Embrace the Mess

The following is not a review of Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman’s book A PERFECT MESS: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder—How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-Fly Planning Make the Word a Better Place. The following is a testimonial. Commuting to work, I listened to the audio version of A PERFECT MESS and, with every mile, found myself more relaxed with my own clutter and my own life.

Abrahamson and Freedman offer fascinating examples and insights into disorder—from personal to professional to political mess—and explode many clichés about the virtues of extreme organization and the vices of messiness. The authors do not advocate utter chaos, but they do speak up for creative clutter and on-the-fly flexibility. They illustrate how those obsessed with organizing tasks can actually waste time that could be use for accomplishing projects. Life is far from perfectly predictable, and people who cope with disorder and unexpected changes and are not guilt-ridden by their own mess may actually hold, in some circumstances, an advantage over the rigidly neat and tightly scheduled.

As a writer, I have long lived with a certain amount of clutter—notebooks and tablets, pens and pencils, multiple drafts of various projects, research books and magazines, index cards, sticky notes, and scraps of paper. The tactile and the visual are essential to my creative process, and technology has not reduced the mess on and around my desks, which now include computers and printers and memory devices. I am far more delighted by creating a story structure and seeing once randomly conceived plot and character elements fall into a compelling design than I am by tidying up my workspace.

After listening to A PERFECT MESS, I have resolved to put aside any remaining twinges of guilt and embarrassment over messiness and embrace the mess as part of the creative process. Of course, there are limits to how many thoughts I can juggle at once in my head, and occasionally I misplace a book or a page of notes. Still, in a search among the clutter, I have often made serendipitous discoveries that benefited the work at hand or sparked a new project. I shudder to imagine what a “professional organizer” might do to my library by imposing the appearance of neatness without regard to my clusterings of ideas and inspirations.

When someone asks how I go about writing a novel or a play, I answer that my method harkens back to ancient augury. In a cardboard box, I collect ideas scribbled on scraps of paper—notes on setting and theme, plot twists and characters, along with fragments of dialogue. The collecting process may last for months or years. Then, when the time feels right, I open the box and spill its contents across the floor, like a diviner splitting the sacrificial beast. From the entrails—all those bits of paper—I read the portents that foretell the story. I discover the pattern that would not have formed without the freedom of random associations and the energy sparked by a perfect mess.

Rosemary Poole-Carter

Mister Rogers, Happy Birthday to You!

When a friend told me that March 20th is Sweater Day in honor of Fred Rogers, a cozy, sweater-warm feeling enveloped me. For many years—now many years ago—Mister Rogers sang his daily welcome to the neighborhood to my children as I settled them with a snack in front of the television before dashing off to my nearby computer. I wrote my first published novel in 90-minute increments during Mister Rogers and Sesame Street. That was my allotted creative time, though truly all the time caring for my children was creative. And Fred Rogers (1928 – 2003), who would have been eighty years old this March 20th, contributed so much to the imaginative energy in my household, to making each day “a beautiful day in this neighborhood.”

Fred Rogers, wearing his familiar sweater and sneakers, did not overwhelm little children with splashy special effects and blasts of noise. He invited and shared and reassured. Looking them straight in the eye, he told them he liked them just the way they were and that they would never go down the bathtub drain. He introduced children to opera and showed them how crayons were made in a factory and explained that the bad and the sad things—such as divorce and death and war—were not their fault. Then, Mister Rogers led the children (and sometimes the parents, as well) to the Land of Make-Believe, where he encouraged them to use their own imaginations.

While choosing a sweater to wear on Fred Rogers’ birthday, I’m reminded of another special someone’s birthday. A little over twenty years ago, when my middle child turned three, it just so happened that on that day, Mister Rogers came out of his kitchen carrying a birthday cake with a lighted candle on top. Through the television screen, he looked into my daughter’s eyes and sang “Happy Birthday to my Friend.” She glowed with joy. And I’m still sweater-warm with gratitude to our beloved neighbor.

