Endless Knots

Published: "Some Peculiar Errand," my novel excerpt; Finalist, Solstice Fiction

I'm delighted to announce that an excerpt ("Some Peculiar Errand") from my novel, The Quintessence, about the return of the 19th-century phenom Margaret Fuller (Bucky's aunt), has been named as a finalist in the Solstice Literary Magazine Fiction Prize, and published here. Two excerpts from the novel have now been published; next up, the novel itself (hello, agents; hello, publishers). Thanks, Solstice.

Margaret's 206th Birthday

On this day in 1810 and not far from where these photos were taken, Sarah Margaret Fuller was born. In forty short years, the journalist-philosopher-linguist-futurist-feminist accomplished more writing by hand and traveling by carriage, train, and ship than a dozen jet-fueled, digitally equipped people combined today might. Although her name was among the handful of "most admired women" at the end of the 1800s (astonishing given that she'd already been dead for half a century), she remains relatively unknown today, except among the "Fullerenes," those for whom Margaret has gotten under their skin. That turns out to be a lot of people, including...me.

Since 1973, the year I discovered Margaret's work, I've made an annual pilgrimage to the Fuller Family plot at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Margaret's father, Timothy Fuller, a lawyer who served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives and in the US Congress, and mother, Margarett Crane Fuller, along with their other children, are all buried there, as is their most famous relative, Bucky Fuller, and his wife, Anne Hewlett Fuller. Bucky's grandfather was Margaret's brother. Re: me, insofar as this is my blog, Bucky wrote the Foreword to Jeff Stamps' and my second book, The Networking Book. There, Bucky makes the link between the seemingly overwhelming challenges we face and their resolution lying largely in the work required to build networks among nations, people, and ideas.

 

 

A memorial stone, bearing a 25-line inscription, stands above the grave of Margaret and her husband, Marquis Giovanni Angelo Ossoli's, little son's body. All three of them drowned in a shipwreck in sight of land off the coast of Fire Island. Only little Nino's body was found; Margaret's and Giovanni's bodies were swept out to sea, along with a treasured trunkful of her European writings.

 

Why is Margaret so important, even today? She did things that women simply didn't do in her day--and that many still find it difficult to do. She supported her mother and siblings after her father died suddenly when she was 25. A contemporary of Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, she was the editor of The Dial, arguably the first literary/political journal in the US. She was the first woman in the US to have a byline on the front page of a newspaper (Horace Greeley's New York Tribune)--and she had plenty, more than 250 in 18 months. She was the first American woman to serve as a foreign correspondent for a US newspaper, covering, among other topics, the Roman Revolution (1848-1849). She traveled alone both domestically and in Europe. And, among other books including translations of Goethe, she wrote the treatise that would serve as the principal manifesto undergirding the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848: Woman in the Nineteenth Century.

In that short book, Margaret did something that few (if any?) have managed to do: she laid out what it means to be fully human, declaring that no woman could be fully realized until man too was realized, a break with conventional Western thinking that polarizes opposites. Margaret integrated them:

There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.

Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But in fact they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman... Nature provides exceptions to every rule.

No writer has inspired me more with their thinking or their example. Margaret Fuller has set me off on many paths over the years, including most recently lighting fire to a trio of novels ("Woman in the 21st Century") where I seek to reprise Margaret's thinking for our current predicament.

And, no quote of hers touches down more deeply than this:

Let every woman, who has once begun to think, examine herself.

I try, especially each year on the day of Margaret Fuller's birth.

 

 

 

On this day in 1850, Margaret Fuller...

...drowned off the coast of Fire Island, NY, in a shipwreck that also took the lives of her husband, Giovanni Ossoli, and their little son, Nino. Five years (and one day) ago, a group of us Fullerenes commemorating Margaret's Bicentennial met to give her a proper memorial service at Mount Auburn Cemetery.

I blogged about it here. And I've blogged about Margaret (her grandnephew Bucky) here. And this is a picture of "the two of us" at Margaret's memorial stone at the cemetery in May 2006, taken just after I finished the first draft of my novel about her, "The Quintessence."

 

 

Happy 205th, Sarah Margaret Fuller

Let every woman, who has once begun to think, examine herself.
--Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 1845

On this day in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, the singular genius and most prolific writer among the Transcendentalists was born. The first child of Margarett Crane Fuller and her husband, the Massachusetts legislator Timothy, Margaret, as she chose to be known, was an autodidact--a child who learned Greek and Latin, who read Shakespeare while others her age were struggling with the alphabet, and who became the first woman in the US to file articles as a foreign correspondent was a nonpareil. Biographies of her abound, including the 2013 Pulitzer-Prize winner by Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life.

I first became entranced with Margaret in the 1970s while researching women in the American Revolution for Addison-Wesley, whose best-selling American history textbook needed some updating. Joan Labby, who was editing that book, asked me and a few others to write features for the book and one of us, either she or I, came up with the idea of bringing some feminist history into greater relief.

