Finding Your Voice, Telling Your Stories

The Man Who Opened the Bag

madmoon55@hotmail.com (Carol LaChapelle) — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 22:04:00 +0000

On the L car, about 11:30 am, heading south to downtown. Busy in my head reading and writing all over a private client’s draft. We meet tomorrow at 11 am and I want to have a few helpful comments to make about her piece.

It’s Tuesday, the first interesting snowfall of the season, the L car crowded with people wrapped in all manner of fleece, scarves, colorful knit hats.

I’m alone in my seat, the one ahead of me empty. Directly across the aisle, someone goes to sit down and picks up a black bag, apparently left on the seat, though it’s anyone’s guess as to when and by whom. He asks the person behind him, “Is this yours?” “No,” she nods. He gingerly lifts it—it’s black, plastic, like a small garbage bag, and obviously has something in it. He then places it across the aisle, on the empty seat in front of me. He doesn’t open it.

Next stop, a woman gets on, goes to sit in that very same seat, the empty one save for the black plastic bag. She turns to me and asks, “Is this yours?” “No,” I say, “it’s been getting moved from seat to seat, don’t know who left it.” She briefly picks it up, considers, then puts it down, and moves on to another seat. She doesn’t open it.

Next stop, a big burly guy with long braids and a puffy black jacket gets on the car, goes to sit in the empty seat in front of me, though not quite empty of course. That small black bag is sitting there. He turns to me, “No,” I say.

He sits down, moves over to the window side (the bag has been riding in the aisle seat), picks up the bag and opens it. I lean over to look. Inside is a neatly ironed and folded denim shirt, like one, we both say aloud, that you would pick up at a thrift store or Salvation Army. He takes it out, unfolds, then re-folds it, places it gently back in the bag, and onto the aisle seat. Then the man who finally opened the bag settles in comfortably, and closes his eyes.

Keeping At It

madmoon55@hotmail.com (Carol LaChapelle) — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 22:27:00 +0000

As we near the end of The Mind at Work, the essay writing workshop I regularly teach at The Newberry Library, the conversation turns to “keeping at it.” Inspired by the workshop—by drafts submitted, helpful comments given and received—my students want to know how they can stay committed to their writing.

For years, I used to give a long list of suggestions, such as carrying a writer’s journal, attending literary events, reading broadly and deeply across genres. And while these are fine and fun recommendations, I now just say one thing: have a reader waiting.

There are many different ways to do this, including taking more workshops, joining a writing group, enlisting a writing buddy. But one of my favorite ways to stay writing is to enter writing contests, no matter who sponsors them or how I learn about them.

For instance, earlier this fall, while chatting up a former neighbor on one of my urban bike rides, I learned that a local theatre was sponsoring an essay writing contest related to their current production. The prize winner would receive two bottles of wine and a gift certificate to a nearby indie bookstore.

Booty enough for me.

And so I went home and onto the theatre’s website, took note of the (spare) writers’ guidelines and submission date, got to work, and two weeks later sent in my essay. And, Dear Reader, I won.

Then just last week, my friend Melanie, designer of the fabulous dog-cozy, the eco-friendly dog “bag” for wet and muddy Fidos (www.dogcozy.com), sent me a link to Modern Dog magazine, which is running its first ever writing contest. Not only will I be entering it—I certainly have a dog story or two in me—but I’ve forwarded the info on to some of my writing students for their consideration.

And if you don’t want to wait for writing invitations to show up in your in-box, or during random conversations on the street, just check out writing magazines like The Writer and Poets & Writers. In addition to listing writing markets, they also include information about writing contests. Caveat: Many contests charge a fee. Obviously I prefer those that don’t, but depending on the sponsor and the odds (and the fee), it might be worth it. What is definitely worth it, though, is the purpose and focus such contests give to your writing.

Stories Goes Kindle

madmoon55@hotmail.com (Carol LaChapelle) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 18:05:00 +0000

The Stories book has gone Kindle and, truth to tell, I’ve mixed feelings about that. Books as objects—with pages that turn, that can be stuffed into the meshed pockets of backpacks, that show the wear and tear of earnest reading—these I treasure. And have since I first worried my Dick & Jane reader to pieces.

