Forgotten Arts

by Linda Rodriguez

In my mystery novel which will launch near the end of April, Every Last Secret, Skeet Bannion’s best friend owns a shop called Forgotten Arts, offering knitting, spinning, and weaving supplies. This shop is basically in the book because I love to knit, spin, and weave, and I’ve always had a little daydream of having just such a shop of my own.

It probably all began with my grandmothers. One of them was an excellent needlewoman who taught me to sew doll clothes and doll quilts, using the scraps from her many sewing and quilting projects. This grandmother even made spring corsages for each granddaughter from old nylon stockings, cut up and dyed into violets, iris, lilies, and roses. The other grandmother knit and crocheted afghans, sweaters, even golf-club covers. Neither of them knew how to spin or weave, as far as I know.

Both of my grandmothers were great “makers from scratch,” though, whether with food, such as bread, butter, cheeses, and such, or with household items, such as baskets, candles, lotions, soaps, washcloths, and dish towels. My Cherokee grandmother even made her own medicines with herbs from her garden and weeds growing in the wild. Most of these medicines, foods, and household items were more effective or better-tasting than the mass-produced versions available in stores and pharmacies.

Beginning as a childhood apprentice to these two grand old dames, I set off on a lifelong quest for the forgotten arts. I have a huge library, and one of the categories within it is that of how-to books. I have books on how to design and make furniture from cast-off materials, how to make braided rugs, how to make doll houses and furniture, how to make canned foods and jellies, how to make your own purses and shoes, and books on yogurt making and felt making—and I have made all of these things and more. I seek out books on forgotten arts, such as spinning, weaving, smocking, rug hooking, tatting, and bobbin-lace making. (I’ve done the first three, but haven’t tried the last three yet.) I even have books on how to build your own log cabin or barn from scratch, how to milk a goat, and how to grow and use your own natural-dye garden. If all these dystopian books come true and we have some kind of societal collapse, I’m the neighbor you want to have.

Of course, now that writing has taken over my life, my big floor loom in one end of the living room has become a cat gymnasium, my sewing machine sits permanently covered on a table where manuscripts have replaced fabric pieces, and gorgeous hand-knit projects languish neglected and unfinished in tote bags hanging from the doorknobs of my combination office and studio. I still believe these crafts have great value. I used to make time for them in a busy life, but I’ve lost that knack somewhere and need to recover it for a sense of balance. Meanwhile, I’ll write into my books a character who has that balance and that fiber craft store that I used to dream of owning.

In your own writing, what aspect of your life finds its way as a part of your story? Do you give a character some passion or aspect of your own personality? And when you’re reading, do you like to see these bits of the author’s personality embodied in the work?

Detail of one of Linda's quilts.

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Linda Rodriguez’s novel, Every Last Secret, winner of the St. Martin’s/Malice Domestic Best First Traditional Mystery Competition, will be published by Minotaur Books on April 24. Linda is the author of two award-winning books of poetry and a cookbook, and is the recipient of several writing awards. She swears she’ll shoo the cat off and warp the big loom just as soon as she finishes her book tour and the edits on her second novel in the Skeet Bannion series and the first draft of her third and…
To learn more, visit www.LindaRodriguezWrites.blogspot.com.

My Local Library

by Sheila Connolly

 Shoot, I had a nice post all ready to go and then I had a "doh!" moment. We're celebrating National Library Week, and I've got a nice library in walking distance, whose materials and services I actually do use, so I shifted gears and wrote this tribute to the Middleborough Public Library.

My experience with libraries got off to a slightly rocky start. I learned to read early, so to keep me supplied with books my mother got me a library card when I was five. One small problem: when I took books from the library, I believed they belonged to me, so I kind of neglected to return them (which does not explain why I hid them under my bed). Needless to say my mother was not pleased, and my library privileges were suspended for a time. But not for long, and I've had plenty of library cards since, including one for the National Library in Dublin (Ireland).

