Butterfly on the Tide Line

Butterfly on the Tide Line by Luanne Rice

Walking the tide line, I came upon an Eastern Comma Butterfly in the wet sand.  The front edge of a wave pushed it higher on the beach.  I thought the butterfly was dead, but then I saw one of its legs move.  I picked it up.  I carried it to the top of the beach thinking I would lower it into the tall grass where it could die, but it held my finger with a sharp grip.  It began to walk up the back of my hand.

I sat in the sand holding it.  We stayed there for a long time.  The sun felt warm.  Ants crawled around the sand.  The butterfly was still, its wings glued together, sticking straight up.  It looked as if a bite had been taken from its wings, but it was so symmetrical I believe that was just their shape.

Brown spots on dark orange wings, like a monarch but with no white markings.  Raggedy wings, big eyes.  She had only one antenna visible.  I thought the other had been torn off, but it was trapped between her wings.  She worked to free it and did.  Now two antennae waved.  Four legs walking.  Up my hand onto the sleeve of my sweatshirt.   Over my shoulder, onto my back.  She positioned herself in full sunlight.  We stayed there a long time.  She was drying her wings.

She moved her wings apart.  A little, then back together.  Stillness.  Her big eyes.  No more walking, then many more steps onto my shoulder.  She tilted.  Her wings opened.  Now she closed them again.  Wide wings, grains of sand stuck to them.  A small patch of sand where the wing joined her thorax.  As her wings dried, the sand fell off grain by grain.

I slid off my sweatshirt and placed it on my towel with her on the shoulder of the sweatshirt in the sun.  I went to swim.  I just ducked in, stayed a few minutes, came out.  She was still there in the sunlight.  The wind ruffled her wings.  They were open now and stayed open.  The sun was setting; I was getting cold.  I waited, wishing she would fly.  I felt my hopes getting up, but checked them.  Maybe she would try to fly and not be able to.  I thought of my youngest sister.  She had once watched a Monarch butterfly emerge from its chrysalis.  It had crawled onto her finger and taken flight from there.  She’d described to me the feeling of tiny claws on her skin.  I had known that with my butterfly.  I wanted her to fly, but she didn’t.  The sun was going down.

I didn’t want to leave her on the beach.  I picked up my sweatshirt with her still clinging to the shoulder, wings open.  Carrying her across the sand, I spotted a young gull, dark markings, standing on one foot.  On the body, right where the second leg should have been, was a scrap of red.  Blood, from where the leg had been—recently, from the blood and ruffled feathers—torn off.

Every day is a heartbreak.  You can’t save everything.  Maybe you can’t save anything.  I carried the butterfly on my sweatshirt.  The sea breeze picks up just before sunset, and I was afraid she’d blow off my sweatshirt when we crossed the footbridge, but I shielded her with my body and she hung on.

We climbed the steep stone steps up the wooded hillside.  When we got to the yard, I left her on my sweatshirt on the ground by the back door.  Her wings were open, then she closed them.  I went to take a shower, an outside shower under the sky, with vines climbing the latticework.  The water felt hot and good.  When I came back around the house, she was gone.

Sea Education Association

Sea Education Association by Luanne Rice

November 1975, Woods Hole.

One stormy November night, studying in a carrel at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) Library, I picked up my pen, wanting to capture the moment.  Feelings of being at SEA, living in Woods Hole, learning about the oceans from great teachers, preparing to join WESTWARD in the Caribbean…  I wrote: “The wind is howling across Eel Pond, clanking in the halyards of boats on their moorings.  Soon I’ll be going to sea.  What will happen?”

I still have that notebook.  Looking back now, did I realize then that I was in the midst of the single most influential experience of my life?  I knew that I wanted to be a writer, and at nineteen had the resounding sense that I was completely unqualified by life to write about anything worth reading.  SEA changed all that.

