http://www.miriamherin.com/blog.asp The Latest Miriam Herin blogs en-US In the mid to late 60's, I came to oppose the war in Vietnam. Like most Americans, I had grown up with a fierce patriotic pride in my nation. My father’s National Guard unit was mustered into the Army during World War II. And although he did not see combat, he was awaiting orders to the Pacific when Japan surrendered. I came of age reading The Diary of Anne Frank and William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Later I read Adolph Hitler’s blueprint for power Mein Kampf. I had no doubts that the evil of Nazism required and justified America’s participation in the Second World War. During my college years, a wonderful, brilliant woman for whom I worked one summer at the Office of Education in Washington, D.C. had me read George Kennan, considered the theoretical father of America’s “containment” policy. Kennan believed America needed to contain communism, halting its spread from country to country in a chain reaction like falling dominos (President Eisenhower is credited with the “domino” image.) So in the early 1960’s, I saw the Vietnam War through the lenses of what I then knew and believed. What changed? When I returned to graduate school, I encountered the Vietnam War in more personal ways. In my Freshman English classes, I taught young men who were returning from the war and young men who were trying to hold on to their student deferments to keep from going to the war. I decided I needed to understand for myself why our government had involved itself in an ever-increasing military commitment to Vietnam. So I did my own research and taught a unit on Vietnam in my freshman classes. Here’s what I learned: Our government’s rationale for the war seemed clear – to keep Vietnam (or one more domino) from falling under the communist rule of Ho Chi Minh and his Viet Minh forces. But as with so much in this world, the roots of this war were anything but clear. In the 1950’s Vietnam had endured French colonial rule for nearly 100 years. Following World War II, Ho Chi Minh, a communist, yet also a fervent nationalist, wanted the victorious western allies to recognize the independence of Vietnam. During World War II, Ho and his forces had allied themselves with America, carrying out guerilla attacks against both the Japanese and the Nazi French government within their country. But the western nations accepted the reinstatement of French rule. When Ho’s forces, the Viet Minh, were on the verge of driving out the French by force of arms in 1954, the western nations became alarmed. Some in Eisenhower’s administration urged the President to use nuclear weapons against the Vietnamese forces, advice Eisenhower prudently chose not to take. Following the French defeat in 1954, Ho Chi Minh announced the independence of Vietnam and became a national hero. Treaties known as the Geneva Accords ended French colonial rule in Vietnam. The Accords called for a temporary partition of Vietnam into North and South, with national elections to be held in two years to create a unified government. The North was then controlled by Ho Chi Minh. In the South, Ngo Dinh Diem, backed by President Eisenhower, was appointed Prime Minister. The anti-communist and Catholic Diem was perceived by the West as a political rival to Ho Chi Minh to govern all of Vietnam. But national elections were never held. Diem proved to be inept and corrupt. Knowing he would be defeated, he refused to allow the South to participate in national elections. There was little impetus among western nations to push for these elections knowing that Ho Chi Minh would certainly win. As the Diem regime grew more oppressive and unpopular, the people turned against it, more and more supporting a broadening insurgency in the South, led by rebels known as the Viet Cong. The Americans who had helped bring Diem to power also eventually turned against him. In 1963, President Kennedy gave a green light to South Vietnamese Army officers who, with the knowledge of the CIA, were plotting a coup against the government. Diem was deposed and brutally assassinated. What followed was a succession of weak leaders in the South and America’s escalating attempts to keep Ho Chi Minh from assuming governmental power, even by means of a national election. American involvement in Vietnam began with a few thousand military advisors sent by Eisenhower. But by 1968, under the escalation of President Lyndon Johnson, America had 537,000 troops in that country. As I looked at some of this history, I could not help but ask: why? And how did we get so deeply committed? To what ends were we willing to go to keep Ho Chi Minh from ruling a government he would easily have attained by popular election? As one American GI was so memorably quoted during those years, referring to a Vietnamese village: they had “to waste it in order to save it.” Was that what we were doing to the entire country of Vietnam? I had other questions as well. Did President Kennedy escalate our involvement in Vietnam for pure political reasons? Some historians say Kennedy needed to prove he was not “soft” on communism, as Nixon charged in the presidential election. In another year, had Kennedy not been murdered, he would have faced re-election. What about Lyndon Johnson? Did he decide that he needed to “win” the war in Vietnam to prove his mettle as President in the shadow of the martyred and popular John Kennedy? The American death toll in Vietnam ultimately exceeded 55,000. Vietnamese deaths were in the millions. And for what? blog.asp?id=1016 http://www.miriamherin.com/blog.asp?id=1016 n/a In the mid to late 60's, I came to oppose the war in Vietnam. Like most Americans, I had grown up with a fierce patriotic pride in my nation. My father’s National Guard unit was mustered into the Army during World War II. And although he did not see combat, he was awaiting orders to the Pacific when Japan surrendered. I came of age reading The Diary of Anne Frank and William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Later I read Adolph Hitler’s blueprint for power Mein Kampf. I had no doubts that the evil of Nazism required and justified America’s participation in the Second World War. During my college years, a wonderful, brilliant woman for whom I worked one summer at the Office of Education in Washington, D.C. had me read George Kennan, considered the theoretical father of America’s “containment” policy. Kennan believed America needed to contain communism, halting its spread from country to country in a chain reaction like falling dominos (President Eisenhower is credited with the “domino” image.) So in the early 1960’s, I saw the Vietnam War through the lenses of what I then knew and believed. What changed? When I returned to graduate school, I encountered the Vietnam War in more personal ways. In my Freshman English classes, I taught young men who were returning from the war and young men who were trying to hold on to their student deferments to keep from going to the war. I decided I needed to understand for myself why our government had involved itself in an ever-increasing military commitment to Vietnam. So I did my own research and taught a unit on Vietnam in my freshman classes. Here’s what I learned: Our government’s rationale for the war seemed clear – to keep Vietnam (or one more domino) from falling under the communist rule of Ho Chi Minh and his Viet Minh forces. But as with so much in this world, the roots of this war were anything but clear. In the 1950’s Vietnam had endured French colonial rule for nearly 100 years. Following World War II, Ho Chi Minh, a communist, yet also a fervent nationalist, wanted the victorious western allies to recognize the independence of Vietnam. During World War II, Ho and his forces had allied themselves with America, carrying out guerilla attacks against both the Japanese and the Nazi French government within their country. But the western nations accepted the reinstatement of French rule. When Ho’s forces, the Viet Minh, were on the verge of driving out the French by force of arms in 1954, the western nations became alarmed. Some in Eisenhower’s administration urged the President to use nuclear weapons against the Vietnamese forces, advice Eisenhower prudently chose not to take. Following the French defeat in 1954, Ho Chi Minh announced the independence of Vietnam and became a national hero. Treaties known as the Geneva Accords ended French colonial rule in Vietnam. The Accords called for a temporary partition of Vietnam into North and South, with national elections to be held in two years to create a unified government. The North was then controlled by Ho Chi Minh. In the South, Ngo Dinh Diem, backed by President Eisenhower, was appointed Prime Minister. The anti-communist and Catholic Diem was perceived by the West as a political rival to Ho Chi Minh to govern all of Vietnam. But national elections were never held. Diem proved to be inept and corrupt. Knowing he would be defeated, he refused to allow the South to participate in national elections. There was little impetus among western nations to push for these elections knowing that Ho Chi Minh would certainly win. As the Diem regime grew more oppressive and unpopular, the people turned against it, more and more supporting a broadening insurgency in the South, led by rebels known as the Viet Cong. The Americans who had helped bring Diem to power also eventually turned against him. In 1963, President Kennedy gave a green light to South Vietnamese Army officers who, with the knowledge of the CIA, were plotting a coup against the government. Diem was deposed and brutally assassinated. What followed was a succession of weak leaders in the South and America’s escalating attempts to keep Ho Chi Minh from assuming governmental power, even by means of a national election. American involvement in Vietnam began with a few thousand military advisors sent by Eisenhower. But by 1968, under the escalation of President Lyndon Johnson, America had 537,000 troops in that country. As I looked at some of this history, I could not help but ask: why? And how did we get so deeply committed? To what ends were we willing to go to keep Ho Chi Minh from ruling a government he would easily have attained by popular election? As one American GI was so memorably quoted during those years, referring to a Vietnamese village: they had “to waste it in order to save it.” Was that what we were doing to the entire country of Vietnam? I had other questions as well. Did President Kennedy escalate our involvement in Vietnam for pure political reasons? Some historians say Kennedy needed to prove he was not “soft” on communism, as Nixon charged in the presidential election. In another year, had Kennedy not been murdered, he would have faced re-election. What about Lyndon Johnson? Did he decide that he needed to “win” the war in Vietnam to prove his mettle as President in the shadow of the martyred and popular John Kennedy? The American death toll in Vietnam ultimately exceeded 55,000. Vietnamese deaths were in the millions. And for what? Miriam Herin Sun, 6 July 2008 Where was I in the turbulent years of the 1960’s? Looking back, I can divide my experiences of that decade into several chapters. In 1963, I graduated from Emory & Henry College in Southwest Virginia. This small United Methodist school, serenely nestled among rolling hills and green pastures, seemed far removed from the festering political and social issues of the early sixties. Even so, I was part of a student legislature that sent a resolution to the college administration calling for the racial integration of the school. (How many of us recall that it wasn’t so long ago when many colleges and universities, particularly in the South, were racially segregated?) I spent the year after I graduated at the University of South Carolina as a graduate student in English. That was the year the University integrated. I heard rumors those first days that students had threatened to bring guns to campus to keep black students out, although that never happened. I was, however, appalled to read an editorial in the student newspaper using the “n” word in an attack on desegregation. That year also brought the assassination of President John Kennedy. This occurred during the run-up to the University’s biggest sports event of the year – the Carolina-Clemson football game. The custom then was for fraternity pledges to keep the Rutledge College bell on the old Horseshoe ringing non-stop twenty-four hours a day until the game began. All week, the constant clangor reverberated in the air and in our heads. The most poignant moment for me after Kennedy’s assassination was the sudden silence when the ringing stopped. I left graduate school after a year with an unfinished Master’s degree and spent the next three years as a social worker in a Columbia children’s institution, founded as an orphanage. Young and single, I spent my free hours socializing and volunteering for the community theater. The Viet Nam War seemed far away. Civil Rights was the more blazing issue, particularly in South Carolina. During this time, I was persuaded by a group of teenagers at the all-white church I attended to take over a project begun by others, which meant going each week to a community center in a poverty-stricken area of the city. The teenagers played games and sang songs with Head-Start children at the Center. Known as Black Bottom, this neighborhood was described by Civil Rights leader Whitney Young as “the worst slum in America.” I’m sure he was right. Thus began my education into some of the realities of the black experience. I also ran head-on into white fears when the church terminated this program altogether because the teenagers asked to invite the children to the church for a party. As one church leader said to me, “You can continue to go if you want, but not in the name of the church.” But where was I in terms of the Vietnam War in these years? Like many Americans then, I saw the war through the eyes of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson (My first vote was for Lyndon Johnson). The war came home to me only in the death of a young Marine who dated one of the girls at the children’s institution where I had worked. During the first half of the sixties, I believed that our leaders knew more than I did about Vietnam and communism and I accepted what they told us as true. For me personally, the first sixties’ years were more significant for experiences with African-Americans that deeply affected me. I probably brought about the actual integration of the children’s institution where I worked when we admitted a girl of bi-racial parentage. Although I learned that her father was most likely African-American, I let stand her mother’s statement that he was “Hawaiian.” Of course, this did nothing to change policy or attitudes in an institution that remained officially segregated for some time afterwards. When I returned to the University graduate English program in 1966, I also worked part-time for what was called the Manpower Development Training Center, a program of President Johnson’s “War on Poverty.” The Manpower Center had a racially mixed administration and faculty, which in hindsight seems quite remarkable for Columbia, South Carolina at that time. I do not recall a single African-American administrator or faculty member