Thinking today about the old chicken-or-the-egg question:  do we choose the stories we tell, or do the stories pick us out of the crowd, follow us home, demand our attention? I just finished reading Rebecca Skloot’s extraordinary first book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, and it reminded me afresh of how important it is for those of us who write to always be listening, as Stephen Dunn puts it, “with that other, inner ear.”  A student in a community college biology class, Skloot first saw the name HENRIETTA LACKS written on the board as part of a lecture on cell division.  HeLa cells, named after Henrietta, were the first cells to survive–and reproduce–for more than a few days within a lab environment, making possible everything from polio vaccines to cancer therapies to gene mapping.  But who was Henrietta Lacks? Skloot wanted to know.  “No one knows anything about her,” her instructor replied. “She was a black woman.”

That was the inciting incident.

“What does your character desire?” we often ask our writing students–or are asked, in turn, by those who read our own works in progress.  “What does this person want?  What is his or her obsession”

But an equally important question might be:  What is the writer’s obsession with the story he or she sets out to tell?  For if it’s less than an obsession–if it’s mere inclination or, god forbid, calculated choice–the deep, primal heartbeat that drives a book’s creation for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and health, cannot take meaningful root.

Sometimes when a book gets uniformly good reviews, the small, winged cynic on my shoulder begins to mutter and twitch.  “Can’t be that good,” it grumbles.  “Probably disappointing.”  Within minutes of beginning The Immortal Life, said cynic was reading as voraciously as I, captivated by the unlikely marriage of personal interest story–the emotionally impacting story of Lacks herself, which unfolds in step with the developing relationship between Skloot and Lacks’s living daughter–and the story of HeLa cells themselves: their discovery, their commercial development, their impact on modern medicine and, as a result, every person living today.  Technically speaking, what makes this book a lasting masterpiece is the skill with which Skloot is able to portray both the personal and the scientific, making each story equally engaging and, through that process, strengthening each.  One might argue that Skloot, who earned her MFA at The University of Pittsburgh and is a contributing editor at Popular Science, is uniquely suited to write this particular story, skilled as she is in both in the portrayal of human pathos and the analysis of scientific fact.  But Skloot’s interest in Lacks began long before she’d developed this particular skill set, and it lasted through long years of disappointment in which Lack’s descendants–burned by past experiences with both reporters and the medical establishment–refused to be interviewed.  It lasted through self-financed research trips, broken relationships, job changes, life changes.  Through it all, beneath it all, that primal heartbeat pumped out its question:  Who was Henrietta Lacks?

Thank goodness Rebecca Skloot never stopped listening.

I enjoy Caroline Leavitt’s blog at carolineleavittville.com Today she posted an interview with writer Dawn Raffel, who offers these thoughts on the work/life balance:  ”I’d like to tell you that I am very disciplined and write every day but I’m not and I don’t. I write when I feel like I’m going to explode if I don’t write. At that point, a missile could be coming through the wall and I might not notice.”  Her latest collection is called Further Adventures in the Restless Universe.   The cover is quite striking and–here’s the detail I loved–it was done by her son.

I used one of my daughter’s drawings in Good Things I Wish You.  She was asked by her pediatrician, at age 4, to draw a picture of her family.  She refused.  After that, she periodically (and gleefully) mentioned the fact that Dr. Ivy had asked her, and that she’d refused.  About 5 months later, she came home from school one day with a drawing that included 17 people, each of them labeled phonetically, plus a note from her Montessori teacher saying she’d worked on it all week.  The striking thing about it is that all the figures in it are smiling except me.  The teacher said, later, she’d been told it was because I was “lonely,” but what she didn’t know what that my daughter used “lonely” as a synonym for “different.”

That same night, after my daughter was in bed, I wrote what became Chapter 17, one of the shortest patches in the overall quilt that shapes the book.  Even typeset, it’s less than a page. I wonder if Raffel’s collection gained focus after she saw her son’s drawing, or if she’d already completed the collection when she chose his artwork for her cover.   Also, I wonder how many other writers have been inspired by their children’s art (or words) to the extent that they’ve physically incorporated those images/ideas into their own projects.  I can think of one other writer, William Maxwell, who used his (grown) son’s artwork for the cover of So Long, See You Tomorrow, and as I mull this over, I’ll probably think of more.  In ways I can’t explain, this thought is connected to a relationship in the novel I’m working on now between a mother, who is an architect, and her grown son.

