Author: Natalie Hart

Voice: Top 5 Novels

~ Natalie Hart ~ 4 Comments

I’ve been avoiding the next voice exercise because I hate coming up with lists of favorite things. Hate it. Makes me cranky. Here goes:

What are your top five favorite novels of all time? 

Every time I try to come up with a list of novels, I wind up with lists of favorite novelists. I wind up thinking about the different genres I read and whether my list would reflect what I read all the time versus which novels have stuck with me. I talk myself out of making the requested list.

I could probably talk you out of expecting me to produce the list, too. But I won’t.

In no particular order:

Cat’s Eye, Margaret Atwood

Fifth Business or What’s Bred in the Bone, Robertson Davies (I can’t choose between these two)

Bet Me, Jennifer Crusie

Lord of Scoundrels, Loretta Chase

The Lost Hero, Rick Riordan

What does this list tell me? It tells me I love novels that take place in Canada, romance, and kidlit.

I haven’t reread Cat’s Eye in years, but it stands out in the Margaret Atwood section of my bookshelf because it so accurately reflected the combination of anxiety and freedom that I experienced as a young girl in Toronto. It was the first novel I read that called out the emotional cruelty of girls for what it is: bullying.

Robertson Davies is on the list because I love his big-hearted classically literate style, his use of Jungian psychology, and his sense of humor. Things are always lurking under the surface, and they always come to the fore, where they’re dealt with lovingly. It’s how I’d like to live, embracing all the aspects of my human condition.

Bet Me is my favorite contemporary romance. It makes me laugh out loud. There’s a lot of great eating and cooking and banter. I love the kid fish expert who throws up when he eats too much. I love that the hero ties up the heroine and feeds her Krispy Kreme donuts. The hero and heroine wind up loving each other for who they truly are, and in the process, change each other. Wonderful. Hopeful.

Lord of Scoundrels is the best over-the-top historical romance. She hits all the tropes: big muscular man who acts like he doesn’t care about society’s rules; tiny beautiful woman who is intelligent and savvy and keeping her family together; two master manipulators who dance around each other, analyzing each word and gesture for what it means; they are forced into marriage and resist the idea that they may love each other. But it’s so perfect. Chase goes deep into what the characters believe about themselves and what they think they’re worthy of, and makes them face it. And change.

Making this list made me realize that I’d pick Rick Riordan as my favorite kidlit author over J.K. Rowling. I love me some Harry Potter. Don’t ask me to do anything when I’m rereading the books, because once I start, I have to get to the end. But I reread the Riordan books more often and learn more from them. They’re more disciplined, more focused. They’re funnier. He never wallows in the teenage romantic angst, although it’s definitely there. And I love the overt mythology. Out of all the novelists on this list, he’s the one I’d most like to be.

How about you? What’s in your five?

Wonderful: The Moment of Being Seen

~ Natalie Hart ~ 3 Comments

I love it when a character who’s been presented as mean, tactless, heartless, or downright cruel reveals that he or she sees the main character with perfect and loving clarity.

This often happens in historical romance novels, particularly between noble sons and their cold, distant fathers. I’m a sucker for it every time. And it happened in the mystery I finished yesterday.

In Alan Bradley’s novel series, Flavia de Luce is an 11-year-old chemistry buff and poisons expert living in a big pile of a house in 1950s rural England with her father and two older sisters. In the second book, The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag, her father’s sister comes to visit. Aunt Felicity is a blowhard of the first order. Every word out of her mouth is an insult to someone, especially to her brother about his house, his finances, and how he’s raising his daughters. She’s bossy, controlling, and Always Right.

But one day, she makes Flavia carry her painting equipment to the island of the ornamental lake behind the house so she can paint the folly (fake Roman ruins). Once there, she tells Flavia tales of her own childhood at that house, playing with Flavia’s mother. Harriet had died the year after Flavia was born, and her older sisters had always told her that she had, through being so disappointing that she’d driven their mother to go all the way to Tibet to escape her, killed their mother. And her father is constantly present, yet too absent to correct this impression.

