrots, so it isn’t exactly a waste. 


But still, how do I pick? Just reach in blindly and pull? Comb through looking for the smallest?


I choked up over the jumble of hopeful green -- the magic combo of water, sunlight, and dirt, growing exactly where I'd once cavalierly scattered their seeds.   

The arbitrariness of life and death was suddenly breath taking. 

The inequality of power between myself -- large, and mammalian and determined -- and the baby carrot plants --  innocent and entirely defenseless.  

Wally Dog watched me get weepy and offered to shred another roll of toilet paper to snap me back to the business at hand.

Thank goodness for dogness.   

xo

Amy

P.S. Dear Dears, Three months have passed & it is now time to harvesrt those un-thinned carrots. They are a bit motley, some knobby & misshapen, some teenie-tiny, but there are lts of them & they are all sweet. No regrets. 
xo
Amy

Amy's Believe it or Not!

Dearest Dears,

Starting tomorrow, Monday, February 6th, I, Amy Goldman Koss, am off for six days to grade THE NATION'S REPORT CARD! Yes, me and 59 other volunteers (read unpaid) shall be sequestered by the United States Department of Education to do whatever it is people like us do under the circumstances, for the NAEP, National Assessment of Educational Progress to evaluate the writing skills of American students. (Training on site.)

There is an unofficial pool afloat re. how long I will last before either being drummed out by the government project leaders when they discover that I am a high school drop out who cannot spell,  who harbors an intense hatred and distrust of authority, as well as a bone-deep skepticism regarding formulaic evaluation of creative skills.

OR I bolt for the airport in screaming boredom and/or horror.

Love and Kisses  

Your,

Amy

PS. I have indeed signed a confidentiality agreement, so will report back in full upon my return.
     In the interim, please feel free to weigh in with your feelings about The Nation's Report Card, our current system of evaluating student writing, or my likelihood of completing this six day, 8:30am -5:30 pm project, intact.