Nothing calms like being among books—in bookstores, libraries, in my modest studio apartment. All those stories, great thoughts, and comforting humor. I’ve likely bought, sold, borrowed, and lent more books than is rational. Then of course, I went and wrote one. And hope to write another. And maybe even a third.

Aye, and there’s the rub. For as a book’s author—at least once it’s out the door and on a shelf in one of those bookstores and libraries—I’m thinkin’ “royalties,” I’m thinkin’ payment for my efforts. For as I tell my writing clients who want to write books: Be prepared. It’s a slog.

So a person can’t help but think they should be compensated at the end of that, and maybe more than the 6% they signed on for. And that’s where Kindle comes in, and the concomitant mixed feelings. For with that format, my royalties jump considerably. Maybe not so much that I can say I make a living from being a writer. Besides, I am a teacher who writes, not a writer who teaches. I’d be bereft without the teaching.

But, still, that jump? It calms in a very different way.

A Sliver of Ice in the Heart

madmoon55@hotmail.com (Carol LaChapelle) — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:20:00 +0000

Graham Greene has been quoted as saying that writers have—or must have—“ a sliver of ice in the heart.” It sounds ominous, but all it really means is that writers use the material from their lives in their work, whether fiction, poetry, personal essay, or memoir. In doing so, they stand a bit apart from their lives, always observing, thinking about how their experiences might be transformed into something artful.

This reminds me of what I once read about James Thurber who, while at a cocktail party, stood alone by the hors d’oeuvre table, looking out onto the assembled guests. Just looking and listening. His wife allegedly came up to him and loudly whispered, “Thurber. Quit writing!”

To me, this all connects in some way to what Vivian Gornick has to say about the “detached narrator” in her book The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative: “The voice I lived with—whiney; grating; accusatory—could not be the voice I wrote with. Our detached narrator becomes the instrument of our illumination.”

Gornick describes that detached narrator as also a reliable one, and as I tell my writing students, all readers want to be in the hands of a reliable narrator, one who is detached enough from the experience to gain meaning from it. Once that happens, she can then share that meaning with her readers.

This is especially true when writing about personal experiences. I refer to that “meaning” as the “what about it?” In effect, we as readers say to the writer, nice story, but what about it? Why should I care? It’s up to our detached narrator to discover the answer to that question. It is in that process of discovery that the writer-narrator becomes reliable, someone we trust to illuminate something important for us.

How To Get a Writing Gig

madmoon55@hotmail.com (Carol LaChapelle) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:25:00 +0000

Easy, show up with some beer.

People who know me know my fondness for beer, preferably lager, chilled, and straight from the bottle. I’ve written about the story of beer for this blog, and about its relationship to the invention of writing. And so I was pleased to learn recently of yet another connection between beer and writing.

From the November 9 issue of The Writer’s Almanac:

The first issue of Rolling Stone was published on November 9, 1967. It was started by 21-year-old Jann Wenner, who dropped out of Berkeley and borrowed $7,500 from family members and from people on a mailing list that he stole from a local radio station, and with that money he managed to put together a magazine. The cover of the first issue featured John Lennon, and in it, Wenner wrote, "Rolling Stone is not just about music, but also about the things and attitudes that the music embraces." He printed 40,000 copies, and 34,000 were returned unsold. But soon Rolling Stone had a devoted group of readers, partly because there were some great writers there. Probably the most famous of these journalists was Hunter S. Thompson, who showed up at Jann Wenner's office in 1970 with a case of beer and an offer to write for Rolling Stone. [emphasis mine] The next year, he serialized Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in the magazine's pages. Today Rolling Stone has a circulation of about 1.4 million.

It's All in the Art

madmoon55@hotmail.com (Carol LaChapelle) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:54:00 +0000

From a recent NYT review of Mary Karr's latest memoir Lit:

"Lit is a story of addiction and recovery, by now familiar in outline from the many A.A.-like autobiographies produced during the memoir craze of the late ’90s. Whereas many of these lesser efforts were propelled by the belief that confession is therapeutic and therapy is redemptive and redemption somehow equals art, Ms. Karr’s own work demonstrates that candor and self-revelation only become literature when they are delivered with hard-earned craft, that the exposed life is not the same as the examined one."

Or as British writer V.S. Pritchett said about the memoir form: "It's all in the art. You get no credit for living."