I moved to Middleboro, Massachusetts nine years ago and obtained a library card; so did my daughter. The library (a block from the town's only stoplight) is housed in a handsome building with an interesting history. Middleboro is an old town, founded in 1669, originally part of the original Plymouth settlement. The town center (mainly the First Congregational Church, a massive 18th-century cemetery, and the original school house) lay a few miles to the north of the current center—I think the shift occurred when the railroad came through.

Town Hall (yes, it still looks like this)

The rules for a town library were approved at a town meeting in 1875, when it was located in the large Victorian town hall. It outgrew that space by 1885 and was moved to a larger space in the same building, with an added reading room. But it became possible for the town to build a new standalone library thanks to a bequest of $500,000 in 1901, given by resident Thomas S. Peirce (yes, e before i). The building was built quickly (on land formerly owned by the Peirce family) and opened in 1904. The library still occupies the same space.

Who was Thomas Peirce? A successful shopowner. His father Peter erected a strikingly large general store in Middleboro in 1826, and sired eleven children (which he himself defined as "very queer children"). Only three married, and none had children, so Thomas ended up inheriting the whole pot.

Middleborough Police Station

The store still stands, a sprawling neo-classical edifice across the street from the library. It currently houses the town's police department (not very comfortably!).

Until I wrote this, I hadn't realized how much I have used the library in the past nine years. I've borrowed books; I've contributed books (mostly mysteries, including mine); I've used their genealogy resources, and even helped catalog some of them; I've attended public events there. I'm a Friend of the Middleborough Public Library, and that means I'm a contributor as well.

Cataloging at the library

I can't imagine a town without a library—and I don't want to. Please support your local library!

Aunt Hilda's Hundredth Birthday

Elizabeth Zelvin


Yesterday was my Aunt Hilda’s hundredth birthday.

I couldn’t reach her in the morning (her 8:45 am in Seattle, my 11:45 in New York). When I caught up with her at noon Pacific Time, she said she’d been at a dance exercise class, where they celebrated her birthday with flowers. She was about to go out for lunch with her son, with more festivities planned for later in the day. “Maybe I'll get a free glass of wine at dinner,” she said. “I’m enjoying the fuss. It certainly isn’t going to come around again.”


I asked if she’d gotten a phone call from President Obama—not that I really expected it, since a lot more people seem to be living to a hundred these days than ever before. “No, but he sent me a very nice letter,” she said, “well written.” Among my aunt’s many talents are editorial skills. She also has political opinions. Luckily, her milestone birthday came during an administration that she didn’t mind getting a letter from. “I also got a letter from André Agassi, the tennis star,” she said. “I don’t know who spilled the beans to him that I still play tennis, but someone must have.”


On her last birthday, or maybe it was the one before, when I asked Aunt Hilda the secret of doing well at an advanced age, she said, “Resilience!” I thought it was an astute comment and have repeated it many times. So yesterday, I asked her if she had any words of wisdom for all the people who consider her an inspiration. “I’m wondering why I don’t know more than I know,” she said. I thought that was kind of a Zen response, indicative of humility in the spiritual sense, intellectual curiosity, and openness to learning, though she would have laughed dismissively if I had said so.


While she has less energy than she used to, she’s in good health, and she certainly has all her marbles. “You have the genes,” she said. “You’ll get there too.” “If the planet doesn’t fall apart before then,” I said, and we talked for a while about what a terrible world it is. “We had such high hopes,” she said. I didn’t know if she was talking about the last Presidential election or the 20th century. “People are no damn good,” she said. But she laughed when she said it.

Virtopsy

 Sandra Parshall

Remember when fictional mysteries were solved entirely by the use of the sleuth’s little gray cells? That era is fading into the mists of time as forensic technology advances. Authors who set their books in the present have to acknowledge the changes or look like idiots in the eyes of readers.

One of the latest things in forensics is the virtual autopsy – the virtopsy. I’m sure you’ve heard of full-body medical scans for the living that can turn up problems you didn’t know you had. The virtual autopsy is similar, but it converts high-resolution two-dimensional MRI and CT scans into a three-dimensional image. Guided by a Virtobot – a robotic arm mounted above the body – it can examine every inch of a dead person, inside and out, from every angle, without opening the body and possibly damaging or destroying evidence.

