Carol Bergman

My cousin, Peggy Weis, had an art opening last Friday night at the Fairfield Arts Center. I’d watched her collect objects as we walked on the dirt road in Martha’s Vineyard last spring and some of these objects had been transformed into a “Road Kill” series and a “Portals” series. I asked her what she was collecting and she said, “fragments.” I wanted to help so she told me what to look for but I didn’t see what she saw so that was a useless exercise for both of us. But we kept on walking and talking about the creative process. Visual artists—their work and their statements about their work—always inspire me. Here’s Peggy’s (eloquent) statement about this show which is called “Back and Forth” :

“The art in this show reflects the movement Back and Forth of my ideas in concrete form—from one medium to another. From that, my creative process begins, deciding what format the work should take, be it work on paper, mixed media or sculpture. I am a walker and I frequently pick up objects while, at the same time, noticing the patterns of the cracks on the sidewalk or road. I have also experienced the deaths of friends and family members during the last few years and thoughts of life’s paths and portals to another realm started to preoccupy my work.”

Like writers, artists don’t sell a lot of work these days but that doesn’t mean they stop working. Peggy works all the time as do the two artists I talked to at the show who had stopped by to see the art but haven’t had a show in a very long time. Is this discouraging? Yes and no. Once back in the studio, they both agreed, the joy of creating new work and working the work takes over. Where the next meal is coming from is another matter; artists become easily lost in their process and find it difficult to surface into “reality.” Others, more commercially minded and self-promoting—Andy Warhol was quoted more than once that evening—find a way to make money from their art. Peggy, who has had numerous job jobs over the years, now has a patron—her husband—which makes her more fortunate than most, but doesn’t diminish her hard work or achievement.

The opening lasted for two hours and held a crowd. There were chocolate-dipped strawberries on the table, dips, crudities. Wine and sparkling water in blue bottles was served in the obligatory plastic cups. There were corporate sponsors in suits, the curator of the show, friends and family, board members of the Fairfield Arts Center. After a while, I wanted to pay attention to the art—a joint show with Roxanne Faber Savage—so I took one of the guide sheets and walked around slowly. A thirteen-year-old visiting from Cincinnati came with me. I tried to talk to her about the work but she was texting six friends back home all the time and had no language left for conversation with me much less description of what was in front of her. I thought this a terrible shame and also worrying. If we are never alone with our thoughts how can we experience art?

I talked to Peggy’s patron—her husband—for a while and we both said how happy we were that Peggy now has an opportunity to “do” her art full-time and is receiving well-deserved recognition from other artists. Artists have always supported one another with encouragement, suggestions, and attendance at openings. With or without financial aid, with or without sales, that’s the nature of real patronage: support, encouragement, suggestions, and admiration.  Read More 

Some years ago, an art appraiser friend gave me a cuneiform tablet for my birthday. What a gift! It’s a round stone, about four-inches in diameter and two inches thick, irregular in shape, and light-reddish brown in color. The inscription on it is not literature but calculation; it's a market transaction.

At first, I didn’t want to touch the stone much less hold it. I considered it precious and kept it in the straw box in which it had been delivered to me from the ancient Middle East. It had been a long, arduous journey. This clay tablet, wet when written on with a stylus, had survived countless upheavals. I think of this, and more, when I touch this stone. I wish Iraq peace and prosperity in the coming years.

When I told my friend I was afraid to handle the stone, he insisted that I take it out of the box. It needed to breathe, to live. And so I did. Its presence in my writing room is a reminder that written communication is universal and has been for millennium.

The expression, “It’s not written in stone,” originates in the discovery of these tablets. It implies that our ancestors in antiquity considered the stone tablets permanent records. But that was most likely not the case; they were ephemera to be stored or tossed away once the transaction was complete. And though all of it is important to us now as artifact, at the time the clay tablets were not precious; they were tools.

There will be more tomorrow and the day after that, into the future, beyond our lifetimes, beyond the wars we are fighting in the cradle of civilization where all artifacts are endangered. I suppose there is some solace in this, at least: The museum in Baghdad is open again, its collection partially restored and on view, most of it stored safely outside the country.

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At least three of my students this term have exceptionally difficult stories to tell and although my workshops and tutorials at NYU are not meant to be memoir exclusively, these writers are working on memoirs. Because of the urgency they feel, it’s difficult to move them into other forms of nonfiction writing such as reportage. So I let them be and encourage their efforts. Good memoir writing encapsulates all that is best in nonfiction writing today anyway—a strong sense of place, character development, dramatic tension, an open, direct narrative persona, lush description, and more.

