What William Shawn Said

William Shawn (1907-1992) was an editor at The New Yorker magazine for thirty-five years.

"Amid chaos of images, we value coherence. We believe in the printed word. And we believe in clarity. And we believe in immaculate syntax. And in the beauty of the English language."

Finding Your Light and Letting It Shine

A good friend of mine posted the following on her Facebook page the other day:

‘There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.’
----from A Return to Love, by Marianne Williamson

It made me think of something that Christ said in one of his talks to his followers—‘Don't hide your light under a bushel basket’. What is the point of keeping a light hidden if it first has been lit? Once the light has been lit within us, we are asked to let it shine. We are asked to share our talents and our gifts with others, not to hide them away or pretend that they don't exist. I think I finally understand this now. False modesty helps no one. Pretending that you have no talents and gifts when you have been given ample talents and gifts is to slam the door in the face of God. It is a unique form of selfishness because you will never know how your talents and gifts could have helped others. You cannot behave in this ungrateful way toward the gift-giver without losing yourself in the long run.

We live in a world that has become crazed by the quest for the proverbial fifteen minutes of fame, but this is not necessarily letting your light shine. In that quest, some people squander their talents by behaving extremely, while others believe that they have talents they don’t have and end up in embarrassing situations. It takes a lot of reflection and introspection to understand who you are, what your particular ‘light’ is, what you can offer the world, and how you can best do this. Some people figure this out when they are very young, whereas others use a good portion of an adult life to figure this out. Either way, it is good that people reach that level of understanding about themselves. Once you reach that level, you can live in harmony with yourself and are less likely to lose your balance or to get pushed off your path by the naysayers and the ones who do not want you to reach your potential or be happy. We all know people who can never say they are happy for others no matter what the achievement or blessing—happiness, wealth, well-deserved fame, the list goes on. It is hard to accept (because it hurts to know it) that there are some people who will never wish you well, who do not want you to shine or be happy, who would rather you stayed put and never grew or changed—all those things. They will never say it directly to you however. They mostly never say anything at all, or if they do, it is only begrudgingly. It is as though your finding your light and reaching your potential forces them to step out of their own shadows and to take a good look at themselves, and they may not like what they see. Or they may not want their worlds rocked in any way. They prefer to stay in the shadows away from the light. But the minute you express a negative thought, they are at your side again because they can relate to you again, to where you once were. The old expression, ‘Misery loves company’, is not so difficult to understand in this context. It could also be rephrased as ‘Fear loves company’. But luckily there are people who will wish you well, who will be happy for you, who will support you as you change and grow. These are the people in your life who are not afraid to really love you—they are not interested in holding you back or keeping you down. They want you to be happy in the truest sense, and you know when you are in the presence of such people. They have found their light and they shine and their light shines on you, warms you, and encourages you to grow. In this way you help others find their own light—by letting yours shine.

Reject and Resubmit

The Peanuts character Snoopy was always trying to get his manuscripts published, and some of the funnier strips dealt with the responses he would often get from publishers who sent his rejected manuscripts back to him in the mail with short comments like ‘please do not ever contact us again’ or similar. In keeping with the theme of my post from yesterday about publishing your book, I thought I would talk about the difficulties involved in publishing scientific articles in established journals and the vagaries of the business when it comes to whose articles get accepted for publication and whose get rejected. I know quite a bit about this since each of my scientific publications during the past thirty years has been an exercise in blood, sweat and tears for me and my co-authors. In other words--not much fun for any of us. Of my publications to date where I was the first author, only ONE article was accepted for publication without major comments, criticisms, or requirements for extensive revisions—rather it received praise and a stamp of approval. My former boss told me at that time (1994) that I should take the short review I got from that journal, frame it and hang it in my office as I would never experience anything like it again. He was right, even though I absolutely did not want to believe him at the time. Since that time, the reviews of my work and the work of others I know have been interesting, to put it mildly. Sometimes I wonder if we are all on the same page, or even the same planet. Some of the reviews have been downright rude, others negative, others constructive but overly ambitious in the sense of what the peer reviewers suggest we do to make the paper better, others simply ridiculous. For example, a common suggestion when we get a cancer cell line article rejected is that we resubmit the article to the same journal after having done the same types of experiments in three or four more additional cell lines. That sounds like very little work on paper. But what it translates to is another one to two years of work for a small research group (four to five people) with perhaps one technician and one PhD student. To do this extra work would mean that the article’s publication would be delayed by at least two years because it will take at least a year to do the work and another year to perform the ‘submit to journal merry-go-round’. In the ‘Publish or perish’ arena that we live in each day as academic research scientists, this is unthinkable. So you send out the paper again to a new journal (that has a lower impact factor) and hope for the best. If this new journal rejects it, you send it out again to another journal, and so forth. Eventually it will usually get accepted somewhere but the entire process can take up to one year, because with each submission, you must wait sometimes up to two months to get a reply. It is frustrating and challenging and ultimately unfair, no matter what people say. But it is the system and at present there is a lot of groaning and moaning about how unfair it all is, but nothing has really changed as of yet.

