Unusual Holiday Lights

The Christmas lights around Oxford seem quite understated after the USA. Back home in Brunswick, Maine people go wild. I’ve seen a dry-docked boat towing a skiing snowman and Santa with all the reindeers on the roof. First prize for original Christmas lights in Maine this year goes to Melissa Walters and Bob Black. Check out their house lights above. That’s the date when the next American president will be sworn into office.

Given that there is no separation between church and state in England, I was not expecting much for Hanukkah. The stores were filled with only Christmas decorations and busy shoppers. Trees were adorned with lights and tasteful white stars hung above the high streets.

Sunday night we had just come from a lovely candle-lit carol service at Magdalen College Chapel when my daughter cried out, “Look a giant outdoor menorah!”

“Where?”

“Right there next to the Christmas Tree.”

At first I thought it had to be Advent candles, but sure enough it was a menorah on Broad Street. The biggest one I’ve ever seen. Add the gothic architecture and it was surreal. My daughter came back the next night to see how it was lit. At 5:00 pm a cherry picker truck hoisted up a rabbi to light the gas lamps. Brilliant!

Hanukkah is usually an understated affair, celebrated in the home by lighting candles for eight nights. Yesterday was the last night. It’s not the most important Jewish holiday but has risen in importance to balance the commercial appeal of Christmas for children.

Growing up in NYC with a Jewish father and an Episcopalian mother, my family celebrated both Christmas and Hanukkah as well as Easter, Passover, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. I thought I was pretty lucky and have done the same for my family. Only my children, unlike me, went to Hebrew School for several years. It’s a relief when Hanukkah and Christmas don’t overlap. It makes the balancing act a little easier.

MOOSE CROSSING is about a mixed religion family that moves from NYC to Maine after 9/11. There’s even a scene with a moose menorah. First novels are often very personal. Common advice is to write about what you know. The characters and the plot are fictional, but I do like to draw from experience for setting and subject. S.A.D. also looks at multiple religions. Neither book is particularly religious, but belief and identity are important themes.

Right now I’m busy turning around S.A.D. for my next reader, Kim Slote, who will be reading over her holiday vacation. That’s a good friend! Kim does advocacy for Planned Parenthood in Florida as well as selling natural cosmetics. She’s a mother of two children and coincidentally from a mixed religion family too. I like to test my work on typical readers as well as get feedback from those in my profession.

As I work on plot, I highlight each plot string in a different color. That shows me how the sub plots are proportioned throughout the narrative and in relation to one another. Unweaving the plot helps me address specific criticisms and focus on inconsistencies, redundancies and verbosity. Each plot string needs to be able to stand alone and to weave seamlessly into the whole. It’s rewarding when it all comes together in the end. Still plenty of work to do!

I'm dreaming of a green Christmas....

Big Chill No Body

Cathy, Jen, Me, Kim, Deb, Amy, Abigail (L to R) at the RopeWalk

“It sounds like it was The Big Chill minus the dead body,” my husband said. I invited my six school friends to Nantucket to celebrate our 40th birthdays. Deb was my first play date when we were toddlers. We met Cathy and Jen in a Central Park playground, and our parents became friends too. Amy, Abigail, and Kim joined us at the Dalton School. One other school friend, Anna, couldn’t come as she lives in Italy.


Abigail summed it up, “What a fabulous weekend! More important than the beautiful surroundings and weather--though of course they helped--the company was just perfect. I find it so amazing that we never run out of things to talk about, and so comforting to know that we all have been there for one another over so many years, with the various ups and downs that we've all had. It makes me wish there was more time to just pick up the phone and chat with more frequency--and I really intend to do that more--but I guess it also says something that we can easily pick up wherever we left off, no matter how much time has passed.”


On Saturday we went on a twelve-mile bike ride and still managed to chat through most of it. Nantucket is small, flat and ringed with bike paths along the moors. The beach plums were in bloom as were the wildflowers. We stopped to watch enormous snapping turtles, a family of swans and a pair of egrets on our way to Madaket beach.

