Writing Letters - Not an art lost to everyone

Dear Friends,

Here's a bit of that garland

Most of you know I love writing letters. I've been writing handwritten letters pretty regularly since I was a teenager, when many of my closest friends lived far away. Through college I got through the long summer months and Christmas vacations by writing to my college friends, and then in grad school I got so many letters that my coworkers working in the office would tease me about it. Particularly the letters I'd get from Owen. He and I wrote dozens and dozens of paper, posted letters (well over a hundred, I'd say), some of them a decade before we started dating. When we got married we clothes-pinned them into a sort of garland to use as a celebration of our love so far, and also a bit of joy that we'd be having the same address soon.

It's pretty clear that writing letters is important to me. Why do I love letters so much? Why do I like slow, paper letters in an age of texting? Here are some reasons why I think notes and letters are still worth writing.

From one of Van Gogh's letters

• Letters show another person that you value them. There's a bit of effort involved in writing a letter, and it's even more noticeable now because there are so many more efficient ways of communicating. Putting in that effort is a great way to let someone they mean a lot to you. I've been very moved reading some of the letters Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his brother, Theo. They were faithful correspondents for many years and exchanged hundreds of letters, full of encouragement and steadfast friendship.

Vermeer gets the importance of letters

• Letters emphasize the importance of thoughtful communication. There are a lot of ways to show a friend or a significant other that you care about them, (giving gifts, spending time, going on adventures) but writing a letter puts a special emphasis on communication. If you write a letter to someone, you're saying you were thinking about them, and that you trust them with your thoughts. To me, this seems pretty special.
• Letters allow enormous room for creativity and beauty. Most digital means of communication leave little room for creative expression outside of the composition of the message. In letters it's very easy to mix written text with pictures or stickers or crazy paper, or include a bag or tea or an origami piece or drawings or whatever else.
  
• Letters acknowledge distance, but fight against its pain. Sometimes when I'm flying a long distance I get a little disoriented by how fast I'm moving. It doesn't seem like it should be possible to scoot over a whole country in such short time, and it makes it feel like the distance is somehow artificial. Like it doesn't exist or something. If I'm driving or taking a train I feel like the distance matters. Emails and letters have a similar dichotomy in my mind. Like riding a train, Letters take a fair amount of time to get somewhere. With email it doesn't matter if you're across the room or around the globe. It's like you're pretending that distance doesn't exist. The message travels through "cyberspace" but letters? I hold them in my hand, write with my hand, put them in a box and it takes effort for them to go via cars and boats and trains and finally a walking post worker putting the envelopes in the mailboxes, and then into the hands of people I love. Sure it's a long way, but this letter can make it.
• Letters make people happy. Because letters are so special, they can make people really happy! It's happen when you get a letter, and if it's a good letter, it can make you happy again and again as you read it later in life. Here's some examples of incredible letters from The Smithsonian Archives.

If you're interested in doing this, here are some suggestions to help you over some initial hesitations.

Letters we've received in the Netherlands

• Don't know who to write to? Write to your mom. Or another family member. Write to a kid you know. Or if you want you can even write to me. I'm slow sometimes, but I'll write back. :)
• Don't know what to write about? Write about whatever you like talking about with the person you're writing to. Or write things you wish you said. Say thank you for stuff. Tell "remember when?" stories. Tell them what you're thinking or feeling or what's getting you excited lately.
• Don't like your handwriting? It's okay! It's probably better than you think it is, but it's also not required for you to hand write the letters. Printing out a typed letter is also great. If you want to improve your handwriting, there's no better way than practicing.
• Don't know what to use as stationary? You can buy stationary, but my favorite sort of letters come written on paperstuff from my friends' lives. Scribbled in the margins of a concert program or on the back of a pamphlet for a school fair. One of my friends once bought an old book of nature photography and cut it up into envelopes. I also love letters written on regular old paper. Notebook paper, computer paper, paper scribbled on by two year olds? Everything's good. 