I think that many of the peer reviewers (those scientists who agree to review your articles anonymously for a particular journal) come from big laboratories with fifteen or more people working for them—technicians, students, postdocs, etc. and they think that everyone else in the academic research world has the same size research group. How wrong they are. My own little research group a few years back had exactly four women in it—me, a PhD student, a Master’s student, and a technician. We worked hard, efficiently, and enthusiastically and managed to publish about four articles in good research journals in the space of the six years we were privileged to work together. Much has changed since that time in terms of getting new funding and finding new students. It’s not easy and it never will be—that is simply the name of the academic game. You either like it or you don’t. But either way, it is a struggle to survive. The more publications you have, the more funding you are likely to generate for yourself and your workplace, which in turn allows you to get more students because students are human too—they want to work for a well-funded research group that guarantees them enough money to do their experiments and to attend a few international conferences where they can present their work and network with others doing the same kind of work. It’s a formula and you get into the groove and just go with it. But sometimes things happen to push you off the path. One of those things is getting an article refused for publication many times (where you ultimately have to throw in the towel and admit defeat), another is losing the funding you once had, another is hearing from your superior that you are good but not good enough because you are not generating a lot of funding for your workplace. Because you are only as good as your last paper and your last grant—and if you don’t accept these facts you can just find another job. Academic research scientists are now expected to be money generators---in the form of grants, patents, companies on the side, research groups with many students, many networks and numerous collaborators (other academic groups as well as collaborations in industry).  Those who manage all of this are the elite scientists, and they are rewarded well—their names precede them. There is nothing wrong with this except when it leads to a system that destroys the small research groups, and in my view this is the current situation in academic science, at least in the realm of cancer research.

Peer review of scientific articles is a mixed bag. It is supposed to function fairly and objectively, but it doesn’t anymore as far as many scientists are concerned. It is supposed to be an anonymous, objective, constructive review of your work since you as the author do not know who the reviewers are, but it often ends up as anything but that. And even though your paper can now be anonymized for peer reviewers as well, they may still figure out who the authors are from the article’s content. If those authors are their competitors, they can slow them down by rejecting the paper outright or by suggesting all sorts of new experiments that they know will take the authors a year or more to complete, thus delaying their progress.  And so it goes. The science journal The Scientist published an interesting article recently on peer review entitled ‘I Hate Your Paper’ (http://www.the-scientist.com/2010/8/1/36/1/) that discusses the current problems with peer review and some possible solutions for how to fix them. Personally, I don’t think that the system will change too much because it is not really clear at this point what type of system will work better. But at the very least, it might be nice to get reviews back that were actually constructive, well-reasoned, and helpful and which took into account the size of the research group before rejecting the article outright for not having used enough cell lines and before suggesting additional work that will simply frustrate the submitting research group who know they will never meet the requirements. You may argue that rejection is good since it keeps the numbers of manuscripts being published down, but this is not always the case. Take a good look around as a research scientist and you will find many articles that used the same number of cell lines as perhaps you did in your experiments (similar research areas), but for some reason those papers were accepted while yours was not. Could there be cronyism involved—did the first or last author know the editor of such and such a journal and did that help them? Perhaps. But in any case, it is difficult to prove this and most scientists have enough to do without worrying about whether this is the case. You just take your Reject and resubmit reply and you do resubmit—but to another journal.

Publish Your Book using CreateSpace

I thought I would talk about how to self-publish your book if you want to try this publication route. It has its advantages and disadvantages, but since I have done it once with good results I think the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. For starters, you learn the entire process of not only preparing your book for publication, but also marketing it once it is ‘out there’ for sale. The online publishing world is a fascinating place! All the things you learn along the way about how to sell your book are of course what you would pay a publisher to do for you and your book. But think of how valuable it may be to learn those processes yourself.