A virtopsy can spot things that even the most skilled pathologist might not find. It can show the precise angle and distance from which a bullet was fired. It can help determine time of death up to three days later, as opposed to the first 24 hours using conventional methods. After the initial investment in equipment, each virtual autopsy costs thousands of dollars less than a conventional autopsy and can be used in cultures where cutting open a body after death is viewed as desecration.

The Virtual Autopsy Table was developed jointly several years ago by Sweden’s Norrköping Visualization Centre and the Center for Medical Image Science and Visualization. It is now being used to diagnose living patients in more than a thousand hospitals around the world. It has been used by the U.S. Armed Forces Institute of Pathology to determine the cause of death of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as to gather data to improve body armor. At present, it plays a role in crime-solving more often in Europe than in the U.S., and Dr. Anders Persson, director of CMIV, predicts that standard open-body autopsies may never be totally abandoned. The cost of the  investment in technology and distrust of new methods will undoubtedly slow down acceptance of virtual autopsies in many places.

But sooner or later mystery authors will have to learn to write about this new way of determining cause of death. Some beloved cliches of crime fiction will disappear. No more grizzled medical examiners making jokes as they saw through breast bones. No more rookie cops barely making it to the hallway before throwing up. Somehow examining scans of the victims’ bodies doesn’t deliver the same emotional punch.


I’ll spare you the pictures here, but you can see how the Virtual Autopsy Table works in this YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bws6vWM1v6g.

You can see still pictures on this page:
https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&hl=en&source=hp&biw=1065&bih=832&q=virtual+autopsy&gbv=2&oq=virtual+autopsy&aq=f&aqi=g2g-S7g-mS1&aql=&gs_l=img.3..0l2j0i24l7j0i5i24.2427l5440l0l5918l15l15l0l2l2l0l104l921l12j1l13l0.frgbld

And read more about the technology here:
http://www.european-hospital.com/en/article/7682-The_Virtual_Autopsy_Table.html

Contrary Virtues

Sharon Wildwind

Around the 5th century in Europe an epic poem called Contest of the Soul proposed a list of seven heavenly virtues. Because each virtue had a direct opposite in one the seven deadly sins, they were sometimes referred to as the contrary virtues. If you’re not up on your virtues, or your sins, here’s a quick review: Chastity opposes Lust, Temperance opposes Gluttony, Charity opposes Greed, Diligence opposes Sloth, Patience opposes Wrath, Kindness opposes Envy, and Humility opposes Pride.

The world, especially the writer’s world, still needs contrary virtues. I am immensely grateful for the virtues that fellow writers have taught me as antidotes to pesky destructive patterns that keep popping up in my writing life like demented ground squirrels.

Sacred Anger

The writing world does not behave as I think it should. I have an endless idea list about how to make it perfect, but unfortunately the letter appointing me to be in charge seems to have gotten lost in the mail. Instead of seething inside, I’m learning to do some small action that, even if it doesn’t make the whole world better, makes my world better. Anger can be a dirty, polluting fuel or it can be cleaned up and used as an energy-efficient fuel. I choose fuel efficiency.

The Clarity of the Afternoon

I am often afraid. Being a writer seems too big, too scary, too tiring for little old me to cope. What I’ve had to learn is the difference between waking up in the middle of the night, sweating, with a pounding heart, convinced that I can’t do something, and sitting down in the middle of the afternoon to clarify why I can’t do something.

The middle of the night panic is an visceral response more often than not rooted in physical imbalance. I ate the wrong things, ate too close to going to bed, drank too much tea, didn’t exercise enough, etc. Or maybe it’s pesky hormones that surge for completely unfathomable reasons. It is something that requires a lot of self-love and nurturing, not a reason that I’m going to surrender to inevitable forces.

The clarity of the afternoon is the ability to look at a situation objectively and admit that, no, I can’t do that particular thing for a good reason. I don’t know enough. I’m ignoring something that needs to be acted upon. I’m listening to what “they say” in place of listening to my own good common sense. The timing isn’t right. I have to finish A before I can do B. I am not superwoman, but I am talented and smart and quite capable of doing whatever reasonable thing needs to be done to get on with getting on.

