Category Archives: Books

The Blog Tour: My Writing Process

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(NOTE: This website is currently under reconstruction, so like a first draft, it’s a little disorganized.)

In 2005, I went to the Squaw Writers Conference in what I only partially realized was an attempt to escape the LA screenwriting world and discovered the sweeter side of writing–novel writing. It may pay less and probably fewer people will read your work than see your work, but there are so many fewer human beings to suck up to in the process–and they are overall nicer human beings. Like Patricia Dunn (http://www.patriciadunnauthor.com/2014/08/) and Myfanwy Collins (http://myfanwycollins.com/blog/), who I met at Squaw Valley and who are both the reason I am taking part in this blog tour. Both have great YA novels coming out this year. So proud and honored to have them as friends and writers.   

Patricia and Myfanwy are outstanding editors, as well as writers—and I think that is in large part because they are big readers. Their feedback on the first draft of The Night Counter was so vital. And Pat has been my guru on so much in my life, including helping me shepherd my middle grade novel into the world, along with her best friend and fellow writer Alexandra Soiseth (http://soisethwriter.wordpress.com/2014/08/22/my-writing-process-blog-tour/)

Squaw Valley is also where I met Alma Katsu, the incredibly prolific fantasy writer of the Taker Trilogy. Alma’s just plain sharp, and it could be all those years working for a mysterious organization. She’ll be answering these questions next week, along with one the funniest writers I know, Amy Bridges, whose Texas/Alaska upbringing is as entertaining as her hijinks in LA today. (See more about them below)

1) What are you working on?  

I wish someone would tell me how respond to this one today. The best answer is somewhere between nothing and too much. I am either cursed or blessed–or somewhere in between—for loving to consume and write television, films, fiction and magazine articles. I even like the orderly, mechanical process of writing academic articles and recipes, but that is my escape

paperbackfrom the stress and chaos creative writing causes. Luckily for the world, I don’t do music lyrics.  

Today I’m reworking from first to third person a middle grade novel about a girl trying to have the perfect Christmas in the small town in Minnesota where she lives with her immigrant Arab parents. It only gets worse when a vision of the Virgin Mary is spotted on their driveway. I’m also drafting my next novel, which involves Abu Dhabi but doesn’t have any camels or oil wells in it so far. I’m also going to spend a lot of time logging footage from The Golden Harvest, a documentary that is a multi-country project that has always bound my family together—olive oil. Any of the above could be a screenplay, too…in the meantime, they’re just tearing at my heart and soul, demanding I focus.

2) How does your work differ from others of its genre?

We are all as individuals our own genre, made up of all the things that have happened to us, that we hope will happen to us, and that our own individual brains juxtapose together. Sometimes for me that juxtaposition comes out as fiction or non-fiction, written or filmed.

3) Why do you write what you do?

Because it comes out of me—it tells me at some point, “Please write about me” and I try to respect the request. I have also written purely for money but that stuff isn’t worth discussing.

4) How does your writing process work?

I move a lot so getting a process down is hard for me, as time zones and cultural clashes and day jobs dictate making adjustments to the different worlds. But I can speak to what have been the elements of my ideal situation, which I am really trying to capture now as I start this new novel.

  • I wake up when it is still dark outside and neither my head nor the road is rattled yet. And then I write for a fixed amount of time without stopping even for chocolate, say two hours. Or until I write a thousand words. This early morning joy has been hard for me to capture in the Middle East, where social life often begins at 9 pm, making going to bed early not so easy.
  • I reserve afternoons for re-reading or editing. And for reading the millions of things in this world that I want read.
  • I tell myself I can go to yoga as soon as I am done writing.
  • I tell myself I can watch my latest TV obsession when I am done writing
  • I tell myself a lot of things to stay put at the desk.
  • When all of the above fails to happen, I clean my house. I have a very clean house.

 

Look for these blogs next week:

Alma Katsu’s debut, The Taker, has been compared to the early work of Anne Rice, Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian and Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander for combining the historical, supernatural and fantasy in one story. The novel was named a Top Ten Debut Novel of 2011 by the American Library Association and rights have sold been in 16 languages. The Reckoning, the second book in the trilogy, was published in June 2012, and the third and final book, The Descent, published in January 2014. The Taker Trilogy is published by Gallery Books/Simon and Schuster and Century/Random House UK.   alma

Ms. Katsu lives outside of Washington, DC with her husband, musician Bruce Katsu. In addition to her novels, Ms. Katsu has been a signature reviewer for Publishers Weekly and an occasional contributor to The Huffington Post. She is a graduate of the Master’s writing program at the Johns Hopkins University and received her bachelor’s degree from Brandeis University, where she studied with John Irving. 

