One of the particular pleasures I have as a publisher is to help writers answer the sometimes complex and tender question of “What next?”
This is the question we see Julia Child and M.F.K. Fisher asking themselves as they gather with their merry band of friends and begin to experience some not-so-merry moments. For both Julia and M.F., the question is intimately intertwined with what their friends are bringing to the proverbial table: dissonance, of one kind or another.
For M.F., the simplified path can be seen in this string of quotes that Barr includes in the mid-section of Provence, 1970:
M.F. needed to escape, and soon, to move beyond nostalgia and snobbery. She needed to write.
—p. 151
‘Picasso was a happy man in his 60s!’ M.F. exclaimed. She had turned sixty not that long ago herself, and was acutely aware of the ebb and flow of creativity. The perennial question of ‘What next?’ was looming ever larger in her mind.
—p. 159-160
If there was one thing Bedford and Olney had caused M.F. to realize, it was that she could no longer keep telling the same stories over and over again.
—p. 174
We often think of friendships as that warm-fuzzy place within which we find (and give) comfort and solace; as such, dissonance is probably not high on our list of desirable friendship experiences. But, if we think of friendship as a continuum, the way Julia seems to (the friendship with Beck was forever, she thinks, but the partnership needed to be over)—then it leaves space for a lot more variation, including dissonance that drives us to change. Whether the friendship can survive the dissonance or the ultimate changes is not always clear. Some do. Some don’t. (And I, for one, am fascinated by what encourages or discourages survival or exit.)
Julia, like M.F., is feeling the need for change, which is rooted in the need “for Beck to find her own way, just as she was doing. And she needed Beck to get out of her way.” Almost sounds like a parent-child relationship (no pun intended). And maybe that’s part of what helps us solve our mystery of what will happen to a relationship as dissonance arises: are there sufficient resources within each party, to ford the floods of emotion and change? Will each party respect the other’s need for both independence and care?
Of course, the “relationship” between M.F. and Olney and Bedford is not of the same depth as Julia’s and Beck’s, so perhaps the issue of survival is a moot point on that count. Regardless, for both M.F. and Julia, friendship coziness has given over to claustrophobia. They need to escape, and pursue their “What next?”
M.F. escapes to her writing. Julia, perhaps, escapes to her writing as well (she seems quite happy to immerse herself in the creation of the new TV episodes).
In this way, writing becomes almost a kind of place. M.F. realizes, though, that the place won’t be there for her if she goes down the same old writing path. She’ll have to tell new stories, in order to make her way. For Julia, the place is all discovery and excitement. She forges ahead.
Looking at this place phenomenon, I realize that when I get the chance to help a writer answer the question, “What next?” I am really inviting them to enter their writing fully. To see what kind of place it already is. To tell that story, if it’s not yet been told. Or, to freshen the room (or build a whole new house, like Fisher’s lovely “Last House”), as it were. That’s a privilege I never take lightly. And I love.
***
We’re reading Provence, 1970 together this month. Are you reading along? This week we read Chapters 7-12. Share with us in the comments what you think so far. What images have stirred? Without sharing spoilers if you’ve read further on, what do you think this journey of Fisher’s will reveal? And what dish are you now eager to prepare (or order in)?
Photo by Sandrine Néel, Creative Commons license via Flickr. Post by L.L. Barkat.
Reading Schedule:
Announcement Post
August 8: Chapters 1-6
August 15: Chapters 7-12
August 22: Chapters 13-17
Buy Provence, 1970
- Journeys: What We Hold in Common - November 4, 2024
- Poetry Prompt: My Poem is an Oasis - August 26, 2024
- Poetry Prompt: Sink or Swim - July 15, 2024
Donna Falcone says
I confess, I’ve read this book, passed it to a friend I thought would love it, and promptly have forgotten every word in it – – – but I remember the feeling of dissonance… I can’t speak to anything specific to the book, but to your comment about survival, agree – it is so interesting… the concept of making space and also the idea of “sufficient resources”. It reminds me of the idea of feeding a relationship – making “deposits” so to speak, so that, when dissonance arises, there is nourishment remaining to see us through the winter (not unlike Frederick’s colors, I suppose 😉 ).
L.L. Barkat says
Now, you’ve got me wondering…
• What do you believe gives us sufficient resources?
• How do believe we can best make space?
• What kind of deposits seem most powerful to you?
🙂
Donna Falcone says
Sufficient resources? I’m not sure where our resources come from.
The best way I have been able to make space, or when I have experienced space being made for me which is always surprising and so full of grace, happens when doors are left open and I can breathe deeply while waiting for the other… or the other can breathe deeply and wait for me…. while whatever is happening happens.