More than One Can Win

I am such a drama queen when I get jealous, and I get jealous a lot. Everyone other writer gets bigger, better contracts; more breaks; an easier ride; and a higher place on the totem pole. In the first place, I’m afraid of heights, so if I were sitting on the very top of the totem pole, I’d be terrified. In the second place, very little in life is a win-lose situation. They’re going to win, so I’m going to lose? Forget that rubbish. There are tons of ways for all of us to win, together, helping each other up the path. To paraphrase the social activist, Emma Goldman, if I can’t dance with you, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.

Swimming Deeper Replaces Worry

Being sensitive is what makes us creative. Being sensitive is what also makes us worry. A year before his death Henry Fonda made On Golden Pond, his second-to-last film, a movie that would win him an Oscar. I’ve read accounts that he still threw up before he went before the cameras. Yes, being sensitive brings all kinds of burdens, but part of being creative is that being sensitive also brings a sense of curiosity and a desire constantly to start another quest. It’s the doing in spite of the worry that makes us who we are.

Don’t be Nice. Be Honest—In a Nice Way, Of Course

Since you’re not doing anything right now, could you . . .? Actually, I am doing something, something very important. I’m pulling an imaginary world into being using twenty-six letters, ten numerals, and an assortment of punctuation marks. So for right now, get on with building your own world for a while. I care about you very much and I’m going to get back to you right after I finish writing.

When the Iceman Came

by Julia Buckley

My son is doing a project in conjunction with his reading of THE GREAT GATSBY, and one of his assignments was to come up with an artifact from the 1920's.  We finally settled on our ice door, which has long since been painted over and sealed off, but still bears testament to the fact that ice was once delivered from our very back porch into our extremely old pantry.  The fellow above, according to Houston Lifestyles online, was holding a 25 pound chip from a 100 pound block of ice--a common thing that these tough guys had to lug from house to house.  (Is this the origin of chip off the old block?  I always thought that was a lumberjack's term).

Anyway, the tool in the man's hand was referred to as a pair of ice tongs, and it kept his hands from freezing to the ice and allowed him to keep a good grip on the sometimes slippery substance.

Our ice door looks like this:

According to the Portage County Historical Society,

"A common sight in the years gone by was the iceman and his wagon (later his truck), making deliveries of blocks ice to his subscription customers. A sign was issued to each subscriber; was a two - sided placard indicating ice was needed or not. If ice was required, the iceman would cut a block of the required size with an ice pick, attach tongs to the block with a mighty stroke, and hoist the block onto his shoulder. Icemen were strong (Jim Thorpe, the great Indian football star was an iceman one summer), for they had to carry an average of fifty to one hundred fifty pounds of ice from the wagon to the icebox at each stop." We knew that our house was old when we bought it (at least 90 or 100 years), and once when we were adding insulation to walls we found that 1920s era newspapers had been stuffed into them to add warmth (and a fire hazard).  So it's interesting to have this other connection to an era gone by, especially since our freezer/refrigerator is still in the very pantry to which our ice door connects. The advent of refrigeration put the ice men out of business, but once they were an important part of every family's week.

A Bold Heroine in the Georgian Era

Our guest’s Lady Fan mysteries, set in Georgian England, feature the bright and perceptive Ottilia, once a lady's companion and now bride to Lord Francis Fanshawe. The first in the series, The Gilded Shroud, is followed this month by The Deathly Portent. Everyone who leaves a comment this weekend will be entered in a drawing for a free copy of the new book.

by Elizabeth Bailey

How can the female detective cope in the Georgian world?

The short answer is, she can’t, not on her own. Ottilia’s status as a lady of the genteel classes precludes her presence in a great many male-dominated domains, especially if she is unescorted. A female alone in a public place laid herself open both to annoyance and loss of reputation.

Ottilia flouts convention in that she investigates at all. Ladies did not commonly examine dead bodies and question anyone and everyone from upstairs or down as to their movements and motives. People are apt to remark upon these activities, which amuses Ottilia, but tends to put Francis on the defensive.