So Aunt Felicity’s words change Flavia’s beliefs about herself in a heartbeat. “Good heavens, child! If you want to see your mother, you have no more than to look in the glass. If you want to know her character, look inside yourself. You’re so much like her, it gives me the willies.”

Aunt Felicity goes into detail, particularly about their mutual love for chemistry. But then she, who is presented as aggressively conventional, talks to Flavia about her passion for ferreting out information, particularly about murders. Because, really, what good would it be to be an under-supervised 11-year-old poisons expert if you couldn’t run around the village solving murders.

“You must listen to your inspiration. You must let your inner vision be your Pole Star…. You must never be deflected by unpleasantness…. Although it may not be apparent to others, your duty will become as clear to you as if it were a white line painted down the middle of the road. You much follow it, Flavia…. Even when it leads to murder.”

And then this, which is amazing advice to anyone: “If you remember nothing else, remember this: Inspiration from outside one’s self is like the heat in an oven. It makes passable Bath buns. But inspiration from within is like a volcano: It changes the face of the world.”

Stuff like that gets me every time. It does in love songs, too. The chorus of Alanis Morisette’s “Everything” sums up why:

“You see everything, you see every part
You see all my light and you love my dark
You dig everything of which I’m ashamed
There’s not anything to which you can’t relate
And you’re still here”

So it isn’t just the moment of being seen, it’s being seen and also loved, appreciated, embraced.

That changes a person, gives them courage to be who they always wanted to be, but were afraid of what others would think. So even though the moments are just that, momentary — Aunt Felicity goes back to being a bossy blowhard. Spouses drift around each other. Friends take each other for granted. We repeat lines in the liturgy unthinkingly — what we believe about ourselves has been changed. And hopefully our actions will follow.

That moment of being seen can be pretty momentous. And now I’m getting as sappy as if I’d just read one of those scenes.

Voice: 12-year-old me

~ Natalie Hart ~ 2 Comments

What did you love more than anything on earth when you were twelve?

Here are some things I loved when I was twelve: horses, Jesus, my friend Elizabeth’s older brother Dan, sitting on my window sill and reading L.M. Montgomery, pretending I was a baton twirler with a broomstick in the basement.

I loved my period. Somewhere, there’s a journal entry that waxed rhapsodic about how it was a wonderful gift from God. I keep looking for it in my papers, but I think I threw it away in my teenage years in a fit of eye rolling over my childhood earnestness.

I loved my phone, which I’d gotten by keeping my room spotlessly neat and clean for six weeks. My parents had read that doing something for six weeks made it a habit. Not so much. I got the phone and quickly went back to my extreme slobbish ways.

I loved my independence. By 12, I’d been riding the subway to and from school by myself for over two years. It was my job to take a first-grader along on that trip and I was starting to babysit in the neighborhood, so I had my own money. My mother hated clothes shopping with me, so she gave me a clothing budget of $12.50 a month and let me take charge of my own wardrobe. I’d been in charge of doing my own hair for a few years, which resulted in periodic rat’s nests in the back, but I made them (through neglect) so I fixed them. My friends and I roamed the city on our own, hanging out in the beautiful Mt. Pleasant cemetery, freaking ourselves out, or going from corner store to corner store buying candy and chips.

This independence wasn’t always great. I was only 9 or 10 the first time an adult approached me and made comments about my looks and asked whether I’d have sex with him. Sadly, this wasn’t an isolated incident. With all the hundreds of people out on the streets in Toronto, a lone, very blonde girl was an easy target for harassment.

That experience makes it difficult for me to give my daughter independence out on the street. I didn’t let her go to her best friend’s house on her own until the summer after she turned 10, and I’ll only let her go by bike, not on foot — my reasoning being that a kid on a bike is faster and more difficult to bother. And I took that privilege away quickly (but briefly), after she and said best friend wandered way farther than approved at a public event. I know I’m going to have to increase her independence, but it’s hard. I don’t trust people on the street.

What did you love when you were twelve?

 

Confusion and Curiosity

~ Natalie Hart ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been wondering about confusion and curiosity.

