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The Sleeping Dictionary is the best sort of historical fiction: an absorbing story with plenty of detail to immerse you in the time, all supported by an historically accurate framework. Set during the turbulent last days of the British Raj, this is the story of a child who is orphaned when a tsunami sweeps away her village and her family. We follow her struggles to make a place for herself in a world that is not kind to women or to Bengali peasants.

Our narrator's name changes with her circumstances, but her voice is strong enough that we never lose sight of who she is. She starts out as Pom, beloved Didi (older sister) to her siblings. Massey weaves in the foreign words so naturally that I had no need of the glossary provided. There are lovely descriptions of her Hindu family's life on the land that they farmed but did not own.

We had potatoes and eggplants and tomatoes and greens from our own vegetable garden. Fruits beckoned from old abandoned orchards and from neighbors who did not mind sharing. To buy foodstuffs we could not grow, my mother raised a small amount from selling the brooms [she made] in summer and catching fish during rainy season.

As the monsoon approaches, she says, “Stillness precedes the rains: a kind of energy that holds you and everything else motionless. It was holding us then.”

When the flood comes, she happens to be in the woods and survives by climbing a tree. Afterwards, several boats of survivors pass her but are not willing to pick her up, saying they had no room for another. Finally one family grudgingly lets her climb into their boat, but refuses to share their food and water with her and abandons her as soon as they reach land. This is a portent of things to come as she finds sometimes reluctant help, a few generous people, and many more who want to make use of her.

I enjoyed the section where, renamed Sarah and ordered to be a Christian, she works as a servant in an Anglo-Indian school. There, through the kindness of a teacher and a student, she discovers a love of reading and languages. The school's name of Lockwood of course reminded me of Lowood, not the only reference to Jane Eyre. But our heroine finds herself more adrift in the world than prim and passionate Jane. She makes more mistakes, poignantly believing in the kindness of strangers and the lure of appearances.

When she finally makes it to Calcutta and renames herself Kamala, she finds a job but also becomes caught up in the movement to free India from the British Empire. Tempting as it must have been for the author to tell us all about those tumultuous and thrilling times, Massey never loses the story. She limits herself to only what Kamala might know and encounter in the course of her daily life. Thus the historical detail remains organic and never intrudes on the story.

I highly recommend this novel. I've enjoyed Massey's earlier books, award-winning mysteries featuring Rei Shimuri. This big novel reads just as fast and fluently as her mysteries. I loved watching Pom/Kamala remake herself over and over, adapting to new worlds, but never losing sight of what's most important. It's a complex story, giving the flavor of many of the smaller worlds within India during the last days of the Raj, always from a woman's point of view.

What historical novels have you enjoyed?

Zucchino is a journalist who in this extremely well-written book sets out to explode the stereotype of the welfare queen that Ronald Reagan promulgated to persuade the public that all welfare recipients were cheating the system and driving around in gold Cadillacs collecting checks to which they were not entitled.

This was also the motive that drove me to write a memoir of my time on welfare, Innocent: Confessions of a Welfare Mother. I closed it with an epigraph from George Herbert: “Poverty is no sin.” I wrote not just about myself, but also about many of the other people I knew. The Writer's Almanac recently had a quote from Frank Capra: “I wanted to glorify the average man, not the guy at the top, not the politician, not the banker, just the ordinary guy whose strength I admire, whose survivability I admire.” I, too, admired the strength and survivability of the people around me who were bravely trying to get out of poverty despite overwhelming odds.

I also wanted to show that we were just parents and, like any other parent, only trying to do the best for our children. Zucchino does this as well by focusing his story on two Philadelphia women: Odessa Williams and Cheri Honkala. Despite ill health Odessa is the bulwark of her large extended family, the person everyone turns to for help. After taking in some of her grandchildren, she was forced to go back on welfare after many years of supporting herself and her family. Cheri is a activist for the homeless. She herself is able to rent a place for her son and herself out of her welfare check, but is dedicated to finding new ways to shame the city into providing help for the city's most vulnerable citizens.