at the University of South Carolina while I was there. I was in only one graduate class with an African-American (and only one African-American!) and that was in summer school. The students at the Manpower Center were predominantly African-American adults, although there were a few white adults as well. The program offered basic education in math and English, high school equivalency (GED) and vocational training. I taught GED. The Center was the most effectively run program I have ever worked for, with a wonderful administrator and a dedicated staff and faculty. I enjoyed the students and was stunned midway through the first set of classes to learn how many were ex-convicts or day-release prisoners from the nearby penitentiary. Mostly young men, they were motivated, polite and fun to teach. How they later fared, I do not know. I was saddened to learn that one young man, a parolee who was a talented artist and the class clown, was later charged in a homicide. Many students, however, found jobs in skilled trades such as auto mechanics and carpentry. (I learned first-hand about these skills, when the carpentry instructor and one of his students were willing to come to my attic apartment and replace floor boards that I had surreptitiously torn out to rescue a kitten that had fallen through a wall crack into the crawl space below – “surreptitiously” because my apartment did not allow pets!) I was employed at the Manpower Center when Martin Luther King was assassinated. Classes were suspended for King’s funeral and televisions set up. I recall how profoundly uncomfortable I felt among the staffers who were black. One young teacher with whom I had become friends said to me that day that he would like to talk with me sometime about “this,” meaning I assumed, black-white relations in America. But he never did. When I took up my English lit studies again at the University, I found that integration had continued to open the school to black students. As a Freshman English instructor, I taught the first African-American USC scholarship football player. Later, another African-American football player, a bulky six-foot-five Freshman, whom I was tutoring, refused to walk with me across the campus to find a quiet place to study. He feared for his safety to be publicly seen with a white woman. Whenever people today think that little has changed in race relations in our society, I tell them this. But in the latter part of the 60's, back in graduate school to finish my Master's and begin a Ph.D. program, I found I had more life lessons to learn as well. And I quickly realized that I could no longer ignore the Vietnam War. blog.asp?id=1015 http://www.miriamherin.com/blog.asp?id=1015 n/a Where was I in the turbulent years of the 1960’s? Looking back, I can divide my experiences of that decade into several chapters. In 1963, I graduated from Emory & Henry College in Southwest Virginia. This small United Methodist school, serenely nestled among rolling hills and green pastures, seemed far removed from the festering political and social issues of the early sixties. Even so, I was part of a student legislature that sent a resolution to the college administration calling for the racial integration of the school. (How many of us recall that it wasn’t so long ago when many colleges and universities, particularly in the South, were racially segregated?) I spent the year after I graduated at the University of South Carolina as a graduate student in English. That was the year the University integrated. I heard rumors those first days that students had threatened to bring guns to campus to keep black students out, although that never happened. I was, however, appalled to read an editorial in the student newspaper using the “n” word in an attack on desegregation. That year also brought the assassination of President John Kennedy. This occurred during the run-up to the University’s biggest sports event of the year – the Carolina-Clemson football game. The custom then was for fraternity pledges to keep the Rutledge College bell on the old Horseshoe ringing non-stop twenty-four hours a day until the game began. All week, the constant clangor reverberated in the air and in our heads. The most poignant moment for me after Kennedy’s assassination was the sudden silence when the ringing stopped. I left graduate school after a year with an unfinished Master’s degree and spent the next three years as a social worker in a Columbia children’s institution, founded as an orphanage. Young and single, I spent my free hours socializing and volunteering for the community theater. The Viet Nam War seemed far away. Civil Rights was the more blazing issue, particularly in South Carolina. During this time, I was persuaded by a group of teenagers at the all-white church I attended to take over a project begun by others, which meant going each week to a community center in a poverty-stricken area of the city. The teenagers played games and sang songs with Head-Start children at the Center. Known as Black Bottom, this neighborhood was described by Civil Rights leader Whitney Young as “the worst slum in America.” I’m sure he was right. Thus began my education into some of the realities of the black experience. I also ran head-on into white fears when the church terminated this program altogether because the teenagers asked to invite the children to the church for a party. As one church leader said to me, “You can continue to go if you want, but not in the name of the church.” But where was I in terms of the Vietnam War in these years? Like many Americans then, I saw the war through the eyes of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson (My first vote was for Lyndon Johnson). The war came home to me only in the death of a young Marine who dated one of the girls at the children’s institution where I had worked. During the first half of the sixties, I believed that our leaders knew more than I did about Vietnam and communism and I accepted what they told us as true. For me personally, the first sixties’ years were more significant for experiences with African-Americans that deeply affected me. I probably brought about the actual integration of the children’s institution where I worked when we admitted a girl of bi-racial parentage. Although I learned that her father was most likely African-American, I let stand her mother’s statement that he was “Hawaiian.” Of course, this did nothing to change policy or attitudes in an institution that remained officially segregated for some time afterwards. When I returned to the University graduate English program in 1966, I also worked part-time for what was called the Manpower Development Training Center, a program of President Johnson’s “War on Poverty.” The Manpower Center had a racially mixed administration and faculty, which in hindsight seems quite remarkable for Columbia, South Carolina at that time. I do not recall a single African-American administrator or faculty member at the University of South Carolina while I was there. I was in only one graduate class with an African-American (and only one African-American!) and that was in summer school. The students at the Manpower Center were predominantly African-American adults, although there were a few white adults as well. The program offered basic education in math and English, high school equivalency (GED) and vocational training. I taught GED. The Center was the most effectively run program I have ever worked for, with a wonderful administrator and a dedicated staff and faculty. I enjoyed the students and was stunned midway through the first set of classes to learn how many were ex-convicts or day-release prisoners from the nearby penitentiary. Mostly young men, they were motivated, polite and fun to teach. How they later fared, I do not know. I was saddened to learn that one young man, a parolee who was a talented artist and the class clown, was later charged in a homicide. Many students, however, found jobs in skilled trades such as auto mechanics and carpentry. (I learned first-hand about these skills, when the carpentry instructor and one of his students were willing to come to my attic apartment and replace floor boards that I had surreptitiously torn out to rescue a kitten that had fallen through a wall crack into the crawl space below – “surreptitiously” because my apartment did not allow pets!) I was employed at the Manpower Center when Martin Luther King was assassinated. Classes were suspended for King’s funeral and televisions set up. I recall how profoundly uncomfortable I felt among the staffers who were black. One young teacher with whom I had become friends said to me that day that he would like to talk with me sometime about “this,” meaning I assumed, black-white relations in America. But he never did. When I took up my English lit studies again at the University, I found that integration had continued to open the school to black students. As a Freshman English instructor, I taught the first African-American USC scholarship football player. Later, another African-American football player, a bulky six-foot-five Freshman, whom I was tutoring, refused to walk with me across the campus to find a quiet place to study. He feared for his safety to be publicly seen with a white woman. Whenever people today think that little has changed in race relations in our society, I tell them this. But in the latter part of the 60's, back in graduate school to finish my Master's and begin a Ph.D. program, I found I had more life lessons to learn as well. And I quickly realized that I could no longer ignore the Vietnam War. Miriam Herin Sat, 22 March 2008 More than a million Southeast Asian refugees entered the United States between 1975 and 1998. They were Vietnamese, Cambodians, Hmong, Montagnards, and Laotians who were fleeing the violent aftermath of the Vietnam War. I came to know many of these families in the1990s when I spent six and a half years working with their children in the inner city of Charlotte, North Carolina. A group of these kids had found their way to a Methodist Church situated on a large grassy field and a semi-paved parking lot. They showed up with their footballs and basketballs, and soon the church, despite its aging and dwindling white congregation, allowed volunteers to create on the site a Boy Scout troop and a Wednesday dinner and activities night for area children. The dinner often attracted well over a hundred kids.I became involved as a volunteer at the time many of the children were reaching their teen years. The church, as well as the neighborhood around it where the kids lived, was then a blighted area of the city. Prostitutes walked the sidewalks in front of the church and drug paraphernalia was often trashed in the church’s unusable and ramshackle Scout hut. I once attended a meeting to talk about attempts to redeem a nearby street of shops. One shop owner tossed a handful of spent bullet casings on the table to demonstrate what he would find in front of his store on Saturday and Sunday mornings. After I began volunteering, several of us decided we needed a program for the teenagers. Although we began with the usual “fits and starts,” I ended up coordinating this program and supervising volunteers and some part-time staff. We began the program around a basketball goal, the grassy field and meeting space in the church. The basketball goal was at first a frequent casualty. Kids and adults who lived nearby could quickly bring it down after program hours by hanging on the rim. But we kept putting it back, added a net, and left it available for anyone to use. Eventually the goal became a fixture of the neighborhood and only came down one other time when the Program Coordinator (named Herin) accidentally backed a bus into the pole! Because it was a church program, we met first on Sunday mornings in what amounted to a Sunday School class. This was not, however, your typical Sunday class. The kids had no interest in a class. They brought their basketballs and often kept them bouncing under the table. Once they brought hazelnuts and began cracking them by slamming basketballs against them on the tabletop. When we later held classes in the newly renovated Scout Hut that did not yet have a working furnace, the kids amused themselves tossing paper into a kerosene heater. Yet the kids continued to come. As several frowning adults let us know early on, the answer was simple: they came only to play basketball after the class. And that was true. These were 6th and 7th graders after all. But they kept coming when we added music and drama, teaching some of them to play drums and guitar and writing and performing a play and later an original musical. We even added dance when we had a wonderful young woman who could teach them. Several of the kids formed their own band of drums, guitar and vocalist. The drums were a wired-together set scavenged from pawn shops – an orange bass drum, two red toms and a snare that matched neither. The drums were eventually replaced by a donated electronic set and an added keyboard. (Photo: The Band). Later a summer intern and his family supervised the creation of a large wall mural in the Scout Hut, which the kids designed, drew and painted depicting the program’s activities. We expanded the program to meet Sunday afternoons, with basketball, soccer, volleyball, flag football and lessons in such esoteric games as golf and croquet. We also began taking summer trips, spending most of a week in Washington, D.C., Orlando (Photo: Touring the Kennedy Space Center), at the beach and in the mountains, trips that each teen had to earn through 20 hours of volunteer work in the community and community agencies. For three summers, a group of our kids spent a week living in a Tennessee camp with other teenagers where they worked in a day camp for children from rural poverty (Photo: Vicheth and Day Camper). Over the years, our teenagers attended plays, musical events, and museums. We took them skiing, white-water rafting, and spent a memorable day on “basketball street” and at team practices when the NCAA Final Four came to Charlotte. We began an after-school tutoring program and provided opportunities for high school juniors and seniors to explore higher education and vocational training. Along the way, we worked with families, teachers and counselors. And when a teenager got in trouble, we worked with that too. And there were times of serious trouble – runaways, car thefts, a schoolyard assault, an armed robbery and a summer in which the program and some of its participants were subjected to gang-type threats. I titled this blog “Encountering Billy Nguyen.” So how were these kids like Billy Nguyen, the fictitious 16-year-old in Absolution? Although the teenagers who came through our program had many things in common, particularly refugee parents and the low income neighborhood, each was a unique person. Some would have done well in their lives despite their childhood circumstances. Others seemed bound for trouble. The ones most like Billy were those who might have gone either way, those for whom a program like ours can make a real difference and I believe ours did. I believe it also made a difference too for the kids who seemed innately motivated to do well in school and stay out of trouble. One told me some time after he had graduated from high school how important it was for him and his friends