La Dolce Vita & Editing on an E-Reader

Heading North is now ready to hit the road with you for the summer! Snag a copy of the newly minted e-book and travel light.

Ciao, tutti!

I write to you from Perugia, Italy, where I am currently leading a five-week study abroad course focused on creative nonfiction. We’re reading things and doing things (like getting a guided tour of the AC Perugia Calcio Museo and Renato Curi Stadium, making pasta Bolognese from scratch, wandering churches and fortresses, &c.) and writing about them, which is basically the best thing in the world.

The timing of the Heading North e-book is strangely perfect, as I’ve been putting my e-reader through its paces here in Italy. I don’t often turn to my e-reader; I like to write in my books, and the process of making notes in my Kindle is a bit too clunky for my taste, especially with regard to accessing them later. But when I’m traveling and suitcase space is at a premium, an e-reader really is a delight, especially because I can borrow e-books from both my local public library and my campus library.

And, when traveling, there is nothing better than a book that simply makes the airport chaos and/or the whole flight disappear from consciousness. I love to save books that are rich in world-building, that are set in places and times that are not my own, for this exact purpose. On my way to Italy, that book was The Henna Artist by Alka Joshi, which is a layered sensory experience of a novel that contains my favorite thing: a character who knows how to do something extraordinarily well and does it, on the page, in a textural, authoritative, and absolutely necessary way. The character’s skill is a primary engine for the work.

I also zoomed through Michael Cunningham’s Day while trying to figure out what time zone I was in, and I found the structure to be very appealing. Cunningham is also very skillful with his choices about what is revealed on or off the page (which was something I thought about a lot while reading Olivia Wolfgang-Smith’s Glassworks).

I’ve just started Elizabeth Acevedo’s Family Lore, too, which is also a structural delight that features absolutely primo character development. I have a galley of Kevin Barry’s forthcoming The Heart in Winter, too, that I’m definitely hoarding for the right moment.

Revising with an E-Reader

In addition to reading while traveling, I use my e-reader for one other important task: revision. The e-reader comes into play in revision for me because it is so reader-focused. It’s a wonderful way to reconnect with a manuscript when your relationship to it has been somewhat fragmented or intermittent (perhaps, say, because of the high-speed whack-a-mole that is a semester’s final month) or when you’ve been deliberately resting the work in order to come to it with fresh eyes.

But why not do that on the computer? Or on paper?

For me, the process of re-reading on both paper and in the active file of the work is much too fuss-friendly. When the task is simply to remember, reconnect, and re-engage, I defeat my own purpose by diving directly into the tinkering and editing phase. If I’m marking up the margins, I’m probably not thinking as hard about what is present, which is the exact point of such a re-read. So converting the work to PDF and then opening it with my e-reader, on which any note I wish to make is a laborious process of individual taps, encourages me to do nothing else except read the words on the page, as they come, and nothing else.

When I’m much later in the project, too, I will then change the font to something sans serif and export it as an actual e-book file, which is easy to do in Scrivener. Then, when I look at it on Kindle, it doesn’t look like mine anymore—the font is new and strange to me; the words appear in different parts of the page.

I do this at two particular points in the process: when I’m in that murky, getting-close-but-not-quite-there phase, when I’ve read the work in progress too many times to actually see what I’m seeing, and when I think I’m ready to share the work with someone else.

In the first instance, the changing of the trappings keeps me from skimming when I revisit key moments. My brain is no longer able to fill in the shape of a page or default to that glazed yeahyeahyeah feeling when a scene or line of dialogue is almost good enough if the visual presentation makes it feel like a new text.

In the second, making the work look like it belongs to someone else can almost convince me that it does belong to someone else—especially if I’ve also let the work rest for a while before this read—so I can turn off the occasional pernicious stab of “this can’t be very good; it just looks like something I wrote.” The defamiliarization allows me to be both kinder to the work—it doesn’t look like mine anymore, so I can’t hate it specifically because it looks like mine—and harder on it. If it looks like a “real book” might look, where are the places I cannot help but mark up (even as laborious and annoying as that part is)? Where are the places I get tripped up, that drag on? If I can find and mend those moments myself, then there’s less noise to distract my reader from the kind of feedback that can’t come from me, that can only come from someone whose brain exists without this story in it. I wouldn’t want to waste an external reader’s time and energy by having them tell me what I already know.

None of this takes the place of a printed, triple-spaced read or reading out loud for me, but these e-reader passes are a key part of my process. If you have an e-reader lying around, consider giving them a try!

Commencement

In mid-May, just four short days before I hopped on the plane, I had the great privilege of delivering the commencement address at Lebanon Valley College’s undergraduate ceremony. The person who delivers the commencement address at LVC is the faculty member who was awarded the Vickroy Award, our highest teaching honor, the previous year, and so to give this speech was really emblematic of everything I have been striving for.

It’s a bittersweet moment, too, because one of the people who made it possible for me to do that, to even think of myself in such a role, the person whose compassionate teaching I’ve tried to model mine after all my life, passed away the same week. Andrea Taylor, who was my teacher twice—in fifth grade and eighth grade—and who was a mentor and then a friend and always, always a guiding star, taught me most of what I value most in being a person: to be endlessly curious, to be kind, to believe in the transformative power of education, to read widely and well, to be eager to try something new. I missed the funeral because I’m here, four thousand miles away, doing my best to teach my students in the ways I learned from her, which is all I can do.

Closing it out with “Bella Ciao” as covered by TALCO, an Italian ska-punk band that I love.