Although the story takes place 15 years after I went off of welfare, there is much that I recognise. Odessa's daughter Elaine has tried repeatedly to get the training that would give her the credentials necessary to securing a job. When her latest training program is cancelled due to budget cuts the day before it is due to start, she says: “‘Seems like just when I start to rise up, . . . something comes along and—bam!—it knocks me back down.'”

When Odessa tells her grandson's therapist that she sometimes feels like giving up, the woman reminds her of what a good job she is doing of caring for her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She says, “‘There's something good inside you—a big heart.'”

Rebecca's kind words had warmed her. It occurred to her that what she needed was acknowledgment, from someone in the world beyond Allegheny Avenue, of her deprivations and sacrifices. She did not expect it from her family; she took care of them because she loved them and because it was her duty. But to receive such reassurance from an outsider afforded her a sort of absolution for all her dark thoughts about abandoning her responsibilities.

This incident reminded me of how important my contacts with the world outside of other welfare moms were to me in my struggle to get out of poverty.

Cheri starts a tent city on the city of a former lace factory that has been burned and bulldozed. As winter falls she moves them into an abandoned church. We get to know several of the homeless folks, particularly two women with young children. Cheri's outrage reminds me of my own, especially when she is given some posters about corporate welfare, with photos of men from Disney, McDonald's and Lockheed Martin and the taxpayer money, ranging from $300,000 to $850 million, they received. “Below each man's photo were two paragraphs pointing out that AFDC accounted for less than 1 percent of the federal budget. The $14.4 billion spent on all social welfare programs in 1994, the message said, was dwarfed by the $104.3 billion spent on corporate welfare.” I especially liked the other message on the poster, which expresses a point I've often tried to make:

Everyone who drives on a toll-free highway, attends a public school or university, deducts mortgage interest payments from their income tax, or enjoys a national park is getting the equivalent of welfare from the federal government. In one way or another, we are all welfare recipients.

The truly sad part of the book is that Zucchino's portrait of the two women is just before Clinton signed the welfare reform act in 1996 that effectively removed the safety net; it “revoked the federal guarantee of welfare cash to low-income families with dependent children.” So as hard as the lives are of those portrayed in this book, we know they are about to get a lot harder.

It is almost impossible, unless you are a highly paid professional or a trust fund baby, for a single parent to make enough money to pay for even the barest living expenses plus child care. The way this country has turned its back on its children continues to shock me. Investing in our children is investing in the country's future.

What book have you read that helped you understand another way of life?

Last week I wrote about a rural family where a girl leaves home—because of restlessness and a desire to see the world, as we are led to believe—while her brother stays and tends his orchard. In this story as well, set some decades later, we have a sister and brother, but here it is the brother who has the wandering gene.

In a remote village in Ontario in the beginning of the 20th century Klara and her brother Tilman are taught how to carve by their grandfather, who emigrated from Bavaria as a young man in search of better wood to carve. He makes a life for himself, working at a gristmill and carving beautiful statues for the church that a priest arriving from Bavaria decides to build in what was then barely a settlement far off in the woods.

Of course, Joseph Becker never thought that his granddaughter would be able to master carving—better for the girl to learn to sew—but he lets her tag along while he teaches Tilman, the child he expects to carry on his work, the enormously gifted boychild.

But Tilman, even as a child, wants to be off and away. He does learn to carve, but only wants to carve the small background landscape, the road leading off into the world. at first he leaves and returns, traveling with hobos, learning to ride the rails, but eventually he leaves for good, while Klara stays. She makes clothes for people in the village and works on her statue of an abbess, living a quiet life, until a young man, a neighbor, begins coming to sit in her kitchen, watching her work but—to her fury—not saying anything.

Urquhart is one of my favorite writers, and this is one of her best books. I find it hard to summarize because of its complexity, though it reads like a dream. It’s about people with big dreams: to build a huge stone church with a bell in remote pioneer settlement in Ontario, to build a huge monument to the Canadian dead at Vimy Ridge. It’s about people with small dreams: to marry and create a home, to find the next meal, to preserve the names of the dead.

