Halloween Here and There

I love Halloween here in Brooklyn. It's more festive than anywhere I've lived. With all the brownstones and apartments and local shops so close together, the streets are lined with people and store clerks giving out candy. There are a lot of families in our neighborhood and people come out in spectacled groups, sequined and felted, wielding plastic swords and scepters, with wild head-pieces and spooks. The leaf colors are at their peaks and it's just before we lose the lushness of our tree-lined streets and things become more stark and cold.

This year, Little O was a duck, an outfit chosen because it's a word he says emphatically. He sends his arm out, like a saluting soldier, pointing at anything in books or in life that closely resembles the feathery creature (rubber duckys, baby chicks, yellow dots). Then he calls it out with gusto: duck! 

At first, the costume made him grumpy. He ripped off his duck-billed hat and the velcro-ed web feet. Then we went to a Halloween party at his daycare, which we call school (which he calls coooool), and everyone fussed over how cute he was, so he finally understood the costume was an attention-getter, and, therefore, a welcome addition to his life.

Later, while trick-or-treating, he learned that holding out his orange and black bag would award him more oohs and ahhs, so he proudly accepted candy, with no concept that his parents would be the eager recipients of the fruits of his labor later that night.

After a long afternoon wandering the streets we went to a child-friendly bar serving pumpkin beer for the adults (we do it right here in Brooklyn) and a mound of french-fries for Little O to share with one of his little buddies.

I kept remarking to my own Dad the kind of 'damage' I could have done had I grown up in this neighborhood on Halloween. I was the kid who came home with pillow case-sized bags of loot, wandering late into the evening with my friends. Halloween was a mission to traverse as much sidewalk and bang on as many doors to get as much candy as I possibly could. 

I remember this woman 'around the corner', as we always said, who gave out whole candy bars on Halloween. They were Ronald McDonald bars -- something I haven't really seen since (though a google search tells me they can be ordered and personalized to sell for fundraising efforts) and she had a giant wheel in front her home, like one you'd steer on an old ship. She wasn't like our immediate next-door neighbor, who gave out pennies if you dared to knock on her door, who once refused to give me any despite giving them to my friends, because, who knows, any one of her crotchety, old lady excuses would do.  

We knew which houses gave the best and the worst treats of the day. We knew which darkened porches to avoid and which streets were too dangerous to cross. We knew the land like we'd settled and mapped it ourselves. 

It made me smile to think, no matter where Little O ends up doing his growing, he'll, hopefully, have his own Halloween land to map out too.

Words From a Novel in Progress, Inspired by the Bodega Cat

Yesterday, this beautiful creature stood ahead of the refrigerated meats and cheese at the local butcher, looked stoically at me as I stood bedraggled after a long day of work and I was reminded of a scene I wrote. One that was inspired by cats like this one, maybe not as impeccably groomed as this regal puff, but roaming Brooklyn bodegas and shops just the same. This is from my novel, THE TREE BOOK, my first attempt at middle grade. A book I've dreamed my way through the best I could. Now I'm dreaming for it.

Not much to set up except that my main character, Cora, is chasing her little sister, who chases a cat.

I slink on over, slow, to Miss Li’s, and stand at the swinging bell door. Adare crouches at the beer refrigerators, where the cat is pawing at the silver and steel. Adare giggles and the cat stretches its front legs out like it might leap away but instead it starts licking its gray fur down and Adare’s cheek falls to her shoulder, mesmerized.

            “No animals allowed!” Miss Li shouts, sticking her arm out, to her handwritten signs behind the register, something about IDs and cigarettes, and no animals, and a big red X slashing through American Express.

            “It’s not ours,” I say but Miss Li’s arm swings back again and one long, wrinkled finger looks like it’ll poke the sign straight into my eye.

            “Out.” She says and her lips sag to her chin, like always, except for the one time Adare reached over the counter and touched the gold bracelet on her bone-thin wrist. Real gentle, with just one soft finger, but I still thought Miss Li would slash her across the store quick. Of course, Adare’s smile, the way it has a habit of knowing people and calming them down, made Miss Li smile too. A gift from my son, she said.