When difficult personal stories surface in a workshop or a tutorial—the recent death of a loved one, incest, other traumas—I always ask the author if s/he has support outside the workshop or tutorial setting. Writing may be therapeutic but it is not therapy; student writers often confuse the two. More importantly, unless the writer develops insight, the writing will remain shallow and elliptical. When important information is with-held—either consciously or unconsciously—the reader feels that something is missing. That’s not easy to critique and may even feel manipulative though it isn’t; it’s self-censorship. One student this term admitted she was still protecting a perpetrator, that he was still alive and she was in touch with him. This being the case, how can the writing fly?

A rule I apply in my own memoir writing is this: If I can’t tell all of the story, I put the story away. There are other stories to write now. We can always return to what hurts when he have more skill, more understanding, and more courage.

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I went for a very long walk with my husband in the warm sunshine yesterday. We started out near our home on the upper west side, meandered down to the river, and kept going for another three miles or so until we came to the Intrepid which was surrounded by armed soldiers and chock-a-block with tourists. Not exactly a peaceful setting. We walked away from the hullabaloo, the soldiers, the guns, and the memories of two awful shootings this past week. I’m working on a new project with combat veterans, Wednesday is Veteran’s Day, I’m thinking about the vets I know a lot, reading a lot about Iraq and Afghanistan, and I needed a rest. Hard to achieve sometimes but necessary to get the work done without collapsing. This is especially true when the subject of the project is emotionally charged. We have to keep going. We have to be strong. So, long walks are very important, literally and metaphorically. Walking is restorative even when the plantings on the trail dwindle and the scenery becomes industrial. At that point, I let my mind drift onto the Hudson and/or begin another conversation with my walking companion. We pretend to be tourists. Where to eat before hitting the Highline? We found a tucked-away local dive on Ninth Avenue—everything homemade, the Latina owner serving us personally, scrumptious cupcakes for dessert, a Sunday treat.

I always have ideas when I am moving and carry a notebook with me. When I was a runner and didn’t carry a notebook I’d bend down and scoop ash off the track and write on my arms. And when I am swimming, I try to hold the ideas in my head until I’m out of the shower and into the locker room. It doesn’t always work but my mind is so clear after exercise that all the important ideas return, albeit in slightly different form. But sometimes I don’t want to think about what I’m working on; I want to relax—completely. And though I had my notebook with me and at the ready yesterday, I didn’t write anything down except the word “apples” on my shopping list.

There were so many people walking the Highline that we couldn’t stop moving. It’s a transformed railroad track, not exactly a parkland, narrow, with interesting plantings on either side of the pathway. There are very few places to sit or lounge, and more views of the cluttered city skyline than the river. All told, we found it disappointing. But it wasn’t the whole day, it was only a part of the day, so it didn’t matter. We headed home on the subway and got back to our computers.  Read More 

I am an indigenous New Yorker and have been a Yankee fan and an athlete all my life. I played softball, basketball, volleyball, I swam, skied and ice skated—all in the days when girls sport was separate and unequal—less money and encouragement given to teams in high school and college, pre-Title IX days. I wrote an essay about this for an anthology called “Whatever It Takes; Women on Women’s Sport,” published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1999. We had a reading when the book was launched and it was thrilling to meet other athletes who had become writers from all over the country.

I was probably the only girl in elementary school who snuck a transistor radio and headset into class to listen to the World Series. It was played during the days back then. I was never caught and managed to keep my grades up enough to satisfy my parents. So whenever the World Series comes around and the Yankees are in it, I’m engaged. I’m watching those players and slugging the ball into the outfield in my imagination, running flat out around the bases, stealing bases.

Last night, the fourth game in the series was very exciting. Two men on base 2 x, Johnny Damon stealing two bases, heart stopping. The words, “bases loaded” came to mind as a metaphor for a piece of writing that’s loaded and ready to fly to home plate. This doesn’t happen without a lot of thoughtful revision. Revision is not the play-offs and it’s not the World Series; it’s spring training. The sketch-books are warm-up, keeping the muscles supple. Revision is more grueling.

Indeed, writer and athletes have a lot in common: discipline (practice, meeting deadlines,) a desire to win (get published), team-mates (the workshop), a coach (the writing instructor), sports-wo-man ship (accepting critique, offering critique), and so on.

Game 5 tonight, a chance for the Yankees to wrap it up.
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My friend Sue Bernstein who owns Bernstein Artists, an arts management company, invited me to see a show called “Two Men Talking” at the Barrow Street Theater. Though I am an indigenous New Yorker and have lived here many years since returning from a sojourn in Europe, I had never been to this theater. New York –all five boroughs—is a treasure trove of unexpected pleasures, a mecca of talent and innovation.

When she is not traveling, Sue is out in the city most nights keeping an eye on her clients or evaluating new ones. The two men –Paul Browde and Murray Nossel--are new clients. They are both originally from Johannesburg, South Africa and grew up under the apartheid regime. They are both Jewish and they are both gay. It was easy to be white and Jewish in apartheid South Africa, not so easy to be gay. Both men eventually emigrated to the United States. Paul is a psychiatrist and Murray, a trained psychotherapist, is now a documentary filmmaker. They have a theatrical background also—actor and playwright respectively.