We met WESTWARD in St. Thomas, and I was assigned to C-Watch, with Mike Phelps as the watch officer.  I spent the first night on lookout—standing at the bow, watching for obstacles, more vigilant than I had ever been.  The wind was so salty and warm, the sea flashed with bioluminescence, and by the time I was relieved by the next student, I was already transformed by the fact of having helped guide my ship and shipmates through the night.

Our cruise track would take us through the Lesser Antilles, across the Old Bahama Channel, and into the Turks and Caicos as we tracked humpback whales.  We hung hydrophones over the side and recorded their songs.  We watched the whales breach and dive, swim alongside the boat with their newborns.   The science we did challenged previously held ideas about migratory routes and about where and when the whales mated and birthed their young.  I internalized the experience of what I observed and felt, and I have been writing about it ever since.

So many of my characters have benefited from my experience with SEA.  The oceanographer in ANGELS ALL OVER TOWN, my first novel, got started aboard a schooner like WESTWARD.  The marine biologist in SAFE HARBOR researched humpbacks in the Caribbean.  I write a lot about artists who paint nature, and I attribute their attention to the beauty and minutiae of various species to my time spent in the shipboard lab.  The meteorologist played by Gena Rowlands in the film version of CRAZY IN LOVE studied in Woods Hole and used to hear the halyards clanking in the wind blowing across Eel Pond.

Most of my novels take place on oceans and shorelines; I can’t even imagine my work without everything I learned from my time in SEA.  Not just the facts taught in class and on board ship, but the sense I gained of the world and my place in it.  The enormity of the sea, the capacity we have to sail it, our responsibility to each other, to future generations, to the sea itself…

I stopped believing that young writers, including myself, lack things to say—instead, it’s more a matter of learning to trust oneself and one’s voice.  Even so, I consider SEA to be my Hemingway experience: Young Woman and the Sea.  I sailed by the stars, followed whales, climbed a mountain on Mona Island, spent Christmas far from land on Silver Bank, watched sharks in a feeding frenzy in Mayaguez Harbor, pondered existence.

Amy Gittell, my Woods Hole roommate and WESTWARD shipmate, has remained a wonderful friend.  I’ve always felt grateful to Dewitt and Lila Acheson Wallace, founders of Reader’s Digest, for giving me the scholarship that made my time at SEA possible—ironically, my work is now published in many languages in their Select Editions, and my gratitude extends to SEA every time I see one of those volumes and realize how much of my material comes from my time there.

One of my favorite words, and states of being, is inspired.  To inspire means, literally, to breathe life into, to impel, move, or guide by divine or supernatural inspiration.

I think back to the wind that long ago November night, when I wrote: “Soon I will be going to sea.  What will happen?”

Now I know: I was about to be inspired.

For more information about SEA, please visit www.sea.edu.

Portrait of the Writer as a Young Chelsea Girl

Portrait of the Writer as a Young Chelsea Girl by Luanne Rice

When I first moved to New York City, I lived on Tenth Avenue just north of Fourteenth Street, over a speakeasy that used to be frequented by the Irish mob.  My mentor, a writer at The New Yorker, had helped me find a room in an SRO.  He’d told me that all writers had to live in New York, preferably in squalor, and since I had basically no money but many dreams, I was on board with that.  Chelsea was the Wild West then—gunshots were a common way to be awakened at two in the morning.  I got so I would dial “911” in my sleep.

My mentor suggested I live as stable a life as possible, writing all the time and not falling into the temptations of drink, parties, and a messy love life.  Soon I married, and moved to an actual apartment in the same neighborhood.  My then-husband was a young lawyer.  We had no money, but big dreams.  I published my first short stories and wrote my first novel in New York—Angels All Over Town.

Throughout this time, the Empire Diner was my café.  I went there for coffee every morning, and until it closed last spring, continued to do so over the last twenty-plus years.  Back then Paulina Porizkova and Elle Macpherson were roommates, and I would see them at the next table.  There were lots of clubs in the neighborhood, and half the diner would be filled with people just waking up, half with people on their way home.

