The Second Book
My first book, My Reach: A Hudson River Memoir, appeared one year ago this month. In this year of publication, I have read to kayaking groups, and Hudson River enthusiasts, devoted library goers, and AARP members. I stumbled through an NPR interview and spoke to local papers. It’s been a lot of fun, being in the world, telling the story of writing my book.
What I never fail to mention in my talks is that when I set out to write the book, I knew nothing about kayaking and nothing about writing a book. People are in awe that I just plunked my boat in the water and stroked off toward the far shore. But no one says, wow, you sat down in a room by yourself and wrote every single word of a book? That, for me, is the bravest thing I’ve done. I gave up writing this book dozens of times—it was just too hard (the file I kept the manuscript in is labeled: Keep Trying). I say that it took me seven years to write this book, but really, it took me a lifetime. So when I hold my book and read from it, I think, miraculous, with all sincerity.
After I read, someone from the audience inevitably asks: what’s the next book? The next book? The question is a kind one—implied is, “I liked this, I could read more.” Or maybe I am flattering myself—maybe the audience is simply polite. But my response is, “really, I have to do this again?” One book seems plenty, like people who decide that one child is just right. But when you write a book, apparently people think you should write another. In fact, I think I should write another. The problem is, I’m not.
My first book, My Reach: A Hudson River Memoir, appeared one year ago this month. In this year of publication, I have read to kayaking groups, and Hudson River enthusiasts, devoted library goers, and AARP members. I stumbled through an NPR interview and spoke to local papers. It’s been a lot of fun, being in the world, telling the story of writing my book.
What I never fail to mention in my talks is that when I set out to write the book, I knew nothing about kayaking and nothing about writing a book. People are in awe that I just plunked my boat in the water and stroked off toward the far shore. But no one says, wow, you sat down in a room by yourself and wrote every single word of a book? That, for me, is the bravest thing I’ve done. I gave up writing this book dozens of times—it was just too hard (the file I kept the manuscript in is labeled: Keep Trying). I say that it took me seven years to write this book, but really, it took me a lifetime. So when I hold my book and read from it, I think, miraculous, with all sincerity.
After I read, someone from the audience inevitably asks: what’s the next book? The next book? The question is a kind one—implied is, “I liked this, I could read more.” Or maybe I am flattering myself—maybe the audience is simply polite. But my response is, “really, I have to do this again?” One book seems plenty, like people who decide that one child is just right. But when you write a book, apparently people think you should write another. In fact, I think I should write another. The problem is, I’m not.
The second book is a treacherous thing. How many times has a writer put out their first book to good success, only to rush out the second book and have it be mediocre? Especially for those of us who publish later in life (I was 50 when my book came out—a fitting celebration of this landmark year), the first book often is a life-book, the one book. That, no doubt, is my situation. Still, a writer writes and I’ll keep writing. And now that I’ve written a book, another should be waiting in the wings.
I have a lot of friends who seem to be able to do this. As one book comes out, another is nearing completion. Then there are those miracle writers who churn out a book a year. I’d be much more likely to kayak around the globe.
Before I wrote My Reach, what I wrote were sentences that became paragraphs that morphed into pages, then something I called essays. I write essays, I said. I thought that alone an accomplishment. One day, I noticed that all of my essays centered on what I did, which was kayak on the Hudson River. They were filled with adventures and mis-adventures, Bald Eagles and snapping turtles, cement and ice factories. I strung these essays together, gave them shape. It was then that I noticed that the story of my parents lurked at every turn. I brought them into the foreground. I was lucky to find a real editor at Cornell University Press, a man with a pencil who wrote comments in the margins like “cliché!” or “you can do better,” or “we need to hear more about your mother.” I was grateful for it all.
What’s the next book? My editor emails me. Give me a call.
The question makes it sound easy. I thought, after doing it once, it would be not easy, but easier. I’d know the pitfalls, skirt some endless revisions. I’d head into a book with an outline, or at least a plan, rather than feel my way through the dark.
But these past few months, as I’ve sat down day after day to write the next book, I’ve encountered a whole other problem.
I’ve been thinking of writing a book--that’s the problem. When what I write are sentences, paragraphs, essays.
