Carol Bergman

Summer’s end and the earth is shifting away from the sun. Gorgeous sunset last night down by the river. I didn’t even want to read, just watched the glow off the water for more than an hour, the gentle lap of the waves. I was relieved to be away from the computer for a while.

With the start of term, I have a lot to do and I am juggling. A new piece of fiction surfaced as I was traveling and I am working on a newspaper article. My agent has decided she is not interested in handling the revised murder mystery so I have to leave time to market that, tedious work. Resting the mind and the body in the midst of a hectic city life is essential. I’m always in search of quiet spaces and stretches of uninterrupted time to write and in this I’m not alone. Every serious writer I know has the same challenge. And so do my students as they begin my workshop.

I do admit I am slightly envious of writers who have (generic) wives and/or servants, live deep in the country, wake to the light, write all day, swim lunchtime laps in their spring -fed pond (heated in the winter of course) and are invited to sparkling literary salons every evening. These (mostly imaginary) writers never have to clean toilets or shop for groceries or make a living doing anything else but writing.

I have been a professional writer for many years, a working writer, and I still have to juggle. It makes the writing sweeter. It makes it real.

I used to laugh when a fiction writer cousin of mine—of the male gender—told me that he had to get out of the house to write, the kids were disturbing his concentration. Once a year he took off and went to Mexico for a few weeks leaving his professor wife behind to tend the house, the kids, and her own career. That was then, this is now. Times have changed but the imperatives of the writing life have not.
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Once again I’m nomadic, traveling in Alaska this time, a magnificent landscape. I won’t be home until after Labor Day. I haven’t started a new project but I’m thinking about it and taking many notes about my journey. I brought a copy of the summer issue of Paris Review which has an interview with Gay Talese, a former New York Times and Esquire reporter, and author of several nonfiction books including “The Kingdom and the Power,” and “Thy Neighbor’s Wife.” Along with Tom Wolfe, David Halberstam and Joan Didion, he pioneered long-form narrative nonfiction which observers at the time referred to as the “new journalism.” Using fictional devices to tell a story, these writers were also seasoned reporters. Their challenge to the detached omniscience of news was profound. It was understood that if a reporter revealed his or her POV, spoke about how s/he felt and what s/he was thinking, s/he’d better be certain of the facts.

Initially, Gay Talese’s editors did not believe that he wasn’t writing fiction. He had to keep meticulous notes and careful records on shirt boards. These are works of art with doodles in colored pencils, artful handwriting, a map of the author’s process. When filled, Talese would then transfer these notations to larger entries on the typewriter adding more research and his personal interpretations and questions.

Now in his mid-seventies, Talese is still an active, productive writer. He’s working on a book about his fifty-year marriage to Nan Talese who was, by paradoxical coincidence, James Frey’s less than meticulous editor at Doubleday. Read More 

A friend’s son is in prison. It’s been a heartbreaking saga spanning several years. The most recent sentence of 18 years is considered outrageous by some, lenient by others. Bottom line: this still young barely educated man is in jail for a good long while. He’s adapted to his life there and has started looking after himself in a way he never could in the outside world; he’s an addict.

We were walking along the beach when my friend told me about his twice-monthly visits to the prison. He seemed relieved to be telling the story to someone who would not judge his parenting harshly. Something went badly wrong with this child but that is not the point now; it’s in the past. My friend loves his son and continues to do his best to care for him. He is still hopeful he will emerge from prison clean of drugs and alcohol, with a nurtured humanity, remorse for his crimes, a promise of restitution to his victims, and an education. In the circumstances, it seems unlikely. There is no school, no library, no access to computers, no AA, no counseling in this particular state prison. Despite this, his son is becoming an autodidact, requesting about four books a month and not just trash. (He’s reading Malcolm Galdwell at the moment.) Books can only be sent via amazon; no wrapped parcels from home are accepted. One can only wonder what inmates do if there are no people in their lives who have money or access to computers.