But the part of Chelsea I’ve always loved best has been the seminary block.  West 20^th St. between Ninth and Tenth Avenues.  Built on land owned by Clement Clark Moore (author of “A Visit From St. Nicholas,”) it seems very alive with ghosts.  I’ve always felt them there, and I wrote about them in Silver Bells.

Back when I first lived here, West 20^th St. was home to two of my favorite writers—Ann Beattie and Laurie Colwin.  It was like a literary mecca for me—to walk down the street on the off-chance of seeing them.  Which I often did…

In spite of his admonition to not become distracted by the literary life, my mentor used to take me to lunch at the Algonquin, where we would sit one banquette away from Mr. Shawn, and to the theater, and opening night parties, and literary soirees.  Once I sat at a table with him, Norman Mailer, John Updike, William Styron, and George Plimpton.  Then I came home to write and try not to feel daunted.

I’ve been a writer my whole life, and I still live in Chelsea.  What a solitary time it was when I first lived here—my husband worked all the time, and I hardly ever saw him.  I just wrote.  My friends were artists, writers, and musicians.  Eventually I did fall prey to all I'd been warned against, and certain things fell apart, and others seemed to come together.   My husband and I divorced.  Hearts were broken and broken again.  I became a wild child, which was inconvenient because by then I was in my thirties.  Chelsea saw me through.

Galleries took over, and the streets became not so gritty.  New places opened.  I found an apartment with two views: a sliver of the Hudson River to the west, and the historic district of Chelsea to the east.  Directly across the street is an old warehouse that sports billboards advertising self-storage with messages such as the one I'm looking at right now: "Material Possessions Won't Make You Happy or Maybe They Will."  Most days I have lunch or at least coffee at the Half King, a café owned by Sebastian Junger and Scott Anderson.  There is a sidewalk terrace, back garden, and black leather couches under slanting ceilings.  On Monday nights there is a wonderful reading series.

After a more recent divorce than the first one, I went into Dan’s Chelsea Guitars and bought an acoustic guitar.  I began to take lessons from Mark Lonergan, a great guitarist who lives in the building next to the Hotel Chelsea.  He’s taught me a lot, but I don’t practice enough.  Even so, I write songs and have formed a band with two women from the neighborhood.  They’re both really good: Dianne plays bass, and Ali plays keyboards.  We’re all in the arts and do so much work from home, we call ourselves “House Arrest.”

Chelsea has been home for so long, it hurts to see the major changes occurring.  Fancy new buildings going up.  Where are all the young writers, musicians, artists, actors supposed to live if all the cheap apartments get torn down so “luxury high-rises” can go up in their place?

It confuses me, but I have faith in young writers.  I found my own inspiring patch of squalor here in New York City, and I trust that they will, too.  They’ll find their way to a Chelsea all their own.

There's No Place Like Home (An Earlier Perspective on the Subject)

Another perspective on Hubbard’s Point… There's No Place Like Home

By Luanne Rice

In the spirit of full disclosure, I should tell you that several years ago I bought the beach cottage where my family spent every summer; this proverb is that dear to my heart.  A small grey-shingled house perched on a rocky ledge overlooking Long Island Sound, it is shaded by oaks and pines, smelling of salt and beach roses.  After a long winter in New York City, I walk through the kitchen door, and a lifetime of memories floods over me.

My maternal grandparents built the house in 1938, just in time to withstand the brutal hurricane roaring up New England’s coast.  My father’s family owned a cottage just up the road; he met my mother the summer after he returned from World War II.  It was a rainy day, and he and his mother were sitting on the screen porch.  As the family story goes, my mother went striding by (I love that they use that word—“striding”—I can just see her) in a yellow rain slicker, and my future grandmother urged her son to go after her in the car, and offer her a ride.

He did, and they got married, and my sisters and I were born.  We lived inland during the winter, but every June we’d pack up the station wagon and head for the beach.  My grandmother let us plant the window boxes; my mother gave us each a section of the herb garden to plant; my father taught us how to fish.  My cousins would be a two-minute walk away at my grandfather’s cottage, and we’d all go swimming and crabbing together.  We looked forward all year till the August meteor showers, when we’d lie on the beach and wish on shooting stars.

