Diana Wynne Jones almost made me miss my flight.

I was so entirely inside FIRE AND HEMLOCK that it was only the final boarding call that managed to penetrate my consciousness.

Are you surprised that I was reading it for the first time? Me, too. But somehow I grew up without discovering her work, and somehow, although I heard many times how amazing a writer she is, was, is — somehow I’d only read THE TOUGH GUIDE TO FANTASYLAND, which, while excellent, is a different sort of project altogether.

I need to tell you that these days it’s hard for me to fall into books. It’s hard to repress a reverse-engineering, how’d-they-do-that style of reading after I’ve spent years honing my ability to pay that kind of attention.

But FIRE AND HEMLOCK felt simultaneously unpredictable and inevitable; like I wasn’t reading, I was dreaming. When I heard that boarding call I was angry, like anyone would be if you woke them up from a dream. And it was the wonderful kind of dream where you feel like you’re learning important things about life and yourself and the world. Not directly, not by someone telling you flat out This is how things are, but by swimming through experiences like a deep-sea diver.

FIRE AND HEMLOCK tells you, slantwise, how to be a writer:

Things seemed to make themselves up, once you got going.

You mustn’t ask it to bits.

What they mean by ‘iron nerve’ is the same as a thick skin.

You have to learn not to notice how silly you feel.

FIRE AND HEMLOCK is also about memory.

Polly gets her memories back.

Until she does, though, and until she understands what she needs to do, she feels a frantic sense of loss.

I’ve felt that loss again and again the past several years, as I’ve watched both my parents’ memories fail, knowing there’s nothing I can do to restore them. The plane I was waiting to board was going to take me home after a stint of that watching.

You could say that I needed an escape, and FIRE AND HEMLOCK provided it. But like a dream, it was singular and strange and deeply familiar at once. And even though the book seemed to be about other people, Diana Wynne Jones’ skill made me feel like it was for me.

How do we keep our memories? The ultimate answer, of course, is that we can’t. As I was writing this, I found out my childhood home was up for sale. My room,  that was pink and then, when I was a little older, cream, with the maps of Narnia and Middle-Earth and that one poster with the violin and the rose, and the other one with the bicycle, and the bookshelves, and the window that faced the street that made me love the sounds of cars driving by and the shapes their headlights made on the wall — this is what it looks like now:

I won’t be in that room again. But writing about it makes it, somehow, present, even though now all the time I spent in it almost feels like a dream.

It’s exactly that space, between memory and dream, that FIRE AND HEMLOCK occupies, and why it’s so perfectly a book about stories as well as everything else it is. And I haven’t even talked about the ballads, or the books Polly reads, or the stories the characters tell each other.

I’m sorry that I’ll never meet Diana Wynne Jones. But I’m extremely grateful that I can know her, through FIRE AND HEMLOCK and the other books I have yet to read, and reread.

For the past week, I’ve been in an Unusual Undisclosed Location, about an hour away from what was for many years my Usual Undisclosed Location. And I’ve been doing my damnedest to maintain the routines that make me feel like I’m operating the machine of my life efficiently — gym, cooking, writing — even as I’m aware that the ground underneath me has fundamentally shifted.

But of course, when I think about it, I realize that ground has never actually been still.

The new normal is the only normal we ever get.

I got the desk on May 2, 2009. (I’m able to be this precise because I wrote about acquiring it.) Shortly thereafter, our laptops were stolen, and for a while it put me off keeping the computer in such an obvious place. Besides, I felt like there was something maybe a little precious about ooh, I must be at my desk to commune with the muse.

But in restoring the desk area post-festivities, I started thinking it could also be precious in its more positive sense; dear, treasured. And that simply maintaining a physical space devoted to writing (even if it takes on other functions from time to time) is a way of claiming writing as a priority.

In writing about the desk here, I’m inspired by Terri Windling’s On Your Desk series, and also by the Science Friday Desktop Diaries — I love hearing Oliver Sacks describe his desk and what’s on it:

Oliver Sacks made me remember how nice it is to have objects on a desk that give your hands something to do while you stare into the middle distance:

Beach glass, smooth stones, petrified wood, tiny animals, a clay skull, an antique pillbox, a miniature pitcher, a yellow off-kilter heart with a bright red crab inside. I’ve had this assemblage for some time, but managed to disregard its tactile appeal for reasons that now escape me as I pause from typing to pick up each object in turn. And you can’t see it, but the pewter tray they all rest on has an engraved Raggedy Ann.

