Brackets for Beginners (Off Topic for a Monday)

It's Monday and I'm off to a particularly slow start, just now reading the morning paper -- yes, a paper paper. Oh, I do read plenty of news online. But I start the day with the New York Times: crossword puzzle and then Arts, next the editorial and OpEd pages, then the special sections – Tuesday/Science, Wednesday/Dining, etc. – and finally, business and then the front national/international news section. I put the Sports section aside for my teenage son. Usually.

Today, however, I am going through the sports pages, doing a kind of homework, trying to learn something intelligent to say the teenager later. Having decided the other day that it's easier (or at least quieter) not to fight it, I've bought into The Bracket, and agreed that even in a household where television is normally banned in favor of homework on Monday through Thursday, college basketball may rule, at least for two weeks or so. I graduated from Syracuse University at a time when the Orange were a dominant NCAA team. I lived across the street from the legendary and decrepit Manley Field House. I was at the first game ever played in Carrier Dome. So you might think I know a thing or two about college hoops. You would be wrong.

But just to prove that I'm not hopeless, I asked the teenager over the weekend to explain this Bracket business to me, which created so much excitement in our house ("Mom's going to make a Bracket!"), that he flew up to my office to make copies of the Sports Illustrated fill-in-the-blank insert for all four of us. These are now posted around the kitchen in various stages of inked-in, crossed-out completion.

After listening to my son's careful and lively 20-minute explanation – the boy wants to be a sportscaster, after all – I knew what seemed like everything I needed to know in order to fill in my Bracket. Everything except which teams are good picks. But hey, if as my son said, the SI editors had already got it wrong ("busted their bracket"), I was game. So I grabbed a pen and got to work.

That is, I went down the list and picked out teams like so: I'll take Louisville (because of the Kentucky Derby), and Dayton (because we used to eat at the Dayton Inn in Clifton when I was a kid), Xavier because I like the way the word looks and sounds, Gonzaga because any team with that name needs any and all help, USC because I lived in Southern California for a while, and Perdue because I once had a crush on a Perdue-bound prep school boy, and Duke because well, doesn't the name Duke just make you think, winner?

Of course, Syracuse too. So what if it took me 20-plus years to take an interest in "my" team? It's also taken me a while also to understand that learning new meanings for some old words (like bracket) and relaxing a relatively new rule (no TV on school nights) in favor of some old-fashioned sports-craziness, can keep a teenager engaged and force a mom outside of her comfort zone to such an extent that she is seriously contemplating if it would be completely wrong to make a new copy of her Bracket and started over without telling the teenager.

And, it's taken me six paragraphs to figure out that today's post has absolutely nothing to do with writing or reading or the literary life. Sue me.

Point of View: A 10-year-old Explains It All

We writer types sit around in workshops and writing groups and such, talking endlessly about tone and voice and point of view, and it's all very interesting of course – at least to us. Then there's this.

My 10 year-old son, home sick from school (but not too sick) is quiet for an hour, reading at the breakfast table. A few times he asks what a word means (frieze). But mostly he is silent, still.

Finally, he looks up, near triumphant. He's read a fairly dense eight-page article by Tom Verducci in the current issue of Sports Illustrated about the history and impending tear-down of storied Yankee Stadium. (Last night our family intermittently watched the final game played in the House that Ruth Built, lumps in throat.)

"Wow, that was a great article! Hey Mom," he says, "It was so cool. It's written like it was the stadium talking."

Indeed. The piece begins, "I am dying. It's O.K. You need not feel sorry for me. I have lived a full life…" and goes on for some 4,000 words in the same vein. (I'm guessing here, but can't you just picture Verducci wondering how to make an article about the legendary stadium stand out from the thousands of pieces he knows will be written this month? He reaches into his voluminous craft bag, considers if writing in the stadium's voice will be enough to make the article a must read. It is.)

So, there's writers opining about POV and feeling as if we are discussing something rather esoteric and incredibly valuable. And then there's a10 year-old taking an hour to read something he did not have to read, then happily identifying and explaining – in case I missed it -- how the choice of POV influences how a piece is read. Priceless.

Guest Blogger Gina Vozenilek on slush piles, sports, journal editing, and MFAs

Note from Lisa: When I very briefly met Gina Vozenilek last year, I was struck by what sounded like her very cool job because at the time I was looking for a home for an essay about my former life as a hunter/jumper horse show competitor. Later, it was a pleasure to have Gina edit my work, and I was pleased too to discover her writing and that we had each written about some of the same mothering dilemmas.

Please welcome Gina Vozenilek.

When Lisa asked me to post on her blog while she labors in the final throes of her MFA, I was simultaneously honored and jealous. I met Lisa briefly at the NonFictioNow conference in Iowa City in the fall of 2007 and know her through her words, which I first admired as an editor at Sport Literate Magazine. Her essay entitled “A Well-Jumped Fence,” which we published this spring in our “Winners and Losers” issue, really stood out from the pile. I thought I might muse a bit about it from an editorial perspective, assuming that if you are reading Lisa’s blog, more likely than not, you’ve got submissions in slush piles all over the place, too.

