A TEACHER'S GUIDE TO Zap
Information and resources on the plays and playwrights spoofed in the play.
MY HOUSE OF VOICES
A tour of my childhood home, written for the Children's Book Council.
INK-STAINED ENTREPRENEUR
An excerpt from my Anne Carroll Moore Lecture, describing my career as a teenaged printer.
FROM SEED TO SEEDFOLKS
How the book about the founding of a community garden came to be.
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A TEACHER'S GUIDE TO
Zap
You can't get a joke if you don't know the references. Zap imagines a desperate theater troupe trying to compete with TV by offering seven plays at once and letting the audience use remote controls to switch among them. All the works except Shakespeare's
Richard III are parodies of well known plays and playwrights. To enjoy
Zap, students have to know what plays are being spoofed.
Zap begins with an English mystery in the style of Agatha Christie, followed by a comedy reminiscent of Neil Simon. We're then thrown back in time to Shakespeare, forward to a solo performance artist, eastward to Anton Chekhov's Russia, sideways to a bizarre hotel presided over by the spirit of Samuel Beckett, and finally southward to a dysfunctional family from the world of Tennessee Williams.
The best preparation is for students to read or see plays by the playwrights above. All the works cited are easily available in libraries and bookstores. Some ideas:
If you're pressed for time, try one-act plays. Many can be read in a single class period. Also consider short stories by the authors.
Reader's theater is a great way to introduce the playwrights and theater in general. It's almost always a new and enjoyable experience for students.
Plays are meant to be seen. Movies of the plays avoid the distraction of stage directions.
AGATHA CHRISTIE
Agatha Christie (1890-1976) was the queen of English detective fiction, renowned for her clever plots and prolific pen. Her sleuths include Hercule Poirot, probably the most famous detective after Sherlock Holmes, and the elderly Englishwoman Miss Marple. A classic Christie story is set in an English country house, features multiple plotlines and red herrings, and ends with a surprise solution--conspicuously omitted in
Zap. Besides novels, she wrote many short stories and plays. The most famous of these is
The Mousetrap, which opened in 1952 in London and is still playing, the longest continuously running play in history. The bulk of her plays are collected in
The Mousetrap and Other Plays (Signet Books, 2000).
RECOMMENDED PLAYS
The Mousetrap
A group of strangers find themselves stranded at a remote English hotel during a snowstorm. One after another, they're murdered by one of their number. A great choice for reader's theater.
Murder on the Nile
Christie's adaptation of her novel
Death on the Nile.
Witness for the Prosecution
A riveting courtroom drama with a shocking ending.
FILMS
Murder on the Orient Express (1974)
Death on the Nile (1978)
Witness for the Prosecution (1957)
Evil Under the Sun (1982)
ONLINE
http://stout.physics.ucla.edu/~yoder/mystery/christie.html
A complete list of Christie's works, with summaries.
NEIL SIMON
Neil Simon (1927- ) is a comic master whose dozens of plays and screenplays have made him the most commercially successful playwright in history. Born in the Bronx, he wrote comedy for television in the 1950s alongside Mel Brooks and Woody Allen. Turning to the theater, he composed a string of hits that included
Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple, The Sunshine Boys, Plaza Suite, and many more. He's the only playwright ever to have four Broadway productions running at once. Wisecracking characters, clashing temperaments, and New York settings are his hallmarks. Beneath the laughter lie personal traumas--abandonment, divorce, and the search for love.
RECOMMENDED PLAYS
The Odd Couple
Two divorced men try living together, with no more success than they had with their wives. Simon's best known play, later turned into a sitcom.
The Sunshine Boys
Two feuding vaudevillians attempt to bury their differences for the sake of a TV special.
Brighton Beach Memoirs
The first in a trilogy of autobiographical plays, followed by
Biloxi Blues and
Broadway Bound.
FILMS
The Odd Couple (1968)
The Sunshine Boys (1975)
Brighton Beach Memoirs (1986)
Biloxi Blues (1988)
RICHARD III
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) wrote
Richard III during the reign of Queen Elizabeth and found it prudent to paint a portrait of evil incarnate in Richard, whose dynastic line was overthrown by Elizabeth's own. Though historians today generally regard Richard as a capable ruler, Shakespeare gives us a hunchbacked monster who murders his brother, wife, nephews, and most of his supporters in his bloody climb to the throne. Opposed by the Earl of Richmond from the rival house of Lancaster, Richard is then defeated at Bosworth Field, where he utters his famous cry, "A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!"