             I look at her gold bracelet now. It’s made to look like a ribbon, looped in a perfect bow. She wears it so tight, so close, her skin bunches up, tries to take a breath from behind it, but never quite lets go.

View Today

It's been a little over three weeks since we welcomed Little O (as he shall be named) to the world and things have been going well.  There have been many sleepless nights but it's an adventure each day. We learn about one another. I figure out how to add mother to the roles I've assumed throughout my life.

I love to hold him in my arms. I love to watch him sleep. I like to dress him -- a real life doll, squirming, squeaking, as I fit a tiny arm through a sleeve.  Right now, I am simply amazed at the way he moves from sleep to waking and reverse. Then I wonder what he might see when he is awake, wide-eyed and staring out into our world. His eyes are big and, right now, blue, and I like to watch them look. I try not to think too much of what's to come but it's hard not to wonder who he will be.

This month, I'm going to attempt the February Photo A Day Challenge which I discovered, during a late-night, bleary-eyed feeding. I thought it might be a low-stress way to be on the blog a bit and work creatively in small patches of time.

I missed the first day but I have a few photos that I believe fit that theme of a view today.  I love the foot bridge at the end of our street.  It takes us over the highway to the subway, to our neighborhood of shops and restaurants and tree-lined streets and stoops.

To me, this is what it looks like to live where I live, on the waterfront. If I were to close my eyes and imagine our neighborhood, these are the first structures I think about, the movement of shipping containers all along our ribbon of street. 

Colors on a Walk Through Prospect Park

Exploring Red Hook, Brooklyn

This is Red Hook, Brooklyn, a neighborhood I'd call mine if real estate divides hadn't designated us as the Columbia Waterfront. It's a short walk towards the bend and bust of rusted fences cornered with overgrown grass. I look through metal bars at the cruise terminal and encounter the careful swirl of paint against aluminum and brick.

Red Hook is as deliberate as it is haphazard. Beyond the projects, the ball fields, the towel skirts and inner tubes spilling from the community pool, there are farm to table restaurants next to stores that sell high-end baby clothes. Printed onesies of a Kentile Floors sign silhouette. The old abandoned trollies sit at the foot of a warehouse turned artist's collective and gallery. The chocolate factory pumps a whispered Wonka reminiscence, a place that also managed to carve out a barrelled whiskey distillery in a courtyard of trees.  

There are buckets of key limes in a smoky shack where they make, only, key lime pies. I'll see them carefully packaged and sold with labels at the local grocery store and it seems too Easter pastel and pristine for the goods of a place cranking out graham cracker crust and slippery green next to the glass-blowing artists at the pier.

At night, there's the slight twang of blue grass from Sunny's bar, a simple hum that spawned rabid kickstarter campaigns when the bar had to close its doors after Sandy blew through.

The streets of Red Hook are quiet, often deserted, but just beyond the brick and cobblestone, creativity pulses, the way the dock-workers there once drummed the New York harbor to life. I love this place and sometimes claim it when asked where I live. Near Red Hook, I'll say. On the border of an accidental neighborhood. 

Do You Wanna?

I read from the grass and then from the bed, both times in the shadow of leaves, next to children's laughter. First the park, then in my apartment, up from the street, where summer floods from the fire hydrants and the blow-up bouncy castle is green and blue, matching my view from the ground.

My neighbor Leo has swim goggles wrapped across his forehead. Spy glasses, he tells me, and I have glasses that can read backwards, his friend chimes in because Leo has wanted me to meet her, his friend, my friend, I don't know how many times he has said this now, my friend, my friend, who I must meet.

Her brown bangs take off running above her eyebrows in a straight line, eyes huge as she surveys my apartment. Leo has flung the door open and soldiered in barefoot but she remains in the hallway, against the wall and tells me her name is Annique not Unique, she is very specific about that, and I wonder, still, how she spells it.

