Beginner's Mind

I’ve written about this before, but just to recap: Tom Franklin hates doing research. Yet his first two novels were historical fiction, which stuck Franklin doing the very thing he hates. Still, Franklin prefers to focus on the writing, to let the fiction drive his work (which is probably the way we all should work), so he developed a way to conduct the research he needed to do without letting it get in the way of his writing. The idea wasn’t his—he credits Steven Scarborough for the suggestion—but he made it his own.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, Franklin has a thing for details. The way he sees it, a story might be entertaining if you focus on character and plot, but the characters aren't real and the plot won’t ring true without the help of minute details. “You can't write convincingly unless you know the tiny details of a place, of people, buttons on their britches or zippers, how much their snuff costs, the caliber of their sidearm,” he once told interviewer Rob McClure Smith. But in Hell at the Breech, Franklin was writing about the late 1890s, a period he had little access to. So, how to get the details right?

Scarborough suggested he find an old Sears & Roebuck catalogue. “Everything in the world you could get you got through Sears & Roebuck,” Franklin told Smith. “I got one from 1897 and it's filled with pictures of everything from Adzes to zebra lined boots. [. . .] This Sears catalogue’s got it all.”

The catalogue became his springboard into the fiction. He’d write and write (and revise as he went), and just keep plowing away at the story until he couldn’t write any more. He was dry; he needed a dip at the well. So he’d pull out his facsimile copy of the 1897 Sears & Roebuck catalogue and flip through it. Eventually, he’d find something—sometimes an item he was looking for, like, say, a pocket watch, but often he’d stumble across something he hadn’t expected, like a stereoscope for viewing photographs, a kind of Victorian-era version of our old 3-D View-Masters—and he’d start describing whatever he found. The catalogue, after all, contained drawings or diagrams of the items for sale, descriptions of what they were and how they functioned, ads explaining who might find them useful, and so on. And absolute wealth of information—practically a time machine. So Franklin would describe the item, would perhaps assign it to a character and let him or her use it, and just keep working over the bit until it developed into a scene. The next thing Franklin knew, the fiction was rolling along again and the story progressed.

Franklin got lucky, of course, that anyone was bothering to print facsimiles of the old Sears catalogue at all, let alone that it was from the same time period he was writing about. But it's not hard to find similar items for yourself, and the more we writers come to need these books, the more our demand will create a market for them. That same 1897 Sears catalogue is actually available now through Amazon, as is an 1895 Montgomery Ward catalogue and an 1886 Bloomingdale's illustrated catalogue. A quick search through your local library might also turn up books on the history of advertising, in which you can find ads and illustrations from years past.  You can also find useful information in histories of clothing and costumes, antique furniture guides, even old cookbooks. 

And while you’re there, look into the library’s newspaper archives. Most public libraries—even the small town libraries—will keep archives of the local papers, and many larger libraries will keep archives of major national papers as well. If your library is well funded, you might even be able to search through the microfilm or microfiche collections for newspapers that are decades, even centuries old. (If your library is not well funded, lobby your local government to increase library funding, and join your area Friends of the Library group to help raise money.)

I mention the newspapers because they’ll also have print advertising and can help add a little local color to your details, and while you’re there, you can also browse some of the community articles to see what people were writing their editors to complain about, what people were gossiping about, what the local community was interested in. Check out the photos, too--you can see what people were wearing, which, as Sherlock Holmes would tell you, can provide excellent character details.  You can do the same with magazines, sometimes with surprising results (the library at one of the colleges I attended has the entire run of Playboy—in full color—on microfiche, though you have to know who to ask to get access to it and sorry, I’m not going to help you with that one).