FILMS
Richard III (1955, starring Lawrence Olivier). A 1995 movie by the same name leaves Shakespeare behind in transplanting the story to the 1930s.
ONLINE
http://us.penguinclassics.com/static/cs/us/10/nf/teachersguides/richardiii.html
A teacher's guide to the play.
PERFORMANCE ART
Performance art grew out of Dadaist soirees, political theater, and the 1960s' rebellion against convention. Sometimes geared to specific sites such as subway stations, sometimes incorporating visuals and music, sometimes interactive or improvised, performance art typically offered a soloist's angry or outrageous take on pressing issues like race, gender, or politics. Since then, the form has flowed into stand-up comedy and the one-person, autobiographical stage show, with highly polished scripts being published and performances given in plush theaters. The torch of old-school performance art has been passed to rappers and poetry slam artists.
RECOMMENDED PLAYS
The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe
Jane Wagner's hilarious survey of urban and suburban life, brought to the stage by Lily Tomlin.
Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n' Roll
Eric Bogosian's gallery of street characters sound off.
FILMS
Home of the Brave (1986). The master of multimedia, Laurie Anderson mixes music, projections of words, movies, and much else in her works.
Talk Radio (1988). Eric Bogosian puts his explosive stage performance of a badgering DJ on the screen, directed by Oliver Stone.
Swimming to Cambodia (1987). Spalding Gray's minimalist and wry account of playing a minor role in the movie The Killing Fields.
God Said, Ha! (1998). Julia Sweeney's funny and moving depiction of her encounter with cancer.
ONLINE
www.sniggle.net/perfart.php
History, links, and hijinks, slanted toward political theater.
ANTON CHEKHOV
Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) trained as a doctor, but became Russia's greatest playwright as well as a revered writer of short stories. He left a picture of Russia in an era of change prior to the Revolution, depicting the decline of the countryside's once-great families. Naïve dreamers and cynical despoilers, characters resisting change and disappointment by retreating into memories--this is the stuff of Chekhov. His plays are built around character, not plot, more home movies than Hollywood movies. Though most readers find his plays sad, Chekhov insisted they were comedies. His distinctive sun-and-storm atmosphere has been honored in the term "Chekhovian."
RECOMMENDED PLAYS
The Cherry Orchard
A country family's pride and procrastination lead them to lose their home and their cherished cherry orchard, symbol of good times past.
The Three Sisters
Through dreaming, scheming, and disastrous romances, three sisters attempt in vain to escape the boredom of provincial life.
FILMS
The Cherry Orchard (2000)
The Three Sisters (1970)
Seagull (1975)
SAMUEL BECKETT
Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) is the best known playwright of the 20th century avant-garde. An Irishman who spent most of his life in France, Beckett offers a farcical and pessimistic view of the human condition. His novels and plays are terse, enigmatic, and wildly experimental. Characters are often stuck in maddening, hopeless predicaments. A writer who distrusted words, Beckett was drawn to silence. His play
Breath lasts less than a minute and contains only a single human cry. Beckett's view of life was shared by many writers who wrote in the style that came to be known as the Theater of the Absurd. In a world ruled by irrationality--the senseless slaughter of World War I, the nightmare of the Holocaust, the superpowers' rush toward nuclear annihilation--why should art make sense? Their works featured stories devoid of plot and resolution, words that didn't mean what they said, and an atmosphere of arbitrary illogic.
RECOMMENDED PLAYS
Waiting for Godot
Beckett's most famous play, in which two tramps await someone they've never met and who may not exist.
Endgame
A servant relates news of a disintegrating world to a blind, chairbound ruler.
Krapp's Last Tape
A short one-act, in which a disillusioned man listens to his thoughts recorded in his youth.
FILMS
Beckett on Film (2003). A 4-disc series containing
Waiting for Godot and 18 other Beckett plays. Highly recommended.
ONLINE
www.samuel-beckett.net/
Info, reviews, remembrances, links.
www2.arts.gla.ac.uk/Slavonic/Absurd.htm
Information on Beckett and the other absurdists.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) is famed for plays set in the South but which deal with universal themes. Like many of his characters, he came from a family rich in name but empty in pocket. As in Chekhov, characters in Williams' plays often flee from the present into dreams or drink. His plays are often violent, filled with vulnerable heroes and heroines. Williams was daring and unflinching, shattering conventions and inspiring some of the most famous performances in film and theatrical history. He twice was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
RECOMMENDED PLAYS
The Glass Menagerie
Williams' autobiographical account of a fragile mother and daughter surviving on memory and fantasy.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Money, alcohol, sex, and power detonate family fireworks when a dying patriarch's relatives gather around him.