If you’ve written a book and you want to try your hand at self-publishing, I recommend CreateSpace (www.createspace.com), not only because I’ve worked with them and am pleased with the results, but mostly because this company is a subsidiary of Amazon.com. Why is this good? Because once you have completed the requirements for publication on CreateSpace, your book can be set out for sale on Amazon.com at no cost to you. If you are a new author your chances of getting your first book published via a major publishing house are probably close to null. But ok, let’s say you’re lucky and your first book gets published by a major publishing house—then you may not need to read this post further. But for the rest of us who believe in our work and who want to see it out there in print, CreateSpace is the way to go. It’s a very easy website to use. You set up an account with them and prepare your book on your very own ‘dashboard’. CreateSpace will assign an ISBN number to your book. The preparation steps are clearly outlined in a kind of ‘checklist’ format—in essence, you can only proceed to ‘b’ if you have finished ‘a’, and so forth. They require the uploading of exactly two files in .pdf format—your text file and your book cover file. The latter must be prepared according to a template provided by them that you can download with instructions. I worked with a designer on my first book who prepared my book cover for me according to this template, and she did a great job. CreateSpace also offers free tools to prepare your book and ready-made book covers that you can use if you don’t work with a designer. Once the book was complete and ready for uploading to their website, I uploaded the text file and the book cover file, and waited no more than a day for them to get back to me with the message that a proof book had been created that I had to order and review carefully in order to make sure that it was satisfactory to me. The cost of a proof book was minimal. At no point along the way did I ever get the feeling that I was being ‘scammed’. My intuition told me that this was a good company to work with and it is. Once you approve the proof book, your book can eventually be sold via both CreateSpace on your own ‘eStore’ and on Amazon. I love Amazon for many reasons (it’s a great online bookstore and so much more), but it is also a company that is very generous to budding authors. The great thing about having your book sold on Amazon is that you can create an Amazon Author page that allows you to provide as much or as little information about yourself as you wish. Additionally, if you write a blog, you can feed it directly into your Author page (as I now do), thus generating more publicity for your writing and/or book. CreateSpace will publish your book only when it is ordered, that is, it is a ‘Print-on-demand’ company, and here is where the savings to you come into the picture. There are no requirements for hundreds or thousands of copies of your book to be produced upfront as would be the case if you worked with a major publishing company. CreateSpace states this clearly—that you as the author do not have to worry about ‘inventory or minimum orders’. The only real costs involved are the payments you make when you order copies (as many or as few as you wish) of your book for yourself and family or friends. And because you are the author, you pay much less to order your book than others will pay. You also get to choose how much you want your book to sell for (the list price). CreateSpace makes its money by keeping a fair share of the royalty you will get for each sale, but you can also increase your share of the royalties. There are two publishing plans within CreateSpace that deal with this topic, the basic plan and the Pro plan (slightly more expensive)—but you get to keep a larger percentage of your royalties by signing up for the Pro plan (the cost is minimal and it’s worth it).  I recommend it also because when you order copies of your book you pay less per copy than you would with the basic plan and also because this plan increases the extent of distribution to other book sellers.

If you want to market your book once it’s available for sale, I recommend that you send out a press release describing your book and its date of publication. I used www.prweb.com and was very pleased with their services. They offer several different packages that involve the use of different multi-media formats (online press release, podcasts, etc.) for press releases, but I went with the basic package (online release only) and it was well worth it. I also set up a simple one-page website to market my book, and spent some time learning simple web design (thanks to Microsoft Office Publisher) in order to achieve this; the only expenses involved with this aspect are the website hosting costs. There are a number of web hosting sites and I hesitate to recommend one simply because there are so many out there that offer very good packages at similar prices.

Of course it took some time for me to learn how to use all of the different online sites available to help an author publish and market his or her book, but once I did, I didn’t look back. The costs involved are minimal and the crash-course in the use of different online sites is challenging and fun. I don’t think I spent more than about three hundred dollars to publish and market my first book, and that included the designer’s fee, signing up for the CreateSpace Pro plan, ordering a proof book, ordering several copies of the published book, website hosting, and one press release. I’ve more than recouped my initial investment. If you’re a new author, you may want to choose this publication route at some future point and I can only say—go for it, you won’t regret it.  


Addendum 29 January 2015--I can now recommend Weebly for both web-hosting and website-building. It offers both for free, but if you want to obtain statistical information about your website traffic and get an idea of who is accessing your site, you will need to pay for that information. You can learn more about it all at www.weebly.com. And as far as book promotion, using social media (e.g.Twitter) is an excellent way to promote your book and an eventual author page on Amazon. 

Journeys of Wonder at the Adventure Center

In October 2010, the Adventure Center: Journeys of Wonder, Inc. (ACJOW, Inc.), located in Riverdale, New York, will celebrate two years of operation as a non-profit educational enrichment organization for children and their families. What makes this so exciting for me personally is that this organization is headed by a woman named Liz who just happens to be married to my brother Ray. Both of them have made the Adventure Center their passion--Liz is the president and executive director of the school and Ray is the program director. The organization offers programs to suit many different tastes--from the Adventures in Nature program that takes children (and interested parents) on exploratory nature tours of the Hudson Valley, to the Joy of Writing program that offers children the chance to learn how to write a play and to perform it if they so desire. The Adventure Center receives programmatic support from the Materials for the Arts, The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and The New York City Department of Sanitation, among others.

The road to the realization of the Adventure Center has surely been a journey of wonder, learning and passion for Liz and Ray, but it has not been and is not an easy road. It is a vision that became a reality, but like any other non-profit organization, it relies on donations and grants to keep it afloat. I want it to succeed for them so much, and I wish I was independently wealthy or wealthy enough to invest in the Center without reservation. But I am not. These days, I often think that if I could choose my work life over again, I might think money and personal wealth first when it came to working and saving, and then switch gears in mid-life and use some of that wealth to benefit society. But knowing me, I would probably choose the same way as I did when I was younger if I had another chance. I did choose a career that I knew would allow me to support myself, but not a career that paid big money, like investment banking or law. We were not raised to go after big money in our family, and that brings up other issues. Why wasn’t this emphasized more in our youth? Should it have been emphasized more? Because having money in and of itself is not a bad thing. You can do a lot of good things for the world around you when you have enough money, but not all wealthy people do this. I know a lot of people who don’t have money or don’t have enough money to realize even their small dreams. I know people who have been out of work for several years after having lost their jobs in middle age. It’s a tough world these days and that is what has made me question whether it may be a good thing to emphasize the value of earning a very good living to teenagers on the verge of making important life choices. One should at least be able to support oneself without much worry. But these days it is tough for some people I know to get a job at all, so perhaps the discussion of choosing a lucrative job is a moot point.

