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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Changing Directions Judy Collins Tried A New Art Form And Now Has A New Book

Robin Pogrebin New York Times

Curled up one morning on one of her many sofas and smiling through her searing Caribbean-blue cat eyes, Judy Collins says she just felt like doing something different for a change, having fun with a new form. So she spent the past eight years writing a novel called “Shameless,” published this month by Pocket Books ($23).

Shameless? From the soulful troubadour of the ‘60s and ‘70s, the avatar of correct political causes?

“The wind howled suddenly, like a terrified soul,” Collins writes. “The trees in the park below danced like thin puppets in the wind and dark clouds hunkered close against the skyline. All of a sudden I thought of Dr. Ernest Wheeling, my horrible old shrink. Then I remembered I was having dinner with my lover, Edward, and life wasn’t so bad.”

As earnest as ever, and with a willful buoyancy, Collins goes over to the grand piano in her Upper West Side apartment-cum-studio, eager to try out the song she just finished writing with her live-in companion, Louis Nelson, in honor of the new Korean War memorial in Washington, D.C.

To see her surrounded by walls of honors and mementoes (including several gold records and 12 framed personal notes from Bill and Hillary Clinton) is to wonder why the interpreter of composers like Kurt Weill, Leonard Cohen and Stephen Sondheim - the woman whose diaphanous voice Ned Rorem once called “icy silver” - would want to write about sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.

One senses that Collins has written it with more lightness of heart than seriousness of literary ambition.

“Writing fiction,” she says, “gave me a chance to play in a way that I had never really experienced. I am so disciplined, and from the time I was so young I’ve had such structure in my life. Do you go on vacation? Never - you always take your work, you’re always singing, you’re always writing, you’re always practicing. This was a time-out. And, you know, I’m 56 years old. And I’ve earned the right.”

Viewed in this vein, the novel begins to seem less a surprising professional detour for Collins than a necessary personal departure.

Since it is practically devoid of any social consciousness, it gave her the chance to do something unabashedly commercial. (And when she was finished writing “Shameless,” she whipped up 13 songs for a companion CD of the same title, also released this month, by Mesa/Bluemoon Recordings.

After years of erratic pop success, the novel offered a welcome relief from worry about making the charts.

But on a deeper level, the novel has given Collins a chance to begin to deal publicly with the darkness that has plagued her since the suicide of her 33-year-old son, Clark Taylor, in 1992. Collins, whose 1987 autobiography, “Trust Your Heart,” chronicled her own suicide attempt at 14, as well as her battles with polio, bulimia and alcoholism, says that despite the depths of grief that forced her to stop working for a time, she does not blame herself for the loss of her son.

“There are no guilts in suicide,” she says. “And there should not be. You didn’t cause it, you can’t control it, you can’t cure it.”

As she describes her current state of mind, the novel seems to have had a therapeutic effect and to have helped her find new heights of creative vigor and inner resilience. “I’ve never felt better physically or emotionally or energetically,” Collins says, her hair cascading down as it always has, her toughened hands the only sign of aging. “I’ve gone through many, many things. I tell you something, that if it doesn’t kill you, you do get stronger. There is never a guarantee that it won’t kill you. Because I think I’ve gone through the single most difficult thing that a person can survive. I think suicide recovery is both the bottom of the barrel and the height of emotional stretching, psychic stretching. I don’t think there’s anything more horrible or more revealing.” Right now, Collins seems to be intent on stretching, as several projects crowd her schedule and compete for an energy that is at once focused and frenetic. Words tumble over one another as she jumps from subject to subject, rarely finishing her sentences.

“It’s an inner engine,” she says, “and I’m always just astonished by it because I don’t have time to do all the things that I want to do. My mind is running on forward.”

Collins is in the middle of a book tour that will take her through 30 cities by the end of August. Thursday in Washington, as part of a day of ceremonies for the opening of the Korean War memorial, she planned to take time out from promoting “Shameless” to perform a song she wrote with Nelson, who designed the monument’s wall.

And Collins is already toying with the idea of turning her novel into a screenplay.

In “Shameless,” she has written about a world she knows, the world of the music business. Her main character, Catherine Saint, is a photojournalist who specializes in shooting rock stars for magazines like Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair. One of the bands Catherine follows is a budding young group called the Newborns.

But Collins is also testing new territory here, particularly with the novel’s often-explicit first-person descriptions of her heroine’s sexual experiences and fantasies.

She says she found writing about sex a freeing experience. “There was sex in this book from the very start,” she says, sending one of her three attention-seeking cats out of the room as she talks. “I’m fascinated with where the sensual aspects of the book led me. Why does sensuality make people nervous? Sensuality is a very fundamental part of life and it has everything to do with liberation.”