Coney Island Today

Sometimes I think it goes without saying: I love Coney Island. But then, I remember, not everyone has wandered the phasmatrope inside my head for the past few years as I wrote a novel inspired by the heart of this special place. They haven't heard the flap and slap of my character's feet against the loose wooden planks of the boardwalk or peeled back the sidewalk to reveal the underworld I created from the contrast of color and grit.

I take trips to Coney Island like I'm entering some magical land, one I have to shh and awe and gaze and point at only once or twice a year, because, to go there too often, well, I couldn't. I have never wanted to know every turn or bend. I prefer to leave Coney Island to my imagination and get lost there.

Last October, after the Sandy storm, there were questions about Coney Island's recovery. I'm not going to pretend that the people who call this place home are not still suffering from the tremendous loss. I'm not going to pretend there isn't work to be done. 

But this is Coney Island today (well, technically, yesterday) with its crowded boardwalk and thrill rides at Luna Park (what's your thrill level: extreme, high, moderate, or mild?) This is a packed Brooklyn Cyclones game and the original Nathan's, the Surf Avenue location, open again. And the dazzling new lights of the Parachute Jump, 8000 of them, said to be seen from space.

I wish we could have known last fall. 

Papa Burger

Boardwalk Flight - A Sky Coaster

Parachute Jump before Sunset

Crowded Boardwalk

Filming the Boardwalk Flight from the iPad mini.

Surprise!

Parachute Jump at Sunset

Brooklyn Cyclones Game

I just really like the Nathan's sign

Wonder Wheel

Just reminds me of 'Big'

A 10:30pm Cyclone ride anyone?

Looking Toward the Sky

Yesterday, I left the looming walls of the office pod, rode the length of the river and into the Bronx to help renovate an elementary school library. We painted carts and chalkboards and walls with the purple and green paint, I learned how to use an electric sander, I even 'gardened', as the spunky school librarian, Roseanna, liked to call it -- meaning, I cleaned a bunch of fake plants with soap and water. I know fake plants are tacky, she said. But these kids don't have a playground. They don't see anything green.  It didn't seem tacky at all.

Of course, I had to know everything. Which books were the favorites. (Captain Underpants. American Girl.) How many students. (800. 6 classes a day. 35 students at a time.) How she became a librarian. (At some point the principal gave her the library to 'see what she could do with it'. She decided she better get a degree in library sciences.)

And then the stories came. A school of 800 students with only a handful of bookshelves, no computers in the entire school until last year, when, after years of grant writing, Roseanna finally received $10,000 and 25 laptops.

Then the story of deciding to host a book fair and having everyone tell her to set her goal low because of the demographics of her students in this low-income community she works in. She dismissed them, laughed, set her goals 'too high' according to popular opinion, and, on the days of the fair, doubled the goal.

Then the story of calling every parent in the school she could get a hold of and walking to every local business owner in the community so she could host an after school reading event that ended up being standing room only, exploding into the hallways and adjacent classrooms.

Then the story of how she wrapped 800 books last Christmas and gave every student their very own book.

And finally the story of how she kept getting emails from someone named Caroline Kennedy, surely not that Caroline Kennedy, until it was that Caroline Kennedy at the security desk one morning, planning to visit her 'little' library and her 25 new laptops.

I know there are many schools in the country like this. I know there are many amazing, awesome, aren't we so incredibly blown away fortunate we have people like this in the world, Roseanna's. But, I loved the passion and energy here. Yes, there has been a concern of not enough at this school but I didn't hear any stories about that. Only about the abundance. The doubling fundraiser. The from-zero-to-twenty-five laptops. The feet to the pavement, word of mouth spiral, and the book event that spilled out and ran the hallways. And, finally, I heard about Roseanna's future goals, a long, inspiring, then this, then this, and then this, list, that ended here:

And then, I'm going to get a bookstore built in this community.  I want every child here to know what it's like to walk into a store and buy a book. 

I have no doubt she will.

At the end of the day, the group of us sat down on the new rug, which, again, needed to be green, because Roseanna wanted it to look like grass, and we all agreed that it did feel an awful lot like being out in an open field. So it was decided we had to take a photo of all of us, head to head, looking toward the sky.

Back From Ireland, Holding on to Then, Now.

I'm back from a most beautiful trip to Ireland and the sun and blue and cool air have, so far, followed me home. I felt lucky there because I saw blueberry skies when everyone said I should expect grey and rain. The incredible expanse of green didn't quite follow me back. The ground is silver and tar here. But the blue did. It did.

I hope the calm I felt there also stays. Spending that many hours on country road drives, climbing mountains, or standing at the foot of the shore breathing and thinking and being, everything wide and open, looking out, feeling as if all I saw could sail the dirt if it wanted to, it made me feel more peaceful than I have in a long time.

There came a moment, towards the end of my travels, when I realized I wanted to go home before the trip was officially over, which is a very rare occurrence for me. Usually, I have to be dragged away kicking and screaming.  But, this time, I didn't want to dig through suitcases for the shirt I had forgotten or sleep on the old, foreign sheets anymore. I wanted to be home and walk the familiar streets and hardwood floors of my real life. And it was the most amazing feeling, to want to return to all I have, but hold on to the calm I felt. I felt it was possible to do that then and I feel it is possible to that now and however that changes in the rush and crowd and squeeze of this real life, I'll try to remember how I believed in the possibility that it could be done.

Beyond that, I bought a fancy new camera and I loved experimenting. I'm looking forward to learning how to really use it in the coming months and years. These are a few of my favorite photographs of Ireland.