A Streetcar Named Desire
Blanche DuBois, faded in beauty and finances, struggles to start again in New Orleans.
27 Wagons Full of Cotton, and Other One Act Plays
A good choice for something shorter.
FILMS
The Glass Menagerie (1973, 1987)
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958)
A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
The Night of the Iguana (1964)
ONLINE
www.webenglishteacher.com/twilliams.html
A teacher's guide to
The Glass Menagerie and
A Streetcar Named Desire.
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MY HOUSE OF VOICES
"I grew up in a house built of voices," Rob begins his autobiography in SEEK. Though his was a duplex in San Francisco, it was my own childhood home in Santa Monica, in southern California, that I saw in my mind: 100 years old now, with two-stories and fifteen rooms, the source if not the setting for nearly all my books. Let me turn back the clock and give you a tour.
You enter the living room--large, with west windows that let in the afternoon breeze off the ocean, ten blocks away. It's here that my father, Sid Fleischman, read his books aloud to the family chapter by chapter, as they were written, from my ninth year until I left for college. Listen. He's speaking Praiseworthy's lines from BY THE GREAT HORN SPOON. The room was an island of oral culture, where words were spoken, heard, performed, their sounds and rhythms relished. His readings were living-room theater, intimate, no-tech, without props or costumes, but riveting nonetheless. Decades later I found myself writing for the same stage--BULL RUN, SEEDFOLKS, MIND'S EYE, SEEK, all spoken, all suitable for performance.
In the corner of the room is a baby grand piano. Under it sit two guitar cases. Both my parents played classical guitar for a time. My mother's real instrument, and my own, was the piano. Both my sisters played flute. I grew up hearing guitar duets, flute duets, and loved playing four-hand piano pieces with a partner. It was here that JOYFUL NOISE and my other multi-voice poems were born--attempts to carry the camaraderie and synergy and do-it-yourself pleasure of chamber music into poetry. Those book weren't designed for virtuosos, but for family and friends. The concert stage I had in mind was our living room.
In the kitchen resides the radio. It's afternoon. While my mother cooks, we're both listening to the Dodgers game. A baseball game is a three-act play, complete with suspense, climax, and intermissions for sustenance. It teaches plotting and pacing. We love Vin Scully, but Jerry Doggett mangles the Spanish surnames; my mother, a Spanish translator during the War, shouts the proper pronunciation back at the radio. Enter later, and the radio's tuned to KFWB, playing the Beatles' new hit--"Daytripper." Later, it's pouring forth Beethoven on KFAC. Early the next morning, it's tuned to Lohman and Barkley's comedy riffs on KFI. Then to pop music--Nancy Wilson, Burt Bacharach. I took it all in. DJs were part of my extended family. Finding one of them in the obituaries years later was one of the sparks for SEEK.
Go down the hall into my father's study. He's out at the moment, but the room is full of voices--the voices of books. The shelves are floor-to-ceiling. When I was young, they seemed twenty feet tall. Over here are the books he's used to research his novels set in the west: THIRTY YEARS A COWBOY, BEANS AND BACON, Bancroft, marbled-edge collections of Harper's Weekly. Over there are the old Baedeker guides he used for his adult books. I loved their microscopic print and fold-out maps. Little did I know that I'd later build MIND'S EYE around his 1911 edition of BAEDEKER'S ITALY.
Coming out, you pass through the den. The TV is there. So is the copy machine, which we've had since the 60s. We're the only family I knew who owned one at the time--possibly the first west of the Mississippi. To avoid endlessly renewing library books that he was using for research, my father had bought it to copy the pages he needed. After college, I began experimenting with using copiers in art projects, the results collected in COPIER CREATIONS.
Go up the stairs. In her room, one of my sisters is playing the Bach unaccompanied flute sonata--the model for all the monologues I would later write. It's night now. Outside, on the sundeck, my father has his eye to his telescope. You hear long stretches of silence. Privacy and quiet were always available in such a large house. Later, you hear laughter. The TV in my parents' bedroom is on. My mother is in bed, "watching" The Tonight Show with a black eyemask on, converting TV into radio.