When we got back to the house, my friend showed me a letter he had received from his son that week. It was handwritten on lined paper, about three pages long, the envelope stamped with the prison seal. It was well written, heartfelt: daily routines, food, work-outs, observations and, to my friend’s surprise, news of an application to a local college to get a degree. But what if he was not accepted? Would the young man be able to tolerate the disappointment? Move forward? Continue to make his disciplined efforts at self-improvement? Or would he be crushed and give up.

Probably the latter, I thought. And then I had an idea: American Pen has a prison writers program. http://www.pen.org/page.php/prmID/152. A mentor from the program could help his son sustain his efforts as a writer and an autodidact over a period of years.

According to the United States Department of Justice website there are more than two million prisoners now being held in federal or state prisons or in local jails – an increase of 0.8% from year end 2007. This is an enormous figure for an industrialized western nation. The culture of some of our prisons is enlightened, others are Dickensian. My friend’s son is in a Dickensian prison where the guards are constantly punitive and the warden is unreachable.

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Even before Nicholson Baker published “A New Page
Can the Kindle really improve on the book?”
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/03/090803fa_fact_baker, I was having unsettling thoughts about reading contemporary fiction on the Kindle. I’ve downloaded a lot of books since March but read mostly nonfiction (five books), some poetry, a classic or two. On the TBR Kindle stack are at least ten contemporary novels. I can’t get into them.

Admittedly this happened to me even before I owned a Kindle. I buy a book, think I want to read it, but the time isn’t right, somehow. And weeks, months, even years later, the story resonates, I’m gripped and held.

But I haven’t gotten anywhere near gripped or held on the Kindle. What’s missing? Like Nicholson Baker, I think I have some answers.

I was up at my mother’s house looking through her many books and found three I wanted to borrow. They were heavy but their heft oddly did not bother me and the smell of the paper, the feel of the cover, the design of the cover, was intoxicating. It was as though I’d been in a sensory deprivation chamber for five months. I took the books and added them to a TBR pile I’ve poured into the trunk of my car. I’ll be upstate next week, between projects, and plan to read a book a day or, realistically, every two days. The trunk of my car has become my library. I’ll have the Kindle also, of course, because I’m struggling through Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine,” perfect for the Kindle as I don’t daydream as I’m reading it or care about the book’s design or the author’s picture. Ms. Klein has a website, she’s a journalist, I can check her out on Google.

I’m trying to not feel guilty about this. I hesitated to tell my husband who gave me the Kindle as a gift. But here’s the reality: For me, reading nonfiction on the Kindle works very well as I am reading for information and ideas. But contemporary fiction is much harder for all the reasons I have already mentioned. Maybe this won’t be true forever; I’ll get used to reading fiction on the Kindle. Narrative nonfiction that reads like fiction is fine, for example. Any book I’ve read before such as “The Great Gatsby,” is also fine, more than fine. It’s in my Kindle library and I can go back to it whenever I want; it’s always with me.

With any new technology there are gains as well as losses. And though the Kindle is here and the digitizing of books is well underway, it’s still just a tool to be used with intelligence and discretion for the benefit of our reading life.
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I was on my way downtown to an important meeting at American Pen when the rain started. I was on my favorite bus—the #5—which is never very crowded even at rush hour. I can always get a seat and have a good 45-50 minutes of reading.

It was just about 5 :30 when I boarded at 72nd Street and Broadway. I settled in to one of the back sideways seats and took out my Kindle. I am in the midst of a book by Naomi Klein, “The Shock Doctrine,” and it’s hard going. I was immersed in the struggle to grasp difficult concepts. Then I needed a break and switched to Wharton’s “The House of Mirth.” I recently downloaded 21 books by Wharton for .$99. I read Wharton often in between other things. Her prose is clear and strong.

