Josh Swiller

Among other things, Josh Swiller has been a forest ranger, raw food chef, slipper salesman, Zen practitioner, and Peace Corps volunteer.

But perhaps what most draws me to Josh's story is that he is profoundly deaf (as is my mother) and the first white man to live in Mununga, Zambia. He might still be relatively young, but he's a true gravity defier.

Josh writes about both experiences in his new book The Unheard: A Memoir of Deafness and Africa, which has just been published by Holt.

Two weeks ago, Josh contacted me about posting on my blog. If after reading his story (originally published last February on Josh's own blog), you would like to learn more about this extraordinary man, go to www.npr.org to listen to his interview on NPR's Weekend Edition (9/15/07) and read an excerpt from his memoir. You can also visit Josh's website at joshswiller.com.

Here's what Josh sent me:

I was born with a severe hearing loss and became profoundly deaf by the time I was five. With the help of hearing aids, dedicated (if thoroughly unusual) parents, three wild brothers, and an audiologist who did not believe in limits, I learned to speak and lip-read quite well. Too well, almost, because I was able to pass through the world of hearing people to such a degree that many people didn't know I was deaf and I consequently could never quite figure out what I was. Deaf? Hearing? None of the above?

I had many questions from a young age. Why was I deaf? But more than that: why was the world created with such things as deafness, blindness, lameness? I was six, eight, and these questions would weigh on me.

As a deaf child among hearing people, you learn to read the subtle cues that people don't know they are giving. It's a trick that helps you figure out conversations when the words are coming too fast to follow. The way a man cleans his glasses, the way a woman puts down her water glass – people are open books. With my hearing aids off I would watch people and see in their body language, in their briefest glances and gestures, whole oceans of emotions that went unsaid. Why? Why unsaid?

I went to Yale and I found it a very challenging place. Lectures and social events were not designed with hearing impaired people in mind. Everywhere were extraordinary ambitious young men and women, but no one seemed to be asking the questions that mattered, at least to me, namely: what was the point? If you achieved everything you sought, well, then what?

Then I went to Gallaudet, the national university for the deaf, and discovered an altogether different world with its own unique answers to the questions I asked about life. The deaf community is close and warm and rich, caring and understanding, and if I were a luckier man maybe I'd still be there, but I'd been in the hearing world too long to feel entirely comfortable there. I needed to be back in the world of speech and sound. In the hearing world I was deaf, yes, but in the deaf world, I was hearing.

So I did the logical thing: I went to live in a rural village in Zambia, Africa for two years.

Mununga, Zambia was a fantastical place. Sixty kilometers past the last paved road, phone line and electric cable, it was part timeless village, part refugee camp. There were friendly faces to greet, fish and fried earthworms to eat, banana wine to drink, a beautiful river to swim in, a gang of teenage boys who worshipped Rambo and studied and debated my Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue like Rabbis debate the Talmud. The energy of 50,000 people packed in a small area -- children, mothers, fathers, goats, and chickens, thatch roof huts going on for miles and miles -- was dangerous and exhilarating.

Dangerous because witchcraft and superstition were prevalent, especially in the person of a shady village strongman named Kingston; exhilarating because, as the first white man to ever live in Mununga, I found a place past deafness. The villagers spoke clearly and slowly, looked me in the eye as they spoke so I could read their lips, and there was little or no background noise. They really cared if I could understand them and if I couldn't, they blamed their English skills instead of my hearing. I was hearing, or about as close as I could get.

I began a friendship with the most remarkable man I've ever met, a Health Clinic Officer named Mr. Jere. (See photo above.) He was gregarious, kind, funny, wise, and brewer of the best banana wine in the village. We spent many nights sipping wine, playing chess and discussing life. He trained me to help him out at the clinic as I had been instructed by Peace Corps to dig wells but that didn't go anywhere, and he helped me navigate sticky situations such as a trial for defiling the virgin daughter of a blackmailing preacher. Good times.

But then everything went mad: mobs, violence, bus crashes. Deaths foreseen and unforeseen. And really, who was I to search for a place to call my own in the middle of Africa?


That's all in the book, but what I want to add is that after I came home from Africa, and after another few years of traveling, I ended up at a Zen Center in upstate New York. I learned meditation there and through meditation I finally took this search for understanding to its logical extreme: to a thorough examination of the searcher. My teacher would ask me: what is it that would search so hard? What is it that makes one feel less than whole? I learned so much in my four years there.

And so while the book is about Africa and deafness it is also about one of the first and deepest instructions my meditation teacher gave me: "Zen practice," he said, "is about learning to have a sense of humor."