The beach in Connemara

Sky sparkle in Clifden

The Cliffs of Moher

Connemara National Park at the top of Diamond Hill

Sunset in Spanish Point

A sheep who posed just for me. 

 

Summer Fury and Starting to Write Again

The days are hot here in New York and I haven't been blogging as much as I would like. I lost my camera early in July and began to realize how many of my posts come from what I see and how that makes me feel.

I've taken, perhaps, the longest writing break I've taken in a while. From the moment I finished the revisions to RABBIT ISLAND back in the first days of June, to today, I've written vritually nothing. Some journals. Some thoughts in this internet space.  I fooled around with a short story and decided to send it off into the wild to see if someone out there will publish it somewhere out there but, beyond that, I have been free of characters and plot for a long while.

I don't quite know how I feel about that. I've been dreaming a new novel for many moons and it, finally, feels like the right time to find the words for it. To think that I haven't worked on a new project with new characters and new story threads since before my wedding, over a year ago, my breath and heart quicken, wondering, what will it feel like to start again? To lean over the page and let my hair fall over the swirling s's and crossed t's of my thoughts.

I don't know.

As I originally thought of what to post here I could only think of the heat, the crowds in the subways, the way we're trapped in between buildings in this ferocious July.  This has been the fury of the sun each day from my iPhone. #NoFilter. As they say.

I leave for Ireland soon. A much needed escape.

I hope your summers are full of happy surprises. Or lazy sameness. Both great in their own ways.

Write A Good Book

So by now, you may have heard of JK Rowling's latest book, The Cuckoo's Calling, which was published under a pseudonym and sold a mere 1500 copies before the true authorship was revealed yesterday (and sales, consequently, skyrocketed.)  More on that, here.

I think this says so much about the industry. That beautifully reviewed, starred books, can still suffer from poor sales. That celebrity names sell books. That the quality of a book has little to do with it's success.

I find it all so fascinating.

Advice for new writers is always the same.  Before you think of finding an agent or a publisher, write a good book. It must start there.  And it must. But I think there's an important lesson here. That it's not everything.

What are your thoughts?

Brother's Day

My friend, filmmaker and writer, Jennifer Treuting and her production company, Squirrel Friends, just released this amazing, heart-warming, short documentary about a group of brothers who created their own holiday. It left a huge smile on my face.

I really wanted to share it because a lot of us are out there creating things for all kinds of media and audiences and Jen is one of the most inspiring people I know -- completely committed to making awesome content for kids (and adults). Every time I meet up with Jen and our friend Jessica, we talk about all the stories we've got brewing, how we're slogging through the process, and how we're trying to get our work out there.  I leave our get-togethers feeling happy with the simple fact that we're doing what we love.

We're makin' stuff.

This documentary, which premiered at The Nickel Independent Film Festival, is an example of how fine that 'stuff' is. Check it out.  (And click on through to the links to see more of Jen's work which is truly awesome.)

Thoughts on In The Shadow of the Banyan by Vaddey Ratner

When I was a little girl, I spent a large amount of time reading about unimaginable tragedy. I wanted to read books about slavery, about hiding in upstairs attics during World War II (there are a surprising many more books about this than just Anne Frank: The Diary of A Young Girl by the way), about the genocide in Bosnia, and anything that involved a concentration camp.

My mother and my teachers thought my obsession was morbid and despite my mother's efforts to lead me towards the vast Babysitter's Club section of the library (which I equally devoured) I was always drawn back to these kinds of stories, particularly anything that involved mass tragedy.      

Even in college at Cornell, I remember taking a Women's Studies class, one of the few classes, beyond credits of required sciences and math, I was able to exclusively seek out and choose for myself, Women In the Holocaust. I remember signing up with Hillel, The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life, a year later to take a journey to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, a trip that involved an overnight eight hour bus-ride in which I hardly slept, an early arrival walking in the imaginary discarded shoes of a real victim of this tragedy, and an immediate turn-around trip back to Ithaca.  

I remember that a lot of people were confused by my intense interest in this period of history, particularly the people on this trip, some who remembered me from that class.  You are not Jewish, they said. My only response was to shake my head, I'm not.  

Then why?

To understand.

It's been a life-long obsession for me, to understand, to answer, not the question of how, but the question of why.  Why, in the shadow of my own great fortune, this kind of intolerance exists, why it repeats itself, why it happens in other countries, why it happens in our own. A futile question, in many ways, despite this life-long search.

Yesterday, I read one of the most beautiful books I've read in a long time. In the Shadow Of the Banyan by Vaddey Ratner. Yes, it's about genocide, but I can not simplify the book and say that's really what it's about. I don't feel I can do this book justice with my own words, so I give you Ratner's, who tells this extraordinary story based on her own experience in Cambodia as a child under the rule of the Khmer Rouge:

A story, I had learned, through my own constant knitting and re-knitting of remembered words, can lead us back to ourselves, to our lost innocence, and in the shadow it casts over our present world, we begin to understand why we only intuited in our naivete -- that while all else may vanish, love is our one eternity.

It is this line, love is our one eternity, and this book in its entirety, that, after all these years, helped me realize, despite concerned teachers and parents labeling my obsession with tragedy and struggle as a child as morbid and morose, and confused students in the back of a bus to the museum wondering why I traveled to understand, even a confused me, as I check out more and more books from the library about these kinds of topics, that,  in fact, it is not tragedy and death I am forever obsessed with. But survival. Human triumph. Eternal love.