Carol Bergman

I had brunch with a well-known literary critic shortly after the Boston tragedy. He’s a retired academic who also writes fiction, but he is not a journalist, and I have to remember that as I tell this story. Fiction writers are different; they make things up. It’s no wonder that journalists often turn to fiction writing—Hemingway, Cather, Twain, so many others—as it is a great relief not to stick to the facts. I have turned to fiction myself. Nothing has to be corroborated and the only disclaimer that has to be written is one about “no resemblance” to people either living or dead.

“Are journalists honoring or exploiting the lives of victims by writing about them? Do survivors want to tell their stories or be left alone? Where, exactly, is the line between being a chronicler and being a vulture?” These are the profound questions that are being asked by ATAVIST, an online media platform, in an invitation to a seminar for nonfiction writers taking place this evening. Even Reddit is engaged in self-reflection after President Obama and others criticized the crowd source witch hunt perpetrated on their site after the Boston bombings. “Suspects” were mistakenly identified. Who is to blame? Who is responsible? The proprietors did take responsibility and are making some more changes on their threads. But we have to remain vigilant as internet users—so fast and ready it’s scary sometimes.

What about fiction writers? What if a retired academic and literary critic, who is also a writer of fictions, creates a website to promote his book? What if this website lures readers to a service similar to a “bucket list” for the terminally ill, but it is entirely false; it’s a hoax? What if the disclaimer is nearly invisible at the bottom of the site and all the photographs on the site are of real people—including this critic’s beautiful wife—with false names? And what is the difference between a “fiction” and a “hoax”? What if? That's the prompt fiction writers use to generate their stories.

“What a sweet idea this is to take terminally ill patients on tours,” I said, just minutes into our brunch.

"It's a fiction," the well known literary critic said.

"I am shocked, " I said. "Terminally ill patients are desperate. They will try anything.”

“My publisher wanted me to take it down.”

“I’m not surprised,” I said.

“Well, I suppose if anyone contacted me and really wanted to go on the tour, I’d take them.”

“That’s good,” I said, “but it doesn’t take care of the problem. Your site is a fiction, but people who go there are not told it is fiction. They read it as true.”

Silence. This pleased me, of course. Like all bloggers, I wanted to have the last true word.  Read More 

Last Sunday was the first anniversary of my mother’s death. I met a friend of hers and relatives at the grave and read two of her favorite poems—“Invictus” and “Daffodils.” We told funny stories, we embraced, we laid stones on the stone, we went on our way. My plan was to spend the rest of the day meditating on my mother and I’d brought a sandwich, an apple, some water, my journal—life passes quickly into pages these days—and good walking shoes. I drove to her house to pay last respects there. I hadn’t been told that it would be torn down. It was a shock, I have to admit, all her plantings bull-dozed into the woods, the dogwood tree my step-father planted still standing, but damaged. The site looks clean, well excavated, a fresh start.

Every settlement is a palimpsest with its layered history and buried memories. We are usually not aware of what came before as we live fruitfully in the present. Refugee families are somewhat different as their history has been broken, the reason, perhaps, that the leveled house hit me hard. We had remade some history there and an illusion of permanence. When our daughter was small, we visited almost weekly, swam in the pool, had barbecues. Our dog’s ashes are scattered in the woods. I’ve written to the new owner to tell her some of these things and to wish her well. I know that her neighbors, warm and caring, will welcome her with all their hearts.