to have, as he put it, “a place to come, a place that was ours.” In the years since I worked with this program, I have attended college graduations, wedding banquets, Buddhist ceremonies of blessing for babies, citizenship naturalizations and many reunions. One of our young men is an officer in the United States Navy. Another served as a Naval medical corpsman in Fallajah. But there have also been kids like Billy who found their way to serious trouble, including homicide. One poignant night after I had left the program, we held a reunion dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant. As more than twenty young adults gathered at the restaurant, we wondered if others could get there, because we had heard news on the way to the restaurant warning of roadblocks around that area. A Southeast Asian male was holed up in a house threatening to shoot police outside. All of us in the restaurant knew that young man. He was one of the troubled kids we had never reached. As much as I love to recall our successes with this program, and there are many, when I write about Billy Nguyen, I can’t help remembering the kids we lost. blog.asp?id=1014 http://www.miriamherin.com/blog.asp?id=1014 n/a More than a million Southeast Asian refugees entered the United States between 1975 and 1998. They were Vietnamese, Cambodians, Hmong, Montagnards, and Laotians who were fleeing the violent aftermath of the Vietnam War. I came to know many of these families in the1990s when I spent six and a half years working with their children in the inner city of Charlotte, North Carolina. A group of these kids had found their way to a Methodist Church situated on a large grassy field and a semi-paved parking lot. They showed up with their footballs and basketballs, and soon the church, despite its aging and dwindling white congregation, allowed volunteers to create on the site a Boy Scout troop and a Wednesday dinner and activities night for area children. The dinner often attracted well over a hundred kids.I became involved as a volunteer at the time many of the children were reaching their teen years. The church, as well as the neighborhood around it where the kids lived, was then a blighted area of the city. Prostitutes walked the sidewalks in front of the church and drug paraphernalia was often trashed in the church’s unusable and ramshackle Scout hut. I once attended a meeting to talk about attempts to redeem a nearby street of shops. One shop owner tossed a handful of spent bullet casings on the table to demonstrate what he would find in front of his store on Saturday and Sunday mornings. After I began volunteering, several of us decided we needed a program for the teenagers. Although we began with the usual “fits and starts,” I ended up coordinating this program and supervising volunteers and some part-time staff. We began the program around a basketball goal, the grassy field and meeting space in the church. The basketball goal was at first a frequent casualty. Kids and adults who lived nearby could quickly bring it down after program hours by hanging on the rim. But we kept putting it back, added a net, and left it available for anyone to use. Eventually the goal became a fixture of the neighborhood and only came down one other time when the Program Coordinator (named Herin) accidentally backed a bus into the pole! Because it was a church program, we met first on Sunday mornings in what amounted to a Sunday School class. This was not, however, your typical Sunday class. The kids had no interest in a class. They brought their basketballs and often kept them bouncing under the table. Once they brought hazelnuts and began cracking them by slamming basketballs against them on the tabletop. When we later held classes in the newly renovated Scout Hut that did not yet have a working furnace, the kids amused themselves tossing paper into a kerosene heater. Yet the kids continued to come. As several frowning adults let us know early on, the answer was simple: they came only to play basketball after the class. And that was true. These were 6th and 7th graders after all. But they kept coming when we added music and drama, teaching some of them to play drums and guitar and writing and performing a play and later an original musical. We even added dance when we had a wonderful young woman who could teach them. Several of the kids formed their own band of drums, guitar and vocalist. The drums were a wired-together set scavenged from pawn shops – an orange bass drum, two red toms and a snare that matched neither. The drums were eventually replaced by a donated electronic set and an added keyboard. (Photo: The Band). Later a summer intern and his family supervised the creation of a large wall mural in the Scout Hut, which the kids designed, drew and painted depicting the program’s activities. We expanded the program to meet Sunday afternoons, with basketball, soccer, volleyball, flag football and lessons in such esoteric games as golf and croquet. We also began taking summer trips, spending most of a week in Washington, D.C., Orlando (Photo: Touring the Kennedy Space Center), at the beach and in the mountains, trips that each teen had to earn through 20 hours of volunteer work in the community and community agencies. For three summers, a group of our kids spent a week living in a Tennessee camp with other teenagers where they worked in a day camp for children from rural poverty (Photo: Vicheth and Day Camper). Over the years, our teenagers attended plays, musical events, and museums. We took them skiing, white-water rafting, and spent a memorable day on “basketball street” and at team practices when the NCAA Final Four came to Charlotte. We began an after-school tutoring program and provided opportunities for high school juniors and seniors to explore higher education and vocational training. Along the way, we worked with families, teachers and counselors. And when a teenager got in trouble, we worked with that too. And there were times of serious trouble – runaways, car thefts, a schoolyard assault, an armed robbery and a summer in which the program and some of its participants were subjected to gang-type threats. I titled this blog “Encountering Billy Nguyen.” So how were these kids like Billy Nguyen, the fictitious 16-year-old in Absolution? Although the teenagers who came through our program had many things in common, particularly refugee parents and the low income neighborhood, each was a unique person. Some would have done well in their lives despite their childhood circumstances. Others seemed bound for trouble. The ones most like Billy were those who might have gone either way, those for whom a program like ours can make a real difference and I believe ours did. I believe it also made a difference too for the kids who seemed innately motivated to do well in school and stay out of trouble. One told me some time after he had graduated from high school how important it was for him and his friends to have, as he put it, “a place to come, a place that was ours.” In the years since I worked with this program, I have attended college graduations, wedding banquets, Buddhist ceremonies of blessing for babies, citizenship naturalizations and many reunions. One of our young men is an officer in the United States Navy. Another served as a Naval medical corpsman in Fallajah. But there have also been kids like Billy who found their way to serious trouble, including homicide. One poignant night after I had left the program, we held a reunion dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant. As more than twenty young adults gathered at the restaurant, we wondered if others could get there, because we had heard news on the way to the restaurant warning of roadblocks around that area. A Southeast Asian male was holed up in a house threatening to shoot police outside. All of us in the restaurant knew that young man. He was one of the troubled kids we had never reached. As much as I love to recall our successes with this program, and there are many, when I write about Billy Nguyen, I can’t help remembering the kids we lost. Miriam Herin Tue, 19 February 2008 In Absolution, Billy Nguyen is a 16-year-year-old Vietnamese-American who encounters Richard Delaney in a Boston drug store with tragic consequences. Of course, Billy is a fictitious character in a novel. But most characters in fiction have their genesis in real life. And certainly Billy does. Were he an actual teenager in 2003 when the novel opens, he would be the child of two of the 1,342,532 Southeast Asian refugees who came to the United States between 1975 and 1998, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. His parents are Vietnamese, but Billy was born in America. At the time his parents came to this country, the Southeast Asian exodus also included Cambodians, Laotians and ethnic peoples such as the Hmong from Laos and Montagnards from Vietnam. These refugees might have spent months and sometimes years in refugee camps in Thailand or in other parts of the world before entering the United States. Although they left their countries for different reasons, their journeys were almost always fearful and perilous. The Vietnamese, many of them “boat people,” fled out of fear of reprisals from the North Vietnamese for siding with the Americans. As many as half the boat people may have died in the attempt. Cambodians fled virtual slavery under the bloody regime of the Khmer Rouge (the “red” Cambodians). Two million Cambodians died from starvation, disease and murder. Laotians and Hmong fled persecution following the communist overthrow of the Royal government of Laos. Montagnards fled years of persecution from both North and South Vietnamese. Each of these refugee groups encountered hardship, terror and death on their flight to freedom. In the mid-1990s, I spent six and a half years working with Southeast Asian teenagers, most of whom were the children of Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian and Hmong refugees. My portrait of Billy Nguyen in Absolution is drawn from these experiences. Not all Southeast Asians are alike, of course. There are distinct cultural differences between the ethnic and national groups. But those who fled their homelands with few or no possessions, like Billy’s parents, often landed in low income neighborhoods, blighted areas of America’s cities infected with crime, drugs, black versus Asian animosities and gangs. Billy’s parents would have spoken very little English when they first arrived, and Billy’s main exposure to English as a small child would most likely have come via the TV set found in just about every home no matter how poor. He probably started school with limited skills in English and might have been placed in an ESL class. One Cambodian teenager I worked with, an A student at his high school, wrote an essay describing how stupid he felt to be assigned to ESL in early elementary school away from the other students. Another teenager’s mother told me that her son cried every morning when he left for school in the first grade (he is today a college graduate). Billy, like many of the teenagers I knew, would have grown up in a family conflicted by poverty, cultural clashes and the devastating emotional wounds of war and dislocation. His parents would have worked long hours at minimum wage jobs, leaving Billy to himself much of the day, home alone or in charge of younger siblings. He might not even have lived with his biological parents. Many families were broken by death and separation, lost spouses, lost parents, lost children, the consequences of war. One refugee family related last seeing their teenage son chasing desperately after the truck in which the Khmer Rouge were forcibly transferring them to a new work site. Billy’s mother says in Absolution “I think I have to give Anh away or he starve.” I knew one young man who had been “given away” to another mother to raise. Even children whose families survived and achieved a measure of stability in their first years in America still struggled with cultural issues. Parents often tried to keep to the “old” ways of their country of origin, while their children readily embraced American culture, not all of it positive. Parents found it difficult to maintain their authority at home when their children became more proficient in English than they were. Billy, like many refugee children, adopts an American name, and English is his true native language. Yet even as Billy seeks to fit in to American culture, he will experience, as other minorities, racial slurs and discrimination. One teenager I worked with, a college-bound honor student, was berated as a “stupid chink” by a Driver’s Ed instructor at his high school. Billy will not have had an easy time growing up in America. But does that doom him to delinquency and anti-social behavior? Certainly I have known troubled kids among the Southeast Asian teenagers with whom I worked – kids who have joined gangs, committed crimes, even murder. But far more have grown into mature, productive American citizens. They have graduated from high school, attended college or received vocational training, joined the military, married, had children, found steady employment and own businesses. So why does Billy get himself in such trouble? Do his actions relate directly to the difficulties of his troubled childhood? We might, of course, ask why any teenager gets into trouble? We all know children of privilege who make tragic errors of judgment – who drink too much, drive too fast, experiment with drugs and sex and violence. Scientific studies have shown that areas of an adolescent’s brain may continue to develop into the early twenties. This research is cited in discussions of whether adolescents who commit crimes should be tried as adults, particularly in capital cases. Perhaps the more important question might be are there ways tragedies like the one that occurs in the opening pages of Absolution might be prevented? Stay tuned. blog.asp?id=1013 http://www.miriamherin.com/blog.asp?id=1013 n/a In Absolution, Billy Nguyen is a 16-year-year-old Vietnamese-American who encounters Richard Delaney in a Boston drug store with tragic consequences. Of course, Billy is a fictitious character in a novel. But most characters in fiction have their genesis in real life. And certainly Billy does. Were he an actual teenager in 2003 when the novel opens, he would be the child of two of the 1,342,532 Southeast Asian refugees who came to the United States between 1975 and 1998, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. His parents are Vietnamese, but Billy was born in America. At the time his parents came to this country, the Southeast Asian exodus also included Cambodians, Laotians and ethnic peoples such as the Hmong from Laos and Montagnards from Vietnam. These refugees might have spent months and sometimes years in refugee camps in Thailand or in other parts of the world before entering the United States. Although they left their countries for different reasons, their journeys were almost always fearful and perilous. The Vietnamese, many of them “boat people,” fled out of fear of reprisals from the North Vietnamese for siding with the Americans. As many as half the boat people may have died in the attempt. Cambodians fled virtual slavery under the bloody regime of the Khmer Rouge (the “red” Cambodians). Two million Cambodians