WORD DRUNK

madmoon55@hotmail.com (Carol LaChapelle) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 20:13:00 +0000

The other day, while making lunch and listening to the radio—a program on Middle East politics—the guest, whose name I never got, used the adjective “pusillanimous” when describing John Kerry’s position on the topic under discussion.

I was startled—even if this was NPR—that this word fell so easily and naturally out of the guest’s mouth. I stopped what I was doing and went straight to the first of my three reference books, The Oxford Desk Dictionary and Thesaurus (2^nd edition) to look up the word’s meaning, though I’d guessed at it from the context within which it was used.

In the Oxford, there were only two listings for pusillanimous: lacking courage and timid. Oops, but then just three words down, I saw the word “pustule,” whose sound has always intrigued me. It also puts me in mind of the Black Death, with which I am slightly obsessed. (Really, just last night I watched a DVD about it.)

I'm also obsessed—and more than slightly—with words, which was why doing dictionary work as a college freshman kept me up most of the night. For on the way to looking up, say, pusillanimous, I'd get waylaid in the D's (diffident) or F's (flotsam) or surely the L's (lobelia).

But I’ve made progress since then, I think, so I didn’t tarry long on pustule, but went straight to my second reference book, the large and unwieldy Random House Dictionary of the English Language (Second Edition) which sits on a built-in dresser in my walk-in closet. It’s pretty heavy, but at chest-height it’s easy to flip open, which I did—and paused but a second at “piddle”—the meaning of which seemed momentarily apt :“to spend time in a wasteful, trifling, or ineffective way; dawdle (often fol. by around).”

Indeed.

But I quickly quit piddling around and pushed on through the “P’s”—pusillanimous being quite toward the end. Once there I was rewarded with a more extended definition of the word, and hence a more nuanced one. In addition to lacking courage and timid, pusillanimous means lacking resolution; cowardly; faint-hearted. And there were synonyms: timorous; fearful; frightened.

Next stop was my third reference book, The Oxford Pocket American Thesaurus of Current English, and even more pusillanimous synonyms, including “lily-livered, chickenhearted, spineless, and craven (and it took just a second for me to spy two pustule synonyms I rather liked: boil and blister).

Finally, I felt sated.

Well, not quite. I went on the internet, to my latest discovery, dictionary.com. This site searches several on-line dictionaries, including The Etymology Dictionary, which I refuse to bookmark, for reasons that should be obvious by now.

At any rate, dictionary.com didn’t have anything new to add, though it did suggest “related words”: poor-spirited and unmanly, both of which sound less like timid and faint-hearted and more like something else.

Now, though, I was sated. Exhausted, actually.

P.S. (Before leaving dictionary.com, I just had to check on pustule. A find! Here it is used as a metaphor: "a cool glimpse of green between hot pustules of sooty sprawl" (Nicholas Proffitt).

And who exactly is Nicolas Proffitt? And whence the quote? Sorry, you’ll have to discover that on your own.

This Wondrous Thing from Our New Poet Laureate

madmoon55@hotmail.com (Carol LaChapelle) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:07:00 +0000

(NOTE: Best read aloud, at least four times daily.)

Turtle

by Kay Ryan

Who would be a turtle who could help it?

A barely mobile hard roll, a four-oared helmet,

She can ill afford the chances she must take

In rowing toward the grasses that she eats.

Her track is graceless, like dragging

A packing-case places, and almost any slope

Defeats her modest hopes. Even being practical,

She's often stuck up to the axle on her way

To something edible. With everything optimal,

She skirts the ditch which would convert

Her shell into a serving dish. She lives

Below luck-level, never imagining some lottery

Will change her load of pottery to wings.

Her only levity is patience,

The sport of truly chastened things.

Every Writer Needs a Friendly Critic

madmoon55@hotmail.com (Carol LaChapelle) — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 21:17:00 +0000

In Howard Gardner’s book Creating Minds, the author examines the idea of creativity through the lives of seven major artists and thinkers of the 20^th century, including Freud, Picasso, Gandhi, and T.S. Eliot. As a writer myself, I went immediately to the chapter on Eliot, which opens with a discussion of a draft of The Waste Land discovered in 1968, in a collection at the New York Public Library.