I did, penning a straightforward account of such women as Deborah Sampson, who donned men's clothing, picked up arms, and fought in the American Revolution, serving 17 months as "Robert Shurtliffe." But before I could learn all there was to know about Deborah, I was stopped in the Encyclopedia of American Woman by another even more fascinating entry, the brief biography of Margaret Fuller.

And thus began my lifelong obsession with Fuller.

For many years on this day, I've visited her monument in Cambridge's Mount Auburn Cemetery, usually inviting others to go with me, sometimes going alone, and one year making a film with Cambridge filmmaker Ron Mortara (2008). Here are links to those visits. Today I'm traveling to my partner's parents' graves and there I will read a few words of Margaret's. Spirit knows no geography.

With John Halamka, whose birthday also is May 23, and who has attended several Margaret birthday celebrations with his Shakuhachi

And, for the record, Margaret is also a central character in my novel-trilogy-in-process, Woman in the 21st Century, of which the first volume, The Quintessence, is complete.

 

World Blogging Tour thanks to BlarneyCrone #WBT

So apparently there's a movement of sorts, passing the blogging baton from poster to poster, under the rubric "World Blogging Tour." The runner who's just come up on me is BlarneyCrone herself, Liz Barron, who's shown up here before. And here. And elsewhere but alas not the point of this post. My job is to reply to the following queries, one of scores, hundreds, thousands, well, at least four bloggers, including Liz (who answered here) participating:

What am I working on?

While I've been blogging less in the past few months, I've been writing more, finishing up some old pieces, including short stories, revising a novel, rough drafting a memoir, and applying to contests and residencies. I'm at the start of a year-long self-imposed writing intensive, which I've been waiting to begin since I was, say, 16.

I got the idea for the novel/trilogy I'm working on walking past the North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts, site of one of the early battles of the American Revolution. The novel has nothing to do with that but the nearby visitor center (it's now a national park site) has a bookstore that sells the work of famous Concord writers, yup, those pesky Transcendentalists, among them Ms Margaret Fuller, who was not of Concord but spent much time in it. There, on Patriots Day, in 2004, a Massachusetts-only holiday that the rest of the world knows as Boston Marathon Day, I found a small booklet written by Carolyn Wells Healy Dall, containing her recollections of the famous "Conversations" that Margaret convened in Boston in the late 1830s-early 1840s. By the time we were back in the parking lot, I'd conceived the idea for a story, which turned into the first volume of the novel, which has spawned a second...

How does my work differ from others in its genre?

This question raises so many others that I can barely answer it. Genre? Having written business books, articles, humor, poetry, children's stories, literary fiction, satire, and whatever this blogging thing (now in its 9th year) is, I'll go with "completely."  

Why do I write what I do? 

Phrases and sentences are always running through my head. Before a thought is complete, I'm often rewriting it. Titles appear as I'm trying to park the car, choose an item from the grocery shelf, click on a website. I write out of compulsion and desire, often with someone in mind whom I imagine is interested. (Are you? Only you know for sure.)

Much more wants to be written than is and I spend a good amount of time castigating myself for not writing more. 

So why do I write what I do? Because this configuration of molecules, born of New York parents in a small Pennsylvania Dutch town not far from Philadelphia, is passing through its unique spacetime, absorbing, shedding, observing, ignoring, and desperately trying to make sense of this confusing wonder called life. That's why.

How does my writing process work?

I write very quickly, typing as fast as I can, then stop due to time constraints, hunger, an interruption, or because I'm suddenly pleased to see that I've gotten 1000 words out. Then I go back before going on, retreading the same words. A "final first draft" for me could have 30 or 40 passes before the end. This is probably not the best way to write but it's the only way I've ever written. It's as if starting at the beginning gives me the momentum I need to leap ahead. Although I want to get everything out as quickly as possible, I hold on to material for eons, which means I have cartons and cartons of unfinished stuff. My hope is to get a lot of that material into circulation in the months to come.

Now, according to Liz, I'm supposed to pass the baton to four other bloggers. Here goes, Bill Ives, whose blogging helped get me started, the inimitable Alex Bain, Myfanwy Collins, to whom very good writing things are happening, and to Jon Keller, author of Of Sea and Cloud, who's just started blogging.

Megan wins a Pulitzer for Margaret

If they'd been awarding Pulitzers during her lifetime, Margaret Fuller surely would have been deserving -- first in nonfiction for the ground-breaking books she wrote (including Woman in the Nineteenth Century) and in journalism for her insightful and daring reporting that she did on the Roman Revolution of 1848 for the New York Tribune. Well, let's be honest: given where woman was in the 19th century, she probably wouldn't have received the highest writing honors but thanks to the talented Megan Marshall, her name is in big lights these days.

For any of us who know her, happiness abounds for Megan Marshall's having won this year's Pulitzer in biography for Margaret Fuller: A New American Life. It took chuztpah to write a biography of Fuller after so many others -- I don't know the full count of the body of bios but it's got to be at least 50, some superb, some not so superb. Megan's falls into the former category, with her having chosen and faithfully executed her desire to have history read like a novel. Many a biographer has tried this but not all succeed where Megan has.

