Here is a progress report (as promised) on the process of getting a book to the market place if you have not been scared off by all the negative information on the demise of the publishing industry as we know it. Ebooks are the rage, but as I blogged previously, unless you are a hyperactive whiz at social networking, only your beloved family, and not even all of your closest friends, will read your (expensive to your checking account) epublished work.

1. The work itself. In my experience books take between three to five years to reach maturity. First there is the magnificent rush of spending twelve weeks of a certain summer writing every day and producing a draft. You are so excited you tell your closest and dearest of your latest obsession (big mistake) and of course they want to read it. But it is like reading tea leaves hidden in a gutter of muddy waters. You can sense they are underwhelmed. At this stage do not do share it with anyone. Those closest to you are your least reliable readers  because they know too much about you and read as if you are all at a pyjama party telling stories. Never, ever, never, never, send this draft to an agent or publisher however tempted you are to share the next great read that will rock the publishing world.

2. Put that draft aside for at least a year and the following summer take a long trip somewhere that leaves you little time to write.

3. When the dark days of that following winter roll around take out the manuscript and read it to see what is salvageable. Not much. Find a new structure, change the third person narrative to first person, leave out all the bits that you love but nobody else will be at at all interested in reading, decide on past or present tense or both. How outside the box do you want to be? The first draft was for you, but who are you shaping the work for now?

4. This process can take two to four years. Finally, when you know every word of the manuscript so thoroughly and can tell anyone on what page to find it. Finally, when you have worked so hard on the first fifty pages that you feel sick at the thought of reading them again, you are ready for an editor.

5. The best editor you ever had is probably dead by now or doddering around your native country that you left decades ago. The other best editor who did such a great job on you memoir also published decades ago, despite your efforts to do so, is no where to be found. The editor you used on your most recent book was “meh” and way over-priced.  So with little faith in achieving results, you turn to social media networks and put out a request for editors, and are deluged. Everyone who writes, it seems, has an editor “to die for.” After conversation with many you pick one who seems sympatico and the process of truly beginning to shape your work is underway.

6. This is where I am at. I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime if you know of an agent who will actually interact with a writer as a person and not a cog on the stalled Publishing Express, someone who will  not take almost as long to get back to you as it took you to epublish your last book, send me their name. My history with agents it at least  worthy of its own blog entry (if not two) and will appear in due course.

July 1960[1]

Plettenberg Bay

On the way to Jan Smuts Airport for my flight to Port Elizabeth, we park the Jag at the entrance to the Rivonia Police Station. The parking lot is mostly unoccupied early on this chilly winter morning on the Highveld. My breath vaporizes as I hurry from the car into the front office. The desk constable’s acknowledgment of my presence is almost imperceptible as he continues to work on a large ledger while he slides a thin register, House Arrest Daily Record 1960, across the counter. Quickly I locate the most recently filled entry line, and below it write the date, 5th July, 1960, in the correct column, enter the time, and print, then sign my name. Half-smiling at the policeman I hasten away. He calls after me, “Totsiens, Mejuffrou Nicolson.”

On the plane I settle into the seat and exhale. My apprehension that I might be detained again recedes somewhat. I am tense and I close my eyes to try and relax but the nightmare images hover under the ajar lid of my sub-conscious mind waiting to spring loose like a clutch of demonic Jack-in-the-boxes. On their faces is the painted intent of shattering my sanity: Hennie van Niekerk’s menacing leer as he snarls, “Pervert! Whore!”; the wardresses grim demeanour; the other inmates nightmare screams of fear and despair and the names of loved ones; and Rosie staring at me in the Fort’s visiting room, her look of horror mingled with love as she whispers, “What have they done to you?” Eventually I manage to shut the lid of my mind to contain them, and momentarily suspend my fears. I succumb to the smooth ride at thirty thousand feet and doze.

Four hours later we are about to alight at Plettenberg Bay on the rudimentary sand strip bush runway in a cleared field. At the last moment a white horse gallops onto the landing strip, and swearing under his breath the pilot lifts the small plane that ferried me from Port Elizabeth, circles to his right, and prepares his approach once more. Someone has chased the horse and bumping and snorting like an animal itself the plane comes to a sudden halt.

The pilot turns to me, “Sorry about that. Can’t wait for 1962 when they say there will be a new runway here and a municipal airport building with at least some radio contact. All we have now is that old wind sock.”

“Can’t be a more beautiful site for an airport anywhere in the world…” Mythic Robberg transfixes me; at times in detention I was not sure if I would ever gaze at the promontory again. “Not with Robberg lying in front of you, like a sleeping leviathan.”