Eliot had originally given the draft of the poem to his wife Vivien and to his friend and fellow writer, Ezra Pound, also an ex-pat poet living in Europe. Pound, it turns out, suggested changes to the original “that reduced the poem to approximately half its length.”

Later in the chapter, Gardner becomes more specific: ”While highly suggestive and full of sections with undeniable power, the original manuscript was bloated….There was much indecisiveness, repetitiveness, and monotony: too many voices and too little sense of overall direction, control, and locale. Pound’s feat was in carving away the overstated sections that pulled the poem in diffuse directions and in both sharpening the remaining verses by crossing out unnecessary or misleading words or phrases and eliminating many hedges and ambivalent tones.”

Vivien, Eliot’s wife, also made changes that Gardner says “nicely complemented Pound’s,” changes that were the result of her “excellent ear for specific lines.” Gardner refers to both Pound and Vivien as Eliot’s “friendly critics,” helping him to create this masterwork of early 20^th century literature.

It gave me great comfort to learn this. Those of us who write and teach writing know that though done in solitude our stories, poems, and essays are really collaborative efforts, dependent on our own “friendly critics” to help make them tighter, more focused, more engaging. And while it’s not always easy to hear that we haven’t created a masterpiece on our first, or fifth, or even twelfth try, we recognize the value of the input we receive from our first readers.

And as I tell my students, we may not make all the changes suggested by others—we are, after all, the final authority on our own writing—but we are grateful for what these comments teach us. Which is why I open every writing workshop with the LaChapelle maxim: "When one of us learns something about writing, we all do."

And so may we all, as Eliot did, use our "friendly critics" to help us find the great work lurking within our own literary efforts.

Stein on Writing

madmoon55@hotmail.com (Carol LaChapelle) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:39:00 +0000

At a literary event I attended in August, one of the panel presenters highly recommended Sol Stein’s book, Stein on Writing. Always in search of new ways to think and talk about writing, I’ve been making my slow way through it. (Full Disclosure: My totem animal is the turtle; “slow” is how I do most things.)

Though most of the chapters are dedicated to fiction writing, Stein has many good things to say—or re-emphasize—to those of us writing nonfiction, including that writers learn their craft by reading and analyzing other people’s writing. This is why writers benefit from workshops, classes, and writing groups; they not only have their drafts read and responded to, but also read and comment on the work of their fellow writers. Both activities help us become better practitioners of the craft.

In the book’s final chapter, Stein lists his Ten Commandments for Writers. My favorite is the last, “10. Above all, thou shalt not vent thy emotions onto the reader, for thy duty is to evoke the reader’s emotions, and in that most of all lies the art of the writer.”

Amen, I say to that, Brother Stein.

The Dangers of Listening to the Radio

madmoon55@hotmail.com (Carol LaChapelle) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 22:05:00 +0000

One of my favorite NPR programs is the Bob Edwards show, which is broadcast on Sunday mornings here in Chicago.

A couple of weeks ago he interviewed Denis Dutton, author of The Art Instinct (Bloomsbury Press), who mentioned a website he edited called Arts & Letters Daily, www.aldaily.com. I made the mistake of writing it down, and now I'm hooked.

Updated six days each week, Arts & Letters Daily contains links to articles, essays, and book reviews on literature, language, ideas, and the arts compiled by the Chronicle of Higher Education. The pieces are originally published in magazines, newspapers, and book reviews from all over the world, making them a must-read for writers.

And if you start to feel guilty about all the time you spend in idle reading, remember what the great Dr. Johnson said, "I never desire to converse with a man [or woman] who has written more than he has read."

P.S. Happy 300th Birthday, Dr. J!

What I've Missed Most is The Teaching.

madmoon55@hotmail.com (Carol LaChapelle) — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 03:10:00 +0000

Last Saturday, I conducted my nature writing workshop, Earth Words, at The Well—an eco-spirituality center near Chicago—for 10 interested writers, nature lovers, and those seeking to marry spirit and nature in their everyday lives.

We met for 2.5 hours in a bright, comfortable room adjacent to a lovely outdoor garden, though everyone agreed the time was too short, that they were just settling in—to the writing, to themselves—and then it was over.

A few days prior to our meeting, I’d prepared by reading and re-reading poems by Mary Oliver, essays by Barry Lopez and Leslie Marmon Silko, and excerpts from Kathleen Norris’s Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. I thought about what writing exercises to use, what readings to bring along, how to connect the poems or stories to the writing and the students’ own experiences.