It took me a long time to understand the depth of that teaching. But I feel that it informs the book, and rightfully so, because the African villagers I met, while poor in many regards, were extraordinarily rich in humor. Even as mobs ran wild, as disease and poverty were widespread, they found reasons to laugh. Do you want a glass of banana wine? Did you see that goat running wild at market?

In telling the story of getting past deafness in an African village, I tried to show this humor, to enable readers to see and experience its power for themselves. With humor comes gratefulness, and that is invaluable. These days I work with the deaf and the terminally ill in Brooklyn, NY, and the experiences I've had in this position only confirm my belief in the power and importance of a smile.

As Jere would say: Did you hear the one about the goat that wears pants?

I feel extraordinarily blessed for the life I've gotten to live, for the people I've met, and for all that they've taught me and I offer this book as a gift to them.

Note: All the photos accompanying this posting come from Josh's website.

Q & A with Carolyn Howard-Johnson

Back in November of 2006, I posted an essay by Carolyn Howard-Johnson, a prolific author and self-described late bloomer. (Click here to read.) Now that Carolyn has a new book out, the time seemed ripe to do an interview with her. I think you'll be inspired by what she has to say.

Prill: Talk about being a late bloomer.

Carolyn: That term is one that gets bandied around a lot in our family. Originally I thought of myself as an early bloomer. I was the youngest person to ever be hired as a reporter for The Salt Lake Tribune. But then I gave up on my writing career, as many women in my generation were wont to do. You know, children. Husband. So when I got back to writing, it was pretty late.

Prill: You mentioned your family…

Carolyn: Yes, my mother, who will be 90 this February, calls my daughter a late bloomer. She's getting a Ph.D. in her early forties. Heck, I consider people in their early 40s, mmmm, babies.

Prill: So, was it slow going when you did get back to the writing you love?

Carolyn: Actually not. You know, when we start a second or third career, we have everything we've done before--all that experience--to put to work in favor of the new effort. I had been a publicist and worked for Good Housekeeping magazine right after my newspaper stint. That helped. My husband and I had owned our own business. That helped. And, there is just something about wisdom. It seems that it naturally collects in wrinkles. I think my fiction is gentler than it would have been when I was young. I am a more confident promoter now than I would have been when I was young, and we all know how important that is to a writing career.

Prill: Does that have something to do with why you started your How To Do It Frugally Series of books for writers?

Carolyn: Yes, I wanted to share all the potholes I fell into when my first books were published. I learned how book promotion differs from other promotion. I even had to learn that promotion is something authors have to do if they don't want their books to die. Every single promotion idea in The Frugal Book Promoter: How to do What Your Publisher Won't is something I tried myself and learned from. No one else need go through what I did. This book will let them pick and choose what's best for them and give them all the little tricks to make whatever they choose successful.

Prill: And now you are releasing The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success…

Carolyn:Yes, and you know, it turns out that The Frugal Editor is a lot about marketing, too. Writers have to market themselves every day with proposals, cover letters, query letters. A poorly edited query can mean an unsold book! Editing isn't all about grammar and structure and dialogue tags. Many of us make lots of errors that annoy people like agents and publishers and contest judges without even realizing it. I mean, they aren't errors that your English teacher would have rapped your knuckles over. They're perfectly good, grammatical statements or punctuation or any number of things that tip gatekeepers off that we're amateurs.

Prill: Back to that part about starting over—as a late bloomer.

Carolyn: The only real drawback of this late bloomer thing is that I have a sense that I must follow my heart in choosing what I write. That's not all bad, of course, but it means I am not making choices based on what is best for my career but, really, on what I want to do. It sounds spoiled but that's another thing that happened to me as I aged.

Prill: I presume you’re referring to your bout with cancer?

Carolyn: They are related—the cancer and the aging. Life is so short. When you start feeling at a gut level that life will end instead of just knowing intellectually that it will, you might use different guidelines to make your choices. I sure did. And it's not all bad. Poetry doesn't sell in large numbers but oh! The joy! And there's so much of that same emotion in helping other writers. So, that's what I do.

----

Note: Carolyn's website is www.HowToDoItFrugally.com. She blogs at www.SharingwithWriters.blogspot.com, www.authorscoalition.blogspot.com (a blog on turning a ho-hum book fair into a sizzling success), and www.TheNewBookReview.blogspot.com. She also edits a newsletter in association with Authors' Coalition, an organization she founded (www.authorscoalitionandredenginepress.com). Subscribe by sending an e-mail with "subscribe" in the subject line to HoJoNews@aol.com.

Have I dreamed of late...

In celebration of the Jewish New Year and in honor of my friend Tamara Meyer (see my 10/17/06 posting), here's the complete version of The Day Has Come:

The Day Has Come

The day has come
To take an accounting of my life.

