It wasn’t until the 2010 playoffs that I became a Giants fan.  I had watched baseball periodically over the years during the World Series, but I never followed a particular team, except the Yankees, my husband’s favorite club (he’s a former New Yorker). But something about the Giants’ ragtag collection of players, some almost over the hill, captured my interest and kept me engaged into the 2011 season. In the process, I’ve been learning what it means to become a fan, and I’m not sure that I qualify. I’ve also been discovering the world of baseball, and I can understand why so many people are drawn to the game: hope.  That’s the key word.

I find myself returning again and again to watching my team even when they aren’t winning or hitting because I hope that something will happen: they’ll have a hitting streak. The pitching will get so hot the opposing team can’t touch it. The Giants will prevail! Hope is the driving force.

While I’ve learned to appreciate the freshman, the new guys on the block (Christian, Belt, Pill, Sanchez: wonderful new talent), I feel more confident in Huff, Torres, Sandoval, De Rosa when they’re playing well  The old guys.

Since April, I’ve seen most of the games on TV. I have no desire to visit AT&T’s gorgeous ball park for a variety of reasons, one being comfort.  Another is the excellent commentary that accompanies TV coverage.  But most important is our delightful LED screen. Watching the game this way, I feel I’m more inside the action than I would experience in person.

Of course, I also regularly check the Giants’ website, keeping updated on recent trades and transactions. Following the players’ records.  Generally being informed.

But it’s difficult to keep up this intensity when my favorite team doesn’t have a chance at the playoffs.  Okay, I know, I should be more expansive, more interested in the intricacies of the plays, in the future of the club. But I’m not. I can applaud wonderful pitching. I can lust over effortless-appearing home runs. And I can get excited about a well-executed double play. Yet the other refinements just don’t interest me. I just want hits and runs. Period. Apparently the Giants’ management seeks the same thing.

How much of this is a reflection on the game as America’s pastime? How much does baseball capture the American psyche? It’s difficult to generalize.  Hope isn’t just an American attitude. Most people cling to it, wishing for the best, desiring what can’t be easily attained. Yet hope does seem to be particularly American when partnered with the American Dream. They are long-time lovers, holding hands, clinging to each other. Hope keeps generation after generation striving to attain more than the previous one. So do we as fans, and the baseball players as well, aim for what can’t yet be grasped, that elusive thing waiting around the corner.

My interest in taking up a more focused spiritual practice again is to experience some of these things listed as preparations for death.  The wisdom texts can help with that need.  I don’t want to be like the ostrich with its head in the sand; I believe in preparing for life’s various stages, being knowledgeable, ready.

That’s why meditation as an active practice attracts me again. I did it daily for many years before Michael and I met, when I was living alone.  The Tibetan Book of the Dead has a good section that gives an overview of the various meditations one can do, from the basic calming meditation of one-pointed attention, to using ordinary daily activities as opportunities for contemplation:

“This involves using sleep as a time for practice.  You can convert the process of falling asleep into a rehearsal of the death dissolutions, imagining yourself as sinking away from ordinary waking consciousness down through the eight stages into deep-sleep clear-light transparency.  And you can convert the dream state into a practice of the between-state, priming yourself to recognize yourself as dreaming when in the dream…. It is very important, for if you can become self-aware in the dream state by the practice of lucid dreaming, you have a much better chance of recognizing your situation in the between after death” (57).

I’ve had numerous lucid dreams over the years, but I hadn’t thought of them as vehicles for preparing for death!  But I’ve had fewer since I stopped practicing meditation regularly.

OM MANI PADME HUM works for me as a meditation, especially when I awaken in the night and have trouble getting back to sleep. I found it in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and I like the idea that it evokes a universal good in all things, which can prevail even in times of misfortune.  Of course, you need to believe that there is a universal good in all things for this mantra to be effective; I guess I believe that. Or I would like to.

Working on this current novel is an exercise in trust, writing and seeing where it all leads, believing that if I create interesting characters, that’s enough. Letting go of my expectations to impress or create an important work. Otherwise, I’ll be giving weight to the negative old man from my recent dream that wanted the women to be made up, unable to see or appreciate their natural beauty.  I must remember primary processes, to get beneath all the shoulds to where something fresh and original lives.