Strange voices are coming from down the hall. Enter my room. The lights are off, but my shortwave is on. I'm listening to Radio Canada. The announcer is reading letters to listeners' friends and family who live beyond the reach of a postman in the Yukon and Northwest Territories. For writers, eavesdropping is a job skill. I roam the dial after a while and find Radio Peking. The shortwave allows spirit travel, much as a book does. I proceed to visit Saudi Arabia, Norway, the Dutch Antilles. I finally turn it off and my bedside light on. I look at my bookshelf--Twain, Gogol, Dylan Thomas, Richard Brautigan, J. D. Salinger, Sophocles, Edward Lear. Living voices, no matter how long-dead the writer. I wasn't a reader until high school. Suddenly, I found myself reading three books at once, the chorus of voices ever-enlarging.
My father still lives and writes in that house. I still sleep in that pine-panelled room when I visit. And in my own books I continue to aspire to the power of a voice coming from a radio late at night in a pitch-black room.
©2003
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INK-STAINED ENTREPRENEUR
It began on the day my parents drove home with our Ford Mercury crammed with type cases, a cabinet to hold them, ink, composing sticks, the heavy composing stone, and a hand printing press. Was my foresightful father looking ahead to the era of short shelf life and insuring his ability to keep his books in print? Actually, he was indulging a long-held interest in hand printing that surfaced years later in his book Humbug Mountain. He announced that we would all learn to print.
The press was installed on a table in the guest house, a room in the back yard that no guest was ever asked to sleep in. My father assembled the type cabinet indoors and put it in our house’s all-purpose room. Immediately, we began learning a language that no one else on our block spoke. My father showed us the difference between “em quads” and “en quads”--the plugs of lead used to separate words. The heavy, iron frame that held type in the press turned out to be called a “chase.” “Furniture” wasn’t couches or chairs, but the blocks of wood used to hold type in the chase. “Tray,” “copper,” “brass,” “key,” “proof”--all suddenly acquired new meanings. Along with new words came a new skill: learning to read backwards. Holding the composing stick in your left hand, you plucked the letters and spaces out of the type case, and lined them up from right to left. After a few weeks, reading right to left felt nearly natural.
My sisters and I decided we wanted our own stationery. First, however, we had to make some choices. What style of type? What size? Name in all capitals, or caps and lower case? How much space between the name and address? Should there be a line between them? How thick a line, and what length? I'd no idea at the time that designing a letterhead was the perfect preparation for designing a story. Both confront you with open-ended questions, the sort with myriad possible answers, none of them certifiably correct. In both cases, solutions come through brainstorming, sketching, imagining possibilities. Schools rarely assign this sort of problem. Children and adults both are apt to throw up their hands in the face of so much freedom and uncertainty. An early diet of such challenges, however--art is a perfect training ground--makes it possible to face more complex assignments later on. If you can design a business card, you have a leg up on designing a novel.
And business cards I printed aplenty. I began printing stationery for my parents' friends. My fame spread through a suite of Beverly Hills shrinks; many a neurotic mailed his remittance in an envelope that had passed through my hands first. I kept up my business all through junior high school. I still have my account book. Though my profits were modest, the care with details that printing demands has served me well, in writing and elsewhere. To help support me during my early writing years, I worked as a proofreader for a textbook publisher, making sure not only that words were spelled correctly, but checking that chapter headings were the right size, with the right spacing below, that subheads were bold and flush left and all caps. From printing, I learned to love the look of type on a page. There is a whole visual, nonverbal element to books: you can communicate not only through the meaning of words, but through line breaks in poetry and page turns in picture books. The first thing I do when I get my first copy of a new novel of mine is to check where the chapters end on the page. Blank space at the bottom of the page is a crucial visual cue to the reader that the chapter is coming to a close, which influences how those last lines will be read.
Though I didn't read for pleasure until high school, the printing press led me to browse type catalogs. These showed dozens of styles of type, each with its own personality: stately Paladino, haughty Hadriano, funny-looking Hickory, whose letters were made to look as if they were built out of branches. I grew up with strong feelings about all the letters of the alphabet. What a pleasure it was recently to be asked to contribute to a book--a collaboration between writers and calligraphers--in celebration of the letter "a."
Today, my children change fonts and spacing with a single click of the mouse. The computer has made it astoundingly easy for them to experiment and see the fruit of their imagining. Lightning fast, no ink smudges on their clothes. But no satisfying weight of the composing stick in their hands either, no scooping the buttery ink from its can, no quiet evenings spent setting type or tantalizing trips to the vast, dimly lit Los Angeles Type Company to pick out new ornaments and fonts. Hand printing presses can still be found occasionally at flea markets and in the pages of the classified ads. One could do worse than to take one home.