When I was working on my Civil War novel, I found myself slowing down about halfway through and I started wondering how I was going to push on through. I thought about Franklin, in the same predicament while working on Hell at the Breech, and I decided to follow his advice: I shopped the catalogue. Of course, I don’t have a copy of that or any other historical catalogue, and living overseas as I do, it was going to be difficult to get one on short notice. But with some search guidance from a librarian (actually, my wife), I started poking around online and I stumbled across the excellent web site titled simply The Civil War. The site is good for all its history and essays and trivia, sure, but the pot of gold is their collection of Civil War-era Harper's Weekly magazines, which they’ve scanned in and posted online. (The coolest thing about their project is that they preserved the text as text, so the magazines are fully searchable!) Now, not only did I have access to contemporary news about the war, but I also had letters, political cartoons, sketches of battles, and, best of all, advertising. Thanks to these magazines, I was able to add vivid realism to my battle descriptions, give depth to characters’ personal sentiments about the war, and include rich details about daily life. In one scene, my characters come across a few worn old books in a dead soldier’s rucksack, and I listed the titles, which I’d found on a bestseller list from 1863. In another scene, some characters are haggling over the price of a few blackmarket firearms, and I was able to describe some of them based on advertising in the magazine, which sold pistols alongside ladies’ stockings.

The Harper’s Weeklys weren’t as easily perused as a Sears catalogue, maybe, and they were comparatively limited in scope, but they got the writing going every time, and that’s the only point anyway—it is always the point—to get back to the writing.

Of course, once you shop the catalogue, you have to unpack all that stuff and arrange it, which is for some people the biggest trick of all. So, tomorrow, I’ll write about marbling….

Bonus link:  For more recent cultural and material research, check out the delightful Retroland website.  Remember Trapper Keepers?  Yeah, so do they.  Loads of nostalgic fun.

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Obama has tweeted about Haiti—his first post on Twitter—and asked Americans to continue supporting Haitian relief efforts.  UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has called for troops and aid organizations to unclog the bottleneck of supplies, and indeed the US military (according to some, a source of the bottlenecking once we took control of the main airport in Port-au-Prince) has agreed to help speed the distribution of supplies.  Yet as the death toll mounts, with some estimates now reaching more than 200,000 dead, survivors continue to be miraculously pulled from the rubble, alive and in dire need of food and medicine.  That means it remains important—is perhaps more important now—to continue giving to relief efforts.  There are reports now of fake support groups popping up on Facebook, which is unfortunate, but the list I put together a few days ago remains a good starting point for finding legitimate, carefully vetted aid organizations.  Please check out that list and consider giving.

A few years ago, I was at the big national conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, and a friend of mine, Tom Franklin, was on a panel discussing research in fiction. Franklin joined the panel by virtue of his historical novels Hell at the Breech and Smonk (particularly Hell, which is based on a true story), but Franklin freely admits he dislikes research, so I knew the panel discussion would be fun. The panel did turn out to be a pretty lively one, frequently digressing into friendly banter and swapped anecdotes between Franklin and his friends and fellow panelists Julianna Baggott, Justin Cronin, Jennifer Vanderbes, and Mark Winegardner. In fact, the stories the panelists started telling sometimes had little to do with research—the group quickly became just a bunch of practiced storytellers trying to outdo each other—but they all did a terrific job of bringing their rambling stories back to the point at hand: research.

Among the planned topics for that panel, some (“what really happened!”) seemed fairly gratuitous, and others (“what to look for and how to look for it”) fairly dry and mechanical. But there was one point that people keep debating, and after the comments from this panel, I’m not sure why, because the answer seems pretty simple. The conference program lists this point three different ways: “negotiating between historic fact and story-truth,” “approximating what can't be looked up,” and “what's better made-up,” but they all boil down to one axiom: Sometimes it’s better to shoot the bullet.

I should confess here that I don’t recall who told this story. I know it was a guy, and I know it wasn’t Franklin. That leaves Justin Cronin and Mark Winegardner, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Winegardner. That should make it Cronin’s story, but my memory keeps adding a fourth guy, tacked on the end of the panel as a late addition, and I don’t want to put words in Cronin’s mouth that weren’t his. But until someone corrects me on this (I e-mailed Franklin, but he doesn’t remember, either), we’ll say it was “Cronin” who told this story.

