Weather Chaser, Wrestler, Writer: A Profile of Merle J. Huerta

Merle J. Huerta and I have been friends since we were little girls in Sunday school. For most of our childhood, we didn’t go to the same elementary school, but just kept gravitating back to each other. We just got along, you know? One of my earliest memories is of a painting that hung in Merle’s family basement/rec room, though she claims not to remember this painting, which she had painted before I knew her, before she knew how to write, and yet somehow, printed in letters larger than life, in the center of this painting, was the single word PORK. The letters were vivid and multicolored and every time I saw it I cracked up. We were two Jewish girls. How had that word sneaked its way into her art?

My next memory of Merle is going swimming together in summer at the swim club. It was such a hot day and Merle’s mom, Charlotte, who was a mysterious, fashionable, and gorgeous brunette drove us home and fed us sliced bananas and blueberries in sour cream because we were so uncomfortable from the heat. It cooled us down wonderfully well.

I have many more memories of Merle, and somehow I thought she would always remain a memory. And then came Facebook and by some twist of fate we ended up as writing colleagues at Kars4Kids. Our friendship for each other only grows with time. What we liked about each other back then, is still the same. Merle’s essential “Merle-ness” still shines through in spite of time and middle age.

VE: As we grow up, most of us keep changing the dream of what we want to be as adults. When did it hit you that you were going to be a writer?

MH: In high school, I had this physics teacher, Mr. Shore. He’s probably dead now but the lessons he taught us continue to hit home. “Be prepared to reinvent yourself, to have multiple careers in your lifetime.”

I never quite understood the impact of his advice. Then again, I never dreamed of or planned on being a writer and now I am.

I was an impressionable kid, a dreamer too. I liked to try on roles just to see how they felt. For a time, I thought I might be a chef like the Galloping Gourmet (aka Graham Kerr). Episodes of his show are still on Youtube.com if you’ve never heard of him. He was a Brit, handsome, dapper, and almost always drunk, but during that half-hour school lunch break, he made me believe (along with millions of other viewers, I’m sure) that cooking could be a social activity, not a chore.

Then there was the studio wrestling phase. Sundays, after Face the Nation, I watched studio wrestling and imagined I was the talented daughter of Bruno Sammartino. I was nimble, deft, and helped my television father defeat his opponents show after show.

Then I wanted to be a meteorologist, the one who chased tornados, flew in a twin-engine through the eye of a storm, and appeared unflustered and perfectly powdered on The Weather Channel. In 1978, during a major winter storm and cold snap (that was the real Polar Vortex) when the barometric pressure dipped to hurricane-pressure levels, twenty-below temps froze the three rivers and stopped any river traffic, there was no school. For two weeks, Pittsburgh public schools remained closed. And like a junkie, I watched the Weather Channel for up-to-the-minute updates.

I was a weird kid. I admit it.

Writing became central to my life in 2002. I was a graduate student, a new stepmother in a blended family of twelve, and my army chaplain husband had volunteered for a year’s combat duty in Iraq. I had a three month-old plus half a dozen teenagers at home and I was going nuts.

It all started so simplistically. My husband wrote a piece on his experiences in a combat zone written to a cadet audience (we were living at the US Military Academy at the time). I tweaked his piece, submitted it to Pointer View, a local paper on the army post, and it appeared in the following week’s issue.

Then he wrote about being in Mosul, ancient Nineveh, and the artifacts of an ancient Jewish community that once lived there. I edited the piece, added transitions, and sent it in to the Jerusalem Post.

It happened quickly—the publication, the feedback, and calls from potential literary agents who wanted to represent us. And then the excitement fizzled. But the writing bug, the excitement of crafting a story that could resonate with others didn’t die.

VE: Why writing (as opposed to, say, basket weaving)?

ME: I’d do basket weaving if I knew how. I would do lots of creative activities if time permitted. Like you, I took classical piano lessons for more than a decade, drew, dabbled in cooking, and sewed. Writing was more of a catharsis and continues to be so. I’m an introvert, a ruminator actually. I need lots of time to figure things out. Sometimes I can’t until I write it down. Then the connections become apparent.

VE: The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, and the air smells intoxicating. Would you:

1. Put your writing away in a drawer and revel in the day
2. Go outside with your laptop and hope you can find a good free wifi spot in the park
3. Set everything aside and go out, but feel really, really guilty
4. Stay inside and work and congratulate yourself on your perseverance
5. Stay inside and work and berate yourself for being such an idiot—days like these don’t grow on trees.

ME: If I have a deadline, I go nowhere. If it’s my own deadline, then d or b.

VE: Describe your ideal work setting.

ME: Ideal work setting. Early morning before anyone awakens or after I drop the kids off at school. Coffee is a prerequisite. I need a window, a picture window is best. Then I find some visual setting that grounds me. It’s the connection with nature, the outdoors that seems to ground me. I guess it’s less hokey than hugging a tree. For me, it works. There’s this red maple with an enormous canopy that grows in my front yard, just outside the living room window. It’s crimson now. There’s also lots of green, wild turkeys, squirrels, and deer. It’s when I feel that connection with nature, that I feel inner stillness. The noise and clutter in my head dissipates and some narrative begins to take shape.

VE: If you could dine with three authors, who would they be, why, and what would you all be EATING?

ME: Toughie. I’m a pretty ethereal kind of person and have wanted to understand the in’s and out’s of the universe since my biological father died of a long-term illness in ’96. I was especially troubled by the notion that I couldn’t prepare my kids for my death and that I couldn’t quite find inner peace in my own life. I was in my early 30s and the thought that I might die without an inherent understanding of my purpose on this planet or my connection to the universe bothered me. I felt a real urgency then to read whatever authors might give me some insight.