My brother is involved in leading the Adventures in Nature program. I think this suits him well since he was an avid fisherman, hiker, and outdoorsman when he was younger. He knew a lot about the different fishing flies necessary to catch different kinds of fish, and he had friends who also enjoyed fishing. I think it was my mother who got him started--she would take him to the Tarrytown lakes as a child to go fishing. He worked in the corporate world for many years before this present endeavor became his daily life, and I venture to say that he does not miss it. His wife has always had a passion for working with and helping children and teenagers in difficult life situations, so it does not surprise me at all that she wanted to start such a center. I am inspired by their choices and the difficulties they face and get through, and I hope that one day in the near future, their journey will lead them to a very good place. If you are interested in supporting their work, please visit their website http://www.adventurecenterjourneysofwonder.org/index.html for more information.

The Art of Boating. Attempts at a definition---by Trond Stokke

From time to time I will post articles and/or poetry written by guest authors on ‘A New Yorker in Oslo’. Today is one of those days. I am pleased to post the following article entitled The Art of Boating--Attempts at a definition, written by my husband Trond Stokke. He is and has been an avid boatman for many years, and we have spent a good many summers cruising the Oslo fjord and exploring the coastlines of Norway. I’ll let Trond tell you more about boating.

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The “art of boating” does not necessarily mean good seamanship or great navigation skills at sea, although these are large parts of the total package. It means more something like “having a good time and feeling good in your boat”. It’s advantageous to have your own boat, or to own one together with a friend, to fully develop this “art”. Lots of people think that it would be nice to be out in a boat on a nice and sunny summer afternoon. However, there is so much more to boating.

First, even in Norway, the season for boating lasts from March to November. If you have a boat with protective plates in the front to protect your hull from being cut in two by the ice (“ishud” or “ice-skin”), there are no restrictions if you want to go fishing in the middle of the winter. Just bring your sweater. Spring provides us with a number of nice and sunny days, excellent for boat trips. In the autumn, when it’s getting darker in the evening, you get to test your night sailing abilities, navigating by using the light houses, and in modern times, also by using a GPS.

Second, to master the “art”, you need to take thorough care of your “beauty”. Yes, your boat is not only a “she”, she’s also a beauty… (Sorry ladies, the boat could in principle be a “he”, but that’s not how it evolved.) If you don’t love your boat, sell it or get a new one! In the spring, you’ll need to sand it, paint it, lacquer it, water it, and put on the bottom paint before it’s afloat. Some years you may need to change planking, or a deck, or something that you didn’t know about till you’d bought the lady. (Most readers have now figured out that I’m the owner of an older wooden boat. However, much of the same goes for more modern glass fiber boats). This work, although sometimes physically tiresome, should not appear to be a bother. If it is, again, sell the boat! 

Third, enjoy being in the boat, whether it’s for repairs, or if you just want to hang around in the harbor. Sometimes you’re alone, and that feels pretty good! (I’ll come back to the fact that you need to be able to maneuver and take trips with your boat alone also.) Other times, some of your good mates will stick around, and often this could lead to get-togethers in one cabin or another, typically accompanied by a beer or an “anchor-drink”. Under such circumstances, you’re going to learn as many different ways of taking care of your boat as there are participants. It is well known that every captain has his own way of doing these things. God forbid that you use Epifanes lacquer instead of Benar, for example! These advices, though, are mostly given by the retired sailors sitting in the shade of the winter storage area in the spring before you put the boat on the water. If they don’t wear black captain’s caps and have long grey beards, forget about it… Seriously, you ought to figure out your own way eventually, or you will be entirely confused. For those of us who do not own a house with access to a garden or a sunny balcony, being in the boat is a great substitute even if you never leave the harbor. Likewise, if you don’t have a cottage at the seaside, your boat may serve this purpose, especially if it’s about 25 feet or larger and has berths. There’s nothing like waking up to the sound of the waves hitting the hull.