My mother lived until April 21, 2012. She was 99 when she died, alert and interesting to the end, listening to the news, eager to vote, eager to hear me recite newly memorized poems.  Read More 

If we learned anything during this hard week in the U.S. it was this: we have a post 9/11 rapid response police/military/intelligence “community” that can be mobilized rapidly, lockdown an entire city, and track “perpetrators” with high tech military weaponry. It didn’t take long for the war jargon to surface—after all we’ve been at war for the past decade—and to quickly lose any real sense of the unfolding tragedy both for the victims and, less so, the young perpetrators. It was the face of the younger brother that captivated, just 19 years old, radicalized perhaps by his older brother, or the legacy of the Russian genocide in Chechnya, or, simply, struggles with life in the United States. (That bitterness came out in the tweets.) Still, many questions remain unanswered. Empathic language about the victims, those who had been injured and died, permeated the discussion at the news conference. And the word “accountability” surfaced. It was a reminder that fanaticism is always challenged in this country—even in Congress—and that jihad may be a word that flies off the tongue, but does not fly in our Republic. I am even more appreciative of our freedoms—physical, emotional, spiritual—as I revise this blog than I was before the bombings. How dare these fanatics interrupt and disrupt our lives? However imperfect, we are free to live them.

There is a saying—and I don’t know where I read it—“Beware of the person who carries only one book.” In my iteration of this sentiment today, I would say: Beware of the person who is not honest/ transparent about his opinions, who maintains a furtive rather than an open life, who has hidden agendas, and makes bombs. Read More 

I went to the basement in my white-brick 1914 landmarked building with its old rusty pipes and three elevators that was once upon a time luxurious. Now it is run down and in need of repair—workers on the roof, workers repointing bricks—which I have already written about here. But it’s been quiet this week and I have been able to get back to the revision of my novel without needing to escape to other writing spaces (I have two) and this has been bliss. Thus, a moment to answer emails from students and to write a blog entry about a laundry room conversation.

I rarely meet anyone in the laundry room as I go there in off hours for my own convenience and also as an act of altruism. Those with 9-5 jobs fill the machines over the weekend. And I take my time, chat to Cleopatra, the old gray in-house cat with yellow eyes, browse the shelves of books people have donated, most of which are old and dusty and not to be touched or brought back into the apartment for fear of cockroaches and flying water bugs, most delicious as they are squished. (My husband saved me from one last night.)

I wasn’t alone yesterday, Bill was there, and I noticed—as he was putting his wet clothes into a dryer—that there was a book at the bottom of his cart and that it was a Kingsolver. So I asked, “Do you like her work?” And he said, “Yes, very much.” So we began to chat about her and her work, which led to other things, of course, about doing the laundry, for example, and the warm weather, and the elevator culture in the building, which is odd—people don’t talk much to each other. In fact, Bill and I had talked a bit in the elevator (I have 14 floors to descend, he has 13), but not all that much in the two years I have been here. And I thought to myself, how wonderful books are—in and of themselves—but also as entrée to shared experience and deep conversation.  Read More 

Went to the Metropolitan Museum yesterday and it was crowded. I’d sent my students on a walkabout to any museum as a mid-term assignment and one had gone to the Met and complained of the crowd, how she was jostled and couldn’t get close to the work, how her notes were all about being jostled, the crowd, and the guards telling people not to take photographs. No Photographs. No Photographs. One of my instructions had been: take notes. The other: eavesdrop and record snippets of conversation. The third: don’t Google any of the artists or the exhibition before you go. And the fourth, unstated, develop concentration, stay focused no matter what else is going on, a reporter’s discipline. Finally, the fifth, also unstated: find the story.

I wondered if I would meet any of my students; I didn’t. Standing in front of a vitrine of corsets for women (to my surprise, men also sometimes wore them), a visitor from Russia told me that, though her daughter is a size #2, she would not fit into any of these corsets. I took notes as she spoke. I took notes as she moved away. I took notes as I moved away. In fact, I didn’t stop taking notes throughout the exhibition: “Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity.”

Yes, there was a crowd; it was a crowd pleaser. I knew a lot about some of the artists, next to nothing about a few others. It was a group of artists known for their radical experimentation. They were so talented, so skilled, that they were able to earn their livings as portrait painters of the leisured class. That kept them eating and corseted in many ways but also gave them freedom to experiment. The stays came off.  Read More 

I’m sick but happy this week because 1) I have a heavy cold and can’t/won’t run around the city and 2) I’m not teaching and don’t have to read any manuscripts and don’t have to get on the subway where I probably picked up this cold and/or where my husband picked up this cold which we are sharing. Thank you.

