Writer, Cogitator, Recovering Ranch Girl

So, You Change Your Own Tires?

2012-02-02T08:43:00.005-07:00

I was thinking this morning about how I used to only buy cars with stick shifts. Can you guess the reason? If you’re from a poor background, you probably can.

You see, you can’t push a car and pop the clutch to get it started on an automatic. This is something you know only if you perpetually have very old broken down vehicles. You have old batteries and engines with shorts. All kinds of other reasons.

One time, I was driving late at night on the interstate, and I got so tired I just couldn’t drive anymore, so I stopped at a truck pullout and slept, diesels rumbling all around me. Well, the car was packed to the brim, so it left a back light on and my battery ran down. Luckily, I was parked on a slight hill. Unluckily, the hill was against traffic. So, rather than an 18-year-old gal knock on some trucker’s semi door at 3 a.m., I waited until I couldn’t see a truck coming for a long ways, I let the car coast backward until the momentum carried me back and turned around, then I let it coast forward (backward on the interstate), popped the clutch, it started, and I flipped back around and was on my way.

God, I hope my daughter or my son is never in a situation like this.

You also buy very cheap tires. Which means it doesn’t matter if you’re a “lady” you change them, unless you want to be doing a lot of walking. And certainly someone in this situation never had the money for AAA. One summer, I was in our old Ford irrigation truck and got a flat tire on a dusty side road. It was one of those tall ones with the long beds. The tires hadn’t been changed in forever, so I jacked it up and put on the star tire iron and it would not budge, no matter how hard I tried to get the nuts to break. I ended up finding a can of WD-40 in the cab and squirting them all and then, literally, standing and jumping on one end of the iron while I pulled with the other. Finally I got it to work and changed the tire. And I swear I changed a tire a day on my old Chevy Impala when I was in high school.

But this indicates something in a larger and deeper sense. (One thing that got me thinking about this was this page at Cracked, semihumorous but also very real.) Imagine only buying vehicles with stick shifts because you don’t trust all the newfangled stuff to work ~ cuz, you know, it doesn’t after that amount of time. Heck, I didn’t even trust power windows because they so often didn’t work. It may seem silly to you ~ why don’t you just buy one that works? ~ but I assure you it’s not silly at all. If you have to choose between a car that’s reliable and say food, you’ll probably choose food. You say, well, go without insurance for a month or something like that, make it work. Well, again, you probably don’t even have insurance. I have relatives who, within the last couple of years, are living on $10,000-$15,000 a year.

But back to the deep and abiding ways poverty changes you. When you go to the grocery store, you only get the cheapest and barest of necessities in small quantities and you feel guilty about that. The small quantities and cheap thing are definitely a problem because what you buy breaks or isn’t at all good for you and you’re always running out of everything, and so you actually may end up spending more for something because you can’t afford to buy a good one all at one time.

This is a small-scale indication of something much larger. You do not allow yourself to dream. At all. You just don’t. When my husband and I got together, I did even conceive of the idea that we would own a house ~ or that we could ~ whereas he took it for granted. He could dream it and believe it because he was from a better background (though his father was not). Because you know, if you can’t afford to get enough groceries, you certainly are not going to be able to afford a better car or college or even to own a house. You do not dream the American Dream.

And it is a platitude and a reality that if you do not dream it, you cannot achieve it. This is where it comes back to creative things. You don’t just hold back on things related to money. You also hold back in other ways large and small. I can say that I would not be a writer today, had my husband not shown me the way to dream.

I love you, honey.

Portnoy's Complaint, by Philip Roth

2012-02-01T08:41:00.003-07:00

I’m reading my first Philip Roth novel, Portnoy’s Complaint. It’s one of those books that I’m ambivalent about ~ in the true sense of the word. There’s so much I love about it but so much I don’t like.

I don’t like the main character. He’s unreliable and racist and misogynistic. He’s a Jewish Charlie from the show Two and a Half Men ~ he has real issues with his mother and he tries to compensate by being a he-whore. The novel is well titled ~ it is a very long complaint. However, it’s so well crafted, and only Roth could get away with so many exclamation points in the work, the only author I know who can. There’s such energy in the language. I like the conceit of the main character talking to a psychiatrist. It's just an amazing book.

I don’t yet know how it ends, but I’m fascinated to find out.

But what is really interesting is Roth’s afterward at the very end of the novel. Roth talks a lot about his life and inspiration. Here’s an excerpt:

It was nothing more than that then, nothing, I swear, that goaded me out to discover not merely four empty chairs at “my” table but the 8 1/2-by-11 sheet of white typing paper that a previous diner had forgotten or left behind at “my” place.

Typewritten on the paper, in the form of a long single-spaced unindented paragraph, were nineteen sentences that taken together made no sense at all. Though no author’s name appeared anywhere on either the front of the back of the page, I figured that the nineteen sentences, amounting to some four hundred or so words, must be the work of a neighborhood avant-gardist with an interest in “experimental” or “automatic” writing. This page was surely a sample of one or the other. The author’s having forgotten this composition here at the cafeteria ~ while trying perhaps not to forget to remember to leave with his or her own umbrella ~ did not seem to me a catastrophe for literature or even for a literary career.

Here is what was written on the single sheet of paper:

“The first time I saw Brenda she asked me to hold her glasses. Dear Gabe, The drugs help me bend my fingers around a pen. Not to be rich, not to be famous, not to be mighty, not even to be happy, but to be civilized ~ that was the dream of his life. She was so deeply imbedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seemed to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise. … For legal reasons, I have had to alter a number of facts in this book.”

...

I came to realize what would surely have been obvious at the outset to anyone less well-trained ~ or perhaps less poorly trained ~ in the art of thinking than I was back then. I saw that these sentences, as written, had nothing to do with one another. I saw that if ever a unifying principle were to be discernable in the paragraph it would have to be imposed from without rather than unearthed from within.

What I eventually understood was that these were the first lines of the books that it had fallen to me to write. …

“For legal reasons, I have had to alter a number of facts in this book.” So begins the preface to Operation Shylock, published in 1993 ~ and so ended what began on a stormy night in Chicago some thirty-seven years before. Free at last. Or that’s what I would probably be tempted to think if I were either starting out all over again or dead.

Portnoy’s Complaint is the fourth book Roth published, and it begins with “She was so deeply imbedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seemed to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise.”

First it gives me chills of pleasure to hear the inner creative life of another writer, particularly such a talented one. And to find this out and contemplate the development of a complete novel from one sentence is fascinating.

But over and above that, the sheer terror of the endeavor! What a commitment! What an ingenious goal! It lasted longer than many marriages. I mean ~ I don’t know how to portray the profoundness of such a thing, how it moves me and how the completion of such a goal chokes me up. It sounds like such a simple thing, this decision, yet it is almost creatively saint-like, this dedication to something greater than us all.

I feel like I’m not very articulate today, but suffice it to say I’m going to be thinking about this for a long time.

The Difference Between Cliché and Art

2012-01-31T08:22:00.001-07:00

Offered without commentary.

Cliché

Art

The great work of James Mollison is here and here. And of course the great work of the Simpsons creators is here.

Our Secret Worlds

2012-01-30T08:11:00.002-07:00

I’ve always said that I read because it’s as close as you can get to another person’s insides, their subjectivity. You learn so much about a person from what they write. And you learn about other people as a whole ~ how different yet the same you are on the inside.

But, also, reading is your own special world. (I hear echoes of Gollum: Mine! Mine!) No one can know your experience of reading this book, not really. They can’t know the thoughts that come into your head, the experiences this book dredges up, your reaction to the protagonist, how it changes your thinking irrevocably.

Going on vacation is something a couple can share. We both climb Mount Kilimanjaro and go on the tilt-a-whirl. We may have slightly different points of view standing right next to one another, and I might have noticed our Italian waiter making eyes at me and you don’t, but our experiences are very similar.

Not so with a book. It’s too interior, too personal, too wrapped up in memory and emotion and where you are in your life right now.

I was thinking about how reading is something that couples cannot share. Oh, I know some couples who do. One reads to the other in bed at night. It becomes a bonding. (My husband and I ~ our tastes in books are too different for this.) However, when you read to one another it becomes more about the performance, more about you and he, than about the contents of the book. No, book reading is and always will be a separation.

But, no, not really ~ let me contradict myself and hope that both contradictions hold true in your mind. Because, even though you are distant from your loved ones, you are close to one other human being and by proxy the whole human race.

And because the experience is so intense, we do try to share it. We do try to read to our lover in bed. We get together in book clubs. We press our favorites into the hands of our friends. Because it is human nature to try to connect, to share these stories of our lives ~ or others’ lives in our lives.

Friday Cool

2012-01-27T08:06:00.000-07:00

As my brother-in-law Tim said: "Damn straight."

Oh, Cruel World

2012-01-26T08:26:00.002-07:00

"Self is a Cruel Master."

You know the feeling. You go to a party, which you’ve prepared for meticulously. You spent weeks dieting and getting your hair cut and highlighted and finding just the right little black dress. You had big plans for this party. Maybe you were sure a certain someone would show up. Or maybe you’ve always had the best time at this particular friend’s house. But then you go and it’s a total flop. Your timing is off all night, and you offend at least one person and maybe you get drunk or maybe you say exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time. So despite ~ or maybe because of ~ your high expectations, the evening is a disaster.

Or maybe you post something very heartfelt online. You worked so hard on it and it bares your soul and you believe it’s the best thing you’ve ever written. But, then, crickets. No one responds, even when you post to Facebook and Twitter and Google+, first a witty come-on and then a heartfelt but bitter, “If you love me, you’ll look at this.” Again, crickets.

I’m sure there’s a lot more examples of this type of thing. You put it out there, hang it all on the line, and the indifferent world shrugs and turns away.

There’s one thing that helps me a lot in these situations. Very early in our relationship, my husband said, “The world really doesn’t care about you. They all are more concerned about themselves ~ the way they look, their witty repartee, whether they’re bombing. They’re thinking about the next thing they’re going to say or about their last flub or about when it’s polite to bag it. So don’t take it personally.”

This has held me in good stead ever since. I rarely take things personally. Maybe even when I should. But I give them the benefit of the doubt. Call me obtuse. But thinking like that has gotten me through many an awkward ~ or what might otherwise be mortifying ~ situation. Online, someone will say something and I don’t get offended (mostly). I take it in the spirit that it’s offered, and when I do feel those familiar pangs, I tell myself, “Don’t be so self-centered as to think it’s personal. It’s not about you; it’s about them.”

In the meantime, I try to remember to forgive myself for not being that perfect person and to forgive everyone else for not anticipating my every need. The world is a wondrous and horrible place, for sure. (And forgive the proscriptive nature of this post.)

Interview with My Lovely Agent Rachel

2012-01-25T08:06:00.001-07:00

My lovely agent Rachel Stout at Dystel & Goderich stopped by over at All the Write Stuff for an interview and said all kinds of smart stuff. Check it out!

The War Between My Critical Faculties and My Social Faculties

2012-01-24T08:27:00.000-07:00

As anyone who’s ever asked me to comment on a manuscript knows, it can be a hit or miss proposition. I have every intention of doing it. I look forward to it before I receive the manuscript and I’m all excited. When I get the manuscript, I’m stoked. I’m all “I’ll jump on that immediately, get it done, I’m so looking forward to it!” But then a niggle of doubt sets in, and I start to avoid a little. I think, what do I really know about giving feedback? You know what, maybe I really do suck at all this. Not only that, but I’m going to horribly offend this wonderful writer person who I adore. God I suck. Then the tension mounts even further, and it becomes this huge weight around my neck that I try to pull away from. Once I force myself to get started on the review, I’m fine. No problem at all. I’ve got confidence, and I think I give good feedback. You can imagine this makes preparing for workshop a bit of a challenge.

So some people have stage fright, and some people have writer’s block ~ I get editor’s block. It may seem silly. I mean, you just have to read, for heaven’s sake. Use your years of thinking about writing and apply it to this manuscript. Piece a cake. But, oh no, it isn’t.

What brought this up now is that a friend (hi, JoAnn!) asked me to help judge a high school writing contest recently. I really enjoyed reading all these young people’s work, and the contest has a fabulous rubric and supporting materials to help the judges. Some of these entries were fabulous pieces of art. But, as you can imagine, it took me a while to get to it.

I used to have the same problem when I was teaching freshman comp and science and technical writing. On one hand, I was supposed to be this supportive teacher and on the other I was the hammer of judgment giving them grades. I felt very comfortable with the former, but the latter was torture. I would think, this person is trying their hardest. They really are. I should cut them some slack. But then I can’t give everyone As. It just doesn’t work that way. I would know that the paper was a C at best, but the person was so nice. So to counter this I had to always go back and adjust grades to that the percentages would even out and be what everyone expects. I had to put my social faculties aside for my critical ones.

I blame my mom. (Hi, Mom!) She’s always been such a supportive person. We joke that if one of us seven kids were a serial killer, she’d say, “Isn’t that nice? I bet she’s very good at it!” I inherited it, and on the whole it’s not a bad quality to have.

Do you have this problem? When you’re going to give someone feedback, does it take forever for you to get to it?

What Would You Regret?

2012-01-23T08:41:00.004-07:00

Bronnie Ware

My husband sent me this thought-provoking and oh-so-true (as far as I can tell at my age) link yesterday. It’s about the top five things people regret as they are dying. It’s funny because they are what you would expect, which makes them cliché, possibly, but they also are so true they hit you right where you live. Maybe I should be more honest and say they hit my husband and me where we live.

Some of them I feel fairly comfortable with in my life. But, you know, ask me when I’m dying.

One think I found comforting is that everyone Bronnie Ware helped in her job grew a lot at the very end, and “Every single patient found their peace before they departed though, every one of them.” I find this strangely comforting. Maybe because it’s what I had hoped, but also maybe because it’s a testament to the fact that we hold on tooth and nail until we reach that point. It’s a testament to gritty human nature.

Her point I wanted to highlight was number 5: I wish that I had let myself be happier. Oh, gosh, isn’t this just so true? We are most often the ones standing in the way of our happiness. Our deep-seated happiness, anyway ~ sure you might think a million dollars might make you happy, but I would think that would only allow you to run away a little bit farther. The hard things in life are the basis for lasting happiness, I’m convinced. And a lot of times we won’t let ourselves follow our dreams, for whatever reason.

So, my biggest takeaway is that, if someone today offers to make friends or someone sends you a link that would further your writing or you meet a cousin who mentions a retreat that is right in line with something you want to do, TAKE IT UP, for god’s sake. That’s the world with its eternal yeah saying, do it, we want you to be happy.

Hanging Out at Yareah Magazine

2012-01-20T08:46:00.000-07:00

Pardon the continuing SSP (shameless self-promotion) but I'm so excited I could burst...

The lovely Isabel del Rio at Yareah Magazine has been following my Project 365 on Google+, and she asked me to write up something for the magazine and send in a few photos. Well, it's up! I'm thrilled and honored to be part of such a great magazine.

Please check out this beautiful and smart magazine.

Myfanwy and I Hanging Over at All Lit Up

2012-01-19T08:21:00.001-07:00

The lovely Myfanwy Collins and I pulled up a chair over at James Goertel's All Lit Up blog to talk about writing. Myf talked eloquently about publishing and fear, and I went on ... and on and on ... about getting my agent. If you have a minute, check it out! Thanks, James!

An Observation on Subjectivity

2012-01-18T09:07:00.002-07:00

Have you seen the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo movies?* I’ve seen the Danish/Swedish version (2009, director Niels Arden Oplev), but I’m waiting to see the American version (2011, director David Fincher) when it comes out on DVD. It’s such a dark vision of the world, I didn’t want it drilled into my brain on the big screen.

One of the many things that struck me about the Oplev version was that the actor who plays Mikael Blomkvist, Michael Nyqvist, is not conventionally handsome by Hollywood/American cinema standards. His eyes are set a little close, and he has rough skin on his cheeks, which are not craigy (forgive the pun) but rather a little loose and round. On the other hand, Daniel Craig of the Fincher version ~ he’s got that strong jaw with long dimples and smooth skin. (Full disclosure: I think Daniel Craig is just yum.)

When you look at Nyqvist and Craig side by side, they actually look fairly similar. They are of a type. However, Craig is definitely classically Hollywood in looks. Nyqvist is more regular guy, more what the rest of us look like. It’s like some of the British drama/comedy series ~ they have regular-looking people on them.

It got me thinking about American sensibilities. Then it struck me: why, in American movies and television, do only beautiful people get subjectivity and depth of character? Of course I know why. Beauty and sex sells. But think of the ramifications. The underlying message is that only people who are beautiful have lives and thoughts and anything worth anything inside them. If you aren’t conventionally beautiful, you are at best a character type. You are to be made fun of or even not shown at all. Fat men can be in comedies only, and fat women aren’t shown at all, if possible.

So our kids are getting the message every day that 95% of our people should not be given any respect for intelligence or depth of character or anything. They are invisible. That’s no small thing.

Food for thought.

* Note that I'm not linking to any Wikipedia sites today. That's because Wiki and many other tools we use every day are being threatened. If you care about your internet, write your congressman or -woman today!

The Tenors Un Limited

2012-01-17T10:52:00.002-07:00

Jem, Scott, and Paul, Tenors Un Limited

I had the unparalleled pleasure of seeing the Tenors Un Limited on Saturday! It was great on so many levels.

First of all, oh the pure pleasure of voice. I’m an amateur in all things musical, but even my ear could tell the absolute control and precision and pure ecstasy of the sound. Each member of the group is a master craftsman. The way they would come in just above the note and then fall down ever so slightly and gently upon it. Their harmonies, and the surprise of the low tone coming it at the last minute. The mixture of arias and more popular favorites and their own compositions. Their humor and coming out into the crowd. Inviting the Laramie High School Choir to join them. Don’t you just love when you hear/see/experience master craftsman at work? It gives me chills every time. Not only that, but I was in the frame of mind that is totally open to new experience, and so it moved me tremendously.

Second, Tenors Un Limited are world-class tenors out of the UK, so it was so fabulous that they opened the season at the Griffon Theatre for the Laramie Plains Civic Center. They call themselves the Rat Pack of Opera. The group is made up of Paul Martin, Jem Sharples, and Scott Ciscon. Paul and Gem are from the London, and Scott is originally from Chicago. One of the reasons they were playing in Wyoming is that Paul is married to Lila, a fabulous opera singer in her own right who grew up in Casper and is my great friend Nina’s sister. Small world, no?

Another reason it was so fabulous is this: My mom’s 88th birthday is next Friday. Before the concert, I emailed back and forth with a friend who attended the concert and hosted a dinner the night before (hi, Peter!) and happened to mention that fact and that I was taking her to the concert for her birthday. Since he’s friends of the family too, he let the tenors know that it was a birthday. So, early on in the concert, they said, “So, there’s a birthday in the house?” We sat in the front row, so they came down and serenaded my mom with “Volare”! Oh, it made her whole year, I can tell you! Not only that, but my birthday was last week, and the woman sitting on the other side of us had a birthday the next day. Then after the concert, I bought two of their CDs and they very graciously signed them and came over and talked with my mom. She’s been listening to them ever since. They are not only great performers but so generous as well! Thank you so much, guys.

So, sadly, since I cannot hand you this experience with my words, here’s a video so you can get some small taste. It does not do the experience justice. Oh, and buy their CDs and go see them, if you get a chance!

Barry Lopez, On the Value of Story

2012-01-13T08:11:00.004-07:00

A great quote (from a short film) from the wonderful Barry Lopez about the value of story, while he's at Bread Loaf.

“I think, what happens in a story is that you are reminded again of something you already know. Maybe you know it in your body or maybe you know it in your emotions without language or maybe you know it in your mind. But the story reminds you of something that you forgot. And when you remember it, you feel exhilarated.

“From my point of view, storytelling is a social impulse, and the social impulse is to take care of your people. Part of the reason I’m at Bread Loaf is to help the people who have chosen to come into the classroom where I am, to help them find that way to take what they know and make it into something that will help all of us.

“There’s shipwreck in life from one end to the other. I think every person probably by the time they are thirty years old has been driven to their knees. They’ve been alone in some room on their knees weeping, wondering who cares if I die? Why should I bother to get up? Why should I go out the door? Why should I go to work? Why should I write or reform this relationship with this woman or this man? Why should I try for custody for my kids? They’re on their knees and they would just as soon die. They need a story. The story that they need is a story that they can believe about the purpose of life, and that’s the place I want to be in.”

"If—" by Rudyard Kipling

2012-01-12T08:09:00.002-07:00

Kipling may be somewhat out of fashion, but I will always love him for not only Just So Stories and Jungle Book and Rikki Tikki Tavi but also for his military poetry and his wonderful stories. Also his cogitations on what it means to be a man.

Courtesy Strom Art Gallery

If—

By Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

Creating Photos, Creating Stories

2012-01-11T08:18:00.009-07:00

So, I’ve been posting a photo a day for my Project 365. I love it. It helps me see the beauty in the world. It reminds me to really look.

But I’ve also been thinking a lot about how all creative endeavors are the same. The aesthetics of presentation. The way they come about. Really amazing.

First of all, that faculty that recognizes ideas, patterns, interesting bits about the world gets turned on. Like I said above, I spend the day seeing colors and patterns and odd conjunctions as I look for photos. It’s the same way with writing. People ask how you come up with ideas. Well, it’s a skill, like finding a good photo, where you learn to recognize them.

Not only that, but it’s as if it has an on/off switch. When I’m in it, be it taking photos or writing, I see it everywhere. In fact, it’s so insistent, if I can’t take the photo or follow up on the idea for a story, I mourn. I regret it for days. Which is a problem, as when I’m in the mode they come thick and fast.

Another way taking photos is similar to writing is that you frame the image or idea. It’s much easier to think in terms of a photo. You have a square. You aim it at something. You snap it. You take it into Photoshop and refine the frame further. But it’s the same as you write a story. You have to limit the world. I mean: you certainly cannot put a person’s full experience as it happens into a story. That would be ludicrious, not to mention boring. No. You have to select. You have to make everything count. You have to take it into the Photoshop of the mind and clip the parts that don’t matter to the effect or the story.