Last, but not least, the art of boating is about how you master your boat at sea. This may look easy and relaxed when the skipper is experienced, but don’t get fooled! Behind every good and efficient move at sea, there are several disasters. The saying goes that there are two kinds of captains: the ones who’ve been on the rock, and the ones who will run their ship on the rock. I’ll use docking as the first example of “the art of boating” when you’re actually at sea. The skills required will of course be slightly different whether you have a sailboat or a motor boat. However, coming onto the pier will not be very different, although some tough guys in sailboats will lower the sail exactly at the right time when they take the final swing to align the boat correctly. Then the boat slides in to a perfect halt and the skipper can just fasten the ropes by leaning over the side of the boat. Since I have a motor boat, I’ll not be in the position to impress all the spectators in this way. (Yes, there are always a lot of people watching you when you’re docking. The more difficult, the more people will be around! Women get impressed if it works fine, men will verbally notify you if it goes wrong. In the latter case, your wife will also suddenly disappear and can later be found hiding in the cabin). However, what all of us need to do is to prepare beforehand. Fenders out, ropes ready and fastened on the boat, and clear roles for the crew. And remember that there is one captain on board, and his word is law. All such maneuvers are even more important to prepare for and master if you’re alone. That’s exactly why you need to train on your own. Docking is a small, but important part of boating. Most of us have seen, or experienced, lousy work at this stage. It’s simply embarrassing to need several attempts to reach land, and even more so if you have to give up.

An update on my blog from the Nyack News & Views in New York State

My blog post 'A Tale of Two Rivers', published on July 17th of this year, has been written about in the online Nyack News & Views. Their short article is entitled 'As Others See Us: From Hudson to Herring' and can be found at the following link http://www.nyacknewsandviews.com/2010/07/aosu_hudson_herring/.

I was very pleased and excited to see this, as I really enjoyed writing this particular post. 

Synchronicities and interconnections

I am always pleasantly surprised by the synchronicities of life--the small but meaningful coincidences that never seem to be quite random. I often wonder if they actually occur more often than they do, just that I have not always been aware of them. Recently, my friend Gisele had been telling me about a book that she liked very much and how that book had inspired her. The author had also recently given a lecture on creativity and writing and Gisele had sent me the YouTube link to the lecture for me to listen to. I enjoyed listening to the lecture very much and was fascinated by what the author had to say. When I was in NY last week, my friend Bernadette told me that she has also heard the lecture and liked it very much, and that she is friends with the author of this best-selling book. It is a book that can change lives--one of those personal inspirational tales that get under your skin because you can relate to what is going on in the author’s life. Other friends reminded me that Bernadette had mentioned this to us last year when we met for lunch, but for some reason it did not register with me at that time. Or perhaps I simply did not hear her tell us this since we were several at the table and we were all talking. I have been working with Bernadette for nearly a year now and we have connected in a way that has changed my life. The synchronicities of these events are not lost on me. I would venture to say that there is a plan at work here, but I do not really know its outcome, just that working with Bernadette has taken me down a new road that I am enjoying being on. New travels and new adventures--such is the stuff of which life is made. It is the randomness of the twists and turns--shall I turn here or there, and why we turn down some paths but not others--that fascinate me and have always fascinated me.

Bernadette is a friend from my high school days. We knew each other in high school but were not close friends at that time. We re-connected in the spring of 2009 at our thirty-fifth high school reunion, and stayed in touch after that. But it is only when we began to work together this past October that we began to talk and learn about each other and what we have been doing these past thirty-five years. She is an inspiration in her own right, having lived a life up until now that is quite interesting and unconventional. She has the gift of being a great teacher of meditation and personal life change, and the consulting work I have been doing for her has much to do with emphasizing how one can change one’s life in order to promote one’s wellbeing and good health. I believe so strongly in this message of personal change, because I see how changing my diet and my approach to how to live life have impacted positively on me just within this past year. So the consulting work I have been doing for Bernadette (mostly online health-related research and some writing) is more like a labor of love than anything else--I enjoy it immensely and have learned so much from doing it. The positive energy generated at our high school reunion led to so many positive outcomes and new roads. I also reconnected with my high school English teacher Brendan at the same reunion; it is he who supported my writing endeavors in high school and who still urges me to write. He has also been writing (a play and a novel) in the intervening years since we last saw each other--he is an inspiration to me in so many ways. It is the interconnectedness of all the different events of the past year that have shown me once more that I must stay open to life, to change, to growth, to traveling down new roads, despite the psychological pain and down times involved in changing my life and my direction. Once upon a time I thought that there was only one career road open to me, and now I know that this is not the case. Once upon a time I also thought that I was only a career woman, that my work defined who I was. I know now that this too is not the case. I feel free now in a way that I never felt before and that is the direct result of the interconnectedness of the events of this past year. Perhaps this is God working in my life, and if so I am very grateful. 