Their tongues are matching green and her shirt is stained the same as they each slurp from wooden sticks and when Leo's ice slides to the floor, before I can chime in that we haven't washed it, his dirt-stained hands are wrapped around the forest green chunk and it's back in his mouth, with Annique gasping, her head shaking at her friend, her friend, her friend.

They speak a language I know I used to understand because while I think to grab a paper towel for the green ice that now leaks across the floorboards, they are already, do you wanna, and the words are off running along side the excitement caught up in her shriek, hand in hand galloping down the stairs past walls that are covered in the dust of tire tracks from carrying the bicycles up and down.

They are off, our brief, necessary meet and greet now over, and I smile thinking of summer and ice melting at my tongue, palms sticky, shirt stained, running hand in hand, breathless with do you wanna?

My Writing Tree

So, this is my writing tree.  I don't sit under it, with my back scratching up against the bark. I sit next to it and, if I opened the window, I could touch the leaves.

In the winter, when it's bare, that space of white you see in the upper left, is the Manhattan skyline, and I can see the crisp edge of lights from the Freedom Tower. I can see the neighbor's terrace across the way and I watch as they move their plants from behind the sliding doors and, another day, back again, in a ritual I can not understand. I wonder, as I watch, if they see me, laptop balanced on my knees, my back propped against a pillow my mother knitted me.

But now my tree is green with a few patches of brick against the spine of each branch. When the sky is crayon blue it looks like someone painted it just for me.

What do you see from where you are?

Our Kitchen on Sunday

This is every Sunday in our kitchen.  

Many things boiling, stirring, pouring, baking.  There's meat for chopping, cookies cooling, an Ipad with its multiple recipe screens for scrolling.  There's no room for any of our equipment so we purchase more bookshelves so that every space of wall in our tiny three room apartment is boarded with already-packed shelves (panicking, panicking, but where will more books go?)  

The refrigerator is too small to fit the groceries, never mind the weekly baby photos friends send and expect to see proudly displayed when they visit.

And with no dishwasher and a sink that is full after just one sauce-stained pot, there is a constant stream of clean up.  

I don't know if it's clear that there's one foot of space between Tyler and the window, where we look out at the neighbor's tabby cat and pretend it's ours.  But that one foot is the space where I get through, from the fridge to cutting board to the cupboard to the table to the sink to the garbage and back again and I don't know how many times I've smacked my butt into the dripping cupboard beneath the sink or stubbed my hip into a drawer but let's just say a lot. 

We think of future homes. Although we already feel very blessed in this life, we wonder if we will ever spill out into wider, longer, deeper blueprints.  Tyler dreams of a backyard pizza oven. (!) I have this wild idea that we will have a long counter with nothing on it. Nothing. Just a wide open space of culinary possibility. 

Why I Love My Neighborhood

Because I'll walk into the local flower shop, (which I'm reminded has been in the neighborhood for over one hundred years) be told I can get whatever I want (yet, if I get anything but fresh tulips I'm crazy) and leave with, not just tulips but, four lollipops, a Saint calendar (and, really, even three months into the year, who can refuse a saint calendar?), and a very official business card.

Knowing What's Next

I feel like I've been creeping under dark canopies, wanting to know tomorrow, standing, waiting, between things, beneath them. When I crossed the footbridge, I watched this encounter, and she didn't like me stealing their parting, so it blurred because I wasn't brave enough to stare straight through their splitting seam.

New York has been like this lately, skulking through each day, whispering you can't know me.  It's gathered rain and snow at our feet and sent us inside the caves of umbrellas, forced us into yarned labyrinths of winding scarves.

I've been dreaming many new things.  I've been wanting to unravel them all. I've wondered, too often, over the years, what's next for me?

Wonderland

When I woke up yesterday I was like a child, went straight to the window to see what magic the night storm had brought.  There were, maybe, ten inches of snow and New Englander Tyler scoffed, that's nothing, but the kids were outside whooping and dragging sleds and the shovels scratched across the sidewalks and I insisted we go to Prospect Park to see it pure.  

