What's it like to be a writer, mother, reluctant rock star?

High Tide in Tucson is a collection of essays Barbara Kingsolver published before she published The Poisonwood Bible (1998) but after she had published three novels, a collection of short stories, a book of poetry, and a non-fiction account of women in the

Arizona mine strike of 1983. She was successful enough that (a) her publisher would even publish a book of her essays; (b) her publisher would commission spot art for each essay and use a second color on every page; and (c) send her off on a four-week book tour, "a different city each day" when she was promoting one of her novels.

It's an eclectic collection, travel pieces, observations about contemporary culture and parenting, and the writing life. We learn something about her background, her daughter, her divorce, her new husband. Not much because these are essays, not memoir. They are all wonderfully well-written, possibly better than the originals because she revised them extensively for this book.

While I read the essays in order, the way Kingsolver hoped, I responded most strongly to the ones about writing. For example: "Write a nonfiction book, and be prepared for the legion or readers who are going to doubt your facts. But write a novel, and get ready for the world to assume every word is true."

That's not always the case. I just looked at an Amazon one-star review of The Poisonwood Bible in which the reader complains that real rebels are bloodthirsty terrorists, migrations of army ants are not as portrayed, no missionary like the one in the novel every made it to the Congo. People, this is a novel. It's a lie. Kingsolver says, "Now I spend hours each day, year after year, a wicked smirk on my face, making up whopping, four-hundred-page lies." And getting paid for it.

She can be laugh-out-loud funny. She writes about her experience playing keyboard for the Rock Bottom Remainders, a pickup rock band that included Stephen King, Ridley Pearson, Dave Barry, Kathi Goldmark, Tad Bartimus, Amy Tan, Al Kooper, and Roy Blount. They all(?) had some musical background (Kingsolver started college on a music scholarship), but they did not pretend to be professional musicians. They toured to raise money for literacy. In Boston before their first concert, King had a breakthrough: and she told him "I thought he was sounding much better. His face lit up like a carnival ride, and he said, 'You know what I discovered? When I'm not sure what chord to play, I don't touch the guitar, I just do this—air strumming!'"

She has a delightful essay,"Careful What You Let in the Door," about reader mail, the good, the bad, and the ugly (and an essay written when reader mail was marks on paper). Example: "Dear Ms. Kingsolver, Enclosed is something I've written. I'd appreciate it if you could get Harper & Row to publish it. I suggest it be marketed as an Inspirational Essay." At the other extreme: "Dear Barbara, I just finished reading The Bean Trees for the fourth time since I bought it through a book club. Please, please, please write more books!"

What takes this essay to another level, however, is the letter questioning violence in books, movies, TV and (presumably) video games, violence as entertainment. It was followed by a letter from a nun who thanked Kingsolver for a novel "which says something hopeful abo9ut death and the life that can come from death." What is the artist's obligation in writing about hate, cruelty, bloodshed? Kingsolver writes, "I don't know whether my convictions about art—and particularly art that contains violence—will ever be allowed to settle into a comfortable position. They have been revising themselves for a long, long time . . . ."

High Tide in Tucson is entertaining, informative, and thought-provoking. What more can you ask?

How many ways can you describe rain?

Carellin Brooks's One hundred days of rain is a difficult book to review. On the one hand, the story, set in Vancouver, is pretty simple: The unnamed protagonist is breaking up with

her wife and is attempting to build a new life. She has an ex-husband, the father of her five-year-old child. A hundred short chapters in the present tense. No quotation marks (which I know drives certain readers nuts). It rains a lot and Brooks describes the rain in at least fifty different ways. Can I make it sound less appealing?

A Rhodes Scholar, Brooks is a poet who has published two books of poetry and edited two anthologies. This is her first novel. Anyone interested in writing, anyone looking for an original work of literary art, anyone willing to be caught up in Brooks's extraordinary prose for the imagination and possibilities in the language should read One hundred days of rain.

But rather than assert, let me sample the prose virtually at random to give you a taste:

"Rain pummels tiny fists on the window. Tinkles and dances, a small drumming like fingers on a tabletop. Rain gusts and smatters against the glass, pushed by wind. She imagines herself reaching through the phone cord, along the wires, to change that voice to something gasping and frightened. A desire so vivid she feels her hands clutching, the strain of the tendons."

A description of Saturday morning routine with her son: "She bakes. Cornbread, banana bread, puffed yellow German pancake. Something hot to table. Inside they sit ignoring the streaming gloomy world. Lifting cakes still warm to their mouths, buttering the crumbly slices with voluptuous concentration. Their world shrunk to yellow box, small and warm and most importantly dry."

That quotation, by the way, is half of a chapter.

One more—although it is tempting to go on quoting for pages: "Easter. A time of renewal or so it's said, bruited about even, the possibility of growth. So many chances for anniversaries and fresh starts and her is another. She arises from her dented bed filled with resolution. She will sort that errant paper, the piles of it she's been augmenting all year. She will put her taxes into order this time, really. Everything due at the library will be returned, all the languishing dry cleaning rescued, perhaps she will even begin cleaning for their move. The sills and lintels can't accumulate much dust in a month, can they? It isn't too early to wipe down her fridge now, surely?"