You have to worry about composition in photos. How the lines lead in the eye. The aesthetics of the placement of trees and people and where their eyes are looking, which leads the eyes of the viewer. Whether there’s color. What ideas are conveyed and how to heighten people’s attention. Once again, the same with stories. You have to “compose” them beyond just the writing. You add elements that enhance effects and you leave out others. You try this. You try that. You try to have a line, an opening, that leads you into the story. You need to have them exit satisfactorily.

And you may or may not be aware of it, but photographers fiddle with the pictures beyond just the framing. They heighten contrast, enhance hue and saturation, blur out background so that the main subject is the focus, and so on. Some photographers enhance photos so much that they are pseudo-realistic, a heightened reality. Look at Trey Ratcliff’s images. The world doesn’t objectively have colors like that that come together in one place, but, yet, we actually experience them that way (more on this in a sec). Same with stories. You need to heighten reality. Compress time frames. Focus and essentialize character. Even in literary fiction, where you’re trying to get closer to lived experience, you must craft the representation for a satisfactory story.

Something I’ve realized, too, is that the photo often cannot represent the experience, and there are some photos that can’t be taken. For example, yesterday morning there was a lovely full moon above the western horizon just before the sun came up on the east. It was full and huge and floated above the blue mountains with snow tipping their peaks. The sky was blue trending to pink. I didn’t take the picture because my camera and my skill would not adequately represent the feeling that image gives. Some people can do it, but often they’ll go into Photoshop and do serious things with the size of the moon and the colors. There are a number of things like that that just don’t translate to image. A vista from a mountain peak often won’t. What it felt like to sit around a fire in the mountains at night. Many things. The same with stories. Dreams seem compelling to the individual, but they mostly don’t fare well in fiction. (And don’t start your story by waking up. Just don’t. That is a huge cliché because it’s been used so much.) The subtleties of lived experience are hard to encapsulate on paper, and maybe I’m not yet able to recognize what doesn’t work or maybe it’s somewhat unconscious, self-selecting as I come across ideas. I guess that’s it ~ it’s in the selection process.

Finally, I look for certain things when I snap photos. Incongruities, patterns, a singular focus. I realize that when I post a photo, I am asking complete strangers to look at my view of the world, and it better be damn interesting. That’s it: interesting, intriguing, weird in some way. Stories, once again, are the same. I’m asking someone to take time out of their busy day and read this thing. It better be interesting. It better have an interesting worldview. It should be well-executed. It needs to entertain or intrigue or something.

Be not boring, which is another word for unoriginal or badly executed.

File Under Interesting Infographics

2012-01-06T08:16:00.001-07:00

The convergence of zip codes and fractals. Very interesting. From Wired.com.

"Characteristics Of A Child Three Years Old," by William Wordsworth

2012-01-05T08:11:00.004-07:00

I love Wordsworth, particularly "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood." However, today, this delightful bit.

Image courtesy http://georgianaduchessofdevonshire.blogspot.com/

Characteristics Of A Child Three Years Old
by William Wordsworth

LOVING she is, and tractable, though wild;
And Innocence hath privilege in her
To dignify arch looks and laughing eyes;
And feats of cunning; and the pretty round
Of trespasses, affected to provoke
Mock-chastisement and partnership in play.
And, as a faggot sparkles on the hearth,
Not less if unattended and alone
Than when both young and old sit gathered round
And take delight in its activity;
Even so this happy Creature of herself
Is all-sufficient, solitude to her
Is blithe society, who fills the air
With gladness and involuntary songs.
Light are her sallies as the tripping fawn's
Forth-startled from the fern where she lay couched;
Unthought-of, unexpected, as the stir
Of the soft breeze ruffling the meadow-flowers,
Or from before it chasing wantonly
The many-coloured images imprest
Upon the bosom of a placid lake.

“I Am a _____ Writer”

2012-01-04T09:00:00.005-07:00

I wanted to cogitate on a topic for a bit today. Not sure I’ll have anything particularly insightful to say, but here we go.

I read the introductions to the 2011 edition of the fabulous series Best European Fiction, edited by Aleksander Hemon. One introduction is by Aleksander, and the other is by Colum McCann.

I just love introductions, people meditating about what they do and why they it, and these were no exceptions. Both Aleksander and Colum talked about what the tem European fiction might mean. Fascinating stuff.

What does it mean to be labeled a certain type of writer? It is a fraught thing. We have often given privilege to the white male writer, and all other writers have had to have an additional tag put on the title. So a white male writer is “a writer,” and a white woman writer is “a woman writer,” and a African-American male writer is “a black writer,” and an African-American woman writer is “a black woman writer,” and so on. The same for your country of origin or your religious persuasion. And if you’re a number of things, they’re often hyphenated ~ Michael Ondaatje is a Sri Lanken-English-Canadian-American writer, say.

The default position needs no clarification, which is evidence of the embedded nature of power structures, while all others need to be carefully delineated. I’m not writing this to point blame; I’m simply pointing to historical realities. It is in our very nature to categorize the world by stereotype, which is a completely different discussion.

One of Colum’s points is that that world has become so small that people live in the hyphens: “We can be Irish and Argentinean, or French and Australian, or Chinese and Paraguayan, or perhaps even all of them at once.”

Colum, however, goes on to lay a special claim for European fiction ~ that its meaning expands and contracts and is particularly unclassifiable and fluid. In one respect I agree with him, in that the borders of nations change, which is not the case any more in the United States.

However, when it comes to a single representational literature, I think Europe is the same as the United States. The consensus centers of culture lay claim to that un-adjectived state of representing everyone. To them, if they don’t read widely outside their own sphere, the fiction of the United States may seem fairly uniform, with oh you know that crazy guy who writes about this weird other place. (I give most people more credit than this, however.) All other literature is given the label of regional. I don’t think I’m saying anything new here. Remember that infamous cover?

But another distinction may be whether the label is applied from the outside or from the inside. Who are you? Are you an American? Are you a woman? Are you an African American? Are you a lesbian American? And who gets to label you? Some people shoulder labels easily, while others reject all labels as superficial.

We need these classifications. That’s the basis for language: we all sort of agree that this word equals this thing with these borders. So there’s always an inherent tension there. For example, it’s not just that dastardly publishing business reducing my fiction to a certain category. People want to know what this thing is. (I did my master's thesis on identity in pioneer diaries.)

I’m going to have to think more about Colum’s claim for the special nature of European literature and reread the intro. However, in the meantime, I get to read these fabulous stories!

PS I know I'm a year behind and there's a 2012. Looking forward to it!

Film Technique in Sherlock Holmes

2012-01-03T09:29:00.002-07:00

My husband and I went to see the new movie Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows with Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law. (We haven’t yet seen the first one.)

I was expecting not to particularly like it, but my husband wanted to see it. He rarely wants to see a film in the theater, so when he does, I’m more than happy to go, as I’m a film addict. But the ones I like are rarely blockbuster and most often character-based.

This one was thought provoking in a number of ways, but mostly ~ for me ~ because of the superb filmmaking technique.

First of all, the actors acted incredibly close to one another. In the real world, if people are enemies or having a fight, you expect them to draw back and put distance between each other. On screen, actors always almost play close to one another, but this one seemed incredibly so. Second, the camera played very close to the actors’ faces. So not only were the actors close but the camera, we, were close to the actors. The overall affect was a feeling of claustrophobia, which was I’m sure the intended effect. It put you close to the actions and emotions but also trapped you there and made you uncomfortable. Very interesting.

I’m trying to think of the literary equivalent. Certainly psychological realism/suspense is that way. I’m thinking Edgar Allen Poe or Henry James. What would be the modern equivalent of this claustrophobic inside-the-skull dramatic positioning? Perhaps mysteries, which I don’t read a lot of. Unrealiable narrators like Humbert Humbert in Lolita, perhaps?

Another thing that was fascinating was the historical realism. The male actors were semi-unshaven, which I’m sure was a the case due to 1880s shaving and bathing technology, and the street scenes you felt would be very much like it might have been. So lovely to see. The lack of lighting and the crowding and the filth. Very lovely. It grounded what otherwise might have been what seemed like the mere attempt to turn Sherlock Holmes into a superhero. That was my suspicion going in, but it certainly didn’t come across that way.

And to be fair Holmes and Watson were the superheroes of their day. I’ve only read a little of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories, but friends assure me that there is a lot of action, so it isn’t misrepresentation. So actually I’m being unfair to the whole enterprise because I haven’t read very much of the actual Sherlock Holmes stories and am relying on stereotype.

Finally, I love the way that Guy Ritchie portrayed the working of Holmes’s mind. Whenever a fight was about to occur, what is going to happen is foreshadowed in quick blur motion in black and white and blue. A very effective technique. It was similar to the technique Peter Jackson used to show Frodo’s draw to the ring in the Lord of the Rings movies. It felt dreamy but also you felt the point of view of the character strongly. And in Sherlock Holmes, it was doubly effective because then you got inside Moriarity’s head too, as he matched Holmes move for move at the end, and then ~ surprise! ~ Holmes was one step ahead.

What would be the literary equivalent? Jumping forward in time inside the characters head but with such energy of language and technique differing from the rest of the prose. It wouldn’t merely be shifting from third to first person, though that might contribute. It’s the play within the play, like "The Murder of Gonzago" in Hamlet, reflecting on the whole but also showing the content of a character’s mind. The difference in the media, though, makes prose much better at showing interiors rather than surfaces, but I thought this was a very affective technique in filmmaking. IMHO and for what it’s worth.

Oh, and Noomi Rapace (of the Danish version of Girl with a Dragon Tattoo) and Stephen Fry and Jared Harris were so delightful!

What Lights You Up

2012-01-02T08:30:00.002-07:00

My friend, the amazingly talented and creative Pierre Hauser, has been doing a project called Photo a Day or Project 365. (He also writes these amazing stories.) He takes a photo a day ~ a lot more than that, in actuality ~ and posts it on his Facebook page. He takes the loveliest photos. Sometimes it’s a very interesting view of a common object, sometimes it’s what’s happening on the NYC streets, and sometimes it’s from he and his family’s travels, but it’s always beautiful and interesting.

Well, I got a new digital SLR camera for Christmas, and it’s prompted me to try the project. That and Pierre’s photos and the great photos that my friend the writer and photographer Twister Marquiss takes and also the wish to see more beauty in the world.

What else could one wish but to see more beauty in the world?

The photo above is my first offering. I will only be posting them on Facebook for the time being, but I would put them here if they relate to what I’m writing about. Or maybe I’ll add another tab here. Hmmm. I’ll have to see if I can figure that out.

I love projects like this. Creative endeavors just make me so happy. I’ve always been driven/loved passionately/had to do creative projects. As a kid, I drew and painted and took art every year at school. I hooked rugs and did embroidery and sewed my own clothes. I cooked, not just recreationally but for the family. And I wrote of course.

It’s one of the things that lights me up inside. You know what I mean? There are things that, when people talk about them, it’s as if they are lighted from the inside. They love them so much and so deeply they are not even aware of the physical effect talking about them has.

My family and writing and reading and talking with friends also light me up.

What things light you up?

New Year Yearnings

2012-01-01T09:34:00.003-07:00

“There are times though when in despair & loneliness & self hatred, finding oneself unable to achieve the things one constantly dreams of, one can only become real & stable again by thinking of those few others who are not too far from one’s own path.” ~ Iris Murdoch

Happy New Year, y’all!

Read the above quote this morning on Facebook (thanks, Corey Mesler!). It gives me food for thought.

I know a lot of people hate new year’s resolutions, but I like them. Anything that prompts us to be better people, pulls us out of ourselves and our doldrums and puts winds in our sails, is good, I think.

I had had great hopes of getting a bunch of writing done this week I’ve had off from work. Unfortunately, that didn’t come to pass. Wait. That was a passive construction, as if it were out of my hands. I guess, really, I didn’t make it the top priority, which has been a problem lately. But I did get a lot of reading and cogitating done on the next project.

But today is a new year. Today, I’m going to write.

But the above quote. I have the usual list of resolutions: eat better, exercise more, manage finances better, write more, be a better person. But this quote reminded me that the road to self-fulfillment is not paved with other’s bodies. Quite the opposite. The most energizing and worthwhile goals involve outward effort, thinking of others, trying to be the best social creature you can be. Granted, you also have to be selfish in order to get the work, the writing, done, but I know that I gain so much energy from my social world. It enhances, rather than drains, my energy.

And I love Iris’s point that one must be outwardly focused in order to pull oneself out of despair & loneliness & self hatred. I can identify with that wholeheartedly. I know that to my core. All I have to do is have a lively exchange with a friend over lunch or online. It jazzes me. It gives me energy for all my other endeavors.

The trick, though, is those negative influences, those interactions that drain the energy rather than add. You know the ones ~ the idiot who cuts in front of you in traffic and then slows down and turns (a personal pet peeve of mine) or those conflicts you always have with the same members of your family, the ones that make you feel like that fat and ugly and unlovable two-year-old.

What to do about those? Draw boundaries, give yourself distance and in my case permission to be angry and get it out so that it doesn’t turn into depression. Also permission to be assertive and say, you know what?, I don’t need to take this. A healthy shell surrounding a lively but serene interior.

I know. Easier said than done.

So in addition and above all other new year’s resolutions: as caring as I can be to my fellow toilers in the ant farm.

So, as my lovely sister Nikki says, stawzawamps, which means love, light, health, joy in Northern Cheyenne.

Beauty Is Everywhere

2011-12-23T10:33:00.000-07:00

“The Hare’s Mask,” by Mark Slouka

2011-12-22T09:03:00.003-07:00

I finished this year’s Best American Short Stories 2011 last night. It always gives me a moment of mourning ~ because I so look forward to it and I draw it out as long as I can. And this year especially because my taste must be similar to this year’s editor Geraldine Brooks. The stories she chose, to a one, were outstanding.

Some years, there is a story or two I can see the attraction of but the craft is not quite there. The reason they were included had more to do with the energy of the language or the unique vision of the author, merits unto themselves.

This year, not a one.

And, oh man, that last story, “The Hare’s Mask,” by Mark Slouka. Oh, wow. I was drawn in but marveling at its construction and the end moved me to tears. It’s the story of a young boy and his father, who was in Europe during the rise of the Nazis. The plot is, basically, the family harbors a man in their rabbit hutch for a few days, meanwhile the father as a boy has to go out every Friday and kill one the rabbits for the table. But he loves these rabbits and names them. Two in particular are his favorites. It is tough times, and then he must choose which of those two to kill. See, I’m getting tears just talking about it.

But what this story does so amazingly is the layers of metaphor and meaning. In the background is the Terrors, and we find out early that the boy/father is the only one who survives. You have the microcosm of this boy having to decide which of his beloveds to kill and then having to kill them, which so strongly resonates with the setting of the story. Even that small thing, the hare’s mask, which is the skin of the face of a hare that is used to tie flies, is a perfect metaphor for the masks we put on, the death of loved ones, the care the father takes with his children. And then you have the present day, which is the son knowing all this, sort of the omniscient narrator, but then his younger sister wants rabbits. It’s really hard for the father, and the son knows it, but the father lets her get rabbits anyway.

It gives me chills to think about the artistry of this piece. What I try to capture in my own fiction ~ with varying degrees of success ~ are those little moments of grace, lived reality, the small kindnesses and violences we do one another. And not just “capture” like a bug pinned to corkboard but elevate to art. How do you transport lived experience onto a higher plain? Make so just right, so moving, so perfect? Well, of course the short answer is that you can’t.

But you can try.

Fall Back ~ It’ll Catch You

2011-12-21T12:22:00.000-07:00

I haven’t written about my writing for a while. Call it a combination of fallowness (fallosity?) and despair. I hate to call it despair but there’s definitely an element of that. It’s much nicer to think of it as a field laid fallow, a ground being prepared for the next season’s bounty.

I’m just coming out of a rough period, as I’ve mentioned before. Hence the despair part of it. But I take comfort in the fact that I’m feeling driven again. I’m feeling inspired. Not that you need inspiration to get the work done. But when you’ve been to that dark place, Pandora’s hope comes very sweet.

As I write this, my good girl insists I mention that I have been writing. I write for my job, I write this blog, I write all kinds of things. But my honest answer is that I haven’t been writing what matters to me most which is my fiction, and increasingly my memoir. Despair-causing, in and of itself.

But I take the metaphor of the fallow field seriously. One thing that has gotten me through my writing in small ways and large is faith in the process. I may feel like I suck, but I know that it’ll get better. I can make it better. I just have to do the work, put in the time, and I will be rewarded by something. It may not be great, or even good, but I will have accomplished something, and even if it’s not good it’ll contribute to something better down the line.

Faith in the process. Putting in your time. Butt in the chair, brain to the task, pen to the paper, fingers to the keyboard. When all else fails, including and especially inspiration, this will get me through.

All this to say I have a little more than a week off from my job, and I hope to get a lot of writing done. I have an exciting new project I want to get off the ground. I’m not going to say much about it. It’s not the memoir ~ I don’t believe I have quite that much faith yet ~ but instead a YA novel, potentially a series of novels. So it’ll be fun, in addition to everything else. Cast it all to wind and write!

Wishing you the gift of faith in your process.

Free Rice

2011-12-20T09:59:00.000-07:00

Have you played this? If not, you're in for a treat. Down the rabbithole, my friends!

The Meaning of Christmas

2011-12-19T08:40:00.001-07:00

Last year, we went hog wild on presents for the kids. We bought our daughter an elaborate doll house, and we bought our son a dragon castle ~ all in addition to lots of regular presents. Then what happened? You can predict. They played with those expensive toys for maybe an hour total.

I think it's partly because they're twins. They're very imaginative, but they play with each other. I think toys like that are made for kids who don't have close siblings. Sure, they want them. But they're really just as happy making artwork together or choosing one small thing each and making a story between the two of them.

It's actually pretty amazing. One will start: "You are out walking one day and then you see a mean wolf." The other one will pick up: "But the mean wolf is feeling nice that day, so instead of biting you he invites you for dinner." And so on. They go back and forth. They never disagree, but this story is this live thing between them. I should post about it.

But my point. This year we're trying to make Christmas more about others and about doing things. So we've made a tree for the wild animals. That's the photo above. We made ornaments out of orange and apple slices, peanut butter pine cones rolled in bird seed, and popcorn and cranberry strings and then chose a small protected pine in the mountains and decorated it. I had them choose gifts for family members and help wrap them ~ their first time. It got considerably less exciting as the day went on.

And to help teach them about money and that Christmas is about giving, we gave them each a $20 bill and they chose gifts for another less fortunate kid. They've never used real money before, or chosen gifts like this ~ something they like they choose and then have to give away. They did great! I was very proud of them.

I would love to hear any ideas you all have in making Christmas better for kids or for teaching them the true meaning of Christmas.

The Ending that Shakes the Foundation

2011-12-16T09:39:00.003-07:00

Spoiler Alert: I’m talking about surprise endings in literary fiction here, so if you don’t want it spoiled, don’t read!

I love Best American Short Stories. I read it every year, along with PEN/O’Henry. I’m taking my time, savoring it. There are always a bunch of the stories I’ve already read in their original pub ~ but I always reread them ~ and then there’s the delicious new ones.

Last night, I read Rebecca Makkai’s “Peter Torelli, Falling Apart.” I began reading it, thinking, this is interesting, not riveting but interesting. It’s the story of two guys who have been friends since childhood who are also both gay. The narrator, Drew, though he doesn’t say it, is in love with the other one, Peter, a charismatic actor. They kissed just once when they were teenagers. But now Peter’s falling apart and his acting career is in crash and burn. Because Drew is his friend, he gets Peter a job at a fundraising function reading a story that Drew doesn’t much like but thinks it suits him. Predictably, Peter flubs it, but so much less predictable is the end. Rebecca does this astounding authorial feat that upends the story and shoots you way out and above and resets the whole thing. I won’t do it justice, but I’ll try. Peter storms out and Drew knows that he will never see him again, but Rebecca frames it using the language of the story that a few pages before Drew had dismissed basically as rubbish (the one that Peter began reading outloud). This electrifies the story, it turns it over, it makes it so sad and moving. I can’t really explain it well.

I get chills just thinking about it. I love it when authors do this. If they always did this, it would get old, certainly. (Like a lot of people say the epiphanic ending is over. But it’s not over ~ writers just have to be careful how they use it. It must be made new, like everything else.) But it is so amazing, when it happens. I can think of a number of old examples: “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and the movie Jacob’s Ladder, to name two. More recently, two novels that have blown my socks off are Michael Cunningham’s By Nightfall and Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending. Again, chills thinking about them. These are all executing a raven. The whole of By Nightfall is about the narrator’s attraction to his wife’s brother, but then in the end it’s about the wife, in such a sad and moving way. I reread and reread it to reposition the rest of the book. In The Sense of Ending, you are blown away by the realization that puts the narrator’s whole relationship with a past love in a new light. Amazing. And the amazing Julian does it again.

I think the risk of such an ending is that it comes off as fake or tacked on. I LOVED Louise Erdrich’s Shadow Tag, but I felt that the end was unearned and tacked on. She shouldn’t have chosen her husband over her children. But in another way it is totally earned and it’s rather my own biases coming in. That’s one of the risks of such an ending.

I’m just standing in awe of these writers’ art.

Merry Christmas

2011-12-15T10:19:00.002-07:00

Just trying to get in the mood! And work on my rudimentary Photoshop skills.

The Aspirational Optimism of Best-of Lists

2011-12-14T09:07:00.000-07:00

It’s the time of year for year-end lists. I know it’s not the politically correct thing to do, but I just love these lists, and I always skim them. Yes, lots of worthy people and books get left off these lists and it’s always the same people chosen and in fact I’m sure that I’ll eventually be left off many if not all of these lists.

However.

I love the aspirational optimism of these lists. Optimism because there’s something almost childlike and naïve about making a list of ten best. Especially if you’re someone like me who falls in love with so many of the books I read. I can see their flaws, sure, but oh what they achieve! Aspirational because, like new year’s resolutions, what are best-of lists for if not to hold the bar up and say, this is good, I want to achieve this.

Also aspirational because I invariably think I should print out the New York Times 100 Notable Books and make sure I read them this next year. I never do ~ I follow my whim too much in my reading for that ~ but it’s a nice thought.

And I love the fact that there are a lot of them and some books keep popping up. I will buy a book if I keep seeing it pop up in the press and on lists. Or I’ll have already bought the book but I’ll put it on top of my pile because I keep seeing it. I also love the other lists, the quirky ones.

So I hope you get one of those best-of books this year for Christmas ~ and it blows your socks off!

