Carol Bergman

I met Pussy Riot’s lawyers at an event at the NYU law school last spring and was inspired by their story. Now these brave women—protest performance artists I would call them-- have recovered from their incarceration and are in Sochi demonstrating against the autocratic Putin regime. Though their staged events may seem silly, their intention is deadly serious. Hopefully, it won't kill them.

Whenever I hear about a police state suppressing artistic expression, I have nightmares. The fear of such suppression—self-censorship—gives me even more nightmares. There is no reason for us to be timid, none at all, yet fear of exposure is a constant in a writer's life even in a Great Democracy such as ours. And we do have to remain vigilant in a democracy, despite our Bill of Rights. Thus, all the necessary conversation right now about surveillance.

Students arrive in my workshop—and I will have a bunch of new students next week—eager to find their voices and their subjects. It is their mandate, I tell them, to speak loud and clear about whatever interests or moves them, and to shuck the editor on their shoulder telling them not to write about this or that. We don't live in Russia. We don't live in China. We are as free as we dare to be.  Read More 

Life can be a twisted skein of snow-laden branches sometimes. And then the weather clears.

I spent most of yesterday reorganizing my atelier. I shifted furniture and unloaded books from the garbage bags where they have been fumigating. They have survived and so have we. Standing in the lobby commiserating, one of my beleaguered neighbors said, “Bed bugs hijack your life.” I agree. Apart from the exhaustion of constant laundry, vigilance, and visits from the exterminator twice a month, we have been living out of plastic bags. And still are. The vigilance can’t stop.

So its hard to concentrate at times, hard to write. I finished a short story over the holidays, sent it out to several readers, and am about to submit, the perfect labor intensive activity for yet another snowy day. I had talked to my agent about submitting using a male pseudonym as the story is edgy and told from a male POV. This is more than an experiment, it’s defiance. Though it’s 2014, male writers are often taken more seriously by editors, even female editors. Why? An anthropologist or psychologist will have to answer that question. Is the same true in England? I’m not sure. I lived, worked as a journalist, and published there for many years without a glitch.

I remember, not so long ago, I wrote an essay about the Golden Gloves competition at Madison Square Garden. Women were competing and I was struck-- almost literally at ringside—by their skill, their tolerance for blows, the blood. I wrote an essay about my ambivalence—admiration and horror. I also had fears for the health of their breasts, albeit they were protected by purpose-built shields. I could feel every punch on my breasts.

The article was well written, I knew that, and it was raw. But I couldn’t place it until I buried my first name in the initials CB: CB Bergman. The editors that wrote back to me assumed I was a male reporter. Their responses were immediate and chatty. Inadvertently, I’d been invited into their sporty club. And that was the point: women were now in the ring. Except the editors thought I was a man.  Read More 

It was my husband, Jim’s, suggestion to go completely digital. And it happened on Sunday when the breakfast table was spilling over with paper, most of which we were not interested in reading, especially the advertisement inserts. So much paper to recycle and we are only one family, we said. Let’s think about the drought in California, the shortage of water, the erosion of our earthly forests. And we agreed that the digital revolution is good for the environment. As the NY Times account is in my name and I have an educator’s rate, I made the change—in just a few seconds. The speed of our lives is incredible these days, no?

Though I have often browsed the NY Times online and I have a Guardian app on my phone, this morning was the first morning that I sat at my computer reading the newspaper completely online. Apart from the flashing advertisements, it was a pleasant experience. I could skim or read the whole article, and then browse the blogs—well written, much longer first person amplifications of the news. They are good.

In my early reporting and book reviewing days, I became competent at writing to strict deadlines and word counts. I still think both are a good disciplines for writers and I insist on word counts in my workshop. What can we do in the space we have? But there are also frustrations when word counts are limited; the capaciousness of blogs enables more thoughtful reporting.

As for the NY Times Crossword, which my husband has finished almost every day since we met, its absence on our first digital morning was a notable sensory deprivation. No pen, no paper. And though I have since found out that the crossword can be done online for a small fee, that does not feel the same. So on the way home from my swim yesterday—I get my best ideas in the pool—I stopped at one of the only three dimensional Barnes and Nobles left in the city and bought a book of NY Times Puzzles in hard copy. My husband was grateful.  Read More 

It’s the 10th anniversary of FB and, in celebration, they have collated our photographs to make a personal "lookback" movie, and they have asked us to share them on our timelines. But they haven’t obtained anyone’s permission from their thousands and millions of happy users. Is this innocent, or not? True, we are free to share or not share our FB “home movies,” and, according to a report in the newspaper today, we may soon be able to edit our movies. Does this also mean that we’ll be able to ditch the schmaltzy music, or ask the FB “automatic” collating film-making machine to delete?