For lunch it was over-stuffed sandwiches on fresh baked bread at Something Natural that has been there decades before the health food craze even started. I always order avocado, cheddar and chutney on pumpernickel with Matt Fee iced herbal tea and carrot cake. We ate picnic style in the bucolic garden.


The sunset over the harbor was, as Deb likes to say, “spectacular.” Someone noticed that we all have our favorite words. Mine is “literary.” A lot of conversations revolved around books. Deb and Abigail worked in publishing before having kids, and we all bonded in high school over our love of books.

I remember taking turns reading aloud passages from romance novels between giggles. We learned all sorts of good SAT words like diaphanous and talked about writing our own Harlequin romance. I wonder now if that is where my idea to write commercial women’s fiction germinated.

Now Abigail, with her background in editing romance novels, and Cathy, with her good proofing eyes, are helpful readers. Deb promises a great book party in NYC when my debut novel is published one day. My novels are not romance genre, but there is still romance, which back in high school was a big topic of discussion.

We weren’t just bookworms. In high school we spent many a Saturday night dancing at clubs like Studio 54. Promoters passed out free passes in front of our school. Some nights we’d go to the theater, concerts, bars, movies or restaurants, when we weren’t babysitting.

Other times we’d just meet up at an apartment to watch a movie or General Hospital over tubs of Haagan Dazs ice cream, warm David’s Cookies and TAB. There can’t be a more fun and independent place to be a teenager than NYC. It’s safer too since no one drives.


You don’t really need a car in Nantucket either. Town has cute boutiques, but sadly the five-and-ten I used to frequent as a kid is now yet another T-shirt shop. On the way to the lighthouse (feeling like Virginia Woolf) we ran into John Kerry, who has a summerhouse nearby. He returned my smile and wave. It was bittersweet thinking he could have been our president instead of out walking alone.


We walked into town for dinner at Oran Mor. It feels as intimate as eating in someone’s colonial home but with gourmet food. Deb’s husband surprised us by calling the restaurant to foot the bill as a birthday present for his wife who turned 40 in Nantucket. Under his instruction, we ordered champagne and the finest wines. He was off fishing with his brother that weekend since their kids were at camp. The other husbands were at home tending kids and dogs.



Heading home to my husband, kids and dog, I took a one-night detour to see my college roommate. We met at the Harvard Book Store and laughed over how their table of summer reading included one of our favorite novels, Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, which would be quite a weight in the beach bag. It’s not just that it is a serious literary novel about India; it is also over 1,400 pages. Another summer read suggestion was a biography of Einstein. Only in Harvard Square!

My college roommate and her husband are heading off to teach for two years at a school in Columbia. They’ve rented out their house in suburban Lexington and are packing up their three kids aged three to thirteen. Mike has been a principal at a bilingual school in East Cambridge, and Debbie has worked in teaching and writer tutoring.

Debbie was also another reader for my first novel, Moose Crossing. We spent a good part of our sushi dinner at Shilla brainstorming over the plot of my third novel. I’m going to miss not having her around to bounce ideas, but what an adventure to move your family to South America!

I took the Downeaster train, my favorite way to travel from Boston to Maine. It’s a pleasant ride through New England towns, farms and marshes, bypassing the summer traffic. Onboard I proofed S.A.D., having finished the first draft of my second novel before my vacation.

Working for myself, I find it helps to set personal deadlines. It takes a disciplined mindset and self-motivation to work at home. After all that social time, I’m ready to revert to my introverted habits, my batteries recharged. This is good since a bigger part of writing a novel is rewriting it. It’s a long process of revision, fact checking, additional research and restructuring after feedback from readers. It’s exciting to be almost at the point where I can share my work. A book is only a book with readers.

Hanging up my Riding Hat

Claremont Riding Academy in Manhattan closed this spring after 115 years in operation. Yes, a horseback riding stable in Manhattan. My favorite city noise was the clop, clop of horse hooves over honking traffic.


New York City was an odd place to be a child who loved animals and nature. I got my country fix at sleepaway camp where I was introduced to riding. In middle school I started taking the bus on my own to Claremont on the Upper Westside. Riding relieved the social and academic pressures of school.