Astrid Lindgren and Pippi Longstocking

2011-12-13T09:26:00.003-07:00

Check out Sarah Mensinga's other cool art at

www.sarahmensinga.com.

"If I have managed to brighten up even one gloomy childhood ~ then I’m satisfied." ~ Astrid Lindgren

When I’m in a rotten mood, one surefire way to comfort myself is to think about a book that I read and loved as a child.

I remember loving Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren. Pippi's combination of self-sufficiency and confidence in the face of adversity inspired me so much.

If you haven't read it: Brother and sister Tommy and Annika meet a curious neighbor, a girl named Pippilotta Delicatessa Windowshade Mackrelmint Ephraim's Daughter Longstocking, or Pippi. She has red hair in stiff braids that stick out from her head and freckles. She has a monkey named Mr. Nilsson and a horse. The three go on many adventures together.

What struck me as a kid was the scene where she cleaned her own house. She tied brushes to her feet and skated around and made it a game. Her parents were gone ~ her mother died and her father was away at sea ~ but she was able to make due all on her own. I loved that self-reliance. And she was the strongest little girl in the world, another aspect of being able to take care of herself. She was as odd as I felt, yet was supremely comfortable with herself.

Like so many writers who create worlds, a whole industry has grown up around Pippi and her world and movies have been made and spinoffs writtten. Astrid also wrote a whole bunch of other things too.

So today I thought I’d point out a few resources about Pippi and Astrid. Here’s the wiki page about the books. Here’s the wiki page about Astrid Lindgren, the author, and here is her official site, though it’s in Swedish of course. A button in the lower right hand corner converts it to English. Astrid was also a screenwriter, so there is a lot of video on the web.

Astrid Lindgren

And that quote at the top? That’s how I’ve always felt. If something I’ve written touches just one other person as much as what I’ve read has touched me, then it’s worth it.

Friends Friday

2011-12-09T10:19:00.001-07:00

I love the people whom I’m able to pick and who choose me back! They are the true miracles, true treasures of the world. Today I wanted to highlight a few writer friends who are doing such great work. I can only highlight a couple, so I apologize in advance if you’re not here. I value our friendship so much!

Pembroke Sinclair

PS is a kickass writer who writes kickass protagonists. She loves writing about apocalypse and the deeply moral issues that come with the collapse of society and the moral implications of life. I make is sound grand, but when you pick up her books, you’re in for a ride.

I’m in the middle of reading her latest, Life After the Undead. I got to read it in manuscript form, and now going back, she’s done such excellent things in revision (not that it was great to begin with) and I’m seeing deeper things and it’s still fresh and a great read. I say her protagonists are kickass, and they are, but there’s also a fragility about them I can’t quite put my finger on. Here’s what it’s about:

The world has come to an end. It doesn’t go out with a bang, or even a whimper. It goes out in an orgy of blood and the dead rising from their graves to feast on living flesh. As democracy crumples and the world melts into anarchy, five families in the U.S. rise to protect the survivors. The undead hate a humid environment, so they are migrating westward to escape its deteriorating effects. The survivors are constructing a wall in North Platte to keep the zombie threat to the west, while tyranny rules among the humans to the east. Capable but naïve Krista is 15 when the first attacks occur, and she loses her family and barely escapes with her life. She makes her way to the wall and begins a new life. But, as the undead threat grows and dictators brainwash those she cares about, Krista must fight not only to survive but also to defend everything she holds dear—her country, her freedom, and ultimately those she loves.

And big congrats her way too! She just finished the first draft of the sequel to this, tentatively titled Death to the Undead. You should also pick up her specfic Coming from Nowhere, which has great aliens and a plot that is so well-constructed but will keep you guessing. Oh, and the great kickass narrator.

Take my word for it: You’re going to see her name coming up a lot.

Nina McConigley

Nina writes such lovely and honest stories ~ "Curating Your Life" (American Short Fiction Fall 2009) is an exemplar of taking the facts of your life and transmuting it into fabulous New Yorker-style fiction. My favorite kind. And I’m so proud of her. A Wyoming but international girl, she’s living in London right now and going great guns on her novel. I can’t wait to read it.

Nina’s life is so fascinating. Her mom is originally from India, and her dad is originally from Ireland, and Nina was raised in Casper, Wyoming. Her fiction often stems from that friction, that intersection of cultures. It’s always deeply considered and painfully honest.

Nina went to Houston ~ second ranked in the nation ~ to get her MFA, and she’s been to Bread Loaf more times than you can count and she’s won awards for her plays and her short stories, including finalist for the Flannery O’Connor short fiction award and a nomination for a Pushcart and much more.

I would recommend you read "Curating Your Life" (here's her reading part of it; unfortunately the whole story is not online) and keep an eye out. Another we’re going to be seeing a lot of. I for one can’t wait!

Ken Olsen

Ken is a freelance journalist who writes these amazing stories about military veterans. These are such works of art unto themselves ~ so moving and well-written. They explore such deep questions in such a human and heart-felt way. It makes you want to take arms against injustice.

But the work of his heart has been a memoir. He has been working on it for a long time, and now it is nearing completion! A HUGE congratulations goes out to him. A great feat. (And now that I’m struggling to approach my own memoir, an even larger feat than I dreamed.) I can’t wait because I think it’s going to be one of those that will sweep the nation, one that you hear about on NPR and elsewhere. It’s a memoir, but it reads like Steinbeck or another literary great ~ and I mean that in the best sense.

This is what the memoir is about.

A college classmate – who leaves me weak-kneed and breathless when she merely tosses her dark bangs out of her eyes – heads to Alaska for a summer job on a fishing boat. This small-town Wyoming boy follows and ends up gutting salmon in a fish cannery to earn a plane ticket home. Six months later, she runs off to North Africa with the Peace Corps and I stay in Alaska, heart bruised, hoping she’ll return. This sets the pattern of our relationship: I pursue, she retreats. Two-and-a-half years later, she returns and we end up on a rafting trip in the Grand Canyon. We fall in love again during that near-death experience, and I struggle to keep our relationship – and myself – together as we spend a decade careening around the West and Alaska. For all we give each other, I’m blind to what she most needs: For me to let her go.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? From what I’ve read, yes, yes.

The National Conversation on Occupy

2011-12-07T12:48:00.004-07:00

Have you been following the Occupy movements across the country? It’s so interesting how it’s the 60s of our age. Similarities but differences too.

I’ve always been interested in kairos, an ancient Greek rhetoric term that basically means right-time right-place. One of the things that fascinates me is why an issue will sweep the nation, when the problem has been around for years.

An example is Matthew Shepard. On one hand, about dang time, you know? It took this iconic death to prompt us to have a national conversation about it. But, on the other hand ~ and I say this in no way to denigrate what happened to Matt and the just cause surrounding it ~ that same year fifteen-year-old Daphne Sulk, also of Laramie, was beaten and stabbed to death by her 38-year-old boyfriend and her naked body was left in the snow near an interstate rest area, all because she wouldn’t get an abortion to cover up the child molestation. If that’s not an iconic image, nothing is.

Let me say that again: Women and girls are molested, raped, and murdered by their partners every day in this country (three to four a day for just the murder part), and we act is if it doesn’t matter and doesn’t happen. This is not to take away from the fact that men and boys are murdered but it’s hard to wrap your mind around the enormity of it. Sorry for the screed, but my God!

Anyway, my point is that the country was ready for the conversation, and that’s why it struck like wildfire across the nation. It’s kairos.

So, if you’ve been following the national conversation around the economy and the Occupy movements, here’s one you might want to read. It’s from a more personal point of view. I read the lovely Dear Sugar religiously every week, and this last letter was from a woman who was upset about her parents and her student loans ~ you’ll have to read it to get your take on it. But make sure to read the comments section, which evolved into a discussion of the Occupy movements. (Here’s another interesting NPR piece, too.)

Is the movement actually about the bad economy? Or is it about a feeling of helplessness? Or is it about expectations and privilege? Are times so much different now than “when I went to school”? Or is it about something entirely different?

Age

2011-12-06T15:19:00.000-07:00

Today, just some evidence.

As a child I remember thinking that old people were the most physically beautiful people in the world.

And they have so much to teach us.

Yet we don't want to listen to their stories, as if age actually lessens a person's value.

Is it fear of death?

Your First Follower, or In Praise of Agents

2011-12-02T14:19:00.004-07:00

When I was an undergrad, I did my thesis on Margery Kempe, who lived from about 1373 to about 1438 in Norfolk, Kingdom of England. She was this firecracker of a woman who some believed should be a saint. She was born into a family of merchants and then married and had 14 kids. Then, she became very devout and made a bargain with her husband that she could remain celebate. Now, remember, this was a time when women had little choice but to spend their adult lives having children. She went on pilgramages and had a lot of autonomy.

Most importantly for what I’m talking about, she had two scribes throughout her life who wrote her spiritual autobiography. She herself did not know how to write, if I’m remembering correctly. But the scribes did not just write about her. They promoted her. They were the original pr men. She was acting in accordance with a tradition of anchoresses and saints of her time, and these anchoresses and saints all had someone at her or his side to champion the cause, to get the word out. These scribes were absolutely essential to the “success” of their saints.

And, so, a while back, I was watching TED talks, as I love to do, and I came across this one. It’s Derek Sivers talking about how to start a movement. Watch it now before you read on.

Isn’t it brilliant? One guy dancing alone is just a crazy lunatic, but it’s the second guy, for whom it takes just as much courage to get up and dance, that gives the first guy power. The second guy is a leader in his own right and lends legitimacy to the first guy. Derek’s point is that if you want to make a difference, don’t be a leader but rather that first crucial follower.

You see where I’m going with this? The reason why the saints became saints is because they had their seconds, their legitimizers, their scribes. They would be just another crazy person starving themselves in a cave if it weren’t for this other guy paying off the bills and slipping food through the door. And, most importantly, talking to everyone who’ll listen about this really cool person in a cave.

So this brings me to agents. They are a writer’s first and most important follower. They are most often the one who legitimizes the writer’s endeavor. They do the heavy lifting of the getting the word out, of making the crazy world of this other guy holed up in a dank writing studio something everyone wants to know about.

Because without them, you’re just a crazy lunatic. Not really ~ well, maybe ~ but you get my idea. One of the very noble things that agents do is legitimize you. They swallow their own self-ishness to represent you.

So, to my agent Rachel and all the agents out there, you rock!

Friday Funnies 2

2011-12-02T08:30:00.001-07:00

So, are you learning the ropes in the trenches? :-)

Here's a link to an old post at the Telegraph about Dan Brown's writing (thanks Michael at D&G for the link). I love how he calls it ingeniously bad. Compelling though, literary crack.

“Stand in Your Truth”

2011-12-01T09:07:00.001-07:00

I recently read Suze Orman’s book The Money Class. I really like her no-nonsense practical approach to finance, and I particularly love her phrase, “Stand in your truth.” To me, it means quit lying to yourself, quit sabotaging your own success, and admit those places where you repeat the same mistakes over and over and over. I posted the phrase on my computer in big bold letters.

I’m trying to follow it in all areas of my life. With the whole eating well thing, I try to admit that actually I’m not hungry ~ I’m just bored or stressed or trying to deal with things. With money, simply avoiding the issue won’t get us anywhere. With emotions, don’t bury them, but work through them. Face it, face it all. Quit hoping it will go away and avoiding and deal with it.

So it was particularly interesting when I came across this yesterday at Lifehacker: “How to Identify and Learn from Your Mistakes.” I love how writer Scott Berkun breaks the types of mistakes we make into four types and then discusses how to deal with each one.

The four types are 1) stupid mistakes like stubbing your toe, 2) simple mistakes like running out of beer when you have more guests than you expect, 3) involved mistakes that are understandable but require effort to prevent such as regularly arriving at work late, and 4) complex mistakes like failed relationships.

Dealing with stupid and simple mistakes is easy. Just avoid them, if you can, but once in while it’s going to happen.

For involved mistakes, you need to make significant changes because these come from habit or from our very natures. It’s tough because it’s changing one habit for a new and better one ~ and we all know how hard it is to change our habits ~ or going against something we really want. These habits, too, are often things we’ve tried to fix in the past, so we feel guilty and like we’ve failed even before we’ve begun. But he makes a very valid point, which is that we often refuse to even acknowledge that we made a mistake. He suggests that we enlist the aid of someone else to help us change, and that we really take stock of our ability to change.

Complex mistakes are the most interesting, he says. You need patience and you often just make things worse if you don’t watch it. He suggests getting multiple outside perspectives on the problem ~ call in the experts, if you will. Then describe what happened, which helps you to clearly define the problem. Make sure you don’t jump to conclusions and do a thorough investigation and examine your own biases. Work backwards from the event, which will help you see contributing factors.

He ends with a reminder to have courage to admit things and face the problem and realize that mistakes are inevitable and you just need to learn from them. Also, try to bring a little humor to the situation ~ it’ll loosen you up and help you deal with it.

I found all this really helpful and in keeping with my “Stand in Your Truth” offensive. We’re all facing tough economic times, which brings up a lot of emotional stuff as well, and the better we can face it, the better we’ll do in the long run.

How are you dealing with economic challenges?

The Lovely Audrey Hepburn

2011-11-29T09:52:00.001-07:00

"If I'm honest I have to tell you I still read fairytales and I like them best of all." ~ Audrey Hepburn

The Perfect Purse

2011-11-28T10:43:00.008-07:00

I’ve had the same purse for more than 10 years. Durable black leather. Tasteful (some would say cheap, I suppose). It didn’t cost that much to begin with. It’s the perfect size ~ long enough for a checkbook but not too big and heavy (unless I collect a little too much change). A long strap for over the shoulder or even crossed over the chest. Not too complicated ~ only one little internal side pocket into which I stuff stamps and my coin purse (which was my dad’s hearing aid case, so that's 25 years old). I clip a card case to the strap ring, so my credit cards are securely fastened. My Android phone just slips inside.

(I realize as I write this that it makes me sound like an old fuddy duddy, and saying the words fuddy duddy makes me one too. I've never been one for Ferragamos or Vuittons, though I can see their beaty.)

I’ve mended this purse at least three times. One of the leather patches that attach the strap rings to the purse broke, and my friend Rena got it fixed for me, and they did the opposite one too. Then the strap broke, so I got a new strap. Then the flat piece that holds the magnet in front broke, and we got it fixed.

I love this purse. I have a larger shoulder bag for notebooks, etc., but this is what I carry everywhere. It went with me to Ireland and England, it’s been through the wars with kids, and so much more.

I have two pairs of pants of which I would kill to get another pair (one velvet wide-legged and one comfortable but fashionable part polyester). My Canon Powershot A610 ~ way out of date now, but it’s been the workhorse of cameras. I’ve got a serious addition to store version tupperware and storage containers and bags. When you find just the right one, it’s heaven.

This is very much me. When I find something I love, years down the road I invariably wish I had bought ten of them. When something like this breaks, I try to find a replacement online, but I’m only successful about 50% of the time. Sometimes I can get a used version.

I wasn’t always this way. Growing up fairly poor, I wanted stuff, and when I started to make a little money ~ heck, even when I was just getting by ~ I would acquire worthless junk just to acquire. Knicknacks that had no meaning or worth.

I’m reading the biography/memoir of Audrey Hepburn by her son Sean Ferrer. What an exquisite book ~ moving and well-written and graceful. It sounds like AH was also very much this way. She found much more worth in something of quality than in just having stuff. I identify with AH in so many ways, and always have, but even more so now that I’ve read this book.

Where did we ever get the idea that quantity makes up for quality? It makes sense in a numbers game, I suppose, but when you’re talking about life ~ real life! ~ it’s too complex to be quantified, no matter how hard we try to make it so.

So, this week, I’m wishing you the perfect purse.

Life Lessons from Zombies

2011-11-26T16:02:00.004-07:00

We almost had a crisis first thing Thanksgiving morning: The video game Plants vs. Zombies wouldn’t play! Crisis averted, however, by the good people at Popcap Games. They responded quickly and fixed it.

Thanksgiving day. Reminds me to send a huge thank you to all you toilers on holidays. It sucks working weekends and midnights and holidays, all so self-centered people like me can have our entertainment. Another thing to be thankful for on this day. You guys rock!

Anyway, as I played and played and played and my five-year-old son played and played, it got me thinking about how a well-designed game reveals your own proclivities and is a lot like life in some ways.

If you’re a cautious person, you’ll probably choose mostly defensive pieces ~ wall-nuts and potato mines ~ but of you’re an aggressive person, you’ll pick the most bang for your buck ~ice shrooms and jalapenos. Defensiveness and aggressiveness exist on a spectrum, and I would think that either end would not do too well in this game. Too defensive and you spend all your time running. Too offensive and you leave huge holes in your line. The best course is the middle one ~ some good offense balanced with some good defense. Finding that balance is not easy, however.

It’s a really well-designed game because it has enough of a comfort zone yet it keeps pushing you forward, plus it has enough variety that you are always entertained. One aspect is that just when you get comfortable, they force you to use a whole new set of tools to accomplish the same task, out of your comfort zone, which teaches you the value of those tools.

You guess where I’m heading. Life is like that. If you’re too cautious, you never really live. If you’re too aggressive, you burn out and leave a beautiful corpse. Not that a long life is a goal unto itself. But the middle road is the best, moderation in all things. The problem, of course, is to find out where the middle road is and to try to navigate that road. The problem, much like the game, is that that road is always changing. It never lets you rest. You have to change and adapt along with it.

I did my master’s thesis on the process of identity negotiation (in pioneer diaries), and it’s the same there. As much as we’d like to think that we’re this fixed thing, we’re unequivocably not. By dynamically identifying with others (“I want to be her”) and othering others (“I definitely am not her”), our self changes, as much as we would like to remain the same.

So, in essence, our surroundings are changing, we are changing, and we’re just doing our level best to keep in top of it ~ or to convince ourselves that we are.

But, you know? If you don’t, if you deny any part of it, you aren’t really living. You’re missing the thrill, or you’re missing the depth. I am thankful for this life, in its many guises.

Bravery on This Day of Thankfulness

2011-11-24T10:21:00.000-07:00

Happy Thanksgiving to those of you who celebrate! Best wishes for the holiday season to all!

There are many things to be thankful for, but today, most of all, I'm thankful for bravery.

I think bravery is something we need in big ways, sure ~ do I take the plunge and get married? do I take that job? ~ but even more importantly, we need small everyday braveries. Things like getting out of the bed, choosing what to wear, getting on the subway or braving the weather, meeting the boss when she calls you into her office, resisting buying something you don't need. Daring to imagine yourself differently in millions of tiny ways.

And the bravery to create. That's a biggie. There are many who have given up, many who have taken the road of cynicism and snide comments and tearing down of others who are trying to be brave, trying to create. They are the destroyers, the crazymakers, the chicken shits. They cannot find the generosity, the courage, the love within themselves and toward others and themselves. He or she needs to dare to imagine him- or herself a new person, a more generous one, a generative one. They need to embrace and love, rather than pinch and shut down.

This year, I am thankful for what bravery I have, and I wish for all of you the bravery large and small that you need to get through the hour, the day, the week, the life.

Naughty Schoolboy

2011-11-22T08:34:00.002-07:00

Unexpectedly home with a sick kid today. I was going to take tomorrow off, so here I am a day early.

Why does a change of schedule like this both unsettle us (me) yet also give me such a sense of freedom at the same time? It’s as if I’m a naughty schoolboy, and I’m getting away with something.

But you know what I’ll be getting away with? I have a new idea for a book, a series actually, and I’m going great guns on the brainstorming part of it. Which of course is the fun part of it because you’re not actually having to do any work yet.

I am thankful for the resources and ability to be a naughty schoolboy. I hope you are able to do something fun this weekend too.

Montage Monday

2011-11-21T09:06:00.001-07:00

On Saturday, in addition to ballet, grocery store, and birthday party/swimming at the rec center, we went to a Lego party at the train depot. It was so much fun! There were snacks and lots of nice people, and the kids loved it. It was put on by the Historic Laramie Railroad Depot and COWLUG (Colorado & Wyoming Lego User Group). Here's some pics.

Here's an overview.

One of the great things was that the people who put it together have such a sense of humor. Everywhere you looked there was something new. That's a dragon eating the car dealership. Oh, and behind here is the Octopi Wall Street, with a bunch of octupuses taking over.

Yes, indeed. That's aliens turning ostriches into pigs.

Fumigation. If you've ever been in one of those little blue toilets, you totally understand.

Who knew carrots would encourage dinosaurs? And that there were carrots in the age of dinosaurs.

Friday Funny

2011-11-18T08:12:00.001-07:00

Tears and Much Gnashing of Teeth

2011-11-17T08:57:00.005-07:00

Some households have problems at bedtime. Tears and much gnashing of teeth as kids refuse to go to sleep. For whatever reason, that’s not us. Our challenge is mornings.

This is how it goes. My husband gets up and jumps in the shower, and I get up bleary-eyed and got down to make breakfast for the kids. We’re usually pretty well-rested, though we complain, because my husband puts a high value on schedules and sleep, which is nice. Still, I’m not a morning person.

I go down and let the dog out and make breakfast ~ usually scrambled eggs and cheese or sausage, toast or a muffin, some kind of fruit, and juice. (I try to get each food group into each meal, though usually not veggies at breakfast, and I try to base our lunches and dinners on vegetables. But you know, some days a diamond.) We have short-cuts. The scrambled eggs are made in the microwave, and we cook the sausages first thing when we bring them home from the grocery store and then freeze them, so you can just heat them up in the microwave too. I try to get a little of my husband’s stuff going ~ make him tea or heat water for coffee.

About the time he’s out of the shower, I’m headed upstairs. I pick out clothes for the kids and bring them down and put them by the stove so they can dress right there where it’s warm. Then I head up to take my shower. My husband wakes up the kids with hugs and brings them downstairs one at a time ~ often carrying them ~ and wraps them in their blankets and puts them at the table. Then he goes about doing his own breakfast, feeding the dog, and sometimes putting dishes in the dishwasher away.

Sounds like a well-oiled machine, right? Wrong. Five-year-olds are involved.

By the time I’m stepping out of the shower, I can hear the kids through the grate right below me. They’re messing around, poking and laughing and dragging their feet. Soon my husband’s voice comes up, a warning tone to get on with it. Ten minutes later, he’s yelling at them to get upstairs and brush their teeth, but they don’t yet even have their pajamas off. Finally they come dragging upstairs. They piddle around till I lose patience and yell at them to get their teeth brushed. It goes downhill from there.