Deposits are complicated. 🙂
Donna Falcone says
I used to think I knew where our resources came from, but the older I get the less I know. So many things at play. 🙂
L.L. Barkat says
Some of the things, being?
Donna Falcone says
Well, there was a time when I might have said that high quality experiences in our youth are what give us our resources in relationship with others… but now I see that is too narrow – because some of the low quality experiences also contribute in unexpected ways. Grist for the mill, you might say.
In addition, we all have different experiences and habits, and so we interpret things differently and not necessarily according to their intent, and how we respond depends on so many aspects of our personalities, so this also plays in to what one might call resources…
And, I do believe that happenstance, what many would call Grace – what I would call Grace- is at play.
And we all know people who seem to be living inside relationships that are nothing BUT dissonance – and we wonder why that person doesn’t have the resources to leave, but that person sees great strength in their staying.
So, from where I sit, it’s complicated. 😉
L.L. Barkat says
Indeed. 🙂
I also wonder what role these might play…
• adaptability
• curiosity
• creativity
• win-win orientation
• humor
Donna Falcone says
Say more?
L.L. Barkat says
I always find it easier to work things out, to grow and change and keep journeying with, people who have developed those qualities. Likewise, I’ve found that if I bring those qualities to a relationship, it can go better unless the other person dysfunctionally disallows them to be part of our interactions. 🙂
Donna Falcone says
Ahhh… I know from experience that you do.
All of us here at TSP have been beneficiaries of your generous perspective on resources. 😉
It’s a great list. It makes me feel like dancing. 😉
Bethany R. says
It’s a thought-provoking post. “I realize that when I get the chance to help a writer answer the question, ‘What next?’ I am really inviting them to enter their writing fully.”
I think it’s lovely and somehow comforting to hear that you enjoy walking writers through this and feel the significance of that evaluation process and forward movement.
L.L. Barkat says
I think it can be a fascinating exercise to picture our writing as a room, a place. What’s in it? What are its boundaries and features? How are we functioning inside it? How do we wish others to experience it when they “walk in”?
Okay, so, if you walked into your own writing, Bethany (and you needn’t answer this here unless that feels fun to do), how would you describe its “place-i-ness”? 🙂
Bethany says
Love this perspective. I’m going to apply to the piece I’m working on right now and see what I can do to help the reader in my room.
Bethany says
What a helpful perspective. I’m going to apply it to the piece I’m working on right now and see what I can do to help the reader in my room. Thank you, L.L. 🙂
Katie says
Okay, I very much enjoyed reading Provence, finding it so indicative of human nature, interesting, funny. I have been wanting to put together a sort of “review” type piece on it to share – but I think if I don’t go ahead and share my random observations now, I might never.
I’m not sure I have read a book before with a 21 page Prologue nor a book with a 25 page Afterword!!
Again and again, I was struck by the use of the word “but”, or, “On the one hand,. . .On the other hand,. . .” – much of the thrust of this memoir/bio/? was focused on the differences in these food writers. Also, he contrasted the individual’s early careers and writings into their later years.
(well, I don’t see my other page of notes at the moment – so more later)
L.L. Barkat says
Katie, if you and I were a comedy routine, you would have just set up the opening lines to a riff I’m hoping to finish in my last post. Hold that thought, then, on “differences.” And, unless I get unexpectedly carried off in another direction, I’ll come in to finish what you started, on Thursday.
Katie says
L.L., Laura, Donna,
Fascinating discussion – makes me eager for the Journey Workshop!
Writing prose, for me, is more difficult than writing poetry, but it seems to help me “know what I think.”
Here are a few sentences from the book that drew me into their lives and their thinking:
p. 3-4 “. . .she (M. F.) left no doubt that at all times she was taking note of what you said and how you said it, of what you ate and how quickly.”
p. 7 “There was a moral dimension to the conversation about food in Sonoma, a sense that quality and refinement and taste were deeply connected to the land itself, to how one worked the land, and how one lived on it.”
p. 13 “It was in writing about herself, something she would do in all her books, by turns brazenly and obliquely, that M. F. found a way to the emotional core of her nominal topic, food and eating. She had not invented Fracophilia, but she’d come up with the modern version and made it her own. M. F. had opened the door to pleasure, to a serious and literary consideration of everything. . .and Julia Child, James Beard, Judith Jones, and, later, Richard Olney, all walked through it after her.”