A Coloured man in a faded blue boiler suit trundles the steps to the plane, and the pilot helps me disembark.

“I need to refuel.”

“Thanks for the flight…”

Walking slowly towards the small Quonset hut that offers travellers shelter from the weather, but no other amenities, my eyes remain fixed on Robberg basking undisturbed, clad in an array of green shaded vegetation.

“Welcome home,” Bert Hall, the town official who administers the airport, greets me warmly. Picking up the car keys off his desk, I return his smile. The effects of my uneven prison haircut are slowly disappearing but they give my face a lopsided appearance. Bert is shocked; he sees my dull eyes, sallow pallor and lustreless hair. A few days later his wife quotes his words to me when we meet outside the village post office, “God only knows what those bastards did to her in there.”

But now he says, “Our Liv, come back to us. We are very happy you are here…”

I inquire as to news of his family. His son was my best friend growing up. “…Four grand children now…keeps us all busy.”

The pilot enters the hut to sign the logbook. “See you in a few weeks, Miss Nicolson. I have already radioed SAMI that you are safely here.”

At the doorway he grins, and makes a thumbs up sign. “Have a lovely holiday,” he shouts as he always does and disappears into the plane.

Tired from the day’s tension and travel, I retire early to the master bedroom and lie awake in the large bed; this is my refuge, this lovely old house, Milkwood, built by my grandfather almost sixty years ago when Plettenberg Bay was an isolated Eden. Before air service, and when I was a child, the journey was a three to four day adventure from the Highveld to the Eastern Cape over many mountain passes that were sand roads and dangerous to traverse; there are still no train tracks laid through forests and across gaping ravines. Thankfully in 1960 Plett remains a remote haven. The baby I was, the little girl, the gawky ten-year old, the rebellious adolescent, the young bride, are with me in the bed where perhaps my father, and certainly (I had figured the dates) I was conceived.

In the morning seated in the warm kitchen and drinking steaming mugs of tea, I stare appreciatively at the winter garden sloping on the hillside where shy loeries call and respond  “kwok-kwok-kwok” in the red-berry bushes. The telephone jangles in the country stillness but I do not want to talk to anyone yet from my life in Johannesburg, my family know I am safe. A key is turned in the kitchen door lock and Blossom’s dark brown, weathered face with wisps of grey hair escaping from under her colourful doek peers around the door.

“Ahi, Missie Liv, you are here. You are home.” She grins toothlessly.

Feeling a rush of affection sweep over me like a low tide wave on Robberg beach, my instinct is to leap to my feet and hug the bent over figure, Blossom, a feature of Milkwood, a stanchion. But the gesture will embarrass the older woman and instead I rise to shake her hand. Blossom bobs a subtle curtsy. Gesturing for her to pour a cup of tea, I anticipate her demurral. We fall into a familiar patter.

“Ten past nine, I knew you would be at the kitchen door. So the railway bus was on time?” Blossom nods, still staring at me as if she can scarcely believe I am in the room. “Still stops at The Crags?”

“Missie Liv?”

“Yes…”

“I say this only one time…your mother told me you were in trouble…I pray for you every night…now I see that you suffer. They are bad, bad people…but now I cook all your favourite foods…put some meat on those bones…” Blossom shakes her head, “Ahi, so sorry. So sorry. May Jesus …”

Rising again and interrupting the old woman, I clasp one of her hands in both of mine. “I’ll be OK. Some Plett air, some walks on Robberg beach, some food from my Nana…” There are tears at the corner of Blossom’s rheumy eyes. “Don’t cry, don’t cry… I’ve cried enough for us both.”

The title words of today’s post are by Anglo-American poet T.S. Eliot in his famous Four Quartets. Last weekend on a glorious fall day I was in our nation’s capital. The area around the mall is indeed living proof of Eliot’s idea that “Time past and time future are contained in time present” — this is expressed in modern coinage as “being in the moment” and in other literary references as “the eternal moment.” Yes, indeed, the past lives on and the dream will never die…

Washington Memorial 10.8.11

©Janet Levine 2011

MLK, Jnr. Memorial 10.8.11

©Janet Levine, 2011

“If only there was a cure for unhappiness.”

The other day someone spoke those words to me accompanied by a heartfelt sigh. Unhappiness is a burden we carry at times and it can be debilitating. Is there a cure? It is easier to contemplate the idea that we cause much of our unhappiness by attaching so much energy and attention to the cause—loss, unwelcome change, illness, our own or that of someone we are close to, disappointment and so on—than to change our state of mind about the situation. Yet change our attitude is exactly what we need to do. As Hamlet in the famous Shakespeare play of the same name says, “There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.” Here are some proven “cures.”