I Love New York--there really is no place like it

Summertime in New York state—the Empire state. “I love New York” as the slogan goes—“there is no place like it”. It’s true, although I guess as a native New Yorker I’m just a bit biased. I’ve been back in my home state since last Friday. It is always nice to come back and be together with family and friends. And I am struck more and more by how beautiful upstate New York is—so green and lush, so many trees and rolling hills and mountains. It is not crowded like the metropolitan area. Of course it does not have the majority of jobs available either and that may be one of the reasons parts of upstate NY are so sparsely populated. But life goes on up there at a different pace—slower, freer in some ways, I don’t know. It feels good to look out over the vast tracts of unpopulated land. The past few days have been quite humid, with some thunderstorms, but they passed quickly and today, Tuesday, is a beautiful warm day. Gisele and I drove through and around Tarrytown yesterday and it is so interesting to see how the town has changed—Phelps Memorial hospital has expanded considerably with so many new buildings, there are numerous new co-op complexes along the Hudson River (sky-high prices), but they are lovely—historical architecture and colors, manicured gardens and just a general overall feeling of elegance. Of course this has happened in Norway too during the past twenty years. When I first moved to Oslo certain areas were shabby and old. Now Oslo is prosperous and you see that reflected in the large building projects, the lovely new buildings, stadiums, ski jumps and so much more. The same has happened to the towns along the Hudson River—many of them have spruced up their waterfronts and they look so much nicer than they did when I was growing up. But nevertheless, there is that ‘lived-in’ feeling in so many of the buildings I see—apartment buildings, shops, restaurants, hotels—you know they’ve been there a while.  But when I lived here I paid attention in a different way, or you might say I did not really pay attention to what was happening around me. The gradual changes are not what you recognize when you live in a place. You have to go away and come back in order to see the changes. I see them now.  

The Long Way Around

Sometimes it feels as though there is nothing to write about, almost as though one’s brain has been emptied of all possible ideas. But I sit down anyway and begin to write and sometimes the words and ideas just start to flow. I write best late at night—when the distractions of the day have disappeared. I wonder what it must be like to write for a living, to know that one is wholly dependent upon oneself—upon the whims of creativity and inspiration that appear at the strangest of times and which can disappear at the most inopportune of times. It cannot be easy to be a writer. I don’t know if I consider myself one (yet)—I write poetry and have been doing so for years, but have always been hesitant to call myself a writer or a poet because I did not do it for a living. Writing full-time for a living seems to impart a certain credibility—you are not considered to be just a dabbler. But after many years I realize that I am a writer or at least that I want to spend the rest of my life writing. I am happy when I write now in a way that I cannot be in any other work endeavor. I have been a research scientist for over twenty years but in all likelihood I was also a closet writer. I have enjoyed performing scientific research, gathering data, analyzing data and writing articles. I still enjoy reading, editing and evaluating the work of other scientists as well as mentoring students. But I do not enjoy the politics of academia and I cannot find my niche in the academic ivory tower. A friend of mine recently commented on this—she felt that at heart that I really didn’t want an office in the ivory tower. I think she is right. I don’t want to be shut in away from the reality of the world around me. I don’t really fit in the academic realm no matter how hard I’ve tried and I remain on the outside looking in, which is fine with me now. I understand how to be a researcher but I don’t understand how to be a politician or an administrator, and the latter two will serve you well in the upper realms of academia. Or perhaps this is not quite accurate; it’s taken me too long to learn to understand the requirements of academic politics.

The turmoil of the past year in my work environment has forced me to re-evaluate what I want from the rest of my work life. I know I want more than I have now. I need a new challenge to sink my teeth into. There are other considerations as well— colleagues who are ill or close to retirement, lack of grant support, lack of students, slashed budgets, malaise, poor leadership, lack of organizational strategy and focus (the result of a major merger?), and other issues. But perhaps most importantly, I don’t ‘see’ the new research path that I should follow, I don’t know what is best for me anymore, I am in a quandary and I have never been in a quandary before in the thirty years I’ve worked in science. I should probably apply for new grants and for new students, but I have no idea what to write a grant about or what project I should focus on or how much money I should apply for. I have no five-year plan, I can barely see past this coming December. I know I need to prepare an opposition for a doctoral student who will defend his work in November—I will be the second opponent and I can see myself doing that. But beyond that, I don’t know. It scares me but it also exhilarates me because I see the potential for a real life change.  

The creative side of my life outside of work however is in full swing. I will be publishing a collection of my poems written during the past twenty-five years that will be available for purchase on Amazon.com during the early autumn. The collection is entitled ‘Parables and Voices’. I have been posting some of the poems from this collection on my blog at the suggestion of my good friend Brendan who is a writer and a playwright (and a blogger in his own right). It has been a good suggestion because I have gotten some interesting and encouraging feedback from friends who never knew I wrote poetry and who like the poems. They are surprised when I tell them I am the poet. I am surprised sometimes that I am the poet, and am perhaps even more surprised that I am finally ready to share my poems with the world. It has taken more than half of my life to get here—the long way around.

Resurrection

I will tell you

What it was like

To rise, like the phoenix

From the ashes of the still-smoldering embers,

Of the house that I was born in.

What I cannot tell you

Is how that house came to be,

That birthed the plagues it did

From one generation to the next.

Only that sorrow was twin to despair

That etched themselves onto the faces of the living.

I moved from that house

To one built in hell.

Walls lined with pain and hate

Of my soul which longed to rise

Above it all and soar

High, like the phoenix.

Almost twenty years have come and gone,

My house is built now

On firmer ground, the walls and rooms

Have known and know love still.