Have I dreamed of late
Of the person I want to be,
Of the changes I would make
In my daily habits,
In the way I am with others,
In the friendship I show companions,
Woman friends, man friends, my partner,
In the regard I show my father and mother,
Who brought me out of childhood?

I have remained enchained too often to less than what I am.
But the day has come to take an accounting of my life.

Have I renewed of late
My vision of the world I want to live in,
Of the changes I would make
In the way my friends are with each other
The way we find out whom we love
The way we grow to educated people
The way in which the many kinds of needy people
Grope their way to justice?

I, who am my own kind of needy person, have been afraid of visions.
But the day has come to take an accounting of my life.

Have I faced up of late
To the needs I really have--
Not for comforts which shelter my unsureness,
Not for honors which paper over my (really tawdry) self,
Not for handsome beauty in which my weakness masquerades,
Not for unattractiveness in which my strengths hide out--

I need to be loved.
Do I deserve to be?
I need to love another
Can I commit my love?
Perhaps its object will be less than my visions
(And then I would be less)
Perhaps I am not brave enough
To find new vision
Through a real and breathing person.

I need to come in touch with my own power,
Not with titles,
Not possessions, money, high praise,
But with the power that is mine
As a child of the Power that is the universe
To be a comfort, a source of honor,
Handsome and beautiful from the moment I awoke this morning
So strong
That I can risk the love of someone else
So sure
That I can risk to change the world
And know that even if it all comes crashing down
I shall survive it all--
Saddened a bit, shaken perhaps,
Not unvisited by tears
But my dreams shall not crash down
My visions not go glimmering.
So long as I have breath
I know I have the strength
To transform what I can be
To what I am.

The day has come
To take an accounting of my life.

*From The Wings of Awe, a Machzor for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundations, Washington, D.C.

Note: The iceberg photo at the top of this posting is widely available on the web. The photographer, Ralph A. Clevenger, fashioned it from a composite of four images. He says: “I created the image as a way of illustrating the concept of what you get is not necessarily what you see. As a professional photographer I knew that I couldn't get an actual shot of an iceberg the way I envisioned it, so I created the final image by compositing several images I had taken."

From Pamela Ehrenberg

Here's another guest-post, this one from a woman named Pamela Ehrenberg (see photo below) who segued from working at a non-profit to writing young-adult fiction. She's a bit younger than most of the people I blog about, but a gravity-defier nonetheless.

Two Years of Books and Babies
(Or, How I Used My Innocent Newborn as an Excuse
To Quit My Job and Follow a Dream)

I'm honored to be here as a guest blogger. (Glogger?) Thank you so much, Prill, for having me! This is actually my first time blogging, although some sources hint at a possible connection between me and the MySpace blog of my character Ethan Oppenheimer (www.myspace.com/ethansuspended).

So, yes--hooray!--I'm a writer. It must be true, now that I've listed it under "occupation" on a doctor's form. Here is my later-than-average bloomer story of how it happened:

When I quit my job in 2005, my immediate priorities were selecting a stroller and wondering whether the crib would arrive on time. Anyone who wondered why I'd leave my agreeable job found their answer in the basketball-sized lump growing larger by the hour. Except that wasn't the whole answer.

Whole answer: I've been writing since before I could write. I dictated dramatic stories to my kindergarten teacher, and at thirteen I lost my first novel, in a red spiral notebook, on the school bus. But I never considered being an actual writer--as in someone who writes fiction during what others consider a workday. Because of bills, sure, but also because of the ideal of a career, or at least a job with enough syllables that people's eyes would glaze over midway through my description.

But with a baby, quitting my job was suddenly reasonable, maybe even noble. And--joyous nonprofit salary--my family's financial picture would not be drastically different if I worked full-time and paid for full-time childcare. (I'm of course grateful to my husband for retaining his job in a multisyllabic agency that offers generous health insurance, even as our country struggles with larger issues of health care and child care.)

So I quit my job. Mostly. I consult about five hours per week, which allows me a sometimes-convenient alternative to admitting I'm a novelist. And it fattens the babysitter fund so I can write and work on book-promotion efforts.

Because there's a book! A year and a half ago, I signed the contract for Ethan, Suspended (Eerdmans 2007). The book came out last spring, by which time the next book--written during Talia's first two years of nap times and some wonderful writing-playdates with friends--was almost ready to submit. And then Talia went to camp this summer, leaving me blissfully trapped in suburbia for nine hours per week, with only my laptop for company. I pounded out a first draft of book #3.

So--was the timing ideal? When I tell people I conveniently launched a writing career the same month I had a baby, I get smiles from everyone who has attempted to do either or both. But the two endeavors complement each other well, reminding me that neither is the sum total of the universe. Potty-training disappointments can be offset by narrative breakthroughs, and there's nothing like ring-around-the-rosy to put an unenthusiastic book review into perspective.