Somewhere in the silence of this summer, I’ve started to write essays again. But it took a lot of silence, sitting on an island in Canada (thanks to cousin Polly!) where I had no internet, no phone. I call it the silence of space, and it’s something I crave and something I know is rare. You can find it in small pockets around the world. It exists in writer’s colonies—I have been lucky to attend two, Ucross and Hedgebrook—where the silence of space greets you at your cabin door. It is both overwhelming and delicious.
The subjects of my summer essays do not neatly line up as they did with my Hudson River kayaking essays. There’s one essay about birding in Alaska, and another about being from State College, Pennsylvania in the wake of the Sandusky affair, and another about dating men after years of dating women, and one about the grandfather I did not know, and the photograph I have of him standing next to Hitler. There’s not a kayak, river, or snapping turtle to be found in these essays.
As I wrote, I loved searching for the next word; I enjoyed watching my ideas unfold. I surprised myself a few times, suffered a bit, and sweated at my desk through the hot summer months. It is possible, but unlikely, that one of these essays will extend and become a book. But after a year of trying to write a book, I now realize that isn’t what matters.
Despite all that I learned while writing a book, I feel like I’m heading out into the dark, holding onto a faith that my literary excursions will take me some place beautiful. It’s hard, holding onto this faith, whether it’s your first essay or your first book. Or your second book. And my guess is, the third book too and on down the line (maybe I’ll get there!). But what matters is sitting down every day and writing those sentences, searching for the next word, and watching my ideas unfold.
In the Antarctic Ocean
When I traveled to Antarctica, working on finding writers to contribute to Antarctica: Life on the Ice (then just a hope in my heart and an idea in my head), I spent a night in Christchurch, New Zealand. There, I shared a hotel room with a complete stranger, Julie Rose, a scientist who was heading out to research on the Nathaniel B. Palmer. I tracked down Julie recently to find out what she's doing and how her research is coming along. It wasn't hard to find her, since she works at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, the world's largest private, nonprofit, ocean research, engineering, and education organization. Read on to hear about Julie's experiences on a research vessel and to get a sense of polar ocean research.
When I traveled to Antarctica, working on finding writers to contribute to Antarctica: Life on the Ice (then just a hope in my heart and an idea in my head), I spent a night in Christchurch, New Zealand. There, I shared a hotel room with a complete stranger, Julie Rose, a scientist who was heading out to research on the Nathaniel B. Palmer. I tracked down Julie recently to find out what she's doing and how her research is coming along. It wasn't hard to find her, since she works at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, the world's largest private, nonprofit, ocean research, engineering, and education organization. Read on to hear about Julie's experiences on a research vessel and to get a sense of polar ocean research.
"I met Susan in 2004 when we were roommates in Christchurch before departing for the Antarctic. Susan and I parted ways shortly after we met, when she left for the ice by air and I set sail from nearby Lyttelton onboard the RVIB (Research Vessel Ice Breaker) Nathaniel B. Palmer. The Palmer, or NBP according to Raytheon lingo, is one of the vessels commissioned by the National Science Foundation for ocean-based research in the Antarctic. The ship can break through several feet of sea ice and is able to navigate through the rough, stormy weather common to the Southern Ocean. The NBP can hold up to 37 scientists and 22 crew members, and has lab benches, cold rooms, wet labs, computer labs and even a stockroom of common lab (and craft) supplies. As far as research vessels go, the NBP, its crew and the Raytheon support staff are first-rate, which makes research cruises (relatively) easy and (relatively) less stressful.
Working on a ship is very rewarding but at times frustrating and difficult. As with any field research, an enormous amount of time goes into planning and preparation. When the weather is bad, not only can no samples be collected, but often no work can be done in labs because the ship’s motion makes it too dangerous (or the researchers are too seasick!) At the same time, research cruises are incredibly productive, intense and often exciting. A huge amount of work and data get collected in a short period of time, and a tight community forms, with 60 people working, eating and sleeping together on a roughly 300 foot long ship for over a month. I’ve found that a lot of great ideas and new, unexpected collaborations can form on research cruises as people with very different backgrounds and perspectives interact on a daily basis. And while research cruises are typified by intense periods of work, people still find time for fun and creative activities. Whether making birthday costumes for fellow passengers, conducting knitting and language classes, watching movies from the huge selection of DVDs available on the ship, or even the occasional rendezvous with international research vessels, the spirit of community on a research vessel makes the time fly by.
