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  Susan Israel

SUSAN ISRAEL | BLOG

Eyes and Ears

5/27/2016

 
When I was in college, I habitually did my homework at the counter of a local bookstore café, guzzling enough coffee to stay awake and alert. The evening crowd was sparse, so the atmosphere was usually quiet enough to concentrate until theater-goers streamed in after a performance down the street. There were other regulars there, including one guy who sat at the counter just about every night I was there, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and staring piercingly at everybody.

What’s he looking at, I’d think, sometimes slightly unnerved. Who is he?

I didn’t know until about a year later when I saw his picture in the program of one of the plays being performed down the street, a play he wrote. I didn’t see him in the café much after that; he was too recognized to blend in with the others hovering over their cappuccinos, he started to frequent other places where he could swallow the atmosphere without being swallowed up, where he could see and hear life without his celebrity being an intrusive part of it. I’m not sure what if anything he gleaned from his observations during those early evenings he transposed into his work, but it made me start to study people more acutely, it made me start to stare and soak everything in. I wanted to see him again, if only to ask him if this was the key to getting this writing thing right. But I didn’t see him again until graduation when he was crossing the quad wearing the cap and gown of an honorary recipient and all I could think of to say was, “Hi.”

Pathetic.

Theater is not only eyes but ears too, and I imagine he eavesdropped as much as he stared. What came out was genius. A playwriting student I met a few years later went so far as to secretly tape-record conversations around him. I haven’t seen his name or picture in any programs. There’s a lot more to be said for using initial observations as a launching pad for exploring imaginative space. As the great philosopher Lawrence T. (Yogi) Berra once said, “you can observe a lot by watching.”
​

Just leave the mini-cam and tape recorder home.

Oh no, I'm a Celebritante!

5/25/2016

 
What I really like about opaque reusable grocery bags, in addition to them helping the environment, is that they hide my weekly cache of celebrity gossip magazines from other shoppers. I shouldn’t have to worry about people second-guessing my literary preferences, but I do. What I just bought is the literary equivalent of Twizzlers. And oh yeah, I bought Twizzlers too.

When I buy Us Magazine or Star at the newsstand near my old college campus, I’m always wary of a former professor seeing me and so I compensate by buying something more typical of someone of my academic background, say, Smithsonian or The New Yorker and sandwich the pulp in between them, bologna between slabs of foie gras.

“It’s research,” I say when caught in the act, blushing. “I’m brushing up on current culture in case I get on Jeopardy.” I auditioned for Jeopardy once but didn’t make the final cut; I’m not sure if a Kardashian or a Real Housewife was to blame, but these magazines may yet pay off, supplying me with names of B list actors and reality TV celebrity-wannabes and musicians that I know nothing about but my fictional characters might. It is research, after all! You don’t think I’d read them for pleasure, do you?

Okay, I’m guilty, I do. And according to ‘Stars Are People Too’, so do the stars. Those who aren’t suing the same magazines for libelous content. Gossip is fun when it’s not about you and most of it isn’t true. Like any true academic, I start my read by deconstructing cover stories; ‘ANGELINA LEAVES BRAD AND THE KIDS!’ just means she walked out the door to get the mail. Of more abiding interest is who had a hissy fit or wardrobe malfunction, which make screaming at the driver in front of me or toilet paper stuck to my shoe pale by comparison. Who hasn’t had a meltdown or done something we know is immoral, illegal or fattening? Fashion Police is fun; it makes me think of the numerous times I’d like to make a citizen’s arrest when I see someone mixing checks and plaids or displaying too much cleavage of any kind. Hey, you in the express checkout with rollers in your hair- busted! It also makes me rethink my color choices before I walk out the door. And yes, I imagine at least some of my fictional characters would read them too.
​

I finish off my guilty pleasure by doing a crossword- see, I needed brain power for that after all! What’s a six-letter word for the name of a girl with poufy hair?

Don't Shoot Me, I'm Only The Blogger

5/7/2016

 
So today there was another shooting and I sent another harried instant message to a friend who lives in the community where said shooting went down; Are you okay? Are your kids okay?

They’re fine. “This is so crazy,” she said. “I just don’t understand how we don’t have gun laws that make sense.”

Nor do I. Nor do 100 million Americans who want sane gun laws, according to the National Gun Victims Action Council (NGAC) NGAC states that of the 4 million NRA members, over 75% want sane gun laws. Yet the NRA leadership believes in a chicken in every basket and a gun in each hand, even criminal hands, even children’s hands, even the hands of the mentally ill. States have passed laws permitting guns on college campuses. As of January 8, licensed gun owners in Texas were allowed to bring their firearms into Texas’ 10 state mental hospitals.

This is crazy.

There are at least 40 books on Goodreads having to do with school shootings. Mine will be one of them. I didn’t plan on writing about a school shooting, but the characters in my book were hurtling toward violent resolution of conflict. Spoiler alert: no students were harmed. I couldn’t do that to them. I live too close to a town where students were senselessly mowed down because somebody who never should have gone near a gun was recklessly allowed access to them, including a killing machine. My novel’s resolution, while far less catastrophic, is fiction, maybe even fairy tale when you consider recent history. Daily tragedy is fact.

While editing my first novel, Over My Live Body, I came across a minor character, a policeman, with the same last name as that notorious school shooter. I quickly did a ‘replace all.’ That last name disappeared. As with my non-lethal shooting scene, I removed negative connotations, I rewrote history as much as I could.

If only it were that easy in the absence of sane gun laws.



The Reluctant Blogger

5/7/2016

 



Okay, let’s get one thing straight, I can’t imagine for the life of me my favorite authors blogging. Keeping a journal, yes – it’s the repository of all things that come to you at 4 a.m. that you don’t want to lose, among other things and I’ve filled 127 in the last 30 years- 127!- but that’s for my eyes only, to make sense of things, develop stories and file away.

Plenty of authors blog; some don’t. And of course until the ‘90s, nobody did. Even if it were available in his day, Henry David Thoreau might well have considered eschewing the likes of WordPress a desirable form of civil disobedience. The authors of the Lost Generation certainly weren’t plugging in their AirBooks at Les Deux Magots. It’s a wonder in the days of limited means of communication that they garnered an audience at all. In his Nobel speech, Ernest Hemingway said, “Writing, at its best, is a lonely life.” It is at its very best solitary, but
not necessarily lonely. Hemingway added, “(The writer) grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates.”

Something’s got to be said for keeping it to yourself.

How would Hemingway – or Fitzgerald or the notoriously private J.D. Salinger- react if asked to keep a blog? What words would be exchanged if Maxwell Perkins said, “Ernest, I suggest you start writing a blog to build your readership.”
I have no doubt that he would reply with a two-word epithet and head to the savannah with a new book and a new wife in the works.

But these are the 2010s.

I don’t have a pith helmet or a quick escape to Tanzania planned. I have a book in the works and will row with the flow, quelling my urge to steer backwards toward the quietude of my personal Walden Pond, at least once a week. Stay tuned.



    Susan Israel

    Susan Israel has published fiction in Other Voices, Hawaii Review, and Vignette and she has written for magazines, websites, and newspapers, including Glamour, Girls Life, Ladies Home Journal and The Washington Post.  Susan Israel is a graduate of Yale University.

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