Canada suffered in the Great War in ways that the U.S. did not. While this novel is about the war, it is mostly about the effects of the war on those at home and those who return, too few, as Wilfred Owen said, “too few for drums.” The book made me think about memorials and what purposes, intended and not, they serve. My local parks are crammed with statues of generals and brave men on horses, but more important for me are those which bring home the cost of these wars: the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, the USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor, the Canadian National Vimy Memorial in France.

The book also made me think about the parents in Canada, on this Mother’s Day. I’ve read and thought so much about this war, I didn’t think there was a new perspective. Then Urquhart wrote about the reverse migration, the parents who left war-torn Europe for a hard but peaceful life in Canada watching their sons migrate back across the Atlantic to fight Europe’s war. And I thought of a song by singer-songwriter Josh Hisle, an Iraq War veteran: “Stay home . . .”

What war memorial has moved you the most or made you think?

This stunning debut novel was my book club’s selection for this month. William Talmadge’s life is a quiet one, tending his apple and apricot trees, selling his produce in town. His movements as he inspects his trees, grafts a branch, fixes coffee are slow and deliberate, well-suited to the pace of life in rural Washington State at the end of the 19th century. When two girls show up, both pregnant and starving, he feeds and protects them. They are feral, too fearful to come close, grabbing the plates of food and withdrawing to the woods to eat.

A nurturing man, Talmadge has created this orchard starting with the two ailing apple trees that he and his mother and sister found on the land back in 1857. His mother passed only three years later, and he cared for his sister until she wandered off into the woods only two years after that, and not found again. He searched for the 17-year-old, helped by his friend, Clee, a mute Nez Perce, leader of a band of horse wranglers who stopped in Talmadge’s valley a couple of times a year.

There are many silences in this book: Clee’s muteness, the sisters’ refusal to talk to Talmadge, the secrets later that blossom and spread. Later, when Talmadge has lost one of the girls, “a kind of vacancy, a silence, hung around him, like a mantle on his shoulders.” And later, sitting at a campfire with Clee, Talmadge reflects on the sound of the horses:

The sound was loud and soft at the same time, like the sound upon which other sound was built. You didn’t hear the horses until you listened for them; and then they were very loud. Already Talmadge was becoming used to them. How that presence equated with silence until it was gone, and then you understood what silence really was.

I was entranced by the beauty and power of the prose, feeling as though I could happily drown in the luscious paragraphs, the startling turn of phrase, the unexpected thrust. Part 1, the first 90 pages, simply blew me away. After that, the story loses some momentum, but by then I wanted to follow Talmadge’s story to the end. There are some flaws in the book, which I will mention since this is a blog about the craft of writing (usually), but let me reinforce that this is a beautiful book.

Though the members of my book club disagreed about some things—one person thought the girls’ background was preposterous given the time period while others of us found it believable—we all agreed that other than Talmadge the characters were rather flat. We just didn’t see enough of them beyond a single dimension. The one other character who seems to be developed, the younger of the two girls, struck some of us as inconsistent and not plausible.

We also found the remainder of the book, after Part 1, choppy. To some extent that came from the very short chapters in the later parts, some only a page or a half page or even a quarter of a page. Even the longer chapters are only 3-5 pages. The short bursts of text advanced the plot in flashes, without the sustained narrative of the first part. In some places, it felt a bit padded, leading me to wonder if the book started as a 90-page novella that was then stretched into a book. I also thought the last part should be cut entirely. A brief summary of the orchard’s life in the following decades, it raises many questions that it does not answer. I thought perhaps the author loved the place and the characters too much to let them go.

At a book release party today, several of us authors were talking about how essential a critique group is in the development of a manuscript. We need other eyes to tell us when we are being long-winded or too much in love with our own sentences. If I were editing this book, I would have trouble cutting it (other than that last part) because of being myself so in love with Coplin’s sentences. Still, I think it would have benefited from losing about a hundred pages. To our surprise, even the slack parts maintained the suspense, but one person astutely noted that the author shows us each character’s vulnerability and how each one is at risk, making us fear for them.

