Note From Marge, December '06

All last year with the exception of June, I was on the road at least a third of the time and sometimes more. After a month of October spent headlining a literary conference in Mobile Alabama and doing five gigs in five days in Wisconsin and Minnesota, I was exhausted and ready to stay home for a few months.

I broke a tooth during that time at the gumline, so I have been having oral surgery, which was extremely painful – so much so that for eight days I couldn’t write and for the first five days I couldn’t even read. It is healing now but I don’t know what they will do to me next.

Anyhow, I am taking some time off from traveling and giving readings, workshops, speeches, what have you. I have started a new book, which is a very personal nonfiction book. I have also been writing a lot of poems.

My new poetry book is called THE CROOKED INHERITANCE. It’s divided into five parts. The first section is “Tracks” -- poems out of my life including some about growing up in Detroit, and the lives of friends and acquaintances. “Choose a Color” is all political poems – feminist, anti-war, poems about the Patriot Act and our general situation. “Mating” -- poems about love or the lack of it and being in a long term relationship. “How to make pesto” contains poems about the natural world and gardening. “The Birthday of the World” is composed of poems that have a Jewish viewpoint or relevance. I think it’s a strong collection. I’m proud of it. It came out in November from Knopf.

Ira Wood and I did a lot of gigs together around SEX WARS, and I did a few on my own. Some were in bookstores and a number were in universities, a rundraiser for Planned Parenthood in Portland, Oregon and three appearances at Family Planning Advocates of New York’s annual conference in Albany. Mostly we put on a Power Point presentation that audiences seem to like very much. Since three of the four viewpoint characters in SEX WARS are historical – Elizabeth Cady Stantion, Victoria Woodhull and Anthony Comstock, it was easy to find portraits of them at different times in their lives. We found cartoons about the first wave of the women’s movement and attacking Victoria Woodhull, especially when she ran for president. We showed photos of places in the novel. Freydeh Levin is a fictional character, but she is based on the lives of many immigrants of that era, so it was possible to find photos of tenements like the ones she lived in, of homeless children like those she took in and streets of the lower east side of Manhattan at the time, when it was the most densely populated area on earth. More dense than Calcutta. We found a great many lively photos and drawings plus a genuine French postcard of the sort sold on street corners at that time, when pornography was just as big an industry as it is today.

We are still doing the SEX WARS presentations on occasion, because the paperback just came out. It’s also out in paperback in England.

Besides readings associated with the novel, I did a number of poetry readings – at Willammette University in Oregon, Eastern Oregon University and Hugo House in Seattle. That’s a great place with a strong neighborhood outreach. I was there for three days with Sharon Olds and Deborah Digges, giving a workshop as well as a reading and having a wonderful time. There was an excellent local band our first night and they even have a bar.

I gave readings and workshops from coast to coast, from Alabama to Minnesota, from Arizona to North Carolina. During Women’s History month, I gave some good rousing speeches at various universities. We both taught workshops in personal narrative and fiction and I did several in poetry.

Coming home from the Oregon trip, there was a freak snow and ice hurricane on the Cape. I got stuck in Providence. I fly in and out of Providence rather than Boston whenever I can. T.F. Green is far pleasanter and faster than Logan, and the parking is less prohibitively expensive. The highways on the Cape were closed and no one was allowed to drive. I found an airport hotel. Ira was stuck in a cold house with no electricity or water. Finally after midnight, the midCape highway was opened. He arrived at the hotel at 3 in the morning.

When we got home, of course, there was still no electricty and the generator died, but I was still so glad to get home, and our four cats were very pleased to see us. And to get fed. It’s nicer to sit in the dark at home than to be in a well-lighted hotel in a room that isn’t ours.

Throughout the last year, I was trying out recipes for the book that will be out on February 20 th from Schocken / Random House. It is called PESACH FOR THE REST OF US: Making the Passover Seder Your Own. I go through the whole seder one ritual and one object at a time, looking for contemporary meaning. It is a way to carry on tradition without being rigid and without saying or doing things which you do not really believe in. Most chapters include poems that are mostly from my own haggadah, which I re-mmake every year. Many chapters have lots of recipes. It’s a different take on the holiday and if you observe Passover or attend a seder, no matter what your religious affiliation, you might well find it useful and meaningful.

Last May, Ira won re-election as one of the Board of Selectmen who rare the board of governors of the Town of Wellfleet – he won by two thirds of the vote. We had a victory party for our supporters and workers at a place that does great barbeque – and a chocolate fountain. The announcement he had won came at ten to nine and then we all had champagne. He enjoys local politics – most of the time, that is. Then he wonders sometimes why he ran and why he does it.

We have enjoyed an extremely mild if slightly wet fall here. We ate our last garden salad about eight days ago (December 11!) and we will be eating leeks from the garden on New Year's Eve. I don’t mind the lack of snow. I figure we’ll get plenty in January. The prolonged fall was great for walking and fiddling around outside. It’s always easier when it doesn’t take ten minutes to get dressed to go out and fill the birdfeeders. Our wild turkeys are back. They left when there was construction next door. They don’t like loud noises. I find them incredible to watch. They are far more intelligent than domesticated turkeys and seem to be avid in their mothering. They are curious and come and stare into our windows to watch us at the table in the diningroom. The cats pretend not to see them, because they are embarrassed by such big birds, much bigger than they are. Birds should be small, they feel. A big bird is an anomaly and potentially threatening.

I’m the process of selling my papers to the University of Michigan graduate library. Before entering serious negotiations, my assistant and I inventoried as much as we could find. It’s pretty weird, looking at old letters you wrote to people who were once tremendously important to you and now you don’t even know where they live. Old lovers are another unsettling category of papers. I loved that fool? I don’t believe it.

It’s moving when you find old letters from friends who have died, like May Sarton. We never wrote a lot but we used to visit her every August in Maine, bringing champagne and my homemade jam, both of which she loved. She would have lunch for us at her house in York overlooking the ocean, with her Himalayan cat Pierrot and her lovely garden. I miss her. And there are many others, plus reams and reams of correspondence with good friends with whom I am still in regular or semi-regular contact. Inventorying old papers is a strange and rich task.

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