Poetry is the one thing I write that I could do forever and not worry about publishing it.  I have a very different relationship with poetry than I do with fiction, say, or non-fiction. The act itself is so satisfying that it doesn’t matter to me if the poem has an audience or not, though, of course, I do publish my poems, and I have a book of poetry coming out in September.  But they don’t have the urgency that the other genres do to get out in the world; I don’t feel I need to prove anything in poetry.

I’m reminded of something I read in the Summer 1995 issue of Parabola:

“…an inclination embodies or mirrors an unexplored capacity in us which, if allowed to flourish, might lead us further into wholeness.  But very often the capacity itself is never left alone—the joy of singing is extended into a dream of being recorded, the transformative process of writing is extended into a need to be published. Ironically, the innate ability to recognize and put things together, no matter what form it takes, is often diverted into an insatiable need to be recognized.

In this way, a passion for a particular way of being turns into a grand goal of becoming, as if life did not reside in who we are but only in the dream of what we might become.  Here, in the same way that the loved one is seen as the keeper of the gift, the idealized ambition—becoming a rock star or a famous writer or a wealthy businessman—is seen as the keeper of the gift that will unleash true living” (18).

Writing for me is a necessity, a spiritual path, if you will.  It doesn’t exist in a vacuum, unrelated to my life.  It is my life, more fully so at times than what I do in the world—teaching, being a wife and mother, interacting with friends.  Not that these activities aren’t fulfilling and terribly important.  But I’m discovering just how interrelated all my various selves are. Writing is the way I come to know myself, one method for recovering and integrating the disparate parts of my psyche.

An interview I read in Border Crossings with Canadian artist Betty Goodwin expresses something similar:

“A work is a deeply personal mixture of your earlier experiences and also your life at the present in this world.  But I can’t shred it and say it’s absolutely this or that.  It’s based in something you don’t even realize yourself until it gives you back information.  It’s like you’re pulling and pulling and trying to get something.  And then there’s that magic time when it begins to pull you.  If that doesn’t happen, you can’t push it any more and it dies.”

This quote captures my feelings about how my writing connects with my on-going life, that somehow its shaping me as I shape it, just as dreams do.  It’s essential to have this dialogue with the work and my life.

My father was born in Central Greece, the village of Karditsa.  In 1994, I stopped in Venice before flying to Greece for ten days.  As the train approached Venice from Florence, I saw all this water and asked, “What is this?”  The Italian fellow traveling in our car said, “The Venice Lagoon!”  What a lagoon!  The place is very different from what I expected, and immediately I knew it would be one of my favorite cities in the world.  I somehow felt at home there.

I hadn’t realized how much the East influenced Venice in architecture and design, a mix of ornate decoration and classical elements.  It gives a bizarre feeling, a magical quality.  It’s not exactly Italian or European but more like stepping into another culture entirely.  Venetian.  Its own world.  The bride of the sea.  It has great symbolic value to me, the bridge between east and west, between my Scottish heritage on my mother’s side and my father’s.

Venice is the opposite of dignified Florence.  There’s a dreamy quality to life in Venice.  Slow moving—you can’t go that fast on the water, so the pace of life is easier.  The water everywhere also makes one feel reflective, suspended.  It’s truly miraculous that men were able to build the place in water, in mud.

In fact, Venice seems a real mix of cultures and people, much more varied than other places I visited on the trip.  It was incredible to sit in St. Mark’s square, drinking a beer, watching the tourists amble by, some dancing to the elegant pop music, violins, accordions, sweet sounds, not the clashing ones of rock.  Venetian feeling.  From where I sat in a restaurant, I could see a pigeon making a nest in the fold of a canvas curtain.  It was touching in the midst of all that activity.

The boat rides after dark were lovely, spots of light illuminating the night and reflecting in the water, gondoliers snaking through the canal, paddles soundlessly cutting into the depths, passengers reclining and enjoying the ride.  So many of the buildings seemed only partially inhabited, many windows dark.  Of course, the shutters may have been closed against mosquitoes and noise from the canal.  But it was so dramatic to look at the places that were illuminated, glimpses into elegant parlors, walls and ceilings ornately decorated.  A woman stepping out on her balcony was silhouetted against the light.  It was like being on a giant stage, everything considered for its effect.