I hope that my students don’t take this blog post personally and forgive me for being happy without them or their manuscripts this week even though I am being punished for my happiness with a bad cold. I am sure they will understand what it means to have time to write because we talk about their frustrations all the time. They go something like this: I have a full-time job and can’t find time to write. I have two young kids and can’t find time to write. I have two young kids and a full-time job and can’t find time to write. I have to travel to Chicago next week and I have two young kids and I am too tired to write. I have to travel to China next week and I am too tired to write. And so on.

What happens, then, when we do have time to write? We write without knowing what day or hour it is and we stop only when we are hungry or have a doctor’s appointment or some other necessary obligation. We don’t care about the weather. Rain or shine or wind, we are writing. Is it still winter? Is it spring? We may or may not feel hunger and eat breakfast at lunch and lunch at dinner. We may or may not answer the phone and not understand who is calling or why they have called. We are utterly and completely immersed in our work, and sustained by it. We write more than 1,000 usable words a day. We surface and it is already Tuesday of our sustainable writing week and we have hit 22,000 words of our revision. And there are still two days left of this bliss—until Thursday—when manuscripts must be read and emails sent out to my wonderful students.  Read More 

One of my students has more than 1,000 friends on FB. How does she find time to write? “If they don’t hear from me, they’ll think I’m dead,” she said. The class riffed a bit on that. Much laughter and also some practical suggestions. Why not post a status that says: not dead, just writing? Would that work?

The discussion got me to thinking about my own use of FB which has increased since I first joined in 2007. The questions that I raised for myself in earlier blogs have not been answered to my satisfaction: Is this virtual platform good for writers? Is it good for our relationships? Is a FB friend a real friend? Is FB just fun? Entertainment? Free advertising? Or more? How are we using or abusing this technology? Is it enhancing or interfering with our creative life?

And so I woke thinking about FB again this morning and posted this on my personal page:

Dear FB Friends,

Except for my Carol Bergman: Writer page, which I use for professional reasons –links to Twitter and my website blog—I am taking a vacation/hiatus from Facebook. If you wish to contact me, discuss, comment, send me a hug, wish me anything at all, or get together in the flesh, and feel one another’s flesh, please send me a private message on FB and I will send you my regular email address and my cell phone # if you don’t already have it. I look forward to talking with you, wishing you a happy birthday, and/or seeing all of you very soon in a non-virtual venue where we can linger and connect. The voice and the body are wonderful instruments.

xo Carol  Read More 

I suppose I should be pleased that I now have 67 Facebook friends on my professional Carol Bergman: Writer page. It’s an active page but what does that mean exactly and how does it enhance the writing life and/or help to solicit professional gigs and/or sell my books? I’m not sure. I do know that my students, prospective students and private clients look at my website and read my blog though they are loathe to admit this. Until I have mentioned them in a blog, then they might say something. “Oh, I think you were referring to me in that blog post the other day.” Of course, I don’t use anyone’s real name but they are nonetheless able to identify themselves and their triumphs or conundrums. I keep the FB page active by routing my blog into the “notes” function. The blog post, this one included, also appears as an RSS feed on my Amazon Authors Page and Goodreads. It also used to appear on the PEN AMERICA website but that has been redesigned and I can’t be bothered to re-do everything, not this week anyway. Are you getting my drift? All of this takes time, energy and a different mind-set than writing itself, although I am writing right now as I write this blog post. (And I hope you noticed the alliteration.) It’s so pleasurable I could do it all day but I have to get back to some other business, as opposed to writing, and then meditate/rest for a half hour before I go off to teach at NYU. Must remind myself to cut up an apple to slip into my bag. (Sentence fragment.) And what else? How about some reading? I’m in the midst of three books at the moment, two on my Kindle e-reader, another in hard copy. The current New Yorker is interesting and there’s more than one article I want to read there. I’ve read the NY Times online today. I wish I could be in a hammock, or on a cruise ship, or at a writer’s retreat because my mind is so befuddled by some brick work drilling on the East Side of my apartment house that I can hardly think much less work today on the revision of one of three failed novels. I have my headset plugged into the computer and am mildly distracted by the Brandenburg Concertos on Pandora, thank goodness. And did I mention that I’ve been “friended”( noun into a verb, quite common in the vernacular American English tongue) by a young woman writer in Kenya and a writer in Hong Kong and another somewhere else, all three people I don’t know, which is a bit unsettling. If you like me, I will like you. Isn’t that how it goes? Unsettling also because I am being “mapped” and “followed.” I forgot to say that my Carol Bergman: Writer FB page appears automatically on Twitter, whatever that means, and that I get notifications there of so many people following me, more than 67, and why? Then these same people, strangers all, writers in far flung places, turn up as requests on Linked In. I think my blog posts appear there also. All told, as I end this blog post, I realize that social media may be more exhausting than useful. Comments welcome.  Read More 