died from starvation, disease and murder. Laotians and Hmong fled persecution following the communist overthrow of the Royal government of Laos. Montagnards fled years of persecution from both North and South Vietnamese. Each of these refugee groups encountered hardship, terror and death on their flight to freedom. In the mid-1990s, I spent six and a half years working with Southeast Asian teenagers, most of whom were the children of Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian and Hmong refugees. My portrait of Billy Nguyen in Absolution is drawn from these experiences. Not all Southeast Asians are alike, of course. There are distinct cultural differences between the ethnic and national groups. But those who fled their homelands with few or no possessions, like Billy’s parents, often landed in low income neighborhoods, blighted areas of America’s cities infected with crime, drugs, black versus Asian animosities and gangs. Billy’s parents would have spoken very little English when they first arrived, and Billy’s main exposure to English as a small child would most likely have come via the TV set found in just about every home no matter how poor. He probably started school with limited skills in English and might have been placed in an ESL class. One Cambodian teenager I worked with, an A student at his high school, wrote an essay describing how stupid he felt to be assigned to ESL in early elementary school away from the other students. Another teenager’s mother told me that her son cried every morning when he left for school in the first grade (he is today a college graduate). Billy, like many of the teenagers I knew, would have grown up in a family conflicted by poverty, cultural clashes and the devastating emotional wounds of war and dislocation. His parents would have worked long hours at minimum wage jobs, leaving Billy to himself much of the day, home alone or in charge of younger siblings. He might not even have lived with his biological parents. Many families were broken by death and separation, lost spouses, lost parents, lost children, the consequences of war. One refugee family related last seeing their teenage son chasing desperately after the truck in which the Khmer Rouge were forcibly transferring them to a new work site. Billy’s mother says in Absolution “I think I have to give Anh away or he starve.” I knew one young man who had been “given away” to another mother to raise. Even children whose families survived and achieved a measure of stability in their first years in America still struggled with cultural issues. Parents often tried to keep to the “old” ways of their country of origin, while their children readily embraced American culture, not all of it positive. Parents found it difficult to maintain their authority at home when their children became more proficient in English than they were. Billy, like many refugee children, adopts an American name, and English is his true native language. Yet even as Billy seeks to fit in to American culture, he will experience, as other minorities, racial slurs and discrimination. One teenager I worked with, a college-bound honor student, was berated as a “stupid chink” by a Driver’s Ed instructor at his high school. Billy will not have had an easy time growing up in America. But does that doom him to delinquency and anti-social behavior? Certainly I have known troubled kids among the Southeast Asian teenagers with whom I worked – kids who have joined gangs, committed crimes, even murder. But far more have grown into mature, productive American citizens. They have graduated from high school, attended college or received vocational training, joined the military, married, had children, found steady employment and own businesses. So why does Billy get himself in such trouble? Do his actions relate directly to the difficulties of his troubled childhood? We might, of course, ask why any teenager gets into trouble? We all know children of privilege who make tragic errors of judgment – who drink too much, drive too fast, experiment with drugs and sex and violence. Scientific studies have shown that areas of an adolescent’s brain may continue to develop into the early twenties. This research is cited in discussions of whether adolescents who commit crimes should be tried as adults, particularly in capital cases. Perhaps the more important question might be are there ways tragedies like the one that occurs in the opening pages of Absolution might be prevented? Stay tuned. Miriam Herin Tue, 22 January 2008 October 1st – October 15th - While in the hospital, I missed two scheduled book events: the Southern Independent Booksellers Trade Show in Atlanta and a talk in Charlotte. Now that I’m home I have two weeks to convalesce before the next events on the schedule. The most important of these is the Carolina Writers Night in Charlotte, which is the official launch for Absolution. Friends and family are coming from New York, Greensboro and Chapel Hill. Airplane and hotel reservations are made. I have also been invited to be the guest speaker at the Charlotte Latin Book Fair luncheon on the same day, and Novello has set up an interview with Charlotte’s public radio station WFAE for the next morning. But my publishers are worried. They fear that two events on one day may be too much for me. Carolina Writers Night is the most important event, so they offer an alternative for the Book Fair. Author Frye Gaillard, one of Novello’s founders, will take my place. I can join him there to sign books but not to speak for more than 10 minutes. I know Frye and have tremendous respect for both him and his work. Yet I think about a night in the hospital when I was unable to sleep, when I spent the time jotting down ideas for the Charlotte Latin talk. Ideas I really want to talk about. I tell Novello that I am happy to have Frye there, but I may need more than 10 minutes. They decide to have Frye speak first and allow me whatever time remains. This will be a casual event, no reading, mostly just question and answer and I will do it seated. I believe I can carry this off well. I am very worried, however, about Carolina Writers Night. I had planned to read from the novel, but my damaged eyesight makes reading difficult. And I will be on a stage under hot lights. I was standing under a hot light in Greenville, reading from the novel, when the hemorrhage occurred. This was the horse that threw me. Do I dare climb back on? So soon? I recall how tense I was in Greenville, how thirsty I got while reading. The event in Charlotte will be far more stressful – and far more important. I am not at full strength and tire easily. Would speaking under these conditions risk another stroke? And what if I had a migraine and could not discern whether it was a migraine or a stroke? As I have done every morning since leaving the hospital, I check my blood pressure. As the first week progresses, I realize that it is going up. I call the doctor in Charlotte who is supposed to handle the neurological follow-up. I’m told he is a brain surgeon and not the doctor to consult with me. I try calling the neurologist who treated me at Carolinas Medical. He has already told me he cannot follow up with me because he left his group and has a no-compete clause. His office cannot tell me what doctor I am supposed to contact. After two frustrating days of runaround, when I imagine my blood pressure soaring off the machine, I reach my primary care physician who increases my medication. I ask his advice about Carolina Writers Night. He suggests I sit on the stage but not speak. This was not the advice I wanted. However, the extra pill he prescribed works. My blood pressure comes down. I talk to Novello and tell them that I will definitely speak at Carolina Writers Night. I also suggest ways to reduce as much stress for me as possible. I would like to speak from a chair on the stage. I would like to have my son John do the readings from the novel. And I would like Novello to ask the tech crew to lower the stage lights while I’m talking. Novello agrees. October 16th - My husband Tom, son John and I drive to Charlotte for the Book Fair luncheon. The event goes very well. I enjoy sharing the program with Frye and am delighted by the questions from the women attending the luncheon. I get my first opportunity to sign books and love every minute of it. After all, I have imagined this for 27 years. Afterwards, we drive downtown to the hotel where two college classmates and their husbands will join us for the evening. But once in the room, I realize I am exhausted. I send Tom and John off with our friends and go to bed. I stay there through the afternoon. I’m still tired when I get up to dress for the evening. My college classmates help me with make-up because I cannot fully see to do it. Suddenly, time rolls back forty years and the three of us are in the dorm again as giggly college kids. When they leave with Tom to go to dinner, John and I drive to the theater where I will share the program with writers Judy Goldman and Fanny Flono and blues pianist Rev. Billy C. Wirtz. I am still tired and worry about getting through the evening. Novello has food for us in the theater green room. I am not particularly hungry but I try to eat. Although I would like to chat with the others on the program (Judy is a good friend and Fanny a writer I’ve met and talked to before and Billy a most interesting man) But I sit quietly, trying to conserve my energy. Thirty minutes before the program begins, I am escorted to the stage for a sound check. Seated in a large wicker chair, I stare into the empty theater and experience a surprising calm. The calm stays with me when the program begins and while I speak from the wicker chair and John so beautifully reads my words from the podium. I am calm afterwards as well, greeting friends and signing books. And later in the hotel room where friends have gathered to party and talk into the night. I wait for the exhaustion to come, but this night it never does. When I finally crawl into bed long past midnight, I sleep well. In the morning, I wake up feeling deliciously relaxed, more so than in months. And why shouldn’t I be relaxed? I have survived Carolina Writers Night and even enjoyed it. I have ridden the horse that threw me. I am back to the life I love. The morning after at the hotel: a very relaxed Miriam with college classmatess Karen and Gayle blog.asp?id=1012 http://www.miriamherin.com/blog.asp?id=1012 Carolina Writers Night October 1st – October 15th - While in the hospital, I missed two scheduled book events: the Southern Independent Booksellers Trade Show in Atlanta and a talk in Charlotte. Now that I’m home I have two weeks to convalesce before the next events on the schedule. The most important of these is the Carolina Writers Night in Charlotte, which is the official launch for Absolution. Friends and family are coming from New York, Greensboro and Chapel Hill. Airplane and hotel reservations are made. I have also been invited to be the guest speaker at the Charlotte Latin Book Fair luncheon on the same day, and Novello has set up an interview with Charlotte’s public radio station WFAE for the next morning. But my publishers are worried. They fear that two events on one day may be too much for me. Carolina Writers Night is the most important event, so they offer an alternative for the Book Fair. Author Frye Gaillard, one of Novello’s founders, will take my place. I can join him there to sign books but not to speak for more than 10 minutes. I know Frye and have tremendous respect for both him and his work. Yet I think about a night in the hospital when I was unable to sleep, when I spent the time jotting down ideas for the Charlotte Latin talk. Ideas I really want to talk about. I tell Novello that I am happy to have Frye there, but I may need more than 10 minutes. They decide to have Frye speak first and allow me whatever time remains. This will be a casual event, no reading, mostly just question and answer and I will do it seated. I believe I can carry this off well. I am very worried, however, about Carolina Writers Night. I had planned to read from the novel, but my damaged eyesight makes reading difficult. And I will be on a stage under hot lights. I was standing under a hot light in Greenville, reading from the novel, when the hemorrhage occurred. This was the horse that threw me. Do I dare climb back on? So soon? I recall how tense I was in Greenville, how thirsty I got while reading. The event in Charlotte will be far more stressful – and far more important. I am not at full strength and tire easily. Would speaking under these conditions risk another stroke? And what if I had a migraine and could not discern whether it was a migraine or a stroke? As I have done every morning since leaving the hospital, I check my blood pressure. As the first week progresses, I realize that it is going up. I call the doctor in Charlotte who is supposed to handle the neurological follow-up. I’m told he is a brain surgeon and not the doctor to consult with me. I try calling the neurologist who treated me at Carolinas Medical. He has already told me he cannot follow up with me because he left his group and has a no-compete clause. His office cannot tell me what doctor I am supposed to contact. After two frustrating days of runaround, when I imagine my blood pressure soaring off the machine, I reach my primary care physician who increases my medication. I ask his advice about Carolina Writers Night. He suggests I sit on the stage but not speak. This was not the advice I wanted. However, the extra pill he prescribed works. My blood pressure comes down. I talk to Novello and tell them that I will definitely speak at Carolina Writers Night. I also suggest ways to reduce as much stress for me as possible. I would like to speak from a chair on the stage. I would like to have my son John do the readings from the novel. And I would like Novello to ask the tech crew to lower the stage lights while I’m talking. Novello agrees. October 16th - My husband Tom, son John and I drive to Charlotte for the Book Fair luncheon. The event goes very well. I enjoy sharing the program with Frye and am delighted by the questions from the women attending the luncheon. I get my first opportunity to sign books and love every minute of it. After all, I have imagined this for 27 years. Afterwards, we drive downtown to the hotel where two college classmates and their husbands will join us for the evening. But once in the room, I realize I am exhausted. I send Tom and John off with our friends and go to bed. I stay there through the afternoon. I’m still tired when I get up to dress for the evening. My college classmates help me with make-up because I cannot fully see to do it. Suddenly, time rolls back forty years and the three of us are in the dorm again as giggly college kids. When they leave with Tom to go to dinner, John and I drive to the theater where I will share the program with writers Judy Goldman and Fanny Flono and blues pianist Rev. Billy C. Wirtz. I am still tired and worry about getting through the evening. Novello has food for us in the theater green room. I am not particularly hungry but I try to eat. Although I would like to chat with the others on the program (Judy is a good friend and Fanny a writer I’ve met and talked to before and Billy a most interesting man) But I sit quietly, trying