Where a Shell Belongs

Shells are teachers, and we put them in the bathroom. Right now there are two Ziploc baggies of shells on our kitchen counter. They hold their beachy breath and wait for us to open them. It seems unfair that they go from the sea to the back of the toilet in a bowl that was made in a pottery class.

Last week two friends and I found ourselves on the beach in the late afternoon, up to our waists in the ocean water. We planned to go for a swim, but the ocean had other ideas. It was serving up all sorts of shells - shards and whole. Standing meant getting the soles of our feet stabbed, our ankles and calves pummeled with the ocean's teeth. Oh, what lovely teeth the ocean has! Instead of swimming, we started collecting, or trying to collect, what was being served to us.

At first, I tried the "spot and grab" method. A beautiful shell would glimmer under the water, the wave would pass over it, I'd reach down, and voila! It was gone, pulled in by the undertow. After a few disappointing tries with this method I switched to the "blind scoop." The wave passed over, I scooped up whatever I could in two hands, and then sifted through for goodies. I found beautiful, tiny bits of seaglass and perfectly smoothed stones this way that I wouldn't have found otherwise.

Wendy noticed our different collecting methods. She had the "spot and grab," Anne pressed herself down into the water against the thrash of waves to seek out whatever she could find, and I continued with my blind scooping. We all stole something from the ocean.

I thought about how when writing something large, you try all of these methods. There's the initial idea - the spot and grab, and then the blind scoop, and finally you press yourself into the project, against all the waves and salt and potential jellyfish. I'm still in the blind scoop mode with a project I'm working on, and will be happy to submerge myself in its last pages. The ocean reminded me to be patient - to let go of that beautiful idea because it is already washed away and replaced by other ideas. It reminded in a fatherly way. It roared, "Look, look, you numbskull! Look at what you've already picked up in your hands!"

These shells belong in the ocean, not in a baggie, not on the back of the toilet. But here they are, all landlocked - on my desk.

Poememory

A poem is composed of words, not of ideas. A poem should come to you, you should not come to it. Be a tiger, not a rabbit. Don't fold laundry. Don't list your prestigious awards. And for heaven's sake, don't be witless.

Two books on writing and reading are on my morning reading schedule -- Ezra Pound's "ABC of Reading," and William Packard's "The Art of Poetry Writing." Reading both at the same time is enough to give a writer a complex. Reading about writing and reading makes me not want to write. But I do anyway. I respond.

Yesterday, just for the joy of it, I memorized a poem by Vasko Popa. There is no book you can read, no workshop you can take, that can replace the wonder of writing or reading a poem. Memorizing a poem reminds me of why I write. A poem is composed of words that form ideas, that wash empty spaces with emotion, that open entire landscapes. It's exciting to me to memorize the molecules of someone's thoughts. Depending on the poem, it can feel naughtier than opening a letter or a diary. The joy comes in sharing the music of those lines with anyone at any time. I have memorized the poem "by heart," as we say, but really it's "by mind and heart." The words become part of my pulse, part of my synapses.

I have mixed feelings about Poetry Out Loud, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation's high school level contest for poetry recitation. The program has gained popularity over the past few years. Stakes are high. There's a hefty scholarship on the line. Students who move through the ranks memorize several poems, each one of a different time period. Recitations are judged on physical presence, voice and articulation, dramatic appropriateness, level of difficulty, evidence of understanding, and overall performance. An accuracy judge follows the text to make sure the reciter doesn't miss a word. They also act as the prompter if a kid "goes up on a line."

I've judged this contest at various levels and have been stunned by the level of understanding some of the contestants have of the poems they chose to memorize. I've also been one of our regional competition's organizers and felt overwhelmed by the level of administration needed to run a contest like this. One one hand, the students are learning poems that probably would not have learned in school otherwise (there's a paucity of poetry in school). On the other hand, there is little to no follow-through from memorization and appreciation of those poems to writing poems of their own.

The prize of memorizing a poem, of understanding the poem, is just that. You have a poem inside of you forever. A twenty thousand dollar scholarship is great, sure, but money has a way of disappearing. Poems have a way of rumbling around inside of you foreverly.

The Wedding Dance Floor

I'm not sure how many weddings I've attended in my lifetime. Twenty? Thirty? Maybe not that many. One thing I am sure of is that I have seen a little girl in a puffy dress at every wedding. She circles the empty dance floor alone with her arms out until she is dizzy and then she falls, exhausted and giddy. I think I can count my lifetime in dizzy, circling wedding floor toddlers. It is surely better than counting out one's lifetime in root canals, or in tax payments.

This weekend we attended the wedding of some dear friends. It was a memorable reception. Fondant robots topped the wedding cake. Articulated metal toy robots, chattering teeth, tiny bowling pins, dinosaurs, and noisemakers waited in clusters at each table for the guests to play and make introductions. An Elvis impersonator shimmied and gyrated the reception into action. A photobooth was available for guests to ham it up and leave a strip of smiles for the bride and groom, and take one away for themselves. I think a few regular restaurant patrons might have taken the opportunity to have their photos taken as well. That will be fun years from now for the bride and groom ... "Who's this?"

This was a relaxed and fun wedding reception, held in the open room of a local restaurant. The heads of moose, elk, deer, and a few whole animals (foxes), looked down at us in judgment. "Let me get this straight. You kill me, stuff me, and make me spend eternity watching you dine and dance?" Disco lights animated their frozen stares.

During faster music, kids four and under imitated what they see on MTV videos without care of who was watching. Loose arms gangsta flapped, bodies turned on the floor, legs kicked up, and those still on the floor elasticized their way back up into a vertical position. A three year old girl really listened to the music and let her body move to the melody, not the beat. Her parents didn't try to alter what she was doing at all, they let her be herself.

Adults who don't know what to do with themselves but who want to dance will try a few different techniques. I have seen these at every wedding reception I've ever attended. I've also used some of these strategies myself.

Survival Strategies on the Wedding Reception Dance Floor

1. Grab a kid and dance.
Smaller kids you can pick up and hold, spin around, and do a pretend, over-exaggerated Tango. With larger kids, you can hold their hands and sway. They will break away from you to dance with other kids.

2. Mock a dance move.
You're dancing in a safety cluster of friends, and you start an offbeat version of John Travolta's point to the sky, point to the floor. Make it obvious you're just "joking around."

3. Dance a waltz with a friend during a rap song.
This is a take on the second survival strategy.

4. Do the Charlie Brown. Or the Lawnmower.
Always a crowd pleaser. For more ideas, Ze Frank has a tutorial.

5. Be yourself.
This is the hardest. Watch the little kids and remember what it was like to not care what you looked like. Now move as who you really are. If you dance who you are, the little kids will dance with you. Maybe.

The bride danced with her sister the other night. A glorious, uninhibited, raucous whelping on the dance floor. Their happy dance was infused with years of history that no one could touch. As the bride's dress burned white in spinning and her sister twirled around her, I missed my own sister who is thousands of miles away. I remembered how we danced at my wedding. Years of impenetrable history. Together our bodies made a geometry. With her, I am myself. I am three years old, spinning with my arms out.

My husband danced with me and it wasn't just a slow turn to the right. He led me, our noses touched, and we closed our eyes. My feet finally felt right in high heels. If I can't spin myself dizzy in a puffy dress, I'll count my lifetime in nose touching dances with the love of my life.

Sixteen Horrible, Terrible, Very Bad Reasons for Writing a Book

1. You think it will make you famous.
2. You seek revenge on that 8th grade teacher who told you that you lacked creativity.
3. You're sure it will make you look thinner.
4. Everyone will say glowing things about you on Facebook, Twitter, and in fancy martini bars.
5. You need something to talk about at parties (i.e. "Yeah, I'm working on a novel.")
6. Someone told you that you should.
7. You figure you can, because now you have an MFA. You learned how, from other people who wrote books.
8. You figure you should, because now you have an MFA. That was an expensive two years!
9. You figure if you don't, people will say you've "lost your touch."
8. You figure you can, because you don't have an MFA. Your degree is from the University of Life.
9. You figure you should, because you don't have an MFA. That'll show 'em!
10. You want to write a book just like that author you love so much.
11. You have a penchant for the barfy smell inside of books that haven't been opened in a really long time, you own a library card catalogue, you spell catalogue with a "u" even though you're American, and the right kind of writing implement is is almost orgasmic to you.
12. You are two pages into your idea and you're already obsessing over who will publish it, thinking of clever marketing schemes, and looking for agents.
13. You like talking about the book more than the actual writing of the book.
14. You have a really great idea - teenage vampires!
15. You don't believe in rewrites, editing, or anything beyond spell check.
16. You had a dream in which the cupcake told you it was time to write your masterpiece.

The Elastic Memory

We remember and in our retelling of the memory we alter it. Memory is elastic. The sounds, smells, sights, textures, flavors you experience as you tell the story may alter the memory itself.

The memory I have of lying on my back in the driveway and looking up into the trees? That’s likely a composite memory. Several instances of taking photographs of leaves and bark, the photographs themselves, of the driveway my father took pride in, of all my time outside, and my own telling and writing about it have created a collective memory of something that brought me joy as a child. I share it often and in many different ways (written, oral, recall in my private universe) and in sharing the memory it is possible that it changes.