But first to the jealousy bit. I can’t help marveling at a mom finishing an MFA. Kudos! A mom finishing a sentence is pretty noteworthy in my book these days. I have four kids myself and usually feel entitled to someone’s congratulations if my family all has two clean socks and three squares a day. I dream of finding the time for my own literary art in a world dominated by cartoons and crayons. Being a freelance writer and editor seems to suck up every artistic minute I can squeeze from a day. I realized with a start just today as I sat at the public pool, chauffeur to the kids’ swim lessons, that if I started an MFA program now I would not be finished by my 40th birthday. [I’d be happy for some suggestions on good creative nonfiction programs in the Chicago area, or low-residency options anywhere.]

Lisa’s essay is about the forward movement of life, simultaneously away from old passions (in her case, equestrian competition) and grounded in them. Her work appealed to me as a mother. She evoked some feelings I have had myself: how I traded in a sporty stick shift for a minivan and drove away from my PhD program in English at Iowa. “I love that my sons want to know about this part of my pre-Mom, pre-wife life,” Lisa writes of her horse memories. Similarly, I need my children to know that there was a “before” to their mother.

But as an editor, just the resonance of Lisa’s theme alone would not be enough to recommend her essay for publication. I don’t suppose writers get lucky merely by hitting on editors’ favorite ideas. It was the art of her writing that did it for me. She executed her theme and packaged those memories, without sap, in a solid wood tack box, the artifact of the life she left behind:

“ …in addition to equestrian equipment, the tack box held a former me—someone who could judge distances, calculate strides, and evaluate footing, while holding the reins to a 1,200-pound horse, galloping fast toward a four-foot fence; a mediocre though competent rider, but an excellent horseperson, someone who aspired and achieved …the tack box, kept all those years, serving no obvious or useful purpose, is really about passion, and about once-in-a-lifetime.”

Many times as an editor I read things that are well written at the sentence level but poorly realized on the larger scale, or vice versa. Editing for a publication topically interested in sports presents a further layer of complication. It’s an unusual niche; perhaps the writer is a sportsperson first and a writer second. So my eye is trained on the superb writer who has a story to tell through the vehicle of sport. I don’t care a jot myself for horses, but the tack box Lisa uses as a motif throughout her work proved to be a treasure chest of literary nonfiction.

As a postscript, I’d also like to say that Sport Literate’s fall football issue and contest is in production, the winning essay having been selected by Creative Nonfiction’s Lee Gutkind. But we are taking submissions for our spring general issue, and I welcome you to give us a read and send us your essays and poetry.

Writing, Horses and Mentors on the Rail

I once made a sizable part of my living writing about equestrian sports (so long ago there's nothing to link to), and so when I read that Maryjean Wall retired, it struck a nerve of sorts. Wall was the first full time sportswriter to exclusively cover horse racing. I rarely wrote about racing, instead concentrating on the horse sports like show jumping, three day eventing, dressage, hunter competitions, equitation -- even endurance riding, barrel racing and polo.

I never met Wall, though I had heard of her. But someone not too unlike her was an important mentor to me – Nancy Jaffer, probably the most prominent and skilled writer covering domestic and international equestrian sports today. Decades ago she convinced editors at New Jersey's major newspaper that an occasional horse show column needed to be a permanent fixture in the sports pages -- where it belongs, still under her byline.

Jaffer has covered the equestrian events at the Olympics, World Cup, Pan Am Games and everything in-between, written or co-authored several books on training and equestrian athletes, and has made the leap to web writing look like trotting over a six-inch rail. Nearly 30 years ago, she took me under her wing when I was a college journalism student doing volunteer publicity for a New Jersey horse show, and she was incredibly gracious when about five years later, I landed on the equestrian journalism ladder and we became colleagues of a sort (she already had a secure position at the top rung, and while I left that arena long ago, she still is at the top of her game).

Wall elbowed aside the outdated thought that a racing writer had to be male, and Jaffer trounced the notion that covering horse sports belonged on the society pages. I'm sure in many ways I later benefited from both. So I'm hoping Wall has a wonderful retirement from the daily newspaper grind, and I'm also hoping the equestrian journalists who'll head to Beijing this summer – along with Jaffer – will have some sense of both of their efforts.

Thank you, I suppose, seems in order.

Sports, Literary Journals, and Strange Bedfellows

My husband doesn't read much; you know, opposites attract and all that. That is, he's not a reader. He does devour each month's Consumer Reports, the newspaper sports pages, and sometimes the stuff I write – that is if I put it in his hands before I sign off on the final proof because it happens to mention him.

Which brings us to my latest publication – an essay in a literary journal I have a feeling my husband will actually read. The journal is Sport Literate, whose tagline reads: Honest reflections on life's leisurely diversions. My essay, "A Well-Jumped Fence," appears in the current print edition (Winners and Losers 2008, vol. 5, issue 2).

So, next time I see hubby headed into his "reading room" (don't we all know where that is?), I'll hand him the journal (at 132 pages and an easy-to-handle 5x7 size, it's not so overwhelming), and see what happens. While I’m hoping he enjoys the entire fine issue, I'm wondering if, once he discovers the other essays and articles – about golf, tennis, archery, baseball and other sports – he'll even get around to reading mine, which is a look back at the huge role horses and competitive equestrian competition once played in my life, and how I feel about its absence now.

I don't often tout journals here, and try not to tell my readers what to buy, but a subscription to Sport Literate strikes me as a win not just for the writer-reader in a household, but for anyone else in the clan who may need a bit of a literary palate expander that speaks their language.