They had been in the same class in grade school but did not run in the same crowd or like each other very much. Then, one day in 1974, a teacher broke the class up into pairs,they were paired off together, and told to tell each other a story. Murray complained that he had no story to tell so Paul encouraged him. “Everyone has a story, Murray," Paul said. So Murray told a story and then Paul told a story. When they left school and then South Africa, they did not see each other again for a very long time. Years later, they ran into each other in New York, the mecca.

Now it was Murray’s turn to prompt Paul into conversation. He’d written a play and as he talked to Paul realized they both had interesting stories to tell, that the stories were bursting out of them, and that they should make a play together by telling their stories. So that’s what they did. The play is a result of their collaboration. Much of it is improvised as they perform depending on the stories they want to tell that particular evening. They sing acapella in African languages, in Afrikaans, and in Hebrew. The narrative meanders back and forth in time, is often very funny, sometimes painful, always endearing. They’ve also started a narrative story workshop—real life storytelling —which they take all over the world.

In a Q&A after the show, I asked Murray and Paul whether the African oral story-telling tradition—passed on to them through their African nannies—and the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission had influenced them. People were invited to the Commission to tell their stories of horror and redemption; it was modeled on tribal traditions of justice. Murray smiled and said, “I would not be here today without it. We began this collaboration just after apartheid fell and the Commission began its work. The play is our own personal reckoning."

For more information about the workshops and a schedule of upcoming performances:
http://www.bernsarts.com/twomen/twomen.html  Read More 

My daughter told me the other day that she no longer prints out photographs. I was alarmed. I’m sure there is no cause for alarm as all the photographs she takes are stored digitally, right? But how will future generations retrieve them? How will historians retrieve them? Would an historian want to retrieve them? Like the thousands and thousands whose photographs somehow find their way to flea markets, we are, after all, just ordinary people. Still, I look at these baskets of photos—25cents each—with great curiosity. Who were these people? How did their photographs end up here?

I suppose every generation eventually worries about extinction, in the most generic sense of that word. We save what we perceive is most important and toss the rest only when we have to. Four years ago, I moved. I threw out twenty years of journals and many letters. A friend in London had sent me postcards whenever she stepped out of her neighborhood. I had all of them. Should I donate them to an archive somewhere? Recycle the paper? Are they part of a permanent record or ephemera? Is it hubris to think that anyone would ever want to read these personal messages ever again?

I have written about this conundrum before in this blog. It seems to be a motif. Who am I writing for? Myself, certainly. Others? The future? Of course, I am superstitious about the permanence of the blog and keep copies on my hard drive and my flash drive. I have, as yet, not printed anything out.

I’ve been reading Victoria Glendinning’s biography of Trollope. That great writer loathed the “melting into open truth” as he called it in personal letters. The trove that remains of his letters, and it is a trove, is all “business.” Nonetheless, he was a fine letter writer though he didn’t know it or wouldn’t admit it. All the letters are in his novels; his characters write them in abundance. Indeed, says Glendinning, he became his characters as he wrote these fictional letters. But in real life, he did not think that letter writing “bolstered” a friendship or was of much use to anyone other than the writer or the recipient. I am sure Victoria Glendinning and Trollope’s other biographers disagree.

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Last Sunday, I went to the Museum of Arts and Design at Columbus Circle. The architects have done a fine job of renovating this once-derelict building; it was empty for decades. Mia Pearlman, a Music & Art classmate of my daughter’s, has three pieces on show there, part of the “Slash Paper Under Knife,” exhibition opening tomorrow. This is not work on paper, it is work of paper. The use of light and negative space to create art has always intrigued me. What is the analogy in writing? What one doesn’t say? The space/breath between sentences and paragraphs? On and on I go trying to figure it all out in the midst of the exhibition.

Three artists were in the gallery finishing up their site-specific installations and I spoke to one of them, Michael Veliquette, from Wisconsin. His candy-colored totem was flush on the wall and did not use the light in the gallery or from the slit windows. Most interesting, oddly, was his ability to interrupt his work and then get right back to it with intense concentration. This is an important attribute to cultivate for all artists and writers. Michael had it in abundance.