All this yelling at them can’t be good for them. And my husband and I get really grumpy.

It’s all about self-control and responsibility, I think. Oh, and because they’re only five. But there are other families that don’t go through this EVERY MORNING. There must be something wrong with us.

I’ve been thinking a lot about self-control lately. I think it’s inevitable to ponder it when you’re a parent. Every child is different. You’ll have the kid who is just naturally a responsible people-pleaser, but then you’ll have the ones who aren’t intentionally bad, they just have another agenda. But the basic question is: How do you instill responsibility and self-control in a child? How can you know, when they become teenagers and are out of your sight, that they aren’t doing something really stupid and dangerous? And it’s when they’re really young that you need to instill this. How do you do that without yelling at them constantly or putting them in fear for their lives?

And it’s not just them. I think about my own self control. I wasn’t raised with many boundaries, so I’ve had to learn them along the way. I’m a pretty responsible person ~ being raised on a ranch does that ~ but as far as personal schedule and self-control, it’s a bit dicey. My eating habits are iffy. I’ll be really good on exercise for a while and then totally stop for months. Left to my own devices, my sleeping habits suck. And what about the writing? You need self-control and motivation to get anything done.

We as Americans like to think of ourselves as exceptions to every rule. The rules apply to other people. “American Exceptionalism,” it’s called in academic circles. It started with the founding of our country ~ our country was founded on the idea that we are exceptions to the religious rule of where we lived. And since then we’ve always been for the underdog, for the rebel. We believe that other people should control themselves, for heaven's sake, but we don't have to.

But I digress.

My husband and I are trying new things, new creative approaches to getting ready in the morning. This is how this morning went.

A couple of days ago we told them that it was their responsibility to get themselves dressed and ready in the morning. We’ve done this before ~ oh the tears and gnashing of teeth! But this time we told them that they had to earn the right to watch any TV in the evening. They got one warning, and after that ~ bam! ~ no TV that night. For 2 days they’ve done pretty well.

My husband is out of town, and this morning I just let them go. My husband can’t do that, and I felt the urge to come down on them like the wrath of God, but I let them go. I said, once or twice, very calmly, it’s your responsibility to get ready. You might want to think about it because you’ve only got a half hour. You’ve only got ten minutes. At one point, my son tried to turn on the TV and I quickly put the kibosh to that.

Needless to say, when I was ready to head out the door, they weren’t ready. My son had managed to get his teeth brushed after the whole TV incident, but he didn’t have his shoes on, his hair combed, nor collected his coat and backpack. My daughter stood in front of the stove completely naked, hair uncombed.

I said, “I’m heading out the door in three minutes. You better grab your clothes and shoes and anything else you want to take.” Then I discretely grabbed a brush and threw it in my bag and walked out the door.

“You wouldn’t really leave us here, Mommy? Is it one of those fake times?” they asked.

Of course not, I said to myself. You’re only five. But out loud I said, “We’ll see, won’t we?”

I went out to the garage and started to get in the car and wait. Very quickly, here came my son, tears streaming down his face, hair standing on end, socks on his feet, shoes and backpack and light sweatshirt clutched in his arms. Did I mention we’ve been having windchill in the negative digits? “I’m sorry, sweatie,” I said, “ but you’ll need to get your coat." Off he ran.

In the meantime, I hear loud screetches and then here came my daughter, tears streaming down her face, miraculously fully clothed, shoes even on her feet, with everything but her backpack. “You’ll need your backpack,” I said.

“Here, Mommy, will you please hold these?” she said. She’s no dummy. She figures if I’m holding something I won’t leave.

Back came my son and got in the car. Back came my daughter and got in the car. I tossed the hairbrush back to them, made sure they’re buckled in, and started to drive to school.

Silence for a few minutes, then my son said, “Do we still get to watch TV tonight?”

Plants vs. Zombies

2011-11-16T10:19:00.003-07:00

Yesterday, when I picked my five-year-old twins up from after-school daycare, my son was sitting off by himself, headphones on, in front of the computer in the small side room, away from the chaos and noise of kids dancing and drawing and agreeing and disagreeing in the main room. He had found a new computer game. When he saw me, he jumped up from his chair, practically hopping up and down, and said, “This is the greatest game ever! Can we get it on our computer at home?”

It’s called Plants vs. Zombies. It really is a great game ~ I stayed up way too late last night playing it after the kids went to bed. The zombies are coming across your lawn to enter the house and eat your brains, and it’s your job to plant various plants in your back yard that defend against them. There’s a little bit of sun that rains down that you have to collect to grow your flowers, and then you plant sunflowers to gather more sun. There are peashooters and repeaters and snow peas that spit projectiles at the oncoming zombies. There are cherry bombs that turn all zombies in the vicinity to ashes. There are wall-nuts that stop the zombies’ progress. There’s a potato mine that explodes if they walk over it, but it takes some time to grow. And then with each level you advance, you get new types of plants, but you’re limited as to how many types you can choose. It turns to nighttime and you have to use various types of mushrooms. Then you’re in your backyard with a pond and you need to plant lily pads in order to plant the plants. The final line of defense is a series of lawnmowers that, if the zombies reach them, they are mowed over. But, the drawback is, once it’s gone it’s gone, and it takes out your plants too. If a zombie makes it past, it walks into your back door and “The Zombies Ate Your Brains!” Game over.

It is seriously addicting. I may have to buy the full version.

But as I was thinking about it this morning, I thought: that’s exactly what you need in a plot. You need it to be seriously addicting. How does the PvZ do it? Well, you have a protagonist (you), antagonists (zombies), and a battle with interesting and clearly defined characters on your side. The zombies too have interesting characters. There’s an athlete zombie who can bypass things and there are disco zombies who swarm. It’s progressive ~ you win (or lose) one level and get new plants and new challenges in the next level. Just like chapters. Each level is enough alike that you easily pick it up and understand it but also enough different that it’s a challenge. Chapters should progress that way ~ not aliens dropping in deus ex machina (unless you already have aliens) but also a new twist each time.

I’m telling: it’s got me thinking about my plotting.

“We teach life, and life isn’t easy”

2011-11-15T10:38:00.002-07:00

For my day job, I interviewed a very nice gentlemen yesterday who is a lawyer who oversees law clinics here at the University of Wyoming. Law clinics are where law students take pro bono cases and actually enter the courtroom with an experienced lawyer to assist. The director’s outlook on life is such a great balance between idealism and practicality, and he loves what he does.

(I love talking to people about what they are passionate about. It’s one of my great pleasures.)

It struck me throughout our conversations how similar being a writer and being a lawyer are in so many ways. Here are some of them.

The original meaning of freelance was, of course, a knight put his “free lance” in service to a king. He represented that king and kingdom on the field of battle, and he put his skills and his life on the line to defend that king. Another word for that is mercenary, but it’s two sides of the same coin. A freelance writer is the same. She puts her skills and her work life on the line to represent someone to the world. And a lawyer is the same thing. They put their professional reputation and skills to the test in ways that have huge impacts on the lives of those involved. Idealistically, each of these is a person giving their lives for another. Less idealistically, this is someone making a buck off someone else in their time of need.

Another way that a writer and a lawyer are similar is that there are academic and practical branches of the discipline. These overlap, but one does not prepare you for the other. In the case of being a lawyer, the director said that three years in a classroom does not prepare you to be a lawyer. Only being a lawyer can prepare you. In that way, it should be a trade school, not an academic discipline. That’s why these law clinics are so important. In writing, there are academics who study it, and then there’s rhet/comp or creative writing that practices it. Sure, academics write as well, and I think being in academia is infinitely fascinating, but it holds the same relation to practicing outside the institution as academics does to practicing law. A technical or creative writer can’t enter into a in-depth theoretical discussion with an academic, any more than an academic can write a technical report or short story (unless the person is both). This split is the source of much conflict in English departments.

I asked the director what students were not prepared for when they came in. He said that they were not aware of the shear amount of hard work involved. Most of the time, it’s not at all glamorous. Same for writing. The years of apprenticeship (10,000 hours) and the piles and piles of rejection. He also said that students were not prepared for the amount of emotion involved. Think about it. You have people’s lives in your hands. Victims of assault and child abuse and rape and murder (well, not the actual victim). And what you help come about has huge impacts in the lives of everyone involved. Not only that, but you have to face very emotional situations on a daily basis. I think that’s true of writing as well. To truly do your best work, you have to put your heart on the page. You have to put your characters through hell and feel that hell as you write, or it won’t translate. Same with nonfiction ~ you’re working with people, and the best work is when you connect with your subjects deeply.

Finally, he said, “We teach life, and life isn’t easy.” We write life, and life isn’t easy. The best writing gets to the messiness of it, to the places that are hard, that are not black and white. But it’s worth it. Life is worth it, and the challenge of writing is worth it.

Ira Glass and Narrative Drive

2011-11-14T09:44:00.008-07:00

Ira Glass of This American Life gave a talk on Saturday at the University of Wyoming. I couldn’t wait, since I first heard of it!

Saturday was one of those bitter cold days on the high plains. The wind had been gale force for days, and the storm blew in that afternoon, so the cold lazered through the many layers of coats, hats, and mittens. The first flakes fell as my friend Naomi and I walked across campus to the A&S Auditorium. They seemed pretty innocent, but by the time we got out there was ice over everything and the wind blew you skating across the pavement. Winter storm warmings, for sure.

We were early, and our tickets were in the balcony. It’s numbered weirdly, with our section only having odd numbers (we were seats 7 and 9), and they were built in a time when people either were the size of school children or did not require much comfort or space. Even my knees hit the seat in front of me, and I’m average-sized. All was solved, though, when we took matters into our own hands and went farther up so no one was cramped in beside us.

Ira Glass. Wow. He is so cool. Nerd cool, brainy cool ~ you know what I mean. Like those old Geek Squad commercials. The guy next to me (before we moved) said, “He looks like Elvis Costello,” and he does. A suit, heavy black-rimmed glasses, long brown leather shoes, very kinetic.

The program started about 20 or 30 minutes late. A woman came out to introduce him, and then the lights went off. Then you heard that voice through the darkness, just like you do through the radio, so cozy and friendly and almost inside your own brain. It’s as if your preternaturally verbal favorite brother, someone you’ve known your whole life, is telling you a really good story. He kept the lights off for a while as he spoke and joked about doing the whole program that way. When he turned on the lights, he said, “I could say anything I wanted for the next couple of minutes because you’re not listening. You’re checking out what I look like and marveling that that voice comes out of this head.”

He orchestrated the whole program from an iPad that he held in the crook of his arm or rested on the music stand next to the tall stool, which he never sat on and never drank from the bottle of water that rested there. He was too busy moving, one side of the stage to the other, moving downstage and back, smiling, talking, waving his arms, setting the iPad down and picking it up. He would sometimes hold the iPad up in front of him and then hold his right arm out behind him before bringing his hand in an arc to touch the iPad and start or stop the music. It was as if he were a concert pianist.

And he has impeccable timing with the music. You don’t usually see someone turning off and on the music, but it was second nature to him, and he explained at the end where the music was from (the internet, movie scores) and tricks to using it (stopping the music makes whatever comes next seem very important and starting it again signals a change in tone or subject). He also explained that the iPad was connected wirelessly to a computer behind the drops, and the software allowed him to do it all from his iPad. It was amazing, with an Oz-behind-the-curtain feel to it.

And he said such smart things (of course). They were smart not only because some of them I’ve long thought.

He emphasized the power of narrative drive. It’s innate in all of us and is more powerful than any of us know. He explained how a normal news story goes ~ it’s a thesis-based essay, with assertion and evidence/quote, then new assertion and evidence/quote, with analysis. But then he explained the structure of stories on his show. It’s this thing leading to this thing leading to this thing, with a moment of reflection, and then repeat. It doesn’t matter how banal the details, if they’re cause and effect they draw us and leave us asking question after question, if only “What happens next?” And the moment of reflection can be something unusual, but it also can be a universal truth that we all know but the story reminds us. He ended everything with the story of Sheherazade, how that narrative drive saved the girl’s life and brought the king back from insanity. It made him empathize with the father of Sheherazade ~ I’ll get back to this.

At one point he stopped the music and said, “Radio is a very visual medium.” I sat there thinking, yes it is, in the very best way. It’s visual in the way the best books are, in that if the story is done right you the listener/reader supply a lot of it. You are an active participant in the creation of this story. And then he said, “It’s not, but it sounded like it’s true,” and everyone laughed.

They did the TV show, as well as radio. TV is a problem to do in the format of This American Life. On the radio, the teller can tell things that happened in the past, but on TV to really take advantage of the medium you have to be there and witness the action with the camera. Which means you have to foretell the future. He said, “It makes you understand why they put a bunch of extroverts in a house together and scatter cameras all around.”

He talked about how we are inundated with narrative nowadays, moreso than at any other time history. But the thing is, most of it doesn’t move us. It doesn’t do what stories have done forever, which is to connect us with others, to make us imagine what it would be like to be them, to empathize. This is something I’ve long said: The reason I am obsessively fanatical about fiction is that it is as close as you will ever get to another person’s insides, to their emotional and intellectual life. Both the writing and reading of fiction is an exercise in empathy. Can fiction save the world? Yes, I think it can.

There was much more, but I’ll stop here. It’s got me thinking a lot about narrative and about reflection and the conjunction of verbal storytelling and written. Ira Glass, you rock!

The Mean Reds

2011-11-11T09:20:00.002-07:00

So I’ve been scarce on the interwebs for a while. Not just here on this blog but elsewhere on Facebook and Twitter.

As I’ve said previously, I’m a bit manic depressive, and right after attending Bread Loaf I nose-dived for a bit. I’m sure you’ve all experienced it at one time or another. No interest in much of anything. Slogging through your day. Dreading even taking a shower because, you know, you’ll just have to take another one tomorrow and it doesn’t really seem worth the effort. Being shorter with the kids then I like to be.

But that’s not the worst part. My drive to write even went away. The joy in looking forward to creating, the joy of creating, being compelled by reading, feeling part of a larger and more noble endeavor, even feeling competitive against other writers ~ that all went away for a while. I avoided writing most everything (except work of course) ~ which would have helped ~ and I avoided most social things because it just takes more energy than I can muster. Mostly what I felt toward writing was simple despair. I suck in every way possible. Why would I ever think that I could get anywhere (despite any evidence to the contrary)?

I’m sure you know what I’m talking about: Depression. Perhaps a bit worse than the usual turn.

But I’m climbing out of the hole. One thing that really helped was I took a four-hour nap on Saturday and then slept in on Sunday. A little alone/me time made a heck of a lot of difference. Plus, I think I was pulling out of it a bit anyway. Now I need to get back to my writing and my exercise routine, and I’ll feel a lot better all around.

But, this blog. Even before all this, I had read that your blog shouldn’t just be a solipsistic writers workshop. That sent me for a bit of turn because in fact I talk a lot about writing ~ because it is my passion and what fascinates me. I tried to think of other subjects. I certainly could do more on the subjects I write about (history, gender, living in the West, etc.). But then I thought, you know what: sure, maybe I could include more general topics, but I love writing, and I know a lot of you love writing, and it’s what lights me up on the inside, so I am going to continue to write about it. Sure, I’ll try to include a broader range of topics, but writing will always be included as one of those.

I’ve always wanted these blog entries to be as well-thought out as possible, as cogent and well-written and compelling as possible. With that in mind, I may or may not write a blog post every weekday. If I think a little more deeply on a subject and try to develop it more, it may take more than a mere twenty minutes. But then again, I may also balance longer ones with some short ones (a la Seth Godin).

And as I said, I think my subjects will trend the way they have in the past, but I might try to include more book reviews. I don’t want this to be this blog’s only subject, but when I finish a book, I might review it. I might also include more general interest things, whatever catches my fancy at the time. I’m also going to continue to point out as many interesting things as I can.

Overall, my motivation here is to be part of the larger conversation, to think out loud, to make explicit those things that, if I don’t write about them, I don’t think them through. I also truly believe that this blog gives energy to my other writing and makes me feel part of the community.

So I’ll be showing up here a lot more. Once a week at least, possibly five days a week. And I appreciate all the people who stop by here to read, when they could be doing something vastly more useful, and I hope you’ll comment if you feel the urge.

Finally, I welcome guest bloggers! If you’d like to, shoot me an email PLEASE!

Off to a Conference

2011-08-09T15:50:00.000-06:00

Sorry for the blog silence. No excuses. But now I'm off the Bread Loaf Writers Conference for a week and a half where I get to work with the inestimable Luis Alberto Urrea. Have you heard of Bread Loaf? It's kind of like the ultimate space camp, only for writer geeks, not science geeks. So I'll be taking notes and be sure to give you a full report after the 20th. Happy August!

Executing a Raven

2011-07-21T08:11:00.003-06:00

Well, it wasn’t really a raven. A crow actually. But raven sounds more poetic, don’t you think?

Yesterday afternoon as I was driving by a park on the way to pick up the kids, I saw the most amazing thing. It was a hot but nice afternoon, with a bit of a breeze blowing in from the west. This crow was trying to land on the top of a telephone pole. You could see him angling, his body crunched with the effort, his wings flapping wildly trying to control his flight. (I say he ~ it might’ve been she. What do I know?) The thing is, he wasn’t trying to drop down on it from above. The wind was in his face, so he flew past it from below, flapped hard until he rose to the height of the top of the pole, let the wind push him backwards, and then he folded his wings and dropped onto the flat circle.

It was absolutely amazing, I tell you! He had to do it twice. The first time he did a complete circle ~ came in below, rose, let the wind carry him, but too far, so he dropped again, flew forward, rose, and then dropped onto the landing pad. Amazing athletics, I tell you.

That got me to thinking about executing a raven in writing. Don’t you just love coming across something in what you’re reading that absolutely makes your jaw drop? A perfect turn of phrase or the subtle observation perfectly expressed or a word in just the right place, or a plot twist that gives you the chills, it’s so good.

There are authors who consistently execute the raven. That’s why we read them. Alice Munro and Julian Barnes and so many others. You just stand in awe of them. Their gymnastics are almost always a perfect 10. The crow, too, was obviously a fabulous flyer, because why would he attempt it if he was not. The skill involved is amazing, and this bird was almost flawless.

But the thing is, even with his skill, this crow had to do it twice. Some maneuvers are so complex and dependent upon chance that you just have to keep trying to get it right, to land Plop! onto that little tiny wooden circle.

Here’s to you and me, today, attempting to execute a raven.

Thought for the Day

2011-07-19T15:57:00.002-06:00

Argh! I gotta get some writing work done!

Writing and the Heart of Artistic Expression ~ A Guest Post by Shann Ray

2011-07-15T08:20:00.002-06:00

It’s been a while since we’ve been honored by a Cool Person Guest Blogger. Well, yesterday I emailed Shann Ray, who I wrote about in yesterday’s post, and he graciously agreed to do one. And a powerful and moving one it is. So without further ado.

Our Cool Person Guest Blogger today is Shann Ray. As I mentioned yesterday, Shann is a professor of leadership and forgiveness, a basketball dunker extraordinaire, a coach, a father and a son, a Westerner, and a kickass poet and writer. His writing has the brute force of Cormac McCarthy and Annie Proulx, yet a style all his own. In addition to his fiction I mentioned yesterday (“Before Sand Creek” and “The Great Divide”), you can check out "City of Hunger and Light" in Five Chapters, and definitely pick up his book, American Masculine.

Writing and the Heart of Artistic Expression

The greatest work of art is to love someone. -Vincent van Gogh

Bell hooks, the powerful feminist writer and a clarion voice in American life, envisioned a world in which we willingly attune ourselves to the deeper disciplines associated with love. "Genuine love," she said, "is rarely an emotional space where needs are instantly gratified. To know love we have to invest time and commitment." In poetry and prose, the same investment of time and commitment sometimes results in small miracles that move the human heart.

In light of bell hooks’s deep revelations, a new understanding arises: people who live well love well, they understand power and become artistic in conversation, they live transparently and develop integrity in response to their own individual and communal faults-in other words, they know and they are known. They lead others, and their relationships are largely free of diminishment. Engagement is infused with a sense of the appreciative mystery of life. For me, writers who infuse my heart and soul with the appreciative mystery of life often hail from the wild vast country of the American West. The profound rhythmic drive, musicality and force of Melanie Rae Thon, the generous fierce voice of Sandra Alcosser, the crystalline sense of witness, clarity, and beauty in the imaginative landscapes of James Welch. Loneliness and courage and fire and home, all captured in the prose of people attuned to the reality of love and loss at the foundation of life together.

In the great European philosopher Hans George Gadamer's concept of the eloquent or elegant question, we find a lucent manner of relating in which we seek to ask of one another questions to which we do not already know the answer. The eloquent question forms a pathway of listening in which we overcome attitudes and behaviors of dominance, negativity, reactivity, fear, anger, or apathy. When we live from darker, more self-absorbed philosophies we effectively force others to submit to our way of living, especially when their views conflict with ours. But when we live from more hope-filled philosophies we approach those around us as sacred, as Thou or You in philosopher Martin Buber's terms, rather than It, and our conversations result in fulfillment and shared meaning. Initiating and sustaining meaningful dialogue reflects a positive sense of self and other. In art that helps heal the human heart, writers attend to, honor, and transcend the burden of human emptiness.

Ornish, in his decisive work Love and Survival, argues (with convincing scientific evidence) that lack of intimacy or lack of emotional and spiritual closeness to others is the root of human illness, and the positive experience of love is the inner core of what makes us well. Accordingly, the great epidemic of the age is what Ornish calls "emotional and spiritual heart disease, the profound sense of loneliness, isolation, alienation, and depression that are so prevalent today as the social structures that used to provide us with a sense of community and connection break down."