Then on that day, while in the room and actually teaching—guiding students in the writing exercises, inviting discussions of the readings—I realized yet again that it didn’t matter what I’d prepared or pre-thought about those 2.5 hours. For out of the immediacy of the moment, and words read, written, and spoken, out of all of that came memories stirred and imagination ignited, discoveries made, thoughts and feelings more deeply understood.

This is what it is like for me to teach.

I stumbled onto teaching by accident, almost 25 years ago, already middle-aged, a returning graduate student in English seeking refuge from a mind-numbing, soul-destroying job, intent upon reading—just reading—the best that had ever been written. And then an offhand suggestion from a fellow graduate student, “Why don’t you apply for a teaching assistantship?” Apparently having nothing better to do that day, I did, was accepted, and in 1987 began teaching my own classes in freshman comp at the same university.

I lasted four years. I loved the teaching, and really loved teaching writing, infatuated with how it always took me places I never expected to go. But I grew impatient with the indifference of most of the students, unhappy with the need to grade them.

Then in the summer of 1991, I picked up Richard Bolles’s What Color is Your Parachute? and found buried in the appendix this by Frederick Buechner: “The place God calls us to is the place where our deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

Though a card-carrying agnostic, those words changed everything for me, especially when I read “work” for “place.” I knew I wanted my work to exist at the intersection of my gladness and what I thought many people hungered for—time to be creative; room to be imaginative; a place to tell their stories.

It took awhile, but that’s the work I created over the next 20 years—writing workshops that served up the time, the room, and the place, and for adults of all backgrounds and ages. How could I not be glad doing that? How could I not be excited every time I rode the Red Line to the Newberry, or the metra to Barrington, or the big bus up to Madison?

And then last year the recession, aka the "greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression." Opportunities to do my work began to disappear. Both institutions and individuals were—and many still are—in real economic distress, with discretionary spending taking an especially big hit.

Woe are we.

But, as Robert Graves once said, there may be no money in poetry, but there’s certainly no poetry in money. So while I could do the numbers and wince like everyone else, it wasn’t until last week, while in that place with those 10 people, the place Buechner so poetically described, that I realized that what I’ve missed most is the teaching.

Yes, I've missed going out to dinner more often, drinking the higher-end wines, visiting family in California and friends in New York. I've missed buying whatever books and CDs strike my fancy. I've missed all the little luxuries that make life so enjoyable. But really what I've missed most is the teaching.

What I Did Today Instead of Write

madmoon55@hotmail.com (Carol LaChapelle) — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 02:22:00 +0000

Listened to NPR, love that Joe Wilson’s rival got over $400,000 in campaign contributions without even asking (what’s going on with South Carolina anyway??);

Made Coffee

Checked e-mail

Went on Facebook

Looked at ranking of the Stories Book on Amazon

Organized Day

Reconciled bank account

Checked e-mail

Went on Facebook

Organized Writing Files

Made 2^nd cup of coffee

Checked e-mail

Read internet article on anti-wrinkle creams

Went on Facebook and Amazon

Did neck exercises (don’t want the tinnutis to return)

Tidied up apartment

Did dishes

Went on Facebook

Checked e-mails

Did stretches (don't want back pain to return)

Went for a walk

Stopped at grocery store; fortunately didn't have run-in again with the lady who yelled at me for eating samples from the salad bar

Stopped at comic book store, asked about the graphic memoir Stitches by David Small

Came home, checked e-mail, Facebook and Amazon

Made lunch

Read the Red Eye, keeping up on popular culture (Ellen is replacing Paula on American Idol)

Read parts of Stein on Writing, got an interesting idea to use in my next writing workshop

Checked e-mail

Went on Facebook

Biked to university library, cruised the periodical stacks. What a treasure trove! In addition to the usual popular magazines like Time, Newsweek, The New Yorker, and Vogue (Vogue???), there are tons of academic journals including The North American Journal of Fisheries Management; Middle Eastern Studies; the Huntington Library Quarterly; and The Scottish Journal of Theology. Can't wait to crack those open.