And the story goes like this: “Cronin” was working on an action sequence in which a character has been shot in the leg but must run to escape his enemies. He has no surgical experience and no time to stop and dig out the bullet even if he knew how, but he also cannot run effectively with that bullet still lodged in his thigh. What he does have is an almost superhuman expertise in firearms, and he has a pistol. So he does what any desperate action hero would do in this situation: He aims his pistol at his own thigh, muzzle pressed into the open wound and angled along the same trajectory as the original bullet. He grits his teeth. Then he pulls the trigger and fires a second bullet into his leg. The result is something like projectile-billiards—his bullet strikes the first bullet and knocks it out the far side of his thigh, and his bullet then continues on the same path and exits the same wound. No more bullets, and now he can run. And off he goes.

We in the audience all laughed at this story, as did the guy who told it. It is a ridiculous scene, he admitted. (In my head, I recalled the scene in Rambo III when Rambo, out in the deserts of Afghanistan and wounded in the stomach, uncases two rifle bullets, pours the gunpowder into his wound, and ignites it—fire bursting from his muscled torso into the desert night—to cauterize the wound). Still, “Cronin” said, shooting the bullet was just too cool to pass over, and it sounded vaguely plausible to him. He wanted it to work.

He’d already been poring over medical references and firearms manuals in the course of writing this book of his, but he’d never come across anything that would either confirm or contradict his idea to shoot the bullet. This sounded like specialist information, the kind of thing you could probably only deduce from experience. So “Cronin” went to the source and called a doctor friend of his. He explained the situation, described how his hero would shoot the bullet, and then asked his doctor friend if such a thing would work.

His friend laughed in his face.

“Of course that wouldn’t work!” the doctor said. “Medically speaking, it’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard—and the odds against it are astronomical!”

Disheartened, “Cronin” began thinking then and there of alternative possibilities, but he didn’t get far in his silent, dejected reverie, because the doctor leaned in close and said, “But the way you describe it, shooting the bullet sounds cool as hell. You should let him do it anyway!”

And that was the lesson for the day: Sometimes the research can get in the way of good writing. Sometimes you have to say to hell with realism, to hell with the facts, and just write a cool story. Sometimes you have to shoot the bullet.

This doesn’t mean you can get away with shoddy writing. You don’t always have to operate within the rules of the real world, but you do have to operate within the rules of your established world—you have to remain true to your story. Take my novella, for example, which involves a couple of teenage boys running around causing trouble just outside Boerne, Texas, in the woodsy little subdivision where I grew up. I have spent a lot of time constructing complicated calendars and character note cards, and I’ve gone through every line of the story checking that the timeline adds up. I can’t say my character is 14 in the winter and 15 the summer, for instance, without knowing that he has a birthday sometime in the spring (it's March 14, if anyone cares). I don’t have to mention the birthday at all, but I do have to know that I can’t mention his birthday in the fall is it had already happened in the spring.  The rules of my story won't allow it.

But I’m not tied to the physical details of my old neighborhood. This is fiction, after all. So I have my characters tearing loose in a version of my own back yard even though the reference sites for each boy's house are nowhere near my parents’ actual home. I can manipulate geography because I’m not drawing a map—I’m writing fiction. The point is not that people reading my story can go out to my old subdivision and find the secret hiding place where these boys spend their time—they can’t, because the geography is imprecise. The point is that someone can read the descriptions and, if they know Boerne or my old subdivision, they can recognize the general landscape (which I hope people can).

When I was an undergrad student, Madeleine L'Engle once visited my college as a visiting speaker. Among the many insights she touched on during her audience Q&A session, she explained what she saw as the difference between fact and truth. Facts, she said, are details, data, pieces of information that we can record and prove and quantify . . . and manipulate. They are not inherently true. On the other hand, truth is not always dependent on facts—truth is just as much something we can feel or something we believe as it is something we can point to or measure. And fiction, according to L’Engle, is often more truthful than factual.