So that's my plug for letter writing. I'm not trying to turn you all into letter writing fanatics, but I think it's a special thing and something that doesn't need to disappear. It takes a little time and effort, but to my mind, it's worth it.

With love,
Clara

More of the tulips

—guest post by Owen

When Clara made her recent post about tulips and poetry, she didn't have access to my photos from our bike trip.  So now that my camera's pictures have uploaded as well, I'm making this second blog post to show them to you as well:

As part of our bike trip, our Dutch teacher took us to the coast at Noordwijk.  The terrain was quite new to us, as we'd never biked over wooded hills or along grassy dunes before in the Netherlands:

And then there was the sea itself!  Of all of us, Clara was the only one to get her feet wet.

Thanks for reading!

How Poetry is like a Tulip Field

On Sunday I went on a five hour bike trip through the bulb fields. Our Dutch teacher suggested we go to Noordwijk, her hometown, and led the way through fields of tulips. We did a little of this last year, but we were early for the tulips so it was mostly daffodils, and hyacinths, and what we found of them we stumbled upon by accident. It was a real pleasure to have a guide who knew the way so well. She even asked her friends which intersections or roads had the best views for this particular weekend. I've been wanting to write a post about poetry, but I also really wanted to post something about these bulbs so here are some ways in which fields of tulips are like poetry.

They both show the ordinary made extraordinary.
Tulips have always been a part of spring for me. My mom has some in the garden, they're in parks, and their sweet cups of color have always made me happy but experiencing the sheer number of tulips together that you see when biking the fields this time of year is so extravagant, so impressive. They don't even seem like tulips anymore, you experience them both as the flowers, but also as enormous blocks of color filling your vision. Poetry transforms words in a similar way. Not only does poetry make us look at the world around us in a new way, it makes us look at words in a new way too. Poets make you listen to words, feel them in meter, and notice their sounds or similarities.

They are both rare.
One of the things so special about tulip fields is how easy they are to miss. Eleven months of the year, they're green or brown like any other field. It's as if they've magically transformed into something different--I feel the same way about flowering trees. Most of the year they're pretending to be normal, unassuming flora, but for a short time they're covered in pink blossoms, or maybe in the fall it turns all crimson and orange? It feels as though you've been let in on a secret to see this little glimpse of beauty. I love poetry, but I realized writing this post that I didn't bring a single book of (nondramatic) poetry with me when I came to live in Holland. Most people spend a tiny fraction of the their time reading, (even if they read literature) reading poetry.

Tulip fields and poetry are both arresting.
Especially on an overcast day, the brightness of the colors of the flowers is so arresting that it's difficult to look away. When you're biking this means you need to keep a little of your brain paying attention to your biking so you don't swerve into a ditch or another biker. If the flash of distant color hides behind a barn or warehouse, I find myself biking faster to see it reappear on the other side. Poetry feels the same way for me, I remember reading the WWI poets for the first time in high school and how those words caught me up. Wilfred Owen's description of the soldier as "guttering, choking, drowning" in the gas around him and just keeling in the horror of those words. I remember reading poems (some upsetting, some beautiful) again and again, because they drew me, captured my attention in ways that more commonplace descriptions of the same events or ideas could not.

They are both experiential.
I've been on the train going through the bulb fields this time of year, you'll see a whole train car go silent as everyone stops conversation and looks out the window. Even those glued to their phones look up to see what has got everyone's attention. Much poetry is written to be read out loud, often experienced as a group. Some of my favorite experiences of poetry have involved friends getting together and reading poems out loud. Maybe all of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets. Maybe reading the American Lit assignment in the sunshine of the quad. In a camp I worked at each camper wrote a sonnet for another camper as a means of bonding, and you really had to work hard to put together your thoughts into a strict structure. Recently in Dutch class we were listening to songs in Dutch, and Owen was so moved by the words of this particular song that he translated it out and read it to me in English. We were both a little teary eyed by the end of it.

