Category: Writing

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“Grace”

I just sent my corrected page proofs back to Turning Point Books, along with an updated photo (now on this blog — this is the poet me, not the executive director me any longer) and the credit for David’s painting which will be on the cover.

One of the first times David and I got together he had a stack of his paintings in the back of his car, in the middle of moving them to his apartment.  He brought several in to show me, and we sat on the coffee table, facing the couch where he propped the paintings so I could see them.  When he showed me the painting above, I looked at it for a moment, then looked at David and said, “It reminds me of me.”

“I know,” he said.  “The title is ‘Grace’.”  He had painted it 2 years before.

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Petrified Stone

I’ve been keeping up with the River of Stones, noticing at least one thing fully each day, then writing down whatever comes from that attention.  A number of those small stones have been on this blog, others I’ve tweeted.  Today’s moment of attention came from David.  He just walked into my study, where I’m working on finishing the novel I got almost finished during NaNoWriMo.  One of the benefits of doing NaNoWriMo, the website tells you, is being able to go to parties and say, “I wrote a novel,” rather than, “I’ve always wanted to write a novel.”  I don’t want to have to say, “I wrote most of a novel, then never finished.”

My writing attention has been more drawn to poetry lately, maybe in part by the ever-complicated life we seem to be living, the constant coming and going of visiting family, being with aging, and dying, parents and ailing in-laws, balancing errands and connecting with friends, exercise and being outdoors and creative pursuits.  Poetry works well in short spells of time, something Maxine Kumin told me when Adrienne was a baby, and I approached her at a reading, complaining about how little time I now had to write, now that I had a baby.  “But poetry is perfect for that,” she said.  “You can take small snatches of time and focus in.”  Now I have a lovely blurb from her for my book (more about that coming soon, page proofs are about to go back to Turning Point Books and I’m getting a book launch and readings scheduled), and here I am, ADDing it again, writing about all the distractions in my life as I’m distracted from working on the novel.  I even got distracted from writing this blog post and looked for a roast chicken recipe online because I’m making roast chicken for dinner with friends tonight.

Back to the novel for a minute, then to the small stone.  I think there may be some very good bits in this novel and I want to finish this first draft, so I can put it aside for a few months, then come back to it with fresh eyes.  In the meantime, I’m starting to pull together poems for my next volume of poetry, and am planning a whole Paris Chapter, because in a week we’ll be on our way there (and more about that to come also).  And I’m also starting to edit An Island Journal, a memoir I wrote three years ago and have done basically nothing with since.

So, what is this petrified stone?  David brought this to me in the palm of his hand.  He’s sorting through papers from his parents’ safety deposit box, which we emptied and closed before we left Lancaster earlier this week.  Looking like long sticks of thick straw, these are actually dried out old rubber bands, petrified into the shape they held around some stacks of papers from the box.  They could easily be 50 years old.  My small stone?  Appreciation for rubber bands, in all their usefulness, along with recognition that at some point rubber bands get old and dry and useless.  As a couple lines from a poem in The Truth About Death say:

I’m the living yin yang, the love, the quiver
in the middle, it will work or it won’t.

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A River of Stones

Thanks to A Woodland Rose, a sister-haiku-writer-blogger I follow, for turning me on to this January writing and being focus.  The River of Stones, created by Writing Our Way Home, invites us to focus fully and appreciatively on one small, or large, aspect of each day, and write about it.  Write it in your notebooks, your blogs, on Facebook or Twitter.  Just appreciate and write.  The simple instructions: 1. Notice something properly every day during January; 2. Write it down.  I can do that.

My small stone for today:  The avocado in my refrigerator is dark green, skin pebbled, ripe and ready to be eaten.

David and I both went out to exercise this morning.  I ran around Jenness Pond with Anne and Betsy.  David walked one side of the Pond and back.  It’s such a glorious day — bright sun, mild air, blue sky with grand white coulds — we decided we need even more time outside.  We’re going to the coast to walk along the ocean.  I’ll be thinking of that avocado, waiting for me at home to be eaten.  Yes, the New Year is a lovely river of stones so far.

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The King Of Honduras

It’s a long story, how I came by the title, The Kind Of Honduras, for my novel.  In fact, I now know the story is well over 50,000 words.  I’m a proud NaNoWriMo Winner!