I expected to see the long wide meadows of Prospect Park in a sheet of white, but I had forgotten that this oasis is also made of narrow, wandering trails, so we found ourselves inside this wonderland.  

Here in the middle of concrete Brooklyn.  

Upside Down

Late last night on a G train, I looked up from my book and found this.

He looks how I feel.

A Familiar Journey

The morning was damp, hazy. I rode my bicycle to work for the first time in weeks, took the familiar journey.  It went (it goes) like this:

My bike plunks off the curb.  I adjust to the concrete, to the wobble of my handlebars. I ride the wrong way, for just a brief moment, in that I know the way but traffic along this one small street runs opposite, so I tuck myself at the edge, aware that I'm where I shouldn't be.

The stoplight is never long but I watch the corner market.  I remember when it burned, the notes that were left on the windows, we miss you.  Now it's bright and open and I know the owner's smile because it sits beneath an unshaven gray shadow and it's kinder than most.

Clinton Street is wet and crowded but the crossing guard, our favorite, stands at the park, the one where we sat with Tyler's cousins and a little girl, lost in play, wandered towards us because she thought she was ours until she realized she wasn't and toddled away.  The crossing guard is little but sturdy and her glasses are fogged or maybe they're smudged and she doesn't mind it.  She shouts things we've come to expect, Come on bikers!  Hey baby doll!  Watch out for these maniacs!  She points at cars and shakes her head.  In the summer we miss her, and those weeks, this fall, when the road was closed, we wondered where she went.  Because her voice is my morning.  Her voice is the moment you think you are sitting alone and someone sits beside you.

I take the road up and around towards the Manhattan bridge.  I know the ground beneath me, the way it curls first, then slopes just enough for my tires to slow.  Soon, I mark the East river, it's middle.  This is where the road flattens, then slips away from itself, a downhill sled. This is where the air changes. The faint smell of fish.  Cooking oil climbs like a chimney swell from unknown stoves.  No one glances from the rushing carts and they take chances, like a gazelle's very first leap, across the painted lines of street.

I always want to stop here, on the path, where the old women in their winter bundle coats stand in Tai Chi formation across the damp grass.  I always think I will stop, someday, to take their photograph, to capture something I've otherwise been unable to keep.  Sometimes they are still and I think I'm caught in the hush of their whisper.

Sometimes they are dancing.

We'll Just Plant the Seeds

Red Hook Community Farm earlier this summer

Our local farm (yes, we have a farm in Brooklyn) is in Red Hook, whose border is just one block away from our apartment and one of the hardest hit neighborhoods after the storm.  The farm is non-profit.  It is an affordable resource for an underprivileged community and it also serves as an educational site for many youth programs.  Unfortunately, the land was badly damaged in the storm.

After making donations, then delivering food and supplies to the housing projects and local businesses in Red Hook, Tyler and I decided to work on the farm for a day. They needed to remove all the remaining crop which had been sitting under several feet of toxic water after the storm.  

Boy did it hurt my foodie heart to dig out thousands of peppers, pumpkins, eggplant, swiss chard, kale...the list goes on...  

Boy did it hurt my human heart to know that people were digging out their homes and lives in much the same way.

As I sat snipping eggplant leaves for composting, I talked with one teenager who had been working on the farm all year.

Does it bother you that everything's ruined after all your hard work? I asked. 

She shrugged.  I'm sad.  But we'll just plant the seeds again.

Strangely Quiet

All is quiet and strange here in South Brooklyn after the storm.  I woke today to find our street untouched but for a few broken tree limbs.  Then I walked our neighborhood to find enormous trees overturned, Red Hook boarded and broken, trapped under water, and the toxic Gowanus canal overflowing.

Today I feel very fortunate.  We live on the waterfront, tucked in between the New York harbor and that canal.  It is a wonder that the ground slopes just right, to leave us elevated enough to reside in "Zone B", to escape what so much of this city has not.

Our offices are uncharacteristically silent and unreachable. Water has filled the subway tunnels. So the underground veins of New York City, it's lifeline, are empty.  There is no coming or going.  There is no timeframe for repair because there is no precedent.