I wish I could take everyone reading this biking through the tulip fields, but I can at least point you in the direction of some good poetry. If anyone's interested I can put together a big list of some of my favorite poems, or poems to read if you're not sure you like reading poetry, but for now I'll just leave you some Keats.

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half-light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Who are your favorite poets? Do you have a favorite poem? Write poetry yourself? I'd love to hear about it.

"What do you do?", "You should...", and other anxiety-inducing phrases.

In the last two years, there have been a lot of conversations in my life that start with, "so, what do you do?" If any of you are wondering, here are some answers I usually give.

Most often I say something like, "I'm here in Leiden because my husband works for the University, and I'm not working full time, and it's been nice to have one of us at home, handling the heavy lifting of moving and adjusting to a new place. But I do teach violin lessons, tutor English students, and babysit."

If they're a teacher or a student I might say, "I'm a bit of an academic out of water at the moment. I study English Literature, but here isn't exactly the best place for me to do it, so I'm working on my own for now." I might add, "I did get to present at a conference in Scotland last year and that was great, and last year I wrote about once a week for an online Shakespeare news source." or possibly, "I just got hired to teach Shakespeare online at a homeschool academy online, so that'll start this fall."

At church I sometimes answer, "Many different things. I am pretty involved in my church, I play in the praise band, help run several of the ministries, organize the church library, and things like that. I'm often lumped in with the moms, because I'm not working full time, but I don't have children, so it's an interesting position to be in."

I know I am not the only one who dreads this question, and hopes my answers don't invoke pity or fear. That would be a tragedy.

Sometimes I give answers saying that I've been looking for work. Mostly not, because when I say I am looking for jobs, I am so often flooded with advice. I tell the sad and laborious stories of applying for many jobs, following many leads provided by friends every one of which hasn't worked out, and respond to many, many, many sentences beginning with the phrase, "you should."

That word, "should" is such a tricky word. I've been tutoring a Spanish speaker who is hoping to improve her English, so we've been working together. She has many questions, often questions on how to ask questions, and I find myself using the word should again and again. "How should I get there?" "Where should I put my coat?" And she asks about it, and so I explain, "we use it as a polite word, to ask someone's opinion. What they think is the best thing to do." And I realize that when someone asks with that word, "should" as in, "Where should I" or "what should I?" one must value the other person's opinion. When I resent the "you should"s around me, I dislike them because I feel like other people are not appreciating my own struggle. If they don't know my difficulties, don't know what I've tried, of course they will not be as effective at helping me. I am a little ashamed of my dismissal of the quick opinions of well meaning people.

Ashamed and anxious. Ashamed because I don't want them to think that I haven't tried what they see as obvious solutions to my long term problem, but also anxious that I do the very same thing. This anxiety as raised a lot of questions in my mind and heart.

How much do I judge other people by their jobs, their accomplishments?

Am I looking down on people whose work isn't as intellectual or stimulating as my personal preference?

How much of my identity have I tied to my occupation?

Have I always been jealous of other people's successes?

When did I stop seeing free time as a gift? a joy?

In what other ways have I devalued the basic everyday work of people who serve others?

How can I broaden my respect and appreciation for the people around me?

These are all questions I'm still thinking about, but that last one I can answer at least in part. And it's something I want to answer well, because maybe in five years I'll have a more normal answer to the question "What do you do?" but I hope to have learned enough to ask different questions myself, so I can listen better and judge less. I think that we can grow in respect and appreciation for each other by listening. By asking questions about people's lives, not just where they'll spend their time this week, but what's made them who they are today. What they hope for, what their struggles have been, how different things affected them, or how their life might be different or similar to your own. If we build understanding, we can get to a place where we want to know people's advice in our lives. We want to know it because we are friends, we know each other and trust each other. I think that can be a beautiful thing.