In high school, I’d wake up at the crack of dawn on Saturdays for combined training classes. Jumping three-foot fences, I had to navigate around eight poles that supported the low ceiling. The small arena was on the ground floor, and the horses lived upstairs and in the basement, going up and down by steep wooden ramps. From the sidewalk, the stable looked like any other building in the city, but it sure smelled different.


To unwind, I’d ride up Amsterdam Avenue to West 90th street to Central Park. Back then, only horses were allowed on the bridle paths. Still there were always loose dogs and curious childrens. When the path was clear, I’d canter around the cherry lined reservoir. I preferred the young horses that ran fast and were unpredictable. The thrill kept me out of worse trouble in the city.


Once a year there was a mock hunt in Central Park. Close to forty riders in their hunting finest would trot down the bridle path to Tavern on the Green. Paul Novograd, who inherited the business from his father, wore his pinks as the red jacket of the hunt master is called. Waiters came outside with hot drinks for the riders (the stirrup cup) and carrots for the horses served on silver platters. Much more civilized than terrorizing a fox, although I’m sure the hunt surprised more than a few New Yorkers.

At the end of high school, I bid goodbye to Claremont and joined the equestrian team at college. No one believed I could have learned to ride in New York City until they saw me make every tight turn on the jumping course.

Since college, I’ve ridden very little. Just the thought of picking it up again makes me sore! Still, hearing about Claremont closing made me teary. It was like reading the last page of a good book.

Building Character

For the kids' spring break the options were:

A. The tree house in our backyard

B. Central Park in NYC (after a record 7 1/2 inches of rain)

Every April the kids and I head south to NYC, trading muddy fields and snow banks for daffodils and blooming magnolias. My mother, the artist Cynthia Lamport, has a long list of museums for the kids to visit.

Grey Landscape by Cynthia Lamport, oil, 1999

We all loved the experimental design exhibit at the Cooper-Hewitt. There were robots, computer simulation games, modern furniture, fashion, light shows, interactive house designing and Chip Kidd’s futuristic book jackets. The Design Triennial is really a children’s museum for preteens through adults with an eye to the future. By contrast, the museum itself is an ornate gem of pre-war architecture with elaborate carved moldings.

The Cooper-Hewitt Museum on 5th Ave.

My parents took the children on an historical tour at the Tenement Museum on the lower Eastside while I worked. We have an ancestor, who in the turn of the last century was living in similar accommodation, crammed 6-12 people to an apartment of 325 square feet. This was both living and working space for the tailors. My great grandfather went on to become a union official in the garment industry.

While the kids were visiting the Museum of Natural History, I met my brother for lunch downtown with his colleague. They are architects at a large, prominent firm. Lunch wasn’t just for fun. The protagonist of my third book hails from a small town in northern Maine and works as an architect in NYC.

My brother’s colleague talked about the experience of being a woman directing a male construction crew. There are a few female electricians, but it’s a testosterone-infused jobsite. At the beginning a woman architect has to fight hard to win respect. Some of the men will say things like, “I bet you thought it would be all picking paint chips.”

After proving herself, a female architect often makes a better manager due to excellent interpersonal and organizational skills. She can earn love as well as respect and encourage people to work as a team.

Although most architecture schools have a 50/50 female to male ratio, most large firms are 40/60 at the junior level, and this ratio drops as you rise through the hierarchy. At this firm there are only two women out of nine full partners: one woman who never married nor had kids and a single mother who adopted.

My brother manages to raise a family with the understanding support of his wife, who is home with the kids in the suburbs. They met when he was working for an architecture firm in Japan. Male architects have an advantage since their spouses are often more willing to take on the responsibilities of being the primary caretaker for their children.

Parenting is difficult because architects work long hours and need to prove themselves in their early 30’s. The pay is low, comparable to academia but with very limited vacation time. There are all-night charettes to make deadlines. The hours only increase with promotion. Worst of all, an architect has little control of her time.

My brother’s colleague, an avid reader of fiction, would love to join a book group but could never commit to a weeknight regularly. Work comes home thanks to Blackberries, known as “crackberries” since architects check them like addicts.