Fiction writer and memoirist Bill Roorbach has alluded to a similar phenomenon in his own work. He likes to joke that his greatest frustration is when he reads from his nonfiction and people challenge him, shouting out from the audience, “That didn’t happen! You’re making that up!” but when he reads a piece of fiction, people creep up to him and lean in conspiratorially, wink at him, and whisper, “I know that’s based on a true story—I know all that really happened to you.” The point, Roorbach says, is that people often confuse fact for truth, so when he writes a story full of truth, people mistake it for fact, and when he writes an essay full of truth, people want only the facts.

We are not in the fact business. We are in the truth business. It doesn’t matter what form our work takes—fiction, essays, poetry, scripts, aphorisms, whatever—so long as we strive to tell the truth. And sometimes, telling the truth, or even just telling a damn good story, requires us to bend or even ignore the facts.

When Tom Franklin was writing Hell at the Breech, his first novel, he spent a lot of time interviewing people who knew the true story, whose relatives had lived through it and passed down their version through the generations. He wrestled and agonized for a long time over how to reconcile all the variations of the local legend, how to write the most factually accurate story possible and please all the folks he’d talked to. But eventually he realized he couldn’t, and in his author’s note in the book, he explains that his is a work of fiction, not fact. Once he let go of trying to get in all the factual details, he discovered he could tell the truest story possible.

Which isn’t to say Franklin gave up doing research. What he did, though, was a specific kind of research best suited to his writing style, something I like to call “shopping the catalogue,” but that’s for tomorrow’s post . . . .

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The situation in Haiti is getting better, but it's also getting more desperate.  Supplies are bottlenecked, relief organizations are tripping over each other, and what little order people managed to cobble together in the immediate aftermath is deteriorating.  Let's not make this sound prettier than it is.  But let's also focus on what is getting accomplished:  Supplies are arriving and are getting distributed.  In fact, despite the bottleneck, supplies are running out as fast as they're arriving, which means relief organizations still need your help.  When you return from the public celebrations of the Reverend Dr. King's life, and before you switch on the Golden Globes, take a moment to give a donation.  See this list of organizations for more information.

UPDATE:  United Arab Emirates, where we live, is joining other Arab nations in sending aid to Haiti, both through Khalifa Bin Zayed Charity Foundation and through the UAE branch of the Red Crescent Society, the organization we're donating to.

A lot of great writers started out as journalists, and critics have offered a lot of reasons for that shared background. Journalists know how to work under deadline, they have an instinct for finding a story, they’ve learned how to find an angle or a hook to draw a reader in, they have developed a sense of concision and compression in language. But I think there is at least one reason that critics tend to overlook: Journalists know how to interview people.

I’ve been writing so far about how to conduct research for fiction, but up till now that research has been primarily textual—books, articles, websites. However, sometimes research in books or online isn’t enough. There are some things you can’t learn by reading, but Hemingway’s or Annie Proulx’s examples aside, there are also a lot of things you can’t learn by living through or traveling to, either. For some things, you have to go to the source, you have to talk to other people who have lived through it, who did travel there—you have to talk to people who know.

This is a hard thing for many introverted writers to do. We’re much happier holed up at our desks with our desk lamp, our music, and our cat for company. We’re writers, we tell ourselves, because we don’t like to talk. So actually tracking down people and meeting them is at best a chore—at worst, terrifying. But hey, you've managed to get out and meet a librarian by now, right? (Right?) So you can do this too. Talking to people isn’t really much different from the kind of research you’ve probably been doing, except instead of asking questions in a search engine or a database or a catalogue, you’re asking a human being. And sometimes, this is the only way it can work.