Note the metaphors, similes: "tiny fists," "like fingers on a tabletop." Yet so much is pure precise description: "streaming gloomy world," "dented bed," "the languishing dry cleaning." The sentences—the sentence fragments even—are vivid with detail, with sensation. Adding "really" to the sentence about taxes adds a paragraph about unkept promises in a word.

A back-cover blurb says it better than I: "Carellin Brooks offers a loud and persistent rejoinder to the idea of 'the pathetic fallacy': the internal and external do coalesce, and they do so at the apex of the most precise and revealing sentences I have read in years."

There. Have I made One hundred days of rain more appealing?

How to write a novel the George way

When Elizabeth George published Write Away: One Novelist's Approach to Fiction and the Writing Life in 2004 she was a New York Times best-selling author of a thirteen mysteries. So the book is more than twelve years old, but the information and advice is as timely today as it was the day it came out of George's computer.

She points out that this is "one novelist's approach," and other novelists with other approaches are equally successful. She is relatively undogmatic; the only rule in writing a

novel is that there are no rules. At the same time, a novel tends to have a character—or characters—in a setting in a conflict. No character(s), no story. No setting and the characters float in an abstract void. No conflict and there is no plot. I believe the best novels have fully realized characters in recognizable settings with significant and engaging conflicts.

A conflict, by the way, is not an argument or a fight. Conflict arises when a character wants something and cannot easily obtain it because of another character, because of circumstances (social, economic, environmental), or because of an internal flaw. Readers continue to read when they want to see how, and whether, characters will obtain their desires—or not. Will Ahab find and kill Moby Dick? Will Edmond Dantès obtain his revenge? Will Elizabeth Bennet marry Mr. Darcy? Will Robinson Crusoe survive shipwreck?

Because, as George titles her first chapter, "Story is Character," and because it is not easy to create vivid, interesting, engaging characters (as I can testify from personal experience), she spends many pages to describe her process. Before she even begins to draft her novel, she writes a detailed character analysis for every significant character in a book. Her Character Prompt Sheet includes a physical description but "best friend...enemies...core need...pathological maneuver...gestures when talking what others notice first about him/her...what character does alone...." And to show the practice that she preaches, George includes the raw material—seven printed pages, around 4,000 words—she wrote about a character "long before she put in an appearance on the pages of my rough draft."

She researches locations as carefully as a movie director, taking pictures and making notes in a tape recorder, so that when it is time to write about, say, a lonely stone barn on the moors, she knows exactly what it looks like, where there are doors and windows, how the light hits the walls.

She also thinks through her entire book in terms of scenes, again much like a movie scriptwriter who has to decide where does the scene take place, who is in it, who says what, how does the dialogue and action advance the story? The novelist, of course, has the advantage of being able to enter the heads of characters in a way that is either clunky or boring in a movie. And on the subject of point-of-view, George has several interesting things to say. For example:

"You have to have a point of view in the novel, and wise is the writer who makes her decision about point of view early in the process. This one element of the craft is crucial because it's part of how a writer dramatizes events. It also is critical to how the story is structured. . .and often it's part of the entire artistic idea behind the novel."

The book is filled with examples from George's novels and other works, so it is both practical and theoretical. She includes two lists that I have copied and will refer to in the future, "Where People Work" (more than 100 entries including sporting goods store, mobile library, clockmaker, martial arts supplies, limousine driver) and 78 THADs.

A THAD is a Talking Head Avoidance Device, "an activity going on in a scene that would otherwise consist of dialogue. It serves several purposes: It eliminates the possibility that a scene will become nothing more than two or three talking heads; chosen wisely, it reveals character; it may in and of itself contain important information; it can be used as a metaphor." Examples? Eating a meal. Cooking a meal. Working on a car. Grocery shopping. Training a dog. Building a structure. Posing for portrait. Killing ants...and 70 more.

I believe anyone who wants to write fiction or improve her craft can read Write Away with profit—I have. I believe anyone who is curious about one novelist thinks about and creates her books will enjoy Write Away. And anyone who enjoys Elizabeth George's mysteries may like this look behind the curtain to see how she does it.

Journaling? A good idea. This book? Not so good

I asked to review Therapy Through Journaling: Be Your Own Savior by Christopher Kalford because I have kept a journal for many years and I was curious. How is keeping a journal therapy? Could I keep my journal more effectively? Are there aspects of journal-keeping that I've overlooked?

The book's cover states "Escape from traditional therapy...organize your thoughts...analyze your past...live in the present...change your future." With such inducements, who could resist? I couldn't. But I think you should.

The book is unpaged, but I counted 68 pages containing double-spaced type. I doubt there are much more than 10,000 words, in short, about the length of two long magazine articles. You can read it in less than an hour. Length, of course, does not correspond to quality (think of the Lord's Prayer or the Gettysburg Address), but I'm afraid this booklet has neither length nor quality.