©1998
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FROM SEED TO SEEDFOLKS
I'm a word person. When I'm eating alone, I need to be reading something--anything. Mere chewing seems idleness. So it was that I found myself, five years ago, between books, with no ghost of an idea for the next, having lunch in a bagel shop that, astoundingly, offered no jam-stained, pre-owned copy of the San Francisco Chronicle for those with my affliction. Like the bagel, serendipity is one of my four food groups. It's usually closest at hand when farthest from my mind. In mild disgust, I resigned myself to a copy of a New Age tabloid--no sports section, no movie reviews--when something caught my eye: an article about a local psychotherapist who used gardening to help her clients. The story mentioned that physicians in ancient Egypt prescribed garden walks for mentally ill patients. Both my heart and brain began to race. The seed for Seedfolks had been planted.
Books don't usually come from a single source. Like rivers, many tributaries flow into them, streams that might have begun running in childhood along with others no more than a few months old. Each book is its own braiding of waters. Sometimes authors themselves are unaware of what lies behind a book. A veil drops over our eyes when we're writing, shielding us from that realization. It might be lifted when the book is finished, or five years later, or never.
Throughout my writing life, I've worked on books designed to bring readers together. Trying to reproduce the joy and camaraderie of the early music groups and string quartets I'd played in, I'd written books of poems scored for two and four voices. I'd written books designed for readers' theater groups. Many have grown out of a germ like the article I happened on that day.
I brought home the newspaper, put the article in my file, and wrote a few notes in my idea notebook. But Seedfolks actually had its start many years before. My parents were both dedicated gardeners. In the summertime, in Santa Monica, California, I could pick plums, grapes, oranges, berries, loquats, apricots, figs, tangerines--and never leave my yard. Little by little, my parents had plowed under the front lawn in search of more planting space. We were--and still
are--the only house in the neighborhood with a cornfield in the front yard.
My father, Sid Fleischman, is a writer of children's books as well. For him, gardening offered a recess break from his study, along with the pride and pleasure of growing one's own food. Often over dinner he would tally up the number of ingredients that had come from our soil. Writers, like gardeners, tend to be self-taught and value self-sufficiency.
I learned to write from my father, but I'm no less a product of my mother, who took her gardening skills into the community. When I was in high school, my mother volunteered at a therapeutic garden in a veterans' hospital, showing men who'd served in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam how to raise vegetables and flowers, helping to heal damaged psyches in the process. The example of my mother's volunteerism was powerful. Over the years, she arranged book giveaways in cash-poor school districts, used her Spanish-speaking skills to tutor students in English, and, in her last years, learned Braille so as to translate books for the blind. The conflict between my parents' spheres--the printed page and the wider world--is an ancient one for me. I've solved it by keeping a foot in both. Following my mother's lead, I've tutored foreign-language speakers, taught violin and string figures, delivered library books to shut-ins. In an earlier book of mine, a character who's lost her mother vows to keep her alive by becoming her. I've found myself doing the same. My own mother died a few years before Seedfolks. She was a large part of the lure of the idea. A book about the healing power of plants would keep her flame lit.
I'd heard about community gardens--plots of land, usually in large cities, where anyone can grow food and flowers. Such a setting would offer a more varied cast than a therapeutic garden: women, children, teenagers, people from every corner of the world. I began researching. A marvelous magnetism takes place when an idea for a book takes hold. Newspapers and magazines suddenly seemed filled with references to community gardens. A friend of mine took a job at a local garden for the homeless. Another friend who'd helped found a community garden in Boston made me a tape of reminiscences. I read books. I toured gardens, taking notes.
I knew immigration would be central to the book. "Seedfolks" is an old term for ancestors. I'd come across it many years before and written it in my notebook as a possible title. My thought at the time was to collect actual accounts of first-generation immigrants to the United States, those who were the founders of their families here. The book had never come to pass, but the title remained on my list and on my mind. Suddenly, I had a book to go with it. For a writer, the few words of a title can be harder than writing the rest of the book. To have an idea that comes ready-made with a title is like buying a house that's already furnished.