It had been raining on and off for days but now the rain started again in earnest, big, sleety rain, sheets of rain, with thunder, lightning and a high wind. The bus driver announced that the last stop would be 14th street; we’d have to catch another bus if we wanted to go further. Everyone groaned. Was the bus disabled? Was there flooding? No, the bus was ahead of schedule or behind schedule, something like that.

Everyone gathered their belongings. I closed down the Kindle, put it in a plastic bag and then into my briefcase. But where was my umbrella? I had put it right under my feet knowing I would need it as soon as I got off the bus. It had been raining for days, the humidity was 100% , and usually breaks at the end of a New York summer day.

Well, my umbrella wasn’t there. I thought, now this is really something. Did someone take it? I got up, looked all around. No, it hadn’t rolled anywhere. And then a woman across the aisle said that yes, she’d seen a man next to her eying my umbrella and he had scampered off the bus at 23rd street. “Imagine that,” I said with typical New Yorker equanimity. “He helped himself to my umbrella. I’m glad it wasn’t my wallet or my Kindle. And all because I was so immersed in READING.”

The woman laughed and told me to be more careful. We both got soaked as we slid off the bus into a drug store to wait out the storm. I took the opportunity to treat myself to a big, heavy $8 umbrella. It’s more than I usually spend but I deserved it.

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The woman standing in front of me at Port Authority Bus Terminal was dressed elegantly in a black suit with a long jacket. She was very tall and thin and could see over the heads of all the people waiting to buy Trailways tickets. The line was very long, there were only two cashiers; I had already missed my bus. There would be another and one after that. Still, I didn’t relish hanging out at the station, Kindle2 notwithstanding.

The woman was carrying a piece of paper but did not have any bags. She looked at the paper now and again, shifted from foot to foot, and then she turned around and looked at me. I noticed that she was wearing pumps and that these pumps were more like slippers than protective city shoes.

“I’m here to get my ticket for a 5 a.m. departure tomorrow morning,” she said. "I didn’t want to take a chance that I would miss my bus. My aunt is expecting me. She insisted I come up. I haven’t been feeling well since I got laid off.”

“I’ve already missed mine,” I said, not responding to news of her bad luck, ignoring this news, in fact, which is so very easy to do. Then I felt bad—the woman was reaching out, trying to connect, so I continued on a more personal note. “I usually take my car but my husband needs to use it today and I couldn’t wait to get upstate. I’m going to be dog-sitting this weekend.”

“Oh, please, go in front of me,” she said. “It’s ridiculous. I got this “ticket” online but I still have to stand on line here to get the real ticket. They don’t scan e tickets on embarkation though they sell them on their site. I don’t get it.”

She looked distraught. Her face was drawn, almost emaciated, with bright amber eyes free floating over high, lightly blushed cheekbones. Neither her gaunt face nor the intense angry timbre of her voice matched the hauteur of her elegant suit and posture.

I had the impression she was relieved to have found a kindred spirit in me, someone with equally deep and persistent laments. She had misread me—I had no laments at that moment—but the journalist in me remained mostly silent and the Buddha in me remained attentive, kind and calm. In the end, I forced myself to hear her story.

Like so many these days, it wasn’t a happy one: The lay-off from the cosmetic company she’d worked for for twenty years was sudden, though expected. Good severance package but she was over fifty and worried that she’d never get a comparable job again. And she’d left so many friends behind, a daily routine, purpose.

“Beyond the general economic down-turn, what led to the cut backs?” I asked.

“Well it was that, of course, but also a change in women. Nowadays they aren’t so interested in cosmetics. A bit of lip gloss and that’s it. The company didn’t keep pace with those changes. We’ve been around too long and had some old-fashioned ideas.”

“Beauty from within these days,” I said. “Exercise, diet.”

“That’s it. I follow the regime myself. I should have known the company would fall apart on old ideas."

“You don’t wear a lot of make-up,” I ventured.

“No, no I don’t.”