Prior to publication of her first novel, Ms. Katsu had a long career as a senior intelligence analyst for several US agencies and is currently a senior analyst for a think tank. http://www.almakatsu.com/

Amy Bridges is a Los Angeles based writer and blogger at www.jurassicmom.com.  Amy’s work has appeared on TLC, HGTV, and Discovery Health. She is a Hedgebrook alumnus, and the recipient of the First Prize Fiction Award at the San Francisco Writers Conference. Her play, Women ofthe Holocaust, was published by The Kennedy Center and The Northwest TheatreJournal. Her play, The Day Maggie Blew Off Her Head, received first prize inthe Edward Albee Prince William Sound Playwriting Lab, presented by EdwardAlbee. Her work has been nominated for The American Theatre Critics Association’s New Play Award as well as The Osborne Award for an Emerging Playwright.  Her creative nonfiction has appeared on The Nervous Breakdownand has received publication by New Lit Salon Press.  Currently, she isworking on a collection of essays. And of course, living in Hollywood, it is required for her to always be working on a screenplay. Follow her on Twitter @rattleprincess and Facebook at amy.bridges.12@facebook.com.

That Mad Game

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…There have 14,000 wars in the last 5,600 years, and at least 160 since 1945.  Children are far more likely to experience war at some point during their childhood than they are to grow up without it.”  J.L. Powers, That Mad Game: Growing Up in a Warzone

That Mad Game

That Mad Game

I was rather reluctant when I got an email from J.L. Powers asking me if I would be interested in contributing an essay to an anthology she was editing about children growing up in warzones.  I am uncomfortable talking about Lebanon because it feels rather narcissistic given how many children suffered far more in Lebanon back then and since those days.  So we agreed we could make it about Lebanon a little but more about a boy from Gaza named Mutassem, a ten-year old amputee who had came to Los Angeles for medical treatment through the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, a U.S. non profit that helps sick and injured children throughout much of the Middle East.  During his time in the US, he had become like a fourth nephew to me.

In reading the stories of the other contributors of the That Mad Game (Cinco Puntos Press, 2012), I realized that some form of war is actually a given in most of parts of the world today, whether a war at home or one for which your country’s soldiers are exported.  For example a whole generation in the US that has now grown up seeing their parents go off to battle zones (often in the Arab world).  As Jerry Mathes and others in That Mad Game talk about surviving parents’ PTSD, it makes you wonder what psychological battles loom ahead for the young children of today’s soldiers everywhere.

The stories in That Mad Game come from around the globe, including birth in a US Japanese Internment camps, a Bosnian love story, an odd friendship with a Taliban mullah, fear of disappearance in El Salvador and Mexico, rescue in Holland, the importance of water skiing in post revolution Iran, exile in China, and other stories from Cambodia, Vietnam, South Africa, and Burma.  Perhaps the book will help young people and adults today understand that they are part of a small world that has great moments of joy but also great misery, the latter which is perhaps in their hands to prevent–which perhaps they will understand better reading these authors, the children of the recent past, today’s wounded adults.
“[R]eaders will be rewarded by [this] compelling and often uplifting anthology … That Mad Game surprises with its variety. From Taliban-controlled Kabul to a Japanese internment camp in northern California, from a teen girl’s ‘soundtrack of war’ in Beirut to a young man’s long walk across much of Africa, the startling stories make for rough going at times. But the humor, beauty, and humanity shining through the darkness are what make this collection a must-have for all libraries serving high school students.” —School Library Journal

http://www.amazon.com/That-Mad-Game-Growing-Anthology/dp/1935955225/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1358741361&sr=1-1&keywords=That+Mad+Game

Gained in Translation (and how I lost the ‘dude’)

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Interesting.  I wonder what this is about?  That was my initial reaction when I opened a package from my publisher the other day and saw Przepowiednia Szeherezady.  I was thinking that another writer must be as equally obsessed with Scheherazade as I am.  Perhaps she had read The Night Counter, and had liked it so much she had written a book length analysis of it.  Perhaps that was why my name was in big letters under the beautiful Nubian princess on the cover.  We can all be delusional for a few seconds.