The simplest thing to do is start with people you already know. For example: I’m currently working on a story in which one of the characters is a Mexican-American who understands English fine but does not speak English. I can write the character without any problems, because I grew up in the Texas Hill Country, in a small town with a significant, proud Hispanic population. My perspective remains irrefutably white, of course, but this isn’t really a problem in the story—most of what we see of this guy is through a white perspective. But he needs to speak, and I need his speech to be authentic. Yet no matter how many Hispanic friends I hung out with at lunch or on weekends, and no matter how many Hispanic coworkers I worked with (this character is in fact based loosely on a guy I used to mow lawns with), my Spanish is limited, academic, and frankly, terrible. I’ve used the language in stories before, but it’s an issue I always wrestle with. I can (and have) used dictionaries and online translators to temporarily write the dialogue I’ve used, but we all know this is inauthentic—no one speaks their own language the way it’s written in textbooks or constructed by translators.  So, for my Mexican-American character’s voice to ring true, I turned to some of my Spanish-speaking friends from back in high school, because they can help me with the spoken rhythms of the language, the idioms and the slang. (This is an on-going project, by the way, so if any of my friends want to volunteer as translators, I’d love to hear from you!)

More recently, I learned a wealth of invaluable information while working on that Civil War novel I keep mentioning. One of the characters in that book has the bizarre habit of skinning wolves and wearing their pelts as clothes—he even wears a real wolf’s face as a mask. But I’ve never been a hunter and I’m now a vegetarian, not to mention that many wolf populations are protected today, so this not only was something I was unfamiliar with, it is something I’ll never have a chance to try for myself. I tried reading some guides online but the specific information I was looking for was difficult to find, and besides, the skinning and preparation of these pelts is, for my character, an intensely personal process, so I needed some kind of inside information. I put out the call online, and several friends came through for me immediately, including my friend Amy Smith Hicks, who is a self-described “country girl” and regularly helps dress and butcher deer during the annual hunting seasons; better still, members of her family are in the taxidermy business, so she had some insights there as well. Amy not only was able to explain the mechanics of the process better than the manuals I was reading, but she also described the sounds and smells of the skinning process, how the skin feels as you strip it from the carcass, and some personal tips for an easier job.  These are details I would never have gotten from reading a book or even watching a video.

If you’re lucky, you can do the same with other complicated professional information as well. Despite the stereotypes, most writers are not insular homebodies who hang out only with other writers, if with anyone. You probably have friends or acquaintances in a wide breadth of fields, from grocery store clerks to construction workers to computer support technicians to police officers to accountants to college professors. You also conduct a lot of business with people in various professions. When you get your cable installed, talk to the person hooking up your tv. When you go to the doctor for a check-up, ask questions about your characters' fictional conditions.

Sometimes, though, you’ll simply need to dive in and play reporter, to call up a professional or an organization and start asking questions. Say you’re writing a crime thriller but you’ve never lived in a dangerous neighborhood, you don’t know any cops, you’ve never even seen a firearm up close. Call up your police department and request a ride-along. (You can usually do the same for your local fire department and sometimes the paramedics as well.) Or let’s say you’re writing about an employee at an animal shelter. Call up your local humane society and ask about volunteering; while you’re there, talk to other volunteers, talk to the vets.

Some professions or people are going to be trickier than others, of course. I don’t recommend diving into dangerous situations without a LOT of preparation and help from other professionals, and even then, I would never condone any writer participating in dangerous or illegal activities just to write a story. When in doubt, go back to the old rule of writing what you know. But you should embrace a certain sense of adventure and talk to interesting people; your readers want to read about those people.  Talk to professionals in the fields your characters work in; your readers they want to know that you know what you’re talking about, or at least that Val, your lawn-mowing main character, knows his way around a commercial-grade Walker mower.