This bowl is full of ancestral objects:

The souvenir wallet from Atlantic City, plastic fan, beaded change purse, and silver compacts all belonged to the grandmother I never knew but whom I somewhat resemble, who died shortly after giving birth to my father. The daguerrotype is an unknown ancestress, and the contractor badge belonged to my great-grandfather. (I wish I knew more about the history of contractor badges. If you do, let me know.) The stoneware bowl is another family object.

And even though I do most of my writing on my laptop, pens are important:

They’re inside my favorite mug from when I was a small child. I was entranced by the colors and how they change depending on the light, the elephant that functions as the handle, and the panels, each of which illustrates a different fairytale. Behind the mug is a bottle I bought at an estate sale. It once contained Weber Waterproof Drawing Ink for the use of artists and draftsmen,  freely flowing and non corrosive as its lovely label attests. Now it holds the marbles my dad played with as a kid.

Here’s a closer look at elephant and bottle:

Below, my laptop in action. (You can’t tell, but the screen shows my latest project in Scrivener.) Behind it is Sarah Oleksyk‘s pen-and-ink drawing of characters from my Flytrap Circus stories. (Yes, I plan to write more of them.)

Above Sarah’s art hangs a piece called Carruaje de delirios by the Cuban artist Eduardo Guerra Hernandez. I bought it nearly ten years ago when I was fortunate enough to visit Cuba.

I’ve looked for more information about him for years, and just yesterday found this slideshow. (I’m not so much a fan of the musical accompaniment, but I like seeing all the work.)

Finally, here I am seated at the desk, courtesy of Photobooth. Behind me is the W4W Buzz poster from Dis Magazine:

The desk won’t stay like this, of course. The available surface will be filled with stacks of research books, cups of coffee, and — inevitably — the cat, whom I hope will refrain from predating the more fragile of the ancestral objects.

That’s my staging area as of 1/2/11. I’d love to see yours.

They’re relatives, I’m fairly sure, though there are no names on the backs except the photographer’s, Roy Leadd.

I like looking at them and wondering about them.

Was it her own cat, or the photographer’s?

Did he carefully consider his hand-on-chin pose?

Was this kid as bored as he looks?

I bet that bow required a lot of starch.

She makes me think of Anne Shirley and her desire for puffed sleeves.

There are more. I might post another set eventually.

I haven’t framed any of them. There are already many familial artifacts displayed in my house. I think there’s a fine line between appreciation of history and heritage and a kind of thralldom to the past. I want to stay on the appreciation side.

Do y’all display family photos? Of recent and/or more ancient vintage? Why or why not?

The conceptual-centric task: revising my graphic novel script. Deciding what threads need to be connected, what dialog tightened, what scenes simply don’t fit and need to be tossed. And I need to do it efficiently, with a minimum of dithering about the wisdom of the choices I make. And I WANT to do it, because seeing Carla transmogrify my words into comics is so unbelievably cool, and I feel incredibly lucky to be working with her.

But I keep getting distracted by the other task: sorting through my dad’s archives and making decisions about what to keep. I don’t use the word “archives” lightly. I’ve written before about my dad’s background as a rare books librarian. He applied curatorial standards of preservation and organization to everything from the very first exchange of letters between him and my mom to several decades’ worth of his canceled checks.

The tasks, of course, are related. Deciding what to keep, what resonates most strongly. But whereas in the script, I can be ruthless — “oh, I can’t even believe I wrote that, it’s totally messed up, DELETE” — with my paternal archives, I am made of dither.

Should I keep the calendars, preserving the giant notation “PRODUCTION WEEK: no sleep no eat no homework” that I scrawled over the the first week of December 1986?

How about the 11 x 14 portrait of my great-grandmother as a scowling infant?

The array of early twentieth-century photos of unidentified ancestors (in an envelope labeled “To Be Identified”)? The even larger array of photos with careful notations of names and dates?