Though my own family had immigrated generations before--one of my mother's relations had been tried as a witch in Massachusetts--I wanted to focus on recent immigrants. This led me to choose Cleveland as a setting, a city famous for its foreign-born population in the past and now absorbing immigrants from new quarters of the globe. Famous as well for its harsh, white winters, Cleveland would be a place with a short summer, where the sight of green would be especially precious. Not to be forgotten in the decision were a number of friends of mine who lived or had lived there. Can you see Canada across Lake Erie? That's the sort of question I'd likely spend weeks fruitlessly trying to track down in books--and the sort that a friend on the phone can answer at once.
Ideas are everywhere. As my father says, the trick is turning them into something. What would be the book's shape and story? I decided to concentrate on the garden's first year--like the infancy of a baby or a plant, a time of dramatic growth. I also knew I wanted to tell its history through a variety of characters, each with a distinctive voice. I'd done this in Bull Run, my previous book, an account of the Civil War's first battle told through 16 points of view. The monologues in that book had been very short, each character speaking several times. I have an aversion to repeating myself and wanted something different this time--longer speeches, closer to short stories, with characters only speaking once, yet appearing in the background of other speakers' accounts, presaging their entrances and following up their exits.
Those characters began taking shape. Some, like sailors awaiting a ship, had haunted my notebook for years but had never found their way into a book. Others popped up out of nowhere. Research is a wonderful push-pull proposition. You go looking for facts and return with fiction. I read that a few gardens had problems with people raising produce for profit, and came up with Virgil's father, the would-be lettuce baron. I came across a mention of a support group for teen mothers taking part in a garden, and invented Maricela. Sae Young came from a newspaper article I'd seen years before about a teacher who'd been assaulted, lost all trust in people, and hadn't left his apartment for years.
Other characters were aspects of me. Sam, who greets everyone he sees, came from the year I spent in an ingrown Omaha neigborhood. Mine was the only beard on the block. Rocks were thrown at me on my first bicycle ride. Like Sam, I began going out of my way to make small talk with grocery store clerks and people at the bus stop, showing them they had no reason to fear me--or, by extension, others who looked different.
"Write what you know" is common advice for writers. In fact, I'm not much of a gardener myself. I read up on soil and pests and propagation, but it soon became clear to me that the focus of the book was people, not plants. To experience some of what my characters were going through, however, I planted a long row of bush beans in my yard midway through the writing. Suddenly, I understood. I felt pulled out of bed to check on them every morning and gave them a last look every night. Every milestone felt worthy of celebration: the first cracks in the earth, the first sprouts poking through like bird beaks, the first flower, the first bean. I picked off bugs with fierce maternal vigilance and laid an aria of invective on pillaging rabbits. Truly, as Nora says, a garden is a soap opera growing out of the ground.
The Vietnam vet, who dropped thousands of tiny seeds on his soil to make up for the thousands of bombs he'd dropped, never made it out of my notebook. Nor did the alcoholic gardener who spoke to his plants. A book, like a plant, finds its own shape. I feared young adult readers wouldn't sit still for a book about a garden and for a time I lost faith and put the book aside. When I returned to it, I felt that it had to be shorter, so as not to bore my readers and to avoid repeating certain character types. And unlike Bull Run, the book would be open-ended, with the outcome of various characters' dramas left to readers' imaginations.
The book came out, with its lovely jacket and illustrations. Books are quite like seeds; the writer never knows exactly what will come up. Some are yanked out by hostile reviewers, others please passersby and spread extravagantly. Like teenagers, successful books move out of the house and take on a life all their own, received in distant homes, traveling far, being translated into other tongues. Writers know nothing of these journeys except through fan mail--the postcards sent home by the book. I've followed Seedfolks's progress through these.
Like the ancient Egyptians, we recognize that contact with nature can heal. Hours after the 9/
11 attacks in New York, scores of people were standing in wait for the gates of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden to open. The city's public gardens waived admission fees and were thronged with those seeking solace and serenity. In the uprush of altruism, we also saw that a sense of community--that we are known, that we care, that we will be cared for--provides an even greater solace.
I sense that we all have hidden stores of generosity that find no outlet except in such moments of disaster. This was the marvel of the community gardens I visited. They were oases in the urban landscape of fear, places where people could safely offer trust, helpfulness, charity, without need of an earthquake or hurricane. Television, I'm afraid, has isolated us more than race, class, or ethnicity. Community gardens are places where people rediscover not only generosity, but the pleasure of coming together. I salute all those who give their time and talents to rebuilding that sense of belonging. It's a potent seed. "I have great faith in a seed," wrote Thoreau. "Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders."
©2001
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