When I was hospitalized in 1999 with a bleeding ulcer, the doctors explained to me how they would insert a gastrointestinal scope down my throat and take a look around inside me to find the ulcer, and then they’d use the laser attached to the scope to suture the ulcer shut. I was going to be unconscious for all this, they assured me, and then I asked what struck them as a strange question: Would they be recording the scope? Sure, they explained, they would keep a video record of the procedure for reference later. I said, “Will I be able to see this video?” They reminded me I would be under anesthesia, but I clarified that I wanted access to the video after the procedure. “I just want to see what it looks like,” I said. I had no plans for the information—at the time, I’d lost a couple pints of blood and was lying weak and woozy on a gurney, already in the surgery room where they were preparing the scope, so I wasn’t thinking about fiction at all. But I knew I needed to see that video, and indeed, a few weeks afterward, I returned to the hospital and asked to see my file.  I watched the video and asked a lot of questions about what some of the images meant, what they’d done during the procedure, what the instruments did and how they worked. And then I forgot it. It became just another piece of information I knew, trivial and quirky but not of much immediate use. But sure enough, more than four years later I had an idea for a story that involved a scope down the esophagus, and I remembered that video; my story “Horror Vacuui,” about a sword-swallower with a dangerous case of intestinal blockage, would not be the same if I hadn’t seen first-hand what the inside of my own bloody intestines looked like. These details matter, and sometimes the best way to get them is from the source itself.

That's why, tomorrow, I'm going to offer some specific advice based on a story about a doctor and how you, too, can "shoot the bullet."

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Relief efforts in Haiti are going slowly and the situation is dangerously precarious, but a lot of supplies have already arrived on the island and volunteers are working hard to help the Haitian people.  The harder they work and the more they give, the more they're going to need your donations!  Please see my list of charity and action organizations, and as usual, if you know of more I need to list, please let me know.

The research series is on hold for the weekend (I live in a Muslim country, where our weekend is Friday and Saturday), so look for Tip #3 on Sunday.

In the meantime, if you're on Facebook:  Today a friend of mine who is a Unitarian minister alerted me to a "Prayers & Thoughts for the people of Haiti" event on Facebook, hosted by the group "Long Live His Holiness the Dalai Lama."  I'm certain there are many other groups associated with other faiths or with secular organizations who are hosting similar pages/events, so look them up.

And keep those donations going!

The links just keep coming, thanks especially to my friends Rima Abunasser, Beth Davidson, and Diana Pearson.  I'm re-posting the list from yesterday, but some links are to organizations and some to lists of organizations, so I'm listing the lists first:

• NEW:  Microsoft Community Involvement site (Microsoft has put together a list of resources, not all of them merely financial.  I can't vouch for the reliability of all those resources, but it's worth a look, especially for the non-monetary ways you help)
  
• Charity Navigator (this is a kind of clearing house for reliable, reputable charities; it weeds out the scams and helps you find the right charity for your giving preferences)
• InterAction (from my friend Rima:  "a list of legitimate organizations who are participating in the relief effort")
• Google (my friend Beth pointed out that Google is listing charities; you can search yourself or just follow the link she sent me)
• BBB Wise Giving Alliance (Beth also pointed out this clearing house, "for 'vetting' charities")
  
• The White House (this comes directly from President Obama, via an mass e-mail he sent out; it lists all the efforts our government is taking and how you can help, and it's where I got this web badge for today's post)
  

Here are some individual charities and organizations:

• International Red Cross Red Crescent (this is the main site for the joint operations of Red Cross and Red Crescent; you can donate directly here, or you can use their search tool to find a Red Cross or Red Crescent office in your home country)
• Doctors Without Borders (they were already operating three hospitals in Haiti before the earthquake, but all three hospitals are destroyed and the medical staff are now operating out of tents and temporary shelters--they desperately need your help, and every dollar counts)
• Oxfam (another hugely important coallition of international aid organizations)
• Heifer International (Heifer seeks to fight hunger and poverty, and has decided to step in as a first responder in the Haiti crisis.  Thanks to my friend Beth Davidson for pointing this one out.)
• Episcopal Relief and Development (my friend Diana says this organization "is already on the ground there and puts 92 cents on the dollar into relief work.")
• World Vision (my friend Rima says, "according to ABC, they're already distributing first aid kits and and other staples in Haiti.")
• Save the Children (also from Rima:  "using grassroots methods like sending motorcycle teams to help people in Port au Prince") 
• Care (Rima:  "distributing high protein biscuits they already had in warehouses in Haiti"; Beth highlighted this one, too)
• UNICEF (a time-honored and reliable group--I used to "trick or treat" for donations when I was a kid; thanks to Beth for pointing this one out!)
• Clinton Bush Haiti Fund (a new addition to this list; this is the organization set up by former Presidents Clinton and G.W. Bush, as the request of President Obama)
  

Thanks everyone for your links and support!  Keep those ideas coming, and keep the words, the money, and the helping hands going!