My brother, like his colleague, is compulsive about his work. The profession seems to attract a creative but intensely focused personality. You have to care about the details. I sat with my brother through a two-hour meeting in which all they discussed was millwork as in window trim, door openings and cubbies. All drafting is now done on computers, but they're still called blueprints.

My brother decided he wanted to be an architect at age five. Most architects come to the profession at a young age like a calling. Watching my brother make his dream a reality has given me a feel for the character of architects and an understanding for the profession. His colleague agreed to be my bridge to the female experience.

It may sound confusing that I’m researching my third novel while I’m still writing my second novel. It’s no more difficult than reading two books at the same time and means that I never have wasted time if my manuscript is out being read.

I like to spend time getting to know my characters and structuring the plot before I start writing. It’s never set in stone but gives me a sound foundation upon which to build.

The Next Meal

My family has a rule (too often broken) that if you’re still eating one meal, you can’t talk about the next meal. We’ve planned entire vacations around fine dining. Depressed in Switzerland, we once drove across the Alps to Italy just for lunch on Lake Cuomo, and it was worth it. In the 1970’s, before Zagat’s and food bloggers, my dad got written up in The New Yorker for his personal computer program allowing you to pick a NYC restaurant by cuisine, quality, atmosphere, price and location. When I visit my parents in Manhattan, I’m going to eat well both in the home and out most of the time.

I flew in a day early to avoid Friday’s big storm that flooded New York and dumped a wintery mix in Maine. My mother prepared sole in capered tomato sauce from Marcella Hazan’s The Classic Italian Cookbook. My father broke out the last Mondavi Blanc, which had aged since 1978 in his self-made wine cellar (an insulated closet with an AC.) My dad’s a venture capitalist so the conversation is often interesting. That night we discussed funding a proposed expedition for sunken treasure.

For lunch on Friday my mother and I crossed Central Park to the West Side for Vietnamese food. The Saigon Grill at 90th and Amsterdam has a sister restaurant on the East Side, but it’s closed for renovation. To call Pho Bo an oxtail noodle soup does not capture the subtle flavors of the paper thin sliced beef in the piquant broth. Fresh Oriental basil, sprouts and hoisin sauce come as condiments. You can easily eat lunch for $6 a person, but you won’t be alone. The cavernous restaurant was packed, but the service was prompt.

We met my father for dinner at Maya (1st Ave at 65th), a gourmet Mexican restaurant with high ratings in Zagat’s and even a mention in the Michelin guide. I don’t know if the chef just quit or what, but the food was disappointing. The special ceviche tasted like rubber in ketchup. My father ordered his favorite chicken mole, but it was no better than my special tuna nor my mother’s red snapper. At least the margaritas and mojitos were good enough to drown our sorrows.

Saturday night I went out with my old Dalton School friends. Deb drove us downtown to 20th and Broadway for Abigail’s and Andy’s joint 40th birthday party. Deb can find a parking spot anywhere, which is quite a skill in Manhattan, especially given the size of her Range Rover. In the city if you see a parking spot you take it, even if you don’t need it.

Craftbar is known for its excellent food and cool décor. The two-story open space dining room was all black, white and red transected by what looked like a fire escape. Abigail had booked the private dining room below, which was perfect for 30 guests. Remember the banker who was reading War and Peace on his Blackberry at the last NYC party (see first blog)? Well, he’s quit, but only because he didn’t like the book. Everyone laughed to hear that I too had quit after 150 pages.

On my recommendation, my friend is now reading and enjoying Lewis Robinson’s Officer Friendly. Robinson is a young Maine author who has an MFA from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He also apprenticed with John Irving. A gifted and original storyteller, Robinson writes in a very male voice, which is, perhaps, part of his appeal. His perfectly crafted stories are about sensitive but manly men set in small town Maine under extenuating circumstances. I hear he has a novel coming out soon – I’m awaiting it eagerly.

On Sunday I met my cousin for lunch. I don’t have a sister, but Gabrielle has been like one to me. Our lives have intersected and reversed over the years. She grew up in a southern college town with an academic father while I grew up in NYC with an investment banker father. At my wedding, Gabrielle met our best man Fabio, a banker, and they fell in love. Now they live in NYC, and I’m married to a college professor in small town Maine.