Rosemary Poole-Carter

For more information about Fred Rogers and Sweater Day, please visit Family Communications, Inc. at http://www.fci.org/

Atonement: Novel to Film

Years ago, while wandering a bookstore, I was drawn to a trade paperback of Ian McEwan’s Atonement, displayed face-out on the shelf. At the time, I was grappling with the very theme of atonement in my own work-in-progress. Then, there was the cover art, like a snapshot from my childhood—a black and white picture of a forlorn barefoot girl, lost in thought. Opening the book, I found a quote from Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen’s tale of a girl with a vividly gothic imagination and Ian McEwan’s promise to his readers about the tale he would unfold. Turning the page, I met his imaginative young character, Briony Tallis, and blushed as if I were reading an episode of my own life story—the budding playwright in pre-adolescence, believing she has created serious drama, presenting her manuscript to her mother, and cherishing her mother’s praise. Embarrassed and enthralled, I fell into the story.

Of course, when a reader admires a novel as much as I do Atonement, that reader may hesitate, as I did, to see the movie version. But now that I have seen it, my advice to hesitant booklovers is: buy a ticket, settle back in a darkened theater, and savor director Joe Wright’s lush film depiction of the novel’s time, place, and shattering emotions.

The story of Atonement begins in 1935 at a lavish country manor in England. Young Briony witnesses and misinterprets a few moments shared between her older sister Cecilia and a servant’s son, Robbie, setting in motion the tragic consequences for which Briony atones. Or does she? When someone asks me what the book is about, I find no easy, jacket-blurb sort of answer. McEwan’s writing offers layer upon layer of nuance and meaning. Shifting points of view reveal the shifting nature of truth. A film version of such a complex novel necessarily omits some layers and compresses some events. Still, screenwriter Christopher Hampton’s adaptation of Atonement, Wright’s direction, and the cast’s superb performances capture the haunting beauty of the novel in a film that is a work of art in its own right. Kiera Knightly and James McAvoy portray Cecilia and Robbie, the lovers caught in the amber of Briony’s imagination as she, herself, ages from a privileged child (Saoirse Ronon) to a troubled young woman (Romola Garai) serving as a nurse in World War II, and, finally, to an aging novelist (Vanessa Redgrave) reflecting on her career.

In one segment of the novel omitted from the film, aspiring-writer Briony receives her first rejection letter. Like the book’s opening paragraph, that letter touched my writer’s nerve with a shock of recognition. Hadn’t I once received that letter, too? Among the fictitious editor’s comments to Briony is a recommendation to go beyond the “crystalline present moment” and set her characters in motion with “an underlying pull of simple narrative.” As a far from simple, multi-faceted story of concealment and revelation, Atonement, both in book and film, honors the editor’s advice, moving beyond the cowardice of stylish evasions and bravely laying bare the characters’ hearts.

Rosemary Poole-Carter

Sweet & Ironic--Away from Her

Perhaps Sarah Polley has an old soul. In her late twenties, she has written and directed a film based on Alice Munro’s short story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”, depicting passion and longing within a 40-year marriage. In Polley’s film AWAY FROM HER, graceful Fiona (Julie Christie) succumbs to Alzheimer’s, while her husband Grant (Gordon Pinsent) watches her disappear into the disease. Polley’s fidelity to the spirit of Munro’s poignant tale is evident in every aspect of the film—in casting, direction, cinematography, editing, and especially in the script. Grant’s memories and musings come to life on the screen in images and lines that echo the short story: “I never wanted to be away from her,” he says. “She had the spark of life.”

Polley began acting as a child, staring in the Ramona series, then the Avonlea series for television. As a young adult she has added writing and filmmaking to her list of accomplishments and has often chosen acting roles in independent films, including THE SWEET HEREAFTER, THE CLAIM, and THE SECRET LIFE OF WORDS. Filming NO SUCH THING, Polley worked with Christie and envisioned her in the role of Fiona. In Christie’s youth, she won an Academy Award for her role in DARLING; now in her maturity, she is nominated for her role in AWAY FROM HER. Indeed, Christie’s performance shines deservingly within Polley’s well-crafted film, as the actor captures all the ages her character ever was, giving the audience a glimpse of timeless beauty, guided by a director who is wise beyond her years.