And yet the images of those earlier houses remain,

The memories raw and naked, still etched with pain. 

from 'Parables and Voices'

copyright Paula M. De Angelis

A New York Summer State of Mind

Back to work today after four wonderful weeks of vacation, and it wasn’t as tough as I had expected. But of course that’s because I know that on Friday I will be on vacation again for another week, this time in New York. ‘A New Yorker in Oslo’ will be ‘A New Yorker in New York’ again for a week, visiting friends and family. I look forward to my annual trips to NY each year, and usually plan them for the middle to end of August so that I can experience a bit of the NY summer—hot, humid, and sometimes tough to take. But it’s a real long summer and it’s what I remember from growing up there. Once I land at Newark airport and step outside, it’s like being hit by a blast of hot air. But I like feeling the heat outdoors and then walking into an air-conditioned supermarket or clothing store and nearly freezing, or lying in bed and feeling the air from the ceiling fan at my friend Jean’s house blowing down on me. I like opening the door to a car that has been baking in the heat and having to air out the car to cool it down. I like the smell of sun-baked asphalt and tar—it reminds me of the boardwalk smell at Rye Beach at Playland from our childhood days. I need my dose of warmth but I also like that feeling of needing some relief from the heat. It doesn’t feel like summer if you cannot complain at least once that it’s too hot. My mother would sometimes complain, and then she would bring out watermelon, sherbet, lemonade or her homemade iced tea (nothing beat it) and we would relax and forget about the heat, at least for a while. The heat would often make us seek relief at the beaches. I can still remember long summer days together with Jean at Jones Beach or Sherwood Island when we were younger, working on our tans, listening to the radio and reading our fashion magazines. When it got to be too warm on the beach, we ran into the ocean—the water was warm but still refreshing. When we were children we often made our way to Kingsland Point Park on the Hudson River, or joined neighbors for trips to Lake Welch or Sherwood Island or Rye Beach. Now I often visit Gisele whose apartment terrace overlooks the beach, and we sit out there watching the people on the beach, sipping cold drinks and enjoying good conversation.

Now that I no longer work in NYC and no longer have to use subways or buses to get to work, I enjoy being a tourist and walking around the city in the summertime. I prefer to walk rather than take the subways or buses. The subways in NYC always seemed to smell worse in the summertime than during the rest of the year as I remember. It’s been a few years since I’ve ridden a subway during the summer, so I don’t know if that has changed or not. I do remember a few times being on a subway train where the windows were shut tight and the air conditioning was supposed to be on but it wasn’t, and it didn’t take long for the cars to heat up and tempers to flare. Someone always ended up opening the doors between the cars and standing in them to hold them open. The stream of cool subway tunnel air that flowed through the cars then was like a gift from heaven even though the screeching of the train wheels and the iron smell accompanied it. It was a trying experience to deal with claustrophobic subway cars and buses where the windows were tightly shut. I never managed that too well and would get off (fight my way off) a subway train or bus at the next stop if it was too unbearable. Asking the bus driver to put the air conditioning on always elicited the same response—it was on and please do not open the windows. We opened them anyway if we could, just to get real air. I don’t miss this aspect of NYC summers at all.

Summer storms in Tarrytown where I grew up were always intense but short-lived as I remember, with a lot of lightning and thunder and torrential rains. Sometimes there was flooding. Afterwards the storms had seldom cooled everything down, but they were fascinating and scary to experience, especially at night with all the lightning flashing about. We always took care to get indoors so as not to be struck by lightning. That was always impressed upon us by parents and teachers—how to deal with lightning storms and what to do in different situations. Oslo has not had many intense lightning storms in the twenty years I’ve lived here, but the past few years have seen an increase in their frequency. Experiencing such storms when we have been out on our boat on the Oslo fjord—with torrential rain, strong winds and high waves—is a scary experience and one I prefer to avoid. We have been lucky the two times it has happened—getting back to port or finding shelter just in time before the storm hit. That is the best way to describe it—it just hits and lashes everything in its path.

I am looking forward to my dose of New York summer—the warmth of being together with family and friends, the summer weather--all the experiences that contribute to the making of memories that keep one warm during the winter months.

Norway through the eyes of others

Today is a beautiful sunny day in Oslo, just like yesterday. Real summer days that give you that lazy feeling of summer, those days that are necessary for the heart and mind and soul if one is to survive the long gray winters. This past week Haika was in town—my very good friend from my Memorial Sloan-Kettering days in Manhattan—and we had a wonderful week together. She arrived last Sunday evening and left on Friday morning. Haika came to Oslo from Berlin, and brought the good weather with her. I was afraid she would take it with her when she left, because it rained heavily all day Friday. But thankfully no, the weekend has been beautiful! We managed to see quite a bit of Oslo together this past week, and spent all day Tuesday doing the ‘Norway in a Nutshell’ trip. As Haika would say, it was a fabulous trip, and it was fabulous to see her too after so many years. The last time I saw her was in England during the mid 1990s when her husband was doing a sabbatical at a college right outside of London and I visited them there. Here we are, so many years later. The passage of time—how quickly it happens.