The Orchardist is not just a story of silences but also a story of solitude and how we communicate and what we owe to each other. In other words, exactly the kind of story I like. I especially loved the descriptions of Della learning to ride and to communicate with the horses. It reminded me of my struggle to learn to ride in my fifties and how the great benefit to me was learning to “listen” to the horse’s language.

Despite my few caveats, I recommend this book. It will take you away to another time and place, and you will be reluctant to return.

Have you read this novel? What did you think?

There are not enough hours in the day (or night) to read all the books I want to, as evidenced by the TBR (to be read) stacks threatening to take over a corner of my study. Reading one book leads me to read others, as The Rings of Saturn which I blogged about a few weeks ago sent me searching for a copy of Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial.

One area where my attention has been deficient is the Russian authors. I somehow missed reading them in school and, apart from Nabokov, never got around to reading them until recently. Prompted by my nephew, I did read War and Peace a couple of years ago, and now, driven by one of my book clubs, I’ve dipped my toe in Dostoyevsky’s oeuvre. Unfortunately I missed the discussion, but I’m grateful for the push.

This book precedes his famous novels. According to the Introduction (which, as always, I read only after finishing the story), it is a pivotal novel in his development as an author, leading him to find his own voice and themes. There is a brief chapter describing how the narrator meets a quiet, withdrawn man named Alexander Petrovitch Goriantchikoff. When the man passes away, the narrator is given the pages of the narrative that make up the rest of the book. It turns out to be an account of the ten years Alexander Petrovitch spent in prison in Siberia.

As a nobleman, Alexander Petrovitch fears the other convicts while envying their camaraderie. He thinks that now they have a nobleman within their power, the men will take out on him their rage at the whole social class. Yet, as he gradually gets to know them, he is able to distinguish good characteristics from bad. The joy of the story for me lies in these vivid portraits of his fellow prisoners and the people who run the prison. It was this appreciation of the value of the lowest of the low that gave rise to his later novels.

Though it is called a novel, this story is based on Dostoyevsky’s own experience. He spent nine years in Siberia after being arrested for supposedly being a member of a revolutionary group. According to the Introduction by Nikolay Andreyev, in writing this book “Dostoyevsky was circumspect in his descriptions.” He toned down both the brutality of the conditions and the hostility of his fellow inmates.

There are a couple of lessons here for memoir writers. Dostoyevsky called the book a work of fiction at least in part to avoid retribution by the authorities. Many memoir writers worry—as they should—that by telling their own story, they will hurt family members or others. I believe that telling someone else’s story, as we inevitably must in telling our own, is a huge responsibility, not to be taken lightly. One solution is to call your book a novel, changing names and recognizable details to hide the identities of the other people.

Another solution is to treat the other people in your memoir with respect and compassion. While I wouldn’t go so far as Dostoyevsky’s decision to hide the truth of his experience, I do think we owe it to the other people in our memoir to present them objectively. No matter how badly they may have behaved, we can try to understand why they did what they did. I personally found that making that effort benefited me as well. It made me see them with new eyes and wiped out any remaining resentment.

This book is a good example of an episodic plot. As we follow Alexander Petrovitch’s days (and nights), we meet various people and incidents, but there is no overall rising action that leads to a climax and resolution, the more common plot structure for novels. Nonetheless, it held my attention and introduced me to characters I will not soon forget. I’m looking forward to reading more of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and other Russian authors.

Which Russian novel do you recommend?

This poetry chapbook from Broadkill Press caught my attention at the CityLit Festival last week at the Enoch Pratt Free Library. Black Narrows is an oyster shack town on an island in the Chesapeake Bay, an island slowly being submerged by the rising water level and the erosion of its edges. It is a fictional island, but based on actual islands now lost beneath the Bay.

Whitaker’s spare and strong poems describe the people of Black Narrows, and a way of life that has almost disappeared.

At least at the edge of the land,
before ocean swallows all hope,
we know what we want . . . .