to conserve my energy. Thirty minutes before the program begins, I am escorted to the stage for a sound check. Seated in a large wicker chair, I stare into the empty theater and experience a surprising calm. The calm stays with me when the program begins and while I speak from the wicker chair and John so beautifully reads my words from the podium. I am calm afterwards as well, greeting friends and signing books. And later in the hotel room where friends have gathered to party and talk into the night. I wait for the exhaustion to come, but this night it never does. When I finally crawl into bed long past midnight, I sleep well. In the morning, I wake up feeling deliciously relaxed, more so than in months. And why shouldn’t I be relaxed? I have survived Carolina Writers Night and even enjoyed it. I have ridden the horse that threw me. I am back to the life I love. The morning after at the hotel: a very relaxed Miriam with college classmatess Karen and Gayle Miriam Herin Fri, 4 January 2008 Monday, October 1st and forward- On the ride from Charlotte to Greensboro, I find it difficult to determine where I am. I have been on this stretch of I-85 an uncountable number of times. Why don’t I recognize anything? This is true even as we come into Greensboro. The scenery outside the car window appears cartoonish, with less depth. It is only when I am in the house and go to, of course, my computer that I realize the problem: it’s the way I see color. The hues of color seem as true as I saw them before the hemorrhage, but now they are less intense, in effect, bleached. I want to adjust the computer screen, brighten it. When I go outside, I experience another visual anomaly; large objects appear slightly truncated, particularly cars, as if I'm viewing them in fun house mirrors. My first days home are spent learning about my damaged vision, what I can see and not see. I find it difficult to read. Words fall off the left margin and when I try to read the newspaper, the columns bleed into each other. I realize that the loss in my left peripheral vision may affect what has always been my unique way of seeing – I am near-sighted in one eye, far-sighted in the other, which is why I have lived so long without glasses. Now, however, the left peripheral loss seems to affect reading, which has been the task of my left eye. I try to remember what the occupational therapist told me in the hospital about marking the left margin with red and blue dots. I try using my hand as a straight edge instead, but quickly give this up. Finally, I decide to just read and see if the brain will eventually find the words for me (for years my brain has seamlessly shifted between right eye and left eye for far and near vision). So every morning I attempt to read the newspaper without aids or gimmicks, and in a few days, the reading gets easier, although I still lose words off to the left. The physical therapist in the hospital warned me about walking about, that I needed to be extremely careful. I don’t have to be warned. The first day I move from handhold to handhold – couch, wall, chair, stair rail. I am quite nervous and run into things, bruising my shoulder, my side. Then comes an “aha” moment. If I turn my head slightly left, about 10 degrees, I can see the way ahead clearly. After a few days, this becomes natural, and I no longer think about it. Although I’m still physically weak, I begin daily jaunts around the house, counting my steps, and soon am less tired, more agile and sure-footed. The computer is a greater challenge. I find it difficult to read the screen or find what I’m looking for. The red buttons on the left to close a file don’t seem to exist. I try writing an e-mail and have to raise the type 50% which seems to take much of it off the screen where I lose it. One day I put together a group e-mail to let friends and family know how I’m doing, and it takes hours, particularly since I have to do it on Tom’s computer because I fried my keyboard knocking over a glass of water – on my left, of course. I have moments of great frustration and tears, but I keep at it and each day it gets easier. Tom loans me his drug-store reading glasses and that helps. In my worst moments, I tell myself to be calm, to remember how lucky I am. I do know that. The one time I give in to depression comes on a morning soon after I’m home, when I think how the neurologist in the hospital said it would take six months to a year to fully recover. I have promised myself to do whatever it takes to come back, as close to one hundred percent as I can, yet I also know that those same six months to a year are the most critical months to promote my novel. How can I possibly do both? Fortunately, I don’t stay depressed long. Too many people are supporting me, extending genuine concern. The overwhelming sense of love and care I felt in the hospital continues after I’m home. Friends from Charlotte and Chapel Hill visit me in Greensboro. A family from Ghana comes by to ask about my well-being, a Ghanian tradition when someone is ill. The family elder prays for my healing in a voice as resonant surely as God’s and I’m deeply moved. Others call, e-mail and send flowers and cards. Our church organizes volunteers to do food, and they bring us a wonderful meal each evening for a week (and offer more). After the less than exciting hospital food, dinner becomes a glorious feast. (I discover, in fact, how much little things mean, like hot coffee and the buttered toast at the diner where Tom and I eat breakfast on his days off.) The food and my ability to sleep soundly begin to restore my strength, although a night comes when I do not sleep, cannot sleep. Our son-in-law, Guy, calls in the afternoon from Kentucky to tell us Carol’s water has broken and she is in labor. They will wait until the contractions are stronger before going to the hospital. They will keep us posted. But we hear nothing further. We call later in the afternoon. No one answers their cell phones. We leave messages. It isn’t until almost midnight that Guy calls back. Everything is fine. Carol is almost completely dilated. It should not be much longer. Hours pass and again we hear nothing. I can’t sleep. What could be wrong? Why don’t we hear? Carol has worked so hard to convince her doctors to allow her as natural a birth as possible. She does not want drugs. She does not want an epidural or a C-section. Still we don’t hear. I try to go bed but toss about. My fears grow. Are things falling apart in our family? Has everything gone too well for us for too long? I tell myself this is illogical, superstitious.Five-thirty in the morning the phone rings. Finally. Benjamin Albert has been born, at almost 9 pounds. Everyone is okay although after 20 hours of labor, the doctors were forced to do a C-section. I am relieved, joyous, excited. I remind myself again how much I have to be thankful for. I have survived a threatening illness. Our first grandchild has entered the world safely. Our daughter is recovering well. I need now to move ahead with my life, embrace it fully with so much to be alive for. I’m not naïve; I know now that life is fragile, that mortality waits in our path no matter how often we dodge it. Our lives can change quickly – in the blink of an eye, as the cliché has it. Knowing that, I want to seize what I can of the life I have. One moment especially is the evening I have anticipated for a year – the October 16th launch of my novel in Charlotte. It will be the first time since my stroke to stand in front of an audience and read from my novel. I have told my publisher, Novello Press, that I intend to be there and I want to read and speak. I have not told them that I’m terrified. blog.asp?id=1011 http://www.miriamherin.com/blog.asp?id=1011 Home Monday, October 1st and forward- On the ride from Charlotte to Greensboro, I find it difficult to determine where I am. I have been on this stretch of I-85 an uncountable number of times. Why don’t I recognize anything? This is true even as we come into Greensboro. The scenery outside the car window appears cartoonish, with less depth. It is only when I am in the house and go to, of course, my computer that I realize the problem: it’s the way I see color. The hues of color seem as true as I saw them before the hemorrhage, but now they are less intense, in effect, bleached. I want to adjust the computer screen, brighten it. When I go outside, I experience another visual anomaly; large objects appear slightly truncated, particularly cars, as if I'm viewing them in fun house mirrors. My first days home are spent learning about my damaged vision, what I can see and not see. I find it difficult to read. Words fall off the left margin and when I try to read the newspaper, the columns bleed into each other. I realize that the loss in my left peripheral vision may affect what has always been my unique way of seeing – I am near-sighted in one eye, far-sighted in the other, which is why I have lived so long without glasses. Now, however, the left peripheral loss seems to affect reading, which has been the task of my left eye. I try to remember what the occupational therapist told me in the hospital about marking the left margin with red and blue dots. I try using my hand as a straight edge instead, but quickly give this up. Finally, I decide to just read and see if the brain will eventually find the words for me (for years my brain has seamlessly shifted between right eye and left eye for far and near vision). So every morning I attempt to read the newspaper without aids or gimmicks, and in a few days, the reading gets easier, although I still lose words off to the left. The physical therapist in the hospital warned me about walking about, that I needed to be extremely careful. I don’t have to be warned. The first day I move from handhold to handhold – couch, wall, chair, stair rail. I am quite nervous and run into things, bruising my shoulder, my side. Then comes an “aha” moment. If I turn my head slightly left, about 10 degrees, I can see the way ahead clearly. After a few days, this becomes natural, and I no longer think about it. Although I’m still physically weak, I begin daily jaunts around the house, counting my steps, and soon am less tired, more agile and sure-footed. The computer is a greater challenge. I find it difficult to read the screen or find what I’m looking for. The red buttons on the left to close a file don’t seem to exist. I try writing an e-mail and have to raise the type 50% which seems to take much of it off the screen where I lose it. One day I put together a group e-mail to let friends and family know how I’m doing, and it takes hours, particularly since I have to do it on Tom’s computer because I fried my keyboard knocking over a glass of water – on my left, of course. I have moments of great frustration and tears, but I keep at it and each day it gets easier. Tom loans me his drug-store reading glasses and that helps. In my worst moments, I tell myself to be calm, to remember how lucky I am. I do know that. The one time I give in to depression comes on a morning soon after I’m home, when I think how the neurologist in the hospital said it would take six months to a year to fully recover. I have promised myself to do whatever it takes to come back, as close to one hundred percent as I can, yet I also know that those same six months to a year are the most critical months to promote my novel. How can I possibly do both? Fortunately, I don’t stay depressed long. Too many people are supporting me, extending genuine concern. The overwhelming sense of love and care I felt in the hospital continues after I’m home. Friends from Charlotte and Chapel Hill visit me in Greensboro. A family from Ghana comes by to ask about my well-being, a Ghanian tradition when someone is ill. The family elder prays for my healing in a voice as resonant surely as God’s and I’m deeply moved. Others call, e-mail and send flowers and cards. Our church organizes volunteers to do food, and they bring us a wonderful meal each evening for a week (and offer more). After the less than exciting hospital food, dinner becomes a glorious feast. (I discover, in fact, how much little things mean, like hot coffee and the buttered toast at the diner where Tom and I eat breakfast on his days off.) The food and my ability to sleep soundly begin to restore my strength, although a night comes when I do not sleep, cannot sleep. Our son-in-law, Guy, calls in the afternoon from Kentucky to tell us Carol’s water has broken and she is in labor. They will wait until the contractions are stronger before going to the hospital. They will keep us posted. But we hear nothing further. We call later in the afternoon. No one answers their cell phones. We leave messages. It isn’t until almost midnight that Guy calls back. Everything is fine. Carol is almost completely dilated. It should not be much longer. Hours pass and again we hear nothing. I can’t sleep. What could be wrong? Why don’t we hear? Carol has worked so hard to convince her doctors to allow her as natural a birth as possible. She does not want drugs. She does not want an epidural or a C-section. Still we don’t hear. I try to go bed but toss about. My fears grow. Are things falling apart in our family? Has everything gone too well for us for too long? I tell myself this is illogical, superstitious.Five-thirty in the morning the phone rings. Finally. Benjamin Albert has been born, at almost 9 pounds. Everyone is okay although after 20 hours of labor, the doctors were forced to do a C-section. I am relieved, joyous, excited. I remind myself again how much I have to be thankful for. I have survived a threatening illness. Our first grandchild has entered the world safely. Our daughter is recovering well. I need now to move ahead with my life, embrace it fully with so much to be alive for. I’m not naïve; I know now that life is fragile, that mortality waits in our path no matter how often we dodge it. Our lives can change quickly – in the blink of an eye, as the cliché has it. Knowing that, I want to seize what I can of the life I have. One moment especially is the evening I have anticipated for a year – the October 16th launch of my novel in Charlotte. It will be the first time since my stroke to stand in front of an audience and read from my novel. I have told my publisher, Novello Press, that I intend to be there and I want to read and speak. I have not told them that I’m terrified. Miriam Herin Tue, 4 December 2007 Monday, September 24th – The Gaffney Emergency Room doctor is blunt: “This is bad. You’ve had a stroke and it’s bleeding.” I hear him clearly but experience no apprehension (later when I write about this in Part I of the Journal, I will find myself shaking). He tells me that they can’t deal with me in Gaffney and offers me options. I choose Carolinas Medical. Soon I am in an ambulance on the way to Charlotte. My friend Sara has tried to reach my husband without success on my cell phone, but has not left a message. In the ambulance my phone rings and I am able to get it from my pocket. It’s Tom calling back, thinking I had called to tell him about the reading in Greenville. I tell him quickly what’s happened and where I am. “I’ll meet you in Charlotte,” he tells me. Tuesday, September 25th – The hours of the night blur into day. I have no memory of what happens in the emergency room, other than that Tom