The question of permission and ownership on the web is of great fiduciary concern to all artists—writers, visual artists,photographers and musicians. Why? Because we create work, own the copyright to that work, and want to be paid for it. Unless we decide to give it away.

And who started the “let’s flood FB with poetry and visual images gig?” Unless a work has outlived its copyright and is in the public domain, this is illegal. FB is a well regarded and well known company. At the very least, they are in a position to enforce copyright law. Why don’t they? If they are scanning this post, perhaps someone in FB cyberspace will answer. Otherwise, I am sure, eventually, they'll have to answer to the organizations that represent artists, photographers, writers and musicians.

In the meantime, I will Google my name every once in a while and track down various institutions and companies that have stolen my copyrighted work. And I won’t be posting a Facebook generated “movie” to my timeline.

Happy Birthday anyway.  Read More 

I was in the car during a freak, unpredicted ice storm, my son-in-law driving, when he asked me what I was working on. We were in the midst of a scary situation, the road a slick rink, my daughter in the car behind with my husband, inching forward in convoy. At first—anxiety riding high—I thought he was trying to distract me, but then he continued to discuss a new Kingsolver novel he was reading and his next question was so astute—for a reader who is not a writer—that I was in awe: “Is it difficult to write from multiple points of view?”

Of course the answer is “yes.” But why? Well, I had to explain that when we first begin to write, it’s much easier to see everything from the prism of our own experience, to write in the intimate first person. (And this is true of both fiction and nonfiction.) Or, alternatively, we’ll establish an omniscient third person narrator who sees and knows everything. (And this is also true of both fiction and nonfiction.)

These days, neither choice satisfies, and I have an hypothesis about why this is so, as follows: We’ve changed. We’re more tolerant. We’ve evolved. We listen more to multiple points of view.

Of course, this is just an hypothesis and it’s from my POV. But I was around when a major shift took place in the newsroom—more women, more minorities—and the “girls in the balcony,” as they were known in the Washington press corps, were finally let onto the floor of Congress to report. The story of pay and opportunity equity for women in the balcony, and the New York Times in particular, is told by Nan Robertson in her page turning book:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Girls-Balcony-Women-Times/dp/0595154646

It was originally published in the 1990’s and reissued in 2000, not that long ago. And it’s not so long ago that women were relegated to the society pages or the home pages. As for minorities in the newsrooms and on broadcast TV, they were non-existent until the late 1960’s, if memory serves. Progress came only after a civil rights struggle and changes in the law.

Do women have a more expansive consciousness? Do they have a larger appetite for uncertainty? For multiple points of view? Because as soon as women and minorities entered the newsroom and the boards of publishing houses and academic towers, narration changed.

When white men did most of the news reporting and essay writing, their voices were often omniscient. Then came the women’s movement and the New Journalism—Wolfe, Didion, Mailer, Thompson—which established a new narrative persona—more peripheral, the reporter in the action and reporting the action. It demanded humility, not omniscience. And we can still feel this tectonic shift today in poetry, memoirs and blogs, such as this one. Needless to say, I’m grateful for it.  Read More 

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me the most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.” James Baldwin

And to this I would add: your joys, your accomplishments, your expectations, your hopes. And I would change the pronoun to “our,” as Charles Blow did in his very personal New York Times blog post today, a touching account of his first encounter with books. It reminded me of my mother’s stories about her childhood library which was immodest for a struggling Viennese family—middle class in its aspirations, but not in its day to day life. Her mother—my grandmother—worked as a sales “girl” in a glove store, family owned, but not immediate family. And her father—my grandfather—was a traveling salesman, selling the gloves to retail stores. And when he returned from his trips, he always brought my mother a beautiful leather-bound book, which she cherished, and read avidly. In absentia, the books gave her courage and comfort when her father was away. And they became a sizable library, all left behind when my mother escaped the Nazi advance after she graduated from medical school, the first woman in her family to go to university.

