Fear of Sharing - Stow it Away

We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and perfect persons. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Self Reliance Project I've embarked on requires me to respond to prompts given once a day for 30 days in a row

Today's prompt by Gwen Bell

You just discovered you have fifteen minutes to live.

1. Set a timer for fifteen minutes.

2. Write the story that has to be written.

Fifteen minutes to live? 

My first urge is to pack all my folders, all printed materials in a box, to schlep all the files and folders on the three Macs I work on to the shared Drop-box and dump. Dump everything in the file I share with my husband (is there enough space?). And then what? I'll be dead. Will he care enough, will he have the gumption to do what needs to be done to get the story out that needs to be written?

Needs to be written? Get out of here! It's all been written. I've been writing since 1980 when IDTV director Harry de Winter lend me one of the Brother typewriters that was used in his office on the Kloveniersburgwal in Amsterdam. I'd pick up the machine and a cassette at 5 p.m. on Friday and return it on Monday morning.

At the time I was working on an opera by Milhaud and Cocteau. Juri Voogd, the director introduced me to Harry in Café Frascati. Harry was curious, where did I come from, a Jewish girl in Amsterdam he had never met, that seemed impossible. So I told him I had lived in Amsterdam until age seven, when my parents and I moved out of town, back to nature.

In 1963 "up north" to Allardsoog could be likened to emigrating to Australia. Raised in isolation, in the middle of the fields, without relatives or friends, I thought we, my father and I, were the last Jews. Not unlike The Last of the Mohicans. My father's mother, after whom I was named was gassed in Auschwitz, so was my father's sister Beppie, her husband Simon, and their children. Whether these cousins were boys or girls, and how many there were, I never heard from him.

My father's brother Jacques was killed at sea, he was the cook on a Merchant Marine ship. My dad never talked about Jacques' wife and children, I gathered there were none. The times that Papa called his surviving sibling Marie on the phone, making contact just for me, he'd hang up after a few minutes. They didn't get along. My father wasn't on speaking terms with Maupie (short for Maurits) either. Maupie was my half-brother, my father's son from his first marriage to aunt Poldi. One of my dolls was a gift from her. I only knew handsome Maupie from a photograph.

The alarm just went off, I'm dead and I haven't told the story I need to write, no, that I need to share. Even the threat of death can't make me come to the point. How pathetic is that? 

For me, writing or creating something is not the problem. I've got loads of material that's already written, and believe me I did get to the point. 

Come back you hear! I'm not finished yet!

This work by by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Garden Design + Blogging Ghostwriters

Five years ago I created the Tuin van Mariënhof garden blog for my friends Jeannette and Meinoud. It all started when I learned that they planned to open the gate to the garden of their monumental estate de Mariënhof to paying visitors. All they had at the time was a simple flier. That they would attract many more interested people if they had an Internet presence was obvious. At the time I had just launched my website DutchessAbroad as well as my blog Hope Filled Jars. I caught the blogging bug and was ready to spread the luv.

An avid gardener myself I derived great joy from finding relevant information to link to the posts I created from their email, intermittently adding my own content. Since I posted all texts —whether derived from my friends' email messages (heavily edited by me) or my own material— in first person plural (we, the landlords of this formidable estate) I basically operated as ghostwriter.

While I loved every minute (or rather the many hours) spent on the content of the garden blog, I often wondered why hardly anyone responded. To be honest, there was only one person (a blogger on the isle of Texel) who engaged in a conversation with me, the writer. Were the readers on to something?

Per definition ghostwriters don't get credit for what they write, it's the client who attracts all attention. In a way the role of a ghostwriter is comparable to that of a landscape architect, or a professional gardener. An important difference however, is that the designer of the lay-out of the grounds will receive credit for his or her work. The same is true of the gardeners who maintain the yard, prune trees & bushes, and keep plants bug free. People are after all always happy to brag about their hired help, unless the help is a ghostwriter.

Comments are feathers on a blogger's hat, the art of blogging is after all dialogue. Visitors of a blog address their comments to the person who "speaks to them", the voice that tells the stories. Usually that's the blogger. If readers feel engaged, if they wish to lead others to their own blog or website, or if they just want to give a thumbs up, they'll respond by leaving a comment on the blog itself.

However, if there's a discrepancy between writer and the storyteller, visitors may send their comments directly to the latter's email address, rather than honoring the writer and the storyteller at the same time by leaving a comment on the blog. A paid-for ghostwriter will live with that knowledge, she after all pockets praise in another form. How well a blogger is paid depends on the value that's put on the writing.

Think it's a goldmine? Consider the fees published by Nicola for blog post subscriptions:
1 post per month $26
4 posts per month, once a week at $24 per post
8 posts per months, two per week at $22 per post

For me blogging about the Mariënhof was not a lucrative enterprise; it was a way to help my friends, and to maintain a virtual garden in my home country. Today their email messages (heavily edited by me) combined with my own contributions add up to 260 posts. Whether browsers are looking for a picture of a blossom of a hazelnut tree, or the architectural feature inspired by Acanthus, Google will take them to the blog of an estate in a hamlet in the countryside north of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

It's time for yours truly to focus on her own blogs and most important her book, about art, nuts and love in a cold climate.

As for readers enticing readers to post comments, I'll be working on the art of blogging/ dialogue here, at Write Day-in Day-Out, at Hope Filled Jars and occasionally at SheWrites or ExpatHAREM, and of course I'll be posting comments on blogs of participants of Dialogue2010 and other writers.

Chocolate Experiments

My tongue, drawn from front to back along the glob of melted milk chocolate stuck to the roof of my mouth creates a clucking sound when it comes loose in the back of my throat. The best way to savor an Easter egg is to suck on the chocolate until dissolved.