For those who cherish memories, the idea of them being not entirely “true” and elastic can be upsetting. But for those who have traumatic memories, this can come as a comfort. It’s an interesting concept.

I read an article last night in the Smithsonian magazine titled, “Making Memories,” published in the May 2010 issue, which focuses on this idea. Karim Nader, a neuroscientist who works at New York University, talks about how he recalled seeing television footage on September 11th of the first plane hitting the north tower of the World Trade Center. He was surprised to learn that this footage aired for the first time the following day.

In order for a long-term memory to be built, neurons need to manufacture new proteins and expand to make the neurotransmitter traffic run more efficiently. Long-term memories have to be built into the brain’s synapses.

We say things like “memory fades,” and think of ink on paper. Over the years, the memory might fade a bit. For an Alzheimer’s patient, the ink becomes invisible. Is it really possible that under any ordinary circumstance, memory stays the same? Nader challenged this idea by experimenting with rats.

From the article:

In 1999 he taught four rats that a high-pitched beep preceded a mild electric shock. The rats froze in place after hearing the beep. Nader waited 24 hours, played the tone to reactivate the memory and injected into the rat’s brain a drug that prevents neurons from making new proteins.

If memories are consolidated just once, when they are first created, he reasoned, the drug would have no effect on the rat’s memory of the tone or the way it would respond to the tone in the future. But if memories have to be at least partially rebuilt every time they are recalled – down to the synthesizing of fresh neuronal proteins – rats given the drug might later respond as if they had never learned to fear the tone and would ignore it. If so, the study would contradict the standard conception of memory. It was, he admits, a long shot. […] It worked.

When Nader tested the rats, they didn’t freeze after hearing the tone. It was as if they had forgotten all about it.

For anyone who has given birth to a child, you recognize the fact that you forget the pain. Your memory focuses more on the joy and less on the pain as time progresses. I’ve always wondered if this was the brain’s trick at getting the body prepared to have more children. If we remember the pain, the likelihood of wanting more children would be slim.

When I think of memory as being plastic, it’s a huge relief. My sister’s memory of a childhood event that we both participated in might be different from my recollection of it because we have led different lives, and told the story in a myriad of unique places which changed it for each. I think seeing photographs of events change the memory of those events too. Photographs remind and can change a memory.

Writers know that the act of writing down a memory can be cathartic. Therapists recommend keeping a journal to patients who need to work through complicated feelings. Is part of this process refashioning the memory so the person can live with it safely?

When I think of writing this essay three years from now, will I only remember the part about the rats and forget the rest?

If memory is plastic, then all memoirs are “lies.” I’m okay with this. I’ve always felt this way. The brain is fascinating, willing to embellish and make connections between all sorts of details that we experience, including those we dream. We are not always aware of our brain’s sleight-of-hand, and it sure is interesting. What colorful scarves are being tossed in the air of my brain as I write this? As you read it?

I Wrote (a very short story using only subjects and verbs)

He swilled. He smoked. They lived. He planned. He collected. They worked. He tested. He hated. They loved. They lived. He drew. He plotted. He slept. They dreamed. He packed. He lifted. He walked. He carried. They lived. He rested. He arranged. He positioned. He aimed. They lived. He fired. They scattered. They screamed. He laughed. They ran. They fell. They lived. He fired. He laughed. They fell. He fired. He laughed. She hid. She aimed. He laughed. He fired. She fired. He fell.

The hive of my heart keeps track of time

On quiet days without you here the house is cleaner, but I fill my own coffee cup, and wonder where the spontaneous laughter from the living room has gone. I make sure all the artwork is hanging straight, flatten out the curled ends of throw rugs, peek into the card catalogue just to see the maps we keep inside. We've been to Arizona together and I kept a pamphlet on the birds we saw there. You were fascinated by the hands at the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia. I saved the brochure and made a sketch of you when we sat outside in the garden.

The refrigerator sighs and trickles, Bananafish pecks at his seed, the window fan drones. I stare at the wall, the shadow of butterfly bush on the floor, my own filthy toes. No one adores you like I do and when you aren't here I probably eat too much cake. Its sweetness makes me sleepy and slow. I count the time by the bees drowzing on thistles in the garden. Zzzzwhirp. Will you be home soon? Zzzzzyes.

The Tempest

The shipwreck left a flotsam of empty Mountain Dew bottles, McDonald's containers, candy wrappers, and Diet Coke cans in our fourth-grade classroom dressing room. Every actor has scribbled on the chalkboard during the long pause between call and places, because no kid can resist chalk and an empty blackboard. "A plague upon this bowling" is my favorite rewritten phrase, and then there's the call for "pants off/dance off," a few caricatures of cast members, and a Shakespeare-as-Devil which somehow got labeled as Therese. Fans stationed in the room fart the hot air around more. It is impossible to keep cool in a mask and several layers of polyester weave during August, so we're left with humor. Paul revisits a favorite Caldecott Award winning book from the teacher's desk while he waits for his scene. An excerpt from "Are you there God? It's Me, Margaret" is written on the board behind the desk. Mandy reworks the ace bandage around her sprained calf, and Emily takes a swig of water and sits behind a personal desk fan.

During intermission, we take off our masks, strip down to the least amount of layers allowable, and stand outside in hope of a breeze. We've set out a few chairs too tiny for our butts near the corner of the school building. One by one players spill out of the building like characters from a romance novel - sweaty and desperate. We light up cigarettes, drink water, laugh about gaffes. Last night a heron flew overhead. A few nights ago a bat circled the urban forest just beyond the school. Some of us talked about watching the meteor showers. Nature doesn't pause for theatre. It is the theatre.

As "five minutes to places!" is called for the second act, we put our masks back on to return to our lives as a devious plotter, a spirit, a goddess, a drunken butler, a monster, a misplaced king. We wipe the sweatstaches from our upper lips. The lights go down and we go on to tell a story, while above our heads the scattered and roiling details of two weeks of our lives wait for our return.

Why I Love Hoop Dance

Some of you might have noticed a photo or two (or fifty!) of me with a hoop around my waist, my arms, or hoisted up in the air. It’s official. I’m obsessed with hoop dancing. Here’s why:

1. It’s some of the best exercise I’ve gotten. Ever.

I used to run. I’d do three or four miles a morning, combined with some weight lifting at a local gym.

With a couple of months of solid practice in hoop dance, I’ve built muscle in my arms (hooper’s shoulders!), toned up my legs a little, and lost weight – a bonus! (I don’t own a scale, but I can tell “the rind” at my waist that appeared around my 40th birthday is significantly diminished.)

2. I’m learning that I’m not such a klutz afterall.

With practice I store different tricks and moves into muscle memory. I’m still not the most graceful hoop dancer ever, but hey, I can move and not look like an idiot. This is a huge deal for me, having been laughed at by a professional dancer in a college-level jazz dance class. That left a bruise on my psyche. So ha ha to you, Mr. NYC FancyPants Dance Man! I CAN dance! Oh, and your class wasn’t as creative as hoop dance either, so there.

3. It’s good for the spirit.

With running, you get “runner’s high,” and with hoop dance you get “hooper’s bliss.”

You know that feeling you get (or got) riding your bike down a really sweet hill? That’s hooping. It makes you a kid again. It’s pure play. Hooping attracts good people. Put a hoop around your waist, and suddenly women, men, and kids alike are coming over and asking to give it a try. Why? Because it looks like fun, and it is.

4. I get to wear skirts!

I’m a girly girl from a theatrical, creative family. I’ve never liked pants much, so getting to wear skirts to “exercise” in is a major thrill. Hooping clothes run anywhere along the line of regular workout wear to tutus with torn fishnets. Some hoop dancers wear masks when they perform, or tiny little hats or crowns, or feathers … there’s a whole incredibly creative array of dress and makeup that makes me giddy just thinking about it. What do I wear when Irun? Oh, right. Sneakers, socks, a pair of shorts and a t-shirt. I’ll take a fun shirt paired with a skirt and pink leggings over that any day.

5. People who hoop make up a community of really positive and kind people.

I joined Hoop City, a sort of “Hooper’s Facebook,” about a month ago, and at the request of my sister (who gets total credit for my addiction to hoop dance), started taking SaFire’s classes. I began reading and posting in the forums on Hoop City, and joining in some of the groups. Everyone from newbies to professional performers posts there – and they are all supportive, encouraging, and inspiring.

The hoopers I know in real life are also this way. Everyone shares ideas and tricks they’ve learned with each other. A lot of hoopers attend festivals and concerts and take their hoops with them. I want to start doing more of that so I can meet more hoopers! I’m still trying to crack the secret code for getting people to join in a free hoop jam I’ve started at the park. My latest attempt at that is a hoop making workshop. I figure by empowering people with the craft of making a hoop, they will want to test it out.

6. It makes me happier.

All of the above combined conspire toward a happier me. When I’m happy, I make things happen for myself and others. I create. I make meals at home instead of eating out, I write more, I garden, I attempt to sew, I learn to use a rivet gun, I paint. I’m more likely to tackle a large, looming project that I've put off if I’ve spent part of my day in the hoop.

If it makes me happier and keeps me creating, inspired, and encouraging others, I think that's some of the best exercise I've gotten. Ever.