But Ottilia is not a woman who seeks notoriety by ignoring the rules from a spirit of rebellion. She does it for expedience when nothing else will do. Where she can, she will obey the dictates of society, even if the necessity chafes her. Indeed, she is unscrupulous in making demands upon her husband for assistance in order to get around the problems posed by the constraints of her sex.

Even in the real Georgian era, it is not inconceivable that a woman might absorb medical lore as Ottilia does from her brother, although she is barred from the profession herself. This gives her a solid advantage, but it is the only practical one. For the rest, she must rely on her intelligence, observational skills and her knack of falling easily into intimacy with strangers, whether high or low born.

There are advantages in the paucity of policing during these times, because Ottilia is unhampered by the authority network that your modern amateur sleuth must negotiate. She finds it relatively easy to bypass, or even to use the local authority for her own ends, and if she has to, she is determined enough to go head to head with anyone.

But Ottilia herself recognizes that she couldn’t conduct her investigations without Francis at her back. Apart from the clear usefulness of his sex, he is both companion and stalwart supporter, and is rapidly gaining his own foothold in the game of deduction.

As the writer, I’m familiar with the period from my historical romances, but crime has added new challenges in terms of juggling the freedoms and restrictions imposed by the age, which I have to say I enjoy tremendously. Perhaps it satisfies a little of the rebel in me who burned the bra along with Germaine Greer! To give a woman power at a time when this was socially denied is intensely satisfying.

I’m often asked why the Georgian era attracted me, and it stems purely from a teenage addiction to Georgette Heyer. I think I absorbed from her the idea of creating a flavour of the time in the prose style I use for my own historicals, rather than relying on contemporary dialogue to delineate the period.

It’s more a question of choosing a way of expressing something that feels right for the period. For example, rather than using the simple she liked I might use she favoured or she was partial to. I pick less colloquial language: hastened, whither, I am inclined to think, if you are minded, is it not, befriend, etc. Then when you add all the titles and the accents of the lower orders, it tends to hold together. I’m so used to writing in this way that I no longer consciously make these choices. It’s as though I turn on a Georgian-speak switch in my writing head.

Of course it still has to be readable and understandable to the modern ear. To use fully contemporary dialogue - as found in 18th century letters and diaries, for instance - would sound stilted today. You don’t want to echo the long-winded Victorians which can be tough on readers now, but you still want to evoke the era.

I like to think that Ottilia is as true to her time, despite its inconveniences, as it is possible to be without alienating a modern reader. As a writer, I find I have to tread a fine balance between what might, to a purist, be considered anachronistic and what serves to take a reader, replete with twenty-first century thinking and values, successfully on a journey into the past.
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Elizabeth Bailey’s second novel in her Lady Fan Mystery Series, The Deathly Portent, comes out in April in the US and June in the UK. Leave a comment this weekend and you'll be entered in a drawing for a free copy.

In The Deathly Portent, the blacksmith has been bludgeoned to death and the villagers blame the local witch, a girl with second sight. The Fanshawes have broken down on the road nearby and when Ottilia hears the news, she cajoles Francis into going to Witherley, where a full-blown investigation  leads her into personal danger before she can find out the perpetrator. More details at www.elizabethbailey.co.uk. Order the book at www.amazon.com/Deathly-Portent-Lady-Fan-Mystery/dp/0425245675.

Flown Again

by Sheila Connolly

My daughter has moved out of the family home—again. When she went off to college, I thought we had done our "empty nest" thing. Then after college she had no firm plans about her next step, so she moved in with us again (note: this is not the house or the town she grew up in). She found a job, made friends, and saved her money. But she's young (to me, under thirty seems young) and unencumbered, and I was happy to support her urge to fly. So a little over a week ago, she packed up her car (with 240,000 miles on it) and headed west for Urbana, to a new life.

And we've been dealing with the "empty nest" issue all over again. This time it feels more final, because when she was in college she was only two hours away, and we exchanged visits regularly. Urbana is about 18 hours away, so it's a little harder to drop in.

But that "empty" is relative, because when she filled up the car, there was a lot of stuff left over, and it's all sitting here where she left it.