My window looks out towards the harbor. In the distance I can see downtown Manhattan. Tonight, it is  completely dark.  

I am thinking of those who have lost so much.

Guest Post: Let Setting Emerge From Character

The lovely and talented Laurel Garver is taking over the blog today!   She's going to talk about one of my favorite topics, setting, and how she worked with it in her novel Never Gone.  

Setting is a key element of my novel, Never Gone, about a teen who is grieving the death of her British father, and must somehow build a life with her workaholic American mother. Danielle’s trip from the US to England becomes a catalyst for her to get to the bottom of family secrets. Setting also undergirds the story flow, as one of my reviewers on Amazon picked up: "From the sky-scrapers of New York, to the hills of England, Garver brings you on a lyrical journey that rolls with highs and lows, full of valleys of tenderness."

Thanks, Melissa, for the opportunity to talk about how I chose some of my settings and used a mix of research and imagination to bring them to the page.

The opening of Never Gone is set in New York City. Why not Philadelphia, since you live there?

My story decisions usually develop out of the characters, rather than the other way around. As I got to know my protagonist Dani’s parents, Graham and Grace, it became clear that no other place would work for them. Grace is a driven advertising executive who would never settle for working outside Madison Avenue. Making a living as a professional photographer—which is Graham’s career—requires proximity to the most potential purchasers of this kind of service, like ad agencies.
Honestly, though, New York City is only two hours away, and we have friends there who’ve been a great help answering my questions about family life in the city. I did five trips (combined with family fun) to chose Dani’s neighborhoods and gather sensory details.

How much are your New York locations real, and how much a fabrication?

Dani’s homes in Park Slope Brooklyn and the Upper West Side are based on real buildings. I was able to find real estate listings for her UWS high rise, including floor plans, which I adapted slightly.
Dani’s school Rexford Academy is a fabrication based roughly on a private school on 91st, though I place it in the West 70s. Her church is riff on All Angels in the Upper West Side, mixed with several Anglican/Episcopal churches I’ve visited in the US and Britain.

I think it’s important to make your fabrications realistic by drawing details from real places.

A majority Never Gone takes place in a rural English village, Ashmede. How did you choose the location? How real are your British settings?

I wanted the time that Dani spent in her late father’s hometown to challenge her strong identification with him. The setting had to be a big contrast from her very American, very urban home, so her dad is not only foreign, but rural.

I’d originally planned to set the story in the Cotswolds in the southwest near Wales, where I lived for a semester in college. But while I was researching and drafting, friends invited us to visit them in Durham, which is up north. When I discovered that folks from northern Britain face deep prejudice in the south, it made Graham’s back story even more compelling. He’d have a hard time breaking into photography in London because of his accent, and would more easily find work in the US. Americans don’t understand or really even hear regional differences among British dialects.

So that visit turned into a major research trip. I invented Ashmede (a popular name for streets, but no village bears it) from places I visited then, and a North Yorkshire village I stayed in during spring break as a student. Durham Cathedral, a real location I fell in love with on my research trip, is the backdrop for several chapters. I also set a chapter at Kings Cross Station, where all the northbound trains leave London. It worked nicely on a couple of levels, including Dani’s love of Harry Potter.

What advice would you give other writers about setting?

Remember that where you come from shapes who you are. Start with your character and do your best to follow logically where such a person would come from and where he or she would naturally chose to go from there.

Second, there is no substitute for real, on-the-ground research. Even if you choose to invent a town like I did, you need authentic details from that geographic area. What is the weather like? What unique topographical features (mountains, forests, deserts, etc.) affect daily life? What is local cuisine and how does it taste? How does the area typically smell and sound? Is the culture informal and inviting or uptight and suspicious? What do the locals do for fun? What slang expressions are typical? You can’t get any of that information from Google street view.
===
Laurel Garver is the author of the Never Gone, a young adult novel about a grieving teen who believes her dead father has returned as a ghost to help her reconcile with her estranged mother.