Mia wasn’t in the gallery, unfortunately, but her work was a big presence, compelling and life-affirming billows of feathery light--lines that are sharp but not disturbing--all exquisitely executed, “a weightless world in flux frozen in time, tottering on the brink of being and not being,” she writes in her poetic artist’s statement. http://www.miapearlman.com/

For some reason, I thought of Haruki Murakami’s book, “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running,” while I was in the gallery. Murakami is a marathon, ultra-marathon and triathlon athlete who writes and trains with equal intensity and concentration. Each sentence is a flower unfolding in the light, each step on the road a meditation. I am not sure if his life is entirely in balance, but the level of his devotion and concentration, like the artists at the Museum, is as inspiring and impressive as the work itself. Read More 

I went to a book club gathering last night with my husband. It’s a club I started some years ago and then abandoned for another more focused on “reading for writers.” But the original core group of the “old” book club remains viable and active. With several new members, including a strong contingent from out of the city, the club now numbers about ten. They allow me to be a guest if the book they are reading is of interest to me which I much appreciate.

Immersed in all things Afghan these last couple of weeks for a project I am working on, I took the opportunity to read the chosen book for the club: Afghan-American Khaled Hosseini’s “A Thousand Splendid Suns,” a sequel to “The Kite Runner.” I had not read that book though I did see the film.

Right now, there are only two other professional writers in this discussion group though all are well read and well rounded in their reading habits, interests and concerns. The discussion is fairly orderly. It begins with an introduction by the person who chose the book, highlights of the author’s biography and some background about the book itself; sometimes the order is reversed with a round robin of initial observations, biography and background, and then a more open free discussion usually over food that honors the ethnicity of the author.

Hosseini’s book is exceptional in many ways, most notably the author’s deliberate decision to write a book from an Afghan woman’s point of view. Why did he make this deliberate choice? In my opinion, the answer is not very complicated. Hosseini is heartsick about Afghanistan and he wants to continue telling its story from every conceivable angle until his readers understand and feel the plight of its people, and do something about it. He’s a good story teller but he’s also an activist. His books are more than novels; they are documentary novels.

After the success of The Kite Runner, Hosseini stopped practicing medicine, became a spokesperson for UNHCR and set up a foundation: http://www.khaledhosseinifoundation.org/. All this is part of his biography. And so it was surprising to me when a couple of people in the book club were offended by what they considered emotional manipulation by the author. They had to put the book down. They found themselves crying. The expository inserts felt contrived. And so on.

If a writer has succeeded in evoking empathy, shall we not sing his praises? Especially if the purpose is not gratuitous? Are we so numbed by gratuitous violence that we cannot respond to real violence when it is skillfully demonstrated? One person even doubted the book’s credibility? “This is fiction. How do we even know it is true?” he said.

He was shot down, an appropriate linguistic image considering the violence we had all experienced through Hosseini's evocative prose. Afterwards, thankfully, the conversation got deeper. What is the future of this beleaguered country? What will President Obama do? We repaired to an Afghani restaurant where we talked into the night.
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Suggested further reading: Jon Krakauer’s, “Where Men Win Glory,” about the life and death of Pat Tillman who died by friendly fire in Afghanistan. In addition to an investigation of the cover-up of Tillman’s murder, there is a lot of solid reporting about American involvement in Afghanistan. The book is patched together from interviews and journals handed to Krakauer by Tillman’s wife, Marie. She made a good choice.

Stephen Tanner’s “Afghanistan,” a history of the country from antiquity to the present time.

George Packer’s article about Richard Holbrooke, special representative to Afghanistan:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/28/090928fa_fact_packer


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The essayist, Michael Greenberg, was fortunate to have an editor at the Times Literary Supplement in London who knew how to get the best out of a writer. He gave him a specific word count—1200 words—which became a discipline and then told him that no matter what he wrote about, the piece should have a sense of “personal necessity, a sense of urgency.” In other words, it’s more than likely that if we don’t risk spilling our blood, guts and tears onto the page, it probably will be of little interest to us or our readers. We don’t have to be vampires or Dr. Phil to do this. We can be ordinary mortals with a story to tell, some ideas to express, observations to make about life past, present or future, ours or someone elses'. And we begin this work in our journals and notebooks—private, silent spaces for our eyes only.

Carl Jung once told a client that her journal was her “cathedral,” a silent place where her spirit lived. Beginning there—in our journals, notebooks and blogs—we begin to sketch out what may or may not become a printed story to share with others. Our first audience is ourselves, then the workshop, a writer’s group, other readers.

And now having written this little essay, I note that it is mellow in tone but also very detached. I have not talked of myself or spilled my own blood, guts or tears into this entry. That is not to say that I don’t care about what I am writing today; I do, very much. But the subject of notebooks and journals and privacy is a tender one for me, as it is for all writers. I once had my journals and private emails ransacked and it took time to recover, to begin again, to rediscover a rhythm, purpose and sense of safety in my own words, those that belong to me and no one else. After the violation, the subjects I became interested in for my journalism and long form nonfiction shifted ever so slightly and so did I, I shifted too. Unexpectedly, I began writing and publishing poetry and short stories. I lost some friends and found others. I tossed out old journals and started new ones.


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