The line inched forward. A couple of children were restive and squawking. I was certain that everyone would have preferred to be traveling some other way. The station had been swept clean of homeless people under Guiliani’s zero tolerance administration but it was still sooty and it smelled.

“It’s a hard time,” I said. “I wish you all the best.”

“Thank you,” she said, and smiled.

“Maybe you’ll be able to write your story one day,” I suggested. It sounded lame in the circumstances but was an offering nonetheless.

“Well, as a matter of fact I’ve started,” she said. “I even have a title.”

I confess I was a bit surprised. For some reason I didn’t think this successful business woman was particularly self-reflective. I was wrong. She had figured out for herself that writing may help her transition from one phase of her life to another, not therapy but therapeutic, and perhaps even marketable.

I gave her my card and we agreed to keep in touch. I told her about my workshops and invited her to attend.


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I went to Scandinavia House on July 8th to attend an Author’s Guild symposium on the children’s book market. I’d written a story with my daughter and was curious. Would this be another market for my/our work? (She’s an artist.) Is the story we’ve written—and an idea for a series with the same character—strong enough to market in the current recession?

Mid-summer, a cool evening, the room was packed to overflowing with authors and illustrators, mostly well published, established, some hoping to get published and established, all wondering what’s next in the publishing industry in general and the children’s book market in particular.

On the panel: two authors, David Levritas and Lisa Desimini, B&N representative Kim Brown, and literary agent Marcia Wernick, all disclaiming—no surprise in the fast changing electronic world—any fore-knowledge of what the industry (or their careers, by anxious implication) will look like even a year from now.

The current—as of today only—buzz words: platforms and portals, price resistance, dystopian fiction, aspirational novels (teens read “up”), tactile quality, collectibles, young middle-grade (how old is that exactly?), creative packaging, gatekeepers (aka agents), tweens (what is that exactly?), podcasts, Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, delivery options, and so on and so forth.

Well moderated by Guild member Rachel Vail, the discussion was both enlightening and humbling. Only during the Q&A did someone suggest that this particular segment of the book industry was moving a bit slowly into the electronic age. They are, for example, still insistent that a book be agented even though agents as gatekeepers do not necessarily have the keenest judgment about upcoming “trends,”(who does?) and they—publishers and agents alike—refuse to look at already digitized self-published work even if it has an ISBN and is selling on amazon.

So where are we? The answer: it’s hard to say. The only solution to the uncertainty is to keep working at the art and craft of writing. A good story well told is, in some respects, recession-proof and will always find its genre and its market.
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I read F.Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” once a year, usually in the summer. I don’t remember when I began this literary tradition for myself, one summer more than likely as the story is set in the summer in a familiar setting—Long Island—in the 1920’s long before air conditioning. The ambience is sweaty and languid. Passengers on the train stick to the straw seats, a hot wind blows into the Buchanan house igniting the characters’ turbulent lives. Every page has a passage or turn of phrase to admire. And I always find something new: a foreshadowing I had missed, a plot connection overlooked. This time round was no different. I had downloaded the book onto my Kindle2 and read it straight through in a couple of hours. Where was I? On a bus, in the train, in the park. No, none of the above. I was in the book, a guest at Gatsby’s party, talking with Nick Carraway, the endearing peripheral narrator just turned thirty, on his overgrown front lawn about what had transpired in his neighbor’s house and berating him—how could you Nick?—for accepting Tom Buchanan’s invitation to go to the city to meet his ill-fated mistress. (Of course he had to accept this invitation, however seemingly callous. He is, after all, the person who tells the story and has to be in every scene in order to tell it.)