A few days after Christmas, the adults on my Hart side got together at my parents’ for dinner and a movie my parents adore: The Tree of Life. My father, especially, loves this movie. He’d seen it three times already, and will see it at least another three. He loves it so much and finds it so deep and affecting that he wants to show it to everyone he knows.

I did not have the same reaction. To put it mildly.

I was alternately bored, confused, irritated, interested, annoyed, impatient, analytical. I spent the entire movie in my own head, and not in any of the characters’ heads. I didn’t experience the story. I observed it. This is not what I prefer. I like story. I learn through story. And Tree of Life is not interested in storytelling.

But that’s not what got me wondering. It was our discussion afterwards, in which I was (see Beginnings for my admission) too negatively passionate. My dad was making a point, based on brain research, that when we are presented with something confusing and tense, our emotions are engaged, to which I may have screeched, “What?!”

Because, for me, when I’m confused, my emotions disengage, and I become skeptical about everything. And if I don’t trust the artist/thinker to lead me out of the confusion, I turn off almost completely.

However, what he said is close to standard writing advice: there should be an overarching story question that fuels the story; when the question is resolved, the story is over. In addition, there should be lots of minor story questions, in service to the overarching one, to keep the tension, and the reader, hurtling towards the end. In fact, I’m organizing the David and Saul story into three books according to this advice. Book 1: Why did Samuel anoint David? Book 2: When and how will David become king? Book 3: Will David be a king after God’s own heart?

This led me to wonder about the differences between confusion and curiosity. Imagine the body language of each of those states. A person curious about something leans forward, their face is open, they’re driven forward. A confused person is frowning, their arms might be crossed, which hunches the shoulders in. Confusion is a state someone is in. Curiosity leads a person to inquire and investigate.

To be fair, my dad explained himself better in a follow-up email:

The book I referenced was Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow by Daniel Kahneman. “Fast” thinking is intuitive, subconscious thinking and “slow” is rational, conscious thinking.  A very good book – full of counter-intuitive findings.

What I recall saying is something to the effect that we are more fully engaged, more alert and more attentive when a situation activates both types of thinking. For example, the Tree of Life film operates on the intuitive level through music and picture. But if it only operates on that level, we might fall asleep. By adding material that puzzles us and motivates slow thinking, we are more attentive, more alert and more engaged.

I can get behind that. With one caveat. Like with everything else, people have differing thresholds for stimuli. My extroverted husband is energized by crowd situations that overwhelm or exhaust me. My physicist brother-in-law understands things I can’t even begin to conceive. And the line wherein curiosity shifts to confusion, wherein a puzzle no longer interests, is shorter for some than for others.

In other words, in art, your mileage may vary.

Voice: Cultures Not My Own, Part 2

~ Natalie Hart ~ 2 Comments

Have you ever felt a particular affinity for a geography or culture that is not your own? Why? What about it do you love or identify with?

Part 2: Gender Culture

For many of my growing-up years, I felt more affinity for boy culture than for girl culture. Actually, let me rephrase that. I was an Anne of Green Gables obsessive, a happy skirt wearer, a sewer and crafter, one of the few who preferred Mary to Laura Ingalls. If it was girly, I liked it.

Except for playing with girls.

Individual girls were fine. I usually had one best friend, maybe two. But I didn’t always play with the girls during recess. Even before girls started getting really mean and political (grade 5), I often preferred to run around with the boys. In Australia, where I lived from ages 6-9, this took some doing. The enormous field of a playground at Jindalee State School was divided in half: girls’ side and boys’ side, and I was often yelled at for playing tag across The Line. That didn’t mean that I joined the boys’ side in the frequent battles for who got ownership of the lunch benches, but outside of jumprope, I have few memories of hanging with the girls at recess.

When we moved to Canada, it got worse. The tiny Christian school I went to had only six other people in my grade, all girls. For some reason, coming from Australia, I didn’t wear pants, just skirts. This was a problem. Even now, it doesn’t take much to transport me back to the Simpson’s department store with my mother, desperately communicating that I needed boy’s pants, not girls pants, expecting that any moment, sirens would start wailing because we were taking corduroys from the boy’s section to the girl’s changing room so I could try them on.