I have been on five cruises to the Ross Sea, Antarctica on the NBP with two separate projects. I am a microbiologist and ecologist, and am interested in the microorganisms living in the coastal ocean that surrounds the Antarctic continent. A lot of people think of biology in the ocean in terms of a food chain: the phytoplankton are microscopic plants harvesting the sun’s energy, they get eaten by krill, who get eaten by fish, who get eaten by whales or penguins or seals. However, there is actually a dynamic and fascinating food web of predators, prey and recyclers just within the microbes themselves. I’m very interested in how this microbial food web may be affected by changes that scientists have predicted for the future ocean, including such seemingly disparate (but actually closely linked) factors such as temperature, CO2, iron concentrations and light.
The Ross Sea is a wonderful place to do research in microbial ecology because it is the home of one of the largest annual blooms of phytoplankton in the world. It may seem surprising that plankton can thrive in what we perceive as a hostile, forbidding environment. But every year, when daylengths get longer and light levels increase, this nutrient-rich region becomes a hotbed of microbial activity. The phytoplankton blooms that regularly form are populated by either Phaeocystis antarctica (a small flagellated microbe that can form colonies big enough to see with the naked eye) or a mixed assemblage of diatoms (a diverse group of microbes enclosed in shells of silica, that can range in size over several orders of magnitude). Scientists aren’t sure why these two types of phytoplankton grow to such high abundance in the Ross Sea every year, or what causes one to dominate the other in different areas of the Ross Sea, but understanding these two questions will be very important to understand the biology and chemistry of Antarctica’s coastal oceans."
Thanks, Julie, for letting us in on your research!
Blogs and websites from some of the Antarctic cruises:
http://www.whoi.edu/sbl/liteSite.do?litesiteid=2530
http://www.vims.edu/bio/corsacs/cruise_2006.html
Antarctica is for Dreamers and Readers
World Hum is a marvelous website devoted to travel writing. Editor Jim Benning interviewed me yesterday--it was a fun conversation--about the Explorer sinking and about Antarctica: Life on the Ice. Here is the World Hum interview.
They have lots of wonderful material at World Hum, and in their dispatches they published Jason Anthony writing about the Antarctic: "A Brief and Awkward Tour of the End of the Earth." This essay was selected for Best American Travel Writing, 2007.
Here is the opening of Jason's "AGO 1" from Antarctica: Life on the Ice:
November, 2000: After five seasons of fairly civilized Antarctic work, I took on a ominous job offered to me at the end of the polar summer by a drunken friend. Kip reeled across the floor of McMurdo Station’s darkened carpenter shop during its massive end-of-season party in February and shouted a slurred version of the question we all ask at the end of an Antarctic contract: “Hey man, are you coming back next year?” When I shrugged the shrug of the restless, he yelled “You should come back and work for AGO next year. It’s crazy!” AGO (pronounced like the end of “Winnebago”) is the Automated Geophysical Observatory program, the maintenance of which demands some of the most notorious work in the United States Antarctic Program (USAP). Kip had graduated to management, and would be doing the hiring.
World Hum is a marvelous website devoted to travel writing. Editor Jim Benning interviewed me yesterday--it was a fun conversation--about the Explorer sinking and about Antarctica: Life on the Ice. Here is the World Hum interview.
They have lots of wonderful material at World Hum, and in their dispatches they published Jason Anthony writing about the Antarctic: "A Brief and Awkward Tour of the End of the Earth." This essay was selected for Best American Travel Writing, 2007.
Here is the opening of Jason's "AGO 1" from Antarctica: Life on the Ice:
November, 2000: After five seasons of fairly civilized Antarctic work, I took on a ominous job offered to me at the end of the polar summer by a drunken friend. Kip reeled across the floor of McMurdo Station’s darkened carpenter shop during its massive end-of-season party in February and shouted a slurred version of the question we all ask at the end of an Antarctic contract: “Hey man, are you coming back next year?” When I shrugged the shrug of the restless, he yelled “You should come back and work for AGO next year. It’s crazy!” AGO (pronounced like the end of “Winnebago”) is the Automated Geophysical Observatory program, the maintenance of which demands some of the most notorious work in the United States Antarctic Program (USAP). Kip had graduated to management, and would be doing the hiring.