I just scrambled and uploaded the 50,277 words of my novel so far, and I think I probably have at least another 20,000 to go before I finish this story.  But the brilliant people at the Office of Letters and Light, who created National Novel Writing Month, inspired me to get my butt in the chair at my desk for “this wild write-a-thon: 30 days of high-velocity, pedal-to-the-metal noveling,” and write the 50,000 words required to be a “winner.”

Yes, I have two long flights, to Moscow and back, to thank for 16,000 of those words.  But all the rest happened during a month when I did a half marathon, hiked numerous times, visited with many friends and lots of family, presented at a national conference, paid bills, grocery shopped, did laundry, cooked dinner, stacked wood (okay, David mostly did that), put my garden to bed for the winter, trimmed my perennials, mowed the lawn for the last time, made several batches of apple sauce, hosted 19 for Thanksgiving, and had our annual bonfire.  And I have four days to spare!

So here’s my next commitment, even though the month coming up is even busier than this one was.  I’m going to finish the first draft of The King Of Honduras by the end of December.  Expect regular updates.  If you don’t see any, ask.  I’m going to be able to go to parties next year and say (this is one of the motivators on the NaNoWriMo website), not that I’ve always wanted to write a novel, but that “I wrote a novel.”  It may not be any good, but first I have to get it written to figure that part out.

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Moscow

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Friday night I hiked up Neville Peak in Espom with the full moon lighting our trail up, even with clouds blowing past and over the moon.  When the racing clouds did open to clear sky, the moon was as bright as a spotlight shining on us in the dark woods.  At the top we could see the darkness of snow showers coming at us across the valley below, then spitting at our faces.

Yesterday afternoon I got on a plane to Moscow, and today I hiked through the Kremlin and across Red Square, again in spitting snow.  The grandeur and glory and energy of a great city swirled around me, and the sharp wind cut into my clothes, reminding me of the coming winter.  For now, I’m contemplating a hot meal, a full night’s sleep in a warm bed, and two days of hopefully interesting and productive meetings starting tomorrow.

And I’m up to 25,691 word on my NaNo!  Nothing like a long plane ride to get some writing done.

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Warm November

I went running in a short sleeve shirt this morning.  I mowed the lawn in a tank top and shorts yesterday.  As I ran, looking out across mist shrouded fields, passing my neighbor’s colonial breed of cows grazing with their bells gently ringing, I thought about another poem from The Truth About Death.  While this poem was written five years ago next month, I thought it fitting for this morning.  It was published the following year in The Sun.  If you’ve never read The Sun, I strongly suggest you check it out.  It’s a fabulous magazine, not just because they took four poems from my manuscript, but also because the writing is excellent, the politics are proudly humanistic and focused on the worth and potential of every individual, and all of us as a community of connected people, and there is a wonderful section each month full of short pieces by readers.

Warm December

Some days I don’t have enough time to cry,
and then I miss it. A beaded curtain of rain
hangs from the porch roof; the Johnsons
have Christmas lights up. This week
I’ve been seeing you in the waiting room
in a wheelchair: exhausted, willing your blood
to behave, to qualify for a clinical trial,
any guinea pig treatment. By then
you were a withered man. If you were alive
we would go kayaking this weekend,
just to say we’d done it in December.
Last November we calculated how many times
we’d made love. Now there is thunder.

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NaNoWriMo

I’m doing it — NaNoWriMo.  National Novel Writing Month.  50,000 words in the 30 days of November. “NaNoWriMo is run by a tiny but mighty nonprofit called the Office of Letters and Light,” as they say on their website.  OLL is dedicated to promoting creativity among children and adults by creating writing events.  And have they ever succeeded with NaNoWriMo.  Started 13 years ago, they now have so many participants their 23 servers couldn’t keep up with all the people signing on just before November 1 this year.   Last year “when NaNoWriMo wrapped at November’s end, 200,530 participants had written 2,872,682,109 words, with 37,479 winners blowing through the 50,000-word goal. The staff deemed it an outrageous success, and wasted no time before congregating in a boardroom with bagels aplenty to strategically plan the upcoming year.”

So, this year I’m on board.  I’m letting you know, because you’re probably going to be hearing less from me this month, as most of my writing energy is going into this “thirty days and nights of literary abandon.”  When I checked into the website on Saturday night, after dinner with friends,  there were over 72,000 people online.  Yes, that’s 72,000 people spending at least some of their Saturday night writing a novel in a month.