When I showed up in them at school, I was coolly informed that it was good that I’d finally worn pants, because the girls had gotten together and decided that I couldn’t come to school anymore in skirts, and they were going to tell me that week.

It is any wonder that I preferred to play soccer with my younger brother and his friends?

Boy recess culture was straightforward. You chose your team and you played.

Although I could be girly about boy culture. I couldn’t stand fighting, so I became the breaker-upper of playground fights. This being the 70s, there were no teachers on our playgrounds, which were city parks, in any case. My method of breaking up the fights: being more accurate with my feet than the boys were with their fists. I kicked them until they ran apart from each other. And then the drama was over. It wasn’t revisited in ostentatiously whispered conversations. It wasn’t rehashed every day for a week. It didn’t require intervention by the teacher.

Boys were so much easier than girls. Until puberty. When everyone became problematic.

How about you? Did you move in a pack of your own kind? Prefer the other side? One of those few who got along with everyone?

 

Voice: Cultures Not My Own, Part 1

~ Natalie Hart ~ 3 Comments

I am human again. Or at least I feel human again.

After enduring several days of throbbing, pulsating, piercing, stabbing, excruciating pain due to a dead, infected tooth, not to mention the nausea/vomiting from lack of food, lack of sleep and too much pain medication, I got a wonderful root canal. I promise not to tell you about the abscess.

Instead, I’ll go back to my intended blogging schedule with a voice exercise. I’m working on a “wondering,” but it’s not yet fully cooked.

Have you ever felt a particular affinity for a geography or culture that is not your own? Why? What about it do you love or identify with?

I’m going to make this answer a two-parter, because of a comment my daughter made, thinking I was talking about boys and girls. Today, I’ll cover geographical culture. Next time, it’ll be gender culture.

I grew up in Canada and Australia, in a largely Dutch immigrant subculture, although surrounded by a whole lot of everybody in Toronto. The only other culture I’ve been attracted to is Irish. (No, that’s not why I dyed my hair red. I did that because I love Anne of Green Gables.)

The first dance I ever choreographed and performed in public was to a song in Gaelic by Clannad. I had no idea what it was about, but it was emotional and atmospheric, so I called it “Gaelic Mourning” and danced in and out of a man’s suit jacket as if it belonged to someone I had loved. It was all very deep and meaningful to my 19-year-old self who’d never been in love and hadn’t had anyone I loved die in 12 years. My image of Irish culture then was like my impression of that song: misty, romantic, yearning.

Another aspect of my attraction to Irish culture connects to my Canadianness: to a certain degree, both cultures define themselves negatively, as “not them” — “them” being the English to the Irish and the Americans to Canadians. Yes, Ireland has its own long history and literature and culture and language and food, but when you grow up right next to a big bully of a country, you can’t help that self-righteous sneer, that disdain towards the hulk you’re dependent upon.

First week of grade 10 history, the lesson was on xenophobia (fear or hatred of foreign things/people), and the prime example was the U.S. We were taught that Canada’s way with “other” cultures was to think of ourselves as a mosaic — each culture maintained its own brightness and beauty while being incorporated into a whole made beautiful by their addition. This was preferable to the American melting pot, wherein everyone was dumped into the stew and expected to come out one way, and that one way was throwing their weight around. (Gr. 10 history did not include any discussion of the assumptions of why the majority culture had all this power to decide how to treat “others” when the original inhabitants of both countries weren’t given that option. And I’ve heard much more scathing indictments about the melting pot from African Americans.) This defining ourselves against Big Brother wasn’t a vague, unspoken part of Canadian culture.

Now, as a dual citizen living in the States with her American husband and children, I’m them and not them. I say us and we when talking about American issues, but I maintain a kernel of that disdain in my Canadian heart of hearts.

I’d still love to visit Ireland, because now I also love the dark beer, but it doesn’t have the same romantic pull it did when I was in college. Does everyone have an “Irish phase”? Kind of like most girls have a “horse phase”?

