Guest Blog: Christopher Hebert November 7, 2011
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Collaboration, Guest Blogs, Writing.Tags: Books
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When we met Margaret Lazarus Dean, we didn’t realize that her husband was a writer. We struck up an exchange with Margaret because she wrote a novel steeped in the space shuttle program, The Time It Takes to Fall. Read her guest post HERE. When we watched Atlantis lift off, that was Margaret’s head at the bottom of the frame in our photograph. Margaret’s husband, Christopher Hebert, was at home in Tennessee.
We’re pleased this week’s guest blogger is Christopher Hebert, a man we’ve never met and someone who expresses little interest in the space program but who has a wonderful take on what it means to be part of a writing couple. His piece connects with some other guest posts, like Eric Wassmerman’s (click HERE for that and his novel is just out) and also with some of our recent regular posts. (Click on the title to read “The Luck and Obligation of Writing,” “Writing Together, Writing Apart,” and “Writing Apart, Writing Together.”) In fact, we inadvertently adapted Hebert’s title a couple of times. Hebert’s guest post, though, stands on its own and beautifully captures the evolution of one writing couple’s habits. Also, for readers who are punctuation nerds, he uses the colon and the semicolon seamlessly.
Christopher Hebert is the author of the forthcoming The Boiling Season, due out in March from HarperCollins (pre-order now from Powell’s HERE). Hebert is an Antioch College alum who’s spent time in Guatemala and Mexico. He and Margaret earned their MFAs at the University of Michigan and teach at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.
LOVE IN A WINNEBAGO: ON WRITING TOGETHER AND APART
The first conflict I remember having with my graduate school girlfriend had nothing to do with romance and everything to do with writing. It was the summer after our first year of graduate school. At the time, she was living in a wood-paneled, shag-carpeted efficiency we affectionately referred to as “the Winnebago.” A good part of the affection was relative; compared to me, she was living in splendor, enjoying not just a refrigerator she could access while standing erect, but a full complement of plumbing.
In my apartment, the bed doubled as a chair for the dining room table. I had no bathroom of my own, and there was never any guarantee that the one I shared with my neighbors would be free when I needed it to be.
If I close my eyes and really concentrate, I can envision my girlfriend setting foot in my apartment maybe three times.
Without ever really discussing it, we began spending all of our time at her place. So much time, in fact, that her landlord—a daffy old jack-of-all-trades who didn’t believe in privacy—threatened to raise her rent if I didn’t produce a copy of my own lease.
That summer, my girlfriend and I were in love and classes were over and we’d both won grants that freed us from having to get jobs. Life was perfect, except for one thing: we were getting our MFAs in creative writing, which meant we were supposed to be—well, writing.
She was the one, after weeks of quiet despair, who finally mustered up the courage to point out that, if we were ever going to get any work done, we’d need to be alone sometimes.
It was the first realization for us of what it meant for two writers to come together—that in addition to love and friendship and family, we would always have this too: a relationship in writing, with all the pitfalls that came with it.
But her announcement also established an important precedent: that of equal importance to the time we spent together would be the time we spent apart.
As soon as my lease ran out, we caved into the inevitable and moved into the slightly larger attic apartment above her old Winnebago. Here we had separate spaces we could work: for her, a child’s desk crammed into a corner of the walk-in closet; for me, in the cramped living room, a scratchy love seat from which we’d evicted a dead mouse.
The Hebert & Dean Kitchen (click HERE to read the blog post about it)
Two years later, we got married in a judge’s living room, in front of a wall of commemorative mugs. The vows he read referred to sickness and health and good times and bad. But they didn’t say anything about writing.
These days we have a house. It’s not big, but it has two separate offices. Margaret’s has an adult-size desk; mine has a full-size sofa, entirely free of rodents. The place is somewhat modern and minimalist, with a nice open floor plan. The Winnebago and the attic are long gone, but it’s hard not to feel nostalgic.
Margaret doesn’t like to write at home now. It’s one of several differences in our habits: she also prefers not to talk about what she’s working on. Or to share it, until it’s as close as possible to perfect. But when she’s ready, she brings it to me, eager to know what I think.
I’m inclined to pester her with every brainstorm and every draft I write, and then I wait for her to tell me what to do.
And our books, too, could hardly be more different: hers about space and mine about a turbulent Caribbean island.
But these differences don’t matter nearly as much as the things we have in common: even when we’re apart, in our private spaces, our separate books feel like pieces of a larger whole.