And it’s interesting that I haven’t written about this in a long time. Perhaps it was Charles Blow’s blog post that jogged memories of my mother’s re-created, re-invented library, first in New York where I grew up, and later in Westport, Ct. after she and my stepfather—in European fashion—retired “to the country.” The bookshelves had to go up before anything else, and if anyone wanted to borrow a book, the librarian—my mother—had to check it out in her indelible mental ledger. As she aged, she became even stricter about lending books, almost obsessively so; they had become a metaphor of both loss and security.

“And you will return it, soon?”
“Yes, of course.”
“And if you do not, I will call you.”
And so on.

The parsimony of lending did not extend to gifts. If she liked a book, she bought copies for her children, grand-children, and friends. And signed them, often with the words: “This is one of my favorite books.”

In her old age, my mother lost most of her sight. She could no longer pull books off the shelf, or read them. But she went to her local Barnes & Noble all the time, and she belonged to a book club. My sister and I tried to shift her to audio books, to no avail. Finally, I found a wonderful man to read to her and talk to her. A book was not a book unless there was a discussion about its characters or the events described.

My mother was bi-lingual, but shifted entirely to English as a reader. Oddly, though, she never liked poetry in English, but when I began to memorize poems, I would practice on her during my visits. These oral/aural experiences echoed the Greeks, who my mother had studied in high school. I was declaiming what was on the page, and this legacy had a mythic feel. She recognized quickly that most poems revise the ancient themes of life and death and love. She was captivated. Soon we were able to touch on her own end of life “issues” and how she wished to depart from this world beyond the documents that had been signed. It was literature that helped us do that.  Read More 

I don't know why I picked up “East of Eden” the other day, an unconscious motivation perhaps. Consciously, I was weary of reading on my Kindle and longing for the sensory experience of paper, paper page turning, and heft. 601 pages of Penguin’s centennial edition—in celebration of Steinbeck’s birth—is heft. The design of the paperback cover echoes the original hardback edition: It has flaps, there is an evocative etching on the top of the cover, and the edges of the pages are scored. This creates an illusion of freshly cut pages, the obligation of the reader in the past. Once cut and turned, the pages feel “thumbed.”

But what about the story and the writing? Has it held up? Has it stood the test of time? Is it now a classic?

Like most American school children of my generation, I had read “Of Mice and Men” in school at an age when it would have meant absolutely nothing to me. I think this was true of many classics on the curriculum in those days. (The other that comes to mind is Wharton’s “Ethan Frome.”) I have no recollection of how the book was taught, what it was about, or the questions we were supposed to answer for homework. I thought it curious that my parents had “Cannery Row” on their shelves, but was not curious enough myself to pull it down. A yellow cover with blue lettering, I remember, and the fact that my mother had read it in one sitting. Much later, the year I got married, I read “Grapes of Wrath” as we traveled across the country and loved it. But I never returned to Steinbeck after that. So why now? A third into the book, and unable to put it down—the writing and the story both compelling—I went online to the Nobel Prize site to listen to Steinbeck’s 1962 Nobel Banquet Speech in which he says:

“The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.”

Inspiring thoughts for me as I have just published a novel—“What Returns to Us”—set in 1945, the beginning of the Atomic Age. I do feel, too strongly at times I know, that writers and artists have an obligation to tell the truth, to illuminate, and to write from the heart as well as the head.

“East of Eden” was published in 1952, soon after the end of World War II and the unleashing of America’s weapon of mass destruction, the atomic bomb. Steinbeck traces America’s history in this epic, beautifully written novel from the 19th century onward. It raises many questions about our frontier history, the loss of civility and a higher purpose, the origins of evil, and what it means to be human. The book is loaded with gorgeous descriptions, deep character portraits, humor, and compassion.

We can’t all be working on such a large canvas all the time, or even some of the time; that would be hubris. And we cannot sit down to write with the intention of creating the great American novel—Mailer’s ambition—or the great anything. Our writing lives are a daily practice, keen observation, and the quest for psychological and historical truths.  Read More 

I spoke to two cousins on the telephone this week. What a treat to have long conversations, to hear their voices, and then to follow-up with a real correspondence using long, descriptive sentences—not just snippet thought- bytes and sentence fragments. I write my letters in Word files with the email off, and then send them as attachments, or paste them into the body of the email. The computer has a pulse and it quickens us. It’s time to slow down.