 

Weekend Voice Exercise: Accents

~ Natalie Hart ~ 8 Comments

1. Where did you grow up? What are the Old World or native languages that predominate in that area? Any special accent?

I admit it. I am only starting with this exercise because the of the one word that appeared on almost every report card: conscientious. I am a conscientious student. This particular prompt doesn’t seem as interesting as others further down the list, but if the teacher tells me to start at the top, I’m going to start at the top. I’m going to trust that the teacher knows what she’s doing, and there’s a reason for starting here.

I grew up in Toronto, Canada and Brisbane, Australia — both lands of long vowels.

The Old World accents I remember most are Dutch: my Oma (grandmother), our minister, older church members. Every kind of Old World accent and language can be heard in Toronto, and I remember noting how similar Dutch-, Italian- and (for lack of a better descriptor) old Jewish-accented English is. But for the purposes of this question, the voice I hear most in my head is my Oma, Wilhelmina Hart’s.

“Hhya. You haff to lawff.”

Perhaps someone more talented in phonetic spelling could capture the simultaneously breathy and guttural sound of that speech. The “Ya” at the beginning is soft to start, but builds into a more explosive exhalation with not much of a “y” sound, but not so much that she sounded like she was in karate class. The “h” in “have” is soft. In the middle of “laugh” she’d go way in her throat; when I imitate it, I duck my chin a bit. Her laugh, itself, was very low in her throat. She loved to lawff.

My name, always spelled, “Nataly”; those “a’s” were soft, like a combo of “aw” and “ah,” with the last vowel a chin tuck, again.

“It comes handy-in.”

“It’s an unicum [oonickum].”

“I simple cannot.”

“Sort of so.” or “Sort of dat.”

When she wanted a little “Maria Tia,” she might ask whether there would be “spirituals” after dinner.

Charlottesville was four syllables: a hard “Ch” as if you were saying “cheese,” and the “es” is a syllable all on its own (said as if you were saying the name of the letter S).

All kinds of switched sounds: j’s are y’s, th’s a t/d combo, wh’s a v/f combo (i.e. to say “What nice, hey,” say a combo of “vat” and “fawt”), slight tongue roll at r’s.

She was a frugal Dutch woman who loved, and I mean loved a bargain — “bargain” said with a bit of a chin tuck in the first syllable. In later years, she’d poke things with her cane, wrinkle her nose as if it was distasteful that she was even considering this, and talk store managers even further down in price. I still have the urge to tell her when I get a great deal (like the winter coat I bought for my daughter last night, originally $120 for $35).

The ends of her sentences were so definite, with character. She didn’t trail off, although, in conversation, you might not be sure where one sentence started and another ended because she talked so much. Seriously. It was nonstop. It was wonderfully easy to visit her, because you were just folded into her ongoing conversation with herself.

And now I see the wisdom of the teacher: I started out reluctant, but wound up in tears, writing a love letter to my Oma.

Speaking of which, I found this letter from her, written when I was in college. Most of my letters from her were brief notes so she could send me the church bulletin, but this one is very personal. I had just spent Interim (a January term of study) in Toronto, and returned to Grand Rapids to, soon after, break up with my boyfriend at the time. He’s the son of one of my mother’s favorite professors when she was at Calvin, and he’d come up to Toronto over Christmas and met a lot of family. I’m going to transcribe it here, mostly for my own pleasure, but if you read on, imagine lovely old-lady cursive, slanted at a consistent and perfect angle to the right. All quotation marks are done with the first one at the lower left corner of the word, and the second in the upper right. And most periods look like low dashes.

March 7, 1987

Darling Nataly,

Is it not exciting to get such a lovely vase of flowers from Claude Monet (more than 100 years old) a wonderful painter!

Thank you so much for your visit by letter and giving me a glimpse of your life in Grand Rapids.

Naturally it is a big adjustment after your exciting interim to be back in the normal running. On top of it you broke your “budding” relationship.

No wonder my granddaughter is a bit in “mixed feelings.”