And now, in addition to our lives and our writing, we share a child too—proof that we can also make something wonderful together.
Happy Birthday, Evelyn Bryan Johnson! November 4, 2011
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Aviation.Tags: Airshows, WWII
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Evelyn Bryan Johnson, the woman pilot with the most flying hours in the world, celebrates her 102nd birthday today in Morristown, Tennessee. The locals call her Mama Bird. Her total flying time is the equivalent of roughly 6-½ years.
(National Aviation Hall of Fame)
Evelyn Johnson learned to fly when World War II was raging overseas and women like Evelyn filled a variety of new roles outside the home. She decided to learn to fly when she saw an advertisement for lessons in the newspaper. Her first lesson was on October 1, 1944, her first solo was November 8, and she earned her private pilot’s license the following June. Within three years, she became a flight instructor, then an examiner in 1952. She later learned to fly helicopters, only the twentieth woman to do such a thing.
As of February of this year (see video below), Evelyn Johnson was working at the local airport four days a week. She didn’t let a car accident and leg amputation in 2006 slow her down much. That said, she stopped flying at the age of 96, in large part because of glaucoma, and gave up her title as the oldest flight instructor in the world. She trained more pilots and gave more than 9,000 FAA check rides, more than anyone else ever. She worries that today’s new pilots aren’t taught to use a map and that instructors are afraid to have student pilots practice stalls. All her efforts earned her a spot in the National Aviation Hall of Fame.
Evelyn’s advice for longevity: “”Don’t sit down and watch the grass grow. Stay busy. Have something that you have to get up and do every day.” (Click HERE for that full news story from November 2010.)
To celebrate women in flight, we may just have to head to the Jacqueline Cochran Air Show this weekend. Jackie Cochran beat Evelyn Johnson into the air by several years and, in 1953, became the first woman to break the sound barrier.
Plans, Happenstance, and Lessons from Harlow Shapley November 2, 2011
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Science, Space Exploration, Writing.Tags: Serendipity, Space Shuttle
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Today, we’re thinking about the serendipity of dates and events. On this date in 1947, the Spruce Goose made its only flight. (Read our post focusing on this aircraft HERE and a guest post by the curator now overseeing the aircraft HERE.) That means something to us, and we’re trying to figure out why.
Dates remind us that, as Abraham Lincoln, a fellow Illinoisan, reportedly said, “The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time.” One of the best things about a calendar, then, is that you can see more than one day at a time. You can plan ahead. Planning ahead doesn’t always feel great, as when one flips the page of her paper calendar on Sunday night. But we understand the benefits of preparation, of setting goals, of knowing how many days it’s been since we’ve written, of not double-booking, of showing up where we’re supposed to be.
A calendar also makes it possible to look back into the past, using a logical system of measurement. Arbitrary as it seems, the approximate time it takes for the Earth to orbit the Sun has become a meaningful timeframe for people, embedded deeply in our physiology and culture, a way to measure progress through life with annual birthdays, a means for comparison over time. A year is long enough that significant change can occur, but not so long that one can’t recall that past time. Looking back a year offers perspective that one day at a time doesn’t.
Discovery on Launch Pad 39A in November 2010
A year ago today, we were on the Space Coast. We’d arrived on Halloween to find out that the launch had been delayed until Wednesday, November 3. That slip gave us extra time to wander around Kennedy Space Center (KSC) and to see Robonaut 2 a year ago today (see that post HERE). Of course, by Wednesday, the launch slipped to Thursday. In the end, we didn’t see Discovery lift off at all. (We recounted the whole experience in our “Countdown to the Cape” series; read those posts HERE.) That experience—those extra, unplanned days at the Cape—set in motion our year with the space shuttle. Those events surrounding the not-launch framed our decisions for months to come.
What were you doing a year ago today? Does that have anything to do with what you’re doing today—or what your plans are for the future?
Eleven years ago on this date, the first residents of the International Space Station (ISS) docked. Humans have been living there ever since. Last year, when we headed to Florida, we didn’t see that anniversary coming. We focused on the launch at hand, and the ISS anniversary took us by surprise. Being at KSC for the tenth anniversary of human habitation of the ISS, especially without intending to celebrate such an event there, pointed us to why we had flown across the country. Sure, we wanted to see a launch, but the story was bigger. We traveled that first time not knowing exactly what to expect, not experiencing whatever it was we had expected, and finding our way.