The Nubian princess on the cover I immediately recognized was not me.  However, it took me awhile to figure out she was indeed my Scheherazade from The Night Counter.  This was in fact the Polish translation of The Night Counter, with one of the main characters literally photographed in a way I had never imagined her.

Being as The Night Counter’s characters are fiction, I had never seen a photograph of any of the characters in the book outside of my head.  Nor did I ever contemplate how hard or easy it would be for the characters to master life in Polish.  Now sometimes in the space they forever inhabit in me, I can imagine them whipping up some witty repartee in Polish.  At least I hope it’s witty and true to themselves.  But no one ever really knows when it comes to translation.  Indeed, how Dobromila Jankowska (the translator) heard them in English might be different than how I heard them, and therefore they might be slightly different people in Polish.  Just like real humans, characters become slightly different when they move to a different language, let alone a different country.  Even my English doesn’t sound the same here in Abu Dhabi as it does in the US.  There are words I don’t use often now—“dude” mercifully high among them—because they sound foreign in English here and maybe I speak louder and slower.

Humor, which is more based on culture and language, than drama is probably the hardest thing to understand in translation.  In Germany, The Night Counter family is apparently quite funny.  I only know this from sitting at readings in Germany in which I would read in English to relatively stoic responses –I could have been reading a new political manifesto for Europe.  But when the translator read the German version, the laughter told me they were not thinking of The Night Counter as a manifesto, at least not one they took seriously.

The Night Counter became Feigen in Detroit (Figs in Detroit) via translators Nadine Psuchel and Max Stradler.  My German editor at Auf Bau called Max a replicant because he can translate in several languages faster than anyone she’s met, run marathons and raise a son on his own.  Max did the first literal translation and Nadine went in and made the characters authentic in German.  At least that’s what everyone who has read the translation tells me:  They said Nadine was able to deliver fully dimensional characters who sounded like they’d always been speaking German suitable for their phobias and demographics.

When I met Nadine, we clicked instantly, bonded by the hours we had both spent pondering every word in the book, something that creates a natural intimacy, as probably no one else has ever had to be so close to what goes on in my head.  We also had similar sensibilities, key to good translation. Here is an exchange, unedited, between us when she was doing the final pass at the translation:

Nadine:  On page 84: “Yeah, we could call it the International Dateline,” he said. “Sometimes these ideas just come to me. The entrepreneur in me, I guess” (Zade talking about a new cooperative partnership in his match-making services). The pun with date doesn’t work in German so we thought of him proposing the name “Achse der Liebe” – “axis of love”. But of course this would have a more political undertone so what would you think of that version? (We could also leave the name in English. Date in the sense of rendez-vous is known in Germany, so the pun would be lost but the name itself would make sense, maybe with a slightly different wording in his next sentences).

Me:  I love axis of love. It would have been better in English, too.

Translation is complicated, but it also made me understand my own language more–and I got to understand my characters better in talking about them as German speakers.  But perhaps on the other hand its simple.  When I met my Norwegian publisher last year, I asked her why she had bought the book for this country with one of the highest per capita reading rates in the world.  “I loved the story,” she said.  “I could see it in Norwegian.”

That’s it really:  translation at its most noble is love of sharing stories and information. Some of the best things I’ve read in my life originated in languages I only know how to say “thank you” in.  If I have any doubts about how translation makes life better, I only have to look at the woman on the cover of Przepowiednia Szeherezady :  Scheherazade understood stories and the importance of them for survival.  That’s why she’s been in translation for centuries, some translations recognizable to how I know her, and some less so–and one day soon, she’ll find herself saying “dude” in someone’s interpretation of her.

A Good Library is Hard To Find

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What is more important in a library than anything else – than everything else – is the fact that it exists.  ~Archibald MacLeish, “The Premise of Meaning,” American Scholar, 5 June 1972

The other day in Jordan, my mother made the day of a young Spanish woman with whom we were chatting by telling her she could be Audrey Hepburn’s double.  This was true enough, but what struck me was how quickly the woman

Faten Hamama

blushed and said thank you,  banging on her tea cup to make sure her boyfriend had heard the compliment.  Audrey Hepburn was before my time, let alone this younger woman’s.  Yet the three of us shared a common language:  Hollywood films.  What we didn’t learn of this language on the big screen or at home, we were taught via the video store, TV, or iTunes.   Or for those of us who wanted to perfect the language, our knowledge grew through classes—and through access to a film library.