When I look back over my twenty years here, I feel blessed to have opened our house to many different visitors from the USA, family and friends alike: my sister Renata and her husband (several times); my good friends Gisele, Jean, Maria, Jola, and Haika; my cousin Cathy; my friends Lucy, Steve and their son Andrew; and my friend Janet’s niece Sonja. They come from different areas in the USA—upstate NY, metropolitan NY, Long Island, West Virginia, Michigan, Colorado, and California. I have learned a lot along the way. For one thing, I’ve relearned that Norway is expensive when I see it through others’ eyes! I stopped dividing the total kroner amount by 6 (roughly the amount of kroner to one USD) a long time ago. It made grocery shopping a lot easier and helped me hang on to my sanity. Early on, when I was still calculating the cost of things in dollars, it would floor me that I was paying nine dollars (about fifty-four kroner) for a grilled chicken, fifteen dollars (ninety kroner) for a small pizza, not to mention fifteen dollars for a cocktail or ten dollars for a beer. When I wanted a turkey to celebrate Thanksgiving, a frozen one could easily cost sixty to seventy dollars in the supermarket back in the early 1990s. Needless to say, it made a huge dent in our meager scientist budgets at that time. Even though we earn more now, it can still be daunting to take a trip to an upscale supermarket. But ok, I’ve lived here for twenty years now, so I’m used to it. I forget that when friends come here, they go into a mild shock initially before they adjust. My current advice in terms of figuring out a travel budget for Norway is to think about what you might normally spend on such a trip and double the amount, just to be on the safe side.

The ‘Norway in a Nutshell’ trip (http://www.norwaynutshell.com/en/explore-the-fjords/norway-in-a-nutshell/) is expensive but well-worth the money in terms of the scenic views and fjord experience. We boarded the 6:30 am train at the Oslo Central Station that took us to Myrdal, about a five-hour train ride. This is the second time I have done this trip. The first time was when Gisele visited in 1995. We have some pretty funny memories of that train ride. Just about every time she was about to take a picture through the train window of some scenic view, we entered a tunnel. After it happened a few times we were laughing hysterically. It was very funny to watch the same thing happen to Haika and to a group of senior citizens traveling together. The latter were also laughing hysterically for the same reason. God knows if they got any pictures at all. Haika got a few but it wasn’t easy. In the summer of 1995, when Gisele and I reached Myrdal, we stepped off the train into close-to-freezing temperatures, completely underdressed for the weather. It was not cold in Oslo, but it was cold in Myrdal! There were a few people on the train before we got off who commented on our lack of warm clothing—looking back I think they must have thought—typical tourists (or typical New Yorkers?). It reminded me of stories I had heard about my former boss in NY when he was visiting Italy and walked over part of the Alps wearing a thin leather jacket and leather shoes. People remember things like that. So with Haika, I remembered my earlier experience with Gisele and we were prepared, but this time it wasn’t cold at all. Once we got to Myrdal, we took a connecting train to Flåm, which is about an hour’s train ride from Myrdal. This is a beautiful train ride with lovely scenic views on both sides of the train. The only problem is all the tourists rushing from one side of the train to the other to get pictures. Not an easy task. My NY ‘get a seat on the subway’ instinct came to good use—I managed to get us both window seats. Once we reached Flåm, we boarded a boat for our trip along the fjord ending at Gudvangen, which took about two hours. It was not really possible to take a photo that truly captured the beauty of the fjord and of the landscape along it, and the same goes for the scenic views from the bus that took us to Voss where we got the train back to Oslo. Luckily I was not aware beforehand that the bus would be driving down a road (from Stålheim) that barely had space for the bus let alone an oncoming car. If we had backed up at any point I think we would have been in trouble. Add to that thirteen major hairpin curves and you end up thanking God that the bus driver knew what he was doing and had nerves of steel. Every time there was a scenic view people moved from one side of the bus to the other and I thought—no, no, please stay in the middle of the bus so we don’t tip over. But we made it to Voss in one piece and with some lovely photos as our reward.

On the train trip back to Oslo, we met a family from the USA traveling together—an elderly woman of 85 and her four sons with their respective families. The trip was their family visit to Norway to see where the woman’s family came from, as her maiden name was the Norwegian name Hellerud. They were a very interesting family; we spent time talking to her (a former professor of Spanish) and her son who was a craftsman. They were as interested in our lives as we were in hearing about theirs. It struck me that every time I travel by train, I meet some interesting people, and time passes quickly in conversation. That is also one of the things about traveling that I enjoy—the world is still an undiscovered place and the strangers in it can become known if one just listens and takes a chance. Haika commented on another thing that we noticed about a few people who sat on the train with all the wonderful scenery outside and instead played video games or watched a movie on their laptops—what they were missing in terms of new experiences and in terms of opening their eyes and really seeing the land they live in or are visiting as well as the people around them. I am glad that Haika and I had our eyes open for the days we were together. Memories are made of such.