Then I stumbled across Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl, a Holocaust survivor and psychotherapist discovered, even while imprisoned in a concentration camp that true happiness didn’t come from success. It came from a belief, a commitment to a cause or to a person. He wrote, “Don’t aim at success – the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself.”

Derech HaShem or The Way of G-d was the next life-altering book. Written by R’ Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, the book explains how the universe is layered into a hierarchy where G-d is at the top of the pecking order, man and other living beings are on the bottom, and a series of messengers, angels, and archangels are somewhat organized by role and divine power. I loved it, read it so many times the cover fell off.

The final author, James Michener, a novelist who wrote historical fiction changed the way I saw myself, especially as a Jew. Michener’s books weave historical facts with fiction narratives. In the case of The Source, a novel about the origins of religion and culture in the Middle East, particularly the Jewish people, I found inner peace and a connection to a collective conscience, a people, a community. Even if we were a people whom others had a need to hate, I knew that being Jewish was a path, my path to understanding the constructs of the Universe.

So if I could share a meal with all three of these authors—Victor Frankl, R’ Moshe Luzzato, and James Michener, all of whom are dead, I’d want to know if I’d gotten it right. If they were right in their assessments. I would want to compare notes, and ask them, am I on the right path? And what happens to our souls when we die?

What would we eat? I’d like to eat all the foods I haven’t been able to because of my allergies—peanut butter, nuts, fresh figs, St. John’s fruit, and cactus fruit.

VE: What writer is so bad he or she gives you the giggles?

Janet Evanovich. She’s so formulaic and predictable. Sometimes the plot is pathetically shallow. And yet, I continue to read her books and buy the new ones as soon as they roll out. I’ve read every single novel she’s written. Why? Because she’s the master when it comes to character development. It’s impossible not to feel invested in her characters—Stephanie Plum, Ranger (there should be a Ranger in each of our lives!), and Lula. Who can resist reading about Lula’s antics and chuckle?

VE: How do you celebrate the end of a day of successful writing?

MH: While creative juices are still flowing, I try to map out a couple ideas for the next day. But the truth is I don’t need to celebrate. Success has momentum, like a rolling stone. One good day of writing leads to a second good day of productivity, at least for me.

VE: What website do you depend on for helping you in your writing that you absolutely could not live without?

There isn’t just one. I love The New Yorker for the cartoon bank. The cartoons make me laugh. Laughter is effective at pushing out karmic garbage, it inserts light where none exists, and lifts the spirit. I also swear by the Purdue OWL (Online Web Learning). It’s effectively a grammar guide where I can check out grammatical questions quickly. I have the complete edition of the Chicago Manual of Style, Strunk and White, a twenty-volume set of the Oxford English Dictionary, and the APA Guide.

But, I’m lazy. Getting any of those sources means I have to roll off the couch, move from my spot by the window.

VE: What is better for writing: happiness or misery? Why?

MH: Misery of course. The stories, tragedies, dichotomies—all come from misery. It’s only in moments of calm and happiness can I extract those stories. I can’t write prose when I’m miserable. When one of my children was ill, I couldn’t write prose. It was poetry, free verse really, that saved me. Free verse helped me to sort out emotional fragments, to make sense of things. Then she was home—frail but stable. It was a good year before I could write prose after that. I needed time to recover from the adrenaline-charged period, her decline and subsequent treatment period. It’s funny. Now that her illness is in the distant past, I can’t write poetry, only prose. I wonder if other writers go through those transitions.

VE: Favorite time of day for writing?

MH: Early morning. When the air is still and despite the bustle of commuter traffic, my mind is clear. By mid-afternoon, I’m no longer working on creative juices. I’m chugging, spent, unfocused. Writing becomes two words down, one word erased. By evening, when our younger two children are home from school, after the homework/dinner rush/nighttime job (I’m an academic coach for one or two students) I’m done—spent and numb. I usually need some serious decompression, to stare at a wall for a couple hours or to play a few games of Candy Crush.

VE: What’s your earliest memory of me/us?

MH: We were convinced John Lennon had left a secret message about Paul McCartney on the White Album, whether he had survived a catastrophic car accident. So we played the song Walrus backwards—as slowly as we could on that portable turntable–to hear if Paul McCartney was dead. I remember your mother’s jars of brandied fruit, the jars that despite the passage of time and tragedy remained the same: a constant.

I remember standing under the drainpipe in front of your house during a massive rainstorm and how carefree it was to be dressed in sopping-wet clothes. Then I remember your father’s funeral. My parents and I were in your living room. Were we in 7^th or 8^th grade? I don’t remember anymore. I do remember your faces. Your mother’s face was beautiful, graceful, still. You, you were numb, nodding your head like a bobble head, going with the flow of the people. I knew it was the last place you wanted to be

And then you were gone. It was tragedy that brought with it the end of innocence. You went to a new school, disappeared from my radar. And I mourned losing you, losing our childhood, the laughter, the light-hearted frivolity.

The last time we saw each other was at your wedding. In the pictures, I’m in shock. We’re 18 and you’re married. How could a few short years create such different paths?

And then in 2011, we reconnected. It was weird, wonderful, and scary. Would you still want to be my friend? Would we have enough to bind us together? Would we have stories to share? Could we laugh again?

And now we work together. I pinch myself for each day we work together. You have carved out an immense readership. You have bravado, are fearless when pursuing a story you find important. You write like I breathe—involuntarily.

You are my friend again. You are my mentor. At age 53, could life be any more serendipitous or wonderful?