The day I visited St. Mark’s, I realized why this city is so important to me.  I was looking at things saved from Constantinople, items Venetians had ransacked during that great city’s demise.  I understood then emotionally, not just intellectually: Venice is the gateway into Greece, into that part of my heritage.  It has a strong Greek influence (the Greek cross is used in the sanctuary rather than the other one, the Greek Orthodox church putting more emphasis on resurrection than the crucifixion, on completeness).  I was in tears and having to control myself, St. Mark’s itself being the most appealing church I’ve ever visited.

Nearly everything about Venice pleases me—the ambiance, the beauty, the color, the art, the architecture.  The mix of so many periods and styles.  I like that kind of blending.  There is also an assortment of races not found so much in other Italian communities.

The Academia was my favorite gallery on the trip.  The Northern Italian painters—Titian, Giorgione, Veronese, Tintoretto, Tiepolo, Bellini—each spoke to me in a different way, capturing my attention completely.  Their use of color, I think, and emotion.  The contrasts.  The drama and tension.

The other thing I learned in the Border Crossing’s article is that “Venice herself is understood to be female, either LaSerenissima or, to use Apollinaire’s nasty phrase, the ‘sexe femelle de l’Europe’ (the she-animal of Europe).”  No wonder I felt at home there!

The discipline of writing an hour or more a day pulls me into myself, gives me the contemplative part I need. Balance. I realize that writing the kind of stories I do keeps me in touch with the strangeness of life, the unfathomable mysteries. Realistic stories I enjoy, but they focus on the everyday, on what we can see in our surface ego view. Many of my stories take another perspective, as if I’m looking at the world from the underside, showing what’s there but not normally perceived. I want to get more of this into my work (fiction and poetry), and it’s why writing can be so much fun.

There’s also a psychological component for me. At the same time as I’m creating something others can read and enjoy, I’m working something through emotionally or intellectually for myself. The “Spirit of the Law” story shows the character refusing to be locked in to this masculine-dominated world of business. She may be doomed to haunt the halls of Johnson et al as a ghost, but there are ways to bring all that’s left out into those walls. It’s not a done deal. The character can take charge and get what she wants. To the degree that this character refers to some trait in me, this obsessive side to my personality can let loose of the restraints she’s put on herself, living in such a restrained way, living through others.

I must keep in mind that the cup will empty, fullness will recede, as happens each night with the waxing and waning energies of the moon.  I can’t help but hear “moo” when I write moon, those old nursery rhymes of the cow jumping over the moon still playing in my imagination.  Of course, cows are very much moon creatures, with their emptying and filling, the various stomachs they have for digesting food that turns into nourishing milk.  They’re a wonderful symbol for the creative person.

Perseverance is the key word.  I need to keep this in mind to combat the bombardment of negative things I’m reading currently about being a writer.  Not only is publishing like finding a needle in a haystack—especially publishing fiction—but also only five percent of writers support themselves on their writing.

For several months I was involved with a small Canadian literary agency with one principal, a former practicing contract attorney (I’ll call her Virginia, though that isn’t her real name), and her associate Sandra, a woman who claimed to have years of experience in the New York publishing scene as an agent and editor.  Before email became ubiquitous, ours was largely a relationship by mail—post cards, letters, faxes, and, occasionally, phone.  With my home in California, the physical distance prevented us from meeting, so I had to form my impressions by other means—the tone of the letter, the timber of voices, phrasings, silences.  It was a thoroughly modern partnership, and like many modern marriages, it offered no promise of permanence, satisfaction, or financial stability.

Since this was my first agent, I had nothing to compare the relationship to except idealized sketches I’d read in articles and books on how to choose an agent.  But it was nothing like the descriptions I’d read of the ideal agent/writer contract, where the agent acts as buffer and muse, encouraging the writer to write, write, write, leaving the driving to us.