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Below you will find a photo of peonies that bloomed in my garden this morning. For some reason this is a once in three years occurrence so I greet each bloom with excitement. They are among the most beautiful peonies I have seen, and the scent is intoxicating. I have been a gardener for as long as I can remember. Growing up in a suburb of Johannesburg, South Africa, I remember my mother at work with her roses, about 50 bushes of various varieties, secateurs in hand as she deadheaded, debudded (to leave only one rose on a stem) and carefully removed aphids and other undesirable pests. My grandfather who spent a third of every year with us always wore a fresh rosebud in the lapel of his suit jacket. When I was an adolescent I was given the rock garden as my provenance and loved to plan and plant and move rocks. My nemesis was the snails who shared my rock garden. Johannesburg, situated on a plateau at 6,00 feet, and with a temperate climate, dry heat and usually reliable summer rain, is an Eden for gardeners. There is one drawback, cyclical drought and with it watering restrictions, so every seven years gardeners watch their hard work, manicured lawns and the beauty they created wither and die. In the suburbs drilling for artesian water sources was a flourishing business.

As a young wife and mother I had first a pocket garden with an almost sub-tropical micro-climate due to a sunny vantage and thick white washed walls. Around giant strelitzes,  avocado and mulberry trees the carefullly designed borders flourished. Later I had almost an acre in which to garden and loved every inch of the rich loam in which whatever I planted grew with vigor and beauty.

When we moved to the Boston area many years ago I had to re-examine everything I had learned about gardening. Our first home was a three hundred year old carriage house set on an acre of land. We had hundred year old giant beeches on the property. The land itself had been neglected for years, but with care and attention a garden will emerge with alacrity from underneath the undergrowth and weeds. As I uncovered flower beds, dug and sowed, the garden returned to some of its previous glory. From spring to autumn we ate fresh produce from the rescued and resuscitated cold frame beds. I planted strawberries around the swimming pool, hosta in the shady areas and a riot of day lilies wherever I could. I learned to accept the cycle of the year, and reluctantly return my gardening tools to their permanent place in the garage each November. Come February the catalogs arrived and soon I would have spindly seedlings growing under lights.

I planted myself in American soil in bringing that garden back to life.

Now I have a much smaller garden again. It is all I want to manage. For me little else in life compares to the satisfaction of caring for a flower bed of rich dark soil where every plunge of the weeding fork or hand spade reveals not only the roots of the weed but wriggling earth worms too. Then you know you have an arable patch and the result is glorious peonies like these.

This weekend I had some discussion with a high-level member of an organization that focuses on reconciling differences between Israeli settlers and Israeli Arabs. Old feuds and resentments run deep. Who took whose land from whom? We can go back thousands of years trying to understand the roots of this conflict. The truth is that over millenia the vast majority of feuds, struggles and wars between all people everywhere are over territory and resources. It is part of our DNA to defend our territory and ensure not only our food supply but the future of our children and our clan. Xenophobia’s face is that of the cave dweller across the valley.

In my native South Africa the famous Truth and Reconciliation Commission that for three years in the late 1990s tried to heal the wounds caused by apartheid atrocities for both the oppressed and the oppressor was a daily Greek theater played out on TV and radio across the land; a catalyst for airing the tragedies, the manifold tragedies of those years. The mighty, the all powerful, the members of the Security Police brought face-to-face with their accusers and humbled by the probing commissioners. Amnesty or no amnesty, a bad conscience set to rest, a death explained, some expiation of revenge. Thus far there is no similar commission anywhere that has attempted to tackle the root question of who took whose land from whom? White settlers with a four hundred year history of living in South Africa regard themselves as Africans born of African soil. And they are, but who took their land from them? History is a tangled knot.

There are so many well-meaning, well-trained mediators conducting grass-level interventions in so many conflict areas; to mention but a few,  Sunnis and Shia, Serbians and Bosnians, Hutis and Tutis, Israeli settlers and Israeli Arabs, Tibetans and Chinese, Indians and Pakistanis. These mediators do good work especially when they work with children to create a new narrative that bridges the differences of conflicting older stories. Then the children can believe, “This is the nownarrative of our land, this is ourstory. ”

A fundamental challenge for our time, as cyberspace  shrinks our planet, is how do we change the humanstory, the rigid mind structures of past eras? How do we  preserve the richness of cultures and traditions and learn to share the resources of the planet. Mother Teresa said, “Small steps with great love.”

Perhaps. But until we understand the fundamental truth that all conflict arises from a struggle for resources even small steps towards lasting reconciliation are unlikely. In North America the Water Resource Wars have already begun…how are we going to change our mind-structures to accommodate this story?