is there. I tell him he has to call Amy, my publisher, that I can’t bear to tell her myself what’s happened. We are supposed to be in Atlanta on the weekend, at the Southern Independent Booksellers Conference, an important event for my novel. I don’t know when I leave the emergency room. At some point I am told that I’m in ICU. They attach me to an automatic blood pressure gauge. Whenever it starts up, it feels as if it will cut my arm in half. I still have a headache. Hospital personnel keep asking me if this is the worst headache I have ever had. “No. It isn‘t much different from normal headaches in the past.” They want to put me on a morphine drip. Tom cautions them that I don’t like strong pain medications. They try a slight drip. My head continues to hurt and I am sick at my stomach. Eventually, they halt the drip and go with Tylenol. Much better! The first thing I notice when I’m in a room is the clock on the wall. It puzzles me. I see it clearly, even with my visual loss. I see the hands and the numbers but I cannot discern what time it is. (The next day, I will re-teach myself to tell time. To do this, I mentally go back to grade school and those “big hands” and “little hands” and what each tells us. That’s all it takes and I gain a small insight into how people like newsman Bob Wodruff, injured in Iraq, reprogram their minds. The brain absorbs information immediately. What I will continue to think about the next few days are the soldiers with terrible head wounds from Iraq. Although their situations are so much worse than mine, I feel a new empathy for them.) I am surprised the first morning to find I have a male nurse. I have not been in a hospital since my children were born. Something new has been added! And I will quickly decide that it’s a very good addition. During the week, I will have five male nurses: 3 Davids, Rick and Alan. I fall in love with each of them: they are wonderful young men, with that special mix of strength and gentleness. Like angels, the real kind, who in biblical literature are all male. Wednesday, September 26th through Monday October 1st – One day runs into the next in a hospital. The door to my room constantly revolves with nurses and aides and five or six neurologists and brain surgeons (“standing by,” the surgeons tell me, in case they’re needed. Fortunately, they aren’t.) I am told by one neurologist that if I had to have a stroke, this was the best place in the brain to have it. The bleeding is walled off there, he explains. I am told that the cause of the stroke is probably high blood pressure and they are putting me on all kinds of medication. I’m told I’m on anti-seizure medicine. My primary neurologist explains that a brain injury can cause seizures, although I may not ever have seizures. I ask him if I should take the medication before I have any seizures or wait to see if I will. He decides it’s best to wait and that he will take me off the medication. I am told that the stroke has damaged my left peripheral vision and that I have what is called a “wide field cut" in my vision. I do my own experiments to see what I can see on the left side. I discover that very dramatically after several days when I get out of bed to go to the bathroom and the bathroom door opens suddenly in my face, as if by magic. I discover that Tom, who was seated at the foot of the bed, has gotten up to open the door for me, passing by my left side. I never saw him. After that, no one has to convince that I shouldn’t drive, at least for awhile. But I am also told, that some of the lost peripheral vision may come back. And that I can probably be trained to drive again. Slowly the headache goes away. I notice that scrawled on the bulletin board in my room is a short motivational message to my care team, that “excellence means no more headaches.” When I complain about the food to one of the nurses named David, he tells me that the chefs are from Johnson & Wales. Then he laughs and says he was a cook before he became a nurse. I ask him where and he names two of Charlotte’s best restaurants. I’m impressed. But he says he loves nursing. When I do my walk down the hallway, he talks about his two-year-old daughter who kept him awake all night. Another time, we talk about Northern Virginia where we have both lived. He tells me that his brother has recently died of war wounds from Iraq and now rests in Arlington Cemetery. He says he would like to read my novel. When Tom brings me one, he is off that day and I am going home. I leave him a copy at the nurses’ station. Through the week, I realize how many people are aware of my situation. I have never before had a serious illness. Now I receive phone calls and cards and flowers and messages sent through others. My daughter, Carol, who is about to deliver her first child in Kentucky, wants to fly to Charlotte. I tell her no, to stay put, we will communicate by phone. I talk with old and dear friends. I experience myself at the center of an incredible outpouring of concern. I will learn that during my illness I have been the beneficiary of thoughts and prayers from across the country and as far as my former grad school roommate in England and my nephew in Tonga. There are angels everywhere and I even receive call from a real angel, well, kind of real, my friend actor Leon Rippy, who plays the angel Earl on the TNT television series “Saving Grace.” Leon and his wife Carol tell me that the cast and crew of the show are praying for me. I know I should accept all of these expressions as what people “do” in times of crisis. I am, after all, a Methodist minister’s wife. But I have never been easy with religious language. I am a born questioner. How do I reach God? What is prayer? Does it really work? Yet I am deeply moved by these words of caring, and through the week, I feel an incredible sense of calm and well-being. [I will ask myself later if that is what beta-blockers do? Or was something far more profound at work? One thought about that: I continue to take beta-blockers, but am not nearly so calm in the weeks since the hospital!] As Sunday approaches, my doctors talk about releasing me. One neurologist hesitates. He says he is concerned that blood pressure may not be the cause of the stroke. He worries, because of the particular place in the brain where the bleeding occurred, that there might be what he calls an “underlying cause,” none of them very good – aneurism, tumor or a tangle of arteries. He wants to do an MRI. I sense that others of my doctors think differently or at least question an MRI at this point. I’m not concerned that they question each other. How else do scientists get at what’s true? I learn on Sunday that I will have the MRI that afternoon. Am I claustrophobic, they ask. “No,” I tell them and later tell the technician I was not bothered by the weird noises. “My son is a drummer,” I explain. blog.asp?id=1010 http://www.miriamherin.com/blog.asp?id=1010 Carolinas Medical Monday, September 24th – The Gaffney Emergency Room doctor is blunt: “This is bad. You’ve had a stroke and it’s bleeding.” I hear him clearly but experience no apprehension (later when I write about this in Part I of the Journal, I will find myself shaking). He tells me that they can’t deal with me in Gaffney and offers me options. I choose Carolinas Medical. Soon I am in an ambulance on the way to Charlotte. My friend Sara has tried to reach my husband without success on my cell phone, but has not left a message. In the ambulance my phone rings and I am able to get it from my pocket. It’s Tom calling back, thinking I had called to tell him about the reading in Greenville. I tell him quickly what’s happened and where I am. “I’ll meet you in Charlotte,” he tells me. Tuesday, September 25th – The hours of the night blur into day. I have no memory of what happens in the emergency room, other than that Tom is there. I tell him he has to call Amy, my publisher, that I can’t bear to tell her myself what’s happened. We are supposed to be in Atlanta on the weekend, at the Southern Independent Booksellers Conference, an important event for my novel. I don’t know when I leave the emergency room. At some point I am told that I’m in ICU. They attach me to an automatic blood pressure gauge. Whenever it starts up, it feels as if it will cut my arm in half. I still have a headache. Hospital personnel keep asking me if this is the worst headache I have ever had. “No. It isn‘t much different from normal headaches in the past.” They want to put me on a morphine drip. Tom cautions them that I don’t like strong pain medications. They try a slight drip. My head continues to hurt and I am sick at my stomach. Eventually, they halt the drip and go with Tylenol. Much better! The first thing I notice when I’m in a room is the clock on the wall. It puzzles me. I see it clearly, even with my visual loss. I see the hands and the numbers but I cannot discern what time it is. (The next day, I will re-teach myself to tell time. To do this, I mentally go back to grade school and those “big hands” and “little hands” and what each tells us. That’s all it takes and I gain a small insight into how people like newsman Bob Wodruff, injured in Iraq, reprogram their minds. The brain absorbs information immediately. What I will continue to think about the next few days are the soldiers with terrible head wounds from Iraq. Although their situations are so much worse than mine, I feel a new empathy for them.) I am surprised the first morning to find I have a male nurse. I have not been in a hospital since my children were born. Something new has been added! And I will quickly decide that it’s a very good addition. During the week, I will have five male nurses: 3 Davids, Rick and Alan. I fall in love with each of them: they are wonderful young men, with that special mix of strength and gentleness. Like angels, the real kind, who in biblical literature are all male. Wednesday, September 26th through Monday October 1st – One day runs into the next in a hospital. The door to my room constantly revolves with nurses and aides and five or six neurologists and brain surgeons (“standing by,” the surgeons tell me, in case they’re needed. Fortunately, they aren’t.) I am told by one neurologist that if I had to have a stroke, this was the best place in the brain to have it. The bleeding is walled off there, he explains. I am told that the cause of the stroke is probably high blood pressure and they are putting me on all kinds of medication. I’m told I’m on anti-seizure medicine. My primary neurologist explains that a brain injury can cause seizures, although I may not ever have seizures. I ask him if I should take the medication before I have any seizures or wait to see if I will. He decides it’s best to wait and that he will take me off the medication. I am told that the stroke has damaged my left peripheral vision and that I have what is called a “wide field cut" in my vision. I do my own experiments to see what I can see on the left side. I discover that very dramatically after several days when I get out of bed to go to the bathroom and the bathroom door opens suddenly in my face, as if by magic. I discover that Tom, who was seated at the foot of the bed, has gotten up to open the door for me, passing by my left side. I never saw him. After that, no one has to convince that I shouldn’t drive, at least for awhile. But I am also told, that some of the lost peripheral vision may come back. And that I can probably be trained to drive again. Slowly the headache goes away. I notice that scrawled on the bulletin board in my room is a short motivational message to my care team, that “excellence means no more headaches.” When I complain about the food to one of the nurses named David, he tells me that the chefs are from Johnson & Wales. Then he laughs and says he was a cook before he became a nurse. I ask him where and he names two of Charlotte’s best restaurants. I’m impressed. But he says he loves nursing. When I do my walk down the hallway, he talks about his two-year-old daughter who kept him awake all night. Another time, we talk about Northern Virginia where we have both lived. He tells me that his brother has recently died of war wounds from Iraq and now rests in Arlington Cemetery. He says he would like to read my novel. When Tom brings me one, he is off that day and I am going home. I leave him a copy at the nurses’ station. Through the week, I realize how many people are aware of my situation. I have never before had a serious illness. Now I receive phone calls and cards and flowers and messages sent through others. My daughter, Carol, who is about to deliver her first child in Kentucky, wants to fly to Charlotte. I tell her no, to stay put, we will communicate by phone. I talk with old and dear friends. I experience myself at the center of an incredible outpouring of concern. I will learn that during my illness I have been the beneficiary of thoughts and prayers from across the country and as far as my former grad school roommate in England and my nephew in Tonga. There are angels everywhere and I even receive call from a real angel, well, kind of real, my friend actor Leon Rippy, who plays the angel Earl on the TNT television series “Saving Grace.” Leon and his wife Carol tell me that the cast and crew of the show are praying for me. I know I should accept all of these expressions as what people “do” in times of crisis. I am, after all, a Methodist minister’s wife. But I have never been easy with religious language. I am a born questioner. How do I reach God? What is prayer? Does it really work? Yet I am deeply moved by these words of caring, and through the week, I feel an incredible sense of calm and well-being. [I will ask myself later if that is what beta-blockers do? Or was something far more profound at work? One thought about that: I continue to take beta-blockers, but am not nearly so calm in the weeks since the hospital!] As Sunday approaches, my doctors talk about releasing me. One neurologist hesitates. He says he is concerned that blood pressure may not be the cause of the stroke. He worries, because of the particular place in the brain where the bleeding occurred, that there might be what he calls an “underlying cause,” none of them very good – aneurism, tumor or a tangle of arteries. He wants to do an MRI. I sense that others of my doctors think differently or at least question an MRI at this point. I’m not concerned that they question each other. How else do scientists get at what’s true? I learn on Sunday that I will have the MRI that afternoon. Am I claustrophobic, they ask. “No,” I tell them and later tell the technician I was not bothered by the weird noises. “My son is a drummer,” I explain. Miriam Herin Wed, 14 November 2007 Wednesday, September 19th – I see the box on my doorstep when I pull into my driveway. But I wait until Tom comes home to open it. He’s surprised: “How could you wait that long?” he asks. “It’s more fun this way,” I tell him. So together we open the box with my twenty personal copies and I hold my published novel, carefully like I might break it. I open it, turn the pages. It is beautifully crafted, the cover, the paper, the typeface. I check my emotional temperature but can’t get a read. How should I feel? I have waited for this for years. Tom snaps two photos of me by the open box and says the camera shows a happy woman. The camera