Was it the right thing? Hard to tell. I found him a charming [slath? can’t figure this word out] young man and enjoyed the evening in his company.

Listening to each other is certainly not to get to know each other and it has to come from both sides. Also it takes time to show the “utmost” for each other — are you ready for that? [Note: I wasn’t talking about sex here, but she sure makes it sound like I was!] It might change your whole outlook and how your coming years will develop. Even the knowledge that God is always listening to us brings sometimes no clarity in our thinking.

I am looking forward to your “meditation.” Usual this kind of writing is also a blessing for yourself.

Wonderful that you have such a bond with Amy again.

I received a letter from Steve who is looking forward to his Toronto adventure. He is satisfied with his courses and I think you too on the whole. [By this she means that I also seem satisfied with my courses, not that my cousin seems satisfied with me — how could he be, he was in Arizona.]

It would be so great to have you home at Easter. Springbreak here starts next week and will be short.

Uncle Bill and Carroll just returned from Cuba (2 weeks).

Maaike’s tonsils were removed last week. She was very brave. She had to stay home from school for 10 days.

Uncle Dirk gave me a call this week from Philadelphia. We will hope Rodney’s operation is a succes [sic] – he was 3 hours in surgery – most likely they will return this weekend.

I was very proud to read in “Calvin Today” that 4 Taunton Rd students earned substantial grants. “Congratulations!!!” Well done.

Letter writing is still an effort for me. So is church going, reading and … walking. But I am coming along. I am thankful for all the support and love. Wonderful blessings from the Lord.

A bug hug from

Oma

Her faith was deep and real, so she could admit this truth, “Even the knowledge that God is always listening to us brings sometimes no clarity in our thinking.”

I would love to read any responses with stories of your grandparents. Let’s have a big old cryfest here on won·der.

Beginnings

~ Natalie Hart ~ 7 Comments

Welcome to my first day.

I called this blog “ won·der, n., v., adj. ,” because wonder in every sense of the word will be the fuel (definitions via Merriam-Webster).

noun:

  • a cause of astonishment or admiration
  • the quality of exciting amazed admiration
  • a rapt attention or astonishment at something awesomely mysterious or new to one’s experience
  • a feeling of doubt or uncertainty

verb:

  • to be in a state of wonder
  • to feel surprise
  • to feel curiosity or doubt
  • to be curious or in doubt about

adjective (wondrous, wonderful):

  • exciting amazement or admiration
  • effective or efficient far beyond anything previously known or anticipated

I also called it won·der, n., v., adj. because it’s a state I often find myself in. I’ve never managed to be “cool.” I get too enthusiastic, too passionate (positively and negatively), too invested about too many things. The detachment required for true coolness has always eluded me, which is the way I like it. So this blog may find me, now and then, exhibiting excited amazement or admiration. It might find me so surprised or astonished that I feel compelled to share the source with you.

It will definitely find me wondering. One of my favorite moments in my children’s worship stories is the “wondering” portion at the end.

* When the Israelites went through to freedom on dry land, I wonder whether the walls of water on either side were solid, or could you stick your hand through them? (Thanks for a friend for that great question.) I wonder whether you’d try to stick your hand through?

* I wonder when David found out why Samuel anointed him? I wonder if the oil dripped in his eyes? Did it stain his tunic? Did that annoy his mother?

* If Ruth was your friend, I wonder whether you would’ve told her to go with Naomi or would you have told her she was nuts for even considering it?

Wondering like this led to my most recent writing project: an imaginative retelling of the David and Saul story, aimed at middle schoolers (no, it’s not ready for anyone’s eyes yet). It’s fascinating to look at biblical stories and see the people as people, to not just gloss over them to get to the lesson we’re supposed to learn.

But religious stuff isn’t the only topic I’ll be wondering about.

Frankly, I’m wondering whether I’ll ever be a published novelist. To hone my craft in the hopes of reaching that goal, I’m giving myself weekend writing assignments that I’ll post here. To start, I’ll work through the exercises on Barbara Samuel’s Voice Worksheet.

Thank you for sticking with me so far. Hopefully, I’ll see you again.