My Aunt Jan has a party every year, on the date of her father’s birthday.  Pop died long ago, but the last weekend in August, his house and yard are alive with his grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

“Home” can encompass more than a dwelling—it can be a gathering, an activity, a state of mind—a moment that tells you who you are, where you come from.  During last year’s party, I took my cousins’ children—twelve of them—for the time-honored Rice family tradition of blue crabbing in the swamp, at the far end of the beach.  Armed with nets and drop lines, buckets and bait, we waited till the tide was right, and then trudged through the tall grass to the creek.

We lined the banks.  Sun beat down on our heads.  I remembered my father telling me to be still, that my shadow would scare the crabs away.  I could almost feel my sisters beside me, our bare feet silver with silty mud, thrilled by the sight of blue shells skulking through the shallows.

Last summer, it all came back.  Nothing can conjure childhood memories like hanging out by a tidal creek with twelve young cousins.  I felt so happy to show them what I knew, to watch them catch and release more crabs than we could count.  We took time out to watch egrets in the pond, to follow an osprey as it circled overhead.  Two of the older kids went exploring, and found the Indian Grave that my sisters and I had often visited so many summers earlier.

Many of the people I loved so much are gone.  My grandparents, my mother and father, some of my aunts and uncles and cousins.  As often as memory makes me smile, it makes me sad for those I’ll never see again.  I think that that is one of the secrets of life: to know that it all goes by so fast, that sometimes we have to let go of people we love before we are ready.

Ergo: the ruby slippers.  Thank goodness we all have a pair.  Your mother’s brownie recipe, your grandmother’s quilt, the picture of you and your sister at the State Fair.  Click your heels three times…

My cottage has withstood many hurricanes since 1938.  So have I, so has my family.  I’ve lived in big cities and small towns, made more mistakes than I can count, roamed far and wide, lived a complicated life.  One thing I can always count on is the feeling of peace that overtakes me when I climb the steps, up the hill to my cottage.

I see the 1938 penny my grandfather pressed into the step’s mortar; I smell the rosemary, thyme, and mint from my mother’s herb garden; I feel the salt breeze that has so often blown my troubles away, that has inspired me with countless stories…and I feel in my heart what I know to be true: there’s no place like home.

Connecticut Center for the Book, 2005

In Honor of Reading Lolita in Tehran: a Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi by Luanne Rice

August 30, 2005

I was born in the United States, where we have a Constitution whose First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech, and I have lived here my whole life except for two years when I lived in Paris, in the Eighth Arrondissement, overlooking the courtyard of a hotel with red awnings, which was hardly oppressive.  So I’m humbled to be writing this in honor of Azar Nafisi’s visit to the library.

While I lived in Paris, I took a train to Amsterdam to see the Anne Frank house.  In fourth grade at Vance School in New Britain, we had read her diary. The small everyday details of Anne’s life made me love her, and feel I knew her.  Like me, she had loved and rebelled against her parents, liked a boy, fought with her sister.

She had also lived in hiding from the Nazis, watched neighbors being dragged from their homes, worried her family would be killed—and written about it.  For a young girl living in the secret annex, that was an act of dissidence.  Here is a quote from Tuesday, April 4, 1944:

“I want to go on living even after my death! And therefore I am grateful to God for giving me this gift, this possibility of developing myself and of writing, of expressing all that is in me. I can shake off everything if I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn."

Writing as salvation…  Anne wrote what the world wasn’t supposed to read.  The power in that act is nearly unfathomable to those of us protected by the First Amendment.  Reading brought me into Anne’s world and changed me, showed me what one voice can do.  Her words have always meant so much to me.  Not only for what they say, but for the very fact she wrote them.