I also know that the book is not perfect. A masterpiece, yes, but not perfect. There is a paragraph that slips from past into present tense I had never noticed before, another that lists by name all the people who attend Gatsby’s parties that summer and goes on much too long. These flaws jumped out of my Kindle screen in high relief then disappeared with a click onto “next page.” The arc of the characters’ decline and/or evolving self-knowledge remained strong. The story and the writing have enormous force. Fitzgerald was writing his heart out.  Read More 

I write to you, dear reader, from a strange but not particularly exotic location: Las Vegas. My husband, a tournament table tennis player, is competing in the US Open. I promised him and myself I would be a cheerleader this year. It’s a gala international event, one I have never attended before. But I am nearly at the end of the revision of my murder mystery and felt slightly frustrated by the interruption of packing and travel. This is not new; writers are always complaining that “life” gets in the way of the writing. I have my antidote: I keep working as I travel, I keep working if I have company, I write every day if only in my journal and notebooks. Writing, as Ernest Hemingway said so succinctly, is a “moveable feast.” And so I have brought: notebooks and fine-tipped pens that don’t leak in airplanes, my computer, my cell phone and my Kindle2. And I am spending some of the day away from the tournament hoopla alone in a room on the 25th floor of the Hilton—a modest hotel by Las Vegas standards—that is wi-fi’d and has a spectacular view of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the distance. The room, where I watched the sun rise this morning, has become my atelier for three days, and my writing routine—once I fully recover from a long, difficult travel day—will be similar to the writing routine I make for myself anywhere: early morning reveries, work-out, write, revise, surface from solitude, hang out with friends and family, have some fun, read, nap, swim, write some more, talk to people, ask questions, listen, record their stories.
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I wrote a poem this morning. It didn’t take me long—it’s a sestet—and once it was done I’d managed to encapsulate a feeling I’d had yesterday as I walked along the Hudson River and stopped to watch the nesting hawks in a tree just north of the Boat Basin Café. I don’t know if the poem will ever be published; it doesn’t matter. It began in my journal and became a poem after I read a sestet by Charles Wright on Garrison Keillor’s “Writer’s Almanac." The reading, the writing are all good practice. But I liked the poem so much that I sent it out to family and friends, publication enough.

I’m a morning writer and, unless I am traveling or unwell, I rarely skip putting pen to paper during the first moments of a new day. I begin with the intimate, confessional journal I write only for myself and usually destroy once it’s done. In this notebook—a cheap one—I record my dreams, miseries, joys, challenges and ideas. I flag the ideas and put them into another notebook and/or a file on my computer marked “ideas.” I have a slew of them, probably more than I will ever get to write in my lifetime. I don’t know what form they’ll take—fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or something else I have not yet tried, a play for example. I’ve always wanted to write a play. At the moment I am revising a murder mystery—a first for me. The idea came to me as I was having my hair cut last summer at a salon in upstate New York. The owner of the salon was in the midst of a terrible tragedy: her son had disappeared. The haircut receded in importance and when it was done I stayed and talked for another hour or so about the disappearance, the investigation, all the minutest details of the case. I knew I’d have to write about it either as a journalist or a fiction writer. I considered my hair cutter’s privacy and suffering. Rather than delve and probe, I decided to imagine. The story became a fiction. Mostly, I was interested in a mother who had lost her son. I could easily identify. The case was unsolved so a journalistic approach would not have led very far anyway. Even when the boy’s body washed up on the shores of the Hudson, the case remained unsolved, and the suffering continued.

I wrote my first thoughts down in my workbook/sketchbook when I got home after first hearing the story. I went onto the internet to do some probing and began to sketch out a story. I wrote a first draft in twelve weeks.

Over the years, I’ve noticed that some of my students have difficulty keeping journals and notebooks on a regular basis so I ask them to keep observational sketchbooks for the duration of the workshop, at least. I don’t call them journals as that sometimes feels too daunting or prissy or exposing, I call them sketchbooks. An artist’s sketchbook is always practice and so is a writer’s journal so the shift in the title is just a bit of a trick to get my students going. Mea culpa, I confess it here. The point is that writing practice—experiencing the world as a writer—eventually takes hold and becomes immensely enjoyable.

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