Jordan’s Royal Film Commission is in my favorite part of Amman, Rainbow Street, which fits because the street is named after the city’s first cinema, the Rainbow Theatre, now long gone. I love the film commission because it has given Jordan a genuine film fan and filmmaker community.

But perhaps more uniquely, it has a cozy film library over looking old Amman.  It’s not big or comprehensive, but if you’re looking for film that brought Syrian cinema to an international audience in 1972, you can scan the shelves and find it:  The Leopard.  Arabic films have a language of their own and very few people learn it because the Middle East has no significant film library and no effort has been made to educate students about Arab cinema.

While everyone laments the decline of reading in the world, particularly the Middle East it seems, one forgets that good libraries also house novels and films, perhaps both truer windows into who we are and who we were than any text or history book could ever be.

Before Kramer vs Kramer made divorce a topic to carry a movie or Broke Back Mountain told of the tortured deceits of closeted homosexuality, Egypt’s most famous actress Faten Hamama was dealing with them in the 1974 film Oridu Hillan  (I Need a Solution) . (Honestly, I haven’t seen it recently, so I can’t verify the gay issues that my cousin said were implied in the divorce.)  The movie in fact changed Egypt’s divorce laws.

When looking for the roots of today’s revolutions, much of it can be found even in the poorly produced and directed very broad comedies and melodramas of Egypt over the past decade—rife with farcical scenes about men not being able to afford marriage because jobs are always illusive, scenes government institutions and the absurd rules applied to the Everyman when he tries to feed his family or take care of their health needs, and scenes of the brutal consequences of speaking out against the corruption.

Arab cinema is not always at level of most Western cinema, but it has a long history that lays scattered—and damaged by time—because libraries don’t have the importance they should.   Arabs have a long film history that is their history.  Yet sadly, Arabs don’t have as much as they should a language in which they can say, “You remind me of Faten Hamama in….”

Thank you, Steve Jobs, for Letting Me Write

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Since I was in college, the one thing that has been in my life nearly everyday—and for better or worse, nearly all day—has

Thank you, Steve Jobs

been my Apple. Along with one of those apples that grow on trees, turning on my Mac has been part of my morning ritual wherever I have been and in whatever state-of-mind I have been in, minus a couple of war zones that have made it impossible. But even in those times, I would sometimes move my hands like they were going over the keyboards writing my thoughts.

I have never been addicted to my Mac, but I’d say we’ve been pretty co-dependent—or let’s say the best of friends, a reliable friend I always cleaned up with only the finest soft cloth, a friend I could count on to help me stay bond to my other friends and family, a friend I never cheated on once, no matter how many times a PC tried to get my attention. A friend who would only abandon me when it was his time to go, like Steve Jobs today. But my Macs always left memories behind, a hard drive that recorded our history together and the history of my life for the time we were together. And I am glad none of them tried to erase me from their memory, at least until we were no longer together .

It hasn’t always been the same Mac, but it has always been the same genius bringing me my new model—as well as smaller ones, ones that were phones, ones that meant I didn’t have to endure the same 10 pop songs on the car radio, ones that are what I now use to read all the books I love, new and old. Some Macs have been better to me than others, but overall, I would be less of a person for not having had them all in my life—even the big, bulky ones that weighed me down, that refused to move with the times, that were serious baggage, but only in the best sense.

I’m old enough to remember life before the various Macs that have lived with me. I would be a different person without them, as we would have all be. The way I stay in touch with people, read, listen to music, watch films, study, figure out my bills—all the paper and machines that would be cluttering up my world if my Macs hadn’t helped me get it together. They have also been fun–playing with my Macs in all their forms is something my nephews and I have bonded over, unlike video games (their choice) or baking cookies (my choice).  Apples are our happy middle.

Most importantly, my Macs helped make me who I am today. I wouldn’t be a writer without my Macs, whether for fiction, nonfiction, for film or television or print. And if I weren’t a writer, I wouldn’t have discovered peace of mind. Whenever my Mac and I have been writing, truly hard as it is everyday, I have felt that I am doing what I’m supposed to be doing. It couldn’t have done it without my Macs: I have weak hands and it is quite painful for me to write with pen or pencil and hard for anyone to read, including myself. It was only when I met my first Mac that I felt free to write.