I signed a contract with my agents based on a biography for children I had written.  I assumed that since both were enthusiastic about the biography, with the prospect of a series, this unanimity would continue.  However, I was disappointed when they asked me to wait a few months before submitting a novel I had completed, a coming-of-age story.  They claimed to be overloaded with manuscripts.

A couple of months later, Virginia finally wrote me.  I opened the letter slowly, trying to guess the contents, preparing myself for the worst—they wouldn’t like it.  The letter’s tone was negative and even angry:  the biography hadn’t sold yet, a surprise and a disappointment to them.  While it wasn’t stated, the message was that they might stop sending out inquiries any minute.  And I’d only reached the end of the opening paragraph!

I couldn’t believe they would give up so easily after only sending out the manuscript for two months.  Where were these heroic agents I’d heard about that persist until a publisher finally makes an offer, Amazons pushing past all obstacles?

Eventually, I reached the paragraph where she told me that the novel had caused her and her associate to have one of their rare disagreements:  Virgina said, “Sandra likes it; I don’t.”  Well, that response was clear enough.  No easing into the negative.  No softening the blow with some recognition of the work’s worth.  No building up of the writer’s fragile ego so she can keep writing in the face of rejection.  Her critique was that the narrator had a “curious tone.”  Curious?  That didn’t tell me anything.

I decided to phone, wanting to communicate my response to the letter’s negative vibe and to clarify some vague statements.  When I did get through to her (she was out of town for a few days), her voice was warm, she didn’t sound angry, and she seemed quite reasonable, unaware, apparently, of how curt and discouraging she had sounded in the letter.  (I had my husband and a friend read the letter to make sure I wasn’t overreacting; they each had the same response I did.)

After Virginia gave me a lecture on tone and audience that I respectfully listened to, noting her own tone and unawareness of audience both in her letter and in that phone call, she gave me Sandra’s home phone number so I could get her take on the novel.

Sandra didn’t sound surprised when she heard my response to Virginia’s letter.  In fact, she appeared to be expecting my call.  While Virginia was warm on the phone, she was still all business and aloof.  Sandra was the opposite—emotional, stream-of-consciousness, slightly hysterical.

I found out that Sandra had done damage control many times for Virginia, this not being the first time correspondence had generated a reaction from clients similar to mine.  Sandra also told me that the agency was having “cash-flow problems” and she had been cut back to one day a week.  Not encouraging, but she insisted they were not going under.

A new agency, only about two years old, they already represented some fine writers.  While Sandra had been in the business for years as an agent and editor, Virginia hadn’t, except as a writer herself of a published non-fiction book.  Hence Sandra constantly had to shore up pessimistic Virginia, who, apparently, was unaware that agencies often go through long dry spells.  As Sandra said, it takes at least five years for a new one to stabilize.

I felt relieved to learn that I was not just being ultra-sensitive; Virginia had alienated other clients.  Unlike Virginia, Sandra told me everything, more than I wanted to know:  about her chronic depression and how ironic it was that she ended up encouraging Virginia, about her family’s floundering finances, about her troubled kids.

Yes, the honeymoon was over.  No longer were these women the invincible, removed, godlike humans I’d imagined that would hang in there through thick and thin, advocating for me, eventually selling my work.  They were as vulnerable as I, only more so in some ways.

While I have only my own rejections to deal with, agents carry the weight of all their writers’ failures.  In addition, they are trying to support themselves in a business that has become increasingly difficult.  The doorway into publishing seems to be narrowing for writers and their agents:  there’s less room for risk, less interest in quality.  As Sandra told me, business interests increasingly run the publishing houses, and publishers also are reducing their staff.  The bottom line becomes the most important one—editors are being eliminated, changing the whole character of publishing.  Sandra also insisted that had my main character in the novel been a boy, the book would be picked up instantly.  Prejudice still exists against females in publishing as elsewhere.

After talking to Sandra for half an hour and hearing her woes, mine seemed insignificant.  At least I still had the satisfaction of creating the work, of engaging it, of giving birth to something original.  Whether I sold anything ultimately didn’t really matter, though of course I want to find my readers.  In a way, searching for my audience is not unlike a religious seeker’s search for God.  It requires the same dogged determination, the same religious devotion, the same certainty that the journey is worth it.  It’s quite a love affair and may be an unrequited one.  Seeing it in this light helps me to continue.