There are young boys skating on the ice on Narrows Marsh that cracks like “the snap of crab-backs over thumb”, joyfully racing down the sawgrass-lined channels. And Ally with her rum flask and cigar. There is John Max who “stole / the backside oysters off the beds laid by Smith, / Sharp and Floyd.” And Marie Countee who came as a new bride to live a fantasy of being a waterman’s wife, who has to learn to pry oysters from their beds and pace within the narrow limits of her walls. Folks so poor they save scrapes of material in Mason jars to use as patches.

There are work songs that capture the rhythm of the old sea chanties. And songs about unruly drunken nights. There are some poems about those who leave, going up the coast to cities where they can make their lonely money, and those who stay behind, “who will not leave the marsh until it is broken.” Those too old to leave light their stoves and drink chicory and make meal from horse corn.

Together the poems build a portrait of a place now lost, or nearly so, and its people. Whether they are yelling their drinking songs or quietly going mad, these people will touch you. You will not soon forget them.

What other books have you read about the Chesapeake Bay, its islands or its borders, such as Virginia’s Tidewater or Maryland’s Eastern Shore?

I’ve been meaning to read this book for some time. It’s ostensibly a travel memoir, a record of a walking tour of Suffolk, on the east coast of England, that Sebald took in August, 1992. However, the narrator sometimes seems to be someone else. The title comes from one of the epigraphs, a quote from the Brockhaus Encyclopedia explaining that Saturn’s rings are probably “fragments of a former moon” that was destroyed when it came too near the planet.

The image works on several different levels, not just his circuitous route around Suffolk but also the wanderings of his mind. Each location prompts a memory, some bit of arcane knowledge or history which Sebald shares with us. For example, sitting on the beach near Southwold, he is reminded of the Battle of Sole Bay, when the Dutch fleet attacked in 1672 and of the painting at the Greenwich Maritime Museum. He imagines the scene in rich detail, the powder magazines exploding, the hulls burning down to the waterline, the yellowish-black smoke. He says that the body of the commander of the English fleet, the Earl of Sandwich, washed ashore a few weeks later, “the seams of his uniform had burst asunder, the buttonholes were torn open, yet the Order of the Garter still gleamed in undiminished splendour.”

In another chapter, the bridge over the Blythe reminds him that the train that first ran on it was originally built for the Emperor of China. The story of how that came to happen is spun out through the Taiping rebellion, the Opium Wars, several emperors, Charles George Gordon (later of Khartoum fame), a scheming dowager empress and her silkworms.

In other chapters we learn about herrings, an Anglo-irish rebel, Joseph Conrad, Norfolk’s silk industry, and a housekeeper who obeyed her employer’s injunction never to speak to him and as a result was left a fortune, among much else—all of it fascinating. And almost all of it tinged with melancholy. He visits the once-thriving towns of Suffolk that are now run-down, remembering the luxury hotels and mansions that have now disappeared or become schools or hospitals. He walks across scrub that was once fields for the flocks of sheep required by the booming wool trade, now gone. His stories are illustrated by grainy black and white photographs, quirky evocations of a remembered past.

He ruminates about the things that are lost, things that have been destroyed or have disintegrated, such as the windmills “whose white sails revolved over the marshes of Halvergate and all along the coast”, dismantled after WWI. It is not surprising that he checked into a hospital at the end of his tour.

The narrator is working on a translation of Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial, a 1658 philosophical “Discourse” prompted by the discovery of some Bronze Age burial urns in Norfolk. While talking about various burial customs, Browne, a devout Christian, reflects on the transitory nature of our achievements in this life. References to Browne crop up in Sebald’s narrative, from his presence at an anatomy lesson in Amsterdam, recorded by Rembrandt, to his catalogue of remarkable books and other artifacts that Sebald believes were mostly imaginary.

The fashion these days is for memoirs to be built primarily of dramatic scenes, held together by as little narration as possible. This book is an interesting hybrid because, though it is all narrated by the author, he infuses his stories with plenty of drama, enough to keep me reading through the night. Even with his stories of what has been lost or forgotten, I loved this book. It is one I will long treasure and return to. Saturn’s rings made of fragments of a moon also make a fitting image for these themes of memory and decay.