So if you are wondering why this is posted on this blog dedicated to Middle East culture, it is because I would have never written anything about this part of the world if I hadn’t come here with my Mac. (And of course, because Steve Jobs was part Arab American.)

War and Body Image: Guernica and Arab American Literature

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When my friend and author Randa Jarrar asked me for a short story for a collection she was editing for Guernica, I wrote “Girls on Ice.”  Those were the people talking in my head at the time.  Some form of them is always talking in my head because they are in part who I once was and who I see so many teenagers as today.   You can’t be Arab or Arab American and female and not have had severe body image anxiety shoved down your throat (as a teen in Beirut, my thoughts weren’t of the war but rather of wanting to be a respectable young woman, i.e. not fat–whereas as the friends I’d left back in Minnesota took fat as an annoyance, not a tragedy).  War was just an inevitable, uncontrollable part of life, and sadly still is, but beauty can be controlled, just ask any woman in the Middle East.  Perhaps we wage war on our bodies to shut out the wars we find ourselves powerless to control.  But when you come to America, you have to be concerned with achieving beyond the bathroom mirror.  Just ask the characters in these stories.

http://www.guernicamag.com/features/2692/jarrar_intro_6_1_11/

Talking Poetry, Not Osama

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Because Abu Dhabi has become such a crossroads of the world since I have lived here, I find myself having a lot of “how did I get here” moments. For example in the years since 9-11, I’ve never sat around picturing where I’d be the day after Osama bin Ladin was put to rest, relatively speaking.  However, had I done so, I probably wouldn’t have come up this: at the home of the the Counselor for Press and Cultural Affairs of the Embassy of the United States of America in Abu Dhabi, celebrating poetry with three acclaimed poets who had just gotten out of Nepal on a rickety plane that morning and were leaving for Afghanistan the next day, having begun their journey in Iowa.

Poetry is the bread and butter of Arab art and culture, and no country has nurtured the arts in modern times more than the US, so it was one of those positive cross cultural meetings, especially given the news of the day wasn’t quite settling in the same for the two peoples.  That the Osama news was so different depending on where you got your information also had its upside, as the reception was also recognizing World Press Freedom Day.

Poets Nathalie Handal, Bob Holman and Christopher Merrill were in Abu Dhabi as part of the International Writers Program at the University of Iowa.  Here’s the official explanation:  “The International Writing Program is the flagship cultural partner of the U.S. Department of State.  For more than 30 years, the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program has brought together more than 1,000 rising and established literary stars from 120 countries to spend a semester exploring the creative writing process. Authors, screenwriters, journalists, and other participants benefit from the rich literary heritage and resources of Iowa City, a UNESCO City of Literature. On the road, IWP writers carry out programming, often in collaboration with U.S. embassies and cultural centers, that helps audiences around the world think about the role the arts, and especially literature, can playing in building bridges of international communication.”  Take that anyone who thinks Iowa is just cornfields and pig farms.

Christopher Merrill, who directs the International Writing Program, read a poem in which a semi-hidden rattlesnake is an easily recognized metaphor.  Bob Holman, who studies dying languages for fun and has appeared on shows like HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, improvised in free verse on the possibility of writing from the other person’s side at the rapid, off tangent rate most of us find thoughts running through our head when we try to write.  Nathalie Handal, Palestinian American poet and one of the editors of the acclaimed anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond (W.W. Norton) read her poem, “Peace.”

I leave you with her latest poem, Freedom, about the current Arab revolutions.

http://www.guernicamag.com/poetry/2612/handal_poem_5_1_11/

The First Female Superhero

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I spoke at TEDx Abu Dhabi last week.  TED is hard, writing is hard–being a superhero is even harder.  But that’s what I talked about at TEDx:  My favorite female superhero, Scherhazade.  I also consider her the first female superheroine.  I’ll post the video in which I explain why when I’m feeling more heroic and therefore not afraid of looking at videos that have me in them.  In the meantime, here’s an article that is  the result of a nice chat I had with National report Manal Ismail after the talk.