Both of my cousins live on the west coast, one in Seattle, the other on Gabriola Island off the coast of Vancouver. Apart from family lore and gossip, shared memories and anecdotes, two of us are writers, the third has started writing poetry and is contemplating a memoir workshop. And though there was a lot to discuss, I found myself becoming impatient and wanting to get off the phone. Not good. I had picked up the phone ready to talk, to tell my stories and listen to theirs. If I hadn’t wanted to talk, I should have let the phone go into voice mail. But I didn’t. It is as though I had momentarily lost the habit of conversing.

It’s our mandate as writers to resist the electronic “pidgin” English we’ve developed to communicate quickly and virtually. I believe that it erodes our language and is not good for any of us, writers in particular. I know it’s not good for me. I’m as glued to my iPhone as anyone, addicted to Facebook and text. But I also resist. I resist by writing long texts in full sentences and using the Facebook status as an opportunity to weave a mini-story. When I went off Facebook for a couple of weeks a while back, and announced that I was doing so, my “friends” objected. I was touched that they were enjoying my stories, but I also wanted to talk to all of them and to meet at a cafe for a chat over a coffee, totally impractical in our trans-national lives. And so I am grateful that our timelines bring us closer.

I always suggest to my students to make calls to friends and family on their cells after 9 p.m. when minutes are free and they can spin their stories. Or to have “talking” dinner parties around a table with a few selected friends. Ten, twenty, thirty minutes of oral story-telling and listening every day is gold bullion for the writer. Our minds clarify, the words glisten, and our solitary writing lives return to balance.  Read More 

I can’t think of a better way to end this writing year than an appreciation of the beautiful sentences I’ve jotted in my journal in recent weeks, such as this one:

“The afternoon was golden and the wisteria vine on the porch was in full unshattered bloom.”

--Carson McCullers, “The Haunted Boy”

As the term drew to a close and my own creative energies returned, I began reading and rereading McCullers, Carver, Wharton and Munro. I treated myself to a hard copy of “Best American Short Stories, 2013,” a well-curated collection by Elizabeth Strout. Despite many years of experience and publication, I need reminding: What makes a good short story?

My less rushed non-teaching days are a tapestry of reading, writing, walking, swimming, seeing friends, cultural activity, doing the laundry. I try not to get too wound up by holiday obligations of any kind—particularly gift and greeting card frenzy—as to do so would cut into whatever free time I have between terms, not to mention my budget. Simplicity at this time of year is my friend. Yes, it is a new year, but a writer’s life unfolds on a different continuum. My journal, unlike a date book, is ongoing. It doesn’t end because the year, we are told, has ended. And the long, retrospective, generic letters from far away don’t satisfy; I prefer the effort of consistent, personal contact on email, Facebook, or telephone. I still have two friends who send me snail postcards and letters. Brava, a correspondence! A party or two is fine, with people I enjoy talking to. Otherwise, I’m not a party person. I need to recover from the chatter of a party and to settle down again into my own thoughts. My husband is a screenwriter—a collaborative medium—and doesn’t require as much quiet as I do to write. He’s always sharing ideas, dialogue, and plots. I keep mine to myself for a very long time. He is social and solitary , I am solitary and social. True, I am looking forward to a getaway at Christmas, and to spending time with our daughter and son-in-law, but the draft of a new story and my journal will be in my bag.

Dear reader, I’m not Scrooge, just a writer.  Read More 

Because it was the end of the summer and I had been upstate and it was a bad mosquito season, I thought I still had mosquito bites. It took a while to put two and two and four together as I examined a cluster of three-in-a-row (breakfast, lunch, dinner) wheals on my body early one autumn morning. My husband had nothing, lucky fellow; I am allergic to the bites.

We hadn’t been told by anyone that the building we had just moved into had a recent bed bug history and, though many apartments in the building were empty at the same time, we hadn’t thought to ask why. So we moved in, anticipating with pleasure the quiet of our new neighborhood, two offices, fresher air, some plants on the windowsills, items out of storage decorating our new home, the books we carried laid out neatly on shelves. Three months later, all the boxes were unpacked, new travel routines established, we were feeling more settled. Until that morning.

I remembered a student telling me once that she had bed bugs and had just moved to Brooklyn. And that it had been an exhausting nightmare. Those two words are not an understatement. Dear Reader, it has not been easy: friends are loath to come over (who can blame them?), and our apartment is not a home.

It’s now been two months since the ordeal started. I write on the eve of another fumigation, this time of the beloved books we carried with us to be reread or consulted. How fitting for two writers that the pages of books and journals might host the eggs of these creatures. I hope they are having a good read.  Read More