Eight months later, I was back in McMurdo preparing to journey outward
with a few others to a string of isolated motes across the top of the
godforsaken East Antarctic ice cap. Bella, the lead groomer, and I
would be joining engineers Joe and Jack on journeys to AGO 1, AGO 4,
and AGO 5. Another team would be flying out to 2, 3, and 6. East
Antarctica is the coldest and most inaccessible geography on Earth, a
plateau of ice ranging from one to three miles deep, larger than the
United States and, except for a handful of people in government-issued
parkas, empty of land and life.
Thanksgiving on Ice
Happy Thanksgiving! For those of you sitting warm inside, watching football and smelling the turkey roasting I want you to send a warm thought to our friends on the ice who are not eating turkey. To give a glimpse of what Thanksgiving can be like on the ice, I'm offering up the first few paragraphs of Traci McNamara's richly detailed essay from Antarctica: Life on the Ice. The woman in blue with the marvelous warm smile is Traci. Enjoy!
We Ate No Turkey: A Holiday on Ice
Traci J. Macnamara
Instead of spending Thanksgiving Day as I usually did in Colorado Springs—watching the Macy’s parade on TV in my pajamas--I was shivering in my work clothes on the McMurdo Ice Shelf, learning how to make a storm-worthy shelter by cutting dense snow into blocks with a paper-thin saw. Snowcraft, as our mountain-savvy instructor called it, was only one portion of McMurdo Station, Antarctica’s two-day survival skills course optimistically called Happy Camper School.
Happy Thanksgiving! For those of you sitting warm inside, watching football and smelling the turkey roasting I want you to send a warm thought to our friends on the ice who are not eating turkey. To give a glimpse of what Thanksgiving can be like on the ice, I'm offering up the first few paragraphs of Traci McNamara's richly detailed essay from Antarctica: Life on the Ice. The woman in blue with the marvelous warm smile is Traci. Enjoy!
We Ate No Turkey: A Holiday on Ice
Instead of spending Thanksgiving Day as I usually did in Colorado Springs—watching the Macy’s parade on TV in my pajamas--I was shivering in my work clothes on the McMurdo Ice Shelf, learning how to make a storm-worthy shelter by cutting dense snow into blocks with a paper-thin saw. Snowcraft, as our mountain-savvy instructor called it, was only one portion of McMurdo Station, Antarctica’s two-day survival skills course optimistically called Happy Camper School.
The course, required of all workers and scientists at McMurdo, started
on a Thursday morning in the Field Safety Training Program conference
room, where our instructor Brian led twelve first-timers to Antarctica
through the lecture portion of the course. Novices, we were. But it
was Brian’s job to get us into Extreme Cold Combat Shape in less than
forty-eight hours, and by the end of our tenure on the ice shelf, we
would be firing up stoves and lashing down mountain tents, all—of
course—with great rapidity in order to outsmart the gale-force winds
and popsicle-death scenarios he concocted in order to keep us moving
quickly. When he wasn’t in Antarctica, Brian—tight-bodied and exuding
a spirit of adventure--worked as a guide in Alaska, but at McMurdo, he
was a member of the highly respected Field Safety Training Program team
(F-STOP for short), a group of sexy men and women who spent their lives
in rugged environments and then migrated south for the austral summer
to teach McMurdo’s scientists and support staff how to survive them.
After Brian introduced us to our Happy Camper objectives, he briefed us
on cold-weather health hazards, their symptoms, and their remedies.
Before lunch, I felt confident knowing the basics of hypothermia and
its telltale signs—the fumbles, mumbles, and grumbles.
“Talk to your partners to determine their LOC,” Brian said while
pointing to a white board scribbled with notes about how cold weather
affects a person’s level of consciousness, “and help them out before
they get into that irreversible phase. If you notice that anything’s
off, start with some food and water and get them moving around.”
Besides those suggestions, Brian offered a few other ideas about how to
prevent and treat hypothermia while he gestured with his hands and we
watched, motionless and mostly bored, from our chairs.
Of hypothermia’s remedies, one above the others captured my
imagination. F-STOP Brian told us that it is possible to warm up a
hypothermic body by stripping it naked and putting it in close
proximity to another naked body. “In extreme cases,” he clarified, “you
can use direct body heat to re-warm a hypothermic individual.”
Ideally, the second naked body would be warm, and these two naked
bodies together would be skin-to-skin within a sleeping bag so that an
ailing individual could reap the thermodynamic benefits. A few giggles
followed and a few glanced around the room.
To read the rest of the essay you have to buy the book! www.susanfoxrogers.com