And, L.L. – “Copy that” on holding that thought until Thursday;)
Laura Lynn Brown says
I noted the same passages you did, as well as these:
Julia Child, in a letter to James Beard, relieved after finishing her book: “I don’t have that driven feeling, that guilt of non-accomplishment always gnawing me.” – p. 95
In a letter to M.F., the feeling of being “re-imprisoned by nostalgia and present pleasure.” – p. 91
M.F. back to Julia: “One reason we are friends is that we both understand the acceptance of NOW. There is all the imprisonment of nostalgia, but with so many wide windows.” – 92
And Luke Barr, about his aunt: “M.F., a modern master of memoir, of the revelatory personal essay, with paradoxically but assertively anti-nostalgic, always looking for those ‘wide windows.’ This unsentimental toughness was in many ways at the core of her genius as a writer.” – 93
And Julia and James delighting in working in a kitchen together, while M.F. mentally invented a rolling chair for him so he could still rule his kitchen while relieving the strain on his legs.
I’m also fascinated by what makes a friendship-in-transition survive or end. Sometimes it’s simply a commitment to the friendship, but with some change, as Julia decided to maintain the friendship and end the working relationship. Some working friendships, though, wouldn’t survive without that connective tissue. Sometimes it’s a commitment to each other’s growth, wherever that goes. I think sometimes it requires something new in the habits of communication.
“[S]he could no longer keep telling the same stories over and over again.” That stood out like neon to me and I keep thinking about it.
Thinking, too, about resources. And about writing as a place.
L.L. Barkat says
I loved the “wide windows,” too. 🙂
Some friendships, if you really think about it, might only have “commitment to the friendship” left, while, in truth, the friendship itself is dead—at which point, we are enamored with the idea of the friendship rather than the friend and the friendship. Hard to untangle that sometimes.
Writing as place. I’ve been using that in my editing work recently. Asking myself: what kind of place is this? What is the writer doing in this place? Is that what the writer should be doing, if she wants the reader to be welcome? What’s the balance then, of the place belonging to the writer versus the reader? As an editor, I’m trying to make space for both, but I think I might have to go in favor of the reader more often than the writer, if the place is being used for things that don’t end up inviting the reader in and keeping her there. It’s been an interesting thought exercise, and more helpful than I’d have expected.
Laura Lynn Brown says
1. Yes. And the living relationship can’t be sustained by love of an idea, or nostalgia for its past.
2. Do you picture a place? Or sense attributes of place — light, dark, spacious, cramped, verdant, dry? This could help in self-editing.
Often when I ask writers what places they think are less strong (or any version of this question — what places are you unsatisfied with?), they point out exactly the places I would point to. As writers, if we’re honest, we have a sense of this place and where it’s inhospitable. Helping writers to more finely attune their sensors to such places and telling them they already have the tools to rehab, so to speak, is also a rewarding part of editing — and an oxygenating part of writing, when we can do it ourselves.
L.L. Barkat says
Very cool, about the dark and light and so forth.
I think more in terms of the use of the place or its placeness. One writer goes for solitude. Another for a place to be self-indulgent (because, maybe, life itself and the places they live aren’t allowing enough healthy attention to be showered upon them). One goes for a place to be generous, and is giving out proverbial fresh-baked bread. Another is entering a kind of courtroom to defend herself—or, alternately, to indict others. One goes to writing as a vacation house and is relaxing and leaning into it. Another is entering a kind of doctor’s office, looking to be healed. One goes as if to a cafe with friends. The list goes on.
It’s not that any of these places are bad places to go, per se. But when they are dominating the writing in ways that the writer isn’t in control of for a clear purpose, it can be necessary to regroup.
Laura Lynn Brown says
This is fascinating. And something I would have loved to bring up, think about, work with in the Place workshop. Not that it couldn’t also be relevant in the Journey workshop.
Whatever these places are, readers do feel them. And feel welcome or not. Even though they wouldn’t necessarily characterize the writing in these ways.
Donna Falcone says
I couldn’t see writing from ‘places’ in that way until now.
Bethany says
I never thought of it that way either, Donna. 🙂
L.L. Barkat says
The girls and I had a rollicking good time over dinner last night, identifying each other’s writing “places.” Apparently, I am a mix of Thoreau’s cabin and Emerson’s “Nature”…
Emerson: “To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars.”
Sonia is outdoors: a car chase!
Sara is indoors, behind a glass: an archaeologist peering over a piece of earth, as it were, brushing aside the dirt to see what’s hidden beneath.
And there were more. Writers we know and don’t know. But those will stay ours. 🙂
Bethany R. says
Love this, L.L.! I am still thinking about what my room is like. Maybe it’s a cozy (furnished with my favorite little comforts) yet breezy treehouse overlooking green rolling hills and meadows. Freedom with attachment.
Sandra Heska King says
I’m late to the party (though I finished the book a few days back), but I love reading through everyone’s responses.
The thread of hunger in spite of so much food intrigues me as well as a gnawing dissatisfaction with the present.
First there was poor James Beard trying to lose weight.