What comes to mind when you think of the east coast of England?

This quirky novel revolves around two people. One is Peter Straker, who lives in a decommissioned lighthouse on the Devon Coast, haunted by an event from his past. His only company consists of the voices from that event. Although he goes into the village via bike and boat to purchase groceries, he does not speak to anyone. He has not spoken aloud in years. The cliff is eroding at an ever-faster rate, ensuring that the lighthouse will soon fall into the sea. Straker, however, views this prospect with complacence. He hopes he will be in the lighthouse when it falls.

The other is Imogen Doody, a loud, prickly and inexplicably angry woman who works as a school caretaker. She has been left a dilapidated cottage in the village by her godfather and begins coming down on weekends to fix it up. She also begins to be curious about the godfather she never met, a friend of her parents whom they lost touch with early on. Fired by an ongoing love of the series of children's stories featuring Biggles, , she is intrigued to discover that her godfather was a pilot.

There are several mysteries to untangle. What events so damaged these two people? What happened to Doody's husband who inexplicably disappeared 25 years earlier? Can Straker ever come to terms with his past? Will these two people, both seriously lacking in social skills, ever come to communicate with each other?

Recently I came across the notion that all modern fiction may be about overcoming the personal isolation that is a consequence of urban life. While I know the cosy village life referred to as “Merrie England” never really existed, there was a certain groundedness in living in the same small area all of your life, among the same people. The need to find a way to get along with each other and to depend on each other's help is lost when we can change jobs and homes and even countries with ease. Our fractured existence, the idea goes, leaves us feeling rootless and alone.

Perhaps I have just been lucky, but I have have always found multiple warm and welcoming communities wherever I have landed. The community may be a neighborhood, or just as easily a book club, a writers' group, regulars at the skating rink, a community dance, or even people at your job. Any activity collects like-minded people who tend to take an interest in each other and can easily grow into a community as you meet again and again over the years.

Still, I agree that isolation and overcoming our fears and hesitations in order to connect with each other are important themes. They do not weigh heavily on this book, though. I quickly became invested in these two people and even in the others around them, their families, their adversaries. The pacing is good, with twists as they strike out in different directions trying to find answers or perhaps peace. The descriptions are outstanding, such as the booming wind that pummels the lighthouse and makes the suicides who regularly show up have to fight their way to the edge; they really have to want it to throw themselves over! Best of all, the ending satisfies.

Have you read any books that seem to trail off or stop abruptly without a satisfying ending?

I could just hear the pitch for this nonfiction book: a literary travel book like the huge bestseller by Elizabeth Gilbert, but going to double the number of countries and, instead of a vague goal of finding yourself, a fascinating goal of gauging reactions to Jane Austen's books, thus pulling in the legion of Austen fans. Its subtitle is A Year-Long Journey with Jane.

Although I haven't read the Gilbert book, I was intrigued by Smith's premise. Austen's novels, which she herself called “miniatures”, provide witty commentary on a narrow band of society: English landed gentry of the early 19th century. To say her plots are basically romances is to say that Joyce's Ulysses is the story of an ordinary day. Her books remain popular 200 years later because her characters capture our imagination; they are universal without being stereotypes. Austen's eye for detail gives readers a sense of living within that world. And we can delight in her linguistic wiles, used to delicately and subtly skewer pretension.

Easy enough for us in the Anglo-American world, but how would Austen's books resonate with Latin American readers? This is the question Smith set out to answer, taking a year to travel in Central and South America, leading book groups and teaching a course based on three of Austen's novels.

Her qualifications are excellent: an inventive writing and literature professor at a small university in California who has her Austen students do creative projects instead of a final paper, resulting in such mashups as Northanger Abbey in rhymed heroic couplets. She found that her students react personally to Austen's characters, saying that they know plenty of Mrs. Bennets or wanting to “dope slap” Marianne. Smith had even started studying Spanish, and wisely begins her year with an intensive language course in Guatemala. Other countries she visits are Ecuador, Chile, Paraguay, Argentina, and Mexico.