Living Where You Love, Loving Where You Live

In a 5 a.m. frenzy to get my baker daughter to work on time I thought about the buildings I passed (going ever-so-slightly over the speed limit and just bowing to the stop signs). The Liberty Throwing Company chucked and clucked behind its grey-painted windows. Early shift workers were at the helm of machines that make spandex threads. I once bought a car from a woman who worked there, and this is why I know the secret behind the name.

St. Hedwig's school sits squarely on Zerby Avenue and promontory in my mind. My daughter's first lessons in socialization, organized religion, and education were in that building. I walked her a mile from home every day to Kindergarten, through the baseball field behind the Russian Club, past a few barking dogs and their fences. It was there at the school that I directed a play called Princess Grey and the White/Black Knight. The entire school community (and my mother) rallied to make it happen - props, costumes, cardboard painted set pieces. The janitor shared his lighting talents with me after revealing he'd spent years in backstage work at a theatre in New York City. I see him now at the mini-mart every morning on Main Street. He is frail and thin. His teeth are missing, but he still smiles and always remembers me.

The school sits empty now, the by-product of diocesan budget cuts. The teachers have found other jobs and moved away. Weeds grow in every crack on the sidewalk where I once stood to wait with other parents for the dismissal bell at 2:05. The kids used to rush out in a whoosh of whoops, and their backpacks made them look like multicolored turtles.

The ungroomed and well-pruned shrubberies of side street homes collect snow in January that turns them into iced cakes. In spring, birds make them sing. Fans rest unevenly in windows of houses in the summer. This morning I noticed a home with two fans whirling away in the bedroom windows of the upper floor. It created a wonky eyed monster.

Most houses here lean like drunken uncles (to borrow from Carl Sandburg). Mine subsidences have been known to open up and swallow entire houses, or children on the sidewalk, or pets. I listen at night for the tell-tale "crack" that I'm supposed to hear before the ground opens up and gorges on clapboard. We only own the surface of our land here, and keep insurance for any greedy gulpings of earth. Owning land at all is such a strange concept.

A sprawl of progress neons "The Ave" as we call it. Planet Fitness runs in place under its bright yellow apex, Price Chopper shares a stripmall with what I've dubbed "World Domination Buffet," Radio Shack, and Blockbuster. Cole Muffler makes a good landmark and a joke - the neon sign blinks out certain letters suddenly turning it French - "le muffler." When a Lowe's Home Improvement Center moved in, they paid off a small church on the property they wanted and moved it up half a block. The day the church was on wheels, the entire town came out to watch it move.

Main Street is congested from sprawl traffic, but no one stops to eat at the Mexican restaurant whose owners painted a sunset mural on the front, or the barber who still has a working awning that he cranks open every morning. His storefront is filled with dollhouses. The old coin shop closed a few months ago when the borough bought it (rumor has it they are demolishing old buildings and putting in a stripmall), and had to pay to clean out three floors of accrued errata from a determined collector. I once took a coin in the shop for appraisal. It was worth nothing, but the shop was piles of fascination. War medals, buttons from ancient elections, metal detectors, and coins in their plastic protective cases. The helmet of a knight sat in his storefront window.

I love to walk and see what neighbors have put on their porches, plant in their gardens, and note the oddball personalities of mailboxes.

We leave a free book box on the stoop of our gallery and studio so the neighborhood has access to free reading material as they walk to and from work, or the sprawl of The Ave. It gets brisk traffic. Sometimes it gets a candy bar wrapper or two, and sometimes people donate bags of paperbacks.

I live here. It's imperfect, weedy, unkempt, off-plumb, full of strangers and friends. The energy of the past toil of our fathers was washed away in a flood that dissolved their progress. Sadness followed and lingered, closed shops, broke wills.

I live here to give my energy to this place. To stand on a school stage and hang a backdrop of roses that a 6th grader painted, to make a space for the arts where people are welcome to share their ideas and poetry, to share books, to plant flowers. I can live anywhere I want, but I choose to live here, and I owe it the best of my life.

500 Words

Can you come up with a list of 500 favorite words? It took me about a half hour to write up a list (which I launched into willy-nilly), and then realized about three-quarters of the way through that I was going to have an overabundance of words for the project. A myriad. A plethora. An ivy-whorl of tenacious words.

1000 words? 10,000 words? I shared some toast with my husband. "Pillowcase."

We walked upstairs. I shouted down the hall, "Freckle! Piano. Gravity. Grace. Bespectacled."

I have some decisions to make (architecture?) with the first list I made. The process of making the list is really interesting to me. Some of the words I like for the sound, others for meaning, some for both. There are words that have emotional attachments. Some are a part of family vocabularies. A few are inventions. In the meantime, (fern) words keep springing up in my mind (foderol) like midnight mushrumps.

What are some of your favorites?

Staying Aloft

I've never stepped on the Priority Sky Miles mat. If you have, you've paid too much by credit card. Sure you get on the plane quicker, but you're on with the screaming kids. They rolled all over the mat first with their strollers and Graco trappings.

Whether you walk down that flap of mat or wait until "Zone 4" is called and are herded through the gate, you likely have some special way of handling flight. (Or maybe not. This could be one of those places where I once again find myself alone on the playground.) Maybe you say a Hail Mary, or a few Please Gods, or you have another special mantra. Maybe you always say thank you to the person who scans the bar code on your boarding pass. Whatever it is, you're sure it works.

I keep a pinecone in my pocketbook. No one has frisked me for keeping a bit of the ground in my purse yet. It's a non-aerosol pinecone and is less than three fluid ounces.

The sudden camaraderie I feel toward my fellow passengers is always surprising to me. These are people I don't know, and will likely never get to know, but I start to think about what we might say to each other if the plane were to spiral toward the earth from 30,000 feet. The woman in the striped shirt looks like a soft grandmotherly sort. The tan guy is returning home from a vacation and seems happy. That crying baby is a good luck charm. The likelihood of a crash with a baby is small, I trick myself. Good.

A friend of mine told me once how she enjoys being in airports because "you can be anyone there." I think you can be anyone anywhere, and would rather be anyone anywhere other than in an airport. I enjoy watching people's reunions, but the frantic chirping of trapped birds in the Detroit airport makes me uneasy.

On the plane, I have my rituals. I figure if I am just good, if I pay attention, if I obey, the plane won't nosedive into the ocean. I always look at the safety card. I buckle my seatbelt when asked. When I exit the plane, I thank the pilot. I never complain about anything until I have gotten back on the ground.

If I am good, if I obey, if I don't complain, we stay aloft. If I bitch, it's a sudden plummet for all.

So I feel love for the trapped humanity on the plane until we land when I start to wonder why that woman is wearing a striped seersucker shirt. What a horrible word -- seersucker. I wouldn't want it wrapped around me. I wouldn't want to die in it.

The salt from my mini pretzels has confettied the insides of my pocketbook. My ears feel like they have blades in them. The view from 30,000 feet was a miniature wonderland. Thank God we're landed. Hail Mary. Hail Pinecone.

Abstractions as Units of Measurement

An exercise in thought and wordplay on a hot afternoon where my brain is a fresnel of flaccidity.

1. An angstrom of angst
2. A furlong of fragility
3. Two hundred leagues of levity
4. An em of entropy
5. An en of empathy
6. A dram of damnation
7. Three gills of gumption
8. A gamma of goodness
9. One pennyweight of perniciousness
10. Ten scruples of sorrow
11. A rod of reality
12. Two cords of compassion
13. Eight pecks of peculiarity
14. An assay ton of anger
15. A hogshead of hilarity
16. A footlambert of foolishness
17. Two hobbets of hate
18. A jansky of joy
19. Three kips of knowledge
20. A maxwell of menace
21. An osmol of obsfucation
22. A firkin of friendship
23. A vara of victory
24. A weber of wisdom
25. A therblig of thrill

A Monosyllabic Essay on the Old GE Fan in the Kitchen

The rite on a hot day in each home is the twist of a knob to form a drift of air. I prod the old fan blade and send it to a slow grind and turn. It finds cat fur in the air and the grate sports flags of hair that ebb in its wind. This fan groans in the face of work and needs a new nudge to pick up drive. One push with the edge of my thumb on the blade, two, three, four, and the force wins. I move the jar that sits near it and clunks with the time and time and time of turns. With my coax, my wish, the fan is still just a head that shakes a slow no, no, no all day in a room where bread sweats.

What the Members of the Hill House Put On Their Cereal

Forecast: Plenty of Piaf

Life is too short to be wasting it on music I don't like. If a piece of music doesn't open up a room I'm in, I don't want to listen to it. Music creates new rooms for me, sometimes entire mansions. There are almost always walls, but sometimes no roof or a floor.

Last night while waiting for friends to arrive for a meeting at the house I put on an album by Edith Piaf, (recorded in Mono!), and everything became a set for a French movie. The room was black and white and looked like it needed the despeckling filter in Photoshop. That's what I love about music. I can't even remember the title of the album I was listening to (it was a gift from my brother), but the music transformed a moment in my life and transported me to another place for a little while.

If the music inspires and creates a safe space for me to dream, or a space that's filled with color and movement, I'll listen. I won't remember the label or who produced it, but I will remember the room it put me in, the color of the walls, and if the room had a floor.

Trivia: Edith Piaf's matron of honour at her wedding in 1952 was Marlene Dietrich.

Oddity: Piaf singing La Vie en Rose turns my living room into pointillism.

Excitement: Rain all weekend. More Piaf in store for me.