I am so happy for her. Megan and I met as a result of her having written her Pulitzer-finalist biography of The Peabody Sisters. I told this story here seven years ago. Shortly after she began work on the Fuller book, we arranged to meet again (also at Whole Foods -- you have to click the link to understand). Megan was asking questions of people like me, people for whom Fuller has served as an inspiration. It was an interesting way for her to be gathering insight into Fuller because there are so many people like us.

Forty years after I first discovered her in the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women, Margaret Fuller is with me still as I progress with the second volume of a novel-trilogy that I'm writing about her and her contemporary counterparts, "Woman in the 21st-Century." I am grateful to Megan for this too as she's provided many new windows into this eternal soul.

Danny Hauben's Beautiful Bronx

Yesterday's New York Times profiles Daniel (to those lucky enough to know and love him, Danny) Hauben, the realist/muralist/"touched with whimsy" (Times description) painter who won the commission to create the art for the new Bronx Community College Library. Stupendous.

The Times interactive page shows four of Danny's works with the ability to mouse over and see them in more detail. Click-worthy, for sure.

This photo, from Danny's website, says what words cannot, him painting, what he's painting, and how he paints it.

 

It was my good luck to meet Danny when he was a teenager. His brother, Eddie Hauben, and his wife Jan (Ward) Hauben, were our first friends in Boston, whom we met in the context of bringing Bucky Fuller to Boston to stage World Game here in the summer of 1970. The story, of course, has many twists to it -- Eddie worked for Bucky; Jan worked for Gus Jaccaci, a futurist who had previously been a Harvard admission's office who had tried to recruit my late husband, Jeff Stamps, to Harvard so that he would ski with the Harvard team. (FTR, he chose Dartmouth instead, where he lasted for less than a year--it was all-male then and far too conservative for him--before transferring to University of New Hampshire.) Gus was working at Boston College at the time and in his role as Arts Assistant to the President was able to sponsor World Game.

And it was evident from first meeting Danny that he was a major talent. Most people (everyone?) in our lifelong network of friends who grew out of that 1970 confluence of interests own Danny's pieces, including one of our house, a pastel from the perspective of the back yard, that has hung in the dining room since 1985 when I asked Danny to do it. Just superb.

Which all of this is.

Are you a verb?

Speaking of names, it was Thanksgiving weekend, when the agonizing decision of which film to watch from the thousands available was upon us. We finally chose the one about which enough people had said, "I'll watch that." No great enthusiasm but enough so that no one was threatening to go to bed instead.

And so it was that the credits had just started to roll past Jeremy Irons when Son-In-Law #2 said, "I wish my name were a sentence." His isn't. Nor is mine. But then...

We realized that, thanks to their papa, my daughters' names are: Miranda Stamps, Eliza Stamps.

Is yours? (And of course this is reminding me of Bucky Fuller's I Seem To Be a Verb.)

 

 

"Bucky and [really] Me" - and Ed Hauben and Jeff Stamps on Feb 2

Unless we're blizzard-ed out on Wed, Feb 2, Jeff, Ed, and I will be the post-performance discussion folks following "R. Buckminster Fuller: THE HISTORY (and Mystery) OF THE UNIVERSE" at the A.R.T. in Cambridge.

Specific focus is Margaret Fuller's influence on Bucky - but I would never have met Bucky had it not been for Ed, who worked with Bucky in New York and Carbondale, and Jeff (who introduced me to Ed), whose work, like that of so many others, has been profoundly influenced by the man whose self-description included this very sensible idea: "I Seem to Be a Verb."

Annie DiMario, production dramaturg, will lead the discussion.

"A Visionary's World"--Don Aucoin on the Bucky play

Last one on Bucky, I promise (for a while).

Don Aucoin's review (and Marcus Stern's photos) of “R. Buckminster Fuller: The History (and Mystery) of the Universe,’’ in today's Boston Globe are spectacular. Aucoin captures the affect of the set, the script, and the actor:

Whether he is simply sitting in a high-backed chair, standing at a table and manipulating geometric shapes to illustrate a point, or bounding about set designer David Lee Cuthbert’s circular, cobalt-blue platform — which, fittingly enough, suggests a swirling cosmos — [Thomas] Derrah conveys Fuller’s perpetual excitement in the workings of the universe and his own remarkable mind.

And Aucoin honors playwright-director D.W. Jacobs's fine lines:

Derrah’s Bucky blends a childlike sense of discovery with a didact’s need to instruct and an aphorist’s knack for making his points in a pithy phrase, viz.: “You have to decide at the outset whether you are trying to make money or trying to make sense, as they are mutually exclusive’’; “All ideologies range somewhere between the Great Pirates and the Marxists, between the fire and the frying pan’’ or “Muscle is nothing; mind is everything. But muscle is still in control of human affairs.’’

Wish all the photos from the Globe were online for you to see. Actually, it's worth buying today's paper if you only read here just to see Stern's cover photo that manages to capture what the stage really looks like.

I leave you with this, the video posted to the ART site (and YouTube) in which Doug Jacobs describes how he came to Fuller and concludes with Allegra Fuller Snyder, daughter of, calling her father "a great teacher to the world." Check.