http://www.thenational.ae/news/uae-news/arabian-nights-character-scheherazade-a-role-model-for-women 

On Being Just Plain American

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It seems like most of my life, I’ve been asked what it’s like to be Arab or Palestinian or Lebanese or Muslim. I’ve even been asked questions about being Latino and Jewish,  based on my appearance I assume.   However, I can’t remember anyone ever asking me what it is like to be an American, although I’ve spent all my life being one.  I think there is an assumption that just by being born American I am privileged, privileged by the international power my country has.  While I’ve recognized the relative truth of that, I’m well aware that the US is not paradise on Earth for so many of its people.  Watch any Michael Moore documentary or just go hang out an urban hospital emergency room eavesdropping on conversations—what doesn’t kill you, will make you question the meaning of life and death.  And never mind that so much US Middle East policy pains me.

But on a more personal level, “what’s it like to be an American” is not even a question I would ask myself about myself, although I would ask it of others:  I think I’ve always felt quasi American because of my childhood.  In the Midwest, where I spent my early years, I didn’t have a Little House on the Prairie homesteading heritage—and not just one but both my parents had accents, didn’t know a twice baked potato from a Tater Tot, weren’t rugged and outdoorsy like the Marlboro Man or Robert Redford and thought camping was something people had to do if they couldn’t afford roadside motels. That childhood reasoning as to why we were not ‘real’ Americans, no matter how much my parents would tell us differently, has somehow always stayed with me, compounded by grown up examples that involve words like terrorism, Muslims, 9/11.

However, this fall at the Frankfurt Central Library, when US Consulate Public Affairs Officer Jeanine Collins introduced me as an American author—just plain American, not a hyphenated American—for the first time I felt that I was indeed an American.  I was not just an American because a representative of the US government was introducing me (although that was the first time I’d ever been introduced by an American as an American), but because in that instant I realized that the US was the country that can claim and that I can claim, the country that has educated me, given me my voice to speak for all my other identities, let me question what it is to be American, and let me praise its ingenuity, innocence and hope and criticize its darker sides without punishment.  There in Frankfurt, I felt that I had come home, that I had been validated as a real American, not just by the US Consulate but finally by myself.

Here’s a clip of that talk:  www.youtube.com/watch?v=7o7s6QssY10

The Quran and the Quest For Kindness

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In the last years of my dad’s life, I spent a lot of time asking him questions about the Quran.  It wasn’t because either one of us was having a religious rebirth or even because it gave us some common ground together other than playing backgammon, although it did do that.  It was because my dad knew the Quran inside out, as it had been part of his upbringing.  I knew almost nothing about it, as that had been part of the upbringing he had given me.  After 9/11 and the consequent Islamanoia, I began to have to field questions about Muslims simply by virtue of being born one.  My dad taught me not to speak without having my facts in order, and so that was when I began my journey to explore the Quran.
While my dad hadn’t taught his kids much about the religion, I learned he was a strong believer, which he began to reveal to me in the passages we talked about and how inspirational and important they were in his mind for living a decent life.  I suspect his interpretations of several things, including alcohol and the hijab and ultimately death, would not have met with the approval of many Muslims, particularly here in the Gulf.  That aside, I think my favorite passage in the Quran would—or at least, should—meet with the approval of people from any religion, including atheists:

“Do what is beautiful. God loves those who do what is beautiful” (2:195)

Beautiful in translation in this case means to show kindness and practice good deeds.  Or as Robert Frager, a Harvard-trained psychologist and Sufi, explains in The Wisdom of Islam: A Practical Guide to the Wisdom of Islamic Belief,  it is “acting with heedfulness, beauty, refinement, graciousness, and respect for others.”  Do what is beautiful just says it so simply.

In manic paced places like Abu Dhabi, where buildings and people and cars come and go faster than the rain, it is sometimes hard to keep focused on the beautiful, until some sad news reminds you of the reality that is sometimes hard to see out of the rabbit hole in this city that my friend Cindy calls “Alia in Wonderland.”

That’s why I like my friend Alicia Bessette and Mathew Quick’s blog, “Quest for Kindness” (http://aliciabessette.com/blog/) Sometimes just the phrase “quest for kindness,” just like “do what is beautiful” act as grounders.   Kind of like “Never a lender or borrower be” from Shakespeare, another source of wisdom my father loved to quote, reminds you to put your credit card away.