www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20080907/LIFESTYLE/809070 -
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Published on: 9/7/2008
Last Visited: 9/8/2008
For a year, noted essayist, author and SSU professor Noelle Oxenhandler studied the phenomenon of wishing and dared to see if her own wishes could come true ...
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And if, as Emily Dickinson famously wrote, "Hope is the thing with feathers," then a wish, says writer Noelle Oxenhandler, "is a desire with feathers -- an arrow's feathers and an arrow's sharp tip."
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Oxenhandler sprinkles her writing with a playfulness as pleasant as fairy dust.But she girds her narrative with scholarly references and research, drawing from mythology, philosophy, theology and psychology.
"I'm not interested in talking about myself for the sake of talking about myself.I'm interested in using my own experience to explore an idea," says Oxenhandler, who also teaches creative writing at Sonoma State University and will give the opening talk at the Sonoma County Book Festival Sept. 20.
With a graduate degree in philosophy as well as creative writing, Oxenhandler typically weaves a personal thread through big themes with social implications.Her previous books include "A Grief Out of Season," (Little Brown, 1991), in which she examines, through her own experience, the unique pain of young adults facing the divorce of their parents.
"The Eros Of Parenthood" (St. Martin's Press, 2001), inspired by the overwhelming connection she felt with her now 22-year-old daughter, proved a provocative look at "the last taboo," the powerfully sensual nectar -- rarely articulated but biologically functional -- that draws parent to child.The book sprang from an essay in the New Yorker that sparked such a furor that publishers and agents were bombarding her for a book deal.
Not every reader gets it, she sighs.She may well be referring to the niggling first poster on Amazon (where her book has consistently ranked within the top 10,000 books sold since its July release) who referred to her as "a reluctant memoirist" who "does not reveal the most essential things."
"Memoir, by definition, is a slice of someone's experience.It's not autobiography where you find out everything but the kitchen sink," she says quietly but with the conviction of one who both practices the genre and teaches it.
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But Oxenhandler says she is drawing from an older tradition.
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Oxenhandler, 56, says she gravitates toward topics that deal with personal things she's driven to explore.
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Throughout her year of wishful thinking, Oxenhandler did not necessarily come to believe in magic even though she got her three wishes for spiritual healing after a painful disconnect, a home of her own in a housing market gone haywire and her perfect man whose description she outlined on a piece of paper tucked between her mattresses.Through a phone call from a fan came Nicholas, her dream man made manifest.
Over the months, she lightened up in a sense, coming to question her lifetime choices of self-denial.
Although she grew up in sunny Southern California and Santa Cruz (where her father taught French lit at the new UC campus) she inexplicably chose a path of "self-imposed exile" to study comparative religion at Oberlin College in perpetually overcast Ohio.
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Along with the liberation that comes with putting one's wishes out there, Oxenhandler said she also came to understand the caveat "Be careful what you wish for," and the old religious edict against "petitionary prayer" based on the recognition that mere mortals lack the aerial view.
But it's also important, she says, "to take that risk."
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Opening: The festival gets under way at 10 a.m. at the Central Library, Third and E streets, with a reading by Noelle Oxenhandler, a Sonoma State University writing professor whose new book is "The Wishing Year: A House, A Man, My Soul."
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