When it became clear that we wouldn’t witness a launch during our trip last fall, we expected to be disappointed. We waited to feel really sad, to feel crushed or angry. When we left the Space Coast, though, we felt invigorated, excited, and full of new information. That’s when we decided to go back, and that decision shaped this past year and hundreds of other little decisions about how we’ve spent our time this year.
To explain what we mean, we want to tell you the story of Harlow Shapley, who was born on this date in 1885 in Missouri. When he was 22, he headed to the University of Missouri to study journalism, only to find that the opening of that school had been postponed. The university wasn’t taking any journalism students. Harlow didn’t want to return home; he wanted an education. So he looked at the university’s catalog of subjects. He couldn’t pronounce archaeology. Astronomy was next in the alphabetical list. That’s what he decided to study. Harlow Shapley left home to become a journalist and, through almost immediate and arbitrary circumstances, became an astronomer.
NASA’s obituary for Shapley notes that, later, he arrived at Princeton University at just the right time, when thousands of observations involving light curves and stars were awaiting analysis, and that Shapley was especially good for the task: “aided by his never-absent slide-rule, and unimpeded by any excess of mathematical sophistication.” Shapley’s dissertation opened new investigations into binary-star astronomy. And of course, he was a pretty good writer.
Harlow Shapley, like us, headed to California. From his perch at the Mount Wilson Observatory, he discovered “the dimensions of our Galaxy, and of the location of its centre.” The Milky Way is larger and younger than people had previously imagined, and Copernicus’s notion that the Earth wasn’t at the center of anything gained another layer of meaning with Shapley’s determination of our galaxy’s midpoint. He spent seven years in California, honing his astronomy, writing, lecturing, and administrative skills, then accepted a position at Harvard University.
He also had four sons and a daughter. One son is an 88-year-old mathematician at UCLA. Another was a NASA official and a member of the committee that drafted the memo upon which President Kennedy’s let’s-go-to-the-Moon speech was based as well as a member of the committee that investigated the Challenger accident. Alan, the geophysicist of the group, claimed that his first name, unusual for the time, had been chosen from the phonebook, just as his father had chosen his college focus. Harlow’s daughter followed in her father’s astronomer-author footsteps, with books on planets and satellites.
Over the years, Harlow Shapley garnered numerous awards, including the Henry Draper Medal, the Rumford Prize, and the Franklin Medal. A Moon crater and a supercluster of galaxies are named after him. He also played important roles in numerous organizations, including the National Science Foundation and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and often found it difficult to balance these roles with his scientific investigations and his writing. Harlow Shapley wanted to do a lot of things, and he proved to be good at several different kinds of tasks. In fact, he also studied ants.
All this is not to say that Harlow Shapley never got the story wrong. In fact, he criticized Edwin Hubble’s views of galaxies beyond the Milky Way, and Hubble’s ideas have gone on to shape the way we think about life, the universe, and everything. Error is always part of the story of innovation and creativity.
Infrared Image of Milky Way’s Core (Spitzer Telescope, NASA)
When we look back on our last year from the vantage of Harlow Shapley’s birthday, we realize that we went to the Space Coast as tourists, but we became journalists, science writers, and cultural critics. We went to watch a space shuttle launch, but that wasn’t possible. Harlow Shapley went to college to become a journalist, but when that wasn’t possible, he became one of the most influential astronomers ever. Our shift wasn’t nearly as drastic, and our contribution isn’t nearly as influential. But Harlow Shapley is a good, new role model.
Just to solidify this serendipity for our readers, we close with a little extra information. Today is Doug’s birthday, as well as Harlow Shapley’s.
Today and tomorrow, Doug is attending the IEEE International Games Innovation Conference. Tomorrow, he is presenting a poster on the topic of video games and virtual worlds, and his collaborator is Pattie Sobczak, who wrote a guest blog for Lofty Ambitions in March. Not a gamer himself, Doug had no plans a year ago (or thereabouts) to make this topic an area of expertise, but one thing led to another, and a year later, here he is because, last fall, we attended an interdisciplinary talk by an English professor that made Doug question how academics, particularly those who were no longer young whippersnappers, viewed games and how theoretical approaches were being used to understand contemporary gaming.
All these connections are loose, to be sure, especially at first. But these are the sorts of nudges that occur to frame a few thoughts, which then influence a decision. Do these connections really mean anything? Maybe not, but sometimes the noticing now leads to meaning a year later. Maybe the noticing is the meaning, for Harlow Shapley said, “Theories crumble, but good observations never fade.”