Anyone else struggling with these same issues? Wishing your story was better heard? I'd love to listen.

Rotterdam Redeemed

—guest post by Owen

Until a couple of weeks ago, I had only negative associations with the name "Rotterdam."

• Rotterdam is the setting for the unhappy beginning of the Ender's Shadow series by Orson Scott Card. This series also led me to mistakenly believe Rotterdam was in Belgium.
• Our trans-atlantic shipment of household goods was held hostage in a Rotterdam warehouse for two months.
• Our trip to Prague fell through because our flight out of the Rotterdam airport was canceled.
• We were once nearly stranded in Rotterdam overnight because Dutch public transit stops at 8pm on New Year's Eve. (Kudos to my amazing family for being so chill through that unexpected part of the adventure.)
• And on top of it all, "Rotterdam" starts with "rot." (It doesn't actually mean "rot." In fact, the name "Rotterdam" comes from a word meaning "mud.")

But none of this is Rotterdam's fault. So I'm pleased to report that our latest intra-Netherlands excursion (incursion?) has lifted the mental stigma I've attached to Rotterdam in the past.

It started when a friend of Clara's noticed that one of the entries on a list of beautiful libraries was in the Netherlands. "Have you been?" she wanted to know. No, we hadn't, but a little digging turned up that it wasn't too far away, so we filed the idea away for later. A couple weeks ago, we had a Saturday free, and decided to go.

Photo from bustler.net

This amazing library—the Boekenberg, or "book mountain"—is in a suburb of Rotterdam called Spijkenisse. Here are some pictures from our trip:

Our first trip on the Dutch metro system we didn't know existed. It goes all the way from the Hague to Rotterdam!

The outside of the Boekenberg.

The top floor is a study area where we read Our Town together.

The inside of the mountain has rooms for reading, like this children's section.

Elsewhere in Spijkenisse, we saw our first example of yarn-bombing in the wild.

We also caught this beautiful rainbow.  Our cries of "Kijk naar de regenboog!" did not seem to excite passers-by, though.

We explored a bit of downtown Rotterdam as well.  The cranes are so beautiful.

The architecture is beautiful too.

That's it for today! Thanks for reading. Have you ever been pleasantly surprised by a place you'd put off visiting?

Some thoughts about Race and a list of picture books

Over the last few months I have been in near constant distress about the racial issues in this world. I was, I suppose, naively shocked by items in the US news with a police officer shooting the unarmed Michael Brown, and read story after story about protests and heavily armed police and struggled to look for hope as ugly events kept flowing in. Living in The Netherlands in November and December doesn't help much because of the "Zwarte Pieten" or "black Peters" the little helpers to the Dutch version of Santa Claus. I know this is a complex issue, with a lot of history and the tradition has changed a great deal for the better. But living in a progressive, tolerant, and beautiful country where it's normal to see children wearing blackface or hear them singing songs with the chorus, "dumme, dumme, dumme Zwarte Pieten!" (that's "stupid, stupid, stupid black Peter!") scares me for the future of this world. I had just convinced myself that the Dutch were more racist than the Americans when I heard more news that the grand jury had ruled that Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot Michael Brown would not even face trial. And somehow these things kept surprising me. Surprising me the way my classmates in Virginia grad school surprised me when I said, "but interracial marriage isn't a big deal anymore" and everyone in my class looked at me like I had lived in some kind of ignorant bubble. And perhaps, mercifully, I had? I had a fair number of friends from mixed families in my homeschool groups, and in music lessons. My white uncle married a black woman and if it was a big deal in my family, I had, in fact missed it. I felt like the kids reacting to this Cherrios commercial: 

I love that it surprises these kids, but I don't love that it surprises me. I don't want be ignorant about these issues of prejudice, because they are clearly still issues. I also want to be honest about my own unconscious prejudices, including my reluctance to seek out books/movies/media focused on or written by people who don't have the same color skin that I do. This has never been something I've consciously thought. I have never walked around thinking, "I don't want to read any books by Toni Morrison, she's black!" but at the same time, I haven't read any books by Toni Morrison, and I read a lot. So what you could call my new year's resolution is reading a whole lot. I want to read many works of classic literature that I've missed so far, especially books by authors of color or dealing with race. I also want to read some non-fiction, such as "The New Jim Crow," which has been on my reading list for a while. So far I've read MLK's Why We Can't Wait, and Alice Walker's The Color Purple. I started Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon this morning. 