What does one's "stuff" say about a person? If you were forensically-minded, you would look at the evidence and say: she likes clothes and books. Her taste in clothes turned out to be very classic and conservative, and I sometimes regret we are not the same size, because I'd be happy to wear some of them.

Ah, but then there are the books. Since she was working in a bookstore the books were kind of inevitable. She's also my daughter, so I'm forced to conclude that book-hoarding is hereditary.

What can you learn about someone's personality from what s/he reads? My daughter was a comparative literature major in college (which may explain why her career path is a bit muddy), and she also favored contemporary poetry. In addition, she would bring home from the bookstore a variety of ARCs and remaindered books that looked interesting, many of which I read. It's a mixed blessing: if I like the book, I feel reluctant to buy a "real" copy when it's finally issued because I already have it, albeit in a sometimes dilapidated form. And if I happen to run into the author at an event, s/he may wonder about me when I say I loved the book, when it came out only two days earlier—and also wonder why I'm not buying a signed copy direct from their very own hands. It's happened.

My daughter and I have had some spirited conversations about writing and books. She claimed that genre (e.g., romance and mysteries) are to be scorned, although I'm not sure how she would define "literature," or even a "good" book. She has never read any book I have written (that she would admit to, at least). Yet for all of that, she once texted me from New York to say she had just walked by Mary Higgins Clark on the street. What? How did she recognize her?

What we share is the inability to get rid of any book we have chosen. I know when I was her age, I reread a lot of books, partly because I couldn't afford new ones, and partly because I continued to derive something from a book each time I read it. I could do that more easily now because I manage to forget a lot about any book I read these days (my current benchmark for a good book is whether I remember it after I've put it down), but I don't do much re-reading because there are new books coming out all the time. So many books, so little time.

Someday my daughter may inherit the books I've collected, and they number in the thousands, I'm afraid. She could probably write a profile of me, based on those that I've kept: a science fiction phase; a smattering of feminist/women's fiction, mainly from the 70s; the requisite collection of classics, old and modern; and of course, a lot of mysteries, starting from the beginning.

When you visit someone's home for the first time, do you check out what books they have on their shelves? And what does that tell you?

Do Not Disturb, Miracle Going On

Elizabeth Zelvin

Let me start by telling you the nightmare I had last night. Not a metaphor—this is an authentic dream, which are why the details are a little surreal. I was working on a novel, and it was giving me trouble. About two thirds of the way through, I’d hit a stuck point. I had those twin feelings that every writer knows and dreads: I didn’t know what came next, and I had an awful feeling that everything I’d already written sucked.

I found myself sitting across from my first editor, the late Ruth Cavin, explaining my dilemma and asking for help. (This never happened in real life. Ruth was almost 90 when I started working with her, she used email, and we didn’t have that kind of back and forth editorial relationship. But in a dream....) She told me I had to go back to the beginning and plot the novel from beginning to end. I envisioned such an outline as a very large, long bone with a knob at each end. (I realize now that my unconscious may have gotten the bone from one I saw at the farmer’s market behind the Museum of Natural History last Sunday. An ostrich farm in New Jersey has a booth there every week.) Then, suddenly, I had the bone in my hand. I hurled it at her, screaming, “I don’t outline!”

In spite of being sure I couldn’t do it, I sat down with the incomplete manuscript, meaning at least to look at what I had so far and see if I could salvage anything or if a way to tell the story all the way through occurred to me. I comforted myself by thinking, “At least the first page is good. I know I can keep that, and I’ll go on from there.” But when I read the first page, I realized it sucked. The characters were bland, the dialogue didn’t present any conflict. And as I watched, the letters came off the page, became a jumble, and disintegrated before my eyes.

At a Mystery Writers of America event, I think it was the holiday party back in December, I got a freebie. It’s a glossy red cardboard sign of the kind with a hole near the top and a slit to the edge, meant to be hung on a doorknob. It has MWA’s logo, Edgar Allan Poe looking anxious, and it says, “Do Not Disturb: The writing is going well.” I hung it from the neck of the lamp by my computer screen, near my Poe finger puppet and the bobble head Poe I got at the Edgars one year. It gave me a lot of reassurance until a week ago, when I happened to notice that the other side, which faces out into the living room, says, “Do Not Disturb: The writing is not going well.”