Dad died of complications from Alzheimers. I know part of my hesitation stems from not wanting to destroy ANY evidence of how brilliantly his mind functioned before the disease. But I also know that he wouldn’t want me to be so paralyzed by contemplating his work that I couldn’t complete my own.

So I’ll put the box of photos aside, shut the door to his office, and open my manuscript.

I have lots of days like that, only rarely underscored by national celebrations, and on those days, I often read Dad’s writing. Sometimes, like today, I choose to share it with the Internet.

Here he is at 27, fourteen years before he’d become a father, writing in his fanzine Bandwagon about his irritation with holidays manufactured by special interest groups:

happy momsday
There’s this little pamphlet put out as a public service — well no, as a private service actually, you probably never saw one unless you’re in retailing — and it contains some clever humor, though I doubt the publishers think so. Some months ago I wouldn’t have thought it funny at all; disgusting, rather. But time brings all things, including perspective. And from this distance I want to mention a few of the morsels from “Special Days, Weeks, and Months in 1957″, published by the Chamber of Commerce of the U.S.

There is both a chronological and an alphabetical list of these special occasions, and the alphabetical list gives the sponsoring organization and the purpose of the event. The wording of these purposes is interesting. For instance, the purpose of National Education Week is “To create awareness…of the important role of education…” National Family Week is meant to “…emphasize the contribution of religion to the family…” Kids’ Day: “To focus attention on youth.” National Salvation Army Day: “To acquaint the American people with the work of the Salvation Army.” Purposes of other observances are “To enhance…public appreciation of”, “To further public interest in”, “To emphasize”, “To inculcate”, “To Stimulate”, “create”, “acquaint”. Get it?

Here are these hundreds of organizations like the Popcorn Institute and the Swim for Health Association and the Mayonnaise and Salad Dressing Manufacturers Association. They’re all promoting their own pet project, like National Ladder Month and Save the Horse Week and Old Maids’ Day, flooding the media with literature and pictures and material and presumably working like crazy to engineer public consent. Are they a Menace? Are they practising another form of brain-washing? Or are they just a bunch of noisy but harmless little insects whom it is best to ignore?

I dunno. But I think I’m going to start my own special observance. It’ll be called Stop Tinkering With My Brains Year, and when it’s over I’ll declare it again. If anyone wants advice and material on setting up this observance in his own locality don’t write me. You’ll only get nasty remarks about people who don’t want to do their own thinking.

Now I must go sneer at some TV commercials. Take it away, Vance Packard.

– Richard Ryan, Bandwagon, autumn-winter 1957, number 4

Links to the descendants of the organizations & celebrations Dad mentions added by me, of course.

After church, we went to plant flowers on Dad’s grave. We drove around for some time trying to remember the grave’s exact location, and at some point it occurred to me that the person who would have known exactly where to go, with a carefully annotated map of the entire cemetery, was Dad. But eventually we spotted my aunt and uncle, and were thus able to complete our mission.

U.S. readers, do you celebrate Memorial Day? If so, how?

Earlier today, someone was congratulating me for the Oregon Book Award nomination for Rules and some other things on the librarian side that I haven’t blogged about. I thanked her. She said: “This has been a great year for you!”

I smiled, or tried to. “Mostly,” I said.

Lots of good things have happened to me this year, and I’m both honored and grateful.

But whatever else 2008 has been and will be, it is, for me, the year my father died.

I know that based on his lyrics, John Darnielle’s feelings about his stepfather are just about the opposite of my feelings about my dad.

But tonight that line rang so true and so hard that the tears came. Again.

I am gonna make it through this year.

If it kills me.

It’s my first trip back to Ohio since my father died in February. It is exactly as hard as I thought it would be. Yesterday Mom and I went to the cemetery, and I found myself wishing I could bring tomatoes, peppers, radishes — things he used to grow. Mom pointed out landmarks en route to Dad’s grave. Once there, we watered, in hopes that the grass seed scattered on top of the dirt will soon germinate.

Now they’re playing “Cherish,” and I can’t write about Dad with Kool and the Gang in the background — the juxtaposition of grief and overplayed, overwrought R&B reawakens my sense of humor. The world so rarely provides a really appropriate soundtrack.