There is nothing wrong with Kalford's advice: "...writing journals allows you to gain an outside perspective on your own thoughts..." Maybe better to say "gain another perspective," but let it go. "The physical act of writing your thoughts down can sometimes be enough to help you determine that certain thoughts are being exaggerated or manipulated by factors they shouldn't be, which will allow you in turn to eliminate some stressors..." "Keeping a journal allows you to look back on your life not only for analyzation and reflection, but for an ever growing source of happiness you can constantly draw from."

The trouble I have with Kalford's advice is that he gives no sources to support any of his recommendations, nor does the book contain any indication of his background or qualifications to give advice at all. Does he keep a journal? He doesn't say. Has he benefited from writing a journal? He doesn't say. Does he have any professional qualifications to discuss the therapeutic benefits of keeping a journal? He doesn't say.

In addition, the booklet is more exhortation than instruction. "Do it" rather than "Here's how to do it—and why." And when he has an opportunity to flesh out his message, he turns away: "The benefits of having so much of your life at your fingertips are too numerous to name..." Maybe there are too numerous to name in their entirety, but how about some examples?

Indeed, on page after page the book cries out for examples, anecdotes, quotations to support and illustrate the advice and the claims. For example, I like the idea of starting a conversation with God by writing "what you would want to say to god if he were in front of you." But why not give the reader a couple or three examples of such a journal entry with, ideally, the writer's thoughts and conclusions about the experience?

Bottom line: Keep a journal. But if you don't know how to do so or what the benefits can be, find another book than this.

Travel back to 1964's Freedom Summer

Freshwater Road, a ten-year-old novel which has just been re-released, reads as if author Denise Nicholas is writing from the inside; that is, based on lived experience rather than research. The protagonist, Celeste Tyree, is a black, 19-year-old University of Michigan

sophomore who volunteers to go to Mississippi in the summer of 1964 to teach in a Freedom School and to register black voters.

Celeste has grown up in Detroit, is virtually middle-class in her values and economic situation. Her father, with whom she's been living earned  enough running number to have bought a bar, support his mother, send Celeste to college, drive a Cadillac, and live in an integrated middle-class neighborhood. Because the book is set in 1964, Detroit is still a thriving metropolis and Mississippi is the Deep South that says "Never!" to the end of Jim Crow.

The One Man, One Vote headquarters in Jackson assigns Celeste to help register voters in a small, poor Pineyville, a town in which a lynching had taken place five years earlier. Pineyville is the kind of town in which Negroes get off the sidewalk when they meet a white, never look a white person in the eye, and can be arrested for coming into City Hall through the front door (there's a back door for blacks). This was the summer Andrew Goodman, Mickey Schwerner, and James Chaney were murdered—news that spreads among the Civil Rights workers—so Celeste lives in a miasma of fear. As soon as she arrives in Jackson and asks when she'll be sent to her assignment, a worker at the building tells her, "As soon as you're ready. Stay low to the floor at night. That apartment's been shot into."

One the book's pleasures (and there are many) is Nicholas's ability to compare and contrast the differences between classes, races, and ages. Celeste observes that Pineyville "wasn't some anonymous village in Africa or South America where people washed their clothes in a stream, emptied their bowels just yards away, and drank the water from the same stream just a few yards in the other direction. It was too close. She remembered Wilamena [her mother] years ago fussing against the way Negro people were portrayed in films. She refused to go see them, said she would not support some 'catfish row' rendition of Negro life."

Celeste cannot be sure that the handful of students she teaches in the Freedom School are absorbing the lessons. Nor are local blacks flocking to her evening voter registration classes in the local Negro church to learn how to register to vote—one requirement, apparently, being able to recite on demand any section of the Mississippi constitution from memory. That's if you weren't asked, "How many bubbles are there in a bar of soap?" And among the many reasons not to register: Your white boss will fire you when he finds out.

White people barely exist in the book (there is, however, a stereotypically bigoted sheriff and a couple of thuggish state police). "Celeste marveled again at how the white people stayed so white even in the magnified sun of southern Mississippi. It was as if they weren't really there, or really live someplace else out of the sunshine, some place cool." The summer was unremittingly hot.

The book also conveys the complexity of the black experience. Celeste's mother has re-married to a man who can pass as white and moved from Detroit to New Mexico. One divorced (or abandoned) Negro mother in Pineyville is the mistress of a white storekeeper. A Negro neighbor abuses his wife and children and wants nothing to do with civil rights. The elderly woman with whom Celeste lives on Freshwater Road during the summer is quietly competent—and, to my mind remarkably brave. The black minister who had experienced (relative) freedom in Chicago as a college student has returned to Mississippi to lead his flock. Here's our first meeting with him:

"He has the sated tone of a well-cared for man. Sweat creeks trickled from his cropped sideburns, beaded his forehead. He took a handkerchief from the jacket hanging on the back of his chair and mopped his face. Every man who sat at Momma Bessie's table in Detroit [Celeste's paternal grandmother] got that look and sound. She took good care of them. Negro men triumphed in the kitchens of older Negro women, if nowhere else."

Celeste survives the summer, but she has been changed by the experience. And readers who allow themselves to enter fully into the world of Freshwater Road will, I believe, be also changed and realize that much of what was true in 1964 is still true and that a book that was first published in 2005 deserves new readers.