In her script, Polley embellishes the subtle humor of the short story, the moments that fleetingly lift us from the heartache. Through flashbacks we see Grant was not always such a devoted husband, and he suspects Fiona’s selective memory of their shared past may be her way of punishing him. At the Meadowlake facility, Fiona forms an attachment to another patient, Aubrey (Michael Murphy), and one odd pairing leads to another when Grant seeks help from Aubrey’s pragmatic wife, Marian (Olympia Dukakis). Polley’s added character development of other visiting family members and patients, particularly the addition of the demented former sportscaster who keeps up a running commentary of goings-on at Meadowlake, are inspired.

Reading “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” and viewing AWAY FROM HER, I was reminded of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116—“Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds . . .” As Fiona and Grant prepare to leave their house, he to take her to Meadowlake and come home alone, he thinks she looks “just like herself on this day”, and in the film he tells her just how she has always looked to him: “Direct and vague. Sweet and ironic.” The camera is on Christie’s face, each spoken word evident in her expression. Grant longs to call Fiona back to him but, instead, attempts to give her what she needs. As G. K. Chesterton wrote, “the way to love something is to realize that it could be lost.” So, a young filmmaker gives us a story of mature love—sweet and ironic.

Rosemary Poole-Carter

Girlfriends Celebrate Books

January 17 -19, 2008, I joined other writers and readers in Jefferson, a small town in the piney woods of East Texas. There, Kathy Patrick, dressed in her trademark hot-pink and leopard print, hosts her annual bash, The Girlfriend Weekend, a celebration of books and big hair. Patrick, an avid reader and a former publisher’s rep, operates Beauty and the Book (www.beautyandthebook.com), a combination bookstore and beauty salon. She is also the founder of the Pulpwood Queens’ Book Clubs (www.pulpwoodqueen.com) and author of THE PULPWOOD QUEEN’S TIARA-WEARING, BOOK-SHARING GUIDE TO LIFE, in which she shares her passions for literacy and living.


The weekend was a loosely organized collection of book talks, panel discussions, and parties, attracting a variety of authors, booklovers, and Pulpwood Queens in sparkling tiaras. This is a festival more for readers to socialize with writers than for aspiring writers to learn about craft. It’s also a chance for the guest authors to leave the keyboard, talk about their books, and connect with book-loving, fun-loving girlfriends—and a few guy friends, too.


When time came for me to present my novel, WOMEN OF MAGDALENE, set in a 19th century ladies’ lunatic asylum in Louisiana, I looked out at an audience of intelligent, curious women, enjoying their community and reveling in their individuality. I thought of the women of my fictional asylum, locked away as many real women were, because they had not conformed to the dictates of the men in charge, the men who held power over the women’s lives—fathers, husbands, doctors, judges, ministers, and politicians. When those men set the standard for what was sane female behavior, they sometimes got it wrong, and asylums could become catchalls for inconvenient women. It was not unusual for 19th century American men to view women’s book clubs with suspicion—all those women gathering without male supervision, reading and exchanging ideas, asserting their own opinions, challenging authority. How marvelous now that book clubs, such as the Pulpwood Queens’ and Timber Guys, continue to flourish, provoking thought, unafraid of being a little outrageous.

Rosemary Poole-Carter, WOMEN OF MAGDALENE, ISBN-13: 978-1-60164-014-7

THANK-YOU NOTES

Before early January becomes late, I hope to finish up sending notes to family, friends, and acquaintances, thanking them for their many kindnesses in the past year and wishing them well in the New Year. To them, I’ll send my thanks by letter or e-mail or speak it over the phone or face-to-face. My thanks to others—kind strangers with generous spirits—must travel in this posting to people I don’t know by name.

Thank you to those in the many service professions—in restaurants and hotels, in retail and transportation, in offices and hospitals—who offered friendliness, helpfulness, and compassion along with competence. Thank you to the drivers who let me merge in traffic, and to the residents who gave me directions when I was a stranger in your town. Thank you to the young man in a New York subway station, who saw me struggling with my suitcase and carried it for me up the stairs. I appreciate all of you, who nodded or smiled and acknowledged the cliché that is true, that we are all in this together, all travelers on the same planet.