A student in my Wednesday night NYU class complained this week that his sentences are short and choppy, like sound byte texts. Everything shorthand, no full sentences or ideas, as I am demonstrating here. And he can’t seem to stop or change or shift into any other gear so that he can cruise into a longer sentence, a paragraph, or a page of sustained story. Apart from turning off electronic devices and/or never using them again, or using them only as needed, could I offer a realistic solution? I suggested he follow his intuition—turn off all electronic devices including the TV—and read all day long for days and days and days. Of course, he might need to abscond from his job and/or sequester himself in his apartment and/or take a trip around the world. Possible? Maybe.

It’s strange that my students never complain about this suggestion; they are longing for it. Even at the beginning of term when I suggest keeping notebooks and journals in longhand, they don’t object. Well, not entirely, perhaps. One or two might object. But then they get into it. The journals thicken, they have heft, they satisfy all our senses, and they slow us down.

There is no way to achieve precision and glory in our sentences unless we slow down.  Read More 

I went to hear some soothing low-brow Bossa Nova—a combination of Samba and jazz, with some Bolero influence—at the Cornelia Street Cafe last Sunday. I’m not a musician; I listen for pleasure. But I was with my husband who once played the tuba and has a good ear, and an opera singer/teacher of opera, and an opera singer/student . All of them had a lot to say about the singer’s voice which they thought light and underdeveloped. They were critiquing the performance and didn’t get into the music the way I did. I was really enjoying it and so were many others in the audience, some Brazilian, some not.

I’ve written here about a book club I once belonged to that annoyed me because the readers were not writers. They quickly dismissed a book that might have taken a year or more to write if it wasn’t entertaining, or immediately gripping, or they had to work to understand what the writer was trying to say. I eventually left the group, offending some of the members in my wake. But since I have written my first murder/thriller, I’ve changed my tune a bit. It’s hard to satisfy the demands of the genre and to write well at the same time. I’m now more admiring of books that others enjoy for whatever reason they enjoy them. It’s their privilege . Who am I to say that a work is not worthwhile, or not good enough. if many other people enjoy it? If a musician, or a writer, or an artist, or a filmmaker has succeeded in captivating an audience then that, in itself, is worth applauding, I feel.

Despite the disaffection at my table, I found the young Bossa Nova singer enchanting. I am not a professional and she didn’t ask me to evaluate her performance as a professional. That is another endeavor entirely, sometimes pleasurable, and sometimes not so pleasurable. My husband used to be a film critic and I remember him telling me that he wondered if he’d ever be able to enjoy films again. Now he is a screenwriter and he is always watching the script. I have the same experience of books: they have to be well written. I read twice, once for pleasure, once again to study what choices the writer has made. But I’m not going to tell anyone not to read a book if it is too low brow and/or it isn’t well written. They might enjoy it even if I don’t.  Read More