Wishes fulfilled
For a year, noted essayist, author and SSU professor Noelle Oxenhandler studied the phenomenon of wishing and dared to see if her own wishes could come true ...
Published: Sunday, September 7, 2008 at 3:40 a.m.
Last Modified: Sunday, September 7, 2008 at 6:08 a.m.
Desire is a passive thing. But a wish? That act of tossing a coin in a fountain or blowing out birthday candles, whether done with faint hope or certitude, like Cupid's arrow takes direct aim.
And if, as Emily Dickinson famously wrote, "Hope is the thing with feathers," then a wish, says writer Noelle Oxenhandler, "is a desire with feathers -- an arrow's feathers and an arrow's sharp tip."
"Only with both arrows and sharp tip," she concludes in her new book, "The Wishing Year: A House, A Man, My Soul," can a wish "snag its object . . . crossing the threshold from idea in the mind to actual occurrence."
The Glen Ellen essayist and memoirist whose lyrical voice has been widely published in such respected literary venues as the New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine, spent an entire year following her own arrows of desire to reach a greater understanding about wishing.
She learns that wishes, whether you believe they are divined by a higher force or drawn by the law of attraction, can come true. Since the subtitle is "A Memoir of Fulfilled Desire," it's not spilling the beans to say that the writer finished her 50th year with all her wishes realized.
"I honestly don't know what I would have done. I probably would have had to write a very different book if my wishes didn't come true," she reflects, sipping green iced tea on a Sonoma Valley evening sticky with August heat.
The petite author who for decades has been a student of meditation and Zen Buddhism, is a portrait of serenity in silk floral dress. She's seated in a peachy and powder blue room that smells faintly of incense.
Readers expecting an easy-to-digest self-help book or something light to throw into a beach bag may be surprised. Oxenhandler sprinkles her writing with a playfulness as pleasant as fairy dust. But she girds her narrative with scholarly references and research, drawing from mythology, philosophy, theology and psychology.
"I'm not interested in talking about myself for the sake of talking about myself. I'm interested in using my own experience to explore an idea," says Oxenhandler, who also teaches creative writing at Sonoma State University and will give the opening talk at the Sonoma County Book Festival Sept. 20.
With a graduate degree in philosophy as well as creative writing, Oxenhandler typically weaves a personal thread through big themes with social implications. Her previous books include "A Grief Out of Season," (Little Brown, 1991), in which she examines, through her own experience, the unique pain of young adults facing the divorce of their parents.
"The Eros Of Parenthood" (St. Martin's Press, 2001), inspired by the overwhelming connection she felt with her now 22-year-old daughter, proved a provocative look at "the last taboo," the powerfully sensual nectar -- rarely articulated but biologically functional -- that draws parent to child. The book sprang from an essay in the New Yorker that sparked such a furor that publishers and agents were bombarding her for a book deal.
Not every reader gets it, she sighs. She may well be referring to the niggling first poster on Amazon (where her book has consistently ranked within the top 10,000 books sold since its July release) who referred to her as "a reluctant memoirist" who "does not reveal the most essential things."
"Memoir, by definition, is a slice of someone's experience. It's not autobiography where you find out everything but the kitchen sink," she says quietly but with the conviction of one who both practices the genre and teaches it. "You focus on a period of life or a particular dimension of life."
The book has been likened by some to popular, one-year odysseys such as Elizabeth Gilbert's "Eat, Pray, Love." But Oxenhandler says she is drawing from an older tradition.
"Henry David Thoreau contemplating his hill of beans is a memoirist, as is Kathryn Harrison ('The Kiss') in revealing she had incest with her father. That's what I love about the genre, as in George Orwell and 'Down and Out in Paris and London' . . . it's an incredibly rich tradition."
Oxenhandler, 56, says she gravitates toward topics that deal with personal things she's driven to explore. A move across country became an "Object Lesson" for the New Yorker on the ritual of packing and one's relationship to objects. The 1993 kidnapping of Polly Klaas moved her to write of a mother's darkest fear in "Polly's Face," also for the New Yorker.
The idea of engaging in "an experiment in desire" as she first called it, evolved organically as she faced a midlife awakening at 50.