Friends and Favorites

I feel so lucky to be surrounded with creative, amazing friends and colleagues.  I have been with my literary agent, Andrea Cirillo, since the very beginning.  We were young when first we began; my mother actually accompanied me to the agency for my first meeting.  Long time ago, many books and much fun since then.  Ron Bernstein has been my film agent forever.  Thanks to him I've had movies and a mini-series made of my work, and gotten to spend much time on film sets. This website was created by Adrian Kinloch.  I thank him for his knowledge, vision, and the beautiful photographs he took at two photo shoots--one in Chelsea, the other at Rockaway Beach.  Jessie Cantrell is a writer, actress, and comedian who moonlights as my assistant.  Mike O'Gorman is a writer, actor, and comedian, and does all our videos.  Ted O'Gorman is a writer, actor, and comedian who fills in for Jessie when she's acting, and who also takes care of my three cats when I'm on the road.  Sarah Walker, writer, actress, comedian, and author of Really, You've Done Enough, is integral to many projects.

The photo above shows me with Audrey Loggia, my friend and California sister.  I'm godmother to her dog Maggie and she to my cat Maggie.  Even though she's allergic to cats.  A great friend indeed.

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Jessie Cantrell Jessie is Luanne's assistant, friend, and fellow coffee lover.  She considers herself very fortunate to have such a wise, talented, supportive, generous, gorgeous and, most importantly, fun boss.  Jessie is an actress/comedian, so when she is not at The Half King with Luanne, she is auditioning for Coke commercials, making music, and/or working on sketch comedy shows for her group The Dan Ryan.  You can check out her stuff at jessiecantrell.com.

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Mike O' Gorman Mike is the director and editor of video content for LuanneRice.com. O'Gorman is also an actor and writer, and has appeared in upcoming episodes of Comedy Central's Ugly Americans, Cartoon Network's Delocated,and VH1's The Short List. When he's not working on Luanne's videos, you can find him performing with his sketch comedy group, The Dan Ryan. Mike O'Gorman lives in New York City.   Follow Mike on facebook >

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Sarah Walker Sarah is a writer and comedian living in NYC. Her column "Sarah Walker Shows You How" appears on McSweeney's Internet Tendency. She also blogs for Best Week Ever (bestweekever.tv). She enjoys cake and naps. For more about Sarah, go to her website: sarahwwalker.weebly.com

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Ted O'Gorman Ted is an actor and comedian in New York. He is the former head writer for Black20.com's The Middle Show with David Price. In addition to his work in videos for LuanneRice.com he performs regularly as a member of the sketch comedy group The Dan Ryan.

Luanne on Deep Blue Sea for Beginners

What could be more disturbing than a mother who leaves her daughters? She's not sick, there's no deep dark secret, she doesn't have amnesia. One day she just walks out. To those who've read Geometry of Sisters, you'll be familiar with Pell Davis. When she and her sister Lucy are abandoned by their mother as children, their world is turned upside down. They have the world's best dad, and for a while he holds the children together. But when he dies, Pell has to grow up almost overnight. She doesn't pity herself, she doesn't look back.  She strives for excellence in everything she does, she cares for Lucy with the ferocity of a mother lion. They attend boarding school in Newport, Rhode Island, and even after Pell finds a new friend on the football team, she has a single-minded plan: to find her mother.

Lyra Davis's whereabouts are no secret—she lives in a romantic villa on Italy's Isle of Capri. But Pell has to travel there to ask the question: why? Why did you leave? How could you have?

In a wild, rocky landscape surrounded by the deep blue sea, Pell will learn the truth about her mother. Nothing about the visit is easy, and Pell is forced to stay true to herself, to keep believing in love and goodness, to try to bring her own gifts to her mother. She's tested in ways we've all been: should we stay the course or give up when it becomes impossible? Be loyal or decide to do something unexpected? And most of all, can we forgive the worst?

I hope you enjoy The Deep Blue Sea for Beginners. I'd love to know what mothers and daughters, friends and fellow readers would have to say about Lyra's choice, and what Pell has to do to proceed in her own life.