I want to pause in the series on researching to focus on more important matters: Haiti. As I write this, the death toll is not yet known, and like the horrible tsunami catastrophe of 2005, we may never truly know. What we do know is that millions--that's millions--of Haitians are injured or dying, and all Haitians, both in their homeland and living abroad, are suffering terrible, unspeakable grief.

There have been a lot of calls for prayer in the past day or so, and I'm among those people who believe that prayer, or meditation, or any other form of mental or spiritual offering can be hugely beneficial in tragedy, not only to those on whose behalf we pray but also for ourselves as well. It's why I'm here now: I view writing as a kind of prayer, like a message in the Wailing Wall or a sutra on a prayer flag or calligraphy from the Qur'an, and I write this because I want to send my hope and compassion out into the world, on the off chance that it can help someone who is suffering, if only to know there's someone like me who cares.

But I also believe that words alone are not going to help the people of Haiti, and I agree with all those people who suggest that action is as important as prayers--maybe, for the time being, action is more important.

I know things are hard for a lot of people the world over. Just today, as I browsed messages and status reports from friends and family, I found as many people despairing over their own hardships as I found despairing for Haiti. I have friends who have lost their jobs, or who have been seeking jobs for months to no avail; I have friends who wake each morning wondering how they're going to feed their children. I have friends who are suffering from terrible illness, or whose family members or spouses are dying of cancer. I have friends who are fighting day after day just to retain (or in some cases earn for the first time) their basic human rights.

But I also know that there are also plenty of us who can afford to help. It doesn't take much. When Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit several years ago, I had students approach me asking to be excused from class for a week. They wanted to head south, down to the Gulf Coast. I said, "You have family down there?" They said, "No, I'm joining a group of volunteers helping to clean up." I excused them from class. A couple of years later, up in Wisconsin, another group of students asked the same thing--they were driving down to build houses with Habitat for Humanity. These actions cost time, but they rarely cost money, and they have enormous impact.

I don't yet know what sorts of actions are available to help Haitians; the Haitians themselves do not yet fully understand the terrible scope of this tragedy or what their needs will be, and the governments of the world, including my own, are scrambling to help but don't yet know how. I hope by the end of today we can know, at least to some degree, and the help can begin. But in the meantime, I do know that one thing needed desperately is money to fund the efforts of those brave volunteers waiting to rush to Haiti's aid. So if you can afford to, please consider donating. Some places are willing to accept anything you can spare, even if it's only a dollar.

To that end, here is a short list of charities to consider, compiled by myself, some friends on Facebook, and one of my favorite blogs, Cake Wrecks:

• Charity Navigator (this is a kind of clearing house for reliable, reputable charities; it weeds out the scams and helps you find the right charity for your giving preferences)
  
• International Red Cross Red Crescent (this is the main site for the joint operations of Red Cross and Red Crescent; you can donate directly here, or you can use their search tool to find a Red Cross or Red Crescent office in your home country)
• Doctors Without Borders (they were already operating three hospitals in Haiti before the earthquake, but all three hospitals are destroyed and the medical staff are now operating out of tents and temporary shelters--they desperately need your help, and every dollar counts)
• Oxfam (another hugely important coallition of international aid organizations)
• Heifer International (already an addition!  Heifer seeks to fight hunger and poverty, and has decided to step in as a first responder in the Haiti crisis.  Thanks to my friend Beth Davidson for pointing this one out.)
• Episcopal Relief and Development (and another addition, this one from my friend Diana Pearson, who says this organization "is already on the ground there and puts 92 cents on the dollar into relief work.")

If you know of any more than I can add to this list, or of any non-monetary ways in which we can help, please tell me--I will [continue to] update and repost the list as long as it's necessary.