Though the honeymoon was over with my first agents, from then on I had a more authentic relationship with them.  I felt part of the family, the child who finally wised up about her parents’ situation.  Virginia came across as curt in her letters, but I recognized it was only her lawyer’s persona.  Having labored under the notion that an agent should fill some ideal, a combination nurturing mother, aggressive father, enthusiastic listener, and cheering section, I realized that I might need to play these roles for them.

But one of my best vacations was when, for a variety of reasons, we decided to take a vacation from vacationing and stayed home.  We took short trips to various places near the Bay area:  Monterey, Carmel, Big Sur, Mendocino.  I anticipated this vacation as much as I have the others, and perhaps more so.  I got a real vacation, meaning I  truly rested from my travails.  Not that a vacation spent traveling can’t be restful.  But there’s usually so much preparation needed—making reservations, finding reliable people to care for the yard and pets, enduring the final press of packing and getting away, not to mention the physical wear and tear of the actual traveling, whether by plane, train, or car.  Just thinking about it makes me tired.

A writer and teacher, I looked  forward to just plotzing.  Instead of frantically trying to fit in my hour or more a day of writing while my husband drove us to our destinations, or while we traveled by plane from city to city, I devoted more than that time to my work.  I also reacquainted myself with my garden and the Bay area, discovering what I’d missed each August while I was biking in the Maritimes, or strolling along Prince George Street in Edinburgh, or cruising down the Rhine.  The flowers gave their best show in August.  We also had warmer weather, something to treasure when you live in a coastal region as we do, so we spent more evenings eating outside in our yard.

While nothing can replace experiencing new cultures and the unpredictable  rewards of travel, a vacation from a vacation offers its own pleasures.

Writers double themselves all the time in their fictions, of course.  That’s one of the reasons for writing them:  to clone yourself and set yourself out on a different path, or to reconfigure yourself as a marginal observer of your own childhood, as Lawrence does with Rupert Birkin in Women in Love, and as Woolf does with Lily Briscoe in To The Lighthouse; or to split yourself in two and reimagine one side of yourself through the eyes of the other, as Joyce does in Ulysses, and as Nabokov does in Pale Fire.

….The reason for this is that making copies of ourselves and setting them in motion in imaginary space is built in to the way minds work.  We do it all the time—when we plan for a future event, when we relive the past, when we daydream.  (July 13, 1995)

I like the idea that I’m daydreaming myself into existence, that day and night dreams, which can be in opposition, work together to make a creative entity.  I’m actually making a fiction in my memoir, just as we all are fictions, walking around.  I can’t possibly capture my whole life in these pages, so in making the choices I do and recording them, I’m altering my experience, describing a fictional “I,” transforming my life and my experiences.  They are both mine and not mine.

In fact, the act of writing these things and reflecting back on them alters that period, transforms it, just as the moon’s reflection changes what it touches, causing us to see a landscape differently at night than in the day time, under the sun’s glare.  The moons softens surfaces, embraces them.  The sun brings out an object’s hard edges and distances us from it.  It makes an object seem farther away than the moon’s light does.

In a way, I’m creating a character named Lily, just as other writers recreate themselves when writing memoir.  By organizing our pasts as we do, we eliminate a good deal, including only what fits the page limitation and what we’re willing to reveal.  Of course, this is how we give shape to a self, anyway, by uncovering/discovering it, bit by bit.  All of our personality doesn’t show at any one time.  Maybe over a long period, the different parts of ourselves will come forward and be exposed.  But we are always selecting, choosing.  When I had my sessions with A., my therapist/analyst, there were many dreams and experiences she never knew about, yet that didn’t make our work any less effective.

It’s similar to what happens when we photograph someone.  So much is left out, and we end up with an idealized (or sometimes extremely revealing) image.  If we took a dozen photographs of the person, while there would be a recognizable self in each picture, what’s captured in celluloid changes.  Usually, we only see a posed image, not a full-blown experience of another caught in natural motion.  I suppose it’s why many people prefer to choose a photograph of themselves that projects their best features, leaving the viewer with a romanticized picture of someone.