My circle of friends and acquaintances continues to expand, and to those newly met Internet folk, who share favorite quotes, books, and provocative ideas or post fascinating information on myriad websites—thank you all. This past year, I joined the publishing family of Kunati Inc., and my world grew larger and richer with more reading and writing friends and associates. Some I can thank by name. Here my gratitude also goes out, as well, to those I have not met—booksellers and librarians and readers, who took the time to support my work or post a review or send me an e-mail.

There is a particular group of strangers I wish to thank with all my heart. On November 3, 2007, my younger daughter and her friend were badly injured when their motorcycle was struck by a car. Thank you to the strangers who stopped traffic and rendered aid. After my daughter sailed off the bike and struck the pavement, she was so afraid that she’d be run over, but you made sure she was safe. An off-duty nurse held my daughter’s head to prevent her thrashing. Someone called for emergency medical help, and many watched over my daughter and her friend until the life-flight helicopter arrived.

Thank you to the doctors, nurses, physical therapists, respiratory specialists, and many other medical care workers at the hospital, whose skills and compassion make such a difference in traumatic times. A special thanks to those nurses who moved a bed across the hall, so my daughter and her friend could see for themselves that they had both survived the accident. Your act of kindness, which allowed them to talk over their ordeal and console one another, helped begin the healing of their spirits as well as their bodies. When you care for a patient, you comfort a whole family.

Like Blanche DuBois, I often depend on the kindness of strangers, and to kind strangers everywhere, this is my thank-you note to you. Gratefully, Rosemary Poole-Carter

HAUNTED BY THE PAST

A pair of old boots with horseshoe nails embedded in the soles started me on the journey to WOMEN OF MAGDALENE, my novel from Kunati Inc., set in a 19th century ladies’ lunatic asylum. As I stared at the boots in a glass case at the Museum of Southern History, the docent explained that the nails served as cleats. She said Civil War soldiers wore such boots to keep from slipping in the mud, and the surgeons wore them to keep from slipping in the blood. In that moment, Dr. Robert Mallory, a young Civil War surgeon from Louisiana, was born in my mind to fill those cracked leather boots. He wears them first in the bloody battlefield surgery tent and later on the muddy trek to the asylum, where he assumes the post of physician to the inmates.

On his way, Mallory thinks: “Attending to the ills of madwomen would make a change from my duties during what my genteel mother referred to as the ‘late unpleasantness.’ Indeed, it had been unpleasant, amputating limbs of the wounded, dismantling whole cartloads of men.” At Magdalene Ladies’ Lunatic Asylum, Mallory finds himself treating patients who are missing pieces, not of their bodies, but of their lives. And gradually, he discovers that Dr. Kingston, the director of the asylum who has labeled the women insane, is himself a madman.

Labeling my writing, I choose the term Southern gothic, gathering the elements of my fiction—historical, suspenseful, mysterious, romantic, theatrical, and grotesque—under that dark canopy. When beginning WOMEN OF MAGDALENE, I jotted a note to myself, words to write by: “create a growing sense of unease.” Even though I’ve not yet written about the supernatural, my writing is haunted, if not by ghosts, then by shadows of the past—cast by ancient demons, which are still with us: greed, racism, misogyny, cruelty, indifference. These are the demons an uneasy Robert Mallory faces when he confronts Dr. Kingston and struggles to he keep his footing once again in those special boots.

My mother believes the whole world is haunted, and I share writer Gloria Wade-Gayles notion that some places are more haunted than others. Years ago, while attending a Tennessee Williams Literary Festival in New Orleans, I heard Wade-Gayles tell her audience that spirituality is most palpable where there has been great suffering. No wonder I have found the shades of my characters in the secluded courtyards of the French Quarter and along the streets of New Orleans, a city where human beings were once sold at the slave market; where sorrow followed in the wake of yellow fever, cholera, and malaria; where lives were torn apart by war; where devastation has swept in from the Gulf.

It seems only right that a novel sparked by a pair of boots keeps its protagonist on the move, ever restless. Robert Mallory travels first to Magdalene Asylum, then to New Orleans and Baton Rouge, with an enigmatic young patient, who takes him on an inner journey of her own. Returning to the madhouse, Mallory finds his way through deception, layered like mud and silt on the delta, thick as fog along the bayou. In those cleated boots, through mire and blood, he dares to approach insanity to find his reason.