Sure, some writers publish their first book at 21, and lately I'm meeting a lot (including Barbara J. Olexer, Bryna J. Fireside, Mary Claire Mahaney, and Sallie Lowenstein) who turned their attentions more fully toward writing after their children were grown. But in writing and in parenting, there's really no time except for the present--and for now that seems like a pretty good place to be.

--Pamela Ehrenberg
www.pamelaehrenberg.com

Terence Clarke's Remembrances of Harriet Doerr

Last Sunday, my blog was mentioned on the front page of the Style Section of The New York Times. A total, giddy surprise. As a result, my e-box quickly filled with letters. One was from novelist/journalist/filmmaker Terence Clarke, who, as it turns out, has quite an engaging blog of his own titled Terence Clarke: Books, Art, Music, Film, Style (www.terenceclarke.org).

With his permission, I'm reprinting below his May 25th posting on late-bloomer Harriet Doerr (see photo at right), who graduated from Stanford at age 67 and went on to became a writer, winning the National Book Award for her novel Stones for Ibarra.

Good Books and Good Ball:
What Harriet Doerr,
a fine novelist,
owed to Bob Gibson,
a fine pitcher

Harriet Doerr, who died five years ago at age 92, was a literary late bloomer. Her first novel, Stones for Ibarra, was published in 1984, when she was 74. It came upon the world like a great chrysanthemum firework and was on best-seller lists for months. She was instantly famous because of the book's wonderful evocations of Mexico and of what it's like to be an aging woman in a world that does not treat aging women very well. I first met her at her home in Pasadena some years ago; I had gone to visit her before a reading from her work in San Francisco. Harriet suffered from glaucoma, and she was concerned that she wouldn't be able to read properly from her manuscript. So she asked if someone would read for her and, through Paul Signorelli, director of volunteer services at the San Francisco Public Library, I agreed.

The granddaughter of railroad magnate Henry Huntington, she lived in a large home at the top of a slope in one of those remarkable neighborhoods for which Pasadena is known. A very small, very white-haired woman answered the door, shook my hand and told me, "I'm Harriet Doerr." She gave me a quick tour of the house. I gave her a book of mine. We went over the materials for her reading quickly, and she felt that I'd do just fine as a reader of her work. But I had a question: How had she managed to begin writing in her early 70s, without any prior wish to do so? And how had she written so well?

"Oh, well, you know, I dropped out of Stanford in 1930 because I wanted to get married," she said. "I raised a family. And then my husband, Albert, wanted to go to Mexico in the 1950s, to resuscitate a mining business that had been in his family for some time. And we lived there for several years.

"That's where I got what finally became Stones for Ibarra, I guess.

"And then my husband died in 1972, and I was at a loss as to what to do. But my son Michael told me that I ought to go back to school, to finish what I'd left at Stanford. So in 1975 I entered Scripps Institute, with the idea that I'd major in history or something."

She smiled. She was wearing a pearl necklace the whiteness of which almost matched that of her hair.

"That first semester, I had chosen all the courses I wanted, and I still had room for a three-unit elective. I didn't know what I wanted to take . . . an art course or something. Music appreciation. But my children had been looking through the catalog, and they'd seen this creative writing course. They urged me to take it."

Harriet smiled again, nodded and sat back in her chair.

"And the first time I was to go to that class, I panicked," she said.

"Here were all these 20-year-olds . . . you know, these children going into the classroom, and I was standing out in the hallway petrified. An old woman in a cloth coat. Me? Write? Then the professor came, and he was almost as young as the students!

"The door closed behind him, and I was all by myself in the hallway. All by myself, convinced that I should turn around and never go into that class."

Harriet sipped from her coffee and looked out into her garden.

"But then I thought about Bob Gibson." Bob Gibson? A Hall of Fame pitcher for the Saint Louis Cardinals, Gibson had retired at the end of the 1975 season after a long career. He gave the impression of being a mean-spirited man who liked nothing better than to punish a hitter. If you'd gotten a home run off him, the next time you came to bat, you were sure he was throwing the ball right at you with the intention of injuring you. He was famous for it. He was feared for it.

"You see, I'd heard him say on the radio once," she said, "that what he did as a pitcher was to just hum that mother in there, to see what would happen."

She began laughing, a high and suddenly very youthful-sounding outburst of glee.

"And I thought, well, if it's good enough for Bob Gibson, it's good enough for me. So I opened that door, and I walked into that class. My plan was to hum that mother in there, and I did!"

Note: The photo above was taken from the Stanford Alumni Magazine website. Click here to read the magazine's profile of Ms. Doerr.