When we consider the children of the nations we consider the next generation, and the opportunity to forgo our self-insulation and sacrifice ourselves for the good of others seems almost to cry out to us, inviting us to listen and take action. The gift of knowing others, and closer still, knowing our own children can completely renew us. Because of inspiration from writers like hooks, Thon, Alcosser, Gadamer, Buber, and Ornish but especially because of the influence of my wife and her dynamic life, in the morning I go now to each of my three young daughters and touch her face and look into her eyes and give her a blessing. The words take me into a quietly enchanting encounter and I go from the blessing better prepared to face the day, and more grateful. For Natalya, "God has given you the garment of praise instead of the spirit of despair." For Ariana, "I have loved you with an everlasting love. I have drawn you with lovingkindness." For Isabella, "God knows the plans he has for you, plans not for calamity, but for peace. Plans for a future and a hope." Yet even in the echo of a morning ritual that heals me, my own frailty and lack of maturity sometimes stalk me throughout the day and rear up in my defensiveness, my will to dominate, my lack of patience, my apathy toward even my most valued relationships. Asserting itself in the daily routine of life is my greed to be served... my failure to serve the most meaningful needs of the beloved others in my life.

The sumptuous wisdom of bell hooks is a wisdom that secures a generous humanity in the center of legitimate mutuality and forms the foundation for the architecture of the mature identity. This involves accepting the invitation to look at one's self, gifts and weaknesses, and draw self and others toward liberation from fear. In this sense what liberates us is love, an identification with the suffering that always precedes life or growth, and a resolved will to seek that which is necessary to make us whole. This love separates the wheat from the chaff from our lives and brings us to our loved ones in a more vulnerable and more truly powerful sense. We can then come to a place of sanctuary with one another in which we find we are capable of living for one another rather than against each other. In this sanctuary joy accompanies us, and we begin to go about the necessary work to move beyond ourselves and willingly give ourselves to others.

Great writing is a whisper in the heart of hearts, and sometimes resounds like a mighty storm.

A well-earned delight takes shape in the heart of readers. In great art, even if that art is sometimes very dark, below or within the darkness we find light, delight in life, and affirmation of people. Cynicism and nihilism are put to rest. Such work is found at the crossroads of ingenuity and a keenly discerned sense of reality. Emerson referred to this crossroads as the oversoul, the place in our collective humanity reserved for transcendence, humility, wisdom, and generative capacity.

that Over-soul, within which every [person's] particular being is contained and made one with all other; that common heart, of which all sincere conversation is the worship, to which all right action is submission; that overpowering reality which confutes our tricks and talents, and constrains every one to pass for what [he or she] is... and which evermore tends to pass into our thought and hand, and become wisdom, and virtue, and power, and beauty. We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within [humanity] is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE.

May the world of writing and reading, in the heart of great artistic expression, bring you greater life.

Shann Ray and American Masculine

2011-07-14T10:45:00.001-06:00

Today, I wanted to introduce you all to Shann Ray (if you don’t already know him). I first heard about him when he won the 2010 Bread Loaf Bakeless prize. I saw that he grew up in Lame Deer on the Cheyenne Reservation in Montana. That’s where my sister Nikki has been an ER nurse for 30 years, so I sent Shann a note of congratulations.

Here’s his bio from his website www.shannray.com

Poet and prose writer Shann Ray Ferch’s collection of stories, AMERICAN MASCULINE, was selected for the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference prestigious Katherine Bakeless Nason Literary Publication Prize and appears with Graywolf Press. He is also the author of Forgiveness and Power in the Age of Atrocity (forthcoming with Rowman & Littlefield), and The Spirit of Servant Leadership co-edited with Larry Spears (Paulist Press). Ferch, who writes poetry and prose under Shann Ray in honor of his mother Saundra Rae, played college basketball at Montana State University and Pepperdine University and professional basketball in Germany. He now lives with his wife and three daughters in Spokane, Washington where he teaches leadership and forgiveness studies at Gonzaga University.

Born and raised in Montana, Ray’s powerful, graceful writing considers the nature of humanity with regard to violence and forgiveness. He holds a dual MFA in poetry and fiction from the Inland Northwest Center for Writers at Eastern Washington University, a Masters in clinical psychology from Pepperdine, and a PhD in systems psychology from the University of Alberta in Canada. He has served as a research psychologist for the Centers for Disease Control and as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Humanities.

His stories and poems have appeared in some of America’s top literary venues including McSweeney’s, StoryQuarterly, Poetry International, Northwest Review, Narrative, Best New Poets and William and Mary Review. Ray is the winner of the subTerrain Poetry Prize, the Crab Creek Review Fiction Award, the Pacific Northwest Inlander Short Story Contest, the Ruminate Short Story Prize, and the Creative Writing Distinguished Alumni Award from Eastern Washington University. His work was selected as a notable story in Best American Nonrequired Reading and anthologized in The Better of McSweeney’s, Vol. 2. His influences include Sandra Alcosser, Claire Davis, Milan Kundera, James Welch, A.B. Guthrie, William Kittredge, Richard Hugo, Richard Ford, Katerina Rudcenkova, and Mary Oliver.

Shann’s father was a basketball coach, and Shann and his older brother Kral are legendary in Montana high school and college basketball. To see some absolutely amazing footage of he and Kral’s dunking, go here (first they talk about Shann's father Tom, and then at about 4:00 they start showing the amazing footage).

But what is so amazing is Shann’s writing. It is brutal ~ and I do mean brutal ~ yet lyrical. You can tell he is a poet, in addition to being a fiction writer. His stories are very dark and violent. Given that my stories are generally pretty dark too, reading his elicits the same sort of deep anguish I get as I write ~ and I’m sure I’m not the only one. But it’s cathartic, and there are small moments of such tenderness. It’s the broken world of a man’s West busted open there on the page. I can’t tell you how much it moves me yet gives me nightmares. And that’s a good thing. He reminds me of Annie Proulx, Cormac McCarthy, Jim Harrison, and Thom Jones.

You’ll have to read it for yourself. Please, I urge you to buy American Masculine today. But in the meantime, here is a story “Before Sand Creek” that appeared on NewWest (a fabulous site - stay and browse for awhile). Here is “The Great Divide,” which appeared in The Better of McSweeneys, Vol. 2, and is the second story in American Masculine.

So, for your own sake, read Shann Ray.

More on Role Models

2011-07-13T12:00:00.002-06:00

I plan to write more on the topic I addressed a couple of days ago (role models for boys), but in the meantime, there's this great post on the Art of Manliness about the lessons to learn from The Old Man and the Sea.

(I know that the idea of role models is problematic, and that those people who are held up as role models are fallible, just as we all are, but that does not undermine the value of such things. We need ideals to strive for, I believe. IMHO.)

In the meantime, another lesson from Old Hem ~ thanks, Art of Manliness!

“Success” is all too often assumed to be the indicator of the value of a man. But success, in and of itself, merely speaks to a particular status and may have nothing to do with the journey that the man took to get there, or whether or not he retained his integrity along the way. Among the many aspects of the story, it is the idea of redefining success and victory that makes The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway’s classic novella, so profound.

Alice Munro

2011-07-12T08:27:00.000-06:00

Alice Munro is one of my writer gods. Her work is everything I aspire to emulate: quiet and subtle yet emotionally shattering. I started reading Too Much Happiness last night and the first story ("Dimensions," which I've read before in the New Yorker) gave me nightmares. A good thing, hehe. So today I wanted to post a quote from her that I have up on my wall from a great interview.

“I want to tell a story, in the old-fashioned way—what happens to somebody—but I want that ‘what happens’ to be delivered with quite a bit of interruption, turnarounds, and strangeness. I want the reader to feel something is astonishing—not the ‘what happens’ but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.” ~ Alice Munro

Being a Man in This Day and Age

2011-07-11T09:25:00.002-06:00

How many men do you know who are overgrown children? They never marry, spend their days playing, and don’t have much real responsibility. Or they are fathers yet don’t lend much of hand with the kids or around the house. Or they run out on their responsibilities. My husband and I have been talking about this lately. Not because he’s one of them ~ in fact, I am so lucky because he is an equal partner with the kids and with the housework. I am so so lucky. “Where did I go wrong,” he jokes.

He’s one of those guys who gets things done. He sent me a great quote a while back:

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” ~ Robert A. Heinlein

I have complete faith that he can do all those things, perhaps with the exception of conning a ship. He’s someone who, if he doesn’t know how to do something, he figures it out. He’s someone who’s physically confident. I’ve always said, he’s the type of guy who inspires confidence in others. He’s got a lot of common sense and he’s very tall with a deep voice. (Did you know that most captains of industry are taller than average?)

What we realize more and more is that he may be the exception, rather than the rule.

What my husband and I talk a lot about is that men on TV sitcoms are the butt of everyone’s jokes. They are often incapable, lazy, dumb, and all those other stereotypes. It’s as if the stereotypes of the women in the 50s (ditzy blonde; here little lady, let me take care of that) have been reversed and now it’s okay to make fun of men.

There’s also been a lot references to Hemingway in the news lately. For example, on wired.co.uk and USA Today. There’s a lot of talk about his relevance, or irrelevance. But, what these articles point out is that Hemingway lived life, that he had an ideal he desperately tried to live up to.

I guess what I’m getting at is that where are the role models for our boys? Heck, for our men? If all they see around them are images of laughingstocks, if they’re allowed or encouraged to be little boys their whole lives, if they don’t have things to be proud of, how in the world can they be happy and functioning adults?

That’s why I love sites like The Art of Manliness. It’s about taking back pride. It’s not about denigrating women. It’s about being the best husband, father, and citizen that you can be. It’s about pride and being capable. This is not at the expense of women. When will we begin to think of the world as a land of abundance, where one is not at the expense of the other?

Why are capable men like Hemingway considered throwbacks, instead of role models? I say this as a feminist.

PS Perhaps I am oversimplifying, but I worry about the future for my son, just as I worry about it for my daughter.

The Lake of the Ozarks

2011-07-08T09:28:00.001-06:00

I don’t know about you, but when I hear the word “Ozarks” I get ~ got ~ an image of hillbillies, broken-down unpainted houses, with lots of hound dogs and barefoot kids out front ~ you know, sort of like I was raised. We certainly did see some of that when we took a “short cut,” thanks to the navigator ~ ahem, me ~ but turns out that the Lake of the Ozarks is pretty developed and a little bit of a tourist trap. It’s one of those places that makes city folks feel like they’re in the country without missing any of their modern conveniences.

I’m just sayin.

But I loved it, and we had such a good time! Every other year, my husband’s family takes a vacation together, and we rent a huge vrbo (vacation rental by owner) house on the water somewhere. We’ve been to Phoenix, the Keys, Michigan, and now Missouri. It’s so great to hang with the inlaws and to have the kids spend time with their cousins. They’re all such good people. We take turns making dinners and we go and do all the things there are to do.

Our house had eight bedrooms, all of which were occupied, and its own dock on the water. We had two jetskis for the whole week and a boat for a day. Most everyone spent all their time down by the water. My two have just been learning to swim, as they’re five, so we were concerned that they would go in, literally, over their heads, but we made the rule that whenever they were outside the house they had to wear their life jackets, which worked out great. I think their swimming came a long way during the trip. Most of the time was in the water, but some of us with young kids took in Cars 2 and some went for a helicopter ride and my mother-in-law got to visit a great friend of hers who was having a bit of a rough patch.

The only challenge we had was on Friday. It was just my husband, kids, and I in our rented van. We’d just come out of the Camdenton Walmart, got in, and were driving through the parking lot, when ~WHAM! ~ we were rammed by a row of 23 shopping carts! Turns out, the young guy had only worked there four days, and he wasn’t paying attention and used the cart pusher to ram the carts into the side of the van. It’s funny now. What insued was 45 minutes of standing in the steaming hot parking lot directing cars away and talking with the manager. They were all very nice about it, and the poor kid who did it kept pacing back and forth and rubbing his hand over his crew cut.

I was in the middle of revising my story for workshop at Bread Loaf, and it was so fabulous because I had the time and space to do it. The house is large and rambling, and our bedroom was on the lowest floor, fairly isolated. My husband would take the kids down two swim and I would be able to just go to the room and write. I was able to get the very intensive revisions done over the course of the week. Lovely. I also got to sleep in every morning, thanks to my husband!

A Reading by Diana Gabaldon

2011-07-07T09:33:00.019-06:00

Well, I’m back from vacation at the Lake of the Ozarks, and it’s taken me a couple of days to get my act together, but I missed you guys! I’ll tell you all about it, but before I do that I wanted to write about the great reading I went to last night.

The lovely and hilarious Diana Gabaldon gave a talk and short reading last night as plenary speaker for the University of Wyoming’s Sir Walter Scott conference (directed by my mentor and great friend Caroline McCracken-Flesher). I just felt honored to be in the room!

My first impression of Diana was that she is beautiful. She’s fairly short, but her presence fills the room, as she stands tall and projects such positive friendly energy. She wore a long flowing dress in black with rust and ruby and green panels at the bottom, and her hair is long and black. She has a heart-shaped face and a wide smile. As she said during her talk, “It’s German bones with Spanish coloring” ~ one side of her family came from Spain, the other side came from England with a bit of German thrown in, and she grew up in Arizona. (People come up to her and ask, impertinently, “What are you? Native American? Russian? French?”) Her voice is gravelly, with a quick-fire delivery and impeccable comedic timing.

(Her name Gabaldon rhymes with “stone,” by the way.)

There was a little difficulty with audio at first, but then Diana entered escorted by a wonderful bagpiper named John. (Sorry ~ I didn’t catch his full name.) Diana began by talking about her background as an academic in marine biology and behavioral ecology, with her dissertation on the nesting habits of the pinyon jay (or, as her husband says, “Why Birds Build Nests Where They Do, and Who Cares Anyway?”). She taught human anatomy and physiology to football players at 8 a.m. and would wake them up with this ditty:

In days of old when knights were bold
And condoms weren't invented
They'd pop a sock upon their cock
And babies were prevented

Yes! She has such a great irreverent sense of humor, and we were in stitches throughout. Yet she had some really profound things to say.

She talked about successful novelists. None that she knows have MFAs ~ which, since I have no MFA, immediately made me feel better. As she said, “Most successful novelists do not have an MFA. It’s not that they aren’t useful; it’s just that they don’t have much to do with writing.” Good point. There are great things about an MFA, but to master writing you have to be intrinsically motivated, to be obsessed and obsessive.

Most of the successful novelists she knows did something else first. Ian Rankin, crime writer, was a grape-picker and a swineherd and a taxman, among other things. Jack Whyte, historical novelist, was a cabaret singer and a whisky seller. Robert Burns and Thomas Paine were both tax collectors. Diana was an academic and, as she said, “killed seabirds and tortured boxfish” for her job. Novelists, she said, “hold jobs that nobody notices very much when they slack off.” Ahem. “All novelists find their own way,” she said, “often a screwy path.”

She talked about the distinction between storytellers and novelists. A story is nothing more and nothing less than a character in a situation that produces conflict, and even bad writers can be storytellers. You just need to keep generating questions, even small ones, in the reader’s mind.

She also talked about the distinction between genre writers and literary writers. “An invidious distinction,” she said, but genre uses the big human archetypes. Romance novels satisfy our needs for courtship, specfic/scifi our curiosity, westerns our need for identity and self-determination, and mysteries our need for social contracts. A very interesting way to put it I thought and something I’m going to be thinking about for a while. It goes along with the idea that genre stories follow specific patterns and conventions upon which our needs and desires play out. They affirm our needs, rather than challenge them. Literary fiction, she said, may use pieces of those archetypes, but it is fiction about individuals out around the edges.

This resonated with me a lot, as well: she didn’t start writing fiction until she was 35, but she had written all her life. She had known she wanted to write from age 8, but her family said, “You’re such a poor judge of character, you’re bound to marry a bum. Get a good education so you can support your family.” So she got a practical degree and became an academic. I was the same way ~ I felt I needed to do something practical and that’s why I almost flunked out of engineering and it took me 13 years to get my degree, in English, finally.

What got her started writing was that she turned 35 and realized that Mozart died at that age and so if she was going to be a novelist she’d better get started. She started writing Outlander the next day. She didn’t know what she was going to write about, but she liked to read mysteries, among other things, so she thought she’d write a mystery. She liked to do research, as she was a research professor, so she decided it would be historical. The reason it was Scotland was that she watched an episode of Doctor Who and there was a fine specimen of a Scotsman in a kilt. “Hmm, that’s fetching,” she thought. So her inspiration was the image of a man in a kilt.

Okay, she thought, I need conflict, so she thought the Jacobite Uprising of 1745 would be good, Scots versus the English. Well, if she had her man in a kilt, she would make her woman English, and there would be even more conflict. On the third day of writing, she had the woman walk into a room with a bunch of Scotsman but what came out of the woman’s mouth was decidedly modern. Diana fought with the character for days until she finally trusted the instinct and that character took over telling her own story ~ and that’s why there’s time travel.

That’s how she writes. She puts herself in the scene and figures out as she goes. “My hands are cold. Why are they cold? Oh, it’s winter. But my feet are warm ~ there’s a fire. Oh, there’s a dog over there.” And so on. She writes in bits and fiddles ~ that’s why it takes her a while to write a book. She doesn’t write from an outline or a plan. She puts herself in scenes where she can see what’s happening, and the scenes start to accumulate and fit together and then she has the timeline in the back of her mind and she starts laying them out in 40-60 page chunks and then she knows where to go. She knows the shape of her structure and all her books have a shape.

Reader interest in historical fiction ebbs and flows. This, she said, is due to a couple of things. 1) It’s related to the age of the reader, because as we get older, say 30s and 40s, we start thinking about our mortality, and we try to place our lives in context. We need confirmation of our choices. 2) In times of uncertainty, historical fiction is popular. People want assurance that things can work out, and historical fiction gives them that.

History isn’t what happens, she says; it’s what people write down. So true. There are three levels of lies in history: 1) the inadvertent lie or selective reporting, which is point of view, 2) deliberate bias but not messing with the fact, which is newspaper reporting, and 3) deliberate bias, which is propaganda. “I was born Catholic,” she says, “I know it when I see it.” She goes on to say that novelists can use these three levels to good effect. A good novelist will use facts and point of view and bias to enhance his or her story. And when Diana writes about a real person, she reads that person's writing extensively to get a sense of them, and she tries not to make them any worse than they really were.

She is sometimes asked, since she’s of Spanish heritage, why she doesn’t write about Spain. Nobody asks that of a white mainstream author, however. A very good point. “The thing about being a novelist is that you can be anybody, anywhere, anytime.” The adage write what you know is wrong, she says; it should be write what you want to know, what interests you.

Finally, the theme of the conference was Sir Walter Scott, Sheriff and Outlaw. A writer, she says, is both. They are sheriffs because they make the rules and enforce them, but the characters disobey just like the populace. They are outlaws too because they are a law unto themselves.

She finished off the evening with a sparkling reading from the book she is working on and answered questions.

And I leave you with some of John’s amazing bagpipe music.

Bye (for a While)

2011-06-22T11:40:00.000-06:00

So, I'm going underground for a bit. Sorry to fall silent. I'll let you know my adventures when I'm back. In the meantime, happy writing. Miss you all!

Michael Collier's "Argos"

2011-06-21T12:40:00.002-06:00

I recently read the poet Michael Collier's collection The Ledge. What clear-eyed loveliness. One of my favorites in the collection ~ and there were many ~ was this one "Argos." If this doesn't shake something loose inside you, nothing will.

Argos
by Michael Collier

If you think Odysseus too strong and brave to cry,
that the god-loved, god-protected hero
when he returned to Ithaka disguised,
intent to check up on his wife

and candidly apprize the condition of his kingdom,
steeled himself resolutely against surprise
and came into his land cold-hearted, clear-eyed,
ready for revenge--then you read Homer as I did,

too fast, knowing you'd be tested for plot
and major happenings, skimming forward to the massacre,
the shambles engineered with Telemakhos
by turning beggar and taking up the challenge of the bow.

Reading this way you probably missed the tear
Odysseus shed for his decrepit dog, Argos,
who's nothing but a bag of bones asleep atop
a refuse pile outside the palace gates. The dog is not

a god in earthly clothes, but in its own disguise
of death and destitution is more like Ithaka itself.
And if you returned home after twenty years
you might weep for the hunting dog

you long ago abandoned, rising from the garbage
of its bed, its instinct of recognition still intact,
enough will to wag its tail, lift its head, but little more.
Years ago you had the chance to read that page more closely

but instead you raced ahead, like Odysseus, cocksure
with your plan. Now the past is what you study,
where guile and speed give over to grief so you might stop,
and desiring to weep, weep more deeply.

Taking Responsibility for Your Audience

2011-06-20T14:51:00.000-06:00

Friday’s video with Rob Kapilow is so rich and wonderful, I thought I’d pick up on another idea he highlights, and that’s about our responsibility to our audiences.

In that video at about 7:40, Rob talks about realizing that he had been playing this particular piece of piano music forever, but he had not actually heard it, and if he hadn’t really listened and heard it, how in the world could a regular audience have any hope of detecting the wonderful nuances that the composer intended? The hundreds of small inspired choices composers make go over most people’s heads. And then Rob made it his mission to educate audiences ~ and he’s so so good at it. He’s entertaining and intelligent and wonderful.

And then (at 11:40) he talks about a retreat he went on with Hallmark Greeting Cards. He quoted a communications expert who spoke at the event:

Most of us think that self-expression happens here [pointing to himself]. It’s all about our content, what we want to say, how we project our voice. But self-expression doesn’t happen here [again pointing to himself]; it happens out there [gesturing to the audience]. … Try taking responsibility for how people listen you.

For Rob, that is the issue with classical music ~ everyone is focused on the wrong side of the footlights. If people aren’t hearing those subtleties, you are expressing nothing. That’s why it became his mission to teach the subtleties of the art.

This, once again, applies so much to writing.

There are two ends of the spectrum. There are those who write strictly for the market. Sure, they may be good writers and are artful, but they do not follow their heart ~ they follow their pocketbook or the market or someone else. All valid reasons sure, but I don’t think it will be their best work. Then there are those who are doing “their art” ~ screw audiences. If anyone wants to try and suss out what the writer is saying, it’s up to the reader, and the writer won’t help out a bit. (The modernist poet Ezra Pound is first among this type of writer. Joyce is this way also. But for some reason I hold it against Pound but not Joyce. Maybe because Joyce wrote “The Dead.”) I am offended by writers who totally ignore their readers.

I’m in the middle, and I believe that it is our responsibility, like Rob says, to help your audience understand you. This takes the form of satisfying genre convention, using good technique and grammar, and “teaching your reader how to read you.” I do believe there are times where a writer is by necessity difficult ~ perhaps your trying to convey a difficult and complex concept ~ but deliberate showy obscurity is the height of selfishness, in my book.