Fragments of Spring

Stapled to the telephone pole
where her classmate died
two wilted bouquets of roses
form a Y.

.

A woman waves with a cigarette in her hand,
her long hair gathered at the bottom
with a rubber band, loose pink pajama pants
flop in the breeze. Her son's hand grips
the green seat of the school bus.

.

Today I clean the baseboards,
tomorrow I paint the hall floor,
Friday I take over the world.

Arrhythmia

The nurse asks: “What do the extra beats feel like?” and I say I don’t know. What I want to say is it feels like I am hugging a bag of feathers. That I am reading another one of those really long poems by a poet who uses tildes in between stanza breaks and is so very in love with the way his words look on paper. It feels like the sound the piano makes when you step on the damper pedal hard and then release. That’s probably too much information for his form, so I say “It feels like I shouldn’t take my heart for granted. I’m nervous. I hate it here.” It feels like I’m falling through the stars. Hole, hold, black hole murmur.

Clothesline

Tuesday March 2nd clomps across the busy street in heavy boots. It is double-freaking-parked, it is pocked with potholes, it is a clothesline full of old towels.

There's nothing particularly wrong with today, other than I can't seem to find my focus. I've had a series of pretty good days in a row where I've been writing and creating, and thinking good thoughts. Today, nothing but old towels and everything has a grey noise.

On the upswing, my stitches came out while I was in the car today! Healing complete.

Expanse

Every day
is an envelope opened
to a letter I must write

aS

a typographical romance

Lowercase a was deviled by x, who leveled him with dagger punches to the gut. X was always bold. K joined in the fray for good measure, and kicked a in the foot while he writhed on the ground. The playground was silent after they grunted their way around the school building, leaving a in the dirt. A birch leaf shivered off a tree from the first frost. Lowercase a threw up from the pain of his bruises.

Lowercase o and u found a in the dirt, lifted him up and brushed him off. They agreed something needed to be done about the burly, aggravated consonants, and rallied the rest of the vowels into a meeting on the rock pile near the woods.

While they hunched and whispered, uppercase S appeared and nudged her way into their huddle. "What's all the hubhub, fellas?" she asked.

Lowercase a weakened. S was different from the rest of the consonants. She was majuscule. She was vivacious, confident, and deliciously curvy. Sometimes her curves dipped below the baseline, and it made lowercase q (who was the quietest girl in class) a little jealous of her display. S showed an enthusiasm for rolling down the grassy hill during recess, and everyone stopped to watch when she did.

The boys urged lowercase a to keep her out of the plans, but lowercase a couldn't help but trust S. "Together we can make similes" he thought.

S let herself in, and when she heard about their plans against x and k, she sighed.

a, e , i, o, u, and s (y only sometimes showed for the meetings), continued their plot to nab their tormentors. The boy's lavatory was a favorite place for meetings because S wasn't allowed, but she would occasionally tease her way inside when the teachers weren't looking.

It was during one of these meetings that x and k were were hiding in a stall, straddling toilets. "We'll use S's skills at rolling ..." o proclaimed with a wide grin. He was trying to win S's favors. It was beginning to irk a that o began all of his sentences with the word "So."

The stall doors clattered and x and k emerged like ninjas, delivering stealthy slugs to all the vowels.

The oooooo's, uuuuuuu's, and iiiiiiii's were heard down the hall and into the principal's office. S escaped without injury by rolling out the door. Lowercase a was slackjawed. The window was a possible escape.

Principal ! marched through the door as lowercase a considered the window. "Stop this at once! Get back to your classes! You all have detention!" Vice-principal ... paused with her mouth agog. "This sort of behavior ..." she trailed off.

Lowercase a was cornered in the coatroom after school by x. "I'll cut you to the core yet," he said. A didn't notice the shuffling of coats behind him as he trembled. O, i and e leapt out. Lowercase i tossed his tittle at x, who caught it with an extended arm. K ambled in just in time to kick i's tittle into the trashcan. A tried to slip into the alley between the coats when x stopped him by sticking out a foot to trip him.

S slithered in the coatroom, slipped a curve around lowercase a, and handed i back his tittle. U rocked back and forth on the arc of his stem, cooing to himself. E curled off to find q. None of this fighting was justified, said S.

X hissed at lowercase a. "I'll get you someday. Together we could have axed our way through school, crossing out all the useless facts, marking spots. You could have been more than an article. With her, you'll just make cute similes."

In love and cooing, lowercase a developed an elaborate swash near his rounded apex. S's love had saved him and transformed him into an alternate character.

S and a skipped a grade, and started a new family, similar in width, weight and posture, giggling glyphs and miniscules.

X and k were held in Principal !'s office, on the mean line. When questioned about their anger, they said they "didn't give a jot and tittle" about any of it and they'd "roll those i's again."

Squaring Up the Rugs

Never underestimate your power as a writer to procrastinate. If you think it's time to sit down to work on your novel, rugs will need squaring, curtains will need washing, and bits of lint will need to be plucked off all your sweaters.

I know this. I'm writing a novel. There. I said it in a public venue (as public as you can get with four readers). I said it and now I am committed to finishing it, because it's "out there." Now pardon me while I go put the kettle on. I like to hear it tick and whistle while I write. Or write about writing.

And in the meantime, here are two valuable and interesting links for writers, which I have read and enjoyed (squandered time):

The Lester Dent Pulp Paper Master Fiction Plot (Lester Dent wrote the Doc Savage series)

Ten Rules for Writing Fiction

My roots are a "22"

Yesterday I put on my heavy winter boots and shoveled a narrow path out to the car, brushed off a foot of snow, brisked the ice off the mailbox, and clomped back in the house to get dressed for a root canal appointment. It's not every day that you find yourself grateful to push aside heavy snow to get to the endodontist, but I've been waiting to get to see this guy for a few weeks, and two of them on a cheery round of bacteria-killing penicillin. The snow storm almost pushed my appointment back another two weeks, but a cancellation got me in earlier. I felt like I was hanging around the phone for a date to call.

With the blinds open at the office, the sun opened up a warm seat in the waiting room for me to fill out my forms and tuck into a book. The ear-budded office staff talked about efficiency with delegating the tasks of the day, and I tried to worry less by reading. Then the dreaded and anticipated sound of the endodontist's assistant calling my name, the intermittent shaking of my legs as I worried about not being able to swallow as my face went numb with novocain.

When the endodontist arrived, he tried to chit-chat about the weather to calm me. "It's a beautiful day, isn't it?" he asked, as my mouth was pried open. I tried to say "gorgeous," but it came out "gggshush."

Then I was faced with a light above my head and what felt like a torn balloon over my wide-open mouth for an hour and a half while the assistant and endodontist worked their medical magic. Words like "mesial" and "pulp" peppered their conversation. I wore plastic goggles and wondered what would happen next most of the time since they weren't the type of dentists who gave a play-by-play to their patient. There was the smell of clove, and the feel of my tooth being oddly higher than the rest for a bit, like a skyscraper jutting out among cottages. I saw the the tiny plastics that would be used to replace my roots, which I was told were "really long." I thought of how careful the dentists were, and how detailed the work was, and wondered about what I do for a living and how it compares. There's no avoiding someone's need for a root canal if it is your job to perform one. There is plenty of avoidance in a writer.

At some point my legs ceased their shaking, and the dentist talked about how he was tricked into watching a movie with his wife on the snow day before. It was "Slumdog Millionnaire." Had I seen it? Did I like it? With my mouth still latexed like the lining of a pool all I could say was "Yesh," but I didn't really like it.

When the procedure was over, I thanked both of them for their careful work, and walked out with my palsied mouth into the sun to try to whistle in the mirror. I laughed at the sight, started the car, and drove off into the blinding blue light of a gggshsh day.

Frequency of Thought

A table after Nicholson Baker's character in The Mezzanine

Subject of Thought	Number of Times Thought Occurred per Year (descending order)
Family (living)	1825
Family (deceased)	730
Body fat	520
Coffee	420
Dreams	360
Writing a poem	300
People who write more poems, jealousy of	280
The movements of birds, curiosity of	220
"Make Your Life"	200
Moving to the city	180
Moving to the country	180
Backyard chickens, or the possibility of a pet duck	180
Pens	150
Losing my mind, fear of	125
Friends, smarter than me	120
Footnotes and marginalia = happiness	90
Insensitive people	81
Flowers and weeds that grow out of cracks in the sidewalk	70
Sandburg's drunken uncles = houses around here	50
Trees against a dusk sky, beauty of	45
Piggyback rides	32
Peeling a chestnut, joy of	21
Candle flickers, fire flames	20
Mitral Valve Prolapse, anxiety of	18
Cognition, or the brain as machine	15
Kindness, my being referred to as kind and a mild resentment for it*	12
Hotel lobbies	8
The Doppler Effect	6
Friends - does it matter if I have few?	5
Minty taste on envelope seal	3
HTML tags	1
Whether or not that note I left in the floor is still there	1
Driveway sealer, scent of	.5

There is no way for this list to be accurate, because thought is so fleeting and changing, but it was an interesting exercise to see how even as I wrote the list, my mind was wandering. "Pens? Yes, pens. I forgot them, and they fit more in the middle of the list not at the bottom."

* This has been bothering me for some time, which makes little sense because I consider kindness to be one of the most important things in life, so why would I not want to be considered kind? I think the root of it may have to do with how we view success in our culture. Successful people tend to be unkind and ruthless. Kindness has a flaccidity. This is ridiculous and I should get over it.