One thing I’ve learned is that I can write quite fast (well, I already knew that) when I’m not worrying much about how the story is hanging together — up to 1,500 words in an hour.  I’m just telling the story and seeing where it goes.  At 12,574 words, I’m in good shape to get to the 50,000 word mark by midnight on November 30.  And I have an hour right now before I go meet a friend for dinner, and my word count today so far is below 100, so here I go.  NaNo time.

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Crossing Art Boundaries

My friend Andi was touched by my Yom Kippur post, and sent it to several of her relatives.  Her Uncle Jerry tried to comment on my post, but had trouble making that work, and sent me an email instead.  His comments about my blog are wonderfully flattering and complimentary, and I’m copying what he wrote here not just because it’s so positive (although that’s certainly part of it), but also because he draws a connection between what he read in my words and his own art of photography.  “Here is a truly brilliant and sensitive human being who has honed her craft by education, insight and the mystical gift of genetics to paint spectacular images with her words.  She is indeed an artist and we have so much more to learn by seeing the world through her eyes. In Japan they have individuals with exceptional talents that are declared national treasures by the government.  Grace certainly qualifies for that accolade. In photography I continually search for new ways of “seeing” but never thought of looking to a poet for guidance. In the words of Marcel Proust:  ‘The real voyage of discovery consists not in finding new landscapes but in having new eyes.'”

While I love the idea of being a “national treasure,” I’m most flattered that my writing speaks to how he tries to capture images through photography.  (Check out his photographs at his website.)  When I was at Vermont Studio Center in the summer of 2007, one of the most nourishing aspects of my time there were the conversations with visual artists.  Over lunch one day a painter said to me, “I think poetry and painting are the most closely related arts,” and we talked about that for an hour.  One evening after an artist’s slide show, a young man and I talked at length about how we do, or don’t, put ourselves in our art, what is self-referential, how do we make that universal, what exactly is art?

Whatever it is, art feeds art in unexpected and important ways.  Last week two friends from my writing group came here so we could all work on some visual art, as a way to use a different part of our brains than writing taps into, hoping to open that writing tap in new ways.  Anne painted her dog, Pat made a 3-D collage, I worked on an altered book collage (using the pages of an existing book for collage, writing, drawing, structural cut-outs) and David worked on photographic images at his computer.  We went from a lively, chatty dinner into the studio, turned to our art, and were silent.  For over an hour we were all absorbed in our creation, intent and focused, bringing something out of our brains and into the world.

I love that my writing can bring something out of my brain, then explode into new ideas and creativity in someone else’s brain.  Art, whether painting or writing, photography or collage, sculpture or ceramics or drawing, is best when it brings us to a new understanding, whether of the world and how to see it, or a puzzle in our own minds.  Whether or not we articulate that new insight through words or painting or collage doesn’t matter, it only matters that we let the expression into the world, and see what it can make happen.

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Dark Day

Yesterday evening, when I got home after a full day of meetings, errands and lunch with a friend in Concord, I saw a star of morning glory blossoms at the top of the teepee we made for the vines to climb.  I thought of getting up this morning and taking a photograph of the flowers, and basing a blog post on rejoicing in whatever is still putting out blossoms this far into the diminishing light of fall.  But I woke up to dark skies, rain, fog tucked in behind the trees on the horizon, and little reason to go any further out the door than the porch.

Last night I picked up Cutting for Stone and started a new chapter.  It’s a big book with a big story, and this chapter picked up a new point of view, with more back story from this character.  I put the book down and closed my eyes and thought for a few minutes.  Do I really want to keep working on the novel I started?  The attention I’ve given to novel structures as I’ve read over the past several months is giving me more confidence I could.  The stacks and stacks of short story drafts I repacked when David and I unloaded the storage pod in the driveway, transferring boxes to the barn shelves, were a reminder, from 30 years ago, that I once wrote fiction prolifically.

Or do I want to work on The Island Journal?  Whenever I open the file on my computer and look at it I get encouraged by its story and language.  And I already know I have lots of work to do to get ready for The Truth About Death to be published in April.  But maybe I just want to order hiking socks online today, then start organizing the room David was using as his studio to be our bedroom again.

Right now, the rain just picked up, there are shots echoing from some nearby pond where a hunter is hoping to get a duck, and I won’t be going out to take any morning glory photos any time soon.