Harriet Chessman's Guest Post: Two Achilles Heels

I have this landscape on my computer screen – a photo my son Micah took at Arastradero Preserve.

Each day, once I’ve read the newspaper, walked my collie, had breakfast, cleaned the kitchen, taken a shower, mailed some letters, worried about the broken dishwasher . . . once I’ve almost spent my whole morning, that is, immersed in my life, I sit down at my desktop and see this beautiful, simple landscape, and remember my writing.

This is, then, my first Achilles Heel as a writer: Life.

As for my second, well, come with me on this little walk.


Something I love about the photo is the path, curving up the slope to blue sky. It suggests what I search for in my writing: a clear path for my story. The writing process, for me, is this search. I try one route, and it ends in sand; I try another, and I land in a marsh, feet stuck, mosquitoes biting.

Of course, what I say to any writer in a similar predicament is: Keep trying! If this path didn’t work, try another! It’s the only sane advice, and yet it’s difficult advice to take.

As someone who started to write fiction after a first career, I still feel like someone new to this process. I look for signs; keys to the map; the best routes to follow.

So this is my second, my most vulnerable Achilles heel: Story.

Description, yes! Lyrical passages on someone’s face or the weather, I can do that! But finding my story? Argh!

I think I’m getting better at it. That is, I’m gaining more patience. If I have to cut 150 pages, so be it. Sometimes I just have to slice my way through underbrush and even damage some very beautiful mature trees, until – incredibly – one day I look up and see a simple path. A beginning, middle, and end. And even though I’m only on page 50, for the seventh time, I am on my way.

It’s important to note that I can’t reach this point on my own entirely. I’ve been lucky in a few brilliant, insightful manuscript readers: my daughter Marissa; my spouse Bryan; other writers; my wise agent Priscilla. Just last week a fellow writer, Maud Carol Markson, led me by the hand out of a wide marsh indeed.

Such readers help me clarify what this landscape is through which I’m trying to move, and who is coming with me on the journey. They help me understand who my characters are as people – and this, after all, is the key. A work of fiction can move forward compellingly once the characters become profoundly real to the writer. Wonderful words: “I think your character is --- ,” or “I think your novel’s about ---,” upon which I always say, “Wait a minute; let me write that down.” My heels feel stronger already.


I’d love to know what your own particular Achilles heel is, in writing or in life. I wish you a fruitful journey!

Harriet Chessman

Harriet Chessman's Guest Post: I Love All Things Irish

I love all things Irish. This ardor doesn’t come from a trip to Ireland, although I hope I will go one day. My love could be inherited from Hannah Horn, my great-grandmother from County Cork – although all I know about her is her musical name. It could be that Irish American families and friends I’ve loved all my life (including the very wise and well-read M. Lucia Kuppens, O.S.B., at The Abbey of Regina Laudis) have captured my heart and transformed it forever – yes, this is true. In addition to all this, Irish literature has become a cherished world I’m still discovering.

I came first, around the age of twenty, to the poetry of W.B. Yeats, which captivated me with its incantatory lyrics, and the thoughtfulness of later poems like “The Circus Animals’ Desertion.” Cutting against such graceful, contemplative poetry came the mordant, moving plays of Samuel Beckett, which I first read in college, and first saw in my twenties.


(Happy Days, one of my favorite Beckett plays, in which a woman occupies herself with toothbrush, lipstick, daily items, as the sand in which she’s stuck rises, will be at CalShakes soon!)


James Joyce’s Dubliners opened up for me the yearning and sorrow of children and others in lives that could be pierced by epiphany. Joyce’s voluble Molly Bloom, in the last chapter of Ulysses, will be my companion for life, as will Portia in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart.

When my children were young, I often chose children’s books based on myths Yeats and other Irish writers loved and used. Tomie dePaola’s sturdy, colorful version of the Cuchulain myth, Finn M’Coul: The Giant of Knockmany Hill, is one of the many that tickled my children and me equally.

Fiction I’ve come to love recently includes Brian Moore’s 1955 novel The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, with its concoction of compassion, realism, and bitter humor. In Moore’s honest vision, the world and heaven itself have come down to a bare boarding house room and the hopes and anguish of a middle-aged woman, longing for an epiphany out of her reach. I came to this novel soon after reading Frank McCourt’s memoir Angela’s Ashes, a book that offers a different portrait, just as fierce and beautiful in its own way (pace to that great-hearted, brilliant son of Angela McCourt).


I hope you may have come across John Banville’s lyrical The Sea and Sebastian Barry’s Annie Dunne, both of which unfold – each in its own gorgeous, slow way – buried secrets. And, finally, I encourage you to read Anne Enright’s novel The Gathering, which offers a similar unfolding, yet in a lusciously fragmented style. To read this novel is to listen closely to a compelling, harshly funny, honest, contradictory, and ultimately redemptive narrative voice – the voice of a woman who has lost her brother to suicide, and who is bent on reconstructing and understanding the childhood she shared with him.

I’d love to hear your own recommendations of books by Irish authors. Anecdotes and travel stories welcome too!

Harriet Chessman's Guest Post: My Life as a Writer

A happy thank you to Aggie and to Kepler’s for inviting me to contribute to this rich blog! Thank you too to Kate Maloy for suggesting it. I’ve enjoyed reading all the posts.

In this first post, I’ll create a snapshot of my life as a writer, through a mini-q&a. My fifteen-year-old son Gabe came up with the questions.

How often do you write?

Once a novel has gotten a foothold and I’m sure of its direction, I write each weekday, for two to five hours. Often it can take me months, though, to reach this point!

What are your favorite or most influential books by any author?


I love so many novels, poems, short stories, memoirs, essays, and plays. In my first career, I taught English at Yale, so I had the chance to read and teach a wide range of authors, from Chaucer to Milton to E.M. Forster. The authors who may have most directly influenced my writing, though, include Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, and J.D. Salinger. Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is the novel that inspires and moves me most deeply.

Which of your own books are your favorite?


I think of them all with affection and some pain! My first, Ohio Angels, helped me see that I could write; my second, Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper, created a voice I trusted; and the third, Someone Not Really Her Mother, generated a form I found fascinating to work with: that of linked stories, each one holding to a small slice of life in present tense, with the mysterious past hovering in the background. I also have great affection for my new novel, The Beauty of Ordinary Things, as yet unpublished.

How did you decide to become a writer?

I fell off the tenure ladder at Yale (ouch!), and something in me doggedly refused to apply for other teaching positions. The pull to write was quite strong.

How have your personal experiences influenced your style and stories?

Oh, I am sure my personal experience is everywhere in my books. Often it’s disguised, though, even to me. Once I’m really inhabiting a fictional world, I use what comes up inside me, yet in the act of writing, I’m not consciously thinking, “This is something from my own life.” As novelist Maud Carol Markson (author of the new, beautiful novel Looking After Pigeon) says, one’s characters quickly become not characters, but people, as close to the author as family members.

What do you think of popular literature, read mostly by teenagers, such as Twilight? I haven’t had the chance to read any of the Twilight series. I am, however, all for any books that entice readers, especially young readers!! The summer you (Gabe) were nine, for instance, I wished I could send flowers to J.K. Rowling each day.

Do you have any advice for a beginning or unpublished author?

Trust yourself.

P.S. You’re welcome to take Gabe’s “quiz”! All thoughts welcome! I’d love to hear your own response to any of these questions.

Coming up Wednesday: Irish Writers I Love.

And on Friday, my Achilles heel as a writer.