I think Proust was pointing to a similar phenomenon when he claimed that the narrative “I” is much different from the writer’s self/I.  The writer is creating another fictional self to speak through, and it isn’t exactly the same as the writer’s self.  I believe this happens in all writers.

It’s very useful to be reading Proust at the moment.  I’m interested in his ideas about memory, how we’re so caught up in the moment that it’s difficult to understand our experiences.  But by revisiting them in memory, we make sense of our lives.  I feel that’s what I’m doing here, trying to sort through inner and outer experiences, to understand them, to uncover their meaning.

This morning I picked up Anne of Green Gables and began re-reading it.  Hearing the narrator talk about Green Gables itself and Anne’s imaginativeness and pluck made me cry.  Really cry.  I realize how important the imagination is to us all, how we need places like Green Gables to visit; it isn’t just an escape but an extension of everyday reality.  In this context, Green Gables represents an innocent ideal that also exists in this world.  Of course, it means a great deal to me that the author of this story happens to be a fellow Canadian—L. M. Montgomery.

I have a great need to write such stories for others and myself.  I have to keep alive this possibility of going beyond the everyday.  The potholes we get stuck in.  The bumps in the road. Without the imagination, we’re nothing.  I don’t think courage, will, or insight mean much without the imagination, by which I mean the capacity to dream of better worlds, to allow other worlds to enter us.  To create out of our own imaginations something no one has seen before. New vistas.  Unlimited possibilities.

I also was moved by Anne’s feistiness and the way she used her imagination to survive.  This ability allowed her to endure awful circumstances as an orphan.  And it’s what allowed me to transcend my childhood.

Yes.  The Spider’s Web made vivid the French occupation of that country and took me inside its people’s feelings about this part of their history.  Being there helped me to see that while the official occupation is over, the French (and others) still dominate.  French is spoken as frequently as Arabic.  And while officially France may not be in charge any longer, it still has a majority interest in most of the banks and other institutions.  It’s not an easy relationship.  Of the over 500 riads in Marrakesh’s Medina (the old section of Arab cities), only five or six are owned by Moroccans.  That doesn’t mean only French people own the others, but it illustrates how powerless in certain ways some native Moroccans are.

Through Amar, the main character in The Spider’s Web, a fifteen year old Moroccan, the book also helped me to understand what role Islam and Allah play in many devout Moroccans lives.  The present is what is important.  Not the future.  The present and the past.  In many ways, it’s a backward looking culture, medieval in many of its current practices.  Donkey carts mix with people riding motorbikes and bicycles in the Medina.  Allah rules these lives: if something good happens, Allah destined it.  The same is true for ill-fortune.  Amar made me feel he had little or no control over his future.  Perhaps none of us do.  But that isn’t necessarily a Western idea.

I keep chewing on the words Marrakesh, Fes, Rabat, the three imperial cities that we visited, extracting the last drop of foreignness from them, trying to discover in the words themselves why Morocco lingers on my tongue like a fantastic meal—or a good book.   From the moment we landed at the Marrakesh airport, I knew we had arrived somewhere strange.  Not strange as in outlandish but as in weird and wonderful.

The airport has a small town feel to it, there being no gates.  We descended from the steps of the plane to Moroccan soil and approached the main building on foot.  Inside passport control, blue tile trimming granite pillars (blue is associated with Berbers, indigenous peoples of North Africa) made the room seem almost charming.  The main entrance has a soaring white ceiling in geometric patterns.  Arabic and French on signs remind us that English doesn’t reign here.  Nor do the usual Western driving courtesies.  Most intersections don’t have signal lights and would probably be ignored anyway.  Drivers also disregard pedestrians, who don’t have the right of way.  They plunge into the chaos of cars, motorbikes, and bicycles that cram the streets, leaving their fate to Allah.