Read parts of the Summer 09 issue of Paris Review

Left to meet private writing client at the local indie coffeehouse

Biked to Sears to pay Discover bill

Went to networking event at Uncommon Ground

Biked back to the university library

Read more of Paris Review, found much solace in Billy Collins’ poem about not writing:

Returning the Pencil to Its Tray

Everything is fine---

the first bits of sun are on

the yellow flowers behind the low wall,

people in cars are on their way to work,

and I will never have to write again.

Just looking around

will suffice from here on in.

Who said I had to always play

the secretary of the interior?

And I am getting good at being blank,

staring at all the zeroes in the air.

It must have been all the time spent

in the kayak this summer

that brought this out,

the yellow one that went

nicely with the pale blue life jacket---

the sudden, tippy

buoyancy of the launch,

then the exertion, striking

into the wind against the short waves,

but the best was drifting back,

the paddle resting athwart the craft,

and me mindless in the middle of time.

Not even that dark cormorant

perched on the NO WAKE sign,

his narrow head raised

as if he were looking over something,

not even that inquisitive little fellow

could bring me to write another word.

---Billy Collins

P.S. I love you Billy Collins.

P.P. S. Came home, checked e-mail, went on Facebook and Amazon.

About Work

madmoon55@hotmail.com (Carol LaChapelle) — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 01:44:00 +0000

In the Stories book exercise on work, I list several of my previous jobs, including mailroom clerk, secretary, waitress, social worker, and college instructor. Having thus been around the career block a lap or two, I’ve thought a lot about work, especially as I wasn’t raised to do it. What the fine nuns at my all-girls Catholic high school hoped for was that we’d all graduate into good Catholic marriages, becoming good Catholic wives and mothers in the process. If we had to work until that happened, it was expected to be of a short duration and in one of three pink collar ghettos: teaching, typing, or nursing.

Of those, teaching seemed the least objectionable, so off I went to college to be an elementary school teacher. I lasted only a year before I began my slow descent into Dante’s Nine Circles of Career Hell. There I drifted far longer than I ever imagined, the good-Catholic-wife-and-mother thing never quite materializing.

The default of course was always secretarial—which I think is the Eighth Circle—since I typed an insane number of words per minute and liked to organize things. What I didn’t like was sitting for eight hours a day, the blandness of the work, and not using much of my own creativity, unless it was to figure out how to better arrange the supply cabinet.

But a default is a default and it came in handy whenever another of my many jobs or careers went poof. Which happened quite frequently until I returned to graduate school in my forties and finally found myself as a writer and teacher. There are likely several explanations for this inability to “settle down,” as my father said on more than one occasion, including having grown up with drunks.

But that’s another story.

This is all to say that I may not have always been the perfect employee, harboring as I did great expectations for what a job is supposed to provide, other than some money and a place to be eight hours a day, five days a week, for an unconscionable number of years of one’s life.

The huge chasm between what I expected and what I got became clear during my recent stint at the bookstore. Ideally, work, even part-time, should be meaningful and fun, calling forth the best of one’s gifts and talents. It should allow for variety and initiative, and promote a sense of well being. Work, even part-time, should also provide a reasonable wage, an easy commute, and more than a half hour for lunch.

So there I was, out of touch with reality yet again. For retail is not work, really; retail is a job, and one I turned out to be lousy at. Not because I couldn’t find the “merchandise,” shelf it, take it off the shelf, ring it up, put it in a bag. But because working retail means doing what the Corporate Entity says to do, and in the precise order It says to do it. Individual initiative is not encouraged, at least among the worker bees, though hewing to the party line certainly is.

Which makes me think of those fine nuns all those years ago. Though they aimed to teach us to be good Catholic wives and mothers—speaking of hewing to the party line—and good typists, teachers and nurses until we got there, they quite overshot their mark. By a lot. For those nuns gave us the tools to think , to value independence of thought, to do more than hew.

Those nuns whooshing quietly down the hall in their black and white habits, hands tucked demurely beneath their starched nun-bibs. Sister Kathleen, Sister Adrienne, Sister Lawrence, even old and blind Sister Paul with the Coke-bottle glasses. This, in the ‘50s, when in my mainly blue collar family thoughts of sending girls to college were dim to the point of absent. Those nuns, wittingly or not, let that wily snake back into the Garden. And some of us learned to love the taste of the apple.