Besides, as a writer, you need to be outwardly focused, don’t you? I mean, what’s the point of me me me all the time? Isn’t writing about connection? About being a spokesman for the world?

It is definitely our responsibility to hold up our half of the writer-reader compact, to be a kind and considerate partner in this exchange.

Friday Loveliness

2011-06-17T08:27:00.004-06:00

So, I recently discovered Gel, which is very much like TED only weighted slightly toward the creative side. Fabulous stuff. They have smart, funny, intellectually authentic videos just like TED. Today I wanted to focus on one that blew me away.

I love it when you come across an brilliant mind and charismatic speaker whose ideas mesh so well with yours, especially when they are in a different field and able to say it in a new way. Yesterday, that fabulous dynamic person was Rob Kapilow, American composer, conductor, and music evangelist.

He starts by talking about Bird by Bird, that great book about writing by Anne Lamott. He extends its ideas to life. Your working hard getting nowhere in your writing, or in your life, and then something happens. He quotes Anne:

You find yourself back at your desk, staring blankly at the pages you filled yesterday. And there on page four is a paragraph with all sorts of life in it, smells and sounds and voices and colors and even a moment of dialogue that makes you say to yourself, very, very softly, “Hmmm.”

Then he says:

You’d had that sense that you’d come in contact with something important that resonated in some kind of fundamental way. I believe the ability to listen for the “Hmmm,” and more importantly the ability to act when something makes you go “Hmmm” is one of the most important abilities that you can possibly have.

This idea of his fits so well as an answer to “Where do you get your ideas?” (Which is kind of what Anne was talking about in the quote, but I’ll extend it a bit.) For me, I’m never at a loss for ideas. They come thick and fast, especially when I’m “in” my writing or tuned in to that frame of mind. For me, ideas come as Hmmm moments. Something will catch my attention, my emotion, my interest, and set my mind agoing. Before you know it, I’ve got a first sentence or the ideas spool themselves out into a character or a plot. An entry point and that “force that through the green fuse drives the flower,” that creative drive and impetus and life. It catches hold and spins me, and is like the kneel Catholics give before entering the pew, a ritual that puts me into a certain state. This way I work fits so well with what Rob is talking about here.

But he goes on, wonderfully, beautifully. He does this amazing thing: he explicates what the experts hear and what moves them (in music). He tells a story about a great teacher Nadia Boulanger, who taught all the greatest composers of the twentieth century, who opened his ears so that he really listened. “There is both an enormous and an infinitely small difference between good and great. The difference is hundreds of small but inspired choices,” he says, and it is so true. And then he made it his mission to show audiences how to hear just as he had that epiphany, which he does regularly on NPR and through teaching.

Oh, oh! In writing, exactly the same thing. It’s so funny because when I was teaching Freshman Comp, every once in a while I would get these perfect papers with these eloquent turns of expression and perfect grammar. You would think that I would’ve jumped for joy, wouldn’t you? But of course I didn’t because this was plagiarism, and someone had bought a paper to hand in. I can see why it happened, but how could a person actually believe that I ~ or any writer/teacher ~ could mistake a professionally written paper from that of a freshman in college? It’s because, to them, they cannot sense the difference, but an expert can tell in the first sentence. That’s what Rob is trying to teach audiences, to sense the difference between good and great, to be able to understand what the composer and the arranger and the musicians were trying to communicate in the intricate and complex language of music.

And that’s what makes the difference between good and great in writing: hundreds of small but inspired choices. First you have to be able to tell that difference ~ which is where reading voraciously and commenting on peers’ work and mimicking the greats comes in. Then you have to implement it in your own work. (This is why I don’t understand people who want it to remain a mystery and can’t explain how they do things. Aren’t our tools words, and if you can’t explain what you’re doing, how can you possibly hope to explain the delicate colors of contaminated water or that look your partner gives you when you’ve broken his heart for the final time?)

He goes on and says many other great things. You should immediately go and watch it all the way through. But in the meantime, I wanted to make your Friday lovely with this ~ if nothing else, go to 17:50 on the video and listen to him playing the piano.

A Kickass Exploration of Metaphor

2011-06-15T08:20:00.001-06:00

Over at Gotham, James Geary has this great piece on metaphor, "Metaphor and Pleasure: Experience is a comb that nature give to bald men." I love the exploration, the sussing out of the ligamen, the exploration of metaphor's history. A must-read for writers. I can't wait to read I is an Other, his new book. (Because, you know, you and I are geeks about this kind of stuff.)

Catch his TED talk here.

Mary Beth Baptiste

2011-06-14T08:16:00.001-06:00

I ran into an old writing friend yesterday ~ Mary Beth Baptiste. It sure was great to see her. She’s a thoughtful woman, very petite, who has such a zest for life. We used to work together at an environmental consulting firm, and we were also in a writers group together for a bit. She’s been working a memoir for a long time, and apparently ~ thrilling news! ~ she was able to get a great agent for it! I am so stoked for her.

Mary Beth, if you are reading this, please comment or send me an email and give me the lowdown on the memoir. I’ll post it here.

A little bit more about Mary Beth (via Permanent Vacation).

Excerpt from "The Weight of a Harlequin"

"Back in Massachusetts, where I came from, I tiptoed through life in fussy clothes and impractical shoes. Like everyone I knew, I lived life with much to spare. I held back, saved it for storms. This was the approach to life I’d been raised with: 'It’s too hot to ride your bike to the library,' my mother would say, setting her soft chin primly over her eyelet collar. 'It would tax your heart.' My grandmother would nod in agreement as she reached into her pocketbook for the keys to her sky-blue Ford."

Mary Beth’s bio:

For her master’s degree in wildlife biology, Mary Beth Baptiste researched human-bear interaction at Shenandoah National Park. She later worked at Cumberland Gap and Grand Teton National Parks. After seven years at Grand Teton, she moved to Laramie, Wyoming, where she now lives with her husband, Richard. Her employment history, while suspect, provides fertile ground for writing material: soda jerk, fire-tower lookout, lab technician, land steward, school counselor, substance-abuse counselor, yoga teacher, wildlife biologist, technical writer, bookstore clerk, environmental scientist, and nonprofit development director. When she’s not writing, Mary Beth enjoys hiking, cross-country skiing, dancing, and spending time with friends, especially when chocolate is involved. She was a 2009 resident at the Jentel Artist Residency Program in Banner, Wyoming, and has won several writing awards, including the Doubleday Award for Creative Writing. Her work has appeared in Vermont Literary Review, Copper Nickel, Newsweek, Wyoming Wildlife, Stonehill Alumni Magazine, and two other anthologies.

She also did a great piece for Newsweek for the My Turn column about how to have a wedding on $150. Catch that here.

Great job, Mary Beth! I’m pulling for you. (And I can’t wait to order my copy of the memoir.)

War Horse and The Book of Mormon

2011-06-13T10:14:00.001-06:00

Watched part of the Tony’s last night. The Book of Mormon and War Horse took much of it ~ from what I’ve seen, very well deserved.

Regarding War Horse, have you seen this fabulous TED talk by the puppeteers of the Handspring Puppet Company? The horse puppets are so real, so very real. They act like horses. The most amazing thing.

And then there’s The Book of Mormon. I don’t know much about the show, only the bit they showed last night. It looks really good. It seems like it might be the year of the Mormon, what with it in the news all the time. I was raised in a Mormon community, though my family is not Mormon. (My grandpa settled in northern Wyoming in 1894 and liked to say he “saw ‘em come over the hill.”)

I won’t get in a discussion of theology here, but I did want to say: Meeting someone of the Mormon faith is like meeting a better version of yourself. They come across as happier, healthier, more optimistic, and cleaner than you or I. It’s as if you were transported to an idealized version of the 1950s. It’s a good lesson for me because I tend to focus on the dark side and to wonder what goes on behind closed doors. I give credence to the bad things people do to each other, when I should also emphasize the good in people.

That’s what ideals are for, aren’t they? To remind us to be better, less self-involved, more kind and caring.

Question of the Day: Why do we tend to be snarky rather than simply strive to be a better person?

The Band Sorry, No Sympathy

2011-06-10T08:50:00.007-06:00

I was talking with my great friend Kim, who is a fabulous artist, yesterday. She mentioned that her son had a band and showed me their Facebook and Myspace pages. I have to say, I was totally blown away.

The band is called Sorry, No Sympathy, and they play hardcore metal/screamo. Wow. Their music just rocks. The band members are Chase Corrigan on voice, Trevor Kuma on guitar and voice, Jesse Riter on guitar, Sean McGee on bass, and Blaise Turcato on drums. Blaise is Kim’s son.

Their bio:

Since their inception in January 2010, Sorry, No Sympathy has been writing and playing music focusing in the genres of metal and hardcore. Be on the look out for their EP release of "Give a Boy a Gun", due out in May of 2011.

You know how it is when you hear so and so has a fairly new band. You think, ah, that’s nice, I bet they sound a little rough. But these guys DO NOT. They’re music is so pulled together and blood-pumpingly raw (in the good way). They write their own songs, and their latest have been based on a book called Give a Boy a Gun by Todd Strasser. It’s about a Columbine incident, and what little I read was horrible and great, if you get my meaning.

My favorite of their songs so far is “The Cave You Fear.” I particularly like the rif starting at about 2:45.

I’m sorry ~ I don’t know much about all the bandmates, and only a little about Blaise. He created the posters and the album cover himself (without the assistance of his mom the kickass artist). The album cover has a haunting image of a boy standing by a window, blank wall at his back, lace-curtained window at his side, toys around his feet, a semi-auto in his hands. The model is another of Kim’s sons, Reece.

I am so totally blown away by people who follow their passion and create art. Art is damn hard. Whether it’s music or writing or drawing or graphic design or whatever, it takes so much effort to put it all together, to pull it out of yourself and present it to the indifferent world. You can tell when something comes from a person’s deepest emotions and fears and self ~ it hums with authenticity and moves you, when all around there are things that try to move you in a surficial way and merely serve to numb you further. I love art that takes me out of myself and my complacency. Sorry, no sympathy does that.

So, music producers, take note. And everyone else too. Fan them on Facebook, fan them on Myspace, check them out on YouTube, listen to their music, and wait with baited breath for their first self-produced album, Give a Boy a Gun, hopefully out soon.

In the meantime, enjoy their show at the Gothic Theatre in Denver.

Ebony Apples Rolling Downhill, by Red Shuttleworth

2011-06-09T07:44:00.001-06:00

Today, I wanted to highlight the work of Red Shuttleworth. He is not only a kickass poet, but also he's a great friend to and advocate for poets and writer. Red, you rock!

Ebony Apples Rolling Downhill
by Red Shuttleworth

Who's to blame for a jealous mouth?
Days of awkward blood. I scramble
up out of bed and run until I fall:
abandoned copper mines, barren coulees,
tiny bars of paper-wrapped soap
liberated from 3rd rate motels, you
weeping snot onto rock concert T-shirts....

You're like some hairless steer....
always needin' shade.

They issued a week's worth of gauze
at the county hospital. On that somber note,
you thought a gold nose stud was an answer.
The question of rust is as difficult to deliver
as it is to grasp. Yet... you do have
lovely peach skin and a beautiful
I-Sure-Am-Stumped smile.

Dusk... clumps of asphalt where
the AAA map indicates a road.
We're out of ice cubes, sugar.
It gets muggy once the car is loaded.
One method of cooling down
is to wander a small town,
saying, turn-by-turn,
Good lawn... Bad lawn.

Parked on Cemetery Road:
sunflower seeds and small talk.
Rattlers don't carry much blubber.
You either feel lukewarm or hinge-busted.
Wild Turkey ought to be in soda pop machines.
How many cadavers go into making the Northern Lights?
We stare at a dark pasture...
sold on the tactic of never opening
first class mail from out of town.

Red and Kate Shuttleworth, and their Irish Wolfhound, Wolfie, live in Washington in the Columbia Basin, not too close to Moses Lake. Their daughter Ciara is also a great poet.

Obsessive, Me?

2011-06-08T08:10:00.003-06:00

Yes, I’ll admit I’m a little obsessive. Not the wash-your-hands-till-they-bleed kind of obsessive. Not the check-the-lock-on-the-door-three-times obsessive. More when I get a problem or a task in front of me, especially when I’m in a certain mood, I can’t let it go and I worry it and obsess about it.

This makes me good at computer problem-solving, and in every job I’ve held I’ve ended up by default becoming a computer go-to person. Those engineering classes help, but it’s more about the fact that I’m a bulldog when it comes to these things and won’t unclench until I’ve figured it out.

This is not always a good trait ~ just ask my husband. I’ll sink my teeth into something and I let other things go until I’ve solved the damn thing. I once spent two nonconsecutive weeks straight trying to get an online backup to work. (Grrrrrr.)

Puzzles like Sudoku and Scrabble and crosswords don’t strike me the same way. I don’t know why. I’ve never gotten into them. They seem surficial, while the puzzle of putting together fiction or tracking down your ancestors for family history is fascinating to me. I guess it’s something about the level of complexity. I would venture that one reason people like puzzles like Sudoku is that they are a pleasant diversion and it makes you feel like you’ve accomplished something. I guess I need the complexity and engagement of the bigger problems.

But it also means I lay in bed at night and obsess sometimes, my mind whirring and whirling. It’s not as bad as it used to be when I drank a lot of coffee and kept really irregular hours, but it still happens sometimes where my mind fixates on something and I can’t let it go. It’ll often be something I’m writing or about to write. Say I’ve got a letter or email on an important topic that I know I need to write. I’ll lay there and start composing it in my head, and it’ll go round and round. I think it’s a good thing in that my mind works over the problem and fixes it and the writing comes easier, but at the time I have a heck of time falling asleep. Part of it too is I hate unresolved conflict, and that will get me going.

Can you tell it happened to me last night?

Question of the Day: So, you got an quaint mental ticks?

Writing Is Like Running

2011-06-07T08:13:00.004-06:00

Today, I thought I’d spin out a metaphor. Writing is like running because …

First of all, both writing and running are hard, damn hard. You know that old saw, you have to push yourself harder than you ever imagined when exercising? It’s so true. I didn’t know how true until I started running regularly. I try for three miles, and at first I kept expecting it to get easier. It never did. That’s because the hard part isn’t the physical part. Certainly at first it is, but soon your body gets used to it, and it’s the mental toughness that counts. Pushing yourself to run ~ er, jog ~ for 35 minutes, which is what it takes me to go three miles, takes a lot of internal pep talk.

I tell myself, you can do it! I tell myself, you’re paying it forward, and tomorrow will be easier (lies, all lies!). I tell myself, just the next lap. I count down my laps, and my favorite one is the second to last one ~ not because it’s the second to last but because on the last one I push myself as hard as I can and after the grindingly slow pace of before it’s fabulous to be flying but the anticipation of the lap before is delicious.

Writing is like this. You have to push yourself harder than you ever imagined. You have to face your inner slacker and stare him down. It’s all up to you, just like in running, and the world does not care a whit if you finish something. In fact, it works actively against you, as it would rather you were serving its needs, rather than your own. As you work those laps, those pages, you have to find little justifications and tricks to get yourself going and around the next bend. “It’s just one page” and “I’m just having fun ~ nobody will ever see it” and “if you don’t write today, it’ll be that much harder tomorrow.” It’s a combination of carrot and stick, but bottom line you have to push yourself to write every day, to get better, to try harder, to go those places emotionally that might scare you out of your wits.

Running and writing are the same because you have to practice every day if you’re going to be any good or complete any body of work. Because each day you lay off makes it that much harder to get into it. You lose muscle, both body and mind, and you get flabby. The discipline’s the thing. This is particularly important when writing a novel. It’s takes a sustained effort, like a marathon, to finish a novel, and it’s easy to get discouraged. By writing every day, you stay in the story, in the world, and it helps to pull you along, just as by running every day you’re in the habit and it’s not so hard to push yourself to do it. So developing the habit is important.

It’s good to have rituals for both. For running, I like to go about 2:30 in the afternoon. There’s hardly anyone at the gym, and I like solitude. I run on an indoor track at our university gym. I change into my clothes and I always pop in a stick of Trident green apple and pineapple gum ~ it keeps my mouth moist. I go to the alcove with the padding by the track and I stretch, the same series of stretches, and then I start right in. I count my laps on my fingers as I go, single laps on my right, groups of five laps on my left. It’s 10 laps per mile. I don’t listen to music, but I think through things as I run and often obsess about my writing. When I’m done, I walk one lap to cool down and then I stretch and do crunches, pushups, and work my arms. Then I change back.

For writing, if at all possible, I do it first thing in the morning. I try not to check my email more than a glance and do not go on the internet. I start a little free timer on my desktop for 1 hour or 2 hours. I may not look at it again, but it helps to remind myself I can’t switch to anything else unless absolutely necessary while that is running. (I even use this trick for productivity at work.) Then I edit through a chapter or portion of what I wrote the day before up to the point I stopped and then I try to write four new pages. I try to complete a scene or a chapter or something, but some days I only get through the editing part. Then, sometimes in the evening if I’m going strong I’ll try to edit through stuff, but that doesn’t happen very often.

Neither writing nor running was something I was raised to do. No one “exercised” as I was growing up because on a ranch or as a waitress you get all the exercise you need. In fact, it was slightly looked down upon as the inferior lifestyle. I mean, if you did “real work” you didn’t need to exercise. No one wrote either. Many read, but no one was a writer. To arrive at the point of running and writing, I had a long way to go. I had to get over a lot of ingrained notions. Plus, exercising and writing are sort of higher level activities. You know Maslow’s Hierarchy? They are at the self-actualization level, and when you’re poor and live on a ranch, you’re just trying to figure out how to pay the bills, and self-actualization is not something you particularly worry about.

And that’s another thing. Writing and running are about self. Some people are very self-ish, and by that I mean more than simply lacking consideration of others. I mean it in a broader sense, that they are comfortable with self and self-referentiality and being the center of things. Their orientation and life is centered on self. While there are others who spend their whole lives running away from self. I have a great friend who’s working on a memoir, and we just had a long conversation yesterday about putting self on the page and how that’s hard for those who come from a Lutheran/Scandinavian/abjure all self culture. I much admire this person’s bravery at trying to claim self by writing a memoir (and a kickass one at that). My wonderful in-laws are like this. They are anti-self and are so giving ~ to the point that they don’t allow themselves to be creative or anything that’s at all self-referential. I think there’s a balance to be struck here. If you deny self, you can become so miserly and angry that you are never happy. Likewise, if you have too much self, you’re also miserable and solipsistic and hard to live with. In order to be creative or to look after your health, you have to balance both ends.

Finally, both writing and running force you to live your life, to be in your life. I know some argue that writing is secondary and derivative, but I do not believe that at all. You have to be present in your life in order to write about it, and you have to inhabit your experiences, even if they are not spectacular, in order to write about it. You have to process them and think deeply about them. Same with running ~ you have to physically be in your body and experience the world around you. And both writing and running are essential for (my) health, emotional and physical.

Questions of the Day: What activities do you compare your writing to?

Good News

2011-06-06T14:13:00.000-06:00

You know, this publishing game runs so hot and cold. Half the time, you believe you are the worst writer on the planet and all you get back from the wide world is the sound of crickets. But sometimes ~ ah, yes, sometimes ~ some intrepid person sends back news that they accept you, that they love you, that what you write isn’t utter and total crap.

The writing game part is different and almost totally separate from the publishing part. Though it has its own exquisite pleasures and tortures.

So, I have good news! In addition to finishing the novel rewrite, I was accepted to go to Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in August, and just today I received word that a short story of mine, “Dammed,” was accepted for publication by the lovely Lee Ann Roripaugh at the South Dakota Review. (If you don’t know Lee Ann’s poetry, you should definitely check it out!)

So, thank you, thank you from the bottom of my heart for making my day, my week, my year!

Question of the Day: How do you feel when you get an acceptance?

PS The New Yorker Fiction Issue!!

Waving on the Internet

2011-06-03T07:56:00.001-06:00

I was thinking this morning about the infinite good will of people. How people bring to their dealings such patience and forgiveness and hope and camaraderie. I was thinking about the web and how it’s this huge cocktail party and all that entails. In the best sense of the word (but also in the worst I suppose). Some will scoff at it all and say it’s very shallow and meaningless, but that’s because that what it is to them.

I think that’s often what my writing is about ~ people reaching out into the void and trying to make connection. Because really, what’s the internet if not an extension of the air around us, another void through which we send out signals, trying to find a receiver?

So in the spirit of offering our gestures to the void, here’s one of the all-time greats.

Not Waving But Drowning
by Stevie Smith

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

PS I'm here, listening. Send out your signals.

Questions of the Day: Do you believe in the inherent goodness of the internet? Or that it’s inherently evil?

Anticipating Your Reader’s World

2011-06-01T13:07:00.003-06:00

Once thing I’ve really realized in this revision of the novel is that some of the best writing anticipates how people view the world. By that, I mean, when you come into a room, often it’s the smells and the sounds that you register first. Then you see the big picture as a whole. Then you focus in on movement or on what you’re looking for or what you’re most interested in, often the people in the room.

Since this is the way that people sense the world, then that’s how best to structure a paragraph, I’ve discovered. One of the errors I was constantly making in my last version of this novel was to jump around on this order and sometimes repeating myself.

The closer you can get to mirroring the way people see the world, the less they’re aware of your story as being a construct, and the more seamlessly and insidiously ~ MWA HA ~ you can reel them in.

Questions of the Day: Any recent epiphanies on how to structure a paragraph?

Well, Hello There

2011-05-31T09:30:00.003-06:00

It’s been a long and productive 5 months! Hello again. I’ve been in my novel writing cave, head down, ignoring the web almost completely. I think I could have tried to keep up on blogging, Facebook, Twitter, and everything, but then I wouldn’t have complete 162,000 words in 5 months! Two novels worth!

So here’s what I’ve been up to.

If you remember, my agent Stephanie was looking forward to a rewrite of the first novel manuscript I had first written a number of years ago, so that’s what I was working on. I kept the plot but changed the style and voice of it significantly ~ much more lush and ornate and interior and more true to the time (1885). Because it was so lush, the 100K turned into 162K, even though I cut out a significant subplot and condensed the time frame. I thought the pace was good, so we’re splitting it into two books. Can you imagine? I wrote two novels in five months! I can’t believe it myself. Now we’ll have to see if they’re any good. I’m almost completely done with both. The first is done done, and I just need to finish the final reading on the second and do the final edits. Then we'll see what Stephanie thinks and on to the next step in the process. Yay!