We saw this first hand when the driver from our riad, a handsome young man who spoke decent English, drove us to one of the many (19 in all) gates that access the Medina.  Cars couldn’t enter, so a porter met us.  He took our two suitcases, and my husband Michael and I followed him into a dusty, pot-holed cobblestone street, crowded on each side with fruit, meat, and vegetable stands; bakeries; and clothing stalls.  We dodged people on motorbikes and bicycles and donkey carts, trying not to stare at the shop owners and their customers, who were gawking at us.  Scrawny stray cats darted between people’s feet and into holes in the walls.  Most stores were open to the street, so workers were on full view, stretching leather or hammering metal or building furniture.

This constant cacophony in the street contrasted sharply with our riad (Riad Kniza) and the-inward turning quality of the houses.  They don’t usually have windows overlooking the street (except for peepholes so residents can see who is at the door), the interiors containing courtyards and gardens and even terraces that overlook the city.  This inwardness mirrors something in The Spider’s Web.  Most of the characters felt trapped in their own interiors, unable to connect meaningfully with others.  But the book didn’t prepare me for our reception at our riad.

When we arrived, we were ushered in to one of the several lovely public spaces on the ground floor, graced with an array of antiques, and a sweet young man poured us glasses of hot mint tea and served Moroccan pastries (not too sweet).  He did all of this with grace and style.  The whole check in process had a ceremonial feel to it.  Hannan, the woman who greeted us, moved very slowly, in a measured way, and the Riad itself felt serene and quiet.  Arab music played in the background.

While we were enjoying our tea, the same young man took our bags to our room and turned on all the lights as well as the air conditioner.  We felt like guests in someone’s private home rather than tourists.  The riad was 100 times better than I expected.  It’s a 5 star place.  We’ve never had a suite so sumptuous and beautiful.  It has a huge living room, a large area with a massive king-size bed.  A large (two basin) marble bathroom.  The décor is Arab/Moroccan and exquisite:  carved reliefs circle the top trim in the room and the cupola above our bed.  We overlooked  the courtyard, but it was quiet there.  The whole place was quiet

On our first night, we walked to the central square in the Medina and were blown away by sights, sounds, smells, and colors.  Locals and visitors strolled on the sidewalks, most headed for the main square (Jamaâ El Fna) unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.  Food stalls and vendors vie with acrobats and storytellers and anyone who has a shtick to peddle.  It’s amazing the number of people who gather here each night to talk, look, and just interact at the end of each day.  The square is huge and it attracts throngs of locals and visitors.  

The old town has roots in medieval times, so we felt part of many historical layers there:  young men are still apprenticing to learn basic crafts and to work with materials that have been lost in America to mass manufacturing and the machine: metal, leather, yarn (incredible to see how they die it non-chemically), etc.  The Souqs are a feast for the eyes, a motley assembly of goods that are gorgeous to behold.

We would have been happy to stay in Marrakesh our whole time in Morocco, but Fes called to us, as it did to Bowles and his characters in The Spider’s Web.

When I recently sent parts of it to my on-line critique group (I’ve only met a couple of these lovely people face-to-face since we started working together several years ago), I didn’t expect I’d need to change much.  (Have you ever heard that voice before?  This draft is perfect as is?)  So when one of the group members commented that it seemed to be an early draft, I felt offended.  I’d been working on this collection for some time, and it had gone through several revisions.  The remark sounded patronizing to me, like one-upmanship.  Then the others in the group began pointing out things that I hadn’t thought about or hadn’t gone far enough with.  I had a defense against all of their suggestions.  Sound familiar?

Fortunately, after a few days, my senior inner editor gained control and suggested I review the emails I’d received.  I took the advice and looked over the draft with the recommendations in mind.  Some I didn’t act on. (I’m familiar enough with these readers’ perspective that I know which things to ignore.)  But as I began to re-read my piece, line by line, I could see many places that could be improved.  I may not have followed some of my critiquers’ suggestions, but just the act of re-entering the material with a critical eye opened it in ways I hadn’t expected.  And that’s one great value of having expert readers look over our drafts.  As writers (and readers), they were able to notice things I couldn’t because of my myopia.  Their varied perspectives gave me several different angles from which to view what I’d written.  The process is invaluable.

So here I am, humbled once again by how challenging revising can be.  I’m also reminded that even the most experienced writers resist being told their prose can be improved.