Add it on Goodreads. It is available at Amazon.com, Amazon UK, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Smashwords, CreateSpace.

Hold Fast

It's more my mantra to let go, to ease away.  But there are reminders for me here. Just sidewalks apart from one another.  This grasshopper and the murals of concrete Brooklyn.

Hold fast.

I've never seen a grasshopper before, I told Tyler.

How is that possible? he asked.

The truth is...I don't know.  But I don't recall having ever seen one.  Not for real.

The Best Friends, The Best Books, and Libba Bray!

After a night spent with two of my favorite friends and beautiful Batman baby (see below) in Stamford, CT, I ended up having a terrible commute home. I narrowly missed two express trains, construction forced me to switch subway lines twice, and after all that, the F train decided not to stop at my stop so I was forced on to a shuttle bus. It took me an additional hour and a half to get home.

The reason I tell you all this is that I was frustrated but happily distracted.  I was completely absorbed in a book I have fallen in love with: Jeanette Winterson's Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal and all this delay allowed me to finish it in its entirety (more on this book soon.)

I woke up knowing I would see two other favorite friends who were in town from Boston for a quick breakfast. Not wanting to risk public transportation, I biked over the amazing Brooklyn bridge on a day that could only be called amazing too.  

In the afternoon, at the Brooklyn Book Festival, more friends, more books.  I met a writer I admire very much, the famously funny, insanely smart and talented Libba Bray.  Fangirl that I was, I stumbled over words and babbled endlessly about being called Michelle and the spelling of my name (and, really, you guys, there is absolutely nothing interesting about the spelling of my name) but Libba did not seem to mind.  She signed my copy of The Diviners. She told me someone once called her Library.  See, that's interesting.  

Sadly, I don't get to see my faraway friends from Stamford and Boston all that often. So I treasure time spent with them and time spent with books.  And Libba Bray!

How was your weekend?

Batman Baby

Brooklyn Bridge

Me, happy

At the Edge

The first time I lived in New York City, over one summer during graduate school, I lived at the heart of it, in the 30's on Third Avenue.  I wanted to be in the center of things.  I craved crowds and anonymity. 

When I moved back years later, I was pushed out towards the river and lived on First Avenue.  This was completely dictated by real estate prices.  The farther you are from the subway in New York City, the less expensive the rent.  I stayed on the far East side of Manhattan for several years and, slowly, I began to set up a life on these quiet edges of Manhattan. I preferred less crowds, the East River running path, the quiet streets.

Now, I live on the other side of the river. In Brooklyn.  I live on the 'wrong' side of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway in a neighborhood no one has ever heard of (the Columbia Waterfront District) so I have to claim a different neighborhood in conversation (Carroll Gardens).  I live far from the subway next to shipping containers and terminals and abandoned lots teeming with stray cats.


Today, Tyler and I rode our bicycles along the edge of our Brooklyn, to Greenpoint.  He watched the tugboats.  I became fascinated with these statues.  While there is so much to see in the center of New York, I always point visitors towards its edge. A river path, a pier, a park.  The ghosts of people sit here, looking as water laps against the rocks. It's strange, and empty and beautiful. And there is, in my opinion, just as much inspiration, if not more, at the edge of things.

What lies at the edge of your world?

Where Do You Go?

On this Road Trip Wednesday, YA Highway asks: When you need creative inspiration, where do you go?

I like the question because place is the largest driving force behind most of my writing. I have never taken a journey to find creative inspiration. I simply walk and live and, in doing that, I am inspired.

When I stepped back to think where that inspiration most often happens, I discovered that it is both near my home and near water.  I think I am still trying to understand why water sets my imagination free.  Maybe because it is vast and uncontrollable, difficult to keep, always moving, bending, emptying, swelling.  Maybe there is something within it I can not capture and so I try.

Below are some photos of the waters that inspire me. I am lucky to live just steps away from them.

So, where do you go?

New York Harbor (I live on the the Brooklyn waterfront)

Atlantic Ocean (from Coney Island)

The Gowanus Canal