But I also wanted to make a list of books for children, because I am passionate about the impact of stories and pictures on children. Children's books have become less and less diverse in the last few decades as budget cuts to schools and libraries put buying power into the hands of the largely white middle class consumer. The people determining what goes on a best seller list are therefore not librarians and teachers looking for diversity, but parents and grandparents who (totally understandably) don't automatically think about race when choosing books. So here are some picture books and some names you might consider adding to your list when you go to the library, or even when you buy books for kids you know and love. 

Kadir Nelson, author and illustrator
Nelson's clear writing and majestic paintings have won a pile of awards, and his work respected well outside the field of children's literature. He has written a staggeringly excellent book on the history of African Americans for ages 9 or so and up, a biography of Nelson Mandela and one of Harriet Tubman, and has illustrated the words to several Spirituals. Sometimes a bit difficult to search for (as books are listed under author, not illustrator) so here are a few of his works that you might miss just by searching.  

Please, Puppy, Please by Spike Lee
Abe's Honest Words: The Life of Abraham Lincoln by Doreen Rappaport
Ellington Was Not A Street by Ntozake Shange
Henry's Freedom Box: A Story from the Underground Railroad by Ellen Levine
I Have a Dream by Martin Luther King Jr. 

Jacqueline Woodson, author
Woodson writes for many different age groups, but the link above is for her picture books. It's a really nicely set up website where you can get a good idea about the books by just scrolling through. One of her most widely acclaimed books, The Other Side, is about a black girl and a white girl who become friends in an intensely segregated town. She says she wrote it because, "I wanted to write about how powerful kids can be. [...] They don’t believe in the ideas adults have about things so they do what they can to change the world. We all have this power."

Nikki Grimes, author
I'm not as familiar with her work as with some of these authors but I just read her early reader Make Way for Dyamonde Daniel and it was great. She's known for her biography of Malcolm X, and A Pocketful of Poems, and When Gorilla Goes Walking.

Walter Dean Myers and his son, Christopher Myers are also good to know. WD Myers mostly wrote for older children (his YA book, Fallen Angels shaped my understanding of Vietnam), but he teamed up with his son for the wonderful poem of a book, Looking Like Me. Christopher Myer's Jabberwocky is also fantastic. 

Langston Hughes, My People photography by Charles R. Smith Jr.
This sparse, glowing poem is set to stunning sepia photographs: 

The night is beautiful,
So the faces of my people.
The stars are beautiful,
So the eyes of my people.
Beautiful, also, is the sun.
Beautiful, also, are the souls of my people. 

Books by Ezra Jack Keats
Keats was not black himself, but he often populated his books with black children as they were the children who lived near him in NYC. The Snowy Day was the first book with a child of color to win the prestigious Caldecott Award.

Books by Patricia Pollaco
Pollaco is from Eastern Europe (Ukraine, I believe) but she, like Ezra Jack Keats, writes and illustrates books with black and white children. My favorite is Chicken Sunday which is a great story for Easter or any time of year. It includes Pusanky eggs, a beautiful hat in the window, and a gospel choir who sing like low thunder and sweet rain. 







These are just a tiny few! February is Black History Month, so there will be more displays and such in libraries and hopefully bookstores. I've just been focusing on books with black characters and/or authors and illustrators because it seemed appropriate to the prejudice I'm seeing in the news and MLK day on Monday. But here are a couple more lists which include more races than just the black and the white.