The lunch at Boucheron Bakery was very good, but the setting was even better. It was worth the ridiculous price and long wait for a table. Suspended on the third floor balcony, the view over Columbus Circle to Central Park is spectacular. The AOL/Time Warner building is an oddity in the city – it’s really a mall if an upscale one at that.

After lunch we scanned the new titles at Borders, and then walked up Broadway towards Gabrielle’s home. We stopped into her local grocery store, crossing a picket line against (I kid you not) foie gras. I agree it’s too cruel to force feed geese, but only in NYC would it be worth a demonstration. Gabrielle abandoned me at yet another bookstore (I admit to being a junky.) I resisted the urge to buy since I was half way through a library book (Debra Ginsberg’s Blind Submission – very funny parody of the literary world.) I walked home through Central Park in time for a fine dinner of spit-roasted chicken stuffed with cellery and ginger crafted by my dad.


Before I flew back to Maine, my mother and I visited the Neue Galerie and had lunch overlooking Central Park. Café Sabarsky is known for its Viennese desserts – an excellent place for tea in an Old World setting. Most of the museum was shut in preparation for the Van Gogh and Expressionism exhibit (3/22-7/2,) but we could still admire the golden Klimt’s on display.


The first day back home in Brunswick, I was afraid to go outside even to walk the dog. I woke up to minus two and high winds. Stella popped out her dog flap and then promptly went back to bed, hiding her ice-cube nose in her paws. The temperature never made it into double digits. Still, it’s great to be back home with my family and time to write.

First Blog: From Maine to New York

How hard can it be to get from Maine to New York? Friday night (1/5/07) I was editing my first novel, Moose Crossing, while waiting in the Portland airport for hours. They announce that Kennedy is closing due to weather delays. I rebook myself on a flight the next morning and call my husband, Henry. He says he’ll drive in to get me and leaves our twelve -year-old son babysitting his sleeping younger sister.

I get a call on my cell from Henry, “I’m okay, but the car is totaled.” A sudden rainstorm had made the car hydroplane off the highway into a ditch. Some college students, one a former boy scout, stopped to help. By two in the morning we are all back home in Brunswick, minus one Subaru. Henry doesn’t even have a scratch.

At the NYC Party: Petria, Me, Cathy, Jen, Llisa, Amy and Deb

On three hours of sleep, I still enjoy my friend’s party in New York Saturday night (1/6/07). She is the first of my Dalton School friends to turn forty and does it with style. There must have been thirty people there, and I talk to maybe twenty. Petria May, in peacock blue Pucci, quit law to open a vintage clothing store in the Berkshires. Llisa Demetrios, a sculptor from California wine country, bemoans the rising cost of bronze since 9/11. A New York investment banker reads only electronic books. He’s reading War and Peace on his Blackberry one sentence at a time. I promise a book group that I’ll visit when (and if) my novel gets published.

As I leave, my hostess asks if I met their friend the editor who just got promoted at a good publishing house.

What editor? Oh, well.


On Monday (1/8/07) it's raining sideways. I borrow a raincoat and umbrella from my mother and head out in a short skirt and high-heeled flower power boots to meet Jean Naggar, my agent, for a 12:30 lunch at A La Turka on East 74th. Only a few blocks from arriving on time, a man in a wheelchair asks, “Miss, can you help me?” He’d scattered about 20 quarters all over the sidewalk. What would the ethicist say? I bend down to help him, and my hair blows wildly in the wind. I’m wet and running late. I arrive at an empty restaurant and go downstairs to fix myself up. My hand comes away from the banister brown with varnish, but it scrubs off. It’s now 12:45 so I call my agent’s assistant only to learn that the time was meant to be 1:00. By then I’ve had time to look back over my manuscript.

Jean is always a delight and her enthusiasm infectious. She brought along her daughter Jennifer Weltz, who handles their foreign and film rights, because she thinks we have a lot in common. We do. Their advice is helpful and well worth the trip. I come home re-energized to tackle the final revisions. There is more rewriting than writing to creating a novel.

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