Meaning

On Sunday I found myself in the comfortable red chair of church, listening to one of our parishioners talk to the children about earthworms and mealy bugs. He stood with his back to the congregation, with the children all lined up on the low step in front of him. One twiddled with a shirt hem, another pulled up a slouching sock while listening to the man's questions about light. He reminded me of my own father in stature and dress -- tweed jacket, tan pants, a white beard, glasses. He asked the children what the song This Little Light of Mine meant, and what was good about light, and then when responses slimmed he moved on to mealy bugs and earthworms, and why they love the dark. He got the kids to think about the meaning of the lyrics to a song they hear every Sunday as they are ushered out of church and into their religious education classes.

His talk to the adults in the congregation was about meaning, and he framed it in the idea of metaphor and how metaphor enhances our understanding of the world through the use of the sensory. A few weeks before I had a short conversation with him in the hallway between the sanctuary and the church office, and he said that he was not going to include any poetry in his sermon, and was a little apologetic about it, which reminded me further of my father, who was not a man for poetry. When I was in my twenties, I had a short talk with my dad about the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay. My mother found a copy of A Few Figs From Thistles, and my dad, being the avid reader that he was, picked it up off the kitchen counter and read it. He liked some of the poems he said. What bothered him about poetry was having to read it over and over to get the meaning. Edna's* were accessible to him.

When the speaker made a visual representation of a timeline from the beginning of time ("this window and wall on the left") to the present ("the paint on the wall on the right"), and marked the beginning of humans on earth (right by the piano which is about six feet from the wall on the right), and then the start of language (still closer to the wall on the right from the piano), I was transported to the Smithsonian Museums and their visual timelines for science and history exhibits, and dwarfed again by the thought of just how new we are to the world. Without language, there is no meaning, because without language there is no word meaning, no word idea, not word thought, no word tweed, no word father. We make meaning out of everything we see, feel, hear, taste, and smell**.

My mind kept wandering in spite of his wonderful talk, or perhaps because of his talk and the ideas in it. His family sat in the first two rows of chairs -- sons and wife, daughter-in-law, all rapt in his words. I kept looking over at them, and thinking of my dad and how when I had my first real poetry reading he and my mother sat in the audience, and he stared at his hands and rarely looked up. I didn't know whether I wanted him to look up, or keep looking at the map of his hands, but I knew I wanted him to understand my poems and to understand me.

When Sunday's sermon was over, the speaker's family led the congregation in a bouquet of applause, which was followed by a few minutes of silent meditation where I listened to the heat ping and creak from the radiators and wished my own father were there so I could hold his hand and squeeze it.

Then I remembered the moment just before children's time started that morning. When the children were called up by the speaker to have a seat in front of him, a boy about 12 years old leapt up and ran from his half-seated position at the invisible prompting from some adult in the back and questioned, "Wait a minute ... I'm not a child anymore?!?"



* I have a cat named Edna, named for the poet. She's 16, very dotty in her old age, and walks a little sideways to go forward. She is very much like a poem.

** My daughter mocked me post-service while I was talking with a friend about the scent of the local casino. "It smells like a combination of bus exhaust and cheap perfume. Probably something they clean with, but certainly it's the scent of desperation," I said, and she chimed in with, "She's always coming up with stuff like that. 'It's tastes like attic!' or 'You know the smell of toast and the inside of an old book? Like that.'"

Synchronicity

Connections of thoughts and ideas paired with phone calls and emails have been buzzing like a well-tuned guitar this week. I'm not sure how this happens, but I love it when it does.

Earlier in the week I was going over the books on the shelf above my "must-be-right-next-to-my-desk" shelf. These are books that I love, but that aren't as important for me to have right at hand. One of them is Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way. It was a gift given to me by my parents in 1998, and I went through the 12-weeks of exercises in creativity in 1999. I remember feeling energized by the Artist Dates, and well-disciplined with the Morning Pages, so I gave some thought to starting it up again. But that was it. I thought about it.

A day or so later my sister wrote me an email about some nail polish I sent to her for Christmas, and she shared that she had joined with a group of women who were doing The Artist's Way exercises. She was already enjoying it, and having the other people working at it too seemed helpful.

This email was a call to action for me. I wrote a long email of my own inviting a group of people to participate in a free 12-week "Creative Cluster" workshop at the studio using The Artist's Way. So far there are six signed up to start, two tentative, and one is inviting a friend. I received some really lovely emails back too -- some people were familiar with the book, others were not, some had just started the book's exercises up again after having tried it years ago they said and my email arrived at the right time. Shared synchronicity. Spreading the positive. Lighting a candle instead of cursing the darkness.

I am looking forward to reading the book again, and sharing it with others. This morning I began my Morning Pages and I already feel more creative energy.

The Mezzanine

I am completely in love with Nicholson Baker's style of writing in his first novel, "The Mezzanine." Detailed, sensory, heavily footnoted stream-of-consciousness. Minutiae on a pedestal. Delicious descriptions of straws, magazines, paper bags, and the way working a stapler feels. This reader is not sad there is no plot. She revels in it.

Checking Yourself out on The FacePlace

A friend and I had a marathon phone conversation today. Three hours. We used speakerphone. With your hands free you can type, search for a book on Bessie Pease Guttman on the shelf, or wash a couple of dishes. Brilliant. Some technologies are delightful. Others are not.

Our conversation ranged from writing and the procrastination of writing (how we can build up projects so much in our heads they become perfect and so impossible to put on paper), how writing for an audience isn't really what it's all about, how lighting a candle is better than cursing the darkness, the peril of being too needy, our children, our husbands, and then finally, Facebook. I've come to the conclusion it's a technology no one really needs.

We agreed that everyone else's lives look so much more interesting than ours on Facebook. Losing 45 minutes of time browsing the FacePlace pages of others means opening ourselves up to looking at other lives as if they were more interesting than our own. They aren't. Clicking our way into and out of the doors of Facebook's pages leave us feeling empty, sad, and worthless. There is nothing fulfilling or rewarding about it at all. Late at night you may find yourself knee deep in a friend-of-a-friend's photo album thinking "If only I had a bunch of friends like that. They all look so happy!" or "Maybe I should lose some weight?" or "Why wasn't I invited to that party?" It's a downward spiral of bad feelings and general malaise. You log off feeling like you just ate a pizza, some Cheetos, and drank several Cokes all on your own.

One of the rules to Marketing with Social Media is this: If your website doesn't push a vice (think 7 deadly sins here and see which one or ones apply to FacePlace), no one will visit it.

So here I am editing this rant of a post in a space where I feel safer because no one but my mother and the occasional true friend reads it, and I'm pretty sure they love me, warts and all. I'd rather be read less than trapped in a whirlpool of fun mirrors.

Mood Swing

The patio chandelier holds up empty votive cups as the last afternoon sun fills the hollows and glints off their rounded edges. Last weeks snow leisures on the grass and stones of the garden path. Spring is a long way off, and we're in this for the long haul. A teacher friend of ours said the other day after we asked about the return to school, "Well, now there's a long wait until another break." This made me wonder what part or parts of my life am I just waiting for until my next holiday.

I enjoy the sparceness of January -- a month where eyesight becomes suddenly attuned to fingerprints on the mirror, flecks of dirt in the carpet, stacks of useless bills, and extraneous words hanging in the air. The world balances its checkbook now and stretches a rubberband around everything that felt out of control.

For all the enjoyment of the blue light, the extra lamps I purchased the other day to banish the darkness, the scent of cookies baking, the snuggly cats ... I am crinkly. I had to get myself out of the house today to swing on a park swing, feel the frozen ground under my inappropriately slippered feet, and let the wind push itself through my bad mood. On the swing all I thought about was how much I think about how I will write about this or that. The snow on the grass, that blue van in among all the tan cars, the wind. I think and think and sometimes feel like I'm missing out on the living experience because I am too busy holding the thought in my head. I think about the feel of the river pebble in terms of words, and forget about the feel of the river pebble in terms of its pleasant texture in my hand. How much does this matter or not?

Entrances and Exits

I can't think of a better way to start of a new year than the multi-sensory learning experience of working in the theatre. The past two months have been spent in a state of semi-realism; a shadowy backdrop of dances, memorized dialogues that suddenly snapped together into meaningful conversations, and objects that waited for the energy of hands. Last night was the final performance of Gaslight Theatre's "Dancing at Lughnasa" by Brian Friel. I played the eldest of the Mundy sisters, Kate. What thrills me about theatre is the transience of it all -- the little realities that we create and then strike. I developed a routine for six evenings that fit around the set and the timing of each performance that included time in front of a lit mirror to put on makeup and pin my hair into a style of the late-1930's, the drinking of copious amounts of water, laughter with the rest of my sisters in the cast and the practicing of dialect with them, a trip around the set to check props, and sweaty-handed prayer and notes in the hallway. Between acts, I had a path to get from the set to the dressing room (for more water and face powder) and back again -- a very real, but very temporary routine. Backstage, I rolled my shoulders back, tilted my head like an accipiter, and firmed up my jaw to get into character. I lifted two noisy shopping bags at the exact same time every night when the stage creaked under another actor's footsteps. Kate's character will remain the same on the page, but will be played differently by every actor who has the opportunity. Now the parts of me that were taken over by Kate drift off like the last few notes of a waltz. It's time now to say goodnight.

