Author Archives: Lori Berhon

About Lori Berhon

Lori Berhon is a New-York based novelist and playwright. Her work is distinguished for its intelligence and for the vivid humanity of even her most impossible characters. She is actually taller, slimmer and far more elegant than she appears to be.

…Of Everything

  By | | Life Sentences
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A little over a week ago, the paperbound edition of my novel The Breast of Everything launched online, quickly followed by the first digital edition (on Kindle).  To make this happen, I’ve been wearing more hats than Bartholomew Cubbins and every time I take one off there’s another one lurking underneath.  I’ve been graphics designer, webmaster, researcher, publisher, publicist and personal assistant, while continuing to cover my usual roles in the office and with my family.  If someone offered me a choice between a spot in the New York Times Book Review and a vacation right now, I’d actually have to stop and think!

Part of the challenge over the last few months has been making my way through a thicket of technology (it would have been accurate here to say “hacking” my way, but that word no longer conjures up images of swinging a machete through a rain forest—at least not when talking about technology).  I’ve taken on learning, or adding to my skills in, WordPress, Photoshop, InDesign, Scrivener, and the CreateSpace and Kindle KDP interfaces.  Plus setting up some new things in Facebook and Goodreads.

As a boomer with a liberal arts degree, I was awed by the scope of the available tools and astonished that I could use them.  This may all be a yawn to your average high school Junior but this kind of technology wasn’t around when I was growing up.  During college, I worked an entire summer to afford a portable electric typewriter.  It wasn’t only the tasteful caramel color of the case that compelled me; in those days, the pop-in self-correcting and colored-ink ribbons were breathtakingly state of the art.  Five years later, I had the opportunity to learn my first word processor.  It was one of those “dedicated” word processors (before word processing software had been developed for personal computers) that required the floorspace of an L-shaped desk and stored a few dozen pages of text on a mylar disk the size of a vinyl LP record; the dot-matrix printer required another wall and a sound-muffling Lexan hood.  Temp word processing was a great survival job for a struggling actor, so I learned seven or eight of these machines, the size shrinking rapidly over time.  DOS-driven personal computers were next, once they supported word processing software good enough for my own writing purposes.  I taught myself well enough to train others.  I learned my first simple database program because I needed to organize my consulting work and my submissions to playwriting competitions.  These self-taught skills eventually go me hired by my first software company, where I picked up bits of assorted knowledge while working with developers as a user-assistance specialist.

Now I make my living as a technical writer, specializing in what I like to think of as “helpful Help.” Not what you’d expect for someone with a double major in Theatre and History.  Sometimes I joke that I’m something of an end-user idiot savant when it comes to software technology, but the truth is that the essential thing I learned in college was how to learn.

I was lucky that way.  The push towards specialization began just a few years after I graduated.  Instead of going to college to broaden their knowledge and experience of the world, students today go seeking job skills and every other one of them seems to go on to get an MBA in something. With so many complex disciplines to master, professional development training is extremely valuable and it’s great that there’s so much more of this available in schools and in the workforce.  But no specialized work skills can replace analytic thinking, critical thinking and the ability to perform research.

Job skills learned today will be outmoded in less than a decade.  Entire occupations go extinct every year (ask anyone who works for a newspaper).  There’s no way of knowing what the future will bring, but most of us will, whether voluntarily or needfully, change occupations many times over the course of our working lives.  And it’s safe to assume that the vast majority of us will never have an IPO or live in McMansion or live out one of those dream retirements that feature in financial planning ads.

But with a liberal arts education behind me, I’ve been able to adapt to new disciplines, changing times and evolving tools.  I’ve traveled through Tuscany using public transportation, learned to knit entrelac and managed to connect my blog feed from my website to Goodreads. All that, and I get to have the fun of yelling “how can you not know that!” a lot when “Jeopardy” is on TV.

Everything I Need to Know, I Learned From Dark Shadows

  By | | 4F: Food, Fashion, Film, Fiction, Life Sentences
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I’ve been keeping an eye on the approach of Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows movie.  Things have been heating up over the last month or so: “sneak peek” photos showing up online, followed closely by trailers; then the TV commercials and a steady trickle of buzzy web pieces; and yesterday, the true harbinger of imminence, the subway poster.  I always look forward to Burton’s work, but this one’s had me giddy with anticipation.  Understandable in view of my having grown up glued to the show. Then today came the sad announcement of the death of actor Jonathan Frid, the original (dare I say the real?) Barnabas Collins. Coming, as it did, the day after Dick Clark’s passing, it was a cold reminder that my childhood is ancient history. But as I read through the press releases, I realized there was more meaning for me here than nostalgia or general middle-aged angst.

I said before that I grew up on Dark Shadows. It might be more accurate to say that Dark  Shadows helped to raise me.  Chronically terrified, introspective and eccentric (I was past 30 before I grasped exactly how eccentric), I was not a happy child. We didn’t have Goth or Emo kids in those days. It might have been easier for me if we had but, as I hit adolescence, everyone around me seemed fearfully confident and optimistic.  Everywhere I looked, it was all bounce and shiny hair—except for people in 19th century novels (which, yes, I was reading at that age) and on Dark Shadows. The family at Collinwood were a mess, and that mess was bred deep down in their DNA.  The plot stretched across centuries and involved a melancholy vampire and (later on) a Byronic werewolf, a brittle female doctor and a sultry witch, ingenues in jeopardy and a Golden Age Hollywood matriarch, a Renfield-like caretaker and children with a creepy touch of Turn of the Screw. The black and white setting for all of this was a gothic mansion on the rockiest coast of Maine, all fog and crashing waves, the one place on TV that wasn’t drenched in California sunshine. Even the music was haunting; I can still whistle the theme.

It was a soap, of course, but oddly educational. There were plotlines that derived from some pretty classic literary sources. Fan magazine pieces on the actors led to additional, wider reading (Frid was a Shakespearean actor, Grayson Hall had been in Night of the Iguana). And of course there was a lot of information on the paranormal and other intriguing areas of exploration. Astrology was all the rage back then, but it was Dark Shadows that gave me the courage to buy my first Tarot deck, and it was through Dark Shadows that I heard of the I Ching. The world Dan Curtis created had all the thrills of a ripping yarn, and I could feel pleasantly smart at the same time. But more than all of this, Collinwood was home.

When I was introduced to Dark Shadows, one long dull summer between childhood and teens, I was invited into a world where I somehow seemed to belong—and I was pretty desperate to belong to something, to not feel so very much alone. Thanks to those weekday afternoon half hours, following some often-miserable school days, I learned that it was okay to be different; maybe not easy, but okay. And that nothing is ridiculous if you care enough about it. A lot of what I learned in adolescence still lingers, but the best of what I learned I learned from Dark Shadows. 

Taking Responsibility

  By | | Duly Noted
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I spent a few years working on a story—first as a screenplay, then as a novel (coming soon to an online outlet near you)—about a kind of Messiah who manifests as piece of female anatomy. Primary among Mam’s messages to humankind is something that we’ve lost sight of in America over the last half century or so: the need to take responsibility for our actions. It’s the crucial first step in making the world a better place for everyone.

When crafting Mam’s speeches, my thinking was that the important messages (like this) are so simple that they’re routinely ignored, but that maybe if they came from an extraordinary source people would pay attention.  All the hours I put in to tell that story, and it turns out Samuel L. Jackson (a different kind of extraordinary source) has said it more powerfully in a few brief seconds.

In the wake of the horrible shooting of Trayvon Martin, Jackson’s wakeup call becomes ever more urgent. Please watch!