“No, he needed to change his life . . . Beard alone could achieve a ‘moral victory’ over his obesity.” – p. 98
“He just ate what they brought him. It was never enough.” – p. 99
“For one thing, he was always hungry. For another, there was no wine.” P. 100
M.F. was physically hungry many pages earlier. But her hunger was and is more than food.
” . . . it was more that . . . silly talk about tipping that had her [M. F.] on edge. It was a creeping, ominous sense of being hemmed in by the past. It was her own doing.” And after Norah left, the fun was over. “. . . she was seeing the dark side of sentimentality, the fossilized remnants of outdated attitudes and ideas . . . ” – p. 151
So much snobbery and surface politeness and backstabbing and the putting on of masks, especially once Olney arrived, and yet he was the catalyst for at least Julia and M.F. to find the courage to prepare for change. Sometimes I think we need need a catalyst of some kind (or less kind) to find our brave.
M.F. felt trapped in a stifling atmosphere that “she had played a role in creating.” She felt her writing was now trapped in the past. – P. 173
” She realized she could no longer keep telling the same stories over and over again. She wanted to immerse herself in the present, to write about what she saw, now. She needed to move forward.” – p. 174
By the end of chapter 12, Julia has made some decisions, too, and she “felt liberated.”
The aging icons are reevaluating, sensing the need to change and move ahead as they enter their later years, to figure out “what’s next” and be willing to leave the past, to find new places in new places.
And Laura, that last paragraph… you do that so well. And I love the idea of freshening a room or maybe having to build a whole new house. 🙂
And now I’m thinking about what my place is…
Laurie Klein says
Hi all!
I’m the caboose just steaming into the station. I read the book some years ago but reading your comments wafts relational scents my way a-fresh—not unlike tastes themselves: sour, salty, sweet, savory. And isn’t there one more, a really odd word? Can’t remember at present.
So much for me to ponder here:
1. The potentially constructive dissonance within friendship and how this interacts with loyalty
2. The place-ness of my own writing (LL, I can imagine a book organized around the places you’ve named. What a great spine! Are you apt to consider this? I’ve yet to encounter a take like this one.)
3. The “what next” of these later years . . .
4. Hunger
5. Fine-tuning hospitality toward readers via editing
My brain runneth over . . .
Laurie Klein says
“umami” that’s the taste word
Bethany R. says
So good to hear from you, Laurie. Love how you put this, “Fine-tuning hospitality toward readers via editing.” I’ve been thinking that over since I read it too–trying to apply it to something I’m working on. 🙂
Laurie Klein says
Bethany, good morning! I’m smiling, remembering sitting beside you, in Indiana, and watching you smile over a cup of coffee, and listening to your work. I’m going to stir my tea with the little brass gift spoon in honor of you this morning, and imagine us both creating hospitable places for the reader. Wide windows. Open doors. New rooms (tastefully appointed). The idea brings such tangible warmth to revision!
L.L. Barkat says
Gold plated. 🙂 (Well, about half of them were.)
Tangible warmth to revision, indeed! I love how you put that. (As well the original note about “fine-tuning hospitality toward readers via editing.”)
I’m not sure what a book like this would look like, though it intrigues. Say more?
Laurie Klein says
Gold-plated, of course. All the more to be treasured. 🙂
I was struck by your new angle on “place” as secret springboard for generating truth and beauty. The singular intimacy implied. The potential ways our “place” may change, depending on which genre we choose: Do we conjure (or inhabit) differing rooms (or natural sites) most conducive to writing poetry or fiction or nonfiction?
A book on generative play might borrow from famous locations. Or architectural terminology. Now there’s some great jargon for chapter headings or metaphors.
Perhaps a workbook format (a Where-To book with pivotal questions and juicy prompts).
Perhaps a collaboration between you and Laura Lynn Brown?
I’ve recently realized that the extraordinary house I grew up in has been quietly directing me all these years toward books where a unique building or estate or garden is a character. I’m drawn in immediately.
Do you know this quote? “There is an Indian proverb or axiom that says that everyone is a house with four rooms, a physical, a mental, an emotional and a spiritual. Most of us tend to live in one room most of the time but, unless we go into every room every day, even if only to keep it aired, we are not a complete person.” –Rumer Godden, A House with Four Rooms
In which room do we spend most of our time? How and when and why do we air it out? Is it seasonal?
Thinking of idioms now: “a place for everything, and every thing in its place”; “hearts in the right place”; “Hey, you’re in my place!” stalled out, marching in place or running in place.
Thoughts?
Laura Lynn Brown says
Now I’m thinking about what four rooms mine might be and whether any of them are neglected.
Bethany R. says
I’m loving this discussion. 🙂