Cooperative Children's Book Center's list 
The Gaurdian's list
Cynthia Leitich Smith's list
The Coretta Scott King Awards These are two awards given out by the American Library association to black Authors and Illustrators of books for children and young adults.

Do you have favorite books by black authors or illustrators? Books with black protagonists? I'd love to hear about them. And thanks for reading. 

Why November is my Favorite: A Story about Dahlias

in case you forgot which ones are the Dahlias

In our Dutch class this week, we were all telling "our news" in three sentences. As my last sentence I threw in that "deze maand is mijn favoriete maand" which led to all sorts of other questions. Why is November your favorite month? And with my limited ability to communicate I gave some reasons I love November, including that I like the change in weather. In October and even September you can feel a bit of crispness coming into the air, but in November you know the change is not coming, it's come, and I love that. I love bundling up in wool sweaters, coats and scarves to go outside. Then coming in to make and eat hot soup, drinking hot tea. I love lighting candles as the evening comes earlier and earlier. In Rochester, where I grew up, often the snow first comes in November, and I love that too. When I was small I found the snow particularly compelling, so beautiful, so sudden, such a joy in its quietness and its immensity.

half killed by frost

I didn't really learn to love November though till college, when I went to Houghton, a beautiful campus set in "the middle of nowhere," where there is not a single stop light, and making a proper grocery store run is a 40some minute trek through farmland and forest. Coming off of campus there is a certain road, named "Centerville," where I would walk several miles nearly every Sunday afternoon during three of my years at Houghton. It was a special pleasure in the fall, as each week more of the trees would turn crimson or orange, and then the colors would all fade to ashy gray. After all that color, the browns and yellows and grays seemed so peaceful, so rugged even. Perhaps it seemed particularly peaceful in contrast to the increasing workload of the semester. In a conversation about the month years back one of my friends said that a November landscape in very romantic, in a harsh, wild, Bronte-esque sort of romance. Another friend wrote a poem about November as the glowing center of a hearth when the fire is burned down. We were very connected to the seasons at Houghton, and we liked to talk about these things.

struggling against the cold

What also happened in my undergrad years is that I learned that my Dad liked November best of all the months. This surprised me, as he's an artist so I thought for sure that May or October or something would appeal more to his eye, but he said that there were several reasons. He loved that the world changes so much, that without leaves on the trees suddenly a whole new world is visible past the foliage. He also loved looking forward to the holidays. I can relate, since Thanksgiving has always been one of my favorites, and these days it is an American holiday that I can feel whole heartedly proud of, not just it as a current reminder to gratitude, but also the history of friendship with the Native Americans so terribly abused in much of the rest of the history of the US. And I feel also that expectation holds much of the joy of the holidays, so November can be even more happy than December (which can feel like a perpetual party) but then he told this story.

When my dad was young, his mother grew dahlias in their yard in Detroit. And in November the flowers would still be in bloom so very evening before a hard frost he would help her cover the dahlias with newspaper to keep them alive until morning. They would do this many times during the month, each threatening night putting up little paper barricades against the cold. But there would always come a time when the weatherman disappointed, and the cold was harsher than he and his mother expected, or perhaps they would have covered the plants only to find them the next morning edged in frost. And for that little glimpse in time before the sun rose the dahlias were more beautiful than ever. He would run inside for drawing paper and then sketch the frozen blossoms with his chilly hands, quickly before they melted and turned brown.

I know that November can be harsh and dark and ugly, and people have good reasons for disliking it, especially here in Holland where the spring is such a feast for the eyes, but I still love it. The long shadows, the golden light in the cold air, the wool socks, the snuggling up with covers, or the smell of dry leaves, or their crackle underfoot. I love the raw skies with their long, blue-gray clouds. It seems there is always so much to be thankful for, and so much to love.

Heartfelt thanks to Frank Richards and Jennifer McCallum for allowing me to use their beautiful photos of dahlias.