knows. Monday, September 24th – This will be a busy day, ending with my first reading in Greenville, South Carolina. I drive to Charlotte that morning and meet with Amy Rogers, Novello’s Publisher. We talk over coffee at Starbucks. Afterwards, she gives me more boxes of books, some for the reading that night, some for two events later in the week: a talk in Charlotte on Thursday and the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance meeting in Atlanta on the weekend. The Atlanta event is important. There I will meet the people who will actually sell my book. I leave Charlotte and drive to Gaffney, South Carolina, where my friend Sara is expecting me. She will go with me to Greenville and I will come back and spend the night with her in Gaffney. I park in her driveway and knock on her door, but she doesn’t answer. I see lights in the studio over the garage. Sara is an artist, preparing for a show in Spartanburg the next week. I climb the stairs and find her framing artwork. We talk while she works and later over the dinner she has fixed. She tells me her friend Lynne is going to Greenville with us. We drive to Greenville and find the Handlebar Restaurant where the reading will be in an adjoining room. I’m surprised to see a bus unloading governor’s school kids in the parking lot. I had planned an opening line about how it isn’t often that we get to be a virgin again but tonight I am just that with my “maiden book” and “maiden reading.” Is that appropriate for high school students? I decide not to use the line and begin my reading with a silly story aimed at the high school kids about taking my children to a Broadway play that was more adult than they were. No one laughs and I believe I have begun badly. [Later my daughter, a high school Theater and English teacher, will tell me I failed to respect those students for their maturity and I know she is right – first lesson learned] I begin reading the novel’s opening pages. This goes better. I am into another section when I realize I can’t see all the words on the page — I’m having a migraine, in which I develop blind spots in my vision accompanied by an aura. It will last only 20 minutes and then I will be fine, so I keep reading. I find it more difficult to see the page. I make up words. This is not going well. Blessedly, my time is up. I find a seat to listen to poet Susan Meyers, who is sharing the reading with me. The migraine is not going away. When the readings are over, I try to talk to people but find I am having difficulty seeing. Perhaps because the reading room is so dark. I bump into tables and people. I need to get books from my car to sell, but I can’t find my car. Mike, the husband of one of the event organizers, goes with me, leading me into the parking lot, while I punch the buttons on my key chain to get my car lights to blink. I am having a migraine, I tell Mike. I explain that to my friends and others of the audience. When the event ends, the migraine has still not cleared up. I am not able to drive. Lynne says she can drive my car to Gaffney. I am getting a headache, an unusual symptom for my particular kind of migraine. Sara asks if we should go by the Spartanburg Hospital Emergency Room. I don’t think so, I say. At her house in Gaffney, she asks me again and before I answer she finds a piece of paper and asks me questions about my symptoms. “You answered yes to two of these,” she says. “I’m calling the Rescue Squad.” I don’t argue. They arrive quickly and two nice young men lift me onto a gurney and into an ambulance. I soon find myself at the Gaffney hospital. They do a Cat-Scan and the doctor takes a look at it. Later I remember nothing of what he looks like. But I remember what he says: “This is bad. You’ve had a stroke and it’s bleeding.” blog.asp?id=1009 http://www.miriamherin.com/blog.asp?id=1009 Greenville Wednesday, September 19th – I see the box on my doorstep when I pull into my driveway. But I wait until Tom comes home to open it. He’s surprised: “How could you wait that long?” he asks. “It’s more fun this way,” I tell him. So together we open the box with my twenty personal copies and I hold my published novel, carefully like I might break it. I open it, turn the pages. It is beautifully crafted, the cover, the paper, the typeface. I check my emotional temperature but can’t get a read. How should I feel? I have waited for this for years. Tom snaps two photos of me by the open box and says the camera shows a happy woman. The camera knows. Monday, September 24th – This will be a busy day, ending with my first reading in Greenville, South Carolina. I drive to Charlotte that morning and meet with Amy Rogers, Novello’s Publisher. We talk over coffee at Starbucks. Afterwards, she gives me more boxes of books, some for the reading that night, some for two events later in the week: a talk in Charlotte on Thursday and the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance meeting in Atlanta on the weekend. The Atlanta event is important. There I will meet the people who will actually sell my book. I leave Charlotte and drive to Gaffney, South Carolina, where my friend Sara is expecting me. She will go with me to Greenville and I will come back and spend the night with her in Gaffney. I park in her driveway and knock on her door, but she doesn’t answer. I see lights in the studio over the garage. Sara is an artist, preparing for a show in Spartanburg the next week. I climb the stairs and find her framing artwork. We talk while she works and later over the dinner she has fixed. She tells me her friend Lynne is going to Greenville with us. We drive to Greenville and find the Handlebar Restaurant where the reading will be in an adjoining room. I’m surprised to see a bus unloading governor’s school kids in the parking lot. I had planned an opening line about how it isn’t often that we get to be a virgin again but tonight I am just that with my “maiden book” and “maiden reading.” Is that appropriate for high school students? I decide not to use the line and begin my reading with a silly story aimed at the high school kids about taking my children to a Broadway play that was more adult than they were. No one laughs and I believe I have begun badly. [Later my daughter, a high school Theater and English teacher, will tell me I failed to respect those students for their maturity and I know she is right – first lesson learned] I begin reading the novel’s opening pages. This goes better. I am into another section when I realize I can’t see all the words on the page — I’m having a migraine, in which I develop blind spots in my vision accompanied by an aura. It will last only 20 minutes and then I will be fine, so I keep reading. I find it more difficult to see the page. I make up words. This is not going well. Blessedly, my time is up. I find a seat to listen to poet Susan Meyers, who is sharing the reading with me. The migraine is not going away. When the readings are over, I try to talk to people but find I am having difficulty seeing. Perhaps because the reading room is so dark. I bump into tables and people. I need to get books from my car to sell, but I can’t find my car. Mike, the husband of one of the event organizers, goes with me, leading me into the parking lot, while I punch the buttons on my key chain to get my car lights to blink. I am having a migraine, I tell Mike. I explain that to my friends and others of the audience. When the event ends, the migraine has still not cleared up. I am not able to drive. Lynne says she can drive my car to Gaffney. I am getting a headache, an unusual symptom for my particular kind of migraine. Sara asks if we should go by the Spartanburg Hospital Emergency Room. I don’t think so, I say. At her house in Gaffney, she asks me again and before I answer she finds a piece of paper and asks me questions about my symptoms. “You answered yes to two of these,” she says. “I’m calling the Rescue Squad.” I don’t argue. They arrive quickly and two nice young men lift me onto a gurney and into an ambulance. I soon find myself at the Gaffney hospital. They do a Cat-Scan and the doctor takes a look at it. Later I remember nothing of what he looks like. But I remember what he says: “This is bad. You’ve had a stroke and it’s bleeding.” Miriam Herin Thu, 1 November 2007 Was your husband in Vietnam? Is Maggie’s story your story? Did you live in New York City? These are questions I have been asked even before publication of Absolution. And I expect more such questions as people read the novel. That’s because readers often expect a novel to mirror the writer’s life. But what occurs in the creation of fiction is far more complex and mysterious than writing autobiography. I call it “fictional alchemy.” You probably know that alchemy was the process by which medieval scientists and sorcerers tried to transform ordinary metals into gold. Well, writers of fiction are like that too. We try to transform the elemental stuff of our lives into stories – stories about people who often aren’t at all like us. The old adage “write what you know” is the most obvious of truisms for novelists. For how can we possibly write what we don’t know? A novel grows out of every experience I have ever had, every book I have ever read, every person I have ever known, every iota of information I have ever unearthed through research. Those are the elements of my life that are transformed through the creative process into fictional lives and places. Here’s how this works. For example, was my husband in Vietnam? No. Have I ever been to Vietnam? No. But I have known people who served there. I have talked with veterans of Vietnam and veterans of other wars. I have read accounts of soldiers in books and on the web. Do you know what amazing treasures can be found on the Internet? I discovered an entire set of U.S. military maps used in the Vietnam War. And through GPS sites, I can sit at my desk in North Carolina and actually look at the present-day terrain of Vietnam’s Central Highlands! But what about Maggie’s story? Is that my story? Not even close, although I drew on personal experiences as I developed her character. I too came of age in the 1960’s. I too came to oppose the war when I was a student. The sum total of my anti-war activism, however, was participating in the 1968 October Moratorium Against the War on the University of South Carolina campus. I helped circulate a petition against the war and sat up all night with other students while the names of the war dead were read. I sang “Give Peace a Chance.” You can see that I was not a very active activist. My awareness of the Vietnam War and the anti-war movement in those days came to me as it came to most Americans – through newspapers and TV. Finally, have I ever lived in New York City? Yes, I have. I lived there for two years in the early 1970’s, just after the events I describe in the novel – the Wall Street anti-war rally and the attack on the protestors – events that actually occurred following the Kent State shootings. Oddly enough, when I lived in New York, I knew nothing about that rally. I learned about it many years later in my research for this novel. But there is one thing in Absolution that is taken directly from my life in New York – that squalid apartment where Maggie and Baird lived. I rented that apartment for a year! And although an anti-war activist lived just down the hall, my apartment was home only to me and three cats. But in the alchemy of fiction, I am able to do anything I want with that apartment. I can put Maggie and Baird there or a serial killer or a poet or a family of Puerto Ricans. That’s how the creative imagination works. So the next time you read a novel and wonder about the influence of a writer’s life on the story and characters, remember this: the stories writers create are certainly shaped by their experiences and knowledge. But the bottom line is this: novelists love to make things up! blog.asp?id=1008 http://www.miriamherin.com/blog.asp?id=1008 n/a Was your husband in Vietnam? Is Maggie’s story your story? Did you live in New York City? These are questions I have been asked even before publication of Absolution. And I expect more such questions as people read the novel. That’s because readers often expect a novel to mirror the writer’s life. But what occurs in the creation of fiction is far more complex and mysterious than writing autobiography. I call it “fictional alchemy.” You probably know that alchemy was the process by which medieval scientists and sorcerers tried to transform ordinary metals into gold. Well, writers of fiction are like that too. We try to transform the elemental stuff of our lives into stories – stories about people who often aren’t at all like us. The old adage “write what you know” is the most obvious of truisms for novelists. For how can we possibly write what we don’t know? A novel grows out of every experience I have ever had, every book I have ever read, every person I have ever known, every iota of information I have ever unearthed through research. Those are the elements of my life that are transformed through the creative process into fictional lives and places. Here’s how this works. For example, was my husband in Vietnam? No. Have I ever been to Vietnam? No. But I have known people who served there. I have talked with veterans of Vietnam and veterans of other wars. I have read accounts of soldiers in books and on the web. Do you know what amazing treasures can be found on the Internet? I discovered an entire set of U.S. military maps used in the Vietnam War. And through GPS sites, I can sit at my desk in North Carolina and actually look at the present-day terrain of Vietnam’s Central Highlands! But what about Maggie’s story? Is that my story? Not even close, although I drew on personal experiences as I developed her character. I too came of age in the 1960’s. I too came to oppose the war when I was a student. The sum total of my anti-war activism, however, was participating in the 1968 October Moratorium Against the War on the University of South Carolina campus. I helped circulate a petition against the war and sat up all night with other students while the names of the war dead were read. I sang “Give Peace a Chance.” You can see that I was not a very active activist. My awareness of the Vietnam War and the anti-war movement in those days came to me as it came to most Americans – through newspapers and TV. Finally, have I ever lived in New York City? Yes, I have. I lived there for two years in the early 1970’s, just after the events I describe in the novel – the Wall Street anti-war rally and the attack on the protestors – events that actually occurred following the Kent State shootings. Oddly enough, when I lived in New York, I knew nothing about that rally. I learned about it many years later in my research for this novel. But there is one thing in Absolution that is taken directly from my life in New York – that squalid apartment where Maggie and Baird lived. I rented that apartment for a year! And although an anti-war activist lived just down the hall, my apartment was home only to me and three cats. But in the alchemy of fiction, I am able to do anything I want with that apartment. I can put Maggie and Baird there or a serial killer or a poet or a family of Puerto Ricans. That’s how the creative imagination works. So the next time you read a novel and wonder about the influence of a writer’s life on the story and characters, remember this: the stories writers create are certainly shaped by their experiences and knowledge. But the bottom line is this: novelists love to make things up! Miriam Herin Tue, 7 August 2007 When I talk about plot wars, I’m talking about the decisions facing writers when we shape and tighten a work of long fiction. What do we leave in? What do we take out? The novel as a literary form has traditionally lent itself to flab, but in today’s markets, flab is out. Here’s one of those train scenes that I cut from the final draft of Absolution. It’s a scene I hated cutting. Most people who read the scene liked it, and I really liked it. I liked the way it unfolded from summer’s idyll to something darker. When you write a passage that pleases you, you never want to let it go. But this time I did. See what you think.The scene is a flashback to the summer Maggie was ten, when she and Jim Scott, a neighbor boy, sneaked off to the train tracks near her family’s farm.