It’s such a different experience to read through a novel from writing it. There’s a lot of time and thinking that goes on between scenes when writing, but it goes so fast when reading it. Something that felt like there was a long time in between during the writing feels side by side in the reading. Also, there’s a magical third element in the reading. I don’t know how to explain it exactly. Certainly you have a third magical element that is the world of the book as you’re writing, but it’s all open and changing, while in reading it it’s fixed. By third magical element, I think that I mean it comes alive on the page and in your mind. Maybe a good way to explain it is, in the writing you’re inside this messy world that’s changing, with you kind of in control, kind of like life, while in the reading you’re outside it and you are not in control, the way is fixed. You suspend disbelief. You turn off the editor, if all goes well.

Another great thing: I’ve been accepted to the Bread Loaf Writers Conference! I have been trying to go for a couple of years, and I was finally accepted this year. A great honor. And I’m excited to join my great writing friend Nina McConigley.

So, you’ll be seeing more of me hanging out in the interwebs. I’ve missed you! (And thanks, so much, Pembroke, for tending the flame!)

Question of the Day: Have you had a good writing year so far?

Progress

2011-05-04T14:09:00.000-06:00

This is to let you know that I'm still making great progress on the novel rewrite ~ Yay! ~ but I'm not done yet. I estimate another month. So I plan to start blogging again about the first of June. And thanks so much to all of you who sent such sweet messages saying you miss my posts!

Talk to you soon!

Algonkian Writer Conferences

2011-05-04T14:07:00.002-06:00

Hey, just a note for all you writers who have written a novel and are just starting to send out queries. Or, if you're where I was at one point ~ you've sent out a whole bunch of queries and are getting almost no response. If you have the resources, you could sign up for an Algonkian conference. It's not about the writing so much as understanding the market. Feel free to email me with specific questions.

{added}

I wanted to add that Algonkian is about the writing too. For me, the most important thing I got from the conference was that invaluable insider information, but you spend a lot of time talking about craft as well and where your book fits in the market. It saves lots of valuable time if you consider, even before you're writing, what shape your book should take. If you are writing a thriller, it doesn't matter how much you want to include a meandering plot with lots of literary backstory ~ if you want to be traditionally published, you had better know and stick to the conventions of your genre.

While there, you do writing exercises and talk about craft and Michael gives personal feedback on your work. It's great!

This is not to discount if you are writing to follow your own whims. A very valuable undertaking. But if you wish to publish, it's a good idea to know where you fit.

Hiatus - and News!

2011-03-25T19:52:00.001-06:00

Well, it's time that I came clean and admit that this blog is going to have to go on hiatus for a bit. The reason? I'm deep in novel revisions. I'm making great progress (about 4 pages a day), but between that, my day job, and you know five-year-old twins and a husband, I find my time a bit short. So, let's not say goodbye ~ let's say see you later. Maybe about a month, as at my present pace that's when I'll have a good solid draft done. Yay!

But the news! I have a story up, one that I'm very proud of. It's called "How to Be a Man," and it's up at the wonderful online magazine NewWest.net. Check it out! I'm one of six writers who were chosen by Russell Rowland to have their work showcased. (And the lovely Jenny Shank is the books editor. Check out her book The Ringer, just out!) Another of those chosen is my friend Shann Ray, who won last year's Bread Loaf Bakeless prize for his short story collection American Masculine (out soon). I would also urge you to hang out at NewWest awhile.

Ciao ~ for now.

Progress

2011-03-11T10:46:00.001-07:00

I haven’t been showing up here or on Facebook or Twitter very much because I’ve been spending every spare moment doing a major rewrite on the novel. Back on that horse! I’m thrilled to say I’m making great progress. First I edit through yesterday’s work or from the beginning of the chapter and then I go on to write new material. I average 4 pages of new material a day. I’ve been using the desk timer, and it takes about two hours to do the pages. I’m between one-fourth and one-third of the way there. Best case scenario, I will have this draft done in a little more than two months. But, you know about those best case scenarios!

Have a fabulous, wonderful, productive weekend. I’m going to try to!

Working a Table at a Convention

2011-03-04T14:05:00.007-07:00

The last couple of days for my day job, I've been working a table at a grad fair. You'd think it'd be mind-numbingly boring, but, you know, it wasn't. It was long but not boring. I'm inherently a people-person, and now that I have a few people skills, it's great just to talk with people!

But you know the greatest thing about this experience? I thought a lot about ways to sell my book, when the time comes. Lots of dos and don'ts of working a table. It's the same things people like J.A. Konrath have been saying for a long time, but sitting there really drove it home. There was a great table over to the side that had the ROTC and AFROTC, and there were at least four people manning the table (three men and a woman) at all times and they looked like they were having fun and they had giveaways and they even walked around and introduced themselves.

So here's what I was thinking:

Try to create a party at your table.
Have cool giveaways. I was thinking of the cool cat pen you get from Hemingway's house in Key West. Also postcards of your books, book marks, any cool inexpensive toys you can think of, and so on.
Have treats or cookies.
Don't forget the kids - have stickers or something.
Talk with people as much as possible!
Have that quick pitch (one line about your book, the hook) handy, but don't necessarily lead with it.
Have a contest where people can sign up, thereby collecting their names for your email list. Or at least have a place for people to sign up.
Have other calls to action. Make sure your web address is on all handouts.
Be positioned near the door to the right - where people will naturally go first and have the most energy. If you can't be to the right, be to the left.
Have lots of flair and stuff on your table.
If you can swing t-shirts as giveaways, do it!
Have your books there to sell.
Have a cool artfully designed short story as a giveaway.
Talk to the organization who's putting the event on for ideas.
Have something that people can take to fill out and mail in to get their email addresses or a handsigned book.
Stand. If not in front of your booth, behind it. Look approachable. Do not hide behind a laptop or a book. And don't bring a friend that will distract you. You're supposed to be talking to new people, not shutting everyone out by talking to your friend. It's okay if there's a bunch of people and a party too.
Take time to mingle yourself, if you can.
It'd be cool to have a whole coordinated ad campaign with promo items and everything organized ahead of time.
A banner that hangs over the front of your table is nice too.
See if you can schedule a reading or some other event at your table.

These were just a few of the thoughts that were running through my mind as I stood there and smiled and saw what other people were doing.

Tobias Wolff and Stephanie Vaughn

2011-03-03T08:42:00.000-07:00

Tobias Wolff is just so cool in so many ways. I love his short stories, and I've just ordered his memoir. I love his voice, down to earth, engaging. And he looks so much like my father (who passed away in 1991) they could be brothers. Same lanky English looking frame, same gray mustache, glasses, same engaging expressions and gestures.

And I've only "read" (listened to) one thing of Stephanie Vaughn's but that story rocks. I wish there were more to read. Toby says there is a novel that hasn't been finished, or maybe a novel in stories, about the subject of this one story. I would love it if she finished it!! (See below - she has.)

(As a side note, it's kind of scary to think about Stephanie's life. She got derailed somehow. She has at least one beautiful gut-wrenching story in the New Yorker, and then nothing. I wonder what happened? It scares the life out me because the world has a way of taking it all from you, your writing energy, and my fear is exactly this: years go by and I don't get anything accomplished. Stephanie, if you're reading this, know that your work is so wonderful. I wish there were more of it!)

Which brings me to the reason for this post. I listened to Tobias read Stephanie's fabulous New Yorker story "Dog Heaven" again for the umpteenth time this morning. What an amazing story! It makes me cry multiple times every time. And the theme of loyalty is so subtle but so surprising. The instances she chooses to include you wouldn't think hang together, but then they do, they do so much it hurts!

You should absolutely go listen to it right now. Again and again. And then go buy both their stuff!

(I now see that Stephanie's collection Sweet Talk is out there, but out of print. I just ordered a used copy.)

Question of the Day: Do you have a favorite author that just has a little bit out there and then nothing?

Stanley Fish’s Structure of a Sentence

2011-02-28T12:20:00.003-07:00

Anyone who’s tried to teach sentence diagramming knows the horrors of figuring out the parts of a sentence. It also effectively points out that (most) teachers of English are not linguists and that the English language is ubercomplex. We can’t do it; how can we expect students to?

I’m reading How to Write a Sentence, by Stanley Fish. I’m only partway through, but he gives us such a fabulous way to look at sentences! He points out that, instead of trying to figure out the parts of speech or whatever, there is a basic sentence structure: “doer-doing-done to.” For example, “Bob collected coins” or “John hit the ball.” You can also shorten it to “doer-doing” such as “Bob collected” or “Joyce jumped.” But all the other added clauses or complexity fits or adds to this basic structure.

Isn’t this brilliant? It really is a great way to look at a sentence. Much easier than parts of speech.

Questions of the Day: Have you tried to diagram sentences recently? Were you successful?

Victim?

2011-02-25T08:59:00.001-07:00

Sort of tailing on yesterday’s post, I’ve been wondering about casting oneself as a victim. I certainly don’t consciously think of myself as a victim, and just because I acknowledge the challenging parts of life doesn’t make me a victim, I don’t think.

It’s like I tell my husband, it’s important to acknowledge where you are damaged and to try to heal that. Blame does not need to be assigned and another person made out to be evil in order for me or anyone to acknowledge how they’ve been hurt in the past. It’s part of the healing process.

I thought I’d explore that a little today.

To me, a victim is not simply someone who has had a bad thing happen to them. Certainly that’s the strict definition. But when I think of victimhood, I think of people who are perpetual victims, who cast themselves in that role ~ and I’m not blaming the victim here, just pointing out that we all have roles that we’re comfortable in life, and victim is one of those roles. People who think of themselves in this way often blame the world for everything. It’s never their fault and they don’t take control of their lives. They feel they have no power so they take no power. Plus they have a distinct poor-me attitude. Let’s call them Eeyores: “I probably wouldn’t have liked it anyway.” They might be complainers or even bitter and angry.

So where is the line between victimhood and acknowledgement? I’m not sure, exactly. On one end of the scale, there are people who don’t even acknowledge bad things happen, like Dr. Pangloss in Candide or Marge Simpson. This is definitely a coping mechanism. But I think that people who do this suppress anger and healthy reactions to things. After all, what is anger but an appropriate response to being hurt, so if you suppress it, turning it in on yourself, you’re suppressing a healthy emotional life. And suppressed anger turns into depression.

There are also angry people. They also feel no control over their lives, and the hurt is so deep and unmanageable they lash out all the time. In a way, they exhibit victimhood too, only instead of turning the anger inward like the optimists, they turn it outward and hurt other people.

Then there are people, often successful people, who are optimists and but they take control of their lives. They try to balance things, try to be proactive in their mental health, try to be healthy in all aspects of their lives. They have a much healthier balance and stable take on things. This is the person I strive to be.

So I guess the component of victimhood that makes the difference is if you try to do better, try to control things. I don’t think a person should labor under the delusion that the world is totally controllable ~ that leads to its own set of problems ~ but having goals and pushing yourself often gets the healthiest emotional results. An active management of our emotional lives.

Maybe this is just self-justification, as I’ve always tried to be proactive in managing my mental health. But I really have never thought of myself as a victim, and I don’t think talking about and working through your problems are signs of victimhood ~ quite the opposite.

And on a final note, writing is a way to take a proactive approach to past hurt, I think. One of the reasons why people become writers is that they feel they haven’t had a voice in the past, and they write to bear witness to things that went unsaid. It’s a healthy emotionally positive response. Bearing witness is not the same thing as passive, inactive, verbal wallowing and blaming.

Questions of the Day: How do you define victimhood? Do you think of yourself as a victim?

Cowboys and Outliers

2011-02-24T09:17:00.003-07:00

Book club last night. We read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. What a fabulous book! I love ideas ~ that’s why I love TED, the website that highlights ideas. In fact, Malcolm has a fabulous TED talk about spaghetti sauce that you should immediately shirk work to watch!

Malcolm’s detractors have accused him of dumbing things down, of stating the obvious, of not being “academic” enough, of logical fallacy, and of focusing too much on anecdotal evidence. To that I say pshaw! Yes, he’s not academic ~ that’s his charm. He has the amazing ability to take fascinating academic research (giving the people full credit) and then telling a great story about it, simplifying it all in such a way that it strikes most readers as, dang!, why didn’t I think of that before. Fascinating stuff. I have ordered ALL his books.

But what I wanted to talk about today is one idea out of Outliers from Chapter 6, Harlan, Kentucky, “Die Like a Man, Like Your Brother Did!” He begins the chapter by describing a family feud, much like the Hatfields and McCoys, in Harlan, Kentucky. Generation after generation, relatives shoot and kill other relatives of Howard and Turner clans. Malcolm’s contention is that this is an example of a Culture of Honor. Cultures of Honor take root in marginally fertile areas with herding societies, like Scotland and Ireland and Greece and Italy and the Basque region of Spain. The idea is that farming is a cooperative society, while herding is much more singular, and a herdsman has to worry about an animal being stolen and is under constrant threat. He’s aggressive (and it is a “he”) and he can’t be seen as weak. Reputation is everything. The people who settled this area of Kentucky are of Scotch-Irish descent, and plus they live on marginal land, thus keeping the tradition alive. (Middle Eastern countries who stone to death women who have been raped, which besmirches the family’s honor, is also a prime example. Another example is the Godfather movies, which I’ve been watching almost obsessively lately.)

What really struck me was that this was also my life, to some extent, growing up on a Western ranch. The Myth of the Cowboy is very much a Culture of Honor. All you have to do is read a Western to get that. And people who live in the West who revere the cowboy naturally take on a culture of honor. In fact, there’s a huge movement right now about ethics and values called Cowboy Ethics, based on the books of James P. Owen. I think the State of Wyoming just adopted it as law. (Here’s a video about it - very moving, but troubling too for me.) Ranching in Wyoming is a marginal proposition because we have such little rainfall and therefore so little vegetation. We’re a herding culture, as far as ranching is concerned.

I think I’ve mentioned on this blog about our family’s feud. The story as I’ve heard it goes like this: When my grandfather passed away in the 40s, my dad and my uncle became partners on the ranch. Now, the ranch could barely support one family much less two. And, the story goes, that my dad was my grandfather’s favorite and my uncle was my grandmother’s favorite, and because my grandpa died, my uncle had the run of the place. He very much wanted to be John Wayne, the Culture ~ dare I say Cult ~ of Honor. So in the 80s my family decided we wanted no part of it and tried to split the ranch. What followed was the family feud, much like the Hatfields and McCoys, between my family and my uncle’s family. No one was ever shot and killed, true, but it came close. People were beaten up, dogs were shot, people tried to run over other people with cars, things like that. My dad and my brother-in-law, I’m convinced, died because of the stress of it all (my dad from cancer and my brother-in-law from a massive heart attack). Today, none of my side of the family ranches, though my brother dabbles.

Yes, there’s a huge upside to Culture of Honor. It’s about an ideal, about being a good ethical person, about having personal pride when you don’t have much else. However, there’s a huge downside too. It justifies might makes right (see the Johnson County War) and the oppression of minorities and women and many other things. It glorifies violence. Human life is worth less than honor.

I can’t help but focus on the downside. A Culture of Honor is a man’s world, and being female means you ain’t worth spit. Women try many ways to find worth in this culture. Some submit and wholeheartedly shoulder the mantle of second-class citizen and their identity is solely derived from the men in their lives and from their children. Religion fits nicely with this vision. However, other women try to rebel. They may become promiscuous (sexual power), they may try to be men (because men innately have power and worth), they may turn themselves inside out trying to find ways to have worth. How many times have you heard the descriptions of pioneer women? Tough old broad. Mind of her own. You wouldn’t know that she wore dresses when she was young. Could give birth and then go out and feed cows. Etc., etc. Often, they’re described by their masculine traits.

(FYI There are only two women in Malcolm's book. One richest person in the world who gets ONE LINE, and then Malcolm's mother, who gets the epilogue.)

And what about if you’re a minority or if you’re gay? Another identity that fits nowhere in the puzzle.

It’s so great when you come across an explanation, a tool, that fits so well with your experience of life and explains things in a new way!

Question of the Day: Did you grow up in a Culture of Honor?

Stephen Elliott’s Bravery

2011-02-23T09:48:00.004-07:00

Stephen Elliott’s daily email from The Rumpus is fascinating and deserves a blog post all its own (sign up for it on the upper right of the home page) ~ as The Rumpus is The Bomb ~ but I wanted to expand on something Stephen said in yesterday’s email, a subject near and dear to my heart. Here's what Stephen said:

Someone said I was brave for being so open about things and I assured them I am not brave. A week ago I was in a cafe with a friend and he said he had that insecurity. Maybe from being bullied as a child. I thought, If you've never been deeply afraid, so afraid you were shaking and irrational and the strength drained from your body so you could hardly grip a pen. If you've never felt that then how could you know cowardice? And when someone told you they were a coward how could you dispute them. Unless you were able to say, I know cowardice. Unless you were able to say, I've stammered in front of an audience, been struck across the mouth without lifting my arms to defend myself, heard someone laugh in the background.

Let me back up a step. Once, when I was a kid, one of my older sisters said, “You don’t know what it’s like to really go hungry.” It’s something that has always stuck with me. I really don’t. Sure, I’ve been on diets, but I’ve never truly been without food, and I don’t think she has either, really. The point is that I’ve never lived where there is true famine or so poorly that I didn’t have access to food. That’s something I’ll never truly know.

That has to change you, truly starving, in a way that is irreversible. You take on a terrible knowledge about the uncertainty of the world that you can't know otherwise. Your body asserts itself and, I imagine, takes over your whole being. It’s one thing if you’re a religious asthete and give up food for those reasons ~ I think denying yourself in these circumstances is a badge of courage, part of the point of it all. However, if say you’re a breastfeeding mother and you can’t get enough sustenance to produce enough milk that your baby starves. My god. That brings with it a horrible kind of knowledge about humanity and about mortality. How can you live through something like that and still believe in the good in people and in the world? It reduces someone to a certain type of emotional poverty and poverty of hope.

I like the line in the above quote, “If you've never been deeply afraid, so afraid you were shaking and irrational and the strength drained from your body so you could hardly grip a pen. If you've never felt that then how could you know cowardice?” It’s easy to be brave when you’ve never really been challenged, and it’s also really easy to pass snap surficial judgment on people, which is much more about you than it is about them. As Stephen says, you cannot know courage until you’ve been so afraid your body has rebelled. (The only comparable thing in my life has probably been my fear of flying, where I’m convinced I’m going to die.)

So, like the above quote, how can you possibly think to know hunger if you’ve never been hungry, really truly hungry?

Having said that, I’d like also to assert the power of imagination. Even if you haven’t felt these things, you can imagine them and extrapolate from your own experiences. I think there’s value in that. Because what’s the opposite? Living comfortably in your own little world and passing judgment on others? And yes I do think it takes a certain amount of courage to reach beyond your comfort zone to try to imagine what life is like for other people, sometimes a lot of courage.

Writing about experiences requires this imagination. I’ve never been a man, but I try really hard to make my male characters authentic. That’s where the power of imagination comes in. Some things I’m better at than others, as are all writers, and I’ve been told I get some things more right than others. But it’s worth the effort even in the hard things, the points of view foreign to you, to try to bridge that gap. What’s the alternative? Books about you and only you?

And if these experiences are truly your own, something you know, you’ll be even more convincing in the telling of it, and you’ll let other people know what it’s like to truly be brave, to truly be hungry.

Question of the Day: Do you allow yourself to range widely from your own experience?

An Interesting Cogitation on Art

2011-02-22T09:38:00.000-07:00

An interesting cogitation on art with a capital A by photographer Erin Sparler. I love her breaking it down into concept, craftmanship, and innovation. In other words, it has to be a good concept well done with enough of the new and enough of the old. No small task.

I'm going to have to think how this applies to writing, because it certainly does. Is there something I think has been left out? Hmmm ...

Questions of the Day: What do you think makes art?

Putting Yourself on the Page

2011-02-21T11:19:00.007-07:00

I thought of one after another idea for a blog post this morning, and then rejected them all. So I returned, as I always do, to the running list of possible topics I keep adding to. It’s funny ~ this list is like the running list of ideas for short stories and novels I keep. Some ideas are timeless and I always remember them, but some fade away. When I wrote the idea down, it seemed really original and interesting, but when I look back on it, I think, what was it about that? I don’t even remember. That’s why I sometimes lament lost ideas. If I don’t strike when it’s hot, it might go away. But this comforts me when I lose an idea because I don’t write it down: If it’s a good idea, a lasting idea, it’ll come back to me.

The idea I chose from my list is this great disclaimer from the bottom of an email I saw recently:

This e-mail is a natural product. The slight variations in spelling and grammar enhance its individual character and beauty and in no way are to be considered flaws or defects nor should it be used to judge the intelligence of the sender in any adverse manner.

I love this! It’s witty and fun and shows the character of the sender. It personalized the sender ~ as opposed to depersonalizes, something we often try to do in "objective" writing, especially professional writing.

It strikes me that that’s often what we’re trying to do in fiction writing. We’re trying to put the person in our writing, be it ourselves or our characters. Another word for characterization. Periodically, I help my brilliant engineer brother with his reports and proposals, and he does the same thing. He tries to make the dry parts human, to connect on a personal as well as a professional objective level. And that’s one of the secrets to his success, his ability to relate to people and to bring people together into teams (against the engineering stereotype).

Yes, we’re trying to put character on the page, but an even broader thing, a thing we don’t talk about much, is we’re trying to put ourselves on the page. I’m not talking strictly memoir. I’m saying, it’s as if we’re at a big dinner party and we’re trying to be a good and amusing guest. Our stories represent us in the dinner party that is the reading world, and we need to be good guests.

I read this recently on a New York Times book review:

Simply, [taste is] the extent to which we take pleasure in the company of the author — or rather, a facsimile thereof, a phantom version composed of and subsisting on words alone.

It’s so true. You’ve all read books, I’m sure, where you’ve thought, I really would not like to hang out with this person. You’ve also read books where you’d give your eye teeth to hang with the author for only 30 seconds - and you’ve hung out in a long line just to have a moment’s glance from that person, maybe an autograph. Then there’s the person who appears one way on the page, but then you find out what a horrible person they are in real life.