I quietly dedicated every one of my performances to my father and grandmothers. When it was time for Kate to cry at the end of the second act during Michael's monologue, it wasn't difficult.

Epiphany

A stuffed snowman still peeks out from underneath our flame-retardant Christmas tree. Epiphany passed yesterday and I am behind on January's sweep up of December's indulgences, but I feel no blast of shame. The melted LP candy dish overflows with chocolates (please come over and have one!). On the piano two silver reindeer stand in a frozen prance next to a pipe cleaner candy cane house my daughter made in the 4th grade.

It's not laziness that keeps the wreath on the door, it's activity. I have an older friend who once said, "We never wanted to be home too much. Home was home base to our kids, a safe place to return to after being out exploring the world of their interests." I think I paraphrased there, but the spirit of his comment is true. I liked his idea about home a lot. Austere, cold, overly-tidy homes have never appealed to me, and neither have ones that are heaped with dirty dishes and magazines. There's a level of comfort you get from, well, not getting too crazy about where the toaster is placed.
The toaster will be fine on the counter for the afternoon while you go out to explore. It performed its duties for you this morning, and you were grateful for the mechanical kindness. Now you are nourished, it said. Go make something worthwhile out of the day.

Intent

I have writing to do, which means I have less social media in my future. The amount of time spent checking updates, responding to messages, commenting, and posting photos of my cats has just gotten out of control. If you know me, you can come and visit and pet the cats, have a cup of coffee, talk to me face to face, and enjoy the cheer of our house. If you don't, maybe we will meet sometime at an event and become friends. Until then, I will be only checking into Facebook to update the Paper Kite Press Fan Page and to leave a the occasional comment.

You can find me here (I will be writing more blog posts), or through email, or a phone call. I'm not disappearing, just backing off from something that is way too distracting.

"Actually all our electronic communication devices—e-mail, Facebook feeds, texts, Twitter—are feeding the same drive as our searches. Since we're restless, easily bored creatures, our gadgets give us in abundance qualities the seeking/wanting system finds particularly exciting. Novelty is one. Panksepp says the dopamine system is activated by finding something unexpected or by the anticipation of something new. If the rewards come unpredictably—as e-mail, texts, updates do—we get even more carried away. No wonder we call it a CrackBerry."

from the Slate article Seeking: How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that's dangerous

Issue #32 of Rattle Inspires

The winter issue of Rattle was still in its plastic cover when I finally picked it up to read last night. I read plenty of journals, but not on a regular or steady basis. I'm not one of those poets who subscribes to every journal to pore over its contents and compare to her own writing to see if they are a "perfect fit." I subscribe to journals I like the most, and more often than not that means they won't be interested in my writing at all. That's okay. In fact, I think it's good. It's like surrounding yourself with people who don't think like you do.

My sporadic journal reading isn't a laziness so much as a gravitational pull toward other reading material. I go through memoir phases, essay phases, fragmentary writing phases, play phases, fiction, non-fiction -- and there's always poetry in my life. It's like my mind is made up of rooms, and each is filled with a different type of writing where the doors stay closed to each other for the most part. Theatre doesn't spill over into fragmentary until I read something by Suzan-Lori Parks. Poetry doesn't open its door to visual until I learn about Tom Phillips. I recognize that my door similie makes me sound closed-minded and unimaginative. However, I love and married a man who has spaces in his mind that are multi-dimensional, press up against one another, meld together, and sing. He doesn't just knock on my mind's doors, he knocks them down yelling, "Hey, did you see this yet?"

If left to my own devices, most of my life would spent in the fragmentary phase I guess. There are books on my shelves I haven't read at all, or read one page of, and it feels like I'm cheating on them if I read an entire issue of a poetry journal instead of putting forth the effort for someone's full-length collection of poems. Why is that? It's not as if the poetry journal took any less effort to put together than the book. In fact, it likely took more effort having to correspond with not just one poet but a long, alphabetized list of them. Imagine the proofing of poems, bios, and keeping in contact with everyone (poets move more often than checkers).

In the middle of no particular reading phase, in fact between them, I picked up issue #32 of Rattle, and now I am in love with poems again. So this is a long-winded way of saying that I am inspired by what I read in a poetry journal, which doesn't happen often. The issue has just the right amount of white space, the choice of typeface is elegant, and the cover artwork (a painting by Stacie Primeaux) is subtly supported by the flyleaf color. (Design is important to me as a reader, and I'm a designer too, so I notice.) The poem, "To a Child" in this issue by J.F. Quackenbush had me reading it over and over again, peeling it apart for its honesty. Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz's poem "At the Office Holiday Party" glitters with humor and pain: "I don't know how to look like I'm not struggling." Michael Kreisel's brief poem, "Threesome," is theatre. There are other journals that are flashy and fun, filled with gimmicky contests and poetry comics, and I enjoy them, but they dissolve like cotton candy. Rattle resonates.

VSA Acceptance ... and I Need Some Help!

Several months ago I applied to the Vermont Studio Center for a fellowship award. Right before Thanksgiving, I received a letter back. It was evening when I got the mail, and Dan and I stood in the kitchen as I went through it all. I held the envelope, noted the address, and said "Well, here's my rejection from VSA." Dan said the envelope was too fat for a rejection, and he was right. I've received a partial award to spend a month writing at the Vermont Studio Center in October of 2010. Exciting!

I've wanted to do something like this for years, but didn't have the opportunity. It just wasn't the right time in my life. I still had a daughter that needed me at home. I couldn't go away for a month and be a reasonably sane or caring parent. Helen graduates in June of 2010. With this in mind, I applied to the VSA.

A partial fellowship means I have to pay the other portion. I can't afford it on my own, and a deposit is due soon. If you have ever read any of my work and liked it, if you want to give me a Christmas present that will be really meaningful, if you have two dollars stuck to the bottom of your shoe and you don't know what to do with them, please donate to my fund. Help a writer accept an offer she's dreamed of getting. Please click on the donate button below. Every little bit helps!

November Opera

Which is more tiresome -- talking about the benefits of moving one's desk every so often, or actually moving the desk? I know I've written about this here before. Every year or so I move my desk. Ever since I was a kid I had a habit for rearranging the furniture in my room a couple of times a year. (Once I moved my little room all around, and then walked in my sleep downstairs to tell my father that I couldn't get out of bed because the desk was in the way.) I doubt I knew it then, but rearranging the furniture helps me to clear my head and think better. It's like a good game of Tetris. Everything fits into its proper place, clutter is removed or at least hidden, and I gain a new view when I'm writing.

Now I just move my desk all over the place. Occasionally it finds a home in our bedroom against the window that overlooks the neighbor's pile of concrete blocks. Most of the time it fits in the space between the bookcase and the library card catalog downstairs in the back library room. Today I moved it out from its nook and against the window that overlooks the patio, and I think I like it there. Right now it's dusk, and the branches of the bare lilac are black against a cornflower sky - a backdrop for a November opera.

A new book ... just in time for the holidays!

Naissance Chapbooks is pleased to announce the release of

NO L

by Jennifer Hill


Jennifer Hill has performed a tour de force of incomparable compactness. 36 Holiday Fictions (one for each of the possible plots in all of literature) in 140 characters each, in which the letter L never appears. Twisted and wrong and completely delightful all rolled together in red velvet trimmed in white. The perfect book for anyone who loves or hates the holidays. An excerpt:

Sacrifice of Loved Ones

The daughter recovered from her Christmas fever. “Nutter has to go,” her mother said as she washed the barf from the stuffed chipmunk’s ear.

—Jennifer Hill


NO L can be ordered through the Naissance Chapbooks site for $10 (includes standard shipping within the continental USA).

The Eldest Cat

Our oldest cat, Edna, is somewhere near 16 years old. We adopted her from a cat rescue in the Reading area when Helen wasn’t quite two. She was the only female cat in the litter of kittens, and the only cream colored one among orange tabbies. We were just going to adopt one cat, but we left with two – Edna (named after Edna St. Vincent Millay) and Albrecht (named after Albrecht Durer). They were devoted to Helen and purred her to sleep, all snugged in among her stuffed animals. As she grew up and we moved, Edna became her helpmate and Albrecht moved on to other manlier pursuits like extended daytime sleeping and purring until he drooled.

Dan calls Edna “the sweet one,” and she is. She loves everyone who walks into the house, and will attempt to sit on their laps whether they are “cat people” or not. She’ll share her fur with anyone’s clothes. She’s not discriminating that way.

Last week she developed a neurological problem, and I caught her confused and weak at the top of the basement stairs. Helen and I wrapped her up in a towel and took her to the vet. She weighed in at less than five pounds. We sat with her on the floor because I couldn’t get her back into the towel and she was getting worse and couldn’t stand. She was suddenly a puppet with a very unskilled master.

The vet looked her over, drew a little blood, and attempted to get her to stand. Her head rolled in under her front feet and she tumbled. I cried. What makes me think I’m fit to have a pet? How did I get to be the adult who takes the pet “to the farm?” When the dog developed a brain tumor and could not longer eat or fend for himself, I drove him to the same vet to have him put to sleep. He was wrapped in a towel, shuddering, and I played Christmas music. It was September. I don’t know if this music was for him or for me. I doubt he could hear it.

