Revision. Take a big gulp of air and cut out a big hunk of text. “Kill your darlings” — the most famous dictum, from Faulkner. Or, conversely, add those three little words that make all the difference. You can’t possibly make it right the first time, so you have to go back, again and again and again, until you get it. The writing will never be perfect, but perhaps less imperfect.
Category Archives: Jean Zimmerman
For Mothers
Mother’s Day is sometimes sneered at as a Hallmark Holiday, but that’s not how it began. Julia Ward Howe called for its institution in 1870 as a war protest that would instead uphold peace and motherhood around the world. The holiday wasn’t made official in the U.S. when it was proposed in 1908, but by 1909 forty-six states were holding Mother’s Day services. In 1914 Woodrow Wilson signed the holiday into law as the 2nd Sunday in May. In those days white carnations marked the occasion. Today my daughter gave me red tulips, chocolate covered strawberries and a day in a sculpture park.
Filed under History, Home, Jean Zimmerman
King Lear
Happy 200th birthday, Edward Lear!
When I was growing up, one of my great favorites was his epic “The Pobble Who Has No Toes.”
It begins:
“The Pobble who has no toes
Had once as many as we;
When they said, ‘Some day you may lose them all;’–
He replied, — ‘Fish fiddle de-dee!’
And his Aunt Jobiska made him drink,
Lavender water tinged with pink,
For she said, ‘The World in general knows
There’s nothing so good for a Pobble’s toes!'”
Lear’s Book of Nonsense, featuring limericks and illustrations, is genius. No one is too old for Lear.
Filed under Jean Zimmerman, Poetry
In Tune
“The Fiddle and the Spade” is a song performed by a fiddler during the Imbrocks’ Advent Wassail, in Chapter 22 of The Orphanmaster. I’ve posted it at the music tab under the Orphanmaster tab, so check it out.
Filed under Jean Zimmerman, Music, The Orphanmaster
Road Show
Making plans for a road trip, out to great unwashed Wisconsin and back, in August. That’s unfair, Wisconsinites are nothing if not washed. Gil and I will have a third driver since Maud is coming along, and a source of ready aggravation since we’re bringing Oliver the pit beagle. A lot of traveling this summer, and yet I can’t seem to find the right shoes, with the proper width, lift and look. Maybe I’ll find them in the midwest. I’m going to make stops at independent bookstores along the way in Milwaukee, Chicago and Cleveland. I can’t wait.
Filed under Jean Zimmerman
A Healthy Helping
My allotment of books arrives! But you’ll have to wait to get one; they’re embargoed until June 19th.
Filed under Jean Zimmerman, Publishing, The Orphanmaster
A College Try
Participated in an annual benefit event called Authors on Stage for the Wellesley College Library alongside fellow authors Howard Frank Mosher and Chris Tilghman. Two hundred ladies made a gracious and attentive audience for our remarks — I presented on Love, Fiercely. A lot of people took signed books with them; I hope they saw as I do that the book makes a perfect Mother’s Day gift!
Filed under Jean Zimmerman, Love, Fiercely
Lobster Tales
Had a deconstructed lobster in a restaurant in Wellesley, MA, where I’m due to speak re: Love, Fiercely on an author’s panel tomorrow. Thought about Antony diving for lobsters in the East River in The Orphanmaster. Wellesley a swanky town in the New England style, everything spic and span, especially the townsfolk.
Filed under Jean Zimmerman
Meat Me at H-Mart
Beef heels, pork jowls, bulgogi. These are the cuts I didn’t get at H-Mart today. It’s a huge pan-Asian supermarket around 20 minutes from the cabin and is the type of place where you can get beasts chopped up in innumerable different formats (I didn’t need chicken feet, I brought some home recently for soup). There were piles and piles of produce, leaves and bulbs I’d never heard of or seen. Wild-caught fish, like the red snapper fresh with slime that I had the fishmonger clean (head off, please) to bake later. This place is an oasis in Shop-Rite-Ville, Westchester County. We don’t even have to cook dinner tonight since we got seaweed and fermented black beans and dumplings and kimchi to go.
Filed under Cooking, Jean Zimmerman
Fur Frenzy
I posted an article on the 17th century fur trade in America under the Orphanmaster tab, so check it out. Ours was a country erected on a hat, specifically a hat made of a beaver pelt deconstructed into the finest felt money could buy. We wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for the European fashion sense.