I always put something a little odd and interesting in my bios. I think you need the regular thing, published in such and such, but you’re also trying to be interesting, so I’ll put in a line like, “Having been raised on a ranch, Tamara appreciates indoor plumbing,” or something else odd.

I’m struggling with this is a slightly different form right now: I’m trying to balance third person limited point of view with a stronger narrator than I’m used to. So there’s layer upon layer. There’s this character’s point of view and then that character’s, then there’s the narrator’s, and then there’s me, the author, out in real space. Quite a balancing act.

Then there’s the differentiation between being likable and being interesting and compelling. You don’t want all your characters to be likable. They’ll come across as namby pamby people pleasers. Some of them can be, but they should actually have less likable traits, if they’re going to come across as full characters. What I puzzle about a lot is not so much likability but how to make them compelling. What makes the “best” characterization? They can’t have all the traits of a real person because a real person is too complex, but they can’t be a stereotype either (main characters, that is).

And you as the author are often equated with your main character. Sometimes this is a fair comparison, and if this is the case, most people want to be liked and don’t want to show their warts. You want to be that good guest at the party. But you have to resist this urge with your characters to some extent or it’ll come across flat.

Representation on all levels is a very complex issue, one particularly difficult for people-pleasers like me.

Questions of the Day: Are you of the interesting-dinner-guest school? Or of the art-comes-first-please-people-later school?

A Great Line

2011-02-18T11:51:00.003-07:00

Now here's a sentence:

These footnotes are possibly the dullest ever written.

That's saying something. From an interesting review of Elizabeth Bishop's collected letters to the New Yorker and other related books on the New York Times.

Kevin Canty’s Everything

2011-02-16T07:10:00.001-07:00

Oh my gosh. I’ve had Kevin Canty’s Everything setting on my bookshelf for a long time, and I picked it up last night. Wow. It immediately drew me in. It’s got both that Western sparity that I love (a la Hemingway and McCarthy and Tom McGuane) but it’s also lush in interiority and subtle keen-eyed real-to-life detail and humanity. And the dialog is spot on, spot on. It’s unornamented but barbed as hell. Kevin, you rock! Here’s the beginning, for your reading pleasure.

The fifth of July, they went down to the river, RL and June, sat on the rocks with a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red and talked about Taylor. The fifth of July was Taylor's birthday and they did this every year. He would have been fifty. RL had been his boyhood friend and June was married to him. He'd been dead eleven years.

This side channel used to be one of Taylor's favorite fishing spots, but five or six years before, a beer distributor from Sacramento had built a twenty-room log home right on the bank and then drove a Cat D6 into the river and piled up a wing dam, to keep his house from falling into the drink. This pushed all the current out of the side channel and into the main river. A few last big fish lurked down deep in the channel but mainly it was suckers. Still, it was a pretty spot to sit on a long evening, the shade of the tall cottonwoods slowly deepening into green water. A pretty spot if you turned away from the log palazzo. They sat on the rocks and watched the water trickle by, the cool splash of river water over gravel.

I wish . . . said June.

You wish for what? RL asked her.

I wish I had a cigarette, she said, and laughed. June smoked exactly one day a year, and this was the day. RL got one out, gave it to her, lit it. He was smoking a cigar himself. He had bought the pack specially for her. The two of them stared at the smoke as it curled through the still air. RL could just barely hear the trucks passing on the interstate, a mile away. The sound always made him lonely, the thought of all that highway, all that American night out there.

These anniversaries, said June. They keep sneaking up on me. He's been gone, now, longer than I ever knew him.

That's not right.

No, I did the math last night. He was twenty-eight when I met him. twenty-eight to thirty-nine, thirty-nine to fifty. It doesn't seem like that long but it is.

Long time gone, said RL. I still, sometimes — I feel like I'm going to walk around a corner and see him on the sidewalk. You know, just sitting around the house, and I think, maybe I'll give Taylor a call, see if he wants to go grab a beer. Down at the Mo Club. See if I can borrow his pickup.

It's not like that for me, said June. Not anymore.

She reached for the square bottle of whiskey and took a demure pull on it. RL admired the workings of her throat, the little hollow at the base of her neck, her fine collarbone. She was younger than Taylor and him and still quite a good-looking girl.

I've been going to church again lately, she said.

Get the hell out of here.

I'm not kidding. Sunday morning ten o'clock.

Which one?

June blushed lightly. She was one of those transparent blondes where every feeling showed on her skin, pale or passionate. In tears she turned a blotchy red. RL had seen her in tears, not often.

I'm going to the Catholic one, said June. Weird, I know. A couple of the girls from work got me going there.

They got you all signed up? Human sacrifice in the basement and everything?

I think they quit doing that.

That's not what I hear.

It's safe to say that you would hate it, June said. I mean, you would hate even the good parts, which are all about doing good things and being nice to people in Central America and so on. They're so [expletive] earnest! But, you know, that's what I like about them.

You've always had an earnest streak.

And you've always been a cynical bastard.

With a heart as big as the great outdoors, RL said. That's me.

No, June said. That's somebody else.

Faith

2011-02-15T12:00:00.000-07:00

Just an observation today. Have you thought about how much faith it takes to begin a writing endeavor? Or a scene or a paragraph or even a sentence? I’m not a traditionally religious person, but in this I believe.

You’re stepping off a ledge into thin air when you embark on your task. You have to believe that the process works, as it always has, and will not fail you. You need faith in your muse or higher power and the goddess or whatever you call it, the source of your creativity. You have to believe that what you write has worth and that maybe it might find an audience. You have to believe that writing makes a difference in the world. Above all else, you have to believe in yourself ~ writing is selfish in the best and worst senses of the term.

Maybe another way to look at is as trust. You have to trust the world and the process and yourself and your audience.

This is why I sometimes tell other writers: “Keep the faith, man.”

Question of the Day: How do you "keep the faith"?

Let’s Be Hard on Ourselves, Shall We?

2011-02-14T12:12:00.001-07:00

I’m recovering from another cold that took me to my knees on Saturday. My husband observed, “Why do you always get a cold right before you’re scheduled to have a writing weekend?” Why indeed?

But, we must rise above these things, mustn’t we?

Off and on, I’ve been watching episodes of the A&E show Heavy, about morbidly obese people who make the commitment to change their lives. It actually has quite a lot in common with A&E’s show Intervention. It’s about addiction and how we sabotage ourselves in the name of escape.

The number one thing that strikes me about these shows is how much these people’s lives have in common. Of course, these shows are scripted like all reality shows, so there’s a certain amount of that, but in reality, there are common patterns. A huge trauma. Family enablers. People whose coping mechanisms are very destructive.

The other thing that strikes me is that it’s damn hard to recover. Damn hard. It often takes other people confronting the person, holding them accountable in a new way. The person has to be broken down, sort of like they are in the military, in order to be built back up. They have to be confronted with the severity of their problems and coping mechanisms. The people have setbacks, but they keep fighting.

For example, there’s the story of Travis. During the course of the 6-month training, his wife gives birth to a second son, he has to get a job, his house is broken into, his possessions get flooded out, yet he still looses 98 lbs. He started at 431.2 lbs and gets down to 333.0 lbs. Don’t you just want to stand up a cheer?! Don’t you just admire the heck out him?

Writing is a lot like dieting actually. I mean long-term writing, like writing a novel or trying for long-term success. The major decision (“I am going to lose weight” or “I am going to write a novel”) is the easy part. The hard part is the small everyday decisions that face you every hour every minute of the day. “I’m stressed right now ~ do I give in to the cravings to numb myself with food the way I’ve always done? Or do I stay strong and make the healthy choice?” “I have ten things to do for work and for the kids and, oh, don’t forget my husband ~ do I do all that and not write at all today?”

Writing and dieting have the same sorts of out-there esoteric rewards. Why write a novel? Because I want to have the satisfaction of completing it, because I want fame and fortune, because I know I was meant to. Why diet? Because it’ll make me feel better, because I’ll be more attractive, because I’ll have the satisfaction of completing something hard. See what I mean?

Certainly, I get more day-to-day reward from writing. I mean, when I’m in my writing, I love it! It’s the getting started that’s the hard part and takes the same sort of willpower as dieting.

But I’m going to take courage from the example of Travis and so many others like him who decide to confront those demons and to be hard on themselves and to just do it, damn it!

Questions of the Day: Complete the sentence, “Writing is …”

Back on that Horse

2011-02-11T11:41:00.001-07:00

Well, I'm writing again. Let me say that again. I'm writing fiction again!!! Yay!

Last night I read through what I'd written in my wonderful headlong rush, and it was long enough ago that I could read it with some objectivity. You know what? I felt like I was in the hands of someone who knew what they were doing. I felt pulled along by a good strong current, with enough eddies and digressions that the story had depth.

Maybe I'm not half bad. :-)

Happy writing!

Courage

2011-02-10T10:10:00.005-07:00

I don’t usually write about politics, and I won’t today, not directly. What I want to talk about is courage.

What we do, us writers, takes a lot of courage. It obviously doesn’t take any special bravery to physically sit down at a desk and type something in. No, I’m talking emotional bravery, commitment to your art, the courage of your convictions. And if you want your stuff to be any good, you have to push even more, beyond the fear, and lay yourself naked and defenseless on the page. The best work is when you write about what makes you nervous, what you’re ashamed of, your deepest darkest secrets. As Steve Almond says, “Run screaming toward the pain.”

This is something I try to do with all my writing. I have to say, I don’t generally worry about what people think, even my mom. (Hi, Mom!) I write the subjects that fascinate me and tweak me. However, the courage that often challenges me is the emotional courage of confronting things inside me. Those really hard things. Like writing about when we lost our first baby in utero at six months. It took a long time and lots of writers block to get to that one. Finally I just had to sit down and write as if I were talking through an outline. That’s the only way I could get started. It’s things like this, the painful things, that challenge me the most.

Why am I writing about this? A report about the Wyoming Legislature by Rachel Maddow. As I’m sure you know, Wyoming is conservative and republican, and I’m a liberal democrat. So I have some differences of opinion with some of my fellow citizens. But this report made me so proud to be a Wyomingite!

This story is not going to turn out the way you expect it, by the way. I won't summarize it. I'll let you go watch it.

Whether you’re republican or democrat, whether you’re for or against abortion, these legislators’ courage to speak (personal) truth to power is amazing. I mean, Rep. Sue Wallis’s courage to tell her own personal story ON THE FLOOR of the Wyoming House.

Oh, and there’s that legislator (Texas, was it?) that stood and told his story in order to encourage gay youths. I can’t seem to find it online at the moment. Such courage. (I found it. Fort Worth City Councilman Joel Burns.)

I’m going to remember these every time I’m sniveling in my cups.

Question of the Day: Who else do you know who’s had such courage?

Appearances vs. “Reality”

2011-02-08T11:18:00.003-07:00

My wonderful mother-in-law Jean has been visiting all week. She was going to be helping look after the kids while I was at AWP, but we got to visit instead. She’s a book fan-atic from way back, and she belongs to at least two book clubs, so we have a grand time talking books and authors.

She was telling me about David Pelzer’s A Child Called It. I hadn’t read it. It’s a memoir about David’s childhood. His mother singled him out from his brothers for significant abuse (making him eating feces and puke, making him drink ammonia, burning him, and much more). Really rough stuff.

As an aside, I told Mom that after having kids I couldn’t stand to read these horrible things any more. It just tears me up too much. This may be lack of courage on my part ~ I know the world’s a horrible place sometimes, but being so starkly reminded of it is hard. This is the reason I hardly ever read the newspaper any more.

Anyway, Mom and I were looking David Pelzer up on the web and came across the controversy surrounding the book. The parents are dead, and one brother claims it never happened and another claims it did and once David was taken away to foster care the mother focused on this other brother, who is now coming out with his own memoir. Another part of the controversy is that people claim that David made it up almost entirely and only for money (a la the unscrupulous James Frey).

One thing that struck me was the vehemence of some of his detractors. It was as if they felt personally betrayed by David, that he had said something that offended them way beyond the claims of a mere book. The very act of reading the book violated them in some way. Often, they would point out things that seemed factually incorrect, such as that David could remember some things, but he couldn’t remember exactly what his mom looked like. Well, if I had a mom that was that horrible, I’d forget as much about her as I could. They pointed out a bunch of other things. It was as if they so wanted the world to be black and white, not the complex thing that it is. Plus, it is a huge case of blaming the victim ~ which is very very wrong. So what if both are true: that David stretched things just a bit and he is good at self-promotion yet he was horribly abused as well?

I also read a New York Times review of the memoir called A Box of Darkness by Sally Ryder Brady. It’s about Sally and her husband Upton, who was a publishing executive and was also closeted and gay but had affairs. Much like the Pelzer memoir, what went on within the home was very different from outward appearances. There was the life of the family and then what the world saw. And not only that, each member of the family saw family life differently.

Which brings me to: You just don’t know what goes on in a family. Just because someone doesn’t look like an abuser ~ and what does an abuser look like, exactly? ~ doesn’t mean they aren’t. (Which reminds me of Mary Gaitskill’s wonderful story in this week’s New Yorker). Just as you don't know what goes on in a family, you never know what’s going on inside someone either.

And that’s why I’m a writer.

Questions of the Day: Where’s the line of truth and fiction for you in memoir?

Slogging

2011-02-07T09:12:00.001-07:00

I ended up not going to AWP, mostly because I didn’t want to be stranded in the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport for the duration. It was 61 degrees below zero with wind chill here last Wednesday.

Okay, on one hand, I’d like to totally ignore the fact that I’ve slipped on this blog and my writing and just plunge merrily in as if nothing happened. (I take my responsibilities in these areas seriously, so I feel bad that I haven’t been true to my word.) However, maybe it helps someone if I talk about these things, even if it feels whiney and unbecoming and all too revealing.

So I get up and go about my day thinking, okay, today’s the day I’m going to pull out of this. Then something happens ~ I get a bunch of assignments at work or the kids have another scheduled thingy or I think about all the stuff I’m supposed to do and all the emotional debts I have to pay and I just can’t face it. It’s as if, rather than the usual bouncy and tough vulcanized rubber, my supporting structures are brittle cindered paper, ready to be crushed at the slightest puff of breeze. I’m just having a hard time bouncing back.

I suppose it’s depression but I can’t pinpoint the exact reason why. It’s like the character from the movie Grand Canyon says about being hysterical: “The lucky ones feel that way. The rest of the people ARE hysterical twenty four hours a day.” And it feels really shameful to say this.

So what am I doing about it? Baby steps. I’m taking the behaviorist’s approach ~ changing my behavior in the hopes that it’ll change my mood. I’m trying to be healthy by eating right and starting to run again. I’m doing this blog, I’m writing, I’m trying to engage. I keep going on the hope that the act of smiling will help me to feel like smiling.

Sorry to be such a bummer, folks. Will think of an insightful and thought-provoking post tomorrow.

Questions of the Day: What do you do to pull yourself out of this sucking maw? Or maybe you just have the good graces not to talk about it. *sigh*

Pat Conroy's Why I Write

2011-01-31T10:01:00.001-07:00

Sorry for the blog silence. I could offer excuses, but they would be lame, so let's just say I'll mend my ways! Maybe not this week, however, as I'm headed to AWP in Washington, D.C. I'm very excited! Expect a full report when I get back.

Today, I thought I'd offer you a little fabulous Pat Conroy from his book My Reading Life (via Gotham).

Some American writers are meaner than serial killers, but far more articulate ...

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear. If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable. But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent. When you come close to succeeding, when the words pour out of you just right, you understand that these sentences are all part of a river flowing out of your own distant, hidden ranges, and all words become the dissolving snow that feeds your mountain streams forever. The language locks itself in the icy slopes of our own high passes, and it is up to us, the writers, to melt the glaciers within us. When these glaciers break off, we get to call them novels, the changelings of our burning spirits, our life’s work.

Hibernation and Resilience

2011-01-24T16:07:00.002-07:00

I feel like I’ve been in hibernation. Other than the heavenly two weeks plus where I wrote 90 pages, I’ve been struggling with my writing productivity, and I haven’t felt I had the emotional/extra energy to do much online. Hence the bit of blog silence and my absence from Facebook and Twitter.

I’m not quite sure what happened. I was going great guns, and then I sort of hit the skids. A bit of depression maybe or something. The two weeks of writing certainly helped, but then I got a cold and fell right out of it again.

As I was getting my hair done today ~ much overdue, as I was starting to look a bit like Ted Kazynski ~ I came across an article about resilience. In it was the great Japanese proverb, if you fall down seven times, get up eight. When I read it, I thought, yeah. Yeah! That I can can do. Once again, the pigheadedness saves the day.

It also said something about having a bit of adversity as a child is a good thing. It inoculates you a bit against giving up later in life. Though it did say you don’t want too much adversity early, to where you’re so beaten down you don’t even allow yourself to dream.

It mentioned scientific studies on rats who received electric shocks and how much electric shocks they received until they didn’t even try to avoid it. The article said that the resilient have some combination of genes that make you resilient but then they’re not getting pounded down too severely. It also said that it helps to have social or family support.

I guess one thing I do have is resilience. Whether it’s from early “inoculation” or from a long line of ancestors who were pigheaded or because I have a great support system. Or maybe it’s just because I’m a bit manic depressive and that pendulum inevitably swings the other way! Either way, it helps me to think that if I just have faith in “the process,” it’ll all turn out all right.

So, I think I’m ready to make some (more) great progress on novel!

Questions of the Day: How’s your resilience? Have you gotten knocked down recently?

You Go!

2011-01-20T11:32:00.001-07:00

Today, I just wanted to say that I believe in you. All you have to do is sit down and write one word and then another, and then it will happen!

"Meditation on a Grapefruit"

2011-01-19T13:26:00.001-07:00

Today, a lovely poem by the lovely and great Craig Arnold. God, we miss him.

Meditation on a Grapefruit

To wake when all is possible
before the agitations of the day
have gripped you
          To come to the kitchen
and peel a little basketball
for breakfast
          To tear the husk
like cotton padding           a cloud of oil
misting out of its pinprick pores
clean and sharp as pepper
          To ease
each pale pink section out of its case
so carefully           without breaking
a single pearly cell
          To slide each piece
into a cold blue china bowl
the juice pooling           until the whole
fruit is divided from its skin
and only then to eat
          so sweet
                    a discipline
precisely pointless           a devout
involvement of the hands and senses
a pause           a little emptiness

each year harder to live within
each year harder to live without

Intervention

2011-01-18T15:04:00.006-07:00

I had yesterday off from work. As you know it was Martin Luther King day (or Equality Day). I am ashamed to say that, rather than doing something befitting the occasion, I spent it flipping between episodes of The Tudors and Intervention. Oddly addicting, both.

Watching Intervention is like watching a train wreck. Very compelling, inherently dramatic, soul wrenching. Not just the addict but the whole family is hitting rock bottom, and you’re there to watch it.

Like anything ~ be it sitcom, reality show, or a profile from a particular magazine ~ there’s a set script that Intervention follows. They film under the pretense of doing a documentary about addiction. We meet the family and hear about the horrible incident or incidents that caused this particular person to become addicted. The family all enables. The interventionist gives them a talking-to to make them realize the seriousness of the situation and then they stage the intervention. Then we find out how they did in a sentence or two at the end. They almost always are clean and sober.

I do not say this in any way to minimize the heart-wrenching situation the family is in nor the depth of everyone’s pain. But, like, say, VH1’s Behind the Music or Law and Order, there is a plot structure that each episode follows. This both seems sad ~ these are lives, after all, fit into this little box ~ but also heartens me to think that humanity is humanity the world over and we have so much in common.

But what really struck me was the beauty of these people, everyone in the family. Maybe it was just my mindset and on another day it would make me feel how ugly people are ~ like, say, an episode of Cops. But as I was watching, even the tormented addict fighting for all she was worth to keep things the same was beautiful to the point it made me teary, like when I think about the sensitive young man my husband was when he was a teenager (and still is).

It just makes me think of the truth in that old saw, “I fall onto the thorns of life, I bleed.”

Everyone in the family has his or her role. Often one parent is an enabler and the other is absent, one way or another. Often, there’s one sibling who is grounded and really the voice of reason, but he or she gets shouted down. In the whirling spinning center of it all is the addict. I don’t blame them at all, though ~ in some ways, they are the emblem of the family’s sickness. They keep the family together as much as anyone else. They allow others in the family to blame them and not face their own demons.

Then, this morning, I drove an hour and a half to a dentist’s appointment in Fort Collins. Up on top of the pass between Laramie and Cheyenne, there were ground blizzards and long stretches of ice. On the way back, I stopped to help a young woman named Laura who had spun out and ended up backwards in the borrow ditch. We were sitting in my car talking when the very nice man in the snow plow stopped to suggest that, since people were on their way to help, that the woman should sit in her car and I should continue on, as he said he’d seen more than once another car come along, lose control, and sideswipe the parked car that was helping. So I gave the gal my number and continued on.

What I thought about after that was that how we put ourselves in danger when we help people and how sometimes we aren’t really helping, just enabling people. I don’t mean to say I regret stopping to help the young woman ~ in Wyoming, especially in winter, you just gotta ~ but it did get me thinking about how life throws you storms and you cling to one another for help and sometimes you save someone and sometimes you do more harm than good. And boundaries ~ I thought a lot about boundaries and the strength it takes to be the one who stands up and says no.

Questions of the Day: What do you think of “reality” television? Which prompts me to ask the leading question: isn’t it another form of us trying to impose narrative, to make order out of the chaos of the world?

The BoDeans

2011-01-14T09:07:00.012-07:00

Don't you love it when you come across artists you hadn't known about before and they blow you away with their skill? How you immediately fall deeply and passionately in love and you want to own or experience everything they've ever done?

Well, I've just discovered the BoDeans. The way they modulate their voices, their exquisite harmonies, the fact that they're from Waukesha, Wisconsin, and they write their own songs, the fact that the lead singers seem to actually like each other and enjoy each other's company, their kickass music. Just gives me the chills.

This morning, as we were getting ready for work, we queued up "Runaway" on the computer, and my little girl wrapped her arms around her daddy's neck and they danced all the way around the living room and kitchen.

So, for your Friday's moment of awe, here's the BoDeans live from Studio X singing "Stay."

Questions of the Day: Who recently has just knocked your socks off, whether they sing or write or paint or sew or cook?