“Hurry, Maggie, we don’t have much time,” he called back to her. She was barefoot and the brush scratched her feet. She kept her head down, avoiding the broken glass in the high weeds and climbed the bank to the tracks, panting. The sharp gravel between the ties cut her feet.“This is scary, Jim Scott. Don’t you get me in trouble.”“No trouble. We won’t be here long. Give me your nickel.”She handed him the coin that she’d been clutching in her sweaty hand, and he got a dime from his pocket and placed the two coins on a rail of the tracks. He squatted down and leaned his ear against the same rail.“Listen, see if you can hear it.”Maggie leaned down. The steel was hot on her cheek. “I don’t hear anything.”“You’re not listening right.” “Well all I get is a burned face.” She walked away from him down the track, balancing on one rail. The rail was hot too and she kept jumping off. Jim Scott had on sneakers but when he tried balancing, his feet kept slipping. She laughed at him and he stuck out his tongue and then all of a sudden they heard the train whistle, close.“Let’s get,” Jim Scott cried and they ran, skidding down the bank into the high weeds at the bottom. Maggie lay on her stomach, feeling the itch of grass on her legs as the train roared down the tracks. The wheels squealed like a pig at slaughter and the ground thundered as if a regiment of horsemen galloped over them. Maggie put her hands to her ears and flattened herself against the earth, feeling the quake as a rumble deep in her belly. She breathed in dirt and clover and grass. “Wow,” she said when the train had vanished around the curve. “Wow, Jim Scott, that was something.”“Yeah.” He grinned. “Like being in a tornado.” He darted up the bank. “Come on.”They found their coins, squashed into thin uneven circles like pieces of tin. “I didn’t know a train could do that.” “It just tells you that you don’t ever want to get in the way of one.”They walked along the tracks. Maggie hop-scotched from tie to tie. “You think they pee on the tracks, Jim Scott, or number two when they go to the bathroom?”“I peed on the track when I rode a train to Baltimore to see my grandparents. When you flush, a thing opens up in the bottom of the toilet. You can see the ground rushing by. It’s pretty neat.”“Ugh.” She stepped off the ties and walked outside the rails.Jim Scott ran in front of her and started singing “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.” He got to “all the live-long day,” but instead of singing the word “day” he broke off and yelled “damn!”She wasn’t looking at him. She’d spotted a piece of red glass beside the track and was leaning down to get it. “Come here, Maggie.” Jim Scott’s voice was quivery, like he didn’t want to talk loud. She tossed the piece of glass away and went. He was standing dead still, pointing to a tangle of vines.“What?”“There.” She looked. A tiny hand poked through the vines."So? Somebody's baby doll, I guess. Probably grew up and didn’t want it anymore.” “That’s not a baby doll,” Jim Scott said, putting spaces between his words like he was sounding out a vocabulary lesson. That scared Maggie so that she wanted to turn away and run, but couldn’t. The little hand was stiff like a porcelain doll, fingers curled but not quite balled into a fist. The color of it was odd, dark, like it was bruised.“Is it dead?” she whispered. “It’s got to be dead.” They stood there like two posts in the ground. The hand didn’t move. Jim Scott finally broke the spell.“Wait here, Maggie. I’ll get something.”“I’m going with you.”They went a few yards down the tracks. Jim Scott walked into the brush and came up with a long stick. She followed him back to the heavy vines, slowing to keep from getting close to the bruised hand. Jim Scott pushed the vines away with the stick.“It’s a dead baby,” Jim Scott said. “It’s somebody’s dead baby.”He probed with the stick. Maggie didn’t look. She didn’t want to see somebody’s dead baby. “Colored baby, that’s what I’d say, look at the hair. Jesus God Almighty.”“Don’t cuss, Jim Scott. Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain.” She stayed turned away. “Not very old, I’d bet. Boy baby.” “Hush, Jim Scott. You’re scaring me. What are we going to do? I’m not supposed to be over here with you. Mamma told me never to go around the railroad tracks. I’ll be in big trouble if she finds out.”“There’s nothing to do. Baby’s dead. I bet nobody’s going to come looking for it, what you think?”“I’m too scared to think.” “Well, let’s get out of here. When we get home, I’ll tell my brother. He’ll know what to do. I won’t tell you were here with me.” They raced down the bank and through the woods to the house, neither of them talking. She didn’t see Jim Scott for a week afterwards. She didn’t want to see him. When she ran into him at the feed and seed, he took her out back and told her that his brother said it wasn’t any of their business. “What a nigger does with her bastard baby doesn’t concern us none,” were the exact words Jim Scott used, apologizing for having to say the word bastard. She never knew if he told anyone else. She didn’t tell anyone, although she tried to get up the nerve to tell her father but couldn’t find the right time. Months later, she dreamed she heard a baby crying outside her window. She came awake with thunder rumbling and flashes of lightning in the sky. She pulled the quilt over her head and thought about the baby lying in the rain, rotting into the ground like a dead dog. * * * * * * Well? Should I have cut this scene? I believe I should have. Because if you’ve read Absolution, you’ll see that this scene doesn’t really have a whole lot to do with the plot or theme of the novel. Yes, I like it. But it really isn’t important to the work as a whole. Does that mean I’ll throw it away? Yes and no. I’ve thrown it out of Absolution, but I keep all old drafts in files on my computer (and backed up on disks). Who knows? It might very well show up in another novel. There’s a scene in Absolution that came from a draft of an earlier unpublished novel about characters who aren’t at all like those in Absolution. I won’t tell you which scene that is. I’ll only tell you that I think it works just fine with the plot of Absolution. blog.asp?id=1007 http://www.miriamherin.com/blog.asp?id=1007 Plot Wars When I talk about plot wars, I’m talking about the decisions facing writers when we shape and tighten a work of long fiction. What do we leave in? What do we take out? The novel as a literary form has traditionally lent itself to flab, but in today’s markets, flab is out. Here’s one of those train scenes that I cut from the final draft of Absolution. It’s a scene I hated cutting. Most people who read the scene liked it, and I really liked it. I liked the way it unfolded from summer’s idyll to something darker. When you write a passage that pleases you, you never want to let it go. But this time I did. See what you think.The scene is a flashback to the summer Maggie was ten, when she and Jim Scott, a neighbor boy, sneaked off to the train tracks near her family’s farm.“Hurry, Maggie, we don’t have much time,” he called back to her. She was barefoot and the brush scratched her feet. She kept her head down, avoiding the broken glass in the high weeds and climbed the bank to the tracks, panting. The sharp gravel between the ties cut her feet.“This is scary, Jim Scott. Don’t you get me in trouble.”“No trouble. We won’t be here long. Give me your nickel.”She handed him the coin that she’d been clutching in her sweaty hand, and he got a dime from his pocket and placed the two coins on a rail of the tracks. He squatted down and leaned his ear against the same rail.“Listen, see if you can hear it.”Maggie leaned down. The steel was hot on her cheek. “I don’t hear anything.”“You’re not listening right.” “Well all I get is a burned face.” She walked away from him down the track, balancing on one rail. The rail was hot too and she kept jumping off. Jim Scott had on sneakers but when he tried balancing, his feet kept slipping. She laughed at him and he stuck out his tongue and then all of a sudden they heard the train whistle, close.“Let’s get,” Jim Scott cried and they ran, skidding down the bank into the high weeds at the bottom. Maggie lay on her stomach, feeling the itch of grass on her legs as the train roared down the tracks. The wheels squealed like a pig at slaughter and the ground thundered as if a regiment of horsemen galloped over them. Maggie put her hands to her ears and flattened herself against the earth, feeling the quake as a rumble deep in her belly. She breathed in dirt and clover and grass. “Wow,” she said when the train had vanished around the curve. “Wow, Jim Scott, that was something.”“Yeah.” He grinned. “Like being in a tornado.” He darted up the bank. “Come on.”They found their coins, squashed into thin uneven circles like pieces of tin. “I didn’t know a train could do that.” “It just tells you that you don’t ever want to get in the way of one.”They walked along the tracks. Maggie hop-scotched from tie to tie. “You think they pee on the tracks, Jim Scott, or number two when they go to the bathroom?”“I peed on the track when I rode a train to Baltimore to see my grandparents. When you flush, a thing opens up in the bottom of the toilet. You can see the ground rushing by. It’s pretty neat.”“Ugh.” She stepped off the ties and walked outside the rails.Jim Scott ran in front of her and started singing “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.” He got to “all the live-long day,” but instead of singing the word “day” he broke off and yelled “damn!”She wasn’t looking at him. She’d spotted a piece of red glass beside the track and was leaning down to get it. “Come here, Maggie.” Jim Scott’s voice was quivery, like he didn’t want to talk loud. She tossed the piece of glass away and went. He was standing dead still, pointing to a tangle of vines.“What?”“There.” She looked. A tiny hand poked through the vines."So? Somebody's baby doll, I guess. Probably grew up and didn’t want it anymore.” “That’s not a baby doll,” Jim Scott said, putting spaces between his words like he was sounding out a vocabulary lesson. That scared Maggie so that she wanted to turn away and run, but couldn’t. The little hand was stiff like a porcelain doll, fingers curled but not quite balled into a fist. The color of it was odd, dark, like it was bruised.“Is it dead?” she whispered. “It’s got to be dead.” They stood there like two posts in the ground. The hand didn’t move. Jim Scott finally broke the spell.“Wait here, Maggie. I’ll get something.”“I’m going with you.”They went a few yards down the tracks. Jim Scott walked into the brush and came up with a long stick. She followed him back to the heavy vines, slowing to keep from getting close to the bruised hand. Jim Scott pushed the vines away with the stick.“It’s a dead baby,” Jim Scott said. “It’s somebody’s dead baby.”He probed with the stick. Maggie didn’t look. She didn’t want to see somebody’s dead baby. “Colored baby, that’s what I’d say, look at the hair. Jesus God Almighty.”“Don’t cuss, Jim Scott. Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain.” She stayed turned away. “Not very old, I’d bet. Boy baby.” “Hush, Jim Scott. You’re scaring me. What are we going to do? I’m not supposed to be over here with you. Mamma told me never to go around the railroad tracks. I’ll be in big trouble if she finds out.”“There’s nothing to do. Baby’s dead. I bet nobody’s going to come looking for it, what you think?”“I’m too scared to think.” “Well, let’s get out of here. When we get home, I’ll tell my brother. He’ll know what to do. I won’t tell you were here with me.” They raced down the bank and through the woods to the house, neither of them talking. She didn’t see Jim Scott for a week afterwards. She didn’t want to see him. When she ran into him at the feed and seed, he took her out back and told her that his brother said it wasn’t any of their business. “What a nigger does with her bastard baby doesn’t concern us none,” were the exact words Jim Scott used, apologizing for having to say the word bastard. She never knew if he told anyone else. She didn’t tell anyone, although she tried to get up the nerve to tell her father but couldn’t find the right time. Months later, she dreamed she heard a baby crying outside her window. She came awake with thunder rumbling and flashes of lightning in the sky. She pulled the quilt over her head and thought about the baby lying in the rain, rotting into the ground like a dead dog. * * * * * * Well? Should I have cut this scene? I believe I should have. Because if you’ve read Absolution, you’ll see that this scene doesn’t really have a whole lot to do with the plot or theme of the novel. Yes, I like it. But it really isn’t important to the work as a whole. Does that mean I’ll throw it away? Yes and no. I’ve thrown it out of Absolution, but I keep all old drafts in files on my computer (and backed up on disks). Who knows? It might very well show up in another novel. There’s a scene in Absolution that came from a draft of an earlier unpublished novel about characters who aren’t at all like those in Absolution. I won’t tell you which scene that is. I’ll only tell you that I think it works just fine with the plot of Absolution. Miriam Herin Sun, 1 July 2007 I’m sometimes asked how I choose what to write about. There’s no easy answer. Sometimes I choose a character, sometimes a story, sometimes a place. Sometimes a story chooses me. Take Absolution, for example. The spark for this novel began years ago with a single word that I typed on a blank page in Microsoft Word. Trains. Now if you’ve read the book, you know there are no trains in it, apart from subways and Maggie’s dream where she wanders along railroad tracks. So what happened? First, I’ll tell you why I began with trains. You see, I have had a lifelong love of trains. My father went to work for the railroads when he was seventeen, riding in baggage cars and handling packages and mail. Later, he shipped race horses to and from Hialeah and spent his career working for Railway Express. When I was a child I loved to walk beside him through the Miami shipping terminal checking out the dogs and cats, alone and lonely in freight cartons and quite happy to see me. (photo: the old Miami FEC station and railyard with the REA terminal at arrow) Once my whole family we