When the vet said Edna wasn’t in pain, I opted to take her home, buy the meds, and see if she’d get better. So this week has been a regular schedule of applying the gel-based thyroid medicine in her right ear in the morning, making a small meal with crushed steroid in it, aiding in a trip to the litterbox, rest, another feeding, another aided trip to the litterbox, rest, another feeding, another application of thyroid medication (this time in the left ear), rest, litterbox.

Over the past couple of days, she’s regained strength, and is walking. It’s a wobbly start. It looks as if parts of her body are pulled by a large magnet while the rest of them are unaffected. But she’s managing, and trying, and eating well enough to “pile on the ounces,” as I said to Helen this morning.

This week she’ll travel with us to Nana’s for Thanksgiving. I’m thankful she’s still around, happy to have her weave her little furs into my black sweater.

Lingue Lounge

We haven't been everywhere so we can't say for sure, but hotel breakfast lounges must be universal in their sleepy feel. In our hotel, the beds are French (no snuggling allowed), the breakfast fare is decidedly German (fliesch und kase), and the radio station plays tinny 1980's pop in English. The walls in the hallways and the breakfast lounge are decorated with fuzzy murals that feature swans, domed buildings, and green scenes. Resin knick-knacks of squirrels and mice sit at each table. Our table this morning hosted a mouse sitting on top of a pinecone and the poor chap was missing an ear. People perform their sleepy ballets around the food stations and barely talk to one another. This seems true everywhere. It is strange for us to not strike up a conversation with the person next to us. We're used to that, but since our vocabulary is limited to the very basics, we're quiet. (This morning we think we said "you're welcome" when we should have said "sorry." Oops. We got our coffee anyway. Stupid, dream-hazed American.) English is a Germanic language. German should not be so difficult to figure out, but we find ourselves feeling like our tongue and brain are wrapped in rubberbands. In the morning it is an exciting challenge, and by evening even the simplest social transaction is frustrating.

Inconceivable - Bum Genius 3.0

It’s inconceivable. Young parents now look like kids to us. We are speaking about the thirty-somethings you see in the park, pushing prams that look like Transformers (Optimus Primary Years!), sipping their soy lattes, carrying diaper bags full of eco-friendly Bum Genius 3.0 cloths*, and gathering in Mommy/Baby cliques by the swingsets. We’re envious, we admit it. Our baby-making years are over (we decided after one child we were done), but we sometimes wish for the child who still snuggles, coos, writes little misspelled notes, hugs our knees and says “I love you Mommy.” These days, we’re lucky if we get a grunt of acknowledgment from our “baby” as she emerges from the bathroom after one of her marathon makeup application sessions.

Lots of young parents are stay-at-home moms and dads who blog about their experiences in parenting like a guided adventure tour. Like the aging mother we are, we sometimes browse these sites to be reminded of what it’s like to have a small child, to be new at parenting, to have a sense of wonder and amazement at that gas-induced first smile. There are plenty of blogs out there to read, and each one reveals the personality of the blogger-parent. There’s the advice-giver who tags posts by topic “Discipline,” or “Making Your Own Baby Foods” to the funny dad who chronicles his life with twin daughters. Some parents start with the first positive pregnancy test and write about everything from morning sickness to ultrasounds. One young mother wrote all about her struggle to become pregnant, her miscarriages, a heartbreaking stillbirth, and then finally the joy of having a perfectly normal daughter. There’s a lot of honesty out there.

When we were pregnant, we wrote notes and bad poems to our daughter in one of those black and white composition notebooks, and continued to write in it off and on for about four years, tucking photographs and notes to the tooth fairy in-between the lined pages. An entry from December 31st 1994 recounts the amount of words she was able to say (over 100! wow!) , notes that she called caterpillars “nonnies,” and ends with a promise for a “really great” second birthday. It’s an entry resplendent with the lame fatigue of a new mother. The next entry is the day of her second birthday, which was described as a “toddler whirlwind.”

Maybe it’s the honesty and specificity of these parenting blogs that we’re envious of instead of the new parenthood. There is something to be said for being able to get in the car without all the Graco trappings, for engaging our 17 year old daughter in a philosophical conversation, and making the connections between who she was a child and who she is as a young adult. It’s cool, actually. We try not to dwell any poor parenting techniques we might have employed in the past (Did you know the “time out” is now frowned upon?). However, we sure do wonder about some of the benign phrasings being used these days. “You don’t have the freedom to ___________” is used to discourage negative behaviors. We can’t help but fill in the blank with "You don’t have the freedom to wear mommy’s bra as an aviator cap, put a saddle on the cat, and play ‘Pilot on the Prairie.’”

For now, we’re content with maybe getting a dachshund, visiting with our friend’s new babies (we like being an aunt!), and reading about the most elaborate, Star Wars themed first birthday party ever. It's delicious, vicarious living where we don’t have to clean the blobs of Bobba Fett cake off the floor.


* Since when do diapers have version numbers?

Convalesce

About two or three times a year someone in the household is sick, and the pace of our day slows. Our interests change from to-do list items like “wash all the laundry” to spontaneous rug squaring (we’ve noted our mild obsession with the 90 degree angle). The cats have stapled themselves to the bed of the sick one, there’s a candle burning in the kitchen, soup has been administered. The morning light feels like afternoon light washed through a dirty coffee filter. There isn’t much to enjoy on a day when someone you love is running a fever. We just want them to be well, to eat and laugh, and possibly help with the laundry. But there’s a hint of the past in a house that has nothing to offer other than broth and a gentle hug, which seems like enough for now.

Poem at Work

Impermanence

for Brian

"I have seen a substance excellently adapted to the purpose of wiping from paper the mark of black lead pencil."

- Joseph Priestley


The man who founded Unitarian Universalism,
a religion based on the art of listening and thought,
also discovered the eraser.

I often wonder
how much a soul weighs
and whether or not rocks
have them. Also, who
discovered invisible ink?

Even the seasons
give us a few months
of rubbed out landscape,
music rests for sustained
moments of contemplation,
poems swim in white space
like misunderstood kids
on the playground.

There is a thrill
in found notes in the margins
of a stranger’s book, some erased,
but the hand so heavy
that the words “allegory
sucks,” have embossed
the page. The writer wished
them to be impermanent.
So much for that.

I have a hard time with allegory too,
ever since a few weeks before my dad died
when he shared the first sentence
of the last book he ever read:
One day you wake up and realize
you know more dead than living.
Then he saw herons
all over his hospital room.

If you press hard enough
with a Pink Pearl you can erase
the ink from a hundred dollar bill
and encourage it to abandon
its life of currency for one
of art.

When I was eight
and philosophical
with a Hello Kitty pencil,
I wrote my name
over and over
just to erase it.
Pages and pages
of little births
and deaths to see
what it felt like
to be real
and then disappear.

I suggest to a friend
who has lost his mother
that he type all his feelings out
and then hit the delete key,
as if it is just that easy.

I still think every heron I see
is my father.

There is no way
to erase thought.

The Power of Scent - a List

Inspired by my friend Mark's article "Scents My Sister Loved" in Sniffapalooza Magazine, I've made a list of my own evocative scents. For me, scent equals memory. I've always had a very strong sense of smell, which in some ways is a detriment, but mostly it's a gift. I get mocked for my descriptions of tastes because I correlate them to scent. The most recent instance of this was at a dinner with friends where I described the risotto as having a flavor "that reminds me of the smell of 1970's basement bar." No, this was not a good risotto, but I got to the heart of the flavor.

So here are some of the scents that resonate with me on many levels - some are universal in nature (like astrological "predictions" in StarScrolls at the supermarket), others are personal. This is the scent-stuff that tells my stories. I'll come back to this and add as I remember more. It's hard to make a finished, definitive list!

acid eaten paper of old books
pencil shavings
Country Cottage puffball curtains
lemon juice
Arpege
driveway sealer
cat fur
a pile of fall leaves
chimney soot
pine tree sap
firewood
coffee
lychee fruit
olives and feta
basement mold
mint tea mist
toasty scent of a Carhart shirt
stuffed animals
warm baby skin, not baby powder
humid bathroom with hairspray
chestnuts
city street sewage sigh
wet sand
vanilla
triple-layer college apartment carpet
first heat kicking in
rose oil
melting candle wax
acidic tomato vine
sawdust
Sunday dinner Salisbury
birthday cake candle wish
snowman mittens
Grandmom & Pampal's attic warmth
onions frying in olive oil
Thanksgiving celery and onion
turpentine and oil paint
air right after rain
air right before snow
marigolds
summer dusk air
envelope mint
dill
the yellow center of a daisy
honeysuckle
inside of a piano (felt, wood)

Crank

It's a good thing I make a decent soup, because my writing sure isn't satisfying lately. With soup, you can toss in all sorts of ingredients from the fridge - spinach, carrot, onion, tiny meatballs. In writing, I over-think every choice until all I have is broth, and then I wonder if I should have just stuck with the water. One drop of it.

It's Not Me It's You

Yesterday we took a trip to Philadelphia to see some live art at the Philly Fringe Festival. A lot of the shows we wanted to see had high ticket prices ($30), but we were able to find something on the schedule that looked interesting and was friendly to our wallets (free). It's Not Me It's You, by Mayumi Ishino was scheduled for 5 p.m. and was located "on the sidewalk of 3rd Street between Arch and Market," according to the website. So, after an afternoon of touring the Magic Gardens and buying too many pairs of shoes on South Street at Dude's, we found our way to the aforementioned sidewalk. It was one of those bright blue days that shoot through your veins, the air was cool, the bass was turned up in the music of passing cars, and our spirits were high.