Filed under Fashion, Jean Zimmerman
Into the Sun
I woke up slightly unwell. A swollen throat. Slight throbbing in head. A not negligible weariness weighing me down, so I didn’t feel up to doing too much. I read (something good: Gods Without Men, by Hari Kunzru), changed my sheets, dozed.
Yet I don’t think I was sick.
Yesterday I shipped off the second draft of Savage Girl to my first and best reader after a lot of thought and intense reworking. It’s weird to come out of that world, the Manhattan of the 1870s, with both horrific murders and fancy dress debuts coexisting in my characters’ lives. At one point they emerge from the cool interior of the then new, now demolished Grand Central Station to the blazing heat of the New York sidewalks in July. That’s kind of how I felt today, stunned by having completed the manuscript and sent it in.
The Old Grand Central Station
Filed under Fiction, Jean Zimmerman, Savage Girl, Writing
Here At Last
There is no experience quite like tearing open a mail package and finding the first printed copy of your new hardcover book. Yes, The Orphanmaster arrived at the cabin this morning, looking much like the beautiful galley but oh so different at the same time. There’s the heft, for one thing. The raised white type. (A scary black shadow encroaches from the left, taking a little bite out of the O.) The clarity of the cover image. And just the fact that this is my book, after hard and long work finally in print and ready to descend upon the world. A book gestates privately — no one can really understand the world you’ve created (even if you blather on about it continually) — but suddenly that world is available to everyone. Welcome.
Filed under Fiction, Jean Zimmerman, Publishing, The Orphanmaster, Writing
Cheez
Home from Holland, my parents brought me a wheel of Gouda. Or How-da, as they say. Howdy, gouda! Apparently the company that makes this particular brand of gouda maintains at least a dozen cheese stores around the country. Imagine. The only region of the U.S. that has that kind of devotion to, or need for, cheese is the midwest, where giant supermarkets offer refrigerated piles of blocks of the stuff, divided into yellow, white, and mottled (colby). You take your life into your hands asking a supermarket worker for blue, feta or, worst of all, parmesan. Well, you can get a green can of it in aisle 4.
Filed under Cooking, Jean Zimmerman
Frogs and Salamanders
Thinking about the Hudson River reminds me of an e-newsletter I get that is really fantastic if you’re interested in the flora and fauna of the river. It’s a compendium of peoples’ seasonal observations compiled by a naturalist with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. There’s always something great there, whether the item concerns shad or eagles or butterflies. Here is a bit from the current newsletter:
“4/21 – Lake Hill, HRM 100: I was working in my basement near midnight with a steady, heavy-at-times rain falling outside. I noticed a tree frog in the basement and put it outside through the “cat” door. A few minutes later, I noticed another frog and placed it outside. Then I began to notice several red-backed salamanders of various sizes that I also put outside. Another two frogs soon joined them, one a tree frog and the other a pickerel frog. Just when I was beginning to wonder if maybe the light in the basement was attracting the amphibians, the “mother” of all salamanders walked slowly toward me. The seven-inch-long spotted salamander was huge compared to the red-backs. I carefully picked it up and, surprisingly, it put up less of a struggle than the red-backed salamanders. I placed it outside and shut the cat door. Though I thoroughly checked the basement in the morning, no amphibians were in sight. There were no aftermaths from my night experiencing a minor version of one of the “10 Plagues” from the book of Exodus. – Reba Wynn Laks”
Okay, this is terrifying, especially because we just found a snake in our kitchen, but I’m glad to know about it.
To subscribe to the Hudson River Almanac, send an email message to hrep@gw.dec.state.ny.us and write E-Almanac in the subject line.
Filed under Jean Zimmerman, Nature
Hudson Walk
We walked north along Haverstraw Bay on this blustery day, the Hudson choppy and the wind socking us in the face as we went. Croton redesigned its waterfront a few years back, eliminating native scrub and little overflow tidal pools from the river, replacing what was there with a concrete walkway and barren expanses of grass. A few tall trees remain, survivors, looking awkward. I couldn’t help but think of the past. This land west of the railroad could never be called pristine, it was all landfill, but still there was the illusion of this being a wild bank of the Hudson. And before the railroad came through in the 1830’s, you could actually walk down to the river’s edge, mosey around, fish, launch your skiff, whatever. Washington Irving, living on the Hudson a short distance downstream in Irvington, agonized when the railroad came through his back yard. Our experience of this fantastic waterway is so truncated now, and yet people swarm the concrete-grass park, yearning for a taste of the river.
Filed under History, Jean Zimmerman, Nature
Jean Zimmerman 