Smith's other quest was to identify the Austens of these countries. Readers in the U.S. unfortunately get little exposure to authors of other countries, the only exception being England. Even major Canadian authors cannot get recognition in the U.S. Only if an author wins the Nobel Prize or is vehemently promoted by someone powerful in the U.S. literary world will we even hear about them. So I loved this idea. She gives us lists of authors she learns about from each of the six countries and a little about each, but not the kind of literary commentary that made Reading Lolita in Tehran interesting to me. Still, I now have a much longer TBR list and there is a little more detail on her web site. She also runs across one of my favorite books, El Pinto de Batalles by Arturo Pérez-Reverte.

Her writing carries us through this light, entertaining memoir. She enlivens humorous descriptions of her adventures with details of local color such as feeding iguanas in Ecuador or attending a boxing match in Mexico. She gives us just the right amount of herself, enough to enjoy and participate in her reactions without overwhelming the story. I love that she allocates so much space to the people who join her book clubs and course, giving us their reactions and thoughts in their own words. I also love the diversity of the groups: from society matrons to working-class folks to academics. They provide her with plenty of recommendations for authors from their countries.

What Latin American authors have you read?

This book is subtitled: How artists and craftsmen make their way to mastery. What Smith does here is examine what it takes to have a meaningful life. “I posit that life is better when you possess a sustaining practice that holds your desire, demands your attention, and requires effort; a plot of ground that gratifies the wish to labor and create.” Whether your practice is gardening, painting, writing or building boats, pursuing a creative artistic effort adds a richness to your life, not just a sense of accomplishment but joy.

And frustration. Smith looks at the things that get in our way. She suggests that these undertakings, whether art or craft, call for “common mental processes of mastery. One must work hard to learn technique and form, and equally hard to learn how to bear the angst of creativity itself.” (her italics) Individual chapters look in detail at aspects of this angst, such as fear, guilt, shame, and the perils of recognition. She compares these psychological obstacles to a milling mass of sheep blocking the road. One of the pleasures of the book for me are her inventive images.

The title comes from Henry James's Roderick Hudson where the character Rowland Mallet explains that an absorbing errand is necessary if you are to get out of yourself and stay out, thus achieving true happiness. Mallet is searching for a means of expression, saying “‘I spend my days groping for the latch of a closed door.'” This line resonated with me, reminding me of my late friend Bill, a photographer who sometimes seemed on the brink of professional success but never quite getting there. He said that when he discovered photography, he felt that he had found the magic key; he just couldn't find the lock that it fit.

Smith doesn't offer pat solutions to overcoming the potential obstacles to mastering your art or craft. Instead, she explores why they affect us and gives examples of artists coping with them (or not). In the chapter on fear, she delves into John Keats's life and his great fear that he would not live long enough to write the poems that filled his mind. Indeed, he did die young from tuberculosis, but used his fear to defeat the self-doubt that paralyzes so many writers.

She mentions a conversation with Alistair MacLeod, one of my favorite authors, who writes about coal miners and fishermen in Nova Scotia. She asked him why so often the best fiction is written by the first generation not actually doing the work, and he responded, “‘There has first to be a chair. And time for someone to sit in it.'” This is a brilliant summary of the problem faced by many writers I know. Even if we succeed in securing a room of our own, we struggle to squeeze out the time to enter it.

“Whether by design or by accident, many of us seem to find enduring gratification in struggling to master and then repeatedly applying some difficult skill that allows us to at once realize and express ourselves.” I'm reminded of a scene in an early episode of the tv show Homicide: Life on the Streets when Bolander finds comfort in playing his cello with a woman he's discovered plays the violin. They don't need an audience; just playing together creates a magical moment and the conviction that life is worth living.

This book is an ideal gift for any creative person you know. It's a comfort to know that we are not alone. And it's inspiring to remember why we want—no, need!—to create.

What books about creativity have you found useful?