At the end of 3rd Street near Arch, in a gated alcove was an installation titled "Emergence," by a potter named Dennis Ritter. A coil of white birds suspended on strings flew up from the ground and into the afternoon patches of light. We stopped to take some photos.



People were milling around to find the performance. Since the performance was described as fluxus and it was free, we thought out loud that maybe the performance was all of us showing up between Arch and Market on 3rd Street. We sat down our bags and were letting the mosquitoes feast on our ankles when we overheard someone with a Blackberry mention that the performance was closer to Church street. We walked up a block or so to find the performers getting ready and a small crowd forming.

Mayumi helped her darkly-clad partner on with his black hat and face covering, and then she placed a mirror in his hands and took out a bouquet of colored Sharpie markers. She started a drawing of a self-portrait on the mirror. Soul music poured from a nearby shop. A truck turning into the alley where the crowd stood, paused so the driver could have a peek and wonder. By the time the first drawing was complete, the woman with the banana in the audience had worked her way down to the empty peel. A man turning down the alley stopped his car, got out, and stood for a few moments to catch the scene before returning to his confused passenger.



Mayumi finished the drawing, tucked the Sharpies back into her fabric bag, and took out a hammer. The entire crowd took a couple of steps back. She swung the hammer back and thwacked the mirror while her partner still held it. The resulting crack in her careful portrait made a perfect web.







The two performers walked down the sidewalk and we followed, and they repeated the same performance - studied portraiture in Sharpie, sudden hammering, packing up and heading to a new destination on the sidewalk. Passerby stopped with their Chinese food containers. A murder of meatheads in football jerseys stopped farther down the sidewalk to say "just a bunch of magic markers." My brother made his presence known to them by saluting a subtle finger and they hulked away. A little girl and boy, breathless from a chase down 3rd Street, stopped near the alley where Mayumi had set up for her latest drawing, panted and watched, then continued their play.

The resulting broken portraits were as haunting as the crowds that formed to see them created. I saw in it the American fracture of self.

Nine Equilateral Triangles, You Think

Jury duty. The little card arrives in the mail stamped in red, its official dates and directions printed with what looks like an old dot matrix. Your partially planned vacation is now on hold, you dread the date, but off you go on the clear bright morning when the calendar matches the card. Of course the weather is bright and cheerful, because you will be spending the day indoors bathed under institutional lighting.

Over a hundred people are called with you, and you all sit in metal folding chairs in the little room with clipboards and forms, and a grey stack of magazines on the windowsill. The cross-section of humanity reminds you of the library; a truly democratic place. Everyone was called to served their civic duty, and here they all share in the joy -- the retired grandmother, the unemployed skater, the over-employed and inconvenienced banker with his fat briefcase, the guy you swear you know from somewhere but can’t place, the woman with four kids who works from home stuffing envelopes. After filling out a form, you are thanked by the judge, and given instructions on what will happen next. When he exits, the room settles into a collective anxiousness. A man in front of you seals envelopes and completes his correspondence. The banker taps at his electronic organizer. Everyone is without their cellphones, and seems adrift in a sea of what-to-do without them. The mother cracks open a romance novel. A few people who recognize each other form conversational cliques. You read. The man in front of you takes out a knitting project, and you watch as each stitch is perfectly executed. You decide he must be a Virgo. His t-shirt looks ironed. The morning passes from quiet anxiousness to lethargy. The grey magazines are perused. Windows are propped open with clipboards.

You are one of the first to be drawn in the random lottery that is the first judge’s panel, and are trooped upstairs into a lustrous courtroom, filled with polished hardwood and an energy you can’t place. The plaintiff and defendant sit in silence as the plaintiff’s lawyer takes two hours to ask questions of the numbered potential jurors. It reminds you of the worst parts of school. A sunny day when your mind wandered, the teacher called on you and your brain fell into a “fight or flight” response. You answer when called. You listen to others respond, and like them less and less. You like the defendant and plaintiff less and less even though they haven’t said a word. You like yourself less for not liking anyone. Where has your kindness gone? You spend the rest of the time figuring out the armature behind the giant painting of Justice on the wall behind the judge’s desk. It has nine equilateral triangles in it.

After the defendant’s lawyer asks a very brief set of general questions, the two sides deliberate on their choices. Papers are passed between them. Finally, jurors are called to their seats. You are not one of them. The rejected return to the waiting room. You spend some time at the window. The trimmed lawn with its tufts of intermittent plantings, linear hedges grown fat into embarrassed forms, remind you that Americans can’t garden. An announcement is made that all are excused for the rest of the week. You walk back to your car in the parking garage with afternoon returned to you like a beloved lost pet, as the plaintiff and defendant dissolve from your mind and into the sun.

What Messages Are Written in Air

A man carves a message into the trunk of a tree for a woman he has never met. She finds it years later while on a walk with the dog. She runs her fingers into the hollows of bark, memorizes the rough script, and spends the rest of her life looking for messages in the margins of books.

The Hold Steady

Driving through Lisle, New York on our way to Ithaca, we see a sign that reads “Father’s Day Cooked In Ground Beef.” The houses lean and sigh, look as if they’d like to exhale some of their incorrect geometry answers. Drying impatiens swing from flowerpots on sprawling porches, a backhoe digs up grass for next week’s “Mud Bog.” Trees flash by greengreengreen – a sign to drive faster and just go.

The music we hear that night in a cramped bar makes me want to get into a car and drive with the windows rolled down. I want to visit a place I love but don’t know yet. The lyrics remind me of postcards from a friend I don’t have, but whose words I crave in his or her scrawl.

At the door, my ID is checked (wow). The bouncer has taken the gauges out of his ears, and they speak a relaxed “O, O.” Most of the crowd is younger than we are, but not by much. Maybe five or ten years, and then there are a handful of really young music lovers whose hands are branded with big black Sharpie X’s, making them visible to the bartenders. I watch a skinny teen grin as he enters, then cross his arms to hide his brand from all the college girls. Castaways is packed by nine p.m. when the opening band starts to play. A few people sway, but most still talk and drink their beers. I watch the continual stream of people enter and get their wristbands Humanity is diverse. Where do all these people come from? Dreads, skinny jeans, grey hair, pink stockings with polka dot shoes, overweight, girls who remind me of all my sister’s college friends, purple hair, no hair, quiet, sad eyed.

During the performance of The Hold Steady, I jump, dance, clap and revel behind a frat boy and his friend who like to jump, clap and dance too, only with more vigor, elbows and heavy feet. A high school girl and her boyfriend who look like they’ve stepped out of a Hollister ad try to wriggle their way through the crowd but their charm doesn’t get them far and they get stuck just a few ahead of us. When the music starts and people scream and jump around, they become as still as frightened deer. A young man just in front of me stands for most of the show looking like a cross between a Dr. Seuss character and a 1950’s sitcom father until his favorite song is played and then he leaps and pumps his fist in the air. Beer is sprayed, confetti cheers and settles onto the sweaty breasts of young women. Jim goes into a ecstatic trance for most of the show and loses his voice. I feel the sweat drip off his arm. Matt swings his head and his hair sweeps like pages in a book. He whoops and raises his arms as if every song is a touchdown, which it is. Dan listens to every lyric, squeezes my hand. The Hold Steady hold steady with charisma. Feet peek above heads in front as a body is carried through the crowd. The encore is a half an hour long. The bar is sticky, packed, and full of positive energy. Joy. The music makes me want to visit a place I love but don’t know yet, because its rooms and landscapes are now a place I love and know. Oh to be 40 forever.

Very Rural Pennsylvania Haibun

chickens in the road
a barn cat slinks into grass
dandelions exhale

It takes me three days to settle into a place that should feel immediately like home. At night, the air is cool and smells like an uprooted carrot. Cowbirds imitate the calls of their neighbors and wait inside shrubbery to burgle nests. There is no mall for miles, no television where I sleep at night. I grew up this way – hours to wander and think, but I’ve forgotten it all, and find myself anxious without my family.

picking blackberries
fingers and lips stained blue
scent of sweetfern

It takes three days for the rhythm of this place to relax into a beat with my heart. Poppies bow their fuzzy, sleepy heads, a peony releases its sweetness into dusk. The donkey is the rude uncle of the pasture – he honks and heehaws toward all the magnificent horses as they graze. His ears are as soft and as big as slippers. I imagine slipping my feet into them, as if into two jewel cases, thanks to Neruda. Fences turn fields of clipped grass and turned dirt into geometry problems.

horse grinds down grass
strong jaw and grey muzzle
nuzzles the world’s body

At a small crossroads store where men stop for coffee, Sanka, and the news, a giant wheel of cheese sits on the counter. Every day the wheel shrinks a little as slices of its cheddarness bid farewell on rafts of sandwiches. Homemade sticky buns and Lepp cookies wait for a sweet tooth. I resist. I remember the comfort of our town’s little store, the aisles of dusty cans, the butcher’s bloody apron, racks of candybars, conversations and local gossip.

Flavors of comfort –
potato, yam, and coffee,
stories of hometown.