I knew that as a kid.

Inquisitive about food matters by nature I wondered what would happen if you were to melt a chocolate egg on a 'droog biscuitje' (Maria wafer). What I had in mind was laying the cookie on the back of our wood and cole burning stove.
Would the cookie burn before the chocolate was soft enough to spread out?
Noticing the seam line in the chocolate I decided to make two chocolate covered cookies, for faster results and less chance for scorching. Unable to wait for the chocolate to melt all the way, I stuck another biscuitje on top of the barely melted half egg and turned the sandwich over before the bottom got burned.
Eureka!
This happened after an earlier delicious discovery of a slice of bread covered with ripe banana slices and chocolate shavings.
Not long after the instant paste was marketed at the new thing. Making me wonder how the factory owner had got into my mind.
But at the time of the choco sandwich all I thought about was how to get another egg.
Surely my mom had some stashed away …

Yep, I'm working on a memoir. This time it's about growing up isolated from the world, with an old daddy who suffered from PTSD (WWI + WWII) and a mommy who struggled with chronic psychosis. Enough fodder for a story or 2(00).

Narrative Magazine

Yes, I do write day-in, day-out. That's why I'm not blogging, ha, ha. 

Not to say anything bad about blogging (I've got a few blogs I try to keep relatively up-to-date), but most of my writing happens in the obscure writer's den in my basement, where wrestling with words transforms an otherwise rather civil word smith into a Revisor. With a capital R, yes. 

Still, one of these days I hope to send my story of the week (or the month, the year, or the decade) to Narrative Magazine, one of the most happening online writers' venues of our time. And perhaps I'll be able to get something to them before the Winter Contest's deadline March 31st.

The Kindly Ones

Bilingual writer Jonathan Littel (he has dual citizenship —American/French) wrote his novel Les Bienveillantes (2006) in French. Dutch literator Peter Steinz reports that Littell had no interest in producing the English version of his successful novel himself.

It's understandable that the author after five years of research followed by six months of actually writing is finished with the book, and has no interest in translating the text.

The chance that the original creator of a manuscript fashions another version of his own book for his readership in the other language is great. A translator however, is bound and bonded to produce a version in the other (second, third whatever how maniest) language that's true to the original text.

When a writer is not fluid in, or even familiar with the language into which his work is translated, he will have to trust the ability of the translator and accept what others say about the translation.
According to Steinz Les Bienveillantes was beautifully translated in Dutch (De Welwillenden) by Jeanne Holierhoek and Janneke van der Meulen (Arbeiderspers). Steinz by the way considers "The Kindly Ones" to be the "nickname" of, rather than a euphemism for, the nasty Furies (Aeschylus - Oresteia).

With all respect for translators (what a tremendously difficult job they have), I find it terribly difficult to enjoy reading novels in translation when I know the first language in which the work is written my self. I'm bothered by the constant critique of my inner editor who questions everything that's being said. That is, I constantly find myself translating sentences back into the original language, wondering, is this really what s/he wrote?

Personally I don't know how Littel manages to distance himself from the translation of his work into English, arguably either his first or second language (born in the US he received part of his education in France, and went to college at Yale).

It makes me think of Jan Willem van de Wetering, who once told me that he worked on both versions, Dutch and English simultaneously on two laptops. Working on two versions at the same time, is laborious and time consuming, yet in the end you have two manuscripts. And you'll rest assured that each says exactly what you had in mind.

There's something to say for letting go though. Especially since there's always the danger that if you translate your own work after the final version in one language is finished, that you wind up with a truly different book.
Question is, would that be a danger?
Perhaps the author's, let's call it —transversion— from say English to Dutch, can then be translated into English by a Dutch English translator. Wouldn't it be interesting to see whether we'd wind up with an identical twin, or a fraternal one?

In the US The Kindly Ones is published by Harper Collins and expected March 3, 2009.

Hotel St. George Press Correspondences

A few days ago I read about Ben Greenman's new book: Correspondences, a collaborative effort of the author and the creative team at Hotel St. George, I should write at "the Hotel St. George Press, but the intrigue of the Press actually comes out of a virtual location —the Hotel. Well, you better go see for your self.

Entering the site is almost like participating in some off the wall participatory theater project. I kid you knot. What did I just write? Knot. Well, that's because I couldn't quite wrap my brain around the —how do they do it and what is this all about— matter of the Press. Since visiting Hotel St. George, my mind is somewhat akin to a knot. But don't let that scare you away, I am after all Dutch and our bilingual efforts sometimes get lost in translation.

In the article I read about Ben Greenman on the NextBook site, he threw some interesting material at the reader, such as Boot Camp in Utah of all places. Actually it's a Rebooters Camp, and it doesn't involve crawling through tunnels of barbed wire, visiting the site is less stressful than the word may invite one to think.

Anyway, before I continue with this flow of thought and lose you and myself in this all together, I'm going to add some links and tags and then move over to my main writing project, for this was more than enough side stepping, meandering et cetera for now.

Ploughshares Non-Fiction

How very exciting, Ploughshares, the literary journal published at Emerson College has chosen one of my favorite authors, Kathryn Harrison as the guest editor for the Fall issue of 2009. According to the Writer's Guidelines , the magazine publishes three times a year: mixed issues of poetry and fiction in the Spring and Winter and a fiction issue in the Fall.

But, here it comes: Kathryn Harrison has decided the Fall issue of 2009 will be dedicated to NON-FICTION. Yea!
Submission of non-fiction pieces, be it autobiography, memoir, personal essay, personal profile, and limited biography, they're all welcome.
Deadline for submission is January 1, 2009.