An obvious writing prompt here, but for those of you with young children, take a closer look at what’s hanging on your refrigerator.  Choose one detail–or one section–of one masterpiece and re-imagine it in words.  Just because it is a child’s drawing doesn’t mean you need to work from a child’s point of view.  In fact, a more incongruous point of view might indeed be more effective, more surprising and, therefore, original.

Emerging Writers Network  just posted a guest blog/essay of mine on “the experience of being edited.”  This site is a wonderful resource for new and emerging writers, not to mention those of us who have been at it for awhile.  Great topics plus a wonderful set of links to all the major literary journals, which makes researching which story to send where a breeze.  To read my essay and others — including one by Dawn Raffel, who speaks warmly about Robley Wilson,  also a mentor of mine — click here or visit www.emergingwriters.typepad.com

A brief excerpt from my essay: (I’m talking about my current editor):

“She’s brilliant.  Her literary ear is pitch-perfect.  She doesn’t suffer fools gladly.  She edits the way Annie Dillard’s miner might, working her way slowly through dark and potentially dangerous spaces, tapping with her pick to make sure each step she takes will hold, pausing when she hears something different, something potentially hollow, false, thin.  Of course, these are exactly the places that I’ve moved through swiftly on tiptoe, hoping that no one will linger here, hoping that no one will notice.  She always notices.  .  . “

First, a happy update: book club members in Washington, Wisconsin, Indiana, Hawaii, Florida, New York and Maine have requested a free signed hardback of Good Things.  Scroll down (or click on Book Clubs) for more details about this promotion, which will continue until we have one hundred requests.

Projects such as corresponding with book clubs require managing details, and though some claim that God is in the details, I always find myself racing around, yet getting nothing done, when I have lots of things–the domestic mashed up with the professional–clamoring for my attention.  Reading Dani Shapiro’s new memoir, Devotion, was a controlled pause, a deep breath. If you feel as if you’re foundering under a thousand post-it sized to-dos, if you find your mind working like a hamster on a wheel, if you can’t be easy, be quiet, be still, the process of Dani’s own struggle to find a spiritual center and silence will completely engage you. “I was always racing,” she writes on the second page. “I couldn’t settle down. I mean, I was settled down–I was happily married, and then mother of an eight year old boy. But I often felt a tremendous sense of urgency, as if there was a whip at my back.”

Shapiro’s search for peace leads her to revisit the life-threatening illness of her son and to reconsider her mother’s death.  She immerses herself in yoga retreats and follows the sparked trail of coincidence. Along the way, she reconnects with the Orthodox Jewish teachings of her childhood. Yet, rather than providing herself–and her reader–with easy answers, the book unfolds, in short collage pieces, as a series of questions that reveal the beating heart of human nature. Why do things happen? Is there a reason for the way life unfolds? Shapiro writes about being “complicated with Judaism,” a phrase that has helped me understand my own relationship with Catholicism. I wrote about this relationship, and its gradual transformation, in my own memoir, Limbo, and though the experience of illness led me to different conclusions, I loved being witness to Shapiro’s own journey.

“My bookshelves were filled with books I had bought with every good intention,” Shapiro writes, “important books containing serious insights about how to live. Over the years, they remained unopened. Taking up space. What would happen if I opened the books? If I opened myself–as an adventurer, an explorer into the depths of every single day? What if–instead of fleeing–I were to continue to quiver in the darkness? It wasn’t so much that I was in search of answers. In fact, I was wary of the whole idea of answers. I wanted to climb all the way inside the questions and see what was there.”

And so she does with eloquence and grace.

The inclusion of images in Good Things evolved out of a happy accident. I commute long hours by train to my academic job–as does my narrator, Jeanette–so I started photographing my desk (laden with research) and importing the photos into my text documents. It was the closest thing to carrying all my books and papers with me that I could come up with. I’d sit on the train, writing, and then when I got stuck, I’d study the images. After a few months of this, I realized these images were fast becoming cornerstones, essential to the story I was trying to tell.

Incorporating images into my writing (which I’d never done before) made visible what had been previously obscured: the relationship between the novel’s historical figures (Clara and Robert Schumann; Johannes Brahms) and its contemporary echoes (Jeanette and Hart.) Each story became more thematically resonant–and more personally meaningful–as a result.

Want a writing exercise? Collage/combine your own contemporary images (let’s say, for argument’s sake, your oldest child’s birthday party) with a seemingly unrelated historical event that has held your imagination/fascination (let’s say Austin de Iturbe y Green, the two year old Heir Presumptive to Maximilian von Habsburg, who was installed by Napoleon as Emporor of Mexico.) Does a third story–somehow greater than its parts–suggest itself?  Begin.