She had already begun delving into the mysteries of wishing when she embarked on a yearlong personal experiment. She found herself fighting skepticism as well as her own tendency to always take the hard road and "drag something heavy," like Jesus and the Cross or St. Bernadette gathering her sticks.
Throughout her year of wishful thinking, Oxenhandler did not necessarily come to believe in magic even though she got her three wishes for spiritual healing after a painful disconnect, a home of her own in a housing market gone haywire and her perfect man whose description she outlined on a piece of paper tucked between her mattresses. Through a phone call from a fan came Nicholas, her dream man made manifest.
Over the months, she lightened up in a sense, coming to question her lifetime choices of self-denial.
Although she grew up in sunny Southern California and Santa Cruz (where her father taught French lit at the new UC campus) she inexplicably chose a path of "self-imposed exile" to study comparative religion at Oberlin College in perpetually overcast Ohio. She then went to graduate school in the frozen north of the University of Toronto before making her way to the Rochester Zen Center in upstate New York, where she met ex-husband Eliot Fintushel, a fellow writer and mime.
When she finally drifted back to California in the early 1990s with Fintushel and their five-year-old daughter, she was so ecstatic by the light and natural beauty of the Sonoma vineyards that she kept "waiting for the paddy wagon to arrive."
To even make her wishes, she had to overcome her old superstition that wishes must somehow be worthy; that wishing for something materialistic like a house, or earthly like romance, was wrong.
"But if you think for most of human history people can't afford to be snobby about wishing for material things. It's totally linked to their survival," said the writer, who ultimately overcame her own tendency to be a "wish snob."
"If you're a basket weaver, then your baskets and the art itself is a divine art. And the reeds are sacred, and your arrowheads are sacred."
Along with the liberation that comes with putting one's wishes out there, Oxenhandler said she also came to understand the caveat "Be careful what you wish for," and the old religious edict against "petitionary prayer" based on the recognition that mere mortals lack the aerial view.
But it's also important, she says, "to take that risk."
"A lot of people are rather unhappy people. It's because they don't ever risk discovering the unforeseen implications of their visions."
CELEBRATING
BOOKS AND AUTHORS
Think of it, says Director Justin Higgs, as a "fashion show for books."
But instead of fashionistas trolling for the latest look, the Sonoma County Book Festival draws thousands of literary geeks in search of a great read.
Now in its ninth year, the one-day celebration of the old fashioned printed word unfolds from 10 a.m. to
5 p.m. Sept. 20 with a line-up of authors that spans the literary spectrum. There's Latina Cristina Garcia, author of "Dreaming in Cuban" and Megan McDonald of Sebastopol, who penned the popular Judy Moody series for girls.
Sports fans can catch journalist David Harris, who is following up "The League," his acclaimed 1980s study of the professional football business, with a new book, "Genius: How Bill Walsh Reinvented Football and Created an NFL Dynasty." Or festivalgoers can meet Cotati's Meredith Norton whose humorous memoir "How Having Breast Cancer Can Be Really Distracting," gives lip to a bad diagnosis.
Opening: The festival gets under way at 10 a.m. at the Central Library, Third and E streets, with a reading by Noelle Oxenhandler, a Sonoma State University writing professor whose new book is "The Wishing Year: A House, A Man, My Soul."
Where: More than 50 authors and 70 exhibitors have signed on for the event, which takes over both sides of Old Courthouse Square in downtown Santa Rosa as well as the stretch of Mendocino Avenue between them.
Two new venues have been added this year. Panel discussions will be held in the Santa Rosa City Council chambers. And for the first time, the Glaser Center at the Unitarian Universalist Church, 547 Mendocino Ave., will be the site of a live interview Saturday night between KRSH radio host Gil Mansergh and KQED's Michael Krasny, whose latest book is, "Off Mike: A Memoir of Talk Radio and Literary Life."
Other highlights include a teen poetry slam and a special tent and mobile art studio for kids. Among the panels will be a discussion on how fame affected writers such as Jack London and Richard Brautigan. It will be moderated by Jonah Raskin, author of the "The Radical Jack London" and include Ianthe Brautigan of Santa Rosa, who wrote a biography of her father, "You Can't Catch Death."
For a complete schedule and more information go to socobookfest.org or call 527-5412.
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