MWA, social and professional home to many mystery writers, has put its finger on it: At any given time, the creative process is either a nightmare or a miracle. Those moments when we experience utter despair, when we want to throw everything we’ve written in the garbage and believe with all our hearts that we can never write another word worth keeping (Do not disturb: It’s a nightmare) have their compensation in the precious times when our fingers fly over the keyboard, a story that didn’t exist a moment before, words that will eventually make our readers laugh and cry, appear upon the screen. Don’t ask me a question, call me on the phone, or tell me dinner’s ready at such a moment. Do not disturb: It’s a miracle.

Getting Rid of Bad Memories

Sandra Parshall

If you could get a simple injection or pill that would erase your worst memories and leave everything else intact, would you do it?

Few things interest me more than the mystery of human memory, and I've dwelled on it a good bit in my writing. So I was fascinated by Jonah Lehrer’s article in Wired magazine about the latest efforts to find a cure for post-traumatic stress disorder.

War veterans aren’t the only people who are crippled by PTSD. Survivors of rape, child molestation, violent muggings, fires, and natural disasters will never lead normal lives again if they can’t find a way to stop the past from poisoning the present. Few effective treatments exist to help these people, and at least one widely used approach, called critical incident stress debriefing (CISD), may have done more harm than good.

CISD has been endorsed and used for years by the Department of Defense, FEMA, the Red Cross, the United Nations, and the Israeli Army. The basic premise is that forcing a victim or survivor to recall the trauma in deep detail as soon as possible after the experience will prevent the memory from festering into PTSD. This “treatment” has been used on thousands of people, including some affected by the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Unfortunately, as Lehrer reports in his article, it rarely helps, and studies show it often increases emotional suffering by reinforcing the trauma. Now psychologists have begun recommending that CISD be discontinued.

The real answer to PTSD probably lies in the neurochemistry of our brains. Scitentists have established that memories, those snapshots of the past that we either cherish or fear, are nothing more than a collection of chemicals and neurons. They aren’t cemented in place, unchangeable, waiting for our consciousness to shine a light on them. Our brains have to reconstruct a memory each time it’s called up, a process called memory reconsolidation. Our present mood or circumstances can alter our memories and our reactions to them.

In most cases, as a person’s emotions settle down after a loss or a stressful event, the memories become less heartwrenching or frightening. They can also become less accurate, as our brains change details or do a wholesale rewrite. We’re not aware this is happening, so an eyewitness to a crime may give false testimony while sincerely believing that he or she is remembering things correctly. Two people with wildly different memories of the same event can have a heated argument over whose account is accurate, when it’s likely that neither is.

But back to PTSD. In the late 1990s, a young neuroscientist named Karim Nader began examining the chemistry of memory recall. If a memory must be reconstructed each time it is called up, would blocking the chemical rebuilding process during recall destroy the memory itself? His experiments with rats proved that it would, without affecting any other memories.

Nader’s discovery, like other breakthroughs in the history of science, was greeted with scorn by his colleagues. Nobody would listen. He was shunned at conferences and couldn’t get his findings published in journals. Infuriated by this cold reception, Nader pushed on, and by 2005 his work was being taken seriously. During the same period, neuroscientist Todd Sacktor of Columbia University discovered that a neuro protein called PKMzeta plays the key role in memory formation, and without it the brain loses its ability to reconstruct long-term memories. If the production of PKMzeta is blocked while a specific memory is recalled, the memory itself may vanish.

Although treatment of PTSD seems the logical use of this breakthrough, Sacktor believes the first to benefit will be people suffering from persistent, unexplained physical pain and drug addiction. In one case, the body’s memory of pain will be erased and the cycle broken. In the other, erasing the memory of pleasure associated with drugs may take away the desire for them.

How much farther will we go with it, though, when this treatment is available beyond the testing lab? We already edit and rewrite our memories, and all of us have probably suppressed a few bad memories. But what about the big, ugly one that won’t go away, the one that invades your dreams and makes you miserable each time it intrudes on the present? Would you pay to have that memory removed forever from your brain?