This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
I was raised by my parents to believe that you had a moral obligation to try and save the world. You sent money to the Red Cross, you registered people to vote, you marched in rallies, stood in vigils, picked up litter.
It was not facing what life dealt that made you crazy, but rather trying to set life straight where it was unstraightenable.
It was about tragedy transformed over the years into joy. It was about the beauty of sheer effort.
It's always the same old problem: how to find ourselves in the great yammering of ego and tragedy and discomfort and obsession with everyone else's destinies.
Late Fragment And did you get what you wanted from this life even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth. RAYMOND CARVER
Life does not seem to present itself to me for my convenience, to box itself up nicely so I can write about it with wisdom and a point to make before putting it on a shelf somewhere.
Life on earth is a head-scratcher for anyone who's paying attention. This place has been a bad match for me since I was four.
Novels ought to have hope; at least, American novels ought to have hope. French novels don't need to. We mostly win wars, they lose them. Of course, they did hide more Jews than many other countries, and this is a form of winning.
One secret of life is that the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. Another secret is that laughter is carbonated holiness
One of the worst things about being a parent, for me, is the self-discovery, the being face to face with one's secret insanity and brokenness and rage.
One writer I know tells me that he sits down every morning and says to himself nicely, It?s not like you don?t have a choice, because you do?you can either type or kill yourself.
Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.
Being a writer guarantees that you will spend too much time alone -- and that as a result, your mind will begin to warp.
But, honey, that's a naughty word. Both of us have absolutely got to stop using it. Okay?
For some of us books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small flat rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world worlds that sing to you comfort and quiet or excite you.
For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.
For some of us, books are as important as anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid pieces of paper unfolds world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet you or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die. They are full of the things that you don't get in life...wonderful, lyrical language, for instance. And quality of attention: we may notice amazing details duringthe course of a day but we rarely let ourselves stop and really pay attention. An author makes you notice, makes you pay attention and this is a great gift. My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I'm grateful for it the way I'm grateful for the ocean.
Frequently, as so many poets and psalmists and songwriters have said, the invisible shift happens through the broken places.
He got me a cup of tea with honey, toast with honey, yogurt with honey, like I was John the Baptist with the flu.
Help. We can be freed from a damaging insistence on forward thrust, from a commitment to running wildly down a convenient path that might actually be taking us deeper into the dark forest. Praying Help means that we ask that Something give us the courage to stop in our tracks, right where we are, and turn our fixation away from the Gordian knot of our problems. We stop the toxic peering and instead turn our eyes to something else: to our feet on the sidewalk, to the middle distance, to the hills, whence our help comes?someplace else, anything else. Maybe this is a shift of only eight degrees, but it can be a miracle. It may be one of those miracles where your heart sinks, because you think it means you have lost. But in surrender you have won. And if it were me, after a moment, I would say, Thanks.
How are we going to get through this craziness? I asked. There was silence for a moment. Left foot, right foot, left foot, breathe, he said.
I like to think that Henry James said his classic line, A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost, while looking for his glasses, and that they were on top of his head.
I resisted as long as I could, like Sam-I-Am in Green Eggs and Ham ? I would not, could not in a boat! I could not would not with a goat! I do not want to follow Jesus, I just want expensive cheeses. Or something. Anyway, he wore me out. He won. I was tired and vulnerable and he won. I let him in. This is what I said at the moment of my conversion: I said, Fuck it. Come in. I quit. He started sleeping on my bed that night. It was not so bad. It was even pretty nice. He loved me, he didn?t shed or need to have his claws trimmed, and he never needed a flea dip. I mean, what a savior, right? Then, when I was dozing, tiny kitten that I was, he picked me up like a mother cat, by the scruff of my neck, and deposited me in a little church across from the flea market in Marin?s black ghetto. That?s where I was when I came to. And then I came to believe.
I want people who write to crash or dive below the surface, where life is so cold and confusing and hard to see. Your anger and damage and grief are the way to the truth.
I was terrified of death by the time I was three or four, actively if not lucidly. I had frequent nightmares about snakes and scary neighbors. By the age of four or five, I was terrified by my thoughts. By the time I was five, the migraines began. I was so sensitive about myself and the world that I cried or shriveled up at the slightest hurt. People always told me, You've got to get a thicker skin, like now they might say, jovially, Let go and let God. Believe me, if I could, I would, and in the meantime I feel like stabbing you in the forehead. Teachers wrote on my report cards that I was too sensitive, excessively worried, as if this were an easily correctable condition, as if I were wearing too much of the violet toilet water little girls wore then.
If you always dreamed of writing a novel or a memoir, and you used to love to write, and were pretty good at it, will it break your heart if it turns out you never got around to it? If you wake up one day at eighty, will you feel nonchalant that something always took precedence over a daily commitment to discovering your creative spirit? If not--if this very thought fills you with regret--then what are you waiting for?
In a library, you can find small miracles and truth, and you might find something that will make you laugh so hard that you will get shushed, in the friendliest way. I have found sanctuary in libraries my whole life, and there is sanctuary there now, from the war, from the storms of our families and our own minds. Libraries are like mountains or meadows or creeks: sacred space. So this afternoon, I'll walk to the library.
If you screwed up and said out loud that you thought something scary was happening, grown-ups would say, Oh, for Pete?s sake?what an imagination. This is the best way to gaslight children. It keeps them under control, because if the parent is a mess, the children are doomed. It?s best for the child to think he or she is the problem. Then there is toxic hope, which is better than no hope at all, that if the child can do better or need less, the parents will be fine.
It gets darker and darker, and then Jesus is born. That line came back to me, from out of nowhere, and I decided to practice radical hope, hope in the face of not having a clue.
I've given guys blow jobs just because I've run out of things to talk about.' Oh, Rae. Who hasn't
My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I?m grateful for it the way I?m grateful for the ocean.
No one has expressed it better than a great novelist I heard once on a talk show who said something like You want to know the price I pay for being a writer? Okay, I'll tell you. I travel by plane a great deal. And I'm usually seated next to some huge businessman who works on files or his laptop computer for a while, and then notices me and asks me what I do. And I say I'm a writer. Then there's always a terrible silence. Then he says eagerly, 'Have you written anything I might have heard of?
Now, if you ask me, what?s going on is that we?re all up to here in it, and probably the most important thing is that we not yell at one another.
One of the immutable laws of being human is that the people who show up are the right people.
Or you might shout at the top of your lungs or whisper into your sleeve, I hate you, God. That is a prayer too, because it is real, it is truth, and maybe it is the first sincere thought you've had in months.
Opening myself to my own love and to life's tough loveliness not only was the most delicious, amazing thing on earth but also was quantum. It would radiate out to a cold, hungry world. Beautiful moments heal, as do real cocoa, Pete Seeger, a walk on old fire roads. All I ever wanted since I arrived here on earth were the same things I needed as a baby, to go from cold to warm, lonely to held, the vessel to the giver, empty to full. You can change the world with a hot bath, if you sink into it from a place of knowing you are worth profound care, even when you're dirty and rattled. Who knew?
Redefinition is a nightmare?we think we?ve arrived, in our nice Pottery Barn boxes, and that this or that is true. Then something happens that totally sucks, and we are in a new box, and it is like changing into clothes that don?t fit, that we hate. Yet the essence remains. Essence is malleable, fluid. Everything we lose is Buddhist truth?one more thing that you don?t have to grab with your death grip, and protect from theft or decay. It?s gone. We can mourn it, but we don?t have to get down in the grave with it.