The Devil In The Brambles

I love autumn. To me, it is the most sensual season of the year. The smell of ripe blackberries, roasting peppers, and the warm baking spices—nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger and cloves. Biting into a crisp, sweet apple—the sound of the crunch. The slant of light that stretches shadows of buildings and tree trunks. The skittering swirl of dry leaves down the sidewalk.

It’s harvest time, which, as a writer, is often when a piece of work that I’ve been growing, nurturing, fully focused on for the past year is finally ready to send out in the world. Which also means its time to start something new. And for me, the best place to start is with the senses. Because the senses, more than anything else, evoke emotion.

Many years ago, a wonderful writing teacher gave me a simple writing exercise that was transformative, opening a portal into deep and emotional memory. Part meditation and part writing, the exercise simply required sitting quietly and going back to some moment in childhood, then connecting to it through the senses. I remember closing my eyes and finding myself standing in a dirt lane in front of a patch of blackberry brambles. The air had a crisp edge but the low sun was warm on the back of my head and the brambly smell of sun on the fruit and leaves and stems and the taste of warm, ripe blackberries was vivid. But it also carried a melancholy note, a feeling of loneliness that the sensual memory brought back from my childhood.

Illustration by Molly Brett

Why blackberry brambles? There seems to be an archetypal element to them—they show up in many fairy tales and fables. Sleeping Beauty’s castle sleeps beneath an overgrowth of brambles, Rapunzel’s prince falls out the tower window, gouging his eyes out in the bramble bushes, Children’s picture books are full of them. Perhaps it’s the prickles, the thorns that one has to endue to get at the sweet fruit. The universal lesson that the pursuit of pleasure comes with some pain along the way. The concept of risk and reward. Of sacrifice for harvest.

Some people say you should not pick wild blackberries after September 29^th, Michaelmas, or you’ll risk running into the devil. The story goes that when the archangel Michael kicked Satan out of heaven on that day, the devil landed in a patch of blackberry brambles and so now every year he gets his revenge by spitting (some say peeing) on them, making them inedible. Whether or not you choose to believe the story, it is a good idea to pick your berries by the end of September before they shrivel into dry, brown seedy bumps.

With that in mind, my daughter and I walked through the Presidio yesterday gathering about half a gallon of berries between us. We both got pricked but it was worth it. The afternoon was also a lesson in patience and quiet observation worth noting for other ventures. Like writing.  Over and over I would be certain I’d picked every ripe berry from the patch I was foraging (and why is it that the sweetest, plumpest berries always seem just out of reach?) but then after looking up at the fog pouring in over us, and getting ready to move on, I would see a whole cluster I had missed. They’d been there all along—right in front of my eyes, but somehow I hadn’t seen them. Kind of like a piece of writing that isn’t quite working—you get ready to abandon it but give it one last glance and see the connections that were missing. Right there before your eyes.

This morning, I had a big bowl of berries for breakfast—they tasted like sunshine and the last of summer’s sweetness. And a little bit melancholy. Which I actually like. Autumn is the melancholy season, which is another reason it’s my favorite season.

What do love most about autumn?

Take Good Care,

Sharry

BREAK THESE RULES is out!

So way back in August of 2012 – doesn't that feel like a long time ago? – Luke Reynolds asked me if I was interested in contributing to an anthology of essays by children's writers about breaking rules. Ummm…yeah. Even only knowing that much I was in.

The book was to be a compilation of rules – societal, parental, peer – that are so familiar we forget to question them; rules that require closer examination. Rules like: Never Be Alone. Don't Quit. Don't Tell Lies. Go to College After High School. Don't Let the New World Change You. Luke came to me because he wanted an essay that focused on nature; one that maybe asked teens to contemplate what nature could teach them about themselves. Would I like to contribute an essay about the power of landscape? This time there was no Ummm. Just yeah. Oh yeah!

And now, just over a year later, I am proud to say that the anthology, Break These Rules: 35 YA Writers on Speaking Up, Standing Out, and Being Yourself has been born!

Here's how to publisher describes the book:

If you're a girl, you should strive to look like the model on the cover of a magazine. If you're a boy, you should play sports and be good at them. If you're smart, you should immediately go to college after high school, and get a job that makes you rich. Above all, be normal.

Right?

Wrong, say 35 leading middle grade and young adult authors. Growing up is challenging enough; it doesn't have to be complicated by convoluted, outdated, or even cruel rules, both spoken and unspoken. Parents, peers, teachers, the media, and the rest of society sometimes have impossible expectations of teenagers. These restrictions can limit creativity, break spirits, and demand that teens sacrifice personality for popularity.

In these personal, funny, moving, and poignant essays, [these authors] share anecdotes and lessons learned from their own lives in order to show you that some rules just beg to be broken.

There are some amazing writers between the covers of this book. A.S. King, Gary D. Schmidt, Sara Zarr, Kathryn Erskine, Chris Lynch, Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovitch, Natalie Dias Lorenzi, Mitali Perkins, Sayantani DasGupta, Mike Jung…the list goes on and on.

I am so ridiculously humbled to be part of such a group.

A candleholder made by Nate, taken from his website.

I write quite a bit in my essay about a friend named Nate. He's an artist now. He carves furniture and cool things (skateboards, iPhone cases, cutting boards) out of gorgeous wood, and he often painstaking inlays carved wooden leaves or (his newest and most amazing idea) recycled coffee grounds, spices, wood shavings, and other bits of things into his work. Nate had an exceptionally painful childhood. And that is putting it mildly. And nature, as he puts it, saved him. His story is so breathtaking to me, both in terms of how devastating it is and how hopeful it is too. And although his childhood fell to one extreme on the continuum, the essential issues he faced – feeling more and more unlike himself the more he complied with "the rules" – are universal. My own experience with those issues circled around peer pressure, being a shy girl within a group of girls, feeling like I had to step outside of myself in order to belong, and obeying "the rules" of the pack. My childhood was perfectly wonderful in many ways – don't get me wrong – but I believe SO strongly that we can do better when it comes to helping our teens be and honor themselves.

And I also believe that nature is a great place to find that help. It is a place full of creativity, intuition, all the wisdom of evolution. A place empty of tomes – or loud, angry monologues – of directions.

I'll leave you with an excerpt from my essay:

We all internalize the directions that are laid out in front of us. The ones our parents give us, the ones our teachers give us, the ones our peers give us. We internalize them, and they become a part of us. We don't even notice them. They are an endless, flat landscape inside our bodies. They just are. This – this incredible process of finding even one of your own loose parts – brings pieces of yourself into relief so that they pop up like little hills. This is the nature – no pun intended – of the truth, especially the truth about you. It sweeps in and stirs up the earth. It brings contrast and clarity. Those are my stepfather's directions. They are more about him than me. I don't believe in them. But I do believe in these leaves and patterns and art. This is what began to happen for Nate. Those girls live by those directions. I don't feel good when I try to live by them too. I do feel good when I follow a trail and imagine the stories that are lingering here and go home and write about them. This is what began to happen for me.

Learning the art of do-not-follow-the-directions was my pathway and Nate's pathway to salvation – or perhaps, more aptly, selfation.

With gratitude,

Tam